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

Inner Space : The Final Frontier

Inner Space of... by Immy-is-Thinking

We respect the voyager, the explorer, the climber, the space man. It makes far more sense to me as a valid project—indeed, as a desperately urgently required project for our time—to explore the inner space and time of consciousness. Perhaps this is one of the few things that still make sense in our historical context. We are so out of touch with this realm that many people can now argue seriously that it does not exist. It is very small wonder that it is perilous indeed to explore such a lost realm.

R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, 1967

To read these words you are making use of the most superficial part of your psyche – your rational mind. Our capacity for reason – for logical thought and enquiry – is like a thin crust which has formed over the sometimes volcanic contents of our subconscious.

The most basic aspect of human consciousness is sense perception. This we share with other animals. Each of the five senses appeared somewhere far back in the evolutionary process.

Our capacity for reason is the most recent part of our consciousness to have developed and, except in a very rudimentary form, it appears to be unique to our species.

Emotions are another element of our consciousness. Emotions are a part of the make-up of the higher animals but they take a more complex form in our species because of our neurosis. We can only make guesses about the emotions felt by animals based on their behaviour. But the historical internal conflict which has made our species vulnerable to doubts about self-worth has made us prone to repress our emotions in a way of which we see no evidence in animals.

Then there is intuition, our ability sometimes to grasp something in a flash of insight without the need to resort to the gathering of evidence and the application of logic.

Reason is a discipline. It is something we were not born with but which we had to learn to apply to ourselves and the world around us. Our capacity for reason, as a species, is now highly developed but this is something which grew over a long period of time and seemingly against the odds. Science, as we know it, is a very recent development historically.

One of the most important tools for the operation of reason was spoken language. While spoken language was crucial for passing on knowledge and for cooperating in the development of understanding by engaging in dialogue, on a more basic level it was necessary for abstraction. Without words there are only things, not ideas about things, and reason is not the realm of raw reality, but of ideas about reality.

Before we had a spoken language, the language of our mind was one of symbols. When we had no word for heat, or for fire, and we were lost in the snow we would have simply expressed our need for heat to ourselves by imagining a fire.

This applies also to our development as individuals. As an infant our internal language consisted of symbols – our mother's breast, the sunshine, the water in our bath... Memories of our sense perception of these sorts of things were the substance of our thinking.

The evolution of our consciousness, both as a species and as individuals, was not a case of one form of consciousness replacing another but of a new layer being laid on top of the old.

So we are able to look at a woman's breasts and :

1. Simply see them (sense perception).
2. Associate them with a sense of comfort (symbolic pre-verbal thinking).
3. See them as a symbol of love (symbolic conceptual thinking).
4. Recognise them as the mammary glands of the human female (rational conceptual thinking).

Our ability to thinking rationally and logically can be disturbed by our emotions. We talk of being coldly rational for good reason. The state of insecurity which characterises our neurosis as a species, however, makes us potentially emotionally volatile and particularly prone to feelings of anger. This is why there is often a correlation between intellectual ability and emotional repression. The pursuit of rational knowledge can come at the price of alienation from our own emotions.

Similarly, strong emotions distract us from sense perception. We may not perceive the world around us with such sensitivity when we are angry or frightened or depressed for instance. And if we deal with our troubling emotions by repressing them, then we create a wall which also blocks out much of our sense perception.

The experience of catharsis, in which repressed emotions are allowed to safely come to the surface and the wall of repression is to some extent compromised, can be followed not just by a sense of great inner peace, but also by increased sense perception and greater capacity to think clearly and insightfully.

Sensitivity of sense perception can also be increased by short-circuiting the alienating tendencies of rational thought.

As I grew up, everything started getting grey and dull. I could still remember the amazing intensity of the world I'd lived in as a child, but I thought the dulling of perception was an inevitable consequence of age – just as the lens of the eye is bound gradually to dim. I didn't understand that clarity is in the mind.

I've since found tricks that can make the world blaze up again in about fifteen seconds, and the effects last for hours. For example, if I have a group of students who are feeling fairly safe and comfortable with each other, I get them to pace about the room shouting out the wrong name for everything that their eyes light on. Maybe there's time to shout out ten wrong names before I stop them. Then I ask whether other people look larger or smaller – almost everyone sees people as different sizes, mostly as smaller. 'Do the outlines look sharper or more blurred?' I ask, and everyone agrees that the outlines are many times sharper. 'What about the colours?' Everyone agrees there's far more colour, and that the colours are more intense. Often the size and shape of the room will seem to have changed, too. The students are amazed that such a strong transformation can be effected by such primitive means – and especially that the effects last so long. I tell them that they only have to think about the exercise for the effects to appear again.

Keith Johnstone, Impro : Improvisation and the Theatre, 1981

Using the wrong names for things can be enough to fracture the wall of rational thought which separates us from the full intensity of sensory awareness. The famous zen koan about the sound of one hand clapping works the same way.

But rational enquiry and logical thought are central to achieving understanding of our world and of ourselves. It alienates us from our deeper self and our full capacity for sensory experience only because of the emotional turmoil and repression which our historic neurosis brought with it. Learning to counter doubts about our self-worth with unconditional self-acceptance and finding cathartic release for our stockpile of buried emotions can not just bring us back the full vibrancy of life we experienced as children but also fully liberate our intellect.

So where does intuition come in? Intuition – the ability to find understanding of something in a flash of insight – only seems mysterious to us because of our neurotic state. Intuition is the mind's capacity to perceive wholes and integrate information into such wholes. It seems likely that our proto-human ancestors lived in the awareness that everything exists as a part of a larger whole. Similarly, in our individual lives, one of the first things a child has to learn is the difference between "me" and "not me". Our ape-like ancestors had no rational understanding of how nature worked but there was no reason for them to see themselves as separate from it. The fracture that grew in human society when the male task of protecting the group from predators and the female task of nurturing the young took the sexes down contradictory psychological paths, led to a neurotic condition characterised by dichotomies – divisions of the whole into opposing concepts. What had once been simply the whole, became split into male and female, good and evil, love and hate, reason and mysticism, and later, the right wing and the left wing in politics.

The more neurotic or internally split we became the harder it was for us to comprehend the operation of wholes. We had to be on one side or the other in the conflicts which raged in our society. To try to encompass the whole would have been to risk our sanity by taking the conflicts of the world within us. But still we have been capable of intuition, of flashes of insight which, like lightning, illuminated the darkened landscape buried beneath the storm clouds of our neurosis.

Unable to clearly perceive the nature of wholes, which seemed to condemn our insecure and divided selves, we set about examining our world mechanistically. Mechanism is an approach to enquiry which involves taking things apart, in reality or conceptually, to try to better understand their nature. It is a very useful approach, but it also has a major shortcoming. Reducing something to its constituent parts can tell us a lot about it but it cannot explain how it operates as a system, that is, as a whole. We tried to come to some understanding of how things worked as a whole, but in our divided state there was always a bias one way or the other which compromised our explanation. A physicist whose emotional make-up predisposed him to the idea of chaos might see entropy as the key factor in the universe while one who was more comfortable with the idea of order might emphasise the patterns to be found in apparently chaotic phenomena. Or a right wing biologist like Thomas Huxley might see nature as characterised by competition and aggression while his left wing counterpart Peter Kropotkin saw mutual aid between animals as being the more important phenomena. Any holistic theory would have to acknowledge and account for the apparent contradictions within the system, to show how the yin and the yang work together in a functioning whole. Science has progressed because it has been practised by a wide range of individuals who, like the rest of us, are all fucked up in different ways and can thus compensate to some extent for each other's blind spots.

Peter Kropotkin, author of Mutual Aid : A Factor of Evolution (1902)

The need for a holistic approach to scientific enquiry is often acknowledged. We are looking for a grand theory of everything. However a genuinely holistic approach is dependent on emotional integrity, something which is in short supply. Fortunately liberation from our neurosis is at our fingertips and with it we have the necessary foundations for a holistic revolution in science.

Our tool for exploring the inner space of our consciousness is imagination. Imagination works with symbols, the language of our pre-rational self. Symbols can reach parts of our deeper self which the reason cannot yet touch.

I'm somewhat uncomfortable about using terms like spirituality or the soul, because they can have bad associations. We might think of the soul as something which survives death or of the spiritual as something concerned with some astral realm or the supernatural. But the terms are also used in other contexts. We say that someone has spirit or we talk about the spirit of our times. We have soul music, that is a style of music designed to stir up deep feelings. What I mean by spirituality or soul is our capacity to feel a sense of wonder or the warmth of love, and also the imagination which has produced all of our great works of art. Nothing supernatural is to be implied in my use of these terms.

The imagination has a reality of its own. The same atheist who will express scorn for a religious person's "imaginary friend" will spend much of his time reading novels in the process of which he is emotionally engaging with the figments of someone else's imagination. What makes the imagination real is that it is expressing truths in the language of symbols.

This is what could be called poetic language. One of my favourite songs is John Hiatt's It Will Come Through Your Hands which was based on a dream that his wife had. It contains a reference to "an angel bending down to wrap you in her warmest coat". Now Hiatt could have written "the female aspect of your deeper self offers you emotional comfort" but if he had expressed himself that way the song would not give me chills and make me weep. There is no such thing as angels in external reality, but this kind of image speaks directly to our deeper pre-rational self, to our inner child. Similarly, I cry when I read Oscar Wilde's fairy story The Selfish Giant. I don't believe in the conventional Christian concept of a heaven we go to after we die, and yet the image of a small boy with wounds in his hands coming to take the giant to Paradise is one of the most moving I have encountered. The concept of being allowed into heaven is perhaps the deepest symbol we have in our culture for redemption, for the possibility of release from the guilt or ostracism or isolation which may result from our mistakes. Belief in the supernatural is not necessary in order to be effected by this symbol.

And here we have the danger of the imagination, and that is the possibility that we may mistake the symbol for an external literal reality. I've suffered for this mistake while in the grip of psychosis. The delusions of the psychotic episode are symbolic truths, but the psychotic individual is incapable of seeing them as anything other than factual reality. That is what we mean by the word delusion.

Everything which we find in our own mind is a part of us. But there are reasons why we might not want to believe this. Our neurosis is a divided state, and we may wish to deny those parts of ourselves which we have most deeply repressed. We may project these aspects of our own nature onto others. Our deepest self can be a source of comfort, though. There are angels as well as devils within us. Our reason for not wanting to own the buried comforting part of us – for believing that God and Jesus are "up in Heaven" or that our guardian angel has come from the astral plain – is that we doubt ourselves so much and are so frightened that we need to believe that something more mighty or magical than us can save us. The might and magic are us, but we don't want to know that. I remember once when my doctor told me that the dosage of anti-depressants I was on was not enough to be effective and that it was me and not the medication which was doing the work of pulling me out of the condition. "Please, say that isn't true," I pleaded. I needed to believe a pill could save me because I was certain I wasn't capable of saving myself.

If God is the creative principle of the universe of which we, like the rest of nature, are an expression, then for our early ancestors this nameless reality would have been the experiential given of their pre-language existence. They had no word for what they were, but what they were was God. But when neurosis set in we were no longer able to understand that we were still an expression of the creative principle even though our behaviour was becoming gradually more destructive. We were metaphorically speaking "cast out of Paradise". This was when we had to give a name to the creative principle and see it as something outside ourselves. At first we might have identified it with nature and worshipped it as a goddess. Later there would be many gods and goddesses representing different aspects of nature and of our own neurotic psychology. The more neurotic we became the more important it was for us to safely relegate our symbols for the divine to an ethereal plain far from the everyday realities of our existence. And the more fearful we became of this now terrible whole which seemed to condemn us for our divided state. Patriarchy brought with it the concept of a male God who sits in harsh judgement of our sins. Today atheism is on the rise. While this is partly a response to the irrational nature of religious dogma and the use of religion as a tool of oppression, it is also partly because we have become so incredibly insecure about our divided state that any acknowledgement that there is a unifying reality just gives us the shits.

There is no doubt, it seems to me, that there have been profound changes in the experience of man in the last thousand years. In some ways this is more evident than changes in the patterns of his behaviour. There is everything to suggest that man experienced God. Faith was never a matter of believing He existed, but of trusting in the Presence that was experienced and known to exist as a self-validating datum. It seems likely that far more people in our time neither experience the Presence of God, nor the Presence of His absence, but the absence of His Presence... The fountain has not played itself out, the Flame still shines, the River still flows, the Spring still bubbles forth, the Light has not faded. But between us and It, there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded.

R. D. Laing, Transcendental Experience in Relation to Religion and Psychosis

The reason why religious belief persists is because the religious symbols speak to our deeper selves. The mistake of many an atheist is to throw the baby out with the bathwater by denying the relevance of those symbols and his or her own need to come to terms with what lies beneath the superficial skin of rational thought. The error of the religious individual is to mistake the symbol for an external reality – to fail to understand that God and the Devil and the Holy Spirit and the living Jesus and all of the angels and demons are symbols for aspects of our own inner life. We can only have a strong emotional connection to anything, even something literally real such as a place or a person or an animal, because it corresponds to something which exists within us.

The demystification of religion is the next great step in human progress and evolution.

If science is to achieve a grand theory of everything then that must include the whole of ourselves. We have made great breakthroughs in our understanding of the functioning of the brain, but the science of the mind has been virtually abandoned. Freud, Adler, Jung, Reich, Laing and the rest of the pioneers of psychoanalysis tried to bring the scientific method to the study of the mind. This is a tremendously difficult enterprise because scientific objectivity is virtually impossible when the tool we are using is also the subject of the enquiry. So results were often rough and heavily biased by the obsessions and blind spots of the enquirers. But this is why science progresses as a collective enterprise with new investigators compensating for the limitations of those who came before. This has not been the case with the science of the mind. In the days of Freud there was a brave charge into the dangerous wilderness of our inner world. Now we are in retreat. Many in the field of psychology and psychiatry have consigned the insights of Freud and his followers to the garbage bin of history. Today, for instance, mental illness is generally considered to be a hardware problem (a chemical imbalance in the brain or a defect in the genes) rather than a software problem (an unhelpful pattern of thinking about ourselves arising from the pathological nature of our social context). Outside the psychological and psychiatric mainstream, Freud, Jung, Reich, Laing, etc., continue to be widely read because, for all their flaws, their writings are rich in meaning for those of us who seek self-understanding. One can only conclude that their rejection by the mainstream is due less to a lack of intellectual rigidity in their work, something which can be corrected by winnowing the wheat from the chaff, than to what Laing termed "psychophobia", a fear of the depths of our own minds. As long as a species-wide neurosis persists, each generation tends to be less secure than the last, and the emotional repression so often required for concentrated reasoning means that intellectuals tend to be among the most insecure. In Freud's day we were still secure enough to peek below the surface, though his work was viciously attack by the more insecure members of society, but by the 1960s, when Laing was at his peak, the psychiatrists themselves were in retreat. Laing was appreciated by his patients and by the counter-culture, but most of his colleagues perceived him as a dangerous madman.

R. D. Laing

The first thing we need to do to demystify religion is to untangle its two contradictory threads – the moralistic and the mystical. The symbols of religion speak to our deeper self, but our deeper self has different levels. At the core of our being, buried far beyond our conscious awareness though it may be, is our perceptual experience of oneness with nature and the universe. The mystical thread speaks to this layer. But that layer is buried beneath everything that we have repressed. The myth of Satan has persisted as a symbol which encompasses our relationship with repressed aggressive and selfish impulses and the sense that we could get what we want through dishonest means, Satan thus being referred to as "the father of lies". But religion is not just about symbols, but also often about rules, for instance large sections of the Old Testament are devoted to prescriptions on behaviour – what not to eat, what not to do on the Sabbath, how to treat one's slaves, which sexual practices to avoid, etc. Such rules are a response to our neurosis. They are a codification of the social conformity required by the most insecure members of the society who are the ones who most feel the need to control the behaviour of others. So demystifying religion has to begin by differentiating between the superficial and the profound. A passage in a religious text which says that we can eat sheep but not pigs is superficial and culture specific, whereas the statement that God is love goes to the very heart of our deepest nature as a species.

Mysticism is the expression of truths in the form of riddles or parables. The reason for this is two-fold. On the one hand the nature of the universe is such that patterns are repeated. So a symbolic expression of a pattern can be applied to more than one factual phenomenon or situation. But the other reason to express truths in a veiled form is as a safety mechanism to avoid causing offence or disturbance to the insecure. We can only solve a riddle or interpret a parable if we are emotionally ready to accept what it communicates to us. And here lies the principle danger inherent in demystification. Religion is all about having a relationship at a distance with something which terrifies us. If facing the truth about ourselves were easy we would not have become alienated. But understanding why we have become what we have become and that it does not reflect badly upon us can, in time, make the disentangling of our deeper selves – using the tool of reason that exists on the surface of our consciousness to understand what lies beneath – something which can be safely achieved.

Some of this may itself seem like mysticism, but it can be understood more concretely by considering the stages of our own individual development. Once we were a physical part of our mother. This corresponds to the time in the history of our species when we saw no separation between our selves and the natural system which nurtured us. Then the umbilical chord was cut. We still had not learned what it meant to be a separate entity but our connection was more tenuous, based on being held and feeding from the breast. This corresponds to the time when the males in our species began to feel a separation from oneness with nature brought on by the need to fight against and understand predators. We would have still felt a sense of connectedness because our society was centred around the nurturing females. Our capacity for intelligence and imagination had been liberated by having a longer nurturing period than all other animals. We were liberated from the predator/prey dichotomy which must make it harder for other animals to experience the oneness of nature. As social vegetarians living in an environment rich in food and where predators were, presumably, not a constant problem, we would have carried the sense of oneness that we all have at birth, when it is literal, into adulthood. The next stage for us as individuals was to come to see our mother and father as individuals separate from ourselves. This corresponds to the early days of our neurosis as a species when tension occurred between the hunting males and the nurturing females and we began to become more individualistic to deal with the fact that the tribe, that subset of nature of which we were more directly a part, was no longer itself a completely integrated whole. The first response when we are separated from something of which we were once a part, is to try to form a bond with it, to hang on to it. And so we loved and bonded with the parents of whom we were no longer a part. But we experienced frustrations and we had the need to experiment with self-regulated behaviour. Sometimes this led to conflict with our parents and they disciplined us. Here we have a replay of what happened to us as a species when our neurosis really came into play, men gradually took on the aggressiveness of the predators they were hunting, bringing that aggressiveness home to the tribe where the women were nurturing the children. This led to the women criticising the men, thus unavoidably exacerbating the conflict. When, as children, we became very rebellious or naughty, we had to learn to defer to adults. And this is what happened to our early ancestors as well, only there was no equivalent of the parent for them to defer to so they had to invent one, combining their sense of the oneness of nature with a memory of the nurturing parent of their own infancy. This was the mother goddess. Later, men would become so neurotic that they had to take control of society and the goddess was replaced by a god. Now God was The Father. To demystify religious dogma it is necessary to recognise where any particular belief or teaching is located in this evolutionary process. We have to allow for the level of neurosis and the cultural context. The more neurotic we become the more we need to put a distance between ourselves and the holy (literally, that which is whole). Thus the belief that gods and devils and ghosts have a literal existence in the external world. If we are insecure we have to believe that anything divine or demonic is not a part of us. And like me with my medication, we may need to believe in magic, to believe that Jesus was of virgin birth, walked on the water and rose from the grave. Only when we feel very secure in ourselves can we admit, as William Blake put it, that "everything that lives is holy."

William Blake

The demystification of religion is not just a death but also a resurrection, a fulfilment of all of its promises. What was once just a fairy story becomes a living breathing reality. Jesus said : "Though I have been speaking figuratively, a time is coming when I will no longer use this kind of language but will tell you plainly about my Father." John 16:25, NIV, 1984. The prophets of old experienced themselves as mouthpieces for the collective soul of the human race. The term "I" should thus not be seen as referring specifically to the individual doing the speaking. Jesus was telling his followers about the symbolic (i.e. figurative) nature of religion. The time was not yet right to speak plainly. Even speaking as profoundly and honestly as he did about the nature of the human neurosis in figurative terms was enough to get him crucified. What makes honesty now possible, in fact unavoidable, is the breakdown of society. In Jesus' day the authorities would kill and torture those who threatened to reveal that the society over which they ruled was founded upon a disease. Today the symptoms of social and personal collapse are so evident that denial is no longer a viable option. But, as Laing pointed out, a breakdown can also be a breakthrough, and this is where we stand, on the doorstep of the greatest breakthrough in human history.

You can also find this post on the How to Be Free forum here. You may find further discussion of it there.