Chapter Three
SPIRITUAL FOUNDATIONS
We shall now turn to Bioethical Psychology and its foundations in human spirituality. Bioethical Psychology is a school of spiritual thought that opposes destructivism[1] — that is, destruction. When we speak of bioethics[2] we refer to sustainable development, which means constructive conduct as co-participants in creation, living as agencies that create well-being, concepts, enterprises, capital, joys and transcendence, among other things. It is therefore our conscious decision to take part in constructivism or in destructivism. Likewise, all religious currents seek in their faithful holiness and the perfecting of the being in spirituality, which is very akin to psychology, which seeks inner and interpersonal healing. In the same way, the various religions contain moral precepts, and ethics is the study of morals; the study of religions is therefore an approach to human ethics across human history, and it is an aspect that, besides being highly interesting, leads us to establish the search for what is right and what is wrong in human morality and the establishment of immaterial values, which today brings us to a new proposition: modern bioethics, the ethics of life.
Over the last hundred years the sciences have advanced enormously to the same degree that morals and ethics have declined. Even some religious figures of every faith have acted badly and have sought to make us falter in faith with their scandals of anti-morality; but religion is one thing, spirituality another, ethical and moral conscience another, and the human and the divine another still — and it is spirituality that unites the human with the divine. At times science defies life, and today we are able to manipulate DNA chains, to carry out cloning, to build robots that already appear humanized, to manufacture a highly dangerous artificial intelligence, to conduct experiments in quantum mechanics and subatomic physics that defy matter, to see cyborgs that will soon be half machine and half human, to produce lethal proteins that enter the body and produce deadly viruses, and to operate communication and information networks never before seen. To the above we may add what we have done through indiscriminate logging, pollution from waste and gases, the reification of the human being, social and environmental indifference, genetic and biomedical experiments devoid of any ethics or morals, infanticide (represented by the abortionist factions), hunger among hundreds of thousands of children, the displacement of innocents terrified by war: all of these are practiced examples of how morals and ethics have declined in millions of human beings, frequently in people who proclaim a false spirituality and even among religious figures who promote murder, impalement and stoning.
All of this brings as a consequence the abandonment of the paths of the light of life and of our earliest and most natural truths and virtues — not to mention those who, out of a reckless neurotic need for prestige, recognition or power, engage in scientific practices that come to endanger the individual, the family, society and even humanity itself. Spirituality, represented by the system of personal principles and inner values, strengthens character and helps to adjust the system of the self. For this reason many self-help programs grounded in spirituality are useful, as is Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy or therapy of meaning, since on the one hand it reconciles the system of the ego and on the other it aligns the intrapsychic agencies toward a single objective: life meaning and the life project. Spirituality is a demonstrable path that improves the quality of human life and must be taken into account; moreover, the majority of us in the world are still believers, and Bioethical Psychology, while not a religion, does draw on the principles of several of them, and is a highly spiritual and phenomenological model, deeply humanistic and existential. Being also a psychological and bioethical model, Bioethical Psychology relieves the tensions and conflicts of the ego.
We have witnessed how, over the past thirty or forty years, certain currents of thought have begun to develop, especially in Germany, Great Britain and the northern United States, which have converged in bioethics. This new discipline must be understood as a religion in the sense of venerating life; it is emphasized by living, by giving life and by helping others live, so as to live in accordance with the ethics of life. Times have changed and we require new intellectual tools for coping — from ourselves toward ourselves, and from ourselves toward our surroundings — being fully aware that the Earth, our beloved planet, is alive. On Earth life teems throughout its biosphere and from its innermost core, which is in constant motion. We must care for it from an integral consciousness that includes the spiritual factor.
We may see spirituality as a light that illuminates our darkness and as an intuition, deduction and sensible expression that couples with our processes, both psychological and relational with our surroundings, with the way we perceive ourselves and perceive the world, so as to generate from there a conduct, a spiritual way of life arising from thoughts, emotional rationality and behavior or actions that are coherent toward ourselves and toward our surroundings. In this way spirituality has, for thousands of years, been understood in the sense of inner healing, and must be taken into account for that reason. In healing a person inwardly, spirituality helps us to transcend adversity, to heal above all inner wounds and conflicts — and better still, hand in hand with Bioethical Psychology, which seeks to resignify life, to reconcile us with ourselves and with our surroundings, and to develop a life marked by inner fullness through the development of life meaning with senses of perception and expression toward the ethereal, the sensible and the necessary.
The word bioethics, let us recall, comes from the root bio, “life,” and from ethics, ethos (character/custom), the latter used to signify those human acts that seek to sublimate the good through their deeds. In philosophy it is understood as the study of morals or the reflection that seeks to distinguish between good and evil; in religion it is understood as the contemplation of the soul that allows one to attain the perfect through the just; and in common sense it is the will to act rightly, or right conduct. This right conduct toward life leads us to the sustainable development of ourselves, not only as biological beings but as spiritual beings, seeking the salvation of the most important thing in our life, which is the spiritual component. Teilhard de Chardin[3] (1984) told us well that it is not carnal nature that possesses a spiritual nature, but rather spiritual nature that possesses a carnal nature. What does this mean? That the timeline of the soul is far longer than that of the physical body, and hence the spiritual aspect is far more transcendent than the carnal.
When we speak of the techniques of psycho-spirituality[4] — which emerged roughly between 1870 and 1880 — we must understand what Edmund Husserl proposes, one of the fathers of the phenomenological schools of psychology, who tells us that consciousness of state is one thing and state of consciousness another. Even so, phenomenology — despite the term having been coined at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century — is very ancient, for from the very origins of religion states of consciousness have been dealt with. While some religions began their forays into this field with natural psychedelics and hallucinogens, a search was later undertaken which, though rudimentary, was legitimate.
As set out earlier, the state of consciousness refers to the state of alertness, even when the person is in a coma, in stupor, in mental confusion or in obnubilation, but working from certain perceptual mechanisms available for becoming aware of one’s surroundings[5]. When we come to consciousness of state we must refer to the great inquiries of certain psychologists of the Soviet era, who tell us that consciousness is produced by an inner language[6] — a language that runs through the deepest part of ourselves, such that we could not speak of consciousness without that inner language within each of us, and without mental pictures bearing representations and emotional meanings produced from the sensible impression, from the intuition and deduction applied to that impression and, indeed, from the behavioral expression of what is perceived through senses that are no longer physical but of consciousness.
Within the hermeneutic sciences, the foregoing translates into making the subjective objective through an inner language of words, inner phrases and mental images that represent meanings and are, in Jung’s words, archetypes. Spirituality is not as subjective as many claim, for we see tangible results in the conscious realm. So much so that we do not see magnetism, yet we do see when a magnet attracts iron filings; we do not see electricity, but we see when a bulb or an electric motor comes on; we do not see temperature, yet we do feel cold or heat; and the same happens to us with light: we do not see it, but we see where it is reflected.
We must be supremely aware that spirituality is something that exists, and in speaking of psycho-spiritual techniques we must refer to the great searches of the human being. Mental health, for instance, was for millennia in the hands of precisely those religious and spiritual processes (Hothersall, 1997, p. 32). In the time of the Greeks these philosophical movements began, and the modern psychological schools split off from the earliest philosophers — but that does not mean we are going to forget our spiritual ancestors.
To understand the importance of the whole spiritual background we must refer to the great religions and how they affect our spirituality positively or negatively. Religion[7] must be seen as the rails of a railway: the locomotive without rails does nothing, and the rails without a locomotive become something useless and wearing. Spirituality is therefore that locomotive; it is that particular inner movement of each one of us. Religions — whose substance is conviction in a doctrine — undoubtedly mark out paths in the conduct of the individual and of the collective that professes them. They are routes that people have laid down in an attempt to draw closer to God or to their spiritual component. Behind many of them we find teachings pertaining to the ethical, the moral and the spiritual, and for that reason we are going to review them. We thus find that all of them develop an ethical and disciplinary code and promote in their faithful obedience and a sense of consequence per se by involving a negative reinforcement, seen as punishment or as some kind of karma within an eschatological cosmological vision — which is to say that after death the soul continues and may suffer consequences according to its acts. Indeed, in all religions the figure is represented whereby, if we act well in life, life will treat us well, and if we act badly there will be a karma, or a hell, or reincarnation as a lesser being. In the same way, religions are routes that posit this law of cause and effect according to our own actions, and how we shall receive, according to our acts in life, consequences after death — which generates greater internal censure and control by making us feel our physical, moral and spiritual integrity to be under threat.
These routes end up producing a sensible expression in our consciousness, moved by a healthy fear that guides our conduct along a spiritual path or road — that is, along a behavioral path. Psychologically, therefore, they are behavioral doctrines, so that in the end we act not out of fear but out of love for a law (deep conviction) and out of the development of healthy conduct, whether by self-determination or by arriving at the deep collective conviction that produces a synergistic effect which occasionally spills over into religious fanaticism, which is already an extreme. True spirituality requires us to be free and not driven by a sociocentric fundamentalism, common among certain faithful and spiritual guides who feel themselves the owners of an absolute truth.
Religions, all of them, are approaches that have managed to organize entire communities through the teachings of some enlightened figure. Like everything else, they have evolved since some human being had the first spiritual cognition and according to how that same person went on to influence human morality and, from there, human psychology — even though the word “psychology” had not yet appeared. Religions must be regarded as the founding stones in the construction of modern morality, ethics and psychology. The spiritual world is seen by the principal religions as a sensible form of light and clarity within consciousness, and from this consciousness, through the study and application of the teachings of their founders (who are called sages, prophets or enlightened ones), sacrifice, fasting, offerings and self-renunciation gained strength until an entire methodology and a way of life full of laws and moral codes were consolidated. In this way the level of light in consciousness is raised; that is, there is greater clarity and discernment regarding the truths of the world and a capacity to establish what is right and what is wrong, what proceeds from the good spirit or from the evil spirit. Often this occurred under the influence of powerful hallucinogenic brews, and the accounts of the world beyond came from accounts of the world of dreams and from those who had crossed the threshold of the line of death and returned. Thus a world of apparent fantasy became real, since behind the fantasy there was evidence — evidence of healing, of the resolution of conflicts and of moral authority.
To understand spiritual psychology and what religion produces psychologically in the human being, and stepping outside the magical and supernatural sphere, one must understand the substance that unites all religions: the concepts of law, morality and justice. Let us recall that in antiquity the priests administered justice and issued laws before the concept of law and of criminal and civil justice existed. Religions are thus founded on the concepts of law, justice and punishment, and they generate fear in the people — the fear of failing, the fear of a punishment that is first human and that will later lead to punishment or consequence in the beyond (the concept of a life in the beyond is common to the most important religions).
Religious beliefs become a significant source for nourishing our agent of internal censure, which issues our own moral judgments and verdicts upon ourselves, on the basis of the belief that we must adapt to moral norms that nourish the superego. In reality, those norms also come from a personal ethics and from the concept of living within legality, bound to a healthy fear that delimits and marks out the right path. This, as Jean Piaget proposed — the father of developmental psychology and of learning and child-rearing patterns — points to the generation (largely autochthonous or autogenous) of moral judgments in the child. In this way we must understand spirituality as a faculty for mastering our will and an ability to distinguish good from evil, so as not to confuse them or take evil for good or good for evil, and so that this intentionality is not propelled by the impulses of the pursuit of carnal pleasure.
Legitimate spirituality, independently of religion, produces self-mastery and produces moral hygiene per se. Religion, for its part, once it separated from the impulse of magic and psychedelic journeys, found itself, discovering ethical codes and developing specific rites in each tradition — meditation, prayer, offerings and sacrifices (renunciations) — in an effort to bring consciousness to a state of fullness, peace, contemplation and inner enjoyment, marking out, from a healthy fear, a specific path according to the religion under study. One of the principles of spirituality lies in sustaining oneself on a path of ethical and moral ascent, one that travels through forgiveness and heals guilt and pain, both one’s own and others’, deeply moved by a healthy fear of wounding, of failing, and of failing oneself and one’s social and environmental surroundings. For this reason, Bioethical Psychology is the first school of psychology to promote the spiritual relationship not only with oneself or with the social environment, but including the spiritual relationship with the environmental factor, with a profound sense of consequence; and it teaches us to travel through or surf our emotions in a coherent, sensible, proactive and purposeful manner. Hence it seeks the harmonious sustainability of the being, occupying itself with itself while occupying a socio-cultural and environmental place; Bioethical Psychology seeks and delivers a true ethics (not a false morality), and produces social, spiritual and environmental consciousness.
In this way, all religions pursue the mastery of the will, the development of the virtues and, in truth, they attempt to define the truths of the deepest part of our being, our existence and our transcendence, describing that which defines us as spiritual entities that even exist without space, travel without speed and move between our pasts and futures. They grant us a present time in which one exists and one is in space, time and energy, moving with intentionality, meaning, direction and with the purpose of saving that which never dies: the human soul and spirit.
Religions begin to establish either a collective consciousness or a Higher Being as the source of will, of virtue and of truth — that is, of energy or pure and powerful force, which is love, and of the modulation, transformation and synchronization of this force, which is virtue — always conducted through truth, so that they may exist and be. Although everything can exist, one only is in time, space and energy; what is true requires these three existential vectors in order to exist and to be within existence. Matter is energy, space is the extension produced so as to be occupied by energy and by time, and time is the distance that separates the past from the future. Consequently, a dynamic particle is generated that moves forward and is present time, which is true in space and energy in the here and now and is not in what was, nor in what will be.
What is true is true light, and light sustains space so that it may be occupied by time and energy. Light gives space to time so that the distance separating what was from what will be may occur; light gives form to what is true so that existence may occur. For that reason God is considered to be light, and everything is held to have been made by the light of God. In the book of Genesis we are told that God, by word, made light as the origin of everything — a something so that that something might move through time, occupy a space and be in a cosmic body. And that in that cosmic body the human might be, and from and within that same body the spiritual seed that is consciousness was to be sown, under a providence or divine plan whereby the universe would be and would be the dwelling of life — this within a plan of God, which is the evolutionary plan, purpose or postulate. So came life, and in life thought, the impulse toward the sublime and the ethereal, ordered intention, and the appearance of love and virtue in the human being, which arose in the heart (soul) and in the consciousness of the human being. This was not by mere coincidence but by the laws of cause and effect: nothing appears just because; rather, all of this required a prior intentionality to trace out and occupy everything that is.
Light traced, the force of love occupied, and virtue modulated the force of love so as to overcome the initial chaos, for God did all of this in order also to dwell in the universe He created. God is in everything, but He only is in those who dispose their truth, their virtue and their love toward Him and toward their social and environmental surroundings. That is the grace of connecting our consciousness with the light (truth), virtue and will (love) of God. At some point in the evolutionary purpose God sowed consciousness among the beings who began to act with truth, with virtue and with love. With consciousness, God grafted the human spirit and soul onto life: the spirit with the essence of truth and light, the soul with the essence of will and love, and consciousness between these two dynamic and eternal entities.
These ethereal essences, according to Jung, are well represented by the unconscious contents he terms archetypes. Viktor Frankl too alludes to the fact that we all possess a spiritual unconscious which, while it may be inactive, comes to arise spontaneously in dreams, visions or imaginings that emanate spontaneously and, in a related way, in multiple beliefs. What some hallucinogenic drugs do, for example, is not to produce or create these hallucinations but rather to draw back a curtain where the unconscious surfaces into the conscious as a result of such consumption. Even so, without any need for drugs these contents are accessed in a more authentic and legitimate way through meditation, prayer and the contemplative states developed in many religions.
The roots of the great religions, which definitively seek to delimit the conduct of their faithful in order to please the gods (or a single God) or to achieve the development of a path of inner perfection, have helped to nourish morality and hope and, through them, the quality of inner life — as we have observed and as multiple studies support. We know that there are currently some 7 to 8 billion people in the world (Worldometer, 2021). With nearly 5.7 billion believers and practitioners (Pew Research Center, 2012), the largest religions[8] sink their roots into the seeds that produced two great strains which arose barely 100 years apart some 3,700 years ago. Thus were born the seeds of the paleo-Babylonian religion and of the Vedic religion, which grew, matured and flourished until they became the great living religions of today, namely: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Brahmanism, Confucianism and Taoism, which we shall set out briefly further on. This tells us that some 1.1 billion people, representing 16% of humanity (Pew Research Center, 2012, p. 24), fall among the factions of Australian, African and American aboriginal beliefs, pantheists, atheists, agnostics and gnostics — still today decidedly minorities[9].
Among these minorities we find pantheism, deism, agnosticism, gnosticism and atheism. In all these subgroups of people we may find morality, seen as goodness and benignity arising from inner probity, and ethics, conceived as right conduct in our works; we also see that the senses of consciousness can flourish in a developed and free manner. In the light of Bioethical Psychology and of modern bioethics, some of these senses may come to be undermined since, as in the case of many believers, their conduct affects the sustainability of the social and environmental setting. For this reason it is essential that, rather than professing a religion or believing or not believing in God, our conduct should obey the perception, intuition and sensible expression of our consciousness, and be reflected in good and benign acts toward ourselves and toward our surroundings. Always, of course, within a framework of deep respect for divergent beliefs, all of them united by ethical and moral conscience in one manner or another.
Pantheism is a philosophical doctrine in which the universe, nature and God are equivalent (Bogdanski et al., 2014). The word comes from the Greek pan, “all,” and theos, “God.” The term first appeared in the work of Joseph Raphson in 1697. Pantheism does not posit God as an entity, and its conception is that everything that exists — natural laws, the existence of life and the universe — is the sum of all that was, is and will be, and God is the whole, hence its name. For pantheists the universe and its totality are God, but God is neither person nor entity.
According to pantheism there is no transcendent reality; what exists is immanent, or that which remains, and is in itself. Divinity is understood rather as a “principle of the world,” identifiable in the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, for whom the divine is present in the totality of things (Mondolfo, p. 164) and, at the same time, is identical with the world and with beings in their entirety. This thinking is also present in the worldview of Giordano Bruno, a worldview that may well be understood as an “atheistic pantheism” with certain specific traits of “panpsychism”; in Giordano Bruno’s work we find his fundamental ideas about natural reality. One general form or scheme of the universe is what is called the “soul of the world,” whose preponderant faculty is a complete and universal intellect that fills all things and illuminates all things. Matter constitutes the second principle of nature, by which the totality of things is formed. The aspects of beings may change, vary or diverge, but it is always the same matter that sustains itself and endures beneath the external transformations.
In the modern era the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza is considered the clearest example of pantheism, constituting the model for later pantheisms, because for him everything is in God, and the supreme Being is confused neither with the world nor with the totality of its modes. Thus, in Spinozist metaphysics, pantheism is interpreted as something materialist, or as a pantheism that annuls the freedom and the personality of God, reducing Him to a mere object incapable of relating to the world.
The term gnosticism comes from the Greek gnosis, “knowledge,” and refers to a set of philosophical-religious currents that blended with Christianity in the first three centuries AD. It is a dualist belief: good against evil, spirit against matter, the supreme being against the devil, spirit and soul against the carnal body.
According to this belief, initiates are not saved by faith in forgiveness through the sacrifice of Christ, but are saved through gnosis, or introspective knowledge of the divine, which is a knowledge superior to faith. Faith alone and the death of Christ are not enough for salvation: the human being is autonomous and must save himself.
Agnosticism — a, “without,” and gnosis, “knowledge” — holds that “truth” values, especially those referring to the existence or non-existence of God, are unknown and therefore inherently unknowable. The British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley coined the word agnostic in 1869. Since Huxley created the term, many thinkers have written extensively on the subject. Nevertheless, several thinkers and works of antiquity had already promoted agnostic viewpoints, including the agnosticism of the fifth-century BC Indian philosopher Sanjaya Belatthaputta regarding the existence of life beyond death and reincarnations. They do not, however, see God as an entity, and as an idea they present Him as something unknowable, hence the name — even though they consider a universal consciousness that might precariously come to be. Agnosticism does not conceive of God as an entity nor relate Him to any identity. This way of thinking is very ancient, although the name is recent. There are the cases of the fifth-century BC Greek philosopher Protagoras, and of the Hymn of Creation from the sacred Indian text the Rig-Veda, probably composed between 1500 BC and 1200 BC, concerning the origin of the universe. That is, they neither deny nor affirm the existence of God on the basis of knowledge, and for that reason certain philosophical-spiritual currents may come to be regarded as agnostic and do not contemplate God in creation, as is the case with pantheism.
Atheism is the rejection of the belief that any deity exists. In a narrower definition, the term atheist comes etymologically from the Latin atheus and this from the Greek a-theos, meaning “without god,” and it was initially employed pejoratively to refer to those who rejected the gods worshipped by their society. Atheism denies everything relating to God as entity and as person, rejecting the idea of God and, in the most radical cases, the existence of the spiritual world. Kant presents God as an idea; this idea takes shape until it presents the necessity of the immortality of the soul and of a creator — not as a mere subjectivity of man to satisfy his fears and dreads in the face of death or of a finite life (as the early psychoanalysts present it), but as a reality necessary in order to account for creation, as an intelligent response by a creator, in which the created soul moves toward perfection and is therefore immortal and transcends beyond the death of the flesh. Plato presents God as an entity that governs over the world of ideas, and therefore, once conceived — even if only as an idea — that idea already exists. God therefore already exists in the world of ideas. Even so, atheists deny this concept.
Bioethical Psychology presents God as creative divinity and shows His existence as, indeed, the entity that most fully is — that is, the one possessing the greatest existential foundation, being the absolute present in the eternal transcendent. Moreover, for atheists this idea of God (even though the idea itself exists by virtue of already being an idea) belongs to the world of superstition. Historically, the concepts of God and of the spiritual world seem to have begun under the influence of certain hallucinogens more than 5,000 years ago. In the midst of that world, something was found that afforded a real connection with the spiritual world, and the legitimate search for this world within our own consciousness began — a consciousness that some atheists also deny. Believers, by contrast, affirm that spirituality and God are a presence which, besides being thought and perceived in the ethereal, is felt, and this is already a clear dimension of reality.
Likewise, ever since the human being began to find evidence of strange things that occur after death, primitive peoples in almost every culture took up the arts of invoking the spirits of the dead and came to believe that something existed that transcended beyond death; this idea of the spirit is present in almost all cultures, both extinct ones and those that endure to this day. For this reason, it comes to be believed that spirituality arises spontaneously within the human being — not solely as a need to satisfy his fears and his finite life, but as a connection with the immaterial world that comes to be felt and that affords sensations of peace, hope and inner fullness. For many philosophers, entry into this spiritual world can be determined by fear, conviction, pain or guilt; and so all these emotions, which are unpleasant and produce suffering, come to be overcome or alleviated by way of the mystical, for more than dogmas, religions or beliefs, mysticism involves the affective and emotional body of the human being when, out of love, truth and virtue, he decides to transcend adversity. Likewise, true spirituality is always associated with a deep mysticism that translates into a life of joy amid adversity and into achieving enthusiasm for the particularities of a deep and meaningful life. It is precisely from this that the word enthusiasm comes: from en theos, in God.
The capacity for connection with this ethereal world, invisible to the eyes of the flesh, is produced from the pineal gland, which is responsible for being able to give a dimension of existence to the immaterial. Studies that have been carried out indicate that people with a high degree of spirituality stimulate and register greater activity in this gland, which as far back as Descartes was believed to be responsible for providing contact with the immaterial or spiritual world.
On the other hand, groups of atheistic people may be classified, according to their internal psychology, into six (6) basic fundamental groups, in accordance with what has been observed over more than 30 years. The first group is made up of people who do not have adequate development of the pineal gland. A second group of atheists, represented in accordance with what Gordon Allport proposed, holds that the relationship with the father and relationships with authority figures are an unconscious referent for the relationship with God. In this way, the second group is related to a difficult and tormented childhood with respect to parental figures, in which the person, in childhood, was a victim of abandonment, or of the tyrannizing of the bond and of repressive authorities. Thus the psychoanalytic origin of this group’s atheism lies in a difficult relationship with the father, in which situations arise that are very hard to accept, or that are not accepted and are repressed, creating an unconscious response of not believing in God as father, as creator, or as a good and just entity.
The third group of atheists is represented by people who suffered and were the victims of great social injustices, and who therefore developed a series of unresolved resentments that have led them not to believe in a universal justice. In this way they develop, from their own perception of justice (whether distorted or not), a conduct of anarchy that tends toward rebellion against anything that signifies authority.
The fourth group of atheists is represented by people who in their pre-adolescence and adolescence suffered a crisis in their self-esteem. As an unconscious response, and in order to shore up their self-esteem, they develop their belief in non-belief as an incitement to rescue their own self-esteem so as to level their ego, as an unconscious process of protecting their ego and their self.
A fifth group is represented by people who possess within themselves something censurable or condemnable before the dogma they profess. The solution to the internal conflict is the annihilation of their belief in God.
And a final group, which we call pure atheism, is that in which the person, free of the psychological representations set out above, develops a firm, non-casuistic conviction concerning creation. This type of atheist possesses a worldview and is independent of any kind of inner distress, attributing the universe and all that is created to chance. This individual believes that nature made itself through the process of evolution, forgetting the laws of physics according to which nothing can only produce nothing; that the universe is a something that did not appear of itself out of nothing; that there was an originating something that obeyed a prior intentionality, ordered, calculated beforehand, with predictable results, and that upon this life originated.
Everything that exists is in time, exists in space and is in energy, which stands radically opposed to the worldview according to which creation requires a creator. It is frequent among people that at the beginning of the study of science they find no need for a creator; even so, the greatest men of science, as they themselves affirm, have found God: “at the first sip from the glass of science I denied God, but as I went on drinking, I found Him at the bottom of the glass.” Such is the case with great names in physics such as Albert Einstein, father of the theory of relativity; Isaac Newton, father of the theory of gravity; Niels Bohr, father of atomic physics; Max Planck, father of quantum physics; Francis Collins, father of the discovery and organization of the Human Genome; and great figures of philosophy such as Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and even Immanuel Kant himself. Even so, in this last group a moral conscience is usually to be found; moral conscience is not an exclusive marker of believers, nor does atheism signify a lack or loss of moral conscience. Spirituality and religion, when they are legitimate and constitute an authentic process of true morality, tend to produce and preserve ethics, moral conscience and, indeed, aesthetics (sensitivity to the beauty of the ethereal, in this case).
Within the concepts of unconscious contents, Carl Jung proposes to us the existence of a spiritual unconscious, namely the archetypes, which are a series of mental constructs that nourish the imagination, the ideas and the concepts relating to spirituality and which, in turn, form part of the collective unconscious. This is why we find so many similarities in the most primordial representations within the concepts of spirituality. This concept is reinforced by Viktor Frankl in proposing that all human beings possess an existential logos, which is spiritual and is found in everyone deep in the unconscious. For this reason, spirituality unveils these contents. We propose that, even though drugs are certainly not needed and are dangerous to use, the effect of some of them (psychedelics and hallucinogens) is to produce some kind of mystical journey. These effects, similar in many people, draw back a curtain so that the unconscious enters the conscious, and for that reason in this type of journey a mystical experience of a religious and spiritual order is found; that is why these drugs have been called entheogenic psychomimetic substances. It is worth adding that these states of consciousness altered by substances do not produce legitimate states of sublime consciousness, but simply run through or exist within the unconscious. These states of elevated consciousness must be sought through a full mind and a drug-free consciousness, so that the potential of consciousness may be authentic and not the product of an altered mind.
Thus we see that everything has been the product of evolution, ever since God sowed the first spiritual seed of faith within human consciousness, which has been developing within that same evolutionary purpose; and the time will come when all those who believe in a true light, a true love and a true virtue will unite their beliefs, when the sacred scriptures will be rewritten giving room to every current, and when we shall finally look upon and treat one another as what we are: brothers and sisters, children of one same father who is God, and children of one same mother who is Mother Earth, whom we must care for and also venerate. There are, then, only two great roots from which all the great religions of today spring.
Along these lines, we shall review the two great roots of today’s religions, with their worldviews, their morality and their ethics. We shall likewise review how these strengthen immaterial consciousness and moral conscience, and become the engine of the necessary internal censure and condemnation in order to counteract the principle of pleasure for pleasure’s sake and to guide conduct under a personal, collective and social ethics.
THE PRINCIPAL ETHICAL-RELIGIOUS CURRENTS
THE NEAR EAST
From the paleo-Babylonian, Sumerian and Babylonian religions to the Abrahamic religions
Between the basins of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers stands Mesopotamian mythology. Within it are the Sumerians: Sumerian religion refers to the cosmology and rites of Sumerian civilization, An (or Anu) being the most important god of the Sumerian pantheon. Sumerian religion had repercussions throughout Mesopotamian mythology, surviving in the mythologies and religions of the Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians; later the Chaldeans and Babylonians arose, and from it split the religions of Abraham and, from there, those called Abrahamic (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). The Amorite or paleo-Babylonian religion (18th century BC) is the oldest; like the proto-religions, it is sustained by divination, magic and a rudimentary theism. From the Neo-Babylonian or Chaldean empire (7th century BC) comes the epic of the hero Gilgamesh, contemplated in what is called the Babylonian Gemara, which, although based on the highly celestial adventures of this epic hero, narrates a social ethics and contemplates appraisals of justice and social conscience — for example, in stating that personal wealth should have a limit so that with the surplus the most needy may be helped: this would be a social capitalism. Later, the Persians worshipped the god Marduk and applied the concept of immortality in their religion.
The Chaldean religion turns out to be the basis of Judaism and Christianity in the mountains of Mount Hebron (which means “common”), and it was there that, step by step, through cultural and mercantile transit, Buddhist beliefs (from the 4th century BC), Hindu beliefs (from the 7th century BC), Jewish beliefs (from the 17th century BC), Persian beliefs (6th century BC) and Babylonian beliefs (from the 17th century BC) came together. Let us recall that the scriptures indicate that Abraham, the father of Judaism, in the seventeenth century before Christ, undertook a pilgrimage driven by famine from Ur to Canaan and finally settled in Hebron, in pursuit of the promised land; there, with his tribes, he founded Ur-ushalem, the new Ur, or the Jerusalem of our times.
Both Abraham and his brother Lot came from the Chaldean peoples and became the first worshippers of a single God. They wandered, disillusioned with their peoples of origin, ravaged by hunger and by the harshness of their travels through the deserts, when they received revelations about a promised land. Abraham and Lot were patriarchs, with servants, livestock and tribes who followed them as leaders and lords. These two patriarchs and lords of herds parted ways along different roads, since they considered it impossible to continue along a single road, for in doing so they would not manage to feed all their peoples or their flocks. Thus they separated, one to the left and the other to the right. Lot arrived in Sodom, where once again the representation of divine punishment upon wicked and arrogant men arose, as with the expulsion from paradise, the universal flood and the confusion of tongues at Babel. In this way Abraham went in pursuit of the promised land while Lot witnessed the destruction of Sodom, a city characterized by extreme lust. Here the figure of punishment continues to strengthen the element of censure and moral judgment which, in one way or another, all religions have contributed to fortifying. It begins with the expulsion from paradise for eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; then the universal flood on account of wickedness and selfishness, or what we might call Cainism; then the confusion of tongues on account of men’s pretension to be like gods in the episode of the tower of Babel; and here we come to the fourth documented punishment of God upon men according to the Judeo-Christian tradition: the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which came about through lust, for these Sodomites wished to copulate even with the angels and with the servants of Lot, Abraham’s brother.
According to the scriptures, Abraham was a descendant in the tenth generation of Noah — the patriarch of the universal flood and of the ark. Noah was the father of Shem, and from him arose the Semitic religions (Jews and Arabs) or the Abrahamic religions, whose root lies in Abraham, such as Judaism (7th century BC), which refers specifically to the region of Judea. From there also arose Christianity (1st century AD) and Islam (4th century AD), which were the first religions to consider monotheism. All three are alive to this day and arose from a single seed: from the departure from Chaldea with its pilgrimage toward the promised land, and from the monotheistic faith of Abraham; and for this reason they are called the Abrahamic religions, which are Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Judaism and the Semitic religions
We can go back to Noah within a faction of the Amorites long before the eighteenth century BC, for he was very probably the protagonist of the very flood alluded to in the paleo-Babylonian accounts. The city of Ur of the Chaldees was founded much later; from it Abraham set out in search of the promised land, and it was Abraham who was the father of these religions that arose from his roots, themselves descended from the Amorites and the Chaldeans. Judaism is the first religion to arise from monotheistic beliefs and from the covenants of father Abraham, father of Isaac, and Isaac father of Jacob or Jez-Rael, from which comes the name Israel. From Israel there arose in turn the 12 tribes, from which, a good deal later during the exile in Egypt, Moses appeared, who for the first time revealed the name of God as Yahweh, meaning “I am who I am” or “he who is.” Moses is greatly venerated as the one who built the ark of the covenant, one of the most mysterious objects and most sought after by humanity. These are the patterns of the Jewish people, in a religion characterized by the fervent belief of numerous human beings who were granted the gift of prophecy, and by being the religion of the wealthy shepherds and merchants. With Moses, deep conviction in faith, obedience and the law is progressively injected into the religion, since he expands the law of the famous Decalogue into hundreds of laws that become complete moral codes dictating how to live.
Judaism goes back some two millennia BC in Canaan, part of present-day Israel, and comprises a belief system closed around its doctrines, rites and customs, which produce a rather strict religious regime in terms of what people may and may not do, including with regard to the taking of food, since the meat of certain animals is prohibited. The Tanakh is the Jewish Bible; in it is told the history of the Hebrew people, or people of Mount Hebron. Its fostering of conscience is based on the books of the Psalms, which are an exaltation of God and supplications for protection, and on the books of Proverbs and of Wisdom, attributed by some to the authorship of King Solomon and of Ben Sirach; these texts are grounded in the fostering of wisdom and the fear of God as the beginning of wisdom, and they gather numerous aspects of common sense and practical advice for living. Its most important part is the Torah, whose first five books include the laws and the Ten Commandments[10] that God revealed to Moses. These five books are called the Pentateuch by Christians, since both Jews and Christians share several sacred books, so that the Christian religion has very deep roots in Judaism, which in turn narrates the history of the chosen people and the promise of the coming of the chosen one.
Judaism may be seen as a disciplinary code (an ethics grounded in discipline) replete with laws and with great punishments for those who fail to comply, which generated conscience through the fear of God as the beginning of wisdom, more than through adoration and conviction, and driven by the law of retaliation (“an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”), a practice in the administration of justice also common in some factions of the Hindu religion. There the miracles begin to be represented — few within written Jewish history — based on the actions of Moses, of the prophet Elijah and of Elisha.
Several tribes or sects stand out, such as the Hasideans and the Essenes, who were characterized, like the Buddhist monks, by renunciation of the world and by sacrifices. After Jesus there arose the primitive Church, in which all of them — Jesus as well as the apostles and the disciples — were Jews; they were persecuted unto death until the time of the emperor Constantine, and thus arose Catholicism, or the universal religion, by its etymological meaning. Later were born the Orthodox churches and then the great number of Christian and evangelical currents that protest against the authority of the Pope, which are alive to this day, such as Lutheranism, the Baptists and the Anglicans. Among these churches, Emerson’s work in the nineteenth century is worth highlighting for its psycho-spiritual approach. Judaism has been characterized as a religion of constant persecutions, struggles and internal divisions from time immemorial — with the Persians, the Assyrians and the Egyptians, among other peoples. This religion managed to stay alive through the oppression of the Roman Empire and persecution by the Muslims, until the Jews lost their land and were left wandering across hundreds of countries; they are known as the Jews of the diaspora, although many of them, shortly after the Second World War, managed to gather once again in their Holy Land, or State of Israel. Although there are several religious states, above all within Islam, the Jewish religion is the only one that has a state of its own, as is the case with Israel.
Christianity
Within Christianity we find a great many religious movements that have arisen from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was born approximately in the year 753 from the founding of Rome[11], into a family of carpenters. At that time carpentry was highly esteemed, for those devoted to this trade built the houses, the boats for fishing, the utensils and the furniture. Together with his brothers, Jesus was raised in his father’s workshop, that of the well-known Saint Joseph (Jesus had step-brothers). Saint Joseph was a widower with several children when he married Mary, another supremely significant figure within Christianity.
The teachings of Jesus are represented by very simple language conveyed through parables, hyperboles, paradigms and in his celebrated Sermon on the Mount. Something that made him unique were the numerous miracles of healing and the many mysteries that surrounded his life, death and resurrection, which were attributed to his grace. The word of Jesus was extremely important, for he had been born within a political panorama that was the height of the Roman Empire; in the time of Jesus the entire Mediterranean region, including Judea, was dominated by the Romans. Although at that time the Roman Empire held political power, the Romans respected the religious beliefs of the dominated peoples so as not to stir up further problems. Amid that domination there arose a great many Jewish movements that wished to eradicate the political and military power of the Empire, and they saw Jesus as a leader who might promote that end.
In that era the Jewish religion had several factions. Jesus was born within the faction of the tribe of Judah, and all twelve of his apostles were Jews like him; scholars affirm that the apostles followed Jesus as their master. Besides the apostles, Jesus had a discipleship of 40 people, among them women and men and several people who were members of the highest religious ecclesiastical power and were members of the Sanhedrin[12], such as Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea.
From its very founding, the Jewish religion has been characterized by promoting wealth, a life of luxury and a certain social discrimination. For that reason, Jesus generated a religion for the poor. If we study carefully his most celebrated discourse, the Sermon on the Mount (Reina Valera, 1960, Matthew 5:1–7), Jesus speaks in it of a series of hopeful promises for poor people and for the humble, and clear guidelines of conduct and behavior are to be found there. Jesus was thus the first to begin creating a religion with a high social content, of equality, of equity, of justice — and they killed him for fear of a revolt. For his time, his teachings were novel and revolutionary against the established order, even though he was respectful of political power. In his teachings, which are very simple, Jesus speaks in parables, as in the parable of the Sower, in which he alludes to the fact that the word of God is life, life in abundance, and that we must abide in it and not merely hear it.
Likewise, Jesus speaks a good deal about himself, calling himself the way that unites the father with the children, the gate of the sheepfold, the truth and the life; we may understand this as a call to abide on paths of love, of life, of truth and of renunciation of selfishness, always with love of neighbor in mind. Jesus calls upon his believers to be like salt, preserving the social group of believers against the corruption of the world, and he points to the importance of believing God and life rather than believing the world when he says “be part of the world, but do not belong to it.” The word of Jesus has a profound sense of psycho-spirituality and of phenomenology.
Jesus began to generate a series of guidelines against hypocrisy or false morality, and he always spoke in literary figures: for example, he alludes to conscience, calling it “the eye.” We see this in “if your eye is clean your whole body will shine”[13]. He even said, “And why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, and do not notice the beam that is in you? What are you doing looking at the speck in another’s eye and not looking at the beam in your own?” (Biblia Latinoamericana [BLA], Matthew 7:3). We can simply replace the word “eye” with “conscience,” and it gives us a coherent sense that may still be valid today.
When Jesus speaks of morality he alludes to leaven, which is what swells and infuses the whole dough, making it fit for use. The same occurs when in his discourses he speaks to his disciples about salt — that is, that believers are called to preserve morality and to set aside the double standard or hypocrisy, which he attacks strongly. His doctrine therefore promotes true morality, hygiene and probity in thinking, in feeling, in loving and in acting; it opposes hatred in all its forms and opposes waging war among ourselves. Jesus calls himself by various names such as “the bread of life”[14] or “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” (BLA, John 14:6), or “I am the water of life; whoever drinks of me will never thirst,” because it is the first religion that began to promote life, life in abundance, and it presents itself as the way of truth and of life — that is, the way of the moral virtues grounded in love of self and of neighbor; and it raises the faithful in the Jewish religion from the condition of servants to that of children of God, which will allow a far clearer fraternity. Jesus refers to God as his father, saying that he and God are one, and he promises and explains that there is a kingdom in the heavens where we may all go according to our works, and that there is likewise a place of torments, represented in his words by Gehenna, hell, where the most wicked go.
In Christian doctrine, Jesus presents a monotheistic and trinitarian God; he no longer proposes Him as a God of armies, warlike and implacable, but as a loving and merciful father. Moreover, he underscores the importance of living in communion with Him through works, for he reiterates that works justify faith, and that faith does not justify works. This leads to the conclusion that his teaching promotes right conduct toward one’s neighbor. In manifesting active and responsible love toward one’s neighbor and toward oneself, with emphasis on helping the less fortunate, Jesus sums up the Decalogue of Moses in a single commandment: to love oneself and to love one’s neighbor.
All these teachings are accompanied by a life full of miracles and mysteries. Thus we see the turning of water into wine (BLA, John 2), the multiplication of the fishes (BLA, Mark 6:34–44), the transfiguration (BLA, Matthew 17) which, according to the scriptures, were things that people witnessed, the most outstanding being his resurrection (BLA, Matthew 28:1–10). The historical evidence of the resurrection is clear: the body of Jesus was never found. Likewise, there is a series of transcendent aspects within the revelations of Jesus Christ, such as his promise of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth (BLA, John 14:15–21), the manifestation of God to human beings through a spirit that teaches the truth; this is a central part of his teaching.
When Jesus made his sacrifice and died on the cross, in a manner that coincided across all the religions of the world known at that time, animal sacrifices and human sacrifices gradually ceased. This leads us to think that there is a highly spiritual background behind the story of Jesus, in that the supreme sacrifice, according to Christians, was imposed over all other sacrifices, with Jesus placing great emphasis on replacing offerings with gifts to the poor, the sick, the widows — that is, to the most needy. Rather than presenting himself as a reformer of the Jewish religion, Jesus presents himself as a fulfiller of the law who elaborates a new covenant or alliance between men and God. That is why, after his death, Christianity was born, separating from Judaism. According to what is stipulated in the Gospels, to the Christian religion (which is the most numerous) are added all the factions that branch off from this belief.
The Roman army and Roman political power began to persecute unto death a small church, a church reduced to very few people, and even so it survived. How a small group of unarmed people managed to survive against tens of thousands of fully armed Roman centurions, with intelligence battalions, is attributed to something supernatural. Many were tortured, stoned, crucified, and not even then did they renounce their faith; they are known as the Christian martyrs, displaying a superhuman resilience.
On another note, we have the figure of Saint Paul; although we know him by that name, he was in fact Saul of Tarsus, a Roman centurion who commanded a century, that is, 100 men. While Saul was traveling on the road to Damascus with the aim of capturing and killing Peter, he encountered the already risen Jesus in the form of light. Then the former persecutor of the primitive church was converted (BLA, Acts 9), and would become one of the principal bulwarks within Christianity. Saint Paul was formed as a Roman of the Jewish religion within the most rigorous military, political and religious teachings. It was precisely Paul who went from persecutor to persecuted; it was Paul who wrote several of the letters represented in the gospels[15], letters through which he called for conversion by way of the control of carnal passions, generating a great spiritual conscience. In the end, Paul too died violently, beheaded by Nero, but without renouncing his faith.
With very few exceptions, all the apostles and many of the disciples who knew Jesus bore witness to the miracles he performed and died violently without renouncing their faith. They were roasted on grills, boiled in oil, thrown from heights, crucified; and not even in the cruellest form imaginable could the Roman Empire prevail against the strength of a church that was born with Christ. Today his church numbers nearly 2.4 billion faithful worldwide, counting the Christian factions such as the Protestants, the Orthodox, the Adventists, the Anglicans and the Catholics, who follow the gospels or books about Jesus.
Christianity thus bases its teachings on four gospels, three of them authored by people who knew Jesus directly: John, Matthew and Mark. The gospel of Luke was written later, because Luke was a disciple of the disciples of Jesus. The gospels narrate the history and life of Jesus.
Within the Christian religion there is an ethical content, a moral content and a psychological content for freeing us from the oppression we feel within ourselves, and there is also a fostering of Christian morality through virtue. Over time we begin to see a church with ever greater power and ever more faithful. When the emperor Constantine came, as has been set out earlier, all the religions and methodologies copied from the Greeks were left behind, the Christian religion was adopted as the official one, and it was given the name of the Catholic religion, which means universal.
Within the word of Jesus there is life: it holds a great sense of charity, of solidarity with one’s neighbor, of helping the needy, and there his word of love of neighbor and love of self is consolidated. Jesus represented the first time that an enlightened figure or a prophet spoke of the importance of love of neighbor, because in earlier times there existed a series of rather egocentric and selfish behaviors among the faithful. Indeed, historically and ancestrally, religions themselves were associated with the most privileged castes. Jesus, by contrast, began to make a religion for the people; it was not a populist content but a vision with a high social sense that invited human beings to be good, charitable and supportive toward the most needy, as we see in the parable of the Good Samaritan (BLA, Luke 10:25–37), which refers to the great sense of solidarity that, unfortunately, is not practiced by many who devote themselves to receiving enormous sums of money in tithes and do not help their neighbor.
We have another series of substantial parables that teach us how human conduct should be. As the word says, “by their works you will know them” (BLA, Matthew 7:15), pointing to how we are inwardly and to the importance of leading a clean, dignified life and of constantly improving our inner values in a process of inner transformation, or metanoia. That is, the religion of Jesus Christ leads us to a process of inner transformation and to the generation of consciousness; without being the only religion that proposes inner change or transformation, it does rest on a unifying experience of God with man, who disposes his will to receive the grace of God, represented by gifts and fruits that come from a supreme trinity formed by the Father (love or will), by the Holy Spirit (truth or light), and by the Son (virtue and life) which, in one single God, presents the world as a creation of man and invites us to be part of the world without belonging to it. That is, we must believe life and God, but not believe in the corruption of the world, because when we believe the world we immediately belong to it.
Upon his departure, Jesus proposes as his legacy that those who so wish, opening their hearts, will receive the spirit of God to help them act well in life and be deserving of a full life after death since, in all its factions, Christianity holds that there is life after death, that the soul outlasts the physical body and transcends. Thus Jesus promises a kingdom of peace, joy and fullness, summing up the law of the prophets of the Old Testament in a single commandment which is not an imposition as the Ten Commandments of Moses are, and he sums them up in one alone: “you shall love the Lord your God with all your strength, with all your spirit, with all your soul and with all your heart, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Reina Valera, 1960, Luke 10:27). Jesus stresses that God’s mercy extends also to sinners who venture to believe in the grace of God. Of great relevance too is how Jesus alludes to leaven as that which makes the bread dough fit — referring to values and to morality when he says that we must be like salt, which means preserving values and above all morality — that which keeps conscience far from corruption.
It was the emperor Constantine who declared this persecuted and oppressed religion the official religion of the Roman Empire, leaving behind the Roman pantheon of gods headed by Jupiter, the Roman equivalent of the Greeks’ Zeus, in an evident act of copying on the part of Roman religion. For that reason, and for the sake of brevity, we shall refer to it as the Greco-Roman religion. Thus what for the Roman Empire had been its religion, its mythology and its customs were from that moment declared pagan, with their vast mythological representation of god-men. From Greco-Roman mythology a whole array of human psychopathologies is expressed, presenting the gods more as humans than as divinities, with emotional, personal and family conflicts, which relate them directly to the overcoming of personal odysseys, to resilience and to self-determination.
Roman mythology was produced from the Greek, which preceded it, since the Romans adopted the practice of worshipping their pantheon of 12 gods, who turned out to be the same as those of the Greek pantheon, with changed names and a few altered aspects. The Roman Jupiter is equivalent to the Greek Zeus and is found throughout their mythology, even in certain words that survive to this day, in literary figures present in Greek works such as the Odyssey to refer to something very difficult, represented in the adventures of Odysseus or Ulysses. We see the figures of the siren songs, the dreams of Icarus, and words such as “herculean,” “nymph” and “muse,” among so many others that today form part of our vocabulary and are figures from their mythology; this allows us to see that both religions and mythologies have exerted cultural influence on all of us and up to our own day. Greek mythology was based on the divinations of pythonesses and soothsayers from their oracles, and it had a highly resilient substance in teaching how their very gods suffered and transcended their pains. Such is the story of Hercules who, betrayed and the victim of intrigues, drew prodigious strength from within himself to accomplish his twelve celestial labors, promoting a culture driven by aesthetics, both toward the material and toward the immaterial (morality and the virtues) — which we might call an aesthetic ethics.
Within the whole Christian quest we find the biblical gifts of the Holy Spirit. The first of these is wisdom. Wisdom is a verb, an action of the human being that can be placed before all other verbs. We cannot speak of wisdom merely as practical knowledge: wisdom is where truth or light, virtue and love converge; that is, they are findings of these truths that seek life and “life in abundance.” Wisdom is closely bound to practical and profound knowledge, and being an action or a verb, knowing is the way we handle our knowledge with simplicity, with a spirit of life or love and transcendence. That is when we begin to apply the golden rule described in Peter Singer’s A Companion to Ethics (2004), the golden rule of Jesus Christ, the law of love: “do unto your neighbor as you would have done unto you” (Midgley, 2004, p. 38), which varies somewhat depending on the passage or the evangelist, but is in essence the same: to love God, to love oneself and to love one’s neighbor (love: intrapersonal, interpersonal and transpersonal).
When we begin to understand the depth of wisdom, we must truly seek our own sustainable development: the sustainability of our being, of our life, of our family, which affords us a morality and an ethics. With the practical application of these gifts of the Holy Spirit, we find that the second gift is counsel; according to Christian tradition, this means hearing the voice of God in our conscience so as to provide from it the criterion, the good sense and the soundness for acting well. This is directly related to the senses we have been proposing in Bioethical Psychology, which split off from consciousness through a sensible intuition and deduction concerning the ethereal, and through the expression, from this sensible intuition, toward a development of our conduct that leads us to act well, with a good heart and with benignity, from that inner language: an intrapersonal language that allows us to be useful, purposeful and proactive particles within the evolutionary purpose, and to project ourselves toward our surroundings in a benign and healthy relationship.
We come to the third gift, the intelligences, among which are analytical intelligence, emotional intelligence, social, affective and spiritual intelligence. The fourth gift is fortitude, which today we call resilience in psychology. We understand resilience as the importance of temperance, of self-mastery, of fortitude; in this way we can understand what that spirit of transcendence is in order to be able to pass “through” our own difficulties, making use of our own will and of this inner resource that is the gift of fortitude: fortitude to endure, transcendence to pass through, and the capacity to recover quickly from what is traumatic and difficult.
We come to the gift of knowledge, which is understood (by tradition) as all knowledge that provides and seeks life. This gift comes from on high and, like all the gifts, is breathed in; to awaken the gifts it is enough to desire them and to dispose oneself fully through self-renunciation. The sixth is the gift of the healthy fear of God. In this regard, we find in Proverbs that this gift is the beginning of all wisdom (BLA, Proverbs 1:7). Further still, in the Johannine letters we find a maxim telling us that “we no longer move out of fear, but out of love for the law, out of love for God” (BLA, 1 John 4:18) — that is, it is when we begin to act no longer out of a behaviorist philosophy (out of fear of punishment or because we are going to suffer), but rather out of love for the law, out of absolute conviction. We find many behaviorist religions grounded in fear and punishment, in deep obedience, such as the Muslim religion. Nevertheless, we must understand that love for the law and love for life truly bring about acting out of conviction, and that from that conviction arises this inner language that seeks the development of consciousness, as Bioethical Psychology proposes to us.
Lastly, we come to the gift of piety. Many people come to understand piety solely as professing some faith, praying, being in prayer or believing blindly in God. In reality, piety means being good toward one’s neighbor and good toward creation. From this seventh gift the different consciousnesses are truly generated: from charity and benignity are generated consciousnesses such as the individual, the social, the family and the ecological, by generating a responsible commitment toward ourselves and toward our surroundings. These consciousnesses have been proposed by the Indostanic cultures and religions and seek a belonging to creation in wise coexistence.
Islam
One of the great monotheistic religions of the world is Islam, which was born in the seventh century AD in Arabia, in an Arabic-speaking area inhabited by polytheistic Bedouins. Islam arose from Muhammad, a political, religious and military leader, who began his preaching of monotheism and of a life “pleasing to God,” and who at first professed a return to radical Judaism. Later his preaching was refined until it formed a separate religion, grounded in the pursuit of sin; for this reason Muhammad had to go into exile before leading the first outline of an Islamic state in Mecca. As soon as he managed to impose himself upon the various Arab tribes that were scattered across the region and were an easy military target to overcome, Muhammad succeeded in consolidating his religion as the most widespread on the Arabian peninsula; under his influence and leadership, the leader initiated a Muslim expansion that would last nine centuries. In Arabic, the word Islam means “submission, surrender to God.” The word derives from the Arabic verb aslama: to accept, to surrender or to submit.
While still a child, Muhammad was orphaned of both father and mother, so his upbringing fell to his grandfather, who was a merchant. When his grandfather died, and while still very young, Muhammad was adopted by his uncle, who was also a merchant and undertook long trading journeys. In this way Muhammad acquired Jewish and Christian beliefs, for cultural exchange was very significant on these commercial journeys. As a young man, Muhammad worked as an assistant in the caravans, becoming very popular and well regarded among his acquaintances, who called him amin in Arabic, “faithful.” On a journey to Syria he met a “Nestorian” friar who practiced “Nestorianism,” devised by Nestorius (Patriarch of Constantinople), a preacher of the division of Jesus Christ into two persons, the divine and the human, who initiated him into the Old Testament (Castellet et al., p. 11, n.d.). Thus Muhammad became a fervent believer in Judaism, in Abraham and in the prophets.
Muhammad then married a very wealthy widow with whom he began to work; he had several wives and by them several daughters, among whom Fatima stood out. Muhammad began his preaching to his family after secluding himself in a cave for several days, where he stated that the archangel Gabriel had appeared to him in dreams and visions, through which he gave him the revelations and instructions for building a new religion.
Muhammad began to preach when he was between 30 and 40 years old: his first preaching was in AD 615. He presented his revelation, his truth, as irrefutable and of absolute validity. The central point was the foundation of monotheism and of the most ancient inquiries that posit it in the idea of “the end of the world” and “the final judgment,” where all men living and dead must answer before Allah (the good will be rewarded, the wicked punished), highlighting paradise, where the good go (Castellet et al., p. 12, n.d.). On the human plane, Muhammad required an ethical life, the practice of prayer, almsgiving, care for orphans and the poor, renunciation of the “goods of this world,” the suppression of tribal or national privileges and the “equality of men before Allah.” These ideas had already been formulated by Judaism and Christianity, with a predominance of the latter.
Muhammad’s preaching arose in a setting of numerous nomadic tribes of polytheistic beliefs, whom this leader persuaded — including through the use of force — to believe in Allah (which means father). The expansion was incredibly rapid and was due in large part to Muhammad’s remarkable leadership as a religious, political and military leader. Muhammad was a figure of incomparable greatness and personality in his time; beyond whether or not one shares his preaching, he had an enormous suggestive force that drew prominent figures of his era, turning them into his followers (Castellet et al., p. 14, n.d.). Muhammad’s thought influences great masses to this day in ethical, political and religious matters, with an enormous present-day influence in Arabic-speaking countries, India, and a few small pockets in China.
In the prophet’s time, tensions among the tribes were very strong, and they lived in permanent combat over territories for grazing their herds. In the midst of these skirmishes over pasture, Muhammad created a small army and imposed the expansion of a religious, political and military state that took on ever greater dimensions until, a few years later, it attained great splendor, coming to produce notable men of science such as Averroes in mathematics and Al-Khwarizmi, creator of algebra, and had an incredible influence on literature and the sciences. From there come our Arabic numerals (from 0 to 9) and the decimal system, and thus an extraordinary economic impulse was produced in the region out of the harmony between religion and science. Active centers were established from which Arab-Semitic culture expanded, and Arabia became a great center of cultural and commercial exchange between East and West. It all arose from Muhammad’s exile from Mecca to Medina: from there he began to consolidate his empire, whose first caliph was his son-in-law and by whose orders the first Qur’an was written, based on Muhammad’s teachings — which is all the more admirable given that the leader could neither read nor write. It is worth highlighting that it has been shown that Muhammad’s teachings were very beautiful and profound and that the Qur’an was later written with more political and civil than spiritual interests; it comes to be believed that for this reason there was manipulation in the present-day scriptures, as also occurred with the Christian gospels and the Jewish writings.
In Muhammad’s time, Mecca was a center of idolatry and corruption where idols were worshipped and sacrifices were made, with moral decadence prevailing. In the face of that licentiousness, Muhammad preached monotheism and the practice of a life pleasing to God. He was not heeded but persecuted, yet he found his first adherents within his own family (Castellet et al., p. 12, n.d.). Then ordinary people joined (including slaves), although adherents from the aristocracy were later added. His doctrine spread slowly, but without pause. When the opponents in Mecca saw that Muhammad was attracting new followers day after day, they became exasperated and, being unable to tolerate any new religion capable of harming their interests, they gathered and agreed upon the death of the prophet. Muhammad had no knowledge of the plot until the conspirators were already surrounding his house; nevertheless, he was able to slip out in the middle of the night in the company of his friend Abu Bakr, and set out for the city of Medina. Abu Bakr later became his father-in-law, being the father of Aisha, Muhammad’s favorite wife. On 16 July of the year 621 Muhammad, aged 52, and his Muslim group from Mecca fled the persecution to which they were subject and emigrated to the neighboring city of Medina. For this reason, that year has been called by Muslims “the year of the flight,” migration or Hijra. 16 July of the year 621 marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar.
Initially Muhammad was not considered the founder of a new religion, but the restorer of the religion of Abraham. Islam is a monotheistic religion, the third in the world, and it testifies that: “There is no god but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God.” According to its theologians, it is the “culmination of the religions” and, consequently, Muhammad is the last of the prophets sent by God (Castellet et al., p. 10, n.d.). Islam accepts as principal prophets Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Solomon and Jesus.
Allah is the same god as for Jews and Christians, but Islam insists on the radical unity of Al-Lah, one alone and without different entities, as occurs with the Christian Trinity. As in Judaism and Christianity, Muslims admit the existence of angels and allude to the Islamic view of epistemology: not all things can be known through the human senses, nor can we limit the field of existence to what our senses perceive.
The Muslim also believes in the angels of God as purely spiritual and splendid beings, whose nature requires neither food, nor drink, nor sleep. Angels have no physical desires of any kind nor material needs; they spend their days and nights in the service of God. They are many, and each is assigned a certain duty. If we cannot see the angels with our eyes, that does not necessarily deny their real existence. Belief in angels originates in the Islamic principle that knowledge and truth are not entirely limited to sensory knowledge alone, or to sense perception.
Islamic philosophy and Christian philosophy agree in a certain way because both are theistic and share some biblical roots; both affirm the supernatural and miracles; both, too, use faith and reason to support their religious beliefs. Muslims inclined toward reflection would agree that “belief in angels originates in the Islamic principle that knowledge and truth are not entirely limited to sensory knowledge alone, or to sense perception.” Most philosophers defend the idea that God is a Necessary Being (a being that cannot not exist) and that the world depends on God for its existence (All About World View, n.d.).
For example, the cosmological argument is the one that proceeds from creation to a Creator; it argues a posteriori, proceeding from effect to cause, and is based on the principle of causality. This principle establishes that every event has a cause, or that everything that begins has a cause. The Kalam argument (Arabic, meaning “eternal”) is a horizontal (linear) form of the cosmological argument. The universe is not eternal, so it must have had a Cause. God must be regarded as that Cause. This argument has a long and venerable history among Islamic philosophers such as Al-Farabi, Al-Ghazali and Avicenna. Some Scholastic philosophers also employed it, especially Saint Bonaventure.
Belief in a final judgment is fundamental in Islam, which requires an implicit belief in life after death. Muslims further affirm the physical resurrection of the dead (although they deny that Jesus died and was resurrected). “Do you not see that God, Who created the heavens and the earth . . . is able to give life to the dead? Yes, indeed He has power over all things” (Qur’an 46:33). And he [the unbeliever] makes comparisons for Us, and forgets his own origin and Creation: “He says: ‘Who can give Life to (dry) bones and (even) to those that have decomposed?’ Say: ‘He will give them Life, He who created them the first time! For He is well versed in every kind of creation'” (36:78–79). Muslims affirm the occurrence of miracles and the existence of supernatural beings, cited explicitly in the Qur’an, both the miracles of Moses (7:106–107) (7:116–118) and those of Jesus (5:113).
Muhammad died on 8 June 632 at the age of 61 and left no male children. Only one of his daughters survived, Fatima, one of the cardinal women of Islam. His son-in-law was Ali (in Arabic Sidi Ali), from whom the first caliphates or Caliphs began, transcendent figures in Islam. Muhammad was buried in the house of the woman who was then his favorite wife, Aisha (Castellet et al., p. 14, n.d.).
From those years a great history has been traversed, one that has even generated certain divisions among the factions of Islam, from the most fundamentalist to the Muslims most open to the Western world — who, when all is said and done, as in all religions alive to this day, become agents for nourishing our own agents of internal censure and for fostering consciousnesses which, indeed, must be adapted to the needs and characteristics of an ever more computerized world, a world with different needs that requires an even broader consciousness more attuned to our present times, without forgetting the importance of ethics and morality.
THE FAR EAST
From the Vedic religions to Buddhism and the Indostanic religions
Vedism, Brahmanism and Hinduism
In the basins of the Ganges river arose Vedism, Brahmanism and Hinduism, Brahmanism being the bridge between ancient Vedism (15th century BC) and present-day Hinduism. In Vedism the worship of elements such as fire and rivers begins, along with the worship of heroic gods such as Indra, to whom mantras were sung and sacrifices dedicated. The Brahmin priests performed highly solemn rituals for warriors, merchants and landowners (the wealthy). People prayed for abundance of wealth, rain, cattle, children, long lives and an eternal life in the celestial world of the ancestors.
Brahmanism is a religion of transition between the Vedic religion (which ended in the 6th century BC) and the Hindu religion, and it began around the 3rd century AD and continues to our own day through a progressive change, which made it possible to leave Vedism and enter a Brahmanism based on the scriptures composed in the following centuries. The Brahmanic religion comes to be the same as the Vedic religion, based on the ritual consumption of soma, a hallucinogenic drug, and on animal sacrifices, as indicated by the oldest text of Indian literature, from the middle of the second millennium BC, the Rig-Veda.
Hinduism is a theistic, polytheistic religion originating in India. It lacks a structured and homogeneous system of beliefs, but within it the following of the sacred texts, the Vedas, and of certain norms of conduct (an ethics of respect for the social caste system) is fundamental, as is the following of a ritual and a marital ethics. Furthermore, Hinduism is characterized by belief in reincarnation and in the existence of a supreme Being who is Brahma, as the zenith of all the hundreds of deities with which its beliefs are adorned, in whom the soul of man merges and dissolves when it is freed from the body through death and manages to leave behind its karma.
Hindu beliefs include that actions and the consequences of those actions are karma. Reincarnation, or the cycle of births and deaths, is named samsara. Hindus even hold the belief of reincarnating in animals as a cycle of perfection, a belief also taken up by Buddhism, and they have several types of yoga for attaining spiritual liberation (which they call moksha), and the four aims of man: 1. Religion, ethics and duties (dharma); 2. Prosperity and work (artha); 3. Satisfaction of desires and passions (kama); and 4. Spiritual salvation (moksha).
In the Hindu religions an ethics or right conduct is likewise pursued according to their own beliefs or according to the meanings they grant to their realities. Among their books are the Vedas and the ancient appendices of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Hinduism pursues an ethics by proposing a balance between our passions and our spiritual salvation, as well as obedience and veneration toward the ancestral writings. Being the oldest religion, it is the least elaborate with regard to the generation of substantial content in psycho-spirituality. One of its merits is yoga, which pursues a harmonious existence, or ordinal sense (order and harmony).
Confucianism
The basins of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers and their tributaries, associated with Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, produced great teachings in the East. Confucianism was founded on the teachings of Confucius (Kung Fu Tzu), 551–479 BC, who regarded himself as a transmitter of the values and theology of the wise forebears.
Confucianism is a philosophical system with ritual, moral and religious applications, and is based on a conservatism of following the guidelines and respect for the ancestors, and of generating consciousness of the fundamental values of respect, honesty, humility, courtesy, family and social harmony, and kindness. Confucianism centers on human values; it might be understood as a social and humanistic ethics that recovers the veneration of inner values and good customs, and promotes the senses of belonging (social affiliation) and of property (the treasuring and conservation of values or patrimony, both moral and material).
Taoism
Taoism was founded by Lao Tzu in the 7th century BC. It was a philosophical school that synthesized the concepts of Yin-Yang (contrasts) and seeks to produce consciousness of order and harmony with one’s surroundings. Taoism has a diffuse concept of the immortality of the soul: the fundamental objective of Taoists is to attain harmony with the tao (the way) and immortality. Sometimes the latter is not understood literally, but as longevity in fullness. In the same way, this religion affirms that people who live in harmony attract harmony, that order brings order, and that those who live in such harmony with nature are immortal.
The ancient form of Taoism was that of a philosophical current and not a religion, and later the Tao was deified as a god. They interpreted immortality as the fact of self-improvement and of a long life, which implies seeking improvement and social and personal progress, in accordance with the constant changes that Taoism teaches. From the laws of the Tao we recover the permanent search for order and harmony both within oneself and in one’s surroundings, in pursuit of the development of a great ordinal sense (harmony and order), and of the progress of ethics in values.
Buddhism
Buddhism originated in India between the 6th and 4th centuries BC. It was born of Vedic Brahmanism and spread toward East Asia. It is a non-theistic philosophical and spiritual doctrine; fundamentally, Buddhism renders contemplation toward the study of its texts, the following of moral principles, renunciation of the material, the practice of meditation, the cultivation of wisdom, the presence of suffering as an innate condition of the human being, and the attainment of kindness and compassion. Additionally, Buddhism contemplates the immortality of the spirit as a transcendence toward a heaven, but does not contemplate a God, but rather a well-being after the death of the flesh.
This religion comes to develop from Nepal and is founded on four truths: 1. The truth of suffering: suffering in all its forms (pain, sorrow, affliction, anguish, stress) is inherent to existence in the world; 2. The truth of the origin of suffering: desire produces attachment, that is, sexual desire, the desire for existence and the desire for non-existence; 3. The truth of extinction: upon determining the cause of the distress comes the total cessation of that same desire, whereby its effect ceases; and 4. The truth of the path: it leads to the cessation of suffering and is achieved through the “noble path” or eightfold path. This is divided into three main sections: wisdom or discernment, morality or virtue, and concentration. The eightfold path is based on right understanding, thought, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and right concentration.
As such, Buddhism is also regarded as a spiritual philosophical current, like Taoism (acting with a sense of order) and Confucianism (acting with a sense of harmony and respect). However, although it is more elaborate (it includes more elements), Buddhism lacks the figure of a central god and the concept of transcendence represented by the figure of “nirvana,” which translates as extinguishing. Buddhism is the extinction of worldly desire in favor of a transcendent desire toward the right path of inner perfection, and it also uses the term karma to refer to an invisible and transcendent energy generated according to our good or bad acts. Karma is shared with the Hindu or Indostanic religions that we shall see below. In Buddhism too a right conduct toward perfection is proposed, and it goes hand in hand chiefly with the transpersonal sense or self-transcendence; it develops intrapersonal ethics and is the first to include distinctly psycho-spiritual aspects by involving an emotional management and a transcendence out of suffering. This philosophy is existentialist and is not theistic, even though the followers of Gautama Buddha raised him to the condition of divinity.
From the Babylonian Gemara, passing through the right conduct of the epic hero Gilgamesh, Hermes Trismegistus or Zoroaster himself, and through the moral ends pursued by the worship of Ahura Mazda — also monotheistic — the Brahmanic strains converge. The quest of Kung Fu Tzu — also called Confucius — through to Lao Tzu in Taoism are, at bottom, the non-commission of evil, and all of these latter are highly akin to Buddhism. Many people read Viktor Frankl[16] and are astonished by his discoveries. Even so, all of that really splits off from the Buddhist school, which is the school of human suffering. This school deals with how the human being is to transcend his own pains, his own sufferings, through the eight agreements[17], through the cessation of suffering by means of the suppression of the desire that gives rise to unattained longing, and through the development of a sense of perfection. These agreements of perfection are based on ethical correctness: on right speech, right action, right effort and right resolve, among others. In this way we understand that all these principles seek a state of morality and, obviously, a state of wisdom arising from right conduct or ethics, seen not as the science that studies morality, but rather as right conduct, as we have already mentioned.
Through this journey across these religions we believe that we cannot be fundamentalists; neither one nor another is entirely right: they are quests that have arrived by different paths at a single principle of wisdom. Wisdom is the beginning of all spirituality and seeks the goods of consciousness; for this reason it is essential that we begin to develop spiritual intelligence, which definitively implies that any route is valid and worthy of respect, provided it is grounded in the same ideas and postulates of benignity and goodness of its founders, contained in respect, love, care for oneself and for the ancestors, and charity and understanding toward one’s neighbor, which are, when all is said and done, the foundations of spiritual intelligence.
PRINCIPLES OF SPIRITUAL INTELLIGENCE
According to Bioethical Psychology, spiritual intelligence rests on five (5) basic principles, which are: knowing how to think; knowing how to believe; knowing how to feel; knowing how to love; and knowing how to be and being able to be. These principles are basic for approaching any spiritual path, for elaborating any kind of route of self-help and personal improvement, and they serve to strengthen common sense besides being a fundamental axis of Bioethical Psychology so that our work may be good. And we know that human work is like fruit, and all fruit comes from a tree and the tree in turn from a seed, and that seed is our thoughts, to which a meaning is then given; then, upon this meaning, an emotion, an affect and finally a behavior are derived. Thus the principles of Spiritual Intelligence are five (5) fundamental knowings for arriving at knowing how to be there and knowing oneself to be there. These five knowings are: knowing how to think, knowing how to believe or to signify, knowing how to feel, knowing how to love, and knowing and being able to be, which we shall review quickly since they are explained more deeply in my book The Mirror of God, and we shall go into them in greater depth further on in the corresponding chapter. It is important to stress that wisdom comes from a verb which is the action of knowing, and it is an action that can, like the verb “to be able,” be placed before all other verbs or actions of the human being; hence its relevance and complexity, since to be wise one must be very simple, and often simplicity is obtained after having passed through difficult labyrinths of reasoning — and wisdom is just that: simplicity and common sense, which afford much peace and inner fullness.
First principle: knowing how to think
We associate this first principle somewhat with the origins of mental health in Jean-Martin Charcot[18] (Freud’s predecessor in mental health), who tells us that mental health is based on the Mental hygiene really consists in removing or eliminating all these useless, self-destructive and lacerating thoughts; our mind is like an enormous freshly ploughed meadow, in which good thoughts are the seed. However, one must know how to sow that seed, because the cognitive weeds or bad thoughts appear on their own, and knowing how to sow is thinking positively. Thoughts. That is why one must make a selection of our thoughts and, although it sounds easy, knowing how to think is quite a difficult task. Knowing how to think is knowing how to change the channel, knowing how to manage our thoughts, having complete government over ourselves by selecting our thoughts. The Greeks already defined it as the noema, a thought that “on its own” does not have much impact[21], but it is in fact the noema that moves toward noesis, or the giving of meaning to a thought; and for that reason knowing how to believe is decisive, which is the next principle of Spiritual Intelligence.
Second principle: knowing how to believe
We can understand the transition from noema to Platonic noesis through the second principle of Bioethical Psychology, knowing how to believe, for which we must clarify concepts. Platonic noesis is when we believe in something and give it a meaning; in the terms of Lacan, Freud’s successor in psychoanalysis, that is the origin of all mental illnesses — that is, the signified (interpretations or beliefs) and the signifiers (that which occasions them).
All of this illustrates for us the importance of understanding the various constructivist quests of psychology. Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky[22] propose that, according to the interpretations we go on giving to our reality, we trace out the paths and the difficulties involved in traveling them. That is why it is crucial to know how to believe, understanding that knowing as the interpretations we make of our own truths, both internal and external. These are the meanings a person gives when, for example, he has poor self-esteem and therefore thinks (believes) that he does not deserve something; from there, then, the basic anxieties arise: the individual does not feel deserving and thinks (believes) that he is not good enough, that he is not adequate, that people do not love him, or that no one wants to be with him — when in reality that is the meaning he is giving to himself.
Consequently, we must adjust our realities to what we are, just as we are, to that ontological As is (what is, just as it is), which is not an alteration of our own reality but simply and plainly what is, just as it is, what we are, just as we are. As the Adlerian conception of the precursors of the false self, of the As if, well proposed to us, neither is it a matter of being myself as if I were not, or being as if I were, for that is the false self. We must identify our realities as a cognitive act, as an intellectual act, and proceed to that acceptance as a sensible act in which our spiritual aspect begins to play an essential role, always giving meaning to what is perceived with a high sense of reality since, for Bioethical Psychology, reality and truth may be two different things, especially in mental health: one thing may be what one believes oneself to be, and quite another may be what one is, just as one is. Consider, for example, a person with delusional psychosis who suffers from a mystical delusion: he believes himself to be a prophet, his emotional body derives from this belief, and his personal “reality” is that he is a prophet, but the true truth is very different. The same occurs with denial, which arises in order to protect oneself from the anguish that accepting the truth would generate; for example, in a diagnosis of bipolarity, depression, schizophrenia or addiction, the reality of the person in denial is that he suffers from nothing, and he acts accordingly. Therefore, the first step toward becoming sensible individuals is to believe or to signify our perception and our experience from a high sense of reality or sense of certainty, which we shall see in the final chapters of this work.
Thus we travel within this whole cognitive phenomenon; our thoughts and belief system are really the postmodernist interpretation we can give of the cognitive-behavioral psychological schools. In other words, our conduct — composed of our cognitive, attitudinal and behavioral aspects — derives from our thoughts and our beliefs. That is why it is so important to understand that this first aspect of the principles of spiritual intelligence, knowing how to think and knowing how to believe, is essential in order to arrive at the third principle, knowing how to feel.
Knowing how to believe is extremely useful for coming to believe in what the eyes do not see, what the ears do not hear, what is not tasted, what is not touched and what is not smelled; it is to believe by sensible intuition in the ethereal, in the sublime, such as consciousness, God and the spiritual world — and indeed, one only feels about what one believes, only about that to which a meaning is granted.
Third principle: knowing how to feel
Knowing how to feel is the resource of assertiveness plus resilience, a word that shares the same root as “spring”[23], whose meaning is cushioning. For us it is our emotional skin; our emotions and our emotional anatomy have a skin, which is our tolerances. We find tolerance against our frustration, in the face of criticism, rejection, betrayal and harassment — aspects that we shall define in the section corresponding to resilience. In that knowing how to feel it is also essential to find assertiveness, defined as the capacity to express our inner concepts and contents objectively. Just as resilience is useful for withstanding the blows life deals us, and those we deal ourselves, assertiveness serves so that we may express, in a proactive and purposeful manner, thoughts, beliefs, concepts and feelings, and thus be able to set limits. Knowing how to feel is the sum of resilience, in order to know how to receive adversity; sensitivity, from perceptual experience; and assertiveness, in order to know how to give and how to give oneself to one’s surroundings.
Fourth principle: knowing how to love
We come to the fourth principle of this spiritual intelligence, knowing how to love. This sense is the one that, in some way, will develop our senses of consciousness. We see that there is an analytical intelligence, there is an empowerment at the cognitive level, there is an emotional intelligence in that knowing how to feel, and for this reason knowing how to love is of the utmost importance. Love truly gives fullness and enthusiasm to life — loving what we do, loving our work, our studies, loving our family, loving our goals. This anchors us to the future and gives us the strength to attain it.
Carl Jung said well that dreams are the motivation of our existence, but we also refer somewhat to Schopenhauer[24] when he describes the will to us. Will and love are the same thing because they are motivating forces that contain desire, wanting — but not a tragic and negativistic will, which would be an ill will. It is that motivation to set in motion and activate our sense of reward. Often we motivate ourselves and want the reward but forget the effort, and this is what knowing how to love gives us: knowing how to love an objective, a dream we have set ourselves. But we must reach that dream, for we must understand that dreams never come to us: it is we who come to them through planning, strategy, effort and perseverance[25].
Love must be seen as much more than affection: love is a force that drives our conduct, because if we move by positive reinforcement it is because we want to, not only by negative reinforcement to avoid pain, punishment, loss and/or suffering. When we do what we do moved by that desire that arises either out of conviction or out of interest, all of this has to do with the mechanics of love, which contains interest, desire and wanting.
Love is that inner force that pulses or comes from the soul; it may be defined as the force that arises from the soul to tend toward well-being, both one’s own and that of others. Love, like faith, is dead without works. True love, genuine love, therefore demands constructive and not destructive works. Love is the genetic principle, the genesis or creation; hatred comes to be the nemesis[26], that is, the destructive principle. Nevertheless, love often serves to destroy: in fact it destroys wickedness and hatred, and it is the supreme force of the universe. Everything depends on the principle of consequence, always seeking the greatest benefit for the greatest number of existential dynamics; hence the example of Jesus Christ. God the Father allowed the sacrifice of Jesus Christ in order to seek a greater benefit for humanity. This is what the principle of knowing how to love gives us: knowing how to give and to give oneself while seeking the greatest benefit and, since it is a force, being able to give and to give oneself.
Fifth principle: knowing how to be there and being able to be there
Finally, we find the great principle of knowing how to be and being able to be, a concept described to us by Martin Heidegger in being there — being the owners of our present time, truly knowing how to be entirely useful, proactive human beings; being able to be in a job; in the case of an addiction, being able to be in abstinence; being able to be in actions or in “verbs,” for it is the verb that represents the action, and it is action that provides real facts in circumstances of manner, time and place.
In sum, we visualize these principles as the floors of a building: on the first floor we enter through knowing how to think; on the second, through knowing how to believe; on the third, through knowing how to feel; on the fourth, through knowing how to love; and on the fifth, through knowing how to be and being able to be. It is also necessary to be able to understand and practice that verb, because it is a verb that can be placed before all the verbs and actions of the human being: being able to feel, being able to work, being able to enjoy, and so on.
We find, then, that beyond what the Buddhist schools propose to us of a sole transcendence of suffering, we must arrive at the proposal of the Christian schools of entering into enthusiasm, as the letter of James describes it well, “joy in adversity” (BLA, James 1:2). The word enthusiasm comes from entheos[27], in God, which is when we join together in a synergistic purpose, in a cause of love, of life and of truth far greater than ourselves, making us far stronger. This is achieved through the empowerment of our consciousness and through spiritual awakening.
With this journey through the various religions we realize how important it is to understand that they nourish morality and foster ethics. Bioethical Psychology conceives morality as an inner probity reflected in behavior, and ethics as right conduct in behavior. That is, Bioethical Psychology proposes moral conduct and ethical behavior, always keeping clear that in psychology behaviors are the visible actions of the human being, and conduct is all the actions of a living being, both inner and outer actions, which are to be developed from the principles of Spiritual Intelligence.
By way of conclusion to this chapter, we must grasp the magnitude of the way in which the various religions have nourished self-regulation, from the breathing of consciousness into billions of human beings throughout history by means of a set of norms that lead to the generation of moral judgments from childhood itself — which translates into these norms of society reaching parents, who transmit them to their children, and into ethical, moral and religious codes being transmitted from society itself, establishing what is right and what is wrong.
In this way the superego, that agent of internal censure, is nourished, and we must keep it very well adjusted, which means that it must be found in the right measure, since if it is too strict it will lead us toward neurosis, and if it is too lax it will lead us to a very primary life driven by the pleasure principle.
In this historical journey we have taken: from the Babylonians, the importance of a social capitalism in which individual wealth has a limit, and of not demonizing the use of psychoactive substances for entheogenic journeys; from the philosophical religions such as Confucianism, the value of thinking about the legacy of our ancestors with veneration and respect for our lineages, and the sense of belonging; from Taoism, the fundamental role of minimalism in life without falling into a materialist reductionism, making life simple and harmonious, strongly driven by the principles of the sense of order and of property; from the Indostanic religions we take respect for animals and the environment, since they venerate many animal deities; and from the great currents of the Abrahamic religions we have taken: from Christianity, deep love of our neighbor; from Judaism, the importance of preserving the rites and the humility of always knowing ourselves to be lesser than God; and from Islam, obedience and submission to the law.
As has been seen in this chapter, it is necessary to grasp that spiritual intelligence, far from being a dogma, signifies the relevance of learning to read within (intus legere), which is what the etymological root of intelligence means — knowing how to read the intangible yet existent, such as art, concepts, aesthetics, morality, that which relates to the human spirit and soul, and that which radically unites all religions: faith, which is the product of coming to believe in what is not seen and which results from spiritual intelligence, itself closely related to the promotion of inner values.
Along these lines, Bioethical Psychology is a psychology of values, morality and ethics, which achieves in those who practice it an aesthetic ethics in their behaviors, for it proposes life in abundance and, as has been set out, living and helping others live with moral, ethical and aesthetic behavior — behavior that is independent of each person’s religion or beliefs. It is a matter of conduct submitting to these principles which, though simple, are not so easy to practice, and which bring together what the psychological schools seek: the cognitive schools, knowing how to think and knowing how to believe; the psychodynamic psychological schools, positive psychology and social psychology, knowing how to feel; the humanistic schools and existential psychiatry, knowing how to love; and the behaviorist schools, knowing how to be and being able to be there.
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Notes
[1] In philosophy this theory holds that a part of a whole may be considered a principal part if the destruction of that part entails the destruction of the whole. In art it is an experimental art movement that involves destroying objects during a public presentation (Collins English Dictionary, 2020).
[2] The term was coined by the German pastor and philosopher Fritz Jahr in 1927 (Valdés, 2012).
[3] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was a French Jesuit, palaeontologist and philosopher. His intense intellectual, religious and philosophical activity leaves a broad legacy represented by numerous works. In his essay Cosmic Life he says: “I have sought to draw attention to the possibility of a sound reconciliation between Christianity and the World, on the ground of a loyal and convinced pursuit of Progress, in sincere communion with a faith in Life and in the value of Evolution” (as cited in Sequeiros, 2017, p. 380).
[4] Psycho-spirituality is “a dimension that encompasses the ancient relationship between the human and the divine; that search for the transcendent within the immanent; that is, finding God in the depths of the soul and, in knowing oneself intimately, surpassing the limits of the ego and diffusing oneself into the whole” (Sánchez, 2018).
[5] In general terms, it may be said that an individual is conscious when he is awake and has an adequate understanding of his surroundings and of himself, representing the sum of the activities of the cerebral cortex (Padilla et al., 2018, p. 90). This sum consists of two components: wakefulness (also called arousal) and the sleep-wake cycle; and what is called consciousness, which is what allows an individual to have knowledge of himself and to interact with the environment (García et al., 2013, p. 57).
[6] Inner language has its origin in communicative activity and in the forms of dialogue that are transferred to the sphere of the individual’s psychological functioning. The regulation of behavior on the intrapsychic plane, by means of inner language, derives from the requirements of speech and from its organization in the form of dialogue. The Russians Lev Vygotsky (psychologist) and Mikhail Bakhtin (philosopher) understood inner language as an internal and subjective instrument of relation with oneself. Vygotsky investigated the role it plays in the mastery of behavior and in consciousness, based on the observation of children and their use of language. Indeed, egocentric speech was at first a mere accompaniment to the child’s action, but he observed that it became an instrument of thought devoted to the planning of cognitive and affective tasks (of self-reflection on one’s own conduct), to decision-making or to creation (Leonor, 2000).
[7] This word is made up of the prefix re, meaning “intensity” and also “reiteration,” and the Latin verb ligare, “to bind,” so that it is interpreted as “to bind or unite again”; it may also be interpreted as “to unite strongly” (DECL, 2020).
[8] The Pew Research Center report (2015) estimated that by 2020 there would be in the world some 2,320,750,000 Christians; 1,907,110,000 Muslims; 1,161,440,000 Hindus; and 429,640,000 Buddhists.
[9] Those with no religious affiliation include atheists, agnostics and people who do not identify with any particular religion in surveys. However, many of those with no religious affiliation hold some religious beliefs (Pew Research Center, p. 24, 2012).
[10] 1) You shall have no other gods before me. 2) You shall not make for yourself an image, nor any likeness of what is above in heaven, nor below on the earth, nor in the waters beneath the earth. You shall not bow down before any image, nor honor them; for I am Yahweh your God, mighty, jealous, who punishes the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, and shows mercy unto thousands, unto those who love me and keep my commandments. 3) You shall not take the name of Yahweh your God in vain; for Yahweh will not hold guiltless the one who takes his name in vain. 4) Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, for six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a rest unto Yahweh your God; do no work on it, neither you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your manservant, nor your maidservant, nor your beast, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days Yahweh made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all things that are in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore Yahweh blessed the day of rest and sanctified it. 5) Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which Yahweh your God gives you. 6) You shall not kill. 7) You shall not commit adultery. 8) You shall not steal. 9) You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. 10) You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that belongs to your neighbor (Reina Valera, 1960, Exodus 20:1–17).
[11] While Jesus Christ is recognized as a historical figure, the exact date of his birth remains a matter of debate. Some point as a reference to the period of Octavian (Augustus) as emperor of Rome, as indicated in Luke 2:1. The reign of Herod in the year 4 BC is also taken as a reference (that is, around 753 from the founding of Rome), which has been debated still further (Conzelmann & Lindemann, 1991, p. 378).
[12] The name Sanhedrin derives from the Greek word sunedrion, meaning “council.” An early form of the Sanhedrin existed under the Greeks, who allowed the Jews a certain degree of self-government. In antiquity there was often little distinction between judicial interpretation and legislation. The Great Sanhedrin, based in Jerusalem, had 71 members (Langbert & Friedman, 2003).
[13] “Your eye is the lamp of your body. If your eye receives the light, your whole person will have light; but if your eye is darkened, your whole person will be in darkness” (BLA, Luke 11:34).
[14] “Jesus said to them: I am the bread of life” (Matthew 6:35, BL).
[15] Thirteen epistles written by Paul are recognized: Romans, First and Second Corinthians; Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, First and Second Thessalonians, First and Second Timothy, Titus and Philemon.
[16] Viktor Emil Frankl (1905–1997) was an Austrian psychiatrist and psychotherapist who developed the approach in psychology known as logotherapy (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2019). In 1946 one of his most influential works was published: Man’s Search for Meaning, in which Frankl recounts his experience as a prisoner in a concentration camp during the Second World War.
[17] For Buddhism, the Noble Eightfold Path leads to the cessation of suffering and consists of: Right Understanding, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration [Samyutta Nikaya LVI, 11] (Sumedho, 2015, p. 47).
[18] [Note text not present in the source document.]
[21] Both terms were taken up by the philosopher Edmund Husserl for his phenomenological proposal, in which the noema is the object just as it is described and the noesis is the corresponding mental activity (Audi, 2004, p. 515). According to the RAE, the noema is thought as the objective content of thinking, as distinct from the intentional act or noesis (Diccionario de la Lengua Española [DLE], 2020).
[22] Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (1896–1934) was an important Russian psychologist who made essential contributions to the development of contemporary Psychology, to the study of disability and to Semiology. Vygotsky formulated a theory of the psychological development of the individual in which the determining factors of this development are found outside, not within the organism and the personality of the child, but externally, through social activity with other people (Vygotsky et al., 1997, pp. 47–48).
[23] Resiliencia comes from the English “resilience,” and this derives from the Latin resiliens, resilīre, “to leap back, to rebound,” “to withdraw” (DLE, 2020a). Composed of several Latin lexemes, it may indicate the quality of that which springs back and remains as it was (DECL, 2020a).
[24] Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was a German philosopher known as the “philosopher of pessimism,” an exponent of a metaphysical doctrine of the will. His writings influenced existential philosophy and Freudian psychology (Hübscher, 2019). Among his works on this subject, The World as Will and Representation, published in 1819, and On the Will in Nature, of 1836, stand out.
[25] [Note text not present in the source document.]
[26] Nemesis is the name identifying the goddess of vengeance, fortune and retributive justice. This deity was charged with imposing punishment upon those who did not obey (for example, upon children who did not respect their parents’ orders). It is told that Nemesis penalized excess and did not allow men to be too fortunate. In her intention to safeguard universal balance, the goddess could bring about the ruin of those who had been favored by fortune. She was also charged with avenging unhappy lovers for the perjury of their partner. Nemesis is often used as a synonym for enemy. Invidia is the name of the Roman goddess who serves as the equivalent of this goddess Nemesis, who has been venerated by a multitude of peoples and cultures over the centuries. Thus, for example, she was worshipped by the Egyptians as well as by the Babylonians and the Persians. This goddess is charged with destroying opulence. We therefore interpret Nemesis and Invidia as that which is opposed to the creative principle of well-being and of life (significadoconcepto.com, 2018).
[27] The word enthusiasm comes from the Greek ἐνθουσιασμóς enthousiasmós, meaning divine inspiration, rapture, ecstasy. A word formed from entheos, en “within” and theos, “god” — one who carries a god within (DECL, 2020b).
