The Anti-Christ May Come As a Social Justice Warrior

Drawing by vladischern

I’ve reached a crossroads where I realise that I need to take a stand and make my position clear.

I was telling a Christian friend yesterday that I’ve come to the conclusion that predictions of the rise of an “Anti-Christ” in the Bible refer to the domination of the world by a particular dogmatic cluster which has been described by various people as “critical theory”, “identity politics”, “postmodern Marxism” or “cultural Marxism”. The latter two terms may not be completely accurate, but what matters is what is being pointed to by them, not how accurate the name is.

There are other people who are much better than me at dissecting and critiquing these ideas. I recommend Jordan Peterson or Bret Weinstein.

The reason I have come to identify these belief systems with the figure of the Anti-Christ is that they promise what Jesus promised - an end to the injustices of the world - but it is not what they deliver.

For me, as an unbeliever, Jesus represents a principle of truth, love, non-judgement, forgiveness and generosity. Love - open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication - is the answer. But I believe that the dogma of identity politics, which has spread through our culture, brings lies, hatred, judgement, vindictiveness and selfishness, all the time claiming to fight those things.

When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:)

Then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains:

Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house:

Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes.

And woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days!

But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the sabbath day:

For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.

And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened.

Matthew 15-22

The “abomination of desolation” refers to offerings give to a false God. To me the significance of this expression is that we are coming to a time when “social justice” replaces love as our highest good. Justice is important, but, by its very nature, it can only be achieved by force and control. Love, the attitude which allows us to treat all our fellows as equal embodiments of the divine, leads us toward healing and a better world for all naturally.

The rise of the “Black Lives Matter” movement has made it all so clear. The cat is out of the bag. We have a movement which claims to be about saving black lives, but it calls for the defunding of the police. Since far more black lives are lost to violent crime than to police brutality, this means it is promising one thing and delivering the opposite. If you point this out you may be labelled a racist. This thought virus is powerful and deadly. The sensible approach to reducing police brutality would be to spend far more money on the police so that they can spend more time training and so that enough police can be employed that it is very easy to fire any police officer the first time they show signs of racism or a propensity to use excessive force. No matter how dissatisfied anyone is with the police, they should be able to realise that any power vacuum created by a reduction in the effectiveness of the police will be filled by violent criminals.

When I went onto Twitter today I found someone who appreciates my writing saying : “If you've ever heard me say that heteronormativity is a product of patriarchy, this is where I got the information from. The book is called "How to Be Free" by Joe Blow.” The following pages of my book were attached to illustrate this.

So here is my crisis. What do I do when I find my writing being associated with that which I identify as the Anti-Christ?

I don’t blame anyone for making this connection. I talk about some of the same things that are talked about in critical theory. I talk about the psychological basis for patriarchy and fear of homosexual desire. But I don’t support calls to “smash the patriarchy” as those in the grip of identity politics sometimes do. I talk of patriarchy mainly in the past tense, because our society no longer excludes women from positions of power.

What about “heteronormativity”? It is defined as “the belief that heterosexuality, predicated on the gender binary, is the norm or default sexual orientation. It assumes that sexual and marital relations are most fitting between people of opposite sex.”

I don’t really disagree with that. Gender is binary. Biologically there is male and female. There are psychological characteristics which we identify as masculine or feminine. There isn’t some third gender with which we identify characteristics. Of course there are men who exhibit more feminine characteristics and women who exhibit more masculine characteristics, and there some people who have about an even mix. It is like colour. There are only three primary colours. All the other colours are mixtures of those. All gender identities are mixtures of the masculine and the feminine. And heterosexuality is the statistical norm, and heterosexual families are the organisation best suited to producing healthy children - all other things being equal.

None of that is to say that we should idealistically insist on that which may be the statistical norm. There are many ways of doing things effectively in the world.

In my book I posit that bisexuality is the underlying form of sexuality. I arrived at this conclusion as a result of what I learned about our close primate relatives - the bonobos - who engage in erotic exchanges irrespective of gender. Also because we have the biological capacity to share erotic physical pleasure with others irrespective of gender. And because many heterosexuals are uncomfortable with homosexuality, which implies, to me, that there is a contrary desire for it buried beneath the public face. All of this is just speculation on my part.

Another incident which has focused this problem in my mind has been the treatment of J. K. Rowling over her discussion of transsexuality. I read her blog post on the topic, which I found to be remarkably sensible, well-informed, open-minded and compassionate. Yet, she has been roundly attacked. This tells me that we are at a very dark time. To speak the truth in a way which challenges this pervasive dogma is dangerous, but necessary.

Some may think me paranoid to use concepts like thought virus or even demonic possession to depict what is happening, but I think it helps to visualise how it works - the way that it has a life of its own, which operates through people without them being aware of what is happening to them.

I’ve said that idealism is the root of all evil and is a thought virus. Identity politics (lets stick with that term) is the most dangerous form of idealism which has ever existed, because it has spread most broadly to the global community. Religious groups have often done terrible things because of an idealistic insistence on imposing their dogma on others. And communists and fascists have slaughtered millions as a result of their idealistic dogma. If the current lie can be exposed in time, it may not come to that. But I have no doubt that, if not exposed as the lie that it is, this current dogma will lead to even worse horrors and, in fact, the end the human race.

So, there, I’ve explained where I stand. If anyone wants to quote my writings as a way of supporting this dogma, they are welcome to. That is their business, not mine. From the very beginning I’ve renounced what I call “the control strategy”. I take no ownership of my ideas. They are offered to be used as the person receiving them sees fit. To my mind this is how I differentiate myself from what I call “the Anti-Christ”. You will see those who are in “his” thrall trying to control others expression through intimidation or censorship.

I am, and have always been, on the side of freedom and love.

"Ye shall know them by their fruits." Matthew 7:16

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 18

“Born Again” “Pseudo-Idealism”

Let’s first look at the limited situation in which there is some truth to Griffith’s concept of “born again" “pseudo-idealism”.

What he is saying is that we have a genetic orientation to selflessness, but our developing mind has to defy its oppression and seek self-understanding which leads to anger, egocentricity and alienation. But if we become too corrupted by these qualities we transcend them (except alienation since to transcend alienation is to become more alienated) and adopt some form of “good” behaviour and convince ourselves that we are now an uncorrupted individual.

We have to look at this in terms of armouring. Many people whose initial form of character armour involves trying to compensate for their compromised self-acceptance by “proving” themselves in an aggressive, materialistic or combative way will eventually find that they can’t maintain it in the face of idealistic criticism, both from others and from the conscience they learned in childhood. So they will either shift their “proving myself” strategy to one of demonstrating their worth with good deeds or verbal support for a good cause. This may be a very dramatic change in which the whole basis of someone’s life reverses, or it may be only a superficial coating which coexists with much of the same aggressive, materialistic or combative characteristics which were there before. To really be healed and returned to our capacity for unconditional love we would have to abandon the battle to prove ourselves altogether in favour of unconditional-self acceptance. This is what Jesus meant when he talked about the need to be “born again”, but this is not what is happening in the situations Griffith is referring to.

In Griffith’s view of the world pretty much all of us are a bottomless pit of rage and corruption and therefore any attempts we make to do something positive about the problems we see around us are just signs of how “false/dishonest/‘phoney’/‘fake’/deluded” we are. Now there is some truth that doing what we feel to be right sometimes involves transcending selfish impulses or feelings of anger for a while. This is after all what Griffith himself has to do when he transcends his angry feelings about our non-ideal behaviour and expresses sympathy for our position.

But since I see no reason to believe we have a genetic orientation to selflessness, I see no reason to believe we have 2 million years of accumulated rage to transcend. We do accumulate rage to the extent that we have to repress it within our character armour, but anyone who does not undermine their self-acceptance by exposing themselves to too much corrupting idealism and provides themselves with plenty of outlets for their frustration, will find they don’t have all that much to transcend. Certainly not as much as Griffith himself who has been both exposing himself to extreme levels of corrupting idealism but also avoiding many of the normal healthy outlets for the frustration that must engender.

The most dramatic evidence of projection in Griffith’s writings is his views on the “pseudo-idealistic” movements.

First of all it is important to consider what we mean by “idealism”. Griffith emphasises the ideal of “selflessness”, but an ideal is any human concept of perfection. For the Nazis racial purity was an ideal. The Nazis were extremely idealistic especially in their worshipping of the beautiful body. Machismo is an ideal - the ideal of the perfect patriarchal male. And the conflict between the left wing and the right wing is not one between idealism and the need for freedom from the oppression of idealism. It is a conflict between two kinds of idealism which can be equally oppressive - the communal ideals of the left and the individualistic ideals of the right.

To really understand the social phenomena Griffith identifies as “pseudo-idealism” we need to recognise that the opposite of idealism is pragmatism. Pragmatism is an approach which puts aside all idealistic expectations in favour of a “whatever works” attitude.

Within each of these social phenomena - religion, socialism, feminism, the New Age movement, environmentalism, etc. - there are differing degrees and varieties of idealism and dogmatism, often conflicting with each other, existing alongside pragmatic approaches.

That Griffith can look at this complex chaotic diversity and see in it simply a dogmatic insistence on ideal behaviour and oppression of expression of contrary feelings or ideas, shows how he is seeing himself reflected in the mirror of the world. He is the dogmatist. He is the one insisting on us deferring to his personal conception of ideal behaviour (now that he has provided a bullshit “defence” for our having departed from it in the first place). His is the boot that would crush the human face forever if we were, en masse, to adopt his “Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living” rather than liberating ourselves by learning to cultivate unconditional self-acceptance.

It is true that all of these social movements have been missing a key ingredient for their success, but that key ingredient is not Griffith’s extreme idealism and bullshit “defence”, it is the cultivation of unconditional self-acceptance so that we can melt away our particular armours and thus be reconciled with those against whom our particular armours dictated that we be in conflict.

Keeping in mind that Griffith’s “defence for humanity” is bullshit that allows him, in his mind, to justify expressing his extremely idealistic criticism or all aspects of human behaviour, doesn’t it sound like he is really talking about himself when he says : “And since the lie they were maintaining was so great, they had to work very hard at convincing both themselves and others of it, which meant they were typically a strident, extremely intolerant, belligerent even fanatical advocate of their position.” You never know, they might even be intolerant of women wearing tights!

Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering individual. Griffith is probably the most selfish person in the world. While there are problems and insufficiencies in the way in which we are trying to address social and environmental problems, Griffth has come to see all of this as despicable because we are addressing ourselves to the world as a whole and not to his personal psychotic problem, which he feels should come first. (Of course that is not how he sees it because he is trapped within that psychosis.) But once we see the way that he is projecting his own situation onto the world, we can see that he is like Oscar Wilde’s selfish giant, not wanting the children to play in his personal garden. Essentially he is saying : “You can’t come into Paradise unless you are selfless.” He wants it all for himself. And that is a sign of how much he must be suffering. No wonder he has been through ten years of chronic fatigue syndrome! By clinging onto the poison of idealism he must have turned himself from William Blake’s Albion Rose to Crouched in Fear. To really understand his world view you have to recognise that he thinks we are all even more fucked up than he is, whereas, in truth, than can be no more fucked up person on the face of the planet than him.

Griffith's second book illustrated with William Blake's paintings - Crouched in Fear and Albion Rose

Burning in Hell

Griffith says : “Moses himself described how ‘The Lord spoke to you [the Israelite nation] face to face out of the fire […fire is a metaphor for the searing truth of Integrative Meaning] on the mountain. [This was only possible because] At that time I stood between the Lord and you to declare to you the word of the Lord, because you were afraid of the fire.’”

And in Genesis 3:24 : “After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.”

Doesn’t this fit with my interpretation of Satan as being a personification of idealism? God (the personification of love and forgiveness) would not be represented by something which burns and destroys, like fire. The fires of Hell belong to the devil.

It would take someone fairly secure in self - fairly self-accepting - to confront the condemning ideals and thus be Satan’s mouthpiece as Moses was. But idealism is both the source of corruption and the flame in which we burn for the “sin” of having been corrupted by it. It is the ultimate negative feedback loop.

Jesus on the other hand was not a worshipper of the Devil like Moses. He was not an idealist. When the idealists tried to stone the woman caught in adultery, Jesus stopped them. He said, “Judge not that thou be no judged.” To judge others is to be an idealist - to hold them up to an ideal standard and find them wanting. Jesus message was a Godly one of love and forgiveness. Love is the opposite of idealism. It is all-accepting. It is the water that puts out Satan’s fire and rescues us from the Hell of idealistic condemnation. Unfortunately, after his death Jesus’ followers turned his healing philosophy into the largely Satanic church known as “Christianity”.

There is controversy now about the Bible’s attitude to homosexuality. Jesus said nothing about homosexuality positive or negative. Condemnation of homosexuality comes from the Satanic (i.e. idealistic) parts of the Bible - Leviticus and the letters of the Apostles. These parts of the Bible preach repression rather than love. Since God is love, those parts of the Bible are anti-God.

Abandoning the Battle to Find Understanding

Griffith says : “Yes, the born-again, pseudo idealistic strategy was both treacherous and extremely dishonest — traits that totally undermined humanity’s search for knowledge — because in campaigning against the battle to find knowledge you were leading humanity towards an extreme state of denial/alienation/separation from the truth/knowledge, when, in fact, humanity had to continue the battle to try to get closer to and ultimately reach the ultimate truth/knowledge/understanding of the human condition.”

Keeping in mind the principle of projection, we can see here that, on some deeper level, Griffith is aware that his theory is not the full truth needed to liberate him from his condition, but that, by dogmatically clinging to it anyway, and shutting down his search for a more accountable understanding, he is taking himself into an ever deeper state of alienation, both from truthfulness and from the world the rest of us inhabit.

Jesus

Griffith says : That Jesus “realise[d] that he had to create a religion around his soundness; he had to suggest to people that through supporting and living through his soundness they could be ‘resurrected[ed]’ ‘from death to life.’”

This is the lie created and  perpetuated by the so-called Christian church. Jesus did not want to create a religion. He wanted to liberate the world from the obscene lie that was religion, i.e. deference to idealism, i.e. deference to Satan. His God was not the Satanic “God” of the old testament. Idealism is hatred. The God he preached was love. But the idealists of his day crucified him. He didn’t love the “ideals”. He loved those whom the idealists oppressed and called “sinners”. “Sin” is just another word for “selfishness” and selfishness is just the self-directedness of the suffering individual. It was the condemnation of idealism which made us sinners. So he recognised that the way to help us was to show that God is love, which forgives all, and thus expose the religion of his day as nothing but Satanism. The Satanists couldn’t stand to have their hypocrisy exposed, so they killed Jesus and, eventually, began preaching a new brand of Satanism in his name.

Of course, Jesus words were passed down, so a few rare individuals, such as William Blake, were able to see his true meaning.

Mental Illness

Griffith talks about the increase in mental illnesses in the world, e.g. depression, ADHD, autism… These are a product of a shortage of love, love from parents and self-love, etc. Love is acceptance. What we need is the unconditional acceptance of others, such as our parents if we are children, and unconditional acceptance of ourselves. What has always undermined our capacity for this kind of love, however, has been the conditions imposed by the kind of idealism that Griffith is dishonestly promoting. While we can’t blame our situation entirely on him, he has, for over 25 years, been pumping out his toxic sludge, and now he is looking around and crying about the fact that children are increasingly suffering from a sickness that comes from exposure to just that sludge. Children are not getting the love they deserve from their parents because their parents are not unconditionally self-accepting. And why are they not unconditionally self-accepting? Because they are weighed down with all this guilt about not being perfect parents. Griffith, with his obscene lie that children are born expecting an ideal world and a mother who is as close to the Virgin Mary as possible, is robbing children of love.

On some level does Griffith resent the innocence of children? It is as if he worshipped “innocence”. But when we worship something we split ourselves in two. The conscious part of us clings to that which is worshipped, but to maintain this state we have to push all contrary feelings about what we worship into our subconscious. The subconscious then grows more and more resentful of that which is consciously worshipped. The Catholic Church worships innocence in the form of the “virgin” Mary and the infant Jesus. So is it any wonder that it has generated so much sexual abuse of children?

The Return of the Repressed

So much that Griffth sees as signs that we are headed toward “terminal alienation” are things I see as positives - tattoos, violent video games, pornography, etc.

We have been repressing so much within our armouring. All of these cultural phenomena are healthy ways of letting it out, of opening up to honest free expression. Sure they can have their negatives, like anything. But those who are most frightened by them are those who are most armoured/repressed. They don’t want to admit that they have even more sickness inside them than is on display in these forms of expression.

But what is buried beneath all of this sickness, the seed of which was sowed in us by idealism’s attack on love, is our capacity for unconditional self-acceptance, i.e. love of ourselves, and thus love for all others.

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

I talk about this subject in more detail in my post Sucked Into Paradise.

It is the censorious spirit of the idealist which would ask us to be dishonest about expressing the non-ideal side of our nature and thus remain forever alienated from our capacity for love.

Read Part 19 (The Final Part)

Chimpanzees, Typewriters and the Inevitability of Paradise

We are an expression of an unpredictably creative deterministic system which some of us refer to as “the universe" and others refer to as “God".

A system has certain characteristics which are broadly predictable. It is for this reason that we are able to see laws behind natural phenomena and, to some extent, make accurate predictions based on those laws. But the direction of creation is towards greater levels of complexity. This takes place through a process known as “emergence" and this is not predictable the first time that it happens. Something truly new is coming into existence and yet it is still a product of the functioning of an inevitable system. There is no such thing as randomness or chance in a connected universe.

To get an idea of how higher levels of complexity can arise from simple deterministic principles it is worth looking at the example of fractals. These are patterns generated by simple mathematical formulae. When mapped out with computer graphics they reveal wildly complex patterns in which the overall shape is re-iterated on each level :

Like a circle in a spiral

Like a wheel within a wheel

Never ending or beginning

On an ever spinning reel

The Windmills of Your Mind (Michel Legrand, Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman).

The relationship between our sun and its planets is close enough to a steady state for us to make predictions about where another planet will be in relation to ours at any particular time, but it isn't really a steady state. Scientists tell us that every year the earth moves 15 centimetres farther from the sun. This isn't much, but it shows that the stability of the system is relative not absolute.

Systems theory reveals that the emergence of a new level of complexity occurs through the process of a system becoming destabilised. Systems seek order, and if one kind of order breaks down, then a more complex form of order has to come into existence. This is not an imposed order but an order which arises from the expression of natural laws on a higher level of organisation. Where we see disorder, as we do in our social system, it is because that system is in the transition phase – it is in the inevitable state of breakdown which leads to breakthrough – to emergence into the next level of orderly system.

Another way to think of the relationship between the predictable and unpredictable aspects of creation is to imagine a classroom where a bunch of children are engaged in a creative writing exercise. There are rules about how they can behave. They are not allowed to fly paper planes across the room. They are not allowed to get out of their chairs. They are not allowed to chew gum. So we can make some predictions about how behaviour in the classroom will look based on those rules. But we can't predict that Tommy will write a story about a dragon that likes to eat its own bogies after roasting them in its fire. This story is an instance of emergence. It is an inevitable product of the universal system but we don't have the brain capacity necessary to process all of the information which led to its expression. We can tell that it is an expression of the intersection of the historical dragon myth with the “eat your own bogies" meme popular with little boys, but we could not predict that Tommy would be the point in the system where this particular manifestation of this intersection should be expressed at this particular moment unless we had a complete dynamic map of the social system of which Tommy is a part. All we could do is to make a probabilistic prediction that between 5 and 10 school boys will write an essay about dragons eating their own bogies this year based on the number of school boys who have done so in each of the previous twenty years.

There is a tendency, where we can't understand something, to attribute it to an imaginary being. Primitive peoples who didn't know anything about the geological structure of the earth attributed volcanic eruptions to the anger of the volcano god. Today there are many scientists who carry on this trend by attributing anything they can't predict to a mythological entity called “randomness". Randomness is the concept that something can happen which is not an inevitable manifestation of the system within which it takes place.

Our central symbol for randomness is the throwing of a dice. And it is from the study of dice throwing which we developed the theory of probability. We can't predict what number is going to come up when we throw a dice, but we can predict the likelihood of the spread of numbers which will come up over a large enough sample. While we can't predict the outcome of a single dice throw, that doesn't mean it is not deterministic in its nature and thus theoretically predictable. How the dice lands depends on such factors as its mass, its shape, how hard and in which direction we throw it and the nature of the surface on which it falls. We don't have the ability to measure and assess all of this information with enough accuracy to predict how the dice will fall, but it is theoretically possible.

Evolution is often presented as the result of “random" mutations, rather than a deterministic interaction between members of species and their environment.

In physics, proponents of the theories of quantum mechanics claim that the behaviour of subatomic particles is evidence of randomness because it can't be predicted even though we can detect probable trends. Sounds a bit like our problem with dice. And this was Albert Einstein's attitude to quantum mechanics – “God doesn't play with dice." Einstein, like myself, did not believe in a personal God, but in the pantheistic conception of God as a way of referring to the integrated nature of the creative universal system.

The belief that we live in a probabilistic rather than deterministic universe has led to much absurdity, such as the idea that an infinite number of alternate universes exist parallel to each other and that anything which we can imagine must have happened in at least one of them. This denies the relationships between things. How could there be a universe in which there are people who breath water but in which there is no water? I can imagine that well enough to write down the concept, but it can't exist in reality because it wouldn't work. If we want to understand the universe in which we live we have to understand its connectedness and thus its inevitability. It's no good me asking myself : “What would it have been like if I'd been born in China?" because someone born in China could not be me. I could only have been born at the precise place and time at which I was born, because even the slightest variation, as chaos theory shows us, changes the whole system.

Another expression of the probabilistic world view is the idea that, if you could train an infinite number of chimpanzees to type and then waited an infinite amount of time, one of them would type the complete works of Shakespeare¹. This would not happen. It is a complete misunderstanding of how things come into existence. Shakespeare's plays were an expression of the system which could only occur at the position of the system known as “Shakespeare". No-one else could have written the plays and Shakespeare could not have written Finnegan's Wake or Twilight. They could only be written by James Joyce and Stephanie Meyer respectively. Each is an expression which requires the knowledge and influences unique to those individuals. Even assuming we could teach chimpanzees to type, they would not type keys probabilistically. An infinite number of chimpanzees might all just thump their fingers on the keyboard in a similar way, which would not produce the variety necessary to accidentally produce a novel or play. What would most likely happen is that they would quickly get bored and jam up the typewriter mechanism with their own faeces. The products of one level of complexity cannot be produced by an entity on a lower level of complexity. The same does not apply in reverse. Stephanie Meyer could quite easily jam up a typewriter with her own faeces should she so choose.

What about the concept of “free will"? If we are part of a deterministic system, then does this mean that free will is an illusion? Yes. But we can better understand this when we recognise that it is also an oxymoron. And to understand why we need to look at the nature of freedom.

The best analogy for deterministic freedom is that of a water molecule travelling down a river to the sea. The molecule moves freely. There are no impediments to block its path. But that path is determined by the movement of the other molecules around it in response to the environment of the riverbank which determines the course of the flow. It's behaviour is determined but not determined in the way that a wind-up robot's behaviour is determined by its mechanism.

We human's are capable of acts of will, but these acts are the product of cultural influences which come from outside ourselves. We can't be other than an expression of the system. So what do we mean by will? The will is the active aspect of the ego. The ego is our sense of our self as a discreet entity. It is constructed of our beliefs. When we act on the basis of our beliefs, that is will. But we do not chose our beliefs, they are a crystallisation of prevalent ideas which come together within us in the only way they could. When our beliefs change it is because we have come in contact with other ideas outside of ourselves which have overridden the preceding ones. Of course, in each individual case it is too complex a process to fully break down and analyse and it is always in flux.

At the heart of any act of will is a lack of acceptance of something. There is something with which we do not feel satisfied and so our will drives us to seek to change it. This might be something as simple as washing the dishes or as complex as seeking a cure for cancer. But it is only an act of will if there is resistance. If I want to wash the dishes, then doing so is an act of free expression. But if I'm feeling lazy I have to will myself to do them. And if we are trying to change something in our environment will will only be required if that something is resistant to change, which is more often the case if we are working against the grain so to speak.

The central characteristic of will is the experience of a relative loss of freedom. The thought behind an act of will is the thought that we have to do something - that we have no alternative. The mountaineer must climb the mountain. The boxer must fight the fight. By contrast the state of freedom is like being a guest at a party where we could kiss the hostess, stand on our head or piss in the punchbowl, among many other possibilities. Such behaviour is not goal-orientated in the way that an act of will is, but whatever we do will be an inevitable expression of the universal system in the place we inhabit. So if someone pisses in the punchbowl, blame the perversity of the universe.

We may think that will is necessary in order that anything get done. No good just sitting around accepting everything. But acceptance is the basis for love and love desires to help and to understand. Love can be the basis for discovery and problem solving. In science love would inspire us to find understanding and work with nature to solve our problems, whereas will inspires us to try to solve problems by changing nature without fully understanding it first. It is the wilful approach to science and technology which has led scientists to misinterpret data in order to support their prejudices and has encouraged our technological development to be at the expense of our ecological life-support systems. The alternative, accepting what is and responding to it in the way which comes naturally to us, will lead to better results.

One way to picture our situation is that we are all cast adrift upon a stormy sea, each in a fragile little boat. The boat is our ego and we need it because the sea is so stormy. Were the sea calm we would swim in it happily. The sea on which we are cast adrift is the schizophrenic mind of God. What emerged in the jump from the other primates to humans was mind as we conceive it. Chimpanzees have the ability to reason on a very basic level, but human intelligence is to chimpanzee intelligence as the fractal is to the mathematical formula which leads to it. A period of disorder accompanies emergence. In the case of human intelligence the root of the disorder was a split in perception which led to the concepts of Good and Evil. This acted like a virus splitting our perception of the world and ourselves in such a way that everything became divided into warring factions. But this was a problem which would begin slowly and then increase exponentially up until the present.

In the beginning we experienced ourselves as an expression of the natural system. This was true as a species (expressed in such myths as that of Adam and Eve) and in our individual lives (as an infant we have to learn the difference between “me" and “not me"). We lived in God. But the idea that it is meaningful to split the world into Good and Evil caused a disharmony which alienated us from this sense of connectedness. We were “cast out of the Garden of Eden". With the invention of language our mind became a collective mind in the sense that each of us is like a synapse and words and the concepts which are expressed through their varying combinations are the impulses travelling through those synapses. We have, as Carl Jung discovered, a collective unconscious. We soak up cultural material without even being aware of it and our subconscious associates this material in ways determined by the flow of different trends within the social system. Now, with television and the internet, the subconscious of each individual is more complex than it was in Jung's day, but the deepest trends are the most universal – the patterns which lie at the heart of the complexity – the formula that produced the fractal.

In science fiction we have the idea of alien species with a “hive mind". We have such a mind and always have had, but it is a schizophrenic hive mind, it is perpetually at war with itself. And this is why we need our lifeboats – our egos – to stay afloat in the maelstrom. I once thought that, even in a state of psychological freedom we would still need our ego in order to self-manage, but this isn't true. We don't need to experience ourselves as separate entities in order to do what we need to do. Our body is made up of separate cells each doing what is required for the maintenance of the whole. But this is only possible if our “hive mind" is not divided against itself and thus deranged. As long as that is the case we need our ego to keep afloat. Many of us have been thrown from our boats by the violence of the storms and come face to face with the reality of the divided mind of humanity in a way which caused us to be labelled “insane" by those still safely in their boats and many have been lost at sea, i.e. committed suicide.

The development of the ego is symbolised in the story of Noah and the ark. When it became clear that living on dry land (remaining psychologically connected to the living system) was becoming impossible due to our internally divided state, and that we would thus become separated from that state by the sea of our growing conceptual consciousness, we developed the individual ego. In Noah's Ark were stored all of the complimentary pairings into which our dualistic conciousness had split things – male and female of every animal. In time the complimentary pairings produced by the dualistic split in our consciousness would become warring factions in many instances.

This analogy also appears in the Leonard Cohen song Suzanne :

And Jesus was a sailor

When he walked upon the water

And he spent a long time watching

From his lonely wooden tower

And when he knew for certain

Only drowning men could see him

He said “All men will be sailors then

Until the sea shall free them"

So our egos have been necessary, but the downside is that they separate us from the ability to perceive unfiltered reality. The ego is a structure of distorted beliefs about reality. It is a form of alienation from reality. If we are going to stay in our boat we have to twist our perception of reality in such a way that it doesn't challenge those distorted beliefs. This is why physicists will look at the behaviour of subatomic particles and see something that “proves" the existence of randomness. Because to think down the honest pathway of the inevitable unfolding of all things is to follow a pathway of thought that leads inexorably to the dissolution of one's own ego. Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. And, yet, the death of the ego is the way to heaven once we have an understanding, as we now do, which can cure the virus of dualism, reconcile the warring factions and bring peace and sanity to our “hive mind" – the mind of God.

The dissolution of our egos into the mind of God is what was predicted by Jesus was “the Kingdom of Heaven" and “the coming of the Son of Man". The term “Son of Man" acknowledges that the next level of emergence is generated by the one which comes before. So unified humanity is the offspring of divided humanity.

Now before this would occur Jesus prophesied that the shit would really hit the fan. The key concept here is given in the passage which begins at Matthew 24:15 : “So when you see standing in the holy place 'the abomination that causes desolation' spoken of through the prophet Daniel – let the reader understand – then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains... How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers..."

What is “the abomination that causes desolation"? We can see that it is idealism. The original virus which contaminated humanity was the false perception that it is meaningful or beneficial to think of some things as Good and some things as Evil and to use our will to try to compel ourselves to pursue the former and avoid the latter. To be fully wedded to this false perception is to be an idealist.

So what is all this about “the abomination" being put “in the holy place"? Since we can see that an accurate understanding of reality is one which acknowledges the larger whole of which each person or thing is an expression we can see that how truthful something or someone is is dependant on how whole (i.e. undivided) they are and thus the degree to which they can acknowledge their connection to the whole. Our word for this is “holy". We have begun to acknowledge this idea in a non-mystical way with our concepts of “holistic medicine" and “the holistic paradigm for science".

In 1988, an Australian biologist by the name of Jeremy Griffith published a book called Free : The End of the Human Condition – The Biological Reason Why Humans Have Had to Be Individual, Competitive, Egocentric & Aggressive. He said that the book, which he spent 13 years writing, “grew out of my desperate need to reconcile my extreme idealism with reality". He presented it as an holistic understanding of the human condition. Central to his explanation is the concept that our conscience, that part of us which tells us what is good, is part of our genetic programming, and that our competitive, egocentric and aggressive behaviour has been an unavoidable rebellion against the oppressive criticism with which that programming responded to our experiments in the use of our newly found intelligence for self-management. He appears to believe that this “knowledge" will itself bring about a reconciliation of all of the conflicts in the world. The problem is that his “defence for humanity" is no defence because our conscience, for those of us who have one, is a part of our ego. In effect then Griffith's books are an unconscious attempt on his part to will his idealism onto the rest of us by presenting it as liberating holistic knowledge. And they are a brilliant attempt because they contain so many of the ideas which would be needed for a genuine liberating understanding but assembled the wrong way and presented with an emphasis on confronting us about our “non-ideal" behaviour. Of course the number of people who've read Griffith's books, or even heard of him, is limited, but all ideas, especially about really important topics, leak out into general awareness. Many in Australia who never read any of his books would have seen him on daytime television at one stage defending his idea that sex is “an attack on innocence". (from Free : “Men invented sex, as in 'fucking' or destroying, as distinct from the act of procreation. What was being 'fucked' or destroyed was women's innocence.")

Griffith gives his own interpretation of the prophesy in his 2003 book A Species in Denial : “...when Christ was unmasking the lie of pseudo-idealism he used the deadly accurate description offered by the Old Testament prophet Daniel, 'the abomination that causes desolation'." So what does he mean by “pseudo-idealism"? Later in the book he says : “One of the problems to be overcome in introducing these denial-free understandings is that there have been so many 'false prophets' promoting artificial, pseudo forms of ideality that the whole business of bringing ideality to the world has been extremely discredited. These false forms of ideality, such as the New Age Movement, Environmentalism, Feminism, the Politically Correct Deconstructionist Movement, The Peace Movement, are such superficially satisfying forms of idealism to live through that when the real ideality arrives, namely the reconciling understanding of the human condition, people actually prefer the non-confronting, false forms of ideality... These false or pseudo forms of ideality are extremely seductive because they give people relief from the horror of their corrupted state by allowing them to feel good about themselves without having to confront their corrupted state. In a world where people are rapidly becoming more corrupted and in need of relief from their condition, pseudo-idealism has become a plague. In fact it has gained such a foothold that it now threatens to control the world and lead it to a totally non-confronting, truthless state of oblivion. Pseudo-idealism is the 'Antichrist' because it is at base anti-truth, opposed to the truth which Christ so wholly represented." Here we have a classic example of paranoia, a false prophet with an oppressive dishonest dogma seeing those who pursue other approaches to addressing the problems of the world as the ones who are deluded and dangerous – that is, he sees in them a projection of the truth he can't face about himself. A Prophet in Denial would have been a more appropriate title for the book.

Glossy insert used to promote A Species in Denial in Australian newspapers

So idealism dressed up as holism is what Jesus and Daniel where on about when they talked about the “abomination that causes desolation" being “in the holy place". And this was the peak point of the danger and destruction which grew out of that original concept of Good and Evil. But this is how systems work. Everything is inevitable and everything is necessary. Only by having the key problem crystallised into its most potent form could it be studied and the real cure found. But it has been a harsh ride for us all. I included the passage about pregnant women and nursing mothers, because one of Griffith's key beliefs is that babies are born with a genetically coded expectation of finding an ideal world and the protection of their innocence depends on being sheltered from contact with the non-ideal nature of the world. This concept puts a lot of pressure on mothers, but it shouldn't, because it is bullshit. The only idealists in the world are neurotic adults. What children most need is for we adults to stop worrying so much. So this prevalent concept, of which Griffith's expression is simply the most extreme, is itself harmful to the welfare of children. It is the generator of a negative feedback loop which causes depression for both mothers and eventually, when they reach adolescence, their children.

Just as these toxic ideas about Good and Evil have sowed division and conflict, so a clear understanding which heals the split will spread out through the mind of God and our ego boats will inevitably dissolve and free us into the bliss of Heaven on Earth. There is nothing to do but do what comes naturally. Acts of will are no longer useful.

The rise of the “Kingdom of Heaven" is something which will happen both within us and around us as the divisions which have characterised our existence heal. When emergence takes place unexpected patterns are revealed. We wouldn't expect water vapour to form into beautiful snowflakes. In the same way we will witness seemingly miraculous coincidences, a phenomena which Jung labelled synchronicity and described as an “acausal connecting principle". Another example of an acausal connecting principle is gravity. “Ah," you may say, "but gravity causes apples to fall from trees." But it doesn't. Gravity doesn't cause anything to do anything, it only shapes the way in which it does it. The word “cause" is defined as : “A person or thing that gives rise to an action, phenomenon, or condition." Gravity doesn't “give rise" to the fall of the apple, whatever dis-attaches it from the tree does. So synchronicity is like gravity, it doesn't make anything happen and it is invisible, but we will be able to know it by the way that it shapes the healing of humanity.

1For the sake of simplicity I will assume that William Shakespeare actually wrote the plays attributed to him, something which is disputed by some.

Deciphering the Jesus Fairy Tale : Part 3 - The Holy Spirit

"He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters. And so I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come. "Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit." Matthew 12:30-12:33, NIV, 1984.

If Jesus' words have a non-supernatural meaning, what might be meant by the term "the holy spirit"?

In the last essay I talked about how the word "holy" comes from the same root word as "whole" and so can be interpreted as meaning "whole" or "of the whole". The largest whole is the universe. Everything which exists in the universe is a whole which is part of that whole and there are wholes within wholes within wholes. Each of us is a whole individual, made up of cells which are wholes, and the cells are made up of atoms which are whole and the atoms are made up of electrons which are wholes. The meaning of a whole is found in it relationship to the larger whole of which it is a part in just the same way that each of the words in this sentence conveys a meaning through its relationship to the rest of the sentence.

There is a creative principle which is intrinsic to the nature of the universe. Were this not the case there would be nothing in the universe but unstructured energy. Creating more complex wholes is one of the things the universe does. Otherwise we wouldn't be here.

But the disintegration of wholes is also an inescapable part of the functioning of the universe. Among we living things there is life and death. Death brings with it disintegration.

While each whole has its own integrity, each is of the larger whole and ultimately of the universe. We may think of ourselves as separate entities but we are actually a system through which energy and matter is always flowing – coming in from outside when we eat, drink and breathe and leaving us when we move, sweat, excrete, etc. And our mind also is a system with information and ideas coming in from outside and being then shared with others. So, while we think of ourselves as a continuing entity, we are not entirely the same person from moment to moment. The qualities we associate with ourselves are really more like statistical probabilities. The fact that I've liked eating spaghetti for 50 years makes it likely that I will still like eating spaghetti in ten years time, but it is possible that at some stage I'll get sick of it, or be introduced to some amazing kind of pasta which will lead me to never consider spaghetti again. On the other hand the fact that I may be a person with a head cold today does not indicate that I'll probably still be a person with a head cold next year at this time.

The reason we needed to develop the concept of the holy is that we became divided, i.e. we became unholy. As I speculated in How to Be Free, there must have been a time before the human neurosis, a time when our ape-like ancestors lived peacefully together and at one with the natural environment. This would have been made possible by our species extended nurturing period which kept our psychological and social development from being hindered by the struggle for survival in a harsh environment and by the need to compete for food and mating opportunities. This would have been fine except that the men had to protect the group from predators such as leopards. In fighting the leopards, and also in trying to learn to understand them, the men would have had to become more like them, to be aggressive and competitive. Eventually this would have caused problems in the tribal group, creating a rift between the men and the women. This would have been the beginning of the human neurosis as the need to minimise social disturbance led the men, and later the women, to internalise the other's criticisms of them. First we were criticised by our fellows, then we began to criticise ourselves. We developed a conscience. Judgement and condemnation came into being. Judgement and condemnation of others and judgement and condemnation of ourselves.

How easy must it have been when a natural disaster occurred for us to see this as some kind of punishment for bad conduct? Even today, when we know so much about the way the world works, those of us who do not believe in the supernatural often find ourselves thinking, when something bad happens in our lives, "Perhaps I'm being punished." But our early ancestors didn't know what made a volcano erupt or lightning fall from the sky or a flood wash away their village.

From this must have come the concept that there were gods who stood in judgement on our behaviour and might punish us for wrong doing. At the time it was probably different gods in charge of specific natural forces. At some stage the concept of sacrifice to appease the gods must have developed. This makes sense. We had nothing on which to base our concept of what these gods might be like except ourselves. Since we knew that we were sometimes willing to forgive an act against us if the perpetrator gave us something in the way of reparation, it made sense that this would also work with the gods.

At some stage the idea developed in some cultures that there was one single god. Once again we imagined him or her in our image. Once our neurosis developed to the extent that the psychological insecurity of males made it necessary for them to enchain women and take total control, i.e. our society became patriarchal, those societies, if they believed in a single god, believed in a male one.

Some of the qualities which were assigned to this male God were qualities which belonged to the creative principle of the universe. God was seen as the creator of all things, including humans. All matter and life, including humans, arise from and are an expression of that principle. God was considered to be invisible and omnipresent. These qualities also apply to the creative principle of the universe.

But the creative principle of the universe is neither male nor female. It has no supernatural powers. After all it is nature. And it does not stand in judgement over us. We may stand in judgement over ourselves. In fact we generally do. But the creative principle of the universe could give a shit. The sun continued to shine on Adolph Hitler and Idi Amin and Charles Manson. It they had a garden it would not stop producing because of their crimes against their fellows. If we harm our fellows they may strike back or shun us. If we do something we feel is wrong, we may feel guilty. But if the creative principle of the universe is God, and I believe that this is the God of the mystics and shamans as opposed to the God of the Old Testament, then God does not condemn us. Both condemnation and forgiveness are human terms. Something immaterial, like a law of nature, cannot condemn or forgive. On the other hand condemnation and forgiveness are understandable metaphors with regard to natural forces. You could say that if we treat an eco-system so harshly that a vegetated area becomes a desert, our behaviour has been condemned by nature. Likewise, we could say that a robust eco-system which can take a lot of harsh treatment and remain verdant is very forgiving. But we know we are using metaphors and not actually assigning emotional reactions to plants.

So by the time of Jesus, we were severely neurotic as a species. We were at war with ourselves internally, feeling that we were torn between the forces of good and evil. And we were divided from each other emotionally and often in conflict with each other. And above us was the figure of a stern cosmic father who had been known to send fire or flood to wipe out those who broke his laws or in any way gave him offence.

It is in the context of a society of individuals divided internally and also socially (just as we still are today), that the concept of the holy can be seen to be deeply meaningful. What we so crave is to heal the division within ourselves, to achieve individuation as Carl Jung put it. And also to find a healing of society – to heal the divisions which blight our lives.

The creative principle of the universe operatives via forces which draw together parts to form wholes. In human society this principle takes the form of love. Love is simply a form of communication characterised by openness, honesty and spontaneity. Where this kind of communication occurs between human beings it is accompanied by warm feelings of attraction and a cathartic breaking down of any kind of emotional repression which may have been interfering with the emotional health of the individual. It is through this process that we become aware that we are all life itself contained as we may be in the temporary shell of our body. The divisions between us exist only in the unrealistic artificial conceptions of our minds.

Since we long for wholeness for ourselves and our society, that which is truly whole and of the whole has a tremendous importance for us. And to describe this we use the word "holy".

So what might Jesus have meant by the "holy spirit"? We think of a spirit as being a supernatural entity, perhaps synonymous with a ghost. And the term "holy spirit" sometimes seems to be used interchangeably with the term "holy ghost".

But we don't always use the term "spirit" to mean an actual supernatural being. Sometimes we talk about "the spirit of fairness". We can use the term to refer to the essence of something.

What might be the essence of the holy?

What is it which divides us? Lies, delusions, prejudices, differing opinions, differing ideas...

If we were going to be united, what would be the common ground on which we could stand together? If we were to all once more become an integral part of a whole, what would that whole be, and what would be its essence?

The whole would be reality. And its essence the truth.

Now I don't mean some specific hypothetical "truth", like "the truth that the Lord Jesus Christ is my Lord and Saviour." I mean the real truth. Whatever is factual.

If you stopped off at the pub on the way home from work for a few drinks with your friends, and your partner angrily asks you where you've been when you get home, then "I had to work back late" is not the truth and "I stopped off for a drink with my friends" is the truth. This is the kind of truth I'm talking about. But I'm also talking about the truth that the earth is about four and a half billion years old. And the truth that the concept of a supernatural being standing judgement over us is a figment of our imaginations.

We may not always know the exact factual truth, but the best approximation of it that we can come to is the only thing which can ever unify us – make us whole and make us part of the whole. There are many lies and delusions, but there can only ever be one truth.

So now we can look at the "holy trinity". The "father" is the creative principle of the universe. The "son" is anything which is a product of the creative principle. And "the holy spirit" is the frame work of truth – the facts – which can be apprehended by the senses and understood, in time, by reason.

Now imagine that you are Jesus and you can see these things and you've been born into a society where people are divided within themselves and in conflict with each other. A society of people who feel ashamed of themselves for various reasons and feel that a cosmic father figure stands in judgement over them. You know that this father figure is a delusion. Unlike them you live in the real world, your mind unclouded by guilt or dogma or superstition. Your God is the God of nature, the creative principle of the universe which does not judge and which gives generously. The God who clothed the lilies of the field more magnificently than Solomon clothed himself. What are you going to do to lead your fellows out of their madness and their misery?

Now you could tell them that it's all in their imaginations. You could tell them that God the Father doesn't exist. This probably wouldn't get you very far. Psychiatrists often try this kind of approach with their psychotic patients. It doesn't work. That's why they rely on drugs. Jesus didn't have access to drugs.

To take that kind of approach is what improvisation teacher Keith Johnstone would call "blocking". A successful improvisation requires that we accept what we are given to work with. One thing which made R. D. Laing such a great psychiatrist was that he took the view that he did not have the right to try to impose his experience of reality onto his patients. He joined them where they were and then tried to help them to find their own way out of the prison cell of their neurosis or psychosis.

I believe that this is also the approach taken by Jesus.

If these people believed that a grim father figure stood in judgement over them then he would tell them that this God had sent him to bring them forgiveness for their "sins". This was not a lie. He knew that the God they feared was the same God in whose world he lived, and that the human face and the judgemental attitude were the distortions of their disturbed minds, like something seen in a crazy house mirror. And he was a product of the creative principle of the universe, as we all are. He was not lying when he said that he was "the son of God". Nor was he lying when he said he had been sent to bring forgiveness. A creative system has to produce what is needed for creation to continue. Flowers produce pollen. If they didn't the bees would die. So it is not inappropriate to say that flowers are sent by nature to bring pollen. Whatever we find to do in our lives to aid creation or the health of the system into which we are born, that is what we were sent to do. But he had to talk the language of the people to whom he was communicating his message.

Jesus realised that God did not judge people. If there was a big flood which killed a lot of people it wasn't because God was unhappy with them. That is not how nature works. And it doesn't take a scientist to see that. Fear-based superstitions were not our original mode of viewing the world. They were a product of our neurosis and they obscured our original realistic view of the world in which we did not try to fill in the gaps in our sensory information about the world with chimeras of the mind.

Jesus realised that we are the only judges, both of ourselves and of others. And he realised that the only Hell was the one we made for ourselves during our life. And he realised that our neurosis left us more dead than alive. The bliss of living in the real world which was his daily experience was unavailable to us. Trapped within the cage of our wounded ego we were deadened emotionally and sensually and our embattlement, our character armour as Wilhelm Reich called it, meant that we could no longer interact with the world and our fellows spontaneously as we had when we were children. We can tell when something dies because it stops actively interacting with its environment. The more armoured we were, the more cut off from interaction, the more we were, metaphorically-speaking, dead. This was acknowledged by those who referred to Jesus as "the first born from among the dead".

Jesus talked a lot about life after death and not having to die. Clearly the body dies. Those who believed in him still died physically. So what was he talking about? Principally, I think, he was talking about the state of spiritual death in which he found people. He was saying that this was a preventable mental illness, one which was reversible, one from which they could be "resurrected" or "born again". And it was a disease which those young people who followed his advice would never have to experience, at least so he thought.

Of course there may have been more to it than that. He talked of eternal life. There are three parts of our consciousness – our raw consciousness, our physical sensations and our ego, or conscious thinking self. Our raw consciousness is life itself, the shared consciousness of the entire universe. We have that in common, not just with all other humans, but with animals, plants, inorganic matter and all forms of energy. And since it is all one network of energy and energy can never be destroyed, it is eternal. Our physical sensations and our thoughts are individual to us and provide the shaping of raw consciousness. One day you will no longer have a body or a brain. There will be no "you" to feel or think anything. But raw consciousness has always been not "you" or "me" but "us" – or rather a big all-encompassing "me". We know what this means when we feel love. When we feel love we realise that "you" and "me" are really "us", that that which is individual to us in our consciousness is tiny compared to what is communal. What we fear when we fear death is the death of the ego, the lesser part of our consciousness.

So why did Jesus say that blasphemy against the holy spirit is the one thing which will not be forgiven? Dishonesty is the blasphemy against the holy spirit. Now, of course, we have all been dishonest at one time or another. He is no talking about something for which we are going to be condemned by a cosmic father figure. He is telling us that dishonesty is the one "sin" by which we condemn ourselves to the prevailing psychological disease. If we do something to harm other people then we may suffer the consequences. They may take revenge on us or shun us. But the universe won't punish us. The universe could give a shit what we do.

But access to the bliss of living in the real world is something we can deny to ourselves. If our mind is truthful, if it is grounded on the bedrock of what is, then there is no fog of confused dogma, self-deception or denial to stand between us and the joy, in all its forms, that the real world has to offer to us. On the other hand, when we start to tell lies we can create a hell for ourselves in which we live constantly in fear of being found out. And we cut ourselves off totally from the possibility of love, because love is open, honest, spontaneous communication. The real world is the only place were love can occur. Lies separate us. Love requires the common ground of truthfulness.

To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." They answered him, "We are Abraham's descendants and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?" Jesus replied, "I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. John 8:31-8:36, NIV

Often we are led to believe that the term "sin" refers to having a good time – sex, carousing, whatever. That's not what Jesus is referring to. What he means by "sin" is selfishness, and slavery to "sin" is neurosis. Neurosis is mental suffering. And, naturally, when we are suffering our attention is directed towards our self, in the same way our attention is directed towards our thumb when we hit it with a hammer. Sex and carousing are not sinful in this sense unless they are pursued selfishly and thus are a cause of division between individuals, or unless we feel guilty about them, in which case they feed back into our neurosis. And the answer to guilt is to be truthful in our assessment of our behaviour. If it does no harm to anyone then there is no reason to feel guilty, and if it is in the past then we can't change it and so, once again, there is no need to feel guilty. But the key here is "you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free". This doesn't mean any specific dogmatic "truth". It means simply the truth. To be able to see things realistically and to be truthful about one's self.

If we have built a cage of fabrications for ourselves, then the way out is to admit the truth about ourselves. To come out of the closet so to speak. The gay liberation movement have set a great example for this. And there are examples of liberating truth-telling throughout our culture. A recent example was the hilarious ending of the film The Campaign (2012) in which rival politicians compete to see who can be the most truthful. They admit all sorts of embarrassing things about themselves and find that the public love them for it.

"Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you." Matthew 7.1-7.2, NIV, 1984.

Jesus recognised that we were only being judged by ourselves and each other. God could give a shit. What mattered, if we were going to be free from our neurosis, was that we could return to honesty. But how could we be open and honest about ourselves in a social context in which we would be judged by our fellows for past actions or present feelings? Honesty was the one thing which could set us free, and dishonesty was the one thing which was condemning each new generation to the same fate. No matter what we did to hurt each other, without dishonesty, the effects would heal within a few generations or less, but if we couldn't be truthful, and each generation grew up surrounded by lies and half-truths, the suffering of humanity would just continue. So he tried to encourage the idea that people should accept their fellows regardless of what they might confess to, because to do otherwise was to exclude us all from a world in which we could live together in the bliss of reality. And he was also acknowledging that the mindset which judges others is one which opens itself up to self-judgement.

The human neurosis has been a terrible curse. At times it has made us do terrible things. But if we are willing to not bar the way back to Paradise – the paradise of the real world (the world that science is telling us so much about) – to anyone else, then we can all return there together.

If Moral Virtue was Christianity

Christ's Pretensions were all Vanity.

The Moral Christian is the Cause

Of the Unbeliever and his laws.

For what is Antichrist but those

Who against Sinners Heaven close.

William Blake, The Everlasting Gospel