Tag Archives: Martin Buber

Religious and Spiritual Addiction

I use the expression “drinking the Kool-aid” often to refer to those who have always carefully followed the dictates of the tribe and never left its “safe confines.” This is in reference to the hundreds of religious extremists in 1989 who followed the dictates of their leader, James Jones, and committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid in the Guyana, South Africa compound.

I admit that using the expression of “drinking the Kool-Aid” to describe those who simply follow the tribal dictates is a bit over the top and even “ugly.” As indicated yesterday, we must have people who follow these “dictates” and allow malcontents like myself to have such a good life. But the problem occurs when the human need to “belong” goes beyond the pale and an inordinate energy begins to constellate to maintain this sense of “belonging” or “tribal identity.” At this point the normal human need for group affiliation becomes poisoned and the need to affiliate with the world at large begins to be diminished and eventually even discouraged. Unconscious fears are then unleashed and then, with a leader who is in tune with these unconscious forces, ugly things can happen. Witness the aforementioned Jim Jones and Guyana Massacre.

What has happened in this scenario is that the need for group affiliation has become addictive and the reason this is so is because the members of the group have a deep-seated fear of the existential loneliness that haunts us all. That terror so grips them that they are willing to make horrible decisions to protect what I will call the “group lie”….even the decision to die or in some cases to kill others…rather than deal with the gamut of fears associated with this loneliness which dwell in all of our hearts.

And many noble truths can be present in a “group lie.” I think, for example, many expressions of this disease are found in my Christian faith, the best example immediately available being Westboro Baptist Church. These people have merely taken a noble spiritual tradition and used it to perpetuate their own private fantasy, giving no concern for the world outside of themselves and even contempt and scorn for that world.

This is religious addiction and religious addiction is one of the most pernicious forms of this mental illness as they “know” they are believing and doing the “right” thing. And it is their “knowledge” and “certainty” that is the basic problem. Reasoning with them is a waste of time. And I might add that this Westboro Baptist Church phenomena is reflective of the poison that is always a temptation with any belief system, certainly any spiritual tradition. Yes, even mine!

For, we are all addicts as psychologist Gerald May noted decades ago. My “guru” Richard Rohr has noted his own penchant for “thought addiction”, a malady that I wrestle with myself. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” said T. S. Eliot. We must have a denial system and religion is one of our best efforts in this respect.

But religion does have the capacity to lead one beyond the “addictive” dimension of faith into a region of value, into a region of human experience in which one offers respect, value, and love to the whole of God’s creation. But this entails giving up the addiction to the “letter of the law” which then entails having the courage to realize just how much we are all slaves to this “letter of the law.” It requires understanding what Martin Buber called the “it world” and respecting and participating in this “it world” while realizing that one’s roots are “elsewhere.”

But religion also has the capacity to illustrate the same dishonesty of the “it-world” and offer only a smug, self-serving dog-and-pony show which has the simple purpose of perpetuating its own private fantasy, of being only a “work of the flesh” as the Apostle Paul would put it. This religion illustrates the “bad faith” so eloquently described by Sartre, the faith that Shakespeare had in mind when he noted, “With devotions visage and pious action they sugar o’er the devil himself.”

A root fear with all addiction is hopelessness which is associated with the fear of being out of control. This fear drives addicts to invest immense energy into their “substance” and thereby derive a sense of being in control even though from anyone looking on they are very much out of control. It is not pleasant for Christians to consider their faith as a “substance”…nor is it for adherents of any other belief system…but when they venture into the addictive dimension of faith they are totally missing the point of their faith and are using it merely as a means of escaping reality. And reality, if we live authentically or even attempt to, will always lead to vulnerability.

Rumi, Shakespeare, and Moral Codes

3 Replies

The Persion poet Rumi noted, “Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing, there is a field. I will meet you there.” This is similar to Shakespeare’s famous observation, “Nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

These two quotations appear to convey moral relativism which permits basically anything under the sun, appearing to convey the absence of any moral absolute. But I do not feel this is the case at all for the teachings of these men suggest they have much more in mind than mere self-indulgent behavior. Each recognized that it was the God-given capacity to think which creates categories for the whole of human experience, including those categories of what is right and wrong. But it is only “thinking” and the capacity to think that allows this categorization to take place. They are merely noting that “thinking” and the resulting categorization of human experience can appear to be quite arbitrary. For example, not too many years ago in our country African Americans were thought of as second class citizens, and in the Deep South in particular, were second class citizens in the estimation of most white people. And having been raised in the South, due to this pervasive mind-set that my sub-culture was imbued with, I saw African Americans as second class citizens. For, as we learn to perceive, so things are. The categories formulated on the basis of our perceptual field are real, as far as we know it. And unquestioningly accepting these categories is validated day in and day out in the community. However, due to the strong arm of…may I say it…an “intrusive” Federal government our thinking regarding race has changed significantly in the past fifty years. African Americans are not viewed with the same racist mind-set by many Southerners and those who continue to subscribe to those Neanderthal beliefs are forced to treat them with more respect, albeit begrudgingly in most cases. One other example is prominent in our world history. At one point the prevailing world view was that the world was flat. That viewpoint was reality and anyone who deigned to suggest otherwise did so at the risk of ridicule or worse. The world was flat for that is how prevailing thought described it.

So, back to “wrong doing” and “right doing” or Shakespeare’s “good” or “bad.” Yes, it is only thinking that makes anything right, wrong, good, or bad. However, what these gentlemen were teaching is that we must get beyond mere categories, mere words, mere labels and learn that subscribing to a mere moral code will merely leave us trapped in the letter of the law. Sure, these moral codes will constrain our behavior and thus serve a useful social purpose. We cannot function as a society without them. But at some point we have to grow spiritually to the point that we are no longer merely constrained by the mere letter of the law but by the spirit of the law. Therefore, if I want to do something which I feel is “wrong”, I am given pause and proceed to ask myself, “Now what does this reflect about the depths of my heart? If I want to do a brother harm, what does that say about me, aside from whatever this brother might have done?

Now Rumi’s note that “I will meet you in a field that lies beyond that domain of right doing and wrong doing” is rich. A field conveys an open space, an area out beyond the narrow confines of a moral code, and this is the realm of the spirit. When we are rigidly governed merely by the letter of the law, when our heart is jam-packed with rules to which we are slavishly devoted, we can never get beyond, we can never get out side of our self, and we can never get into that Sacred Space where honesty, openness, and intimacy is found. This is the domain of the “I-Thou” relationship so eloquently described by Martin Buber.

Let me reiterate. A person who is slavishly devoted to the letter of the law, whose life consists of punctilious observation of moral, religious, and spiritual rules is trapped inside himself/herself. And if he/she finds the comfort of like-minded people, great comfort can appear to be found, but at a great price. And usually this mind-set produces a judgmentalism which has to be wielded on other people as the beasts within which this “letter of the law” carefully constrains will be projected onto the outside world. One expression of this poison is the view that the world is “going to hell in a hand basket, is inherently evil, and must be actively combatted.” Well, the world has evil present but I argue that groups with that emphasis need to pay an equal amount of attention to the evil within their own hearts. The evil outside with which they are obsessed is actually within their own hearts. This is the classic projection spoken of my Karl Jung.

Boundaries and “I and Thou”

2 Replies

On Friday a man in New York City demonstrated his belief that we are one with nature by jumping into a lion pit, explaining afterward that he wanted to be “one with the lions.” Well, he almost accomplished this purpose as one of them proceeded to chew on him.

I also feel that boundaries are a nebulous construction and that we do need to realize that we are one with the world, with the animal world, physical world, and the human world. But we must never carry it to the extreme that he did and will do so only at our great peril.

One dimension of this “object separateness” issue is drawing the social distinction between “me and thee.” Where do I end and you begin? If I err on either extreme there will be major psychopathology. In the early months of our lives we begin the process of formulating a “me” (and ego identity) and if this task is impaired, our life will be very challenging. But if our “me” is defined too rigidly, it will also pose problems. Ideally, it will have an age-appropriate rigidity at first, a rigidity which can be relaxed with maturity so that our “me” can recognize that the distinction between “me and thee” is not as rigid as the social contract would have one believe.

Martin Buber wrote a marvelous book about the process of discovering this boundary subtlety—I and Thou. He also delved into the spiritual nature of the process of making this discovery and the spiritual nature of life itself. Our Source, he suggested, is found only in the “In-Between”, in that space between “I” and “Thou”, in what Deepak Chopra terms “the gap.”

Here is a marvelous poem by Edgar Simmons about this matter:

THE ART OF BROTHER KEEPING

the instant you can

accept the colon

you are christenened

in the right compromise

that no things are alike

but are related.

the greatest

the necessary

the most powerful leap of metaphor

is when I decide

I am you

the result is

a birth

metaphysical differentiation

carried out and on

not in flesh but in spirit–

prophetic fact in time

more than children of our flesh.

Saved vs. unsaved

I and Thou

4 Replies

Martin Buber’s I and Thou is one of the pivotal books in my life. I think it is one of the finest works in spiritual literature of the 20^th century. This book is about relationship and the infinite grace which is involved in establishing relationship, establishing connection with another person. Buber writes of the “in-between”, what Deepak Chopra would call “the gap” which separates us all. And, actually this “gap” separates us from all objects/persons in the world. To have meaningful communication…or connection…with another human being, we must experience this “in-between” which always comes to our ego consciousness as a loss. (I personally think that this experience is what “the judgment of god” is in Christian literature and tradition). It is knowing our aloneness, our alienation from the rest of God’s creation.

Buber also apparently believed that animals have a soul, noting that this can be experienced when one gazes into the eyes of an animal. I have two dachshunds and I can affirm this conviction. Those beautiful little doggie eyes convey mystery and love, suggesting the presence of another soul. Buber credits the animal with anxiety, the anxiety of becoming, “the stirring of the creature between realms of plantlike security and spiritual risk. This language is the stammering of nature under the initial grasp of spirit, before language yields to spirit’s cosmic risk which we call man.”

If I was more mature spiritually, I would become a vegetarian. Any time I drive behind a Tyson chicken truck, I feel the need to take that leap of faith. But, I don’t think I’m going to pull that off in this lifetime.

literary lew

prose/poetry/philosophy/religion