|
Chapter 11: Beyond Doubt
The Psychosis of Doubt
A talk by Da Free John
DA FREE JOHN: Many people claim to be religious
and to be profoundly committed to traditions that belong to
a higher view of human culture, but very few people have a
sense of the powers behind the world, or an experiential
understanding of the psyche, or a moral grasp of what it
truly means to be religious, or a heartfelt commitment to
how one must live in order to realize a truly religious life
and destiny. True religion is to enter ecstatically into the
Domain of Radiant Existence that is beyond the limited
personal self, or ego, or body-mind. It is to engage in
higher intuitive, mystical, moral, and emotional processes
that lead into and then beyond the realms of the psyche and
even all the realms beyond material visibility. It is a way
of making positively creative changes even in ones
“material” or physical life, as well as passing consciously
beyond this gross physical life into another destiny, even
while alive, and also at death. However, very few people
have any understanding of this process, or even any hope
that such a process may actually exist.
It is only later in time, in the recent centuries of
objectively glamorous “civilization,” that people have lost
or begun to deny their psychic connection to the universe.
And it is only in such exclusively materialistic or
world-conquering civilizations that religion has become
nothing more than a collection of behavioral precepts for
downtown life, for how to manage your business, how to be
completely fulfilled as a “person,” and so forth. But true
religion is not based on the emotionally dissociated
superficialities of conventional worldliness. True religion
is based on the psychic connection to Reality. There can be
no true religion without profound psychic activity. True
religion expresses the inherent disposition and motive of
the psyche, or the intuitive, feeling core of Man. The
contemporary religion of civilized popular societies has
little or no psyche remaining from its psychic, feeling
origins. The psyche is taboo to science and industry. Only
the verbal mind is permitted to priest our destiny with all
the automatic nonsense of meaningless, heartless rituals and
objective beliefs. Such civilized religion is not based on a
sense of the invisible forces with which we each need to
enter into right association in order to live well and to be
happy, in order not to be undone, bound up, smothered, and
destroyed by the elemental movements in Nature. All true
religion and spirituality are founded in the Way of the
psyche, which contains a secret Pathway that leads beyond
the Realm of Nature.
In order to live such a true religious Way of Life,
individuals must enter psychically into the play of their
experience in the material or objective universe. We must
move beyond the self-bound stupidity of the verbal mind,
which has no sympathy, no heart, no feeling, no psyche. We
must move beyond the unhappy and degenerative stupidities of
the mere bodily exploitation we inevitably engage when we
are frozen in this mind without a psyche. The usual man in
our time is limited only to verbal thinking and exploitation
of his physical experience. Everything else is taboo, or
else confounded by complications. The usual man cannot go
beyond the hard-edged appearance of the physical body and
the apparent objectivity of physical experience, because he
is not permitted his own deep psyche. The psyche is the deep
disposition of union with That which is Radiant and Alive.
Only the unitary and self-transcending disposition of the
psyche, rather than the separative and self-defining
disposition of the conventional mind, can provide the
foundation for true religion and a true humanity.
What is precisely and devastatingly wrong with the
universal scientism of modern society and all the forms of
mass politics that are derived from that scientism is that
the modern scientific and political world view does not
permit the human being his psyche and the Way of the psyche.
Scientism (or the disposition of scientific materialism)
constantly obliges the individual to stand face to face with
mere elemental experience and to deny all reality and
hierarchical supremacy to higher and subtler dimensions,
which in ancient times were commonly recognized to be the
fundamental resource of human individuals and societies.
Scientism denies our true connection to the energies and
creative sources of the world. We are denied true religion
by the mind of scientism and all of the social and political
agencies of popular scientific or material culture.
Scientism is simply an analytical activity of the verbal
mind. It is oriented toward the investigation of elemental
phenomena without the “limiting interference” of psychic
participation. Even when scientists consider phenomena that
are not merely elemental, but that belong to the ambiguous
realm of energies and the human psyche, they do not study
these things through the psyche. They study them
objectively, as if these invisibles were butterflies under a
pin. But in order to investigate the higher phenomena of
light-energy (or the hierarchy of processes in which
“matter” is arising) one must ultimately enter into
consideration of them through the medium of the psyche
itself, through feeling, through intuition, through
surrender to energy, through all the aspects of the mind and
heart that precede and transcend the verbal
consciousness.
The currently popular presumptions about the world do not
permit us to recognize and acknowledge the invisible and
psychically perceptible dimensions of existence. We are
encouraged to watch TV and go to work and wait for science
to save everyone. But science can never save anyone. Science
is not a method of salvation. Salvation depends upon the
awakening of the psyche of the human individual. There is no
salvation (no fulfillment of Man) apart from psychic
awakening. Science, however, is not a psychic activity or
adventure. Therefore, it does not serve or awaken the psyche
or the psychic Path of the individual. Science is nothing
more than a useful method for the investigation and
mechanical exploitation of aspects of the externalized or
apparently objective and material universe. Such an
enterprise can, if rightly used, produce useful technologies
and benign changes in the environment, but it cannot improve
our lot in any fundamental sense, because human beings are
fulfilled and liberated only through psychic awakening, and
psychic participation in the pattern and ultimate Condition
of the universe. We must be awakened psychically,
personally, emotionally, and deeply in order to be truly
happy and free.
That the materialistic point of view of civilized
scientism dominates human beings is a profoundly negative
state of affairs, because such an application of science
strictly anathematizes the awakening and the activation of
the psyche of human beings. The propaganda of popular
science is most profoundly about the anathematization and
material limitation of the psyche. Whatever benign changes
it may bring technologically, scientific materialism
represents a trend in philosophy that is opposed to the
psychic awakening of human beings. That is what is wrong
with it. And as soon as anybody shows an inclination toward
psychic life, toward the things of the psychic view of the
world, toward mysticism, or toward religion (in the psychic
sense, rather than just the downtown illusions of morality
and self-fulfillment), he is considered crazy, bizarre,
eccentric, an anachronism. And the popular cult of
scientists is regularly represented in the press, animating
benighted claims that the movement toward psychic experience
is nonsense, falsehood, superstition, a sign of reaction to
urban pressures, a passing phase in our material leap toward
utopia and final collective knowledge.
The historical origin of modern scientism was in the
rebellion of the verbal mind against the popular
institutions that tyrannized it. Modern science was founded
on a philosophical reaction to archaic exoteric religious
institutions and other movements in human cultures that
prevented the free and independent exercise of mental
activity in the investigation of Nature. Scientism appeared
as a righteous and, at the time, entirely appropriate,
reaction to cultural oppression. Science arose as a
revolutionary movement, which sought to permit the free
exercise of the verbal mind. That revolutionary cultural
reaction was fundamentally right and positive, and a major
aspect of science and scientific influence is certainly
positive. However, because of the philosophical
exclusiveness of that original reaction of science, the
popular culture of scientific and political materialism now
supports a cultural psychology (or psychosis) that wants to
exclude the psychic awakening and the psychic Path of our
Destiny in and beyond the Realm of Nature. Therefore, such
scientism represents a new kind of oppressive exoteric
priesthood, a different kind of Church, against which others
must now rebel. There must be the free exercise of the
verbal mind and of intellectual inquiry, but there must also
be the free psychic and Spiritual exercise of human
individuality. Human beings must be permitted psychic
association with the Great Universe. If such is denied them,
they become crazy and dangerous. And that is exactly what
has happened-these few hundred years in which the modern and
materialistic scientific point of view has gradually become
dominant have emptied human culture of its higher psychic
associations and aspirations.
Now we are looking toward a future of technological
domination, a heartless world, a human world without psyche.
It is not only political totalitarianism that is represented
in the image of the future of science fiction. It is a human
world without human psyche or Transcendental Destiny. It is
a universe without a psychic dimension, a merely physical
universe rather than a psycho-physical universe. The current
state of our so-called culture reflects the same lack. True
culture depends on the awakened and heartfelt disposition of
the human psyche.
The scientific community must understand and acknowledge
that its positive aspect is its orientation toward free
intellectual inquiry. The old exoteric religious
institutions perpetuated an “understanding” of the physical
universe that was characterized by uninterpretable poetic
mythologies and all kinds of absolutist cultic nonsense.
Fresh and direct inquiry into phenomena needed to be
permitted. That aspect of the emergence of scientism was
completely positive. The exoteric religious institutions
that existed when scientism began to appear were not founded
in universal Truth or a broadly communicated esoteric
understanding of the “material” universe and the Way of Man.
They were (and remain) downtown exoteric institutions,
traditional cultic institutions, without great Adepts and
without universal Wisdom. In throwing away this half-baked
religion, however, we have also thrown away all psychic
inquiry into the universe and its ultimate Condition or
Destiny. Intellectual inquiry into the objective phenomena
of experience certainly has its value, but psychic inquiry
into the experiential universe is not only equally
essential, it is primary, and it is more fundamental to the
individual. Indeed, such psychic inquiry is absolutely
essential for human happiness.
The attention of the psyche can move in any number of
directions. There are Great Teachings and lesser teachings
and false teachings. The dull conventions of downtown
religion and the aggressive passion that one acquires in the
streets and in the school of the common world are no Great
Teaching at all. All of that is the lowest form of human
communication, because it denies that the deep psyche is the
fundamental nature of Man and that the individual must live
by his psyche, not by the things of the world, not by the
objects of experience, not by the elemental, fleshy life,
and not by thinking alone.
To “sin” is to “miss the mark,” to be without a psyche,
or to fail to accept the Way of the psyche, which is to be
surrendered into the eternally all-pervading Life-Principle
and to be identified with the Radiant Transcendental Being
wherein all experience and the total Realm of Nature are
arising. To “sin” is to fail to accept the Law of sacrifice,
or self-transcending love. It is to be enamored of things
themselves, to have lost the psychic and feeling connection
to Reality, and to be turned in on yourself without free
consciousness. To be awakened from sin is to “meet the
mark,” to be awakened in your psyche, in your heart. Man
must live by his psyche, his unqualified feeling nature. He
must enter psychically into relationship with the powers of
the world, into relationship with the ultimate Power, the
absolute God of the world. If he does not, he is deluded and
seems to be destroyed.
The function of the Adept, or Spiritual Master, is to
restore this understanding, this awareness, to reveal the
true significance of all experience. The Adept Spiritual
Master does not represent the glorification of any single
convention of human experience. He is Awake in the midst of
all experience, all the psycho-physical phenomena of human
life. Therefore, such an Adept can establish (or
reestablish) a culture based on the perfect Realization of
Truth, in which all aspects of the structure of human
experience are rightly understood. Man must realize a right
sympathy with the etheric life of energy, feeling, and
life-force; Man must also ascend through and beyond the
etheric life in his astral, or mystical, higher mental, and
intuitive structures of consciousness; and he must also
evolve beyond the subtle inward dimension into the
Transcendental Realization of Reality. We cannot even
exclude bodily life in our Realization of the Absolute; we
must become a sacrifice, even bodily, into the Absolute
Being and Radiant Living Truth. Our action and adaptation
while alive must represent a right relationship to that
Absolute Reality, and, through that relationship, to all of
the manifestations of the Universe and of Man that proceed
from that Absolute. All things work together for the good of
individuals who remain in right association with the
Absolute Reality or Living God. They are awakened, they see
through the limits of their experience, and they transcend
the phenomena that bind and contain them.
The Adept Spiritual Master communicates the entire Way of
the psyche, the Way of Life in Truth, and the right
disposition toward all of the phenomena of experience.
Therefore, he must criticize all of the forms of exclusive
acculturation, all of the less than absolute religions and
persuasions. You may hear me criticize all kinds of
religious and psychic and mystical approaches to the Divine
Reality, but I will not deny what is useful in them. I
criticize the exclusiveness in every point of view and the
limitation of experience and understanding that is evident
in each kind of approach. Just so, I also constantly
criticize the social and cultural conventions of ordinary
worldly life, not because people enjoy themselves-true
enjoyment is necessary and positive-but because there is no
psyche in the dull and repetitive enjoyments of the usual
man. There is no heart, no Truth, no Life in the popular
design of our subhumanity.
The whole world is obsessed with the anathematization of
the psyche, and to the degree that people become involved in
the deep psychic life at all, they are involved in some
little compartment of it, some creepy, petty, fascinated
aspect of it that is not God-Realizing. I communicate the
disposition of the heart in absolute terms, the Way of Life
that involves the psychic or heartfelt relationship to
everything. I communicate the Way of sacrifice, via the
heart, or the psyche, to the Radiant Absolute Living
Reality. In the process of this Way, through your awakening
to the psyche, you will likely become fully aware of
uncommon phenomena that are not discussed on television or
admitted by the intellectual elite who presume to determine
what we may know and not know. You are inherently and
perfectly free to experience everything from ghosts and
spirit forces to the most sublime visions and absorptions in
the Great Light that shines above Nature and the body-mind.
And you are also inherently obliged to transcend all
experience through heartfelt understanding and the feeling
sacrifice of the whole body-mind into the All-Pervading and
Radiant Transcendental Consciousness that is the Seat of the
world.
Just as scientific inquiry must be free, so also must
psychic or religious inquiry be free of all kinds of
nonsense and suppression. As it exists in the common world
today, religion is largely comprised of accretions of
nonsense, the archaic ideas and presumptions of very
ordinary people. True religion can only be founded on the
direct communication of Realized individuals, or Adepts,
whose voices must be heard and honored in the world. People
must begin to engage in truly religious forms of activity, a
truly religious Way of Life. Likewise, science, or free
intellectual inquiry, must also be permitted its freedom,
its special function in the world. Nevertheless, the motive
of science and its social influence in general must be
purified of anti-psychic dogmatism. If the voice of science
is not thus purified, it will more and more represent an
evil influence in the world, an influence that seeks to
dominate, suppress, and destroy the psychic potential and
the psychic need of Man.
|