BOOK REVIEW : The Murder of Christ by Wilhelm Reich

This book by controversial psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich is unlikely to appeal to traditional Christian believers. Reich theorises that Jesus must have had sex with one or more of the women who surrounded him during his ministry. If Jesus was a naturally loving individual, Reich concludes, he must have exhibited the free genital expression intrinsic to a healthy character structure. 

Reich was not a traditional believer. He views Jesus as a man whose presence had a profound impact on the world because he was so healthy and the rest of us are so sick. The very tendency to interpret his specialness as something otherworldly, something supernatural, and to create myths of magical events such as virgin birth and resurrection from the dead around his memory, is evidence of how alienated we are from the functioning of our own bodies. 

We are born with primary instincts which direct us toward loving behaviour through the pleasurable streaming of the life energy in our bodies. But we are born into a society which is antagonistic to such feelings. The frustration of the primary instincts causes them to be re-channelled into secondary drives. These can take many forms, including various kinds of egotism, aggression, anxieties, etc.

What Reich admits he cannot explain is how this occurred in the beginning. The story of Adam and Eve gives this change from healthy functioning to antagonism towards the free operation of the life force, i.e. God, a mythological expression. We are caught in a terrible trap and that trap is our own neurotic character structure, which alienates us from each other and from nature. In the first chapter Reich gives a description of The Trap and the various ways we try to reconcile ourselves to imprisonment within it. Religion is one source of solace, a promise of a life outside the trap after death.

But Reich presents Jesus as a man who never entered The Trap. A man with a healthy character structure, a man who unselfconsciously gave expression to our original loving instincts. His wisdom was the honest clear thinking anyone would exhibit who was not impeded by the fears and frustrations that come with being divided against one’s own life energy.

Central to this condition is fear of our sexual feelings. This is the hook on which our loving instincts get snagged.

In Western culture things have changed a lot since Reich’s death in 1957. We are more honest about sexuality. He played a role in opening things up. It was he who coined the term “Sexual Revolution”. But that doesn’t mean that the problem he highlighted is any the less with us. What he felt was repressed in us was not so much sex itself but the loving expression of “the genital embrace”. It’s possible to have sex several times a day and still be a denizen of The Trap. Reich uses the term “four-lettering” to describe compulsive neurotic sex - the “wham bam thank you ma’am” kind of copulation that is all the world away from the gentle process which builds slowly and naturally to an orgasm which frees the soul to meld with that of one’s partner.

Maybe attitudes to adolescent sexuality are more enlightened than they were in Reich’s day. He talks of the sexual agony of the adolescent. This is something I could identify with. Even though I had sexually liberal parents, I was greatly disturbed by the onrush of powerful sexual desires at puberty. I remember wishing at one point that my sexual desires could be medically removed, because they were such a source of terrible anxiety. Why? I don’t know. Reich felt that young people were psychologically damaged by the sex negative attitudes of parents, teachers and the church, which caused them to fight against and repress their sexual desires instead of expressing them in a healthy way. Thus one generation of sexual cripples cripples the next.

Once again, the fact that young people today are more sexually active would not necessarily be a positive sign for Reich. Compulsive unloving sex is just another neurotic symptom.

In this book, which was written only a few years before he was imprisoned and died, Reich doesn’t try to make a carefully reasoned or evidenced argument about human nature or about the life and death of Jesus. This is written more in the mode of the prophet crying in the wilderness. His early work was supported with references to case studies and anthropological research. Here he simply states what he strongly believes to be true and it is up to us to either feel that it makes sense of our own experience and what we have read in the gospels about Jesus or that it doesn’t. Given that, in the middle of his career, Reich claimed to have discovered scientific evidence of the life energy, which he called “orgone” - evidence which was taken seriously by very few other scientists - perhaps this less scientific approach is preferable. One need not agree with everything Reich says to gain from the stimulation of his iconoclastic thought. We all need to be shaken up from time to time.

The story of the life and murder of Christ is, arguably, the most important story in Western history. Even those of us who are not Christians know its major events. It permeates our culture. It doesn’t matter that Reich is no Biblical scholar. Even if this were a fictional story, it is one which embodies the central human dilemma. Reich is using the basics of the story as a way of contemplating and illustrating the human condition. And he doesn’t hide the fact that he identifies aspects of his own situation with that of Christ. He too, at least in his own mind, is a speaker of truths unwelcome to the authority figures of his time. He too had reluctantly taken on a leadership role.

Reich presents Christ as a man who only gradually discovers that he is special. He has to learn that others are not free in the way that he is. His psychological freedom and loving nature make him very attractive to those around him. He wants to help them. But he doesn’t understand that their character structure is such that they will suck up whatever love he shows them and then resent him because they can’t be like him. They will seduce him into becoming a leader - into marching on Jerusalem - but it will all be for nothing. He will be killed because those with a sick character structure always have a murderous resentment for those who are still truly alive inside themselves.

It is this tendency which is the central subject of the book. For Reich, the murder of Christ is something that happens all over the world ever day. Christ was an embodiment of our original loving instincts as they are expressed in the body. And the Murder of Christ continues through the stifling of the expression of those instincts in every child. Who is the murderer of Christ? Reich points the finger at all of us.

Like Listen Little Man!, another book Reich wrote in the latter part of his life when he was at the centre of much hostility, The Murder of Christ is often a harshly accusatory book, but we may gain much through our encounter with its thorniness. Today we know more about the chemistry of love. We know that there are forms of intimacy, sexual or otherwise, which cause our bodies to produce the chemical Oxytocin. The experience of this chemical in our blood stream, which produces warm feelings of affection and bonding and thus, no doubt, works to melt the rigidity of our angry, frightened or resentful ego structure, is perhaps what Reich and his patients experienced as the flow of “orgone energy”. Perhaps it is true that a significant element in the dark side of our life as humans - aggression, sexual predation, greed, depression, loneliness - arises through a fear of bodily sensations which, were we less troubled by them, could lead us to a more loving society.

Eva Reich, Jerome Siskind, Peter Reich, Wilhelm Reich and Ilse Ollendorff in Maine

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 19

“Non-Religious Pseudo-Idealistic Causes”

Because he feels that our whole human history has been driven by guilt - i.e. driven by our need to battle against, and eventually find liberation from, the guilt produced in our insecure minds by the condemnation of our genetic programming for selflessness, Griffith grades the level of alienation (departure from responsible truthfulness) involved in any movements which run counter (or try to run counter) to our destructive or anti-social tendencies according to how little emphasis they place on guilt (how “guilt-free” they are). This is faulty reasoning. If we understand that how truthful we are capable of being is dependent on how self-accepting, and thus free of dogmatic armouring we are, we can see that less guilt can tend to lead to more truthfulness in our thinking. This is not to deny that we may achieve unawareness of feelings of guilt by blocking them out or transcending them, and thus being less truthful in our thinking. But we can’t assume that that is always the case. Guilt-inducing forms of idealism, such as religion, are, in and of themselves, corrupting of self-acceptance and thus of our ability to think truthfully. This explains the spectacular levels of irrationality we often see exhibited by religious fundamentalists.

As I have said above, each of the causes he discusses have been pursued with varying degrees of idealism vs. pragmatism, dogmatism vs. free thinking. Each addresses itself to a serious problem. Sometimes the cure may be worse than the disease, but the successes have also to be acknowledged. Communism under Stalin was monstrously oppressive, but the socialists in Britain after the Second World War established a welfare state which greatly improved the lot of the poor and thus the health of that society as a whole. Having a healthy impact on society is less a case of being left wing or right wing and more a case of how self-accepting the individual is and thus how generous and open and non-oppressively they can pursue their ends. Stalin had very seriously compromised self-acceptance. He was a psychopath. That had nothing to do with his politics.

The New Age Movement

The New Age Movement actually tries to address the key problem for we humans, which is our psychological state. It has provided useful techniques for healing, but it has also often been given to high levels of irrationality and the cult of personality. It does have one major advantage over religion (apart from the absence of guilt) and that is that it is not authoritarian or dogmatic. It may be largely self-directed, but that means that it is relatively free of the sickness of trying to force one’s idealism on others.

Feminism

Griffith says : “Yes, the Feminist Movement maintained that there was no real difference between people - and especially not between the sexes.”

This seems a gross generalisation to me. There has been great diversity amongst feminists. I think some feel that there really is a major difference between men and women. Others feel that the difference in roles is more based on socialisation. But Griffith himself admits that women can perform very masculine roles, e.g. Margaret Thatcher.

What seems to bother him about the feminist movement is a lack of compassion for men, an inability to understand why we have been patriarchal. This is understandable when we consider the issue of armouring. Patriarchy is an armoured state. Armouring exists as a defence. To criticise the armoured individual is to increase their need for their armour. So, while feminism has been a shot in the arm for women, who have been oppressed by the patriarchal order for so long - while it gave them a strong sense of sisterhood - it didn’t make it easier for men to abandon patriarchal behaviour.

Environmentalism

Griffith says : “…the Environmental or Green Movement … removed all need to confront and think about the human state because all focus was diverted from self onto the environment — as the aforementioned quote acknowledged, ‘The environment became the last best cause, the ultimate guilt-free issue.’”

I was involved with the environment movement for a while, and I wouldn’t say that it was entirely “guilt-free” for me. The concept of “sinfulness” in religion can seem abstract, but there is nothing abstract about considering one’s carbon footprint, i.e. contribution to global warming. The degree to which people in the environment movement realistically address the problems which confront us varies. Sure you have people who just want to hug trees and put themselves in front of a bull dozer, but you have others who are trying to find practical pragmatic solutions to real problems.

Griffith is right that the root cause of our environmental problems is our own life style and thus our own psychology. I’m sure many, if not most, environmentalists would agree with that statement. But Griffith’s bullshit theory is not the answer to that problem.

A sign of how uncritically Griffth will use a quote which seems to support something he is trying to say is that he uses this quote from Ray Evans, whom he refers to as “an Australian business leader and political activist” : “‘Environmentalism has largely superseded Christianity as the religion of the upper classes in Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States. It is a form of religious belief which fosters a sense of moral superiority in the believer, but which places no importance on telling the truth.” As usual he insists on putting words in other people’s mouths by making it “…telling the truth [about the real issue of our corrupted condition]” Whether Ray Evans actually believes we have a “corrupted condition” we don’t know.

So who is this Ray Evans who thinks that telling the truth is so important? According to Source Watch : “Evans was Executive Officer at Western Mining Corporation (WMC) from 1982 until 2001, during which time he was a close associate of WMC CEO Hugh Morgan. "My role was to engage in the culture wars and provide him with feedback," Evans says of his work for Morgan.”

So he has been a representative of the mining industry which is threatened by the arguments of environmentalists.

Does he have a commitment to telling the truth?

The quote Griffith uses comes from a document Evans wrote in 2006 called Nine Facts About Climate Change (The Lavoisier Group).

I’m not a climate scientist. Neither is Evans. But if you want to decide for yourself how good Evans is at telling the truth, you might want to read that document and then read a critique of it which seems to fairly convincingly expose it as composed mostly of, often ludicrous, misinformation. I’ve only read a little of Green Scientist’s critique, but enough to decide who I think has the most respect for the truth :

http://n3xus6.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/ray-evans-nine-facts-about-climate.html

http://n3xus6.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/ray-evans-nine-facts-about-climate_10.html

http://n3xus6.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/ray-evans-nine-facts-about-climate_18.html

http://n3xus6.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/ray-evans-nine-facts-about-climate_21.html

http://n3xus6.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/ray-evans-nine-facts-about-climate_23.html

In his youth Griffith was himself a member of the environmentalist movement. His search for the Tasmanian Tiger was an example of the more escapist form of environmentalism in which the real issues of human behaviour are left behind.

Political Correctness

There is good reason to criticise political correctness. It is a censorship of the ability to express anything other than positive feelings in many situations, and the negative feelings which are not expressed or acknowledged will tend to build up. The sickness festers below the surface when what is needed is for it to be drained off through healthy forms of expression and thus be able to heal. Politically incorrect humour provides an important safety valve here. 

But Griffith goes overboard in his tirade : “This is not to say that in a critical battle, such as the one humanity has been involved in, showing care and compassion towards those who were suffering from the effects of the battle was not important. It was very important, because although we have all been involved in the upsetting battle, selflessness is still, as has been repeatedly emphasised, what binds wholes together; it is the glue within humanity’s army. However, while caring for those struggling to keep up was important, it was obviously more essential to support those on the frontline who were still carrying on the battle to ensure the war was ultimately won.”

This makes sense if humanity was actually engaged in a collective battle, as Griffith’s central thesis says, but I don’t believe this is true. Each of us has been engaged in our own private battle, while giving and receiving support from others. That battle has been the battle to maintain our self-acceptance, and we don our armour to fight that battle. In Griffith’s conception, the more combative right-wing members of society have been bravely fighting for us all. But, in truth, this combativeness has been a particular approach to dealing with the insecurity which comes from criticism, especially from idealism. How much we contributed to society was dependent on how generous or creative we were. Combativeness has always been an insecurity-based sickness which has drained energy from society. But we couldn’t help but become combative when criticism, often in the form of idealism, undermined our self-acceptance. Griffith is right that the combative need our concern as well, but not as loyal attendants and supporters of their campaign. We need, rather, to recognise that they are victims of their own insecurity and need healing and liberation as much as anyone else.

We can see so clearly in statements like the following that what Griffith is seeing in “pseudo-idealists” is a projection of his own denied self. Deep down he knows what he is and what he has been engaged in, but unable to face the truth he sees it as a paranoid projection on the world around him : “Their conduct was completely selfish and not at all the selfless, idealistic behaviour they made it out to be and deluded themselves it was.” How many socialists, feminists, environmentalists etc. do you know who believe themselves to be “selfless”? But we do know someone who believes himself to be selfless.

Postmodernist Deconstructionist Movement

I don’t know a lot about this, so I’ll try to wing it.

Griffith says : “While language is artificial it nevertheless models a real world, so to say that just because language is artificial there can be no universal truths is ridiculous, but again, when the need to escape the truth becomes desperate, any excuse will do; just baffle the world, and yourself, with intellectual baloney, such as this from Jacques Derrida, one of the high priests of deconstructionism, who gave this highly intellectual (instinct/soul/truth-less) description of why truth supposedly doesn’t exist: ‘Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written, as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring’”

The way I understand what Derrida is saying is this : If you take any idea out of its context it loses its meaning. Therefore context is all that really matters.

This is the essence of holism. Nothing can be understood except within the context of a greater whole. Contrary to his claims, Griffith isn’t a holist and doesn’t understand holism.

But doesn’t what Derrida says sound like a critique of Griffith’s method, i.e. to take quotes out of context and try to build his own picture of the truth with them?

This is the way I understand post-modernism or deconstructionism. Imagine there is a murder. The police are investigating. There are ten witnesses, but no video footage of what happened. As usually happens, everyone’s story is markedly different. How are the police going to come to the most accurate understanding of what happened? They first record everybody’s narrative. Then they find out more about the lives and characters of the witnesses. By understanding the context in which their narrative fits - what their biases are - they try to detect what factors might be causing each person’s narrative to be distorted in a particular way. And so they deconstruct their narratives in order to be able to deduce from them a more objective account of what actually happened.

In a way, by trying to interpret the things people say in the context of how innocent or upset he feels they are, Griffith is himself practicing a crude form of deconstructionism.

Griffith makes the complaint we so often hear about right-wing conservatives being underrepresented in the national public broadcasting networks of the UK and Australia. I think this is because their tendency to cling in a reactionary manner to outdated dogmas makes them less capable of commentating in a meaningful way about the changing realities of the world. (Just look at right-wing American commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter, who are not capable of any kind of coherent analysis and can only give in to their insecure need to spew venom.) They are part of the old world which is dying, not the newer, healthier world which is being born. Which is not to say that more left leaning journalists can’t sometimes be superficial.

Griffith says : “…finally, the totally dishonest, completely alienated, definitely autistic postmodernist movement; again, ‘autism’ is ‘a complex mental structure insuring against recurrence of…unthinkable anxiety’ — in this case, ‘anxiety’ about being extremely corrupted/upset/hurt/soul-damaged in your infancy and childhood.” Again we can see Griffith’s projection of his own situation onto the world, here in a particularly suggestive form.

Why would he feel that post-modernism, i.e deconstructionism, poses such a terrible threat to the world? Because his “liberating understanding of humanity” might be deconstructed. It is his “autistic” “complex mental structure” which is the only thing standing between himself and some terrible anxiety he experienced in his infancy or childhood. What that was we can only guess, but his tendency to see so many things as “an attack on innocence” is suggestive.

Death by Dogma

Griffith has been blind to the subtleties of these social phenomena, and has lumped them altogether as a “death by dogma” which would “crush the human face forever”, because he is seeing himself reflected in the mirror of the world. Those of us who are not blinded by our own delusions can see that, while there are some within these movements who dogmatically insist on restricting freedoms in favour of an idealist conception of how the world should be, this is the exception rather than the rule. It is Griffith who is promoting a rigidly idealism-demanding dogma, which, were we to fall for it, would indeed “crush the human face forever”. While I’m sure he believes in it himself, his “defence for humanity” is a fraud.

“The Abomination That Causes Desolation”

Griffith believes that “the abomination that causes desolation”  which the prophet Daniel warned about, and which was also referred to by Jesus, is a reference to what he terms “pseudo-idealism”, i.e. socialism, feminism, environmentalism, political correctness, post-modernism, etc.

I won’t deal with the Daniel version as that is pretty long and complicated.

Here is the passage where he cuts and pastes together bits from Matthew 24 & Mark 13, with his own extrapolations :

“Referring to ‘the sign…of the end of the age’, Christ said that ‘At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other [a great deal of upset will develop], and may false prophets [pseudo idealists claiming to be leading the way to peace and a new age of goodness and happiness for humans] will appear and deceive many people…even the elect [even those less alienated, still relatively sound and strong in soul, will begin to be seduced by pseudo idealism] — if that were possible. See, I have told you ahead of time…Wherever there is a carcass [the extremely upset], there the vultures [false prophet  promoters of delusion and denial to artificially make the extremely upset feel good] will gather. Because of the increase in wickedness [upset], the love of most will grow cold. So when you see the “abomination that causes desolation” spoken of through the prophet Daniel, standing where it does not belong [throwing out real religion and falsely claiming to be presenting the way to the human-condition free, good-versus-evil-deconstructed, post-human-condition, better, correct world] — let the reader understand — then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let no-one on the roof of his house go down to take anything out of the house. Let no-one in the field go back to get his cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days of great distress [mindless dogma and its consequences] unequalled from the beginning of the world until now — and never to be equalled again. If those days had not been cut short [by the arrival of the liberating understanding of the human condition], no-one would survive’.

Griffith here uses this bit from Mark : “…So when you see the “abomination that causes desolation” spoken of through the prophet Daniel, standing where it does not belong…” But the equivalent passage in Matthew 24:15, says “So when you see standing in the holy place ‘the abomination that causes desolation,’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel…”

We’ve seen how Griffith is projecting his situation onto the world. We have also seen that idealism has been a thought virus which has been the source of all of humanity’s problems. It is thus “the abomination that causes desolation”. How is it “in the holy place”? Griffith identifies idealism with holism. The word “holy” means “whole” or “of the whole” and holism is the acknowledgement of wholes. But idealism and holism are incompatible. Idealism is dualistic - it is founded in the division of behaviour into “good” and “bad”. Holism is necessarily pragmatic, inclusive rather than exclusive.

So why would this be such a problem? If we were to be convinced by Griffith’s argument that idealism is in our genes, then we would have no defence against it and its corrosion of our self-acceptance, and thus our capacity for love. Destroy our capacity for love and you destroy the human race. To speak metaphorically we would have been branded by Satan for eternal damnation.

The Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living

Griffith’s answer to the question “where to from here” is what he calls “The Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living” - basically an appeal to repression and transcendence of our “upset” in deference to his view of what an ideal world should be like. He insists that this is not a new religion, because it is not deference to a deity but to “knowledge”, i.e. his crackpot theory.

When I became a “life member” of Griffith’s organisation it was called The Centre for Humanity’s Adulthood. Then it became The Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood. At that time they were the subject of a current affairs program which, by implication, presented them as a cult. They fought a long legal battle to defend themselves against “defamation”. They won, at least on some key points. Later they changed their name again to The World Transformation Movement.

Ironically, in 1987, Stuart A. Wright, in his book Leaving Cults: The Dynamics of Defection, used the the term “World-Transforming Movements” to describe certain kinds of cults, including The Children of God, The Unification Church, and Hare Krishna.

This summary of some of the defining features of such organisations is worth thinking about :

http://jmscult.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=a6bf7b2947d8cc56b272fcdf3ab92c5e&topic=856.msg2099#msg2099

Griffith says : “Regarding the degree to which we should each investigate these explanations, obviously it is necessarily to sufficiently verify to our own satisfaction that they are the liberating understandings of the human condition that the whole human race has been tirelessly working its way towards for some 2 million years — but we shouldn’t risk investigating them to the extent that we start to become overly exposed and confronted by the truths they reveal… The more intelligent and/or the more educated in the human-condition-avoiding, denial-based, mechanistic, reductionist paradigm, who pride themselves on being able to think and study and grasp new ideas, will initially be especially tempted to study these understandings beyond what their varying levels of security of self can cope with, but it won’t be long before everyone learns that such an approach is both psychologically dangerous and irresponsible and, in any case, unnecessary.”

As you can tell from my analysis here, I have looked deeply into these ideas. Griffith is not wrong about the psychological danger involved in doing so. I ended up in a mental hospital strapped down to a hospital bed after a suicide attempt. I was begging the doctors and nurses to kill me because I felt that the whole history of humanity was going to come to nothing entirely because of a failure on my part. Griffith’s ideas are incredibly toxic if you truly absorb them and take them on board. The combination of extreme idealism and the false frame of reference created by his attempt at explaining our psychology can easily put a person in a sanity-destroying double bind situation. The good news is that I gradually picked up the pieces of my shattered self, came to understand what was wrong with Griffith’s theory, and in so doing found security, happiness, freedom from depression (which had plagued me since my teens) and the creative inspiration to pursue my writing.

I highly recommend reading praising reviews of Griffith’s books and also watching the videos on his website in which members of the WTM talk about what his ideas mean to them. I think you will see evidence of a general tendency to praise his “understandings” to the roof, but with little evidence of a fluent understanding of them. I don’t blame them. Don’t go to hell if you can avoid it. For me it is fine. I can now study Griffith’s work all day with no problems, because I know which bits are truthful and which bits are not. In fact I understand Griffith’s work better than he does himself, because I am on the outside of his psychosis looking in. He has to be evasive of things which I don’t.

A Summing Up

What makes Griffith’s writing hard to dismiss is that there is so much truth in it.

He says : “Similarly, the Bible states that ‘the truth will set you free’ (John 8:32), and while we know this statement to be truth, the problem has been that all the partial truths — such as that humans are the most brutal and destructive animals to ever walk the earth — condemned our upset state, fuelling it further, which means that, ultimately, for the truth to genuinely set us free, it had to be the full truth that explains why humans are all good and not bad.”

The central problem with Griffith’s work is that his “defence for humanity” is not true. This means that he is bombarding us with what he calls “partial truths” which “condemn” us without having made it safe to do so. It may feel safe to him, because he doesn’t see himself as being in the category of any of those who might be “condemned”. He is not aggressive. He is not a materialist. He doesn’t recognise himself as being alienated. And he is certainly not a mother whose inability to love her child has rendered that child autistic. He is not being “condemned”, at least on a conscious level, by these grim facts. He feels that it is now safe for him to confront us with these hard to face facts and also idealistic expectations, because he has provided us with a compassionate dignifying understanding of why we are so fucked up, an explanation which “proves”  that we are all immensely heroic.

What he is trying to do is to provide a collective character armour for all of humanity. Even if it were not a bullshit explanation for our behaviour, what we need is not more armour. What we need is that our enemy be killed so that it is safe to leave our armour behind. And the enemy we have to kill is idealism. What we need is to liberate our capacity for love (including forgiveness). Idealism - such as the expectation that we should be “selfless” - is corrosive to our self-acceptance, our love of ourselves, and thus of our ability to love others. It is love (unconditional self-acceptance and acceptance of others) which will give us the ability to face all of those grim facts. Once a mother realises that her child doesn’t expect her to be perfect and that the cultivation of self-acceptance can heal any psychological damage she might inadvertently do to her child’s emotional make-up, she will be able to relax and open up to a fuller and more joyful loving relationship with that child. We have been too loaded down with grim facts while having the nourishment we need to face them sapped by idealistic expectations.

It is true that “the truth will set you free”, because it is our lies which imprison us and separate us from each other, but before we can become truthful we have to become unconditionally self-accepting, so that we are invulnerable to criticism or feelings of shame about those aspects of ourselves or our situation we have been trying to hide with those lies. And an accepting and forgiving attitude towards others also makes it easier for them to put aside their defences and be set free.

Photo from World Transformation Movement Facebook page

Book Review - Going Clear : Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright

This book had a personal fascination for me as I've been compared to L. Ron Hubbard.

O.K. It was facetiously by my flatmate, who has been known to refer to me as L. Ron and his Church of Wanketology, and by an impassioned atheist on a discussion board who saw some similarity between some of my beliefs and those of Dianetics. Perhaps this sort of thing happens to all authors of self-help literature, even when, as with myself, they have no “followers" let alone their own empire as Hubbard did.

To me, the story of Scientology is a compelling cautionary tale also because I was for a few years a student of another individual (who shall remain nameless) who, like Hubbard, claimed to have achieved a scientific understanding of human nature which could save the world. He came to believe that he had a special ability to perceive the truth and to think holistically. Unlike Hubbard, or myself, he is a scientist who accumulated a vast body of evidence for aspects of his theories. And, also unlike Hubbard, he did not turn his campaign to save the world into a money-making scheme. He did sue his critics, but unlike Hubbard and his successor David Miscavige, he did it with the honest intention of correcting misperceptions about himself and his followers. Hubbard's avowed strategy was to use legal action as a method of intimidation.

The reason I mention these things is that my experiences have led me to think a lot about how the individual who wishes to play a role in the psychological healing of society should behave. My own writing has been a product of my personal struggles and what I have learned from others. To some extent it is an expression of things I have been trying to give rational voice to since my teens, to some extent it is a response to my would-be guru friend and to some extent it is a synthesis of the ideas of others which have been important to me.

My experience with my friend, however, greatly affected my presentation of my ideas. To my mind, he went wrong in two key ways. He stopped questioning himself and thus allowed his theories to become a dogma and he came to view himself as “a prophet" and became intolerant of dissent in his organisation. Thus he became surrounded by a small group of people who, I believe, if it were a question of trusting themselves or trusting him would trust him. He's no Hubbard. His organisation has remained small and presumably had little impact on society. But in the case of Hubbard we can see these problems writ large. Not wanting to fall into this trap, I reminded myself that I might not be the best judge of my own ideas. I view an idea much like a potentially beneficial virus. It is something which, if it proves useful, will spread and take on a life of its own irrespective of the individual in whose mind it first appeared. If we have to put too much effort into persuading people of something then perhaps it is because it is not true. So I did two things to correct for these potential problems. I emphasised in the presentation of my writing that I make no claims that anything I say is necessarily true and that I claim no authority of any kind. And I gave myself a dismissive pseudonym – Joe Blow – so that, in the perhaps unlikely event that my writing strikes a major chord, there can be no cult of personality. Hardly anyone knows who I am. In this way, any ideas I present stand or fall on their own, and there is no need for me to try to maintain some kind of control over how people respond to them, something which, while it may have made Hubbard a rich man, was inseparable from his life of paranoia and criminality. He died a broken man, hiding from the authorities.

Wright does a brilliant job of making the phenomenon of Scientology understandable by placing it in its historical context, giving due attention to the complexity of Hubbard's personality and the impressive scope of the dogma he created and showing, through the experiences of ex-members, most notably screenwriter/director Paul Haggis, an insight into the movement's appeal as well as how it went badly wrong for so many.

The search for understanding of human nature and an effective form of therapy for the human race was the most important task before us in the late forties when Hubbard developed his theory of Dianetics and it is still the most important task before us today. But Hubbard was certainly not in a position to achieve this single-handedly, which is what he believed he could do. His methods were not bad methods - introspection, imagination and automatic writing. When psychology is the area of enquiry there is no such thing as objectivity. We have to use our mind to understand our mind. The object and the subject are the same. It is even questionable whether we can be truly objective even in areas as far from ourselves as physics and chemistry. The human dilemma is that we are so insecure in ourselves that we are always looking for reassurance in the phenomena around us. If our neurosis makes us competitive then we see more competition than cooperation when we look at the natural world. If even there we cannot be unbiased how can we look honestly into ourselves? And yet we must. We must understand our disease - the psychological disorder which has been with us since before recorded history. In our insecure state we try to tell ourselves we are not sick. We look for some precedent in the rest of nature for our aggression, our pathological competitiveness, our oppression of our fellows, our greed. We can try to excuse our patriarchal behaviour by pointing to alpha male chimpanzees, or our wars by pointing to territorial disputes between hungry groups of animals, etc., but we have to hunt pretty hard and ignore an awful lot to present this flimsy case. There is no precedent in the rest of nature for the sickness which has pushed us to the brink of self-annihilation. When Hubbard came up with Dianetics the imminent threat seemed to be nuclear war. Would Dianetics (later Scientology) save us from blowing ourselves up? That may be less on our minds now, but our population continues to grow exponentially while we are caught up in addictions which are fast destroying our life-support systems and we have an economy completely dependent on fostering those unsustainable addictions. We are in deep shit. The need for rapid psychological healing and resultant cultural change of the most revolutionary kind is far greater than it was in Hubbard's time. And this is part of what makes the story of Scientology such an important one. If we wish to achieve something we must learn from other's failed attempts.

If Hubbard had invented Dianetics in our day it would almost certainly not have flourished as it did in his time. There is too much competition. There is a New Age guru on every corner. But in the 1950s there was almost no counter-culture. It's not hard to see why some intelligent individuals believed that Dianetics was the only hope for human survival. What else was there? There was psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, who probably had the deepest genuine understanding of the human dilemma, what he termed “the emotional plague", but he would die in 1957. I can't think of anyone else who had a grand radical vision for the rehabilitation of the human race.

The problem we have in understanding ourselves is one of honesty. If we can think honestly there is no great mystery about the basics of human behaviour. If we do something we are capable of being aware of why we do it. But we grow out of the habit of thinking honestly early in our lives, and this is at the heart of our problem as a species. To the degree that we can be honest with ourselves, introspection is an essential way of learning about ourselves. But the free exercise of the imagination, and techniques like automatic writing (which Hubbard appears to have used frequently) are ways in which we can sometimes short circuit the mind's self-censorship and dishonesty. Others sometimes make use of psychoactive drugs.

The key problem with Hubbard's attempt to excavate some grand understanding of human nature and psychological therapy from his own imagination was that he appears to have been a pathological liar. Exploration and honesty are the two things needed for this project. Hubbard was pretty brave and enthusiastic about the former, but he fell down on the latter. And where things went badly wrong is that life and society provided him with no reality check. There were plenty of people who needed to believe that someone could lead them out of the human dilemma. What we believe often has more to do with what we need to believe than it does with logic or reason. I know from my own experience of psychosis how easy it is to believe something, even something ludicrous, because of the power with which it bursts into the mind. But I had reality checks in the form of everyone around me who realised I was crazy, not to mention anti-psychotic drugs. If I had been like Hubbard, surrounded by disciples hanging on my every word, I might still believe those things now. I learned that, while the imagination is inescapably prophetic, it speaks in symbols not facts.

Where conventional religion explained the unprecedented nature of the human disease by introducing the supernatural – we were cursed by God or possessed by evil spirits – Hubbard introduced science fiction – our bodies are a place of exile of extraterrestrial beings. It is important to keep in mind, however, that the most bizarre aspects of his explanation were kept secret from initiates until they were already integrated into the movement and had experienced, or felt they had experienced, benefits from its therapy.

If Hubbard's ideas of therapy had absolutely no practical value then it is doubtful his movement would have taken off. But he borrowed ideas from Freudian psychotherapy and adapted them into a kind of fast food equivalent of psychoanalysis. Freud put forward the credible idea that when we have a block in our memory it is because of an association with something unpleasant, possibly a memory of a bad experience. Hubbard turned this into a crusade to produce “clears", individuals whose traumatic blocks had been removed, allowing them, among other things, to have total recall of everything they had experienced in their lives. He announced a lot of “clears", none of whom showed any signs of such recall or any other special abilities. Desensitisation is a major part of the Scientology strategy, and this is something which has a proven track record in conventional psychotherapeutic practise for the treatment of phobias and obsessive compulsive disorder. I think the appeal of Scientology can probably be summed up by a combination of potentially effective techniques (including the kind of positive thinking also preached by people like Anthony Robbins), show business razzle-dazzle with e-meters etc., and community. You might get better therapy from a university-trained psychotherapist, but it would be a private process, you wouldn't be a member of a therapy community.

Wright gives a disturbing account of the sick goings on amongst the Sea Org, the clergy of the Church of Scientology – including the inflicting of punishment in the form of imprisonment and virtual slavery. While some members make a break for freedom, most accept their punishment as justified. Perhaps the development of such a culture shouldn't surprise us. Scientology lures people in by playing on their insecurities. While emotional insecurity turns some of us into paranoid control freaks, more often it leads us to seek some sense of security through submission to authority. Perhaps the most reliable indication that someone is emotionally healthy is that they interact on a basis of equality with all of their fellows. It would be surprising if a society which set out to attract the insecure didn't end up a kind of perfect storm of dominance and submission. Of course this would not be the case if it was the Bridge to Total Freedom it claims to be.

It is never enough to simply criticise toxic social institutions. To do so can play into their hands. They can portray this as persecution. And it does us little good to distance ourselves from such institutions as if we were superior to those who comprise them. We need to understand them, because it is only full understanding which can bring healing. Wright places the story of L. Ron Hubbard and the religion he gave birth to into its social and historical context, and he makes no attempt to deny anybody's experience. We read of horrific abuse of power, we read of space opera become dogma, we read of any number of fabrications and hypocrisies, but there is no attempt to exclude the possibility that many Scientologists have gained benefits from the church's therapy techniques, whether those benefits come directly from the techniques or from the placebo effect. In fact this element is necessary to an understanding of the relative popularity of the movement.

Some see L. Ron Hubbard as simply a clever con artist - a snake oil salesman who hit the big time. This is not the Hubbard we encounter in Wright's book. We find a deeply flawed and tormented individual who made a desperate attempt to find understanding of human nature and a method to heal our propensity for self-destruction. Wright gives plenty of evidence to back up the view that Hubbard believed in the essence of his dogma for the whole of his life. This doesn't preclude an addiction to wealth and power or a complete inability to live by or realise the supposed benefits of that dogma. One could make a comparison with the upper echelons of the Catholic Church where hypocrisy, corruption, extravagant luxury and abuse of power do not preclude the possibility that those who behave in this way may genuinely believe they are God's representatives on Earth. Hubbard was an addictive personality - and part of what he was addicted to was his own delusional belief system.

This is also the story of Scientology's attempt to seduce Hollywood and of the thuggish rule of Hubbard's successor, David Miscavige. If you want to gain some insight into how John Travolta and Tom Cruise became Scientology's poster boys, you will find it here.

Lawrence Wright tells his story like a novelist, but the thoroughness of his research and the fact that he is such a skilled devil's advocate, makes this a powerful expose which will no doubt do great and necessary damage to the Church of Scientology.

Parental Guilt and Mental Illness

Image credit: makler0008 / 123RF Stock Photo

At one point, during the early days of my bouts with severe adolescent depression, I accused my parents of being responsible for my mental illness. Looking back I hate to think what it must have been like for them. My father was a psychologist and my mother a nurse. They were completely supportive of me even when I made this accusation. And I know they were terribly frustrated that they couldn't do more to help me than they did.

I've always been a big admirer of the psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who, like his predecessors in the psychoanalytic field, viewed mental illness as something which is socially generated. Laing did a lot of work on trying to understand schizophrenia as an adaptation to unhealthy forms of social interaction in families. Critics accused him of blaming parents for the fact that their children became mentally ill. He tried to point out that he didn't feel it was anyone's fault, but that the problem had to be treated holistically and that other family members also needed the therapist's help. More recently the theory that mental illness is socially generated has fallen into disfavour. The concept of mental illness arising through genetically determined chemical imbalances has become the predominant one. I believe that one reason for this is that it is comforting to parents. There is no doubt that mood changes and anxiety states are expressed through changes in the brain chemistry, but I see no reason to think that those mood changes or feelings of anxiety are not responses to social experiences and unhealthy learned ideas.

But perhaps we can untie this knot that was at the heart of Laing's rejection.

The negative feedback loop is central to the problem of mental illness. A simple example of this would be the situation of a young woman who feels she is unattractive and seeks comfort from her depressed feelings by over-eating. The more she eats, the fatter she gets, and the fatter she gets the more unattractive she feels, and the more unattractive she feels, the more depressed she gets, and the more depressed she gets the more she feels the need for the comfort of food. This kind of pattern can be found in depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, phobias and, I believe, schizophrenia.

Now lets go back to me as a depressed teenager. I remember what it felt like, but when it comes to understanding the thinking which underlay it I have to speculate. This can seem false to me. I put myself back into the situation and look at it almost as if it were a mathematical equation to be worked out. But I think this is part of the nature of depression. Thinking is the key, but sometimes it is below the level of consciousness. We spend so long thinking about how we are depressed, that the short time in which we had the thoughts which generated the depression are lost to us in retrospect.

There were no doubt many factors involved. But lets just isolate the question of my parents and feelings of guilt, and lets assume that they did feel guilty about the fact that I was depressed. I don't know if this was true in their case. But parents generally have a strong predisposition to feelings of guilt even if they don't have a child with a mental illness. Central to the human neurosis is that we are incredibly hard on ourselves as individuals. We very easily resort to punishing ourselves if we don't meet our high self-expectations and this must be even harder to resist when we are responsible for the raising of children.

Image credit: goodluz / 123RF Stock Photo 

What if I felt very unhappy about something and my unhappiness made my parents feel unhappy. Not knowing how to shake my unhappiness, and noticing that it was making my parents unhappy, I would have become even more unhappy. If my parents felt, on some level, that they might have made a mistake which led to my depression, then they would feel guilty. I would notice that they were feeling guilty and feel that it was my fault and thus become more depressed.

Since feeling guilty is a problem for parents anyway, perhaps we should tackle it head on rather than trying to run from it.

The reason that guilt has been a persistent problem for humans is that we have a strong cultural belief that it is appropriate. We feel that we are supposed to feel guilty if we make a mistake or accidentally hurt someone's feelings. We feel we would be heartless or selfish if we didn't have these feelings. But the truth is that guilt is a profoundly selfish emotion. When we feel guilty it becomes all about us. Am I good enough? Our attention is on ourselves not those we feel we have let down. This is natural. Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering individual. Make ourselves suffer and we will make ourselves more selfish. If we want to not be selfish, then we have to let go of guilt and practise unconditional self-acceptance. We always do the best we can in the circumstances. What keeps us from doing better is that we won't accept this.

If the cause of mental illness is negative feedback loops, then the solution is positive feedback loops. If we accept ourselves unconditionally and allow ourselves plenty of the healing balm of pleasure, then our warm, loving and playful nature will reassure others and help them to heal. Even if some people have problems which can't be fully solved, we will help to take them as far as they can go.

Image credit: goodluz / 123RF Stock Photo

Did You Used to Be R. D. Laing? (1989)

R. D. Laing is one of my heroes. Luckily, a few years before he died, a television documentary was made about him which gives an inspirational portrait of what he was like - presenting his ideas to audiences, in more intimate conversation and working with patients. Laing's ideas about mental illness and interpersonal communication were a major influence on me in writing How to Be Free.

The documentary was available on YouTube when I made this post. Now only a couple of clips are available there, but you can buy it on DVD :

http://www.directcinema.com/category/186/32

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