If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I often focus on the writing of another person. It’s not because I’m lazy or uncreative. Rather, it’s for two reasons. One, I want to acknowledge people who I think are saying important and helpful things. Second, I want you to know that there are lots of people out there doing such things. So much of the talk we hear or read is so simplistic, alienating or inflammatory. It’s important, I think, to hear voices other than the talking heads or columnists in the media, who are beholden to their employers or trying to rack up clicks and “Likes.”

One such person who I follow is the Australian blogger, Caitlin Johnstone. Most of the time she writes about international politics and world events. She does not pull any punches in describing acts of injustice or the nefarious leaders behind them. She has been relentless, for example, in exposing Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and the complacency of other countries towards them, including the US. And frankly, even I can only take Johnstone in small doses.

But she balances her often harsh exposés of current events with reflections on life and the world that make clear her underlying compassion. One example is this recent post, “Human Life Is So Much Harder Than It Needs To Be.” Johnstone is no Christian, and does not identify with any particular religion. But like many people today, she is nonetheless profoundly spiritual, which comes through in this essay.

Again, like so many today, Johnstone’s spirituality is filtered through an Eastern lens, yet has no specifically religious content. Rather, she inculcates Eastern spirituality’s deep appreciation of the mind and of human personality.

While this topic is certainly not absent in the biblical religions, in their orthodox forms this was never their strongpoint. For a spiritual understanding of human psychology, you have to turn to the mystics of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. While generally tolerated, such people were rarely appreciated by the religious hierarchy, at least during their lifetimes. In part, the rise of modern psychology and psychiatry in the West is the result of Christianity, especially, failing to take the human psyche seriously or positively.

Why is it then, according to Johnstone, that “human life is so much harder than it needs to be?” Because we live so much of the time, not in the real world, but in the cacophony of conflicting voices in our head.

 We make it so hard for ourselves, this human experience.

Like it would be hard enough just being born into mortal bodies that have to experience pain and get sick and deteriorate and die. That alone would be more than enough to deal with. Then on top of all that we go and create these psychological ego structures in our heads that make us miserable for a whole bunch of other reasons that aren’t even real.

I mean, we’re thrown into this world and we have no idea what’s going on, surrounded by chaotic and unpredictable giants who are full of neuroses and delusions handed down to them by previous generations, we’re very quickly taught how to make ourselves miserable using belief systems and shame and self-hatred and enmity, we stumble around for a few years, maybe plop out a baby or two and teach them how to be as crazy as we are, and then we fall down and they throw us in a hole. And then it’s over.

From birth on, we accumulate so much stuff in our heads it seems they ought to be even bigger than they are. Much of it is valuable but so much is painful and worse than useless. It poisons our appreciation of other people and our appreciation of ourselves. You don’t need to be a trained therapist to know this. It’s common knowledge, as the character Lt. Cable sings in this hit song from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific.

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear
You’ve got to be taught from year to year
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught….
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You’ve got to be carefully taught

And sadly, we are even taught paradoxically to “hate and fear” ourselves because of our supposed failings and unworthiness. When, a few years ago, a woman from my congregation told me with a chuckle, “You don’t want to know what goes on in my head,” I knew exactly what she was talking about.

[W]e make up stories in our heads that cause us distress and discontentment. Stories that we are inadequate or unlovable. Stories about how other groups of people are bad. Stories about how the people around us aren’t doing the right thing. Stories about how we’ll be able to feel okay with ourselves if we can just rack up one more career accomplishment and achieve one more life goal….

And none of it’s real. We stress ourselves out so bad entertaining these nonstop mental monologues in our skulls, and we made up the whole show. All of it. All the defects and unworthiness. All the enemies and conflicts. All the doing it wrong and getting it wrong. It’s all made up.

Most people live in this imaginary world of believed mental constructs that offer up all sorts of reasons to feel anxious and afraid and hostile and ashamed. And then clever manipulators use those feelings to get us consenting to wars and injustices and all the self-destructive human behavior we see before us today. And that’s why everything’s as messed up as it is.

As I say, orthodox Christianity does not seem to have much to say about our mental suffering and how we can free ourselves from the demands of the voices in our head. But that’s in part because of a language problem. If we translated some of the words of the New Testament into more modern vernacular, I think they might touch us very differently. The stories of Jesus delivering people from demons, for example, could be easily appreciated as deliverance from our mental turmoil.

The most psychological writing in the Bible is that of the apostle Paul, but his ancient mindset gets in the way of our recognizing that. I’ve long thought that he would be much better understood, for example, if the word confusingly translated as “flesh” was instead rendered as “ego.” Try reading Romans that way sometime. And it’s in Romans that we hear Paul speak most directly on our need to shut off our mental voices.

Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind….

This is the great gift of the Spirit according to Paul: “renewing our mind” to be awakened to the valued and loved selves that we all really are, setting us free from the judging and enslaving voices planted within us by “this age.” “For freedom Christ has set us free,” Paul says in Galatians, a theme he returns to again and again. And in her own words, this is what Johnstone is pointing to.

The human organism can function perfectly fine without nonstop mental chatter. Thought can be nothing more than a useful tool that gets picked up when it’s needed and set down when it’s not, with attention resting in the profound wondrousness of the senses instead of mental babbling about made-up nonsense throughout the day.

It can take some work to undo all the interior dysfunction and come to this level of clarity, but it’s not nearly as much work as we’re already exerting in continuously turning the wheels of our insanity and keeping all these fictional worlds happening inside our heads. Bringing clarity to our inner processes and awakening to reality is actually the easy path. It’s just so much more peaceful and enjoyable.

In this famous passage from Philippians, Paul says much the same using the religious language of his gospel.

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

“It’s just so much more peaceful and enjoyable” to live in the real-world God has given us, with both its genuine pain and its glorious wonder, than in the imaginary, fevered dramas of our egos, fed by the anxieties the world teaches from childhood on. Finding such life is the purpose of all true religion. As Jesus says in John, “I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly.”

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