A Big "What If?"

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What if there were a framework of understanding which could unite the perceptions of the mystic, the fundamentalist and the atheist into a single whole?

This is very much a “what if” experiment. Ride with it and see where it leads. For simplicity’s sake I’ll state speculations as if they were fact.

The universe is made up of energy. Matter is a structured form of that energy. Energy is eternal. It changes form, but it never ceases to exist. 

Energy is conscious, but it is a formless consciousness, lacking the kinds of limitation needed for the structured consciousness we call thought or sensation.

The universe is a place where structure arises from formless energy. The ways in which this happens may be mysterious to us, but our existence is evidence of just how complex and meaningful the products of that process can be. Apparently there are more connections in our brain than there are atoms in the universe. We’re pretty complex.

We are highly structured systems of energy which persist for an average of about seventy years. We have bodies which shape raw consciousness in a way we experience as physical sensations, ranging from pleasure to pain. And we have a brain which shapes raw consciousness into images and words.

The universe is a meaningful place. Complexity arises through relationship and meaning lies in relationship. The meaning of any part is defined by its relationship to the whole.

As individuals we sometimes identify with our separateness and sometimes with our connectedness to the whole. When we are in a loving relationship we identify more with the bond we share with the other person than we do with our seperate existence. Or an artist may think more of the meaning which is coming into the world through his art than he does of where his next meal is coming from.

We are not just our body. We are also meaning. We are not just the instrument, but also the music which plays on that instrument.

But we have a problem. To a significant degree we have become cut off from our source of meaning.

The creative principle of the universe is manifested by the emergence of more complex wholes from a meaningful relationship between less complex parts. This looks like the part selflessly surrendering to the needs of the whole.

We know that we are selfish, not selfless, so are we in a state of rebellion against the theme of the universe, against that which created us?

It is within the context of this question that religion arose.

Aware of our sinful, i.e. selfish, nature we could not look upon the face of God, i.e. acknowledge the theme of the universe which gave birth to us. We feared God and sought redemption through sacrifice and prayer.

To the degree that we were insecure, we needed the comfort provided by picturing a God with a human face.

ROME, ITALY - MARCH 12, 2016: The fresco God the Creator by unknown artist from end of 19. cent. in the church Chiesa di Nostra Signora del Sacro Cuore. Copyright: sedmak / 123RF Stock Photo

In the Old Testament there is an emphasis on laws. If selfishness were not to lead to the collapse of the society there needed to be laws. Such laws are a compromise. They don’t solve the underlying problem, and they are based on the prejudices prevalent in the society, hence the absence of such current day laws as : “Thou shalt not own slaves.”

The New Testament seeks to address the underlying problem of the need for redemption from the selfish state into a state in which we love our neighbour as our self. That is to end the separation of humans and God.

The Bible relates stories. Our state of insecurity determines our relationship to those stories. Just as our insecurity may require God to have a human face, so it may require the stories related in the Bible to be literally true.

What matters in a story is its meaning. We read fictional stories and respond to them as if they were real. Do we weep for Little Nell? Or do we weep for ourselves, because we know what loss is like? We fear Dracula, not because vampires are real, but because we fear death, or something worse than death.

The stories we read in the Bible are profoundly meaningful, because they are stories about what we fear and about what we crave most deeply. We fear that we may lose that which makes the suffering of life bearable, and we hope to find that which redeems us from our state of fear and trembling in the face of the absolute.

We could argue forever about whether or not a story is literally true. A fundamentalist will insist that Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. An atheist will insist that all of these things are impossible.

Meaning is to a story what the soul is to the body. If we get too caught up in the worldly - and whether or not something happened literally is a worldly question - then we can lose that which has a higher value. In meaning we find the transcendent. Through meaning we participate in the eternal.

Having separated ourselves from the worldly to find the meaning, we then come back to the world to make it real. What matters is not whether Jesus fed the hungry with seven loaves and a fish, but whether we ourselves feed the hungry.

KRAKOW, POLAND - DECEMBER 19, 2010; Christmas Eve for poor and homeless on the Central Market in Cracow. Every year the group Kosciuszko prepares the greatest eve in the open air in Poland. Copyright: praszkiewicz / 123RF Stock Photo

Selfishness is the knot that needs to be untied for us to feel at home in the universe that gave birth to us, for us to be re-united with God. Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the insecure or otherwise suffering individual. Hit your thumb with a hammer and you’ll have trouble thinking about anything else but your thumb. In the same way, our insecurity turns us inwards. It can be a negative feedback loop. We behave selfishly. We feel guilty about behaving selfishly. The pain of the guilt directs our attention even more strongly toward our self. This makes us even more selfish. Thus the knot tightens.

Assurances that God forgives our sins may ease the problem, but they are founded on faith rather than rational understanding.

If we try cultivating unconditional self-acceptance and find that it produces a better result than trying to force ourselves to be less selfish, or punishing ourselves, then we learn through our own direct experience what it means to find redemption.

The relationship between Hell and Heaven can be understood in the relationship between the body and meaning. 

The body makes suffering possible. Meaning makes that suffering bearable. Pleasure is experienced in the satisfaction of bodily needs or the easing of bodily suffering.  The psychological insecurity which comes from being cut off from meaning may interfere with our ability to feel satiated by the satisfaction of these needs.

What is bliss? It isn’t a thought, though it may accompany a thought. It isn’t a physical sensation, though it may accompany a physical sensation. Bliss is loss of self-consciousness. Bliss is when we are so enraptured by something that we forget ourselves.

If the universe is conscious energy, perhaps bliss is it’s default state. The limitation provided by a body and mind increases its ability to manifest meaning, but carries with it the price tag of suffering, something which can be increased or decreased depending on the thoughts that form in that mind. So, from bliss we come and to bliss we will go. And while we are alive, the secret to bliss is love, the meaningful connection that allows us to forget ourselves in a union like that from which we came. This may be love with another person or love of an activity.

So the concept of eternal life is one of identification. Do we identify with the body or ego, which are temporary, or with the process in which we participate? If our consciousness is that of the universe limited by a temporary form, then we are at least as much the eternal as we are the temporal.

Concepts of life after death often revolve around the idea of the persistence of the personalty into a post-death realm, either of punishment or reward. Like the focus on stories being literally true, this is an indication of how insecurity makes us cling to what we know. We fixate on that which we can’t fully accept, and so, not truly accepting our personality we can’t imagine leaving it behind.

So let’s cultivate unconditional self-acceptance and find out whether doing so blissfully realigns us with the creative principle of the universe.

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How Do We Reassure?

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Our central problem as a species is lack of faith.

This may seem like a strange thing to say given that many of our problems are so intensely wrapped up in religion. But is religious dogma a product of faith or lack of it? Of course it depends on which definition of faith you use. Faith can be defined as “belief in God or in the doctrines of religion.” In that sense, religion is faith. But the less specific, more essential, definition of faith is “confidence or trust in a person or thing.”

A dogma is not a belief system in which we have confidence and trust. In fact it is a belief system in which we lack confidence and trust to such a degree that we dare not expose it to the critique of reason.

It is the fear which characterises the absence of faith which drives us to cling to dogma.

Now I’m not suggesting that blind faith is a good idea. In the social sphere it might be dangerous to have faith that everyone is trustworthy. And to have faith that our problems will be solved without us lifting a finger is not going to be very practical.

But faith isn’t always conjured up out of thin air. We can inspire faith in each other through our behaviour. What we feel is still faith, but it is grounded in a modicum of evidence. Similarly, we have faith in the scientific method as a means of enquiry. Good results have given us reason to have confidence and trust in the process.

If fear is what causes us to lose faith in each other and in free thought and to cling to dogmas and to our embattled ego structures, then the big question is : “How do we bring a deep sense of reassurance to ourselves and each other and thus inspire the kind of faith which enables us to open up to truth, to freedom and to each other?”

The hardest knot to untie is that of fear-based religion. Just as it is difficult, if not impossible, to prove or disprove the existence of a god, so it is just as big a challenge to try to prove that that god or gods are not going to punish you if you think for yourself, act as you chose and embrace your fellows regardless of their behaviour.

What has got me thinking about this issue recently is the problem of Islamic refugees. On the one hand sympathy would lead us to want to provide refuge to anyone fleeing from a war torn country. On the other hand, if someone’s religious beliefs include the ideas the women must be subservient to men and that homosexuals cannot be tolerated, it becomes problematic to let large numbers of them into countries which have had to go through their own long struggle to establish the equality of the sexes and to let go of fear of homosexuality.

This kind of dogmatic fear-based belief system is clearly a blight on the human race, because it prevents us from being able to actually help each other with our problems.

Simply insisting that someone let go of their fear-based beliefs is clearly not going to work. This would be like tugging on a child’s security blanket. They will only hang on tighter.

What is fear of God?

Many of us believe that we may be punished by God if we do something we have been taught is wrong. In this sense, God appears to be operating as an externalisation of our conscience. We learn that certain things are right and other things are wrong. Internally, the punishment for breaching these principles is to feel guilty. Externally, as a child we may have been punished for misbehaviour by a parent.

It would be interesting to know if there is a strong correlation between the nature of our parents and our personal concept of God. It stands to reason that parents who believe that God will punish their children severely for misbehaviour are likely to feel motivated to punish those children severely preemptively on the basis of the belief that being hit with a stick as a child is preferable to being sent to Hell after death. Thus authoritarian religions no doubt operate as negative feedback loops.

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One thing I’m sure of. If the insides of our minds were exposed for all to see, the hold of dogmatic religion would end. We would all see how it fails to achieve what it claims to achieve. We would see that those who claim the greatest holiness are among the most depraved, because this is what fear-based repression does to us. And the young would lose all respect for their elders. Their respect would hopefully be replace by sympathy.

So how do we reassure?

“A ‘guru’ doesn’t necessarily teach at all. Some remain speechless for years, others communicate very cryptically. All reassure by example. They are people who have been into the forbidden areas and who have survived unscathed.” 

Keith Johnstone, Impro : Improvisation and the Theatre

I think we are all in a similar position to the depraved religious leaders. They are just deeper in the shit than the rest of us. It’s handy to imagine their situation in order to grow more comfortable with our own. What makes us most insecure is the suspicion that we are alone with our depravity. Realise that we are all, to a greater or lesser degree, in the same boat, and it is actually reassuring.

Recently I’ve been writing a bit about how political correctness seems to be getting out of control. I think this is a symptom of this dilemma. The more ashamed we feel of how hateful, scared and depraved we are the more we feel the need to take the pressure off by being hypercritical of others.

This is the end point of the development of the human condition. It began with the arrival of the idealism thought virus - the concept of good and evil. Idealism undermined out unconditional self-acceptance, our capacity for unselfish love. Loss of self-acceptance made us selfish and frustrated and aggressive. We developed all sorts of forms of self-restraint - law, ethics, religion. We developed channels for our aggression - sport, war, etc. And we found ways to transcend - art, music, etc. And we developed ways to heal - e.g. meditation and psychoanalysis.

To the degree that we practiced repression of the feelings of fear, hatred and depravity produced in us by our encounters with idealism (or other forms of criticism or rejection which undermined our sense of acceptance), they have accumulated.

The Christian and the Islamic religions both have the concept of a Judgement Day in which our true natures are revealed. One need not believe in the dogmas to see in this a perceptiveness about the larger situation. At some point, repression as a strategy was going to become ineffective. The more we battle with what we are containing within us the harder it is to deal with the external challenges of life. And since these religions are based around systems of morality and fear of judgement, it makes sense that they would give expression to such a fear through the concept of a day on which God would pronounce his judgement of us and bring punishment.

What needs to be remembered is that what concerns us is not our essential nature, but that part of us which is a product of exposure to idealism. If we are filled with hate, it is not because we were born that way, but because we have had our self-acceptance undermined. If we are depraved, it is because our loving nature has been warped by exposure to idealism and other forms of intolerance. These are thoughts and feelings only. Thoughts ask only to be thought. Feelings ask only to be felt. It is in accepting them - in thinking them - in feeling them - that we will be free of them. The truth about how we think and how we feel will set us free. And what makes this easier is that it is a universal experience. Some of us may be in the shit deeper than others, but we are all in it plenty deep, and that should be a source of great reassurance. This is where Johnstone’s concept about the ‘guru’ comes in. Anyone who calmly talks of this in a way which shows that it is something over which to rejoice, rather than something over which to despair or feel ashamed, helps others to emerge from the darkness into the light. 

The world is full of cultures of rejection and social control - from conservative religion to political correctness - but these can only lead towards disintegration. A counter-culture spreading a message of acceptance of ourselves and each other warts and all would be characterised so obviously by the joy, creativity and practicality that come from loving community that it could not be too long before it would have to be recognised as the realisation of the old religious dogma’s promise of paradise on earth.

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Why Do We Quarrel? : (The Example of the Religious Person and The Atheist)

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Sometimes something someone else says gets under our skin. We feel compelled to express our contrary view.

This is not a sign that we have confidence in our ideas. Quite the contrary. Confidence in an idea gives an individual the viewpoint which Jesus expressed in the parable of the mustard seed. A valid idea will bring forth a good harvest when it falls on fertile soil, so the best strategy is to spread it as widely as possible and waste no time on cursing the rocks who are immune to it or the barren soil incapable of giving it sustenance.

If we feel the need to enter into a quarrel it is because there is a threat to the security of our beliefs from within.

A person secure in their own religious faith may try to spread it, but will not feel the need to argue with members of other faiths or with atheists. However, for some, religion is a way of trying to maintain discipline over what is perceived as sinfulness. This is an insecure position, and in the extreme, if reason appears to threaten the structure of restraint, then reason itself must be denied and argued against. (Religion need not be like this. Some religious people do not feel at all threatened by the contrary views of others. And some of the great contributors to the progress of reason have been religious.)

Once again, when we come to atheists, there are some who are secure and some who are insecure. Reason has two main roles - 1. As a strategy for pursing understanding of ourselves and the world which gives us greater capacity to manage both. 2. As a defence against the irrational aspects of the human psyche. Emotions are not rational, and rational arguments have a limited ability to quell them.

If an atheist and a religious person are quarrelling, then each is also shadow boxing with his denied self.

If the denied self of the quarrelsome religious person is doubt in the reality of his system of belief or in its effectiveness to maintain his state of self-discipline, then what might the nature of the denied self of the quarrelsome atheist be?

Here are a couple of arguments made by atheists against religion :

1. It is irrational.

Someone using the discipline of reason to try to quell irrational feelings of fear or guilt, may see in the religious person an ally for such feelings, especially since attempting to inspire fear or guilt is a major strategy of the insecure religious individual.

2. It falsely claims moral superiority.

None of us are really morally superior, but it may be very important to our conditional self-acceptance to convince ourselves that we are. Deep down we know that it is a sham in ourselves and this is why we would rather attack what is, to us, the more obvious sham of another.

A religious individual may believe that an atheist is mad. An atheist may believe that the religious individual is mad. Believe me, as a person who has actually been clinically insane, you do no good arguing against insanity, because it is a defensive mechanism the purpose of which is to protect the individual from reality.

What lies at the heart of insecure individuals, be they atheistic or religious? Fear and guilt. Fear is sometimes useful to alert us to real dangers and motivate us to take action against them. But when the danger is not real, fear may paralyse us or drive us to counter-productive action. And guilt is useless. It pretends to be a corrective, but all it does is cause us pointless suffering and thus make us more selfish.

Unconditional self-acceptance is the solution to such feelings of guilt or fear. Freed of them, the believer can be a more appreciative servant of their God and the atheist can be immune to the compulsion to argue with the rocks who refuse his seed.

Oppressive Religion Among the Poor

Reading the following article about an atheist man who has been granted asylum in the United Kingdom because of the danger that he would be persecuted for his lack of religious belief if he returns to his native Afghanistan led to me thinking about how the cultures of many nations where the people are mostly poor and the living conditions harsh have developed in a way which is so socially oppressive :

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10569748/Atheist-Afghan-man-granted-asylum-in-UK-to-protect-him-from-religious-persecution.html

The first thing we have to take into account is that the evolution of culture is not linear. There is a chicken or egg element to it. At the heart of the evolution of destructive symptoms in the human system is always the negative feedback loop. So we need to look at what drives specific strategies and what negative effects they have without worrying too much about where it all started.

I don't know a great deal about the specifics of Afghani history and culture so I'm going to try to be very general. What I'm saying could also apply to other countries with other religions, such as a poor Catholic country in South America.

Most of the people who live in Afghanistan are very poor and their living environment is very harsh. One of the ways we humans have developed to bear our lives of quiet desperation is to hope for something better after we die. If our life on this earth is going to be overwhelming one of suffering, then way not just kill ourselves now? Because maybe this is a test we have to undergo to get a decent life after death. There is no factual evidence for such a belief, but it enables people to keep going and society to keep functioning.

Where there is poverty some people turn to crime. And the frustration of poverty can lead to political violence which, in turn, brings retaliatory violence in just one of many interlinking negative feedback loops.

The more desperation and resentment there is the more discipline is needed to hold society together. Religion, as well as holding out hope for something better beyond the grave, provides a structure of discipline for such a society. Where there is hope of reward if one obeys society's laws, there is also fear of punishment if one transgresses them. Many of these laws are about not compromising the religious coping strategy itself.

One element of this situation about which I won't go into much detail here, as I've dealt with it more generally in a number of other articles, is that of sexual repression. All hierarchical patriarchal societies have a fundamental fear of the anarchic power of the erotic. This fear preceded patriarchy and law-based religions, being a major contributory factor in their development. And the more discipline-based a religion becomes, generally the more sexually-repressive it becomes. If it is patriarchal then the emphasis is on denigrating and controlling female sexuality and homosexuality. There is also a focus on the difficulty for the male in restraining his sexuality (a struggle which is emblematic of the patriarchal society's struggle against its natural urges generally), and thus a tendency for some in such societies to excuse rape. (It should also be acknowledged that rape is itself a form of repression of the erotic, a revenge against the one who, usually unintentionally, disturbs the repressed individual's precarious equilibrium.)

Why is apostasy – abandonment of the faith of Islam – considered such a serious crime? Because so many Islamic people have no faith. What do we mean by "faith"? Faith is the kind of trust in something which lends confidence and minimises fear. Faith is not necessarily about believing in something for which there is no evidence. You may have faith in your ability to meet a challenge because you have met so many similar challenges in the past. The fact that you have done so is evidence of a kind, but this is still faith.

We can assess another person's faith by observing their behaviour. If someone makes a big song and dance about a belief this suggests that they are trying to convince themselves, that they are whistling in the dark.

A lot of religions have rituals. What are rituals? Sometimes they are ceremonies which provide the context for a shared and enriching ecstatic or cathartic experience which may be community-building and/or emotionally healing. But some religious rituals are more comparable to the rituals engaged in by those who suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder – strictly adhered to, often repetitive activities, the performance of which reduces anxiety.

When, through a negative feedback loop, a society's religious strategy becomes particularly oppressive – discipline leads to frustration leads to the need for more discipline leads to more frustration – it becomes a form of shared obsessive compulsive disorder.

Obsessive compulsive disorder is a pathological lack of faith. We may feel that a loved one will die if we don't obsessively tidy our home. Performing the ritual provides some temporary relief but only at the cost of increasing the anxiety when we are not tidying. By contrast, to have faith is to believe that, as long as we take due care of practicalities, things will turn out as well as they can. Faith is that which takes the pressure off.

So it can be seen that oppressive religion of this kind is defensive in its nature. It is both a response to fear and a generator of fear. It is cultural character armour. When criticised we tend to feel the need to cling to our character armour all the more tightly. No-one actually likes living an armoured existence. It's horrible. But we are only liable to come out of that armour when we feel reassured that it is safe to do so. And, in repressive religious societies, the weaker people's faith becomes, i.e. the more their religion becomes a desperate and insecure strategy rather than a belief capable of quelling fear and lending confidence, the more exposed they feel by those who may be walking around naked of such armouring. Such individuals are a constant reminder of their own state of sickness. This is why Jesus was crucified. This is why heretics were tortured to death by the Inquisition. And this is why this Afghani man is not safe in the home of his birth.

Who will bring to the people of Afghanistan the feeling of safety and reassurance which will allow them to come out of the oppressive religion closet?

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.