Adelphiasophism
Life, Purpose, Health and Spiritual Health
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Friday, May 28, 1999
The Purposeof Life
Those modern gurus, the psychiatrists, pick on their own favourite symptoms and base their “cures” on them. Freud emphasised peoples desire for pleasure, Adler their fight for power and Jung their expression of instincts or archetypes. Yet the real cause of the modern neurosis is the absence of purpose in our lives, as Victor Frankl, another Viennese psychiatrist realised. Once people have a purpose, it becomes their personal duty to fulfil it and their lives stop being empty and become rich.
Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist who was incarcerated for the duration of the War in Nazi concentration camps. His wife and his whole family except one sister were murdered. Yet he discovered from this awful but real experience that Nietzsche was correct in asserting that humans can put up with almost any torture as long as their lives have a meaning or purpose. Faced with terrible injustice, starvation, humiliation, fear and depredation, people found sustenance in several strategies: memories of loved ones, adopting an indifference or detachment from it all, turning to otherworldly comforts, or, by contrast, finding spiritual nutrition in seeing the beauties of this world—a sunset, a flower, a rare smile—with unclouded eyes.
All of these really fall into the last category because we are creatures of Nature and our experiences, however abnormal, are natural. Some people faced with death will see how wonderful life is in its totality—Nature. Others comfort themselves by imagining a future life after death, or by reliving the life they are losing, or by being detached, realising that we are merely tiny atoms of a magnificent whole. It is the Goddess in us that makes us speculate, as death approaches, in ways we never, or rarely, do in the prime of life. These moments of truth, that we should be taught to appreciate in life, might only come as the light fades but, then, for some it gives them the will to live on, and, if they pull through, to turn their lives to some purpose more directly related to protecting the Goddess and her children, either by helping people or the planet, in some way. A close encounter with death rarely makes people more selfish as one might expect.
Later treating profoundly disturbed people who had sought his assistance, Frankl would bluntly ask them why they do not commit suicide. Their replies would reveal that all had some purpose in holding on to existence, painful though it was.
Frankls discoveries uphold the Adelphiasophist attitude to life. The symptoms emphasised by all the other Viennese gurus are self-centred principles, internalised ones. Only awareness of purpose and duty is external and ultimately fulfilling. Everyone today demands their right to pleasure, to power, to do as they like—all selfish. Few people balance it with talk of duty. “No taxation without representation,” was the old democratic slogan. It is, of course, a correct principle, but expressed selfishly. It should be counter-balanced with “No rights without duties,” but this slogan should not need expressing because it should be written on our hearts. Modern society has forgotten this maxim and has thus become self-centred and neurotic.
Psychiatrists will tell you that the central symptom of typical neurosis is an excessive self-centredness. One way of abating the neurosis is to distract the neurotic from their peculiar self-interest and to eliminate activities that reinforce it. If selfishness is a symptom of neurosis then the modern world is plainly neurotic. The richest people and nations are not content with their priviledges but want still more, and the humblest citizen spouts on incessantly about their rights. Neither rich nor poor is interested in duty, despite the prevalence of huge patriarchal religions that dominate moral thought today.
The world is insane, or, more correctly, going insane and we have to try to break the cybernetic links that are driving it insane. Despite thousands of years of priestly spouting, we have a population that has minimal interest in devotion or duty. Rights are internal, duties are external. People have to look for meaning outside themselves, though it is no less their own personal meaning. The world does not exist for us nor we for it, we exist for each other in a glorious symbiotic relationship that the unhealthy and persistent emphasis on the non-existent transcendental god has blinded us to. The world is not a resource to be plundered as almost every Christian seems to believe. It is a fragile egg which we can easily break with dire consequences when the fluids of life drain out of it and leave us gasping in death. We must start to protect out Goddess after millennia of neglect, or we shall be destroyed.
Formless Void or Wondrous Vista
It is natural for people to want a purpose in life, and it is proved by their constant invention of supernatural purposes such as devotion to god. It proves how important purpose is but also shows the huge waste of lives over the last two millennia. Those who imagine a formless being somewhere outside of nature miss the obvious beauty around them and their plain purpose and duty of conserving it for our future generations and our cohabitants of this planet. We can neither help nor be helped by a void, yet thousands of lives have been wasted by people trying to see into it. Any help we get from our illusion of God is psychological and can be had from sincere belief in a lucky penny. But the real world in which we live can both be helped and protected by us and will in return help and protect us, or our children. The Goddess gives us physical as well as psychological rewards. Because belief in God is not based in reality, it has no checks and balances and can end up in bigotry and usually does.
Like any religion, Adelphiasophism involves some preaching and some teaching but it does not require anyone to believe in supernatural beings or events. We wish to inculcate proper moral values in our children and we base them on science and reason, but the foundation of it is before your eyes not in a transcendental Erewhon. No one is accountable to God, but everyone is accountable to their own conscience today and to the judgement of future generations that have to inhabit the planet in the state we leave it in.
Christians, since the religion was founded, have been fond of the metaphor of the blind being given sight, meaning that they suddenly “see” the significance of the cross. Yet, in their actions for 2000 years, Christians have done the opposite to their converts—they have tried to blind them to truth. They have put scales of ignorance over their eyes. Adelphiasophists aim to remove ignorance and promote understanding. Good will has been directed by Christians into a bottomless void while the Goddess in whose bosom we rest has not been merely ignored but has been repeatedly burnt and bitten quite savagely and viciously by her misled and ungrateful children. If she finally drops them in the mud, theyll pray to their nameless, faceless, formless, immaterial god living in his empty pit and beg forgiveness. Doubtless at that point their prayers will be answered and theyll be put out of their misery. And while they are pitifully praying, the passive Christians can reflect that Adelphiasophists told them so.
By the time the truth imposes itself, it is too late. We have given fair warning, and we do not pretend to be the first. We appeal to Christians, not anticipating any response, to stop deluding themselves with invisible gods in in imaginary voids and look at the world in which they live, a bubbling fountain of life, a beautiful aromatic flower, a mystery transcending the pitiful invention of ancient Jewish priestly cheats. Give up the absurd obsession with the supernatural and consider the real wonders of the natural world that our neglect and abuse is turning into a fetid pool. The true meaning of life will be found in this world, not in heaven. We have a responsibility in this life, however unbearable it might become. We must recognize that the world does not owe us a living at any price. We live together or not at all.
Christians are always keen to experience “the transcendent” but whatever they think it is, it is a phenomenon of this world and therefore of the Goddess not of the invisible and ineffable. Such experiences are emotional states arising out of wonder or love, quite often love of life itself, brought to a particular focus by some Christian mystics through varieties of self-deprivation. Love itself is a deeply wondrous emotion, even transcendental in a romantic sense, but quite natural. Love is, of course, quite different from sex. Love does not require sex and it has hardly ever been more plain that sex does not require love. Love is a complex emotion that bonds people in more ways than the merely sexual. The Christian Gods love of mankind is translated from the Hebrew as love, loving kindness, steadfast love, mercy and grace. It is an inchoate feeling of caring and compassion and comes originally from a mothers love of her offspring. Few animals leave the duties of caring and compassionate for the kids solely to the father. It is either a mothers instinct or the instinct of both parents jointly. Through evolution, the feeling, which was plainly an advantageous adaptation, diffused to brotherly love, sexual love, pack bonding and even to altruistic love.
The second sex is the male and it is certain that fatherly love could not have come before motherly love. Some modern Christians deny that God is male, despite Adam being the image of God and Eve an afterthought made only of a rib. And, of course, Jesus “the Son” always spoke of God as his “father”. Feminist Christians, in particular, ignoring all this, declare that God is asexual or even a mother. Their obvious step is to reject the void god and adopt the real mother—Nature. The point of universal love then becomes immediately evident—we are all of us children of the same mother, the same protoplasm—every bacterium, alga, vegetable, animal and human. That is why what we see in the biosphere is so awesome to us. We live outside ourselves as well as within. We transcend our bodies, but nothing transcends Nature.
Moral Behaviour and Free Will
People decide for themselves their moral behaviour. Arguably, our free will decisions are simply the totality of the influences upon us reflected in a purely mechanical or behavioural way, but the things that influence us are so many, varied and complicated that any individuals decisions are not easy to predict. It is wahat mathematicians call a “chaotic” system, not in the sense of randomness but in the sense of unpredictability through complexity and particularly feedback. Since we are conscious of what we have done in the past, our past actions provide us with feedback. We are cybernetic. Our decisions therefore have every hallmark of being free-will decisions, whether they really are or not, and, since we are conscious of deciding, we are responsible for what we choose to do. It might be merely the way we have evolved but it is how we are.
It could be no other way, if we want an orderly society in which everyone and everthing is respected. If evolution had gone far enough perhaps there would have been no need for big government and human society would function adequately as an anarchy. And anarchy demands mutual respect. That is the point. Moral behaviour towards others requires a sense of duty and therefroe of purpose, and denial of free will or personal responsibility relieves everyone of the need to care about duty. No one can be held responsible for purely conditioned responses, so let us admit that whether we jump into a pond to save a drowning neighbour or push them under with a pole, the decision is consciously our own. And conscience, though it might have started moral thought, is not the end of it. Conscience is a fear of punishment inculcated by a parent. Now we need not be so negative but can look to a benefit in the future, though it might be a benefit for our descendants. A sense of duty predicated solely on conscience is sterile and leads also to bigotry or formalised rituals for achievining “goodness”. A “conscience” is doubtless useful in preventing outright wrongdoing but cannot replace a positive duty to realise practical benefits here on earth, through awareness of the need to preserve what we have inherited or to improve on it.
It is this awareness that confers true spirituality. People can get a spiritual feeling in many ways and inevitably attribute it to God or otherworldliness, but while they remain alive, for sure, their experiences are of this world and not of any other. Failure to appreciate this simple truth has people committing themselves to all sorts of self-denials and psychological and even physical chastisements to get a feeling of the spiritual, and all are misguided whatever the outcome. Living a lifetime on top of a pillar might make Simon a saint, but it has hardly been a positive commitment to respect the natural world. Indeed, like all these bizarre behaviours, it is a denial of human nature.
There is less value in tracing unconscious motives for behaviour once it is accepted that cures for anti-social or neurotic behaviour can be effected personally by the decision to serve the Goddess rather than God or nothing at all. Unlike serving God, this is not wasting away in cells, sitting on columns or piously thinking you are holier than anyone else, but actively doing something useful to stop our fellow humans from cutting holes in Natures fabric for their own selfish ends.
A career woman had fought her way up the corporate ladder in the eighties and was now in a senior position of a mining company, but felt strangely disturbed and unfulfilled by her success. Seeking psychiatric help, she was told that she was rebelling against her symbolic father in the shape of the corporation. She did not feel any better and over several years of psychoanalysis was finding the job increasingly stultifying. Then she granted an interview with an Adelphiasophist who was objecting to some of her companys activities. She stuck to her corporate guns but became friendly with the Sister who taught her that her unhappiness was a subliminal recognition of the corporate attack on the Goddess that she was abetting. She realised that this was the truth that she had been suppressing in favour of her high powered career. The outcome was that she abandoned her corporate career for one of public service and dedication to the world. She is not so well off materially but is spiritually content.
The career woman feared neurosis but in truth had a sublime senstivity to what was happening but refused to face it because of her conditioning to achieve. Not all but many depressions are like this. A personal conflict over lifes purpose can cause symptoms of neurosis. Such neurotic symptoms can be relieved when people find a meaning in life. In the most real and natural sense, such people have a spiritual crisis. They consciously suppress a spiritual feeling and become mentally torn as a result. The revelation of deep feelings and longings can resolve such conflicts, which are, oddly, sometimes exacerbated by conscience. Today, we are brought up to achieve, to be ambitious, to be a success. The successful ones tell us that all we have to do is want it enough. It is pure nonsense that only those who actually do succeed can say.
It is quite impossible for everyone to succeed and those who reject it often face pangs of conscience. They are being lazy, lacking ambition or relying on others. If they think more deeply they will often find both practical and spiritual reasons telling them that opting out of unreasonable demands made on them by convention is not sinful. The mistake is suppressing their deepest feelings that object to their course of action. Realising a new set of careers goals based on a personal symbiosis with the Goddess will often relieve such tensions and make life much more worthwhile.
The essence of life is change. Nothing remains static. Equilibria in nature are dynamic or only apparent, a temporary stasis. So, it is natural for people to “do” things. For an animal, vegetation is a form of death. The implication is that tension or conflict is natural and has to be accepted as positive. The question is whether, in any individual, it is pathological or creative. The creative struggle is what gives people a sense of doing, of overcoming and of succeeding. Pathological struggle is a burden, a feeling that life is against you and a loss of spirit leading to breakdown, depression and even suicide. It is a moot point whether such people need treatment or spiritual assistance.
Adelphiasophists, while not rejecting alternative approaches, think those who are disturbed need more encouragement to find their real forte. It goes without saying that this is best done before the burden of defeat completely breaks down the personality. Since most people will have to endure the feeling of such a burden at sometime or other, but will pull through unscathed, it is the ordinary person that we should seek to encourage, before pathological symptoms set in. Adelphiasophists want to see a caring society that will prevent spiritual defeats from becoming disasters.
It is pointless trying to achieve a non-existent balance, though drugs might give the illusion of doing it. Attenuating a life by drugs is no cure and is not constructive. Of course, it might be necessary when the personality is a wreck to prevent suicide or self-abuse but a healthy society should not let emptiness get that far. People oppressed by a sense of failure need to reorient themselves from the unachievable goals they have set themselves, to achievable goals, or need, perhaps, to be shown that they have already achieved whatever could be achieved, though it fell short of their goal. A shipwrecked sailor floundering in the water is better adopting the goal of swimming to a piece of flotsam than simply cursing fate for his bad luck. When people are psychologically floundering, setting them new goals to be realised is better than saying “never mind” and hoping that the depression would soon pass.
Wisdom and Imagination
The source of wisdom is imagination. One is inclined to believe that cruel people are unimaginative people because they cannot imagine what effect their cruelty has. But monsters forced to understand what cruelty means to the victim sometimes learn to understand. Frankl tells the story of Dr J, a man who thought curing “untermenschen” meant killing them. He vigorously pursued his own purpose in life, that of relieving the world of those he considered inadequate by murdering them. The Russians captured him at the end of the War and he disappeared. Years later Frankl met a man who had spent time as a prisoner of the Russians who said he knew Dr J as the most caring and compassionate man he ever met, selfless in his helping others while bearing his own troubles lightly. He died in prison. Was this a man who could not imagine what he was doing to others? The vicissitudes of life can rob us of everything except what we keep in our heads, our attitudes, our values, our puposes and aims. Subject to awful suffering like that he inflicted but could not imagine, an apparently evil man could act like a saint.
Exercising your imagination can only be good for the individual and for society. Having the capacity to imagine what the outcome of your actions might be, considering the cautious outlook of the Adeplphiasophist, and how you would react if you were the victim of your own actions is essential to making choices likely to conserve the Goddess. Because imagination is the mother of responsibility is one reason that Adelphiasophists are intersted in sponsoring creativity. Because change is continuous and is never reversible in totality, decisions have to be taken with special care. It is simply not good enough for politicians, tycoons, and those scientists who prostitute their objectivity and honour to these people, to say “Trust me.” We can imagine the worst and the worse it is, the less we trust you.
Suffering
The biggest problem Christianity has is the problem of suffering. How can a God supposed to love us allow suffering? Christians try but cannot come up with a satisfactory answer because an all powerful loving God could not behave in such a way. There is no such problem with the Goddess because Natures love is entirely diffused among her creations. Each of her creations evolve to fill a certain niche in her endless reef of being and, so long as it fills it successfully, it survives. If not, she is quite ruthless and cares no more for the human race than she did for the dodo. We should be grateful to her for being here at all and, since we have the advantage that the dodo had not, we are conscious of what we are doing, we should be taking care that we do not go the same way.
The worst aspect of suffering is peculiarly human for this very reason—we know what is happening. Not that we feel pain when we are being eaten by a predator, say. Our pain is numbed by the shock that releases natural endorphins to anaesthetize us. The suffering is fear, a natural emotion that stimulates flight or flight, and the horror of being aware of what is happening. Now most human suffering is not caused by predators but by disease, disaster, warfare and loss. Yet as Nietsche said, however bad it is , it is possible to survive it as long as the sufferer has a good reason to live.
Frankl tells the story of an elderly doctor who for two years had been unable to shake off a depression caused by the death of his much loved wife. Frankl asked the man how his wife would have felt had she lived the longer of the two. The old man said she would have been devastated. “So, your suffering has saved your wife from worse suffering.” The old man took Frankl by the hand and said, “Thank you!” The psychiatrist had not cured the old man of his suffering but his new understanding allowed him to bear it. He saw a purpose in it.
Suffering has to be necessary suffering otherwise it becomes futile flagellation or masochism. Medieval monks who abused themselves or wore hair shirts, or spiked belts, were not suffering. They were showing off, even if only to themselves. Their pain was self-imposed and could be stopped in a moment. It is a perversity of suffering and a perversity of Nature. Nature does not deliberately cause suffering any more than she deliberately loves us.
Not that everyone has a right to be happy, but when people get unhappy, rather than considering them neurotic or depressed for not being happy, they should consider, instead of any “right” to be happy, the duties they are ignoring or neglecting that might give them a reason to be happy. Thamas Becket, a fun loving young noble, was made unhappy when Henry made him Archbishop of Canterbury as a sinecure. He did not mind the wealth and power of the position but had a conflict over its responsibilities. He resolved it by taking them seriously, whereupon, he again became happy. In so doing he became a meddlesome priest and signed his own death warrant. The perpetual search for happiness as a right is empty, and the impatience with unhappiness is unfeeling. The old man above continued to be unhappy. He had a personal dignity in his state of mind because he knew he had saved his wife from equal unhappiness.
In this context religions, even false ones, can give meaning to life. The effect is not supernatural but is psychological, purely and simply, though no less real for that. It does not matter that a belief is not true for such purposes but that it is a belief sincerely held. So, when people believe that their almighty God has a reason for their suffering, although he could notionally stop it in a moment, they will tolerate it. The Judaeo-Christian justification is that God knows! He knows what we do not, and that is sufficient for them. They say we are like laboratory rats, suffering pain, unnatural conditions and a premature death to save human life, but unable to comprehend it. This is a cynical argument. The rat is not suffering in the cause of rats but of humans. Are we to suppose that humans suffer in the cause of gods?
Such desperate attempts to justify suffering are not necessary because it is natural. Everything in life is not pleasant. Birth itself is not pleasant for mother, and probably for child too. Bad smells are unpleasant to us for the evolutionary purpose of making us try to avoid them, because they are usually poisonous. Losing our shirt at Las Vegas is not pleasant but perhaps we should not have been so foolish. Suffering is unpleasant but it can be uplifting. It has no purpose but is like insects and oceans—they are just there, an inevitable part of Nature. And we have to learn how to handle insects and suffering in our lives.
Spiritual Purpose
Some people complain that their lives are empty and meaningless. The closest to an abstract meaning of life, like the Christian “loving God” or “seeking salvation” is perhaps venerating the planet. Otherwise people will find their own purpose in life. Certainly, life can have no meaning that requires death, nor any meaning that can be postponed from the here and now. When we are dead we can do nothing for the world as even Christians concede in their rejection of the rival swindle of spiritualism.
Fulfilment comes from correct action not by ay determination that we shall be happy. Depression, unhappiness, neuroses are often symptoms of an unhealthy self-centredness in our psyche. We must make our mental conflicts creative by consolidating our symbiosis with the world rather than destroying it. By turning outward to the Goddess that gave birth to us we find purpose and meaning and get the will to live and enjoy life.
In the thirties, a woman was widowed and was left with two boys, one of whom was a cripple. The younger able-bodied boy died of diphtheria and the woman wanted to kill her other son and commit suicide. The crippled son however, did not want to die and persuaded his mother that they should struggle on, though life was hard. The mother, intensely depressed, sought help. She was asked to imagine what she would think of her life at the age of eighty as she lay dying, and as an example she was told the tale of a woman in her late twenties who had sought fun and riches in life, had loved handsome men and eventually married one and become a famous socialite. She then realised she had left it too late to have children and lay aged eighty looking back on a life of pleasure but feeling deeply unfulfilled because she had no children to show for it.
The suicidal mother, imagining herself also aged eighty and dying, said that she too had wanted children and had had them but had lost her husband and youngest child leaving her with a crippled son. She had considered suicide but had remained alive to look after her crippled son to stop him from being institutionalized. The boy had lived a full life and she had cared for him as his mother and, though life had been a tribulation, she could die happy knowing her life had been fulfilled. The woman was stating what she felt her purpose in life should be—the reason she was seeking help instead of putting her head in a gas oven. The experience made her openly recognize the duty that made her life worthwhile.
We should try to do things in our lives that will allow us to emulate the words of Bertrand Russell towards the end of his life:
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
Awareness of unhappiness is because we are conscious animals. Ape-men in the pre-conscious phase would have led their lives untroubled by the need for any sense of meaning or fulfilment in living. They lived their lives, like any animal, purely instinctively. Consciousness gave people a lot of mental anguish, from which there is no retreat, this side of death.
For a long time in human history, though conscious, people were happy to follow instinct as it came to them personally or to some official seer, shaman or prophet in visions or dreams. Now, in the age of science and mathematics, we demand rational justification for everything we do, excepting only our irrational beliefs in ancient superstitions now called religions.
Many people have no confidence in their ability to take hard decisions and prefer to leave them to others who make a profession of it, though usually the consequences still fall on ordinary people. So, we appoint experts to take decisions for us—politicians, priests, entrepreneurs. Having all the main decisions taken by others leaves us suffering from boredom, pursuing unexciting lives merely to make a living. This boredom translates often into recklessness, vandalism and anti-social and criminal behaviour—feeling bored or even having an injustice done to you does not give you the right to impose injustice on others.
Boredom might cause neurosis and, especially in a retired person, a sense of not being appreciated and being a burden on society. No one who has devoted their life to helping the Goddess need feel like this. Aging is a depressing process for many people, but is less depressing for those who can point to ways in which they have made life better in the world by improving the quality of future life in some way, however small. The less selfish these achievements and the more oriented towards the Goddess, the better they are and the more proud of them you can be. In younger people, boredom resolves itself into the chief symptoms of the other Viennese psychiatric schools—an endless and unfulfilling drive for endless pleasure or power—and the two combine in the frightening increase in the incidence of rape.
Now, though we can say that real spiritual purpose in life can be had by seeking to serve the Goddess, there are countless ways in which it can be done, some obviously Goddess oriented and some not. Human beings are social animals and we can serve the Goddess by serving society, as long as we are not beguiled by those elements of humanity that will commit any outrage against the Goddess provided that they miss the consequences. So, doing normal jobs in society suffice for some. Others want to do something more clearly beneficial, choosing to become vets, doctors, conservationists, ecologists, park keepers, estate managers, farmers and so on. All have their own dangers, of course, but it would be a strange Adelphiasophist who was not aware of them.
Those who do relatively neutral jobs in society like, schoolteachers, shop assistants and housewives might want to display a positive commitment to the Goddess by being activists against exploitation of the planet in their spare time and will join rallies and organise movements to oppose the eco-vandals. For some, fulfilment might be in simply having children and showing “them” how to be sensitive to the fragility of Nature. Some people can have a set of different roles at the same time or different roles at different times. The point is not to let spiritual emptiness enter your head as long as the earth, the oceans or the atmosphere is under attack from parasitic planet eaters, euphemistically dubbed “global players” by their fans.
The true meaning of life is realised in the Goddess who bore us and nurtures us. Above all, it is specific to the individual. The individual person asks the question as a conscious animal that has become aware that such a question can be put. No God put it, though. It came from observing the wonder of the Goddess and thinking, “Why should it be?” Adelphiasophists simply recommend that you will save a lot of time and perhaps anguish in seeking the answer, by realising it lies in the Goddess herself.
People must seek their true purpose in life and reorient themselves from both metaphysical unreality and self-centred reality, towards unselfish realization. Awaking to this realization will contribute to the salvation of our little corner of the universe and the future of our children in the unpolluted world of the Goddess.
