The Fear of God

"The world and the Gods are dead or alive 

according to the condition of our souls."  

(James Hillman)

  
     One of my earliest psychological births was in the mid-sixties at Catholic school.  I was formally taught to believe that God lived somewhere else and he was madder than hell at me for what a couple of my dubious ancestors did (something about not sharing apples).  As a child this dogmatic guilt by association, and my being "a sinner" because of it, didn't make much sense to me but it was a perpetual concern for the nuns and priests.  They often said, "God loves you" and "suffer the little children" but in reality some of them hated us "sinners" and were hell-bent on making us suffer.  To them the whole world was evil and the devil was three-and-a-half feet tall, had a bad haircut and wore a polyester sweater vest.  Too many of us imaginative and loving children took this abusiveness to heart and soul where the Potential of our world and the Gods began dying in agony.

     I still love learning but by the second grade I already had emotional reasons to be confused and hate school.  Fortunately, there were many adults in my life who weren't violent, even on school days when they found me hiding-out in the alley unable to verbalize my fear.  These adults practiced self-discipline and the Freedom of Responsibility so I trusted their love and loved them in return, even when they firmly held my hand and walked me to school where they mistakenly believed I belonged.  They didn't really know what was going-on other than hearing "his conduct is disruptive, he doesn't listen, he daydreams, he won't sit still, he teases the girls, he doesn't work up to his potential, he doodles pictures when he's supposed to be doing math" etcetera, ad nauseum.  (This report was actually saying, "From our perspective your son's main problem is that he's a child and a sinner and we're going to fix him good.")  It wasn't until many years later around the family table when the real stories of cruelty had their cynical telling.  The elders were confused and outraged but by then my ego was flooded with shame for instincts and distrust of my own Potential.  For almost three decades the condition of my soul drowned in the intoxicating hatred I fostered for the world and the Gods.  However, these experiences were also a "compare and contrast" push toward enlightenment.  To this day I thank the fates for sending me home from school to many loving and Responsible adults who used religion to guide instead of justify their behavior.  I can well imagine the shame in the hearts and minds of those children who experienced psychological fear and cruelty at home as well as school and to this day still think they deserved it.

     Enlightenment and healthy psychological birth are cyclical experiences of naming the world, intentionally holding one's Internity up to the light of solemn examination.  The purpose is to make some meaning out of it all.  And many psychological births later I now have empathy for those nuns and priests who were vicious.  I suspect they were systematically and maybe even ritually scared and hurt during their formative years.  There's no other way to explain how the condition of their rigid souls could have become so fearfully nailed to the crosses of their own neurotic dogmas.  They must have been scared to death of us children because as children they had been scared to death.  I now understand their behavior for what it was: projections of, and overcompensations for, their own unexamined fears being presented in the black and white costume of religion. 

     Righteously scaring and hurting children has been a terrible idea for too many centuries.  Throughout history and all around the world today - within individuals, families, communities and nations - the evidence of this common practice is found in atrocious acts of all kinds and all dogmas.  I am convinced that whenever people claim to know "God's will" they are actually revealing the unexamined, mean-spirited conditioning of their own damaged egos and dying souls.  The natural condition of a child's soul, on the other hand, allows for the whole world and all the Gods to be inspirational and alive.  To meet this truth with sanctioned cruelty has always been and will always be a fundamental act of terrorism against the psychological birth of the world and the Gods. 

Ideas

      I've been writing about ideas - ego and Self; reflections and revelations; Potential, Relationships, Experiences and Perceptions; etc., etc.  I've come to understand Life in the cyclical sense of mythological Calling, biological birth, psychological birth, the experience of being alive, biological death and psychological remains.  The constant theme is Internity.  The core idea is that one's Internity is always and everywhere in participation with always and everywhere. 

     Such an idea is fluid, subject to change and open to suggestion.  The diagram below is another one of the symbols I utilize to help me formulate ideas of Potential.  My unscientific name for what's inside the circle is "The Stuff of Life."  It's a mirror.  The top half and the bottom half continuously reveal and reflect the emotional components of one's Life.  The Violence/FEAR side and the Self-respect/SAFETY side are each generalized responses.  These responses, all of which have a core emotional element, then become personally specific formulations known as characteristics and schemas.  My conviction is that in the beginning of everyone's Life the Potential for "How I Am: Being Human" is either sabotaged by Violence/FEAR or encouraged with Self-respect/SAFETY to one degree or another.  However, regardless of developmental sabotage or encouragement, neither side is an unmitigated determinant of one's genuine Internity because the forces of Life are always presenting new Consciousness, Challenges, Choices and Changes.  

   

(I think and hope that you can click on the image to enlarge it.)

     

     The real determinant of Internity is whether or not one fully comprehends and practices the connection between total Freedom and total Responsibility right Here and Now!  This relationship between Freedom and Responsibility is unbreakable and non-negotiable.  It demands reality based Consciousness of purposeful behavior as it relates to and impacts the Challenges, Choices and Changes of self and others!  Unfortunately, most people believe Freedom and Responsibility are opposing ideas.  Such beliefs are actually a diffusion of Freedom and Responsibility.  And such diffusion is being demonstrated as detached and reckless behavior all over the World.  

     The focused intention of Internity, on the other hand, understands how the Freedom of Responsibility is what brings forth the genuine Self in Relationship with all otherness.  This focused intention transforms the meaning of Life into the act of finding and aligning with one's Calling regardless of anything!  In the words of James Hillman, "The task is to find the gold in the volcano."  Joseph Campbell sums it up by saying, "The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are."  Not settling for the beliefs of who you think you are (ego) but finding the core of who you really are (Self).  When All is said and done in this Life the psychological remains, created as emotional memory within others, will mirror one's awareness and practice of how Freedom and Responsibility mirror each other as the same idea.   

Formulations

     I'm fascinated by the human capacity (particularly my own) to absorb and comprehend images that are both positively inspiring and hopelessly negative.  From our first sensations to our last breath we all play host to images in a continuous flow of projections and introjections.  And even though the images are primarily outward, the deeper realities they reveal are inward.  In the words of Joseph Campbell, "When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image."  My blog post just prior to this one talked about a meditation practice where all the images one comes upon are never to be attached to but instead are to be read as formulations of the ego-self, the deeper Self and the apparent intentions of Life.  Such a meditation practice contradicts our stimulus-response conditionings but, paradoxically, it's those very same conditionings that hold clues to absorbing and comprehending images with enlightened purpose.
     I'm also intrigued by cultural symbols.  I've learned, however, to see symbols as representational gateways to truth, not as holders of truth.  Symbols are functions of mythology and as such are meant to be looked beyond because they reference the mysterious unknown that is within and beyond each one of us.  Too often, however, our desperate egos get trapped in the literalism of symbols.  This trap almost always becomes manipulative of self and others.  We then interpret Life through that system of literal beliefs, thereby making all other symbols and beliefs oppositional.  Granted, the function of ego is to differentiate the Relationships, Experiences and Perceptions (the projections and introjections) of family and cultural symbolism.  But without ritually awakening to the deeper Potential beyond the symbols (the original function of Myth) we become stuck in differences.  Under such circumstances, I think it's accurate to say that all the violence in the world is the result of our inability to move beyond the rigid beliefs we attach to symbols.  These dogmatic attachments then keep us all separated from the spiritual and scientific truth of Universal connectedness.  In effect, the righteous fervor of "my symbol contains the one truth" completely denies truth.  I think this level of denial is symbolic of personally desperate and culturally disastrous formulations of emotion.
     The emotional formulations, "within you and without you" (thank you George Harrison), then interact with the personal and impersonal Potentials of Life.  Biological birth, psychological birth, the experience of being alive, biological death and one's psychological remains all tell a story of one's emotional formulations.  The discoveries, expressions, connections and created meaning are all symbolic signposts on a path (sometimes a hero path) to and from one's Calling.  The sense of having, feeling, acting loving, speaking/being heard, seeing and knowing are all projections and introjections of emotional ego development.  Ultimately, ego formulations reveal either fearful and ignorant diffusions of responsibility or the safety and freedom of total responsibility for one's Internity.  Either way, it seems that Life is pushing us all to have ego-formulations for the sole purpose of facing challenges, making choices and creating changes - "within you and without you" - toward a deeper awareness of Self-consciousness.  In effect, the apparent intentions of the collective Life seem to be teaching that living one's personal Life with anything less than focused intention on genuine Potential will result in emotional chaos.
     Finally, with a mindful focus on genuine Potential, my future posts will talk more specifically about understanding the energies of "How I Am."  Every element in the diagram of my May 18th post symbolically reveals and reflects personal and impersonal formulations.  My effort will be to systematically show how these formulations of image, symbol, energy and emotion are original, sexual, imaginative and mortal Creations that always and everywhere mirror the fluctuating truths of "Being Human."

The Well-Being of Internity

     The most powerful and challenging meditation practice for Well-Being I have ever encountered is based on this concept: All the World - every person, place, thing, event, idea and All there is, ever was, or ever will be - is Divine and enlightened except for me.  (The idea is similar to my previous post of being Alone in an eternal garden.)  This meditation practice involves my ego at the center of consciousness while my sensations consciously and unconsciously Perceive the World.  It's my ego, then, that does most of the interpreting of internal and external Potentialities, Relationships, Experiences and Perceptions.  This meditation practice, if effective, results in humbly Perceiving the World as trying to awaken my ego to deeper realities of the numinous Self!  This practice promises to create spiritually compassionate Relationships based on gratitude for All the World's images, symbols, energies and emotions - positive and negative.  In effect, this meditation practice turns the created meaning of my Life into a deliberate reunification of ego-consciousness with the a priori elements of the Self.  And this meaningful ego-Self unity then becomes a genuine path toward discoveries, expressions and connections of and with Well-Being.
     Practicing this meditation and achieving ego-Self unity means I have to be emotionally aware enough to take total responsibility for "How I Am: Being Human."  Most of us, however, have forgotten the Potential of emotional awareness; and most of us actively resist being totally responsible for how we are.  It seems that somewhere along the way we've been taught to believe that responsibility and freedom are opposites when in fact they are identical twins.  After all, learning the World's lessons demands full responsibility for how our projections and introjections affect the personal and interpersonal Experiences of being free.  Instead, we are more likely to learn and "believe" that our Experiences are uncontrollable reactions to erratic Otherness, a belief which then allows most of our Relationships to violently carry-on unimpeded by emotional awareness or personal responsibility.  Practicing this meditation also means Perceiving how feelings and values are conditioned by the presence, or absence, of safety within the context of Relationships.  But too often safety itself is conditional, created on the inequitable premise that, "As long as I am made happy, everyone else will be safe."  Of course, such a premise is completely antithetical to emotional awareness and personal responsibility.  Additionally, this meditation practice forces one to critically evaluate the beliefs and thinking patterns that justify behavior.  And this critical evaluation typically reveals dissociations from repressed and unsafe emotional Experiences.  (Freud nailed this idea when he wrote, "That which is repressed goes through no alterations with time.")  Fundamentally, this meditation practice creates freedom by demanding emotional awareness of, and personal responsibility for, the unity of ego and Self -  Internity.
     Imagine how freeing it must be to emotionally and responsibly move about Life with a unified ego-Self Internity!  Jesus of Nazareth did so and ultimately asked this question - Who are you to judge?  The Buddha acknowledged the attachments and sorrows of ego but then walked the path of the deeper Self, imploring us all to examine the thoughts, hopes, efforts, choices, words, awareness, livelihood and knowledge that create Internity.  Throughout the human story countless others have given us mythical clues to the unification of ego and Self.  It all seems to come down to this idea from Anais Nin, "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."  Therefore, I must become fully conscious of "How I Am: Being Human."  By embracing the challenges of these concepts I can choose gratitude for All the World as it attempts to guide me toward enlightenment.  In the final analysis, practicing this meditation means to examine the ego, see beyond ego to the deeper Self, and always participate in Life with the freedom of emotional awareness and personal responsibility.  The genuine result is the Well-Being of Internity.

All ONE's Divine Relationships

     Chances are you've heard of this one Mythic story (and there are many more like it).  It starts with an eternal and noble soul in this SELF-made garden paradise (right away creativity and expression establish the psychic norm of All is ONE).  ONE time (even though there wasn't a concept of time yet) the eternal being was walking in the garden (in a sensory yet unconscious Relationship with its own image) when All is ONE transformed into a concept - All ONE - and then into an experience - Alone (probably not possible for eternal beings but the story, like all "otherness," has its own purpose).  In response to this Aloneness (the original glimpse of consciousness) the eternal being followed its creative, expressive nature and made a second eternal being (out of some sort of garden material), again in its own image.  So now the garden had a significant "other" to relate to the next time ONE came to visit.
     Out of the ONE comes Two.  Two, however, soon needed something to do (the seeds of Calling were already present) and so was given the task of naming All the "otherness" in the garden.  Two was also given the privilege of using the "otherness" of the eternal garden (of course this "use" meant the killing and eating of the "otherness" but there isn't conscious differentiation of Life or Death or Need in eternity so it wasn't a psychological dilemma).  After Two finished naming All, which took an eternity, All One again transformed into Alone (the incessant stirrings of consciousness).  So Two goes to ONE and says, "Hey, everything in the garden here is really nice and convenient and well-cared for but something's missing."  ONE thought this over for an eternity.  ONE knew that up to now All was still unconsciously ONE.  But ONE also knew all about, and even predicted, Two's experience of the Alone transformation.
     ONE smiled in a peculiar way and then, out of different (as yet undifferentiated) garden material, created a third eternal "other."  ONE knew the timeless truth that out of ONE comes Two; out of Two comes Three; out of Three comes all things - consciousness.  Of course, it wasn't long before Three's Calling and Internity sensed and acted upon conscious discovery, expression and connection with ONE.  And ONE knew from the beginning that Three would choose the genuine purpose of walking the Hero's path.  ONE also knew that Three would consider hanging around in the eternal garden utterly meaningless.  That knowledge was behind ONE's peculiar smile.  That smile expressed ONE's eternal Love as Three said "YES" to consciousness and "YES" to Being Human and "YES" to a life-long relationship with Creation.
     In this way Three's consciousness brought Divine Relationship into the world.  Three then began to differentiate the Potential and mysterious duality of All Life.  Three's consciousness learned to honor the original sacredness of All that was revealed in the garden.  Three's consciousness of time and space impelled projections and introjections of sorrow and joy and fear and desire in the Experience of being alive.  Three courageously said "YES!" to Death because to do so made Perceptions of Life possible.  Without Three's consciousness ONE and Two would still be All ONE and Alone in the unconsciousness of the eternal garden.
     This Myth, of course, corresponds to the unconscious symbiotic union we all experience at the beginning of Life.  The garden story describes the psychological birth of Being Human.  The garden story, as a living Myth, is about bringing ONE's divinity - the images, energies and emotions - to full symbolic consciousness of and atonement with individual and collective Life.  Anything less than Mythic interpretation of this garden story is madness and puts the soul's nobility at odds with circumstances - All ONE's Divine Relationships.

From Here to Internity

     Myth-making is an ancient human endeavor.  (To really understand the important story of Myth-making one needs to study Joseph Campbell's work for about 80 years.  I only have 56 years remaining in my own studies!)  Jung refers to myth as one of the earliest forms of science.  Myth-making, after all, is the discovery, expression of, connection with, and attempt to find meaning in the fact that every single one of nature's species-specific phenomena are pushed to be and live.  (Consider a blade of grass pushing through the pavement.)  This Calling to life reveals and reflects how the internal and external potentialities of all nature are in a cyclical life-death-rebirth participation with the power of nature.  In other words, the life of nature and the nature of life contain relationships that demand specific tasks of consciousness and fulfillment from every organism, whether a single cell creature or complex human being.  As I understand it, the scientific and mythological task of "Being Human" then is to consciously acknowledge the sacred life-death-rebirth story contained within all of nature's relationships.  In the words of Joseph Campbell, Myth-making is the capacity and intention "to wonder, at once terrible and fascinating, of ourselves and of the universe." 
     My conviction holds that "to wonder" about ourselves and the universe is a process of always going forth from, and returning back to, Internity.  In the beginning, as newborn unconscious potential, our sensory systems go forth as projections and return as introjections.  With every projection and introjection cycle one's Internity finds an expanding relationship to image and a new experience of energy and emotion.  Each time this cycle occurs there is a centering of consciousness within the newborn.  With each centering of consciousness the seed of ego takes root within Internity.  Sometime late in the first year of life the ego begins to consciously differentiate between the perceptions of self and otherness.  Around two years-old the ego begins to consistently declare, "I Am!"  The ego's consciousness of images, energies and emotions then goes through the innumerable physiological, psychological, social, mental, emotional and spiritual transformations of an individual lifetime.  And every transformation is a symbolic microcosm of the terrible and fascinating life-death-rebirth relationships that we each share with the universe.  Mythically speaking, the story of consciousness demands the ego's declarations of "I Am!" but must also involve movement toward discoveries of the deeper SELF (the unconscious).  From Here to Internity, therefore, always includes some level of both conscious and unconscious processes as we all go forth from and return back to wonder.
     The PBS series with Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell called "The Power of Myth" starts with these words spoken by Joseph Campbell.  I don't know if it's his poem or not but for me it sums up part of what I'm trying to write about in this blog.

"We have not even to risk the adventure alone
for the heroes of all time have gone before us.
The labyrinth is thoroughly known.
We have only to follow the thread of the hero path.
And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god.
And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves.
And where we had thought to travel outward,
we shall come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."

     The adventure is Here and Now and it's ours alone.  Truly following bliss, "the thread of the hero path," is not all happy-go-lucky or fun and games but if it's a genuine Calling it is the right path.  One's ego, which is often emotionally unstable (more on that later), too often "thinks" the symbolic labyrinth is filled only with dark and scary threats to its own limited existence - the Minotaur.  But, as the words above say, if the conditioned ego will heroically risk the experience of self for the genuine adventure of SELF what's found is "the center of our own existence" - Internity.          

Myth

     I think the word "myth" is too often used to describe a falsehood, a fantasy, an untruth.  Misunderstanding and misusing the word that addresses the most fundamental discoveries, expressions, connections and meanings of life is one of our first clues to the limited and limiting human condition these days.  But the words falsehood, fantasy and untruth only describe the death of myth.  The truths of a living myth are intense revelations and reflections of divine image.

     I've learned how to conceive of a living myth from several different sources.  They each describe the power of myth as clues to our deepest potential; as our souls and bodies being composed of individual elements which were already present in the ranks of our ancestors; as turning inward and getting the message of the symbols; as the natural and indispensable intermediate stage of cognition between conscious (ego) and the collective unconscious (the deeper SELF); as opening our eyes to the kingdom spread-out before us; as the center being everywhere; as always and everywhere having a divine link with the infinite Guest we often call soul; as embodying an essential and finding meaning in life via what we each already embody; as welcoming the sacrifice; as a way to make sure that beyond our deaths we leave behind psychological remains that continue to serve love; as kindling a light in the darkness of mere being; as becoming fully human in this spiritual experience of being alive.  Myth is an attempt to describe the divine image within each one of us and surrounding each one of us; to realize (make real) and then bring forth one's genuine discoveries of potential, expressions of relationship, connections to experience and meaningful perceptions of it all; to find atonement (at-one-ment) between conscious information and the daily glimpses of the collective unconscious; to give form and the power of transformation to our most natural ability - imagination.      

     In this age, however, I think we've lost the necessary imagination for how a living and meaningful myth guides us in our daily psychological birth.  Sure, we have all kinds of religions that are founded on myth.  But too often religion becomes rigidly dogmatic and is then utilized to judge and justify beliefs and behaviors relative to some exclusive after-life instead of guiding the relationships to all life right Now.  I also think the historical and collective practices of too many religions have resulted in the sacred mysteries of the Earth being viciously reduced to expendable resources in a manipulative "holier than thou" quest to carry-out delusions of the "chosen" group.  Add to this the reality that the Earth is no longer the center of the solar system and much more ancient than many religions want to believe.  This scientific fact coupled with the lack of a living myth threatens to psychologically reduce our planet and the experience of being alive to mere interstellar good luck in an ever expanding cosmos.  And this boxed-in psychological perspective then leans perilously close to completely denying the relationships that define our role as stewards of the Earth's consciousness.  Consequently, without a living myth the spirit of the age has mostly failed to move beyond the poverty of dependence and independence toward more responsible and sustainable realities of interdependence and intra-dependence (Internity).  The externally focused egotistical pedagogy of it all then becomes even more rooted in oppression, addiction, trauma and shame while righteously running-off at the mouth and tripping over the emotional baggage between its legs.  Without a meaningful and living myth our psychological birth becomes instead a chronic limitation of human potential, relationship, experience and perception.  Without the divine revelations of a living myth the discoveries, expressions, connections and meaning of "How I Am: Being Human" forget how to look beyond the symbols, losing the beauty and intensity of our most important gift - imagination.

     I think the poet Kabir says it best:

To be a Slave of Intensity

Friend, hope for the guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think...and think...while you are alive.
What you call 'salvation' belongs to the time before death.
If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
Just because the body is rotten -
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire.
So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!
Kabir says this: When the guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.