Inspiration for The Unholy!

Andi's Book Review: 

What was the inspiration behind ' The Unholy'? 

The story comes out of over thirty years of treating patients in psychotherapy who are survivors of the dark side of religion…have been used and abused and cast to the side. I’ve seen that when this happens people, those around the victim, to include family and friends, often turn a blind eye and deny what has happened. Rather than writing a self help book I decided to approach this realm of human suffering in fiction. To tell a story moves the reader into a deep and unconscious dimension that bypasses conscious defenses, leaving us open to truths that otherwise would be blocked. So, dramatizing the dark side of religion, pulling what can be the most vile and evil, and pivoting it against an innocent and sincerely searching soul leaves the reader on edge, hopeful, but unsure as to what will happen and who in the end will survive…a truth conveyed symbolically and dramatically.

The Devil's Throne...Trapped Emotion!

The Devil's Throne, an actual place in New Mexico dramatized on the front cover of The Unholy, reminds me that some places are simply haunted! There's an eeriness to them. Old Gothic writers stated that violent emotions can be trapped in floorboards or walls of homes or contaminate land. As a matter of soul, I have to agree that violent emotions seep into people, things, and places, leaving a residue of eeriness and haunting.

The human psyche, the soul, picks up on such matters as an antennae attracts and conducts electrical waves.  In The Unholy, Claire finds her way to a haunted place in the desert. She, as a sensitive female healer, feels an eeriness, violent emotion trapped about the area. I remember when my wife and I were looking for land to build our home. One plot looked good, but that night I had a nightmare that it was a black sink hole. There was bad trapped within its confines. We purchased another plot and built our home in large part because of a dream of it being imbued with luminosity...goodness in and through the property. Others built on the first property, one thing after another going wrong, tragic misfortunes. Our land has been good, a setting for hearth and home.

Badness trapped, goodness moving in and through land and places--both are real.  The Devil's Throne in the story of the Unholy,  locates evil in time and place. Awareness of what is not good super charges human sensitivities. Places, houses, land effect us. When we're in a bad place in life becoming aware of it is key. Awareness can move us on. "Awareness sets the stage for transformation," taught an old professor. Stories and symbols generate life altering sensitivities, potentially untrapping, exorcising devilishly destructive memories, relationships, emotions, psychic gunk that's been plugging up the transformational works.

La Loba...Shape-Shifting Divine Feminine!

La Loba, the instinctual, wild feminine energy within, shape shifts into necessary forms inner and outer. Intense changes propel us to let go of the old and jettison into mysterious realms of energy and transformation. In The Unholy, Claire Sanchez, a young curandera, faces life threatening attacks from darkness. The dark side of the archetype, of any powerful spiritual force, in this case religion, can overwhelm the life giving aspects of both the self and the ego, leaving us in spiritual crisis and day-to-day torment. La Loba, wild yet purposeful impulses beating their way to consciousness, can offer potential for both consciousness and change. Shifts in energy states and moods may well signal the call of La Loba!

Sitting in the airport, en route from one end of the country to the other with less sleep than is desirable within a 48 hour period, I felt a strange impulse. I tried to shake it off as nervous energy resulting from lack of sleep. However, the mood shift didn't leave. It mounted to a fierce desire to leave behind something that I'd been needlessly clinging to. That night in dream I found myself clinging to the side of a cliff, with all my might holding on so I wouldn't drop. My fingers trembled as the edge slipped away, sandstone crumbling. I caught sight of what lay below and couldn't see a thing. It was so dark that all I knew was a depthless abyss below and myself plummeting if I lost my grip. I lost the grip, fell back, the sense of dropping through space and time unimaginably frightening. As is many times the case in dreams, or in this case a nightmare, I woke up before hitting bottom.

La Loba stirred within me at the airport, the nightmare confirming the descent into the wild needing to take place so that I could be expedited into an unfathomably mysterious, frightening, yet transformative realm. It was a wild feeling that stirred within me. La Loba howls and, as with Claire in The Unholy, we become hesitant, fearful, hold back from letting go, facing what must be faced, and having a chance to move on. It's definitely life transforming if we let it be; on the other hand, when you consider it, it's totally no fun at all to stay stuck on the side of a cliff, gripping for dear life and not wanting to let go, drop down, move on.

Religious Abuse, Brain, and Soul!

A neuroscientist and I got caught in a conversation while in a NY elevator. He talked about his work with the brain and wanted to know what I did in treating survivors of religious abuse. We got into the story of The Unholy and how religious trauma affects not only the brain but the deepest recesses of soul. It didn't strike him as odd that I'd emphasize this; but, it did hit him hard, though, that he'd never considered soul as integral to trauma and its impact.

Well, thus goes it in the world of everyday, mainstream, mental health care. It still has a ways to go in terms of understanding that we are not only physical beings, but soulful beings whose most intimate aspect is that of psyche, soul. Psyche reels and is loaded with torment when traumatized by religious guilt, fear, and deceit. A young man once shared a dream with me in which God appeared to him in the form of a luminous woman who instructed him to enter into a hallowed place within the center of the earth and there escape the terror of living in a religiously rigid and angry family that incessantly berated him for not being "worthy in the eyes of god." He stated that he learned to go within himself, to "the place that for me was the center of the earth, the center of my being."  He fled within himself, to deep recesses of soul, to protect himself from the religious trauma of being raised by parents set on the dark side of religion. 

A childhood diagnosis of attention deficit disorder led to a regimen of medication. He described it as "settling my brain but my soul was still quivering, shaking inside me." The brain can be dealt with, treated when injured by trauma; the soul requires patient tending and healing that requires what he felt was "a good long time." In his adult years he entered depth therapy and furthered his understanding and experience of psyche, soul. He discovered that the ground of his being indeed lay within, in psyche. The woman who had come to him in the dream during his adolescence returned many more times to confirm her watchfulness over his life. He came to terms with the reality that for the rest of his life he would be in the process of healing from the damaging effects of having been immersed in the dark side of religion during his childhood. Fortunately, the psychological injury was not as bad as it could have been due to the dream he had had as a teenager. He responded quickly to it, went within himself and there found safety.

The dark side of religion disrupts brain chemistry and physiology and traumatizes the soul; but, auspiciously, the psyche comes during dire times, and she guides us to turn within and discover hallowed realms of soul, the center of our being so as to begin the process of healing from injuries sustained by the lash of the dark side of religion.  

Breath, Heavenly Wanderings, and The Unholy!

Breath, heavenly wanderings, and The Unholy (Sunstone Press/Release Date August 2013) fit together just as natural spiritual openings that are blocked generate toxic backup. My depth psychological colleague, Michael Eigen, author of The Psychoanalytic Mystic, shared with me the following quote by Chuang Tzu: "All things that have consciousness depend upon breath. But if they do not get their fill of breath, it is not the fault of heaven. Heaven opens up the passages and supplies them day and night without stop. But man on the contrary blocks up the holes. The cavity of the body is a many-storied vault; the mind has its Heavenly wanderings. But if the chambers are not large and roomy, then the wives and sisters fall to quarreling. If the mind does not have its Heavenly wanderings, then the six apertures of sensation will defeat each other."

Psychic breath happens naturally. Toxic religion loads spiritual passageways with shame. Bad things happen when natural spiritual openings are blocked. Here in New Mexico, the realm of Aztlan in my novel, we have witnessed institutional religion inflicting horrors on innocent souls. Both Eastern and Western religions have been implicated on the front page of newspapers. Eastern gurus and Western priests have prohibited what Chuang Tzu described as Heavenly wanderings. They claimed souls for themselves. Shame bore down on souls meant to be nurtured into increasing degrees of freedom.

In The Unholy, Claire discovers that hidden within her own past is a religious skeleton that cannot be escaped. It rattles in the closet like a bag of old bones. The dark side of religion, its masked ways and shiny lures, eclipse the reality of human suffering perpetrated by ecclesiastical masters of illusion.

What is not faced takes us down. Going down, in the realm of depth psychology, is not necessarily a bad thing; it offers psychic prospects. In the case of Claire, she must enter the depths of her own life experience and make discoveries similar to those made by patients in depths therapy. As skeletons are faced, room is made, and transformational possibilities emerge.

All things that have consciousness depend upon breath states the old wise man. So, breath for us, as practitioners of soul, remains the sure conduit to the sacred. Healing soul blockage, induced by the dark side of religion, require opening the mind to darkness and light, the truth of shame and the luminosity inherent in choosing one's own path over institutional demands. Breathing large and roomy breaths ushers us into dream time wandering in spheres of soul where destiny calls and choices lie before us.

Shame, Bad Religion, and Freedom

     Shame and bad religion ring about as hard in the human ear as a bell clanging way too up close that finally stops. Shame gets the bell of bad religion going. Without the human capacity for shame, the inner sense of being defective, then bad religion would have no hold on the human psyche.
     For over thirty years I've been helping people take the deep plunge into the unconscious mind so as to find freedom from the dark side of religion. It doesn't always work. Sometimes people want quick fixes, a whole lot of help without much struggle. In my novel, The Unholy (Sunstone Press, August 2013), Claire comes face to face with feelings of being defective and not wanting to go on. The shame induced by bad religion cripples the soul, at least momentarily, and can cause us to want to give up, not go on with life.
     When a child is raised in bad religion, the mind's innocence and receptivity to natural and freeing spiritual experience is compromised. Bad religion induces shame, the sense of being defective way down to the core. Bad religion goes on to state that giving your soul over to it will insure you of salvation. Giving yourself over to something, to anything, outside of yourself and your own right mindedness inevitably compromises the psyche.
     "I was so into the cult of it all, that I thought it was right. I felt superior to everyone who wasn't following my religion. They were bad and I was good, they were shameful creatures, I was not." So said a man who underneath it all finally admitted his emptiness and unhappiness. "I was all right when I was with the religion. They did my thinking for me. But, when I was alone, I was with myself and what was left of my self eventually got through to me. I had to work hard to find and then to keep my own mind, my soul."
     A dream came to him one night. "I was walking out of the church, looked up and saw a giant turd fall on the church. I got the message, from above so to speak." This man found his way out of bad religion, the unholy, the clanging bell finally coming to a stop. Like Claire in The Unholy, he discovered that something other than himself had hold of his mind and he was the only one who could do something about it.

The Prison of Belief!

Healthily, the way it's supposed to go is that belief is to supposed to set us free. When it doesn't then it makes sense that reconsidering things is in order. Guilt, fear, force, shame can't be the way to make lives better and people more loving, creative, and conscious.

Religion, psychology, art, all manner of spiritual practice, and sexuality are charged with numinous energy that can compel people to either find themselves, or else (horror of horrors!), lose themselves. Loss of self takes place when we no longer think for ourselves. We can end up thinking like everyone else, whether they are artistic geniuses, Jungian or Freudian therapists, yogic gurus, or passionate lovers unless we rather fastidiously take into account the guarding of our own mind.

New York Times article,  Going Clear (12.20.13) , explores the power of belief within an organized religion and how it literally corrupts human nature. Rather than engaging in spiritual encounter that heals and transforms, individuals find themselves succumbing to group think, a terrible loss of self and mind. A professional colleague on hearing of my upcoming novel, The Unholy (release date Spring 2013), said ".....the dark side of religion?.....Paul.....it's all dark." I went on to say, "Even saying that is too much. People need to have their own experience of what works for them and what does not. That leaves us free, or else we run the risk of dictating that all manner of one thing or another is bad." We want to encourage exploration, experience, psychic freedom.

Prisons of belief are built when all manner of this thing or that are judged all good or all bad. Excluding obviously destructive ideologies and actions, ideas and practices are in large part neither good or bad. It depends on what we do with what we have and what life has dealt us to deal with. Healthily, it is the nurturance of inner truth, what sets you and me as individuals on the path of a free mind lived without knuckling under to threat from external forces that demand compliance, that ultimately unbinds the human psyche and lets loose consciousness!