Tag Archives: Paul Tillich

Winning the World to Jesus!

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In my youth, this was a favorite evangelistic cry in my fundamentalist religion and it often stirred my adolescent and, later,  young-adult passions with visions of “taking the world for Christ.”  Yes, I needed an identity back then for I had none otherwise and when I “surrendered to preach” I immediately knew that my life was laid out for me, that I had heard and answered “the call” and God would do great things through me.  And that passion and ambition is appropriate and common  in our youth and fortunately the exigencies of life slowly eroded the hubris and I am learning to approach spirituality with more maturity.

But looking back on the zeal to “win the world to Jesus” and seeing the same clarion call being announced from pulpits, and some version of it even from the political the platform, brings memories back about that phase of my life and the community I was raised in.  I see so very clearly now that my desire to “win the world to Jesus” was my desire to “win the world to Lewis Earl Chamness, Jr. (aka “literarylew”).  It was a deep-seated need to make “the world” like myself with my “world” being primarily those around me, those unfortunate souls who happened to cross my path.  I was lonely, alienated, depressed, anxiety-ridden and the anguish that tortured my soul could be mitigated by the comfort of having a safe little world of people who believed just like me.  And, yes, the long-term goal was to win the entire world to Jesus but mercifully my narcissism graciously allowed me to focus primarily on my little obscure tribe.

And now, having retired after careers teaching history and practicing as a mental health clinician, I’m finding the courage to apply my clinical “gaze” more to the human “predicament.”  The snapshot of my early spirituality presented above is seen with more maturity and even humility.  We are all children at one time and when we were children we behaved as children.  But if we ever find the courage to look back on our childhood, and discover that it still is very much present with us and very much an influence in our adult life, we can learn so much about ourselves and find the power and grace to make better choices.  This “gaze” allows me to see the fundamentalist zeal of my little Baptist sect (Landmark Missionary Baptists) in an historical context, realizing that the origins of this group were in the post-Civil War South as an expression of poor Southern white people who were feeling disenfranchised or dispossessed.  Any group feeling intense grief like that will always find some means of claiming “self” importance and with my little church it glommed onto the common notion in religion that they were “special” and that they, and other Christians, had to task of “winning the world to Jesus.”  (Though with Landmarkers, there were Christians and then there were real Christians who when in heaven would have the exalted status of being included in “the Bride of Christ.”}

But everyone’s belief system has an historical and personal context and that does not necessarily leave it without value.  For example, this critical look at Jesus presented above has nothing to do with the historical figure of Jesus; it merely demonstrates that Jesus, and any spiritual teacher, will always be utilized to some degree to fulfill tribal and personal wishes, including thate for aggrandizement.  But for people with a fervent spiritual impulse, recognizing and owning this need for aggrandizement, and other base impulses, is very difficult to entertain.  These baser impulses are what the Apostle Paul called “the flesh.”

I think that “winning the world to Jesus” could still be a valuable goal in our world but it would require a critical look at the terms and a willingness for those consumed with this passion to take a critical look at themselves.  In other words, it would require self-reflection which is very difficult, and often impossible, for those who are comfortably ensconced in the firm conviction that they are “right.”  Jesus was not, and is not, a toy or bauble for children to play with to avoid their existential malaise or anguish.  Jesus was, and is, about relationship and “relationship” involves connection with other people and with the world itself.  “Relationship” is not about subscribing to dogma and learning a lot of theology and philosophy.  It is about finding the courage to being open to other people and to see the inter-relatedness of all people even those that we find it easy to banish into that vast category “them.”  The spirituality of my youth, my passion for “Jesus”, was merely about maintaining a precarious immature identity which could only be done by drawing rigid boundaries between me and the world, having imbibed of the “us vs. them” mentality.  The Christian faith of my youth was only for the purpose of maintaining my isolation which theologian Paul Tillich described as “an empty world of self-relatedness.”  Oh how empty it was!

Control Issues and Freedom

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One of my reader’s response to yesterday’s blog has got me to thinking more about control issues and related matters.  As noted yesterday, we all have control issues and address them in ways unique to our genetic, cultural, and social endowment. Hopefully our adaptation will leave us with a socially tenable persona; or, if not, one that is so “untenable” that that we don’t give a damn about the outside field of reference, basking in the comfort of some rigid ideology or cultic religion!

The latter response is what Erich Fromm had in mind half a century ago with his book, “Escape from Freedom.”  Those who can’t submit their private field of reference to the external “market place” of ideas escape into the illusion of being in control but will be safe from any awareness of their dilemma.  Their “freedom” is specious as hell and, indeed, might be one of the best examples we have of hell.  Those who have opted to enter and confine themselves to this conflagration have found the illusory need for control so powerful that they have sold their soul.  And always they will be voicing a conviction that “we are right”…usually exclusively so…to counter the deep-seated feeling that they are intrinsically wrong and even “damned.”  Confinement to this narrow prism of “the right way” is the curse of death, spiritually speaking, as it reflects a deep-seated inability to self-reflect, to deign to let go of some of the very-human need to be in control, and to gently tippy-toe into the realm of a mature faith.  For in the often frightening world of faith, doubts, fears, and insecurities are common.

So, why do we have such an inordinate need to be in control and thwart the heart’s natural inclination to faith?  I think it stems from our unconscious “knowledge” that life is much more precarious than our tribe taught us that it was.  And this tribal “fig leaf” (part of which is our persona) was very necessary just as T. S. Eliot noted with his observation, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”  But if we are lucky in what Richard Rohr and Carl Jung describes as “the second half of life,” we will find the courage to slowly remove that fig leaf, tippy-toe into the nakedness that it has hidden, and learn to swim in the realm of faith.  But faith, at this mature point of our life must not be the ideological regurgitation of dogma that often characterizes the first half of life.  It must be a faith that, in addition to an external reference point, includes an internal reference point which is what Jesus had in mind when he told us the Kingdom is within.  This faith must at some point become a faith, not only in a God who is “out there” but in the person “in here” who is “me.”  It requires “The Courage to Be.”  (See Paul Tillich book by same title, free on-line pdf at following link—http://www.pol-ts.com/Research_files/Source%20Material/Tillich/courageofbe011129mbp.pdf)

Paul Tillich’s Critique of Religion

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Two of the most important gifts that living in Taos, NM the past year and a half has offered me  is discovering two reading groups, one focused on the work of Carl Jung and the other now focused on Paul Tillich’s “The Courage to Be.”

“The Courage to Be” is one of the most important books I’ve ever read, delving into the heart and soul of “being” itself and showing the relationship of “being” to spirituality and religion.  The body of Tillich’s work approaches spirituality as a mysterious enterprise that cannot be captured by the rational mind.  In fact, in one volume of his” Systematic Theology” he declares, “A religion within the bounds of reason is a mutilated religion.”  Tillich knew that faith was a matter of the heart and that the “heart” was a dimension of human experience that involves more than simple rational enterprise.  This emphasis grabbed by attention 30 years ago when I first encountered Tillich and now is even more meaningful to me and helps me understand why modern religion often appears to be so intrinsically perfunctory and even banal.

On Face Book’s Tillich page this morning I ran across quote from another Tillich book which brilliantly  assesses the state of American religion in the middle 20th century, an assessment which is still valid today.  In the selection provided below, note that he did not see religion as a detached, casual, objective enterprise but one that involves the whole heart and even the whole of life.  He saw religion as an expression of the mystery of life, an effort to find meaning in the unfolding of life into which all of us were born and into which all of those who follow us will be born.  He addressed the ephemeral nature of the subject-object distinction:

“An age that is open to the unconditional and is able to accept a kairos is not necessarily an age in which a majority of people are actively religious. The number of actively religious people can be greater in a so-called ‘irreligious’ than in a religious period. But an age that is turned toward, and open to, the unconditional is one in which the consciousness of the presence of the unconditional permeates and guides all cultural functions and forms. The divine, for such a state of mind, is not a problem but a presupposition. Its ‘givenness’ is more certain than that of anything else. This situation finds expression, first of all, in the dominating power of the religious sphere, but not in such a way as to make religion a special form of life ruling over the other forms. Rather, religion is the life-blood, the inner power, the ultimate meaning of all life. The ‘sacred’ or the ‘holy’ inflames, imbues, inspires, all reality and all aspects of existence. There is no profane nature or history, no profane ego, and no profane world. All history is sacred history, everything that happens bears a mythical character; nature and history are not separated. Equally, the separation of subject and object is missing; things are considered more as powers than as things. Therefore, the relation of them is not that of technical manipulation but that of immediate spiritual communion and of ‘magical’ (in the larger sense of the word) influence. And the knowledge of things has not the purpose of analyzing them in order to control them; it has the purpose of finding their inner meaning, their mystery, and their divine significance. Obviously, in such a situation, the arts play a much greater role than in a scientific or technical age. They reveal the meaning of the myth on the basis of which everybody lives.” (Paul Tillich, “Kairos,” 1922, in The Protestant Era, pp 81-82)

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Paean to Pope Francis

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“The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone! And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class. We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all. And we all have a duty to do good. And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: We need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: We will meet one another there.”  (Read more, including discussion of the contest of this quote at: http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/popeatheist.asp#xwbkSGqYxMVhujwy.99inj)
Pope Francis is one of the most courageous human beings I have seen in my life time, a true example of “speaking truth to power.” The above quotation has been circulating on social media and stands out and is deeply appreciated by all of us who recognize when someone is daring to step outside of the “box” that he finds him/herself in and offer an authentic word. And Pope Francis finds himself in one “hell” of a box for the Catholic Church is monolithic, steeped in rigid tradition that does not want anyone to “think outside of the box.” But, this epistemic closure goes far beyond the Catholic Church as I don’t see anyone else in christiandom daring to “think outside of the ‘christian’ box” and offer a prophetic word. Theologian Paul Tillich authored a book of sermons, “The Shaking of the Foundation” in which he voiced the need of Christianity in the mid-twentieth century to find a prophetic voice in the din of its burgeoning echo chamber.

Of course, Pope Francis is meeting resistance within the Catholic church and even from American politicians who do not like him daring to suggest that his faith has anything to do with such “mundane” and “unholy” things like, say, climate change. These politicians are driven largely by a fundamentalist faith which practices a “pie-in-the-sky, by-and-by” theology in which this world we live in, and the bodies in which we live, are only a means to the end of getting to heaven where we will spend 39 quatrillion years fawning over Jesus, not realizing that Jesus is really more mature than to even permit that!

Pope Francis realizes that the Christian faith is more than a doctrinal creed which, if taken too literally and seriously, will only be used to create and perpetuate a Christian echo chamber in which we “bask, agreed upon what we will not ask, bland, sunny, and adjusted by the agreed upon lie.” And yes, in this case the teachings of Jesus become a “lie” when they are used to hide behind, deny reality, and oppress others in the name of “faith.” W. H. Auden, the author of the above quote, also noted, “The divine and the demonic often speak the very same language.”

Christians have a hard time understanding how their dogma, centered on the Holy Bible, can embody epistemic closure in which they are merely “thinking within a ‘christian box.’” But the New Testament clearly warns of this temptation, repeatedly warning of those who mistake “the letter of the law” for “the Spirit of the law.” When this mistake is made, we are guilty of “having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.” (2 Timothy, ch. 3) When any suspicion of this error confront those self-imprisoned in this “box,” they merely “shout a little louder” their dogma and heap disapproval…and sometimes worse…on those who have brought “discomfort” to the safe little world in which they are ensconced.

“The Closed Cab of Occupation”

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THE CLOSED CAB OF OCCUPATION

W. H. Auden declared that “We drive through life in the closed cab of occupation.” Auden was, like myself, an alienated soul sentenced to life as an “observer” of life rather than a “participant.” But being an “observer” with the capacity to even “observe” himself, i.e. self-reflect, he realized that even his occupation of poet was a “closed cab” and he was fated to view life through the prison of metaphor. And I’m glad he accepted that imprisonment as his work has been a god-send to myself and to many others, though he suffered greatly under its torments.

My “occupation” from very early in my development has been to “observe” life rather than to experience it, a stance that eventually evolved into the “closed cab” of a diagnostician, a mental health counselor. In the comfortable confines of that self-imposed prison I could…and still can…categorize and label this beautiful mystery that we call life and keep myself insulated from its hoary depths which are often frightening. But, mercifully I have the gift that Auden had and can self-reflect somewhat even about my “self-reflection” and thus my clinical detachment is breaking down. Yes, the prison-bars are bending and with a “little bit of luck and a strong tail-wind” I’m gonna be able to slip between those bars at some point and come out to play for moment before that damn Grim Reaper has his way with me!

A recent phrase I stumbled across on a Paul Tillich Facebook page is someone’s observation that Tillich’s teachings had taught him “just how much I am embedded in my own thought.” This “embeddedness” is a critical dimension of life that is difficult to grasp; for, to grasp this nuance of life is to see and experience a schism in the depths of one’s heart and he/she begins to realize there is more to one’s “experience” that what can be “thought.” This insight can be the beginning of recognition of one’s “closed cab.”

I want to share with you the insight of John O’Donohue about this discovery:

Thought is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. The way you see things makes them the way they are. We never meet life innocently. We always take in life through the grid of thought we use. Our thoughts filter experience all the time…Even your meetings with yourself happen in and by means of thinking.

 More often than not we have picked up the habits of thinking from those around us. These thought-habits are not yours; they can damage the way you see the world and make you doubt your own instinct and sense of life. When you become aware that your thinking has a life of its own, you will never make a prison of your own perception…In order to deconstruct the inner prison, the first step is to see that it is a prison. You can move in the direction of this discovery by reflecting on the places where your life feels limited and tight…”Heidegger said, ‘To recognize a frontier is already to have gone beyond it.’” (“Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong.”)

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A few days I in this venue I made reference to a Muslim terrorist gunning down shoppers in a mall as he kneeled from time to time to pray. There is a similar demonstration of religious lunacy taking place in many states in my country where laws exempt parents from homicide or murder charges if their children die because their faith did not permit them to use medical care, relying instead on “faith healing.” To make it worse, in these states the legislatures turn a blind eye to this issue because to address it with the firm hand of the law would be to turn the conservative, bible-thumping electorate against them. Therefore, my charge of “lunacy” can also be applied to these legislatures as they stand by and allow children to die because they don’t have the courage to confront group insanity. (See: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/11/08/in-idaho-faith-healing-may-have-killed-more-children-than-we-ever-suspected/ and  http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/11/idaho-christian-faith-healers-12-kids-have-died-since-2011-and-nobodys-doing-anything-about-it/)

It seems like there is insanity in everyone’s religion. With everyone I meet, everything I read, everywhere I go I see people believing and doing stupid things because of their faith. And, yes, I fear that is the case with you also, my friend. Gosh, I’m the only one who is doing this faith “thingy” right and I wish the rest of you people would just wake up and listen to me. Or, as I often like to put it, “You know, I think you and I are the only ones who are right on this matter…and sometimes I have my doubts about you.”

Now, those who know me, or have read this blather very long know that I’m speaking in jest here. For, I see clearly that the lunacy I note in other people’s faith is very much here with me also. And, I don’t actually see “lunacy” everywhere; my point is merely that in our faith…and in the whole of our lives…lunacy abides and it is frightening to acknowledge it. Now to be fair, most of our “lunacy” does not merit that label and can best be described as not seeing things with the maturity we are capable of. This is because we tend to see things as we wish to and that self-serving dimension of our perspective, carried to an extreme will always be lunatic!

You might say “there is a fly in the ointment” in everything we do and this is especially critical in our value system; for our values are always sullied by this aforementioned self-interest. But the “true believer” is always incapable of considering this gut-level flaw and that is one reason why he is capable of such “true” belief.

But the real culprit in Idaho, the real “lunatic”, is the state legislature who see clearly that these “faith healers” are impoverished, poorly educated people and are permitting their faith to rule them even to the death of their own children. YET, these legislators will not intervene because of their moral and spiritual cowardice.

This stupidity…and I’m talking here of the legislators…is one of the reason that people like Bill Maher (and I love this guy!) so readily lampoon Christians for belief in their “imaginary friend.” Well, though I am a Christian, I agree with Bill Maher regarding this stupidity. Just because we have faith does not give us the freedom to be stupid and fail to consider the outside world and the relevance of our faith…or lack thereof…to this outside world. Mental illness is a reference problem and anytime when our field of reference becomes too private, a private self-referential system, we are in deep trouble. Paul Tillich called this an “empty world of self-relatedness” and that is always lunacy, regardless of the positive feed-back you might be getting from inside your echo chamber.

And, Christians need to be aware that to some degree even their faith is guilty of becoming an echo chamber and will inevitably do so from time to time. If our religious tradition, including recitation of dogma, becomes merely a form of “self-soothing” it is not any better than someone who “self-soothes” with a substance addiction. Our faith…even the one we are so “sure” about…can become a means of escaping reality rather than empowering us to deal with reality openly. This is what T. S. Eliot had in mind when he noted, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.” This is why Eliot also noted the importance of coming to a point in our life when we find the courage to “live in the breakage, in the collapse of what was believed in as most certain, and therefore the fittest for renunciation.”

 

 

Make the World Go Away

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Make the world go away


And get it off my shoulders


Say the things you used to say


And make the world go away.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdWEbweX1rQ)

These words from Eddy Arnold, an old country-western great, really speak to me from time to time. Everyone feels from time to time that they wish to “check out,” perhaps using the old line from Star Trek, “Beam me up Scotty. There is no intelligent life down here.” The need to escape is part of being human and requires us to find appropriate ways of making the escape. For, there are many “escapes” that are costly or devastating in the long-run such as addiction, or fanatical beliefs…of any sort… or insanity, or even at an extreme suicide. These are all merely ways of saying, “I hurt too much! Stop it! Give me an escape! I can’t take this anymore.”

Shakespeare had insight regarding the escape into insanity and btw, all of these “escapes” carried to an extreme become insanity. For example, Hamlet pined re his desire to, “Flee to a nutshell and there be the king of infinite spaces.” This brilliant image of retreating to a private world is an astute description of insanity, which is always a retreat to a private reference system where one is freed….at least in his mind…from the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” There, the assault of reality might continue, but the individual ensconced in his private prison will be oblivious to the “assault.” “Free at last! Free at last! Praise God, I’m free at last,” he might say. But this “freedom” is an ugly escape from reality, for actually it is the antithesis of freedom as one is then in the bondage of his own whims and fancies. Paul Tillich called it “an empty world of self-relatedness.”

And all escapes have some risk for if they become too much a preference over reality, they can devolve into insanity. Religion is such a classic example of how a valid “escape” can become a prison. And a glass of wine or shot of bourbon can become such a delightful escape, or release, that addiction sets in and one disappears into the bottle. (And I admit, I have some experience with this “disappearance.”)

Arnold’s lovely tune also offered a marvelous escape…of the adaptive variety…as it was a love song and he was pining for the solace of relationship when his lover would again, “Say the things you used to say, and make the world go away.”

But Faith Must be “Nuts”!

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Yes, religion has to be “nuts” if it has any value…or, to be more precise, if it offers any Value. By “nuts”, of course, I do not mean insane but I do mean an approach to a dimension of life that lies beyond the grasp of reason yet paradoxically is an essential dimension to life. This dimension is “meaning” and meaning always poses a challenge to our rational mind and a meaningful religious discipline will pose that challenge. Paul Tillich said, “A religion within the bounds of reason is a mutilated religion.” And he was not advocating irrationality, but merely noting that religion needs to direct us beyond ourselves. But we know that if we can keep our faith “rational” then we will not face any challenges to the basic premises that guide our life. And thus we are so often guilty of “bestial behavior” as Goethe warned us when he noted, “They call it reason, using light celestial, just outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

Now it is easy to focus this argument on the faith of other people. The challenge for all of us….certainly “moi”…is to always recognize the presence of premises in our thinking, “basic assumptions”, and listen to reality when it deigns to challenge us. Personally, I’ve spent most of my life with blinders on and merely dismissed any of these challenges. I think W. H. Auden had me in mind when he noted, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”

Bonheoffer, the Fall, & Time/Space Continuum

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(I posted this yesteday but forgot to include a title!)

 

Several days ago I discoursed re the time/space continuum and the human dilemma of being trapped (i.e. “lost”) therein. This is a very abstract notion and I recognize it probably sounds like a lot of non-sense to some. But I’d like to refer you to the work of Dietrich Bonheoffer who was one of the noted theologians of the 20th century; I think I could even safely place him in the evangelical pantheon of that era. In his book, Creation and Fall, he interpreted Genesis 1-3 and explained the extent of “the fall” in a similar vein to how I did in the aforementioned posting.

He posited the notion that the fall left mankind in this “time-space continuum” and that reason is itself a reflection of this fall and is intrinsically tainted by the experience. But mankind thinks he can “think” his way out of this existential predicament, not realizing that ultimately faith and hope have to have a role in the process if his rational quest is to have any ultimate meaning. Here Bonheoffer describes the circular reasoning that is the essence of this narcissistic endeavor:

…the thinking of fallen man has no beginning because it is a circle. We think in a circle. We feel and will in a circle. We exist in a circle. We might then say that in that case there is a beginning everywhere. We could equally say that there is no beginning at all; the decisive point is that thinking takes this circle for the infinite and original reality and entangles itself in a vicious circle. For where thinking directs itself upon itself as the original reality it sets itself up as an object, as an object of itself, and therefore withdraws itself behind this object again and again—or rather, thinking is antecedent to the object which it sets up.

Now I know this is convoluted. Let me try to interpret what he is saying. Bonheoffer is is echoing the words of Paul Tillich who said that “A religion within the bounds of reason is a mutilated religion.” And neither of them was disavowing reason (thinking); they were merely emphasizing its limitations. As long as mankind can keep his experience “reasonable” then he is safe in his illusion that he is in control. Spiritual teachers over the centuries have taught us that the experience of being “out of control”…momentarily, at least…is redemptive as it is in those moments that we can find an Anchor that transcends the mundane which is paradoxically immanent therein. But it/He is found only when we relinquish control and to the degree that we have done so.

And it is this “out of control” moment that teaches us the presence of a Beyond which graces the whole of our day to day life, a Beyond that gives meaning to all facets of human experience, including reason! Without this knowledge…and experience of this Beyond…we are reminded of the words of Goethe in Faust, “They call it Reason, using light celestial; just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

And again I am brought to a perfect object lesson in my country, the United States, and its current political impasse. We have so much confidence in “reason”, in “common sense”, in our political, military, and economic might. But we don’t pay any attention to this “Beyond” to which I make reference. If our leaders would pay the faintest attention to this Ultimate, they would at least be able to cooperate with each other well enough to address our issues like mature adults and not like two school-yard groups of thugs. Ultimately, our national issues…just like our personal issues…are resolved in the realm of the Spirit.

Paul Tillich and “The Courage to Be”

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Change is hard. Change is so hard that most people solve the problem by opting
to not change, clinging to the routine of their life even if it is most painful.
People prefer to follow the admonishment of Hamlet and “cling to these ills that
we have than fly to others that we know not of.”

This is true individually and collectively. Social scientists teach us that
during times of social transition anxiety is very intense sometimes the
society’s adaptations are not ideal. Paul Tillich, a noted theologian from the
20th century, declared in The Courage to Be (1952) that the anxiety arises from
the threat of “non-being” and that this threat is found with conservative and
liberal extremes.

It is significant that the three main periods of anxiety appear at the end of an era. The anxiety which, in its different forms, is potentially present in every individual becomes general if the accustomed structures of meaning, power, belief, and order disintegrated. These structures, as long as they are in force, keep anxiety bound within a protective system of courage by participation. The individual who participates in the institutions and ways of life of such a system is not liberated from his personal anxieties but he has means of overcoming them with well-known methods. In periods of great changes these methods no longer work. Conflicts between the old, which tries to maintain itself, often with new means, and the new, which deprives the old of its intrinsic power, produce anxiety in all directions. Nonbeing, in such a situation, has a double face, resembling two types of nightmare (which are perhaps, expressions of an awareness of these two faces). The one type is the anxiety of annihilating narrowness, of the impossibility of escape and the horror of being trapped. The other is the anxiety of annihilating openness, of infinite formless space into which one falls without a place to fall upon. Social situations like those described have the character of both a trap without exit and of an empty, dark, and unknown void. Both faces of the same reality arouse the latent anxiety of every individual who looks at them. Today most of us do look at them.

Non-being is merely the emptiness that we find when we lose the “fig leaf” (or “ego identity”) that we donned in our Garden of Eden.  And those “fig-leaves”, be they conservative or liberal…or at any point between the two extremes…are very difficult to let go.