The Spiral Path

Wonder, Science, and Faith

Archive for the tag “religion + mental illness”

05 Sep 2012

RS29: Father of Lights and Mother of Breath – Again

Irises (c) JAT 2013

Irises (c) JAT 2013

A:  I just love Biblical Archaeology Review.  Yesterday I came home from work and checked out the latest newsletter they’d e-mailed.  I get a newsletter from them every few days, and sometimes I don’t read them.  But this one caught my eye, and I clicked on the link (http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/misogyny-in-the-bible/).  There I found a wonderful article by Biblical Studies professor April DeConick.  The full article, called “Biblical Views: How the Mother God Got Spayed,” appears in the latest issue of Biblical Archaeology Review (Sept./Oct. 2012).  I just love everything about this article.  It’s so honest.  She dares to ask if we’re “trying to apologize for the misogny in the Bible because of our religious belief in the sacred nature of the Bible.”  Thank you for saying this out loud, Dr. DeConick!

I’d like to quote one paragraph from her article:

To begin with, humans — whether ancient or modern — think within gender categories.  And whether we admit it or not, gender never has been neutral.  Power is always involved.  In the ancient world, the female body was believed to be subhuman, imperfect — a deficient body because it lacked the male genitalia.  The male body was the perfect body.  So the male body dominated the scene, including the Bible, Christian theology and Christian ecclesiology.  In other words, the Bible came into being within a cultural matrix where the female body by definition was substandard and dehumanized.  This dehumanization of the female body affected virtually every storyline of the Bible.

She then goes on to explain how this misogynist view of the female body affected the way ancient Jews and early Christians perceived God:

This misogynist view of the female body affected the way in which the ancient people created their theologies and engaged in worship.  This is not to say that all ancient Jews and early Christians perceived God only as a male Father God.  Indeed, worship of the Mother God in conjunction with the Father God can be demonstrated to have occurred within ancient Israel.  Both the Bible and archaeology confirm this.  So it isn’t that the Mother God was absent from their worship.  Rather she was consciously eradicated from worship by the religious authorities.

Then DeConick dares to say that in early Christianity, “[w]e have records that demonstrate that the Holy Spirit was perceived by the first Christians to be not only female, but also Jesus’ Mother.”

Yup.  I just love it when good scholarship backs up everything you’ve been telling me for the past few years.*

J:  I worked very hard to distance my teachings from the religious orthodoxy of my day.  As we’ve discussed many times, I didn’t view God as a male-only figure.  I also didn’t view God as a “genderless divine essence,” as biblical scholar Ben Witherington so quaintly puts it (a thesis that’s challenged by Dr. DeConick in her article).  For Paul, Spirit/God/Christ was a genderless divine essence, just as for Plato, God was a genderless divine essence.   But this was never my teaching.  So for those Christians who want to retreat into the cowardly territory of God as “cloud of knowing” or “ground of being” instead of God as two loving people, they need to be honest about their beliefs.  They’re modern day Platonists, not followers of the teachings of Jesus.

A:  The Gospel of Mark speaks so eloquently about your lack of misogyny.  The stories about the hemorrhaging woman and the daughter of Jairus (Mark 5) break my heart.  The hemorrhaging woman seems to me like a symbol of the terrible abuse suffered by any woman whose symptoms make her “unclean” and “impure” according to religious law.  Can you imagine being treated as a pariah for years and years simply because you’re a woman and you’re medically ill?  How cruel is that.

J:  It seems hard to believe the Roman Catholic church and the strict Calvinist traditions can be so willfully blind about my teachings on women.  They can reinterpret the healing stories from the Gospel of Mark until they’re blue in the face, but they can’t erase the obvious truth that I believed women are equal to men in the eyes of God and are not unworthy or impure simply because they’re women.

A:  I love the way DeConick picks up on Tertullian’s role in destroying the self-image of Christian women for centuries to come.  Tertullian was a very nasty fellow — a status addict of the worst kind.

J:  To despise a woman because she’s a woman is a clear indication of status addiction.  To despise the idea of God as two people — God the Mother and God the Father — is another clear indication of status addiction.

A:  How so?

J:  Status addiction is a form of theft.  It’s an intentional theft of someone else’s sense of worthiness and self esteem.  In the Christ Zone model we’ve been looking at, there can be no true balance or wholeness or self-actualization unless all four major needs are met: physiological needs, safety needs, love & belonging needs, and self-esteem needs.  So important are these four major needs to human health and happiness and peace that psychiatry should reformulate its DSM bible to show disorders of physiological needs, disorders of safety needs, disorders of love & belonging needs, and disorders of self-esteem needs, instead of its current categorization system.

A status addict is someone whose brain is not functioning in balanced, holistic ways.  For various reasons a status addict can’t generate an inner sense of self.  They can’t generate a portrait of themselves, if you will, a portrait of themselves as a child of God.  Often this is due to damage in the parietal and parieto-temporal regions of the brain.

Because they can’t “see” themselves — because they can’t “plant” themselves in the firm ground of relationships and boundaries and heart-to-heart bridges among all life in Creation — they can’t rely on emotions such as trust and Divine Love and forgiveness to help them cope.

A:  Why not?  Why can’t they rely on trust and Divine Love and forgiveness?

J:  Because these coping mechanisms are all founded in the core principle of relationship — relationship between two or more people.  If you choose not to “do relationships” you also can’t “do love and trust.”  Positive, mature relationships draw on all the same parts of the brain as love and trust do.

A:  Such as oxytocin and vasopressin and prolactin levels in the bloodstream and brain.  Also serotonin.  To name a few.

J:  Yes.  One of serotonin’s jobs is to act as a mediator between the Darwinian Circuitry of the brain and the Soul Circuitry of the brain.  The role of serotonin in sustaining mood is beginning to be understood by medical science.  But it’s not the only factor in mood disorders.  A major complicating factor for many individuals — one that hasn’t been recognized by researchers — is status addiction.  Status addiction drives a person at a physiological level to seek a brief glimpse of himself by stealing somebody’s self-image.

It goes like this:

The status addict sees a woman who has confidence, self respect, and dignity.  It’s as if she’s painted a portrait of herself inside her heart and knows who she is.  Also who she’s not.  The status addict doesn’t know who he is and doesn’t know who he’s not.  But he’s jealous.  He’s jealous and angry at the woman who has something he does not.  So he endeavours to take it.  He endeavours to steal her portrait, or a piece of her portrait, and claim it for himself.  He takes it any way he can — usually through threats and physical or emotional abuse.  But the most vicious predator will try to rob the spiritual part of her self portrait, the part that tells her who she is in relationship with God.  He’ll try to rip out her entire sense of worthiness and self-esteem as a child of God.  Then he’ll take that piece of her portrait and pin it up on his own “inner wall.”   He’ll look at it and gloat.  He’ll enjoy her suffering.  The stolen portrait becomes a hazy sort of mirror where he can finally see himself. And for a brief moment, he’ll see himself as someone powerful and clever and potent.

Sixty seconds later his brain will let go of the high.   The image will vanish.  The sense of inner emptiness will return.  So he’ll have to go out and steal somebody else’s spiritual portrait.  This is how he copes with his own inability to love and trust and be in relationship with anyone, including God.

A:  Religious law as schadenfreude.

J:  Yes.  It’s a very poor substitute for reality, but many individuals rely on it.

To steal the reality of another person, to steal their wholeness, to try to steal their very existence, is a concentrated form of hatred.  It’s not purity of thought or transcendence that drives a person to say there is no personhood in God.  It’s not wisdom.  It’s not faith.  It’s just hatred.  Plain old fashioned hatred.  Hatred born of a status addict’s rage at the void he feels within himself.

To try to rip out God’s own self image, God’s own need for love & belonging, God’s own need for self-esteem (or, as we’ve called it here, God’s humbleness) is cruel and unconscionable.  I mean, where do people think we get our needs in the first place?  Do they think angels have a hard-wired need for love & belonging and self-esteem (humbleness) but God the Mother and God the Father don’t?  Do they really think God the Mother and God the Father have no feelings?

Every child born on Planet Earth tells the truth about God and God’s angels again and again and again.  Even the chromosomes of a child tell the truth.

God the Mother is real.

There’s no point fighting this truth any longer.

 

* Please see “Third Step: Invite Our Mother to the Table” and “Father of Lights, Mother of Breath


 

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Posted in Bible, Christ Zone, Gospel of Mark, historical Jesus, Mother and Father God, Mother God, Plato, psychopathy, Realspiritik, religion and mental Illness, sense of time & timing, status addiction and tagged , | Leave a Comment
06 Aug 2012

RS 21: Who Knew? It’s the Clash of the Titans!

Temple of Apollo, Delphi 2

Temple of Apollo, Delphi (c) JAT 2001

A:  I’ve been mulling over what you said in “The Peace Sequence” post about Paul’s wealthy, powerful backers.  What exactly was their “One True Religion”?  Are Paul’s teachings a form of this “One True Religion”?

J:  “The One True Religion” is an ancient mystery cult that had its origins in Egypt beginning about 5,000 years ago.  And yes, Paul’s Christ Movement is a clear expression of this ancient cult’s beliefs.

A:  What were the core beliefs of this group?

J:  They believed they needed to unlock the secrets of science so they could control the mysterious powers of Creation.  They believed in the infinite powers of the human mind and they despised all forms of emotion or love or compassion.  For them, Love was the great enemy, the great destroyer of purity, order, and Truth.  They worshipped only logic and reason.  They believed that purity, order, logic, reason, and Truth were visible in the corrupt world around them through the trained observation of Divine Law.  These Laws could be observed, then harnessed, then used to acquire almost infinite power.  The Pyramids of Giza were an early physical expression of this group’s beliefs.

A:  Ooooh.  Sounds like a Dan Brown novel.

J:  “The One True Religion” never exactly disappeared.  It keeps popping up in one form or another, century after century.  So writers keep writing about it.

A:  Why does it keep coming back?  Is this constant “rebirth” proof of its truth?  Its genuine truth about the nature of Creation?

J:  It’s proof of only one thing: the thinking patterns of a psychopath.  “The One True Religion” is the perfect religion for psychopaths.  It’s all about logic, power, and eradication of compassion.

A:  It’s about “doing what needs to be done” without guilt or remorse.

J:  Yes.  For this group, the end has always justified the means.  This is how they’ve justified the use of tens of thousands of slaves at a time to build countless alchemical projects such as the Pyramids of Giza.  They have a secret cache of myths about the origins of Creation that helps them explain and justify their own unconscionable actions.  They take their religious myths very seriously.  Their religious myths are the “glue sticks” that are literally holding their biological brains together.

A:  You mean that without their religious myths to cling to they’d fall apart?

J:  Yes.  The Darwinian Circuitry of the brain, which a psychopath relies on exclusively, has to be fed a constant diet of status and short-term logic in order to keep functioning in a reasonably stable way.  Status and short-term logic are the psychopath’s “fuel.”  But raw fuel alone isn’t enough to create “order” in a psychopath’s messed-up life.  Successful psychopaths — and there are many — must have a rigid ideology, a rigid external framework, to lean on.  Followers of the “One True Religion” have built for themselves an “ideal” ideology, a mythological Utopia that soothes and calms the troubled mind of a psychopath with its perfect blend of monism, dualism, and hierarchy.  Whenever they feel their actions and choices are being “unfairly” attacked, they retreat into their inner Utopia.  There they repeat to themselves their ancient mantras about being Divine Warriors sent to Earth to find and restore all the broken bits of “The One” that fell out of the Heavens and have to be valiantly carried back into the highest realms of Creation by the tiny band of Chosen Messengers who, alone among all other souls in the universe, have the purity and knowledge and strength to carry out this perilous task.

A:  Oh, come on.  This is sounding like really bad sci fi!  Like the film “Clash of the Titans.”  The original and the remake!

J:  Inside a psychopath’s head, it is a clash of the Titans.  On the one side, you have yer Evil Galactic Overlords who are trying to take over all Creation, and on the other side you have yer Warriors of Light who are called upon to lead all the weaker souls to victory by whatever means are necessary, even if it means forcing them to build the Pyramids, because in the long run they’ll be grateful to you that you were wise enough and knowledgeable enough to know what steps to take to save them (with or without their permission).  It’s even okay to lie to them in the short term because eventually they’ll realize that your lies were justified.  Blind faith — fideism — is therefore a necessary means to an end.  Obedience is a necessary means.  And guilt is a necessary means.

You’d be surprised how many successful psychopaths in politics, business, and religion believe this shit.  And I don’t mean they believe in this a little.  I mean they believe this myth with their whole mind — well, the parts of the mind that are still working.

A:  And they really, really believe that Love is the enemy?  The cause of Creation’s brokenness?  Now that I think of it, though, Plato had some pretty weird beliefs about love . . .

J:  Yes.  So you can see why Paul believed I was broken.  In his view, my task as THE human being assigned to carry the “imprint” of Divine Logos was to highlight this problem and fix it, not make it worse by telling people how to love God and trust God with all their hearts.  Where was the logic and loftiness in that?

A:  So poor Paul, what could he do except throw himself on his sword to correct your mistakes, your sins against Spirit?

J:  Well, you know, it’s a perilous world, this place called Earth, and every time a true piece of “The One” tries to incarnate here, what with all the evil forces an’ all, there’s always a grave risk that the divine piece will once again become contaminated by the forces of chaos (i.e. the forces of Love and All Things Feminine) and then — poor brave Warriors that they are! — these Messengers of Light will have to start over again in their brave and noble attempts to prepare the Way for the incoming Spirit of Truth!  And it takes a lot of helpers — a lot of slaves — to carry out this brave and noble endeavour, and it takes a lot of sacred rituals repeated over and over and over, so there’s no time like the present to enlist all those unwitting (and unworthy) human beings to help you with the cleansing prayer work that needs to be done before THAT DAY can take place.

A:  Go on!  You’re joshing me.

J:  Nope.  This is what they’re actually thinking.  This is what “The One True Religion” is all about.  It’s about a small group of psychopaths who are sitting on top of a great metaphysical pyramid, as close to the heavens as they can get, and waiting for the precise moment when there’s a big enough “pool” of prayer energy available to them to open up those great cosmic gates of power in the sky.  You know, thunderstorms, lightning, rainbows, sacred water, all that stuff they think they can one day control.

A:  Sighhhhhhhh  . . .

 

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Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, Gnosticism, occult themes, Paul's teachings, prayer, psychopathy, Realspiritik, slavery and tagged , | Leave a Comment
10 Mar 2012

TBM26: A Practical Tip For Getting Along With Your Angels

Here’s a super-practical tip for people walking the Spiral Path: don’t ask your guardian angels to help you get more status.

Probably the single biggest mistake made by spiritual seekers anywhere (and I mean anywhere) is to assume that God and God’s angels are remotely interested in anything resembling status.

I know that countless religious tomes have told you otherwise. I know you’ve been told that God needs your worship and sacraments (i.e. status points for God). I know you’ve been told that God needs your prayers (i.e. status points for you). I know you’ve been told that angels (if they exist at all) are bound within a strict Celestial Hierarchy — escalating angelic tiers of seniority and importance and proximity to God. (Thanks for nothing, Pseudo-Dionysius). I know this is what you’ve been told again and again. But if you look at the evidence for success among pious devotees of these beliefs, you’ll find precious little in the way of consistent, positive, demonstrable outcomes such as improved health, improved standards of living, or improved family and community safety.

Which is how God measures these things.

God the Mother and God the Father know that your task here is to see what it feels like to juggle the needs of the 4D soul with the needs of the 3D body, with lots of chances to practise forgiveness thrown in (’cause it’s never too late to remember how). So God is very interested in helping you and your family achieve a state of relative good health (both physical health and mental health) until it’s your time to Go Home (colloquially known as dying).

Naturally, a God who’s interested in helping you stay healthy is going to be very worried about the painful effects of addiction in your life, since addiction is one of the major causes of suffering among human beings. Addiction issues create physical suffering, mental suffering, emotional suffering, family suffering, and community suffering. Addiction also creates financial suffering and educational suffering and job-related suffering. It gets in the way of everything that’s positive and selfless and healing.

So . . . it should take you all of about five seconds to realize that God and God’s angels are not going to be supportive of choices based on status addiction.

Even if the myth surrounding the status addiction is a religious myth.

The general assumption seems to be that God is tolerant of all religious beliefs and all religious myths because, when push comes to shove, these religious traditions have one thing in common: they confer status points on God.

Only an emotionally immature person would conclude that God actually wants status points.

Unfortunately, all too many emotionally immature individuals have gradually fallen into the trap of status addiction, where, mired in the swamps of narcissism and bullying, and looking at others through the characteristic tunnel-vision thereof, it seems perfectly logical to conclude that the correct way to approach God is to offer status points. After all, the giving and taking of status points is a normal way of existing (though not a normal way of living) for many human beings on Planet Earth.

As humans, we don’t like to hear that angels have free will, but they do. Your own guardian angels use their free will to decide when, how, and if they’ll respond to your requests for aid – even if it means you have to go through some rough patches to get where you need to go.

So don’t do it. There aren’t a lot of strict rules to follow on the Spiral Path, and even this one isn’t really a rule, since you can ignore me and do whatever you like because you have free will. But before you make that choice, you need to know there are consequences for the choice to seek status on the spiritual journey. Here is the consequence: your guardian angels will stop helping you. They’ll still love you. They’ll still forgive you. But they won’t enable you as you rejoice in the high of an addiction disorder — any addiction disorder, including status addiction.

Just as family members of a person with addiction issues know it’s wrong to enable dysfunctional behaviours, angels know it’s wrong to enable dysfunctional and harmful behaviours. It’s courageous and loving and forgiving of them to refuse to enable the choices of status addiction. And why would we want it any other way?

Angels will help you find healing once you make the choice to be honest about your addiction. They’ll guide you to people and books and learning experiences and medical treatments that will help you heal. But they’ll let you fall flat on your face over and over until you accept the truth that your status addiction isn’t pretty and isn’t divine and isn’t acceptable to anyone, including your core self.

During my theology classes, I was required to read the teachings of Christian theologians from the time of Paul the Apostle to the modern day. I read many different explanations for why human beings suffer, but never once, except in the teachings of Jesus himself, did I come across the one explanation that fits all the facts: God refuses to be an enabler of status addiction.

The communities in the world today that have the highest standards of health, the highest standards of living for the middle and lower classes, the lowest levels of crime and corruption, and the highest standards of ethical, legal, and interpersonal conduct are the communities with the least cultural emphasis on status acquisition.

Too often it’s assumed the recipe for success in these communities is the abolition of faith, a rejection of belief in God — that is, atheistic societies built on humanistic values without religious superstitions to hold people back.

Faith in God never holds a person back. But religious institutions which are deeply committed to the preservation of status addiction can and do hold people back. This is a biological reality.

Keep the idea of God. Ditch the idea of status acquisition and status addiction in all its nasty and insidious forms.

As a spiritual practice, it’s simple. It’s sane. And it works.

Because your guardian angels are thrilled to help you when you aren’t being such an ass.

Next time I’ll talk about some of the ways in which your angels can help you. I think you’ll be very surprised to learn what matters to them.

 

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Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), faith, free will, HDM Myths, healing miracles, prayer, relationship with God, spiritual practices, status addiction, The Blonde Mystic, theodicy and tagged , | Leave a Comment
19 Feb 2012

TBM 22: Why I Don’t Endorse "A Course In Miracles"

In the past few days, I’ve been busily researching the well-known text called A Course in Miracles (Foundation for Inner Peace, Publisher. A Course in Miracles: Combined Volume. 2nd ed. Mill Valley, CA: Foundation for Inner Peace, 1992.).

The Three Magi (felt panel (C) JAT)

The Three Magi (felt panel (C) JAT)

I purchased this book at Chapters a few years ago. I’m not sure exactly when I bought it. It was probably in 2004 or 2005. In more recent years, I’ve made a habit of noting the date of purchase on the title page of my new acquisitions, and there’s no purchase note in my copy of ACIM, as it’s commonly known. But I picked up a copy when I saw it at the bookstore because I like to have primary sources on my bookshelves — books written by mystics rather than books written about mystics. I like to read for myself what famous mystics and channellers of the past have written in their own words.

You can tell a lot about a person’s internal brain architecture by reading what they’ve written or what they’ve “transcribed” in a mystical state.

Although no author is listed on the title page of ACIM, it was written between 1965 and 1972 by a New York professor of medical psychology named Helen Schucman. She was aided in this process by her colleague William Thetford, who was also a professor of psychology. (You can read more about it by googling ACIM, Helen Schucman, and William Thetford.)

Schucman was 56 years old when she went through a four-month period of “unusually vivid dream sequences” and “unusual waking experiences.” She gradually began to discern an inner character, a voice who spoke to her and identified himself as Jesus. At first she heard this voice only in her dreams. One day, however, she was sitting in her home when she heard the same voice say to her while she was awake, “This is a course in miracles. Please take notes.”

So she took notes. Lots and lots of notes. She used shorthand to write down what the inner voice was dictating, and her colleague Bill Thetford transcribed the notes onto a typewriter as she read them aloud. Apparently she at times needed a lot of reassurance from Thetford to keep going with this process. Thetford eventually edited the material with the help of a third clinical psychologist, Kenneth Wapnick.

I have a lot of concerns about this material. I have concerns about the state of Schucman’s mental function when she was hearing the inner voice. I have concerns about the motives of Bill Thetford, who coaxed her into continuing to “channel” even when she repeatedly expressed her uncertainty. (As a clinical psychologist, he ought to have known better.) I have concerns about the extent to which other people — including Thetford and Wapnick — oversaw and edited the raw material and helped popularize it through a Foundation created on the other side of the country. I have concerns about the report given by Benedict Groeschel, a Roman Catholic priest and psychologist, who knew Schucman well. Groeschel said that in the last two years of her life Schucman was suffering from a severe psychotic depression. (She died in 1981). If she were writing this material today, I would want to see her current brain scans and I would want to investigate through conventional medical means the possibility that at age 56 Helen Schucman was showing early signs of a dementia with dissociative features.

If you open up any page of A Course in Miracles, what you’ll find is stream of consciousness poetry that resonates with the words and the imagery of ancient mystical texts. It is apophatic mysticism in one of the purest forms I’ve ever seen — a sort of modern day Gnostic Docetism.

Here is an example (one of many, many examples) of the Docetic/Gnostic content of ACIM: “It should especially be noted God has only one Son. If all His creations are His Sons, every one must be an integral part of the whole Sonship. The Sonship in its Oneness transcends the sum of its parts. However, this is obscured as long as any of its parts is missing. That is why the conflict cannot ultimately be resolved until all the parts of the Sonship have returned. Only then can the meaning of wholeness in the true sense be understood. Any part of the Sonship can believe in error or incompleteness if he so chooses. However, if he does so, he is believing in the existence of nothingness. The correction of this error is the Atonement (Chapter 2, Section VII, para. 6).”

Sounds very lofty, very wise, very ethereal, eh?

Small paragraphs taken out of context in ACIM sound this way much of the time, which is probably why the text has been so popular with spiritual seekers who are fed up with traditional religious teachings. The book seems to have so many helpful insights! The problem comes when you try to paste all the paragraphs together. When you paste them together, you don’t have a coherent body of thought with a logical structure and a strong foundation in science. What you have is a circular stream of cliches, cliches that were robbed from other writers (albeit unwittingly) and pasted together in a hamster wheel of Wisdom (“Sophia” in ancient Greek).

A Course in Miracles will take you round and round in circles, but it won’t help you move forward along the Spiral Path because it’s not grounded in reality.

The “Workbook for Students,” which follows 666 pages of “revelation,” contains 365 lessons for spiritual students. Three hundred and sixty-five lessons! (Does anyone need that many?) In my opinion this isn’t a one-year course in miracles — it’s a one-year course in how to become dissociated from your own free will, your own thoughts and emotions, and your own soul’s inner wisdom.

I mean, come on, if you tell your biological brain for a whole year that “nothing I see in this room means anything” (Lesson #1), what do expect your biological brain to do with that? If you tell yourself for a whole year that “This table does not mean anything. This chair does not mean anything. This hand does not mean anything. This foot does not mean anything. This pen does not mean anything (page 3 of Part II),” what do you honestly think your brain is going to do? Your brain — whose job it is to follow the instructions you give it — is going to stop assigning meaning to anything.

Just as you’ve told it to do.

I don’t know about you, but I see one of the greatest causes of suffering in this world as people having too little meaning in their lives, not too much.

When I look at a chair, I see lots of meaning. In the chair I see chemistry and physics at work. I see God the Mother and God the Father sharing baryonic matter with their children who are incarnated here on Planet Earth — children who need all the help they can get! I see an important household item that adds to my sense of comfort and household beauty. I see a medical device, if you will, that helps support my back so I don’t get a backache. I see a product of economic health and well being. (I had to pay money for the chair.) I see the hard work of many people — the people who designed the chair, tested the chair, manufactured the chair, transported the chair, and sold the chair — all people who deserve to make a living.

I see relationships in the chair. And I feel grateful for these relationships.

Relationships are real. Relationships are the very foundation of everything that’s real and meaningful in our lives. I refuse to accept any spiritual or religious teaching that tries to force me to stop seeing relationships in the world around me.

Recently I spoke with a young woman I’ve been acquainted with for the past couple of years. When I saw her a few weeks ago, she looked distracted and unfocussed, and her affect was sort of “flattened.” I asked her how she’s been doing.

Terrible, she said. In the past two months, she’s been to eight funerals. One was the funeral of her elderly grandmother. But the others were all suicides. Suicides of “successful” twenty-something year olds.

I was shocked and horrified to hear her speak of friends she’s known since day care who are choosing to hang themselves.

People choose to hang themselves for a lot of different reasons, but it’s not something people tend to do when they feel there’s a way out of their sense of emptiness or hopelessness or depression. Seeking help from others, speaking about major mental illness, accepting appropriate medical treatment, and finding an ethical spiritual mentor are all ways that can help people restore a sense of faith and trust and love in their lives and in their relationships — including their relationship with themselves.

But telling people who are already suffering from emptiness or hopelessness or depression that their suffering isn’t real and is only an illusion . . . that’s just plain cruel.

This is why I refuse to endorse any of the teachings or methods of A Course in Miracles. In my view, the Course is just plain cruel.

 

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Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, apophatic mysticism, dissociation, Gnosticism, HDM Myths, healing, religion and mental Illness, The Blonde Mystic and tagged | Leave a Comment
11 Feb 2012

TBM20: Definition of Status Addiction

One of the great advantages of walking the Spiral Path in fellowship with God and your guardian angels is that you’re constantly being encouraged to learn new things and meet new people. You’re constantly being encouraged to let go of belief systems that are holding you back in your quest to know your full potential as a child of God.

“Living your full potential” is another way of saying “living your soul purpose.” It’s a positive, hopeful concept, one that Jesus son of Joseph taught his own followers 2,000 years ago. Jesus described the quest to know yourself and live according to your soul purpose as “entering the kingdom of the heavens.” It’s not really God’s kingdom you’re entering (though parts of the Bible describe it as such). It’s your own little kingdom — your own little corner of God’s spiritual kitchen. It’s the truth about yourself you have to understand so you can better help other people.

The Apostle Paul hated and feared Jesus’ teachings about “the Kingdom.” He was determined to snuff out Jesus’ teachings on the nature of the soul because he (Paul) wanted to help preserve the status quo. The status quo protected the rights and privileges of the people at the top of the social pyramid — the priests, the kings, the lawmakers, and the chosen bloodlines of their families.

Things haven’t changed much since then, eh?

The danger in Jesus’ teachings was — and is — the lack of “fuel” for people who are addicted to status. By that I mean people who are physiologically addicted to status. People who are biologically addicted to status. People whose dopamine receptors and orexin receptors (to greatly simplify) respond in imbalanced ways to an ingestion of “status points.” (You can read more about this in the post called “The Corruption of Free Will Through Addiction.”)

Unfortunately, not much useable research has been done on this topic, but I’m hopeful that, in time, researchers in cross-disciplinary studies will come together to discuss the reality of status addiction from all angles: neuroscience combined with psychiatry, education theory, sociology, parenting skills, and Twelve Step programs.

Status addiction, like any other addiction disorder, isn’t a black-or-white psycho/social/medical issue but a spectrum of need. At one end of the spectrum are the people who only occasionally use the substance. Sure, they have cravings, but other factors in their lives help them keep a lid on their using.

At the other end of the spectrum are the full-blown addicts, the ones who can’t get through a few hours let alone a few days without a fix. The behaviour of a full-blown addict makes sense only to the addict himself or herself. To everyone else, the status addict’s behaviour is cruel. Lacking in empathy. Intolerant. Judgmental. Perfectionistic. Demanding. Controlling. Angry. Abusive. And in a constant state of denial.

Sound familiar? Everyone knows a person who’s chosen the path of status addiction. They’re the bullies, tyrants, narcissists, and psychopaths of the world. They’re the ones who thrive at a biological level on the idea that they’re better than other people. Better or smarter or faster or stronger. Nicer. More generous to others or more obedient to God than you. More deserving of praise, reward, health, and wealth than you.

It’s not in a status addict’s best interests to agree in principle with the idea that God doesn’t play favourites. Nor is it in a status addict’s best interests to agree in principle with the idea that human beings are responsible for their own choices, including the choice to be angry, cruel, and abusive.

b3_humanoids007 01

Being around a status addict makes you feel as if you need a gas mask and protective armour. ((C) Image*After)

It’s important to understand that the Apostle Paul was convinced God plays favourites. Paul’s Letter to the Romans explains in gory detail who will be saved by God and who won’t (or who won’t be saved at first, anyway). For Paul, there’s no question that Christians are better than other people. There’s also no question, when you read Paul’s convoluted thesis about “Sin,” that he himself was trapped by the selfish behaviours of status addiction.

If you find all the places in Romans where Paul talks about cosmic “Sin” and replace the word “Sin” with “status addiction,” you’ll quickly realize that Paul was a man in a state of denial about his own addiction issues. He didn’t want to take responsibility for his own choices, and he was prepared to invent ever more status-soaked theologies to explain why he wasn’t responsible for the way he felt inside his own head.

I want to emphasize an important point, though. Paul knew what he was doing. He wasn’t mentally incompetent in a legal or moral or medical sense. He maintained a grip on many of his mental faculties, including his ability to write cogently and logically; his ability to manipulate and coerce others in subtle, sophisticated ways; and his ability to stay clearly focussed on tasks and goals. He wasn’t dysfunctional in the way that a person with a serious, untreated psychotic disorder is dysfunctional. He knew what he was doing and he wanted to do it so he and his followers could acquire more status points.

Paul, in fact, was so shrewd in his observations about human nature that he understood what tyrants such as Pol Pot have failed to understand. Paul understood that if you want to build a stable social structure to support the status needs of those at the top of the pyramid, you have to put an effective leash on the status-seeking behaviours of everyone, even the people at the top. Otherwise, chaos runs rampant as countless individuals seek a “hit” of status at the expense of their neighbours.

Paul’s leash is humility. And it’s as effective a scam today as it was 2,000 years ago, judging by this quote from Rick Warren’s book The Purpose-Driven Life (Rick Warren, The Purpose-Driven Life (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002)):

“Cultivating community takes humility. Self-importance, smugness, and stubborn pride destroy fellowship faster than anything else. Pride builds walls between people; humility builds bridges. Humility is the oil that smoothes and soothes relationships. That’s why the Bible says, ‘Clothe yourselves with humility toward one another.’ The proper dress for fellowship is a humble attitude.

The rest of that verse says, ‘. . . because, God opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble.’ This is the other reason we need to be humble: Pride blocks God’s grace in our lives, which we must have in order to grow, change, heal, and help others. We receive God’s grace by humbly admitting that we need it. The Bible says anytime we are prideful, we are living in opposition to God! That is a foolish and dangerous way to live (page 148).”

Humility and humbleness. Are they the same thing? I argue they’re not the same. Humility is what Paul and others have taught as a leash on the selfishness of status addiction. Humbleness, on the other hand, is what Jesus taught as a tonic for the wounds caused by status addiction.

Warren says, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less. Humility is thinking more of others. Humble people are so focused on serving others, they don’t think of themselves (page 148).”

Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!

(I loved the TV show Lost in Space when I was a kid.)

If you try to always think of others, and never think of your own needs, you’ll become one messed-up puppy.

I tried this whole dissolve-yourself-in-service-to-others gig for three whole years in the “middle phase” of my spiritual journey, and guess what happened? I ended up being an enabler for status-addicts.

There’s nothing a status-addict loves more than having an obedient, admiring, selfless acolyte to kick around. (Well, having a whole group of acolytes would probably be better than having just one doormat to wipe his/her feet on, but even one servant is better than none.)

Humility is not the oil that smoothes and soothes relationships. Forgiveness is the oil that smoothes and soothes relationships. Forgiveness and tough love are closely linked to each other because both require you to dredge up your own soul-given courage. Knowing yourself and trusting yourself also require great courage.

Being a doormat and an enabler of status addicts may be the easy way out, but it’s not the divine way out.

Did you know that Paul almost never discusses forgiveness in his known letters? Yeah, that’s because if you tell people they have the power within themselves to forgive themselves and each other, they may discover on their own that we’re all equally amazing children of God and nobody — but nobody — is “chosen.”

Couldn’t have that, now, could we?

______

P.S. After I posted the body of this article, I was prompted by my guardian angels to look closely at the index of Rick Warren’s book. His book is divided into a preface plus 40 chapters (one chapter for each day of the “journey”). There are many footnotes. Most of the footnotes give scriptural references to support Warren’s argument, and a few refer to recent Christian publications he admires.

Of the 787 footnotes in this book, only 7 refer to the biblical Gospel of Mark (with one footnote listing 2 different verses in Mark). (There’s a ninth footnote reference to Mark, but this is for Mark 16:15, which is generally believed to be a later addition to the gospel).

The Gospel of Mark is a troublesome book for evangelical and conservative Christians because this is the story of a physician-scholar who gives up his status and breaks a lot of religious rules in order to help the poor, the disenfranchised, and the sick. It can also be called the Gospel of Forgiveness, ’cause that’s what Jesus does throughout.

As I said, it’s a troublesome book. (You can read more about the dispute between Mark and Paul at “Choosing Between Paul and Jesus,”  “The Case for Mark Versus Paul,”   and “Mark’s Themes of Understanding and Strength.” 

 

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Posted in forgiveness, Gospel of Mark, humbleness, humility, Kingdom teachings, Paul vs Jesus, psychopathy, status addiction, The Blonde Mystic and tagged , | Leave a Comment
05 Nov 2011

RS10: The Soul’s Blended Logic

A: Hey, I like that new maxim you wrote a few days ago when I was grousing and complaining about the landlord I was stuck with until recently: “The measure of a man is how he decides to behave when the Law is placed in his hands. The righteous man uses the Law as a club to beat others down. The humble man sees that if he places the Law upon the pedestal of his own courage he will have a lever to raise others up.” Yeah, that about sums up my experience with my ex-landlord, Shane. When Ontario rental laws were “on his side,” he was all for quoting the law to his tenants and telling them the law prevented him from doing anything to resolve tensions or disputes. Of course, when the law was on our side — the tenants’ side — that was different. When the law was on our side, we were just troublesome, difficult tenants, in his view, not important enough to respond to in a timely and ethical fashion when there were issues. Not a nice man.

J: You think so. But inside his own head he thinks he’s the most wonderful guy in the world. A real “people person.”

A: If he were the most wonderful guy in the world he wouldn’t have treated me the way he treated me when I gave him notice I was moving out. He wouldn’t have treated the other tenants the way he’s been treating them. He would have responded promptly to the serious maintenance issues that have arisen in the building over the past few months. He would have kept the building in good shape, as the previous landlords did. He wouldn’t have tried to pass the buck to other people. He’s a real pro at passing the buck.

J: What I’m about to say probably won’t cheer you up much.

A (sighing): Go ahead. I’m ready. I think.

J: The way your ex-landlord operates is considered normal, acceptable behaviour by many “successful” business people. And it’s nothing new. This kind of behaviour is as old as humanity itself. In each generation there’ve always been some people who think it’s okay to climb their way to the top by kicking other people down. Any history book will reveal this reality.

A: And a lot of films, too.

J: In my day it was no different. I didn’t have to go very far to see it and feel it, either. Within my own family there were plenty of unfortunate examples of this kind of behaviour. I was raised to think in positive ways about slavery, about treating other human beings as property. This was normal. Commonplace. Acceptable. If you came from a family of honour, you just didn’t think of slaves as people, as individual beings with their own thoughts, needs, relationships, and dreams. They were there to serve you. The Law said so. Religious, political, and economic law all agreed on this (though in my time these forms of law were hopelessly intertwined with each other). The Law said it was proper to own slaves. So we owned slaves. As did almost every aristocratic household in the first century Mediterranean world. It was wrong, of course, for us to endorse slavery. It was profoundly abusive and morally unjustifiable, but hey, the Law said it was okay. And the Law couldn’t be wrong, now, could it?

A: From time to time I come across Christian writings that enthuse about the “enlightened” Laws of Jubilee in Leviticus. Yes, right in the Bible it says that every 50 years a man who lost either his property or his freedom to debt-holders will get it back in the Jubilee year. “Each of you shall return to his holding and each of you shall return to his family” (Leviticus 25:10).

Yeah, right. Like that was ever going to happen. People willingly giving back land and slaves to the original owners after many decades? Don’t think so. And just who were the original owners? If you think about it logically, and add one Jubilee onto another, all property would have to revert to the one who owned it all “originally” — like, maybe thousands of years ago. So whoever could establish the strongest and oldest legal claim to the land would own everything, presumably, if you follow the logic of Jubilee. Which sounds pretty on paper but has no basis in human reality.

J: As you long as you appear to be doing something Lawful to protect slaves and indentured servants, you can still pretend you’re a nice person who cares about others. A real “people person” who’d give your shirt off your back for a complete stranger.

A: You know, there are all kinds of theories these days about the Historical Jesus — who you were, what you were teaching, what kind of relationship you had with the Pharisees and Sadducees and Romans. They try so hard to squeeze biblical verses into understandable boxes so they can define the boundaries of the particular box you were in. They seem to think that if they can define the right box they can finally define you. But it’s not like that. You weren’t living in a definable box, where certain Laws told you what to do and when to do it. You were that guy with the pedestal who wants to use the Law as a lever instead of a club.

(c) Hemera Technologies 2001-2003

(c) Hemera Technologies 2001-2003

J: When people are raised up instead of beaten down they always surprise you. You can’t predict what amazing things they’ll do. You just have to step back and let them do their thing. Human beings at their best are totally unpredictable, yet they’re not in any way illogical. Human beings at their best live according to the blended logic of heart, mind, body, and talent, and this logic is amazing. It’s the blended logic of the soul. Creative. Spontaneous but also cautious. Organized but not obsessive. Funny as hell. Capable of tears. Capable of quiet reflection. Capable of great action — but not constantly so. Deeply grateful for a relationship of love and faith and trust in God. Able to tell right from wrong.

A: Which does not describe some of the people I know.

J: Exactly so. A great many adolescents and adults have stopped using the parts of their own brains that are dedicated to advanced emotions such as creativity, spontaneity, grief, contemplation, trust, and the biggie everybody wants to know about . . . divine love. The less functional a person’s brain, the more obsessive he or she becomes about the Law. The traditions of Law — including “family honour,” which is Law in its worst incarnation — are crucial to those people who’ve stopped listening to input from the Soul Circuits of their own brains.

A: Why? Why do people become righteous about the Law when they lose access to their own empathy?

J: A full answer to that question would fill more than one book, but the simple answer is that they’re frightened to death of the void they feel inside themselves. There’s a huge cost involved when you choose to ignore big chunks of your own brain. If you were to tie your dominant hand behind your back and refuse to use it for years, there’d be a huge cost to that, too. First your hand would weaken, then it would wither, and eventually you’d get ulcers and infections, possibly leading to incremental amputation, even system-wide sepsis and a swift death. Would this be a good thing? Would a sane person do this? Probably not. Yet every day human beings choose to do this kind of thing to their own brains. They choose, under societal pressure, to stop listening to input from the smartest parts of their own brains. Then they’re surprised when they feel like crap! They profess to be totally mystified by the sense of emptiness they feel inside. Well, ya know, that’s gonna happen when you force your own brain to shrink — to literally shrink in size within the confines of your own skull.

A: You don’t sound very sympathetic.

J: I have forgiveness for their choices, but I also have a lot of exasperation. I mean, come on, folks. What you put in your brain matters!

A: A favourite theme of yours.

J: Many people get caught in a vicious cycle. They choose to stop listening to the input of their own inner wisdom. Then they start to feel restless and empty and confused.

A: And angry.

J: And angry. After a while, they may get tired of feeling this way, so they look for answers that make logical sense to them. At this point, many will stumble across various forms of religious Law. The Law gives them answers that seem to make sense if they’re suffering from big holes (literally) inside their brains, holes that make them feel lost and listless and helpless. The Law gives them an external framework to cling to. However, the more they choose to lean on the Law, the less they use the parts of their brain they most need to “hear” — their intuition, their common sense, their empathy and faith. This leads to an even greater sense of futility and disconnection from God. So they redouble their efforts to “properly understand” God’s Law through more prayer and more self-denial and more study of scripture. Which means they’re again ignoring their own inner intuition, common sense, empathy, and faith. Which leads to further imbalance in the brain’s functioning. Which can lead directly to the anguish felt during “the dark night of the soul” — a never-to-be-sought-after state of severe neurophysiological breakdown. Famed theologian Augustine of Hippo arrived at his conclusions about God and the soul through this very process.

A: No wonder Augustine’s teachings on Original Sin make no sense.

 

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Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain's Soul Circuitry, Jesus' family of origin, Law (Nomos), Original Sin, psychopathy (niceness), Realspiritik, slavery, Soul and tagged , | Leave a Comment
13 Sep 2011

RS7: More of a Skeptic Than James Randi

Great Blue Heron at Sydenham1 - June 2014James Randi is one the of the world’s best known skeptics. He’s an experienced, talented magician who can spot a trick, gimmick, or fake at 20 paces (metaphorically speaking). He’s made it his mission to “out” all the paranormal tricksters who are stealing people’s money and trust through clever use of misdirection. I have no quarrel with him in this regard.

For several years he was offering one million dollars to anyone who could prove he/she had a paranormal ability. (He was quite confident he’d never have to pony up.) Later he changed the conditions of the “test.” He said he would only test somebody who has a media presence (I assume he means somebody like Sylvia Browne). I haven’t checked lately to see whether the prize is still being offered. I don’t know what he’d do with somebody like me.

James Randi also writes a column for Skeptic Magazine. This month he takes aim, once again, at psychic Sylvia Browne. Apparently she has a new book out (Afterlives of the Rich and Famous). I’ll take his word for it. I have little interest in anything Ms. Browne says. I own only one of her books, which is plenty enough for me to see the intent that lies behind her writings. I’m in agreement with Mr. Randi about the fatuous nature of her book material.

Mr. Randi is a trained magician, and he objects to Sylvia Browne’s writings because he’s suspicious of her motives and methods. I’m a trained mystic/channeller and I also object to Sylvia Browne’s motives and methods. But probably not for the same reasons that Mr. Randi objects.

Mr. Randi doesn’t seem to believe (if I’ve been reading him correctly) that anything atypical can occur in the Newtonian world we live in. In his view, if anything “weird” happens, there must be a simple, logical, Newtonian explanation for it. Either there’s a scientific phenomenon that hasn’t been fully explored yet, or the person who reported the “weird event” is lying or is being duped by a clever manipulator.

This makes life very neat and tidy. But not very real.

The honest truth is that we don’t live in a Newtonian world. We live in a quantum world, a quantum world we barely understand at all with our somewhat limited human thinking capacity. I say “limited” because the human brain, while complex and sophisticated and quite a marvel when it’s working well, can only go so far in grasping the nature of quarks and bosons and probability wave functions and gamma rays and dark energy and dark matter and on and on and on. I think it’s important for us to continue to develop our scientific understanding of these phenomena. At the same time, I think it’s important for us to be humble about our own abilities. It’s important for us to remember that we actually don’t know everything (though we’re often tempted to think we do). It’s important for us to remain both open-minded and open-hearted.

Each human brain and central nervous system (hereafter the brain), as Jesus and I have said before, is its own mini-universe, its own small kingdom of the soul that exists separately from but contiguous with other kingdoms-of-the-soul (i.e. other people). Within any particular human brain, the principles of quantum physics apply — including the principles of the conscious observer (in each case, the conscious observer is the person who “owns” that particular brain) plus Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. When consciousness is understood from this point of view (instead of from the Materialist point of view), it’s a lot easier for us to accept the challenges that are part and parcel of “being human.” We have a better starting place for understanding why we do the strange things we do — for the simple reason that we’re not expecting easy cookie-cutter solutions. We’re not expecting easy Newtonian instruction booklets that can guide us through the complex quantum realities of our own brains.

Psychic-medium Sylvia Browne is doing some strange things, to be sure, but I doubt very much she has the level of intentionality James Randi ascribes to her.

She has her very own kingdom of the soul — her brain — and she’s using her brain as the primary tool for her “psychic work.” Regardless of what she says about her sources of information, at the end of the day all the information she “receives” goes through the circuits of her own brain. She can’t detach herself from this scientific reality. Her brain is the processing centre, the combination of hardware and software that determines how data is perceived, analyzed, stored, and transmitted. She’s responsible for maintaining her own hardware and software. All of it. This is what it means to be the master/mistress of your own Kingdom.

It’s her own brain that decides what information she’ll pass along to other people. She’s responsible for what she decides to tell other people. It isn’t her angel’s responsibility to decide, and it isn’t God’s responsibility to decide. It’s her own responsibility. Her brain belongs entirely to her, not to some cosmic force that’s guiding her or taking over part of her brain as an “indwelling spirit.” (Believe it or not, this is a frequent claim among mystics, psychics, and prophets in all religions.) Whatever Sylvia Browne chooses to put on paper is her responsibility — not God’s — just as whatever I choose to put on paper is my responsibility. Sylvia Browne is choosing to try to write about the quantum universe without knowing a darned thing about the quantum universe. (If you’re looking for hard science in her books, you’ll be looking in vain.) I would love to see what her brain looks like on a SPECT scan while she’s talking to her spirit guide, Francine. If she’s certain of her ability, she has no cause for concern.

The International Olympic Committee requires that all athletes who win medals at an Olympic event be tested for banned drugs. I would suggest that anyone claiming to be a mystic or channeller or psychic or prophet or whatever be required to undergo rigorous medical assessment and have his or her brain scanned by an objective third-party professional. This would immediately root out the psychopaths and the seriously mentally ill, such as the woman I tried to learn from in the early years of my spiritual journey.

Grace had a personal history of mental illness, a family history of serious mental illness, and a history of being horribly abused as a child. She was a binge drinker, had a probable eating disorder (she weighed about 250 pounds when I last saw her), took antidepressants and Andriol for a mood disorder, and was easily triggered by rage. (Her own rage, that is.) She was also manipulative, cunning, and adept at “cutting and pasting” other people’s ideas into “new and divinely revealed tapestries of spiritual truth.”

Yet never once did she come up with an original insight. She couldn’t. Her brain was too damaged to do anything except copy. She could barely learn any new facts from the newspaper let alone learn new facts from her guardian angel.

She said she was a channeller. She very much wanted to be a channeller. But she couldn’t pass the very first test of ethical mysticism, which is the ability to feel empathy for others. (Schadenfreude was one of her favourite ways to brighten up the day. Even better than a few shots of vodka, thought she. And cheaper, too.)

I hope she’s been receiving the professional medical care she needs. She went through a lot of horrible things during childhood, and I hope she’s been able to find some healing and forgiveness.

God bless you, Grace.

P.S. The brain’s hardware is very sensitive to alcohol. If you meet a mystic or channeller who abuses alcohol, run for the hills. This person has damaged his or her brain and is in need of healing. Chances that he or she is a bona fide mystic are pretty close to zero. People who can’t or won’t look after their own brains are in no position to give you advice about how to look after yours (though your compassion for their suffering is always important.) Spiritual connection with God depends on the brain. Look after your brain and you’ll be surprised at how much inner common sense you actually have!

 

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Posted in ethical mysticism, Kingdom teachings, Materialism, mysticism, quantum theory, Realspiritik and tagged , , | Leave a Comment
01 Aug 2011

JR61: Sixth Step in Healing the Church: Be Honest About the Bible

A: I’ve been reflecting for the past few days on the suffering inflicted by Anders Breivik on everybody everywhere who’s capable of loving their God and loving their neighbours as themselves.

Several news reports have referred to a 1,500 page manifesto that Breivik posted on the Internet shortly before the Norway attacks. Apparently Breivik copied a number of sections almost word from word from the writings of several well-known far-right ideologues. (Which just goes to show, once again, that psychopaths are very good at “cutting and pasting” other people’s ideas, but not capable of coming up with original insights of their own.) Breivik’s manifesto has been compared to the writings of Ted Kaczynski, the U.S. Unabomber. But when I look at excerpts from Breivik’s diary and manifesto, and compare his actions to his beliefs, I don’t see a modern day European political movement. I see a very old ideological movement, one that fills up many pages in the Bible. I see the Book of Jeremiah. I see the Book of Revelation. I see the Book of Numbers.

J: These are all biblical books that give permission to psychopaths to carry out “Just Wars.”

A: I’ve noticed in news reports about Breivik that he readily admits he carried out the Oslo bombing and the camp shootings, but he says he didn’t break the law in doing so because he’s at war with the Norway government.

J: Inside our man Breivik’s head, it all makes perfect sense. Of course, the reason it makes sense to him is that he’s only using certain parts of his biological brain. He’s not using the parts of his brain that deal with empathy or relationship or common sense or compassionate humour or trust or creativity. If he were using those parts, he wouldn’t be capable of planning such a cold, ruthless, legalistic act of violence against others.

A: On the other hand, interviews with some of the camp survivors suggest these young people embody all the best of human potential — empathy and relationship and trust and so on. There was a really good article in Saturday’s Toronto Star: “Norway Tragedy: Inside the nightmare on Utoya” by Michelle Shephard (Toronto Star, Saturday, July 30, 2011). One 20 year old woman, Karoline Bank, is quoted as saying, “Yes, he took many people away from us, and every life lost is a tragedy. But we have gotten so much stronger over this. There’s not much more to say.”

J: Couldn’t have said it better myself.

A: People of faith will wonder why God allowed this to happen.

J: People of faith have to stop listening to people of religious humility. People of faith — by that I mean people who want to be in relationship with God now, TODAY, not at some vague time of future judgment — have to start being more honest, more realistic, about the motivations that drove the authors of many revered religious texts. They have to stop wearing rose-coloured lenses when they read the Bible. They have to stop making excuses for the psychopaths who wrote so many parts of the Old and New Testaments. They have to stop making excuses for the parts of the Bible that were clearly written by those suffering from major mental illness.

A: Like the Book of Revelation.

Christian theologians have long been desperate to endorse the violent imagery of the Book of Revelation as a central justification for orthodox Christian teachings about the End Times. But from the point of view of God’s angels, the prophetic visions recorded in Revelation feel like a psychopathic attack on God and also on the soul who lived as Jesus, an attack no different in intent than Anders Breivik’s systematic rampage against campers trapped on a small island. Like Breivik, who disguised himself as a police officer so he could ensnare more victims, the prophet who penned Revelation pretended to be a faithful follower of Jesus as he took direct aim at Jesus’ teachings about a loving and forgiving God. Shown here are the head and wings of a large 9th century BCE Assyrian human-headed bull found in the North-West palace at Nimrud (on display at the British Museum). Photo credit JAT 2023.

J: This is an issue of trust. People have to decide for themselves whether they’re going to trust what John says about humanity’s relationship with God, or whether they’re going to trust their own hearts, their own heads, and their own experiences about humanity’s relationship with God. Would a loving and forgiving God put a gun in Anders Breivik’s hands and tell him to go out and shoot people to “ensure that the warriors fighting for the preservation of European Christendom [will] prevail”?*

A: God didn’t stop him, though.

J: Really? You’re sure about that? Because from where I’m standing, God did a great deal to stop him.

A: Sixty-nine people at the camp are dead, plus several more at the site of the Oslo bombing. They’re dead and they’re not coming back.

J: No, they’re not coming back. And their families and friends will grieve because they — the human survivors — have loving hearts. Their grief is unavoidable and is a measure of their wholeness. Yet one day their family and friends will cross to the Other Side, as all creatures of Planet Earth must do, and they’ll be reunited with their loved ones. So from God’s point of view, the relationships haven’t ceased. The relationships still exist, despite the death of the physical body, because love never dies. The form of the relationships has changed, but not the substance. The substance is real. The love can’t be taken away from any of these souls. Love continues beyond anything the physical body knows. Love is greater than anything the physical body knows. Love is the great mystery. It’s what guides God the Mother and God the Father in their decisions about when people are coming Home. But make no mistake — everyone eventually dies. God has never promised otherwise. This is the natural order of the universe.

A: You wouldn’t know it to listen to an apocalyptic prophet who promises bodily resurrection of the dead.

J: It’s a funny thing about psychopaths. A psychopath has a distinctive pattern to his logic and choices and behaviours, and one of the most distinctive features of psychopathy is the peculiar attitude towards death. They’re unable to trust anyone, of course — since trust is closely related to empathy and love and forgiveness — and this means they’re completely unable to trust in the idea that physical death is a natural, loving part of the soul’s relationship with God. Death without future punishment isn’t logical to a psychopath, just as life with present forgiveness isn’t logical to him. He’s incapable of feeling love, so he’s unable to conceive of a loving death. He’s also incapable of believing that God is smarter than he is, so he’ll spend a great deal of time and energy looking for “escape clauses” in the contract laws about death in the Abrahamic religions. If the clauses he wants aren’t there, he’ll claim to be a divinely-inspired prophet and add them himself. Egyptian attitudes towards death in the pre-Hellenistic period epitomize the psychopath’s fear of death.

A: You’re saying a psychopath’s attitude towards death isn’t unique to a specific religion or culture, but is instead universal because it’s biological. You’re saying that “escape clauses” come out the same way in different cultures because all human beings share the same basic DNA.

J (nodding): A psychopath is, by definition, a person who is cut off from the input of his own brain’s Soul Circuitry. This “cutting off” may have resulted, in rare circumstances, from a head injury or infection or poisoning or oxygen deprivation. But the vast majority of psychopaths are “self made.” High functioning psychopaths such as Anders Breivik are individuals who’ve turned themselves into psychopaths one bad choice at a time. This is why psychopathy doesn’t usually emerge in full-fledged form until adolescence. It takes a long time for a person to consciously undo the healthy connections God builds into the human brain.

A: It’s still amazing to me that human beings have that kind of control over the wiring of their own brains. But history bears out the truth of what you’re saying.

J: You’ll probably be shocked to learn, then, that within the annals of religious history there have been select groups who’ve intentionally incorporated the blueprint for “how to build a psychopath” into their religious doctrines.

A: You mean . . . these groups wanted to create psychopaths? On purpose?

J: It can be very useful, from a utilitarian point of view, to have a man like Anders Breivik on your side if you’re trying to acquire wealth, power, status, and “immortality.”

A: This immortality thing . . . this need to leave behind a human legacy of power and status for future generations to admire and imitate — is this a normal state of mind for a person who feels whole and healed and humble? Because it seems awfully narcissistic to me.

J: It’s normal and natural for a soul-in-human-form to want to create and build and improve the quality of life for his or her community. Persons-of-soul — angels — have a strong sense of purpose and mission and service. So you expect to see a community of Whole Brain Thinkers busily at work devising new ways to dig wells for clean water or improving ways to eliminate toxins from the environment or building new schools and medical clinics in underserved areas. Human beings are at their best when they come together in teams to bring healing to others in the face of suffering.

A: Healing instead of revenge.

J: A large number of people around the world have responded to the Norway tragedy by offering their hope, faith, and love instead of judgment, piety, and revenge. Some have found, for the first time in their lives, the courage of their own faith. The courage of their own trust in God. The courage of their own trust in each other.

A: That’s a powerful insight, to know you have the courage to choose hope, faith, and love.

Forever 1

Jesus said: One person cannot ride two horses at once, nor stretch two bows; nor can a servant serve two masters, as he will respect one and despise the other. No one drinks vintage wine and immediately wants to drink fresh wine; fresh wine is not put into old wineskins because they might burst. Vintage wine is not put into new wineskins because it might be spoiled” (Gospel of Thomas 47a-d). You can choose the path of redemption or you can choose the path of revenge. Pick one because you can’t have both. Photo credit JAT 2014.

J: To find that courage is to know redemption. I send my love to all who are open to the wondrous idea that humans — not just God — are filled to overflowing in their own souls with divine courage and trust and gratitude and devotion.

This courage is yours. It’s not God’s. It’s not your neighbour’s. It’s not your parents’. It’s not your priest’s. It’s yours. It’s part of who you are as a soul.

Claim it and live it. Be the person God knows you really are. Don’t be a bully and coward like Anders Breivik, who hasn’t the courage to love. (Though I forgive him.) Be open to a loving relationship with God, no matter what your religious background. Your neighbour is loved by God as much as you are. All your neighbours.

No other truth is acceptable.

* On July 24, 2011, The Globe and Mail published a Reuter’s article, “Excerpts from Norway attacker’s diary.” An entry from June 11, 2011 said, “I prayed for the first time in a very long time today. I explained to God that unless he wanted the Marxist-Islamic alliance and the certain Islamic takeover of Europe to completely annihilate European Christendom within the next hundred years he must ensure that the warriors fighting for the preservation of European Christendom prevail.”

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Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, Bible, Book of Revelation, brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain-soul connection, Church of today, Divine Love, forgiveness, free will, Jesus Redux, life and death, psychopathy, redemption, Soul, the right to be right, trust, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged | Leave a Comment
24 Jul 2011

JR60: The Utoeya Tragedy in Norway

Sadness (C) JAT

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 | Leave a Comment
23 May 2011

JR42: Harold Camping’s Failed Apocalyptic Prophecy . . . Like, There’s a Surprise

A: Well, it’s May 23, and the world didn’t end two days ago as prophesied by Harold Camping and his multi-million dollar non-profit apocalyptic Christian media ministry. The 200 million people who were supposed to be taken up into heaven in the Rapture are still here. Slightly impoverished after giving their money to Camping, but still here. All is well with the universe.

J: People are easily parted from their assets once they’ve lost their common sense.

A: I read the Globe and Mail on-line. Usually when I check an article there are a few dozen readers’ comments — 40 or 50 posts at most. Yesterday, by 2:50 p.m., there were 1,052 comments attached to an article by Garance Burke (Associated Press) called “Believers confused as Judgment Day doesn’t come.” I didn’t read the comments. But I thought it was interesting that a failed prophecy from a retired civil engineer in a different country would attract so much attention.

J: People have very strong opinions about religion and religious leaders.

A: Can’t argue with you there. So let’s talk about angels instead — souls who are not currently incarnated as human beings on Planet Earth. How do you and other angels feel about apocalyptic prophesies?

J (chuckling): Isn’t this a holiday in Canada? Wouldn’t you rather be outside barbequing or something?

A: It started raining again a few minutes ago. There’s been a lot of rain and cool weather this spring. All the more reason to sit down and do some typing.

J: Well, it’ll come as no surprise to you that angels are fully aware of the kinds of things that are being said about us by religious leaders in various parts of the world. You could say we have our own clipping service.

Most people have been conditioned to believe that apocalyptic prophecy is a rare and sacred gift granted by God. Few people realize that from the point of view of God’s angels, all claims from apocalyptic human prophets look like temples — temples to the glory of narcissistic humans. Nothing good comes from prophecies about the End Times, and your angels know it. They see the fear, contempt, and justification of hatred that pour into every aspect of your life if you buy into these unloving lies about God. This is one temple where your angels will always let you fall flat on your face. Shown in this photo are remnants of the temple pediment found during excavations of the Roman Baths at Bath, England (because all good Remnants must come to an end). Photo credit JAT 2023.

A: A man like Harold Camping is giving God bad press — telling people that God is so narcissistic and selfish that “he” enthusiastically plays Russian Roulette with his own children. Do angels care about this bad press? Does God?

J: Would you be happy if the people who claim to know you went around town saying you’re a controlling, manipulative, obsessive compulsive, right wing, politically conservative, Medicare-hating, gun-loving bigot who hates gays, people of colour, and women?

A: No. I’d know they were lying, and I’d forgive them. But I’d still be hurt.

J: Same with angels. Every day in every culture these lies about God are being preached. Angels not only feel hurt on behalf of God the Mother and God the Father, but they feel hurt on behalf of the souls who speak these lies while they’re struggling with human brain dysfunction.

You can be very sure that Harold Camping’s own guardian angels are now very relieved to have the whole thing over with and the lie of his prophecy revealed for what it is — not just among his own followers, but among all those who heard about it on the daily news.

A: Camping’s angels aren’t upset that he’s been embarrassed in front of millions of people?

J: Far from it. They know he’s hurt a lot of people with his narcissistic predictions. At the same time, they know that his harmful choices emerged from his dysfunctional human brain — not from his true self, not from his soul. They forgive him, but they also have to do the right thing by him and by others. They have to allow people to see the consequences of these kinds of abusive choices. If they protect Camping from the consequences of his own choices, and if they protect his followers from their own arrogance and stupidity, how will it be possible for human beings to learn not to make these kinds of choices? Tough Love is an angel’s expression of courage, trust, and faith in the ability of human beings to live their human lives in loving ways. Divine ways. Ways that don’t prey on other people’s vulnerabilities.

A: Ooooooohhh. I can just hear the response from readers. What you’re saying about Tough Love sounds perilously close to the idea of divine punishment — an idea that many liberal and progressive Christians reject as incompatible with the idea of a loving and forgiving God.

J: I can’t help it if some individuals want to reject the possibility of Tough Love from God and God’s angels. Usually the people who are most keen to reject this belief are the ones who are most interested in NOT having to learn from their own mistakes.

A: The narcissists.

J: Religious narcissists — and there are plenty of those — employ a number of psychological defences to try to shift responsibility for their own mistakes onto other people or onto other time frames. Religious doctrines such as Original Sin, Satan, Judgment Day, and the Rapture make it possible for the narcissists to stop blaming themselves for their own choices. They can shift the blame onto “conditions” that are outside their control. “Conditions” that make it easy for them to shrug their shoulders and say — with Godfather-like equanimity — “Hey, we can’t help being who we are. One day God will make us answer for our crimes, but not today. Today we have a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card and we plan to use it. Because we can. So screw you.”

Really, I mean, come on. Do people think God can’t hear that? Of course God can hear that. God forgives them when they say it, which is exactly what you’d expect from a loving and forgiving God. But forgiving somebody means you have faith in their true potential, their truest and most loving nature. Forgiving somebody means you don’t walk away from them when they’re in distress. Forgiving somebody means you do your best to help them better understand the choices they’re making. This usually means you have to let them experience consequences for their choices. That’s how they begin to recognize the harm caused by their abusive choices. Every loving parent knows this.

A: Loving parents also know you have to “choose your battles.” You can’t harangue your child about every little mistake, or he stops listening. You have to save your authoritative tone for the times when it really matters.

J: Guardian angels are no different. Their job is to help guide their human “foster children,” if you will, in the direction of greater compassion, greater balance, greater common sense. They have complete discretion and free will in carrying out this task. Sometimes they decide to help soften the consequences of a really poor human choice. Sometimes they decide to let the consequences build into one mega-consequence that hurts like hell. This is the reality. God has free will and angels have free will. Therefore, God and God’s angels are free to create consequences or not as they see fit. They aren’t bound by religious contract laws. Neither are they bound by laws of cause and effect. God is a heck of a lot smarter than the Law of Cause and Effect would suggest.

A: I don’t think religious narcissists actually want God to be smarter.

“His disciples questioned him: Should we fast? In what way should we pray? Should we give to charity? From which foods should we abstain? Jesus responded: Do not lie. If there is something that you hate, do not do it, for everything is revealed beneath heaven. Nothing hidden will fail to be displayed. Nothing covered will remain undisclosed (Gospel of Thomas 6).” This life-size Roman bronze hand is covered in sacred symbols — well, sacred to occult believers, anyway. It dates from 200-400 CE and was found at Caglia, Umbria, in Central Italy. It’s on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. Photo credit JAT 2017.

 J: True. Then again, that’s what narcissism is all about. It’s about human beings whose brains are so dysfunctional — whether from head injury, toxic substances, stress hormones, malnutrition, sleep deprivation, lack of social and emotional supports, abusive upbringing, or lack of education — that they start trying to cope by inventing inner myths about their own wonderfulness and superiority and breathtaking talent. There’s no room within the myth for somebody else who’s smarter or faster or stronger. Even if that somebody else is God.

Of course, this is why religious narcissists rely so heavily on the theme of humility. A person of humility — as opposed to a person of humbleness — can see in a logical and practical way that it isn’t very smart to go around proclaiming to be as smart as God, if not smarter. That’s no way to recruit followers who’ll willingly give you money and tell you how wonderful you are. So you don the sackcloth of humility, and you tell everyone who’ll listen that you’re just an empty vessel waiting to be filled by Spirit, by God’s inspired Word. That’s how the world acquires its apocalyptic prophets.

A: So it’s layers upon layers. A myth of personal superiority that has to be cloaked in another myth — the myth of humility. Then, when this isn’t enough to get you the reverence you crave, you add other layers, other myths, each more convoluted than the last to explain why you deserve to be treated as “special.”

J: This is what happens when people aren’t honest with themselves about their own abilities, their own intentions, and their own unhealed anger. The lies build and build on top of each other. After a while the lies can take on an entire imaginary life of their own. Such is the case with orthodox Western Christianity. Its official doctrines are largely a body of lies. Only when individual Christians choose to help their neighbours in love rather than piety do they walk the path of genuine spirituality and faith. These are the times when their guardian angels smile.

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Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), apocalyptic prophecy, Cause & Effect, forgiveness, free will, humility, Jesus Redux, Mother and Father God, narcissism, occult themes, psychopathy, religion and mental Illness, theodicy and tagged | Leave a Comment
15 May 2011

JR39: John, Paul, and James: The Lunatic, the Liar, and the Lord

Religious statues in doorway of church in Quilinen France

“Jesus said: No prophet is accepted in his own village. No physician heals the people who know him well (Gospel of Thomas 31).” Photo credit Hemera Technologies 2001-2003.

A: By now people will have noticed that you and I aren’t apologists for conservative or evangelical Christianity. I was thinking again today about C.S. Lewis’s “Trilemma” argument that claims to prove the divinity of Jesus — the “lunatic, liar, or lord” argument (presented in his book Mere Christianity). For Lewis, and for countless other conservative Christians, you — Jesus — have to be lord. Why?

J: Orthodox Western Christianity can’t survive in its present form if there’s no Saviour. The Saviour myth — Jesus as Saviour, Jesus as Lord — provides the perfect camouflage for all the lunatics and all the liars who have shaped orthodox Christianity over the centuries. This applies to both the Roman Catholic church and to mainstream Protestant denominations. Nobody wants to rattle all the “lunatic, liar, and lord” skeletons in the closet.

A: How many skeletons are there?

J: Too many for me to list here. But I can tell you who the earliest ones were.

A: Okay.

J: The earliest “lunatic” was John — by that I mean John the Baptist, who reinvented himself as John the chosen apostle after my death. John was seriously mentally ill, and I make no apologies for being honest about this fact. The word “lunatic” is too harsh, of course, and I wouldn’t use this word in the context of mental health discussions today. There’s far too much stigma around mental health issues already. But pretending that mental health issues don’t exist and pretending that mental health issues don’t touch all families is naive and cowardly. Mental health issues have always been a reality in human society. They’ve always been a reality in religious organizations. Religious organizations are never been exempt from these realities. Pious theologians hurt regular people when they go through contortions to try to “redeem” apocalyptic texts such as Revelation. The book of Revelation was written by John when he was floridly psychotic. This book hurts people. It scares people. It should come with a warning tag on it, but it doesn’t.

The honest truth is that some mentally ill people end up trying to hurt others, especially if psychosis has set in. Not all mentally ill people by any means. But some mentally ill people. Mental health professionals are trained in risk assessment, and they know that only a small percentage of mentally ill individuals are at risk of harming others. This is a reasonable, responsible, and appropriate approach to mental health. The church should take this approach in reassessing the writings of its own theologians — starting with John. They should look at what John actually said instead of pretending that John was so mystically elevated compared to his peers that regular people couldn’t understand his symbolic, mystical messages. The reason they couldn’t understand him is because he was having hallucinations and delusions.

A: Ever the honest fellow, aren’t you?

J: Lies don’t help anyone.

A: Speaking of lies . . . .

J: Nobody who’s been reading this site or your Concinnate Christianity site will be surprised to learn that the earliest “liar” in the church was Paul himself. I won’t go into detail on the Paul question today. If people are interested, they can check out some of our earlier posts about his motives.*

A: Okay. So what’s with the “lord” thing? How does that tie in with the “lunatics and liars”?

J: Well, this brings me to my older brother, James. James and I had . . . well . . . a very complicated relationship. He didn’t believe I was the Saviour as such — not in the way Paul described me. In fact, James despised Paul, and did everything he could to confront Paul’s teachings. But contrary to what scholars such as Bart Ehrman and Barrie Wilson think, my brother James was not a follower of my teachings. He taught his own version of reformed Judaism that undercut my central teachings. He liked me only slightly more than he liked Paul. Unfortunately, he and Paul had a lot more in common than either one realized.

A: In what way?

J: Quite honestly, both were pompous narcissists.

A: That’s not a very nice thing to say about your brother.

J: Maybe not, but it’s true. James was the eldest child and the eldest son born to an elite family of Jewish aristocrats. His maternal grandfather had at one time been a member of the Sanhedrin — the ruling council in Jerusalem. He wasn’t raised to be compassionate and trusting towards God. He was raised to be pious and fearful of God. He was considerably older than I was. He was — like so many eldest children — conservative, highly responsible, obedient, cautious, and “certain” of his role in life. He believed in law, and in particular in the laws of Moses. He was a devout Sadducean Jew.

A: I thought the Sadducees didn’t believe in resurrection. How did James reconcile himself to the strange events that occurred around your crucifixion and “resurrection”?

J: He didn’t. He tried very hard to downplay the rumours that swirled around my “death” and temporary reappearance. He, along with Peter and John, worked very hard to spread counter-rumours. It was he who came up with the idea of saying my body had been stolen from the tomb by my disciples (Matthew 27:62-66). Of course, my body hadn’t been stolen because I wasn’t even dead. Yet. James had more reason than anyone alive to know that I was a real human being and not a god-in-human-form who’d been resurrected from the dead. James, along with Peter and John, and with the help of my older brother Judas, were the ones who had me arrested in the first place.

A: Why?

J: For the simplest of human reasons — pride. Pride and “family honour” and that most terrible of dysfunctional human behaviours — the narcissistic rage reaction. I pushed all my brother’s buttons, and he had a narcissistic rage reaction. If you’ve ever been standing in the way of such an event, you’ll understand what I mean when I say the rage becomes all-consuming and self-absorbed in a way that’s difficult to describe. It’s like the entire universe shrinks to one spot of pure, blind, selfish hatred, and nothing else matters but revenge. There’s no logic to it. Not from anyone else’s point of view, anyway. But from the narcissist’s point of view the logic is diamond-hard. He (or she) becomes fanatically convinced that he’s right and everybody else is wrong. If he’s a religious man, this is the time when he’ll start saying that God is on his side and God demands revenge. Such a person is capable of the most murderous acts imaginable.

A: Including acts against one’s own family.

J: Especially against one’s own family. The people at greatest risk from an extreme narcissist are the people closest to him (or maybe, as I’d like to emphasize, her). Family members and group associates are the ones most likely to observe the mistakes, hypocrisies, memory failures, and lies made by a narcissist — none of which a narcissist wants to hear about. Those who make the mistake of pointing out a narcissist’s errors in judgment (including errors by proxy) may well find it’s the last mistake they make. Extreme narcissists can and do kill when they feel their “honour” has been “unjustly” attacked. My brother James was such a person.

A: He convinced himself that he was doing the right thing in having you arrested.

J: Absolutely. I was attacking the cultural and religious belief systems that gave him great status. I was attacking his right to be called “lord.” All along I was at greatest risk not from the Romans and not from the Jewish religious authorities in Jerusalem (where I spent very little time), but from my own family and friends. They were the ones who had the most to lose if I continued teaching my new brand of Judaism.

A: Where there are no lords.

J: And where “lunatics” are healed and liars are called to account for their lies.

A: Sounds like a place of rainbows to me.

 

* Please see Materialism, Pauline Thought, and the Kingdom

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Posted in Book of Revelation, Favourite Posts, historical Jesus, James brother of Jesus, Jesus Redux, Jesus' family of origin, John the Baptist, narcissism, Paul, religion and mental Illness, resurrection, status addiction, the right to be right and tagged | Leave a Comment
15 Apr 2011

JR33: The Black Swans of Mysticism

(c) Hemera Technologies 2001-2003

(c) Hemera Technologies 2001-2003

A: You know what? I’m feeling pretty peeved this morning, and I have a lot of things I’d like to say about some of the mystical ideas we’ve been talking about this week. I think I know how the Gospel writer Mark must have felt when he first read Paul’s First Corinthians. Some ticked!

J (smiling): I’m all ears.

A: Thank you! All this talk about apophatic mystics and anagogic mystics has brought up some issues that have been bugging the heck out of me for years. But yesterday was the last straw. Yesterday I was in the mood to do some spring cleaning, so I tackled a pile of papers that needed to be filed. There I found a church newsletter from November 2010 with a review of Karen Armstrong’s book The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (Toronto: Random House-Vintage, 2004). The reviewer dutifully tried to capture the content of Armstrong’s thesis about God, her discovery that “some of the most eminent Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians and mystics insisted that God was not an objective fact, was not another being, and not an unseen reality like the atom, whose existence could be empirically demonstrated. Some went so far as to say that it was better to say that God did not exist, because our notion of existence was too limited to apply to God.” Oh yeah? thought I indignantly. The reviewer went on: “Most would agree with the Greek Orthodox that any statement about God has to have two characteristics. One is ‘to remind us that God cannot be contained in a neat, coherent system of thought,’ and the other, ‘it should lead us to a moment of silent awe or wonder, because when speaking of the reality of God we are at the end of what words or thoughts can usefully do.'”

OH, YEAH? Really? That’s the best you can do, huh? You’re gonna just wimp out because intense emotions can’t be explained by using pure logic? You’re gonna just let yourselves off the hook that easily and give up on one of the best, most wondrous parts of the spiritual journey of redemption and transformation? You’re gonna just listen to these dopey mystics? Get a life, people! And I mean that literally. Get a life, and then get back to me on the question of who God is.

And you apophatic mystics out there — until you decide to get a whole life, a balanced life, a compassionate life, a forgiving life, I’m going to assume your biological brain circuits are seriously seized up in several crucial areas (your anterior cingulate, your amygdala, your orbitofrontal cortex, your right insular cortex, your caudate nucleus, and your hypothalamus). And if you think I’m wrong, then prove it to me. Volunteer to get your bran scanned. I’ve already had my brain scanned once. I’m game to go again. Show me your brain is healthy and fully functional and not damaged from psychoactive drug use. Then we’ll talk.

J: As you’ve said — and I totally agree — there’s no ethical mysticism without ethical scientific investigation.

A: I’m so upset about mystical claims that can’t be substantiated or corroborated. I’m upset about the sloppiness of current scientific investigation into mysticism, too. I’ve looked at some of the criteria for different “Mysticism Scales” used by researchers. Researchers such as Hood want to know if potential mystics have had an experience of transcending themselves or losing themselves in an experience of oneness. But this is only one type of mysticism — it’s a measure of apophatic mysticism, an experience that’s quite likely to be a highly dysfunctional dissociative disorder, not a true mystical state at all. There. I’ve said it. I think some of the highly revered mystics of the past have been severely dysfunctional. Especially the apophatic mystics — the ones who claim to feel only a void and empty unity. There’s something seriously wrong with a person’s brain if all he or she can feel is an empty unity.

J: Yet this is the state of so-called transcendence that so many seekers have been taught to seek.

A: Well, it’s not what I feel. And it’s not what you felt. So I guess that makes you and me the Popperian “black swans” of falsifiability. And you’re technically dead, which makes your soul mind pretty hard to study. So that leaves me, and others like me, as possible test subjects for a study of non-dysfunctional mysticism. Such a study can’t come soon enough, as far as I’m concerned.

J: Unfortunately, such a study would only help distinguish between those whose brains are reasonably functional and those whose brains aren’t. It would do nothing to identify the mystics of the past who were lying — the ones who intentionally invented a mystical journey for their own narcissistic purposes.

A: Ah. Pseudo-Dionysius comes instantly to mind. Pseudo-Dionysius, the great 6th century CE apophatic-anagogic inventor of Christian mystical hierarchy. The inventor of Christian angelology. The inventor of mystical theology. The bolsterer of Neo-Platonic Christian thought. The bolsterer of mystical church authority for the church of the Byzantine Empire. The man who cemented the worst ideals of Platonic mysticism into a church that wanted to utterly eradicate all aspects of your own core teachings on inclusiveness, forgiveness, non-chosenness, and heart-based relationship with the Divine. You mean that kind of liar?

J: I mean that kind of liar.

A: As I said earlier, I think I know how Mark felt when he read what Paul wrote about you. If I were a cartoon character right now, I’d have steam coming out of my ears.

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20 Feb 2011

JR12: A Divine Love Story

Beauty. Photo credit JAT 2014.

A: You know, for the past two weeks I’ve been doing a lot of research on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and after wading through the English translations [Wise, Abegg, and Cook]* of the Essene’s own teachings, I’m sick of them. Just sick of them.

J: Sick of the teachings? Or sick of the Essenes?

A: I’m sick of the teachings. And I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to go to dinner with anybody who believes in these teachings, either. The writings are so . . . so self-centred and narcissistic. So full of themselves. So full of hot air. They don’t say anything moderate or balanced about our relationship with God. They’re full of cliches and bluster and prophecy and big long strings of fancy-sounding words. But where is the love? There’s no love in them — no kind, respectful, trusting, compassionate, inclusive love. It’s just narcissistic bullshit. Did I say that already? I think I said that already.

J: Don’t forget paranoid. The teachings are also very paranoid.

A: Yeah. Enough with the evil Belial, for God’s sake! Enough with the final battle where the pure and virtuous Essenes will lead the armies of Light to victory! Get a life, people.

J: Or Pauline Christianity.

A: Say what?

J: If they don’t want to get a life, they could always get some serious, heavy-duty evangelical Christianity. Evangelical Christianity doesn’t say much that the Essenes didn’t say within their own brand of Community Rule.

A: Yeah, well, I’m not feeling the love from evangelical Christianity, either. Again, lots of narcissism, not so much trust in God. I can’t believe what these people are saying about God!

J: Which people? The Essenes or the Pauline Christians?

A: Both. I’m not seeing a lot of difference between them, as you’ve pointed out. This is not what you’ve taught me about God. I don’t see any resemblance at all. I don’t see any resemblance between your teachings and Paul’s teachings, or your teachings and John’s teachings. This is crazy! How did orthodox Christianity get so far from the truth?

J: I hate to sound like a broken record, but, again, it’s the mental health issue. My teachings have no appeal for narcissists. Or psychopaths.

A: Because there’s no “fuel” for status addiction. Narcissists and psychopaths suffer big-time from status addiction.

J (nodding): And as for people suffering from psychotic illnesses . . . they’re not in a position to take full control of their thoughts and feelings. They can’t. The illness interferes with their thinking and feeling processes. So they’re filled with fear and paranoid thoughts even before you add the religious paranoia. They can also suffer from narcissism on top of those biologically confused thoughts and feelings, as John did. But the main point is they’re not mentally or emotionally well, and their writings — if they write about spiritual or religious topics — always reflect their inner mental state. The writings of a person suffering from a psychotic illness sound psychotic. You have to step back from their writings and ask yourself . . . would an adult human being with a clean bill of health as far as the DSM-IV is concerned — and taking into consideration the psychopathy that the DSM-IV writers left out for bizarre reasons — would a non-paranoid, non-manic, non-depressed, non-psychotic, non-substance-addicted person write this? Is this writing the reflection of a person in a highly stressed mental state? Is this writing the reflection of a person who understands what compassionate love is? Is this writing the reflection of a person who understands what it means to trust in God’s goodness? Because let’s be honest — a person who writes all the time about the devil or Belial or whatever you want to call this imaginary evil entity is showing that he or she does not trust in God’s goodness. How can anybody say they trust wholly in God, then turn around and say God is too weak to prevent the existence of a devil? You can’t have it both ways.

A: Orthodox Western Christianity says you can. And another thing —

J (starting to chuckle):

A: Yes, I’m on a rant this morning. I’m sick of the way these writers — the Essenes and Paul especially — talk about women. I’m sick of the way they’ve just gone ahead and eradicated the Divine Feminine from everything. I’m sick of their pompous warrior-king Messiahs and I’m sick of their divinely appointed male priests and I’m sick of their testerone-soaked jockeying for the best places at the table. Me, me, me. Look at me — I’m special! That’s all these people can talk about. For religious people who claim to be serving God humbly and piously, they sure spend a lot of time bragging about their own status and putting other people down. Have you read what the Essenes say about people with physical infirmities and imperfections [IQSa]? It’s just plain cruel!

J: The difference between humbleness and humility. You and I have talked about that a lot.

A: It wasn’t very humble of early teachers such as Second Isaiah or the redactors of Genesis to go ahead and do a hatchet job on God the Mother — to just slice her out of the story of Creation. Even the Greeks, for all their crazy Homeric myths, had the sense to include strong female archetypes in their pantheon. Anybody with half a heart can see that Creation — the world of beauty and wonder and mystery all around us — is a Love Story. It’s a testament to the love shared by God the Mother and God the Father for each other, a record of their journey of love, growth, commitment, struggle, and faith. It’s a giant love story. That’s what you’ve taught me. That’s what I feel myself. It’s a painful story, but a truthful one. Everything around us talks about the importance of relationship, the importance of balance. How can religious people look at the world and see a Judeo-Christian Covenant? How can they think “it’s all about them”?

J: Narcissists always think it’s all about them. It’s how they view the world — through a very small lens of “I.” Me, myself, and I. It doesn’t matter whether or not they’re religious. The issue isn’t one of spirituality or faith or God. It’s simply a matter of biological brain health. Sadly — broken record again — it’s about the human brain and how people use the brain God gives them.

A: I notice that God gave women brains, too. You’d think that would count for something in the grand religious scheme of things.

J: Not to mention the thorny reality that 75% of the human sex chromosomes are X chromosomes — female chromosomes, not male. I’m thinkin’ that’s probably an important “Post-It Note” in the biologist’s Book of Creation.

A: I’m so glad I was raised in a family where I was taught that men and women are equal in terms of their intellectual gifts and in terms of their right to be treated with dignity, respect, and equality. Thanks, Mom and Dad!

J: I’ll second that. I wouldn’t be able to talk to you this way if your human brain hadn’t developed along the lines of dignity, respect, and equality. That’s what the relationship between God the Mother and God the Father is all about — dignity and respect as the basis of their mutual love and trust, despite their respective differences in temperament and talent and size. As above, so below. When human beings live according to the values and principles of their beloved Divine Parents, they can feel the love of God coming into their daily lives. When they reject those values, their biological brains become like big pots of quivering jello — lots of colour, lots of movement, but not much substance. It’s fun to eat, but 15 minutes later, you’re hungry again.

A: They feel empty inside when they reject the core values of the soul.

J: Which is all very confusing when it’s their time-honoured religious traditions that insist they reject their soul’s own values. They’re taught by their religious leaders to reject divine notions of equality amongst all life, to reject balance, to reject symbiotic relationships — to reject all mutuality. Then they complain because they can’t feel God’s love. They complain they’ve been abandoned by God. It’s a crock. It’s not God who’s abandoned them. It’s they who have abandoned God. They usually don’t realize that this is the cause of their feeling of inner emptiness. They think their religion is helping them fill the void. But unless they have an unusually mature, unusually intuitive religious leader, their church services are just making the inner bowl of jello bigger. There’s no substance because there’s a lack of will, a lack of courage, to teach the truth about God.

A: The truth that God is the God Who Is Two, not the God Who Is One. And not the God Who Is Three, if you’re a Trinitarian.

J: It’s a simple truth, seen everywhere in Creation. There’s no relationship when it’s only “me, myself, and I.” Relationship MUST begin with two. It can involve more than two — and, in fact, the angelic community of God’s children is so large, so much bigger than two, that I can’t give you a number that’s meaningful to the human brain.

A: Gajillions?

J (smiling): Yes. Gajillions of angels, both male and female. But no matter how many angels exist within God’s family, it’s still about relationship. It’s still about people — angels — knowing each other, respecting each other’s uniqueness, respecting each other’s differences, working together in a symbiotic way to make a “whole” that’s much larger than the component “parts.” The sense of Oneness that people long for in their relationship with God isn’t a sense of losing themselves in the infinite Mind of God. It’s the sense of Oneness that comes from combining your strengths with the strengths of your brothers and sisters towards a common goal. It’s not Oneness of identity. It’s Oneness of Purpose. It’s Oneness of Commitment. It’s family. It’s people with differences coming together to work as a Team to create something much bigger than each could create on his or her own. That’s what Divine Love feels like.

A: Habitat For Humanity. It feels like the charity called Habitat For Humanity. Where groups of committed people volunteer their time and their skills to help build safe, affordable housing for families.

J: Exactly. It feels just like that. Everybody has different talents. Some are good with plumbing. Some are good with woodworking. Some are good with designing. But all the talents are needed, and no one talent is more important than another. Everybody’s got a job to do, and everybody’s job is important.

A: Especially the guy who makes the coffee. Ya gotta have your coffee breaks while you’re busting your butt to get a job done.

J: Even angels take coffee breaks.

* Wise, Michael, Martin Abegg Jr., and Edward Cook, trans. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation. New York: HarperCollins–HarperSanFrancisco, 2005.

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17 Feb 2011

JR11: More on John the Baptist

A: You said a few days ago [Feb. 6] that the man you knew as John the Baptist had been raised to believe he was one of the Essene’s two prophesied Messiahs. Tell me more about that.

J: In order to understand the history of John the Baptist, you have to understand the mindset he was raised in. Most normal people — by that I mean psychologically and emotionally well adjusted — can’t relate to the mindset. This is true regardless of what time period you’re looking at. By that I mean there were normal, well-adjusted people 2,000 years ago who were just as bewildered by John as normal people would be today. He was an extreme person — and his extreme nature brought out a lot of different reactions in people. Some people thought he was a hero. Others thought he was a dangerous provocateur The normal people thought he was a dangerous provocateur.

A: Yet you spent several years hanging out with him.

J: I did. I genuinely believed he had important things to teach me about God. He had a masterful grasp on the sacred writings of the Hebrew tradition. His recall was phenomenal. It was rote learning, pummelled into his brain by years and years of study. I didn’t understand for a long while that rote learning isn’t the same thing as insight.

A: You thought he had insight.

J: He was so different from other people I knew. He seemed so focussed, so pure in his devotion to his calling. He never had doubts. He seemed almost . . . almost invincible. His faith seemed as sturdy as a mountain. Unshakeable. Unmoveable. I found it fascinating. I wanted to understand how to get faith like that. Of course, it turned out he had no faith in God at all. He had faith in the teachings of his religious sect, the Essenes. Faith in sacred teachings is not the same thing as faith in God.

A: I learned that one the hard way.

J: As did I. As did I. The Essenes were a breakaway sect — one of several groups that all used the sacred Hebrew texts but in very different ways. There was no single form of Judaism then. And not just Judaism. There were too many different religions at the time to count — some Greek, some Egyptian, some Persian, some mainstream, some cult-like, some offering wisdom, some offering salvation, some offering healing. It was a giant mishmash of religious options. A giant smorgasbord. People think it’s bad today. But it was much worse 2,000 years ago. It was confusing as hell.

A: So a prophet with unshakeable conviction was very appealing.

J: People need certainty. Not in everything, of course, but in their relationship with God, they want clear answers. John seemed to have those clear answers.

A: What was John’s relationship with other religious groups? How did he view other Jews, for instance? I should probably ask something else first, though, just to be sure . . . was John a Jew?

J: Most definitely. He was a circumcised male. As far as he was concerned, the tribes of Israel were the chosen people, and he was one of their chosen leaders. He had no use for Jews who fraternized with the enemy — the enemy being a rather broad category that included almost every non-Essene on the planet.

A: How did John feel about Jewish groups such as the Pharisees? The Pharisees were interested in teaching people how to live according to the laws of the Torah. So was he more sympathetic to the Pharisees?

J: No. As far as John was concerned, the Pharisees were just another bunch of corrupt, impure, impious, unfaithful Jews. Anyone who rejected the Essene’s phenomenally rigid purity laws were inferior in John’s eyes. That’s why the Pharisees are not painted in a positive light in John’s gospel.

A: Nobody’s painted in a positive light in John’s gospel except for the Son of God.

J: And maybe John the Baptist.

A: Yes, he does “show” rather well, doesn’t he?

J: It’s John who makes the definitive identification of the Messiah.

A: So if John believed he himself was the Messiah, why did he write a whole gospel dedicated to making you into the Messiah?

J: Well, you know, that’s the tricky thing. John doesn’t really make me — the fleshly, earthly me — the Messiah. He uses my name. He uses some of my own writings. He uses some of the people and events in my life. But he doesn’t tell the story of me — the man who rejected Essene teachings and the legitimacy of the Temple. He creates a myth. He creates the man he eventually believed me to be. He creates an elaborate dream-myth of mythical overlighting to explain — largely to himself — why he himself wasn’t actually the Messiah. His gospel is his justification, his justification of himself and his actions. He created a tale of a human figure who was so divine — so impossibly elevated beyond the reality of human life and human understanding — that nobody — not even the most righteous Jew — could come close to his perfection. This got John off the hook. Because if nobody could come close to the perfection of the Son of God, then John himself couldn’t come close. Not even with his impressive pedigree.

A: What do you mean by “mythical overlighting”?

J: Ah. This goes back to what we were talking about earlier today — John’s extreme but troubled mindset. As I mentioned before, John suffered from a psychotic illness throughout adulthood. His delusions came and went. Like most people who suffer from schizophrenia, he had periods where he had difficulty separating reality from delusion. Unfortunately, this is part of the illness. John’s psychopathology made him vulnerable to delusional ideas about the nature of God and humanity. He came to believe that I had not really been a human being. Not in the normal sense of the word. He knew I’d had a physical body, but in his delusional state he decided that I’d been “overlighted” by God. “Taken over,” if you will, by the divine presence. “Bumped out” and replaced by pure divine consciousness. Sort of like being “possessed,” only instead of being possessed by a demon, it’s possession by the One God.

A: Oh. That idea is still quite popular with fantasy and horror writers.

J: And many New Age gurus.

A: Yeah, that too.

J: This is partly why John’s gospel was popular with later Gnostic Christians. Gnostic Christians had an elaborate, dualistic world cosmology where good and evil were doing battle, and sparks of the divine fell to Earth to be trapped in evil human bodies. John’s portrayal of an overlighted Messiah fit right in with that.

A: And of course there was the Docetic heresy, where people read John and decided that Jesus never had a physical body at all and was just pure divine light all along — a vision of divinity that could only be seen by certain followers.

“Jesus said: When you give rise to that which is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not give rise to it, what you do not have will kill you” (Gospel of Thomas 70). The experience of redemption comes from within when you accept your own potential to love and forgive and your own potential to be loved and forgiven. Redemption leads to so many internal emotional and spiritual changes that you feel as if you’ve been “saved.” But redemption isn’t the same thing as theological salvation. Theological salvation is something only God or the Universe can effect to remove the threat of future punishment, damnation, or karmic rebirth. When you focus on the negativity of the “salvation model” instead of the positivity of Jesus’ “redemption model,” the constant lack of love can alter the wiring of your brain to such an extent that you begin to suffer from neurological and psychiatric dysfunction (e.g. major depression, addiction disorders, dementia). Photo credit JAT 2015.

J: This is the problem with taking books that have been written by mentally ill people and labelling them “divine revelation” or “the inspiration of God.” John’s gospel isn’t balanced and isn’t truthful. It says all the wrong things about God. It’s caused no end of problems.

A: It sets the bar impossibly high for all human beings. How are we supposed to follow the example of a guy who’s the Son of God, and the living bread, and the gate, and the good shepherd, and the vine, and the light of the world, and the resurrection and the life. I mean, that’s a tall order.

J: Not if you’re God the Mother and God the Father.

A: Yeah. But John’s not talking about God. He’s talking about a man named Jesus. That’s a whole different kettle of fish.

J: It keeps people from trying too hard. If you raise the bar too high, people won’t even bother trying. That’s what John wanted, though. He wanted to raise the bar so he himself wouldn’t have to jump it.

A: That’s so selfish!

J: John was a selfish man. He and his brother James were raised to believe they were the chosen Messiahs. It was their whole life, their whole mission. They weren’t going to give it up. When circumstances forced them to give it up, they didn’t go down without a fight. John was still fighting for his birthright till the day he died. And the one thing he was determined to do was prevent anyone from following the teachings of “Jesus of Nazareth” as opposed to his divine “Jesus, Son of God.” If he couldn’t have the crown of glory, he was going to make certain I couldn’t have it, either.

A: You didn’t want it, though.

J: No. I didn’t. But John never accepted that. He was certain I was “out to get him” — that I was trying to take the crown of glory for myself. John was paranoid. And John was angry. And eventually he saw me as his enemy. It ended badly. Very, very badly.

A: What did he do to you that he would have to drag thousands — millions — of other people into his own self-serving fantasy of divine rescue?

J: He helped turn me over to the authorities. And then he stabbed me. Right in the lower gut. He thought he’d killed me, but he hadn’t.

A: Ah. That might make a person feel guilty enough to try to explain away his actions.

J: It wasn’t a very saintly thing to do.

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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 | Leave a Comment
06 Feb 2011

JR7: John the Baptist and Jesus

Theologians and biblical researchers have tended to overlook the significance of this passage from Mark 3: 13 – 19, in which Jesus names the twelve apostles: “. . .James son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder)”. The Gospel writer Mark isn’t telling his audience that James and John were powerful preachers (as Christian writers would like to believe); Mark is telling his audience that James and John were claiming for themselves a powerful pedigree. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the charter for the Yahad is a reference to two prophesied Messiahs — a priestly Messiah and a Messiah of Israel (a royal commander for the armies) — who will serve together in the Last Days at the Messianic Banquet. Once it’s clear that the Yahad was waiting for a pair of Messiahs rather than a single Messiah, the reference in Mark to the Sons of Thunder takes on much greater significance. Mark is saying that James and John were claiming divine heritage, just like the long parade of gentile heroes who insisted they were the sons of Zeus, Jupiter, and other Thunder Gods. (And I don’t think Mark thought much of this particular claim.) Shown here is the mosaic above the entrance to the Chapel of St. John and the Grotto of the Revelation on the island of Patmos. Photo credit JAT 2001.

 A: Tell me more about John. Why do you say that John the Baptist and John the Evangelist are one and the same person? Is there any proof for that in the Bible?

J: You have to know what to look for. Mark’s account of John’s beheading is much more than it seems. But Mark is like that throughout his gospel. You really have to know your sources — important early texts — to understand Mark. Mark was highly intelligent and very well read. He riffed off well known symbolism and motifs to tell his tale of intrigue. And intrigue it was.

A: The Gospel of John mentions John the Baptist’s early ministry several times, but then he sort of fades out of the picture. The Fourth Gospel doesn’t say what happened to the Baptist.

J: That’s because John the Baptist was still alive and still teaching long after I died.

A: Tell me about him as a person.

J: How much time do you have?

A: The Gospel of John is considered by many Christians to be the clearest expression, the clearest depiction, of the ministry and divinity of Jesus. Theologians love John’s “high Christology.” Many people feel that when they’re listening to the voice of John, they’re listening to divine truth. The prologue — John 1:1-18 — is poetic, elegant, mystical. It helps people feel they’re getting closer to God.

J: John was a gifted communicator, a skilled rhetorician and poet. If he hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have been drawn into his movement in the beginning. He was truly charismatic when he spoke. His writings definitely reflect that. Even his last writing — the book of Revelation. Even when he was profoundly psychotic, as he was in the later years of his life, the poetry and metre of the texts he’d read again and again in his childhood infused all his thinking. In a way you could say that the poetry and metre of those early texts — the logos — acted for him to lessen the pain, fear, and confusion that comes with psychosis. The logos was a soothing mantra. Olanzapine in word form, you might say.

A: Olanzapine being a highly effective atypical anti-psychotic medication.

J: Yes. Before the advent in recent years of tailored psychiatric medications, those who were suffering from major mental illness — including the flattened affect and hallucinations that accompany schizophrenia and related forms of psychotic illness — suffered more than most people can imagine. The suffering is internal but intense. Sometimes it feels to them as if their head is on fire. Or that ants are crawling everywhere inside them. It’s a horrible feeling. They have to find relief wherever they can. The majority turn to addictive substances — substances that trigger the dopamine circuitry in the brain, the pleasure circuitry. Others turn to religion. It’s sad to say, but extreme religiosity — rigid piety, fideism, blind faith, obsessive observance of ritual — all these careful, minutely observed rituals can bring relief to a suffering individual, depending on what parts of their brain have been ravaged by the effects of the disease process.

A: When I was working in the mental health field, I saw firsthand that one of the hallmarks of psychotic illness is paranoia. A fear that people are out to “get them.” When they’re floridly psychotic they’re often afraid of their own family members and medical caregivers. They’re sure they’re being watched, spied on. They’re afraid somebody will put poison in their medications. They think they’re perfectly sane and everybody else is sick. They have no objective understanding that they’re ill when they’re ill.

J: It’s the tragedy of the disease. They don’t believe they’re sick. If they get proper treatment, and become medically stabilized, they begin to develop insight. They begin to understand that the voices they’d been hearing in their heads weren’t normal, weren’t real. They can begin to trust their family members again. However, it’s not possible to persuade a floridly psychotic person to trust you. You can’t use logic to get through to them. As those working in the field of psychiatry know, sometimes you just have to lock the person up for a while and treat him against his will. Of course, by the time he’s that psychotic, he doesn’t really have free will — not as you and I would understand it. He has lots of thoughts, but they’re not balanced, they’re not integrated. There’s no functioning internal framework to hold his thoughts together, to help him process his thoughts and experiences, and learn from them. It’s a big jumble in his head — very frightening, very confusing.

A: So if he can find an external framework that makes sense to him . . .

J: Right. If he can find an external framework such as a strict religious code, then he can lean on that code. He no longer has to make sense of anything on his own. He’s off the hook, so to speak. The code tells him what to do and when to do it. This means he doesn’t have to decide these things for himself. For a person with schizophrenia (not really one disease, but a related cluster of illnesses) this is a huge relief. Life becomes liveable. Painful but liveable. The tradeoff is the fear. You can’t get rid of the fear. You’re constantly afraid of attack from “evil forces” such as the devil or demons or vampires or aliens. But at least you can blame the “evil forces” for your fear. You don’t have to blame your family. So from that point of view, the strict religious code makes it easier for you to stay with your family and receive the care you need.

A: Can you explain how all this relates to the man named John?

J: The man I knew as John — though his real name wasn’t John — would be diagnosed today under the category of schizophrenia. I first met him when he was about 18, and he already showed signs then of the illness.

A: As I understand it, that’s a common age for a diagnosis of schizophrenia to be made. The signs and symptoms often show up in late adolesence, early adulthood.

J: Yes, except I didn’t have a DSM-IV to refer to, and I didn’t recognize his illness at first for what it was. I thought he was an inspired prophet.

A: What was his background? Where did he come from?

J: He was an Essene. He was born Essene and raised Essene. He wasn’t a raw recruit, as some were — including myself for a short time.

A: You were an Essene?

J: I never officially joined the yahad or “Unity,” as they described themselves. In fact, I never made it past the “inquiry phase,” as you might call it. I was curious about the yahad. Many Jews were. Like many spiritual inquirers, I thought the Essenes might have the answers I was looking for. So when I heard about the new prophet named John, I went to check him out. It took me a long time to understand that John didn’t have the answers. He spoke endlessly and eloquently, but had no answers for me or anyone else. He was far too delusional to help anyone, including himself.

A: You said his real name wasn’t John. What was his real name?

J: I never knew. Not during my lifetime as Jesus. Readers today may have a hard time understanding what I’m about to say, but when I was growing up, “name magic” was a big deal. If you believed in the mystical “truth” of name magic, you didn’t lightly give out your real name.

A: Why not?

J: Your real name was said to be a source of great power. If an evil sorcerer or magician got hold of your name, he could gain power over you.

A: Interesting. That idea is still floating around. I remember reading Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea novels when I was growing up. The power of true names was central to her stories.

J: Kabbalah also embraces this idea.

A: Not a big fan of Kabbalah myself.

J: Kabbalah owes a lot to the ancient ideas of the Essenes.

A: What goes around comes around.

J: There aren’t a lot of new mystical ideas under the sun. The human brain, when diseased and dysfunctional, tends to produce certain distinctive patterns of thought, mood, and behaviour — what physicans call signs and symptoms. When patients start believing — truly believing — in occult magic, psychiatrists get worried. It’s okay to believe in things you can’t see if those things have a scientific origin — because one day the science will catch up with the theory — but there’s a line.

A: For instance, it’s okay to believe in love, even though we can’t see it. Though neuroscientists are now trying to capture it on brain scans.

J: Right. But mature love makes the world a better place, a more compassionate place, a more logical place. Occult magic doesn’t do any of these things. Belief in occult magic makes people less mature, less balanced, more grandiose, more controlling, and therefore less able to bring healing and compassion into the world around them.

A: Belief in occult magic ties in with the signs and symptoms of major mental illness.

J: Including psychopathy and severe narcissism.

A: Only a profoundly narcissistic person would believe that God gives special magical powers to small groups of bullies and tyrants who abuse others in the name of God.

J: There you go — your description of John in a nutshell. Raised to believe he was one of the Essene’s two prophesied Messiahs, hence profoundly narcissistic and dysfunctional by the time he was 18.

A: I guess he didn’t like you very much, then.

J: The Essenes were taught to hate the Sons of Darkness and raise up the Sons of Light. As far as he was concerned, I proved myself beyond dispute to be an apostate to the yahad cause and a Son of Darkness worthy of death. By the time I was arrested, John hated my guts.

A: So much for the theory that John himself was the Beloved Disciple.

J: Yeah, but I forgave him anyway, even after he tried to kill me.

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Posted in Book of Revelation, dissociation, Essenes, Gospel of Mark, historical Jesus, Jesus Redux, John the Baptist, Messiah, occult themes, religion and mental Illness and tagged , | 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 | Leave a Comment
03 Jan 2011

TBM4: More Thoughts on the Soul

I’d like to be able to recommend some well-written books to you about the constitution, as it were, of your soul. But I can’t. Because there aren’t any.

I know this because, for my Master’s degree in theological studies, I recently wrote a long research paper (or short thesis, if you prefer) on the history of doctrines of the soul in ancient Greek, Judaic, and early Christian thought. You wouldn’t believe how kooky some of the ideas were back then — and how kooky they continue to be in major world religions today. These ideas are so kooky that fiction writers — the people who write horror and dark fantasy novels and screenplays — don’t need to invent any new ideas. All they have to do is recycle ancient ideas about the soul that have been scaring the crap out of people for thousands of years.

So ya got yer stories about lost souls. And stolen souls. And soul vampires. And souls detaching from bodies to go on nightly dream journeys. And souls corrupted by original sin. And souls wandering around as ghosts. And souls sent to Hell or Sheol or Gehenna or Hades or whatever. And souls enslaved by the devil. And souls that are demons in disguise. And souls that can be controlled with magic spells, potions, or rituals. And souls that are trapped in assorted jars, bowls, vials, statues, TV sets, cars, and the latest fad, of course — Facebook pages.

These ideas about the soul all have one thing in common: they reek of paranoia and terror. So I’m thinkin’ they have nothing to do with God, and everything to do with major mental illness (eg. psychosis).

In other words, these untrusting ideas about the soul belong in only one place, and that’s the garbage can.

(c) Image*After

(c) Image*After

So today’s practical tip is this: when it comes to the constitution of your soul, keep it simple, keep it sane.

Start with the assumption that God is not stupid.

From there, go to the assumption that God only creates good souls that can’t be imprisoned and can’t be stolen.

Then remind yourself (as often as you can) that you are a good soul, too. (In other words, God didn’t turn all of Creation upside down and zero in on you — and only you — just so you can be the one and only soul in Heaven and Earth who’s truly defective. No pity parties allowed.)

After that, there’s only one logical place to go — total confusion! ‘Cause if God’s not stupid, and God only makes good souls, and you are a good soul, but your life is still a complete mess . . . then the problem is that you don’t have the necessary tools — the facts, the information, the knowledge, the insight you need — in order to make sense of who you are and why you’re here.

As I said yesterday, your problems as a human being aren’t caused by your soul. Your problems are caused by poor teaching — poor teaching that makes it almost impossible for you to live a balanced, holistic life with the information you currently have.

It’s not God who has created the confusion within you. It’s all the poor teaching you got when you were growing up. It’s all the black-and-white (dualistic) thinking that got rammed down your throat year after year. All the either-or ideas. All the pure rights and pure wrongs. The winners and the losers. The saved and the unsaved. The righteous and the unrighteous.

Creation isn’t made like that. And neither is your soul. It’s not healthy for your soul and it’s not healthy for your biological body to embrace black-and-white thinking. Black-and-white thinking leads to perfectionism. Perfectionism leads to extremism. Extremism leads to violence and terror.

Better to be confused for a while than to be caught in a nightmare of perfectionism and “Divine Law.”

Living a confused life is much simpler than living a perfect life.

On the Spiral Path, simpler is better.

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Posted in dualism, mental illness, Mother and Father God, orthodox teachings about the soul, Soul, soul blueprint, The Blonde Mystic, theodicy, trust and tagged | Leave a Comment
15 Oct 2010

CC38: An Ancient Mystery Revealed

I’m old enough to remember the 1984 Wendy’s commercial that featured the three little old ladies and the stick-in-your-head catch phrase, “Where’s the beef?” Sure, the commercial was meant to sell Wendy’s bigger hamburger patties. But the catch phrase went deeper than that. It quickly became a cultural metaphor for something that was “all talk, no action.” Something without real substance.

Many spiritual teachers are interested in selling you books about how to “raise your consciousness” and “seek wisdom” and be “one with all Creation.” These books are full of platitudes and cliches, and they remind me a lot of the big fluffy bun that was being parodied in the Wendy’s commercial. The bun looks impressive on the outside, but when you bite into it, you discover there’s precious little substance inside. There’s just the same old mystery teachings that have been taught by cult leaders for . . . oh . . . for at least five thousand years now.

We are all One. Blah, blah, blah. Your soul is a spark of the Divine. Blah, blah, blah. Your physical body and your physical mind are drenched in evil and must be transcended. Blah, blah, blah. Specially chosen spiritual leaders have consented to descend into this corrupt world to lead the forces of light against the forces of evil. Blah, blah, blah. You can help in this great battle. Blah, blah, blah. The time is at hand when human beings will rise to a new, never before seen level of consciousness and enlightenment. Blah, blah, blah. In order to reach this new level, you must surrender yourself, let go of yourself, live in the moment, let go of attachments, let go of illusion. Blah, blah, blah. Only then can you know the bliss, peace, and joy of oneness with the Divine.

At the beginning of Eckhart Tolle’s bestselling 1997 book The Power of Now (Vancouver: Namaste Publishing, 1997), he describes an episode of spiritual awakening that took place after a “dark night of the soul” when he was 29. For five months, he “lived in a state of uninterrupted deep peace and bliss” (page 2). He then “spent almost two years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy. But even the most beautiful experiences come and go.”

Really? They come and go? Because that hasn’t been my experience. My experience has been that if you understand why you’re doing what you’re doing on the Spiral Path, and if you ground your spiritual journey in reality instead of in ancient mystical gobbledygook, you can get up every morning and go to bed at night and live every moment of your ordinary, ho-hum day in a state of profound trust and companionship with God.

This makes every ho-hum day anything but ho-hum.

If you see what I’m getting at here.

This amphora, found in Etruria and dated 540-535 BCE, depicts Herakles killing the Nemean lion – the first of the twelve labours of Herakles. The spiritual journey shouldn’t make you feel as if you’re reinventing Herakles’ terrible struggles. (Amphora on display at Royal Ontario Museum. Photo credit JAT 2017.)

 Eckhart Tolle and his mystical predecessors are always talking about escape — escape from the body, escape from suffering, escape from illusion, escape from evil forces, and (in the most extreme form) escape from death. They’re missing the point. The Spiral Path has never been about escape. The Spiral Path has always been about forgiveness, healing, and redemption.*

If you want to feel deep peace and joy every day (and this is possible, believe it or not), your ongoing goal is to HEAL yourself, not escape yourself.

In order to heal yourself (and perhaps others, too), you need to understand at a conscious level what’s going on inside your biological body as you struggle to make sense of your spiritual journey. In order to do this, you need more than ancient myths to guide you. You need science.

There are no exceptions to this general statement. Every mystic in every faith tradition in every country of the world needs science. There is no ethical mysticism without ethical scientific exploration.

There is no science in The Power of Now. There’s a great deal of mystical speculation, but there’s no science. Put plain and simple, I don’t trust any spiritual teacher who’s afraid to look science in the eye.

There is no need to postulate, as Tolle does, the existence of a “negative energy field” (called an emotional “pain-body”) whose job it is to control your thoughts and your mind like some sort of “invisible entity” (page 29). This sounds little different than demon-possession as it was formerly understood. It’s an irresponsible and scientifically insupportable claim. It confuses and frightens people.

Furthermore, it relies entirely on the author’s own authority as mystic and prophet. It starts with Tolle’s personal assumptions about the interface between mind, body, soul, and brain. From there, he builds a pyramid of guesswork. My question in response to his thesis is . . . where’s the beef? Where’s the science combined with the heart? Don’t talk to me about a corrupting “pain-body.” Talk to me — scholar to scholar — about neurotransmitters and glial cells and underactive sections of the brain and seizure disorders and over-activation of the pain-pleasure circuitry (to barely scratch the surface of the neurophysiology that’s involved). I don’t mind if you use some analogies and even some mythical archetypes to explain brain chemistry to a lay audience, but if you yourself don’t understand your spiritual journey in scientific terms, then you’re not saying anything different than Plato said to a vulnerable audience 2,400 years ago. It’s pure myth. And it’s pure crap.

I’m sorry, but it’s just not true that human beings can somehow separate the spiritual journey or the spiritual brain from the everyday science of everyday life. You cannot find God by sitting on park benches for two long years. (You’ll find something on those park benches, but it won’t be enlightenment.) You can only find God in a lasting way by making lasting choices in your life — choices that will slowly heal your biological brain and your biological body, and allow you to live each day as an angel-in-human-form. Your spiritual task is not to become less yourself. It’s to become more yourself — more and more like the soul you really are.

This depends, of course, on a belief in the soul. If you don’t believe you were born with a soul — a pure, amazing, unique soul that always is and always will be a pure, amazing, unique soul — then you and I have no common ground for discussion. Everything I’ve learned from God the Mother and God the Father, and everything I’ve learned from the angel who once lived as Jesus, begins with the core integrity of the soul. Everything I’ve learned about healing and redemption revolves around the full integration of your immortal soul with your very mortal human body.

Everything I’ve learned about healing and redemption revolves around the balance of body, mind, soul, and heart. Around the balance (NOT the pyramidal, step-wise hierarchy) of Maslow’s physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging needs, and self esteem needs. Around the balance of physical joy, mental joy, spiritual joy, and emotional joy. Around the balance of work, play, extroverted relationships, and introverted downtime. Around using the whole brain, not just parts of the brain.

Whole Brain Thinking is the only way to find the Spiral Path, understand the Spiral Path, and persevere on the Spiral Path.

There. That’s the Ancient Mystery in a nutshell: you have to use your whole brain — your whole central nervous system — in a consistently balanced, healthy, emotionally mature way. When you do, you can more easily hear God’s voice, because God’s voice is as balanced and emotionally mature as can be.

And guess what? You don’t have to take my word for it! You can research all the ways to have a happy, healthy, fully functioning brain, and you’ll come up with essentially the same ideas I’ve presented here!

Science and spirituality together on the same page. Now we’re cooking with gas.

* On the last text page of The Power of Now, Tolle reveals that “the whole concept of forgiveness then becomes unnecessary (page 193).” Needless to say, Tolle and I couldn’t disagree more.

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Posted in "Escape", balance as spiritual practice, brain-soul connection, Concinnate Christianity, ethical mysticism, Gnosticism, healing, mysticism, oneness, Plato, prophets, Soul, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged , | Leave a Comment
07 Oct 2010

CC37: More on Harpur’s "Pagan Christ"

I’m still feeling grumpy about Tom Harpur’s suggestions for Christians who want to find “the only way ahead,” so I’m going to talk some more about that.

Early on in my writings on this blog, I stated — in bold letters, no less — that I am NOT a Gnostic (March 6, 2010: Some Reference Books I Read & Recommend). Even though I’m a practising mystic, and even though I believe in a number of things that can’t be seen by the human eye (so sue me — even radio waves can’t be seen by the human eye), this doesn’t make me a Gnostic. It’s only sloppy thinkers who haven’t done their homework on Gnosticisms would insist on calling me a Gnostic. (Note here that I’ve used the plural form of Gnosticism because careful researchers know there’s no such thing as one single historical form of Gnosticism any more than there’s one single historical form of Christianity or one single historical form of Judaism.)

According to Gnostics of all traditions, this is what you look like: old, ugly, stained, and walled off eternally from God unless you accept the cult teachings that will grant you “escape.” Naturally, for the price of your human obedience, worship, and financial contributions, Gnostics will be happy to sell you the secret knowledge that blasts open the door to ascendance. Photo credit JAT 2021.

In order for a person to be included under the umbrella term of Gnosticism, he or she has to hold certain beliefs about the nature of humanity’s relationship with God. Central to all Gnosticisms is the idea that the soul is a tiny piece of God’s essence that is trying to find its way back to God. Immortal souls end up in mortal bodies, but this isn’t really a good thing, according to Gnostics, because our physical bodies drag the soul down into a “prison” of matter. The spiritual task for Gnostics is to recognize the spark of God/Christ/Divine that exists within, and to set about freeing that spark by raising their consciousness to a higher level. The goal is to seek “wisdom” and hidden knowledge (gnosis in Greek). This knowledge leads to transcendence.

If this sounds a lot like Plato’s teachings about the soul’s journey, it’s because Plato’s teachings and later Gnostic teachings have a lot in common. Most orthodox Western Christian scholars don’t want to admit it, but these teachings also strongly influenced the apostle Paul. The famous passage about life after death in Chapter 15 of First Corinthians is a fascinating blend of Jewish apocalyptic thought (future resurrection) and Platonic thought (incorruptibility of the divine): “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.” (Cue Handel’s Messiah.)

Tom Harpur is quite up-front about the fact that he admires Gnostic thinking. On page 175 of The Pagan Christ, he says, “What’s really important is that Paul’s spiritual view of Christ (his Christology) and Gnostic Christianity held the early Christian movement up to a truly high standard of intellectual and philosophical excellence.”

Bear in mind that Harpur himself doesn’t believe there ever was an actual man named Jesus Christ who lived in1st century CE Palestine. He believes the gospel stories about Jesus should be read typologically, not literally. He believes the story of Jesus is pure symbol. An important symbol, but a symbol nonetheless. A myth, not a fact.

In fact, Harpur believes that all Scripture should only be read symbolically, not literally or historically. For Harpur, “the enigma of the Bible has been largely solved. Dark passages, cryptic narratives or events — all have been shot through with a new, though long-lost, light because of this awareness that the key to all Scripture is to be found in the doctrine of Incarnation (page 181).”*

And what is the long-lost light that Harpur sees in this symbolic reading of Scripture? Why, it’s the ancient wisdom of the Egyptian mystery cults!

Here’s where I have a really big problem with Harpur’s thesis. He recommends without reservation that Christianity of the third millennium reclaim “the wisdom expounded by the Egyptians, the Orphics, the Pythagoreans and Plato, as well as by St. Paul, the Gnostics, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and a host of others . . . (page 191).” (Can’t argue with the historical links that existed among these groups, although I would have added Manicheans and Albigensians.) He thinks the choice to reclaim this long-lost light will arm us “with the moral and intellectual courage to live our lives to the fullest for the advancement of all . . . (page 193).”

Me, I think such a course of action will demolish whatever moral and intellectual courage Christians have.

Why do I think this? I think this because I’ve lived through the devastating effects of ancient mystery teachings on the human brain, and although I’ve fully recovered from the effects of my Big Fat Idiot Stage, I’m alarmed when I see reputable scholars using their positions of authority to urge dangerous spiritual practices on vulnerable, less well educated people.

It’s irresponsible, and there’s no excuse for it.

Harpur is advocating a return to what is indisputably a cult psychology based on status addiction. He’s kidding himself if he thinks the leaders of these ancient cults were nice people who truly found divine wisdom and willingly shared it with all people. Pythagoras (of whom Harpur seems fond) founded a sectarian cult with strict rules where only a small group of chosen disciples were initiated into the secret knowledge and rituals. (That’s status addiction!) Hellenistic mystery cults such as the Orphic mysteries and the Eleusinian mysteries engaged in bizarre, ritualistic, occult practices that most people would find abhorrent today. Addiction issues and sexual misconduct were rampant in these cults. Later, especially in the Eastern Roman Empire, Christian monks, nuns, contemplatives, and mystics separated themselves from regular communities and engaged in self-harming ascetic practices so they could “imitate Christ” and be “closer to God.” (Again, status addiction.) Needless to say, addiction issues, sexual misconduct, and other forms of abuse continued to take place in monastic communities and continued to be blamed on evil forces such as demons, incubi, and the devil.

Is this what Harpur wants? Because this is what he’s going to get if he naively places these ancient mystery cults on a pedestal. Where he sees a “long-lost light” in these ancient teachings, I see only a “darkness of abuse” we’re well rid of.

As for Harpur’s claim that he wants to help bring science and religion closer together and “highlight Nature’s guiding role” in a renewed Christian faith, I just want to choke. There is no hard science in his book, but there are lots of superficial cliches and lots of references to the spiritual symbols seen in Nature. When Harpur says, “I never see the moon without being reminded of its reflecting the solar glory and its monthly telling of the story of our incarnation and ultimate resurrection (page 188),” I gotta say that don’t impress me much. (Cue the Shania Twain song.)

There’s tons of light and wonder and goodness and love in the natural world — the scientific world — that God the Mother and God the Father have created for us. But we won’t find it by looking backwards to the mystery cult teachings of people who believed in a status-ridden journey of spiritual ascent, and we won’t find it by pretending that all Scripture is “good” if only we understood how to read it symbolically! Christianity has been there and done that. It doesn’t work.

You don’t have to choose between mystery and science. Jesus understood this, as did Job before him. The back of the moon wasn’t visible until the space program revealed it. But seeing the moon through the eyes of science hasn’t lessened the sense of wonder and awe we feel when her silvery beauty gleams. Photo credit JAT 2021.

The only way forward for the Church, as I see it, is for us to come at spirituality from a whole new angle. We have to let go of “traditional teachings” and “infallible doctrines” that don’t line up with new findings in neuroscience, quantum physics, quantum biology, astronomy, and so on. Other fields of endeavour have had to let go of cherished beliefs that eventually proved false. Why should Christianity be any different?

Does it make sense to you that God would make special rules for the Church that hold us to a LOWER standard of scholarship than the standard observed by secular researchers in fields such as teaching, environmental science, or psychiatry?

Maybe it’s our unwarranted sense of entitlement — not the devil — that’s the source of our ongoing problems in the Church.

I think I’ll sign off now and go read Discover magazine’s latest special issue on The Brain. Although I don’t always agree with the scientific conclusions I find there, there’s plenty of good food for thought, and I’m grateful for that.

Happy Thanksgiving!

* In his glossary, Harpur defines “incarnation” as “the God within each of us — the ‘Light which lighteth every person coming into the world.'”

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Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, Gnosticism, HDM Myths, orthodox teachings about the soul, Paul, Plato, spiritual ascent, status addiction and tagged , | Leave a Comment
06 Oct 2010

CC36: No Room in the Inn . . . or on the Spiral Path

I was reminded again today how much the spiritual journey for human beings can be likened to a spiral path.

(c) Image*After

(c) Image*After

Well, maybe less a spiral, and more a helix. Like a Slinky — from one direction (end-on) it looks like a simple circle, yet from the side you can see it’s actually a long, continuous, spiralling wire. Another good analogy is a DNA helix — long, complex, and spiralling, with no two points exactly the same. Both the Slinky and the DNA helix capture the idea that the spiritual path can sometimes feel like a circle (as in “I seem to going round and round in circles”), yet a closer examination of your experiences from the side angle will reveal you’ve also made some forward progress.

But, you know, from a strictly artistic point of view it sucks to call the spiritual path “the helical path.” Like, you can’t even doodle a helix on a pad of paper and have it make any sense to somebody who doesn’t know what a DNA helix is. But when you draw a spiral on a piece of paper, everybody can recognize the idea of going round and round in circles, while at the same time never being in precisely the same place. That’s why the image of the spiral path has been used in many periods and in many places to represent the spiritual path. Don’t mess with a perfectly good symbol, I say. So I’m sticking with the image of “the spiral path.” But, really, it feels more like a Slinky.

I got on this train of thought today because I suddenly decided to revisit Tom Harpur’s book The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2004). I bought this book when it was first published because I’d been reading Tom Harpur’s column on religion in the Toronto Star and I was curious to know more about his theories. The book was attracting a lot of attention from Progressive Christians in Canada because it seemed to offer a way out of the dangers of dogmatic, literalistic Christianity. It didn’t hurt, either, that before Harpur turned to journalism, he’d been a professor of Greek and New Testament at the University of Toronto. The guy had credentials. He had credibility.

When I’m reading any book, no matter what the topic, I read at two levels. I pay attention with as much objectivity as I can to the flow of the factual argument — what facts are being stated, what facts are being left out, what inconsistencies exist. But I also pay attention with my intuition, with my mystical side. Sometimes when I’m reading an alarm goes off in my intuitive circuitry, and I know there’s something fundamentally wrong with the author’s argument.

I may not know at a factual level what’s wrong, but I’ve learned to trust the kernel of insight I receive from my mystical side. My task at this point is to accept the challenge of closing the gap between the factual reading and the intuitive reading — to do more research on the factual side so I can understand in an objective, logical way why my “gut” is reacting the way it’s reacting to a particular author.

It often takes me years — years! — to do enough academic research to get to the point where I can close the gap between the factual reading and the intuitive reading of a book.

To give a specific example, it’s taken me 6 years to close the gap between my factual reading of The Pagan Christ and my intuitive reading of The Pagan Christ. It’s taken me 6 years on the spiral path of spiritual (and academic) learning to figure out why I was so incensed at an intuitive level when I first read Tom Harpur’s book.

The information I needed didn’t appear to me in the form of a “revelation,” a “vision,” or a “prophecy.” I had to slog through sixteen half-courses in topics such as New Testament, Old Testament, early church history, and church liturgy, plus I had to research and write a long academic research paper (also called a short thesis or a cognate) on the topic of early doctrines of the soul. I had to work my ass off.

My goal in taking those courses wasn’t to challenge Harpur’s book. By the time I enrolled in graduate studies, I was focussed on other questions, other challenges, that occupied my time, energy, and enthusiasm. Nonetheless, with the hallmark unpredictability of all spiritual journeys, I accidentally discovered this morning that I now have the tools to challenge Harpur’s thesis. The tools didn’t come to me accidentally — but the realization of what I could do with the tools kind of snuck up on me.

Somehow the spiral path has brought me back to a book, an author, and a thesis that has been quite influential in the past few years.

Just for the record, I’m NOT going to do an about-face, and I’m NOT going to claim that upon revisiting Harpur’s book I’ve suddenly “seen the light” (pun intended). No way, Jose. To be ultra-clear, I don’t agree with Harpur’s thesis AT ALL — in fact, I’m more incensed today with the ideas in his book than I was when I first read them in 2004. The difference between then and now is that I’ve moved forward on my spiral path. I’ve added to my knowledge. I’ve added to my experience. I’ve added to my healing. I’ve changed, learned, grown. Most of all, I’ve worked hard.

God helped me at every turn (and I could never have accomplished what I’ve accomplished without God’s loving guidance), but the knowledge base I’ve built has come through conventional means — such as university courses, academic journals, and interdisciplinary research. Even though I’m a mystic, I did not acquire this new knowledge through revelation. I had to use the brain God gave me. What’s more, I had to use the free will God gave me. And I had to look after my body and my brain (i.e. choose a healthy lifestyle) so I could learn effectively. Just like any other person on Planet Earth. God did not make special rules for me.

Even though I’m a mystic, I have to follow the rules of healthy living and healthy learning that God wants everybody to respect. I’m able to communicate clearly with God the Mother and God the Father BECAUSE I use my free will to respect my body, my soul, my mind, and my heart in a balanced, holistic way. This life of balance lies at the core of the teachings of the man who once lived as Jesus son of Joseph.

I can’t emphasize enough how radically different this claim is when compared to the claims of traditional, ascetic, cloistered Christian mystics.

Or when compared to the claims made by Tom Harpur in his book.

Near the end of The Pagan Christ, Harpur says:

“So [Alvin Boyd] Kuhn can argue that you and I, in a profound sense, are never going to be more “dead” than we are right at this moment. He says, ‘Right now our deific souls are at the very bottom of the arc of death and can never be as dead again as they are now and have been.’ As we live our lives here, immersed in matter, we are gaining experience and expanding consciousness. But we are, in a deep sense, alienated from, or ‘dead’ to, the spiritual realm whence we originally came and to which we shall one day return (page 192).”

All I can say to this is . . . speak for yourself, buddy.

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Posted in Concinnate Christianity, ethical mysticism, free will, Gnosticism, Jesus' teachings, My Spiral Path, mystic, mysticism and tagged , | Leave a Comment
14 Sep 2010

CC34: Pseudo-Enlightenment

My friend Linda is dying of cancer, but this isn’t the part I’m worried about.

Linda was first diagnosed with colon cancer three years ago, and she’s had a challenging course. The cancer has metastasized more than once. Most recently, a tumour was found in her brain. She’s definitely going to die. The people who love her are going to miss her, but she’s going to die, and that’s the reality of the situation. Her friends and family will grieve in different ways, depending on whether or not they believe she has transitioned to a loving afterlife in Heaven with God. But prayers and faith will not stop Linda from dying.

No one, no matter how devout, gets out of this life alive.

I’m not losing any sleep over the idea that Linda is going to die. It will happen when it happens, and nothing I think, say, or do will have any effect on the outcome. That’s up to Linda, her doctors, and her God.

On the other hand, I did lose sleep — quite a bit, actually — worrying about Linda’s mental state over the past few months. It’s not that I thought she was mentally incompetent in a medical sense. (Her doctors didn’t deemed her incompetent, even after the discovery of the brain tumour.) My concern was that Linda was starting to behave like a tyrant — an abusive, controlling, manipulative tyrant. A bully. A control freak. A nasty person. A cunning person. A person who’s not very nice to be around.

I’m not alone in this assessment. Linda’s behaviour became so verbally and emotionally abusive that in August she drove her own mother out of their shared home. Linda’s mother is in her mid-80’s, so this hasn’t been easy for the family. Linda’s mother moved out because she couldn’t tolerate the abuse from her daughter any longer. (Good for you, Kay!)

Linda has been relying on her network of friends to help her while she receives palliative care at home, but each time someone objects to her demands, she “fires” them. One by one she has cut off most of her oldest and dearest friends.

She has also fired several paid assistants. This is because they haven’t been doing a good enough job, according to Linda. Some have also been accused of stealing.

Despite her aggressive behaviour, she was not delusional until quite recently. (Delusional thinking appeared for certain only in the last couple of weeks). Until recently, she showed a truly frightening grip on her own mind, her own logic. Her memory was excellent in all areas where she wanted to exert control. Her ability to organize her environment was fine-tuned to the point of obsession. (She had a pre-existing diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, the symptoms of which were unfortunately exacerbated by her cancer treatments). She retained an ability to recognize and respond to social cues. She could be polite and friendly when it suited her.

All this was very upsetting. But I haven’t told you the worst part yet. The worst part is that Linda (a devout United Church of Canada Christian) has now come to believe she’s spiritually enlightened.

She believes that her battle with cancer has brought her to a point of heightened spirituality, a state of spiritual purity, a transcendent state of wisdom that her friends and family simply can’t understand.

She speaks often now of her “voice,” of her need to have her voice “heard.” Regular people can’t hear her voice. Only other spiritually enlightened people can hear her.

She thinks I’m one of the people who can hear her voice. But what I hear when I listen to her is the paranoid, grandiose thinking of a person who has suffered a psychotic break. Linda is psychotic. Under the stress of her illness and treatment, her biological brain has gone into “self protection mode” (sort of like the dreaded blue screen on a computer), and is refusing to accept external data and input. She’s now living entirely inside her own head. This means there’s no room in there for empathy. (Empathy requires you to reach out to other people, and temporarily place yourself “inside other people’s heads” so you can understand their needs.) Her brain is now a closed system. She’s stuck in an infinite thinking loop, which causes her to repeat a small number of ideas again and again, each time expressing them as if they’re new and exciting insights that have just occurred to her. To her, it feels as if she’s transcended time. She thinks she’s living in a state of enlightenment. But really her brain is “fried.”

No one who’s in a true state of enlightenment would ever treat people the way she’s treating people.

Linda’s doctors really dropped the ball on this one. They failed to arrange appropriate psychiatric care for her when it would have done some good. Now she has to live out her final days in a state of acute mental dysfunction. This sucks.

The honest truth is that some people will be relieved when Linda dies because she’ll no longer be able to abuse them.

If this isn’t a tragedy, I don’t know what is.

This is one portion of a large early 14th century CE (Yuan Dynasty) wall mural called “Homage to the Highest Power (west wall)” that originated from a monastery in Shanxi Province, China. It’s one of a pair of murals that expressed Daoist concepts of cosmic order. As part of the Royal Ontario Museum collection, the two murals underwent a significant conservation effort in the early 1980’s to remove earlier repairs that could have damaged the long-term integrity of the original clay, paint, and ink. I know this because I spent 8 weeks on the conservation project as part of a 1982 summer internship program. A properly trained conservator never tries to fill in the gaps by guessing what used to be there or trying to create perfection or wholeness where wholeness no longer exists. Hence, you’ll see many spots on these murals where bare clay is allowed to mar the perfection of the overall image. The bare clay spots mark areas where the conservators didn’t have enough documentation (e.g. early photographs) to support their beliefs about the original composition in those areas. It was more honest, in their view, to repaint only those sections where they were certain they were following the original intent and artistic conception of the unknown Daoist artists.

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Posted in afterlife, apophatic mysticism, boundary issues, brain's Darwinian Circuitry, Concinnate Christianity, dissociation, empathy, life and death, prayer, religion and mental Illness, spiritual ascent and tagged | Leave a Comment
14 Jun 2010

CC20: Further Update on the Vatican’s "Sin Within"

Last Friday, on June 11, 2010, Pope Benedict XVI addressed 15,000 priests who were in St. Peter’s Square to mark the end of the Vatican’s Year of the Priest. In his homily, Benedict asked forgiveness from God and from affected people for the sins of the sexually abusive clerics in the Roman Catholic church. He also promised “to do everything possible to ensure that such abuse will never occur again” (Nicole Winfield, “Pope Begs Forgiveness, Promises Action on Abuse,” The Globe and Mail, June 11, 2010).

While I’m quite certain that God the Mother and God the Father do, indeed, forgive Benedict for his own errors, and do, indeed, forgive the priests who’ve intentionally harmed the faithful in their care, I’m equally certain that hidden abuse will continue in the Roman Catholic church.

Many Christians want to make this a question of theodicy: how do we explain evil in the world while at the same time preserving our image of God as good and loving? If God allows abuse to continue in the church, does it mean that God is powerless and ineffectual? Impotent against the powers of the devil? Or does it mean that God is actually not a very nice person?

Many of the Christians I know would much rather blame the problem of evil on God and/or the devil than put the blame where it belongs: on the values and moral beliefs held by both individuals and by cultural groups.

The Roman Catholic church is a cultural group. It teaches particular cultural beliefs. (These comprise its theological doctrines). It has a consciously promoted schedule of active teaching. Its goal is to teach its people early on in life how they should conduct themselves in relationship to God, church hierarchy, and empire. Traditionally, it has punished members who question its teachings or its authority (the Inquisition). It has conferred upon itself the mantle of infallibility. It claims it is the one true church, the only legitimate path to salvation.

The Roman Catholic church has long held a vision of how society should be — how society should look, act, and “feel.” Its body of theological doctrines has been carefully cultivated so that only kind of garden can grow in its presence. The church has no one but itself to blame for this.

at the Vatican (c) J MacDonald 2011

at the Vatican (c) J MacDonald 2011

The conditions in a garden dictate what kinds of plants will thrive there. A garden that has full sun, lots of water, and lots of nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, etc.) will grow very different plants than a garden that has shady conditions or low nitrogen or a high pH. If you restrict certain nutrients, you restrict which plants will flower abundantly. If you water some plants and not others, you control which plants will flourish, and which plants will live a miserable life of bare subsistence before dying a premature death.

Throughout its history, the orthodox Western church has been heavily committed to the lessons learned from gardening. Hewing closely to the principle that the person who controls the conditions of a garden will control the ultimate harvest of said garden, the church has intentionally chosen a specific blend of nutrients for its religio-political garden. The nutrients in this case are its doctrines. The doctrines are what “feed” the hearts and minds of the faithful. If you precisely control the “mix” of doctrines available to your people, you precisely control the rate at which people’s hearts and minds can grow. If you balance this mix with the precision of a master botanist, you can ensure that the people in your congregations grow just enough to offer you the occasional flower without ever getting big enough to overshadow you.

It’s a new idea, this idea that the introduction of particular belief systems can alter the physical structure and biochemical functioning of a person’s central nervous system and brain. I suppose I should amend that to say it’s a new idea among neuroscientists — unfortunately, it’s not a new idea among history’s power mongers.

Long before the advent of brain scanning technologies, would-be tyrants had empirically observed that people’s behaviour could be altered through the careful repetition of certain ideas. These tyrants didn’t understand the changes at a biochemical or neurophysiological level, and they didn’t need to — all they needed to understand was the result, the harvest of their ideological campaigns. Early orthodox Church Fathers understood this principle well.

Early in the history of the church, orthodox Christian teachers made a conscious decision to take an axe to the teachings of Jesus as represented in the Gospel of Mark, and to overshadow Jesus’ sunny, open “vineyard” with the giant magic beanstalk of spiritual ascent (a beanstalk seen later in the children’s fairy tale of that name). They’ve been feeding this beanstalk of “elevation” for the “elect” with their repeated assertions that the devil exists, that Judgment Day is coming (soon, very soon! — or at least sometime, maybe, we’re pretty darned sure, because it says so in the apocalyptic books), that the soul is tainted by original sin, that Jesus is your only hope of salvation, that Holy Mother Church is the only portal through which you can gain access to the gold at the top of the beanstalk.

This set of teachings was well established by the mid-3rd century CE. It’s not new (and it certainly didn’t originate with Jesus himself!). The problem with the church’s teachings is that their doctrines damage your biological brain. When you fully embrace these teachings as “divine truth,” your brain stops working the way God intends. Your brain responds exactly like the plant that’s been crippled because the gardener has intentionally withheld the water, nutrients, and care you need. Your heart and mind don’t really grow. You spend all your life sitting in the shadow of the towering beanstalk and feeling like crap. You feel like crap because all the truth — all the spiritual nutrients — about the actual nature of your relationship with God have been artfully concealed from you. You wouldn’t recognize the plants that grow in a sunny, lush, well-watered garden if they came chasing after you.

Such as forgiveness. Would you be able to recognize forgiveness if it entered your life? Probably not. Most Christian’s can’t. That’s because the orthodox Church has never taught people about forgiveness (which is why I’m somewhat sceptical about the Pope’s current pleas for forgiveness).

Why hasn’t the Church taught people how to forgive when it’s obvious from reading the Gospel of Mark that Jesus insisted on the message of forgiveness? The Church doesn’t want to teach people how to forgive, because once people catch onto the feeling of forgiveness, they’ll be able to figure out for themselves that divine forgiveness is the antithesis of “salvation” and “grace.” They’ll realize the church has been lying to them for centuries about their souls. The garden of orthodoxy might start to look like a thorny patch of weeds and thistles instead of the prophesied paradise!

It’s no mystery why some church clerics have been sexually abusing vulnerable people in their care. You can’t expect a human being’s brain to produce a harvest of compassion, integrity, inclusiveness, and enlightenment when all you do every day is try to fill that person’s brain with a steady diet of dissociation, lack of forgiveness, hierarchical control, and suppression of learning.

If Pope Benedict really means it when he says he wants to do “everything possible to ensure that such abuse will never occur again,” the only truly effective strategy will be for him to call a Council along the lines of Vatican II, and embark on the painful path of rescinding some of the church’s most cherished doctrinal beliefs.

Somehow I’m not holding my breath.

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Posted in "4 S's", Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, forgiveness, Gospel of Mark, occult themes, orthodox teachings about the soul, Paul vs Jesus, relationship with God, Soul, spiritual ascent, spiritual practices, theodicy and tagged | Leave a Comment
08 Jun 2010

CC18: "Oneness" — The Great Bait and Switch

There’s something particularly insidious about the idea that “We Are All One.”

Yeah, I know, I know . . . it sounds wonderfully spiritual and enlightened to say “we are all One.” It sounds, oh, so inclusive, so un-American, so gentle and loving and soothing and healing. It sounds like the very opposite of our society’s social isolation and lack of love. It sounds like something the soul would say, doesn’t it?

Droplets upon the waters (c) JAT 2015

These ripple patterns in a still lake were formed as single water droplets fell from the trees after a heavy rain. As souls, each of us affects the universe in the way these small water droplets bring wavelets to the lake. From a distance, it may look as if the waters of the lake are “all One.” But up close, each droplet affects the lake in unique ways. Christian mystics have too often looked at Creation from a distance and chosen to see it as “all One.” In fact, Creation is a marvel of diversity and uniqueness. It’s Divine Love that creates the background of calmness and beauty against which each soul — each droplet — can paint a small picture that says, “I’m here! I may be small, but I matter!” Together, countless small droplets flow and dance and weave together to create infinite wonders. Photo credit JAT 2015.

Millions of spiritual seekers think so. They’re out there trying to become “one” with God, “one” with Creation, “one” with each other. They’re trying with all their might to “let go.” They’ve been told by religious and spiritual teachers that they have to dissolve themselves and let go of their wants and needs in order to experience transcendence — a blissful sense of union with the oneness of all life, a sense that all boundaries have vanished, a sense that they’re finally free of all longing and suffering.

This, my friends, is not what mystical union feels like. This is what dissociation from your thoughts, feelings, and inner wisdom feels like. This is what the major mental illness called Atypical Dissociative Disorder feels like. Sometimes the dissociation is so extreme that the person can be said to exhibit psychopathy (also called sociopathy).

Many people will be furious with me for saying this. But it needs to be said. And it needs to be fully researched. There’s no excuse for the church — or anyone else, for that matter — to be teaching people to dissociate from their thoughts, feelings, and needs. This is reckless, dangerous, and abusive. It scars people’s central nervous systems, typically for life. It’s no different than driving a steel rod through their skulls, and turning them all into Phineas-Gage-lookalikes. (Phineas Gage was a 19th century worker who underwent a dramatic personality change after an industrial accident propelled a steel rod through his left cheek, into the orbitofrontal cortex of his brain, and out the top of his head.)

I am a practising mystic. I’m NOT a mystical wannabee who wants to be counted as a mystic but has never actually had a genuine mystical experience. Thomas Merton, famed 20th century Christian monk, contemplative, and writer on mysticism, died in his 50’s without ever having experienced a transformative mystical connection with God. Yet he wrote many books on the topic. I think he was a very sincere man, but I don’t think it was right for him to claim to be an expert on something he’d never figured out for himself.

Me, I don’t keep track of the many mystical experiences I’ve had in the past few years, because mystical experiences are now a normal part of my normal, everyday, Canadian life.

I live a normal Canadian life in most ways. I don’t live in a religious community, and I don’t live according to traditional Christian monastic rules. I have an apartment, a car, and a job. I take courses at the university. I get together with friends and family. I like to listen to pop music, and I love to watch TV (certain shows only, though).

Yet woven all around and within this daily life is a deep spiritual practice that yields a tremendous harvest of mystical connection with God. How have I managed to do this when dedicated, highly religious people like Thomas Merton have failed? I’ve managed to do this because I’ve discarded all spiritual teachings that insist “we are all One.”

We are not all One. To say that we should have empathy for other people is NOT the same as saying we are all One. Of course I believe we should have empathy for others. Of course I believe there’d be a whole lot less suffering in the world if more people had empathy for others. Of course I believe that to cultivate empathy is to walk the walk of a spiritual life.

But this isn’t what spiritual leaders mean when they say to you that “we’re all One.” They mean it literally — they mean there’s literally no real distinction, no real boundary, between you and your God. They mean that boundaries between you and other people are “illusion.” They try to use some of the recent findings from physics to “prove” that everything in the universe is really only a manifestation of one big blob of energy in the sky. (Yes, I’m being facetious).

When they say you’re One with God, they mean that if you try hard enough to shed all your humanness (like a snake shedding its old skin), you’ll be able to merge with that big blob of energy called Creator. In effect, you’ll become God, because you’ll be able to “remember” that your “inner spark” is God. Once you’ve achieved this wondrous state of perfection, you’ll no longer have to struggle with annoying human challenges such as forgiveness. You’ll be above illusory things such as forgiveness. What’s to forgive, after all, if the neighbour who harmed you is really just “you” in a different snake suit?

Isn’t it an interesting coincidence that when you fully embrace the idea that “we’re all One,” you don’t have to do any spiritual work anymore?

It’s a good life, being “One with the All.” You don’t have to struggle with messy feelings, because you’ve dissociated yourself from your healthy human emotions. You don’t have to feel guilt or shame about your choices, because all choices are illusory anyway. You can smile when other people are crying, because you’ve detached yourself from all that pain and grief stuff. You can go around pretending you understand what unconditional love is, because words are cheap when you’re disconnected from your own inner wisdom, disconnected from your own soul.

The true path of the soul — a path that has rarely been described in the history of Christian mysticism — is a path of finding yourself rather than losing yourself. It’s a path of finding out who you really are as the soul God made you to be. (Needless to say, everyone’s soul is amazingly awesome.) It’s a path of finding out what makes you a unique individual in a vast angelic family of other unique individuals (none of whom are better than you — they’re just different from you). It’s a path of learning how to deal with powerful, divine emotions such as love, gratitude, courage, devotion, and trust. It’s a path of honouring and respecting the differences between you and others (i.e. gender, race, age, talents, quirks, and “blind spots”), and at the same time rejoicing in what makes you the same (i.e. our innate ability to love, to learn, to change, to forgive). It’s a path of knowing who you are so you can know who other people are. It’s a path of respecting boundaries between you and other people. It’s a path of respecting boundaries between you and God.

Only then will you be able to enter into a mature and humble relationship with God the Mother and God the Father while you’re living your human life.

This is the path that Jesus has taught me.

I highly recommend it. 

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Posted in apophatic mysticism, boundary issues, Concinnate Christianity, dissociation, empathy, ethical mysticism, My Spiral Path, mystic, oneness, psychopathy, Soul and tagged , | Leave a Comment
06 Jun 2010

CC17: My Firsthand Experience With a Modern Apocalyptic Prophet

That's me in the red shirt during my Big Fat Idiot Stage in 2003. That's Grace on the right in the light blue shirt.

That’s me in the red shirt during my Big Fat Idiot Stage in 2003. That’s Grace on the right in the light blue shirt (though she wasn’t looking particularly beatific during this shot).

Even to this day, I can’t believe I missed the signs of Grace’s major mental illness.

At the time I first met Grace in 1998, I was working in the mental health field. Every day at the office I met and spoke with people whose lives had been torn apart by major depression, bipolar disorder, OCD, and Axis II issues such narcissistic personality disorder. I’d seen people suffering from psychotic depression, and I’d seen some of those psychotic patients undergo miraculous recovery after proper treatment. So it’s not like I could claim ignorance.

Ignorance, no. But naivete . . . yes, I admit to a heaping dose of that. And compartmentalization. I made the near-fatal mistake of compartmentalizing spirituality, of separating spirituality from everyday life, of trying to place my spirituality — and Grace’s — on some sort of special pedestal.

In my naivete, I was trying to climb the ladder of spiritual ascent. At the time, I thought that was a good thing. Only later did I realize that the path of holy ascent can be likened to a Boston Marathon of spiritual narcissists all scrambling to beat each other to the top of the special pinnacle where only a few special people are chosen to be especially close to God.

Like Plato. And Paul. And my spiritual teacher Grace. Apocalyptic prophets, all. Supremely confident. Absolutely convincing in their sincerity. Charming and persuasive. Endlessly energetic and enthusiastic. Psychopathic as hell.

I met Grace when I went for my very first Reiki healing. A mutual friend, Francesca, had arranged the Reiki healing for me. I knew very little at this point about New Age spirituality, and even less about traditional Christian mysticism. But I was eager to embark on a more spiritual path in my life (not so surprising for a 40 year old woman), and I’d suddenly found a bona fide Reiki master in my own community! It seemed too good to be true.

Grace had a beatific face. True, she was obese, but that was only because she so enjoyed cooking for other people to make them happy. True, she could knock back 5 ounces of vodka in half an hour, but that was only because she had a high threshold for alcohol (and she never drank the day before a Reiki healing). True, her two adult sons used alcohol and cannabis heavily, but that was only because they were so friendly and sociable and couldn’t say no to their friends, and in any event they were loved unconditionally by their parents, regardless of their behaviour. True, she became heavily addicted to pornography, but that was only in the context of a loving, monogamous relationship. True, she had a violent temper, but that was only because . . . well, that was only because she was right and other people were wrong, and she needed to clearly express to other people that she wouldn’t tolerate their unfair criticisms of her.

What mattered most to Grace was her spiritual path. She had trained as a certified Usui lineage Reiki Master. She revelled in the language, the symbolism, of it. Handpainted symbols covered the walls of the room in her home where she carried out her Reiki healings. She lit scented candles, played gentle, reassuring instrumental music, spoke in a reassuring tone. She talked the talk of divine love from beginning to end.

She talked endlessly and sincerely about divine love. She talked about the wondrous gift of divine healing that could come to people through hands-on healing. She said loudly and often that “we are all One, we are all equal.” She constantly strove to update her knowledge through New Age books, Internet sites, and spiritual workshops. She took new courses. She taught new courses. She seemed like “the real deal.”

But Grace was all talk. That’s all she did — talk. She did not practise empathy in her own life. In fact, she was one of the most vindictive, most unempathetic, most controlling, most self-entitled people I’ve ever met.

That’s why I have to thank her. I have to thank her for teaching me so consistently and so painfully that you can’t trust a spiritual teacher on the basis of words alone. You can’t trust the teachings of a dysfunctional spiritual teacher. Everything Grace did was focussed on Grace. She said she cared about her students and her Reiki patients, but she didn’t. She cared about herself. She only taught spiritual teachings that made her feel superior to other people. She needed to be “the Master.” She needed to be one of God’s specially chosen messengers. She needed to make prophetic claims. She needed to be in charge of other people’s spirituality. This was how she coped with her dissociative disorder.

Don’t get me wrong — Grace was highly dysfunctional for a damned good reason, and I know that. She’s a survivor of an abusive childhood home, where an alcoholic father sexually abused his daughters, and an alcoholic mother humiliated the children. It’s to Grace’s credit that as an adult she managed to hold down a respectable job and stay in a stable marriage for as long as she did. But Grace was unable to accept that she had addiction problems and needed professional assistance. By the time I met her, she was a mess. And her “commitment” to her path of spiritual ascent made life worse — both for herself and for her vulnerable students.

I didn’t break off ties with Grace until 2005. I hope that in the past few years she has received the care she needed. Somewhere underneath all her vitriol was the kind and loving person God knew she could be.

Unfortunately, I never got the chance to know that person.

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Posted in anagogic mysticism, apocalyptic prophecy, apophatic mysticism, Concinnate Christianity, My Spiral Path, prophets, religion and mental Illness, spiritual ascent and tagged | Leave a Comment
31 May 2010

CC16: The Difference Between Mystics and Prophets

Washing the windows of the entrance pyramid at the Royal Ontario Museum is no easy task, and you shouldn’t try it unless you’re an expert and have the all the proper equipment. Teaching about the soul, the brain-soul nexus, and ethical mysticism is no different – it takes proper training. Going to a weekend energy-healing workshop doesn’t qualify you as an expert. Be patient, be humble, and take the time to overcome your own status addiction issues before you seek to become a mentor to others. Photo credit JAT 2017.

 This morning, I happened to hear a radio interview with Mike Holmes, Canada’s famed “make it right” building contractor, teacher, and advocate for families in distress. Mike Holmes had been asked to speak about the home inspection business, and he was lamenting two current realities. First, many home inspectors have little or no hands-on experience in the contracting industry (so they don’t know what they’re talking about), and second, many home inspectors simply don’t care. The practical and ethical standards aren’t high enough, in Mike Holmes’s view, and this means that home buyers who rely on shoddy home inspection reports will end up with “lemons” — houses with major structural problems.

Anyone who has ever lived in such a house knows how stressful, how exhausting, how infuriating it is to be told there’s nothing wrong with your house, even as you watch your basement fill up with water after every rainstorm.

This is exactly how I feel about the “mysticism business.” Practical and ethical standards are pretty much non-existent in this field. And I’m not talking here about the charlatans and the New Age preachers who knowingly take advantage of vulnerable people. I’m talking here about the church.

The orthodox Western church has given itself prime credentials as THE “home inspectors of the soul” without having any solid knowledge, experience, or compassion to back this up. They hung out their shingle centuries ago, and it’s been hanging there for so long that most Christians just assume the church must know what it’s doing when it comes to “home inspections of the soul.”

But it doesn’t. When it comes to matters of the soul, the church is no different than the slipshod home inspector who tells you that a nice new coat of paint on your outside walls will fix your leaking basement. Just because a home inspector gives this advice loudly and often to all his clients doesn’t make it right. You can paint the upper walls as often as you like, and it won’t make a damn bit of difference to your crumbling foundations. The only way to fix the basement, of course, is to dig up all the soil around your house (even though it makes an ugly mess of your gardens for a while) and methodically repair the hidden cracks. It’s a lot of work. But in the end it’s worth it.

If you’re an earnest spiritual seeker who wants to know more about your soul, don’t bother asking the United Church of Canada for guidance. They have no official answers for you. They would prefer that you not embarrass them with your questions about the soul. The soul, you see, is perilously close to being a four-letter word in the United Church lexicon. It’s no longer uttered in polite company. Polite company — which includes professors of theology and United Church ministers and policy makers — wants you to speak about grace and Spirit and God’s justice breaking in proleptically.* But they don’t want you to speak about the soul. They want you to be part of a soulless church — at least, that’s what they’re implying.

Mike Holmes worked as a hands-on contractor for many years before he signed on to do his first TV show. (If I remember correctly, he grew up in a home where his father worked in the building industry. Mike Holmes’s children, now grown, have also been learning the ins and outs of home contracting and home renovation.) People who watch Mike Holmes’s TV shows trust him. They trust him because they can tell he’s not an actor — he’s a real contractor who knows what he’s doing. People learn a lot from watching his shows, because he’s also a good teacher and a dedicated advocate. He puts his money where his mouth is.

I’m not a home renovator (even though I wield a pretty mean paint brush!), but I do have a particular talent, and I’m trained in what I do. My particular talent is mysticism. My talent isn’t better than anyone else’s talent. It’s different, but it’s not better. Like Mike Holmes, I have a set of professional tools, and I know how to use them. I also insist that these tools be used according to the highest ethical standards.

In my view, few Christian mystics in the history of the church have used their talents ethically.

Furthermore, many of the men and women who’ve been traditionally revered as Christian mystics have not, in my opinion, been mystics at all. Rather, they’ve been apocalyptic prophets.

There’s a big difference between a mystic and an apocalyptic prophet. I know this because of my experience, training, and academic research. The church, however, often doesn’t make a distinction between mystics and apocalyptic prophets. The church tends to conflate them — which is kind of like saying there’s no difference between a real contractor and a TV actor who doesn’t know which end of a hammer is up.

This is why the church’s doctrinal garden is filled with the weeds of teachings based on mental illness (i.e. apocalyptic prophecy). This is why the church’s doctrinal garden is filled with ancient traditions from Plato, from apocalyptic literature, from Paul, and from later theologians such as Tertullian and Augustine of Hippo, all of which have choked out the original teachings of Jesus.

Prophecy compared to Mysticism

The church’s teachings on the soul are filled with weeds (as on the left). Many people seem afraid that, if they pull out the weeds, they’ll have no tangible mystery teachings left to sustain the spiritual roots of the church. In fact, when the weeds are pulled, what remains is the beautiful underlying structure of the soul’s courage and goodness. Gardens (and churches) are always healthier and stronger when the weeds are pulled. Photo credit JAT 2014.

Jesus was a mystic — a mentally healthy person capable of holistic thought, empathy, intuition, creative learning, logical thought, industrious actions, and advanced philosophical inquiry. Jesus was not an apocalyptic prophet — a mentally dysfunctional person demonstrating a consistent pattern of dissociation, dualistic thinking, narcissistic entitlement, anti-social behaviour, and a need to gain attention from admirers by making “divinely inspired” prophetic claims about the future.

Mystics are content to TRUST God, and have no need to make predictions about the future. Mystics know that God will do what God needs to do when God needs to do it. Mystics make no claim to having the keys to the future. Only those who don’t trust God insist on guarantees about what will happen and when it will happen. Bullies and narcissists are drawn to prophecy. Jesus was not a bully or a DSM-IV narcissist.

Mystics believe in the eternal soul in a positive, uplifting, holistic way, and they don’t try to scare the crap out of other people by making dire predictions about what will happen to somebody else’s soul. They believe that all souls are good because “God don’t make no junk.” Bullies and narcissists enjoy making threats about the fate of your soul because it gives them a twisted kind of high. It’s an addiction — not a very pretty one, but an addiction nonetheless — just like any other DSM-IV addiction problem.

Mystics (the real ones, anyway) are emotionally mature. They understand boundary issues. They understand that other people ARE other people. (Seriously dysfunctional people don’t see you as “real” in your own right, with your own distinctive personality — they see you merely as an extension of their own self-entitled needs, which is why they try to force you to comply with their wishes at the expense of yours.) Prophets love to give other people big, long lists of laws — required thoughts, required behaviours, which you’re expected to follow. Prophets tell you that their laws are divine laws. But most often the laws are designed to provide some sort of psychological relief to the prophet himself or herself. Usually, the laws entrench the “divine authority” of the prophet, and place the prophet in an elevated position. This is just narcissistic bullying in a more sophisticated form.

Mystics don’t talk about fearing God. Mystics talk about having a positive, mature relationship with God. Mystics don’t fear death. Mystics don’t believe in cosmic evil. Mystics don’t believe that human beings are more important to God than God’s other creatures. Mystics don’t believe that human laws are infallible. Mystics know that God is always listening and always acting in the world whether we pray for help or not.

Mystics trust in the fantastic goodness of God.

Apocalyptic prophets believe in their own power and their own status. They don’t trust anybody, especially not God.

Jesus was a mystic. He trusted God the Mother and God the Father. It’s time for the church to let Jesus’ teachings about God re-enter the hearts and minds of our community of faith in the twenty-first century.

It’s time for us to learn to trust our beloved God.

* If you don’t know what “prolepsis” means, then I’d like to suggest you’re a lucky person. You’ll sleep much better at night if you’re not wasting your time trying to embrace the scientifically impossible feat of time-travel.

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Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, boundary issues, Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, ethical mysticism, historical Jesus, My Spiral Path, mystic, mysticism, orthodox teachings about the soul, prophecy, prophets, religion and mental Illness, Soul and tagged , | Leave a Comment
28 May 2010

CC15: On the Road to Jericho

Yesterday, I watched a rerun of Law and Order that was fascinating for its depiction of a righteous, devout, sincere Roman Catholic woman who was put on trial for murder after a botched exorcism killed a teenaged girl. Interestingly, the woman had been a nun before leaving the convent to follow her “gift from God.”

The assistant DA was sent to interview the woman’s former Mother Superior. The Mother Superior informed a surprised DA that the former nun’s intense belief in the devil proved that she was more obedient to her faith than other people, not less so.

In the show, everyone agreed that the woman’s faith was sincere. In court, she testified in a calm, persuasive voice that she had a gift from God, and that the archangel Michael had commanded her to beat the devil out of the rebellious girl. She had obeyed St. Michael. She had failed in her mission not because the divine command was flawed, but because she wasn’t strong enough to overcome the devil. The girl had died when the devil took her soul. She regretted her personal failure to save the girl’s soul, but she didn’t regret the attempt. She had cared about the girl, and she’d been trying to do the right thing.

Fiction? Exaggeration? Misrepresenting the facts in order to make good TV?

Not really. In fact, the show didn’t go far enough in showing the reality of this kind of religious mindset, and the damage these “sincere, devout, faithful” people cause with their beliefs.

Many “sincere, devout, faithful” people used to believe in creatures that were part man, part horse — the centaurs of Greek religion. Sincerity of belief has no bearing on the veracity of a belief. You don’t have to accept the Church’s teachings about “the devil” any more than you have to accept the ancient Greek belief in centaurs. Shown here is South Metope XXVIII, originally from the Parthenon in Athens, now on display at the British Museum, London. Photo credit JAT 2023.

Just last week, the Globe and Mail published a brief article about three cult members in Baltimore who have been convicted in the death of a toddler (“U.S. Cult Members To Be Sentenced For Starving Child,” The Globe and Mail, May 18, 2010). Says the article, “Prosecutors say cult leader Queen Antoinette told the mother that denying food would cure her child’s rebellious spirit.” What had the child done? He had refused to say “Amen” after meals.

The article also includes this eye-popping fact: the child’s 23-year old mother (who is already in a residential treatment program) made an unusual plea bargain “in which her plea will be withdrawn if the child is resurrected.”

If the child is resurrected?

Many members of today’s church would like to distance themselves from this kind of bizarre thinking, and would like to pretend that church teachings on the devil, on Judgment Day, on bodily resurrection of the dead, and on exorcism aren’t really real. But these teachings are real. And they continue to create terrible suffering in the world today.

Let me be clear. I’m not saying that the devil is real. I’m saying that the teachings about the devil are real.

The teachings are still official church law. If you’re a righteous Christian — a sincere, devout, faithful believer in the church’s teachings — you’re supposed to believe in all this apocalyptic b*llsh#t.

Mind you, apocalyptic b.s. is not new to the world, and it’s not limited to Christianity. Scholars aren’t sure when apocalyptic religious claims first surfaced, but they know that plenty of bizarre apocalyptic claims about God and the devil had been circulating long before Jesus of Nazareth lived. There’s a lot of raw apocalyptic material in Plato’s writings, but Plato wasn’t the only one to make dualistic claims about good versus evil. There’s a long track record for this kind of scary religious belief, and it’s found all over the world.

Why is it found all over the world? It’s found throughout history and throughout the world because — radical thought, this — because serious mental illness is found throughout history and throughout the world.

Human beings all share the same basic DNA. Part of our human DNA package includes a susceptibility to major mental illnesses such as unipolar depression, psychotic depression, bipolar disorder, psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia, not to mention addiction disorders, personality disorders, and psychiatric symptoms that are secondary to primary medical disorders. (For instance, sepsis — systemic blood poisoning — can cause sudden psychosis). Certain kinds of major mental illness are known to lead to certain kinds of recognizable — but highly dysfunctional — thinking patterns.

Apocalyptic thinking patterns are dysfunctional. I do not care that apocalyptic beliefs have been enshrined in many different major world religions. I do not care that I’m supposed to fully honour and respect everybody’s religious beliefs. I refuse to honour any religious belief — whether it’s Christian, Kabbalist, Muslim, animist, or whatever — if that particular belief system is founded on teachings that emanated from mental illness. So I don’t care what somebody’s revered prophet once said if that prophet showed clear signs of mental illness. Apocalyptic teachings are a clear sign of mental illness.

The human genome hasn’t changed much over the past few millennia, and that means that prophets who lived and taught 3,000 years ago had the same DNA as you and I, and they had the same vulnerability to biologically-based psychosis as you and I. The difference between then and now is that we finally have the tools to recognize these major mental disorders, and we finally have some good treatments for them — such as SSRI’s and olanzapine.

I have no patience and no sympathy for people who tell me that all religious traditions are equally worthy of respect. They are not. Religious traditions founded on dysfunctional, dualistic, good versus evil thinking are not worthy of respect. This means I believe that some aspects of the Christian tradition are not worthy of respect. I also believe that some aspects of certain other religious traditions are also not worthy of respect.

I’m not going to apologize for this. Religious leaders have a moral duty to reexamine the traditions of their respective faiths to weed out all teachings that originated in mental health disorders, teachings that continue to contribute to mental health disorders, teachings that create great harm in the world today.

The church must take responsibility for its past failure to work closely with scientific researchers who have been trying to show that bizarre, abusive behaviour is a medical, social, and educational issue, not a spiritual or religious issue involving evil forces.

The church needs to “grow up.” It’s not helpful to anyone — especially to those who have a genetic vulnerability to major mental illness, and are therefore easily traumatized by teachings about evil forces — for us to pretend that we can all happily and lovingly accept every “religious belief.” We can’t. Each world faith must start to take responsibility for its own doctrinal garden. Each world faith must begin to weed out the destructive teachings that have grown in its garden over the centuries. Each world faith must plant new seeds that can close the current and utterly inexcusable chasm between science and faith. Each world faith must begin to cherry-pick among its own teachings, and keep only those teachings and traditions that allow people to enter into a full, loving relationship with God based on the values of trust, courage, devotion, and gratitude.

This is what Jesus was trying to say 2,000 years ago. Maybe it’s time we listened.

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Bath June 2013

On the Road to Jericho (Photo Credit JAT 2013)

Once upon a time, long, long ago and far, far away, there was a certain man who was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He fell into the hands of robbers who were led by a man named Saul. They stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half resurrected.

Now by chance an orthodox Western priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a universalist ecumenist, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.

But a woman who came from a distant land and had also once been beaten and left for dead by her kinfolk came near him; and when she saw him, she was moved to pity. She bandaged the wounds that had been bleeding for 2,000 years, and she took him to the local women’s shelter. There the little children knew him, and those who were like the little children knew him.

The man who was just a man happily died.

Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers led by Saul?

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Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, dualism, humility, mental illness, mysticism, Paul vs Jesus, Plato, prophets, religion and mental Illness and tagged | Leave a Comment
13 May 2010

CC9: "The Sin Within"

DSC_0089

At the Vatican. Photo credit J MacDonald 2011

Like many people, I’ve been following media reports about the sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church.

On May 11, 2010, the Globe & Mail published a Reuter’s story entitled “Pope Says ‘Sin Within’ Is Church’s Greatest Threat.” There are two parallel threads in this report. The first thread is the Pope’s statement that “today we see in a truly terrifying way that the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from outside enemies but is born of sin with the Church.”

The second thread is encapsulated in this quote from the Pope: “We must admit that the Catholic faith . . . was often too individualistic. It too often left concrete things to the world and thought only of individual salvation and religious affairs without realising that there was a global responsibility (for economic decisions).”

Ya think?

Hmmm . . . maybe there’s a connection between the second thread and the first one. Maybe — just to go out on a limb here — maybe the Vatican’s own theological belief structure of sin and salvation is a major contributing factor to the abusive behaviour of some of its senior clergy.

I really, really hope that when Benedict says “the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from outside enemies but is born of sin within the Church” that he isn’t trying to imply that the true source of this “sin” is Satan, a.k.a. the Devil. It would be typical of orthodox Christian thinkers to try to pass the buck to the Devil. Christians have been pulling this stunt since the apostle Paul wrote his Letter to the Romans. (In Romans, Paul made “sin” a sort of cosmic force, and many other Christian authors followed Paul’s lead.) Yet, before Paul, there was apocalyptic literature. Read that stuff (including some of the Dead Sea Scrolls) and you’ll hear all kinds of paranoid speculation about the cosmic battle between Good and Evil. Long before that, Plato was scaring the crap out of people with his Evil World Soul doing battle with the Good World Soul (see Plato’s Laws). Yup — there’s a time-honoured tradition amongst philosophers and theologians of blaming bad behaviour on the devil. (I’m old enough to remember comedian Flip Wilson’s famous line, “The Devil Made Me Do It.”)

Lest you think I’m being unfairly suspicious about the Pope’s beliefs, the honest truth is that Original Sin and the Devil are still very much a part of official Roman Catholic doctrine. If influential senior clerics didn’t still believe this stuff, they would take it off the books.

It’s too easy to blame bad choices on an imaginary Devil. We have enough difficulty trying to understand our relationship with God without making up stories about big bad scary evil beings. There are plenty of logical scientific explanations for abusive human behaviour — particularly scientific observations related to brain physiology and mental illness.

Occam’s Razor: go with the explanation that requires the fewest assumptions. The simplest assumption in this instance is that the Roman Catholic church has not properly assessed its clerics for evidence of psychological dysfunction. No imaginary Devil is needed in order to explain the abusive behaviour of these men. It’s just plain old fashioned brain chemistry.

An even simpler assumption is to ask what happens to people’s brain chemistry when they’re told over and over, year after year, that human beings are a worthless, sin-ridden lot who may, if they’re lucky, be blessed with the gift of salvation, but could just as easily end up in the eternal torments of hell. I’m thinkin’ these teachings are probably as healthy for the brain as a dose of carbon monoxide.

The reason carbon monoxide is so deadly is that it bonds like crazy glue to hemoglobin in the bloodstream, and hogs the sites where oxygen molecules are supposed to catch a ride to your body’s cells and tissues. You end up asphyxiating invisibly from the inside out because you can’t get enough oxygen into your brain, organs, etc. — even though you may still look normal on the outside.

If the church fills up people’s brains with toxic “carbon monoxide” teachings, there’s less and less room available for the life-giving “oxygen” of Jesus’ teachings about divine love.

It’s well known that people who’ve been poisoned by heavy metals can show marked changes in behaviour. (The classic example is the Mad Hatter who, in former days, used mercury salts to craft gentlemen’s hats, and gave himself mercury poisoning).

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that some Roman Catholic clerics are behaving so badly. Many of them seem to be suffering from a case of self-induced “sin poisoning.”

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Posted in "4 S's", Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, occult themes, Original Sin, orthodox teachings about the soul, Plato, religion and mental Illness and tagged , | Leave a Comment
31 Mar 2010

CC6: Why I’m Hard On Scholars Who Study Mystics

One thing you’re bound to notice as you read my posts is that I’m very hard on mystics.

I’m also very hard on scholars and academicians who write about mystics.

Let me put it this way: in one of my recent theology classes, a senior professor recommended that we read Evelyn Underhill’s book Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness if we wanted to understand more about the nature of Christian mysticism. The problem I have with this book is twofold: (1) Evelyn Underhill was not a practising mystic herself, and was writing from an academic perspective, and (2) Evelyn Underhill first published her book in 1911. That’s one hundred years ago, folks. I can’t imagine in all honesty that I would be urged to study a 100 year old textbook in any other field. (Can you imagine what that would be like in a field like chemistry?) Yet this book is still in print, and is still available on the bookshelves of regular bookstores. (I bought a spanking new softcover copy at an Anglican bookstore in 2009). This kind of stubborn denial in the world of theology makes me want to metaphorically pull my hair out by its little grey roots.

For the sake of scholarly balance, a much more recent book that is well researched is The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, edited by Bernard McGinn (New York: Modern Library-Random House, 2006).

McGinn’s book is a collection of short pieces written by well-known and lesser-known Christian mystics over the past two millennia. He provides a short introduction to each mystic, but he allows the reader to hear the mystics speak in their own words. His approach is in sharp contrast to Underhill’s approach. Underhill, in my view, does not show an understanding of her own limits, and seems to believe she is within her rights to make factual claims about the characteristics and interior experiences of Christian mystics.

Thank you kindly, Ms. Underhill, but some of the mystical experiences you describe in your book sound to me an awful lot like various forms of serious mental illness, and I wouldn’t be recommending those pursuits to anybody who cares about their mental, spiritual, physical, and emotional health.

Of course, I understand that Underhill was writing her book at a time when research in the fields of psychiatry and psychology was still young, and advanced investigations in neurophysiology and neuroplasticity hadn’t yet been contemplated. I get that. What I don’t get is the church’s refusal to revise its theological understanding of mysticism in light of new neuro-psychiatric research. What I don’t get is the desire to shield the church from the realities of science, especially in the tricky areas of prophecy and mysticism. The Christian church was founded on prophecy (revelation) and mysticism. There would be no church without the claims made by early prophets and mystics. You’d think the church would desperately want to know how to use modern scientific advances to help them better understand what makes prophets and mystics tick.

Mystics who take themselves too seriously will be reminded by God to be more humble and more aware of their personal limitations. Mystics are no more important to God than any other human beings.

But, of course, if the church took the bold step of researching its closetful of prophets and mystics, some of its traditional heroes might not look so good anymore. And then the church would have to start rethinking some of its doctrinal positions.

You know, stuff like . . . oh, Original Sin. Adam and Eve and the Fall. The Devil. Judgment Day. All that kind of paranoid, obsessive-compulsive, DSM-IV-TR Axis I and II stuff. The kind of thinking that responds really well to a properly managed treatment course with olanzapine.*

Yeah, well, call me a cynic, but when you’ve had five years of experience working in a lay capacity in the field of psychiatry, it’s pretty hard not to think in psychiatric terms when you read some of the things that Christian mystics have written over the centuries.

As a practising mystic, I would never say that mystical experiences don’t exist or can’t exist. I would never say that all reported mystical experiences are the result of mental illness. I would never say that all reported mystical experiences are pure fabrication, either. But some reported experiences are caused by mental illness, and some reported experiences are pure fabrication.

The trick is to be able to sort out the genuine mystics from both the tragically mentally ill and the enthusiastic fakers. We need science on our side to do this.

That’s why I would like to see an introductory course on neuroscience as a requirement in the theological curriculum.

* olanzapine is the generic name for an atypical antipsychotic medication that is particularly useful in the treatment of schizophrenia and psychotic depression.

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Posted in Concinnate Christianity, ethical mysticism, HDM Myths, My Spiral Path, mystic, mysticism, prophecy, prophets, religion and mental Illness and tagged | Leave a Comment

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