 119. Parental Diety |
Atheism is the ultimate form of denial of the Parental “God”. Atheism is not founded on real observation of the ultimate facts of the universe. Rather, it is a kind of adolescent development of the human species. What characterizes the doctrine (or dogma) of atheism is not a discovery that there is no “God”, but a refusal to acknowledge every kind of parent (or parent-like authority), including (therefore) the Parental “God” of childish “religion”.
If conventional “religion” amounts to an actual “experience” (rather than just a kind of conventionally acquired state of mind), it could basically be defined as a very primitive sense that invades all of your life, but that relates to you most specifically in your solitariness, your private individuality. It is the sense that, when you are alone—and you are, in the sense that you have a private destiny, always alone—there is do, and represents a “Parental Will” relative to what you do. That One wants you to do certain things, wants you not to do other things, and will presumably reward you if you do the things that It wants you to do and will punish you in various ways if you do not do those things. Out of this kind of “Parent-God”-ism come all the other traditions associated with the notions of “sin”, or the valuation of events not merely factually but in terms of the Parental Deity. In other words, if something negative happens to you, it is generally regarded as a Divinely given punishment or a result of what you have done in terms of your social personality and your conventional moral activity. If good things happen to you, they are presumed to be gifts or rewards from the same Source.
Examine the “point of view” of conventional “downtown” (or popular) “religion”. You will see that it corresponds to this structure of notions, and is (therefore) primarily a development of a child’s state of awareness. It is a development of the original parent-bond of your childhood, and it is complicated by the dissociative individuation that develops in adolescence, and that tends to characterize your adulthood as well.
The Acausal Divine, or Real (Acausal) God, the One to be Realized, is not other than Reality Itself. That One Transcends your personal, conditional existence—but your conditional existence arises in That One. All of this conditionally arising “world” is a modification of That One, a “play” upon That One. To Realize That One, you must enter profoundly into the Intrinsically egoless Self-Position—but not by means of the traditional “method” of introversion, or turning attention “inward”. That “inward”-turning effort is simply one of the ego-based solutions to the presumed “problem” of existence. That Which must be Realized is in the Perfectly Subjective Self-Position—and It is Realized not by appeal to Something “outside” yourself nor by entering into childish dependence in relation to some great Principle, but by transcending your own separative (and “self”-contracting) activity, and Realizing Most Perfect Identification with That in Which you "always" and "already" inhere.
All of the public “religious” chitchat, the seemingly endless “worldly” conversation, about whether “God” exists or not, is simply a continuation of the doubting and “subjective” mulling-over of “problem”- consciousness that is part of the adolescence of humankind. Always wondering about whether “God” exists is simply an adult occupation of basically adolescent personalities whose notions of “God” were formed by the childhood situation of dependence. Thus, wondering about whether “God” exists is basically an effort to prove the existence of the “God” you believed in as a child. Nevertheless, the “God” you believed in as a child does not exist—not as It was then described to you, nor as you then believed. What you are told (in childhood) about “God” is communicated in terms that your parents hope will satisfy your needs as a child.
In other words, parents develop your “God consciousness” (or your “religious” orientation) when you are a child as an extension of what they themselves are otherwise trying to do as parents. Parents naturally want their children to feel protected. They do not want their children to become neurotic and to feel threatened. And they want their children to learn how to behave as expected. They want their children to develop socializing tendencies, to learn how to relate to others positively and to function socially, how to survive socially and in ordinary human terms. This is what parents want you to do—and, in some ordinary sense, it is natural enough for them to want you to do this. Thus, when parents teach “religion” to their children, they teach them (as a general rule) about a “God” who is basically a poetic extension of themselves as parents.
