Reason is both the means of liberation and the cause of bondage. Reason has fallen into unreason, into delusion and psychopathology, which is the cause of all suffering. Reason must now be purified of its distortions through its analysis and transmutation of itself.
So we have to use reason and complete the job of self-purifying our minds of that which is irrational.
Three: Reason is the soul of the human being. Reason serves the heart. (OK, reason is the soul, but it must be in the service of the heart. It must serve love—God’s divine love, not an ego. So reason serves the heart.) The heart is the true seat of intelligence. Reason transforms the will of the heart, which is the will of God, into thought and action.
Four: The ego operating system, which falsely identifies the Self with the body, distorts reason and causes it to become ugly. It becomes egoic judgment. It becomes self-justification, pseudo master’s discourse, and irrational behavior. Reason at the soul level reflects the image of divine beauty and works to bring that beauty into life. The Self is beauty itself, but it is too bright to be fully seen by the soul without going blind. So the soul must settle for beautiful immaculate conceptions of reason.
Creativity is the soul’s expression of the heart’s joy at the unfoldment of reason to its full flowering. Destructiveness is the expression of the heart’s pain. When the ego refuses to serve reason, then it is destroyed by the heart’s sadness, which appears as the Lower Death Drive. When the ego’s evil form of thinking and acting becomes generalized, then God must bring an end to the world.
By the way, Lacan’s idea of master’s discourse came from his understanding of that part of Hegel that was discussed in those seminars by Kojève, which was limited to a chapter in The Phenomenology that discussed the master-slave dialectic. So the only aspect of the dialectic that Lacan was interested in was that of the master-slave relationship. And he saw that capitalism produced a master-slave relationship at every level—dominance and submission, labor and management, the bosses and the slaves. The master-slave dialectic is important, but the master’s discourse can only be overcome by the death of the ego. Analytic discourse—that is, an attempt to analyze the false premises of the pseudo-master—is not a sufficient instrument for bringing about that transformation.
We’ll come to understand why that is, and the reason is that it lacks force. It lacks power. OK? What the psychoanalysts discovered, in addition to the necessity of purifying reason to the extent that they did, was that an intersubjective relationship creates a force field. This was also actually in Hegel, at least in a kind of fledgling form. This force field meant that there was a nonverbal influence of the most coherent intelligence present in that relationship that could have a transformative effect by penetrating the defense mechanisms (not at a symbolic level—not linguistically—but at an energetic level), because the force was based on love and the ego’s defenses could ultimately not resist the power of love. So love combined with reason is the instrument, the force, that can free the soul from the ego. But if the analyst is not operating with divine love, then all of his conceptualizations are useless.
This is why Atmanologists must have reached that point where they are functioning out of unconditional love as well as having coherent reason based on the truth of the Atman. If you’re not in that situation, then no matter how much training you get in Atmanology, you won’t be able to function—you won’t be able to perform that act. It has to come out of the liberated heart and mind. If you’re not yet in an Atmanology training program and you want to be in it, recognize that 90% of the training is doing that and you can do it previous to any formal initiation into that, and then the training is very quick. The real obstacle is your own defense against truth and love.
OK, where did I leave off my little excess? That was number four. Sutra five:
Five: God gives the soul freedom and reason. Freedom is the nature of the Self. The soul has the duty to sustain the world as a heavenly realm (in other words, a realm in which there’s unconditional love and it’s sustained by the wisdom (the dharma) of those who manage and guard the social order to keep it free of distortions and negativity and egocentricity. So the soul has the duty to sustain the world as a heavenly realm) but it chooses irrational enjoyment of the sensual dimension of experience rather than reason as its guide. And then the world gradually morphs into a hell realm. (It chooses the thrill of jouissance over the self-restraint of reason.)
Reason is our true conscience, and once the ego disconnects from conscience (which is our moral compass), it falls into ever greater egocentric distortions of logic. These distortions create karma, which organizes the forces of destruction to dominate over those of creativity. Reason must again overcome its egocentricity and become truth-centric.
Six: Since freedom is our nature at every level, the ego demands freedom to behave unreasonably. By seeking freedom through the enslavement of the Real Self and the inflated appropriation of the Self’s authority, the ego sentences itself to torment because it is not at peace with itself and it has to hold off its conscience. It has to become psychopathic, but there’s a torment that is always threatening to come into its consciousness that will destabilize it because it knows it has defiled the world with its rejection of truth and of love and of God. To be free of its misery, the ego must live in unconditional love, which is the command of reason.
All symptoms of suffering result from the making of judgments based on projections, because those judgments are not based on love and all judgments are the refusal to love unconditionally. So this is the ego’s main activity—making judgments—pronouncing judgments on people (and on itself, which creates its own instability). It judges other people for hurting it, for insulting it, for not appreciating it. It judges people for not giving it more attention and for all of the various ways in which the ego feels not fully appreciated.
That anger (that non-acceptance) then turns into self-attack (people cut themselves, they hurt themselves physically and psychologically), hurting others, refusing to function, and becoming either actively aggressive or passively aggressive but internally alienated—judgmental, attacking others in their minds constantly. How many people can relate to any of that? If that isn’t cured, then torment increases.
Only the renunciation of judgment will free the soul from the ego’s torment. This is why religions teach that only God is the judge. It’s not for us to judge: “Judge not lest ye be judged.” In fact, your judgments are always self-judgments, and they create, therefore, negative karmic feedback. The soul (not the ego)—the soul accepts karma as its feedback loop. Therefore, it recognizes that whatever suffering it endured somehow was deserved, somehow was needed, somehow was required for the balance of the universe. Suffering doesn’t come just because people are mean and evil; it comes because this is part of the logic of reality that has to be expressed.
The soul accepts that feedback and engages in the purification of its thinking until reason prevails over narcissistic irrationality. This is the alchemy that transforms suffering into wisdom and love. So, in other words, you have to accept your karma. If you hold a grudge, if you’re still angry, if you have internalized that as anger at yourself, if you’re even blaming yourself for the negative karma, even that is a judgment that must be released. It’s not about feeling guilt and feeling shame. No, that’s also a judgment.
You have to understand the logic of why the ego is suffering, from a state of disinterest in the ego. It’s only when there is disinterest that there is the accurate capacity to evaluate. That’s the difference between law and judgment—disinterest. A judge, even in the juridical field of the state, supposedly is chosen because he’s achieved a state of disinterest; and he has to recuse himself if he has any financial interests with the plaintiff or the defendant—he’s not allowed to take the case, right? He has to at least have that level of disinterest. But he doesn’t have to have psychological disinterest—he doesn’t have to have achieved soul-consciousness. The legal system has failed and has collapsed basically through corruption, but this is how the law of God operates.
So we have to go through the alchemy of the purification of our reason, which means renouncing all judgments. Only then will our intelligence be able to flower.
Seven: The result of freeing the Self of ego is empowered joy. God is revealed to the righteously joyous. The truly joyous are reabsorbed into God, who is then revealed as the Self.
