THE GOD CONNECTION
CHAPTER I
____IS GOD REAL OR AN ILLUSION?
My father, named Elias after the Hebrew prophet, was born to Greek Orthodox parents living in Kiutahia, Turkey, in 1899. He followed the faith of his people until he grew up to become a tall, thin young man with high forehead and eyeglasses, a young “logios,” intellectual and literary. He read Plato, Aristotle, Nietsche, Schopenhaur, and Bergson, published stories and articles in Smyrna magazines, and along the way lost faith in what the priests taught. Elias remained dryly kind, compassionate and charitable all his life, but stood aside in the practice of religion. He declared himself an agnostic, non-believer.
“Infidel!” my mother Georgia called him when she was mad at him. She was born and raised in Sampsous, Turkey, of Greek parents, and was short, plump and ebullient. She was a devout Greek Orthodox like her mother before her.
My parents were living in my house in San Diego California when death came to them. They had argued and scolded each other for seventy years. At 92, Georgia suffered a massive heart attack and was gone in two months. To the end she praised God and fought for her life. I would take her for rides in the San Diego countryside and she would look up at the pale blue sky, the setting sun, the greenish brown hills, and galloping ocean, sigh deeply and say, “Oh God, you’ve created everything with infinite wisdom.”
Elias remained detached from God and grew increasingly isolated as his friends died and family scattered. In the end he lost interest in his favorite books, classical music, and food. He died two years after Georgia, in complete indifference and perfect health, refusing steadfastly all nourishment. “I’m tired. I want to sleep,” he kept saying to me. He was 100 years and 17 days old. It was one in the morning and I was away from home. My daughter, Elizabeth, went to check on him because she heard a strange sound from his room. She took his hand and he opened his eyes, looked at her without saying a word and stopped breathing.
1. The Notion of God: Opium or Elixir?
Are you an infidel? You may come across ideas in this volume to change your mind and consider spiritual values. Are you a true and unquestioning believer? Be prepared to open up to doubt and thoughts other than what you’ve known all your life. You exist now and you experience love, hate, sunrise and sunset. But where did you come from and where are you going at the end of your life? Like my father, perhaps you believe you go out like a puff of smoke to be extinguished forever; or like my mother your faith tells you there’s an afterlife for you with God. Both outcomes are true; and what occurs at death depends on how you think while you are alive. Think of God and you go to God.
But does God exist? Great philosophers, Plato, Aquinas, Spinoza, Descartes, Leibniz, and many others have given us proofs of God’s existence, but other equally great thinkers, Voltaire, Russell, Freud, and Nietzsche refuted these proofs. God does not exist as rocks and rills, animals and plants, planets and stars do; otherwise, smart and learned people, scientists would generally agree about God’s existence as they do about natural phenomena; they don’t. God is an idea, existing in our minds and hearts, and properly we should ask, is God a useful idea or a harmful one? The answer is that we may use God, and related concepts of Judgment, Heaven and Hell, for good or foul ends, as we may use atomic energy to light our cities or destroy them.
God is the spiritual light of the world, and people have thought about God, death, and the afterlife for a very long time indeed. Over a hundred thousand years ago even the subhuman Neanderthals buried their dead with tools and other objects for use in the next world. Every nation, every people, every tribe has a God or gods and numerous deities, saints, holy, evil spirits and other ethereal beings to worship or fear. Are all such entities products of superstition and nonsense or real and important? My life, experiences, studies, and thoughts reveal to me God, Heaven, Holy Spirits and Saints can be useful ideas--but handle with care. Yes, there is a God such that you can accept though you may be well educated, smart, rational, and a free thinker. God and the moral code are ideas we have brought out to the universe from our hearts and minds to rule over lesser notions.
Communism was such a lesser notion. Is religion the opium of the people, as communists taught? The Communist Party banned God in the Soviet Union and set up the State and Stalin for all comrades to worship. Once Stalin mocked the Pope of Rome, “How many army divisions do you have?” Now the Orthodox and Catholic churches are shepherding the people again, and Protestants raise missions in Eastern Europe. Religion persists. Faith in God is common for most people in all cultures on Earth; but can we accept anything as true just because most people have believed it for a long time everywhere? Most people have always had erroneous beliefs. The vast majority among us don’t possess sharp enough intellects to dig deep for truth and distinguish it from enticing falsehood. “They have eyes and see not and they have ears and hear not,” said Jesus, a distinguished teacher of the Western World. Insanity is also common everywhere on earth; it’s the price we pay for our complex brains. Do we ever accept insane ramblings as true and proper thoughts? Yes, if the person we respect most, our Leader, has overpowering charisma.
The Leader appears almost supernatural. He seems connected with the Supreme Being. The connection sometimes leads him to madness and destruction. Have you read about the Reverend Jim Jones in Guyana, David Koresh in Waco, Texas, and Shoko Asahara, leader of Aum Shinri Kyo in Tokyo? Many charismatic leaders lead their flocks and others to the slaughterhouse. Adolph Hitler, though not a declared prophet, had much in common with Mohammed and Moses. So did Alexander the Great, who thought he was God, and Napoleon the Great, who believed in his destiny and infallibility until he rode to Waterloo.
Disaster has been much of our human experience with the supernatural. Today, all over the world, the faithful are often bigoted. Every dedicated member of a particular Church or Temple thinks he has the connection to the true God. The believer is certain whatever a suitably draped priest, minister, or imam teaches is the correct moral code of behavior. Religion’s teachings are not theories that can be disputed with impunity, as theories are treated in Science. If you are Christian, to you Jesus was the true Son of God and the Light of Faith. If you believe in the Buddha, you are a pagan and a proper target for conversion. There is only one Allah for Muslims; Christians and Jews are infidels, although the Koran calls them people of the Faith. Are you Irish Christian Catholic in Belfast? If so, you are despised by Irish Christians Protestants across the street. If you’re an Arab Muslim Shiite, you can count on the hatred of Arab Muslim Sunnis. In the subcontinent of Asia, you divide people into India and Pakistan, fight wars, and assemble nuclear warheads, because one side calls God “Allah,” and other, “Krishna.”
Yet if we examine all the major religions, below the superficial differences of cultural origin, we find the same essential premises, even the same basic methods of practicing faith. Mohammed said, “What do you think the Koran is? It is the message of God in Arabic.” The basic message: an entity or being operates in Nature, unleashing creative or destructive forces, forming the world. This Great Spirit is connected to us in our innermost minds, and in the material world of Nature. When we are being truly creative in our works and we actualize our dreams, we project a force into the universe, uniting the spiritual world inside with the physical world outside. Approach this God inside you with caution, humility and respect. Give God devoted service and adoration, because true believers are rewarded, bad people punished in this or the next life on Judgment Day.
For you Jesus may sit in judgment of the dead, but in all faiths people revere prophets, holy persons and saints, gifted and trained in contacting the Great Spirit. Supposedly, prophets impart divine messages to the rest of us. Holy persons and saints are angels in the flesh. Moses was such a man and he was close like a friend to Jehovah. The Old Testament includes passages where Moses admonishes God, with due respect, pointing out to Him how He should treat His people. Moses was very persuasive. Some centuries later, Jesus of Nazareth declared himself to be the Messiah, in Hebrew the Son of Man: God in the flesh. God was in him and he was in God, being one with Him in spirit due to a very strong link between them. However, in moments of trial, he obeyed God’s will, praying for compassion like the rest of us.
Prayer is one path to God, but in all religions, Divinity is approached by means of the subconscious mind. The devotee fasts perhaps, remains passive, quiet, and is silent in a natural setting or temple. The holy man prays, meditates, chants in a repetitious manner the same words over and over, and enters a trance. A change in consciousness occurs. The brain waves change to the slower alpha or theta rhythms and inspiration is received. In this state of mind, prophecy gushes forth. “Come with me,” wrote Walt Whitman “and I will teach you the secret of all religions. You will not have to know God secondhand.”
Was Whitman, a true or false prophet? Just as all societies have quacks, shysters, crooked cops, confidence men, and dirty politicians, there also have false priests. But even though much of religion, stained often with blood, is rough and dirty, in need of cleaning, cutting, and polishing, what remains in our lives is the purest diamond of value and meaning. Religion is at the very core of our being. It embodies the moral code, which has no scientific or any other objective basis. Yes, religion can be good or bad, but somewhere in the wide spectrum of beliefs I see luminous Hope: God, the Great Idea, lives and loves us.
Still, faith is not enough. We need proper guidance and understanding to arrive at our desired destination at death’s door. We need a foundation for critical religious reasoning, a methodology for investigating matters of faith, for accepting or rejecting religious notions, whatever their source: a discourse on the method of Religion, such as conceived for Science by René Descartes and Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century. You and I, and other free thinkers, have a conflict coming on, looming larger each year, with oily barbarians and nuclear despots. It’s imperative we prepare well our minds and spirits, as humanity floats ahead in the 21st Century, to preserve the earth and civilization and put out the fires of Armageddon before they spread.
Religion begins in the mind. Let us begin there also.
2. Can You Contact the Cosmic Mind?
Mind is the source of everything. Sure knowledge comes from personal experience; every other bit of information garnered from others may only bolster or shrink our personal beliefs. I talk to you and I seem human, but am I? I may be only a computer program with some intelligence. Alan Turing, one of the founders of computer science in the late thirties, imagined the making of an intelligent program. The test of intelligence is for the judges to type questions on a terminal for the program to answer. If the program can lead the judges to think it’s intelligent, then it is. A prize of $100,000 awaits the designer of such a program. It has not been claimed as yet. Descartes wrote: “I think; therefore, I exist.” But what is mind? Humans have many minds, perhaps legion, but we’ll discuss four: the conscious verbal, conscious silent and creative, the subconscious, and the cosmic mind of unlimited power. I can connect with the Cosmic Mind, because I have experienced contact with it, and you can too. The next step is realizing this God within your mind.
But before you realize God, you have to contend with the four or more minds in your head. Residing in ten billion neurons and innumerable connecting fibers in furious electrical activity, your minds may not be in harmony with each other. They may bicker, fight, and sometimes come to blows one against another, causing you grief and making your life a mess.
First, most widely accepted and recognized, is your ordinary verbal awareness: your consciously logical mind. The organ for this mind is the left brain and the speech center. Words segment and categorize reality. Verbal terms both define and limit. Their use simultaneously empowers and restricts conscious thinking. Feelings, emotions and sensations normally associated with this state of awareness participate in decision making and focusing of the attention to the external world. This is the province of the pragmatic and analytical reasoning which does most of your routine work. Your survival depends on it. Don’t put this mind to rest while driving, flying a plane or operating a harvester.
Your second mind, in the non-verbal right hemisphere of your brain, is the creative and artistic mind. It’s conscious also, but silent. Silent thinking is not restricted by language. It doesn’t classify impressions and doesn’t break them down into their component parts. This mind is not a surgeon, but a sculptor. Feelings, emotions and sensations are associated with this mind also, but they’re focused on the gestalt or the whole of experience rather than on parts of it.
Both the verbal and silent minds communicate, through an information channel, with a vast area of functioning, your third, subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind is more than 95 percent of the total, and those who can harness its powers wield a vast superiority over the rest of humankind. It’s the third mind. It has a complicated structure and carries out many functions. Clearly the automatic operations of our bodies are controlled by it: breathing, heartbeat, reflex responses, endocrine gland secretions, the parasympathetic system, responses to fear, anger and other strong emotions. In emergencies, such as combat, accidents, and environmental threats, it carries out the necessary actions for a chance at survival. These are basic, primitive, animal functions. Yet some of the highest creative tasks are also performed subconsciously. Great scientific, artistic, and religious breakthroughs are conceived in the subconscious and often revealed in dreams.
When Sigmund Freud and others explored the subconscious and wrote about it, they were often ridiculed. They were psychiatrists and their concern was with mental illness caused by emotional trauma buried in the subconscious. To them the subconscious was a source of trouble, not a cornucopia of ideas and powers. Today it seems incredible that anyone can doubt the existence of the artistic mind or the subconscious. We can observe these minds functioning in ourselves and in others easily, as we can observe the curvature of the earth from a high mountain. The loci of these minds in the brain can be seen in CAT scans, surgeries, and probing. Consider bicycle riding, driving a car, doing any task well learned and automatic. Most of our skilled, professional, daily work is done at the subconscious level, allowing the conscious mind to focus, select material, to decide on what to do next, allow for new information, and to open the channels of communication to other minds and the environment.
Our subconscious mind, a powerful central processing unit, is programmed by our conscious mind or by others, through verbal, visual, auditory, or olfactory signals. We now know how influential television and other media can be in shaping our subconscious attitudes and opinions and even in galvanizing us into action. Parents, friends, teachers, politicians and religious leaders all can put us in a hypnotic and receptive state, and program our subconscious mind, even when we are unaware--especially then--of their influence. Subliminal persuasion is effective, because you’re drugged and don’t know it; then you buy the product.
The fourth mind is vast and largely unexplored by humans. It’s cosmic, universal, and supra conscious. It’s infinite intelligence. Freud didn’t find it and called it a great illusion. He was not looking for it in the right places. Is the cosmic mind part of your own mind or is it elsewhere, yet you can tap and use it? Is it established through a connection with God? Many great men and women have felt so, and have attributed their achievements in science, music, poetry, literature, or religion to inspiration from God, rather than to their own powers. Homer, Mozart, Descartes, Shelley, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and many other creative persons believed in their Muse.
Today many people are turning to a belief in God or at least the spiritual world: some in the traditional ways of our religions, but others in new or foreign ways. The new practices include meditation, Buddhism, crystals, pyramids, flying saucers, aliens and other omens. I’m reminded of the many prophetic tools of the past: animal guts, birds, bones, coffee cups, and hand palms. You may think this stuff is absurd, and I am inclined to agree with you. But let’s remember what’s important in these practices: not the props, but the person using them.
The way to the cosmic mind is via the subconscious and you can reach it with meditation--an altered consciousness after you have achieved mental tranquility and you have put out the chatter of trite thoughts, sensations, feelings and emotions. This universal mind is perhaps the collective of all sentient beings, on earth and elsewhere, including the spirits of the dead and of others not yet born. What is our individual mind, after all, but the collective function of about ten billion neurons?
How can we know that this fourth mind exists? Many bright and well-informed people argue against it. Yet we infer the existence of the cosmic mind from cases like those of Mozart, Mendelssohn, Homer, Saint-Saëns, Shakespeare, and many other geniuses. Some say Homer and Shakespeare had not existed as individuals, because no individual could have produced such great works; actually many poets wrote under the same name. But a group of people does not produce a masterpiece. This is an individual creation, although congenial companions may stimulate the creator. The cosmic connection is with an individual soul and self, not with a committee, as Ayn Rand told us in “The Fountainhead.” If information is produced which we cannot attribute to environment or heredity, what can be the source?
In some individuals there sometimes arises a sense of the divine, the source of ideals and moral principles. Such notions don’t spring from our animal evolution, from nature with tooth and claw, but from our future as a species or a cosmic source very far away, but also very close. What exactly is the mechanism responsible for the transfer of this spiritual energy is not clear to science. EEG waves have been suggested, but these are very weak and quickly disperse. Interference from other transmitters quickly overwhelms them. Brain waves, not yet detected, emitted at a special frequency may be the medium of spiritual talk.
Such a frequency occurs in the vibrations and palpitations of love, visiting every human bosom, and yours too, I’m sure. Love is an inner experience that cannot be explained rationally. God is also an innermost experience, not a thing to be observed outside of you, and you connect with God when you contact the Cosmic Mind inside your own self. With love, your emotional link to other people and things, you change your narrow self to the Universal Self and you become one with them--and with the mind of God. Such was the experience of many philosophers who broached the ideas of God and the Cosmic Mind. Philosophy, literally love of wisdom, is the search for meanings. The search has given birth to religion, science, and the arts. Almost every major philosopher has embraced religion and ethics; but some philosophers have attacked religion and common morality. Now, as a way of introducing you to my ideas, I will assay a few atheists, then some agnostics, and finally some believers.
3. Nietzsche: Antichrist or Prophet?
A dedicated romantic, who studied ancient Greek literature and art, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900, German-Swiss, was a professor of classical literature at the University of Basil, Switzerland. Today he’s best known for a pseudo-prophetic work, “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” the life and sayings of Zarathustra, or Zoroaster. In “Zarathustra” Nietzsche created a Messiah for our times, a fiery personality, a prophet plunging himself into an obscure spiritual adventure. Much of this epic poem is a diatribe against the Christian God and Judeo-Christian ethics of meekness and compassion for the weak and unfortunate. With this work and others along the same lines, the philosopher thoroughly aroused the animosity of the religious establishment. Nietzsche became the Antichrist. But he was not just an enemy of Christianity. In “Zarathustra” and other books, Nietzsche offered us the ideal of the Superman, a superior species of man who embodies our best virtues and strengths, who seeks life fulfillment in this world, rather than in the Hereafter.
In other major works, such as, “Will to Power,” “Beyond Good and Evil,” and “Ecce Homo,” this philosopher pursues a shocking, almost insane, ethical course. Among other sins, he displays a pathological animosity and contempt for women. Nietzsche, sick from syphilis, died insane at age 56. Yet, his writings have had great influence, because they helped liberate Western thinkers from the limiting doctrines of Christianity.
Liberation from Christian thinking led other Western philosophers to consider atheism, agnosticism and Eastern mysticism as alternatives to established doctrine. Nietzsche influenced the Nazi ideologists, who set up their own ideal of a superior race, Aryan Germans. Hitler’s “Mine Kampf” praised the Will to Power. With brutal force Hitler and his followers achieved many stunning successes for a decade until they finally destroyed themselves and Germany. Never underestimate the power of a bad idea.
Ideas, good or faulty, affect young people most critically. When I was in Athens College preparatory school in Greece, each year (along with ancient Greek and Latin) we had a course on religion, mandated by the government. It was Orthodox Christian dogma and practice, taught by a priest in civilian clothes. Our class was divided into a Classical section, filled by those destined for the liberal arts, and a Science section for those such as myself planning careers in science and technology. Science attracted the best and brightest students then. We were well-read and arrogant. We argued with the priest in religion class constantly, and delighted in tearing down the basic tenets of Christian faith, using arguments from Nietzsche’s works. The little priest fought valiantly for the Orthodox Faith and Church, but he was outwitted and outnumbered. He squirmed in his seat and at last he would burst out, “This is how it is. Get it down right in your exams, or fail the course.” W e got it down right to get a high grade, but among ourselves, we admired Nietzsche for his pride and passion. He had been a rebel against the prevalent Christian doctrine in Europe as we were. The man with the lean high forehead, big drooping mustache and fierce eyes was our hero. He had preached against weakness and conformity.
Nietzsche castigated Christians for their love of humility, their concern for the weak, sick, and poor; he praised great and noble actions, the growth of a superior race of men, preaching a new religion for the strong in body and intellect. In our youthful arrogance we fancied ourselves as noble, superior and brilliantly intellectual, and we fell for Nietzsche’s faulty ethics. Yet, Nietzsche’s works were sources of mental challenge and freedom for us in our youth. We drew courage from his passionate writings to look at age-long doctrines and say, “Nonsense!” Then we could go on from there to our own thinking about the world and moral behavior.
4. William James: God Madness?
More respectful than Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity, in “Zarathustra,” but just as penetrating, was William James’s “Varieties of Religious Experience.” William James, 1842-1910, Harvard psychologist and philosopher, wrote a detached and objective volume on religion. His book includes many written accounts and case histories of mystical experiences among Christians. James offered as examples George Fox, founder of the Quaker movement and Joseph Smith of the Mormons. He recognizes both Fox and Smith as geniuses, imbued with “exalted emotional sensibilities, authority and influence.” Some of James’s stories, however, deal with cases of weird religious behavior because of mental dysfunction and illness. Extreme preoccupation with God, sin, Heaven, and Hell can lead an unstable person to mental illness.
William James’s book was an authoritative work on religion as practiced in the West. He was neither an atheist nor a passionate Christian. He tried to be objective, to have an open mind regarding religious experience. James wrote, those with psychic experiences firmly believe we inhabit an invisible spiritual sphere from which help can come in times of need; our souls are mysteriously one with a larger Soul whose instruments we are.
On the other hand, the case histories he described of people possessed by the Spirit often reveals schizophrenia, manic-depression, and paranoia. It’s hard to come away from reading “Varieties of Religious Experience” without feeling some skepticism about religion. And yet, something important and meaningful happens in such religious experiences as James described. Most people are conventional believers, who follow patterns of faith handed to them by others, patterns established by custom and retained by habit. But a few rare persons go to a source deep inside the mind and make their own discoveries, upsetting the established dogmas and the officials who administer churches. These are the mystics who carve spiritual pathways, create new myths and illusions, burn at the stake, die on the cross, give rise to legends, and set up cults, which sometimes end up becoming major religions.
5. Bertrand Russell: A Paradox of Faith
William James dared to describe religious behaviors like psychological case histories. Bertrand Russell, a mathematician and philosopher, opened up the subject of God to logical scrutiny. In a collection of essays entitled, “Why I am not a Christian,” he shocked his generation with his personal discovery of atheism. Incidentally, he followed that up with another shocker, “Marriage and Morals,” advocating in the nineteen thirties that unmarried couples live together while in college. This cost him a job at City College, New York, at a time when he needed the salary. Russell dealt with Christianity and Christian ethics, not with hostility like Nietzsche, but with contempt. He also expressed sadness that unfortunately this religious dogma was beneath his intellectual height, although he admired its moral teachings. His moral character sprouted as a paradox, because he hopped from faith to atheism, and back to belief in humanism.
Russell was a liberal, though descended from British nobility. (He acquired the title of Earl after the death of his elder brother.) In his entertaining, “Autobiography of Bertrand Russell,” he wrote of his early upbringing as a dutiful Christian by a deeply religious aunt and uncle, his parents having passed away when he was a child. That was a somber faith, steeped in the guilt of original Sin and the hope of Salvation. Russell, a brilliant young man, liberated himself from this dogmatic burden with the help of agnostics such as, Voltaire, Marx, Freud--and the discovery of Sex. His intellectual stance towards faith closely parallels Freud’s in “The Future of an Illusion.” Religion is not bad; it’s mistaken and will be swept away as civilization and science advance.
In spite of his stance on religion, Russell’s popular books from “A History of Western Philosophy” to “The Conquest of Happiness” won him many readers and money. “Principia Mathematica,” an important early work had by his own admission burned him out for other serious projects. Unless you indulge in symbolic logic, you will not find this book readable. But you will love Bertrand Russell’s crystal clarity of thought and subtle wit in his popular books and essays. His writing prowess finally won him the Nobel Prize for literature at an advanced age. And he won recognition for solving an important logical enigma, now known as Russell’s paradox.
He was a paradox too, being a moralist, but an atheist too. At 89 years of age Russell was still fighting for peace and sanity--and being jailed for civil disobedience. He was a true Christian in spirit if not in thought, indulging himself with mystical sentiments in his essay, “A True Man’s Faith,” while scoffing at mysticism and extolling reason in “Mysticism and Logic.” Russell denied God, while being securely connected to the Word.
6. Voltaire: God’s Joker
Voltaire, 1694-1778, was a rascally philosopher with a long sharp nose often stuck into the inflated egos of French nobles and churchmen. He lived and wrote his pamphlets and stories fomenting rebellion before the American and French revolutions. Poking fun at the political and religious rulers of France got him jailed twice and finally exiled for twenty years. He’s best known for “Candide,” with the unflappable Dr. Pangloss, a caricature of the German philosopher Leibniz. “All is for the best,” Pangloss would declare, after pirates captured him and his student Candide. Then the pirates sold them into slavery, and they were tortured. “Divine Providence will provide,” Pangloss would say, glossing over every misfortune and atrocity that fell on the woman Candide loved. Voltaire laughed in this way at religious stupidities.
Voltaire tied many atrocities to the Kings and Cardinals who ruled people’s lives with leaden hands in France and the rest of the Europe. On occasion the princes of the Church and those of the State would feud, as in “The Three Musketeers” of Alexandre Dumas; but normally they cooperated in suppressing all dissent.
Democracy, however, born in ancient Greece and forgotten for a thousand years, flowered again in America with the 1776 revolution against the king of England. In France democracy for the masses meant freedom from hunger. “Give us bread” was their cry, but for intellectuals like Voltaire, democracy meant freedom to think and speak openly without fear of punishment. It was a time when the poor and powerless were allied with free thinkers, students and intellectuals. King Louis XVII and Marie Antoinette dropped their heads in the guillotine and the people were free. After a brief period of parliamentary rule, anarchy and terror came to France and rebellion against the yoke of religion. High ranking churchmen were usually the second sons of titled men and members of the nobility. So the common people attacked the Church as well as the nobles. People chased liberal ideas with abandon until from the ranks of the military rose Napoleon Bonaparte to defend the Republic at first, later to force a new order and a bloody empire. Voltaire rightly mocked such arrogant pretenders to authority as Napoleon.
Voltaire also laughed heartily at the religious idiocies of his time. Moreover, he fostered liberal ideas and humanism in his day. He judged much of the prevailing religious thinking as nothing but superstition, stupidities of the masses exploited by their rulers. Voltaire’s weapons against the establishment were wit, ridicule, and reason. In his writings he mined the comic views of life, death and the divine. With delight he punctured the claims to wisdom by his contemporary philosophers, such as romantic Rousseau and equable Leibniz. He wrote of Rousseau’s penchant for a return to the natural state, Rousseau would have him walk on all fours, but due to advancing age, he was unable to comply. Voltaire was brilliant and often arrogant, but kept his mental balance with wit and humor.
7. Freudian Slips
Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939, is known as the father of psychoanalysis. As a medical doctor and psychiatrist, Freud delved into the recesses of the subconscious mind using hypnosis to treat his patients. Many of them suffered from hysteria, a ready diagnosis for frustrated women in those days, when men ignored their sexual needs, their intellect, and their aspirations. Freud was also an intellectual, a philosopher, and an atheist. He viewed the subconscious mind as a cauldron of psychoses and the idea of God as simply the product of sick minds. In his book, “The Future of an Illusion,” he predicts, with the progress of science, the demise of religion and such mass hallucinations. A century has gone by since his book came out, during which science has made huge advances; but faith in God remains prevalent.
In Freud’s view, religion answers some universal needs of mankind: the need for certainty in a chaotic world, the hope of protection from life’s vicissitudes, the promise of everlasting life in the face of death’s inevitability, and moral guidance in the bewildering passage through the social labyrinth. God is simply an inflated father figure, idealized into an entity of immense power, wisdom, compassion, and authority. The procreator of the believer’s family is thus transformed into the Creator of the universe, the Lawgiver and the Administrator of reward and punishment at the end of life, if not before.
To his credit, though, Freud was the originator of good ideas regarding the subconscious mind. Id, superego, and libido have entered mainstream language in psychological fiction of stories, novels, and plays. Such concepts were impressions of the soul from clinical practice and were tinged by the negative aspects of mental illness. Yet Freud was much admired by many of his contemporaries and other practitioners in psychoanalytic arts, attaining the rank of a cult figure, clothed in the prestige of medical science.
Much of what Freud taught as his medical research, psychiatrists have abandoned in their practice. And psychoactive drugs have largely replaced hypnotherapy and psychotherapy, which required many years on a pricey couch. In spite of some shrinkage, however, Freud remains a towering figure among serious investigators of the human spirit, mainly because of the philosophical and psychological interest he stimulated in the subconscious mind.
Yet Freud slips on religion; faith in the supernatural continues to blossom, and today we know natural healing can provide much comfort to disturbed souls. The priest smiles at Freud’s id and libido, blessing men, women and children with peace after confession, enabling them to face the tumult in their lives without couch and Prozac.
8. Whitehead: There is a God Process
Alfred North Whitehead, 1861-1947, an English mathematician and philosopher of Science, who taught at Cambridge, England, for 25 years and at Cambridge, Massachusetts, for 13 years, was Bertrand Russell’s collaborator on the monumental “Principia Mathematica.” The son of an Anglican clergyman, an atheist he was not. But to Whitehead, God is an evolving process in the universe, not a constant and static entity as in the Christian dogma.
Whitehead believed that God is the source of what is of value in the universe, but not the Creator of the material world. He wrote: “God is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.”
God, evolving with us, leaves us free to choose between good and evil and moves us by persuasion only. This view of God appears in his books “Religion in the Making,” “Science and the Modern World,” and “Process and Reality.” Today Whitehead is considered the father of “process theology,” in which God is process: not changeless and omnipotent, but a growing and evolving entity like all living things, opposing the ever increasing thermodynamic chaos of the universe.
9. The Socratic Way: Finding God with Questions
The Socrates based his method on asking probing questions in searching for truth and virtue. Socrates (470-399 BC) was one of the main pillars of western civilization and many of his contemporaries thought him to be “the wisest, most just and best of men.” In 399 BC he was convicted for preaching against the Greek gods, corrupting the morals of Athenian youth, and punished with death. He could have escaped, gone into exile with the help of his wealthy students, but he chose to uphold the laws of his country and die in jail. According to Plato, his disciple and scribe, Socrates resigned his life by calmly drinking a cup of poison hemlock handed to him by his executioner, while continuing a dialogue with friends and students until he became too numb and weak to sit up and talk. He left a legacy of his method: asking probing questions for finding truth, honor and God. Having found God, Socrates extolled a just Heaven and the immortality of the human spirit.
The talk that Socrates enjoyed to the end was about duty, the value of the soul, and immortality in a world beyond ours. Socrates, an ugly but impressive lion of a man as shown in a statue by Lysippus, never formally educated, worked as a stonemason until he inherited some money from his father. Thereafter, he devoted himself to raising a family with Xanthippe and teaching philosophy. Like the Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed, Socrates did not put his teachings into writing, and we know of them from Plato’s works. Socrates’ students and disciples were scions of the Athenian elite, as was Plato, the founder of the Academy in Athens, which remained a center of learning for hundreds of years, until Christians came to power with the Emperor Constantine.
Plato wrote the dialogues of Socrates, “The Apology,” “Crito” and “Phaedo,” having to do with the trial, imprisonment, and execution of Socrates, mainly to expound his mentor’s ideas about the meaning of life and death. Socrates was never satisfied with stock answers in the quest for wisdom. He went about the agora of Athens, posing sharp questions to all with a claim to certain knowledge and thus deflating egos. He made enemies. In the evenings he gathered his disciples in one of their homes and spent the night drinking watered wine and having philosophical talks. He was poor and lived in a small cottage with his wife and children; but he did not charge his wealthy students money, just his wine, for their lessons.
Socrates often told his students God spoke to him. He called God his “demon,” meaning a spirit, not something evil. His friends often caught him in a frozen trance. He would sit without movement for hours. It could have happened on his way to an important occasion, which he completely forgot, or to a meeting with friends who missed him. When questioned about this strange behavior, he would say God had been talking to him and had to sit down and listen to what God had to say.
In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates asserts his belief in God and the immortality of the soul with complete assurance. He argues his case in detail. Since everything in Nature is cyclical, if death follows life, then life must follow death. The soul, not being perishable, survives death and returns to a new body or joins the gods in Heaven. The soul is rewarded by God for doing the right things in life and enters a better world on its next pilgrimage to earth.
Socrates describes God’s Heaven, the ideal world, as he saw it a dream. Everything in Heaven is well ordered, bright, tranquil and perfect in the magnificent company of the gods and other immortal spirits. In this life we sometimes see shadows of this ideal world, like those on cave walls. We look at the outside, the material world with our senses, but we look at the spiritual world through an inner eye.
Socrates offers this lecture on the ideal world while in jail. His students urge him to let them bribe the guards and escape. He responds that he cannot violate the laws of his country. These laws protected and nourished him for seventy years and he will not disobey them at the end of his life. He says, “I ought to be careful that I did not lose the eye of my soul.”
This eye we all possess allows us, should we choose using it, to look at Heaven “through a glass darkly.” What Socrates sees is a world of material objects and energies; but beyond these, spiritual forces or principles, attributes, ideals, and harmonies--like the harmony continuing to exist even after the lyre that gave it sound has been destroyed. Such is the nature of the soul: it lives on after the body has decomposed. The soul goes to a “higher earth,” free of disease, suffering and death, where the righteous exist forever in peace and joy. The wicked are punished in Hell and are then sent back to earth to live in animal bodies until they prove themselves worthy of human form once again.
To support his ideas on God, Heaven, and the soul’s immortality, Socrates says: “I believe on the authority of one who shall be nameless.” He continues with a vision: The earth is round, vast and a hollow place. We look up from the earth to the heavens as fish look at the surface of the water. A better place exists in the heavens for people purified by philosophy, where they live without bodies in beautiful mansions. These are the souls that have given up pleasures of the flesh and treasures, and instead have sought the jewels of knowledge, temperance, justice, courage, nobility, and truth.
10. Confucius Avoided Religious Confusion
On the opposite side of the earth from Greece, in ancient China, around 500 B.C., lived another immortal philosopher: K’ung Ch’iu or Confucius to you and me. Confucius’s family was in the upper crust of Chinese society and he served in numerous government posts, usually as counselor to the ruler of a province. His disciples collected his teachings in the Analects, which have always had in China as much authority as the Bible in the West; but Confucius was not so much a religious teacher as he was a practical philosopher. Like Socrates, he had an insatiable thirst for knowledge and a passion for wisdom, equaled only by his desire to offer other men the fruits of his mind. He taught true virtue to his countrymen: be good to your fellow human beings.
Confucius, was deeply concerned with discovering for himself and his countrymen what was the right way to live virtuously. Much of his teaching in the Analects has to do with the proper way for a gentleman, as opposed to a common man, to behave. The key characteristic of the gentleman was benevolence: love for all persons. A gentleman uses his own feelings as a guide to determine how to behave towards others so as to benefit and not to injure them. He said, “Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.”
A gentleman is also wise and courageous. He has no fear, anxiety or worry because he is capable of doing the right thing and leaving the rest to Heaven. This is The Way or Tao. Confucius encouraged young people to study the poetry classics, known as the Odes, and to enjoy good music. Confucius judged some music of his time to be wanton, loose and reckless, damaging the character of youth. Confucius said: “He has not lived in vain who dies the day he is told about The Way.” He said, “Put service before the reward you get for it.” He taught: “Attack evil as evil and not as the evil of a particular man.” And, “Love your fellow men.”
Confucius taught about virtue well; but in a long life full of joy and happiness, he had his low moments. He said once: “There’s no one who understands me. If I’m understood at all, it’s perhaps by Heaven.” His was a nimble mind and caution ruled him in giving criticism to others. He was compassionate and kind, teaching virtue and speaking the truth. Not surprisingly, enemies plotted to kill him many times and he was nearly assassinated. He also survived several dangerous illnesses to live to a ripe age. Confucius was a rational and practical man, but his connection to the Cosmic Mind was fully evident in his teachings and the conduct of his life.
11. Spinoza Spinning a Logical God
Many centuries after China’s Confucius, another brilliant intellect, tackled the question of God and immortality on rational grounds. He was Spinoza (1632-1677) and lived in Holland at the time of René Descartes in France and Francis Bacon in England. His open interest in their new scientific and philosophical ideas got him thrown out of his synagogue in 1956. Ostracized by his own people, he lived by grinding and polishing lenses. But philosophy was Spinoza’s love, a philosophy reaching to a logical, mathematical, yet tender God.
Before Holland, Spinoza’s forebears had lived in Spain or Portugal, where their name had been Espinoza. They fled The Inquisition and with other Jews settled in the more tolerant Dutch cities. But this frail, little man wanted to explore Divinity in his own way. Spinoza worked to reduce the concept of God down to a few basic axioms and derive from these all other consequences by means of logic, such as in Euclid’s geometry. He also wrote political treatises and sided with the losing party in Holland. Thus he was put in jail. Given his delicate constitution, he became chronically ill with tuberculosis, and died shortly after his release from prison.
Before dying, however, Spinoza had developed a following among some bright people. He was offered the chair of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, but refused the job to keep his moral independence. He influenced and was influenced by the famous French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, 38 years older, one of the founders of modern science. Spinoza also influenced Leibniz, the great German philosopher. They knew each other personally, although Leibniz denied this friendship to protect himself from dogmatic Christians.
Everyone who got to know Spinoza closely loved this gentle little man with the giant intellect. Spinoza never married, like nine out of ten great philosophers. He spent his days spinning his yarns of divine logic, culminating in his epic volume, “Ethics.” It’s a huge structure of definitions, lemmas, propositions, theorems and corollaries, but not like any mathematics you were taught in school. It drove away all but the most dedicated scholars of religious philosophy. And yet, there are many gems of thought in this and Spinoza’s other works that shine like pure diamonds.
Spinoza begins from Plato’s thought of the ideal world, which is Heaven, and proceeds to establish its validity on the basis of pure reason. God is simply a collection of attributes having to do with Virtue. His existence can be proven. Individual souls are aspects of the Divine Being. Any person can look within and find God. We’re all capable of communion with our Creator. Finite things are defined by their boundaries, but God has to be outside of space and time, infinite. We partake of that infinity when we merely acknowledge our connection to Him. He wrote: “The mind’s highest good is knowledge of God.”
Spinoza’s concept of God, however, is not only logical, but also includes emotional content. The Spirit that descends to us is a blend of exalted feelings, as well as information. The passions have self-preservation as a goal, pleasure itself is good, but the wise man’s self-seeking is different from the common egoist’s: the wise man doesn’t feel separate from others, or the world. A man is in bondage if he’s an unwilling part of the whole, but is free through the understanding of himself and his passions. Love of God is a union of thought and emotion, and this love must hold the chief place in the mind.
12. American Gurus Preached on the Self
Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman: This triad of American writers had much in common. In the turbulent period of the Civil War, they knew and influenced each other. All three were intuitive thinkers who admired Asian philosophy at a time when the West thought Asia had little of value to offer. They preached self-reliance, self-realization, and revelation through our inner self.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born first and lived longest (1803-1882). He was the prophet of self-reliance. “Trust your own self” was his motto. You may judge his writing as obscure, but his message was unmistakable. Have faith: rely on yourself and divine guidance. Be confident and you will achieve your just goals. Emerson was the first man of any importance to recognize the genius of Walt Whitman, who is regarded by most literary critics as the greatest American poet.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born on Long Island and his father was a farmer and carpenter. Whitman worked as a journalist and later in life subsisted on meager sales of his “Leaves of Grass” praised by Emerson. During the Civil War he worked as a war correspondent and nurse. He was probably bisexual and never married, living with his mentally retarded brother.
Whitman spent many happy days wondering along the beaches of Long Island, Paumanok as he called it by its Indian name, composing his immortal poems. “I loaf and invite my soul,” he wrote. Whitman was a mystic and as close to the Source as anyone ever was. “Come and stay with me,” he wrote “and I will show you the source of all religions.” In “Song of Myself,” he wrote, “And I know the spirit of God is the brother of my own.”
Whitman’s spiritual brother was also Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), who wrote “Walden,” and was a naturalist, essayist and poet. Like Emerson he had read Asian philosophers and the Hindu scriptures. He liked living alone on the shore of Walden’s pond, Vermont, in close communion with unspoiled nature. Thoreau was strange and childlike, enthralled by the ways of birds, squirrels, ants, and the changing hues of the waters. He was also a mystic, a beautiful writer and an astute thinker on matters of the spirit. His advice for those searching peace of mind: “Simplify, simplify, simplify!”
That was clear enough, but Thoreau’s writing was sometimes obscure like Emerson’s, because his goal was obscure--that of self realization, getting close to God, as it has been for many holy men in the East. Thoreau wanted to search for God directly without intermediaries and he looked for the divine in his own heart.
13. Dewey: Tools of Religion
John Dewey 1859-1952, an American educator and philosopher, was an inspired apostle of pragmatism. His theory about ideas: ideas are tools for solving problems and dealing with our environment. If we get a thought and it’s of no use to us, we can ignore it or even declare it untrue. Similarly, we can accept as true a notion that proves practical in solving vital problems. God, Heaven, Judgment Day, and other religious doctrines may not exist in the world outside our brains, yet we accept them anyway, because they can help us improve our minds and behavior to survive the shocks of life.
Thus Dewey liberated himself from conventional religion, but remained faithful to the morality of the Christian Church. Jesus was asked, “How shall we know who is the true prophet among all the false ones?” “By their fruits, you shall know them,” he said. For example, consider the consequences for the German people of their trust in the prophet Adolph Hitler. How about herbs and acupuncture? If they work--never mind how--it’s hard to argue against them. Similarly, doctors routinely prescribe medicines and therapies for their benefits, often not knowing how they work.
What works is the approach to knowledge by John Dewey. Who can know the Truth? If we are on the right side of the booby hatch, we know how to behave in accordance with Truth and Justice. If we survive danger, we possess a kernel of reality. Because when something works, it ties in somehow with the universe as it is. What we call reason is nothing but our habitual way of thinking. To break new ground in any field of knowledge or invention, we become irrational; but we cannot ignore the results that follow our thoughts and actions.
CHAPTER II
SPIRITS ARE IDEAS
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My mother Georgia, a vivacious woman in constant motion unless at rest, charmed nearly everyone with her warmth and love of life. In her thirties she suffered from kidney stones and I remember her crying out in the bathroom with pain. She thought she was dying soon from the stones or some other dread ailment and often told us: “Don’t cry for me when I’m dead. I’ll be with you in spirit.”
As a child I adored my mother and when she was not at home for a few days, I’d mope around the house depressed and go into her closet to smell her clothes hanging there with her lavender aroma. Often I had nightmares about her death, her lying on a bed cold and white and unmoving. I’d cry in my sleep with anguish, tears streaming down on my pillow, and say over and over: “I will light candles for you, mother, and keep them lit until I die too.”
One day when she was 33 years old my mother passed the kidney stones in the bathroom and was never again bothered by them or any other serious illness until she became 92. She was small but tough and strong, a packet of energy all her life, rearranging heavy furniture around the house, working as a dressmaker and fitter and doing all household chores. At 92 she was complaining of chest pains and I took her to the doctor who found no problems with her heart. Next morning she was hurting again and I took her for a car ride to a coffee shop, because rides usually relieved her anxiety. She didn’t touch her coffee or bagel, her favorite food, and I took her home. Outside our door, she suddenly slumped in the car seat, clammy and greenish, wheezing strangely. I called 911.
She had suffered a massive heart attack, which destroyed 80% of her heart function. She was in and out of the hospital for the next two months desperately fighting for her life, but when I took her there for the last time, she looked at the building and said, “I’ll never get out of here alive. I’m glad to be the first in my family to go, so I’ll not see any of you dead.” It was summer and my sister Alice was vacationing in Greece with her husband. Mother said, “I’ll never see my little girl again.” A few days later she was in bed at the hospital, wires and tubes attached to her body, wrists tied to the bed so she would not pull out her life support connections and begged me to release her. In tears I told her I could not.
I kissed her forehead and held her for a moment. Shortly, she was cold and still, that vibrant something gone out of her forever.
1. How Was the Idea of Spirit Born?
Seeing life and death up close, it’s natural to imagine and believe something animating and vital leaves the body at death. This vital something has been called soul, spirit or ghost. Consciousness has left the body and gone to some other place or nowhere, depending on your beliefs. People have claimed they have seen something like a spark, radiant emanation, or fog, rise up from the body that has just died. Others have said the body weights a few grams less after death. Scientists haven’t measured such things to this day. They have not detected the graviton that mediates gravity either, although theoretical physicists believe it exists. Similarly, I hold the belief supported by its usefulness and some observations: human spirits exist and are imperishable.
I used to think it absurd to believe consciousness survives death. Consciousness, the self being a function of the brain, ceases when the brain decomposes. Consider the instance when you’re hit hard on the head: just a concussion makes you unconscious. Or, when you’re anesthetized for surgery: some chemicals enter your brain and time disappears until you’re awake. When you sleep deeply, you wake up in the morning and the night is gone. In sleep the brain only partially shuts down to recharge its batteries and rest--and consciousness, except for some dreaming, disappears. How much more so must be the case in the sleep of death!
Death then is the end--or is it? You take up a sledgehammer and give a good whack to your computer. The lights go out and the humming stops. The hardware is a total loss and the operating system has vanished. Has it really? What about the master copy of it in the Microsoft vaults in Seattle, Washington? Clearly a spirit is not a computer program, but Heaven has kept a copy somewhere for all eternity, if worth preserving.
Now, if a spirit is preserved after the body is dissolved, and thus it’s never lost to the universe, then where was it before it entered the body in the first place? Religious theory says it was at the origin: with God. Was then the spirit the same thing or was it a different version? It must have been different and less perfect; otherwise, what would have been the point of the pilgrimage to Earth and the trials and tribulations of life?
If it’s hard to imagine a loved one lost completely to extinction, it is harder still to believe our own self totally gone. Your mind refuses to accept the finality of death for your personal consciousness, even in battle when many of your buddies are dead, stretched still in their blood or in a hospital with terminal illness, next to others departing without a whimper in a drugged state.
We see then how the notion of the eternal spirit has come about. When people or animals we love, wonderful beings, die we cannot imagine that they’re gone to nothingness. For me anyway, watching in old movies Fred Astaire dance, Judy Garland sing, Jimmy Stewart act, and Lana Turner turn on her baby blues, it’s hard for me to believe these talented beings are really, truly, totally and forever dead.
So, primitive man seeing his beloved mother, father, mate or child on the ground, pale and cold, covers the body with stones and sees the beloved’s image moving and speaking in another world, the world of spirits. He lays a bunch of wild flowers on the grave and kneels, his head bent down. The spirit of the ancestor will live in his memory and that of his children. Ancestor worship, such as Shinto in Japan, may have been the first religion. It’s a very valuable idea, because the wisdom of our ancestors continues to guide our steps after they’ve shed their flesh.