Who We Are and What We Can Be

We are all born potential saviours of the world and potential answers to the problem posed by our parents. But, lacking the information we need to pursue this course, sooner or later we either conform to the world or let it crush us. That is no longer necessary. The information we need to understand ourselves and each other now exists. Much has been learned about psychology over the last century and a half in particular. This knowledge just has to be put together in a coherent and easily digested form. This is a process to which I’m trying to contribute here.

There are three main factors in how we turn out as a person :

1. How much love we received from our parents.

2. How much anger we were exposed to.

3. The level of honesty we encountered in the adults with whom we came in contact.

Sometimes, if we are parents, we beat ourselves up about whether or not we gave our children the amount of love they deserved. There is no need to worry about this. The world needs all kinds of people, and their are pros and cons to receiving lots of love. The saying “from those to whom much has been given much will be expected” applies. The more nurtured we were as children, the more of a feeling we grew up with that we had to be the world’s saviour. Jesus was a very well nurtured individual. This gave him great potential to help the world, but it also condemned him to live for others and be crucified. He would have been better off if his mother had loved him less. But the world would have been worse off.

Regardless of how damaged we may feel that we are as an individual, we can be a good parent. All that is required is honesty. When our parents, or other adults, were dishonest with us, or hid their true feelings from us, they presented us with a riddle we had to solve. Trying to solve these riddles could sap a good deal of our enthusiasm in life.

Of course we are afraid to be honest with our children. We are afraid that they will judge us for our true feelings. But each child is like Jesus, and Jesus judged nothing but dishonesty. The only ones he couldn’t forgive where the Pharisees - the hypocrites.

We think of children as being fragile beings, but this is not true. It is we adults who are the fragile ones psychologically. We are never again as resilient and strong as we were when we were a child.

The difference is that a child has not developed the defences we have as adults against emotionally responding to the things around us. And what a child experiences is taken on board as a riddle that needs to be solved.

If we were abused as a child and were able to understand why it happened, it would not do us much long term harm. The problem really is that we don’t know why it happened and so we spend the rest of our lives wrestling internally with that problem.

If our parents were much alike, then we will grow up to be like them. If they were both gentle loving beings, then we will be a gentle loving being. If they were both angry people then we will grow up to be a person who freely expresses anger.

But, if our parents were different from each other, as is usually the case, we will take on the characteristics of both and be at war with ourselves. We will have taken on the challenge of resolving the conflict between our parents.

My mother was a very strong nurturing woman, but one very defiant of the dishonesty in the world. My father was a very gentle intellectual man who kept his anger bottled up. I followed the example of my father in bottling up my feelings and being an intellectual, but what I bottled up was what I got from my mother, a love for all people but a hatred of their dishonesty. You can see from what I have been writing here, that my view of the world is merely a projection of my internal dilemma. But is it not also a realistic perception of how the world really is? I’ll leave that for you to decide, as none of us can be sure we are seeing beyond ourselves.

In trying to resolve this problem of mine I ended up developing what we know as a mental illness. First depression and later bipolar disorder, including periods of psychosis. These are very common paths taken.

In depression we try too hard to work out our problem inside ourselves. The healthiest way to work on our problem is in interaction with others. When we bottle it up within us we are nobly but foolishly trying to take the burden of the world upon our own shoulders. We are trying to be like Christ. It’s an heroic thing to do, but look where it led for him.

What we think of as our soul - if we think in such terms at all - is the psychological underpinnings we have from infancy. The rest of our identity is built on this foundation. So if we want to understand the world of the soul we have to think in terms of a mind programmed for love but lacking any conceptual understanding. A time before language. Thus the language of the soul is a language of symbols. If we need to think of love, but don’t have the word, then we imagine a breast. If we need to think of pain, but don’t have a word, we think of the splinter we got in our finger.

What happens when we become psychotic is that we are so reluctant to let go of the world of the soul that we will sacrifice our reason to remain in touch with it. The delusions of the psychotic are symbolic truths. The imagination is inescapably prophetic. Whenever we tell a story we tell a story about ourselves and our journey as a species. But the danger of psychosis comes through mistaking the symbols for reality. This leads to socially inappropriate or self-destructive forms of behaviour. But often all the psychotic needs is to be in a safe place with people who don’t fight against the process he is going through. He is working on his problem, taking the soulful path rather than the path of reason. It is a potentially dangerous path, but perhaps the only path for him.

It is easy to look around the world and think that things are getting worse, but I see something else happening. I see the seeds of a new and better world growing.

There is a new honesty breaking out in the world. There was a time when you would be harshly judged for your appearance, your sexuality or your beliefs. You wouldn’t have wanted to be : a homosexual like Oscar Wilde in Victorian England ; a person with heretical beliefs during the Inquisition ; a communist during the McCarthy period in the United States, etc. There are still parts of the world were intolerance persists, but they are the exception rather than the rule. One of the things which keeps us from being who we can be, and thus a part of the brave new world, is conformity. As I’ve said, imagination is inescapably prophetic. Fly your own particular freak flag high and you are a part of this new world.

Now we can better understand fundamentalism and conservatism. These things are fear of the new world. If we are a fundamentalist or a conservative, we are a person who is afraid to be who we really are. We have a rigid false self which we are afraid will break down, as, indeed, it must.

Take the example of the Islamic fundamentalist cleric here in Australia who recently caused controversy by blaming the problem of rape on women who wear skimpy clothing. Fundamentalism requires the repression of one’s own sexuality. Hot women in skimpy clothing are, to the man who is trying to repress his sexuality, as a succulent feast to a man who is dying of hunger. The problem this cleric sees in the world is his own problem, and this is true of all fundamentalists and conservatives. They see rampant immorality in the world and feel that the world is flying out of control. But the immorality is in their own heart and it is their own rigid personality structure they are afraid will fly apart.

Understanding this we can see that we have no reason to worry about conservatives or fundamentalists unless they turn to violence, which only a very few of them actually do. What these people need is reassurance that they can survive the inevitable breakdown of their false selves. At the moment there are many individuals in our mental hospitals for no other reason than that they have lost their ability to live in a dishonest world. As the world moves towards greater honesty they will take their proper place in it, and our asylums will become places for the conservatives and fundamentalists to find a comfortable retreat in which they can be eased through the process of their inevitable breakdown in the most pleasant way. I’ve experienced just such a breakdown and it can be a very frightening thing, but it can also be a very exciting and liberating thing. How pleasurable or painful it is depends largely on the support one receives from those around one.