Spirit, Religion, and Mental Health

Anything that relieves responsibility degrades ability. Religion does both.

“Absolution forgives the guilt associated with the penitent’s sins and removes the eternal punishment (of Hell) associated with mortal sins. … Theologians say the absolution of a penitent more than twenty paces away would be questionably valid. Phone absolutions are considered invalid.”
Wikipedia (2024)


Lincoln Stoller, PhD, 2024. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
www.mindstrengthbalance.com

Magic

As I make a last pass, looking for errors in the manuscript of my book Operating Manual for Enlightenment, I’m reminded of how spirit supports mental health.

When I was studying ritual magic, adherents claimed magic had a direct, physical effect. This naïve belief in the power of faith is reflected in most religions. I was studying this because I wanted to see what a belief in magic amounted to when stripped of all the religious trappings.

Belief in magic is pre-scientific. From a scientific standpoint, magic is ridiculous. Yet a majority of the world’s population believe in magic in its religious form. Many serious scientists have and are religious, and accept the magic of religion in some form. Many careful, thinking people see physical reality as different from religious reality.

The paradox can be resolved if magic applies to people, while causality applies to everything else. I can accept that “God created man in his image” only if God is a human image. In a world that doesn’t have humans, God is irrelevant. If you disagree, then you live in an imponderable world.

What is moral behavior? This is an important question we need to ask. Religion approaches this unscientific questions with an unscientific answer that fails in many regards.

Absolution

According to Webroot (2024), 35% of all internet downloads are related to pornography but there is no open discussion of this.

“Pornography hinders the development of a healthy sexuality, and among adults, it distorts sexual attitudes and social realities. In families, pornography use leads to marital dissatisfaction, infidelity, separation, and divorce.”
Patrick F. Fagan (2009), psychologist and former Deputy Assistant at Health and Human Services

Religion is designed to hide moral failure. It fails because we must address moral failure ourselves, an institution cannot do it for us. Yet, most people cannot do it, so religions are created to absolve them. In this way, we accommodate immorality within communities and ourselves.

False endorsement is a blank check written on an empty bank account; an evasion that obscures insight, erodes resilience, and damages mental health. Religious absolution is an illusion.

Religion requires instructions and a protocol, asserting that words convey spirit, but this mistakes incantation for insight and ceremony for understanding. The closest any religion comes to spirit is possession.

“Currently, when I attend my psychiatrist appointments, I often run into the same young man who stops me in my tracks and tells me flat out, ‘Jesus loves you and will return to the earth one day to save us.’… I have met others who have started entire organizations because of their experiences of a God in a psychosis. One woman, in particular, is proud to share the love that she experiences from her own beliefs. She always tells me, ‘It is not about religion, it is about love.’”
Andrea Paquette (2014)

Unwritten religions are not religions in the Western sense. These typically indigenous frameworks are social systems. I was not raised in such a system, nor in any religious system, so what I know now comes from watching and living with people of other cultures.

Spirit

Indigenous religions are experiential while the Abrahamic religions are intellectual. Experiential traditions focus on spirit, while intellectual traditions focus on behavior. Experiential traditions claim spirit must be experienced internally, while intellectual traditions claim it can also be written. Does intellectual experience prevent spiritual experience?

It is a mistake to equate experiential and intellectual religions. In the tradition of the Kwakwaka’wakw of the Pacific Northwest, a spirit dancer does not dance like an animal, they are the animal. The experience is an altered state of being. You are not a person speaking to a God, you are channeling a divine force. Is being possessed the same as having spirit?

Even though the experience of possession cannot be contradicted, it provides no tool for argument. In contrast, intellectual constructions can be righteous, obliged, pious, guilty, and absolved. Thoughts are not states of being. Intellect lacks spirit. The question is whether intellect can lead to spirit.

“Teosi’s words (the words of the Christian’s God) belong to the white people… No one had pronounced them before the missionaries arrived with them. This is why we do not really understand them. Our thought cannot open them out in every direction as we do with those of the spirits. If we go on following them for no reason, we will eventually forget the words of our elders. Then we will be called believers, when in fact our minds will simply have become as forgetful as those of the white people who know nothing of the forest… The xapiri (spirits) continue to let us hear their songs, which are our true language.”
Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami Shaman (2013, 204)

Spirit is a personal dimension of meaningful awareness that’s different from being healthy, stable, and normal. It does not cure disease, but it can foster mental health. Catalysts for spirit, like ceremonies, religions, therapy, and psychedelics, are not medicinal, though they can be used like medicines.

Because spirituality is not a commodity, it does not fit Western culture. Western culture seeks consolidation and condensation; spirituality seeks evolution and ethereality. Western culture encourages you to seek happiness, which depends on one’s mood, one’s mental weather. Spirit generates one’s weather.

Independent Thought

People follow conventions in thought and action in every field. Without convention, there is no “field.” Divergent behaviors are grounds for exclusion. It’s easy to condemn this pervasive human habit for all the ignorance it perpetuates, but it holds people together.

Most people lack a firm moral compass because they’re uninformed, unaware, and inexperienced. Few of us have had our behavior tested outside our family or community, and many of us feel these domains fail us.

I got a call from a young man who succeeded in having sex with his father. His family structure is in chaos and probably has been for generations. Without help, his failure in understanding boundaries will reach a crisis. It’s not written guidance this person needs, such as offered by scripture or argument, it’s insight.

Rule-based behavior is contrary to spirit and learning; it’s contrary to the scientific method. Spirit and learning require exploration, testing, failure, and resolution. Proscriptions teach nothing. They do not inform.

We’re trained from an early age to defer to authority, which reinforces our lack of power. This hive-mind conformity does not create a responsible society. It creates a fear of differences and a distrust of others.

Politicians offer to lead by pretending to be leaders, but few politicians are. Their performances are mostly a sham. Schools, corporations, and bureaucracies are filled with sham authorities. Independent thinkers are called artists.

Doctors do much the same. They’re trained to think of themselves as agents of healing, and they’re expected to play that role. But only you can manage your cure because only you have the potential to control your microbiology. A surgeon might attach something, but you are the person who does the healing.

Schools Teach Ignorance

We equate schooling with education, but education means learning while schools teach doctrine. They were designed to do this. The only thing in their structure that fosters learning is the rejection of their doctrine. As long as you accept the premise of schools, all you’ll learn are skills.

If schools offered resources without teachers, they could be redeemed, but then they would be libraries. If you visit today’s school libraries, you’ll notice how empty they’ve become. They have removed all materials that contradict their doctrine.

My son’s 9th-grade Studies Studies teacher assigns homework on the French Revolution. What aspect of his future is connected with Napoleon? My son is too timid to tell his teachers what I encourage him to say, which is that his time is being wasted. I insist that he not answer their questions and instead make up his own.

Your mind is limited by the questions you ask. To allow another person to define your questions is to forfeit your mind. The only valuable thing my son can learn in school is how to think for himself. In that regard, the worse the teacher, the sooner he will see their fabrication and reject it.

“I was told ‘You need to go off your meds and trust God for your healing.’ Thankfully, I knew that was a bad idea and stayed on them–for me, the meds were God’s healing. I was also told, ‘If you just had enough faith and truly wanted to be healed, you would be.’ I countered that God does not always heal.”
Becky Oberg (2012)

In church, as in school, the congregants are taught to distrust themselves, repress their feelings, and accept the doctrine. This is anathema to spirituality and creates the purgatory of our current age. This has become standard practice in both totalitarian and what are presented as democratic governments. But democracies require a populace exercising discerning thought and effective action. We do not have democracies in practice.

The only thing of value taught in elementary school is literacy. If following instructions could be taught without literacy, then I doubt literacy would be taught at all. And what is literacy really? How many of us are literate beyond the level of following instructions?

I got a college degree and wrote many papers, but I never learned how to write. Eventually, I taught myself. I earned a doctorate in physics without any honest discussions of science. I learned moral values through mountaineering, by being responsible for the lives of others.

The only credit I give to my high school experience was the opportunity to refuse to go to class, which is what I finally did. To create spirit, reject required doctrines regardless of the threatened dire consequences.

spirit religion mental health counseling, therapy, coaching lincoln stoller

Learning Spirit

You become spiritual by living responsibly for yourself and others. The people I lived with in the Caribbean, of whom few progressed past elementary school, govern themselves better than the citizens of the US, in which 91% of the population are high school graduates.

It was not scripture that made these people spiritual; it was making decisions of spiritual consequence. The women went to church while the men went to bars. Both were social places and everyone was in everyone else’s business. It was the ratification of their differences that balanced the community.

Western Culture teaches that sanity is different from spirituality, and that mental health is different from spiritual health. The result is the creation of people who create change but take no responsibility for it, people who are servants. How much of these maladjusted minds are due to natural or nurtured forces?

I saw this process in physics where people learned to ignore the ends to which their projects were directed. Although it was hidden, I suspect more than half of physics research is subsidized by the military. One colleague described with wonder how hard solids flow through soft solids. He studied depleted uranium projectiles as they passed through steel armor.

Dysfunction Versus Maladjustment

Most mental ill health is learned and socially maintained. It is not a disease. Most mental distress is maladjustment, not dysfunction, but this depends whether you distinguish the two. Mental illness is a distress-based diagnosis, either yours or theirs. It’s a person’s behavior that qualifies them for a diagnosis. There are no physiological criteria.

Treating distress as if it is an illness is a failure in two regards. First, it’s a failure of therapists who feel that if they can’t fix you, then your problems must be beyond your power to correct. In other words, their failure is your failure, so the problem must be medical.

Second, it’s your failure if you agree and abandon responsibility for your state of mind. This is the acceptance of an unscientific diagnosis. Distress cast as malfunction is a bad diagnosis that should be rejected.

Most of us are on a mentally ill spectrum, but we don’t recognize it. We only call it mental illness when we lose control. At that point, we become clinically depressed, anxious, angry, confused, or delusional. Then, an authority will tell you what you are and expect you to accept it. The truth is, there is no obvious line between a bent mind and a broken one.

The role of spirit is to contribute meaning, patience, purpose, and value to your actions. When you have these going for you, you’re less inclined to succumb to stress, mania, or depression. You’re less likely to abdicate responsibility because you are committed to your life, your values, and yourself. Having spirit gives you self-respect; accepting someone else’s opinion undermines it.

Spirituality deepens one’s foundation of sanity. It gives you a meta-cognitive perspective, providing a distance between life and circumstance. Instead of losing your shit over your distress, you will consider ways of using it to a positive end. A spiritual perspective gives you a higher goal and purpose.

Our triggers push us out of the bounds of sane behavior. Spiritual stability can disarm these triggers. When seen from a higher level, what seems broken are things in need of adjustment. Religion does not provide this perspective because it does not accept deviance. Spirituality can provide this perspective because, lacking doctrine, it is based on relationships and self-awareness. Mental health rests on your point of view.

References

Fagan, P. F. 2009. “The Effects of Pornography on Individuals, Marriage, Family, and Community.” Marriage & Religion Research Institute. https://downloads.frc.org/EF/EF12D43.pdf

Kopenawa, Davi, and Bruce Albert. 2013. The Falling Sky. Harvard University Press. https://last303.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2023/11/kopenawa_falling-sky.pdf

Oberg, Becky. (2012, February 1). “The Demons of Mental Illness: What Possesses Us?” healthyplace.com. https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/borderline/2012/02/the-demons-of-borderline-personality-disorder

Paquette, Andrea. (2014, November 24). “Mental Illness and the Stigma of the Spiritual Experience.” healthyplace.com. https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/survivingmentalhealthstigma/2014/11/mental-illness-and-the-stigma-of-the-spiritual-experience

Webroot. 2024. “Internet Pornography by the Numbers; A Significant Threat to Society.” Webroot.com. https://www.webroot.com/ca/en/resources/tips-articles/internet-pornography-by-the-numbers

Wikipedia, 2024. “Absolution.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolution


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