The Ekklesia originally refers to a gathering of those who feel called out by God. In more down-to-earth terms, it can be understood as called out by conscience: a sense of right and wrong. In the Koker trilogy, director Abbas Kiarostami shows how this call can move people to their deepest life journeys. The point of the trilogy is that each chapter has a different story but at heart the protaganists are moved by this call within the confines of an earthquake that has trembled the community.

Psychoanalyst Prof. Donald Carveth has written extensively on conscience, most notably in a book called The Still Small Voice, a biblical reference to the calling of Elijah.

“After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a still small voice.” (1 Kings 19:12)

The still small voice implies something not easily seen, much less measured. Nonetheless, for Carveth it is a key marker distinguishing two types of mental state. Following Melanie Klein, he differentiates between the schizoid-paranoid position and the depressive, or reparative, mental state. The reparative state is marked by conscience; the schizoid-paranoid state by the superego.

In the schizoid-paranoid position, the defining process is splitting: one perceives mental objects as either entirely good or entirely bad. This is driven by a superego that fuels idealization of the all-good object and persecution of the all-bad one. It can lead to the pattern: idealize today, persecute tomorrow.

Contrasted with the splitting of mental objects that defines the schizoid-paranoid position, there is the reparative position that is informed by conscience. If I make a mistake, rather than persecuting myself as a completely bad-object, I try to make repair for the situation. Persecuting or flagging myself while the other bleeds doesn´t even help the other person, it is a narcissistic preoccupation with how bad I am that can drown oneself.

To do justice to life requires overcoming the savage superego and finding the call and path of conscience.

This distinction has remarkable consequences for both psychology and religious communities. As mentioned, this differention I extent to inform two types of religiosity: one may claim to be an atheist, but if one operates on a schizoid-paranoid mental state, this can lead to the split that there is an all-good object (e.g. science) and the persecution of other beliefs.

But what is important isn´t just the surface explicit belief, but the mental state dependent upon which such a belief arises. On the surface level one may have an explicit disbelief in God, yet be unconsciously driven to behave in ways of schizoid-paranoid religiosity. And such a person misses out on a lof of religious communities which thrive, which are loving, in which persons grow old and happy. They miss out on religious communities that are reparative and which don´t hold perceptions of God in the way they themselves do.

The real question, then, is not whether one professes belief in Christianity or atheism. It is whether one’s mental state produces splits, all-or-nothing objects, opposed to cultivating perceptions, intentions and even consciousness that accesses the world beyond ones own representations. The Carvethean challenge to Christianity and modernity, then, is to overcome the savage superego by following conscience, even if that for the child in the movie means disobeying some authority. That amounts to a conversion: a choice of love over hate, life over death.

From a perspective of the Dhamma, additional analysis is possible on the delusion underlying the all-good and all-bad object. Splitting is further marked by the mistaken idea that the object is fundamentally about a me. The reparative insight is that the object is a mental construction, a representation. Further, in splitting, the object is perceived as permanent. In the reparative position, one comes to understand that all objects are transitional: as the causes and conditions giving rise to a perception change, a new chapter becomes possible, however entrenched the old perceptions had been.

It can gradually lead to the understanding that mental objects are not-self, impermanent, and stressful to hold onto. It gets one closer to something that is beyond perceptions. And so to say that one is called out by God can be big words. We merely have the conscience as a gateway to something that can be experienced as truer.

This experience may lead to a conviction or faith that there is some fine- or immaterial goodness that can orient oneself in life. It may lead one into the discovery of what are known as jhana´s and finally achieve in successive stages, if combined with insight, to what is known as extinguishing certain dependently arisen processes from arising (also known as nibbana).

And so it is one who has turned away from one type of religious family and its doctrines, that can find different type of spirituality that is more utterly ‘Christian’. It is also found with Jesus who doesn’t abide by the religious laws of a jewish community:

“You make God’s law mean nothing so you can keep your own traditions! … These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship is in vain; they teach as doctrine the commandments of men.” (Matthew 15:6–9)

“And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as the scribes.” (Mark 1:22)

In effect, the scribes and Jesus each regarded the other as unbelievers — the scribes for his deviation from explicit law, Jesus for what was absent at a deeper level. Mere adherence to rules and rituals says nothing about one’s orientation toward goodness, forgiveness, or reparation. It is to remove the spirit from the letter.

This points toward a dialectical synthesis that refuses the supposed contradiction between atheism and theism, a paradigm seeking to overcome fundamentalism and persecution through forgiveness and an intuitively nourished sense of the good. To grip tightly to a fixed belief, to defend it at all costs, is what the scribes did. It is precisely what needs to be left behind.

This also runs counter to thinkers like Sam Harris and others who seek to ground morality in reason, a project with its most famous expression in Kant, who attempted to derive morality from rational principle alone. What Carveth suggests is that morality cannot be rooted in reason alone; it must be rooted in conscience. Reason, as the instrument of science, helps in describing reality through inference and deduction. This is a useful, even necessary, instrument for ethics too. Being moral requires prudence, and prudence requires understanding what consequences follow from what actions and then using conscience to avert from or assert to that. But this makes reason an essential procedural instrument for ethics, not its material foundation. The measure of morality must be experiential knowledge — wisdom — intuited through an ever more freely developed conscience.

It was these ideas, worked with and practiced over six or seven years, that eventually led me to stumble into the teachings of the Buddha. And yet, having discovered and studied them, I find I cannot help but owe a great deal to what was first found here.

Article:
http://www.yorku.ca/dcarveth/christianity.pdf