Hello. Do You Exist?

I’m sure I am a soul. How about you?

If you don’t have a soul why not cook one up?

The English language has been perverted over the decades of my life and the wellspring of perversion is the perverted academia of the Anglosphere. The thrust of the perversion is the campaign to destroy Christianity in order to replace it with moral and even perceptual relativism. The reason for the implacable hatred of Christianity is hatred for the doctrine of the immortality and sovereignty of the soul upon which all three Abrahamic faiths are founded.

The freedom of choice, indeed the duty to choose, and the authority of the personal self to choose between right and wrong, that is the enemy against which Western academia has set its sharpest lance. Above all else, the mind of Western Man must be robbed of any sense that he has a self, an intention, a spirit, a soul. The duty of Western Academia, inculcated into every respectable intellectual, is to strip Western Man of his certainty that on this earth in his mortal time, under God alone, he is the absolute authority who can decide what he will do and not do because he “has ears to hear and eyes to see” and a sovereign mind to judge for himself what is real and what is unreal, what is true and what is a lie, and what is morally right or wrong.

The opposing doctrine of moral and intellectual relativism proposes that there is no God because there is no such thing as a reality beyond the physical, so there is no immortal soul, neither mine nor God’s. When my brain and heart and gut stop functioning I cease to exist. In the final analysis I don’t exist; I’m nothing but a collection of functions. So where is my sovereignty? Who do I think I am to be deciding important things. I’m free as a bird and just as brainless. Which in the final analysis necessitates and validates deference to human deciders outside one’s own mind. And this is called Liberation.

I thought deference to authority was especially for Christians? But how come deference to authority is greatest among those of us who check the “No Religion” box because we have no real religion at all?

Deference to authority – to Medical Science, the Health Authorities, the Government – is what caused millions of us to let other people cancel our jobs, put breathing restrictions over our mouths and noses and even restrict the breathing of our children and inject an unknown substance into our veins over the last 4 years. We were so educated, so democratic, so liberal that we gave every human freedom away because we were ordered to do so. We were liberated enough to volunteer to be slaves.

And we are told in a thousand ways that Irony is Dead.

Shakespeare put into the mouth of his Hamlet an immortal weapon of satire against the moral relativism that was already evident in the Protestant universities of circa 1600. “There’s nothing either right or wrong but thinking makes it so”. I read that when I was 11 years old. Lucky me!

In John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here” is carved into the stone above the gates of Hell. For over a century there may as well have been an analogous motto above the gates to every Western university, “Abandon Self all Ye Who Enter Here”. Believe what you are told to believe and above all, never, ever utter a belief in personal sovereignty or even personality at all.

Do you, my reader, believe you exist? When I said “Christianity”, did you summon up images of an implacable authority who called himself God and ruthlessly enforced His dictates on what is Right and Wrong? Maybe you were raised in a rigidly religious household and that’s why you bridle at the mention of God. I was raised in a liberal middle-class atheistic household but I was a rebellious teenager too. The word “father” meant “tyrant”; my WWII veteran father was difficult enough to fill the role. My “inner child” – a feature of the 1960s, that phrase, isn’t it? – still feels put upon. Because we were put upon, all of us, one way or another!

I feel your confusion because, being a child of the post-WWII “Baby Boom”, the first generation raised by the Saturday morning TV, the Counterculture generation, I once shared your assumptions. I was subtly groomed, by simultaneous, ubiquitous forces, to despise and discard “middle-class” morality during my formative years. We all were, we rock and roll kids. It cost us dearly. It destroyed my marriage. It hurt the people I love most of all. That’s why I’m writing this. I need to make up for it somehow.

When my then wife was working towards her BA in the 1970s she wrote an essay in which she referred to the self. I read it and thought it was so reasonable and even self-explanatory that I shared my wife’s surprise and even shock to find that she and her teacher were almost besieged by young students who ganged up and vehemently denied that such a thing as a “self” could be said to exist. Finally the compromise was struck that “the SENSE” of a personal self was barely intellectually permissible. We Western college kids can be allowed to have a “sense” of any stupid, emotional, illusory, heretical thing as long as we don’t take it seriously.

That there could be the actual existence of a “self” was all too close to the reviled and immolated “soul” to be permitted in the educated mind. I was reminded of Western Philosophy 101 at UBC in the 1960s when our teacher spent the year crusading for B.F. Skinner and for Logical Positivism and against any vestigial notion of the reality of the Self. Asking where was the Self, the ego, the “I am Myself”, was the same as if one would watch the passing of carnival bands and floats and clowns and elephants and then ask, “But where is the parade?”

The erosion of Christian belief among American and British and European intellectuals during the latter 19th century was noted by Friedrich Nietzsche and famously aphorized as “The Death of God”. Nietzsche darkly anticipated that, as belief in God loses its respectability among the intellectual elites, moral boundaries would decay among the elites, among scientists and philosophers and the very wealthy, and this demolition of the conviction that there is an absolute standard of right and wrong would percolate downward to the common people. The removal of God would leave an empty hole in humankind’s sense of self which would have to be filled with more powerful gods. The rise of the violent revolutions, Hitlerism and Leninism, have often been cited as proof that Nietzsche was horribly right.

I believe the means whereby Christianity has been corroded and driven out of academia during the post-World War Two period have been guided and imported and used by US/UK secret intelligence. The most militant enemies of the “sense of self” have come from the principals of the Frankfort School of so-called cultural Marxists who had their origin in 1930s Germany and who emigrated to the USA before WWII broke out and who immediately were embraced, feted and empowered by Columbia University most of all. The best remembered figures are Herbert Marcuse and Eric Fromm. Marcuse once famously railed against American values as the origin of all evil and he vowed to spend his life destroying American Christian values from within. I find it significant that Marcuse was hired as a propagandist by General William Donovan in 1942 as Donovan was constructing his Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA.

Both Islam and Christianity come out of Judaism. The late great theological philosopher David Ray Griffin – all hail that mighty hero of truth and liberty – called the three of them the Abrahamic religions. And what is the essence, the core, of them all? The personification of God. To worship personhood itself. To say to the mysterious unknowable darkness of the universal abyss, “I am here. I exist because you made me. Answer me like a man. For you are a soul, a person. My creator is like me and I am like him. My creator is not a thing, he is a person.”

What presumption! It’s daring, childish. Dare I say, it is an act of creation in itself, godlike creation. The Book of Job, written by a Jew some 2500 years ago or more, is the story of a man who irritates God by demanding that God – portrayed as a living person, a king on His eternal throne – give an account of Himself to a suffering man and explain why, since He is a person, why He allows his creations, his personifications, to suffer misfortune. Implicit in this question is the vision of the immortality of personhood. We Judaeo-Christians take personification so for granted that we do not notice how strange it is.

What am I trying to get at? I notice this cult of personality now as I never did before because from the unimpeachable accounts of friends of mine who have had experiences of ghosts I realized, several years ago, that I have to accept it as real that – at least potentially – my consciousness, my “here I am”, will not stop when I die physically. So I find myself in the same situation as Job, asking that God answer my call. Unlike Job, I’m not suffering, I’m only afraid of loneliness. The way I feel about it now, God can say anything He pleases, just as long as He’s there. Dying alone is said to be a great fear. But can that compare to the fear of living alone without end?

Having delved into the I Ching for half a century I have gotten a taste of Chinese philosophy. I mean the Richard Wilhelm/Cary Baynes translation of the I Ching. Wilhelm reconciled the East and West by his translation. We typically say Chinese philosophy denies God. That’s not really true. The I Ching refuses to personify God. It speaks of what we would call God as The Creative, The Benevolent Will of Heaven. This is not atheism, it’s humility. Humbled by his realization of the mystery of eternity the respectful, the humble Man dares not name the Divine abyss. To put a name to anything is to assume you understand what it is.

There is a version of this humility in the story of Job. God confronts Job with the vastness of creation and the mystery of life and Job humbles himself, saying that God has spoken of things, “Too high for me.”

“What was your face before you were born?”, so goes one of the riddles of Chan Buddhism or Japanese Zen Buddhism. They call these little riddles Koans. A Koan is an absurd question which is meant to break down one’s presumption. Experiential Buddhism, Chan and the Japanese Zen, seeks to strip away all the illusions of personality to experience the immortality of this unnamable thing, consciousness.

Richard Wilhelm frequently footnotes passages of his translation of the I Ching with references to passages of Biblical texts that show similarities. He might have compared that Zen Koan to St Paul’s poem:

“Though I speak with the tongues of angels and have not love I am nothing … for whether there be tongues they shall cease and whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away …”

It seems to me that the philosophy of the East, of China and before that of India, refuses to personify the universe, but it does personify the human spirit. It does, perhaps even more strongly than Abrahamic thought, reify the consciousness of the human person, the “sentient being”. This is that which loves and sees and hears and creates even beyond our knowable Time. This is what we Westerners call the Soul.

There is a battle going on right now in our time all over the world. It is a struggle for the dominance of the human mind between those who worship personhood and those who wish to annihilate all personhood.

I believe the evidence of the events of recent years reveals that there is a group of human beings, an oligarchy which has loosely conglomerated around an accumulation of wealth over the last 200 years. These people are the descendants of wealthy families and their allies whose virtual fortresses are the “developed” world’s houses of banking. These people are a cult whose fantasy religion has been seen fitfully developing in various secret societies, among which have been the Freemasons, Yale University’s Order of Skull and Bones, California’s Bohemian Grove, the Bilderberger Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Club of Rome, the World Economic Forum, and the Central Intelligence Agency.

In the first four pages of his book “JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy” Leroy Fletcher Prouty succinctly set out the idea of the Power Elite. Prouty said that in the early 1500s when Magellan’s voyagers arrived back in port after having circumnavigated the world for the first time the banking elites of Europe found themselves confronted with the practical realization that, since the world was demonstrably finite and also demonstrably within the grasp of European technology, the world could be and therefore it must be taken under the ownership of those with the power to conquer it, that is, themselves. This opened the era of European colonization. The struggle over who shall rule the colonized world resulted in the British Empire and the American Empire. Around 1800 Thomas Malthus, chief economist of the British Empire’s British East India Company, promulgated the second foundation of the modern Power Elite, the idea of overpopulation. Since, in Malthus’ view, the growth of population would outstrip the means of agriculture the bulk of humanity will not survive the future, so there must be a hierarchy topped by those who will survive, by implication those who can limit the unsustainable growth of the surplus rest of humanity.

Soon came Darwin whose ideas were interpreted by the power elite as validating the concept of biological life as an incessant all-against-all struggle for survival. Darwin’s Law of Evolution was seen as a biological arms race to determine who shall be “fittest” to survive. Darwin’s idea that life is an incessant struggle for survival of the fittest was interpreted by the Power Elite as an imperative to become the fittest by the act of surviving while the great bulk of humanity must be culled.

This is the philosophy underlying all of the secretive and elite societies – very notably The Club of Rome, the financiers of Paul Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, the first bible of the Environmentalist/Overpopulation Control movement. It is the conviction that the inner circles of these people who hold secret power deserve to survive and dominate all of humanity. We, the rest of humankind outside the inner circle are fit to be slaves at best. It is my feeling that we people of the modern, “democratic” or egalitarian tradition, the Euro-American tradition of social egalitarianism going back to the Peace of Westphalia and the English Revolution and Bill of Rights, are struggling against the inherent tendency of the wealthy and politically powerful few to aspire to become the absolute slavers of their fellow humans. This great question of who shall rule and who shall have liberty is inherent in every highly developed organization of human masses.

When St Paul was writing in the 50s and 60s AD, the first century of the Christian Era, according to tradition he wrote, in a letter to the Christian community of Ephesus, that he and his fellow believers in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth were struggling not against people but against something spiritual. In an enigmatic passage he wrote:

[Ephesians 6:12, King James Bible] :

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places…”

When we of the Western tradition lost faith in God we thereby unintentionally abandoned faith in our own personhood. Our deepest tradition now leaves us no recourse but faithlessness. Which is the abandonment of the belief and trust in the sovereignty, the integrity, the wholeness of our own souls. This is the terrible vulnerability inherent in validating human authorities above our own selves. For humans who have political power are only human too. They and their forebears have spent several centuries despising their own souls as well as those of others.

In the story of Jesus encountering a man who was possessed by a demon, Jesus asks the demon what is his name. The demon answers “my name is legion” meaning that the demon consists of a numberless multitude of voices all desperately clambering and clawing and imperializing any personhood that they can catch and assume. The demon is Satan and Satan is Nothing. Nothing, but a disembodied hunger to be Something. The demonic spirit is a Nobody, hungry, desperate, to be a Somebody.

Have you ever met someone who has not grasped a sense of personhood? The psychologists and movie makers call them narcissists and psychopaths. Predatory narcissists and predatory psychopaths. Jordan Peterson calls them “predatory parasites”. I like that phrase.

I was in a relationship for years with a woman whom I can only understand as a person with many narcissistic personality features. When this century opened I was living alone, divorced, struggling to make a living, to be an actor and artist. My children were estranged and my father died. I had cast off the moorings. I had tried and failed to live without love.

So I was a natural mark for a narcissistic gold digger. She zeroed in on me with unerring accuracy, like a shark senses the electric pulse of a living heart. She even thought it was love. And it really was the nearest thing she could understand as love. I can’t even hate her because there’s really no one there to hate.

Or maybe it’s more accurate, and more humble, to say that the immortal part of people like them is too small for the rest of us, even for themselves, to see or hear. Perhaps it is, like the Biblical poet’s tiniest grain of mustard seed, infinitesimal, lost and crying in the vast darkness of the human heart. The dear God help them. And God protect the rest of us.