Threads
Forgiveness, healing, reconciliation
A recent interview with Dr. Peter Breggin is reminding me of my father once more. I always admired my father for declaring early, at the onset of the invasion of psychopharmaca in medicine, that he would not prescribe them and was committed to talk therapy only, his only prescriptions were walking with your bare feet on the grass (grounding!), or warm milk with honey at bed time if someone had insomnia.
The circle of doctors and therapists he had around him were all of the same ilk and the corruption of healthcare by big pharma was a frequent topic of conversation at our dinner table, even in the fifties and sixties. Just today, my attention was drawn to an excellent video on the Flexner report, which provided the foundation for the allopathic monopoly in American healthcare. It makes very clear that it all rests on a completely materialistic understanding of what we are. I was aware at some level that my father hoped I would be a psychiatrist, but that never appealed to me and instead, I studied Sanskrit and Comparative Linguistics briefly, but gave it up for a business career. My father was from 1921 and finished his studies right after the war, just when the invasion of psychopharmaca started. Breggin is from 1936, and when he finished his studies, the pharmaceutical invasion of psychiatry was in full swing, and he smelled a rat. Like my father, he committed himself to talk therapy only. This interview is a good reminder of that sordid history, and it isn’t over yet.
Ken Wapnick would frequently comment that Freud always remained a physician at heart, and always stuck to the notion that if we did enough research, we would eventually find that all of the psyche was reducible to the brain chemistry. It was that kind of thinking that was at the foundation of the pharmaceutical invasion in psychiatry. But meat does not think. At best brain activity reflects what is going on in the mind. The body is the effect, mind is the cause. This hilarious sci-fi episode always reminds me:
They're Made out of Meat
Terry Bisson, 1991
Someone did a radio play of this...
"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars."
"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat."
"Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."
"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?"
"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."
"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!"
"So... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"
"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
"Finally, Yes. They are indeed made out meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
"So what does the meat have in mind."
"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual."
"We're supposed to talk to meat?"
"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home?' That sort of thing."
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say?" `Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."
"So we just pretend there's no one home in the universe."
"That's it."
"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You're sure they won't remember?"
"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."
"A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."
"And we can marked this sector unoccupied."
"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"
"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotation ago, wants to be friendly again."
"They always come around."
"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the universe would be if one were all alone."
(https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html)
Freud’s contemporary, Georg Groddeck, was the exact opposite; for him, the cause was always in the mind. Seemingly, Freud never caught on to the illogic of his position. For me, this was always intuitively obvious, so much so, that I was once talking with my father, at age 14 or so, when some doctor had referred a patient to him with a “psychosomatic illness,” and in our conversation I noticed that he was using that word as if it were a special limited class of illness. I asked: “… but is there any other?” (i.e. another kind of illness besides psychosomatic). He paused a few seconds and then he admitted: “I think you may have a point.” And there it rested, he was off to see his next patient.
From a very young age, it always seemed to me that physical illness was the effect of a failure to process something in the mind, that much seemed obvious to me. I thought this is what I saw my sister do, as she seemed prone to refuse to process her emotions and to deal with certain issues, and eventually she would get sick. I don’t know where that came from, for me that was just the natural way of looking at it. For myself as well, this seemed to be the process.
After my parents were divorced, I mostly would have coffee with my father once a year, but by that time conversation was nearly impossible, beyond what I liked in my coffee (nothing). However, I was always conscious of the fact that we shared certain common interests, certainly human psychology, and an interest in a range of literature about spiritual matters, most specifically, the work of Johan Willem Kaiser. My father died in 1984, and by 1987, my spiritual teacher, Frits Willem Bonk died, but I also realized consciously that I had had difficult relations with my father as well as with the owner of the company I worked for, and I realized that this was nothing but a reflection of my troubled relationship with God, and I plunged with renewed vigor into Kaiser’s books, most particularly his book The Experience of the Gospel (no translation available).
Four years later, in 1991, I was to encounter A Course in Miracles. I had a dream experience which very strongly confirmed that this book came from the real Jesus, as I had understood him all my life. By Christmas time 2002, I was working on a book about Johan Willem Kaiser, which I titled The Gospel as a Spiritual Path, and that captures the essence of his work exactly. It was during that time I was working on memories of my father, because of the interest in Kaiser I shared with him, and slowly it dawned on me that his deepest aspiration was to be a healer, that was the content, and the form that took in his life was being a psychiatrist. What bubbled up for me that he was not so much wanting me to become a psychiatrist specifically, but to become a healer in whatever form. And that is when I felt very connected to him and it was a profound forgiveness experience. In the spring the book came out and I presented a copy to a clairvoyant friend who had supported me in the making of the book, and, as soon as she touched it, she promptly said that my father was very much around, and very interested in the things I was doing. That made sense and it was a big lesson that forgiveness does not require the presence of the other party, for you are really forgiving your projection on that person. Since then I have felt much closer to him.
From July of 1991, I had immersed myself in the Course, and that never stopped. Through Kaiser’s work I had come to appreciate the Gospel as a spiritual path, and I read the Bible that way, primarily via Kaiser’s translation and commentary on the Gospel of Mark. It was clear to me than that the pre-Pauline Jesus was a very independent spiritual teacher, and that the Gospel was a parable for our spiritual path. And I saw a clear break between that pre-Pauline Jesus and the Jesus of Christianity, who brought us vicarious salvation. Kaiser thought vicarious salvation was a lame ego-excuse, because the ego simply wants to have its cake an eat it too. Thus, when I discovered the Course, this was my first question at the end of June 1991, I prayed for clarity that this book was truly from the real Jesus, and not the Christian substitute. Clarity arrived in the form of a dream, which gave me complete clarity that this was the real thing. I never looked back. I read the Course the first time, a chapter a day for 31 days, during July of 1991. By September of 1991 I attended my first workshop at the Foundation for A Course in Miracles, in Roscoe, NY, with Ken Wapnick.
In general, I attended many seminars every year at the Foundation in Roscoe, until the Foundation moved to Temecula. Ken’s way of explaining the Course in the Course’s terms was always very helpful to me. For a long time I struggled a bit with how Ken read the Bible, as a Christian, which I never had, and I did not understand that he did not have a better religious education, but gradually it dawned on me that he really meant it when he said he never paid attention in Yeshiva, and he that the bulk of his reading of the Bible was more as a Catholic than anything else, all of which was alien to me.
For me it had been clear form very young that the Christian view of Jesus had nothing to do with him or his teachings. In my view the resurrection was at the Baptism in the River Jordan, and the sonship was one, Jesus was not God’s son to the exception of others, but the example of what we all are in truth. Kaiser had a good way of teasing out Jesus from the Christian tradition, particularly with his book on the Gospel according to Mark. But the Thomas Gospel would not appear in translation until 1959, a year before Kaiser died. Once you understand the Thomas Gospel, and where it fits on the timeline (before the oldest synoptic Gospel, Mark), the break between Jesus and Paul is clear. Never mind Paul has said some beautiful and wise things from time to time, but there was a fault line between them that I initially had a tough time putting my finger on exactly. The Thomas Gospel helped initially just to increase my suspicion, but I did not really put it together till later. Eventually, Gary Renard’s work helped me to put it all together in my book Closing the Circle: Pursah’s Gospel of Thomas and A Course in Miracles.
This was really an interesting collaboration, for Gary ended up commenting on something I said about this in a discussion forum, and that is what then got me motivated to do the book. At the end of the day, it is all very simple but it took me a lifetime, or so it seems. Cognitive dissonance grew out of little things about Jesus sayings that simply did not line up with the Christian view of him, and eventually it can be summed up in the simple conclusion that Jesus was a teacher of non-duality, whose teachings were subsequently interpreted in a dualistic way, and that formed the religion we know as Christianity.
That budding misunderstanding was obviously clear to Jesus, when he said such things as there was much the apostles would not understand till later. It was evident from the start with Peter and Paul that they took off in a different direction. Recently, I listened again to an interview with Gary Renard on the Miracle Voices podcast, where he relates how in growing up he experienced a strong relationship with Jesus, but did not go to church. He sensed that Jesus was something else, and in his books this finds complete expression.
Thus it is how there are threads in my life which seem to show me the outlines of a whole tapestry, beyond anything I could have imagined. There are most definitely more things between heaven and earth than were dreamt of in my philosophy. And on some days I get a glimpse of how it all hangs together, and the thread starts feeling like a thread of Ariadne, and my job simply is to follow it all the way out of the labyrinth.