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.

Thoughts on the Male Feminist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trying Too Hard to Be Good Made Us Capable of Evil

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There are two forces at war in the human breast - love and idealism. 

Love is the impulse to accept. To accept ourself. To accept others. To accept the world as it is. To accept life as it is.

Idealism places limits on our acceptance of ourselves, others, the world and/or life as it is. Idealism is a bottle of poison labelled “medicine”. It advertises itself as the road to Heaven, but is really the road to Hell.

Love gives us the ability to cooperate. It gives us the ability to heal social divisions. It allows us to forgive. Love is the road to Heaven, but sometimes it is portrayed as the road to Hell. If we view life as a battle between Good and Evil, then to accept evil would appear to mean letting it win. But fighting against evil is what generates evil and always has. Accepting evil is what heals it. This is true of the evil within us as well as the evil of others. If we find a flaw in ourselves, it will grow only if we fixate on it, that is if we fight against it. And the evil behaviour of others is defensive. It arises from fear. The fear may not be of a threat to the body, but to the individual's ability to accept themselves. A guilty conscience is a major motivator of hostile behaviour. What all of us desire in our heart of hearts is to be accepted totally, so that we can give up our defensive battle. All of the atrocities which have been committed through the whole of human history have grown out of a lack of acceptance.

In the history of religion we can see the intertwining of these two elements. 

On the one hand, a religion is a repository of ideals, of high standards, and thus an eroder of self-acceptance. If we accept ourselves unconditionally, then we tend to be loving and cooperative naturally, because such behaviour makes us feel good. When we set high standards for ourselves and come to believe that anything less is unacceptable, we rob ourselves of the joy which would feed loving behaviour. If we beat ourselves up about being “sinful”, that will make us more “sinful”.

The unconditionally self-accepting individual - the individual who loves himself - has no resentment toward others. He has his bliss.

But those of us who strive to meet our ideals by an act of will unavoidably build up a well of resentment towards those how are not suffering as we are suffering.  We envy those who allow themselves to commit the “sins” we won’t allow ourselves to commit. And we resent the joyful existence of the innocent. The innocent also confront us with the falseness and misery of our own state.

From this arose the concept of the blood sacrifice. Unable to acknowledge that idealism itself was the source of all “sin”, religions often came to accept that resentment towards innocence needed some kind of outlet. Unable to see that what needed to die, if love were to rule the world, was idealism, they substituted the resented innocent. In some religions the sacrifice would be a lamb. In some a baby. In some a virgin woman.

Some interpretations of Christianity view Jesus the same way. They say that what frees the believer of sin is that the messenger was killed.

This isn’t just a religious thing. Men raping women or molesting children are acting on exactly the same impulse. Trying to find relief for the pain of their guilty conscience by inflicting suffering on those who are psychologically healthier and freer in spirit than themselves.

But the possibility of forgiveness and redemption and an admonition to love one another is also often present in religions. The problem is that this would always remain an unfulfilled potential until we came to realise that idealism and the idea that we need to strive through discipline to be better people, or that we need to insist that others do so, was the very thing which gave rise to our capacity for greed, murder, rape and domination.

A Free Society Can Only Grow From Psychologically Secure Individuals

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How often have you been in a situation where someone has said something which caused offence to someone else, and then that person criticised the first person, who responded defensively, and thus the fabric of the mini-community of which you were a part at that time was temporarily, or perhaps permanently, torn apart? Isn’t the world as a whole like that, with conflict all too easily arising and often becoming entrenched?

The root cause of this propensity for conflict is compromised self-acceptance. If our self-acceptance is dependent on the words or actions of others, then we are in a very insecure position. Were this not the case we could laugh off any insult, feeling no resonance between it and some internalised sense of self-contempt. But we do tend to internalise the negative feelings of others towards us, and by carrying around this toxic sludge, we make ourselves vulnerable and thus prone to falling into conflict with others. As long as we see the problem as an external one and fight for a change in the behaviour of others, we will be disempowered. But if we make a conscious decision to learn unconditional self-acceptance, we can “hurt-proof” ourselves, and thus make of ourselves a still centre for the growth of a healthy society.

I discuss the concept of hurt-proofing in more detail in this essay :

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/419005

If we don’t feel compelled by our own insecurity to react against the anti-social behaviour of others, then we can come to better understand how that anti-social behaviour is essentially defensive. Just as we were trying to protect our compromised self-acceptance, so is the person on the other side of the conflict. Our state of relative security will enable us to make no demands on others, and this can gradually drain away the defensive motivation for their anti-social behaviour.

There are two forces at war within the human psyche and the society to which it gives form. Let’s call them spirit and repression. The spirit is the outwardly motivating force of the individual. It has no morality. It can propel us toward generous acts or it can propel us towards violence. Repression consists of the forces of restraint imposed on the spirit, essentially by fear. To the extent that our conscience may restrain our behaviour it does so essentially through fear of incurring feelings of guilt. And we obey the laws of society, to the extent that they may contradict our personal desires, for fear of being ostracised or punished.

When in a state of freedom, enlightened self-interest leads us to loving cooperative interaction with others. To the extend that our behaviour deviates from this state of health, it does so because we lack the freedom which arises from unconditional self-acceptance. So, ironically, it is the force which would curb and control the spirit which, by restricting its freedom, drives it further into the tight corner that produces hostile behaviour.

When we try to curb the anti-social behaviour of others through criticism, we are trying to make their self-acceptance conditional on their behaving in the way we think they should. It is natural that, in our insecurity, we will attempt a control strategy of this kind, because we are simply externalising the strategy we use internally to keep our own anti-social behaviour repressed. But the net result will be a negative one. We may force good behaviour on someone, but only at the expense of engendering feelings of frustration which will come out in some other way. Sustainable good behaviour can only come from love and love can only come from unconditional self-acceptance.

To renounce control strategies in all situations where they are not unavoidable (as they sometimes are to restrain violent behaviour) requires being free in oneself.

From the perspective of the free individual, where does the problem lie and what can be done about it? There are anti-social feelings which must not be repressed and there is an insecurity at the heart of us all which responds poorly to criticism and may try to defend itself against such criticism through anti-social behaviour. Where insecurity is extreme, such criticism - or even implied criticism - may be experienced as a form of oppression so severe as to drive the individual towards extremely hostile forms of retaliation.

If we are to have a healthy culture it depends on two things :

1. Freedom to express our frustrations. If we have anti-social feelings we will never move beyond them by repressing them. We need a culture in which it is O.K. to be as “politically incorrect” as we want to be within the understanding that feelings are not fixed beliefs. Of course this may be hurtful to those about whom insulting things may be said, but that is why “hurt-proofing” is so important. The more sensitive we are to being hurt by what other people say, the more we will require a society based on repression, and thus the more insecure and incapable of freedom we will become in a dangerous negative feedback loop. This is something which has been happening recently with calls for universities to offer “trigger warnings” about works of literature which might be emotionally disturbing to insecure individuals.

2. When we are not blowing off steam in this way, but genuinely want to address ourselves to solving social problems, then an accepting non-reactive approach will often be the most effective. (Of course I’m not saying that we should be accepting of violent behaviour.) We need to avoid attempts to control others behaviour by shaming them or threatening them with ostracism. We need to accept that their anti-social tendencies arise from insecurity and that acceptance is the answer to that insecurity. What our “enemies” need most is love. If we really want to help someone then we need to recognise that they have legitimate needs and that their anti-social behaviour is simply an ineffective way of trying to meet those needs. In this way we can find our common ground.

The Pleasure of Love

Most of us have probably had times when we experienced intense pleasure in providing for the needs or desires of another. This can be a common feeling in the early stages of a romantic relationship, when nurturing one’s child or when caring for a pet. At other times, helping others can be a duty which requires discipline. This produces a sense or frustration because our action does not correspond with our basic desire. We may desire to go to a concert, but have to stay home with a sick child instead. If we experience this as a duty rather than a pleasure in itself, then we will feel frustration and resentment, no matter how much we may try to repress or transcend such feelings. Either we find an outlet for such frustration or it stands as a barrier to reconnecting with the feelings of pleasure which originally accompanied the act of caring for the other’s needs.

The experience of pleasure we feel in answering the needs or desires of another is what we mean when we say that we “feel love”.

Our primary motivation in life is to seek pleasure and avoid pain. And when we are born it takes a while to learn the difference between “me” and “not me”. This suggests that our original nature is one which desires pleasure not just for ourselves but for others.

Love is the path of commonality of pleasure. If the increase in total pleasure is our aim, then any pleasure we give ourselves which does not detract from another’s pleasure serves this process as does anything we can do to increase another’s pleasure or reduce their suffering as long as it does not reduce our own pleasure or cause us suffering. (If it does reduce our pleasure or cause us suffering, we will need some form of outlet to ease the frustration caused. This is often quite easily achieved, so it need not be a serious problem. And since the experiences of love mentioned above show that the giving of pleasure or easing of suffering can in itself give us pleasure, we can see that there is great potential for finding commonality in pleasure.

The key question then is what blocks this most natural experience of mutually shared and binding pleasure. Why do we make ourselves suffer? Why do we make others suffer?

Of course, suffering can arise from non-psychological factors - disease, age, natural disaster. But these forms of suffering can be significantly eased through mutual aid. A community bound by love will deal more effectively with such problems and thus the suffering of individuals in such a society will be less than they otherwise would be.

The big barriers to our experiencing the pleasure of love to the fullest, and thus realising our full potential to contribute to the wellbeing of others, are guilt and fear.

Guilt arises from “shoulds”. Let’s say, when you were a child, you wanted to watch your favourite television show, but your little brother asked you to help him with his maths homework. Your parents have told you that you should always help out your little brother. If you decide not to help him, but to watch your television show, then you will feel guilty. If you decide to help him out of a feeling of duty, then you will feel resentment about renouncing your pleasure for his need. Guilt is a problem in either case. It either forces you to do something you don’t want to do and thus breeds resentment, or it stays with you as a thief of pleasure if you go against it. Either way, it ends by making us more selfish. Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering individual, so when we feel guilt, our attention is directed towards ourselves and we become less available for others. And resentment also stands as a barrier between ourselves and others.

One of our most pernicious cultural concepts is that we shouldn’t be motivated by our own self-interest. It is inevitable that we will be motivated by our self-interest. But this is different from selfishness. Selfishness is that state in which our self-interest turns in on itself in a way which is unhealthy for us and for the wider system of which we are a part. When we become selfish we cease to successfully cater to our own self-interest. Take gluttony. If we over-eat we may feel that we are meeting our own self-interest, because we are doing what we want to do, but costs to our health and freedom are greater than any benefits. Ultimately, we will cause ourselves more pain than pleasure.

The same is true when we take pleasure at the expense of others. We are not serving our net self-interest. How many of us take say half-an-hours pleasure in an activity we then spend months or years worrying someone will find out about? Even someone in a position of power who thinks they can get away with taking pleasure at the expense of others will have to pay a price through the knowledge of the enmity they have spread for themselves. So often the pleasure at the expense of another is fleeting and the price perpetual.

Fear is also a barrier to love. Love is expansive. It reaches out to others. Fear causes us to retract.

What about Jesus statement that “greater love hath no man than that he give his life for his friends”? How does that fit with pleasure and self-interest? Reportedly suicide bombers, who falsely believe that they are giving their lives for the benefit of their community, experience a tremendous sense of joy before blowing themselves up. While this is clearly not serving the interests of others, even their own community, since such behaviour only serves to motivate retaliatory attacks, what matters is that they believe they are serving the interests of others and thus it seems fair to assume that others whose sacrifice is more appropriate feel similar pleasurable feelings. This seems a mystery to us, if we haven’t been in that situation. But it is similarly a mystery that saints reported feelings of intense bliss when they kissed lepers. If we haven’t experienced these situations, all we have to go on is the reports of those who have, and there are such reports which support the idea that even in the acceptance of self-annihilation there may be an intense experience of pleasure.

So lets forget about “shoulds” for moment. Lets accept that what we want is to maximise our sustainable pleasure. We need to recognise that, while personal cost-free pleasure is sometimes possible, the sustainability of our total pleasure rests with its mutuality. That mutuality rests on open, honest communication - so that we can see where we can get pleasure from helping each other - and also on non-destructive outlets for the feelings of resentment which result both from the pain inflicted on us by others and the frustration we inflict on ourselves through “shoulds”.

There is a tendency to view our aggressive or selfish impulses as the base from which we hope that ethics, morality or love may raise us. This is what I would call a control strategy. But I believe that the opposite is true. Love is the base. Unhelpful (and unrealistic) patterns of thinking act as a block to that deeper pattern. Rather than trying to impose further control, what we need to do is to find ways to dismantle the forms of control which already exist in us, and to set love free.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Group Identification Vs. Freedom

We are all individual human beings. Paradoxically, this is what unites us. Though our individual experiences are different, they are all human experiences and thus share many common features. We are capable of love but we are prone to fear. Sometimes we think that love and hate are the great opposites, but it is really fear which is the barrier to love, and hatred is just one of the masks which fear may wear.

When we feel truly safe, love is inescapable. It is our natural form of communication with others and the natural feeling we feel towards ourselves. To the extent that we put up barriers to loving communication, we do so because we are frightened. The barriers are protective. At least they are intended to be. Love is open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication. If we are afraid, we close off. If we tell lies it is because we are afraid of what might happen if someone knew the truth. If our manner is rigid and stereotypical it is because we are afraid to set sail on the open sea of unending possibility. And if we are selfish it is because we are holding on to what we fear we may lose.

Sometimes we think that fear is simply the conscious experience of feeling anxious, but that is only its passive form. Whenever we take actions which are defensive or aggressive we are motivated by a sense of threat. We may not feel afraid. When we feel consciously afraid it is because we doubt our ability to meet a perceived threat. Even in the extreme danger of battle, soldiers often feel no fear while they are actually fighting. It is in periods of inactivity that anxiety is most likely to strike.

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The protective barriers which interfere with communication between individuals can take the form of character armour – fixed defensive habits. Sometimes we adopt some form of armouring to meet a specific current threat. If you accidentally knock over a motorbike and then a big hairy biker comes up and asks you if you saw who did it, you might consider it wise to put up a barrier to honest communication and say “Fucked if I know." On the other hand, armouring can be habitual. Past experiences where we “put our foot in it" may leave us with a chronic underlying fear which prevents us from being open and spontaneous in what we say.

One common form of armouring is group identification. Loving communication is something we can only practice from the basis of our individuality. To communicate in this way we have to perceive ourselves as individuals first and members of groups second. The only group we all belong to is the human race. We may have a gender, a race, a nationality, a religious affiliation, a sexual orientation... While these things are not always clearcut, most of us identify to some extent with some of these groupings. Sometimes, usually if we feel under threat in some way, we may think of ourselves as a member of a group first and an individual second. This will be a barrier to communication. If I communicate with you as one individual human with another then we begin with our common ground, and from there the fact that I identify myself as an Australian heterosexual male in his fifties with left-wing tendencies, a pantheistic belief system, and a love of movies, gives us rich subject matter for our interaction. Our differences become a source of great creative possibility. But if a perceived threat makes me think of myself as an Australian first and an individual second, then my mode of interaction is dualistically split into the “Australian" and the “not Australian". This may not pose a problem if I am communicating with another Australian, but it will if I'm communicating with someone who is not. Our common ground is compromised.

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Let's look at some examples of how this can happen. It should be emphasised that, when a threat is genuine, group identification is a natural reaction and may be an necessary step along the road to a healthier mode of interaction. Let's look at the Black Pride and Gay Pride movements. The threat which led to the development of these forms of group identification were and are very real. Violence and discrimination against blacks and gays in various parts of the world have been extreme. People have been treated as if the colour of their skin or their sexuality were a cause for shame. And long term prejudice of this kind easily becomes internalised. People can come to think less of themselves because of the way they are treated and viewed by others. So the declaration of pride in the characteristic of which we have been told we should be ashamed is a crucial step forward. But it cannot be the end in itself. Our sexuality or the colour of our skin is not the real source of the pride. Sexuality and race are characteristics on which we cannot place a value. It isn't better to have one sexual orientation than another or to be one race rather than another. The source of pride is the way we as individuals have dealt with the challenges and threats placed in our path. If we are black or gay this may involve many cases of prejudice. But the healthy state towards which we are headed is one in which we are individuals first and everything else second. And, in the end, a state in which our self-acceptance is so unequivocal that the very question “Am I proud of myself?" becomes meaningless.

Religion is another area in which group identification can take precedence over the individual. We may view ourselves first as a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or an atheist and then as an individual. Or someone else may view us first as a member of one of these groups and only secondarily as an individual. Fear is the major factor in both cases. If we are insecure in our own beliefs then we will downgrade the doubting individual self and cling desperately to the group identification. And if someone has had bad experiences which prejudice them against our group then they may find it hard to see past our religious affiliation to the individual human who holds those beliefs. It is this insecurity which is the basis of religious intolerance and you can find it in many if not most religions and also amongst atheists. Insecurity about one's own belief system takes the form of an inability to agree to disagree. One finds minorities in Christianity and Islam whose fear won't allow them to enter into friendly communication with those of a different faith. Among atheists there are those who argue that even moderates of any faith should share the blame for things done by extremists because they are “enablers". I read a comment from one in which he said something along the lines of “Even a moderate Christian thinks you are going to Hell for your lack of faith." Now, leaving aside the fact that many modern Christians don't even believe in Hell, I ask myself “So what?" As long as I don't believe I'm going to Hell why should it worry me that someone else does? I would be most happy to be friends with such a person. I'm secure enough in my belief system that I'm sure we could agree to disagree on the whole Hell issue and still find much to talk about and productive things to do together.

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One of the starkest examples of group identification is what happens in time of war. When our country is attacked we close ranks and become nationalistic in our thinking.

If fear is the basis for both defensive and aggressive behaviour, it is worth asking ourselves what is the basis for safety. Sometimes defensive behaviour, either personal or military, can preserve our life against a present danger. But can it be the source of longterm safety or freedom? There is always a price to pay in both freedom and safety from defensive behaviour. Sometimes the benefits are greater than the price, sometimes not. On the personal level we can see that our armour cuts us off from a life of creative loving interaction with all of our fellows. In the case of international conflict, nations often end up sacrificing personal freedoms by instituting conscription or imposing censorship, and there can be great loss of life, international reputation, mental and physical health of surviving combatants, etc. Defensive behaviour may be necessary when a threat occurs, but if we really want to increase our safety and freedom then we have to look at preventative measures. The social health of our community is like the health of our body. What makes us healthy? Is it the medicine we take when we are sick? Or is it the healthy food and exercise which makes us get sick less often?

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Communication is the key to freedom, happiness, safety and creation. All of these things grow out of communication. Freedom is the ability to do the things we want to do and not have to do the things we don't. Without communication we can do very little. Most of the things which make us feel happy involve some form of communication. Sometimes it is one way communication, as when we enjoy watching something or listening to something. Sometimes it is communicating with others, which can range from a chat over a cup of tea to engaging in an orgy. A large part of safety is knowing about potential threats. A lack of communication can have dire results. A young man sits alone day after day, not wanting to have any communication with others, and then one day he takes a bunch of guns and heads to the local pre-school. If we had been able to find a way to get him to talk to us we might have found out what was going on in his head and averted a tragedy. And, on an international level, imagine what the Cold War would have been like if Russia and the United States shared a language and had the internet. People from each country would have been conversing with each other on a daily basis. Tension between the nations would have been greatly lessened and the governments of both nations would have been held more accountable by their citizens. People will always go easier on their government if they feel they need them as protection against the “Evil Empire" across the other side of the world. But when some of our best friends are “evil ones" the picture changes. Plus, international communication of this kind makes national censorship impossible. Finally, most of our greatest creative endeavours are cooperative projects which require lots of communication. Even a lone artist gets ideas from others.

We have the image of the brave soldier who fights for our freedom. This can be one side of the equation when we are faced with a current threat. He or she may be the medicine when we are sick. But if we want to make the world safe for freedom, there is something we all can do, and it also takes tremendous courage. It has always been fear which has held love in check. We loved completely before we learned to be afraid. Perhaps the hardest thing in the world is to stand alone and naked. To be defenceless. But beneath our armour we are all alone and naked. That is what unites us. All we need to do is to be that naked self and to say “Hello".

The Gift by Lone Justice (from their album Shelter) with images of primatologist Jane Goodall