And it came
to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and
said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am.
And he said, Take
now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get
thee into the land of Mor'ah, and offer him there for a burnt
offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.
—Genesis, 22:1-2
Divine
Relationships
Abraham, in the Genesis
account, has been said to epitomize "the human of
faith." The way
of faith is one manner of relationship to the divine, and it
can be contrasted to the modes characteristic of what have been
called the "archaic human," the "historical"
or "modern human," and the "posthistorical"
or "postmodern human."
What characterizes the faithful
human is separation from the divine, strict obedience, and
fear of God. The archaic
human, by contrast, lives in harmony with divine order and,
through ritual, seeks the re-creation of that order. The modern
human is even more separated from the divine and makes
historical, this-worldly, interpretations of events—that is to
say, this person does not attribute to events a divine
significance or see them as part of a divine order or as
indication of falling away from that order.
What characterizes the postmodern
relationship to the divine is conjecture as yet, but it has been
said that it contains elements of all three of the other
relationships and that in it the divine is most clearly
identified with the person. That is, that the divine order
is seen as identical to that within the deepest parts of the
person or that the order is created out of the highest
expression of the person. At any rate, it is that the
person's deepest (or highest) will is identical to God's
will. It is in this sense, also, that the postmodern
attitude might be called existential. It is in this sense
that it coincides with the view of the perennial philosophy, as
described and defined in Aldous Huxley's classic book of the
same name.
My reason for bringing out these
different modes is to indicate that there are different ways of
interpreting the divine relationship. The Abraham story in
The Bible expresses
one of these types, but only one.
His story is said to be the prototype of
the faithful human.
And within itself the story is consistent, and it points to an
interpretation that corresponds to it. The interpretation
is the obvious one; and it is the traditional
one—specifically, that we can not know the ways of the divine
and therefore our relationship to it should be one of strict,
nonthinking obedience. God does not have to make sense to
us, to satisfy our intellect or our feelings of right and
wrong. The essence of faith is in taking that leap outside of one's own considered judgment and placing total reliance,
dependence, and trust in something other than one's self.
What I will attempt here, however, will
be to look at the Abraham story from the perspective of another
of the different relationships to the divine—specifically, the
postmodern one. In doing so, I feel that new light might
be thrown on this age-old story.
First, however, let us briefly compare
the different relationships to the divine along the criterion of
separation from God. Doing so, I believe, yields something
like the chart that follows:
As you can see, in the postmodern perspective persons are
identified with God, whereas there is separation between God and
the person in the relationship of faith.
Knowing
God's Will
With these distinctions in mind, now,
let us turn to the story itself. The first question I wish
to ask concerning this story, as reproduced at the beginning of
this article, is, could Abraham have really known God's
will? Can we really know God's will? If so, how do
we know God's will?
There are many ways that we attempt to
discern the will of the divine. Chief among these has been
the use of The Bible and other holy
scriptures, dreams, divination, hallucinations, visions, and
intuition—intuition that is used both in and of itself and as
brought to bear upon one or several of the foregoing. For
us, then, intuition is essential; we must seek to discern or
uncover, in the light of reflection, meditation, or
contemplation, what it is that the divine will have of us.
The message must be gleaned, as it were, from the stuff of
personality, or ego, or simple randomness; the wheat separated
from the chaff.
In the Abraham story, however, the
communication of God's alleged will comes to him directly, as
spoken. Keep in mind that our interpretation of all that
follows in the story hinges on our acceptance of this assertion,
hinges thus upon a fundamentalist and literal interpretation of
these verses, hinges upon our acceptance of The
Bible as the Word
of God.
Now, for a long time and for many people
even today, The Bible was
the Word of God. Therefore it was not liable to
error. Modern historical research and cross-cultural
information have allowed us to drop this impossible presumption
and to instead interpret The
Bible as spiritual literature, not as spiritual fact.
This allows us to ask questions that are not even conceivable
under traditional circumstances.
Misunderstanding
God
In light of the preceding statement of
how we can know God's will, such a question might be, could
Abraham have been wrong? Could he have misunderstood the
Lord, or misinterpreted God's will?
I realize, in asking this, that we are
attempting something that was not the intention of the author,
whether these scriptures are taken as historical fact and as the
Word of God or even if taken as spiritual literature. One
could argue that we are reading into them something that was
never intended by anyone ever to be there. Be that as it may,
this story is one that has survived and come down to us,
maintaining itself in our collective consciousness, for
thousands of years. Told, and retold to children, of
generation upon generation in Judeo-Christian culture, it is a
mythological landmark in the socialization of many, including
myself.
I recall the dilemma of Abraham—a
rather heady one for a child to consider, it occurs to me
now—being put to us grade-schoolers on more than one
occasion. It seemed this story was a favorite touchstone
for instilling something or other into us that was especially
important to those who taught us, at every level of elementary
school.
I remember being taken into the story,
"What would you
do if you were Abraham? What would you
do if God told you to destroy something that you wanted very
much? How do you think Abraham felt? Can you imagine
his dilemma?" Transporting us into the story, into
the very sandals of Abraham, was a powerful ploy—it definitely
had us thinking. From there we were skillfully led to the
"proper" conclusion and understanding of the
story—that is, that it represents the degree of obedience God
requires, that it presents the exemplar of such
obedience—Abraham—and the unthinking and dutiful response he
came to in his fear of God, and the rewards that come from such
obedience—in Abraham's case, the fatherhood of nations.
I earnestly considered all this and
applied myself to understanding its messages as they were
presented, and to accepting them. But though I convinced
myself that I had it, still a part of me inside, a feeling,
would remain—an uneasy feeling about the kind of God that
would make such a demand . . . and then there was a funny
feeling about Isaac.
Now, we may not agree with this
traditional interpretation of Abraham and Isaac; but we must
concede that taken as myth, as an element of our collective
psyche retold across the generations, we have every right to
interpret it.
In other words, it has potency and
meaning for us, to be sure. That it resonates with
something in our psyche or collective or personal unconscious is
certain. What it is that it resonates with is something
that is an open question. As myth, in its configuration it
may be reflecting realities within us, other than those we have
previously addressed.
So let us consider if Abraham may have
misinterpreted God's will. This notion is not so absurd
when we consider the story's placement after the fall from grace
in Eden.
One interpretation of the Eden myth
concerns God's direct communication with Adam and Eve prior to
the Fall. It is said that Original Sin occurs out of the
fact that Eve begins talking to the serpent and making decisions
of her own without consulting God—keeping Him "in the
dark," so to speak.
So Original Sin, it follows, occurs out
of our separating ourselves from God, turning from Him, as it
were, to the things of the world and leaving off direct
communication with Him. The result is that we are banished
from Eden—the place where we "walked with God"—and
are thrust out on our own, "in the sweat of thy face,"
to work it out by ourselves.
First
Fall
Now, the obvious psychological corollary
to this pattern of falling from grace is that of one's birth
into this world. Prior to birth, many of us have a direct
relationship to the divine. The first shutdown has not occurred—that is, the first time that we
have retreated from our roots in the infinite because of our
entanglement in the pain of physical existence. Birth
trauma causes this first major shutdown, this first major
forgetting of our divinity.1
After birth we no longer "walk with God" as
easily, like most of us did in the womb. We are too caught
up in the world, its play of pleasure and pain, our survival in
it.
On the other hand, the obvious historical corollary to the fall from grace in Eden is the switch
from the hunter-gatherer way of life to the
horticultural—termed by anthropologists the
agrarian revolution. For most of our time on this
planet, our species has lived as hunter-gatherers. Only at
a certain point did some of us begin the agrarian attempt to
harness the natural order for our benefit. The
hunter-gatherer and the horticultural lifestyles correspondingly
reflect two radically divergent ways of viewing oneself and the
world—two separate attitudes, two different consciousnesses,
if you will.
In the agrarian worldview, people are
separated from nature and seek to control it. By contrast,
the hunter-gatherer sees in nature a great provider who asks
only that one relate harmoniously to it and act in harmony with
it. Since Nature is seen as beneficent, this dependence on
it is not viewed as a problem. Still, it implies a strong
element of basic trust, whereas the agrarian culture seeks to
control the natural and economic forces upon which it is
dependent and implies basic mistrust. The relationship for
the agrarian society, thus, is one of fear, struggle, attempt to
control nature, and to propitiate and appease God—in a word, separation.
Notice that at the outset, in The Bible, immediately after being thrown out of Eden, people are
horticultural:
And Adam knew his wife; and she conceived,
and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord.
And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of
sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.
(Genesis,
4:1-2)
We, of course, did not really start out
keeping sheep and tilling the ground. So in Genesis
the entire period of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of
years of hunter-gatherer culture is subsumed under the time in
Eden. But then we ate fruit from the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil. We no longer trusted God and instead
attempted ourselves to gain power over nature by the separation
of life into a duality of good and evil and pleasure and
pain—struggling to avoid one and possess the other. In
doing this we began our agrarian lifestyle, and so we were
thrust out of the garden.
At any rate, the point is that viewing
it either psychologically or historically, it can be said that
the fall from grace in Eden is such that ever afterwards people
are indirectly related to God and Nature. They have turned
their back on the beneficence of God, or Nature, and seek to go
it on their own, to control Nature, to focus on survival.
In that they are focused now on the world, they can see only a
reflection of the divine. And in that reflection they seek
to discern God's will.
Second
Fall
Everything that happens in The Bible, then, can be taken in the light of its occurring after
the separation of humans from God. Cain can kill
Abel—and even lie to God about it—and so on.
Then we arrive at Abraham.
Assuming this divergence of God and humans, what kind of truth
might the story of Abraham be reflecting? I believe it is
possible to see in Abraham, not only an example of mistakes that
one can make in understanding the divine after the fall from
grace in Eden, but also a reflection of a psychological reality,
a psychological event. I submit that this event occurs to
us all as a consequence of that fall—which in history is the
adoption of horticulture and in idiostory
(an individual's life) is one's birth. I contend that this
event reinforces the psychospiritual shutdown at birth and
reinforces the limited consciousness of the agrarian
society. It narrows consciousness even further and makes
possible the suppression of self and feelings and needs that are
characteristic of the horticultural society's commitment to
economic control and survival values. Therefore we might
call it the second fall
from grace—the "civilized" fall from grace.
Abraham, as the person of faith,
exemplifies those qualities of separation from the divine will
within. He denies his inner conscience as the voice of
God; we know his conscience is at odds with him else there is no
dilemma here. He demonstrates that humans, in this mode of
relating, doubt their highest understanding and look outside of
it for evidence of God's will. Humans are no longer
identified with God. Human's highest expression is
different from God's expression. Human's deepest will is
separate from God's will. Thus, God can demand of a human
actions that go against her or his innate sense of rightness and
morality (which is the inner representative of God). God
can even play the role of the devil and tempt humans—as it is
written that God decided to "tempt" Abraham in giving
him this command. I submit that all of these, taken
together, are the psychospiritual characteristics of the second,
the "civilized," fall from grace.
Primal Scene
But when does this second fall, this
psychological event, happen in one's individual history?
Just as the first shutdown, the first fall from grace, happens
at birth with the forgetting of our divine heritage in the
travails of the birth trauma, so also this second fall from
grace—the mechanics of which are exemplified in the Abraham
story—occurs at the time of the primal
scene, with the denial of our inner God under the
terrorizing influence of what might be called social, societal,
or relationship trauma.2
This primal scene is said by Arthur Janov to occur
somewhere, on the average, at around the ages of 4 or 5.
It is at this point that the child perceives the hopelessness of
ever being loved for him- or herself and becomes instead what
the parents (and, by proxy, society) want. Their needs
become her or his needs.
The real self, the "child
within," the natural self, the God within is slain and
buried in the unconscious, indeed, becomes the unconscious
self. Janov (1970) explains this process of losing the
real self in a systematic and detailed manner. He points
out, first of all, that
We are all creatures of need. We are
born needing, and the vast majority of us die after a lifetime
of struggle with many of our needs unfulfilled. These
needs are not excessive—to be fed, kept warm and dry, to
grow and develop at our own pace, to be held and caressed, and
to be stimulated. These Primal needs are the central
reality of the infant. The neurotic process begins when
these needs go unmet for any length of time. . . .
Since the infant himself cannot overcome
the sensation of hunger (that is, he cannot go to the
refrigerator) or find substitute affection, he must separate
his sensations (hunger; wanting to be held) from
consciousness. This separation of oneself from one's
needs and feelings is an instinctive maneuver in order to shut
off excessive pain. We call it the split.
(p. 22)
The original split evolves into the
permanent disconnection between the real and unreal
selves—between the real, needing, "feeling" self and
the self we must pretend to be in order to try to get some of
our needs satisfied.
Demands for the child to be unreal are not
often explicit. Nevertheless, parental needs become the
child's implicit demand. The child is born into his
parents' needs and begins struggling to fulfill them almost
from the moment he is alive. He may be pushed to smile
(to appear happy), to coo, to wave bye-bye, later to sit up
and walk, still later to push himself so that his parents can
have an advanced child. As the child develops, the
requirements upon him become more complex. He will have
to get A's, to be helpful and do his chores, to be quiet and
undemanding, not to talk too much, to say bright things, to be
athletic. What he will not do is be himself. The
thousands of operations that go on between parents and
children which deny the natural Primal needs of the child mean
that the child will hurt. They mean that he cannot be
what he is and be loved. . . . Rather, the child begins
acting around his parents, and then elsewhere, in the manner
expected by them. He says their
words and does their thing.
(p. 25)
In contrast:
A loved child is one who's natural needs
are fulfilled. Love takes his Pain away. An
unloved child is the one who hurts because he is
unfulfilled. A loved child has no need for praise
because he has not been denigrated. He is valued for
what he is, not for what he can do to satisfy his parents'
needs. (p. 24)
The upshot of this process, then, as Sam
Keen (1972) described it:
He knows he cannot both be himself and be
loved. So he splits into a real and an unreal
self. His real feelings are sealed in the throbbing
vault of the lonely inner self and he begins to tailor his
conduct to the expectations of his parents. His
watchword becomes: I will be what you want me to be if
you will only love me. Although I feel hurt, alone,
fearful, and unlovely, I will act trustworthy, loyal, helpful.
. . . Henceforth the budding neurotic child gets plastic
approval but no genuine love. His unreal self is
rewarded for being obsequious while his real self seethes in
the prison of loneliness.
(p. 46)
The primal scene itself, however, is
that crystallizing event that for the child symbolizes the
essential truth of all the accumulated interactions which from
birth on have demonstrated that in order to get a semblance of
one's needs fulfilled, one can not simply be oneself but must
instead struggle to please another—for now a parent or
parents, later it will be a lover, a spouse, a boss, society in
general.
As mentioned, the time of its occurrence
is usually around the age of 4 or 5. In its configuration
we may begin to see the parallel to the Abraham and Isaac story.
Children As Assets
At the primal scene, the God within, the
real self of the child, is sacrificed. The altar she or he
is sacrificed on is that of the parents' own supposed growth
needs. Just as Isaac, the son, the child, is to be offered
in sacrifice to Abraham's relationship to the divine, his
"spiritual needs," if you will; so also we, each and
every one of us, are required to redirect, to conform, and to
shape our inner-directed natural purposiveness, our divine
heritage, into the other-directed wants and needs of the
collective, the economy, which in its initial presentation is
that of the parents.
This factor in psychological development
became immensely more important in history with the changeover
from hunter-gatherer to agrarian means of subsistence wherein
children became important economic assets. And the
differences in modes of child-rearing are evident from current
anthropological study as we see a tendency for greater
indulgence, care, and tolerance towards children in
hunter-gatherer societies compared with greater harshness and
attempts to train and re-form children for social and economic
ends in horticultural societies. See on this website, for
example, "Organic Parenting,"
Lyn-Piluso & Lyn-Piluso, 1994.
For other examples of such different
attitudes toward children, look to Colin Turnbull's (1961) study
of the Pygmies, a hunter-gatherer society, in The
Forest People. For the classic analysis of this
process of repression of self in the face of society, see
Freud's (1961) Civilization
and Its Discontents. Refer to Arthur Janov's (1970) The Primal Scream and Abraham Maslow's (1968) Toward a Psychology of Being for the alternative perspective on this
same process, as I am presenting it here.
However, we need only look around us for
direct evidence of this phenomenon of child neglect in the
service of parental needs. This trend of agrarian
societies seems to have become even more pronounced in
industrial-technological societies. Indeed, Whiting and
Child (1953), in their classic cross-cultural study, found the
Western societies of fifty years ago to be among the very lowest
in terms of the degree of indulgence that we afforded our
children.
But currently we perceive an additional
trend. Formerly, the child's needs were neglected in favor
of economic and social values as presented by the father.
In this age of equality, however, women have joined the ranks of
men and so equally put their supposed social, economic,
personal, "spiritual," and psychological growth needs
ahead of the child's real physical, emotional, psychological,
and spiritual ones. "Liberation" has brought
with it the freedom for women to be as equally neglectful of
their children's needs as have men. And so we have child
care, preschools at earlier and earlier ages, and latchkey kids.
In fairness, though, some women as well
as men are fighting this strong socioeconomic, cultural, and
psychological trend and are striving to be caring, loving,
giving of time, and attentive to their offspring in ways that we
perhaps do not see as a societal characteristic except in
hunter-gatherer societies. (For an explanation of this
evolution, see "The
History of Childhood As the History of Child Abuse,"
deMause, 1994, on this website.) So we see that
freedom, as always, includes the freedom to abuse as well as to
improve.
Isaac's
Eyes
At any rate, the psychological structure
of the Abraham myth and that of the typical primal scene in the
life of the individual are the same. In eliciting this
from the myth, we have to make the unusual effort to see through
the eyes, not of Abraham or of God, but of Isaac. The
son's perspective screams out its significance in the poignancy
of its utter absence. To mangle Shakespeare's words: it
doth disappear too much. The absolute only indication of
the son's perspective is given in his question: "My father
. . . behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a
burnt offering?" (Genesis,
22:7)
This lone statement is telling in its
innocence and utter dependence on the parental figure.
Both innocence and dependence are important elements in the
psychological construct I am describing.
But to elicit the other
elements—betrayal and hopelessness not the least of
these—let us jump into Isaac's sandals. What might the
boy be thinking and feeling with all these heavy dealings
unfolding around him? At a certain point, the realization
that sets in is identical to that of the four- or five-year-old
at the time of the primal scene. Equally ignored and
unseen, equally destitute of hope for ever getting his or her
needs seen and fulfilled, the words ring out—screaming from
the primaler upon reliving and integrating the traumatizing
primal event and silently raging in the mind of Isaac.
Those words are, "BUT WHAT ABOUT ME?!"
Societal
God
It is in the sense of this
interpretation, then, that it can be said that the God of
Abraham, this God that is outside oneself, is the God of
Society—that is, of economic reality, of survival in this
world. It fits with this interpretation that Abraham's
grandiose dreams—his, so-called, "promises" from
God—would be for a nation to be founded from him, i.e.,
that they would be societal aspirations for this-worldly
aggrandizement.
And we, in our turn, generation upon
generation, to the societal dragon we sacrifice our
"first-born." Having been psychically maimed
ourselves, we are unable to see or fulfill our children's needs
for love. We are unable to adequately see and fulfill the
needs they are helpless to satisfy themselves or to accept them
in their uniqueness—which is their manner of being in direct
contact with their God within (or their "inner child,"
as they like to say these days). So having been forced to
sever our own ties with the Infinite, we cannot help but do the
same to our own children in their turn. Interestingly, it
is the first-born child that takes the brunt of this neurosis .
. . and is in so many ways more than the later-born forced to be
the embodiment of the parents' lost hopes and broken dreams; to
carry out, as it were, not its own unique spiritual destiny, but
to rescue the failed spiritual-human destinies of his or her
parents.
In psychological terms this means to
become neurotic, to be cut off from one's child within, to be
separated from one's real self with its real and unique and
magical needs, capacities, desires, duties, and destiny.
In spiritual terms, it means to become separated (further) from
God . . . the second fall from grace.
Postmodern
Perspective
Abraham thinks it is O.K. to sacrifice
another person in the interests (supposed) of his own personal
relationship to the divine. We see here how in becoming
separate from God, humans have also become separate from other
humans. No longer seeing the God within oneself, one fails
also to see the God within others. God is totally Other,
demanding obedience and extracting fear, directing and ordering
humans about in ways that a human does not and can not hope to
understand and that sometimes go against his or her own
conceptions of good and morality as well as against other
persons.
The "postmodern," if you will,
alternative to this position is Joseph Campbell's "follow
your bliss." More specifically, humanistic
psychologists—notably, Abraham Maslow and Carl
Rogers—emphasize the innate goodness of the human organism and
its tendency to be self-regulating, self-actualizing, purposive
and self-disciplining, interpersonally responsive, and socially
responsible. This is especially true, it is said, to the
degree that one is open to the totality of one's experience and
feelings. Thus, our highest needs coincide, not only with
our own greatest good, but with that of society and the people
around us as well.3
In a similar vein, consider Sathya Sai
Baba's "be yourself," as well as his injunctions to
find your own highest answers within you, to look inside
yourself for the Baba within and to leave off relying on the
external Baba when you are able to. We also see an
alternative to Abraham's nonthinking obedience in Sai Baba's
invitation to examine and experience, not to accept what he says
just on "faith," and ultimately to think and decide
for oneself.4
Therefore, from a postmodern perspective
that seeks to bridge the separation between the human and the
divine, what we see in Abraham and Isaac is hardly a worthy
exemplar of religious conduct. On the contrary, the
Abraham and Isaac story marks an epitome of the kind of patriarchal
pathology that has come down to us through our
horticulturally rooted patriarchal religious heritage.
Patriarchal
Pathology
I say that our patriarchal heritage is a
pathology because this is clear from observing this phenomenon
in its extreme form. For example, newspapers reported the
incident of a particular man who, in broad daylight, stabbed and
killed several people in a rampage on a city street. Only
police shots (many of them) and death ended his rampage.
He asserted throughout his spree and as
he lay dying that God was directing him to do it. I defy
anyone to show me a difference between this incident and
Abraham's, save that the outcome was different. Of course,
one could make the bald assertion that the difference lies in
that God really was
directing Abraham and wasn't in the modern incident, but that is
Monday-morning quarterbacking.
Furthermore, this modern incident is
hardly an isolated one. According to psychopaths and
psychotics—as reported frequently in the media and observed on
psychiatric wards—God is kept rather busy directing and
commanding them to do all kinds of atrocious and violent
things. Also significant is the consistency with which the
belief in a fearful God, which we saw was characteristic of the
way of faith, correlates with these psychotic types.5
If these extreme versions are too much
for you, keep in mind that examples of socially respected, even
distinguished, religious persons are often claiming that God
talks to them and directs them on what to do. Many of us,
however, are downright skeptical when we hear that God has told
Pat Robertson to run for president or has told Oral Roberts to
stay in a tower until so many millions of dollars are donated to
his university, as has actually happened in recent times.
We suspect the designs of ego here, not those of God. What
I am saying is that the same skepticism might rightly, no, more
than that, should be applied to the assertions of Abraham. Further, I
submit that those same designs of ego, not God, might also be
discerned in the supposedly divine promises to Abraham of
fatherhood of a great nation and of a special
relationship to the divine, superior to other peoples and other
nations.
In fact, these promises of special
privilege from the divine begin to sound like the manifest
destiny of the white peoples in the Americas . . . which leads
me to another point.
It occurs to me that, now that its
configurations have been traced on the level of the single
individual, there is much to be learned from looking at this
phenomenon as it is exhibited on the mass or macrocosmic
scale. Less obvious, perhaps, but equally heinous versions
of this patriarchal pathology can be seen in religious wars of
massacre and genocide—crusades, for example; in manifest
destiny and its legacy of bloodshed and genocide of Native
American peoples; in Bible-,
or Koran-, or
scroll-thumping war mongering of all kinds (our
"adventure" in Vietnam; the Conservative Christian's
version of our effort in the Islamic world, and terrorism—foreign
as well as domestic—jump to mind). And how
can we omit the example of evil par excellence—the good
Christian Nazis of Hitler's Germany whose God-fearing and
obedient qualities were virtuous fuel for their sinister
endeavors. Indeed, any time that God becomes identified
with nation or society (and thus becomes wholly Other), we have
this tendency and its bloody wake.
Now, I say this pathology is a
patriarchal one because, as we saw earlier, traditionally
society was represented in the family unit through the
father. Thus, for little boys (and of course it is little
boys who grow up to be the patriarchs of the next generation),
there were two distinct phases of their psychological
development. One corresponded to the earliest years.
It was overseen by the mother, and it allowed for some
individuality and indulgence of personal needs (although only
comparatively). Another phase came afterwards and was
overseen by the father. At this time all the preceding,
so-called, "nonsense" was forever to be put behind
one. This transition time corresponds roughly to the time
of the primal scene—age 4 or 5—sometimes later in more
"primitive" cultures. At this time the child is
forced "away from the Mother-world, forward to the
Father-world"—which is the world of society, of duty to
the collective, of repression of the child within, and of
obedience to the outer God in His reflections in the world while
simultaneously turning away from the inner God—the one who is
seen and experienced directly in consciousness—in one's direct
experience.
And it is at this time that the little
"Isaacs," so to speak, become the new "Abrahams,"
the new patriarchs, who will in their turns terrorize their own
little Isaacs into a denial of their own God within. These
events are ritualized in virtually all cultures; the
anthropologists refer to them as rites
of passage into manhood..
So we see how this pathology is a
patriarchal one. However, as mentioned, this aspect of it
has been carried further in modern times. These days,
there is often a maternal as well as a paternal influence in
this direction, so that—with child care and earlier preschools
and mothers who are not home—even the relatively blessed
earlier years are denied many modern children.
Coming
Home
To the traditional person of faith, God
is not in him- or herself, God is not in nature, and God is not
in other people. As Bette Midler once popularized it in
song, "God is watching us . . . from a distance." Considering this separation from God
and the corollaries that go with it, it is not surprising that
the Judeo-Christian heritage has produced the Crusades, the
theft of the New World, Western imperialism in third-world
countries, environmental pollution, the poisoning of the food
and water supply, and corporate capitalism. All of these derive
their life blood in the separation of God from humans, humans
from other humans, humans from Nature, or all of the above.
I conclude, therefore, that the Biblical
"faithful human" represents a devolution in
psychological health and spirituality from the archaic human.6
It is one more step removed from our identification with
the infinite, corresponding, no doubt, to an agrarian way of
life that encouraged the perception of children as economic
assets. As concerns the question posed at the outset—viz.,
what do you do when God tells you to go against your own
conscience?—the bumper sticker slogan from the postmodern era
responds clearly: you "QUESTION AUTHORITY"!
A final note: It is interesting
that at this stage of history we have such an explosion of
literature and information of all kinds—including that of
spirituality, religion, and philosophy—that The
Bible's claim to be the sole possessor of divine Truth
cannot help but be radically diluted. It is interesting
because this diversity, of its own, diminishes the likelihood of
the Abraham mistake. People are forced, as it were, to
look within, to their own conscience, their own inner link with
the divine, their own God within, to make some sense out of this
seeming chaos and to find their way home.
In light of this, it may be the story of
the prodigal son that will be seen to be the most relevant story
of The Bible. If so, we can only hope that its promise holds true
and that we will, after our extended rebellion from God and
Nature, in fact be welcomed back into our true
Father's house—which is, indeed, our real home, the home of
our real self, who is the God within.
NOTES
1.
Technically speaking, birth is the first major narrowing of
consciousness after the one at conception, and as
well, there is a great deal of individual variation in this
depending upon the events in the womb. These are
complicating issues that would not be profitably addressed
here. [return
to text]
2. Of course,
Freud calls it the Oedipus and Electra complexes.
Also, this primal scene is not to be confused with
Freud's meaning of that term, which is completely unrelated
to this one. [return
to text]
3. In light
of the preceding discussion, we might note the coincidence
of our highest needs with the greatest good of Nature,
also. People attuned to their inner divinity, their
real selves, are known to tread lightly on the Earth and to
act in harmony with Nature. [return
to text]
4. From
Hislop, My Baba and I, 1985, p. 70:
A doubt may arise: "Baba is
far away in India and I am unable to talk with him.
How am I to know God's 'inner guidance'? Is not an
'inner voice' doubtful? People have even claimed the
'inner voice of God' as the reason for harmful
actions."
The question was directly put to Baba
as follows, "Baba says that conscience is God's
voice. But how could that be? Millions of
people have been killed in religious massacres, and the
'inner voice of conscience' tells the person doing the
killing that what they are doing is right."
Baba replied, "Not so. In such
cases an idea or concept from outside has been
accepted. If the individual would stop, discard all
ideas and concepts from other people, turn inward and ask
his conscience, a true answer would be forthcoming." [return
to text]
5. The angel
said to Abraham, "Lay not thine hand upon the lad,
neither do thou anything unto him: for now I know that thou
fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son,
thine only son, from me." (Genesis, 22:12,
emphasis mine) [return
to text]
6. More
correctly, this analysis reveals a devolution from the
hunter-gatherers, who may or may not be considered to have
an archaic-type divine relationship. [return
to text]
References
deMause. Lloyd. (1994). The
history of child childhood as the history of child abuse. Aesthema,
No. 11, 48-62. [Also
available, in its entirety, on this site. Click here.]
Freud, Sigmund. (1961). Civilization
and Its Discontents: Standard Edition, Volume 20. London:
Hogarth Press.
Hislop, John. (1985). My
Baba and I. San Diego, CA: Birth Day Publishing Company.
Janov, Arthur. (1970). The
Primal Scream. New York: Dell.
Keen, Sam. (1972). Janov and primal
therapy. Psychology
Today, February 1972, 6-89.
Lyn-Piluso, Geraldine and Gaetano
Lyn-Piluso. (1994). Organic
parenting. Aesthema,
No. 11, 63-79. [Also
available, in its entirety, on this site. Click here.]
Maslow, Abraham H. (1968). Toward a Psychology of Being. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold
Company.
Turnbull, Colin M. (1961). The Forest People. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Whiting, J., & Child, I. (1953). Child Training and Personality: A Cross-Cultural Study. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Copyright © 2004 by Michael D. Adzema
Biographical
Note
MICHAEL ADZEMA is an independent scholar whose articles have appeared
in a variety of international and regional magazines and journals. He
is also a primal breathwork facilitator whose experience in experiential
psychotherapies such as primal therapy, rebirthing, and holotropic breathwork
extend over thirty years. He has done doctoral work in psychological anthropology
as well as Master's work in psychology, religious studies and philosophy and has an M.A. in Interdisciplinary
Studies (combining anthropology, psychology, and philosophy) from Sonoma
State University. He taught Pre- and Perinatal Psychology at
Sonoma State University. Michael has written extensively and combines his
focus on psychological growth with an equally long-standing interest and
involvement in mysticism, shamanism, and the anthropology and philosophy of
consciousness, writing in depth on the relation of psychology and spirituality. He was the
editor of the print version of the journal,
Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology, which now appears
on this site, and of the magazine Primal Spirit, which likewise appears
on this site, now as an e-zine, as well as the of the journal Aesthema #11, in
which the foregoing article first appeared. Portions of and expansion
on the ideas in this article are included in the book Primal
Renaissance: The Emerging Millennial Return, the text of which is
available in its entirety on this website. Michael's extended bio can be found at
Mickel Adzema's writings
. To comment by email, click on mickel@primalspirit.com.
** Editor's Note: This
article had previously been published in Aesthema #11.
[return
to text]
Related Article: Go to "Organic
Parenting"
by Geraldine and Gaetano Lyn-Piluso.
