The Uselessness of the Concept of Good and Evil

If we take an holistic, i.e. systems, view of human society we have to come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as free will. The individual is only a location within the system where the system's processes are playing out.

We may experience ourselves as individuals with free will struggling against impulses which we feel it would not be right to act upon, but the impulses come from the system and so do the ideas, factual information and beliefs, which cause us to exercise restraint. What is happening if we experience such an internal struggle is that tides which are larger than us are clashing in us. We are the location where this is happening, but we have no control over the process.

In the broad sense of the term the idea that there is such a thing as good and evil is a dualistic concept - that is one which divides phenomena into two opposing forces.

But the distinction between good and evil would only be useful if we had free will and could thus chose good behaviour and avoid evil behaviour. Since we don't have free will, we can't. All of our behaviour, whether constructive or destructive is a product of the wider system of which we are a part and over which we have no control.

From this systems view of humanity, it is precisely the idea that there is such a thing as good and evil which has acted like a virus to generate all of the behaviour we identify as evil.

And, since, all systems try to maintain equilibrium we can see that it is actually the fight against those forms of behaviour we identify as evil which generates that behaviour. If we try to push the system one way it will inevitably push back the other way. It is only acceptance which can bring harmony to the system.

This concept of the idea of good and evil as a virus contaminating the human system is, of course, expressed metaphorically in the story of Adam and Eve being cursed by eating from the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil. The only thing is that it wasn't knowledge but a delusional belief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Might Happen If We Weren't So Scared of Sex?

Image credit: spectral / 123RF Stock Photo

What is sex when we strip away the sometimes confusing beliefs and emotions which surround it? It can be a reproductive activity, but that is only in the minority of instances. If we only had sex to produce offspring it would be something which occurred no more than a handful of times for most of us and never for others. But sex is also a form of pleasure usually generated by the rubbing of one or more erogenous zones. More often than not the source of pleasure is the genitals. Sometimes this involves the penetration of an orifice by a part of the body, sometimes, but not always, the male genitals. If we leave aside the pleasure which may be experienced, this is no different from picking our nose or receiving a rectal exam from a doctor. There isn't anything inherently serious on a physical level about any of this, unless it results in pregnancy or disease. Of course it is possible to do damage through sexual activity by trying to put something too big into an orifice which isn't big enough to accommodate it. But the physical element of sex, in and of itself, is not serious in the way that violence is serious. Stroke someone's genitals and it is unlikely to do much long-standing physical damage.

So if sex has a special mystique for us, it is not an obvious part of the physical act itself. Which leads to the question – Why do we treat genital pleasure differently from oral pleasure? We get oral pleasure from eating chocolates. Why is it socially acceptable to talk about enjoying a delicious chocolate, but not about enjoying an orgasm? If one of our friends gave another a box of chocolates for his birthday we would think it appropriate. If they gave him a hand job we might not. Sex can carry the risk of spreading disease, but so can eating contaminated food. And sex can lead to an unwanted pregnancy. But there are forms of erotic activity, such as mutual masturbation, which are completely safe, and yet we still act as if there is something about these activities which makes them essentially more serious than a hug or a kiss on the cheek.

Image credit: pepperbox / 123RF Stock Photo

One difference is that sex is not always equal and consensual. Coercion or force can be involved. But coercion and force are themselves a problem. If someone were running around grabbing people and ramming their mouths full of chocolate we wouldn't view the chocolate as the problem.

Sexual behaviour and sexual desire can also be a currency for the ego. Some think in terms of “sexual conquests" or “knots on the belt" rather than loving encounters with other equal and complete human beings. And some use their ability to attract the sexual interest of others as a power trip.

What are the consequences of viewing sex as something more than a physically trivial way of giving ourselves or others pleasure?

We live in a society where a man who makes children laugh by exposing his genitals to them may be viewed as a monster but we have no legal way to protect a child from the lifelong trauma which can result from being told by a parent that he might burn in hell for eternity if he masturbates or if he grows up to be a homosexual.

I recently discovered that a friend of mine has lived with crippling shame and fear of the judgement of others for about 25 years as a result of the response of his psychiatrist to a confession that he had engaged in acts of mutual masturbation with a male work colleague and had experimented by hiring a couple of adult male prostitutes. The psychiatrist told him he had done something very very bad. He said that, if his work colleagues knew that he had seen male prostitutes they would ostracise him. And he said, apparently out of the blue, that if my friend had sex with a fifteen-year-old boy he would be put in jail for life and that the other inmates might force him to eat his own faeces. As a result of this event twenty-five years ago, my friend was afraid to tell me about the incident lest I responded angrily like his psychiatrist.

Perhaps the area where our irrational attitude to sex does the most damage is in the area of rape and child sexual abuse. Unpleasant experiences which end when they end in a physical sense are usually not hard to recover from as long as we don't suffer permanent physical damage. Traumatic events are traumatic because, in some way, they put a rent in our relationship with our self or between ourselves and others.

Image credit: yeletkeshet / 123RF Stock Photo

Non-judgemental communication is love, and love heals. This idea is at the heart of the psychotherapeutic relationship and also the institution of the confessional in the Catholic Church. If something happens to us which causes us emotional suffering or leaves us with desperately confused feelings, it is talking about it honestly and openly with sympathetic people which allows us to recover. But because we treat sex, whether pleasurable or abusive, as something embarrassing if not shameful, and because the consequences of talking about sexual offences can lead to traumatic trials for survivors and a harsher punishment than they may want for perpetrators, especially if the perpetrator is a family member, there is a tendency for them to lie or remain silent about what happened. I think it is the lies and the silence and inability to receive the loving comfort that would come from openness, which is the major factor in the trauma. Without this element, the effects of the event would probably disappear fairly quickly. And this must be particularly true where an individual has mixed feelings about the event, such as the case of an adolescent who may have taken sexual pleasure and emotional comfort from an inappropriate relationship with an adult. If other adults try to deny such an adolescent's experience and insisted that they view the incident exclusively as an act of abuse, then they may be doing more harm than good. Healing requires that our experience by listened to without demands.

Sexual self-control and sexual repression are not the same thing. Sexual repression does not require that we act on our sexual desires, only that we accept them and enjoy them. We might not actually have sex with anyone other than a chosen partner, but, if we are emotionally healthy, we will feel sexual feelings for many other people. To be unrepressed is to allow ourselves to feel such exciting feelings fully. And if we are masturbating we can feel free to fantasise about any kind of act with any individual. There are no consequences in the imagination. If we feel sexual feelings which it would be problematic to act on then we can have a really good time by getting off to fantasies about them in our imagination. There can be a tendency, because of our cultural fear of sex, to think that indulging in taboo fantasies during masturbation will lead to us losing our ability to behave appropriately in real life. The opposite is true. If a man has truly depraved desires, such as having sex with his mother-in-law, he will find that, if he indulges these fantasies during masturbation, his relationship with his mother-in-law will improve because he will not be weighed down by the anxiety generated by trying to hold such desires in when in her presence.

Fear of the erotic can undermine our ability to enjoy non-sexual pleasures as well. Anyone who has ever gone for a walk on the beach or eaten a delicious meal after having an orgasm knows that sexual release opens up the full treasure chest of pleasures in the world around us.

When we think of the bonobos, those most sexually uninhibited of primates, and their happy, healthy and peaceful existence, one wonders if the root of our aggression, our mental illness and vulnerability to physical illness does not come down to pleasure deprivation. If our lives were more filled with pleasure would we build up the level of frustration which overflows into violence. One of the defining features of mental illness is living more in our head than in our body. And it stands to reason that a body which feels good will work more efficiently to heal.

Now I'm not suggesting that we need to participate in orgies. Only that we take a more common-sense, practical approach to sex, that we be less afraid and more tolerant, and that we create an environment in which sexual experiences, loving or abusive, can be more easily talked about rather than becoming a potential source of life-long trauma.

Image credit: pressmaster / 123RF Stock Photo

The Anti-Christ Psychosis

I just noticed today that Nicolas Cage has signed on to star in an Apocalyptic sci-fi thriller called Left Behind, due for release next year. This is a remake of a 2001 film based on the first of a series of best-selling novels. These books, and the previous films, have been very popular with a certain section of the U.S. Christian audience. I haven’t seen any of them, but they appear to be based on a very literalist interpretation of The Book of Revelations. The rise of a seductive and powerful Anti-Christ occurs after all of the Christians have been taken off to a better place by The Rapture. The message is that you better hurry up and accept Christ as your personal saviour or you may be “left behind” in this horrific world.

This got me thinking about people who believe in this sort of thing. Apparently 13% of U.S. voters believe that Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ. This is not something which just affects a few guys wearing “The End Is Nigh” sandwich boards. So lets look at it both from a historical and psychological perspective.

The first five books of the New Testament were written to spread a message to anyone who would listen. They were not addressed only to those who were already believers. This is not true of The Book of Revelations. This book, like the epistles of Paul and others, was aimed exclusively at members of the established Christian churches of the time when it was written. It was a prediction about problems which were likely to occur within the Christian churches. And it was not to be taken literally. It was presented as a record of a dream. Dreams are not literally true, though they can contain valuable truths expressed symbolically. A beast isn’t going to come out of the sea with ten horns and seven heads. We don’t live in a Godzilla movie. (Anyway, how would you distribute ten horns over seven heads and not have it look like a mistake?)

So the warnings about false prophets are warnings about those who teach something false within the Christian churches. And the warnings about great tribulation when hidden secrets are revealed is a warning that the crimes of those who take the wrong path into a false form of Christianity will be exposed and that they will be greatly mortified by that revelation. Hence the book of “Revelations”.

The Anti-Christ is a symbol for something within Christianity. There are two basic ways to be someone’s enemy. One is to do something against them while they are alive. No-one can be the enemy of Jesus in this way any more. He died two thousand years ago. The only way we can be the enemy of someone who is dead is to betray their legacy. We are ourselves and we are the ideas or works we may leave behind when we die. If we make no claim to being Christians then we can do no serious damage to Jesus’ legacy, whether we be atheists, agnostics, wiccans, Muslims, Hindus, or anything else. To reject or even attack someone’s ideas still leaves them intact. I suppose, in theory, we could try to destroy the record of that person’s ideas, but in the case of the words of Jesus that would be a very big job. No, if Christ has enemies they are Christian enemies. There is no worse betrayal than to claim to represent someone while preaching the very ideas they abhorred. I think the warning that John gave in the Book of Revelations was a warning that some Christians would betray Christ by preaching intolerance and hatred in his name.

The central message of Jesus was that love is the thing which really matters. Love is God manifested in human affairs. We should even love our enemies. And we shouldn’t judge anyone if we do not wish to be also judged. He told his followers to love each other as he had loved them. Love is any form of communication characterised by openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity. It requires that we accept the other person unconditionally and not try to exercise control, physical or psychological over them.

Jesus said nothing about homosexuality, promiscuity (as opposed to adultery which is the breach of a promise), abortion, voting for the Democrats, etc. If these are trespasses, then he recommended that we forgive them. He even asked God to forgive those who crucified him. There are clearly some Christians whose behaviour is in opposition to the philosophy preached by Jesus. The Anti-Christ is a symbol for this pathological tendency, just as Satan is a symbol for the pathological tendency of dishonesty, hence his being referred to as “the Father of Lies”.

The poet William Blake (1757-1827) viewed the Bible as a fictional document which was of interest because it depicted in a symbolic way the deep psychological conflicts which go on in the human psyche. He saw all the angels and demons as representations of internal psychological archetypes. And he used this same kind of symbolism in his own writing. In his poem The Everlasting Gospel he says “For what is Antichrist by those / Who against Sinners Heaven close.” He understood what the Book of Revelations was really warning against. By contrast his view of Christ’s message is summed up in a line from The Gates of Paradise : “Mutual forgiveness of each Vice, Such are the Gates of Paradise.”

Paranoia is an anxiety disorder in which we project the disowned part of our psyche onto others or onto the world around us generally. Belief in an Anti-Christ of the kind portrayed in Left Behind is a classic case of paranoia. We can see that such a literal figure is not what was intended by the author of the Book of Revelations. And we can see that many, if not most, of those who exhibit a belief in such an Anti-Christ also exhibit behaviour which places them within the category of the Anti-Christian that Blake described and the Book of Revelations warned Christians about.

If this belief can be seen as a paranoid delusion then it fits the definition of a psychosis. I know what it is to have a psychotic episode. I’ve had a few of them. They are characterised by irrational beliefs which are not supported by the evidence of the senses or, in some cases, a disturbance of the senses so that one hears or sees something which is not heard or seen by anyone else in the vicinity. The cause of this disjuncture with reality is an extreme state of emotional confusion arising from what is called a double bind situation. This is a situation in which we feel we have two options neither of which is acceptable. A case of damned if we do and damned if we don’t. An example given by the psychiatrist R. D. Laing was of a woman who had an absolute need to believe in the trustworthiness of her husband. When she came home and found him having sex with another woman she began hallucinating. There was no rational way for her to face her dilemma so her mind temporarily abandoned rationality.

Most cases of psychosis which are so defined are individual in nature. I had delusions. I behaved in bizarre ways. I was locked up in a hospital and given anti-psychotic medication. This is what normally happens as our delusions are experiences which are contrary to the experience of those around us. We may try to maintain these delusions but it is us against the world and the world wins, partly because the delusions are unrealistic and partly because the world outnumbers us and has access to a mental hospital and anti-psychotic drugs.

But there is also such a thing as a collective psychosis. If a whole bunch of people are caught up in the same double bind situation and there is a cultural precedent for the delusion they develop as a result then the world may not win, at least for a long time, as the delusion in each individual gets reinforcement by the others who share it.

Many Christians have a deep sense of ambivalence about Jesus. They need him desperately. They feel he offers them the only way to salvation. They need to be seen to be his supporters. This is central to their self-image. But, deep down, probably below the level of consciousness, they hate him. They hate him because he asks the impossible of them. He asks them to love everybody. And they feel, falsely, that he expects them to live a radically disciplined life. This puts them in a double-bind. They feel they must love Christ. But the more they try to love him the more they hate him. It is a negative feedback loop, and a double-bind. I think that one reason why the film The Passion of the Christ (2004) had such a powerful cathartic effect on some Christians, in a way which was distinct from their response to previous cinematic depictions of the story of Jesus, was because it provided an outlet for the hatred of Christ which they did not even dare to acknowledge to themselves. It let them share in the crucifixion of the man they felt, on some level, had crucified them. After all, the film portrayed very little of the loving message of Jesus and an awful lot of flayed flesh and spurting blood.

Of course, many Christians are not judgemental, nor are they paranoid. Many appropriately respond to Jesus’ message. They recognise that love and non-judgement are to be practiced with oneself as well as others, and they are able to live in the real world. These are the quiet Christians. The more of a song and dance someone makes about a belief the more they are trying to silence that contrary voice inside. It would not surprise me to find that Christian literalism or fundamentalism is something which has grown since Jesus day. They didn’t have science like we do, but that doesn’t mean that talk of angels and demons was always taken literally. You don’t need science to not believe in the literal existence of such creatures. You only need never to have seen one. And do we really think hallucinations were more common then than now? But poets talk in these kinds of terms all the time. It is possible that the key difference between now and then was that most people spoke poetically then while now we tend to speak literally. There is every reason to believe we are more prone to mental illness now than then. And in the area of religion this is especially true as the kind of double-bind I describe here has been with us for a long time now, spiralling further and further out of control.

So we can see that the Anti-Christ Psychosis is the projected fear of those who, on a subconscious level, know that they themselves are anti-Christ.

What will happen when this delusion collapses, as it inevitably must? This is what is warned of in the Book of Revelations as the time of great tribulation for many Christians. A time when people will feel so bad they want to die. There is no Hell in a literal sense. The warning that taking the wrong path would lead to a “Lake of Fire” is a description of the emotional pain of being confronted and exposed by the revelation that we were the thing we abhorred. The separating of the goats from the lambs describes what happens when the world at large can see clearly which Christians were real Christians and which were not.

I view Jesus not as a supernatural being and not as a religious leader, but rather as a psychiatrist operating through the medium of traditionally religious symbols and parables. I don’t think he performed literal miracles, in the sense of anything contrary to the normal laws of nature. But I do believe that he “cast out devils”. What is our image of the possessed individual? Linda Blair in The Exorcist (1973). What kind of behaviour does she exhibit when possessed? Lets forget about the Hollywood nonsense of green skin and spinning head. She is uninhibitedly sexual and she is verbally abusive and blasphemous. What do we repress within ourselves? Aggressive feelings toward others. Sexual feelings especially of a taboo nature. And, if we are religiously disciplined, blasphemous thoughts. What we see here, if we ignore the supernatural trappings, is the return of the repressed – the cathartic spewing out of psychological or emotional poisons. Exorcism has nothing to do with demons, it is what Freud called the Id – the repository of repressed angers and libidinous drives - which is being expelled. You’ve heard of speed dating? This is speed therapy. Transference, counter-transference and liberating catharsis all in a matter of minutes.

This is how I imagine it happening. Jesus is preaching when this angry man approaches him.

“I’ve had enough of your hippy drivel you long-haired pig-shit-eating pustule on a whore’s cunt! I’d like to cut off your diseased cock and shove it up your mother-fucking asshole. I can’t wait for them to nail you to a cross. I’ll be there eating popcorn, you piece of shit,” he says. And then he falls to his knees with tears streaming from his eyes.

Jesus calmly places his hand on the man’s shoulder and says “It’s going to be okay. You’ll feel better now.”

It is the truth, and only the truth, which sets anyone free. This is not some mystical truth. It is the factual truth. So, while the realisation that one is a part of what was labelled the Anti-Christ by John in the Book of Revelations, may be a painful shock at first, akin to a dip in a lake of molten lead perhaps, it is really a liberating realisation. Christ forgave those who crucified him, so that loving element in the human spirit of which he was an expression will also forgive those who, through fear and confusion, turned against it. In truth, nobody gets left behind.

Parental Guilt and Mental Illness

Image credit: makler0008 / 123RF Stock Photo

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image credit: goodluz / 123RF Stock Photo 

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

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

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

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

Image credit: goodluz / 123RF Stock Photo

Group Identification Vs. Freedom

We are all individual human beings. Paradoxically, this is what unites us. Though our individual experiences are different, they are all human experiences and thus share many common features. We are capable of love but we are prone to fear. Sometimes we think that love and hate are the great opposites, but it is really fear which is the barrier to love, and hatred is just one of the masks which fear may wear.

When we feel truly safe, love is inescapable. It is our natural form of communication with others and the natural feeling we feel towards ourselves. To the extent that we put up barriers to loving communication, we do so because we are frightened. The barriers are protective. At least they are intended to be. Love is open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication. If we are afraid, we close off. If we tell lies it is because we are afraid of what might happen if someone knew the truth. If our manner is rigid and stereotypical it is because we are afraid to set sail on the open sea of unending possibility. And if we are selfish it is because we are holding on to what we fear we may lose.

Sometimes we think that fear is simply the conscious experience of feeling anxious, but that is only its passive form. Whenever we take actions which are defensive or aggressive we are motivated by a sense of threat. We may not feel afraid. When we feel consciously afraid it is because we doubt our ability to meet a perceived threat. Even in the extreme danger of battle, soldiers often feel no fear while they are actually fighting. It is in periods of inactivity that anxiety is most likely to strike.

Image credit: evdoha / 123RF Stock Photo

The protective barriers which interfere with communication between individuals can take the form of character armour – fixed defensive habits. Sometimes we adopt some form of armouring to meet a specific current threat. If you accidentally knock over a motorbike and then a big hairy biker comes up and asks you if you saw who did it, you might consider it wise to put up a barrier to honest communication and say “Fucked if I know." On the other hand, armouring can be habitual. Past experiences where we “put our foot in it" may leave us with a chronic underlying fear which prevents us from being open and spontaneous in what we say.

One common form of armouring is group identification. Loving communication is something we can only practice from the basis of our individuality. To communicate in this way we have to perceive ourselves as individuals first and members of groups second. The only group we all belong to is the human race. We may have a gender, a race, a nationality, a religious affiliation, a sexual orientation... While these things are not always clearcut, most of us identify to some extent with some of these groupings. Sometimes, usually if we feel under threat in some way, we may think of ourselves as a member of a group first and an individual second. This will be a barrier to communication. If I communicate with you as one individual human with another then we begin with our common ground, and from there the fact that I identify myself as an Australian heterosexual male in his fifties with left-wing tendencies, a pantheistic belief system, and a love of movies, gives us rich subject matter for our interaction. Our differences become a source of great creative possibility. But if a perceived threat makes me think of myself as an Australian first and an individual second, then my mode of interaction is dualistically split into the “Australian" and the “not Australian". This may not pose a problem if I am communicating with another Australian, but it will if I'm communicating with someone who is not. Our common ground is compromised.

Image credit: icetray / 123RF Stock Photo

Let's look at some examples of how this can happen. It should be emphasised that, when a threat is genuine, group identification is a natural reaction and may be an necessary step along the road to a healthier mode of interaction. Let's look at the Black Pride and Gay Pride movements. The threat which led to the development of these forms of group identification were and are very real. Violence and discrimination against blacks and gays in various parts of the world have been extreme. People have been treated as if the colour of their skin or their sexuality were a cause for shame. And long term prejudice of this kind easily becomes internalised. People can come to think less of themselves because of the way they are treated and viewed by others. So the declaration of pride in the characteristic of which we have been told we should be ashamed is a crucial step forward. But it cannot be the end in itself. Our sexuality or the colour of our skin is not the real source of the pride. Sexuality and race are characteristics on which we cannot place a value. It isn't better to have one sexual orientation than another or to be one race rather than another. The source of pride is the way we as individuals have dealt with the challenges and threats placed in our path. If we are black or gay this may involve many cases of prejudice. But the healthy state towards which we are headed is one in which we are individuals first and everything else second. And, in the end, a state in which our self-acceptance is so unequivocal that the very question “Am I proud of myself?" becomes meaningless.

Religion is another area in which group identification can take precedence over the individual. We may view ourselves first as a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or an atheist and then as an individual. Or someone else may view us first as a member of one of these groups and only secondarily as an individual. Fear is the major factor in both cases. If we are insecure in our own beliefs then we will downgrade the doubting individual self and cling desperately to the group identification. And if someone has had bad experiences which prejudice them against our group then they may find it hard to see past our religious affiliation to the individual human who holds those beliefs. It is this insecurity which is the basis of religious intolerance and you can find it in many if not most religions and also amongst atheists. Insecurity about one's own belief system takes the form of an inability to agree to disagree. One finds minorities in Christianity and Islam whose fear won't allow them to enter into friendly communication with those of a different faith. Among atheists there are those who argue that even moderates of any faith should share the blame for things done by extremists because they are “enablers". I read a comment from one in which he said something along the lines of “Even a moderate Christian thinks you are going to Hell for your lack of faith." Now, leaving aside the fact that many modern Christians don't even believe in Hell, I ask myself “So what?" As long as I don't believe I'm going to Hell why should it worry me that someone else does? I would be most happy to be friends with such a person. I'm secure enough in my belief system that I'm sure we could agree to disagree on the whole Hell issue and still find much to talk about and productive things to do together.

Image credit: lsantilli / 123RF Stock Photo

One of the starkest examples of group identification is what happens in time of war. When our country is attacked we close ranks and become nationalistic in our thinking.

If fear is the basis for both defensive and aggressive behaviour, it is worth asking ourselves what is the basis for safety. Sometimes defensive behaviour, either personal or military, can preserve our life against a present danger. But can it be the source of longterm safety or freedom? There is always a price to pay in both freedom and safety from defensive behaviour. Sometimes the benefits are greater than the price, sometimes not. On the personal level we can see that our armour cuts us off from a life of creative loving interaction with all of our fellows. In the case of international conflict, nations often end up sacrificing personal freedoms by instituting conscription or imposing censorship, and there can be great loss of life, international reputation, mental and physical health of surviving combatants, etc. Defensive behaviour may be necessary when a threat occurs, but if we really want to increase our safety and freedom then we have to look at preventative measures. The social health of our community is like the health of our body. What makes us healthy? Is it the medicine we take when we are sick? Or is it the healthy food and exercise which makes us get sick less often?

Image credit: nejron / 123RF Stock Photo

Communication is the key to freedom, happiness, safety and creation. All of these things grow out of communication. Freedom is the ability to do the things we want to do and not have to do the things we don't. Without communication we can do very little. Most of the things which make us feel happy involve some form of communication. Sometimes it is one way communication, as when we enjoy watching something or listening to something. Sometimes it is communicating with others, which can range from a chat over a cup of tea to engaging in an orgy. A large part of safety is knowing about potential threats. A lack of communication can have dire results. A young man sits alone day after day, not wanting to have any communication with others, and then one day he takes a bunch of guns and heads to the local pre-school. If we had been able to find a way to get him to talk to us we might have found out what was going on in his head and averted a tragedy. And, on an international level, imagine what the Cold War would have been like if Russia and the United States shared a language and had the internet. People from each country would have been conversing with each other on a daily basis. Tension between the nations would have been greatly lessened and the governments of both nations would have been held more accountable by their citizens. People will always go easier on their government if they feel they need them as protection against the “Evil Empire" across the other side of the world. But when some of our best friends are “evil ones" the picture changes. Plus, international communication of this kind makes national censorship impossible. Finally, most of our greatest creative endeavours are cooperative projects which require lots of communication. Even a lone artist gets ideas from others.

We have the image of the brave soldier who fights for our freedom. This can be one side of the equation when we are faced with a current threat. He or she may be the medicine when we are sick. But if we want to make the world safe for freedom, there is something we all can do, and it also takes tremendous courage. It has always been fear which has held love in check. We loved completely before we learned to be afraid. Perhaps the hardest thing in the world is to stand alone and naked. To be defenceless. But beneath our armour we are all alone and naked. That is what unites us. All we need to do is to be that naked self and to say “Hello".

The Gift by Lone Justice (from their album Shelter) with images of primatologist Jane Goodall

Paperback Edition of "How to Be Free" Now Available on Amazon!

How to Be Free has been very successful as a free ebook. I decided to do a print-on-demand paperback version through Lulu because this makes it possible to get it into some libraries and maybe a few book shops. So far it is early days and I've only sold a couple of copies, but I have submitted it for the library selection system in Australia. I also intend to donate copies to libraries which don't chose to buy it, so any profit I might make on sales will help to fund that project.

Recently I was able to sign up for a free promotion campaign with Lulu so that the book can be sold by all of the Amazon stores (U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, France). For some reason the Canadian site has it listed as "unavailable" but I'm sure that will change. It should also become available through some other on-line bookstores eventually.

My good friend The Happy Looker has posted a review on Amazon :

If you would like to help out, consider posting a review on Amazon. If you have written a review elsewhere you can always cut and paste it. Or consider requesting your local library to purchase a copy. If the book was helpful to you, think of the satisfaction of knowing you are bringing the same kind of help to others by putting it somewhere they may find it.

Image credit: andresr / 123RF Stock Photo