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April 12, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
20:53
1638 The Ghosts of Self Knowledge

Why mankind is religious.

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Time Text
Hey, it's April the 12th, 2010.
Just on my way to the gym. Oh, it's been a few days, so the creaking that you think you may be hearing from the weights may actually be coming from my elbow and shoulder.
So this is a...
Oh, it's pretty cool, my friends!
It's pretty cool.
It's a pretty good idea. It's a good wraparound.
Almost like Unified Field Theory of the Brain.
So let's dive straight in, shall we?
I've been thinking recently about ghosts.
No, not the Henri Ibsen play, but the protoplasmic frighteners of the Scooby-Doo crew.
And ghosts is a universal human mythology, and I was thinking, well, gee, why, of course, why?
Why would there be this universal human mythology?
Whenever there's something universal in mythology, the first thing I assume is that it is a mirror of some universal psychological phenomenon.
So let me give you my thoughts.
Now the first thing that's true about ghosts is that they almost always represent consciousness.
So there's no ghost of a brick.
There's no ghost of grass.
There's not even really ghosts of trees.
There is the memory of trees, but that's a fairly drippy album.
There is always consciousness, and almost always human consciousness.
You will occasionally hear stories of ghost dogs and so on, but for the most part, It is human consciousness that is represented.
Now, the second thing about ghosts that is interesting is that they're always...
I'm just going to say always instead of almost always.
Just for those of you who are going to email me exceptions, I think that's useful, but I think we can go with just always and understand that I mean almost always.
Is that ghosts are always the residue of people in the past.
Which... When you think about it, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
If the ghost is the soul of a being, and the soul of a being is eternal, then the soul or the personality of the ghost should not really be affected by being corporeal, by becoming a human being.
So what I mean by that is, let's say you're 60 and you take a five-minute bus ride.
Well, you don't step out of that five-minute bus ride an entirely different human being.
That would be sort of nutty, because you are who you are.
You're taking a very short bus ride, and so you are who you are when you come out of that bus.
And that's pretty much...
I mean, it's even more compressed in terms of eternity of the soul versus the short span of a life.
The soul is eternal, and therefore...
The soul has all the characteristics of the personality it contains before it ever comes into a fleshy form.
The soul is not born with the body and then lives on forever.
The soul is eternal. And so this is like a 60-year-old taking a few-minute bus ride.
A soul that is eternal, having a 70-year lifespan.
And so, there should be no reason, of course, why...
Ghosts would be only people who've died and their personalities have lingered on.
Because souls are eternal, there would be actually even more people milling around in ghostly form, waiting for their bodies to arrive from the future.
More people will be born than have been born, and therefore the souls of the dead, those who've died, should be vastly outnumbered by the ghosts or the souls of those who have yet to be born.
But there are very few mythologies, as none that I can think of, but I'm certainly no brain-bending expert on the topic, but there's very few mythologies that I can think of wherein the ghosts are of people yet to be born.
So ghosts are always about people who have died, or people who've died.
And there is a form of ghostliness, though, that is interesting, that is about astral travel, Which is that you can see the ghost of somebody, even if that person has not yet died.
And I think that's a very interesting aspect to it, and I think will fit into the general theory that I'm going to map out during our very special time together this afternoon.
So you can see...
The ghost is someone when they haven't actually died.
So it's all about either the present or it's about the past.
Now, the other thing that is very true about ghosts, almost universally, is that ghosts are associated with crimes.
That much we all understand.
You don't have to be Joel Osmond to see that.
Dool Haley Osment, that was the name.
And the typical mythology of the ghost is that a crime was committed that was not discovered.
A crime was committed that was not discovered.
And the ghost cannot rest until the crime is discovered.
And once the crime is discovered, the ghost...
Can shuffle off his mortal coil, drop his bag of bones and links of chains, and vanish into the next realm.
Now, we're going to start with ghosts, but we're going to end with...
Religion slash supernaturalism as a whole and tie it into a core aspect of philosophy.
So it's hopefully not going to be a too swaggering tour de force, and hopefully we'll have some ring of truth to it.
I believe it does. Otherwise I wouldn't be wasting your time with this, but it's very, very important, I think, to understand why there is superstition, why it's such a common phenomenon, what purpose it serves in the human mind.
So we're starting with ghosts, and we will go to Supernaturalism and religion as a whole.
The other thing that is true about ghosts is that they are always frightening, but when you overcome your fear of them, then you have pity and understanding.
Right? So the typical thing is the, you know, the...
The woman who died mysteriously in the house and the husband is remarried and the ghost appears in the house until the wife finds out that he poisoned her.
The new wife finds out that he poisoned her and then she goes off, right?
So the ghost reaches out for you in ways that are utterly terrifying and you have a desire to flee.
But if you stay, if you overcome your fear, if you act with courage and resolution in the face of ghosts...
Then you see them as pitiable people reaching out to right a wrong.
Pitiable ex-people, I guess, reaching out to have a wrong right it.
And your fear is replaced with sympathy.
And this, of course, is what goes on in the sixth sense, that he's terrified by these ghosts, but he discovers the crimes that are keeping them here, and then they vanish and remove to...
I guess, either complete death or to a better place, to a higher plane.
Now, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to put all this stuff together and to understand that a ghost is an ecosystem member.
So, a very brief overview.
The Miko-system, as I talk about it, and as others have talked about it as well.
The Miko-system is the idea that the personality is not a single ego, but our personality is an ecosystem of balanced and competing forces.
We have multiple personalities within us.
We argue with ourselves.
We have, in some situations, we can be bossy.
In other situations, we are subservient, that we can flip between a wide variety of roles, some of which I think are innate to us and some of which are incorporated or sometimes inflicted by those around us when we're growing up and as adults, that you can't be around anyone for any particular period of time without internalizing their personality.
Everybody leaves a distinct and deep impression upon us which animates, which comes to life and animates within us and that the purpose of mental health or the goal of mental health It's not to eradicate this multiplicity, since that's not possible.
It's like saying that we would be really healthy if we had only one organ.
Ah, you know, we only need the heart.
Those kidneys are a waste of time. Well, no, we are healthy when we have a variety of organs, each of which are performing their specified task.
And we are healthy mentally when we have a variety of personalities in balance, able to converse with one another, with a mediator, and everyone gets to sit at the table, and the critics and so on, we don't attack them, because we can't We can separate from abusive aspects of ourselves.
We can separate from abusive people.
We can separate from abusive aspects of ourselves.
And so the purpose of mental health is to have a balance.
Peace of mind is a balance and conviviality between the different aspects of ourselves.
And if you've heard any of the role plays I've done with listeners, you can see just how powerful and how compelling these templates are that people have absorbed, particularly, of course, from their parents.
So ghosts then can be seen as a metaphorical way of telling the basic story of self-knowledge, which is that crimes unacknowledged can never be buried.
Crimes unacknowledged walk the halls of the mind demanding truth.
And that psychological energy Repression.
Split-off aspects of the self.
Alters. That these can only be put to rest, integrated into the personality, when we stop telling ourselves lies about the past.
And in almost every ghost story sans sting, there is an investigation into the crime.
And this, of course, is always some sort of sleuthing.
About stuff that's happening in the outside world.
You find a secret passage, and you follow the girl to find a sibling who's being munch-housed by proxy to death.
But the reality is that this is not at all an external passage.
This is not a Sherlock Holmes.
This is a self-exploration.
This is an exploration of history.
This is an intuitive understanding, an exploration of family history.
And the reason that people hope that some external...
Clue can lead them to the truth about an external family is the reason why these stories are so repetitive, right?
Why do we keep telling ourselves the same stories?
Because we haven't got the moral yet!
That's why we keep telling ourselves the same stories.
Why do we keep telling ourselves about horror stories, guys, with axes and so on?
Well, because we haven't dealt with physical and sexual abuse as a society yet.
We barely even acknowledge it.
Why is it that we keep telling ourselves...
Ghost stories. Well, for two reasons.
Because one, they're always told about an exploration of external clues in the outside world, which is not true.
It is introspection that leads us to the ghosts within.
And number two, it's almost always about somebody else's damn family.
It's almost always about someone else's damn family.
It's not about our own family.
Every... Horror movie that I've ever seen is either about some distant ancient relative or it's about some other family, right?
In the sixth sense, it's always some other family that's being exhumed and explored, not one's own family.
And because of these two distancing and falsifying habits, defenses, the ghosts...
Of haunted movies continue to haunt us.
We cannot expel the ghosts of our mythologies about ghosts, because we haven't understood that it's about introspection and conversations within our own family, that that's how we discover and deal with the crimes that may have occurred within our families.
It's always someone else in the distant past, in another place, and the clues are physical, not conversational or introspective.
And, I mean, that would be tough to do in movies, though you could certainly do it with CGI, but it would be easier to do in a novel.
Now, when we have repetitive stories and superstitions as a whole, but religion in particular is a repetitive story, it's because we haven't understood it.
What the story is really about.
What the purpose of the story is.
Once you understand what a story is really about, then you can act on it.
And then it loses its power to captivate you.
So, why do we love watching action hero films?
Well, because we like to see people taking on external threats with physical courage.
When the reality is we need to take on internal threats with emotional courage.
But because we don't want to place that lightsaber within our own hands, we want to watch somebody else wielding it.
We don't want to pick it up ourself, because that's really terrifying.
That's why we want to watch other people do it, so that we can participate in heroism without actually having to be heroic.
And in fact, the more we participate in heroism, the less heroic we actually are.
And if you want a pop culture...
Proof of this, all you have to do is look at, and I think one of these showed up in Gossip Girls, and it's the theme of the Big Bang Theory, look at the guys most into comic books.
Well, they are the least heroic in their own lives, and the most frightened, and the most conformist, and the most broken.
And so they want to look at heroism, because they don't want to be heroic.
And the degree to which they're rejecting heroism is the degree to which it shows up in art around them, and they're addicted to that.
Take away the art and the possibility of personal courage would arise.
And so that which we have not processed as actionable within our own lives we project and become addicted to in the realm of fantasy, in the realm of art, in the realm of idealism, and in the realm of religion.
So... The purpose of religion is to help us to understand that our ego is not the master of the mind, because humanity, who is the ego in all religious...
Humanity is to the gods as the ego is to the unconscious, and we don't really understand that.
So in religion, you are bowed to an ancient and universal and all-powerful consciousness.
I mean, it's not even subtle. All superstition is about consciousness.
All ghosts, all gods is about...
I don't mean sort of like don't walk under a ladder, which is about your consciousness.
But it's all about consciousness, which is the completely obvious clue.
It's more than a clue. It's a GPS. It's a roadmap that it is talking about the contents of the human mind.
It's not talking about anything external, of course, because there are no gods out there.
But the fact that superstition always portrays consciousness in an immaterial form, but that's how we experience the characters within us, the unconscious, that it is consciousness without material form.
And it feels both alien and very familiar.
And this is all very clearly spelled out in the fact that Supernatural, by definition, is beings who are not subject to physical laws.
I mean, come on, you can't get more obvious than talking about the contents of consciousness, which show up every night violating all sorts of physical laws, walking through walls and flying and walking on water and so on, that what's being talked about is the contents of consciousness.
But because...
The excessive splitting that is required for a successful, quote, successful projection of the contents of consciousness into a polytheistic fantasy world, because the degree of splitting that is required to successfully achieve that is so great and results from such trauma,
people don't want to reclaim the contents of their consciousness, because that would be to undo the trauma that caused them To spiral and spit all of the contents of their unconscious and spread them across the heavens like evil treacle.
So people don't want to reintegrate the contents of consciousness because that would require healing, identifying and healing and experiencing the trauma that caused the massive projections to spring up and the expulsion of the contents of consciousness into the fantasy universe as a whole.
People don't want to do that.
It's a very, very painful thing.
And the longer you don't do it, the longer you don't put your knee back into joint, the more painful it's going to be when you do it.
Eventually it's not possible. And so what religion is, is the reminder that we are not the master of our own consciousness, that we are subject to larger psychological or psychic forces within us.
And the sad thing, of course, the reason that it remains so prevalent is because Religion is not a friend of negotiation, and is not a friend of courage in the confrontation of psychic energies, right? So you're inner critic and so on, right?
You just must bow down to it as a stern Old Testament God.
Or the sentimentality, which is the flip side of brutality, is represented in that dewy-eyed Bubba Jesus, who is constantly doing the reach around under the table.
And people don't Want to withdraw those projections?
That's very traumatic.
And so they continue on and on and on to project the contents of consciousness into the world around them.
And because the contents of consciousness are so diverse you tend to have or you always have monotheism breaking into polytheism.
The saints and the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary.
As consciousness develops You get fewer and fewer gods.
That's true, because there's less and less child abuse and less and less splitting going on, which results in less and less projection.
So you can actually have fewer gods, or as master gods and subservient gods.
In the more primitive cultures, everything is alive.
There are thousands or millions of gods, because consciousness is so shattered by trauma.
In these primitive societies, but in a more advanced and child-tolerant society, there's no real child-positive society, but there are more child-tolerant societies such as ours, you get fewer and fewer gods.
And this, of course, is one reason why people resist.
It's got nothing to do with whether there is or isn't a god.
People resist the identification of atheism.
They resist the identification of there being no god.
Because the moment that they accept there is no God, and that psychological projection collapses back in and of themselves, into themselves, and they actually have to deal with what is really going on in their minds, and they won't have the easy narcotic of projection anymore, and that's why they fight it so ferociously.
The idea that it has anything to do with what's written in the Bible or anything.
That's all, in effect, of the need to project trauma into the outside world.
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