A Species In Denial—The Demysticification of Religion
Page 438 of
Print Edition Why the psychologically desperate do not suffer from the ‘deaf effect’
While talking about ‘soundness centering people’, it can now be explained why the psychologically desperate don’t suffer from the ‘deaf effect’, the difficulty of reading about the human condition (as explained in the Introduction).
It is not difficult to understand that in living in such an extreme state of denial or alienation, resigned humans could reach a crisis point where they had become excessively alienated from their true self and as a result become what is labelled ‘psychotic’. While it can now be understood that virtually all people have been psychotic to a significant degree, people with extreme psychosis—the ones society evasively refer to as being ‘people with psychological problems’—can often ‘hear’ discussion of the human condition. There are two reasons for this. One is that they have become so desperate for relief from their exhausted, alienated state that they are ready and wanting to hear the realigning truth. The other is that people who have become extremely alienated may want to maintain their denials but under the stress of their circumstances, the rigidly maintained structure of denial in their mind breaks down, and the truth, as it were, is able to slip through these shattered defences. As was mentioned in Resignation, R.D. Laing was describing the ‘shattered defence’ access to the truth when he said that ‘the cracked mind of the schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter the intact mind of many sane people whose minds are closed’ (The Divided Self, 1960, p.27 of 218). Laing went on to say that the German existentialist, Karl Jaspers, considered the biblical prophet Ezekiel ‘a schizophrenic.’ While some biblical prophets may have accessed the soul’s true world using shattered defence, those who had full and natural access to the soul were exceptionally sound, unresigned men, rather than exceptionally exhausted, alienated, separated from their true self, or schizophrenic people.
As mentioned, Christ was aware that his unevasive, human-condition-confronting ‘language was not clear’ to most people, that they couldn’t ‘hear’ what he had to say. The very sick, however, were able to hear his unevasive words and were thus able to have their psychosis or soul-denial healed, along with all the outward, physical expressions of this psychosis. The truth is, the agony of the human condition Page 439 of
Print Edition has been the real agony in human life and the real cause of most physical sicknesses.
In summary, there are four categories of people who can readily ‘hear’ discussion about the human condition. They are those who have not yet reached the age of resignation; those who are exceptionally innocent and didn’t have to resign to a life of denial of the issue of the human condition; those who are ‘ships at sea’, who should have resigned but didn’t; and those who are exceptionally alienated and can hear through their shattered defence. All those in between, which is the great bulk of humanity, have great difficulty reading about the human condition.