The God Child-Abandoned


		The God Child-Abandoned SYNOPSIS We are almost completely unaware of the evolution of psychic function. We believe that the people of ancient times were exactly like us, as if human nature, psychically, was born, like Paul Bunyan, in its present form, without any need for psychic leaps of understanding, perhaps most of which haven’t yet happened. The human psyche is our spirit. It doesn’t belong to God. It’s ours—who we are—a transcendental entity. It gifts us with the vision of a god, joining that god at the hip to a flighty, unpredictable and vulnerable heart—making a maddening marriage. We alone, abandoned by wisdom, must bring peace to these usually warring disparate parts of our nature. The term “spirit” refers to the psychic whole of a single human with all of its parts—thinking, feeling, intuition, imagination, etc. Spirit is that intangible, abstracted ethereal core of human nature that we know almost nothing about, which deeply intimidates us, and which we avoid owning as our true center. Its intangibility is the rub. Instead of occupying our spirituality, we cling fearfully to our physical nature to explain all things human, most specifically our psychic dysfunction—we say our problem is genetically biochemical. We study the “brain” as if doing so meant to study the human psyche. What’s more, we’d rather physically possess the mechanical power of a techno-hu-machine—the he-man of current Hollywood movies—than occupy our incorporeal, still largely undeveloped psychic identity, in spite of the fact that, at least potentially, it’s much more powerful. Excerpts from The God Child-Abandoned GOD—THE BIG PICTURE God—whatever we mean by that—defines our relationship with the universe. It’s our big-picture perspective. Everyone’s got one whether they think about it, want to have one, or even know it’s happening. To be human is to know-it-all in one way or another. Until very recently we’ve always insisted our relationship to the universe is a very personal one by making God, and in earlier times every part of nature a personality. Meanwhile science has discovered the enormous advantages of treating the universe as a thing that functions independent of personality, has its own rules, opportunities and limits available for our translation, adaptation and application. But this change has alienated us from nature, most particularly from our own. Technology—an imitation of some aspect of nature we’ve decoded—solves many of the terrifying realities of a God who, like all personalities is jealous and requires gratitude and obedience or He takes away what we need to survive. The monumental struggle within this transition from God as person to God as thing is still going on. This process happens because nature turned loose in the human animal talents that permit disobedience to some of the laws of the universe, which in all other species are pre-programmed as involuntary ‘instinctive’ processes. That idealized arrangement of unquestioning, instinct-motivated cooperation with the bearing forces of the universe is known in western civilization as the Garden of Eden. It is fondly remembered by a species now banished from that automatic, seemingly completely safe place by virtue of possessing extraordinary independent psychic talents that daily eat of the Tree of Knowledge. We can’t help ourselves. It’s how nature fashioned us, to be exceedingly curious and want to know-it-all. We’ve done three things with the amazing skills that are intrinsic to willful self-consciousness. One, we’ve tried desperately to give them back to someone—in our mythology to God or the gods, both in this world and the next. For most of human history it’s God or gods who have possessed the will and purpose we now at least partly give to ourselves. As a result we have regarded the next world, or tomorrow as far more desirable than present experience, leaving what often seems like the enormous injustice of this world to be handled later—which never seems to happen very much. The second thing we’ve done with willful self-consciousness is to give the power of a god to humans we choose to pretend are bigger than the rest of us—like our leaders, famous people or ‘the rich’. In many ways we entrust to them the care and control of our lives. Though more recently we’ve put checks and balances upon Him or them, though these restraints are utterly inadequate if we expect to call ourselves democratic. In spite of our claims that we occupy a thriving democracy, the power in present time of a moneyed aristocracy still dominates, rules and abuses much of our lives—mostly by putting a toll gate called ownership upon opportunity as if it permanently belonged to the people who got there first—thus almost entirely shutting down change. We already know that ownership is a primitive relationship to have with nature, and with each other. Look at the destruction of the world’s forests by those who lay claim to ownership. Remember slavery that’s still going on in some ways. And look at the homeless. What a scandal it is for so many of us to be utterly dispossessed of place because we can’t afford to buy property. Instead of encouraging stewardship of the land ownership does the opposite—‘I’ll do what I want with it’. But we still cling desperately to this familiar form of pretend-security, based upon the premise that we can fully possess something. Yet any shared arrangement of property or opportunity requires far better skills than we presently have in managing the competition and the conflict cooperation always generates. Though we usually prefer to deny that competition is necessary in spite of the fact that it’s nature’s principle strategy of change. The third thing we’ve done with these talents is to believe that what we think and feel about life is all that’s happening in it. In other words we’ve assumed a grandiose relationship with our self-understanding in relation to the bearing forces of the universe—that what we know now is everything there is to know. Hypothetically and rhetorically we know this isn’t true—that we don’t know everything. But pragmatically in the middle of experience we operate as if we do. This behavior suggests we are of two minds. We know the truth but we almost never deal with it at the most critical times. And yet ironically we must function in this grandiose way. What other choice do we have but to assume we know what’s going on in spite of evidence to the contrary—like scientific experiments that produce contradictory results. Any alternative perspective—that we don’t know most of what’s taking place in present time is terrifying! And it paralyzes the process of choice. So we largely ignore contradictions…except to complain, but almost never to change what’s obviously contradictory and therefore intrinsically inaccurate. So who are we? This strange self-conscious willful species occupying a planet full of unconscious instinct-driven life—who has been gifted with *the mind of a god, and cursed with the heart of a small child* that remains painfully *vulnerable* until death—very powerful and helplessly dependent. How do we live inside of that impossible contradictory arrangement? copyright© 2007, 2008 Don Fenn. All rights reserved.