by Kittredge Cherry | Jun 6, 2020 (qspirit.net)

Biblical arguments for LGBTQ rights and a queer Jesus may seem like new ideas, but they were pioneered about 200 years ago by an influential British philosopher — in writings that were published only in recent years.

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832) presented Biblical evidence for Jesus’ homosexuality as part of his theological defense for same-sex love in “Not Paul, but Jesus Vol. III.” It was published for the first time in 2013 and is freely available to download or view online. He died on June 6, 1832.

Bentham didn’t dare publish it during his lifetime because he feared being labeled a “sodomite” himself. At the time “buggery” was punished with death by hanging in England.

This champion of sexual freedom was far, far ahead of his time. “Not Paul, but Jesus” lays out many of the same arguments that are still used today by LGBTQ Christians and our allies: debunking the scriptures typically used to condemn LGBTQ people and pointing out that Jesus never said anything about homosexuality. Bentham goes on to present an idea that many still consider blasphemous. He suggests that Jesus had male-male sexual relationships.

Bentham wrote the book so long ago that the word “homosexuality” had not been invented yet. Instead he has a chapter titled “The eccentric pleasures of the bed, whether partaken of by Jesus?” His language may sound quaint, but his ideas are right on target for today. Bentham himself struggled with words for what we call homosexuality, deliberately creating new vocabulary so he could avoid the negative connotations associated with the terminology of his day (sodomy, buggery, perversion, etc.).

Bentham is best known as the founder of Utilitarianism, a philosophy that advocates “the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people” A respected thinker during his lifetime, Bentham was also far advanced on a wide range of other legal, economic and political issues. He coined the word “international.” He was one of the first proponents of animal rights. He supported women’s equality and opposed slavery and capital punishment. He corresponded with various world leaders, including US presidents Jefferson and Madison. Several South and Central American nations sought his advice in creating their constitutions and legal codes. Born and raised in a devout Anglican family in London, he became an agnostic who believed that religion was an instrument of oppression. His solution was separation of church and state.

Bentham sheds light on “clobber passages”

In the third volume of “Not Paul, but Jesus Vol. III,” Bentham corrects false interpretations of what would later come to be called the “clobber passages.” He identifies the sin of Sodom as gang-rape. He puts the sexual prohibitions of the Hebrew scriptures into historical context, pointing out that many of the other taboos are no longer enforced.

Bentham dismisses Paul’s condemnations of homosexuality as an asceticism not shared by Jesus himself. He sees romantic love between Old Testament heroes Jonathan and David — and possibly between Jesus and his beloved disciple John, noting that the Bible reports their loving touch without condemnation.

Jeremy Bentham engraving by J. Thomson, from a painting by W. Derby (courtesy of the Bentham Project)

Bentham goes on to analyze the account in Mark’s gospel of “the stripling in the loose attire” (now usually known as “the naked young man”) at the arrest of Jesus — a passage that continues to fuel 21st-century speculations in the LGBTQ community. He urges readers to consider the most “probable interpretation” for the nakedness. (In a different manuscript he made it clear that the youth was probably a male prostitute loyal to Jesus.) Bentham even hints that Jesus was killed for homosexuality, asking readers to consider what interaction with a naked man could be “so awful” that it leads to cruel execution.

Pro-LGBTQ Christians today often note that Jesus never said anything against homosexuality. Bentham makes the same point in his own elaborate way, with sentences such as: “In the acts or discourses of Jesus, had any such marks of reprobation towards the mode of sexuality in question been to be found as may be seen in such abundance in the epistles of Paul—in a word, had any one decided mark of reprobation been so to be found as pronounced upon it by Jesus, in the eyes [of] no believer in Jesus could any such body of evidence as hath here been seen [to] present itself be considered as worth regarding.”

Indeed Bentham’s main purpose in all three volumes of “Not Paul, but Jesus” is to show the error in following the ascetic Paul instead of the true Christianity of the more tolerant Jesus, who accepted the human pursuit of pleasure. This concept is introduced in the first volume of “Not Paul, but Jesus” was published in 1823. Fearing hostile reactions, Bentham used the pseudonym Gamaliel Smith. The second volume, which deals with the early church, and the third volume, which focuses on sexual morality, remained unpublished.

Bentham wrote a lot about homosexuality

Bentham wrote more than 500 pages explaining his liberal views on homosexuality during the last 50 years of his life.  Some of these documents may have circulated among his followers, but none of it was published during his lifetime.

The first Bentham writings on homosexuality to be published were primarily secular. His 1785 essay “Offences Against One’s Self: Paederasty” is considered the first document arguing for decriminalization of homosexuality in England. He reasoned that consensual sex between same-sex partners should not be punished because it does not harm anyone. The essay was not published until 1931, when a fragment first appeared in print. The full essay was finally published in 1978.

Only now are Bentham’s writings on Jesus and homosexuality coming to light. The third volume of “Not Paul, but Jesus” was not published in any form until 2013. It was released last year by the Bentham Project at University College London, which counts him as its spiritual father.

In January 2014 Bentham’s own overview of the “Not Paul, but Jesus, Volume 3” appeared as a chapter in a book published by Oxford University Press: “Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Writings on Sexual Morality” by Jeremy Bentham. (More info at: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199685189.do)

A section on “Jesus’s Sexuality” is also included in the 2012 article “Jeremy Bentham: Prophet of Secularism” by Philip Schofield, director of the Bentham Project. He draws on the “Not Paul” book and another set of manuscripts to draw powerful conclusions such as this:

Bentham claimed that, unlike Paul, Jesus did not, according to any account that appeared in the four Gospels, condemn either the pleasures of the table or the pleasures of the bed. On the contrary, Jesus’s opposition to asceticism was shown in his condemnation of the Mosaic law in Matthew 9: 9–17…. Bentham pointed out that Paul’s most forceful condemnation was directed towards homosexuality. Bentham responded that not only had Jesus never condemned homosexuality, but that he had probably engaged in it. There were, moreover, many females in Jesus’s immediate circle, and again Bentham saw no reason why Jesus might not have engaged in heterosexual activity as well.

Bentham’s mysterious life and lasting impact

Although Bentham doggedly defended consensual sexual activity between same-sex couples for half a century, his own love life remains a mystery. The son of a wealthy lawyer, he was a child prodigy who grew up to be a brilliant and eccentric recluse, living alone in London in what he called “a state of perpetual and unruffled gaiety.” He referred to his home as his “hermitage.” He lived there with a “sacred teapot” called Dicky, a favorite walking stick named Dapple, and a beloved tom cat addressed as the Reverend Doctor John Langborn. He declared, “I love everything that has four legs,” and allowed a colony of mice to share his office. One study concludes he had Asperger Syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism. Check this link for an 1827 description of Bentham’s eccentricities.

The philosopher’s influence continued to grow after his death as his supporters spread his ideas. Most of what is now known as liberalism is rooted in Bentham’s philosophy. His diverse followers included economist John Stuart Mill and feminist firebrand Frances “Fanny” Wright, who once exclaimed in a poem, “Oh had I but the Lesbyan’s lyre, / Blue-eyed Sappho’s fervid strain, / Then might I hope thy blood to fire…”.

Contemporary queer theologians such as Robert Shore-Goss have recognized him too. Shore-Goss writes a section about Bentham in the chapter on “Christian Homodevotion to Jesus” in his book “Queering Christ: Beyond Jesus Acted Up.”

During his 84 years Bentham wrote manuscripts totaling more than 5 million words, and many remain unstudied and unpublished. The Bentham Project is busy recruiting volunteers worldwide to transcribe them. More words of wisdom are likely to emerge from this prophet of LGBTQ rights who once summed up his approach to life by saying: “Create all the happiness you are able to create: remove all the misery you are able to remove.”

Not Paul, but Jesus Vol. III by Jeremy Bentham, edited by Philip Schofield, Michael Quinn and Catherine Pease-Watkin, is now freely available to download or view online at:
http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/2013/04/30/not-paul-but-jesus-vol-iii/

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Top image credit:
Jeremy Bentham portrait by Henry William Pickersgill (Wikimedia Commons)

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Related links:

To read this article in Russian, go to:
Гомосексуальность Иисуса в трудах философа XVIII века (nuntiare.org)

To read this article in Italian, go to:
Il Gesù omosessuale del filosofo Jeremy Bentham (gionata.org)

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This post is part of the LGBTQ Saints series by Kittredge Cherry. Traditional and alternative saints, people in the Bible, LGBTQ martyrs, authors, theologians, religious leaders, artists, deities and other figures of special interest to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and our allies are covered. It is also part of the Queer Christ series by Kittredge Cherry at the Jesus in Love Blog. The series gathers together visions of the queer Christ as presented by artists, writers, theologians and others.

This article was first published on Q Spirit in June 2017 and was updated for accuracy on June 5, 2020.

Copyright © Kittredge Cherry. All rights reserved.
http://www.jesusinlove.blogspot.com/
Jesus in Love Blog on LGBT spirituality and the arts

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Kittredge Cherry

Founder at Q SpiritKittredge Cherry is a lesbian Christian author who writes regularly about LGBTQ spirituality.She holds degrees in religion, journalism and art history.She was ordained by Metropolitan Community Churches and served as its national ecumenical officer, advocating for LGBTQ rights at the National Council of Churches and World Council of Churches.(Visited 862 times, 3 visits today)

7 Comments

1. Rick on November 23, 2018 at 6:38 pmTo state that Jesus was homosexual is blasphemy of the worst kind. The Bible is precisely clear that Jesus Christ is the hypostatic union or the fusion of two natures “God and man” and he in theological circles he is called the God/man. As God Jesus could not have had sex with anyone male or female. It was totally against his sinless purity to surrender to lust. He was totally pure and spotless as a man which made him the lamb of God without spot or wrinkle and he was beyond human purity and fully holy as God. To assault the character of God come in human flesh is heinous blasphemy and inexcusable.AND YET God the Father gave his ONLY BEGOTTEN SON who was conceived of the Holy Spirit to a virgin (not human lust but a miraculous inpregnation) the required no sexual activity. So Jesus as God in the form of man walked on earth among us and never had a sexual encounter. If he had it would have been spelled out as are the sexual encounters of other scripture characters.The person or persons who espouse this blasphemy need to repent in humility and confess this atrocious sin to God and seek his forgiveness and eternal life through the blood shed on Calvary to pay in full for man’s sin debt. Continuing to teach this blasphemous idea and to die teaching it will be a sure fire trip to the lake of fire forever as spoken of in Revelation 20 and verses 11-15. Be warned; “God is not to be mocked.”For assurance that Jesus Christ is God in human flesh please visit the page https://www.crlord.com/the-deity-of-jesus.html – See also the related pages on this website for further information on this subject.Reply
   • Raph Martin on June 6, 2020 at 5:20 pmRick,
     I think I understand your vision of Jesus’ aimlessness but don’t understand why you think sexual expressions are sinful. As you know, there are Saints -married couples such as Louis and Zelig Martin who were the parents of St. Therese of Lisieux. Her parents engaged in sex to have her and their other children too. Can you bring yourself around to recognizing holy sexuality – a mutual loving and caring expression of sexual intimacy between couples -in this case betweeen a married man and his wife, that accords with the mind and will of God? John’s gospel speaks of being born from above and makes it clear that this kind of regeneration transcends the way people are conceived and born into this world.
     It seems to me that holy sexuality is capable of being expressed between people of the same or different sex when their expressions are motivated by live, care, and the willingness to bring pleasure into the bonds that unite them.
     For the most part, people cannot reconcile the thought of Jesus expressing love to another man as they hold that sex is dirty or filled with selfish passion. However, as I am trying to show there are holy expressions of sex carried out in a living fashion. Jesus, being sinless was also relational and if ever he had sexual intimacy with another person it would have been holy and living. Most Christians have seen the exploitation of sexuality as depicted in sensual scenes in theaters or other art firms but that is not the whole expression if the gift if sexuality. All men and women are capable of sexual relationships that are informed by love and respect and unfortunately this dimension is lacking in a world dominated by greed and lust. And yet, there have been saints who have risen above worldly standards affirming the holiness of sex and sexual relationships. Would you concur?
2. Rollan McCleary on June 18, 2017 at 5:15 am It is interesting how Bentham was pre-modern in regarding this whole subject in an almost wholly sexual rather than psychological light. It’s as fundamental a mistake as most gay/queer theologians make today when they keep insisting that Jesus said nothing at all about homosexuality when in fact he did. Not only did he significantly affirm that some people are born different (the eunuch word was the nearest ancient world term for homosexual)but he referred to homophobia and its potential for murderous violence in the Sermon on the Mount using it, I think, as a kind of symbolism of all racisms and prejudices. Amazingly, the Aramaic Raca word which should translate something abusive like “faggot”, is an asteroid notably connected in Jesus’ birth data (that I claim to possess) to Honoria (Honour) and the Part of Sexuality. It is so in a tense way which suggests Jesus probably was insulted in the course of his life by some critics as gay/queer/different, which there are a variety of reasons to suppose he was.Some people think it doesn’t matter whether Jesus was gay or not which seems as strange as suggesting it couldn’t matter whether Michelangelo was when plainly the orientation influenced his whole output. Gay (and I do mean an essential orientation rather than the fluid identity without essence assumed by queer theory) is however before all else a psychology, a mindset, an outlook. If and why Jesus was gay is an important subject, but as far as sex is concerned almost the most vital question for us today is whether Jesus would approve or tolerate its expression in others. Even though some kind of eros may be assumed to have existed between Jesus and John,(again, the birth pattern supports some kind of relation) for himself as Messiah we can categorically affirm Jesus had intercourse with no one of either sex. Not only is that written into his natus quite descriptively, but this abstention was necessarily the case in cultural and religious context. No matter what anyone’s beliefs and opinions regarding Jesus’ humanity and divinity are, the fact is Jesus was self-understood and understood by his disciples to be what to the OT was the Angel of the Lord, the visible face of the invisible God. Given the sin of the fallen angels who mated with the daughters of men in Genesis, it would be unthinkable for Jesus and his disciples to duplicate something of the kind. (In fact, had not the men of Sodom wished to have intercourse with angels?) So, imagination should not be allowed to get too out of hand in this area after the manner of especially some theological queer theorists who seem to take the liberty to say almost anything about Jesus.In its details and various implications however this whole subject is so large, complex and controversial one cannot possibly hope to cover it here, but anyone who wants to explore it could usefully read my “Testament of the Magi” (available in book and kindle at Amazon https://goo.gl/I28aCm)and in especially its Part Two which covers a lot in terms of history, psychology and theology. The information here should have been common knowledge and discussed long ago but I have always met almost complete silence and indifference if I have ever approached gay names in religion to the point I have pretty much given up on the subject of Jesus and sexuality and on gay Christians generally. Among other things it seems to be I am dismissed as some non American poaching on territory still after many years largely in American hands.Reply

July 4, 2020 (astrobutterfly.com)

On July 5th, 2020 we have a Lunar Eclipse at 13° Capricorn.

This is the very last eclipse in the Cancer/Capricorn axis. This is the “final act” of the drama series that started in 2017 when we had our 1st eclipse on the Cancer/Capricorn axis.

This Lunar Eclipse is a South Node Eclipse so it is about letting go of the past. Even the aspects the Full Moon is engaged in are separating. Everything about this eclipse screams “move on”. We are ready to move on.

“Ready to move on” doesn’t mean moving on is easy. Moving on is almost never easy, and even when we think we have moved on it’s probably because we haven’t fully processed the experience.

South Node eclipses are about letting go. Again, we can never truly let go of something, because the material and energetic imprint of that ‘something’ does not just ‘disappear’.

It transforms. It moves on to other realms. It becomes something else. It may no longer belong to us. It may no longer be part of our lives. But it is still somewhere, ever-evolving.

In Vedic astrology, the Lunar Nodes are represented by a Serpent. The North Node is the head of the Serpent, or the Direction, and the South Node the tail.

That’s why we are told to focus on our North Node – our Direction in life. (at least in our capitalist society; in the past, it was the South Node that was revered, since it was a spiritual point of liberation and transcendence).

The North Node, the head, is hungry for new experiences. The South Node, the tail, is what comes out of these experiences.

But then the serpent is depicted as an infinity symbol or as a serpent that eats its tail. What comes out, the South Node, doesn’t just go away, it becomes the new fuel for the North Node. That’s karma, or what goes around comes around.

This Lunar Eclipse highlights themes connected to Cancer and Capricorn. Cancer is what we create and nurture. Capricorn is rules, systems, and top-down hierarchies.

We need both, however when the North Node is in Cancer and the South Node in Capricorn, our focus is on nurture, not on systems. Now the question is, what do we do with these outdated Capricorn systems and rules? Do we just drop them?

Just as the serpent that eats its tail, we cannot just drop them. We need to take what’s nurturing and can still serve the purpose of the North Node, and then allow what’s left to become something else.

Today a song came to mind, “Empty garden” by Elton John, a very South Node title. It is a sad song about separation and letting go.

Elton John sings about a gardener who used to take good care of a garden, so “he must have cared a lot”, however now the garden is empty and “in the cracks along the sidewalk nothing grows no more”. He’s been knocking on the door, but no one answers.

I was surprised to find that he wrote the song as a tribute for his good friend John Lennon, a few months after Lennon’s assassination in 1980.

Elton John was very affected by it, and writing this song was a way to ‘move on’ in a South Node way. He did not “let go” of Lennon, but he processed his emotions through a tribute-song, leaving a legacy behind.

Moving on does not mean erasing something, or making it go away. It means just that. Moving on. From Elton John’s psyche into the collective psyche. John Lennon is no longer amongst us but he still lives through his own songs and through other artists’ tributes.

If you know you need to let go of something and you find it difficult, remind yourself that letting go is not about eliminating or erasing that thing from your life. Is about allowing it to re-invent itself and become something perhaps even greater.

–Astro Butterfly

BY RICHARD SMOLEY (newdawnmagazine.com)

This article was published in New Dawn 131 (Mar-Apr 2012)

It has happened to everyone. You go into a room only to find you have no recollection of why you went; someone reminds you of a promise you made but have completely forgotten; or you realise you’ve set down your keys but can’t remember where. Nor are such cases always matters of failure: sometimes you discover that you have done a perfectly good job of making coffee or writing a cheque even though you have no memory of it.

We usually take these harmless instances of forgetting for granted; it’s hard to believe that they can tell us anything important. But according to George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1866?-1949), they point to the heart of the human predicament.

Long before the twentieth century’s discovery of the unconscious, people knew that there were unseen parts to themselves. “I cannot totally grasp all that I am,” wrote St. Augustine in the fifth century CE. “For that darkness is lamentable in which the possibilities in me are hidden from myself: so that my mind, questioning itself upon its own powers, feels that it cannot rightly trust its own report.”

Gurdjieff would have agreed. Indeed he insisted that we are not awake even in the so-called waking state, but go about our lives in a hypnotic stupor. “It may surprise you,” he said, “if I say that the chief feature of a modern man’s being which explains everything else that is lacking in him is sleep. A modern man lives in sleep, in sleep he is born and in sleep he dies” (emphasis here and in other quotes is in the original). 

This sleep, Gurdjieff contended, is universal, or nearly so. Today some contend that the mass of humanity is being manipulated by a small and sinister elite who are keeping people in the dark in order to maintain their own power and position. This is not Gurdjieff’s view. According to him, the world’s leaders are in the same position as the rest of us. During World War I, Gurdjieff said, “Neither Emperor Wilhelm [of Germany], nor generals, nor ministers, nor parliaments, signify anything or can do anything.” Nor is it a matter of a secret cabal pulling the strings behind the scenes. Instead “everything that happens on a big scale is governed from outside, and governed either by accidental combinations of influences or by general cosmic laws.”

In 1915 in St. Petersburg, Gurdjieff met his most famous student, the man who, more than Gurdjieff himself, would become the most widely read exponent of his teaching: Piotr Demianovich Ouspensky (1878–1947). Ouspensky’s account of his experiences appears in what is perhaps the best and most famous book about Gurdjieff’s teaching: In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of a Forgotten Teaching, which Gurdjieff himself endorsed as an accurate picture of his views. It presents an intricate and fantastic esoteric system. One theme is the “sleep” of ordinary life. Another is the disunity of the human being. Gurdjieff says:

Man such as we know him… cannot have a permanent and single I. His I changes as quickly as his thoughts, feelings, and moods, and he makes a profound mistake in considering himself always one and the same person; in reality he is always a different person, not the one he was a moment ago….

Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking “I.” And each time his I is different. Just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man’s name is legion.

Gurdjieff is here alluding to an ancient view of the human mind, which regards human beings as essentially tripartite, consisting of the intellect, the emotions, and the instinctive and motor functions of the body.

These three “centres,” as Gurdjieff called them, “instead of fusing inwardly in the normal way to produce common outer manifestations, have become, especially of late, quite independent outward functions…. [Man] cannot be master of himself, for not only does he not control these centres, which ought to function in complete subordination to his consciousness, but he does not even know which of his centres governs them all.”

This disjunction would be bad enough on its own, but it is compounded by “sleep,” the hypnotic trance in which we habitually live. Gurdjieff links this “sleep” to the concept of kundalini.

The spread of Eastern teachings over the past generation has made kundalini a comparatively familiar term. Most esotericists use this Sanskrit word to refer to the “serpent fire” at the base of the spine. This subtle energy is said to lie dormant in most people but can be awakened through meditation or yogic practices. Travelling up the spine, it brings about illumination when it reaches the head.

Gurdjieff thought this view of kundalini was completely wrong. “In reality Kundalini is the power of imagination, the power of fantasy, which takes the place of a real function. When a man dreams instead of acting, when his dreams take the place of reality,… it is the force of Kundalini acting in him. Kundalini can act in all centres and with its help all the centres can be satisfied with the imaginary instead of the real.”

In his immense and difficult magnum opus, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, Gurdjieff speaks of “the crystallised consequences of the properties of the organ kundabuffer.” Kundabuffer, a coinage of Gurdjieff’s, is a portmanteau word formed from “kundalini” and “buffer”; “buffers” were what he called those psychic mechanisms that keep the different “I” ’s from confronting each other. (The idea resembles the modern psychological concept of dissociation.)

But what Gurdjieff calls “the terror of the situation” is still worse. It might not matter if we lived our lives in sleep; perhaps we would not achieve all we could, but that almost inevitably happens anyway. According to conventional religion, if we are good, we will still go to heaven (or obtain a favourable rebirth) when we die.

Gurdjieff does not subscribe to conventional views of immortality. For Gurdjieff, we possess the possibility of having immortal souls, or what he calls “higher being-bodies,” but we almost never attain them because we live in sleep. And for undeveloped human beings, there is no immortality. “The ‘man-machine’… who is now one, the next moment another, the next moment a third, has no future of any kind; he is buried and that is all.”

This bleak view of human fate is reminiscent of the gloomier Gnostic cosmologies, and to many who have read In Search of the Miraculous, Gurdjieff sounds like a Gnostic. “Kundalini is a force put into men in order to keep them in their present state,” he asserts. “One would think that there are forces for whom it is useful and profitable to keep man in a hypnotic state.”

There is some truth to the idea that Gurdjieff is a kind of Gnostic, but only some. To understand it fully, we need to grasp something of his intricate cosmology. It can be best seen in a diagram known as the Ray of Creation (Figure 1). Gurdjieff did not claim to have originated it but said it “belongs to ancient knowledge.” Many other esoteric systems are, he adds, distorted or incomplete versions of this system.

As one can see from the diagram, the Ray of Creation rather resembles the way children sometimes address envelopes: after listing the street, city, and state, they will add “USA, North America, Planet Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the Universe.” It also resembles the levels of manifestation seen in other systems, like the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. But Gurdjieff depicts the cosmic levels in terms of scale. The Absolute, or God, is all-encompassing. The next level is that of “all worlds,” that is, all galaxies (and perhaps all universes) taken as one. The next stage is that of “all suns” in our own galaxy, and so on. Each level, as it descends, is subject to a new set of cosmic laws of its own in addition to those of all the levels above it.

In contrast to the higher realms, where there is comparative freedom, we on Earth are subject to many cosmic laws. In fact we are very nearly at the bottom rung of the ladder – but not at the absolute bottom, for that rung is occupied by the Moon. Contrary to the prevailing scientific views both of his time and of our own, Gurdjieff held that the Moon is not cold and dead but is rather “an unborn planet, one that is, so to speak, being born. It is becoming warm gradually and in time (given a favourable development of the Ray of Creation) it will become like the Earth and have a satellite of its own.”

“Food for the Moon”

The growing Moon needs to be fed by certain cosmic energies. What Gurdjieff calls “a huge accumulator” exists on Earth to accomplish this end. This “accumulator” is organic life in all its forms: “Everything living sets free at its death a certain amount of the energy that has ‘animated’ it: this energy, or the ‘souls’ of everything living – plants, animals, people – is attracted to the Moon as though by a huge electromagnet.” Human beings, like the rest of life on Earth, are thus merely “food for the Moon.”

Such is the view set out in In Search of the Miraculous. Because this book is much more readable than Gurdjieff’s own magnum opus Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, many take it as the final word. But Beelzebub amends this picture in an important way. For while Gurdjieff here reiterates that humanity was indeed designed as “food for the Moon,” he adds that we have a choice of how to serve this end.

Buried toward the end of Beelzebub, in a convoluted passage on war, Gurdjieff makes an important and often overlooked disclosure: that the energy needed to “feed the Moon” is precisely the same as that given off by people “forming and perfecting… their higher bodies by means of conscious labours and intentional sufferings.” If people do not serve the purposes of “Great Nature” by inner work, this energy will be extracted from them on a massive scale by means of wars and epidemics.

Gurdjieff’s picture of the universe, stated so baldly, seems improbable. What are we to make of “higher being-bodies,” “kundabuffer,” and the idea that we are “food for the Moon”? Does he mean these things literally? There was always a touch of the rogue about Gurdjieff, and the reader is sometimes struck by his writing in the same way that some people were struck by him in life: he seems to be staring at you with a penetrating gaze and asking you to decide whether or not he is kidding.

Yet there is nothing in Gurdjieff’s life and work to indicate that he did not mean what he said. He despised conventional wisdom, and indeed one of the main themes interwoven throughout Beelzebub’s 1,200 pages is that modern people are so stuffed with absurdities that they have lost sight of cosmic truths. So Gurdjieff would hardly be concerned that today’s scientists and psychologists might differ with many points of his teaching.

At the same time there is an elegance and sublimity to Gurdjieff’s vision. He is telling us not only that we are here for a purpose, but that the universe is benign and intricately constructed: if we fulfil its designs, we will be rewarded with immortality.If you appreciate this article, please consider a contribution to help maintain this website.

“The Fourth Way”

To rescue us from our plight, Gurdjieff brought what he called “the Fourth Way.” He contrasts his approach with three more familiar ways: (1) the way of the fakir, who masters his body to the point where he can stand “motionless in the same position for hours, days, months, or years”; (2) the way of the monk, who, by prayer and devotion to God, masters the emotions; (3) the way of the yogi, the one who gains control over the mind.

Unlike these paths, the Fourth Way, “the way of the sly man,” does not require withdrawal from the world, but can and should be pursued in the course of everyday life; and instead of working with the mind, the body, or the emotions alone, it works with all three. It is, Gurdjieff claimed, faster and more efficient than the other three ways. “The ‘sly man’ knows the secret,” said Gurdjieff, “and with its help outstrips the fakir, the monk, and the yogi.”

What is the sly man’s “secret”? It is a higher force, an energy that is able to penetrate the being of man and create unity in his centres where there was none before. This energy must come from above, but it will not come by itself; Gurdjieff does not preach quietism but advocates “conscious labours and intentional suffering.” (Indeed Gurdjieff’s disciples refer to his teaching as “the Work”; those attempting to follow it are said to be “in the Work.”) For a long time these “labours” and “sufferings” will consist, not in some sophisticated form of masochism, but in striving to overcome the slumber of daily life and see oneself as one really is.

A central practice of the Fourth Way is self-remembering. “You do not remember yourselves,” Gurdjieff chides Ouspensky’s Petersburg group. “You do not feel yourselves; you are not conscious of yourselves. With you, ‘it observes’ just as ‘it speaks,’ ‘it thinks,’ ‘it laughs.’ You do not feel: I observe, I notice, I see.”

Anyone who has read even a little in the literature of contemporary spirituality will find familiar resonances here, for many books emphasise the need for mindfulness. Gurdjieff’s teaching goes still further, for it puts this effort at the centre of the spiritual search. It also gives many more specific practices for “self-remembering”: people in the Work often receive instructions about being consciously present at certain moments of the day or during particular tasks.

Many who have read about – or even practiced – Gurdjieff’s teaching seem to fall into the trap of seeing “self-remembering” as a completely cerebral practice; trying to carry it out, they end up simply being self-conscious in the ordinary sense. They miss an essential part of the practice: that self-remembering entails a conscious effort of sensing the body.

Self-remembering begins with the body because, as the French Gurdjieffian Jean Vaysse puts it, the body “is solid and concrete, with an apparently stable form which can… be relied on to some degree. It is the instrument through which we perceive and our means of action. It can stay still voluntarily and thus is easier than the other parts for us to observe. It is relatively obedient, and we have a certain amount of control over it (in any case more than over our other parts). In addition, it is the one solid material base in us.”

Hence a Gurdjieffian reading this article might attempt to read while giving some attention to the sensation of some part of the body, the foot or hand, say, or even the body as a whole. This may sound simple, but if you try it, you’ll find it isn’t. If you’re lucky, you may be able to keep this “divided attention” for a few seconds before you lose it again. For a long time the Work involves returning to this sensation of the body over and over again no matter what you’re doing. Such attempts are known as “efforts.” They are meant to counteract the sleep of everyday life. Those who persist in this practice find that some of the “maleficent consequences of the properties of the organ kundabuffer” are, if not destroyed, at least interrupted, for these efforts help to dissipate daydreaming, absentmindedness, and the hazy stupor in which we stumble through our lives.

These efforts of attention tie into other aspects of the teaching as well. Gurdjieff defined attention as “the direction of the thinking centre’s activity.” Self-remembering, at least in the early stages, directs the “thinking centre” toward the body, which is governed by the “moving-instinctive centre.” Self-remembering brings these two centres closer together. When the mind is paying attention to the body, they are working a bit more in harmony, and the practitioner is slightly closer to becoming a unified being. (See the accompanying article on page 27 for further discussion – purchase a copy of the magazine to read it.)

Gurdjieff further explains that “making a conscious effort at the moment an impression is received” enables the organism to absorb more of certain subtle energies than it ordinarily does. These energies are used to create “higher being-bodies” that can withstand the shock of death. Thus self-remembering, a practice as rich and multileveled as meditation itself, is meant not only to counteract the sleep and disunity of man, but to help one attain the immortality that, Gurdjieff says, usually exists for us as nothing more than a possibility.

A second, closely related practice is self-observation, whereby one tries to see as much as possible of one’s own immediate state – thoughts, moods, emotions, reactions, and physical postures. Self-observation attempts to fulfil the injunction of the ancient oracle at Delphi: “Know thyself.” All true teachings must work toward this goal in some way. The Gurdjieffian technique is to observe ourselves in the course of daily life, to see ourselves as others see us, in all our moments of awkwardness, irrationality, and sleep.

This process not only helps students accumulate material for understanding themselves better, including the subtle organism of the “centres,” but it enacts certain changes in its own right. “Many psychic processes can take place only in the dark,” says Gurdjieff. “Even a feeble light of consciousness is enough to change completely the character of a process, while it makes many of them altogether impossible.”

Today most Gurdjieffian groups focus on the practices of self-remembering and self-observation; people also take part in various forms of physical labour and craftwork as a means of seeing different aspects of themselves. There are even some who continue an interesting facet of his teaching known as the Gurdjieff Movements.

The origins of the Movements form part of Gurdjieff’s legend, for most people in the Work connect them with the “sacred dances” he learned in his explorations in Central Asia during his youth. These dances, which Gurdjieff claims are over 4,500 years old, “correspond precisely to our books. Just as is now done on paper, so, once, certain information about long past events was recorded in dances and transmitted from century to century to people of subsequent generations.” Each posture forms a letter in an alphabet of gestures; understanding this code, you can read the information therein.

Although the Movements, accompanied by music written by Gurdjieff and his pupil, the composer Thomas de Hartmann, are still taught in some Gurdjieffian schools, it is not clear that the means of “reading” them has been passed down as well. If Gurdjieff did impart the secret to some of his pupils, it has been well hidden. It is rarely possible even to see a performance of the Movements; the best way of glimpsing them is in the 1977 film Meetings with Remarkable Men, directed by Peter Brook under the supervision of Gurdjieff’s pupil Jeanne de Salzmann, which shows the performance of some of these dances toward the end.

Anyone who does see the Movements can understand how they fit in with Gurdjieff’s teaching. They require the performer to maintain two or three different rhythms with different parts of the body, say, the head, arms, and feet, often while executing complicated dance steps. The difficulty of these “sacred dances” is obvious, but they accord with Gurdjieff’s goal of integrating the “three centres” so that a new, higher “I” can be created. As for the difficulty, Gurdjieff insisted that “only super-efforts count.”

What possibilities does the Work offer for the seeker today? Its hardships rarely take the peculiar forms they did under Gurdjieff himself, but much of the master’s rigor remains. It is not a path for those who crave conviviality or emotional warmth; many who encounter the Work complain of its coldness. On the other hand, this very characteristic tends to weed out dilettantes, so the calibre of people one encounters is probably higher than in many traditions. There are of course dubious entities that lay claim to Gurdjieff’s heritage, but most of them can be avoided if one keeps clear of groups that aggressively proselytise or demand exorbitant sums of money.

For a sense of the possibilities offered by the Gurdjieff Work, one might take a clue from Beelzebub, whose hero at one point remarks that of all the creatures in our solar system, “personally I liked best of all the three-brained beings breeding on the planet bearing the name Saturn.” Traditional astrology portrays Saturn as the cold, remote planet that creeps slowly through the sky. As such, it has always been associated with slow, unstinting labour (which is why in the old rhyme “Saturday’s child works hard for a living”) as well as with authority and depth. Hence the “super-efforts” required by the Work may seem to lack glamour and fun, but they may also confer knowledge that cannot be won by easier means.This article was published in New Dawn 131.If you appreciate this article, please consider a contribution to help maintain this website.

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About the Author

RICHARD SMOLEY is the author of Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition; The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe; Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity; The Essential Nostradamus; Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism; Supernatural: Writings on an Unknown History; The Deal: A Guide to Radical and Complete Forgiveness; How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying about God and the Bible; and Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (with Jay Kinney). A frequent contributor to New Dawn, he is editor of Quest: Journal of the Theosophical Society in America. Visit his blog at www.innerchristianity.com/blog.htm.

thepostarchive Cornel Ronald West is an American philosopher, political activist, social critic, author, and public intellectual. The son of a Baptist minister, West focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their “radical conditionedness” James Arthur Baldwin was an American novelist, playwright, and activist. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son, explore intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America If you are a copyright holder that would like something removed from my channel please message me on YouTube & I will respond so you do not need to file a DMCA Copyright Takedown Request with YouTube. Thank You. Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

Mutual Aid

by Pyotr Kropotkin 

In this cornerstone of modern liberal social theory, Peter Kropotkin states that the most effective human and animal communities are essentially cooperative, rather than competitive. Kropotkin based this classic on his observations of natural phenomena and history, forming a work of stunning and well-reasoned scholarship. Essential to the understanding of human evolution as well as social organization, it offers a powerful counterpoint to the tenets of Social Darwinism. It also cites persuasive evidence of human nature’s innate compatibility with anarchist society.

“Kropotkin’s basic argument is correct,” noted evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. “Struggle does occur in many modes, and some lead to cooperation among members of a species as the best pathway to advantage for individuals.” Anthropologist Ashley Montagu declared that “Mutual Aid will never be any more out of date than will the Declaration of Independence. New facts may increasingly become available, but we can already see that they will serve largely to support Kropotkin’s conclusion that ‘in the ethical progress of man, mutual support—not mutual struggle—has had the leading part.'” Physician and author Alex Comfort asserted that “Kropotkin profoundly influenced human biology by his theory of Mutual Aid. . . . He was one of the first systematic students of animal communities, and may be regarded as the founder of modern social ecology.”

(Goodreads.com)

(Contributed by Jonathan and Sarah Flynn.)

By Susan Mack and Ellen Hanna

Shepherd, show me how to go
O’er the hillside steep,
How to gather, how to sow,
How to feed Thy sheep;
I will listen for Thy voice,
Lest my footsteps stray;
I will follow and rejoice
All the rugged way.
Thou wilt bind the stubborn will,
Wound the callous breast,
Make self-righteousness be still,
Break earth’s stupid rest.
Strangers on a barren shore,
Labr’ing long and lone,
We would enter by the door,
And Thou know’st Thine own;
So, when day grows dark and cold,
Tear or triumph harms,
Lead Thy lambkins to the fold,
Take them in Thine arms;
Feed the hungry, heal the heart,
Till the morning’s beam;
White as wool, ere they depart,
Shepherd, wash them clean.

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Mary Baker Eddy

by Alexander Blum (highexistence.com)

“Long before 1933 there was a smell of burning in the air, and people were passionately interested in discovering the locus of the fire and in tracking down the incendiary.”

– Carl Jung, 1945, After the Catastrophe

In our collective memory of twentieth century crimes against humanity, including the Soviet gulag, the extermination camps of Auschwitz and the picnic-and-a-photo nature of American lynchings, the common thread is that ordinarily civilians with no exceptional defects wound up being capable of malignant evil. Entire communities ignored the smoke of Jewish bodies meeting German skylines, and American schoolchildren stood beside burning black men on funeral pyres as they smiled and posed for photographs. Supposing that all people involved in such events were uniquely sociopathic would be convenient, but false. There is no evidence to suggest a fundamental change away from the human proclivity toward racism, nationalism and utopian violence since the early twentieth century. The difference between then and now is merely what culture permits; what illusions our neighbors allow.

The link between groups and their murderous behaviors was in some sense described best by the scholar Rene Girard. He conceptualized all group organization as centered around a ‘scapegoat’, a collective cause which a tribe could externalize their defects upon, like a twisted totem, and reject and publish that scapegoat in lieu of self-criticism. Girard found that only Christianity, of all the myths he studied, explicitly rejecting scapegoating in the figure of Christ, who was killed by the tribe and was fundamentally innocent.

Still, the problem of tribal behavior haunts all the world, especially what remains of the former-Christendom of Europe and North America. As Gandhi once said “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians.” Lynchings and burnings-at-the-stake were features of the belief system which claimed the innocence of the scapegoat.

In 1957, the depth psychologist Carl Jung published The Undiscovered Self, a lengthily essay aimed at describing thedisenfranchisement of the human individual in the modern world, and the risks of technological and moral disaster that come from such individual powerlessness. Jung wrote: “The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual. The more unrelated individuals are, the more consolidated the State becomes, and vice versa” (72). Since Jung’s time, states and corporations have grown into the same singular role – that of Hobbes’ all-consuming Leviathan, with private entities like Google, Amazon and Facebook constituting a public square far more closely than any state enterprise.

In retrospective, the cost of complex technological societies was always the diminution of the individual. In order to sustain a global network of mass trade and consumption, the individual had to offload many of its responsibilities and agencies onto impersonal third-party conglomerates. These entities – states and international corporations – can only exist insofar as individuals trade their freedoms away to those organizations capable of coordinating large-scale human behavior. No individual can build an iPhone, but a Leviathan – Apple empowered with corporate tax breaks and the bypassing of Western labor laws via trade agreements such as the TPP – can.

It is no surprise, either, that the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini arrived at a similar conclusion about the state of the individual in the modern world. Atomized people without beliefs are the most susceptible to fascistic ideology. Just last week, Republican congressman John Cornyn was blasted for tweeting a quote of Mussolini’s: “We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become.”

Mussolini, like most fascists, promises a form of catharsis in joining mass movements to oppose the alienation and atomization of individuals in the modern world. Jung noted that if individuals are unable to find any meaning in their own lives, and nowhere to assert their agency, dignity and individuation, they become susceptible to mass movements which uplift the State and the nation above the dignity of human life altogether.

Fascist scholar Julius Evola wrote Revolt Against the Modern Worldas a rallying cry for a return to a neo-traditionalist, patriarchal and feudal society with rigid and unbreakable class hierarchies, a State which paid fealty to the divine and rendered individuals irrelevant. If individualism has failed us, say the fascists, then we merely need a society where individuals are given their place at birth and have no mobility whatsoever. Fealty to the traditional divine image replaces individuality altogether.

For Jung, fascism is a threat precisely because the alienation, lack of individual achievement, loneliness and ‘atomization’ that characterizes modern life, especially in cities, is easily given over to what Jungians call the “mass man”. Mass man, distinguished from group-oriented man, is a force of nature, a crowd given over to the strongman or the ruling ideology with such fervor that individuals are no longer even present in the crowd. The solution to modern loneliness, for fascists, is to subordinate ordinary individuals to the “Great Individual”. In fascism, this phenomenon is obvious – see Hitler, Mussolini, and authoritarian revolutionaries like Vladimir Lenin. In smaller-scale cases, the crowd attending an American lynching is given over to the mass psychosis of white supremacy, which enabled self-identified Christians to observe individuals bound as corpses to trees and not recognize their own cross in the image.

The problem with complex global societies is that the human psyche did not evolve to exist in such an environment, and thus the psyche of the global citizen is uniquely vulnerable to mass authoritarian movements which exalt “nation and often race above the individual”. The promise of return to a group-oriented society, with thinking, feeling and community, is a powerful force. We do not relate intimately to insurance companies and the DMV, but they have replaced the interpersonal realities that once defined the human environment. The craving for a primordial world of glory, action, honor and violence, repressed in modern man, can be set free by historical circumstance such as perceived national shame or weakness.

Jung saw the inevitably of a “dictator State, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units (74)”. This is why hard-right thinkers such as Mencius Moldbug advocate for monarchy and other extremely hierarchical forms of governance. As the Grand Inquisitor of Dostoevsky once argued, slavery to a system of hierarchy is preferable to Christ’s individuality, of consuming “locusts and roots” in the desert.

Of course, this is the illusion that history can be turned back in any meaningful way. All traditionalist critique of modernity seeks the return of an impossibility. In rolling back freedoms, in undoing the individual and restoring the primordial state of ur-consciousness, fascists and authoritarians are utopians in the backward direction of time.

Hannah Ardent and Umberto Eco, key anti-fascist thinkers of the twentieth century, saw the alienated middle class in particular as the most susceptible to fascism. The storms of the unconscious brew fantasies of ultimate catharsis and meaningful action. The frustrated middle class becomes a prime receptacle to become the “mass man” of dictatorial will.

Today, we see these impulses enacted in lone wolf scenarios. A mass shooter or a suicide bomber is often not a member of the oppressed class, but a spoiled member of the bourgeoisie. In his classic essay on the timeless characteristics of fascism, Eco writes: “Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.”

The Western Psyche and the Cold War

Much of The Undiscovered Self is concerned with the effects of scientific rationalism and statistical thinking on individuals. Here, Eco and Jung part ways – Eco views attacks on science and rationalism as an element of fascism. While this is no doubt true, the reduction of human beings to statistical units contributes to the very powerlessness that propels fascistic thought.

Jung’s critique of statistical thinking demonstrates this. Taking the example of a bed of pebbles, Jung proposes that even if we know the average weight of a pebble in a pile is 145 kilograms, we still know nothing about any particular pebble in that pile. You might not find a single pebble that is exactly the average. This example is meant to indicate that any objective schema for understanding individuals tends to fall short in obvious ways. Averages are not souls. This also proposes problems for thinkers like Steven Pinker, who propose an analysis of upward statistical trends as reason not to feel pessimistic. No human in agony was ever permanently uplifted from that state by recognizing that poor people in 2019 at least have vaccines and microwaves.

Jung argues that two organizations have always sought to introduce scientific objectivity and regularity into individual life – the state and the church. We have already observed the influence of the modern state, but the church is in denial of the individual, for Jung, because it reduces the bizarre and unclassifiable life of an individual’s dreams, transcendental experiences and other unconscious realities into a set of incomprehensible and irrational “facts”, that is, the resurrection of Christ, baptism, and other matters of religious dogma.

The mysteries of being and faith became, in Christianity, just another set of objective facts, and the recognition of Christ and subservience to the church was offered as the path out of total chaos. And yet, any history of the twentieth century will clearly show that Western nations have become less religious and less dogmatic over time. I was never raised to attend church, for example, and The Bible is more a curiosity than a resource of endless certainty.

For this reason, Jung was pessimistic about the United States’ ability to combat the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Written in 1957, his political analysis is unmistakably of its time. Jung argued that neither the modern state nor the failing church were even remotely adequate to combat the religious fervor of the Soviet Union, which rejected religion and placed the state in its place. As much as Jung decried this form of organization, he admitted that it provided a far more powerful belief system than American corporate life, which is detached from the pretense of religious goals.

A religion will always defeat a secular belief system, argues Jung, because once religious aims and secular aims become identical, a total belief system is formed. Holding religion at arm’s length produces a fractured belief system, as is the case in secular American society, pretending that somehow Christ is present in the stock market.

The United States, an ostensibly secular society with a failing church, was able to attain a sense of unity only by focusing on a shared enemy. The Red Scare and McCarthyism were a form of religious crusade. Anti-communism was able to fill a particular void within the ordinary person and make an individual feel as if he were a part of something on the level of a theological battle. The presence of an all-consuming enemy prevented fatal self-reflection. The average American’s “spiritual and moral opponent…no longer dwells in his own breast but beyond the geographical line of division (59)”.

With the fall of the Soviet Union came the collapse of this scapegoat. Jung died long before that time, but following the arguments made inThe Undiscovered Self, the loss of the USSR as our collective ‘Great Satan’ means the loss of meaning for individuals who identified with their nation’s crusade against an enemy religion.

The social function of a foreign enemy is to “fascinate the outward eye and prevent it from looking at the individual life within (pg. 46)”. If the tide of crisis has turned within our borders, and the enemy is in fact not the Russian or the Muslim but ourselves, we have one last refuge to reject self-examination – “the normal individual…sees his shadow in his neighbor (pg. 46)”.

To prevent the dissolution of American society into neighbor vs neighbor, all against all, a new enemy needed to be created. This enemy came in the form of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. Rather than the religion of Stalin, the grand unifying theory of the American psyche became opposition to Islam.

After 9/11, the United States became a holy crusader. George W. Bush was able to call Islam a religion of peace, and simultaneously kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims. But in the 2010s, this righteous butchering faded as the predominant character of American public life. Islam, contra Huntington, was not a sufficient foe to prevent the long-overdue self-reckoning of the fragmented American peoples.

The constant presence of an external enemy prevented American society from a fatal introspection. Among the repressed fatal flaws of Western culture, able to be ignored so long as we had a common external foe, was the inadequacy of our inherited Christianity, and the repression of our “crimes committed against the dark-skinned peoples during the process of colonization” (67).

Today, religious crisis and existential guilt about the past dominate the American mind. The 2010s have appeared as a kind of collective panic attack – all at once, our mass media seemed to collectively remember that our Founding Fathers owned slaves and that there was no real ‘purpose’ in life, and it has sent shockwaves of culture war, existential crisis, and a mood of nihilism into our society ever since.

It was an inevitable reckoning, and with no foe to oppose it, we are now left with internal contradictions. Neighbor against neighbor, and a rising tide of individual powerlessness that threatens to erupt in cathartic action. Political correctness, resurgent nationalism, and a mood of apocalyptic feeling toward technology characterize our era. The West no longer has a religion, and it seeks a new one. The trouble is, new religions always seem to disappoint. The neo-traditionalists emblematic of fascism therefore always remain at the gates – the foggy appeal of a return to less chaotic times will always retain power, and should the future become many times madder than it is today, these appeals will only gain in momentum and supposed credibility to the utopian dream of restoring “mass man”.

Jung in His Time, and Ours

The vacuum of meaning in an imperiled Western world is rapidly being filled in by strongmen. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro has combined nostalgia for dictatorship with an anti-environmentalist, anti-gay politics, and has declared that the former dictatorship’s chief mistake “was to torture but not kill”. Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon has advised Bolsonaro as part of a “global populist movement”. Brexiteer Nigel Farage has called Hungary’s Viktor Orban “the future of Europe”. And in the United States, Donald Trump’s approval rating remains stable despite being credibly accused of criminal conduct on multiple fronts. At the same time, both Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Justin Trudeau of Canada face calls for resignation in the face of indictment and corruption.

Those who propose political centrism as an antidote to this phenomenon are humbled by the example of French president Emmanuel Macron, who despite beating the nationalism of Marine Le Pen in an election, boasts a “rising” 28% approval rating and faces the most massive ongoing protest movement in Europe by way of the Yellow Vests.

I confess my bias – I am a supporter of Bernie Sanders and believe that social democracy will do a great deal to heal the social fabric of the United States. Yet I cannot deny that this, like all political schemes, is a slow-moving state-driven enterprise without a personal component. It won’t heal our fractured communities and all non-economic anxieties, and the continued social frustration of the middle class will not be solved through purely economic solutions.

Perhaps the most radical aspect of Jung’s approach to fascism is that he is explicitly asking you, his reader, to conceive of yourself as a fascist. In your own heart you must see a monstrosity waiting to take your role in a group of crucifiers, and in this the whole secret of unconscious evil comes undone and blossoms into an undeniable facet of our internal nature.

The key to understanding Jung is that, contrary to the rationalistic psychology of today, he emphasized the non-rational experiences of dreams, spontaneous mental images, fantasies and other objective inner events that are not generated on purpose by the active conscious mind, but that impact our psyche without any agency from our consciousness at all. For Jung, “the unconscious is objective, manifesting itself mainly in the form of contrary feelings, fantasies, emotions, impulses and dreams, none of which one makes oneself” (61).

The unconscious contains all good and all evil, and is a monstrous object to behold.

On this, Jung himself has been accused of a kind of romantic fascism. Pankaj Mishra’s essay “Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism” misunderstands Jung’s ideas at a fundamental level. In accusing Jung of being one of those “worshippers of the unconscious” responsible for the calamities of the twentieth century, Mishra has failed to understand the entire enterprise of Jungian psychology. Great Jungian works, including The History and Origins of Consciousness, trace the evolution of the self according to the subordination of the tyrannical unconscious to our conscious ego-morality. Jung has never advised that we sink into unconscious horror and become forces of tyrannical nature. The unconscious is the content of ‘Being’, but we are human beings and not animals precisely because concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ do not exist in the animal world – they are treasures that have been introduced by the human soul, and must be organized accordingly.

That said, Jung was not infallible – his writings on women (as were Nietzsche’s) are emblematic of his time, and have aged terribly. Additionally, Jung’s earlier writings prize the “Aryan consciousness” in ways that are uncomfortably aligned with the spirit of his times, though he did cooperate with the American OSS once World War II began, and tried (and failed) to get a leading German physician to declare Hitler mad.

Jung described Hitler as “a sort of scaffolding of wood covered with a cloth, an automaton with a mask…You know you would never be able to talk to that man; because there is nobody there”. He saw Hitler purely as the projection of the German citizenry, the “unconscious of seventy-eight million Germans”.

In essence, the lunatic people are to blame for their dictator, not the single lunatic at the top. Jung, when interviewed in 1945, said of the German people: “All of them, whether consciously or unconsciously, actively or passively, have their share in the horrors.” What Jung advocated for Germany was “responsibility”, and for those who claimed their unique individual innocence, he said: “I regard the case as hopeless”. Contrary to the myopic individualism Jung is often accused of, he was a strong believer in collective guilt for the crimes of particular cultures, because they become embedded in the cultural framework which dictates the forms of the unconscious. Our unconscious approaches us in symbols, fragments, words and images, all of which are not only biological but meditated through our culture, no matter how broken or sinister it may be. If our culture is anti-Semitic, or racist, or too violent, or anything of the sort, so our unconscious may reflect it.

The Hangman

The challenge of reading Jung in an age of uncertainty is to find the enemies you recognize in the outer world dwelling inside your own heart. It is to drop culture war, group witch hunts and righteous battle against external scapegoats in the name of facing your own contradictions. Jung understood how difficult this was – he knew that our fear of the unconscious, our fear of our own innermost selves, would almost certainly prevent the sort of introspection he demanded of his patients.

This, ultimately, was why Jung believed in ‘God’ so strongly. For Jung, God was always a symbol, a stand-in for the ideal of the unified, whole self, rather than an actual entity operating in Heaven.“I put the word ‘God’ in quotes in order to indicate that we are dealing with an anthropomorphic idea (64)”, writes Jung, attaching the significance of God to the concept of a single individual who, despite being a product of circumstance and flawed, temporary cultures, is nevertheless able to attain an identification with the ideal of transcendence without looking outward to powerful leaders or seeking bulldozing impact over the world.

The answer to the unforgiving world is fidelity to oneself. Jung asks of us all: “Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd? (62)”. In an age of atheism, Western people have to find a new God, that is, a new organizing ideal of the highest order, which speaks to our transcendental experiences without making us scapegoating monsters. One thing is for certain – that God won’t come from the outer world. As long as your God is in the world, it can be destroyed there, and force you to reconcile its absence with even worse terror than before. God is the complete self, not the fractured madman hunting others.

Part of coming to terms with the victim of the gulag, of Auschwitz, of the lynching tree, is that even if you and I are the all-too-human murderer who has shaped history, the dead are not forgotten. The living murderers, shown their crimes, live in a state of eternal remembrance, so long as they stay honest, and recognize in themselves the dark heart of the hangman.

by Alexander Blum Alexander Blum has written on the Jungian Shadow for Quillette, and has written fiction on mystical and gnostic themes. You can find his website here.

“The only people beyond hope are psychopaths.”

–Tom Stevens, Jungian therapist

A published author since 1976, novelist and screenwriter Steve Richards (professional name Tom Stevens) is the author of over 12 published novels plus books, articles and professional papers on subjects as diverse as psychology, mythology, mind-body relationships, history, philosophy and sports science. A depth-psychologist and therapist with over thirty years’ experience, he is the UK’s leading author in the Jungian Mythic-Fiction genre. As well as the Victrix and Lilith trilogies, he has screenplays in development for: WAGS and Witches , Remote Viewing and The Cauldron , an epic Arthurian drama set in post-Roman Britain. His Oxford’s Blues series is in development with veteran British television and film-maker Colin McKeown of LA Productions. His new novels include The Dead Room about the American Civil War and Odin’s Wolves, an historical and fantasy Viking-Age epic. Both these projects are earmarked for screenplay development. A visionary writer, Tom is the Creative Director on the Lilith movie Trilogy, which was born out from collaboration between him and former Mike Oldfield singer Maggie Reilly.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Victrix FPC Limited

July 3, 2020 (theonion.com)

Stefan C. Dombrowski|TED-Ed

In 1905, psychologists Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon designed a test for children who were struggling in school in France. Designed to determine which children required individualized attention, their method formed the basis of the modern IQ test. So how do IQ tests work, and are they a true reflection of intelligence? Stefan C. Dombrowski explores how the tests have been used throughout history. [Directed by Kozmonot Animation Studios, narrated by Addison Anderson, music by Deniz Doǧançay].

MEET THE EDUCATOR

Stefan Dombrowski · Educator

ABOUT TED-EDTED-Ed Original lessons feature the words and ideas of educators brought to life by professional animators.