NO JUDEO-CHRISTIAN TRADITION; THINGS DON’T HAPPEN FOR A REASON; GLUTAMATE AND SCHIZOPHRENIA

Lenticular clouds near Mt. Rainier
 
ODYSSEUS IN BARSTOW

 
If you knew what suffering awaits you,
you would stay with me and be deathless,
croons Calypso of the Tidy Braids —

but bronze-armed Odysseus 

only broods on the beach.
His gaze caresses the watery horizon. 


He wants his own life, its breakable glory. 

He wants to be Odysseus. We praise forever
the man who chose not to be a god.

Yet I wonder: would I choose a life  

rich with the journey, yet doomed to lap
at the shore of less and less —


I could sail an infinity of sunsets,

be it shipwrecked in Barstow, California, 

in a tract named Desert Meadows,

married beyond return
to a gun collector, TV on loud,
scrawny palm trees rasping in dry wind —



My morning walk, the hills carved in crystal. 

Petting the neighbors’ dogs and cats;
returning home to read about Odysseus.


I build a monument of pebbles
to the pebbles in Barstow, California.
Memorialize a dung beetle’s march, 


every cloudlet with its knife-blade shadow.
every fissure in the sun-struck ground. 

I trace faces of the dead in the dust —

the silent dead who sing life’s siren song: 
the mere joy of existence. Even in 
Barstow, caressed by the moonlight.

~ Oriana © 2015

Odysseus disguised as a beggar.
 

This poem is one of my personal favorites. I take joy in announcing that Nietzsche was wrong and what doesn’t kill you does NOT make you stronger. After a traumatic experience, you are lucky if your PTSD isn’t too disabling. It’s being happy and fulfilled and loved by the right person that makes you stronger. The less stressed you are, the better your health and your brain function.

In the same contrarian spirit, unlike Odysseus, if offered immortality I would take it, even at a price. I identify with Odysseus to a significant extent, but I would take immortality. Why? Simply so I could go on having consciousness. I enjoy the company of my mind. There’s never a dull moment; my mind keeps surprising me.

(True, there came a time when depression got to be repetitive and boring; that’s when I became fed up with it and ready to let go.)

I love my own mind. I love having a mind, having a consciousness. Always new adventures! And yes, I can imagine being shipwrecked in a dull place. I don’t need to be “where the action is.” I can take that for a short time only. The favorite part of every trip has always been returning home.

The worst deprivation? Not having a home (home = a refuge from stress; a place where I can be myself and do what I love doing). I am not a wanderer, except in the inner sense. I have to have a base camp, my queendom, my very own corner of the world. I'm like a cat: if I have a home, I am happy.

Remember that at seventeen I left home in a very big way. It wasn’t any kind of “running away from home.” Nor was it a hero’s setting out on a quest. I don’t identify with warrior heroes setting out to kill a dragon. I can’t imagine what woman could, even though the media have introduced female warriors, ludicrous escapist imitations of Superman — tall, athletic women who fight the forces of darkness. They never shop for groceries or change diapers. If such wonder women exist, I know I'm not going to run into them where I live.

Is there even such a thing as a heroine’s journey to begin with?  There are patterns in women’s lives: betrayal in love and self-discovery are frequent. Is self-discovery and simply “being yourself” a heroic achievement if you happen to be a woman? Is “having your own life” rather than being mainly a service person to a man still far from what an average woman ends up with?

All we can say is that there is no single “heroine’s journey.” But whatever these journeys are, they are not those of a “warrior princess.”

For a while I strongly identified with an “artist’s journey.” It took a bad wreck, and some related hurtful adventure, to end that particular phase of my life. Again, it was my mind that made me survive the end of what at first seemed infinite. My mind kept whispering that it was still there, and much larger than a device for writing poems, which was challenging but also terribly restrictive and time-devouring.

You may ask, “But isn’t a woman’s journey about love and family?” For most women, that may be true, and the supportive role needs to be honored as much as being the quester and achiever. But for a growing number of women, their journey is neither about achievement nor about raising a family.  

Still, there is the importance of affection. The longer I live, the less I worship achievement and the more I treasure affection. Looking at the clasped hands that survive of the statue of the Pharaoh Akhenaton and his wife Nefertiti and Beautiful (1350 bc), I feel that the most important part survived. 

 
Likewise, I’ve come to see cooperation as an essential part of achievement, not just the lonely individual struggle.

But, above all, life is much larger than “achievement.” That’s where “mere existence” comes in. It’s fantastic simply to be alive, taking in the astonishing world, both the outside world and the the thoughts mysteriously arising, like clouds passing through the sky.

Even in Barstow, to see the moon is a joy. To smell the wind. To hear the coyotes laugh in the hills.

As long as there is consciousness to take it in, just to exist is transcendent. 

 

HAROLD BLOOM: YAHWEH AND JESUS ARE INCOMPATIBLE; THERE IS NO “JUDEO-CHRISTIAN TRADITION”
 
There is no Judeo-Christian tradition anymore than there could be, say, a Christian-Islamic tradition.

~ "Harold Bloom: All through the Hebrew Bible, the prophets perpetually proclaim that the Jewish people, that Israel, has failed to keep the covenant with Yahweh. Nowhere do they say what is palpably true on the basis of Jewish history and of human history in general, which is that Yahweh has failed to keep his covenant with the people.
I say in the book again and again that when Yahweh, which is the name of the high god ultimately in the Hebrew Bible, that when Yahweh is asked by Moses to give Moses his name and in the Hebrew, Yahweh punning on his own name, massively says, ‘Tell them that  [words in Hebrew] has sent you’, which is translated in the King James Bible ultimately as ‘I am that I am’, which I translate in order to get it into an English that will make sense, ‘I will be present wherever and whenever I choose to be present’, which also implies its rather frightening corollary, ‘And I will be absent wherever and whenever I choose to be absent’. It seems to me that he has chosen to be absent throughout most of human history, including Jewish history.

NPR: Well, if Jesus is like Hamlet for you, Yahweh, the God of the Hebrew Bible, comes closest to King Lear, a passionate, impulsive figure.

Prof. BLOOM: I think that Shakespeare probably founds his extraordinary figure of King Lear — irascible, jealous, intense, immensely awesome, angry, bereft, dangerous — on the Geneva Bible's version of — which is essentially not very different from what is now the authorized, the King James...

There are four different layers in the five books of Moses. The original strata of Yahweh as written by the author we call the Yahwist is of a remarkably impish kind of a person. He is not God the Father. He is something of a mischief maker. He conducts on-the-ground inspections all the time to satisfy his curiosity. He is very much a human being. He prefers the cool of the day in the Garden of Eden because evidently he gets hot as human beings get hot. He picnics on the side of Mount Sinai with Moses and 70 elders of Zion, who stare at him silently while he sits there silently and he eats and they eat. He closes the door of Noah's ark with his own hands. With his own hands, he buries his prophet, Moses.

And most of all, with his own hands, at the beginning, almost like a child playing with a mud pie, he plays with the moistened Earth and makes there a figurine. And then he breathes life into that figurine, and man becomes, as the Hebrew Bible says, a living soul and this is Adam. That is not what most people, I admit, think of as God.

God the Father is a later invention, on the one hand, of the Talmudical rabbis but primarily of Christian theology when they devise the Trinity, when Jesus of Nazareth, the more or less historical figure, has become an absolutely different figure, a Greek dying and reviving, God, a theological God. Yahweh is not a theological God at all. He is a human, all-too-human God.

The basic argument of this book, “Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine,” is that we have three very different personages or beings: the more or less historical Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew of the first century of the common era; the Greek theological formulation, or God, Jesus Christ; and the original God of the Hebrews, now greatly shrunken into God the Father, Yahweh, he who will be present wherever and whenever he chooses to be present and will keep himself absent when perhaps we most want him and need him. These three figures are so incompatible with one another that I don't believe it is possible to bring them coherently together in any single statement. They come out of totally different realms of discourse. Trying to think them together is really an act of psychic violence.

The operations of the mind have got to become extremely distorted in order to bring the more or less historical Jesus, the Greek theological God Jesus Christ and the human, all-too-human God, Yahweh, into some coherent relationship. The normal processes of thought are being disturbed, and an act of imposition is taking place.

NPR: Now you write that a Messiah who is God and who dies on the cross as an atonement for sins is irreconcilable with the Hebrew Bible. Why is that?

Prof. BLOOM: Yahweh does not commit suicide. And if one is to take the argument of Christianity, then Yahweh is, in effect, committing suicide through his supposed son. Yahweh also does not, even as a descending dove upon a human female virgin, bring forth a son. This is material that comes to one out of Greek and pagan traditions but has nothing to do with traditional Judaism.

I quote the great scholar of Hebraic matters Jacob Neusner as saying, "Judaism and Christianity are different groups of people talking different languages about different Gods to very different people." There is no Judeo-Christian tradition anymore than there could be, say, a Christian-Islamic tradition.

Whether 50 years from now, there will be of the 14 million now self-identified Jews more than a mere scattering, I would not be prepared to say. What that means about the existence of Yahweh is also a very interesting question. He is, after all, covenanted. Would he survive the disappearance of the Jewish people if that, indeed, is what happens? I do not know. I may, as I say, lack trust in the covenant, but though I keep asking Yahweh to go away, I say so many times in this book, he won't go away. He haunts me.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5048309

Oriana:

It struck me way back, in my teens, that no Hebrew prophet speaks of Yahweh as “my father” —  it’s The Lord, it’s “Boss.” Then comes Jesus, who seems to be a messenger of an entirely different god, a non-punitive god (there are exceptions, but the non-punitive god shines through)  — a god endowed with radical non-judgment and compassion entirely uncharacteristic of the times. I agree that trying to reconcile the two testaments is an act of psychic violence. And it doesn’t work. As Bloom observes, Jesus is a dying-and-resurrecting Greek mystery god. Yahweh is not the sort of  deity who’d commit suicide, even with the idea of resurrection later. He’s too full of ego for that.

I like Bloom’s parallel between Yahweh and King Lear. I would add: the need for flattery. That’s a very strong trait the two have in common.

*
ALREADY THE GNOSTICS OBJECTED TO THE RETENTION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
 
The observation that the Old Testament and the New are incompatible is not exactly new. The Gnostics were a major group who said, "Look, no way was Jesus the son of Yahweh. Yahweh is evil. Jesus is the messenger of the true god." They were entangled in the imaginary, but at least their true god (Pleroma, or "fullness") wasn't as distasteful. There was also a major figure of Sophia, Wisdom, who also was the Divine Feminine. The Gnostics were seen as such powerful opposition to the church that they were exterminated. As usual, Catholicism triumphed by exterminating the opposition. The first time they failed was with Luther (there was of course a price on his head).

There were other voices calling for letting go of the Old Testament god and making Christ the sole deity — but those were mainly “heretics” who got burned at the stake. Then came Swedenborg, who doesn’t make an explicit case for dropping Yahweh, but simply pays no attention to the archaic deity. Swedenborg’s god is Christ. But Swedenborg did not attract many followers. The denomination exists to this day — I stumbled into a Swedenborgian church in Boston — but to avoid extinction, the church has latched on to New Age concepts.

Still, the voices calling for liberation from the Old Testament exist, but they are feeble and scattered. I think the movement will gain strength in the coming decade: why don’t we just drop the Old Testament, and make Christianity about Christ? Let’s take only those stories which we find inspiring (this would mean excluding some of the New Testament too). Let’s focus only on that which we find uplifting, which helps us live. But that’s still a huge step, and people are still too timid. And most people are too indifferent, and don’t want to think about the difficult issues. And after all, which are talking about choosing between two unreal beings!

By the way, the selective approach would mean that we don’t “revere” the ancient texts as revelation — or else claim the authority to decide which stories we will accept. That is close to saying, “We will decide what in here strikes as as holy and gives us moral guidance; the rest is an  archaic encumbrance.” It would be an admission of how human, all too human, the whole enterprise is. We would know we are dealing with mythology. 
 
*

The elevation of Jesus to the status of deity required the invention of the Trinity. Well, a binary deity was possible, but three was a magical number, and the Greeks were already familiar with one god in three forms, though this seemed a more female pattern: Maiden-Mother-Crone.

The divinity of Jesus was precarious, given the Jewish origins of Christianity. There could hardly be a greater blasphemy to the Jews than to say that Yahweh had a mortal son with a mortal woman — though later this son sat on the right hand of Yahweh, and was actually co-eternal with his father, his stay on earth having been only temporary. The church was defensive about the concept of the Trinity. We were warned against trying to use reason (because reason will always choose against god, and god must be chosen at any price) — but we were especially warned not to even try to understand the Trinity. It was forbidden to think about the Trinity.

Fortunately children have no particular inclination to contemplate the mysteries of the Trinity. I was more interested by far in why “Mr. God” (as we politely called him) was hiding — why didn’t he show himself, why didn't he speak, or at least give a sign? Why didn't he answer prayers? Those, to me, were the burning questions, and not the Trinity.

Even so, I was suspicious of the foreign, Hebrew roots of Christianity. Why were we learning about a remote place with camels and deserts, and people who worshiped by slaughtering lambs?  And back then I didn’t even know that the Catholic mass was based on the Temple ritual of animal sacrifice. But that gets into yet another angle of the awkward fusion of the Old and the New Testaments. Even as a child I sensed that it was not a good fit.


STEPHEN MITCHELL AND “THE REAL GOD”

Mitchell: “People have been trying to rationalize God’s lies for thousands of years. These stories are very powerful and are at the root of our culture. But you have to realize that the God of Genesis is a human creation, and not the God at the center of the universe,” says the celebrated translator Stephen Mitchell in an interview with Psychology Today, November/December 1996. Later he speaks of “the ultimate intelligence of the universe, which some call God or Tao.”

Mitchell states that he believes that there is absolute justice in the universe, but not in the sense of punishment and reward — more in the sense of surrender to whatever happens and bearing it with grace, without resentment, trusting that all is as it should be (I dare say: here is someone who didn’t grow up under a dictatorship, raised by an Auschwitz survivor . . . who, by the way, was not broken by her camp experience, in a way bearing out what Mitchell says)

Mitchell’s wife, Byron Katie, said about him, “Stephen is brave enough to be married to the impersonal.” Maybe more and more people are becoming brave enough to regard the divine in impersonal terms, but there is still a craving for a someone or something “out there” that cares. We can’t help it: we want the universe to be friendly.

 
“SPIRITUAL NO MORE”: TO HEAVEN AND BEYOND    (redux)

The last time I set foot in a New Age bookstore I happened to be in Encinitas, that Mecca of New Age eclectic esoterica. In one of the several Lotus-something bookstores, I saw the title “To Heaven and Beyond.” AND BEYOND — as in Bed, Bath, and Beyond, a realm beyond mere bedrooms and bathrooms, new horizons that open as you part the shower curtain.

“To heaven and BEYOND.” Heaven is not enough any more. Heaven is so yesterday!

I stood there with a smile on my face – and suddenly the title of my third book came to me. You see, years ago I had an unforgettable dream of trying to save the manuscripts of my three wisdom books from the fire — then realized they were charred beyond salvaging and I’d have to re-create them. The title of the first one was The Serpent and the Dove (“Be ye as subtle as the serpent and gentle as the dove”).

It took me many years after the dream to “see” the titles of the other two books. The title of the second book was to be Letters to a Middle-Aged Poet. The third book remained a puzzle until the doors of perception were cleansed that evening in Encinitas and I saw it: Spiritual No More.

And the weight I didn’t even know I was carrying fell off me, and a feeling of great joy enveloped me as I ascended into clarity.

Now I can agree with Mary Oliver’s “You don’t have to be good” if I translate it into “You don’t have to be spiritual.”

Furthermore, I’d like to translate “what the animal of your body loves doing” to “what your mind loves doing.” If my mind is happy, my body is also happy.

I had this thought before, but now the realization was complete: instead of attending lectures on emptiness, chanting, meditation classes and the like (all wonderful for those who find nourishment in those activities), I needed to spend more of my time doing what I loved doing. Insights tend to have a stunning simplicity. Mine was: FORGET “SPIRITUALITY.” JUST DO WHAT YOU LOVE DOING.

Well, of course, a friend indulgently smiled. That stuff is for people who still haven’t figured out what to do with their lives. And I did, quite a while back, but I kept having crises and doubting my vocation.

I love having insights, especially life-changing paradigm shifts. Imagine — released from having to attend lectures on emptiness! No more chanting, unless seized by a sudden nostalgia for those vibrations setting up an odd tingling in my nose . . .  No more the stench of incense, which I always hated, going back to my Catholic childhood. No more twangy music, no more wind chimes jangling my nerves.

The energy and sense of effortless accomplishment that comes from doing what you love, and afterwards, blissfully tired, falling asleep smiling to yourself — it’s a magnificent surprise. It’s “beyond heaven,” that dull place with nothing to do. It’s the bliss of knowing, pardon the trite expression, that you are on the right path.

You can imagine people’s consternation when they’d say to me — out of habit, I suspect — “I'm a spiritual seeker,” and I would calmly reply, “I'm not.”

I wasn’t trying to shock or offend. I was trying to give them the courage to drop the cliché. It’s OK NOT to be a spiritual seeker, to be on a perpetual quest. Perhaps you’ve already found a place where you feel at home and do your best work. That place won’t necessarily remain the same for the rest of your life, no. But life will evolve as it will, quite without the aid of seeking aid from “spirit guides.” If anything, that’s trying to be too controlling. The unconscious does its best work without such meddling. Just wait.
I realized that all my “spiritual” thrashing around — normally described as “seeking” or “quest” — was like staying in a relationship with the wrong person. And there is a terrific difference between a “default” infatuation and being in love with the right person.
 
JOSEPH CAMPBELL’S “SPIRITUAL PRACTICE”

Some people are likely to ask, “But isn’t writing your spiritual practice?” No. To me writing is writing. It’s not a ritual. It’s not the least bit like prayer (at least as I’ve experienced prayer — practically the opposite of writing, which wells up from the unconscious, and progresses by a “stairway of surprise,” as Dickinson put it).

For me writing is writing, just as a tree is a tree. How magnificent to see a tree as a tree, in its beautiful tree-ness, and not a “manifestation of the Spirit.” I see only the tree and the wind in the leaves, and love the tree as a tree and the wind as wind.

Others are welcome to see the tree as the Spirit, or Gaia, or the more archaic Earth Goddess, or Intelligent Design. “It’s a free country,” as people in Milwaukee were always telling me (oh Milwaukee, the city where I learned to say “It’s a free country,” as well as quickly mastered all the “bad words” in English).

From a poem of mine:

The same moon moved between
darkness and light-wounded clouds,
winter’s hungry Wolf Moon,

adding phantom beauty to beauty.
“That is all,” the master said.
That is all but it is splendid.”

*


 
as I see the Spirit of Milwaukee

I don’t have any special time set aside for writing. It’s not a practice – it’s writing. I write whenever quiet opens up and thoughts arise like the flight of an owl. Non-fiction prose is effortless, inspiration abundant. With poetry, it’s been more of a love-hate relationship. In the case of poetry, I write if the knocking of words inside my head becomes too painful to ignore.

Deep reading actually comes ahead of writing. Joseph Campbell was once asked, “What kind of spiritual practice do you have?” He replied, “I underline in pencil sentences in a book.” Now that brings a big smile to my face. Yes, that’s my “spiritual practice” too.

At the same time, I am happy to announce a new arrival in my scriptorium: a heart geode – it could also be called a womb geode. It’s gorgeous: beautifully polished, lined with a wealth of amethyst crystals. It’s the most beautiful thing in the house, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever owned. We carry on little conversations, the geode and I.  “Amethyst” means “not intoxicated.” In the past, my chief intoxication has been delusional, depressive thinking. Amethyst, a philosopher’s stone, keeps me cool-headed. How can I sweat the small stuff with such beauty next to me showing me what’s really important?

Crystals. Geodes. This may sounds like a throwback “spirituality.” But that’s the part of me that has always worshiped beauty. Creating and sharing beauty is at the center of my vocation. Beauty for the sake of sheer delight in beauty — not beauty as “spirit” or “pathway to the divine.” Why try to put unreal labels on the real?

Tree as tree, amethyst as amethyst. A crystal I can endow with a personal meaning, but above all a crystal whose physical structure is more profound that any theology. All actual beauty is more profound than any pathetic, world-rejecting theology (and they all reject the world for the “beyond,” don’t they?).

A friend observed, “So you too are a crystal-waving rationalist. Welcome to the sisterhood.”

At last I belong.

**

DOES EVERYTHING HAPPEN FOR A REASON?
 
When people have to cope with difficult situations in their lives, they sometimes reassure themselves by saying that everything happens for a reason. For some people, thinking this way makes it easier to deal with relationship problems, financial crises, disease, death, and even natural disasters such as earthquakes. It can be distressing to think that bad things happen merely through chance or accident. But they do.

The saying that everything happens for a reason is the modern, New Age version of the old religious saying:  “It’s God’s will.” The two sayings have the same problem – the complete lack of evidence that they’re true. Not only is there no good evidence that God exists, we have no way of knowing what it is that he (or she) wanted to happen, other than that it actually did happen.  Did God really will that hundreds of thousands of people die in an earthquake in one of the world’s poorest countries? What could be the reason for this disaster and the ongoing suffering of millions of people deprived of food, water, and shelter?

Why do people find it reassuring that the Haiti earthquake happened for a reason such as the will of God, when such terrible events suggest a high degree of malevolence in the universe or its alleged creator? Fortunately, such events can alternatively (and with good evidence) be viewed as the result of accidents, and possibly even of chance.

The idea that chance is an objective property of the universe was advocated in the nineteenth century by the great American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who called this doctrine tychism, from the Greek word for chance. Scientific support for the doctrine came in the twentieth century with the development of quantum theory, which is often interpreted as implying that some events such as radioactive decay are inherently unpredictable.

Even if events that affect human lives do not happen by quantum chance, many of them should be viewed as happening by accident, in the sense that they are the improbable result of the intersection of independent causal chains. The deaths in Haiti, for example, came about because of the results of many causal chains, primarily (1) the historical events that led to millions of people living near Port-au-Prince, and (2) the seismic events occurring in the tangle of tectonic faults near the intersection of two crustal plates. These deaths were accidental in that the intersection of the unconnected causal chains was unpredictable.  Neither history nor seismology are random, but their intersections often are so unforeseeable that we should call them accidental.

The doctrine that everything happens for a reason has intellectual variants.   The German philosopher Hegel maintained that in historical development the real is rational and the rational is real. Similarly, before the recent meltdowns in the financial system, it was a dogma of economic theory that individuals and markets are inherently rational. Some naïve evolutionary biologists and psychologists assume that all common traits and behaviors must have evolved from an optimizing process of natural selection. In history, economics, biology, and psychology, we should always be willing to consider evidence for the alternative hypothesis that some events occur because of a combination of chance, accidents, and human irrationality. For example, Keynes attributed financial crises in part to “animal spirits”, by which he meant the emotional processes that can make people swing between irrational exuberance and pessimistic despair. 

But if the real isn’t rational, how can we cope with life’s disasters?  Fortunately, even without religious or New Age illusions, people have many psychological resources for coping with the difficulties of life. These include cognitive strategies for generating explanations and problem solutions, and emotional strategies for managing the fear, anxiety, and anger that naturally accompany setbacks and threats. Psychological research has identified many ways to build resilience in individuals and groups, such as developing problem solving skills and strong social networks. Life can be highly meaningful even if some things that happen are just accidents.  Stuff happens and you deal with it.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hot-thought/201002/does-everything-happen-reason-0

(from another article)

 “WHATEVER the origin of our belief in life’s meaning, it might seem to be a blessing. Some people find it reassuring to think that there really are no accidents, that what happens to us — including the most terrible of events — reflects an unfolding plan. But the belief also has some ugly consequences. It tilts us toward the view that the world is a fundamentally fair place, where goodness is rewarded and badness punished. It can lead us to blame those who suffer from disease and who are victims of crimes, and it can motivate a reflexive bias in favor of the status quo — seeing poverty, inequality and oppression as reflecting the workings of a deep and meaningful plan.

Not everyone would go as far as the atheist Richard Dawkins, who has written that the universe exhibits “precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” But even those who are devout should agree that, at least here on Earth, things just don’t naturally work out so that people get what they deserve. If there is such a thing as divine justice or karmic retribution, the world we live in is not the place to find it. Instead, the events of human life unfold in a fair and just manner only when individuals and society work hard to make this happen.

We should resist our natural urge to think otherwise.”

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GREAT CHANGES I’VE WITNESSED OVER THE DECADES
 
I’m pondering the great changes I've witnessed:

less abusive child rearing — I think this is the foundation of many other psychological changes

more respectful treatment given to the average person (the "dignitarian revolution" — human rights for everyone, greater kindness to animals); women’s right, children’s rights, animal rights

the older generation is more affluent than the younger one; a reversal of help between generations

greater cultural diversity, an opening up of America to cuisine beyond hamburger and meatloaf, and various kinds of "artsiness"; the decline of religion, the conservatives losing the "culture wars”


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HIGH LEVELS OF STRESS-INDUCED GLUTAMATE IN BRAIN MAY KICK-START SCHIZOPHRENIA

An excess of the brain neurotransmitter glutamate may cause a transition to psychosis in people who are at risk for schizophrenia, reports a study from investigators at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) published in the current issue of Neuron.

The findings suggest 1) a potential diagnostic tool for identifying those at risk for schizophrenia and 2) a possible glutamate-limiting treatment strategy to prevent or slow progression of schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders.

 In patients who progressed to schizophrenia, the researchers found the following pattern: First, glutamate activity increased in the hippocampus, then hippocampus metabolism increased, and then the hippocampus began to atrophy.

Theoretically, this dysregulation of glutamate and hypermetabolism could be identified through imaging individuals who are either at risk for or in the early stage of disease. For these patients, treatment to control glutamate release might protect the hippocampus and prevent or slow the progression of psychosis. Early intervention may prevent the debilitating effects of schizophrenia, increasing recovery in one of humankind’s most costly mental disorders.

In an accompanying commentary, Bita Moghaddam, PhD, professor of neuroscience and of psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh, suggests that if excess glutamate is driving schizophrenia in high-risk individuals, it may also explain why a patient’s first psychotic episodes are often caused by periods of stress, since stress increases glutamate levels in the brain.”

http://newsroom.cumc.columbia.edu/blog/2013/04/17/high-levels-of-glutamate-in-brain-may-kick-start-schizophrenia/

The worst thing to give a schizophrenic is an upper (e.g. amphetamine). The brain makes its own natural "uppers." Dopamine and glutamate are excitatory neurotransmitters. Dopamine is in part converted to noradrenaline, another excitatory neurotransmitter. In the acute stage of schizophrenia, the brain is OVER-EXCITED. What follows is burn-out. But there is a genetic component as well, so stress reduction/de-excitement can probably help only so much. But even so. 

ending on beauty:

TWO OWLS IN LOS ANGELES

They fly over the roofs
in a ghostlike flight;
disappear into a tree

like the night into the night.
Then they perch in parallel,
each on a TV antenna.

Absolute in upright stillness,
silent overlap of feathers,
urn-shaped bodies on the metal branches

that draw signals from the pale city sky,
the owls are ambassadors,
come to relay messages

even to us,
unvisited as we are
by the gods.

Only my lover and I,
meeting here in secret,
see them.

~ Oriana © 2015 




THERE IS NO JUDEO-CHRISTIAN TRADITION 

Darlene:

The interview with Harold Bloom is powerful. “Trying to think of them [Yahweh and Jesus] together is really an act of psychic violence.”

SANTA CLAUS FOR ADULTS

Oriana:

One attempt to avoid the psychic violence of putting together a god of punishment with a god of mercy has been to get rid of the god of punishment (GOP) and retain only Christ — Swedenborg is among those who tried. This is emotionally much more comfortable, but it reveals wishful thinking with screaming clarity. A convincing deity should be not exactly as we'd like it to be, not simply a mirror of our desires. But then if god is an emergent phenomenon, as some have argued (on the basis of chaos theory, no less — science!), then it's surprising that anything but a sweetheart kind of god, totally nurturing, purely benevolent, has not universally emerged. It's a minority belief associated with liberal Christianity, and liberal Christianity is declining fast, while the punitive fundamentalist churches are the only ones to have shown growth.

It seems that, on the whole, children who grow up in nurturing families are attracted to the idea of a merciful god (and tend to grow up to be politically liberal), while children who grow up in punitive families tend to believe in a punitive god and become politically conservative.

But it’s possible that a merciful god is more obviously non-existent — a Santa Claus for adults — unless you admit it’s an imaginary friend you create now and then to help you in crisis situations. Likewise, if you start thinking about matters such as “Does it really make sense that Eve was created from Adam’s rib?” — without expecting to be thrust into hell for asking that question — you may distance yourself from the mythology a lot sooner, and stop attending your nice, liberal church. I’m speculating here. 

As an aside, 12-Step programs realize that many (perhaps most) people were raised with toxic theologies, so they encourage imagining the kind of god you’d like to exist — again, a Santa Claus for adults. For some, it apparently works! Having a supportive group seems to be a primary factor behind what effectiveness those programs do have, but the idea of a helping, benevolent deity may also be of use. The brain is very flexible, and will usually do whatever serves survival, never mind the pursuit of truth. 

NIETZSCHE: A HANGMAN’S METAPHYSICS

Nietzsche: sculpture by Peter Lenk
 
NIETZSCHE: POSTCARDS FROM SWISS ALPS
   
I love the great despisers,
for they are great worshipers,
arrows of longing for the other shore.

Dearest Mother: 
Yesterday I walked into a cloud 
of newly hatched ladybugs,
the air insane with red,
hundreds of tiny bodies, tick-tick,
colliding with my straw hat.
I dine at The Alpine Rose,
make compresses for my eyes
with glacier water from the lake.
As for my sleep medicine,
don’t worry, I don’t go above
50 grams of chloroform.
Please send some sausages.

Dear Friend, 
please pardon my delay
due to my landlady’s powdered face,
her sweetish odor of valerian drops.
The geraniums on her balcony
trail after me, interrupting my thoughts.
What if I asked her point-blank,
“Madam, but suppose God
is an invention of the devil?”
Philosophers are such sadists.
We who think should present ourselves
for immediate execution.

Dear Fräulein,
thank you for the kind gift
of your Memoirs of an Idealist. 
Please stop complaining
that women are slaves.
That’s what makes civilization possible.

Dear Cosima, Dear Lou,
Dear Stranger on the Train:
love was the screaming of the nightingales.
Solitude is a dawn.
In the red silence I write bitter,
I mean better —
Yet if only at the mouth of the question,
outlined with a thread of light,
stood Ariadne —

Respected Colleagues and Illustrious Dead:
I want back
the coin under your tongue.
I climbed as high as I could.
On the ledge of heaven I saw
a swift’s nest, festooned with droppings.

Dear Sister: are we not
the fools of a dead god?
Through granite 
swirls of birth I shout:
There is no truth,
only perspectives,
the sacred word
is perhaps –
 
Dearest Sister:
are we not happy

~ Oriana © 2014

**

“There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth” and, even more so, “To kindle lightning, one must for a long time be a cloud” — and, of course, the most famous: “One must have chaos within to give birth to a dancing star” — these aphorisms seem to glorify inner turbulence. But is “Dionysian philosophy” of passion and transience a contradiction in terms? Isn’t a philosopher a calm, resigned man? One who cultivates restraint, and not a wild mustache?

Wait. Let me not get Dionysian right away. My plan is to deliver the essay about Hangman’s Metaphysics first, and shamelessly indulge in Dionysian-Nietzschean intoxications later. Nietzsche teaches one to think in terms of no guilt, no punishment — self-trust. This time my self-trust counsels me to be coherent first.

THE GOD OF PUNISHMENT

By not rejecting the Old Testament, Christianity had to absorb an angry and cruel god (all ancient gods were cruel; mercy is fairly recent development). It was a tribal god, nameless and faceless (Moses was once allowed to see his backside) — a god of wrath who tried to drown the earth in a flood because he regretted the mistake of creation; in the main, a god of vengeance and punishment (GOP = "God of Punishment"). Joyce called him the Hangman God. He was probably inspired by Nietzsche’s “Christianity is a hangman’s metaphysics.” Let me quote a bit from “Twilight of the Idols”:

“We no longer have any sympathy today with the concept of “free will.” We know only too well what it is—the most infamous of all the arts of the theologian for making mankind “accountable” in his sense of the word, that is to say for making mankind dependent on him. . .  The doctrine of the will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is, of finding guilty. The entire old-style psychology, the psychology of will, was conditioned by the fact that its originators, the priests at the head of ancient communities, wanted to create for themselves THE RIGHT TO PUNISH—or wanted to create this right for God . . . MEN WERE CONSIDERED "FREE" SO THAT THEY MIGHT BE JUDGED AND PUNISHED — so that they might become guilty: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within the consciousness (whereby the most fundamental falsification was made into the very principle of psychology).”

Nietzsche argues that MOST COMMANDMENTS WERE MADE NOT TO BE OBEYED, BUT TO BE BROKEN, CREATING GUILT. Religion creates and exploits guilt. “Brothels were built with the bricks of religion,” William Blake observed. Some religious rules are so contrary to human psychology that they are virtually impossible to follow. Don’t even think about sex, young man! If you ever lust after a woman, it’s the same as committing adultery. Young woman, keep yourself pure. Don’t covet that pretty dress, much less fantasize about the Prince, you vile temptress under the curse of Eve!

Such commandments were made to be broken, so that people would feel perpetually guilty and deserving of punishment. It wasn’t just people’s actions that god spied on, but even more so their thoughts. One of the first ideas taught to children is that god can read their thoughts. No use hiding under the bed or in a closet; you are under constant surveillance. And whose thoughts can be always pure and holy? We know we have trespassed, and thus we feel constantly guilty.

“Religion is in the guilt-producing control business,” as Bishop Spong put it. It’s about controlling people. It keeps the poor from murdering the rich, as Napoleon shrewdly observed.  But Nietzsche is not interested in the social function of religion, but rather in its impact on the individual psyche. In Nietzsche’s eyes religion was anti-life; Christianity was a religion of death. “God degenerated to the contradiction of life instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes” (The Anti-Christ).

Ideally there’d be no guilt and no punishment, no gulf between man and a non-judging, all-accepting deity. Christianity took a step toward that radical doctrine, but quickly drew back. The god of punishment ruled more absolutely than ever, the vengeance complete with the doctrine of eternal damnation.

Here is Bishop Spong’s wonderful video on the invention of hell:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF6I5VSZVqc

If god is dead, what about the fate of the immortal soul? Here is Nietzsche’s answer: ”The concepts “soul”, “spirit” and last of all the concept “immortal soul” were invented in order to despise the body, in order to make it sick — “holy” — in order to cultivate an attitude of appalling disrespect for all things in life which deserve to be treated seriously.” (Ecce Homo)

DO WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO PUNISH OUR PEERS?

Nietzsche on punishment: “A strange thing, our punishment! It does not cleanse the criminal, it is no atonement; on the contrary, it pollutes worse than the crime does.” (The Dawn)

Soon after my twentieth birthday, I had an insight that we have no right to punish others. It was an intuition that simply occurred to me, rather than something I reasoned out. And I didn’t mean criminal justice — obviously a serial killer should be locked up for the sake of public safety. Children — no corporal punishment, but “time out” seemed acceptable. My “no punishment” intuition concerned adults, and particularly relationship partners. What right do we have to set ourselves up as judge and executioner, and try to punish them for doing or saying something that displeases us? Do we ever have the right to be nasty in revenge for it?

By “punishment” I mean sarcastic remarks or other verbal abuse, or “the silent treatment,” or refusal of physical affection. “We don’t have the right to punish” occurred to me long before I read “heaven is a place where everyone is kind,” or essays on how we are moving away from an honor-and -vengeance based social code to a dignity-based code. I didn’t have a fully worked-out explanation, but somehow I managed to realize that we have to break the chain of unkindness leading to more unkindness — even if we feel “provoked.” 

It is unfortunate that Nietzsche became so famous for having said “god is dead.” For the broader public, this eclipsed everything else he said. His views on free will, guilt, and punishment are hardly known at all — a great loss, since this is one of the crucial issues of our time.


BUT WHAT ABOUT . . . REWARD?

But if the most radical message of the gospels is non-punishment or non-revenge, what about — reward? According to Nietzsche, the psychology of the gospels is not about punishment and reward. If we must use think in terms of "reward," then the reward for the no-punishment attitude is the kingdom of heaven not in the afterlife, but right now: “the kingdom of heaven is within you.”  

By abolishing punishment, we abolish the gulf between the human and the divine, thus entering “the kingdom.” Or, to secularize the language, by abolishing punishment, we abolish the gulf between the flawed, vengeful humanity and the more loving and compassionate humanity, thus entering heaven, a place where everyone is kind. Heaven is a state of mind; or, to use Nietzsche’s language, “a condition of the heart.” 

(True, scholars have come to question the "within you" translation, saying that it should be: The kingdom is among you — it refers to the person of the Messiah. The Messiah is already among you. But if so, then it ceases to be of interest to me. But I'm among those who claim the right to choose those stories, sayings, and interpretations that we find inspiring — that help us live. The scriptures are always read selectively, regardless. We might as well choose the best parts.)

Likewise, it’s imperative to be selective when it comes to Nietzsche; we must be careful to absorb only his best, and not, for instance, his contempt for the “herd.” I think “a hangman’s metaphysics” — the idea that religious rules were imposed not to be followed, but broken, thus making everyone feel guilty and living in dread of punishment — belongs among his most brilliant insights.  

“The greatest ideas are the greatest events,” Nietzsche claimed. To a lover of ideas, that is self-evident. There is a great idea buried in Christianity, and that is the idea of non-punishment. That idea was too radical not only for its time; it is too radical in our times as well, except for all but a handful of intellectuals who debate the existence of free will — a concept invented by priests to justify punishment. In Nietzsche’s words, “Religions are at bottom systems of cruelty.”
 

Sils-Maria, photo by Ivan Pastoukhov

**

AN ACTUAL POSTCARD FROM SWISS ALPS
 
I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by “instinct.” Not only is his overtendency like mine—namely to make all knowledge the most powerful affect — but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergencies are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science. In summa: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and make my blood rush out, is now at least a twosomeness. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, from a postcard to Franz Overbeck, Sils-Maria, 30 July 1881

(And my mother used to criticize me for writing overly long and complex postcards — but a postcard from Nietzsche, now THAT was a postcard!)

Overbeck was a German theologian and Nietzsche’s most loyal friend. Overbeck’s most important work is “How Christian is Our Present-Day Theology?” He argued that Christian theology, both the dogmatic and the liberal kind, had basically nothing to do with the radical ideas of Christ.

Indeed we can trace the beginnings of the death of god to medieval theologians, who argued that even god was subject to the laws of necessity and a priori concepts such as mathematics. The scholastic meditations on questions like, “Could god choose to do evil?” or “To whom was the ‘bloody ransom’ of the sacrifice on the cross paid?” —  such questioning undermined the concept of omnipotence and benevolence, and paved the way for the rationalistic biblical scholarship that, like Enlightenment before it, concluded that far from being the inerrant word of god, the bible was written by men.

 A view of the Upper Egandine, Switzerland. Sils is the lake farthest in the distance.

WHAT, NO FREE WILL?

Nietzsche was elated to discover that Spinoza did not believe in free will. God and nature were one, and mind and the body were two aspects of the same substance. Human beings, being a part of nature, are subject to the laws of necessity. Nietzsche introduces more complexity: in spite of being ruled by nature and causes of which he is not conscious, man wants to affirm himself, to feel that he is a powerful agent. “The first result of happiness is a sense of power,” Nietzsche asserts in Dawn. On the subjective level, a human being has no choice except to see himself as an agent, a doer who deliberately chooses one thing and not another. (As more than one person quipped, “I believe in free will. I have no choice but to believe in it.”)

And yet: “Artists have here perhaps a finer intuition; they who know only too well that precisely when they no longer do anything "arbitrarily," and everything of necessity, their feeling of freedom, of subtlety, of power, of creatively fixing, disposing, and shaping, reaches its climax — in short, that necessity and "freedom of will" are then the same thing with them” (Beyond Good and Evil). To put it simply, artists know that their best work arises from the unconscious.

“If ever I played dice with the gods at the divine table of the earth” — But here the poet is at play, not the philosopher. Ultimately Nietzsche is only struggling toward the understanding of the subjective experience of will. The foundations of the scientific worldview are not yet in place. The closest thing to determinism is the idea of “god’s plan” — forever causing confusion about predestination versus free will and thus guilt — “a hangman’s metaphysics” indeed!

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra comes down from the mountains to correct the concept of duality. Good and evil are intertwined, as well as freedom and necessity — artists learn that by experiencing the creative process. But then everything is intertwined. In Zarathustra’s words “Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you have said Yes too to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored . . . ”

*

THE DOG WHO’S KNOWN NOTHING BUT LOVE

Not long ago in a park-like area where I tend to meet the neighborhood dog walkers, I met
Kayli, a beautiful German shepherd. I love the breed, and I also know a German shepherd is not a spaniel that you can start petting right away. But Kayli wanted to be petted practically right away. In fact pretty soon she was lying on her side, asking for her belly to be scratched. I was somewhat taken aback. German shepherds are police dogs and military dogs, and intelligence is only one reason they are chosen for such work. They are still close to the wolf, and when they attack, they are ferocious. Though exceptionally beautiful, they are also the “intimidator dog.” And here was Kayli on her back, asking to have her belly scratched by a stranger. I couldn’t imagine trying to train Kayli not to fawn on the terrorist suspect — sure, it could be done, but who’d want to?

And then I thought: “All this dog has ever known is love.”

Shouldn’t Christianity be about love rather than sin and guilt? A child who gets a lot of love grows up into a different adult than a child who’s constantly shamed and made to feel guilty. That great experiment is actually being performed; child rearing has become less and less harsh. This is particularly true of children of professionals, who strike observers as brighter, happier, and more affectionate than children in previous generations. When these children grow up, we can already guess that war and violence will have little appeal to them.

They are growing up without the nonstop surveillance of an omnipresent “eye in the sky” and the constant guilt induced by toxic religions. It’s hard to exaggerate the benefits of being treated with respect and love ever since you can remember. This is the basis of lifelong emotional security.

I asked myself: What if Nietzsche had known nothing but love and respect (it’s not that his mother wasn’t loving, but let’s not forget that he attended German schools at a time when adults believed children needed to be dominated into the ground)? In addition, what if he knew Zen and Daoism and got to practice serenity? What if he didn’t suffer as much as he did — would we then ever have The Birth of Tragedy? I wouldn't in the least mind the loss of Zarathustra, but I’d want The Birth of Tragedy at any cost. Lest we continue in rationalist slumbers, someone had to remind us that the word “tragedy” derives from tragos, he-goat. (But maybe life inevitably delivers sufficient hardship, without the need for people to torment one another.)

 

 A mask of Dionysus, Myrina, 2nd century BCE
 
But I’ve been changing my mind about the necessity of torment for creativity. Does it take an inner emotional storm to render passion on the page? Art requires distance — on that point all agree. Wordsworth said that art is “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Philosophy should be tranquil — we take that for granted. But the invigorating energy in Nietzsche’s writing — could it have been born of tranquillity? Would his quarrel with Christianity been as intense?

“Emerson and Goethe were serene, almost as though they lacked superegos,” Harold Bloom states in Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? The superego is the internalized punitive parent, the angry father, identified by some with conscience. But it’s the collective angry father, including social norms, peer pressure, and of course religion.

What happens if the parents are predominantly loving and the child grows up feeling secure rather than fearful? We’d expect this loved child to have an inner supportive parent and become a slow-to-anger, serene adult. Ah, the cheerful serenity that permeates much of classical art, the joyfulness that is supposed to be the daughter of Elysium and the essence of the immortals. Some might object that a serene person can’t be creative since art is trauma-driven. But does art have to be trauma-driven? Could anyone find Goethe or Emerson insufficiently creative? Or Goethe, in spite of his later rejection of Romanticism, incapable of rendering mystery, storm, and passion?

*

Continuing with Bloom, I came upon this:

~ Goethe was an instinctive pagan, believing in his own daemonic endowment and spontaneously manifesting the “joyful wisdom” that Nietzsche so desperately sought to attain . . . Originally a Unitarian minister, Emerson abandoned his post  because he knew only the God within, which he defined as the best and oldest part of his self. . . . I enjoy the thought of Eliot reading my favorite sentence in the essay “Self-Reliance”:

‘As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.  

~ Harold Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

*

The middle of the nineteenth century was by no means a time of tolerance. True, Darwin’s The Origin of Species (an act of intellectual courage on the order of Copernicus and Galileo — though Darwin did not have to fear for his life) was published in 1859, but it would be decades before its ideas became widely known and become a cornerstone of the scientific worldview that made a Creator unnecessary, an archaic relic. Emerson did not dispense with a Creator, but posited a “god within.” I think it was extremely brave of him to call prayers a disease of the will and religions a disease of the intellect. This meant that no university would employ him, but then, unlike Nietzsche, Emerson did not care to be a professor. His eloquence brought him a wide audience, his lectures and books supplying him with a secure income.

And it was also brave for Emily Brontë, a parson’s daughter, to write this stanza in “No Coward Soul Is Mine,” her most famous poem, one of the finest in the English language

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main

(For more on Brontë and Emerson, please go to

http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2012/09/no-coward-soul-is-mine.html)

To call organized religions “worthless as withered weeds” was at least as radical then as it is now (not in contemporary Europe, but here in the US; the US is an anomaly in the developed world, being close to Mexico in religiosity). Of course Blake also had a rather Gnostic personal system, influenced by Swedenborg, whose concept of god was highly idiosyncratic and his theology unorthodox (e.g. he believed the Last Judgment had already taken place).

And what about Spinoza’s pantheism and his claim that the soul dies with the body? Yes, there were precursors . . .  Nietzsche wasn’t even the first one to say that god was dead — Hegel used the phrase in his works several times. But who reads Hegel? Nietzsche was the one who announced the death of god as the “greatest event of our times.” Churches and cathedrals — those were now the great tombs of a dead god.

Nietzsche knew that the news of god’s death would take a while to make itself fully known: “After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.— And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too!” (Joyful Wisdom)
 
Nietzsche and Marx as the killers of god
 
(A shameless digression: The missing figure among these “god killers” is of course Freud, who saw religion as an infantile projection of a parent in the sky.)

André Malraux said that the twentieth century century would belong either to Marx or Nietzsche. Marx prevailed, though he’d be horrified by Stalin’s Soviet Union and communism as the state religion. (By the way, did anyone notice that Putin starts his speeches by addressing his audience as “comrades”? The imperialist-communist dream is not over as long as Putin is in power.

While the omission of Freud is ridiculous, many might also see Darwin as belonging here. Darwin was the most reluctant of god's assassins. He was concerned about his wife Emma, who was devout. Could she live on if told that Adam and Eve were a myth? The 19th century, so astonishingly daring in many ways, also gave us the fragile "lady" who shouldn't roam too far from her fainting sofa.)
 

*

The recent progress in secularization would be incomplete without stating that some of the clergy no longer believe in god. Already in 1993, an article in The Independent yielded this juicy quotation about the Episcopalian non-belief:

'In the good old days (about ten years ago) it was enough to run off with a choirboy or the organist's wife to be unfrocked. But, having dismantled the liturgy of Cranmer, the [Anglican] Church is now so lazy about language that it allows blatant confusion between doubt (which any reasonable person experiences) and disbelief. So any friendly atheist who is above moral suspicion is welcome to stay on board and receive a salary and accommodation to the value of £20,000 a year’.

And I have personally met rabbis and liberal Protestant ministers who either openly admitted to agnosticism, or adopted Rabbi Kushner’s definition of god as a sum of human ideals. As for the Catholic left, it has embraced doubt. Doubt is no longer a sin; it is now officially a part of faith. As Catholicism goes, that is huge progress. The church is living dangerously!

*

This morning I pondered the name Yahweh: what an alien sound, how obviously an imported god! No wonder the generic names for “god” are preferred. In Hebrew, that name was EL (recognizable in Elohim). After all, it’s Isra-EL, and not Isra-yahweh. (Yes, of course I know that it was forbidden to pronounce Yah’s name, but I suspect there were reasons for this prohibition beyond mere “respect.”)

I checked Wikipedia: “The origins of the god [Yahweh] are unclear: an influential suggestion, although not universally accepted, is that the name originally formed part of a title of the Canaanite supreme deity El, el dū yahwī ṣaba’ôt, "El who creates the hosts", meaning the heavenly army accompanying El as he marched out beside the earthly armies of Israel; the alternative proposal connects it with a place-name south of Canaan mentioned in Egyptian records from the Late Bronze Age.”

What an image! Yahweh as the warrior god who leads the heavenly army marching beside the army of Israel! No wonder the name Yahweh is no longer used; that tribal god is truly dead, the pronunciation of that name forbidden so successfully that it got lost with the loss of the vowels. We are listening to the last echoes of the hollow gong. Even the Jehovah of Jehovah’s Witnesses is not the Bronze Age god.

ETERNAL VITALITY

What is of genuine importance is eternal vitality, not eternal life. ~ Nietzsche

To Nietzsche, what matters is not the eternal boredom of the feeble Christian heaven, but “living dangerously” (in Nietzsche’s case, it was rather the matter of thinking dangerously). “Eternal vitality” instantly reminded me of Blake’s “Energy is eternal delight.” And somehow that energy finds a venue for itself, the ideas and new areas of growth. It goes both ways: when a goal seizes the imagination, the energy will be found; and when energy is abundant, a goal will be found. Like a mountain river, the eternal vitality rushes on.

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
Now lending splendor . . .
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

~ Shelley, “Mont Blanc”



I started living when I fully and absolutely realized that there is a deadline. Only then I realized that I can choose to cope, or I can choose to "practice falling apart." Likewise, I can choose to be generous and adorable, or grumpy and miserable. But I won't cease to be outspoken for the sake of being adorable. It's enough that my friends and neighbors like me, and most people I interact with. The message "I value you as a human being" is included even in a brief chat.

Nietzsche was known as a kind man of impeccable manners. In his writings, alas, he shows himself filled with contempt for the great majority of humanity, the “herd.” This is a trap into which an intellectual can easily fall, especially if he is isolated from his peers: “I am separate, different, and superior.” Among philosophers, only Plato seems to have understood the value of kindness instead of judging and punishment. That’s the famous, Be kind

But Nietzsche understood at least in flashes the price for being judgmental:

"If God had wanted to become an object of love, he would first of all have had to forgo judging and justice: a judge, and even a gracious judge, is no object of love.” (The Joyful Wisdom)

It was the commandment to love god that caused me the most distress. I would go as far as to say that if we’d been given the freedom to hate god (to me god = Yahweh, god the father, the boss with real power; the son seemed subordinate), or at least not been coerced into pretending to love him, then who knows, I might have developed some affection for the lonely guy in the sky (I saw him as an “old bachelor,” a European label for an eccentric never-married man). True, vengeful and narcissistic, but I imagined he suffered too — not out of compassion, no, but due to isolation and boredom. The constant praises of angels sounded hellishly boring to me. “How can he stand it?” I asked myself when I was still a child, trying to imagine heaven: nothing but clouds and angels and the souls of the dead, all singing hymns 24/7. No respite for the night, since heaven was constant daylight. 

JUNG ON THE “CATACLYSMIC SHIFT”

Jung observed that “A cataclysmic spiritual shift had taken place, largely missed by the theologians, a shift from the God above to the God below [i.e. in the unconscious], from communal liturgy to private communion, from ritual observance to EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE (emphasis mine), from dogma to myth, from religion to psychology, from the conscious to the unconscious.” (Paul Stern, C.G. Jung: The Haunted Prophet, p. 253)

But that had been already said by Emily Brontë in her famous poem, “No Coward Soul Is Mine.” She was dismissing all religions as “worthlesss as withered weeds” and affirming the “god within.” But poetry is not taken seriously. Milosz also speaks of this shift, along with the disappearance of heaven and hell, as the greatest event of modern times.

I suspect it will take a few more decades before the full extent of the “cataclysmic event” is known. As Ginette Paris observed, “It’s still early after the death of god.”

THE MEANING OF “OVERMAN”:

According to Friedman in The Disappearance of God, the overman is not an individual or an ethnic group. It’s the collective human potential. It’s the ideal future humanity. The term expresses “a yearning to yield something happier, nobler, and wiser than ourselves.” (It’s instructive here to recall the Superior Man in Dao de Jing.

The attainment of this potential is tied to the death of god. It’s only after religion decays that humans can experience richer development, free from imaginary guilt. To repeat once more: the rules were meant to be broken, so that we’d feel guilty. In The Antichrist Nietzsche says: “The very word ‘Christianity’ is a misunderstanding — in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.”

What can this richer development lead to? Zarathustra declares: “I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth . . . Once the sin against God was the greatest sin, but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing.”

This should not be taken as Nietzsche’s precocious environmentalism. “The earth” stands here for this earth, this life — this one and only life need not be a “vale of tears”; it can be a joy; it can be magnificent. Once, blasphemy and failure to pray and attend worship services were major sins. With the death of god these become irrelevant, ludicrous even. What matters is the growing human cooperation and the extension of human rights so that one small group doesn’t fatten off the exploitation of others. We may be still a long way from reaching this ideal, but at least there is an awareness of it.

Rilke stated that we were “building god.” Nietzsche saw the task as building humanity. Dostoyevski warned that man wants to become god, and the result can only be disastrous. In terms of the “new Soviet man,” Dostoyevski was right. But now globalization and the Internet are opening new perspectives. Nietzsche, that misunderstood anti-nihilist, that glorifier of humanity as it should become, really thought that we must become gods. Or, at the very least, move beyond the old heaven-and-hell mentality toward a full embrace of this life and this beautiful world.

“This I teach men: no longer to bury one’s head in the sand of heavenly things, but to bear it freely, an earthly head, which creates a meaning for the earth.” “Evil I call it, and misanthropic – all this teaching of the One and the Plenum and the Unmoved and the Sated and the Permanent. All the permanent – that is only a parable. And the poets lie too much.” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Upon The Blessed Isles)

 


FREE WILL IS NOT AS IMPORTANT OR AS INTERESTING AS WHAT THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS PRODUCES

Charles:

This blog has more information than a good sized book.

My favorites quotes: "True, this is a very selective reading of the New Testament. But the scriptures are always read selectively, regardless. We may as well choose the best parts."

“I believe in free will. I have no choice but to believe in it.”
But free will is not as important or as interesting as what the unconsciousness produces.

"Doubt is no longer a sin; it is now officially a part of faith.”

Of course my favorite section is the one about Kayli. I love that you said this dog has known only love.

Oriana:

Creative people definitely learn about the importance of not interfering with the creative process, which is unconscious. The unconscious is the source of interesting, often surprising ideas or images. “Free will” is indeed not relevant here. That’s an excellent observation.

Darlene:

His atheism aside, I can easily see Nietzsche as a Christian writer trying to restore Jesus' ideas about no judgment and no punishment.

Oriana:

I agree. It’s just that he could see that god was dead, and he became the great announcer of the death of god. It was too late: Darwin’s theory of evolution was becoming known, and the geologists had established that the earth was much much older than 6,000 years. Nietzsche said that there was no longer any need to debate the existence of god. It was sufficient just to trace the evolution of the construct of god.

But Hangman’s Metaphysics can easily be seen as a radical critique of organized Christianity from the point of view of the revolutionary ideas of Jesus —  instead of punishment, forgiveness; the kingdom of heaven is within — a blissful and loving state of mind.

I think people are beginning to take more interest in the idea of no punishment. For one thing we are aware that violence is often associated with having been abused as a child. More cruelty toward a prisoner will not rehabilitate him. But letting him work with animals just might work, providing unconditional love. 


Darlene, you’ve hit on something huge here: the essence of Christianity. Now, when you ask people about the central message of Christianity, Protestants may say that we get to heaven by grace and not by deeds, but others (including the more liberal Protestants) will say the central message is compassion and forgiveness. If you equate that with “non-punishment,” then Nietzsche can indeed be regarded as a more Christian thinker than a lot of fundamentalists, for instance, who seem so preoccupied with who will burn in hell forever. Nietzsche as a radical Christian — there is something to be said for it. And hell, being a cruel and unusual punishment and the opposite of compassion and forgiveness, is the most anti-Christian concept there is.

Now if only god would exist . . .