The Ekklesia originally refers to a gathering of those who feel called out by God. In less big words, 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 the deep 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.

Psychoanalyst Prof. Donald Carveth has written extensively on this call, 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. It doesn´t mean it isn´t important. In the movies, it shows how the conscience can get buried and stumped. The mother of the child has no space for what the child feels called by. Throughout the movie, some villagers are moved and helped. In his quest to give back a notebook, a narrative space opens for elders who talk about memories, he inspires a clergyman, and all are moments of connection that reshape the village.

If the conscience gets space, that is fundamentally uplifting and what Carveth calls reparative. It is a mental state that he, following Melanie Klein, describes as a reparative position of the mind. It is differentiated with the schizoid-paranoid position. This second position is marked not by conscience but by the superego, a harsh, even savage voice, which buries the conscience, and leads to splitting: one conceives mental objects as either entirely good or entirely bad.

Using the dhamma, I understand the splitting position further through the object being seen as having a fixed identity, rather than being a condition that is dependently arisen upon conditions. Further, the object in splitting would be seen as being permanent, rather than seen as transitional due to being dependently arisen.

If I want to have a certain life, and something happens beyond understanding, there can be an attempt to stitch it together. Stitching to be, to not be, to have. This stitching burns, as it darts the consciousness and produces holding onto, deepening unconscious drives, and leads to becoming otherwise in a cycle that only worsens. This is superegoic. It demands to be quenched, but with ignorance, it just gets worse and worse.

In contrast, a reparative mental state arises dependent upon attument with the conscience. Attuning with conscience, there is loving-kindness, compassion, joy, peace that cools the burning stitching. One starts to conceive or see mental paths away from stress, seeing more than black and white, permanence and me.

Even if there is a mistake, rather than persecuting myself as a completely bad-object, there is letting go of stitching it together. Persecuting or flagging the mind while the other bleeds doesn´t help the other person. Rather, it is a narcissistic preoccupation with a fixed me that spirals the mind into falling and drowning itself. To do justice to life requires refraining from the savage stitching otherwise, and to surface the conscience onto safe shores.

When one achieves skill at this to the point that the entanglement with these heaps is secluded from, understanding the dependently originated causes dependent upon which entanglement happens, this can lead to bliss and advanced concentrative absorption meditative states (ACAMs).

This distinction, further, has significant consequences for psychology and religious communities. It means that the atheist or deist who is in a schizoid-paranoid state 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 generally don´t hold idealized all-good perceptions in the way they themselves do.

The real question, then, goes beyond rationalistic debate weeding out the content of what is said, defending 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 see the six sense bases, including the mental sense base, as not being about a me, as transitional, as stressful to hold onto.

The Carvethean challenge to Christianity and modernity is to overcome the savage superego by following conscience, even if that for the child in the movie means disobeying some authority. It amounts to a conversion: a choice of love over hate, life over death.

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´t be described. 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 deviation from explicit law, Jesus for what was absent at a deeper level. This points toward a dialectical synthesis refuting the supposed contradiction between atheism and theism, a paradigm in which fundamentalism and persecution is overcome through forgiveness and an intuitively nourished sense of the good. The rationalistic debate needs to be supplemented with being loving, and attuned to right and wrong, as a means to understand. To grip tightly to a fixed belief, to defend it at all costs, is what the scribes did. It is what needs to be left behind.

This goes against an approach from, for example, a Sam Harris and other exponents of reason, who seek to ground morality on reason alone. One of the most famous examples of this enlightenment paradigm is the work from Kant, who argued for a categorical imperative based on reason.³ What Carveth suggests, is that morality cannot be merely rooted in reason. Reason, as an instrument for science, can help in describing reality by processes of inference and deduction. This likewise can be a helpful and necessary instrument for morality: to be moral requires prudentiality, and to be prudential requires understanding dependent on what actions what consequences arise, and to then avert from or assert to that. But this implies reason as an essential instrument for the procedural realization of ethics, not the material measure of it. The measure of it has to be experiental knowledge (wisdom) intuited by an ever more strongly developed – and surfacing – conscience. Having understood the dependently arisen dimension of conditions leading one way or to the other, the conscience can be surfaced. This surfacing, unnattainable by mere reasoning, is what Gotama taught as the various shores of Nibbana.

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