A Big "What If?"

Copyright: alexmit / 123RF Stock Photo

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.

Copyright: noltelourens / 123RF Stock Photo

Thoughts About "God"

Reading the Bible has led me to think about some of the ways people think about God.

Some say that God is perfect. What does it mean for something of which there is only one to be perfect? Where there are two of something we can look for flaws and decide that one is closer to perfection than the other.

Why is this relevant? If our view of God is of the absolute grounding of reality as something perfect, then this becomes a mirror for our own very personal conceptions about what is or is not perfect in ourselves or others. We may become less accepting of our own apparent flaws or those of others if we believe there is a grounding of perfection from which we and they have deviated. The Bible contains many laws expressing what is or is not considered acceptable to God, yet why should the absolute grounding of reality give a shit?

Religion is a human institution with a human basis and a human purpose. The purpose of religious laws, as with any laws, is to try to resolve or prevent conflict in society. It doesn’t begin with something abstract, but contemplation of the abstract may give the lawmaker some of the required distance to make laws for the common good rather than his own. What we find in the early parts of the Bible are flawed attempts which we may look on critically from our own position, but we would probably find similar flaws in most indigenous systems of law - a mix of wisdom, superstition, intolerance and brutality.

My own definition of “God” is the creative principle of the universe which we see in operation in the increasing complexity of life’s development and which operates in human affairs as love. Something holds energy in the meaningful pattern that we call “matter”. And some principle allows some of that matter to organise itself in what we call “life”. The comparable meaningful arrangements of humans are what we call “families” and “tribes” and “corporations” and “societies”. What holds these together is love, i.e. open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication. Sure tribal selfishness may be a motivating force, and all groups are diluted by intra-group selfishness, but if there were no love the group would fall apart.

We put a human face on impersonal forces with which we are in a relationship. We think of nature as a “she” for example. This can be helpful, but also misleading. We may be Mother Nature’s children, but she won’t necessarily protect us the way our real mother would, in fact she may slaughter us without hesitation.

If “God” is the creative principle of the universe, then we have everything to be grateful to “him” for, but a principle doesn’t need us as individuals. This is not a “Father” who cares one way or the other what happens to us. It is we who care what happens to ourselves and, hopefully others, and only we who need to care.

One thing we see in the Bible is that God is used as a conceptual tool for widening one’s concept of self-interest. God is presented as a personification of what Hindus and Buddhists call Karma. If you behave selfishly, recklessly, dishonestly or against the legitimate interests of others, God will bring you down, but if you act generously, honestly and practice frugality, he will protect your long term interests even if you may be persecuted by others in the short term.

Of course, in reality, there are no guarantees. You could live a spotless life and get some terrible disease.

But the principle of enlightened self-interest is still the best basis for guiding one’s life. Don’t trade current pleasure for future pain, and recognise that, as long as we are social beings, our wellbeing is nested in the wellbeing of those around us. If we sow enmity in those around us, then we will also reap it. And those who profit by an unjust society will have to live within walls which prevent them from enjoying the warmth of its community. We don’t need to believe in a personal God to come to these conclusions, but historically many have found it useful.

They say that we are made in God’s image. Clearly we are not omnipresent, omniscient or invisible. So in what way might this be true? We are not just products of the creative principle of the universe, we are expressions of it. It operates through us as surely as it does through anything else which exists. Our capacity for reason gives it a whole new level on which it can operate, through culture and technology.

Our sense of alienation from God, that God is to be feared and that we are to be ashamed of ourselves, comes from our awareness that our creative potential - our expression of love - is held in check by our selfishness. But our shame is not appropriate. 

The creative principle doesn’t operate by forcing chaos into a preconceived orderly mould. The natural intrinsic potential unfolds through spontaneously occurring connections based on the mutuality of self-interest. (We can see this most clearly in ecosystems which are balanced, orderly networks built from the individual self-interest of the constituent organisms.) 

To decide what is good and try to force it into being is the root of evil. The ends don’t justify the means. It is by embracing healthy means and not thinking too much about what the ends will be that we become faithful expressions of the creative  principle. 

And this applies also to our relationship to ourselves. If we fight with ourselves because we don’t conform to an ideal we will only make ourselves more self-obsessed. But look for ways in which our own longterm self-interest aligns with that of others and we see the seeds of a more creative way of living. If we concentrate on fostering what works, we may find that what wasn’t working has disappeared while our attention was elsewhere.

Book Review : Illuminating the Darkness by Noel Dear

Noel Dear is a pastor who has written a book which he claims is "A Fresh and Effective Solution to Depression, Stress, and Anxiety". He sent me a direct message on Twitter suggesting that I read his book. I did. This is my review which I have submitted to Amazon.

First, let me lay my cards on the table. I'm not a Christian. I read this book because the author recommended it to me via Twitter. I am also an author of a book on how to free ourselves from mental suffering. I spent a good deal of my life living with such forms of mental distress as extreme depression (two suicide attempts and two courses of shock treatment), obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety, bipolar disorder (including a number of psychotic breakdowns). I'm now happy and healthy and bursting with creativity. My own writing in this field is an articulation of the insights and techniques I discovered along my journey to freedom.

I say I'm not a Christian but that does not mean I am not a big believer in the philosophy expressed by Jesus. To me Jesus was a psychologically healthy individual who tried to use his insights to set people free. Noel Dear talks about benchmarks for normalcy. For me, personally, Jesus is the benchmark for mental health. I can believe that because I don't believe he was in any way a supernatural being. I only believe that he was the son of God to the extent that we are all the sons (or daughters) of "God" (though Dear and myself would no doubt differ on what we mean by that word). He was just an individual relatively free from the prevailing neurosis, and the more neurotic we are the more we are liable to view that state of health as something magical, because to do so helps us to deny our own condition. So my healing was greatly helped by Jesus words taken directly, but I view the Christian churches as a perversion of Jesus philosophy, a perversion that began as soon as he was dead, which contaminates the accounts of his life (hence all the ridiculous stuff about virgin birth, miracles and resurrection) and of which the nail was finally put in the coffin by Paul who turned a philosophy of liberation into a promise of a pie-in-the-sky and a philosophy of submission to the neurotic, sexually repressive, patriarchal social order from which Jesus wanted to show us the way out.

So now you know that I'm a heretic. But, since this book is presented as a cure for depression for all rather than only for those who already share the author's particular dogma, perhaps my thoughts on whether this book would have helped me back when I suffered from depression are not irrelevant.

Dear asks the question : "Are Depression, Stress and Anxiety Sin?" and comes to the conclusion : "The simple answer is, no. You feel the way you feel. If a door slams on my finger, it will hurt. It would be foolish for someone to tell me my finger should not be hurting. I feel what I feel. Always be wary of someone who tells you that you should or should not feel a certain way." This is good advice, but Dear does not go far enough in explicating his issue of sin. To my way of looking at things "sin" is just a word religious people use for selfishness. And suffering, whether physical or emotional, naturally causes us to direct our attention towards ourselves. If our finger is hurting from being slammed in a door, we will find it hard to think of anything other than the pain. So if "sin" is selfishness, then suffering is the source of "sin". This doesn't mean we should be ashamed of being selfish, because the healthy thing to do when we are suffering is to look after our own need for healing and any sense of shame or guilt is further emotional suffering which will only make us more selfish. The answer to emotional pain that causes selfishness (i.e. "sin") is unconditional self-acceptance and the pursuit of pleasure (as long as it can be had without doing harm to ourselves or others). While suffering makes us selfish, pleasure heals us and frees us to be more loving and available to others.

Dear's critique of some traditional approaches to depression - that they attempt to treat the symptoms rather than the cause of the problem, that they are about "chasing away the darkness" rather than "turning on the light" is reasonable. The question is whether his ideas are able to turn on that light. It was the turning on of a light in my life which drove away depression but it was not the light of doctrinaire Christianity. Dear provides a lot of build-up to his answer to depression, to the extent that he sometimes comes across as condescending, but what really matters is if what he is promoting can really free people from depression even if they are incapable of putting aside their capacity for rational thinking to the degree necessary to believe in a supernatural religion. If what he is offering can't do this job then Dear could be accused of exploiting the desperation of the depressed to try to convert them to his religious beliefs. I would not like to believe that he is such a cynic as this, but that his intentions are genuine, but that does not make his book a useful one for the free-thinker.

Dear believes that the only cure for depression is "the spirit of God". He has a point if we take "God" to mean love. Our deepest nature is one of unconditional love and uncovering that capacity once again by finding ways to let the things which keep it repressed melt away is the solution to depression. But "God" is such a troublesome term, because not everyone means simply "love" when they say "God". Some people mean an old man in the sky who is capable of committing genocide against those who disrespect his dictatorial rule. That God doesn't exist. He is a paranoid delusion of a neurotic patriarchal civilisation. And, even if he did exist, to submit to his tyranny would be unhealthy because it would entail repression and when we repress any aspect of ourselves we contribute to our repression of our capacity to love and thus express the nature of the only "God" that does exist. I believe that the only God Jesus believed in was love (and the universal creative principle of which love is the human social manifestation). I don't think that he believed in that Old Testament bogeyman. And that is probably why he was killed as a blasphemer and a heretic by those who did believe in that other God.

Dear presents the whole sin guilt trip we have become used to from Christian writers. But all of this is unnecessary. The creative principle of the universe is not perfect. Creation grows through variation, through imperfection, and our imperfections are not something to be ashamed of or to ask some deity's forgiveness for. They are the seeds of our future growth. Jesus himself expressed this with the story of the prodigal son. The prodigal son was valued more highly by his parents than the son who stayed at home. They didn't slay the fatted calf for the stay-at-home. Love and creation are a process of experimentation and improvisation, not a process of obeying rules.

According to Dear, if we remain depressed it may be because we are sinners. It is our own fault. I believe that the essence of depression is the unnecessary struggle to prove our worth or shake off an unjustified sense of guilt. For many, Dear's approach is liable to exacerbate this process and drive them to deeper despair. How prone to guilt we are depends on the learned expectations we have about ourselves and our conduct. A Christian like Dear is bound to be more prone to feelings of guilt then someone like myself because he believes more things are unacceptable to God. As long as I do nothing to hurt anyone, I can do what I like and not feel guilty, but a Christian is liable to be prone to guilt about many things because he or she feels that God disapproves. I don't believe in that kind of God therefore I have no need to feel guilt about those particular things. I will still feel guilt if I do something dishonest, because that goes against my own personal value system. But I don't care about the personal value system of a supernatural God, because I don't believe he exists. Dear, no doubt, does not feel guilty because he does not bow toward Mecca at particular times of the day, yet a Muslim probably would. Our conscience is a personal thing, a part of our ego which contains our expectations about ourselves which we have learned from parents, teachers, religious leaders. The stricter our conscience is the less likely we are to be able to live up to its dictates and therefore the more prone we are likely to be to depression. One of the major factors that can lead to depression and other related conditions is perfectionism. So hanging on to some myth about a perfect God of whom we are not worthy is hardly a recipe for mental health.

Dear says : "Because God is a God of perfect justice, he cannot simply ignore our sin. So, God sent Jesus to take the punishment for our sins. Because I have sinned, someone must be punished for my sin. Jesus through the death on the cross did just that. Moreover, Jesus did it not only for me but also for you. You can be forgiven and have your relationship with God restored because of what Jesus did for you on the cross."

Because this is such a long-standing cultural belief, a lot of us have not really thought deeply about what this doctrine is saying. What would happen if the judge who tried a gang of serial killers said to the media : "Yes, they are guilty. They killed all those women and children. But I've decided that, instead of punishing them, I'm going send my own son (who's always been a good boy) to the electric chair and let the serial killers go free." We would not consider that judge a judge of perfect justice, we would consider him a lunatic.

This concept of Jesus dying for our sins is a self-serving interpretation of events. Jesus was a psychologically healthy individual who tried to show us the way to freedom from our neurotic ego-embattled mindset (what he called "sin"). The way he did this led to him upsetting some people and they put him to death. But his words lived on after him because they contained wisdom. It is as simple as that. It is in his life and his teachings and not in his death that we can find a way to escape from selfishness and return to the paradise which our deeper capacity for love makes possible. The sin and salvation game is about maintaining the discipline of the group. And the irrational belief that we have a personal afterlife either in Heaven or Hell (as opposed to our current life being an individual expression of a natural phenomena which is itself eternal but undifferentiated) is also something which is useful for maintaining control over people via the old carrot and the stick strategy.

On anger, Dear's approach seems to be to suggest the use of Biblical wisdom to help you repress it. And yet repressed anger never goes away, it forms the structure of the neurotic personality and continues to separate us from our fellows. Surely the better advice is to help people to find cathartic but undamaging ways to release their anger and thus free themselves up to be more loving individuals. He also says that : "You have a righteous anger when you oppose things that anger the Lord. Righteous anger never leads to sin." And yet he gives no advice on how to be sure if you are angry about something which angers the Lord and whether your actions are an appropriate response. When the religious leaders of his day decided that God was angry at the "heresy" and "blasphemy" of Jesus and that he should be handed over to the Romans for crucifiction was this righteous anger? And what of the anger of those who burned women at the stake because they believed that those women were witches and that God was angry?

Dear has clearly done a lot of studying of the Bible. But what does he really know about depression. He makes no mention of having suffered from it himself, and he is not a psychologist or psychiatrist who deals with a broad range of depressed patients. He is a pastor and as such he talks with some depressed people who share his belief system, but this is a limited sample. I myself am not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, but depression is a land whose length and breadth I have travelled personally and from which I have returned with understanding of its landscape and where the road out lies.

Dear talks a lot about the bearing of "spiritual fruit". I think that one of Jesus most useful statements was : "By their fruits shall ye know them". While this may have a specific meaning to Christians related to "the last days", to me it emphasises the importance of judging the value of an idea or a belief system by the effect it has on those who absorb it rather than by the claims which its advocates or their critics make about it. Does the idea or belief system lead people to a state in which they are more loving, more creative, happier, and more secure. This last point can be determined by whether they are comfortable mixing with people who do not share their beliefs and open-heartedly engaging with beliefs that differ from their own, or whether those beliefs need constant re-enforcement through surrounding themselves with other believers and by reading the articulation of those beliefs over and over again. Freedom doesn't require that much discipline.

I'm sure this book will be of some use to people who share Dear's particular religious belief system. I can see that, within the context of this dogmatic mindset, he gives some good advice about how to manage somewhat better. But to a free-thinker like myself, looking in from the outside, this seems a little like learning how to rearrange the furniture in your prison cell.

I make no promise that my own self-help book "How to Be Free" by Joe Blow (not on Amazon but you can find it as a free download at many other places where ebooks can be obtained) will necessarily free you from depression. The principles in it have worked for me and for some others. But I can say from my own experience that becoming free of depression does not require being a Christian or believing in God.

***

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

Atheist or Not?

When, before publication, I showed How to Be Free to an atheist friend of mine he expressed disgust that it was “theist”.

Recently I've had a new review on I-Tunes warning Christians against reading my book because I express a lack of belief in God :

Before that came this one :

I've always expected that believers in the more dogmatic forms of Christian belief would tend to take a dim view of the ideas about God which I express in the book.

But the term “God" means different things to different people, and I can well imagine a good many religious people not seeing my book as being atheistic.

So I'm interested to hear from readers. Do you consider the book to be theistic or atheistic?

Postscript : Here is another review which was posted later which responds to the first two :

Very well put!