Obedience

Obedience may seem a strange subject for me to pontificate about but you needn't worry, I am naturally going to subvert it completely.
When I was a child, well before I had the life changing experience of realising that I am an INFJ, my mother used to tell me that she couldn't make me out. Apart from indicating the obvious fact that my mother and I were never going to be on the same page, what she was usually meaning was that, to use her words, I was a strange mixture of absolute conformity and absolute independence. I was and am quite capable of being totally obedient in certain situations while feeling free to subvert the same authority to which I had been compliant a moment before. She could never tell which side I was going to come down on, and of course my reaction to her also could never be predicted. The most extreme example of this was one of many occasions when she threatened to put her head in the oven and I replied, 'Go on, then, but you're wasting your time because natural gas won't kill you'. She asked how I knew it was natural gas and never made that particular threat again!
My existing 'authority problem' crystallised in my twenties with my experience of religious life and the realisation that I was never going to be obedient to those turds. A major turning point was my realisation that the Christian saying of 'in his will is our peace' had only ever resulted in heartache and abuse for me. I realised that my peace was actually in my own will, not anyone else's, and thus my initiation into the magical worldview began. Of course I took to Starhawk's analysis of power over and power with, like a duck to water, and then discovered anarchist ideas about power and authority. I can have power but authorities over me have authority. The reflexive idea of obeying myself sounds strange at first, but locates both power and authority in myself.
Another idea which was very influential on me was an article in a monastic journal I read when a novice about discernment, discretion and prudence. Obviously discretion and prudence are not really me, but this idea of being able to discern is something which hit me like a hammer blow, and probably that's when obedience really ended for me. From now on I wouldn't take people's shit because I myself would discern what was really going on.
Discern isn't really a word used much in the pagan or magical world, but it probably best equates to our idea of divining something. In my subversive way I ask a few questions which without fail show what is going on:
Does this situation look like the way I think things should be?
Where is the authority in this situation?
Where is the power?
Where is the money going?
Who benefits?
Will this give me power or take it away?

As always these questions have proved useful in my current work situation, where as I said recently the situation has rather imploded. The new manager has handed in her notice already, and in fact commented in staff meeting when she announced this that senior management of the company wanted to be present when she made the announcement. 'I'm not a robot,' she said. How I laughed afterwards!
Oh alright, I know you want a soundtrack to this post: