“In an adult lifetime of analyzing thousands of men and women, I’ve never known a disturbed person of middle age or older who recovered emotionally without accepting what the living religions of the world teach about spirituality.”
Carl G. Jung, World Class Psychotherapist/AuthorThe world class psychologists, psychiatrists, philosophers, theologians, poets, novelists, sociologists, anthropologists and others that I weave together as primary sources for this seminar, study humans and their relationships through their own personal mind sets. Men and women invariably interpret knowledge and wisdom through personal values, attitudes, expectations, beliefs and choices, even as the great majority of us naively insist that we deal only with facts. Voltaire wrote that most people think only enough to justify their own attitudes and behaviors. Subjective interpretations of almost everything are inevitable when meaningful topics are discussed. Actually, when any two persons agree all the time, it is an indication that at least one of them has stopped thinking. Nevertheless, regardless of how my select scholars assumed humans reached this point, they virtually all agree that for some reason men and women are first and foremost spiritual creatures with a powerful metaphysical streak in the unconscious functions of their minds. They must be right, because every one of the twenty-two civilizations that left their footprints on earth was based on religious beliefs that shaped their society and the values, attitudes and behaviors of the people.
In addition to my study of civilization’s psychospiritual giants, learning much from them, I have also waded through the mud and blood of human existence. I served America as a military airman, pastor, science instructor, psychology professor and chairman, industry manager, clinic director, leadership professor, management consultant and author. I have distilled half a century of my own researching, counseling, teaching and consulting to help liberate human souls from alienation, dissatisfaction and suffering. I do this by offering the elements of life that empower persons through spiritual values, positive attitudes, high expectations, mature beliefs and sound choices. This course of study isn’t simplistic; it isn’t something I’ve hurriedly cobbled together, and obviously, living successfully in our era of relentless change and frustration isn’t easy. Soul liberation requires the application of both psychological knowledge and philosophical wisdom.
To begin with, I really must present for your understanding three astonishing psychospiritual breakthroughs in which most of my great scholars reached consensus although they reported them in their own ways.
As a pre-emancipation African-American gospel song laments, life is filled with complications and sorrows for everyone. At times life can become an unmitigated horror as time slowly but surely converts every plant that sprouts and ever creature that wiggles into fertilizer to feed future doomed generations.
Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen -- Nobody knows but Jesus.We really are finite beings adrift in a dangerous world, beset consistently by the tragic human quartet of suffering, rage, guilt and death. George Santayana, the brilliant Harvard philosopher wrote;
Life is neither entertainment nor a feast but a predicament to be resolved in the face of enormous difficulties.Most of us do indeed live out at least some portions of our lives in quiet desperation. As many as one person in five suffers from serious mental or spiritual health disorders at times. In addition, we are all caught up in the frustrations of life virtually all our days. Even now we are suffering greatly as the American middle class and the democracy it creates, is being deliberately destroyed by the plutocrats of Global Capitalism that few men and women understand.
During my half century of psychospiritual research, this existential enigma emerged from the writings of men and women like Soren Kierkegaard, Carl Jung, Karen Horney, Otto Rank, Laura Perls, Abraham Maslow, Melanie Klein and others. Some of them started as agnostics or atheists who like Sigmund Freud assumed God was a security myth, religion a fraud, worship and prayer naively subjective and faith, hope and love meaningless illusions. I understand Freud’s skepticism. How could any serious scholar want anything to do with the state controlled churches of his day -- as the clergy pandered to the nobility and betrayed families into poverty and in religious and financial wars? Nevertheless, as the best scholars matured personally and professionally, when everything psychological had been researched, after they’d reached the limits of psychotherapy, the incredible insights contained in the following paragraph appeared regularly in many of my most influential scholars’ lectures, therapy sessions and books. Most of them did reach consensus on this:
For some reason that we have not yet discovered, we humans have evolved with strong metaphysical natures and mystical needs. We simply cannot be satisfied with physical and psychological benefits alone. We have conscious and unconscious philosophical or spiritual yearnings that must be met consistently. Therefore, to mature beyond neurotic anxiety, to cope with existential alienation, to live purposefully and win consistent satisfaction, each person must develop a faith in God -- or at least in an idealized God. We scholars can find no God -- organized religion probably panders to human weakness while prayer and worship may be frauds, Nevertheless, to avoid crippling our metaphysical souls, we must assume that a God-Ideal exists and offer devotion to this creator, because doing so gives us feelings of security in a dangerous world. We can then live with the illusions of faith, hope and love that are essential for a meaningful life.
Oh my -- how wondrously droll, how terribly convoluted! Nevertheless, most scholars saw this spiritual hunger inherent in all humans. And, fortunately, there is a much better way, for according to William of Occam, with all factors being equal, the simplest solution to a problem is usually the best one. Soren Kierkegaard, the always brilliant and forever relevant godfather of modern psychology, the most equal of my score or so authors, along with Otto Rank and Ernest Becker, saw life more clearly than most. The Danish philosopher of the First Industrial Revolution, when writing about spiritual freedom, reported;
The only way we humans can find contentment in a commercial society is through a self-transcending faith in a gracious God that lifts us beyond a fearful, frustrated and meaningless existence. We must become men and women of faith.
You must understand this. In this seminar I examine aspects of human personality and experience that are filled with painful and self-defeating elements. It is worse than useless to ignore our problems when every newspaper edition exposes us to a flood of human disasters. Nevertheless, my approach is spiritual and positive when followed through to the end. I shall try very hard to teach you how to peer into your souls, to balance knowledge and wisdom, psychology and philosophy and the earthy elements of psychotherapy with the cosmic elements of worship -- in order to deal with human suffering and to make life come out well along the way. I use the term psychospiritual with a full understanding of its dual implications of strong emotional and deeply philosophical elements.
To resolve our spiritual difficulties, to succeed in our quest for liberation, we must successfully pass through the major emotional crisis of human liberation. During this conflict, the soul with its unconscious scar tissue; repressed, anxious, subjective and frozen at the core of our being, must surrender itself. Selfishness must yield to generosity. We must mature beyond the immature attitude of I - Myself Alone. The seeker after freedom, to use St. Paul’s concepts, must nurture a contrite attitude in order to regret and abandon personal selfishness. In psychoanalytic terms, the self must sacrifice the ego in order to become free of its tyranny. Only after we have removed our emotional armor, have matured beyond egoistic self-deception and often gone past the assistance psychotherapy can give us to connect consciously with God, can we find deliverance. We have too many primitive homosapien traits to break free in our own strength. We need spiritual support to mature beyond our posturing and pretension, past our repressed killer-ape paranoia and nagging anxieties, beyond our compulsive defenses. We must abandon such baggage to escape through the prison bars we ourselves have erected for ego protection against our anxiety and guilt. Only then can we find the courage, knowledge and wisdom to become spiritually and emotionally free as Jesus, St. Paul, Martin Luther King and Sister Theresa among many others were liberated souls -- were Kierkegaard’s men and women of faith, hope and love.
Our search for spiritual liberation via the repentance of our failures, with sincere contrition, followed by trust in God, creates several crucial questions to be answered as we seek deliverance from our homosapien anxiety, guilt and rage through faith and selfawareness. We must ask ourselves;
How can I end my self-defeating ego defenses, remove my emotional and cultural armor to become the loving parent, supportive spouse and faithful friend I yearn to be?
How shall I courageously stand in my quaking and bleeding nakedness -- my ego crying out for esteem regardless of who is abused, without being overwhelmed by the cruelties of life?
How can I, a mere mortal already living under a death sentence, in a prison of my own making, successfully make my way through this confusing maze of suffering, guilt and death that is the unavoidable tragic triad of existence?
I wish I could tell you that my special scholars identified two or three shortcuts to soul liberation that shall sweep you into happiness all the days of your life. It would also be wonderful if each person could make a single emotional adjustment, like the religious experience called being born again that is expected by many to guarantee forever each believer’s spiritual liberation. I recall, during my youth in a fundamentalist revival meeting, an enthusiastic young evangelist begging us to come forward to shake his hand and accept Christ as our personal savior. That would, he assured us, take us straight to heaven regardless of where we strayed or what sins we committed later in life. He pleased some rebellious adolescents greatly but horrified our parents by saying;
Come and shake my hand, signifying your acceptance of Christ, and then it doesn’t matter whether death overtakes you drunk in a saloon or from the arms of a harlot -- you shall have been saved, you will go directly to heaven for an eternity with Jesus and with God our heavenly father.
I remember my father grumbling aghast to my mother;What is that idiot teaching our teenagers -- that living a Christian life gives them license to immorality and sin, to drunkenness and adultery, if you first get saved? He’s a loony. Not only must you talk the talk; each Christian must walk the walk. You must run the race through to the end!
I shall elaborate more on this later but for now, let me say here that dealing successfully with life and its problems, with our secret yearnings, is much like following a twelve-steps program for drug addicts. It is never a one-time event such as being redeemed through a simple mental assent. Human nature is too complex for so simplistic a deliverance, although as an aspect of God’s grace, it must indeed begin with contrition and a connection with the Cosmic Creator. Given the fact we are subjective and finite creature-selves, frequently in conflict in an imperfect world, our psychospiritual health is always a life-long project we must accept and follow through to the end. Of course that creates a problem for many because we are such impatient souls. We are indeed attracted to quick fix solutions whether in religion, industry, education or our personal lives. Even more, we really want to pretend nothing is wrong and then when we are forced to face some unpleasant reality, we usually call in a specialist, have the expert do the quick fix and write out a check. Psychospiritual healing doesn’t occur that way -- it is a process that always extracts a price and often draws blood. Life becomes really satisfying through maturing and no one grows up in a few weeks or months. We mature and nurture ourselves in stages and while others can help, as with Alcoholics Anonymous, we have to very much want to rid ourselves of our conscious and unconscious methods of avoiding personal responsibility before we become free.
Through this seminar I shall be dealing with some of the common defenses we humans use to feel good about ourselves in a difficult world where life is often nasty, brutish and short. These include keeping secrets from ourselves (repression) - pretending that unpleasant things didn’t occur or really are not that bad (denial) and keeping existence simplistic (avoidance). This leads to yet another paradox.
Given the difficult nature of life, while we cope with the tragic quartet of suffering, rage,, guilt and death, we normally protect our egos in our search for satisfaction, Of course, we all need defenses to avoid severe anxiety that would render us unable to function well. On the other hand, when we use too many ego defenses, they raise havoc in our families, companies, churches and communities. Getting along without falling into despair is somewhat like balancing along a tight rope. We live on a continuum between neurotic domination and crippling isolation and we must work regularly to make life come out right. Much as a recovering addict must deliberately choose each morning to remain sober even as his or her insecurities are clamoring for counterfeit liberation.
Life in the raw is often too painful, too dangerous to face without some pretensions, ego games and hidden secrets. In fact, we learn early in childhood that some very nasty things happen to everyone -- that life is fatal in the end and no one gets out alive. Just last week as I write this, a darling little second grade girl in our community slipped while running after a school bus and was crushed in front of many of her schoolmates. It was devastating to them and I wept as I thought of the precious little life cut short in the terrible accident. Amy my own red-headed, left-handed granddaughter with a mind of her own, recently revealed her anxiety about death to her grandmother. And while I probably would have overwhelmed Amy with my research, Roberta in essence told her that is why we trust God. She recommended Amy keep her head cool, her feet warm, her diet modest and to always trust in the Lord. My, oh my -I do have a bevy of strong women in my life. One wife, one daughter, one daughter in law, several granddaughters and great granddaughters who keep me honest and humble.
To pretend that life is a rose-garden is nothing but self-deception and denial. Therefore we must learn how to cope with the reality of existence that is often very hard to bear without fleeing from reality by becoming neurotic. Unfortunately, reality is so terrible a burden to lay on children, while we are learning who we are, where we belong and what life is all about, we all use self-deceptive repression and denial. The key is to keep them from dominating our choices. We must learn how to cope successfully with life’s tragic elements and then work at it regularly.
It has become obvious that the greatest human problems of our era no longer come from the forces of nature but from within ourselves. Wars, hunger for half the world’s people and even global warming are human created conditions that are worse than tsunamis, tornadoes and hurricanes. As the great philosopher Pogo Possum (a k a Walt Kelly) said, We have met the enemy and he is us. We are finite beings who simply cannot find redemption and liberation through our own wisdom and courage. With our psychological unconscious scheming selfishly to dominate others, or conversely, yearning for some great, god-like figure to assume responsibility for our lives, we lack the spiritual resources to pull it off in our own strength. Fortunately, we can find selftranscending liberation, as reported in the Atheist’s Enigma and a Contrite Spirit, while we are connected consciously with God. As Pope John Paul II said shortly before he died;
We cannot be good without God.To which I add;
We cannot even feel satisfied with ourselves and our achievements without a relationship with God that lifts us beyond our own egoistic, homosapien selfishness, rage and consistent self-deception.