The Great Controversy: The Struggle in Consciousness Between the Psyche and his Community (Revised Edition)

By Perry Tkachuk

The Self is fundamentally misunderstood. For millennia, Religions have targeted the Self as man’s sinful evil nature, citing Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience as being the origin of humanity becoming mortal.
But, it is this mortality that taught man to value life by overcoming death with every breath of air and every bite of food, and as a result, and over many millennia of time, forming consciousness, morality and Self—making creationism and the assumptions built on it throughout Biblical times and beyond, diabolically contrary to reality.
This book attempts to put the pieces of Self together through the perspectives gained from an understanding of our split brain, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, philosophy, linguistics—and especially how language and culture are formed. Tkachuk toggles these findings with his own experience of being born and raised in the Seventh-day Adventist faith and becoming an ordained minister of the faith. But then tragedy struck his life—and it was significant enough to force him to reevaluate the assumptions his life was built on, which ultimately meant leaving the church and the Christian faith. This is his story.
Christianity confuses being mortal with being immoral (sinful). It teaches that since man sinned, he became mortal and immoral, and in need of a supernatural rebirth to regain immortality which then solves his immoral sinfulness. Tkachuk was caught in this delusion—and this is his story of untangling himself and forming an authentic Self.
Morality doesn’t come from being immortal, and real guilt is not from being born. Mortality didn’t come from disobedience, and is not experienced as guilt. Death is not the wage of sin—and is not our enemy, but it is an essential function of a biosphere that support systems of life bigger than man. This makes the mortality of man a perspective from man’s point of view, for if man’s cells (his parts) were not constantly dying, man could not live (as whole).
Had Eve not eaten the fruit, we all would have been stuck in a paradise of not being able to take control of our own lives and destinies, but be constantly controlled by the whims of a God—really religion—that tells us that there is a devil behind every tree it wants to control us by. Make no mistake about it ...
If Self exists, God cannot.
If God exists, Self cannot.
The existence of one negates the
other, for they are a competing design.
This means the more of the one, the less
of the other there can be.
Do your “Self” a favor—read this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Perry Tkachuk
• Release date: Aug 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370605446

Perry Tkachuk

Perry Tkachuk is a 4th generation Seventh-day Adventist and grew up with the expectation of becoming a minister to help prepare the world for the second coming of Christ. But Tkachuk had niggles of misalignment about the internal unity of the teachings of the Bible since he was 10 years old. He went through the Seminary hoping to solve these niggles--but alas, Tkachuk studied himself out of the church and Christianity, in favor of a life built on his new found philosophy of morality, Self and the development of human consciousness. Tkachuk's career has been focused on international education, where he has worked in 17 countries producing recruitment systems for US universities, distance education degree programs, transfer programs, articulation agreements between universities and schools, and the design of online courses. Tkachuk has assisted thousands of students to become international students and scholars and has sold millions of online courses in multiple countries, mostly in Asia. Tkachuk's exposure to dozens of cultures has helped him realize the fundamental socialization that language creates, which in turn forms culture, society and ethnicity--which forms the perceptions for what we see inside consciousness. Without an authorized Self, there cannot be successful negotiations between people and cultures so that they can see what the other sees and appreciate the differentness so that it builds diversity into strength instead of barriers that divide. His experience is illustrative of what change happens inside the psyche when Self takes back its authority from the external sociological Selfs (our groups and religions) we are socialized within.

Book preview

Disclaimer

Though my journey out of Adventism and Christianity was painful and guilt ridden, we all journey out of somewhere to somewhere else. Within Adventism, I met many beautiful people. In a book on consciousness versus mythology, I am not here to claim that Adventists or Christians cannot be authentically conscious, for I have met loving moral giants in Adventism with whom I am pleased to be included within their circle of friends. While in the Seminary, I often thought that if Jesus had a modern face, it would be missiologist Dr. Gottfried Oosterwal, or my New Testament professor, Dr. William G. Johnsson, or my Professor of Greek Exegesis at Newbold College, Dr. M. E. Brinkman.

This said, my story will present the difficulties with evaluating the effects on consciousness religions like Adventism have, which will always be associated with the leaders that carried the authority of the larger group. The people’s names that I will mention in this writing were not people whom I am here to judge, merely to reflect how I perceived they influenced my journey and the church. If I have in any way cast a negative reflection on their person, work or reputation that is untrue or unjust, it is unintended. I merely express their impact on my life.

I wrote this book during the American presidential election cycle ending on November 8, 2016. Many of the pressures driving the extreme emotions and opinions taking place in that campaign are explained in this book. I finished revising it by July, 2017.

However, since one of the Republican Presidential Candidates was a Seventh-day Adventist, it is paramount that the general public be fully aware that the main tenets of Adventism are shaped by their obsession that we are living in the Time of Trouble that ushers in the Second Coming of Christ where Adventists are the Sealed Remnant that stand up to the persecution led by ALL Protestantism who will form an alliance with Catholicism ushering in an obey or die Sunday law that ends up persecuting Adventists, taking away their constitutional rights to freely worship. This is not a minor side-issue of Adventism, it is its raison d'être. The visions of Ellen G. White are the basis of this belief. She is believed to have the Gift of Prophecy for this end-time church, as stated in Adventism’s Fundamental Belief #18. Since Adventism has never disavowed White, and since accepting her visions is a Fundamental Belief, it means no one can be baptized into the Church without publicly acknowledging belief in Ellen White’s visions.

You cannot be brought up in the midst of such attitudes and not be affected and infected by them. Now, how much is the candidate a true, loyal Seventh-day Adventist? For those concerned or wishing to be informed, my book is a must read.

Since I develop a new paradigm of consciousness, it requires redefining or reassigning meaning to words and phrases. So throughout the book, I have been intentionally redundant to help build the meaning and impact of this new paradigm—for it will inevitably conflict with any status quo. I hope it is not distracting but helpful.

Dedication

I dedicate this book to my sister, Gloria Crites and my brother-in-law, Darrell Crites who both lost their lives in 1986 in a private plane crash. They were soulmates. Their deaths jolted me out of my religious complacency and started me on the road to asking bigger and better questions. This started my quest of cognitive disequilibrium. It is fitting I completed this manuscript on what would have been her 66th birthday and finished revising it on her 67th birthday. She and Darrell are profoundly missed.

I also dedicate this book to my oldest son Justin Tkachuk, whom I dearly love and respect. He is a dedicated Christian. He can fathom why I left Seventh-day Adventism, but he cannot fathom why I left Christ. And it is to clarify why I left and cannot return that I write this book. I discovered what was always in plain sight: the authority and responsibility of my Self. And through the exercise of my internal morality, I can engage evil and overcome it towards what I value—no half-human half-divine sacrifice needed.

I likewise dedicate this book to my younger son, Jeff. A little over two years ago, we attended a conference celebrating the work of Psychologist, Dr. Julian Jaynes, that started me on a journey into writing about the notion, psychology, and neuroscience of consciousness that has changed my life in ways for which I cannot thank him enough. The other authors and notions Jeff since introduced me to have added a wealth of depth and context—and have become my friends inside my consciousness. I am amazed at Jeff’s breadth of context and ability to synthesize—at half my age! Between Jeff and Justin—we have lively repartee.

Carl Jung has also been a key inspiration for his uncanny understanding of how the concept of the unity of opposites operate within and behind the physics of consciousness. I lean heavily on his works and the implications of this statement:

"There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."¹

Acknowledgements

Brenda Eastman took my challenge of drawing the trapped religious guilty Self against the free conscious Self through the enabling left and right brain, and conceived the incredible cover for this book. Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.² Brenda captured this in great class. It is nothing short of remarkable and inspired. She was a student in my Religion class while in high school at Rio Lindo Adventist Academy in the 1980’s. Her journey has many points of intersection with my own which gave her special insight into the dynamics of this book.

Eastman is a figurative artist currently living at the foot of a volcano in extreme northern California with her effervescent partner and sleepy orange tabby. She strives to have a conversation with her viewer of a shared experience and interconnectedness. She is drawn to the human form and its relevance to the unique human psyche. A watcher of nature, actions, creatures, self. She works to expand, grow, and evolve. All the while loving and living. To view her work visit Brendaeastman.com.

I chose to use a female theme for the cover, since throughout the book I use male pronouns for the convenience of language.

The right hemisphere, the one that believes, but does not know, has to depend on the other, the left hemisphere, that knows but doesn’t believe.

Iian McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided

Brain and the Making of the Western World

Table of Contents

Disclaimer

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Prolegomenon: The Dawn of Meaning

Chapter 1 I was the Most Lovable, When I Wasn’t My Self

Chapter 2 My Mystified Self: God's Sinister Side

Chapter 3 1960's & 70's: A Time of Trouble, but Not the End of Time

Chapter 4 Ellen White's Authority and the Investigative Judgment Assaulted

Chapter 5 Cognitive Disequilibrium

Chapter 6 Conscious Entanglement

Chapter 7 The Incredible Split Brain

Chapter 8 The Wages of Sin is Not Death

Chapter 9 Mortality is What Formed Morality

Chapter 10 Language and Consciousness

Chapter 11 Opposites Form Language

Chapter 12 The Development of Mind

Chapter 13 Culture: The Extended Mind

Chapter 14 Mythology or Inspiration?

Chapter 15 The Mythic Tower of Babel

Chapter 16 The Thinking Mind as Spirit

Chapter 17 God is Dead: Now All Lives Matter

Chapter 18 Self is Not Responsible to God

Chapter 19 Real and Mythological Forgiveness

Chapter 20 The Backstory of Mythological Cosmology

Chapter 21 The Investigative Judgment: The Terror Behind My Childhood

Chapter 22 Why Did Jesus Have to Die? Salvation Turns on the Quirks of a Dualism

Chapter 23 The Games Adventists Play

Chapter 24 The Last of the Mythic Gods

Chapter 25 Theology Happened When the Gods Stopped Talking: Voices to Whispers

Chapter 26 Evil is a Perspective Not a Nature

Chapter 27 He was More Than a God: He was a Righteous Man

Chapter 28 My New Church

Epilogue: Love, the Exopsychic Language of Self

Bibliography

Notes

Prolegomenon:

The Dawn of Meaning

And a women was going down from Market Street to Union Square when she fell into the hands of some young men . . . Lk. 10: 25-37 A Paraphrase

The woman lies bleeding, battered, and gang raped. Filled with terror, she hovers between life and death. Are they gone? Will they hurt her again? As the video camera pauses at this intense moment of pain, fear, and betrayal, theology seems awkwardly powerless. The texts, the doctrines, the creeds, eschatology, soteriology, Christology, justification, sanctification, glorification, heaven and hell—all seem like mocking gargoyles on some medieval cathedral in the still evening.

In her abandonment, the woman gropes for meaning. She did nothing to antagonize, so why did they violate her? What is it inside humans that would brutally hurt another for no reason? Where is God³ now when she needs him? Is salvation just a reward you get in some distant detached future after tolerating a life of abuse here? Was Theology only carved out of man’s⁴ despair to help him cope with what he couldn’t explain nor change?

And what is justice for this woman? Is it in catching these violent promiscuous males and inflicting a social stigma as intense as the crime they committed? How could that ever give back to her what was taken away? Will that change these men into responsive, caring, mature adults? Whose responsibility is it to bring justice? Will she ever be able to share in a heaven where these men will dwell? What power in the universe could transform her feelings for these men—from hatred to trust or abiding caring? Does that matter? Is it relevant? Or is that only for mothers?

Could real justice ever be having someone else pay the price each of these criminal youths ought to pay for himself—like the woman taking their place? Does justice require the criminal himself stand trial for his injustice? Or is real justice involved in transforming attitudes—seeing something different in each other from one’s heart? In developing a perspective of each other that can look past and through each other’s sins and assume something better is possible?

Theology proposes that Jesus’ death can supernaturally infuse forgiveness into the woman’s heart and remorse and contrition into the men’s. Is that real or just theological jibber jabber? As is evidenced day in and day out, Christ could die a thousand deaths and these kinds of resolutions don’t seem to precipitate—consistently. So how is man’s conscious and unconscious perception transformed where he can take responsibility for the wrong he does and adjust to being wronged by others, so he learns how to productively relate to his Self and his community?

In this book I will address consciousness through the assumptions of physics, a touch of neuroscience, and a goodly dose of cultural anthropology, psychology and linguistics, illustrated by my own journey within the perceptual universe of Seventh-day Adventism and how this affected me. It is essential to realize that the notion of consciousness touches so many disciplines, it is impossible to be an expert in all of them. However, I’m attempting to integrate an inter-disciplinary approach because it changes the face of consciousness, which is essential to feel the difference it makes—not because I consider myself an expert in all these fields. Then, through the design of consciousness, I will elaborate how Biblical Theology is a product of embedded notions from ancient Sumerian (Babylonian) mythological cosmology as passed down to us from their Shaman prophets—not Theology, not reason, nor a psychological paradigm through which we now experience conscious existential awareness. We will call these embedded notions that get passed on, Archetypes.

Theology has unwittingly kept us hostage to an understanding of our internal psychological Self through a few ancient metaphors lying as Archetypes, where Self is an evil nature with the Devil in control until Self is redeemed. These assumptions were passed down from cultures of antiquity, by a process we will carefully investigate—for they are now Fundamental Beliefs. They are believed because of how language was formed in our brains from the beginning. And now we are so accustomed to thinking through them, their prejudice isn’t easily unbelieved.

The perception Christians have in their mind’s eye of Good and Evil results from a confusion between what is external to our minds, and what is abstract within them. Good and Evil are considered a cosmic war between God and demons external to us, which we will call, The Great Controversy. This war is simultaneously experienced within consciousness as moral Good and Evil struggling for supremacy. I will demonstrate that this model is mythology, however, not the model or design of consciousness. In this mythological model, either God or demon is seen in the mind’s eye in between the internal Self and the person upon which an action is done, so what you do to others, you are doing to God (Matt. 25:31-41).⁵ God holds you accountable for your behavior, making you responsible to him. This book is a refutation of this assumption.

The reason for the cosmic war is because God first had a war in heaven with the rebellious Devil and his angels, after which they were cast out and hurled to earth. (Rev. 12:7-9). Because Adam and Eve sinned, man became mortal with an evil nature that needs redeeming. Notice how Ellen White, Adventism’s prophet, describes this external and internal war:

"The Bible is its own expositor. Scripture is to be compared with scripture. The student should learn to view the word [Bible] as a whole, and to see the relation of its parts. He should gain a knowledge of its grand central theme, of God's original purpose for the world, of the rise of the great controversy, and of the work of redemption. He should understand the nature of the two principles that are contending for supremacy, and should learn to trace their working through the records of history and prophecy, to the great consummation. He should see how this controversy enters into every phase of human experience; how in every act of life he himself reveals the one or the other of the two antagonistic motives; and how, whether he will or not, he is even now deciding upon which side of the controversy he will be found."⁶

Consciousness is a phenomenon of man’s dual nature from his split brain. As a result of man’s left and right hemisphere, man has two Selfs. Man’s right brain connects man to his external sociological Self—which is man’s collective nature and relationship with his groups: parents, religion, language, culture, etc. It is his community Self. It first socializes us to see as our sociology sees. Man’s left brain connects man to his internal psychological Self, his psyche. These two selfs are the same self but from two perspectives: man looking at himself from the perspective of his group (his sociological Self)—which is like the group acting as an external right brain; and man looking at himself introspectively, from the perspective of his internal psychology (his psychological Self), as interpreted primarily from his left brain.

Ellen White’s comment here is almost profound, had she changed "word to World and left the two principles that are contending for supremacy as the two abstract principles of Good and Evil" that lie as the basis of human morality exclusively perceived on the inside of man. For this interaction does not play out through Gods and demons in between the two Selfs. Self acts directly with others, which is the difference between the design of ancient mythology, of which the Old and New Testaments are still a part, and consciousness.

Moral consciousness is where man can abstract Good and Evil as the two forces contending for harmony within man—not control. As a result of the pressures created by the interactions of man’s sociological and psychological Self: when I act towards you, I act directly towards you. I see no God or demon involved in between you and me interacting. Apparently, ancient man did and it is this we will expose.

Consciousness operates off a language, which is a decoding of energy as language that both Selfs understand and communicate through. Without these two Selfs being thus interconnected, there would be no consciousness, for consciousness is circuits of energy. Each of the two Selfs only know Self through their other Self as a mirror from which to gain the other Self’s perspective. We only know through points of reference. But in mythology, you know God through man as his proxy, not directly.

Because these two Selfs must be connected in order for either Self to be conscious, they cannot be separated. Any separation is simply a delusion of consciousness. But our attention filters or focuses our consciousness so what we see excludes everything except what we are attending to—but what is filtered is still in the unconscious providing the other Self’s perspective as backstory to the conscious.

The connection of these two Selfs forms morality inside consciousness—as part of the very brainware code of the language of consciousness—because we cannot escape the consequences of being connected to our external sociological Self. This means, however, that morality is innate to, and a property of being conscious. It is not something given by God or any other external entity. It is developed as an interplay of cross-(left-right)-hemispheric oscillations over a decade of a child’s life, bouncing back and forth inside our split brain and between the interacting two Selfs. It becomes a specific language of the two Selfs: our culture and language. It becomes a specific language of the psyche and our external culture and language.

In this book I will demonstrate that the Christian perspective of morality and responsibility to God comes from ancient mythology and cannot coexist in reality as an aligned structure of consciousness. For mythology is based on assumptions and brainware formed thousands of years ago, but the brain has evolved since then, through a process analogous to a child becoming an adult. But instead of mythology being bred out of our brains where a new wine skin paradigm is then built on the design of our adult consciousness—Theology simply breathed consciousness into the gods and demons of the metaphoric cosmic war and exchanged their metaphoric function for real gods and demons, then provided a left brain logic for Self to be an evil nature as its default nature, that needs to be redeemed to perform Good. But any modern mature adult knows that within himself, he can do either Good or Evil—with no help from God or Devil.

And just like a child has memories, habits, and proclivities from his early stages of development that will haunt him the rest of his life and affect his behavior—so humankind have the same, Archetypes, that marinate our brains with notions from antiquity, that left unchecked or are not reassigned or reinterpreted, will similarly haunt our brain and experience with unwanted distortion within our mind’s eye.

However, Mythology and Consciousness end up being two competitive models of Self. Superimposing them on each other is the essential nature and task of Theology—trying to make them a compatible one, when they can never be one. This means Theology uses the assumptions of consciousness to justify mythology. But, if consciousness exists, then the Biblical structure of mythology cannot. Likewise, if mythology exists (as human reality), consciousness cannot. They annul each other, because they represent competing structures of Self and reality, which cannot coexist—despite Theology’s vigorous rational attempts to harmonize them.

In this book we will explore the Mythological and Consciousness models and provide an explanation for why it is that ancient man projected God in between his actions and those upon which the action was made. The answers are hidden within our split brain and the development of language and consciousness in history.

We live in a day-to-day world of psychological truth—knowing we have a Self. But then we have to abandon our common sense understanding of Self, with all our assumptions and collective knowledge, and validate moral and spiritual truth from ancient Shamanic visions of not-so-conscious Shaman prophets behind the Bible,⁷ to which we give authority, as being the conduit through which God pretty much exclusively contacted man. We do this instead of continuing to be informed by the wider context of our rich array of social and other sciences that now provide thoughts in our heads instead of hallucinated voices, because we don’t understand how different the brains of ancient people were—they were just acquiring language and were therefore, not conscious. If truth doesn’t comply with the ancient Shaman, it will be doubted or discarded. This is how deeply mythology is still rooted within the language and thinking processes of our brains.

Christians will never question whether or not the Shamanic process of visions adequately informs them about truth, or whether inadvertently and mysteriously, inside the vagaries of how language is embedded in the brain, it keeps them locked within the Archetypes, the mindset and thought structures of the ancient primitive cultures out of which these notions were derived. This reinforces concepts as a feedback loop between the hemispheres which is seldom broken. I was caught in this feedback loop, and this is my story and journey.

Theology remains locked within the mythic cultures of Bible times, as if their time and culture were normative for everybody for all time, and as if all truth has been captured and preserved in the Bible as an outline to which the Spirit now inspires by filling in the blanks in the mind of the believer. I intend to demythologize this notion.

In this book, I propose a solution to the discrepancy between the ancient and the new. It lies in reexamining the assumptions and meaning of morality, as what creates the structure of authority and responsibility. We will explore the concept of Self within the theological notion of the Investigative Judgment, which lies inside the broader Great Controversy, the cosmic war between God and the Devil.

The video camera resumes. The battered gang-raped woman is lying abandoned by the side of the road, frozen with fear hovering between life and death. Why did they do it to me? she ponders while in and out of consciousness. Where is Theology now to rescue her? Where is the God who promised to be with her always and protect her from all evil: "I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you." Lk. 10:19? But it did harm her. No creed or doctrine is powerful enough to quiet the emotions now in crisis.

The woman hears footsteps coming toward her and leaving again—twice—and she dimly recognizes both passers-by as leaders from her church. After what seemed an eternity, she hears another set of footsteps. Fear seizes her heart. The stranger, a heavily tattooed minority male, bends over her and tenderly checks her vital signs and evaluates her wounds. Relief splashes over her. Help has come. Waves of an entirely new set of emotions and feelings tingle through every nerve, as her inner person flirts with hope around the kindness of the stranger.

As the woman looks deep into the stranger’s eyes, she whispers a raspy, Thank you. A bond is forged between stranger and woman. The woman is already beginning to heal. Her suffering has turned into the dawn of meaning.

And who is the real neighbor? Jesus asks. The expert in the law replied, ‘The one who had mercy on her.’ Jesus told him, ‘Go and do likewise.’ Lk. 10:25-37

Love is the capacity to value. It creates value where there is none; it makes people and actions matter. Love begins with an assumption of value that plays out that value in healing behaviors that help a soul in trouble regain their self-respect—that is, regain the frame of reference in which they can perceive they matter.

Love is not a gift from God (Gal. 5:22), nor is it poured into our hearts from God (Rms. 5:5), as the Bible teaches. It is a capacity developed within the apparatus of a conscious Self—available to anyone, without a sacrificial death taking place. Becoming conscious is the result of the sociological Self interacting with the psychological Self. When conscious, the Self sees from both perspectives—and this forms morality which is the psychological authority of Self to act from its autonomy to the extent it takes sociological responsibility for its actions and outcomes.

The ability to be responsible is what constitutes morality and the exercise of responsibility is what constitutes love, the expression of value. Love is a priority system where that which matters most is top priority and that which doesn’t matter, is redirected towards what matters. Love’s alchemy is that everything love touches matters more than before, because love is the eyesight of valuing. Love is, therefore, the essence of overcoming evil, changing what matters little—into what matters more. What constitutes moral Good is engaging energies that would in their normal course work against the priorities of Self, towards the priorities Self values.

Love is managing energies that would otherwise work against us, to what moves us towards what we value. This is the management system of the Self within moral consciousness—and it is beautiful because the Self owns it. Love is Self’s value. Every conscious human being has developed the ability to love because it is part of the design of being conscious. And this is where the design of our now conscious human nature has been seriously misunderstood by Religion, which has used the notion of God and eternal life as emotional blackmail to both make the soul believe it is evil and keep it imprisoned in this weakness so it needs the control and help of the church, because the Church always matters more than any one member. I will expose this evil in this book, for nothing could be further from present truth.

Real love can never result from the structure of Biblical mythology because we will find out, that the God of Scripture has no intention of anyone becoming conscious, for it is a threat to him (or to those who act as his proxy on earth, the Church). All are to be and remain obedient children—which is interpreted as loving God, striped of moral authority—though judged as responsible adults. This is the enigma we now tackle. I hope this will be a shocking, but insightful journey.

The cross stands alone, a great center in the world. It does not find friends, but it makes them.⁸ Ellen White

If this is your experience, I’m not here to throw stones. For what we see in our mind’s eye is often powerful enough to drive goodness in our lives. But I am here to show that it isn’t the cross that makes friends—it’s something else, and it has to do with the Self.

Chapter 1

I Was the Most Lovable, When I Wasn’t My Self

"There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."⁹ Carl Jung

I was born into a Seventh-day Adventist family, where I was the fourth generation on my mother’s side, third on my father’s. As a young teenager in the 1960’s, I felt fully conscious and had developed a Self where I felt responsible for my own outcomes; I was aware I was aware; and I introspected and enjoyed an abstract subjective meaningfulness I interpreted as a spiritual nature that apprehended God through his Spirit inside me. However, I also felt responsible for my family’s outcomes and the outcomes of the world. In fact, there was no clear end to my responsibility. For the gospel was to be taken to all humankind before the end could come, and that was my mission. I was so loaded down with these global expectations, I could hardly cope. Yet, I felt this was normal—didn’t everyone feel this burden like I did? So I learned to shoulder that load, but it hurt me.

What defined Adventism was the belief that the world had entered the Time of Trouble which was the earth side of the judgment being carried out in the heavenly side sanctuary that was soon to end and Christ would come back to earth, crushing the nations of the world (Dan. 2:40, 44) and rescue his faithful ones, those who kept his Ten Commandments and had faith in Jesus (Rev. 14:12); the 4th Commandment being paramount: the 7th-day Sabbath. Out of these two teachings, came the name: Seventh-day Adventist [hereinafter, Adventist].

As an Adventist, heaven and earth were superimposed on each other and we were trained to trace God’s actions and intentions in everything that happened on earth, just like White stated in the quotation above from Education. Every action of man to his fellow man was seen as directly done to God and would receive his judgment. The world as we knew it, was soon to end.

Though your church may not openly recognize this mythological structure in the Bible, I will later expose its extensive roots in both history and throughout the New Testament—and how it gets buried within Fundamental Beliefs. Theology has obscured us from seeing its insidious roots.

Passages from Adventism’s own prophet, Ellen G. White were the background of my Adventist obsessions, because she was a prototype of what God expected of us all. What God said to her, was his message to me—as if constantly playing over and over in my mind like a feedback loop making her obsessions mine:

The angel raised me to my feet, and said: ‘This is not your case now, but this scene has passed before you to let you know what your situation must be if you neglect to declare to others what the Lord has revealed to you [there’s the threat]. But if you are faithful to the end, you shall eat of the tree of life, and shall drink of the river of the water of life [there’s the carrot]. You will have to suffer much [there’s the fear], but the grace of God is sufficient.’ [There’s the promise.] I then felt willing to do all that the Lord might require me to do, that I might have His approbation, and not feel His dreadful frown [there’s my obligation].¹⁰

In everything I did as a child, I looked for that approbation to escape his implicit threats and his dreadful frown, which was the inevitable result of not being good enough and not working hard enough—for I had the truth and people were dying without being saved. I was 8 when I first learned that word, approbation. It’s still that indelible, for it’s the only time I’ve ever heard it used.

Unbeknown to me, every thought, every mind-construct, every perception, every recording, and every bit of meaningfulness I experienced in my conscious mind was a language developed in reference to my Adventist socialization. I was a Persona, an image of this external sociological Self, with an underdeveloped internal psychological Self, though I knew not to what extent. Does anyone? I thought I was being me, never realizing I didn’t have a me, there was only an Adventist Persona that I defined as me.

Though I used all the mechanisms of my own mindware, all the programming had come from the language of my sociological Self. Any new thoughts and desires authentically my own, organically springing from my psychological Self as a result of interacting with my non-Adventist external culture, were anathema to this socialization and forbidden. This drove them underground into the private world of my unconscious, contaminating me, making me unclean, in need of forgiveness, a process requiring the cleansing of contrition and purification—the objective end of the final judgment.

So, though my fellow Canadian neighbors spoke the same language, wore similar but more fashionable clothes, and acted in similar ways, what we experienced internally was interpreted and experienced differently. So different, we lived as strangers in different worlds, which I will refer to as different contexts. Adventism created a them and us—the unsaved and the saved. Even all other Christian groups were in the unsaved category and I was to beware of them all. Our True Remnant status gave us a real edge, making us a little smug, but the flipside is that danger lurked on all sides. We were to vigilantly watch for we knew not the hour.

Behind all my thinking constructs were the Archetypal assumptions, values and propositions of the Adventist church, which collided with the cultural values of my larger ethnic group, Canada. When any new information, thought, or idea hit my conscious mind, I would first validate it against my internal Adventist language, a collective database of Archetypes, experiences, and assumptions.

We will use the term Archetypes to refer to these authoritative recordings, like mind-grooves or axioms that function as unconscious assumptions in the mind. They are like sourcecode that generates images and notions on your mind-screen. If information conformed, I added it to my overall paradigm and would feel enriched. If it did not conform, I immediately constructed barriers and arguments against it, and subsequently put it into the "contraire database for future reference. I would feel bright and thankful I had averted the subtle influences of the devil and a wall would be constructed to ward off any further influence. If those thoughts reoccurred, I would feel a tinge of guilt or fear and feel God’s frown, that I was somehow disappointing him for thinking about them again, and I would suppress them, again feeling exultant over the devil. In this way, I took captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ." (2 Cor. 10:5).

Without knowing it, my perceptual awareness was not my own, but a version of the Adventist culture imposed and then imprinted on my internal mindware. It colored every thought and action of my being. The intensity of the programming was exacerbated by my extremely sensitive personality, for I was like an absorbent sponge with no boundaries. I was a licensed user by baptism and later ordination, and became a product of this brand of consciousness-mindware. Though I had a small struggling psychological Self, it had no authority to assert itself as the authentic manager over my Self, only the limited authority allowed by my sociological Self (God/Adventism/parents) to be responsible to the extent of acting out the mandates of its will. This was understood as free will. I became an Adventist Persona, an enhanced obedient adult-child, like a caterpillar inside a cocoon that couldn’t attain metamorphosis, but was judged as a butterfly.

When you purchase Microsoft Word, you own a license to be a user of Word. You will own all the derivative creative documents that you write using this software, but you cannot own the software itself. The difference between my consciousness as socialized through Adventism and Microsoft Word is that there is a confusion of who owns the derivative creative outcomes of the Adventist software—Self or God? Christianity is the same. Christians are bought with a price (1 Cor. 6:20), the software, therefore, is only to be used for the purpose of glorifying God, its owner (Rms. 1:5). To give glory means to make him look good, or its negative flipside, not to bring shame to his name. That is the Christian’s top priority and responsibility in every decision made. Obedience is judged against this standard.

This helps God win his battle in the Great Controversy between Good and Evil, God and Devil. You are not licensed to use the Christian software as a self-directed authorized Self based on what is important to the Self, wherever it differs from Christianity’s interpretations. There are stiff threats of Jesus denying you before the father (Matt. 10:33-40), of your branch being burned for lack of bearing fruit (Jn. 15:6) or for disobedience (Matt. 3:10). And in Adventism’s case, punishment by fire in the final judgment, to the extent of the magnitude of your sin.

"The wicked receive their recompense in the earth. [Isaiah 34:8; Proverbs 11:31.] They ‘shall be stubble; and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts.’ [Malachi 4:1.] Some are destroyed as in a moment, while others suffer many days. All are punished ‘according to their deeds.’ The sins of the righteous having been transferred to Satan, he is made to suffer not only for his own rebellion, but for all the sins which he has caused God's people to commit. His punishment is to be far greater than that of those whom he has deceived. After all have perished who fell by his deceptions, he is still to live and suffer on. In the cleansing flames the wicked are at last destroyed, root and branch,—Satan the root, his followers the branches. The full penalty of the law has been visited; the demands of justice have been met; and Heaven and earth, beholding, declare the righteousness of Jehovah."¹¹

So just like Azazel on Yom Kippur in the Old Testament, Satan, in the end, is the real Savior that pays for man’s sin, if you believe in types and antitypes. But Adventism should have seen that Jesus is declared to be the sacrifice associated with the Mercy Seat in the Most Holy Place in Hebrews 2:17—so that whatever his death meant, it ensured God’s angered was turned from man—and that happened on the cross, not in 1844. Mission accomplished. But it had nothing at all to do with the Day of Atonement.

"Mystification is a state of confused identity. In its most extreme form, mystification describes the bewilderment of a person who has never been born psychologically…. A person in this state is so enmeshed with a parent or other elder that she is the elder [Adventism in my case]. This is a common consequence of severe abuse. It explains why many victims of incest, for example, become incest offenders…. Patriarchal parenting teaches blind obedience and the repression of all feelings except fear, and demands the surrender of the will. In varying degrees children learn that they are most lovable when they are not being themselves."¹² John Bradshaw

That is the epitome of my childhood. I was the most lovable, when I wasn’t my Self. I lived and breathed in the reality I was living in the Time of Trouble at the end of time where God would soon break into time and rescue me from evil and take me into his everlasting Kingdom—if I remained faithful. This mystification, as a result of my sociological Self posing and acting as if by the authority of God, is similar to the Stockholm syndrome, where a kidnapped victim hypnotically comes to believe their kidnapper is their friend, and they were kidnapped for their own benefit. Though I speak for myself and my particular family, which was enmeshed with Adventism to an obsessive degree, in the context of Bradshaw’s comments, in the context of Bradshaw’s comments, our family wasn’t outside the norm of conservative Christian culture in the 1960’s.

Language, culture, society, and religion all compose the framework and sourcecode of our sociological Self as one entangled mechanism of energy that our consciousness is inextricably connected to in order to function as an interacting entity with Self. But depending on a number of factors, the hookup can either control, distort, and hinder the Self in its quest for authority and understanding, or it can act as a portal through which the two Selfs align and create an authentic consciousness that is constantly adjusting because the Self acts as an authority over both Selfs to establish the broadest possible context through which to gain perspective and make decisions to navigate life.

By working through a design of consciousness, you will be able to establish whether or not your Self is fully conscious or whether it has been wholly or partially selfknapped by your belief system. You will be able to determine whether the voices in your head are the Spirit’s or your own morality speaking to you through thoughts generated within and by your own consciousness. You will be able to adjudicate how to prioritize when to act in favor of what your religion or sociological Self stands for, and when you must differentiate from it.

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."¹³ Friedrich Nietzsche

Or, here is how Ellen White strips you of Self in typical mythic, but theological metaphor:

The human heart that has learned to behold the character of God may become, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, like a sacred harp, sending forth divine melody.¹⁴ Ellen White

The purpose of this book is to show that Self is the alchemy of consciousness, not the pit of evil needing redemption. Self’s maturity is the only hope and solution to moral life. The Self is not to be a sacred harp playing a divine melody, but an empowered droplet that contributes back to the sociological ocean of community, imparting to it, its attributes, not just the other way around. As the two Selfs interact, they form synergies that mutually empower each other in a feedback loop. The sociological Self becomes like its conscious parts and the psychological Self in turn receives empowerment from the added attributes of its group. This is the human symphony playing a human song. A song of attunement.

The trouble with setting God’s character as the standard, means that a Self cannot be conscious because consciousness requires interacting with an external Self—whether that be God or group—where that external entity is likewise conscious, and therefore adjustable—not an absolute unchangeable standard. Consciousness is the ability for both Selfs to likewise and mutually adjust. But God doesn’t adjust. That means that God lives without a context. For context changes all meaning.

Chapter 2

My Mystified Self: God’s Sinister Side

I grew up with an internal psychological terror from which I could not escape. But, if you met me, you would think you had met my doppelgänger opposite: a happy, helpful, content, bright, effervescent, seemingly perfect child. I was the dream-child of every parent, the envy of our entire church family. Yet, if you were to take a journey to the inside of me, I was a psychosomatic mess of unresolved fears, expectations I couldn’t live up to, guilt and paranoia, with the responsibility of saving my family and the world on my back. Everything I did and said was to avoid seeing God frown on me and invite his approbation. I was terrified because God was obsessively watching me. He was a stalker, and a psychological abuser—for he intruded into the very private recesses of my mind, where no one is allowed to enter. That is MY Most Holy Place.

God as an obsessive stalker is a reflexive unstoppable flipside consequence of the Adventist doctrine, the Investigative Judgment, now called Christ’s Ministry in the Heavenly Sanctuary. He is watching every move you make. He records every thought you think—and it will all be brought up against you when your name comes up in judgment. God get’s too close—when I deserve at least 18 inches of private space.¹⁵

The Psalmist inadvertently paints this same abusive intrusive God, while intending to show how God is always there for us, he implicitly exposes just the opposite:

Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend to heaven, thou art there! If I make my bed in Hell, thou art there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. Ps. 139:7-11

When I later came across John Bradshaw’s book on Family Secrets, I cannot tell you the relief I experienced. In fact, a number of his books, along with Donald Sloat’s book: The Dangers Of Growing Up In A Christian Home, were foundational for my personal growth and recovery during this time-period.¹⁶

I was over-protected and over-parented—from God, my church and my home, though the opposite was intended—or was it? With a blatant teaching that God was opening the Books of Heaven to investigate all my deeds and thoughts—how could anyone see this as the opposite being intended—especially when I had to go through this process without a mediator: alone. No one to defend me. So everywhere I turned, it seemed to reinforce one message: God had a sinister side.

We sang songs in Sabbath School like: "Be careful little feet where you go. Be careful little feet where you go. For your Father up in heaven is watching from above. Be careful little feet where you go. This was repeated through, Be careful little eyes what you see, little ears what you hear, little hands what you do, little mouth what you say," etc. This song taught me to "watch out for God," for he is intrusively watching everything I do.

This is the essence of perfectionistic moralism, which is the certain consequence of believing in the Investigative Judgment. Every part of Church life was aimed at warning me about God, because we were all at some level terrified of him. He was not loving, he was a controller, right down to invading my thoughts. If I didn’t measure up I would be burned to that extent and exposed to the on-looking universe.

It is the right of every human being to live within the privacy of their mind and know that what others know about them, is ONLY through their words and behavior. This privacy ensures and motivates human courage to crawl out into the public eye and attempt to do something or be someone. For judgment starts when Self meets the public.

Adventists teach that the 1,000 year millennial period is where you will have the right to look through every one’s record and see why they aren’t with you in heaven—in order to justify God’s decision. My mind will be open to your scrutiny! How sick is that?

Judgment is the response of our sociological Self to the attitudes and behaviors we act out towards them and also, how we respond to their attitudes and behavior towards us. Judgment is inside every response of every human to each other. It is always immediate. Justice, on the other hand, can elude us, sometimes forever.

But there cannot be any judgment of our thoughts. That world is private and sacred and belongs to me alone. And it is not until I act—that any judgment can be done. Any other understanding of consciousness, and the privacy and the assumed integrity of privacy of our human minds, is dangerous, abusive, sinister, and evil.

As such, Adventism and Christianity are dangerous, abusive, sinister and evil--because judgment starts inside the privacy of the mind. God is now at this very moment investigating YOUR account—right down into the dirty dark secret recesses of your mind. God writes down all your thoughts, your fantasies can already be judged as adultery, and it is … out of the heart that evil thoughts come out of, according to Matthew 15:19. So there is no place to hide, God is always watching.

If you are a Christian, do you quietly pray in the sanctity of your mind—or do you pray out loud? If he hears your mind prayer—then he knows your thoughts. So whether you believe in the Investigative Judgment or not—you believe God intrudes your mind. But what the judgment adds to that—is that your thoughts will be used against you, for you are to take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. (2 Cor. 10:5).

In a recent episode of Bull, Dr. Bull and attorney J. P. Nunnelly were defending the privacy of a company that had a warrant from the FBI to open the privacy of their client’s accounts on their servers for the greater good of finding who was behind a terrorist attack in their community. Here is Dr. Bull’s conversation, which then went into the summation of J. P. Nunnelly to the Jury. I combine them here:

"I think the world must have been an easier place to navigate when everything we did, every secret we had, everything we looked up and wondered about, dreamt about, tried to accomplish, failed to accomplish, give up on or succeed, wasn't stored forever in one place where someone, maybe even our government can see it and judge it, and use it against us without our permission. You know what happens in a country like that? People stop looking things up, people stop wondering, people stop dreaming, they don’t fail--they just don't do anything, because when their right to privacy is taken away, their ability to move forward, to reinvent themselves, to imagine something better, is taken away too."¹⁷

That’s what caused my terror. That is God’s sinister side about the judgment in how God’s uses our minds against us.

Consciousness, as we will later see, was formed in humankind out of a rebellion against such tyranny and control by the group—in the name of their gods. Society—our sociological Self, whether that was just King, or King in the name of and under the authority of God, has always wanted to control our minds. And any control or pressure from control on our minds—rips away free will, human rights—and worse, our will to try: we stop looking things up, we stop wondering, we stop dreaming, we don’t move forward, we don’t try to reinvent ourselves. Therefore, the whole notion of human rights, privacy of mind, and what the Self is and has a right to—is at the center of an understanding of consciousness, Self, morality and judgment—contrary to Religion. Consciousness is the kingpin of democracy, human dignity and the right to privacy.

However, Adventism was formed on the following logic that controlled my family, and shaped the mindset behind the terror behind my psychological world and behavior. What was meant to give me hope, assurance and peace of mind—terrified me, because for everything it said, there was a flipside left unsaid that contradicted it—with a twist to control my thoughts and mind. So if you are tempted to think what you believe doesn’t ultimately define your consciousness—what you see, and therefore interpret the context in which you will live—learn from me.

(1) Adventism was directly set up by God as his end-time Church, through an end-time prophet Ellen G. White and others, to warn and prepare the world of impending doom and Jesus’ second coming. We were the chosen Remnant to go through the persecution of the end-time Time of Trouble to vindicate God’s character.

(2) Keeping the seventh-day Sabbath was the seal that made us Remnant and would be considered by God as the covenant of faithfulness that got us through the Time of Trouble, brought on by the 666 beast—where his number is his mark or seal on the foreheads of his followers (Rev. 13). This Time of Trouble was to be brought on by the Protestant churches joining hands with the Catholic Church to make an image to the beast, by enacting a universal Sunday law that would violate all our constitutional rights. At the height of that persecution Christ would return.

(3) The Time of Trouble was going to be a time of persecution worse than earth had experienced thus far. Christ’s protection during this time was vague and uncertain.

(4) Christ was performing his last rights as High Priest within the heavenly sanctuary’s Most Holy Place, called the Investigative Judgment. When our name came up in judgment, we must stand before God without a mediator. All of our thoughts and actions are recorded in God’s books and we will be judged accordingly.

(5) Those found guilty, would not inherit heaven, but would be burned according to their sins. The Devil would be held responsible for all humankind’s sins and be burned to that magnitude and extent—which would take a very long time.

(6) All thought and action, no matter how great or small was part of the mosaic of the character that would either result in you being saved or lost. So watch—for you don’t know the day or the hour and when you will be in need of the oil of the Holy Spirit to power your lamp. We lived in confusion of what God did for and in you, and what you must do for yourself. The mingling of the Holy Spirit with my spirit was the miracle behind conversion, but what exactly constituted the Spirit’s role and power, was the least understood.

(7) Heaven was the prize where there would be no more evil, sin, heartbreak, tears, sorrow or pain and you would live forever. Heaven was the escape from all the toil, evil, and suffering, not a reunion with our best friend, Jesus, and certainly not his Father, whom we were unconsciously diligently trying to appease and please.

Make no mistake about it, Adventism was formed and created for and around the assumptions of apocalyptic tensions and mind control. But mind control is just the flip side of being made into the image of God. With one comes the other. Without one, there is no other. Having the Spirit inhabit the mind is what it means to be remade in the image of God—but, that IS the surrender of the Self to the Spirit’s control. What Christians don’t realize, is that surrender changes what you see in your mind’s eye. You no longer see an arc of perspective of who your sociological Self is against who your psychological Self is. You only see God as the model you wish to become and emulate.

That was only 50 years ago. Now, you wouldn’t know that Ellen White or the apocalypse existed. What is sinister, however, is that nothing about the above assumptions have been disavowed by Adventism. So it is anyone’s guess as to how much these assumptions still seethe below the surface, still poisoning generations of youth against the unsaved others and making them live a life of internal terror of never being good enough, afraid to explore the world around them because their Self has not been empowered with authority, but condemned as an evil nature.

Being Invisible: Where Self Doesn’t Matter

As a child, I was to be invisible, which meant that I was not to be noticed but it simultaneously meant that I didn’t matter. And when I don’t matter, I cannot develop a healthy Self. In order not to be noticed I was to be obedient and perfect, seen but not heard;