Our ability to think free, creative thoughts places, paradoxically,
new constraints on us; for we now have to learn what to think about,
and learn to accept responsibility for our gift.
Mankind has developed the faculty, alone among all life forms
on our planet, to think and reason. This unprecedented step has
led us into the steep learning curve that now characterises our
cultural age.
Thinking has become a reflex experience - we can't stop thinking;
we think all the time, to a greater or lesser extent, and this capacity
must find itself a secure vehicle of expression or lose its way
in chaos. A lot of thought replaces our instinctive need to provide
and survive as we go in search of the immediate and unmodified gratification
of our basic needs, the underlying call of our mammalian heritage.
But what of the other thoughts, those intellectual horizons that
constantly nag us for attention. The easy option is to think what
our parents thought....
Peoples' thinking perspectives tend to be modelled, inevitably,
by their social and cultural conditioning. The cultural inheritance
of the last 2,000 years has been modelled, in the West, by the Christian
ethic. Any philosophical deliberations have been limited by what
has become our thought conditioning. We believe what others want
us to believe, condition it by what we experience on the way and
modify it periodically to appease passing whims.
CHALLENGE
Psychologists observe how a developing child projects upon his parents
to be omnipotent. This enables him to accommodate the primal needs
of his childhood, like food, warmth and protection, and to side-step
most of the major intellectual issues of life, like perhaps, a belief
in his parents' spiritual destiny. Growing up can be hard work -
the newly conceived child must first exert all his power to break
free of his mother's womb, the first and most pressing experience
of his life - only to find himself still held fast by the umbilical
cord, a tie that can constrain him psychologically for the rest
of his life. If he manages to escape the mother's tie at last, he
must then challenge and overcome the father for his own place in
the world and the freedom to express his originality and individuality
-
And Oedipus breaks free....
[] Developing human foetus in the womb.
Mature at last, the grown child now reviews his place in the world
of mankind. We are herd animals, and the herd instinct is expressed
by a desire to follow a leader, like 'The Prophet', 'The Saviour'
or 'The Master' (whomever we may project upon to carry this role).
We seek coequal dependence at the expense of our own creative thought.
We live in fear of being ridiculed, of being isolated from the herd.
We reject those whom we consider non aligned, the infidels who threaten
our frail faith. We have to choose between herd orientation or intellectual
alignment. If we get it wrong we are ostracised by our own kind;
if we get it right, we are liberated forever.
Political persuasions are much in vogue as a refuge from our unchannelled
thoughts. So are religions. As long as we are aligned behind a powerful
and disciplinarian cultural structure we are able to defer our move
towards maturity by perpetuating the unliberated perspectives of
the dependent child. We seek filial refuge in parental institutions.
ALIENATION
Politicians know this, and so do cult leaders, witch doctors, self
appointed messiahs and itinerant saviours. We enjoy being led, and
our leaders enjoy leading us. Soon we are following the profitless
path of repetitive thought which drives itself around in circles,
rather than thinking some creative and original thoughts of our
own, and risking alienation from the tribe. Circular thought is
the barrier to individual liberation, and mankind's lingering Oedipus
complex is the obstruction.
Freud held that the Oedipus complex, (expressed here as the inability
to separate from the 'birth mother', 'the mother church' or 'the
mother state') is at the core of every human neurosis. The complex
is extended beyond infantile fixation to a life long struggle to
break the umbilical cords of our social inheritance, and be born
into unconditioned and unrestrained maturity. The security afforded
by a parent is the same security offered by the authoritarian political,
religious or social structures of the world. These primary ties
to parental institutions give us refuge in both the physical and
intellectual sphere. When they become threatened we respond with
all the extremes of passion that generate anarchy, racism and genocide.
The main religions of the world now number so many diverse sects,
divisions and chapels that their real message is often lost in the
battles that are fought in their name. This is the visible face
of circular thinking; we have long forgotten what our gurus said
and are no longer able to interpret what they meant; we are locked
into a mode of self expression quite devoid of individual input.
We are performing a repetitive cultural ritual in obedience to our
ancestral thought conditioning.
ABRAHAM
The great patriarch Abraham lived 4,300 years ago and became, with
his sons, the father of not only Judaism but of Islam and Christianity
as well.
Abraham's wife Sarah failed, initially, to bear him a child. So
in the custom of the day he lay with Sarah's handmaid, Hagar, and
she bore him a son called Ishmael. The event triggered Sarah's fertility
and not long afterwards she too brought forth a son, who was named
Isaac. Now regretting her husband's liason, Sarah drove off Hagar
and her child into the desert. They wandered far South to the Arabian
peninsular to dwell among the desert nomads; there Ishmael founded
the Arabic people. Isaac's son, Jacob, journeyed North among the
settled tribes becoming established in the fertile Jordan valley
and founded the Jewish race. And so started the cultural division
between Arab and Jew that persists to this day.
What unholy divisions the redoubtable Abraham sired with generations
of religious bloodshed to mark the passing of time; fundamentalist
sects are, even in this enlightened age, on the increase - and are
invariably powered by circular thoughts unable to break free of
matriarchal or patriarchal conditioning. True to our ill channelled
passions, we are ready to kill rather than stray alone into a reasoned
world of tolerance and spiritual harmony.
When driving in Saudi Arabia recently I was stopped near Mecca
and directed to the, thus named, 'Christian Bypass', a road especially
constructed to keep infidels out of the Holy City. Jews aren't even
allowed into the country.
In all these religious disciplines the repetition of circular thought,
the perpetuating of unreasoned doctrine passed on from parent to
child, has locked the faithful into intellectual stagnation powered
by pure memory functions, devoid of any creative, original or personal
input.
Whilst we won't change history with idealistic observations, I
feel we can take immediate steps to disempower the negative whim
of secondhand thought patterns by replacing them with our own original
perspectives. Those that dare to stray from the herd will find rich
grazing in their maturity and their new found liberation.
I believe the true synthesis of science and spirituality is only
just beginning, and our generation is responsible for its development.
The logical, left-brain stance of science, manacled for generations
by indisputable but incomplete scientific facts, is now finding
ways to embrace the sometimes inexplicable and generally intuitive
perception of the right-brain. Words like morphic resonance are
entering our vocabulary as scientists strive to reconcile fact and
fancy, matter and spirit.
If a religious or political thought system contributes to personal
growth and development, and if it is secure enough to tolerate debate,
question and challenge, then its practitioners' spiritual flowering
will be prolonged and sustained. If, however, a system is dogmatic
and restrictive, and its teachers self righteous, dictatorial and
intransigent, then the subject's intellectual participation is silenced,
and bitterness, anger and aggression will simmer dangerously beneath
an ingratiating exterior. We are imprisoned, gripped by our failure
to challenge the archetypal father and break our Oedipal bonds -
and to learn at last to think, learn to love...
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