FIRST -
THE ATHEIST'S
ENIGMA
(BELIEVING)


SECOND -
THE CONTRITE
SPIRIT
(BELONGING)

THIRD -
SELF-CREATION (BECOMING)

Conclusion

YOU MUST READ THIS SECTION TO UNDERSTAND
ALL THAT FOLLOWS!

I really must first tell you about three astonishing psychospiritual breakthroughs in which my outstanding existential or life-style scholars reached remarkable consensus.

FIRST -- THE ATHEIST'S ENIGMA (BELIEVING)

As an ancient Afro-American spiritual laments, life is prone to suffering, frustration and sorrow. No one escapes life’s troubling realities for long. At all times and in all places, existence is eventually tragic as nature slowly but surely converts every plant that sprouts a stalk and every creature that twitches a muscle into fertilizer to feed still more doomed generations. Decline, death and decay form the inevitable order of life - so far as nature is concerned, individuals are sacrificed for the development of each species. Without the replacement of every creature by its offspring, there is no evolutionary progress for any group - life per se cannot improve. In the overall scheme of nature, only life itself is immortal, only the species are protected, so perceptive persons end up lamenting with the old Negro spiritual;

Nobody knows the trouble I've seen -- Nobody knows but Jesus!

We really are finite beings adrift in a dangerous Cosmos, beset consistently by the tragic elements of suffering, rage, guilt and death. George Santayana, the brilliant Harvard philosopher understood this when he wrote:

Life is neither a farce nor a feast but a predicament for each thoughtful  person to resolve in the face of enormous difficulties.

Most persons do have many times of joy and satisfaction but there is always a strata of sadness to existence as we understand that nothing is constant, that we are always subject to elements of defeat and loss in our relationships, careers and aspirations. One has only to sense the mood of America following the disastrous Twin Towers attack of 9/11. We felt much pain following the collapse of many middle class careers in the recession that followed, suffered so much theft of national wealth by company executives with the criminal connivance of their narcissistic political allies, withdrew from the stock market and still endure the ongoing dread of terrorism. All of us do indeed live out some portion of our lives in quiet desperation and going back to old father Job in the Old Testament, existence has always included pain, guilt and anxiety.

Nevertheless, during my generations of psychospiritual research, a concept I call the Atheist's Enigma emerged from the work of men and women like Sigmund Freud, Viktor Frankl, Alfred Adler. Carl Jung, Karen Horney, Otto Rank, Laura Perls, Abraham Maslow, Melanie Klein, Ernest Becker, Dugal Arbuckle, Carl Rogers and others I shall refer to later.

It is important to understand that many of my scholars started their work as atheists or agnostics who thought God was a myth, religion a fraud, worship and prayer naively subjective with faith, hope and love as meaningless illusions. Let me say that given the nature of many American and European religious groups in the 19th and 20th centuries, I well understand their doubts. How could any serious scholar turn to the savage, dictatorial church rulers that blessed the ruthless Crusades, bloody Pogroms, the Spanish Inquisition, American Slavery, the Holocaust and also supported constant wars by pandering to the nobility? The church had frozen in a 12th to 14th century anti-female, anti-intellectual and anti-democratic theology in which the people were expected to pay and to pray and to obey their religious lords and masters with never a thought of their own.

Had that been all I had seen of religion, I would have rejected it also! And yet -- as my key scholars matured personally and professionally, when everything psychological had been researched, when they reached the limits of psychotherapy -- the incredible insight captured in the following paragraph emerged regularly in many of my influential authors’ lectures, therapy sessions and books. I understand that not every scholar signed off on every concept I present -- there was always considerable shifting, agreeing and disagreeing, but for every concept I interpret, there was a significant group of scholars who supported it. The coalitions then shifted with some coming in and others dropping out of the next concept and reforming once more which is what thoughtful persons do. After all, when any pair or group of people agree all the time, it only means that one or more of them has stopped thinking! Here is the first consensus that I find so valuable to the liberation of one’s soul.

To mature beyond neurotic symptoms, to cope with existential alienation, to live purposefully and win consistent satisfaction, each person must develop a faith as if God were real. We scholars can find no evidence of God -- religion probably panders to human neuroticism, prayer and worship possibly are frauds. Nevertheless, the human race evolved with undeniably powerful religious instincts that must be met for life to become complete. In order to avoid crippling our souls, to live wisely, to find love and peace, we must assume that God exists and accept what we scholars call the God-Ideal. Connecting personally with cosmic values gives us a crucial sense of acceptance and security in a confusing world. Only then can we live with the faith, hope and love that keeps life worth living.

Oh my - how wonderfully droll, how well rationalized, how terribly convoluted! Fortunately, there is better way to approach our universal religious needs. According to William of Occam, with all other factors and forces being equal, the simplest solution to a problem is almost always the best solution. Soren Kierkegaard, the forever brilliant Danish philosopher of the Industrial Revolution thought of it this way;

The only way we humans can find contentment in an industrial society is through a self-transcending faith in God that lifts us beyond a fearful, frustrated and meaningless existence. We must become Knights and Ladies of Faith.

Kierkegaard wasn't writing about a mere assumption -- as if God were real, but of a personal faith in God as The First Cause of Creation, The Seminal Spirit, The Ground of All Being. He was saying; God is why there is something here rather than nothing -- recommending an immediate self-transcending connection to the ultimate personality -- that through spiritual growth can make us lords and ladies of faith. Because humans are products of divine cosmic alchemy and came out of the Cosmos that cosmologists say apparently transcends its own laws, our souls have metaphysical needs that we can meet only in fellowship with God the Cosmic Creator of very existence itself. Of course, many souls are deeply secular persons who grow restless when others speak seriously of God and spirituality, as if they were discussing something irrelevant to their family, company and community. The quest for soul liberation is so crucial that a lack of faith literally destroys many persons before their time. According to the research of Medard Boss and several American scholars, persons who worship twice per week on an average, actually live from seven to eight years longer than persons who fail to worship.

In my work I examine key aspects of human attitudes, experiences and choices that contain painful and threatening elements. I do so because it is disastrous to ignore our flaws and failures when every news medium is saturated with a daily flood of human disasters. Nevertheless, I ask you to stay with me, for despite my honest assessment of our creature-self nature, my approach really is positive when taken in its entirety. I am not a dark and melancholy soul but as a joyous person, I have devoured the apple life handed me -- stem, core, seeds and all, despite the worm lurking within. I can help you peer into your own existence, to balance knowledge and wisdom, psychology and religion, and psychotherapy with the cosmic elements of worship. In other words, help you deal successfully with the human condition and to make life come out well for yourself and the persons you love. I shall certainly come around to the best ways to live wisely although I must lay a foundation first.

SECOND -- THE CONTRITE SPIRIT (BELONGING)

The next great consensus to emerge from many of my special scholars is one that runs counter to our ego-driven culture that insists real men play football, avoid quiche and sushi, treat women as sexual toys, never admit to mistakes and never-ever apologize because that is a sign of weakness. This second concept is about confronting human guilt and accepting the necessity of humility and a personal contrition through a connection with a God-ideal in a great fellowship of the forgiven. The major reason we must repent in order to mature psychospiritually is found in what some of my scholars call THE ULTIMATE LIE.

This deception is the egoistic pretense that the human race is loving and peaceful and that we can be relied on to make logical decisions in order to do what is right.

How self-deceptive. During the twentieth century alone we killed around a hundred million of our sons in selfish wars of conquest. A peaceful species simply couldn’t be that cruel. We usually become violent and ruthless when greedy or threatened and we generally rationalize our cruelties in order to continue the delusion that we are the aggrieved parties in every conflict. Humans really are killer apes, homosapiens, who are clever enough to slaughter our own kind for personal benefit when the fit strikes us or the benefits are enticing enough. And we need the ultimate lie that we are peaceful and loving souls in order to feel good about ourselves despite our consistent violence. Only last night an American politician was touting this nation’s peaceful ways, telling his listeners on the Public Broadcasting network that Americans never-ever start wars. The man must be a cultural neurotic who isn‘t honest enough to recognize his own ultimate lie. In the last half century we Americans have fought wars or serious engagements against Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Libya, Cuba, Panama, Somalia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iraq again. Notice that every one of the above nations is small and poor and inhabited by dark skinned people who couldn’t possibly field a serious threat against the United States.

The second consensus is summed up like this;

To resolve our psychospiritual difficulties, to succeed in our quest for soul liberation, we each must pass through a major emotional crisis of deep contrition. During this crisis, the narcissistic soul with its layers of unconscious scar tissue, feeling guilty from its failures and enraged because of old wounds, must surrender itself to an humble mindset. Narcissism must yield to community, egoism must yield to cooperation, we must mature past the immature egoism of I - MYSELF - ALONE. The seeking soul can then nurture an open and loving acceptance of others in order to keep one’s personal prestige and power in perspective. In psychoanalytic terms, the ego must sacrifice the id in order to become free of its often violent and always lonely tyranny. Only after we have lightened our emotional armor, have matured despite egoistic self-deception and often gone beyond the help psychotherapy can give us -- to connect devoutly with God and honestly serve others in sound faith based relationships, can we find consistent deliverance.

We must civilize the primitive homosapien traits of rage, aggression, repression and denial, not to destroy our self-esteem but to keep it in balance with other persons with whom we must relate peacefully for life to become whole. We all carry much emotional baggage hidden deep inside from childhood and adolescence as well as from the self-serving choices of adulthood. This baggage must be lightened before we can escape the prison we ourselves have erected for ego protection against our greed, rage and guilt. And this self-surrender is difficult for we not only hide our fears, flaws and sins deep within the unconscious aspects of our mind, we have limped along for so long at half speed that we accept a secular life-style as normal.

THIRD -- SELF-CREATION (BECOMING)

Finally, my scholars virtually all agreed on this one; each child with normal abilities unconsciously weaves his or her genetic inheritance, environmental experiences and crucial choices into a personal self-creation project. No person ever pops up full grown as did the dwarfs of Nordic mythology but every person gradually develops into some form of a creature-self who can manage life and its challenges. The third consensus is:

We all remain works in progress all our lives. While growing to adulthood, children reach life shaping conclusions about who we are, what we are worth, what we deserve from life and much more. We gradually create the creature-self we project into an indifferent world, releasing ourselves on society with excellent, mediocre or disastrous results.

The earlier we understand the truth of self-creation, the more likely we are to connect the results of our activities to personal efforts rather than to government, to dehumanizing corporations or to fate. We understand that we can usually succeed when we set out to do something meaningful and we realize that our futures are not preordained. If as children we learn that we have to power to change life for the better through work, compromise and persuasion within the family and school, the better we carry that belief into the adult world. We become change agents with a positive mindset that sets the stage for life. On the other hand, the more deeply we have buried our self-creation processes in the depths of our unconscious, the more we feel victims to great forces of fate over which we have little or no control. Crippled creature-selves tend to approach life as supplicants, in immature and self-defeating ways, rather than as self-directing adults who have made cosmic connections and learned to relate cooperatively with others. For, while our genes establish the floor for each individual life, one’s environment and choices inevitably set their ceiling.

I wish I could tell you that my brilliant scholars identified a shortcut to soul liberation that would sweep you into happiness every day of your life. It would be wonderful if each person could make a simple emotional adjustment of values, attitudes and expectations -- like the peak religious experience that some call being born again. Of course, even that religious commitment is only an initial step to a more spiritual existence; it must be followed with a lifetime of virtuous choices or it soon loses its potency. Dealing successfully with our emotional challenges is more like a life-long twelve-step program used to help alcoholics and drug addicts get sober and stay that way.

Our three major self-defeating defenses include keeping painful secrets from ourselves (repression) - pretending that unpleasant things don't occur or are really not that bad (denial) -- keeping life's activities and relationships simplistic (avoidance).

Given the challenging aspects of life while we cope with the inevitable issues of suffering, rage, guilt and death, we all protect our egos in our search for esteem. And that is all right! It is obvious that humans need defenses, often against life itself, in order to avoid excessive anxiety that would cripple our ability to live well. Life in the raw can indeed be devastating. On the other hand, too powerful a defense system plays havoc in our families, companies and communities. Few things annoy and frustrate other persons more than a woman or man who bolsters a crippled ego by pretending never to make mistakes, to be correct in all of one's opinions or activities while every challenger is totally wrong.

Getting along without falling into delusion or despair is somewhat like balancing on a tight-rope. We homosapiens live along a continuum between an aggressive desire to dominate life and a guilty yearning to be protected from it. In the various stages of a successful self-creation, we must chose carefully to keep our activities from causing failure, much as a recovering alcoholic must choose each morning to remain sober and competent -- even as his insecurities are clamoring for chemical deliverance from the pain of many self-defeating choices.

To pretend that life is a rose garden is just as self-deceptive as to insist that spiritual values, positive attitudes, high expectations, mature beliefs and responsible choices don't normally bring a sound return to the person who consistently applies them. Of course they do, according to the Law of Reciprocity which says that the way we approach life and treat others is the way normal men and women usually react to ourselves. And yet, learning to cope with reality is such a burden for children, who are still learning who they are, what they are worth and where they are going, that all kids tend to build into their personalities repression, avoidance and denial. Children deceive themselves and others constantly, in their attempts to cope with critical adults and painful activities they can neither avoid nor control. When they are overly stressed by poverty, war or even by bad parenting, many often turn their rage-filled reaction inward toward schizophrenia or outward toward psychopathy. After all, unrelieved frustration virtually always leads to aggression or to apathy, neither of which is enhances the maturing soul. As adults, the key is to keep from letting our neurotic traits, and we all have some genetically and environmentally, dominate our souls. We must learn how to cope with life's tragic aspects of suffering, rage, guilt and death and then create a satisfying life for ourselves.

I see this as possible only through the three steps I discussed above, through the Atheist's Enigma, the Contrite Spirit and Self-Creation that leads toward greater psychospiritual maturity. In other words, to Believe, to Belong and to Become what we can become in our activities and relationships.

Roberta, my wife of half a century, is a full partner in several of the courses appearing in our FULFILLMENT FORUM. We long ago entered into covenant relationships with God. We believe sincerely that these relationships connect Roberta and myself to the Lord of the Cosmos. We accept God’s love and belong in the fellowship of believers and understand that our lives contain seeds of purpose that we deliberately sow throughout society. Life becomes more and more meaningful. Now, I’ve said that to say this. There come times to us when this conscious spiritual connection is more than Roberta and I can express. A keen awareness of coming into God's presence may develop when either of us reads some meaningful passage from the Bible, while singing a great hymn of the church or when working to accomplish something significant for humankind. At that time we know we are indeed connected to God. I suppose that makes us mystics.

When that conscious connection occurs, something significant happens to us. We find ourselves, now and forevermore, situated at the shining center of the Cosmos, at the holiest of places, where the physical, psychological and philosophical aspects of existence converge, where the strands of faith, hope and love are woven together in God's brilliance. We are at the summit of faith and grace and we know that the spirit realm extends through all the ages to come. We understand that so long as we remain connected to God, life will never again revert to the fearful and the banal. We have come into God’s realm through faith and grace and have identified with Jesus’ love of all souls.

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