This book is a Get Out of Jail Free card and a passport back into the playground.
The aim of this book is to set you free. But free from what? Free from neurosis. Free from the feeling that you have to obey authority. Free from emotional intimidation. Free from addiction. Free from inhibition.
The key to happiness, mental health and being the most that we can be is absolute and unconditional self-acceptance. The paradox is that many of our problems are caused by trying to improve ourselves, censor our thinking, make up for past misdeeds and struggling with our negative feelings whether of depression or aggression.
But if we consider ourselves in our entirety in this very moment, we know these things :
1. Anything we have done is in the past and cannot be changed, thus it is pointless to do anything else but accept it. No regrets or guilt.
2. While our actions can harm others, our thoughts and emotions, in and of themselves, never can. So we should accept them and allow them to be and go where they will. While emotions sometimes drive actions, those who completely accept their emotions and allow themselves to feel them fully, have more choice over how they act in the light of them.
Self-criticism never made anyone a better person. Anyone who does a “good deed” under pressure from their conscience or to gain the approval of others takes out the frustration involved in some other way. The basis for loving behaviour towards others is the ability to love ourselves. And loving ourselves unconditionally, means loving ourselves exactly as we are at this moment.
This might seem to be complacency, but in fact the natural activity of the individual is healthy growth, and what holds us back from it is fighting with those things we can’t change and the free thought and emotional experience which is the very substance of that growth.
Greta Thunberg has attracted a massive amount of attention. Some have pointed out that individuals who are actually coming up with practical solutions or are taking personal action to address problems get far less attention than someone who expresses anger at those who are intransigent on a problem.
Why is our attention attracted more powerfully to a locus of anger than to a locus of solution or inspiration?
It is sometimes necessary to do or say things which will make others angry. And anger is an appropriate response to many things - something that alerts us to the fact that there is a problem to be solved - whether that be a problem in the world or a problem within our own psyche.
It's a healthy thing to accept our anger, unconditionally, as it is to accept all of our emotions. To act on anger directly is not healthy. If we don't use our reason to come up with a workable solution to the problem it represents we will find ourselves in strife and we might cause great destruction.
But if we want a better life for ourselves and others, solutions are what we need to focus on. If loci of anger interfere too much with our ability to do this then we are not going to do well.
The Thunberg phenomena gives a good example of how the locus of anger works. To analyse it as such is not to say that it is not, in some sense, a necessary or unavoidable thing. Historically, protest has had its place in the necessary recalibration of society as circumstances change. But what I'm concerned with here is the psychology of interest attraction.
Thunberg gives people an opportunity to feel angry. Those who identify with her can feel angry at the fossil fuel industry and intransigent governments. Others can feel angry at Thunberg herself (viewing her as a whiny privileged virtue signaller), or at her activist parents, or at those who lioniser her. There is no doubt that she is an angry locus for the anger of many.
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN - MARCH 22, 2019: Greta Thunberg climate activist demonstrating on Fridays Photo by Liv Oeian.
Anger can be very appealing as a form of escapism. We all make mistakes and most of us are prone to feelings of insecurity about our own worth - to feelings of guilt. The beauty of anger is that it focuses our attention away from ourselves. It's someone else's fault. For the moment, anyway, we are not the ones who need to make a change to ameliorate a problem.
In this way, anger is a like a drug, an intoxicant. And we can see how the professional media and social media are awash with this drug.
What have we come to when some people seriously say that they support a political leader because the people they hate hate that leader so much?
As William Blake put it, in The Everlasting Gospel : "What is the accusation of sin, But moral virtues' deadly gin?" Are we not drunk on angry accusations of other's sins? Anything to forget our own.
What this leads to is polarisation. Solutions to our problems require that we find some way to come together. How do we come together after calling each other "fascists" or "baby killers" or whatever?
If an addiction to anger arises from our propensity to feel guilt, i.e. compromised self-acceptance, then cultivating unconditional self-acceptance is how we break our addiction to anger. We will still recognise and respond effectively to unacceptable behaviour from others, but we won't be drawn away from focusing on practical solutions or forming bonds with others, even where we may have different beliefs on key issues.
The first thing you should know about this book is that it was not written by a religious believer. We have probably all heard someone who identifies as a Christian claiming that atheism is really just another religion. And those whose worldview is founded on the concept that their religious belief is wisdom might well judge atheists to be foolish. So when you see a book with this title, the natural expectation is that it will be the work of a religious person who has become sick of atheists labelling them as the dupe of an irrational belief system and is indulging in an “I know you are but what am I?” comeback.
What we have here is an ex-atheist - he says he is countering arguments he himself used to make. For him, God is not a matter for belief or disbelief. Because belief and disbelief are for matters which can’t be definitively settled.
It’s all about semantics for Monk E. Mind.
All words he says refer to either objects or concepts. Objects have shape. Concepts describe the relationship between objects. To exist is to be an object with a location. Only objects exist. The universe and space are concepts, therefore they don’t exist. God would only refer to something existing if that something had a shape and a location.
The name Monk E. Mind seems appropriate for the author of this book as his authorial voice suggests nothing so much as a noisy little primate scampering around pulling mocking faces and hurling his faeces at anyone who comes close. His faeces in this case being his pseudo-reasoning and pedantry.
Monk E. Mind was also the author of a book called Rope Hypothesis and Thread Theory. The Rope Hypothesis is a physics model proposed by an engineer named Bill Gaede, who first came to public attention as an industrial spy for the Cubans. When I did a bit of reading and watched him on YouTube, I found that his philosophy is the same as that presented by Monk E. Mind in this book. Is Monk E. Mind a pseudonym for Gaede, or for a disciple of his? I don’t know. Gaede used his own name for his magnum opus Why God Doesn't Exist.
One of the key qualities needed by anyone who wishes to pursue a deeper understanding of any subject is humility. Boldness can be very useful for breaking free of unhelpful patterns of thought, but only the individual who has humility will be on the look out for their own errors and learn from them. Monk E. Mind is so full of the idea that his vision is superior - dancing and crowing about how remarkably stupid scientists are for believing in things like black holes - that he can’t see the obvious fallacies on which his arguments are based. “People that do not define are using word magic,”he says. But what about those who make up their own definitions? Monk E. Mind has built a house of cards out of his own personal definitions for words.
Clear effective written communication requires that the writer and the reader agree on the definitions of the words being used. Dictionaries are there to help us to get on the same page. There is a kind of democracy about dictionaries in that it is in the best interest of the lexicographer to match what is meant by the majority of individuals when articulating a definition. People kicking up a fuss because they feel a word has not been defined in the way in which they intend it would hurt the reputation and sales of the dictionary.
If someone comes up with their own personal definition which doesn’t appear in any dictionary then the onus is on that definition to have, for us, an obvious advantage over the definitions used by as many as 1.5 billion other individuals (if we are communicating in English).
The argument Monk E. Mind presents rests entirely on his own definitions for words.
“Object : that which has shape.”
An ideal triangle doesn’t exist, but, by definition, it has shape. It’s a triangle. Shape is all it has.
Google’s definition is “a material thing that can be seen and touched.”
Of course you could object that objects can’t be seen by a blind man or that an object on the surface of the moon can’t be touched because it is too far away. But that would be silly, and lets not be silly.
“Concept : the relation between objects”
A concept isn’t necessarily a relation between objects. It can an relation between other concepts. A mathematical formula is a concept which is a relation between numbers. Numbers are concepts.
Google’s definition is “an abstract idea”.
So how do they define “abstract”? “(E)xisting in thought or as an idea but not having physical or concrete existence.”
So theories about gravity are abstract, but gravity itself is physical (it effects the movement of physical objects.) According to Monk E. Mind’s definition, gravity itself would be a concept presumably.
“Exist : object with location; something somewhere; physically present.”
So relationships between objects don’t exist? The planets exist, but the solar system doesn’t?
Google say that to exist is to “have objective reality or being”.
They define “objective” as “not dependent on the mind for existence; actual.”
Now remember Monk E. Mind is saying that only objects can exist and that objects are what have shape. Google allows the solar system to exist, because it isn’t dependent on the mind, even though it is not an object but a relationship between objects.
Gravity is not an object, but does it depend on the mind for its existence? If you jump off of a tall building you will splatter on the pavement whether you believe you will or not.
Most of us use the term “exist” to refer to relationships as well as objects. For us laws exist, even though they may have originated in the human mind. They exist because they can have consequences on our actions and the actions of others.
And most concepts of a monotheistic God can be understood as a universal system of law. For a pantheist like myself these are natural laws potentially accessible to science. To religious individuals God’s law may be moral in nature. But unless someone worships something like a golden calf, one’s God is a relationship rather than an object.
Bringing it closer to home - are you an object or a relationship? The human body has a border, but we are not simply our body. We are the whole process which animates that body. In the same way to speak of God is to speak of the whole process which animates the universe.
One may have the view that the universe has no such coherent process, and even if we do have the view that it does, we may disagree greatly on the nature of that process, especially the degree to which it resembles a human personality. I don’t see an insistence that such a process doesn’t exist because it isn’t an object doing anything to silence debate on this topic.
“Because matter and motion are eternal, there was no first cause to motion or creation of matter, therefore no Creators are possible!”
Would Monk E. Mind tell a painter… a sculptor… an engineer… an architect… a movie maker… that creation is impossible? They know that they don’t create their own raw materials, but creation is the arrangement of raw materials into a new and meaningful whole.
Mr. Mind claims that matter can’t be created. I’m not particularly well-informed on science, but I do remember being taught at school that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. We were also taught that matter is made out of energy and can break down to release that energy. So it makes sense to say that energy can’t be created, but if it changes and can have the form of elements which react with each other to form different kinds of matter and might lead to forms of matter which are alive and eventually living forms which are intelligent, then it seems to me that creation is something that can take place. Something more complex and meaningful can arise from something pre-existing. We see it in our own culture when individuals come together to form an organisation which is, in some way, more than the sum of themselves as parts. For creation to be the theme of life does not necessarily require that it ever had a beginning. One might believe in God as the eternal creative theme of a universe which has always existed.
The author claims that matter can’t be created. Can he prove it? And, if he can’t prove it, why should we not simply ignore his argument?
Ah, but science is not about proof, he insists. It is about explanation only.
“science: rational explanations for reality”
But how do we arrive at these rational explanations?
Google defines science as “the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.”
So that definition tells us how we can arrive at our rational explanation - “through observation and experiment”.
Monk E. Mind says :
“…you need to get over…the idea of facts, truth, proof and evidence. Reality is having none of it. These things are founded on the limited sensory system and the beliefs of man. They are opinions. Facts are the opinions from authority. What is true for you may not be true for your neighbor. Proof, which is based on evidence (observation), at best confirms what the person already believes.”
Only objects exist, according to the author. So love, energy, waves, circles, squares, magnetic fields, motion, the universe, numbers and the mind don’t exist, but rocks do. But on what basis does he make the claim that rocks exist if he doesn’t recognise facts, truth, proof or evidence (observation)? He can see them and feel them, but that is nothing but unreliable observation. And if truth is a useless concept, what, in his view, differentiates his ideas from those of others he rejects?
So he wants us to arrive at our goal - “rational explanations” - but rejects the method by which we are trying to get there. Maybe his rational explanations are going to come to him by divine revelation.
One fallacious form of argument is the argument from authority. That an idea is expressed by a person who has some form of social acknowledgement of expertise in an area doesn’t, in itself, make the idea more worthy of credence. It has to work in and of itself, regardless of the source.
The author says that there are no authorities, and challenges the reader to reject his explanations because he is “a Wal-Mart greeter”who “learned this from a shoe shine boy.”That would be all well and good if his explanations were sound and illuminating, but we need to be just as rigorous with the thinking of a Wal-Mart greeter as we would with someone like Richard Dawkins. If his new definitions of words are not useful, his lack of academic credentials won’t make them so.
“Any one person with the willingness to do so has the ability to learn anything that another human can learn.”The problem is that learning requires time and access to information. The ideas about physics expressed by someone with a PhD. in the subject may not be completely reliable, because humans are fallible and science is a process of elimination of unsatisfactory explanations, but the advantage they have over the average Wal-Mart greeter is that the time they have been able to devote to their study is not severely limited by the time requirements of supporting themselves with a low paying job, and they have been able to engage in discourse with others knowledgeable in the field. They may also have had the chance to do experiments. Having said that, if the Wal-Mart greeter can express something that makes the physicist slap his head and cry “How could I have missed something so obvious?!?” of course we will pay attention.
Let’s get to the title of the book. On what basis does Monk E. Mind come to the conclusion that atheism is a religion? Unsurprisingly, he starts by making up his own definition for the word “religion”.
“religion: irrational explanations for reality”
What do we mean by “explanations”? According to Google, an explanation is “a statement or account that makes something clear.”
Given how mystical many religions are and the degree to which their dogma, rather than making things clear, tends to need its own explanation, this hardly seems a satisfactory definition.
Google gives us : “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods”.
Sounds more like the religions I’ve come in contact with.
Ah, but how to troll the atheists without finding some dishonest way to equate them with that which they reject?
To demonstrate his contention that atheism is a religion he points to a Supreme Court judgement and a dictionary definition. This indicates that some people consider it a religion, but unless they can produce a reason why they consider it a religion which is based on a definition on which we can all agree, this is an empty argument from authority. The soundest argument he has here perhaps is that official forms often have a question about the person’s religion which give one option “Atheism” and another option “No Religion.” The existence of such forms proves nothing, but if someone who identifies as an atheist ticks the “Atheism” box rather than the “No Religion” box, one could reasonably ask why they are accomodating the false listing of atheism as a religion when they have the option of having nothing to do with this error by simply ticking “No Religion.” This is a small point.
Now I’ll indulge in a little armchair psychoanalysis. Monk E. Mind is contemptuous of atheists, who he presents as hypocrites for criticising others for having a faith-based belief system when that is what they have themselves. He lumps atheists together and he lumps scientists together, claiming that they believe in magic. The individual in a state of severe denial often projects the disowned aspect of their own psyche onto the world around them, showing a diminished acknowledgement of differences between individuals within the groups onto which they are projecting. Monk E. Mind is arguing that we should seek easily visualisable explanations for what happens in the world around us and that we not bother to test these explanations experimentally. That is what religious people did in a pre-scientific era. Perhaps his exasperation with others is a projection of his subconscious fear that his game of semantics may be “the dumbest religion on Earth.”
I don’t think we need to trouble ourselves much with this book. It is full of ideas. Ideas are not objects. Ideas are concepts. Only objects exist. Concepts don’t exist. There’s nothing to see here.
[This review has been heavily revised as a result of feedback from the author.]
There is a Christian principle “Judge not that thou be not judged.” Some people no doubt believe that the usefulness of this advice hinges on a belief in God. After all, is it not God who would judge us?
I interpret it differently. If we have a framework of judgement, then we will subject ourselves to that framework of judgement whether we like it or not.
I was thinking about this today as a result of a controversy which has erupted about a cartoon by the controversial Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig.
The cartoon depicts a baby falling out of its pram unnoticed by his young mother because she is too busy looking at Instagram on her phone.
This is a pretty extreme situation. There is no need for anyone to identify with this mother simply because they are a mother with a mobile phone themselves. It is not as if the cartoon is about a baby in a crib looking up accusingly at his mother on her phone. It depicts extreme social media addiction and neglect. If you don’t have a serious social media addiction and you are not a neglectful parent, then it isn’t about you.
But the cartoon has made a lot of people very defensive.
Controversial feminist Clementine Ford responded :
Clearly the cartoon touched a raw nerve. That’s what it was meant to do. If Ford didn’t feel guilty, she wouldn’t respond in that way. But it isn’t a judgemental cartoon. If judgement comes, it comes only from the conscience of the viewer. The cartoon is using imagination to suggest what an infant’s eye view of the world might be. An infant doesn’t know if you are on your mobile phone for work or sharing pictures of him, he only knows that your attention is elsewhere. Leunig is depicting something which already exists in our subconscious, so it is no good shooting the messenger.
Parental guilt is a major problem which exists with or without Leunig’s cartoons. What makes it so insidious is that it is a negative feedback phenomena. The more guilty a parent feels the more they turn inward or need distraction and ego-reinforcement to deal with the pain, and thus the less available they are for their children, which leads to more guilt.
There is also a feedback link between our judgement of others and being prone to judging ourselves. Ford is someone who is known for being judgemental - for calling people “cunt” or “creepy fuckface”. Standing in judgement of men, in particular, is her stock in trade. So, of course, she has a guilty conscience about her parenting. Not only do we judge ourselves if we are locked into judgement mode with others, but the judgement of others may be our way of getting some relief from the torture of our own conscience. Thus it can be another negative feedback loop.
So, once again, we see the need for cultivating unconditional self-acceptance. Only this will unleash our full capacity to be there for those who depend on us, and enable us to respond to the destructive behaviour of others without judgement of the wounded individual who lies behind that behaviour. And it will make us into people who can’t be hurt by a cartoon.
It seems that the battle between the conscience and the insecure ego is playing itself out around us all the time. It is the theme of our times and it has been the story of our history from the very beginning. And, surely, it is not just around us but within us that the battle rages.
I feel myself torn. Those who play the conscience of our times articulate the realities of our situation ecologically and socially. While they may not always get it right, they are pointing to things which cannot be dismissed without burying one’s head dangerously in the sand.
On the other hand, when such individuals inspire even violent hatred, that is not something alien to me. I identify with those who feel this way. I feel it in me too. Preach at me. Tell me what is wrong with me. Remind me of the things I deep down know are true but desperately wish were not true. And I’ll wish you were dead.
This dilemma is the story of our species. What we need in order to behave lovingly towards each other is self-acceptance. From this comes our ability to be generous, open, spontaneous and honest. But an unforgiving insistence on such behaviour means that our self-acceptance is progressively undermined by feelings of guilt. Beyond a certain point, the more the conscience insists, the more the ego resists.
Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering or insecure organism. Thus guilt, far from correcting the totality of our behaviour, makes us selfish.
And the dictatorial demands of the conscience on the selfish individual generate malevolence - the desire to revenge ourselves on the critical voice by doing something ever worse.
Of course we couldn’t do without the conscience. We needed to have some concept of what loving behaviour would look like which could continue to exist in our minds long after the love needed to realise it had died from our hearts. If we had been able to forgive our failures to meet that standard, then that love would never have died, but we have never been able to forgive ourselves enough.
The history of the human race has been one of great courage, determination and initiative. When we think back at the dangers and challenges our ancestors met head on and the terrible suffering they experienced, and inflicted upon each other, it is remarkable that beings of mere flesh and blood could persist through all that.
As Hamlet said, “…conscience does make cowards of us all.” Historically we persisted against the odds partly because we repressed our conscience. Our conscience would tell us that it was wrong to conquer, to steal and to oppress. But we did it anyway. If we had followed our conscience exclusively we would probably be living in huts in the jungle eating nuts and berries - without science and without the benefits of technology.
This doesn’t mean we could or should continue to live a life of conscience-suppressing domination. We just don’t want to lose the spirit and courage which we will need to meet our current crises. If we are to find a new relationship with the conscience it mustn’t be one in which our spirit is broken, crushed beneath it’s unforgiving jackboot.
If we are to have a sustainable new way of living it will have to be an expression of exuberance arising from an unalloyed love for ourselves. It can’t be some humiliating act of penance for past misdeeds.
The courage that brought us through the nightmare of history was the courage of divided beings. We were carrying the burden of a condemning conscience. If we can heal this conflict and all of the social divisions it gave rise to, then we will find a courage and determination we have never known.
How do we do this?
We need an understanding of this underlying human dilemma.
We need to unconditionally accept thoughts and feelings, recognising that they are the inevitable product of our current situation and that, the more we acknowledge them consciously, the more easily we can chose appropriate behaviour in the light of them. To accept a thought does not mean to believe that it is a truth. And to accept a feeling does not mean to act upon it.
We need to be able to honestly articulate our psychological position.
Acceptance is what shrinks the dark side of us. It was inflamed by unforgiving criticism, and criticism open or implied continues to exacerbate it.
So what if someone hates me? I say : “It’s O.K. if you hate me. If I were you I know I would hate me too.”
Hatred is a cover emotion for underlying feelings of guilt or shame. If we can feel that our feelings of hatred, as an emotion, are accepted, perhaps the feelings of guilt or shame can come into consciousness. The idea that an emotion is accepted acts against the impulse towards repression, while criticism of that emotion encourages repression of whatever lies beneath it.
Sometimes sadism masquerades as righteousness. Sometimes the sense of humiliation which we experience when we look at our own sins makes us need to point out the sins of others and glory in their humiliation.
Instead we could realise that we are all in the same boat. If we can feel love and behave benevolently in the world, then we are one of the lucky ones whose situation in that world has not been one that killed our love and drove us to malevolence. If our love is real and our benevolence not a show, then we will have no interest in the egotism which would take credit for it.
The path towards healing for society is the path of honesty. That means acknowledging our own darker emotions and accepting them in others.
Jordan Peterson, on the other hand, claims that a better translation of the Greek word ήμερος usually translated as “meek” is “those who have weapons and the ability to use them but are determined to keep them sheathed”. Those who take the right path are those who integrate their shadow, who acknowledge the dark side of their nature but do not succumb to it, gaining strength from their encounter with it. He is afraid that we may assume that meek is synonymous with “weak” :
Here is a guide to how the Greek word is generally translated.
Here is some discussion of Peterson’s interpretation.
One problem I have with both interpretations is the failure to acknowledge the meaning of the word “inherit”. An inheritance is something unearned which falls to us. Now it may have been earned in some instances, in the sense that someone may put us in their will because we have been of service to them or we may be written out of a will because we have done something to offend a family member. But none of this is intrinsic to the meaning of the word “inheritance”. The passage doesn’t say “the meek will earn (or win) the earth”.
I think we have to look at the context to get a better understanding.
This is the third in what are known as the Beautitudes. Jesus tells us that eight particular classes of people are “blessed” or “fortunate”. He then tells his followers that all of them are “blessed” or “fortunate” if they are persecuted because of him.
He first claims “blessedness” for the “poor in spirit” and then for “those who mourn”. Clearly these are not those who are blessed with good fortune in the world as it currently stands.
I think that, to understand the Beatitudes, we have to recognise that Jesus was an apocalypticist, i.e. a person who believed that some event was going to occur which would overturn the established social order and usher in some kind of paradise on earth. (I recognise that it is more popular to interpret the concept of a “Kingdom of Heaven” as some ethereal place we go to when we die, but that doesn’t make so much sense to me.)
The Beatitudes make sense in the framework of two worlds - the social world we know, with its injustices, its dishonesty and its oppressive power relationships - and a potential world of honesty and love which lies buried beneath its repressions.
Sermon on the Mount 1 Le Sainte Bible Traduction nouvelle selon la Vulgate par Mm J -J Bourasse et P Janvier Tours Alfred Mame et Fils 2 1866 3 France 4 Gustave Dor Engraving photographed by ruskpp.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” 5:3
Perhaps the “poor in spirit” are those who have been very wounded by their experiences of life. They have little spirit left in them. But in a world of love their wounds will be healed and they will be free of oppression. In terms of a transition to the new world, they have the advantage - “the blessing” - of not being invested in the old.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” 5:4
To be in mourning is not a form of righteousness that one pursues. As with being “poor in spirit” it is a disadvantage in the old world, but one which makes us less invested in it. We fixate on loving relationships which we have lost, through the death of the loved one or through a breakdown in the relationship. In a world where everybody loves everybody else, it will be easy to let go of the past and live in the present.
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” 5:5
No amount of power or aggression can keep the old world from dying. Terrible destruction can occur. Nothing can necessarily protect anyone. But, only a healthy society will not eventually fall. If such a healthy loving truthful world comes into existence, it will belong to the meek as much as to anyone else. The point is that the powerful and aggressive try to hang onto the world, and, individually, they always fail. They can postpone the new world, but they can never have a world of their own which persists.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” 5:6
Those who long for a world in which we treat each other well, are not invested in a world in which we don’t. So, once again, we have a group of people who have nothing to lose and everything to gain in a transition from the old world to the new world.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.” 5:7
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” 5:8
I think this is where we come to what Griffith calls “the innocent”. As very young children we were aligned to the world of love. If God is the creative theme of the universe which is manifested in human behaviour as love, then children can “see God”. This is the source of their “enthusiasm”, i.e. “the god within”. It is the wounds of life, which sow the seeds of internal division and breed resentment, which “hide the face of God” from us. In a world in which these divisions are healed with understanding, everyone will live in full awareness that they are manifestations of this creative force.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.” 5:9
This is similar to 5:7. Peace between warring factions is keeping us in the old world. Those who can resolve conflicts are architects of the new world. The reward falls to all, not just to those who behave this way. It isn’t about pursuing righteous behaviour in order to pass a test and get a reward, it is about being a manifestation of a social process from which the whole of humanity benefits.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” 5:10
The old world is threatened by honesty and is insecure in it’s sense of its own worth, so those who tell the truth or act in a way which shows up the old world’s corrupt behaviour tend to be persecuted. It is necessary to keep the vision of the new world in mind in order to not give in to this pressure.
Another interpretation could be put on this sentence. Some people are persecuted because of a false sense of righteousness (what William Blake called “Moral Virtue”). A good example might be people who are persecuted for their sexuality. Someone who is in a loving gay relationship is being honest and loving - requirements of the new world - and someone who tries to persecuted them in the belief that they are deviating from righteousness, by not adopting dishonesty and suppressing their love, is part of the old world. The new world is for the person being thus persecuted as it is for all who have been persecuted.
So how does this apocalypse, this death of the old world and birth of the new take place?
What makes the most sense to me is that the human race has always been engaged in a kind of collective improvisation to find the path to the new world. Art, philosophy, religion, science… These are all ways in which our minds and our hearts have been engaged in a process of trying to sort ourselves out. We make mistakes, we strive to learn from them and compensate for them. We examine the world around us and try to better understand where we come from.
Think of us as a computer trying to work out the bugs in its own programming. We can even see this in the evolution of different religions. We can see Jesus as someone trying to compensate for the flaws in Judaism, just as Judaism was an attempt to compensate for flaws in various pagan belief systems. It’s all a part of a process of trying to find something which works. And, in the modern world, we have new abilities and new problems not dreamt of in Jesus’ time.
The advantage we have is that this collective improvisation is taking place at an exponential rate. We can share ideas very quickly and with minimum censorship.
What should we do? Participate in the process. Speak what we feel to be the truth. Listen to the ideas expressed by others and test them for flaws. The conceptual framework of understanding which ushers in a new world will be the one which passes the test of such scrutiny. And we will know it because it works, because it heals conflict and spreads wellbeing wherever it is expressed. “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” Matthew 7:16
Every day we see evidence of how rotten the old world is - lies and corruption are exposed. It’s time for the new world to find itself amidst the collapse of the old. It can only grow out of open, honest, spontaneous and generous interaction between individuals. Dogmatic utopias constructed through social programming or the impositions of more laws are part of the old world. We will know the truth by the fact that it sets us free from all that.
A beautiful young man named Dorian Gray becomes an obsession for two gentlemen - artist Basil Hallward and cynical socialite Sir Henry Wotton. To Hallward he is a muse, to Wotton an amusement and would-be protege. Hallward captures his beauty in a remarkable portrait. When Wotton tells him that youth is all that matters, Gray makes a wish that the portrait might age instead of him. He is astonished and frightened when he finds that the painting shows the signs of his loss of innocence, while his own face remains the same. Under the tutelage of the witty cynic Wotton, he comes to embrace a life which runs after beauty and pleasure with no regard for the welfare of others. He leaves a trail of broken individuals behind him, his ex-friends and ex-lovers, himself apparently untouched. But there is always a price to be paid.
Oscar Wilde’s only novel begins with a preface consisting of epigrams on the subjects of art, literature and criticism. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book,”he tells us. “Books are well written or badly written. That is all.”There is perhaps something paradoxical about this statement appearing in the preface to a book which conforms very much to the conventions of the morality tale, and in which a book plays a corrupting role in the life of the protagonist, at least in his own mind.
So what is the apparent moral? A warning against idolatry. To worship at an idol, we are told repeatedly in the Old Testament, is a certain way to lose our soul.
The soul of any person or thing is that integrity which maintains its existence as a functioning whole. To place too much emphasis on any part or quality of the whole is to risk the loss of the integrity which gives it its meaning. Dorian Gray comes to give youth primary importance - to worship at its altar - and any worship requires sacrifice. The soul of life is its impermanence. An inanimate object may remain the same. To live is to change, to be affected by others and by our own actions.
Dorian Gray is emotionally affected by life to some extent - he feels fear and self-pity - but something in the resilience of his flesh seems to keep the negative emotions from persisting.
There is a chapter in the middle of the novel which takes Dorian from the age of 20 to 38. It is a florid description of jewels and tapestries and unusual musical instruments - objects of fascination for him, to read about or to experience. This is the way that Wilde articulates his path of decadence. There will, later in the story, be hints at sexual excess, not to mention a visit to an opium den, but everything is left up to our imagination, which works well. Each of us can easily conjure our own personal image of depravity. But the fact that so much time is spent on descriptions of treasures seems significant to me. Someone could devote themselves to social pleasures - the pleasure of fellowship in song or dance, the sensual pleasure of skin on skin - either in a sexual or non-sexual context. Such pleasures might bring them closer to others and encourage them to be open also to their welfare. Or one might take pleasure in communing with nature. But the jewels and tapestries are like Dorian himself, beauties which exist outside of time - beauties cold in the face of human vulnerability.
The character of Henry Wotton is like the public face of Wilde himself taken to the extreme. He too was known for his cynical wit. It seems as if he recognised that his persona - and his philosophy of aestheticism, which championed beauty over all else - could be dangerous if taken too far. This gives the novel its brilliance. There is nothing like a great artist playing out through his imagination something which could symbolise his own possible downfall. As it is, extracts from Wotton’s dialogue are often presented as if they were things which Wilde said in own social life. Within the context of the novel we can see that he recognised the limitations of such cynicism.
Nevertheless, Wotton’s siren call carries weight with Gray, and with the reader, because there is truth in it. Repression, in order to conform to society’s demands, robs us of our vitality. Virtue, as it is assessed by the current standards of society, can also become a idol which robs us of our soul. In Wilde’s satirical portrait of self-important philanthropists we get a glimpse of the emptiness of respectable society. And, after all, it was respectable society which would put Wilde in prison. The danger is always one of over-compensation. As the Taoists point out, the key is to walk the line of balance.
In The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde said : “For each man kills the thing he loves…”That idea is here also in this earlier work. We see how romantic love can be more about attachment and projection than appreciation of the other person for who they really are. We are bound for disappointment, a disappointment which can be deadly. Genuine love is the spirit of openness to who the other person really is that does not close off if they prove to be something other. It requires openness to being changed in fundamental ways through the encounter. Yet Dorian Gray has prayed to be immune to change, therefore he is not capable of love.
Most of us have a tendency to feel the emotion we call "guilt" when our behaviour fails to conform to an internal vision of how we should behave. We call that internal vision our "conscience".
But what is the source of our conscience? Is it an instinct we are born with? Is it something we learn from others? Or is it the voice of a supernatural being speaking through us? There are many advocates of each of these theories.
This concept that the conscience is simply an instinctive program is one of the key problems I have with Jeremy Griffith's theory that our disturbed psychology is the result of a conflict between the conscious mind, and its need to experiment with self-management, and the dictatorial demands of such a gene-based moral programming.
It may be that everyone, with the possible exception of psychopaths, has a sense of right and wrong. But what is right or wrong differs from culture to culture and individual to individual. While the conscience may not be entirely learned, there is certainly a learned element in the way in which it manifests itself.
Let's see if we can learn something by trying to strip human existence back to its basics. What does it mean to be an organism? The key motive of the organism is self-preservation. It may be that the breeding instinct provides a self-preservation motive on the level of species which supersedes that of the individual, but most of the time our base-line objective is to stay alive, all other things being equal. I may be saying "all other things being equal" a lot, because the less basic motives for our behaviour can override the more basic. Our basic impulse may be one of self-preservation, but that doesn't mean that our mind, freed from the task of keeping us alive for a while, may not arrive at a bad idea which drives us to take our own life.
It is hard to argue with sensory experience. Pain and pleasure speak to us directly, free from the clouding of language and concept. All other things being equal, the first repels us and the latter attracts. Once again, less basic factors can interfere with this. We can arrive at a psychological state in which we shrink from some pleasures and glory in something painful. But that isn't where we start.
So our most basic intentions would be to stay alive, to avoid pain and to experience pleasure.
But we are born into a social context in which we are cared for. If we are one of the lucky ones, we are born into a context in which we are loved. But even the most harshly treated are looked after sufficiently to be kept alive.
Clearly there is an instinct for love. A mother abandoning her baby because its care imposes more suffering than pleasure on her is the exception rather than the rule. And, once again, if we wish to understand such exceptions we need to look to factors which interfere with the natural - e.g. drug addiction or mental illness.
What feels best to us as infants? To have our needs met within a harmonious social context in which there is plenty of affectionate touching and verbal communication.
Our myths have their grounding in our experience. If we experienced a loving infancy, then it is the basis for our concept of Paradise. All-giving mother Goddesses and stern but loving father Gods also are concepts which carry into adult life the infant memory.
So an instinct for love provides parents with the motive to care for their child, and no doubt shapes the way the child bonds with them. I have said that love can be defined as open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication. It almost doesn't need saying that this is the mode of communication of an individual who is operating in a healthy, unwarped manner. It is not hard to understand how the processes of learning and becoming a social being will be impeded if a child is closed off, a liar, habit-bound or greedy.
All other things being equal, we don't want to abandon paradise. Sometimes we can see directly when we have breached the laws of this paradise. It requires a harmonious social context so, if we upset someone, then we may reasonably feel we have breached those laws. We want to be accepted. To be accepted by those around is to remain in paradise. Parents and teachers may also teach us the rules we must seek to follow if we want to remain there. What makes it difficult is that we can't please everybody. There are times when we are damned by someone if we do and damned by someone else if we don't.
So, I think, there is an instinctive element to the conscience - the instinct for love provides the crucible in which it takes form. But that form is socially determined.
The conscience is that part of our ego - our conscious thinking self - in which we store our expectations about ourselves, those expectations very often being an internalisation of the expectations of others. This is to the extent that the conscience is conscious. It is also possible that some of our expectations are repressed to the level of the subconscious by the fact that they are so painful to look at. But I would contend that they have sunk down from our mind rather than risen from some genetic substrate.
Even if we assume that the reluctance to do something we perceive to be harmful were genetically-based, the intellect is often required to tell us what is harmful. We can't feel guilty about our carbon footprint unless the intellect has worked out how global warming works.
Is there a battle with the conscience going on within the conscious mind? Absolutely.
What I call "the human neurosis" is the divided state of the ego. Paradise lay in being accepted and being able to accept ourselves. To not be accepted, in some way, by others, can inflict a wound upon the ego, and the ego will become focused on a counter argument as to why it is acceptable, or not to blame for what has led to the rejection. But even more painful is the sense of self-betrayal, when we find ourselves unable to avoid breaching the rules and so we split into a fiery accuser with the pointing finger - "you fucked it up for yourself" - and the cringing supplicant - "I couldn't help it!" In either case response to the critical voice can go either way - contrite depression or defiant anger.
What is the nature of malevolence? Why are we capable of inflicting cruelty for its own sake? I believe malevolence is conscience-driven behaviour. If our self-acceptance is undermined to too great a degree, we can end up feeling totally backed into a corner, our conscience making demands of us which we no longer have the generosity of spirit to fulfil. The more self-accepting we feel - the more relaxed and carefree within ourselves - the more enthusiasm we have for generosity. But current suffering tightens us up. Think of some time when you were suffering greatly and somebody asked something of you. Did it not make you angry that they would ask for something when you had nothing to give? The darkest place we can go is that corner where we hate the dictatorship of our conscience so much - for having eaten away all the love we have and still be wanting more - that we have to have revenge - we have to try to stab it to death by doing the one thing which it says would be the worst thing we could do.
If our conscience were in our genes it would always oppress us. Our ego and our society are adaptable, they are capable of adjusting to new knowledge. Genes can't forgive, and healing lies in the power to forgive. It is the intellect which has the power to make sense of our dilemma and find the way home.
When the conscience's criticism causes a level of insecurity which drives further breaches of its dictates, the negative feedback loop which results spreads a social poison far beyond the individual. If we can find an easily replicable way of untying this knot, the world will be swept with an enthusiasm for solving all other problems.
The Christian religion talks about redemption. Our sins are forgiven and we are instructed to go and sin no more. If following the conscience is an act of will, we will always tire. We need to return to our awareness of how it worked in our first paradise. The joy of accepting and being accepted was the source of our enthusiasm. Our mistakes needed to be both learned from and forgiven. Where things went wrong was when we stopped being able to forgive ourselves and thus became split into prosecution and defence in our own internal trial.
In the scheme of things, those trials are trivialities. We are looking to the past and concentrating on our "sins", giving them primary importance. What really matters is what we want and how we can get it. If we want a world in which we thrive together, then we need to concentrate on finding ways to untie the knots that impede the flow of loving communication between us, and the malfunctioning conscience is the king of such knots.
