Themes Is There a God?

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• John Voreades – April 29 2008

  This is a lengthy continuation to my lengthy comments of February 22 on the thematic question “Is There a God?”
  
  In that first part I started with a religious/psychological approach to the subject; now I will continue with a materialistic approach. When saying materialistic, let me remind you, I mean that I will present my definition of God and faith as well as my understanding of the religious experience, making conjectures on how all these can relate to brain functions.
  
  There has been some change in my plan, though. I will first present my definition of God and faith as I have promised, but I will postpone the discussion of the materialistic approach to the religious experience. In its place, I will talk a little about my road to maturity, and thus be able to better elaborate on my views presented so far. It turns out that if I were to include all the material in one block of text, these comments would be too lengthy. Moreover, I still need quite a lot of time in finalizing my text on the materialistic approach to the religious experience. I will not fix a date for this third part of my comments, but I will be working with the minimum delays possible.
  
  I have reread the first part several times and I don’t feel I want to change anything. Aside from a syntactical change (changed “western’s man” to “western man’s”), and a stylistic change (changed “Gospel of John” to the more accurate “Gospel according to John”), I did an essential change towards the end (changed “behavioral pattern” to “core behavioral pattern”) which was an obvious omission given my earlier reference twice to the expression “core behavioral pattern” in that text. I also have questioned myself several times whether the word “alienated” I used once (in the phrase “He becomes an individual totally alienated from the world”) was a better choice than one of the words “isolated” or “separated”. I think now “separated” is a better word. After all, the immediate effect of cutting the spiritual umbilical cord (the topic in that context) is separation, the annulment of any mental attachment to the outer world. So, I made this change, too.
  
  Now, as this discussion goes on, I feel a little uneasy with my constantly repeating those “heavy” words “God” and “Jesus” and “love” and “goodness” which, believe me, I have not used so many times in my entire life. I am writing this just to get it off my chest. It annoys me a lot. I hope you can tolerate my overuse of these words, since I will be doing that many more times, as our subject dictates so. You see (to explain a little bit my relation to this stuff) I was never close to any religious circles and, although baptized Orthodox Christian, had a mother with admiration to Jesus’ teachings, and had formal religious training at school, fortunately, nobody imposed any doctrines on me and I was never strictly catechized by professionals. I don’t remember being present in open discussions on God and love of God; it was always my choice when and how to dig into those concepts. But, on the other hand, even when I was a little boy, and later, of course, I must confess, I enjoyed reading texts stressing the positive values in human conduct, I enjoyed the teachings of Jesus (which I read about only when I decided to), and I enjoyed texts on spirituality across religions and cultures. I remember myself at the age of 10 reading and enjoying Edouard Schure’s “The Great Initiates”, written in 1889. Today -I am 64- I still find it a fascinating book. Also, today, I am lucky to be able to say I understand very well how this inclination to spirituality has contributed to the formation of my current state of mind and of my attitude towards spiritual issues, which to many must seem mostly heretic, I am sure. But this attitude keeps me, mind you, even more optimistic than I was during my days of highest religious idealism. Expressions that belittle man, like “after all we are humans”, are completely incomprehensible to me. Complaints about natural disasters are also incomprehensible to me; we should all remember we are living on a broken crust of an internally burning globe! Right now, my state of mind, in both psychological and existential sense, is: “I can never know you and I don’t complain about it; I can expect anything from you and I don’t complain about it; I don’t want to change you but I have a listening ear for you on all of our differences; and that’s because I know that you and me, we both can feel deeply in ourselves that we are essentially the SAME, once we experience ‘the Way’ of nature within us that makes us totally DIFFERENT and SEPARATE”. To finish up these thoughts, I must add that the best advise I have thought so far regarding one’s behavior is: “Be consistently truthful to yourself and consistently thoughtful of others.”
  
  To get to the subject, and to be consistent with my previous comments (part one), I must now give an explanation as to how I think the concept of God and faith in God emerges in man. My view about God presented so far could be summarized in:
  
  - A God as projection of one’s unconscious inner self (the personal God). By the way, this concept was first adopted by Ludwig Feuerbach, in his book “The Essence of Christianity” published in 1841. Feuerbach, the last of the classic German philosophers, is considered the founder of Atheism in modern western philosophy. I discovered all about him several weeks after I wrote my first comments, while googling on the word “projection”.
  - This projection as a personal God whom man loves, identifies with ultimate goodness, and yearns for union with (the God of Christianity); in Eastern Orthodox Christianity this union is called “theosis” or “deification”.
  - This projection as an idolized myth, when man (alone or in groups) assigns attributes to Him at his will, following his aspirations (older or less mature forms of projection).
  - This projection as Law, when man assigns (through God’s revelation to him) a code of behavior that pleases this personal God (the personal God of Judaism and Islam).
  - This projection as Dogma, when man assigns agreed fixed attributes to the Higher Being (the personal God of institutionalized religions).
  - The claim that to each man God as projection is man’s object of loftiest inspiration (man’s particular personal God).
  
  The concept of God I will talk about now is the one defined in the verse “God is love” (1 John 4:8). In other words I will try to explain, referring now to the first, second, and last bullet of the previous paragraph, how man comes to love a personal God, identifying Him with ultimate goodness, and yearning with union with Him.
  
  God as love is based, in my opinion, on the inscriptions that Mother Nature has instilled in our hearts and minds while we were growing embryos and fetuses in the blissful environment of the womb, under the unique experience of instant gratification of all of our needs. We shouldn’t miss the fact that during that period, we were unconsciously experiencing the ideal one-with-nature state, we were growing in “the Way” of nature (I will use the expression “the Way” a lot below). Nature has always shown us that she knows how to create beauty, functionality, and perfection in her off-springs. During the nine months in the womb, she did exactly that to us, but also offered us the right equipment for adaptability after birth as babies, children, and adults.
  
  The process, therefore, did not necessarily stop there. As newborn babies and during the first years of our life, those inscriptions were reinforced and expanded (if we were fortunate enough) with a positive influence within ourselves, by motherly and paternal selfless love and care, and a possibly loving, broader than family, environment. We have been fostered into our well-being, into our physical and mental development best fit to our personalities, and our well-being was sustained through acts of care, affection, respect and thoughtfulness from our environment. We were recipients of open responsiveness to our needs, and of wise guidance for our behavior through proper upbringing. The fact that we were recipients of such care and attention, explains, I think, the UNCONSCIOUS foundation upon which our attachment and longing for an inner sense of goodness is based. All these have created balance, harmony, and a sense of security within us. We unconsciously learned what goodness is by being fostered and by feeling good on account of this fostering. We got an orientation for goodness.
  
  To go a bit further, referring to the age when unused synapses are withdrawn in our brains, I believe that the above mental deposits do remain intact, because they do not link contradicting and mind confusing experiences, which is the same as saying that they remain intact as valuable memories since they contribute to reinforcing the desirable UNCONSCIOUS feeling of selfless love we learned first-hand by our mother (primarily), father, and immediate environment. In unfavorable situations, my opinion is that large numbers of synapses would be broken as unneeded. This is another way of saying, poetically may I say, that in those unfavorable cases the flame that burns inside and sustains our longing for the inner warm feelings that pure love awakens and sustains gets dimmer.
  
  All of the above are (mainly for sensitive and introverted people, where genetic characteristics help accordingly in this scenario) a firm base for a vague, at first, belief in a heavenly state that exists and is desirable, which is our faith, our “docta ignorantia”, our certainty for the uncertain, which is our SUB-CONSCIOUS wish for a desirable goal for ultimate personal happiness, because it leads to a desirable feeling of wholeness, security and self-appreciation. The longing for this heavenly state is constantly reinforced by learning and contemplating, as man grows up and usually faces disturbing or conflicting experiences which force him to establish his preferences and priorities on behavioral issues by the effect they have within him. If man had received consistent loving care by his immediate environment in the first years of his life, the evaluation of disturbing or conflicting experiences later in his life would be much easier, and his decisions would reinforce his sub-conscious wish for a desirable goal for ultimate personal happiness. But still more, last but not least I may say, as man moves into adolescence and adulthood, this sub-conscious wish becomes a CONSCIOUS desire, through his emerging capacity to love, to express the selfless love that was given to him by establishing a genuine loving relation to the object of his loftiest inspiration, that is to what is sacred or divine to him. This is how one feels the sense of “love of God”.
  
  This is all I want to say about God as love for the moment. On the issue of personal God, aside from the argument that the “personal” attribute inevitably stems from the definition of God as projection of one’s unconscious inner self, I can explain it by the very fact that with love of God we are talking about feelings, i.e. our expression of unconditional, selfless form of love, and this alone justifies by itself the requirement that the recipient of this love is a feeling person.
  
  To finish up, I believe “the Way” of nature is inner balance and harmony. God as love is “the Way” of nature. To me, God is the purest form of love that evokes feelings of harmony and balance, in both the donor and the recipient. The more we experienced environmental input conducive to inner balance and harmony in our first years of life, the more we are prepared to search for meaning of life as adults, trying, sub-consciously, to find out how our experiences fit to our hidden memories of inner balance and harmony that sustained our faith in God, our faith in “the Way” of nature, that sustained our model of “goodness”.
  
  The rest of part two of my comments is autobiographical, with some of the issues involved elaborated as they pop up in the discussion. I will talk about the two important events in my life, which will make my “Weltanschauung” better understood. The first involves reasoning in analytical or scientific style of thinking, the so called thinking in the vertical axis (hierarchical, primarily sequential/algorithmic/linguistic but parallel also in sub-conscious thinking, monistic, left brain, pure rational, masculine). The second involves reasoning in the realm of feelings, my quest for the meaning of life, which is thinking in the vertical/horizontal axis (relational, holistic, sequential/parallel, linguistic/holographic, body/mind continuum engaging, reason driven and feelings motivated, dualistic, with left/right brain interaction, with rational/behavioral attribute mix, with union of masculine/feminine characteristics as target –a real marriage with eternal or, better said, lifetime marital vows-, with becoming/being interaction –or better said: interaction, complementarity, and interdependence-, with corpus callosum traffic congestion, Christian, meaningfully symbolized by the Cross). In case you wonder if there is also an experience in the horizontal axis alone, this is the one described by Gnostics, as well as western and eastern Mystics and meditators (non-thinking, parallel, holographic, feelings motivated, monistic, right brain, pure behavioral, feminine, consciousness of being engaging, mystical).
  
  At the age of 20, I had an experience originating from my left-brain sub conscious reasoning engagement. While studying for my entrance examinations to undergraduate level universities in Athens, Greece, I got tremendous interest in geometry, thanks to a fantastic instructor I was lucky to have. In my free time I tried to invent some geometry problems of my own, as a hobby. In one instance I had an interesting problem in front of me but couldn’t find the proof. I squeezed my mind on this problem about three times a week for several months, but never felt in a hurry to finish it quickly because I enjoyed the effort every time. I had already succeeded in the entrance examinations but kept working on my problem in my spare time. One day, on a weekend I think, as I set on my desk, I surprised myself by “seeing” the answer to the problem very quickly, as if it was ready for me somewhere in my sub-conscious and didn’t know. It was not an elegant proof; in fact I wouldn’t bother then too much to convince myself that the proof was even valid. The amazing thing, at that moment, which made me all of a sudden look at the proof as a secondary issue, was that, immediately after my first discovery, my mind was flooded with ideas about other questions (almost ten of them) that could easily by asked as an extension to the original problem, by drawing a few lines and circles on the original figure. And not just that, but I was also surprised to see that I had quick answers to all of them, well thought out, of course, but not with much difficulty, although they were far from trivial. I was very happy at that moment. I had just gotten a lesson from myself for myself on the value of persistence and the significance of creative thinking. But this was also accompanied by an experience. For some five to ten minutes, as I was walking in my home, I had the feeling of a lighter body, of being weightless, as if I was walking one or two centimeters off the ground. Without any peculiar accompanying thoughts or visions whatsoever, other than thoughts about the geometry problem I had just solved, and the liberating and elevating feeling that emerged.
  
  At the age of 30, in Berkeley, California, while doing my graduate studies in Computer Science, I had an experience originating from my left-brain conscious mental loving engagement with my “object of loftiest inspiration”, an act of will exercised as an active engagement with my right-brain feeling system (not a passive introspection). Through a series of COINCIDENCES resulting in changes in my sentimental state, and at a time when I was sensing a maturing process within my mind concerning the depth of my affecting, accepting, loving, and relating to members of the opposite sex, I found myself one spring day in an almost uncontrollable mood to focus my loving attention to a female acquaintance and friend whose qualities I could summarize in: innocence, sweetness, beauty, self-esteem, goodness, and integrity of character. That happened in my room at I-House, in the afternoon, while I was lying in my bed and contemplating in the mental framework I just described. It may seem unfit to quote the Scriptures at this moment, but I will do it because it serves a purpose. So, looking in retrospect at that event, of which a long, but not complete yet, today, discussion follows, I realize that I was then practicing the two great commandments of the New Testament: “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.” (Mark 12:30), and “And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:31). As an aside, let us not forget that the first commandment appears in the Old Testament, too, in a slightly modified version (Deuteronomy 6:5), and the second, identical in Leviticus 19:18, although in a slightly different context. To make these commandments applicable to my experience, you must substitute “God” with my female friend, clearly the “object of my loftiest inspiration” in my heart at that moment, the object of my religious idealism, the projection of my unconscious inner self, my particular personal God, my model of “goodness”, as I said before. At that moment I acted as a western truth seeker, which means I could seek my Truth only focusing on projections of my inner self to objects. Without going into more details, this was the setup for my experience of (ultimate) mind maturity (or religious experience). The whole thing lasted for maybe two minutes, and the climax, in the middle of the whole process, lasted for less than half a second; Its long-term aftermath, however, lasts for a lifetime. Imagine me during the first minute of the experience exercising mentally my strong feelings, and during the second minute, after the climax, becoming conscious of a flood of existentially significant thoughts which I am going to present below.
  
  What exactly I will present you is the content of my experience, by giving you all the information you should expect from me, on the basis of my comments of February 22 on the mind maturing experience, where I was referring to the four ultimate concerns referenced by Yalom in his acceptance speech of the 2000 Oscar Pfister prize: death, isolation, meaning in life, and freedom.
  
  1. Death.
  
  Within seconds after the climax, which, by the way, starts with a sense of cosmic union, one tenth of a second in duration (a fact that makes me call the religious experience “mind orgasm”, which, understandably, is always simultaneous, with regard to the two brain hemispheres coupled together simultaneously in vivid mental activity), the thought that came to my mind, without any effort from my part or any other previous thought related to it occupying my mind, was the verse from Luke 2:29: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.” The appreciation of the significance of the moment is so big that you are sure there is nothing else in your life that could match this experience in magnitude. Death is not a concern anymore, once you have experienced it all.
  
  2. Isolation.
  
  Within seconds after the climax, an overwhelming feeling swept my whole mind: The feeling of the cutting of the spiritual umbilical cord between the “I” and the “Other” (these very words uttered in my consciousness). So natural and expected, that I instinctively blamed myself with a question: “How on earth hadn’t you, John, imagined until now that this should happen to you one day?” A deep and almost frightening sense of being totally separated from the “Other”, of being alone in the world, just as we were alone, separated from others in the world, at the time of the cutting of the bodily umbilical cord. An all to nothing style of transition. But this sense of separateness is not the psychopathologic feeling of isolation, the sense of not being understood, of not wanting or not being able to communicate successfully and essentially with the “Other”, the feeling of lack of compassion from others towards us, the feeling of indifference from the part of social environment. On the contrary: the feeling of separation I am talking about is immediately compensated by the discovery of your own unconscious self as the source of all essential relation of your conscious self with the “Other”. It is the termination of your projection of your unconscious inner self to the external “Other”, the breaking of all spiritual or mental attachments that we all necessarily build and carry since our birth because of our constant need of, and dependence on the outer world. It is this separation and total self-dependence that emerges which also brings forth a sense of openness, total availability to the “Other”, because you stop seeing the “Other” as a competing ego anymore, you don’t expect to “get” something from the “Other” to achieve your completeness, your source of knowledge of life is your own unconscious you have now developed a permanent relation with (as the immediate flood of positive thoughts entering your mind at that moment indisputably proves that to yourself). But the most important thing about the “Other” is that you realize that he is also consciously or unconsciously in the process of achieving a maturing experience of equal magnitude and significance as yours, therefore he is an absolute EQUAL to you, and deserves your full attention. This state of mind, I believe, is the best prerequisite for human compassion.
  
  3. Meaning in life.
  
  This is the most important of all, and this is what distinguishes (in religious terms) the Christian type of religious experience from all others. Immediately upon the firing of the experience, a phrase was stuck in my head, and this is exactly what I call (see the first part of my comments) “the event of extracting and running (in my left brain) the semantic algorithm of my core behavioral pattern (in my right brain)”. This phrase was: “so... love of woman is the same as love of God”. That was the moment of my resolution of the God delusion. The moment of terminating of the projection of my unconscious inner self (my God, the “best of me”) to the external object of my loftiest inspiration (actually the inspiration from my female friend, not the person herself). And, please note this: half a second before the firing of the climax of the experience, I sensed this phrase in my mind: “at this moment I feel God should be smiling”. May be this was the beginning of the resonance event (my mind’s Eureka! cry), the climax itself, that occurred half a second later, because a resolution to the core behavioral issue was imminent: all my projections to the absolute goodness, through my focused love feelings to the “object of my loftiest inspiration”, the female friend, caused at that moment a resonance to the equal feelings of absolute goodness within, the God as love I described earlier in this text (i.e. my selfless love inscriptions in my memory as an embryo, fetus, and as baby and child in my early years of life, together with my learned appreciation of those, through the power of faith, later in my life), and my focused love feelings were redirected to my unconscious inner self, my unconscious inscriptions of selfless love in my feeling system, the feminine self (conceptually, now you easily notice, we are talking about a marriage of opposites here, a marriage between reason and feeling, consciousness and unconsciousness, a marriage, as already said, whose marital vows are inescapably eternal or lifetime), and my consciousness generating mechanism discovered in my truth seeking process the equivalence of the love of woman to the love of God. Not an intuitive deduction, or, by reason alone, possible change of mental state.
  
  I wondered for a few seconds then, in the same way that so many spiritual and religious teachers of transcendental experiences have wondered in the past, who had spoken to me at that moment. Is there a supernatural God that “reveals” the linguistic content? Now please, tell me, what decent God would spell out this sort of phrase in my mind! Being a technocrat, I was fully aware of the mind processes that were going on at that moment, in the way I conceptually explain them here and I will explain more, from a materialistic perspective, in the third part of my comments, where I will try to connect the experience to the firing, removal, or reinforcing of myriads of synapses (a major reorganization or restructuring of synapses) and explain the sense of light (yes, there was also a sense of quick flashing, along with the sense of cosmic union, which justifies the term enlightenment that is often used for religious experiences) by the amount of electric energy released.
  
  There is no God’s Grace involved, and there is no Holy Spirit acting upon, and there is no Divine Providence controlling it all, and there is no transcendence into a supernatural world. All is Physics. What “there is” is favorable opportunity lurking at every moment, usually perceived as synergy, or as synchronicity, or as favorable coincidence, or as one’s accomplishment thanks to his strong will, or... not perceived at all -lost. But watch out: when you have faith in God, you discover this fact, by your own mental capacities, only AFTER the experience has happened. The above words and concepts, pivotal in the Christian religion, are meaningful and magnificent symbolisms for the Christian faith, and I would never belittle their meaning in the eyes of an earnest truth seeker, nor would I insult him for his religious idealism, for his belief in these symbolisms, because they are a source of immeasurable hope and optimism. They are symbolisms that control and direct religious narcissism in a healthy way towards ourselves and others, and they encourage us to intensify our pure loving relation to our projected self, our God. It all boils down to using our religious idealism to get knowledge of ourselves, to become fully mature individuals, not to justify or cherish some concept of a supernatural entity, a pure chimera indeed. And this is accomplished through pure, unconditional love alone. The same thoughts on symbolisms apply also to the truth seeker’s love and fear of God, or his will of submission to His will, something very close but deeper than Albert Schweitzer’s “Reverence for Life”, because it targets the ultimate union with our “being” through the “Other” rather than our compassion only towards the “Other” and our care for our own well-being through the appreciation of life. I am saying all this because I have been there once, and I can appreciate this state of mind accordingly. But it is not just me, or a Christian, in general, who appreciates these symbolisms. Submission to His will, to give one example, is another way of saying “lowering the importance of one’s Ego”, which is a well-known prerequisite to get in touch with your feeling system in all spiritual practices, i.e. to get in touch with your right brain, your “being”, your unconscious inner self, or, idealistically, your God. The difference with Christianity, of course, is that you get in touch with your “being” under the willful action of your “becoming”, to get these two interact, and through this interaction (i.e. love) to enable you to extract the meaning in life (that is consciously “become” what you always unconsciously “have been”). To wrap up this discussion on symbolisms, in place of the religious phenomena expressed by the above symbolisms, I believe it is sheer causality which explains all about the religious experience.
  
  Speaking of causality, I would like to make a general remark. In the discussion of man’s journey into consciousness, one inevitably comes across with the issues of destiny (or hazard) and free will. Both of these issues hold true. The first relates to causality and the second to freedom of choice, i.e. one’s sense of seemingly not being forced to make a particular choice. I bring this in the discussion because, as we all know, the Gospels put a lot of emphasis on the importance of freedom of will, on the fact, that is, that, expressed in religious language, God lets man choose freely for himself his road to salvation. But this remark does not give the complete picture. Contrary to many people’s belief, the Gospels adopt both issues as true. The relevant passages are as follows:
  
  “Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” (Mark 8:34)
  
  “... no one can come to Me unless it has been granted him from the Father.” (John 6:65)
  
  Speaking again in general terms, I will somehow repeat myself stating my belief that the application of intensively FOCUSING loving feelings to an external object with the resulting linguistic content (left brain activity) that gives meaning to the union of the reasoning brain with the feeling brain shows clearly the distinction of the Christian or “western man’s” experience in contrast to the experience of the Gnostics, or western and eastern Mystics, which is the application of the intensively FOCUSING ON SWITCHING OFF OF FOCUSED THINKING on feelings towards any particular object, which results in pure feeling (right brain activity) of the infiniteness of “being”, the feeling of the touch with the unconscious self. As an afterthought, I believe that the significance of the experience for the self is the reason that all external dependencies and attachments are broken, as it seems probable to me that a new prioritizing strategy is settled in the mind that lets man fully TRUST his unconscious feelings, drops all his prior fears and doubts about the value of his judgments and reinstates in the individual the spontaneity that was lost or blocked on account of social conventions and enculturation while growing up. It is the “growing young” of Ashley Montagu, or the “dare to be naive” of Buckminster Fuller, or the “blessed are the poor in spirit” of Mathew 5:3, or my saying about the voluntary adopting of “conscious innocence”.
  
  The important think to keep in mind here is that if a man manages to find meaning in his life, this is achieved when he is inspired by an object that matches his highest idealism, his perception of perfection, his model of goodness. To me it was the inspiration from the female friend, hence the equating of love for woman to love of God that emerged in my mind. To the people who have experienced God’s revelation (Moses and all the prophets), it is God himself (the prophet’s projected unconscious inner self) who gives them His message. To the saints, and a great number of known and unknown truth seekers and followers of the Christian religion, it is Jesus Christ (a more conspicuous object than the abstract image of God, since he was an incarnated individual), who is called Savior for the benefit he passed to his devotees.
  
  With regard to Jesus himself, it is risky to take a chance and get into his mind and explain his own religious experience (during his baptism). But if I claim that I have got some deep insight of optimistic mental stereotypes through my mind maturing experience, it is my obligation to give it a try. I believe the key factor for the realization of Jesus’ experience must have been his inspiration from the much expected in his times Messiah, as preached by John the Baptist at Jordan River, upon whom (the abstract figure of the expected Messiah, just like the abstract figure of God used by the prophets) Jesus must have projected his own charismatic personality, the “best of Jesus”, being himself a master of the Law, a capable healer, an eloquent preacher, a man of goodness and dignity, with compassion and love for all people. The result of all this is that, during his baptism, his inner self emerged into his consciousness through the well known verse “Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11) declaring him as the Messiah he was yearning to meet, join and serve, when he decided to join the group of followers of John the Baptist. It is not unlikely that his mother may have added in him a subtle and discrete touch of will to save the World, having appreciated the talents and natural inclinations of her son, while experiencing, during the years of her son’s upbringing, the messianic expectations of her times. Some role may also have played John’s preaching that “cometh one mightier than I…”, which, combined with his probable bodily expression of deep humility and sudden awakening at Jesus’ sight, as John realized in his mind that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, might have helped the triggering of the experience.
  
  4. Freedom.
  
  In the first part of my comments I said that the man who experiences his ultimate mind maturity, within seconds after the climax, “he is caught by surprise as he […] discovers that faith suddenly expires, and that all the spiritual quests that previously occupied his mind vanish. He literally gets peace of mind.” This happens because of the resolution of the quest on the meaning of life, as discussed in the previous item. This is clearly the message contained in the verse from John 8:32 which justifies peace of mind as a result of knowledge of truth. What is not usually appreciated is the meaning of another verse, that of John 17:3, which identifies knowledge of truth (the sense of freedom we are talking here) with knowledge of God and, most importantly, with ETERNITY:
  “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent”
  
  Please note: no mention of afterlife!
  
  Having completed the elaboration on my interpretation (through experience) of the significance of the four ultimate concerns pointed out by Irving Yalom in his aforementioned speech, I want to draw your attention to a reference to a phrase in this same speech, at the point he is talking about religious experiences:
  
  “I believe that these extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
  
  I have squeezed my mind many times to think of such an extraordinary evidence. I have thought of a fictitious experiment that is not easy to realize, but will make clear, I believe, how you might distinguish persons who have had such an experience from persons who have not, on the basis of differences in behavior against certain stimuli.
  
  The idea is to trigger the mind with a stimulus of “perfection” that affects the feeling system and then watch and measure man’s reaction (in his brain) to that stimulus. In order to ensure greater success with your experiment you must catch the person off-guard. Imagine that you present to the person being tested a woman of special beauty and of his liking, who is staring intensively at him and is also smiling at him genuinely and gently, not provocatively, and you do it in such a way that our subject, without suspecting anything, turns his head to see her, triggered, say, by some neutral signal, and views the woman obviously caught off-guard and a little surprised by this setup. There is no man who sees a very beautiful woman and has no inclination to call her a “goddess” (let’s be frank: the first reaction is an automatic projection of “the best” of our feelings, an admiration to the absolute beauty of the object stared at –by the way, this is the problem with “love at first sight”: although one knows nothing about the woman, other than the fact that she attracts him physically, he projects on her both physical and character qualities of his liking; a sheer madness indeed). The point is how this man reacts next in his mind to a stimulus of perfection with sexual connotations. I can see some cases as follows:
  
  - The “macho” type might first think: “no one can resist to my charm”.
  - A mature, extroverted adult might think: “I would love to know her better; I would love to start a relation with her”.
  - Another kind of adult might think: “What does she have in mind, now?” and be a little confused or embarrassed, evidently influenced by normal social conventions which don’t encourage this behavior.
  - A sensitive, introverted adult might look at her for a moment and then lower his eyes while thinking: “How pretty she is; but this is more beauty than I can handle”.
  - Finally, an adult subject with a history of an ultimate mind maturing experience will instantaneously generate in his mind, in his feeling system, a deep hedonistic, but not possessive or lustful or ego driven, feeling of feminine inspiration, absorbing the femininity she UNCONSCIOUSLY radiates, and will instinctively respond (if social context is not an obstacle) with a gentle smile of appreciation of her special qualities, a smile similar to the one all of us can offer, and I am sure, have instinctively offered, to a beautiful child. One should not wonder for this kind of reaction: he is a spiritually self-dependent man and can only radiate outwards his positive feelings for humans. Moreover, his permanent “union” with his feeling system, during his mind maturing experience, was caused (figuratively) by a falling-in-love and seduction by his own (projected) sensitivity, so don’t expect him to fall in love or be seduced by a woman in real life ever since. It is as if he is in love from then on with all women (regardless of age but with varying intensity, of course), who are (let me use the biblical phrase) the “image and likeness” of his inner sensitivity, and as they involuntarily display their femininity they cause in him the hedonistic feeling I talked about earlier.
  
  By the way, about the giving of this gentle smile, women do it all the time, because their minds are more holistically oriented than men’s, and they instinctively project outwards the unprejudiced and uncensored feelings of the goodness in their beings.
  
  I believe there is a lot to learn from the energy that is exchanged when a man and a woman look at each other. Especially if they are focusing on each other’s eye pupil. I believe every man (I can’t talk of women here) has a personal story regarding the emotions that his look to a woman of his liking evoke. The difficulty that usually men have when they wish to express for the first time their feelings to a woman they like, has a similar counterpart in the way they look at her.
  
  There is a beautiful phrase in Hermann Hesse’s book “Siddhartha” that explains the change that occurs in men after they live their mind maturing experience:
  
  “To say this, I have come to you, oh Kamala! You are the first woman whom Siddhartha is not addressing with his eyes turned to the ground. Never again I want to turn my eyes to the ground, when I'm coming across a beautiful woman.”
  
  A lot more could be written on the subject, but I am not going to write a book here. I have already written a very long text.
  
  Having completed at this point the second part of my comments, I wish to add, as a P.S., my credits to Ludwig Feuerbach’s thinking on religion, in the middle of the 19th century.
  
  The brave big step in his thinking is, of course, his statement that “Theology is Anthropology.”
  
  In fact this marks the final step in the philosophical quest for the essence of spirituality and transcendence, and it is no wonder Feuerbach’s thinking has also marked the end of classical German philosophy, before Marx’s move to a philosophical perspective of the socio-political issues of his time. Some of Feuerbach’s sayings, which I discovered only recently, as I said, clearly express my conviction that “God is our unconscious inner self” projected as “man’s object of loftiest inspiration”. Please, read this:
  
  “If God loves man, is not man, then, the very substance of God? That which I love, is it not my inmost being?”
  
  “Is not the love of God to man – the basis and central point of religion – the love of man to himself made an object, contemplated as the highest objective truth, as the highest being to man?”
  
  “Man, by means of the imagination, involuntarily contemplates his inner nature; he represents it as out of himself. The nature of man, of the species – thus working on him through the irresistible power of the imagination, and contemplated as the law of his thought and action – is God.”
  
  All credit goes to Ludwig Feuerbach. Truly, now, I almost feel I copied the guy!
  
  But I must say I am not a follower of Feuerbach. He sees the projection of the inner self to God as the presence of an unnecessary intermediary between man and himself (i.e. as an illusion). I understand his view, but it does not tell the whole story. I believe that any conscious human communication with the “Other” (including the communication with his inner self as “Other”) is unavoidably a communication of a subject with an object, where the object is the projection of the “Other” as visualized in the subject’s mind (always an illusion). To push this thought to its extreme end, the fact is that the only projection that can be really and permanently broken is one’s projection of his unconscious inner self (his God), and that happens only through the mind maturing experience, when the God illusion is resolved. This is so because from then on you don’t need “conscious communication” with your unconscious inner self, your God, anymore (in which case a projection would be needed again, by my sayings and by Feuerbach’s sayings, too), since you act holistically in your brain, and your right brain spontaneously provides its content to your left brain each time a behavioral issue arises in your left brain for, say, a decision for an appropriate action, a resolution of conflicting opinions, or pure contemplation. By the way, there is a biblical expression for this: “take no thought how or what you shall speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what you shall speak” (Matthew 10:19).
  
  Copying the last sentence of my comments of February 22, I will apologize again for some repetitions I made today to give emphasis to my views. In my next comments I will deal mainly with the materialistic approach to the ultimate mind maturing, or religious experience, but I will also put down still more ideas on the concept of God, in a systematic presentation that encompasses the religious phenomenon on the entire world. I will also speculate about the future, including in my speculation my view on the never ending conflict of who is right about the Messiah, the Christians or the Jews. My answer is “both are right”, but I need some space and time to explain it properly. But I can say it briefly as follows:
  
  Quoting the Revelation about the Jews: “And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:2). And later: “And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely” (Revelation 22:17).
  
  Quoting the same about the “mature” Gentiles: “Surely I come quickly.’” And then the response by the Jews again: “Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20).
  
  I prefer a simpler (again metaphorical) way of saying it, copying a tiny section of the script of the movie “Pretty Woman”:
  
  Edward Lewis (Richard Gere): So what happens after he climbs up and rescues her?
  Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts): She rescues him right back.
  
  After reading both stories, the bottom line is that love is a two-step process.
  
  We are witnessing the marriage of the two modes of thinking in the social arena of the Western World: The Greek Logos, the spirit of the Gentiles, the Bridegroom of the union referenced in the Revelation, and the Jewish Law or Wisdom of God or Sophia, the spirit of the Jews, the Bride of the Revelation. This union has its cause in the conquest of the Eastern World by Alexander the Great, which resulted in a deep mix of the two cultures at their peaks back then for the first time in history. This union goes hand-in-hand with the spiritual union of the two modes of thinking in our brains (wisely expressed by Origen in the phrase “Psyche, the bride, swived by Logos”), because the actors of the union in the social arena are individuals. With Jesus, with his pure love addressed to the whole of mankind, this union started by him for the first time, both in his mind and through his social conduct. Referring to his mind, he had a religious experience by which he became conscious of being the Messiah, marking so the beginning of the Messianic Age, the Kingdom of God, for Christianity. Referring to his social conduct, he preached and lived social “goodness”, but he was also conscious that there is a future ahead, and he realized that the conversion of society is a two-step process, although he expected that not to take longer than the time span of his generation. This is clearly expressed in the verse: “Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed? And Jesus said, I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:61-62). To make a (really) long story short, my conjecture is that this marriage is still in process, even after 2000 years, but when a “critical mass” of social “goodness” accumulates, when the world “sees the light”, the Jews will “know” it (to use a verb from Exodus), and it’s only then that they will declare the arrival of the Messianic Age of their religion, and will only then appreciate Jesus Christ as well. To say things in a down to-earth way now, they will then play the role of Vivian, the second step in the process of love.
  
  Out of all this, my little mind comes to one conclusion only: The World has yet to experience the treasures of the Jewish Soul!

• Jesse Sellers – April 23 2008

  Geraldine, you raise a very important issue. The way I have expressed it is that too many Christians are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good. The thing they forget is that the same Jesus who calls us to faith also said, "I was hungry, and you didn't feed me; I was thirsty, and you didn't give me anything to drink; I was naked, and you didn't clothe me; I was in prison, and you didn't visit me--inasmuch as you didn't do it to the least of my brothers, you didn't do it to me. Depart from me, you workers of iniquity. I never knew you at any time."
  
  If the truth of the Christian faith isn't lived out in the here and now, then it is not a genuine faith. This is the entire point of the Epistle of James--faith without works is dead. If one has genuine faith, it will be revealed in what he does.
  
  There is much more to it than simply sitting on a cloud eating bonbons. In fact, I don't think bonbon eating even enters into it, let alone cloud sitting. The challenge for those of us who are Christians is to remain relevant in this present world. There are many good reasons to believe in a better future world for us, but the fact remains that God didn't take us out of this one just because we believed. And if He left us here, He left us here to serve.
  
  "No greater love has anyone than to lay down his life for his friend." -Jesus

• Geraldine Daly – April 23 2008

  Oh Geraldine is just fine thanks.
  
  I worry about the amount of people who are dying (no pun intended) to escape the earth to get "free" or "saved" or "enlightened". I believe you are supposed to figure it out while you are alive, or else believer or non-believer alike-- what's the point of now? I think to hope that all knowledge will rain down on us when we die is a seriously mistaken ideal. That just the act of passing over (insert whatever image pleases you best here) will fit us to be given all the knowledge of the universe will lead to massive disappointment. I think god or no god you are supposed to concentrate on what is here and now. To learn all about this life and not to strive constantly for the next one. I feel that people who believe in a heaven are at a massive disadvantage to understanding the point of earthly life and its only natural when the next bit sounds so appealing. I am by no means trying to insult at all. I think the point of life now is just that and i'm pretty sure that god (or the man jesus) alluded to this a lot. Heaven is here and its something else entirely out there. I suppose most people see it as a kind of gradutation process if you like and if thats so and I think it is, why would it stop after we die. Why would there be only one exam. What kind of heaven or existance would be worth not discovering/creating/thinking of new things. I feel sometimes people view the next part as sitting on a cloud eating bonbons which would be pretty cool for about 5 minutes then what? And why if you are one of the elite of this earthly realm would that desire and dedication be shelved by this god? I think there's more to it :-)
  Anyway hope you are all doing well.

• Jesse Sellers – April 22 2008

  Geraldine,
  
  (Or Ms. Daly, if you prefer). What a wonderful and interesting question. I don'tbelieve I've ever heard anyone ask that specific question before.
  
  Hmmm. If there were no God, and yet death is not the end, would I be disappointed? I think that I probably would be, because as a Christian, my faith doesn't consist of following a set of religious rules or simply affirming intellectually a slate of acceptable doctrines and dogmas. The heart of Christian faith is a relationship with the living Lord of the universe, and if it turned out that He did not exist, then I would be extremely disappointed, as well as surprised, because I not only would have wrongly interpreted a pretty sizable amount of evidence that seems to me to point to His existence, but also I would have somehow allowed myself to be deceived that I had a personal relationship with a being that doesn't exist. Shades of "A Beautiful Mind" here.
  
  Incidentally, when I refer to God as "He," please don't think that I believe God is a male. That would be anthropomorphism. The Bible reveals a God who is neither male nor female, and the "He" is used because this God--THE God, as I mentioned to Jose'--has chosen to use the paradigm of a Father to show us something about Himself...err, Godself. (Now, at the risk of having Jose' accuse me of contradicting myself, I DO believe that Jesus, who is God, was and is male).

• Jesse Sellers – April 22 2008

  Jose',
  
  It took me a while to wrap the duct tape around my head so I could keep my head from exploding from the effort of attempting to decipher your last post, but I think I got it. :-)
  
  I don't think we are that far off in what we are saying, Jose'. And I don't think I am contradicting myself. Let me put it this way: If the Bible is true (and I believe it is), then Jesus Christ has to be the only way to gain access to God the Father. If the Bible (And John 14:6 specifically) is NOT true, then access to God might be gained through some other means, or by no means whatsoever. It is simply my contention that the "unknowable" God has chosen to make Himself known through several channels of revelation, including but not limited to the Bible. (I also believe He makes Himself known through nature, conscience, and most clearly through the person of Jesus Christ).
  
  By the way, as an interesting aside--and I'm not really sure why I mention it here, except that I "feel" led to--in the New Testament, "God" is translated as "'o theos," that is, THE God. I think that the English Bible loses something in the translation by leaving out the definite article. Again, I don't know why I mention it here, so feel free to ignore it as an episode of me free associating.

• Geraldine Daly – April 22 2008

  Hi Jesse & all below,
  
  I don't understand the law of non-contradiction as well as you do but its still not a point that I am trying to make, you wrapped that around my statement as I think it made sense to you that way and that is not problem. Ultimately that's how humans interact. I try not to get stuck into semantics as the ideas themselves can be difficult enough to get out without re-useing another's words and therefore other's meanings around a word and then the third party element of all that is then a futher person reads those other words and interpretes them. In any case it's probably more attractive to some on the earth to construct ideas around a fulcrum such as the one you were describing below.
  
  However back to the point though, which is whether there is a god or not. your statement (“If there is a God, why is there evil in the world?” My response is this: If there is no God, why is there good in the world?) is not getting the discussion any further along although I do understand the need to reflect back to people what you think. If there is a god it doesn't matter whether our ability to believe comes from evolution or not, it is only if there is not a god that then that statement becomes incredibly interesting. But what if there is not a god but also not a end which involves rotting away and that's it. What if there is a large depot of energy and experience which incorporates all of the experiences that are had by every living thing but with no driver. Would that please or disappoint -- have never had the opportunity to ask this question. I am interested by the need for God?
  
  I hold dear to my everything is true statement at least for the moment and don't expect to be accepted but to leave you with the starting point or the springboard if you will. There are many but I like Mr. Ford's the best. "Whether you think you can or whether you think you can't you are usually right".
  
  Its a pleasure this opportunity and I wish you all a blue sky where ever you are.
  
  Geraldine

• Dexter Francis – April 21 2008

  Perhaps I have been too obscure. I was not disputing whether humans are capable of belief. I was questioning the combination of "evolutionary", "ability", and belief, which I took as an assertion that belief was a human trait that developed as a result of evolution. I do not think that has been proven yet.

• José Tavares – April 21 2008

  Jesse:
  
  I stand corrected.
  Rephrasing it, "According to your own words, everything you state is true [to you] but what's subject to the 'Law-of-No-Contradiction', which, by the way, should also apply to your own words."
  
  Given the condition:
  
  "The problem with Geraldine Daly’s suggestion that “everything is true” is the Law of Non-Contradiction. If everything is true, then the Christian faith is true and the Bible is true. And if the Christian faith is true, and the Bible is true, then Jesus’s words in John 14:6, in which He states, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through Me,” is true. And if Jesus’s statement is true, then other faiths that claim they have the way to God cannot be true. And if they cannot be true, then everything cannot be true."
  
  and applying your statement, "...as best I can determine, nothing I believe to be true contradicts anything else I believe to be true.." to the given condition, 'else' being "...everything I state I BELIEVE to be true.", your arguments do not stand up to the 'Law-of-Non-Contradiction', since - according to your condition - "...if they cannot be true, then everything cannot be true.", is also true. Therefore, everything is true.
  
  Corolary (sort of): "There are those who wish us to dispense with all objective truth. Before we do, perhaps we’d better consider some of the consequences of doing so. We might opt for a source of truth that is objective after all.", which is also contradictory, given that, "...everything I state I BELIEVE to be true.", should also be true, irrespective of your belief.
  
  
  Cheers!

• Jesse Sellers – April 21 2008

  Jose’
  
  No, no, my friend. According to my words, everything I state I BELIEVE to be true. There is a difference. And, as best I can determine, nothing I believe to be true contradicts anything else I believe to be true.

• Jesse Sellers – April 21 2008

  Ms. Daly,
  
  Please, call me “Jesse.” The Law of Non-Contradiction actually says that something cannot be “A” and “Not A” AT THE SAME TIME AND IN THE SAME WAY. So, your illustrations of water’s boiling point and the moon’s gravity don’t quite hold up there. But, I do understand your point. While I am a different Jesse today than I was yesterday, the constant is that I remain the same Jesse who changes every day—hopefully learning something new every day, loving more every day, being less temperamental, etc. I am evolving—microevolution, not macro.
  
  Yes, God apparently did allow the holocaust. It is beyond my ken to know the purposes behind His allowing it. I also know that God allows thousands, if not millions, of lesser holocausts on a regular basis. Why didn’t He stop it then; why doesn’t He stop them now? Well, I believe that He will at some point. But to change things now, today, would require the destruction of every selfish person on the face of the earth. And who of us would be left? And, please, let’s not confuse His allowing evil with His creating it.
  
  Someone occasionally challenges me with the question, “If there is a God, why is there evil in the world?” My response is this: If there is no God, why is there good in the world?