Category Archives: religion

Thoughts about the “Saved vs. Unsaved” Paradigm

Now I’m not going to dismiss the “Saved/Unsaved” notion. Christianity is part of our world culture and “saved/unsaved” is part of Christian tradition. I’m just much less certain about use of the idea and have deep-seated convictions that it is usually merely a means of the ego to trot out one of its favorite paradigms, “Us” vs. “Them.” You see, drawing distinctions is one of the earliest developments in the human psyche and is absolutely necessary if an ego is to emerge. The determination of “self” vs. “not-self” is an intrinsic part of the operation. If we never learn to draw a distinction between our self and that which is “not-self” we will have grave problems to say the least. In fact, many of the behavioral problems that mental health professionals deal with are boundary issues stemming from an impaired ability to draw that distinction.

And I have faint memories of learning to draw this distinction. And I know from my clinical work that the toddler’s discover of the word “No” is a key hallmark of this step in development and is an essential step in determining “self” vs. “not-self”. I remember very well the comfort in knowing that there was an “us”…meaning my particular family…and that we were separate and distinct from “them.” I also remember when this “us-them” paradigm began to grow in power in my life and when I learned that “saved-unsaved” was one of the primary ways in which the world was divided up. In fact, in that mindset, it was the most fundamental and most important division as it determined who was going to heaven and who was going to hell, who was “right” and who was “wrong.”

But what I now see is the ego reward that came with imposing that template on the world. It was exhilarating to know that I was part of “us” and that “them” did not belong there. And, yes I was horrified to know that, nevertheless, “them” would eventually burn for eternity in hell. ( I guess on some level I was really pleased that it wouldn’t be me though! I definitely took some satisfaction that “one of these days” God was “gonna kick ass” on all those rotten sinners!)

As I grew up this religious ardor diminished but for decades I know that whether or not anybody I met was “saved” or “unsaved” was an immediate issue. It was a template that I imposed on everyone, reflecting that deep-seated need to maintain a primary perceptual grasp of the world, I was “us” and they were “them.” And this also paralleled my view of the very world itself, the whole of God’s kingdom, flora and fauna. I was separate and distinct from “it” and did not see it as a matrix which ultimately was an integral part of God’s granting of my very existence.

In my participation in the blog-o-sphere the past two years or so I have met many conservative, evangelical Christians who, though more conservative than myself, demonstrate less rigidity in their faith and offer love and acceptance more readily. One in particular even had the audacity to discourse about lessons he had learned from atheists he had met. (Check out T. E. Hanna, http://ofdustandkings.com/author/TEHanna/) Hanna’s stance is that when a Christian meets an atheist, he should not immediately go into overdrive with, “Uh oh. He’s going to hell. How do I get him saved?” His attitude is to accept the person as he is, accept him lovingly and unconditionally, and not assume that it is his responsibility to cajole, intimidate, and manipulate that person into becoming a Christian. I think his attitude is like mine, that we should “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling” realizing that as we do this, God will take care of any converting that needs to take place. But when we are obsessed with “winning souls for Jesus”, we are often merely obsessed with making other people believe just as we do.

Neurophysiology and Political Beliefs

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Several times in recent days I have addressed the subject of purity and the problems it poses when it becomes an obsession. These obsessional purists eventually live in a bubble and seek to obliterate anyone who would deign to think or behave differently than they do. I have received some very interesting responses from this blog post, some of which provided further grist for my mill. One suggested a neurological dimension to the conservative mindset (see “neuro notes” on wordpress) which led to even further google exploration on my own. I am going to share with you an article from Mother Jones magazine which suggests that conservatism is not a function of reason as much as it is underlying neurophysiology. Now in fairness, by extension the same can be applied to a “liberal” mindset or any other mindset. Our “thinking” is not autonomous and “objective”. There is always an underlying neurological substrate that influences our thinking, our reasoning. This is related to an observation I have shared several times from a source I cannot recall, “Our thinking is the belated rationalization of conclusions to which we have already been led by our desires.”

Now, I know the terror that this strikes in some hearts. I know because I once lived there and recoiled when notions of this sort were proposed. These notions always brought to my mind the arch enemy of my conservative mind, “RELATIVISM!!!!” And relevant to this demonic buzzword, there was the fear that “nothing is real.”

I do not see it that way now. Yes, things are much more relative than I used to think and much more relative than they appear to most people, especially conservative extremists. But I do believe in an Ultimate and do so with great passion. I just don’t have as much confidence anymore in my ability, or the ability of any human, to grasp and understand and control that Ultimate with his/her mind. When we allow our spiritual exploration to take us beyond that neurological substrate, and beyond any other underpinnings that science might posit, we find a primordial emptiness (or Nothingness) and that is where faith is required, faith in the sense of hope. This emptiness is expressed in the Christian tradition as “kenosis” or “self-emptying.” This requires an humility which the ego finds repulsive.

This leaves us seeing our beautiful world “unreal” in ultimate terms. But it is the only reality we know (as in consciously “know”) and is very important as it is the means by which the Ultimate can begin its/His unfolding. This hidden world gives the “seen” world meaning and therefore allows Essential Beauty to become manifest.

I’m going to share some of the wisdom of Lao Tzu before I conclude with the Mother Jones article by Chris Mooney:

Thirty spokes are made one by holes in a hub,
By vacancies joining them for a wheel’s use;
The use of clay in moulding pitchers
Comes from the hollow of its absence;
Doors, windows, in a house,
Are used for their emptiness:
�Thus we are helped by what is not
To use what is

MOTHER JONES ARTICLE

The past two weeks have seen not one but two studies published in scientific journals on the biological underpinnings of political ideology. And these studies go straight at the role of genes and the brain in shaping our views, and even our votes.

First, in the American Journal of Political Science [1], a team of researchers including Peter Hatemi of Penn State University and Rose McDermott of Brown University studied the relationship between our deep-seated tendencies to experience fear—tendencies that vary from person to person, partly for reasons that seem rooted in our genes—and our political beliefs. What they found is that people who have more fearful disposition also tend to be more politically conservative, and less tolerant of immigrants and people of races different from their own. As McDermott carefully emphasizes, that does not mean that every conservative has a high fear disposition. “It’s not that conservative people are more fearful, it’s that fearful people are more conservative,” as she puts it [2].

I interviewed the paper’s lead author, Peter Hatemi, about his research for my 2012 book The Republican Brain. Hatemi is both a political scientist and also a microbiologist, and as he stressed to me, “nothing is all genes, or all environment.” These forces combine to make us who we are, in incredibly intricate ways.

And if Hatemi’s and McDermott’s research blows your mind, get this [3]: Darren Schreiber, a political neuroscientist at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, first performed brain scans on 82 people participating in a risky gambling task, one in which holding out for more money increases your possible rewards, but also your possible losses. Later, cross-referencing the findings with the participants’ publicly available political party registration information, Schreiber noticed something astonishing: Republicans, when they took the same gambling risk, were activating a different part of the brain than Democrats.

Republicans were using the right amygdala, the center of the brain’s threat response system. Democrats, in contrast, were using the insula, involved in internal monitoring of one’s feelings. Amazingly, Schreiber and his colleagues write that this test predicted 82.9 percent of the study subjects’ political party choices—considerably better, they note, than a simple model that predicts your political party affiliation based on the affiliation of your parents.

I also interviewed Schreiber for The Republican Brain. He’s a scientist who was once quite cautious about the relevance of brain studies to people’s politics. As he put it to me: “If you had called me four years ago and said, ‘What is your view on whether Republicans and Democrats have different brains?’ I would have said no.” Now, his own published research suggests otherwise.

The current research suggests not only that having a particular brain influences your political views, but also that having a particular political view influences your brain.

One again, though, there’s a critical nuance here. Schreiber thinks the current research suggests not only that having a particular brain influences your political views, but also that having a particular political view influences and changes your brain. The causal arrow seems likely to run in both directions—which would make sense in light of what we know about the plasticity of the brain. Simply by living our lives, we change our brains. Our political affiliations, and the lifestyles that go along with them, probably condition many such changes.

The two new studies described here are likely connected: It is hard not to infer that fear of outsiders or those different from you—along with greater fear dispositions in general—may be related to the role of amygdala, a brain structure that has been dubbed the “heart and soul of the fear system [4].” The amygdala has been repeatedly implicated in politics. Indeed, Schreiber’s research builds on prior brain studies: In a group of University College of London students, for instance, conservatives showed more gray matter [5] in the right amygdala.

So what’s the upshot? How about this: We need a much broader and more thoughtful discussion about what it means if political ideology turns out to be nothing like what we actually thought it was. Scientists working in this new field tend towards the conclusion that the new research should make us more tolerant, not less, of political difference—not to mention a whole lot more humble about our own deeply held beliefs.

(For additional information of the neuroscience of political belief systems, please google Jonathan Haidt for several very interesting and provocative You Tube lectures. Also, please check out this You Tube post by Neuro Notes: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFnAN0Tb-Nc)

The Danger of “Purity”

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Several days ago I blogged about the TV series “Breaking Bad” and segued into human culture and its tendency to not allow this kind of self-criticism, which is especially so with hyper-conservative cultures. One reader posed the question about my particular culture (the United States), “How could purity be such an issue in a land of such conspicuous free speech?”

The answer lies in the human heart and its deep-seated and dark need to isolate in a particular mindset, to “know” the truth, to be ensconced in an autistic shell; and when anyone “knows” the truth in this way, then he/she must convince others of this same truth, even at the point of the sword! And that is the reason that in a land of free press an individual or group of individuals will not be content with his/her little universe that American freedom has granted him/her. The poison of his/her interiority is so pervasive, so rigorous, so lethal that it cannot be stopped and it must proselytize. It must spread like cancer.

Of course, this “knowledge” does not employ honest use of human reason. It is a fragile heart that has grasped at the Kierkegaardian “flotsam and jetsam” when overwhelmed by the vortex of meaninglessness….or, to be more precise, when unconsciously threatened by that vortex. This mindset never knows (consciously) the vortex and seeks to destroy any inkling of its existence, not just in its own heart but in the hearts of others also. Thus the demand for “purity”, “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

Some of my readers are from other cultures and may not follow American politics. But if you happen to do so, you know that this “purity” motif is really pronounced right now in the right-wing base of the conservative Republican party. This movement has coalesced in what is known as the “Tea Party” movement within the Republican Party and it is really posing a threat to that party and also to our government. Though it is relatively small, this party screams loudly and have managed to cower the leadership of the Republican party and to influence a broad spectrum of that party.

Related to the “purity” issue is the fear of having been “penetrated.” This fear of violation was most clearly articulated last year when Michelle Bachman (who I like to describe as “Michelle ‘Deep Penetration’ Bachman) raised the hackles even of her Republican party by arguing that Islamist extremist had “penetrated deeply” into our government. In this purity obsessed mindset, always rife with paranoia, any incursion of “difference” is seen as a threat, a threat that must be deterred and even obliterated. For if their purity is violated, it will shatter…in their estimation…like a fragile vase. I argue, on the other hand, that mature purity can withstand threats and survive with the ensuing ambivalence, not giving in to the temptations of impurity

This purity obsession is compensatory. It is a defense mechanism designed to block the ravaging impurity which lurks in the human heart and is feared by these extremists to be seeping out and threatening to overwhelm them. Karl Jung said, on the other hand, such impurity (which he called the shadow) is to be acknowledged, embraced even, and thus deprived of its power. And “embracing” this dark energy does not mean succumbing to it. Those who are most likely to succumb to it are those who resist it the most. As Jung put it, “What we resist, persists.”

“Breaking Bad” and our Collective Shadow

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I have recently been watching the first four seasons of Breaking Bad, finally relenting to the pressure of a good friend who insisted it was television at its finest. He was right. It is the most compelling television presentation I’ve ever seen. The story-line, the plot, the character-development, the acting, the directing, the cinematography is absolutely magnificent. I don’t watch a lot of popular television but once I started viewing this series, I could not stop and even now have embarked on the recently available season five.

BUT, this show is intensely disturbing and dark. Usually with a description like this I would refer to grisly violence and sexual perversion; and there is some violence but the real disturbing violence is psychological, emotional, and ultimately spiritual.

The story is about a benign…even lame…high school science teacher who learns he is dying of cancer and is going to leave his family nothing. He happens to be suddenly exposed to the world of methamphetamine manufacturing by his DEA brother-in-law and decides, “Hey, I can do that.” And he does. And he does it well.

From episode to episode he is lured down the dark path of drug culture though he always avoids use of the meth himself. But relentlessly he makes poor decisions which lead to other poor decisions which brings him to a point where he has gone over to the dark side…he has “broke bad”…even though he continues to have the façade of a middle class citizen who is recovering from cancer.

But Breaking Bad is not about the drug culture, nor is it a “made for tv” morality story. It is about human ugliness and the way in which good, upright people can suddenly find themselves in the middle of this “shadow side” of life through a series of unfortunate events, compounded by the willingness to forego moral principles. Early in the series I found myself asking, “Why am I watching this?” It was so disturbing, creating unrest in my heart that I usually find only with violence in movies.

As I paid attention to my reactions as I watched the series, I could not help but observe that many world cultures would not permit this kind of social analysis and criticism. The Taliban, for example, would never allow self-reflection of this sort to take place. In fact, ultra-conservative ideologies of all stripes would not allow such self-reflection and would radically extirpate the first hint of such a tendency. In fact, in all ultra-conservative extremency there is always a theme of “purity” which serves the purpose of keeping out this “shadow side” which our culture permits in shows like this and in the arts in general. (Anthropologist Mary Douglas and psychologist Julia Kristeva are two people who have addressed the problematic nature of this “purity” obsession.)

And, for all the problems that our culture does have, I feel that ultimately to own this “ugly” dimension of our experience, to articulate it through various forms of art, is to give vent to it. Otherwise, we always project it onto others, that ubiquitous “them” out there, that “barbarian horde” which is always threatening our perimeter. We fail to own up to the wisdom of Charlie Brown, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

My Paean to “Mindfulness” in the Blog-o-sphere!

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I love meeting “mind” and will share a Robert Frost poem on the matter. And by “mind” I don’t mean the routine, mechanized palaver, the “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness” (Conrad Aiken) but a “discerning” mind, one that is quickened by what I like to call the “Spirit of God”, one that is wry and witty, one that can “rock ‘n roll”, is even sarcastic on occasion and certainly ironic, one that can trot out an occasional “word fitly spoken”, and to sum it up, one that is “present”. And every time I stumble upon one of these “minds” I am given pause and say to myself, “Hey, let’s check this fellow (or fellow-ess) out! Somebody is home!” And this occasionally happens even with a five year old student. And even with my beloved dachshunds, Ludwig and Elsa, I often get the distinct impression that “Somebody is present here”. (But these doggies are going to have to hurry up and develop more fore brain capacity before they can offer me subtlety!)

Emily Dickinson described “a mind too near itself to see itself distinctly.” She was describing a mind that lacks these qualities, a mind too self-absorbed for the person to see beyond the end of his/her nose….or should I say “knows”? This self-absorbed mind lacks self-reflection without which there is no awareness.

And I have met many of these aforementioned “mindful” people and try to make sure I circulate in a circle where they are apt to be found. And I read literature by writers who are gifted with this quality. Movies and even television-shows can offer this god-given perspective if one is discriminating about his/her choices.

And in the past two years I have discovered that the blog-o-sphere is full of men and women who have this “Presence” and share from it daily. To you, my dear friends, I today doff my hat and thank you for all you have added to my life and continued to do so daily. You know who you are. You are a gift to me but also to your family, friends, and community. What I like to call “The Spirit of God” vibrates in your heart and therefore “winds of thought blow magniloquent meanings betwixt me and thee.” (Archibald MacLeish)

A CONSIDERABLE SPECK
By Robert Frost

A speck that would have been beneath my sight
On any but a paper sheet so white
Set off across what I had written there.
And I had idly poised my pen in air
To stop it with a period of ink,
When something strange about it made me think.
This was no dust spike by my breathing blown,
But unmistakenly a living mite
With inclinations it could call its own.
It paused as with suspicion of my pen,
And then came racing wildly on again
To where my manuscript was not yet dry;
Then paused again and either drank or smelt—
With loathing, for again it turned to fly.
Plainly with an intelligence I dealt.
It seemed too tiny to have room for feet,
Yet must have had a set of them complete
To express how much it didn’t want to die.
It ran with terror and with cunning crept.
It faltered: I could see it hesitate;
Then in the middle of the open sheet
Cower down in desperation to accept
Whatever I accorded it of fate.
I have none of the tenderer-than-thou
Collectivistic, regimenting love
With which the modern world is being swept.
But this poor microscopic item now!
Since it was nothing I knew evil of
I let it lie there till I hope it slept.

I have a mind myself and recognize
Mind when I meet with it in any guise.
No one can know how glad I am to find
On any sheet the least display of mind.

Thomas Merton and Humility

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Thomas Merton was such a gift to Christianity and to mankind as a whole. He had deep spiritual insight which has fallen on deaf ears in most instances as is usually the case with Truth. I often quote W. H. Auden on this note, “And Truth met him and held out her hand. And he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”

Here is a stirring observation by Merton:

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and absolute poverty is the pure Glory of God written in us, as our poverty, our indigence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it, we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that could make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.

As I copy this for you I am stirred once more. This is now added to my daily devotional. It is absolutely stirring and painfully humbling. I really like his conclusion, “I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.” We prefer a “program” as that is easier. A program offers “slam, bam, thank you ma’am” with everything written up neatly in a little syllogism. And when we can wrap spirituality up like that we have succeeded in co-opting God, in maintaining our illusion of supremacy under the guise of spirituality. If we look closely, with a discerning spirit (and practice “mindfulness”) we have to acknowledge, ‘Oh, this is all about me.”

I conclude with part of a stirring sonnet by John Masefield about this spiritual smugness:

How many ways, how many different times
The tiger mind has clutched at what it sought,
Only to prove supposed virtues crimes,
The imagined godhead but a form of thought.
How many restless brains have wrought and schemed,
Padding their cage, or built, or brought to law,
Made in outlasting brass the something dreamed,
Only to prove (itself) the thing held in awe.

My Periodic Rant about Paranoia

Meaning and Meaninglessness in Spirituality

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Richard Rohr writes powerfully and eloquently about the need to live in the domain of “duality” and recognize the specific relevance of the notion in the realm of spirituality. We do “see through a glass darkly” as the Apostle Paul once noted because this world we live in, which we daily imbibe (usually without any conscious awareness) is made up of infinite complexity, teeming with paradox stemming from this “duality.” One simple example is merely a favorite notion of mine, “We are not what we know ourselves to be. We are much more than that.” But being mere mortals, clothed in flesh, we have had to carve for ourselves an identity fashioned from the ephemeral so that we can function in this beautiful world, a world which…ephemeral thought it might be…is God’s creation.

As we pursue this path which Rohr and others suggest, we must “wrestle with words and meanings” (T. S. Eliot) and thus we dive headfirst into this maelstrom of ambiguity, confusion, doubt, and fear. This is because, here in this land banished from conscious awareness by our “common-sense” day-to-day world, we discover “meaning” and learn that “meaning” inevitably taunts us with “meaninglessness.”

Let me explain why with a simple philosophical maneuver. Imagine a world in which everything was colored blue. In that world, “blue” would therefore not exist for “blue” has no meaning without its complement, “not-blue.” Asking someone to pay attention to “blue” would be like asking a fish to see water.

And the whole of language lies in a similar matrix. However, I must insist that I don’t spent a lot of time wondering about the meaning of most words that I use! If I did, I would soon be swallowed up by an abyss and cease to be functional! I thank the good Lord for this neurological gift as some are not so fortunate. But some words I do deign to explore…to name just a few…god, love, truth, and “right”… and most importantly, in my case, deign to explore the word “Lewis”, the origin of Literary “Lew”. With each of these terms, which I have deemed significant, their complement (including opposite) has to be considered in order for the words to have meaning.

Let me close with an excerpt from W. H. Auden about this treacherous journey. The “Star of Nativity” is speaking his Auden’s Christmas Oratorio:

All those who follow me are led
Onto that glassy mountain where are no
Footholds for logic, to that Bridge of Dread,
Where knowledge but increases vertigo;
Those who pursue me take a twisting lone
To find themselves immediately alone
With savage water or unfeeling stone,
In labyrinths where they must entertain
Confusion, cripples, tigers, thunder, pain.

Thoreau’s version of, “Ye Must be Born Again”

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The first time literature spoke to me was in college when I was introduced to Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau voted with his feet that “modern” life was not accommodating to his soul, and so he retreated to the woods and sought authenticity, declaring, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

The notion of “not having lived” as one comes to the end of his life stunned me and did so because I saw its relevance to my life at age 21. And, I did not fully understand then why, but it immediately brought to my mind the famous words of Jesus, “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?” The “not having lived” of Thoreau and the “loss of soul” that Jesus spoke of were one and the same, but I could not really explain it at that point. The insight was intuitive.

Thoreau recognized that modern life was increasingly alienated, that it increasingly cut man off from nature and from himself, turning him into a cog in an industrial apparatus. Thorough intuitively knew what we have come to witness more overtly, that Western civilization was producing a culture of consumers, people whose modus operandi was “consuming”, or “getting stuff.” (And, if he were alive today, he would marvel at how prescient he had been.!) Jesus too recognized that mankind in his day were overly invested in the “stuff” of the day, though rampant consumerism had not blighted human consciousness yet. But he recognized that mankind was missing the point, that they were guilty of the sin of “misplaced concreteness” even then taking for real that which was only ephemeral. When Jesus taught, “Ye must be born again” he was telling us, “Hey, there is another dimension of life that you need to tap into. What you see is not all that there is. You are not all that you know yourself to be. You are more than that mere concept.”

The “Judgment of God” in Tandem with Grace

literary lew

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