Wrestling With Angels
I came across the phrase while reading Spotify the Gnostics, Here’s the First Church of David Bowie by Sean Manseau.
Wrestling with angels.
Some phrases arrive carrying more weight than their literal meaning. They feel older than language. Older than the person who spoke them. This was one of those phrases. The moment I read it, something in me recognised it before I had even fully thought about why.
It immediately pulled me toward the story of Jacob beside the river Jabbok. Night falling. Isolation. A mysterious being appearing in the dark. Then the struggle itself, physical, spiritual, psychological, mythic all at once. Jacob wrestles until dawn. He refuses to release the angel, even when the struggle wounds him. Even when it leaves him limping. And in the end he emerges transformed, renamed, somehow more fully himself because of the encounter rather than despite it.
It strikes me now that this might be one of the oldest surviving metaphors for consciousness itself.
To think deeply is to wrestle with angels.
Not the sentimental angels from greeting cards and Christmas ornaments. Not harmless beings of soft light and certainty. I mean the older kind. Terrible and illuminating. Messengers from dimensions of reality larger than the ego can comfortably contain. Forces that interrupt sleep.
Ideas can behave like that.
Questions can behave like that.
A single insight can arrive and suddenly make your previous life impossible to fully return to.
That, I think, is part of what has been happening to me over the last few years. I have been wrestling with angels, trying to reconcile who I am with who I imagined I might become and with whatever it is the modern world keeps demanding I turn myself into.
Some days it feels like three incompatible stories fighting for possession of the same nervous system.
There is the self that wants simplicity. The barefoot philosopher. The man who wants to walk slowly, read deeply, write honestly, drink coffee outside while listening to birdsong, and build a life measured more by meaning than metrics.
Then there is the self shaped by culture’s demands. Worker. Professional. Brand. Persona. Content producer. Optimised digital entity required to constantly translate inner life into consumable fragments for algorithmic systems that feed on attention.
And somewhere between them is another figure entirely: the unfinished self. The one still becoming. The one still trying to understand what it means to be human in a world increasingly mediated through machines, prompts, platforms, feeds, and simulations.
No wonder the struggle feels exhausting sometimes.
There are moments when I fantasise about becoming Homer Simpson.
Honestly, I understand the appeal.
A cold Duff beer. Television glow. Predictable routines. A life governed by appetite, habit, and immediate comfort. No existential burden. No obsessive need to interrogate meaning. No compulsion to turn experience into language and then examine the language itself for hidden architecture.
Just autopilot.
There are days when that sounds almost holy.
Because consciousness is tiring.
Not intelligence necessarily. Consciousness. The ongoing awareness of contradiction. The inability to fully believe the stories you inherited once you begin seeing the machinery underneath them. The exhausting recognition that identity itself is partly constructed, partly performed, partly chosen, partly imposed.
Once you see this, you cannot entirely unsee it.
And that may be the real curse and blessing of awakening: once you become aware of the struggle, you can never fully return to sleep.
You can distract yourself, certainly. Most of us do. Endless scrolling. Endless entertainment. Endless productivity systems. Endless noise designed to protect us from encountering ourselves too directly. Modern society has become extraordinarily sophisticated at manufacturing psychic sedation.
But sedation is not resolution.
The ignored story does not disappear simply because you mute it.
It waits.
It leaks sideways into your life.
Into moods you cannot explain.
Into low-grade despair.
Into strange feelings of absence while performing the routines you are supposedly meant to want.
Into the quiet suspicion that you have somehow become a supporting character in your own existence.
I think many people feel this now, even if they do not yet have language for it.
They sense a fracture between their inner life and the identities available to them in public culture. They feel reduced by the templates being offered. Consumer. User. Audience segment. Political tribe. Career designation. Content niche. A thousand prefabricated masks waiting for a face to attach themselves to.
And maybe thinking, real thinking, begins precisely at the point where those masks stop fitting comfortably.
Maybe thinking is not the accumulation of information.
Maybe it is the refusal to remain fully possessed by inherited narratives.
A refusal to stop mid-becoming.
A refusal to surrender the authorship of your consciousness completely to culture, algorithm, exhaustion, or fear.
This is partly why philosophy has always mattered to me, though perhaps not philosophy in the institutional sense. Not philosophy as purely academic analysis. I mean philosophy in the older sense. Philosophy as a way of life. A lived struggle with existence itself.
The ancient philosophers understood something modern culture often forgets: ideas are not abstract decorations. They are forces that shape perception, behaviour, emotion, possibility. Stories are not entertainment layered onto reality. Stories are one of the primary mechanisms through which reality becomes intelligible in the first place.
The narratives we inhabit become invisible operating systems.
And once you begin noticing this, you start seeing how much of modern life is essentially narrative conflict. Competing mythologies battling for psychic territory. Nations built from stories. Economies built from stories. Identities built from stories. Entire lives organised around scripts inherited so early that people mistake them for objective truth.
To wrestle with angels is to wrestle with these scripts.
To examine them.
To resist total possession by them.
To ask: whose voice is this inside my head? Which desires are actually mine? Which ambitions were installed? Which fears belong to me, and which belong to systems trying to reproduce themselves through me?
These are destabilising questions.
They can leave you limping.
Jacob leaves the river wounded. That detail matters to me. Transformation is not presented as clean transcendence. It leaves a mark on the body. Wisdom is not sterile. Consciousness costs something.
I suspect anyone who has seriously wrestled with themselves knows this already.
The artist knows it.
The writer staring at the blank page knows it.
The person standing at midlife wondering whose life they have actually been living knows it.
The addict getting sober knows it.
The person leaving a religion, career, marriage, ideology, or identity knows it.
There is often a moment where the old self begins dying before the new self fully exists. And in that threshold space, certainty collapses. You no longer know exactly who you are. Only that you cannot entirely return to who you were before.
That threshold is the riverbank.
That is where the angel appears.
And perhaps this is why I keep returning to writing.
Writing feels less like self-expression these days and more like participation in the struggle itself. A form of conscious wrestling. I write not because I possess certainty, but because language helps me stay in relationship with the mystery long enough for another fragment of meaning to emerge.
A sentence can become a foothold.
An essay can become a temporary shelter against chaos.
A journal entry can become evidence that consciousness was here.
Sometimes I think my entire body of work is simply a long record of negotiations between competing realities. Between myth and modernity. Between technology and soul. Between the desire for simplicity and the strange gravitational pull of digital existence.
And now AI enters the picture, complicating everything further.
Because here we are: humans manipulating reality increasingly through text. Prompts becoming action. Language becoming executable. Words triggering systems into motion. Stories becoming infrastructure.
William Burroughs once said language is a virus. In the age of artificial intelligence, that statement begins sounding less metaphorical than diagnostic.
We are becoming text-based ontologists operating inside environments where text increasingly functions as the universal substrate.
Which means the stories we tell ourselves matter more than ever.
The struggle matters more than ever.
Because the danger now is not merely propaganda or ideology in the old sense. It is the possibility of becoming psychologically automated. Handing over the difficult work of meaning-making to systems optimised for engagement, efficiency, and behavioural predictability.
To remain conscious inside this environment requires effort.
Attention becomes spiritual practice.
Thinking becomes resistance.
And maybe that is why I cannot fully become Homer Simpson no matter how tempting the fantasy occasionally appears.
Something in me refuses total sedation.
Something keeps returning to the wrestling mat.
Not because I enjoy suffering. I do not. But because some deeper instinct understands that the unlived life extracts its own terrible price. The avoided question does not vanish. The abandoned self does not stop calling.
And every so often, in the middle of the struggle, something real emerges.
Another fragment of the story.
Another sentence sturdy enough to stand on for a while.
Another glimpse of coherence hidden inside the chaos.
Not certainty.
Not final answers.
Certainly not enlightenment.
Just a slightly deeper relationship with the mystery.
Maybe that is enough.
Maybe maturity is not about resolving the contradictions once and for all. Maybe it is about developing the capacity to remain in conscious dialogue with them without collapsing into cynicism or numbness.
To keep wrestling without demanding immediate victory.
To limp forward carrying both the wound and the blessing.
To understand that consciousness itself may be less like arriving at truth and more like staying awake inside the question a little longer.
Jacob does not defeat the angel.
That is important.
He survives the encounter changed.
Perhaps that is all any of us can really hope for.
Not mastery over existence.
Not perfect self-knowledge.
Just the courage to remain in relationship with the forces larger than ourselves long enough to become more fully human through the struggle.
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Sparked By
- Spotify the Gnostics, Here’s the First Church of David Bowie by Sean Manseau.
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