Searching for God # 76

 The matter of a faith and its impact on one’s life, has some many cognitive lenses through which to ‘biopsy’ human decisions. And human decisions, both individual and collective, taken together, form a metaphoric river of collective consciousness and unconsciousness that flows in and through each of us and in which we ourselves ‘flow’ or swim or are buffeted by the various currents, rocks, embankments and seasons. Our intimate participation in that shared collective river is inescapable.

We read psychological depictions of ‘getting into the flow’ a phrase ascribed to highly tuned and trained, dedicated and committed athletes, Olympic athletes, for example. And there are also religious depictions of a similar, although likely different flow. In her introduction to the Benedictine Way of Saint Benedict, Seeking God, Esther de Wall writes:

But first of all we have to tackle what can both ruin our private life and become a corrosive in our relationship with others, namely self-will. It is our self-centredness that St. Benedict means by self-will and it is important to that when he says ‘renounce your will’ this does not mean our free-will. That is one of our greatest gifts. He wants us to free ourselves from the possessive self, concerned with self-interest, which so grasps and clutches that it gets in the way of any free and open relationship with God. So it is the use we make of our will which is the point at issue…..(And in summary, she writes) Knowing my own limitations I have no right to destroy other people for theirs. (p. 45-6-7)

In his insightful work, Peace of Mind, Joshua Liebmann writes, in a section entitled ‘Acceptance of Self’:

Most men have a dual interpretation of themselves—two pictures of their two selves in separate rooms. In one room are hung all of the portraits of their virtues, done in bright, splashing colors but with not shadows and no balance. In the other room hangs the canvas of self-condemnation-a kind of grotesque Dorian Gray caricature—painted equally as unrealistically with dark and morbid greens blacks and no light or relief. Instead of keeping these two pictures isolated from one another, we must look at them together and gradually blend them into one. In our exalted moods we are afraid to admit our guilt, hatred, and shame as elements of our personality; and in our depressed moods we are afraid to credit ourselves with the goodness and the achievement which really are ours. We must begin to now to draw a new portrait and accept and know ourselves for what we are. We are relative, and not absolute, creatures; everything we do is tinged with imperfection. So often people try to become rivals of God and make demands of themselves which only God could make of Himself—rigid demands of absolute perfection. There is a little  tyrant and a touch of the critic and martyr in all of us. There are moments when we want to dominate, to tear down and make others suffer. These traits, however, can be and must be subordinated to the total goodness of the personality. (p. 41)

The last statement begs some unpacking, based as it is, on the premise that we are all created in the image of God, and continue to encounter those voices of the tyrant, the critic and the martyr from within. Perhaps Tolstoy’s little epithet might be helpful, not as another ingredient in a self-help menu, but rather as a light of wisdom. From Tolstoy’s collection entitled, Three Methods of Reform (1900), Everyone thinks of changing the world but no one thinks of changing himself.

Although Saint Benedict had no intentions or illusions of ‘changing the world’ his idea seems quite congruent with Tolstoy’s. And at its core, the search for   seems to have as its parameters, the transformation of one through the transformation of the other. Saving the world, and saving the sinner, are neither antithetical nor mutually exclusive. In his 1846 lecture and later book of the same title, ‘Existentialism is a humanism,’ Jean-Paul Sartre expresses the idea that whatever we wish (or decide) for ourselves, we also wish for the world. (Paraphrasing AI)…Sartre explains that because there is no pre-defined human nature or God to determine our purpose, every individual is entirely free to define their own essence through their actions. (Existence precedes essence). The idea of making a choice, for Sartre, was not about choosing only for oneself but rather choosing to create an image of what one believes a human ought to be, essentially creating a set of values for the whole world. Personal subjective choices have universal significance.

If we bring Jung into our discussion, we find that, while we are constantly making decisions, choices, the ‘motivations’ for those choices are mixed, including not only our conscious discernment of reality and our conscious attempt to ‘discern’ what we would like but also our unconscious, our inner conflicts, fears, repressed emotions and what might seem like ‘fate’ (echoes from the last post). Nudging Sartre’s idea, Jung posits the notion, not of essence, (as a static portrait) but also the dynamic concept of making a choice based on what I choose to become. And, helpful, at least partially, is the cornerstone idea: ‘until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our life and we will call it fate.’

What does ‘making the unconscious conscious’ have to do with a search for God? Much if not all of our conversations in the academic, corporate, political, medical and legal fields are based upon a recitation of empirical, literal information. Our senses perceive, our brain interprets and our deliberations ensue. From one perspective, we come to consciousness of ourselves, others, and the universe as if in layers; we know in part, and see and think in part, until we see and think and know further, again only in part. Jung’s (and Freud’s) discernment of those influences in our mind/psyche/soul (from Hillman), include what we can articulate and what remains a mystery.

From Medium.com, in a piece entitled, How Writing makes peace with the baggage we carry, by Jan fortune, November 8, 2018, we read:

Poet, Robert Bly describes the shadow as a ‘long bag we drag behind us’ filled with all that we denigrate and repress:

·      The parts of parents and teachers disapproved of

·      The parts that didn’t fit with peer pressure

·      The parts our culture has labelled ‘disallowed’

It is not a stretch to note inferentially, as each of us lugs our ‘bag’ behind us, that collectively too we share a different bag of what we might call blindnesses, shames, embarrassments, guilts, denials, repressions, disapprovals, and disallowals. Not surprisingly, the collective unconscious has a similar and imperial impact on the social ethos, or the anima mundi, (Hillman) as Jung reminds us it has on our individual lives.

In his penetrating critique of the corporatist society and culture, entitled, ‘The Unconscious Civilization,’  John Ralston Saul writes about knowledge this way:

I am a snake, not an apple.

What does that mean? Well, our civilization—the Judeo-Christian—in its founding myth portrayed the deliverer of knowledge as the source of evil—the devil—and the loss of innocence as a catastrophe. This probably had more to do with religion than with the standard desire of those in authority to control those who are not. And control of the Western species of the human race seems to turn upon language….Those of us who disseminate language are the snake not the apple. What does this mean in a corporatist society where knowledge is power—that is in a society which rewards and admires the control of information in its tiniest strips of specialization by the millions of specialists in their thousands of corporations, public and private? The apple is the game. Power, self-protection, self-advancement are dependent on our ability to control knowledge as if we were the apple itself. I would say that we have now reached an astonishing level of sophistication in our apple-envy psychosis. (p.38-39)

In scribbling in search of my own unconscious, and attempting to bring into congruency (if not always harmony) those duelling pictures of myself (hero and martry/victim and conscious/unconscious), I am conscious that while the last several decades of North American culture have seemed to concentrate on the ‘personal, individual, ego’ aspects of each human, in and through therapy, as Hillman reminds us, ‘We’ve had a hundred years of Psychotherapy and Things are Getting Worse’ (book title, 1992). Both Hillman and Saul are interested in addressing the ‘culture’ as an entity needing to have its blinders removed. Conformity, repression, fitting-in, for the purposes of personal self-aggrandizement both within the corporations, government and also the church, have resulted in a conspiracy of silent repression of many truths on the personal level as well as on the cultural level.

Saul continues:

In this century dominated by mass ideologies, all-inclusive structures and technological revolution, it is as if the Western individual has taken refuge in the search for something that no one can take away—their own unconscious. Therapy, as Hillman puts it, thus becomes yet another ideology—‘a salvation ideology’. (p.103 of We’ve had a hundred years of therapy etc.) But this flight into the unconscious has gone far beyond formal therapy into the general Western myth of what as individual is and –more importantly—what properly should interest an individual. The answer? Himself. Herself. Not society. Not civilization. The particular versus the whole. The narrowly examined life of the passive citizen versus that unexamined life of the twentieth century. (Saul, The Unconscious Civilization, p. 49)

Left off the agenda of what amounts to the consciousness and the dramatic confluences of geopolitical powers in deep tension over their own hegemony, often supported by the churches, are the most profound and legitimate interests of the civilization itself: survival, protection from global warming and climate change, the widening gap between the rich and the poor, the growing public awareness of a tension between mass migration and traditional cultural, religious and social values. Buried in the narcissism of personal interest, (an argument abrogated by the MAGA cult) along with the denial of the needs of civilization, we could be facing an existential crisis of our own making.

MAGA is merely a mirror image of everything it HATES, including D.E.I., international collaboration, shared decision-making and shared international responsibility and the co-operation of at least a form of ‘world order’ that MAGA, in its own narcissistic obsession, deems to be fatally flawed. The corporation, and the pursuit of profit and wealth and self-aggrandizement are now the mantra of the United States. Saul, and Hillman, doubtless, would be neither surprised nor shocked.

Hillman considered ‘money’ the idol at which American worships, while Saul considered ‘corporatism’ the disease under which North America labors and lives.

How complicit is the church in both of these icons, idols, images or archetypes depends on one’s experience, one’s sense of outrage and pursuit of justice? Irrespective of one’s answer to that question, it is a matter not only of  our politics or our economics that demands critical examination. The churches’ both conscious and unconscious ‘fitting-in’ to the politically correct and also psychically and spiritually repressive expectations and demands of the corporation, and its hierarchical, literal, empirical and structural obsession with its own power, and the gigantically shaped rise in its influence has only increased since both Hillman and Saul were attempting to frame its influence on individual and on our shared culture.

Salvation therapy is neither ethical nor effective on either the personal or the societal level, under the shadow of unconsciousness. The Search for God, in these times, can be and perhaps even should and could be open to that exploration. Risky, undoubtedly, yet inescapable too.