Our
dehumanization begins with unreasonable stresses to which we respond with conformity
or compensation. The urge for liberation and release is known to psychologists
as the death instinct. Unfortunately, they fail to explain why people should
will their own deaths.
The
death-wish (the need to be liberated from the prison of the body) begins for us
with the liberation from the inhibition of the conscience. At the end of
life's journey, as the guilt of existence becomes more and more unbearable,
there appears the need to be liberated from the body itself. This, in a
nutshell, is what is known as the death-wish. As people often say, "No one
wants to live forever”. The desire to be "free" from the bonds of conscience
comes from the inclination of the soul to play God.
Were
conscience obeyed and experienced, rather than rejected, there might appear a
very different kind of liberation for the soul, known in religious parlance as
salvation but as it stands, the world is experienced instead and the potential
of your conscience is set aside.
So
we all have a choice; to grow in pride and become a mortal beast or to grow in
some yet unknown way as a real person. These two different experiences produce
totally opposite developments and personalities and through one kind of
experience come forgetfulness of the other. From the experience of pride comes
a shock or trauma and through trauma comes the downward change. A steady diet
of trauma sustains the growth of the changed form.
Failing
has many names and forms. Another word for failing is trauma; to fail in one
sense means to sin. Alterations in identity and form I call compensations but
to compensate is also a form of sin or failing.
Pridefulness,
sin or freedom from conscience is permitted so that we might learn what we
could discover in no other way. Once we have learned the lesson of pain we are
ready to experience the liberation of conscience. Until that day,
"life" remains liberation from conscience, the very last liberation
in a series of sin experiences being death itself. Sin is an emotional
experience through which one separates from God and grows in the forbidden way
of pride.
