Who Are the Meek and How Do They Inherit the Earth?

Photo by wisitporn.

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” Matthew 5:5

There is an old joke that goes : “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth (if it’s O.K. with the rest of you guys.)”

Meekness is often exploited. It seems as if the aggressive are more likely to get what they want.

There are different interpretations of this passage.

Jeremy Griffith, the author of Freedom : The End of the Human Condition, says that “the meek” are “the more innocent”, by which he means those of us who have been more nurtured and are thus less insecure and more honest in our thinking and less aggressive in our nature. By “…inherit the earth” he thinks Jesus meant that these individuals will “…have to lead humanity home to a human-condition-free world.”

Jordan Peterson, on the other hand, claims that a better translation of the Greek word ήμερος usually translated as “meek” is “those who have weapons and the ability to use them but are determined to keep them sheathed”. Those who take the right path are those who integrate their shadow, who acknowledge the dark side of their nature but do not succumb to it, gaining strength from their encounter with it. He is afraid that we may assume that meek is synonymous with “weak” :

Here is a guide to how the Greek word is generally translated.

Here is some discussion of Peterson’s interpretation.

One problem I have with both interpretations is the failure to acknowledge the meaning of the word “inherit”. An inheritance is something unearned which falls to us. Now it may have been earned in some instances, in the sense that someone may put us in their will because we have been of service to them or we may be written out of a will because we have done something to offend a family member. But none of this is intrinsic to the meaning of the word “inheritance”. The passage doesn’t say “the meek will earn (or win) the earth”.

I think we have to look at the context to get a better understanding.

This is the third in what are known as the Beautitudes. Jesus tells us that eight particular classes of people are “blessed” or “fortunate”. He then tells his followers that all of them are “blessed” or “fortunate” if they are persecuted because of him.

He first claims “blessedness” for the “poor in spirit” and then for “those who mourn”. Clearly these are not those who are blessed with good fortune in the world as it currently stands.

I think that, to understand the Beatitudes, we have to recognise that Jesus was an apocalypticist, i.e. a person who believed that some event was going to occur which would overturn the established social order and usher in some kind of paradise on earth. (I recognise that it is more popular to interpret the concept of a “Kingdom of Heaven” as some ethereal place we go to when we die, but that doesn’t make so much sense to me.)

The Beatitudes make sense in the framework of two worlds - the social world we know, with its injustices, its dishonesty and its oppressive power relationships - and a potential world of honesty and love which lies buried beneath its repressions.

Sermon on the Mount 1 Le Sainte Bible Traduction nouvelle selon la Vulgate par Mm J -J Bourasse et P Janvier Tours Alfred Mame et Fils 2 1866 3 France 4 Gustave Dor
Engraving photographed by ruskpp.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” 5:3

Perhaps the “poor in spirit” are those who have been very wounded by their experiences of life. They have little spirit left in them. But in a world of love their wounds will be healed and they will be free of oppression. In terms of a transition to the new world, they have the advantage - “the blessing” - of not being invested in the old.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” 5:4

To be in mourning is not a form of righteousness that one pursues. As with being “poor in spirit” it is a disadvantage in the old world, but one which makes us less invested in it. We fixate on loving relationships which we have lost, through the death of the loved one or through a breakdown in the relationship. In a world where everybody loves everybody else, it will be easy to let go of the past and live in the present.

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” 5:5

No amount of power or aggression can keep the old world from dying. Terrible destruction can occur. Nothing can necessarily protect anyone. But, only a healthy society will not eventually fall. If such a healthy loving truthful world comes into existence, it will belong to the meek as much as to anyone else. The point is that the powerful and aggressive try to hang onto the world, and, individually, they always fail. They can postpone the new world, but they can never have a world of their own which persists.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” 5:6

Those who long for a world in which we treat each other well, are not invested in a world in which we don’t. So, once again, we have a group of people who have nothing to lose and everything to gain in a transition from the old world to the new world.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.” 5:7

Again, things don’t always work this way in the old world. But mercy is clearly the path to the new world. Our divisions keep us trapped in the old world. As William Blake put it : “Mutual forgiveness of each vice, Such are the gates of paradise.”

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” 5:8

I think this is where we come to what Griffith calls “the innocent”. As very young children we were aligned to the world of love. If God is the creative theme of the universe which is manifested in human behaviour as love, then children can “see God”. This is the source of their “enthusiasm”, i.e. “the god within”. It is the wounds of life, which sow the seeds of internal division and breed resentment, which “hide the face of God” from us. In a world in which these divisions are healed with understanding, everyone will live in full awareness that they are manifestations of this creative force.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.” 5:9

This is similar to 5:7. Peace between warring factions is keeping us in the old world. Those who can resolve conflicts are architects of the new world. The reward falls to all, not just to those who behave this way. It isn’t about pursuing righteous behaviour in order to pass a test and get a reward, it is about being a manifestation of a social process from which the whole of humanity benefits.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” 5:10

The old world is threatened by honesty and is insecure in it’s sense of its own worth, so those who tell the truth or act in a way which shows up the old world’s corrupt behaviour tend to be persecuted. It is necessary to keep the vision of the new world in mind in order to not give in to this pressure.

Another interpretation could be put on this sentence. Some people are persecuted because of a false sense of righteousness (what William Blake called “Moral Virtue”). A good example might be people who are persecuted for their sexuality. Someone who is in a loving gay relationship is being honest and loving - requirements of the new world - and someone who tries to persecuted them in the belief that they are deviating from righteousness, by not adopting dishonesty and suppressing their love, is part of the old world. The new world is for the person being thus persecuted as it is for all who have been persecuted.

So how does this apocalypse, this death of the old world and birth of the new take place?

What makes the most sense to me is that the human race has always been engaged in a kind of collective improvisation to find the path to the new world. Art, philosophy, religion, science… These are all ways in which our minds and our hearts have been engaged in a process of trying to sort ourselves out. We make mistakes, we strive to learn from them and compensate for them. We examine the world around us and try to better understand where we come from.

Photo by smileus.

Think of us as a computer trying to work out the bugs in its own programming. We can even see this in the evolution of different religions. We can see Jesus as someone trying to compensate for the flaws in Judaism, just as Judaism was an attempt to compensate for flaws in various pagan belief systems. It’s all a part of a process of trying to find something which works. And, in the modern world, we have new abilities and new problems not dreamt of in Jesus’ time.

The advantage we have is that this collective improvisation is taking place at an exponential rate. We can share ideas very quickly and with minimum censorship.

What should we do? Participate in the process. Speak what we feel to be the truth. Listen to the ideas expressed by others and test them for flaws. The conceptual framework of understanding which ushers in a new world will be the one which passes the test of such scrutiny. And we will know it because it works, because it heals conflict and spreads wellbeing wherever it is expressed. “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” Matthew 7:16

Every day we see evidence of how rotten the old world is - lies and corruption are exposed. It’s time for the new world to find itself amidst the collapse of the old. It can only grow out of open, honest, spontaneous and generous interaction between individuals. Dogmatic utopias constructed through social programming or the impositions of more laws are part of the old world. We will know the truth by the fact that it sets us free from all that.

Photo by Gleb TV.

BOOK REVIEW : Selected Poetry by William Blake

This is a great entry point to begin exploring the poetry of one of English literature’s great visionaries. Blake’s poetry can make for challenging reading, especially his epic poems which are full of allusions to the Bible, to history, to famous philosophical works and also to individuals who were important in his own life. And, to make it even more difficult, many of the mythological figures who appear in these poems were Blake’s own creations, the nature of whom we have to try to pick up from the context. (The footnotes help to make sense of the allusions and also explain some of the archaic words Blake uses.)

For a long time I thought of Blake as someone who had a big impact on my view of the world, even though I had only read a handful of his poems. While London, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The Everlasting Gospel spoke to me like the voice of a friend to one lost in a wilderness, the prospect of reading his epic works was daunting. The beauty of this collection is that it contains much of his shorter work, including the entirety of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, along with extracts which can be read alone from two of his epic poems - Milton and Jerusalem. This helped to give me confidence that I will be able to read them in their entirety at some time. I was also inspired to buy The Blake Dictionary, The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake by S. Foster Damon and Morris Eaves to help with this.

An argument could be made that the way to read Blake’s poems is as he presented them, illustrated with his drawings and paintings. Still, I think there are advantages to reading the text on its own. His words conjure up images which are more powerful than his pictures, amazing as they are. I would recommend reading the poems on their own and then seeking out the illuminated versions afterwards.

What I relate to particularly strongly in Blake’s writing is his vision of the entrapment of the human soul within the repressive structures of society. “A robin redbreast in a cage sets all Heaven in a rage” was not just some superficial animal rights statement, it was a cry for freedom from repression of the human spirit.

Good and evil, in Blake’s eyes, were not so simple to distinguish. He used the term “moral virtue” to label a form of self-righteous judgement which viewed itself as good, but was the enemy of love and love’s forgiveness. By contrast the vital energy we feel in our bodies might be viewed as a source of sin by the church, but, by Blake, as a source of “eternal delight” for “everything that lives is holy.”

Blake’s was very much a pantheistic vision. The divine was always present in nature, and, while he had visions of angels and demons, he didn’t believe, in a literal sense, in miracles which defied the laws of nature. He didn’t believe that Mary was a virgin (Jerusalem, Chapter III, lines 369-393), and from this he draws his own vision of Jesus as a child of love and of liberation from the law’s oppression of love. Mary was impregnated in an act of love unsanctioned by the law. Joseph, discovering that his betrothed was carrying another man’s child, had to exercise forgiveness in keeping with God’s forgiveness of human sinfulness, and love for life rather than for the law, to marry Mary. Thus, in his very conception and the family circumstances into which he was born, Blake sees Jesus as an embodiment of love supplanting law.

I don’t believe in the supernatural, so that kind of religious belief which depends on belief in literal resurrection of the dead, etc., is not accessible to me. William Blake is someone who helps me to draw inspiration and hope from religious visions in a metaphorical sense. If we can cleanse our “doors of perception” perhaps we can achieve a “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” and “build Jerusalem” in our own “green and pleasant land.”

Thoughts About "God"

Reading the Bible has led me to think about some of the ways people think about God.

Some say that God is perfect. What does it mean for something of which there is only one to be perfect? Where there are two of something we can look for flaws and decide that one is closer to perfection than the other.

Why is this relevant? If our view of God is of the absolute grounding of reality as something perfect, then this becomes a mirror for our own very personal conceptions about what is or is not perfect in ourselves or others. We may become less accepting of our own apparent flaws or those of others if we believe there is a grounding of perfection from which we and they have deviated. The Bible contains many laws expressing what is or is not considered acceptable to God, yet why should the absolute grounding of reality give a shit?

Religion is a human institution with a human basis and a human purpose. The purpose of religious laws, as with any laws, is to try to resolve or prevent conflict in society. It doesn’t begin with something abstract, but contemplation of the abstract may give the lawmaker some of the required distance to make laws for the common good rather than his own. What we find in the early parts of the Bible are flawed attempts which we may look on critically from our own position, but we would probably find similar flaws in most indigenous systems of law - a mix of wisdom, superstition, intolerance and brutality.

My own definition of “God” is the creative principle of the universe which we see in operation in the increasing complexity of life’s development and which operates in human affairs as love. Something holds energy in the meaningful pattern that we call “matter”. And some principle allows some of that matter to organise itself in what we call “life”. The comparable meaningful arrangements of humans are what we call “families” and “tribes” and “corporations” and “societies”. What holds these together is love, i.e. open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication. Sure tribal selfishness may be a motivating force, and all groups are diluted by intra-group selfishness, but if there were no love the group would fall apart.

We put a human face on impersonal forces with which we are in a relationship. We think of nature as a “she” for example. This can be helpful, but also misleading. We may be Mother Nature’s children, but she won’t necessarily protect us the way our real mother would, in fact she may slaughter us without hesitation.

If “God” is the creative principle of the universe, then we have everything to be grateful to “him” for, but a principle doesn’t need us as individuals. This is not a “Father” who cares one way or the other what happens to us. It is we who care what happens to ourselves and, hopefully others, and only we who need to care.

One thing we see in the Bible is that God is used as a conceptual tool for widening one’s concept of self-interest. God is presented as a personification of what Hindus and Buddhists call Karma. If you behave selfishly, recklessly, dishonestly or against the legitimate interests of others, God will bring you down, but if you act generously, honestly and practice frugality, he will protect your long term interests even if you may be persecuted by others in the short term.

Of course, in reality, there are no guarantees. You could live a spotless life and get some terrible disease.

But the principle of enlightened self-interest is still the best basis for guiding one’s life. Don’t trade current pleasure for future pain, and recognise that, as long as we are social beings, our wellbeing is nested in the wellbeing of those around us. If we sow enmity in those around us, then we will also reap it. And those who profit by an unjust society will have to live within walls which prevent them from enjoying the warmth of its community. We don’t need to believe in a personal God to come to these conclusions, but historically many have found it useful.

They say that we are made in God’s image. Clearly we are not omnipresent, omniscient or invisible. So in what way might this be true? We are not just products of the creative principle of the universe, we are expressions of it. It operates through us as surely as it does through anything else which exists. Our capacity for reason gives it a whole new level on which it can operate, through culture and technology.

Our sense of alienation from God, that God is to be feared and that we are to be ashamed of ourselves, comes from our awareness that our creative potential - our expression of love - is held in check by our selfishness. But our shame is not appropriate. 

The creative principle doesn’t operate by forcing chaos into a preconceived orderly mould. The natural intrinsic potential unfolds through spontaneously occurring connections based on the mutuality of self-interest. (We can see this most clearly in ecosystems which are balanced, orderly networks built from the individual self-interest of the constituent organisms.) 

To decide what is good and try to force it into being is the root of evil. The ends don’t justify the means. It is by embracing healthy means and not thinking too much about what the ends will be that we become faithful expressions of the creative  principle. 

And this applies also to our relationship to ourselves. If we fight with ourselves because we don’t conform to an ideal we will only make ourselves more self-obsessed. But look for ways in which our own longterm self-interest aligns with that of others and we see the seeds of a more creative way of living. If we concentrate on fostering what works, we may find that what wasn’t working has disappeared while our attention was elsewhere.

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)

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 16

Mistaking Satan for God

God and Satan are two mythological figures. God is our personification of the creative principle of the universe, which in our own species is manifested as love. Satan is seen as the originator of evil behaviour, and yet he is recognised as having come from God, as having been one of God’s “fallen angels”.

Our capacity for reason is clearly a product of the creative principle of the universe (God), but it brought with it the distinction between “good” and “evil” which led to the destructive mind virus we call “idealism”. Love requires unconditional acceptance, but idealism made our acceptance conditional and thus gradually eroded our capacity for love and sowed the seeds of conflict.

If idealism is what brought evil into the world, then Satan is a mythological way of referring to idealism.

In our increasingly insecure state we recognised that we were out of harmony with the theme of life - i.e. love, but by feeling guilty about that, by giving in to Satan’s whispered suggestion that embracing idealism was the way back to harmony with God, rather than recognising that God works precisely by refusing to judge or to expect perfection, we went down a dark path, one in which we would quickly come to adopt Satan as our God.

People often wonder why there is such a difference between the judgemental, jealous, condemning God of the Old Testament, and the forgiving God spoken of by Jesus and of which it is said : “God is love.”

This is because the God which cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, who drowned the world in a flood, etc., was really Satan. Of course these are mythological events, but the point is that they are stories about a harsh judger of humanity, and that judger of humanity has been what William Blake referred to as “the accuser”, i.e. the originator of destructive behaviour, the enemy of the real God (love). And to the degree that we have worshipped that God we have been Satan worshippers.

Blake expressed this in the Epilogue to his poem Gates of Paradise :

"To The Accuser Who is The God of This World
Truly My Satan thou art but a Dunce
And dost not know the Garment from the Man
Every Harlot was a Virgin once
Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan
Tho thou art Worshipd by the Names Divine 
Of Jesus & Jehovah thou art still
The Son of Morn in weary Nights decline
The lost Travellers Dream under the Hill."

If we can throw off idealism (the habit of standing in judgement of ourselves or others) then there is no need to worship God. We can be God, we can be love personified.

Patriarchy

Griffith’s view that we have a genetic instinct towards selflessness which criticised our attempts to self-manage, means that he sees the attempt to find understanding of the world and ourselves as “a battle against the ignorance of our instinctive self”. Because this was “a battle” he feels that it naturally fell to men, and because women are biologically nurturers, and thus aligned with “our instinctive self”, it brought about a rift between the sexes which required the institution of patriarchy, so that the men could pursue the battle to find understanding with support rather than interference by the women.

I don’t think this is at all what happened. I see no evidence that we have a genetic instinct for selflessness which criticises us. However, as I’ve outlined previously, conflict arising from the requirements of the nurturing role provided by the women and the group protector role provided by the men, would have led to the distinction being made between “good” and “bad” behaviour - aggressive vs. nurturing - and thus the thought virus of idealism came into being.

Armouring is our defence against criticism. Since the men would have been more vulnerable to criticism because theirs was the aggressive role, they had to become more armoured. And it was a negative feedback loop. The more armoured they became the more criticism they were subjected to because of their relative lack of responsiveness and generosity to others.

This situation progressed until society became patriarchal. The armour is a form of control - it protects us against threats from without and within. A lot of repression is involved. A lot is bottled up within the armour. And since we project our inner battles onto the outside world, the more desperately embattled an individual is in their armour, and thus the more self-control they need to keep it from breaking down, the more they also feel the need to control the behaviour of those around them which resonates with that internal threat. And so the most armoured individuals came to exercise control over society. The more embattled the men in charge of a society the more oppressed the women in that society will be. It takes a secure, i.e. relatively armour-free, man to not feel threatened by a woman’s freedom.

I don’t think the need to find understanding, in general, comes into it. Clearly an understanding of our psychology, particularly the relationship between idealistic criticism and armouring, was needed. But I don’t know that men were necessarily in any better position to find that understanding then women. And the search for general understanding is something which can be pursued by anyone with a functioning brain irrespective of their gender.

So I see patriarchy not as a retrospectively justified strategy in the journey toward self-knowledge, rather I see it as a symptom of an unavoidable mental illness which occurred along the way.

Feminism’s critique of patriarchy and defence of a woman’s right to perform any role in society is fundamentally sound. The only problem is that, since the role of patriarchy was as a form of armouring, and armouring is a defence against criticism, feminism didn’t exactly make it easier for men to become less patriarchal. It is the practice of unconditional acceptance (except of destructive behaviour towards others) that makes a world of equality possible.

By contrast, Griffith’s approach to healing is to try to demonstrate that the patriarchal role has been a heroic one, necessary to the salvation of the human race from the human condition, but one which can now disappear because understanding of the human condition has been achieved. But to tell someone they are a hero is surely a reinforcement of their armouring. What heals is to be made to know that one is simply acceptable. It is the difference between trying to repair someone’s self-esteem, which needs always to be maintained, and encouraging them to leave the self-esteem economy altogether.

Sex

According to Griffith : “Unable to explain their behaviour to women, men were left in an untenable situation: they couldn’t just stand there and accept women’s unjust criticism of their behaviour — they had to do something to defend themselves — but because women reproduced the species, men couldn’t kill women the way they destroyed animals, and so instead men violated women’s innocence or ‘honour’  through rape. Men perverted sex, as in ‘fucking’ or destroying, making it discrete from the act of procreation. What was being fucked, violated, destroyed, ruined, degraded or sullied was women’s innocence. The feminist Andrea Dworkin recognised this underlying truth when she wrote that ‘All sex is abuse’.”

Here we see the real irrationality coming out in Griffith’s thinking. Because his own sexual desires are a threat to his “innocent good little boy” persona, he views sex as essentially an “attack on innocence.” Now it is true that women don’t like to have sex, or anything else, forced upon them. That is an attack. But he is assuming here that recreational sex could only occur if it were forced onto women. He is saying that an innocent woman has no desire for erotic pleasure. He talks about ‘honour”, but surely the concept of sexual honour is a product of a sexually repressive society. “A good and proper woman doesn’t want to do those beastly things. She just lays back and thinks of England.” I can imagine that many women will find this attitude insulting. And when he quotes from Andrea Dworkin he fails to point out that she was a lesbian who was molested by a man in a movie theatre at the age of nine.

He says : “Well, sex as humans have been practising it has similarly been extremely offensive to our instinctive self or soul, and has caused the same ‘emotion-induced’ shock to our soul and thus temporary ‘blackout’ in our mind, as this study found : ‘Research suggests that when shown erotic or gory images, the brain fails to process images seen immediately afterward. This phenomenon is known as “emotion-induced blindness.’”

That doesn’t seem terribly significant to me. If we see something which induces a strong emotional reaction in us then our mind remains focussed on that for a while before being able to focus on something else. I’m sure that the degree of this response would be lessened in individuals like myself who are very desensitised to erotic and gory imagery. I don’t think it has anything to do with some sensitive innocent instinctive self. I’m sure that, if you met up with an old friend in the street, it would take you a while, as you walked away after talking to them, to really open up to concentrating on the world around you, because your emotion had drawn your attention away from your environment.

And the degree of disturbance which erotic or gory imagery has on the individual is generally based on how repressed that individual is. If we are repressing a lot of sexual desires within us, then erotic images are liable to be disturbing to us as they resonate with what we are repressing. On the other hand, a child watching the same image would probably view it with untroubled curiosity or amusement, because he or she does not yet have the desires required to resonate with what is seen. And gory footage will be most disturbing to someone who is repressing a lot of anger, as the violence resonates with their repressed feelings of hostility.

He says : Humans don’t remember sexual episodes very well and the reason we don’t is because sex, as currently practised, is a violation of our soul and we don’t want to remember such violation.

I don’t know what evidence he is basing this on. I haven’t had much sex in my life, but I think I remember those episodes better than a lot of other things. My view of the soul and Griffith’s seem quite opposed. I feel that masturbating to pornography is one of the things which nurtures my soul, providing some healing from the soul-crushing repression of the erotic which is the norm in our society.

He goes on : “The main point being made here, however, is that sex became a way of attacking the innocence of women, the result of which was that women’s innocence was oppressed and, to a degree, they tragically came to share men’s upset.”

I think that it is true that women became armoured as a result of macho retaliations to their criticism of men, but I don’t think sex was a driving force in this. As we become armoured, free erotic sex becomes channelled, egotistical and sometimes aggressive sex, but the development of the armouring as a response to criticism is the driving factor, not the sex. In fact, orgasms have a tendency to temporarily release us from our armouring, hence the expression “the little death”, i.e. death of the ego.

Griffith’s attempts to describe and explain human sexual behaviour and psychology are spectacularly off-base, but unfortunately they have the ability to seem credible to some people because they fit with the sexually repressive ideas, often religiously based, which have historically warped our society.

Read Part 17

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 15

His Psychosis

Presumably being well-nurtured would make it easier for values of cooperativeness to be imprinted on the blank slate of a child’s uncritical acceptance, because frustration would not have yet built up in such a way as to lead to rebelliousness against this programming.

But eventually life does provide frustrations to the growing individual. If Griffith tried to hang on to his “good innocent little boy” persona, then the source of frustration would be two-fold - that others didn’t behave according to these principles, and that his own frustrations, including anger at others for not behaving cooperatively, threatened to undermine his own ability to be cooperative himself.

These kinds of insecurities would require the adoption of a form of character armour, so the “good innocent little boy” became his increasingly rigid embattled perception of himself. It was how he would prove himself.

This persona needed to be maintained by self-nurturing - remaining close to nature, for instance. If it were really the genetic basis of the human individual, as he would come to believe, it would be far less fragile than that. You might block out your genetic orientation mentally, but it would be much stronger, and any time the mind lost its strength it would return to that orientation.

When our psyche becomes split - when we hang onto one aspect of ourselves in such a way that it requires us to repress all that is contrary to that aspect, e.g. cling to cooperativeness by repressing feelings of anger, those contrary feelings will only tend to build up more strongly in the subconscious.

So “good little innocent boy” Griffith gradually became more troubled by the aggressive and uncooperative behaviour of those around him, because their aggressiveness and lack of cooperation resonated with his own repressed aggressive feelings and resentment towards his cooperativeness-demanding character armour.

And the “good little innocent boy” isn’t sexual, so Griffith became increasingly troubled by other people’s sexual behaviour and felt the need to repress his own sexual feelings in order to hang onto that persona. Thus he came to view sex as essentially an “attack on innocence”, because other people’s sexual behaviour resonated with his repressed sexual desires which threatened to undermine his “good little innocent boy” persona.

Eventually, if he were to live in the world, and not hide himself away in a monastery somewhere, he had to seek some kind of reconciliation between the extreme idealism of his character armour and the contrary tendencies which he saw all around him and felt within him.

He built a theory, but it was a biased theory intended to normalise his position. He took his own position as the normal inborn condition of all humans and tried to work out why everyone else had diverged from that.

His battle to transcend selfish tendencies is evident throughout his theory. “Love-indoctrination” overcame the horribly competitive nature of other animals. What is “indoctrination” but learned alienation? In just such a way, the “good little innocent boy” persona Griffith has nurtured in himself alienates him from acknowledging the selfish impulses which lie beneath it.

Of course going down this path has made Griffith angry, egocentric and alienated, so when he looks into the mirror of the world he sees his own face staring back at him. And he rails against what he terms “pseudo-idealism” because his own idealism is “pseudo”, i.e a cultivated form of egotism. He also identifies now strongly with the right wing, because their embattled state, in a world in which their selfishness is causing great suffering and endangering the planet, resonates with his own.

In his first book Free : The End of the Human Condition, 1988, Griffith predicted, about its reception : “We will suspect it to be an expression of some form of disguised psychosis and will see its authority, its sense of conviction, as offensive arrogance.” Now we can see that that is what it was. The truth does carry its own authority, but that authority is intrinsic and does not need to be accompanied by big claims and promises.

The “Human Condition” Personified

Griffith says we set out seeking understanding of the human condition. In adolescence we resign ourselves to the fact that we are not going to achieve it. We adopt a false front and become angry, egocentric, selfish and alienated. Alienated in that we block out and angrily deny any truth which criticises us.

Griffith set off to find understanding of the human condition. He was unable to, because to do so he would have had to be able to confront the fact that the social phenomenon of idealism, which has no basis in our genes, was at the heart of the problem. He would have had to confront the fact that the idealism expressed by those he admired and the idealism he had been in the habit of expressing, was the source of all the manifestations of brutality and cruelty which troubled him. This is the central insight of any holistic systems view of the problem of good and evil, as Oscar Wilde acknowledged when he said : “It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had gained by his crime. It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.”

Trying to reconcile his “extreme idealism” with “reality” he came up with an evasive explanation for the human condition, one which tried to reconcile the two by providing an appeasing excuse for the “non-ideal”, a “defence for humanity”.

This theory became central to his character armour. In his state of increasing insecurity about his own worth it became his way to prove himself. He became increasingly aggressive and egotistical about the way that he tried to push it on the world. And became more and more alienated, placing more and more effort into collecting bits of quotes from famous thinkers to reinforce the blocks that prevented him from truthful thinking.

All of this is evident in his projections. It is humanity which suffers from a “psychosis”. It is humanity which is “evasive”. He thinks that simply thinking about how the conscious mind works would be enough to quickly lead us to think : “‘Well, if I’m so cleverly insightful why can’t I manage my life in a way that is not so mean and indifferent to others; indeed, why, if I am such a brilliantly intelligent person, am I such a destructively selfish, angry, egocentric, competitive and aggressive monster?’” But is it not possible that this is what his subconscious mind is saying about himself? “What if my theory is wrong? What if my behaviour in support of that false theory has, in truth, been destructively, selfishly, angrily, egocentrically, competitive, aggressive and monstrous behaviour”?

He says that our attitude to the truth is : “‘I don’t believe the criticism is deserved, and in any case it’s too unbearable to accept, so I will never tolerate any insinuation that I am a bad person.’” But hasn’t that been his embattled response to criticism of his work or behaviour?

Griffith is not a bad person. He lacks insight into his own madness. The road to his Hell has been paved with good intensions.

An holistic systems view of the universe sees that everything unfolds in the only way that it can. Thus any judgement of individuals as “good” or “evil” is inappropriate. Griffith has done something which had to be done. Just as Jesus is reputed to have taken the sins of the world onto himself, Griffith has absorbed all of the destructive poison of idealism into himself, so that, by his downfall, he can forever end humanity’s contamination by that poison. In William Blake’s philosophy Satan was the Accuser (the accuser of sin), i.e. idealism. So Griffith, in this metaphorical sense, is possessed by “Satan”. And his battle to have his ideas accepted is “Satan’s” last stand.

But, as I say, nobody is evil. Evil resides in destructive ideas which “possess” us. In time, Griffith’s “demons” will be cast out, both to his relief and the relief of us all.

We can see that the mythological figure Satan represents idealism, i.e. the accusation of sin. “He” is known as “the father of lies”, and it is because of idealism (that original distinction between “good” and “evil”) that we first began lying. When the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis says that we became ashamed of our nakedness and began wearing clothes, I think this a metaphorical way of saying that we became dishonest, we began telling lies as a way of trying to protect ourselves from the criticism which idealism brought with it. Nakedness is a powerful symbol for honesty. Dishonesty to protect ourselves from criticism was the first kind of character armour. And today, still, what keeps us in our various “closets” is the fear that aspects of our thinking, emotions or behaviour will be exposed to criticism. (Of course idealism would eventually cause us to become afraid of our erotic feelings and part of the process of repression that led to would be the literal wearing of clothes because idealism’s intolerance of our natural bodies and natural sexuality eventually made us ashamed of them.)

We can see in religions that they contain intertwining threads of the “Satanic” (the accusation of sin) and the “Godly” (love and forgiveness). This has been religions great flaw, the reason that it has failed to heal or liberate humanity. The disease has generally been a part of what was offered as a cure.

Read Part 16

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.