God and the myth we created of the Parent (part 1)

part 1 of a three-part series.

You first learned about God through stories. These stories created in your mind an image of something called ‘God’. They probably depicted him as male, perhaps authoritarian, austere; you get the picture. This God could be unpredictably, was obsessed with rules, and seemed to have a neurosis around sexuality. He could be kind, or despotic, depending on his inclination. Either way it was probably wise to keep on the right side of him. You learned about this entity from the most important people in your life at the time, your parents (or whoever substituted for them). God is part of your first projections. God is part of your story of yourself.

We come into this world from the seed of man and the labour of woman. The parent is metaphor for creator. They protect the infant, watch over it. The child draws on that sense of security and builds it into her own sense of self. That is if she feels loved and needed. Not every child does. However, that sense of security, of being loved and needed is dependent on others, on something or someone outside the child. The physically helpless child now transfers power to that which he is wholly dependent on, and which he later, when he has acquired language, designates as ‘parent’, by which time a certain relationship with it has been fixed in his mind. A relationship that tends towards one of continuing helplessness. This can both serve and oppress the child, and later the adult. Helplessness itself, while unpleasant, can be a rewarding form of manipulation. As we go through life we learn to be helpless in an astonishing amount of ways.

A sense of helplessness often seeds the need to control. We think, ‘if only I can get control of this situation then I’ll be all right. I’ll be safe. I’ll be loved again.’ This is one of the earliest scripts we pick up, and which many of us carry with us throughout our lives. It is a script often difficult to undo because usually it is invisible. By invisible I mean we hide it from ourselves. Control is the supreme illusion. In fact, it is the illusion that creates the world.

People equate lack of control with being powerless. But the two are quite different. If you don’t believe me stop this minute and try controlling the bile from your gallbladder. You cannot (not without medical assistance anyway). Control is not power. Power is who we are at our core. It is what intimately connects us with God, not the image of that which we carry around in our head, created by stories, but with what that image represents. And in truth we are never without power, because we are never without God. When we feel we are powerless we are looking outside of ourselves. It is then we experience lack, not because of what is not there, but because of what we perceive is not there. Again, we will do another quick experiment to test this. Are you feeling a sense of lack in your life right now because, let’s say, you’re not the current Supreme Inca Ruler, successor to Quetzalcoatl, Lord of all Meso-america? And I know you’re not! No, but are you feeling any lack because you feel you haven’t the lifestyle your neighbour or someone you admire has? Their wealth, prestige, large house, the trappings? Get the idea?

Now the idea that we don’t have control is true, that we are without power is a lie.

This lack of control is reinforced as the child begins to grow, its movements are restricted for safety reasons, its behaviour modified for decency sake, its manners corrected and so on. The child quickly learns that if she does certain things she gets a particular result, while different actions procure a different one. Because we cannot overthrow these tyrants, (our parents), we manipulate instead. We learn the art of negotiation. Pleading, demanding, crying, being disruptive, acting cute, are only some of the weapons in our arsenal. Manipulation becomes a habit indelibly ingrained in our being, one which we spend the rest of our lives perfecting. True, we achieve some success in our endeavours, but these only encourage us to buy into the illusion.

And so, the idea of ‘parent’, kind but controlling, is born. And to this idea, in its various forms and disguises, along with its many names and designations, we continue to give our power.

So, how is this connected with God?

Well, as we’ve just seen, the idea of parent establishes in the child, after they’ve connected to it, a sense of belonging, of safety. Concomitant with which is a sense of duty, responsibility, ownership even. The word ‘belong’ can simultaneously contain these contradictory meanings, to shelter, and to own. I think it’s fair to say that as children we’ve all experienced this with our own parents. But the idea expands to include other things. The child has a relationship with his siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Soon another idea is born, this one we call ‘family’. In time, this too expands to integrate aspects of the world around it, into itself. It begets more ideas, which we various call neighbourhood, tribe, nation. And the child’s relationship to ‘parent’ now determines, in different ways, some tenuous, others tightly held, his relationship to these new ideas, new aspects. Each of which affords him more entitlements, while in return demands duty, payment, loyalty. In time these new ideas, and the agents which the ideas represent, assume quasi parental roles; employers, spouse, police, government. We play out our conflicts around control, dependency and power with all these agents. In fact, anyone you perceive of as having power, (and if you do so, in some way you’ve ‘given’ it to them), is potentially your parent.

This system is dualist in its nature. As well as parents, you also have ‘those who are not parents’, which is basically everyone else, although some people are assigned substitute parental roles, namely teachers. These deputise for your parents when you’re sent to school, and complete the story of God to you. Then there is ‘family’ and ‘not family’, those people why live in your neighbourhood, and those outside of it; tribe and other, and so on. When we create ‘same’ we are creating an identity with a particular group, which we often refer to as ‘us’. This automatically creates its polar opposite, which we call ‘other’ or ‘them’. There is never an exception to this. Now ‘other’ designates that which is not part of the group, that which is outside, which is different. Inchoate in it is the more extreme idea of ‘enemy’. And, containing as it does the potential to destroy family, tribe, and even parent, the system depends as much on ‘other’ as it does on ‘same’. In fact they are two sides of the one coin.

Now the adult is willing to lay down his life for his comrade, country or whatever cause he believes in, should he perceive it to be under threat. Causes, or movements we are passionate about, are also part of this fabric. They too demand our service, our loyalty, and our life energy. They too can become substitute parents. And the idea that we call ‘religion’ is probably the single cause that has most often replaced that role. This is not to say the idea ‘religion’ is wrong, that would be the same as saying the idea ‘parent’ is wrong. But religion is emotive. It creates groups and internal cadres to protect its special interests. It is something that people, down through the ages, were willing to fight, die, and even kill for. In its true form religion can be a way where we, unconsciously, become helpless, because for many it is their first encounter with the great ‘parent’, God himself.

The picture of God that emerges in the story about yourself, is also the picture of the parent. It is at best that of a benign tyrant, at worst a despot, a thing to be feared and shunned, but to be worshipped at the same time. We transfer the learned characteristics of mortal parent to super parent, and with it our behavioural attitudes. We feign love for that which we fear. We learn to lie, be deceitful. We must become very cunning, least this sleeping ogre awakens and devours us whole. We need to hide it, or hide from it. We do this by going ‘unconscious’ around it.

The collective mind, which is only your own multiplied many millions of times, also confuses control with power. It describes God as omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. It sees God’s power as world power, writ large, which is really another version of control. The world cannot overthrow God, although secretly it wants to, so it turns to worship it/him.

So it would appear that God is merely a parental substitute, an argument put forward by others, created from personal experience, and used thereafter as a weapon by society to control us. But this is not so either. Indeed such a conclusion is simplistic and misses the point entirely.

The belief in a higher power that created us, and rules over us, goes back as long as humans have existed. Also, it would appear that it was always, in some way connected with this idea of parent we’ve been discussing. Naturally, of course, the form it took could be as diverse and varied as were the innumerable clans and tribes scattered across the globe, who expressed it. We know from wall murals and ancient burial sites, which predate written language, this to be the case. Also, it would appear, in olden times people channelled this believe into a kind of supreme reverence for the earth itself. This is not to say that the earth was a ‘god’ in the way we might be familiar with the term today. However, in those early times people seemed to have a deep intimate bond, or ‘belonging’ to the earth, a sense of knowing that everything came from it, and that at some level everything was connected, even sacred. (see J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, Macmillan press, 1922). There is an abundance of evidence that ancient cultures experienced the earth as a form of parent. Further, they expressed this in the feminine, and called their parent ‘Mother Earth’.

To these first people the earth produced a dazzling array of fruit and other good things to eat, which meant it provided life. Its lush green meadows presented ample room to rest, its flowing streams cool refreshing drink. Animals roamed the surface, and great winged birds soared through the air. In the cool shade, and when darkness blotted out the sunlight, fire provided heat and warmth. This created the occasion to cook hot meals and delicious broth, as well as making it conducive for people to gather in groups, thus instigating social discourse, the meeting of minds, forming of new ideas. In those days people understood the spirit and body as one integrated system, indeed they walked and talked with higher beings, and so would not have been frightened by the return of the outer frame, tired and complete, to the great mother. Everything came from the earth and returned to her too, gracefully, in time. This all exclusiveness extended to the sun and stars and the galaxies. The moon became sister to the earth, lighting up her shaded bowers when the sun rested. The constellations were great lights, distant but near, that charted the lives of individuals, as well as epochs. And the sun, a masculine counter to mother earth, penetrated her with rays of heat and energy, seeding new life in her, which in due course, and with the passing of seasons, brought forth issue. And so to the collective consciousness the sun and earth became symbolic of the creative male and female principle, creating life just as a man and woman did. In short, they became prototypes of the original ‘parent’.

The ancients speak of this as a series of ages, beginning with the Golden Age, followed by Silver, then Bronze, and lastly Iron, which roughly equates with our present time. In the Golden Age it is said people walked and talked with the Gods and lived in peace with each other. But as the ages slowly melted into each other, life changed, a deterioration set in. Struggle and hardship became commonplace, war and disease less rare. A mark of the decline was a need for people to invent gods that better reflected their current anger pattern. The new war gods were sometimes referred to as ‘sky gods’, denoting a sense of separation between the energies of earth and the heavens, redolent perhaps of a power struggle between the sexes. Perhaps it was a time when new family and tribal structures were being laid down. But, in truth, it denotes a struggle within the self. This change may have come about with the end of the hunter gather age, when farming began and people started becoming more domesticated, living together in large groups. People started harnessing animals and tilling the land in order to produce specific crops at a certain time. And here an element of control, of regulation, of wanting to make nature act and respond the way we want it to crept in.

There were great shamans and wise people who walked the earth in those early days with the power to commune with higher life energies (indeed there are such people even today). But, gradually a change came about. People stopped listening to these wise ones, and fell to worshipping the outer expression, or form, of what nature stood for. Once they had true vision, but as people made more and more projections of false and fear-based images, they began to see these instead. They started to see the earth with different eyes, and that which was erstwhile benevolent became menacing and treacherous.

For just as nature gives life, food and shelter, it can also be seen to take these things away. Prolonged winters cause hardship, which we may choose to see as struggle. Wind wreaks havoc, rain causes flood and devastation. Viewed through the prism of fear, that life is unfair, people saw lack, and then crops failed. Even the sun, the great giver of life, could seem oppressive, its heat murderous. Can you imagine the terrors endured by early man when he first encountered thunder raging behind the heavy dark clouds, and first witnessed the angry spit of lightening cutting the firmament? Phantoms were created that would populate a thousand fairy tales, and a plethora of bad movies generations later. Hence was the prototype of Jove, or Zeus the Thunderer forged.

And so people began to placate the power of nature, that destructive power they now saw. They did what people still do today, they made sacrifice. They tried to cajole and manipulate. Reverence had turned to worship, and worship to fear. The human race had projected aspects of itself, both noble and ignoble, onto these energies, gave them names, personalities, mythic stories. Now it seemed they were turning against them.

And all these memories are imbedded in the memory bank of the infant. Terror is in the darkness when it wakens at night. Heat or strong light can trigger primordial fears, real or imagined. Guilt darkens the mind, fears are transferred to others, and with those fears a lot of its own power is also misplaced. It spends the rest of its life trying to get it back, mistakenly thinking it can do this by control, that control is indeed the issue. And also mistakenly believing that it is without power.

In part 2 of “God and the myth we created of the parent” we further explore the relationship between the idea of parent and the idea of God, and how it impacted on Christianity and modern ways of seeing God.See you here next week.