One of the two remaining counseling clients I have came this morning. Let's call him Mike.A bit of sun is peeking through clouds but after experiencing left-sided pain all day yesterday, worse last night after supper, I was in no mood to be happy when I woke up at 8:15 this morning. I read from André Aciman's Out of Egypt then got up to get ready for the appointment at ten.
The "session" with Mike ranged over relationships, spirituality and procrastinating about implementing what we are "called" to do. Raised by a distant, authoritarian father on a farm in south-central Indiana, Mike grew up with a distaste for Christianity with its tradition of filter-down authoritarianism. He has been studying yoga for many years but continues to struggle with Christianity, especially fundamentalist Christians. He and his wife see a counselor at the church she attends.
This morning Mike repeated his experience several years ago when he and his wife (let's call her Anne) drove to Fort Wayne. While she was attending to her business, he whiled away the time at the library. He walked to the stacks in the back and pulled out a book about French Jesuit anthropologist, Teilhard de Chardin. Chardin wrote about human consciousness evolving and referred to the parable of the mustard seed. To Mike, picking up this book from the thousands at the library and reading something he needed to read at that time was inexplicably moving. "What are the odds that I would do that, pick up the one book that I needed to see at that time?"
Months before, Mike told me of another unbelievable "coincidence" when he asked the kids he teaches yoga to choose a yantra. All his grandchildren chose the same yantra he chose but none of the other kids, not his son-in-law nor wife, chose it. To his this was marvelous.
One of Mike's chief objections to Christian orthodox dogmas is how fundamentalist Christians and the majority of Christians through the ages have balked at the idea of "God within." He refers to the Gospel of John where Jesus says he and the Father are one and everyone through him one with the Father. To Mike this said we are "God."
I reflected on what we know about monotheism and the injunction against worshipping or even believing there can be "another God beside me." It is clear now that centuries after Moses reportedly accepted the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai (Exodus 31:18) or Horeb (1Kings 8:9), the Hebrews continued to worship Astarte and other Gods besides Jahweh. It appears that it took the Babylonian captivity when the remnants of David's kingdom was overrun and the people taken to Babylon for the Jews to finally toe the line: no more other Gods. Contemporary Jews and Christians have since then trembled with fear even at the thought that God could be anywhere else but "in heaven" where "he" reigns alone.
Monotheism is the latest stage in the evolution of religions. I doubt it will be the last. The idea appeared apparently independently in various parts of Africa, the Near East and India between 1200 to 500 years before the common era. Now, anything other than monotheism is considered "primitive religion." It has become dogma for the majority of people in the world who follow Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Religions to me are human creations to deal with human experiences. There is a lot to be said for monotheism. While monotheism has not prevented acts of terrorism, more and more peoples of diverse faith beliefs are accepting the idea that the "one God" they believe in is the same "one God" in which others put their faith. Ultimately this idea of one "source" of power and knowledge and life might yet unite all the earth's peoples that they join together in the same set of moral injunctions and beliefs. We would then have become "one."
Paul, the man from Tarsus in modern-day Turkey, created the Christianity most people nowadays follow and believe in. He wrote how people in believing in Christ became one with Christ, "neither male or female, slave or free." In social psychology and literary criticism we hear about deconstructionism. By nature we incline towards simplicity and unity while spinning webs of diversity that keep us individuals. The most powerful product of the renaissance in Western Europe is the idea of the value of the individual. Socialism and communism that treated everyone as being part of the whole are gradually making way for capitalism and its focus on how one person can make her or his own fortune if he or she had the diligence and wit to mine human nature with its greed, fears and lust.
"What is your idea of dharma?" Mike asked towards the end of our meeting. To me Dharma like the Tao in Chinese philosophy and God in Western European and Muslim beliefs are the same if not identical. Dharma is the way things are. It is the "will of God" that Christians pray when they pray the Our Father. To have the faith of a mustard seed is easy when we are acting according to the ways of what Buddhists might call the "interconnected universe." Instead of insisting that how we see things is how things should be, we act and see what results from our actions. That is dharma.
I doubt I'll return to the practice of orthodox psychiatry but today's meeting with Mike recalled what I enjoy about doing psychotherapy. When two people come together and put their heads and hearts together, something wonderful happens. Jesus in the Christian gospels says as much: when two or three are gathered in my name, there shall I be also. To live with grace and freedom, that is, successfully, we toe the line between the value of the individual and how at times we need to function as a community to neutralize the otherwise destructive, nonproductive ramifications of an individual-centered life.
