In a previous post: God, a Useful Definition, I closed with another quote from C.G. Jung: “Religion is a defense against the experience of God.”
God, a Useful Definition, page 2 is about our experience, pure and simple.
It is obvious in the world today how “Religion is a defense against the experience of God”. It is not only a defense but a literal attack on others, all in the name of God. It is not necessary to expand on this, but I would like to look into a more subtle manifestation of this problem that might be useful to us in our personal lives.
Because the Judeo-Christian religions have been dominant in the West for over 2000 years, we can consider that these attitudes are in the drinking water. Even if we have never stepped foot in a church, the effects will operate in a very unconscious way.
Righteous religious attitudes can operate as a sort of secret religion within ourselves. But, they are actually a defense against our peacefulness, meaning, genuine connection with others, and clarity of perceiving life as it is.
I have seen so many marriages either dissolve or live in misery because someone always leaves the sponge in the sink, doesn’t budget money, wants more/less sex, and spends too much or too little time with the kids. Each person has their own sacred right and wrong. The more rigid/religious we get about our right/wrong, the less openness we have with our own and others’ differences in feelings, sensitivities, histories, and attitudes of various complexity.
Such as, “I realized when I always want you to put the sponge away, it is initially because it is cleaner and more sanitary to me. I got stuck there in my religious beliefs about cleanliness and that “good people finish the job correctly” but that was just “my correctly”, and “my cleanliness”, and my “good people” commandments. It is really covering up a feeling of uncertainty for me. I feel anxious and confused a lot. I am sometimes baffled how to have a good relationship, I am baffled how to be happy, and I have no idea what a “good person is and I definitely feel like I am not one of them”. Consequently, I take my frustration out in anger towards you and the fucking sponge.”
This secret religion would come in the form of how we carry rigid beliefs based in fear and shame about “ how I should be” and “how you should be” and the way “life is”. These secret beliefs fuel our behavior and attitudes about ourselves and others unconsciously, many times without us even knowing it. When we become aware of these attitudes we have a chance for release. In the same way someone realizes their disillusionment with a particular religious belief, we wake up and no longer need it.
For example, we can find this rigidity in ourselves as an emotional attack on our self or an attack on another because I or you do not fit an ideal image of who we “should be”. We have gotten religious about what is right and wrong. Where ever one feels excessively angry, guilty or shameful is the place where this secret religion operates.
I daily hear my patients describe these secret beliefs of how they “should be” or “how their wife or husband or child or parent should be”. We can be trapped in puritanical attitudes that have been handed down through the ages. How many arguments with loved ones are over who’s way is right? But in actuality each person has their own point of view.
Therefore, different points of view in a marriage or family could be discussed as just that, different points of view that have equality, instead of a religious war over whose way is right or most sacred.
This devotion to an ideal way can be made conscious. Name it, say it out loud, and even confess it to a friend. “When I feel vulnerable, I make that vulnerable feeling wrong and judge it as weak but in fact it is simply my humanity.” Then practice tenderness toward that vulnerability and consider its value as sensitivity.
This does not mean religion and spiritual ideas have no purpose, but more about how we relate to the religion and spiritual teachings. Holding onto beliefs to give us a sense of false goodness or clinging to one-sided ideas so we do not have to actually feel our helplessness is defending against the truth of experience.
As the Dalai Lama said, “Love is the absence of judgement”.
