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!

The Dark Side of Religion

The dark side of religion was exposed in a recent New York times article entitled "An Antiquated Abortion Law in Ireland"! The writer admitted that religious faith had been manipulated, sexual abuse justified. She detailed how women's rights have been neglected and abused by organized religion. Human psychic functioning and well being depends not on neglect or abuse via guilt and fear but on freedom!

For over thirty years I have been treating individuals suffering from the ravages of religious abuse. With patient healing, facing hard truths and making critical decisions, they often find their way out of the winding and dastardly tunnels of human unhappiness. This requires turning inward, to the realm of the mythopoeic, deep regions of soul.

Story telling plumbs facets of mind inaccessible to waking ego consciousness. Consciousness and healing can be facilitated by entering imaginal realms. The Unholy (Whiskey Creek Press 2013), my first  novel, explores the dark side of religion. A young curandera, a medicine woman, is engaged in a life- and-death battle against an evil archbishop. Set in the mystic land of Aztlan, visions, dreams, and intuition guide the seeker to confront hidden, destructive forces. She comes face to face with the shocking truth that life and freedom depend on battles fought and decisions made.

Follow me during 2013 for a year long reflection on the theme of the dark side of religion!