The Bible can be more profoundly understood in the context of P-A than in P-B. From the perspective of Simple Reality it becomes a deeply meaningful and revealing document and a work of beauty. The mystic Thomas Troward was able to demonstrate just that in assessing the meaning of Jesus’ teaching. “The teaching of Jesus, whether by word or deed, may, therefore, be summed up as follows. He says in effect to each of us: What you really are in essence is a concentration of the ONE Universal Life-Spirit into conscious Individuality—if you live from the recognition of this Truth as your starting-point, it makes you Free.”[i]
In a brief article such as this we can only give a few examples to illustrate the deeper meaning contained in the Judeo-Christian narrative.
The first caveat in approaching the Bible is that its authenticity has to be questioned, in the sense that some of the original meaning has been lost in translation and to deliberate distortions for political purposes. Bruno Bettelheim notes that: “St. Jerome remarked about some translations of the Bible that they are not versions but, rather, perversions of the original.”[ii] The Bible is a P-B document, born in and used within a narrative controlled by the false self to meet the basic needs that we know to be ultimately self-destructive. Nevertheless, as we will illustrate, there is much that can be learned that can enhance our experience of P-A. Just remember, the Bible was created by unconscious people, just like most of us, who rarely if ever lived in the present moment.
Secondly, the contradictions within the Bible give the lie to scripture as divinely inspired and make it impossible to be taken literally because how is one to know which of the opposing instructions is correct? “In his Epistle to the Romans (III, 20-28) Paul taught that man can be saved only by faith, not by works; the Epistle of the Apostle James (II, 24) taught precisely the opposite; which was God’s view and Word? Spinoza answers an obvious question: ‘In what sense, then, is the Bible the Word of God? Only in this: that it contains a moral code that can form men to virtue.’”[iii]
It is interesting to examine concepts in the Bible in light of psychology. Take “hell” for example. Edward Edinger, a Jungian psychologist, begins with a definition of hell. “In many religions the ‘judgment of the soul’ is projected into the afterlife and conceived as a post-mortem experience, in which the individual is finally subject to total scrutiny and is made the object of comprehensive knowledge of God. Depending on the outcome of this trial he will either be acquitted and sent to paradise or condemned and sentenced to hell.”[iv] Few of us take hell to be an actual “place” so let’s examine what is a more sophisticated understanding when revealed by a modern psychological interpretation.
We know that there is no future time/space but only the present moment and Edinger agrees, at least in part, with our P-A worldview. “The image of the ‘Last Judgment’ can be understood psychologically as a projection into the afterlife of the ego’s encounter with the Self and the archetypal experience of being the known object of a transpersonal subject; it is an awesome experience, as the myths make clear, an experience that man has understandably tried to postpone as long as possible by transferring it to the afterlife.”[v]
We see the problem when we combine two P-B institutions, religion and psychology. The confusion is compounded. That which is simple is made complicated. That which is easy is made difficult or terrifying. That which can be accomplished immediately is postponed indefinitely or conceived as a task which will take many years, decades or in some religions even lifetimes. The false self whether using religion or psychology likes to conveniently ignore one of the most basic teachings of Jesus, namely that the kingdom of Heaven (the present moment) is here and now. In the language of religion, P-A does not have to be earned (works), it is ever-present or freely given (grace). There is nothing to do—just accept.
One of the most profound stories in the Bible is that contained in the Book of Job. Our tongue-in-cheek introduction to the remainder of this article is not meant to offend but to remind us all that we take life in P-B too seriously. We would encourage you to read the Book of Job in the Old Testament before or after reading this part of the article. However, do not read this article at all if you interpret the Bible literally. Your experience will be way worse than a bad hair day. If you are still contained in the P-B narrative, you are already suffering enough. Proceed at your own risk—the truth can be painful.
For those of us who have shifted to P-A, and abandoned the sinking ship, HMS Global Titanic (P-B), we realize that an anthropomorphic “God” is a projection of the human ego or false self. Hence, the true meaning of any dialogue that occurs among characters in the Judeo-Christian myth can only be profoundly understood metaphorically. Unfortunately, that rich meaning which would help us understand answers to how to live a sustainable life on our planet today has been lost due to ignorance and or usurped for political purposes within the institutions of organized religion. Notice how simple it is to revivify and make relevant this story of Job that is considered one of the most powerful in all of sacred literature.
The Old Testament god in our story of Job is a primitive tribal god because he is a projection of a primitive Semitic, nomadic desert tribe (the Hebrews). God’s idea of justice is brutal and unforgiving just like the natural environment that challenges the very survival of these people who are faced everyday with trying to find a survival strategy that works.
No fundamental change has occurred in the human condition since the Book of Job was written. For all of us, there is a basic psychological need to answer the First Great Question, namely: Where Am I? Another form of that question is: What is the nature of reality? The classic “sub-question” within the larger question is: Why do bad things happen to good people? In P-B the age-old answer to that question within religious paradigms is some form of force opposing god, our old friend and adversary, Satan. We say friend because he plays a key role in our choice not to accept responsibility for our behavior and lets us off the hook as in: “The Devil made me do it.” In P-B one of the most pervasive identities among people is that of the “victim.” With Job both God and the Devil play the role of “victimizers.”
Now, let’s enter the fascinating story where God and the Devil conspire to amuse themselves at the expense of a human being and we have a myth wherein the two superhuman characters, not surprisingly, resemble the personalities of the Greek gods and goddesses with their propensity to interfere in the affairs of ordinary human beings. The Greek goddess Nemesis, for example, inflicted retribution or justice on humanity and was a source of injury or destruction for those unlucky enough to attract her attention. In the story of Job, God plays just such a role in his wager with the Devil. We will not go into the specific “trials” of Job since they are well known. We want to focus on the deeper meaning of the over-all story revealed in the context of P-A.
Following each of the horrific “tests,” Job remains faithful to his God and does not react. In other words, Job manages to stay in the present moment, fully cognizant of the nature of reality. He intuitively knows that reacting or resisting will only create more suffering and that accepting “what is” is the only truly conscious thing to do. Job has transcended the illusion of P-B, which is more than we can say for God and the Devil. Are we saying that Job has an awareness superior to that of God and the Devil? Isn’t it obvious? What other purpose could the storyteller have had in creating the Job myth?
The Book of Job is demonstrating the superiority of the emerging “chosen people.” Job is the prototypical “new” Hebrew that will enter the land of milk and honey and settle down to life with a non-nomadic higher standard of living. This is how they can justify violently taking land away from the morally inferior other (think Palestinians). Don’t get self-righteous you non-Jews, we all do it in some form or another today.
Let’s return to the conclusion of our story. The Old Testament god will not do for such a superior and favored tribe, so God must be reshaped into the new and improved God that will eventually fully emerge in the New Testament. Job with his remarkably higher consciousness is reflecting to God his own truer nature and thus helps God awaken to a higher reality and thus a more compassionate identity. Job “teaches” god how to be God. Now God will eventually grow into the deity that can love unconditionally and stop reacting to those vexing human beings who do not do what they are told to do.
Job has foreshadowed the coming of the Christ by embodying the higher consciousness that we all seek today. Job understands the distinction between reaction and response that is the timeless essence of the shift from P-B to P-A. He demonstrates the means by which we can end human suffering which we describe in “The Point of Power Practice” article in this encyclopedia. The Book of Job was meant to teach humanity then, and it can still do so today, how to create a sustainable future. Are we listening?
You have read our take on the Book of Job which we can now compare to Edward Edinger’s “psychological” interpretation. “The Book of Job can be considered as the pivot of the Old Testament. Here for the first time Yahweh engages a man as an individual rather than as the representative of Israel, the collective nation. This book thus marks the transition from collective psychology to individual psychology, from the election of a people to the election of an individual who must now encounter the numinosum [mysterium tremendum] on his own without the supporting containment of identification with a nation or a creed.”[vi]
The numinosum Edinger speaks of is the present moment which cannot be understood from the perspective of P-B and therefore, when considered at all, is viewed as mysterious and beyond comprehension. The reaction to this encounter is, of course, one of fear. Ironically, we fear that which can offer freedom from fear and suffering. Such is the madness of the P-B narrative. Like Job, we must as individuals choose to leave the unsustainable story of P-B and assume the responsibility of applying The Point of Power Practice and assume the new identity as one who responds rather than reacts.
All human institutions originated in P-B and have operated in service to the false self. Specifically, they are often driven by the intellect, a tool of the false self, and as such are unnecessarily elaborate and complex. Our mind can become fascinated by this type of content but gets lost as if in a maze and cannot find the profound (and simple) meaning. The following quote in which Edinger further explores the meaning of the Book of Job illustrates our point. “As previously mentioned, Job is the pivotal book of the Old Testament. Considered psychologically, the Old Testament as a whole represents a vast individuation process unfolding in the collective psyche. Its pivotal crisis is Job and its culmination is the mandala vision of Ezekiel. This vision is really a foundation-image of the Western psyche. The Ezekiel vision is a mandala, the type of symbolic image that marks the peak [present moment] experience of the individuation process as it is observed in psychotherapy. We can thus consider this vision to have the same meaning in the collective individuation process of which the Old Testament, psychologically understood, and the starting point for later Jewish mysticism as well as much Cabalistic speculation.”[vii]
Great stuff for finding some comfort or entertainment in the realm of the relative but actually a barrier in attaining that insight into the distinction between paradigms B and A that will free an individual from the ultimate cause of existential anxiety.
Edinger gives a brilliant psychological interpretation of the significance of the Book of Job. “Yahweh suffered a moral defeat in his encounter with Job and the unnoticed result was that man was elevated above Yahweh. This required Yahweh to ‘catch up’ with man. God must now become man. He must incarnate. Thus henceforth, the term Son of God will be synonymous with the term Son of Man since God has become man. Mankind is now caught up in the process of divine transformation. God has fallen into man and man has become a participant in the divine drama. This fact remained on the symbolic projected level as long as the process was confined to one man (Christ) who was worshipped as divine. But now, with the psychological understanding of this imagery, the experience becomes available potentially to all individuals.”[viii] “Divine transformation,” the ultimate attainment possible for a human being, is simply becoming present. In so doing we attain “Christ consciousness” and exhibit the compassionate behavior that is the essence of the Gospel “love thy neighbor as thyself.” In P-A thy neighbor is thyself. There is no other.
To show that Job is a universal archetype we can find his counterpart in the religious scriptures of the East. “Ezekiel’s visions [Ezekiel 1:26] are of an archetypal nature” says Carl Jung. “They are a symptom of the split which already existed at that time between conscious and unconscious [between paradigms B and A]. Here Ezekiel has seen the essential content of the unconscious, namely the idea of the higher man by whom Yahweh was morally defeated (Job) and who he was later to become (Jesus). In India, a more or less simultaneous symptom of the same tendency was Gautama the Buddha (b. 562 BC), who gave the maximum differentiation of consciousness supremacy even over the highest Brahman gods.”[ix]
What did Buddha teach? He taught The Four Noble Truths. We will rephrase The Four Noble Truths in the context of Simple Reality P-B and P-A:
- The First Noble Truth is that life in P-B is characterized by suffering (the failure to be present).
- The Second Noble Truth is that this suffering is caused by pursuing security, sensation and power or the construction and maintenance of our personal survival strategy in P-B.
- The Third Noble Truth is that there is a way out of suffering (the shift from P-B to P-A).
- The Fourth Noble Truth sets forth the precepts (The Eightfold Path) that will lead to liberation from suffering. Here Buddha makes the classic mistake of all religions in using fear to “compel” behavioral change.
We would replace The Eightfold Path and the Ten Commandments with The Point of Power Practice which actually does change human behavior and transform the experience of and the relationship that we have with suffering.
Leaving Job we turn to our last example found in the Bible, the parable of the prodigal son. A conventional interpretation of the return of the prodigal son is that it enables the father to demonstrate his capacity for forgiveness. Carl Jung expanded on this interpretation in the book, Jung and the Story of our Time by Laurens Van der Post. He says: “The money he receives from the father is an image of the talents he has been given by life and the story tells him that far from hoarding these talents, which the New Testament has already warned no one must bury, far from being thrifty about them as the brother left at home is, it is the duty of the young to spend them utterly—in other words, to use his talents until they consciously seem worn out and he is enabled to see at last how impoverished his collective self is, how inadequate and provisional the world and the social realizations demanded by it.”[x]
Now we will move the story into the context of P-A.
The prodigal son cannot be in the present moment as long as he is under the influence of the collective unconscious (his collective self or P-B). The “world” (P-B), in which he has pursued security, sensation and power, and all of the dysfunctional and self destructive “social realizations demanded by it,” is unsatisfying. So he returns home from P-B to P-A. The father, an example of someone who lives in the present moment, exhibits compassion (forgiveness). This is the only response possible for a person who has transcended the illusionary context of P-B which would have elicited reactions such as judgment, resentment or punishment.
This brief excursion into the content of the Bible is simply to give examples representative of all sacred literature. No source written in and interpreted within a P-B narrative will be profound. No religion or theology can reveal Simple Reality. We must leave behind all self-destructive emotions, beliefs, attitudes and values if we are to create a sustainable human community and transcend human suffering. Then we can return to those scriptures and understand them at a deeper level.
[i] Troward, Thomas. Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning. New York: Dodd, 1913, p. 250.
[ii] Bettelheim, Bruno. Freud and Man’s Soul. New York: Random House, 1982, p. 103.
[iii] Durant, Will and Ariel Durant. The Age of Louis XIV. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963, p. 627.
[iv] Edinger, Edward. The Creation of Consciousness: Jung’s Myth for Modern Man. Toronto, Canada: Inner City Books, 1984, p. 46.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Ibid., p. 68.
[vii] Ibid., pp. 70-71.
[viii] Ibid., pp. 73-75.
[ix] Van der Post, Laurens. Jung and the Story of our Time. New York: Random House, 1975, pp. 590-591.
[x] Jung, C. G. The Portable Jung. New York: Penguin Books, 1971, p. 187.
