“In light of Jung’s understanding of the psyche, any claim to exhaustive possession of a saving truth constricts personal development and is currently a, if not the, major threat to human survival.” (Dourley, A Strategy for a Loss of Faith, p. 63)
Today’s photo was taken close to our village on the Canadian prairie. It is an idyllic scene that belies the fact of a planet in trouble. In a way, the photo can be seen as a fact and a proof that the planet is not really in trouble at all. Yet, what the photo doesn’t show is the odour of foul waste that is being contained in this water, the village sewage lagoon. That said, it is too easy for us as humans to be misdirected away from what the “self” being fully present would discover.
The danger is in accepting anything as truth, as the truth. I was spending a few days with my brother who is often a reader here. He works in law enforcement, a place where there is an established right and wrong, a world of black and white. Of course since he has been working in this field for a long time and is nearing retirement, he has discovered that there are rare instances of black and white. In spite of what is said and written by the organization reality tells both him and the administration that truth is relative.
We all learn this as we experience life. However, in spite of what we experience and what we intuitively know, we have a hard time when it comes to “religion.” We are only too willing to deny “self” and accept a scripted black and white vision of both world and soul. We are taught that doubt is merely blackness oozing into the soul rendering the soul in jeopardy. Only blind acceptance without question to the “WORD” is acceptable. We follow this WORD and its priesthood into all manner of dark corners, doing all manner of dark deeds while at the same time being wracked with guilt for what we do and say as it contradicts the screams of our inner self and the agonies suffered by our soul. The guilt is forced back by renewed efforts to be pure. We inflict our own penances by becoming zealots, by marching in the vanguard to chase the heresies of competing WORDS which we are led to believe are really faces of evil. We deny and deny, even while our actions provide evidence to our senses of the wrongness. We send armies, join these very armies in order to wage war against the faces of evil.
And we embrace the mantra, “The truth and nothing but the truth.”