Beginner's Mind - April 2nd, 2007
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Cathedrals
Cathedral Hypnosis
In The Secular Spirit, I have a section that talks about the fact that "the Mass is Prozac".
Now, the Mass is a Catholic ritual that a lot of people might not be able to relate to. But cathedrals are a landmark that everyone can relate to. (But cathedrals are simply the buildings they built to perform the Mass in.)
The thing to get about cathedrals is that they are an instrument for third-trimester regression. Everybody recognizes that cathedrals are hypnotic. Everybody also recognizes that they are some how "deep", "important" and "comforting". The conventional wisdom is that this is because they somehow put us in contact with "God". I don't think so. I think their function is much more this-worldly. They put us in contact with ourselves. They carry our consciousness back to a moment in time before we were born, when we were still in the womb, when we still had not been traumatized by the ordeal of birth itself, and then all the other pains and neglects that are visited on infants by the normal child-rearing practices of our culture.
But, this third-trimester regression is a trance-state. To get there, we need to be sedated. And this identifies the essential problem of "religion". The problem of religion is not its belief in God. The problem of religion is that it is a drug. It feels obligated to sedate in order to notice God. This highlights one of the cnetral functions of religion, which is to control. Religion feels it has to control experience, and control behavior, in order to save itself from pain, and this pain it wants to avoid is the residue of trauma imprints that are stamped on the psyche.
So, the whole discussion about "faith" that is going on today is wildly mis-placed. There is no problem of faith. We always need faith. It is the non-rational knowledge that grounds us in our full existential reality. There is a problem, however, of needing drugs, of needing the authoritarianism of control that religion is invested in.
What we need is freedom, and what we need is to be awake. When we are free and awake, we have the non-rational knowledge that gives "the peace that surpasses all understanding", and we don't kowtow to anybody, we don't have any belief-based enemies, and we are very creative in helping all those who need help.
That's why this present discussion of "faith" troubles me. It is a wild goose chase, a wrong trail, an obstacle to freedom and awakeness.
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