Free Wake Up Now by Stephan Bodian Page B

spiritual traditions to avoid succumbing to its temptations. Through your spiritual beliefs, you can gain a sense of security and comfort in a world that may otherwise seem threatening or chaotic,create community with other like-minded people, organize your life according to certain fundamental principles, and connect with a current of spiritual energy that has been transmitted from one generation to the next. In the process, however, you trade the possibility of experiencing reality directly for a familiar, reassuring, unquestioned (and unquestionable) filter that you project onto the real. Such filters in turn make up the spiritual ideologies and dogmas that wreak so much havoc in the world. (By the way, I’m not suggesting that there’s anything wrong with spiritual beliefs per se. In fact, some of them are masterful creations of the human imagination, like poems or symphonies. The suffering begins only when you become attached to them and mistake them for truth.)
    Recently, I responded to a flyer announcing a gospel music festival near my home in Austin, Texas. After I arrived, I quickly realized that I had stumbled on a revival meeting in disguise, and that the audience was a relatively close-knit group of evangelical Christians who regularly convened for music and prayer. The people I met were friendly and kind, and the singing was filled with heartfelt love and devotion. In my ecumenical way, I found myself grooving on the good vibrations as I translated the references to Jesus into more generic references to the Divine. Soon, however, the performers began interspersing their songs with hostile comments directed at those who didn’t share their conservative political views. The love and devotion never stopped flowing, but now it was being filtered through layers of judgments and beliefs. If you didn’t believein old-fashioned family values, support the Republican Party, and above all put your faith in Jesus, you were undeserving of love and destined for damnation.
    More than their judgment of others, though, what struck me about these lovely, heartful men and women was how judgmental they were of themselves. Considering the commentary that accompanied their songs, they seemed to be struggling mightily to be good Christians and resist the temptations of Satan because they believed that they were inherently flawed and unworthy and that their natural insights and impulses were misguided. Their faith provided them with the possibility of salvation, but it also kept them bound by their sinfulness. I could understand why they held so tightly to their religious beliefs. Without the reassurances such beliefs provided, they might have to face the uncertainty and self-doubt they were trying to overcome.
FILLING THE VOID WITH BELIEFS
    Fundamentalists aren’t the only ones who feel inadequate and attempt to compensate by adopting the right attitudes and beliefs. As a psychotherapist, I’ve found that just about everyone I’ve counseled believes at some level that he or she is inadequate or unworthy, and many approaches to therapy attempt to bolster people’s self-esteem by substituting positive beliefs for negative ones. The problem is that no amount of bolstering will ever completely reassure the ego, the apparently separate self, that it’s adequate because it knows at some level that it’s just a construct, a collection of thoughts, memories, and feelings, without any substantialexistence. In the words of Ramana Maharshi, the ego is just a “shadow cast on the ground” by being. No wonder it feels inadequate—it doesn’t really exist!
    Developmentally, the ego arises in childhood when you’re given the message that you’re not enough just as you are and that you need to act in certain ways to win love and ensure your survival. For example, your parents may tell you, with the best of intentions, that good girls don’t get angry, they’re cheerful and accommodating, or that big boys don’t cry, they hold their