Tuesday, September 8, 2015

GOD, BIBLE, JESUS, US AND POST MODERN SCIENCE..... September 8, 2015

When anyone speaks of us humans being as God, even Jesus made the statement, it must primarily mean that the only avenue by which God has ever been imagined has come through the natural human psyche.

There is no story or metaphor of God in or out of the Bible that demands  the notion that  God came , or was revealed, to humanity except through the natural processes of the human psyche. All comes to us from within us, the mind or psyche. No reality outside of us, including God, is pushed literally or physically into our heads and we thus get an image of it ...whether it be a tree or a god. There is no other way to comprehend or to be conscious except through the natural processes of the psyche. God was never, by any normal evidence, ever anything 'outside the human' that the human discovered. It seems quite important to get clear this awareness in order for our notion of god to further develop from the ' Super being in the sky.'

This does not mean that any human is equal to God or that the idea or experience of God is always as Freud said,  'only a crutch for the weak minded'. No human has ever or can ever 'know' and thus embrace consciously the whole psyche. In fact most of the whole collective  psyche remains unconscious to any one human and even to all humanity's combined consciousness.
The part of anything can never embrace the whole but the part can be the home of the whole and so we are, in that sense, all God in potential.
For all that can be potentially known is at home within us. Philosophers have spoken of the          'Macrocosm being contained in the Microcosm.' This, if Jesus were truly a human being, had to also be true of him or else, by any psychological definition of human, he was not fully human. Of course Jesus of Nazareth must most assuredly been  fully human-- and thus  potentially  God. This reasoning does astonishingly imply at some point God and Human become the same from different perspectives. But like us, for Jesus to remain human means he also did not embrace or become conscious of the whole psyche- the  Collective Unconscious. Only his admirers claimed that status for him. And their claim need not be considered a delusion or deception  but an evolutionary psychological fact for them.

Now there have always been humans who have claimed to be God overtly or by their presumptuous
behavior and their cultures have usually recognized them, when in that state of mind,  as not healthy representatives of the human species. Jesus was no doubt a very healthy representative of our species so would have made no such claims for himself.

It was not deception by which those who after his death told and wrote about him made him to be the totality of what depth psychology now calls  the Collective Unconscious or God but a sincere natural human process we can now call unconscious projection. Everything that is or can be that has not become conscious to the human is automatically and unconsciously(without our knowing it) projected onto something in the outside world and there we 'see' what was already in us both good and ill.

We have within us an image or many images of God and, until we become more conscious of how we 'see' or imagine God by projection we unconsciously project these images of 'all knowing' and 'all powerful', 'all perfection' and 'all horrible' onto the outside, most usually as a 'person' or 'being' much like ourselves only much more of everything. Thus our unconscious determination to keep alive the Big Person, anthropomorphic image of God in the sky.
One among many ways to begin to grasp our own projection of the internal psychic God image is to explore our experience of how we projected this on to our parental figures as small children when personal consciousness was just beginning to unfold. We 'saw' them as 'extremely powerful, knowing and either very kind or the opposite.' Our parents simply were not truly as we 'saw' them but were very much our own projections. Many persons cling strongly to those original parental projections their entire life, never facing and integrating the imperfections of their own human parents. Humans become conscious of such projections and many others in varying degrees for reasons we do not know. It seems evolution of the mind pushes us to withdraw projections as much as possible so we become more conscious. The level of consciousness attained, and there are always many blind spots remaining, does not depend primarily on having superior intelligence but more likely on experiences, inner and outer, that seem to push one to doubt the conventional notion of  'common sense' reality and to intuit that there is a 'world unseen'. An underlying penetrating world  that is just as real and influencing us, mostly unconsciously, as the  biased conventional claim to see clearly the material world as it 'actually is' whether acknowledged or not. 


Finally now, in the past 100 years, the objective processes of science, which at first supported our common human confidence of the certainty of the material world being substantially what it 'appears' to be by common sense, is showing us more and more(via Sub Atomic Quantum Theory) that consciousness development in the human is the process of dropping our projections along with all other kinds of biases and assumptions in what can be a long and painful, as well as exhilarating, awakening to more and more of what is more  real and true. The maxim, " Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free" continues to be happening with us.