Introduction
I finished Paul Ham’s The Soul: A History of the Human Mind nearly 2 weeks ago and I am still processing my reactions. I don’t agree with Ham on several interpretations but as a survey of the human soul/mind the book is stupendous in its embrace. It is a history, not a theology.
Below is me processing what I got from engaging with the book.
What we believe
Belief is, I think, distilled in the imagination and then expressed as ideas – as art, as ritual, as dogma. We seek to meet our psychological needs through our beliefs. And so much depends upon whether we are psychologically healthy or not. Also, a lot depends upon our relative state of psychological maturity.
When I finished the book, I felt a bit stunned. The survey of the psychology of some believers left me aghast. It wasn’t that this was news to me, just that the scope was laid out so starkly, so copiously.
The book understandably has a strong focus on religious traditions, but includes philosophy, psychology and AI. The religious traditions are shaped by the psychology of the adherents and believers. People like Dawkins who blame religion have, I think, a poor understanding of what religion is.
Ham asserts that the gods are invented by humans – which is kind of true in that we describe the divine according to our capacity to apprehend it – and then assert that our description is a rendering of an objective reality. However, this is by no means a universal approach. What we choose to believe depends on what we need and our capacity to be aware of the nature of that need.
Belief and morality
We edit what a faith founder said. For instance, many words and ideas have been put into the mouth of Jesus by those writing in support of his mission. It could be fairly argued that Jesus, like the Buddha, delivered a simple but challenging message, which, if taken at face value, would defeat many adherents. Hence Christianity adopted the Jewish tradition – colonised it in fact – so it had a rich resource of God-sanctified outrages to rely upon. A follower could be both faithful and an abuser with no difficulty.
Christians and Buddhists can choose a purist approach – a deeply challenging path of self-awareness. That’s not for everybody. Or they can elect a path of graduated expose to truths and challenges that serves their psychological needs. But that path will also be crafted to attract their interest and commitment, and may include financial, social and political benefits for those who do the crafting.
As a result, moral codes will be designed to meet the needs of all involved. I was interested in the discussion as to whether spiritual salvation depended on works or faith. It can seem like a strange debate to have. Acts of loving kindness don’t stack up against a person who has accepted Jesus as their saviour, but who is neither kind nor loving to many – beyond those in their in-group. And even then they can be cruel to members of their in-group in their faith’s name.
The idea that spiritual salvation is conditional upon accepting and adhering to a theological dogma appeals to many. That’s an interesting barrier to place between a person and their own connection with the divine. Its an effort to control that connection and shape it to conform to the demands of a dogma.
My question is, “What is the psychological need of a person who is committed to exerting that kind of control?” How do they frame their moral argument to justify that choice – to themselves and to others?
It seems that when a spiritual philosophy changes from being a personal pursuit to cultural movement other factors are activated, and these modify how that philosophy is understood and followed. The colonisation of Judaism by Christianity effectively transformed a personal spiritual philosophy into a cultural mechanism which diluted the potency of personal commitment to the original philosophy. What was created accommodated pragmatism, distortion, and corruption – as happens with all scaled up cultural processes.
We are not dealing with something inherent in religion in isolation from other forms cultural activity. We are dealing with something inherent in ourselves and in our cultures. I can now recognise the same problem arising in the public sector – after a career spanning 5 decades.
Just what is religion?
Ham says, briefly, that our ancestors responded to their dawning existential awareness with fear. That’s an attractive argument reinforced by anthropologists. But I think it’s just wrong.
Fear is a sensible response to many things which are a genuine source of peril. Staying alive in one’s organic body is an imperative impulse we mostly have to a good degree. But we are not naturally dominated by fear. It is one colour on the palette of human emotions.
My inquiry into animism [2002 to 2009] convinced me of several things:
- Our ancestors did not have the binary distinction of living vs inert. They were, I think, biased toward seeing reality as a ‘thou’ rather than an ‘it’. We have superimposed that duality upon human perception with the bias favouring ‘itness’.
- Our ancestor’s awareness of ‘reality’ included what we’d call extra-sensory perceptions. But we have no realistic idea of what, or how, they perceived the reality around them. But we do know they had beliefs in spirits – which might suggest this was because they engaged with them. The widespread belief, now, is that they were mistaken – because spirits are not real.
- They made a sensible decision to pragmatically engage with the agencies whose presence impinged upon them in both the physical and metaphysical sense. This was done at a communal level, and it would have included all the elements familiar in magical practice and rituals many of us recognise as elements of religion.
The great difficulty we have these days is that we are attuned to our dominant environmental factors. We are bombarded by stimuli, we are pressured to conform to social norms, and our physical being in the world is relentlessly mediated and modified by our own technologies and human-made environments.
We have no idea how our ancestors operated. Our filters process data that comes to us from people who still live in what we’d see as ‘uncivilised’ ways and generate a bias and hubris in favour of our way of knowing. We hold the idea of civilisation as a necessary and desired state for all humans.
Religion is an idea developed by Europeans between the start of the 16th and the end of the 17th centuries. Its an idea that sits firmly in our minds to describe how cultures organised to deal with the spectrum of experiences which impacted them – where God is concerned. Non-God related experiences are described in other, secular, terms – and dominated by materialism.
I will use the term religion because no other alternative term is available. If we understand that it is a modern term, maybe the only alternative is the idea of ‘life’ in which gods and spirits were sensed to play an active role.
In this sense religion is an effort to make sense of being in the world using the tools at hand. Our transition into materialism arose, I think, from the debasement/complication of religion. As it became more a matter of social influence in service of those disposed to favour faith, dogma, order, and conformity over loving kindness. As the evidence of a viable God diminished, a more sceptical and reasoned form of inquiry asserted itself.
As an idea, religion has been tarnished. When the word is used it invokes a host of negatives. The growing popularity of the term ‘spiritual but not religious’ tells the story. Religion has been separated from spirituality. This is the dogma vs loving kindness divide. In an important sense a ‘natural’ response to the divine has been domesticated and rendered compliant to authority. Hence those who seem themselves as ‘spiritual’ want nothing to do with the cultures of compliance, seen in religious communities.
This is a justified response. It starkly distinguishes between the psychological needs that crave elaboration of the essential theme of behaving well so that one can be ‘saved’ by faith and belief in dogma and sincere acts of loving kindness that are self-directed.
There was a time when I regularly travelled by train into Sydney. As the train neared Central Station it passed a building which bore a sign – ‘Believe on Jesus and you will be saved.’ Really? The authors of the sign thought that spiritual salvation was a deal based on accepting a belief and nothing else? You didn’t have to work on yourself, just believe a proposition?
Ham records the litany of cruelties that have flowed from such an assertion. It is easy to imagine that an act of belief can quarantine a person from a litany of abuses. You can be cruel yet saved because you believe. A kind and loving person is consigned to eternal damnation because they have the ‘wrong’ belief.
Why do some people still imagine this is okay? The problem isn’t the religion. They’d find some other justification. The ‘problem’ is their psychological need.
For me religion is a far grander notion than what it has become. It will always reflect the culture in which it expresses. We shouldn’t condemn something because it is manifested poorly. Sex and food are staples of our biological reality and yet we have all experienced awful manifestations of them. Fasting celibates motivated by terrible experiences are scarce.
I am arguing for a rethinking of what religion can be rather than discarding it. It isn’t universally a bad thing, and if we imagine what it can be we can open doors to potential we can’t presently see. Thinking begins with imagination. It isn’t about grinding through rational processes. The history of science tells us this.
To me what we have called religion is a holistic response to life as we experience it – dogma free.
Where do we go from here?
The Soul has obliged me to think more deeply on the nature of psychological needs. If reincarnation is a valid idea, it suggests we enter our biological lives with existing needs and triggers that then get tangled up with whatever nurture experience we have. Karma is profoundly complex, maybe? It’s not the simplistic moral ledger balancing vices and virtues of popular belief.
Quite some decades ago now I had an interview with an non-physical entity who was the teacher of an occult group I was then associated with. The entity expressed through the partner of the group leader. I have had several such interviews since then with other entities.
I was having issues with the group. I was frustrated and impatient. The entity told me things about me which were beyond the insight capacity of the group leader and then observed that magick wasn’t my challenged area. I had major challenges in myself.
That statement has stuck with me since then. I recall it regularly. Indeed, my life has been a struggle with self-awareness and balance. Still is in a lot of ways. I have a sense at times that in a past life I was an extreme believer, maybe a participant in the Spanish Inquisition I have no evidence that I was, its just that that time strikes me as being at least indicative – it gives shape to a deep sense that I was a perpetrator of cruelty in the name of my faith.
We are a fusion of nature [what we bring with us] and nurture [our life experiences in our organic body]. That fusion of itself is deeply complex and in a world full of others similarly steered who knows how easy it is to be diverted into mistaken paths in the name of virtue.
In part religion frames how we imagine reality, and how we behave in it. Its core is essentially animistic. Christianity started to depopulate the ecology of spirit so it could disenfranchise agents that did not conform to its dogma. It also sought to diminish the validity of non-conforming thinkers through torture, death and banishment. These were the first steps toward atheism and materialism.
Why did anyone imagine that a religion that behaved so brutally and against the values of its ‘founder’ would flourish? It did flower briefly and has been diminishing steadily for a very long time. I am inclined to think the decline happened when the word religion was invented – so there was a sense of something was not that. We created the idea of religion so we could escape from what had been created.
Science, liberated from materialistic dogma is delicately restoring the ecology of spirit, albeit in language that is new and ideas that are tentative. But the signs are unmistakeable.
In terms of spirituality, we must think psychologically and look closely at what impels our need to craft beliefs we imagine will satisfy our needs.
Conclusion
For me The Soul has been an extraordinary stimulant that has signposted where my earlier inquiry into the nature of belief should progress.
I commend the book – all 800 pages and over 38 hours as an audiobook – as a remarkable effort at writing history of the soul/mind. I saw a review that complained Ham said gods were a human invention – and therefore the book wasn’t worth the read. But it isn’t a book pushing a dogma. There is no hint of dogma, just an opinion – mildly offered.
Ham isn’t right, but neither is he wrong. It’s a position one can hold and do no injury to the vast scholarship necessary to craft this book. You can’t write a book like this without some hint of imperfection.
It doesn’t have a conclusion – as in a summing up and a declaration of what is in the author’s mind. That conclusion is up to the reader. I hope you engage with it and get as much out of it as I did.