Laying Ghosts : Jordan Peterson, Jeremy Griffith and the Denial of Truth

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) - What's he all about? Fucked if I know.

After discussing the reactions of Jordan Peterson and Jeremy Griffith to post-modernism, especially Jacques Derrida and de-constructionism, in a recent Facebook post I went looking for more information on the topic and found this account of Derrida’s approach which tends to back up Griffith’s contention that it is all about “proving” that there is such thing as truth. Of course, if there is no such thing as truth, you can’t prove that there is no such thing as truth. If it is an accurate description of the essence of the approach then I’m still a bit mystified as to how it became so popular. Playing games with words, based around unsupported and illogical contentions, to undermine the usefulness of actually saying anything, doesn’t strike me as something which would lead people to think : “Ah, this is a powerful tool we can use to achieve what we want to achieve.”

Griffith contends that this popularity is due to a need to deny that there is such a thing as truth as a desperate way to evade truths about ourselves which we can’t face. But, on a personal level, he is faced with the fact that most people are not interested in or accepting of his interpretation of them. What he sees as the truth is not what they wish to acknowledge as the truth. If what he expresses is the truth, then he may have a point, but the other interpretation is that it is his biased vision of truth and the indifference and rejection are due to its flaws, especially if those flaws are experienced by other’s as unfounded criticism within the body of what purports to be a defence for them. Instead of going back to the drawing board, there can be a tendency to shout : “You can’t handle the truth!”

I don’t know anyone who lives their life as if there were no such thing as truth or meaning. They may not believe in ultimate truth or ultimate meaning, but they have to base their actions in the world upon the assumption that some things are true and some things are not. If it is neither true nor false that it is raining, how do we know whether to carry an umbrella?

What I can see with Derrida is that he was concerned with texts. The question of truth in a text is not the same as the question of truth in the wider physical world. To what degree is the text trustworthy? But even here nobody I know lives as if there is no truth contained in a text. If the TV guide says that The Simpsons is on at 7.00 PM, that’s when we turn on the television and most of the time it turns out to have been true.

Texts range from car manuals which we tend to trust to fiction which everyone agrees is not literally true (though it may embody universal truths in symbolic form). When it comes to accounts of events in the news media or history texts we have reason to acknowledge that they can never embody objective truth. There is what we could call The Rashomon Phenomena. In Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1950 film we see the same event replayed from the point of view of each of the participants. Each time we see a different story, because the way each of us relates an event is shaped by how it fits into our larger narrative, by our perception of who we are and how the event impacted us.

Then we have the area of beliefs. Beliefs are provisional, even the long standing beliefs expressed in cultural traditions such as religion. They are narratives which we use to bring coherence to our experience, but there is always the possibility of new experience and new data requiring us to update our beliefs.

Post-modernism, at least as it is perceived by its critics, seems to represent a kind of radical skepticism. Not a denial that the TV Guide is useful for finding out when The Simpsons is on, but a resistance to accepting belief systems and accounts of events.

If all belief systems and all accounts of events are viewed as personal bias, there is no reason not to assert that one’s own is as good as anyone else’s. This could lead to complacency about testing one’s own assumptions against contrary evidence which is how we arrive at improved ways of managing our relationship with others and with life itself. And it could lead to the idea that some belief systems, some narratives, are “privileged” because they are those held by members of society who hold more power in an unfair system. This is not an entirely invalid observation, for instance, in the Middle Ages the Catholic Church had the power to crush heresy through violence rather than allow their own worldview to be challenged by critical discourse. And, today, those who have a lot of money to invest in the media can promote ideas which might not survive as well on a level playing field.

Peterson puts forward the pragmatic approach to truth. Truth is what works. if you believe something to be truth, you base your decisions on that belief and if it helps you to more successfully manage the challenges which face you, then that is the only evidence on which we can decide what is true and what is not. This applies to science, too. Our scientific theories are tested by whether they work to predict phenomena and whether, when we make decisions based upon them, the results stand up.

So how do we find some common ground. Perhaps when we are in conflict with someone we can decide not to attempt to force our beliefs upon them, no matter how well supported by evidence they may be, but rather to see if we can find some things we can agree upon. 

My experience of psychosis leads me to believe that, when our beliefs do diverge from that which is supported by direct evidence and from social norms (to the extent that that term is meaningful), they do so for a reason, because there is something we have not been able to integrate. The “normal” ways of understanding one’s place in life are not working, so the mind experiments in ways that may be very erratic, looking for a new way - a new truth which works. To simply say “That’s madness!” and expect the individual to conform, doesn’t work, because they need to go forward, not back.

The way forward is through dialogue, but in this we may need to move beyond the oppositional approach. Those of us who have spent a great deal of time and effort developing the framework with which we interpret the world - and this is true of Peterson and Griffith - will tend to view ourselves as crusaders for our truth. But what is most effective with those who view things differently from ourselves is to draw them out and let them discover for themselves the limitations of their conceptual structure. I’m sure that Peterson is good at this, because he has been a very effective therapist, but media events don’t allow time for this kind of approach.

This is where improvisation teacher Keith Johnstone’s techniques as outlined in his book Impro : Improvisation and the Theatre seem so useful to me. They encourage us to look less at the content of our discourse than at how we are relating to and communicating with the other party. Are we listening to them and responding spontaneously to what they say or are we “blocking” them by negating anything which runs counter to the path we have decided beforehand to follow?

I have a worldview which I express in my book How to Be Free. Unlike Peterson and Griffith, I haven’t put much time or effort into developing it. It is simple and, although I arrived at it through much introspection, I’m not a researcher or academic. I don’t feel motivated to “go to battle” for that worldview. I put it out into the world with a sense of Peterson’s pragmatism. If it is true, it will work. If it gives me insight into what Griffith calls “the human condition” then it will help me to engage with people in meaningful dialogue about the experience of being human in a way from which both of us will benefit, without me needing to feel pressure to persuade them of anything.

Peterson talks about the problem of ideological possession. I’ve experienced it. There are times when I’ve absorbed ideas, not been able to integrate them, and found myself, when in an argument with someone of the opposing persuasion, spewing them out as if they had a life of their own and I was not in control. But what supports this happening is an encounter with another entrenched and biased worldview. Peterson’s worldview may be far more nuanced and supported by study of psychological research than that of many who react negatively to him, but it is necessarily partial. 

The ideologies which may possess us are like ghosts. In stories, the ghost represents unfinished business, an entity which cannot be integrated into the conventional order because some truth has not been properly recognised.

So if we find ourselves in conflict with the ideologically possessed it is a copout to blame the ideology which possesses them, as the way to lay the ghost is to look for what that possession tells us about what is missing from our own worldview.

Jesus told us to love our enemies. For those of us who are trying to help spread ameliorating understanding in the world it is worth asking ourselves whether we feel we have enemies or whether we think only in terms of people we have not yet achieved the ability to help. Do we assume the responsibility for our own success or failure or do we tend to externalise that responsibility.

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 18

“Born Again” “Pseudo-Idealism”

Let’s first look at the limited situation in which there is some truth to Griffith’s concept of “born again" “pseudo-idealism”.

What he is saying is that we have a genetic orientation to selflessness, but our developing mind has to defy its oppression and seek self-understanding which leads to anger, egocentricity and alienation. But if we become too corrupted by these qualities we transcend them (except alienation since to transcend alienation is to become more alienated) and adopt some form of “good” behaviour and convince ourselves that we are now an uncorrupted individual.

We have to look at this in terms of armouring. Many people whose initial form of character armour involves trying to compensate for their compromised self-acceptance by “proving” themselves in an aggressive, materialistic or combative way will eventually find that they can’t maintain it in the face of idealistic criticism, both from others and from the conscience they learned in childhood. So they will either shift their “proving myself” strategy to one of demonstrating their worth with good deeds or verbal support for a good cause. This may be a very dramatic change in which the whole basis of someone’s life reverses, or it may be only a superficial coating which coexists with much of the same aggressive, materialistic or combative characteristics which were there before. To really be healed and returned to our capacity for unconditional love we would have to abandon the battle to prove ourselves altogether in favour of unconditional-self acceptance. This is what Jesus meant when he talked about the need to be “born again”, but this is not what is happening in the situations Griffith is referring to.

In Griffith’s view of the world pretty much all of us are a bottomless pit of rage and corruption and therefore any attempts we make to do something positive about the problems we see around us are just signs of how “false/dishonest/‘phoney’/‘fake’/deluded” we are. Now there is some truth that doing what we feel to be right sometimes involves transcending selfish impulses or feelings of anger for a while. This is after all what Griffith himself has to do when he transcends his angry feelings about our non-ideal behaviour and expresses sympathy for our position.

But since I see no reason to believe we have a genetic orientation to selflessness, I see no reason to believe we have 2 million years of accumulated rage to transcend. We do accumulate rage to the extent that we have to repress it within our character armour, but anyone who does not undermine their self-acceptance by exposing themselves to too much corrupting idealism and provides themselves with plenty of outlets for their frustration, will find they don’t have all that much to transcend. Certainly not as much as Griffith himself who has been both exposing himself to extreme levels of corrupting idealism but also avoiding many of the normal healthy outlets for the frustration that must engender.

The most dramatic evidence of projection in Griffith’s writings is his views on the “pseudo-idealistic” movements.

First of all it is important to consider what we mean by “idealism”. Griffith emphasises the ideal of “selflessness”, but an ideal is any human concept of perfection. For the Nazis racial purity was an ideal. The Nazis were extremely idealistic especially in their worshipping of the beautiful body. Machismo is an ideal - the ideal of the perfect patriarchal male. And the conflict between the left wing and the right wing is not one between idealism and the need for freedom from the oppression of idealism. It is a conflict between two kinds of idealism which can be equally oppressive - the communal ideals of the left and the individualistic ideals of the right.

To really understand the social phenomena Griffith identifies as “pseudo-idealism” we need to recognise that the opposite of idealism is pragmatism. Pragmatism is an approach which puts aside all idealistic expectations in favour of a “whatever works” attitude.

Within each of these social phenomena - religion, socialism, feminism, the New Age movement, environmentalism, etc. - there are differing degrees and varieties of idealism and dogmatism, often conflicting with each other, existing alongside pragmatic approaches.

That Griffith can look at this complex chaotic diversity and see in it simply a dogmatic insistence on ideal behaviour and oppression of expression of contrary feelings or ideas, shows how he is seeing himself reflected in the mirror of the world. He is the dogmatist. He is the one insisting on us deferring to his personal conception of ideal behaviour (now that he has provided a bullshit “defence” for our having departed from it in the first place). His is the boot that would crush the human face forever if we were, en masse, to adopt his “Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living” rather than liberating ourselves by learning to cultivate unconditional self-acceptance.

It is true that all of these social movements have been missing a key ingredient for their success, but that key ingredient is not Griffith’s extreme idealism and bullshit “defence”, it is the cultivation of unconditional self-acceptance so that we can melt away our particular armours and thus be reconciled with those against whom our particular armours dictated that we be in conflict.

Keeping in mind that Griffith’s “defence for humanity” is bullshit that allows him, in his mind, to justify expressing his extremely idealistic criticism or all aspects of human behaviour, doesn’t it sound like he is really talking about himself when he says : “And since the lie they were maintaining was so great, they had to work very hard at convincing both themselves and others of it, which meant they were typically a strident, extremely intolerant, belligerent even fanatical advocate of their position.” You never know, they might even be intolerant of women wearing tights!

Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering individual. Griffith is probably the most selfish person in the world. While there are problems and insufficiencies in the way in which we are trying to address social and environmental problems, Griffth has come to see all of this as despicable because we are addressing ourselves to the world as a whole and not to his personal psychotic problem, which he feels should come first. (Of course that is not how he sees it because he is trapped within that psychosis.) But once we see the way that he is projecting his own situation onto the world, we can see that he is like Oscar Wilde’s selfish giant, not wanting the children to play in his personal garden. Essentially he is saying : “You can’t come into Paradise unless you are selfless.” He wants it all for himself. And that is a sign of how much he must be suffering. No wonder he has been through ten years of chronic fatigue syndrome! By clinging onto the poison of idealism he must have turned himself from William Blake’s Albion Rose to Crouched in Fear. To really understand his world view you have to recognise that he thinks we are all even more fucked up than he is, whereas, in truth, than can be no more fucked up person on the face of the planet than him.

Griffith's second book illustrated with William Blake's paintings - Crouched in Fear and Albion Rose

Burning in Hell

Griffith says : “Moses himself described how ‘The Lord spoke to you [the Israelite nation] face to face out of the fire […fire is a metaphor for the searing truth of Integrative Meaning] on the mountain. [This was only possible because] At that time I stood between the Lord and you to declare to you the word of the Lord, because you were afraid of the fire.’”

And in Genesis 3:24 : “After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.”

Doesn’t this fit with my interpretation of Satan as being a personification of idealism? God (the personification of love and forgiveness) would not be represented by something which burns and destroys, like fire. The fires of Hell belong to the devil.

It would take someone fairly secure in self - fairly self-accepting - to confront the condemning ideals and thus be Satan’s mouthpiece as Moses was. But idealism is both the source of corruption and the flame in which we burn for the “sin” of having been corrupted by it. It is the ultimate negative feedback loop.

Jesus on the other hand was not a worshipper of the Devil like Moses. He was not an idealist. When the idealists tried to stone the woman caught in adultery, Jesus stopped them. He said, “Judge not that thou be no judged.” To judge others is to be an idealist - to hold them up to an ideal standard and find them wanting. Jesus message was a Godly one of love and forgiveness. Love is the opposite of idealism. It is all-accepting. It is the water that puts out Satan’s fire and rescues us from the Hell of idealistic condemnation. Unfortunately, after his death Jesus’ followers turned his healing philosophy into the largely Satanic church known as “Christianity”.

There is controversy now about the Bible’s attitude to homosexuality. Jesus said nothing about homosexuality positive or negative. Condemnation of homosexuality comes from the Satanic (i.e. idealistic) parts of the Bible - Leviticus and the letters of the Apostles. These parts of the Bible preach repression rather than love. Since God is love, those parts of the Bible are anti-God.

Abandoning the Battle to Find Understanding

Griffith says : “Yes, the born-again, pseudo idealistic strategy was both treacherous and extremely dishonest — traits that totally undermined humanity’s search for knowledge — because in campaigning against the battle to find knowledge you were leading humanity towards an extreme state of denial/alienation/separation from the truth/knowledge, when, in fact, humanity had to continue the battle to try to get closer to and ultimately reach the ultimate truth/knowledge/understanding of the human condition.”

Keeping in mind the principle of projection, we can see here that, on some deeper level, Griffith is aware that his theory is not the full truth needed to liberate him from his condition, but that, by dogmatically clinging to it anyway, and shutting down his search for a more accountable understanding, he is taking himself into an ever deeper state of alienation, both from truthfulness and from the world the rest of us inhabit.

Jesus

Griffith says : That Jesus “realise[d] that he had to create a religion around his soundness; he had to suggest to people that through supporting and living through his soundness they could be ‘resurrected[ed]’ ‘from death to life.’”

This is the lie created and  perpetuated by the so-called Christian church. Jesus did not want to create a religion. He wanted to liberate the world from the obscene lie that was religion, i.e. deference to idealism, i.e. deference to Satan. His God was not the Satanic “God” of the old testament. Idealism is hatred. The God he preached was love. But the idealists of his day crucified him. He didn’t love the “ideals”. He loved those whom the idealists oppressed and called “sinners”. “Sin” is just another word for “selfishness” and selfishness is just the self-directedness of the suffering individual. It was the condemnation of idealism which made us sinners. So he recognised that the way to help us was to show that God is love, which forgives all, and thus expose the religion of his day as nothing but Satanism. The Satanists couldn’t stand to have their hypocrisy exposed, so they killed Jesus and, eventually, began preaching a new brand of Satanism in his name.

Of course, Jesus words were passed down, so a few rare individuals, such as William Blake, were able to see his true meaning.

Mental Illness

Griffith talks about the increase in mental illnesses in the world, e.g. depression, ADHD, autism… These are a product of a shortage of love, love from parents and self-love, etc. Love is acceptance. What we need is the unconditional acceptance of others, such as our parents if we are children, and unconditional acceptance of ourselves. What has always undermined our capacity for this kind of love, however, has been the conditions imposed by the kind of idealism that Griffith is dishonestly promoting. While we can’t blame our situation entirely on him, he has, for over 25 years, been pumping out his toxic sludge, and now he is looking around and crying about the fact that children are increasingly suffering from a sickness that comes from exposure to just that sludge. Children are not getting the love they deserve from their parents because their parents are not unconditionally self-accepting. And why are they not unconditionally self-accepting? Because they are weighed down with all this guilt about not being perfect parents. Griffith, with his obscene lie that children are born expecting an ideal world and a mother who is as close to the Virgin Mary as possible, is robbing children of love.

On some level does Griffith resent the innocence of children? It is as if he worshipped “innocence”. But when we worship something we split ourselves in two. The conscious part of us clings to that which is worshipped, but to maintain this state we have to push all contrary feelings about what we worship into our subconscious. The subconscious then grows more and more resentful of that which is consciously worshipped. The Catholic Church worships innocence in the form of the “virgin” Mary and the infant Jesus. So is it any wonder that it has generated so much sexual abuse of children?

The Return of the Repressed

So much that Griffth sees as signs that we are headed toward “terminal alienation” are things I see as positives - tattoos, violent video games, pornography, etc.

We have been repressing so much within our armouring. All of these cultural phenomena are healthy ways of letting it out, of opening up to honest free expression. Sure they can have their negatives, like anything. But those who are most frightened by them are those who are most armoured/repressed. They don’t want to admit that they have even more sickness inside them than is on display in these forms of expression.

But what is buried beneath all of this sickness, the seed of which was sowed in us by idealism’s attack on love, is our capacity for unconditional self-acceptance, i.e. love of ourselves, and thus love for all others.

Theatrical improvisation teacher Keith Johnstone says : “Grotesque and frightening things are released as soon as people begin to work with spontaneity. Even if a class works on improvisation every day for only a week or so, then they start producing very ‘sick' scenes : they become cannibals pretending to eat each other, and so on. But when you give the student permission to explore this material he very soon uncovers layers of unsuspected gentleness and tenderness. It is no longer sexual feelings and violence that are deeply repressed in this culture now, whatever it may have been like in fin-de-siecle Vienna. We repress our benevolence and tenderness.”

I talk about this subject in more detail in my post Sucked Into Paradise.

It is the censorious spirit of the idealist which would ask us to be dishonest about expressing the non-ideal side of our nature and thus remain forever alienated from our capacity for love.

Read Part 19 (The Final Part)

Deciphering the Jesus Fairy Tale - Part 2 : Faith

Without warning, a furious storm came up on the lake, so that the waves swept over the boat. But Jesus was sleeping. The disciples went and woke him, saying, "Lord, save us! We're going to drown!" He replied, "You of little faith, why are you so afraid?" Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the waves, and it was completely calm. The men were amazed and asked, "What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the waves obey him!" Matthew 8:24-27, NIV, 1984.

We don't live in a Harry Potter world where an individual can command the elements and they will obey, so, assuming that this story had its origins in a real event, what kind of event might it have been?

To make sense of this we need to consider what Jesus may have meant by "faith". He says that his disciples have "little faith" and also that they are afraid. Whatever he means by "faith" it is something which would counter fear.

Faith is often viewed, both by religious believers and by critics of religious belief, as a belief in the existence of something of which we have no factual evidence. This is one kind of faith. Sometimes it counters fear. For instance a fearful person may temper their anxiety by clinging to the belief that they have a guardian angel. On the other hand this kind of faith can itself be a source of fear. The existence of a devil and a place of eternal punishment after death are also matters of faith of this kind.

But faith need not be a belief in the existence of something. It can be a belief in the effectiveness of a process. Most of us have faith in science. This doesn't mean that we believe that every conclusion a scientist comes to will necessarily prove correct. But we believe that the progress of science is toward a better understanding of the universe. Superstition made us fearful of the world. Science is the response. The fearless confrontation with and examination of reality. Such fearlessness requires faith that we can meet the challenge. And this, I believe, is the kind of faith to which Jesus was referring.

Of course he wasn't specifically talking about science. But he was talking about what is open to us if we can learn not to be afraid. If reality itself or life in all its potentialities can be viewed as a sea then the faith Jesus was referring to is the courage that allows us to cast ourselves out onto that body of water. To open up to all that there is in life and the world around us, rather than allowing fear to blight our life or drag us from the glory of creation into the pointlessness of conflict with our fellows.

Because at the root of all anger or conflict is fear. Fear that we may lose something if we do not strike back against that which inspires it in us. Of course it may not be the person who angers us whom we fear, but there is something about them or something they express which makes us anxious.

If we are full of insecurities and fears, our inner life and our outer life is liable to be stormy. We will be at war within ourselves and we will be prone to getting into conflict with those around us. The root cause of most of our insecurities and fears is a lack of self-acceptance. Our sense of our own worth is fragile and this leaves us fearful of aspects of our own psyche and makes us vulnerable to be upset by things which others do or say.

The presence of a person who accepts us unconditionally has a soothing impact on us. We know that nothing we are liable to do or say will trouble them or make them think less of us. When conflict breaks out, the presence of such a person, a person who has no allegiance to one side or the other, can have a calming influence. Deep down we know that our anger is a sign of weakness, and if someone is genuinely unmoved by it we are liable to defer to their inner strength.

The storm which threatened Jesus' disciples was no doubt of the psychological rather then meteorological variety. This story is a record, albeit in mythological form, of Jesus' ability to resolve conflict amongst his disciples.

If by "God" Jesus meant the creative principle of the universe, then he was talking about faith in a process, not in the existence of something. We might have faith in nature. This need not mean that we believe that fruit trees will grow spontaneously in the desert or that a tiger will not try to eat us. It just means that we trust to nature to provide for our needs as long as we appropriately acknowledge its limitations and its dangers. So to have faith in God, for Jesus, meant to approach life fearlessly, in recognition that the world is full of things and processes and people who will help us if we live in such a way.

To understand the nature of this concept of faith and see its wisdom we could consider the decisions we make in our lives as wagers not unlike the wager that Blaise Pascal proposed concerning the existence or non-existence of God.

First it should be pointed out that faith is no replacement for reason. If we jump off of a tall building we are most likely going to die no matter how much faith we have that we can fly. Faith should only come into the question after we have determined that a positive outcome is not beyond the bounds of possibility.

1. We don't believe we will succeed, so decide not to try.
2. We don't believe we will succeed, but we try anyway.
3. We believe that we will succeed, but we fail.
4. We believe that we will succeed, and we do.

We'll interpret a decision not to try as a failure. And, in the second case, our belief that we will fail is not a good basis for success and is liable to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. So we will assume that that is also a fail.

So the results would look like this :

1. Fear Fail
2. Fear Fail
3. Faith Fail
4. Faith Success

If jumping 50 cars on a motorcycle was the thing which was being attempted, then 1. would probably be the most sensible choice, as there is little to be gained by success and everything to be lost by failure. But when we apply this wager to the everyday decisions of our lives, we find that we might as well have faith that things will go well. If we do find ourselves in a number 3. situation we know that we have lost nothing by having faith. We would have failed anyway. And faith almost always is a prerequisite to success.

To pick a practical example. We may fear to speak to strangers. You never know who's a serial killer these days, we may tell ourselves. Of course the statistical likelihood of meeting a serial killer is quite small. What we don't know is how our life might have been transformed for the better by friendships we may have made, or even ideas exchanged in casual conversation, with all those strangers. The same could be applied if we are afraid of flying. We might eliminate the possibility that we will die in a plane crash, but we also deprive ourself of the rich experiences which might await us in other countries.

Is the existence of God necessarily a matter of faith?

For many it is. For Jesus it was not. God is raw undivided reality unobscured by the abstraction of rational thought, the preconceptions of received dogma or the fracturing effect of the embattled ego.

The world "holy" comes from the same root word as the word "whole". Something which is "holy" is something which is undivided. When William Blake said "Everything that lives is holy" he was acknowledging that every living thing is an undivided whole and indivisibly connected to the whole of nature. The universe, the totality of all things, is also an undivided whole. That is what God is. That is what God means.

In our wounded paranoid state, this reality can become a mirror in which we see reflected the human face of an individual who shares our own prejudices or an embodiment of the torturing conscience programmed into us by our society. None of this has anything to do with the nature of God. And much of what Jesus had to say about God was aimed at destroying such misconceptions. He stuck with the use of terms like "He" and "Father" because he had to start with the language people were used to using when talking about God, but he also explained to them that "Though I have been speaking figuratively, a time is coming when I will no longer use this kind of language but will tell you plainly about my Father." John 16:25, NIV, 1984.

Rational thought is a crucial tool for developing understanding of reality. But it is not rational thought which tells us whether or not something exists. It is direct experience which does that. If I hold an orange in my hand I know that it exists because I can see it, feel it, smell it, taste it. Rational thought combined with such direct sensory experience can help me to discover more about the orange. I can learn that it is good for me because it contains high quantities of Vitamin C. But I cannot use reason to prove the existence of the orange, because the a priori establishment via sensory perception that the orange exists it the primary datum for the reasoning process about its nature. In other words we have to decide whether something exists before we can begin to use reason to tell us anything about it.

And rational thought is an abstraction. It does not deal directly with reality. It deals with ideas about reality. It requires language. The word "orange" is not itself an orange. Its meaning for us is determined largely by our sensory experience of the real thing. And this is where we run into problems with the word "God". Because the direct sensory experience of the reality to which we assigned the label "God" is not as easily accessible to us, because of our neurosis, as direct sensory experience of a piece of fruit.

To perceive reality as an integrated whole we have to be able to temporarily turn off that part of our thinking which divides. If we are thinking in terms of us and them, good and evil, inside and outside, up and down, alive and dead, etc., we cannot perceive a reality in which there are no such divisions. Some see God when they take hallucinogenic drugs, because these drugs prevent the mind from maintaining its conceptual divisions. Others are able to achieve direct sensory experience of God through meditation, because meditation involves the cessation of all rational thought. And there are those who see God when rational thought is broken down by psychosis. And it is likely that as children, before we learned to think rationally and divide the world into separate bits, we lived in an awareness of God.

Keith Johnstone tells this story :

A Psychotic Girl

I once had a close rapport with a teenager who seemed 'mad' when she was with other people, but relatively normal when she was with me. I treated her rather as I would a Mask – that is to say, I was gentle, and I didn't try to impose my reality on her. One thing that amazed me was her perceptiveness about other people – it was as if she was a body-language expert. She described things about them which she read from their movement and postures that I later found to be true, although this was at the beginning of a summer school and none of us had ever met before.

I'm remembering her now because of an interaction she had with a very gentle, motherly schoolteacher. I had to leave for a few minutes, so I gave the teenager my watch and said she could use it to see I was away only a very short time, and that the schoolteacher would look after her. We were in a beautiful garden (where the teenager had just seen God) and the teacher picked a flower and said : 'Look at the pretty flower, Betty.'

Betty, filled with spiritual radiance, said, 'All the flowers are beautiful.'

'Ah,' said the teacher, blocking her, 'but this flower is especially beautiful.'

Betty rolled on the ground screaming, and it took a while to calm her. Nobody seemed to notice that she was screaming 'Can't you see? Can't you see!'

In the gentlest possible way, this teacher had been very violent. She was insisting on categorising, and on selecting. Actually it is crazy to insist that one flower is especially beautiful in a whole garden of flowers, but the teacher is allowed to do this, and is not perceived by sane people as violent. Grown-ups are expect to distort the perceptions of the child in this way. Since then I've noticed such behaviour constantly, but it took the mad girl to open my eyes to it.

Impro : Improvisation and the Theatre, Keith Johnstone, Eyre Methuen, 1981.

At that time Jesus said, "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Matthew 11:25, NIV

This is not to say that we should abandon rational thought, only that we need to take a holiday from it occasionally if we are to remain in contact with reality. This is something which Einstein understood : “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” No doubt it was this approach which allowed Einstein to transcend the boundaries placed on our understanding of physics by the limitations of mechanistic enquiry. I'm sure we have all met individuals who are intellectually brilliant but seem to be emotionally dead inside, incapable of weeping in the face of beauty for instance. Rational thought is a essential tool, but it can also be used as a neurotic defence by the emotionally wounded. The mind has a built-in capacity for holistic thought, for integrating pieces of information into a meaningful picture of the whole, but any form of internal conflict disrupts this ability, therefore the most effective thinker will be one who is not just intellectually skilled but emotionally healthy.

If God is the creative principle of the universe then the task of science is to unveil God. To flee from that unveiling is to lack faith. Some fearfully cling to fairy story descriptions of the nature of the world written thousands of years ago. Others angrily deny the existence of God.

We are caught up in a storm. But some of us have faith that reason will prevail, that a clear understanding of our current situation, humble, free from dogma, free from judgement, can provide an island of calm on which refugees from the sinking boats of irrational superstition and rationalistic denial can all find refuge.

Sucked into Paradise

Grotesque and frightening things are released as soon as people begin to work with spontaneity. Even if a class works on improvisation every day for only a week or so, then they start producing very ‘sick' scenes : they become cannibals pretending to eat each other, and so on. But when you give the student permission to explore this material he very soon uncovers layers of unsuspected gentleness and tenderness. It is no longer sexual feelings and violence that are deeply repressed in this culture now, whatever it may have been like in fin-de-siecle Vienna. We repress our benevolence and tenderness.

Johnstone, Keith. Impro, Improvisation and the Theatre (Eyre Methuen, 1981)

Why would surrendering to the free operation of the imagination lead us through “sick" or disturbing ideas to a rediscovery of our capacity for love?

There is within us a natural pull towards wholeness and healing. What impedes this tendency is fear. We began as unconditionally loving beings. This was a state of faith in love. But at some stage we lost our faith. We gave in to fear and a divide opened up between ourself and others and our own psyche became split. This was the infliction of our defining wound. This is sometimes referred to as The Fisher King Wound after one of the characters from Arthurian legend.

When I was a young child I had an irrational fear which was the cause of much amusement among my family. I was afraid that, if the bath plug was pulled out while I was in the bath, the force of the circling water might suck me down the plughole.

If we cling to dogmatic ways of thinking or in any other way resist the uncensored and unimpeded operation of our own imagination or that of others it is because we can sense that we are being sucked towards the black hole of our defining wound. We fear immolation.

And yet the improvisers in Johnstone's example found unexpected tenderness beyond the cannibalistic fantasies. What lies on the other side of the black hole is our original unconditionally loving self, our inner child.

Why might cannibalism be a key concept surrounding the defining wound? To understand this we have to imagine ourselves in the position of a child who is unconditionally loving and has not yet become wounded and thus selfish. Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the wounded. If we hit our thumb with a hammer, all we can think about is our sore thumb. And if we are wounded, much of our attention will be focused on our wounded self. But how does this look to the unselfish child. The world of adults, as we come to know it more intimately as we get older, must seem to us like a world of cannibals, in which the selfishness of each individual eats away at the life and needs of the others. The free operation of the imagination leads us back through the acknowledgement that we are spiritual cannibals to the point before we acquired the wound which made us such. The door to Paradise looks like the door to Hell, that is why we have been so reluctant to go there. But Johnstone shows how easy it is to negotiate this trip back down the black hole as long as we are in an environment in which we feel safe.

In Homer's Odyssey there is a very famous passage in which the sailors have to steer a course through a narrow body of water which lies between two terrible dangers – the Scylla and the Charybdis. The Scylla is a monster with four eyes and six long necks with frightful heads each equipped with three rows of sharp teeth. Charybdis was once the beautiful daughter of Poseidon and Gaia, but she has become a monster – a giant bladder with a huge mouth which swallows huge quantities of water three times a day and then belches them out again. Later Charybdis came to be viewed simply as as a whirlpool.

This myth is a very succinct description of how we live our lives, caught between fear of the black hole or Charybdis within and the battle against external threats (the Scylla). Often the two threats mirror each other. The need to deny some aspect of ourselves, the acknowledgement of which might lead us down the black hole, can drive us to obsessively fight against the expression of that very quality in others. An example might be a very conservative individual who is obsessed with the defence of freedom by military means but who also is in favour of censorship. Unable to acknowledge to ourselves that we fear the freedom which might lead us down the black hole, we project our internal struggle onto those who express opposition to freedoms we do believe in and fight against them. Our fear of the Charybdis drives us onto the fangs of the Scylla. And yet the way to end the injustices of the world is to lead the way down that black hole and show that it leads not to Hell but to Paradise.

This is not just a personal phenomena. Culturally we are in the midst of an improvisation similar to that described by Johnstone. Censorship of artistic expression was one form of cultural armouring we used to keep ourselves from being sucked down that black hole. Fifty years after the banning of Lady Chatterley's Lover was overturned in Great Britain and the United States, 50 Shades of Grey has taken the world by storm. And in the cinema we have moved from a time when all films in countries like the United States, Great Britain and Australia had to meet a restrictive code in which the length of a kiss had to not exceed a certain length to a time in which films depicting extended scenes of graphic torture and dismemberment are considered acceptable entertainment at the local multiplex. Allow artistic freedom and at least some of the expressions will tend to circle down to the most primal of material, that which leads through the black hole to Paradise. And what are the obsessions of our time? Flesh-eathing zombies. Vampires. Incest. Acknowledgement that our wound turns us into a living dead creature which sucks the life out of others. Zombies and vampires don't begin as zombies and vampires. They have to be bitten by someone who has already turned. They have to receive their wound. And, as Freud pointed out, the unavoidable rejection of our initial incestuous desires is one of the most common forms of psychic wound. Hence, in the world of erotica, pseudo-incest, and in some cases genuine incest, are all the rage. Allow freedom and we go back to our origins.

Fear is an important factor in how we view this collective improvisation. There are some who become very fearful and view it all as some dark Satanic conspiracy. Such individuals may claim that the Illuminati have conspired to create popular television characters who are homosexuals to brainwash us into accepting homosexuality, etc. It is easy enough to understand how a frightened individual can fall into this manner of thinking, because an improvisation is much like a conspiracy, but it is an unconscious one. It is an expression of what Carl Jung called “the collective unconscious" – a kind of group mind which exists beneath the level of consciousness, joining us all together. In an improvisation this group mind manifests itself externally. Feel a part of it and it seems magical, but feel isolated and frightened and it is the very stuff of paranoia.

It is important to remember that Johnstone's students didn't actually become cannibals and eat each other. They acted out scenes in which they were cannibals pretending to eat each other. Some are afraid that if we allow depictions of depravity and sadism in our books and movies then we are encouraging people to become depraved and sadistic. But going down the black hole requires only that we remove the impasse in our thinking and feeling which originates in fear of re-experiencing our defining wound. Our culture is a place to collectively renegotiate this passage and realising that we have nothing to fear will make this easier.

I know a good deal about this process because I've experienced what is now called bipolar disorder. It used to be described as manic depression. Bipolar disorder, in its more extreme manifestations, is a tendency to be repeatedly sucked down the black hole of one's defining wound and then spat out again. And, as with most forms of psychological disorder, fear is the key problem. In the manic phase one touches Heaven, one reunites with the inner child and the inhibitions of adult neurosis are abandoned. But there are two problems. One is that losing one's inhibitions and behaving like a child leads to trouble. Just because the neurotic adult state may be unhealthy in a way we may identify with cannibalistic zombies, doesn't mean that a grown man running around naked in a hospital emergency room were people have serious problems that need attending to is not just as, if not more, of an unhealthy manifestation within the social system. The other problem is fear. The descent into the child state is generally precipitated by a serious crisis – often some kind of double bind situation in which we are damned if we do something and equally damned if we do not (see Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972). What we are looking for is reassurance. Simply being dumped back into our childlike state does not provide that reassurance. It happens too quickly. And we have to remember that when we were a child we were particularly prone to fears. We might feel the need to check under our bed for monsters. And because the process of being sucked down the black hole is one of cycling through opposites – yin, yang, yin, yang, yin, yang – a prediction of that which is desired is likely to quickly be followed by a prediction of that which is to be feared. A classic example from my own major episode was when I was in the emergency room. I thought a bunch of sexy female nurses were going to drag me off into some shower room for an orgy. But that was immediately followed by a sense of terror that, when they were finished having sex with me, they would eat me alive, beginning by biting my fingers off one by one.

Gregory Bateson

So highs can be scary and the disruption they cause to our lives can be extreme. For this reason there is a tendency to pull back from them to an extremely repressed state – that of depression. At some stage though, for our own healing, we have to return to the creative maelstrom of mania. What I've come to realise over time is that the key to managing this process is to replace fear with understanding and acceptance of the process. There are four things which can lead to problems for a person in a manic state – fear, reckless behaviour, taking thoughts too literally and talking too freely. Fear drives the excitement level and makes it hard to get enough sleep or to restrain one's reckless behaviour. The thoughts of the manic state are prophetic, but not to be taken literally. They have to be interpreted. The thought that we should be naked should not be seen as a rationale for shedding our clothes in public but rather as an inducement to shed our neurotic armouring. And it is not necessary to talk about our experiences if we think that those around us will interpret what we say as a reason to impose unwanted psychiatric care upon us.

I once read about a man who believed himself to have a fish in his jaw. (The case was reported in New Society.) This fish moved around, and caused him a lot of discomfort. When he tried to tell people about the fish, they thought him ‘crazy', which led to violent arguments. After he'd been hospitalised several times – with no effect on the fish – it was suggested that perhaps he shouldn't tell anyone. After all it was the quarrels that were getting him put away, rather than the delusion. Once he'd agreed to keep his problem secret, he was able to lead a normal life. His sanity is like our sanity. We may not have a fish in our jaw, but we all have its equivalent.

Johnstone, Keith. Impro, Improvisation and the Theatre (Eyre Methuen, 1981)

By understanding the process of going back to that childlike state, I now find that I don't suffer from depression any more and that I go to that state more often and find it a less volatile place to be. The process of improvisation is the best way to understand that place – one of openness in which we see that those who are closed off are closed off because they are fearful and long only for us to give them permission to be free. What keeps us from Paradise is the feeling that we don't really deserve to go there, and there is no more powerful way to have this false belief challenged than to have the door opened for us by someone who is already on the inside.