New Secular Spirit

THE SECULAR SPIRIT
By
Michael H. Ducey, Ph.D.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR:
Sunday Morning: Aspects of Urban Ritual (New York, TheFree Press, 1977)
Outgrowing Catholicism (Madison, Wisconsin, The Windhover Press, 1990)

Millard: How does one start on the path?

Trungpa: Make friends with oneself. Start sitting.1

Table of Contents

Introduction

PART ONE: THE HEART OF THE MATTER

Chapter One: The Argument
Chapter Two: A Personal Preamble
Chapter Three: The Alice Miller Finding
Chapter Four: Two Kinds of Faith
Chapter Five: The Jesus Question
Chapter Six: Spiritual Learning
Chapter Seven: The Secular Spirit

PART TWO: THE BIG PICTURE

Chapter Eight: The Development of Spiritual life: Theory
Chapter Nine: The Development of Spiritual life: History

PART THREE: CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA

Chapter Ten: The Mainstream Protestant Churches
Chapter Eleven: Those Catholics!
Chapter Twelve: Evangelical Insurgency

Introduction:

BISHOPS AND CHILDREN

My question is this: how could Roman Catholic bishops, for a period of at least 25 years, not perceive the inherent evil of child abuse? I mean, this is not a population of convicted felons in penal institutions. These are supposedly spiritual leaders. There is a puzzle here. But it is a puzzle that a valid psychology of religion can solve.

It is a clinical question, and deserves a clinical answer. My answer is that bishops are influenced by a state of mind that is the equivalent of being on a mood-altering medication. It is a product of their religious practices. We can call it "religious trance."

In this state of mind, the reality of children's pain does not fully register on them. And in this state of mind, they tend to deny anything that threatens the instruments that produce it. What has gotten them to take child abuse seriously is not the pain of children, but subpoenas, criminal charges and millions of dollars in costs. In this case the spiritual teacher has been secular law and society, and the spiritual student has been the religious organization.

I have thought a lot about the comment of Karl Marx that religion is the opiate of the masses. I eventually came to the conclusion that it is an extremely simplistic observation which nonetheless raises the question of the place of opiates in human consciousness. The overview is that there are a lot of them, and the more we study them, the more we know about the human condition. Opiates have been essential in the evolution of human consciousness.

The fact that religion is one of the opiates used to stabilize emotions does not make it necessarily a bad thing. In fact, the historical analysis suggests that religion is one of the most positive opiates humans have devised. It protected from pain, allowed the powers of the ego to grow, and people have outgrown it.

So, the true nature of religion is that it has a dual character. On the one hand it is a vehicle for awareness of the ultimate conditions of human existence. But on the other hand, since it is an instrument that goes to the very depths of the human experience, it also has to handle the introspective disorders in the human psyche. And so, historical religion, in its beginnings, came up with genius-level trance induction techniques that permit gradual access to commonplace trauma imprints. The Mass is one example; the haaj experience of Muslims is another; bathing in the waters of the Ganges for Hindus is another.

These are all culturally-supported hallucinations whose historic purpose is the gradual healing of the effects of primitive child-rearing practices. We must regrettably conclude that the "real presence" of the divine in all these exercises is purely, but powerfully, imaginary.

The use of these practices has declined over time. The twilight of their usefulness is most extreme in advanced industrial society. The alternative to them for mature spirituality is to engage one's interior self without sedative, while fully awake. To paraphrase a Buddhist maxim: Stop sedating yourself with ritual; make friends with yourself; start sitting.

Thus, the Mass is a sedative, Roman Catholicism is deeply attached to that sedative, and its cultural value is declining. Thus bishops, the ultimate insiders of that culture, have a double psychological problem. On the one hand, they view reality through the lens of religious trance, and so abused children do not easily appear real to them. On the other hand, they so highly value the Mass as a unique instrument of "salvation", that when its existence is threatened, they tend to go into a denial defense.

PART THE FIRST:
THE HEART OF THE MATTER

1. THE ARGUMENT

Religion has a dual character. On the one hand it is a vehicle for awareness of the ultimate conditions of human existence. But on the other hand, since it is an instrument that goes to the very depths of the human experience, it is also the vehicle for any introspective disorders that may show up in the human psyche on the way to that awareness.

The work of the Swiss psychiatrist Alice Miller has shown that culturally approved child-rearing practices routinely traumatize. So there are in fact powerful disorders in the human psyche that individuals and cultures only heal in the course of time. This repressed pain and fear must be sedated in the earlier stages of ego development in order for attention to be paid to more positive introspective elements. Any element so sedated still shows up in the thoughts and behavior of the sedated individuals, but as projections -- i.e., qualities seen as outside the self -- rather than attributes of self.

Therefore the paradox of traditional religion is that it has been successful at both these enterprises: revelation and sedation. So, Karl Marx was only partly right. The opiate function is only one side of religion. Insofar as traditional religion only sedates the repressed, it does not heal the self. It rather makes ticking time bombs out of its adherents.

Thus we find that religious ritual is a complex and brilliant trance induction technique that succeeds in quieting internal anxieties while suggesting thoughts and images that serve, generally, to strengthen the ego. Ritual is in fact the main practice that simultaneously reveals and sedates the content of the unconscious. However, since religious ritual is a form of hypnotic induction, it is clearly "therapy" -- a means to the end of a more mature personality structure. Individuals who benefit from the experience of ritual will often arrive at the point where they want to "terminate therapy." They will want to encounter the world from a more wakeful standpoint and therefore outgrow the need for the hypnotic state. This frequently turns them into "heretics" and causes social upheaval.

Religious symbolism is saturated with projections of infantile dependency, and religious organizations make parent-child relationships permanent.

The constant presence of these projections in religious practice fits into a pattern if we only grant one over-arching premise: they are all based on traumatizing child-rearing practices.

Where We Are Now

The dialectical irony is that religion has been successful at its twofold task, and so it has rendered its opiative function obsolete. The successor to religion in regulating the repressed is called secularism. Secularism begins in Europe in the sixteenth century when the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V does not invite the Pope to the treaty deliberations in Augsburg in 1555, when he is trying to negotiate his relationship with the Lutheran nobles of northern Germany. This is because he knows that the Pope will not make any compromise with "heresy", and he needs the troops of northern Germany to help him fight the Turks.

Under secularism there is positive self-regard, and "reason" is given the task of healing the repressed. Instead of going to church, we turn to science. Historically, this is not immediately successful in regulating the repressed. In fact, it sinks into the pathology of the Holocaust in the mid-twentieth century on the way to a full understanding of itself. Yet, because secularism relies on the native powers of the psyche instead of the artificial controls of religious trance-induction techniques, it is the only system than can support the later stages of emotional development. [See the discussion in Chapter 8.]

Therefore, the present moment is a time when the sedating/ regressing technologies for spiritual growth designed for the earlier stages of personality development are giving way to the wakeful technologies of the later stages. This situation has not been in existence for very long. It is new, and as a culture, we do not know very much about it. So, it is a time of confusion and anxiety. For many people it is a loss of familiar and reliable reference points in the spiritual landscape that feels dangerous and threatening.

2.

PERSONAL PREAMBLE

I was born into a middle-class Irish Catholic family in Chicago in 1933, the sixth of seven children. Absorbing the neuroses of the sub-culture and the time, I joined the Jesuits at age nineteen, went to India as a missionary at age twenty-six, and had an identity crisis at age thirty-three which got me out of the Jesuits and the church. Looking back, there were certain key transition points.

One happened in 1963. I was studying theology in the Jesuit seminary near the town of Kurseong in India. The location is in the Himalayas at an altitude of about 7,700 feet, about 20 miles from the famous British military resort of Darjeeling. Incredible scenery. In what I remember as my very first formal class in New Testament exegesis, Fr. Herman Volkaert, S.J., had us read to ourselves John 20, 19: "In the evening of that same day, the first day of the week, the doors were closed in the room where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews. Jesus came and stood in their midst." Then he shouted at us, "What happened?" (In his manner of teaching, as I recall, he did a lot of shouting.) In the moment of that question and the discussion that followed, I realized that all I had been previously taught about Christianity was superficial and lame. I was 30 years old at the time and had been in the Jesuits for 11 years. But it was only at that moment that something shifted in my body, and I realized that Jesus was part of a reality that was open-ended and mysterious.

The shift was so subtle that I had no language for it at the time. I did not acquire language for it until about 25 years later. In that interval I did not even seek language for it. I just lived my life according to its impact. Only when I started working on my book Outgrowing Catholicism in 1987 did I go back into my memory banks to see if I could account for the steps in my life's process. When I did that, I realized right away that that moment in 1963 had been a crucial turning point. Even in 1987 the language I had for it was crude. I could only say that "something shifted in my body." Now that I have worked more with somatic process I realize that the shift that occurred in 1963 was an awakening of the connection between my neo-cortex, limbic cortex and brain stem as centers of control in my body. I had begun to stop living just in my head. [SIDE BAR - The Tri-une Brain.]

The Tri-une Brain

This description of three broad functions of the human brain was the beginning of "brain mapping".
The first scientific paper on the tri-une brain was written by Paul D. MacLean and published in 1952, but it took about thirty years for this knowledge to inform thinking about human behavior and motivation.
The overall structure of the perspective is that there are three seats of knowledge in the brain: (1) the neo-cortex with its right and left hemispheres which is the seat of the "higher functions" such as language, imagery and reasoning, (2) the limbic cortex which includes the amygdala and the septem and governs fight-flight responses and other emotional functions, and (3) a group of elements clustered around the brain stem which process time and space awareness and other sensori-motor functions of the body. MacLean called this area "the R-Complex".
The neo-cortex is a late evolutionary development and found only in the primates. The limbic cortex is common to all mammals. The R-Complex is shared by reptiles, and hence is sometimes referred to as "the reptilian self".

Fr. Volkaert pointed out that obviously, from the text, the body of Jesus that John reported on was not exactly the same kind of body that I have. The text is very clear: the doors of the room were closed. (I remember him asking the class in the discussion, "Do you have a body like that?") In order to answer the question, I had to do a somatic scan. So this was the moment in time when I started to recover my body. It was the moment when I started to realize that I was in the Jesuits because of disembodied images playing in my head (i.e., neo-cortex), and that if I listened to my body, I could not stay in that social location. But this "realization" was not verbal at that time. There was no actual conversation with myself. The realization was entirely somatic, and it was nascent. I only began tentatively to think differently. It took another three full years before I consciously decided to leave the Jesuits.

The second incident was three years later, on the eve of my actual departure from the Jesuits. It took place in St. Stanislaus Retreat House in Parma, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. The time was December 1966. When I got to the point where I knew I was going to leave, I planned out the day when I would stop saying my daily morning Mass. On that day I went to the chapel where I had been doing it, in order to see what, if any, emotional reaction I would have. I was prepared for a twinge of sadness or guilt. But what actually did happen was quite different. I stood there and looked at the little altar, the chalice, the vestments and missal that I was never going to use again, and what went through me was a gentle but definite feeling of relief. It was actually quite startling. It was as if my body was releasing toxins it had been holding on to all my life.

(A few years later, when I was experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs, I did have the experience of my body releasing chemical toxins when I was coming down from an acid trip. The LSD on the market in those days was often lightly laced with strychnine. I remember standing on the third floor back landing of the house on Wrightwood Avenue in Chicago, looking out the little square window across the frost-laden garage roofs of Chicago back yards in the early morning light of All Saints Day (the day after an all-night hippie Halloween party). We had been up all night. I had taken the acid about twelve hours previously. I was now near the end of the "coming down" cycle. I felt a slight shiver through my whole body as the level of strychnine released another notch. And the thought passed through my mind, "Why, this is exactly what I felt that morning at St. Stan's when I said goodbye to the altar.")

I have since concluded that the practice of saying Mass is a trance-induction technique that induces a state of dissociation from the body. This eases traumatic pain but also dulls the generic body sense that is mediated by the reptilian brain. It mobilizes the endogenous opioids.

The third experience in the recovery of my body was a series of introspective insights in 1986 and 1987. During that period of time I was investigating the offerings of "New Age" therapeutic workshops. In three separate events over a period of about two years I experienced what psychologists would call the release of childhood memories, in which certain garden-variety moments of trauma in my early life came to the surface of my consciousness. Each of these experiences had its own grounding and completing effect on my life. Each of them contributed towards a more secure sense of my self. Each of them reduced the areas of my body and the areas of my brain that were numbed by habitually mobilized opioids.

Also in this period of time I embarked upon the project of writing out the whole story of my experience with Catholicism. This resulted in a book called Outgrowing Catholicism -- A Study. A Practical Guide. A Personal Reflection. The writing of this book was extremely cathartic for me, but it only analyzed the break-down of the old belief system. It did not offer anything to put in its place. As a religion editor at Doubleday tersely put it in turning down my manuscript, "You have to give them something." So I ended up having to publish it myself. I sent out review copies and in the end sold a few hundred books. The rest are still in my storage locker. The book was a commercial disaster, but a therapeutic success. I got my past out of my system.

The fifth phase of my recovery of my body began right after writing Outgrowing Catholicism. When I finished the book I realized that now indeed it was time for me to focus fully on learning more about my body. This was in 1991. It so happened that I encountered at that moment a woman by the name of Kay Ortmans, who was then 84 years old, and had been teaching body awareness for over fifty years. She is well-known in bodyworking circles for her seminars conducted over many years at The Wellsprings Foundation in Ben Lomond, California in the Santa Cruz mountains. In 1991 she was living in semi-retirement in Madison, Wisconsin, where I was, but was still taking students, giving massages, and holding small workshops.

I ended up studying with Kay for two years. She and her followers and other students gave me my apprenticeship in the workings of somatic energy. I spent hundreds of hours assisting and giving and receiving bodywork, in movement workshops and free-associational drawing, all to the accompaniment of classical music. At the end of that training I moved back to the Chicago area.

In Chicago I extended the reach of my somatic self-awareness even further by studying bodywork and trauma treatment with the trainers of Hakomi Integrative Somatics. Nowadays they call it "sensorimotor psychotherapy" and it is gaining more and more acceptance in professional psychology.

I still study reptilian, to get more proficient at it. There is always more to learn about one's body-mind relationship. But in the main I would now describe myself as "reasonably well embodied". I think I get what somatic existence is really all about. I feel more confident about the little koan I made up for myself: "The body is not afraid of death. Only the mind, incomplete in its relationship with the body, is afraid of death."

3.
THE ALICE MILLER FINDING

The Swiss psychiatrist Alice Miller published three books in the 1970s (in German) and 1980s (in English) that developed the observation that child-rearing practices themselves regularly traumatize children.2 She uncovered very specific evidence in the form of nineteenth century German child-rearing manuals. For example she comments that:

In the mid-nineteenth century a man named Schreber, the father of a paranoid patient described by Freud, wrote a series of books on child-rearing. They were so popular in Germany that some of them went through forty printings and were translated into several languages. In these works it is stressed again and again that children should start being trained as soon as possible, even as early as their fifth month of life, if the soil is to be "kept free of harmful weeds".3

Miller calls this "poisonous pedagogy". A central feature of it is "the conviction that parents are always right and that every act of cruelty, whether conscious or unconscious, is an expression of their love."4 She says that this claim of parental figures to unchallenged authority comes from unresolved experiences of their own childhood.

The pedagogical conviction that one must bring a child into line from the outset has its origin in the need to split off the disquieting parts of the inner self and project them onto an available object. The child's great plasticity, flexibility, defenselessness, and availability make it the ideal object for projection.5

The first thing to note about this situation is that these child-rearing practices traumatize. Traumatic child-rearing leads to the split-self: "Splitting the human being into two parts, one that is good, meek, conforming and obedient and the other that is diametrically opposite."6

How can it have come about that the split I have just described is attributed to human nature as a matter of course even though there is evidence that it can be overcome without any great effort of will and without legislating morality? The only explanation I can find is that these two sides are perpetuated in the way children are raised and treated at a very early age, and the accompanying split between them is therefore regarded as "human nature." The "good" false self is regarded as the result of what is called socialization, of adapting to society's norms, consciously and intentionally passed on by the parents; the "bad", equally false self is rooted in the child's earliest experiences of parental behavior, visible only to the child who is used as an outlet.7

Such practices also give rise to "the illusion of existential worthlessness", which the British psychiatrist Michael Balint called "the basic fault". Balint was trying to explain certain difficult cases he encountered in psychoanalysis. He came to the conclusion that "analytical work proceeds on at least two different levels, one familiar and less problematic, called the Oedipal level...", and the other "...I propose to call the level of the basic fault."8

The term "basic fault" does not refer to a moral condition and implies no guilt. It is a metaphor drawn from the physical sciences. "In geology and in crystallography the word fault is used to describe a sudden irregularity in the overall structure, an irregularity which in normal circumstances might lie hidden but, if strains and stresses occur, may lead to a break, profoundly disrupting the overall structure."9

It shows up as an extremely painful "gap" in the deepest recess of the human psyche. It is a chasm, a crevice, an abyss, possibly of fearful darkness, into which the conscious ego is in danger of irretreivably falling. It projects out into the world as an array of binary oppositions, e.g., between self and other, we and they, sacred and profane, grace and nature, safe and dangerous, etc. Balint says of the patient's emotions when aware of the basic fault:

The only thing that can be observed is a feeling of emptiness, being lost, deadness, futility and so on, coupled with an apparently lifeless acceptance of everything that has been offered. Everything is accepted...but nothing makes sense. ......Although highly dynamic, the force originating from the basic fault has the form neither of an instinct nor of a conflict. It is a fault, something wrong in the mind, a kind of deficiency which must be put right. It is not something damned up for which a better outlet must be found, but something missing either now, or perhaps for almost the whole of the patient's life.10

Balint says that "...the origin of the basic fault may be traced back to a considerable discrepancy in the early formative stages of the individual between his bio-psychological needs and the material and psychological care, attention, and affection available during the relevant times." 11 This is of course a reference to child-rearing practices.

This basic fault or something very much like it is undoubtedly the experiential foundation for the "original sin" of Christian theology. The theological doctrine of original sin turns an experiential defect into an ontological defect, a clear case of projection.

A short time before Balint's work, there appeared a more popular description of the basic fault that has produced a slightly different language. It is The Aristos, a philosophical essay by the novelist John Fowles, first published in 1964. The Aristos is a literary rather than a scientific work. He speaks of the existence of the "nemo".

...I believe each human psyche has a fourth element, which, using a word indicated by the Freudian terminology, I call the nemo. By this I mean not only `nobody', but also the state of being nobody -- `nobodiness'. In short, just as physicists now postulate an anti-matter, so must we consider the possibility that there exists in the human psyche an anti-ego. This is the nemo.12

Fowles expands for many pages on the manifestations of the nemo in personal, social and political life. Some examples:

7 The nemo is a man's sense of his own futility and ephemerality; of his relativity, his comparativeness; of his virtual nothingness.
8 All of us are failures; we all die.
9 Nobody wants to be a nobody. All our acts are partly devised to fill or to mask the emptiness we feel at the core.
16 I can counter my nemo by conflicting; by adopting my own special style of life. I build up an elaborate unique persona, I defy the mass. I am the bohemian, the dandy, the outsider, the hippie.
37 I vote because not to vote represents a denial of the principle of right of franchise; but not because voting in any way relieves my sense that I am a pawn, and a smaller and smaller pawn, as the electorate grows. 13

The basic fault shows up in many accounts of spiritual life, but not all of them. It is "the dark night of the soul" in St. John of the Cross, "the shadow" in C. G. Jung, "the gap between subject and object" in D. W. Winnicott, "the nemo" in John Fowles, "the leap of faith" in Soren Kierkegaard, "the heart of darkness" in Joseph Conrad, "dread" in Jean Paul Sartre, and so on and so forth. In each case it is an experience of darkness, meaninglessness, isolation and self-worthlessness at the "center" of human experience.

But it does not show up in all spiritual literature. I do not find the basic fault in the works of Lao Tzu, classical Buddhism, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the biblical prophets or the four Gospels. It is however pervasive in popular culture, modern literature, the letters attributed to St. Paul, and the history of organized religion.

In recent years, especially since the First World War, there has arisen a body of scientific literature on the effects of trauma. We now know a lot about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. That knowledge is being applied to the diagnosis and treatment of military personnel, former prisoners of war, victims of torture, and victims of physical or sexual child abuse.

The level of trauma being treated in modern hospitals is obviously deeper than what is produced by child-rearing in the culture as a whole. That is why its symptoms stand out. However, the symptoms will be the same in both cases, except those due to cultural traumatization will be milder.

Dr. Judith Herman (Trauma and Recovery, 1997) gives this overview of those symptoms:14

It is a kind of fragmentation, whereby trauma tears apart a complex system of self-protection that normally functions in an integrated fashion. Abram Kardiner described the essential pathology of the combat neurosis in similar terms. When a person is overwhelmed by terror and helplessness, "the whole apparatus for concerted, coordinated and purposeful activity is smashed." (p. 34)

The symptoms of PTSD fall into three main categories: hyperarousal, intrusion (the permanent imprint) and constriction (numbing). (p. 35) Pitman and van der Kolk suggest that trauma may produce long-lasting alterations in the regulation of endogenous opioids (endorphins), which are natural substances having the same effects as opiates within the central nervous system. (p. 44)

Traumatized people become adept practitioners of the arts of altered states of consciousness ... dissociation, voluntary thought suppression, minimization , outright denial ... Perhaps the best name for this complex array of mental maneuvers is doublethink (Orwell), "the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." (p. 87)

The ability to hold contradictory beliefs is one characteristic of trance states. The ability to alter perception is another. Prisoners frequently instruct one another in the induction of these states through chanting, prayer and simple hypnotic techniques. (p. 87) These include the ability to form positive and negative hallucinations and to dissociate parts of the personality. (p. 88)

Alice Miller pointed to the evidence of "poisonous pedagogy" in child-rearing manuals in German, but not just one linguistic culture is at issue here. The Germanic tribes were after all only one of the numerous groups that entered Europe from the steppe of Central Asia and became the forebears of all Caucasians. In The Chalice and the Blade (1987), Riane Eisler notes that the Kurgans replaced the Old Europeans in the second millenium before the Christian Era. The last surviving example of Old European culture was on Crete. Old European culture in the Bronze Age -- starting around 8000 BCE -- had a highly developed agricultural organization, female goddess figures, social planning and non-warlike economies. It was much more peaceful and comfortable than its successor cultures. Old European culture was matrilineal, but not matriarchal. It was a "partnership culture".

Two salient characteristics of the Kurgan cultures were the centrality of violence in their economies and their pre-occupation with death. They were also of course patriarchal, highly stratified, practiced slavery, and subjugated women. The Old Europeans did not appear to make a very big deal about death, but the extremely elaborate funerary practices of the Kurgans -- especially for their chiefs -- expended great energy in trying to "overcome" death.

If the second millenium before the Christian era seems like a long time back to go to find the source of contemporary child-rearing practices, recall that World War I is generally conceded to express tribal hostilities that went back over a thousand years. So, 2000 BCE is not too far back to go, because child-rearing practices are the product of an evolutionary learning process, and cultural evolution, as we know, is quite slow compared to some other human processes.

Judith Herman notes that when Freud talked about childhood trauma in "The Etiology of Hysteria" in 1896, the effect on his colleagues and his culture was so dire that it prompted him to suppress the whole topic forthwith and never return to it in his lifetime. The whole idea of the presence of trauma in western culture had to be subsequently re-discovered three times (twice by Abram Kardiner, that is, after World War I and after World War II, and for the third time by Vietnam veterans and women working on issues of rape and domestic violence in the 1960s and 1970s) before its existence was publicly acknowledged.

This history powerfully suggests that childhood traumatization is indeed a regular feature of all cultures. Indeed, if we look at the symptomatology carefully, there is no reason to suspect that any cultures on the whole planet are free of this phenomenon.

Peter Levine (Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, 1997) is one of the leaders in contemporary trauma research. He cites a study of aboriginal societies that finds that "societies that practiced close physical bonding and the use of stimulating rhythmic movement had a low incidence of violence. Societies with diminished or punitive physical contact with their children showed clear tendencies toward violence in the forms of rape, war, and torture." He then adds:

The work of Dr. Prescott and others points to something we all know intuitively: that the time around birth and infancy is a critical period. Children assimilate the ways that their parents relate to each other and the world at a very young age. When parents have been traumatized, they have difficulty teaching their young a sense of basic trust. Without this sense of trust as a resource, children are more vulnerable to trauma.15

So, I take the Alice Miller finding to be that we are all traumatized, and all prone to being dissociated. Miller herself says that in her clinical work, she came to the conclusion that "every perpetrator was once a victim." This leads to the corollaries that terrorists are terrified and torturers are tortured. This is not to excuse. This is only to correctly diagnose, strategize and respond.

4.
TWO KINDS OF FAITH

A useful definition of faith is that it is the non-rational knowledge religion gives.

To go along with the dual character of religion, there are two kinds of faith. One of them is trans-rational and gives the awareness of the ultimate ground of human existence. The other is pre-rational and consists of the set of terrified projections imprinted by a harsh childhood that introspection encounters on its way to awareness of ultimate ground.

The object of the interiority exercise is to be completely awake. In this condition we know exactly who and what we are, without illusion or deception or fear. It is a fully embodied sense of the ultimate conditions of human existence. I call this knowledge universal faith. It is serene, flexible and tolerant.

The second kind of faith is a projective-regressive-dissociative set of beliefs that we can call sectarian faith. It is rigidly boundaried and thus provides an identity: "I am a Catholic, ...a Protestant, ...a Muslim, ...a Jew, ...a Hindu, ...a Vaishnavite, ...a Buddhist, ...a Christian, ....a Methodist, ...a Pagan", and the rest. It is powerfully defensive and therefore subtly or overtly hostile to all other forms of projective-regressive-dissociative faith. It creates an us-and-them world and is the vehicle for strong emotions of anger and fear.

Sociologist Dean R. Hoge calls it "empirical faith":

Our experiences have taught us that the members of different denominations actually live in different worlds and are shaped by distinct assumptions and experiences. This is shown by the different ways denominational members talk about their own faith and church life, and it is shown by the ignorance they have about other denominations. ..... We have been impressed repeatedly by how encapsulated church members are in their own religious worlds. For people in every congregation, their own congregation, and especially their friends in the congregation fashion their understanding of religious reality. Anyone disbelieving this statement can put it to a test: Ask people in any denomination about the theology and practices of other denominations. You will see how little they know.16

This kind of faith is projective and regressive in that it conceives of god and spiritual realities as the unfinished relationships of childhood. It takes all those memories of the first few years of life that were lived under the regime of harsh child-rearing practices, and projects this content out onto the world as divinely inspired truths. This kind of faith is dissociative in that it has suppressed and is completely out of touch with huge chunks of self. In particular, all the pain from harsh child-rearing practices is thoroughly suppressed and the parts of time and the parts of the body that carry those memories are completely numb. Therefore, the behavior associated with this kind of faith is ruled by ideas rather than empathic perception, and so it can perform all manner of insensitive cruelties in the name of orthodoxy and truth.

Universal faith, on the other hand, is completely inclusive in its scope, remarkably defenseless, and identifies as merely human. It grounds an extremely realistic, flexible and compassionate presence in the world. That is, because it has complete access to all that its own self truly is, it also has great access to the truth of the existence of other human beings. It can comprehend and care for their existence. It also has a completely embodied sense of the permeability of the boundary between time-space and non-time-space, and it finds all this quite amusing.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin describes the path to universal faith as follows:

... I took the lamp, and leaving the zone of everyday occupations and relationships where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates. But as I moved further and further away from the conventional certainties by which social life is superficially illuminated, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself. At each step of the descent a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me. And when I had to stop my exploration because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and out of it came -- arising from I know not where -- the current which I dare to call my life.17

One of the best verbal descriptions of this kind of faith to be found anywhere is that of the Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi:

Because you think you have body or mind, you have very lonely feelings. But when you realize that everything is just a flashing into the vast universe, then you become very strong and your existence becomes very meaningful.18

Ken Wilber noted that it is not always easy to detect the difference between pre-rational and trans-rational knowledge:

A major therapeutic confusion among theorists stems from what I have called "the pre/trans fallacy", which is a confusing of pre-rational structures with trans-rational structures simply because both are non-rational. This confusion runs in both directions: pre-rational structures (phantasmic, magic, myth) are elevated to trans-rational status (Jung), or trans-rational structures are reduced to pre-rational infantilisms (e.g., Freud). It is particularly common to reduce samadhi to autistic, symbiotic or narcissistic-ocean states. ... Alexander (1931) even called Zen a training in catatonic schizophrenia. In my opinion such theoretical (and therapeutic) confusions will continue to abound until the phenomenological validity of the full spectrum of human growth receives more recognition and study.19

The pre/trans fallacy causes a lot of problems: "Practitioners of meditation, often swimming in the rhetoric of transformation, may fail to recognize the regressive nature of much of their experiences."20 It is easy in personal growth work to get "a mixture and confusion of pre-egoic fantasy with trans-conceptual insight, of pre-personal desires with trans-personal growth, of pre-egoic whoopee with trans-egoic liberation."21

For the past four hundred years or so there has been a great debate in Western culture about the relative merits of two forms of knowledge, one of them called "faith" and the other called "reason." The "reason" in this discussion is the rational-deductive-logical-conceptual knowledge obtained by science. The "faith" that is involved is not universal faith, but rather the projective-regressive-dissociative faith of the Christianity of the time. It is the kind of knowledge of self and the world possessed under the conditions of religious trance.

We now know that the knowledge of science is a limited form of knowledge. And we should now know, at this stage of the discussion, that projective-regressive-dissociative faith is also an extremely limited form of knowledge. There is no conflict between universal faith and scientific knowledge. There is however a very serious conflict between universal faith and sectarian faith.

5.
THE JESUS QUESTION

I was rigorously trained in Roman Catholic theology. Thirty-five years after that training I have arrived at a two-part conclusion. Part one is that Jesus of Nazareth is the incarnation of the second person of the blessed trinity. The other part is that this assertion is largely irrelevant to the present stage of history.

So, I think the legacy of Jesus is important. It tells us something about our existence that no other source reveals. But I am also convinced that the authentic legacy of Jesus has not the smallest hope of taking its place in history until Christianity is divested of all traces of sectarian faith. That is to say, we have to take all the projections, regressions and trance induction techniques out of Christianity before the legacy of Jesus can get a fair hearing. However, Christianity without its projections and trance induction techniques would be unrecognizable vis-à-vis the contemporary institutions that go by that name.

For example, the Roman Catholic practice of the Mass will have to go. It is too heavily a trance induction technique and is based on a mistaken interpretation of the New Testament. [See Chapter 9.] The authority of clergy has to go. This is clearly a paternalism that doubts the power of self to grow. The concept of "redemption" has to go. It was a metaphor that worked pedagogically in the time of St. Paul, but it is merely a metaphor, and once you get to the heart of things, it gets in the way. We are not green stamps. There is no economic transaction going on in the Jesus event. The concept of original sin has to go. It was in the first instance a very big mistake that may have served developmental purposes, but is clearly schizoid in implication, and in conflict with positive self-regard, which is the state of consciousness of the healthy human organism. The concept of "grace" as something added to and outside of nature has to go. Again, this line of thought is schizophrenigenic and a leftover from a stage of emotional development in which the ego is very weak.

So, I like to say to those who ask me when I am coming back to my former religion that I will be glad to do that on only a few conditions: If they throw out going to church, the clergy, original sin and their doubt of self, then I will be glad to join them in talking about Jesus.

And I actually think that when you do throw out all those things, the New Testament becomes a really interesting document.

However, in the cultural climate of today -- which is dominated by religious institutions deeply invested in trance-inducing ritual, a powerful clergy, and defensive identity structures -- it is pretty much a waste of time going after projection-free investigation of the legacy of Jesus. The main tasks of spiritual development today are education, political and economic stability and introspective healing. If we manage those, then sectarian religion will continue to wither away, and in a few hundred years we might have an interesting global synthesis of spiritual systems.

A Weird Little Theological Post Script

Creation and Evolution

I have always thought that the controversy about creation versus evolution is really silly. Ever since I was a very young philosophy student in the Jesuits it has seemed simple and obvious to me that God creates evolution. (Recently I seem to find in the thinking of Stephen Hawking some mathematics that would support this.) I mean, isn't that pretty obvious? Creation is about Being. It is the answer to the question, "Why is there anything and not simply nothing at all?" Evolution is about what happens after things are.

Well, I guess you do have to have an insight into Being in order to get that point, but doesn't everybody have the ability to have that? After all, everybody is. I mean, does anyone really think that he or she causes himself or herself to be?

As long as we are on this point, we might as well follow it out. Once you get it that everything that is, is because it is made to be by a source outside itself, then you get it that creation is totally gratuitous. And once you get it that creation is totally gratuitous, then there is no need for some ontological extra called "the supernatural."

However, lots and lots of theologians love to talk about the supernatural, as in "the supernatural order", which they think of as "the order of grace", which is a "higher" order than the order of nature, an order to which human beings need to be "elevated". But it seems to me that if you look at the history of Christian theology, you will see very clearly that this whole business about a "supernatural order", as well as the whole business of "original sin", is based on a very serious introspective misunderstanding that took place in the time of Augustine.

Now certainly Paul and the early Christians are very clear about an experiential aspect of their lives -- which is the difference in their control of impulses such as sex and greed -- after their conversion to Christianity compared to before their conversion. And they certainly take a very dim view of the pagans of their time and of the jews who did not convert to Christianity. However, I do not think they ever actually ontologize this experience. It would never even have occurred to most of them to talk in that language. Paul in particular was not one to use the ideas of Plato and Aristotle. Paul talked about experience.

It remained then for Augustine and his generation to ontologize the experience of Christian conversion, and to turn the xaris of grace from a mere gift to a whole new order of being. It was an understandable error because, given the level of introspective competence of the culture of the time, it was natural for them to mistake emotional forces residing in the unconscious and attributable to child-rearing practices for fixed aspects of being. But it was a mistake, and only Pelagius came even close to getting it right.

So I like to observe that in the argument between Pelagius and Augustine, Pelagius was right philosophically, scientifically and exegetically, but Augustine was right developmentally. So I think it is about time that we re-visited Pelagius to see what a Christian theology would look like that did not split the psyche into two distinct components, and did not split the world this way either.

6. SPIRITUAL LEARNING

Millard: How does one start on the path?
Trungpa: Make friends with oneself. Start sitting.22

The key concept is that traditional religious practices are developmentally "early", in the service of the weak ego. They are techniques for engaging the unconscious and coming to an awareness of our essential human being. They are ingenious and appropriate to the level of development they address. However, recent trauma studies have made them all, not yet completely obsolete, but certainly obsolescent. The point of all those techniques is to be grounded in your true reality. The main obstacle to this grounding is the residue of fear and overwhelm left over from early childhood experiences. Now there is a technique that is more direct, more efficient and more sensitive than all those traditional religious techniques. We can think of it as "therapeutic mindfulness accompanied by a highly developed inner body sense."

As human beings continue their quest for wholeness, more advanced techniques gradually replace earlier attempts.

Spiritual learning is mainly about pacifying your demons. Once you pacify your demons, everything becomes clear. "When you realize that everything is a flashing into the vast universe, then you become very strong and your existence becomes very meaningful."

But it can be hard to get started. When the ego is weak, it is easily overwhelmed by the forces of the unconscious. The early twentieth century French poet Paul Valéry said somewhere, "If you want to go down into the self, you'd better go armed to the teeth."

That is why traditional religion devised its trance induction techniques: to access the unconscious safely. They were appropriate technology for a thousand years ago, but now they have become addictions.

From recent trauma studies we have learned that "armed to the teeth" simply means armed with certain specific skills, principally a well-developed "inner body sense", which is able to detect the earliest onset of re-enacting trauma. Once you can detect the onset, you can control the memory, and gradually allow yourself to complete the defense mechanism that was overwhelmed when you were very young and very small. In trauma treatment we have learned that we can access anything inside ourselves as long as we do it slowly enough.

So, the watchwords now are (a) relax and (b) notice. It is not necessary to be ambitious. Exert no pressure. We do not have to "do" anything. The unconscious yields up its secrets easily if only it is permitted to be voluntary.

There are some spiritual systems that understand this. There is a meeting today between very old spiritual technologies and very new ones. Sufism and Buddhism harmonize with psychotherapy. The thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Jelaluddin Rumi could easily say that "The cure for pain is in the pain."23 But he was a very unusual personality. For most people, engaging one's demons takes guidance in starting slowly and proceeding step by step.

Sleeping Vs. Waking

Just noticing the difference between being awake and being in trance is step one. This is a bit tricky, even though it is elementary, because culture's default setting for introspection is escape. Culture typically supports habitual trance, and so awareness of the difference between waking and sleeping is not automatic.

However, once you get the difference, you are ready to grasp the fact that you have a choice. And it is not the point never to go into trance, but simply to be aware of when you are awake and when you are asleep. Then you also learn how useful it is to make your home in the waking state. When you have a satisfying or disturbing trance experience, you "return to the body" and find grounding there. Of course, there is the problem that emotional pain stored in the body can make trance-states very attractive. In fact, escapist trances for people who have a lot of pain stored in their bodies are the foundations of cults and other totalitarianisms.

The Secular Spirit

When one is making progress with being awake and being asleep and beginning to enjoy wakefulness, there comes a time when the sedating ministrations of conventional religion no longer feel good. The ritual, the organ music, the pious hymnody, the orchestrated entrancements all become mild irritations that interfere with the texture of consciousness. This distaste is a response of the deepest part of the psyche. It is therefore quintessentially "spiritual", and is exercised in respect to all sedating technologies. The psyche in this condition cannot stand being put to sleep -- unless of course it is for some clearly defined and specific purpose in therapy -- because this gets in the way of its path to wholeness. This discomfort with sleepiness occurs when the woundedness created by harsh child-rearing practices is reduced enough to permit a positive disposition towards going inside. What awakens at this moment is the appetite for interiority.

The principal objection of the secular spirit to sectarian religion is the obstacles it puts in the way of this appetite for interiority. The secular seeker says to religion, "Will you please go away and stop trying to put me to sleep!"

This appetite understands Rumi: "The cure for pain is in the pain." Now, I have seen people visibly recoil when I cite this saying of Rumi. I have seen the expressions on their faces turn from receptivity to anger. This is testimony to the normal level of pain in society today, and the power of the default setting of escape. To bring interiority into the conversation violates a taboo.

But there must be some reason why we are still reading Rumi's works six hundred years after he died. If the comment about the source of pain is accurate, then it is of inestimable value, because it gives the actual solution to the problem. If you look for the source of pain where it isn't, then you will not cure the pain. Your only recourse will be more and more sedatives. You are stuck with the constant deadening of your sensibilities, and the prospect of living a less and less full life. But if you look for the source of your pain where it is, ah, then a whole new range of opportunities opens up for you.

There's Nothing Ahead

Lovers think they're looking for each other,
but there's only one search: Wandering
this world is wandering that, both inside one
transparent sky. In here
there is no dogma and no heresy.

The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said or did
about the future. Forget the future.
I'd worship someone who could do that!

On the way you may want to look back, or not,
but if you can say There's nothing ahead,
there will be nothing there.

Stretch you arms and take hold the cloth of your clothes
with both hands. The cure for pain is in the pain.
Good and bad are mixed. If you don't have both,
you don't belong with us.
When one of us gets lost, is not here, he must be inside us.
There's no place like that anywhere in the world. 24

The thirst for interiority can be produced by the lucky accident of exceptional childhood experience, by unusual individual talent, by psychotherapy, or by fortunate experiences of personal success such as continuous material security, getting a good education, social approval, or by any one of these or by all of them together.

A device that the Buddhists use is the sutra. A sutra is a statement of spiritual principle that the practitioners memorize and then chant, usually daily. It contains introspective truths that a master will then use as a basis for commentary and other guidance of the learners. A popular sutra in use today is the work of a first century teacher called Avalokitesvara. It is called "The Heart Sutra". It is readily available in numerous commentaries, and there are many translations on the Internet.

The Heart Sutra

Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva when deeply practicing Perfect Understanding perceives that all five skandhas are empty and is saved from all suffering and distress.

Shariputra, form does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form. That which is form is emptiness, that which is emptiness is form. The same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness.

Shariputra, all dharmas are marked with emptiness. They do not appear or disappear, are not tainted or pure, do not increase or decrease. Therefore, in emptiness no form, no feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness. No eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no color, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mind, no realm of eyes, and so forth until no realm of mind consciousness. No ignorance and also no extinction of it, and so forth until no old age and death and also no extinction of them. No suffering, no origination, no stopping, no path, no cognition, also no attainment with nothing to attain.

The Bodhisattva depends on Perfect Understanding and the mind is no hindrance; without any hindrance no fears exist. Far apart from every perverted view one dwells in Desirelessness.

In the three worlds all Buddhas depend on Perfect Understanding and attain enlightenment.

Therefore, know that Perfect Understanding is the great transcendent mantra, is the great bright mantra, is the utmost mantra, is the supreme mantra, which is able to relieve all suffering and is true, not false. So proclaim the Perfection of Understanding mantra, proclaim the mantra that says:

Arrived, arrived, completely arrived, everyone arrived at enlightenment, yes!

Notice that the center of the sutra is about fear. And this is enough to begin the exploration of self.

If the fear of going inside seems to be persistent and sticky, then don't do it. Temporize, be oblique. Just play around with the idea. Read a book by just about any contemporary Buddhist, or have a casual conversation with a friend. The cultivation of interiority is so much a social movement these days that it is not hard to find some one who just casually and in the normal course of their lives has tried some form of meditation or other introspective practice.

Pre-Trans Confusion

In 1985 Robert Bellah published a book called Habits of the Heart. It is a study of belief systems of modern Americans. It turns out to be a profoundly elegiac lament for the loss of some earlier time of harmonious bliss. Bellah found Americans to be quite confused about where to place their spiritual loyalties, and the solution he recommended for this problem was a return to the practices of a Christian childhood: "Perhaps common worship, in which we express our gratitude and wonder in the face of the mystery of being itself, is the most important thing of all."25

This is paradoxical because Bellah is precisely the scholar who charted the course forward for many developmental thinkers with his ground-breaking description of religious evolution and the process of "religious symbolization." After all of his marvelous and helpful commentary on this activity, he seems to have personally abandoned it.

One lesson to be learned from this is that intellectual achievement and emotional achievement do not necessarily go hand in hand. Bellah's personal rejection of religious symbolization in favor of the regressive trance of traditional Christian ritual does not one whit detract from the quality of his scholarly work. And he is certainly welcome to practice what he intuitively decides is best for him. The greatest spiritual legacy of the Protestant Reformation is the freedom we have to choose our own tools of spiritual growth (e.g., secularism). But his choice also illustrates the two general options we have in a situation of spiritual confusion. One is to shut down the pain with some mildly or extremely regressive trance induction device, such as traditional Christian ritual. The other is to stay awake, go inside with Rumi and seek the cure for pain in the pain.

In Chapter 9, I will discuss the dynamics of religious trance at length for the Roman Catholic Mass, but the same principles apply to all "worship". For the term "worship" itself means regression to a childlike state. When one worships, one gets very little and turns one's dependent face to the hoped-for benevolence of an extremely powerful parent-figure.

The pre/trans fallacy makes it likely that in a time of spiritual confusion we can regress in the service of the ego and not recognize it as such. In order to tell the difference between pre-rational regression and trans-rational advancement, we have to experiment with both of them and keep careful notes.

The Teaching-Learning Relationship

There are different teaching-learning relationships in the two phases of spiritual growth. In the earlier phase the relationship is one of parent to child. It is characterized by the transference of the learner, as the primary need is to complete the unfulfilled needs created by the lack of nurture in child-rearing practices. In this relationship the parent dictates behavior and provides reality orientation. It performs the functions of the ego for the weak ego of the learner. This is the "Our-Holy-Mother-the-Church-and-Our-Holy-Father-the-Pope" system.

In the later phase the relationship is between equals, between two adults, where the "teacher" is merely a technical assistant to the self-controlled ego-functions of the learner. The learner has an appetite for interiority, but finds it confusing.

The basic model for this relationship is what Carl Rogers described as "the helping relationship" fifty years ago. Rogers' formulation of this relationship paved the way for the present era of personal growth technologies in the West. He first proposed the basic principle of this relationship in the nineteen-forties: "I have come to trust the capacity of persons to explore and understand themselves and their troubles, and to resolve those problems in any close, continuing relationship where I can provide a climate of real warmth and understanding." 26

The characteristics of the helping relationship can be summarized as follows:

1. Congruence: to be what you are, genuine and without "front", openly being the feelings and attitudes you actually experience.
2. Empathy: accurate understanding of the other's private, inner world and the ability to communicate significant fragments of that understanding.
3. Positive Regard: a full acceptance of what the other actually is.
4. Communication skill: the ability to detect the interpretation the other puts on my efforts to express congruence, empathy and positive regard.27

When these qualities are present, Rogers says, "change is predicted." That is, personal [spiritual] growth will occur.

Religion and Interiority.

All religions know about the practice of introspection. In most religions it is offered only to a few initiates, not to the general public. Different systems call it by different names, and handle it differently. Some names for introspection are: (1) the classic buddhist term: mindfulness, (2) the Zen phrase: doing nothing, (3) Meister Eckhart's: Gelassenheit (lit: "letting-ness") , and (4) the more familiar western term "meditation".

These terms are all generic and stand for the threshold position of "looking inward", an initial placing of oneself in the presence of one's unconscious. However, once one enters the ante-chamber of the interior world by assuming the stance of "mindfulness", there are still significant choices to make. The world of interiority is quite complex and vast, and there are many options as to purpose and method. Therefore, Chogyam Trungpa's observation seems to be universally valid, "To start on the path, make friends with yourself; start sitting." But once you do get inside, there are still choices.

A centrally important aspect of these choices is the degree of freedom each one gives in accessing the unconscious. For the unconscious is rarely entered without prior censorship.

All religions exercise some form of conscious control over their introspective practices. So, one way we have of classifying religions is by the degree of freedom they permit in this matter. On a scale from zero to ten these degrees range from the zero of conservative Christianity to the seven or eight of the "free association" of psychotherapy, or the nine of Sufi mindfulness.

Some examples of forms of control are (a) meditation protocols (mantras, texts, images), (b) rituals, (c) theological treatises, (d) chanting.

Lack of freedom is due to the fact that the content of the unconscious is extremely unfamiliar to the conscious mind and potentially very painful. In regard to the issue of unfamiliarity, the information stored in the unconscious is non-linear and extra-rational. It includes elements that are neither visual, auditory nor conceptual, but purely tactile and kinesthetic. In regard to pain, the unconscious contains the memories of all the early experiences of life that were painful to the fetus, infant and young child that we all once were. Thus entry into the unconscious can produce all manner of mystery and surprises, some of which can be emotionally devastating.

So, religions generally approach it very cautiously, in a highly structured manner. In fact, taking the notion of freedom one step further, we can classify religions and schools of meditation by the degree to which they are escapist or engaging of the painful content of the unconscious.

I would note three major structures in wide use today and that have been around for thousands of years. They therefore represent three fundamentally basic strategies humans have devised for getting into the unconscious, but doing so safely.

1) concentration ("one-pointed") meditation. This Hindu technique is, I would say, resolutely escapist, and produces powerful out-of-body states that can anesthetize the subject in regard to physical pain, but also isolate the subject from physical/social reality and lead to the construction of inegalitarian and insensitive social systems (e.g., the caste system).

2) vipassana ("non-judgmental insight") meditation. This ancient and powerful buddhist technique is, I would say, delicately and subtly escapist in its orientation. The distancing of "self" from the content of the unconscious through the technique of being non-judgmental creates a soft but powerful barrier between the ego and all painful memories. In order for "healing" to occur -- the only process that leads to complete integration of these materials -- pain must be allowed to "come up." Of course, if one does not have the tools to handle such memories, they can overwhelm. So, vipassana is an effective introspective tool for the culture and the period of history in which psychotherapeutic insight into childhood trauma was not available.

3) Western monastic meditation (text-based, image-based, concept-based). This cornerstone of Christian consciousness is I would say, powerfully ambivalent. I would call it 80% escapist and encouraging the subject to live in an out-of-body state organized around the verbal-conceptual imagination. It lives in storyland. However, insofar as the central "story" of storyland is biblical, it has the opportunity to live in real-time history versus imagined history. So, the principal problem of Christianity is distinguishing between imagination and perception. It tends to wander off into ego-centric flights of fantasy. It's most dangerous heresy is Gnosticism, an actually schizophrenic escape into fantasy. It also produces a highly paradoxical social system: it is horrendously violent, supports a completely ego-centric and head-tripping patriarchal bureaucracy, but also produces a societal commitment to personal freedom and equality that is unique among human cultures.

Secular Mindfulness

In the fourth place I note a recent addition to the repertoire of choices that take off from the ante-chamber of mindfulness. It is derived not from a religious source, but from a scientific source. So, it is secular. We can call it therapeutic mindfulness. It is the culmination of centuries of trial and error. It is secularism's signal contribution to human spirituality.

This is a form of "meditation" that seeks to engage the painful content of the unconscious in order to heal it. Its success depends on understanding the somatic foundation of traumatic injury, and the ability of "inner body sensing" to re-organize somatic imprints left over from early injury. This technique actually seeks out the source of pain. It is Rumi's technique.

Note that each of these four techniques is a "path" that one can take from the common ante-chamber of "mindfulness" into the deeper layers of the unconscious.

The form of therapeutic mindfulness I practice is a part of the practice of "trauma work" of a school called Hakomi Integrative Somatics. One Hakomi practitioner gives the following explanation:

Mindfulness ... is attention to present experience. It is "simply noticing" what is so in your experience, without the addition of judging, analyzing or even understanding. It is different than "thinking about." In using mindfulness, we create opportunities which allow the unconscious a clear chance to express and be seen, heard and felt. We work with the interaction of belief and experience, of conscious and unconscious, of mind and body. We work to establish and enhance communication between parts of the whole. Acknowledging, accepting, allowing, being, responding. In therapy, strong emotions are sometimes felt and early memories come back with intensity and clarity. In mindfulness, these experiences can be examined and used to free us from the painful unconscious compulsion to repeat them again and again. 28

Staying In Your Body

We are all indebted to Ken Wilber for his investigations of spiritual growth, but there is one strain in his thinking that needs to be pointed out as a cautionary tale, and that is his tendency towards monism. Theological monism is an idea that only spirit is real; matter is not real, but illusory. The experience and practice that grounds monist theory is to be disconnected from one's body. The monist lives in his neo-cortex and has very tenuous connection with the limbic cortex and the brain stem. He is dissociated.

As we enter an age when more and more people are meditating, leaving one's body becomes a serious problem. Dissociation from bodily states is a permanent issue in the pursuit of interiority because of the body's rich capacity to store the painful results of traumatic child-rearing practices.

I first noticed Wilber's monism when I read his book No Boundary some years ago, and then I discovered an extensive discussion of the matter on the web page of Professor David C. Lane of Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California.29

In a more recent work, The Marriage of Sense and Soul (NY, Random House, 1998), Wilber appears to have recanted his monism of earlier days, but his youthful excursions into dissociative practices is still a valuable lesson for anyone pursuing interiority.

In Wilber's earlier work he came under the influence of the neo-Hindu monist Franklin Jones, who is also known as Bubba Free John and Adi Da, and has authored books under both of those names. Jones was born in Jamaica, Long Island, New York in 1939 and showed an early predisposition for meditative disciplines. He studied in India under Swami Muktananda in 1968, and opened his own teaching establishment in Hollywood in 1972. His writings impressed many spiritual seekers of the time, including Wilber. At one point Wilber called Da Free John "the greatest spiritual master of all time", and his book The Dawn Horse Testament "the greatest spiritual tome of all time". He also said that John's The Paradox of Instruction "is, in its scope, its eloquence, its simplicity, and its ecstatic fund of transcendent insight, probably unparalleled in the entire field of spiritual literature."

But commentators also noted that Jones's personal practices were often bizarre and exploitative, and his teaching career has led him to reside presently on an island in the Pacific Ocean once owned by the actor Raymond Burr. It has been my experience that spiritual teachers who do get separated from their bodies inevitably become involved in bizarre social and interpersonal situations.

The basic problem is that the body is the storehouse of emotional pain, and when introspective devotees start spending considerable amounts of time meditating, they can experience extremely attractive and extremely remarkable out-of-body states. In the eleventh century in France, the Albigensians' ability not to experience pain when Simon de Montfort's troops burned them at the stake scared the Christian crusaders out of their wits and only made them more zealous in stamping out the heresy. The whole Gnostic strain in the history of Christianity is a continuation of this dissociative experience. On the emotional level it is dissociative, and on the intellectual level it is "monist". That is, it says that only spirit is real. Matter is some form of illusion. In terms of behavior, once one gets addicted to these out-of-body states, a pattern of narcissistic delusion inevitably follows. One critic of Wilber's indebtedness to Adi Da makes this comment:

My neurological research reveals that this so-called "very small minority" of individuals "ready" for "The Path" is constituted of persons who already have and/or self-induce neurological damage and neurological dysfunction -- or are neuropsychiatrically ill ab initio. Indeed, and once again, these so-called mystics, meditators, and spiritual "Masters" with the "big realizations" are suffering from various species of (i) brain damage, (ii) epilepsy, (iii) psychosis, (iv) schizophrenia, and (v) debilitating depersonalization disorder, or (vi) some combination of these five.
In my case, I was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy as a youth and years later delusively believed myself to be making "spiritual" and meditative "progress" when all my weird "mystical" experiences started (as a result of intensive and protracted meditation practice).
In the case of Bernadette Roberts (author of The Experience of No-Self), she talks about her own personal experiences of "bodilessness", profound "mystical unknowing" + experience of "Oneness" or "nonduality", "subtle energies", and a "dismantling of the continuum of time". Do such experiences constitute profound "mystical realizations" and "enlightenment"??? I say no!!! What her symptoms do actually indicate is a fairly complicated mix of profound neurological disorders, neurological damage, and neurological dysfunction -- a literal reversal, in many ways, of millions of years of the neurological evolutionary biology of the brain and nervous system. Specifically, and to wit, her experience(s) of: (i) "Bodilessness" results from total proprioceptive failure. (ii) "Mystical Unknowing" and the experience of "Oneness" or "nonduality" is little more than a convoluted mix of semantic aphasia + visual aphasia + auditory agnosia + optic agnosia + visual object agnosia. (iii) "Subtle Energies" are, in reality, nothing more than a combination of somatosensory seizures and partial complex seizures which have their roots in temporal lobe and limbic epilepsy and extreme cortex disinhibition. (iv) Her inability to experience time as having a continuum can be accounted for by a blend of time agnosia with a concomitant and serious impairment of memory vivacity. Highly similar states and conditions such as we have here in this third case are well known to medical and mental health practitioners who deal with amnesiacs, Alzheimer's sufferers, and so forth.
"Transfigurative" mystical experiences have their origin in neuro-epileptic disorders, various psychoses and species of schizophrenia, Near Death Experiences, brain damage that can result from, for instance, untreated Lyme's Disease, and so on. One would reasonably expect that the population of meditators and spiritual "masters" who are "authentically enlightened" and have had "transfigurative" mystical experiences would reflect the relative rarity of these conditions (i.e., neurological and/or neuropsychiatric conditions and disorders) in America and throughout the world.30

As a practical matter, we just need to make a note of all this. In any meditative practice there is a tendency to want to leave the body because the repressed pain of the unconscious is actually stored somatically. The correct strategy is to relax in the presence of pain and thus engage the unconscious, rather than continue to suppress it, as we noted above in our comment about Jelaluddin Rumi. There are many schools of spiritual learning that understand this and that always return to the body either informally or formally. The whole collection of psychotherapy schools that are working with trauma have developed "inner body sensation" as the core of their healing technique. These would include the work of Eugene Gendlin (his technique is called "focussing"), Peter Levine (See Waking the Tiger, 1997), the workshops of Emilie Conrad, and the Hakomi Integrative Somatics team of Boulder, Colorado.

There is in fact an important convergence today between "healing" modalities and "spiritual" disciplines. I think this is extremely warranted and the wave of the future. I note in Chapter 9 that a careful look at the history of Christianity shows clearly that religion is therapy. That is, the effort to experience the ultimate conditions of human existence necessitates developing techniques to work with the emotions, especially the unconscious emotions that are the result of traumatic child-rearing practices. The objective of religious "ministry" has after all always been to produce "loving" people, that is, emotionally mature persons who are capable of generosity and compassion. Behaviorally, the "bottom line" of religion has always been "therapeutic". And, when we get to the absolute core event of Christianity -- the resurrection of Jesus -- I think we find a remarkable wake-up call to full somatic awareness of the essence of the human condition. We live to a large extent inside space and time, but not entirely.

The fact that the Christianity of the Augustinian Arrangement (See Chap. 9) made its main investment in technologies that put people to sleep was merely an adaptation to the needs of the time. There is nothing in the central event of Christian "revelation" that requires falling asleep. I would suggest that quite the contrary is true. Once we get that, then I think the door is open to a fully non-sectarian discipline of human wholeness, beyond creed, beyond code, beyond cult, beyond identity. The human project as such.

Holiness is wholeness. Wholeness is holiness. Wholeness is all there is.

7.
THE SECULAR SPIRIT

As I use the term "secularism", it is about social structure, not personal beliefs. That is to say, secularism rejects the authority of churches, but it does not at all, necessarily, reject universal faith. So, there can be secular theists as well as secular humanists. There can even be secularists who think that Jesus of Nazareth is the incarnation of the second person of the blessed trinity while at the same time discarding all church affiliation and practice.

Given the dual character of religion, we should not be surprised that in history it has regularly been the vehicle for unthinkable violence. Until very recent times, in fact, religious fanaticism was commonplace in human affairs rather than exceptional. So, any religious fanaticism now remaining in the world is simply a cultural holdover. We would expect to find it in isolated social or geographic pockets where modern global institutions of education and commerce have not reached. In societies characterized by harsh child-rearing practices in support of a warrior culture, everyone is afraid of their unconscious. Hence Paul Valéry's comment, "If you want to go down into the self, you'd better go armed to the teeth."

One segment of conventional wisdom today says that secularism is some form of spiritual devolution, obtuseness or decline. But if we look at the actual history of secularism, I think we will find that it is a form of spiritual growth. This would be in support of Ken Wilber's position:

I agree with sociologists in general that the course of modern development is marked by increasing rationalization. What perhaps distinguishes my viewpoint from other spiritually sympathetic theorists is that I believe the trend of rationalization per se is necessary, desirable, appropriate, phase-specific and evolutionary. It is therefore perfectly religious in and by itself (no matter how apparently secular): an expression of increasingly advanced consciousness and articulated self-awareness that has as its final aim, and itself contributes to, the resurrection of Spirit-Geist.31

I propose that the essence of secularism is precisely this choice of conscience over religious authority as the vehicle to guide the quest for ultimate fulfillment.

It is clear that in the fourth century of the Christian era -- the time of St. Augustine of Hippo -- the consensual choice of western culture was for religious authority. As we shall show in the next few pages, it is equally clear that in the time of the Protestant Reformation, the choice was for individual conscience.

How did this happen? Clearly, in the thousand years between the two decisions, some growth in emotional maturity took place.

It is also worthwhile to note that in both cases it was the state that made the choice. In the time of Augustine, the bishop of Hippo had to persuade the emperor. In the time of Luther, it was necessary to do the same. This means that the state always represents the middle of the developmental curve of spirituality, not the churches. For even a monarchical state cannot rule for long without the consent of the governed. Furthermore, once we see the matter from this point of view, it is clear that churches are only one social institution having an impact on the spiritual growth of the human community. Anything that gives material security or information influences the spiritual make-up of society.

So, in the fourth century of the Christian era Western Europe chose the restrictive confines of religious authority to protect the ego and promote its growth. A thousand years later, faced with the continuing violence of religious consciousness, European society would dispense with those confines and allow the native human spirit to seek growth on its own natural resources. There came a take-off point when the self could no longer grow within the old protective confines. Society was driven by the central élan of the human spirit to explore the tracklessness of human existence more fully:

And indeed, gods must die that men may live and grow. Image-breaking is no less a part and parcel of human life and history than image-making; it is also no less part and parcel of man's religion, and no less essential to it. For the fixed image evokes the fixed stare, the fixed loyalty which may blind man's vision to the claims of further and wider loyalties, and so paralyze the human spirit and crush its inherent will to advance and to venture. The painful recognition of the clay feet of old idols is indispensable to human growth; it is also indispensable to the emergence of more appropriate figures for human awe, devotion and service. This is the inexorable law of growth both in the individual and the group.32

The Birth of Secularism

For centuries in Europe, through the hegemony of the Papacy over the emotional and cultural lives of the whole continent, "faith" had been the ultimate arbiter of reality. It was of course a sectarian faith, a stage-specific faith [See the stages chart, and the discussion in Chapter 8.], but as Robert Bellah notes, it had a noble and important evolutionary function. Rome's evolutionary task -- as the caretaker of one of the "historic religions" that appeared on this planet three to four thousand years ago -- was to preserve the "discovery of the self" that was still at its early stages, and thus "increase the freedom of personality and society relative to the environing conditions":

At each stage of religious evolution the freedom of personality and society has increased relative to the environing conditions. Freedom has increased because at each successive stage the relation of man to the conditions of his existence has been conceived as more complex, more open and more subject to change and development. The distinction between conditions that are really ultimate and those that are alterable becomes increasingly clear though never complete.
The historic religions discovered the self; the early modern religion found a doctrinal basis on which to accept the self in all its empirical ambiguity; modern religion is beginning to understand the laws of the self's own existence and so to help man take responsibility for his own fate.33

However, by the end of the fifteenth century, the rule of the Papacy in Europe was in the final stage of a parent-like arrangement between a clerical elite centered in Rome and an increasingly powerful middle class festering with unfulfilled and legitimate desires to control their own destinies. And so, when Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the cathedral door in Wittenberg in 1517, that was not some isolated event coming out of the blue, but just the spark that ignited a flame ready to burn in a climate of widespread discontent with Roman rule. It quickly became a cultural and political event that tore Europe in half.

Within twenty years Protestantism was the dominant religion in northern Germany, Scandinavia and the Low Lands, in the traditionally independent enclaves of Bohemia and several of the Swiss Cantons, and a powerful minority in France. Italy and Spain remained Roman Catholic. Issues of conscience became embroiled with politics and economics, and the use of military might came into play. Independence was the cause of the day, and physical violence was the instrument of choice. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V wanted to retain the commerce and wealth of the Netherlands. The burghers of Amsterdam and Ghent wanted to keep their own books. The royal families of the Habsburgs and the Bourbons eyed each other's power bases with lethal competitiveness, et cetera and et cetera.

All hell had broken loose and in the chaos that ensued, the spiritual leadership of Europe shifted quietly, momentously over from the church to the state. The shift was decisive and consensual. It was clear to the preponderance of the population at that time that "faith" was no longer a viable instrument of peace and justice. There was something about "faith" that was just too outrageously violent to govern the human condition.

The shift from a "one truth" culture in Europe to pluralism started with the Lutherans' Confession of Augsburg in 1530. The right to practice the new orthodoxy was gained in several regional Diets in the next two decades and finally agreed to by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. In that treaty, the Emperor agreed that religious practices would be those determined by local secular authorities (cuius regio, ejus religio). This was at the same time decentralization and secularization.

But the Peace of Augsburg applied only to the territories within the Holy Roman Empire. It did not apply to France or the Low Lands. There followed another hundred years of simmering local warfare, persecution and generally bad behavior that culminated in the large-scale hostilities of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). When the (Protestant) nationalist enthusiasts of Prague defenestrated the officials of Ferdinand II, the major military maneuvers began. They were long and tiring and expensive. Probably 300,000 people died violent or untimely deaths in Germany in the next thirty years. The collective psyche of the continent was suitably impressed. In the Treaty of Westphalia in 1848, they returned to the arrangements of Augsburg, reinforced and expanded them, and the modern nation-state was born, with ultimate control over public human behavior.

This was a transfer of spiritual control. Religion is now "private", not public. When you transfer the control of behavior from the court of faith to the court of reason, you are transferring spiritual control as well. For, as an extremely contemporary commentator observes: "The essence of churches continues to be 'the Word' -- the teachings, the beliefs and the discourse, and the behavior that arises from them."34

So, it was in this manner that the institution of "secularism" was born. Therefore, from 1648 on secularism is not some sort of competitive idea jousting with faith in the marketplace of meaning for control of the minds of men. It is rather the law of the land. You can publish tracts and produce television shows to your heart's content, but in modern Western society, you better not cross a certain line of respect for the freedom of others or you will find yourself in court, in jail, in "trouble." And by the way, when you are in this kind of trouble, you are out of the forward flow of history.

But the arrangement of Westphalia was not a finely tuned finished product. It was rather a pretty rough-cut piece of work, a kind of historical lurch forward prompted by massive disruption and pain, rather than a confident step forward fully thought-out and packaged. So, there was still much work to be done in sorting out the claims of faith and the claims of reason over the hearts and minds of men.

That sorting out still goes on, but it is the only game being played on the field. The field itself is secularist, and so are the referees and the rule book. It could not be any other way. If the human race is to come to spiritual maturity, it has to learn by doing. If one views the history of Western civilization for the past four centuries as the story of Reason discovering its limitations, I think many things fall into place.

The Limits of Sectarian Faith

We have noted that the paradox of sectarian religion is that it is both inquisitive and repressive with respect to human interiority. It seeks emotional/spiritual depth and is terrified of it. Insofar as it is repressive, sectarian faith will always have the two-fold problem of a tendency towards violence and lack of self-awareness. The tendency towards violence comes from the repressed anger left over from childhood. This anger also shows up as various forms of extreme boundary-setting between the in-group and out-groups: techniques of intolerance, shunning and self-separation.

The lack of self-awareness comes from the fact that the unconscious is, unfortunately, unconscious. Religious orthodoxy is a defense mechanism. It helps suppress unconscious fear and anger. But of course it would not be a useful defense mechanism if it did not successfully suppress. So, people with positions of religious orthodoxy inevitably have things going on inside themselves that they cannot see.

Thus, even though religionists speak of God and grace and altruism, the judicious observer knows they cannot be trusted because they are not aware of their own unconscious fears and anger. The way this plays out on the stage of politics and social governance is that even though their language is bathed in transcendent innocence -- in fact because their language is so adorned -- they have a deep and abiding commitment to the social deployment of a central feature of their psyches, the control mechanisms of the super-ego. Their political stances tend to be rigid, and when they get political power, they do not manage freedom well.

There has recently been a renewed interest in the writings of the early twentieth century Catholic jurist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt saw in the Catholic Church a structural model for a connection between internal spiritual life and external social life. He thought that this was a better model for conducting human affairs than what he saw as the Protestant model of religion as separated from public life, Protestant "inwardness." However, even though he liked the Catholic Church as a structural model because it connected inwardness with social behavior, he was equally clear that he did not like it as a de facto ruler. When the Catholic thinker Josef Pieper once asked him why he never spoke of the bonum commune, Schmitt responded, "Anyone who speaks of the bonum commune is intent on deception." And in his work entitled Political Theology he says, "Everyone agrees that when antagonisms appear within a state, every party wants the general good -- therein resides after all the bellum omnium contra omnes."35

Furthermore, "religious" thinkers such as Pieper never get this. They always seem to be completely convinced of their own innocence and good will, which is why Pieper could ask Schmitt that question. But what Schmitt is saying is that sectarian religion always has hidden agendas, and it would be fatal for the state to forget that.

So the secularist judgment of religion on the social and political level is that it is simply too controlling, too rigid, too unaware of self and therefore too prone to violence to be trusted to govern society. The secularist judgment of religion on the individual level is that it is too controlling and rigid psychodynamically to permit emotional (i.e., spiritual) growth. The pragmatic political judgment is grounded in the intuitive personal judgment. A few decades without warfare were enough to stabilize the political arrangement, but it took a widely distributed positive self-regard to make the arrangement stable over centuries.

The Limits of Reason

If the problem of sectarian religion is that it shuts down the unconscious too much and trusts the ego too little, the problem of the rule of reason was, when it first came on the scene, that it was naïve about the power of the unconscious and trusted the ego too much. But now that we have come about four hundred years along under the regime of reason, we are older and wiser.

The choice to end the rule of sectarian faith was originally a pragmatic political judgment made by the native good will and intelligence of hereditary princes, in this case the Habsburgs Charles V and Ferdinand III (at Augsburg and Westphalia respectively). No "religious genius" here; just native human pragmatism.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the shift in political principle in Europe was identified as the imperium rationis by Thomas Hobbes, and the realm of an objective reason "beyond theology" by Hegel. The 1700s were a kind of honeymoon of reason for Europe. The American colonies were being developed. Voyages of discovery were circling the globe. Science was making great discoveries. Perhaps the darker energies of the European unconscious were being siphoned off in the extra-punitive exercises of colonialism rather than internal violence. But all of these activities gave rise to a self-conscious congratulatory episode called "the Enlightenment". Its confidence in the power of reason to solve all problems turns out to have been naïve, of course, but that does not make the shift any less necessary historically.

During the past four centuries, rationalists and theologians have had great fun speaking ill of one another. Clearly many secularists had authoritarian religious parents whose rejection they never overcame, and theologians had the same kind of parents, with whom they then identified. And there seemed to be general agreement that "reason" is non-religious or even "anti-religious." Thus the term "secular humanism" arose as one of those polemical buzzwords that has no analytic depth, and therefore has no significant meaning beyond its evocation of repressed emotions.

But if we keep the bigger picture in focus, we only have to note that now, four hundred years into the process, we now know that the choice of freedom from sectarian faith was seriously risky. In making this comment we should also note that at this point in the discussion we are at the heart of the matter. For the question inside the comment is: how do human beings grow spiritually? The answer is: by engaging more and more of the unconscious. For holiness is wholeness. That is to say, wholeness is holiness. Wholeness is all there is.

This is the statement of a theist who sees the completion of the human spirit in the ineffable communion with the ground of all our being. When you are "whole", you get everything, including the temporariness of time, the ebb and flow of history, the necessity of staying involved in the dialog of civilization, the historical reality of Jesus, etc., etc., etc.

There is always risk in making the choice for growth. There is the possibility of substantial pain in taking on an unconscious filled with the repressed emotions left there by harsh child-rearing practices. There is also the possibility of corrosive narcissism in the escape from overbearing parental authority. And so, as one leaves the safety of the controls provided by traditional religion, one is faced with the task of designing new tools to manage the unconscious. It turns out that this is not easy. There are many mistakes to be made along the way. However, there is also no choice. The whole process is driven by the central spiritual drive of the human organism.

So, the history of secularism is a history of seeking, of mistakes, and I would argue, of ultimate success. I would make the argument that the history of the last four hundred years, since the break-up of the Augustinian Arrangement [See Chapter 9,], is a testament to the frailty, yes, but also the ultimate validity of the native human spirit. If we track the efforts to promote freedom and equality during that time, I think we will find that it was pragmatic secularists rather than religionists who doggedly, inventively and successfully pursued their establishment in human life.

Nones and Others

The secularists are the "Nones" or "Others" that show up in recent surveys of religious affiliation. It appears to be a reasonable estimate that the "Nones" and "Others" in America have grown from about 3 percent of the population of the U.S.A. in 1955 to about 13 percent in 1995. As the National Opinion Research Center says:

During this same period the proportion without any religious affiliation has also been rising. While the net trend has been upwards at about .0014-.0027 per annum, it has not been a simple, monotonic increase and has varied by house. The number without religion appears to have dipped from the late forties to the late fifties before increasing until the mid 1970s. From then to the present the proportion None has apparently remained constant. Signs of a large and growing segment of token religionists or of the unchurched are limited.

Overall these indicators provide at best mixed support for the secularization hypothesis. The secularizing changes have been 1) small in magnitude, 2) intermittent in time, and 3) restrictive in scope. However, whenever there has been change, it has been in the secular direction. 36

Percentagewise and in actual numbers this is a significant increase. If we add to it the numbers of those who have experimented with alternative religious practices or who continuously experiment with them while still identifying socially with their traditional affiliation, then we have a group of Americans that is culturally very significant. It would not be too extreme to say that the "Nones" and "Others" in American society no longer represent some socially marginal group of oddballs, but are in fact a "major" religious grouping. And, this is something quite new in industrial society: a major, indigenous, growing religious grouping not from any traditional western religious tradition.

But, if we have some idea of their numbers, we still do not know much about their beliefs or practices. The survey researchers sometimes seem to assume that they are "atheists" or "non-religious". But there is a very good case to argue that some of them at least are engaged in forms of authentic and well-grounded spiritual practice that are simply not customary in any of the traditional religious groups in American history. It would therefore be a good idea to have some empirical testing of hypotheses about the "Nones" and "Others", hypotheses that are open to quantifying the stages of spiritual development beyond the parental dependencies of Stage Four. But that is beyond our resources in this writing.

It is also beyond my resources to write a spiritual history of the regime of reason. To do that would require examining the causes of the major spiritual successes and failures of the past 400 years. These would be failures such as colonialism, slavery, the Holocaust, Hiroshima-Nagasaki, and successes such as the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, the end of Apartheid, the International Red Cross and Amnesty International, to name but a few.

But I do have the resources to offer just one small "case study" of the learning curve of reason. It is part of a piece I wrote years ago in a contemplative period of my life. It will cover the period from the end of World War I to the end of World War Two. A similar description covering any other century of the last four would, I am sure, lead to a similar understanding of how the regime of "reason"-- by resourcefully engaging the forces of the human unconscious -- acts as the vehicle for the spiritual growth of the human race.

A Learning Experience in the Regime of Reason

At the end of World War I, the Allies designed their treaty with Germany to end the war during four months of meetings in Paris (January-April, 1919). They signed it in the famous Palace of Versailles in June. The terms were the result of the interplay among the three Allied heads of state: David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, and Woodrow Wilson. These men all brought strong feelings to the process.

John Maynard Keynes called the treaty "The Carthaginian Peace", because it was so harsh towards Germany. Keynes left the Paris Conference in dark despair at its outcome, and went home to write a book that came out the following December. He called it The Economic Consequences of the Peace, and it was a bestseller in Europe and America. In the book he predicted that the treaty would give rise to the darkest demagoguery in Germany:

Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little. Physical efficiency and resistance to disease slowly diminish, but life proceeds somehow, until the limit of human endurance is reached at last and counsels of despair and madness stir the sufferers from the lethargy which precedes the crisis. Then man shakes himself and the bonds of custom are loosed. The power of ideas is sovereign, and he listens to whatever instruction of hope, illusion, or revenge is carried to him on the air.37

History seems to say that he was wrong on the exact mechanism of disaster, but correct about the final outcome. Economic privation alone did not do the damage, but economics plus the political intentions: revenge, the imputation of guilt, the public blame and shame. German financiers evaded most reparations payments, but German consciousness did not evade the psychic consequences.

The violent polarity coming out of World War I set up the emotional framework for World War II and the Holocaust. (And just as an aside, Versailles was not the work of godless communism, but of God-fearing Christianity.)

Some people learned from it. The political leaders who ended World War II -- people like Eisenhower, Marshall, Dulles, Harriman -- had been present in Paris in 1919. In 1945 they resolved the German hostility. But the polarized structure of experience shifted to a new global field.

When the fighting ended in 1918, Britain was in bad shape.

The country was indeed at this time swept by a sudden, vehement cry for revenge. ... The war had brought suffering of a scale and intensity which the harshest pessimist could not have prophesied, and for which Britain, after a century of peace and progress, was, psychologically speaking, peculiarly unprepared. The interminable casualty lists, the row upon row of beardless faces in the "Roll of Honour", the rattle through a thousand letter-boxes of the same War Office telegram -- all this produced a stunned sense of disbelief at the annihilation of so much youth and promise. When, with the peace, people began to come to terms with what had happened, it was not to be expected that they would rise overnight to the serenity of saints or sages. Even if they wished to forget, the press would not let them. As a Cambridge newspaper put it, "Somebody has got to be hanged."38

The Armistice of Nov. 11, 1918 ended actual fighting. None of it had taken place on German soil, and the country was never occupied. Lloyd George was the most skilful maneuverer of the three leaders who met in Paris, and he brought the feelings of his country with him.

Historian Lentin observes:

It was borne in upon me that the essence of what happened at Paris ...... was -- despite the by-play of time and chance -- "acts or omissions thoroughly expressive of the doer" in the words of A.C. Bradley (Shakespearean Tragedy, 1904), "characteristic deeds"; and that "the centre of the tragedy, therefore, may be said with equal truth to lie in action issuing from character, or in character issuing from action."39

The negotiations were labyrinthine exchanges of layers and layers of feeling, conducted under severe pressures of time. Only six months transpired between the armistice and the treaty's signing. Here is the scenario:

January, 1918: Woodrow Wilson proclaims before the U.S. Congress the morally high-sounding "14 Points" as the basis for the coming peace.

October, 1918: The German government sues unilaterally to Wilson (by-passing the British and the French) for an armistice.

November 4, 1918: British, French and U.S. representatives sign a pre-Armistice agreement with the Germans. Drafted by U.S. Secretary of State Lansing, it is referred to as "the Lansing note". On monetary reparations, it stipulates that "compensation will be paid by Germany for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies by land, by sea and from the air."

November 11, 1918: The Armistice is signed.

November 12, 1918: Lloyd George addresses a pre-election gathering in London, where he says: "There will be vigorous attempts to hector and bully and stimulate, to induce and cajole the Government to here and there depart from the strict principles of right, in order to satisfy some base and some sordid, and if I may say squalid, principles of either revenge or avarice. We must [he concluded to loud applause] relentlessly set our faces against that; and if we go to the country, it will be the business of every candidate to have regard to that."

November 13, 1918: Prime Minister William Hughes of Australia and press baron Lord Northcliffe of London start to raise a hue and cry about getting large war indemnities from Germany.

November 26, 1918: Lloyd George forms the Indemnity Committee as a special sub-committee of the British cabinet to recommend a policy on the matter. He makes Hughes its Chairman, includes two notoriously narrow-minded bankers (Herbert Gibbs and Lord Cunliffe), and leaves off the British treasury's chief economist, John Maynard Keynes.

November 28, 1918: After a few hours of its very first meeting the Indemnity Committee produces the sum of 24 billion pounds as the amount to be sought from Germany, a figure 12 times higher than the estimate by the British treasury. Gibbs' and Cunfliffe's reason for the sum is on record: British trade would be "completely ruined by American competition" unless the burden is shifted onto the Germans. As Cunliffe put it, "It is rather a choice of who is to be ruined, we or they. On the whole, I think we had better ruin them." No economic analysis is offered. Hughes says, "Everything is practicable to the man who has the strength to enforce his views, and we have that strength."

December 11, 1918: Lloyd George goes along with the 24 billion figure. In his re-election campaign he starts to sound the theme, "We have a right to demand the whole cost of the war from Germany."

January, 1919: In Paris, Wilson and the American delegation flatly oppose the war indemnity as illegal breaching of the Lansing note.
January-March 1919: The British, French and American leaders and delegations argue, bicker and intrigue back and forth over the various terms of the Armistice. Woodrow Wilson gets worn down.

March 30: Lloyd George gets Jan Christian Smuts, the highly respected leader of South Africa, to write a legal brief interpreting the Lansing note to George's liking. Smuts turns Wilson around.

April 3: Woodrow Wilson becomes bedridden with physical and emotional exhaustion.

April 5: The "war-guilt clause" is added to the treaty draft. George Clemenceau erases Wilson's opposition to it by offering French support for the League of Nations, an institution Clemenceau despises and that Wilson ardently believes in.

May 7: The draft is submitted to the Germans.

May 7-June 16, 1919: Back in England, faced with the actual language of the draft, public opinion and Lloyd George shift away from support for the treaty's harshness. But Clemenceau is unyielding, and Wilson, having compromised himself, now digs in also.

June 16: Faced with the German answer to the draft, all the Allies self-justify.
June 28: The Treaty of Versailles is signed, with the war-guilt clause and an extremely large indemnity provision whose exact sum is to be established by an ongoing commission.

December, 1919: John Maynard Keynes publishes The Economic Consequences of the Peace. The book is an immediate and immense publishing success in England and the U.S.A. and on the continent. It eloquently vilifies the Treaty of Versailles, becomes a factor in the election of 1920, and crystallizes the guilt-feelings of the British for many years to come.
1936: The British give away the Sudetenland to Hitler at Munich, perceived by historians as the final attempt at expiation of guilt by the British for their part in the treaty of Versailles. Historian Lentin chooses "character" as the key element. But there is also Zeitgeist. Politicians can channel the feelings of the people. They cannot create them. There is always a "spirit of the times". This is some tide of emotion that politicians do not control.

In 1919, England had experienced a lot of death. France had had three generations of war with Germany, and the desire to possess the industrial resources on the Franco-German border. Germany felt a sense of conspiracy between France and England over colonial expansion.

There was also widespread ignorance of anything resembling modern economics. Keynes did not publish The General Theory until 1932, and even top bankers had primitive ideas about the world economy. Their business sense bordered on the mentality of street gangs. When it came time to actually pay reparations, Germany rather easily evaded them with inflated currency, bonds, debentures and other modern fiscal instruments that completely thwarted a process which had been absurd in its conception from the start. All that was left of it by 1932 was the original high insult.

Then there were the perennial populist stirrings: "... that native, xenophobic and thoroughly honest toryi