THE METAPHYSICS OF FEAR

Sister Helen dwelt at length on fear. She gave fear a metaphysical interpretation. As she sees it, we separated from God and from each other. We feel like we did something wrong. This separation is akin to what the Catholic Church calls the Original Sin. To be on earth, that is, to be separated from God, is an act of sin.

We feel like we sinned against God by separating from him. Since God is our real self, we feel like we sinned against our real self, by denying our true identity as unified spirit and taking on a false identity as separated, ego in bodies. To identify with the human personality is to attack the real self, and whoever attacks his real self has inflicted pain on his self. We cause our self pain by being in ego, separated states.

To be on earth, to feel separated from God and from other people is to feel guilty and sinful.

The guilty expect punishment. We feel like God would punish us for the sin we committed. We fear God’s punishment. To be human is to feel guilty and to fear God’s punishment, Sister Helen said. The person, who feels separated from God, defends his ego personality, feels like he committed a crime and fears punishment. To be human, which is to separate from God, therefore, is to live in GUILT AND FEAR.

Fear is existential, Sister Helen tells us. Fear is not just a biological phenomenon, as biological psychology tells us, but is a metaphysical one.

Punished by God? Let us see. God is not apart from his children. God is in his children. God is his children, for the extender are the extended. God is his children.

God is everywhere and is everywhere. Since everything is God, if God punishes us for our sins, he has punished himself and acknowledged that he himself sinned, for our sins are his sins.

We are now in a philosophical tickle, so pay close attention, my dear friend. (In philosophy, these issues are generally addressed under ontology, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.)

Listen. God extended himself into his son, you. It follows that God is his son, you, for the extender is the extended. What you did, therefore, God did. QED (You cannot refute this statement on rational grounds.)

To sin is to separate from God. Since you are part of God, if you sinned, God sinned. If you separated from God, God separated from himself. QED

Since God is in his son and he is in God, and they are eternally unified, it is impossible for God to separate from his son, from himself. It is impossible for the son of God to separate from God, from his self. Therefore, in truth, separation has not occurred. Even the dream has not happened. QED

Shankara, the seventh Indian sage, having established that the world is a dream, goes on to tell us that the dream has not even occurred, for it would mean that God is dreaming this world.

Shankara’s postulation is that the world does not exist. Sister Helen said that the world existed for a brief second and was over with. When we separated from God and from each other, we but did it for a nanosecond. This would seem to imply that there was a moment when God was not on guard and did not notice what his children were doing. Since, by definition, God knows the past, present and future he must have known what his children were up to. Thus, by logical necessity, God knew that his children were planning on separating from him. In as much as he did not prevent them from doing so, he is partially responsible for their deed!

Nevertheless, Sister Helen tells us that God immediately realized what his children were unto and corrected it. (When the Big Bang occurred, separation occurred. As it were, reality was split into fragments; particles were invented. But immediately, some unknown force reunified the particles into atoms, then the molecules that formed biological life forms. It is as if the fragmentation of reality was reversed. What we are trying to do here, in case you have not noticed, is reconcile physics with metaphysics. In the temporal universe, man is both physics and metaphysics, so we must reconcile both aspects of him.)

When we separated from God, he created the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit immediately corrected our mistake. The Holy Spirit overcame the world. (And Jesus, having totally identified with the Holy Spirit, overcame the world.)

THE HOLY SPIRIT AND HIS FUNCTION IN TIME

God as God is not in this world. God is transcendent. But God has an immanent aspect to him. When we separated from God and seem to live in this world, God entered the world as the immanent God. God remained in his transcendent state while also operating as the immanent God.

Thus God seems to have two aspects, the transcendent God and the immanent God. Actually, since the Son of God is an extension of God, it follows that God seems to be in three places: the transcendent God, aka God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. The Catholic Church calls this mystery the Holy Trinity, Triune; One God with three selves: God the father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. According to traditional Christianity, God the Son is Jesus Christ. According to Sister Helen, God the son is each of us.

God the son is not the self that we are currently aware of, but our real self. Currently, we are aware of our separated self, the ego self. But our real self is unified self, aka Christ self, or Son of God, or God the Son.

God placed the Holy Spirit in our “right” minds. The Holy Spirit is where the ego (wrong mind) separated mind is. As long as you think that you sleep and dream, you can dream with the ego mind (wrong mind) or dream with the Holy Spirit’s mind (right mind).To live from the Holy Spirit directed mind, which is to love and forgive and serve all people is to be righteous. (We are now employing traditional Christian concepts; pay attention, you might learn their true meaning.)

(Please do not concretize the term mind. Mind is an abstraction and does not exist as a tangible entity. There is no mind that you can touch or feel. Mind is the process of thinking. The universe thinks through what we call mind. Thinking itself is mind. There is a self, which is spirit, and that self thinks through a mind. God and his children think through their mind. God has a unified mind. We all share that unified mind of God. What this means, in fact, is that God thinks through all of us and that we think through God. God is not independent of us and we are not independent of him. Our thinking is God’s thinking. Conversely, God’s thinking is our thinking. Our ego thinking is the thinking of an insane God, God that thinks that he is not one but is in different places.

Hinduism believes that it is Brahman himself, God, who sleeps and dreams and thinks and lives in this world as all of us. To Hinduism, there is one God, Brahman. He has infinite parts, each part is called Atman. In heaven, Brahman and Atman know themselves as one self. On earth, they forget their unity. Each atman thinks that he is different from others. Each jivatman now sees himself as a separated self, as an ego, called Ahankara.

According to Hinduism, the object of religion is to enable us to remember that we are parts of God, and for us to give up our current identification with separated, ego self and return to the awareness of formless and selfless unity. This is accomplished through practicing one or more of the five Yogas explained by Patanjali.

Each person is different, temperamentally. One follows a yoga, religion, that suits ones temperament. The intellectual follows Jnani Yoga and thinks until he comprehends the nature of unity. The emotional type worships God via Bhakti yoga, the typical religion is Bhakti for over 90% of the people are not intellectuals and cannot really think, they belong to Bhakti Yoga. The active type person, Karma yoga, returns to God via philanthropy; the experimental type person returns to God via meditation, raja yoga, the royal yoga where one tunes out the world and unify with God in Samadhi, or as Buddha called it, Nirvana, and Zen Buddhism calls it Satori; the sensual person returns to God through love of his spouse, Tantra yoga.

Hinduism wants people to break through the veil of ego, Mocksha, and attain the awareness of cosmic union, Samadhi. But to get there, one must work out ones past sins, Sansara.

Hinduism believes in karma, the law of cause and effect, and reincarnation hence that it may take many life times to work out ones salvation.

You are saved when you love and forgive all persons. If saved, when you die, you no longer return to this world but stay close to God and enjoy his presence, in what Hinduism calls Bramaloca, which is equivalent to what Christians call heaven.

I spent three years studying Oriental religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Shintoism; I love to share insights from these amazingly sophisticated philosophies of life. Oriental religions are philosophical, whereas the Semitic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are poetic and appeal to our feelings, not to our thinking. Consider that the Rishis, the founders of Hinduism, speculated that the atom is made of three strands, three Gunas: Satva, Raja and Tamas. Modern physics agree that the atom has three parts, electrons, protons and neutrons. One must raise one’s hat for the ancient Indians; they were the world’s best thinkers. No wonder contemporary Asians are smarter than the rest of us; their ancestors used their minds to figure out the nature of reality and passed that habit of thinking to them. The rest of the world mostly emotes when they think that they are thinking.)

The Holy Spirit’s mind enables you to see all people as one with you and asks you to love them all and to forgive them all. If, for one brief second, you love all people, in that brief second, you awaken from this world. When you love and forgive all people, Sister Helen says that you are saved.

What is salvation, deliverance, redemption, healing, atonement, (all mean the same thing)? To be saved is to know that one is one with all people and love them all and forgive them all and see them as innocent.

We live in a perceptual universe. This means that there is a you, and a non-you. You see yourself as apart from other people. You see yourself as different from other people; indeed, you see yourself as unequal with other people; sometimes seeing you as superior to others and at other times as inferior to others.

There must be separation, differences and inequality for there to be perception. Whenever we look with the eyes of the ego we see a separated world.

Into this perceptual field enters the Holy Spirit. His function is to help you see things differently, to see with unified eyes. He wants you to see union rather than separation, to see all people as part of your one self. When you see all creation as one with you, your seeing is said to be purified. Now, you see with Christ vision and have spiritual sight.

What is a miracle? Is it healing physical diseases? To heal physical diseases presumes that body is real. But Sister Helen told us that body is a figment in a dream and is not real. The real disease is to see ones self as separated from other people. Healing and miracle is to change ones perception, from seeing other people as separated from one to seeing them as unified with one, followed with love and forgiveness for all people.

When we see people as separated from us, our mind is sick. When we see people as unified with us, our mind/ thinking is corrected, healed and purified.

A corrected mind, that is, a loving and forgiving person, has met the condition for returning to God. You are, as it were, now at the gate of heaven, but not in heaven yet. Your life on earth is now characterized by peace and happiness. Life is now a happy dream for you, rather than a nightmarish dream. You love all creation and they all love you in return. You now experience life on earth as if a gentle breeze is carrying you along, effortlessly.

To Sister Helen, when you forgive and love all, you momentarily experience what she called the Holy Instant. In it, the temporal world, the world of separation, disappears and you experience the world of union; you return to eternity, to unified state, to heaven and experience yourself as unified with God and all people.

Then you come back to this world of sin, the world of separation, for sin is separation, a mistake. But now you know that union is real, that love is real, that God is real. You become a teacher of union, a teacher of love and a teacher of God.

No son of God can stay permanently in heaven while his brothers are still in hell, that is, on earth. So when one is enlightened to ones true self, is illuminated of the fact that there is only one self and one mind in the universe, that we are all parts of us, one comes back to the world as an Avatar, Buddhavista, teacher of God etc to help those still believing in the illusion that separation is real, to believe that union is the truth.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

God is everywhere, so if he were to punish any one of us, he would be punishing himself. Only an insane God would punish himself, for to punish is to inflict pain and God does not like to inflict pain on himself. God does not punish you, himself.

God, Sister Helen tells us, is not punitive. God does not punish us, no matter what we do on earth, in the dream that has never been dreamed.

To God his Son, you and I, are always innocent, for we have never done what we think that we did, separate from him. All the seeming evils we do on earth are done in a dream and, as such, have not been done. We are, therefore, always guiltless, innocent and holy. We are forever as God created us, unified with him and with each other.

To be in union is to be sinless. To separate from God is to be sinful. Since we have never separated from God, we are in union hence are sinless. We are forever and ever sinless, guiltless and innocent. (The Holy Spirit tells us that the Son of God, all of us, is forever as his father created him, unified with God and all his brothers hence sinless and innocent. Jesus, who completely identified with the Holy Spirit, teaches us the Holy Spirit’s gospel, that the son of God is forever Holy and sinless.

All teachers of God, all prophets, past, present and future teach one message: that the son of God is holy, innocent and guiltless; that he has not done the evil we see him do on earth. What we do on earth are done in a dream hence have not been done.)

But the part of us that thinks that we separated from God and from each other, the part that wants separation, the ego, the separated I, tells us that we are sinful, guilty and deserve to be punished. God does not punish us. The ego punishes us in behalf of God. Without waiting for God to punish us, the ego punishes us; since we are the ego, we punish each other.

Let me try to explain this metaphysics with real life experience. When I first encountered homosexuals and became aware of what they do, put their penises into other men’s anuses, in my eyes, they seemed less than animals, they had no worth whatsoever. I wanted all of them killed, now, not tomorrow. How could they do such bestial thing? God, where is Hitler to corral them and work them to death. Get rid of garbage. I had absolutely no regard for homosexuals. The female variety, lesbians, seemed like dogs licking each other’s filthy genitals. Get rid of these animals from my sight.

At one point, I had an office mate, a Caucasian male. I did not know about his sexual orientation. One day, he invited me to his house for dinner. As I walked in, he introduced a young man as his lover and kissed him. I soon recognized what was going on and felt like I was in the house of sin, Sodom and Gomorrah, and vomited, right there in his house and subsequently left. The next day, I asked him to move out of my office and he did. I did not want to see him for as long as he lived. He simply was a beast, in my eyes.

Prior to the discovery that he was a gay man, I had respect for him. He is a PhD clinical psychologist, and seemed to have a sharp mind in his head. Now, he seemed like nothing, in my eyes. As you can see, I experienced cognitive dissonance. I still know that he is sharp, so how can I dismiss him as nothing? The individual cannot live with cognitive inconsistency for long. He must reconcile his dissonance, one way or another. I could tell myself that he is crazy, that all homosexuals are insane. But that is not true. He is as sane as sane can be. (He has a touch of narcissism, all homosexuals do; they love their bodies and egos. Narcissism is not psychosis, it is a personality disorder. Just about every human being has a personality disorder, so why should a man living in a glass house, like me, point fingers at this brother?)

I began to think about homosexuality, trying to understand it. Whatever you have understood, you tend to forgive and live with. To understand all is to forgive all.

I found heterosexual sex ridiculous but accepted it for procreation only. Beyond procreation, I had no use for sex. I am asexual.

Being me, I read everything there is to read on homosexuality, that I could lay my hands on.

I had at that point not heard of Sister Helen and her philosophy that the world is a dream.

I had just read Sigmund Freud’s analysis of Judge Shreber’s paranoid schizophrenia. Freud thought that all paranoid persons have latent homosexuality and denied it. He was wrong, paranoid persons feel weak and inadequate and homosexuals remind them of their weakness, hence they tend to fear been seen as homosexual. If you make the mistake of making homosexual proposition to a paranoid man, he could attack you for feminizing him, transforming him into a weak, sexual object. Paranoia is a struggle to seem powerful and important and has nothing to do with sex, as Freud thought.

One fine day, the idea that homosexuality is something that happens in a dream entered my thinking. I said to myself: these folks are in a dream of self forgetfulness. They have forgotten their real self, the unified spirit self and imagine themselves as bodies. They then resolve to enjoy their bodies, if what they do can be considered enjoyment. Their acts are dream acts. It has never happened, just as what is done in a dream has not happened. Since dream acts have not happened they must be overlooked. These thoughts came out of nowhere and entered my mind.

Building on those thoughts, I resolved to overlook what seemed to me an idiotic lifestyle. Now I overlook the behavior of homosexuals. I allow them to have their absurd dream. Each of us is having his own dream; all dreams are not real, so shine them all off. What is done in dreams are not deserving of punishment.

God’s children are a defiant lot. They came to this world out of defiance of their father, and while in it will defy anything, including the proper sexual processes. God wills union and we defy him and seek separation. The world came into being as the opposite of God’s will. Separation is the opposite of union. But union is reality and separation is impossible. Therefore, overlook the absurdities of human behavior and your journey through this world would be characterized by peace, which is the same as happiness.

God will not punish homosexuals for they do what they do in dreams. As it is, they are already punishing themselves by destroying their anuses…as they grow old; they usually have feces dripping out of their anuses and have to wear depends, diapers. (Religionists would say that that is the price they pay for their defiance of nature. Every sin has a cost. The wage of sin is death.

The price of separation, which is sin, is to live in this world; to live in this world is to be dead. To live in the presence of God, that is, to be aware that one is unified with all creation, is to be alive.)

Sister Helen teaches that everything done on earth is like actions in dreams and ought to be overlooked. The Son of God remains as his father created him, holy, sanctified, unified and innocent; he merely dreams that he is unholy, separated and does the seeming evils things he does on earth.

Sister Helen tells us that Brother Jesus recognized that what we do on earth is like things done in a dream, hence are nothing, and overlooked them. He forgave what we do on earth for they are equally nonsensical, they are nothing. The world is not worth defending, so the brother overcame the world by not defending it.

By forgiving the world, by not defending its pathways, he awoke from the dream and, as they say, resurrected from death.

To be on earth is to be metaphorically dead. Jesus was dead when he lived on earth, when he lived in body and ego.

Jesus resurrected from death when he recovered awareness of his spirit self.

Did Jesus physically die and resurrect? What a question! To be on earth is to be dead. But death is impossible, so Jesus merely dreamed that he was on earth and was dead. He awakened from the dream of death. He cast off the veil that hid the face of Christ from his perception. He saw the face of Christ in all his brothers and sisters, that is, recognized all of them as unified with him, and in doing so experienced himself as Christ, the one Son of God. God has only One Son.

Jesus rolled the stone away from the sepulcher and walked away. (This is metaphor for saying that this world is a sepulcher, is our grave, and is a place where the son of God comes to seem dead and buried; that the stone is what prevents us from looking out of that grave we placed our selves in. See Plato’s parable of Cave dwellers.)

Sister Helen said that Jesus, while in this world, recognized that while he thought himself apart from God, which he was always one with God. There is no such thing as separation. Only union is real. Sin, that is, separation, does not exist. Death, that is sin/separation, does not exist. There is no death. It is all a dream.

Consider: in our nightly dreams, we see people die, get buried and rot but when we wake up in the morning, we realize that none of that happened. Nobody died.

We merely dream life and death on earth, Sister Helen tells us. The lady, as it were, was consoling us. You see, human beings fear death. Whoever tells them that death is not real tends to appeal to them.

Alas, the good news lady, Helen, developed cancer and died from it. That would seem to invalidate her philosophy, wouldn’t it?

Did she really die or did she play a trick on us and seem to have cancer and died? Was she ever on earth, in the dream? If so, did her dream require her to have cancer and die in the manner that she did, so as to make those still in the dream dismiss her philosophy as sham, and get on with their ego separated existence? Where are you, unified state or separated state? You must answer this question for your self.

(I know the answer to these questions. I will not tell you. And even if I told you, you would not believe it, for you probably are not ready for it. Struggle to find the ANSWER TO THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE. When you are ready for it, it will dawn on you, on its own accord. But you must meet the condition for truth, love, forgiveness and service to all God’s children, for truth to be revealed to you, by your real self. We have one problem, our belief in separation; there is but one solution to our problem, no matter what hue that problem takes: union. To unify is to love, to forgive and to serve all children of God.)

FEAR PREVENTS US FROM DOING WHAT WE WANT TO DO

In the meantime, people on earth would like to do certain things and shrink from doing them because of fear. Fear of harm and fear of death prevents us from living fully. Ultimately, all fear is rooted in fear of death.

Fear of death is rooted in belief that this life is it and that there is no life after death. One never knows whether there is life after death or not. Therefore, I advice you to put metaphysics aside and simply resolve to do whatever you are afraid of doing.

If you experience fear, go ahead and do what you are afraid of doing. Of course, there is such a thing as rational fear, after all some fear is adaptive to the exigencies of this world. If a car careens towards you, it is appropriate to experience fear and run away from it. The type of fear that we need to eliminate is properly called anxiety.

So you are afraid of talking to other people, lest they reject you, eh? Go ahead and talk to them. Let them reject you. Their rejection of you will not be the end of the world. Actually, the chances are that they would not reject you. Like you, they are seeking other peoples acceptance, they too fear rejection hence do not take the initiative to reach others to make friends. (See Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis’ writing on Cognitive Behavior Therapy. These might help you restructure and reorient your thinking; help you believe in yourself and do whatever you are afraid of doing.)

If you reach out and try to make friends, you would find out that most people are dying to be friendly. I am a black man. I used to believe that white folks want to keep to themselves. So I avoided them and kept to myself and to other black folks. Then I reached out to whites and found that they are like me, seeking friends, but held back by the bugaboo of racism and irrational fear.

If you over look color and gender, you can relate to any human being on earth. Fear prevents people from relating to those from so-called other races. Actually, all human beings belong to one race. The idea of race is a misnomer. Genetically, all people, black and white, are 99.9% the same. Human beings belong to the animal species and can procreate with each other.

Fear holds one back from doing whatever one wants to do. Therefore, I tell you, go do whatever you want to do that fear prevents you from doing. Do it and do it now, not tomorrow.

You will always have some residual fear, for fear protects your body and the ego it houses, and is involuntary; fear is built into the body. My ego and body still react to fear as before, but I have learnt to use my cognition, my mentation, my mind, my thinking to overrule it. Use your mind, which is not body but of spirit, to overcome the fears of your body.

I try to walk my talk. I am a very fearful person. As noted, that fear is in my genes. But I have learned to do whatever I am afraid of doing (which would not lead to my death, of course; there is such a thing as rational fears).

I find that in doing so, I have expanded the horizon of my life. Fear had restricted my life and enslaved me into a small corner of the world.

With resolution to do whatever fear asks me not to do, my world has expanded. The entire planet earth is my home. I am born in Africa but the entire world is my home. I feel at home wherever I go, Europe, North America etc. I refuse to permit some territorially aggressive animal to tell me that any part of this world is not my home. If the birds of the air have a right to fly to wherever they want to, I see no reason why I should not live wherever I feel like living at. My home is everywhere and nowhere in particular.

Fear had given me poverty from not trying to do anything in the competitive world. My effort to overcome fear gave me the freedom and ability to roam the world.

In a manner of speaking, I have overcome fear and the body and ego that it protects. Of course, I still live in body and ego and have some residual fear. Any one who completely overcomes fear cannot live in ego, body and this world. I am in this world but not of it.

Actually, I have always wanted to overcome the ego and its body. At first, I did so neurotically. At an early age, I recognized the meaninglessness and purposeless of this world and rejected it. I hated my sickly and over sensitive body and rejected it. Other people seemed even more nonsensical so I rejected them, too.

I embarked on a neurotic trip to change my body, other people and the world. I wanted to change myself into an ego ideal, my body into a perfect body. I used to run, at least, four times a week, five miles at a time. I Swam, rode my bicycle, weight trained, ate sparingly, all in an effort to make my body as good as it could be. (I still exercise and hate to see fat on my frame. But I now exercise for a different reason, health, not escape into idealistic body.)

I wanted to change myself and the world into ideal forms of them. I saw reality as ugly and wanted to transform it into an ideal form of it.

With middle age, age 40, I learnt that reality is what it is, and that one cannot change it. All you can do is try to understand it, through science, and cope with it, through technology. Therefore, I have given up my youthful idealism. I no longer feel the urge to change man and his society.

I wanted to change society into socialist ideals of it. Now, I know that socialism is a pipe dream.

I accept man as he is, competitive; I accept the capitalist economy as the most realistic adaptation to human nature. I accept democracy and the power plays in it. Power plays are realistic adaptation to man’s impersonal environment.

I accept people as they are, competing for power and wealth, each self centered. I accept the world on its terms.

EXISTENTIAL DEPRESSION AND BEYOND

Acceptance of the world, as it is, initially makes one depressed, for it means accepting the ugliness that is this world. This means accepting one’s imperfect self, accepting other people’s imperfect selves and accepting imperfect social institutions. It means giving up the youthful yearning to transform the self, other selves and the institutions of this world into their ideal forms.

Plato is wrong; there are no ideals out there waiting for us to discover and be them. Our earthly reality is imperfect. This imperfect reality must be accepted and dreams of perfectibility of man given up. What is, is, Katie Bryan, a Canadian mystic, wrote. Accept this world on its own terms and seek to understand it through its own terms, science, and adapt to it through realistic terms, technology.

Give up wishful thinking for ideal states. Give up neurosis and psychosis…those are wishes for ideal states.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Sister Helen gave us a metaphysics that negates this world, is idealistic and escapist. If you followed her recommendations, you would not defend yourself and you would die. She said that you would merely re-awaken in unified state, aka heaven. But you do not know that heaven is real. There in lies the rob. She asks you to make what Kierkegaard called a leap of faith and believe that heaven exists.

She is asking for too much. I do not believe in faith; I accept only self evident propositions that I can verify, following the scientific method. I do not ask you to have faith in the unseen.

I ask you to understand the nature of fear, as delineated by science, and do its opposite. Do whatever fear asks you not to do. Do so and then find out if unified state exists or not.

Do not consciously pursue unified state. As Adam Smith pointed out in The Wealth of Nations, those who consciously attempt to serve other people tend to end up not producing wealth and, moreover, tend to become dictatorial; see the former Soviet Union. But when people pursue their self interests, somehow, the blind forces of the market make them produce what the people desire and they wind out serving other people’s interests.

So I ask you to go ahead and do the opposite of whatever fear asks you not to do. If fear tells you not to relate to other people, go ahead and relate to them. If fear tells you not to travel to other parts of the world, defy it and travel to other parts of the world. If fear tells you that you cannot enter any profession, go train for it. Do whatever fear attempts to prevent you from doing and you begin to live fully, happily and in peace. When you live in joy and peace, you are approximating living in union.

Is there another world, other than our present world? If not, why bother reviewing Helen’s metaphysics? Good question. I do not know whether there is another world or not. By nature, I am skeptical, cynical and agnostic. But I have had certain experiences that speak to the existence of another world. Those experiences, unfortunately, are not amenable to scientific verification hence not an acceptable evidence for the existence of another world. Let us then say that one has an open mind in these matters.

I provided a review of metaphysics because I know that man does not live by bread alone. Man searches for meaning in many quarters, one of which is religion. So, I thought it nice to provide some religion. My experience is that to overcome fear, one needs to understand the science of fear. I also think that one needs some hypothesis on metaphysical issues if one is to truly overcome fear.

Human beings have no control over many contingencies that affect their lives and need belief in some sort of God, even if God is an illusion(as Freud said in The Future of an Illusion) to derive a sense of control, albeit fictive control.

Good luck in your effort to understand and over come the fear that prevents you from living fully. I hope that I have been of some use to you? If not, then search elsewhere for help. No other person can save you; only you can save you. What other people can do is show you how they saved themselves and, hopefully, that helps you save yourself. If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. As Buddha himself said, 2500 years ago, discover the Buddha in you, not the Buddha that other people tell you exists.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD

600-1 Avenue, Suite 325

Seattle, Washington 99104

(206) 464-9004

africainstitute@yahoo.com

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In this essay, I consciously chose to expose my own issues. I did so for a reason. Most Africans do not talk about their mental health issues. They do not go to psychotherapists until they decompensate and have to be hospitalized against their will. I have involuntarily placed many of them at Psychiatric Hospitals. They all would like to think that they are psychologically healthy. (There is no such thing as a healthy human being. At best, one is normal, that is, has issues that are not out of control, and is within the norm. Norm means the middle, average; one has issues like the average person but is not healthy. Only extraordinary persons’ like Jesus Christ and Mohammed attained perfect mental health.)

Here are the facts. All middle class Africans and African Americans have mental health issues, ranging from garden verity neurosis, like mine, to serious psychosis (schizophrenia, delusion disorder, mania, depression, organic mental disorders etc). The white man knows this fact and manipulates African leaders’ psychopathologies. Although this is not a clinical/academic paper, let me remind us that the foremost political psychologist of all time, Harold Lasswell, wrote that politics is the arena where individuals act out their personal psychopathologies. Many politicians are sick persons acting out their madness on the political arena. Adolf Hitler felt inordinately inferior and wanted to seem superior and thought that political office would give him that feeling. Political office does not change an inferior feeling person to a superior person. Hitler killed over 50 million persons in his quest for deluded power. African leaders pauperize their people in their misguided quest for narcissistic sense of special-ness. They are not special; they are just ordinary human beings pretending to be special and the sooner they accepted that reality, the better they get on with becoming their people’s servants, not their imaginary masters.

It is psychological sickness to want to be seen as a very important person and to hang unto office for that reason only, as African leaders do. This is called narcissistic personality disorder. Most African leaders have either narcissistic or antisocial personality disorders. (They exploit their people and do not feel guilty and remorseful from doing so.)

It is time the so-called educated African examined his psyche and resolved the inevitable conflicts in it. He is African but he is educated in European ways of life. He experiences cognitive dissonance. He is confused. Africans should learn from me and heal themselves, or continue to be the sick men of the world. Of all people on earth, Africans seem unable to govern themselves; they make a mess of their continent and run to the well ordered societies of the West, where they work as neo-slaves.

An Igbo medical doctor admonished me not to wash my Lenin in public, not to talk about our individual and tribal’ issues in public. That is part of our problem.

A problem must be publicly identified, accepted and solutions sought for it. I wash my Lenin in public to help the superior feeling-inferior feeling Igbo medical doctor to learn the psychological truism that the mark of mental health is perception of one’s self and all human beings, men and women, black and white, as the same and equal, and as worthy of love. We are all members of God’s one family; whoever fancies himself better than other people, as Igbos tend to feel towards other Nigerian groups, and at the individual level, to other Igbos, as the pathetic pathologist, apparently, feels towards me, is a neurotic and is in need of psychotherapy, to help him accept our inherent equality. When a person accepts his equality with all people and works for our common good, he or she tends to feel peaceful and happy.

Peace and joy are the gifts of God. To the extent that you feel peaceful and joyous, you are in the presence of God. If your life or your country’s life is chaotic, as is the case in much of Africa, you have deviated from the presence of God. God is love and those who want to be godly must be loving, forgiving and social interest serving persons.

August 15, 2005

See also, Overcoming the Fear that Holds Africans Down, Part 1