Spiritual Ecology: Evolution Beyond Faith Based Culture

By Patrick de Sercey

In this present work, the matter of faith based cultures is
addressed as a developmental cultural stage corresponding
to adolescence during which ideologies compete in violent
confl icts which, with the present state of armament, promise
human annihilation. The path towards an evolution towards a
spiritual ecological maturity is discussed at length with particular
emphasis on the relevance of spiritual teachings from both
the Eastern and the Christian traditions. The work is an attempt
to relate the spiritual teaching associated with transpersonal
psychology to the social and political context of our existence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 22, 2007
• ISBN: 9781469101859

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Copyright © 2008 by Patrick de Sercey.

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Contents

PREFACE

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

PART TWO

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

PART THREE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

PART FOUR

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

PART FIVE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHATER FIVE

IN CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PREFACE

In the following pages, I have attempted more or less successfully to put together what I have written over the course of the past two or three years with the intention of presenting a picture describing our present cultural condition and suggesting ways for its evolution towards the spiritual ecological recovery to which an increasing number of us now aspire. Their volume grew to the point where any manageable organization of them into what I wanted and what would be a reasonable work was beyond me. There were many overlapping and repetitions. I therefore picked from them what is now an adequate version of my original intention.

My intention in writing all this was no doubt that I was going to die before having said my piece. But I also was very concerned about the threat of wars and all sorts of social ills. I could give a good number of other reasons for engaging in this work, such that it functioned as a way to ventilate my state of mind, none of then convincing and all of them undermined by the little quiet but persistent voice within that whispers BS to all my cherished opinions. In the end the reason is obvious, but at the same time not amenable to a satisfactory and authentic expression, something which after all does not really matter.

A more concrete motivation for this work is the growing conflict on the world stage between the forces of free market economics globalization devastating our ecosystem and the people of the so called underdeveloped nations in the service of big business interests and their corporate elite with the resistance movement responding with violence in what we choose to call terrorism. Therefore the underpinning spiritual bankruptcy of our culture fanning the crass materialism of our corporate and religious institutions is the major concern that I address here.

When I graduated from Columbia University with a major in political science, my interest was the phenomenon of nationalism or patriotism which I saw as the moving force behind World War II and the Korean War, two wars in which I had been intimately involved. I therefore thought of pursuing this interest in graduate school. I had heard of behavioral political science and in my crass ignorance, I assumed it involved looking into human behavior for the source of political forces. To me it was obvious that nationalism or patriotism were psychological phenomena. But at the same time, psychological phenomena seemed, in ways I was not clear about, connected to spiritual matters as well as to culture itself also having a spiritual basis. In order to pursue this line of endeavor, I naturally took a course in psychology which I found completely irrelevant, not only to what I was pursuing, but to what I thought the psyche was. And when in some course in international relations while a student at Florida State University I presented a paper attempting to address nationalism from the stand point of psychological processes and phenomenology, I was in no uncertain terms told that one had to stick to one’s discipline, that a study of nationalism would properly involve a case study, but to me this would have amounted to answering the question why nationalism happens by saying it happens.

So I quit political science and took my academic pursuit into art, philosophy and Eastern religions and their connection with culture, while on the side entering a spiritual practice. Eventually I discovered existentialism and later humanistic and transpersonal psychology when I was introduced at West Georgia College, now the University of West Georgia, to Mike Arons, chairman of the psychology department who informed me that my interest was indeed in transpersonal psychology.

What follows then is probably not easily lodged in traditional academic niches, though to me it is an application of transpersonal, humanistic and existential psychology to the social and cultural realm, what perhaps one could call an attempt at some holistic approach to our cultural evolution based on a spiritual foundation.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

OUR SOCIAL STRUGGLE

In spite of all the denial, our social and political activities exist in the context of class warfare. From centuries of a system of slavery to our present paid servitude, it has been a conflict between the economic and social elite in power, and the masses whose assigned purpose in life has been to serve. And though there may be some elements of mutual dependence, it overwhelmingly leans on the side of those in power depending on the serving masses maintaining their servitude.

The two classes live in reality in two worlds where one knows nothing much of the other, and indeed cares little about it. And perhaps it is those in power who care least about the serving class beyond fear that those unwashed masses might rebel against their servitude.

This fear rises from a combination of factors. One is that the masses tend to demand something more than desired profits and ensuing personal comfort would allow the privileged classes to grant. In other words, there is the whole matter of the workers pressing for higher wages and more extensive benefits, but also demanding the larger and more complex matter of human dignity, respect and a sense of some control over their own existence during working hours. And this fear arises in the ruling classes from this dependence on employees for profits with which corporate managers struggle endlessly. We hear a lot of talk about businesses outsourcing jobs to India and other places in order to benefit from lower wages. But perhaps more to the point is this dependence all businesses have on their workers. And this dependence translates into controlling the employees. The goal of the corporate establishment is that the balance of power be such that control is secure so that the workers can be counted on submitting to the wishes of the administration. Consequently corporate management avoids a balance approaching equilibrium, and automation and outsourcing are pursued in order to remove the workers from the equation as much as possible by replacing them with others who present no threat, or with technology.

This adversarial arrangement seems to be rooted in the guts of our culture. It is of course something taught in all our schools on the football or baseball field, and it is the essence of our court proceedings and capitalistic competition. It is near about a dogma of our cultural faith.

We of course can trace it all the way back to the earliest days of Christianity with the whole notion of the original sin being sexuality, that the body is sinful, and that a good person fights all that is natural in him. Nature itself is to be overcome, conquered; some today even claim absurdly that we conquered Everest, the plague and ourselves as we do enemies on the battlefield. Everything organically real is to be conquered into submission to the all abstract will of an equally abstract persona and its contextual props. It is a fight between mind and matter. This is the essence of humanism, that notion that man is the measure and master of all things. But it is also a phenomenon of arrested adolescent development.

What we have here is a materialistic fixation when by materialistic I mean taking as real, as a final reality, the person or ego we create for ourselves and the context which defines it. Humanism is a fixation on intellectual constructs which exist defined or delineated by their opposites so that in the end they exist through denial of what they are not. And ultimately what they are not is reality, nature, Being. As a person, one in the end is not really one’s body but the personality that has evolved from it and now rests on it. In order to avoid recognizing that we are deluding ourselves about our reality, we fight off those so called animal instincts, this physicality and belongingness to the world, and all those people whose explanatory rationalizations of their presence undermine and contradict ours.

We have assumed a belligerent stance as the basis of our identity and thus of its institutionalized props which sets up nature as the adversary. And in the context of those institutions propping up our persona, the individual human being as both a physical and spiritual existent is relegated to the status of raw material to be used to enliven those institutions. The danger is that those people may loose their ability to make themselves believe in the faith which binds them to the world view cherished by their society and make demands that would undermine the safety of the system which they are expected to serve.

In the not so distant future we can imagine a condition where the so called unwashed masses are replaced by technology serving the few members of the power elite and ruling class. Perhaps the day of self sufficient and well guarded fenced communities set up to keep the threatening, useless masses out predicted by some futurists is not far off.

But this climaxing of a humanistic materialistic culture is not necessarily inevitable. And an evolution and maturation beyond the adolescent fixation embodied in materialistic humanism may indeed overcome this grim image and the violence which is inseparable from this cultural stance. The unwashed masses may after all awaken in time to assume their proper position in the social and economic context and move it beyond the crass profit motive and general economic determinism now governing, a burgeoning awakening to the spiritual essence that materialistic humanism has so far successfully blocked. The growing development of welfare programs, the banning of the death penalty in more advanced civilized societies, the various ways nations have devised to redistribute wealth, the providing of health care to all through national programs, and the growing respect for the individual existence of people exemplified by such things as the acceptance of gay or lesbian people along with the fading away of faith-based institutions mostly in Europe and among the more educated people all indicate that there is indeed a maturing beyond this adolescent materialism in which so many of us are still stuck. But this evolution is also experiencing a reversal in corporatism—call it fascism if you will—now assuming power in the United States.

The evolution that is desperately needed now is hampered by poor understanding of the spiritual foundation of the human condition. This spiritual reality which enlivens all of us is still being hidden by an addiction to faith in this or that theory used to block out of our consciousness its true spiritual nature. It is therefore our job to open up a window on our spiritual essence so that we might both understand how we got stuck in the trivialities of our economically determined values with which spirituality is blocked, and find our way to our sacred roots in the immensity of the Great Spirit we so dread.

CHAPTER TWO

FAITH BASED CULTURES

Faith based cultures, as opposed to religiously based ones, came to dominate areas of the world where Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions flourished. Over time, it infiltrated such religions as Hinduism and Buddhism where of course its seeds already existed. Now that these faith based cultures are bringing us to the threshold of human annihilation with weapons of mass destruction, they have become a phenomenon which needs to be very seriously addressed and it is on their roots in the human condition that we need to focus. This of course has been evident for a long time, but it has been a taboo of academia to bring in psychological, spiritual and sociological perspective in the study of politics. The violence with which faiths have imposed on people is unfortunately simply dropped as a regrettable historical fact we would rather not mess with beyond the promulgation of international laws intended to bind states and their rulers from such violations of human dignity, this largely to no avail.

But we of course cannot forget the medieval crusades conducted with all possible fervor and cruelty in the name of God or Jesus, not only against Muslims, but against Christians as in the massacre of the Cathars in what is now southern France, a crusade ordered by the Pope and conducted with incredible cruelty by good Catholics lead by Simon de Montfort Lamaury who was finally killed in 1218, appropriately by women operating a catapult during the siege of Toulouse. And from this crusade and indeed in the midst of it, was started the equally vicious inquisition set up by the Pope and run by the Dominican order which had been founded by Saint Dominique during his attempt to bring the Cathars into the fold before the Albigencian Crusade against the Cathars was proclaimed. And this inquisition is still in fact in effect, though not functioning, but it is not long ago that it banned books and their authors, such as Voltaire’s and Helvetius’ among many.

Recent history has seen this same phenomenon of faith sweep people into frenzies of patriotism used to move them to support the economic interests of nations. In the 1930s, partly as a response to demands of the working classes for better pay and more civilized working conditions that had fed the communist and socialist ideologues’ organizations, big business interests got behind the ideology of corporatism which gave birth to Fascism and eventually supported the Nazis, an ideology finding sympathy among the upper classes of not only Europe but the US as well.

From this was unleashed an imperialistic war the goal of which was the imposition of this faith on the industrialized world whereby corporate interests would safely and tightly control the masses to keep them subservient to the corporate elite. In the rest of the world, in the more extreme form of this ideology, especially in Nazism, all those people of other cultures and races were to be either eliminated or in essence enslaved in the service of the corporate interests. Its spirit of course can be seen as a reawakening of that of the opponents of the French Revolution of 1789, a throw back to the good old days when the masses kept their place as servants of the privileged aristocracy and later of the pillars of the industrial revolution. It is this endless struggle on the part of those in power to secure their position and improve it. But today this struggle does not present itself in its naked form. It comes dressed in the garb of the faith prevailing among those who are to serve. Without the faith in the ideology justifying those social conditions, such system of governance would be impossible.

And of course the same faith based system is not unique to just this cultural descendent of Christianity, the capitalistic systems. Faith was the order of the day in the other offspring of Christianity, the Soviet and Communist system such as in Cuba, Korea and China with the same goal of ensuring that people will serve the economic institutions of the nation. Indeed all of it is capitalism, private capitalism in one system, state capitalism in the other and economic determinism and materialism in either case.

And now we find ourselves in the process of imposing in our own country the faith we claim to be the foundation of our national identity and in its name, entering a crusade to impose on the Islamic world the institutions which embody our faith so that we might engage in profitable business in their land, and indeed assume a dominating position in the world. Nothing has changed. We are still in the throws of a faith based culture with all the hate, violence and deception attending. But whereas in the medieval crusades bows and arrows were used, now weapons of mass destruction are the weapons of the day and this includes cluster bombs and the rest of the arsenal of modern warfare. One thing that does not seem to have changed is the ruthlessness and cruelty and the general disregard of human dignity whereby people are considered instrument in the fulfillment of industrial and corporate interests couched in terms of what ever faith may be the cultural base.

One of the most blatant demonstrations of this degradation of the person at the hand of faith based culture today is the recent lavish inauguration of the president of the United States. While we sent our troops to war in Iraq where daily they face violence and death, in Washington, those very people who have sent them there are engaging in dances and various celebrations of the most elegant sort in complete oblivion of the deadly reality they have thrown those soldiers into, not to speak of the Iraqis’ suffering. The flag is lowered at half mast when some politician dies, but when a thousand or so of our troops are killed, we dance in the capital. Those soldiers are the expendable servants of our policies, meat for the guns (de la chair a canon), as Napoleon put it. This is the natural result of the blinding effect of our faith based culture which permits us to sacrifice people in our plants and mines as well as on the battlefields. Just as the corporate entities are not responsible to their employees and their responsibility is to the owners, so is the government not responsible to its soldiers, but to the corporate interests it serves, the oil companies in the case of Iraq.

The faith which flourishes today in this country is in essence a form of economic determinism, and this economic determinism is an expression of the materialism inseparable from humanism, this fundamental notion that ideas hold a higher ontological status than nature and existence itself. But like all ideas, they have no other reality than the one we give them, and this assigning reality to ideas and theories or philosophies is what faith is about. It is all a matter of ensuring that we successfully make ourselves and each other believe in them.

The Islamic fundamentalists, just as our Christian and capitalist counterparts, are fettered to this humanistic materialism which assigns words the status of reality in a sort of concrete thinking process which constitutes the essential intention of faith.

Here then resides the crux of the problem we face; those faith based wars armed with weapons of mass destruction, rooted in some fashion in the cultural collective psyche. I am therefore going to try to clarify the spiritual and psychological processes which are involved in this human failing which imprisons us in faith.

CHAPTER THREE

EVOLUTION TOWARDS FASCIST/

LIBERAL CONFLICT

We are not using the word yet, but as the conflict between the conservative and the liberals sharpens, it will become apparent that it is conflict between the corporate and the workers or middle class interests which in modern times has been referred to as the a conflict between left wingers (socialists, communists, liberals) and fascists.

This is a very old conflict which a few centuries ago climaxed in the reign of terror in France, and more recently in the communist revolution in Russia. That the revolutionary movement in Russia, as in France two centuries ago, was captured by conservative power interests using for their benefit in the Russian case the communist ideology twisted so as to suit their interest changes nothing here. It was on the surface quite different from the fascist ideology spelled out and implemented in Italy, in Spain and in Nazi Germany, but its essence is not different in that the government served economic interests above those of the workers or people in general. In the rest of the world Fascism was highly praised and favored, though under the various guises that the local patriotic faith dictated. For this essential stance of the conservative position and ideology is essentially a matter of raising institutions in a position of supreme power, preferably sanctified by some divine or sublime authority through which the masses are induced to place their faith and allegiance in what comes to constitute an economically determined, corporate nationalism. Patriotism is therefore the conservative glue used to bind the masses into submission to the will and needs of the economic or corporate interests. The government and its constitutions and laws are changed through appropriate interpretations so that the function of the state and its administration come to be to support the corporate institutions through control of the masses. Mussolini made no bones about it by telling us that business and government held a higher status than the people, indeed, the government was the supreme authority, and that this was according to the world order. In a sense he was refurbishing once more the old notion put forward by Augustine, that an authoritarian state was justified in light of the essential evil nature of mankind. The state assumes the position of a father figure, just as our Anthropomorphic God.

In this country we have come around to that position. During the hay days of the Hippies, a city attorney in Atlanta stated as axiomatic that the function of the state was to protect people against their natural evil tendencies like a father would his children. Today there are increasing arrests or punishment of those who disagree publicly with the administration, this even by local authorities such as school principles. The name of the game, the excuse for it all, is that such disagreements are unpatriotic and even subversive, most especially during what has conveniently been declared a state of war.

And it is not just a matter of corporations engaging in a power grab through lobbying and other uses of their money. What is more important and effective is the government sharing the corporate system of values which places their institutional goals and bottom lines above anything else, relegating their employees and the environment to peripherals.

In the clinic where I worked for many years, the focus was gradually removed, not only from concern for the employees, but from the needs of the clients so that both employees and clients were reduced to being instruments to justify the financing of the organization. This is the mentality which pervades the whole culture, something which we thought had been put aside once and for all with the advent of democracy and the end of the autocratic monarchies and their aristocratic clicks. As the corporatist interests continue to grab power and control of the government, this conflict between the liberal supporting individual liberties and the corporatists asserting the authority of their institutions and values over people may rise to the level where it will be recognized as a conflict between fascism and democracy. And when we get there, we have reached the braking point where a violent conflict becomes inevitable.

The power of the conservative corporatists rests in that they have made their needs and norms, and thus their values, what defines the American myth, thereby using American patriotism to move people in their support. Indeed there is something un-American about criticizing our business institutions, as conservative stalwarts are wont to tell us. American nationalism is of course in praise of what is unique in America, and what is unique in American is industry and the lore that goes with the size of our corporate entities and the wealth of its owners. This wealth and power are held as the valued goal of our services in industry, the myth of the success story presumed to be the unique American reality.

Nationalism is a faith placed in what is seen as the essence of the country, a faith which like all faiths is a matter of placing in its mythical object the ground of one’s being. This myth is seen as what makes us what we are, our maker and thus of a higher status than any one. Consequently the nation is divine because it is our maker, what we depend on for who and what we are. For us America is this complex system of corporate institutions which to most of us is of incomprehensible size and power, with its upper elements reaching into a misty metaphysical realm taken up close to the divine where it merges with our religious myths. We are reminded here of the book God, Gold and Government linking economy with the divine plan, published decades ago.

Conservatism, like any ism, rests on the dependence of people on some ideology or institution, be it the Church or the political party. In the context of an economically determined society, corporate institutions of business are the sacred entities which define and make us.

Thus the Republican Party as the corporate party is awash in patriotic propaganda it uses to silence dissent such as we see in the accusation that Kerry was unpatriotic if not a down right traitor by saying what he said when he returned from Vietnam. But since all this is also wrapped up in the aspect of our national myth which speaks of democracy and freedom, much double talk is inevitably necessary to convince people that the way to their freedom is through submission and service, and indeed allegiance to the corporate world. The freedom which is sacred is not individual freedom from abuse and oppression, but free enterprise, free market economy, the freedom of institutions of business to do what they see as necessary to increase their profit, and the possibility ascribed to the individual person to gain wealth by productive participation in the corporate game.

The corporatist propaganda obviously works. The corporatist party has the allegiance of more than half the population. What is the source of