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14 Sep 2012

RS33: The Way of the Cross

“For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him (Psalm 22:24). Pictured here is the garden at St. Michael’s Mount, Cornwall, which for some reason reminds me of the Garden of Gethsemane. Photo credit JAT 1997.

A: Tell me more about the practice you taught of “taking up the cross.”

J: We got a little side-tracked last time, didn’t we?

A: As usual. No straight lines around here. Always curves and meandering paths.

J: Funny how the clearest and truest path to the heart is never straight.

A: It took me a long time to figure this one out. But there’s so much freedom, so much peace, in understanding that love isn’t linear and isn’t supposed to be. It has its own strange rhythms. But in the end it’s stronger than anything I’ve ever known. It’s so . . . so . . . strong. It’s so complex. It’s not a pure strand of anything. It’s this amazing tapestry, as you’ve described it before. A tapestry with so many colours and so many songs and so many tears. All woven together into this picture, this portrait, of life. Life filled with passion and wonder and awe. Life where you’re constantly surprised. But also life where you don’t mind being surprised.

J (nodding): It’s very important, the idea of being surprised and not minding. It’s the “not minding” part that sets apart a person who’s listening to his/her soul and a person who’s not. The soul doesn’t mind surprises. The brain’s Darwinian Circuitry hates surprises. You can tell a great deal about a person’s brain health in the small moments when surprise strikes. The soul takes these unexpected events in stride. The Darwinian Circuitry seizes up and panics and can’t take swift, wise action. The soul continues to be able to act during a crisis. The Darwinian Circuitry comes to a grinding halt.

A puzzling thing happens when the Darwinian Circuitry panics. Inside the brain there’s a sudden “disconnect” between the decision-making centres and the movement centres. People literally freeze like a deer in the headlights. This is when they’re most vulnerable to lies — to words spoken aloud with authority by people who are in a position of trust. This is when mobs can be persuaded to riot. But it only works — and I want to emphasize this — it only works when people have already panicked. It only works when people have stopped listening to their own souls. You can’t force people who are listening to their own souls to join a mob. They won’t do it. They find no pleasure and no safety in the ridiculous idea that’s floating around of “homo duplex.” Mob mentalities — hive mentalities — are dangerous to the goals of healing, peace, and redemption. Mob mentalities lead to Crusades. Crusades are never a positive thing in the eyes of God or God’s angels.

A: It’s interesting how individuals stop taking personal responsibility for their own actions when they’ve agreed to hand over their own free will to a mob leader.

J: For those who can’t hear the inner wisdom of their own soul, it’s a relief to hand over their free will to somebody else.

A: It’s a difficult process, reclaiming your own free will. (Sighhhhh.)

J: Yes. There’s probably no greater challenge for a human being. Nonetheless, it’s the challenge that all human beings are called to. They must wrestle with what it means to have free will. They must question it, be confused by it, be angry at it, reject it, and finally come to terms with it.

A: What you just said reminds me of the stages of grief.

J: That’s exactly what the process is. It’s an experience of working through grief. And, by god, you need forgiveness to get you through it, because somewhere in the middle of the process you’re going to come face to face with the reality of all the times when you didn’t apply your free will in loving and trusting ways. You’re going to feel like a shit. This is where forgiveness sees you through. Forgiveness is the act of free will that allows you to keep going, to get up the next day and keep going even when you’ve stopped denying the harm you’ve created here on Planet Earth.

A: This is where you really need a mentor.

J: Yes. You need to know that somebody else has already forgiven you so you can find the courage to forgive yourself.

A: That mentor can be God.

J: Yes. If a person trusts that God the Mother and God the Father forgive her even when she’s been a shit, she can lean on their strength as she struggles to learn from her mistakes and forgive herself. It takes time to learn to forgive, but that’s okay. People have to believe that God doesn’t expect instant results. Indeed, instant results aren’t scientifically supportable or biologically possible. God only expects consistent effort. God will help you if you’re willing to make a consistent effort to be the best person you’re capable of being.

A: Warts and all.

J: God doesn’t mind warts. Human beings end up covered in warts and scars and cracked bones and broken hearts in their time on Planet Earth. God forgives you anyway. I can’t emphasize this enough. God sees past all the warts and scars and cracked bones and looks straight into your broken heart. You can’t hide a broken heart from God. Nor should you want to.

A: It’s so difficult for regular human beings to believe they’re worthy of God’s daily forgiveness. I really struggled with this in the beginning. But I’m glad you persisted!

J: It changes everything when you’re willing to accept God’s forgiveness. Everything. You find the freedom to move — really move. So instead of being nailed helplessly to the cross, immobile, desperate, unable to flow with the changes and surprises of each day, you begin to be able to move. Sure, at first you have to drag the damn cross with you, and it’s heavy, and it hurts. But at least you’re moving! And you’re starting to reclaim your sense of your own self, your own true potential. After a while the cross you’re dragging around starts to feel different to you. It starts to feel less like a heavy burden and more like . . . gravity. A place where you can feel the weight, the seriousness, the reality of honest truth and not be afraid of it. A place where honest truth is your ally, your very foundation. Your centre of gravity.

A person who has chosen to pursue status (“gaining the whole world” at the expense of honest truth) relates strongly to the image of the crucifix — Jesus nailed to the Cross — because this is the way he or she feels in relation to the world and to God. He feels trapped. Nailed down. Impoverished of health and happiness. Stuck in an endless circle of pain and self-sacrifice. So he thinks the image of the crucifix is right.

By contrast, a person who has chosen the path of knowing free will, love, forgiveness, healing, and redemption sees the cross in very different terms. He sees a symbol of freedom from the self-enslavement of status addiction, a symbol of the courage to be yourself and know yourself and trust yourself in a world that tells you this is impossible.

To be disenfranchised from Empire is not necessarily a bad thing.

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Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain-soul connection, conscience & morality, courage, Divine Love, forgiveness, free will, honesty, Jesus' teachings, Peace Sequence, personal responsibility, Realspiritik, relationship with God, Son of Man and tagged brain-soul connection | Leave a Comment

02 Jun 2012

TBM40: What Sheldon Cooper Can Teach You

When the writers and producers of the hit TV comedy The Big Bang Theory first envisioned the character of Sheldon Cooper, I’m sure their main goal was to craft a truly funny show. I’m sure they couldn’t have known their blend of spot-on writing and Jim Parson’s brilliant acting would end up creating an iconic portrait of the human brain’s Darwinian Circuitry. But just as the writers of The Big Bang Theory are always referencing some of my favourite series — series such as Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and Star Wars — I’m going to reference their Sheldon Cooper character as a way to speak accurately about the realities of the human brain.

Wind Turbines (c) Jamie MacDonald 2009. Used with permission of the artist. Every time I see a wind turbine, it reminds me of the ruthless logic of the brain’s Darwinian circuitry.

Jim Parson’s portrayal of theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper is hilarious because it’s 100% accurate in scientific terms. The humour works because the science works. In this case, the science they’re showing (albeit unwittingly) is the science of a brain that’s operating entirely on its 3D Darwinian Circuitry without benefit of the soul’s gifts of empathy, heart, and dignity.

I know it sounds really hard to believe that a person can function at all without using every part of the brain. We assume a person can function with only one kidney or one leg, but it never occurs to us to ask whether the same analogy applies to the brain. We tend to think of the brain as a single organ — either a whole brain that functions wholly and properly or no brain at all — so we give people the benefit of the doubt with regard to their internal thinking processes. We assume that if they can do all the basics — go to school, get a job, make everyday decisions — then their brains must be operating the way they’re supposed to.

But there’s a problem with this assumption: the basic tasks of going to school, getting a job, and making everyday decisions require the brain to use only one “software suite,” whereas it actually has two. Basic tasks require the brain to use only its Darwinian Circuitry, a “suite” of software devoted solely to 3D biological survival. The brain’s Darwinian Circuitry carries the programming for all things related to your body’s biological needs — food, water, clean air, sleep, protection from the elements, protection from predators, procreation (which is more optional than most people think), and relief from pain. In our culture, school and jobs and money and status are regarded by the Darwinian Circuitry of the brain as essential tools for survival. So anything to do with money and status are given extremely high priority by the Darwinian Circuitry, even it means pursuing a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, as our character Sheldon Cooper has done.

So efficient is the Darwinian Circuitry that it can carry out important survival tasks without any input at all from the brain’s Soul Circuitry. Of course, without input from the soul, survival tasks won’t be carried out with empathy. Or with trust. Or humbleness. Or gratitude. Or humour. Or anything resembling conscience. But they’ll be done, by god, and they’ll be done with the viciousness and cold logic of an S.S. death camp commander.

These are the kinds of selfish, conscience-free behaviours that idiot atheists such as Richard Dawkins have promoted as the “truth” about human nature. I see a lot of similarities between Richard Dawkins, philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and the Christian Apostle Paul.

Dawkins has coined the phrase “the selfish gene,” and at a certain level the label is accurate. There are stretches of genetic material in our DNA that are meant to boost our awareness of our individual survival needs. Otherwise how would we instinctively know how to run away from danger?! But these are not the only kinds of coding we have in our DNA. We also have coding for unselfish traits. We also have coding for traits such as empathy, trust, humbleness, gratitude, humour, and conscience.

In the language of personality theorists (a branch of psychology), we have to be able to account for the five universally observed dimensions of personality — Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Extraversion, Openness, and Conscientiousness — and we have to be able to account for all five of these dimensions in the face of aggressive arguments from behavioural psychologists and evolutionary biologists that human beings are nothing more than a collection of selfish genes seeking to reproduce themselves in the most efficient way possible.

So here’s how it actually works. The Darwinian Circuitry of your brain is responsible for expressing traits that fall within two of the five dimensions: Neuroticism and Agreeableness. The Soul Circuitry of your brain is responsible for expressing the other three dimensions: Extraversion, Openness, and Conscientiousness.

Yeah. It really is that simple.

Sheldon Cooper is an absolutely perfect representation of what happens to a human being’s behaviour and relationships when he falls into the trap of relying exclusively on choices that score very high on the Neuroticism and Agreeableness scales, and very low on the Extraversion, Openness, and Conscientiousness scales. He becomes, well, he becomes a Sheldon.

This package of traits is distinctive and highly recognizable. You get a person who’s highly controlling; perfectionistic; tense around other people; resistant to sudden change; inflexible; always “right”; quick to anger; thorough but lacking in imagination; socially compliant but lacking in genuine empathy; obsessive or obsessive-compulsive; politically conservative or right-wing; and rigidly obedient to the Law (dogmatic). The latter trait — rigid obedience to the Law — is especially important to understand in its proper context as a Darwinian trait because it’s often wrongly confused by researchers with traits from the Conscientiousness dimension.

The Darwinian Circuitry of the brain is very good at what it does (when it’s in balance with the Soul Circuitry) but on its own it’s very “black and white” in its thinking. It looks for simplistic “Cause and Effect” patterns. It looks for rigid “laws” that can be applied quickly and easily in all situations. The Darwinian parts of the brain “recognize” Materialist philosophy and codified religious texts and scientism (that is, treatment of scientific thought as an infallible religion). There’s NO capacity in these parts of the brain for processing complex emotions such as empathy, humbleness, courage, and forgiveness. On the other hand, logic and law are elevated to the status of the divine. You can see these patterns plain as day in Sheldon Cooper’s self-absorbed devotion to pure logic.

If you’re familiar with the Big Five personality theory, you’re probably saying to yourself that I’ve got the Agreeableness dimension all backwards and I obviously haven’t read the material carefully. I’ve read the material, and I think the scale for Agreeableness has been written backwards. High scorers on the Agreeableness dimension are harder to sort out in research studies because status addiction affects this dimension more than it does the other four. For instance, generosity and altruism may be genuine (in which case they’re coming from the Soul Circuitry and belong on the Extraversion dimension). On the other hand, generosity and altruism may be nothing more than status-addiction-in-sheep’s-clothing (which means they’re coming from the clever tactical centres of the Darwinian Circuit, and should stay right where they are on the Agreeableness dimension, since Agreeableness is focussed on social strategies that enhance 3D biological health).

A philanthropist who can’t donate money to a worthy cause without seeing his/her name emblazoned in big letters on the outside of a new research centre is suffering from a severe case of status-addiction-in-sheep’s-clothing. This behaviour deserves a high score on the “I’m-doing-it-to-survive-on-the-social-ladder” scale.

Giving, of course, is good. If you’re giving from your heart and soul, you’ll have no trouble giving anonymously and forgoing any credit for your generosity. It should be fairly obvious, though, that giving to others so you can earn yourself lots of status points is not so good from the soul’s point of view.

Poor Sheldon Cooper. He can follow the rules of social conventions by rote, but he doesn’t understand them. He doesn’t understand why he’s not supposed to call his twin sister “inferior genetic material.” He doesn’t understand why Leonard wants to be with Penny in emotional, intimate, heartfelt ways. He laughs when it’s socially appropriate, not because he gets the joke, but because he knows at a Darwinian level that he’s supposed to. He’s a classic Platonic Philosopher-King who believes in his own superiority and not much else.

He’s busted from top to bottom. But this doesn’t stop him from bossing other people around and using pure logic to abuse the people around him.

Not that Sheldon thinks he’s an abuser. In his own eyes, he’s a really nice guy.

This is why he reminds me so much of the Apostle Paul.

TBM37: Dreams – The Courage to Trust the Science of Sleep

One thing people on a spiritual path are very curious about is dreams. What are dreams? Where do they come from? Why do we have them? What do they mean? Does God send us messages in our dreams?

Sint Maarten 2014

This is a huge topic, and I can’t answer these questions in a single post, but I’d like to point out a few things you need to know about sleeping and dreaming if you want to stay healthy while you follow the Spiral Path.*

The number one thing you need to know — based not on religious teachings but on a huge body of scientific research — is that you need to get a good night’s sleep (or a good day’s sleep if you’re a shift worker). If you want to have a healthy brain, you need to set aside a single block of sleep time each day, a single block of uninterrupted time that’s 8 hours long or so. Your brain requires this time because it does a lot of work for you while you’re sleeping.**

I’ll come back shortly to the question of people who need to get up several times in the night for compassionate reasons — for example, young parents or caregivers who are looking after someone who’s ill. For the moment, I’m talking only about adolescents and adults who have a choice about their daily schedule and a choice about their nighttime activities.

Chronic sleep deprivation is currently wreaking havoc on the brains of people in our society. Perhaps you think I’m exaggerating, but this is one of those instances where I have lots and lots of scientific research on my side. So I don’t have to apologize for my strong statement about sleep deprivation. It’s the honest truth.

I have no tolerance — absolutely none — for any spiritual or religious teaching that barrels over the realities of sleep health like a tank on a military mission. I have no tolerance for any religious tradition that requires you to wake up part way through your sleep cycle so you can pray. I fully understand people’s desire to be in sincere communication with God, but if you really want to be in sincere communication with God, then please respect the way God designed your brain, and please make sure you get the sleep time God wants you to get.

You’ll be able to hear God and God’s angels much more clearly if you honour the teachings that come to you through current brain research (even though such research seems to contradict the wisdom of ancient religious teachings). There’s a reasonthat so many studies have linked sleep disorders to a whole slew of physical and psychological health disorders. Chronic sleep deprivation and chronic sleep interruption (eg. sleep apnea) are as toxic to your brain’s health as chewing lead paint off an old wooden spoon. You may not notice the effects at first, but you sure as heck shouldn’t be surprised when you start having health problems. Health problems are a biological consequence of your failure to get long blocks of natural sleep. If you already have a sleep disorder, then you know what I mean. When this major system of your body is “broke,” it ain’t pretty.

I’ve tried to emphasize on this site that everyone on Planet Earth is equal on the Spiral Path. Everyone has equal access to the wonder of it. Everyone has — or should have — equal access to the basic tools. The basic tools — free will, education, self-discipline, courage, empathy, brain health, teamwork — don’t require lots of money. They don’t require special rituals. They don’t require obedience to religious laws. But they do require trust — trust in the scientific realities of God’s good creation.

The need for natural sleep is one of the scientific realities of God’s good creation here on Planet Earth. It’s a scientific reality that can’t be circumvented by religious or cultural laws, no matter how much we’d like to believe in our own ability to “rise above” such petty biological concerns as sleep.

I know, of course, that many ambitious individuals in this world think sleep is a nuisance, and, even more significantly, that sleep is a sign of weakness, a sign shown only by needy and pathetic underlings unworthy of the right to lead others.

These ambitious Type A individuals (as they used to be called) are the same human beings who have lost all (or most) of the connections between the Darwinian Circuitry and the Soul Circuitry inside their own brains. Their brains are operating on a steady diet of status addiction, anger, contempt for others, narcissism, and denial. They no longer need as much sleep as other people because, to be honest, their own brains have less work to do at night.

This isn’t a good thing, by the way. It’s never a good thing when your own brain stops working the way it’s supposed to. It’s not a sign of strength or superiority when you only need 4 hours of sleep each night. It’s a sign that you’ve seriously fucked up your own brain.

Those who don’t sleep well also don’t dream well. Did you know that many people don’t actually have dreams? Not ones they can remember, anyway. Yeah, no dreams. It’s more common than you think. But most people who suffer from this kind of “dream disorder” don’t want to admit it out loud because they suspect, somewhere deep inside, that it isn’t biologically normal for a person to be “dreamless,” so to speak.

I’ve noticed a pattern over the years in the type of person who’s likely to confess he or she never remembers dreams. The people I’ve personally known who are “dreamless” are all high-functioning people in their waking lives, people who are meticulous, perfectionistic, highly rational, and bulldog-like in their relationships with others. These people mistrust sentiment, have little sympathy for the suffering of people they don’t know, hold politically conservative views, and cherish the values of duty, honour, obedience, and denial of pain. In psychological terms, they would score high on the “Negative Emotionality” or “Neuroticism” dimension of the Big Five Personality scale. They would also score high on the “Agreeableness” dimension of the Big Five.

These two dimensions — the Neuroticism dimension and the Agreeableness dimension — generate traits that are linked to the brain’s Darwinian Circuitry. The other three dimensions in the Big Five model — Extraversion, Openness, and Conscientiousness — are linked to the brain’s Soul Circuitry.

A human being whose brain is balanced and healthy will exhibit behaviours that seem, well, balanced across all five dimensions. Such a person is open to new experiences, but not so open that your brain falls out; conscientious without being obsessive or controlling or perfectionistic; agreeable and willing to compromise with others, but not willing to be an enabler of addictive behaviours; comfortable in relationships with other people, but also comfortable spending some time alone (as when sleeping!); alert to surrounding situations and stressors, but not preoccupied or obsessed by them.

This is a lot to balance, and it’s very hard for your brain to maintain this balance if you refuse to give your brain the time and energy and nutrients it needs so it can sort and label and store and heal the data it receives every day through your many experiences. Dreams are a significant part of the nightly sorting process.

Human beings are born with the capacity to have three different kinds of dreams. Each does a different job. But they all share one thing in common: they activate the primary visual cortex of the occipital lobes. This is why dreams are accompanied by visual images.

The first kind of dream you can have is purely biological. It’s the kind of dream nobody remembers clearly. It’s a sort of visual record that your brain transmits as it’s doing its nightly housecleaning. It’s a bit like an Excel spreadsheet accompanied by pictures on little Post-It notes. There’s no coherent story line — it’s really just a bunch of important snapshots taken at different times during the previous day. These dreams aren’t especially memorable, and they don’t have much emotional content. (Like an Excel spreadsheet with little pictures.) Important and necessary, but not what you’d call juicy.

Second is the kind of dream that’s more personal, more emotional, and more memorable. If you can remember your dreams, you’re most often remembering dreams from this category. When you have dreams of this kind, what you’re really doing is talking to yourself. Your soul is talking “out loud,” so to speak, with pictures and words and actions. Even more important, your soul is talking about emotions — honest feelings about choices you’ve made. The soul is nothing if not truthful and honest. So if your brain has made some choices your soul doesn’t like, your soul will pipe up while you’re asleep and will express feelings such as fear, anxiety, or a desire to do better (i.e. guilt). (Yes, your own soul can be afraid of choices made by the Darwinian Circuit of your own brain. This is called conscience. If you stop listening to the voice of your own soul — and many, many people do — your brain will stop accepting input from the parts of the brain wired to help you express your Openness, Conscientiousness, and Extraversion. Your brain will also stop sending you output in the form of personal dreams. You won’t have personal dreams anymore until you heal your brain.)

The third kind of dream is the kind of dream that’s experienced least often and is written about most. The third kind of dream is the message dream — the direct communication that takes place between you and God, or between you and God’s angels. Message dreams are only possible if you’re in an “open” state.

If you’re never in an open state (because you’ve chosen to reject input from the Soul Circuitry of your brain) you won’t get this kind of dream. Message dreams can only be received by a brain that’s relatively healthy and balanced. (Sorry — no exceptions.) So-called “oracular dreams” that come to you after you’ve used drugs or alcohol or intentionally induced trance states DO NOT COUNT. If you use outside means to try to receive a dream message from God, you’re likely to hear and see many fantastical things, but none of them will be messages from God.

Just because you can’t receive dream messages from God, it doesn’t mean God has abandoned you. Far from it. God never abandons anyone. But you have to accept the scientific reality that a closed brain can’t receive clear messages — either awake or asleep — and you have to work around this particular form of disability. There are plenty of other ways that God can — and does — communicate with you. If you can’t dream at present because your brain is in need of some serious healing, please be patient. Help is all around you.

Last, I’d like to return to the question of sleep deprivation in situations that can’t be helped, such as feeding and caring for an infant at night.

A young infant has strong biological and emotional needs that must be met by the parents or caregivers, and in a case like this — where you’re getting up in the night because someone else needs you and because you care — God and your angels will lend you extra support. You don’t have to ask for this support (though a prayer of thanks and gratitude is always appreciated!!). All you have to do is get up in the night because your heart tells you it’s the right thing to do. As long as you stay “in the zone” of caring and worrying about another person, God will look after the relevant wiring in your brain.

If, on the other hand, you’re getting up at night solely because you “have to” — solely from a sense of duty or obligation or feeling sorry for yourself — you won’t get the angelic support your body needs. Why not? Because you’re not being your true self — the loving, emotionally supportive person you’re capable of being. God has free will, and God does not enable choices or behaviours that snuff out the messages of the soul and replace those message with ideologies of perfectionism, superiority, victimhood, or obedience to religious law. So if you’re getting up in the middle of the night to recite traditional prayers so God will be properly “assisted and nourished,” you’re shooting yourself not in the foot but in the head. You’re ruining your own sleep cycles — intentionally and on purpose — because you believe you’re “helping” God, but all you’re doing is making it harder and harder for you to ever hear God’s quiet voice in your life.

God doesn’t need this kind of “help.” And neither do you.

One great thing about being asleep is the quiet. Once you’re finally asleep, it’s quiet in the kingdom of your own biological head. It’s in this place of quiet that God’s voice is most easily heard.

God the Mother and God the Father are very quiet and shy, you see. They love to laugh and they love to sing, but they’re both very quiet. They laugh and sing in some places, but in other places they’re the quiet of dew-laden rose petal, the quiet of the morning mist, the quiet of deep waters, the quiet of the sun’s rays silently bearing life to this wondrous planet we live upon.

If you’re very quiet and very open to the Heart of God the Mother and God the Father, you’ll feel the joy and tenderness of their embrace as a deep inner sense of comfort and safety that’s hard to describe.

I invite you to slip into quiet sleep tonight and feel the kindness and shyness of their love.

* Since I first wrote this post, there’s been a tidal wave of articles on the importance of sleep. Here’s a sample of recent articles that have appeared on the BBC news site:

** For more information on what your brain is doing while you’re asleep, please see “Perchance to Prune” by Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli in the August 2013 issue of Scientific American.

Posted Wednesday, May 9, 2012 on The Blonde Mystic

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Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain's Soul Circuitry, brain-soul connection, building your intuition, conscience & morality, healing, Mother and Father God, spiritual practices, The Blonde Mystic, theodicy, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged brain-soul connection, science & faith | Leave a Comment

24 Jul 2011

JR60: The Utoeya Tragedy in Norway

Sadness. Photo credit JAT 2014.

A: Well, big guy, when you’re right you’re right. On Tuesday (July 19, 2011) you talked honestly but in general terms about the mindset of psychopaths. You talked about a psychopath who props himself up with ideology and believes he’s a nice person.

Three days later, on Friday, July 22, 2011, Norwegian police arrested a 32 year old Norwegian man Anders Behring Breivik on charges of setting off a car bomb in Oslo and later mowing down at least 84 young people at a summer camp northwest of Oslo — on the island of Utoeya. The report I read in Saturday’s Globe and Mail (“Death toll reaches 91 in Norway attacks” by Walter Gibbs and Anna Ringstrom (Reuters)) gives some background information about Breivik. Early accounts referred to the gunman’s Facebook and Twitter accounts. (Since then, his Facebook page has been blocked.) His Facebook page apparently listed interests in bodybuilding, conservative politics, and freemasonry. He described himself as “a Christian, leaning toward right-wing Christianity.” He may also have been a a gun club member.

The real kicker is this: The Reuters account says, “Norwegian media said he had set up a Twitter account a few days ago and posted a single message on July 17 saying: ‘One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.'”

This is a horrible real-life example of exactly what you’ve been talking about for months now on this site. It’s almost exactly word for word what you’ve been saying. An ideologue — a psychopath who’s got his teeth sunk deep into a Big Idea — is capable of the most vicious crimes.

J: People from all quadrants, especially the conservative Christian quadrant, will be rushing in to offer their breathless analysis of “what went wrong.” They’ll speculate and cluck their tongues on the question of why a man who had so much, a man who appeared to be so capable and logical and well-organized, went so badly off the rails. Many people will shrug and say, “It’s just life. Humanity’s a pile of shit anyway, so who should be surprised?” Pious religious folk, including devout orthodox Christians, will invoke the Devil, as they usually do when they don’t want to look at themselves and their own contribution to man-made evils such as the Utoeya tragedy. They’ll say, “Satan possessed him and took his soul,” and similar bullshit. Not many people will be looking at this man and his ongoing choices and saying, “This man turned himself into a psychopath. On purpose. Because he liked the high of hurting other people.” But that’s the only appropriate response.

This is the response the angels around me are having to this crisis. God’s angels know what this man did this to himself. We forgive him, as we always forgive our brothers-and-sisters-in-temporary-human-form. But we can see this man’s brain, and this man’s brain is a seriously fucked-up mess. It also happens to be a fucked-up mess in a highly predictable and observable fashion. There’s a pattern to his behaviour. A definite, clear, observable pattern. Brain scans would show this pattern. Nobody has to take my word for it. Prove it to yourselves through more research. Please!

A: Don’t blame the Devil. Blame the brain.

J: Yes. You have to place the responsibility where it lies: squarely on the brain of this man Breivik. He made the choices and he made the plan. It’s his responsibility. Years ago he stopped listening to his own soul. But he’s still in charge of the rest of his brain and the rest of his choices, and he’s still responsible — legally and morally responsible — for his choice to use his logic and planning skills to carry out an intentional crime against humanity. He’s not a nice person, and he needs to be held to account during his human lifetime for the suffering he’s chosen to create.

A: Is it actually possible for a person who’s just mowed down 84 teenagers with a gun to still believe he’s a nice person? How could he possibly think that? It’s beyond belief! (Note: As of July 30, 2011, the number of dead at Utoeya is reported at 69, with the number of injured at almost 100.)

J: It’s beyond belief to you because you’re not a psychopath. You have a conscience and connections to your heart and soul. Brievik has no such connections. He decided years ago to cut them off inside his own brain.

A: But . . . how is that possible? How can a human being actually sever connections inside their own brains? Aren’t there fail-safes for that? Aren’t there Darwinian imperatives to prevent that from happening?

J: The human brain is an extremely complex series of organs. Way more complex than any other system in the biological body.

A: This month’s issue of Scientific American says essentially the same thing on the Forum page. (“A Dearth of New Meds: Drugs to treat neuropsychiatric disorders have become too risky for big pharma” by Kenneth I. Kaitin and Christopher P. Milne, Scientific American, August 2011, p. 16.)

J: I can’t emphasize enough the stupidity of treating the human brain as if it’s a single organ like the heart, and the insanity of pretending that human beings don’t have information from their souls hardwired into their DNA. And when I say “souls” I mean only good souls. I have no time or patience for patently abusive religious doctrines such as original sin. I will not tolerate any Christian saying to me, “Oh, yes, of course we believe in the scientific reality of original sin being hardwired into our human DNA! Why, anybody can see he was born evil!” This is NOT what I mean.

Our man Breivik wasn’t born evil. He wasn’t born in a state of original sin. His biology has been gradually changed and altered over many years because of conscious choices he’s been making. It’s taken years for him to become a psychopath. Years. But the signs have been there. The signs of his status addiction and his obsessive compulsive dysfunction are clear from his Facebook page and other reports. He was fixated on bodybuilding, conservative politics, guns, freemasonry, right-wing Christianity, and the Big Idea of “us versus them” (i.e. Dualism). This is a package deal, folks. An observable package, an observable pattern of choices followed by an observable pattern of behaviour. Why would Breivik’s soul, his true self, like any of these things? Why would his true loving self enjoy obsessive bodybuilding that damages the physical body over time? Why would his true loving self choose conservative politics that take away the sense of balance in a community between the rights of an individual and the rights of the group? Why would his true loving self think it’s fun to shoot other people for the heck of it? Why would his true loving self accept the myths of Hierarchy and Dualism?

Why would he choose any of these things if he were in a state of balance and wholeness? He wouldn’t. He just wouldn’t do it. It would feel wrong to him. But he can’t feel that wrongness because he opted years ago to start listening only to the stupid parts of his own brain — the parts of the brain that are supposed to help people look after aspects of their human lives that are purely 3D, purely temporary. Necessary but temporary because life on Planet Earth is temporary.

A: In the past you’ve called these parts of the brain the Darwinian circuit.

J: Yes. There are parts of the brain devoted to human physiological needs and human safety needs. These can be thought of in a general way as the Darwinian circuitry. There are also parts of the brain that specialize in the soul’s need for love and belonging, along with the soul’s need for self esteem. These latter two parts can be thought of as the Soul circuitry. All these parts have to be working together in order for a person to feel balanced and whole and sane and safe. Self-actualized, as Abraham Maslow called it. All these parts are needed for the experience of faith — genuine soul-based faith. It should go without saying that our man Breivik has the Big Idea but absolutely no faith. He calls himself a Christian, but he has no faith. All he has is the Big Idea.

A: You talked on Tuesday about score cards. You said a psychopath has a score card inside him instead of a heart.

J: The great dilemma for the psychopath — the person who’s dissociated from his own empathy and his own ability to love and trust — is how to get through the day. How to fill up all the looooooong, boooooooring hours between waking and sleeping.

A: Seriously?

J: Oh, yeah. Tell a psychopath he has to sit under a tree and be still and quiet for 8 hours and he’ll want to pull his hair out.

A: Really? I could sit under a tree for 8 hours and have a wonderful time.

J: Yes, but you don’t feel empty inside. You don’t feel purposeless and hopeless and restless and bored all the time.

A: Sometimes I feel restless.

J: How often?

A: I don’t know. Maybe a couple of times each week.

J: A psychopath feels like this all the time. He lives constantly for the next brief high, the next brief hit of status or cocaine or sex. It’s all he’s got to get him through the day. There’s only such much cocaine he can do each day, only so many times he can get an erection each day. So the mainstay for him is status points. He’ll do anything to get status points for his internal scorecard. He’ll keep his cell phone on 24 hours each day so he can get a “hit” from the fact that he’s needed by somebody at 4:00 in the morning. He’ll check his Facebook status 20 or 30 times each day. He’ll play computer or video games that rack up big points. He’ll gamble. He’ll gossip. He’ll focus fanatically on professional sports. Or, if he goes in a religious direction instead of a secular direction to find his daily supply of status points, he’ll become a man of the Book. A pious, obedient follower of the Law. An obsessive compulsive religious devotee.

A: But not a nice person. Not a person of empathy and patience and humbleness.

J: He has to choose between being an addict and being a nice person. He can’t be both at the same time.

A: Yet he’s certain he can be. He’s certain he’s a nice person who’s not an addict.

J: What’s the greatest obstacle to healing for those who suffer from addiction?

A: Denial.

J: Our Norwegian man, Mr. Breivik, is in a serious state of denial about his addiction to status. He’ll have no chance of recovery as a human being until somebody is honest with him about the nature of his addiction. Unfortunately for him, the doctrines of orthodox Christianity will only excuse his behaviour rather than force him to confront it. Pauline Christianity is, in essence, an anti-Twelve-Step Program.

This isn’t exactly the sort of helpful Church teaching God’s angels have in mind.

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Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, Christ Zone, conscience & morality, dualism, HDM Myths, Jesus Redux, Original Sin, psychopathy, psychopathy (niceness), status addiction, theodicy and tagged religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

19 Jul 2011

JR59: News of the World: "New Lamps For Old"

A: I see a lot of similarity between the current phone hacking scandal in the U.K. and the behaviour of the apostle Paul and his cronies in the first century CE. In both situations, a very powerful man does whatever he wants regardless of how unethical, corrupt, manipulative, and cruel it is. The only difference between then and now is that Rupert Murdoch’s employees have received a public shaming. Without the huge public outcry that accompanied the recent re-revelation about phone hacking at the News of the World, the authorities wouldn’t have reopened the investigation or arrested more people. The authorities — or rather I should say certain individuals in senior positions of authority in the police and government — knew about the accusations of unethical conduct and did nothing much about them until regular people started yelling and putting their foot down.

“But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at their image and, on going away, immediately forget what they look like. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act — they will be blessed in their doing” (James 1:22-25). Replicas of Ancient Greek vessels. Photo credit JAT 2014.

J: The parallels are uncanny. If people today are having trouble imagining what it felt like for my followers soon after my death, they can read about the phone hacking scandal and put themselves in the shoes of the families of the murder victims who were psychologically assaulted by the News of the World reporters, editors, and decision makers.

A: I think most people would be shocked to learn how unethical Paul really was. How cold and calculating he really was.

J: He was a business man. Very practical, very logical. He was like the editor at the News of the World who approved the phone hacking strategies. Anything was okay as long as it got the job done. “The end justifies the means” and all that crap. Success at any price. Just the way his bosses in Alexandria wanted it.

A: Yet you’ve said in previous discussions that Paul truly believed in what he was doing.

J: Sure. A successful psychopath is an ideologue. It’s what separates the successful psychopaths — “snakes in suits,” as researcher Robert Hare calls them — from the garden variety criminals who get caught and thrown in jail for reckless, impulsive crimes. An ideologue — and Paul was a religio-political ideologue — uses “The Big Idea” as a crutch to hold up his dysfunctional brain. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s an external framework of ideas that the psychopath clings to because he’s lost his own internal compass. He can’t hear the voice of his own soul telling him what’s right and wrong. But he’s still very logical, very goal-oriented, and he’s addicted to status. So if he can “attach” himself to an external Big Idea, and apply his logic and ambition to it, he can acquire status and not end up in prison.

A: Why won’t he end up in prison? Aren’t psychopaths inherently impulsive? Prone to risk-taking behaviours and uninterested in consequences? Doesn’t this make him more likely to do something criminal?

J: Yes. It’s part of the package for psychopaths. But if you put a psychopath in a structured organization where there are very strict rules, very clear punishments, and rigid ladders of governance, he’ll be so busy trying to claw his way up “the ladder of success” he won’t bother going out to rob banks or gas stations. The buzz he gets from plotting his long-term strategy for “success” is much better than the temporary high of terrorizing a gas station attendant.

This is not to say the snakes-in-suits are “nicer” psychopaths. They’re not nice people at all. But no one can question their ability to promote “The Big Idea” (whatever their Big Idea happens to be) with charismatic passion. Regular people are easily sucked in by this passion.

A: So Paul was a snake-in-a-suit. I kinda like the way this ties in with the conversations we’ve had about the Book of Genesis.

J: Paul was promoting the Big Idea of salvation. Escape from a life without status. Escape from a death without status. He and his followers built a humongous empire on the “4 S’s” — sin, separation, sacraments, and salvation. But Paul’s Big Idea was just that — an idea. A belief system. A theory without proof. A theory that’s never had proof. Its very lack of provableness is what makes it so attractive to psychopaths. Why? Because there’s nothing in the Big Idea that can act as a mirror for the psychopath’s true intent. There’s nothing to make him look at himself honestly. There’s nothing to challenge him to be his best self. The Big Idea gives him 1,001 excuses to brush his abusive behaviour under the carpet. Unfortunately, until the psychopath sees himself as he really is, he has no incentive to change.

A: I think we’ve just spiralled back to your analogy between a psychopath and the Greek monster Medusa. Medusa’s hideous face turned everyone into stone until Perseus held up a mirror-like shield and forced her to look at herself.

J: Part of the problem here is that regular people don’t understand what makes a psychopath tick. Regular people look at a “successful psychopath” — the guy who has the drive and ambition to work 16 hour days — and they think he must really know who he is and what he wants. They think they should try to be like him. They think they themselves are failures if they want to go home to their families after working an 8 hour day. But the honest truth is the successful psychopath has no idea who he really is. All he has inside himself is a score card. A score card instead of a heart. His soul is all heart, of course, but he long ago stopped listening to this core part of himself. This is why he has no conscience and no empathy. His soul isn’t defective, but his biological brain is seriously out of balance. He’s so used to living this way that it’s normal for him. Even worse, he likes living this way. He likes hurting other people. He likes making regular people feel small and useless. And he’s not going to change until he recognizes the honest truth that he’s not a nice person.

A: It took me years to understand this lesson. I misunderstood what compassion was. I thought compassion meant you should never intentionally make another person feel bad about themselves. That’s before I learned (the hard way) that a lot of people out there want to hurt other people and consciously choose to hurt other people and get a high out of psychologically abusing other people and won’t decide to stop this behaviour until they’re forced to look in the mirror. I also learned the hard way that the more dysfunctional a person is, the more insulted and offended she’ll be when you tell her she isn’t being a nice person.

J: You’re thinking of someone in particular when you say that.

A: Yes. I’m thinking of Grace, the modern day “spiritual leader” (a.k.a. apocalyptic prophet) I hung out with for several years before I came to my senses.

J: These are the people who are quickest to say, “You have no right to say such things about me.”

A: Hey, don’t forget the other favourite response of the psychopath who insists she’s a nice person: “Oh, my dear, tut tut, how can you say such things about me? Why, everyone knows what a good person I am and how hard I work on behalf of the community. I’m so concerned for you, you poor thing. You really need to get some help.”

J: A psychopath has extremely strong defences against hearing the truth about his or her own behaviour. It’s scary how strong these defences are. The doctrines of orthodox Western Christianity have served as excellent body armour for its successful psychopaths. Pauline Christians are not called upon to look honestly at themselves and make changes to live up to their true potential. Instead they’re encouraged to stoop to the level of a psychopath’s dysfunctional mind so the psychopath doesn’t have to feel bad about himself.

A: You said pretty much the same thing in James 1:22-25.

J: I’m a consistent fellow. But it’s not hard to be consistent when you’re trying to speak the truth. Truth has an annoying habit of being consistent and provable and open to new and unfolding sources of knowledge. Even if it takes a couple of thousand years for the truth to be recognized, for the facts to be identified, remembered, understood, and acted upon.

A: I’m glad there’s finally a solid and widespread foundation of research in place so the truth about Paul’s “News of the World” can finally come out.

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Posted in "4 S's", "Escape", conscience & morality, empathy, Jesus Redux, Jesus' original writings, Letter of James, Paul's teachings, psychopathy, psychopathy (niceness), theodicy and tagged Paul vs Jesus | Leave a Comment

15 Jul 2011

JR58: The "My Fellow American" Interfaith Initiative

A: I was contacted this week by a person who’s working with the Unity Productions Foundation on an interfaith initiative called My Fellow American. The goal of the initiative is to encourage Americans to think of their fellow Americans who happen to be Muslim as fellow Americans. There’s a 2 minute film produced by Unity, and there are also uploaded videos and stories from various supporters of the idea that all Americans are equally American, regardless of religion. What do you think of this project?

J (grinning): I think you should post the address.

A: Oh yeah. Good thinking. The address is http://myfellowamerican.us/

I discovered when I went to watch the film how truly outdated my computer really is. Computer updates are not my thing. Good thing the computer at work has more juice in it.

The person who contacted me also wondered if I could maybe Tweet about the project if I checked it out and liked it. I don’t know how to tell her this, but I don’t even own a cell phone. So the Tweeting is pretty much out.

J: Everybody has their own way of communicating with others.

A: Anyway, I certainly can’t argue with the basic principle of treating all your neighbours with dignity and respect and compassion and kindness regardless of religion. This is what makes a society internally strong.

J: The one thing people have to remember is that all human beings are children of God. A Muslim woman is just as a much a child of God as the saints of Christian history. To deny a woman dignity and respect simply because she’s Muslim is to withhold divine love from your neighbour. It’s as simple as that.

A: I think some people are afraid that if they love and accept the woman with an open heart they’ll be required to love and accept all the religious teachings that are part of her tradition. At least that’s how they view it.

Regardless of religious affiliation, we’re all children of God. Photo (c) Hemera Technologies 2001-2003

J: Religious teachings are very much a human thing. Divine love, on the other hand, is a soul thing. Divine love always trumps religious teachings. Every religion on the face of Planet Earth today has problems — problems with abusive doctrines, problems with gender issues, problems with “law,” and problems with balance. Every religion. Islam is no different from Christianity in this regard. Sure, Islam has some problems. But so does orthodox Western Christianity. This is no excuse for failing to love your neighbour and failing to believe in his or her best self. Everybody’s struggling. People of all religions have to hold each other up. People have to work together. It’s the only way to find healing.

A: The 10-year anniversary of 9/11 is coming up. Some people haven’t got over the shock. They’re still looking for someone to blame.

J: If they’re looking for someone to blame, then they should be looking at the unassailable laws of neurophysiology, not at religion. Only a seriously, seriously dysfunctional individual thinks it’s okay to blow up buildings “in the name of God.” This applies across the board to all religions and all cultures. Christianity has had its fair share of psychopaths in martyrs’ clothing, too. Psychopathy is a social, medical, and educational issue. Psychopathy is about as far from genuine relationship with God as it’s possible to get.

The vast majority of Muslims and Christians and those of other faiths are doing their best to get closer to God — not farther away from God and faith — even though they make mistakes along the way. People of all faiths are constantly learning, changing, growing. Traditions change. Religious teachings change. The one core truth that doesn’t change is the reality of the good soul, and the potential of all human beings to help each other understand this reality. If you allow yourself to be open to this truth, amazing things can happen in your community. Whatever community you happen to live in.

A: There are some psychopaths in positions of religious authority.

J: Yes. But there are also psychopaths in positions of political and economic and educational authority. Psychopathy is an entirely separate issue from the question of faith. Inherent to the definition of psychopathy is a total lack of conscience and empathy — in other words, a disconnection from all that enables true faith, true relationship with God. A psychopath seeks status, not faith, when he or she chooses to blow up buildings. It’s entirely a question of status addiction. Can we say this status addiction is true of “all Muslims”? Well, OF COURSE NOT. This would be the same as saying that every person who lives in Boston must be a status-addicted psychopath simply because he or she happens to live in Boston. It isn’t right or fair to make such a claim.

A: Claims such as this have been fairly common over the course of history, though.

J: True. These claims fall under the umbrella of the HDM Myths that you posted about on Concinnate Christianity. (http://concinnatechristianity.blogspot.com/2010/11/it-takes-village-non-hdm-village-that.html ). Group myths of Hierarchy, Dualism, and Monism. Again, these are human myths, human choices, that have nothing to do with the faith of the soul. Challenge the myths and heal the soul, remembering always that the soul is not the aspect of the self that’s perpetuating these myths. It’s certain parts of the biological brain that have gone off the rails, so to speak, and now enjoy the addictive high of schadenfreude. For a person suffering from status addiction, there’s just nothing better than a good hit of mental revenge and religious hatred to get you through the day. It’s cheaper than buying whiskey and cigarettes.

A: That’s a pretty tough statement.

J: Addiction is a pretty tough reality. Addiction destroys lives. Better to be honest about its effects.

A: Because, as you often say, healing follows insight.

J: My hat’s off to the My Fellow American participants because they’re doing their best to help others in their community be their best selves. And they’re working together as a team to teach and share and communicate in relationship with each other. As an angel, I can’t ask for more than that.

Addendum, October 16, 2023: It’s been 12 years since I wrote this post with the soul who lived as Jesus.

The world has changed greatly during this time. One of the unfortunate changes has been an ideological shift towards monism within many educational institutions and humanitarian organizations in Western nations. This shift has taken society further away from the idea that people hold individual responsibility for their own choices. In place of the long-held Judeo-Christian value system built on free will, personal responsibility, and accountability to your own inner wisdom (what we call “conscience”), there has been a push to impose a value system based on “group banners” behind which individuals can hide.

No one can be his or her best self if “group banners” (especially religious “group banners”) are used as an excuse for hanging onto harmful traditions, hateful actions, or justification for revenge.

Mother Father God and your angels don’t care what your religious teachers say. What matters to God is how you choose to use your free will as a human being during your time on Planet Earth. If you decide it’s a great idea to hate other people on the basis of their religion, that’s not okay with God. The recent resurgence of anti-Semitism is therefore not okay with your own soul or your angels.

Anti-Semitism isn’t the only example of extreme hatred in today’s world, but right now it’s a cauldron of suffering, especially for those who are doing the hating.

It’s your job as a human being — as a soul in human form — to learn how to look past the “group banners” that breed hatred and divisiveness. Seek the best in others and stand your ground as a child of God. Treat each person you meet as an individual who is responsible for his or her own choices towards others and towards God. This probably means you’ll have to reject some of the destructive religious doctrines that are causing problems in the world today. But if that’s what you have to do so you can hear your own conscience, that’s what you have to do.

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Posted in conscience & morality, faith, free will, hatred, HDM Myths, Islam, Jesus Redux, monism, psychopathy, religion and mental Illness, Soul, status addiction and tagged brain-soul connection, Divine Heart | Leave a Comment

13 Jul 2011

JR57: Suffer the Little Children to Come Unto Me

A: When I came home from work on Monday, Oprah was rerunning an episode about two twin daughters who had been being sexually assaulted and raped by their father and two brothers until a neighbour called authorities. Towards the end of the episode, Oprah offered the definition of forgiveness that she’s found most helpful. It was something to this effect: “Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been different.” How do you respond to that?

J: Well, I find this definition demeaning and discouraging. Forgiveness is not about “giving up hope.” Forgiveness is about finding hope.

A: Maybe the person who coined this definition was using the word “hope” in a different way than you and I use it.

J: Hope is one of those slippery, hard-to-define spiritual terms. About as easy to explain as forgiveness. And about as complicated. Basically, though, angels use the word hope as a synonym for “trust in God.” It’s a powerfully positive, uplifting emotion. It’s an emotion that expresses an element of uncertainty. Perhaps I could rephrase that. Hope — trust in God — is an experience of emotional continuity in the face of apparent discontinuity in the Materialist laws of Cause and Effect. In other words, you still believe in God’s goodness even when you can’t see an obvious link between actions and the results of those actions.

A: A leap of faith, in other words.

“Jesus said: From Adam to John the Baptizer, among those born of women, there is no one greater than John the Baptizer, so that his eyes should be averted. But I have said that whoever among you becomes a child will know the kingdom and will become greater than John” (Gospel of Thomas 46 a-b). Photo credit JAT 2023.

J: Yes, but not a blind leap of faith. Trust, surprising as it may seem, requires an element of brutal honesty. Brutal honesty about oneself. Trust requires you to know your own limits, your own abilities right down to a “t.” This knowledge allows you to recognize situations where you’ve reached the limits of your own abilities and experience. At this point, you switch over to your knowledge about other people’s abilities and experience. You switch over the decision-making process to somebody who has more knowledge about the topic at hand than you have. You hand over the reins, as it were. Angels do this without an instant of shame or jealousy or regret. They simply accept their limits and gratefully hand over the reins to other angels. This is what humbleness feels like. Not false humility, as the Church teaches it, but divine humbleness.

A: You’re making my head hurt with all these different terms — forgiveness, hope, trust, humbleness.

J: These are all complex divine emotions. Not the same as each other, but interwoven with each other. Holistically. Hopefully, people will like the idea that God the Mother and God the Father are capable of experiencing and expressing the most complex emotions of all.

A: This switching-over thing you’re talking about . . . is this related to the research you’ve been helping me collect about the “gears” in the biological human brain that are supposed to help people switch smoothly from one idea or emotion to another?

J: You mean parts of the human brain such as the anterior cingulate gyrus?

A: Yes. And related “switching centres.”

J: Definitely. Angels don’t have an anterior cingulate gyrus, but souls-in-human-form do. Angels who incarnate as human beings need a biological “toolkit,” and a number of tools in that toolkit relate to the human brain and central nervous system. When those tools aren’t used the way they should be — when, for example, a “hammer” is used when a “screwdriver” is called for, or when the blunt end of the adjustable wrench is used instead of the adjustable claws at the other end, you can’t expect the result to be pretty. The human brain is designed with an entire set of “ball bearings” and “lubricants” to prevent the various gears of the brain from grinding against each other and causing excessive wear. Unfortunately, in many young human beings, the ball bearings and lubricants are the first thing to go. After that, you see the onset of DSM-IV psychiatric disorders such as bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, problems with impulse control, problems with anger control, possibly even psychopathy.

A: All because their switching mechanisms aren’t working properly?

J: The human brain is an incredibly complex set of tools and machinery. It uses many different types of switching mechanisms to help it balance incoming data and outgoing choices — outgoing thoughts, feelings, and actions. The operative word here, of course, is balance. The brain has to be able to identify, remember, understand, and fix many different sorts of problems. It has to switch constantly between different spheres of reality, between logical thought and positive emotions and practical actions, between the needs of the self and the needs of the other, between active learning and quiet processing, between past, present, and future. Believe me, human beings need every scrap of brain tissue they can muster for this job of Whole Brain Thinking.

A: So when the switching mechanisms aren’t working properly, people get “stuck.” They get stuck in one or two spheres. For example, a person who gets stuck in the past.

J: Yes. Or a person who gets stuck in logical thought. These are the people who lack empathy, who lack compassion for others. They make all their choices based on logic alone. The Church has had an overflowing cup of bishops who were incapable of feeling empathy.

A: I’ve also known some people — mostly women — who seem stuck in their emotional circuitry and can’t make a decision that’s tough. They don’t forgive other people so much as put blinders on. They try to sweep great harms under the carpet so they don’t have to deal with the fallout of taking a firm stance.

J: Forgiveness is very much about taking a firm stance. The first step in forgiving somebody — whether it’s yourself or someone else — is honesty. There must be an honest assessment of harm. This means you have to take a stance on the question of right and wrong. For the soul — for all souls in Creation, including God the Mother and God the Father — some choices are clearly right and other choices are clearly wrong. The soul knows the difference. The soul feels confident and clear when right choices are made. The soul feels abused when wrong choices are made. This is what many people call . . . conscience.

A: There’s been a trend among some New Age gurus and some Progressive Christians to claim there are no moral absolutes. Hence there is no need for forgiveness. According to these thinkers, all choices are equally acceptable to God because each person is really just a spark of God trying to express itself. Neale Donald Walsch has built a lucrative empire on this idea.

J: Only a person who doesn’t want to face his own life choices would find this theory acceptable.

A: It does leave a lot of wiggle room for people who want to excuse their own behaviour . . .

J: Forgiveness is a clear and conscious decision to call forth and believe in the best that a person can be and the best a person can do. Forgiveness is a refusal to accept excuses. At the same time, it’s a gift of love that has no strings attached. Divine love goes beyond anything a Materialist philosophy of Cause and Effect can imagine. Divine love is an up-front gift, a conscious decision to offer the recipient (whether the self or an another person) a vote of confidence in his or her best self. It’s a leap of faith. It’s a boost-up. A helping hand. A sense of purpose for a person to hang onto. It does not require you to prove yourself before you get the gift of love. If you had to prove yourself first, one proof at a time, as many theologians have taught, you’d be looking at the vertical path of spiritual ascent — anagogic mysticism. Anagogic mysticism is a form of Materialist belief. God the Mother and God the Father are not required to obey Materialist philosophy. They love us because they choose to love us, not because they “owe” us anything for our “obedience” and “piety.” They believe in us, their children, so much that we simply cannot and will not let them down. They inspire us to be our best selves. But they don’t force us to be our best selves — we, as angels, choose to be our best selves. It’s as natural as breathing for all angels.

A: Including the angels who have incarnated on Planet Earth.

J: Yes. Including the angels who have incarnated on Planet Earth. There are no exceptions among God’s children. All angels are filled with trust and devotion and gratitude and courage BECAUSE God the Mother and God the Father believe in our best selves. They have faith in us.

A: So in the case of a father who has raped his own daughters, how would God look at that?

J: God the Mother and God the Father would recognize instantly the selfish, uncourageous intent of the father. They would identify the problem — the father’s dysfunctional brain circuitry — and they would remember this as they worked to help him and those around him recognize the great harm he’s been choosing to create. They would not condone or accept this behaviour as acceptable. They would identify the behaviour as “wrong.” Nonetheless, they would blanket him in divine love. They would whisper to his soul, “We believe in you. We know this isn’t the best you can be. We know you can make loving choices. We won’t abandon you. We’ll stick right with you and show you why your choices have been wrong. You won’t understand at first, and you’re going to be angry and confused and resentful for a while, but that’s okay, because we know that more than anything in the world you want to be able to give love. We believe in you.”

A: And then God sends you through the human court system that’ll cart you off to jail for “X” number of years.

J: Somehow you have to get it through your thick human skull that you made an abusive choice that was very, very wrong. You have to accept that you made a mistake, you have to accept that you can learn from your own mistakes, and you have to accept that you can be a better person who makes right choices. If you receive the right kind of help.

A: Locking up a person and throwing away the key isn’t the right kind of help.

J: Nor is revenge the right kind of help. Usually it takes a whole team to provide the right kind of help to a man who has raped his own daughters. A whole team of well trained professionals. Of course, if the professionals themselves don’t believe in the soul or the power of forgiveness or the mystery of God’s divine love, they’re ill-equipped to provide the kind of mentorship the abuser needs if he’s to have any chance of living up to his best self.

A: In which case the abuser isn’t likely to be healed.

J: Healing follows insight for both the victim and the perpetrator of a crime. Forgiveness, as we’ve said, is a catalyst that speeds and facilitates the healing process. Healing is the path towards Wholeness. Not the path towards Oneness but the path towards Wholeness. Wholeness is the place — the Kingdom, the experience of self — where you know yourself and all your limits and all your strengths and all your quirks and you can be humbly proud of yourself anyway because you’re being the best person you can be.

A: Young children are like this. They have the ability to throw themselves into new relationships and new experiences to the best of their ability without any concern for status or “face.”

J: Yup. That’s what I meant when I said that to enter the Kingdom you must become again like a little child. Humble and guileless, yet full of infectious enthusiasm and intelligence. Many three-year-olds are smarter than the adults around them because they haven’t yet forgotten how to learn.

A: And they still know how to forgive. Young children are born with an amazing ability to forgive.

J: I rest my case.

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Posted in anagogic mysticism, brain-soul connection, Cause & Effect, conscience & morality, Divine Love, forgiveness, healing, honesty, humbleness, insight, Jesus Redux, Materialism, mental illness, mentorship, Soul, trust, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

22 Jun 2011

JR52: Pelagius and Personal Responsibility

A: In our discussions lately, you’ve been emphasizing the role of personal responsibility in the journey of healing and faith, and I’ve been waiting for somebody to jump up and accuse you of being a Pelagian. How do you feel about the Pelagian philosophy of free will?

For the record, Pelagius was born sometime in the late 300’s CE, and died around 418 CE. He and his followers drew vicious attacks from Augustine of Hippo and Jerome, and Pelagianism was condemned as a heresy in 431 CE.

J: Without getting too much into the details of the debate between Augustine and Pelagius on the nature of free will, I’d have to say that both of them were wrong.

A: How so?

J: Neither of them had a balanced view of what it means to be a human being. Augustine had no faith at all in the ability of human beings to consciously change their lives and their communities through human initiative. He thought people would be happier if they just accepted their miserable lot in life. Acceptance of Original Sin and concupiscence was the best they could hope for, in his view. His views on human nature have created no end of suffering for devout Christians over the centuries.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, Pelagius preached the opposite extreme. He taught the path of spiritual ascent — anagogic mysticism — which says that people can achieve a state of holiness and perfection if they just try hard enough. He placed the entire burden on the individual. This is no less damaging to people’s lives than Augustine’s idea. Neither man understood — nor wanted to understand — that the path of healing and relationship with God is a path of balance. There must be a balance between personal responsibilities and group responsibilities, a balance between personal responsibilities and divine responsibilities. In particular, there must be a willingness on the part of individuals AND on the part of groups to be honest about their own limits. This honesty is the foundation of great strength for souls-in-human-form. Unfortunately, both Augustine and Pelagius hacked away at this foundation with all their might. They both snatched away a source of deep courage and strength for Christians, and insisted on despair and self-blame in its place. It was a cruel thing to do.

A: So your understanding of personal responsibility isn’t the same as what Pelagius taught.

J: It’s important to note that in the Peace Sequence we’ve been discussing, I’ve placed personal responsibility as the third “gear” in the sequence, not the first gear. Pelagius and others have tried to place personal responsibility in the first position on the Peace Sequence, not the third position. They’ve tried to equate free will with personal responsibility, as if they’re synonymous, as if they’re exactly the same thing. But they’re not.

A: Can you elaborate on that?

J: Personal responsibility is perhaps the most complex, most advanced skill set that human beings can learn during their lifetime here on Planet Earth. It’s not a single skill or a single choice. It’s what we referred to earlier as a “meta-choice” — a pasting together of several smaller choices into something bigger. A meta-choice is so well integrated, so cohesive, so holistic that it often seems like a single choice. But actually it’s a blend of several other choices. It’s a blend of the choice to be courageous, the choice to be empathetic, the choice to be humble, the choice to be intuitive, the choice to be well organized, and the choice to be self disciplined. It’s all those things together.

A: You mean . . . maturity. Emotional, psychological, and physical maturity.

J: Yes. It’s maturity. It’s individuation. It’s compassion. It’s Whole Brain Thinking.

A: Using the whole toolkit of the human brain instead of isolated parts of it.

J: The human brain has long been treated as a single organ, though really it’s an interconnected series of semi-autonomous sectors, each with its own specialized ability to “choose” on behalf of the whole. When all the different choices work together towards a common goal, the human brain works smoothly. If “feels” like a single whole, a single choice. But really it’s a combination of choices. When a person has arrived at the stage in life when he or she “gets” the concept of personal responsibility, it means his/her biological brain is working in a balanced, holistic way. The fruits of this long process should — if all goes well — START to be visible in the actions of people 16 to 18 years of age. The process isn’t normally complete, however, until about age 21 or 22. If all goes well.

A: Last week, after Vancouver lost to Boston in the seventh game of the Stanley Cup finals, large crowds of young people — many of them now identified as coming from “good” families — rioted in downtown Vancouver. There was a lot of looting and vandalism. Something tells me these young people haven’t developed the Whole Brain Thinking approach to personal responsibility.

J: There were some people in the crowd who stepped forward and did the right thing to protect others who were being beaten. These Good Samaritans are the individuals who instinctively know “the right thing to do” in a crisis. Their sense of personal responsibility, of right and wrong, of courage and compassion doesn’t desert them in an emergency. In fact, it may only be during an unexpected emergency that they themselves realize for the first time that they “get it.” They act first and ask questions later — fortunately for those they can help.

“Do not give what is holy to dogs, or they might throw them upon the manure pile. Do not throw pearls [to] swine, or they might make [mud] of it” (Gospel of Thomas 93). Jesus taught several centuries before either Augustine or Pelagius, so of course we don’t expect to see any reference to these later theologians in the Gospel of Thomas. On the other hand, Jesus had unflattering things to say about both the Pharisees and the Herodians, whose teachings resembled those of Augustine and Pelagius respectively. It seems likely that in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus was using the metaphor of “dogs” to refer to the Pharisees and the metaphor of “swine” to refer to the Herodians. It seems Jesus wasn’t impressed with either group’s approach to God’s holy things. Recently, I visited a Toronto Conservatory where several generations of cardinals have learned to enter and exit through the automated roof openings so they can build nests for their young in a warm, safe place. These birds not only provide basic food and shelter for their offspring, but also, in this case, are teaching their young an unusual and complex skill set that calls upon them to maximize their latent potential without exceeding their limits. In other words, the parent cardinals are mentoring their offspring. Photo credit JAT 2017.

A: You’re saying that maturity — personal responsibility — is the product of many years of education and mentorship of children. Is that right?

J: Yes. Education is the first “gear” in the process, but education alone isn’t enough to guide a child towards maturity and personal responsibility.

A: As the well-educated youths who rioted in Vancouver proved all too well.

J: Along with education there must also be appropriate, mature mentorship. It’s the older mentors who are supposed to guide children in their emotional growth with firm, consistent, boundary-respecting compassionate tough love. Parents, grandparents, teachers, sports coaches, medical professionals, and many others can all be mentors for children if they so choose.

A: What about ministers and priests? Can they be mentors?

J: Ideally, yes. However, realistically speaking, they rarely are.

A: Why not?

J: Because most of them have deeply embraced either Augustine’s idea about human nature or Pelagius’s idea. Neither approach helps a young person learn how to find the balance they so desperately need. In addition, those ministers who try to inject balance into their youth work are also the ones most likely to have rejected the idea of the soul and the spiritual life. It’s lose-lose for ordained clerics.

A: Unless they’re willing to accept new doctrines of faith.

J: For that to happen, they’d have to apply their own God-given free will. It’s a choice each cleric will have to make on the basis of his or her own conscience. That’s what divine courage is all about.

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Posted in anagogic mysticism, Church of today, conscience & morality, empathy, free will, honesty, Jesus Redux, meta-choice, Original Sin, Peace Sequence, personal responsibility, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged The Peace Sequence, Whole Brain Thinking | Leave a Comment

22 Feb 2011

JR14: Crimes of Religious Passion

A: I have a confession to make. I was looking back at some earlier posts, and I realize that both you and I were guilty of using the terms “light” and “dark” in a less precise way than we might have. So first I want to apologize if we confused anybody.

J: Language is fluid. Communication is fluid. Words like “light” and “dark” have a lot of different meanings, depending on the context. This is why I say the intent is more important than the words. The goal here is not to speak or write like a corporate lawyer, but to talk about feelings and ideas related to the spiritual journey. Writing “live” on a blog has some of the same problems as being interviewed live on TV. People will look for ways to trip you up. But that’s their choice. That’s their intent. If their intent is to be legalistic for their own benefit, that’s up to them. Small errors in speech are going to happen, and each individual has to decide how to react to those errors. It’s a choice like any other choice.

A: It’s a choice to look at the intent behind the words or actions.

“Jesus said: What you will hear in your ear, in the inner ear proclaim from your rooftops. For no one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket, nor does one put it in a hidden place. Rather, one puts it on a stand so that all who come and go will see its light” (Gospel of Thomas 33 a-b). In this saying, the act of lighting a lamp shows both your intent and the consequences of that intent. No matter how hard you try, and no matter how many excuses you invent, you can’t hide your actual intent from either your inner self (your inner ear) or from God. Your actual intent shines as brightly as a lamp to those who have the emotional maturity to see it. So it’s best to be honest about your intent and start trying to fix your mistakes in a responsible way (instead of blaming other people or blaming God or Satan for what you yourself chose to do). The photo above is a graphic reminder for me about the steps involved in taking personality responsibility. In the “oops, I made a mistake” department, I forgot to check the old back shed before the start of winter and failed to notice the hole chewed by a family of rodents so they could bring in a pantry-full of seed-filled cones. Cleaning up after the mistake I made wasn’t fun, but one of the important spiritual practices is learning how to be honest with yourself about your own mistakes and then figuring out how best to clean up after yourself. God is always happy to help you with this spiritual task. Photo credit JAT 2016.

J: Yes. People make mistakes. It’s part of the human condition. Everybody makes mistakes. But not all mistakes are made with intent. Many mistakes are nothing more than accidents — pure accidents, with no intent to harm. Sometimes the results of purely accidental mistakes can be tragic. More often than not, though, the greatest harm is caused by people who have harmful intent towards others. Among adolescents and adults, the majority of mistakes carry with them a harmful intent. A young child who drops a glass of milk because his motor skills aren’t fully developed has no harmful intent. An adult who gets behind the wheel of a car after drinking may not be planning to crash into another car — so from this point of view a crash is an “accident” — but his intent is clearly harmful from the moment he gets behind the wheel. He intends — he chooses — to drive regardless of the consequences to himself or anyone else. That’s what I mean by a mistake with harmful intent.

A: He made a choice and hoped he wouldn’t get caught.

J: The body of law known as common law understands this principle. You treat a crime done “on purpose” differently than you treat an accidental harm. You look at the intent of the people involved, and ask yourself if anybody had motive. Did anybody stand to gain?

A: Can acquisition of status can be considered a motive, an incentive, a measurable and desirable gain in the eyes of some individuals?

J: Acquisition of status lies behind many a crime.

A: Including religious crimes against humanity — the ones committed by status-seeking religious leaders?

J: Especially the crimes of religious passion. Especially those.

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Posted in conscience & morality, honesty, intent, Jesus Redux, Law (Nomos), Peace Sequence, personal responsibility, psychopathy, status addiction and tagged The Peace Sequence | Leave a Comment

09 Feb 2011

JR8: Mystical Bloodlines, Mystical Castes

J: I’d like to start out today’s discussion by emphasizing a very important point. I want to emphasize that it’s wrong to make sweeping generalizations about any particular religion or religious tradition. Just as it’s wrong to “hate” somebody on their basis of their religion, it’s just as wrong to “love” somebody on the basis of their religion. Religious beliefs form a framework for people, a place to start on the journey of faith. But in the end, the only thing that matters as far as God is concerned is what choices you make as an individual. No religion has all the answers. No religion is even asking all the right questions. So when I come out swinging against a revered figure from the past such as John the Baptist, I’m not trying to attack huge groups of people. I have specific complaints about the choices made 2,000 years ago by John the Baptist while he was incarnated as a human being. I also have specific complaints about specific choices made by a number of individuals who were close to John at the time. However . . . and this is a big however . . . the choices made by John the Baptist 2,000 years ago have nothing to do with the choices open to individual people today. There is no “loss of honour” for readers today because of choices that were made by somebody else centuries ago. No real “loss of honour,” anyway. If individuals today believe I’m undermining their own personal sense of honour by exposing the reality — the harsh and painful truth — about ancient religious teachings, then they’ve got bigger problems than they realize.

A: Yes, but a lot of people still believe very deeply in ancient ideas such as the mystical power of bloodline. For these individuals, there’s such a thing as honour in the blood. Honour carried from generation to generation through the bloodline. Power carried from generation to generation. Divine rights carried from generation to generation. It’s one of the underpinnings of their modern day lives. So they’ll take enormous offense at what you’re saying. Gargantuan offense.

J: I’m sorry to have to say this, but a conviction in the innate mystical power of bloodlines is a fantasy superstition that belongs only in novels and films. God does not favour any one clan or family group over another. It should be clear to everyone by now what happens in the wider world when particular clans, tribes, or nations give themselves the label of “Chosen by God.” Nothing good comes of it. Nothing.

A: Yet it’s a myth-dream that’s found in most cultures and most places in the world. Not to mention most major world religions. Why is this myth-dream so universal?

J: It goes again to the issue we’ve been discussing — major mental illness.

A: Ooooh. I can hear the gasps already.

J: Well, I won’t apologize for saying what needs to be said. Individuals will have to deal with it. It’s the reality. It’s time the blunt reality was brought into the open. Other forms of violence and abuse have been brought forward, brought into the open in recent decades. It’s painful and awkward at first, but it’s only when people openly discuss their suffering that change begins.

A: As you’ve said many times to me, healing follows insight. Healing follows self-honesty and public transparency.

J: Abusers will keep their secrets for as long as they can. They won’t volunteer to tell people their dark secrets. Even when they’re caught, they typically deny they did anything wrong. Other people have to step forward, point the light of truth at the abusers, collect evidence of their wrongdoing, and demonstrate their guilt through a public, transparent, non-corrupt legal system. It’s the only way to change a society’s perception of what’s moral and what’s immoral.

A: Can you give some examples?

J: Sure. Not so long ago, it was considered acceptable by many North Americans to treat women as inferior “possessions” of men. It was considered acceptable to turn a blind eye to incest and child sexual abuse and child pornography. It was considered acceptable to dump vast quantities of highly toxic pollutants into the water, air, and earth.

A: These things are still going on.

J: Yes. But these choices are no longer considered acceptable by the majority of North Americans. There’s been a cultural shift. The harmful actions of the abusers — the narcissists and psychopaths — are no longer being condoned by wider public opinion. There are legal and social implications for the abusers now. The legal and social implications didn’t use to exist. They only exist today because a lot of decent people got on board with the idea that these particular choices — the choice to abuse women, the choice to abuse children, the choice to abuse the environment — are wrong. Immoral. Not acceptable in a compassionate community.

A: It’s a work in progress.

J: Yes. It’s astounding and beautiful and amazing because it shows the truth. It shows that if you boldly and honestly expose the reality of abuse, a lot of people will recognize the wrongness of the abusers’ choices. They’ll feel it deep in their bones.

A: Deep in their souls.

J: The soul is consciousness with a conscience. The soul knows the difference between right and wrong, between moral choices and immoral choices. The soul is not stupid. Everybody has a soul, and everybody comes “prewired,” so to speak, with a “right and wrong” package in their DNA. It’s why mentally mature, emotionally mature people instinctively recoil from certain actions, certain choices. They just feel in their gut that it’s wrong.

A: Except for the people with psychopathy. The psychopaths have lost access to the “right and wrong” package. They know it exists, because they can see it operating in the world around them, but they don’t care. They don’t recoil from horror and abuse the way other people do. Brain scans confirm that certain parts of their brains are underactive, other parts are overactive.

J: As I said, it’s a major mental illness.

A: One that isn’t in the DSM-IV, the bible of psychiatry.

J: Psychopathy is a touchy, touchy topic. It should come as no surprise that a lot of “successful” people in politics, business, religion, and entertainment have little regard for the nuances of “right and wrong.”

A: That’s a polite way of saying that many successful people are psychopaths.

“Jesus said: There was a rich man who had a great deal of money. He said, ‘I shall invest my money so that I may sow, reap, plant, and fill my storehouses with produce, that I may lack nothing.’ These were the things he was thinking in his head, but that very night he died. Whoever has ears should hear” (Gospel of Thomas 63). Even psychopaths have a personal code of morality — a set of internal laws to live by — despite their lack of conscience. Competitiveness, dominance, perfectionism, obsessiveness, chosenness, and eradication of weakness are among the key markers of moral success for a psychopath. Needless to say, a psychopath has no use for traits such as love, tolerance, forgiveness, ambiguity, or individuation, despite what he or she may say out loud. Shown here is the entrance to the Chapel of John the Baptist, Westminster Abbey, England. Notice all the sharp, spiky, metal forks on the door — all the better to stab your heart as you try to open the door to relationship with God. Photo credit JAT 2023.

J: Again, no surprise. But these people have tremendous power, tremendous resources. It’s risky to piss off a psychopath. They think nothing of getting revenge. In fact, revenge is a favourite pastime. Even worse, psychopaths lose their ability to feel empathy for others, but at the same time, they show an eerily heightened grip on logic and a creepy ability to spot other people’s vulnerabilities. It’s scary how manipulative they can be in a purely cold, hard, logical way.

A: Almost as if they’re compensating for the loss of empathy and emotion by putting extra biological resources into their logic circuitry.

J: That’s exactly what psychopathy is. They’re trying to find a way to cope with life. They’re trying to find a workable system. They have no capacity for love, forgiveness, or trust. They’re so empty inside that they’re always looking for ways to fill the void. It’s a literal void, not just a metaphorical void. They can’t access certain functions of their brains. They can’t access the emotional circuitry they were born with. So they actually do feel empty, as if something’s constantly missing. They’re so narcissistic, however, that they believe everybody else on the planet feels as empty as they do. They think other people are faking it when they talk about love, redemption, forgiveness, and trust. In the world of the psychopath, love — mature, respectful love — is pure fantasy. It can’t be real. A psychopath feels nothing but contempt for the ideals of love, redemption, forgiveness, and trust.

A: A contempt that’s notably present in the orthodox doctrines of the Western Christian church.

J: True. But Christianity isn’t the only faith tradition that’s riddled with contempt for these compassionate ideals. I was dealing with the same contempt 2,000 years ago in Palestine. Lots of people were. Women, children, slaves, foreigners — all these people had to deal with the fallout of a religious tradition that had steadily erased all the empathy from the earlier spiritual traditions —

A: Like the Covenant Code in Exodus.

J: Like the all too brief Covenant Code. Bit by bit they replaced the Covenant Code’s early focus on human dignity with mystical authority for a few select men and their families. What scholars today call Second Temple Judaism bears so little resemblance to the Rabbinic Judaism practised today that I hesitate to even call the ancient religion “Judaism.” It was a bizarre caste system, really. It placed incalculable power in the hands of the High Priests and the Levites, who happily abused the “lesser tribes” of Israel — the lower Jewish castes. Meanwhile, the priests derived all their power, authority, and wealth from the “sacred books” they themselves wrote. A bit of a conflict of interest, don’t you think?

A: Yeah. I notice that after a while they decreed there could be no more prophecy. No more troublesome prophets standing up on soapboxes and speaking the truth.

J: The priests were always willing to endorse new prophetic voices off the record as long as those new voices reinforced the idea among the general population that Jews were the chosen people and Jerusalem’s priests were “the best of the best.”

A: Hence they could tolerate the Essenes, who required obedience to the caste system, but they couldn’t tolerate you, because you rejected the caste system in its entirety. And said so publicly.

J: The idea that Jews had allowed themselves to become enslaved to the priests may have entered my teachings more than once.

A: Yeah, I’ll bet.

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Posted in conscience & morality, empathy, Essenes, faith, HDM Myths, healing, intent, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus Redux, John the Baptist, occult themes, psychopathy, religion and mental Illness, slavery, Soul, status addiction and tagged religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

24 Jan 2011

JR4: Talking About Psychopathy

A: I notice that human nature hasn’t changed in the past 2,000 years. Families still fight over the same issues.

J: Right. And it’s not surprising from a scientific point of view. Two thousand years is a very short amount of time as far as the human genome is concerned. Human DNA is still the same today as it was then. Most importantly, the DNA involved in mental health issues hasn’t changed. Two thousand years ago, people were just as susceptible to major mental illness as they are today. There’s a bias among scholars who are trying to recreate the cultural mindset that existed in the first century (CE). They seem to want to believe that people’s brains worked differently then, and that people’s mindset was “unique” to the time, and impossible for us to understand today. But that’s not true. If you start with the logical scientific assumption that human brain physiology hasn’t changed in the past 2,000 years because the human DNA that shapes the physiology hasn’t changed, then you have a different starting point. You can look at the issues involved in major mental illness today, and you can assume that the same issues must have existed in the 1st century. This starting point can free historians from the false assumption that we can never understand what people were thinking and feeling in the Roman Empire of the 1st century. On the contrary, you can understand them better by using the new research tools available to you.

A: Tools like brain scans.

J: Exactly. You can’t actually run a brain scan on a skeleton that’s been dead for 2,000 years. But you can use medical forensics to extrapolate backwards. You can make better guesses about the past by using new research data that’s only become available recently.

A: The History Channel has a show based on that idea. It’s called “Ancients Behaving Badly.” Sometimes I wonder, though, about their experts’ understanding of psychopathy.

J: Psychopathy is not well understood by psychologists. There’s a tendency to pretend it isn’t a major mental illness because it’s not treatable. There’s no drug regimen and no effective psychotherapy model that can be patented or copyrighted. So there’s not a lot of good research. Also, people are worried about the legal implications. People are worried that if psychopathy is labelled a major mental illness then it will be used in court cases to prove a lack of responsibility in major crimes. There’s a risk of this because there’s currently such a poor understanding of how the human brain works. However, proof of psychopathy is in no way proof of lack of responsibility or lack of criminal intent. Psychopathy is a class of major mental illness characterized by a complete lack of conscience that is accompanied by a complete preservation of logic, will power, and intent. It’s an illness because a psychopath’s brain is not functioning properly — it’s not wired according to the psychopath’s DNA package. Nonetheless, the psychopath is responsible for his or her actions because he/she is consciously aware of the choices he/she is making. That conscious awareness is the test for criminal intent in a legal proceeding.

“Jesus said: Blessed is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion will become human” (Gospel of Thomas 7). Being a successful psychopath is lot like being a trained pilot who can land near the shore of a frozen lake without crashing through the ice. It takes rigorous training, commitment, logic, and a laser-eye view of where you want to be and what you need to accomplish to get there – even if it means mowing down all the people between you and your goal. Being a successful psychopath is also a lot like being a lion on the hunt. Photo credit JAT 2015.

A: In other words, psychopaths know what they’re doing is wrong, so they shouldn’t be given a “Get Out Of Jail Free” card.

J: Exactly. They should be held accountable for their choices and their actions. At the same time, they should also receive appropriate medical therapy and intervention to assist them to learn how to make better choices.

A: Healing and redemption for serial killers.

J: It’s possible. But not likely in the current climate of Newtonian psychology.

A: Newtonian psychology. That’s an interesting phrase. I’ve never heard it before.

J: By Newtonian psychology I mean the current vogue in neuroscience research. Researchers are examining small little bits of the human brain in isolation as if the brain is nothing more than a complex Lego set. But the brain isn’t like that. It’s much more sophisticated than that. The sum of the parts does not make the whole. The whole is . . . the whole is almost beyond words. It’s not called “the three pound universe” for nothing.

A: I’ve been noticing that researchers themselves get so caught up in the details that they lose sight of the big picture. They can’t see the forest for the trees, as the saying goes. I picked up the current issue of Discover (Jan/Feb 2011) with its list of the 100 Top Stories of 2010. Top Story No. 62 (“Glia: The Other Brain Cells”) breathlessly informs me that glial cells in the brain might actually play an active role in brain function, rather than just a structural role. I’ve known this for years because you told me years ago to keep an eye on glial cell research. And there’s been good research on glia, too. Fascinating stuff. It’s a shame that many other researchers haven’t been paying attention.

J: Well, the neuron is the “fad du jour.” It’s a nice easy-to-understand Lego block, and it’s easier to design experiments with. Researchers are limited by experimental constraints.

A: And funding grants. Research often follows the money. There’s more money in tracking the parts of the brain that can be changed by patented medications. It’s a huge industry.

J: And a very powerful one that has a vested interest in viewing the brain as a collection of fixable Legos.

A: Not much room in there for a doctrine of the soul, is there?

J: That’s the whole idea, actually.

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Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain-soul connection, conscience & morality, Jesus Redux, mental illness, psychopathy, religion and mental Illness and tagged religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

08 Jul 2010

CC24: The Emperor’s New Clothes: Psychopathy in the Church

There’s a fellow in my graduate theology program who is a constant reminder to me of how the orthodox Western church ended up preaching the doctrines of sin, salvation, sacraments, and separation from God (the four S’s). If we were to put this fellow — I’ll call him Titus — in a time machine, and send him back to Carthage in the early fifth century CE to argue with the famously tortured Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo, I’m not sure which of the two would prevail. That’s because, in traditional parlance, “they’re both cut from the same cloth.” They share certain dysfunctional psychological traits along with certain coping mechanisms to compensate for their dysfunctional traits. They’re also both deeply sincere in their beliefs. This is why both men cause so much suffering in the lives of others.

It’s important to emphasize that the man I know, Titus, is absolutely convinced he’s been called to ministry by God. He’s not a con man or a criminal with a conscious intent to harm others. In fact, if you asked him about his motives, he’d look you straight in the eye and tell you that he’s a humble servant of God. He truly believes this.

But Titus has serious issues — as in unresolved psychodynamic issues. He’s a walking powder keg of narcissistic bullying, and he’s utterly blind to this. (His classmates, who are the targets of his behaviour, see his issues quite clearly). So serious is his lack of empathy and his lack of respect for boundary issues that I suspect he suffers a great deal. I suspect he suffers inside his own head. He’s tormented by his own “demons,” and, like so many other people, he’s looking for some form of relief from his inner despair. And who can blame him? It’s not fun to feel like crap all the time.

Secular treatments have given him no long-term relief. So now he’s looking to the Church — traditionally, one of the great sanctuaries for narcissistic men (and narcissistic women). Here he can find a logical explanation for his suffering. Here he can be absolved of personal responsibility for the current state of his life. Here he can finally use his intellectual gifts, his musical gifts, and his badger-like tenacity in order to create something meaningful in his life. I’m not being facetious here — Titus is a talented, well educated man.

I have no doubt that he’s finding psychological comfort and relief in the teachings of men such as Paul the Apostle, Augustine of Hippo, and Martin Luther. That’s because these famous theologians were also talented, well educated men who were suffering from the effects of their own unaddressed issues. They were not stupid, nor ill-informed, nor criminally minded. But they knew something was wrong, and they earnestly wanted to fix it. If they found themselves forced to alter everything Jesus once taught in order to fix it, then so be it. Once they’d found a theological solution that offered some relief for their personal feelings of emptiness, well, who can blame them for wanting to tout their solution to others? Who can blame them for intentionally supplanting Jesus’ message of personality responsibility and forgiveness with a message of sin and salvation? It’s a much easier “sell” than Jesus’ message, and besides, each of these men had personally felt the relief that came with the “4-S package.” So they weren’t really lying — they were just improving on Jesus’ message.

Silenos was a figure from Greek Mythology. He was said to be a close companion of the Greek god Dionysos and was known for his drunkenness, one of the “sins” that human beings tend to blame on everyone but themselves until they find the courage to take responsibility for their own actions. Anyone who has succeeded in healing an addiction to alcohol knows that this particular “sin” can be overcome with the right sort of help (which doesn’t include being told you’re a worthless, hopeless, “demon-possessed” wretch who has no control over your unloving choices because of Original Sin). This Roman marble after a Hellenistic work of the 3rd C BCE is on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. Photo credit JAT 2019.

The problem is that this package of theological doctrines — the 4-S package of sin, separation, sacraments, and salvation — only offers psychological relief to a certain subsection of the population that’s suffering from certain kinds of psychiatric dysfunction. It enables the narcissistic bullies to feel a lot better about themselves. But it doesn’t do a damned thing for anybody else.

This notion will be extremely unpopular among devout Christians who cherish their traditional, orthodox beliefs about original sin, etc., etc., and this notion will be especially offensive to those who insist that Church doctrines are the handiwork of God instead of the handiwork of a few dysfunctional theologians. But there you have it — the Church has codified within its body of sacred laws a self-correcting, virtually impregnable suit of body armour to protect the “rights” of a select group of self-entitled, selfish, controlling, abusive, HUMBLE (!!!!) servants of God.

How could such a self-serving system survive for so long if it wasn’t God’s true intention?

Well, that’s an easy question to answer. Have you ever tried to live with a severe narcissist? Or work with a severe narcissist? Or live in a community (or even a country) ruled by a severe narcissist? Once a narcissist crosses the line into full-blown psychopathy (and this happens more often than good-hearted intellectuals want to admit), the rule of terror takes over. It’s very hard to think straight, let alone challenge official doctrine, when you and your loved ones are being terrorized, abused, relentlessly persecuted, tortured, raped, imprisoned, and silenced in every way imaginable.

We’ve recently seen this kind of psychopathic behaviour emerge in group-form in the European Holocaust, the Cambodian Holocaust, and the Rwandan Holocaust. These holocausts were all instituted by “revered leaders.” The Church, I would argue, has had its own share of “revered leaders” who relentlessly preached holocausts (crusades) against “heretics” who rejected official church doctrine.

Am I saying that some of the Church’s revered theologians and past leaders would match today’s understanding of psychopathy?*

That’s exactly what I’m saying.

* For more information, please see Robert D. Hare’s Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (New York & London: The Guilford Press, 1993.)

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Posted in "4 S's", boundary issues, Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, conscience & morality, humility, narcissism, Original Sin, Paul's teachings, psychopathy, religion and mental Illness, theodicy and tagged Jesus vs Paul | Leave a Comment

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