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

Photo by wisitporn.

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

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

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

There are different interpretations of this passage.

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

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

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

Here is some discussion of Peterson’s interpretation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by smileus.

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

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

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

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

Photo by Gleb TV.

The Hammer or The Key : Exposing the Dictatorship of the Imagined

Copyright: bee32 / 123RF Stock Photo

All of us maintain some kind of relationship between the world as we can perceive it with our five senses and that which we can only imagine.

The approach of science is to study what we can perceive with our senses and deduce from this evidence the laws of nature which cannot be directly perceived but only imagined.

Religious belief often takes the opposite approach. Through our culture we absorb beliefs about something we cannot directly perceive and then allow these beliefs to shape our interpretation of what we can perceive. 

I say “often” because religious belief doesn’t always work this way. Some observe the physical world of nature and from its orderly creativity deduce the existence of a deity of some kind. They may add to this perception moral principles derived from observation of nature or society - a direct assessment based on sensory evidence of what produces a harmonious and creative society and what does not.

The relationship between the real and the imagined is a key issue for all of us regardless of our belief system. Every day we make decisions which mediate between the world we can perceive with our senses and that which we can only imagine. If I’m saving up my money to go on a holiday, something imaginary is effecting how I manage my real physical environment. My holiday will be purely imaginary until it occurs.

The imagination is crucial to our existence as creative beings. A healthy relationship to it is one in which it grows like a plant from the soil of our sensory perception of reality. Let it be as wild and prolific in its growth as it wants to be as long as it doesn’t enter into a relationship of hostility to the world of perceptible reality which gave birth to it.

In the extreme, some insist on the submission of the human individual and society generally to the will of a deity who can only be perceived through the use of the imagination. Yet we can all be prone to just such a tendency - trying to make ourselves or others conform to an imaginary vision of how we think things should be.

Love is the alternative to such an approach. Love arises from the forging of connections within perceivable reality. It is improvisational in its nature. It is the creative process through which the potential intrinsic to any social situation realises itself. Thus it cannot be imposed on the basis of a belief in something imagined, but it can be the key to the realisation of that which has previously only been imagined.

When we attempt to make ourselves or others submit to something imagined - be it a deity or a personal ambition or a utopian concept of how the world should be - it is if we are taking a hammer to reality. We are engaging in an act of violence. This is idealism. It is the root of all evil.

What we need is not a hammer with which to shape reality but a key to unlock its intrinsic potential.

When we gather information and seek understanding we are using a key. When we open ourselves up to listen to those with whom we have been in conflict and engage in civilised debate with them we are using a key. When we accept ourselves as we are as a basis for healthy growth, rather than trying to force ourselves to conform to something we imagine, we are using a key. The path of the open mind is the path of the key. The path of  equal communication is the path of the key. Love is the path of the key.

It is easy to become confused by all of the conflict in the world. The tendency is to chose sides. By so doing we can find ourselves committing complimentary mistakes. We can end up becoming more like that against which we fight.

A wiser approach is not to look for right or wrong sides in a conflict but to look for creative or destructive strategies. On either side of any conflict we might find those who use the hammer and those who use the key. If we seek the people of the key and shun the people of the hammer, regardless of their allegiance, then we will be moving towards real solutions to the problems we face.

Copyright: anyka / 123RF Stock Photo

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Sucked into Paradise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gregory Bateson

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

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

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

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