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Authentic Spiritual Growth and The Evolution of Our Beliefs© Dick Rauscher - Issue# 7

Since our happiness and authentic spiritual growth are both directly dependent on growth in self-awareness, we will continue our examination on the subject of "beliefs" in this issue of the Stonyhill Newsletter. Last week we looked at the "bent nickel" beliefs of our primitive ego. We explored some of the suffering and unhappiness that come from our bent nickel beliefs when we use them and psychotically distort the reality of "what is".

This week we will look at the concretized "unexamined beliefs" of our primitive ego.

Nothing is fixed and static. Everything in the created universe is subject to change. Everything in creation is in a process of becoming. This is true for everything except our unexamined beliefs. They resist change simply because they are never examined. We do not take the time to think about them. They simply represent the "truths" we use to live our life.

Despite the fact that "every" belief is relative and subjective, our unexamined beliefs are the beliefs that we hold to be "absolutely" true. We seldom remember where they originally came from; all we know is that they have been around for a long time. They represent the rigid bedrock beliefs that define who we are as a person; our beliefs about reality, our prejudices, our values, our biases, our ethics, our phobias, and our principles.

If others ask us "why" we hold these beliefs, we often find ourselves at a loss for words. "Just because it's true" is a common emotional response. We have trouble defending our beliefs because we have never really thought about them or examined them. Never the less, we will passionately, and angrily defend these personal beliefs when others dare to challenge them. Our primitive ego does not like to be told that it is wrong.

Beliefs are not necessarily fact. Beliefs are just mental constructs that we "emotionally" believe to be true. Just because we "believe" or "think" something to be true does not make it so.

There are no beliefs where this is more evident than when we are talking about our spiritual or faith beliefs. For example, many of us believe in a theistic God; a white, elderly bearded male "being" that lives "up" in heaven, listens to and answers our prayers, keeps tabs on us, judges our behaviors, and sends us to hell for disobedience. He sacrificed his only son so that we could be forgiven our sinful nature. He rewards obedience with eternal life in heaven. When we sin, it is the work of the Devil.

Whether we are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or simply non-religious, many of us would not have a significant problem with the majority of the above statements. They are simply the common unexamined faith beliefs of our culture. They are so interwoven into our day to day culture they have become "flat world belief's. Everyone assumes them to be true. We take them on "faith".

Regardless of how easily a culture's faith beliefs come to be accepted as "truths", it is important to remind ourselves that faith is never an absolute certainty; an absolute provable truth. If it were, then it could not be called a faith. We take things on faith when they "can not" be absolutely proved. It is only when we attempt to concretize our faith beliefs and hold them as "absolute truth" that we begin to create problems for both ourselves and those around us.

When we stop to take a closer look, we will find that our belief in a theistic God as described above, is actually the root-source of most of the violence and prejudice we experience in the world today. Theism was the creation of our early ancestor's primitive egos seeking safety in a dangerous and mysterious world. If they understood exactly what their tribal God wanted and expected from them, then they could know with certainty that they were under His or Her care. We know from Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs that safety is a very basic and primal human need.

Religious uncertainty and doubt would have created an intolerable anxiety for our superstitious early ancestors who experienced natural events as unexplainable mystery. Their tribal "faith" beliefs would have quickly become "absolute truths". Of course, it inevitably led to tribal conflict and violence to determine whose God was more powerful. The collective primitive egos of each tribe would have split the world into the judgmental categories of us versus them. Theism has been one of the primary root-causes of war, conflict, and violence for thousands of years.

Lets imagine that we "believed" God to be immanent or an integral part of all creation like many Native Americans believe, then there would be no dualistic categories of sacred versus profane; our God versus your God. There would be a oneness or unity in which all creation would be experienced as sacred. God and faith would no longer be based on religious "beliefs"; God would be intuitively "experienced". The God experience would be a mystical happening, not a set of religious "beliefs". The concept of my God versus your God would no longer have any meaning.

Whether we understand God to be Universal Intelligence, the Consciousness of the Universe, the Ground of all Being, or the Initiating Evolutionary Spirit that infuses all of Creation, the bottom line is God would still be God. Only our beliefs "about" God would have changed.

What if we believed God to be immanent in all of creation; that all of creation was sacred. Would our relationship to the Earth and our current exploitation of the Earth's natural resources change? Would our religious wars that have killed so many millions of people end? Would we be better able to see the sacred in every human being? Would the religious conflict and violence that we are experiencing in the world today end? In time, I believe they would. The cultural beliefs, stories, and memes that we teach our children have great power to shape our world.

Nothing in creation is fixed or static. Living systems are both evolving and changing, or they are in the process of dying. In his book, The Stages Of Faith, James W. Fowler tells us that this is true in our faith beliefs. We should expect to have different understandings of our "faith" as we mature and grow through adolescence, early adulthood, middle adulthood and late adulthood. The faith of our childhood should not be the faith we hold at the end of our life.

Everything in Creation is in a process of evolving and "becoming". This includes our "unexamined beliefs".

Authentic spiritual growth is growth is self-awareness.

We are capable of shinning the light of unconditional love and compassion into the world only when the authentic or essential self that resides at the core of our consciousness, that sacred part of each of us that is created in God's image, is able to transform and mature the unexamined beliefs of our primitive ego.

We will take a closer look at conditional love and our essential self in the next issue of the newsletter.

(Readers can go to www.stonyhill.com for in-depth articles and past Newsletter discussions on the subject of our inner-child's primitive ego, happiness, and authentic spiritual growth.)

2) PERSONAL THOUGHTS

Like most, I began my spiritual journey firmly grounded in the religious beliefs of my childhood. It took forty years, but I finally accepted that I was meant to make spiritual growth my life vocation. I entered seminary and was eventually ordained an Elder in the United Methodist Church. I chose a ministry of Pastoral Psychotherapy and Pastoral Counseling in part because I was embarrassed to call myself a Minister or Pastor. I did not want to be identified with the conservative, literal Fundamental Christians that were increasingly becoming the public face of Christianity.

Along with my training as a Psychotherapist I began to read and study the ways of Native American spirituality, Buddhism, and other Eastern spiritual practices. I read Thich Nhat Hahn, Anthony DeMello, and other contemporary spiritual teachers, including Jesus Seminar biblical scholars such as Robert Funk, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Karen Armstrong, Robert Miller, and Bishop Shelby Spong.

Over time, I grew to better understand the source of my embarrassment with Christianity. I saw increasingly clearly that Christianity, as commonly taught and practiced by the Christian Church, was stuck in the ethics, values, and primitive beliefs of a culture that had disappeared into the misty annals of history. Christianity had stopped growing, evolving, and "becoming" more than three to five thousand years ago.

I was embarrassed to be identified with those who said that the Bible should be read literally not metaphorically, that Jesus was not fully human, that homosexuals were perverted sub-humans, that evolution was not real, and that women were not equal to men. I could not relate to these ideas, I could not teach or preach them, and I could not worship the God that they represented. They simply did not make any sense to me.

I considered these antiquated ideas and concepts to represent ignorance, and I did not want to be seen as ignorant. My life and ministry was devoted to helping people heal the wounds of their lives and learn to live more fully in the moment with reality, not teaching them the primitive beliefs of a long dead culture and insisting that these primitive superstitious beliefs represented literal truth in the 21st century.

The power of belief in the consciousness of the human species is what shapes our reality. Unconscious beliefs and unexamined beliefs are powerful shapers of the human realities we create because we do not see them. We never examine them. They operate outside of our awareness. We believe them because we assume they represent "truth". They represent truth because we believe them. The primitive ego is easily caught in circular logic.

Today, I believe that unconditional love and the compassion of authentic spiritual growth are directly linked to growth in self-awareness; not to religious or faith "beliefs". I believe that understanding and examining the beliefs that shape our personal lives, our culture, and our global community is the most important work we can undertake. The Primitive Ego Theory of Human Social and Spiritual Development that I often refer to in this Newsletter was created by me over the last thirty years as a developmental and spiritual growth model or tool to facilitate and support the growth of our self-awareness; as individuals and as a species.

I believe that we no longer have the luxury of functioning out of our unconscious and unexamined beliefs. They are too dangerous to the global community that we are becoming. A compassionate global culture will evolve only as we grow in self-awareness as a species. I believe that authentic spiritual growth or growth in self-awareness is the ultimate commitment and responsibility of every individual; that the survival of our species may well depend on how well we meet this challenge.

3) SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

What are the fixed, unexamined beliefs that your primitive ego is convinced represent "truth"? What do you believe about members of the opposite sex? What do you believe about people of color? The elderly? Poor people? Mexicans who want to work in our country? Same sex marriages? What evokes emotion and anger in you? What are the unconscious unexamined beliefs behind those emotions? Remember, because you believe something to be true, does not make it so.

Authentic spiritual growth and the ability to sustainably manifest unconditional love and compassion come only from growth in self-awareness. Sitting with our emotions can be a powerful source of self-awareness and insight into our unexamined beliefs. As Carl Jung reminds us, "everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves".

Over time we will come to understand that our beliefs are only illusions created in our mind; certainties created by our primitive ego that needs to "know".

True wisdom comes only from the emptiness of "not knowing".
StonyHill Institute

GOALS OF THE STONYHILL NEWSLETTER

We live in a world filled with conflict and violence. Almost everyone agrees that something has to change. There is an urgent need to develop a more compassionate global spirituality.

At Stonyhill, we believe it makes no sense to profess the values and morality of peace and compassion while continuing to manifest the primitive ego's paradigm of vertical power called survival of the fittest; a paradigm of power, control, and violence.

We must learn how the unconscious judgments of the primitive ego bring the seeds of conflict, and a sense of "otherness" into the world. If our personal goal is to do no harm to others or the world, then our thinking must consciously evolve and become more conscious or self-aware.

We will become what we think about and authentic spiritual growth is achieved only when we grow in self-awareness.

Traditional mainline religions are based on primitive pre-modern and violent tribal metaphors written during a time when our human consciousness was still very primitive. Until our mainline religions remove the violence contained in their scriptures and come to understand that most of the wisdom in their scriptures is metaphoric and should not be interpreted literally, they will be unable to offer the moral and ethical framework needed to create effective global solutions to the challenges facing us in the 21st century.

We will evolve as humans only as we become more self-aware and intentionally increase our ability to love unconditionally. A compassionate global spirituality is no longer just an interesting philosophic idea; the future of the human species may very well depend upon our ability to create it. The danger that we could destroy ourselves as a species has never been greater. The creation of a compassionate global community is the most important goal of human consciousness in the 21st century.

The Stonyhill Newsletter explores the insights and spiritual practices required to achieve the authentic spiritual growth that comes from deep self-awareness, understanding the primitive ego that resides in each of us, and the intentional evolution of our species consciousness.

The Stonyhill newsletter is written each month for counselors, therapists, clergy, and individuals interested in authentic spiritual growth, intentional growth in our human consciousness, and the formation of a compassionate, non-violent global community that openly embraces radical inclusiveness and diversity.

Namaste
Dick Rauscher

IMPORTANT INFORMATION

The Stonyhill Newsletter is written and published by Dick Rauscher, M.Div., Fellow AAPC. For past issues of the Stonyhill Newsletter and other in depth articles on authentic spiritual growth and the Primitive Ego Theory of Human Development written by Dick Rauscher go to www.stonyhill.com
All rights reserved.
Copyright 2007

There are many article on spiritual growth, the middlepath and the primitive ego on the Stonyhill web site at www.stonyhill.com. If you would like to read an in-depth article on The Primitive Ego Theory of Human Development and the relationship between authentic spiritual growth and the growth in self-awareness that comes as we better understand the primitive ego that dwells inside each of us, you can go to the Awakening article #26 on the web site or just click on this link: http://www.stonyhill.com/articles.htm - awakening

Visit the STONYHILL INSTITUTE website at http://www.stonyhill.com/articles.htm for additional articles on the integration of spirituality and psychotherapy.

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Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Carl Jung

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