"Thou Must" vs. "Fuck That!"

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I’ve always experienced a tension within me between feelings of frustration and the imperative to “do the right thing”. When the frustration dies down, “doing the right thing” comes naturally. But when it builds up, there is a part of me that doesn’t want to “do the right thing”. To do so at such times requires discipline. But it is right. This I don’t question.

When I feel at peace and full of generosity, I just want to be kind and helpful. But at other times, reason and conscience act like an electrified fence to keep frustration from bursting through. And just as an electric fence is hardly likely to truly pacify the herd, but rather make them feel resentful and oppressed, so the feelings of frustration can be exacerbated by the pressure to “do the right thing”, even when it would come naturally in a peaceful state of psychological freedom.

We are surrounded by messages of what not to say about people. How are we supposed to referred to the intellectually disabled? What kinds of things should a man say to a woman, and what should he not? What are we to call people of particular races? How are we supposed to respond to people’s religious beliefs, especially if they seems silly to us or we feel that they are hurtful to others? What about personal appearance? What if someone is really obese? What if we find someone physically repulsive?

There is no doubt that being polite and tolerant is the right thing. But when the pressure builds there is a little man inside me that wants to say the cruellest thing possible. He’s fed up with “doing the right thing.”

There is no problem when I feel at peace, and that is most of the time these days, but when I feel this contrary spirit well up in me and yet I continue to “do the right thing", I feel like a liar and a hypocrite, because I’m putting on a false, socially-acceptable front. This in spite of the fact that nothing would be achieved, and much would be lost, by not doing so.

And it seems as if this contrary spirit can be conjured up where it didn’t exist by the preaching of the well-meaning. Tell me I mustn’t be racist, sexist, homophobic, or whatever and I want to use terms like “nigger”, “slut” or “faggot”. Because “doing the right thing” feels like oppression when you are implicitly threatened with punishment if you don’t do it.

I think this is why offensive humour plays such a role in our culture. We’ll “do the right thing” as long as we can let off steam by watching Borat do everything we know we mustn’t.

At the moment, I think this contrary spirit is contributing to the popularity of Donald Trump. He’s a real-life Borat. The only problem is that he is a politician who wants to lead one of the most powerful nations on the planet. I love Borat, but I wouldn’t vote for him. To many Trump no doubt feels “honest” for the same reason that I feel like a “liar” when I don’t allow myself to express the offensive things that are going on in my head.

Photo from Reuters

Now I’m not suggesting that we stop being polite and respectful, or that we just give up hope of the Trumps of the world ever finding that inner peace that would enable them to be polite and respectful themselves. But I do think we need to try to come to a better understanding of the relationship between that part of us which says “thou must” and the part that says “fuck that”.

I use my own inner life as a way to try to understand the world around me. If I find that the “fuck that” feelings are increased when the “thou must” comes on strong, is it not possible that the way we push for greater tolerance in the world may not be generating more intolerance? The “fuck you” may be offensive, but it is also defensive. It is a response to what feels like oppression. And if it feels like oppression then it is oppression. The problem is that we can’t see internal psychological oppression. Haven’t we all felt it though at some time, in some way. That point where there is just too much exploding in your head and someone tells you you shouldn’t be unkind and you just want to punch their face in.

There are no easy answers, but if we want to avoid social disintegration - if we want to achieve a society of sustainable equality and respect - if we want to be able to work together to solve the problems which face us - there is a commodity we really need to make our number one priority and that is what I would call “psychological space”. When we feel pressured to “do the right thing” it makes us want to do the opposite. This is especially true of those who do the wrong thing most of the time. Instead of concentrating on arguing about who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, it would be more useful to view every human being as a resource the efficient functioning of which is in the interests of us all.

We could think of ourselves as cars. The people who do the wrong thing are like cars which are very short of petrol. We try to get them to go down the road. We stand in front of them giving them a lecture on which road to take. If they don’t move we get behind them and we try to push them. We get frustrated and we kick them. But the reason they don’t do what a car is supposed to do is because they are all out of gas. We tell someone off for their bigotry or selfishness or violence, but if they don’t have the psychological room needed to do any better, then we are wasting our effort.

When we confront the terrible conflicts raging through the world, from the battlefields to the boardrooms to the bedrooms, it may seem that what I’m saying is impractical philosophising. If someone is trying to make your life a misery, you can’t just say “I know it’s just because you’re out of gas” and expect that to make things better.

But I think that acknowledging that we are all in the same boat, that each of us behaves only as well as our psychological space allows, is a good starting point. Then we can work on what opens up that space within us. How can we find a way to let out all of our frustrations in a non-destructive way? How can we learn to be guided by the principles that foster community without feeling oppressed by them? How can we learn how to unconditionally accept ourselves?

The more space we make in ourselves, the more capacity we will have to help those who are "out of gas".

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BOOK REVIEW : How to Be an Imperfectionist by Stephen Guise

In my book How to Be Free I said that “the love of perfection is the root of all evil” and that “the key to happiness, mental health and being the most that we can be is absolute and unconditional self-acceptance.” That’s all well and good, but what practical steps can we take to break the hold that perfectionism may have on us and to become more self-accepting? When I was asked this I couldn’t come up with much in the way of practical exercises, but had to acknowledge that that is one of the things people quite reasonably look for in a self-help book. So imagine how excited I was when someone alerted me to the existence of this book which promises a “new way to self-acceptance, fearless living, and freedom from perfectionism.”

Stephen Guise’s book is what a self-help book should be - short, illuminating and practical. It is full of observations which seemed so obvious after he said them that I wondered why I hadn't thought of them before.

Some of us may not view ourselves as perfectionists, but on close examination some of our problems - shyness, procrastination, depression, addiction, rumination - may arise from perfectionistic thinking, from having unhelpfully high expectations of ourselves, of others or of situations or events. Shyness can arise from a feeling that we mustn’t make mistakes in our social interactions with others. Procrastination can come from wanting to hang onto a vision of perfect action rather than discover the imperfections involved in actually carrying it out, or it can arise from over-estimating the effort that may be required in the doing of something or the negative results which might result from it, an unhelpfully high negative expectation. Depression can be increased by fighting against negative thoughts, being intolerant of our deviations from positivity. The “never enough” feeling of psychological addiction is also a form of perfectionism, as is the intolerance towards our past mistakes which takes the form of ruminating over them.

The practical exercises suggested in the book are based around the idea of forming mini-habits - very small daily tasks (so small that there is no excuse not to do them) the purpose of which is to establish the groundwork for larger habits. The example Guise uses most often is his exercise plan of doing one push-up a day. This gradually led to full workouts five days a week. His earlier book on this topic - Mini-Habits: Smaller Habits, Bigger Results - is apparently a best-seller. (I haven’t read it.)

Guise’s approach is not about building up motivation. It’s about removing barriers. We are unlikely to be very good at anything the first time we try it, so becoming skilled and confident in any area of life means removing the barrier of high expectations. One way he suggests we can do that is to adopt a binary view of success. For instance, if we want to give a speech in front of an audience, we can forget about the issue of how well we do it, but count doing it, even incredibly badly, as a success. The only failure is to not give it a go. This isn’t just a trick. It’s being realistic, because the only way we become confident and skilled at public speaking is by being willing to do it badly until we learn to do it well. So doing it badly really is a success, because it gets us far closer to doing it well then not attempting it will.

Another idea I really like is that of replacing the phrase “I should have done…” with “I could have done…” It’s such a simple cognitive technique, but it turns us away from regrets about the past and towards a practical strategy for the future.

Need for approval from others can also be an area of unhelpfully high demands. Guise recommends ways we can break past this barrier and thus gain confidence to be more authentically ourselves. I’m not sure that singing at the supermarket is one of the suggestions of his that I will take up. (I don’t think that my authentic self is sadistic enough to inflict such suffering on others.) The principle is a good one though that, where fear stands as a barrier, liberation can come through the process of desensitisation. The more we do something potentially embarrassing or anxiety-provoking, the more those feelings will decrease.

As Guise points out, this is the problem with so many motivational books. We can build up a high level of motivation, but it too may tend to decrease over time. The beauty of his mini-habit idea is that it requires minimal motivation at the start. The habit, once established, then provides a framework within which motivation can grow, if the habit turns out to be a rewarding one. If you do one push-up a day for a few months, you may find you are curious to see if you can do a few more on your more energetic days. Eventually you are doing enough to feel stronger and more confident, and that is the motivation to join a gym, or whatever. If you write two sentences a day for six months, you may find that a really good idea for a novel is starting to emerge. Then the excitement of discovery is the motivation to keep going. But if you pumped yourself up with motivation, did as many push-ups as you could do before collapsing and said “I’m not going to do that again for awhile” or if you pumped yourself up with dreams of being the next J.K. Rowling and sat down to begin on your first novel and found you couldn’t think of a plot, you might give up before you’d had a chance to really begin. Think of Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams. Build the habit and the motivation will come.

Guise isn’t one of these self-help gurus who hands down his wisdom from on high. He’s the kind of self-help author who tells you about the embarrassing thing he accidentally said to the hot woman at the gym. He practices what he preaches not just in life but in the manner of his writing. He doesn’t try to avoid embarrassment. And that makes me feel all the more comfortable in listening to his advice.

I’d recommend this book to anyone. I don’t think there is anyone so perfect in their imperfectionism that they can’t learn something from it. Any book which can give us methods to increase our chances of success in any endeavour we choose to pursue, and provides us with strategies to avoid being hard on ourselves even if we fail at all of them, is definitely worth the short amount of time it takes to read.

Beyond self-help, though, there are ideas in this book which, if they were to take hold, could make all the difference to our chances of survival as a species. Our ecological and economic crises both rest upon our “‘never enough’ bias” (pg. 58). Our apathy arises from our inability to “focus on the process” (pg. 61). The breakdown in community (and thus the cooperative skills we need to work together on solving our social problems) arises from our “need for approval” (pg. 85). Chaos theory shows that small changes in a system can gradually lead to a complete change of that system. Who knows what could be unleashed by an imperfectionist revolution? When you consider how hampered so many of us have been by perfectionism in its many forms, that is an awful lot of potential energy and talent of which we have been deprived throughout the whole of our history (has there been a time not blighted by perfectionism?).

Thoughts on the Male Feminist

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I want to sketch out some rough ideas which have arisen from contemplating the behaviour of some men who support feminism. There are risks involved in speculating about what goes on inside people’s heads. But it is also dangerous to leave ideas unformed and unexamined in our minds. Laying them out on the table and assessing them seems the way to go.

When trying to understand a phenomena, sometimes the best place to begin is with its most exaggerated manifestation. If we can see meaning in the bold shape of the extreme, then it may enable us to see the same pattern, but with softer edges, elsewhere.

I’ve noticed that there are some men who, having adopted the cause of feminism, become almost rabidly savage in their condemnation of any signs of sexism they find in the speech or behaviour of other men. This is the relatively rare extreme. That someone with a generosity of spirit and ethical integrity should decide that equality between the sexes is a goal worth pursuing enthusiastically is understandable enough, but where declared support for that aim takes a form in which generosity of spirit to one’s own gender seems seriously compromised the behaviour makes less immediate sense.

I have misogynistic thoughts and feelings. I have racist thoughts and feelings. I have homophobic thoughts and feelings. None of this is much of a problem for me, because I accept these thoughts and feelings when they arise, and so they quickly depart.

Life and our interactions with other people involve a degree of frustration. When we feel frustrated, the process of interacting with someone of a different mindset or culture than our own may be a little more difficult and low level hostile feelings may be generated. If we accept them, they will quickly dissipate, but if we feel ashamed or guilty about them they may become a fixation and grow.

Misogynistic feelings, from the fleeting to the ingrained, have clearly been common in men from the beginnings of civilisation down to the present day. When we men have oppressed and mistreated women it has been an expression of such feelings.

Now if a man takes  up the cause of feminism, doesn’t it make sense that he would take this approach in interacting with other men :

“Look, guys, I know you have these feelings of frustration with women. It may have got to the stage were you feel embittered and hateful towards them. I understand. I’ve had those feelings too, maybe not as strongly as you do, but I know. The thing is, though, that allowing those feelings to determine how we interact with women isn’t doing us any favours. I’m not talking morality. Stuff that. I’m talking about our own self interest. We share this planet with women. The happier they are, the happier we’ll be. Happy women are generous women. And no amount of power or wealth is more valuable than being surrounded by people who are fond and supportive of you in a way which comes from the heart.”

There may be some men who take that very approach to promoting the cause of female equality. But what of the guy who is screaming at his fellow men about what sexist pigs they are?

Let’s skip to another cultural phenomenon in which someone becomes very angry and contemptuous in support of a cause. I was watching a video recently of a man who considers himself a Christian. He was strutting around a stage, spittle flying from his lips, as he condemned homosexuality and called for the state to execute all gay people. Why the extreme hostility? Does it not seem likely that he is caught in a negative feedback loop arising from the anti-homosexual beliefs he has either adopted or been indoctrinated into? It seems likely that most non-gay men have at least passing homosexual urges from time to time. Some may indulge them, others will let them slip away and go back to lusting after women. But if you believe that homosexuality is an abomination, you don’t have the luxury of taking twinges of this kind so lightly. There may be a moment of horror when you face the possibility that you yourself may be the abomination, then you shove that thought deep down into your subconscious, and you begin to build a wall to keep the horror contained. You can’t accept this part of yourself, and thus you fixate on it, but because you can’t even bare to face the fact that it is a part of you, you split from it and become deeply paranoid, going to battle in the world around you with anything which resonates with the monster within. You would slay all the gay people in the world if you could, but it could never satisfy you, because that monster within would not have been slain. The irony is that all that it takes to make the monster go away is to own it. It is denial which feeds such monsters, and acceptance which slays them.

Is it not possible that the angry male feminist is in the same position as the gay-hating preacher? He has gone to war against the misogyny of his fellow males (something which, unlike homosexuality, is genuinely a problem) as a way of maintaining his denial of his own repressed misogynistic feelings.

Generosity of spirit requires what we might call psychological room. If we are caught up with internal battles we have little room to really listen to others or accommodate their needs or desires.

I think that most of we men have a battle going on within us (often one of many) between our misogynistic feelings and our conscience which tells us that it is wrong to have these feelings and even worse to act upon them. If we could tell our conscience to back off a little, we might be able to simply accept the feelings and allow them to dissipate. The more our conscience crowds us, the less room we will have and the more likely we will be to accumulate further misogynistic feelings.

And the more insecure we feel because of the turmoil of this kind of battle, the more we need to cling to some kind of “proof” of our worth. We may try to “prove” ourselves by some kind of competitive activity or by accumulating material goods or whatever. One way that we may try to demonstrate our worth is by taking up a cause. At least with regard to this cause we are on the side of the angels, we tell ourselves.

Just as Saul of Tarsus, having been battling the Christians, renamed himself Paul and tried to leave his angry self behind by taking up their cause, so the man who feels guilty about his misogynistic feelings may decide to rise above them (i.e. repress them) and become a champion of women’s rights.

This can seem like a good idea. He doesn’t have to view himself as the bad guy. He may get superficial acceptance from feminist women (I say superficial because they are accepting only the front he is putting on and not the repressed misogyny which really needs the healing touch of acceptance). And he gets an outlet for some of his frustration, in the same way the preacher does, by expressing anger towards men who give outward expression to the feelings he is repressing in himself. But this won’t bring him healing. It won’t give him the room for generosity of spirit, even to women, let alone his fellow men.

If he could own his own dark side, then he could bring to other men the release that they need. He could show them how to make the monster inside go away. And so doing he could be a part of melting away the barriers to equality for women, rather than leaving women to have to break them down, as no doubt they do have the capacity to do.

Now you may be thinking “Hang on a minute. I know men who accept that they are misogynists and that misogyny hasn’t disappeared, rather they aggressively and unrepentantly act up on it.” This is bravado, not acceptance. Such aggressive, arrogant behaviour is defensive. An army is not needed when there is no insecurity to protect.

The Achilles heal of feminism has always been the tendency for its criticism, real or implicit, to make it harder for we men to learn to accept our misogynistic feelings and thus let them dissipate. Generosity of spirit is the natural state of the non-embattled human, but we, men and women, have been so embattled - so troubled by all the things we have found it next to impossible to accept about ourselves - that it has been easy for us to fall into conflict and drive each other deeper within those battlements.

We tend to view the concept of confession of sins that we find in the Christian religion as a form of reparation through the humbling of oneself before God. But I wonder if that is how it was originally intended. I have a different vision. I see a bunch of people sitting around in a circle. A woman says, “I’m pretty lustful you know. All I think about is sex.” Another says, “Wow! What a relief! I thought it was just me.” A man says, “I get so angry at my wife I just want to sock her in the face.” “I feel that way, too,” says another man. “And I want to kick my husband in the balls when won’t listen to what I’m saying,” says another woman. “You and me both, sister,” says another. No-one feels particularly repentant, but as they open up to each other in this way their self-consciousness, their selfishness, melts away. They laugh about their aggressive feelings and they don’t feel aggressive any more. And once their sexual feelings are expressed they no longer have the selfish, i.e. self-directed, quality which comes with hiding and repressing something. A key aspect of this is that nobody is judged or expelled because of their confession, because it is understood that the process is a healing one, if they are expelled because they admit to bad behaviour then they will most likely return to that bad behaviour, but if they are shown acceptance and remain within the community the acceptance they find there will heal the motivating force behind that behaviour.

Perhaps this is too simple, too naive, a fantasy for our troubled world, but sometimes things have to begin with unrealistic dreams.

Me... Or My Disease?

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Recently I was reading some feedback comments on Natasha Tracy's Bipolar Burble Blog. The idea was put forward by one sufferer with bipolar disorder that it is important to understand that the turbulent behaviour of individuals with the condition comes from the disease and not from the individual who suffers from it. Unfortunately my manner of questioning the usefulness of this attitude caused some offence to the individual in question. I realised in retrospect that the best way to discuss such difficult topics without giving offence tends to be to speak of personal experiences. So I thought I would use that exchange as inspiration to give a very personal and detailed account of my viewpoint here.

I've experienced bipolar psychosis. To clarify my take on the “Is it me or is it my disease?" question, I'd like to look at two examples of my behaviour in a hospital emergency room while experiencing a psychotic episode.

One of my delusions at the time was that an apocalyptic transformation of human society was taking place and that, in this new world which was coming into being, things were acceptable which would not have been acceptable before. I thought it was O.K. for me to grope the bottoms of nurses. It took a couple of experiments before I recognised that I might be mistaken. One nurse responded angrily, another broke down in tears.

Was this me? Or was it my disease? I wasn't to blame for my behaviour, because, had I not been confused by psychosis, I would not have behaved in that way. I had no desire to cause offence or distress. It was the delusion that my behaviour would not cause such feelings which made it seem acceptable to me at the time. But where did the impetus for the behaviour come from? It came from my desire to grope women's bottoms, something which had nothing to do with my psychosis. I wanted to grope women's bottoms then. I want to grope women's bottoms now. I have two reasons for not doing so :

1. Such behaviour would lead to me being excluded from civilised society.

2. It would be liable to cause distress the women involved.

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One of the symptoms of the manic phase of bipolar disorder is a loss of inhibitions. When we lose our inhibitions, and thus our tendency to censor our expression of our feelings, what is revealed is, arguably, more our real self than the sanitised version we present when we are concerned about making a good impression.

Something else I did during this wild evening in the emergency ward was to point at a fellow patient and shout : “You're not my father!"

Was that me? Or my disease? Once again, I would not have done this if I had not been psychotic. I had no desire to confound or frighten some poor fellow patient. In my confused state he looked like someone I knew, someone from whom I felt a desperate need to declare my independence. (Not my actual father I should point out.)

My disease was the source of my confusion. But the message of defiance, misdirected as it was, was very much my own.

Stability in the personality comes from integration of all of its aspects. If we accept all aspects of our psyche as a part of who we are, then wholeness is possible. If we view some aspect of our thought, feeling or behaviour are something alien and/or hostile which we must contain, fight against or attempt to expunge, then it will tend to become more severe.

Let's look at a hypothetical situation now. One of the major problems we may have if we are suffering from some form of psychological condition such as bipolar disorder or conventional depression is the pressure which may be put upon our relationship with a loved one. No doubt I was a source of distress not just to nurses but to friends and members of my family when I was ill. But I've never been married or had a comparable kind of relationship. What if I had?

When we are suffering it is natural for our attention to centre upon ourselves. If we are depressed or manic we will be selfish. This is inescapable. We may fight against it. We may try to force ourselves to recognise the needs of others. But our heart won't be in it. Maybe we will feel guilty about putting an emotional drain on our partner. If we do, it will make us more depressed or it will add to our mania. The essence of mania is escape. Our situation seems intolerable, so rather than facing it our mind races away into wild dreams or spending sprees or sexual escapades, anything to avoid facing what would otherwise seem to be our reality. I say “seem" because often what is so unthinkable is unthinkable only because we have not yet discovered a comfortable way to think about it. Our problems are not necessarily objective problems.

“I know I'm treating you terribly," we might say, “but it isn't me, it's the disease. I love you."

What is love? It's a form of communication characterised by openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity. Often what we think of as love is something else - attachment, commitment or sexual attraction. Attachment is when we desire the presence of a person or a thing. When we pick someone to be our partner, we make a commitment to be supportive of them and to try to keep our love for them alive. Love exists when it can. It requires the qualities listed above. If we have to hide something from our partner - be less than open - then that compromises the love between us. The same is true if we lie to a partner, if we fall into patterns of rigidly formulaic interaction or if we are selfish.

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If we feel the need to say “I love you" then love at that point is at best tenuous between us. Since love is a form of communication, both parties can tell if it is happening or not. A more honest approach might be to say : “I want to be with you" or “I want love to occur between us".

One of the barriers to love between someone who is suffering from depression and the person who cares for them is the feeling on the part of both parties that they need to be fair.

We all have desires and needs. If those desires and needs are not met it can cause feelings of frustration. This is irrespective of why those desires and needs have not been met. First we feel disappointed or angry, and only after that do we ask ourselves whether we are being reasonable to feel this way. If we come to the conclusion that we are not being reasonable, all the worse for us, because then we have two layers of bad feeling - one the frustration and on top of that the sense that we don't even have a justification for that feeling of frustration.

The loved one of a person suffering from depression can't possibly give them all that they need. And it is unreasonable to expect it. But the unreasonableness of such an expectation only makes it that much harder to bare. This can become a negative feedback loop. The depressed person places a burden on their partner. They know this is unfair to their partner. So they feel guilty. The guilt makes them more depressed. The more depressed they are the more of a burden they put on their partner, which leads to more guilt, and so on.

But feelings are only feelings. Once we have established that they do not conform to what is reasonable, we can see them as a quality of being and not as a message. What hurts is the implication that we are at fault. If we understand that the other party is just “letting off steam", i.e. giving vent to the frustration of their position, rather than taking what they say as a criticism to be taken on board, even if that is the verbal form it takes, then we can come closer together. It is the log jam of “shoulds" that blocks the passage of love in this kind of situation.

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If we were to insist that the bad feelings and the behaviour they impelled us towards were “our disease, not us" then we would not be able to come to an understanding of the dynamics that generate them or those which could ease them.

And if I told myself my desire to fondle strange women's bottoms was a symptom of a chemical imbalance in my brain rather than an intrinsic part of my sensual nature, then I might live in fear of an unpredictable fit of glute groping rather than being able to look back with amusement at my moment of madness.

Frederick March as Mr. Hyde

Book Review - Going Clear : Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright

This book had a personal fascination for me as I've been compared to L. Ron Hubbard.

O.K. It was facetiously by my flatmate, who has been known to refer to me as L. Ron and his Church of Wanketology, and by an impassioned atheist on a discussion board who saw some similarity between some of my beliefs and those of Dianetics. Perhaps this sort of thing happens to all authors of self-help literature, even when, as with myself, they have no “followers" let alone their own empire as Hubbard did.

To me, the story of Scientology is a compelling cautionary tale also because I was for a few years a student of another individual (who shall remain nameless) who, like Hubbard, claimed to have achieved a scientific understanding of human nature which could save the world. He came to believe that he had a special ability to perceive the truth and to think holistically. Unlike Hubbard, or myself, he is a scientist who accumulated a vast body of evidence for aspects of his theories. And, also unlike Hubbard, he did not turn his campaign to save the world into a money-making scheme. He did sue his critics, but unlike Hubbard and his successor David Miscavige, he did it with the honest intention of correcting misperceptions about himself and his followers. Hubbard's avowed strategy was to use legal action as a method of intimidation.

The reason I mention these things is that my experiences have led me to think a lot about how the individual who wishes to play a role in the psychological healing of society should behave. My own writing has been a product of my personal struggles and what I have learned from others. To some extent it is an expression of things I have been trying to give rational voice to since my teens, to some extent it is a response to my would-be guru friend and to some extent it is a synthesis of the ideas of others which have been important to me.

My experience with my friend, however, greatly affected my presentation of my ideas. To my mind, he went wrong in two key ways. He stopped questioning himself and thus allowed his theories to become a dogma and he came to view himself as “a prophet" and became intolerant of dissent in his organisation. Thus he became surrounded by a small group of people who, I believe, if it were a question of trusting themselves or trusting him would trust him. He's no Hubbard. His organisation has remained small and presumably had little impact on society. But in the case of Hubbard we can see these problems writ large. Not wanting to fall into this trap, I reminded myself that I might not be the best judge of my own ideas. I view an idea much like a potentially beneficial virus. It is something which, if it proves useful, will spread and take on a life of its own irrespective of the individual in whose mind it first appeared. If we have to put too much effort into persuading people of something then perhaps it is because it is not true. So I did two things to correct for these potential problems. I emphasised in the presentation of my writing that I make no claims that anything I say is necessarily true and that I claim no authority of any kind. And I gave myself a dismissive pseudonym – Joe Blow – so that, in the perhaps unlikely event that my writing strikes a major chord, there can be no cult of personality. Hardly anyone knows who I am. In this way, any ideas I present stand or fall on their own, and there is no need for me to try to maintain some kind of control over how people respond to them, something which, while it may have made Hubbard a rich man, was inseparable from his life of paranoia and criminality. He died a broken man, hiding from the authorities.

Wright does a brilliant job of making the phenomenon of Scientology understandable by placing it in its historical context, giving due attention to the complexity of Hubbard's personality and the impressive scope of the dogma he created and showing, through the experiences of ex-members, most notably screenwriter/director Paul Haggis, an insight into the movement's appeal as well as how it went badly wrong for so many.

The search for understanding of human nature and an effective form of therapy for the human race was the most important task before us in the late forties when Hubbard developed his theory of Dianetics and it is still the most important task before us today. But Hubbard was certainly not in a position to achieve this single-handedly, which is what he believed he could do. His methods were not bad methods - introspection, imagination and automatic writing. When psychology is the area of enquiry there is no such thing as objectivity. We have to use our mind to understand our mind. The object and the subject are the same. It is even questionable whether we can be truly objective even in areas as far from ourselves as physics and chemistry. The human dilemma is that we are so insecure in ourselves that we are always looking for reassurance in the phenomena around us. If our neurosis makes us competitive then we see more competition than cooperation when we look at the natural world. If even there we cannot be unbiased how can we look honestly into ourselves? And yet we must. We must understand our disease - the psychological disorder which has been with us since before recorded history. In our insecure state we try to tell ourselves we are not sick. We look for some precedent in the rest of nature for our aggression, our pathological competitiveness, our oppression of our fellows, our greed. We can try to excuse our patriarchal behaviour by pointing to alpha male chimpanzees, or our wars by pointing to territorial disputes between hungry groups of animals, etc., but we have to hunt pretty hard and ignore an awful lot to present this flimsy case. There is no precedent in the rest of nature for the sickness which has pushed us to the brink of self-annihilation. When Hubbard came up with Dianetics the imminent threat seemed to be nuclear war. Would Dianetics (later Scientology) save us from blowing ourselves up? That may be less on our minds now, but our population continues to grow exponentially while we are caught up in addictions which are fast destroying our life-support systems and we have an economy completely dependent on fostering those unsustainable addictions. We are in deep shit. The need for rapid psychological healing and resultant cultural change of the most revolutionary kind is far greater than it was in Hubbard's time. And this is part of what makes the story of Scientology such an important one. If we wish to achieve something we must learn from other's failed attempts.

If Hubbard had invented Dianetics in our day it would almost certainly not have flourished as it did in his time. There is too much competition. There is a New Age guru on every corner. But in the 1950s there was almost no counter-culture. It's not hard to see why some intelligent individuals believed that Dianetics was the only hope for human survival. What else was there? There was psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, who probably had the deepest genuine understanding of the human dilemma, what he termed “the emotional plague", but he would die in 1957. I can't think of anyone else who had a grand radical vision for the rehabilitation of the human race.

The problem we have in understanding ourselves is one of honesty. If we can think honestly there is no great mystery about the basics of human behaviour. If we do something we are capable of being aware of why we do it. But we grow out of the habit of thinking honestly early in our lives, and this is at the heart of our problem as a species. To the degree that we can be honest with ourselves, introspection is an essential way of learning about ourselves. But the free exercise of the imagination, and techniques like automatic writing (which Hubbard appears to have used frequently) are ways in which we can sometimes short circuit the mind's self-censorship and dishonesty. Others sometimes make use of psychoactive drugs.

The key problem with Hubbard's attempt to excavate some grand understanding of human nature and psychological therapy from his own imagination was that he appears to have been a pathological liar. Exploration and honesty are the two things needed for this project. Hubbard was pretty brave and enthusiastic about the former, but he fell down on the latter. And where things went badly wrong is that life and society provided him with no reality check. There were plenty of people who needed to believe that someone could lead them out of the human dilemma. What we believe often has more to do with what we need to believe than it does with logic or reason. I know from my own experience of psychosis how easy it is to believe something, even something ludicrous, because of the power with which it bursts into the mind. But I had reality checks in the form of everyone around me who realised I was crazy, not to mention anti-psychotic drugs. If I had been like Hubbard, surrounded by disciples hanging on my every word, I might still believe those things now. I learned that, while the imagination is inescapably prophetic, it speaks in symbols not facts.

Where conventional religion explained the unprecedented nature of the human disease by introducing the supernatural – we were cursed by God or possessed by evil spirits – Hubbard introduced science fiction – our bodies are a place of exile of extraterrestrial beings. It is important to keep in mind, however, that the most bizarre aspects of his explanation were kept secret from initiates until they were already integrated into the movement and had experienced, or felt they had experienced, benefits from its therapy.

If Hubbard's ideas of therapy had absolutely no practical value then it is doubtful his movement would have taken off. But he borrowed ideas from Freudian psychotherapy and adapted them into a kind of fast food equivalent of psychoanalysis. Freud put forward the credible idea that when we have a block in our memory it is because of an association with something unpleasant, possibly a memory of a bad experience. Hubbard turned this into a crusade to produce “clears", individuals whose traumatic blocks had been removed, allowing them, among other things, to have total recall of everything they had experienced in their lives. He announced a lot of “clears", none of whom showed any signs of such recall or any other special abilities. Desensitisation is a major part of the Scientology strategy, and this is something which has a proven track record in conventional psychotherapeutic practise for the treatment of phobias and obsessive compulsive disorder. I think the appeal of Scientology can probably be summed up by a combination of potentially effective techniques (including the kind of positive thinking also preached by people like Anthony Robbins), show business razzle-dazzle with e-meters etc., and community. You might get better therapy from a university-trained psychotherapist, but it would be a private process, you wouldn't be a member of a therapy community.

Wright gives a disturbing account of the sick goings on amongst the Sea Org, the clergy of the Church of Scientology – including the inflicting of punishment in the form of imprisonment and virtual slavery. While some members make a break for freedom, most accept their punishment as justified. Perhaps the development of such a culture shouldn't surprise us. Scientology lures people in by playing on their insecurities. While emotional insecurity turns some of us into paranoid control freaks, more often it leads us to seek some sense of security through submission to authority. Perhaps the most reliable indication that someone is emotionally healthy is that they interact on a basis of equality with all of their fellows. It would be surprising if a society which set out to attract the insecure didn't end up a kind of perfect storm of dominance and submission. Of course this would not be the case if it was the Bridge to Total Freedom it claims to be.

It is never enough to simply criticise toxic social institutions. To do so can play into their hands. They can portray this as persecution. And it does us little good to distance ourselves from such institutions as if we were superior to those who comprise them. We need to understand them, because it is only full understanding which can bring healing. Wright places the story of L. Ron Hubbard and the religion he gave birth to into its social and historical context, and he makes no attempt to deny anybody's experience. We read of horrific abuse of power, we read of space opera become dogma, we read of any number of fabrications and hypocrisies, but there is no attempt to exclude the possibility that many Scientologists have gained benefits from the church's therapy techniques, whether those benefits come directly from the techniques or from the placebo effect. In fact this element is necessary to an understanding of the relative popularity of the movement.

Some see L. Ron Hubbard as simply a clever con artist - a snake oil salesman who hit the big time. This is not the Hubbard we encounter in Wright's book. We find a deeply flawed and tormented individual who made a desperate attempt to find understanding of human nature and a method to heal our propensity for self-destruction. Wright gives plenty of evidence to back up the view that Hubbard believed in the essence of his dogma for the whole of his life. This doesn't preclude an addiction to wealth and power or a complete inability to live by or realise the supposed benefits of that dogma. One could make a comparison with the upper echelons of the Catholic Church where hypocrisy, corruption, extravagant luxury and abuse of power do not preclude the possibility that those who behave in this way may genuinely believe they are God's representatives on Earth. Hubbard was an addictive personality - and part of what he was addicted to was his own delusional belief system.

This is also the story of Scientology's attempt to seduce Hollywood and of the thuggish rule of Hubbard's successor, David Miscavige. If you want to gain some insight into how John Travolta and Tom Cruise became Scientology's poster boys, you will find it here.

Lawrence Wright tells his story like a novelist, but the thoroughness of his research and the fact that he is such a skilled devil's advocate, makes this a powerful expose which will no doubt do great and necessary damage to the Church of Scientology.

What Might Happen If We Weren't So Scared of Sex?

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What is sex when we strip away the sometimes confusing beliefs and emotions which surround it? It can be a reproductive activity, but that is only in the minority of instances. If we only had sex to produce offspring it would be something which occurred no more than a handful of times for most of us and never for others. But sex is also a form of pleasure usually generated by the rubbing of one or more erogenous zones. More often than not the source of pleasure is the genitals. Sometimes this involves the penetration of an orifice by a part of the body, sometimes, but not always, the male genitals. If we leave aside the pleasure which may be experienced, this is no different from picking our nose or receiving a rectal exam from a doctor. There isn't anything inherently serious on a physical level about any of this, unless it results in pregnancy or disease. Of course it is possible to do damage through sexual activity by trying to put something too big into an orifice which isn't big enough to accommodate it. But the physical element of sex, in and of itself, is not serious in the way that violence is serious. Stroke someone's genitals and it is unlikely to do much long-standing physical damage.

So if sex has a special mystique for us, it is not an obvious part of the physical act itself. Which leads to the question – Why do we treat genital pleasure differently from oral pleasure? We get oral pleasure from eating chocolates. Why is it socially acceptable to talk about enjoying a delicious chocolate, but not about enjoying an orgasm? If one of our friends gave another a box of chocolates for his birthday we would think it appropriate. If they gave him a hand job we might not. Sex can carry the risk of spreading disease, but so can eating contaminated food. And sex can lead to an unwanted pregnancy. But there are forms of erotic activity, such as mutual masturbation, which are completely safe, and yet we still act as if there is something about these activities which makes them essentially more serious than a hug or a kiss on the cheek.

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One difference is that sex is not always equal and consensual. Coercion or force can be involved. But coercion and force are themselves a problem. If someone were running around grabbing people and ramming their mouths full of chocolate we wouldn't view the chocolate as the problem.

Sexual behaviour and sexual desire can also be a currency for the ego. Some think in terms of “sexual conquests" or “knots on the belt" rather than loving encounters with other equal and complete human beings. And some use their ability to attract the sexual interest of others as a power trip.

What are the consequences of viewing sex as something more than a physically trivial way of giving ourselves or others pleasure?

We live in a society where a man who makes children laugh by exposing his genitals to them may be viewed as a monster but we have no legal way to protect a child from the lifelong trauma which can result from being told by a parent that he might burn in hell for eternity if he masturbates or if he grows up to be a homosexual.

I recently discovered that a friend of mine has lived with crippling shame and fear of the judgement of others for about 25 years as a result of the response of his psychiatrist to a confession that he had engaged in acts of mutual masturbation with a male work colleague and had experimented by hiring a couple of adult male prostitutes. The psychiatrist told him he had done something very very bad. He said that, if his work colleagues knew that he had seen male prostitutes they would ostracise him. And he said, apparently out of the blue, that if my friend had sex with a fifteen-year-old boy he would be put in jail for life and that the other inmates might force him to eat his own faeces. As a result of this event twenty-five years ago, my friend was afraid to tell me about the incident lest I responded angrily like his psychiatrist.

Perhaps the area where our irrational attitude to sex does the most damage is in the area of rape and child sexual abuse. Unpleasant experiences which end when they end in a physical sense are usually not hard to recover from as long as we don't suffer permanent physical damage. Traumatic events are traumatic because, in some way, they put a rent in our relationship with our self or between ourselves and others.

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Non-judgemental communication is love, and love heals. This idea is at the heart of the psychotherapeutic relationship and also the institution of the confessional in the Catholic Church. If something happens to us which causes us emotional suffering or leaves us with desperately confused feelings, it is talking about it honestly and openly with sympathetic people which allows us to recover. But because we treat sex, whether pleasurable or abusive, as something embarrassing if not shameful, and because the consequences of talking about sexual offences can lead to traumatic trials for survivors and a harsher punishment than they may want for perpetrators, especially if the perpetrator is a family member, there is a tendency for them to lie or remain silent about what happened. I think it is the lies and the silence and inability to receive the loving comfort that would come from openness, which is the major factor in the trauma. Without this element, the effects of the event would probably disappear fairly quickly. And this must be particularly true where an individual has mixed feelings about the event, such as the case of an adolescent who may have taken sexual pleasure and emotional comfort from an inappropriate relationship with an adult. If other adults try to deny such an adolescent's experience and insisted that they view the incident exclusively as an act of abuse, then they may be doing more harm than good. Healing requires that our experience by listened to without demands.

Sexual self-control and sexual repression are not the same thing. Sexual repression does not require that we act on our sexual desires, only that we accept them and enjoy them. We might not actually have sex with anyone other than a chosen partner, but, if we are emotionally healthy, we will feel sexual feelings for many other people. To be unrepressed is to allow ourselves to feel such exciting feelings fully. And if we are masturbating we can feel free to fantasise about any kind of act with any individual. There are no consequences in the imagination. If we feel sexual feelings which it would be problematic to act on then we can have a really good time by getting off to fantasies about them in our imagination. There can be a tendency, because of our cultural fear of sex, to think that indulging in taboo fantasies during masturbation will lead to us losing our ability to behave appropriately in real life. The opposite is true. If a man has truly depraved desires, such as having sex with his mother-in-law, he will find that, if he indulges these fantasies during masturbation, his relationship with his mother-in-law will improve because he will not be weighed down by the anxiety generated by trying to hold such desires in when in her presence.

Fear of the erotic can undermine our ability to enjoy non-sexual pleasures as well. Anyone who has ever gone for a walk on the beach or eaten a delicious meal after having an orgasm knows that sexual release opens up the full treasure chest of pleasures in the world around us.

When we think of the bonobos, those most sexually uninhibited of primates, and their happy, healthy and peaceful existence, one wonders if the root of our aggression, our mental illness and vulnerability to physical illness does not come down to pleasure deprivation. If our lives were more filled with pleasure would we build up the level of frustration which overflows into violence. One of the defining features of mental illness is living more in our head than in our body. And it stands to reason that a body which feels good will work more efficiently to heal.

Now I'm not suggesting that we need to participate in orgies. Only that we take a more common-sense, practical approach to sex, that we be less afraid and more tolerant, and that we create an environment in which sexual experiences, loving or abusive, can be more easily talked about rather than becoming a potential source of life-long trauma.

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The Anti-Christ Psychosis

I just noticed today that Nicolas Cage has signed on to star in an Apocalyptic sci-fi thriller called Left Behind, due for release next year. This is a remake of a 2001 film based on the first of a series of best-selling novels. These books, and the previous films, have been very popular with a certain section of the U.S. Christian audience. I haven’t seen any of them, but they appear to be based on a very literalist interpretation of The Book of Revelations. The rise of a seductive and powerful Anti-Christ occurs after all of the Christians have been taken off to a better place by The Rapture. The message is that you better hurry up and accept Christ as your personal saviour or you may be “left behind” in this horrific world.

This got me thinking about people who believe in this sort of thing. Apparently 13% of U.S. voters believe that Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ. This is not something which just affects a few guys wearing “The End Is Nigh” sandwich boards. So lets look at it both from a historical and psychological perspective.

The first five books of the New Testament were written to spread a message to anyone who would listen. They were not addressed only to those who were already believers. This is not true of The Book of Revelations. This book, like the epistles of Paul and others, was aimed exclusively at members of the established Christian churches of the time when it was written. It was a prediction about problems which were likely to occur within the Christian churches. And it was not to be taken literally. It was presented as a record of a dream. Dreams are not literally true, though they can contain valuable truths expressed symbolically. A beast isn’t going to come out of the sea with ten horns and seven heads. We don’t live in a Godzilla movie. (Anyway, how would you distribute ten horns over seven heads and not have it look like a mistake?)

So the warnings about false prophets are warnings about those who teach something false within the Christian churches. And the warnings about great tribulation when hidden secrets are revealed is a warning that the crimes of those who take the wrong path into a false form of Christianity will be exposed and that they will be greatly mortified by that revelation. Hence the book of “Revelations”.

The Anti-Christ is a symbol for something within Christianity. There are two basic ways to be someone’s enemy. One is to do something against them while they are alive. No-one can be the enemy of Jesus in this way any more. He died two thousand years ago. The only way we can be the enemy of someone who is dead is to betray their legacy. We are ourselves and we are the ideas or works we may leave behind when we die. If we make no claim to being Christians then we can do no serious damage to Jesus’ legacy, whether we be atheists, agnostics, wiccans, Muslims, Hindus, or anything else. To reject or even attack someone’s ideas still leaves them intact. I suppose, in theory, we could try to destroy the record of that person’s ideas, but in the case of the words of Jesus that would be a very big job. No, if Christ has enemies they are Christian enemies. There is no worse betrayal than to claim to represent someone while preaching the very ideas they abhorred. I think the warning that John gave in the Book of Revelations was a warning that some Christians would betray Christ by preaching intolerance and hatred in his name.

The central message of Jesus was that love is the thing which really matters. Love is God manifested in human affairs. We should even love our enemies. And we shouldn’t judge anyone if we do not wish to be also judged. He told his followers to love each other as he had loved them. Love is any form of communication characterised by openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity. It requires that we accept the other person unconditionally and not try to exercise control, physical or psychological over them.

Jesus said nothing about homosexuality, promiscuity (as opposed to adultery which is the breach of a promise), abortion, voting for the Democrats, etc. If these are trespasses, then he recommended that we forgive them. He even asked God to forgive those who crucified him. There are clearly some Christians whose behaviour is in opposition to the philosophy preached by Jesus. The Anti-Christ is a symbol for this pathological tendency, just as Satan is a symbol for the pathological tendency of dishonesty, hence his being referred to as “the Father of Lies”.

The poet William Blake (1757-1827) viewed the Bible as a fictional document which was of interest because it depicted in a symbolic way the deep psychological conflicts which go on in the human psyche. He saw all the angels and demons as representations of internal psychological archetypes. And he used this same kind of symbolism in his own writing. In his poem The Everlasting Gospel he says “For what is Antichrist by those / Who against Sinners Heaven close.” He understood what the Book of Revelations was really warning against. By contrast his view of Christ’s message is summed up in a line from The Gates of Paradise : “Mutual forgiveness of each Vice, Such are the Gates of Paradise.”

Paranoia is an anxiety disorder in which we project the disowned part of our psyche onto others or onto the world around us generally. Belief in an Anti-Christ of the kind portrayed in Left Behind is a classic case of paranoia. We can see that such a literal figure is not what was intended by the author of the Book of Revelations. And we can see that many, if not most, of those who exhibit a belief in such an Anti-Christ also exhibit behaviour which places them within the category of the Anti-Christian that Blake described and the Book of Revelations warned Christians about.

If this belief can be seen as a paranoid delusion then it fits the definition of a psychosis. I know what it is to have a psychotic episode. I’ve had a few of them. They are characterised by irrational beliefs which are not supported by the evidence of the senses or, in some cases, a disturbance of the senses so that one hears or sees something which is not heard or seen by anyone else in the vicinity. The cause of this disjuncture with reality is an extreme state of emotional confusion arising from what is called a double bind situation. This is a situation in which we feel we have two options neither of which is acceptable. A case of damned if we do and damned if we don’t. An example given by the psychiatrist R. D. Laing was of a woman who had an absolute need to believe in the trustworthiness of her husband. When she came home and found him having sex with another woman she began hallucinating. There was no rational way for her to face her dilemma so her mind temporarily abandoned rationality.

Most cases of psychosis which are so defined are individual in nature. I had delusions. I behaved in bizarre ways. I was locked up in a hospital and given anti-psychotic medication. This is what normally happens as our delusions are experiences which are contrary to the experience of those around us. We may try to maintain these delusions but it is us against the world and the world wins, partly because the delusions are unrealistic and partly because the world outnumbers us and has access to a mental hospital and anti-psychotic drugs.

But there is also such a thing as a collective psychosis. If a whole bunch of people are caught up in the same double bind situation and there is a cultural precedent for the delusion they develop as a result then the world may not win, at least for a long time, as the delusion in each individual gets reinforcement by the others who share it.

Many Christians have a deep sense of ambivalence about Jesus. They need him desperately. They feel he offers them the only way to salvation. They need to be seen to be his supporters. This is central to their self-image. But, deep down, probably below the level of consciousness, they hate him. They hate him because he asks the impossible of them. He asks them to love everybody. And they feel, falsely, that he expects them to live a radically disciplined life. This puts them in a double-bind. They feel they must love Christ. But the more they try to love him the more they hate him. It is a negative feedback loop, and a double-bind. I think that one reason why the film The Passion of the Christ (2004) had such a powerful cathartic effect on some Christians, in a way which was distinct from their response to previous cinematic depictions of the story of Jesus, was because it provided an outlet for the hatred of Christ which they did not even dare to acknowledge to themselves. It let them share in the crucifixion of the man they felt, on some level, had crucified them. After all, the film portrayed very little of the loving message of Jesus and an awful lot of flayed flesh and spurting blood.

Of course, many Christians are not judgemental, nor are they paranoid. Many appropriately respond to Jesus’ message. They recognise that love and non-judgement are to be practiced with oneself as well as others, and they are able to live in the real world. These are the quiet Christians. The more of a song and dance someone makes about a belief the more they are trying to silence that contrary voice inside. It would not surprise me to find that Christian literalism or fundamentalism is something which has grown since Jesus day. They didn’t have science like we do, but that doesn’t mean that talk of angels and demons was always taken literally. You don’t need science to not believe in the literal existence of such creatures. You only need never to have seen one. And do we really think hallucinations were more common then than now? But poets talk in these kinds of terms all the time. It is possible that the key difference between now and then was that most people spoke poetically then while now we tend to speak literally. There is every reason to believe we are more prone to mental illness now than then. And in the area of religion this is especially true as the kind of double-bind I describe here has been with us for a long time now, spiralling further and further out of control.

So we can see that the Anti-Christ Psychosis is the projected fear of those who, on a subconscious level, know that they themselves are anti-Christ.

What will happen when this delusion collapses, as it inevitably must? This is what is warned of in the Book of Revelations as the time of great tribulation for many Christians. A time when people will feel so bad they want to die. There is no Hell in a literal sense. The warning that taking the wrong path would lead to a “Lake of Fire” is a description of the emotional pain of being confronted and exposed by the revelation that we were the thing we abhorred. The separating of the goats from the lambs describes what happens when the world at large can see clearly which Christians were real Christians and which were not.

I view Jesus not as a supernatural being and not as a religious leader, but rather as a psychiatrist operating through the medium of traditionally religious symbols and parables. I don’t think he performed literal miracles, in the sense of anything contrary to the normal laws of nature. But I do believe that he “cast out devils”. What is our image of the possessed individual? Linda Blair in The Exorcist (1973). What kind of behaviour does she exhibit when possessed? Lets forget about the Hollywood nonsense of green skin and spinning head. She is uninhibitedly sexual and she is verbally abusive and blasphemous. What do we repress within ourselves? Aggressive feelings toward others. Sexual feelings especially of a taboo nature. And, if we are religiously disciplined, blasphemous thoughts. What we see here, if we ignore the supernatural trappings, is the return of the repressed – the cathartic spewing out of psychological or emotional poisons. Exorcism has nothing to do with demons, it is what Freud called the Id – the repository of repressed angers and libidinous drives - which is being expelled. You’ve heard of speed dating? This is speed therapy. Transference, counter-transference and liberating catharsis all in a matter of minutes.

This is how I imagine it happening. Jesus is preaching when this angry man approaches him.

“I’ve had enough of your hippy drivel you long-haired pig-shit-eating pustule on a whore’s cunt! I’d like to cut off your diseased cock and shove it up your mother-fucking asshole. I can’t wait for them to nail you to a cross. I’ll be there eating popcorn, you piece of shit,” he says. And then he falls to his knees with tears streaming from his eyes.

Jesus calmly places his hand on the man’s shoulder and says “It’s going to be okay. You’ll feel better now.”

It is the truth, and only the truth, which sets anyone free. This is not some mystical truth. It is the factual truth. So, while the realisation that one is a part of what was labelled the Anti-Christ by John in the Book of Revelations, may be a painful shock at first, akin to a dip in a lake of molten lead perhaps, it is really a liberating realisation. Christ forgave those who crucified him, so that loving element in the human spirit of which he was an expression will also forgive those who, through fear and confusion, turned against it. In truth, nobody gets left behind.