Category Archives: Myth

Jung’s Red Book 2: The God of experience

Books, Great Thinkers, Jung, Meaning, Myth, Religion, spirituality,

Though in many ways Jung’s Red Book is a unique text, the closest thing it reminds me of is the texts of Christian mystics who wrestled with God in their own inner experience: people like Julian of Norwich, Richard Rolle, or the anonymous author of ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’. These mystics, writing in the late Middle Ages, could not distance themselves explicitly from orthodox Christian theology in the way Jung could, but it nevertheless seems obvious to me that metaphysical beliefs really didn’t matter much to them. What really mattered was the living God they encountered within. One thing that disturbs me about the language of naturalists and so-called ‘skeptics’ is that they tend to use ‘mystic’ as a pejorative word. But if you genuinely value experience over dogma, mystics are worthy of the highest respect, and Jung is perhaps the most recent and the most striking of them: a man who tried to take scientific method and the experiential God seriously at the same time, whilst being critical of dogma, including the dogmas about God that atheists are rightly critical of. I find the same spirit of objectivity in the mystical Jung of the Red Book as I do in his psychological works.Mandala_from_Jung's_Red_Book_Joanna Penn CCA2-0

The apparent contradiction for the mystic is that God remains supremely powerful whilst being inner. It might be assumed that those who treat God as something within one’s own mind (remaining at least practically agnostic about claims of God beyond the mind) thus reduce God to a kind of powerless abstraction, and indeed some post-modern theology can apparently end up doing this. But this misunderstanding of the implications of an inner focus confuses wider inner experience with mere intellectualisation.   God does not become a mere abstraction when we treat him as an experience, because experience is recognised through the right hemisphere of the brain, and it is the over-dominant left hemisphere that creates mere abstractions unconnected to experience. Jung is very obviously not just engaged in an intellectual reduction of God to left-hemisphere terms. One of the indications of this the power of God as Jung encounters him. We’re talking about a full-blooded God here, not some sort of ‘mitigated’ God. A God who is, indeed, terrifying, in the spirit of the holy awe felt by the ancient Israelites.

Jung’s accounts of his visions bring this tension vividly to life. In the section headed ‘First Day’, Jung encounters God on a mountain path. He is terrified, but oddly enough the God himself also seems to be terrified.

As I approach the top, a mighty booming resounds from the other side of the mountain like ore being pounded. The sound gradually swells, and echoes thunderously in the mountain. As I reach the pass, I see an enormous man approach from the other side.

Two bull horns rise from his great head, and a rattling suit of armour covers his chest. His black beard is ruffled and decked with exquisite stones. The giant is carrying a sparkling double axe in his hand, like those used to strike bulls. Before I can recover from my amazed fright, the giant is standing before me. I look at his face: it is faint and pale and deeply wrinkled. HIs almond-shaped eyes look at me astonished. Horror takes hold of me: this is Izdubar, the mighty bull-man. He stands and looks at me: his face speaks of consuming inner fear, and his hands and knees tremble. Izdubar, the powerful bull trembling? Is he frightened? (p.277-8)

Jung then has a conversation with Izdubar, in which he tells him he comes from ‘the West’, with its science and rationality. On learning this, Izdubar is dismayed. He flings away his useless weapon and falls ill. This seems to reflect the initial impact of the modern outlook on God, which at first looks likely to kill him: the function of God undermined in the human psyche by the left-brain dominant explanation of the ‘natural’ world.

In ‘Second Day’ Jung finds himself on a mountain ridge with a sick Izdubar, whom he realises he loves and wants to save. But Izdubar cannot move, and is too heavy to be carried to safety. Then Jung has an idea.

I: My prince, Powerful One, listen: a thought came to me that might save us. I think that you are not at all real, only a fantasy.

Izdubar: I am terrified by this thought. It is murderous. Do you mean to declare me unreal – now that you have lamed me so pitifully?

I: Perhaps I have not made myself clear enough, and have spoken too much in the language of Western lands. I do not mean to say that you are not real at all, of course, but only as real as a fantasy. If you could accept this, much could be gained. (p.293)

Eventually he persuades Izdubar to accept that he is only as real as a fantasy “if it helps”, and Jung is then able to pick up Izdubar, who becomes “lighter than air” and carry him home. This is an extraordinary recognition, not just that God remains valuable when recognised as a human construction, but of the incrementality of the ‘reality’ involved: it is not just a question of being real or unreal, but rather of having more or less of the qualities we associate with ‘reality’, such as tangibility, extension in space, causal effectiveness, and so on.

When he gets home, despite being light, Izdubar will not fit through the door. So Jung squashes him into the size of an egg (p.295). Yet, despite being squashed into the size of an egg, God has lost none of his meaning and importance. Jung sings moving ‘Incantations’ over the egg containing God.

Oh

light of the middle way

enclosed in the egg

embryonic,

full of ardour, oppressed…. (p.300)

Come to us, we who are willing from our own will.

Come to us, we who understand you from our own spirit.

Come to us, we who will warm you at our own fire.

Come to us, we who will heal you with our own art.

Come to us, we who will produce you out of our own body.

Come, child, to father and mother. (p.303)

Jung conveys a wonderfully integrated experience here, at one and the same time recognising that we create God, that God is not something threatening us from without, and that God is nevertheless a matter of overwhelming yearning. But nevertheless, such an encapsulated God, without power, cannot fulfil all the functions of God, and Jung wishes to restore him to his former splendour. In ‘The Opening of the Egg’, Izdubar bursts out of the egg.

I: “Oh Izdubar! Divine One! How wonderful! You are healed!”

“Healed? Was I ever sick? Who speaks of sickness? I was sun, completely sun. I am the sun”.

An inexpressible light breaks from his body, a light that my eyes cannot grasp. I must cover my face and cast my gaze to the ground.

I: “You are the sun, the eternal light – most powerful one, forgive me for carrying you.” (p.307-8)

This to me conveys a powerful message about God as meaning. A meaningful God is not an inch less impressive and powerful than a real God. He remains perfect, omnipotent, omniscient and eternal in meaning. But such a God and his infinite qualities should not be an object of belief – for that would fix the nature and qualities of God in relation to everything else. Since God has the archetypal function of projecting forward a complete integration of the psyche, the form taken can vary with each person or each group sharing ideas about that supreme meaningfulness, it being only his function that creates universal consistency.

Elsewhere, Jung describes God as the supreme meaning.

But the supreme meaning is the path, the way and the bridge to what is to come. That is the God yet to come. It is not the coming God himself, but his image which appears in the supreme meaning. God is an image, and those who worship him must worship him in the image of the supreme meaning. (p.120)

This meaningfulness becomes all the more intelligible if we interpret it in the light of embodied meaning. The meaning of God does not have to be tied to beliefs about the circumstances in which propositions about him would be true, as analytic philosophers would have it. It is this representationalist assumption that makes most philosophy of religion a waste of time. Instead, the meaning of God, like the meanings of all other words and symbols, consists in synaptic links formed by associations with our active experience, and built up through inter-related metaphors that connect different areas of that experience. God does indeed reside in our bodies, but no one metaphor is solely adequate to describe him: rather it would require the synthesis of all metaphors into the widest possible meaningful experience. To ‘worship’ God should surely be to try to connect with that supreme meaning – not to reify it, but to get as far as we can in experiencing it.

Personally I find this portrayal of God in the Red Book both liberating and inspiring. One thing I have in common with Jung is a Christian background, indeed being like him the son of a pastor. In earlier life I have tried to evade God and think of him as irrelevant, but, as Jung writes:

God is unavoidable. The more you flee from the God, the more surely you fall into his hand. (p.164)

God is unavoidable, not just for those of us who have an image of God etched into our childhood experience, but even in a sense for others, since the God archetype is a dimension of human experience that may manifest in other ways using other labels, but nevertheless have the same function.

Reading the Red Book has reminded me of how important that function is to me, but it leaves me nevertheless in a continuing indecision about my practical relationship to Christianity that becomes, if anything, more loaded than it was before. Churches are rich sources of archetypal experience, but overwhelmingly still filled with people who externalise and absolutise that experience. Sometimes I encounter the wish to worship God, but any such worship seems destined to be solitary. Perhaps one day there will be a Jungian church led by people who explicitly acknowledge the archetypal  nature of God at every turn: but until that day, it is only churches empty of people that I, perversely, find attractive, and where it seems possible to explore Jungian interpretations of what one encounters in solitude.

 

Link to the first blog in this series: The Jungian Middle Way

Picture: Mandala from Jung’s Red Book: Joanna Penn CCA2.0

Jung’s Red Book 1: The Jungian Middle Way

Books, Great Thinkers, Jung, Myth, Religion, spirituality

I have just finished reading Jung’s Red Book, which is an extraordinary text. Only published since 2009, the Red Book is Jung’s personal record of a series of self-induced visions, which mainly took place between 1913 and 1917, together with Jung’s reflections and interpretations of them, which he continued to refine until about 1930. This book takes us to the core of the personal experience on which Jung drew more circumspectly in his psychological works. That experience is centrally one of integration, as Jung confronts the archetypal expressions of different aspects of himself – sometimes in reverence, sometimes in anger, but always with acceptance of his own multiplicity. The record of that experience often reads like a prophetic or religious text, and the religious language is full-throated and unabashed, but at the same time clearly placed in the framework of an ‘inner’ psychological rather than an ‘outer’ supernatural process.Jung's Red Book

I had at first thought to write a conventional review of the book, but on further consideration decided that this was not the best way of writing about it. For one thing, it is not a philosophical or scientific text: there is no argument in it. It is the record of an experience, and the main way I can assess that experience is by trying to share some of what I experienced as an incredible richness when reading it. It’s not so much a book that can be readily judged right or wrong in itself in any given respect, as one that you can engage in and find useful to a given degree in deepening your experiential understanding of integration and the Middle Way. So I don’t want to review it so much as share some readings of it. My plan is, instead, to write a series of blogs on different aspects of it. It is full of rich quotations, but ones that will nevertheless probably need interpretation.

This will be very much my reading of the Red Book rather than the one I would necessarily expect you to have. Obviously the meaning of any text varies with the reader, but this one most markedly so. I do think some readings are more helpful than others, but it is also easy to understand how such a rich and ambiguous text can give rise to very different readings. Jung’s own words reinforce such an impression:

There is only one way and that is your way.

You seek the path? I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you.

May each go his own way. (p.125)

I do not interpret such words in terms of relativism. Some paths can be better for us than others, but Jung warns us against the assumption that we know what the best path is for someone else, or that we should assume someone else’s path is best for us. Jung was born in the nineteenth century, the son of a Swiss pastor, and it is unlikely that his path will very closely resemble most other people’s today. Nevertheless we can learn a good deal from it.

For the rest of this first blog I want to explore the central question of how far the Red Book reflects the Middle Way. I think the answer, obviously based on my own reading, is ‘quite closely’, though not without some caveats. The most important reason that it is about the Middle Way is that the whole text is about a process of integration (even though Jung does not use the word ‘integration’), and one cannot integrate two opposed beliefs or desires if one sees them in absolute terms. In a way the whole book wrestles with the question ‘What do God, the soul, the devil, the dead etc. mean when they are not absolute’? Simply by being recognised as aspects of the psyche subject to integration, they can no longer be absolute.

But I was also gratified to find several explicit mentions of the Middle Way in the text, all of which suggest that the Middle Way was central to Jung’s thinking, even if he did not develop it formally or philosophically in his other writings. There are three explicit mentions, plus of course a great many other points where the Middle Way is implicit.

The first explicit mention is very much in terms of the Christian Middle Way:

Divinity and humanity should remain preserved, if man should remain before the God, and the God remain before man. The high-blazing flame is the middle way: whose luminous course runs between the human and the divine. (p.289)

Here Christ is in a symbolic role as mediator between the absoluteness of the idea of God and the embodied situation of humans. Elsewhere Jung stresses the story of Christ ‘harrowing hell’ between his crucifixion and resurrection, to indicate the ways he symbolically unites heaven and hell, the heights and depths with human experience. If we can hold ideals in mind as meaningful at the same time as addressing the ordinary conditions of human life, we can internalise this symbolic Christ.

The second mention occurs in Jung’s conversation with a librarian, who represents the analytically-bound, scholarly, left-hemisphere-dominant aspect of Jung. Jung tries to moderate some of the librarian’s Nietzschean anti-Christian approach:

“…Like everything healthy and long-lasting, truth unfortunately adheres more to the middle way, which we unjustly abhor.” [Jung said]

“I really had no idea that you take such a mediating position.” [The librarian replied]

“Neither did I – my position is not entirely clear to me. If I mediate, I certainly mediate in a very peculiar manner.”

This suggests to me that, although Jung assumes the Middle Way a lot of the time, he never actually developed it explicitly in the way he is using it here (to avoid both extremes of a polarised intellectual debate). Perhaps he was afraid that public development of it was incompatible with the public reputation he wanted to cultivate as a scientist. But Jung’s corpus of writings is large and I have certainly not read it all, so I’d be happy to hear from anyone who’s come across a more explicit development of the Middle Way in Jung elsewhere.

The third explicit mention occurs in a discussion of ‘stretched hanging’ which Jung had experienced in a vision, hanging between heaven and hell. Again, Christ is the symbol of it.

To deliver the men of his time from the stretched hanging, Christ effectively took this torment upon himself and taught them “Be crafty like serpents and guileless like doves.” For craftiness counsels against chaos, and guilelessness veils its terrible aspect. Thus men could take the safe middle path, hedged both upward and downward.

But the dead of the Above and the Below mounted, and their demands grew ever louder. And both the noble and the wicked rose up again and , unaware, broke the law of the mediator. They flung open doors both above and below. They drew many after them to higher and lower madness, thereby sowing confusion and preparing the way that is to come. (p. 357)

The madness of the above here could be identified with what Buddhists call eternalism: the belief in positive absolutes such as God’s absolute existence and absolute command. The madness of the below, on the other hand, would involve nihilism, or the rejection of any moral judgement being better than another. The Middle Way requires craftiness not only in avoiding chaos, but also in avoiding rigid order, but guilelessness in making a straightforward response to the Middle Way itself.

‘The way that is to come’ here may be a reference to a recurring theme in the Red Book, which is the First World War (hardly surprising, since Jung’s visions either anticipated it or occurred during it). Jung clearly blames the ideological madness of the First World War on this kind of polarisation, and was well aware that Christians fought on both sides in absolute belief that God was on their side. Jung also writes elsewhere that “What stays in balance is correct, what disturbs balance is incorrect” (p.266), very much suggesting his moral commitment to avoiding this polarisation.

However, before leaving you with too unequivocal an impression of Jung’s relationship with the Middle Way, I must also mention some caveats. Obviously it is one thing to use the term ‘middle way’, and another to develop and apply a strong understanding of it which avoids any kind of appropriation by creeping metaphysical assumptions. As I’ve already mentioned, my impression so far is that although Jung’s understanding of integration was both profound and pioneering, its relationship to the Middle Way in his thinking was probably sketchier. The Red Book is also a very ambiguous text, which makes it pretty wide open to metaphysical readings, and I’m sure that the metaphysicians will already have been at work on it. In the comments section of my earlier ‘Middle Way Thinkers’ blog post on Jung, I have already had a discussion with ‘Gregory Wonderwheel’ who wanted to interpret Jung metaphysically.

It also has to be said that some of Jung’s own tendencies encourage such metaphysical readings. He is pretty incautious with the terms he uses throughout – basically he will take almost any terms from traditional religion (including ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’, ‘redemption’ and ‘revelation’) and trust entirely that the context will safeguard such language against absolutizing interpretation. For this reason, beware of apparently absolutizing Jung quotes taken out of context. Near the end of the book, too, his ‘Seven Sermons to the Dead’ seem to come close to offering us a metaphysical scheme (of the ‘Pleroma’, which is nothing and everything) based on that of Gnosticism, most of which seems to bear no relationship to any practical application. At the same time, these sermons are hedged around with the kind of disavowals that seem familiar from Buddhism (‘It is fruitless to think about the Pleroma’ – p.510). As with Emptiness talk in Buddhism, I often just want to shout back in frustration, ‘Well, why are you thinking about it then?’ Whether Jung’s gnostic cosmology is metaphysical or not is entirely a matter of contextual judgement, but it certainly threatens to turn into a diversion if one wants to use the Red Book as a text supportive of the Middle Way.

Such caveats should not be off-putting on balance. The Red Book is overwhelmingly experiential in most of its course, and there is a great deal more to say about it – for example, about the riches of its approach to God, to evil, to gender, to death, to Christianity, to the eucharist, to pride and humility, to power, to the individual and the group, to embodiment, to language, and to symbols. But all of these other themes will have to wait for other blogs.

The boredom of heaven

Middle Way Philosophy, Myth, Religion,

As soon as Dilbert arrived in heaven, he was greeted by St. Peter, who warmly but somewhat formally shook his hand. This was odd, as he no longer had a hand. It was also odd that he could see St. Peter, as he no longer had any eyes. But let us leave such details aside.

“Welcome to heaven” said St. Peter briskly. “We have a brief half hour orientation session before full heaven conditions become operative. That allows me to explain to you how the place works, and you to ask any questions you may have. After that we’re straight into eternity. I hope you had a good trip here?”

“Er, yes, thanks – apart from dying, that is. A bit painful.”

St. Peter waved a dismissive hand. “Dreadful what they make you put up with when you’re dying these days. I do sympathise. But it’s all over now. Let me explain the ropes in heaven.”

St. Peter led them through the pearly gates into an area where a number of seated figures could be seen. They were all completely immobile and expressionless, spaced at some distance from each other and not communicating or interacting. Suddenly one of the immobile figures abruptly disappeared, as though a trapdoor had been opened up right underneath him, and he had immediately fallen through it.

“Oh, there he goes!” said St. Peter in a slightly jolly fashion.

“Where’s he gone?” asked Dilbert.

“Hell” said St Peter. “Now, the first thing about heaven I really must impress upon you is that it’s perfect. No imperfection allowed. As long as you remember that, and take it to heart, you’ll be fine.”

“But I thought heaven was a place of love!” protested Dilbert. “Surely the love of God allows a little imperfection here and there?”

“Oh, well, love is fine, but it’s got to be perfect love, you know. The Church is quite clear about that, and we always take their instructions seriously. It’s very easy to think you’re being good and loving, but because of all that imperfect conditioning you’ve had down there, to slip into imperfection. Any love you express has to be totally without reservation, even unconsciously. And then you have to think of your neighbour. If you start talking to them about heavenly love, and they start responding to you but haven’t got it perfect, then they’ll soon start breaking the conditions of heaven.”

“So what happens when you break the conditions of heaven?”

“Well, you go to Hell, of course. You saw what happened to that fellow just now. He must have had a stray impure thought. So off he went, down to the Other Place. It happens to most people sooner or later. We have to be very strict, I’m afraid, because there really is no wriggle room where perfection is concerned.”

“Straight to Hell with eternal torment? Is there nowhere in between? No Middle Way?”

St. Peter chuckled. “Middle Way? What are you, some kind of Buddhist or something? That’s a completely unintelligible concept. No, either you’re in heaven or you’re in hell. If you can’t stick it out here, it’s eternal torment for you. There’s purgatory of course, for Catholics, but that’s only to prepare you for heaven, and Limbo for unbaptised babies, but I take it you haven’t come via purgatory?”

“No, I’m a Protestant – and not a Buddhist” said Dilbert with some indignation. “Look, I was always told that I would be saved by my faith, and that heaven was eternal. God has mercy on sinners if they have faith in Christ, doesn’t he?”

“Oh yes, that’s doubtless why you’re here. And heaven is eternal – for as long as you can stick it. The trouble is that since the Reformation we’ve had all sorts of people up here who really aren’t prepared properly. They may have faith, but it’s a bit of a big leap from being faithful and imperfect to being perfect all of a sudden. If you ask me, just between you and me, I preferred the old system: at least when people have made their way up through all the levels of purgatory they’re a bit more ready for what heaven is like, and last a little bit longer. The descent rates for Catholics are a bit lower than for Protestants.”

“What about Jews, and Muslims?”

“Oh, they’re stuck in the grave for now. They have to wait until the Last Judgement. But then it will suddenly get crazy, I’m sure: millions of Jews and Muslims all arriving here at once.”

Dilbert looked back at the people seated in complete passivity. “So, don’t these people do anything?”

“I don’t think you’ve fully understood the rules” said St. Peter, “If you do anything you’ll very quickly find yourself in a state of imperfection. So, no activity. Remember, you don’t need to do any of the things up here that you had to do down below – no need for eating, or defecating, or even breathing. Souls don’t need any of that any more. So you can just be still. Some people get used to it after a while.”

“Do they think, then – compose books or play games of chess in their heads? Or do they meditate?”

“Oh no, none of that. Thinking is an especially quick way to perdition. You’ll get to impure thoughts pretty quickly if you start thinking. No meditating either – you’ll do it wrong at some stage and get distracted.”

“It sounds pretty, well, boring.”

“Boredom is the condition of the imperfect, my friend. I can assure you that Hell isn’t boring – oh, no, not a bit of it. Just in case you get bored with one torment they keep varying it so that you try them all. Here, you’ll either have to get over your boredom or go to Hell – shape up or ship out.”

There was a pause.

“So, do you have any more questions, or shall we start eternity conditions now?”

As he was increasingly unable to distinguish the prospect of the torments of heaven from those of hell, Dilbert desperately sought some more questions to put off the hour.

“Does anyone make it? I mean, is there actually anyone who stays in heaven for eternity and puts up with the boredom?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. From a human point of view, you’d have to wait an eternity to know the answer to that question.”

“Well, is there anyone – a saint or somebody – who has lasted, say, a hundred years?”

“We no longer measure time in earthly units, once the half hour orientation period is over. All I know is that heaven has never been empty, for there are always fresh recruits coming up with a hunger for perfection.”

“Are there any great saints still here who died centuries ago? St. Francis? St. Theresa? And what about Jesus Christ? Surely if he took human birth for the sake of our sins, he wouldn’t be perfect, would he? So he wouldn’t last long in heaven?”

“That’s all classified information I’m afraid. Releasing it might undermine the credibility of the Church, and stop the flow of recruits that keeps us going. Our very existence as an institution would be at stake.”

For the minute or so that remained to him, Dilbert stood dumbfounded.

“Now, I’m afraid your half-hour of orientation is up. Let me lead you to your place. Once you have settled into it, heaven-conditions will start to become fully operative.”

*****************************************************************************************

 The irrelevance of perfect goodAscent_of_the_Blessed Bosch

It is not too difficult to grasp evil in terms of human understanding. We may often over-simplify by projecting an archetype of evil onto those who are mixed, but nevertheless there are some aspects of evil we can readily access as part of our experience. When it comes to good, however, we have no such facility. Since good involves avoiding dogmatism and addressing conditions, and there are many ways of doing that, there are many apparently conflicting goods. The good of compassion conflicts with that of wisdom, justice conflicts with freedom, courage conflicts with prudence, honesty conflicts with tact. Good is multiple (though not relative), in my view, because it is human and imperfect. However, for most of human history we have been confronted with views of good that are strikingly at odds with the very possibility of imperfect goodness. Instead, good has been constantly idealised and put into absolute forms. Good is seen as deriving from some sort of state of perfection, whether that perfection is the rational perfection of Plato or Kant, or the religious imagination applied to belief in God and heaven. The result of this has been a great deal of confusion, as we have tried to reconcile metaphysical beliefs about perfection from beyond experience with our actual experience of plural and imperfect goodness.

This story highlights the implications of that confusion as it applies to our understanding of heaven. Heaven is necessarily seen as perfect in the way that God is perfect, yet the implication of this is that humans could not exist there in any form. Religious teachings through the ages have tried to deal with this through the claim that only non-physical souls go to heaven. Imperfection has been identified with the body, leading to confused arguments about sex and other bodily functions, and whether these were intrinsically evil or good because designed by God. This approach failed to appreciate how much our entire experience, including our mental experience, is dependent on and shaped by our bodies. In effect it has adopted a narrow left-brain view of the self as sufficient and ultimate, completely ignoring the right-brain recognition of the wider conditions of our bodily experience. Not only could a person ascending into a perfect state not have a body – they couldn’t have thoughts, either. In fact, in removing all evil from them you would also be removing all good, and in removing variety of experience you would be condemning people to a new form of torment. Heaven and hell would be indistinguishable.

Heaven is more frequently imagined as a place of delight, but delight is not compatible with an eternity of perfection. Earthly delights are then explained to be mere analogies for the more subtly heavenly delights that we cannot yet imagine. Thus the Islamic tradition seems unembarrassed about offering the delights of sex with lots of virgins (houris) to the (presumably male) martyrs after their deaths, with the theological explanation that this is just an analogical way of imagining delights that will actually far surpass those fleshly pleasures. But pleasure of any kind needs a contrast with other states to continue being appreciated as such. The conquering martyrs will soon be bored with their virgins and want to be off killing infidels again. Even the ‘purest’ pleasures, coming from religious ecstasy, meditative states, or drug-induced release of dopamine, require contrasts if they are not soon to become ends in themselves that lose their meaning in human life. What is good about these sorts of states arises, not from their indefinite continuation, but from the ways in which they can contribute to balancing of judgement and sustainable equanimity in our lives. Pleasure, on all the indications, cannot be eternal without ceasing to be pleasure.

There will probably be some Christians who think I have misinterpreted heaven. Believing profoundly in the loving and forgiving nature of God, perhaps they will admit that heaven has to be imperfect and accommodating to our sins. If so, will it seek to help us to improve further, by reducing and ultimately eliminating our sins? If so, it is not heaven but purgatory. Or will it simply allow us to continue with our sins as they are without any moral goals? If so, this seems more like a continuation of earth than it is heaven. No, if we come to terms with our imperfection, perfection merely drops out of the picture and becomes not merely irrelevant, but unhelpful. If, on the other hand, we do actually achieve perfection of any kind, it seems that the torments of eternal boredom follow.

The fact that heaven turns out to be just as much of a torment as hell has profound implications. It throws us back on the Middle Way, in which we recognise and come to terms with our imperfection, and no longer seek to appeal to ideas of perfection. It also makes it clear that the perfections we may have idealised as good are actually evil, since it is beliefs about perfection that are evil, whether those beliefs pose as ‘good’ or ‘evil’. That means that there is no moral difference between belief in God and belief in Satan or evil, as it is the absolutised beliefs that create the evil, even if they are beliefs about good.

Such a recognition is consistent with the very poor track record of absolutised religious belief. Many of those who sincerely believed in peace have instead brought endless conflict, whether that conflict occurred on the battlefield, in the debating chamber, or in the individual psyche. It is not your belief in peace that potentially creates peace, but your ability to engage with conditions, and the more strongly you identify with an absolute formulation of the right way of acting, the more that is likely to bring you into conflict with those with a different formulation. The whole concept of heaven is ludicrously contradictory because the moral basis on which it has been built is contradictory. It is time for a new understanding of morality to be based on the Middle Way.

For other recently posted parables by Robert M Ellis, see the following links:

An Acre of Forest

The Lute strings

The Ship

Middle Way Thinkers 6: Jesus

Great Thinkers, Myth, Religion, The Arts,

Was Jesus a Middle Way Thinker? Largely not. His beliefs seem to have included many absolutes, and he has also been interpreted since in terms of those absolutes. Yet in this series I also want to encourage incremental thinking. I want to suggest that there are some important ways in which Jesus moved forward from the dogmas of his time, which amount to some specific instances of Middle Way thought. I’d suggest that it is due to these new ways that he addressed the conditions of his time that he gets much of his power. Particularly for those of us from a Christian background (which includes me), I think it’s important to re-examine Jesus in a critical way: one that tries to separate out the dogmas of Christian tradition from those elements that might helpfully speak to our experience.

However, this is a loaded subject, so I’d better start with some clarifications. On the one hand, I’m not interested in supporting any of the dogmas of the Christian tradition about Jesus: either that he was the Son of God, affirmed as some type of supernatural status, or that everything he uttered was ‘true’ and the Word of God. But nor, on the other hand, am I interested in historical revisionism, which seems to be the opposite trap for those interested in re-examining Jesus. I don’t want to make any claims about what Jesus “really” was, or believed, or meant to say. I’m content to work with the Jesus accepted by Christian tradition, and depicted in the four canonical gospels, because that is what ‘Jesus’ effectively means to most people today. I’m looking for insights or symbolic inspiration, rather than historical revelation, in this traditional depiction of Jesus, without getting swallowed up by the various scholarly quagmires of Biblical Studies. The third extreme I’d also want to avoid here, is the mere rejection of Jesus as a source of insights or inspiration. For me, and I suspect many others in the West, Jesus is a powerful archetypal figure, both because of his role in Western art and culture and because of his influence through the Christian churches (very much associated, for me, with childhood experience as a minister’s son).

Let me also briefly note some of the aspects of Jesus that I think are pretty unhelpful. There’s the virgin birth, the idealised childhood, and the sense of divine destiny as the son of God. There are the miracles: at least where these are presented not as acts of compassion but (as particularly in the gospel of John) as signs of divine status. There’s the self-sacrificial aspect: he appears to have basically offered himself up as a sacrifice, aware that he was walking into a trap that would result in his death in Jerusalem, but still doing it. In his trial before Pilate he also seems guilty of false modesty, not offering even a moderate defence to draw people’s attention to his innocence. It seems possible that he believed God would save him from the cross (accounting for ‘My God! Why have you forsaken me?’), because of his profound belief in cosmic justice and an imminent doomsday. Finally, if we follow the role of Jesus in Christian tradition, there’s the interpretation of Jesus’s death as an atonement for human original sin, and the belief in his resurrection as a further sign of divinity and a proof of eternal life for the saved: all these are damaging dogmas by which the moral complexity of our experience is overlaid with crude diagnoses and crude magical solutions.

But, if we can manage to leave all that stuff aside, let’s try to focus on some of the ways that Jesus can be inspiring and insightful – corresponding also to ways that he moves towards the Middle Way. I’d suggest that these fall into two categories: one of these is helpful elements in Jesus’s moral teaching, and the other is helpful archetypal interpretation of the meaning of Jesus as the Son of God.

Much of Jesus’s moral teaching involves a struggle with the Pharisees, who were a sect of Jewish legalists, and the Sadducees, who were conservatives associated with the priestly elite at the Jerusalem temple. Jesus is excoriating about rigid observance of tradition or adherence to the letter of the law, instead urging awareness of motive and the spirit behind the law. For example, when his disciples plucked ears of corn on the Sabbath (against the laws that forbid harvesting on the sabbath, which would be work) and were criticised by the Pharisees, Jesus said “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). He also emphasised motive in urging people not to be showy about giving alms, “Your good deed must be secret” (Matthew 6:4). From today’s perspective, to merely emphasise motive in ethics is not enough, because our motives vary so much along with our unintegrated desires. However, this emphasis was a major step forward in a context where people were thinking of ethics only as an extension of law, in the form of rigid social rules. On the other hand, Jesus seems to be trying to strike a Middle Way in relation to the Jewish Law, because he does not reject it either: “Do not suppose that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to complete” (Matthew 5:17).

Jesus is also well-known for his teaching of ‘turning the other cheek’ – the apparent pacifism of “Do not resist those who wrong you. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn and offer him the other also” (Matthew 5:39). The key insight here is the necessity of avoiding fruitless conflict. Rather than offering one rigid position in response to another, we need to find ways of reducing (an not acting on) the narrow egoistic identification we may have with ‘winning’ when someone challenges us. However, I also think that the Pacifist interpretation of this verse develops another kind of dogma. If we read it as forbidding violence in all circumstances whatsoever, then we rule out the possibility of violence addressing conditions in some circumstances where it might be the best response.

Jesus also offers what might be regarded as a brief equivalent to the Kalama Sutta in Buddhism, offering the suggestion that we need to consult experience when confronted with a conflict between different dogmatic claims. “Beware of false prophets, who come to you dressed as sheep while underneath they are savage wolves. You will recognise them by their fruit. Can grapes be plucked from briars, or figs from thistles? A good tree always yields sound fruit, and a poor tree bad fruit” (Matthew 7:15-17).  Here he seems to be suggesting that verbal claims are not enough, and one of the ways we can judge the justification of conflicting claims is by their integration, evident in people’s behaviour. Again, we could take this to another extreme, by rejecting a person’s view whenever there is a shade of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy does not necessarily make people’s claims untrue, but it is a useful warning sign.

Much more could be said about Jesus’ moral teaching, but I must keep this post brief. More broadly, too, I think Jesus’ symbolic role should also be mentioned. His traditional position in Christianity as ‘Son of God’, both wholly human and wholly divine (according to the Nicene Creed) does not have to be merely rejected as a dogmatic belief, because its meaning can be separated from such beliefs. That meaning is one I encounter very frequently in Renaissance art, where I encounter Jesus as what sometimes seem to be an attempt to represent the Middle Way in human experience. The symbolic richness of Jesus’s status as both divine and human is one way of confronting the profound ambiguity of the relationship between perfect ideals and imperfect experience, the ‘truth on the edge’, or necessity of maintaining a robust conception of truth without claiming to possess it. Jesus is full of contradictions: he is both vulnerable and powerful, wise and foolish, alive and dead, but these contradictions are only damaging as objects of incoherent belief. As symbols, on the other hand, their ambiguity can help us to recognise both the conflicts in our own experience and the ways we can work with those conflicts.

Orozco_Christ_cuts_his_CrossWestern art often depicts Jesus in three particular forms: as an infant, in his crucifixion, and in his resurrection. All of these, I think, can be appreciated as offering evocations of that symbolic richness. As an infant he represents the incarnation, that strange ambiguous middle way between divine and human. On the cross he represents the unbearable and unjust suffering of the human condition when understood in relation to divine perfection. When resurrected, he shows the perseverance of hope: that the good can still come through human experience even when we least expect it, when we have come to terms with the conditions of human life. The picture here is an intriguing one by the Mexican artist Orozco. There are many ways of reading it, either as a symbol of resurrection, or as an anti-theistic statement in which mere humanity triumphs.

I have passed through a number of stages in my response to Jesus. As a child and teenager, I mainly had a negative reaction to the idealised figure I was presented with, who was being foisted on me, but didn’t at all seem to represent the qualities I would have chosen to idealise or to worship. At times, however, I also tried out that idealisation, though I had great difficulty making it my own. I then started to see Jesus primarily as a swindle: an attempt to magically jump across the difficulties of human life. Now, however, I’m quite clear about rejecting a lot of the religious claptrap that surrounds beliefs around Jesus, but at the same time I think I am beginning to develop  a relationship with him both as a man and as an icon. As a moral teacher, he can be inspiring, but does not seem to me as hugely significant as he is often cut out to be, and a lot of contextualisation is needed to see how he was moving towards the Middle Way. As an archetypal symbol, though, he means a lot more, and that meaning develops a little almost every time I step into an art gallery.

Postscript (2018)

This article was written in 2014, and since then I have written a whole book, The Christian Middle Way, that is now being published. In that book I give a much more detailed interpretation of Jesus with rather more reference to the gospels. Although this article gives an idea of the direction I was heading in a couple of years before I wrote the book, the view of Jesus that I arrived at subsequently is in many respects more positive than this one.

Robert M. Ellis

What is evil?

Myth, Psychology, Religion, ,

This is a re-blog (with a few minor improvements) of a post on my old Middle Way Philosophy blog in September 2012.

Let’s start with a compilation of evil laughs. You’ll probably only need to watch the first minute or so to get the point. What I’d like you to note is certain features of what we imagine to be evil. Note the falseness, the association with a separate universe constructed in one’s own mind, the alienation from others, and the group mentality. All of these are part of our experience of ‘evil’ – but they are not an indication of a supernatural force. Rather they are the features of metaphysics: of fixed beliefs and goals in a super-dominant left brain.

Some people see evil as a supernatural force, whilst others deny its existence or seek to ignore it. I want to avoid either of these approaches and to account for evil, with all its power, in human experience. Just as God can be supremely meaningful without being an object of belief so can evil. The meaning and seriousness of evil seems to be undermined and trivialised in modern culture (illustrated most strongly by the slang use of the terms ‘wicked’ and ‘evil’ to mean conventionally good), but at the same time it is easy to see why this has happened. It demands an absurd level of fraught anxiety to regard ordinary human desire as the work of Satan, when our experience of desire is that it is largely both unavoidable and – up to a point – beneficial. If we have let go of that anxiety and accepted our desires as human, then that is a starting point, but we then need to start taking seriously the need for moral awareness and moral effort. We can only do that with an awareness of what we are avoiding – of ‘evil’ in a broad sense, neither supernatural nor naturalised into nothing.

So what is evil, if it is not Satan outside us, or human desires within us? My thesis is that evil is not a person or a set of feelings or desires, but a type of belief: that is, metaphysics. The integration model explains how we do not have ‘good’ desires and ‘evil’ desires, but rather desires that can be more or less effective as they get more or less integrated. Desires that I may experience as ‘evil’ (say, the desire to be insulting in an argument) are just unintegrated: they are in conflict with my other desires. However, if I then ask what prevents the integration of ‘evil’ (i.e. currently rejected) desires with ‘good’ (i.e. currently accepted) desires, the answer is fixed beliefs. Those beliefs may, on the surface, be about ‘good’ or ‘evil’, but they rigidify and simplify what I understand as good so I can idealise and hold onto it regardless of challenges, and rigidify and simplify what I understand as evil so that I can reject it, regardless of what it may have to tell me. My thesis is that such rigidification tends to occur around metaphysical beliefs – i.e. ones that cannot be incrementally addressed in experience but merely asserted or denied.

So, what is evil, in the broader and more helpful sense, includes metaphysical beliefs about good as well as metaphysical beliefs about evil – along with other metaphysical beliefs such as those about self, fate, freewill, God or nature. It may run against the mental habits of a lifetime to start thinking about the belief in an ultimate good as evil: but we only have to consider the amount of alienation and conflict created by sincerely held ideas of ultimate good to begin to appreciate why this is so. This doesn’t imply that those who hold such beliefs are ‘evil’ or even that they are mainly motivated by evil: only that the impact of such metaphysical beliefs on them is evil, within the context of wider moral development gained by experience. Great saints and religious leaders with strong metaphysical beliefs may often have had a largely good impact – but my thesis is that they were handicapped, not aided, by those beliefs. Their moral objectivity came not from those beliefs, but from the degree of integration created by the other conditions working in their lives, often including the meaningfulness of the symbols (such as God) that they also had metaphysical beliefs about. Similarly, great figures widely regarded as evil (such as Hitler) had a variety of conditions working on them. They were not evil as people, but their rigid metaphysical beliefs dominated their lives to such an extent that their actions strike others as evil. In the case of Hitler it is not only Nazi ideology, but also his beliefs about himself and about the destiny of himself and the Germans, that could be identified as the metaphysical source of this evil.Devil_Goat

But what does this have to do with Satan or with evil as traditionally conceived? The picture here, in Jungian terminology, is a picture of the Shadow: the rejected energies in ourselves that we project outwards onto Dark Lords, villains, evil spirits, unfaithful spouses, bad bosses, evil capitalists etc. The features we normally give to ‘evil’ are associated with narrow left-brain dominance rather than with integration: empire-building, scheming, ruthlessness, and false emotion (as in the evil laughs above). Psychologically, then, it appears that what evil means to us is unintegrated desire.

We allow evil itself to dominate, however, if we project that unintegrated desire outwards and treat people or things as themselves evil. An appreciation of complexity, or of humanity, is an antidote to this. We also allow evil to dominate if we even treat our desires themselves as evil – for they are part of us. Evil instead works primarily at the level of belief. It is the belief in the ultimate truth and completeness of his schemes, and the ultimate justification of his ruthlessness through the idealisation of current egoistic desires, that makes the Dark Lord evil.

 

Devil picture by Rex Diablo (Wikimedia Commons). Picture can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons licence if attributed