More about fear of "God" & the authentic life

A friend from college Mike told me once that laying awake in bed in the middle of the night trying to force ourselves back to sleep is actually leftover childhood psychosis.  Still subconsciously being reliant on the long-ago established inner-parent voice and our unquestioned compulsive adherance to the "right" way of behaving.  We should, in the event of mid-night sleeplessness and according to my buddy, get out of bed and eat ice cream instead.

Wise words.  And the idea has me pondering the continuation of my response to a different buddy of mine, this one's over at The Vent.  Garret's working out his troubles with organized religion right now, and that my friends is territory where I've spent an enormous amount of time wandering. 

I recently posted about the idea that human beings are afraid to be still with themselves (and thereby mostly unable to pull from their own essential power) because they are afraid of the programmed ideas lingering within that might arise.  I claim that often at first stillness opens up in the form of bad feelings or fear or anxiousness.  I went even further to claim that these anxieties are actually rooted in our programmed ideas, beliefs and essential fears about GOD.

So let's talk about Joe Campbell.  He's the one who tagged the phrase Follow Your Bliss.  He was a world renowned mythologist (and if you've never seen it, his PBS interview with Bill Moyers changed my life.) Myth is story, to keep it simple.  And in Campbell's words (from the book Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation)  "...I don't know what consciousness is.  But I do know what bliss is: that deep sense of being present, of doing what you absolutely must do to be yourself.  If you can hang on to that, you are on the edge of the transcendent already."  Thick with simply explained instruction--he suggests that we cant get to our bliss until we are willing to investigate the "given social order" to which most of mid-America gives her or his energies.  IE:

"He has a nervous breakdown--this is no joke; this is a phenomenon that the United States can document, millionfold: the man who thought he knew what he was working for.  He was working to go fishing.  Then he suddenly found that he was married, had kids, and had to work like hell, and everybody was sort of helping him get through this with the hope that someday he would retire and do the things he wanted to do...Or Mother; we all know Mother: she's given her life to us, she's given everything she has to us.  Then the kids go away so it's an empty house.  So it's an empty life, and on comes this fury to grab life again.  She goes crazy; she becomes what's known as mother-in law.  She's bringing up your kid, she's telling you when to shut the window, when to open it, how to fry eggs..."

Our solution?  To tackle the mommy-daddy-as-god element within our psyche.  And how to do this?  To brave the big, the scary, the outward beliefs of the "given social order."  The religion.  To recognize how we internalize religious judgement by never questioning the psychological programming we receive from our very first gods:  mom and dad.

Let's be clear now.  Campbell's not bashing religion, far from it; and nor is he demonizing mom and dad.  What he does instead is present a reasonable (okay powerful--as this was his life's work, his bliss) argument that actually all religions have at the core similar stories or myths, and it is those stories meant to be studied and applied to grow yourself as a unique human individual.  And that this is actually the true moral calling of man, to evolve himself.  To play the hero in his very own life.

Most religious instruction, if interpreted in a strict moral way, presents the idea that to be true to ourselves is wrong because it is selfish, godless, hedonistic even.  Mythic instruction (applying the moral of the stories on which religions the world-round is based) actually says yes, yes, why aren't we being true to ourselves?

I'll tell you myself: because meeting the devil--your internalized ideas and self-judgements about right and wrong and "being" good or bad--is hard, hard work.  Aint for the faint-hearted that's for sure.  This, to paraphrase Joe Campbell, or Socrates, is THE trouble with God.  The unexamined life.  Not examining it doesn't mean it wont come to get you, you know?  In fact, it's almost a guarantee that it will.

Dont let "God" be the excuse NOT to Follow your bliss.  Owning what you absolutely must do to be yourself is the most holy thing there is, and the only one who can do for you is you.