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The capacity to reflect on religious experience is significant in itself. Where does our ideation of God, or 'the more', or transcendence, come from? Does the God-idea simply grow out of fear of the unknown? Was religious experience reported in the beginning in order to manipulate others by claiming other-worldly powers? Has the God-idea simply evolved, survived because it is somehow related to the survival of the fittest?

Teilhard in The Phenomenon of Man takes issue with this view of evolution:

We are definitely forced to abandon the idea of explaining every case simply as the survival of the fittest, or as a mechanical adaptation to environment and use. The more often I come across this problem and the longer I pore over it, the more firmly is it impressed upon me that in fact we are confronted with an effect not of external forces but of psychology. According to current thought, an animal develops its carnivorous instincts because its molars become cutting and its claws sharp. Should we not turn the proposition around? In other words, if the tiger elongates its fangs and sharpens its claws is it not rather because, following its line of descent, it receives develops, and hands on the 'soul of a carnivore'?

It would appear that something in the state of man has changed, through the long process of evolution, which first appears as the ideation of transcendence, and then as transcendence itself.

Teilhard says further in the same book:

The law is formal. We referred to it before, when we spoke of the birth of life. No size in the world can go on increasing without sooner or later reaching a critical point involving some change of state.

The first remarkable change of state in the development of man occurred when he crossed the threshold of reflection, what Teilhard calls a critical transformation, a 'mutation from zero to everything'. With the power of reflection the cell has become 'someone'. He said this threshold had to be crossed at a single stride and that it was 'a Tran experimental interval about which scientifically we can say nothing, but beyond which we find ourselves transported on to an entirely new biological plane'.

In view of the 'impossible, unprecedented' development of thinking man, is it not reasonable, and compatible with the evolutionary process in the universe, to say that there may have developed an 'impossible, unprecedented" transcendent man?

Transcendence means an experience of that which is more than myself, a reality outside of myself, that which has been called The Other, The All, or God. It is not a 'floating upward', as in pre-Copernican paintings; in fact, it is better expressed in the image of depth. This is the way Tillich comprehends it in The New Being:

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The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, or the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation. Perhaps, in order to do so, you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even the word itself. For if you know that God means depth, you know much about him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: life has no depth! life is shallow. Being itself is surface only. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not.

What happens, then, in a religious experience? It is my opinion that religious experience may be a unique combination of Child (a feeling of intimacy) and Adult (a reflection on ultimacy) with the total exclusion of the Parent. I believe the total exclusion of the Parent is what happens in kenosis, or self-emptying. This self-emptying is a common characteristic of all mystical experiences, according to Bishop James Pike:

As we have seen there is a generic character to the mystical experience of, say, a Christian and a Zen Buddhist, and in the experiential patterns of persons of both traditions, can be observed common factors. This is illustrated by the fact that present day Zen Buddhist philosophers use the same Greek word as is used by both Paul and Western theologians to describe a process which experience - in East and in West - has been found to be a principal route to the consummation of personal fulfillment. The word is kenosis, that is, self-emptying. {19}

I believe that what is emptied is the Parent. How can one experience joy, or ecstasy, in the presence of those recordings in the Parent which produced the not ok originally? How can I feel acceptance in the presence of the earliest felt rejection? It is true that mother was a participant in intimacy in the beginning, but it was an intimacy which did not last, was conditional, and was 'never enough'. I believe the Adult's function in the religious experience is to block out the Parent in order that the Natural Child may reawaken to its own worth and beauty as a part of God's creation.

The little person sees the Parent as ok, in a religious vein, righteous. Tillich says, 'The righteousness of the righteous ones is hard and self-assured.' (This is the way the little person sees his parents, even if in fact the parents, according to other standards, are not righteous.) Tillich asks, 'Why do children turn away from their righteous parents, and husbands from their righteous wives, and vice versa? Why do Christians turn away from their righteous pastors? Why do people turn away from righteous neighborhoods? Why do many turn away from righteous Christianity and from the Jesus it paints and the God it proclaims? Why do they turn to those who are not considered to be the righteous ones? Often, certainly, it is because they want to escape judgment.' {20} The religious experience is the escape from judgment, acceptance without condition. The 'faith of our fathers' is not the same as my faith, although in exercising my faith, I may discover the same experience they did, with the same object they did.

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There is one kind of religious experience which may be qualitatively different from the Parent-excluding experience we have just described. This is the feeling of great relief which comes from a total adaptation to the Parent. 'I will give up my wicked ways and be exactly what you (Parent) want me to be.' An example is a 'converted' woman whose first act to confirm her salvation is to wipe off her lipstick. Salvation is not experienced as an independent encounter with a gracious God but as gaining the approval of the pious ones who make the rules. The 'will of God' is the will of the congregational Parent. Freud believes religious ecstasy is of this sort: the Child feels omnipotence by selling out to the omnipotent Parent. The position is i am ok as long as. The conciliation produces such a glorious feeling that there is a hunger for it to happen again. This results in 'backsliding', which paves the way for another 'conversion' experience. The Adult is not involved in this experience. The religious experience of children may be of this sort. We cannot be judgmental about religious experiences of others for there is no certain, objective way to know what really happens to them. We cannot say that one person's experience is genuine and another's is not. A subjective appraisal, however, leads me to believe that there is a difference in a religious experience based upon Parent approval and a religious experience based on acceptance without condition.

If it is true that we empty ourselves of the Parent in the religious experience first described, this leaves the Child and Adult. Whether God is experienced by the Child or by the Adult is a fascinating question. It has been said that the God of the philosophers is not the same God as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The God of the philosophers is a 'thought' construction, an Adult search for meaning, a reflection about the possibility of God. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob 'walked with God and talked with God'. They experienced transcendence. They felt it. Their Child was involved.

Theology is Adult. Religious experience involves the Child, also. It may be that religious experience is totally Child. After all, the Abraham who followed God out of the Land of Ur had not read the Torah, and Paul was converted without the benefit of the New Testament. They reported an experience, and their lives changed because of that experience.

'That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you,' wrote John. Perhaps the spontaneity and vigour of the early church was due to the fact that there was no formal Christian theology. Early Christian literature was essentially a report of what happened and what had been said. 'Once I was blind and now I see' is a statement of an experience and not an interesting theological idea. The early Christians met to talk about an exciting encounter, about having met a man, named Jesus, who walked with them, who laughed with them, who cried with them, and whose openness and compassion for people was a central historical example of I'm-ok- you're ok.

H. G. Wells said, 'I am an historian. I am not a believer. But I must confess, as an historian, this penniless preacher from Galilee is irresistibly the centre of history.'

The early Christians trusted him and believed him, and they changed. They talked to each other about what happened. There was little of the ritualistic, no experiential activity so characteristic of churches today. Dr Harvey Cox of Harvard Divinity School, said in an interview with Colloquy, a monthly magazine published by the United Church of Christ:

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'The earliest gatherings of the followers of Jesus ... lacked the cultic solemnity of most contemporary worship. These Christians gathered for what they called the breaking of bread - that is, the sharing of a common meal.

They had bread and wine, recalled the words of Jesus, read letters from the Apostles and other groups of Christians, exchanged ideas, sang, and prayed. Their worship services were rather uproarious affairs ... more like the victory celebrations of a football team than what we usually call worship today.' {21}

Theirs was a new, revolutionary style of life based on I'm Ok - You're Ok. If Christianity were simply an intellectual idea, it probably would not have survived, considering its fragile beginnings. It survived because its advent was an historical event, as was Abraham's leaving the Land of Ur, as was Moses' exodus from Egypt, as was Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus. We may not understand religious experience, we may differ in its explanation, but we cannot, if we are honest, deny the reports of such experiences by reputable men through the centuries.

How Does a Religious Experience- Feel?

Persons report religious experience to be more like a Presence of God rather than knowledge about God. It perhaps is truly ineffable, and its only objective validation may be the change it may effect in a person's life. This change is seen in people who are able to remove the not ok from positions they have held about themselves and others. Deciding on the position I'm ok -you're ok has been reported as a conversion experience.

The following description by Tillich in The New Being seems to come close to how the religious experience feels. He begins by asking, 'Do you know what it means to be struck by grace?" (I would like to paraphrase: Do you know what it means to experience I'm ok - you're ok?) In answer he says:

It does not mean that we suddenly believe that God exists, or that Jesus is the Savior, or that the Bible contains the truth. To believe that something is, is almost contrary to the meaning of grace. Furthermore, grace does not mean simply that we are making progress in our moral self-control, in our fight against society. Moral progress may be a fruit of grace; but it is not grace itself, and it can even prevent us from receiving grace ... And certainly [grace] does not happen ... so long as we think, in our self-complacency, that we have no need of it. Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel our separation is deeper than usual, because we violated another life.

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It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appears when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: Tom are accepted,' accepted by that which is greater than you and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted! If that happens to us, we experience grace. After such an experience we may not be better than before and we may not believe more than before but everything is transformed. In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presuppositions, nothing but acceptances.

In the light of this grace, we perceive the power of grace in our relation to others and to ourselves. We experience the grace of being able to look frankly into the eyes of another, the miraculous grace of reunion of life with life.

This is intimacy. This is awareness. Berne says in Games People Play, 'Awareness means the capacity to see a coffee pot and hear the birds sing in one's own way, and not the way one was taught.' Tillich speaks of experiencing God or grace in his own way, and not in the way he has been taught Every preprogrammed idea of what God is gets in the way of experiencing God. This is why I contend that an important aspect of the religious experience of intimacy is the exclusion of the Parent.

Berne says, again in Games People Play:

A little boy sees and hears birds with delight. Then the 'good father' comes along and feels he should 'share' the experience and help his son 'develop'. He says: 'That's a jay, and this is a sparrow.' The moment the little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing. He has to see and hear them the way his father wants him to. Father has good reasons on his side, since few people can afford to go through life listening to the birds sing, and the sooner the little boy starts his 'education' the better ... A few people, however, can still see and hear in the old way. But most of the members of the human race have lost the capacity ... and are not left the option of seeing and hearing directly even if they can afford to; they must get it second-hand.

That is why theology, or religion, may stand in the way of religious experience. It is hard to experience ecstasy if my mind is occupied with an effeminate painting of Jesus, angels with hard-to-believe wings, the serpent in the Garden of Eden, predestination, or the finer points of purgatory. Intimacy is an experience of the natural Child (the Child who heard the birds sing in his own way). 'Usually,' Berne says, 'the adaptation to Parental influences is what spoils it, and most unfortunately this is almost a universal occurrence.'

The adaptation begins at birth. Jesus said, 'Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.' The rebirth of which Jesus speaks is, I believe, the rebirth of the natural Child. This is possible after the Adult comprehends the not ok, which was produced by the adaptive, or civilizing, process. When we turn off the Parent, there is even the possibility of intimacy with our parents. They suffered from the adaptive process, too.

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People in Perspective

One of the most helpful ways to strengthen the Adult for the task of examining Parent data (which data can be extremely overpowering to the Child, particularly on the subject of religion) is to stand back for greater perspective, the broader view. I gained a helpful broader view from a 'calendar' of the evolution of man which was written by Robert T. Francoeur:

Arbitrarily, for the exact date of man's appearance will never be known, let us estimate that appearance at about one and a half million years ago. Then let us propose a comparison of mankind's history with a calendar year in which one 'day' equals four thousand years of human history.

In this scheme January first would witness the appearance of our Homo habilis ancestors. Homo habilis could walk erect and use the most primitive tools. Hunting in bands, he probably could not talk as we do, though he undoubtedly had some method of communication. Speech, as we know it today, evolved very gradually during the first three months of our 'year'. Man's evolutionary progress was at best tedious and halting: fire first for protection from the cold and wild animals, and only much later for cooking; tools chipped from stone; the skills of hunting; the slow concentration and involutions of the cerebral cortex. Summer came and went, and the fall was two-thirds through its course when Neanderthal man finally appeared around November 1st. The first indications of a religious belief can be seen in the burial sites of the later Neanderthaloids, around December 17th in our scheme.

By December 24th of our hypothetical year, all the nonsapiens or primitive forms of man had died out or been absorbed by the more progressive and modern Cromagnon man. Agriculture began around December 28th and the whole of our historical era, the brief six to ten thousand years for which we have records, is nestled in the last two days of our 'year's Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were born about 9 am on December 31st, Christ at noon and Columbus about 9.30 pm. The final hour of December 31st, from 11 pm to midnight New Year's Eves embraces all of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. {22}

In this perspective we recognize rather dearly that our particular brand of 'old-time religion", with its claims of ultimate and exclusive knowledge about God and his creation, is not so old after all.

Faith, True blood says, is not a blind leap into nothing but a thoughtful walk in the light we have. Part of that light is the recognition that the world which 'God so loved' is considerably larger than our own personal comprehension of it. If nothing else, this recognition should make us modest and rule out our claims to exclusive truth.

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I am reminded of one politician's statement, 'When white and black and brown and every other colour decide they're going to live together as Christians, then and only then are we going to see an end to these troubles.' That statement may mean something to him; but what does it mean to the 1 1/2 billion persons in the world today who don't know who Christ was and never have heard his name?

This brings us to a second way in which we can look at people in perspective. In a sermon I heard some time ago the following statistics were presented:

If the 3 billion people of the world could be represented in a community of one hundred:

Six would be United States citizens; ninety-four would be citizens of other countries.

Six would own one-half of the money in the world; ninety-four would share the other half; of the ninety-four, twenty would own virtually all of the remaining half.

Six would have 15 times more material possessions than the other ninety-four put together.

Six have 72 per cent more than the average daily food requirement; two-thirds of the ninety-four would have below-minimum food standards, and many of them would be on a starvation diet.

The life span of six would be seventy years. The life span of ninety-four would be thirty nine years.

Of the ninety-four, thirty-three would come from countries where the Christian faith is taught. Of the thirty-three, twenty-four would be Catholic and nine would be Protestant.

Less than one-half of the ninety-four would have heard the name of Christ, but the majority of the ninety-four would know of Lenin.

Among the ninety-four there would be three communist documents which outsell the

Bible.

By the year 2000 one out of every two persons will be Chinese. {23}

We are deluded if we continue to make sweeping statements about God and about man without continually keeping before us the facts of life: the long history of the development of man, and the present-day diversity of human thought. This may be frightening data to some people. 'Hopeless!' they may cry. I rather like Teilhard's view. When asked once what made him happy, he said: I'm happy because the world is round.' The borders, corners, or angles are not physical, but psychological. If we remove the psychological fences erected to protect the not ok Child existent in every person, there are no barriers to prevent our living together in peace.

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Also, I share the hopeful view of Mr Hirschberger, the druggist in Adela Rogers St Johns' Tell No Man: 'Something's up, young Hank, something's abroad, we're stirring in our long sleep. Something vast and new, as when Moses came down from the mountain, evolution is converging, the glory of man is beginning to force up a little green shoot through all the crap and crud of what's called reality.' {24}

What Is Reality Therapy?

Early in this chapter I stated that reality is our most important treatment tool. I have proceeded to discuss a number of realities. In concluding this chapter I wish to compare briefly Transactional Analysis with Reality Therapy, developed by Dr William Glasser. {25} Glasser holds that man's basic problem is moral in that being responsible is the requirement for mental health.

I believe both approaches - Transactional Analysis and Reality Therapy - can be thought of as products of a new breakthrough in psychiatry born of the dissatisfaction with the ineffectiveness and unreality of those types of psychiatry and clinical psychology, which, in effect, dismiss morality from the focus of treatment. Both Transactional Analysis and Reality Therapy hold that people are responsible for their behavior. There is an essential difference, however. I disagree with Glasser in his general denial of the significance of the past in understanding behaviour in the present. I do not believe in the game of 'Archaeology', or digging in the past, but neither do I believe we can totally ignore the past. To me the man who ignores his past is like the one who stands in the rain, arguing about its wetness while becoming drenched. Telling a patient he must be responsible is nowhere near the same thing as his becoming responsible. Transactional Analysis is also a 'reality therapy', but it provides answers that I do not believe Glasser has provided. What is wrong with people, for instance, who cannot perceive reality or whose perception is distorted (contaminated)? What is the answer to those who 'know what they must do but continually fail to do it'?

Glasser states, 'We do not concern ourselves with unconscious mental processes ... we do not get involved with the patient's history because we can neither change what happened to him or accept the fact that he is limited by his past."

It is true we cannot change the past. Yet the past invariably insinuates itself into our present life through the Parent and the Child, and unless we understand why this happens, and admit that it does, we do not have an emancipated Adult by which we can become the responsible persons Glasser admonishes us to be. We have to understand our P-A-C before we can turn off the past. When a therapist tells us we must, this is Parent. If we choose to do so ourselves because we understand how we are put together, this is Adult. The 'staying power' of our decision is totally dependent upon whether the decision is Parent or Adult.

Another reservation I have about Reality Therapy is that it does not have a special language with which to report 'what happened'. Glasser states: 'The ability of the therapist to get involved is the major skill of doing Reality Therapy but it is most difficult to describe. How does one put into the words the building of a strong emotional relationship quickly between two relative strangers?"

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In Transactional Analysis we have these words. The patient begins by activating his Child, and viewing the therapist as Parent. In the initial hour, Parent, Adult, and Child are defined, and these words are then used to define the contract, or mutual expectations from treatment. The therapist is there to teach and the patient is there to learn. The contract is Adult-Adult. If the patient is asked, 'What happened?" he can tell what happened. He has learned to identify his own Parent, Adult, and Child. He has learned to analyze his transactions. He has acquired a tool to free up and strengthen his Adult, and only this Adult can be responsible.

I agree wholeheartedly with Glasser's central focus of responsibility, just as I agree with the ideal of the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule. The reality that concerns me, however, is why these admonitions do not routinely produce responsible persons. To simply restate them in new ways is not going to do the job.

We cannot produce responsible persons until we help them uncover the I'm not ok - you're ok position which underlies the complicated and destructive games they play. Once we understand positions and games, freedom of response begins to emerge as a real possibility. As long as people are bound by the past, they are not free to respond to the needs and aspirations of others in the present; and 'to say that we are free', says Will Durant, 'is merely to mean that we know what we are doing'. {26}