Spiritual Freedom: William Ellery Channing and Christopher Bollas

Gregory V. Wilson, D.Min.

August 8, 2004

What I would like to talk about this morning is something that came to me when I was
reading some of the works of William Ellery Channing. and also the works of psychoanalytical
thinker Christopher Bollas. Bollas is writing in the here and now, and Channing was writing in
the early 1800s, so their positions are interesting – a couple hundred years apart, and yet I find
them very insightful and helpful both in my work as a pastoral counselor and also my work as a
minister in a parish. The essence of spiritual power and spiritual freedom, as Channing talks
about in his sermon, “Spiritual Freedom,” is not power from an external perspective, not power
over other people; he talks about it as power from within himself. And what I like about what he
says is his whole perspective of spirituality is about what happens within us. It is focused in on
the mind. What Channing does is very helpful and insightful, and it is the earliest writing I have
found that connects our spiritual lives with civil liberties. He connects who we are as free
individuals with how we are governed. It is interesting to note that when he does that, he is
addressing the Massachusetts Legislature, addressing the government, and he is saying that the
highest function of government is to create the highest value of what it means to be human, to
enhance the inner world of the human, so that the goal of those who govern us is to keep our
inner worlds in mind. Those who govern us are to keep our psychological and spiritual health in
their minds as they create legislation, as they go about the business of governing. What I’ve
noticed about what he is saying, and why this is critically important, is this. I don’t know how
many of you read the book Unequal Protection by Thom Hartmann, who was a speaker at
General Assembly in June last year. That book is about how corporations got the rights of
citizenship. And in the beginning of his book he talks about how culture is created. I’d like to
read to you from that book. “A culture is a collection of shared beliefs about how things are.
Those beliefs are associated with myths and histories that form a self-reinforcing loop, and the
collection of these beliefs and histories form the stories that define a culture. Usually unnoticed,
like the air we breathe, these stories are rarely questioned.” What I want to notice about what
Hartmann is saying is that there is a danger in culture’s becoming a “reinforcing loop,” which
means it is a closed system. In the reading we just read by William Ellery Channing, on Spiritual
Freedom, he encourages us to accept new thought, to grow. In his particular time probably the
new thought that he is talking about, and he mentions coming across from another continent, he
is talking about the higher criticism coming from Europe, coming over to this country, high
criticism being a particular way of studying the Bible, studying the different types of languages,
even getting to the point of asking “Does this author use a different type of verb structure at the
beginning of a book from that at the end–did the same author write the whole book?”–these
kinds of questions. And Channing is saying we should accept this new knowledge and not be
closed off to it. We are in a culture, and if we are dedicated to the myths and stories that are
continuing the reinforcing loop, and we have got our minds set so that all we can do is move in
the circle of that culture, then we are not participating in the meaning-making of that culture. An
external force is creating the meaning of that culture and we are accepting that meaning
passively. And Channing is clearly encouraging us not to do that. One thing Channing does is
different, and it’s very forceful. Usually when I think of spirituality, I think of mysticism, I might
think of meditation, I think of quieting our minds, to get past the thoughts of today; but
according to Channing, spiritual freedom is an active mind. It’s a critical, reflective, thinking
mind. It’s not a mind that accepts old habits; it’s not a mind that accepts meaning from others. It
is a mind that is engaged in dialog with others to create meaning. It is a mind that steps out of the
myth and looks at and evaluates the myth that we live in. And I think he is saying something that
is extremely important in this day and age, and I will get to some reasons for that in a minute.

There is another group of folk that point to why an open mind is so important, who write
about narrative therapy, Michael White and David Epstein, family therapists. They say that
meaning is derived and structured from experiences into stories, and that the performance of
these stories constitutes the lives and the relationships in which we live. So if we are just
accepting that reinforcing loop, somebody else is determining how we are going to relate to one
another. Somebody else is determining how we are going to behave in this world. Somebody else
is determining our purpose and direction in this world. And Channing is encouraging us–he is
doing more than just encouraging us– he is saying that that is who we are as human beings–that
we do this kind of reflective meaning making. He says about human beings in observing human
nature that we have the power to turn our minds inward to determine who we are, to determine
our natures, to determine our capacities, to determine how we are going to interact in this world.
And because of that, we also have the power as human beings according to Channing to
transform ourselves. So his understanding of spiritual freedom is to be in a diligent process of
self-transformation. Do not accept the belief systems passively, he says, of culture. He says,
engage the belief systems of culture. And the outcome of engaging these belief systems of
culture, and the outcome of our engaging in dialog is our capacity to remain calm, our capacity
to develop a sense of compassion, our capacity to develop a sense of love for one another. And it
is the transformative process that we move in that direction. He creates a perspective that I think
is very unique, he says that in a culture, what we need to do is we need to understand the
evolution of the human mind, coming to terms with what he says maturity of the mind is:
compassion, love, kindness towards others, and justice. He says that as we structure our culture
and as we structure our communities, we need to structure them considering how the mind
evolves, how the mind matures. That will structure our culture. He says historically what
governments have done, governments have had a belief system and a cultural structure and they
have imposed those beliefs and that structure on individuals. Channing does just the opposite. He
says we have to move to the inner world of the person and structure the world so that it nurtures
the inner world of the person. He says that governments don’t necessarily attend to individuals,
historically governments have not done that. He says what that means when you don’t attend to
the individual, you create the individual for the state. Channing says what we need to do is create
the state for the individual. He turned what was historically true upside-down, and honoring the
individual.
Another thing that I want to suggest about Channing is that if you look at that piece on
spiritual freedom that we read, is to emphasize in spiritual freedom, the activity of the mind: the
mind that masters the senses, the mind that seeks after righteousness, the mind that escapes the
bondage of matter, the mind that jealously guards, the mind the receives, a mind that knows no
bounds of love, a mind that recognizes in other human beings the act of recognizing the other. He
talks about a mind that has confidence in God, that is calm in the midst, a mind that guards itself
from being merged with others. This guy’s mind is busy. I’m reading that thinking, this is a
diligent human being about his thinking, and that this is a very different kind of spirituality than I
am used to, and you might think that he is more individualistic than he is, but when he talks
about the outcomes of this mind, he says that the mind recognizes the other. The mind is
attentive to the well-being of the other. The mind is alive within itself; it’s guarding itself so
when I watch a news program, I just don’t accept that as truth. He said you need to guard what is
going on inside your mind and when something comes in your direction, you need to evaluate it
and you need to talk about it, and we need to create a community where we can talk about it
before we just accept it as true. He considers the absence of justice and civil liberties a
movement toward tyranny. And he knows the stories of tyranny. I believe a couple of weeks ago
somebody talked about Joseph Priestly here, and I would imagine they included the story of how
he was persecuted in England and how he came over to this country? Channing also sat with
Priestly, and learned under him. He knew of the religious tyranny that was going on in Europe,
and he understood what that meant. He understood that in some places in this world, if you
believed differently, you would be killed. He knew that to be true. And he was caught up in a
controversy of his own. There was a time in Channing’s life, being a Unitarian, never believing
in the trinity--there was a time when trinitarians and unitarians shared their pulpits, had dinner
together, talked about life. And then there came a day when somebody said, “Wait a minute; we
are really different. You’re not trinitarian; you’re unitarian and you are different from us.” And
from that day on, there came a division within that community, because somebody said there’s a
black-and-white, stark difference between us. Somebody could no longer live in the ambiguities
and the ambivalences of life. They had to diminish the dialog with one another, and at that
particular point, Channing became “the reluctant rebel,” as one of the books calls him, to the
point where he took it on to make the definitive statement in Baltimore, Maryland, that, yes,
indeed, we are unitarian, and we do not believe that Jesus was God. And he was pushed into that
statement, and what happened is that it became divisive, and communities became separated,
communities that were once united. So in a sense, there was no freedom. There became a
reinforcing loop in the mythology that caused division, not accepting one another. So when he
talks about the absence of civil liberties, or he talks about the absence of being in a community
where we can have dialog with one another, he begins to say that is a movement toward tyranny.
It is a movement away from the world view that begins to develop the best of what it means to be
human. It is a movement that says “we are different, and because we are different” (and in the
particular case that we are talking about with Channing) “we are better. We have better access to
the truth.” Which is a problem–when any type of ideology or belief systems moves toward
absolute truths, because what was true ten years ago is not necessarily true today. I remember
reading this wonderful book about theologians, and every ten years, this group of theologians
would get together and they would say, well, now what do you think? And they had a series of
these meetings covering 30 or 40 years, and they would be talking about how what they believe
now is different from what they believed ten years ago. So, what I think Channing is saying is,
that is going to happen. An example of how that happened in Channing’s life–at first in the
1820's, he was not necessarily for the separation of church and state. When he wrote a piece
about that, the Universalist Hosea Ballou, who was a wonderful Universalist, preaching the
message of love, wrote point-by-point challenging Channing’s position, and then over the years,
Channing began to move his position, and Jack Mendelson, in his biography, says that Channing
came around to Ballou’s thinking. Now here are two drastically different positions, and yet by
accepting and reading and pondering, he began to shift his position. And I think that is what
Channing is talking about: that when we can accept new knowledge, and work with new
knowledge, then we have the power to transform ourselves. This is key to Unitarian
Universalism, that we have the willingness to recognize that we have the power to change our
lives, to be different, to sit among folks who think differently, and have that be okay. I think that
is at the heart of who we are, as we come together to live out the seven principles.

Now I’d like to share a little about the work of Christopher Bollas, before putting those
two together. Christopher Bollas in his book called Being a Character has a chapter called “The
Fascist State of Mind.” He says of this chapter, The Fascist State of Mind, that he is playing with
those words, because we have fascist states, and his question was, how do we have fascist
national states, how does that happen. And his suggestion is that the thing that needs to happen is
that there needs to be the creation of the inner world of the individuals to become fascist within
themselves. And fascist toward themselves. And when I first read that I thought, What is he
talking about; what does that mean? Over here we have Channing talking about the free mind,
engaging with all this kind of energy, and over here we have Christopher Bollas saying that all of
us have the potential to be participants in a fascist state. I wonder if that’s not what Channing is
guarding against. Before we look at how we go about doing that, let me read two definitions of
fascism, in case we are thinking differently. One is from the dictionary, which says that “fascism
is a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically to the
merging of the state and business leadership together with belligerent nationalism. Bollas’s
definition helps us make the transition from the national state to the inner world. He says
“Fascism extols the virtue of the state” and remember Channing’s work–the individual is not
made for the state, but the state for the individual, “an organic creation driven by the militant will
of the masses, in sharp contrast indeed to the federal republic encumbered by checks and
balances, dividing power so that the people remain individually free to speak their minds in a
pluralistic society.” He goes on further to say that how are minds are made up, is that they are
made up of checks and balances. For example, when I am driving a car, and I see a light yellow,
something comes into my mind, and I say, Well, wait a minute, the light is yellow, and it’s going
to turn red and I need to stop. That’s an internal check and balance. Another example, of that,
let’s say that I am in an argument with somebody, and I’m arguing, and I’ve got this little voice
in my head that says, Don’t say that–that would be hurtful. Or Don’t say that because that’s
irrelevant and it won’t help you make your argument. So I’ve got this internal dialog happening
inside my head. But when the arguing gets intense, some of us are vulnerable to--that kind of
observing, that kind of internal voice, that kind of internal checks and balance in our heads–some
of us are vulnerable to that collapsing. And I know that when that collapses, I say things that are
hurtful. I say things that I wish I would never have said. But what Bollas is saying is that when
that collapses, we are moving toward inner tyranny. We are moving toward inner fascism. And if
there are enough things that happen in my life so that that voice, that “observing eye” as I call it,
that it collapses permanently, I’m more vulnerable to participate in an oppressive culture,
because I don’t have that inner checks and balances. How many of you have ever had that
happen, where that particular thing collapses? My wife and I have developed a wonderful thing–
a lot of people say you can’t do it, but you can do it, the saying of “I take that back.” You know
how people say “you can never take that back if you said it.” Believe me, relationally it is an
excellent principle to have in your house–“I take that back,” especially if your partner is telling
you “you better take that back,” then you better take it back. (laughter) Right or wrong is
irrelevant at that point. Salvation is important at that point–you are working on saving that
relationship or marriage. When we don’t have that kind of ability, we don’t have that kind of
humor, we can get locked into a reinforcing loop from our history that moves us in a direction
that moves us in a direction that’s really not healthy for us relationally or spiritually. So I loose
my observing eye. I loose the capacity to say That’s how understand it, but I could be wrong. I
might not be right. This is how I understand theology today. This is how I understand what’s
going on politically. This is how I understand what’s going on sociologically. This is how I
understand what’s going on economically. That doesn’t make it right. In a system of inner
tyranny or external tyranny, we loose the capacity to do that or the say that. Bollas is warning us
that we have a particular vulnerability to kill off parts of our inner self. I was thinking about that
from a counseling perspective, and how many folks have I run into who have gone through a
divorce and who have said to me, “I will never invest in a relationship like I invested in that
relationship, because it is just too painful.” When somebody says that, what they are saying is,
some of the best of who I am, that I can invest in a relationship, invest in another person, in this
life, is going to go away. I’m not going to do it because it is too painful.

Bollas is saying that at that point we have killed a part of ourselves. How many of you are
entrepreneurs and have said that I will never have another partner because that partner betrayed
me. Or I will never reveal that about myself because when I have shared about myself, that was
used against me. How many of us have moved through life and given up dreams that we once
had, and made statements that well that’s not going to be for me in this life. Bollis is saying that
at that point we have killed off parts of ourselves and that makes us vulnerable to participate in
oppressive states. He also says something that I find very interesting, very helpful, and very
confronting. He says that there is assessed them of moving from a liberal, free thinking mind in
that has its own kind of legislative process, with checks and balances within itself, that
participates in a democratic society. He says that there are eight stages of moving from a free
state to a fascist state. The first he says is distortion. If you distort the truth about the view of
your opponent slightly or big-time, he says that’s part of a movement toward a fascist state of
mind. I thinking, just read the newspaper. You don’t have to go far on either side. Three or four
months ago there was a paper floating around here that said that both Democrats and
Republicans party chairpersons in different states were advising their candidates not to speak
directly to the issues. And I got to thinking, what in the world are they doing, not presenting the
issues directly. After reading this, that’s an absence of reference, we’re not going to refer to the
issues directly. The second stage he talks about is decontextualization. What does that mean?
Well, that means 911 and is like Pearl Harbor. What you do at that point is you take the feelings,
events, and the reasons of Pearl Harbor and you put those on and 911. And you understand 911
not from the hear and now dynamics of 911, but from the historical understanding of Pearl
Harbor. What that looks like a relationship is, “You always do that. Remember two years ago?”
So I take the events of two years ago and impose them on the events of here and now. I distort
the contextual understanding by referencing the historical event, which helps manipulate the
person’s mind to come around to my point of view. Decontextualization. Denigration, where you
belittle the person, just turn on any comedian’s show in the evening and we are belittling our
politicians on both sides and having great fun at it. We make fun of people all the time that think
differently. We belittle. We shame. One thing I noticed about these eight characteristics is it
seems to me they are all shame based. They don’t honor the person for who they are in the here
and now. So now when I think of John Kerry, all I see is this huge head of hair, because that’s
the cartoons and conversation and going out, even to the point where I don’t hear what he says
about health care, I don’t hear what he says about the issues, because the power of the
imagination to move in with images, sometimes that takes over how I think about a person, so I
really don’t know what they are about. I can remember working with some folks who would
come in and they would be passionately hating a particular candidate. And I would say well how
are they voting? They don’t know how they’re voting, but they’re hating the candidate. Then
thinking how does that happened? It doesn’t make sense to me. This is how that happens--
Denigration, characterization, making cartoons of people, character assassination. And we do
that all the time. And change of name-- I think this is crucial not only what is going on in our
national life, but also personally. Changing the name is the first rule of conflict. Objectifying
the enemy, objectifying the other person means that I am no longer yelling at another person. I
am yelling at the objectified name. So we create names for enemies. How many of us ever call
people we love a name which makes it easier for us to be mean to the people we love. What we
call a person a name that is not their name, it is objectifying. And when we do that it gives us
permission to be mean to the person or mean to a group of people.

And then the absence of reference– you simply don’t include a group of people or particular
thought in the conversation. How many third, fourth, fifth parties do we hear about? How many
times have we done something and we have prayed that our community doesn’t bring it up,
because if we don’t mention it, it will go away? How many times have I said, I don’t want to talk
about that anymore, because it is confronting. How many times have we said, if we just leave
this item off the table and not talk about it, we may get our idea through. The absence of
reference.

Channing lived in a time when tyranny was not far away. Prior to the Revolution, there was a
theological movement in our country that would have been very pleased to have of government
that was run theologically, as it was in Europe for many, many years, as it was in Channing’s day.
Channing lived in a brief moment where we created the Constitution, and we created the Bill of
Rights, connected to the Unitarian Universalist movement I may add, with tolerance, and
freedom of conscience. It came out of Poland, the Socinian community, which is one of the
founding lights of Unitarian history. It is in our heritage, and Channing was not only creating but
also carrying the lights of our heritage. So when he talks about spiritual freedom, he is talking
about tolerance, he’s talking about civil liberties. He’s talking about a way of life that had been
traveling through time for a couple of hundred years, that was already birthed in Poland by then
by the Unitarians. And he lived in a brief moment of time when all of a sudden that light was
really bright. So when he was talking to the Massachusetts Legislature, he was affirming them.
He said, in this state we have a government that honors these civil liberties. We have a
government where I can speak these words and not be persecuted them. But he also knew that
tyranny was not far behind, and that’s why he did speak those words to the government.

And we’ve been in a fight ever since, when you think about it, both personally, relationally, and
within the government, of freedom and oppression, bouncing back and forth. It’s not any
different in the community of the church. I think Bollas is absolutely right–that all of us have a
fascist within us. All of us have a person that under the right circumstances would move to guns.
What Channing is saying is that we have got to jealously guard our spirituality, our inner lives.
We’ve got to be conscious of how we treat one another, and if we are not treating one another
with a sense of compassion, with a sense of understanding, with a sense of care, we have moved
away from our faith tradition. Because our faith tradition is one of compassion, of love, of
honoring the inherent worth and dignity of every person, of honoring the search for truth and
meaning no matter how we have got to do it, not belittling one another, but affirming one
another, caring for one another as we are on this pilgrimage. Channing challenges us that if we
don’t see our best selves in relationship and in community, then we need to confront one another,
and we need to say, Hey, what’s going on? and care for one another in that way. As a community,
when we see those issues in a larger way, then we need to go march. I think Channing is saying
that as well. Many of us know that if we don’t address those things that are hurtful, they become
more powerful. When we continue to build resentments within ourselves, do the resentments not
indeed take us over, and move us to be harmful? When we don’t confront that which is moving
toward life, which is moving toward love, which is moving toward compassion, when we don’t
say anything about that, in a sense are we in agreement about moving in that direction? What
Channing teaches us is to be alive within ourselves, and nurture that inner dialog, and have our
imaginations be alive as we engage one another. That is our faith tradition.
 Christopher Bollas' creating a fascist state of mind.

Bollas says that there are eight stages of moving from a free state to a fascist state. The
eight stages are Distortion, Decontextualization, Denigration, Caricature, Character
assassination, Change of Name, Categorization as Aggregation, and Absence of Reference.

These stages move through a process of distorting the opponent’s view, taking the views out of
context, belittling the views, belittling the individual, discrediting the opponent’s personal
character, eliminating his or her proper name and identity, and finally simply not referring to the
opponent or his or her views at all. The opponent has become “a disposable non-entity.”

The first stage is Distortion, distorting the truth about the view of your opponent slightly
or big-time. Just read the newspaper. You don’t have to look far, on either side.

The second stage is Decontextualization. I distort the contextual understanding by

referencing the historical event, which helps manipulate the person’s mind to come around to my
point of view.

The third stage is Denigration, belittling the person’s views, a process that reduces
conversation by replacing reason (the ideation of the disagreement) with emotion (affect).

From here we move easily to the fourth stage, Caricature, where you belittle the person.

The fifth stage is Character Assassination–discrediting the personal character of our

opponent.

The sixth stage is Change of Name. Changing the name is the first rule of conflict.
Objectifying the enemy, objectifying the other person means that I am no longer relating to
another person; I am relating to the objectified name.

The seventh stage is Categorization as Aggregation–in which the opponent’s identity is

lost as you lump him in with others, “They all say that” or “She’s just a hysterical woman.”

And finally the eighth stage, the Absence of Reference, at which point you simply don’t
include a group of people or particular thought in the conversation.