CC34: Pseudo-Enlightenment

My friend Linda is dying of cancer, but this isn't the part I'm worried about. 

Linda was first diagnosed with colon cancer three years ago, and she's had a challenging course. The cancer has metastasized more than once. Most recently, a tumour was found in her brain. She's definitely going to die. The people who love her are going to miss her, but she's going to die, and that's the reality of the situation. Her friends and family will grieve in different ways, depending on whether or not they believe she has transitioned to a loving afterlife in Heaven with God. But prayers and faith will not stop Linda from dying.  

No one, no matter how devout, gets out of this life alive. 

I'm not losing any sleep over the idea that Linda is going to die. It will happen when it happens, and nothing I think, say, or do will have any effect on the outcome. That's up to Linda, her doctors, and her God.  

On the other hand, I did lose sleep -- quite a bit, actually -- worrying about Linda's mental state over the past few months. It's not that I thought she was mentally incompetent in a medical sense. (Her doctors didn't deemed her incompetent, even after the discovery of the brain tumour.) My concern was that Linda was starting to behave like a tyrant -- an abusive, controlling, manipulative tyrant. A bully. A control freak. A nasty person. A cunning person. A person who's not very nice to be around. 

I'm not alone in this assessment. Linda's behaviour became so verbally and emotionally abusive that in August she drove her own mother out of their shared home. Linda's mother is in her mid-80's, so this hasn't been easy for the family. Linda's mother moved out because she couldn't tolerate the abuse from her daughter any longer. (Good for you, Kay!)  

Linda has been relying on her network of friends to help her while she receives palliative care at home, but each time someone objects to her demands, she "fires" them. One by one she has cut off most of her oldest and dearest friends.  

She has also fired several paid assistants. This is because they haven't been doing a good enough job, according to Linda. Some have also been accused of stealing.  

Despite her aggressive behaviour, she was not delusional until quite recently. (Delusional thinking appeared for certain only in the last couple of weeks). Until recently, she showed a truly frightening grip on her own mind, her own logic. Her memory was excellent in all areas where she wanted to exert control. Her ability to organize her environment was fine-tuned to the point of obsession. (She had a pre-existing diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, the symptoms of which were unfortunately exacerbated by her cancer treatments). She retained an ability to recognize and respond to social cues. She could be polite and friendly when it suited her.  

All this was very upsetting. But I haven't told you the worst part yet. The worst part is that Linda (a devout United Church of Canada Christian) has now come to believe she's spiritually enlightened.  

She believes that her battle with cancer has brought her to a point of heightened spirituality, a state of spiritual purity, a transcendent state of wisdom that her friends and family simply can't understand. 

She speaks often now of her "voice," of her need to have her voice "heard." Regular people can't hear her voice. Only other spiritually enlightened people can hear her. She thinks I'm one of the people who can hear her voice. But what I hear when I listen to her is the paranoid, grandiose thinking of a person who has suffered a psychotic break. Linda is psychotic. Under the stress of her illness and treatment, her biological brain has gone into "self protection mode" (sort of like the dreaded blue screen on a computer), and is refusing to accept external data and input. She's now living entirely inside her own head. This means there's no room in there for empathy. (Empathy requires you to reach out to other people, and temporarily place yourself "inside other people's heads" so you can understand their needs.) Her brain is now a closed system. She's stuck in an infinite thinking loop, which causes her to repeat a small number of ideas again and again, each time expressing them as if they're new and exciting insights that have just occurred to her. To her, it feels as if she's transcended time. She thinks she's living in a state of enlightenment. But really her brain is "fried."  

No one who's in a true state of enlightenment would ever treat people the way she's treating people.  

Linda's doctors really dropped the ball on this one. They failed to arrange appropriate psychiatric or neurological care for her when it would have done some good. Now she has to live out her final days in a state of acute mental dysfunction. This sucks.  

The honest truth is that some people will be relieved when Linda dies because she'll no longer be able to abuse them. 

If this isn't a tragedy, I don't know what is.

"Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits" (James 3: 1-5).  Shown here is one portion of a large early 14th century CE (Yuan Dynasty) wall mural called "Homage to the Highest Power (west wall)" that originated from a monastery in Shanxi Province, China. It's one of a pair of murals that expressed Daoist concepts of cosmic order. As part of the Royal Ontario Museum collection, the two murals underwent a significant conservation effort in the early 1980's to remove earlier repairs that could have damaged the long-term integrity of the original clay, paint, and ink. I know this because I spent 8 weeks on the conservation project as part of a 1982 summer internship program. A properly trained conservator never tries to fill in the gaps by guessing what used to be there or trying to create perfection or wholeness where wholeness no longer exists. Hence, you'll see many spots on these murals where bare clay is allowed to mar the perfection of the overall image. The bare clay spots mark areas where the conservators didn't have enough documentation (e.g. early photographs) to support their theories about the original composition in those areas. It was more honest, in their view, to repaint only those sections where they were certain they were following the original intent and artistic conception of the unknown Daoist artists. Photo credit JAT 2017.

 

CC25: How the Church Puts Free Will On a Very Short Leash

Not long ago, on Canada Day to be exact (July 1), I headed out from Toronto on the 401. It was early afternoon and the weather was good. For all intents and purposes, the trip should have been easy and stress-free. There were no construction sites (a miracle in itself) and there were no accident sites (thank goodness). The traffic should have flowed smoothly. But it didn't. If someone had been watching from a helicopter, they would have seen an accordion pattern on the highway: traffic speeding up and spreading out, then suddenly squeezing together into compressed knots as large groups of drivers hit the brakes at the same time.

Now, I'm a person who enjoys driving. I like to feel the sudden kick of acceleration when I hit the gas. I like to go down country roads just to see where they go. I like a road that demands you pay attention to what you're doing as you navigate tight curves and steep hills. So I find driving on the 401 kind of boring, to be honest. But I'm a careful driver, too, and I think it's asinine to tailgate. So when traffic is heavy, I usually stay in the right-hand lane, and I keep my distance from the vehicle in front of me. This way, I have choices open to me in the event of an emergency or unexpected problem. I have choices open to me because I have time and space. I have time to see a problem, assess a problem, react to a problem, and hopefully get my car (along with me and my passengers!) safely out of harm's way.

Many other drivers don't share this opinion about driving on the 401. They inexplicably believe that the laws of Newtonian physics don't apply to them, which, of course, gives them an excuse to join the large pack of vehicles spaced a mere 3 car lengths apart in the left-hand passing lane.

(When I took driving lessons many moons ago, the rule of thumb for determining a safe distance between cars was one car length per 10 miles/hour of speed -- in other words, six car lengths between you and the guy ahead of you if you were driving at 60 mph in dry weather. And this was the minimum recommendation!)

As reality would have it, the laws of inertia bow to no man.* This strikes home when the driver at the front of the left-hand string of traffic suddenly decides to hit his brakes. All the drivers following close behind him must hit their brakes, too. They have no other option, except, of course, to swerve onto the left-hand shoulder or smash into the neighbouring cars. A chain of red brake lights appears. This in turn causes the people in the right-hand to brake, and within moments everyone on this section of the 401 is travelling at a snail's pace. There's no external reason -- such as a lane closure -- for this slowdown. This kind of slowdown is entirely the result of the choices these drivers are making.

Although each of the drivers in the left-hand lane might like to blame somebody else for the slowdown, in fact each person who chose to travel at high speed with no safe buffer of time and space ahead of him is a co-creator of this mess. Each of these drivers has free will. Each one used his free will to make an initial choice (the choice to drive this way). No one forced these drivers to drive 3 car lengths apart. Each driver chose this action independently and autonomously of his neighbour (free will). Yet, in doing so, each driver independently and autonomously volunteered to give up -- surrender, eliminate, erase -- some of the choices open to him. Each person willingly decided to give up his time and space, the precious and irreducible time and space that would have preserved for him a wider range of options.

You could say -- without exaggeration -- that each driver used his free will to intentionally (if temporarily) relinquish his free will, and hand it over to the lead driver in the string. Why so? Because it's the lead driver who sets the speed and who chooses the time when everybody else will have to brake in unison. Once you agree to join his string, his pack of drivers, you don't get a say in these things.

The Church's teachings on free will remind me a lot of these traffic strings on the 401. In the orthodox Western church, theologians like to remind their faithful flock that God gives each person free will at birth. This doctrine of free will prevents people from falling into a tar pit of fatalism and despair, because people still have a glimmer of hope with regard to their own free will. Although the doctrines of original sin and grace dictate that they don't have a lot of free will, they know they still have the choice to pay attention and brake on time, and thereby prevent a major pile-up!

Of course, if they make a mistake, and misjudge the timing, and cause a major pile-up in the left-hand lane, they'll accused by the Church of a massive failure of piety. 

The Church, unfortunately, has long conspired to prevent Christians from learning about the existence of the right-hand lane -- the spiritual lane where people can more fully exercise their free will, the spiritual lane where there's no leader of the pack to restrict the traffic flow.** In fact, the orthodox Western Church is founded on the premise that you -- poor, weak, sin-ridden creature that you are -- need to be in the left land and want to be in the left lane because you're rushing as piously as possible toward the future goal of salvation. You're rushing anxiously with the rest of the flock, and you're following as closely as possible to the guy in front of you so you won't get lost. And you're grateful to the leader at the front of the pack -- oh, excuse me, I mean the flock -- because he's so wise and strong and so much better than you. You know you can place all your trust in him. You can trust him to know when to brake. And you're grateful when he decides to brake, because then you yourself have a rare opportunity to apply your free will and choose to brake! And what better way could there be to prove your love for God!

"For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents. In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents. But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master's money. After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. Then the one who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five more talents, saying, 'Master, you handed over to me five more talents; see, I have made five more talents.' His master said to him, 'Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.' And the one with the two talents also came forward, saying, 'Master, you handed over to me two talents; see, I have made two more talents.' His master said to him, 'Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.' Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, 'Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.' But his master replied, 'You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth'" (Matthew 25: 14-30).  In this parable, the only slave with the courage to tell the truth about the master is cruelly punished. As the honest slave learns, the path to knowing God is neither straight nor paved nor predictable. Photo credit JAT 2014.

What Jesus knew, and what Jesus taught, is that the road to God is neither straight nor level (Isaiah 40:3 notwithstanding). The right-hand spiritual path -- the path the Church doesn't want you to know about because it would lessen Church authority -- curves and climbs and enters the most unexpectedly beautiful landscapes. Sometimes you can't see a darned thing on the road because it's so foggy and misty. Then you have to slow down and try to listen to God's voice. And that's okay, because sometimes God's voice is very, very quiet, and very, very shy, and you'll miss it unless you tell yourself it's okay to listen to God's shy voice instead of the loud voice of the guy who's leading the long string of Church traffic.

You should be aware, though, that if you decide to pull into the right-hand lane you'll be considered a heretic. Or a Concinnate Christian. Or a person who trusts God. Or a follower of Jesus' message.

Free will is a pain in the ass, don't you think? 

* My apologies for exclusively using the male gender in these paragraphs. My intent is not to point fingers at male drivers, but simply to avoid the awkward use of he/she and his/her phrasing in my sentences. Next time I'll try to remember to use "she" as the gender in my example.

** In countries such as the United Kingdom, where the convention is to drive on the left and pass on the right, these references to "right-hand" and "left-hand" lanes would be reversed for the purposes of discussion. I'm not in any way endorsing the ancient and misguided view that lefties and left-handed things are somehow tainted or inferior to right-handed people or things.

CC24: The Emperor's New Clothes: Psychopathy in the Church

There's a fellow in my graduate theology program who is a constant reminder to me of how the orthodox Western church ended up preaching the doctrines of sin, salvation, sacraments, and separation from God (the four S's). If we were to put this fellow -- I'll call him Titus -- in a time machine, and send him back to Carthage in the early fifth century CE to argue with the famously tortured Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo, I'm not sure which of the two would prevail. That's because, in traditional parlance, "they're both cut from the same cloth." They share certain dysfunctional psychological traits along with certain coping mechanisms to compensate for their dysfunctional traits. They're also both deeply sincere in their beliefs. This is why both men cause so much suffering in the lives of others.

It's important to emphasize that the man I know, Titus, is absolutely convinced that he's been called to ministry by God. He's not a con man or a criminal with a conscious intent to harm others. In fact, if you asked him about his motives, he'd look you straight in the eye and tell you that he's a humble servant of God. He truly believes this.

But Titus has serious issues -- as in unresolved psychodynamic issues. He's a walking powder keg of narcissistic bullying, and he's utterly blind to this. (His classmates, who are the targets of his behaviour, see his issues quite clearly). So serious is his lack of empathy and his lack of respect for boundary issues that I suspect he suffers a great deal. I suspect he suffers inside his own head. He's tormented by his own "demons," and, like so many other people, he's looking for some form of relief from his inner despair. And who can blame him? It's not fun to feel like crap all the time.

Secular treatments have given him no long-term relief. So now he's looking to the Church -- traditionally, one of the great sanctuaries for narcissistic men (and narcissistic women). Here he can find a logical explanation for his suffering. Here he can be absolved of personal responsibility for the current state of his life. Here he can finally use his intellectual gifts, his musical gifts, and his badger-like tenacity in order to create something meaningful in his life. I'm not being facetious here -- Titus is a talented, well educated man.

I have no doubt that he's finding psychological comfort and relief in the teachings of men such as Paul the Apostle, Augustine of Hippo, and Martin Luther. That's because these famous theologians were also talented, well educated men who were suffering from the effects of their own unaddressed issues. They were not stupid, nor ill-informed, nor criminally minded. But they knew something was wrong, and they earnestly wanted to fix it. If they found themselves forced to alter everything Jesus once taught in order to fix it, then so be it. Once they'd found a theological solution that offered some relief for their personal feelings of emptiness, well, who can blame them for wanting to tout their solution to others? Who can blame them for intentionally supplanting Jesus' message of personality responsibility and forgiveness with a message of sin and salvation? It's a much easier "sell" than Jesus' message, and besides, each of these men had personally felt the relief that came with the "4-S package." So they weren't really lying -- they were just improving on Jesus' message.

 

Silenos was a figure from Greek Mythology. He was said to be a close companion of the Greek god Dionysos and was known for his drunkenness, one of the "sins" that human beings tend to blame on everyone but themselves until they find the courage to take responsibility for their own actions. Anyone who has succeeded in leashing an addiction to alcohol knows that this particular "sin" can be overcome with the right sort of help (which doesn't include being told you're a worthless, hopeless, "demon-possessed" wretch who has no control over your unloving choices because of Original Sin). This Roman marble after a Hellenistic work of the 3rd C BCE is on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. Photo credit JAT 2019.

 
The problem is that this package of theological doctrines -- the 4-S package of sin, separation, sacraments, and salvation -- only offers psychological relief to a certain subsection of the population that's suffering from certain kinds of psychiatric dysfunction. It enables the narcissistic bullies to feel a lot better about themselves. But it doesn't do a damned thing for anybody else.

This notion will be extremely unpopular among devout Christians who cherish their traditional, orthodox beliefs about original sin, etc., etc., and this notion will be especially offensive to those who insist that Church doctrines are the handiwork of God instead of the handiwork of a few dysfunctional theologians. But there you have it -- the Church has codified within its body of sacred laws a self-correcting, virtually impregnable suit of body armour to protect the "rights" of a select group of self-entitled, selfish, controlling, abusive, HUMBLE (!!!!) servants of God.

How could such a self-serving system survive for so long if it wasn't God's true intention?

Well, that's an easy question to answer. Have you ever tried to live with a severe narcissist? Or work with a severe narcissist? Or live in a community (or even a country) ruled by a severe narcissist? Once a narcissist crosses the line into full-blown psychopathy (and this happens more often than good-hearted intellectuals want to admit), the rule of terror takes over. It's very hard to think straight, let alone challenge official doctrine, when you and your loved ones are being terrorized, abused, relentlessly persecuted, tortured, raped, imprisoned, and silenced in every way imaginable.

We've recently seen this kind of psychopathic behaviour emerge in group form in the European Holocaust, the Cambodian Holocaust, and the Rwandan Holocaust. These holocausts were all instituted by "revered leaders." The Church, I would argue, has had its own share of "revered leaders" who relentlessly preached holocausts (crusades) against "heretics" who rejected official church doctrine.

Am I saying that some of the Church's revered theologians and past leaders would match today's understanding of psychopathy?*

That's exactly what I'm saying.

* For more information, please see Robert D. Hare's Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (New York & London: The Guilford Press, 1993.)

 

CC18: "Oneness" -- The Great Bait and Switch

There's something particularly insidious about the idea that "We Are All One." 

Yeah, I know, I know . . . it sounds wonderfully spiritual and enlightened to say "we are all One." It sounds, oh, so inclusive, so un-American, so gentle and loving and soothing and healing. It sounds like the very opposite of our society's social isolation and lack of love. It sounds like something the soul would say, doesn't it?

"Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you? Can you send forth lightnings, so that they may go and say to you, 'Here we are'? Who has put wisdom in the inward parts, or given understanding to the mind? Who has the wisdom to number the clouds? Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens, when the dust runs into a mass and the clods cling together" (Job 38: 34-38). In this passage from the Book of Job, God is reminding Job that human beings, though loved and  cherished by God, are not being offered a chance to feel "transcendence." Photo credit JAT 2023.

Millions of spiritual seekers think so. They're out there trying to become "one" with God, "one" with Creation, "one" with each other. They're trying with all their might to "let go." They've been told by religious and spiritual teachers that they have to dissolve themselves and let go of their wants and needs in order to experience transcendence -- a blissful sense of union with the oneness of all life, a sense that all boundaries have vanished, a sense that they're finally free of all longing and suffering.

This, my friends, is not what mystical union feels like. This is what dissociation from your thoughts, feelings, and inner wisdom feels like. This is what the major mental illness called Atypical Dissociative Disorder feels like. Sometimes the dissociation is so extreme that the person can be said to exhibit psychopathy (also called sociopathy). 

Many people will be furious with me for saying this. But it needs to be said. And it needs to be fully researched. There's no excuse for the church -- or anyone else, for that matter -- to be teaching people to dissociate from their thoughts, feelings, and needs. This is reckless, dangerous, and abusive. It scars people's central nervous systems, typically for life. It's no different from driving a steel rod through their skulls, and turning them all into Phineas-Gage-lookalikes. (Phineas Gage was a 19th century worker who underwent a dramatic personality change after an industrial accident propelled a steel rod through his left cheek, into the orbitofrontal cortex of his brain, and out the top of his head.)

I am a practising mystic. I'm NOT a mystical wannabee who wants to be counted as a mystic but has never actually had a genuine mystical experience. Thomas Merton, famed 20th century Christian monk, contemplative, and writer on mysticism, died in his 50's without ever having experienced a transformative mystical connection with God. Yet he wrote many books on the topic. I think he was a very sincere man, but I don't think it was right for him to claim to be an expert on something he'd never figured out for himself. 

Me, I don't keep track of the many mystical experiences I've had in the past few years, because mystical experiences are now a normal part of my normal, everyday, Canadian life.

I live a normal Canadian life in most ways. I don't live in a religious community, and I don't live according to traditional Christian monastic rules. I have an apartment, a car, and a job. I take courses at the university. I get together with friends and family. I like to listen to pop music, and I love to watch TV (certain shows only, though).

Yet woven all around and within this daily life is a deep spiritual practice that yields a tremendous harvest of mystical connection with God. How have I managed to do this when dedicated, highly religious people like Thomas Merton have failed? I've managed to do this because I've discarded all spiritual teachings that insist "we are all One."

These ripple patterns in a still lake were formed as single water droplets fell from the trees after a heavy rain. As souls, each of us affects the universe in the way these small water droplets bring wavelets to the lake. From a distance, it may look as if the waters of the lake are "all One." But up close, each droplet affects the lake in unique ways. Christian mystics have too often looked at Creation from a distance and chosen to see it as "all One." In fact, Creation is a marvel of diversity and uniqueness. It's Divine Love that creates the background of calmness and beauty against which each soul -- each droplet -- can paint a small picture that says, "I'm here! I may be small, but I matter!" Together, countless small droplets flow and dance and weave together to create infinite wonders. Photo credit JAT 2015.

We are not all One. To say that we should have empathy for other people is NOT the same as saying we are all One. Of course I believe we should have empathy for others. Of course I believe there'd be a whole lot less suffering in the world if more people had empathy for others. Of course I believe that to cultivate empathy is to walk the walk of a spiritual life. 

But this isn't what spiritual leaders mean when they say to you that "we're all One." They mean it literally -- they mean there's literally no real distinction, no real boundary, between you and your God. They mean that boundaries between you and other people are "illusion." They try to use some of the recent findings from physics to "prove" that everything in the universe is really only a manifestation of one big blob of energy in the sky. (Yes, I'm being facetious).

When they say you're One with God, they mean that if you try hard enough to shed all your humanness (like a snake shedding its old skin), you'll be able to merge with that big blob of energy called Creator. In effect, you'll become God, because you'll be able to "remember" that your "inner spark" is God. Once you've achieved this wondrous state of perfection, you'll no longer have to struggle with annoying human challenges such as forgiveness. You'll be above illusory things such as forgiveness. What's to forgive, after all, if the neighbour who harmed you is really just "you" in a different snake suit?

Isn't it an interesting coincidence that when you fully embrace the idea that "we're all One," you don't have to do any spiritual work anymore?

It's a good life, being "One with the All." You don't have to struggle with messy feelings, because you've dissociated yourself from your healthy human emotions. You don't have to feel guilt or shame about your choices, because all choices are illusory anyway. You can smile when other people are crying, because you've detached yourself from all that pain and grief stuff. You can go around pretending you understand what unconditional love is, because words are cheap when you're disconnected from your own inner wisdom, disconnected from your own soul.

The true path of the soul -- a path that has rarely been described in the history of Christian mysticism -- is the path of finding yourself rather than losing yourself. It's the path of finding out who you really are as the soul God made you to be. (Needless to say, everyone's soul is amazingly awesome.) It's the path of finding out what makes you a unique individual in a vast angelic family of other unique individuals (none of whom are better than you -- they're just different from you). It's the path of learning how to deal with powerful, divine emotions such as love, gratitude, courage, devotion, and trust. It's the path of honouring and respecting the differences between us (i.e. our gender, race, age, talents, quirks, and "blind spots"), and at the same time rejoicing in what makes us the same (i.e. our innate ability to love, to learn, to change, to forgive). It's the path of knowing who you are so you can know who other people are. It's the path of respecting boundaries between you and other people. It's the path of respecting boundaries between you and God.

Only then will you be able to enter into a mature and humble relationship with God the Mother and God the Father while you're living your human life.

This is the path that Jesus has taught me. 

I highly recommend it.