Search inside
(98 results)
Bookmarks
(0)
Visual Adjustments
Share this book
Search inside (98 results)
god
Page 9
I would also like to apologise for continually referring to God in the traditionally masculine image, but I have done so in the interest of simplicity rather than from any rigidly held concept as to gender.
Page 76
In regard to the last of the above, it may seem to many that the ultimate requirement - to give up one’s self and one’s life - represents a kind of cruelty on the part of God or fate, which makes our existence a sort of bad joke and which can never be completely accepted. The attitude is particularly true in present-day Western culture, in which the self is held sacred and death is considered an unspeakable insult. Yet the exact opposite is the reality. It is in the giving up of self that human beings can find the most ecstatic and lasting, solid, durable joy of life. And it is death that provides life with all its meaning. This ‘secret’ is the central wisdom of religion.
Page 76
The process of giving up the self (which is related to the phenomenon of love, as will be discussed in the next section of this book) is for most of us a gradual process which we get into by a series of fits and starts. One form of temporary giving up of the self deserves special mention because its practice is an absolute requirement for significant learning during adulthood, and therefore for significant growth of the human spirit. I am referring to a subtype of the discipline of balancing which I call ‘bracketing’. Bracketing is essen¬ tially the act of balancing the need for stability and assertion of the self with the need for new knowledge and greater understanding by temporarily giving up one’s self putting one’s self aside, so to speak - so as to make room for the incorporation of new material into the self. This discipline has been well described by the theologian Sam Keen in To a Dancing God:
Page 101
It is obvious and generally understood that sexual activity and love, while they may occur simultaneously, often are disassociated, because they are basically separate phenomena. In itself, making love is not an act of love. Nonetheless the experience of sexual intercourse, and particularly of orgasm (even in masturbation), is an experi¬ ence also associated with a greater or lesser degree of collapse of ego boundaries and attendant ecstasy. It is because of this collapse of ego boundaries that we may shout at the moment of climax ‘I love you’ or ‘Oh, God’ to a prostitute for whom moments later, after the ego boundaries have snapped back into place, we may feel no shred of affection, liking or investment. This is not to say that the ecstasy of the orgasmic experience cannot be heightened by sharing it with one who is beloved; it can. But even without a beloved partner or any partner the collapse of ego boundaries occurring in conjunction with orgasm may be total; for a second we may totally forget who we are, lose track of self, be lost in time and space, be outside of ourself, be transported. We may become one with the universe. But
Page 165
It is clear that exercising power with love requires a great deal of work, but what is this about the risk involved? The problem is that the more loving one is, the more humble one is; yet the more humble one is, the more one is awed by the potential for arrogance in exercising power. Who am I to influence the course of human events? By what authority am I entitled to decide what is best for my child, my spouse, my country or the human race? Who gives me the right to dare to believe in my own understanding and then to presume to exert my will upon the world? Who am I to play God? That is the risk. For whenever we exercise power we are attempting to influence the course of the world, of humanity, and we are thereby playing God . Most parents, teachers, leaders — most of us who exercise power — have no cognisance of this. In the
Page 166
arrogance of exercising power without the total selfawareness demanded by love, we are blissfully but destructively ignorant of the fact that we are playing God. But those who truly love, and therefore work for the wisdom that love requires, know that to act is to play God. Yet they also know that there is no alternative except inaction and impotence. Love compels us to play God with full con¬ sciousness of the enormity of the fact that that is just what we are doing. With this consciousness the loving person assumes the responsibility of attempting to be God and not to carelessly play God, to fulfil God’s will without mistake. We arrive, then, at yet another paradox: only out of the humility of love can humans dare to be God.
Page 178
The difficulty that humans so generally seem to have in fully appreciating the separateness of those they are close to interferes not only with their parenting but with all thenintimate relationships, including marriage. Not too long ago in a couples’ group I heard one of the members state that the ‘purpose and function’ of his wife was to keep their house neat and him well fed. I was aghast at what seemed to me his painfully blatant male chauvinism. I thought I might demonstrate this to him by asking the other members of the group to state how they perceived the purpose and function of their spouses. To my horror the six others, male and female alike, gave very similar answers. All of them defined the purpose and function of their husbands or wives in reference to themselves; all of them failed to perceive that their mates might have an existence basically separate from their own or any kind of destiny apart from their marriage. ‘Good grief,’ I exclaimed, ‘it’s no wonder that you are all having difficulties in your marriages, and you’ll continue to have difficulties until you come to recognise that each of you has your own separate destiny to fulfil.’ The group felt not only chastised but profoundly confused by my pronounce¬ ment. Somewhat belligerendy they asked me to define the purpose and function of my wife. ‘The purpose and function of Lily,’ I responded, ‘is to grow to be the most of which she is capable, not for my benefit but for her own and to the glory of God.’ The concept remained alien to them for some time, however.
Page 186
*See Peter Brent, The God Men of India (New York: Quadrangle Books, i972)-
Page 193
short of completely fulfilling their potential. They may have travelled a short or even a goodly distance along the journey of spiritual growth, but the whole journey is not for them. It is or seems to be too difficult. They are content to be ordinary men and women and do not strive to be God.
Page 199
We suffer, I believe, from a tendency to define religion too narrowly. We tend to think that religion must include a belief in God or some ritualistic practice or membership in a worshiping group. We are likely to say of someone who does not attend church or believe in a superior being, ‘He or she is not religious’. I have even heard scholars say such things as: ‘Buddhism is not really a religion’ or ‘Unitarians have excluded religion from their faith’ or ‘Mysticism is more a philosophy than a religion’. We tend to view religion as something monolithic, cut out of whole cloth, and then, with this simplistic concept, we are puzzled as to how two very different people can both call themselves Christians. Or Jews. Or how an atheist might have a more highly developed sense of Christian morality than a Catholic who routinely attends mass.
Page 200
In supervising other psychotherapists I rather routinely find that they pay too little, if any, attention to the ways in which their patients view the world. There are several reasons for this, but among them is the notion that if patients don’t consider themselves religious by virtue of their belief in God or their church membership, they are lacking in religion and the matter therefore needs no further scrutiny. But the fact of the matter is that everyone has an explicit or implicit set of ideas and beliefs as to the essential nature of the world. Do patients envision the universe as basically chaotic and without meaning so that it is only sensible for them to grab whatever little pleasure they can whenever it is available? Do they see the world as a dog-eat-dog place where ruthlessness is essential for their survival? Or do they see it as a nurturing sort of place in which something good will always turn up and in which they need not fret much about the future? Or a place that owes them a living no matter how they conduct their lives? Or a universe of rigid law in which they will be struck down and cast away if they step even slightly out of line? Etc. There are all manner of different world views that people have. Sooner or later in the course of psychotherapy most therapists will come to recognise how a patient views the world, but if the therapist is specifically on the lookout for it, he or she will come to this recognition sooner rather than later. And it is essential that therapists arrive at this knowledge, for the world view of patients is always an essential part of their problems, and a correction in their world view is necessary for their cure. So I say to those I supervise: ‘Find out your patients’ religions even if they say they don’t have any.’
Page 201
been an exemplary husband and father, he felt worthless and evil. ‘The world would be a better place if I were dead,’ he said. And meant it. Stewart had made two extremely serious suicide attempts. No amount of realistic reassurance could interrupt the unrealism of his worthless self-image. As well as the usual symptoms of a severe depression, such as insomnia and agitation, Stewart also suffered great difficulty in swallowing his food. ‘It’s not just that the food tastes bad,’ he said. ‘That too. But it’s as if there’s a blade of steel stuck straight in my throat and nothing but liquid can get by it.’ Special X-rays and tests failed to reveal a physical cause for his difficulty. Stewart made no bones about his religion. ‘I’m an atheist, plain and simple,’ he stated. ‘I’m a scientist. The only things I believe in are those things you can see and touch. Maybe I’d be better off if I had some kind of faith in a sweet and loving God, but, frankly, I can’t stomach that kind of crap. I had enough of it when I was a child and I’m glad I’ve gotten away from it.’ Stewart had grown up in a small Midwestern community, the son of a rigid fundamentalist preacher and his equally rigid and fundamentalist wife, and had left home and church at the first opportunity.
Page 202
‘Stewart,’ I said, ‘you have told me that you’re an atheist, and I believe you. There is a part of your mind that believes there is no God. But I am beginning to suspect that there is another part of your mind that does believe in God - a dangerous, cut-throat God.’
Page 203
penance and figuratively cutting his own throat in the hope that by so doing he could prevent God from literally cutting it.
Page 203
Where did Stewart’s notion of a vicious God and a malevolent world come from? How do people’s religions develop? What determines a person’s particular world view? There are whole complexes of determinants, and this book will not explore the question in depth. But the most important factor in the development of the religion of most people is obviously their culture. If we are European we are likely to believe that Christ was a white man, and if we are African that he was a black man. If one is an Indian who was bom and raised in Benares or Bombay, one is likely to become a Hindu and possess what has been described as a pessimistic world view. If one is an American bom and raised in Indiana, one is more likely to become a Christian than a Hindu and to possess a somewhat more optimistic world view. We tend to believe what the people around us believe, and we tend to accept as truth what these people tell us of the nature of the world as we listen to them during our formative years.
Page 203
But less obvious (except to psychotherapists) is the fact that the most important part of our culture is our particular family. The most basic culture in which we develop is the culture of our family, and our parents are its ‘culture leaders’. Moreover, the most significant aspect of that culture is not what our parents tell us about God and the nature of things but rather what they do - how they behave toward each other, toward our siblings and, above all, toward us. In other words, what we learn about the nature of the world when we are growing up is determined by the actual nature of our experience in the microcosm of the family. It is not so much what our parents say that determines our world view as it is the unique world they create for us by their behaviour. ‘I agree that I have this notion of a cut-throat God,’ Stewart said, ‘but where did it come from? My parents certainly believed in God - they talked about it incessandy - but theirs was a God of love. Jesus loves us. God loves us. We love God and Jesus. Love, love, love, that’s all I ever heard.’
Page 204
Stewart was not the only person who believed in what I have come to call the ‘monster-god’. I have had a number of patients with similar concepts of God and similarly bleak or terrifying notions as to the nature of existence. What is surprising is that the monster-god is not more common in the minds of humans. In the first section of this book it was noted that when we are children our parents are godlike figures to our child’s eye, and the way they do things seems the way they must be done throughout the universe. Our first (and, sadly, often our only) notion of God’s nature is a simple extrapolation of our parents’ natures, a simple blending of the characters of our mothers and fathers or their substitutes. If we have loving, forgiving parents, we are likely to believe in a loving and forgiving God. And in our adult view the world is likely to seem as nurturing a place as our childhood was. If our parents were harsh and punitive, we are likely to mature with a concept of a harsh and punitive monster-god. And if they failed to care for us, we will likely envision the universe as similarly uncaring.*
Page 208
One of our problems is that very few of us have developed any distinctive personal life. Everything about us seems secondhand, even our emotions. In many cases we have to rely on secondhand information in order to function. I accept the word of a physician, a scientist, a farmer, on trust. I do not like to do this. I have to because they possess vital knowledge of living of which I am ignorant. Secondhand information concerning the state of my kidneys, the effects of cholesterol, and the raising of chickens, I can live with. But when it comes to questions of meaning, purpose, and death, secondhand information will not do. I cannot survive on a secondhand faith in a secondhand God. There has to be a personal word, a unique confrontation, if I am to come alive.*
Page 210
To some extent. While I believe that the sceptical world view of the scientific-minded is a distinct improvement over a world view based upon blind faith, local superstition and unquestioned assumptions, I also believe that most of the scientific-minded have only barely begun the journey of spiritual growth. Specifically, I believe that the outlook of most scientific-minded people toward the reality of God is almost as parochial as the outlook of simple peasants who blindly follow the faith of their fathers. Scientists have grave difficulty dealing with the reality of God.
Page 210
When we look from our vantage of sophisticated scepticism at the phenomenon of belief in God we are not impressed. We see dogmatism, and proceeding from dog¬ matism, we see wars and inquisitions and persecutions. We see hypocrisy: people professing the brotherhood of man killing their fellows in the name of faith, lining their pockets at the expense of others, and practising all manner of brutality. We see a bewildering multiplicity of rituals and images without consensus: this god is a woman with six arms and six legs; that is a man who sits on a throne; this one is an elephant; that one the essence of nothingness; pantheons,
Page 211
household gods, trinities, unities. We see ignorance, super¬ stition, rigidity. The track record for belief in God looks pretty poor. It is tempting to think that humanity might be better off without a belief in God, that God is not only pie in the sky by and by, but a poisoned pie at that. It would seem reasonable to conclude that God is an illusion in the minds of humans - a destructive illusion - and that belief in God is a common form of human psychopathology that should be healed.
Page 211
So we have a question: Is belief in God a sickness? Is it a manifestation of transference - a concept of our parents, derived from the microcosm, inappropriately projected into the macrocosm? Or, to put it another way, is such belief a form of primitive or childish thinking which we should grow out of as we seek higher levels of awareness and maturity? If we want to be scientific in attempting to answer this question, it is essential that we turn to the reality of actual clinical data. What happens to one’s belief in God as one grows through the process of psychotherapy?
Page 214
Kathy wailed, ‘Oh, God, I’m going to die.’
Page 214
‘Do you feel that God is going to punish you for wanting to see Bill again?’
Page 214
Finally I said to her, ‘Kathy, you believe you are going to die because you believe you know the mind of God. But you are wrong. Because you do not know the mind of God. All you know is what you have been told about God. Much of what you have been told about God is wrong. I do not know everything about God, but I know more than you do and more than the people who have told you about God. For instance, every day I see men and women, like yourself, who want to be unfaithful, and some are, and they are not punished by God. I kriow, because they keep coming back to see me. And talk with me. And they become happier. Just as you will become happier. Because we are going to work together. And you are going to learn that you’re not a bad person. And you’re going to learn the truth - about
Page 215
yourself and about God. And you will become happier, about yourself and about life. But now you’re going to sleep. And when you awake you will no longer be afraid that you’re going to die. And when you see me tomorrow morning again, you will be able to talk with me, and we will talk about God and we will talk about yourself.’
Page 217
silently, ‘please let Bill see me, please let him notice me.’ Still nothing happened. ‘Please let someone see me, anyone. I’ve got to fuck someone. Oh, God, Pm a whore. I’m the Whore of Babylon. O God, kill me, I’ve got to die.’ She jumped in the car and raced back to the apartment. She got a razor blade and went to cut her wrist. She could not do it. But God could. God would. God would give her what she deserved. He would put an end to it, an end to her. Let the vigil begin. ‘O God, I’m so scared, I’m so scared, please hurry, I’m so scared.’ She began to chant, waiting. And that was how her sister-in-law found her.
Page 221
the same capacity, and was quite pleased with herself at the age of twenty-seven. She does not go to church and no longer considers herself a Catholic. She doesn’t know whether she believes in God or not, but will tell you frankly that the issue of God just doesn’t seem a very important one at this point in her life.
Page 221
I have described Kathy’s case at such length precisely because it is so typical of die relationship between religious upbringing and psychopathology. There are millions of Kathys. I used to tell people only somewhat facetiously that the Catholic Church provided me with my living as a psychiatrist. I could equally well have said the Baptist Church, Lutheran Church, Presbyterian Church, or any other. The church was not, of course, the sole cause of Kathy’s neurosis. In a sense the church was only a tool used by Kathy’s mother to cement and augment her excessive parental authority. One could justifiably say that the mother’s domineering nature, abetted by an absentee father, was the more basic cause of the neurosis, and in this respect too Kathy’s case was typical. Nonetheless, the church must share the blame. No nun in her parochial school and no priest in her catechism class ever encouraged Kathy to reasonably question religious doctrine or in any way whatever to think for herself. There was never any evidence of concern on the part of the church that its doctrine might be overtaught, unrealistically rigid or subject to misuse and misapplication. One way of analysing Kathy’s problem would be to state that while she believed whole¬ heartedly in God, the commandments and the concept of sin, her religion and understanding of the world was of the hand-me-down variety and badly suited to her needs. She had failed to question, to challenge, to think for herself. Yet Kathy’s church - and this also is typical - made not the slightest effort to assist her in working out a more appropri¬ ate and original personal religion. It would appear that churches generally, if anything, favour the hand-me-down variety.
Page 223
By the time she entered therapy, Marcia agreed with her parents wholeheartedly. At the very beginning she announced, somewhat proudly and stridendy, that she was an atheist - not a namby-pamby atheist but a real one, who believed that the human race would be much better off if it could escape from the delusion that God existed or even might exist. Interestingly, Marcia’s dreams were chock-full of religious symbols, such as birds flying into rooms, their beaks holding scrolls upon which obscure messages were written in an ancient language. But I did not confront
Page 225
am.' Sometimes now when the world feels right, I say to myself, “You know, I bet there really is a God. I don’t think the world could be so right without a God”. It’s funny. I don’t know how to talk about this sort of thing. I just feel connected, real, like I’m a real part of a very big picture, and even though I can’t see much of the picture, I know it’s there and I know it’s good and I know I’m a part of it.’
Page 225
Through therapy Kathy moved from a place where the notion of God was all-important to a place where it was of no importance. Marcia, on the other hand, moved from a position where she rejected the notion of God to one where it was becoming quite meaningful for her. The same process, the same therapist, yet with seemingly opposite results, both successful. How are we to explain this? Before we attempt to do so, let us consider yet another type of case. In Kathy’s case it was necessary for the therapist to actively challenge her religious ideas in order to bring about change in the direction of a dramatically diminished influence of the God-concept in her life. In the case of Marcia the concept of God began to assume an increased influence, but without the therapist ever challenging her religious concepts in any way. Is it ever necessary', we may ask, for a therapist to actively challenge a patient’s atheism or agnosticism and deliberately lead the patient in the direction of religiosity?
Page 230
Glory be to God for dappled things -
Page 231
‘God rejected you so you rejected God.’
Page 233
‘It’s interesting, Ted,’ I said, ‘that whenever something significantly painful happens to you, you rail against God, you rail against what a shitty, terrible world it is. But when something good happens to you, you guess you’re lucky. A minor tragedy and it’s God’s fault. A miraculous blessing and it’s a bit lucky. What do you make of that?’
Page 234
‘Well, I suppose God is the most important thing.’
Page 234
‘So why don’t you study God?’ I asked.
Page 234
‘If God is the most important thing, why don’t you study God?’
Page 234
‘Really, I don’t understand. How can one study God?’
Page 234
‘One studies psychology in a school. One studies God in a school,’ I answered.
Page 235
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I am not making any choice for you. I am in this instance being purely analytical. I am analysing the alternatives open to you. You are the one who for some reason does not want to look at one of those alternatives. You are the one who wants to do the most important thing. You are the one who feels that God is the most important thing. Yet when I drag you to finally look at the alternative of a career in God you exclude it. You say you couldn’t do it. Fine if you can’t do it. But it is my province to be interested in why you feel you can’t do it, why you exclude it as an alternative.’
Page 235
‘Because . . . because to be a minister one is publicly a man of God. I mean, I’d have to go public with my belief in God. I’d have to be publicly enthusiastic about it. I just couldn’t do that.’
Page 236
And so we arrived at the deepest core of Ted’s neurosis. Gradually, by act of will, continually having to remind himself that he was not still ten, that he was not still under the thumb of his parents or within striking distance of his brothers, bit by bit he forced himself to communicate his enthusiasm, his love of life and his love of God. He did decide to go on to divinity school. A few weeks before he left I received a cheque from him for the previous month’s sessions. Something about it caught my eye. His signature seemed longer. I looked at it closely. Previously he had always signed his name ‘Ted’. Now it was ‘Theodore’. I called his attention to the change.
Page 236
‘I was hoping you would notice it,’ he said. ‘I guess in a way I’m still keeping secrets, aren’t I? When I was very young my aunt told me that I should be proud of the name Theodore because it means “lover of God”. I was proud. So I told my brothers about it. Christ, did they make fun of me. They called me a sissy in ten different ways. “Sissy choir boy. Why don’t you go kiss the altar? Why don’t you go kiss the choirmaster?” ’ Ted smiled. ‘You know the whole routine. So I became embarrassed by the name. A few weeks ago it occurred to me that I was no longer embarrassed. So I decided it was all right to use my full name now. After all, I am a lover of God, aren’t I?’
Page 237
The foregoing case histories were offered in response to a question: Is belief in God a form of psychopathology? If we are to rise out the mire of childhood teaching, local tradition and superstition, it is a question that must be asked. But these case histories indicate that the answer is not a simple one. The answer sometimes is yes. Kathy’s unquestioning belief in the God her church and mother taught clearly retarded her growth and poisoned her spirit. Only by questioning and discarding her belief was she able to venture forth into a wider, more satisfying, more productive life. Only then was she free to grow. But the answer also is sometimes no. As Marcia grew out of the cold microcosm of her childhood into a larger, warmer world, a belief in God also grew within her, quiedy and naturally. And Ted’s forsaken belief in God had to be resurrected as an essential part of the liberation and resurrection of his spirit.
Page 237
What are we to do with this yes-and-no answer? Scientists are dedicated to asking questions in the search for truth. But they too are human, and like all humans, they would like their answers to be clean and clear and easy. In their desire for simple solutions, scientists are prone to fall into two traps as they question the reality of God. The first is to throw the baby out with the bath water. And the second is tunnel vision.
Page 237
There is clearly a lot of dirty bath water surrounding the reality of God. Holy wars. Inquisitions. Animal sacrifice. Human sacrifice. Superstition. Stultification. Dogmatism. Ignorance. Hypocrisy. Self-righteousness. Rigidity.
Page 238
Cruelty. Book-burning. Witch-burning. Inhibition. Fear. Conformity. Morbid guilt. Insanity. The list is. almost endless. But is all this what God has done to humans or what humans have done to God? It is abundantly evident that belief in God is often destructively dogmatic. Is the problem, then, that humans tend to believe in God, or is the problem that humans tend to be dogmatic? Anyone who has known a dyed-in-the-wool atheist will know that such an individual can be as dogmatic about unbelief as any believer can be about belief. Is it belief in God we need to get rid of, or is it dogmatism?
Page 238
Another reason that scientists are so prone to throw die baby out with the bath water is that science itself, as I have suggested, is a religion. The neophyte scientist, recendy come or converted to the world view of science, can be every bit as fanatical as a Christian crusader or a soldier of Allah. This is particularly the case when we have come to science from a culture and home in which belief in God is firmly associated with ignorance, superstition, rigidity and hypocrisy. Then we have emotional as well as intellectual motives to smash the idols of primitive faith. A mark of maturity in scientists, however, is their awareness that science may be as subject to dogmatism as any other religion.
Page 238
I have firmly stated that it is essential to our spiritual growth for us to become scientists who are sceptical of what we have been taught - that is, the common notions and assumptions of our culture. But the notions of science themselves often become cultural idols, and it is necessary that we become sceptical of these as well. It is indeed possible for us to mature out of a belief in God. What I would now like to suggest is that it is also possible to mature into a belief in God.' A sceptical atheism or agnosticism is not necessarily the highest state of understanding at which hpman beings can arrive. To the contrary, there is reason to believe that behind spurious notions and false concepts of God there lies a reality that is God. This is what Paul Tillich
Page 239
meant when he referred to the ‘god beyond God’ and why some sophisticated Christians used to proclaim joyfully, ‘God is dead. Long live God’. Is it possible that the path of spiritual growth leads first out of superstition into agnosticism and then out of agnosticism toward an accurate knowledge of God? It was of this path that the Sufi Aba Said ibn Abi-l-Khair was speaking more than nine hundred years ago when he said:
Page 239
Whether or not the path of spiritual growth necessarily leads from a sceptical atheism or agnosticism toward an accurate belief in God, the fact of the matter is that some intellectually sophisticated and sceptical people, such as Marcia and Ted, do seem to grow in the direction of belief. And it should be noted that this belief into which they grew was not at all like that out of which Kathy evolved. The God that comes before scepticism may bear little resemblance to the God that comes after. As I mentioned at the beginning of this part, there is no single, monolithic religion. There are many religions, and perhaps many levels to belief. Some religions may be unhealthy for some people; others may be healthy.
Page 240
tradition, there is a tendency for them to consider any passionate belief in God to be pathological. Upon occasion this tendency may go over the line into frank bias and prejudice. Not long ago I met a college senior who was giving serious consideration to the possibility of entering a monastery a few years hence. He had been in psychotherapy for the preceding year and was continuing. ‘But I have not been able to tell my therapist about the monastery or the depth of my religious belief,’ he confided. ‘I don’t think he would understand.’ I did not begin to know this young man well enough to assess the meaning that the monastery held for him or whether his desire to join it was neurotically determined. I very much would have liked to say to him: ‘You really ought to tell your therapist about it. It is essential for your therapy that you be open about everything, particularly a serious matter such as this. You should trust your therapist to be objective.’ But I did not. For I was not at all sure that his therapist would be objective, that he would understand, in the true meaning of the word.
Page 241
Another major reason that scientists are prone to throw the baby out with the bath water is that they do not see the baby. Many scientists simply do not look at the evidence of the reality of God. They suffer from a kind of tunnel vision, a psychologically self-imposed psychological set of blinders which prevents them from turning their attention to the realm of the spirit.
Page 242
others. The use of measurement has enabled science to make enormous strides in the understanding of the material universe. But by virtue of its success, measurement has become a kind of scientific idol. The result is an attitude on the part of many scientists of not only scepticism but outright rejection of what cannot be measured. It is as if they were to say, ‘What we cannot measure, we cannot know; there is no point in worrying about what we cannot know; therefore, what cannot be measured is unimportant and unworthy of our observation’. Because of this attitude many scientists exclude from their serious consideration all matters that are - or seem to be - intangible. Including, of course, the matter of God.
Page 244
The church has been a bit more broad-minded. To the religious establishment what cannot be understood in terms of known natural law is a miracle, and miracles do exist. But beyond authenticating their existence, the church has not been anxious to look at miracles very closely. ‘Miracles need not be scientifically examined’ has been the prevailing religious attitude. ‘They should simply be accepted as acts of God’. The religious have not wanted their religion shaken by science, just as the scientific have not wanted their science to be shaken by religion.
Page 258
While I have personally not experienced this, I have several friends who have witnessed automobile accidents in which ‘victims’, have crawled virtually intact out of vehicles smashed beyond recognition. Their reaction has been one of pure amazement. ‘I don’t see how anyone could have survived such a wreck at all, much less without serious injury!’ is the pronouncement. How do we explain this? Pure chance? These friends, who are not religious people, were amazed precisely because chance did not seem to be involved in these incidents. ‘No one could have survived’, they say. Although not religious, and without even thinking deeply about what they were saying, in attempting to digest these experiences my friends made such remarks as ‘Well, I guess God loves drunks’ or ‘I guess his number wasn’t up yet’. The reader may choose to assign the mystery of such incidents to ‘pure chance,’ an unexplainable ‘quirk’ or a ‘twist of fate’ and be satisfied thus to close the door on further exploration. If we are to examine such incidents further, however, our concept of an instinct to explain them is not terribly satisfactory. Does the inanimate machinery of a motor vehicle possess an instinct to collapse itself in just such a manner as to preserve the contours of the human body within? Or does the human being possess an instinct at the moment of impact to conform his contours to the pattern of the collapsing machinery? Such questions seem in¬ herently absurd. While I choose to explore further the possibility that such incidents have an explanation, it is clear that our traditional concept of instinct will not be of help. Of more assistance perhaps will be the concept of synchron-
Page 263
moment, for which no physical cause had ever been found. Because of this sensation of dizziness she walked with a straight-legged, wide-based gait, almost a waddle. She was quite intelligent and charming, and initially I had no idea as to what might be causing her dizziness, of which psycho¬ therapy of some years’ duration had failed to cure her, but for which she had nonetheless recently come to me for assistance. In the middle of our third session, as she was comfortably seated and talking about this or that, a single word suddenly popped into my mind: ‘Pinocchio’. I was trying to concentrate on what my patient was saying, so I immediately pushed the word out of consciousness. But within a minute, despite myself, the word came back into my mind, almost visible, as if spelled out in the back of my eyes: pinocchio. Annoyed now, I blinked my eyes and forced my attention back to my patient. Yet, as if it had a will of its own, within another minute the word was back into my awareness, somehow demanding to be recognised. ‘Wait a second,’ I finally said to myself, ‘if this word is so anxious to get into my mind, maybe I’d better damn well pay attention to it, because I know these things can be important, and I know if my unconscious is trying to say something to me I ought to listen to it.’ So I did. ‘Pinocchio! What the hell could Pinocchio mean? You don’t suppose it could have anything to do with my patient, do you? You don’t suppose she’s Pinocchio, is she? Hey, wait a minute; she’s cute, like a little doll. She’s dressed in red, white and blue. Each time she’s been here she’s been dressed in red, white and blue. She walks funnily, like a stiff-legged wooden soldier. Hey, that’s it! She’s a puppet. By God, she is Pinocchio! She’s a puppet!’ Instantly the essence of the patient was revealed to me: she was not a real person; she was a stiff, wooden little puppet trying to act alive but afraid that at any moment she would topple over and collapse in a tangle of sticks and strings. One by one the supporting facts rapidly emerged: an incredibly domineering mother who pulled strings, who took great pride in having toilet-trained her daughter
Page 270
nucleic acid codes within cells. The concept of chemical storage of information allows us to begin to understand how the information potentially available to the human mind might be stored in a few cubic inches of brain substance. But even this extraordinary sophisticated model, allowing for the storage of inherited as well as experiential knowledge in a small space, leaves unanswered the most mind-boggling questions. When we speculate on the technology of such a model - how it might be constructed, how synchronised, and so on - we are still left standing in total awe before the phenomenon of-^the human mind. Speculation on these matters is hardly different in quality from speculation about such models of cosmic control as God having at His command armies and choirs of archangels, angels, seraphims and cherubims to assist Him in the task of ordering the universe. The mind, which sometimes presumes to believe that there is no such thing as a miracle, is itself a miracle. *
Page 279
Yet we cannot even locate this force. We have said only where it is not: residing in human consciousness. Then, where does it reside? Some of the phenomena we have discussed, such as dreams, suggest that grace resides in the unconscious mind of the individual. Other phenomena, such as synchronicity and serendipity, indicate this force to exist beyond the boundaries of the single individual. It is not simply because we are scientists that we have difficulty locating grace. The religious, who, of course, ascribe the origins of grace to God, believing it to be literally God’s love, have through the ages had the same difficulty locating God. There are within theology two lengthy and opposing traditions in this regard: one, the doctrine of Emanance, which holds that grace emanates down from an external God to men; the other, the doctrine of Immanence, which holds that grace immanates out from the God within the centre of man’s being.
Page 280
cannot be both. Ships are ships and not shoes. I am I and you are you. The I-entity is my identity and the you-entity is your identity, and we tend to be quite discomfited if our identities become mixed up or confused. As we have previously noted, Hindu and Buddhist thinkers believe our perception of discrete entities to be illusion, or maya, and modem physicists, concerned with relativity, wave-particle phenomena, electro¬ magnetism, etc., are becoming increasingly aware of the limitations of our Conceptual approach in terms of entities. But it is hard to escape from. Our tendency to entity-thinking compels us to want to locate things, even such things as God or grace and even when we know our tendency is interfering with our comprehension of these matters.
Page 280
I attempt not to think of the individual as a true entity at all, and insofar as my intellectual limitations compel me to think (or write) in terms of entities, I conceive of the boundaries of the individual as being marked by a most permeable membrane - a fence, if you will, instead of a wall; a fence through which, under which and over which other ‘entities’ may climb, crawl or flow. Just as our conscious mind is continually partially permeable to our unconscious, so is our unconscious permeable to the ‘mind’ without, the ‘mind’ that permeates us yet is not us as entities. More elegantly and adequately descriptive of the situation than the twentieth-century scientific language of permeable membranes is the fourteenth-century (r. 1393) religious language of Dame Julian, an anchoress of Norwich, describing the relationship between grace and the indi¬ vidual entity: ‘For as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin and the bones in the flesh and the heart in the whole, so are we, soul and body, clad in the goodness of God and enclosed. Yea, and more homely; for all these may wear and waste away, but the Goodness of God is ever whole.’*
Page 287
To explain the miracles of grace and evolution we hypothesise the existence of a God who wants us to grow - a God who loves us. To many this hypothesis seems too simple, too easy; too much like fantasy; childlike and naive. But what else do we have? To ignore the data by using tunnel vision is not an answer. We cannot obtain an answer by not asking the questions. Simple though it may be, no one who has observed the data and asked the questions has been able to produce a better hypothesis or even really a hypothesis at all. Until someone does, we are stuck with this
Page 288
strangely childlike notion of a loving God or else with a theoretical vacuum.
Page 288
And if we take it seriously, we are going to find that this simple notion of a loving God does not make for an easy philosophy.
Page 288
If we postulate that our capacity to love, this urge to grow and evolve, is somehow ‘breathed into’ us by God, then we must ask to what end. Why does God want us to grow? What are we growing toward? Where is the end point, the goal of evolution? What is it that God wants of us? It is not my intention here Jo become involved in theological niceties, and I hope the scholarly will forgive me if I cut through all the ifs, ands, and buts of proper speculative theology. For no matter how much we may like to pussyfoot around it, all of us who postulate a loving God and really think about it eventually come to a single terrifying idea: God wants us to become Himself (or Herself or Itself). We are growing toward godhood. God is the goal of evolution. It is God who is the source of the evolutionary force and God who is the destination. This is what we mean when we say the He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.
Page 288
When I said that this is a terrifying idea I was speaking mildly. It is a very old idea, but, by the millions, we run away from it in sheer panic. For no idea ever came to the mind of man which places upon us such a burden. It is the single most demanding idea in the history of mankind. Not because it is difficult to conceive; to the contrary, it is the essence of simplicity. But because if we believe it, it then demands from us all that we can possibly give, all that we have. It is one thing to believe in a nice old God who will take good care of us from a lofty position of power which we ourselves could never begin to attain. It is quite another to believe in a God whp has it in mind for us precisely that we should attain His position, His power, His wisdom, His identity. Were we to believe it possible for man to become God, this belief by its very nature would place upon us an obligation to attempt to attain the possible. But we do not
Page 289
want this obligation. We don’t want to have to work that hard. We don’t want God’s responsibility. We don’t want the responsibility of having to think all the time. As long as we can believe that godhood is an impossible attainment for ourselves, we don’t have to worry about our spiritual growth, we don’t have to push ourselves to higher and higher levels of consciousness and loving activity; we can relax and just be human. If God’s in his heaven and we’re down here, and never the twain shall meet, we can let Him have all the responsibility for evolution and the directorship of the universe. We can do our bit toward assuring ourselves a comfortable old age, hopefully complete with healthy, happy and grateful children and grandchildren; but beyond that we need not bother ourselves. These goals are difficult enough to achieve, and hardly to be disparaged. Nonethe¬ less, as soon as we believe it is possible for man to become God, we can really never rest for long, never say, ‘OK, my job is finished, my work is done’. We must constantly push ourselves to greater and greater wisdom, greater and greater effectiveness. By this belief we will have trapped ourselves, at least until death, on an effortful treadmill of selfimprovement and spiritual growth. God’s responsibility must be our own. It is no wonder that the belief in the possibility of Godhead is repugnant.
Page 289
The idea that God is actively nurturing us so that we might grow up to be like Him brings us face to face with our own laziness.
Page 291
The key issue lies in what is missing. The story suggests that God was in the habit of ‘walking in the garden in the cool of the day’ and that there were open channels of communication between Him and man. But if this was so, then why was it that Adam and Eve, separately or together, before or after the serpent’s urging, did not say to God, ‘We’re curious as to why You don’t want us to eat any of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We really like it here, and we don’t want to seem ungrateful, but Your law on this matter doesn’t make much sense to us, and we’d really appreciate it if you explained it to us’? But of course they did not say this. Instead they went ahead and broke God’s law without ever understanding the reason behind the law, without taking the effort to challenge God directly, question His authority or even communicate with Him on a reasonably adult level. They listened to the serpent, but they failed to get God’s side of the story before they acted.
Page 291
Why this failure? Why was no step taken between the temptation and the action? It is this missing step that is the essence of sin. The step missing is the step of debate. Adam and Eve could have set up a debate between the serpent and God, but in failing to do so they failed to obtain God’s side of the question. The debate between the serpent and God is symbolic of the dialogue between good and evil which can and should occur within the minds of human beings. Our failure to conduct - or to conduct fully and wholeheartedly - this internal debate between good and evil is the cause of those evil actions that constitute sin. In debating the wisdom of a proposed course of action, human beings routinely fail to obtain God’s side of the issue. They fail to consult or
Page 292
listen to the God within them, the knowledge of rightness which inherendy resides within the minds of all mankind. We make this failure because we are lazy. It is work to hold these internal debates. They require time and -energy just to conduct them. And if we take them seriously - if we seriously listen to this ‘God within us’ - we usually find ourselves being urged to take the more difficult path, the path of more effort rather than less. To conduct the debate is to open ourselves to suffering and struggle. Each and every one of us, more or less frequently, will hold back from this work, will also seek to avoid this painful step. Like Adam and Eve, 'and every one of our ancestors before us, we are all lazy.
Page 292
Some readers may say to themselves, ‘But I’m not lazy. I work sixty hours a week at my job. In the evenings and on the weekends, even though I’m tired, I extend myself to go out with my spouse, take the children to the zoo, help with the housework, do any number of chores. Sometimes it seems that’s all I do - work, work, work’. I can sympathise with these readers but can persist only in pointing out that they will find laziness within themselves if they look for it. For laziness takes forms other than that related to the bare number of hours spent on the job or devoted to one’s responsibilities to others. A major form that laziness takes is fear. The myth of Adam and Eve can again be used to illustrate this. One might say, for instance, that it was not laziness that prevented Adam and Eve from questioning God as to the reasons behind His law but fear - fear in the
Page 293
face of the awesomeness of God, fear of the wrath of God. But while all fear is not laziness, much fear is exactly that. Much of our fear is fear of a change in the status quo, a fear that we might lose what we have if we venture forth from where we are now. In the section on discipline I spoke of the fact that people find new information distinctly threatening, because if they incorporate it they will have to do a good deal of work to revise their maps of reality, and they instinctively seek to avoid that work. Consequently, more often than not they will fight against the new information rather than for its assimilation. Their resistance is motivated by fear, yes, but the basis of their fear is laziness; it is the fear of the work they would have to do. Similarly, in the section on love I spoke of the risks of extending ourselves into new territory, new commitments and responsibilities, new relationships and levels of existence. Here again the risk is of the loss of the status quo, and the fear is of the work involved in arriving at a new status quo. So it is quite probable that Adam and Eve were afraid of what might happen to them if they were to openly question God; instead they attempted to take the easy way out, the illegitimate shortcut of sneakiness, to achieve knowledge not worked for, and hope they could get away with it. But they did not. To question God may let us in for a lot of work. But a moral of the story is that it must be done.
Page 301
But we still have not explained how it is that the unconscious possesses all this knowledge which we have not yet consciously learned. Here again the question is so basic that we have no scientific answer. Again we can only hypothesise. And again I know of no hypothesis as satisfac¬ tory as the postulation of a God who is intimately associated with us - so intimately that He is part of us. If you want to know the closest place to look for grace, it is within yourself. If you desire wisdom greater than your own, you can find it inside you. What this suggests is that the interface between God and man is at least in part the interface between our unconscious and our conscious. To put it plainly, our unconscious is God. God within us. We were part of God all the time. God has been with us all along, is now, and always will be.
Page 301
How can this be? If the reader is horrified by the notion that our unconscious is God, he or she should recall that it is hardly a heretical concept, being in essence the same as the Christian concept of the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit which resides in us all. I find it most helpful to understand this relationship between God and ourselves by thinking of our unconscious as a rhizome, or incredibly large and rich hidden root system, which nourishes the dny plant of consciousness sprouting visibly from it. I am indebted for this analogy to Jung, who, describing himself as ‘a splinter of the infinite deity’, went on to say:
Page 302
Jung never went quite so far as to actually state that God existed in the unconscious, although his writings clearly pointed in that direction. What he did do was to divide the unconscious into the more superficial, individual ‘personal unconscious’ and the deeper ‘collective unconscious’ that is common to mankind. In my vision the collective unconscious is God; the conscious is man as individual; and the personal unconscious is the interface between them. Being this interface, it is inevitable that the personal unconscious should be a place of some turmoil, the scene of some struggle between God’s will and the will of the individual. I have previously described the unconscious as a benign and loving realm. This I believe it to be. But dreams, though they contain messages of loving wisdom, also contain many signs of conflict; while they may be pleasandy self-renewing, they may also be tumultuous, frightening nightmares. Because of this tumultuousness, mental illness has been localised in the unconscious by most thinkers, as if the unconscious were the seat of psychopath¬ ology and symptoms were like subterranean demons that surface to bedevil the individual. As I have already said, my own view is the opposite. I believe that the conscious is the seat of psychopathology and that mental disorders are disorders of consciousness. It is because our conscious self resists our unconscious wisdom that we become ill. It is precisely because our consciousness is disordered that conflict occurs between it and the unconscious which seeks to heal it. In other words, mental illness occurs when the conscious will of the individual
Page 303
deviates substantially from the will of God, which is the individual’s own unconscious will.
Page 303
I have said that the ultimate goal of spiritual growth is for the individual to become as one with God. It is to know with God. Since the unconscious is God all along, we may further define the goal of spiritual growth to be the attainment of godhood by the conscious self. It is for the individual to become totally, wholly God. Does this mean that the goal is for the conscious to merge with the unconscious, so that all is unconsciousness? Hardly. We now come to the point of it all. The point is to become God while preserving consciousness. If the bud of consciousness that grows from the rhizome of the unconscious God can become itself God, then God will have assumed a new life form. This is the meaning of our individual existence. We are bom that we might become, as a conscious individual, a new life form of God.
Page 303
The conscious is the executive part of our total being. It is the conscious that makes decisions and translates them into action. Were we to become all unconscious, we would be indeed like the newborn infant, one with God but incapable of any action that might make the presence of God felt in the world. As I have mentioned, there is a regressive quality to the mystical thought of some Hindu or Buddhist theology, in which the status of the infant without ego boundaries is compared to Nirvana and the goal of entering Nirvana seems similar to the goal of returning to the womb. The goal of theology presented here, and that of most mystics, is exactly the opposite. It is not to become an egoless, unconscious babe. Rather it is to develop a mature, conscious ego which then can become the ego of God. If as adults, walking around on two legs, capable of making independent choices that influence the world, we can identify our mature free will with that of God, then God will have assumed through our conscious ego a new and potent life form. We will have become God’s agent, his arm, so to speak, and therefore part of Him. And insofar as we might
Page 304
then through our conscious decisions be able to influence the world according to His will our lives themselves will become the agents of God’s grace. We ourselves will then have become one form of the grace of God, working on His behalf among mankind, creating love where love did not exist before, pulling our fellow creatures up to our own level of awareness, pushing the plane of human evolution forward.
Page 307
The experience of spiritual power is basically a joyful one. There is a joy that comes with mastery. Indeed, there is no greater satisfaction than that of being an expert, of really knowing what we are doing. Those who have grown the most spiritually are those who are the experts in living. And there is yet another joy, even greater. It is the joy of communion with God. For when we truly know what we are doing, we are participating in the omniscience of God. With total awareness of the nature of a situation, of our motives for acting upon it, and of the results and ramifications of our action, we have attained that level of awareness that we normally expect only of God. Our conscious self has succeeded in coming into alignment with the mind of God. We know with God.
Page 307
Yet those who have attained this stage of spiritual growth, this state of great awareness, are invariably possessed by a joyful humility. For one of their very awarenesses is the awareness that their unusual wisdom has its origin in their unconscious. They are aware of their connection to the rhizome and aware that their knowledge flows to them from the rhizome through the connection. Their efforts at learning are only efforts to open the connection, and they are aware that the rhizome, their unconscious, is not theirs alone but all mankind’s, all life’s, God’s. Invariably when asked the source of their knowledge and power, the truly powerful will reply: ‘It is not my power. What little power I have is but a minute expression of a far greater power. I am merely a conduit. It is not my power at all’. I have said that this humility is joyful. That is because, with their awareness of their connectedness to God, the truly powerful experi¬ ence a diminution in their sense of self. ‘Let thy will, not mine, be done. Make me your instrument’, is their only desire. Such a loss of self brings with it always a kind of calm ecstasy, not unlike the experience of being in love. Aware of their intimate connectedness to God, they experience a surcease of loneliness. There is communion.
Page 308
Joyful though it is, the experience of spiritual power is also terrifying. For the greater one’s awareness, the more difficult it is to take action. I mentioned this fact at the conclusion of the first part when I gave the analogy of two generals, each having to make the decision of whether or not to commit a division to battle. The one who regards his division simply and solely as a unit of strategy may sleep easily after having made his decision. But for the other, with his awareness of each of the lives of the men under his command, the decision will be agonising. We are all generals. Whatever action we take may influence the course of civilisation. The decision whether to praise or punish "a single child may have vast consequences. It is easy to act with the awareness of limited data and let the chips fall as they may. The greater our awareness, however, the more and more data we must assimilate and integrate into our decision-making. The more we know, the more complex decisions become. Yet the more and more we know, the more it begins to become possible to predict just where the chips will fall. If we assume the responsibility of attempting to predict accurately just where each chip will fall, we are likely to feel so overwhelmed by the complexity of the task as to sink into inaction. But, then, inaction is itself a form of action, and while doing nothing might be the best course of action under certain circumstances, in others it may be disastrous and destructive. So spiritual power is not simply awareness; it is the capacity to maintain one’s ability to still make decisions with greater and greater awareness. And godlike power is the power to make decisions with total awareness. But unlike the popular notion of it, omniscience does not make decision-making easier; rather, it becomes ever more difficult. The closer one comes to godhood, the more one feels sympathy for God. To participate in God’s omniscience is also to share His agony.
Page 309
there is a similarity, in at least one dimension, between spiritual and political power. Someone who is approaching the peak of spiritual evolution is like someone at the peak of political power. There is no one above to whom to pass the buck; no one to blame; no one to tell you how to do it. There may not even be anyone on the same level to share the agony or the responsibility. Others may advise, but the decision is yours alone. You alone are responsible. In another dimen¬ sion, the aloneness of enormous spiritual power is even greater than that of political power. Since their level of awareness is seldom as high as their exalted positions, the politically powerful almost always have their spiritual equals with whom they can communicate. So presidents and kings will have their friends and cronies. But the person who has evolved to the highest level of awareness, of spiritual power, will likely have no one in his or her circle of acquaintances with whom to share such depth of understanding. One of the most poignant themes of the Gospels is Christ’s continual sense of frustration on finding that there was no one who could really understand him. No matter how hard he tried, how much he extended himself, he could not lift the minds of even his own disciples to his level. The wisest followed him but could not catch up with him, and all his love could not relieve him of the necessity to lead by walking ahead, utterly alone. This kind of aloneness is ‘shared’ by all who travel the farthest on the journey of spiritual growth. It is such a burden that it simply could not be borne were it not for the fact that as we outdistance our fellow humans our relationship to God inevitably becomes correspondingly closer. In the communion of growing consciousness, of knowing with God, there is enough joy to sustain us.
Page 310
A number of seemingly disparate statements have been made about the nature of mental health and illness: ‘Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering’; ‘Mental health is dedication to reality at all costs’; and ‘Mental illness occurs when the conscious will of the individual substantially deviates from the will of God, which is his or her own unconscious will’. Let us now examine the issue of mental illness more closely and unite these elements into a coherent whole.
Page 313
There are several ways to look at this rather typical case. Betsy’s anxiety attacks were clearly a form of agoraphobia (literally, fear of the marketplace, but usually fear of open spaces), and for her represented a fear of freedom. She had them when she was outside, unhindered by her husband, free to move about and relate with others. Fear of freedom was the essence of her mental illness. Some might say that the anxiety attacks, representing her fear of freedom, were her illness. But I have found it more useful and enlightening to look at things another way. For Betsy’s fear of freedom long predated her anxiety attacks. It was because of this fear that she had left college and had begun the process of constricting her development. In my judgment Betsy was ill at that time, three years before her symptoms began. Yet she was not aware of her illness or of the damage she was doing to herself by her self-constriction. It was her symptoms, these anxiety attacks which she did not want and had not asked for, which she felt had ‘cursed’ her ‘out of the blue’, that made her finally aware of her illness and forced her to set out upon the path of self-correction and growth. I believe that this pattern holds true for most mental illness. The symptoms and the illness are not the same thing. The illness exists long before the symptoms. Rather than being the illness, the symptoms are the beginning of its cure. The fact that they are unwanted makes them all the more a phenomenon of grace - a gift of God, a message from the unconscious, if you will, to initiate selfexamination and repair.
Page 317
Those who have faced their mental illness, accepted total responsibility for it, and made the necessary changes in themselves to overcome it, find themselves not only cured and free from the curses of their childhood and ancestry but also find themselves living in a new and different world. What they once perceived as problems they now perceive as opportunities. What were once loathsome barriers are now welcome challenges. Thoughts previously unwanted become helpful insights; feelings previously disowned become sources of energy and guidance. Occurrences that once seemed to be burdens now seem to be gifts, including the very symptoms from which they have recovered. ‘My depression and my anxiety attacks were the best things that ever happened to me’, they will routinely say at the termination of successful therapy. Even if they emerge from therapy without a belief in God, such successful patients still generally do so with a very real sense that they have been touched by grace.
Page 321
I have come to believe and have tried to demonstrate that people’s capacity to love, and hence their will to grow, is nurtured not only by the love of their parents during childhood but also throughout their lives by grace, or God’s love. This is a powerful force external to their consciousness which operates through the agency of their own uncon¬ scious as well as through the agency of loving persons other than their parents and through additional ways which we do not understand. It is because of grace that it is possible for people to transcend the traumas of loveless parenting and become themselves loving individuals who have risen far above their parents on the scale of human evolution. Why, then, do only some people spiritually grow and evolve beyond the circumstances of their parentage? I believe that grace is available to everyone, that we are all cloaked in the love of God, no one less nobly than another. The only answer I can give, therefore, is that most of us choose not to heed the call of grace and to reject its assistance. Christ’s assertion ‘Many are called, but few are chosen’ I would translate to mean ‘All of us are called by and to grace, but few of us choose to listen to the call’.
Page 322
And so it is with spiritual growth as well as in professional life. For the call to grace is a promotion, a call to a position of higher responsibility and power. To be aware of grace, to personally experience its constant presence, to know one’s nearness to God, is to know and continually experience an inner tranquillity and peace that few possess. On the other hand, this knowledge and awareness brings with it an enormous responsibility. For to experience one’s closeness to God is also to experience the obligation to be God, to be the agent of His power arid love. The call to grace is a call to a life of effortful caring, to a life of service and whatever
Page 324
could, pointing out to her that the reason she had felt so well was that for the first time in dealing with her family she was in a position of power, being aware of all their distorted communications and the devious ways in which they attempted to manipulate her into fulfilling their unrealistic demands, and therefore she was able to be on top of the situation. I told her that as she was able to extend this type of awareness to other situations she would find herself increasingly on ‘top of things’ and therefore experiencing that good feeling more and more frequently. She looked at me with the beginning of a sense of horror. ‘But that would require me to be thinking all the time!’ she said. I agreed with her that it was through a lot of thinking that her power would evolve and be maintained, and that she would be rid of the feeling of powerlessness at the root of her depression. She became furious. ‘I don’t want to have to think all the goddamn time,’ she roared. ‘I didn’t come here for my life to be made more difficult. I want to be able to just relax and enjoy myself. You expect me to be some sort of god or something!’ Sad to say, it was shortly afterward that this potentially brilliant woman terminated treatment, far short of being healed, terrified of the demands that mental health would require of her.
Page 326
We have spoken in various ways about how difficult it is to grow up. A very few march unambivalendy and un¬ hesitatingly intti adulthood, ever eager for new and greater responsibilities. Most drag their feet and in fact never become more than partial adults, always shrinking from the demands of total adulthood. So it is with spiritual growth, which is inseparable from the process of psychological maturation. For the call to grace in its ultimate form is a summons to be one with God, to assume peership with God. Hence it is a call to total adulthood. We are accustomed to imagining'the experience of conversion or sudden call to grace as an ‘Oh, joy!’ phenomenon. In my experience, more often than not it is, at least partially, an ‘Oh, shit’ phenomenon. At the moment we finally listen to the call we may say, ‘Oh, thank you, Lord’; or we may say, ‘O Lord, I am not worthy’; or we may say, ‘O Lord, do I have to?’
Page 328
At the same time, however, I know that that’s not the way it is at all. We do not come to grace; grace comes to us. Try as we might to obtain grace, it may yet elude us. We may seek it not, yet it will find us. Consciously we may avidly desire the spiritual life but then discover all manner of stumbling blocks in our way. Or we may have seemingly little taste for the spiritual life and yet find ourselves vigorously called to it in spite of ourselves. While on one level we do choose whether or not to heed the call of grace, on another it seems clear that God is the one who does the choosing. The common experience of those who have achieved a state of grace, on whom ‘this new life from heaven’ has been bestowed, is one of amazement at their condition. They do not feel that they have earned it. While they may have a realistic awareness of the particular
Page 329
How do we resolve this paradox? We don’t. Perhaps the best that we can say is that while we cannot will ourselves to grace, we can by will open ourselves to its miraculous coming. We can prepare ourselves to be fertile ground, a welcoming place. If we can make ourselves into totally disciplined, wholly loving individuals, then, even though we may be ignorant of theology and give no thought to God, we will have prepared ourselves well for the coming of grace. Conversely, the study of theology is a relatively poor method of preparation and, by itself, completely useless. Nonethe¬ less, I have written this section because I do believe that the awareness of the existence of grace can be of considerable assistance to those who have chosen to travel the difficult path of spiritual growth. For this awareness will facilitate their journey in at least three ways: it will help them to take advantage of grace along the way; it will give them a surer sense of direction; and it will provide encouragement.
Page 331
A major purpose of this section on grace has been to assist those on the journey of spiritual growth to learn the capacity of serendipity. And let us redefine serendipity not as a gift itself but as a learned capacity to recognise and utilise the gifts of grace which are given to us from beyond the realm of our conscious will. With this capacity, we will find that our journey of spiritual growth is guided by the invisible hand and unimaginable wisdom of God with infinitely greater accuracy than that of which our unaided conscious will is capable. So guided, the journey becomes ever faster.
Page 332
every inch of the way and have it demonstrated to them that each step will be safe and worth their while. This cannot be done. For the journey of spiritual growth requires courage and initiative and independence of thought and action. While the words of the prophets and the assistance of grace are available, the journey must still be travelled alone. No teacher can carry you there. There are no preset formulas. Rituals are only learning aids, they are not the learning. Eating organic food, saying five Hail Marys before break¬ fast, praying facing east or west, or going to church on Sunday will not take you to your destination. No words can be said, no teaching can be taught that will relieve spiritual travellers from the necessity of picking their own ways, working out with effort and anxiety their own paths through the unique circumstances of their own lives toward the identification of their individual selves with God.
Page 333
Yet it is that same science that has in certain ways assisted me to perceive the reality of the phenomenon of grace. I have attempted to transmit that perception. For once we perceive the reality of grace, our understanding of ourselves as meaningless and insignificant is shattered. The fact that there exists beyond ourselves and our conscious will a powerful force that nurtures our growth and evolution is enough to turn our notions of self-insignificance topsy¬ turvy. For the existence of this force (once we perceive it) indicates with incontrovertible certainty that our human spiritual growth is of the utmost importance to something greater than ourselves. This something we call God. The existence of grace is prima facie evidence not only of the reality of God but also of the reality that God’s will is devoted to the growth of the individual human spirit. What once seemed to be a fairy tale turns out to be the reality. We live our lives in the eye of God, and not at the periphery but at the centre of His vision, His concern. It is probable that the universe as we know it is but a single stepping-stone toward the entrance to the Kingdom of God. But we are hardly lost in the universe. To the contrary, the reality of grace indicates humanity to be at the centre of the universe. This time and space exists for us to travel through. When my patients lose sight of their significance and are disheartened by the effort of the work we are doing, I sometimes tell them that the human race is in the midst of making an evolution¬ ary leap. ‘Whether or not we succeed in that leap,’ I say to them, ‘is your personal responsibility.’ And mine. The universe, this stepping-stone, has been laid down to prepare a way for us. But we ourselves must step across it, one by one. Through grace we are helped not to stumble and through grace we know that we are being welcomed. What more can we ask?
Page 342
To a Dancing God, by Sam Keen, copyright © 1970 by Sam Keen. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.
