The Realm of Religion (Post #8 of 8)

In his article, Dr. Warner stated that in order to gain a more complete understanding of the concepts he discussed, “it is necessary to venture beyond the human sciences and philosophy into the domain of religion.” I agree completely. There are several key reasons he outlines for his viewpoint:

1. Because we succumb to temptation and sin (self betray), our personal view of what must be done to correct our course is not sufficient. Neither will the viewpoint of another person be sufficient for us, for they too have sinned. We need an independent witness who can reveal the truth regarding our situation and what must be done to escape it. That witness is the Holy Spirit, or Spirit of truth.
2. Even if the witness of the Spirit of truth enlightens us as to the path we must pursue to change our ways, our power alone is insufficient to fully change our natures. Only the redemptive power of a Savior can provide power sufficient for us to fully repent of our mistakes.
   
3. In order to more completely understand our roles as moral agents we must have revelation from a higher source to enlighten us. Our Creator, who bestowed the gift of agency upon us, is that source.

Only by viewing our natures in the realm of religion can we truly see what it is we are destined to become. Our destiny is to become as the Savior of mankind, Jesus Christ. We are to pattern our lives after His life of compassion and self-forgetfulness. By becoming a person of Christ-like nature, we can become saviors ourselves as we help others overcome their acts of self betrayal.

Conversely, when we refuse to allow the redeeming power of the Savior to change our natures, we reject his act of sacrifice on our behalf. Rather than accepting what is being offered freely to us through the sacrifice of the Lamb, we insist on making others our scapegoats. That is such a stark revelation that it bears repeating. When we reject the sacrifice of the One who willingly suffered for our sakes, we insist on transferring our suffering onto the heads of others. That we do this ought to be evidence enough of the dire need each of us has to be saved from our sins. There’s just no getting around that fact. But too often, in place of the cleansing, healing process that comes through true repentance made possible by the atonement, we seek a “bogus certification of worthiness”, as Dr. Warner calls it, that falsely purports to absolve us of responsibility for our sins.

Dr. Warner ends his article with this inspired insight: “Our ignoble desires are not ultimately derived from an ignoble nature, and our anxieties are not the result of being unable to make ourselves whatever we are striving to be. These desires and anxieties stem from our betrayal of what we really are, from our refusal to love, from an exercise of our agency that ties that agency in knots—in short, from sin. If we’re emotionally troubled, it is not because we were created to be that way but because we have betrayed, perverted, and denied what we were created to be. The condition of our liberation from our unwanted desires and anxieties is our responsiveness, in love, to what others need from us, and to the supreme loving act that makes our love possible.”

Amen to that.

How Do We Stay “Out of the Box” (And Help Others Do the Same)? [Post #7 of 8]

I have found that recognizing the temptation to betray myself and choosing not to betray myself require constant vigilance on my part. An awareness that I have been “in the box” for so much of my life and can easily walk back in during a moment of weakness must stay at the forefront of my mind. I’m hoping that learning to stay “out of the box” is like learning to shoot a basketball was for me—it gets easier with practice. Here are some tips that have helped me in my attempt to avoid self betrayal:

• Recognize the serious nature of self-betrayal. Dr. Warner describes it as “an active crusade of world defilement, conducted in the pretense that we are only doing the best we can to cope with the troubles being dealt to us, but which in fact we ourselves are promoting”.

• Consciously seek to serve others. Follow through on my feelings of compassion toward others.

• Work at creating an atmosphere free from accusing attitudes and evasion.

• Treat others as responsible for their emotional lives, including myself.

• If I still feel that “my parents (or friends, or ex-spouse, etc…) did it to me”, realize I am still colluding with them. What they did to me in the past is no longer the problem; what I am doing in the present is.

• When I find myself in an undesirable emotional state (such as harboring negative feelings toward someone, feeling like I’m helpless or out of control, sinking into despair, or just plain frustrated with life), I stop for a moment and think about why I’m there. I ask myself, “What prompting did I not follow through on that I should have?”. Sometimes the answer is readily apparent, but often finding the answer requires deeper introspection. If I can rectify my failure, I do so. If the opportunity to act has already passed, I commit to follow the prompting next time.

• Understand, as Dr. Warner said, that “if we’re emotionally troubled, it is not because we were created to be that way, but because we have betrayed, perverted, and denied what we were created to be.”

When we stop betraying ourselves it becomes easier for others around us to take stock of their own lives and commit to stop betraying themselves. We can seek to help them in loving ways that will give them the freedom to recognize their problems and overcome them. We can be willing to share their burdens because we no longer carry our own. We can exemplify the very essence of what we are striving to become.

We Must Free Ourselves (Post #6 of 8)

The key to breaking the bonds of self deception lies within us. We are the only ones who can get ourselves “out of the box”. But when we are seeing our experiences through the lenses of false morality, we tend to think we must do something to fix the problem. We try to change the people around us, try to boost our positive self image, try to have “honest” conversations with ourselves and others, and the list goes on. We fail to recognize, however, that our doing while self deceiving is only compounding the problem.

If there’s nothing we can do to fix things, then what is the key? It is to stop what we are doing. Stop betraying ourselves. Stop self deceiving. Stop blaming others. Give up feeling like we are always doing our best to “cope” with others because of their faults. Stop seeing other people as the cause of our problems. Drop our preoccupation with the false self image we have created.

Here’s a scenario from Dr. Warner’s book that illustrates our ability to overcome the temptation to self betray, deceive, and blame:

“My husband and I (Celia) are both writers. We have a baby. Shawn insists without sympathy that I keep the house clean, prepare the meals, stay well-dressed and appealing, and, most of all, keep the baby absolutely quiet during his writing hours. I write during the baby’s afternoon nap if I can, but usually late at night and early in the morning.

“If there is any noise from the baby, Shawn is not patient. He bitingly asks whether I understand the importance of what he is writing or its crucial place in his career or what it means for our future. Until recently tears would well up in my eyes in response to this harshness. Sometimes I would protest that he had no right to speak rudely to me. A quarrel would ensue. But more often I would suffer this sharpness silently and bitterly. I could not understand why I had to suffer when I had done nothing wrong.

“One morning I was doing an assignment on collusion writing a case. I left the bedroom door ajar and the baby toddled out. She was scattering some of Shawn’s pages when he saw her. He began to yell at me. Immediately I felt attacked; I began to burn with resentment and to search my mind for some way I could respond in kind. But all of a sudden I thought, ‘It’s a lie. What I am doing right now is a lie.’ I was doing the very thing that I was imputing to him! My rage just melted. I was filled with compassion toward Shawn for the first time in a long time. In fact, all I could think of in that moment was how I could help my husband.”

A vital factor in altering Celia’s behavior was her recognition of the temptation to betray herself. Because she recognized the temptation she was able to choose to follow her conscience instead of betraying it. As it was with Celia, so it is with us; we hold the key to freeing ourselves from the bondage of self deception.

False Morality Traps (Post #5 of 8)

So far, I’ve discussed how betraying what we know to be right causes us to deceive ourselves into placing the blame for our wrong choices somewhere else. We seek the collusion of others in living a lie we have fabricated. What makes this so difficult to correct is that we aren’t even aware we are doing it. If we do not correct our thinking and accept responsibility for our choices we begin to see the world through a warped set of lenses. These lenses cause us to see our experiences through a false morality that ensnares us in what many see as an inescapable trap. We think it’s inescapable because we’re convinced someone else holds the key, even though the key has always been in our own pocket. We just refuse to acknowledge it’s there.

In his book, Dr. Warner refers to our self deception and the false morality we create as an attitude of being “in the box”. When we are “in the box” toward someone, we fail to see them as a human being with needs and desires just like us. We see them as objects that must be dealt with and protected against in order to preserve ourselves and what we see as rightfully ours. We must avoid getting caught in the traps others are laying for us for their own self preservation.

These traps present us with contradictions that appear to have no morally correct solutions. It’s not that there isn’t a morally correct solution, it’s just that we can’t see it because we refuse to open our eyes to it. We fall into the trap of thinking that there are only two ways to deal with the dilemma that we are convinced is being caused by someone else. One option is to take the morally superior high road and keep our feelings to ourselves. The other option is to “be honest” with ourselves and the other person and place the blame squarely where we see its origin—on them. Some do it in the “brutally honest” way and others dance around the issue in a “socially acceptable” way so as to not offend the other person while placing the blame on them. In short, we are faced with the choice of being either dishonest or unkind. Whichever we choose, we’re convinced that we can’t be held responsible for the choice.

Another false trap we create is a conflict between duty and desire. We feel it’s our duty to be loving, kind, or to help others, but when someone has offended us our desires betray those duties. “How can I be kind to someone who fails to appreciate me? How can I help someone who is trying to harm my career?” Although our conscience tells us how we should be serving others, we feel it is too great a requirement in light of what the other person has done to us. We feel justified in withholding our help. For those of us who aren’t betraying ourselves there is no conflict between duty and desire. We don’t perceive duty as unnecessarily burdensome and therefore don’t resent it.

When seeing through the lenses of self deception, we find ourselves more concerned with being right than with doing right. We feel we are safely within the bounds of societal compliance when we adhere to society’s moral codes. These moral codes, according to Dr. Warner, “specify what honesty, considerateness, and duty will consist of, with the result that everyone is relieved, if they choose to be, of responsibility for their immoral feelings, as long as they outwardly conform to the rules.” Instead of developing a spiritual sensitivity to our promptings of conscience, we are being “nurtured in the ways of hypocrisy.” Rather than yielding our hearts to our feelings, we become obsessed with following rules that let us off the hook.

Once entrenched in our false morality we feel open to attack and tend to interpret situations accusingly and defensively. We feel insecure because we’re obsessed with ourselves and with the false image we have created for ourselves. We are easily offended and have a heightened fear of rejection. Our insecurities prevent us from freely loving others. We are in bondage and we don’t know why.

Collusion: The reciprocal provocation of one another to validate the lie we are living (The blame game) [Post #4 of 8]

In order to completely deflect any responsibility for our actions away from us, we must place blame on someone else. We make ourselves out to be helpless victims to someone else’s unjust manipulation of our lives. But the very act of accusing someone else of our wrongdoing shows who is actually victimizing who. “Victims are victimizers” is how Dr. Warner states it.

When we victimize another person we end up with a result that is the opposite of what we actually want. By blaming another we think we are identifying the cause of our frustrations and we hope that person will change their ways. But our accusations don’t inspire a repentant attitude in our victim, they induce blaming that is directed right back at us. When we see the other person (or people-there can be more than 2) become defensive, we accept that as validation that we are right about our blaming that person. After all, why would they become defensive if our blaming wasn’t hitting close to home? So we hurl more accusations upon our victim. But the other person is feeling the same way about us and gives it right back to us. This blame game then becomes a perpetual cycle, with each participant provoking in the other the very behavior he finds offensive.

Despite finding the other person’s behavior offensive, we find it necessary for them to continue it in order to justify our accusations against them. We focus our efforts on changing their behavior, thinking if we can only fix the other person then our problems will be solved. Their behavior typically worsens as we attempt to force an unwelcome change upon them, which proves to us that we were right about them.

In reality, our deceitful outward concern for the other person’s perceived faults is a perverse attempt to pacify our own guilty conscience. Without a proper understanding of who we really are, it is difficult for our minds to conceive that we can be a person of good moral character, striving to be fair and just, while at the same time exhibiting moral weaknesses that conflict with our knowledge of right and wrong. In a vain attempt to reconcile this puzzling contradiction we convince ourselves that we are indeed fair and just, doing the best we can to cope with the injustices that others heap upon us. We don’t realize that others feel the same way we do and see us as the problem that needs to be fixed. When two willing colluders get together, the blame game has begun!

Self Deception (Post #3 of 8)

Inherent in the act of self betrayal is the willingness to deceive ourselves into thinking that someone or something else prevented us from acting as we know we should have. The moment we accept that lie is synonymous with the moment we betray ourselves. “There’s no possibility of betraying oneself without living a lie” writes Dr. Warner.

The decision to betray ourselves brings with it an arsenal we can use to defend our self deception: rationalization, justification, excuses, and blaming. Add to that the fuel of our emotions and we have a potentially explosive situation. Many of us choose to childishly rationalize our failure to act; some engage in acts of self-disparagement after failing to act; others decide to engage in the act, but with an air of moral superiority. Though different in appearance, all of these behaviors are branches growing out of the same rotten root.

It’s telling that our attempts to justify or rationalize our failure to act (or to act with moral superiority) are actual acknowledgments that we know what we are doing is wrong. Dr. Warner puts it this way: “Someone who is straightforwardly doing what seems to him right will have no cause to excuse or justify himself and someone who isn’t doing what seems to him right shows that he does have such a cause.”

When we seek to absolve ourselves of responsibility for our decisions we must find a scapegoat upon which we can heap blame. In a perverted way, it makes it all the better for us if we find a willing victim. How is it that we seem to succeed so sensationally in our search? I’ll explore this in my next post.

Self Betrayal (Post #2 of 8)

Self betrayal is the root cause of our emotional troubles. Dr. Warner describes this as, “going against our honest feelings of what’s right and wrong for us to do.” In a religious sense, this can be described as “sin”. When we receive a prompting of conscience that we recognize as morally correct, in that moment we obligate ourselves to follow the course of action suggested. In essence, the very recognition of the morally correct idea requires that we follow it. Let me illustrate a simple example:

The other day while driving to my office I approached an intersection with a red traffic light. As I began to slow down I noticed a car ahead of me and to my right that was waiting to exit a gas station and wanted to turn into my lane. At that moment the idea occurred to me to let this car enter in front of me. In the split second I received the prompting, I expected myself to do it. But I didn’t do it. I betrayed myself. Whatever anyone else may have expected me to do in that moment doesn’t really matter, because I expected it of myself.

This may seem like a harmless event on the surface, but our acts of self betrayal can lead to a false view of ourselves and everyone and everything outside of ourselves. This false view of reality taints our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors without our conscious recognition of it. That’s the real kicker-- we’re not aware of what we’re doing. Picture a doctor showing you an X-ray of the tumor in your intestines and you had no idea it was there. No pain, no symptoms, nothing. Once you know what you’re facing you can deal with the problem, but until then, not knowing you have a problem is the problem.

Next I’ll discuss what we do to mask our acts of self betrayal.