Living within Limits - Dying outside of them
Religion and Philosophy
Holiness and Holism
Religion is about evolving (improving) one's relationship to the whole. (By "the whole" I mean everything that unfolds into existence). There is fortunately a growing trend to look to "holistic" approaches to mental health and the word "holism" has the same language root as "holy" - that is to say that which evolves and unfolds our wholeness. Becoming whole is a process whereby one finds a harmonious way of living within the limits set by one's body, sex, habitat, relationships, income, work and other life activities as one participates in the wider interpenetrated patterns of society and planetary ecology.
Ethics and Non-Futility
I have been much influenced by Taoism and Buddhism as thought systems that help me to orientate in my participation in this flow of existence in my evolving corner of the cosmos. For me ethical decisions are essentially about evolving a flexible set of guiding principles for non-futile ways of acting and living. They are not "thou shallt not" for the sake of self mortification and denial but more "if thou doth that then these might be the destructive consequences, so better not...." In other words I think religion, when it is at its best, provides principles for living to minimise the chance that our actions will end up rebounding. (Bad Karma if you like). It is a universe where every action has a reaction and where excessive actions tend to lead to painful counter- reactions.
God as a Father in the Sky
I am not at all happy at religions which are about "You must not do that because there is a big Daddy in the sky who says it is wicked". I go along with Freud in seeing the crude god idea as an echo in our consciousness of our experience as tiny infants. As infants we struggle to understand a confusing jumbled flow of smells, light, colour, sound and shapes and in this mystery there are these all powerful giants on whom we are dependent, including a father who is laying down mysterious limits on what we can and cannot do and sometimes enforcing them with awesome and terrifying actions. We can become frightened of being "naughty" in our first few formative years and this can leave an ever present feeling of guilt and of unworthiness in our psyche for the rest of our lives. To relieve this we can easily fall prey to messages that we are intrinsically guilty but that if we pay up our dues to a church and keep a priest well fed we have been forgiven because God's son has been punished for us already. I do not go along with this way of thinking at all.
I have most sympathy for those mystical traditions where "God" is the description of the common root of things, that which include and unites everything. In mystical traditions whichever word a belief system uses for "God" is understood as merely being a word that expresses something inexpressible because beyond limit. For myself I prefer the word "Tao" , instead of "God" as an idea of a personal path in a cosmic limitless process best understood as void, the limitless emptiness in which things are better understood as events which evolve in time.
Change, stability and the temporary comfort of illusion
To understand this idea imagine a cine camera pointed at a mountain range with one frame taken every century over hundreds of thousands of years. What we see in our limited time frame as objects, the very solid and imposing mountains, would appear, in the longer time period, as a flow of events, or as a process, a crinkling wave in the Earth's crust. It is this process which is the deeper reality. All apparently solid objects and things come into existence and then dissolve back into new forms. Their solid character is a perception particular to our limited human time frame. In this time frame our day to day motivations are mostly focused on activities which create a stability in our body by keeping it fed and clothed and housed. Our continued livelihoods and lives depend on manipulating matter and energy flows into humanly useful foodstuffs, buildings and tools and the like for our comfort. Our comfort lies in the very temporary reassurance that universal dissipative and dissolving processes of change which will weaken, age and kill us are occurring slowly - i.e. that we are well fed, in a good habitat, with a supportive network of relationships and, in the modern world, that we have a secure money income to buy these things. In short most of our domestic, community and market economic activities are to create a durable but ultimately temporary order and stability which maintains our an ordered (manageable) life inside the change process of the universal flux. The path to spiritual liberation cannot lie in a guilt based self denial about the need to give these material activities their place. However when these activities dominate our consciousness to the point that our existence becomes wholely focused on the piling up of possessions and bank accounts it is then that we lose the wider orientation and sense for harmonious and holistic living. ( "In the Taoist view, individuals who are materially oriented - who identify with their possessions - have no real purpose in the universe other than moving matter from place to place and reproducing life forms that may ultimately have the potential for intellectual evolution. Materially oriented individuals cannot evolve intellectually because their attachment to and hoarding of matter trains the mind to view reality as fixed and unflowing. This view is in harmony with dying, not growth and thus they cannot connect with the larger meaning behind consciousness" R.L.Wing, commentary on the Tao te Ching )
Limiting definitions of God
Ultimately the wider picture is an experience of that emptiness in and out of which our bodies, buildings and mountain ranges come into existence and then disappear, an experience of the fertile void out of which the universe materialises and then dissolves. In the mystical approach "God" is a word, a limited human sign signifying that which is unlimited. It is noteworthy in this respect that Islam refused to accept visual representations of God as these would be limiting. Instead Moslems richly illustrate Mosques with an infinitely complex patterning as if to point to the infinite variety of patterns in which Allah might partially materialise. I am reminded here that Allah is pronounced similarly to the German word "Alle" which means "all" and the German word "All", which means (cosmic) space. The problem is that any word leaves a flavour, an impression, a picture or a sound and therefore sets down limits. It is my impression that most "God" believers, while acknowledging the unlimited power of God allow a sense of limitation to return through the back door by using the idea that God "wills" things to happen. The psychologist Piaget discovered that early in their lives infants discover that they can make things happen - e.g. they can drop their rattles on the floor. The infant can then develop a view that whatever happens in its world of daily experience is the result of willed action. If a person dies, for example, this would be interpreted as it being intended that they die. This is a mental state that is blind to the impersonal determination of events. Thus everything without a clearly person-caused explanation becomes the result of "God's will" - a superpersonalisation of why things happen.
God and Modern Science
To make this awfully powerful superbeing consistent with the world discovered by modern science a variety of strategies have been used. In the world prior to Galileo, Copernicus and Newton this awesomely powerful being presided over the heavens (the sky) where things seemed to be perfect because, so the argument went, the stars and sun moved in eternal circles and ellipses around an Earth where things were far more ragged, imperfect and impermanent. Then a different view of God took hold (in Europe among intellectual people) as a superbeing who decided on the laws of nature and society like a designer specifying the determining mechanisms of a machine. In our own age "he" has been described either as a description of the interrelated life process of the planet ("Gaia") or as a being who plays dice. (With Quantum Mechanics it is discovered that sub atomic physical reality is best understood as probabilities of interconnections observed and measured in particular kinds of scientific apparatuses). I myself feel that all concepts which limit the idea of God, as if "he" is a decision maker who wills how reality will be, seem limiting. The underlying idea here is that somehow "God" is over there doing the decision making ( or making the determining laws or throwing dice) and the rest of reality is somewhere else. Far better to drop the personalisation and go simply for a word pointing beyond words - for me "Tao".
Madness and Disconnectedness
Madness tends to occur when we find ourselves isolated and at odds with those around us. Our connection into "Alle" through our work, through our living spaces and through our human relationships is broken. This can turn into a living of hell on earth. In his poem the Divine Comedy Dante describes the bottom of the pit of hell, its ninth circle, not as souls burned in fire but of being frozen in the icy lake of lovelessness. This can come about when chaos evolves in the practical arrangements of our lives and relationships and when, in this chaos, we are left to cope alone against a sea of troubles. It comes about when we come into conflict with others and out of tune with the patterns of our lived-in environments and over ecological, economic, social, habitat and interpersonal issues. Behind therapy is the idea of correcting self inflicted problems which arise perhaps when we fixedly pursue narrow personal goals without recognising how these will effect the wider patterns of relationships in which we participate. In other words it is about preventing us acting in a way that can be seen to be futile. Frequently this happens when we try to overstep our limits ( not enough money, not enough attention etc.). However the whole picture must also include the way in which our actions are also often driven by desperation because those individuals and institutions with power in our world are, perhaps, ruthlessly overstepping their own limits and imposing crushing burdens upon us.
Connectedness, harmony and measure
We are incomplete as people without other people. But for our relations to be harmonious then there must be proportion and limit both in the narrower pattern of personal relationships and in the broader pattern of economic, social and political relationships. A stable measured pattern of equality in society will never be possible but it will usually be possible to see whether in our individual lives, and in society in general, we are witnessing a move towards, or away from, greater social equality and social justice. A move away from personal and social justice and towards inequality and disempowerment usually brings in its train greater conflicts, personal and social ills and results in misery and suffering. The root of the word medicine comes from a Greek Verb "medere" which means to measure. "Rationality" and "reason", which are the opposite of madness, are also words which comes from the Greek. In their original meaning these words also meant "in the right proportions" as will be noticed when one sees the words "ratio" and "ration" in the word "rationality" (i.e. rationality means in the right ratio). There was an idea then that sickness (including mental sickness) arose out of unmeasured action, that which is disproportionate and excessive - which to the ancient Greek mind led inevitably to tragedy and punishment by the Gods. But the Greek society that evolved these ideas was based on slavery and the consideration of proportion and limit was blind to the slaves.
We need a middle path, as the Buddha put it, that does not deny our material needs but does not go beyond that point in the pursuit of material needs that divides us from other people, or destructively acts in the interwoven ecological fabric of life processes on a planet. All this is clear enough but what do we do when other people and institutions are ruthlessly pursuing their own goals to our cost and that of the ecology? What happens when our own human species creates the most hideous suffering and extinction for other sentient beings (species) on the planet - going way beyond the limits of a balanced species interdependency towards a common extinction, an eco-disaster which would mean colossal suffering. This is where Taoism, which for me allows a place for returning to harmony through well timed and measured defensive responses, scores over Buddhism, because it has more to say strategy in the here and now.
Negative emotions and harmony
When we act excessively and non-harmoniously we are driven deeper into illusion. The negative emotions that come to the surface as we struggle to survive in the chaos stirred up beyond harmony may make it difficult to look dispassionately at reality. Our negative emotions (anger, fear etc.) instead of being used to defend our integrity defend our non ratio-nal and irre -ratio - nal views. (Irre in German means mad or crazy ). Our interpretations can become paranoid and conflict based. (We should beware of saying that all angry thinking is by definition invalid. Was Jesus wrong to lose his temper with the money changers and drive them out of the temple, or for railing against the moralising hypocrisy of the rich and educated? If our anger arises as response to injustice and energises the move towards harmony based on greater justice it is neither irrational or invalid. However this anger must be well measured, well timed and well directed if it is not to perpetuate the vicious spirals of deepening chaos as Taoists recognise). The problem is that negative emotion generated while building up excess possessions and personal power generates concepts like guilt and blame giving us dark and pessimistic views of where other people are coming from. Our view of the world narrows and becomes paranoid. Particularly interesting here, are those Buddhist approaches which seek to transmute negative emotions into positive energies towards spiritual liberation. ( I cannot claim to be far down the road to understanding these matters).
When negative feelings distort open and clear perception it is as if our stormy feelings are blowing like an unquiet wind that stirs more and more waves into the surface of a lake whose calm reflections should tell us who and what we are but which is now broken up into fragments. (The Buddhist word "Nirvana" comes from a Sanskrit word meaning "without wind" - as when the still water reflects the sky. An ideal lifestyle would enable us to move towards seeing truthfully the empty and yet immensely fertile unifying "ground" of the universe from which everything emerges and into which we will eventually experience our individual selves dissolving - as when the wind subsides and the individual waves lose their apparently separate identity and disappear back into the lake).
Justice and religion
Unfortunately there are issues about how one lives when other people or unjust economic and social processes are ruffling up the surface of the lake. As I have written emotional turmoil arises not only when one as an individual acts disproportionately it can arise when others act disproportionately. They seek to overcome their limits (e.g. of money) at the expense of other people. One has to have a way of dealing and working with this in life. What is considered to be "proportionate and disproportionate" tend to be defined by those comfortable people who have a lot for those who have virtually nothing. People who have virtually nothing then cannot easily manage their habitats, relationships and lives within their incomes and their work becomes onerous and burdensome. Moreover they are told they are being unreasonable when the groan and explode under the injustice.
Social justice and loving your enemies - the difficult dichotomy
The social justice message is often the explosive ingredient at the beginning of religions which is later found to be missing when religions become well established and institutionalised. Over time, successful religions get taken over and absorbed into the power structures of society. They lose their social justice message and become meaningless but colourful rituals. (As when the common meal, an economic event, becomes a ritual with wafers and wine). This leaves people with no guidance of what to do about their enemies. Does "loving them" mean not resisting their destruction or, trying to fight them in a honourable fashion, in a measured fashion, seeking to restore harmony rather than to impose a tit for tat punishment that would restart the cycle of conflict? There are marked differences between different religions. Mohammed, for example, slaughtered some of his opponents. People with mental health problems have often lived under oppressive family and traumatically abusive life circumstances and then have to survive extreme poverty and need to have some guidance on this matter of resistance. As I have said I think Taoism is very useful as a guide to everyday life and non destructive resistance. For me Buddha's middle path needs somehow to give more emphasis, in our own time of ecological and economic catastrophe to meeting people's material needs in a way that is harmonious in society and with nature and which through political -economic strategies. When millions are screwed on the edge of starvation by multinational corporations or to pay interests on debts incurred by their governments to international banks, where is the calm emotional starting point for meditation? Tibetan Buddhism is an example of a religion having to wrestle with this kind of question - i.e. how to find a way of compassion when dealing with its (Chinese state) oppressors.
Money and religion
It is worthwhile noting that the early Christians were so successful because of institutions like the common meal the common purse, and what the Marxist Karl Kautsky called a "Primitive Communism of Consumption". People stuck together against the rich powerful and destructive patricians of the Roman Empire. Christ himself was clearly no friend of money changers and money lenders. One of the versions of the Lords Prayer says very explicitly "Forgive us our debts" instead of "Forgive us our sins". This is not a message likely to go down well at the Vatican Bank. (In German the word "schuld" means both "debt" and "sin" ) Clearly also Christ recognised the peculiarly destructive effect of "the love of money" in community and spiritual life. Mohammed too recognised the corrosive effect of moneylending and interest.
Sexuality and religion
Christ also like wine and women like Mary Magdalene. This kind of religion seems fair enough to me. I am also attracted to the idea of a god like the Khrishna whose love affair with Radha (and the other Gopis or women looking after the cow herds) gives a very different sexualised flavour to elements of the Hindu religion. In the Indian classics, the Upanishads, a sexualised metaphor is used as a creation myth. In Taoism too the interplay of Yang and Yin in the evolution of Tao has a sexual element. Compare this to the western tradition in which God works the first six day week and has a day off to admire his creation. Once he became successful Mohammed was blessed by Allah with several wives.
Self mortification, over indulgence and the middle path
In the eastern tradition there is less place for self mortification and this, it seems to me is a damn good thing. Popular Taoism makes a big place for sexual experience and in Tantrism there is a recognition that sexual union can be used as a starting point for the journey to a deeper spiritual union. Religion and self denial, challenged also by Luther who took a wife shortly after he had pinned his revolutionary theses against Catholicism to the church door at Wittenberg, is counter-productive because it denies our inbuilt biological natures. Male sperm, for example, comes out either in sex, masturbation or wet dreams and if it does not come out enough then one is in grave risk of prostate cancer - someone should brief the Pope on this. Self mortification as a way of holding at bay a childhood created sense of guilt will not take away our innate biological urges to eat, drink and to feel sexual desire. While we have a body we should enjoy it otherwise we get tangled in inevitable hypocrisies - but one should also keep a middle path so as not to get unhealthily fat, or get liver cirrhosis or AIDS or impose things on other people that they do not want, poisoning relationships and, possibly rebounding on us. Non- neurotic gratification of our biological potentialities and needs must also recognise the harmonising power of limits. Far from such limits representing a negative restriction on our freedom they should be seen as that which keeps us balanced and which allow us to develop other sides of ourselves. (This is where the ideology of economics reveals itself as its most absurd when it implies human needs for consumption goods are infinite and we must all orient ourselves to buying and owning more and more).
Death - the final frontier
Of course the other area that religion touches on is the Big D, death. At the heart of madness for me was a terrifying idea that if I died it would be as if I had never existed. I go along with Dorothy Rowe who points out that the way people respond to the idea that they will inevitably die very much determines how they live and the quality of their life. The absolute terror that I have experienced in one insanity was clearly related to this because I had devoted my life to a political belief system that was in rags and after many years all I had done seemed to have come to nothing. As a child I remembered that I had come to think about death in this way - I must achieve something for the world before I die so that my life will have meaning. This psychological crisis was so deep because I realised that after many years deep commitment I had achieved little but had being pursuing what now looked like a political illusion.
What our collective religious culture(s) say about death is clearly central to our living. As far as I can see virtually all religions seem to tidy up the unfinished business of life in their different descriptions of post death experience. They virtually all have something of a balance sheet approach in the sense that the life led before death determines the state of a residual surviving spirit or identity after it. In the patriarchal religions it seems as if there is a punishment-reward model but Dante's summary of the medieval Christian concept can be seen not as a heavenly model of the judicial system so much as an inevitable cause - effect process in which souls who have pursued power and possessions are rendered into nothing when they lose their place in the material world. To crudely put it in terms of measure - if a person is measured by their possessions then, because they cannot take these possessions with them, their post death souls will have no weight - so to speak - while the negative measure arising from their exploitative deeds to other human beings will pull them badly over into the negative scale. Such a review of one's life may, however, occur while one is physiologically alive, in the experience of madness because in madness one's existing way of "holding one's world" together has dissolved and with its one's identity. Outside one's identity one may, perhaps for the first time, begin to see that there are other ways in which other people (and species) may see the self.
Interestingly the reports of near death experiences include a life review when people get a clear sense of who and what they have been - I suppose it is as if one could step outside of oneself and see oneself clearly for the first time because in the post death experience, as I have read, one experiences the melting of boundaries between oneself and everything else in the universal flux.
These are realms which I am a mere beginner and I feel embarrassed to write about that which I know little. I am reminded of Lao Tzu's remark that when you are wise you realise how little you know and remain silent so that it is the people who are ignorant who pronounce most on things. Is it really helpful to contribute my muddles. When I read the incredibly detailed accounts of Tibetan Buddhists about the death experience I feel I am looking at something about which I understand little. It seems that to understand these accounts would require a choice to spend much time in meditation, a leap of faith, that it would be worthwhile.
There is a part of me, as materialist that was schooled by Marxism, that believes that if we could all live an earthly life in which we lived the potential of each age of life, to suck, to play, to find a lover, to have children, to play a respected and productive role in community life, to contemplate the universe and our place in it, all at an appropriate age, then we would die without pain or unhappiness because we had done everything appropriate to the age of our lives and we would die when we had nothing more to do, with no interest in living. We would give up life just as we give up our toys because we have no interest in it any more. In this approach to death there would be no need for an afterlife for there would be nothing left over from life to be done. (I have derived this idea from Jean Liedloff's book, The Continuum Concept).
But then there is a bit of me that feels that while this might be a social state to be aimed at things will never be like that. I do not want children because I think the 21 century will likely be a century of horror so already my dream of an ideal non-neurotic life is disrupted by grim reality. The real world is one where chaos is always round the corner and with this chaos suffering. I cannot ignore the Buddhist descriptions of the death process because perhaps here is a clue to another kind of liberation. This is also because there seem to be parallels in the description of post death states to the experience of madness.
On deeper inspection we often find there are ways of understanding which reveal more than we ever expected. Thus descriptions of post death experience from Tibetan Buddhism are highly detailed in things like the description of colour and forms which appearing in the Bardo state of transition. These descriptions might appear as the bizarre and fanciful fantasies of people with wierd other worldly views. Yet we know that different colours evoke different emotional states. We know too that different colours and different musical notes share the same frequency patterns in light and sound waves. We know that musical melody and rhythm can "move" us profoundly. Why not then go along with the idea that there is a frequency pattern, or a musical harmony for different emotional states? Why not then recognise that if our personality is best described as our emotional responses to different kinds of events in the world and, if emotions correspond to frequencies or rhythms, that our personality can thus be described as a patterning of energy (=emotional) responses? Why not then acknowledge that this emotionally determined response, pattern that is our identity, will disintegrate at death in a way that corresponds to the different frequencies of these emotions? Why not then go even further and acknowledge that the adepts of meditation may be able to, so to speak, steer, their process of dying into a liberation that is undisturbed, uncoloured and into a clear white light of clarity and compassion? For this we will need a new approach of care and respect for the dying. We will need to recognise that just as children, if abused, can have their lives ruined, so too can we abuse the experience of dying and its potential for liberation.
In conclusion - religion related to the science and arts
Final thought. Jesus said he was the son of God. He also said that all the rest of us are supposed to be children of God. So what is the difference? When I asked this of an East German Lutheran paster and friend, Pfarrer Mathiass Seifert, he said "None". When I asked it of C of E vicar his response was very different and to the effect that Jesus was somehow very special and different. How then? These are all arguments about words....I want to ask questions like "what exactly is the nature of the 'spirit' in spiritualism?". Is it what physicists would call subtle energy patterns which contain information? Religion is not the same as science or art but to my mind there needs to be a bridge towards science (and art in the recognition of the patterns). The alternative is a "believe anything you like" message whose appeal to "faith" makes me deeply unhappy as it seems to be an appeal to stop questioning which can easily evolve into unchallengeable dogma. This is the downside of religion and no help to mental health service users at all in my view.
Brian Davey
mid-late August 1998
Sources: David Bohm, "Wholeness and the Implicate Order" , Routledge, 1980
David Bohm, "On Creativity" Routledge, 1998
David Darling, "After Life. In Search of Cosmic Consciousness" Fourth Estate Books, London, 1995
Gyorgy Doczi, " The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art and Architecture" Shambhala Books, London 1985
K Kautsky, "The Foundations of Christianity"
Jean Liedloff, "The Continuum Concept", Penguin,
F David Peat, "Synchronicity. The Bridge between Matter and Mind" Bantam Books, 1987
Lao Tzu (Tr. with commentary by R.L.Wing ) "The Tao of Power" Thorsons, London 1997
Maxime Rodinson, "Mohammed" Penguin Books 1973.
Philip Rawson, "Tantra. The Indian Cult of Ectasy", Thames and Hudson, 1973
Sogyal Rinpoche, "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying", Rider Books, London 1992
Lin Yutang (ed), "The Wisdom of India", Four Square Books, 1964. (Contains The Upanishads).
The Bible
© BRIAN DAVEY