Truth vs Falsehood (56 page)

Other than the familiar symbol of Yin/Yang, few Americans were aware of Taoism until Fritzof Capra published
The Tao of Physics
(1976). Ideologically, to a society that lauds assertion and aggression, nonresistance seems weak, passive, and a foreign concept. It was not understood or accepted as having any functional validity until Mahatma Gandhi, whose nonviolent stance eventually defeated the British Empire and liberated India from colonialism, demonstrated its effectiveness. The effectiveness was again demonstrated by Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and in America by Martin Luther King’s civil demonstrations. There is Christian precedent in the teaching of Jesus to “turn the other cheek,” and in Buddha’s teaching of detachment and his statement that there is no point in hating one’s enemies as they will bring themselves down of their own nature. Despite localized uprising, the relative nonresistance of the Jews in Europe to their destruction by the Nazi regime thereby allowed the full karmic responsibility to fall upon the conquerors. They realized that Judaism would survive that onslaught as it had all others over the past centuries.

Aggression can be seen as a short-term response to a challenge and nonresistance as long term. The populace of occupied countries need only wait out the domination of the invaders who eventually either leave or become integrated into the culture of the occupied country, such as the Roman army at Hadrian’s Wall, where they simply married the local women and settled down to domesticity.

From a consciousness/spiritual viewpoint, the strengths of Yin and Yang are identical and equal, and the Yin/Yang symbol reflects the importance of balance in which interactive forces shape and define each other. In Western culture, this was most obvious in the male/female relationship. Traditionally, the male stereotype is aggressive and the female passive. In an earlier agrarian society that rewarded aggressiveness, male dominance was seen as superior, but as civilization advanced, neither is now seen as having more value than the other. Genderization became ingrained, however, in even language itself, as in German and other languages where all nouns are male, female, or neutral. In America, there has been much social discourse over the relationship of the feminine and the masculine, their balance, and their representations, e.g., men were advised to ‘get in touch’ with their Yin feminine side, and women with their Yang male aggressive side, etc. In Nature, however, there is nothing more aggressive than the female’s protecting her young.

Bahá’í

As the calibration indicates, the central intent is integrous to represent the spiritual core of all faiths and the ecumenical ideal. Bahá’í is also attractive in that from its very founding, it was based on the equality of men and women. The capacity of the world’s great religions to coexist peacefully side by side is represented by the culture of India, which serves as a laudable teaching example as was pointed out by the Dalai Lama in early 2004. Bah‡” arose out of the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh, an Iranian who declared himself to be “He whom God shall make manifest” as the forerunner of peace via unification of the world’s religions and peoples.

Bahá’í has been under attack in Iran since the rule of the Ayatollah Khomeini who, in 1991, signed the government document to extinguish Bahá’ís and demolish the House of Ba’b in Shiraz, which had been a center for worldwide pilgrimage for Bahá’ís. Bahá’ís are now viewed by militant Islamics as heretics and therefore deserving of elimination even though they are fellow Iranians (
New York Times
, 9/12/04).

Native American

There is a dearth of authoritative information and research on Native American spirituality in spite of the fact that it is one of the predominant and attractive characteristics of that culture. The high calibration (500+) reflects the acknowledgment of God as the Great Spirit/Creator and source and essence of all life, which is therefore held to be sacred.

The acknowledgment of the Divine as the source of all blessings and sustenance is part and parcel of daily life. To seek to commune with Divine will via the peyote ceremony is respected as are the sweat lodge purification ceremonies of spiritual cleansing and self-honesty. The act of sacrificing an animal life for food is also sanctified by prayer, which acknowledges the oneness of all life. Family and honor are established values as are courage, truth, and bravery encouraged as character traits.

In the 1970s, the author had the privilege of being invited to the sacred Hopi Snake Dance ceremony. There had been a long drought and the corn was struggling to survive, even though the seed was planted in Hopi style six inches deep, along with a piece of fish. The ceremony took place in old Oraibi. People crowded the rooftops and then, just prior to the start by the Antelope Dancers, the elders arrived and took their seats of honor. Even though it had not rained in many months, they all carried umbrellas! The reason soon became apparent—as the Antelope Dancers began, clouds formed in the sky, which later darkened rapidly when the Snake Dancers began to circle about, holding live rattlesnakes in their mouths. They sprinkled corn meal on the ground and, one by one, let the snakes go to crawl through it and then on into the crowd of onlookers. The snakes approached very closely and then slithered away. Calm prevailed. And then, after the prolonged, relentless, scorching drought, rain began to fall—but not on the gathered celebrants, only just past the nearby cliff, precisely onto the corn fields far below. It did not rain elsewhere but only on the acres of corn plants. It was the last Snake Dance to which white people were admitted since some of them had been disrespectful in the past.

The elders had brought umbrellas because the Snake Dance had always brought rain; they were not at all surprised. Their certainty and lack of doubt intensified the group intention and expectation, combined with faith and gratitude.

Religion and Traditional America

In traditional America, religion was a Sunday morning event, and out of respect, all bars and liquor stores were closed until noon. Sunday was the Sabbath and therefore all stores were closed, as they were on the afternoon of Good Friday. Jewish people observed Saturday as their Sabbath and their shops were closed as they were on Jewish holidays.

Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish places of worship were respected, as were their respective religious schools. Each of the three denominations was respected for its benevolent works and each funded and ran hospitals and humanitarian charities. They supported well-run charitable clinics to which the medical community donated its services. Government and politicians maintained a respectful hands-off attitude, as the charities saved local governments sizable sums of money and provided needed public services.

Charitable hospitals and their clinics were protected from litigation and the hazard of malpractice suits. Emergency rooms were strongly staffed by resident physicians that were backed up by rotating consultants. Any medical malfeasance was handled by the local medical society from which expulsion ended a doctor’s career. Charitable Christian hospitals were run by nuns and regulated by the local diocese. All of the charitable institutions were heavily funded by philanthropy and bequests. Successful industrialists and companies were major benefactors. The relationships between religious parochial schools, medical institutions, philanthropy, and the public, including local government, were generally harmonious and mutually beneficial. The overall system calibrated at 415 (prior to 1959).

The concept of charity was integrous as a fundamental religious virtue and social attitude of goodwill, selfless service, and benevolence. With the rise of egotism in the 1960s, pridefulness began to see charity as ‘demeaning’, and so the burden of the costs of public service was gradually shifted to the taxpayer.

During the 1960s and subsequent decades, the system was progressively secularized and dismantled by political and legal inroads. Overall costs skyrocketed to what are now the highest of any country in the world (fifteen percent of the GNP). The system declined from calibrated level 415 to the level of 195 for the current system. The same disparity is seen in nursing homes. Those run by church groups (e.g., Samaritan) calibrate at 410, whereas those run by business-oriented corporations calibrate at 195.

Secular regimentation of humanistic activities brings down the calibration level of intention and paradoxically increases the cost while the level of the overall system drops precipitously. In the U.S., the quality of individual medical practice is still high overall at 430-440. The expanding “cultural creative” segment of society is attracted to spiritually oriented practitioners who, as a group, calibrate at 499, or approximately seventy points higher than secular medicine. (They also have a twenty-two percent higher recovery rate in their patients despite having a greater caseload of difficult and chronic patients that are resistant to traditional, strictly medical-model treatments.)

Experientially, the author’s spiritually oriented holistic practice of psychiatry became the largest in the United States and eventually required fifty employees, twenty-five offices, plus research and clinical laboratories and attracted patients from all over the world. Its research department had one of the first computers, a huge machine that required a specially air-conditioned room and a direct electrical power line. The practice also provided specialized programs for 12-step groups as well as an Attitudinal Healing program based on the model initiated by Dr. Gerald Jampolsky, author of
Love is Letting Go of Fear
. (Jampolsky, rev. 1988) These family spiritual programs were provided at no cost, and the clinic itself, which had two thousand patients and treated one thousand new patients each year, charged reduced fees on a low-to-moderate cost basis. The clinic was financially self-sustaining and received no public funding. (It calibrated at 499.) Results of the innovative holistic treatment for relatively difficult, chronic, and hopeless patients were reported in many lectures, professional papers, worldwide articles (Hawkins, 1968-1981), and in book form (Hawkins and Pauling, 1973).

Spirituality and religion also have a positive impact on family health and overall social behavior, including children’s school performance, deportment, and a lower dropout rate. There are lower rates of marital conflict and violence, fewer suicides, fewer arrests, less drug use, and lower divorce and unemployment rates. There is also a lower incidence of illnesses and accidents. The overall benefit is so striking that a reviewer concluded that “religion is warranted, even if just for its social benefits” (Robb, 2003). Overall, people who attend church tend to be more conservative, as noted by public opinion polls (CNN News, December 2003).

Atheism

Atheism represents a belief system about religion and God that covers a wide spectrum. It is also commonly characteristic of a phase of life, although in some people, it may be a life-long position. An in-depth study would be too extensive to be included here, but the primary characteristics can be calibrated since the subject is actually very important. It has, of course been examined in depth by theologians, historians, psychologists, and psychoanalysts. (See Adler, M., 1976-1980; Feuerbach, 1891; Freud, 1910-1963.)

Although the integrous skeptic or agnostic who is honestly in self-doubt calibrates at 200, the majority of atheistic positions calibrates very low. These range from ignorance and indifference to anger, resentment, and hatred of God by militant atheism at calibration level 25. If we ask what is the calibration of the karma of rebuking God or the great Avatars, the calibration levels are 20 to 40, although some of these anti-God positions are merely rejections of the anthropomorphic Old Testament depictions of God as being prone to anger, jealousy, favoritism, etc.

The psychological matrix of atheism has been well described by Feuerbach and others as the rejection of the father figure, as was the case with Karl Marx. Anger at the father figure for being less than perfect is also a factor with political expressions as pointed out by Coulter (2003). Disillusionment results in narcissistic resentment towards all authority figures. The psychology of atheism is well covered by Vitz (1983-2000), a professor of psychology at New York University (excellent 10-page summary available on the Internet).

From the viewpoint of the evolution of consciousness, atheism results from the refusal or inability to let go of the illusion that the narcissistic care of the ego is sovereign and is the source of one’s life and existence. This persistence of a dualistic self-image is a consequence of the ego’s basic structure, as discussed previously. One reason computer games are so popular is that they reinforce the illusion of ‘being in control’ and thus sovereign and the “captain of one’s soul.” (The poem
Invictus
calibrates at 170.) Atheism is also to be differentiated from freethinkers (cal. 335) or uncommitted theists, such as those who were the designers of the United States Constitution.

The relinquishment of the illusion of self-sovereignty is the essence of the “hitting bottom” experience that is transformative and to which millions of people testify. It is also the crux of a true conversion experience, as well as a major consequence of the near-death experience. Curiously, atheism is based on faith, but on faith in falsity (the ego, intellect) and cannot be overcome except by an act of the Will.

The Will (Cal. 850)

Although there are extensive writings on psychology and all aspects of mental functions, there is a relative dearth of information on the human will itself. Its importance is overlooked even in psychoanalysis and most spiritual writings, although its function is critical to the advancement of consciousness, spiritual and religious development, and the steps to Enlightenment itself. The intrinsic power of the Will is denoted by its extremely high calibration at level 850; thus, it has the power to overcome all lesser positionalities and belief systems.

The basis of the power of the Will is that it is a function of the Spirit and not the mind, intellect, or emotions. It is thus unique as a human faculty. The mind ceaselessly sifts options and choices, coming to conclusions and chosen premises, but they are merely linear constructs with limited intrinsic power (i.e., logic, reason, and intellect calibrate in the 400s).