What Is The Conscience?

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Most of us have a tendency to feel the emotion we call "guilt" when our behaviour fails to conform to an internal vision of how we should behave. We call that internal vision our "conscience".

But what is the source of our conscience? Is it an instinct we are born with? Is it something we learn from others? Or is it the voice of a supernatural being speaking through us? There are many advocates of each of these theories.

What inspires me to try to make sense of the conscience is some debate on the discussion board at Jeremy Griffith's World Transformation Movement website. I'm banned from taking part in the discussion there. Dr. Anna Fitzgerald says : Our conscious self does feel criticism from our instincts, we call it our CONSCIENCE. Everyone knows that, and being shared by us all means it’s instinctive – which Griffith reiterated with Darwin’s affirmation that “the moral sense affords the highest distinction between man and the lower animals”.

This concept that the conscience is simply an instinctive program is one of the key problems I have with Jeremy Griffith's theory that our disturbed psychology is the result of a conflict between the conscious mind, and its need to experiment with self-management, and the dictatorial demands of such a gene-based moral programming.


It may be that everyone, with the possible exception of psychopaths, has a sense of right and wrong. But what is right or wrong differs from culture to culture and individual to individual. While the conscience may not be entirely learned, there is certainly a learned element in the way in which it manifests itself.


Let's see if we can learn something by trying to strip human existence back to its basics. What does it mean to be an organism? The key motive of the organism is self-preservation. It may be that the breeding instinct provides a self-preservation motive on the level of species which supersedes that of the individual, but most of the time our base-line objective is to stay alive, all other things being equal. I may be saying "all other things being equal" a lot, because the less basic motives for our behaviour can override the more basic. Our basic impulse may be one of self-preservation, but that doesn't mean that our mind, freed from the task of keeping us alive for a while, may not arrive at a bad idea which drives us to take our own life.

It is hard to argue with sensory experience. Pain and pleasure speak to us directly, free from the clouding of language and concept. All other things being equal, the first repels us and the latter attracts. Once again, less basic factors can interfere with this. We can arrive at a psychological state in which we shrink from some pleasures and glory in something painful. But that isn't where we start.

So our most basic intentions would be to stay alive, to avoid pain and to experience pleasure.

But we are born into a social context in which we are cared for. If we are one of the lucky ones, we are born into a context in which we are loved. But even the most harshly treated are looked after sufficiently to be kept alive.

Clearly there is an instinct for love. A mother abandoning her baby because its care imposes more suffering than pleasure on her is the exception rather than the rule. And, once again, if we wish to understand such exceptions we need to look to factors which interfere with the natural - e.g. drug addiction or mental illness.

What feels best to us as infants? To have our needs met within a harmonious social context in which there is plenty of affectionate touching and verbal communication.

Our myths  have their grounding in our experience. If we experienced a loving infancy, then it is the basis for our concept of Paradise. All-giving mother Goddesses and stern but loving father Gods also are concepts which carry into adult life the infant memory.

So an instinct for love provides parents with the motive to care for their child, and no doubt shapes the way the child bonds with them. I have said that love can be defined as open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication. It almost doesn't need saying that this is the mode of communication of an individual who is operating in a healthy, unwarped manner. It is not hard to understand how the processes of learning and becoming a social being will be impeded if a child is closed off, a liar, habit-bound or greedy.

All other things being equal, we don't want to abandon paradise. Sometimes we can see directly when we have breached the laws of this paradise. It requires a harmonious social context so, if we upset someone, then we may reasonably feel we have breached those laws. We want to be accepted. To be accepted by those around is to remain in paradise. Parents and teachers may also teach us the rules we must seek to follow if we want to remain there. What makes it difficult is that we can't please everybody. There are times when we are damned by someone if we do and damned by someone else if we don't.

So, I think, there is an instinctive element to the conscience - the instinct for love provides the crucible in which it takes form. But that form is socially determined.

The conscience is that part of our ego - our conscious thinking self - in which we store our expectations about ourselves, those expectations very often being an internalisation of the expectations of others. This is to the extent that the conscience is conscious. It is also possible that some of our expectations are repressed to the level of the subconscious by the fact that they are so painful to look at. But I would contend that they have sunk down from our mind rather than risen from some genetic substrate.

Even if we assume that the reluctance to do something we perceive to be harmful were genetically-based, the intellect is often required to tell us what is harmful. We can't feel guilty about our carbon footprint unless the intellect has worked out how global warming works.

Is there a battle with the conscience going on within the conscious mind? Absolutely.

What I call "the human neurosis" is the divided state of the ego. Paradise lay in being accepted and being able to accept ourselves. To not be accepted, in some way, by others, can inflict a wound upon the ego, and the ego will become focused on a counter argument as to why it is acceptable, or not to blame for what has led to the rejection. But even more painful is the sense of self-betrayal, when we find ourselves unable to avoid breaching the rules and so we split into a fiery accuser with the pointing finger - "you fucked it up for yourself" - and the cringing supplicant - "I couldn't help it!" In either case response to the critical voice can go either way - contrite depression or defiant anger.

What is the nature of malevolence? Why are we capable of inflicting cruelty for its own sake? I believe malevolence is conscience-driven behaviour. If our self-acceptance is undermined to too great a degree, we can end up feeling totally backed into a corner, our conscience making demands of us which we no longer have the generosity of spirit to fulfil. The more self-accepting we feel - the more relaxed and carefree within ourselves - the more enthusiasm we have for generosity. But current suffering tightens us up. Think of some time when you were suffering greatly and somebody asked something of you. Did it not make you angry that they would ask for something when you had nothing to give? The darkest place we can go is that corner where we hate the dictatorship of our conscience so much - for having eaten away all the love we have and still be wanting more - that we have to have revenge - we have to try to stab it to death by doing the one thing which it says would be the worst thing we could do.

If our conscience were in our genes it would always oppress us. Our ego and our society are adaptable, they are capable of adjusting to new knowledge. Genes can't forgive, and healing lies in the power to forgive. It is the intellect which has the power to make sense of our dilemma and find the way home. 

When the conscience's criticism causes a level of insecurity which drives further breaches of its dictates, the negative feedback loop which results spreads a social poison far beyond the individual. If we can find an easily replicable way of untying this knot, the world will be swept with an enthusiasm for solving all other problems. 

The Christian religion talks about redemption. Our sins are forgiven and we are instructed to go and sin no more. If following the conscience is an act of will, we will always tire. We need to return to our awareness of how it worked in our first paradise. The joy of accepting and being accepted was the source of our enthusiasm. Our mistakes needed to be both learned from and forgiven. Where things went wrong was when we stopped being able to forgive ourselves and thus became split into prosecution and defence in our own internal trial.

In the scheme of things, those trials are trivialities. We are looking to the past and concentrating on our "sins", giving them primary importance. What really matters is what we want and how we can get it. If we want a world in which we thrive together, then we need to concentrate on finding ways to untie the knots that impede the flow of loving communication between us, and the malfunctioning conscience is the king of such knots.

The Psychological Function of Hell

Devils and seducers-Picture is from the Vision of hell by Dante Alighieri, popular edition, published in 1892, London-England. Illustration by Gustave Dore
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It can be useful to compare belief systems to home appliances and our mind to an electrical socket. As long as an appliance has a plug which will fit in the wall-socket it can draw power, regardless of whether it is an appliance which is in good running order and does something useful or a faulty appliance which shoots out sparks which cause the house to catch on fire and burn down. We will often come to believe something which conforms to some psychological need, regardless of whether it functions well to meet that need over the long term. It may be a false satisfier. When this is the case, trying to argue against the belief based on evidence can be futile. What is needed is less to understand the belief system as to understand the nature of the need which causes us to be attached to it. We want to understand the nature of the socket if we are going to find a better appliance to plug into it.

Reading religious texts has led me to contemplate the concept of Hell. Some texts spend a lot of time talking about who will go to Hell and graphically describing it’s torments.

Jordan Peterson, in his series of lectures on the psychological significance of the Bible stories, argues that religion has to be more than “the opiate of the masses,” because, if you just wanted something to make you feel good, you wouldn’t have the concept of Hell. 

There are strengths and weaknesses to this argument. Some see religion as a tool for controlling “the masses.” In this context perhaps the opium comparison fits. A drug dealer has the addict wrapped around his little finger. How? Because if the addict doesn’t get his dose, he suffers withdrawal symptoms. His heaven becomes a hell. Either way, it works as a pacifier. The addict is either too wasted or too sick to stand up for himself.

However, I agree with Peterson that religion is too complex and meaningful a phenomena to be dismissed in this way.

I agree with him that we can look on the concepts of Heaven and Hell as representing states of being in the world. If we go down the wrong path our life can certainly become a hell. Take a happily married man with children. One day he is tempted to have an affair. From that point on his life becomes dominated by the fear of being found out. When he is, his family breaks up and he sees his children growing bitter. He knows that his simple mistake may have negative consequences into future generations, when he had hoped he would be the rock on which his children would get their best start in life. That’s a common form of hell. For someone else it might be ending up in jail.

I experienced my own hell while in hospital for a breakdown - a time when my mental suffering was so great I begged for death. The mistakes I made that took me to that point were mistakes in thinking. It wasn’t a departure from moral behaviour, as far as I’m aware. And my aim in my writing has been to try to help others to avoid ending up where I did.

Peterson’s focus has been on how the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and Soviet Gulags occurred. What is it in us that makes us capable of turning our world into Hell? From this perspective, the religious texts make some sense. If such events occur because of the collective effect of individuals abandoning moral responsibility and honesty in their own lives, then it is not beyond the bounds of probability that we could make real the horrors of the Book of Revelations. We really could all go to Hell.

The problem is that the idea of Hell, as it occurs in religion, is often not functional. Sure there are real hells and potential hells, but does the concept that we might have our flesh burned off endlessly for eternity inspire in us the kind of behaviour which will prevent us from bringing them upon us?

If we take this idea literally, what kind of cosmic order does it speak of? If we lived in a state where order was maintained by the threat of torture, we would rightly consider it the most oppressive of dictatorships. And in such a state, it would be hard to achieve anything positive. Living in permanent fear doesn’t bring the best out of people. Imagine if someone pointed a gun at your head and told you to assemble a piece of Ikea furniture, telling you that if you didn’t have it successfully assembled in half an hour they would blow your brains out.

And belief in Hell is not a defence against becoming a participant in the kinds of atrocities seen in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. People who professed a belief in Hell have been known to burn people alive or crucify them. Hell could easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So how might this idea have developed and what is the need which it satisfies, albeit in a pathological way?

First, lets look at another psychological phenomena which fits a similar pattern - the mental illness known as obsessive compulsive disorder. This is an anxiety disorder in which a link forms between an anxiety and a ritual. A person may be obsessed about the possibility of catching a deadly disease and feel that, in order to protect themselves, they have to keep washing their hands with fresh bars of soap, perhaps unwrapping and disposing of the paper wrapper around the soap while wearing rubber gloves. Or someone may feel that, if they don’t line all of the books on their bookshelves exactly straight, one of their children will die. This is a form of what David A. Kessler, M.D. calls “capture”. [Capture : Unravelling the Mystery of Mental Suffering, 2016]. The mind has a tendency to come back to anxious thoughts - in a field of neutral information, such thoughts have a charge of significance - and so the neural pathways to those thoughts become more well-developed. If there is something which soothes that anxiety then the mind will get into the habit of associating the anxiety to that which soothes it, and so what starts as the equivalent of a dirt track becomes a superhighway circling endless around between the anxiety and the soothing ritual. This individual condition gives an idea of the socket into which the religious belief appliance can be plugged.

If we want to see how the religious conception of Hell originated we need to go back to another religious story, that of Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. This is a symbolic way of acknowledging the birth of idealism. Idealism, in this context, means the idea that we should set a standard for our behaviour and try to maintain that standard through self-discipline and group discipline. This is the beginning of criticism. This is fine except that it gradually leads to an undermining of self-acceptance. Thus we come to resent some of the criticism. Eventually it lead to feelings of guilt, which turned our attention back towards ourselves making us more selfish and ego-embattled. It generates anger. So the story of humanity can be understood as a conflict between idealism and the wounded ego. This expresses itself as a battle between discipline and defiance, which at base is defiance of criticism.

For society to hold together we need to maintain discipline. This is what we mean by civilisation - it is our defiance we are attempting to civilise. But self-acceptance is always being eroded and the defiant impulse becomes increasingly strong.

We know that we need to restrain our defiance of moral principles so that the society on which we all depend can be maintained, but the more the pressure builds the harder that is.

I think this is where a concept such as Hell may have become perversely attractive. Normally we would think that beliefs motivate behaviour, but I think that, sometimes, behaviour can motivate a belief. You know that maintaining your discipline is important. You don’t want to suffer the individual consequences of misbehaviour. And you recognise that society is dependent on such discipline. But that is a rational motive, and what you are trying to restrain are some pretty powerful emotions or drives. Now what if someone told you that people who broke the law would suffer after they died? You might actually welcome that idea, because it might be just what you need to motivate you to maintain your discipline.

Unfortunately, this is liable to be a negative feedback loop. It helps to motivate restraint, but it doesn’t solve the problem of the erosion of self-acceptance which is driving the defiance which needs to be restrained. Thus, in order to be effective, the stories about how terrible Hell is have to get worse. And the worse they get, the more we are captured by them. And, of course, as with the person with obsessive compulsive disorder, reassuring rituals become locked in by this capture.

When we see people who place a high importance on the threat of brimstone and hellfire we can see that they are people who are having a hard battle restraining their appetites, or they are people who are cynically manipulating such people.

If we learn to cultivate unconditional self-acceptance we can heal the spirit of defiance at its source, live according to the necessary moral principles without internal struggle and discover our spiritual relationship to the universe and our fellows. Thus can we leave Hell behind us and know Heaven.

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Why Do We Have a Dark Side?

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What produces the dark side of we humans?

Some think that we are instinctively competitive and that the roots of our dark side can be found in our underlying animal tendency to form a dominance hierarchy.

We are biological entities with biological needs. It makes sense that a shortage of something we need might lead to conflict in the absence of a very strong cultural structure to restrain that tendency. If there is a shortage of food we might fight over what is available because our desire to remain alive overrides any disinclination to deprive others.

Among other animals there is often a breeding imperative which leads to competition for a mate. Does this apply on a biological level for humans? That’s hard to say. As intelligent beings with imagination we don’t have to follow our instincts. If we don’t listen to what our instincts would tell us about what food is healthy to eat, why would we think that we listen to our instincts when it comes to striving to win the most biologically healthy mate we come in contact with? Of course we often do put a great deal of effort into winning a particular kind of mate, but is it for biological reasons or psychological reasons? A millionaire’s trophy wife will win him the envy of his peers, but she may not necessarily be the best breeding prospect.

One of the factors which has given us the power to dominate the global environment as a species is our ability to cooperate and to override our instincts with the use of our intelligence and imagination. When faced with a food crisis, I imagine that chimpanzees don’t have much option but to fight it out. We humans can come up with a strategy for rationing the food and setting off in search of a new home where food is more plentiful.

We are less likely to compete for biological reasons than other animals, and yet, as a species, we have been far more brutally destructive for reasons which are not immediately obvious.

We follow the pleasure principle and the pleasure principle, in the absence of the kinds of dominating biological factors which lead to conflict amongst other animals, fosters love. The most pleasant form of life for us is to live in a close community, easing the burdens of life through cooperative strategies and sharing the sensual pleasure that comes through affectionate interaction of all kinds.

So what is the darkness that plagues us, standing in the way of such a blissful existence?

Psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich points out that the stifling of natural drives channels that energy into malignant symptoms. Our instincts are to love, to engage in productive activity, to learn, and to enjoy an erotic relationship with another individual. Hatred is generated by the frustration of the instinct to love. This can be the self-hatred characterised by depression and other forms of mental illness or hatred felt towards others.

But it is not simple barriers which impede the loving instinct in this way. We can see plenty of evidence that love is able to stand firm in the face of the obstacles life throws at it. It is when the loving instinct is frustrated at it’s very base that it gives rise to toxic secondary drives.

Love is a form of communication characterised by openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity. Only if we are capable of being open, honest, spontaneous and generous in our relationship with our own self can we interact lovingly with others. Any lack of honesty with self will compromise our honesty with others. When we fear aspects of our self this compromises our capacity for spontaneity. We don’t trust ourselves to be spontaneous. And if we are not generous towards our self, then we won’t be able to be generous toward others without resenting the fact that we are treating them better than we treat our self. The ability to love our self is central to the ability to love anyone else.

So what threatens our ability to love our self? To love our self is to accept our self. Why would we fail to accept our self? What makes us feel that we are not worthy of acceptance?

From The Function of the Orgasm by Wilhelm Reich

I think the answer is idealism. It’s necessary for us to have some kind of system of thought to guide our behaviour. We need to understand that some forms of behaviour will lead to bad results for us, either directly or because they lead to bad results for others, which will be disadvantageous to us as well. But it is possible for such a system to be so strict or so harshly imposed that it comes to oppress us. It is one thing to be guided by a gentle hand and it is another to be kicked and shoved and berated by the one who would direct our behaviour. There are times when doing what is right is intrinsically very difficult. The question is whether our guidance system helps to foster courage or leaves us weak by undermining our capacity to feel good about ourselves at all. If idealistic expectations, either personal or from peers, are too strict, they will tend to engender in us increasing levels of resentment towards them. This resentment will then spill over into our behaviour towards others, and, in the extreme, can manifest as a drive to inflict suffering or death upon the innocent and defenceless.

How does this work? Well, if you feel oppressed by the demand that you be good, if you experience this demand as something which gradually erodes the self-acceptance which is, metaphorically speaking, the floor of the house in which you live, so that you just get angrier and angrier as you are backed further and further into the only remaining corner, the one thing which might give you some temporary relief is to rebel against that demand, to respond to its demand that you do the best thing by deliberately doing the very worst thing.

How did I come to this conclusion? I looked into myself, into the heart of my own darkness. I remember once seeing footage of a group of men attacking a pod of dolphins with machetes. They hacked and hacked and hacked and the bay was filled with blood. Everyone was saying : “How horrible! What monsters those men are!” I was thinking : “Hacking dolphins to death might provide a kind of relief.” This was at a time when I was prone to depression. When we are depressed we don’t love ourselves and we don’t get any consolation from the love of others. It’s almost worse to be loved when we feel we don’t deserve it. Either the other person is a fool for not realising how unworthy of love we are, or we are a fraud for not disabusing them.

I could have identified with the dolphins. Many, including many depressed people, probably would. I don’t know why I’ve always had a tendency to identify with victimisers rather than victims when confronted with these kinds of scenarios. But this tendency has an advantage for someone who wants to understand human problems. If our imagination tends to take us into the position of a victim then we may have the basis for extrapolating what is going on in their mind when they are being victimised. But if we want to understand why it is happening we have to understand what is going on in the mind of the victimiser.

I don’t think that this impulse toward defiance of the good is the only reason for the victimisation of the innocent. Another element is the resentment of the unlovable for the loved. The individual whose self-acceptance has been eaten away until they are backed into that final corner, cut off from all capacity for joy, hounded by condemnation on all sides, unable to defend themselves because their behaviour has been genuinely destructive, is the rejected of the world. How are they going to feel when people talk about how much they love the cute dolphins? What about when they see the devoted mothers dropping their children off to the pre-school? Isn’t that the darkest point to which a human can sink? The point at which a young man may take a bunch of guns to that pre-school.

We can say that the school shooter, the terrorist, the child molester, is a individual starved of love. So what are we to do? We have barely enough love for ourselves and those closest to us. We can’t go throwing our precious love into the black hole at the heart of the sociopath. It wouldn’t do any good if we did.

So what can we do about the problem of evil?

If we understand the roots of the problem in the tendency of idealistic demands to undermine self-acceptance, then we can develop a culture of unconditional self-acceptance in our own lives. If such a culture really does foster love, courage, creativity and an enhanced capacity for problem solving, then it will spread quickly. Eventually it will spread even into humanity’s heart of darkness, bringing the redemption which is urgently needed to free us from our capacity for evil.

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The Vultures and The Lightning

“For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Where there is a carcass, there the vultures will gather”. Matthew 24:27-8

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Are we vultures? And, if so, what are the carcasses around which we gather?

So much of our behaviour is an expression of our insecurity about our own worth - a desperate quest for reassurance or to prove ourselves.

Let’s take religion. When we were at school we were taught that 2 + 2 = 4. We were shown evidence that it was true. We retain that knowledge and use it, but we don’t have to be reminded on a regular basis that it is true. The knowledge is secure with us and we are free to only call it to mind when we need it. But if we believe in God and we go to church on a Sunday and are told God loves us, do we believe it? Can we be shown evidence? Is it knowledge that is secure with us? If it were we would not have to keep going to church every Sunday to be told the same thing. Where we don’t trust that something is true, we may feel the need for it to be repeated to us on a regular basis.

Now we may not believe in God, but still we doubt our own worth. We become depressed or we try to prove that we are worthy by the the clothes we wear, the car we drive, our score at golf or the fact that we give money to the needy or fight against injustice. But this world of the ego trying to prove itself is a dead world. It’s a carcass. Not because there is anything wrong with pretty clothes or playing golf or helping people, but because it doesn’t fill the underlying need.

Love is life. Our insecurity is our inability to love ourselves. If we could love ourselves we wouldn’t need to be told every week that God loves us. We wouldn’t have anything to prove.

There is a famous Chinese proverb : “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.”

If we are unable to love ourselves then we are like that hungry man who doesn’t know how to fish. We are dependent on other people (or other things) to feed our hunger. And, unable to take care of ourselves, we may be easily led by those who throw us the occasional fish.

While there is a famous story of Jesus feeding the multitude with two fish, I think his main aim was not to feed us but to teach us to fish - to liberate us from our insecurity about our worth, and thus to unleash in us the life-giving love that motivated him. The church that grew up in his name - providing reassurances of our worth which need to be endlessly repeated - is just a fish market.

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This is why he gives the above prophecy about a time when we will achieve that liberation. He presents it as a decentralised process. Something which is visible across the whole world - from the east to the west. It won’t be a case of people gathering around some leader. It is only around the carcasses - the dead ideas and those who purvey them - that the vultures flock.

For me, none of this is supernatural, even if Jesus had a tendency to use poetic language which conjures up fairy story images.

At some point in our history we arrived at the concept of idealism. We divided forms of behaviour into good and evil and sought by self-discipline and social pressure to foster the former and restrain the latter. In so doing we unwittingly undermined our unconditional self-acceptance, and thus our capacity for love of others. To the extent that ideal standards became oppressive to us as our capacity to love ourselves and thus be generous to others was eroded, we felt compelled to retaliate against them, sometimes being driven to acts of extreme cruelty. The more we suffered from feelings of guilt the more selfish we became (selfishness being the natural self-directedness of the suffering or embattled individual) and the more selfish we became the more guilty we felt and the more guilty we felt  the more selfish we became. It was a negative feedback loop.

Central to Jesus’ philosophy was “judge not that thou be not judged”. This is a call to self-acceptance. When he says we are not to judge, he doesn’t say that we are to exclude ourselves from this attitude of non-judgement. It is we, not God, who are holding ourselves unworthy. If God is love and love is held back in us by our lack of self-acceptance, our tendency to feel ourselves to be unworthy, then the greatest good is achieved by giving up striving to be good and holding ourselves accountable when we fail.

So how could this dramatic liberation of humanity (“the coming of the Son of Man”) take place? We arrived at this point via the accumulated damage inflicted by a negative feedback loop that began before the dawn of civilisation. The fact that we have lived with it so long without it destroying us shows just what a powerful and resilient force love is in us. Replace the negative feedback loop with a positive feedback loop, which works with what is strongest in us - our underlying capacity for love - rather than against it, and the kind of wall-to-wall awakening of humanity from the nightmare of history symbolised in Jesus’ prophecy doesn’t seem so inconceivable. At the moment the world seems very polarised, but we are driven to our angry condemnation of others by our desperate need to distract ourselves from our own self-critical voice. We will find that the more we come to accept ourselves, the more accepting we will become of others, and in time even the bitterest and bloodiest of conflicts will cease as it becomes clear that there is nothing to gain by shutting oneself out of paradise.

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BOOK REVIEW : The Varieties of Religious Experience : A Study in Human Nature by William James

Religion is a contentious topic. It is normal that each of us should look on our own form of belief or lack there of as truthful and the other options as various forms of eccentricity. So I feel that the best way to start a review of a classic book which surveys the field of varying forms of religious experience, is to give an overview of my views on the topic so that my own bias can be accounted for.

I identify as a pantheist. Wikipedia gives this definition : “Pantheism is the belief that the Universe (or nature as the totality of everything) is identical with divinity, or that everything composes an all-encompassing, immanent god.” So perhaps it is not surprising that I view the world’s religions (and also atheism) as deviations from an original state of pantheism.

To me, God is a mythological figure representing the creative principle of the universe in the same kind of way that Mother Nature is a mythological figure representing the natural ecosystem and Father Time is a mythological figure representing time. That there is a creative principle at work in the universe is self-evident. Once there was nothing on earth but inorganic matter, now there are complex living systems of which we ourselves are one of the most complex and capable manifestations. Thus creation takes place in the universe by the medium of the laws of nature. If we term this “an act of God” then we are talking not of an extrinsic God (a human-like creator sitting outside of “his” creation forming it though conscious decisions) but of an intrinsic self-creating “God” the face of which is the laws which favour such complexity when circumstances allow.

This creative principle is not just expressed by our form, but we give conscious or unconscious expression to it when we create or when we cooperate with others in creative ways. The creative principle at work in ourselves is what we call “love”. Love is a form of communication characterised by openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity. It is through this process that we become more than our individual selves. We become part of a whole which is more than the sum of its parts.

I believe that there was a time when our ape-like ancestors (maybe Ardipithecus over 4 million years ago) lived every moment of their existence within the experience of being life itself in all its creativity. They knew they were what we would later come to label “God”. The individual ego of each male or female being an essential tool for exploration and self-management but existing always within the context of loving communion with the other members of the group.

So what went wrong? Our questing minds arrived at the concepts of “good” and “evil” and from there we developed morality. “Evil” may initially have been something outside of ourselves, e.g. the predatory behaviour of some animals. But once we had “knowledge of good and evil” it opened us up to the social phenomenon of criticism of behaviour and thus a system of morality based on the discouragement of some forms of behaviour and encouragement of others. Initially, in such a loving community this would have caused little disruption, but it was a slow poison. We would come, by an act of will, to try to avoid certain forms of behaviour and pursue others. What started as an external social phenomenon would eventually have become internalised when we began to second-guess what behaviour might lead to criticism and thus developed our conscience, i.e. a part of our ego in which we store our expectations about ourselves.

To be secure in our life as “God” we need to practice unconditional self-acceptance. Otherwise we become internally split between the acceptable and the unacceptable. Morality and the conscience would increasingly have led us to practice repression and also experience guilt. It gave us a dark side to battle with and to feel ashamed of.

Of course all of this is symbolically represented in the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge and being expelled from the Garden of Eden. 

The more we experienced feelings of guilt or felt the need to battle against repressed anti-social tendencies within us the more selfish we became. Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering individual. But selfishness was something of which our morality was critical. Thus we became caught in a negative feedback loop - guilt about being selfish made us feel more guilty which made us more selfish.

It was this state of alienation from the creative principle of the universe which gave birth to our various conceptions of God. (I’ll stick to the mono-theistic variety here. The varied gods in polytheistic religions seem to represent different elements of nature and/or human qualities, and thus provide a somewhat different function.)

Personifying the creative principle as “God” was a way to provide focus to our condition. Our relationship to this principle had become difficult, and it is easier to deal with a difficult relationship with a human-like being than with an impersonal principle. Again, this is the reason we came up with the concept of “Mother Nature”. The earliest personification of the creative principle probably was female. A Goddess who gave birth to us, but might also be critical of us. Later, as society became patriarchal, this would have been supplanted by “God the Father”.

This psychological state of disturbance is what gave rise to our capacity for superstitious belief. There is a general belief that superstition is the expected state of the non-scientifically informed individual. But why should there be any relationship between not knowing how things work and belief in things of which we have no sensory evidence? To a person in a state of psychological integrity, a volcano would not be an angry being who needs to be appeased. Only a person with a guilty conscience would interpret it’s eruption as some form of punishment rather than a random natural act. And we could not people the dark night with ghosts and demons unless we had parts of our own psyche from which we had become alienated and which were thus a source of fear that we could project into our environment. Sure we would believe that the earth was flat and would not know why the sun and moon appeared and disappeared, but we would have no reason to believe in a supernatural God who was invisible to us.

As very young children we have a tremendous capacity for learning about our environment and, like little scientists, we will carry out experiments to see what will happen if we do this or that or how our parents will respond to this or that behaviour. This shows how reason is more basic to our nature than superstition, which may come as a later addition once the psyche is fractured. The fact that we can learn so efficiently in early childhood, picking up language very quickly for instance, is because our psyche, not yet undermined by the conflict between the conscience and the selfish desires, has an degree of integrity it will never again have.

I can take a further example from my own life. I’ve experienced a couple of severe mental breakdowns. They were the result of a double-bind, a “damned if you do/damned if you don’t”, emotional knot. I was in a state of mind which seemed to me unbearable. At that time I developed psychotic delusions about some form of “magical rescue” from my situation. I had previously been rational. Later I would be rational. This magical thinking was not a product of ignorance, but of the desperation of my current situation. I think magical religious thinking is the same. Not an essential product of ignorance, though ignorance may accompany it, but of psychological desperation. If our psychological state is such that our life would be intolerable without believing in magic then we will believe in magic. And no amount of appeals to reason will dissuade us from such belief as long as that state of desperation persists. In fact the threat posed to our ego structure by such arguments is liable to increase the need for the belief and thus serve only to reinforce it.

The concept of a judgemental God of which we are fearful is, of course, a projection. The sense of being judged was internal, arising from our conscience. In our insecurity we might look at the evidence of creativity in nature around us and recognise that it comes about through cooperation rather than selfishness (competitiveness playing a role only as a subset within natural systems which require cooperation for their stability), and this could add to that sense of insecurity and self-condemnation, but the creative principle doesn’t actually judge us. It isn’t capable of doing so as it is a natural principle not a human-like consciousness. We can gain great advantage by working with this principle, and bring suffering on ourselves by working against it. There is nothing personal though. The concept of a judgemental God who needs to be appeased is our paranoia arising from this insecure state of embattlement.

In our embattled state we would tend to create our God in our own image. If you “hate fags” your “God hates fags”.

To the pantheist, the universe is the most magnificent of cathedrals, but to those who have become alienated, exiled from their home in that reality, there may be a need to create their own magnificent cathedrals or mosques and ceremonies full of pomp and circumstance so that they can feel a part of something big and wonderful, but it is always a pale shadow of what they have lost. This is similar to the way that material wealth becomes more important to us as “evidence of our worth” the further we become removed from our capacity for loving relationships with others.

Chester Cathedral

When a child is born they are an unmediated expression of the creative principle of the universe. To the extent that their parents are alienated from that principle, they may feel the need to shape the child’s psychology in a way which will not make them feel uncomfortable. They will also, on a more conscious level, want the child to have the advantages they feel they get from their religion. Thus they will generally indoctrinate the child into that religion. It may be less a case of saving the child from “original sin” and more a case of cultivating out their original divinity. We shouldn’t, however, assume that non-religious neurotics don’t do something similar. It is not only the religious who may feel the need to pass on their prejudices to their children.

While it was the idealism thought virus (“knowledge of good and evil”) which generated the original double bind which gave birth to our capacity for selfishness and aggression, religion can sometimes turn into an even more destructive form of double-bind. If someone believes that the God or saviour they worship is perfect and that they have to struggle to be worthy of them, this is going to undermine their self-acceptance quite quickly, and yet they must strive to love this deity or saviour as the only way out of their dilemma. The more they are drained of the capacity for love, which requires unconditional self-acceptance, the more resentment towards this figure will build on a subconscious level. This can lead to a paranoid state in which they see “Satanic” forces in the world around them which are really just a projection of their own repressed hatred of that God or saviour.

I think this double bind is the source of religion’s dark side. The Catholic Church, for instance, worships innocence (placing a particular emphasis on the infant Jesus and the Virgin Mary). The value of Mary is seen as residing in her having been “sexually pure”. Such worship may create a double-bind in which the worshipper becomes progressively less accepting of those characteristics within themselves which make them, in their own eyes, unworthy of that which is worshipped. Intense (possibly subconscious) resentment may build up towards the object of worship along with a fixation on the sexual feelings which are not accepted. Is it then so surprising that the Catholic Church should have such a massive problem with priests sexually molesting children? Authoritarian power structures obsessed with secrecy and self-protection are also a natural outgrowth of the rigid character armour which is bound to be the outer shell around such a cancer of the soul.

A double-bind pushes us right back into a desperate psychological corner. It is when someone is in that corner that their beliefs may take a very “magical” form or they may feel the need to reject reason and cling to literal interpretations of religious texts, which I don’t believe were ever intended to be taken that way in the first place. (As we can see with the story of Adam and Eve, these mythological stories were symbolic ways to express our psychological situation. We have no reason to believe that they were viewed as factual histories when first expressed.) The atrophying of the imagination and the inability to appreciate symbolism are both symptoms of alienation. To interpret myths as literal realities or to dismiss them as meaningless because they are not literally real are both symptoms of such alienation.

On the other hand, not all forms of religious belief malfunction in this way. While the kind of naturalistic explanation for and resolution of our psychological dilemma which we can now give with the benefit of science may do the job more effectively, it has been possible for some individuals to find their way to a more effective and meaningful life via religion. And it should be kept in mind that, in many parts of the world and throughout much of our history, it has been difficult if not impossible to find any assistance in dealing with our state of psychological alienation outside the medium of some kind of religious organisation. Some brave individuals might strike out on their own, but for those who felt the need of companionship in negotiating life in this state, a church of some kind, with all of its flaws, was probably the only help on offer.

Our identity floats between our embattled ego and our capacity to experience love - i.e. participation in something beyond ourselves. The story of mysticism is of psychological encounters with this wider world of love. And the fact that we can come to identify more with process than with our own body and ego is demonstrated by the willingness of some to sacrifice their lives for their comrades on the battlefield, for a stranger trapped inside a burning building or for their beliefs upon a cross or at the stake. Religion is not the only cultural expression of this kind of spiritual experience, but it is one very rich in material.

Another significant aspect of many forms of religious belief which appeared at some point was belief in a personal after-life. This is a response to the unhappiness of life, partly due to our psychologically divided state and partly due to the suffering which may be inflicted on us by others. If we lived a life of slavery or grinding poverty, for instance, we may have felt the need to believe that such a life would not be all we got. Belief in a heaven after we die would have been a comfort, but also, if our double-bind backed us into a corner in which we had to repress ever-increasing levels of hostile feelings, our self-control may have been greatly aided by the threat of hell. And the belief in a post-life reward or punishment would have had a role in maintaining social cohesion. On the other hand, all other things being equal, the more psychologically healthy an individual is the less they fear death and the less reason they have to believe that there is an existence for their ego beyond it. The healthier we are the less self-directed we are and the more we identify with the creative process of life which will continue anyway. To me the soul is something collective rather than individual. When we feel love or inspiration we know that we are not merely ourselves but are a part of something larger in the same way that a cell in the body is more than just a cell, but is an integrated part of a bigger whole.

Many view religion almost entirely as a social evil. There is no doubt that many of the worst acts our species have carried out have been carried out in the name of religion. But where exactly does the problem lie? Not with someone having a mystical experience in which they “see God” or having a conversion experience and devoting their life to helping the poor. The problem lies with dogma, rigid adherence to that dogma and oppression of others based on that dogma. Dogma is a defence system against free thought, based on the fear that such thought might lead to a scary place. Dogmatism of any kind is, at base, fear-driven insecurity. If the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages felt the need to torture heretics it was because they were afraid of the threat that such heresy posed to their insecure belief system. If an Imam insists that women cover themselves from head-to-toe it is because he is afraid of the boiling stew of lust that his repressive belief system has caused to build up in his psyche. But insecure dogmatism is not peculiar to religious institutions. Great crimes have been committed in the name of insecure political dogmas like Communism and fascism. And what is “political correctness” but an attempt to restrict others freedoms in order to protect one’s own (or someone else’s) state of insecurity.

Some mistake religious dogmatism for faith. Actually it is lack of faith. Faith is trust. Religious faith is trust in God. To feel the need to torture or kill those who do not agree with our religious beliefs is evidence both of a lack of trust in the veracity of those beliefs and also a lack of trust that God is able to handle his own affairs. When we cling to dogma and ritual, we do so because we are afraid. Faith would make us fearless. To open oneself up to the possibility of having a mystical experience requires faith. To venture beyond conventional modes of thought requires faith. We know so much more about our world than we once did, because we have had faith in the scientific method. We went to the moon because we had faith in our own abilities and faith in the process we envisioned to get us there. This is what we mean when we say that “faith moves mountains”.

For me the value of studying the field of religious belief is because it has the capacity to lay bare our deeper psychology. An atheist may not tell you what keeps them awake at night or what makes them feel depressed. They are under no obligation to do so. But the guilts, fears and insecurities of the religious individual are exposed, at least to some degree, through their belief system. Often I can identify, even if I do not share their way of addressing those problems. For me personal liberation through self-knowledge is the highest goal. (For that I find a non-supernatural interpretation of the philosophy of Jesus very useful.)

William James

The Varieties of Religious Experience : A Study in Human Nature is an edited collection of lectures which William James gave at Edinburgh in 1901-1902. Throughout the lectures covering topics such as the despair preceding conversion, conversion, positive-thinking-based religion, saintliness and mysticism, he presents extensive personal accounts from the literature of the day and of the past. There is a wit and generosity of spirit to his handling of the subject which made it a great pleasure for me to spend time in his company. He has been criticised, fairly, for deemphasising the negative aspects of religion (beyond some harrowing accounts of ascetic self-torture). He does advise that religions be judged on the basis of whether or not they produce good results, but he doesn’t go out of his way to give negative examples.

It is easy to look at the religious beliefs of others from the outside. This book gives us a chance to walk with those who have experienced the agony and the ecstasy and share intimately in what it means to them. There is also plenty to amuse as we marvel at the wild varieties of human eccentricity. James’ philosophy is to seek out the most extreme experiences, as he feels that, in them, we see a kind of enlarged version of the more commonplace, much as a microscope’s process of enlargement enables us to get a better understanding of a microbe.

And, as with the classic psychoanalytic case studies, this is important raw material for anyone wishing to come to a deeper understanding of the human psyche. We needn’t accept the interpretations the experiencers put upon their own experiences, but if we want to know ourselves better we may learn much from the snapshots of the interior world that they have brought back, blurry and badly-lit as they may be.

In his summing up James says : “Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.”

The aim of science is to be objective. This is what makes psychology such a tricky field of study. The observer is the observed. And yet, as James’ points out, the psychological experience is the only one in which we actually experience facts taking place. We are dependent on the input of our senses for the gathering of data in all other areas. If we turn out to be disembodied brains sitting in tanks having false sensory information fed to us, the one incontrovertible fact for us will be that we are having those experiences, illusory of not. René Descartes may have said “I think therefore I am” but he could have generalised a little more and said “I experience therefore I am”. Of course we are not ourselves having the religious experiences the accounts of which James’ shares with us. We may not trust that some or all of the writers are telling the truth. But the the inner world of the psyche is too important not take an interest in what evidence we have, uncertain as it may sometimes be.

James expresses his own belief in the existence of God in the following way :

“If asked just where the differences in fact which are due to God’s existence come in, I should have to say that in general I have no hypothesis to offer beyond what the phenomenon of ‘prayerful communion,’ especially when certain kinds of incursion from the subconscious region take part in it, immediately suggests. The appearance is that in this phenomenon something ideal, which in one sense is part of ourselves and in another sense is not ourselves, actually exerts an influence, raises our centre of personal energy, and produces regenerative effects unattainable in other ways. If, then, there be a wider world of being than that of our every-day consciousness, if in it there be forces whose effects on us are intermittent, if one facilitating condition of the effects be the openness of the ‘subliminal’ door, we have the elements of a theory to which the phenomena of religious life lend plausibility. I am so impressed by the importance of these phenomena that I adopt the hypothesis which they so naturally suggest. At these places at least, I say, it would seem as though transmundane energies, God, if you will, produced immediate effects within the natural world of which the rest of our experience belongs.”

I’m sure that the kinds of religious experiences he has discussed in this book are evidence of a source of great transformative power, but I don’t find his conclusion that this supports belief in the supernatural convincing. I believe the power involved is wholly natural. The psychological burden imposed by the battle between “good” and “evil” within us - that thought virus eating away at our peace of mind - has been such that it may seem miraculous to us if a mystical experience or religious conversion brings some relief from this situation and with it dramatic positive change. But far greater positive change, without any dogmatic framework, will occur for all of us if we learn the practice of unconditional self-acceptance. By so doing we release ourselves from the poison of humanity’s historic curse. I believe that this is what was at the heart of the philosophy espoused poetically by Jesus. Give up worrying about being “sinful” (i.e. selfish), because that self-criticism is the main thing making you selfish and thus standing between you and your true unconditionally-loving nature. And to love and be loved unconditionally is “the Kingdom of Heaven”.

A major advantage we have over James is the ability to study the chemistry and electrical functioning of the brain. Today we know that participating in group singing, such as many individuals do in church, tends to cause the body to produce oxytocin, a chemical which promotes feelings of affection and bonding. The feeling of love is an experiential fact of the kind to which James’ is referring. Now we have achieved a greater objective understanding of it through discovering its chemistry. 

The church-goers may explain it to themselves as “the infilling of the Holy Spirit”. Would they be wrong? If they think that something supernatural is happening perhaps so. But I see nothing wrong with their terminology. The word “holy” means “whole” or “of the whole”. Oxytocin enables us to bond with others, to experience ourselves as part of a larger whole. The “spirit” of something is its essence, that which motivates it. Why should we not see oxytocin as a “holy spirit” or as a medium for “the holy spirit” (i.e. the creative principle of the universe)? A poetic vision need not run counter to science.

"Thou Must" vs. "Fuck That!"

Copyright: kornilov14 / 123RF Stock Photo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo from Reuters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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