Page 395 of
Print Edition Demystifying the role of religions

With understanding of how people have lived in mortal fear of integrative meaning or God and thus have had to resign themselves to living a life of almost total denial of it—imprisoned in a deep, dark ‘cave’ well away from the glare of the ‘sun’ as Plato described it in his allegory—it is not difficult to understand the immensely valuable role ‘religions’ came to play in the human journey.

While the resigned state of denial saved humans from condemnation, it could eventually lead to a state of so much darkness, so much soul-death and meaninglessness, that the despair from living in that state was worse than the condemnation it provided an escape from. When this happened, life became so bereft of access to our species’ original, cooperatively orientated, happy, healthy, God-imbued state that people began to feel a desperate need to find their way back to some connection with it. Humans were forever burying their condemning, ignorant, idealism-demanding instinctive soul or ‘child within’, only to find they wanted to unearth ‘the child’ again; they deliberately blocked out and lost sight of the cooperative meaning of life but as a result became so disorientated and lost that they had to try to find their way back to it again. As Fiona Miller said in her extraordinarily truthful poem (quoted in the Resignation essay), after resignation humans ‘spend the rest of life trying to find the meaning of life and confused in its maze’. Such was the oscillation, or Yin and Yang, or dialectic of life, under the duress of the human condition. On one hand humans were forever struggling with the consequences of living in denial, yet on the other were trying to face the unconfrontable truth about their corrupted, divisive condition.

The value of religions was that they provided an avenue for humans to be realigned or re-integrated with the true, cooperative, loving world of soul that they had previously devoted all their time denying, repressing and burying. In fact the word ‘religion’ comes from the Latin re-ligare, which means ‘to bind’ or integrate. By embracing and deferring to the true world and true words of the prophet around whom their religion was created, alienated people were able to live through the prophet’s unresigned access to that true soulful world. They could be re-associated with or ‘born-again’ to the true world. (Incidentally, the common use of the term ‘born-again’, a Page 396 of
Print Edition term introduced by Christ [see John 3:3], represents a slip of resigned humans’ evasive guard because it implicitly acknowledges that at some stage in life humans had killed off their true self, died in soul, an event which can now be seen as resignation. Similarly, humans’ use of the word ‘alienated’ is an implicit admission that humans have become dissociated from their true self.)

Through religions people could relieve the pain they suffered as a result of their alienation and dishonesty by acknowledging the denial-free, honest world of the prophet their religion was built around. Religions saved people from themselves, from living so dishonestly, from the agony and guilt of being so false. Christ for example was called ‘the saviour’. He saved people from having to live so falsely by providing people with a way to be ‘born-again’ to a state of relative honesty. By supporting the prophet, people were indirectly recognising the prophet’s soundness and indirectly admitting to their own lack of soundness. The words ‘relative’ and ‘indirectly’ have been italicised for emphasis because the person was not totally or directly admitting to their corrupted, alienated state. While this admission of corruption and alienation was implicit in their actions, people were not having to openly admit to it. To do so was something they could not afford to do while they could not explain their corrupted, alienated state. To openly admit to their corruption while they could not explain it would have led to dangerous suicidal depression. Adopting a religion was a way for humans to be as honest as they could possibly be, short of being suicidally honest. As Carl Jung was fond of saying about the Christian religion, ‘in Christianity the voice of God can still be heard’ (The Undiscovered Self: Present and Future, 1961).

Above all, to be religious was an expression of ‘faith’, faith that there was another world and state to which humans had lost access, and faith that one day that state would be regained.

In the book, The Last Two Million Years, under the heading ‘Beginnings of Religion’, it is stated that ‘Man’s religious urge through the ages has found expression in a bewildering variety of beliefs, ideas and practices. But one factor seems permanent and universal in religious experience: the sense of a supernatural “other world” which, though invisible, is believed to have power over men’s lives. Even in the few religions which do not recognise a God, or are indifferent to the idea of one, such as early Buddhism or Jainism, this supernatural world is assumed to exist. Since the dawn of human consciousness men and women have regarded the supernatural world with a mixture of awe, fear and hope, and sought to bring Page 397 of
Print Edition their lives into harmony with it’ (Reader’s Digest, 1973, p 284 of 488). This ‘other world’ that humans have regarded with the extremely contradictory mix of ‘awe, fear and hope’ is in fact not ‘supernatural’, as in a realm beyond or above the natural physical world; rather it is ‘ultranatural’, the true, natural world that humans blocked out, became alienated from, when they resigned. In fact it was a reverse-of-the-truth lie to describe this ‘other world’ as supernatural, because it is humans’ resigned, alienated state that is the unnatural or supernatural state.

In the Plato essay R.D. Laing talked about humans being separated from their true soulful state by ‘a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete’. In part the quote was ‘The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man [p.24 of 156]  …between us and It [our soul] there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded [p.118]’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967). We can now appreciate Laing’s famous comment that ‘Insanity is a perfectly natural adjustment to an insane world.’ The resigned evasive world was a state of such deep denial of the truths about our world and our condition that it was effectively ‘an insane world’, and escaping to a state of derangement or insanity did make a lot of sense. It is now also possible to understand the comment made by Diogenes, the Greek philosopher who was Plato’s contemporary, that ‘Most men are within a finger’s breadth of being mad’. (Incidentally, since holding onto such a false state has been extremely difficult and humans have been doing it for some 2 million years, natural selection must have excluded many people who could not adopt denial. This means that all humans today must have some instinctive propensity to block out the true world, a situation that makes the task of having people now confront the truth all the more difficult.)

While religions could not liberate humans from the agony of the human condition because they could not explain why humans are good and not bad (that enlightening explanation depended on science first finding sufficient understanding of the workings of our world), in providing people with an indirect way to reconnect with the soul’s true world, they provided them with an invaluable way to withdraw from the brink of madness.

Religions could offer a degree of relief from the agony of the human condition but only with understanding of the human condition, which is at last found, could it end. It should be emphasised that the new culture that is coming has nothing to do with a new Page 398 of
Print Edition religion. As stated in my earlier two books, ‘this work brings about the end of faith and belief and the beginning of knowing’.