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 :
Simply
see them (sense perception).
Associate
them with a sense of comfort (symbolic pre-verbal thinking).
See
them as a symbol of love (symbolic conceptual thinking).
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.
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.
