Michael, how important do you think the belief in God, spirituality, mythology and ritual is to the human psyche? Is a person who believes only in science and dismisses any idea of a higher power missing anything?

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Hi Earl,

Thanks so much for your question, and welcome to the discussion.

You asked the following very pertinent questions:

1) what were your thoughts re the Tibetan Book of the Dead-the Bardo Thodrol and from a pragmatic point of view- what are your views regarding actual spiritual practice?

I am actually fascinated to the core by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I had the good fortune of studying under the magnificent tutelage of John Hick at Claremont Graduate School in 1989, and he has written a great deal about the profound wisdom about afterlife that is contained in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, particularly the Bardo Thodrol.

When I read this remarkable document, I was stunned by its utter similarity to certain aspects of modern depth psychology, particularly given the power of the unconscious to determine our subjective experience in the afterlife. In fact, I incorporated this entire perspective into my pragmatic view of the subjective experience of "hell" in the afterlife, which is contained in my book JOB, JONAH, AND THE UNCONSCIOUS.

Basically, what we reject about ourselves becomes trapped into the unconscious, where it strives our entire life to become conscious, so it can then become incorporated into the wholeness of our personality. Most people, however, do not accomplish this psychological/spiritual feat in this particular lifetime, so when they die, their conscious defense mechanisms, that used to be utilized by the ego to help banish these forbidden parts of our personality into the unconscious, then drop away naturally, leaving the contents of our unconscious fully exposed to our conscipous self. However, since we do not recognize these banished aspects of our personality, we experience them as external "projections" that seek to harm us.

Not coincidentally, these are the very same things that could be said in modern psychological terms of what will probably happen to the unconscious after we die.

The beauty of the Tibetan Book of the Dead is that it instructs us on precisely how to handle our subjective projections after we die. For by telling us to identify these otherwise frightening projections "merely" as parts of ourselves, we identify them for what they naturally are, thus stripping them of their horrendous power to frighten us, which in turn helps us immensely in our ongoing quest for psychospiritual wholeness in the afterlife!

As far as the helpfulness of various spiritual practices is concerned, I think that virtually all of them can be immensely helpful, and even life-saving, so I think that they should be practiced regularly, to one's own unique taste and idiosyncratic needs.

I hope this helps to answer your question! Please ask for a clarification if you think I can offer one.

mc

Hello Lightkeeper!

I really like your screen name, or handle. Light, of course, is often used as a metaphor for the Most High Himself, and the Bible actually tells us directly that "God is Light." This is a magnificent realization that strikes deeper into relativistic physics than most people ever realize.

For instance, Einstein taught us that anything that travels at c, or light velocity (186,282 miles per second) experiences infinite mass and zero time. But traditional theism teaches that God on a spiritual level is omnipresent, and is "outside of time." This is a fascinating parallel in and of itself, but to be the actual "keeper of light" -- WOW!

At any rate, you asked the following question: "how important do you think that belief in God, spirituality, mythology and ritual is to the human psyche? Is a person who believes only in science and dismisses any idea of a higher power missing anything?"

Well, I think that belief in God and spirituality, along with mythology and ritual, is absolutely critical to the growth and spritual development of the human mind and personality, which in turn is essential, I believe, for spiritual wholeness.

Moreover, anyone who accepts science only, and dismisses any idea of a higher power, is missing EVERYTHING. How far out of line would it be if we were to be able to accept a car or a computer without implicitly or explicitly accepting the existence of their respective makers? In the same way, anyone who is somehow able to accept the many miracles of science, without accepting the very Designer and Creator of these miracles, hasn't even gotten to first base, at least as far as possessing a cosmic perspective that is at the very least appropriate to the scientific facts that we know about it.

Take, for instance, the atheistic belief in a self-organizing universe. I believe that this belief is itself incoherent on a deeper level, because one must first ask, "Where did matter get the ability to self-organize? This is especially true because many powerful physical laws are required to make this miraculous power a reality. Such a non-believer is tantamount to driving a self-assembling automobile, and yet not asking where it originally got the power to build itself in the first place! In the same way, one simply cannot accept self organization as a brute fact, without first attempting to explain how and why matter ever got this miraculous power in the first place.

In their heart of hearts, I believe that many outwardly skeptical scientists, are privately BIG believers in the scientific Power and Intelligence that pervades all of reality.

In this sense, God is obviously an indispensible part of all the natural sciences, as I explain in much more detail in THE GOD HYPOTHESIS.

mc

Hello Bea Ond !

Thanks so much for your reply and additional questions.

The important thing to realize about the Anthropic Principle is that it is a principle that necessarily applies to our own universe. So, whether one accepts the idea of a Creator or not, "one ignores the anthropic principle at one's own peril," in the words of the great British astronomer John Barrow.

The reason why the Anthropic Principle is such a necessary feature of our present universe is that we DO in fact exist. The counterfactual idea that a world without a God would have no need of an explanation is actually beside the point, because all the anthropic principle really does is tell us the necessary conditions for our own existence. And since we clearly do exist, it is imperative that we find a satisfactory explanation for how and why the various ingredients in our existence have the values that they do, and why, for that matter, that they exist at all.

Many important scientific discoveries were in fact made by working backwards from our existence (using the Anthropic Principle), in the sense of asking a) what is first required for our existence, and b) how that particular parameter came to exist in the first place.

Moreover, doesn't a universe that is fine-tuned for life cause one to ask how and why this should be the case in the first place. To merely assume that it could have been this way by chance alone is to miss the immense, mind-bending power of the cosmic coincidences themselves, which I cannot explain in more detail here, due to space and time limitations. Does anyone ever think to themselves that their television sets could have come into exisence entirely on their own, without a larger manufactuer to design and build them? The same exact prinicple also applies to our life-supporting universe as well, and it doesn't do us any good to ascribe utter non-important to the phenomenon of life itself. Indeed, the very asking of this question presupposes the cosmic importance of intelligent life, because only intelligent beings could be capable of asking such questions in the first place.

I don't mean to be harsh here at all, and if I sound this way, I do apologize, because this is not my intention. I simply mean to say that we all intuitively know that life is important, which is why so many people are so intent on finding it elsewhere in the universe. This could only be true if life possessed its own degree of self-importance.

I hope this helps. If not, let's hone in on the deeper issues that are at work here, and hopefully we can find a good middle ground that we can both accept.

Warmly,

mc

Michael, from what you are saying then is a skeptic has not found the Higher Power within and is projecting self-organizing onto the Universe?

Why do you believe that it is important to mental health to believe in a Higher Power?

What has God been doing since the creation of the Universe?

What part does God play in our everyday life?

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Thank you for your reply, Michael. I'm curious, though, as to whether given your studies you see any particular forms/types of spiritual practices as theoretically more beneficial-i.e., types of mediatation, devotional vs. non-devotional forms of religion. etc. Am enjoying this discussion very much. Earl

I am now going to answer Lightkeeper's new questions, which I found to be very interesting indeed.

Yes, I'm saying that a scientific skeptic has in fact discovered the self-organizing principles of the universe, but he or she just takes them to be a brute fact that is not in need of an explanation. But this is a bizarre position to take, because it is question-begging in the extreme, since they very powers of self-organanization are themselves in desperate need of explanation themselves. To think otherwise is to assume that the most miraculous and fine-tuned aspects of the physical world are themselves not in need of explanation!

But just imagine if this skeptic had a self-building car that he or she was driving. Would they just assume that it's power build itself was not in need of explanation, or far more likely, would they be in awe of this self-organizing process, and see as a self-evident fact that it is in desperate need of explanation?

I believe it is important to mental health to believe in a higher power for several reasons. First, it is important to everyone's mental health to have a positive outlook on things, and it is much easier to have a positive outlook on things if one first has a deep belief in God to fall back on. Secondly, the brain seems to have a "God chip" hard-wired into it, and this "God chip" apparently needs to be addressed in an appropriate manner before that elusive commodity known as "happiness" can ever be attained. Part of this is due to the fact that all mental health authorities agree that hope is an essential part of anyone's mental health, and it is hard to have hope in today's crazy world of one evil event after another without first believing in a higher power.

And indeed, studies have shown that those individuals who believe in God are healthier and happier, in general, than their atheistic and agnostic counterparts.

You also asked what God has been doing since the beginning of the universe? I am tempted to give the same answer that St. Augustine gave; namely, preparing a hell for those people who ask this type of question! (laughs).....No, more seriously, I believe that God is an intimate--though unseen--part of our lives, and moreover, that He experiences our pain and basically suffers with us. To me, this idea of a Creator who is in solidarity with the feelings of His creatures, who are suffering from various evils in the world, is a positive one. But I also believe that God is "busy" luring people to do the right thing every day in this world, WITHOUT violating their free will. The example I gave earlier of how my aunt was motivated to stay home for some "unknown reason," when she ordinarily always takes my uncle to the doctor, itself points to the Hand of God in her life, because once she decided to stay home, she found out why she had to stay home that day just a half hour later, when her daughter in law showed up at the door on her knees, because she was in the middle of having a potentially lethal stroke. Had my aunt not been home, Julie would almost surely have been dead or in a coma by now!

On the other hand, I believe that a perfectly self-sufficient God doesn't have to be doing anything at all from the begining of the universe, because He is by definition beyond all needs in the ordinary sense, and has a perfect existence in every conceivable way.

I think that the role that God plays in our ordinary life depends a whole lot on how much we invite Him into our lives. The more we invite Him (say through prayer), the more involved He will likely become in our lives, by helping us to notice the good things in life, and helping us to do the right thing on a daily basis, when the right thing (i.e., that which produces the least amount of evil) isn't always clear to most people.

I hope this helps to answer your questions!

mc

I will now reply to Earl's second qeustion.

First, I'd like to thank you, Earl, for your kind words. I'm so glad that you are enjoying this discussion! I am too. This is such a wonderful and unique forum for the free expression of ideas. I am just SO impressed with the medium of communication itself.

That being said, you wanted to know "whether given your studies you see any particular forms/types of spiritual practices as theoretically more beneficial-i.e., types of mediatation, devotional vs. non-devotional forms of religion."

Yes, I see some forms of spiritual and psychological practices as theoretically more valuable than others. Almost all of them are non-denominational in nature, although going to the Church or Synagogue of your choice is usually very helpful in most people's spiritual lives.

The first psychological or spiritual practice that I think is inherently the most valuable to our spiritual lives is the ongoing quest to purify our inner hearts and souls of any accumulated "bad karma." Another way of saying this is that it is imperative that we purge or purify ourselves of all the unwanted elements in our personality that have been banished to the unconscious. We need to do this because these unconscious "rogue" elements of our minds and souls are dividing our personality structure right down the middle, because it means that we are not unified with the unconscious elements of our being, and this inner division tends to present any "free forward movement" towards greater levels of spiritual maturity. This is why it is so important to purse ourselves of our accumulated inner repressions!

One of the best ways to do this is through the process of "primal therapy," which is simply when one chooses to face the elements of one's unconscious head on. When one does this, there is usually copious amounts of crying, and even wailing, that typically result, as one tends to relive all the unfinished emotions that we have retained from childhood. They are "unfinished" in the sense that most children instinctively repress these emotional threats to their unconscious so they won't be torn apart by them at their young age. However, by the time we are adults, we are old enough to face these "inner demons" without having them destroy our personality. So the basic "trick" here is to find a way to finish feeling these aborted feelings from childhood, because I believe that they are the primary impediments, not only to a happy psychological existence on this planet, but also to a happy and fruitful existence in the afterlife as well. For as we have seen, these unconscious elements will naurally tend to haunt us in the extreme after we die (as explained in more detail in both the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and in my own JOB, JONAH, AND THE UNCONSCIOUS). However, if we face them now, before we die, we won't have very many unconscious demons to face and to come to terms with after we die.

One of the best ways to do this process of self-purging is to isolate oneself in a private, quiet area, next to a box of Kleenex. Then, just close your eyes and start to focus on whatever negative feelings you might be having. When you do so, then you can begin to ask youself if any of these feelings had their origin in your childhood. If not, just "follow your feelings" by "reeling them in" the way one would reel in a big fish. For if you just follow your inner instincts, they will tend to lead you directly to your own innermost feelings, many of which could have been aborted feelings from childhood. The trick to defusing these aborted feelings is to simply finish the process of feeling them. Usually, this involves disturbing memories from childhood, and also copious amounts of crying. This is the crying that we never finished doing as children. For once we do this on a regular basis, one will find that one's inner storehouse of unconscious, aborted feelings will begin to dissipate, thus leaving one much happier in the present, and much more capable of continuing one's spiritual journey towards greater and greater degrees of spiritual maturity.

Of course, other forms of spiritual and psychological practices, such as daily meditation and even bio-feedback, can be immensely helpful in helping to restore a calm and happy state of mind to those who have been stressed out by life's many relentless stressors.

Oftentimes, just a simple walk in the woods can go a long way towards helping us to clear our minds, so that we can begin to appreciate the inherent beauty of nature all around us.

I hope this helps!

mc

Yes, I agree with this. Another way I have found to recognize "stored" feelings and traits is take a good look at anything you have strong feelings about. For instance if you hate whiners, look at your hidden whiner. If you have difficulty with any traits of another person, it is probably something you are not recognizing, acknowledging and forgiving yourself for.

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I am now going to respond to Lightkeeper's response to my own comments regarding Earl's second set of questions.

Lightkeeper said, "Yes, I agree with this. Another way I have found to recognize "stored" feelings and traits is take a good look at anything you have strong feelings about. For instance if you hate whiners, look at your hidden whiner. If you have difficulty with any traits of another person, it is probably something you are not recognizing, acknowledging and forgiving yourself for."

Lightkeeper, this is SO true! You hit the nail on the head with this one! Because anything that we have strong feeling about in other people usually DOES reflect the very same qualities in ourselves that we have banished to the unconscious. This is called "projection" in Freudian parlance, because the individual projects their own shortcomings onto other people. Your words, Lightkeeper, are truly to the point, and I hope that the other visitors to this interview really understand the point you've made. It is about as impotant as it gets! Thanks for your excellent addition and clarifiation!

mc