You are not rational beings interrupted by occasional (or even frequent, or even continual) emotional forces. You are compound beings living your entire life as conduits for forces that flow through you, you doing what you can to channel and direct them. That is not the picture [English philosopher] John Locke would paint of humans. Nor behaviorist B.F. Skinner. But equally it is not the point of view of Freud and Jung and those who accompanied and followed them. They recognized the role of passion in the human, but they assumed that the human occupied a detached place that was affected by the emotions and what they knew as the problems of the person. They did not necessarily see that in any person’s life the central fact is that the 3D individual is a conduit of forces from beyond. They tended to see the 3D individual as a separate unit affected by these forces. We have repeated this now, several times. We wonder: Have any of you actually heard it?
Your physically separate and seemingly independent life accustoms you to thinking your mental life equally separate, and your civilization accustoms you to seeing your emotional life as an offshoot of your mental life, which is ridiculous but persuasive because habitual.
You know, I think that for the first time I understand why the metaphysical types and the religious types can not be made to take each other seriously!
Not to mention the scientific types, the “hard-headed realist” types and especially the worshipper of an idea of the mind as an ideal. Go ahead.
It is not just a temperamental difference, nor a matter of prejudice, nor of strongly held opinion, though that is how I have usually seen it (on either side). They aren’t using the same definitions!
They do not consider the same forces, no. They define the world differently.
And that is a matter not of opinions, but of orientation. Religious thought begins by seeing humans as living in a torrent of forces, call them, that often manifest as emotion or even as persistent non-rational motivators. Religious thought proceeds from a recognition that we as individuals are not the basic unit we think ourselves to be, but are conduits of vast inhuman forces that they perhaps personify as God or Devil, or perhaps see merely as illusion. [I was thinking of Buddhism, here.] For those who do not see life in this way, religious thought seems nonsensical, superstitious. And you can see that psychotherapy is halfway toward religious thought, only it persists (as far as I know) in thinking the individual the unit it seems to be, rather than the construct and community it also is.
All right, now you, and at least some of your readers, will have made the adjustment. You will find life looks differently, only – look close to hand, don’t succumb to the temptation to look only (or primarily) at others, or at society at large. Look to your own lives: What else do you know so well? What else can you know “essence to essence,” so to speak?
This is very interesting. With that one fundamental insight, we can proceed beyond futile arguments about the track record of organized religions, and about points of dogma, and about most of the things that prevent discussion on sympathetic grounds. Once realize that the great divide is between those who think us independent units mostly motivated by reason and those who see us as conduits of vast impersonal forces, and lots of things clear up, including where (relative to that divide) we ourselves belong.
Bearing in mind, of course, that this is one way to divide the world. It is useful at any given moment, but remember that the cake may be sliced in many different directions, to yield different, equally valid, divisions. But this particular division should prove particularly useful just at the moment. This is a logical place to pause, and an opportunity for people to examine the nature of their lives to see if they agree with what has been said.
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This is an edited excerpt from “Only Somewhat Real,” not yet published.