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June 8, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:30
1384 The Psychology of Mysticism Part Two

Why Jesus was able to be as 'kind' as he was.

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Alright, no time for introductions.
Let us move briskly along with our examination of the psychology of mysticism.
Projection is when you take an emotional aspect off yourself and pretend that the world is...
Put it out there into the world, right?
Project your personality into the world.
So if you're cynical, then you interpret people as dumb and hostile.
And if you're an optimist, you can view people as better than they are.
Oh! Woe is Steph for the many times he has done that and will, I'm sure, again in the future.
And if you're an angry person, then you view people as either cowardly or angry.
And if you're a biological person, as we all tend to be, then you will look at the universe and think that it lives and dies.
And you will project or anthropomorphize the universe by putting consciousness and life in it.
Or, in a sense, wrap it in consciousness and life.
So that's one aspect of it.
Now, another aspect is when you absorb, rather than projecting stuff out into the world, you absorb the universe into yourself, right?
So rather than project your thoughts and feelings into the universe, you take the thought of the universe and you put it into yourself.
It sounds all kinds of kinky, but what I mean by that is you will get upset, right?
If it rains, right?
Take it personally. The blind actions of a blind universe, you will take it personally, or you may take it personally, if it rains, or if you get a cold, right?
We've all been that, you know, especially if you have a sequence of ailments, right?
It's like, oh my god, another one.
Oh, what's going on?
You know, blah, blah, blah. What did I do?
Why me? Why me, right?
So you will take the actions of a conscienceless universe, and you will Take them into yourself, right?
So the first is taking the humanity within you and putting it out into the universe.
And the other is taking...
I mean, they're related, of course, but the other is taking the blindness and inanimate-ness of the universe and putting it into yourself as a personal thing or something that's been done to you.
So both of these aspects are...
A core part of religion, but the second is what I would like to talk about and It's a very overlooked aspect of religion.
Because, I mean, it's a real question.
Like, why do people believe this nonsense?
Why do people believe this silly stuff?
Well, of course, it has a lot to do with bullying and all the stuff we've talked about over the years.
Years. Years and years to come.
So, it's definitely part of that.
But there's something else I think is really, really important.
The strongest belief systems, in my opinion, tend to be those where the psychological reality almost perfectly mirrors what is being described.
And religion is very, very powerful that way because it mirrors, the psychology of religion mirrors what it is pretending to describe.
What does that mean? Okay, I'm trying to make it a little clearer.
Oh, so sorry. Try to be clear.
When you look at the universe as a religious person, as a mystic, Then you see it infused in meaning for you.
Infused with messages and signs and guides and all.
For you. For you.
I think of astrology.
You know, the planets move and it's for you.
The stars move and they're for you.
I mean, we even anthropomorphize the constellations by planets.
The bear and Orion's belt and so on.
Andromeda. The hunter.
We put all of these things up there, right?
Like the stars. And this is the typical explanation in a mystical society for the stars, is that a good one threw the bad up into the sky or immortalized the victory or the battle in the sky, and that's why the constellations are the way they are, right?
Like, reality is a story with myths and portents and foreshadowings and communications towards people, right?
That we live in a story with an author, right?
And like all good Agatha Christie or detective novels or whatever, there are clues scattered throughout the text which you go, aha, when you see them later.
And of course, there is a lot of truth in this psychologically, but...
The real question is how does this work in terms of religion?
So, in religion, the universe is contained within a mind, right?
The universe is contained within a mind.
Now, biologically speaking, in general, in rough form, that which is contained within is lesser than, right?
So, the heart is within the body, and the heart is lesser than or a part of the body.
That which is contained within is usually, in many ways, is lesser than.
Think of the dead tree inside, or the tree bark on the outside.
The dead tree inside is less important, but the...
The tree bark, which is the living part outside, is more important.
And again, I know that you can think of a million exceptions, but we're talking about a pretty primitive time in the human species when this stuff was all developed.
So that which is inside is usually more vital or important than that which is outside, right?
Volcanoes inside the mountain and so on, right?
The fruit inside the rind.
So that which is inside is usually lesser than that which is...
Sorry, forget the fruit one.
That's the example of the opposite, right?
And when the universe is contained within a mind, which is the cosmological view of the universe, that God is larger than...
Antidecent to, prior to the universe, and will outlast the universe, that the universe is smaller than God and more temporal than God.
God is infinitely non-temporal outside of time or eternal.
The universe is contained within a mind.
And the reason why people believe that, or a central reason, I think, why people believe that, is because religion...
It's a vast attempt to place the universe inside the mind of the believer.
I said that the theologies or ideologies are most often believed when that which is being described also describes the psychology, unconsciously of course, of the adherent to the belief.
I mean, to take a silly example, angry art attracts angry people, right?
Because what is being portrayed is projection, art is projection, and so what is being depicted is a kind of angry projection, and the people who are attracted to it have, as their psychology, or core aspect of their psychology, angry projection, right? So it mirrors what is going on in the world of art or theology, or ideology for that matter, mirrors In an unconscious way, the actual psychological mechanisms of its adherence.
So to take the universe and place the universe within a mind, which is the cosmological view of religion, is psychologically the attempt through projection and that inversion or taking the universe and putting it inside you.
It is to make your mind larger than the universe.
And why is it important to make your mind larger than the universe if you are religious?
Because the universe has a convenient lack of proof or evidence or support for the existence or even the very notion of a deity.
And why do you have to take the whole universe and put it inside your mind if you're religious?
Because your preferences must be larger than the universe.
So think of two circles, one circle inside and a circle outside.
So the circle inside, in the cosmological view of the universe, the circle inside is the universe, the circle outside is God.
But in the psychology of religion, the representation of the universe is small, and the consciousness as a whole is small.
of the adherent is larger than the universe.
Why? Because there has to be something other than the universe in order to believe things which are the opposite of the universe.
There has to be something larger than or opposite to logic in order to sustain something that is anti-rational.
There has to be something larger than the boundaries of time, space, and empiricism in order to support a belief in something that is unsupported in time, space, and empiricism.
Right? Which is why religion is not It's not illogical.
It's anti-logical. It's anti-empirical.
It's not like there's no empirical proof for it.
I mean, there's no empirical proof for fairies, right?
There's no empirical proof for square circles where people don't worship them.
It's anti-empirical. And the reason that we have to have that the psychology of the religious person is fundamentally grandiose...
When, of course, God is grandiose, right?
The whole very concept of a God is grandiose.
I mean, on the part of God, right?
You would hope that God would be more modest, right?
But the grandiosity that is required to just believe stuff that is the very opposite of evidence means that you have to elevate prejudice, bigotry, or mere emotional preference, right?
To outside, to larger than, to that which contains the universe.
The universe is a lesser subset of perception relative to the perception that it's believed to see God, to know God.
So, in the religious mindset, the universe is just one character in the Miko system.
The opposite of philosophy is where the mind is larger than reality means anti-reality.
I mean, it can't be anti-reality completely or you wouldn't get out of bed or breathe, right?
The opposite.
Theology is anti-reality.
Theology is anti-truth.
It's anti-empiricism.
It's anti-logic. And to do that, it has to elevate consciousness to be much larger than the universe, which mirrors what they're worshipping, which is a consciousness much larger than the universe, right?
You see, it's a projection. The grandiosity of the believer is a projection into the grandiosity of the very concept of a God.
And God is the very definition of grandiosity, delusions of grandeur, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-wise, all this, all that.
And so, when you look at the...
The grandiosity of the believer, of the faithful.
Well, the universe is just one not very important character in the complete spillover delusional mycosystem projection into the universe as a whole.
And if you look at how gods behave, the behavior of the gods mirrors The anti-rationality of the believers, right?
So, given that religion is anti-rational, you would completely expect that religious commandments would be completely contradictory.
Because they're anti-rational, right?
So here you say, oh, thou shalt not kill, and then you'd have God recommend killing, right?
Thou shalt not steal, and then God would recommend theft, right?
That's exactly what you would expect, and that, of course, is exactly what you see.
And in the least healthy religions, you have monotheism, right?
The least healthy religions are monotheistic.
I mean, without saints or brides of Christ or Magdalene's or Mary's or whatever, right?
The most destructive religions are those which don't even mirror the ambiguous complexity of the mycosystem in the sky, right?
They're the most primitive and least healthy religions.
are the monotheisms. And because they're the least healthy, right?
In a crazy world, sanity is what used to be called a CLM, a career-limiting move.
And so, in the realm of mysticism, you would expect, perfectly expect, that the least healthy, i.e.
the most monotheistic, the least healthy religions would be the ones in the ascendancy.
And you generally, though not always, think of Hinduism and so on.
You do see that To be the case.
You would also expect, I believe, that since almost all violence is the result of tension, that the most monotheistic religions would be the most aggressive, right?
Because there is not a representative reflection of the complex ecosystem of the human personality in monotheism doesn't reflect that.
And so it's going to require a psychotic level of self-control So you would expect that the least healthy religions would be monotheistic and also would have the most virulent devils, right?
Because some of the Zoroastrianism has a sort of yin-yang, good and bad, and so on.
And if you look at the Norse religions, right, and the Ragnarok and so on, I think good even loses in the end, but there is good and evil.
But there is good in the evil, and there is evil in the good, right?
So there's the Tao, right?
There is the yin-yang, and there is the complexity, which we really like to see in some of the religions that didn't make it, because they weren't psychotically aggressive enough, right?
So it's one of the things that helps religion develop as a meme, is the more aggressive it is.
In other words, the more The less it reflects the complexity and ambiguity of the human psyche, the more aggressive it's going to be.
Because if you get people to believe, like if you look at some of the ancient world's religions, where there was, you know, good and evil, and evil in the good gods, and good in the evil gods, and so on, there was more complexity, there was a more rich reflection of human experience, and these people were on their way to developing, you know, science and science.
Irrational philosophy and so on because they didn't live under the tension of having that psychotic self-control that characterized the Christian Middle Ages, right?
It's psychotic. You know, you can only ever think one beautiful thing about God and you can't have any resentment and everything which is then hived off from the human personality and dumped into the bowels of Satan is the source of the eternal war and tension that goes on in the bowels, in the worlds of the monotheistic religion, psychological worlds.
Alright, enough of that.
Let's move on to buddy Jesus.
So here's another example of how the psychology of religion is so closely tied up.
What is worshipped is so closely tied up to the method or the psychological apparatus of worshipping.
So, Jehovah versus Jesus.
A little J-on-J action.
Jehovah is the Old Testament God.
Rules through direct murder, right?
I mean, rules through direct murder.
A little bit of bribery, but endless punishments and psychotic love tests like with Job and the murder of children as is threatened through Abraham and And the ruler of the Old Testament is the murderous patriarch, right? It's a massive death cult, right?
Death threats abound, genocides, murders, slaughters, rapes, you know, killing of children.
It all abounds throughout the Old Testament.
So the threat and the punishment Of disobedience in that story is death.
And not just the death of you, but the death of, you know, everybody who ever looked at you funny or not.
Relatives, anybody who ever did your laundry, all of that, right?
It's a clan wipeout.
That is the punishment.
Now, when you evolve past that...
What Damas calls the infanticidal mode of parenting.
Once you evolve past the clan murder death cult of the patriarchal slaughterhouse of Obedians, what happens is you begin to rule not through the threat of death.
But through feigned affection and self-attack on the part of the ruled, right?
So the first rulers are, you know, we simply slaughter anyone who disobeys us.
The evolution, and it is pitifully to say an evolution, the evolution from the Old Testament to the New Testament is that the attack of The attack of the ruled moves inward.
We're all familiar with this, right?
I talk about this a lot in RTR. The attack of the ruled is no longer the external slaughterhouse of murderous masters, but the internal attack of alter egos, right?
Now, because the attack has gone from corporal to psychological...
The rulers can feign affection.
This is important progress.
This is again the psychology and how it is reflected in the theology.
When you don't have to kill a guy's family to get him to obey you, but instead you can get him to attack yourself, you can put down your whip hand because now he holds it.
Instead of it being in your physical hand, it's in his psychological hand.
So because he attacks himself now, You can begin to feign some affection.
So with an increase in overt affection, it always arises in a sort of psychotic environment.
An increase in verbal affection Always coincides with an increase in self-attack on the part of the victim, right?
And this is another reason why we self-attack, right?
So that we could get a few scraps of, and continue to self-attack, but we could get a few scraps of affection from those around us, right?
And we see this in 1984.
It's portrayed beautifully between Winston Smith and O'Brien, right?
That when Smith begins to break down and attack his own sense of reality, O'Brien becomes gentle.
Kind, right? And so, how does this show up in the New Testament?
Well, Jesus starts to show a few scraps of affection.
You know, that he who is without sin cast the first stone and blessed are the peacemakers.
Right? So, he begins to...
Show a few scraps of affection.
Now, this wouldn't work in the Old Testament because the murderous, bloody, hateful, genocidal Yahweh would have...
Jehovah would have just slaughtered anyone who spoke kindly.
So why is it that Jesus is able to speak with some kindness?
Well, because parenting has improved, God help it, to the point...
I think it's the ambivalent style of parenting.
But parenting has improved to the point where children are now attacking themselves and therefore do not have to be regularly killed by their parents.
And so, because the burden of punishment is falling upon the slaves within themselves, the parents can show a scrap or two of affection.
And that is very important.
It's a very, very important progress.
Now, How is it that I know, or how is it that the thesis I'm putting forward is supported by the New Testament?
Well, Jesus, it is often forgotten, is the magical inventor of the cavern of infant torments called hell, right?
Now, hell is so clearly a metaphor for self-attack that you really couldn't make it any more clear.
Because hell... Hell is punishment not inflicted in the real world, which of course is self-attack, right?
Hell is a punishment not inflicted in the real world, but is inflicted in an otherworldly abstract realm, i.e.
the unconscious. And it is inflicted because you break moral rules.
Well, this is a metaphor for guilt and self-hatred, right?
So, Jesus, I mean, at least with Yahweh, when you died, you died.
He didn't punish you for eternity, but Jesus has invented this concept called sin, which is a clear metaphor for internalized self-attack, for not following, you know, obviously arbitrary and impossible things.
And there is a feeling of eternity when it comes to self-attack, right?
Because if you punch yourself in the face repeatedly, I mean, eventually you're just going to pass out, right?
Or faint or, you know, your arm's going to get tired.
You'll stop, right?
And then you won't do it for a while because you're healing, right?
So there is a cessation to physical attack against yourself or to the physical attack.
You're either going to die or you're going to have some place to heal, right?
Some cessation. When the blow is not actually impacting, right?
There is not the pain of the impact, you know, of the impact, right?
There's obviously the lasting pain.
But in hell, the punishment is eternal, and that's another metaphor for self-attack, right?
Because self-attack, because it doesn't have the physical impact, it doesn't cause us to faint, it doesn't cause us to bleed, it doesn't cause us to lose teeth, it doesn't cause us any of those things, and therefore it can be kind of eternal.
And that is a very, very important aspect of hell, right?
It's non-corporeal. It is from not following moral rules.
It is delivered by someone with a sort of outward appearance of kindness, right?
And of course, this tends to be a bit more maternal, which is why Jesus always has the long hair.
And so, it's long hair for the feminine side, and the dewy eyes, right?
And the lambs, and the beard for the masculine side, and all that kind of stuff, right?
And so...
So, Jesus invents hell, which is...
And hell is believed, right?
Everybody invents stuff all the time.
Crazy people invent everything all the time.
But hell is believed because, at that time in history, the direct murder of children was on the decline.
And instead, terrifying psychological self-punishment was being substituted for murderous external violent punishment.
And so the concept of hell, that if you break moral rules, you will be punished by some abstract realm, in some abstract, eternal, non-corporeal realm, strikes a chord with people because they are being raised with savage accusations of immorality rather than just direct murder or beating verily nay unto death.
And Those two aspects, to me, represent or reflect an improvement in parenting.
Now, the other thing that you would expect, of course, in the psychology and in God, right, that God would hate two, fundamentally would hate two groups of people.
Of people, right?
He would hate children, and he would hate skeptics, right?
Because children are not born with religion.
Children are born very rational, very scientific, very empirical.
I can see this with my daughter.
All the theories I had so far have been Amply confirmed.
You can't fill a baby's belly with mimed milk, right?
So children are born very empirical and very skeptical towards the idea of God, right?
Because children ask a million questions about reality and religion misguides and brutalizes every single conceivable answer.
And so you would expect huge violence.
And of course, parents who are immoral, who pretend morality, hate children too, because children, they see their own morality reflected in the fear and contempt in their children's eyes.
And skeptics, of course, are put to death.
And people who switch religions, of course, would be punishable.
Heavily punishable because that takes the absolutism out and substitutes unknown and clear bigotry for that which is considered pure, fundamental, and eternal.
So you can see all of that reflected, right?
Religious people hate children fundamentally, right?
Or they hate the skepticism and empiricism of children, and that's why they have to brutalize them so much.
And that's, of course, where hell fits in.
Originally, black and blue children were not a negative status symbol, which is why parents would be happy to beat.
But after a while, cowering, brutalized children became less of a status symbol because parenting standards had shifted up, societal standards had shifted up slightly.
And so you had to find a way to have cowed and psychologically brutalized children, which is where the professions of love that Jesus comes up with, plus the eternal punishments of abstract hell, which is a metaphor for guilt.
So just about everywhere you slice religion, you find that...
What is described in religion is actually a description of the psychology of religious adherence.
And I hope that this has been helpful.
I know it's a bit of a brainstorm, but I hope that it's of use.
I look forward to your donation. Thank you again so much, everybody who came into the barbecue.
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