Critical Idealism and the Inner Darkness

Photo by Aberdeen82

I want to present a simple model of an aspect of human psychology in order to test to what degree it maps onto our own experience and our observation of the behaviour of others.

When we feel accepted, our tendency is to open up to greater flexibility, tolerance and generosity.

When we are, or feel, criticised, we may respond in a variety of ways - from withdrawal and depression to anger, defiance and hostility. The potential to respond creatively and adaptively lies on a narrow band between the negative passive and negative aggressive responses.

If we adopt a critical form of ideology, we carry the destabilising tendency of criticism within us. It may be an ideology which criticises us directly or it may be one which criticises someone else. But very often even the latter will be implicitly critical of us, for instance criticism of the wealthy may seem to be not about us, until we realise that according to a different frame of reference we are the wealthy.

Is it not perhaps to be expected that, just as the grain of sand irritates the oyster into producing a pearl, the presence of this aggravating critical voice will cause the formation within the psyche of an ever-growing well of either despair or angry defiance and resentment? And is it not resentful defiance of “the good” (as represented by the voice of the conscience) the essence of malevolence - the evil intent apparently unique to humans?

We are not whole unless we own our dark side.

In the absence of an acknowledgement of the dark side, doesn’t the face we show the world become an increasingly brittle and desperate fraud? And don’t we have a tendency to project that dark side we dare not acknowledge onto others?

There are examples every day of people who are labelled “Nazis” simply because they critique “wokeness”. They are seen by those who embrace this form of critical idealism as embodiments of both authoritarianism and malevolence, in the absence of any evidence of behaviour betraying either tendency. This seems a clear-cut case of projection. And those making the accusation may betray malevolence and authoritarianism (a bullying attitude) themselves.

We can see these tendencies also in some people who have a particularly critical form of religious belief which seems to drive them to behave in a malevolent or otherwise authoritarian manner towards those whose behaviour they see as a threat to it.

Unconditional self-acceptance is a healing force which can address the underlying problem. It we accept our thoughts and feelings, not as accurate messengers about reality, but as the ever-changing flesh of who are at this very moment - as the road to freedom for our deeper loving self - then, to the extent that they are negative, they will evaporate. It’s O.K. to hate goodness. It’s O.K. to hate everybody and everything. Because as soon as you’ve felt that unashamedly, the natural thing is to let go of it as something not useful to you.

Critical forms of idealism are poisonous seeds which grow despair and malevolence and social conflicts which strangle love.

As we are developing our competence in the various areas of life we want appropriate criticism so that we can learn to improve. But we don’t want to be subjected to idealistic, i.e. perfectionistic, criticism to the extent that it wears us down and makes us bitter. How much criticism we can respond to creatively is determined by how accepted we feel in general.

How much “good behaviour” is part of a desperate battle to deny and keep contained a growing inner malevolence - or despair? We need to address and find ways to heal that inner darkness, because whatever comes from our depths will be the basis for our society. That can be love, but only if we learn to remove the ideological weeds which poison it.

The Intoxicating Power of Anger

Illustration by Teguh Mujiono

Greta Thunberg has attracted a massive amount of attention. Some have pointed out that individuals who are actually coming up with practical solutions or are taking personal action to address problems get far less attention than someone who expresses anger at those who are intransigent on a problem.

Why is our attention attracted more powerfully to a locus of anger than to a locus of solution or inspiration?

It is sometimes necessary to do or say things which will make others angry. And anger is an appropriate response to many things - something that alerts us to the fact that there is a problem to be solved - whether that be a problem in the world or a problem within our own psyche.

It's a healthy thing to accept our anger, unconditionally, as it is to accept all of our emotions. To act on anger directly is not healthy. If we don't use our reason to come up with a workable solution to the problem it represents we will find ourselves in strife and we might cause great destruction.

But if we want a better life for ourselves and others, solutions are what we need to focus on. If loci of anger interfere too much with our ability to do this then we are not going to do well.

The Thunberg phenomena gives a good example of how the locus of anger works. To analyse it as such is not to say that it is not, in some sense, a necessary or unavoidable thing. Historically, protest has had its place in the necessary recalibration of society as circumstances change. But what I'm concerned with here is the psychology of interest attraction.

Thunberg gives people an opportunity to feel angry. Those who identify with her can feel angry at the fossil fuel industry and intransigent governments. Others can feel angry at Thunberg herself (viewing her as a whiny privileged virtue signaller), or at her activist parents, or at those who lioniser her. There is no doubt that she is an angry locus for the anger of many.

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN - MARCH 22, 2019: Greta Thunberg climate activist demonstrating on Fridays
Photo by Liv Oeian.

Anger can be very appealing as a form of escapism. We all make mistakes and most of us are prone to feelings of insecurity about our own worth - to feelings of guilt. The beauty of anger is that it focuses our attention away from ourselves. It's someone else's fault. For the moment, anyway, we are not the ones who need to make a change to ameliorate a problem.

In this way, anger is a like a drug, an intoxicant. And we can see how the professional media and social media are awash with this drug.

What have we come to when some people seriously say that they support a political leader because the people they hate hate that leader so much?

As William Blake put it, in The Everlasting Gospel : "What is the accusation of sin, But moral virtues' deadly gin?" Are we not drunk on angry accusations of other's sins? Anything to forget our own.

What this leads to is polarisation. Solutions to our problems require that we find some way to come together. How do we come together after calling each other "fascists" or "baby killers" or whatever?

If an addiction to anger arises from our propensity to feel guilt, i.e. compromised self-acceptance, then cultivating unconditional self-acceptance is how we break our addiction to anger. We will still recognise and respond effectively to unacceptable behaviour from others, but we won't be drawn away from focusing on practical solutions or forming bonds with others, even where we may have different beliefs on key issues.

Illustration by lightwise.

Judgement and Parental Guilt

There is a Christian principle “Judge not that thou be not judged.” Some people no doubt believe that the usefulness of this advice hinges on a belief in God. After all, is it not God who would judge us?

I interpret it differently. If we have a framework of judgement, then we will subject ourselves to that framework of judgement whether we like it or not.

I was thinking about this today as a result of a controversy which has erupted about a cartoon by the controversial Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig.

The cartoon depicts a baby falling out of its pram unnoticed by his young mother because she is too busy looking at Instagram on her phone.

This is a pretty extreme situation. There is no need for anyone to identify with this mother simply because they are a mother with a mobile phone themselves. It is not as if the cartoon is about a baby in a crib looking up accusingly at his mother on her phone. It depicts extreme social media addiction and neglect. If you don’t have a serious social media addiction and you are not a neglectful parent, then it isn’t about you.

But the cartoon has made a lot of people very defensive.

Controversial feminist Clementine Ford responded :

“Hey Leunig, you f**king gronk. I bet you never spent hours walking babies around in a pram, feeling isolated and alone and terrified. After my bub was born, I walked him around and around for hours in the pram or the carrier trying to get him to sleep. I spent much of that time on my phone. You know why? Because I was f**king WORKING. Sometimes I was tweeting sh*t or scrolling Instagram... and sometimes I was just looking for anything to distract me from the internal screaming about this incredibly traumatic physical and emotional thing I had been through. If a woman is on her phone and pushing a pram, it's nothing to do with you. Keep your f**king bullshit cartoon nonsense to yourself, you f**king judgmental prick.”

Clearly the cartoon touched a raw nerve. That’s what it was meant to do. If Ford didn’t feel guilty, she wouldn’t respond in that way. But it isn’t a judgemental cartoon. If judgement comes, it comes only from the conscience of the viewer. The cartoon is using imagination to suggest what an infant’s eye view of the world might be. An infant doesn’t know if you are on your mobile phone for work or sharing pictures of him, he only knows that your attention is elsewhere. Leunig is depicting something which already exists in our subconscious, so it is no good shooting the messenger.

Parental guilt is a major problem which exists with or without Leunig’s cartoons. What makes it so insidious is that it is a negative feedback phenomena. The more guilty a parent feels the more they turn inward or need distraction and ego-reinforcement to deal with the pain, and thus the less available they are for their children, which leads to more guilt.

There is also a feedback link between our judgement of others and being prone to judging ourselves. Ford is someone who is known for being judgemental - for calling people “cunt” or “creepy fuckface”. Standing in judgement of men, in particular, is her stock in trade. So, of course, she has a guilty conscience about her parenting. Not only do we judge ourselves if we are locked into judgement mode with others, but the judgement of others may be our way of getting some relief from the torture of our own conscience. Thus it can be another negative feedback loop.

So, once again, we see the need for cultivating unconditional self-acceptance. Only this will unleash our full capacity to be there for those who depend on us, and enable us to respond to the destructive behaviour of others without judgement of the wounded individual who lies behind that behaviour. And it will make us into people who can’t be hurt by a cartoon.

What Is The Conscience?

Photo by Holger Harfst

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaking Free with Joe Blow : Female Physical Beauty

This is my first proper Joe Blow YouTube video. I'm hoping to do many more. Teaching myself how to use a camera, record voice-over and edit a video has been a process of trial and error. Sometimes the best way to learn how to do something right is to do it wrong the first time.

Let me know what you think.

BOOK REVIEW : Holy Bible : New International Edition, 1978.

How does the Bible come to take up a central position in the life of someone who doesn’t believe in the supernatural?

It began in my adolescence. Someone gave me a pocket-sized copy of the New Testament, and, out of curiosity, I read The Gospel According to Matthew. It had a profound effect on me. I don’t remember the details of my response at that time. What stays with me was that the line “…I will make you fishers of men” brought tears to my eyes.

I had a very troubled adolescence, the beginnings of a tendency toward depression and anxiety which would plague me up until my mid-forties. I felt both ashamed and afraid of the strength of my sexual desires, desires I lacked the confidence to act on anyway. I developed obsessional thoughts. I was afraid I might gouge out my own eyes or that I might kill a baby.

I wondered what life was all about. I wondered why, if what we most want is to love and be loved, we don’t all just love each other. Why do we pursue things like wealth or fame or power, which are such poor substitutes for love? But then my own capacity to love was eaten up by my fear and guilt.

The gospel of Matthew dropped into this context. Did the thoughts about gouging out my eyes come before I read “…if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away…”, or after? Before, I think, but it wasn’t a conscious part of the obsession.

There was something in this gospel which attracted me, but there was something which stuck into my flesh like a thorn. If the truth hurts, does that mean that what hurts is necessarily true?

I was afraid of my sexual desires. Into that context comes the line “…anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart…” But why would it matter to me that I was committing adultery in my heart? I wasn’t married and anyway I was agnostic about the existence of this God who disapproved of adultery.

I desperately wanted to be reassured that I was O.K. Here was a book telling me I was a sinner. But it was telling me this within the context of a poetically expressed vision of redemption.

Somehow I would need to learn how to resolve my inner conflicts, depressions and anxieties. Whether what I had read in that book would end up helping me with that was an open question.

My parents were Quakers. I was taken to the Quaker meeting house a few times and attended Sunday school there, and some form of religious education was a part of primary school in my time. I don’t remember much of that. It didn’t seem to change things much. I remained an agnostic. My parents were not really religious. Their attraction to the Quaker church, into which my mother was born, had more to do with their pacifist politics.

I read the gospels of Mark, Luke and John a bit later, around the same time I read Sigmund Freud’s A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, where, with some relief, I read about his patients who, like me, suffered from obsessive thoughts about committing terrible acts.

Jesus’ words continued to float around in my mind, but what context could they have in the absence of a belief in a supernatural God or an after-life? The promises of Heaven were no use to me, because I didn’t believe, but the ethical principles were not easy to dismiss. Who could tell me how to live a meaningful life? And who could tell me how to relieve my suffering?

What gradually dawned on me was the idea that there might be another way to conceive of God. I read a biography of the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich - a student of Freud - who viewed God as a cosmic life energy. According to him, emotional and social problems are caused by blockages in the flow of this energy. This I could related to. I could see that my psychological suffering was associated with fear-based blockages in the free flow of the life energy in my body. Reich associated the free flow of the life energy in the individual with love of others and enthusiasm for productive work.

Wilhelm Reich

Later I would encounter the ideas of Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith, who also provided a non-supernatural definition of God, saying that “God is integrative meaning,” by which he means :

1. The tendency in nature for smaller less complex wholes to integrate and thus form larger more complex wholes - e.g. single-celled organisms forming a community of single-celled organisms and then growing a membrane so that they become a multi-cellular organism with the capacity for increased complexity through specialisation of those cells.

2. The ability of truth to integrate items of data into a coherent framework which allows for the reconciliation of previously conflicting ideas.

3. The fact that love manifests social meaning through the integration of individuals into a functioning community.

Jeremy Griffith

That was over 25 years ago. Only recently I became aware of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who looks for psychological insight in the Bible and defines God as “the Logos - the spoken word which brings habitable order out of chaos”. This is compatible with, but less all encompassing than, Griffith’s definition.

Somehow, over the years a framework of belief grew in me which has enabled me to integrate the meaning I finding in the Gospels with the fact that I still have seen no evidence for the existence of the supernatural.

There is a kind of matrix of love which exists in the realm of possibility. This is the Kingdom of Heaven. God is the creative principle of the universe which brings order out of chaos and is expressed in us as love, the force which brings order out of chaos in the social realm. God in Heaven is an imagined possibility, but an possibility having force to change lives through the power of faith in his existence. When order comes out of chaos in the natural or social world, that is God making “his” presence felt in the real world. This is organically arising order, not imposed order.

What are we? We are the creative principle of the universe as expressed within the limitations imposed by a physical body and an individual personality. The physical body and the individual personality are temporary. The creative principle of the universe, which inhabits this temporary form, is eternal. Mortality or eternal life? It depends on your perspective. Identify with the eternal whole of which you are a part, and you are eternal. Identify with your body or your personality and you are mortal. In practise it is a question of whether one identifies more with one’s body and ego or more with the process one is engaged in. A mother who forgets herself in caring for her child, in doing so participates in God because her identification is with the eternal creative process of life itself rather than with her temporary body or personality.

What is love? Love is our awareness that, at base, we are one, all limited parcels of a single creative principle. Love is God. Through love God is made manifest. We can picture God sitting on a cloud in the heaven of our imagination, but when we feel love for others, God is real and active in the world through us. There is nothing supernatural about that, it’s the product of natural evolution. Our capacity for love arose because the nurturing of children is beneficial to a species’ survival.

It is only now that I’ve read the Bible as a whole. The story of Adam and Eve in the Old Testament had been important to me because an interpretation of it plays such an important part in the work of Jeremy Griffith. I was a supporter of Griffith for a while. Now I’m a critic of his ideas. Once I realised I couldn’t agree with the central precept of his theory - that we have a genetically-encoded conscience which is critical of the rational mind’s experiments in understanding - I had to come up with an alternative way to view the internal battle between good and evil.

Adam and Eve, woodcut, Germany, 1514, Metropolitan Museum of Art

If our problems are due to a blockage in the free flow of the life energy, then compromised self-acceptance is central to that blockage. The self-accepting individual looks outward and participates unselfconsciously with others in pleasure and in problem solving. A lack of self-acceptance cause us to look obsessively inward or to interpret the world around us in the light of our need to service our wounded ego. Guilt is a spanner in the works.

Where does guilt come from initially? From a mistake unforgiven or a demand for improved behaviour we find ourselves unable to accommodate. In a world full of angry and selfish behaviour, guilt may often seem justified. But how did our propensity for anger and selfishness grow?

Idealism is the root of all evil. Somehow we arrived at the idea that we should make a strict division between good behaviour and bad behaviour and strive to promote the former and restrain the latter through both self-discipline and the imposition of social discipline on others. On the surface this seems reasonable, which is why our problems have persisted so long. The problem with it is that it tends to undermine self-acceptance. The individual pursuing self-discipline gradually accrues a feeling of guilt over his mistakes. And when he feels that others are being too strict in their demands for improved behaviour, he gets angry at the criticism. All of this begins small. We begin with give and take, with self-forgiveness and forgiveness of others. But overtime the love has trouble compensating for the corrosive effect of the idealism.

This is what the story of Adam and Eve is about. They eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, i.e. their experimenting minds arrive at the concept of idealism, and, as a result they become ashamed of their nakedness and clothe themselves. Nakedness is a symbol for honesty. In the absence of idealism we are happy to be honest, to let it all hang out, but once we feel that we may be judged for our imperfections we feel the need to cover our asses with a protective coat of lies. The devil is described as “the accuser” and also as “the father of lies”. Idealism accuses us of not being good enough and in so doing inspires us to lie. And the arrival of idealism also cast us out of Paradise, our unselfconscious existence in nature, and alienated us from God, because, when our self-acceptance is undermined it opens up a black hole in us which drains our ability to love others and thus to participate in God.

There is much in the early parts of the Old Testament which I had a hard time seeing in any kind of positive light. Why are these people killing all these cows and sheep and burning them? What good will that do? Who is this God who tells his followers to kill a man for gathering wood on the Sabbath? Why does he tell them to slaughter all those infants when they lay a town to waste?

Jordan Peterson helped me to see these things in a different light - to see the Old Testament as an account of how our concept of God evolved. We have a habit of approaching some problems by doing things and then asking ourselves why we are doing them afterwards. So we performed the idea of sacrifice before we came to really understand the practical nature of sacrifice. i.e. making a bargain with the future in the way that we sacrifice a few years at college in order to get a high paying job as a lawyer. Burning something valuable to us so that the universe could smell it seems primitive to us now, but we have the benefit of hindsight.

Jordan Peterson

As I came to the end of the Old Testament it occurred to me that it was really a story about the importance of maintaining integrity, personal and social. Some of the laws may seem unreasonable now, but the aim was to find a codified way to mediate conflicts and thus maintain the integrity of the society. If there were a prejudice prevalent at the time, that would be reflected in the laws. Most of us don’t believe in slavery, so owning slaves is against the law in our countries. At the time the books of the Old Testament was written, owning slaves was considered acceptable, so laws are about how to treat slaves. This is a problem for those who believe in a supernatural God who could have got Moses to tell people to release their slaves. It is not a problem for someone who sees the Bible as a human document recording our search for the divine.

If the Old Testament is treated like a novel in which integrity is presented as an all-too human figure, then it makes more sense. A jealous God sending out armies to attack cities and slaughter their inhabitants seems unworthy of worship, but if we see the moral of the story being - “If you don’t maintain your personal integrity and the integrity of your society, both will be laid waste utterly!” - then it makes sense. God is blood-thirsty and vengeful only because he is a fictional character representing realities which we ignore at our peril. He is also loving, because if we work with reality, we are liable to be blessed. A farmer who diligently tends to his fields is liable to prosper and eat well; one who sits under a tree drinking and forgets to sow his seeds is liable to starve. In this scenario, God’s nature is determined by our behaviour not by God’s will.

One of the ways individuals and societies come a cropper in the Old Testament is by worshipping idols. If God is a representation of integrity, to worship an idol is to value something else more highly than we value our integrity, to “sell our soul” for riches, fame, power, or whatever. When we do that, it doesn’t end well.

The emphasis in the Old Testament is on laws and the need to obey them. It is lots of “thou shalt not” and not much “it would be a good idea if we”. A stranger could come to your door fatally wounded and looking for help. If you turned them away and closed the door on them, you wouldn’t be breaking any of the Ten Commandments.

With Jesus we get the articulation of a positive way to live. Love your neighbour as yourself. Be non-judgemental. Be humble. Be generous. Be honest. Value human relationships over wealth.

His message was that “the Kingdom of Heaven” is close to us - the potential matrix of love is all around us and inside us, just waiting to be made manifest - and that we should repent of our sins. Sin is a religious word for selfishness. We are selfish because our compromised self-acceptance turns us inward so that we view the social world from the perspective of our need to reinforce our wounded ego. Feeling guilty about being selfish doesn’t help. If just makes us more selfish. The Greek word which is translated as “repent” apparently means, more literally, have a change of consciousness. He was telling us to change our consciousness in such a way that we could open up the Kingdom of Heaven. He assured us that God would forgive our sins. If God is the love which manifests when the guilt which blocks it is removed, then of course the sin is of no importance once the floodgates are opened.

What of the Book of Revelations? I don’t pretend that I can make sense of its complex symbolism. I’m no Jordan Peterson. But this is the gist of it as I see it. The social world is built on lies and delusions. The apocalypse, or revelation, is what happens when this becomes apparent because humanity arrives at a framework of understanding which exposes all others. This is the point at which the little boy points out that the emperor is naked. Jeremy Griffith thinks he has that framework of understanding. He’s wrong. But it is on its way. Wherever there is earnest dialogue amongst the informed, it is coming into being.

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What about the judgement and the “lake of fire”?

One of the things that happened on my journey was that I faced a crisis where the bottom dropped out of everything for me. I lost all faith in myself. I ended up strapped to a hospital bed begging doctors and nurses to kill me because I felt that the whole of human history, all the suffering of the countless millions and the effort they had put in, was all going to come to nothing, to be rendered worthless, all because of my weakness.

When the bottom drops out of your world and you find yourself naked in the face of the unknown, it feels a lot like hell. So I don’t see it as a matter of judgement and condemnation. The warning is to follow the path of truth, so that there is always something dependable under your feet. But if I can come back from hell, anyone can.

“And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged accord to what they had done as recorded in the books.” Revelations 20:12

If we achieve a full understanding of our psychology and how it relates to the rest of the natural world, it stands to reason this will change our attitude to people who are now dead. Some will be revealed to be closer to the truth and others further from the truth than we had generally believed. I think this is the kind of judgement being described, but we shouldn’t underestimate how disturbing this may be for many of us. Our ego gets very bound up with our beliefs and to find that we were wrong in a very profound way is disturbing.

I would like to believe that, if this massive shake-up is on the way, carrying with it the likelihood of intense and widespread existential crisis, maybe the ideas which helped me to repair the damage brought on by my own crisis of this sort, expressed in my book How to Be Free, will also be a help to some others.

Of course there is so much more which is worth saying about the Bible, but this will have to do for the time being. 

A Big "What If?"

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What if there were a framework of understanding which could unite the perceptions of the mystic, the fundamentalist and the atheist into a single whole?

This is very much a “what if” experiment. Ride with it and see where it leads. For simplicity’s sake I’ll state speculations as if they were fact.

The universe is made up of energy. Matter is a structured form of that energy. Energy is eternal. It changes form, but it never ceases to exist. 

Energy is conscious, but it is a formless consciousness, lacking the kinds of limitation needed for the structured consciousness we call thought or sensation.

The universe is a place where structure arises from formless energy. The ways in which this happens may be mysterious to us, but our existence is evidence of just how complex and meaningful the products of that process can be. Apparently there are more connections in our brain than there are atoms in the universe. We’re pretty complex.

We are highly structured systems of energy which persist for an average of about seventy years. We have bodies which shape raw consciousness in a way we experience as physical sensations, ranging from pleasure to pain. And we have a brain which shapes raw consciousness into images and words.

The universe is a meaningful place. Complexity arises through relationship and meaning lies in relationship. The meaning of any part is defined by its relationship to the whole.

As individuals we sometimes identify with our separateness and sometimes with our connectedness to the whole. When we are in a loving relationship we identify more with the bond we share with the other person than we do with our seperate existence. Or an artist may think more of the meaning which is coming into the world through his art than he does of where his next meal is coming from.

We are not just our body. We are also meaning. We are not just the instrument, but also the music which plays on that instrument.

But we have a problem. To a significant degree we have become cut off from our source of meaning.

The creative principle of the universe is manifested by the emergence of more complex wholes from a meaningful relationship between less complex parts. This looks like the part selflessly surrendering to the needs of the whole.

We know that we are selfish, not selfless, so are we in a state of rebellion against the theme of the universe, against that which created us?

It is within the context of this question that religion arose.

Aware of our sinful, i.e. selfish, nature we could not look upon the face of God, i.e. acknowledge the theme of the universe which gave birth to us. We feared God and sought redemption through sacrifice and prayer.

To the degree that we were insecure, we needed the comfort provided by picturing a God with a human face.

ROME, ITALY - MARCH 12, 2016: The fresco God the Creator by unknown artist from end of 19. cent. in the church Chiesa di Nostra Signora del Sacro Cuore. Copyright: sedmak / 123RF Stock Photo

In the Old Testament there is an emphasis on laws. If selfishness were not to lead to the collapse of the society there needed to be laws. Such laws are a compromise. They don’t solve the underlying problem, and they are based on the prejudices prevalent in the society, hence the absence of such current day laws as : “Thou shalt not own slaves.”

The New Testament seeks to address the underlying problem of the need for redemption from the selfish state into a state in which we love our neighbour as our self. That is to end the separation of humans and God.

The Bible relates stories. Our state of insecurity determines our relationship to those stories. Just as our insecurity may require God to have a human face, so it may require the stories related in the Bible to be literally true.

What matters in a story is its meaning. We read fictional stories and respond to them as if they were real. Do we weep for Little Nell? Or do we weep for ourselves, because we know what loss is like? We fear Dracula, not because vampires are real, but because we fear death, or something worse than death.

The stories we read in the Bible are profoundly meaningful, because they are stories about what we fear and about what we crave most deeply. We fear that we may lose that which makes the suffering of life bearable, and we hope to find that which redeems us from our state of fear and trembling in the face of the absolute.

We could argue forever about whether or not a story is literally true. A fundamentalist will insist that Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. An atheist will insist that all of these things are impossible.

Meaning is to a story what the soul is to the body. If we get too caught up in the worldly - and whether or not something happened literally is a worldly question - then we can lose that which has a higher value. In meaning we find the transcendent. Through meaning we participate in the eternal.

Having separated ourselves from the worldly to find the meaning, we then come back to the world to make it real. What matters is not whether Jesus fed the hungry with seven loaves and a fish, but whether we ourselves feed the hungry.

KRAKOW, POLAND - DECEMBER 19, 2010; Christmas Eve for poor and homeless on the Central Market in Cracow. Every year the group Kosciuszko prepares the greatest eve in the open air in Poland. Copyright: praszkiewicz / 123RF Stock Photo

Selfishness is the knot that needs to be untied for us to feel at home in the universe that gave birth to us, for us to be re-united with God. Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the insecure or otherwise suffering individual. Hit your thumb with a hammer and you’ll have trouble thinking about anything else but your thumb. In the same way, our insecurity turns us inwards. It can be a negative feedback loop. We behave selfishly. We feel guilty about behaving selfishly. The pain of the guilt directs our attention even more strongly toward our self. This makes us even more selfish. Thus the knot tightens.

Assurances that God forgives our sins may ease the problem, but they are founded on faith rather than rational understanding.

If we try cultivating unconditional self-acceptance and find that it produces a better result than trying to force ourselves to be less selfish, or punishing ourselves, then we learn through our own direct experience what it means to find redemption.

The relationship between Hell and Heaven can be understood in the relationship between the body and meaning. 

The body makes suffering possible. Meaning makes that suffering bearable. Pleasure is experienced in the satisfaction of bodily needs or the easing of bodily suffering.  The psychological insecurity which comes from being cut off from meaning may interfere with our ability to feel satiated by the satisfaction of these needs.

What is bliss? It isn’t a thought, though it may accompany a thought. It isn’t a physical sensation, though it may accompany a physical sensation. Bliss is loss of self-consciousness. Bliss is when we are so enraptured by something that we forget ourselves.

If the universe is conscious energy, perhaps bliss is it’s default state. The limitation provided by a body and mind increases its ability to manifest meaning, but carries with it the price tag of suffering, something which can be increased or decreased depending on the thoughts that form in that mind. So, from bliss we come and to bliss we will go. And while we are alive, the secret to bliss is love, the meaningful connection that allows us to forget ourselves in a union like that from which we came. This may be love with another person or love of an activity.

So the concept of eternal life is one of identification. Do we identify with the body or ego, which are temporary, or with the process in which we participate? If our consciousness is that of the universe limited by a temporary form, then we are at least as much the eternal as we are the temporal.

Concepts of life after death often revolve around the idea of the persistence of the personalty into a post-death realm, either of punishment or reward. Like the focus on stories being literally true, this is an indication of how insecurity makes us cling to what we know. We fixate on that which we can’t fully accept, and so, not truly accepting our personality we can’t imagine leaving it behind.

So let’s cultivate unconditional self-acceptance and find out whether doing so blissfully realigns us with the creative principle of the universe.

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Why Do We Have a Dark Side?

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What produces the dark side of we humans?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From The Function of the Orgasm by Wilhelm Reich

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what can we do about the problem of evil?

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

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