15/01/2020
Who am I? ... A survivor.
At each stage the basic question, "Who is God?" immediately raises other questions. The first of these is "Who am I?" In stage one identity is based upon the physical body and the environment. Survival is the foremost consideration here. If we look at biblical history, we find that the ancient Hebrews could survive in a harsh world much more easily than in a purposeless one. The hardships of their lives were manyâit took persistent, unending toil to raise crops from the land; enemies abounded; and being in the middle of a much larger nomadic culture, the Hebrews were caught up in one migration after another. How could this life of bare subsistence be reconciled with any sort of benign God?
One solution was to make him a capricious and unpredictable parent. This role is played out with great dramatic conviction in the Book of Genesis, which spends far more time over the fall of Adam and Eve than on their creation.
The first man and woman are the ultimate bad children. The sin they commit is to disobey God's dictum not to eat of the tree of knowledge. If we examine this act in symbolic terms, we see a father who is jealous of his adult prerogatives: he knows best, he holds the power, his word is law. To maintain this position, it is necessary that the children remain children, yet they yearn to grow up and have the same knowledge possessed by the father. Usually that is permissible, but God is the only father who was never a child himself. This makes him all the more unsympathetic, for his anger against Adam and Eve is irrational in its harshness. Here is his condemnation of Eve:
I will increase your labor and your groaning, and in labor shall you bear children. You shall be eager for your husband, and he shall be your master.
Eve has such a reputation as temptress that we forget one thingâshe is not overtly sexual until God makes her so. Being "eager for your husband" is part of the curse, as is the pain of giving birth. The rest of family life will have to bear the sentence pronounced upon God's son:
With labor shall you win your food from the earth all the days of your life. It will grow thorns and thistles for you, none but wild plants for you to eat. You shall gain your bread by the sweat of your brow, until you return to the ground; for from it you were taken. Dust you are, to dust shall you return.
This entire scene, which ends with Adam and Eve driven in shame from paradise, also divides a family, shattering the intimacy of the preceding days, when God would walk in Eden and enjoy himself with his children. But if paradise quickly turned into a faded dreamâwe are not far from the time when Cain kills his brother Abelâthe lesson sank deep: humans are guilty. They alone made the world harsh and difficult; on their heads falls the blame for the agony of childbirth and the backbreaking toil of eking out a living.
The Genesis story came about two thousand years before Christ and was written in final form by temple scribes, perhaps a thousand years after it originated. Women had been subjugated to men long before that, and the rigors of farming and childbearing are as old as humankind. So to arrive at the God of stage one, it was necessary to argue back from what already existed.
When they asked, "Who am I?" the earliest writers of scripture knew that they were mortals subject to disease and famine. They had seen a huge percentage of babies die at birth, and many times their mothers perished as well. These conditions had to have a reason; therefore the family relationship with God got worked out in terms of sin, disobedience, and ignorance. Even so, God remained on the sceneâhe watches over Adam and Eve, despite the curse put upon them, and after a while he finds enough virtue in their descendant Noah to save him from the sentence of death placed upon every other offspring from the original seed family.
Another irony is at work here, however. The only character in the episode of Eve and the apple who seems to tell the truth is the serpent. He whispers in Eve's ear that God has forbidden them to eat of the tree of good and evil because it will give them knowledge and make them equal to the father. Here are his exact words after Eve informs him that if they eat of the forbidden fruit, they will die:
Of course you will not die. God knows that as soon as you eat it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing both good and evil.
The serpent is holding out a world of awareness, independence, and decision making. All these things follow when you have knowledge. In other words, the serpent is advising God's children to grow up, and of course this is a temptation they cannot resist. Who could? (The famed authority on myth, Joseph Campbell, points out that at this time the wandering Hebrew tribes had moved into a territory where the prevailing religion was based on a wise, benign goddess of agriculture whose totem animal was the snake. In a complete reversal, the priests of Israel made the female the villain of the piece and her ally a wicked serpent.)
Why would God want to oppose such a natural development in his childrenâwhy didn't he want them to have knowledge? He acts like the worst of abusive fathers, using fear and
terror to keep his offspring in an infantile state. They never know when he will punish them nextâworse than that, he gives no hope that the original curse will ever be removed. Good and bad actions are weighed, reward and punishment are handed out from the judge's bench, yet mankind cannot escape the burden of guilt, no matter how much virtue your life demonstrates.
Rather than viewing the God of stage one harshly, we need to realize how realistic he is. Life has been incredibly hard for many people, and deep psychological wounds are inflicted in family life. We all carry around memories of how difficult it was to grow up and at any given moment, we feel the tug of old, childish fears. The survivalist and the guilty child lurk just beneath the surface. The God of stage one salves these wounds and gives us a reason to believe that we will survive. At the same time he fuels our needs. As long as we need a protector, we will cling to the role of children.
How do I fit in? ... I cope.
In stage one there is no indication that humans have a favored place in the cosmosâon the contrary. Natural forces are blind, and their power is beyond our control. Recently I saw a news report about a small town in Arkansas flattened by a tornado that struck in the middle of the night. Those who had survived were awakened by a deafening roar in the darkness and had the presence of mind to run into their basements. As they surveyed the wreckage of their lives, the dazed survivors mumbled the same response: I'm alive only by the grace of God.
They did not consider (nor express out loud) that the same God might have sent the storm. In crisis people seek ways to cope, and in stage one, God is a coping mechanism. This holds true wherever survival is in peril. In the worst ghetto areas ravaged by drugs and street crime, one finds the most intense faith. Horrible situations stretch our coping skills beyond their limitsâthe random death of children gunned down in school would be an exampleâand to escape complete despair, people will project beyond hopelessness, finding solace in a God who wants to protect them.
What is the nature of good and evil? ... Good is safety, comfort, food, shelter, and family. Evil is physical threat and abandonment.
An absolute standard of good and evil is something many people crave, particularly at a time when values seem to be crumbling. In stage one, good and evil seem to be very clear. Good derives from being safe; evil derives from being in danger. A good life has physical rewardsâfood, clothing, shelter, and a loving familyâwhile if you lead a bad life you are left alone and abandoned, prey to physical danger. But is the picture really so clear?
Once again the family drama must be taken into account. Social workers are well aware that abused children have a strange desire to defend their parents. Even after years of beatings and emotional cruelty, it can be nearly impossible to get them to testify to the abuse. Their need for a protector is too strongâone could say that love and cruelty are so interwoven that the psyche can't separate them. If you try to remove the child from the abusive environment, he is deeply afraid that you are snatching away his source of love. This confusion doesn't end with adulthood. The old brain has an overriding need for security, which is why so many abused wives defend their husbands and return to them. Good and evil become hopelessly confused.
The God of stage one is just as ambiguous. Twenty years ago I read a poignant fable about a town that was perfect. Everyone in it was healthy and happy, and the sun always shone on
their doorsteps. The only mystery in the town was that every day a few people walked away, silently and giving no explanation. No one could figure out why this was happening, yet the phenomenon didn't end. We finally discover that a single child has been trapped by his parents in the basement, where he is tortured, out of sight. Those who walk away know this secret, and for them perfection has come to an end. The vast majority don't know, or if they do, turn their heads the other way.
Fables can be read in many ways, but this one says something about our stage one God. Even if he is worshiped as a benign parent, one who never inflicted guilt upon us, his goodness is tainted by suffering. A father who provides with great love and generosity would be considered a good father, but not if he tortures one child. Anyone who considers himself a child of God has to consider this problem. Much of the time, as in the fable, it is papered over. The need for security is too great, and in addition there is only so much we can cope with at any one time.
How do I find God? ... Through fear and loving devotion.
If the God of stage one is double-edged, providing with one hand and punishing with the other, then he cannot be known only one way. Fear and love both come into play. For every biblical injunction to "love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy strength, and all thy soul," there is a counterbalance. The injunction to "fear the Lord" is expressly stated in all faiths, even the faiths supposedly based on love. (Jesus speaks quite openly about the evildoers who will be "cast out with wailing and gnashing of teeth.")
What this means in a deeper sense is that ambivalence is discouraged. Peace of a sort rules in a family where the children are told simply to love their parents but also feel secret anger, hatred, and jealousy toward them. The "official" emotion is only positive. An outsider may call this a false peace, but to the insider it works. But has negativity really gone away? It takes a great deal of growing up before one can live with ambivalence and its constant blending of dark and light, love and hateâthis is the road not taken in stage one.
A friend of mine told me a touching story of the day he grew up, as he saw it. He was a protected, even coddled child whose parents were very private. He never saw them disagree; they were careful to draw the boundary between what the adults in the family discussed between themselves and what they told the children. This is psychologically healthy, and my friend remembers an almost idyllic childhood, free of anxiety and conflict.
Then one day when he was about ten, he woke up late one night to hear loud noises from downstairs. He felt a chill of fear, certain that some crime was taking place. After a moment he realized that his parents were having a loud argument. In great consternation he jumped up and ran downstairs. When he entered the kitchen he saw the two of them confronting each other.
"Don't you lay a hand on her, or I'll kill you!" he shouted, rushing at his father. His parents were bewildered and did everything they could to calm the boy downâthere had been no violence, only an angry disagreementâbut even though he eventually grasped the situation, something deep had changed. He no longer could believe in a perfect world.
The mixture of love and anger, peace and violence, that we all have to live with had dawned on him. In place of certainty there was now ambiguityâpeople he once trusted completely had showed that they possessed a darker side. By implication the same holds true for each of us and, by extension, for God.
Everyone must face this conflict, but we resolve it in different ways. Some children try to preserve innocence by denying that its opposite exists; they turn into idealists and wishful thinkers. They show a strong streak of denial when anything "negative" takes place and will
remain anxious until the situation turns "positive" again. Other children take sides, assigning all the anxiety-provoking traits to a bad parent while labeling the other as always good. Both of these tactics fall under the category of coping mechanisms; therefore it comes as no surprise to find how much they invade religious belief in stage one, which is all about coping.
The good parent-bad parent solution takes the form of a cosmic battle between God and Satan. There is abundant proof in the Old Testament that Jehovah is willful and cruel enough to assume the role of bad parent by himself. Even a man of titanic righteousness like Moses is deprived in the end of being able to enter the promised land. No amount of fear and love, however you mix them, is enough to satisfy this God. His capriciousness knows no bounds. However, if this portrayal is unacceptable, there must be an "adversary" (the literal meaning of Satan's name) to take the blame away from God. Satan appears in the Old Testament as tempter, deceiver, stealer of souls, and the fallen angel Lucifer, who through pride tried to usurp God's authority and had to be cast down to hell. You could say that he is the light gone bad. But never once is he described as an aspect of God. The division between the two makes for a much simpler story, as it does for a child who has decided that one parent must be the good one and the other bad.
The other coping strategy, which involves denying the negative and seeking always to be positive, is just as common in religion. A lot of harm has to be overlooked to make God totally benign, yet people manage to do so. In the family drama, if there is more than one child, interpretations become fixed. One child will be absolutely sure that no abuse or conflict was ever present, while another will be just as certain that it was pervasive. The power of interpretation is linked to consciousness; things can't exist if you are not conscious of them, no matter how real they may be to others. In religious terms, some believers are content to love God and fear him at the same time. This duality in no way involves any condemnation of the deity. He is still "perfect" (meaning that he is always right) because those he punishes must be wrong.
In this case faith depends on a value system that is preordained. If some ill befalls me, I must have committed a sin, even if I didn't have any awareness of it. My task is to look deep enough until I find the flaw inside myself, and then I will see the perfect judgment God has rendered. To someone outside the system, however, it appears that an abused child is figuring out, through convoluted logic, how to make himself wrong so that the cruel parent remains right. In stage one, God has to be right. If he isn't, the world becomes too dangerous to live in.
What's my life challenge? ... To survive, protect, and maintain.
Every stage of God implies a life challenge, which can be expressed in terms of highest aspiration. God exists to inspire us, and we express this through the aspirations we set for ourselves. An aspiration is the limit of the possible. In stage one, the limit is set by physical circumstances. If you are surrounded by threats, to survive is a high aspiration. This would be true in a shipwreck, a war, a famine, or an abusive family. However, each stage of God must give scope to the whole range of human abilities; even in the worst situations a person aspires to do more than cope.
You might think that the next step would be escape. In stage one, however, escape is blocked by the reality principle. A child can't escape his family, just as famine victims often can't escape drought. So the mind turns instead to imitating God, and since God is a protector, we try to protect the most valuable things in life. Protectors take many forms. Some are policemen protecting the law, firemen protecting safety, social workers protecting the helpless. In other words, stage one is the most social of all the seven worlds we will examine. Here one learns to be responsible and caring.
The reward for learning to protect others is that in return they give you their love and respect. Notice how furious the police become if they are taunted by the very people they are sworn to defend (this occurs in riots, political demonstrations, and racially divided neighborhoods). The protector craves respect. He is also inflexible about rules and laws. Being a guardian, he sees danger everywhere; therefore he is motivated to keep people in line "for their own good." This is essentially a parental feeling, and you will find that police officers can be fatherly, in both the good and bad sense. They may be quick to forgive offenses where the perpetrator acts humbled and chastised, but they are also prone to dispensing rough justice when a bad guy shows no remorse. Outright defiance is the worst response to a protector, who then feels completely justified in holding you to the letter of the law, just as Jehovah felt justified in punishing infractions of his law. Divine authority could be very cruel even to the chosen people, but those outside the law (meaning anyone with a different religion) deserve no mercy.
What is my greatest strength? ... Courage.
What is my biggest hurdle? ... Fear of loss, abandonment.
It isn't hard to figure out what you have to do to survive in a harsh worldâyou have to show courage in the face of adversity. The Old Testament is a world of heroes like Samson and David who fight battles and defeat enemies. Their victory is proof that God favors them. But as we saw, no amount of effort will totally appease this God. The courage to fight must eventually turn into the courage to oppose him.
If we take it back to the family, a vicious circle is involved. If you are afraid of your father because of his violent and unpredictable temper, the prospect of facing him head-on will arouse even more fear. Thus the incentive to keep quiet gets strengthened. Unfortunately, keeping quiet only makes the fear worse, since it has no release. The only way out is to overcome the hurdle, which is true at every stage of God. As in the family, the devotee of a fearful God will not move on to a higher stage until he says, "I am tired of being afraid. You are not my God if I have to hide from your anger."
In social terms we see this played out in rebellion against authority. A policeman who decides to testify against his fellow officers on charges of corruption walks a fine line. From one perspective he is a traitor, from another he has found a conscience. Which one is true? It all depends on where you are heading. Some people have to preserve the system, and since corruption is inevitable, they must decide how much bad can be stomached in the name of the common good. Fathers and mothers make such decisions every day over the bad behavior of their children, just as the police do over behavior under the law. But others look at the same system and decide that doing good isn't consistent with breaking the rules you are assigned to enforce. Parents can't teach truth-telling while at the same time being liars; policemen can't accept bribes and at the same time arrest crooks.
There is no clear line here. As organized religions demonstrate, it is possible to live a long time with an angry, jealous, unfair God, even though he is supposed to be the highest judge. Neither side of the line is better than the other; ultimately one must learn to live with ambivalence.
The important issue is psychological. How much fear are you willing to live with? When this hurdle is cleared, when personal integrity is more important than being accepted within the system, a new stage begins. Thus the exhilaration felt by many war protesters. To them, demonstrations against authority mark a new birth of morality that is guided by principle
rather than outside force. Now translate this to an inner war, with one voice urging rebellion and the other threatening you with punishment for breaking the law, and you have the core drama of stage one.
What is my greatest temptation? ... Tyranny.
You would think from the story of Adam and Eve that God's children were tempted to sin, but to me this is just the official version. The guardian wants you to obey; therefore he must make disobedience a wrongful act. The real temptation lies on God's side, just as it does with any protector who acts in his name. God's temptation is to become a tyrant. Tyranny is protection that has gone too far. It exists in families where the parents cannot balance rules with freedom. It exists in systems of law where mercy has been forgotten.
The desire to rule is so seductive that we don't need to delve very far into this particular temptation. It is more interesting to ask how it is ever escaped. The tyrant more often than not has to be deposed, overthrown by force. In some societies, as in some families, this happens through violence. The children rebel against authority by killing it; this takes place symbolicallyâthrough reckless teenage behavior with drinking and driving, for example. But short of violence there is a subtler mechanism for escaping any temptation, which is to see through the need for it. In Mafia films the gangsters inevitably run a protection racket. Under the pretext of keeping harm away from a storekeeper, they sell him insurance in the form of their protection. But this scheme works only through a lie, since the violence being held at bay comes from the gangsters themselvesâthey are the threat and the insurance. In spiritual terms, God's protection is valued only by denying that he is also the source of the threat. In the end, nothing is outside the deity, so asking him to protect you from storms, famine, disease, and misfortune is the same as asking the perpetrator.
I was reading a psychiatric case study in which a father was very worried about his three-year-old daughter. The little girl couldn't sleep well and suffered from bouts of severe anxiety. The father sat up with her every night, reading fairy tales to her and trying to offer reassurance.
"I read to her about Little Red Riding Hood and the big bad wolf," he told the therapist, "and when she gets scared, I tell her that there's nothing to worry about. I'm here to protect her."
"So you can't understand why she still seems so frightened?" the therapist remarked.
"Not at all," said the father. "Do I need to be even more reassuring?"
"No, you need to ask yourself why you choose frightening stories when she is so frightened to begin with."
The answer in this case is that the father was blinded by his need to be reassuring, a need rooted in his pastâhe had had an absent father who wasn't around to calm his child's fears. This is a telling anecdote, because it poses the central question in stage one: Why did God have to make such a frightening world? Was it just out of the temptation to tyrannize us? The answer doesn't lie with God but in our interpretation of him. To get out of stage one, you must arrive at a new interpretation of all the issues raised so farâWho is God? What kind of world did he create? Who am I? How do I fit in? In stage two the basic problem of survival has been overcome. There is much less need for fear, and for the first time we see the emerging influence of the new brain. Even so, just as the reptilian brain is buried inside the skull, not abolished by the cerebrum or canceled out by higher thought, the God of stage one is a permanent legacy that everyone confronts before inner growth can be achieved.
