JANUARY ARTICLES FOR SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGY

THE METAPHYSICAL NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

If you are a Christian, you probably have heard the concept of a New Jerusalem or
New Israel, a world led by Jesus Christ? It is said that Jesus would return to the world to
judge all people and banish the evil to hell and with the just begin the reign of God’s
kingdom on earth, a world where the will of God is done. This new world allegedly will
last for a thousand years and after which Jesus and his followers would leave the world in
rapture and return to heaven. Folks read the Revelation (Apocalypse) part of the Bible
and provide us with fanciful interpretations of the end times (eschatology).

I am intrigued by religious concepts and do give them some thinking. My present

preoccupation is the possibility for there to be a world ruled by Jesus Christ? In other
words, can we have a Christian kingdom on earth, a world with a government led by the
Biblical Jesus Christ? Please come with me as we explore this subject.

NORMAL SOCIETY AS COMPOSED OF SHEEP

First, here is the picture of the extant world. We live in a world where most
physical adults are no more than children. Consider the typical American so-called adult.
He is emotionally arrested and is no more than ten years old in maturation. His world is
the world of children.
Americans, as I see them, are children playing games and in fact believe that their
childish games are for real. For example, they pass unjust laws and use those laws to
judge folks, find them guilty and place them in jail. Consider their drug laws. It is mostly
frustrated poor folks that take drugs. They take drugs to reduce their existential pain. If
society is adult it would figure out a way to reduce folk’s existential pain so that they do
not seek drugs to dull their senses. Instead, society apprehends these suffering persons,
judges them with its so-called laws, finds them guilty and clamps them into jails.
American jails are filled with inmates whose crimes are drug related. Pure reason
would suggest that these folks belong in drug treatment facilities, not jails, but reason is a
scare commodity in America.
As you observe the American legal scene (which is replicated all over the world…I
am using America because I know her well) you cannot help but conclude that these
people: police, judges, prison wardens etc are, more or less, like children. They, in fact,
believe that they are doing the right things but their concept of right things is very
childish. At first you blame them but later you learn that they are doing their best, that
they are operating at their level best and are not necessarily evil persons. You conclude
that you are dealing with children in adult bodies. It is not their fault that they do the
seeming evil they do, it is because they’re developmentally retarded that they do what
they do. They do not know any better and cannot do better. They are where they are in
space and time and are doing what they have to do.
 NEUROTIC IDEALISTS

Some persons, those that Karen Horney (Neurosis and Human Growth) called
neurotics, see the games normal adjusted persons are playing and realize that they are
unacceptable. They reject the games that characterize normal society. They use their
thinking and imagination to invent ideal selves for themselves and for other people and
ideal social institutions and ideal world and attempt to replace the normal world with
their ideal conception of it.
These people use their ideal standards to judge the imperfect world they see with
their eyes. Of course, they are not going to be able to change the real world and,
moreover, cause a lot of pain by using the standards of pure ideation to judge the real
world.
If you use mentally derived ideal social constructs to judge peoples actual behaviors
you must necessarily find them as not good enough and reject them. You become
conditional in your approach to people. You accept people only when they seem to meet
your ideal standards and since nobody ever lives up to those impossible ideas of
perfection you reject them.
If you reject people (particularly your wife and children) because they are not ideal
you cause them inordinate pain.
The idealistic neurotic causes those around him tremendous pain and psychological
suffering by insisting that they live up to his grandiose ideal standards that no human
being can ever live up to.
Clearly, the solution to the imperfection of the world is to not escape into neurotic
impossible ideals.

THE SCIENCE SOLUTION

The alternative solution is to accept the real world as it is, accept people as
imperfect and leave it at that. This is the scientific solution. The scientist sees a world
and studies it, as it is, without trying to make it perfect. The world as is, is to be
understood. People as they are, imperfect, are to be studied and understood without
judging them good or bad.

THE RELIGIOUS SOLUTION

Another alternative solution is the metaphysical solution. Here folks see the world
as imperfect but desist from using their minds to construct ideals of it and simply ask the
Holy Spirit, Christ, to guide them into doing the right things. As it were, they accept the
world as it is but have the Holy Spirit guide their participation in that imperfect world.
They do not go about judging the world and its people as good or bad but merely ask the
Holy Spirit to tell them how-to relate to that imperfect world.
It is said that the Holy Spirit teaches only love and forgiveness. Thus, such people
are guided to love and forgive all peoples apparent evil behaviors. You see a person and
you love him. You overlook his behaviors that seem inappropriate. For example, you see
a homosexual person. You find his sexual behavior stupid but you do not dwell on that
behavior; you overlook his sexual behavior and see him as a son of God and love him at
the spiritual level. You overlook the evil that men do and love their spirit selves.
You see people as the children of God who are sleeping and dreaming that they are
who they are not, ego separated selves, and as egos do awful things and overlook those
things.
You see what people do on earth as what is done in dreams and overlook them.
Dreams are not real, so you overlook them and focus on the reality of the dreamers.
The dreamers are the children of God, Christ, and you love Christ, for Christ is love.
You forgive the evil that the sleeping Christ is doing but focus on his good in awake
(spirit) state.

The person who adopts the Holy Spirit guided approach does not go about trying to
use his mind to come up with ideals of how people should behave or who they should be.
He simply accepts that in the world of illusions people are not their real selves and as
false selves they do awful things. He accepts that the world is an evil place but also
accepts that the seeming sinful people on earth have good aspects to them, their awake
Christ selves, and focuses on those selves. Such a Holy Spirit guided person does not
ever expect to change fallen human beings for he does not see that responsibility as his
function. He tolerates people as they are: imperfect.

THE IMPERFECT WORLD

The people as they are obviously imperfect and by and large very childish. There
does not seem much that we can do to improve human beings and make them perfect.
The neurotic solution of using thinking and imagination to come up with ideals of how
people ought to become obviously is like having a pie in the sky, and building a castle in
the sky; it is wishful fantasy and is not going to happen in the real world. It is a waste
time wishing for ideal human beings and ideal society for it is not going to occur.

NEW ISRAEL AS RELIGIOUS IDEALSIM/FANTASY

Some religious persons, like neurotics, reject the real world and seek a religious
idealistic solution. One of those solutions is the expectation that Jesus Christ would, at
some point in the future, come back to the world and judge the living and dead and
banish the wicked to hell and establish a kingdom of love, God on earth. This view
expects a Christ based just government to replace the imperfect government we have on
earth.
Is this expectation realistic? It is not realistic. In the here and now world, as noted,
most seeming adjusted adults are like children and think like children and are not capable
of forming a Christ like just government on earth. It is simply not going to happen;
mankind is not going to have a just government that treats all people with love. Why so?
People are too emotionally retarded to be able to love one another. People are like
predatory animals and can only hurt one another. Nothing you do would ever transform
the normal man into a loving person. He is too deep in his sleep of self forgetfulness to
even realize that his actions hurt other people. Therefore, a world of love, a world that
requires adults to love one another is not going to happen in this world.

If you leave the idea of a Christ based government, a new Israel, only to the
imagination and not try to actualize it, it is a suiting fantasy. We all can conceive an ideal
world. But such fantasies are not going to occur in the real world, for in the real world
people are selfish animals who are seeking only their self interests.
At most you have a pragmatic world, a place where people come together to serve
their mutual interests, usually at the expense of other people.

Clearly the neurotic option is not tenable for it is mental and is not going to happen
in the real world; building castles in the air is not a realistic solution to the human
condition.
In the real world, at any point in time, only a handful of persons actually are
emotional adults and understand the need for love and forgiveness. I learned this hard
lesson when I ran around with folks who called themselves students of A Course in
miracles. I had read their book and it talked about love and forgiveness. I had hoped that
those who said that they are students of the book would practice love and forgiveness.
Instead, what I saw were folks who are like all other people, self centered and each
pursuing his self interests at the expense of others. Not one of the people I saw in those
groups practiced what their book asked them to practice, love and radical forgiveness.
It was at that point that I learned that at any point in time in human history only a
handful of persons understand the imperative of love and forgiveness. This
understanding cannot be forced on other people. Each person plods along and would
understand it when he is ready. Therefore, you cannot have governments and groups
based on love and forgiveness; you cannot have a Christ like government on planet earth.

What is feasible is for an enlightened person, such as Buddha or Jesus, to teach the
need for love and forgiveness and have those who want to learn about them come to him
and learn.
The students or followers are largely normal persons and cannot actually practice
love and forgiveness. The followers cannot form a love and forgiveness based
government. Thus, it is impossible to have a Christ based government on planet earth.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 31, 2007

CHOOSE AGAIN, CHOOSE THE CHRIST NOT EGO

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

To be in this world we have already chosen to be special, self created and be the
creator of God and other people; we have already chosen to be a separated ego self
concept. If we had not already chosen to be an ego we would not be in the egos world.
 The only question we now have is when are we going to choose differently, this time
choose Christ, choose equality and sameness and union, choose God?
Eventually, we must choose for union for we are always in union and merely dream
that we are separated egos. The choice is not whether we shall return to God or not but
when. Since the return must eventually be made one ought to make the choice to return
now, rather than wait much longer and in the meantime cause ones self and other people
unnecessary pain and suffering.

Therefore, choose for Christ, now. Christ is the son of God who knows himself to
be one with all human beings, one with all creations and knows that he is the son of God
and that he did not create himself and that God created him. Christ accepts God as his
father and loves God and all his brothers.

In the temporal universe Christ shows his love for all his brothers by forgiving all of
them what they do in dreams that they have not done, in fact.
Dreams are causeless and effects less; what we do in dreams do not last forever. In
dreams we hurt each other.
Christ forgives what is done in dreams; he overlooks what is done in dreams and
only loves all children of God.
In forgiveness and love the sleeping son of God (now ego) awakens to his real self
(Christ) and the journey to nowhere, a journey without distance ends for him.
You will eventually choose Christ, so you might as well do it now. You do it now
when you see your attackers as those who called you to love them.
Forgive those you see hurt you. In forgiving them you love them. In loving them
you reconnect with them, that is, you regain the awareness that you re connected with
them, for you are always connected with all people, including those who attack you.
It is in forgiveness that you know love and union and in union know peace and
happiness. So, my brother; choose differently, this time choose forgiveness and love, not
hate and separation, and know peace.
Christ vision lies in choosing forgiveness and love; in Christ vision, that is, spiritual
seeing (love) that over looks physical sight (hate) one experiences peace and happiness.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 31, 2007

HEALED VERSUS UNHEALED RELATIONSHIPS

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Our relationships in this world are unhealed. By this I mean that we are separated
from each other. In eternity we are unified but on earth we are separated. We are
separated because we desire and pursue specialness, individuation, self creation etc. We
do not see other people as parts of us. We see ourselves as separated islands and do not
care for other people. When we relate to each other we do so from the perspective of
what is good for each of us. We do not feel connected and joined to other people; we do
not love other people. We do not care for other people. We are invested in defending our
separated ego selves.

Relationships where folks are nurturing their ego separated selves are unhealed
relationships. In them folks feel lonely, fearful and angry and depressed. The children of
God, children of union, children of love, are only happy and peaceful in unified,
connected and loving relationships, for union are their natural home; separation is an
alien home for them.

Healed relationships are those where we consciously decide to give up our pursuit
of specialness, power and self interests and reconnect to other people and work for our
common social interests. When one does not seek what is in it only for ones self but for
all of us, love and forgive one another, one is in a healed, that is, joined relationships.
Whereas we are still in bodies hence not in spirit, we approximate the conditions of
spirit, God, heaven, union, love hence feel some attenuated peace and happiness.
In healed, joined loving relationships the children of God feel more like themselves
in spirit hence are happy. (See the essay on special relationships for more on this topic).

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 31, 2007

SIN VERSUS MISTAKE

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

The Christian world considers our pursuit of specialness (pride, self creation) and
separation from God as sin. To sin is to separate from God, to be apart from our creator.
The world sinned because it separated from God. Adam and Eve sinned because they
separated from God to go do their own things, to do what God did not ask them to do.
God asked them to unify with him and with each other but they chose to separate from
God and from each other.

In this world, we seem to have separated from God and seem powerful and special.
Thus, it would seem like we sinned.
However, we only seem separated and our seeming separated world is only an
illusion, a sleep-dream.
We remain as God created us, unified with him and with each other. We remain
unified spirit but seem to close our eyes and seem separated and live as special egos on
earth. We have not in fact separated from God.
Because in fact we have not separated from God and are not special, we have not
sinned. We are not guilty and are still innocent.
But in as much as we still wish specialness and separation and see a separated world,
albeit a dream world, we have made a mistake. Though a mistake is not a sin, yet it must
be corrected.
 We must correct the error of belief in specialness and separation. We correct it by
giving up the desire for separation and specialness.
We made a mistake in seeking specialness and separation. That mistake, the desire
for specialness, gave rise to the empirical world we see. We must give up that desire and
in giving it up see our empirical universe disappear from our awareness, as we return to
the experience of union with God and each other in spirit.
Like the prodigal son, we must all accept that we made a mistake in going on a
journey to go seem independent from our father and then return home. A mistake must be
owned and corrected.
As long as one does not acknowledge ones mistakes one cannot correct them (giving
up special ego self).

The world is a mistake and needs correction. It is corrected when we forgive one
another and love one another. In love we awaken to the awareness of union, hence have
peace and joy.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 31, 2007

NO ATTACK AND NO DEFENSE

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

If you have any power of observation at all you probably have observed that in this
world we live by attacking other people (and things). Our survival depends on killing
other living things: we kill and eat animals and plant matter. Without the death of other
biological organisms we would not live.
At the social level, the powerful live off the sweat of the weak. Indeed, sometimes
the powerful often chase the weak off their properties and expropriate them.
This necessarily raises many existential questions: a life that is sustained through the
death of other lives is it a good life? If we live on the death of other animals are we not
evil? This is a serious question and the various religions and philosophies of mankind
therefore tried to provide answers to it. These answers were mainly rationalizations,
excuses that enabled human beings deal with their predicament.
How can we be good and yet living on the death and destruction of other life forms?
The Bible said that God created animals and vegetables for the good of man. In
effect, the Bible writers are trying to permit human beings to go ahead and kill and eat
animals and plants without feeling guilty. Of course, that rationalization does not
completely obviate the dreadful situation we find ourselves in.
Every time you kill a chicken, goat, sheep or cow to eat you must feel a pang of
guilt. The human mind, the unconscious, is filled with guilt, guilt from many things we
do, including from our manner of survival.

So is there a way out of this conundrum? Fact: we can only live by killing other
living things. Even if we all become vegetarians and did not kill animals to eat, we would
still have to destroy vegetables to eat them. There is no getting away from death and
destruction as the basis of human survival. Indeed, at the microbiological level,
microorganisms (virus, bacteria, and fungi) are attacking our bodies and trying to make
meals of our bodies. Our immune systems are killing them and in fact eating them.
Simply stated, at the physiological level killing seems inevitable.

How about at the social and psychological level, can we avert attack and killing?
Other people do attack us; there is no doubt about that. The powerful at all times try to
use the weak to procure a decent living for themselves. The weak are always used by the
strong as slaves or workers in modern factories. So is there any way that we can extricate
ourselves from this dreadful situation? Can we live a life not based on attack and
defense?

I do not think that we can survive on earth without attack and defense. If we did not
attack and defend ourselves we would die. If, for example, the Christian world did not
defend itself from Muslim attack…Islam is messianic and wants to convert the entire
world to its world view…they would be attacked, killed and or enslaved to Muslims. If
they want to remain free men they would have to fight back, I mean militarily fighting
back, not some mumbo jumbo fighting back.
Given the constant attacks that is our world we must be constantly defensive to
survive in this world. As long as folks want to live in bodies, in the world of space, time
and matter, they must be defensive and must attack one another.

NO ATTACK AND NO DEFENSE LEADS TO EXIT FROM THIS WORLD

On the other hand, those who want to get away from this world; exit from the
slaughterhouse called planet earth, can cease attacking other things, animals and trees
included. They can stop being defensive when they are attacked.
When a man stops attacking other things and stops being defensive to their attacks he
uses his mind to tell his immune system to shut down and stop defending him from
bacterial and other germ attacks. Such a man would be defenseless when other people
attack him. Within a few minutes such a defenseless man would die. He would exit from
the abode of attack and defense and return to the world of formlessness, the unified spirit
world.

This is exactly what Jesus did. When he still wanted to live in ego and body he
preached love and was persecuted and ran to all over the place to protect his physical
existence. But at some point he decided to die and quit defending himself. He stopped
attacking people (he used to call the Pharisees a brood of vipers, this is psychological
attack, it is as painful as physical attack, and made the Pharisees defend themselves by
wanting to arrest and punish him) and stopped being defensive when he was attacked.
Naturally, he died, for nobody can live on earth without being defensive. His body was
destroyed. He died to the awareness that he is a body and regained the awareness that he
is spirit, unified spirit.
 Spirit is one and at the same time infinite in numbers. There is no separation in
spirit. Where there is no separation, no boundaries, there is no attack and defense. In
unified spirit, God, heaven there is no attack and defense. All are one.
(Sheep and lion lay side by side in harmony in the purified world of light forms;
here there is no attack and no defense. In unified spirit itself there are no forms, no sheep
and lion, just pure spirit.)

What is the point? The point is that if you want to be in this world of attack and
defense that you must attack and defend yourself. Defense is necessary for your survival
in our empirical world. If you did not defend yourself you would die and exit this world.
Defenselessness is the same as forgiveness. If you want to exit this world you should
be totally forgiving. But if you want to be in this world you must attack those who attack
you and not forgive them. Or you should only forgive occasionally.

Why did I find it necessary to say all these? I said them because some new age
religionists run around talking sweet talk of being non- attacking and defenseless and all
forgiving. True, we can become non-attacking, defenseless and forgiving, but if we do so
we die and return to unified spirit.
Defenselessness and total forgiveness is not compatible with the exigencies and
realities of this world. Do not mix heaven and earth, for they have different conditions.

When you decide to return to heaven, unified spirit, you will stop all attacks and
become radically forgiving and defenseless. But as long as you are on earth, you will
choose when to forgive others.

If you attack me, I will choose whether it is worthwhile to fight back or not. If you
attack me where it hurts, I will fight back. I will be defensive.

To be in this world one must be defensive and not forgiving at all times; this is the
logic of the ego and its world.
The logic of the Holy Spirit, Christ, forgiveness and defenselessness is also true but
it takes one out of this world and to the unified spirit world.
One has to choose what world one wants to live in: our present egos world or God’s
unified world.
I have, in the time being, chosen to be in our special separated, egos world and, as
such, must engage in some form of attack and defense and attenuated forgiveness, not
total forgiveness.
Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that salvation, redemption and deliverance
from the ego and its defensive world requires being defenseless and totally forgiving. It
is up to you to decide when you are going to be saved, that is, give up attack and defense
and return to unified spirit, aka heaven.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 31, 2007
 DECIDING WITH THE HOLY SPIRIT NOT THE EGO

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

At every moment in our lives we are making decisions. Some of these decisions we
are consciously aware of and many others we are not consciously aware of, that is, they
are made at the unconscious level.
The decisions we make produce our daily experiences. The world we see at the
collective and individual levels reflect our collective and individual decisions.

Decisions can be made from the ego perspective, that is, from the pursuit of
specialness and separation; from the desire for personal power, the feeling that one is in
charge of ones life. Decisions made from the perspective of the ego produce pain,
conflict and war.
Decisions can also be made from love and forgiveness, from a sense that one is
unified with all people. Decisions made from love are guided by the Holy Spirit (God)
and produce peace and happiness.

Who makes these decisions? It is the son of God, a part of God, who makes these
decisions. He chooses how he makes them; he chooses who guides him, the ego or the
Holy Spirit.
In the temporal universe, the ego and the Holy Spirit are guides, guides to making
decisions. If the ego is ones guide one feels special and in charge of ones life and makes
decisions to optimize ones self interests at the expense of other people, and one reaps
chaos. On the other hand, if the holy Spirit is ones guide, one makes decisions that
optimize our collective interests, love for ones self and for other people and generate
peace and happiness.

Whereas decisions are made at all times, many unconscious, one should become
aware of those one is making at the conscious level and make them from love and
forgiveness, from the Holy Spirit.
If you want to concretize this process, then say: God (Holy Spirit) please make this
decision for me; I will not make it by myself.
Of course, it is you, the son of God, who makes all decisions, but while you sleep
and dream that you are special and separated from God, the Holy Spirit represents your
higher self and helps you remember love; whereas the ego represents your lower self and
decides from hate and anger and fear.
If you decide from the ego you are pretending to be in charge and must feel guilty
and fearful; if you decide from the Holy Spirit you feel peaceful and happy and no guilt
and fear.

The relevant point is that one is always making decisions and that one must make
them from the Holy Spirit and that one ought to be guided by God and love and
forgiveness if one wants to have a peaceful and happy day and life.
 You cannot not make decisions, the only choice you have in the matter is from
whose perspectives you are making them.
If you are egoistic (as most people are, especially Africans) you make decisions
from the ego, from pride, from what is good for you at the expense of other people and
reap chaos, such as the chaos in Africa.
The goal is to change your decision making patterns and make them from love,
from what is good for all people and in doing so produce harmony for all people (all
Africans).
The choice is in your hands; before you chose to decide through the ego, now
choose to decide with the Christ, your higher self, the Holy Spirit, God; choose what
serves our collective social interests.
Ones decisions determine what kind of day and life one wants to have and what
kind of world one wants to see and experience. Our individual and collective decisions
determine the world we see and live in.
If you choose from the ego self that believes that you are in charge of your life, you
produce the chaos you see in the world; if you decide from love for all, for what serves
our common interests, you produce a peaceful world for you and for all people.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 31, 2007

THE CONDITIONS FOR GUILT AND INNOCENCE

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

As long as we desire specialness and seem separated from God and from each other,
that is, see ourselves in the world of separation, our world, we live in guilt. On the other
hand, we live in innocence when we accept that God created us; accept our sameness,
equality and union with each other.
On earth we are already living in a mistake; in sin, guilt (that is, separation and
specialness). We must give up our belief in specialness and separation and return to union
and love, the condition for innocence and sinlessness and guiltlessness.
(To live in love and union is to live in to peace and happiness….to the extent that
you accept God as your creator, accept our human equality and sameness and love and
forgive all people, you feel peaceful and happy; peace and joy are the indicators of
Godliness, whereas conflict and war are the indicators of acceptance of the ego into your
life).

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 31, 2007

AFRICANS: TO GIVE OR TO GET?

 Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Years ago, I used to feel angry towards Africans. I was angry at them because, as I
looked at them, I saw a people who did not seem to care for their people, a people whose
leaders simply sought for opportunities to steal from their people and use the wealth they
acquired to seem like they are very important persons but did not really care to help their
people. I concluded that these people are useless to themselves and to any one else. I
wrote them off as useless to human evolution, as a people who have to be helped by
every one else (by the West, and now, by the East) but who cannot help other people.
They seemed a pathetic race, a race of receivers, not givers, children, a people one should
not identify with.
I still feel this way about Africans. But something has changed. Now, I know that it
is for me, and those like me who are service oriented human beings, givers, to give to
Africans and eventually help them to learn to give rather than wait to receive.
It is for me and Godly persons to serve this incredibly un-giving and un-serving
people. It is for us to heal them, to teach them what it means to be the children of God:
loving, that is, service oriented people.
What has changed is that instead of me sitting around and feeling angry at
Africans for not giving to each other, I just give to them what I can and leave it at that.
I no longer feel angry at them. I simply see them as children to be given, served and
serve them and not worry that they do not serve me, give to me in return. Saint Francis
said: God, give me the opportunity to serve other people, not to be served by them.
In psychological terms, what has changed is that I have grown up: hitherto, I
expected to receive from Africans and did not receive from them, and felt angry at them
for not giving to me. Now, I accept that it is not for them to give to me, serve me, but for
me to give to them, serve them.
Adopting this service oriented attitude has enabled me to obtain inner peace and
happiness.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 30, 2007

PRIDE AS OBSTACLE TO SUBMISSION TO GOD

(Pride as obstacle to peace and happiness)

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Karen Horney (Neurosis and Human Growth) pointed out that the neurotic is an
extremely proud person. In his pride he rejects his real self and posits an ideal self and
attempts to become that ideal self, a self he himself created.
Alfred Adler (The Neurotic Constitution) pointed out that the neurotic is a very
proud person; it is pride that makes him want to seem superior to other persons; it is pride
to reject ones real self and seek to replace it with a false superior self.
 It is even more grandiose pride to want to change other people, all of society and
make them seem as one wants them to become, ideal. The idealistic personality (my term
for the neurotic) wants to change himself, change other people and change the world and
make them as he wishes that they were.
The neurotic is driven by existential pride, the pride to reject what are: himself, other
people and the world, and make them over into what he wants them to become. He is
motivated by inordinate power; he wants to be more powerful that God himself; he is
deluded. To be mentally health the individual must have no pride.

All mental illnesses are rooted in human pride. I do not care what form the illness
takes: schizophrenia, delusion, mania, depression, anxiety, personality disorders etc, they
are all characterized by pride.
The insane person is an inordinately proud person; he wants to destroy his real self
and recreate it in a different form, a form he believes is better than he already is.

NORMALCY IS MINI-NEUROSIS

Normal persons tend to accept their real selves and are not on an inordinate power
trip to reject (kill) their real selves and replace them with imagined better selves.
However, normalcy is nothing more than mini neurosis. The normal person does what the
neurotic does but in a less obvious manner.
Even the most normal persons tend to reject aspects of their real selves and quest
after ideal selves but they do so in a less driven and obvious manner.

Simply stated, normal persons, neurotic persons and psychotic persons, all human
beings, up to a point seek to reject their real selves and desire ideal, all powerful, superior
selves.
Put differently, all human beings are proud, for it is pride that makes a person want
to reject what is, his already existing self, and make it over into an imaginary better self.

PRIDE, SPECIALNESS AND SEPARATION

Pride is what brought this world into being. In heaven, eternity, all is the same, equal
and united. There are infinite selves but none of them employs the term I.

The moment one says I, one has felt proud and separated from the whole. At some
point the unified children of God wished to seem special, to go create themselves, create
each other and create God. This desire for self creation led to separation from God and
from each other.
The pursuit of self creation (as in self concept) is what brought about our world.
In our world each of us has a sense of I, a special separated self.

It is pride in the self, in ones power to recreate ones self and make ones self what
God did not make one that brought one into this world and keeps one in this world. As
long as the individual has a sense of I, a self apart from other persons, he is proud.
 In pride the individual is in pain. As long as one is proud one is in hell, in a prison of
ones own making.
The only way to know peace and happiness is to let go of ones sense of I, ones
special, separated self and return to the awareness of our unified and shared self, the Holy
Son of God.

BHAKTI RELIGION AND THE SEPARATED SELF

One of the best lessons I learned from reading Ramakrishna’s teaching (The Gospel
of Ramakrishna by M) was the man’s insight into the fact that as long as we have
separated selves that we must live in pain. To have a sense of I self, is to be in hell.
He said that since to be human is to have a sense of me, a separated self, hence to be
in hell, that one can reduce ones pain and hellish life by using that I to serve God. He
propounded the Bhakti approach to God. In his view, the Bhakti approach to God is the
best suited for this age, an age that has people who want to have the illusion of separated
selves.
Bhakti encourages people to retain the illusion that they have separated selves and
uses those selves to worship God.
In reality there is no separated self but as long as you believe that you have one,
then keep that illusion but use it to serve God. Worship God with your seeming separated
self, and if you do so you would know some attenuated peace and happiness.

In other words have a separated self but submit it to God. As long as you desire a
separated self and believe that you have one submit it to God and ask him to guide you.

Islam teaches that the separated self should be submitted to God.

Christianity teaches that the separated self should be submitted to God. It is in

submission to a higher power that the individual reduces the pain and hellishness of
living as if he has a separated self.

This does not mean that God wants one to submit ones self to him. God is not some
pathological narcissist that asks his children to obey him. God does not ask for our
submission. But our submission to God is made necessary the moment we believe that
we are special and separated from God.
God created us and is us. Other than the fact that he created us, God and us are the
same and equal. But we desired to be more powerful than God and seem to have
separated from God. In our separation we have sense of I. As long as we have a sense of
I we live in pain and suffer. To reduce our suffering we have to use that false sense of
special separated self to worship God and also use it to serve other people, other seeming
separated selves.
It is in serving God (Bhakti yoga) and humanity (Karma yoga) that the separated self
obtains some joy in his life. Thus, to serve God and other people is for the individuals
good, not for God’s good.

JNANA AND RAJA YOGA

 If you can get your separated self out of the way, convince yourself that you have no
separated special self, and then you do not need to worship God and serve people. This is
what happens in meditation (raja yoga). In meditation the individual consciously
relinquishes his illusion that he has a separated self. He denies the existence of the
separated self, denies that he can think independent of God and all of us. He rejects the
ego and all its thinking categories and tries to remain calm.
If the mind is emptied of the ego, the individual is now a void; he rejoins the
universal self, a self that is itself (as God) and simultaneously all of us (infinite selves).
There is only one self, God, who is at the same time his infinite children. God and
his children share one self and one mind and think one thought. As long as one is in this
state one is in reality and is peaceful and happy.

The moment the thought of specialness and separation enters ones mind, one seems
separated from God and all creation and returns to existing as separated I, the human self.
One returns to living in hell, in pain.

If you do not want pain in yourself, if you desire peace and happiness then
relinquish your separated self.
If you keep your separated self, as Ramakrishna said, then use it to serve God and
man and in doing so reduce the pain of having a separated self, not eliminate that pain.
As long as you are a human being, hence has a sense of I, ip so facto, you are in
pain. To be human, as Buddha said, is to suffer, to live in pain. We suffer because we
convince ourselves that we have separated selves and take pride in our selves. It is self
inflicted wound. As such, you can heal that wound by removing its cause; accept that you
do not have a separated self, and see yourself as unified with God and all people.
The Jnana yogi through thinking comes to recognize that his real self, Atman, is one
with Brahman, God, and lets go all assertion of the special separated self and in doing so
knows peace and happiness.

The Western, normal society, solution to the separated self is Bhakti yoga. The
American encourages people to have the delusion of having separated selves and asks
them to use those illusory selves to serve society, to serve their government and other
social organizations. This is good for as long as people use their false special selves to
serve society and government they obtain some peace and happiness in their lives.

Africans tend to want to retain their special separated selves more than any other
people. Africans are the most narcissistic human beings alive. They want to live for the
self alone. The result is that they live in hell, pain and poverty. Nothing would work out
for Africans until they subjugate their swollen special separated selves to the service of
God and society.

CONCLUSION

My experience on planet earth has led me to conclude that as long as we human

beings have a sense of special separated self, desire to create themselves and other
people, seem superior to other people and in charge of their lives, they must live in
psychological pain and suffer. They live in delusion if they believe in their own self
creation and suffer.
The truth is that God created people and they are unified spirit. In that truth people
do not suffer any psychological pain.
In the meantime, as long as they believe in specialness and separation hence are in
this empirical world, if the individual wants to reduce his suffering and pain he must find
a way to reduce his belief in special separated self and its delusion of self creation and
being in charge of ones life.
One of the ways to reduce that delusion of self creation is offered by the Bhakti
religions of mankind (Judaism, Christianity, Islam and aspects of Hinduism and
Buddhism). Here, the individual retains his belief that he has a separated self, he does not
have a separated self, for, in reality there is only one universal self, God, but use that
seeming separated self to worship God and serve other human beings.
In fact it helps if the individual has an idol, say a wooden image of Buddha, Krishna,
Jesus Christ etc to bow down to. The idea is not that the craven image is real but that it
helps shrink the individual’s over swollen ego self and to the extent the human self image
and self concept are shrunk to that extent do people feel peaceful and happy.
(As an aside, in politics, the most dangerous person is a person who does not believe
in God and who does not bow to a higher power; such persons are likely to be motivated
by crass egotism and in pursuit of their ego sense of power could destroy those who
disobey their whims. A good leader ought to be a religionists; a Bhakti type person who
bows before a God and prays to that God. The philosopher type finds his salvation in
having no self, Jnana yoga, and does not belong in politics. Politics is for normal average
persons, for intellectually underdeveloped children, not for mature adults. Real adults
belong in philosophy and science, the pursuit of true knowledge.)
Alternatively, the individual should use pure thinking to come to the realization that
the special separated self is impossible, for there can only be one unified spirit self, albeit
with infinite selves, and, therefore, cease asserting his seeming separated self. This is the
philosophical, (Jnana Yoga) approach.
Meditation (Raja Yoga) helps a lot. Whatever helps the individual to shrink and
eventually eliminate his sense of I, the separated self, and eliminate his illusory pride that
he is in charge of his life, helps to give him peace and joy.
Peace and happiness lies in having no pride, in having no special separated self, in
not feeling that one is in charge of ones life, in believing that a higher power, let us call
him God, is in charge of ones life. It is in having no self, no separated special self, that is,
that one obtains peace and happiness.
Of course, we always have a self; the real self is the unified self, God. Each of us is
a part of God. We are eternally unified with God and with each other; we cannot be
separated from him and from each other.
The ego separated self is a false illusory self, a self in a dream setting and ought to be
jettisoned rather than taken pride in, as human beings do, and in the processes give
themselves unnecessary psychological and somatic pain.

*I have no ego separated self; I do not defend what seems my ego separated self. In doing
so I am peaceful and happy.
 Whenever I am tempted to believe that I have a special separated self and defend it, I
cause me psychological pain. The choice is mine: to defend an illusion, ego, or not? To
identify with truth, Unified Self, Christ, God, and be happy?
At all times each of us, human beings are making this choice and how we make it
gives us peace or conflict.
Now you know the truth; so choose peace, which is synonymous with choosing
Christ, unified self, and love and forgiveness for all creation and its creator.
Cheers, there is hope for you, and for mankind.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 30, 2007

THE WAR AGAINST OUR REAL SELVES

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

In this world, we are all at war, a war against our real self, a war against our unified
Christ self, a war against God. In this world we attack our real self, unified spirit self.
We attack it and split it into fragments and each of us identifies with one fragment, one
self and denies that other selves are parts of him.
In identifying with one self he satisfies his desire for specialness, self creation and
superiority. He now has the delusion that he created himself, created God and created the
world.
He defends his seeming separated special self at the expense of other people.
Whenever he defends his separated self he has attacked other people; in attacking other
people he feels that he is safe since they are not part of him.
But since other people are parts of him, in attacking other people he actually attacks
himself though he does not know it at the conscious level, for at the conscious level what
he sees is separated self, not the unified self that is at the unconscious level.
At the ego unconscious level we are all unified and joined. What is done to each of
us is done to all of us.

The war against other people is, in fact, the war against our real selves. We hide the
knowledge of this fact by housing ourselves in bodies and living in space and time. I see
you as over there and see me as over here; there is body, space and time separating us.
Thus, I believe that what I do to you I do not do to me. If I hurt you I do not seem to hurt
me; if you are in pain I do not seem in pain; if you die I do not seem to die; if you are
poor I do not seem to be poor.
This is delusion, for since we are at the spiritual level unified, what I do to you I have
effectively done to me.
What is done to any son of God reverberates and affects all children of God. What I
do to you I have done to all children of God and what I do to me I have done to all
children of God.
(As a practical example, consider racism and how it affects all blacks; if a white
racist does not employ a black man, his racist behavior has affected not only the black
man but his family, his wife and children etc. The children would grow up to be poor and
hate whites, all whites, and some of them would kill white men’s children. We reap as we
sow. All our actions affect all of us, perhaps, not immediately.)

The way to stop the war against ourselves is to love and forgive one another what
we did to one another. Forgive all people and love all people and you bring peace and joy
to all people. Peace and joy are the opposites of war and conflict. The war against
ourselves ends when we return to the awareness that we are unified spirit, when we
awaken in God. But to awaken, we must meet the conditions of heaven: love one another,
which in this world mean forgive one another.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

CONSCIOUSNESS IS OUTSIDE MATTER

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Let me make it clear that I am not a religionist. I do not belong to any religion.
However, I was raised a Catholic and understand Christianity as well as any one else. I
am not an atheist either.
My God is the philosophers God, not the religionists God. My God is my belief that
there is Consciousness in the universe. I do not fully grasp it, but I believe that that
consciousness is outside our human bodies.
I believe that outside our bodies consciousness feels adequate but the moment it
identifies with the human body it feels inadequate, hence the universal tendency for
human begins to feel inadequate.
While in body and feeling inadequate, consciousness remembers its pre bodily
existence and sense of adequacy. It therefore strives to seem adequate in its new bodily
abode.

To feel inadequate one must have hitherto felt adequate. We cannot know what
inadequacy is unless we had known what adequacy is.

To say that our experience in body is the sole reason for making us feel inadequate
and inferior, as Alfred Adler said, is overly rational and reductive. It reduces complex
issues to simplistic psychologisms.
Adlerian psychology is descriptive but not satisfactory in its explanations. It
correctly explains our tendency to feel inferior and compensate with desire for
superiority, but it did not explain the origin of our inferiority feeling.

I believe that our inferiority feeling originates in our awareness that in a pre-bodily
existence we were adequate, compared to our bodily life where we feel weak, pained and
inadequate.
 Body, like automobiles, can be weak and rickety and unable to perform its functions
but that is not enough explanation why we feel inferior. An old car does not feel inferior.
It is the consciousnesses in us that feel inferior upon recognizing the vulnerability of
the human body.
Simply stated, it is not biology that solely caused our sense of inadequacy but our
consciousness that upon perception of the vulnerable, body feels inadequate and seeks
imaginary restitution.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 30, 2007

INNOCENT PERCEPTION VERSUS GUILTY PERCEPTION

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

In heaven, eternity, we are unified, joined, are the same and equal; we work for
each others common interests.
In union and working for our common interests we do not attack each other. In
eternity we are innocent, guiltless, sinless and holy (unified).
We desired specialness and separated from each other and now work for our self
interests (and cooperate to work for our mutual interests).
In separation and selfishness we are guilty, sinful and not innocent. In union, love we
are innocent.

On earth we approach each other from selfish interests and as separated special
selves. On earth we are guilty.
We can make our approaches to each other innocent when we know that we are
unified with each other and work for our common social interest.
When the individual accepts our eternal union, sameness and equality and works
for our common social interests he has purified his perception and now has innocent
perception of himself and other people. His life is now characterized by peace and
happiness. He has approximated the condition of heaven here on earth. He has a healed
mind, a mind that knows itself as joined to all other minds and that whatever it does to
others it does to itself, so it loves all other people to love itself.

Innocent perception does not waste its time judging people as good or bad; of
course, it sees people engaged in bad behaviors, but it forgives them, overlooks their evils
and loves their real selves, the Christ in them.
This does not mean condoning evil; it means emphasizing good and correcting evil,
not through moralization but through good examples.
Teach and live love. Those who hate would imitate you and love. If the evil are
arrested and put in jail, as they should, we must go there and teach them love for all
people.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 30, 2007

RELINQUISHMENT OF EGO IDEALISM IS HEALING OF MENTAL DISORDER

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Some children feel pained. They reject their bodies and subsequently their selves.
They reject the self as is, other people as they are and the world as is. They seek ideal
alternatives to themselves, alternatives to other people and to the world. Their minds seek
ideals to everything that is. Their thinking is geared to idealism, to perfection.
These people use their minds to invent ideals and use the ideals that they made to
judge themselves, judge other people and judge everything in existence. Nothing is ever
good enough for them.
They are perpetually unhappy, for since they and the world are not ideal, they
depress themselves by judging the real with the standards of the imaginary ideal self and
ideal world.
They embark on improving the world, at the mental level, any way. All these
amount to escape into fantasy since they are not going to improve the world or
themselves.

Helen Schucman (A course in miracles) was actually talking about herself when she
talked about the neurotic’s flight into fantasy. She was a neurotic idealist who rejected
the real world and sought escape into neurotic ideals (or psychotic ideals) hence an
unhappy woman. At some point she realized that the world cannot be improved and she
wanted to stop her escape into fantasy. She then asked folks to stop all ego idealism and
abandon all hope in the ego, in this world.
As an alternative, she encouraged folk to seek spiritual idealism, a world led by the
Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ.
The Holy Spirit guided world she advocated is an ideal world, though it gives peace
as long as folks do not feel that it is for them to bring about that world.

IDENTIFICATION WITH IDEAL EGO LEADS TO SOCIAL ACTION

In the meantime, ego idealism and preaching of idealism in every thing gives the
ego energy to be ambitious, to work hard. As long as you expect other people and the
world to be ideal and use ideals to judge them and hope to achieve that ideal in the future,
you are not yet depressed, you have not given up on life.
In fact, you may have paranoid ambition, the type Hitler had, and keep plugging
ahead trying to change the world.
As long as you do not personally try to live your ego idealism, but merely talk about
it and expect other people to live it and criticize them for not living it, you will keep
going.
It is when you try to live your ego idealism that you find out that no one can live it.
The ego knows this fact, that you cannot live your ego idealism, so it encourages you to
just keep it at the mental level and use it to judge other people and judge yourself.
 As long as you are using impossible ideals to judge you and other people you
depress you and other people. You remain depressed and in the meantime not do
anything to improve the real world. The ego enjoys your depression for it does not want
you to be happy.

If you give up your ego idealism (that is, neurosis and or psychosis), and accept the
real world and do your best to adapt to it you feel okay and actually make some impact
on the world. Science takes the world as it is and deals with it on its own terms and does
not escape into fantasies.

Mental health lies in giving up all ego idealism and living with the real world, as it
is. The objective of psychotherapy is to get folks to give up their world of imaginations
and live with the real world, as it is, and leave it at that. That is what Karen Horney
attempted to teach; she tried to get the neurotic to give up his pursuit of idealism and deal
with the imperfect real self and its real world and not depress himself with ideal
standards. (Ego ideals are of the devil and Satan; folks use them to make their lives
miserable; Johnson used ego ideals to make his life and the lives of those around him
very miserable).

Look at it this way: the real world is nothing important, meaningful or purposeful
but what is the alternative, to it: Futile ego idealism, fantasy?
Reconcile yourself to the real world or shut up, but no ego idealism, no escape into
fantasy, secular or religious.

EXTREME PAIN LEADS TO DISCONNECTION FROM UNION, TO INABILITY

TO LOVE OTHER PEOPLE

My extremely weak and pained body disposed me to desire extreme specialness.

Actually, I chose extreme specialness, sense of self creation, creation of God and people.
I chose a pained body to make me extremely disconnected to God and to other people, for
if I was a son of God and was loved by God and other people how come they allowed me
to live in such pain, I asked?
I chose my body and the pained body gave me but projected it out and made it seem
like other people gave me my body and pain.
Now that I know that I chose my body for the function it served me, to optimize my
desired specialness and separation, the goal is to reverse what I chose, to choose
differently.

BODY PAIN AS CRUCIFIXION

While still living in a pained body, being physically crucified, as Jesus was
physically crucified, by body pain, the goal is to recognize that I am not body, that I am
mind. My mind is different from my body. (My mind and my body; who is the self that
owns both mind and body? The Son of God is; he is different from his mind and body; he
uses his mind to think and his body to live in the world of space and time, but he is
neither mind nor body.)

RESURRECTION IS DENIAL OF BODY AND IDENTIFICATION WITH CHRIST

In fact, my body is a figure in a dream and does not exist. Resurrection lies in
recognizing that one is not ones body or mind and overlooking the pains of the body and
focusing on the mind as a loving, forgiving person, as Jesus did. In doing so, one
reawakens to joy and peace.
But the ego wants one to identify with body and its pains and struggle to reduce that
pain by improving the egos world and in so doing remain enslaved to the material world,
to hell.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 30, 2007

OUR WORLD REFLECTS OUR THINKING AND BELIEFS

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

What we believe is possible is generally what happens to us. What we believe is

what we see and experience.
Therefore, change the belief system you have and you see a different world and
experience a different world.
Believing is seeing and experiencing. This is true both at the collective and
individual level.
At the collective level we all believe that we are special and separated from God
and from each other and see and experience a world of specialness and separation, a
world where there is no love, no connectedness.
To be on earth is to believe that it is possible not to be in love, to believe that it is
possible to be disconnected to God and other people, and what one believes in is what
one sees; thus, we do not love one another and are not connected to one another; the
pursuit of specialness, personal creation and creation of God is desire not to love the
whole and other people and ones self, and as one believes one sees.

The world we see and experience is literally a manifestation of the world we believe
is possible. We desire a world of specialness and separation and disconnected persons
who do not love themselves and do not love each other and do not love God. That desired
world manifests as our world. We project that world out and see it as if it is outside us
and experience it.

At the individual level one wants to seem special and self created and sees such a
world. Each of us has certain beliefs about him self and those beliefs determine what
seems to happen to him.
 If one believes in poverty, that belief produces poverty for one; if one believes in
wealth that belief produces wealth for one; if one believes that one has personal worth,
that belief produces a worthy life for one; if one believes that one should do a certain job,
that belief produces the opportunity for one to do that job; if one believes that one should
be unemployed, that belief in unemployment produces unemployment. As one believes
is done to one by ones dreaming mind. Nothing that the individual does not believe in,
does not want to experience, can occur in his life. We do not live in an accidental world;
we live in a world that mirrors our individual and collective beliefs.
(Africans, for example, believe in poverty and chaos and their continent is poor and
chaotic.)

It follows that if one changes ones belief system ones life changes. In fact, if one
changes ones existential wish for specialness and separation one would exit this world,
awaken from the dream of specialness and separation and find ones self in unified spirit.
Alternatively, if one still believes in separation but wants to love all people, one
sees ones self and all people in loving, light forms.

The world we see and experience, heaven, near heaven or our far from heaven
world reflect our belief systems.
So do not blame any one else for your life, just see it as a reflection of your prior
beliefs, as a world showing you what you want to experience. If you do not like it, then
change your belief system and it would show you a different world for you to see and
experience.

Nothing that you do not believe in ever happens to you. If you believe that you
ought to work for, say, the United Nations and help build a united world and a world
government, you will do what you have to do to work there and will work there. Working
there reflects your belief system. On the other hand, if at the unconscious level you do
not want to work for the United Nations you would not work there, for you would not
project yourself out working there.
Everywhere you are and whatever you are doing reflects what you believe about
yourself, what you want to do. There are no accidents, for the world is your dream, your
beliefs, your thoughts are transformed into pictorial images and projected out into a
dream.

So what belief systems do you have about yourself? What do you want to do with
your life?
Those are the real questions for you to answer. Your deep level beliefs determine
the world you see and experience; change them and your life changes.

However, some of the deepest beliefs we have were formed before we came to this
world; those shape our choice of body, parents, social circumstances etc.
Whereas it is difficult to change the pre-birth beliefs one can understand some of
them and change them so as to have different experiences.
 There are some deep unconscious beliefs and choices that one cannot change in this
life time. For example, one has already chosen ones body, gender and race, to experience
them; one cannot change those but one can determine how one experiences them.
For example, if ones body causes one pain ( chosen to make one angry and
dissociated from God and other people, to feel that they crucified one by giving one pain)
one can now accept the crucifixion of one body, the pain one feels, and, instead, deny
ones body and identify with ones spirit.
One can use ones mind to understand that one is not ones body and ignore ones
body and its pain and dwell on forgiveness and love.
In doing so, one resurrects from crucifixion (identification with body is crucifixion).
The point is that one can make changes in ones thinking despite certain seeming inherited
physical realities.

Ultimately, the lesson is that we have certain belief systems and that those beliefs
determine the world we see and experience.
You believe and then see what you believe is possible and experience it. It is not the
other way around that seeing is believing no, it is believing is seeing.
If you do not like the world you see, your experiences, then change your beliefs,
change your thinking patterns and now have different beliefs, different thinking patterns.
Now believe in love, in forgiveness, in God and his abundance and see yourself as not
guilty, as innocent and as worthy of the best the world can give and what you believe in
will be reflected in your world.

The world you see and experience reflects your thinking and your beliefs. It is in this
knowledge that you accept the justice of God and know peace.
The son of God, you, all of us, desired specialness (an impossible insane idea) and
seem to separate from his father and brothers. His desires, his beliefs produced the
experiences he is having and the world he seems to be living in. As we desire and believe
in, at the deep unconscious level, we see and experience.

God is merciful for he offers us the opportunity, through his Holy Spirit, to choose
different beliefs, to choose different patterns of thinking, to choose loving and forgiving
thoughts, and in so doing see and experience a different world. This alternative world,
while still composed of separated persons approximates unified heaven.
The Holy Spirit guided world is, as it were, at heaven’s gate: it is a happy dream for
it is still a dream in that people still seem separated albeit they are loving people; it is a
semi peaceful and happy world.
When, ultimately, we, individually and collectively, give up all desire for
specialness and separation, we return to unified spirit; we see our seeming separated
world disappear into the nothingness from which we conjured it out; we continue living
as unified spirit with God and with each other; we continue living in bliss, not the pain
and conflict of our temporal world.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 29, 2007
 WHO IS THE ANTICHRIST?

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

I am not quite sure when the term the antichrist came into usage but what is evident
is that it came to be used for any one who is perceived to oppose Christians. If an
individual is seen as standing in the way of Christianity and its expansion he is called the
antichrist and persecuted.
At a different level, the antichrist is seen as Satan, the Devil himself. Satan is
working against Christ, against God and therefore is anti Christians. The devil is to be
done away with as the antichrist is to be done away with.
Other views make the antichrist out as a bogey man who would come to the world
at some future time and lead Christians astray, for he is in a struggle with Christ (Jesus)
for the domination of the world.
Needless to say that all these conceptions of the antichrist are fictional! We still have
to know what the antichrist is before we can run off to speculating on what he is going to
do in the world.

God created us as his unified children. In our union with God and each other we are
the Christ, the real son of God. We seem to have separated from him and from each other.
In our seeming separated state we are the ego self concept, the human self housed in
bodies.
Christ is united with God and all creation; the ego is separated from God and all
creation.
The ego, therefore, opposes Christ, as separation opposes union. The ego is the anti
Christ in that he stands for everything that Christ is not.
Christ is for union, the ego is for separation; Christ is for sameness and equality and
the ego is for inequality and differences; Christ is for love and the ego is for hate; Christ
is for forgiveness and the ego is for punishment; Christ is for innocence and the ego is for
sin; Christ is for returning to our eternal unified state with God and each other and the
ego encourages us not to return home, to feel special and separate from God forever and
ever.
THE ANTICHRIST IS INSIDE NOT OUTSIDE US

The antichrist is not outside us; it is inside us; the antichrist is not some bogey man
out there that is waging a war with Jesus Christ and Christianity; he is not some Muslim
mogul who is bent on destroying Christianity.
The antichrist is inside us, it is our separated self concept, our false self, the self we
made to oppose the real self that God created us as.
God created us as unified with him; the ego was made by us, the children of God, in
opposition to the real self that God created us as. The ego is whatever opposes God and
his creation.
 The ego is not a person; the antichrist is not as person; the ego, that is, the antichrist
is the desire by the son of God to be what he is not; to be as his father did not create him.
His father created him unified and he wants to be separated; his father created him
equal with him and all creation and he wants to seem superior to God and all creation.
This spirit of rebellion and separation works against God. That rebellious spirit is the
antichrist.
The antichrist is a pattern of thinking, not a person external to us. Whenever you are
pursuing a course that is anti union and love, anti God, you are acting as the antichrist,
anti God. Whenever you identify with the ego and its body, the human body, you have
opposed the will of God that you are spirit who is unified with him; you are acting as the
antichrist.
(The ego and the human body are antichrist; but neither ego nor body exists; both
are ideas in our minds, both are patterns of thinking, so the antichrist is the pattern of
thinking that opposes God and his unified creation.)

I am going to make this paper short for there really is nothing left to say. Anything
else that one says on this topic is details. We may have time to fill in the details in oral
presentation but for now the concept of the antichrist is defined. Good luck.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 29, 2007

OVERCOMING FEAR

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Fear is probably the most common human affect. To be human is to be prone to

fear. All human beings know fear (except for a few, those born with deficiencies in the
pain and fear mechanism, anhedonia hence do not feel pain and or fear) and need to
understand how it works. I have, therefore, spent quite a bit of time writing about fear, its
physiology and psychology. In this particular essay, I want to summarize what I wrote in
over a hundred pages in less than eight pages. I will pay particular attention to the
metaphysics of fear, for we are currently talking metaphysics, not biology or psychology.

Briefly, let us recapitulate the physiology and psychology of fear. A car comes
close to you. You feel that your life is threatened. Feeling as if something, the car, is
about to destroy your life, something happens inside you, and it happens rather
involuntarily. You do not pause to think about it and ask it to happen, it just happens.
Your body releases certain excitatory neurochemicals (such as adrenaline) and they
speed up the working of all your body. Your nervous system works very fast sending
messages to your brain; your brain searches your memory bank as to how you should
respond to the perceived threat to your life. In most cases your brain will urge you to flee
from the car…if it is a person that is threatening you, your brain makes a decision as to
whether you can fight him; your brain tells you to flee from him if he is stronger than you
or if you can defeat him to stay and fight him. That feedback is quickly sent back to your
body; your heart pumps blood furiously to all parts of your body; your body releases
sugar, energy, and blood carries it to all the muscles thus enriching them, making them
ready to fight or flee from the danger confronting you; your lungs work faster inhaling
more oxygen into your body and exhaling carbon dioxide from your body; your skin
eliminates the heat produced by your rapidly working body.
All said, in fear you feel threat to your biological and psychological self, and your
body works to prepare you to either fight or flee from that source of danger. The goal of
the response, flight or fight, is your (organism’s) survival. As it were, your body does
whatever it could to enable you survive and you survive to see another day. (I will not go
into the biophysics and biochemistry of fear response, for it is rather intricate; such an
attempt would make this paper technical and beyond the purview of the average reader,
its intended audience.)

All the physiological responses during fear are involuntary; even the psychological
ones, to fight the source of danger or to run from it, are involuntary. You don’t really
have time to think about it, you just do what you have to do to survive. Moreover, the
response takes place in seconds, not minutes. A Car comes close to you and in
nanoseconds your body reacts to it, as just described, and you survive, or YOU get
crushed if your response is inappropriate.
Most tests books on biology and psychology say that fear response is biological and
involuntary. And so it is.

However, I have to tell you that fear response is also voluntary, for it is your
decision to live as a special separated self that made your body react as it does in fear. If
and when you decide to die to the separated self your mind instructs your brain and body
not to run from danger and you would not run and you would be killed. If you do not
want to live and a car comes close to you, you use your mind to over rule the involuntary
urge for you to run away and you would not run and you would be killed.
The point is that mind plays a role in what seems a purely involuntary nervous
system response. Listen to this story. When I was a defiant college student I went to the
Southern USA. Being black, other blacks told me not to do certain things. They said that
if I did them that white folks would kill me. Okay, I said to myself. I deliberately went to
the white section of town and went into a white bar (in Huntsville, Alabama) and sat
down. No waiter came to take my order. I was ignored. I then decided to do the thing
that whites hated most, talk to a white girl. I was not particularly interested in sex for
even as a teenager I was not overly interested in sex; I was just in an oppositional defiant
mood.
My nature is that I generally do what other people ask me not to-do, just so I defy
them.
I sainted to a white girl and began talking to her. As would be expected, most of the
white men began looking at me in a menacing manner. You could see that they resented
this nigger talking to their property, a white woman. If they could they would physically
attack me.
I felt fear and my heart began to pound. I used my mind to over rule the physiological
responses of my body by firmly telling myself: look, here, boy, all human beings are the
same; and no god dammed white son of a bitch is going to stop me from relating to any
human being that I choose to relate to, white or black. I have every freaking right to talk
to white girls, as well as black girls.
Thus resolving, I calmed my body and did what I was doing despite being
psychologically, if not physically, threatened by the territorial white males who were
trying to push a black man out of their presumed territory.

Fear motivates human beings to run and preserve their lives. However, the individual
can use his thinking, mind, to over rule the instruction of fear and stay and get killed. The
aggressive white males asking me to leave their woman alone could have killed me, but I
did not care, what mattered to me was my freedom to do what I felt was right.
Point: fear is not just a physiological response, as biologists tell us, but a choice, a
mental choice. Now, let us get to the mental aspect of fear.

THE METAPHYSICAL ASPECT OF FEAR

If you have been following the message of my metaphysics, by now, you know that
in eternity, in heaven, we are the creations of God. God created us and we are unified
with him and with each other. God and his children are literally one self and one mind.
God, as it were, expands into infinite parts and is all of them, and they are him.
The whole is greater than the part and the sum of its parts. God is the whole and each
of us is his part and whereas we are one yet God is greater than each of us and all of us
combined together.

At some point we resented the fact that God created us and wanted to create
ourselves. I have called this phenomenon specialness; you can call it whatever you want
to.
We could not creature ourselves for we have already been created (perfect, and
complete). Still wishing to be special we seem to have separated from God and from each
other. We did so in a world of sleep-dream, a world of illusion, our world. Now we seem
separated from God and from each other.
We invented space, time and matter and use them to make separation seem real.
Each of us houses himself in body and sees space between him and others and it takes
time for him to reach other people. So, in his mind the illusion of separation seems real
and he believes it.

On earth we invented fear and use fear to maintain separation. Each of us contrives
to place himself in a weak and vulnerable body. Body can be hurt or destroyed. Yet we
identified with body and now believe that since body can be destroyed that we can be
destroyed, too. We fear each other since we can hurt or destroy each others bodies.

On earth we perceive each other as threats to our existence and fear each other; in
fact, we perceive everything as a threat to our physical survival and fear them. We stay
away from what we fear. If I fear you I stay away from you; if you fear me you stay away
from me.
 What does that make fear if we stay away from what we fear? You guessed correctly
if you said that fear is a means of separation.
We designed fear as a means of separation and use it to separate from other people
and other things. We house ourselves in bodies, make bodies very vulnerable, weak and
easily pained. We, therefore, perceive that other people could inflict pain on us, harm or
even kill us. To survive we fear other people and in fearing people separate from them.
Fear is a deliberately designed means of separation from what are feared, other
people. Fear is not just what happens to us but what we deliberately designed to enable us
separate from other people, those we made out as capable of harming and or killing us.

At a higher existential level fear has a still more subtle function for us. We wished
specialness and seem separated from God.
Separation is an attack on what God made. God made a unified self. We seem to
have attacked and split it into smithereens and fragments. Each fragment now sees itself
as a separated self. Each fragment wants to seem a separated self and believes that it is
now a separated self housed in body and living in space and time.
Each fragment feels that it did something terribly wrong by separating from God and
his brothers.

EXISTENTIAL GUILT

Each of us feels guilty from separating from God and each other. The guilty
believes that he is to be punished by the person he wronged.
Each of us believes that since he separated from God and other persons that God
and other people are angry at him and see him as guilty and want to punish him, hence he
fears God and other persons.

I have elaborated on the nature of existential guilt in another paper. For now, the
salient point is that we feel guilty and fear punishment. Fear of punishment by God and
each other leads us to separate from them.
I fear that I did something wrong to God and to you by separating from you. I fear
God’s and your punishment. I therefore avoid God and you. I separate from God and you.
Fear is now an instrument enabling me to do what I really want to do: separate from
God and other people. Fear performs an existential function for me; it enables me to
maintain the illusion of separation.
I want to feel fear for it is functional for me. Fear is not just what happens to me but
what I chose to happen to me.

Fear has a function for us. It enables us seem special and separated from God and
each other. If so it follows that the cause of fear must be undone if we want to eliminate
fear. If you want to cease experiencing fear you must undo what you did to bring fear
about.
To live in fear is to live in hell, to live in a prison of your own making. If you want
to get out of this prison, fear, and stop being afraid you must undo what you did to cause
fear.
 What you did to bring about fear is your wish for specialness and separation. You
must undo those causes of fear. That is, you must give up your insane wish to create God,
create yourself and create other people. You must accept that you are a created being and
not your own creator. You must accept that you are forever joined to God and all of us.
This means giving up the ego and the egos world you seem to have invented.

To avoid feeling fear you must give up the compendium of wishes I have called
specialness and separation. You must consciously stop wishing to be special and
separated from God. You must consciously tell yourself that you are a creation of God
and accept God as your creator. You must consciously accept that you are not superior to
any creation of God. You must accept our eternal sameness and equality. You must give
up the ego delusion of superiority and inferiority and differences.

To not be fearful you must give up the self concept you invented to replace the real
self God created you as. You must give up the ego and its world and ask God to give you
the world he created.
If for a few minutes you consciously give up your ego and attachment to this world
you would escape from this world and experience the unified world of God. In that
unified spirit there is no fear and guilt. You are in bliss. I cannot describe the world of
God for it is beyond speech.

In the meantime, as long as you seek specialness and separation you must
experience fear. Fear is what you want to experience and project it into your body and
make it seem involuntary; make it seem what happens to you. It is a trick we performed
on ourselves.
Mind chose fear but made fear seem like a physiologically caused variable. If it
would not scare you, I would tell you that body, matter, space and time do not exist. They
have not existed, not for second. Better put, they seem to exist in a dream and what exists
in a dream is not real. You can know this reality by undoing the cause of fear, give up
your wish for specialness and separation and experience unified self where there is no
fear.

Fear is the absence of love. If you are fearful you do not love; you do not love God
(the whole), you do not love other people (parts of the whole) and do not love yourself
(the Christ real you). Fear is literally the absence of love.
Conversely, love is the absence of fear. If you are in love, in God, in the state of
union with all being, you do not experience fear.

Have I lost you or are you still with me? Let me try another approach and see if I
can make this phenomenon clear.
To be human is to live in fear for we choose specialness and separation. Every once
in a while, some one wholly choose to give up specialness and separation and not feel
fear.
Since fearlessness is an occasional phenomenon, I am not expecting you not to feel
fear. All I want you to know is that if you feel fear that you are in ego state and body
state. Okay. Feel that fear and then ask God, the Holy Spirit or Jesus Christ to help you.
 If in fear, firmly say: God, help me to overcome this fear. God will help you
overcome your fear. How?

LOVE AND FORGIVENESS OVERCOMES FEAR

God will tell you that if you feel fear that you do not love his other children. That is
correct; if you do not love other people you will feel fear. Therefore, to not feel fear you
have to love all people.
As long as there is one son of God that you do not love you would feel fear.

To love is to forgive. Therefore, forgive all people. As long as there is one human
being that wronged you that you have not forgiven you would feel fear. So forgive all
human beings, particularly those you see do bad things to you. Forgive all and reduce
your fear.

Love and forgiveness is the antidote to fear. This is a fact not conjecture. So if you
are prone to fearfulness learn that you are an unloving person and that you are cherishing
your special ego and let it go and then love all people.

AVOIDANT PERSONALITY DISORDER

As a child, I was extremely shy. Later in life I studied shyness. I will not bore you
with a review of the literature on shyness. Briefly, the shy child fears other people’s
rejection. He feels that, as he is, he is not good enough. He feels that if other people come
close to him that they would see him as not good enough and reject him.
He does not want to be rejected. To avoid being rejected he avoids intimate
relationships with other people. He withdraws from other people and when forced to
relate to other people does so from a carefully planned emotional distance.

As a shy kid I feared that other kids would reject me. To avoid their rejection I kept
to myself. In social isolation I imagined that I was better than other kids. Since, at school,
I was probably one of the smartest kids, I felt that I was superior to the other kids.
That is to say that social avoidance was a mechanism for me to seem superior to
other people. Shyness was a means for fancying me superior to other kids. Shyness, and
its allied fear, was a means of maintaining my desired specialness and separation. I did
not love those I feared and separated from.

When I understood the function of shyness/fear for me: enable me to seem

neurotically special and separated from other people, I gave it up. I firmly told myself
that I am not superior to any one and that no one is superior to me. I said to me, we are all
the same and equal. I said that we are all children of one human family. As members of
the same family, I have to relate to all people without the bugaboo of inferiority and
superiority. Thus, I relate to all people, black and white, and in doing so overcome the
shyness that used to hold me down.
 (If I were you, I would take a psychological test, including a personality test, to
ascertain your personality type; mine is shyness aka avoidant personality; every person
has some personality problems and if you understand yours, you are in a better position to
work to improve it; please do not deny the obvious; I am in the mental health field and
have seen thousands of clients and am yet to see a totally healthy human being; we all
have our character foibles. This is what it means to be human, a flawed, imperfect
creature.)

Fear is a choice; it is a mechanism for feeling special and separate. If you accept our
equality and sameness and union you would not feel fearful.

Do you get the point? The point is that fear has a biological level as well as an
existential level. We choose to focus on the biology of fear so as to not understand its
existential level.
(When I worked as a psychotherapist if you presented with fear, I approached you
from what I learned at school, that is, I know the biological reactions in your body, know
that certain neurochemicals are at work, that perhaps you tend to produce excesses of
excitatory neurochemicals, such as norepinephrine, and less inhibitory neurochemicals,
such as GABA; therefore, I recommended that you be given anti anxiety medications and
my psychiatrist would dutifully prescribe Valium or Librium, Xanax, Ativan and any
other anxiolytic medication for you. These medications tend to reduce anxiety.
I will not bore you with explanation of how medications work to reduce somatic
arousal, all you need to know is that they tend to be addictive and that you build tolerance
to them and demand more and more of them to obtain the initial effect you felt with a
lower dose. Before you know it, you are addicted to them. They have adverse side
effects; they do the same damage that alcohol does; slow down the workings of your
nervous system, your heart etc. When you try to quit them you tend to experience all the
withdrawal symptoms of alcohol, such as hallucinations, especially visual, and tactile …
you see things and feel like ants are crawling in your skin…this is called DTs.

If you are a fearful person, and you must be if you are a human being, please explore
the scientific and spiritual psychology of fear. I am not an either or type of person. I
accept both science and Meta science. I accept this world and the spiritual world. I am not
an escapist from this world; I do not negate this world. I live in the real world as well as
the spiritual world.
If you have anxiety disorder (extreme fearfulness), please accept secular scientific
treatment of anxiety and also explore the spiritual psychology that I explicated in this
essay. I am not one of those misguided new age teachers that ask you to eschew scientific
medicine.
No, I want you to take your medications but while taking them think about God and
what it means to be a child of God.
When you do what God asks us to do: love and forgive one another you would
experience God and in that experience know that fear is superfluous. But until you
experience God, please see your psychiatrist if you have anxiety disorder.
(There are many types of anxiety disorder, including generalized anxiety, social
anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder, agoraphobia and the personality
disorders associated with anxiety, such as avoidant, obsessive compulsive, dependent and
passive aggressive and even paranoid).

If you have a psychiatric disorder, do not hesitate seeing a psychiatrist and take the
medications he prescribes for you; they do work. But if you are one of the few that can
love all and forgive all and let go of your identification with the special ego self, well,
you do not experience fear and do not need magical pills to overcome your fear.

DISCUSSION

I do feel fear when I am in ego state, when I feel special and separated from other
people, but when I know that I am a unified son of God and love all people, I do not
experience fear. Unfortunately, as a human being, every once in a while I feel the
temptation to feel special and separated. Let us say that I am talking to you. I quickly
assess you. If I feel that you are average and minimally intelligent I am tempted to feel
superior to you. If I do I am now in ego state. I must feel fear. But if despite our supposed
differences I know that you and I are the same and equal and unified, and I love you, I am
in unified state and do not feel fear.
The struggle is not to give in to the temptation to feel special and separated from
other people. As long as we live on earth, in ego state, we are always tempted to imagine
ourselves better than other people. Here is the truth: we are all the same and equal and
unified. Treat all human beings as your equals and brothers and sisters and join them and
you would reduce your fear of them.

CONCLUSION

Fear has a biological, psychological and existential component. Strive to

understand all aspects of fear and approach it from them all. Ultimately, fear emanates
from the absence of love; from separation from love, separation from union, separation
from God and other people. If you want to reduce and eventually eliminate your fear,
please join all people, no matter their race; love all and forgive all. In love and
forgiveness we overcome our existential fear. Good luck, my friend

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 29, 2007

THE REAL SELF VERSUS THE SELF CONCEPT

 Ozodi Thomas Osuji

The individual’s real self is part of the unified spirit self. The unified spirit self is
spirit and formless. We cannot explain this self with our ego rational categories.
The ego is a separated self and has separated thinking categories and therefore cannot
comprehend the categories of God’s unified thinking. Man cannot understand spirit.
However, it helps to see the unified self as one self that is simultaneously infinite selves
(us), and all of the selves are joined together and in each other. There is no space or gap
between one self and another. Where God ends and his children begin is nowhere and
where one child of God ends and another begin is nowhere. We are all one self, literally.
Perhaps, it is better to put it this way: we all share one self and share one mind.
I do not presume that you can understand what I said until you have had what
Christian folks call mystical experience and suddenly know that you are everything and
that everything is you.

UNIFIED SELF

In heaven the unified children of God desired to separate from God and from one
another. They are eternally joined to their father and to each other. They cannot separate
from God and from one another.
While remaining joined to God and to one another, they seem to have put
themselves into sleep and in their sleep dream that they are now separated from God and
from each other.
No one can explain this phenomenon but if you want to appreciate non-dualistic
idealistic monism see the writings of the Hindu philosopher Shankara…that philosophy
in Hinduism is generally called non-dualistic Advaita or Vedanta; it was translated into
Christological language by an astute Western clinical psychologists called Helen
Schuman in her book A Course in miracles.
The fact is that no one can explain this reality until he has experienced it; suddenly,
one knows, not thinks, but knows that one is one with all beings; that there is no you and
I, no seer and seen, no subject and object that there is one God and that we are parts of
him; we are not separated from God and from each other and that we are all the same
equal and permanent etc.

SEPARATED SELF CONCEPT

In heaven we are unified and the same and coequal. We desired specialness (the
desire to create ourselves, create God and create each other) and separation. We seem to
fall asleep and in our sleep dream that we are separated selves.
In our new world, planet earth, we evolved space, time and matter…non of which, in
fact, exists in spirit…and use them to construct self concepts for ourselves.
Each human being, in childhood, uses his inherited biological constitution and social
experiences to construct a separated special self concept for him and or her.
 The self concept is then translated into a pictorial self, the self image. The self image
is seen both outside ones self and inside ones mind.
The construction of the self concept and self image is complete by age five.
Subsequent to its construction, the child sees the world through the prism of his self
concept and self image. He sees the world through his own biases and seldom sees
anything as it is. He is a prejudiced seer.
In fact, the world one sees is colored by ones self concept, ones ego self. One might
say that perception is projection; that what is inside colors what is seen as outside. (In
extreme solipsism it is believed that the outside world is inside us; that we dissociated
from that world and projected it out and see it as if it is outside us; this happens every
night when we sleep and dream and seem to be in a world that is outside us while it is
inside us; actually, a world that is nowhere for our minds produced it.)

The self concept, aka the human personality, was constructed in this world. It is built
on the child’s experiences. It is influenced by his inherited body and his social
experience. Another way of putting it is that we helped each other in constructing our self
concepts.
(The question is what force takes the child’s body and experiences to construct his
self concept for him? Spirit? Or is the self concept epiphenomenal, a product of the body
and its interaction with its environment and that is all there is to it?)

Western psychology can help us understand the construction of the self concept. All
the great personality theorists help us understand how the self concept was formed via
biological and social influences. I personally find Freud, Adler, Jung, Fromm, Horney,
George Kelly and the behaviorists such as Watson, Pavlov, and Skinner, Hans Eysenck
etc very helpful in understanding the etiology of the self concept.
In simple terms, our inherited body interacts with the society we are born into and we
form our self concepts.
Subsequent to its formation, the self concept, aka human personality, influences our
lives until we pause and try to understand them and correct whatever warts exist in them.
To be a human being is to have a self concept and a self image, to have a personality
that is rooted in our body and social experience.
Each of us has an idea of the self that says that he is special and separated from
other people. No one on planet earth does not have a self concept and self image that
says that he is special and better than other people.
We are all arrogant egotists and fancy ourselves superior to other persons. At the
deep unconscious level, each of us fancies that he created himself, created other people,
created God and created the world.
It is the desire to chase God out and become the creator of the world that led to our
coming to this world.

I do not plan to make this essay long since it repeats what I have said in other
essays.
The point that needs made is that we have a real self that God created us as, the
unified spirit self and unified mind; and that we forgot that real self and its spiritual
thinking and, as it were, now seem sleeping and dreaming ourselves different selves, the
selves in bodies and on planet earth.

God created the unified spirit self; we invented the special separated self in bodies.
We attempt to use the self we made, the ego self, to replace the self that God created us
as.
The ego is a substitute self; the ego is a replacement self; it is false self. But it is the
only self that in the temporal universe we know of.
We forgot our real self so as to be on this earth. The ego self is not real; what is not
real must be defended to seem real.
At all times we are defending our ego selves.

When we stop defending our special separated selves, the ego self concept, we
return to the awareness of our true self, unified self. But as long as we defend the
separated ego self concept we shall never be conscious of our true self.
If you like, the ego is like a block preventing us from seeing our true self; the ego is
like a veil clouding the perception of the Christ in us.
The Christ, the son of God who is as God created him, is formless spirit and cannot
be seem in forms and image but in ego is seem in forms.

THREE SELVES

For our present purposes, each of us seem to have three selves, the unified self, the
Holy self, that God created him as, and his separated ego self that he invented for himself
and that ego self purified by the Holy Spirit as the light self.
In the here and now empirical world, each of us sees his separated self and that is
what we work with. To know that the separated self is an illusion, a dream figment that
does not exist we have to tune it out, let it go and then return to the awareness of unified
formless self. Not too many people want to give up their separated selves, for they are
proud of it and it is their handwork.
The ego is our idol for we made it and we are proud of it. We want to keep it. So be
it.

CONCLUSION

The identification with the ego self concept leads to internal and social conflict. So
God sent his Holy Spirit into our minds, into our thinking, into our sleeping, dreaming
world. The Holy Spirit is here to tell us that we are one self and should love and forgive
each other the wrongs we do to each other.
To the extent that we love and forgive one another we feel peaceful and happy. In
forgiveness, we experience a happy dream, still a dream, still separated from God but
now dreaming with love hence having peaceful and happy dream. As it were, we are now
at the gate of heaven.
To enter heaven itself we must completely let go of our belief in separated self and
accept that we have unified self, the spirit self that God created us as.
 Occasionally, handful human beings let go of their identification with the separated
self, their attachment to their separated selves and experience their unified self.
Buddha and Jesus Christ are such enlightened selves. Each of us can become
illuminated by letting go of our attachment to the false special separated self concept.
Salvation, redemption and deliverance can be seen as the letting go of the self
concept; the ego separated self, and the acceptance of our unified self. In salvation we are
still in body but now know that we are unified spiritual self. We love and forgive all.
Since we know that we are unified and love all, occasionally, we experience unified
self in which God reveals himself to us.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to talk about revelation aka mystical union. It is
enough if we change our separated self concept to still separate self, but now a separated
self that loves and forgives all other seeming separated selves.
As it were, we change that which was designed to be a means of specialness and
separation to become a means of union. The ego of hate becomes the ego of love. When
the ego is used to love all it is healed, it leads to healed relationships. The ego, aka Satan,
is now transformed into the Christ (The Christ, that is, the real self is beyond ego
conceptualization and cannot be understood by us on earth.)
In love we feel some attenuated peace; total peace lies in formless God. For now, our
goal is to transform the ego separated self concept, to make it loving and forgiving. God
is beyond what can be talked about in human terms and we do not need to go there. Just
make your thinking loving and forgiving, that is, purify your mind, change your self
concept from ego to still ego but now an ego of love and experience the peace of God that
the ego cannot understand.

* Today is my birthday. Peace is unto all creation of God.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 28, 2007

THE MEANING OF HEALING

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

In religious circles we hear a lot about healing. What exactly does healing mean?
Some say that it means healing physical illness through non physical means. In this light,
they cite passages from the Bible whereby Jesus Christ supposedly healed the physically
ill through supernatural means.
Some persons claim ability to heal the sick through supernatural means. Thus you see
Christian ministers prancing around, invoking Jehovah Jar to come and heal the sick. Of
course, none of them ever heals the physically ill.
As far as I know only medical science and technology heals the physically ill. There
is not one iota of evidence that physical illness is healed through calling on the names of
non-existent spirits.
So what exactly is healing? Let us see. Healing is not the magical show religious
folks put up for us to see. Healing has to do with reparation of what is damaged.
 God created a unified son. There are infinite children of God. These infinite
children of God are one son of God. They desired specialness and seem to have separated
from God and from each other. They now seem to live as fragments, apart from their
creator and from each other.
As individual parts, each human being feels incomplete and inadequate (adequacy and
power lies in wholeness). To the extent that a human being feels apart from God and
from other people he is sick.
This is psychological, that is, mental sickness. What heals this psychological
sickness is regaining a sense of completion.
A sense of completion is regained when a separated person recognizes that he is
forever joined to God and all his brothers and returns to their eternal union. When the
individual consciously relinquishes his desire for specialness and separation and accepts
his eternal union with all creation and its creator, he feels at one with all being. He feels
completed and perfect. He feels peaceful and happy.

Healing occurs when the separated parts of God relinquish separation and return to
the awareness of our eternal union with each other. To accomplish this end the individual
must let go his desire for the separated world we live in; he must let go his ego self and
not defend the ego.
That is, healing has a price; the cost of healing is the letting go of this empirical
world. To be healed is to let go of the world of separation and live in the world of union.
The world of union is spiritual, not material, for the material can only separate. Only
the spiritual can unify and join. Those in matter, space and time must be separated hence
not healed, and are sick.
To be healed is to return to the awareness of unified spirit, to a world that is as God
created it: formless, spiritual union of all creation and its creator.

What is sickness? Sickliness is of the mind; sickness is belief in specialness and

separation.
What is healing? Healing is of the mind; healing is the return to the awareness of our
eternal spiritual oneness.

Healing takes place in the mind, in our thinking, not our bodies. However, when a
mind is healed, when a person accepts his eternal union with God and all of us his body is
generally healthy. However, it must be emphasized that healing the body isn’t the
primary objective of metaphysics, healing the mind is. Body itself is a neutral thing.
Body is there and can be used for love (joining) or hate (separation).
Consider, when the individual dies his body is burned, cremated and he does not feel
pain. He only feels pain only when he identified with that body. Body is not different
from wood or rocks. Body is simply a bunch or particles, atoms and elements, matter. In
its self body has no worth and value. Body has neither meaning nor purpose, it simply is.
It is when a person takes a body and sees it as who he is and identifies with it that body
can now feel pain (fear, anger, depression and other upsetting affects).
 Body in itself cannot be sick. Only mind can be sick. Animals and trees, of course,
do get infected by germs and die from them. Trees and animals are manifestations of
mind, as is everything in this world, so mental illness occurs in animals and trees, too.
For our present purposes, the salient point is that the human mind can become sick.
The mind is sick when it sees itself as separated from its creator.

When mind is sick it may project its sickness to the body and make body sick.
Mind does this to avoid awareness of where sickness is, in the mind; that is, mind
chooses to deceive itself by making it seem that it is body, not mind that is sick.
As long as body seems sick the individual forgets that it is really his mind that is
sick, and not do what heals the mind, returning to wholeness, and concentrates in trying
to heal the body.

Mind is sick if it feels separated from its creator and creation. Mind is healed when
it accepts its eternal union with all being. To accept union, the individual must let go of
his hitherto belief in specialness and separation; that is, he must give up this world of
separation.
When the individual accepts union he is healed. A healed mind heals the body. That
is, the body is now seen as a neutral agent and not projected to and made sick. Mind no
longer projects its desired separation, sickness, to the body.
The body remains neutral and is not sick. The individual then uses his neutral body,
as we use automobiles to get from place to place and to do the work he wants to do in this
world.
The work we are charged to do is to teach our union and oneness; in other words,
to love. A healed mind and its healed body are used to teach love for love is who we are.

Can a healed person heal other people? Can a mind healer of bodies exist? A
person can heal his mind by unifying with God. Once he is healed he can teach love,
union, and if other people listen to him and return to union in that sense he is a healer.
A healer is a person who enables people to return to the awareness of our eternal
union.
Can such a person heal others physically? Yes. He can use his mind to persuade
them that we are at the mental level unified. To the extent folks believe in our mental
union and love one another they have healed bodies. Thus, a healed son of God can use
his mind to persuade the physically ill that they need to accept mental union with God
and if they do have their bodies healed.
This process is not the magic of trying to tell a person with cancer that you can use
your psychic power to heal him; you cannot. What you can do is teach him union and if
he accepts it his mind is at peace and happy. His peaceful mind now stops projection
sickness to his body and his body naturally heals itself.
The healer does not directly say to the physically sick: I heal your body. That is
magic and does not heal any one. What he does is teaching about God as union and love
and if the physically sick accept that message and loves himself and all persons his mind
is healed and his healed mind heals his body.
 Jesus did heal his mind. He relinquished his hitherto belief in separation and
specialness and accepted his eternal union with God and all of us. In his unified state he
could heal people with physical illness. If those people want to be healed and came to
him, first, he teaches them to accept that they are not sinners (are not separated from
God…that is he heals their belief in sin). If they believe that they are not sinners, are not
separated from God and accept union, their minds are healed. Their healed minds
thereafter heal their physical illness. This is what happened in Israel two thousand years
ago, not the magical spectacle we are told happened.
You cannot directly heal your physical illness without first healing your mind.
What healers can do is persuade you that we are unified and if you accept it and love and
forgive all of us your mind is healed. Your healed mind makes your body a healed neutral
object that enables you to do the work you came to do in this world.

CONCLUSION

In sum, healing is of the mind, not of the body. Healing is the reunification of a
separated mind with all minds.
A healed mind practices only love and forgiveness. A loving and forgiving mind
generates a healthy body.
A healthy body is used to do the work the individual came to do in this world, and
when he is done doing his work, he lays his body down (it dies) and continues living as
unified spirit.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 27, 2007

THE EGO AND THE CHRIST

(Physical sight and spiritual sight)

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

The term Christ is banded about a lot but few actually understand what it means.
Let us explore its meaning a bit.
Christ is Greek for anointed person. Apparently, the Greeks, at some point, employed
the term to refer to a Jewish man who claimed to be anointed to teach the words of God.
At a later point, the Greeks called the followers of that anointed teacher of God
Christians. Christians were called Christian in the Greek city of Antioch in what is now
Syria.
The term Jesus is also of Greek origin. The man to whom the name Jesus is
assigned to could not have been named Jesus by his parents for they were Jews. As Jews,
they gave their child a Jewish name. His name was Joshua (Emmanuel) Ben (son of)
Joseph.
Joshua Ben Joseph apparently was renamed Jesus Christ by the Greeks. As they say,
the powerful define terms for the weak.
 At the time of Joshua’s birth Greek Culture ruled the Mediterranean world (the
Roman world into which Joshua was born). The Greeks called Joshua Jesus and that
name stock.
This is similar to what is going on today in our world where the powerful West
pretty much rename Africans. My father was named Ohaegbulam (people do not kill me)
by his parents and the Christian missionaries renamed him John (son) and that name
stuck with him. The powerful name the weak and such is life, so let us call Joshua Ben
Joseph Jesus Christ, a name he was not called during his life time.

Whereas Christ in Greek means anointed one, over time the name Christ came to
mean different things to different persons.
Early Christians had a healthy debate as to whether God has more than one son or
whether he has only one son. Over time, they settled on the notion that God has only one
son and that that son is Jesus.
The term Christ came to mean the only begotten son of God. Thus, Jesus became
the only son of God, Jesus the Christ.

Although one is not interested in silly doctrinal debate but one could not help
asking how God could have only one son? If God created one son, did that one son
create the rest of us? Did Jesus, the only son of God, create us? If he created us is he not
responsible for our sins? If he did not create us, who created us, since it is not God? Did
the devil, Satan create us? If so, the devil is more powerful than God, is he not? Okay,
the devil did not create us, so who did? Are we orphans abandoned in the universe? If
so, who orphaned us? Let us move on and leave childish Christian theology aside.

Whereas the Catholic Church at the Nicene council of 325 declared Jesus Christ the
only begotten son of God, other interpretations of the meaning of Christ arose. Those
interpretations were largely suppressed until recently. The Gnostic interpretation was the
most widespread, so let us explain it.
Gnosticism derives from Greek, meaning knowledge. Gnostics believed that they
had mystical knowledge of God. They believed that they understood God more than any
one else.
And what did they understand? If you have been reading these metaphysical essays,
you are learning about Gnostic conception of God, for my approach to God is an
attenuated form of Gnosticism.
There were secular Gnostics, such as Plotinus, and there were Christian Gnostics.
Many of the third century AD Greeks were either secular or Christian Gnostics.

GNOSTICISM

The Gnostic believed that there is one God and that he created all of us. God, to
Gnostics, is light. If you like, put it this way: one light, called God has infinite particles
to it. Each of us is a particle, a unit of God.
We are not separated from God; we are joined to God. God is a wave of light in
which each of us is a particle of it.
 Light, in other words, has a wave, as well as a particles function. (This is also the
view of modern quantum mechanics, physics; the Gnostics reached this conclusion over
two thousand years ago. They say that there is nothing new under the sun.)

Some units of God, called various names, including Demiurge, Lucifer, Satan, Devil
etc) became proud and wanted to separate from God. They could not separate from God,
for God is a whole. Since they are units of God they simply closed their eyes and dream
that they are separated from God and from each other.
Dreams are done in darkness, not in light. The world of dreams that the separated
children of God are in are dark.
To Gnostics our world is a world of darkness, whereas the world of God is a world of
light. God is light and our world and the separated ones, egos, are dark.

The term ego simply means a unit of God that now sees itself as special and
separated from God and from other selves.

To Gnostics if a unit of God knows himself as unified with God and other units of
God he is called a son of God, or, simply, Christ. The Christ is a unit of God, a part of
God, a son of God who knows that he is part of God and stays there. The Christ is
accepting of his union with God and all other units of God.

Love is what glues all the units of God to him and to each other. The Christ,
therefore, loves God and all other sons of God.

The ego (originally from Latin meaning the self; Greek for the self is psyche) came
to mean the son of God that sees him as separated from God. The ego is the human self
that is sleeping and dreaming in the world of darkness and sees himself as separated from
God and from other people and works only for his self interests.

When units of God separated from God, according to some versions of Gnosticism,
those units that were still loyal to God fought with them. The Catholic Church built on
this notion to talk about the war between Lucifer (and his rebel followers) and the Arch
angel Michael (and his loyalist followers).
Michael, in this metaphor, led the followers of God against the followers of Lucifer.
Apparently, Michael and his loyalists chased Lucifer and his rebels out of heaven and
they descended to the earth, to darkness, to form their kingdom, a world in opposition to
God.
Our world is seen as a fallen place, a place where those children of God, who listened
to Lucifer, to the ego and its pride, lies, fell to, to darkness.
To Gnostics, to be a human being is to be a fallen child of God or a fallen angel (if
by angel you mean a child of God who has not rebelled against his father, an innocent
person).

As you can see, this story of innocence, oneness and fall has been told in many
versions, including the one in the Bible, Genesis, about Adam and Eve disobeying God
by eating a forbidden apple and been driven out of the Garden of Eden.
 These stories are metaphors denoting that originally man was part of God and
somehow separated from him, and descended into darkness (hell, our world). Metaphors
are attempts to represent reality in human language but those are not always true, for we
cannot represent unified spirit state in language since language evolved to adapt to our
separated world.

For our present purposes, the salient point is that Christ, to Gnostics, means a child
of God who accepts his union with God and all creation. The term ego means a child of
God who thinks that he is separated from God and from other creations of God.
The religion and philosophy of Gnosticism aims at enabling the fallen children of
God, egos, those who live in the world of darkness, to return to the world of light, to God
and his unified heaven. Gnostic teaching enables folks to reject our world and return to
the world of God.

Some Gnostics see our world (matter) as evil and reject it and do not want anything
to do with it; they simply want to return to the good world of God.
Jesus, according to Gnostic religion, is a child of God who, while on earth,
discovered that to be an ego is to be evil and to live in darkness. He let go of the world
and overcame it. He returned to the world of light, the world of God.
Gnosticism negates the material world and wants to escape from it, to return to the
world of God.
If you read the four gospels written about Jesus Christ would you not conclude that
Jesus wanted to negate this world and return to his father’s world? Thus, Gnostics
consider themselves the only true Christians. The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas and others
make this clear. (See the Dag Hammadi findings; a Codex of Gnostic literature written
during the third century but hidden to avoid the conquering Athanesian Catholic Church
from burning them; they were found in the 1940s, 1700 years later.)

We are currently not engaged in religious debate but merely describing the meaning
of ego and Christ and took excursion to Gnosticism as a way of explicating the origin of
ego and Christ.
I accept the Gnostic perspective on Christianity. However, I am not an escapist
from this world. I do not negate this world. I know that this world would be around for
the next four billion years. Our sun has enough energy left to burn, heat and light this
world for billions of years to come. We shall be in the world for a long time. We ought to
study science and technology and use them to make the most of this world. There is no
use trying to run away from this world.
At any rate, there is nowhere to run to, for where we see this world is also the world
of light. As the Gnostics say, we are always in God and merely close our eyes and seem
to sleep and in our sleep dream this world. This world is a dream, an illusion. It does not
exist.
Exist or not we are entitled to sleep and dream and we ought to understand the
nature of our sleep dream world.
W must employ the scientific method to study our world on its own terms and not
try to leave it. When we have thoroughly understood the world, understood matter and
energy, we shall figure out a way to return to the awareness that we are made of pure
light
Our true self is light, part of the light of God. This light is not physical light as in
photons but formless spiritual light.
Somehow, we transformed God’s formless light into physical light, our world.
Ultimately, we shall return to the awareness of spiritual light. This process will take
millions of years to accomplish. When we do so, the world ends and we return to living
in God’s light.
In the meantime, the task at hand is transforming our world into a loving world.

Jesus taught us that the best way to love is to forgive. We must, therefore, love and
forgive all persons in this world. Love, forgiveness and the study science and technology
are my religion, philosophy and science, my world view, the world view I am teaching
here.

Each of us in the temporal universe is an ego, that is, a self that sees itself as
separated from God, his creator, and separated from other selves. I have pointed out what
led to separation: specialness, the desire to create ones self, create ones creator and create
other people.
On earth we want to seem powerful. On earth we are in opposition to our creator and
to our true unified self. This is what the ego is, the opposite of Christ. The ego is the
antichrist.

Christ is the son of God who is as his father created him: unified with him and with
all creation.

The purpose of life on earth is dual. First, to seem separated and seek maximum
separation from God and from each other. Second, to understand that separation is a
mistake and seek union with God and each other. When we see this world as ephemeral
and transitory, we begin the journey back home to unified spirit self. We do what the
prodigal son did: return to his father and his real home.
Each of us does the journey home at his own pace. No one can force another
person to return home, for return home means rejecting the ego and its world.

In Christological language, our first creation occurred when God created us. We
died when we separated from God.
We resurrect when we remember that God created us and return to him. The second
coming of Christ into our lives is when we reject the ego and accept the Christ as our true
identity.

We perform the last judgment when we decide that the ego and its separated world
are false and accept that Christ and his unified world are right.
We perform this judgment with the aid of the Holy Spirit and with all those children
of God who have been enlightened to their true self, with Jesus Christ at their head.
 The last judgment does not take place in the future, not at a point in time for all of
us; it occurs for each of us at the moment he rejects the ego and its world and accepts the
Christ and his world. When you judge your ego separated self concept as false and accept
your Christ unified self, you have had your last judgment. The world will last until all the
children of God, one at a time, performs the last judgment on his ego and its world and
returns to unified Christ and unified spirit, God.

In sum each of us is an ego and will eventually reclaim his status as the Christ, the
unified, holy son of God.
God has only one son, the Christ. That one son of God is infinite in numbers, all of
them unified as one and unified with their father in the unity of God and his children.
In Christ we see all people as joined to us and as one with us. We see all people as
all members of God’s one family.
As members of one family we love one another. In Christ we are loving and
forgiving of each others faults.
Since we are loving and forgiving in Christ, we live in peace and happiness, a
situation that approximates heaven’s perfect peace and happiness, bliss.

When we live as Christ, loving and forgiving, we occasionally see ourselves in light
forms. This is called having Christ vision or spiritual sight.
Choose a person who has done something wrong to you. Forgive him or her. Love
him or her. Do not see him or her as evil but as the holy, innocent, sinless and guiltless
son of God. Do so and believe it. Momentarily, you would see them in light forms, a
beautified form.
Light form or spiritual sight or Christ vision is still not the true self, the real son of
God. As long as you see yourself and other people in forms, purified light forms or dense
gross forms, you are not seeing the real son of God.
The real son of God is not in forms, not in images and cannot be seen. The true self
is unified spirit, he is experienced not seen.

As long as we are on earth, clearly, it is better to have spiritual sight than ego sight.
Spiritual sight, Christ vision is our ego selves purified by Love. It is the self the Holy
Spirit remade from the self we made.
We made our physical bodily selves and the Holy Spirit remade them into light
forms.
Each of us has three selves: the formless unified self in God, in heaven; the light
self the Holy Spirit made and the ego self we made.
When we are in one we forget the other two. In God’s unified spirit we do not know
about the light and dense forms. In one form we do not know of the other form.
If you are in ego form, human form, you cannot see the light form. If you see the
light form you do not see the ego form. This is because each state requires a different
state of mind, a different pattern of thinking.
In our ego form we have to see ourselves as separated salves; in light forms we still
see ourselves as separated but now we use our seeming separated selves to love and
forgive one another; in God we are one and do not see other persons, for all are literally
one shared self.
Ozodi Thomas Osuji
January 26, 2007

JUDGMENT: RIGHT AND WRONG TYPES

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

It is reported that Jesus said: thou should not judge (?) Could he have ever said
that?
Is it possible to live as a human being and not engage in judgment? Let us see.
Perception requires judgment. At any point in time numerous stimuli are besieging your
senses (say, your eyes) and you are judging and making decisions which ones to see, to
pay attention to and which ones to ignore.
Your immune system is judging the millions of virus, bacteria and fungi attacking it
and deciding which ones are friendly and thus tolerate them and which ones would kill
you and thus fight them.
We make judgments to cross a road or not in light of oncoming cars (would we
cross quick enough and not be ran over?)
Simply stated, to be a human being is to judge and to judge at all times. If we did
not judge we would die, right now.
Yet we all know that judgment is one of the most wearying things on earth.
Judgment saps our mental, emotional and physical energies. Judgment tires us. The
judgmental person is a fatigued person.
Thus, it would seem ideal if people did not engage in judgment. Alas, if they did not
engage in judgments they would die, now, not tomorrow.
To live as human beings people must always judge. The real question is how they
judge, not whether they are going to judge or not judge.

It is judgment that brought this world into being and it is judgment that maintains
this world. When we stop judging we shall surely exit from this world.
That probably was what Jesus was saying? He was saying that we ought to stop
judging each other and then die and exit this world?
Whether that was what he said or not, it was what he did. He was attacked, did not
defend himself and was crucified. Obviously, his ego understood that he would be killed
and would have done things to stay alive. If he was identified with the ego and the egos
drive to survive, he would have seen danger lurking in the Garden of Gethsemane and ran
away, ran to safe grounds (as he used to run from one place to another to avert the
Pharisees, Seducers and Sanhedrin from apprehending, trying and killing him).
Apparently, Jesus decided to stop defending his ego and body, to stop running and
allowed himself to be apprehended, tried and killed as a trouble maker. Like Socrates,
Jesus was accused of corrupting the youth of the land by teaching them to actually love
one another and practice justice.
 In our world, love and justice would get you killed. Try talking that human beings
should love one another and be just to one another and most human societies would see
you as an enemy. They would arrest, try and jail or kill you. The world rewards haters,
not lovers, unjust, not just people.
For example, tell George Bush and his goon squared that it is wrong to kill Iraqis
and see what happens to you. Since the man went to Iraq probably half a million Iraqis
have been killed. Even Saddam Hussein did not kill that many Iraqis! But Mr. Bush
would like you to look the other way as he and his minions killed Arabs. Question their
logic and off you go to prison.
No sir, the world does not concern itself with justice and love; if you take those
seriously you are perceived as a trouble maker and done away with.

Jesus was keenly aware that to live in this world we have to be judgmental. The day
we stopped being judgmental we die and leave this world and return to where we came
from, the non-judgmental world of unified spirit.

In eternity all are one, the same, equal and unified. There is no specialness in
heaven; there is no superiority and inferiority in heaven.
In this harmonious sea of sameness and union the idea of their opposite entered.
The idea was for each of us to seem better then other people.
In heaven no one can be better than other people. The desire for inequality therefore
could only be practiced elsewhere. We decide to invent a different world, a world that
opposes the nature of heaven. We invented an unequal world, a place where people are
different (man and woman, adult and child, black and white etc). Our world is the
opposite of heaven.

It was judgment that brought our world into being. We made a judgment that it is not
okay to be the same and coequal; we decided that it is better to be separated from each
other. We decided to defy the will of God (union, equality) and go invent a world that
opposed his will.
Judgment brought our empirical world into being. Judgment maintains our world.
When we stop judging ourselves and everything we shall cease existing in this world. We
exit from the temporal universe when we no longer judge good and bad.

As long as we are in this world, the question is not whether to judge or not to
judge but how to judge. If we did not judge we would die and return to heaven. The only
option we have in this world is how we judge. We can judge wrongly or rightly.

There are two parts to our minds, to our thinking; each part has its habitual pattern
of judging. There is the ego mind and there is the Holy Spirit (or Christ) mind.
The ego mind is the mind most of us are aware of. Each of us identified with the ego
or else he wouldn’t be in this world.
The ego is the wish for the son to be separated from his father. We are the children
of God but we wished to be separated from God.
The ego is the concretization, the embodiment of the wish for specialness and
separation. We are the separated ones, that is, the ego identified ones.
 We look at the world from the perspective of our egos, from our separated minds.
We judge everything from the ego perspective.
We see attack and judge it as such and defend ourselves. In defending ourselves we
live and perhaps kill our assumed enemies.
In this world we live upon the death of other things (our immune systems kill
germs wishing to make our bodies their food).
The ego mind wishes to live as a special, separated self and judges everything from
that perspective. It is primarily concerned with what is good for its survival. It makes
friends with those it deems interested in helping it survive and makes enemies of those it
feels want to kill it. It cooperates with other human beings to work for their mutual
interests but fights those who oppose its interests.
Simply stated, the ego is invested in the individual’s survival and does whatever it
does because of that.

Mind is not a thing and does not exist. Mind is metaphor for thinking patterns. Mind
means thinking so when we say a part of the mind we are merely referring to a pattern of
thinking.
The ego is not a person but a pattern of thinking, a pattern that maintains this world.
The Holy Spirit is a pattern of thinking, a pattern that says that we are all the same and
should love one another.
The Holy Spirit, like the ego, sees what other people do. It sees other people attack
you. Unlike the ego, however, it urges you to forgive them, to overlook their attack on
you.

Why tell you not to be defensive when only defense makes for survival in this
world? The Holy Spirit knows that this world is not real, knows that it is a dream. The
Holy Spirit knows that we have a home, unified spirit, heaven. He knows that in spirit we
are not attacked and cannot be killed. In spirit we are eternally safe. Knowing that we are
safe in heaven the Holy Spirit tells us to be defenseless to attacks and that if we are
killed; all that happens is that we awaken from the dream of separation.

Oh yah, we tell the Holy Spirit. How do we know that heaven exists? You got to be
putting us on, correct? We know that it is in defense that we survive in this world.
Therefore, we ignore the Holy Spirit and defend ourselves. In doing so we survive in this
world (as individuals, and as nations defending themselves with militaries).

Occasionally, a son of God in the temporal universe listens to the gospel of

forgiveness and defenselessness taught by the Holy Spirit and does not defend his self
and forgives his attackers. Generally, as the world considers these things, he is killed
(what is killed isn’t worth having, any way).
Jesus listened to the Holy Spirit and when he was attacked did not defend himself.
He forgave those who attacked and destroyed his body. As we, egos, see these things, he
was killed.
 Jesus was not killed. He merely awakened from the dream of self forgetfulness, the
dream of specialness and separation. He remembered that he is unified spirit and that
unified spirit is immortal; he contiguous to live as unified spirit.
In truth, we are not born in bodies and do not die. This is fact, not conjecture. We
merely seem born in bodies, live and die.
When we seem to die we merely awaken from sleep, and since we still want to
sleep, still desire specialness and separation, we are reborn on earth; we reenter the world
of separation.
We cycle through this world many times until we remember that we are unified and
stop defending specialness and die to the world of specialness and separation and awaken
to the world of union, as Jesus did.
Jesus decided to not look at the world from the perspective of his ego mind but to look
at it from the perspective of the Holy Spirit. He forgave all and was defenseless and
seems to die. He awakened to his true self, unified self.

This sounds interesting but the problem is who is going to try it, I mean, not defend
himself when he is attacked and die to find out whether there is life of spirit? There in is
the testing ground that separates those who are going to awaken or not.

Nobody can make you stop defending the ego. Not even God can stop you from
defending your seeming separated self. So, go ahead and defend your special separated
self. Sleep and dream for however long you desire. Dreams are permitted. When you are
tired of sleeping and dreaming, you know what to do. I am explaining what to do to you
here. Forgive all; overlook the evil folks do to you.

MEDITATION AS SEMI AWAKENING (BUDDHA)

In meditation one deliberately stops defending ones separated self, the ego. One
tells ones self that everything that one can think of, that all conceptual thinking is
separated thinking hence false. One negates ones thinking. One denies that one is the
separated self, ones ego personality. One empties ones mind of all thoughts of separated
special self. One makes ones self a void emptied of the ego and its categories.
If you can stop thinking in ego terms, just for fifteen minutes, you would escape
from the separated world. You would enter the world of unified spirit. You would then
know that the seeming solid world we live in is just a dream.
Buddha was a man who stopped thinking in ego categories and, as it were,
temporarily died to the ego and experienced oneness (Nirvana, Samadhi, Satori and
Mystical Union). However, Buddha’s experience of oneness is done within the non
threatening confines of his meditation (under a Bo tree). He did not consciously permit
his body to be crucified, as Jesus did. Though he experienced God’s revelation, Buddha
was still part of the world; he was still touched by the ego and its fears and defended his
body for another fifty years before he died at age eighty.
Jesus was the first human being who consciously permitted his body and ego to die
without defending them. Jesus is the greatest teacher of God. Folks like Buddha are also
teachers of God but they are under Jesus. This is not to say that there is inequality in
salvation, but to state who first permitted his body and ego to die and was forgiving and
totally defenseless. Jesus is in charge of the atonement process, the return to unified state.

We are talking about you, not others. Are you willing to let go of your ego and body
and return to God? You are invested in the ego and its separated self and are afraid to
stop thinking in ego terms. Your mind would always think in ego terms and cannot
meditate. Okay. Stay where you are, for the time being, anyways.

For our present purposes, there are two ways of judging: judging from the ego and
judging from the Holy Spirit.
The ego sees attack and defends itself; the Holy Spirit sees the same attack that the
ego sees and forgives it.
If you forgive folks they would still attack and perhaps kill you, as Jesus was
attacked and killed.
In this reality, what most people do is forgive sometimes and not forgive sometimes.
Nobody who practices total forgiveness is in this world. We have relative forgiveness in
this world.
To the extent that you forgive others you feel peaceful and happy. So go ahead and
sometimes forgive and sometimes bear grievances and seek vengeance; that is the nature
of human beings.
When you are ready for total forgiveness you would do what Jesus did and get killed
and exit from this world and return to unified spirit.
It is not for me to tell you what to do, for no human being is qualified to tell
another to die. A person can tell himself to forgive and die.
Jesus initially practiced attenuated forgiveness for he wanted to live as an ego but
eventually he decided to practice radical forgiveness hence allowed himself to be arrested
and crucified. It is only you who can make that decision; others cannot make it for you.

We live in the world of judgment. We can judge from the ego mind (which is the
left, or wrong mind) or we can judge from the Holy Spirit (which is the right or Christ
mind). When we judge from the ego we hate, when we judge from the Holy Spirit we
love people.

There is a third pattern of thinking; here one does not judge at all. If one did not
judge good or bad one would not be in this world, one would be in unified spirit, God. If
one did not judge at all one would exit this world.
Try it. Do not judge yourself as good or bad; do not judge other people as good or
bad. If you did so, first you would feel light and peaceful and momentarily disappear
from this world.

To be in this world we must judge ourselves and people as good or bad. To judge
is to be separated from heaven, from oneness. To judge is to be in pain, in hell. We who
judge the son of God, each other, are living in pain and in hell. The world is a prison
where inmates judge themselves good or bad; they do so for they want to create
themselves and be in charge of their lives. Those who know that God created them do not
judge and are in peace.
 You make the decision when to emancipate yourself from hell and pain and stop
judging yourself and other people as good or bad and you die and return to the awareness
of union.

JUDGMENT AND PERCEPTION

Yesterday we talked about perception. From what we have talked about today you
can see that there are two ways of perceiving the same world, the same events: right
minded perception (seeing from the yes of the Holy Spirit) and wrong minded perception
(seeing from the eyes of the ego).
We live in a perceptual world and the only option we have is how we choose to
perceive it. We already perceive the world through our special, separated eyes, the egos
perception. If we did not see with the egos philosophy (desire for separation), we would
not be in this world.
The goal now is to change our perception and judgment and see through the eyes of
the Holy Spirit. As pointed out before, each manner of seeing has consequences. If we
want to be in this world we would see through the eyes of the ego. On the other hand, if
we want to leave this world we would see though the eyes of the Holy Spirit (love and
forgiveness).
If we see through the eyes of the Holy Spirit we would not be defensive and we
would be killed by those who attack us. Make no mistake about it; if you are a forgiving
person the world would kill you. The real question is whether they, in fact, killed you or
whether you merely returned to our real home, unified spirit state?

If Christian Americans did not defend themselves against Muslim Arabs, Muslim
Arabs would kill them and or convert what is left of them to Islam. This is the reality on
the ground. To be Christians and not Muslims, Christian Americans must defend
themselves when attacked by Muslim Arabs.
Make no mistake about it, this world is an ego based world, a place of attack and
defense. If you want to be here you must defend yourself, you must be judgmental and
you must judge from the egos perspective.
On the other hand, if you are nihilistic (as the ego would say) and want to die and
exit from this world, then do not defend yourself; forgive those who attacked you and die.
Do as Jesus did: forgive and allow yourself to be killed and exit from this world.
That which needs defense to seem alive, the ego and its body, Jesus believed, is not worth
defending, and is not important.
That which exists only on defense is worthless, valueless, and lacking in meaning
and purpose. The egos world, a world that must always be defended, is worthless,
valueless, meaningless and purposeless.

CONCLUSION

To be in this separated egos world, we must always judge. If you judge with
forgiveness and love you tend to be at peace and are happy. As pointed out, if you
perpetually forgive others evil to you, you would be defenseless, and given the nature of
the world would be killed and exit this world.
 If you want to be in this world, the alternative is to understand evil and when it
occurs forgive it but correct it. Arrest evil doers, put them in jail and while in jail teach
them to love their fellow human beings.
Transform the world into a teaching- learning situation, a situation where we teach
love, for love is who we are.
Clearly, I do not want to leave the world yet. Therefore, I do encourage arresting
and incarcerating evildoers. However, I want them to be taught love.
Like Jesus, when I have done all my teaching and become world weary, I would
practice total forgiveness and defenselessness and exit from the world. At that point, I
would regain the awareness of unified spirit and cease returning to this world, to hell, to
prison.
Each of us must make the decision to be in this world or to leave it, to forgive or not
to forgive. No one else can make it for him.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 25, 2007

#8

PERCEPTION VERSUS KNOWLEDGE

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

We live a world of multiplicity, separation and differences. Each of us is housed in

a body and seems a closed system and different from other persons. I am over here and
you are over there. There is no way that I can know what is going on in your mind, and
there is no way that you can know what is going on in my mind. Oh, we do speculate
about what other people are thinking, but speculation does not mean knowledge. We may
conjecture all we want about what is in other people’s minds but the fact is that we do not
know.
We live in the world of not knowing what other people are thinking about, and not
even knowing about the true nature of other people and things. Simply stated, we live in
a world of ignorance.
On the other hand, if people’s minds were not hidden in bodies and were transparent
to each other, they would know what each other is thinking about and, therefore, would
not be in a state of ignorance. So how did this come about?
In eternity folks lived as spirits, and not in bodies. They had connected minds. They
were transparent to each other.
You can think of folks in heaven as joined computers that could read each other and
communicate to each other.
This tendency to know what each other is thinking and doing obviously had the
advantage of making people know each other. When people know each other they feel
safe around each other. In heaven people were perfectly secure.
 . On the other hand, openness meant that folks could not hide from each other if they
had evil thoughts. Those with socially untoward thinking tend to want to hide it, to
prevent other persons from knowing about their nefarious thoughts. If you are planning to
rob a bank and every person could read your mind and know what you are going to do,
obviously, they would prepare for you and apprehend you, and thwart your plans. It was
better if folks did not know what is in each others minds if they plan evil deeds to one
another.
The evil think that transparency makes them vulnerable and weak; while the just
know that it makes them safe and strong.)

For reasons of specialness, folks decided to separate from each other and to construct
a world of differences. They employ space, time and matter to enclose themselves off
from each other. Now each of them lives in ignorance of what others are thinking. They
can no longer predict each others future behaviors hence live in uncertainty and fear of
each other (each human being can kill others hence they fear each other).
On earth, people live in a state of real self (that is, unified self) forgetfulness, and
ignorance. In our world folks hide from each other and believe that nobody can know
what they’re thinking and doing. They believe that darkness can hide; but darkness
merely clouds light and does not hide it.
At a deeper level our minds are still joined and we still know what each other is
thinking, albeit not at the conscious level.
An enlightened son of God, such as Jesus, knows what all of us are thinking; he
knows those who are loving and forgiving and comes to help them learn love and become
enlightened; he avoids the unloving, the hateful, even if they call themselves Christians,
for they are not yet ready for illumination, knowledge of our unified nature.
As already observed, people have not really separated from each other; at a higher
level their minds are still connected and joined. All minds are joined and we do know
what each other is thinking. But this level of mind is not known to us at the conscious ego
level. The aspect of us that is joined is forgotten by us. We chose to forget it. We
choose to live in ignorance of our eternal union.
To live as an ego separated self is to live in a state of ignorance, by choice. If the
ego is let go, in what is called mystical union experience, the individual momentarily
enters into a realm where he knows what all creation is thinking and all creation know
what he is thinking. This level of being is the level of knowledge; it is not the world of
perception. Knowledge is found in joined minds, in God’s unified state; perception is
found in separated minds, in our world.

In the extant world we live in separated states. I am over here and you are over
there. I do not know what you are thinking, and you do not know what I am thinking. We
are ignorant of each other’s thinking. In the world of ignorance we can only perceive, not
know things.
We live in the world of perception. The world of separation and multiplicity is the
world of perception. In the world of perception each of us sees things differently; no two
people see the same thing. Each of us has a past, a history, a learning record that he
brings into every perceptual field and must necessarily see the things differently. The
world you see is not the same world I see. If two people were asked to describe a
situation, say, an accident, they would render two different pictures. And each would
believe himself correct in his description of the event! No wonder people have social
conflicts and go to wars with each other; they see phenomena differently while thinking
that they perceive the same phenomena. (On the political level, folks often perceive the
world as they think that their social leaders expect them to perceive it, and would
deliberately tell lies if lies agree with what their opinion leaders would approve in them!)
The world of perception is the world of guessing, speculating and conjecturing. Each
of us tries to understand what other people are thinking, but try as he does he does not
understand.
STUDIES AND LEARNING

The world of perception is the world of ignorance. Here we have to study the nature
of things and learn about them. We study about the physiology of the human body,
animals, trees, and inanimate objects; we study about the human mind. Through scientific
efforts we come to understand how matter and energy is put together and works. We
gradually learn about phenomena. At no point do we know it all.
We live in ignorance and gradually penetrate that darkness by learning about the
truth of things but never completely knowing it all.
The world of perception is the world of learning. It is a world where folks do not
know what any thing is or means, and want to know, study things and learn about them,
and to the extent that they know they reduce their ignorance. Alas, there are always
things they do not know. Thus, we live in relative ignorance.
We all live relative ignorance no matter how much we study and learn. The greatest
scientists know only a fraction of what there needs to be known about phenomena.

Where people do not know they generally feel vulnerable and powerless, for, as
they say, knowledge is power. Alas, we cannot have knowledge hence power in the world
of perception.
Knowledge is only possible in the world of union, which is the world of spirits, the
world of God.

The world of perception, the world of ignorance, is a world of learning. Thus we go

to school and study about things and learn about them. There are relative states of
knowing the truth in the world of perception: some persons know more than others but
nobody know it all.
(People have different rates of learning; there are fast learners and there are slow
learners. Generally, the more egotistical a person, that is, the more a person seeks
specialness, superiority and separation, the slower is his learning speed. Those with less
sense of egoism, less wish for specialness; less desire for superiority, less wish for
separation from other persons tend to learn at a higher speed. In secular psychological
language, the healthier ego learns quicker than the unhealthy neurotic and or psychotic
ego. Observe very smart persons, they tend to be less egotistical, they tend to be child
like in demeanor; it is the stiff and stuffy egotist who does not learn well. Paranoid
personalities, the epitome of egoism, tend to be the slowest learners of them all. In
general, black persons, especially Africans, tend to be full of themselves, vain, proud and
egotistical; they are very slow learners at school; if they give up their false pride and
accept being the children of God their learning rate would be speeded up. If you removed
Africans false pride they would learn as quickly as other races and their so-called lower
IQ would be done away.)

Relative ignorance and relative knowing obtains in both the physical and spiritual
worlds. Each of us has relative knowledge of physics and metaphysics. Nobody knows it
all, although some know more than others.
We are currently interested in spiritual matters, not physical matters. In
understanding how spiritual matters work, some persons understand more than the rest of
us.
Those who understand more about spiritual matters than others are generally those
who permit their minds to be taught by the Holy Spirit and his teachers.
As we observed in different places, when we separated from each other and
proceeded to live in a world of ignorance (separation), God created the Holy Spirit and
sent him into the separated world. The responsibility of the Holy Spirit is to teach us
about our true state, unified spirit state.
Whereas we believe that we are separated selves living in bodies, the Holy Spirit
knows that we are, in fact, unified spirits; he, nevertheless, sees us where we think that
we are, in the world of separation. He knows the state of union and understands the world
of separation; in other words, he knows heaven and understands the world.
The Holy Spirit uses materials in our world to teach us bout the nature of heaven. He
reinterprets our material world to teach spiritual matters.

Our world is the world of separation and mutual attack. We do attack each other.
We do hurt each other. The most rational approach to our world is offense and defense.
We do defend ourselves from other persons’ attacks. We see attacks on us and feel angry,
bear grievances and defend ourselves. This is the world’s reality.
The Holy Spirit interprets the world differently. Where he sees other people attack
us he teaches us that they did so for different reasons. They attack us because they think
that we are separated from them and do not love them. Their attack is meant for us to
forgive them hence love them.
To the Holy Spirit, attack is a call for help, for love, when love is deemed missing,
as it is missing in the world of separation. The Holy Spirit teaches us to forgive and love
those who attacked us.
On the other hand, our ego minds, the minds that adapt to the realities of this world,
tell us that those who attack us could kill us and ask us to defend ourselves. We generally
operate from the perspective of the ego and defend ourselves.
As they say, the best defense is offense, thus we attack those we think are out to
attack us. (George Bush attacked Iraq preemptively to avoid been attacked by it should it
have nuclear weapons; now look at what he has done, he has initiated a thousand years
long war with the Islamic world.)

The teachings of the Holy Spirit and the ego are different. The one teaches
forgiveness and love and the other teaches bearing grievances and defense.
The two teachings are irreconcilable. If you embrace one you cannot have the other.
It is either one or the other. However, most of us try to practice them in degrees. We are
some times loving and forgiving and sometimes vengeful and punitive. This mixing of
two contradictory approaches to life is the nature of our world.
There is no human being who is not sometimes loving and forgiving, and some
times punitive; if one were completely unloving and not forgiving one would be a
monster.

Ultimately, each of us must learn to forgive and love at all times. Those who
forgive all and love all are saved from the world; they have overcome the world. They
have returned to the awareness of the conditions of heaven, unified state.
When the conditions of heaven are met, the individual experiences heaven. When
the separated children of God return their minds to how God created them: loving, via
forgiveness, they have approximated the condition of heaven.
Where a mind is made acceptable to God, God is experienced. If the individual
forgives all and loves all he experiences God (unified state).
But until mind is returned to the condition that God created it as, loving (via
forgiveness) that mind cannot experience God (union with all). An unloving and
unforgiving mind is a mind that is in this world of specialness and separation, a mind that
deliberately hurts itself and inflicts pain on itself.

(Yesterday, I wrote a piece on the meaning of atonement. That piece contradicted

the traditional Christian manner of understanding atonement. Traditional Christians
would see it as an attack on what they believe in, an attack on their world view. Feeling
attacked they would counter attack me, the source of the information that produced
cognitive dissonance/conflict in them. My ego would feel angry at being attacked, just as
their religious egos felt angry at me for attacking their views. On the other hand, the Holy
Spirit teaches that all attack is a call for love. Any one who attacks you is asking you to
help him. The Holy Spirit teaches that we forgive those who attacked us and gradually
help them learn the truth. They attacked us because they think that we attacked their
egoistic patterns of thinking and living, their egoistic world view which they call
Christianity. The fellow who attacked my point of view and asked that it be prevented
from seeing the light of day is asking me to forgive and love him and, ultimately, teach
him the truth, for he is living in ignorance which he had thought is religious knowledge.
True knowledge threatens ignorance, as light threatens darkness. If one is a true teacher
of truth, teacher of God, one cannot be angry at him; one would have pity for him and
understand the conflict going on in his mind, as darkness and light, ignorance and truth
battle each other. The best approach to doctrinal conflicts is to quietly assert the truth and
leave folks to do their own cognitive battle, and not fight them. State the truth and let
folks fight it but do not fight them, do not behave defensively towards them. Those who
hate the truth would eventually come around to it, for they cannot live in ignorance, in
hell, in pain, forever. Have mercy on a suffering brother, a brother in pain. Love and
forgiveness is called for. Practice what you teach; practice radical forgiveness at all
times. The teaching on love attacks an unloving people, Africans, and they would fight
back; they would want to oppose it; just keep plugging away and stating the truth of love,
and leave them to eventually come around to learn that life is love and in doing so change
their inability to love and correct the chaos that is Africa, a continent of mutual hate,
tribes hate each other, individuals hate each other, each person working for his selfish
interests but seldom working for their collective interests. Those who need the truth fight
it most. Understanding and patience is called for. Finally, most people have the option of
not reading what they do not want to read. On a typical day, people get hundreds of email
letters and delete many of them and read only those they want to read. This chap could
have simply deleted my mail. But he sort of read it and wanted to talk about it. It was a
premeditated desire to challenge my world view. He saw my world view as contrary to
what he believes in and he felt irritated by it and wanted to attack it. He wanted to make it
disappear. The ego wants to make whatever threatens it to disappear, so that it might
continue being in existence. Thus he made negative comments about me. He is actually
smart enough to understand that I am presenting an alternative perspective on life and he
wants that perspective knocked out; as darkness wants light extinguished. The ego, and
those who identify with it, wants to be left alone to live in its ignorance. On the tribal
level, since he came from a different tribe, he resented that some one from my tribe is
teaching him and he would rather that not be so. If I identified with the ego I would feel
annoyed for my ego would feel that he ought to appreciate that I am giving him free
information, information that he clearly needs. But I must not be irritated for if I do I
would be operating at his ego level. His anger at me is a call for me to teach him love via
forgiveness. He wants to learn the perennial wisdom of mankind and eventually give up
his primitive religion that he had believed is the world saving gospel of love and
forgiveness brought to the world by the Holy Spirit, and made most manifest in Jesus
Christ. There was a reason why he attacked me: to give me the opportunity to forgive
him, hence love him and in the process teach him that love is better than his egoistic
attacks. Eventually, the brother will learn and turn to God. If I, an atheist, who used to
wish all religious persons treated for psychiatric disorder, can turn to God he, too, could
find salvation in Jesus Christ.)

MIRACLE MINDEDNESS

When an individual’s perception is corrected, purified and he how sees

approximately as God created him to see…in God we are all one, so there is no such
thing as perception in God, we are talking metaphors… he is said to have miracle
mindedness.
What is the magic? The magic as our convincing ourselves that we are special and
separated from each other and from God and inventing a world that seems to represent
that illusion of separation.
Given the magical belief in separation and its manifest world (Charm, Spell, Maya)
a miracle is called for. The miracle is re-convincing ones self that one is not special and
separated but unified with all being. When one accepts our eternal union with God and all
people, loves and forgives all people, one is now in a miracle state of mind. He is, as it
were, at the gate of heaven, but not in heaven, just close enough to it to be affected by it.
He is calm, peaceful and happy.
If you are around him you feel peaceful and happy. Indeed, merely thinking about
him makes you feel happy and peaceful.
He is now a bringer of peace. Jesus said: I am the prince of peace, I bring peace to
the world; my peace I give to the world. Few understand what he was talking about. He
meant that he has rejoined his mind to God’s mind and to all our minds, and is now no
longer seeing himself as separated from any of us.

MIRACLE WORKER

If an individual has regained the awareness of union (via love and forgiveness), he
becomes a miracle worker. If you are physically sick he can heal you. But before you run
to new age quarks and psychics, most of whom are charlatans, make sure that you
understand how healing works.
We are unified. We convinced ourselves that we are separated from each other.
This belief in separation is sickness.
The sickness therefore lies in the mind that believes that it is separated from God and
all people.
But mind cannot be sick since mind is always unified with God (ideas cannot leave
their source). So what to do? Knowing that it cannot be sick, the mind projects its
desired sickness to the body and makes it sick (pained or weak).
As long as the body is sick, pained and or weak the individual believes that he is
separated from God and all people. Mind makes body sick to make it seem sick when in
fact mind cannot be sick.

Healing occurs when a mind that believes itself separated from God and all of us
persuades itself that it is unified with God and call people. If you believe that we are
joined, that you are part of the whole self, Holy self of God you are healthy.
You can therefore heal yourself by convincing yourself that you are joined to all
existence and love and forgive all. If you do, you are healed; you are at peace and happy.
You no longer have a need to project your desire for illness to your body, so your body is
healthy.

Now suppose that you still desire specialness and separation, that is, want to be sick
and since you cannot be sick at the mental level, you could project your desired illness to
your body. Suddenly, your body seems physically sick. You become sick, may be have
cancer etc. As longer as you seem to have physical illness you believe in separation and
live in the illusion of separation.

If you are physically sick, you should go see your medical doctor for treatment.
Take the medications he gives to you. Medications are curative in this world. They are
magical pills that are used to cure a magical body.
Both body and medications do not exist, but in as much as we believe that they
exist, so be it, so take medications, just as we eat food to maintain our non existence
bodies. Neither food not bodies exists.

If you are sick, a teacher of God, such as, Jesus Christ, could use his mind to heal
you. How? He identifies with your mind and at the mental level where your mind and his
are joined convinces you that you are one with him and with God. If at that mental level
you accept union with all being and give up your belief in separation your mind is healed.
 Your healed mind immediately heals your seeming sick body. Jesus used his mind
to heal many physically sick persons. But he did not heal all physically ill persons. If a
person refuses to accept union, when told that he is unified with all, he is not going to be
healed by Jesus. Jesus does not heal those who insist on separation; he heals only those
who accept union.
Consider what I am saying here. Convince yourself that you are unified with God and
all of us. Believe it. Love all of us; forgive all of us. Here is what would happen. You
would feel peaceful and happy. Ultimately, you would feel physically healthy. In fact,
you would reduce your need for food, alcohol and the other poisons people take to make
their bodies seem alive.
(I have not taken medications since I became an adult; I have no need for
medications for I seldom feel sick. I do not have need for much food, a bit of food, once
a day, is enough for me. No alcohol or drugs for me. I am not necessarily asking you to
do what I do, for not every one is a special case. People are different and some are here as
teachers of God, teachers of union, teachers of truth. They are always few. So go ahead
and take medications and eat etc. Be where you are, for that is where you have to be at
this time.)
For our present purposes, the salient point is that when a mind is healed, that is, when
ones perception is corrected, when one knows oneself as unified with God and all his
creation, one is in a miracle state of mind.
God, the Holy Spirit works miracles through a purified mind. The most important
miracle is not healing physical bodies but changing ones mind about ones identity; from
separated to unified, from ego to Christ. Change your mind about who you are; accept
union with all and you have corrected your perception and would experience peace and
happiness.

CONCLUSION

We live in a perceptual world. There is no way each of us understands the truth of

other people or of things in general. At best we have relative knowledge but never
absolute knowledge. Those who study very hard, learn tend to know more than those who
do not study and learn. We must therefore gradually learn about the nature of things.
It is possible to know about reality; that requires letting go of ones attachment to the
separated ego self and returning to ones true self, the unified self, aka Christ self.
However, the knowledge gained in that state is the knowledge of spiritual matters, the
knowledge of oneness and union.
In spirit matter does not exist, so one does not understand matter in spiritual union.
Those who want to understand the nature of matter must be in the world of matter and
study science and technology. In the world of perception there is no alternative to
studying and learning about things.

In our world of perception we see each other as separated from each other. This is
ego based perception. This is false perception.
False perception must be gradually purified, improved. Corrected perception is
seeing all people as united with one hence loving and forgiving them.
 Purified perception means seeing with the eyes of love. When one loves ones self
and loves all people one is seeing with the eyes of love which is the eyes of the Holy
Spirit.
Seeing with the eyes of the Holy Spirit, love and forgiveness leads to Christ vision,
or spiritual sight. This means seeing people as divine beings. When we see with spiritual
sight, treat all people as divine, we occasionally see them in beautified light forms.
At present we see everything through glass darkly but when we see with forgiveness
and love we see them through polished glass. In that purified seeing the entire world
takes on a beautified nature, things become so beautiful that one is astounded that such
beauty can exist in this world of anger and attacks and wars.
We invented the world of dense matter and the Holy Spirit reinvented it as the
world of light matter. Each of us (including animals and trees) has two pictures, the one
he sees, the ego body, and the one the Holy Spirit made for him, the self in light form.
To see the one the other must be forgotten, that is, overlooked. If you see your
current body you cannot see your light (astral) body. Why? Each seeing requires different
conditions of mind. To see the separated ego world one must be separated; to see with
spiritual light one must see with unified eyes.
Both the world of the ego and the world of the Holy Spirit are perceptual. The Holy
Spirit guided world is a purified version of the ego world, but this world nevertheless.
Knowledge exists only in unified spirit state (aka heaven). We cannot talk about
heaven, for heaven is unified and there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and
object and nobody to talk to or explain anything to.
Our present task is to purify our perception by loving and forgiving all people.
When our perception is corrected we are brought to the metaphorical gate of heaven and
live fairly peaceful and happy lives (happy dream). A forgiven world (the Holy Spirit
reinvented world) is still an illusory world, but a happy illusion, a happy dream.
Ultimately, when all living things perceptions are corrected we all awaken to
oneness, the world of God, a world beyond speech, for language is meant to adapt to the
world of separation. We cannot describe heaven, we are silent in it. There is no talking in
knowledge. It is only perception, our egos world and the Holy Spirit’s version of it that
needs to be talked about and improved. There is no learning in unified spirit, in heaven;
there is only knowing.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 24, 2007

#7
(Metaphysical Essays, #6 of 31)

THE MEANING OF ATONEMENT

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

The term atonement is probably known to every Christian? The question is: what
does it mean? Different persons, apparently, have different definitions of atonement.
Please consider the definition of atonement provided here; it approximates the true
meaning of atonement (At- one-ment).

To atone is to make amends for a mistake one has made. To atone one must accept a
mistake as a mistake, correct it and resolve not to make the mistake again.
What mistake are we talking about when Christians talk about their atonement? The
sin, actually, a mistake, that Christians are atoning for, is their choice for specialness and
separation from God, from each other and from their real selves.
(As we go along in these metaphysical essays, I am going to assume that you have
understood the previous essays and their terms of departure from regular Christian views
and therefore not repeat them. In that light I will assume that you have understood the
nature of specialness and separation?)

The sin, in my terms, error, that Christians are atoning for, is their separation from
their father, from each other and from their real selves. To be in this world is to deny our
original nature and take on a different, a false nature.
In truth, we are unified spirit. We are one spirit self with one mind. God is spirit and
the spirit of God extended himself into us, his infinite children. We are in God and he is
in us, as the one self of God. This is the state of eternity, oneness. This assertion is a fact,
not speculative.

The children of God are exactly like God except that God created them and they
did not create themselves. They wished to create themselves. They could not do so in
reality.
To seem to have created themselves they went to sleep and forgot their real selves
and dream different selves, a self they invented.
The new selves we created are our self concepts, our human personalities, selves
housed in bodies that believe that they are special and different from other selves.
This is where we are now; we are the rebellious children of God who denied their
father’s creation of them and now believe that they created themselves and that they live
in a world of space, time and matter.
Our new selves and world seem very real to us and we believe them to be real. We
defend our new selves with all the ego defense mechanisms, particularly with fear.

As long as human beings believe that they created themselves and that they are
special and separated from God they have made a mistake. In Christological language,
they live in sin.
However, sin is a wrong term for it implies that what the children of God did is
permanent and not changeable.
What the children of God did is impermanent and changeable. They are merely
sleeping and dreaming that they are separated from their father and that they live in
space, time and body. Their new selves and world are a dream phenomenon, defended
and defense makes it, an illusion, seem real.
If defense is withdrawn from the self and world we made they disappear. If you
did not defend your ego self concept, right now, you would disappear from this world and
reawaken in the world of spirit where you and I and all of us are part of each other and
are parts of God. Try it; if you are attacked by other persons, do not defend yourself. The
fact is that you do not want to return to the awareness of spirit. You are in this world
because you want to seem separated from God and from all of us.

Because we have not, in fact, separated from God and only seem to have separated
from him, what we did is not real. The world is not real. We remain as God created us,
unified with him and with each other.

The empirical world is causeless and has no effect. It is a mere wish fulfillment but
not a fact. Only God has effect for he has cause.
God caused his children to come into being; we are the effects of God. We cannot
change the cause of God (creation); we cannot change the effects of God (us). We cannot
recreate ourselves into what God did not create us as, although we sleep and dream that
we are different selves. We remain as God create us, holy (that is, whole, unified with
him), innocent, sinless, guiltless and innocent.
In Sister Helen Schucman’s colorful metaphors, ideas cannot leave their source.
God is the thinker; we are ideas in his mind; we cannot leave his mind; we are always in
God’s mind as part of his thoughts and self.
(The ideas in Dr Schucman’s book, A Course in Miracles, are similar to the ideas
expressed here. Truth is the same; they are merely articulated differently by different
teachers of God. We are one but think that we are different and God’s Holy Spirit sends
us seeming different teachers of God to teach us in seeming different languages, in
languages that we, in our apparent differences, can understand. If you can understand
Sister Helen’s verse you do not need my prose; both of us are teaching the perennial
philosophy that all are one, same and equal.)

To atone for our sins is to undo what we did. We did the ego self and its world. We
atone for the sin of separating from God by undoing the ego and the world. This means
giving up the separated ego self and its physical world and returning to the world that
God created. It means willingly letting the separated self go, so that one reawakens to the
consciousness of unified self.
This seems too simply, does it not? But know what I am talking about here for it
will cost you the whole world you see. If you understand what you are being told, you
will have to let go the empirical world! Don’t kid yourself; the world of God and the
world of man are different and they do not mix. If you hold unto one, you will not see
the other. You must let go of our world to experience the world of God; as long as you
see yourself as in our world, you cannot experience the world of God.

Jesus Christ was the first son of God who, while in the separated ego self, in our world,
completely atoned for his sin. (Other teachers of God, like Buddha, did not completely
relinquish their attachments to the ego and body and this world hence lived in this world
for a long time whereas Jesus exited it.)
Jesus gave up the ego and its world and returned to the awareness of unified spirit.
He is now in God’s spirit.
 Because he has experienced both our egos world and God’s world he understands
the conditions of both worlds; he is now a mediator of heaven and earth. He knows the
conditions of heaven and earth and can therefore intercede for those of us still on earth. If
we ask him to guide us, he will guide us; if not asked, he would leave us alone, and,
ultimately, each of us would find his way back to God, with or without Jesus; it may take
longer for us to return to our true home, so it may be a good idea to ask for a little help
from our big brother.
Jesus reconciled heaven and earth and is our chief guide as we try to return to God.
There are, of course, other guides. The Holy Spirit is actually our guide home and any
human being who listens to the gospel of love and forgiveness taught by the Holy Spirit
can guide us on our journey home.

It was not easy for Jesus to do what he did. His ego, of course, wanted to live in this
world of specialness and separation. Remember the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane
when Jesus behaved as all too human, eco homo: God, I would rather not die, not go
through this ordeal, crucifixion, but since it is thy will for me to do so, I give in to it.
God willed that his son give up his ego and return to as he was created, Christ,
unified self. Jesus gave up his desire for separation and voluntarily permitted his ego
self and its body to be crucified, to die.

Jesus did not die; he merely gave up his false self and returned to the awareness of
his real self.
I have always found Christians funny. They talk about Jesus and make it seem like
he is far from them. The living son of God, Jesus Christ, is in us. He is in you. If you let
go of your attachment to the separated ego self, you would see him, in light form, right
now. You would see him in whatever form your upbringing prepared you to see him.
I was raised a Catholic and my idea of a holy man is the Catholic priest, the Pope. In
this light, when I saw the brother he took on the form of a Catholic priest, attired in
Catholic robes. He was in light form, made of photons, so light that you could see
through him. This is called having Christ vision, or spiritual sight.
I will not talk about issues that you may not be ready for yet. What is salient is that
Jesus Christ is real. He is in unified spirit; he is one with God and all of us. But since we
still believe in form we can see him in form, not in dense human body but in the purified
form of light body. (If you take what I am saying seriously, you would see him tonight in
your dream, for in dreams are egos and spiritualized egos.)

Jesus was a son of God who initially sought separation from his father. He pursued
specialness. At some point he recognized that he is not separated from God and his
brothers. He learned that we are all one self and one mind and that God created us. He
let go of his attachment to the ego and body and the egos world and had unitive
experience where he knew that he is one with God and his creation. With that experience
he began to teach us to forgive one another so as to experience what he did.
But we aren’t willing to forgive one another. We insist on bearing grievances and
punishing those who wronged us.
 For our present purposes, Jesus permitted his ego and its body to be crucified, to
die. We see this event, crucifixion, as bad because we want to live in ego and body. But it
is not bad; it is glorious for it means giving up the identification with that which does not
even exists, body and ego, an identification that causes us a lot of pain.
If for second you detach from your ego and body, my God, you would feel blissful
and would wonder why you ever saw yourself as body.
Although I am not interested in talking about myself but let me tell you how my
journey into the spiritual world began.
My mother, Teresa, died. God, I love that woman. My mother is a saint. She lived
for other people. She did everything she did out of consideration for other people.
Consider. During the Biafran war this woman was all over the place buying and selling
and had the means to feed people. She fed most of the children around us. Nobody
around us suffered malnutrition. She herself would not eat until all the children around
were fed. She placed other people’s interests above her own interests. She lived for other
people not for herself.
When mother died I simply could not believe that such an angel could die. I wanted
to die along with her. I stopped eating, consciously wanting to die.
One Sunday morning, I lay on my bed consciously willing myself to die. Suddenly, I
saw myself leave my body. That is correct. I saw myself above my body. I was not
sleeping or dreaming. I was fully awake. In fact, I was with a friend of mine, a German
psychologist, and we were talking before the out of body episode occurred.
Suddenly, I saw myself above my body. I looked up and saw a dense dark cloud. In
the midst of that darkness was a point of light. I was fascinated by that tiny point of light
and began moving towards it. It was more like flying towards it; if we could travel at the
speed of light (186,000 miles a second) I believe that I was moving faster than that
velocity.
As I got closer, the light expanded and incorporated everything; all became light.
Suddenly, my mother, in light body, was holding my hands, just as she used to do when
we went to church at Lagos. We were talking and she was telling me that she understood
what I was doing but that since my children were still young that though I have the right
to leave the world that it would be a good idea to be with them and provide for them, as
she provided for us, until we were all out of university before she left us. Without telling
me what to do, I felt the desire to go back and be with my children.
The moment I made that decision I returned to my body. The desire to be on earth
and return to my body was almost instantaneous, although the desire preceded the action.
At this juncture in my life, I had so many spiritual experiences that narrating them to
folks trained in the scientific method are like denying the world they think is correct.

The point is this. We choose to be in separated selves housed in bodies and defend
our lives in bodies. The defense of bodies’ make bodies seem to exist. If we stopped
defending them they would no longer exist.
We do not die when we think that we are dead; we merely awaken in spirit; first in
light forms and, ultimately, in non-physical formless state, unified spirit.

Not too many persons are yet willing to let go of their identification with their
separated selves and their bodies.
 Okay, God said. Go ahead and identify with separated self in body. But do all of us
a favor, will you? Use your separated self and its body to love other seeming separated
selves and their bodies. Love every person you see.
God does not destroy what his children made (our world). He asks us to be where
we want to be and love ourselves. Love every person you see, black and white, man and
woman, child and adult. (Silly you, I am not talking about sex; I am talking about
spiritual love.)

Atonement is the recognition that we made a mistake in separating from God, and
the decision to correct that mistake by returning back to God, to unified state.
Jesus put it very well in the parable of the prodigal son. The prodigal son was Jesus
himself. He is also each of us.
Each of us, the prodigal son, wanted to go seem special and separated from his
heavenly father; he wanted to go create himself and separated from his father and came to
this world.
Each of us went on a journey without distance, a journey to nowhere (for wherever
we go we go in God). On earth, in the journey, each of us seems to succeed for a little
while until he falls. The son of God cannot live without his father; everything he does is
with the power of his father in him. He cannot do anything with the power of God in him.
The prodigal son fell and was unable to feed himself and had to rent himself out to a
pig farmer and was reduced to eating with pigs. While eating with pigs he remembered
that he has a rich father and resolved to return home. He took a step towards home and
his father ran to meet him and had a humongous feast for him.
All these are metaphors meaning that separated from God, our real selves, we suffer
and in suffering remember that we have a heavenly father who can provide for us. We
accept our mistake of separating from him and then begin the journey home.
We must first acknowledge our mistake, accept that specialness and separation is a
mistake and resolve to correct it, to atone for it. A mistake not accepted is not corrected.
You must accept that you made a mistake in seeking specialness and separation.
As we accept our mistake, we have atoned for it, and as we take the first few
hesitant steps towards God, he runs towards us and welcomes us back home, to himself,
and has a feast for us.
Heaven rejoices when a child of God returns from his journey into separation, ego
land, back to unified land.
We are welcomed home with heavenly music and rejoicing. If you like classical
music, as I do, you have not heard good classical music, my friend, until you move
towards heaven. As I sit here typing, I am listening to Mozart. I am in heaven as long as
classical music is playing around me. But then one takes a step towards God and hears a
type of music that is blissful and out of this world. This is literal not figurative. We are
talking heavenly spires.
Jesus relinquished his attachment to his ego and its body and the egos world and
returned to God. In metaphoric language, he died to the ego and returned to Christ. Hence
he is correctly called Jesus (ego) Christ…the son of God who is as his father created him:
loving and unified. He atoned for his own sin of specialness and separation.
 What Jesus did I must do, and you must do, and all of us must do. It is up to us when
we do it.
(Actually, when each of us would do it, return home, is already set by us. Each of us
wrote the script that is his life’s play and enacts it. Imagine me, a chap with total trust in
the scientific method, the precocious boy, who, at fourteen, read Charles Darwin’s Origin
of Species and found a philosophy, materialism, and gave up his original Catholicism.
Though I still went to Church, perfunctorily, I became an atheist at age fourteen. I was
an atheist until my mother died and I had experiences that led me to accept that spirit is
real. I used to reinterpret my spiritual experiences, as any old materialist would, that
mother’s death led to my wishful thinking, my wishing for her to survive in some form,
and that wish led to those fantasies that I called spiritual experiences. The problem was
that I actually wished for total annihilation from being; I wanted to disappear into the
world of non-being, finitude. I wanted nothing to do with an unjust world where saints
like my mother could die and rot. Well, my friend, I am trained in philosophy and
psychology and understand all the objections to spirit’s existence. And do not think
hallucination, for I certainly was not hallucinating. I have worked with psychotics,
schizophrenics and manic-depressives, and have heard them tell me about their
hallucinations. In hallucination there is always thought disorder. But in my spiritual
experiences I could not have been more rational, and my ordinary personality is pure
reason. Nor do I think that I was deluded, either. The present point is that I turned
towards God when I was meant to do so. The circumstances of my return to our true self
are my circumstances. You, too, have set the circumstances upon which you would
remember your true self. It may be during this dream time or in another…what folks call
reincarnation are simply different dreams, for we are not born and do not die, we merely
seem born and die in different dreams.)

CONCLUSION

Atonement is the relinquishment of the belief that one is a special- separated self
living in body and accepting that one remains as God created one, unified spirit.
Do you get it? Okay, let me try again, take a different tack and see if I can make
myself clearer.
As long as we identify with special-separated selves housed in bodies we are
metaphorically dead to our real self, unified spirit.
We start living when we let go of our identification with separated self and its body.
We are reborn in Christ. The second coming of Christ into our lives occurs when we
accept the state that God created us: unified self.
What we call life in body is death (except that there is no such thing as death…we
do not leave the world via death, but by remembering the truth of our unified self).

I am not asking you to kill yourself. Suicide is a waste of time, for all that happens
is that you are reborn on earth in a different body. You continue where you stopped in
past life times. You continue your education until you learn that you are unified spirit.
When you learn that all people are parts of our unified self, you love and forgive all
people, as Jesus did, as the Holy Spirit asks us to. When you love and forgive all people,
you are saved.
 Salvation lies in love and forgiveness of all people. Forgiveness emanates from the
awareness that you are not a separated self in body but a unified self having a dream of
separation and that the wrong other people do to you are done in a dream state, not real.
To forgive what is done in dreams is easy.
If the evil people do on earth is real, who would forgive them? Who would forgive
Adolf Hitler? It is because the world is a dream and what we do in it is done in dreams,
and is not real, that we must forgive people.

Salvation from the ego gives us attenuated peace and happiness. Salvation, in a
metaphorical sense, brings us to the gate of heaven.
In salvation we are still living in bodies, but we now use our bodies to love all
children of God. When we love all people and forgive all people our lives are relatively
peaceful and happy.
This relative peace and joy is called having a happy dream while still one earth, in
the dream of separation. If you like, you are now dreaming with love, dreaming with the
guide of the Holy Spirit.

If you are saved, delivered and redeemed from specialness and separation, you
become a teacher of God and do what I am doing here: teaching all of us our unified
nature and our need to love and forgive each other.
If you do so, when eventually you die, that is, seem to die, you awaken to living in
light form and, ultimately, return to formless unified spirit. You join the world teachers of
God, such as Jesus Christ and Buddha, and from their world of light forms teach those
still living in our world of dense forms the nature of truth.
All the people that you think are dead are not dead. If any of the people you know
of was a loving and forgiving person, he is now in the world of light forms and from it he
is putting ideas into your head, ideas of love. But if some one you knew was an evil,
egoistic person, upon his seeming physical death, he returns to this world and continues
learning until he learns that all that matters is Love and forgiveness.

Are you saved, redeemed, delivered from your sin? This means: are you a loving
and forgiving person? It means have you returned to the awareness of union and
equality?
If you know that our true self is spirit and you love all people, you are relatively
happy and peaceful hence saved. You have atoned for the sin of separation; a sin that is
not really a sin since you have never separated from God.
Separated or not, you believe that you are separated from God and what you believe
in is real for you. You believe in separation and seem to live in a separated world. Okay,
live in it. But love all people, love all the separated ones. Love all the dream figures in
your dream. Forgive us all our evils towards you. If you do so your life would be
relatively happy. You would have a happy dream, a happy fiction, and a happy illusion.
You have atoned for specialness and separation; you have given up the illusion that the
son could create himself, his father and his brothers. You have accepted reality: God
created us and we are joined to him and to one another.
In union are harmony, peace and happiness. In separation is conflict. Choose which
one you want. I have chosen union and peace.
* I write these essays after a full day at work. I limit each to three hours. I do not have the
time to edit them, though I will do that when I eventually collate them into a book. In the
meantime, please forgive any grammatical and or typographical errors in them.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 23, 2007

NORMALCY, IDEALISM AND METAPHYSIC

(The sleepers, the idealists and the mystics)

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

There are basically three approaches to living life on earth. The first is normalcy.
Here the individual is sleeping and dreaming and takes his dream world as real. He
knows no better and simply assumes that his dream world is real. This is the well
adjusted human being. He is found in all the professions’ science, engineering, medicine,
law, in short in the vocations that adapt to this world. Ninety five percent of the people
are here. I call them THE SLEEPERS.
The second group is those whole while in sleeping and dreaming recognize that the
sleep-dream is totally meaningless and purposeless. They know this right from the time
they were born (it is not an acquired characteristics, just as normalcy is not an acquired
characteristics but a state the individual is born in). These people reject the world, reject
their bodily and ego self. They use their minds and imaginations to come up with ideal
self, ideal world, ideal every thing and aspire to bring them about. The pursuit of ideas
gives their lives meaning and purpose; moreover it gives them a sense of power for after
all the inventing the ideal they are pursuing. They find it difficult to give up their ideals
for they do not want to embrace the ego real world that they saw as meaningless and
rejected. (Western psychiatry calls such persons neurotics and psychotics, persons living
in individually invented world, not the group invented world of the normal person.)
The third group, usually a handful at best is those who rejected the normal world,
rejected the ego ideal world and turn their attention to God. These are the mystics. The
mystic escapes from the world to his idea of God; the neurotic escapes from the world but
to a world he invented, a fantasy world; the normal lives in the world he and others
invented, the group sleep dream animal level world.

THE AIMS OF EQUALITY AND INEQUALITY

(The goal of specialness)

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

We are spiritual beings. In spirit we are eternal and immortal. More to the present
point, in spirit we are the same and equal.
There are infinite spirits all of whom are joined and unified as one spirit.
 To be joined and unified the constituent parts of a thing must be the same and equal.
Where there are differences and inequality there can be no joining. Differences
make for separation and conflict.
Sameness and equality makes for joining, harmony and peace and happiness.
God is sameness, equality, joined, immortal, permanent, changeless etc. The
children of God desired to experience the opposite of God, the opposite of their real self
and their real home; they invented our world of inequality, differences, inequality,
mortality, changeability, ignorance and not knowing.

There is one God. God is spirit. God is creative. God is always creative; there is no
time he is not creating. God has always created and will continue to create. God creates
parts of himself; if you like to anthropomorphize it, you could say that God creates his
children.
God creates by extending his one self into another self. One God expands to another
self and, as it were, there are now two gods. But they are not two gods for the original
god and the created god, god the father and god the son, are the same God. God the father
and God the son are the same self.
(When God the son, us, separated from God the father, God the father, the
transcendent God, created another God, God the Holy Spirit, the immanent God, God in
the world, and gave him the task of bringing God the son back to his senses, to his
awareness that he is part of God the father. Thus, now there are three selves in one God:
God the father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit; all three are the same God. This is
called the Holy Trinity by the Christian Church.)

God gave all of him self to his son. God is creative and gave his creative
capabilities to his son. Thus, God the son is given the property of creation. God the son
is as creative as God the father. God the son creates his own children. The children of
God the son create their own children, ad infinitum. This way creation has no beginning
and no end. God is always creating and his children are always creating. Creation can
never stop. Creation can never stop for God and his children are by nature creative,
expansive and will always expand. Nothing can restrain their expansion; nothing can
stop them from creating.

God the father is not separated from God the son. God the father is inside God the
son. God the son is inside God the father. Father and son are the same self. Father and
son share the same self and share the same mind. Where God the father ends and God the
son begin is nowhere; there is no space or gap between them. This is a fact, not
conjecture.

God the father created God the son. Beyond this fact they are the same and coequal.
There are no differences between God the father and God the son.
God the son entertained the idea of having the one attribute that God the father has
that he does not have: creating his father and creating himself. That is, he wanted to
reverse the order of creation and create reality.
Since God the father and God the son are permanent, changeless and eternal, it
follows that God the son cannot change what has already been created; his father has
already created him, so he cannot create his father or create himself (although he can
create his own children with the creative power of God in him…on earth our parents
create us and we create our children, but we cannot create our parents, much as we wish
to do so).
In reality, in spirit, the wish for self creation is impossible of gratification.

WHAT IS SPECIALNESS, SUPERIORITY?

The wish for self creation and creation of God is desire for superiority, desire for
specialness. The son of God (who are infinite in numbers but are one son of God) wished
to create God and create them selves and create each other. This is wish for specialness
and cannot be gratified in reality.

THE ORIGIN OF THE MATERIAL WORLD

Unable to fulfill their insane desire to kill their father and each other and become
the author of reality, the sons of God, as it were, attacked their father and each other; they
exploded (Big Bang) and seem to have separated from their father and from each other.
In a nanosecond, they sped apart from each other. However, there is no place for
them to speed apart to, to separate to; so all they did was seem to have cast a magical
charm, spell, Maya, on themselves and seem to have gone to sleep and in their sleep
dream that they are now apart from their father and from each other.
In their dream (this is a metaphor, not fact; we are trying to represent unified reality
in human language, separated world of illusions, and must employ the language that
adapts to the world of separation, illusions; in unified reality there is no language, for the
father and son are one and do not have the need to speak to each other or see each other)
they invented separation, space, time and matter. They used matter to invent bodies for
themselves and each of them now seems inside a body.
Body makes them seem separated from each other and from their father. Body gives
us a sense of boundary from each other.
Separation, space, time and matter are all illusions, for, in fact, they do not exist; they
merely seem to exist in the world of illusions, in a dream setting.
(I am giving you facts, not conjectures, for, if you want to you can tune out our
seeming separated world and experience the world of unified spirit, right now; however,
you are afraid of letting go of your separated world, for you want to seem separated from
God and from other people; you see union as the death of your ego separated self, which
is true, except that your ego self is not your real self; and the ego needs to disappear from
your awareness for you to know the reality of unified state.)

The children of God now seem asleep and dreaming that they are separated from
their father and from each other. They have forgotten their real selves and real home.
They are living in ignorance of their true identity. They have identified with a false self
and false world.
In reality, in truth they are not separated from their father and from each other.
Separation is impossible for no force can disobey the will of God.
 God’s will is that everything is unified, eternally. No force in the universe that is God
can make what God willed not so.
The children of God do not have the will to disobey their father. But they can have
the wish to disobey their father.
Wishes produce illusions, sleep and dreams; wishes produce fantasies. Will creates,
wish invents fantasies.

The children of God have the power of God in them. They are given the power to
create and are always creating like their father. Right now, they are in spirit, heaven, and
are creating, producing more children of God who are like them.
However, you and I, children of God, parts of God’s one son, cast Maya on us and
seem to have forgotten our true self as the children of God and now live in the state of
ignorance of our true self. We see ourselves in the world of space, time and matter, in the
world of illusion. We are now miss-creating ourselves, misusing God’s creative power in
us.
We made a wish for specialness-separation and that wish produced the material
world we now seem to live in. The empirical world is a world that came into being
because we wished it to come into being; we wished it because it gratifies our desire, our
wish for special separated existence.
The world has a purpose for us. The world exists because we want it to exist.

The desire that led to the existence of this world is the desire to seem as if one
created God, created ones self and created other people; these compendium of desires is
called the goal of specialness or the desire for superiority.
Each human being desires to seem superior to God and to other people. It is that
desire to seem superior to other creatures and their creator that brought our world into
being and maintains it.
Originally, and still so in heaven, we are the same and coequal, but we desire
inequality, we want to seem superior and self created and that wish led to the origin of
our world.

You and I are in this world; we are sleep-dreaming that we are separated from our
creator and from each other. This world is an illusion, because each of us wishes to seem
superior to each other and to God and make our wish seem realized when in fact it has
not.
You want to seem superior to me and to every person you meet and to God; I want
to seem superior to you and to every person on earth and to God. Please accept this
existential reality, for it is only when you accept it, see it as a mistake and forgive it that
you are saved and know peace and happiness.
The desire for personal superiority is the illusion that produced this world and the
delusion that maintains it in seeming existence.
The day you recognize that you and I, all of us, are the same and are coequal and
accept that God created you and I, not you created God, is the day that you are saved
from the painful illusion of specialness.
 Here is an example. White folks fancy themselves superior to black folks; within the
black world some fancy themselves superior to others. This illusion of superiority is what
brought this world into being and is what maintains it.
Your personal world ends when you relinquish the illusion of specialness. Of course,
you do not want your world to end for you are proud of the world you invented to replace
the world that God created.
God created the world of sameness and equality and you invented a world of
differences and inequality. You are proud of the world you made for it is your handiwork,
your idol. You worship your idol, the antichrist, the opposite of the real self that God
created you as. (The separated self, the ego, is the antichrist; the unified self is the Christ;
the Christ is the son of God who is as his father created him, unified with him and all his
brothers; a holy self…holy is contraction of whole, whole self/holy self.)

COLLECTIVE AND INDIVIDUAL SPECIALNESS

Whereas, collectively all of us, as the one unified son of God, have the goal of
specialness, each of us has a personal goal of specialness. This is an insane goal for it
contravenes the will of God, which is that we are the same and equal. Each of us is
insane. It is the insanity, the desire for superiority and inferiority that led to the invention
of this world and it is that insanity that maintains this world.

SIN

At any moment I see you as separated from me and you see me as separated from
you we have made a mistake. This perception of separation and differences is what the
perverted Christian Church means by sin. In this light, I have sinned whenever I see
another human being as apart from me; you have sinned whenever you see another
human being as apart from you. However, we are always unified in spirit and cannot
separate from each other, so we merely made a mistake, an error that needs to be
forgiven, overlooked, so that we experience the reality of union that is always there but
clouded by the wish for separation. We do not sin, but the desire for sin, separation and
specialness is what produced the temporal universe of space, time and matter.
(The wish that brought this world into being is a powerful wish, so do not trivialize
what you are being taught here. It is difficult to give up the wish for specialness and
separation; very few persons have accomplished that goal; Buddha and Jesus are among
the few that have relinquished the desire for separation and returned to the awareness of
union.)

SPECIALNESS, SEPARATION AND PAIN AND SUFFERING

Please pause and ponder what I have just said. There is no such thing as sin but
belief in sin produces pain. We are always unified. But we wish to be separated and
contrive to seem separated from each other.
Whenever I see you as separated and different from me, I have sinned against God, I
have attacked God, and I have disobeyed the will of God.
 (In reality, of course, I cannot attack God, nobody can attack God. Nevertheless, I
believe that I have attacked God, wholeness, split the unified world he created into
fragments an identified with a fragment of it, my ego self; hence I feel sinful. When I
return all the fragments together, I have stopped attacking God/reality, I have met the
condition of God/heaven and experience God, return to heaven; experience oneness.)
In truth we are always unified and are always in spirit, but my desire for separation,
my sin, produced the world of separation I see.
Because I wish to seem separated from you and you wish to seem separated from me,
both of us have sinned.
To sin is to live in pain. I live in pain because I see me as separated from other
people; you live in pain because you see you as separated from other people.
To live on earth, which is to suppose that one is separated from other people, is to
live in sin and to live in pain.
To be a human being, Gautama Buddha correctly surmised, is to live in pain and to
suffer. To be a human being, which is to wish separation, is to suffer.
(Buddhism is going to change the world, it will replace all other religions and
philosophies, for it is true; however, it does not have to be called Buddhism; call it what
you like, the salient point is that you understand its import: that we are unified and that
currently we seem separated and suffer pain and need to return to the awareness of union
to remove our pain and suffering; eliminate the desire for separation and its root,
specialness, and you return to union and its attendant bliss.)

SAMENESS AND EQUALITY AMOUNTS TO PEACE AND JOY

Sameness and equality is synonymous with peace and happiness. On the other hand,
those who seek separated special selves live in conflict and pain.

EGO DEFENSES DEFEND ILLUSIONS

Illusions must be defended to seem real. Defense of illusions give us pain. If you
desire superiority and fancy yourself superior to other persons, you have invented an
illusion since in reality we are the same and equal. You must now defend your illusion of
superiority with the various ego defenses, and in doing so live in neurotic pain and suffer
anxiety.
All neurosis and psychosis emanates from the postulation of a superior self, an
illusion, and the defense of that illusion. Defense of an illusion makes it seem real in
ones eyes. The person who wishes to seem superior to other people (and at a deeper level
superior to God) must defend his illusion and in doing so make it seem real to him.
The paranoid personality wants to seem superior to other people; he is not superior
to any one; nevertheless, he has the wish for the illusion of superiority and must defend it.
Thus, at all times he is defended, tense, guarded, jumpy, fears been demeaned, slighted,
belittled, humiliated, disgraced, insulted, criticized, any thing that makes him seem not
the illusion of a superior self. He lives a tense anxious life. But if he gives up the wish for
superiority and accepts our inherent equality he relaxes, both somatic and psychic
relaxation and knows the peace of God that no human being can explain.
 THE PURPOSE OF BODY

The human (animal) body was invented to serve the purpose of specialness. We
invented body for a purpose and put it to serving that purpose. We seek specialness
(superiority, pretense that we created God, created other people and created ourselves).
In the world of spirit we are the same and equal and joined. In spirit all spirits can
read all spirits minds, for they all share the same mind (each of us is an open unit in the
mind of God). We are open books for each other and know what each other is thinking.
To seem to have secret thoughts (the wish for specialness is hidden from our
conscious awareness…if made conscious and understood it can be let go and that is why I
am writing this paper for you) we invented matter and use it to make bodies for ourselves
and hide inside bodies and in our hiding pretend to be better than other people.
In body all people fancy themselves superior to other people; why, because they
think that their bodies are better than other people’s bodies. Our bodies which are really
shit, stuff that will die, rot and smell to high heaven are used by the foolish children of
God to play their psychotic game of superiority and inferiority (some want to seem
superior and want others to seem inferior; whites want to seem superior and want blacks
to seem inferior).
Body is designed to enable us make specialness and separation seem real in our
consciousness.
We use the body for several purposes, but the chief one is to make body real and if so
to make what body houses, the separated ego self seem real.
We make our bodies weak and pained and afflicted with diseases. A weak, pained
or diseased body makes body seem real in the sick person’s consciousness. If his body is
real then he is a separated self and his separated self seem real.

Let me personalize what I am talking about. I was born with an oversensitive body.
My body was overly weak and pained. Other people, for example, enjoy food but food
caused me stomach pain. The slightest physical exercise made me feel over taxed. All
said, I became extremely aware of my body. I was preoccupied with my body and tried
everything to make it seem strong (including compulsive exercises, eating right, not
having alcohol, cigarette etc).
What is going on here is that my sickly body (which I chose before I was born on
earth…for nothing can happen to us without our desiring to experience it, there are no
accidents in the world of God) made me concentrates on being a body.
My bodily thoughts reinforced my desire to be a separated ego self. I was an egotist
who wished to seem separated from other people and to seem superior to them.
This was the game I was playing until one day, somehow, I let go of my awareness
that I am a body and escaped from my body awareness and entered into realms that I
cannot talk about; unless you have had unitive experience, it is useless for other persons
trying to explain to you that there is a world where all are one self, one mind, where there
is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object, just one joined, formless self that
is immortal and all knowing.
 For our present purposes, body serves the purpose of specialness. We adorn our
bodies with fine clothes, jewelry etc and make them seem important and in so doing
make our separated ego selves seem important.
Although this may shock you, let me give it to you straight: body does not exist.
Body has not existed, not for a second. If you like, body exists as in a dream, but is not
real. Body and what it houses, the separated ego self, do not exist, period. This is a fact,
not conjecture. You may not be able to handle this fact yet, if you can, good for you.
We are pure spirit who sleep and dream that we are in bodies and see ourselves in
our material world. In fact, we are not in bodies, not in this world; we are always in spirit,
and are always bodiless and formless.

WHAT ARE PSYCHOLOGICAL ILLNESS, PSYCHOTHERAPY AND HEALTH?

Psychological dis (at) ease is any belief that one is separate from other people and
that one is superior or inferior to other people.
If you believe that you are superior or inferior to other people, you have made it
necessary for you to separate from them. In your separation you nurse your sense of
specialness.
Let me personalize. As a child I was shy, very shy. I would have been diagnosed as
having avoidant personality disorder (which is the psychiatric term for shyness). I was
shy and felt that I was not good enough and that if other people got close to me and know
me as I am (a physical weakling) that they would reject me. I wanted to be accepted and
feared social rejection. To avoid been rejected by other people I kept to myself. This is
essentially the psychology of the shy child: fear of social rejection, anxiety from
anticipated social rejection and reduction of that anticipatory anxiety via social
withdrawal.
The above is how official psychology sees shyness. Whereas it is descriptively
correct, it does not explain shyness.
Here is the somatic and psychodynamic explanation of the shy child. The shy child
inherited a highly excitable body. (I will not go into the specifics of physiology here).
Suffice it to say that the shy child has a biological constitution that is easily aroused
hence made anxious.
At the psychological level the shy child feels inferior to his environment. His
physical weakness makes him feel inadequate and unable to cope with the exigencies of
his world. He then tries to compensate with fictional, imaginary sense of s superiority.
In my own case, I felt somatically inferior. I kept apart from other boys. In my social
isolation I fancied myself superior to other boys. That is to say that social isolation,
separation, served a purpose for me; it offered me the opportunity to seem superior to
other people. Separation has a purpose: it serves the goal of specialness.

The shy kid invariably feels superior to other kids. Try telling a shy kid what to do
and you learn that he feels superior to you. An adult would tell me to do something and I
would say to him: who the hell do you think that you are telling me what to do? I would
ignore him. I had what we might call opposition defiant behavior. I did only what is
rational. Explain something to me and if it made sense to me, I did it without your
bossing me around. If you simply asked me to do something, I would tell you to take
your freaking, bossy self out of my sight.
The point is that the shy child is on a power trip; he wants to seem powerful and
important; he wants to seem superior and special; at the metaphysical level, he wants to
create himself, create other people (whom he invents self concepts for) and, ultimately,
create God. He wants to destroy the self God created him as, the unified spirit self, and
replace it with the self he invented, the separated ego self housed in body. All human
beings do what the shy child does, for this is the human condition.

All mental illnesses, and I do not care whether it is schizophrenia, bipolar affective
disorder, delusional disorder, depression, anxiety, personality disorders, all of them are
rooted in the individual’s desire for separation and superiority (seeking inferiority is
seeking superiority).
All desire for specialness and separation are rooted in the desire to kill God and
create ones self and create other people (which desire is gratified in inventing the self
concept, the ego for ones self).

All healing of psychological disorders lies in jettisoning the special self concept and
accepting the self God crated one as: the same and equal self. If you extinguish your wish
to seem special and better than other people and accept that you are the same and equal
with all people, mean it, and behave accordingly, you are mentally healthy.
Any moment you feel superior or inferior to other people you are mentally
disordered. Ultimately, mental health lays in knowing ones self as joined with all people
and with God and surcease of every desire to affirm the ego separated, special self.

There are two levels of mental illness and mental health. On the immediate level,
where we are, this world, one must give up all desire for superiority and specialness and
accept our inherent sameness and equality.
At the higher unconscious level one must accept that we are all joined and joined as
unified spirit self. We must accept that God created us and that we did not create
ourselves. We must accept that we are spirit not bodies (and see bodies as means of
hiding from the truth and redirect it, use body to love the other children of God in
bodies).
We must forgive one another, for forgiveness is the true meaning of love.
All these are easier said than done. Unconsciously, we want to seem special and
better than other people. Every thing we do on earth is motivated by subtle and not so
subtle desire to seem better or worse than other people. Even when one consciously
wants to seem equal to others, when others irritate one, ones sense of superiority comes
out.
For example, at the conscious level I see me as the same and equal to other people.
But if you treated me as inferior to you, I would immediately revert to my old worldly
self and told you that you are nothing but shit and had no right to treat me as such. That is
to say that I would behave as an egotist and fancy myself superior to you.
 The ego is the spirit of superiority, the embodiment of the son of God’s desire to
seem superior to his father and all his brothers.
The ego is difficult to overcome but one must keep trying until one gets to a point
where one sees all people, black and white, man and woman, adult and children as the
same and coequal.
To the extent that you feel equal with all people, to that extent are you mentally
healthy, and living without the delusion of superiority or inferiority.
To the extent that you accept our sameness and equality to that extent are you at
peace and happy. Conversely, to the extent that you entertain desire for specialness you
disturb your peace and happiness.
Everything has its benefits and costs. Sameness and equality gives the rewords of
God: peace and joy; differences and inequality gives the gifts of Satan (the ego is what
old time religion calls Satan, Devil) pain and suffering.
The choice is for you to make, and as you decide; as you choose you reap the
consequent rewards. My function as a teacher of union, a teacher of God is to explain the
perennial philosophy of mankind and leave it for you to choose; I cannot choose for you,
only the individual can choose for himself. I choose union, I choose sameness and
equality, and I choose forgiveness, which is the true meaning of love.
I forgive all God’s children what they do in a sleep-dream setting that, in the reality
of unified spirit, they have not, in fact, done.
I know that all my brothers are as their father created them: unified hence innocent,
sinless and guiltless; they are my holy brothers in our unified self.
In these choices I know peace and happiness.

*Next, Special relationships, that is, relationships based on inequality of members.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 20, 2007

Metaphysical essays #5 of 31)

THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF GUILT AND FEAR

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Human beings do feel fearful and guilty, so how did these feelings come about? Of
course, we know that we feel fear when our physical and psychological lives are
threatened and feel guilty when we do something wrong, but are those the only reasons
why we feel fear and guilt?

The human body is wired in such a manner that it anticipates what could harm the
individual and reacts with fear before such a thing happens, or when it actually happens,
it reacts with fear. If a car comes very close to you, in an involuntary manner, your body
reacts with fear. Excitatory neurochemicals, such as adrenaline are released and they
excite most of your visceral organs into more rapid activity. Your heart pounds at a
higher rate, your lungs flap more rapidly, your nervous system transmits messages more
rapidly to the brain and the brain quickly retrieves information stored in its memory
centers and tells you what to do, to jump away from the oncoming car. The rapidly
pumping heart sends blood (carrying nutrients, such as oxygen and sugar) to all the
muscles of your body and makes them enriched so as to work faster (your muscles
become tort and able to do races that would do Olympians proud); your lungs work
harder to inhale more oxygen into your body, oxygen you need to do work when your
body is over taxed; that oxygen and sugar are quickly burned and exhaled through the
nostrils or through the skin.
Simply stated, fear is a physiological response to protect an animal organism when it
perceives a threat to its integrity. Fear response in human beings is exactly the same as in
other animals (except in neurotic anxiety whereby the individual uses his imagination to
anticipate threat that happened in the past happening in the present and his body reacts as
if he is currently threatened; such as in post traumatic stress disorder).
We have pretty much understood the physiology of fear and know the
neurotransmitters involved in fear, anxiety and stress response (Norepinephrine,
Acetylcholine and GABA for example).

Guilt is experienced when the individual believes that he has done what he should
not have done. When a properly socialized child who had internalized the norms of his
group does what he is not supposed to do his conscience (superego) makes him feel
guilty. His conscience punishes him and he would not feel happy until he desists from
doing what he is not supposed to do.
Guilt, it appears, is largely a social variable, for other animals do not feel guilty (?).
Other animals, apparently, have no concept of morality, good and bad. A lion simply kills
a sheep and eats it without regard to the welfare of the sheep. A dog does not feel that it
is stealing when it takes a piece of meat left by some one; it is hungry and eats and that is
all there is to it.
Guilt appears to be specifically a human phenomenon and is socially taught and
learned? Unfortunately, there are those human beings who are born with less capacity for
guilt feeling. Criminals (antisocial personality disorder) tend not to feel guilt and tend not
to feel remorseful for their hurtful deeds. Indeed, there is ample evidence that they tend to
take pleasure in hurting other people.
(Some psychologists suspect that some black persons tend to be amoral because
they have less capacity for guilt feeling and may, in fact, take pleasure in hurting people;
they hurt their own people more than other people hurt them. If you take away anti
slavery laws from the books, many Africans would gleefully sell their own people and
feel powerful and important because they could apprehend and sell their people. I learned
this fact when some of these primitives actually minimized the crimes of their ancestors
and justify the presence of residual slaves in their societies. Apparently, to have slaves in
their societies made these people feel more important than those slaves. A highly
civilized person takes pride in human equality; savages take pride in being better than
other people.)
 The above are definitions of fear and guilt but are those all there are to fear and
guilt? I do not think so. There is an existential component to fear and guilt. Let us
briefly examine them.

THE EXISTENTIAL BASIS OF GUILT AND FEAR

Guilt and fear are rooted in the origin of this world. As I have already pointed out in
other essays, the world came into being when the children of God disobeyed their father,
when they wanted to separate from him and go construct their own world. God created
them and they wanted to create themselves and create God. God created them unified
spirit and so they remain. However, they seem to have separated and invented a non-
spiritual world, the world of space, time and matter we live in.
The children of God invented a world that is the exact opposite of their father’s
world and now seem to live in it. Their father’s world is permanent, changeless, eternal,
immortal, unified, same, equal etc; they invented a transitory, ephemeral, changeable,
mortal, separated ego world of space, time and matter.
In reality no one can disobey the will of God for the will of God is the universe
itself. In reality the children of God remain as their father created them, joined spirits.
Nevertheless, while remaining unified spirit, as it were, they closed their eyes (this is a
metaphor, for there is no seeing in spirit) and see the empirical world we seem to live in.
In the world of sleep dream, an illusion, the children of God seem to have created
themselves by inventing self concepts, egos, for themselves, in substitution for the
unified self God created them as.

The process of separating from God in pursuit of specialness generated guilt that we
did some wrong. The children of God, on earth, in the dream, feel like they did some
wrong and feel guilty.
The origin of guilt, sin is our awareness that we disobeyed the will of God. The will
of God is union and we seem to have disobeyed it by inventing a world of separation. As
long as we live in the temporal world, the world of separation, we must feel guilty and
sinful; we must feel like we did something wrong. To be human is to feel guilty.

(The Catholic Church put this matter differently; it says that we are born with
Original sin; a sin that supposedly derived from our alleged forebears, Adam and Eves. It
is said that this original couple ate an apple that God forbade them to eat, hence
disobedience of God’s will in the Garden of Eden. How could the sin of two people affect
all of us? It does not make sense. What the theologians of the Church were trying to say
is that to be born a human being is to be separated from our creator, God, hence to have
disobeyed his will that we be unified with him. This act of separation is what the Church
calls original sin. To live as a human being, a separated self, is to live in sin. Sin is ended
when we return to union with God. Jesus extinguished his separated ego-self and returned
to God, to obeying the will of God by allowing his ego, his human self to be crucified, so
that he regains the awareness of his true self, the unified self. Each of us stops living in
sin when he lets go of his identification with the separated ego self and re-identifies with
his real self, unified spirit self.)
 GUILT, FEAR AND PUNISHMENT

The guilty fears punishment from the person he wronged. We fear that God would
punish us for separating from him. Thus, human beings fear punishment from God (and
from each other since they also separated from each other and recreated each other, from
spirit to material beings).
Every human being feels guilty and sinful because he separated from God (from his
real self) and expects to be punished by God and other people and fears God’s and other
people’s punishment.

ANGRY VERSUS FORGIVING GOD

Does God feel angry at us for separating from him and does he want to punish us?
The Old Testament God, the God of Moses, said that God is angry at his children for
separating from him, for disobeying his will. The New Testament God of Jesus Christ
said that God is not angry at us, that he forgives and loves us.
If God were angry at us he would not be an all powerful God, for he would be
acknowledging that we, in fact, did separate from him, hence could disobey his will. If
we could separate from God, it follows that we are more powerful than God.
God is all powerful and no power can disobey him. We have not separated from
God. We are still joined to God and to each other. All we did is while in God and each
other seem to sleep and dream that we are separated from him and from each other.
What is done in sleep-dream has not been done in reality. Therefore, we have done
nothing wrong.
God knows that his children have done nothing wrong. God knows that his
children are not guilty and sinful. God knows that his children are still as he created
them: unified, innocent, sinless and guiltless.

God does not want to punish us; but he knows that we are not hearing him because
we are sleeping and dreaming that we are separate from him. God does not want to
destroy the world of dreams his sons invented; he blesses and purifies it. He sent his Holy
Spirit to come and remake the world we made into a happy world.
The Holy Spirit is not charged to awaken us rudely, but to reinvent our world and
make it pleasant and gradually awaken us to the world of spirit. He does so by teaching
us to love our fellow dreamers and to forgive our wrongs towards each other.
What is done in dreams have no lasting effect. In dreams, people kill, rape and harm
each other, but in reality they have not done any of those things. We therefore ought to
overlook what we do in dreams, what we do on earth and still love one another.
This is the message of forgiveness taught by the Holy Spirit, and his most
outstanding teacher, Jesus Christ.

OUR INVESTMENT IN SIN AND PUNISHMENT

In the meantime, we believe that we did wrong and are guilty and sinful. We
believe that God wants to punish us. This belief that we are guilty and that God is out to
punish us serves a function for us. It enables us to fear God and in fearing him, stay away
from him. In staying away from him, we maintain the world of separation we want to
have.
Belief in sin, guilt and punishment thus maintains the egos world of separation; the
children of God have an investment in sin for it enables them to seem separate from their
father and from each other.
If they recognize that sin is impossible they would then know that separation is
impossible and awaken to the state of union. But they do not want to live in union, where
God is in charge. They want to live in their own temporal world where they seem in
charge. We are invested in the world of sin, guilt and punishment.
Each of us sees other people as sinful and as criminals and wants to punish them and
in doing so feels that they too see him as sinful, as a criminal and want to punish him.
Thus, we fear each other and in fearing each other we stay away from each other and
maintain the world of separation.

God is not punitive and we know it. Therefore, instead of waiting for God to come
punish us, punish evil persons, we know that he would not do so; we punish ourselves
and each other. We set up courts to punish those who wronged us or punish them by
ourselves.
The world is a vengeful place; we bear grievances and seek revenges for wrongs
done to us. The ego, the separated self, is an evil thing. It revels in punishing the children
of God, for it thinks that they committed a crime by separating from their father.
The ego is arrogant, it punishes people on behalf of God, and a God it knows is not
punitive.
The arrogant egoistic Christian Church defined God as punitive and proceeded to
kill people (inquisition) when, in fact, God is not punitive and does not ask any one to be
killed.
As we speak, arrogant Islamic Mullahs make decisions on who lives and dies when,
in fact, God does not punish any one.
Human beings, secular or sacerdotal, are arrogant creatures, they chase God out of
his throne, usurp his functions and proceed to perform them, including perverting them.

The origin of guilt, fear and punishment is our pursuit of specialness and
separation. How do I know that this is the case? I know that it is true because if you give
up the quest for specialness and separation you no longer feel guilty, fearful and fear
punishment.
If in doubt, perform this simple experiment. See yourself as the same and equal
with all people; see you as created by God; see yourself as unified with God and with all
people; see yourself as not body but as unified spirit; see you as in God and in all people.
Never mind if this manner of self perception is realistic or not; it is not realistic to the
egos realities but just assume it. Then behave according.
Do not defend against attack. Do not defend the illusions of specialness and
separation. Become totally defenseless and forgiving. When other people attack you,
forgive them, that is, be defenseless.
If you can reverse the pursuit of specialness and separation you would have done
what the prodigal son, Jesus, did: gave up your ego and this world and returned to your
heavenly father. You would see this world as a mistake and regret it and go back home to
the state of union.
In union you would feel no sin, guilt, fear and punishment. You would feel totally
relaxed, peaceful and happy. In unified state, heaven, you feel peaceful and joyful,
blissful.

However, you cannot feel innocent until you give up the conditions that brought
about sin feeling: specialness and separation. You cannot defend specialness and
separation and expect to feel guiltless.
If you see yourself as self created and as apart from God, you must feel sinful, guilty
and deserving of punishment.
We are guiltless in God (union) and sinful in ego (separation).

THE GOSPEL OF THE HOLY SPIRIT, THE SON OF GOD IS INNOCENT DESPITE
WHAT HE DOES ON EARTH

The Holy Spirit and his earthly appointed teachers (Buddha, Jesus Christ etc) teach
one lesson: that in God, as God created us, that we are innocent, holy, guiltless and not to
be punished, but that as special, separated selves that we think that we are sinful and to be
punished. They ask us to give up specialness and separation and thereby give up the
feeling of guilt and fear and punishment. They teach us to be forgiving of those who
wronged us.
What is salvation? It is the perception that all children of God, despite what they do
on earth, are innocent. See all people as innocent despite what they do in this world and
you are saved.
Look at Adolf Hitler. He killed millions of people. Our egos see him as evil and
want to punish him. Our egos fear him because we want to live as separated selves
housed in bodies and fear whoever destroys our bodies. We kill those we think want to
kill us. But now look at Hitler and other criminals and recognize that he/they did what
they did in a dream setting and know that their true self, the Christ in them, is still
innocent. Forgive them, overlook their apparent evils so as to see their Christ self.
(Of course you must stop Hitler’s evils, stop him from killing for no one is asking
you to become a masochist and tolerate others abuse, you must not confuse metaphysics
and physics…in physics you must defend your separated self but in metaphysics you
must not defend your true Christ, unified self).

Forgive and overlook the evils men do on earth and you are saved. Consider white
racism. Whites oppress and abuse blacks. In physics they are inflicting pain on blacks.
Blacks must work for a racism free society. However, blacks must also overlook white
racism and see that the spirit of God is in racist whites. Whites are the children of God,
Christ, who identify with separated, special self, ego, and use the mind of God in them in
an evil manner. They are miss-creating with the Christ mind in them. Overlook them and
love the Christ in them.
Over looking their evil does not mean tolerating their evil. It means working against
racism while still loving the racist’s humanity. You can love a person’s essence while
working to change his antisocial behaviors.
 Any behaviors that inflict pain on you must be stopped for it is egoistic and evil.

LOVE

We could talk about other affects, such as love, anger, depression, paranoia,
schizophrenia etc. However, we shall deal with them in other essays. Suffice it to say that
anger and fear are the same. Anger is the attack side of fear. In fear the individual feels
like running from whatever is threatening him or fighting it. If he runs he is in fear, if he
attacks it he is in anger. The physiological correlates of anger and fear are the same and
for all intents and purposes the two affects are the same; they are the two ends of the
same thing.

Love is the affect that unifies. Love is sort of like glue; it is used to tie all people, all
creation together.
Since God is union, God created love and uses it to unify, join all people, all his
creation. Thus, you can say that God created Love, whereas we made fear and the other
negative affects.
Love is of God and fear is of man (the ego); love is of union and fear and anger are
of separation.
As long as people see themselves as separated from God and from one another they
must feel fearful, be prone to anger, feel threatened and defend themselves (that is have
paranoia)and escape into their own fantasy worlds where they sort of feel secure
(schizophrenia). That is to say that mental illness is always going to be the lot of the
separated ones.
Mental health lies in unified state, whereas mental disorder lies in separated state.
We shall elaborate on these issues in other essays. For now our interests is the affect of
fear and guilt.
Guilt and fear emanate from our separation from our father and from each other; we
feel that we did wrong in separating from God and from each other and fear punishment
from those we separated from, God and other people.
Give up separation and the desire for specialness that motivated it and you would no
longer feel guilty and fearful; you would feel holy, innocent and sinless and guiltless.

* If you read all 31 essays (I will produce one a day, or, at most, in two days) you would
learn a different approach to people and the world. This metaphysical approach, however,
does not mean that you should negate the physical approach to the world. You must not
confuse physics with metaphysics or mix physics and metaphysics; separate them and
apply each to appropriate setting.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 22, 2007

Next essay, the meaning of Atonement

 SPECIAL AND HOLY RELATIONSHIPS
(Relationships based on inequality and equality)

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Yesterday, I talked about the goals of specialness, our desire to create ourselves and
be superior to one another. Let me continue with that topic but this time talk about
specialness in relationships.
In special relationships members are motivated to seem superior to one another and
make special arrangements whereby each accepts the others disguised sense of
superiority. These are the relationships of this world, be they marriages or any other kind
of human relationships; they are disastrous relationships.
Special relationships are filled with guilt, fear, anger, anxiety, depression, paranoia
etc. The goal is to transform special relationships into Holy Relationships; relationships
that give folks feelings that they are joined and are one hence give them attenuated
(some) peace and happiness.

A REVIEW OF THE ORIGIN OF SPECIALNESS

As noted yesterday, specialness began in heaven. In eternity all are unified spirit
and the same and equal. All the same and equal children of God know that their father
created them and accept him as their father. Somehow, the desire to create God, create
each other and create ones self entered the minds of the children of God.
It is impossible for the individual who has already been created to create his creator
and himself. Therefore, the goals of specialness could not be met in heavenly reality. The
next best thing to do is to tune heaven out and, as it were, go to sleep and in ones sleep
dream that one created God, created ones self and created other people.

SELF CONCEPT, SELF CREATION

The place of the illusion of self creation is our world. In our world we fancy that we
create God, each other and ourselves. This idea of self creation is shown by our invention
of the human self concept, the human personality. In the world each of us forgets his real
self, the unified spirit self that God created him as and identifies with a different self he
himself invents, the self concept, the self that says that he is separate from other people.
The self concept is a self one invented and with it one replaces the self God created
one as. The self concept is a false self. As long as the individual sees himself as his self
concept, his human personality, the ego housed in body, he is living a false life. He is in
the world of illusions and delusions. He is fast sleep and dreaming that he is who he is
not.
The individual invents a self concept for himself and also invents concepts of the
self for other people and for everything in the world. He has a concept and image of
himself, other people and everything in the world. Thus, as it were, he ass now created
him self, created all human beings and everything in his world. He is now the lord and
creator of the universe.
He has now gratified the wish that gave rise to this world, the desire to kill God,
usurp his creator throne and replace him and become the creator of the universe.
All these are, of course, delusional for, in reality, the son cannot kill his father and
cannot kill his brothers and cannot kill himself. We cannot remake ourselves into the
selves we desire: separate selves housed in bodies; we merely dream that we have done
so.
(What is salvation? Salvation is the relinquishment of the self concept, the letting
go of the egos we made for ourselves. The human self concept, the ego is false; what is
false needs defense to make it seem real in our awareness. Illusions need desperate
defense to seem real; without defenses illusions, self concepts egos, disappear. When we
stop defending our self concepts, our egos we experience unified self, heaven. That is, to
return to the awareness of the self that God created us as, unified spirit, we have to let go
of the replacement selves we made for our selves, the human self concept, egos, the
human personalities housed in bodies.)

In this world, each of us has attacked God, attacked himself and attacked other
people and believes that he has killed them and replaced them with false selves, the self
concept he made, the ego separated self housed in body.
The ego separated self is a dream self, a false self. Right now, as I am here typing,
my real self, your real self is spirit and remain as our creator, God, created him, spirit. We
remain in God, in unified spirit, while in our collective dream we see each other as
separated egos housed in bodies and living on a place called earth. This is a fact, not
conjecture.
SPECIAL RELATIONSHIPS

In our earthly relationships what happens is that we present the selves we made for
ourselves to each other for relationship. We ask other people, those we want to relate to,
to be the selves we made for them, the separated ego selves and they ask us to become
the false ego selves they made for us.
Please pause and think about what you are being told. I want to relate to you. But
instead of relating to the real you, the self God created you as, which is unified spirit, I
ask you to take on the guise of a separated self housed in body. You do the same to me.
What have we done to one another? Think, my friend, for God gave you a mind to
think with.

I asked you to murder your real self, to kill the real son of God, so as tolerate to me
as I want to be related to, a false self. To do what I did to you, I must have done it to me;
I have attempted to murder my true self, the son of God, and now identify with a false
ego self housed in body.
A person who asks you to kill yourself is not exactly your friend, is he? Get the
point? In our earthly relationships we ask each other to die to his real self and become a
false self, so that we may relate to him on our false terms. That is to say that we attack
each other as the basis of our earthly relationships.
What does that make us? It makes us noxious to one another.
 All relationships based on the ego special self, human personalities, are attacks on
one another. These are sinful relationships. They are murderous relationships. These are
antichrist relationships (Christ is the real self, in my term, unified self, and the self as
God created him). These are relationships that are based on the death of the real son of
God (unified spirit) so that we may have our wishes met (our wishes to be separated
selves housed in bodies).

Can you then imagine what obtains in such relationships? What happens in
situations where you ask other people to destroy themselves and become what you want
them to be? You have attacked them and they know it and would hate you.
Special relationships are filled with guilt, fear, hatred, anger, anxiety, depression,
paranoia and other mental disorders.

The special relationship that most people know too well is marriage. So, let us
consider it. In marriages, a man asks a son of God who is spirit to take on body and
become a woman, a vagina, for him. She asks a son of God who is spirit to take on body,
a penis, for her. These two bodies, false selves embark on relating to each other as
bodies.
That is, they relate to each other on the basis of the death of their true spirit self. It
is a relationship of dead persons.
More to the present point, because they expect each other to become a false self,
they hate each other. Marriages are associations of mutual hatred. The man hates his wife
and the woman hates her husband. These are mutual hating societies
(Any child of God, who, while on earth, becomes aware of his true self, spirit, cannot
have special relationship; certainly he cannot have sex, for he does not see other people
as vaginas and penises; he sees them as spirits. Enlightened children of God, such as
Buddha and Jesus eschewed sex the moment they became real self realized. Upon having
unitive experience sex became uninviting.)

Special relationships, be they marriages, families (children and their parents),

between so-called friends, work place relationships, in short, all human relationships are
based on the wish that ones partners die and become the selves that God did not create
them as, spirit, that they become as one wish them to become, separated selves in bodies,
so that one would relate to them on that basis. This is attack on people’s reality. An
attacking situation is a fear and anger making situation.

All people fear each other. They fear each other for they know that they attacked
each other and turned each other into what they are not: separated selves housed in
bodies. As it were, they have killed the real son of God and made him into what he is
not, a body that will die and rot. They feel like they have done something terribly wrong.
They feel guilty for what they did. They feel that their father, God, would punish them
for transforming his son into bodies. In the present, they are angry at each other for what
they did to each other.
 That is to say that in special relationships people are filled with fear, anger, guilt,
depression, paranoia and expect punishment from God and from each other for attacking
and transforming each other into bodies.

THE EGO UNCONSCIOUS VERSUS THE EGO CONSCIOUS

The psychodynamics I have just described is not known at the ego conscious level.
It is hidden in the ego unconscious level, from which subterranean region it affects
human relationships. (We hide the tricks we are playing on each other in our unconscious
minds; only very few gain insight into that dark vault where we hide our sins. I am
helping you to gain access to that dark closet of ours.)

SPECIAL LOVE RELATIONSHIPS

On the conscious level folks tell themselves that they love each other. Boy tells girl:
I love you, and she tells him I love you. This is special love relationships. Here, the
murder and hatred that underlies special relationships are carefully hidden in the ego
unconscious as two people pretend to love one another; while they substitute their idea of
love for God’s idea of love. (God is real love; love based on spirit; our earthly love is
substitute love, for it is pseudo love based on body.)

SPECIAL HATE RELATIONSHIPS

Whereas most marriages etc are special love relationships where the wish for
murder and hatred are carefully hidden, in some relationships the murder and hatred that
underlie all human relationships come to the fore and are immediately known. These are
called special hate relationships.
They are actually more honest relationships for the partners know that they hate
each other and want to kill each other. These special hate relationships are filled with
overt hatred, fear, anger, depression etc, and make it impossible for members to stay long
in them hence they separate from each other.

Let me personalize this analysis. As a young man, I heard a lot about sex. Naturally,
I wanted to experience it. I had sex with a woman. My God, she seemed filthy. I thought
that may be it is her and that other women are different? So, I tried another woman. May
be it has to do with race? So, I sampled women from the different races. They are all the
same.
Eventually, I recognized what is going on. Sex is a dance of bodies. Right from
childhood I knew myself to be spirit having a physical experience. To have sex,
therefore, was to treat me as a body and to treat other children of God as bodies. Thus, I
changed my mind about sex. I saw sex as a means of procreation and procreated and said
goodbye to it.
That is to say that I had special hate relationships with women and left them. I did
not leave them in hatred but in understanding. I know women as the children of God and
in God, spirit, love them, but in body want nothing to do with them.
 Any one who pursues sex is treating other people as bodies (with their permission,
of course, for nothing can happen to a child of God without his or her permission).
In the meantime, those who relate to each other as bodies, as sex objects, have
figuratively attacked them and tried to kill them. They therefore feel that they have done
something wrong. They feel guilty, and fear punishment. They hate each other.
In special relationships where folks treat each other as bodies they know that they
have attacked each other and therefore fear each others revenge.

In special relationships you want your partner to die and take on a body so that you
may relate to him as a body. You have attacked him. You know that he is eternal spirit
and therefore cannot die. But because you made him or her pretend to be a body so that
you may relate to him as a body, you feel like you did something wrong. Thus, special
relationships are filled with guilt and fear and anger and other upsetting affects.

Because in special relationships you want your husband or wife to be as you want
him or her to be for you, so that you relate to him in that manner, you have acted as if you
are greater than God, destroyed what God created, spirit, and made it over into separated
selves housed in bodies and relate to ego/bodies in your dream that ego/body is real.

Are you with me so far? You are capable of learning and will eventually learn.
Hang with me, boy, girl; I will bring you to the gate of heaven and teach you about your
true self, unified spirit.
Examine the married couples around you. What do you perceive? You perceive
folks in special love relationships, right? They seem benign and loving right? But what
you have seen are two folks who are on a power trip, two children of God who are
pretending that they are more powerful than their father; that they have killed their father
and remade his children into bodies, so as to have bodily experiences.
Of course, they are merely engaged in fantasy and are dreaming. No one can kill
God and his children; no one can change the real children of God. We remain as God
created us, spirit, while playing our insane, childish games that we are bodies, born to die.

Because the Mr. and Mrs. are engaged in an “evil” game (so to speak) where they
think that they can destroy God and each other and become different selves they feel
guilty, angry and fear each other. Thus, human relationships are filled with unhappiness.

As noted, the child of God who has experienced his true self, unified spirit does not
engage in special relationships. Buddha was married but the moment he had unified self
experience he walked away from his marriage and spent all his time teaching about God.
Jesus experienced God early in life and did not mess around with women and sex and
devoted all his energies to teaching about reality (love and forgiveness).

Here are the facts. You are where you have to be and where you want to be. Each of
us is developmentally where he is at this point in time. He cannot be where his
development does not justify. If you are going to rise above special love and special hate
relationships, you would do so from childhood; your ego and bodily experience would
dispose you to see through the silliness of separation.
 At any point in time, only a handful of people can transcend ego/body
identification. Most people are identified as egos/bodies and want to have fun as bodies.
That is, they want special love relationships. So be it.

HOLY RELATIONSHIPS

God blesses what his children make. He does not destroy them. God sent his Holy
Spirit to come to the world and change our special love and special hate relationships into
holy relationships.
In Holy relationships, you are still in special relationship but now you see your
partner as a son of God. You remain in your marriage but while having sex with your
wife, husband you remember that you are having physical experience with a spirit. That
is correct; each of us is spirit having physical experience. Therefore treat your partner as
if she/he is divine, for he is.
Love your partner with a love that approximates heaven’s love. True love gives
without asking for anything in return. Give total love to your earthly spouse. If you do,
the two of you would have a semblance of peace and happiness in your household.
But you are not going to have the peace of God, for the peace of God is rooted in
being spirit and formless and not identifying with body and separation.

(Before we progress, let me say a word or two about homosexuality. In the West, the
current fad and fantasy is that same sex relationships are merely alternatives to
heterosexuality. Look, all sex is attack, is treating the children of God as bodies when
they are spirits. In heterosexual relationship we can justify the attack on the basis of
procreation. What is the justification for homosexual? People engage in this absurdity
just so that they feel that they can do whatever they want to do and define reality on their
own terms? The children of God are oppositional defiant and will do whatever they want
to do. So if their particular mode of defiance is same sex behavior, they would do so. It is
all part of the insanity that body is real. Enlightened folks do not attack wrong; they
understand them. If you attack something, you make it stronger. If you oppose
homosexuals you make them more defiant and do it more aggressively. Therefore, have
pity for homosexuals; see them as spirits pretending to be animals. Ones wishes that folks
were spiritually enlightened persons are not going to happen, not at a mass level, anyway.
In every generation only a handful of people are going to experience God; the rest of
humanity are at animal state of being. Therefore, one should leave homosexuals alone. If
they are so underdeveloped to find pleasure in shit so be it. When they are ready to know
that they are spirit, they will dissociate from sex.)

All earthly, that is ego/body based relationships are not real. They are relationships
that take place in the dream that separation is possible. They are illusory. They are taking
place in a fantasy. They are taking place in our world.
Of all of them only holy relationships approximates our heavenly relationships but
is not it.

UNIFIED SELF AND UNITIVE EXPERIENCE

 In heaven we are spirit and are literally in each other and in God, as he is in us. In
heaven there is still an I and you but that you and I know ourselves as part of the one self
of God. We know that we are the same and are equal. There is no separation, no space,
time and body to separate us; we are in each other.
On earth we have space, time and matter to separate us. I m over here and you are
over there. We are separated by space; we are separated by the time it takes to reach one
another; we are separated by our bodies. In this world, then, separation seems real. The
most that we can do in this world is to love one another and forgive one another.

THE HOLY SPIRIT

We have to give our earthly relationships to the Holy Spirit. In his hands our special
relationships are transformed into holy relationships.
Holy relationships are still false, still illusory, still sleep dream relationships, but
now they approximate heaven’s will and, therefore, are holy (unified).
Holy relationships bring us to the gate of heaven but do not take us into heaven
itself. To enter heaven we must completely let go of all attachments to physical forms and
separation. Only the formless spirit is in heaven.
Heaven is not a place; it is the awareness that one is formless spirit. Right now I am
in heaven while dreaming and seeing myself as sitting in front of my computer typing
this essay. We are all in spirit while dreaming ourselves on earth.
Holy relationships transform our earthly relationships into holiness, unified. Love
purifies our relationships and makes them meet the condition of heaven. Where the
condition for God is met God is known.

PURIFIED LIGHT WORLD

Here is an experiment for you. If you are married perform this experiment. Do not
see your partner as a body, as a sex object. See her, him as pure spirit. Love him, her as
you imagine pure love is. Do not expect to get any thing in return for loving her, him.
Just give her love. If she does anything wrong, as you construe wrong to be, forgive
her/him. Forgive her past mistakes. Do not judge her as good or bad. Just see her as a
child of God who is created holy, innocent, guiltless, and sinless.
If you can look at your partner in this manner, for a second, just a second, this is
what would happen. Suddenly, she would be physically transformed into a literal being of
light. Her/his physical form, currently in dense form, would be remade in light form, on
photons.
In her light form she/he would look amazingly beautiful. (Each of us has a dense
physical form, the self and body we made for ourselves and a light form remade for us by
the Holy Spirit. Both forms coexist but to see one you must ignore the other, for you
cannot see both illusions at the same time. The light form is seen after death; it is the
form seen in so-called near death experiences.)
If you persist in loving her/him the light form of her that you see would disappear
and you and she would merge as one formless self. You would unify with her and both of
you would unify with all creation and its creator as the unified spirit self.
 I am not presuming that you can attain the unitive experience (Mystical Union,
Samadhi, Nirvana, Satori) I have just described for few are willing to let go the
perception of themselves and each other as bodies. Therefore, it is good enough for you
to love your partner. Love her as you construe love to be. Try as much as you could to
forgive her errors. If you do so you would experience peace and happiness in your
household. Forgivingness gives us peace.

DISCUSSION

All teachers of God teach the same message but do so in different forms, for we are
in the world of differences and need different forms of the same message to reach us.
The eternal message from God is that all his children are one and that they are one
with him. In oneness they are innocent, guiltless and sinless. But in separation they seem
guilty and sinful.
The Holy Spirit and his teachers (you and I) teach that we forgive one another and
transcend guilt to experience our innocence.
God created us as unified with him. We now seem to have separated from him. In
reality, we have not separated from God and each other, for no human being can separate
from God and other people; separation would amount to breaking the will of God, which
is union. No one can disobey the will of God.
But we can sleep and dream that we are disobeying the will of God. We are asleep
and dream that we are separated from God and from each other.
God the father knows that his son, God the son (us) are now sleeping and dreaming
that he is separated from God the father.
Please remember that God the father and God the son are one literal self. So, if you
like, you could say that an aspect of God forgot that he is God and sees him self in this
world of separation.

God the father (the transcendent God) created another God, God the Holy Spirit (the
immanent God), and as him enters the sleeping-dreaming world of his son, our world.
God the Holy Spirit is both in heaven and in the temporal universe. He knows
heaven and our world. He mediates heaven and earth, for he understands the conditions
prevailing on both worlds.
The Holy Spirit is given a charge: to wake up God the son. He is to reinterpret the
world of the God the son, to reinvent the meaning of his dreams. He is not to destroy his
dreams but to make them pleasant.
He is to remind the son of God that he is all the people he sees in the world and as
such should love them all to love his whole, holy self. Since he is all people and things in
the world, if he forgives what all people do wrong him he forgives what he did wrong to
himself? In forgiving all people, since they are he, he forgives himself.
To forgive others is to forgive ones self. To love others is to love ones self for other
people are part of ones holy, unified self.
The Holy Spirit teaches love and forgiveness. He reinterprets the wrongs that people
do as calls for love.
Let us say that another person does something that hurt you. Your ego conscious self
wants to attack and kill him, punish him by sending him to jail.
 The Holy Spirit reminds you that he is an ego, a dream figure and cannot hurt you.
He tells you that your true self is eternal spirit and merely dream and seem hurt. He asks
you to forgive the other dream figures that seem to hurt your dream figure.
In forgiving all you experience peace and happiness in this world, you transform
your nightmarish dream into a happy dream.
The Holy Spirit, like God, is not apart from us, the son of God. You cannot see him
as out there. He is inside you, just as God is not outside you but inside you.
God is our unified mind. The Holy Spirit is our right mind. The ego is our wrong
mind.
In this world we think with our wrong mind, the ego separated mind that perceives
differences and defends what it sees as good for it. The Holy Spirit is the part of our
minds that sees us as one and asks us to do what serves common good, and where other
peoples wrong us, ask us to forgive them.
The Holy Spirit is usually silent, whereas the ego mind is the mind we know. God
or Unified mind is only experienced when one detaches from separation and body and
dies to the world of separated selves and forms.
At any point in time each of us chooses what part of his mind he thinks and behaves
from: ego mind, Holy Spirit directed Christ mind or Unified Mind.
In God, unified mind you are in perfect peace, bliss; in the right mind you experience
some peace and joy, in the ego mind you are in conflict. How you feel tells you what
state of mind you are in.
The function of the Holy Spirit is to transform our world into a happy dream, a
pleasant illusion; to remake the world we made with hate with love, to bring us to the
gate of heaven but not to take us into heaven itself.
When we have forgiven and loved one another, since we are one another, and as
God the son is God the father, we suddenly realize that the father and the son are one and
end the temporal world. We return to God and he returns to us; father and son know
themselves as one self.

For our present purposes, the Holy Spirit transforms this world’s relationships from
special to holy relationships; from attack and hate filled relationships to relationships
filled with love and forgiveness. In doing so, the Holy Spirit gives us some sort of peace
and joy.

Of course, all these are metaphors. God the father, God the son, God the Holy Spirit
are just words for the same God in different manifestations.
If you are capable of figuring out that God extended himself to his son, you are
capable of knowing that what God’s son does God did, in effect, God the father did. That
is, God invented this world via his son. As it were, an insane aspect of God invented this
world and a sane aspect of God reinvented it.

I will not confuse you with highfalutin metaphysics. For now, it is enough to
understand the nature of specialness and special relationships and to know that special
relationships can be transformed into holy relationships where love and forgiveness have
entered; hence there is peace and happiness.
 You must not, however, minimize what you are dealing with. Many new age
religionists tend to talk Namby-Pamby stuff and make it seem that man is a good
creature. Look here, the ego is an evil force. The ego is the concretization of the son of
God’s wish to kill his father, kill his siblings and himself, usurp their powers and recreate
the world and himself in his own evil image. This is the force that produced the Big
Bang and seems to have shattered heaven’s unity into smithereens. It is a force that is
invested in specialness and superiority. It merely presents the egos face of innocence but
underneath it is the ugly destructive face of the ego. (Human beings are so evil that,
sooner or later, they would use their nuclear weapons to destroy themselves. Actually,
since there is no such thing as death, all they would do is return to the awareness of
unified spirit.)
Have you seen people going through divorce? It goes like this. Two people enter
special love relationships. They hide their desire to murder each other and transform each
other into egos in bodies. They pretend to love one another. As long as each believes that
the other is serving the goals of his or her specialness, the relationship is tolerated. If the
man makes the woman feel special, like she is powerful and created herself and him she
feels appreciated and stays and if she makes him feel similarly he stays.
In special love relationships each partner feels incomplete and feels that the other
completes him, gives him what he thinks that he needs to feel special(powerful, self
created, superior).
Then it occurs to one or both partners that the other is no longer meeting his special
needs. They separate and the divorce dance begins. Those that hitherto seemed loving to
one another now are so destructive that they want to kill each other (or take each others
money). They hire fancy divorce attorneys (vultures) and seek to wipe the other clean.
The ugly face of the ego is bared for the world to see.
The ego believes it is innocent and sees other persons as guilty and blame worthy.
Thus, folks going through divorce blame each other, see each other as abusers and go all
out to destroy each other.
The ego is a terrible thing; a force that produced this insane world is a terrible force.

After divorce the partners soon seek other partners. They find partners that they
would reenact other special love or special hate dances. For a while they seem in love,
again, until they separate and again seek to destroy each other.
They were never in love, for real love does not end. God’s love is the eternal union
of all parts in a whole as one. True love is expansive and all inclusive; true love includes
all persons. God’s inclusive love is only possible in formless spirit. In our separated
physical state we only have limited love, special love.
The ego, the desire to be special and separated from God and creation, is evil
through and through. It has to be understood and corrected. It is corrected via holy
relationships where you overlook people’s egos and bodies and see them as divine spirits
and love and forgive them. But do not minimize the destructive goal and power of the
ego, for it aims at killing the son of God, you and all of us.
You must consciously understand the nature of specialness, special relationships and
how to transform special relationships to holy relationships where love and forgiveness
prevails. In Holy relationships are attenuated peace and happiness (total peace and
happiness, bliss, is only possible in formless, unified state, aka heaven). For now, it is
enough that folks experience the lesser peace of heaven’s gate, holy relationships. That is
where learning ends. Any thing beyond that is heaven; in heaven there is no learning, just
knowing.
Our essay concerns itself with learning, not the knowledge of heaven. Remove the
obstacles to the awareness of oneness, heaven, and you would experience heaven. Our
present goal is to remove the obstacles preventing our experience of heaven, one of
which is specialness and special relationships. We end by encouraging you to transform
your special relationships to holy relationships, to see all people as the same and equal
and love and forgive them all.
Cheer up, for there is good news: the son of God can be saved, by himself, with a
little help from the Holy Spirit and all of us, if he returns to the awareness of his unified
spirit self.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 21, 2007

WHY WE ATTACK AND DEFEND OURSELVES

(To feel vulnerable, pained and defensive so as to maintain separation)

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

God (unified spirit) is safety. We desire to experience the opposite of safety, to seem
not safe. Heaven is invulnerability and we desire vulnerability. Heaven is unified, joined,
the same, equal, permanent and changeless and all knowing. We desire to experience
heaven’s opposite: to seem separated and different from each other, not equal to each
other, not permanent, changeable, and mortal and not knowing (who we are). The world
is a place where the children of God come to experience the opposite of their true nature.
We desire separation from God and from each other. We seem to do so and house
ourselves in bodies. Bodies are neutral (in nature matter is neutral, matter in rocks, lavas,
sun does not feel pain but we made it to feel pain in the human body). We deliberately
make our biological systems fragile, weak and easily pained. We contrive to attack other
people and to have them attack us. We see other people attack us and we feel pained and
defend ourselves. In doing so we push other people away from us hence separate from
them.
In reality, in unified spirit we are not separated and do not live in bodies. We are not
weak, pained and vulnerable in spirit. No one can attack us in spirit for we are all one. In
the meantime, those who want to live as separated selves contrive to make themselves
seem vulnerable and respond to attack with defense.
The Holy Spirit teaches us that we are not our bodies and that we are not weak and
vulnerable and as such should not defend ourselves when attacked; that we shouldn’t
attack any one and should not be defensive; that we should forgive others. His teaching
does not make sense to our ego based world where attack and defense seem the realistic
way to survive in bodies, so we ignore him.
 Jesus listened to the Holy Spirit and recognized that attack and defense takes place
only in a dream state, that in reality no one can attack us since we are not separated from
any one. Jesus therefore forgave attacks on him and in doing so awakened to the
awareness of spiritual union of all people.
Jesus was attacked and forgave his attackers for he knew that their attack took place
in a dream place and is not real; it was merely his preplanned dream to be attacked so that
he would feel angry but he chose not to feel angry and forgave it.

Those of us who still identify with the ego and its body believe that we are vulnerable,
weak and pained and that attack is real and manage to attack others and get attacked and
feel pained and defend ourselves and in doing so perpetuate our state in the world.
Eating food, wearing clothes and living in houses are designed to protect the body;
the body is deemed vulnerable and needs safety; practically everything we do on earth is
designed to procure safety for our bodies; we think that we are our bodies when, in fact,
we are spirits.
We use our minds to make the matter in our body to be prone to weakness and pain.
When we die the same matter in our bodies could be burned and not feel pain. It is mind
that chose to feel pain through the human body. The same mind can choose not to feel
pain from body by not identifying with body. A purified mind, a mind that identifies with
God can see itself in a body of light, still made of matter, photons of light, to use that
form to seem human so as to reach those still in forms, us, and in that form does not feel
pain, for it identifies with spirit, not body. Body here is strictly a device for teaching love,
for reaching those in body and communicating to them the Holy Spirit’s message of love,
union as reality.
Mind, as spirit, does not feel pain; it was the insanity of separation that made mind
chooses to feel pain and on earth now seem to feel pain.

We preplan the manner of others attack on us…we planned who is going to attack
us and who we are going to attack before we go to sleep and dream it, before we are born
in this world. Black persons preplanned it for white persons to attack and discriminate
against them before they go to sleep and dream being subjected to racism. They
preplanned for racism to make them angry.
(Like Jesus they are supposed to see racism, attack, as dream events and not feel
angry from it and forgive it and in doing so awaken from the dream. White persons
would not have discriminated against black persons if black persons had not wanted to
experience attack and feel hurt, insulted and respond with anger and counter attack. By
the same token in their insane desire for separation white persons want to attack black
persons. Now, black persons must forgive those they made attack them in their dream
that attack is possible, so as to make separation seem possible. Attack is impossible in
spirit, for separation is impossible in spirit.)

Nothing can happen to the son of God unless he wants to experience it. Each
individual preplans how he is going to be attacked, writes the drama of his life before he
goes to sleep and enacts it out. He places himself where those he desires to attack him
would do so. He experiences what he wants to experience, what his dream play calls for
and feels vulnerable, pained and attacked and defensive.
 The Holy Spirit and Jesus teach him that nobody is attacking his unified spirit that
the earthly attack he sees is in a dream of his making, and for him to forgive it and
awaken.
As it were, each of us has a destiny, a fate for his earthly life; the dream is already
mapped out; the Holy Spirit does not change it; he merely gives a different interpretation
of it and thus makes it a happy instead of nightmarish dream.
Those who would attack you, such as discriminate against you, would still do so,
but now you respond to them differently, you forgive them, and experience peace and joy
and awaken.
You cannot not have the dream you came to have. All that you can do is reinventing
that dream. To reinvent a dream is not to change it but to reinterpret it so as to have a
happy dream.
If your girl friend is going to dump you, she is still going to do so. Your dream, ego
character makes her do so and her own ego character makes her do so. (It is a mutual
dream, after all.) But you can see her action from forgiveness, Christ, Holy Spirit
perspective and forgive it and not feel angry at her. Conversely, you can choose to see her
action from the perspective of the ego and feel abused, injured by her and feel angry at
her.
No one can abuse or oppress you….unless you feel that abuse is possible. Oppression
is not possible in spirit and on earth it seems possible but can be forgiven.

We believe that we can be attacked. We plan who would attack us. We are attacked
by them. What we believe in is what happens to us. It is our dream where we place
dream figures to play the role of attackers for us, so that we feel injured and vulnerable
and counter attack them.
From the perspective of the world attack and defense and vulnerability seem
realistic, but to the Holy Spirit it is merely our dreams.
The Holy Spirit does not change ones dream but changes how one responds to ones
dream figures. One has already planned who would attack one, as Jesus preplanned to be
killed by his brothers. What the Holy Spirit does is have one reinterpret the attack and
respond differently.
This makes one a masochist who prefers attack to pleasure, for it is one who
projected out those who attacked one and if one does not want to be attacked one would
not project them out, one would remain as spirit. But we are here as bodies, as masochists
and sadists (for we invite attacks and attack others); the question is how we respond to
attack, forgiveness or vengeance. Forgiveness gives peace whereas vengeance disturbs
ones peace.

At any point in time very few persons understand the gospel of forgiveness and
practice it. Until a person practices it, when he seems to die he is re-born on earth and
keeps learning until he learns that he does this thing to himself and forgives it and stops
doing it to himself.
Helen Schucman wrote a wonderful book on not seeing ones self as body, a
vulnerable, weak and pained body. She chose to have cancer and die from it, as Jesus
chose to die from crucifixion. Initially, she saw herself as a victim hence felt angry at
Jesus for using her to write his book. She brought her cancer unto herself by her life style
(by smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, heavily etc). She should have reinterpreted what
she did to herself, forgiven her mistake and die peacefully. Actually, she did exactly that,
but at the point of death hence the peace that she felt during her final moments. That is
how she planned it, though it would have been more peaceful if she recognized it earlier
and not behaved in the intemperate temper tantrums she did when she was sick.
(Ramakrishna smoked cigarettes hence chose to die from throat cancer; he did it to
himself, as each of us did to himself whatever happens to him, including the manner of
his death.)
Jesus recognized that he chose to die in the manner he did and died peacefully by
forgiving those he made kill him in his dream that death is possible (which he
reinterpreted to mean that there is no death and that he could use his death to teach
resurrection from ego identification).
If you are going to die of cancer so will you die, for so you chose to die? The
difference is how you see it, anger (ego) or forgiveness and its peace (Holy Spirit,
Christ). You did it to you and can only choose to respond differently to what you did to
you.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 17, 2007

* I just took a peek at the folder where I store materials that I have posted on the various
African Internet sites. They came to over three thousand pages! Three thousand pages
could be edited and redacted to six books, each five hundred pages long. That should be
my task now. Of course, I understand that very few persons read my posts; how could
they when the ideas in them seem strange? But there is a method to my madness. I
observed that contemporary Africans have no theological or philosophical frame of
reference. They flounder all over the place operating with the smatterings of poorly
digested Westerns ideas that they imbibed from whatever education they believe that they
obtained from the West. No group succeeds without an operating philosophical and or
religious frame of reference. I undertook to perform for them a function that my
ancestors, the priests of Amadioha, have always performed for their people. I dropped out
of the rat race, Western academia, and lived on the side lines, undisturbed by other
people’s pull to conform to their views. In solitude I formulated a unique philosophy. I
posted the ideas as they occurred to me on the Internet. It is now time to edit them into
books and, hopefully, start helping Africans get a grip on themselves. Their chaos makes
one want to cry. I have performed my existential function: for the first time have an
African postulate a philosophy that people could live by.

HOW WILL THE WORLD END?

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

 Last night, January 15, 2006, I watched a television program on the end of the
world. A bunch of scientists, mostly astrophysicists, were talking about how the world
would end. They presented many scenarios on how the world would end.
At some point in the future, may be four billion years from now, the level of
(hydrogen and its isotopes…light is produced through nuclear fission) gas in our sun
would be reduced and the sun would turn into a supernova and engulf all its planets, and
they would then explode into smithereens, thus ending our world.
Two, a star close to our solar system becomes a supernova and explodes and knocks
out the ozone layer that prevents the penetration of ultra violet rays from scorching us;
we would then be roasted to death.
Three, a star burns itself into a black hole and somehow falls into our earth’s orbit
and sucks out the ozone layer protecting us from the rays of the sun and in the process
destroys all biological life forms. The earth would then remain as a barren landscape, like
the moon, may be.
Four, a giant meteorite or asteroid smashes into the earth and throws up a
humongous dust that clouds the sun; the dust cloud lasts for months and during that time
the temperature falls and ice covers the earth and all of us die. It is said that sixty five
million years ago such an event took place and caused the death of the dinosaurs. (Only
those small creatures, such as rodents, that live underground and can withstand long
darkness and cold, apparently, survived and evolved into human beings.)
Five, super volcanoes erupt and spill dust into the atmosphere and cloud the sun and
cause the type of situation a giant meteorite does and end human existence.
Six, we explode our nuclear bombs and end all life on earth. Perhaps either the USA
or Russia mistakenly believes that the other has unleashed its nuclear weapons at it and
reciprocates and nuclear war is on. In a few hours most people would be dead and months
and years later the rest would die from radiation generated diseases.
Seven, we unleash our genetically engineered germs, such as Ebola (biological
weapons) and end life on earth.
Eight, we continue polluting the environment and bring about environmental changes
that could end the world…the ice caps of Greenland, Arctic circle etc are melting and
sooner or later would raise coastal sea levels and swallow coastal lands etc.
Many other scenarios where presented but those are the ones I can remember off
hand.

This is depressing, is it not, to be told that the world, at some point in the future,
would end? It means that, sooner or later, we shall all die and disappear from existence.
Everything that we work for would end. And if so why bother with trying to do anything
worthwhile in this world if it is all destined to end in dust? This and similar television
programs that purport to be the truth can engender existential depression and anxiety.
They might make folks conclude that life on earth is not worth the trouble. Why bother if
it is all for nothing. Why not kill yourself now and get it over with? Folks who suffer
existential depression often commit suicide and end their mental and emotional anguish.

The question raised is: are the so-called scientists stating the truth or are they merely
speculating on the future? We all know that we cannot predict the future. No human
being has the ability to know what is going to happen in the next second of his life. He
may conjecture but the fact is that he does not know for sure. Are scientists different from
the rest of us and know what is going to happen in the future? Are these so-called
astrophysicists stating the truth or are they acting like primitive soothsayers and
pontificating on what is going to happen that is not going to happen? Clearly, we have
made scientists our high priests (of knowledge) and take their views as objective facts,
but the question is, are they stating facts? How many predictions by scientists actually
come to pass?
In the empirical world we know that earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, floods,
hurricanes, draughts, plagues of diseases etc randomly kill human beings. Only two years
ago a tsunami destroyed over 200, 000 people in Eastern Asia. Clearly, nature does not
treat human beings any different from the way it treats animals and trees. To nature we
are not special and could be destroyed at any time. Despite our fancy that we have
existential worth the fact is that to nature we have no worth and are destroyed randomly.
Indeed, any human being who so desires it could kill others (until he is stopped). Hitler
decided that he is a predatory animal and killed over fifty million persons. Stalin decided
that human beings are means to ends and killed over thirty five million people in his
efforts to transform Russia into a socialist state. No divine force stopped these two
monsters from doing their thing, only the intervention of other human beings stopped
them. The point is that human beings do not seem to have existential worth and value and
nature and man destroy them at will. In this light one can accept that nature, in the form
elucidated by the scientists, could wipe us out and end our planet. One does not argue
with facts.

While, last night, the astrophysicists did not talk about it, cosmologist tells us that
our universe began in a Big Bang and is currently expanding. It is speculated that at some
point one of two scenarios would occur. The expansion ceases and the universe collapses
back into itself and end the material world as we know it. The other scenario is that the
universe expands forever and looses heath and becomes very cold that all of us die and
biological life forms end. Either scenario points to our end. This is depressing.

So are the scientists correct or are they the modern equivalents of soothsayers,
psychics, pseudo prophets and such charlatan? What do you think? Does what one think
in a world where the high priests of science who claim to have the truth, matter any
more? Are these so-called scientists’ science fiction writers or are they to be taken
seriously? Here is what I think. What I think matters, at least to me, if not to other
people.
I think that what the scientists say may come to pass. There is no denying physics
and its laws. For example, we are born and must die. That is made necessary by physics.
Our bodies are temporary agglomeration of particles, atoms, elements and they will
sooner or later decompose and we die. Give or take, 120 years and a human body is dead
and returns to the elements that composes it. No one denies this fact, unless of course he
suffers delusional disorder and denies reality and juxtaposes his own idea of reality and
believes it.
 There are people who live in the fantasy of their own construction. In the real
world, physics and its laws rule and it rules that we are born and must die and so it is.
I live in the world of physical reality and do not deny it; I see the evidence of physics
all around me and accept it as it is; I have no need to escape from facts into fantasyland. I
do not build castles in the sky and try to live there and psychiatrists charge me rent.
Physics rules the world, period.
But is physics all there is to life? How about the postulations of religion? The
Christian Bible has something to say on the end of the world, is that not so? In the Old
Testament part of the Bible, Daniel said something about how the world would end. In
Revelation, Apocalypse the writer, attributed to John the apostle, presented a gory
scenario of how the world would end. John actually believed that the world would end in
his life time. But the world has not ended two thousand years later, so obviously he was
not able to predict how the world would end. Thus revelations ought not to be taken
seriously. Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity actually conjectured on when the
world would end. His disciples believed that the world would end during their life times
hence sold all their earthly goods and lived communally awaiting the end of the world
and the return of their savior, Jesus Christ. Jesus was to take them to a glorified world
(the second coming of Christ, rapture, the founding of 1000 year reign of New Jerusalem
and eventual return to heaven). None of these have come to pass (some take the
destruction of the temple in 70 AD as what Jesus predicted, not the end of the world).
I am not going to engage in theological debate; the point is that Christian
eschatology does not have a good tract record predicting the end of the world.
Other religions do not do better. We can safely say that religion does not help us
understand when and how the world would end.
If one rules out the speculations of physics and religion on how the world would end,
then what? How is the world going to end? This is a good question. Let us get to it.

The world will not end for it does not exist. What does not exist cannot end. The
world seems to exist but in fact does not exist. The world seems to exist as in a dream
state but not in reality. We are asleep and dreaming and in our dreams see the world we
see. The world is a dream world and exists as in what exists in dreams. When the
sleeping dreamer wakes up the world he had seen in his dream that had seemed solid to
him no longer exists. In our nightly sleep-dreams we see houses, trees, mountains, cars,
stars, in short, everything we see in our world. We see people born, grow and die. We see
people kill each other, die and are buried. But when we wake up we know that everything
we saw in our dreams was not there. While sleeping and dreaming, the world we see
seems real. The dreamer takes his dream world as external to him and as real. He bumps
into stones and feels pain, bleeds etc all in the dream but when he wakes up he realizes
that he had not bumped his toes on a rock and did not bleed and had no pain. Indeed, his
body was a dream body very much as the stone he bumped into was.
Our day to day world is a dream. It seems to last long because it is a mutual dream, a
collective dream. All of us, all people, animals, etc are in this dream as opposed to the
individual’s singular dream at night. In individual sleeping one wakes up after a few
hours and know that the dream is not real. But in a collective dream the dream lasts long,
for it enables all people to dream what they want to dream, to fulfill the goals that made
them go to sleep.
 WHY THE WORLD IS THE WAY IT IS

In eternity (if you like, heaven) all are spirit. Spirit has no form (body). Spirit is one
and infinite in numbers. One spirit is simultaneously infinite spirits.
Spirit is the same everywhere it is. Spirit’s infinite numbers are all equal with each
other.
All spirits are joined as one spirit. Each spirit is in other spirits, as they are in it.
There is no space and gap between spirits. Where one spirit ends and another begin is
nowhere.
If you like, you can call spirit God. God is one and has infinite parts to him. God
and his infinite parts are the same and co-equal. The difference is that God created his
children and they did not create him or create themselves and create each other.
God is in his parts and his parts are in him and in each other. God and his parts are
joined as one self (and they have one joined mind).
Peace and harmony can only obtain where things are the same, equal and joined. In
heaven all things are the same, equal and joined hence there is perfect peace and
happiness in heaven. The peace and joy of heaven is inconceivable by our earthly
separated minds.
THE OPPOSITE OF UNION IS SEPARATION

The parts of unified spirit decided to experience their oppose state. They are joined
and wanted to experience separation; they are the same and wanted to experience
differences; they are equal and wanted to experience inequality; they are immortal and
wanted to experience mortality; they are permanent and changeless and wanted to
experience impermanence, and change.
What they wish to experience, the opposite of heaven, opposite of love, opposite of
God, opposite of their true self is incapable of been done. Reality is forever joined unified
spirit with its unified mind.
Nevertheless, they wanted to experience it. As it were, they cast a powerful charm,
magic, spell, Maya on themselves and caused themselves to forget their reality and
experience a different reality.
Another way of putting it is that they went to sleep and in their sleep dream a
seeming different reality, our world. They fell into a state of ignorance and forgetfulness.
Our empirical world is the world of self forgetfulness, the world of Maya, the world
of dreams. Here we experience the opposite of our true nature.

The world was designed for it to be the opposite of heaven. Our reality is total joy.
We chose the world of pain. In pursuit of that pain we housed our selves in body and
made it receptive of pain. Thus, our bodies feel pain and feeling pain we defend against
whatever causes us pain. In defending against perceived source of pain we separate from
it hence maintain separation and separated selves.

THE HOLY TRINITY

 When we separated from God, heaven, our home, God, created the Holy Spirit and
placed him in the world of separation we made, in our minds, and gave him the function
of guiding us back home. The Holy Spirit does not awaken us against our wishes but
gradually helps us to understand that our true self is the children of God, parts of God
who are unified with him. He teaches us that our true self is unified, which is the same as
love. He asks us to love one another and forgive one another our wrongs. Forgiveness is
the sign of love.
The Holy Spirit is the mediator of heaven and earth. He is part of heaven, God, and
knows about it and is also part of this world and knows about it. He, therefore, tries to
help God’s sleeping-dreaming children to understand the condition of heaven, love,
peace, and approximate it in their new place of abode, the separated world.
God the father (the transcendent God) and God the son (us, but now identified as
separated selves, egos) and God the Holy Spirit (the immanent God) are really the same
self, person; they are the three aspects of one God.
God as God is awake in his heaven and knows himself as unified; God as his parts,
his children, is asleep and forget that he is unified and see itself as the separated us,
housed in bodies (the son of God is now identified as the separated self, the ego); God the
Holy Spirit is the part of God that is in his son and knows itself to be unified with God
the father.

For our present purposes, the salient point is that the world would end as scientists
speculate that it would. I would even go one step further and say that it would end sooner
than they speculated. As we understand science fully, given our egoistic nature, we would
end the world sooner than people expect. I do not expect mankind to last more than a
thousand years. Just imagine the nuclear weapons that third world folks would train on
the West, for exploiting them, unless the West makes amends for its exploitation of them.
I hate to contemplate the future of the world. Simply stated, mankind would sooner or
later, destroy itself.
But this physical destruction is not the end of mankind. The seeming physical world
is a sleep-dream world. In their dreams people see the stars. In their dreams the stars
explode and die, as astrophysicists say.
When their seeming physical world ends and people seem to die, they merely
continue living in another seeming physical reality. That is, the dream of separation
continues in another form. The dream would last for however long people seek
separation from their true selves (unified spirit).
The world of separation would end when people give up the desire for separation and
seek union. When all that we do is the affirmation of our unified nature, when we love
one another and forgive those who wronged us, we end the world of separation.
Before the seeming physical world ends, we shall have a seeming loving physical
existence, a happy dream. Metaphorically, we would be at the gate of heaven, but not in
heaven yet. Heaven is formless, non material. To be in heaven we have to relinquish all
attachment to our bodies and the separated self. When we let go of our wish for
separation we end our existence in physical form and know ourselves as unified spirit and
awaken from the dream that we can be separated from our true self.
 I am saying that the scenarios conjectured by astrophysicists as to how the world
would end would come to pass but that they would come to pass only in a dream state
and that we merely continue in other physical dreams and keep doing so until we let go of
the wish for separation, in which case the world truly ends. The world truly ends when
we become aware of our unified nature. The world does not end with our physical death
but with the recognition of our spiritual nature. Of course, our bodies would end but our
spirits would continue existing as part of God’s unified spirit and unified mind.

It is necessary that what I said here be said for if one embraces only what the so-
called scientists say one would fall into deep existential depression and give up hope. The
fact is that there is hope. Man is spirit. This is a fact, not conjecture.
If you want to know that you are spirit then change your thinking. Accept
meditation and go through life in a meditative mood. That is, stop thinking through your
lower self, lower mind, ego mind. Think through your higher self, higher mind, the
Christ unified mind, a mind guided by the Holy Spirit. Here you stop doing anything that
the ego asks you to do but do what love and forgiveness asks you to do. If you do so you
would be guided by love (in religious categories, by the Holy Spirit).
You would still be in form, in body, but live a more peaceful and happy existence.
Every now and then you would escape from the awareness of space, time and matter and
enter into the spiritual realm, a realm that cannot be described in words.
Spirit is unified; words evolved to adapt to the world of separation; therefore,
words cannot explain the unified world of spirit.
What is certain is that in spirit there is no you and I, as we know it on earth; there is
only one self with infinite selves, one whole with infinite parts; there is no other person to
see, for all persons are parts of ones self. No seer and seen, no subject and object. All are
unified and joined as one self. This is the world of permanency, immortality, eternity,
changelessness, peace and joy, bliss.

CONCLUSION

As noted, last night I watched a depressing television program. I felt a desire to help
correct the misinformation these high priests of science are spreading.
It is true that our physical world would end in one of the forms that astrophysicists
speculate that it would, the point that I hope that I have made is that the end of matter,
space and time is not the end of spirit.
As spirit we live eternally. In fact, it requires the end of matter, space and time for
us to know that we are spirit. When the world ends, as these scientists speculate, we shall
know that we are spirited and are eternal.

If I put on my ego thinking hat I would say that the thesis of this paper is fantasy, is
an ego defense, something in the realm of religion. Religion, apparently, gives folks false
hope in a hopeless world.
If it makes you feel fine that I have just posited an ego defense fantasy, then
believe it. But you should try meditation. This means tuning out our world.
In meditation one consciously rejects the categories of our ego based thinking and its
world and firmly say to one: whatever I think is true is not true, I do not know who am, I
do not know who other people are, I do not know what any thing means. I do not know
and nobody living in body knows, either. Then one stays silent.
Knowledge of the truth, what Christians call mystical union, Hindus call Samadhi,
Buddhists call Nirvana and Zen calls Satori, would down on ones thinking, mind, on its
own.
It is difficult to attain unitive experience. However, meditation does have other
benefits, such as the feeling of calmness, peace and joy. If you persist in negating the
world, escaping from it, you would one day escape from the physical world and enter the
unified spirit world.
The unified spirit state is not what you read in new age books about seeing your
dead ancestors. In the unified spirit world there are no bodily forms. (Nevertheless, if you
still want to see people in forms, still want to sleep and dream, you would see them in
glorified forms, in light forms; forms made of photons of light. These forms are still
illusory for they are temporary and do not last forever. Though beautiful to look at, light
forms are still part of the illusion of separation. )
Try thinking with love and forgiveness. A loving and forgiving person and world is a
peaceful and happy person and world.

The physical world will end as our physical scientists say that it would but the spirit in
people are eternal. Hopefully, this impromptu essay has helped explain how all these
would work out.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 16, 2007

AFRICANS DID THIS TO THEMSELVES

(Africans are responsible for their miserable fate)

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

If you have eyes to see you probably see that in the extant world African peoples, in
Africa, in the Americas and in Europe are second class citizens. Everywhere black
persons are found they are not treated as the equals of other people.
Not too long ago, Africans were overt slaves of other races (slaves of Europeans in
North America and slaves of Arabs in Arabia).
This apparent anomaly calls for explanation. Our (Africans, that is) superficial
explanation is that we are innocent victims unto whom others do bad things to. Tons of
books have been written from this perspective. Their thesis is always the same: Africans
were minding their own business when Arabs descended on them and enslaved them and,
later, Europeans did the same to them. Africans are innocent; Arabs and Europeans are
evil.
Africans are masochists and Arabs and Europeans are sadists. The sadist inflicts
pain on the masochist. Pity Africans; have compassion on these innocent victims of other
people’s depredations.
 This was how I saw Africans until I began to interact with them more intensely. For
almost two years I interacted with Africans at various Internet sites. What I found out
about Africans disabused me of my belief that they are innocent victims of other persons’
mischief. I found out that Africans are their own worst enemies. They are evil beyond
belief. They hate themselves as no other race do. Their whole existence seem motivated
to attack and destroy each other. If they cannot attack you physically, they would do so
psychologically. They say awful things about you with the sole intention of degrading
and humiliating you. They seldom do anything to uplift any one; their stuck in trade is to
degrade each other.
At the political level, Africans are not motivated to help their people become
developed. Oh, they make a show of it; talk about their intentions to develop Africa. But
give the African who talks about developing his people money to do so and he redirects
that money to his personal pockets and could care less about his peoples suffering. On the
streets of Lagos poor people die and their bodies lay on the streets and people walk over
them and few would do anything about it. There are practically no public health officials
to come and remove such bodies. (On paper officials exist, but you first have to bribe
them to care to do their jobs.)
As I observed Africans, closely, I began to learn that they are not other people’s
victims. They, in fact, did this to themselves; they brought about their own enslavement
and in the here and now world currently marginalize themselves to second class
citizenship.
African people have an inner compulsion to do things that would place them as
second class persons. They choose to be second class persons. Other people did not
choose this for them, they chose it for themselves. (However, what one chooses for ones
self is simultaneously what other people choose for one and in that sense you could say
that other people choose for one.)
As Africans chose, other people go along with their choice and place them in
second class citizen status.

All human beings make existential choices. Black persons chose to be masochists.
White folks chose to be sadists.
The sadist and the masochist meet and each enacts his wish, plays his role, dances
their bizarre dance and that is what their earthly lives is all about. Earthly living is a
macabre dance, an absurd dance of master and servant, lord and servant, leader and led
sadist and masochist.
The world is a bizarre dream where the children of God come to suffer, by their
choice. We did this to ourselves. We have no one to blame but ourselves.
The good news is that what we did to ourselves we can undo. If other people did
this to us then we cannot undo what they did and have a different life. The good news
given the world by Jesus Christ (and his guide, the Holy Spirit) is that the children of
God, us, did this awful thing to us, brought our pain unto us, and, as such, can undo what
we did to us.
(If you doubt this proposition then give Africans well organized organizations to run
and see what happens; in a few months, they would destroy it, manage it to the grave;
they would steal most of the money and resources meant for running the organization;
they aim at destroying everything they touch. Observe South Africa. In a few more years
Africans would drag it to the mud; they would do what would destroy that thriving
economy. They will take it down because their fate is to bring down whatever they
touch.)
Do Africans consciously do this to themselves? It depends on what you mean by
consciously. At the ego conscious level they desire the best for themselves.
They bring pain and suffering to themselves at the ego unconscious level (which
really is conscious level).
At their ego unconscious level Africans chose to be slaves and second class citizens
(just as at the ego unconscious level white folks chose to be sadists and racists).
Human beings make their choices at the unconscious level and disguise them at what
they call their conscious minds.
Unconsciously, black folks choose masochism; unconsciously, white folks choose
sadism. Each hides what he chose and pretends its opposites.
A white person must be racist towards blacks for that is his choice at the
unconscious level, even though at the conscious level he may pretend to be fair to blacks.
The fact is that whites are meant to discriminate against blacks and blacks are meant to be
discriminated against by whites. This is their existential choices, their game and their
dance.
They must dance this sick dance until some one teaches them differently, as I am
doing here.

Having chosen to be maltreated by other people, Arabs and whites, Africans are
maltreated by those people. They then see themselves as innocent victims of others
maltreatment and feel angry at them. Part of the egos game is to do something and then
see itself as the victim of others behaviors so as to justify anger and attack at them.
Arabs and Whites in the meantime see themselves as innocent and fair when, to any
one with eyes, everything they do towards blacks is discriminatory.
These two insane groups, blacks and whites, must do to each other what their ego
unconscious desires that they do. Whites would keep abusing blacks and blacks would
keep been abused until the role is reversed and blacks abuse whites.
Within two hundred years blacks would be governing whites. The white world is at
the last gaps of its bizarre anti social civilization.

So how did it come about that Africans chose to suffer social humiliation and see
themselves as victims of other people’s abuse? This is a good question. To answer it we
need a bit of metaphysics.
All metaphysics is metaphor, an attempt to represent the truth in language.
Metaphors are not the truth they are trying to capture in words. Nevertheless, please
consider the following metaphor, it approximates the truth, but since the truth cannot be
articulated in words, is not the truth.

WHY THE WORLD IS THE WAY IT IS

In eternity (if you like, heaven) all are spirit. Spirit has no form (body). Spirit is one
and infinite in numbers. One spirit is simultaneously infinite spirits.
 Spirit is the same everywhere it is. Spirit’s infinite numbers are all equal with each
other.
All spirits are joined as one spirit. Each spirit is in other spirits, as they are in it.
There is no space and gap between spirits. Where one spirit ends and another begin is
nowhere.
If you like, you can call spirit God. God is one and has infinite parts to him. God
and his infinite parts are the same and co-equal. The difference is that God created his
children and they did not create him or create themselves and create each other.
God is in his parts and his parts are in him and in each other. God and his parts are
joined as one self (and they have one joined mind).
Peace and harmony can only obtain where things are the same, equal and joined. In
heaven all things are the same, equal and joined hence there is perfect peace and
happiness in heaven. The peace and joy of heaven is inconceivable by our earthly
separated minds.
THE OPPOSITE OF UNION IS SEPARATION

The parts of unified spirit decided to experience their oppose state. They are joined
and wanted to experience separation; they are the same and wanted to experience
differences; they are equal and wanted to experience inequality; they are immortal and
wanted to experience mortality; they are permanent and changeless and wanted to
experience impermanence, and change.
What they wish to experience, the opposite of heaven, opposite of love, opposite of
God, opposite of their true self is incapable of been done. Reality is forever joined unified
spirit with its unified mind.
Nevertheless, they wanted to experience it. As it were, they cast a powerful charm,
magic, spell, Maya on themselves and caused themselves to forget their reality and
experience a different reality.
Another way of putting it is that they went to sleep and in their sleep dream a
seeming different reality, our world. They fell into a state of ignorance and forgetfulness.
Our empirical world is the world of self forgetfulness, the world of Maya, the world
of dreams. Here we experience the opposite of our true nature.

The world was designed for it to be the opposite of heaven. Our reality is total joy.
We chose the world of pain. In pursuit of that pain we housed our selves in body and
made it receptive of pain. Thus, our bodies feel pain and feeling pain we defend against
whatever causes us pain. In defending against perceived source of pain we separate from
it hence maintain separation and separated selves.
For our present purposes, because we came here to experience pain we assigned
ourselves to roles that would inflict and receive pain. Thus in the extant world we
assigned some the role of inflicting pain to others.
White persons were assigned the role of inflicting pain on black persons. The black
race was assigned the role of receiving pain.
Both the pain giver and the pain receiver are, of course, in pain. (White persons are
the most miserable human beings there are on this planet. This paper is not focusing on
white persons but black persons.)
 The children of God made choices as to what role they would play and, as it were,
went to sleep and in their sleep dream and in that dream each enacts the role he chose and
that others chose for him.
In the world’s dream, Black people chose masochism and suffering, white people
chose sadism and the givers of pain.
These choices are hidden in people’s ego unconscious. From there, they guide our
behaviors.
If you are a black person here is the fact that you must deal with. A white person
must always discriminate against you and all black persons, for that is how the dance is
designed to be. Do not deceive yourself by a white person’s seeming overt good gestures.
He chose to abuse and oppresses you, and so must he do, for so he is programmed. By the
same token, you, a black person chose to be abused and must be abused.

The purpose of this essay is to enable you, black persons, to choose differently. To
choose differently you must understand what is in your ego unconscious, what you chose
before going to sleep and hide in your unconscious. You are the one, who chose to be
abused and oppressed.
Please accept this fact for nobody else chose for you. Nobody can do to the son of
God, you and I, what he does not want to experience. We, Africans, chose to experience
abuse and abuse ourselves and are abused by other people. We did this to ourselves. The
good news is that what we did to ourselves we can undo and do differently.

AFRICANS CHOICE OF BAD GOVERNMENTS

Africans chose to govern themselves badly. As things stand, Africans cannot govern
themselves well. They cannot govern themselves well because they chose not to be able
to do so. Obviously they are as intelligent as other people.
All the children of God are the same; the same intelligence, God, is in all people.
Nevertheless, each of them chooses how to misuse the intelligence in him.
We Africans chose not to be able to do anything right. We chose to suffer. We chose
to be in pain.
We chose to see ourselves as victims of other people’s abuse. We chose to complain
about what other people do to us.
While complaining about what whites did to us, if given the opportunity to improve
our lives we mess it up, for we choose to suffer. Our existence is guided by our
existential choice for suffering.

We must, therefore, understand this choice. As noted, Whites chose their own fate
and that fate is catching up with them, too. Those they chose to abuse are soon going to
come at them with total vengeance (unless we change the parameters of the game, as I am
trying to do here). All the nuclear bombs third world persons are trying to develop will be
exploded in the Western world. Folks get what they chose. Whites chose to do evil and
chose to receive the evil from others coming at them. It is as simple as that.

We do reverse roles. Those who choose sadism in some life times choose
masochism in other lifetimes. Leaders in some life times are the led in other life times.
The rich in some life times are the poor in other life times. The sons of God experience
everything in their world, good and bad, by their choice.

Until the present, Africans chose oppression, abuse and social marginalization and
the question is what are we going to do about it?
The answer is obvious. Choose differently. Make a choice that is in accord with
heaven. Reverse the decision to live the opposite of heaven and now choose to
approximate heaven.
Heaven is love (love is union). Choose love over hate; choose union over
separation. Choose to live the opposite of our world’s reality.
Look at our world, see it as it, as it is, and choose to live its opposite. See what your
realistic ego tells you are the real world and do its opposite.

For example, the ego shows you a world where other people do bad things to you
and asks you to defend yourself. In this world we are involved in offense and defense,
attack and counter attack; bearing grudges for the evil other people do to us. Bearing
grievances and seeking revenge are the ego mind’s hall mark. We feel attacked, feel
grievances and seek vengeance. We do attack those who attacked us. We do seek
punishment for those we consider our enemies.
In the empirical world, white people attack black people and black people feel
grievance against them and want to counter attack them and punish them. That is the
nature of the world.
Now do the opposite of the world’s reality. Forgive those you see do bad things to
you. Black persons see whites discriminate against them. Now forgive them.
To forgive those who wronged you is to love them. Just let go of your desire for
vengeance. Forgive white people. They are operating at the level of apes and monkeys; if
you see it that way it becomes easier for you to forgive them. Animals have no
conscience so forgive them their evil behaviors.
Forgiveness gives you peace and happiness. Forgiveness also gives the person you
forgive some peace and happiness. A forgiving person, that is, a loving person, brings
peace to this conflicted world.

When you forgive (which does not mean tolerating attack, we forgive the past not
the present, in the present you do that which protects love, insist on loving behavior from
all) you have made the world approximate the world that God created. However, you are
not yet in the world God created. The world that God created is spirit, formless, not in
forms, bodies. Forgiveness merely makes us, while still in forms, bodies, to approximate
heaven, but not be in heaven. To be in heaven we must be formless, not live in bodies.
Forgiveness metaphorically brings us to the gate of heaven. Heaven’s gate is a
metaphor for a forgiven world that is relatively peaceful and happy, but not as peaceful
and happy as in formless spirit- heaven.
Our world needs to be forgiven, hence brought to heaven’s gate, and made peaceful
and happy before it ends. Our present function is to forgive the world, to make the will of
God come to the world and to transform the kingdom of man to the kingdom of God (a
world ruled by Christ…not Jesus, Christ is our higher self, and his Holy Spirit).
 A forgiven world becomes a happy dream, still a sleep-dream but a happy dream; it
is still an illusory world but now pleasant illusion. From this pleasant illusion, happy
dream the world is translated into real joy, real peace. The world ends.
Actually the world has never existed. It exists as a dream. We merely awaken from
the dream see that the world we had thought is real is not real, that where we had seen
seeming solid matter nothing existed, it is matter in dream state.

Our world has its own categories and while in it seems real but there are other forms
of existence. In heaven all is spirit and there is no matter.
We are always in heaven, spirit, and, as it were, tune it out and see ourselves living
in what we call our material universe.
Just as we tuned out heaven, we can tune out the world and return to unified spirit.
We awaken from this world, a nightmare and résumé awareness of blissful eternity.

The point I am making is that we African chose our fate. This is a fact, not
conjecture. We chose it and hide it in our unconscious minds. At the conscious level we
see ourselves as victims of others attacks and abuses, but at the unconscious mind level
we asked other people to oppress us.
In a just world no one can do to us what we do not want to experience. If what we
did not want to experience can happen to us then the world is unjust and if the world is
unjust spirit does not exist.
If you think that our African fate is in other people’s hands, so why are you, an
African refusing to dedicate yourself to governing Africa and dragging it o the same level
as the West? Why do you steal too much and redirect money that could have helped your
people to your Western bank accounts? You do so for you intend to help give your
fellow Africans poverty and pain. You are evil for the ego is an evil thing. (Whites are
evil, but we are not dealing with them).

Please understand the dynamics of your unconscious and conscious mind and
choose to change it. In your unconscious is the choice to suffer. That choice was made
when you chose to live the opposite of heaven. Now change the choice. Choose not to
suffer.
To not suffer you must live in accord with heaven; to not suffer you must obey
God’s will.
God’s will is love. You must obey it and love all people.
To love is to forgive all. On earth, love means working for social good. Do all you
do for all the people around you? Work for Africa’s development. Do not steal, not even
a penny from the public, for the theft of a penny is as grievous as the theft of billions of
dollars. Forgive those who wronged you.
Love and forgive and work for social interest and see Africa transformed in this
century. On the other hand, if you chose to retain your old African ego self and produce
suffering for your fellow Africans, that too is your choice.
I am merely explaining the dynamics of your ego mind to you. You are not a victim
of others but a person who deliberately victimizes yourself and ask other people to
victimize you. Stop your foolish game and love all Africans and work for Africans well
being.
 But to change you must acknowledge your past mistakes; accept that you chose to
inflict pain on you, did so and now regret it. Change and start working for Africa. If you
do, like the prodigal son you have decided to return home. Home is love.

NOTHINGNESS AND IDEALISM

Here are some related ideas in the world view that I am teaching. We find out that
people are doing nothing (meaningless and purposeless world) and want to make them do
something worthwhile and meaningful. Our idealism is meant to replace a meaningless
world with an ego ideal meaning that seem to satisfy and obviate the meaninglessness of
the world.
What our ideals wish for cannot come into being, for whatever is in flesh is nothing,
is useless and impermanent. Life in flesh is nothing. Only life in spirit can be something.
(If it does not exist, then existence is nothing.)

If evolution is true and produced people then life is nothing and has to be done
away with, for it does not matter. At best the individual enjoys the nothingness without
taking it seriously. Pass through the world without taking it seriously, without disturbing
your peace.

THE FUNCTION OF BODY

We chose to live in bodies and program our bodies (via the information we placed in
our DNA) to feel pain. We feel pain and weaknesses and struggle to reduce that pain and
weakness. Our lives are geared towards reducing the pain and diseases of the body.
In the meantime, pain and weakness makes our bodies seem real to us. We defend
our bodies and in doing so make what we defend, body, and the separated ego self it
houses seem real in our awareness. In making the separated ego self and its body real we
forget our reality, formless, bodiless, unified spirit.
The greatest surprise of our lives is the realization that we are not body that body
does not, in fact, exist, except as in a dream state. What exists is formless spirit.
We use pain, weakness and sickness to make our bodies, hence separation seem real
in our consciousness.
The other means of making body seem real is food and sex. Eating food makes body
real. Sex arouses the body and makes it real. In sex people think that they are bodies. In
fact, the pursuit of sex is pursuit of body reality hence ego reality. Average persons like
sex for they like to feel that they are bodies. They want to feel orgasm, that is, feel
intense bodily reality. These people are at a lower level of spiritual evolution; in fact,
they are closer to animals than true human beings. Gay and lesbian folks practically exist
to experience the intense sexual arousal they give to each other. In their crazed sex, they
forget that they are spirit and affirm their bodiless. (Spiritually developed persons do not
engage in sex; they do not over affirm their bodies.)

EACH PERSON WILL DIE WHEN HE IS MEANT TO DIE

 Each person is exactly where he is meant to be, doing what he is meant to be doing
and will die when he is meant to die. It is all preplanned. Who preplanned it? His ego did,
his unconscious mind planned it out for him. His life is like a drama he wrote and plays
out.
Please understand what you are doing and live peacefully and die peacefully. You
cannot alter peoples scheduled times to die or what would happen to them.

PEACE LIES IN HAVING NO SELF CONCEPT

To have peace the individual must give up his psychological self concept and not
defend it. He must not have a sense of separated ego self and must not defend it (though,
obviously, he must wish to defend his body. There must be a wish to live as a separated
self to cause the body to defend itself in a seemingly involuntary manner. Without that
wish the body dies and one returns to undifferentiated spirit state. No self concept means
peace and joy.

PAIN LIES IN HAVING SELF CONCEPT

To have pain is to have a separated self concept and defend it. We defend the
separated self at two levels, the physical level (which seems involuntary but actually is
voluntary, for a wish to live in body keeps it going and if that wish is removed it stops
defending the body) and the psychological level. In the here and now it is the
psychological wish for separation that can be removed and therefore reduce ones pain by
fifty percent.

GOD’S GUIDANCE

In the ego the individual has the illusion of self determination and self guidance
hence feels pain. If he lets go of his ego he must accept God guiding him, have no ego
plans but have the Holy Spirit, his higher self, a deeper part of his self guide him. Here he
is guided to have pleasant dreams.

CONCLUSION

I do not, for a minute, presume that this essay would make sense to you. I expect
your ego conscious mind to see it as silliness and reject it. I have been there and done
that.
Our egos like to see us as innocent victims of others evil behaviors (while ignoring
our own evil behaviors….Africans ignore the fact that they do not help their people while
harping on what whites did to them).
Go ahead and deny reality and see yourself as good and see others as bad. Go
through that trip for as long as you want. You assume that those you see as bad feel guilty
and that you could manipulate them with your guilt; the fact is that white folks are mostly
sociopath and have no guilt feeling, no remorse for their wrongs, no sense of right or
wrong and cannot be manipulated by your trying to guilt trip them.
 You are therefore left no option but to accept responsibility for your life. Accept that
you, an African, did this to your self. Then decide to undo what you did. Decide to
change and work for Africa’s good, and not give Africans suffering, as we currently give
our fellow Africans suffering.
I know that you cannot accept my thesis until you are ready to accept it. If you are at
the animal level of existence you would deny the thesis and keep screwing up and
blaming others. You are where you are and that is all there is to it.
My function is to explain reality to you. It is left to you to choose to behave
differently. I cannot choose for you. I can only choose for me. What I asked you to
choose: love and forgiveness and dedicating yourself to working for public good etc are
what I have chosen for me.
I choose for me and my choice affects you. Your choice affects me, too, for we are
living in an inter-dependent world. I hope that you choose love and work for Africa’s
good.
.
Ozodi Thomas Osuji
January 15, 2006.

DECEMBER ARTICLES FOR SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGY

THE CHOICE FOR WEAKNESS AND PAIN

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

It is difficult for human beings to accept the idea that they choose what happens to them,
particularly if we are talking about their biological weakness (vulnerability) and pain.
Accept it or not but such is the case. However, we must ascertain what self made the
choice.
It is not the self that one is aware of now that made the choice for physical weakness
and pain. The self that one is aware of now wishes for strength and power. The self that
made the choice for weakness and pain is the larger self, the unified, holy Son of God,
ones real self, the Christ.
There is God. God is infinite in numbers yet he is one. That one God gave himself to
his son, who is one son of God and yet is infinite children of God. Thus there is one God
(who is infinite in numbers) and there is one son of God (who is infinite in numbers).
The son of God (one and infinite in numbers) separated from God. He chose to
experience the opposite of God. God is spirit and he chose to experience materiality; God
is unified and he chose to experience separation; God is eternal and he chose to
experience time, God is permanent and he chose to experience change, God is immortal
and he chose to experience mortality and so on. God is peace and joy and he chose to
experience conflict and unhappiness (which is inevitable in separation). He chose to
experience body and to make his body seem real he made his body experience weakness
and pain (he could make his body strong and painless, if he so wanted…but that would
not serve the purpose of separation).
In feeling weakness, vulnerability and pain he makes his body seem real. If his body is
real then his separated ego self, the dream self is real. He sees his body suffer and
defends it. He sufferers pain and try to minimize his pain.

It is all a game invented by the son of God to make himself as a separated self seem
real. As long as he identifies with body and ego he must suffer. When he is tired of
suffering he knows what to do to end it. He relinquishes his identification with ego and
body and returns to the awareness of unified spirit and its peace and joy... It is all up to
the individual to decide to give up his attachment to the separated self. If he lets it go he
feels peace and joy and becomes a teacher of peace and joy to other people. That is, he
teaches other parts of his infinite selves, his infinite creations that the solution to their
pain is relinquishment of the ego and body. He stops esteeming the ego and esteem
spirit. He now flows with life. He is now an enlightened son of God and is a teacher of
God, teacher of union, teacher of love and forgiveness and bringer of peace and
happiness to a world that is in conflict.

The salient point is that it is one who chose ones weak body and ones pain and that one
chose it to make ones ego and body seem real hence defend them and in doing so stay in
the world and make the world real. When one decides to return to unified spirit, to make
the world not real one would stop defending the ego and body and loose ego, separated
self consciousness and loose consciousness of body and in doing so return to the
awareness of unified spirit and its attendant peace and joy.

This view may or may not be true but if accepted it tends to give the individual good
psychological approach to life. You are not self conscious, not conscious of your body
being good or bad, strong or weak, and you do not make your body weak by overeating,
drugs etc so as to feel weak and an ego (people do drugs, over eat etc to make their
bodies seem real hence their egos seem real…if you are not body why take dugs and over
eat?). You forget about your body and ego and exist peacefully and happily.

WEAKNESS IS CHOSEN FOR IDEALISM, PLAYING GOD

The individual chose a weak body and a pained body so as to wish for an ideal body and
ideal self and ideal world. That is, he chose his weakness to enable him become an
idealist, in effect a person who reinvents the self and the world according to his own
wishes and to reject his ego self and world and recreate it. In the process he is playing the
ego god. He will fail but in his failure lays his success for he helps shape a more realistic
ego and egos world.

OVERATING, COFFEE ETC MAKES BODY REAL, SEPARTION REAL

Why do people over eat, drink coffee, take drugs? Those make their bodies real; the little
pain and weaknesses those induce make their bodies real in their awareness. That makes
their egos real hence makes them to forget that they are spirit. It is all an attempt to be
ego. That is, over eating, drug addiction is an attempt to not be in love (not love ones self
and not love other people). The compulsion in over eating is an attempt to be an ego and
forget that one is spirit; it all ones game.

KILLING YOURSELF DYING IS AN ATTEMPT TO BE EGO

Human beings kill themselves and die (all death is suicide from over eating etc). They die
for in dying they prove that they are bodies and separated selves, egos. In dying they
prove that they are right and God is wrong; that separation is right and union is wrong,
that mortality is right and immortality is wrong; that the son is right and his father wrong.
They die and then get reborn and repeat the process until the learn that death is
impossible, that nobody dies in which case they become the teachers of eternity, the
teachers of God.

WHITHER SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGY?

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Science is a methodological approach to phenomena that attempts to understand them

as they are, not as one thinks that they should be. Science is omnibus and has several
aspects, including physical and psychological and social.
Psychology is the aspect of science that deals with human thinking and behaving.
The term spiritual science is too global since it would include spiritual study of physics,
chemistry and biology etc. Therefore, we ought to limit the science of mind to spiritual
psychology if it deals with the study of human thinking and behavior.
Spiritual psychology studies whether there is a spiritual aspect to thinking and
behaving.
If the term psychology is employed then the scientific method must be applied to it.
In that light, is there a science to spiritual matters? Can we study spirituality without
injecting our opinions, just the science of it, as it is?
You see a person. He is there. You study him and do not ask why questions or
wanting to change him, for those are not scientific questions but choice or moral
questions.
Psychology does not aim at changing people but studying them as they are now, not
how they should become. You see a schizophrenic and study the processes of
schizophrenia in him. If you can understand it then you can seek ways to change it
(biologically and psychologically). But you do not say that he should not be
schizophrenic (for that is an idealistic wish, a fantasy that does not address what is, as it
is, our idealistic wishes that people be better does not make them better, only
understanding why they are the way they are would help make them better). You see a
deluded person and you do not aim at making him trusting and less fearful but
understanding why he is that way. Science does not blame people for being who they are
but studies them and then intervenes realistically. Morality and religion is the one that
asks useless idealistic questions and does not bring about changes, all it does is make
people feel guilty and drive their behaviors underground so as to seem ideal.

You study your parents, siblings and every body as they are and then seek change if
change is possible or leave it at that and use them as they are in the work place, more
effectively, to do work. You cannot change people. Secular psychology and spiritual
psychology do not change people. They only understand people.

SELF ACCEPTANCE, PEACE AND HAPPINESS ARE THE BENEFITS OF

PSYCHOLOGY, SECULAR AND SPIRITUAL

The only benefit of psychology, secular or spiritual is enabling people to accept

themselves as they are, change what is changeable and live with the rest, in peace and
happiness, without the delusion that you can change people. Psychology does not
directly put food on the table but enables people to understand themselves, accept
themselves as they are and then live in peace and joy and go do the types of work that
their state enables them to do best and leave it at that.

Spiritual psychology is not a means to escape into fantasyland, into the world of ideation,
idealized world that does not in fact exist. It is a means of understanding that there is
another world but a world that has nothing to do with this world for it is spirit and all in it
are the same and equal. In the here and now world it gives people hope in life after death,
not life as separated ego personalities housed in bodies, for that is impossible, but in life
in spirit, which is unified and eternal. In the present world it does not put food on the
table but gives peace and happiness from the relinquishment of childish ideals and
acceptance of the world as it is. Spiritual psychologists also practice secular psychology
and physical science.

PHYSICAL PAIN LED TO IDEALIATION, FANTASY

Life in body is tough, filled with pain and suffering so some people attempt to escape
from it by using the ego defense mechanism of fantasy, idealizing a self, body and world
that is not too pained, that is not filled with suffering, an ideal world but that is not going
to happen and they might as well let it go and deal with the real world and make the most
of it.

IS IT FANTASY OR NOTHING?

Are you saying that you have to persist on idealism, fantasy or else life is not worth
living; in effect, you either pursue madness, a goal that cannot be attained, or die? That is
the stupidest thing that I have ever heard in my life.
You pursue what is real and doable and accept human limitations and give up
thinking like a child who thinks that all things are doable and lives in the world of dreams
and accomplishes nothing, not even the little that can be accomplished in the real world
of limitations that adults live in, the world of science and technology.

Psychology does not change people, does not make them gods, as fantasy wants it to do;
it understands them and enables them to live within their limitations and give up fantasy.
Spiritual psychology gives people peace of mind and makes them happy, that is all it does
and that is enough for it to do; give up the childish fantasy expectation for spiritual
psychology, metaphysics to be a magical wand and transform the world into heaven for
there is no heaven. There is a unified spirit state but it is nothing like our world nor can
our world be it.

AMERICANS, NORMAL EGOS, BELIEFVE THAT THEIR LAWS PROTECT THEM

White Americans take their laws very seriously. They see themselves as egos and trust in
their laws to protect them from each other and also trust in their other laws (of nutrition,
health, science etc). This is the ego at its best. They do not have faith in love and do not
love but rely on ego justice, vengeance. They are a lost people indeed. However it should
be noted that it is the same all over the world for normal persons.

AFRICAN LEADERS ARE LEADING AFRICANS TO EXTINCTION

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

As you look around black Africa, you cannot, in honesty, say that any country there is
well governed. What you see in Africa is the reign of graft and corruption; you see
politicians who seek public office for personal gain and who do nothing to benefit their
people. The result is that Africans are sinking more and more into poverty.
African leaders seem childish and not even the suffering of their people bothers
them. Moreover, they have the infantile tendency to blame everything on other persons,
particularly their whipping boy: the white man. They do not take responsibility for their
activities but always blame other persons for their self evident inability to do anything
right. They misgovern their countries and blame it on white persons. Apparently, their
goal is to make white persons feel guilty for Africans poverty and suffering and come
calling with monetary aid.
Monetary aids from white persons promptly go into the pockets of African
politicians and bureaucrats. Indeed, if you gave Africans money to help their people with
HIV-AIDS, they would redirect that money into their own pockets and not help their
people. They would rationalize their amoral behavior by saying that those with AIDS are
going to die, anyhow, so why bother taking care of them?
Africans are, perhaps, the world’s most unsympathetic human beings. They are cruel
beyond belief. They actually disrespect white persons because they consider them fools,
“mugu”, for being helpful to other people.
Christianity, among other things, socialized Europeans to have compassion for the
weak and to come to the rescue of those in need. Generally speaking, European
Christians tend to devote their lives to helping the poor. Africans look at social serving
white persons as fools. To them, apparently, the “rational” thing to do is to live only for
ones self (and, perhaps, for ones expanded ego self, ones children) but never for other
people.
As a matter of fact, many Africans take advantage of Christian white persons’
tendency to care for their fellow human beings. Helpful persons (who, by the way, are
mentally healthy persons; unhealthy persons tend to not help other people) tend to be
trusting persons. (Unhealthy persons, say paranoids, tend to be untrusting, suspicious
persons.)
Generally, Africans tend not to trust other people and consider one foolish if one
trusts other persons. In light of their lack of trust in people, they see trusting white
Christians as idiots and deliberately set out to exploit them. Yesterday, December 1, 2006
we read of how a bunch of Nigerians at Houston, Texas set out to exploit those they
called “Mugus” (trusting persons), screw the Medicaid and Medicare system to the tune
of eight million dollars. Nigerians 419, credit card and social security number rackets…
each predicated on exploiting trusting persons… are well known. (The ability to trust
other people is indicative of mental healthy; the inability to trust other people is
indicative of mental disorder, paranoia; it is sad that Africans see a sign of mental health,
trusting, as weakness to be exploited. It is more than sad that they take a symptom of
mental disorder, lack of trust in other people, as strength. Jesus Christ said: unless you are
like a child that you would not enter the kingdom of heaven; this means that unless you
trust like a child and love all persons you are not healthy hence peaceful and happy. It is
pathetic that a people take illness and its attendant disturbance of peace and happiness as
something to revel in.)
Africans cruelty to one another and their tendency to criminal activities without
corresponding self sacrificing behavior on behalf of other persons sometimes make you
wonder whether they are human beings, at all.
Could it be that these people are not human beings, as we understand that term to
be? Could they be a different breed of animals that look like human beings?
A human being is at his best when he loves himself and all people and sacrifices his
ego life for his fellow human beings. Jesus Christ is an example of such love.
I am yet to see an African who lives a life devoted to serving the needs of other
human beings. What I see are those taking advantage of other human beings and, worse,
do not seem to feel guilty and remorseful for their obvious antisocial behaviors. I see
folks who cheat and become wealthy and present their narcissistic egos to other people to
admire as ogas, big men. (And their people, who seem not to care how wealth was
acquired, make them chiefs.) I see a morally contemptible and despicable people!

World wide, some persons are beginning to ask whether Africans are capable of
moral behaviors.
I believe that if in fifty years (in mid century, 2050s) no African country has
demonstrated the capacity to govern itself well, if African politicians remain crooks and
if Africans remain very poor, the shame of mankind, some people would start advocating
the eradication of Africans.
I can see tough minded politicians arguing that Africans are sub-human beings and,
as such, are unable to govern themselves and would always be poor and the white man
would always have to support him. In which case, they argue that it would be better if all
Africans are killed off. Kill them off, so that they do not have to be messing up, be poor
and make people feel guilty for their perpetual suffering.
Out of pity for their suffering we help them but they waste our help and do not seem
capable of helping themselves.
The West already has the means to eradicate all Africans from the surface of the
earth. They can lob a few of their nuclear weapons on Africa and get rid of all Africans.
They would then resettle their surplus population in Africa.
David Duke, an American racist, essentially made the above argument in one of his
books. As he sees it, Africans are unable, and will forever be unable, to govern
themselves and will always be poor. He believes that the best thing to do is wipe Africans
off the surface of the world. He visualizes giving Africa’s territory to white persons or
keeping it as game reserve. As in Adolf Hitler’s lebensraum foreign policy towards
eastern Europeans, he advocates keeping some Africans alive and use them as slave labor
until their labor is replaced by machines, at which point they, too, would be killed off.
(Suppose some white persons tried this genocidal policy would Africans resist it?
Would they finally recognize that life is worthless if not lived as free persons and,
therefore, fight and die rather than live as slaves? In the Americas, they chose to live as
slaves rather than fight and die fighting, as real men ought to do, if the alternative is
slavery. Their history in the Americas where they tolerated slavery makes you wonder
whether they would tolerate slavery in the hands of whites in Africa.)

The idea of wiping off all Africans sounds far fetched but it is a possibility if
Africans continue to mess up. Hitler and his Nazis tried such a policy and failed, This
time around, if the world’s consensus is that Africans are shiftless and unable to fend for
themselves, people probably would not prevent Africans from being killed.
The moral dilemma that folks would grapple with is: why keep Africans alive if all
they do is steal and be able to govern themselves?
Unsentimental reason would probably permit Africans been wiped off. Whites did
wipe off blacks in Tasmania (Australia), so it is not like there is no precedence where a
group of people have been wiped off the face of the earth.

What is the point of this essay? The point is that time is running out for African
leaders and for Africans in general. Unless Africans wake up and start behaving like
human beings and care for their people, they would bring the death of all Africans. At
present, one can assert that most African leaders are, at best, childish, do not care for
their people and see public office as from which they enrich themselves at the expense of
their people.
Africans must begin seeing public office as opportunity to serve their peoples needs
hence develop Africa. Africans must work to eradicate poverty in the continent. Failing
to accomplish these goals they risk being wiped off by other groups and their lands taken
over by such groups.
Very few persons are now willing to listen to Africans eternal complaint of what other
people did to contribute to Africa’s poverty. It is true that we live in a general system’s
world and what every person does affects all other persons. Each of us affects each of us,
for good or bad. Yes, the West affected us negatively (and positively, if I may add).
Nevertheless, in the real world, folks take charge of their lives and do what they have to
do for their survival. Real adults do not constantly harp on what other people did to
contribute to their problems.
People no longer want to hear about what they did to contribute to Africa’s apparent
shiftlessness; what they want to hear is what Africans themselves are doing to improve
their lives. They want to hear of outstanding leadership in Africa, not thievish leaders in
Africa.
Time has passed for talking about what other people did to Africa but for talking
about what Africans do to help themselves. One is sick and tired of reading about what
Europe did to under-develop Africa, what the Metropolis did to keep the Periphery
backward. Asians, too, were part of the periphery but are doing what they have to do to
extricate themselves from the economic and political strangle hood of the Western
Metropolis. Indeed Asia is increasingly becoming the Metropolis, leaving Africa their
periphery, supplying their economic engine with raw materials.
Failing to turn things around in Africa, Africans risk been wiped off from the surface
of this earth. And if they manage to get themselves wiped off, it would be their choice,
for they had the opportunity to live to serve their peoples needs and, instead, chose to live
to serve only their narcissistic egos. Those who live only for their personal egos die off;
those who live for our collective self live eternally.

*Part of my motivation for writing this essay is to shock Africans into doing what they
have to do to survive. In doing so, I find it necessary to talk as if all Africans are the same
and do the same thing. This is stereotyping Africans. In truth, Africans are individuals
and there are probably some Africans that transcend their little selves and serve the larger
social whole? I apologize to those Africans who realize that a well lived life is one
dedicated to serving social interest and working for public good. If you dedicate your life
to serving society, I salute you. But, if you live to serve your ego, I detest you. I hate
most those who tell us what other people did to contribute to our miserable situation. I
hate socialists and communists, for they tend to tell us that other persons are responsible
for our intolerable situation. I appreciate those who tell us that we are responsible for our
bed and make it as we wish to sleep on.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

December 2, 2006

A QUESTION FOR BIAFRAN WANNABES

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

An hour ago, I was watching an MSNBC news cast, hosted by Carl Tucker. He had as
his guest Mr. Ignatius of the Washington Post. Mr. Ignatius was talking about why the
US cannot afford to choose sides in the current war going on in Iraq. Apparently, some
Americans are suggesting that since the Shiites constitute 60% of Iraq, that the US ought
to just support the Shiites side under the guise of democracy and give them the military
weapons they need to defeat their enemies, Sunnis. Mr. Ignatius said that it is not as easy
as that, for the surrounding countries (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Egypt and much of the
Arab Muslim world, minus Iran) are Sunni Muslims, and would be offended if the US
picked the Shiites to support.

Imagine what could happen if Saudi Arabic and other Arab oil producing countries cut
off oil to the USA? The US economy probably would not do too well. The point is that
making a choice as to who to support is not a sentimental one but one that is done out of
US national interest.

While talking about national interests, Mr. Ignatius talked about the British decision to
support the Federal side during the Nigerian civil war. He said that whereas the British,
as individuals, pitied the suffering of Biafrans that they, had to make a cold blooded
decision on what is in their best interests.

The British, apparently, concluded that it was not in their best interest to support the
Biafrans and, therefore, supported the Gowon Government, and pumped in military
weapons for Gowon to prosecute the war.

Russia also made such a cold hearted decision and supported the Federal government and
pumped in military hardware for Nigeria to destroy Biafra.

This is called cold hearted, cold blooded, unsentimental real politics; in international
politics, nations do what is in their national interests.

Let us assume that Igbos seceded from Nigeria. The Ijaws and Efiks, if rational, probably
would calculate that it is not in their best interests to join the Igbos. Why? Because a
cold, dispassionate analysis of the Igbos shows that they are aggressive and rapacious and
only idiotic Ijaws/Efiks would permit themselves to be dominated by self serving,
rapacious Igbos. This is cold blooded political reality. The Ijaws and Efiks, therefore,
would opt to go separately from whatever misadventure the Igbos embark on.

Should the Ijaws and Efiks not join whatever journey Igbos embark upon, this would
deprive Igbos of revenue from Niger Delta oil.

Other nations, like the Ijaws/Efiks, would dispassionately study the situation and make
decisions that serve their best self interests.

What are in Alaigbo that serves British, Russian, French American (etc) national
interests? Could any of the Biafran wannabes please tell me? Perhaps, I am very dumb
and somebody needs to crack open my empty head and fill it up with useful ideas.

In my opinion, there is nothing in Alaigbo that other nations would consider good enough
for them to make them commit to making Alaigbo Republic succeed.
Nations do not make foreign policy decisions on the basis of feeling (sympathy for
human suffering, and or persecution…please note that during the second world war,
America did not go to war to save the Jews while Hitler killed Jews, but entered the war
when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Hitler, in support of his ally, Japan,
foolishly declared war on America).

Consider: the USA will not go to war in Darfur, Sudan simply because the Arabs are
killing Africans; Darfur has nothing, no oil etc that serves US national interests. Please do
remember that should the US go to war in Darfur that it means her spending billions of
dollars, monthly, to persecute that war, and having her young men die at the war.
Therefore, US decision makers must ask: what is the USA going to get in return for its
expenditure and sacrifices? It would seem fool hardy for young Americans to go and die
in Darfur, not to talk of running up budget deficits (money borrowed from, say China) for
no useful interest for America.

There are some Igbos who believe that they ought to secede from Nigeria. This crowd
agitates for Biafra. (For some reasons, the Igbos that agitate for Biafra seem particularly
uneducated and unable to write in Basic English language; I can think of Odera,
Chukwuma, and Nebuchadnezzar…all virtual illiterates.)

My question is this: why would other nations support Biafra? What is in it for them?
Please bear in mind that willy-nilly you need other nations support to be able to prosecute
the war that would necessarily ensue should Alaigbo seceded from Nigeria. Since this
time around, Igbos do not even have oil (assuming that the Niger Delta does not go along
with Igbos) Igbos would not even have the resources to buy weapons in the black market
(usually with jacked up prices) for weapons.

Could you, Biafran wannabes, please explain (1) the benefits to other nations that would
make them support Biafra, (2) where Biafra would obtain the resources to prosecute the
war of independence and (3) where Biafra would obtain the resources to make her
economically viable.

It is one thing to be sentimental and emotional and another to be hard nosed and
objective.

If Igbos separate from Nigeria, I submit that no European country is going to support
them; America will not support them, either.

This is despite the fact that Igbos are nominally Christians and Europeans are Christians.
Europeans would make decisions to support or not to support on the basis of what serves
their national interests, not some sentimental religious nonsense. Besides, it is really
stretching the matter to call Igbos Christians! Igbos have only been exposed to
Christianity for about one century; therefore, Christianity has not had the time to
permeate their ego unconscious yet; it probably requires, say, five hundred years for a
people’s psyche to be thoroughly converted to a particular religious mode of thinking and
approaching the world. Igbos are still Africans in their outlook on life. They are,
generally speaking, opportunistic and find it easy to cheat and rationalize such amoral
behaviors. Christians are not supposed to do so.

Simply stated, Igbos are not yet Christians in their moral behaviors; they are more likely
to make a man who stole and became rich their chief rather than castigate him. Therefore,
Europeans, who, by the way, understand that Igbos are not yet Christians and are, as
such, prone to thievery, cannot support Igbos on the basis of their alleged Christianity.

All said, then, Europeans probably would not support Igbos if they were to secede from
Nigeria.

In light of this reality, may I ask why we still have some Igbos running around calling for
secession from Nigeria?

I submit that those who ask for Biafra are overly sentimental and not rational persons.
They look at the world from their feelings rather than from their heads.

Some of us look at the world from our heads and can see the cold reality facing us. Thus,
whereas we may not like the fact that in Nigeria thieves govern, we know that the
alternative, Igbo secession, is not readily available. I certainly do not like the rule of the
Abuja thieves but I do not see Alaigbo been permitted to separate from Nigeria.

Assuming that Nigeria breaks apart, implodes and each of the ethnic groups go its way, I
am not sure that this bodes well for Igbos, either. I can see the emergence of Alaigbo as a
country, the emergence of Ijawland, the emergence of Efikland as a country, the
Emergence of Yorubaland, Edoland, Uroboland as countries etc. If that were to be the
case, what economic resources do Igbos have to enable them become an economic
superpower?

Rational persons study situations before they wade into them. For some reasons, Alaigbo
is no longer producing cold headed, rational persons who look at situations they find
themselves in, in a detached, cold, dispassionate, objective and impersonal manner.
Indeed, Alaigbo seems to be producing persons who do not like thinking and, worse, if
they see you as prone to thinking, curse you out. I have been cursed out by virtually most
Igbos here. What is my sin? I insist that Igbos use their heads rather than their hearts in
making tough decisions. The continued existence of Nigeria, a true federation, methinks
serves Igbo best interest.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

2 PM, December 1, 2006

THERE IS NO SPACE TIME AND MATTER NOTHING EXISTS

 (Only the now of God, not our empirical now, exists; Past, present and future do not
exist; all are dream projections; no reincarnation.)

There is no space, time and matter. There is no past, present and future. The empirical
world does not exist. The son of God, all of us, who is one of us, goes to sleep and
forgets union and timelessness and dreams time. He uses his mind to project out a world
of space, time and matter and projects out past, present and future. In it he sees time sees
those who preceded him, his parents, and he is born lives in time and dies in time. But in
fact there is no space and time, his parents etc do not exist, nor does the him that he sees
in the dream exist. Nothing exists (only unified spirit exists). He projects all people out
and they project all people out. He can choose to withdraw his own projection and not see
the world but those who still want to see the world would see it even though it does not
exist. He sees people in bodies doing all kinds of things to him, he projected them out
and they projected themselves out and projected him out. He does what they do and they
do what he does. It is a hilarious world, all done from the delusion of wanting to make
separation and ego seem real, absurd.

The personality disordered persons out there such as Carolyn (Adaoma) is acting engaged
in her infantile attention seeking histrionic behaviors and wanting to be right and
acknowledged as right and others wrong all in an effort to make her ego seem to exist
when it does not exist. The schizophrenic, manic etc are trying to make their separated
egos seem to exist when they do not exist. They do not want to return to union and loose
their egos so asking them to let go of their egos and return to unified self is scary for
them. Concentrate on giving up your own ego and return to unified spirit and then talk
about the phenomenon from experience and leave it for the psychotic etc to decide when
they want to let go of their ego and separation and return to unified spirit; you cannot do
it for them..

Nigerian thieves are trying to make their ego seem real via their thieving behavior. In
their childish games they steal and think that they are now rich and therefore important
and exist when in fact they do not even exist. It is there own game, their own efforts to
seem to exist. Of course t5hey do not exist so their thieving games are not a moral issue,
just their game. The White folks they are thieving from are also egos that use their own
ego tricks to make themselves to seem to exist as important selves when they do not even
exist.

Eating food is used to make one seem to exist (as body hence ego). If you stopped eating
(fasting) for thirty days you would loose awareness of body and become aware of unified
spirit (which you do not want to experience for it scares you, you think that in it you die
and get lost, when in it you are found as your real self)

Reincarnation does not exist for it presupposes past, present and future. The dream is
taking place right now. If you choose to believe that you have had other dream times,
make past real for you, so it would seem real to you so you would seem to have had past
lives. But the fact is that you have not had past or present ego lives. ACIM is correct in
stating that reincarnation does not exist except in so far that the individual wants to
believe in it so as to make the idea of spirit acceptable to him.

THE ETERNAL PRESENT, NOW OF GOD

God always live in the now. While living in the present a part of God seem to go to sleep
and dream. In his dream all that we see in the world is taking place. There is no past,
present and past (in the manner we understand them), no space and time, no matter. Only
mind exists and that mind wishes separation and that wish produced space, time and
matter, past, present and past, all non existent, illusions. But in the here and now the
world seems real to us and space, time and matter, past, present and future seem real. In
our world accidents are real and we evolved gradually in matter but in God none of these
has taken place and mind produced them (determined them, no accident).

INU NA MGBE

The Igbo has the concept of mgbe. Here a person is placed inside a house and does not
leave it and go outside to play; he is just fed food and fattened. As It were, I have been in
mgbe and do nothing but thinking and fatten my ideas. It is now time to go out to the
world with those ideas. No more idealistic thinking. (Separating from the world to do
ones own idealistic thinking, live in fantasy, play god)? There is time for everything
under the sun.

ARE AFRICANS A REMORSELESS AND SHAMELESS PEOPLE?

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Africans live in abject poverty. All over the world, Africans are looked at in a
negative manner: they are seen as unintelligent and as prone to criminal activities.
The African situation and negative perception of Africans ought to make Africans
resolve to do something to alleviate the lot of their people. But no, many Africans do not
seem motivated to help their people. African leaders, for example, seem to seek public
office, not because of what they want to do for their people but because of what they
want to get from their people. They seem motivated to become very important men, VIPs
and to steal from the public treasury. They seem not to care about doing what helps their
people.
This situation makes one wonder whether Africans have shame at all? Don’t these
people feel embarrassed by their unenviable situation? One would think that they would
be ashamed to show their faces in the public and instead quietly work hard to improve
their lot.
Some of them, in fact, do not take responsibility for their people’s misery. They
blame other people for it. They are always blaming the West for their situation. In their
view, it is Europeans who enslaved them; they ignore their role in selling their own
people; it is Europeans who structured the world economy in such a manner that Africa
remains a plantation economy producing raw materials to feed the factories of Europe;
Europeans control world commodity prices thus keeping Africans poor. It is Europeans
who are responsible for Africans poverty many Africans tell themselves; it is never their
responsibility that their houses have fallen down.
Africans, in the past, sold their brothers and sisters into slavery and do not feel guilty
and remorse for that crime against their own people! In the present, they pocket money
that could have been used in developing Africa and do not feel an iota of bad conscience,
no moral qualms for such wrong doing. Are these people amoral predators or human
beings? What exactly are Africans, human beings or animals? Animals are amoral;
human beings are supposed to be moral and to care for the suffering of their fellow
human beings.

Some Africans, especially the so-called socialists’ ones, attempt to make Europeans
feel guilty for Africans poverty; feeling guilty, Europeans give African leaders monetary
aids to help their people.
African leaders and bureaucrats redirect the financial aids from the West to their
personal pockets and nothing is done to alleviate African people’s poverty. Indeed, if the
world health community gives African leaders money to help their diseases ridden
people, such money would be redirected into the pockets of these so-called African
leaders. If medications are given to treat the sick of Africa, such medications would, in
the main, be sold on the streets and the leaders would pocket the money rather than use
the medications to heal their sick people.
(The West is reaching surfeit of guilty feeling and, sooner or later, would no longer
feel guilty for the suffering of Africans. Other people can only feel so much guilt for a
people who refuse to do the right things for themselves. If Africans aim at manipulating
Western guilt to get the West to help them, they can only manipulate other peoples guilt
feeling so much; after a while, people catch on to what you are doing and since you
refuse to help your people, they would ignore you and your people. The rest of the world
would, sooner or later, abandon Africans to their fate; leave them to die off, if that is what
they want to do. And they would not be the first or only group of human beings to
become extinct.)

While engaging in apparent antisocial behaviors, African leaders do not seem to feel
guilty and remorseful their behaviors.
These people’s apparent insensitivity to their people’s fate and their tendency to
antisocial behaviors makes one ask: don’t Africans feel ashamed of their existential
status, their poverty and seeming shiftlessness? If they do not feel shame at their
miserable condition, are we dealing with a different breed of humanity?

We need to ask this seeming unsympathetic question and find out the answer, for if it
is true that Africans do not feel guilty, remorseful and shame, then there is nothing we
can do to alleviate Africans poverty. Throwing all the money in the world at Africans
would not help them help themselves, for such money would only be stolen and misused
by remorseless thieves calling themselves African leaders.
 How can these people, the few rich Africans, steel their hearts so that they can have
“pleasure” while the rest of their people live in unimaginable poverty? Amazing!
To me, one should not be happy unless those around one are happy; one should be
working for improving the unhappy lot of humanity.

The mental health profession (psychology, psychiatry) believes that some human
beings are motivated by desire for admiration from other people, seek attention and use
other human beings to obtain their selfish goals. These people are considered personality
disordered, they have narcissistic and or antisocial personality disorder(s).
Whereas they seem mentally healthy and are able to hold down regular jobs, they are
such that those around them sense that they are exploitative and do not care for them.
The antisocial personality (aka sociopath, psychopath), apparently does not feel
guilt, does not feel remorseful, does not feel shame and does not feel anxious; he is
apparently motivated to exploit other people. The antisocial personality, in fact, enjoys
hurting hurt other people. Some of them do kill other people and derive perverted sense
of happiness from their warped behaviors. Antisocial personalities are responsible for
most of the criminal activities that take place in most societies; some of them are in and
out of jails and prisons.
These people without moral qualms, who do not feel shame and remorse,
unfortunately, tend to make a go of it in our world. In our world sensitive persons who
are preoccupied with morality, with doing what is right often end up poor. Those who
could care less about morality and pay superficial attention to law and indeed manipulate
it tend to amass wealth and attain high social positions.
The person with a false self that wants to be liked by other people and as a result does
all the right things and is afraid of doing bad things lest other people hate and reject him
is less likely to do what our brutal world requires for people to do to become rich. On the
other hand, the person who does not give a damn for morality is more likely to do what it
takes for him to become wealthy (including exploiting, even killing other persons).
Predatory animals tend to have more territories to live off than timid animals. Simply
stated, in our world it is generally the tough minded that tend to more material things and
power. (Europeans were able to conquer the world largely because of their politically
amoral behaviors; they tend to see non Europeans as peoples whose property is to be
taken by force.)
Both the narcissistic and antisocial personality disordered persons have a sense of
entitlement; they believe that society owes them a living, that if other people do not give
them what they need to have to survive that they are entitled to take it from them; they do
not feel bad from so doing.
The narcissistic and or antisocial personality is a taker and not a giver; he expects to
get from other people but does not expect to give to other people. He wants to be rich and
be admired by society while doing nothing that benefits society hence earning its
admiration.
These people are more like animals than human beings. True human beings tend to
intuitively appreciate the suffering that suffuses the human condition, recognize that most
people live in physical and or psychological pain and resolve to do their best to reduce
that pain.
 True human beings tend to have compassion for their fellow human beings.
Narcissists and sociopaths do not have compassion and sympathy for their fellow human
beings. They know about human suffering all right, but instead of been motivated to
alleviate it, want to exploit it.

Whereas the normal person feels anxious and fearful when he does something wrong,
the antisocial personality does not feel anxious; in fact, he is thrilled and excited by the
antisocial and cruel behaviors. He derives a sense of power from outwitting people and
talking what they worked hard for.

Are Africans mostly narcissistic and antisocial personalities hence do not feel guilty,
remorse and anxiety from engaging in inappropriate social behaviors? And if so, do we
need to write them off and do not expect Africa to be anything but a poor house?
These are very critical questions that we must answer, for the inability of Africans do
anything right by their people is becoming unacceptable. Few people are now willing to
listen to the usual rationalizations and excuses given for Africans inability to do anything
right. The real question many people are beginning to ask is whether Africans are born as
they are, not able to do the right things?
Are Africans like the rest of humanity, creatures that feel bad when they step on
other peoples toes, and feel shame when they do not do something to help their fellow
human beings?
We need to answer these questions and stop sweeping ugly facts about Africans under
the rug. It is time we found out whether Africans are capable of moral behavior.
To be honest, one is tired of hearing about corruption in Africa, what one now
wants to hear is behaviors that show social interest and commitment to the welfare of the
entire African community.

• END OF NEGATIVE VIEW OF AFRICANS; FOR PERSONAL

CONSUMPTION, LEAVE IT OUT OF POST.
• A Nigerian, upon reading some of my articles, retorts that moralists are losers. As
he sees it, bleeding hearted fellows what talk about social good end up poor, while
those who could care less for morality and do what they have to do to make
money, become rich? Look at how much good religion and morality has done
their followers, he said. In the meantime, he steals, cheats and does whatever he
could to make money (and tries to cover his track so that he is not caught and
punished by society). He borrows some of the psychological terms I employ in
my writing and applies them to me without, in fact, understanding what they
mean. For example, he reads my using the term neurotic and he applies it to me.
In his mind he thinks that he is saying something worthwhile. In the meantime, he
exhibits the symptoms of neurosis: feeling inferior, masking his inferiority with
pursuit of fictional superiority, pretending to be important, seeking other people’s
admiration etc. Hearing about a psychological term, instead of trying to
understand what it means and how it possibly applies to one, this brother and
others like him, defensively apply it to others. This is classic projective behavior.
A little education is a dangerous thing, they say.
 • Who is right, moralists or opportunistic pragmatists who do not give a hoot for
morality? Are those who see our world as a dog eat dog place, a place where the
fittest survive and weak die off, role modals or are we supposed to aspire after
morality? I let you decide and upon your decision rest the fate of Africa.
• One of my goals is to shame Africans, assuming that they are capable of feeling
shame, into doing the right thing by their people. If they are not capable of shame,
and will not work for public good, well, then we write them off and leave them to
die.
• As for me, all I can say is that I admire the few Africans who are quietly doing
their best to improve the lot of Africans. I loathe the ostentatious living Africans
who do not give a damn for Africans suffering.
• It is time to let up, to stop focusing on the misbehaviors of Africans and do ones
bit to help Africans. Focusing on the bad, as I have done during this year, even if
true, can be nauseating. Christmas is a time of rebirth and resurrection from death;
a time to leave the old self and be reborn in a new self, a self that serves the world
rather than talk about how rotten the world is. One good trounces a million bad.
One must never fall into the trap of cynicism and merely criticize other people for
not doing well; one must do ones own little bit to improve the situation one finds
ones self in, Africa. It is easy to criticize, to posit a grandiose goal and use it to
evaluate actual people’s behaviors and find them not good enough; what matters
is doing ones best to help real human beings live as well as is possible in a world
that Gautama Buddha correctly judged a place of suffering. One must have
compassion for suffering humanity and dedicate ones life to helping people. Love,
care and that is all that one can do. And, so, with this essay, I end my focus on
what is wrong with Africa and focus on what I can do to improve Africa.

CHRISTMAS: THE BIRTH OF THE CHRIST SELF IN US

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

This is Christmas season. We, therefore, ought to pause and understand what
Christmas means.
Christmas is the time of the rebirth of Christ. Traditionally, the Christian Church
takes this to mean the birth of a Jewish man called Emmanuel Ben Joseph whom the
Greeks called Jesus Christ.
In so far that the Bible is our guide, it would appear that Jesus was born in the spring.
How so? When he was born, it was reported that the Shepherds and their sheep were
about in the pasture; shepherds are not out in the fields in the winter. The Bible also
suggests that “Joshua” was born when his parents went to Jerusalem to be counted, per
the edict of Caesar Augustus. Augustus’ census was done in the spring, not in the winter
(and the year was different, 4 AD, from the year that Jesus was allegedly born, 1 AD).
Some observers claim that the Conquering Christian Church accommodated its
European converts by transforming European pagan winter solstice celebrations into the
time for the birth of Jesus Christ; hence the birth of Jesus was fixed for December 25. (By
the same token, Easter, when Jesus supposedly resurrected from death, is said to be a
transmutation of the time certain pagan tribes worshipped one of their goddess called
Esther.)
In the final analysis, it does not matter when Jesus Christ was born; what matters is
what his birth stands for.
The name Jesus Christ was given to Emmanuel the son of Joseph for what he stood
for. In Greek, Christ means the anointed one, the anointed child of God.
Jesus, in effect, is the son of man who became the anointed child of God, the Christ.
Jesus the son of man, as a result of how he lived his life, was called Jesus the son of God.
Indeed, Jesus himself said it, over and over, again, that he is the son of man who wanted
to become the son of God (upon the death of his ego and body and the rebirth of the
Christ in him).
The story of Jesus is the story of how a son of man became the son of God.
Christ is the son of God as God created him to be. Man, on the other hand, is what
the son of man has become. God created his son, Christ, as part of him and all his other
creation. Christ is the son of God who is as his father created him: unified with his father
and all his brothers.
Clearly, only the non-material can unify; matter separates. Christ is spirit, as God is
spirit. God and Christ are unified, joined and connected.
The son of God, as his father created him, is holy (holy is contraction of whole). God
and his son are the whole of existence (holy).
The son of God is unified with God and all creation. He is in God and God is in him.
Where God ends and his son begin is nowhere. There is no space between God and his
son, Christ. God is in his son, Christ, and his son, Christ, is in God; both share one self
and one mind.
God the father and God the son (Christ) are equal except that God the father created
God the son. The father is the creator of the son and the son is not the creator of his
father. The two could not have created each other. If each created the other there would
have been chaos. There is order in the kingdom of God because God created all his
children.
Other than the fact that God created his son they are equal. God the father and God
the son are equal and the same.
God the father and God the son are eternal, permanent, immortal and changeless.
They have no beginning and no end. They have always been and will always be. There
was no time when both did not exist (time is our earthly category and does not, in fact,
exist in eternity; I am employing the concept of time to make myself understandable, not
because I think that it is real. In spirit there is no space and time).
God the father and God the son are the same age. (Age is another earthly category
and does not exist in fact; I am employing it to make myself understandable.)
How is it that God and his son are of the same age? In creation, God gave all of his
pre-existing self to his son; this means that his son is now as old as all of God, for he
contains all of God.
God is a creator and has always created. If God did not create he would not be God.
If there was a time that God did not have a son, he was not a father, not a creator and not
God, since a son gives one fatherhood, creator-hood and Godhood. Since God to be God
must have a son it follows that he and his son are coexisting.
 God created his son. He created him by extending his one self to his son. God
extended all of himself to his son. His son is given all of God. God is creative and gave
his son his creative capability. The son of God subsequently creates his own sons; he
creates as his father did, by extension, by extending all of himself to his own children; the
son of God gives all of himself to his sons. (An earthly analogy is that parents do give all
of themselves to their children. An earthly father and mother give all their genes and
personality etc to their children.)
The son of God creates his own children and his children create their own children,
ad infinitum. There was no time when creation was/is not taking place.
Creation has no beginning and no end; it is the nature of God to expand himself. God
cannot not expand himself, for, by definition, God is a creator, an extender of itself. (In
earthly analogy, the universe is always expanding. Where is it expanding to? Is there an
already existing place, such as space, where it is expanding to? Physics tells us that the
universe is creating where it is expanding to; that where it is expanding to does not exist,
apriori.)

Creation means God the father creating God the son; God the father extending his
holy self into his holy son and his holy son extends his holy self into his own holy sons
and the later to their own holy sons, ad infinitum.
Creation is taking place at all times. In spirit, in heaven, in eternity, creation is
always taking place. God has created his son, his son has created his own sons and his
sons are creating their own sons. Right now, as we talk, you, a son of God, is in God, in
spirit and you are creating your own sons (in spirit); but you do not know this fact (given
your present false consciousness).

THE FALL OF MAN; THE DESCENT INTO DARKNESS

The first creation is the creation by God of his children. The children of God, as it
were decided to separate from God and go create God and create themselves. In truth,
they cannot separate from their father and from each other. If it was possible for the sons
to separate from the father or the father to separate from his sons, both would cease
existing, both would die out. Existence is maintained by the fact that God and his sons,
the whole and its parts are eternally joined as one whole. Separation is impossible in
reality. (This is so even in the world of matter; for though we see a seeming separated
world, at a deep level, there are super strings that connect everything together; there is no
space between people…science will, in time, prove this fact; all particles are connected
and are in constant communication with each other; every particle knows what every
other particle in the universe is up to, at any time. In fact, the concept of bi-locality is an
illusion, for every particle, atom, is everywhere.)
As it were, the children of God went to sleep and in their sleep dream that they are
separated from their father and from each other. While remaining unified with God and
each other, they are dreaming that they are separated from God and from each other.
The dream of separation is our world. Our world is a dream, an illusion where what
has not happened and what cannot happen in reality is believed to have happened and it
seems to have happened. In our world, we seem separated from God and from each other;
we see space and time between us, we seem to live in body (matter). All these illusions
seem real. They are real because we wish for them to be real.
(Those who have awakened from the dream know that the dream is not real; that we
remain as God created us, unified spirit; as ideas of God, we have not left our source,
God; ideas of do not leave their source. Helen Schucman’s book, A Course in Miracles
teaches similar ideas as are in this essay.)

The will of God is that he is unified with his sons.

Love is what unifies the father and the son and all the sons (love is the glue that
unifies all eternity). The will of God is union and love; union and the affect, love, that
unifies it.
No force in the universe of God can disobey the will of God.
Nevertheless, the children of God can have wishes, fantasies that seem to contravene
the will of God and live it out in dreams, not in reality. In reality the will of God remains
constant. All creation and its creator remain unified (and loving) while we dream that we
are separated (hateful).

THE EGO, HUMAN PERSEONALITY, SELF CONCEPT

In our dreams of separation, we helped each other invent separated self concepts.
The self concept is the ego self, the human personality, the sense of I-ness; the belief that
one is apart from other people. My self concept is that I am separated from other human
beings. I see myself as separated from all creation, as a self housed in flesh, my body.
You are like me. All people on earth have separated self concepts housed in bodies and
live in space and time.
The separated ego self is a false self. In reality, we are unified with all human beings
and with our creator, God.
Each human being has a separated self concept, his personality. The separated self,
the ego, the human personality is a replacement self, a self we individually and
collectively invented for ourselves. The human self concept is a substitute self, a self we
made to substitute for our real self. Our real self is unified self; our false self is separated
self.
(In spirit there is no such thing as individuality or separated self; in spirit, all are
unified, thus what one self did all selves did. Each of us invented his self concept; this
also means that all of us invented the self concept of each of us. The self and other selves
are unified self and work in concert, in tandem. It is in our world of illusions where
separation seems real that one can say: I invented my self concept, my personality and
other people did not help me invent it. In truth, one and other people share one self;
therefore, all selves worked in tandem in shaping each individual’s personality. Because
we all worked together to shape each others personality, we must work together in
reshaping each others personality; my efforts will help you to reshape your personality,
for I am you. I am you which you dissociated from you and denied that I am you and
projected out; as I did the same to you. In truth, we are one and what I do, you do and
what you do, I do. I am writing this essay means that you are writing this essay through
the part of you that you projected out as me; you are reading this essay written by a part
of you that you projected out as me.)
 In the temporal universe (as opposed to the permanent spiritual universe of God) we
are only aware of our separated self concepts, the ego personality. The ego is the dream
self, the dream figure. The ego, in fact, does not exist and is not real, yet it is the only self
that we are currently aware of.
Our greatest fear is the loss of the separated ego self concept; we are afraid of its
demise, for we know that it is not real though we fervently desire it to be real; we know
that it would die (it has never lived and would not die) and we regain the awareness of
our real self, the unified self, the Christ self.

SALVATION, DEATH AND RESURRECTION

God created his son. As it were, his son died when he denied his true self, unified
spirit self, and see himself as separated ego self. The son of God is metaphorically dead;
a person who is not aware of his true self, unified spirit, can be said to be dead (actually,
he is not dead, he is merely sleeping and dreaming that he has a different self, the ego self
housed in body).

REBIRTH

The son of God is reborn when he jettisons his ego self awareness and recovers his
Christ self awareness.
We resurrect from death (attachment to the false, separated ego self) when we let go
of our identification with the separated ego and accept our true self, the holy son of God,
the Christ. Christ self is our true self. Christ is unified spirit; Christ is eternal, permanent,
changeless and all knowing.

THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST TO THE WORLD

The first coming of Christ into being was when his father created him (not when
Emmanuel Ben Joseph was born on earth). When we regain awareness of the Christ self
as our true self, we are born again.
Christ has come to the world a second time when one lets go of ones identification
with the ego self and knows that one is the son of God. The son of God is unified with his
father and all his brothers; he loves at all times. The Christ is always a loving, unified
self; separation and hate cannot enter into the mind of Christ.

THE LAST JUDGEMENT

We performed the first judgment when we decided to separate from God and from
each other. We maintain the world of separation with a judgment to remain separated.
The world we see is maintained by judgment, the decision to see other people as not part
of one (in the case of Africans, to sell their brothers; in the case of whites, the decision to
see blacks as different and buy them and use their labor to improve their ego-based
existence).
 The world came into being through our judgment and is maintained by our continued
judgment to be separated from God and one another. The last judgment is performed
when each of us judges the separated world as an illusion, as unreal and lets it go and
regains the awareness of his unified spirit self, his Christ self.
When is the last judgment? Is it going to take place in the future? In the world of
God there is no past, present and future. In God there is no space, time and matter hence
there can be no past, present and future. In God, spirit, there is only the eternal present. In
God, everything is taking place now.
Each of us will perform his own last judgment with the aid of all of us, Christ, and
the Holy Spirit (with the aid of his real self, not Jesus the person). The world ends for
each individual when he judges against the ego (separation) and for Christ (union). This
will happen, an individual at a time. There has not been a mass awakening of humanity
(to its Christ self) yet. Therefore, the world will last a long time to come, perhaps, billions
of years. The sun and stars will continue to produce energy to maintain our world until all
children of God decide to return home from their journeys without a distance (every
where they go is in themselves). The world would not end until all children of God
individually decide for God (union, love) and against the ego (separation, Hate).

THE HOLY SPIRIT

When the children of God separated from God and each other, their father entered
into their world as the Holy Spirit. That means that there are now three selves: God the
father, God the son (us) and God the Holy Spirit. God the father remains in the state of
oneness, in heaven. God the son appears to have separated from heaven (state of
oneness). God created God the Holy Spirit and as him entered the world his children
invented, our world.
God is spirit and as such the Holy Spirit cannot be seen in bodily form. The Holy
Spirit is in our minds.
As it were there are several selves in our minds. In our mind, in your mind, in my
mind is the unified self, unified mind, God and his son; there is the separated self, the ego
and there is the Holy Spirit.
The function of the Holy Spirit is to teach God’s son (now calling himself the ego,
human beings) that his true self is unified spirit.
God as God, is transcendental, not in this world; God becomes the immanent God, the
Holy Spirit, and as him is in this world. The son of God is in this world as you and I.
Where is the Holy Spirit? It is in you and in me (just as the ego is in you and me). If
you love other people you have behaved as the Holy Spirit; on the other hand, if you hate
other people you have behaved as the ego (for the ego is the spirit of separation; when
you hate a person you separate from him and when you love a person you unify with him
or her). God is love. We have separated from God and separation is hate.
Those identified with the ego are hateful. All of us in the temporal universe are filled
with hate. We do bad things to each other. To regain awareness of our loving nature, we
must forgive those who did bad things to us.
To forgive is to return to love. In the world of separation, where we do bad things to
each other we must forgive each other. The Holy Spirit’s mission is to teach us to forgive
each other, so as to know love, union. Forgiveness is the only means known to return us
to the awareness of love, union. The ego bears grievances against those that wronged it,
the Holy spirit forgives those that do bad things for it knows that all are the sons of God,
sons of love who do bad things only in their dreams of separation, In reality the evildoer
and the good doer remain as God created them, unified with God, holy, sinless, guiltless
and innocent. In heaven, in God, in union we are always sinless. But in separation we are
sinful. But separation has not occurred, is a mere dream, an illusion hence what is done
in the world of separation has not been done. (When you awaken from the dream, you
will find that Hitler is in heaven as Mother Teresa is. This does not mean that you should
go ahead and do bad things.)

When the individual decides that the world is an illusion and lets it go and returns to
living as the Christ (is a loving person), he is born again, he is reborn as Christ; Christ has
come into his life, Christ has come to the world. (He is now a teacher of God teaching
other people about their real self, the Christ.)

Christmas is the time of Christ; it is when Christ is reborn in each of us (in our
awareness). Christmas means that ones old ego self is permitted to die and a new self, the
unified self, the Christ self, the self that is as God created him: a self unified with his
father and all his brothers, a loving and forgiving self, is reborn in ones awareness.
Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Christ in each of us (in practical terms, in the
mind of those who have accepted their Sonship in God and their brotherhood to all
human beings).

SALVATION, REDEMPTION AND DELIVERANCE FROM PERSONALITY

Those in the state of separation, all of us on earth, are literally living in hell; in pain
and suffer; we are in a jail house of our own making. Separation imprisons God’s
children (those who love and forgive have soft labor; those who hate have hard labor).
To see ones self as separated from God and other people, to have a separated self
concept, to have a human personality is to be in hell, in prison; to suffer pain.
Those in hell, those who suffer need emancipation from their suffering. What would
liberate them from pain? It is when they give up their human personalities, their self
concepts. Salvation is the relinquishment of the human personality.
Salvation is the liberation from the individual’s personality. Personality is the specific
manner an individual makes his self different from other people and from God. The ego
or personality is the individual’s choice. (Personality is the individual’s habitual pattern
of behavior; it is influenced by his inherited biological constitution and social
experiences. Personality is very difficult to change. But it can be changed, usually as a
result of conversion to a different mode of thinking, to the type of thinking been
articulated in this essay. Secular psychotherapy has poor record of changing human
personality.)
Each of us is born with a different biological constitution and unique social
experiences that led him to invent a unique and different personality. Personality
differentiates people. (Those who in spirit are the same, in human personalities are
different.)
 On earth, each of us believes that he is his personality, his ego and body, and
defends it. In doing so, he identifies with a false self. He is now in hell, the ego hell, the
world. He has adapted to hell.
Liberation is liberation from the individual’s personality, his ego. This means that one
must examine ones self concept and eventually come to see it as an illusion and give it up
and embrace ones real self, still conceptual, the Christ unified self.
The Christ is a loving, caring self, a self that is committed to serving all other selves,
for all selves are the children of God, hence are extensions of ones self. When this is
done, ones ego, personality has changed and one now lives in relative peace and
happiness.
Since our world is a dream, one is now having a happy dream. One is still dreaming,
for one is not yet awakened. If one is completely awakened one would not be separated,
would not be in body, form, and would only know ones self as unified spirit self (which
offers total peace and joy, bliss).
The loving person, metaphorically, is at the gate of heaven but is not yet in heaven, for
in heaven there is no separation, no living in forms. Heaven is formless unified spirit. In
heaven God and his children share one self and one mind.
We are always in heaven but dream ourselves as apart from heaven; those that dream
with forgiveness and love are closer to heaven, to their real self. Heaven is not a place but
a state of mind, a pattern of thinking and behaving that sees all people as one and loves
them all.

JESUS CHRIST AS THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE EGO TO CHRIST; THE

TRANSFORMATION OF HATE BY FORGIVENESS INTO TO LOVE.

We can indulge in academic debate as to whether there was a historical Jewish man
called Jesus Christ or not. This is a waste of time. What is salient is what the concept of
Jesus Christ represents. Jesus Christ represents a human being, an ego, a separated self
who recognized the falsity of separated self and knew that we are always unified. He
realized that the ego is false and that union is true. He accepts union with all creation and
its creator.
If all are unified what is the right attitude to all? Love is the right attitude, for love
gives us joy. Jesus loved all human beings and their creator, God.
In the world of separation and hate, love is meaningless unless we forgive those who
wronged us. Thus, Jesus forgave those who wronged him. His entire teaching is summed
up in one word, forgiveness.
Jesus is the symbolic manifestation of the gospel of the Holy Spirit, forgiveness. He
forgave all, including those who crucified his earthly body and ego (for they did nothing
to him, since his ego and body are mere dream figures, destroying them is destroying
nothing).
If you are a student of the Christian Bible, you must have recognized that Jesus taught
forgiveness as the means to becoming aware of the love that is always there and
everywhere. We always live in the presence of love while dreaming ourselves unloved.
What is the sum of the laws and prophecies, Jesus asked? Love. Love God; Love
all people as you love yourself. Forgive your enemy. If someone slaps you on one cheek
turn the other cheek for him to slap, too.
 And a man was on his way to worship God and remembered that his neighbor
wronged him. Jesus said that he must first go home and forgive his wrong doer, for until
he does so, God will hear his prayer, answer it, but he would not receive God’s answers.
God knows us and what we need and have already answered our request to him before we
even say them. But they are waiting for us to forgive one another, hence love one
another, before we receive those gifts of God. How many times should we forgive those
who wronged us: seventy times seventy times, that is, infinitely.
And they brought a woman caught in adultery to him and asked him what should be
done to her. The laws of the ego, Mosaic Law stipulates that she be punished, stoned to
death. But the laws of the Holy Spirit require for her to be forgiven. So, Jesus said, let
him who has not sinned be the first to cast the first stone at her. If you are not a sinner
judge another person as sinful. We are all sinful and therefore live in glass houses and
should not throw stones.
They came to arrest him while he was praying in the garden of Gethsemane and
Peter, the egotist, tried to defend Jesus by using his sword to smote one of the policemen
that came to arrest him. Jesus looked at him, as one looks at a child who has been told
what to do, forgive, and he does not do it. We are to forgive those who arrest and
unjustly punish us, so Jesus forgave those who came to arrest him. Indeed, he healed the
man that Peter cut. Finally, they crucified him and instead of being angry at them he
forgive them, for they destroyed his ego and body but not his real self, a unified self that
is eternal.
Simply stated, the New Testament, the new dispensation brought to the world by the
Holy Spirit, via Jesus Christ, is forgiveness as the path to the resurrection of love in our
minds. The New Testament, forgiveness, love, replaces the Old Testament, hate, bearing
grievance, an eye for an eye, punishment. The Old Testament is the laws of the ego; the
New Testament is the laws of Christ. Jesus (love) replaced Moses (hate).
The era we live in is the era of forgiveness and love, the Christ era. (Ramakrishna
called it the Kaliyuga of Bhakta, that is, approaching God as Love; not necessarily as
avidya, illusion, the Jnana yoga approach of seeing the world as an illusion, as nothing
and negating it, so as to experience the impersonal and formless God; we are to see God
in form, in the form of a human being, Jesus Christ and treat every person with love.)
“Father, forgive them for they know what they are doing”, Jesus prayed for those who
crucified him. If they knew what they were doing they would only love, for love is what
gives them peace and joy. They are ignorant and forgetful and insane and so do that
which gives them pain, hate----bearing grievances.

Jesus is the ego, a human being who recognized the saliency of love (via forgiveness)
and forgave all, and in so doing recognized his true self, the unified spirit, the Christ. He
regained awareness of his Sonship in God, his Christhood.
Jesus the man, Jesus the ego died and Christ the son of God is resurrected in his
awareness. He overcame the ego and its world.
Jesus, as well as other Christ enlightened children of God, such as Gautama Buddha,
mediate between heaven and earth because he understands the earth and know heaven
and understand the categories of both worlds. He has reconciled the world to heaven,
separation to union (via forgiveness).
 He can act as your guide in your effort to return to God. Though he is spirit and no
longer in form, you can talk to him as you talk to human beings. Ask him to guide you to
love. He would teach you to forgive at all times.
Indeed, even though he is no longer in body, in form, if you wish to see him in form,
he would appear to you in physical form and you would see him. He would appear to you
in the form you imagine him to be. If you are a Catholic he would appear to you as a
reverend father.
All forms are illusions but whatever form, whatever illusion would make sense to
you, Jesus would appear to you as. In truth he is formless spirit and is in all of us. He is in
our right mind, in the part of our minds where the Holy Spirit is, for he is the Holy Spirit
concretized.

Of course, you do not have to believe in Jesus Christ to follow the theology been
explicated here. You can believe in Buddha, Krishna and other mythical human beings
who have transcended their egos and unified with God. Nevertheless, I choose to employ
Christian categories in illustrating my world view.

CHOICE OF WHAT HAPPENS TO US

A part of the Jesus story that most people are not aware of is the fact that Jesus
chose what happened to him. He did not see himself as a victim unto whom others did
bad things to (as his apostles, those attached to the ego, saw him…the ego sees itself as a
victim of others injustice, so as to justify anger at them and attack them).
Jesus said that if the temple (of his body) was destroyed that he would rebuild it in
three days. That is, if killed that he would resurrect from death. His mission was to come
to the world, get killed and resurrect from death, so as to show the people that death is not
final. He chose what he went through. He chose to be killed by other people, to be killed
and die and resurrect from death. If he had not died he would not have resurrected from
death and we would not today be talking about his birth.
If what the children of God do not want to experience can happen to them then
there is no justice in this world. If only accident rules this world, there is no fairness in
life. If there is no justice in this world then there is no God.
God can only exist in this world if there is justice in this world; it is only if what
God’s children want to experience, no matter how hard, happens to them can we say that
there is justice in this world.
In our world we would like to believe that we are innocent victims unto whom bad
things happen to and that justifies anger in us and enables us to rationalize attack on other
people, doing evil things to them and, they, in turn, defend themselves and counter attack
us, do bad things to us; this way, the world of attack and defense continues.
The ego (the human personality) attacks others and forgets that it did so, but sees only
other egos attack on it and feels unjustifiably attacked and angry at them, so as to fight
back. Such behavior maintains the world of attack and defense we live in and guarantees
the disturbance of peace in all of us.

Jesus recognized that nothing could happen to the son of God without him wanting
to experience it. His father, God, does not prevent his son from wanting to experience
whatever he wants to experience (after all, his father is in him and experiences whatever
his son chooses to experience). Jesus chose death and was crucified by his brothers. But
he did not feel angry at those who crucified his ego and body for he realized why he
chose to be crucified: to teach the world that resurrection is possible.
We are born in this world as egos housed in bodies and that is our real death.
Identification with ego and body is our death, metaphorical death for in truth we are not
born as separated selves and do not live in bodies and do not die. Resurrection lies in
choosing to let go of ones identification with ego and its body and identify with Christ
and its light body.
Jesus overlooked what other people did to his ego and body and in doing so
overcame the ego and its world (which are maintained by fear, anger, grievances and
defense). He resurrected in Christ.

What the story of Jesus teaches is that each of us chose what is happening to him.
(Each of us contains all of us so the individual’s choice is the choice of all individuals for
him.)
It is very difficult for us to accept that we chose our lives but such is the truth.
However, the choice was not made in this world (which does not exist) but was made
before one was born on earth.

The individual, particularly those suffering poverty, physical and psychological pain
tend to see themselves as innocent victims of others evil actions towards them. They are
not. They chose what they experience and did so for a reason and can understand the
reason and choose forgiveness so as to return to love, peace and happiness, as Jesus did.
Instead of talking globally let us use specific examples to illustrate our message.
Consider Africans. In the contemporary world, Africans, in the main, live in the poorest
continent; they suffer materially and psychologically. Those of them living in the West
are generally discriminated against and are often unemployed and are poor and suffer.
They look around and see those who seem to be doing bad things to them, white folks,
and feel angry at them. They defend themselves against white folks, against those they
believe caused their problems (that enslaved their ancestors and now discriminate against
them). They feel angry and justified in attacking white folks. They see themselves as
victims of whites and justify their attack on whites.
In turn, white folks, being human beings, those who identify with separated selves,
egos housed in bodies, do not see themselves as oppressors and do not see themselves as
abusing black folks. Perceiving themselves attacked by black folks, white folks defend
themselves against black folks (send them to jails and prisons). Thus, black and white
war on each other and their living in conflict.
Both of these people, all of us, must realize what Jesus did: that we chose to undergo
whatever journey we are undergoing in this world. We must accept responsibility for our
fate and destiny. Once we accept it, then we turn to God (the immanent God, the Holy
Spirit), as Jesus did, to teach us what to do to extricate ourselves from the world we
made.
The Holy Spirit teaches us to forgive what we did and what other people did in the
world. The Holy Spirit has only one lesson: forgive the children of God what they did in
a dream of separation, for what is done in a dream state has not been done. The world is
not real and what we do in it has not been done. We are all still innocent, guiltless and
holy. Forgive each of us and forgive yourself what we do here. Do so and you are no
longer angry at what the world did to you. Forgive and you become peaceful and happy.
Forgive and you become a Christ.
So you are an African and you see yourself suffering unemployment and poverty, the
usual lot of Africans in our extant world. So you went to all that school and come to find
out that the world discriminates against you and you are poor and suffer. You feel that
whites are responsible for your bad situation and feel angry at them and want to attack
them.
As noted, if you attack them, being egos, they would feel pain and to reduce their
pain would counter attack you. See, on September 11, 2006, Muslim Arabs attacked
white Americans and white Americans counter attacked them; both are now engrossed in
a no-win war in Iraq. In ego land conflict and war is perpetual, no one can win ego wars.
The only rational option is to forgive our attackers. When we forgive others their
attack on us we simultaneously forgive us our attack on them. The USA should have
forgiven Arab Muslims attack on September 11, 2001. But as egos, they felt like victims
and counter attacked, forgetting their previous attacks on Arabs.

If you are an African and find yourself suffering, please do what Jesus did:
remember that before you were born on earth you chose to separate from God and chose
how you are going to experience your separation. You chose to sleep and how you are
going to dream. You chose where you are born, into what family and race you are born
into (those you chose, simultaneously chose you).You chose every thing; repeat
everything, that happens to you.
Accidents are not possible in God’s universe. Each of us chose what his life is all
about. We chose it to feel like victims of others attack, to feel pain from others attacks on
us, to feel fear and pain and justify attacking other people. If we counter attack others we
have defended ourselves and thereby perpetuate our stay in this world, in hell, in prison.

The alternative choice is to choose with Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit. Choose
forgiveness.
If already born on earth, you cannot change the material circumstances of your life.
But you can choose how you interpret the circumstances of your life. You can choose to
think about the world differently. Instead of choosing victim-hood, now choose strength;
instead of choosing ego, now choose Christ. Choose to be guided by the Holy Spirit and
the spirit of Christ, which is forgiveness and love.
When you accept responsibility for choosing every thing, good and bad, that has
happened to you in your life, and do not blame other people for your fate, you then
analyze why your life turned out the way it did. It turned out as it did because you chose
ego and the body that houses it. You chose to be separated from God and from your real
unified self, the Christ self, and be a separated ego self.
Now choose differently, choose again; choose your real self, choose Christ.

Let go of your choice to be a separated self, an ego and choose unified self. Choose
forgiveness. Do not bear grievances against any one who did you wrong. Forgive those
you believe crucified you, as Jesus did.
 Forgive all white people (for doing what you saw them do to you in your dream of
separation…Remember that all are unified and that white people are parts of you). When
you forgive whites and are no longer angry at them and do not attack them, you
experience peace and happiness, the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
When you no longer have bitterness against any one, no longer see yourself as a
victim others do bad things to, and love all people, no matter what they did to you, you
are reborn as the Christ self, the son of God who is as his father created him, innocent,
sinless, guiltless and peaceful and happy.

Please note that the theology been taught in this essay is either/or. You do not have
the choice to combine it with the philosophy of the ego, science.
Science sees us as victims of other people and of the world. On the other hand, the
Holy Spirit’s gospel sees us as the makers of our world.
Science and religion are different. Be a scientist to adapt to the realities of this but
practice religion to overcome the world.

You must forgive all people whatever you think that they did to you. You must not
be angry at other people for whatever you see them do to you. You must not be
defensive at the wrongs you see others do.
You asked those people who wronged you to do the wrong they did to you, just as
Jesus asked his brothers to crucify him, so that he resurrect from death (ego living). You
asked people to attack and crucify you so that you would resurrect from death.
Let me personalize. When I finally left college campuses and entered real America. I
learnt about racism. I could not get the type of jobs that I thought that I deserved. I felt
discriminated against by whites. I felt angry. I bore grievances against whites.
At some point I recognized that I chose what happened to me. For one thing, when I
completed my formal schooling in America, I could have returned to Africa etc. The fact
that I chose to stay in America meant that I wanted to experience racism. There must be a
reason why I chose to be discriminated against, to suffer poverty. I wanted to experience
the fate of black folk’s world wide.
I realized that I am responsible for what my life has turned out to be. Nobody else
did this to me, I did this to me, I brought my suffering unto myself (and since all people
are joined to me, what I did to me other people did to me).

The alternative to my choice is the choice given to us by the God in the temporal
universe, the Holy Spirit.
Thus, I consciously chose to forgive white folks what they did to blacks and what
they did to me.
Since what they (whites, other people) did to me, I chose to have them do to me; I
did those things to me. I discriminated against me through those of my brothers I
dissociated from and projected out and called whites. In forgiving them, I forgive me. To
forgive others is to forgive ones self.
When I forgave others I forgave me. This brought me inner peace and happiness.
This made me aware of my real self, the Christ self.
The experience of Christhood, unity with God and all creation is ineffable and cannot
be described in words, so I will not go there. The salient point is that you must accept
total responsibility for all things that happen to you, for that is what you wanted to
experience. What your life is is how you wanted to be crucified, so that you would
resurrect in your real self, Christ self (a self of peace and joy).

When the individual is going through tough times, to tell him that he is responsible
for his difficulties seems like blaming the victim and seems insensitive. Yet we must
remember the example of Jesus Christ. Jesus seemed like an innocent lamb who was
crucified by other people. But he did not see himself as a victim; he did not see himself as
persecuted and was not angry and paranoid. He forgave those who destroyed his ego and
body (for what could be destroyed is nothing, anyway and is not worth defending). In
forgiving those who destroyed his ego and body, Jesus reawakened to the awareness of
his unified self, the Christ self.
You are like Jesus. You have chosen attack and persecution (separation is attack on
oneness, splitting it into fragments and having other fragments, other people, attack you
so that you defend you and in defense make the world of separation seem real to you).
Now become a true Christian: forgive the world what you made it do to you and what
you did to it. In forgiving the world you feel peace and happiness, for you have
embraced your true self, the Christ self.

Permit the Christ to be reborn in you this Christmas. This means: forgive all people.
Be happy and peaceful no matter the tough times you are going through.
When every thing appears bleak and every avenue seem to close for you, please do
not contemplate suicide. Killing yourself is not the solution. This world is not left by
death but by forgiveness.
If you killed yourself you would return to this world until you learn how to leave the
world through forgiveness, through ignoring the ego and its world.
I know that life can be tough but so we made it to seem. Just learn to take things in
stride. Let go of your ego of pride and accept the ego of humility. Ask the Holy Spirit to
guide you.

You cannot choose differently from the material aspects of your life but you can
choose how you look at them. If you are black, you have already chosen to be black.
The Holy Spirit can show you how to extricate yourself from the hell that is this
world. Forgive all and you experience love, peace and happiness.

Seek you first the kingdom of heaven and all else would be given you. Forgiveness is
the door through which we return to the kingdom of heaven (return to Love, to God).
Forgive all and learn peace and happiness.
Forgive the world and then do what you have aptitude and interest in doing and what
has social value. Work for the common good and you would, in fact, make a good living
in this world. Doors that were hitherto closed to you would be opened the moment you
forgive all God’s children.
To forgive is to love. Forgive and you have loved and are loved by all those you
have forgiven.
To forgive is to give people peace and happiness and they would return the favor to
you and give you peace and happiness.
 Forgiveness doesn’t mean condoning evil. If others insist on attack, you do not
encourage them to attack; you teach them that love is better than attack. For example,
Arab Muslim terrorists insist on attacks. See what hate has made: see the Arab world,
particularly Iraq. Iraq is now a Hobbessian jungle where all are at war with all: Sunni kill
Shiite and vice versa.
Instead, teach these people true religion, forgiveness and love. No one is justified in
attacking and killing another child of God. God is love and those who serve him are
loving people.
Terrorists are not serving God; they are serving the ego (whom the world calls Satan,
Devil). Teach these unloving persons love, not through attack but by standing up to them
and telling them to love, undeterred by their terrorist attempts to intimidate you and
control you through intimidation. Love and in love there is no fear.
Love is the absence of fear, as fear is the absence of love. It is the ego, the separated
self that experiences fear. The son of God who knows himself as spirit does not give in to
fear, for he knows that he is safe in Christ (love).
Teach only love for that is who you are. If you are attacked do not defend your ego
and body, but be defenseless. That is, forgive the attackers while insisting that they
practice love.
At any rate, no one can attack you unless you want to experience attack. (Americans
wanted to experience attack and Muslin terrorists attacked them to give them the
opportunity to experience what they want to experience; in strife the ego feels alive; in
attack Americans feel alive defending their egos and bodies).
No terrorist would attack you unless you want to experience terrorism, for there are
no accidents in God’s universe.
In the mean time, concentrate on doing what your present situation calls for you to
do, for it is the situation you want to be in. See the bad things that happen to you as your
choice and forgive them. In forgiving your seeming detractors, you love them. In
forgiving the world you are beginning to live out of your Christ self.

CHRISTMAS IS THE REBIRTH OF OUR TRUE SELF, THE CHRIST SELF

Christmas is the birth of Christ, as symbolized by the birth of Jesus Christ; the
transformation of the separated ego into the unified ego, the ego of love (aka
Ramakrishna…see M, The Gospel of Ramakrishna).
So, what are we celebrating during this Christmas season? We are celebrating the
season when we voluntarily let our ego die and permit our Christ self to be reborn in our
consciousness. That transformation of the human ego is symbolized by the mythical
story of Jesus Christ.
As you celebrate Christmas, by all means buy gifts for your loved ones etc, but do
remember the meaning of Christmas: the transformation of the human ego to Christ like
ego; hate to love via forgiveness. Live as Jesus Christ did; forgive all human beings so as
to live in love with all human beings.
 When we forgive all, bear no grievances against any child of God, we return to love.
In love, union (where we always are while dreaming separation) we experience peace and
happiness.
Christmas is the season of peace and happiness, for the prince of peace and
happiness (forgiveness, love, Jesus Christ) is reborn in the world. Christ has come to the
world a second time.
Man has left his sinful conception as an ego and embraced his immaculate
conception as the unified self, a sinlessness birth in union. (Immaculate Conception does
not mean been born by a virgin. What Immaculate Conception means is the fact that our
true self, the Christ is created immaculately, without sin, and is pure. To be pure is to
love, to be in union with God. We were created by love, God, hence in union with love
and are love and pure. I am talking about the birth of our real self, not the self that are
currently aware of, the ego. The ego was conceived in unholy thinking, unholy mind and
given birth in sin. Our birth in separation is birth in sin. Separation from God and from
each other is the meaning of sin; conversely, union with God and with each other is
sinlessness.
By all means buy material things for those around you; have merriment, but do
remember what Christmas is all about: times to forget the ego separated self and
remember the Christ unified spirit self, and return to loving all human beings by
forgiving all of them.

CONCLUSION

In this world each of us (first) identified with the separated ego self housed in
bodies, the human personality and self concept. The ego is a pattern of thinking and
behaving, one that sees the self as separate from others and as having different interests
from others. The ego mind defends its interests and in doing so attack other people and
they, in turn, attack it and the result is conflict in this world.
The (second) part of our living in this world is to change our mind, to change our
pattern of thinking. Now we see all people as parts of us and forgive what we see them do
to us. (What we did to us through seeming them.) In forgiveness we experience love.
Forgiveness gives this world peace. The forgiving person gives himself peace and
gives other people peace. A forgiving person is a bringer of peace to a world at war with
itself. A bringer of peace to the world is like Jesus Christ, the prince of peace (prince of
peace means prince of forgiveness, prince of love).
You are in the world. You have the personality that adapts to the world, the ego
separated self. You do think and behave like the ego. Now change your mind about your
identity. See you as a unified self, as unified with all being and forgive all and love all.
Give up identification with the ego, normal ego or idealistic ego (idealistic as in
neurosis). Let go of the ego and let Christ be in your life.
The aim of psychotherapy is to change your pattern of thinking and behaving, from
ego (hate, unforgiving) to Christ (forgiving and loving).
As long as we are in bodies, forms, we are still in the world of illusion. The most that
we can do in the illusory world is to think and behave like Christ, forgiving and loving. If
we persist in doing so, we are a changed people.
 When we forgive and love at all times, one day we experience formlessness, what
folks all mystical union with God, cosmic consciousness, Samadhi, Satori, Nirvana etc.
We experience the disappearance of our separated self and unitive oneness with all
creation and its creator. This experience is ineffable and cannot be explained in words
and concepts, in speech. Besides, it is too far removed from the average person that it is a
waste of time to talk about it.
To experience heaven (oneness) one must meet its condition: love. Forgiveness is a
way to meet the condition of heaven. Forgive at all times and you have purified your
thinking, from ego-based thinking to Christ thinking. This is about the most the average
person can attain, now. Do so and experience the rebirth of Christ in you and experience
peace and happiness. Let Christ thinking, forgiveness and love, be your pattern of
thinking from this Christmas on for the rest of your living in ego-land, our world. Such
thinking brings us to the gate of heaven. There we have happy dreams and from there on
heaven’s gate opens and we return to the awareness that we are joined with our creator
and with each other. We return to perpetual peace and happiness, bliss.

* This essay is my Christmas Greeting Card to you. Have a Merry Christmas and a
Happy New Year. Cheers, for the good news (the birth of Christ, our true self) is
reawakened in our consciousness, in our thinking. The son of God has not died; for he is
not a separated ego self; he is the Christ and, as the Christ, lives eternally with his father
and all his brothers. I wrote this essay in metaphoric language. It is not literally true.
However, the essence of what I wrote represents the truth. The truth itself is beyond
words, for words are illusions; words and concepts are adjustments to the world of
separation, space, time and matter. Separation and differences are false, so words and
concepts that adapt to it are also false. Truth, union, love is beyond words. In truth, in
union, in love all are one shared self and there is no other person that is not one’s self for
one to talk to; no you and I, no subject and object, no seer and seen. In God all is silence,
peace and happiness. In this paper, I am talking to you, which assumes that we are
separated selves; this means that I am still in ego state. I am disturbing my peace and
your peace. In God there is no speech. But neither you nor I are in God (we are always in
God but do not have that awareness); we are in ego state (state of real self forgetfulness,
forgetfulness of unified state); a state where words and concepts are necessary, so I
employed concepts and words to try to explicate Christmas for you. Have fun. Enjoy, for
Christmas is the season of merriment for our true self, Christ, has dawned on our
awareness, we are no longer in the state of ignorance, total ego identification. Rejoice,
rejoice for the son of God, the prodigal son who left his father and home and went on a
journey to nowhere (for wherever he goes he goes in God, a journey without distance, for
he and his father are everywhere) has finally returned home, recognized his true self, the
Christ self. It is clear that I see Christ (my term is unified spirit self) as our true self. The
Catholic Church and most traditional Christian Churches, on the other hand, see Jesus
Christ as the only Christ, not us. One may then ask: if Christ is the name of our shared
Sonship in God, as I said, how come the Catholic Church reserved the status of Christ
and son of God for Jesus only? Another question is: if Jesus is the only son of God, the
only Christ, then who is our father? Who created us? The Devil? The Church’s founding
fathers, folks like St Paul, Origen, Tertullian, St Augustine, St Athanasius etc (especially
under the pressure of Emperor Constantine, 325 AD Nicene Council, to come up with a
unifying mythology to hold his crumbling empire together) probably believed that since
no other human being seems able to do what the mythical Jesus Christ allegedly did, heal
the sick and resurrect the dead (such as Lazarus) that he must be unique. If you consider
yourself the Christ, and as having the same status as Jesus, well, could you do what Jesus
supposedly did, could you heal the sick and walk on water? If the answer is no, it would
seem a delusion (partial psychosis; full psychosis has both delusion and hallucination) for
you to place yourself on the same footing with Jesus! Okay. The next question is: did
Jesus, in fact, heal the sick and resurrect the dead from death? Where is the corroborating
evidence? Josephus few lines on him? If Jesus, for example, resurrected Lazarus from
death, it follows that he is no longer the first person to overcome death, as Christian
theology holds, for Lazarus beat him to it? What a bummer. Here is what I think. I think
that Jesus Christ is a composite figure unto whom religious folks projected their ideas and
wishes of what a son of God should be like. There probably was a wonderful Jewish
Rabbi who preached the gospel of forgiveness and love, like no other rabbi did. The Jesus
story of miracle working was probably made up, make belief yearn Unless, of course, by
miracle we mean the changing of our minds, the changing of our thinking and behavior:
from perceiving ourselves as separated egos with different interests to perceiving
ourselves as unified egos with common interests. The change of self conception, from
separated to unified, if it leads to working for the common good is the only miracle that
my reasoning is able to accept. My reason also accepts that our world, the world of
separation, has an opposite, the world of union. This essay essentially talked about how
to attain the world of union: forgiveness and love.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

December 12, 2006

THE DESIRE TO BE WHAT YOU ARE NOT IS THE ROOT OF LACK OF PEACE
AND UNHAPPINESS

All human unhappiness and lack of peace is rooted in the individual’s desire to become
something that he is not, something that he erroneously believes that if he becomes he
would be a better person. That is, he rejects himself as he is and desires to become a
different self, a concept self, a self that his thinking, mind, tells him that if he becomes he
is a better self (and a self that cannot ever be attained, a futile self that merely makes him
unhappy and disturbs his inner peace). The desire to become somebody else actually
makes the human body stressed and tense (psychological pain) and when the individual
no longer feels any urge to become something that he is not he relaxes his body and self.
Relaxation is rooted in not desiring to become what one is not, in accepting the original
self (which is spirit, provided one does not aim at defining spirit in conceptual terms).
Neurosis is nothing but rejection of the real self and the desire to become something else,
a different self perceived to be better than the self as it is. Psychosis is a more grand
effort to become something else. Normalcy is minor desire to become something else. All
our living on planet earth is desire to become something else. The ego is desire to become
something that we are not. In truth we are unified spirit and we desire to become
separated selves housed in bodies and make our ego, body based world work as perfect as
the perfection we lived in unified spirit. We desired separation from unified spirit for in
unified spirit though we have peace and happiness we did not have individuality and
private power; the ego gives us the opportunity to seem to have private power (in a
dream) and we choose body to make us feel vulnerable so as to feel powerless and seek
power.

As long as the individual desires to be what he is not, he will be unhappy. The cure for all
human unhappiness is to let go of the wish to be what one is not and become what one in
fact is. In the here and now be your ego and physical self. Be a man or if a woman be a
woman, be white or black, whichever one you are and do not wish to be another. Just be
as you are, now. After that you would have an intellectual quest to find out whether all
you, we are is ego and body. This leads to religion and metaphysics. In truth we are
unified spirit (part of God). We felt powerless in union for it lacked individuality, though
it gave us peace and happiness, and sought the seeming power of separated individuality
hence invented space, time and matter and seem to live in them. We live in the illusion of
separation. Accept union in spirit and love all. But in the here and now do your best to
get along with all people. Relax and stop questing to be who you are not. Stop trying to
be perfect ego for that is not going to happen. Just be who you are, accept you in an
unconditional perfect manner. If you do you would relax and know peace and happiness,
relative peace and happiness for perfect peace and happiness can only exist in spirit, not
in matter, body, space and time.

IDEALISM VERSUS FANTASY

Idealism is the wish for things to be better than they currently are. Obviously, it is a
useful behavior for everything could always be improved. However, Idealism, like every
thing, could degenerate into fantasy. In fantasy the individual merely wishes for ideals
but does not pay attention to the real world; he forgets things as they are and lives in the
world of wishful imagination. Idealism could lead to the improvement of this world
whereas fantasy leads to escape from this world. Fantasy is an ego defense mechanism
that enables the weak and failed person to fancy himself successful in his imagination
while ignoring doing what he has to do in the real world to become successful.

BIOLOGY DETERMINES ESCAPE INTO FANTASY, NOT A MORAL ISSUE

It must be said that the escape into fantasy is rooted in the individual’s reality. Such
person’s invariably inherited weak bodies that are not able to cope with the exigencies of
this world and find it necessary to use their minds o seem to cope. If you are unable to
play soccer you can imagine yourself doing so, indeed being the best player. The
individual is who he is by virtue of his inherited body and social experiences. You should
not put him down for escaping into fantasy for he had to do so give his weak and pained
body. What science should do is study the biological system that escapes into fantasy and
learns about it and then teaches the person, via psychotherapy, not to escape into fantasy,
secular of religious, but deal with this world on its own terms. Escape is not a solution of
problems, but merely ignoring them. Only science and technology solves problems.
Those who escape into fantasy will always do so but they can come to understand what
they are doing and redirect it to productive imagination, say, writing works of fiction
where they consciously know that they are engaged in fantasy but not take it as true or
possible of being true.

SEASONAL AFFECTIVE DISORDER (DEPRESSION)

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Generally, our people deny their mental health issues. As they see it, mental health
issues are for other people and not for them. Indeed, when they do think of mental health
issues, at all, they tend to think of the psychoses (schizophrenia, mania, delusion, organic
mental disorders etc) and are not aware that there are all sorts of mental disorders.
The American Psychiatric Association estimates that one out of every four persons
(25% of the population) has some treatable mental disorders, ranging from severe
psychoses (where there are delusions and hallucinations) to the various personality
disorders, to anxiety disorders, dissociative disorders etc.
Nigerians and Africans are human beings and, as such, have the same mental health
issues that other people have. Alas, Nigerians, been largely poor and ignorant of these
issues, do not even know when they have mental health issues!
Worse, when they hear you use a mental health term, they turn around and use it on
you (such as the clown in New York who read my employing the term neurotic and
called me a neurotic, while presenting the classical symptoms of neurosis: parading his
titles to make him seem important in other peoples eyes, because, deep down, he feels
unimportant and needs externalities to make him seem like he is somebody…inferiority,
compensatory fictional superiority feeling, and allied vanity, pride and infantile
narcissistic behaviors…see Alfred Adler, The Neurotic Constitution. New York: Ayer,
1987).

This season is called the season for affective disorders (seasonal affective disorders).
The affective disorders are mania and depression (etc).
Briefly, in mania (there are many levels of it, including cylothymia) the individual
feels euphoric, excited and happy for no good reason, feels like a person who won
millions in the lotto, exhibits poor judgment (sometimes he writes bad checks for money
he does not have in the bank), and generally engages in stupid behaviors. Onset is
characterized by lack of sleeping and hypo-manic activities (such as thinking that he has
ideas that could save the world; engages in grandiose projects to make him become rich;
may go for a week or more without sleep etc). The individual is often found laughing to
himself. Mania, aka bipolar affective disorder, affects about 1% of the population,
worldwide. Generally, blacks score high on the mania scale in the Minnesota Multiphasic
Personality Inventory, MMPI (the primary personality test in the USA).
The other arm of affective disorders is depression. Clinical depression, aka major
depression, is characterized by a feeling that life is not worth living; a lack of interest in
the activities of daily living, such as, lack of interests in work, sports, friendship, food,
personal grooming, sex, fatigue, tiredness, not wanting to get up from bed in the morning,
and wanting to be left alone and to die etc). The depressed person is generally
pessimistic (whereas the manic is the polar opposite, wildly optimistic) and feels that his
life is worthless and valueless. He often contemplates suicide as a way out of what he
sees as a bleak situation. Self mutilation is common. There are levels of depression, from
major depression (just described) to milder forms of it, such as dysthymia, adjustment
disorder with depressed emotions (situational depression felt when one loses ones job,
loses ones significant others, is poor, does not have the money to buy expensive
Christmas gifts for ones significant others etc).
Mania is treated with medications (Lithium, Depakote, Tegretol etc…the neuro-
scientific assumption is that in mania the brain, Central Nervous System, CNS, produces
excess of certain excitatory neurotransmitters, such as norepinephrine and these
medications help to reduce their level in the brain hence reduce the excited behavior of
the manic person’s nerves); depression is treated with anti depression medications (these
days, with the various serotonin reuptake blockers, such Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil etc…the
assumption is that the depressed person is not retaining sufficient serotonin, a
neurotransmitter, in the appropriate nerve receptors and these medications block the re-
absorption of serotonin hence retains much of it in the brain…it takes about two weeks to
do so …and alleviates depression).
These days, the general assumption is that whereas these affective disorders may
have other causal factors (?) that they are, by and large, correlated with certain observable
changes in brain chemistry. Therefore, they are amenable to biochemical and
pharmacological treatment.
If you have any of these affective disorders, please go see your medical doctor and
get appropriate treatment.

During Christmas season, generally, folks visit with their loved ones. Those who do
not have close friends to be with tend to feel depressed. There tends to be high levels of
depression during the Christmas session.
Nigerians, on the surface, appear gregarious and sociable and would seem to have
friends hence are not lonely. But when you come close to them and get to know them as
they are, not as they pretend to be, you recognize how lonely some of them are. Their
loquaciousness is, among other things, an attempt to be close to people so as to reduce
their underlying existential aloneness. We are all born alone, live alone and will die
alone. Friends are surface thing. I talked to a Nigerian, a chap that calls me every abusive
name under the sun, right here in Seattle, and, thereafter, he was calling me day and
night. That told me that he feels lonely and is mildly depressed (and do not know it).
For our present purposes, many of our people are mildly depressed and do not even
know it. Mild depression does not require medical intervention but psychotherapeutic
intervention (talking to a therapist or to any perceptive person helps one cope with the
exigencies of living in an impersonal world where nobody cares for us…as the Igbos say:
“Onye ma mkpa me?” who knows my problems, no body. We are all alone in the whole
wide universe and know it; to be a human being is to suffer existential and
phenomenological depression. Ultimately, we shall all die and this is depressing thought,
hence what Ernst Becker called Denial of Death. What a bummer is this life of ours.

During the winter months, as it were, the sun takes a vacation. (In Seattle, for
example, it is cloudy most of the time and, generally, dark by 5PM and remains dark until
almost 9AM). What this means is that folks are living in near darkness, most of the time.
Darkness is depressing. It literally does something to the body (may be help reduce
the level of serotonin in the body?). Whatever, what is empirical is that during the winter
month’s folks tend to feel more depressed than they do during the sunny months?
The term seasonal affective disorder applies to the depression folks feel during the
absent sunshine winter months.

If you experience seasonal affective disorder please see your physician for
treatment. Do not delude yourself with bravado and tell yourself that you are immune
from depression and other affective disorders. These mental disorders occur in Nigerians
and Africans, as they occur in other people. It just so happens that they are mostly
untreated in Nigerians. The last time I was in Nigeria and had the opportunity to observe
folks in my village, I was shocked at how many of them had mental disorders, especially
personality disorders. Boy, many of the women in the village had borderline and or
histrionic personality disorders. They were almost always quarreling with other people
and threatening to kill themselves if they were not the centers of attention.
For our present purposes, this is the season of affective disorders. I have briefly
described the symptoms. Depression is often masked by over eating, over drinking of
alcohol, doing drugs, and over sexing. Observe yourself, your spouse and children and if
any of them seem to have these issues, please go get them the help they need.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

December 14, 2006

THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF NIGERIA?

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

It seems that we are now witnessing the beginning of the end of Nigeria! Since
Obasanjo and his handlers have decided that they should crown another northerner as
Obasanjo’s hair apparent, they have probably rang the bell for the dismissal of the school
for scandal called Nigeria.
 Obasanjo’s behavior is baffling. It is baffling because statesmen are supposed to be
political realists who take the political lay of the land into consideration before making
decisions; folks who do not make decisions on sentimental and or idealistic grounds.
In the context of Nigeria, political realism demands that Nigerian statesmen, through
projective identification (human beings can project themselves to other people and
imagine how they would feel about any particular situation) imagine how Igbos would
feel if continually they are shut out of executive power in Nigeria. Igbos would feel like
orphans in the Nigerian polity. Orphanage is not exactly the preferred state for any one.
Nigeria gained independence in 1960, thanks to the struggle of Nigerian nationalists
(who were predominantly Igbos). But since then no Igbo has had the opportunity to be
the executive ruler of Nigeria. (Through a fluke, Major General Johnson Thomas
Umunna Aguiyi Ironsi, who had not sought power, was the interim leader of Nigeria for
seven months in 1966, before, as Major Yakubu Gowon said: power returned to northern
hands, where, apparently, he believed, it belongs.) Beyond the Ironsi interregnum, no
Igbo has had the opportunity to rule Nigeria.
(To pacify Igbos, the Hausa-Yoruba rulers of Nigeria throw some crumbs to Igbos,
such as, make an Igbo the deputy of the designated ruler: Abubakar Tafawa Belewa-
Nnandi Azikiwe; Shehu Shagari- Alex Ekwueme; Umaru Yar’Adua- Peter Odili.
Apparently, in their minds, Igbos can only play second fiddle rather than the key role. I
say, shame on those Igbos who undertake to accept and perform such humiliating roles
for their African colonial masters.)

All indications are that there are three, more or less, equal tribes in Nigeria: Hausa 24
million, Yoruba 22 million, Igbo 20 million. (Source: World Almanac.)
Given this population parity, it would seem that common sense dictates that all
efforts are made to accommodate the feelings of these three dominant groups. Peace in
the polity would seem to depend on how the three dominant groups are treated.
Political realism dictates that rulers take into consideration their opponents feelings,
assuming that they desire peace and stability in their country.
Apparently, the Hausa and Yoruba, the rulers of Nigeria, consider the Igbos a
defeated people and do not take Igbo feelings into consideration in making political
judgments in Nigeria.
I believe that this is an egregious mistake. If come next year, another Hausa president
becomes the leader of Nigeria, we might as well kiss Nigeria good bye. Nigeria probably
cannot survive another eight years of continued marginalization of the Igbos.

Those of us who have struggled to avoid joining the Biafra crowd will certainly see
no hope in Nigeria and will make decisions that serve our best interests. We cannot
afford to be second class citizens forever and ever, particularly if those who are appointed
to rule us are most likely to accomplish nothing significant for Nigeria.
If one may ask: what good is it to Nigeria if Igbos are continually alienated from the
country? Common sense (which, apparently, is a scarce commodity among the rulers of
Nigeria) suggests that all people in a polity be made to feel a part of that polity.
Allowing people to participate in all facets of national life is one way to get them to feel
that they have investments in the polity’s welfare. Those who feel invested in a polity
work for its survival.
 On the other hand, if you systematically give a group of people the impression that
they do not belong to the polity and are, at best, tolerated as second class citizens, what
exactly do you expect them to do? Laugh and smile and go along with you? Do you
expect them to be satisfied because you treated them as dogs?
Do slave masters expect slaves to be happy and contented? Or do they invest in
police (and other so-called law enforcement agencies) to control the restive enslaved
masses? And how long can they control people? Forever?
Human nature disposes people to seek freedom and self governance. Like birds,
human beings may be caged for a while but the moment they have opportunity they fly
away to freedom.
Nigeria is increasingly becoming like a cage for Igbos. Nigeria is increasingly a
place where Igbos freedom is curtailed.
It seems that Igbos are relegated to second class status in Nigeria. Black on black
colonialism, that is, Hausa-Yoruba domination of Igbos, would not be tolerated for long,
for it is unnatural to subjugate a group of human beings to other groups’ perpetual rule.

Africans fought to free themselves from European rule; they did not fight to have
themselves ruled by other African groups. Hausa-Yoruba colonialism must be fought as
we fought white colonialism.

In the best of circumstances, those swept under the rug, as is obviously the case of
Igbos, fume with anger and bid their time until they come to their own. All things being
equal, Igbos feel not respected in Nigeria and are angry at their continued powerlessness
in Nigeria.
Of course, a few Igbo opportunists, the unprincipled types, pitch their tent with the
unscrupulous rulers of Nigeria, hoping to pickup the crumbs of bread that fall from the
table as the children of the table (Hausas and Yorubas) eat. These pragmatic,
opportunistic Igbos are found in the ranks of the PDP kleptocrats. These clowns are there
for their pockets, and not necessarily because they love Nigeria. If some powerful
personality makes a move to remove Alaigbo from Nigeria, these Igbo quislings, being
amoral and shameless, would redirect their loyalty to Alaigbo.
The point is that to say that some Igbos are participating in the present keptocracy of
Abuja is to deceive ones self, for those Igbos are essentially criminals participating in the
looting of Niger Delta oil revenue.

In several essays, I pointed out that many contemporary Igbos have a siege mentality.
They feel besieged and persecuted by their fellow Nigerians. They feel constantly under
attack by Nigerians. Whereas this social paranoia has some individual causation, yet it
has social causes.
Those who feel attacked, unless they are totally delusional, tend to be attacked. The
Jews, another group with a siege mentality, were empirically discriminated by Europeans.
Whereas, Jewish arrogance played a role in their neighbors hating them, the fact remains
that their neighbors attacked and killed six million of them during the Second World
War. By the same token, Igbo arrogance plays some role in their hated status, but the fact
remains that they are attacked, marginalized and frequently killed by other Nigerians.
 The self and other selves are in a dynamic relationship where both affect each other.
You cannot say that what happens to the individual is only his fault or the faults of
others; it is the fault of both parties. In a General system, everything affects everything;
all persons adjust to the behavior (stimuli from) of other people.
The observable functional paranoia found in many Igbos is partly a product of other
Nigerians unwelcoming attitude towards them. (Many African Americans exhibit
functional paranoia; this is generally attributed to racial discrimination, to white
America’s rejection of their human hood.) Been shut out of the corridors of power in
Nigeria plays a role in Igbos apparent sense of been unwelcome in Nigeria.

Some of the alienated Igbos work for what they call Biafra. They tend to look with
nostalgia at what they believe is the shining moment of their people’s self governance
during the Biafra episode. They yearn for an opportunity to return to that brief moment of
glory under the sun. They make Emeka Ojukwu, the Biafran leader, a heroic figure and
worship him.
This crowd is largely composed of unsophisticated Igbos. So far, they have not
attracted the Igbo intelligentsia. But the continued maltreatment of Igbos is surely going
to make the goals of the Biafra crowd attractive to the Igbo middle class.
As the educated class of Igbos join the clarion call of the Biafrans for secession,
Nigeria will certainly suffer. It does not bode well for the continued existence of Nigeria
for the rulers of Nigeria to continue to be insensitive to Igbos desire to be associated with
ruling their country.
Obasanja and his handlers insensitivity to Igbo pride is beginning to irritate those of
us who hitherto pitched our fate with Nigeria’s survival.

If it has not occurred to Obasanjo and his handlers that they are alienating Igbos by
returning power to the north, rather than to the south east, I believe that they have sowed
the seed for the destruction of Nigeria.
Since Obasanjo has decided to have another northerner replace him, as he had one
replace him in 1979, and subsequently relegated Nigeria to mediocrity, the time has come
to reconsider the Igbos continued association with Nigeria.
Even though ones particular predilection is for larger political entities, not small
nation states, but if the price of staying in Nigeria is the continued marginalization of the
Igbos, I say that it is time for this forced marriage to end.
Nigeria was always an artificial marriage, a contrived social construct with none of
the ingredients that make for nationhood. The various peoples of Nigeria do not have
similar outlooks on life; the various groups have cultures that are as dissimilar as night
and day. Perhaps, it is about time for each of these disparate groups to go their separate
ways and develop according to their nature.
Perhaps, it is time the Igbos are no longer weighed down by uncompetitive peoples
who do not seem to realize that what makes for progress is the unfettered competition for
the allocation of resources, and the most competitive, the fittest allowed to win, but share
their wealth with the weakest…hence mixed capitalist-socialist economy.
Perhaps, nature and nature’s God does not intend for the people of Nigeria to stay
together in the same polity? I speak for me: if the Hausa and Yoruba scheme to foist
another incompetent northerner on Nigeria, hence relegating Nigeria to another era of
political and economic irrelevance, I am in support of Igbos leaving Nigeria. It is time to
take the idea of The Republic of ALAIGBO seriously, and stop fooling ourselves into
thinking that a moribund colonial construct can be put on a proper footing to make a
difference in the world?

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

December 17, 2006

HAUSA-IJAW MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE

The PDP choice of Umaru Yar’Adua and Goodluck Ebele Jonathan seem a well
calculated Machiavellian behavior. The North has the political power, as it desires, and
the Ijaws, those who have the oil wealth that keeps Nigeria going, are rewarded with
semblance of political relevance.
Conjoin the powers that be with the owners of wealth seem to be the idea.
Thereafter, all should be well in the land, these devilish folks imagine. But what they
have not taken into consideration is what matters most in politics: sentiments. Men fight
when they feel insulted, over and over. The Igbos have been insulted. There is simply no
two ways of going about it. When men’s pride is injured they do something to assuage it.
Despite the sad happenstance whereby some Igbos sell their souls for pittance from the
governors of Nigeria, fall all over themselves to given insignificant jobs at Abuja, there
are still some men of integrity in Alaigbo. Obasanjo and his cohorts are about to find out
that there are still real Igbos around. Their gravy train is about to be overturned.
Obasanjo is a bigger fool than I had thought him to be. If he imagined that what he
had wrought would bring peace to Nigeria, he is lacking in statecraft. Apparently, his
idea of peace is Carthaginian peace for the Igbos.
If these folks assume that the Igbos would accept to forever play dead in Nigeria,
they are in for the shock of their lives.
If come next year a northerner is rigged into power, Igbos must start leave Nigeria. It
is as simple as that. Their continued stay in Nigeria is a luxury that they cannot afford.
So far, the Biafra crowd is mostly constituted of the Igbo underclass, but if Nigeria
takes the turn to where Obasanjo wants it to go, it is time that real Igbos came forward
and worked for the good of all Igbos.
In the meantime, we shall wait and see how next year’s election is conducted. If it is
rigged so as to place another incompetent northerner in power, I say Nigeria ought to be
thrown into the dustbin of history, where it belongs.
Nigeria has been given enough time to do the right thing and if it chooses to
continue doing the wrong thing, we must say goodbye to it, and, from our own quarters,
make a fresh start for political and economic excellence.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

THE OHANEZE CHARADE

 The word Ohaneze has three syllables: Oha (public/people) na (is at ) eze (chief).
Thus, one can safely assume that the multi-syllabus word means the people are the chief?
(But literally, chieftaincy lies with the people?).
I have always wondered why “the apex Igbo organization” (as this group calls itself)
chose the name Ohanaze, and what they stand for?
Does the name imply that the Igbo people made this group their chiefs, their spokes
persons? And since they were not elected by the Igbos, does the name mean that they are
the self selected chiefs of the Igbos, the self anointed spokes persons of the Igbos?

Let us dispense with platitudes and say it, like it is. Ohaneze is a crowd of self
serving sycophants who seek ways to present themselves to the rulers that are in Nigeria
as the spokes persons of the Igbos. Their hidden agenda, however, is personal: they use
the Ohaneze organization as a means of seeking sinecure (jobs) at Abuja. This
organization is a self serving crowd of folks who are seeking handouts from the rulers of
Nigeria. They do not represent Igbos.
If you believe that they do represent Igbos, could you kindly tell me what it is they
have done for Igbos?
Occasionally, they make bleeping noises about pertinent issues exercising people’s
minds, and in a self satisfied manner think that some one is talking their noises seriously.
You are not taken seriously if you are known to be a time server. Somehow, it came
to pass that contemporary Igbos are known as folks who only seek individual glory, who
in so far that they organize at all, use such organizations to further the ambitions of the
individual members. They each want to seem a very important person and parade around
with empty titles (such as chiefs) and bogus academic degrees (internet bought
doctorates) and in their minds think that such infantile masquerading makes them
important in other people’s eyes.
Actually, such behaviors make them clownish and every person knows it. Certainly,
the Nigerian rulers know it; they know that this generation of Igbos are easily bought.
Throw some silly political posts to them and they run around pretending that they matter
in Nigeria’s political set up. He, she is the minister of Finance, Information etc and that is
supposed to have made him or her a very important person and the rest of us are
supposed to bow down to him or her and sing their praises. Their egos desire for glory is
satisfied.
But real people ask: what is it that you are doing for the people with the office you
occupy? So you want to be the governor, what is it that you want to accomplish through
that office? Steal money and appear the most important person in your small pond? Such
questions are seldom asked by vain glorious folks who think that fame and vicarious
power is all that matters in life.
Occasionally, the Ohaneze gangs gathers and makes chirping noises and in their
minds believe that they are taken seriously by other Nigerians, after all they are the “apex
Igbo organization”. They are laughable. They have gotten their rewards, such as there is,
the satisfaction of their craving for worthless glory.
Over the years all we hear about Ohaneze is that they had meetings and elected
officers and sent delegations to Abuja to hobnob with the powers that be, but not what
they actually accomplished. Worse, they took to dressing like their Northern masters
(wear Arab derived agbada). They permit northern cultural imperialism over them, just so
that they seem to be important men. What a bunch of clown!

Obasanjo and the powers that be in Nigeria have made a calculated political decision
to give power to the North and buy the allegiance of the oil producing areas, the Ijaw, by
making an Ijaw man the vice president. This decision was made without consulting the
“apex Igbo organization”.
Simply put, Ohaneze is an irrelevant outfit. It is a self admiring society that has no
political relevance. And Nigerians know it! Nigerians also know that Igbos are driven by
desire for personal admiration, so every once in a while they pay them some attention
and, as Andy Warhol said, give them their fifteen minutes of fame. (Obasanjo consents to
have photo Ops. with the forever Ohaneze delegation to his office, and these folks cut
out the newspaper write up where the president was with them and place them in
prominent places for all to see how they schmooze with the powerful hence are
powerful.)

So Ohaneze said that the next president of Nigeria should come from the South East,
eh? What clout is in that pronouncement? None at all. This is sad, very sad.
It is really said that our people have made themselves the laughing stock of other
Nigerians by preferring the pursuit of individual glory to working for social interests. If
you are perceived to be invested only in what is good for you, as is the universal
perception of Igbos, no one takes you seriously. You are seen as a sub-human being, for a
true human being is a person who subjugates his personal ego to serving the public good.
This is what it has come to: we have made ourselves politically irrelevant people,
so much so that the powers that be in Nigeria do not even bother wondering how their
singular insulting actions would affect us. They take us for granted and assume that we
would fume for a day but would get over it if thrown a few positions and money.
(The idiot, Ken Nnamani, never tires of telling us that he is the number three man in
Nigeria. Last week the empty vessel was talking how he could not do another job, for
they are beneath what he had done. He referred to ex Governor Jerry Brown of
California, who, after having occupied a gubernatorial position, the governor of a state
with a GDP that equals all of black Africa minus South Africa, is now the mayor of a
college town, Berkeley. Nnamani was wondering why Mr. Brown descended low to take
a lower position! There you have it. Nnamani is an unmitigated fool. The concept of
public service is not in his vocabulary. It never occurs to him that it is not the position
that matters but what you do for the people. Jerry Brown works for the people and is not
bothered by appearances of power or lack of it. Last year, Nnamani visited California to
address an Igbo organization. He made comments about the poor quality of the Hotel
where the meeting was held. That comment made it crystal clear that this man is a
coxcomb and is only interested in appearance of power and glory not the substance of
power. Nnamani represents every thing that is wrong with Igbo politics: pursuit of ego,
not public service.)
Ohaneze demands that the next president of Nigeria be from the South East. Who
listens to clowns? Let us move on.
I have never, in my life, seen a people who have made themselves politically
irrelevant! They did so because they insist on nurturing their apparent character
weakness: seeking the narcissistic goal of admiration for the individual self. The
perennial wisdom of mankind is that children seek ego goals whereas adults subjugate
their egos to social service.
We shall yet grow up and eliminate our desire for personal glory and instead serve
society. In the meantime, let us forget Ohaneze and its empty demands.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

IDEALISM IS RESPONSIBLE FOR FAILURE, REALISM FOR SUCCESS

I correctly assessed my body as weak and pained and did not like it. I saw my body
as worthless and valueless. This is a correct assessment.
I then rejected my valueless and worthless body and sought an ideal alternative to it.
The ideal alternative is purely mental, a mental construct, a self reached by my mind,
thinking and therefore non existent in the physical world. I embarked on seeking the
realization of the idealized self, a perfect physical self, a powerful self, an ideal self in
everything that is not ideal in the real world. I insist only on accepting my ideal self. I
present that ideal self to other people and try to behave as if I am it (hence pretended self
and behavior) and wanted people to accept that contrived self). This process was in place
by age six, certainly by age eight when other kids perceived it and used to say: Thomas
huru ekwuru nwa dede kpoya mgbaradu, omara kwnana ogara ikpo ya akpo. Literally,
Thomas saw a certain type of insect and called it by a different name, if he had known
would he have called it it so? The kids perceived me as all serious and intent on
becoming ideal, powerful and tried to make fun of me by reminding me that I did not
know it all as exhibited by not even knowing the name of a certain insect in our world.
They were asking me to let down my ego and be like them, relax and be ordinary not the
imagined all important self I pretended to be.)
I insisted on becoming my ideal, superior all powerful self; I also wanted other people
to deny their real self and pretend to be ideal selves. In effect I was asking me and other
people to become insane since pursuit of ideals is pursuit of an illusion and delusion
hence insanity.
In pursuing the ideal self I was making myself and other people tense and lacking in
peace and happiness.

The question is: is it necessary to seek to become an ideal, superior self? True the real
self of all human beings are nothing. People are meat for worms and that is all there is to
them. Acceptance of their nothingness is reason (sanity and peace and happiness). Desire
for an importance self for the self and for others is neurosis (and psychosis). A worth that
is based on delusion obviously is no worth, is not real and is not attainable.
Religion is rooted in the awareness of the nothingness of the self and desire to make
that worthless self seem worthwhile by positing a god heaven that people seem to go to
when their meaty body rots. Religion like neurosis and psychosis are delusions for they
seek the impossible.
 The only thing that is real is science. This means accepting the self as it is: nothing,
worthless and valueless and studying it on its own terms, and improving it, so as to live
as nicely as is possible without the illusion that it is possible to become ideal and make
nothingness something important. No escape into imaginary ideal self or imaginary
religious world.
Even when I try not to be idealistic in my thinking, I am idealistic. Because of this
perpetual idealism, I am always judging me, judging other people and judging every
thing. I use my idealistic values to judge the real world and necessarily find them not
good enough. No idealism no judgment of the self and people.

CAN THERE BE THINKING IF THERE IS NO IDEALISM? UNDERSTANDING AS

IN SCIENCE YES

Much of what we call thinking is really judging things with the imaginary ideals of the
ego ideal. Thus much thinking is a product of idealism. Realistic thinking is scientific, it
studies what is, understands it and is non judgmental and calm. Idealistic thinking is
speculative, realistic thinking understands and does not take flights into fantasy.

THERAPY IS ACCEPTING THE NOTHING SELF

The best psychotherapy there is, is to look the self in the mirror and know it to be nothing
and accept it on that terms and do not seek ideals; and to accept other people on that
terms and not expect them to be ideals before they are accepted. It is perfectly rational to
see the body for what it is: vulnerable, weak and pained and reject it; what is not
reasonable is to seek a mental ideal of it an ideal that cannot exist in the real world.

WHITHER NIGERIA’S EDUCATION SYSTEM?

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

In a brief campaign video, the presidential candidate, Pat Utomi, lamented what, to
him, is the collapsed Nigeria’s public education system. He talked about how in the
1950s and 1960s Nigeria’s public education system was ranked among the best in the
world. Nigerians with secondary school education were admitted to the best universities
of the world and at them did very well. But today, Nigeria’s university graduates, he
said, are not considered material for admission by Western universities. Nigeria’s
secondary school graduates are not even as good as elementary school graduates in the
1950s. Mr. Utomi regretted this sad state of affair and said that he has a plan to fix it.
Whereas, he did not particularly elaborate on how he is going to go about fixing this
fallen educational system, he said that he would make Nigeria’s education functional and
pay teachers well, so as to attract and retain the best minds in the educational sector.
It is refreshing to hear a Nigerian politician seeking public office clearly enunciate
why he is seeking office and present an agenda of what he plans to accomplish if elected.
One wish Pat Utomi good luck and wished that other candidates for public office in
Nigeria followed his admirable example and articulated what they plan to do for
Nigerians if elected to office.

Let us, briefly, focus on the Nigerian education system and what could be done
about it. Clearly, we have an educational problem in our hands and a problem calls for
solution. The manner of the solution makes a world of difference.
Essentially, there are two ways of going about solving problems: idealistic or
realistic.
Idealistic solutions are mentally constructed solutions that sound attractive but may
not be feasible in the real world. The real world limits what human beings can do, for
space, time and matter have their own immutable laws, laws that make it impossible for
human beings to do certain things. For example, we can dream of flying but the law of
aerodynamics makes it impossible for us (animals without wings) to fly, unless we
construct mechanical contraptions that obey the aerodynamic law.
Realistic solutions to perceived problems often do not conceptually sound attractive
but take into consideration the realities of the environment and are likely to work out in
the real world.
A politician can be idealistic and appeal to our feelings; on the other hand, a
politician can be realistic and appeal to our reason.

Mr. Utomi talked about the excellence of Nigeria’s yester years' education system.
This is true. However, he seemed to have forgotten something. Until the 1970s, not
every Nigerian had the opportunity to go to school, be it elementary, secondary or
university. To start with, there were very few schools in the country. Many vied for
admission to these available schools. Examinations were used to select the few admitted
to those schools.
In the Lagos, where I grew up in 1960s, for example, there were very few secondary
schools: Anglican Grammar School, Methodists Boys Highs School, Baptist Academy,
Igbobi College, Kings College, Saint Gregory, St Finbars, Ansaru Deen, Ahmadiyya,
Lagos City College, Queens College, and a few others? That meant that all the boys and
girls graduating from elementary schools had to sit for what was then called common
entrance examination. The few that passed this examination were selected to attend these
secondary schools (each school admitted less than a hundred boys, each year).
The point is that only the few, the best, got into secondary schools during the era
that Mr. Utomi was talking about.
These schools were based on the British public school system and, indeed, taught
the same subjects: English language, English Literature, History, Geography, French,
Latin, Greek, Mathematics….Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Statistics,
and Calculus…Physics, Chemistry and biology. All the students were required to take all
these subjects, right from the get go, form one, although for the purposes of the West
African School Certificate Examination they were required to take about ten of the
subjects and must pass, at least, eight of them.
These schools were not free; they were paid for out of the students’ parents’
pockets.
The combination of the facts that these schools were difficult to get into, and were
expensive to attend, made students to work hard at their studies.
 Graduates of these schools were as good as those who went to the best of the
English public school system (Harrow, Rugby, Eton, Winchester etc). Indeed, students
often read the same books as was read at those English schools and took the same
examinations.
The salient point is that those secondary schools were very selective and exclusive
and prepared students as well as could be found in secondary schools any where in the
world.

The Nigeria of the 1960s had only four universities: Ibadan, Lagos, Nnsukka, Ife
and Ahmadu Bello. Generally, each of these universities had small student populations
(ten thousand students would be the outermost number).
This meant that the many graduates of secondary schools had to fiercely compete for
admission to the few universities. Naturally, only the best were able to make it into those
universities.
Simply put, only the best made it through yester years’ Nigeria’s educational
system. A Nigerian university graduate in 1970 was as good as the graduates of the best
universities of the world, including, Oxford, Cambridge, Sorbonne (University of Paris),
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, University of California etc.

I took the trouble to rehash Nigeria’s past educational system for a reason. Pat Utomi
talked somewhat nostalgically about that past education system. He seems to wish that all
Nigerian students could be provided with such excellent schooling. However, he seems to
have forgotten that then, only a few Nigerians were given such excellent education.
To the best of my knowledge, no country in the world provides all persons that level
of quality education. Even America does not have the type of quality education that the
1960s Nigerian schools gave its students.
In the USA, there are essentially two types of education: Mickey mousey education
for the masses, offered at K through 12th grade at America’s public schools, and the
rigorous education found at America’s private secondary schools, such as Andover.
The typical American high school is not as good as the 1960s Nigerian secondary
schools. Perhaps, we could compare the private secondary schools of America with
typical Nigerian secondary schools of the 1960s?
The same applies to America’s universities. There are about 3000 post secondary
school colleges (universities) in America. Many of these are simply not good. A few
hundreds of these are the best in the world. Generally, the best universities attract
students from the best secondary schools (mostly private schools) and from the best of
other countries. Graduates of Nigeria’s 1960s secondary schools did very well at
America’s best secondary schools.

The past educational system of Nigeria that Pat Utomi wishfully talked about was
highly selective, elitist and undemocratic; it was, by design, meant to educate only the
best and brightest. It was not designed for the masses. No country can afford to replicate
that outmoded educational system in the extant world.
Even Britain, the country from which Nigeria copied its past education system, did
not provide such expensive education to all British children. Britain uses a series of
examinations to weed out many students from higher education and redirect the less able
to technical schools.
In Germany, by age sixteen, secondary school students are tested and a few tracked
to universities, whereas the rest are tracked to vocational schools (and they have the best
vocational schools in the world).
The relevant point is that what Mr. Utomi is hoping for is idealistic and not realistic.
Idealistically, a country should provide the best education to all its children but
realistically no country does so. And even if a country has the will and resources to give
all its children the best education, it is frustrated by the little fact that students come with
different intelligence levels, and not all of them can benefit from top notch education.

Nigeria does not keep good statistics; nevertheless, we can safely state that prior to
1970, no more than 60% of Nigerians graduated from elementary schools, no more than
20% graduated from secondary schools, and that no more than 5% graduated from
universities.
Beginning from the 1970s, education was made available to the masses of Nigeria.
Obafemi Awolowo had given the then Western region free primary education in the
1950s. In the 1970s, and thereafter, the other states of Nigeria followed the West and
offered universal elementary education to all their children?
Today, just about all Nigerian children go to primary schools and, at least, fifty
percent of them go on to secondary schools. Perhaps, 25% of Nigeria’s secondary school
leavers go to universities?
Universities are been built every where, from the four in the 1960s to about 79 today.
Just about every young person who wants to go to university can now do so in Nigeria.
(With a population estimated at over 100 million, the country probably needs about 500
universities to accommodate all those eligible for university education.)

What has changed between the 1960s and today is that education is now offered to
most Nigerians, as it should be.
In the processes of doing so, unfortunately, Nigeria has not thought out where it
wants to go with its educational systems. What it seems to be doing is copying other
people’s educational system. She forgets that educational systems, like everything else,
adapts to specific environments. You cannot necessarily make what works in one
environment work in another.
In the past, Nigeria used to have the British (elitist) system but has, more or less,
jettisoned it and embraced the American twelve year public school system (six years of
elementary, six years of secondary education…broken down into two parts, three years of
junior high school and three years of senior high school). Nigeria is increasingly copying
the American four years undergraduate education (as opposed to three years in Britain);
two years graduate education for the masters and additional three years to complete the
doctoral education before dissertation. However, while embracing the American
university system, it, more or less, still has a somewhat British academic culture. In the
British system, undergraduates focus on their discipline, only; in the American
undergraduate system, students are generalists though they choose a major.
 What is the problem with the Nigerian educational system? There are many
problems with the Nigerian educational system. One of the problems is that Nigeria has
not yet produced her own philosophy of education to give its educational system purpose
and direction.
In America, folks like John Dewey, who built on America’s dominant philosophy,
William James Pragmatism, formulated an educational philosophy for the country.
America considers itself democratic (?). For all citizens to be able to make wise
democratic choices, it is deemed proper to provide them with free elementary and
secondary schooling. Thus, for pragmatic reasons, to have citizens who make rational
voting choices, most Americans are given publicly paid elementary and secondary
education. This education is general in nature. After secondary schooling, America
leaves graduates to their own devices. Those who desire it go to universities where they
pay for their own education (or are on scholarship).
America’s university education is not practical and functional ala Mr. Utomi’s
wishes. For example, a person graduating with a degree from the liberal arts and sciences
generally has no job opportunities and has to redirect himself into whatever field he
wants to work in. It is only in a few fields, such as Engineering, Medicine, Law, and
Business etc that America’s education is highly specific and functional.
America’s vocational education system, what there is of it, is in shambles. The
Germans know best how to produce technicians: send high school students who are not
academically inclined to trade schools, where they have two years workshop training in
specific trades, and additional two years of on the job training in their trade; German
technicians are well trained and probably are the best in the world. (Nigeria ought to look
into the German trade school system. We certainly lack people who can fix things. We
produce university graduates who cannot do anything in the work world. Perhaps, it was
better if we tracked many of our so-called university graduates to trade schools?)

For our present purposes, Nigeria does not have a well articulated educational
philosophy. It does not know what kind of education it wants to provide its young people.
However, hypothetically speaking, education ought to produce workers demanded by
industry and other employers in general. Schools ought to be making adjustments to fit
what the market (demand of labor) requires. For example, in the 1990s, America went
through an Internet revolution. Universities were churning out students trained in
computer science. College seniors were actively recruited by high tech industries. But
today, the high tech industry is saturated and graduates of computer science often go for
years before they could obtain jobs (if at all). Universities appreciating changes in the
market (supply and demand of labor) are now concentrating on producing students with
other skills.
Pat Utomi’s proposition for functional education would seem to mean designing
higher education to produce graduates whose skills industry has demands for. In that
light, Nigeria, a developing economy, needs doers, lots of engineers (and some thinkers,
pure scientists) and ought to design its schools to churn out these desired people. South
Korea, for example, designed its school system in such a manner that over 33% of
graduates is in engineering!
 So what is Pat Utomi going to do to fix Nigeria’s broken down educational system?
First, some one needs to articulate an educational philosophy for Nigeria. Having done
that, politicians like Pat Utomi ought to implement it.
In the absence of such a well articulated educational goal, we are left with our
individual views on the subject.
My personal view is that we ought to pay attention to education. We ought to teach
students what they are supposed to learn at each level of the education process:
elementary, secondary, technical and university. We ought to make sure that our teachers
know what they are supposed to teach (by hiring qualified ones and testing them to make
sure that they have comprehensive understanding of their subject areas). We ought to pay
our teachers well.
We ought to hold students accountable for learning what they are supposed to learn
at each educational level. Teach all there is supposed to be taught at each level then test
students to ascertain that they learned what they are supposed to learn. Reality being what
it is there are very bright students, average students and mediocre students. Society’s
obligation is to offer all people equal opportunity (education) but not to equalize them.
Teach them and test them and group them according to their performance.
Finally, I wish that the public pay for all students education, at all levels: elementary,
secondary, technical and university. In my view, education is a human right. (If you ask:
how are we going to be able to pay for it, where shall we obtain the resources? Well, that
is a topic for a different essay. For a start, we could look into how America pays for its
public education, such as property taxes etc. Where there is a will there is a way.)

Realism tells us that a developing country like Nigeria is not likely to have the best
education in the world. Good education systems take time to come into being. Education
systems, like democratic systems, grow over time. Countries develop educational
traditions, traditions that cannot be hurried. The British or French educational system
took centuries to develop. You cannot replicate those systems in Nigeria in a hurry. Even
if you tried to transplant them to Nigeria, they would not work as well as they do in their
countries of origin, for they reflect the culture of their owners.
This is not to despair, for, in time, Nigeria would develop an educational tradition, a
tradition that reflects Nigerians culture. In the meantime, the most that we can do is build
schools, make them as rigorous as possible and leave it at that.
We do not need to worry about the quality of our schools. They will take time
before they become as good as America’s elite colleges. Talking about America’s
colleges, it was only in the 1930s when, as a result of Nazi persecution, Jewish scholars
left Germany and came to American universities, that America’s universities became first
rate. Before that they were considered second rate.
By the same token, in time Nigeria and Africa would produce first rate universities.
In the meantime, just build, equip and fund them.

*Pat Utomi, I saw your video tape this morning, thanks to Professor Bolaji Aluko,
who made it available to us and during my lunch hour, sat down and wrote this essay. I
did not have the time to edit or reflect on its content. It is my on the spur feedback to you.
Do with it as you desire. If there is anything else that I can do to help you accomplish
your goal of becoming the next President of Nigeria, please do not hesitate in contacting
me. God bless you.

Sincerely,

Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD (UCLA)

December 20, 2006

RETAINING BUT REDIRECTING THE EGO TO SOCIAL SERVICE

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

I have just re-read Mahendranath Gupta’s biography of the nineteenth century

Indian mystic, Ramakrishna: The Gospel of Ramakrishna.
Mahendra (short for Mahendranath), one of Ramakrishna’s disciples, recorded
Ramakrishna’s teachings during the last four years of his life (1882-1886). In this brief
period, Mahendra managed to capture the essence of Ramakrishna’s teachings. He did
what Christian Gospel writers did: focus on the last (three) years of Jesus’ life on earth.
(Come to think of it, Mahendra called his book the Gospel of Ramakrishna probably
because he was consciously imitating the Christian concept of Gospel of Jesus Christ?)
Ramakrishna explicated most aspects of Hindu religion. In addition to explaining
his people’s religious view, Ramakrishna attempted to live it. His powerful appeal to
people lay in the fact that he did not just talk about his people’s religion but lived it.
Living what one believes in makes one appealing to people. As they say, intellectuals talk
about ideas they may not believe and live, but the prophets of God live the ideas they talk
about, and in doing so, give those ideas power, even if the ideas are false.
Ramakrishna’s immediate predecessors in articulating Hinduism, members of the
Brahmo Samaj, were intellectuals and merely talked about religion but, by and large, did
not live its precepts. If you recall, the British had taken over India and attempted to
superimpose its Christian religion on Indians. Some Indians embraced Christianity.
However, in the mid nineteenth century, nationalist Indians attempted to throw off the
imported religion of Christianity and replace it with their inherited Hindu religion.
India has a four thousand year religion, Hinduism, and Indian nationalists were not
about to let it go asunder just because Europeans would like them to embrace the
Europeanized Jewish sect, Christianity. Thus, the members of Brahmo Samaj tried to
resurrect their ancient Hindu religion. These people were educated in Western
rationalism and could not embrace the non-rational aspect of Hinduism and, instead,
emphasized the seeming rational aspect of that religion, Jnanayoga (also called Vedanta,
Advaita, and non-dualism).
Hinduism has many schools, including Jnanayoga, Bhaktayoga, Karmayoga,
Rajayoga, Tantrayoga etc. Briefly, Bhakta yoga teaches that people should worship God
as if he were a father, mother or king; and that God is to be prayed to and sang to. Karma
yoga sees God as everywhere and sees people as manifestations of God and encourages
people to worship God by serving other human beings, for in serving people one is really
serving God; go ahead and work hard but work as if it is service to God; engage in
philanthropy. Raja yoga attempts to directly reach God through meditation. In meditation
the sense of I, the ego and its thinking processes are voluntarily relinquished and,
hopefully, one rises to the “we consciousness” of God. Tantra yoga sees all people as
manifestations of God and approaches them as if they are divine, respectfully.
Jnana yoga teaches that God is an impersonal force that manifests in everything in
the universe. One force, Brahmin, is everything in the universe. Brahman, in his true
state, is not known to us, but in his manifest state is the material universe.
Jnana yoga sees the temporal universal as an illusion, a mirage that does not, in fact,
exist. According to the foremost philosopher of Jnana yoga (Advaita, Vedanta),
Sankaracharya, the world is a dream and the dreamer is Brahman himself. One God, as it
were, cast a spell/magic (Maya) on himself and went to sleep and in his sleep dreams that
he is many things. Everything in the material universe is an aspect of God’s dream.
God in his true essence is spirit, creative, loving, infinite, changeless and permanent,
but in his dream state is the opposite of those attributes: changeable, impermanent,
transitory, ephemeral, finite and destructive.
According to Hinduism, human beings’ true essence, Atman, is the same as
Brahman. But in the dream, the world, the Atman (individual soul) sees itself as
separated from the universal soul (Brahman).
As long as we see ourselves as separated from God and from each other, we are
caught in the dream of the world. We are living in an illusion. We are deluded in the
sense that we believe what is not true (separated self, ego) as true.
Truth is the union of all being; lies are the beliefs in separation. The individual is
forgetful of his true identity, unified state hence is said to live in ignorance. As long as a
person believes himself separated from God and from other people, Hinduism teaches
that he is ignorant of his truth, union with all being.
Enlightenment is the awareness of ones union with all being, and living as such.
The purpose of Jnana yoga, and other aspects of Hindu religion, is to enable the
individual to break through the ignorance of his true unified self (over come real self
forgetfulness) and come to remember his true identity (thou art that) as one with Brahman
and all his manifestations.
To attain the truth of his being, the individual is encouraged to meditate (Raja yoga)
and in meditation tune out the separated self and its thinking and experience Moksha
(break out from the ego and its world) and enter Samadhi (oneness with God).
In Samadhi, the individual looses consciousness of the separated “I consciousness”
and regains the “we consciousness”. In that unified self consciousness, he is said to be
enlightened to his true self and thenceforth is an illuminated soul (such as Gautama
Buddha).
When one is enlightened to ones true self, unified self, one either stays in it (in which
case ones body dies) or one returns to aspects of separated consciousness, our world, and
becomes a teacher of God.
To return to our world, the enlightened person takes on the ego, once more, but
now, the ego of knowledge, and uses it to teach other egos, separated selves, people,
about the illusory nature of the ego and help them do what they have to do to regain the
consciousness of unified consciousness.
 Vedanta philosophy appeals to reason (it influenced many European idealistic and or
solipsistic philosophers, such as Pascal, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer,
Berkeley etc) and, as such, tends to be amenable to the few human beings that are given
to thinking.
As Hinduism sees it, Jnana yoga is for the few human beings that are prone to
thinking. Bhakta yoga, on the other hand, is the appropriate religion for the majority of
mankind, for those not given to philosophic thinking.
In Bhakta yoga, the individual is encouraged to retain his separated self, the ego, but
make it an ego of love. He is to use his ego to serve God and other people (who are also
God). The ego is to be seen as the servant of God and used to serve God and all people.
In redirecting the separated self to service to God and man, Hinduism, as represented
by Ramakrishna, hopes to ameliorate the rough edges of the ego.
Left alone, the individual human being seeks only his selfish interests and, as
Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan) observed, would exploit, even kill, other people to serve his
own selfish (genes) interests. (See Richard Dawkins book, Selfish Genes.) If people are
left alone they live as raw egos, they live in a state of war, and there would be perpetual
social conflict where all fight with all and the strongest survive and the weak are
trampled on. After the strong have enslaved or killed the weak, they turn to each other
and the result is perpetual social and personal insecurity.
To reduce their personal and social security, people must reduce their ego cravings.
(Hobbes sought to bring about social security by establishing a commonwealth where
people voluntarily relinquished their individual power to the sovereign, the king, the
government, and allowed him/it to pass laws that protected all of them and punish, even
kill those who violated other persons’ rights.)
Ramakrishna, unlike the secular Hobbes, is a religionist and teaches that if people
can redirect their egos to what he called the servant ego, the ego of love, an ego that
serves God and his human manifestations that they would have a happy illusion, a happy
dream. That is, they would still live as separated selves (an illusion, a dream) but live
happily, in the sense that they are working for each others mutual interests, rather than
work against each other, as in Hobbes state of nature. They are still in a dream, are still
living in from (body), they are still unreal selves in an unreal world (for the real self is
formless unified spirit), but they can do so until they are ready to awaken from the dream
and recognize that they are all the same self, formless Brahman.
As Ramakrishna sees it, since only a few persons are capable of eliminating their
egos altogether or attaining the ego of knowledge (Jnana yogi) the best alternative is for
them to strive for the ego of love, the servant ego. Let them keep their illusory separated
egos (ahamkara) but use them to serve God and one another. Since they want to be in the
world (as householders, marry, have children, enjoy sensual pleasures), very well, let
them do as they wish, but they should redirect their egos to egos of service.
Ramakrishna believed that we are living in what he called Kaliyuga. Hinduism
posits cycles of the world; that is, believes that the world exists for a period of time then
is destroyed and another cycle is created to replace it (God, as Siva, is seen as both
creator and destroyer). These cycles are called Yuga. In Kaliyuga cycle, God, though,
ultimately, impersonal, has made himself a personal God, such as Kali. We are to see
God as a person and worship him, her, as if he is a person. The same impersonal
Brahman becomes a personal God, Kali, and is to be worshipped as if she is our mother.
 Ramakrishna saw God as a woman, Kali, and called her his mother and worshipped
her as one would worship a queen. “Mother told me to do this, or that” was
Ramakrishna’s habitual pattern of speaking. Asked to do something, he would say:
“mother willing, I would do it”. Ramakrishna had intense personal relationship with his
mother, God.

Jesus also saw God as a person, in his case, as his father, and saw himself as the son
of God and worshipped him. Jesus, too, had an intense personal relationship with his
father, God.
Perhaps, it is because of these two avatars personalization of God that they were
efficacious? They taught the perennial philosophy of mankind with such authority that
people believed them. Ramakrishna did not say anything new that one could not glean
from reading Hindu religious books, such as the Veda, Ramayana, Mahabharata,
Bagavad Gita, Upanishad, Patanjali’s yoga etc but the manner he said what he said and
believed them, even when what he believed in seemed like nonsense, made him seem
credible. Jesus re-articulated the eternal gospel of love and forgiveness in such a powerful
manner that he seemed believable.

According to Ramakrishna, our age is the age that ought to see God as a person and
worship him. God, who is our true self, as it were, is projected out as an other person, and
worshipped. In doing so, we retain our sense of having separated selves, an illusion, but
reduce the rough edges of that illusion by worshiping God as an other.
Of course, this is an illusion, for according to the very Hinduism that Ramakrishna is
espousing, God is not an other person; God is the unified self, our real self. We can
simply let go of the separated ego self and become aware of the fact that we are part of
God. But to do so entails letting go our sense of I and the form of that I, the human body.
God is spirit and is formless. To return to the awareness of God, one must return to
formlessness, and stop identifying with the separated self housed in human body.
However, we do not want to relinquish our sense of I, the separated self and its body.
We are identified with our bodies and the separated selves it houses. We think that if we
let go of the separated ego self that we would die off. We are afraid of the disappearance
of the separated I self. We fear oblivion of the I, self. We cling to the separated ego self
for dear life.
We willfully forget that we have another self, the unified spirit self, for we do not
want to return to that unified self, for in it we think that our separated selves would die.
(According to Hinduism, we do not die; indeed, we were never born, we merely seem
born and die in the dream setting. When we return to impersonal Brahman, we merely
expand our selves, from the small self to the big Self, God. It is like a drop of water
dropped into the ocean; it does not disappear in the ocean but becomes part of the larger
ocean.)
We cling to the separated self and Ramakrishna says: very well, go ahead and cling to
your illusory selves but use them to serve God and one another, and in doing so obtain
some peace and happiness, albeit illusory peace and happiness (real peace and joy lies in
formless unified spirit, heaven, God).
 The American spiritual and clinical psychologist, Helen Schucman, in her book, A
Course in Miracles, essentially said the same thing that Ramakrishna said. She, too,
believes that we are clinging to our illusory separated selves, egos, and urges us to use
those illusory selves and bodies to love and serve one another. Dr Schucman combines
aspects of Bhakta and Jnana Yoga in her version of Christianity. She essentially
Christologized Hinduism.

Extrapolating from Hindu religious categories, I think that Christianity is a Bhakta

religion. Christians see God as an other and see themselves as separated from him. They
see God as their lord and master and serve him as his servants.
European Christians are people who perceive God as a king and themselves as
servants of that great king. In doing so, they reduce their ego’s rough edges.
Serving God makes the ego the ego of service. Moreover, perceiving God as a great
king to be served has the added advantage of transferring that mental state to the world.
Thus, European Christians, who construe themselves as the servants of God, are able to
posit earthly kings and or governments and serve them as they serve their heavenly king.

One can draw the inference that Bhakta religions make it possible to retain the ego,
humanize it and use it to grow human civilizations. Civilization entails the individual
living together with other people. To shrink ones ego and use what is left of it to serve
society makes for people getting along with each other and working together for their
greater good, hence for civilization.

Those persons who retain their ego self intoto, such as Igbo Nigerians, and refuse to
redirect their egos to serving God and society, but merely seek personal goals and
individual achievements, tend to be unable to produce worthwhile civilizations. The
Igbos had only a rudimentary polity; in that society, most people ran around pursuing
their ego needs and seldom worked for their collective social interest. The Igbo
emphasizes personal possessions; he is forever boasting about his individual
achievements and material possessions but does not seem to recognize the salience of
relationships and love for people. Indeed, they construe relationships in terms of use; they
will use you to get what they want out of life and dump you and blame you too (call you
a mugu for permitting yourself to be used by them, it is never their fault that they did a
wrong thing). These people see nothing morally wrong with thieving and you would be a
fool not to assume that they are going to rob you (and go use the money to build houses
in their villages and be made chiefs. And if you complain that their behavior is anti
social, like terrorists they would try to intimidate you into silence by saying nasty things
about you. These people are totally uncivilized. It would probably take a couple centuries
before they are civilized, that is, respect other peoples rights, personal and property.
To relate to other people, one must shrink ones ego to normal proportions, to what
Ramakrishna called the ego of love. But the Igbo prefer to retain the optimal ego, the
level of ego found in uncivilized savages.
If the Igbo remain as they currently are, egoistic and narcissistic, always pursuing
personal ego goals and opportunistically and pragmatically using people to accomplish
their personal ego goals, exploiting people and showing no interest in love, it is doubtful
that they can have a worthwhile civilization.
 Of course, like all human beings, Igbos will soon recognize the ego as the main
problem of human existence and begin the struggle to reduce and or eliminate their egos.
At present, like heathens they tend to think that to have egos is to be powerful.
Poor fellows; they do not realize that to be in ego state is to be in literal prison, to be
in hell, to be in bondage, to be in pain and suffer.
Peace and happiness lies in non-ego state, non separated state. In time, Igbos, the
symbols of maximal egotism, will reduce their egos and redirect what is left of it to social
service. At that point they would embark on producing a great civilization.

European civilization, I think, is based on the trick of retaining the human ego but
redirecting it to the ego of social service.
Transforming the ego to an ego of love makes for human civilization (staying in the
dream and making it a happy dream).

If the individual were to completely let go of his ego, annihilate the separated self
concept and regain the awareness of unified self, God, as Jnana yoga teaches, he would
exit from the world of separated selves, our world and die (return to unified self).
Of course, a few persons are able to experience unified self, retain aspects of the ego
and return to the world and teach other people the need to let go of the ego; Buddhism
calls them Budhavasta (?) and Ramakrishna called them those with ego of knowledge.
If people pursued Vedanta to its logical conclusion, they would escape from this
world. Vedanta negates this world, and sees the world as dream to be awakened from and
left. In as much as Vedanta is geared towards escaping from this world, in my view, it is
not conducive to human, ego based civilization.
All human civilizations are ego based civilizations. Without the ego, the separated
self, the I consciousness, there would be no human beings, as we know them. If there are
no people there would be no civilization, as we know it. Thus, to have human
civilization, Ramakrishna is correct in teaching that the ego must be retained but
transformed into ego of service and ego of love.

The objective of this essay is not Ramakrishna or Hinduism but an inquiry into the
transformation of the selfish ego into the ego of social service. I explored the teachings of
Ramakrishna and aspects of Hinduism to help me make my argument.
My argument is this: we human beings are separated selves. We have I
consciousness. We work for our seeming separated selves. Each of us places his self
interests ahead of other people’s interests.
This behavior is not a moral issue and no one should be made to feel bad about it. It
is just the way it is. When push comes to shove, each human being has selfish genes and
if need be, will work for its survival at the expense of other people. This is the truth of
our earthly existence.
No one should delude himself as to the nature of human beings. I know from
experience living on planet earth that each person looks after his interests and while he
would cooperate with other persons for their mutual good, would not hesitate using other
persons for his own good, even killing them if it serves his interests. (And rationalize it,
such as white folks telling themselves that blacks are not intelligent hence justifying
using them as slaves or discriminating against them.)
The true nature of human beings is such that one recoils from looking at them. It is
better that the true face of human beings is not seen, for if seen as they are, they are
repulsive. As Schopenhauer said (World as Will and Idea) human beings are mistakes
that nature ought not to have made.
People are cruel beyond belief. For a start, they have to kill and eat other animals,
that is, they live off the death of other creatures! God, it were better we did not exist!
But we do exist and the question is what are we going to do about it?

I believe that as long as we are on earth we are condemned to being separated

selves, egotists, narcissists etc. Jnana yoga or Vedanta Philosophy is correct in stressing
escape from the separated self, but in as much as we are still in body we retain the ego
and its dreadful behaviors.
I think that the best that we can do is understand the nature of the separated self, the
ego, in an objective manner. We should then struggle to redirect our egos to what
Ramakrishna called the egos of service and love.
However, I do not agree with Ramakrishna that we should construe God as our
master and serve him. It is foolish to see God as a master and us as servants. God is our
father and our father does not want us to be his servants. A loving father does not want
his children to worship him. I serve nobody.
Nevertheless, I do understand the psychological benefits of serving and worshipping
God and man: it reduces the human ego and makes it complaint with laws. The
psychological benefits of serving God and kings not withstanding, I believe that we can
find alternative ways to reduce the rough edges of our egos. How? We can consciously
use our egos to serve society and mankind in general.

WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY AND THE SELF

In this essay, I consciously choose not to employ Western psychological categories;

but since they are inevitable to minimize their employment.
I am employing the term ego where Western psychologists would employ the term
personality. Personality is the individual’s habitual pattern of thinking, behaving and
responding to his environment. Each human being has a habitual and predictable manner
of thinking, behaving and responding to stimuli emanating from the physical and social
environment. That habitual way of doing things is his earthly self.
Western psychology describes the personality (the term personality is derived from
persona, Latin for mask). As it were, personality is a mask, a persona won by the
individual. Personality is the superficial self but not the individual’s real self.
Western psychology does not explore the deeper self. Oriental religions enable us to
explore the deeper self.
The term ego, employed by oriental religions, enables us to explore both the learned
aspect of the self, personality, and the deeper aspect of the self, the real self, hence I
prefer it to Western concepts of the human self.
Moreover, the idea of ego enables one not to do what Western psychology does,
pathologize people. In Western psychological categories, the human self is seldom seen
as healthy; at best it is considered normal that is well adjusted to group norms (which
may be pathological). Most people are said to have personality issues, ranging from mere
functional personality disorders (such as paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal, narcissistic,
histrionic, antisocial, borderline, avoidant, obsessive compulsive, avoidant, passive
aggressive) to more serious personality issues like schizophrenia, delusion disorder,
mania, depression etc.
Western psychiatry easily patholigizes people but does not heal those it gives cute
psychiatric labels.
In the perspective of Hinduism, we are all living in an illusory world, in a dream. We
believe that we have selves; egos that are dream figures and are not our true selves. Our
true self is unified spirit self (Atman, Brahman) but we believe that we are separated
selves (Jivatman, ahamkara). In that sense, we are all deluded, if by delusion is meant
believing that which is not true as true. Indeed, if the world is a dream and unreal and we
talk to and see dream persons, such behaviors amount to hallucination. Since delusions
and hallucinations characterize psychosis, it follows that all human beings are psychotic!
Those officially diagnosed as psychotic, such as the schizophrenic, manic and deluded
persons are not different from so-called normal persons!

In Hindu and Buddhist categories, the ego is the separated self concept. It is a
conceptual self, an idea of who the individual thinks that he is. It is an idea that says that
the individual is separated from other people.
Building on his inherited biological constitution and social experiences, the human
child constructs a self concept for his self and thereafter defends that self concept, his
personality. He defends a mere idea of who he thinks that he is with the various ego
defense mechanisms (repression, suppression, denial, dissociation, projection,
displacement, rationalization, sublimation, reaction formation, fantasy, fear, anger, guilt,
shame, perfection, minimizing, avoidance etc). Defense of ones idea of the self makes
that self seem real in ones eyes. (Suppose one did not defend a self concept and assumed
that one has no concept, no idea of who one is, what would happen? Try not defending
any self concept, any idea of who you think that you are, and see what happens. In the
least you would feel peace and happiness.)
Concepts are not real. Concepts are mere ideas in our thinking, ideas that do change
when we acquire better information. At all times we have limited information in our
minds hence the concept of the self based on our limited information is false. No self
concept is correct.
As people acquire better information, they gradually improve their self concepts.
Ultimately, we must let go of all the concepts of who we are or are not.
Salvation (rediscovery of the real self, unified self) lies in the relinquishment of all
concepts of the self, concepts of other people and concepts of what the world is and
simply being open without concepts cluttering our minds. In a mind without concepts,
good or bad, the truth of which we are unified spirit, dawns on its own. But to experience
that truth one must sweep ones mind clean of all conceptual selves; as long as the
individual has a self concept that he himself constructed he would not know his real self.
The self concept is like a clouding masking our real selves. The cloud must be removed
for the light it hides to be seen.
 In the mean time, each of us has a habitual pattern of thinking, of conceptualizing
himself, conceptualizing other people and the world. That habitual pattern of thinking, of
seeing things and behaving in the world is his ego self concept aka the human
personality. The ego self concept is a false self. The true self is not conceptual, and is not
known to our ego, separated minds.

PERSONAL EGOTISM

I know myself to be an egotist. As a six year old child, nobody dared tell me what to
do. At school, I found it very difficult to accept the authority of teaches. (I was probably
what contemporary psychiatry calls an oppositional defiant child, the passive type, since,
on the surface, I seemed shy and pliable until you tried to tell me what to do and I asked
you who the hell you thought that you were, and where did you get off telling me what to
do?)
As a child I was a holy terror. It was either my way or the high way. Consider. I was
a teenager during the Biafran (Nigerian civil war) war. The Biafrans had child soldiers,
some less than fourteen years old. One day, Ojukwu’s soldiers came to my village,
literally going from house to house capturing boys and taking them to the nearest army
training camp. They came to my compound and asked for all the boys there to be given to
them. I stood in the middle of the door to our compound, obiriama, and asked the lead
sergeant who the hell he thought he was capturing boys to go fight and die for his
masters’ war? I told him that if he dared touch me or any boy in the compound that he is
a dead man. Believe it or not, if he dared touch me, I would not have hesitated, for a
second, in killing him. (I would gladly fight in a war that I personally believe is a just
war, but not in a war somebody else told me to fight for him.)
No body, repeat, nobody born of woman tells me what to do. Certainly, no one was
going to conscript me to go fight a war whose goals I know not.
Here is another example. I was raised a Christian. At age fourteen, I discovered that
Christianity is other people’s religion, and said good bye to it. I said: no god dammed Jew
was going to tell me about the nature of God. Whoever defines your god for you has
defined and controlled you. Only the individual should define his god, hence himself.
I was willful and stubborn beyond belief. It is a wonder that I managed to go through
school without dropping out, as unruly boys do. I guess that the reason why I did not
abandon schooling was because I liked knowledge. As it were, I tuned out the fact that
teachers were authority figures and telling me what to do, but listened to the knowledge
they were giving to me. (A fellow trained in Western psychology, especially abnormal
psychology probably could find diagnoses for me. He could rule out one of the
personality disorders? If you try very hard you could come up with a diagnosis for every
human being.)

This digression to my personal psychology is done deliberately; its purpose is to show

that human beings are egotists. Whereas not every person is as egotistical as I was, all
people, in degrees, are egotistical.
To be a human being is to be an egotist, period. The real question is what to do about
our egos.
 I do not believe that we can completely eliminate our egos and still be in this world.
If it were possible to completely eliminate our egos, we would return to the
consciousness of us,”we consciousness”, what Hinduism calls God Self (Self
Realization).
I believe, in fact, I know, that there is a unified spirit self, a Self where there is no you
and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object, a self that is one and simultaneously
infinite in numbers; a self where one self ends and another begins is nowhere, a self that
is in all other selves as they are in it.
I am currently not interested in metaphysics, for metaphysics, like Vedanta tends to
lead to escape from this world. I am not interested in negating this world. I am escaping
to nowhere. I want to be here, study science and understand how the world is put together
and use applied science, technology, to adapt to the world, as effectively as is possible. I
want to live here for as long as is humanly possible (which science tells us is 120 years).
Simply stated, I am not motivated to run away from this world, painful as it is. I want to
make the most of this painful world.

BUDDHA’S NOTION THAT TO BE HUMAN IS TO SUFFER

To be in this world is to have a separated self, an ego. To have an ego, I know from
personal experience, is to suffer.
If one identifies with the separated self one is literally living in pain and is in hell.
Ask me, I ought to know, for I am an absolute egotist. I have lived in total bondage to my
ego self concept. As noted, no one dares tell me what to do. I recall what happened when
I completed my dissertation and, for a while, toyed with the idea of working for the
United Nations. I went to New York and asked to talk to the UN Secretary General, to
explore job opportunities with his work outfit. I was redirected to the personnel
department. I talked to some human resources folks and learned a bit about the UN, how
it is structured and operates. Suddenly, I became aware that to work at the UN is to work
for an impersonal bureaucratic machine, to be a spoke in a giant wheel and the powers
that be telling one what to do. I was horrified by what I was about to get myself into. Me,
work in an organization where other people tell me what to do? No way. I caught the next
flight out of New York.
I refused to work in government or non government bureaucracies because my ego,
my sense of separated self, the I, feared been told what to do. My ego wanted total
autonomy and felt that it would be squelched in a bureaucratic organization.

What my experience teaches me is that I am an optimal egotist and that all people
are egotist (in degrees, of course) and that there is nothing any one can do about it, for as
long as we live in bodies.
(Our inherited biological make up largely shapes our degree of egotism. I am
tempted to explicate the etiology of personality; however, I will not go there, for it would
entail exploring biology in some detail. Suffice it to say that I know that each of us
inherited a certain genetic make up and that that make up predisposes him to develop the
type of ego structure he has. Biology, genes, influences our ego more than our pride is
willing to accept.)
 From direct experience, I know that the ego can be momentarily overlooked and
overcome and the individual experiences oneness with all being (unitive experience,
cosmic union, mysticism, Samadhi, Nirvana, Satori etc) but as soon as the individual
returns to identification with his body, he feels that he has a separated self and returns to
being egotistical. Being egotistical is the human reality.
It is delusional to believe that human beings are not egotistical (narcissistic and
fearful); the only question is how to reduce their swollen egotism.

I think that we can redirect our egos to serving social interests. One can consciously
understand ones ego structure, and consciously use that ego to figure out what serves the
common good and choose to dedicate ones self to serving it.
In my experience, a life committed to public good gives people the only peace and
happiness there is in this world.

I do not like to talk mere precepts but from experience, so let me personalize. When I
lose myself in doing what I believe serves social good, I tend to be peaceful and happy.
For example, when I am teaching young people subjects that interest me, say,
psychology, I tend to forget that I have a separated self. I literally become unconscious of
my ego self and flow with what I am talking about; I become one with what I am talking
about.
During periods of no self consciousness, (which I attain in work; karma yoga) I tend
to be happy and peaceful. Therefore, I necessarily conclude that human happiness lies in
losing the separated self consciousness in social service.
Alas, as soon as one is not working, one quickly regains ones painful self
consciousness. To feel separated self consciousness is literally to be in pain, jail, prison,
hell and bondage. Conversely, to feel no separated self consciousness (to not defend ones
ego self) is literally to be in bliss (what religionists call heaven).

The goal of life, I think, is for the individual to discover what he enjoys doing and
dedicate himself to doing it and doing it for the good of all humanity. A life dedicated to
serving social interest, as the secular mystic, Alfred Adler, wrote in his Individual
Psychology, is peaceful and happy.

You ask: what is the benefit of serving society? It is because to serve society is in
ones best interests; social service makes one feel peaceful and happy.
Please note that I am not engaged in moral masturbation. I am not asking you to
obey any one and go extinguish your ego life in obedience to him. I am not asking you to
go join an army and fight for a course you know nothing about. I know that political
demagogues (especially fascists) exploit the fact that in public service we are at our
psychological best and therefore bid people to go fight for their egos (projected out as
national egos….the Fuehrer’s egos, Hitler’s ego, etc).
I am asking you to use your own ego based thinking to come to the realization that
human beings, as Buddha said, live a painful life. To live as a separated ego self is to
suffer. We desire ego states hence bring our own suffering to ourselves. We can have
compassion for our mutual suffering. We can then figure out what we can do to help
reduce our suffering. Once figured out, we should commit our lives to doing it.
 I commit my life to understanding the human psyche: psychology, secular and
spiritual, and teaching it. I do so to help us understand the nature of our psyche, our egos
and how identification with the ego brings us suffering, and help reduce that suffering by
teaching reduced egotism.
I do this job because it gives me peace and happiness, not because I want to please
other people or some imaginary God. (Though I accept the existence of an impersonal
spirit self, I choose to live as an agnostic). I am doing what I like doing, what I came to
this world to do.

THE INCREDIBLE BELIEF IN WORTH

Any one with the slightest power of observation, sooner or later, observes that to
nature human beings have no worth. Natural occurrences like tsunami, earthquakes,
volcanoes, floods, tornados, bacteria, virus, fungus, disease, plagues etc destroy people,
as they destroy animals and trees. The human body is meat to be eaten by worms.
Pure reason teaches us that we have no value and worth, that whatever value that we
think that we have is make belief and pretentious and not real. But no, the ego (the human
self) believes that it is very important and defies the verdict of phenomena and acts as if it
has worth.
A bullet into any human beings head and he is food forms, yet he behaves as if he is
very special. Human beings are amusing, really; that are that which nothing that pretend
to be something important is. It is amazing how that which, objectively, has no worth
deludes itself into believing that it has worth.
People take themselves seriously when, in fact, they are nothing serious. This
situation leads one to believe that people are more than their egos and the body’s that
house them. People are gods, insane gods who denied their spiritual nature and manifest
in bodies. Obviously there is intelligence at work in this world but what seems an insane
intelligence, insane gods.

Human beings pursue meaning and purpose. But a clear eyed look at this world
shows that our lives have no apparent meaning and purpose. Our lives seem meaningless
and purposeless, as existential writers like Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, Jasper etc write.
To posit any kind of meaning for this world is make belief and not real. In fact, much
of neurosis and psychosis emanates from folks desire to see meaning in their lives. The
neurotic/psychotic sees a meaningless world and invents private meanings, made up
meanings, and pretends that such meanings are real.
Whereas the neurotic/psychotic gives himself private meanings, the religionist gives
himself meaning by positing (a) god and worships him,. The religious person hopes that
by worshipping an imaginary ego like god that his life is transformed from meaningless
to meaningful. Religion is group neurosis (group delusion, belief in that which is not true
as true, whereas neurosis is individual belief in that which is not true as true).
This leaves us with the only realistic thing to do: see life as a meaningless play and
have fun with it. See people as nothing and, nevertheless, do what you can to help them
have happy lives. Do not fall into the trap of the ego by taking nothingness as something
special and feeling angry at those who did wrong to you. Forgive all their wrongs and in
the process make your and their lives pleasant.
 GRIEVANCES

Human beings are living in terrible pain and suffering (both physical and
psychological) and we must all do whatever we can to reduce that suffering. As long as
we see ourselves as separated selves, identify with the ego and work for our self interests
we must suffer. Since we are all pursuing self interests, we all must suffer. But we can
do what Gautama Buddha did, seek ways to reduce our suffering; we cannot eliminate
suffering while living in separated selves housed in bodies; suffering can only be
eliminated in formless, spirit self, unified self, that is, outside the parameters of this
world..
Consider. If one identifies with the separated ego self and seeks personal interests one
must do what generates conflicts with other people who are also seeking the satisfaction
of their separated interests. One must injure other people as they must injure ones
interests. One must subsequently be aware of the wrongs other people do to one.
The ego self is acutely aware of all the wrongs other human beings do to it. It
resolves to get back at them. The ego is driven by desire for revenge and vengeance. The
ego bears grudges and grievances and seeks revenge for every wrong done to it. If you
have ever slighted another person (ego), he has stored that humiliation in his memory
bank and is resolved to get back at you in kind. If you are more powerful than him, he
will probably bid his time and wait for the day he would be powerful enough to pay you
back in kind.
The ego is an unforgiving phenomenon; it seeks punishment for all those it
perceives as harming its interests.
For example, I am a black man. I am acutely conscious of all the wrongs white folks
did to black folks. However, my ego understands that white folks are, at present, more
powerful than black folks and, therefore, that it is not in my best interest for me to seek
vengeance against white folks at this time; they would clobber me. But I still seek
vengeance for the wrongs done to black folks. Since I have no way of getting back at
them at this time, I look forward to a future when I would be able to get back at them. I
dream of a time when black folks would become powerful and do to whites what they did
to us. I imagine how we could enslave whites and use them to work for our pleasure, as
they used us to make their lives pleasurable.
Simply stated, my ego, all egos, are unforgiving and always seek to get back at those
it sees as having wronged it.

ANGER

The individual’s ego keeps records of all the wrongs done to it and seeks vengeance;
this means that the ego is prone to anger. The egotist lives in perpetual anger at whoever
he believes did him wrong.

FEAR

All of us do wrong other people. If one is angry at those who wronged one, one
must also recognize that since one has wronged other people that they are angry at one.
 If one is aware that others, those one wronged, are out to get even with one, how does
one feel? One fears them.
Thus, the ego is always living in the state of fear and anger. The ego is always living
with grudges, smoldering anger and fear.

GUILT

The ego believes that those who wronged it are guilty. Since every person on earth
has wronged the individual, to him all people are guilty. (There is also existential guilt;
what the Catholic Church calls original sin; we supposedly separated from God, hence
committed a sin against God and feel guilt, and sinful for this metaphysical guilt. Feeling
like we wronged God we expect him to punish us. Hence human beings fear God’s
punishment. Faring him they run from him, that is, they separate from him.)

PUNISHMENT

The ego wants to punish those who wronged it and fears punishment from those it
wronged. It sees punishment as justice.

UNHAPPINESS

A person who bears grievance and seeks vengeance, and feels anger and fear and
guilt etc is not exactly a happy peaceful person. To live as an ego is to literally live in
hell.
Human beings, egotists, are living in hell and do not know it. They tend to think that
hell is a place they go to when they die. No, hell is in this world, hell is living in fear,
anger, guilt, grievance, and vengeance. Hell is a pattern of thinking and behaving, living
in accordance with the egos dictates. Hell is a state of mind.

FORGIVENESS

How could human beings get out of the hellish life they relegated themselves to? It
is by doing the opposite of what their egos ask them to do.
The ego shows you people who wronged you and asks you to punish them. Now do
the opposite of what the ego asked you to do, forgive them.
The ego shows you wrong doers and tells you that they are guilty. Now, do the
opposite of what it asks you to do: tell yourself that they are not guilty, that they are
innocent.
(I am here borrowing from the perennial wisdom of mankind re-articulated by Helen
Schucman. In her view, this world is a dream and all the things we do in it are done as in
a dream; the good and bad people do are done in a dream; what is done in dreams have
not been done in reality, and have no lasting effect; people remain as God created them:
innocent; dream actions are not real actions; therefore, the evil doers we see are not evil
persons; by the same token, the good persons we see are not better than evil persons; both
the good and evil are playing roles in our dreams of separation; forgive the good and the
bad doer; overlook what human beings do and experience the truth behind their dream
figures and dream behaviors; their true self is the unified son of God, the Christ.)

Jesus Christ taught forgiveness. When we forgive people we overlook the evils they
do and in doing so see those as God created them: innocent, guiltless, sinless and holy.
The children of God remain as God created them, innocent, despite the evil and good we
see them do on earth.

There are behaviors that if engaged in give human being personal peace and
happiness. When we forgive each other we tend to feel peaceful and happy. On the other
hand, when we do not forgive other people we tend to feel tense, conflicted and unhappy.
To feel happy and peaceful, it follows that people ought to choose forgiveness to
bearing grievances and seeking vengeance.

I personally choose to forgive whoever has ever wronged me (and in doing so

forgive whoever I have wronged). In forgiving the world I feel happy and peaceful. Peace
and joy is good enough reward for me.

Of course, peace and happiness is not enough, for there is still the little matter of
physical sickness. I look around and see human beings suffering all sorts of physical and
psychological maladies. As I sit here typing, I know that children in Africa are starving.
Malnutrition is making the lives of many children miserable. Therefore, I must do what
little I can to help feed the world and cure people’s physical illness.
I must be engaged with the world; I cannot afford to escape from the world, to dis-
engage and amuse myself that I have found peace and happiness in some wooly
metaphysics and or new fangled religion.
I am part of this world and must work for its good and will do so until I die (exit
from separated self in form and return to formless unified spirit).
I study the human ego, psyche, the sense of I, the separated self and appreciate the
pain it brings us and teach us how to reduce that pain and suffering by shrinking our
swollen egos and by serving each other.

CONCLUSION

Identify your own specific aptitudes and fields of occupational interest; train for a
profession in that area, and use your profession to serve all people. A life dedicated to
social interest, and social service, as my hero, the psychologist and secular mystic, Alfred
Adler said, is the only life worth living. A life committed to social service is very
fulfilling, gives peace, happiness and material abundance.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

December 21, 2006
* Today, winter solstice seems like a good day for a new beginning, is it not? Try to
dedicate your life to serving the whole of mankind and experience the reward of such life
style: peace, happiness and material abundance.

IS IT POSSIBLE TO GET RID OF CORRUPTION FROM NIGERIA?

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Can we ever get rid of corruption from Nigeria or is the wish to do so a misguided
one? Is corruption so embedded in Nigerians psyche and cultures that it is now like
second nature to them, so that nothing anyone does will ever get rid of it?
When Nigerians gather one of their favorite topics of conversation is corruption in
Nigeria. Listening to them get all worked up over this corruption thing one would think
that they are going to fight it with every fiber in their bodies. But, no, such is not the
case.
Perform this little experiment. Identify those Nigerians who are the most vocal
opponents of corruption and target them for a little bribery. Give them money for
performing the tasks that they are supposed to perform as part of their official duties.
Then see how many of them would feel outraged that you dared compromise their
integrity by attempting to bribe them.
The chances are that well over ninety percent (90%) of these Nigerians would take
bribes from you. That is correct; while making a whole lot of noises about the evils of
corruption, the average Nigerian would engage in corruption. They are all talk and no
integrity.
Corruption exists in every country but perhaps nowhere is it as rampant as in
Nigeria. Nothing gets done in Nigeria without money exchanging hands between people.
Whether it is dealing with the Nigerian police, custom officers, government bureaucrats
(it even costs you money to obtain a supposedly free form from a Nigerian government
office), gaining admission to schools, obtaining jobs, securing government contracts etc
you have to exchange money with somebody to get things done.
One would be naïve regarding human nature to expect a country to be completely
corruption-free. Realistically, if a country can reduce corruption to less than ten percent
(10%) of its population, it is doing fine. On the other hand, no country can do fine with
the outrageous level of corruption in Nigeria.
Clearly, Nigeria is not going to become economically developed with the absurd level
of corruption in it. Every person knows that all you have to do is give Nigerians a few
dollars and they look the other way as you literally carry their country’s resources to the
West. How is Nigeria going to be economically developed with that kind of attitude in
Nigerians?

ORIGIN OF CORRUPTION IN NIGERIA

Corruption is not really new in Nigeria. Corruption has been with Nigerians for as
long as Nigeria existed.
 Consider. The founder of Nigeria, Frederick Lugard, invented and imposed what he
called warrant chiefs upon those Nigerians who did not have traditional rulers. He
intended to indirectly rule the people through the artificial chiefs he invented for them.
Instead of these so-called chiefs resenting the fact that they were agents of foreign rulers,
they took pride in their phony positions and imagined themselves the most important
human beings since Adam. They carried themselves as great kings and embarked on
oppressing their people. They subjected their people to outrageous bribery. To even see
them entailed bringing some bribes up front. Their notion of political and social
importance was that they were bribed before they rendered the “justice” they were
supposed to render by their British colonial master.
Nigerian warrant chiefs (properly put, thieves) were essentially anti social cum
narcissistic personalities. They were amoral, felt no guilt from wrong doing, did not have
conscience of right and wrong; did not feel remorse from hurting their own people, in
fact, enjoyed abusing their own people; injuring their own people made them feel
important; they lived to seek admiration and attention from the people and did every
thing they did just so that they seemed very important persons.
Working for their people’s good was not part of the mental make up of Nigeria’s
warrant chief thieves; what mattered most to them were seeming socially very important
persons, VIPs. These Nigerians were narcissistic and anti social personalities. That is to
say that they had personality disorders; they were psychologically sick human beings.
(Sigmund Freud defined mental health as the ability to love and care for other
people; Alfred Adler defined mental health as the ability to have social interests, to work
for the common good of society rather than working for ones self interests only. As Adler
sees it, those who work for their self interests, only, are neurotic.) The warrant chiefs
imposed on some Nigerians were sociopaths and psychopaths, period.

Contemporary Nigerian politicians have not improved one bit on their early twentieth
century counterparts. The typical Nigerian politician is an outright sociopath, an
antisocial cum narcissistic personality disordered person.
There are always exceptions to every generalization. In that light, we may grant that,
perhaps, ten percent of Nigerian leaders are healthy human beings, that is, those who
work for public interest?

The salient point, though, is that Nigerian leaders, from the inception of Nigeria in
1914 to the present (2007) have been criminals in political office. There is no two ways
of going about it. What we have in political offices in Nigeria are criminals masquerading
as political leaders.
A proper political leader lives to identify his people’s needs and serve them and
seeks way to do what develops his people economically.
That, certainly, is not the motivation of typical Nigerian politicians; most of them go
into politics with the specific intention of transforming their public offices into thieving
offices. They want to steal from the public treasury, and while at it seem very important
persons in the publics eyes.
Criminality and narcissism are the two common traits of Nigerian politicians.
(It is amazing that this observation, which I reached independently, was made by the
colonial masters. Go read the writings of most of the colonial administrators of Nigeria,
from district officers to county commissioners, area residents, regional lieutenant
governors, and the country’s British governors…most of them observed that Nigerians
are primarily narcissistic and seem motivated by desire to seem important in other
people’s eyes and would steal to obtain the money to make themselves seem important.
They noted that the typical Nigerian seemed motivated by efforts to become chiefs, that
is, important person; and that Nigerians seldom are motivated by public service, as
healthy human beings should be. Since, according to psychoanalysis, narcissism is found
where there is arrested development, they generally concluded that Nigerians were
infantile personalities. Some of these colonials were very brutal: they doubted that
Nigerians, folks with arrested emotional development, could ever effectively govern
themselves. To govern effectively, folks are supposed to suppress their selfish needs and
devote their lives to the public good. If you take issue with these negative assessments of
our ancestors by our colonial masters then examine contemporary Nigerians. What are
they doing but masquerading about insisting that you call them engineer this or that
though they cannot build diddle squat, professor this or that though they go for years
without producing useful knowledge, Doctor this or that though they write at sixth grade,
elementary school levels. Nigerians are still as attention seeking as their colonial masters
saw them doing.)

So, when did this apparent generalized Nigerian character disorder: antisocial and
narcissistic personality disorders, come into being?

I believe that Nigerians, in fact, all Africans have been disordered human beings since
they embarked on the unnatural mission of selling their own people. Africans have had
personality disorders since slavery days.

Islam came to Sahel Africa around 900 AD (?). Shortly after that, West African
Muslims were selling other Africans to Arabs. We have it on historical record that by
1000 AD African slaves were sold to Arabs. Mansa Musa of Old Ghana took thousands
of African slaves to Mecca and sold them there.
(That is what African kings are for: selling their people. Contemporary African
leaders, like their old ancestors, are still selling their people to the white man. If you do
not develop your country so that Nigerian professionals come to the USA and work as
janitors and security guards, that is, perform menial labor for white men, what are you but
a god damned slave seller?)

In the mid 1400s, Henry the navigator of Portugal sent his ships to the coast of West
Africa. By the 1480s, Portuguese sailors had pretty much explored the West African
coast, from Dakar, in Senegal, to the Cape of Good Hope, in South Africa.
By 1500 (at least) West Africans were already selling their children to the
Portuguese. (The first African slaves came to the USA in 1619, at James town, Virginia,
which the British settled in 1607, four hundred years ago.)
 Africans had had practice in selling themselves to Arabs and, apparently, found it
easy to sell themselves to Europeans, too. The Trans Atlantic Slave Trade lasted to about
1900 (?).

That is to say that for a thousand years (900-1900), at least, Africans sold
themselves into slavery.
Perhaps, there was domestic slavery in Africa before Africans began selling
themselves to foreigners? Perhaps, slavery existed in Africa prior to 900 AD? (I say
perhaps, for though I have read many books on African history, I know that most of them
are made up stories and not yet proven as facts.)

Africans habituated their psyche to selling their own people.

What kind of people would sell their children into slavery? Think about it. Let go
of all your ego defense mechanisms, psychological rationalizations and just think about
it, as objective as you could. Africans are human beings and nature’s god gave them
intelligence, too, so they can engage in dispassionate thinking (as opposed to their
habitual emotionalism which they take as thinking).

It is a sociopath, a psychopath, an antisocial personality, a criminal that sells his own

children into slavery.
(It is also sociopaths that buy slaves; we all know that the typical American
character trait is antisocial; but America is not our present interest; criminal Americans
have their rendezvous with destiny, sooner than later, as their crime based empire
implodes on their face.)

Just think of what life in slave trade Africa was like and you are horrified. A child
leaves his home to go play with other children and African slavers apprehended him,
marched him to the coast and sold him (See Equino Olauda’s interesting narrative of how
he was captured at age twelve from somewhere in Alaigbo and sold into slavery.)
Villages randomly went to war with each other for the sole purpose of capturing slaves to
be sold to either Arabs or Europeans.
My God, people must have lived in tremendous fear. No wonder many Africans have
elevated paranoid traits. Life was totally Hobbessian: nasty, brutish and short for most
Africans.
It is as if these people were savages who had no interest in the welfare of their
fellow Africans! (No wonder many Africans do not want to be psychoanalyzed; they are
probably apprehensive of the dirt that would be seen in their unconscious minds. In
psychoanalysis, the client is encouraged to free associate, to say whatever comes to his
mind, without checking or blocking it with reason; to engage in transference relationship
with the analyst, to project to him; that way he cathects what is repressed into his
unconscious mind, brings it to the ego conscious mind and the analyst analyzes them and
explains their import. What is repressed into the unconscious makes people behave
irrationally, as we see Africans behave! Many Africans, today, would sell their people
into slavery…the way my fellow Igbos attacked me, for stating obvious truths about
them, tells me that they would easily sell me into slavery. There is tremendous evil in
Africans unconscious minds and they do not want to examine this evil, and correct it.
Watching them humiliate each other, attack each other, attack to destroy, tells you that
there is underlying primitiveness in these people. )
(Or were they not savages? Let us hear you engage in your futile ego defenses and
tell us that it was all the white man’s fault. Go ahead and blame your favorite scapegoat,
the white man. We have heard that excuse before. Very few persons are now listening to
such infantile rationalizations for why Africans tolerated evil for as long as they did. And
they still practice evil by not working for their people. They cart their people’s wealth to
the West and their people are the wretched of the earth. Instead of facing their emotional
brutality they seek to redirect blame by telling us that it is all the fault of “Papa” white
man and that they are children whose fate other persons are responsible for. It is the mark
of childishness to deny responsibility for ones fate and blame other people for it. No
human being is a total victim of others behaviors, for, in a system, all parts contribute to
what affects all parts. An adult takes responsibility for his fate, good or bad. Our
characters determine what we get out of life.)

I am contending that the Nigerian character has been corrupted since around 1000
AD. I am saying that corruption is not of recent origin in Nigeria. I am saying that
corruption is deep in Nigeria’s various cultures. I am saying that corruption is deeply
embedded in the Nigerian psyche.
I will be brutally honest with you. I have not seen a Nigerian who is not prone to
corruption!
Worse, I have not seen a Nigerian who seems mentally healthy! Most of them seem
to have character disorders. And the most pitiful aspect of it is that they do not even know
it. And they do not seem interested in knowing.
(A certifiable paranoid personality on Naijapolitics does exactly as you would
expect such a person to do: hide his identity, feel that other people are out to get him, is
guarded, is suspicious, is grandiose in his self assessment, sees his uneducated ideas as
profound, wants to be respected and fears been demeaned; as a suspicious, untrusting
paranoid, he feels free to investigate other people’s backgrounds, presumably to ascertain
the truth or lack of it about their claims, while hiding his own background, so that nobody
could investigate it. And he does not see the irony of his behavior! A person interested in
the truth living in darkness, in the shadows, hiding from the sun light, so as not to be
known as he is: a freaking potentially harmful paranoid personality. When paranoids feel
demeaned they can attack the person they feel degraded them. They feel totally inferior
and compensate with false superiority and act as if they are superior, and if you point out
their underlying sense of inadequacy they will attack to kill you. This paranoid man feels
totally entitled to do the amoral things he does, protected by the darkness he lives in.
When told that he is mildly mentally disturbed, instead of been grateful that some one
cares enough about him to give him an objective feedback about his warped character, he
fumes in the mouth and denies his obvious personality disorder. Alas, denial does not
eradicate the obvious. By generalization, Nigerians denying their psychological issues
does not make those issues go away.)

So, can corruption be eliminated from Nigeria?

 I do not think that we can eliminate corruption from Nigeria in the near future. I do
not think that this century will see a corruption free Nigeria.
Corruption is too embedded in Nigerians for it to be easily eliminated. Nigerians
have corrupt characters and corrupt cultures. They have had this problem for over a
thousand years, and only a fool would expect such a long standing problem to be cured
over night.

Does this mean that we should throw up our hands and give up? Not at all. It means
that we must appreciate the degree of the sociopathy and psychopathy we are dealing
with and face it squarely.
It means that the various Nigerian governments must pass stringent laws against
corruption and implement them in a draconian, merciless manner.
It means that if you take bribes that you ought to be caught and sent to do time in the
big house. (Not American type jail where you are fed by the public, but Stalin’s Russia
type of Gulag, where you are sent to Siberia, Sahara desert, and used to do public works,
such as irrigate the Sahara desert and, if necessary, die from that hard. Thieving, corrupt
animals have no business polluting the human environment with their unproductive
lives.)

Nigerians, indeed all Africans, must address this corruption issue with single
mindedness. With luck, by the end of the twenty first century we would begin to get a
good handle on corruption.
If we can reduce our people’s corruption to ten percent of the population we are
doing well. As it is, with over 90% of the people prone to corruption, clearly, we are
going nowhere, economically.

OTHER ISSUES

Of course, there are other factors contributing to corruption in Nigeria. In fact, there
are structural contributors to the absurd level of corruption in Nigeria. Consider that most
of the revenues powering the Nigerian economy are obtained from the Niger Delta. As it
were, the rest of country takes the resources from a section of the country to improve
themselves. This is patently unfair, not when we consider the degradation of the
landscape of the Delta region!
The “thiefocrats” at Abuja take money from Ijaw-land and share it among
themselves. As long as these thieves are able to loot Ijaw wealth and put it to their
personal uses, they have something binding them together. But when that resource runs
dry, like thieves all over the world who no longer have a common place to steal from,
they would fall in on each other and attack each other.
Chaos and anarchy would reign in Nigeria if there were no oil money to steal and
squander.
Structural problems are easily corrected. The over reliance on Niger Delta oil
resources can be corrected if Nigeria restructures itself into a true federalism and have
each area control its destiny, including its resources. The various governments would
then be compelled to find other resources to maintain themselves. They would,
ultimately, get the people to pay income, property, sales and other forms of taxes, the
usual revenue stream for governments.
One acknowledges that there are serious structural contributions to the absurd level
of corruption in Nigeria. As long as the Federal government is essentially a thief thieving
Ijaw resources and using that money to buy the governors and other thieves that support
it, corruption will be endemic in Nigeria.

I am, at present, not focusing on structural (political, economic) issues. The point
this essay makes is that corruption in Nigeria is long standing, is, in fact, over a thousand
years old; that corruption is totally embedded in Nigerians psyches and cultures and that
we must make psychological and sociological efforts to heal Nigerians of this social-
political malady. Until it is healed, until we reduce Nigerians proclivity to corruption,
Nigeria is going nowhere. All that money from oil will not make any difference in
Nigerians lives. A fool and his money are soon parted. The West takes our monies
because we are fools. When we become wise, care for our people, instead of overlook
their needs, work for our people’s interests no one would “underdevelop” us; we would
develop us.

Have a happy new year.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 1, 2007

THE LESSON OF ETHIOPIA’S QUICK DEFEAT OF SOMALIA

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

In less than two weeks of military operation in Somalia, the Ethiopian military drove
out the rag tagged militia causing a whole lot of trouble in Somalia.
If you recall, since the fall of Said Bare, the last president of Somalia in the mid
seventies, Somalia has been in chaos. There has not been a legitimate government in that
God forsaken African country. Several militia groups war among themselves and have
made that country a jungle, a no man’s land.
Today, Somalia is a lawless land where the powerful oppress the weak and a band
of weak fellows fight the powerful. The country, if such it can be called, is classic state of
nature (per Hobbes Leviathan) before the formation of the common wealth (civil society,
government). In it is war of each against all and all against each person. Consequently,
folks live in perpetual insecurity. Life, if what obtains in Somalia can be called life is
nasty, brutish and short. The life span of the average Somali is less than forty years!

Economic development is not possible without political stability. Thus, Somalia

reverted to pre-industrial status, if not the stone age (where most African countries are
heading).
 Today’s Somalia is pretty much like tenth century Europe where feudal lords and
their knights fought and killed each other and anarchy reigned in the land. (Thereafter, a
few of the lords emerged as kings by using brutal force to subjugate the others to their
rule hence the emergence of European countries.)

For our present purposes, the lesson of Ethiopia’s quick victory in Somalia is that a
determined African military power can very easily defeat other African countries and use
military power to unify all of Africa into an African federation.

In my view, Nigeria ought to get its act together and militarize the population (have
all adults above age eighteen trained in the military, thus giving it a military of millions)
and use that mighty force to defeat the so-called other countries of West Africa, and unify
them into a West African Federation.
Subsequently, Nigeria should work for a united Africa.
This task, eventually, must be performed by somebody. We cannot, like fools, keep
defending our present countries, countries created by our European colonial masters.
Africa’s current nation states are not natural states and ought to be gotten rid of.

All of West Africa is a natural country. (Please do remember that so it was before the
advent of the white man in West Africa; the great empires of West Africa, Ghana, Mali,
Songhai etc comprised, more or less, most of Sahel Africa; in the nineteenth century,
before the French stopped him, Toure was in the process of unifying all of West Africa.)
All of East Africa is a natural country; all of South Africa is a natural country. The
peoples in each of these regions of Africa tend to be the same both genetically and
culturally hence are fitted by nature and nature’s god to be in the same polity.
In a few decades, there ought to be no more than four countries in sub-Saharan
Africa: West Africa, East Africa, South Africa and Central Africa.
We ought to have large African polities organized as federations, with each African
tribe a state within them.
(That means that at the national level would be a president, a legislature, preferably
a unicameral one, and a judiciary; at the state level, a governor, a legislature and
judiciary; at the local level a country administrator, a county council and a county court;
at the city level, a mayor, a city council and a city court. All elected offices….president,
governors, legislators, councilors etc… for five years, with two terms limit for executives
and six terms limit for legislators and thirty five years maximal stay in the judicial
branch.)

Political realists may point out that the proposed action plan is overly idealistic. For
example, they would say that if Nigeria makes a move to conquer most of West Africa
that the French would intervene to stop such a move, since France considers Africa,
particularly West Africa, its sphere of influence. This may be true. But one asks: since
when have the French been known to win wars? Adolf Hitler and the Germans marched
into France and took the country over in a few days. A resolute Nigerian military will
defeat France at war, any day. Minus nuclear weapons, I doubt that even John Bull
(Britain) can defeat Nigeria at war. As for the United States of America, the presence of
African Americans in its military rules out that it engages in military adventurism in
Africa, for such a move would not sit well with its largely minority composed military.
All said, one expects Europeans to make noises should Nigeria resolutely attempt to unify
West Africa but do nothing decisive to stop such a move. In a few months of fighting, I
see Nigeria unifying all of West Africa and bringing sense to bear on an area of Africa
for once in Africa’s modern senseless existence.
Another objection to quick military actions is the long term problems of nation
building. The United States overran Iraq in a few weeks but is now bogged down trying
to run that country. Some political observers are saying that Ethiopia might have similar
problems in Somalia and that its quick military victory may turn out a political disaster
for it. This is true enough, but luckily Ethiopia plans to withdraw from Somalia in a few
weeks. The Somali government (in exile, Kenya) is calling on the world community,
particularly Africa Union, to send in peace keepers to help restore civil society after over
twenty years of chaos in Somalia.
The issue of nation building and its problems is real enough. Therefore, an African
military power that proposes to use force to unify all of Africa must give it considerable
thought before embarking on such a mission. (I have given this issue some thinking and
written extensively about it; this is not the place to write about such issues; let us just say
that the issue is real enough and should not be cavalierly dismissed.)

The point that I am making is that given the ease with which an organized Ethiopian
army chased out the clans (Islamic of politic) making a mess of Somalia, it is possible for
a determined African country, a country ruled by committed African leaders (even
benevolent dictators), to unify all of Africa.
Contemporary African countries are really banana republics with no military
powers of note; their governments would easily be chased out of offices in a few days of
determined and resolute fighting. The fact that we tolerate these corrupt rogues who call
themselves African leaders shows our lack of will to power. One world class leader in
Africa can unify all of Africa. Think of Napoleon Bonaparte, even Adolf Hitler. (If Hitler
had known where to stop and not declare war on the United States, after Pearl Harbor, he
could have won the Second World Aar. Without the United States, who could have
stopped Hitler from conquering all of Europe? Remember that operation Barbarossa,
Hitler’s attack on Russia in 1941, took the German army to Moscow in a few months. If
the United States had not come to the rescue of Russia with advanced military weapons,
Russia would today be a German colony.)

A true Africa union is the best condition for sustained economic development in
Africa. Economic development requires larger markets, which all of Africa provide.
Africa’s present artificial boundaries are barriers to the movement of goods and services
hence hinder Africa’s economic development.

Think about this admittedly idealistic wish for a unified Africa. Since it does not
hesitate in employing military power to accomplish its goals, I call it realistic idealism. It
is doable and not just a pie in the sky.
 Think big. Please stop seeing yourself as a powerless African, a Lilliputian, and
disgracing your self with such absurd behaviors as bribe taking. Have a larger focus for
your life and diligently work towards it.
A life dedicated to a goal larger than the individual’s puny existence gives human
beings the only meaning, purpose, worth and value there is in this world.
Moreover, a focused existence seldom degenerates to corruption. It is those who live
only for their bellies and egos, self centered persons, that tend to give in to corruption.

It is time for Africans to start engaging in tactical and strategic planning for the
welfare of all Africa and stopped living for the immediate gratification of fleeting
narcissistic desires.

PS: If this goal (United Africa) seems grandiose and undoable, prove it, via reasoned
arguments. Think, don’t emote.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 3, 2007.

THE PARALLEL FATE OF JEWS AND AFRICANS

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Those of you, who are Christians, or apostate Christians, will remember this story
too well.
Abraham had a son called Isaac. Isaac had a son called Jacob. Jacob had twelve
sons (out of which the twelve tribes of Israel emanated).
The sons of Jacob conspired to sell one of their own brethren, Joseph, into slavery.
They sold him to Egypt.
In Egypt, Joseph found favor with the king, Pharaoh, and rose in the ranks of the
king’s administrators. He became a lord in his new home.

The brick that was rejected has become the pillar of the temple.

Subsequently, there was famine in the land where the children of Jacob lived,
Canaan, and they went to Egypt to buy food.
As these things always work out, these slave sellers were brought to the presence of
the brother they had sold into slavery! The slave made it possible for the Israelites to
survive by giving them food and enabling them to relocate to Egypt, the then land of
plenty.

Africans callously, heartlessly and brutally sold some Africans into American
slavery. Today, Africans are undergoing their own famine; they are starving and
suffering. They have come to America, to the land where they sold their brothers into
slavery, in search of food (employment).
 In my experience, the few Americans who seem to have good jobs in America almost
always got those jobs through the auspices of African Americans.

We sold our brothers into slavery and today we have come to the land where we sold
them to. We survive in the new land largely due to the efforts, directly or indirectly, of
our sold brothers. It is the struggles of African Americans for acceptance by racist white
America that changed the culture of America and made it possible for Nigerian
professionals to now come to America and work in some sort of professional capacity.
Before the 1960s civil rights struggles, Africans in America largely worked as janitors,
security guards, porters and other menial jobs.

What is the point? The point is that those who commit evil, as Joseph’s brothers did
by selling him, as Africans did by selling African Americans, somehow, are forced to
rejoin those they sold. Suffering in their land of origin forces them to go live with those
they cold heartedly sold into slavery.
Africans are cold hearted human beings. They suffer because of their lack of love for
one another. They will continue to suffer until they learn the meaning of life: love.
And just as Joseph’s brothers eventually became slaves in Egypt the Africans
currently streaming to the West in search of food and work are modern day slaves; they
perform menial jobs for their White masters. They are been punished for their sins and do
not even know it! (They work as security guards etc and come to the Internet…which
they proceed to abuse by using it to abuse each other… and claim to be professionals…
professionals without professional ethics…and make a great deal of empty noises.)

Jesus asked: what do you want other people to do for you? If honest, you would
say, love you. If so, he said that you should love other people.
“Do unto other people as you would want them to do to you, love them”. This is the
sum of all the prophecies of the past and the laws of the present.
Instead of obeying this law of God, Africans do not care for their people. Instead of
working like driven people to develop their people, all we hear are stories of corruption,
of a few Africans pocketing the money that would have gone to caring for other Africans.
We make light of this astonishing evil.

For our present purposes, the rejected stone (African Americans) has become the
pillar of the temple (helpers of those who, by selling them, rejected them, Africans).
Those we sold into slavery are today rescuing us from our inability to do the right thing,
govern ourselves well. (And many of us do not see the irony! Apparently, we are too
shameless and too amoral to see the irony of our coming to live in the place we sold our
brothers and sisters to. This is amazing daftness.)

Things will not work out well for Africans until they apologize to African
Americans, those they hurt, badly. This is my view. Call it superstition but something in
me tells me that one must apologize to those one hurts if one is to go forward with ones
life. Deny reality all we want, it is what it is. Human beings do, do evil and ought to ask
for forgiveness and ought to be forgiven. But until they ask for forgiveness they have not
acknowledged their mistakes, their evil and will not move forward and prosper.
 Africans are stuck, are not moving forward, like other people, because they refuse to
acknowledge their past and prevent evil, and make amends for them. They keep blaming
other people for an evil that they obviously played fifty percent role in. Nature and
nature’s God will not give Africans material and psychological abundance until they
make amends for their past. When the past is forgiven people are released and can then
live peacefully, happily and abundantly in the present.
If you are the cynical type and think that the universe is amoral and that every
behavior is justified, and asks: what about the slave buyers, didn’t they get away with the
so-called evil one is talking about? May I ask you where the great slave states of the past
are today? Where are Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome and Europe? They are in the
dumpster of history.
America, the remaining great empire built by slaves, the sole superpower of evil,
certainly will not be an exception to history. What goes up must come down. America
may seem too great to fall but remember that all the nuclear weapons possessed by the
USSR did not save it when its evil caught up with it. Great empires fall in a few months,
not years. America has its appointment with the destiny of slave holding states unless it
changes its evil ways and stop abusing black folks. At any rate, America is not my
concern. Africans are my sole concern.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 4, 2007

PS: The lesson of this little parable is that we must be nice to our African American
cousins.

IS THERE AN ALTERNATIVE TO WESTERN JURISPRUDENCE/CIVILIZATION?

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

THE WEST

Clearly, Western jurisprudence (a people’s legal system represents their civilization;

I will, therefore, alternate the terms jurisprudence and civilization), as we know it, is a
rogue civilization; it is based on criminality and operates on criminal grounds. It is a dog
eat dog world where the strongest survive and weakest are exploited, suffer and
eventually die. The strong attack the weak and take over their territory and pass laws to
make the stolen territories their land. The Norman French conquered England in 1066
and passed laws making the new land theirs. Europeans came to the Americas, drove the
natives off their lands and took them over and passed laws giving themselves property
rights to the lands they had stolen. In their so-called democratic form of government, the
majority supposedly rules. But what actually obtains is that the most powerful hoodwink
the weak and manage to get themselves elected to office and pass laws that essentially
protect their class interests at the expense of the poor. Their courts are nothing but
kangaroo courts where mercenaries called judges implement the oppressive “laws” aimed
at controlling the masses.
There are no two ways of putting it: Western civilization is a criminal civilization;
the real question is whether there is an alternative to it?
One can come up with idealistic alternatives to it but one is not in the business of
idealism. The individual perceives the imperfect real world and imagines how it could be
better and comes up with mental constructs of what could make the world perfect. Alas,
in the world of space, time and matter, reality limits what could be; we can imagine
perfection but reality makes every thing we try on planet earth imperfect.
One is interested in realism, not fantasies of how the world could be perfect. Is there
a realistic alternative to the West?
My idealistic friend tells me that the best thing for us, non-Westerners, to do is to
hurry and come up with nuclear weapons and use them to end this blight on human
sensibility called Western civilization. And that if Western civilization is the only type of
civilization that mankind can have, end mankind, too. As he sees it, mankind ought to
cease existing, if civilization can only exist by a few living off the suffering of the many.
While my idealistic friend gets himself all worked up over Western exploitations of
non-Westerners, my realistic friend does not loose sleep from the situation. As he sees it,
the West is devoid of morality; Westerners are totally exploitative and their legal system
is deliberately set up to exploit the weak. Do not sweat it; do to them as they do to you.
Be amoral and use them in an unsentimental manner. They are out to screw you, then
screw them, that is all there is to it, no misguided sympathies for them. Learn about their
amoral legal system and exploit it to your advantage and that is all there is to it. Case
closed. It is big fish eat small fish world, so what are you complaining about? Just make
sure that you are not the fish eaten by other fish. If you are small and disadvantaged then
use your thinking to figure out seeming devious ways to catch the big fish and eat it and
have no feelings about it after all, it was out to eat you! Knock off all sentimental talk of
God and morality, for they do not exist. What matters is to live well until one dies.
Opportunism, pragmatism, every behavior is permitted in an amoral world.

THE REST OF THE WORLD

It is necessary to state that most extant legal systems in the world (and the
civilizations they represent) are, more or less, like the West. Most countries legal systems
are based on crime, judgment and punishment. Laws are made and those persons who
appear to have not lived up to them are arrested, tried and punished.
This type of jurisprudence assumes that people are by nature evil and need the law
and fear of punishment to make them not do bad things to each other. Left alone, it is
assumed that people would do what is in their interests, often at the expense of others’
interests. The powerful would oppress the weak.
Laws are used to corral and control the people, to make them behave as society (its
leaders) wants them to behave.
For example, in America, white Americans, the temporarily more powerful, enslaved
Africans, the temporarily weak, and used their labor for free to build up America. In the
present, white Americans discriminate, with impunity, against black Americans.
Apparently, their laws are deliberately designed to enable them oppress African
Americans and other minority persons, while pretending to be impersonal laws.
All over the world, the rich and powerful exploit the weak and powerless. As
Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan) noted, people are self centered and seek their self interests
and only cooperate with other people when doing so serves their mutual interests. Man,
by nature, is selfish hence evil and we need governments and their laws to prevent him
from doing harmful things to other people. Without these punitive laws, people would
harm one another.
The best that we can do is making our government limited in scope (John Locke,
Second Treaty on Government.) Without government and laws people will revert to the
state of nature and perpetual warfare would reign. The powerful would enslave and or kill
the weak and attack each other, and the result would be personal insecurity. Life in nature
is nasty, brutish and short. The only way to secure security for people is through the
punitive laws of governments, laws that punish those who transgress other people’s rights
to the pursuit of life, liberty and property.
The first order of business in organizing society is to build jails, hire prison guards,
policemen, build courts and hire judges and other law enforcement agents and have them
arrest law breakers, try and jail them. Without this punitive legal system, society would
not exist in an organized fashion, the philosophy of Hobbes and company, which is
essentially Western political philosophy, holds.
Man is evil, man is a criminal by nature, so punish him or threaten to punish him if
you want him to respect other persons’ rights and thus obtain fragile law and order in
society.
Carrying this negative view of man to its logical conclusion, in the USA the
business of government (from the city council to state legislatures to Congress) is
primarily to make laws and hire law enforcement officers to implement them. The
assumption is that this is the only way to secure social security for all persons. Thus jails
are built in just about every American city. Some people must be punished so that others
may live in safety. Some persons’ right to live warrants incarcerating other persons.
Over two million Americans (mostly black persons) are in jails and prisons. America
has the highest percentage of its population in prisons relative to other countries. And this
is the land of the free! It is more like the land of the enslaved. At the rate America is
going, soon, most Americans would have been jailed or be under the supervision of
parole and probation officers. Perhaps, this is as well, for the people consider themselves
as having criminality in their genes and behave as such.
It costs over $35, 000 a year to house and feed each inmate in America’s prisons. At
this rate, the country may soon bankrupt itself!

The Western justice system is predicated on feeling grievances and seeking

vengeance for the wrongs other people do to one. If it were possible, the person who feels
wronged would seek direct vengeance but it is not always possible for him to do so. The
individual hires others, judges, etc to punish those who wronged him for him. In so
doing, the individual believes that justice is done, justice based on bearing grievances and
punishing people. What a weird sense of justice!
 From the moment the individual and his hired agents, courts, punish a person to the
end of his life, he would live in fear, aware that the person he punished could take the law
into his own hands and punish him. All it takes is a bullet and any human being becomes
food for worms.
You punish people and you fear that they would reduce you to food for worms.
Thus, in America people live in perpetual fear of each others revenge.
To live in fear is literally to live in hell. Americans are literally living in hell. They
build jails and prisons on practically every city to arrest and house those they consider
evil people yet they do not feel secure and live in fear of vengeance from those they
punished. These people are literally insane.

Insane civilizations cannot last forever. It is only a matter of time before insane
civilizations collapse. We have had such ego-based punitive civilizations in the past:
Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, France, Britain and Russia. All of them were
based on crime and punishment and necessarily fell.
America is the current representative of crime and punishment based civilization.
America probably has had its best days and will soon join the have been ego based
powers of the past.

Are people all over the world stuck with the Western/American judicial system? Is
wishing for an alternative to it a wish of the wisp? Should people adjust themselves to
this monstrosity as the way things are (ego realism) and console themselves with alcohol
and drugs (most well adjusted Americans are either alcoholics or drug addicts, for they
had to adjust to an unjust political system)? Are there alternatives to Western ego based
legal systems?

AN IDEALISTIC ALTERNATIVE TO WESTERN JURISPRUDENCE

An American clinical psychologist, Helen Schucman (A Course in miracles),

appreciating the punitive Western legal system under which she lives, thinks that the
alternative to it is a civilization guided by the Holy Spirit. She rigorously delineated how
her evil system operates and imagines an ideal alternative to it and supposes that a force
that she called the Holy Spirit could lead to that alternative system. She called the
present Western jurisprudence ego-based system and came up with an alternative to it
that she called the Holy Spirit guided system of justice.

In the Holy Spirit guided world, everything is done in the opposite of how they are
done in the ego based world. In the ego based system each of us sees himself as separated
from other people and as having different interests from other people and lives to defend
and protect his supposed different interests. In the process, each of us attacks other people
and wants to punish them. For the evil other people do to him, the individual believes that
in punishing other people he derives security (only to live in fear).
In the Holy Spirit directed system we see ourselves as unified; we see ourselves as the
children of God.
 God is love, so his children are love. In so far that they do injure other people, the
children of God’s one family, forgive each other.

FORGIVENESS

The world guided by the Holy Spirit is a world predicated on forgiveness. Every
person forgives every person the wrongs they do to him.
Forgiveness means being totally defenseless. You do not defend your individuality
and separated ego self. If other people do what harms your ego state you do not feel
aggrieved and do not go out of your way to punish them. You forgive them.
In forgiving them, that is, overlooking the evils they did to you, you live in peace
and happiness. You live as if this world is a happy dream.

ONTOLOGY

The lady psychologist provided a story of the origin of the world. In her ontology,
we separated from God and choose to live as the opposite of God.
God is unified and we chose to live as separated selves. We invented space, time and
matter to enable us seem to live as separated selves.
In her view, separated existence is impossible since it is the opposite of the world
that God created and what opposes God’s Will can not happen. There is no force in the
universe that can oppose God.
Separation has not occurred. However, it seems to have occurred in a dream
setting. Our world does not exist, in fact; rather, it exists as in a dream. The empirical
world is an illusion.
Our world is literally a psychosis where we see what is not there and believe that it
is there and hear people that are not there talk. We are all deluded and hallucinating. We
are all psychotic.
This psychosis needs to be healed; the dream needs to be awakened from.

AWAKENING FROM THE DREAM OF SEPARATION

The way to awaken from the dream of separation is to forgive the world, to
overlook the world. Look at the world and its events as events in a dream and overlook
them, see everything in the world as not real. Ignore the bad things people do to you, for
they did so in a dream and have, in fact, not done what you saw them do to you. Dream
events do not change reality. In a dream you see people get killed but when you awaken
you realize that they are not, in fact, killed (dreams have no effect on the unified reality
of God)
As Dr Schucman sees it, if you forgive the world, overlook it, you would initially
feel peaceful and happy and, ultimately, rise above the world. You would literally
awaken from this evil dream; and experience yourself as unified spirit, the world of
oneness, which is the world of God.
At all times, we are in God, and remain as God created us, unified spirit, but dream
that we are separated. We need to awaken from this evil dream of separation.
 Dr Schucman believes that her interpretation of the nature of this world is the
message that Jesus taught the world. Indeed, she said that her theology is written by Jesus
Christ himself and that she is merely a conduit for him to continue teaching the world
what he had come two thousand years ago to teach it.

THE EGO AND THE HOLY SPIRIT

Apparently, when the children of God separated from him, God created another
aspect of him, the Holy Spirit. As the Holy Spirit, God entered the world his children
made.
God as the Hotly Spirit came to the separated world and teaches his children to
forgive it, to over look it so as to return home to his unified world.
In our earthly minds (patterns of thinking) are three modes: unified thinking or God,
separated thinking or ego, and Holy Spirit directed separated thinking or right thinking.
In our minds are right and left minds, right and wrong ways of thinking. When we
think as egos, wish separation, we are engaged in wrong thinking and defend separation,
defend this world. The ego urges us to bear grievances and punish those who wronged us.
Through punishment of our enemies (laws that punish people) the ego makes us feel
important, after all we punish and sacrifice other people and that ought to make us
valuable persons, worth derived from the punishment and death of our brothers. On the
other hand, the Holy Spirit asks us to forgive those who wronged us and in forgiveness
derive real worth. When we see this world of separation and forgive events done in it we
are engaged in right minded thinking and are on our way to returning to God, heaven, the
state of oneness.

THE HOLY TRINITY

Dr Schucman reinterpreted the Catholic Church’s notion of three persons in one

God: God the father, God the son and God the Holy Spirit.
God the father is the transcendental God and remains unified; God the son (God’s
creation, his children, us…are now dreaming that he is separated from his father and
siblings) and God the Holy spirit (the immanent God, God in the world) is trying to help
us return to union, to God, to heaven.

Dr Schucman hopes that people would practice her theology; she believes that if
they do so that they would transform their self concepts from separated ego self concepts
to unified self concepts, to Christ like selves that work for social good and love and
forgive each other.
When people love and forgive one another, they transform their lives and the world
becomes like a happy dream. People would then live in a semi peaceful and happy
world. As it were, they are now at the gate of heaven, for they have approximated the
conditions of heaven but are not yet in heaven.
Heaven is spirit and spirit is formless. As long as people live in forms, bodies, they
cannot be in heaven. It is when people finally decide to let go of identification with
separated self, ego housed in bodies, and see themselves as created by God and are equal
and the same and work for their common interests that they return to heaven. (One senses
socialism here: work for their common interests, not for self interests. So, socialism is
salvation?)
The prodigal son who went on a journey to nowhere, for everywhere is in God, on
a journey without distance, for all places are in God, returns home, where he always is,
though dreaming that he is apart from it.
Man must understand that his desire for separation is a mistake, a dream and let go of
that mistake by not defending it so as to awaken in God.

CRITICISM OF SCHUCMAN’S SPIRITUAL IDEALISM

It all sounds terrific until you pause to think about it and ask if it is doable in the
real world. Our world is predicated on attack and defense. Bacteria, virus, fungus etc are
always attacking our bodies and our bodies’ immune systems are always killing them.
Without that form of defense we would not survive for a minute in bodies.
Other people are always attacking us. For example, if black people assumed that
white persons are loving persons and did not defend themselves from their attacks, they
would live to regret it, for whites would enslave them, in a jiffy.
People are dreadful beasts that live off the death of other human beings. If one did
not defend ones self one is either enslaved or dead.
If people tried to be forgiving and defenseless, as Dr Schucman encouraged them to
be, they would not live a day and die off. In effect, her theology is nihilistic, a theology
of death. If practiced people, as we know them, would die off and no human beings
would be on planet earth!
Not to worry, the lady psychologist said. People would not have died off, they would
have returned to spiritual living.
There are no such things as birth and death; those happen only in dreams, in illusory
states. The children of God are created spirit and always live in spirit, while they dream
to be separated from spirit and live in bodies. God and his children are eternal, immortal,
changeless and permanent.
The perception that if we let go of defense via forgiveness that we would die is ego
perception and it perpetuates our state in ego land. Its logic is the egos logic. We have to
ignore that logic, a logic that maintains separation and perpetuates our stay in the world.
Let go of the ego and do not identify with separated self, do not defend your separated
self. If you do so, though you seem to die, but, in fact, you resurrected from death (for
ego and body is metaphoric death).

What shall we make of Dr Schucman’s alternative jurisprudence (forgiveness)?

Does it make sense?
Ego realism tells us that it does not make sense, that it is the rambling of a neurotic,
idealistic Jewish clinical psychologist? Nevertheless, Dr Schucman believes that her
views are the only alternative to our ego based jurisprudence (crime, guilt and
punishment).
 Helen Schucman’s jurisprudence is totally idealistic. She used her mind, her thinking
processes, to construe what seems to her as the ideal alternative to our current imperfect,
ego based system and proposed to get society and people to adopt her idealistic system.
Generally, ideals are not adaptive to the world of space, time and matter. In the
world of space, time and matter certain immutable laws limit what we can do. We can
dream of flying but cannot fly because it takes wings to fly. Idealistic views cannot be
operationalized in this world and if we tried to do so, the realities of the environment alter
how they take form.
If the mass of humanity tried to forgive evil doers, evil doers would kill them off and
eventually kill themselves, too. Consider America’s present war with the Arab world.
The Arabs have this dreadful delusion that their religion is what is good for the world.
They are motivated to impose that religion on the rest of the world. They perceive the
West as their enemies, a people to be conquered and converted to Islam.
On September 11, 2001, Muslim Arabs attacked America and fired the first warning
shot on the war for the control of the world, the clash of civilizations. Arab Muslims
actually hope to defeat the West and impose their feudal civilization on the West. They
fully intend to form a new Caliphate based in Mecca!
Americans, like all human beings, are egotist and cherish living as separated egos in
bodies. They felt attacked by Arabs and defend themselves. In short order, America went
to war and quickly defeated Afghanistan and Iraq.
The West and the East are now joined in battle, a war that began in the eight century
when Muslim Arabs tried to conquer Europe and impose their religion on it and they
were stopped by the Frankish German. The war is back on. The Muslims would not back
off until they are either thoroughly defeated. I see a thousand years war in the future of
the West and East. These two egoistic giants are fighting for the control of the minds of
humanity, and for the control of the entire world; each wants to impose its worldview on
the rest of us.

If the West did not defend itself, the Muslims would defeat it and impose their world
view on it. Islam is an intolerant religion; it does not like to coexist with other religions; it
sees non-Muslims as infidels to be converted to Islam. If the West does not like to
become Islamic and operate its society as Arabs do, feudal, it seems that it must be
defensive. If the West desires freedom from Islam, it must fight Islam. This is the nature
of this world’s reality.
Westerners may desire to be slaves and or die, in which case they may forgive Arab
Muslims and become defenseless. And they would be enslaved or die, make no mistake
about it.
Jesus practiced forgiveness and defenselessness and was killed and died. Those who
practice forgiveness and defenselessness are killed and die. This is the truth of the
empirical world we live on. Do not deceive yourself.
If you want to live in this world you must be defended. Nation states must pay
attention to military matters, for if they are weak, strong ones would defeat and take over
their lands, as white Americans defeated and took the weak red man’s lands. In the egos
real world, the axiom is that all nations must strive for balance of power and if one is
weak the stronger ones would dictate to it.
 At the end of the cold war, the USA became the sole superpower, the world’s
Hegemon, running around trying to impose its will on other countries and will continue
doing so until an equal power emerges and checks its hubris.
However, our world is as Dr Schucman described it, a place of fear and to live in
fear is to live in hell. If in doubt, go see Americans; they live in literal fear. They are the
epitome of the ego based culture and live in hell.
One has pity for Americans, for they are like persons in hell, a hell of their own
making. The question is whether the alternative that Dr Schucman delineated is possible
or just a flight into fantasy?

Forgiveness has limits. We can forgive at the psychological level but not at the
physical level. At the physical level our bodies (immune system) do destroy germs that
try to infect them. If our bodies were not unforgiving and defensive we would not live for
a second. As I sit here typing, millions of bacteria, fungus and virus are trying to make
my body their evening meal, and my body’s antibodies are killing them.
That is to say that my body is unforgiving. If my body is totally forgiving it would
not defend against germs and I would die. It takes defensiveness for us to live.

In this world we can only practice forgiveness partially, not totally. For example, if
you called the individual a put down name, he could feel psychologically attacked by you
and want to attack you back, call you a derogatory name or even physically attack you for
insulting him, but he can choose to overlook what you said, that is, forgive you.
Forgiveness at the psychological level can be done and the individual still survives.
But if forgiveness is done at the physical level the individual would not survive. If
other people physically attacked you and you did not defend yourself (and the best
defense is offense) you could die. If Arab Muslim terrorists attacked Americans and
Americans did not defend themselves (by counter attacking them) they would be killed.
Make no mistake about it, human beings are capable of great evil and would enslave
and eventually kill you if you do not defend yourself. If in doubt, review the career of
Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
Those who want to live on planet earth cannot be completely forgiving, if they did
they would be killed, die.
If you want to live as a separated self, as an ego housed in body, you must be
physically defensive (and can choose to be psychologically defenseless).

Jesus was totally forgiving and did not defend himself when he was attacked. As a
result he died. If you want to live on earth you cannot practice total forgiveness. If you
practiced total forgiveness, like Jesus, you would be killed and die.

Nevertheless, Jesus taught forgiveness as the true meaning of love. When we forgive
other people we feel at one with them; we unify with them.
Our original state is unified (union of all things in spirit). To come to this world,
we chose to separate from this unified state and now live as separated selves housed in
bodies.
 When we stop defending the separated self, the ego, we die to the separated ego self
concept, we die to the human personality, and return to the awareness of our original
unified spirit consciousness. But as long as we want to live in the separated self
consciousness, have a sense of I, we must be defensive and not be totally defenseless and
forgiving.
Finally, nothing that I said in this essay invalidated the thesis of Dr Schucman.
Pointing out that her philosophy is idealistic and solipsistic does not make it untrue. It is
possible that there is a world that is the opposite of our world, a world of sameness,
equality, union, changelessness, permanency, eternity and all knowingness. That world is
not our world and the categories that obtain in it cannot possibly obtain in the world of
separation and differences we live in. Nevertheless, reason tells us that it is possible for a
world that is the opposite of our world to exist, a world where there would be perfect
peace and harmony, for peace and harmony exists only where there is sameness and
equality; in our world peace is impossible for there is differences and inequality. Our
world is filled with noise; noise is not amenable to peace.
All said, the world of unified spirit that Dr Schucman talked about and the major
religions, such as Hinduism, also talk about may well exist. My point is that that world
cannot exist in our separated world and it would be fool hardy to think that our separated
world could ever operate as a theoretical unified world would.

A REALISTIC CHRIST LIKE JURISPRUDENCE/CIVILIZATION

To start off, let me state my political and economic predilections. I accept democracy;
I accept mixed economy (mixture of capitalism and socialism). I believe that it is the
function of government (the public) to pay for all citizens’ education and medical health.
For me, there are no compromises on these issues. I have covered them in other writings.

I think that there is an alternative to the brutality that passes for legal system found
in America and the Western world.
In pre contact Africa, Africans did not have physical facilities called jails where
folks were sent to. How did our people manage to have the most law abiding societies
without prisons and pompous judges, as found in America?
Africans had a jurisprudence that saw all people as one, as belonging to the
community and cared for all people. Those who did what the community considered anti
social were rehabilitated rather than punished for the sake of punishing people. Africans
did not punish people so as to make our egos feel powerful.

Clearly, no society can survive if people engaged in anti social behaviors and they
were permitted to do so. Every society must seek ways to dissuade people from antisocial
behaviors and encourage pro-social behaviors.
The best way to encourage pro-social behaviors is to teach people to do the right
thing and nurture them, and those who do wrong things re-teach them the right things,
over and over, again, until they learn to do the right things.

TRANSFORMATION OF JAILS TO SCHOOLS

 In the extant world, it is impossible not to have prisons. But we can transform our
prisons to places where we actually teach people pro-social behaviors rather than places
where we just punish them.
Our prisons must be different from contemporary Western prisons where folks are
sent to be warehoused and, incidentally, trained to become hardened criminals. We can
transform our prisons and make them into schools where under-socialized persons are re-
socialized and helped to learn appropriate social behaviors. Prisons ought to become
literal schools where school drop outs complete their education. When these people
eventually are released they ought to have sufficient social and work skills to make a
living in society so that they do not have to resort to criminal activities to survive.

THE INCREDIBLE BELIEF IN WORTH

Any one with the slightest power of observation, sooner or later, observes that to
nature human beings have no worth. Natural occurrences like tsunami, earthquakes,
volcanoes, floods, tornados, bacteria, virus, fungus, disease, plagues etc destroy people,
as they destroy animals and trees. The human body is meat to be eaten by worms.
Pure reason teaches us that we have no intrinsic value and worth, that whatever
value that we think that we have is make belief and pretentious and not real.
But no, the ego (the human self) believes that it is very important and defies the
verdict of nature and acts as if it has worth.
A bullet into any human beings head and he is food worms, yet he behaves as if he
is very special. Human beings are amusing, really; that which is nothing pretends to be
something important!

Human beings pursue meaning and purpose. But a clear eyed look at this world
shows that there is no apparent meaning and purpose to the world. Our lives seem
meaningless and purposeless, as existential writers, such as Sartre, Camus, Heidegger,
Jasper etc write.
To posit any kind of meaning for this world is make belief and not real. In fact, much
of neurosis and psychosis emanates from people’s desire to see meaning in their lives.
The neurotic/psychotic sees a meaningless world and invents private meanings, made up
meanings, and pretends that such meanings are real.
Whereas the neurotic/psychotic gives himself private meanings, the religionist gives
himself meaning by positing (a) god and worships him,. The religious person hopes that
by worshipping an imaginary ego like god that his life is transformed from meaningless
to meaningful.

Life on earth is a meaningless play; we ought to have fun with it. We ought to see
people as nothing and, nevertheless, do what we can to help them live happy lives. We
should not fall into the trap of ego fantasy and take nothingness as something special.

HEALTHY VERSUS UNHEALTHY BEHAVIORS

 There are behaviors that if engaged in give human being personal peace and
happiness. When we forgive each other we tend to feel peaceful and happy. On the other
hand, when we do not forgive other people we tend to feel tense, conflicted and unhappy.
To feel happy and peaceful, it follows that people ought to choose forgiveness (most
of the time) to bearing grievances and seeking vengeance.
Blanket forgiveness is not practicable. Those who attack people and intend to harm
and or kill them can do so. Clearly, society cannot let some persons go about harming and
killing people. Society needs to arrest and incarcerate such persons and while in jail teach
them pro-social behaviors.

DISCUSSION

Western jurisprudence is ego based; it is primitive and insane. It is based on the

assumption that human beings are sinful and are criminals and ought to be punished for
their crimes. Whereas this may have worked in the past, it is not going to work in the
future. In our future, knowledge would be so available to all persons that any one who so
desires it could destroy a whole city. Soon, for example, nuclear physics would be taught
to high school students. Consequently, kids would be able to rig crude nuclear weapons.
There is nothing any one can do to prevent the process of spreading knowledge.
Initially, a system of knowledge seems very difficult and only a few persons understand
it, but eventually it becomes common knowledge. What only our best minds know today
would eventually become known to most people. In the past, only the best minds
understood Isaac Newton’ mechanics (physics) but today just about every high school kid
understand it. By the same token, today few persons understand quantum physics but by
the end of this century most high school kids would understand it.
In the history of mankind, generally, a group discovers a weapon system and, for a
while, has sole possession of it and it gives them advantage over other groups. Sooner or
later, the other groups learn about the new weapon system and are able to defend
themselves.
At present, the West and a few other countries have sole knowledge of nuclear
technology and use that knowledge to subject the rest of the world to their control.
Essentially, the West, particularly America, acts like a school yard bully and uses its
possession of nuclear weapons to intimidate other countries into doing as they are told to
do. The West acts as terrorists and uses their nuclear weapons to arouse fear in non-
nuclear countries and propose to destroy them if they do not do as told to do. Clearly, the
rest of the world would not permit this type of terrorism to last forever. The rest of the
world will, in time, have nuclear weapons, for no one likes to be constantly intimidated
by other people.
The best efforts, such as America’s self interest serving efforts (because by
preventing other countries from having nuclear weapons and having it itself she is able to
intimidate them; this is an unacceptable behavior; if there must be nuclear disarmament,
all countries, including the West, must destroy their nuclear weapons; it is patently unfair
for some to keep such weapons while preventing others from having them; who gave the
few the right to have them, might is right?) to halt the spread the knowledge of nuclear
technology to other nations, would not prevent the inevitable spreading of knowledge.
The genie is out of the bottle. The alternative strategy is to seek a different form of social
organization, one that makes people less likely to feel alienated from society and seek
vengeance against those they perceive as wronging them.
If society insists on punishing people, some would be mad enough at it to destroy
an entire city, state and the world.
At present, Americans, like primitive egotists, are running around doing harmful
things to other people and those people are working very hard to lay their hands on
nuclear weapons. These people have the intention of using those weapons on America.
By the later part of this century, most countries would have nuclear weapons. Unless
America changes its arrogant behavior Vis a Vis other countries and people, its cities
would be going up in flames. Another ego based human civilization would end. The
chicken would come home to roast for America.
This does not have to happen. We do not need to have the fall of another human
civilization for others to rise from its ashes. We can change the parameters of individual
and group behaviors and in so doing make sure that our civilizations last long.
For America not to join the dustbin where other ego-based exploitative civilizations
are relegated, Americans, indeed, mankind must discover a different legal system, one
based on love and some forgiveness. This new jurisprudence would make for a new type
of civilization, one not based on crime, guilt and punishment but forgiveness, love and
caring for all people.
Humanity must move from ego based selfish behaviors to love based, Christ like
behaviors. This is the only way the human species will survive in a future world where
many have access to nuclear technology, and if they so wish could destroy all of
humanity. History has made self centered egotism obsolete and made love necessary for
human survival.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

December 29, 2006

* The end of the year is when people make resolutions for a new beginning! This essay is
my New Year’s resolution. This New Year should be the time for non-Westerners to start
considering a different type of society than the one that was imposed on them by the
West.

WHY HUMAN NARCISSISM AND GRANDIOSITY

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Human beings would like to think that they are special and important; they would
like to think that they have worth and value and that their lives have meaning and
purpose. Clearly human beings do not have worth and value and their lives do not have
meaning and purpose (except the false ones they give to themselves). I believe that
human beings pursue these false goals because they perceive themselves as worthless,
valueless, meaningless, purposeless and unimportant. Seeing themselves as they are they
refused to accept that truth and trying becoming their opposites? They compensate for
their powerlessness with imaginary power, their lack of value with fictional value. They
even invent religions and god to give themselves delusional worth and future.
These perceptions is not a moral issue but a scientific one and ought not be occasion
to put people down, just understand them and their existential dances and leave it at that
(some exploit it by giving people the impression that they are important and getting their
heads to swell up and use them, Hitler did that to Germans). Human beings are animals
whose brains developed to such a point that they are aware of themselves as unimportant
in the scheme of things and they feel compelled to feel important.
Human beings work hard to seem important, to make a living for their desired
important lives. But, alas, they are food for worms. They are pathetic and miserable
creatures.
Have sympathy for them without being derogatory from your knowledge of their
futile struggles.
What is described here is the human condition. Nature destroys them as if they have
no worth; human beings who have the will to destroy them, destroy them at will. Hitler
killed 50 million of them and no god stopped him, only other human beings, those who
want to live, stopped him.
Human beings are nothing wanting to become something and would never become
something. This is pathetic, is it not?
Man is a creature condemned to seeking worth when he has no worth. If he did not
seek worth (narcissism and grandiosity) he would be depressed and kill himself.
Or, alternatively, he would accept his reality and live in peace, without delusions of
worth and meaning.

MAYA, SPELL, MAGIC, CHARM HOLD PEOPLE TO THE DREAM

Any person who thinks about the nature of being must despair. Therefore to live on earth
the individual must be charmed into doing so, compelled by a force he is unable to
overcome. Hinduism calls that force Maya, magical spell. What it means is that people
live as if compelled to live, held by a magical charm that they cannot dispel. Life must
be a dream for in it people do what does not make sense but take pride in it. They take
pride in their bodies, food for worms, and their egos what does not even exist. People
must be s asleep and dreaming that they are living. Those who awaken from this ugly
dream die or hang around for only a little while and move on. No clear headed person can
tolerate the life as we know it.

The ego is difficult to break through for to do so is to despair of life and die (or be bored
by live). Life on earth is pure insanity. If one sees through it one either dies or passes
through it peacefully and dies without missing it. What is there to miss? Is insanity
missed? The ego is difficult to give up because without one would no longer find
insanity worthwhile. No self, or merging in universal self, obviously means escaping
from this world,
If any one breaks through the spell of Maya, overcomes insanity and awakens he would
wonder why any one would find this world worth living, find silliness worth the trouble.
Consider animals, cows, they struggle to live but are really food for other animals, for
people as people are food for other animals, so what is the point? They live because a
compelling force, Maya makes them do so. If people realized that life is shit they would
commit mass suicide, or awaken to spirit.

Having convinced themselves that they have worth (as egos in bodies…all animals do
this for it is the nature of animal being, from mosquito to man…all assume that their lives
are worthy of living or else they commit suicide and die off…) normal human beings
fight to maintain that worth via legal system and military; everything they do on earth is
designed to make their worth seem true. They are all unconscious, sleeping and
dreaming that dream worth is real. Normal persons are like animals (each animal assumes
its worth and struggles for it, even though it is eaten by other animals, hence worthless
but it must assume its worth, positive self esteem people call it and defend it and maintain
it)

Neurotics know that they have no worth and struggle to seem to have worth in the ego
state. But they fail for they are beginning to awaken from the dream that there is worth in
ego state, in worthlessness

Mystics know that there is no worth in ego body state and do not desire it but have worth
in spirit; they do not deny worth mind you, they just find it somewhere else, in non-ego
body state.

Life in body and as ego is truly an unconscious state (per psychoanalysis and per
mysticism), a dream state where what is worthless, ego and body is valued and defended.
Any body who has awakened from the unconscious state called normalcy, the dream, of
real self forgetfulness would not value the world.

Have pithy on normal persons for taking nonsense as worth while, they are sleeping and
dreaming, unconscious spirits.

HUMAN BEINGS ARE UNCONSCOUS SPIRITS, SPIRITS IN UNCONSCIOUS

STSATES, DREAMING SPIRITS.

THE INTERFACE OF THE BRAIN AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Many textbooks on physiological psychology (neuroscience) begin with the

narration of an event that took place in 1848. A man, Phineas Gage, was helping lay
Railway tracks in Vermont, USA when a nail he was pounding into the ground flew up
and into his head and pierced his brain. Subsequent to this brain injury, Mr. Gage’s
personality changed, radically. Hitherto, he was a sober, Church going moral man known
for his good judgment. After the accident, he became a foul mouthed, drunk never do
well. In other words, it seemed that changes in his brain’s integrity changed his
personality.
In the 1860s, in France, Paul Broca began studying the human brain, as it is, not as
we think that it should be; that is, he began the study of the brain empirically, objectively
and scientifically. His efforts gave rise to what we now call neuroscience (brain science).

Brain science has come a long way since Broca’s tentative investigations. The
brain has been mapped and we now know what part of the brain controls what part of our
actions. The functions of the various parts of the brain (cerebral cortex, corpus callosum,
frontal lobe, thalamus, caudate, hypothalamus, amygdala, hippocampus, brain stem,
cerebellum, pineal gland, occipital lobe, parietal lobe etc) are pretty much well described.
We now know that much of our cognitive (thinking) processes take place in the cerebral
cortex. We know what parts of the brain control our involuntary activities, such as the
beating of our hearts, lungs, response to heat, danger etc.

The human brain performs a myriad of functions that we are not conscious of, and
even those we are conscious of we do not fully understand how the brain performs them.
The much we know suggests that the brain is composed of over 100 billion neurons
(nerve cells). Each nerve cell (neuron) communicates with others through complex
electro-chemical movements. Dendrites (of neurons) meet with one another (at their
synapses). Messages pass from one dendrite (neuron) to another.
The electrical ions inside and outside neurons (calcium ion, magnesium ion, sodium
ion, magnesium ion, phosphor ion etc.) coordinate their activities to open and close
neurons so as to transmit messages from one neuron to another.
In addition to the role of electrical activities in the transmission of messages from
one nerve cell to another are the activities of certain neurochemicals called
neurotransmitters.
Many neurotransmitters have been identified, such as Dopamine, Serotonin,
Acetylcholine, Norepinephrine, GABA, Endorphin, and so on. These neurotransmitters
play key roles in the transmission of messages from one nerve to another and,
additionally, affect thinking and emotions.
For example, dopamine has been implicated in psychosis (disordered thinking,
including delusions and hallucinations). Apparently, psychotics seem to have defective
dopamine receptors (where, upon release, that neurochemical is stored). It seems that
somehow psychotics, particularly schizophrenics, tend to have a lot more dopamine than
is normal in the brain. This excess dopamine, apparently, is correlated with such
psychotic symptoms as hallucinations and delusions.
Neuroleptic medications, such as Zyprexa, Risperdal, Senequan, Geodom etc.,
apparently, reduce the level of dopamine in the brain and in the process reduce psychotic
symptoms, though they do not heal psychosis. A few weeks on these psychotropic
medications, psychiatric patients are released from psychiatric hospital and are able to
live, semi independently, in the community, whereas in the past they spent most of their
lives in insane asylums (and or roaming the streets).
But like every thing good there is bad in neuroleptic medications. Having reduced
dopamine and psychotic symptoms, they generate the symptoms of those diseases that
ensue from the deficiency of dopamine, such as Parkinson and its tremors, and have to be
treated with anti Parkinson medications (such as cogentine etc).

Those who take stimulant drugs, such as cocaine and amphetamine, apparently,
compel their brains to release additional dopamine. Initially, elevated dopamine gives
these drug takers a feeling of well being, but, ultimately, generates psychotic thinking and
behaviors in them. Persons on high doses of cocaine have been know to hallucinate and
feel paranoid to the point that they hide from imaginary enemies, are suspicious, guarded
and to escape from imaginary assailants jump out of their houses windows and either
injure or kill themselves.

Apparently, in depression there is less serotonin in the brain. For any number of
reasons, depressed persons seem unable to retain this “happy chemical”
(neurotransmitter) in their brains. Medications that block the re-uptake of serotonin (into
its neuro-receptors, hence increase its presence in the brain) have revolutionalized the
treatment of major depression. After about two to three weeks on these anti depressant
medications (such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil etc), clinically depressed persons become
lively and buoyant. Anti depressant medications have done wonders for depressed
persons.
In the past, depressed patients used to go to psychoanalysts and processed their
entire lives stories with their analysts, with the hope of figuring out what made them
depressed, to no avail. Thirty years of psychoanalysis was not known to have healed one
depressed person! But a few weeks on antidepressant medications, the depressed person
no longer feels that life is not worth living, and regains interests in the activities of daily
living (work, sports, food, sex, personal grooming, and has energy to go out and do what
life demands from all of us to live it).
Persons with bipolar affective disorder (alternating depression and mania) are
increasingly stabilized with anti manic medications (such as Lithium, Depakote and
Tegretol).

Medications also are increasingly healing anxiety disorders (neurosis). Apparently,

in anxiety the brain somehow is deficient in either the production or retention of certain
inhibitory neurotransmitters (GABA, Endorphin, for example) or is over active in the
production and retention of certain excitatory neurotransmitters (such as Acetylcholine,
Norepinephrine).
Anxiolytic medications (such as Valium, Librium, Xanax), apparently, work on
certain neurotransmitter receptors and enable them to either release more inhibitory
neurotransmitters or reduce certain excitatory neurotransmitters. The net effect is the
feeling of less anxiety in hitherto anxious persons.
Thirty years of psychoanalysis did not heal one anxious, neurotic person but after a
few weeks of pharmacological intervention, anxious persons claim reduction of their
anxiety levels.
 Persons prone to intemperate anger are treated with medications and these
medications seem to reduce their propensity to temper tantrums. Ativan, for example, is
known to reduce the state of somatic arousal in anger (and anxiety) and help anger prone
persons to calmly process what ordinarily would have made them angry.

Even such seemingly culture induced affects as shame, guilt and fear can be altered
by the ingestation of appropriate medications. Disordered human thinking and emotional
systems are amenable to medicinal interventions.

There is no denying the fact that the medications employed in treating persons with
psychological disorders do work; and that they seem to work where other psychological
interventions do not. This may seem like a simple matter, but it raises a philosophical
question; it proposes to change our view of human nature.

Is the human brain, a physical (material) thing, all there is to human thinking and
feelings? The real question is: is man only matter?
We know that in organic mental disorders we can correlate damage (lesion) to the
brain with changed thinking and behaving patterns. A hitherto gifted student who was
involved in an accident and suffered brain injury became a moron. In other words, was
his hitherto high IQ (over 132) strictly biological in nature, since an injury to his brain
reduced his IQ to less than 70 (the benchmark for mental retardation)?
Those involved in accidents that affected their brains undergo radical change in their
personalities (organic personality disorders), from being calm to excitable persons with
poor judgments; from controlled anger to uncontrolled anger etc. So, is personality a
product of brain chemistry? If so, what about all that talk about culture and religion’s
influence on the human personality?

In philosophy is the age old debate between materialism and idealism. Material
monism posits that human beings are animals and that their thinking, their so-called
mind, is epiphenomenal; that is, is a product of the configurations of particles, atoms and
elements in their brains. Man is part of matter, period. He is nothing more than matter.
His so-called consciousness, his sense of self is a product of the permutations of electrical
and chemical processes in his brain. If in doubt, give him drugs that alter his brain
chemistry and he looses his consciousness. Before surgery, patients are anaesthetized and
do not have consciousness during the period of operation; so where did their
consciousness, their sense of self, go to during such periods?
Accidents produced particles (quarks, neutrons, protons, electrons etc), atoms and
elements and further accidents produced the mixture of these elements into molecules,
and they eventually evolved and, over time (the earth has been around for four billion
years?) evolved into animals who think, feel and behave as we do. We are the products of
accidental evolution.
 Charles Darwin (Origin of Species) believes that human beings are nothing more
than glorified apes foraging for food and mutating and adapting to changes in their
environment, with those who did not adapt dying off.
Whereas in his Ethics, Spinoza had seen human beings as capable of making
judgments to serve social interests, life on earth is a struggle for the survival of the fittest,
Herbert Spencer writes in his Ethics for the new age. (Alas, the human sense of self, the
ego and its pride would like to believe that they are more than monkeys in business suits.)
Neuroscience, obviously, reinforces the contentions of materialism. (David Hume, a
Scottish logical positivist, would be glad to dispense with the contention that there is
more to man than his physical brain; neuroscience has finally enabled him to dismantle
Berkeley’s idealism.)

On the other hand, is the view that man is more than his body (in this case, his
physical brain)? Rene Descartes argued for dualism. In his view (I think, therefore, I am;
cogito ergo sum), man has a dual nature, matter and mind. Man is a thinking creature.
His ability to think transcends his biological nature. In other words, there is a spiritual
aspect to human beings.
The generality of humanity would seem to believe that man has a dual nature, a
physical and a spiritual nature.
(The belief that man is more than his body is referred to as idealism; extreme
idealistic monism denies physics and emphasizes spirit. George Berkeley, for example,
sees the entire world as a dream in our minds, solipsism. Berkeley’s extreme idealism is
not shared by other idealistic philosophers. These would be content with the notion that,
somehow, our thinking affects the physical environment and that we are not just the
product of the physical world. German idealistic philosophers, such as Leibnitz, Kant,
Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche etc believe that the world is changed by human
beings thoughts; that thinking is primary, as opposed to environmental determinism of
human beings. The French idealist, Blasé Pascal believed that we are spiritual beings and
that the existence of God is true.)

Clearly, the thrust of neuroscience is that human thinking, emotions and even
consciousness are produced by the nature of the human brain (the nervous system).
Neuroscience is thus changing the definition of what it means to be a human being.
If the assumptions of neuroscience are correct, all the talk about God, spirits, heaven
and hell are hocus pocus. Human beings are like other animals; they do what they do as a
result of their bodies programming, which is a result of their evolution on this planet, and,
therefore, when they die they end with their bodies.
(Studies of the phenomenon known as near death experience, a phenomenon which
would seem to support the idea of our existence outside matter, show that certain
chemical alterations take place in the brains of people who are near death, and that all the
claims these people make regarding going through a dark tunnel, entering a place of light
and seeing their dead ancestors etc are biological in origin. The brain can be
biochemically induced to have such experiences. That is to say that there is no such thing
as after death world.)
 Believing in the conclusions of neuroscience, the evolutionary biologist, Richard
Dawkins recently penned a book, The God Delusion, claiming that the belief in God is a
mental illness, a delusional disorder, a belief in that which is not true as true. As he sees
it, human beings have to be healed of the God Delusion, their making up what does not
exist, God, and believing in it. The idea of God is an absurd story we made up and we
ought to get rid of that story and face the truth that we are the product of matter, Mr.
Dawkins, argues.
Before Dawkins, Sigmund Freud (The Future of an Illusion) had argued that the
belief in God, and religion, is a neurosis.
Eric Fromm considered religion group neurosis while seeing what ordinarily is
called neurosis a personal religion.
As a rational secular humanist, Alfred Adler saw no need for the hypothesis of God;
as he sees it, we can train people to devote their lives to serving social interests and that is
the only way to obtain a feeling of meaning, purpose, worth and value in our (as
existentialists, such as Sartre, Camus, Jasper, Heidegger claim) otherwise meaningless
existence.

Simply stated, neuroscience is nullifying religion and spirituality. On the other hand,
human beings like to see themselves as spiritual beings but neuroscience tells them that
such self perception is wrong.
The question is whether human beings self perception that they are more than their
bodies is psychotic, as Professor Dawkins contended?

As an empiricist, I cannot deny the evidence that neuroscience shows me. I have
witnessed changes in the human brain and their effects on human thinking, feeling and
behavior. On the other hand, I am convinced that man is more than his brain. While
recognizing the conclusions of neuroscience, I make an argument for a non physical
consciousness interacting with the human brain.

RELIGION AND CONSCIOUSNESS, AKA GOD

The subject of this paper is the interface of the brain and consciousness, not
religion. But since to understand consciousness it is necessary to talk about religion, and
religions’ gods I decided to make some comments on them.
The major religions of the world are Judaism, Christianity, Islam; Hinduism and
Buddhism. Let us briefly see how these essentially Asian religions construed God. (What
religions call God, I call consciousness; I, therefore, interchange the terms god and
consciousness.) (Apparently, the Asians define God for us and Europeans define science
or us. Where do Africans come into the picture?)
Judaism, Christianity and Islam are Semitic religions; they were founded by
essentially the same people, people living in the Arab world. (The Jews are a variant of
Arabs; both Jew and Arab speak related languages and have the same middle-eastern
world view.)
The three religions of the Semitic race do not bother to explain God but merely
posit the existence of one God and ask their followers to accept his existence on blind
faith.
 In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, no attempt is made to be rational, to persuade the
individual to believe the hypothesis that God exists; it is simply assumed that he should
accept such a proposition on trust. Essentially, these religions are irrational religions. At
best, they could be considered metaphysical poems on the possible existence of a non-
physical reality. They do not appeal to persons with rational, philosophical turn of minds.
To the scientist, they are gibberish, really.

Judaism’s (and, by default, Christianity’s) Genesis, stated, without proof, that in the
beginning was God. God created the world. What that God is was not explained. Is he a
person like us? Is he an impersonal force?
The Bible’s God sometimes acts like psychotics in psychiatric hospitals; his sense
of specialness and consequent anger at those who do not recognize and respect his
presumed importance would make him a chap with pathological narcissism. If what the
old Testament portion of the Bible calls God were a human being, most mental health
professionals would involuntarily commit him to psychiatric hospitals and fill his body
up with neuroleptic medications to see if he could be made a reasonable human being.

Christianity accepted Judaism’s postulation that there is a monotheistic God and did
not make any effort to explain him. It is interesting that the compilers of the bible saw it
fit to combine the Old Testament and the New Testament gods since they are different.
The God of Moses was an angry god who punished whoever disobeyed his whim. The
God of Jesus Christ, on the other hand, was a loving and forgiving God. The entire gospel
of Jesus Christ can be summarized as love and that forgiveness is the true meaning of
love; we forgive the wrongs done by those we love. One would think that the two
approaches to God were so radically different that they ought not to be in the same book?
Perhaps, the Church fathers wanted to give historical continuity to their religion hence
they linked it to the Old Testament? Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism (just as
Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism).
Assuming that God exists, the founder of Christianity, Jesus proceeded to preach a
moral gospel of love and forgiveness. Jesus was a powerful moral preacher but certainly
did not prove the existence of God, nor did he make an effort in that regard. (See Thomas
Jefferson’s Bible.)
Simply stated, Judaism and Christianity did not prove the existence of God, nor did
they attempt to do so.
I am aware of Christian theology, in fact, I have studied it but it was largely
undertaken by non-Middle Easterners, by occidental minds trying to make an oriental
poem seem reasonable. Even then, Christian theology failed in trying to marry Greece
and Arabia. Thomas Aquinas (Sumna Theologica) efforts to use Aristotelian logic to
prove the existence of God does not persuade any one. You either accept Christianity on
faith or you don’t; you do not have the delusion that you are accepting it on rational,
scientific grounds. I will, therefore, disregard European Christian theology.

Islam is essentially like Judaism and Christianity. In 610, the founder of Islam,
Mohammed (570-622) began hearing voices talking to him, voices he claimed were from
the angel Gabriel. (Do angels exist? Where is the proof? Were those voices
hallucinations? How do we know the difference?)
 The Koran is the compilation of what Mohammed’s private voice told him is from
the angel Gabriel (and, ultimately, from God).
Mohammed assumed the existence of God without demonstrating its reality. For all
intents and purposes, Islam does not intend to persuade any one to believe in its idea of
God but merely asks the individual to accept it on faith. ( The non-believer, an infidel, the
individual is game for killing by radical Muslims on a jihad to convert the world to Islam
and re-establish an Islamic Caliphate, a theocracy that rules the world from Mecca. Arabs
and their religion are on ego power quest to convert the world to their religion and to
dominate the world.)

We can safely dismiss the Semitic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam as
irrational religions. These religions tell us nothing important about God. Western
theologians’ attempts to make these essentially irrational poems on God seem rational
beg the point. St Augustine, Origin, Tertullian, Athanasius, Meister Eckhart, Thomas
Aquinas, Anselem, Erasmus, Martin Luther, Calvin, Thomas Kung, Thomas Merton etc
were projecting European thinking to Arab religion and they did not help matters at all.

India produced two religions that made some attempts to explain what they meant by
God.
Hinduism teaches that God is an impersonal force that manifests in everything in
the universe. One force, Brahmin, is everything in the universe. Brahman, in his true
state, is not known to us, but in his manifest state is the material universe.
Hinduism sees the temporal universe as an illusion, a mirage that does not, in fact,
exist. According to the foremost philosopher of non-dual Advaita, Vedanta, the Jnana
(Yogi) Sankaracharya, the world is a dream and the dreamer is Brahman himself.
One God, as it were, cast a spell/magic, charm (Maya) on himself and went to sleep
and in his sleep dreams that he is many. Everything in the material universe is an aspect
of God’s dream.
God in his true essence is spirit, creative, loving, infinite, changeless and permanent,
but in his dream state is the opposite of those attributes: changeable, impermanent,
transitory, ephemeral, finite and destructive.
According to Hinduism, human beings’ true essence, Atman, is the same as
Brahman. But in the dream, the world, the Atman (individual’s soul) sees itself as
separated from the universal soul (Brahman).
As long as we see ourselves as separated from God and from each other, we are
caught in the dream of the world. We are living in an illusion. We are deluded in the
sense that we believe what is not true (separated self, ego) as true; we are also
hallucinating in the sense that we talk to people that are not real. The world is a psychosis
and we are all insane.
Truth is the union of all being; lies are the beliefs in separation. The individual is
forgetful of his true identity, unified state hence is said to live in ignorance. As long as a
person believes himself separated from God and from other people, Hinduism teaches
that he is ignorant of his truth: union with all being.

The power of Maya, however, is very strong and not to be trifled with. It is a magical
portion that makes us forget our true unified self and identify with a false ego separated
self. This charm is too powerful and only few can dispel it. People on earth are charmed,
are under a magical spell hence take a meaningless, purposeless life as meaningful and
purposeful; they take their worthless bodies, food for worms, as worthwhile; they devote
their lives working like slaves to provide for their bodies, bodies that are food being
prepared for worms. It is insane to take nothingness as something important and seek it.
(Have you observed the well adjusted American seeking material things, working many
hours in pursuit of it all? In his sixties nature does him a favor and gives him a heart
attack and or stroke and he is put out of his misery. Seriously, you ask: why is he seeking
nothing and taking it as something important? Does he not have the brains to know the
difference? You wonder if he has arrested intellectual development, whether he is
forever a child, not an adult. The American is a study in infants in adult bodies. Can’t
they see that life in body is nothing? And this is not some sort of major depression.
Indeed, when the American begins to think, real existential thinking, his superficial
culture and its childish psychiatrists tell him that he is depressed and his already bloated
body is pumped full of antidepressants, whose adverse effects damage some of his
internal organs and eventually kill him. These over fed animals must learn to think, for
nature gave human beings the ability to think.)
Hinduism believes that a powerful spell must have been cast on people to prevent
them from recognizing the futility of their existence on earth. Worse, they take their
separated ego selves, the human personality, as important when, as Buddha said, it is a
mere puff of smoke, that which does not even exist, or seem to exist only as in a dream
state. Pure reason would lead one to give up this world, Hinduism says. But we are
prevented from reasoning by a powerful charm, Maya. We take nothingness as something
important and even fight for it. The world is insane, and at bests a child’s play. Give it up
and return home to Brahman and his home, Brahmaloka, Hinduism teach.
Enlightenment is the awareness of ones union with all being, and living as such.
The purpose of Hindu religion is to enable the individual to break through the
ignorance of his true self, unified self, (to over come real self forgetfulness). “Thou art
that”, one is one with Brahman and all his manifestations.
To attain the truth of his being, the individual is encouraged to meditate (Raja yoga)
and in meditation tune out the separated self and its thinking and experience Moksha
(break out from the ego and its world) and enter Samadhi (oneness with God).
In Samadhi, the individual looses consciousness of the separated “I consciousness”
and regains the “we consciousness”. In that unified self consciousness, he is said to be
enlightened to his true self and thenceforth is an illuminated soul (such as Gautama
Buddha).
When one is enlightened to ones true self, unified self, one either stays in it (in which
case ones body dies) or one returns to aspects of separated consciousness, our world, and
becomes a teacher of union, who is a teacher of God and teacher of love and forgiveness.
To return to our world, the enlightened person takes on the ego, once more, but
now, the ego of love and the ego of knowledge, and uses it to teach other egos, separated
selves, people, about the illusory nature of the ego and help them do what they have to do
to regain the consciousness of unified consciousness.
 To Hinduism there is something called unified consciousness (Brahman, God) and
all of us are part of it. At some point, we undertook to separate from that unified
consciousness and now have separated consciousness.
The separated self, the “I consciousness”, is said to be false and the unified “we
consciousness” is said to be true.
Hinduism aims at enabling people to extinguish their separated self consciousness
and regaining the awareness of their unified self consciousness. In unified self
consciousness is said to be peace, happiness and joy.

Gautama Buddha was a Hindu who claimed to have attained the “we
consciousness”, to have escaped from separated self consciousness (the ego self) and
attained the unified we consciousness. The "we consciousness" is called the real self,
whereas the separated consciousness, our present state of consciousness, is called the
false self.
Buddha called this experience of union Nirvana. (Hinduism calls it Samadhi and
Zen calls it Satori.)
Buddha teaches that to attain unified self consciousness we must let go of our
separated consciousness.
The individual must consciously deny that he is the separated ego self and empty his
thinking of all separated self concepts. He must silence all ego conceptual thinking and
remain quiet. His mind must be emptied of all ego separated categories, all sense of I,
and the world of separation, our empirical world. The mind, as it were, should be empty,
a void, with no known self in it.
In a mind swept clean of all conceptual thinking, the individual experiences his real
self, the unified spirit self.
That unified spirit self, Buddha said, cannot be explained or understood with our ego
based thinking; for ego thinking is separated thinking and it cannot understand unified
thinking; thus Buddha refused any question asking him to explain nirvana (God state).

Both Hinduism and Buddhism teach that in unified spirit self there is no you and I,
no seer and seen, no subject and object, and that all are one literal self.

Having experienced union with all existence, become enlightened and illuminated
to his/our real self, Buddha proceeded to teach that as long as human beings desire to
have separated selves and identify with them that they are in this world, a dream, an
illusion; and that they would suffer.
Suffering, Buddha said, 2500 hundred years ago, is rooted in our desire to be
separated selves, egos, and doing what makes the ego and the body that houses it seem to
survive.
To overcome suffering, we must give up the desire to have separated selves. We
must give up our attachments to the "I consciousness" and its world, our separated world,
and return to the truth of the unified world. (Matter separates, so the unified world is not
material, is, if you like, spiritual.)
In the unified state, the opposite of our separated state, all things are unified, and
they are in harmony. The world of union is the world of peace and happiness.
 For things to be unified they must be the same and equal. The world of unified spirit
is the world of sameness and equality, a world of permanency, changelessness, and
knowledge.
In our present world, there are differences and inequality hence conflict exists in it.
We must return to the unified spirit world of sameness and equality and experience its
peace and happiness, Hinduism and Buddhism teaches.

Hinduism and Buddhism teach their adherents to meditate and in meditation

extinguish their separated self consciousness so as to attain unified (no separated ego
self) consciousness.

DISCUSSION

Religions are not based on rational parameters, whereas science is. Religions make
certain assumptions and without proving them merely ask folks to accept them on faith.
Hinduism made the most valiant effort to inject some reasoning into its religious
categories.
Apparently, out of fear of death, human beings are willing to accept the irrational
postulations of religion.

Science does not ask any one to accept anything on faith. The scientific method
asks people to accept only what is self evidently true, what they can see and or verify. A
hypothesis about the nature of a thing is exactly that, a guess. It is those hypotheses that
can be demonstrated as true in the empirical world that science accepts as scientific
propositions, until they are demonstrated as false, so said Karl Popper.
Neuroscience is a science. Any of us can perform a little experiment and verify the
conclusions of neuroscience. Cut open the human brain, study it and you come to the
conclusions of neuroscience. You do not have to believe neuroscience; you have to verify
it before you accept it.

No one doubts the truth of certain conclusions reached by neuroscience. The

question is whether those conclusions say all there is to say about human beings, or are
human beings more than their brains?

THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

In the last section I talked about religions God (philosophers’ consciousness). I did
so not because religion proves the existence of God; but as segue to the discussion on
consciousness.
What is consciousness? There is no universally accepted definition of
consciousness. However, many people take it to mean human beings awareness of their
individuality, their awareness of their selves as separated and apart from other people and
from the world.
 Generally, it is believed that other animals, at best, have species (group)
consciousness but not individuated consciousness. A dog probably identifies with other
dogs but does not think of itself as apart from other dogs? It is human beings (and,
perhaps, some of the higher apes, such as chimpanzees) that have separated self
consciousness.
Within human beings the level of self consciousness is different in people. The
normal person’s self consciousness is slightly above that of animals, that is, species
(group) level but not by much. It is the so-called neurotic that has optimal self
consciousness. (Whereas the neurotic seeks maximal separated self hence lives in tension
and conflict, the mystic extinguishes his separated self consciousness, his ego, Hindu
Ahamkara, in unified consciousness, and in doing so regain eternal peace and joy. The
egotist lives in conflict, the mystic lives in bliss.)
The neurotic feels totally individuated and separated from other people and from
existence. He feels all alone in the wide universe. He does not feel like he belongs to any
groups (his family, clan, tribe, nation, humanity etc). He is man alone. It is this aloneness
that hunts him and makes him do some of the things he does. He feels inordinate anxiety
(primordial anxiety from the sense of separateness). He lives in total fear and seeks ways
to wriggle back to the group, to where normal human beings are, and where animals are.
Alas, no matter how much he tries he cannot extinguish his sense of aloneness and return
to group sleep-dream, animal unconscious existence. (Animals unconscious existence is
in contradistinction from the mystic’s merging of his self in universal consciousness,
where, though, he loses awareness of his separated self he gains the awareness of
collective consciousness; the self does not die in universal consciousness but is expanded
to include all selves.)
The neurotic is fully human and has no place to go but to return to where human
beings came from, unified consciousness aka God. As long as people seek separated
consciousness they will experience conflict (the tension arising from the real and false
selves, the unified and separated selves).
The normal person is yet to become a true human being, to be given birth to the
tragedy of being human, aloneness; the normal person is sheltered from primordial
anxiety by his sense of connectedness and belonging to his group.
Clearly, biological factors play a role in the development of extreme self
consciousness. Neurotics are born neurotic, not made; normal persons and their limited
intelligence and awareness of the human condition are born that way and remain that way
throughout their lives (unless you can change their genetic structure and open them up to
real thinking, the type found in introspective, reflective shy neurotic persons.)
The normal person is only slightly higher than animals in evolution but not fully
human, yet. And that is as well for if normal persons were fully human and appreciated
the meaninglessness and purposelessness of being they would commit mass suicide; it is
as well that they remain like sleeping-dreaming animals and take that which is disgusting
to neurotics as interesting: enjoyment of sensual pleasures, for example.

At this very moment scientists are busy studying the various parts of the brain, some
are mapping the brain’s functions; others are trying to understand how the brain produces
thinking and emotions and yet others trying to locate the sit of consciousness.
 Rene Descartes thought that the Pineal gland was the sit of consciousness, the area of
the brain where spirit interfaced with matter. He was wrong. Other neurologists have
indicated that, perhaps, since the cerebral cortex is the part of the brain responsible for
much of human beings cognitive functions that it is the sit of consciousness. They are
wrong. So far, no one has located a specific part of the human brain responsible for
human consciousness.

MY THESIS

Brain scientists will not locate a specific part of the brain responsible for
consciousness.
Consciousness is apart from the brain but uses the entire brain and the entire human
body to operate on earth.

From the scientific perspective, consciousness does not emanate from outside the
brain, from so-called spirit, but from the brain itself. In other words, the dance of the
various neurons (electro-chemicals) somehow produce the human sense of I, the
separated self that perpetually sees its life endangered and defends it.
(All of human activity is really defense of the separated self, observed the astute
American metaphysical psychologist, Helen Schucman. See her metaphysical cum
psychological poem, A Course in miracles.)

Even though it is clear to one that consciousness does not emanate from the brain, it
is necessary that scientists search for it in the brain continue, unabated; their fooling
around in the brain enables us to understand the brain more fully. We do not need to
truncate that understanding. We need to understand the final frontier of our physical
existence, our brain.
The human brain is, perhaps, the most complex machine constructed by the universe.
We do not need to cut short the scientific inquiry into the nature of the brain and
consciousness because of misguided religion’s insistence that we believe in its unproven
hypothesis that there is spirit.
Religion has a way of stifling the search for knowledge, and for setting mankind
back, relegating it to belief in nonsense as the truth. For thousands of years, human
beings lived in ignorance; when they were sick they prayed to non-existent gods. The
gods of their imaginations (we invented god in our human image and turned around to
say that God created us in his image…if God exists, he is formless spirit; spirit does not
have images) did not heal them, they suffered and died.
It was only when some human beings accepted Francis Bacon’s scientific method
and studied phenomena on its own terms, without reference to so-called gods that we
began to improve the human condition. In the four hundred years since mankind
gradually accepted the scientific method, look at what they have learned and
accomplished!
In the past, people died young from assorted diseases. (Ramakrishna’s died at fifty,
from throat cancer; apparently, his mother god, kali, did not prevent him from having
cancer, see M the Gospel of Ramakrishna. Helen Schucman died from pancreatic cancer,
apparently, the god that she said that she labored for in writing her book did not reward
her with a more peaceful and graceful death.)

If left unobstructed, science would improve human life span to, at least 120 years,
by the end of this century. So, I say, onward science soldiers (not Christian soldiers or
Islam’s solders). We have to use knowledge to conquer the world, and transform the
human culture into a scientific culture and drive out all religious superstitions.
The Bible, Koran, Veda etc will join Homer’s Odyssey and Illiad and Virgil’s
Aeneid as books on ancient mythologies. They have held mankind back long enough and
it is time to set them aside and move on to the search of truth in a scientific manner.

UNIVERSAL INTELLIGENCE, A CONJECTURE

Is consciousness a product of our brains, a physical phenomenon, only? If so, how

did consciousness come to be and have the need to understand itself?
I have a need to understand human beings (physiology, psychology etc). How did
that need/desire arise? How did matter produce the desire to study itself?
Clearly, matter affects consciousness, but to say that matter produced consciousness
is to beg the question.
Epiphenomenalism is another form of religion, this time, the religion of science,
with scientists acting as its high priests and their unfounded pronouncements accepted on
blind faith, as religionists accept, on blind faith, the gibberish propounded by so-called
ministers of god.

It seems to me that belief in God and life after death is mostly predicated on fear of
death. Fear of death disposes human beings to accept the rubbish found in the various
religions of mankind. Therefore, a serious consideration of consciousness can only be
embarked on by those who do not fear death. If you can look death in the face and say, I
do not fear you, I do not mind oblivion and finitude as my fate, you are ready for
philosophy. As long as your life is driven by fear you are not ready for philosophy, you
are only capable of religion. As Sigmund Freud pointed out in the Future of an Illusion,
religion is the abode of terrified children seeking a powerful father figure to protect them
from the vicissitudes of living on planet earth.
I do not fear death. If death is the end of our existence, that is fine with me. I
consider it cowardly for people to believe in God because they are afraid of finitude and
want to live forever and ever. I particularly loathe those who fear going to hell and desire
to go to heaven. We do not know that heaven and hell exist; therefore, to fear hell seems
absurd.
As far as I can see, oblivion is preferable to living in the impoverished conditions
many people live in this world.
My motivation in trying to understand consciousness is not fear (of death) or such
rubbish but curiosity. I am intrigued that in a seeming chaotic, meaningless, purposeless,
worthless and valueless universe, human beings have consciousness.
 The mystery of the universe is that it produced consciousness, a consciousness that
can study the universe. (Albert Einstein observed another mystery: that the universe can
be understood by human beings.)
Looking at the absurdities of the universe, such as produce human beings only to
have them die and become food for worms, it would seem better if consciousness did not
exist in the universe. Why have the ability to understand the universe’s insanity? What is
the point?
We are born; we grow, pursue meaningless and purposeless goals and eventually
die. Our bodies are food for worms.
Our egos are chimera; they are here today and are gone tomorrow. As existentialist
writers correctly observed, our lives are meaningless and purposeless, though given
pseudo meaning and purpose by our efforts to understand the universe, physically and
psychologically. As Arthur Schopenhauer noted, man seems a mistake that ought not to
have been made; we ought not to exist, for we exist for nothing. Consider that the
expanding universe would, sooner or later, either re-collapse into itself and end
everything or expand for ever, loose heath, become too cold to support life and every
thing dies (the big chill). What is the point to it producing life in the first place? Why
produce life only to extinguish it? It is absurd.
Why did the universe produce a conscious creature, a creature that, as Shakespeare’s
Hamlet observed, in his intelligence is like the gods (who are our creation) yet is food for
worms! People live to suffer. As we used to say during my teenage years: life is pain and
then you die. What a bizarre universe!
Only an insane intelligence could have produced such a weird universe; sane
intelligence would not have created this world; why create it, what is it for? Silence!

Existential philosophy notwithstanding, there is the question of consciousness. Is

consciousness the product of the concatenation of accidental particles, atoms and
elements, only?

Without beating around the bush, here is what I think, my speculation. I have no
proof for my stance but it makes sense to me (to my five senses and more).

I think that consciousness is not rooted in matter. I think that there is a conscious
aspect of the universe. I do not know how it works. And I do not have a need to attribute
its working to the gods of my invention; I do not worship imaginary gods.

Though I do not understand the nature of consciousness, I am inclined to approach it

along Hindu (Vedanta) categories. I am fully aware that Hinduism, like all religions, is
metaphorical representation of reality and not the reality it is trying to represent. Mental
constructs and models of reality are not the reality they are trying to understand. What
reality is, I do not know.
I think that there is consciousness that is the same everywhere in the universe. That
consciousness has no sense of I and you; it knows itself as one. It is the same and equal
everywhere it is. It is all knowing, eternal, changeless and permanent. It is not a person;
it is impersonal and probably does not know of our ego, separated personal existence!
 To say one immediately implies two. You cannot conceptualize one without
conceptualizing two. One thing presupposes two things.
The one consciousness is, therefore, simultaneously one and infinite in numbers. If
you like to call it spirit: spirit is one and many. And if you insist on anthropomorphizing
it, there is one self who is infinite selves; one mind that is infinite minds; one thinker
thinking through infinite units of thinking.
I think that in its actuality that the one self knows itself to be infinite in numbers but
knows all its infinite parts as itself.

TRANSCENDENT AND IMMANENT CONSCIOUSNESS

Somehow, the various seeming parts of the Self seem to have become separated
from each other. They have not separated from each other; they remain joined, connected
and unified; they merely believe that they have become separated and what they believe
in and behave as if it is real, seem real to them.
Our empirical world seems to be the place where that which is one consciousness, if
you like, one self, seems to be separated into infinite consciousness, infinite selves.
On earth, each person fancies himself separated from other people, from animals
and from trees. But in truth each self is the same as other selves.
(Unified consciousness, unified self, which, by logical necessity, must be non-
material, for matter separates, is the transcendent self, whereas separated consciousness,
the separated self, the empirical, earthly self is the immanent consciousness/ self.)

In Hindu categories, one self, as it were, cast a powerful charm, Maya, on a part of
itself, and that part goes to sleep and dreams that it is our seeming infinite selves. The
many selves on earth are illusions, dream selves, dream figures (and, at best, temporary
selves).
The seeming separated selves: human beings, animals, trees etc die and disappear
from existence but what exists forever and ever is the one unified self, the one
consciousness that produced them in its dream that separation is possible in its eternal
union. We are dream figures, not real selves.

This does not mean that we should negate this world and escape from it, as some
Hindus propose to do. We are here and ought to make the most of it. We ought to study
this world as scientifically as we could and device technology to adapt to it.
I believe that in the future, science and technology would make it possible for
people to live healthier lives.
Genetic science and genetic engineering would make it possible for us to understand
how our bodies are put together and engineer out defective genes and replace them with
healthy genes.

To me, it seems that life on earth is a dream, a bad dream, a nightmare; we ought to
transform this nightmarish dream into a happy dream.
Love all our fellow dreamers. Forgive those who harmed us, as much as it is
possible to forgive them. (Sometimes, you have to fight those who are bent on harming
and or killing you. For example, the West must fight the advocates of Islam and prevent
them from converting mankind to their feudal, theocratic social structure.)

I think that the human body is like an automobile, a car. Somebody is driving that
car. Who that somebody is, I do not know.
It is self evident that the state of a car affects how well it runs. If a car is rickety or
old it does not run well despite the intentions of the driver to make it run well.
By this analogy, if the human body (brain) is disordered and or old it does not
perform well for the human beings trying to live through them. If the brain is not healthy
it does not permit its owner, its driver to make much through it.

We must, therefore, understand the body’s mechanics and improve it, so that it
enables us to do the work we are doing with it and for as long as we live on planet earth.

I think that there is intelligence at work in the universe, albeit a weird, insane
intelligence that constructed our bodies and everything in the universe and lives (dreams)
through them. That intelligence is not our bodies and the other material agents that it lives
in, just as we are not the cars we made or the computers we built.
I do not propose to explain the nature of that universal intelligence, for I do not
understand it. Nor do I think that any human being understands it, the founders of extant
religions included. I just assume that there is an unknown aspect to our lives and leave it
at that.
The unknown X in our lives, I do not think can be understood through our current
separated conceptual categories.

CONCLUSION

The ideas expressed in this paper do not fall into any of the usual religious
categories. It is not theism or atheism or deism. It is not agnosticism, either. It is what it
is.
My hunch is that if the universe could produce the complex information in our DNA
that it could also produce intelligence outside of matter.
Quantum mechanics, particularly the findings of Heisenberg, Schrodinger and Pauli
seem to suggest that we (observers) have influence on what we observe. Other
observations in quantum physics seem to suggest that all particles are aware of each
other, communicate with each other, and, indeed may be each other (non locality). A
universe that can produce such wonders can produce an independent intelligence in it.

However, it is not necessary to use the ideas of quantum mechanics to prove the
existence of independent intelligence. Physics studies matter and should not be confused
with religious beliefs. I am not interested in commingling the two systems of knowing.
Physics should be studied on its own terms and religion (philosophy) should be studied
on its own terms.
 An unknown intelligence, a seeming insane intelligence (for it created a meaningless
world) operates, if you like, dreams, through our bodies. That intelligence is not our
bodies though the nature of our bodies affects how it operates through them.
Some weird Intelligence interfaces with the human brain. How it does so, one does
not understand and for the present leave it at that.
What do you think?

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 7, 2007

REFERENCE
(Add references to the redrafted version for print, not the electronic media.)

WHAT IS SUCCESS AND FAILURE?

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

In this world, many people want to be successful and fear failing. Society, by and
large, tends to reward those it considers successful and ignore those it considers failed
persons. The average human being admires successful persons, whom he wants to be like,
and has little or no use for failing persons. So what exactly is success and failure?

Let us begin with the seeming positive, success. There are two types of success.
There is the success of normal persons. Here, a chap goes through the expected
schooling, acquires relevant job skills and obtains a job and works his way from entry
level positions to the top of his profession (game). This type of person has normal self
concept and is not motivated to be a grandiose self. He is happy to be alive and does his
share in the work place and is rewarded with good pay and promotions. The normal
person provides decently for his family and contributes to social well being. He is
successful if he is what Americans call a middle class person, say, a medical doctor,
income over $150, 000 a year, married with two children; a lawyer, income over $50, 000
a year, married with two children; an engineer, income $65,000 a year, married with two
children; a teacher, income $45, 000 a year, married to another teacher with two children;
an auto mechanic, or an electrician, a plumber, a carpenter etc making good hourly
wages, married with four or more children and adequately supports them.

The other type of success is the success of those doing what they really, really want
to do with their lives. This type of person may or may not be making too much money.
For example, a scientific researcher studying the human brain and helping us understand
the nature of the brain, I think, is a truly successful person. A person who dedicates his
life to understanding human psychology, such as the early psychologists (Freud, Adler,
Jung, Fromm, Sullivan, Horney, Maslow, Rogers, R.D Laing, George Kelly, Pavlov,
Watson, Skinner etc) I think, is a successful person. If the individual studies something
and uses the information he obtains from it to make human living a bit pleasant, I think
that he is a successful person.

There are two types of failures. There is failure from the normal perspective. Here a
person fails to make a good living for himself and his family (if he has one). Society calls
such persons never do well. A man who is unemployed and is unable to support his
family, all over the world, is considered a failure.
The other type of failure is failure to do what one likes doing. If a person who would
like to write novels finds himself working as a salesman of books, he is probably not a
success (even if he makes tons of money). As Abraham Maslow tells us, the best lived
life is life dedicated to self actualization. Maslow had posited what he called hierarchy of
needs: physiological, safety, social, esteem and self actualization. At the base people need
food, clothes and shelter; when that physical necessity for survival is satisfied they need
to feel secure in their persons, to know that other people would not harm them, that is,
they need to live in a safe society; they need to feel that they are worthwhile and have
positive social and self esteem and, finally, they need to be doing what they have interest
and aptitude for doing. As Maslow sees it, if a person is not doing what he likes doing he
is not a successful person. Success is defined by doing what one enjoys doing and,
hopefully, using it to contribute to the world’s good.

What I am interested in is the type of failure found in those gifted human beings,
neurotics, who fail.
By way of definition, I accept Karen Horney’s definition of neurosis. As she sees it, a
neurotic is a person who, for reasons, rejects his real self, other people’s real selves and
the real world and seeks to bring about an ideal self, ideal other people and ideal world.
(See her seminal work, Neurosis and Human Growth.)
Obviously, Horney’s definition is built on Alfred Adler’s definition. Adler had
defined the neurotic as a person who feels inferior and attempts to seem superior; a
person who feels powerless and tries to feel powerful. As Adler sees it, the neurotic lives
a life of “As if” he is his desired (compensatory) superior, powerful self.
Sigmund Freud defined neurosis in a funny manner. Freud sees neurosis as a result
of intra-psychic conflicts, the tension arising from the Id (instincts of sex and aggressive)
Superego (internalized social norms) and ego (reason, referee) struggles. In Freudian
categories, the superego represses the Id into the unconscious and from there it still
exercise influence on the conscious mind, the ego, and the result is the confusion of
neurotics. Freud’s view is interesting but has nothing to do with the actual neurotics that I
have worked with. Actual neurotics do not report wanting to have sex with their parents
of same sex and failed resolution of the so-called oedipal complex.
Freud made useful contribution to our understanding of human beings unconscious,
which, by the way, is not only populated by instincts but by Jung’s spirits and other
matters. As I will presently argue, all human beings are living unconscious lives; they are
sleeping and dreaming and take their dreams as their truth; they need to awaken from
their dreams, they need to become conscious and live consciously.
 (Contemporary psychiatry has gone beyond the early psychoanalysts and seldom
employ the term neurotic; it now employs terms like personality disorders. In this light,
those judged to have personality disorders can be considered as neurotic. I prefer the term
neurotic for it is an omnibus term and a short-hand for talking about the various
personality disorders. One does not always have the time to explain all the ten accepted
personality disorders: paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal; narcissistic, histrionic, borderline,
antisocial; avoidant, dependent, obsessive-compulsive and passive aggressive. By
employing the term neurotic one covers all of them.)

Neurotics are different from psychotics in that they are operating in reality but do
not like that reality. That is, they have not completely escaped from reality; they test
reality well but resent it and want to change it and make it better. All persons have a bit
of neurosis, hence the term: normal neurotic.
Psychotics, on the other hand, escaped from reality and live in their own fantasy
world. Neurotics are found in the world, he could be your medical doctor, engineer,
lawyer, teacher, professor etc, whereas psychotics have dropped out from society.
Neurotics make it to the top of society; psychotics make it to the bottom of society.

The neurotic, as is presented to me, is a person who rejects his real self and
attempts to become a different person, a better person. Generally, he considers his real
self as not good enough and uses his imagination to construct an ideal alternative self.
He then feels an inner compulsion to become that assumed ideal self. All his thinking
and behaviors are motivated by his desire to become the ideal, perfect self and to make
the world an ideal perfect place.
The neurotic uses his ideal mental constructs (ideal standards) to judge his real self,
judge other people’s real selves, judge social institutions and naturally finds none of them
good enough and rejects them.
The neurotic’s life can be summed up thus: a person who struggles to become ideal
and make people and the world ideal.
(Why did the neurotic hate and reject his real self and aspire after ideal self? This is
a theoretical question that I have addressed elsewhere. It invariably has to do with his
biological constitution. Generally, he inherited a body that is prone to high arousal, to
high pain and anxiety. Isaac Marks and other neuroscientists are gradually showing that
anxiety disorder is rooted in a problematic biochemistry: inadequacy of certain inhibitory
neurotransmitters, such as GABA, for example.)

Nobody likes to be subjected to constant evaluation. Human beings want to be

accepted, as they are, in Carl Rogers’s terms, in an unconditional positive regarding
manner. People tend to resent the judgmental neurotic who is forever judging them and
finding fault with them.
If you want to get along with people, tell them that they are great, even if it is not
true (flattery), but if you want to make enemies tell them about their faults, and
exaggerate those faults.
The neurotic is the world’s most critical and judgmental person; he criticizes
himself, other people, social institutions, the world, everything. He does not accept what
is, as what is, but wants to make whatever is, even animals, trees, houses etc, better than
they are.
Adolf Hitler, a paranoid personality, neurotic, rejected his real self, rejected other
people’s real selves and rejected the real world and wanted to recreate people and the
world; he wanted people to be tall, six footers, athletic and blond. Hitler was five feet-
seven inches tall, a dark, Middle Eastern looking man in blondish Germany; his body was
wracked by pain; all sorts of food caused him stomach pain and he became a vegetarian,
to ease the pain he experienced after eating; he could not smoke or drink coffee without
fainting; therefore he imagined an ideal, compensatory body, and worked to make people
become it. That is, he was a neurotic on a quest to make people become his conception of
how they ought to be; he rejected himself and people as they are; such persons are
dangerous persons for they can kill in their misguided efforts to make people and the
world become ideal. David Duke, an American racist, hates himself and projects his self
hatred to blacks and wants to kill off blacks, so as not to see those who remind him of his
self hatred. Please pay close attention to neurotics, for in pursuit of their ideals, they do
damage to mankind. In mental health, people are accepted as they are. If you accept
yourself as you are, and accept other people, people of all races and genders, as they are,
you are relatively mentally healthy.

What is at work in the neurotic is power quest. He wants to recreate himself,

recreate other people, recreate social institutions and recreate the world to his liking.
The ability to create is powerful, so the neurotic really wants to be a very powerful
person ala Adler; he wants to be his own creator, the creator of every body and the
creator of the world. He wants to be the author of reality. This is grandiose power,
indeed. (This quest for power may be unconscious in the neurotic; unanalyzed neurotics
may deny that they are pursuing power. Adolf Hitler denied that he was seeking power.
See his Mein Kampf and Table talks.)

The neurotic (say paranoid and or narcissistic personality) is on a power trip. He has
a grandiose self concept; he sees himself as a very important person, so important that it
is up to him to recreate himself, other people and every thing.
(Please note that neurosis may be disguised with religion. Arab Muslim neurotics
on a personal power quest claim to act for Allah; they kill people for their insane concept
of God. These neurotics actually want to conquer and rule the world. Osama Ben Laden
is a paranoid personality out to convert the world to his idea of what is ideal, Islamic
Caliphate, which he hopes to rule from Mecca. People ought to keep watchful eyes on
neurotic religionists, for they do wreck havoc. A powerful God does not need human
beings to kill on his behalf; if God is a sadist and enjoys killing his own creations, let him
do so, not by proxy, not through insane religionists. Of course, it is not Allah, God that
makes mad religionists kill, it is their individual madness; madness they deny, and project
to God. A sane God loves, for a sane parent loves all his children.)

SCHUCMAN’S RELIGIOUS METAPHOR

What the paranoid personality (neurotic) really wants to do is kill God (who
created him) and become God by creating himself and creating all people and the world.
 In Helen Schucman’s colorful metaphors (see A Course in miracles), the ego (her
term for what I have been calling the neurotic) wants to kill God and or chase him out of
his creator throne and usurp it and proceed to create himself and create the world. In her
view, God created his Son (her name for the collective us) but we resent been created by
God and want to create God and create ourselves.
The part wants to create the whole and create itself. We are in competition with our
father, to be more powerful than our father. It is impossible for us to kill God or become
more powerful than him. Our father is the author of reality and has already created us, his
son, and the son, us, cannot create himself or create his father.
God’s son does the next best thing: cast a magical spell on him, and, as it were, goes
to sleep and in his sleep dreams that he is the creator of his father, himself and his
brothers.
According to Dr Schucman, our empirical world is a dream and in it we each
construct our self concepts. Our self concepts are our false selves. Our true self is beyond
concepts, it is spirit.
The self concept, the human personality, the ego, the lady clinical psychologist
says, is a substitutory self, a replacement self, a self we made to replace the real self God
created us as.
God created us as unified self, as one with him and all people, as unified spirit, as
the same and equal. We invented selves that are the opposite of the self that God created.
Where God created unified self we invented separated self. God created us changeless,
permanent, immortal, eternal and all knowing but we made ourselves to be the opposite
of those attributes: changeable, transitory, ignorant, in body etc.
God created us as unified, the same and equal but we made ourselves separated,
different from other selves and seem better or inferior to other selves.
We hide our false ego selves in bodies. The ego separated self housed in body is the
self the son of God made to replace the unified spirit self his father created him as, Dr
Schucman says.

And here is a point that many of the fellows running around and calling themselves
students of Dr Schuman’s book, A course in miracles, do not seem to grasp. She said, in
effect, that the normal person is like animals, is unconscious, is in deep sleep and takes
his dreams as real and defends them (and defense makes what is defended, ego, body,
seem real to people). Normal persons are in deep sleep and take their sleep dream world
as real. They are at the beginning stages of separation from God, separation from their
true self. Like animals, they are not yet beginning to awaken from the sleep. They are
enjoying the sleep. They should not be disturbed for they are having pleasant dreams.
(Dr Schucman did not expect normal persons to understand her book; she expects
only neurotics like herself, folks with superior intelligence to comprehend her book; even
then, she doubted that more than a handful of them could! What a proud lady. Karen
Horney saw pride as the hallmark of neurosis; the neurotic is a proud person and sees
himself as superior to other persons.)

Moving on, the neurotic and psychotic, Helen Schucman says, are beginning to
awaken from the sleep-dream (this world). They have become aware that the world is an
illusion, is false, and is not real. They are aware that their bodies are worthless and
valueless and that life as an ego is meaningless and purposeless. In existentialist terms,
they have recognized the utter meaninglessness of this world. They generally come to this
point before puberty.

As Helen Schucman sees it, the abnormal personality is beginning to awaken from
the sleep that we are separated from God, whereas the normal person is still in deep sleep
and takes his sleep-dream world as real. The normal person is slightly above animals in
his consciousness; both are unconscious, asleep and take their dream selves and dream
events as real. (Dr Schucman was existentialist and nihilistic in philosophy; she hated this
world with venom. She was world wary and wanted to escape from this world to a world
she believed is better, a spiritual world.)

Unfortunately, the neurotic and or psychotic, in Schucman’s terms, is still unwilling

to awaken from the dream of self forgetfulness; he is not yet ready to let go of his
separated self and the separated world and awaken from the dream that separation is
possible. (Mystics awaken from the dream. See Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism.)
Instead, the neurotic attempts to improve his ego, improve other people egos and
improve the world. He seeks to make a world he sees as meaningless meaningful, a world
he sees as purposeless purposeful, and a body he sees as worthless beautiful.
In short, the neurotic wants to be in the world of separation and improve it. His
idealism, an obsessive compulsive trait, is his efforts to change himself, people and the
world and make them better. He wants to accept the world on improved terms.

As R. D. Laing (see Politics of experience) recognized, mystics are like neurotics and
psychotics in that they see the same rotten world the neurotic sees, but instead of trying to
improve it via ideation and imagination, they escape from the world. The mystic makes
one judgment: the world is meaningless and not worth his efforts to adapt to it. He seeks
a better world, not in the world of his own invention, as neurotics do, but by relinquishing
the world as a whole.
The mystic goes into meditation and, as Gautama Buddha said, sees nothing his ego
thinking could come up with as real. Neti, neti, the Upanishads said. Truth is not this or
that, it is beyond the world.
The mystic tunes out the empirical self, gives up his self concept, gives up his
concepts for other people, gives up his concepts for everything, gives up whatever he
thinks that the world and events means and simply stays silent. In the silence of his mind,
God reveals himself to the mystic.
God is unknowable to our separated, conceptual minds but is known to our unified
mind. God is impersonal spirit force that is simultaneously one and everything. God is in
each of us, animals, trees, everything, as we are in him. Where God ends and his
creations begin is nowhere.
God is us and we are God. In God there is no I, you, seer and seen, subject and
object, all are literally one self, one mind.
For our present purposes, as Professor Schucman sees it, (she taught psychology at
Columbia University, New York) the mystic, the self realized person extinguishes his ego
self and awakens to his unified sprit self.
 While the mystic (Meister Eckhart, for example) negates his ego and this world and
escapes from it, the neurotic affirms his ego and this world.
The neurotic wants to improve his ego and this world. He sees his self and the world
with clarity: as awful, but wants to use his mind and thinking to improve it, hence his
tendency to ideational living (living in his mind, thinking a lot).

The neurotic is different from the psychotic, for he still retains the awareness that his
imaginary ideals may not be true. The psychotic invents an alternative self and world and
believes that his fantasy is actually real.
Most people do not realize why it is difficult to heal the schizophrenic, manic and
deluded person; it is because the mad man prefers his fantasy ideal self and world to our
screwed up world!
(From my clinical experience here are some examples. A white man who claims to be
John Lennon of the Beatles. He attires as Lenon did, and behaves like him. Diagnosis:
bipolar affective disorder, with delusional traits. He denies his identity and identifies
with another person, John Lennon. Psychoanalytically speaking, he finds his real self not
good enough and takes on an identity he thinks is better, the famous Beatle. In his manic
phase, he actually believes himself John Lennon. When he recognizes that he is not
Lennon, that he is an ordinary John Doe, he becomes depressed; he cycles between
euphoric moods and depressed moods. Another case. A young black man. He claims to
be Zeus, the Greek God. He is a black man in America and necessarily must feel
inadequate and inferior, for the mainstream culture tells him that blacks are not good
enough. Of course, he inherited a more sensitive body that led him to over introject
racism. For our present purposes, he denies his real identity, a poor black youth, and
identifies with the Western Greek God. As Zeus, he feels all important and powerful.
Diagnoses: Schizophrenia, paranoid type. Another case. A Nigerian who fancies himself
a very important person. He writes with big words trying to seem well educated and
erudite and presents himself as very knowledgeable. He is grandiose and feels so
important that he believes that people are out to kill him and hides; he disguises his
identity and from darkness writes in grandiloquent malapropisms. Diagnoses, delusional
disorder.)

The relevant point is that many persons see their true selves as not good enough and
use their imaginations to invent ideal, powerful and grandiose selves and wish to be those
false selves.
Psychotherapists tell these people that they are not their imaginary big selves and
ask them to return to being like all of us: ordinary human beings and they refuse to-do so.
They want to be the grandiose selves they invented for themselves and with which they
replaced their imperfect selves.

TO THY SELF BE TRUE

You may be wondering what all these have to do with being a failure? Have
patience, my friend. I tend to want to cover all bases before I get to the point.
 The neurotic sees an imperfect humanity and wants to replace it with an ideational
perfect humanity. In the world of work he tends to want to use his profession to improve
people, to make them perfect. He wants to make everything perfect.
In the mental health profession, for example, young neurotic therapists, and many
psychiatrists and psychologist I know of, especially the brilliant ones, are neurotic, want
to change their patients, change them and make them better.
R.D. Laing was one such brilliant psychiatrist. He could not handle the waste of the
human mind found in psychotics. He did his best to change them. Alas, the mentally ill
cannot be that easily healed. As noted, they see our world as evil and check out of it, and
check into an imaginary ideal world. They live in their fantasy land. Psychotropic
medications do reduce the gross symptoms of psychosis, such as reduce hallucinations
and delusions but do not heal psychosis.
What heals psychosis is mysticism. The psychotic, in my view, is a person on the
path to mysticism but whose development was arrested.

If a person rejects his real self and identifies with a different self he is a failure, is
he not? If you reject who you are and try to be somebody else, you are, in my opinion, a
failure. The manic chap trying to be Bill Gates or any other famous person he could think
of is a pathetic person. The deluded person trying to seem important is a miserable
person. Common sense would tell him that courage lies in being himself, whatever that
is.
Igbo Nigerians have a serious psychological problem. Their culture is very
achievement oriented and accepts them mostly when they seem successful. To be
accepted by their conditionally accepting culture, they strive to become successful. They
are always striving to seem successful. Those of them who are not, as the world sees it,
successful, will present themselves “as if” they are successful. They will make up tall
tales; they tell lies about their supposed high social positions. They would do everything
to seem important and successful. Generally, many of them are paranoid, narcissistic
personalities.

Is success becoming what the world considers successful? If one is motivated to

seem successful, as the world defines success to be, one has a problem.
Sooner or later, each of us reaches a fork in the road, to a place where the road
branches into two: left and right. The individual must at that point make an existential
decision, to go left or right.
To go left is to continue doing what he had done before, seek ego ideals, be
neurotic, or turn right and walk a different path.
The turn to the right often entails giving up all that the world considers important.
Right thinking and right behavior might entail doing what mystics do, give up the
separated self, the ego, normal or neurotic or psychotic and simply acknowledge that one
does not know who one is, does not know who other people are and does not know what
any thing means.
The right thinking person rejects all ego conceptual categories and remains silent
and lets the universe, in its time, tell him what is true.
 What is failure? Failure is not defined by the world but by the individual. Only
you know what constitutes success for you.
What the world considers failure may, in fact, be success for you and what the
world considers success may be great failure for you. If you keep doing what you have
always done and received the same results, conflicts, tension and lack of inner peace,
even if you are materially successful, you are a failure (in spiritual terms, any way).
As Sister Helen Schucman puts it, man’s idea of success is not God’s idea of success
and man’s idea of failure is not God’s idea of failure.
To God you are successful if you see through the ego and its world as tinsel and
relinquish them. If you see things as chimerical, and pass through this world without
disturbing your peace, you are a success.

How can you live without disturbing your peace? It is by knowing what you are
interested in doing, what you are good at, and studying them and practicing them; it is by
loving and forgiving most of those who wronged you.
Love and forgiveness and not bearing grievances against others are what give us
inner peace. In terms of vocation, doing what one likes to do is success, even if one
makes no money from doing it.
(If one does something out of love, one is happy doing it and somehow the universe
gives one ones living. As Goethe said, do what you like, commit to something and the
universe would be committed to you and doors would open for you. The universe hates
uncommitted persons.)

You know that you are successful if you feel peaceful and happy most of the time.
If you can honestly say that you are in peace and joy, you are a successful person.
You are most likely to be peaceful and happy when you are doing what you truly
enjoy doing and do it for social good.
Making money should be incidental. Of course, it is good to have money to pay ones
bills and support ones family, but making money should not be ones primary motivation;
ones primary motivation should be doing something one likes doing and doing it well.

Another component of success is losing self consciousness. We all have separated

ego self consciousness. We perceive attacks on our bodies (and our egos fragile esteems)
and fight back. This is the world we live in, a world of attack, offense and defense. The
result is tension and conflict.
If you can truly forget your separated ego self, even for a moment, you are peaceful
and happy.
When I am writing, I generally forget that I have an ego self. Alas, after such
momentary and peaceful loss of self awareness, my old ego self returns and disturbs my
peace.
I wish that I could get rid of my ego self entirely. But I know that as long as I live in
body and on earth I am condemned to being an ego and body. As I pointed out elsewhere,
as long as we are alive we must have egos and the best that we can do is redirect our egos
to egos of love and egos of knowledge. One can understand the nature of ego power
quests and make sure that one is not on an ego power trip and has no deluded sense of
importance to defend. One should see ones self as a unit of life with no grandiosity in
ones self concept, no false sense of importance. All life is the same. One should never
look down on another human being for that is indicative of pursuit of a false self, which
gives one tension.

LOOKING FOR JOBS IN THE IDEAL WORLD, CASTLE IN THE SKY

The real world, which I understand too well, did not make sense to me, so I sought
an ideal world. I did not really seek work in the real world, for it was not good enough for
me. I was seeking an ideal work in an ideal world and, of course, could not get it (I quit
college teaching, for I considered it humdrum.)
Look for work in the real world and you would get it and give up your dreams of
ideal self, ideal people, for those do not exist in this world.
If you opt for mysticism then drop out of this world and live in the world of hope
for heaven, unified state, but it is not this world. Live like the Hindu mystic and escape
from this world and not care for this world and be poor (or get others to go work in this
world and support you, as they support parasitic priests.)

SECULAR MYSTICS WORK

Clearly, not too many people are ready to awaken, yet. Not more than one percent of
the population is interested in giving up the ego self, the egos world and egos work. The
mystic has no delusion that he has a large market. He knows that only a few people
constitute his audience, for mot people are asleep, dreaming, unconscious of their real
self, finding worth and value, meaning and purpose in the egos animal level state of
being. The mystic rejected the normal world but does not aim at replacing it with
imaginary ideal self and world and satisfies himself with impersonal spiritual world, and
lives in peace and joy. He does work in that area, teaching harmony, peace and joy, aware
that normal persons find worth in the sleep, and are unconscious, so he does not feel
disappointed that they are not listening to him, for it is not their fault, they are asleep and
unconscious and those sleeping, unconscious, cannot listen to true reason but the lies of
the dream.

GRANDIOSITY

The grandiose person invented an ideal self for him and wants to make it seem real,
when, in fact, the ideal self does not exist and cannot exist. One of the means he employs
in his efforts to make his ideal self seem real is ideas of reference. Here, he thinks that
what other people are doing refers to him (to his ideal self that is).
The false ideal self pursues false ideal goals, false big jobs, and other grandiose goals
that would never come into being.
Give them up, give up false big selves and wake up to peace and joy and teach
others how to do so.
 A person fails because of his character. But his failure is meant to be, for it is in
failing to (1) adapt to the normal world and (2) make his ideal world become real. The
idealist fails and in failing learn to seek what is real, love, aka God.

FAILURE OF THE IDEAL SELF IS A PRECONDITION FOR TURNING TO GOD

A human being must reach a point where he knows that there is no hope for him,
that is, no hope for him to realize his ego ideals or return to normal ego functioning and
then seek real success, in unified self. But as long as he thinks that he can attain his ego
goals, his idealism, he cannot turn to God yet.
Total failure from the world is a precondition for turning to love, God. So be glad
that you failed in the world for it leads to awakening from the unconscious state people
live in. However, when folks realize that there is no hope in the ideal or real world, they
tend to think of killing themselves because they cannot attain their ego ideals and life
seems bleak. Suicide is not the solution; the solution is turning to God, where joy is. One
does not leave the world by killing ones self but by loving ones self and loving the world.

CONCLUSION

Are you are a failure or are you a successful person? Who defines success or failure
for you? Other people, society, or yourself?
If you accept the world’s definition of success and pursue it, at best, you live as a
normal-neurotic. Your life would be filled with anxiety, conflict and tension, for you
would fear failing to meet other people’s expectations from you.
You are like an Igbo person (I employ Igbos as my example for I am motivated to
help them overcome their group neurosis, this is my social service for them) who has no
real individuality. The Igbo is scared of having a separated self from the Igbo group; he
fears social rejection.
His group members manipulate his desire for belonging and threaten to withdraw his
acceptance by the group if he does not do as they please. Machiavellian Igbo leaders use
threat of ostracism to get Igbos to conform to what they want them to do. As members of
a traditional society, Igbos are developmentally not individuated (ala Carl Jung) enough
to withstand such political manipulation by shrewd leaders who exploit the human desire
for membership in groups.
Igbos conform to each others pathological expectations. When I began pointing out
the pathologies in the Igbo culture, many of them jumped on me and called me all sorts of
names. The poor things thought that I am like one of them, a person who fears social
rejection hence would give up stating the truth, as I see it, and conform to their group and
in doing so become like one of them, neurotic. Poor things, no force on this planet can
make me not state the truth as I see it. I am one of those forces that pass through this
world once in a thousand years; forces that insist on the truth and nothing but the truth.
Life is not worth living if it has to be lived on the basis of lies.
 The Igbo does everything he does to conform to his group and to be liked by his
group. He literally panics if he thinks that his group members would reject him.
Since his group accepts persons conditionally, when they are successful, he strives to
be successful so as to be accepted by his society. He is generally successful but pays a
heavy psychological price: he is almost always a neurotic person.
I have not seen one psychologically healthy Igbo person, man or woman; they are
always going places, striving after some goals external to them, and are almost always
dissatisfied and malcontented persons; they are an unhappy breed of humanity.
From a psychological perspective, they are slaves, slaves to seeking other people’s
approval, to living up to society’s pathological values.
They are yet to be born to true humanity: independence. We are here to seem
separated from God and from each other. We ought to be separated from other people.
It is only when we accept our separation without apologies to other people that we
can then seek ways to doing what serves our and other peoples self interests and in doing
so obtain healthy sense of belonging. (Eric Fromm made this point in the Art of Love and
Man for himself.)

Success is figuring out who you are, what you like doing, and throwing yourself to
doing it (hopefully, for social good).
Ultimately, success is recognizing that animal as he may seen, man is at root a
spiritual being having physical experience.
Spirit is not some convoluted religious conception. Spirit is love. Man, at base,
despite Hobbes correct empirical perception of him as selfish, is love.
Love yourself, love other people. Forgive yourself and forgive those who wronged
you, as much as it is possible to do so and you are a successful person.
I must say that some sins are not forgivable…defend against physical attacks and, if
necessary, kill those who want to kill you. But make sure that your perception of others
attack is real, not paranoid. Fight Arab Muslim terrorists, for they are neurotics and or
psychotics on an ego power trip; they are trying to convert the rest of the world to their
misguided sense of ego idealism, which they project to Allah. (None of us has been
talked to by Allah, so whatever we say Allah asks us to do is our own idea. Men think
and project their thoughts to God hence are crazy.)

Do what you like doing and money will come your way.

Doing what one likes doing that is not egoistic is my definition of success.

Doing something to obtain social approval and attention; doing something for
money, only; doing something that one does not like doing is my definition of being a
failure. What is your definition of success and failure? Let us hear from you.

* My vocation is to study and write about mental health or lack of it, at the secular
and spiritual levels. What is your vocation? Do you have clarity as to what you are here
on earth to do? There must be a goal before we can judge whether it is attained or not.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

January 10, 2007

FORMLESS GOD AND GOD WITH FORM

A God that takes on form as human beings, animals and trees etc certainly has the power
to take on other forms, too. God can take on purified forms as in Buddha, Jesus Christ
etc. God can also take on spiritual forms (light forms, as in visions). Ultimately, God is
formless. God is impersonal and yet can take on personal attributes. This is what
Ramakrishna was teaching, that a formless, impersonal God took on form as the God
with form that he worships and wants people to worship. The human ego is so enormous
that he felt that the only way to harness it to social good is to use it to worship a God with
form (Christians worship Jesus as God).

GOD WITH FORM IS AN INSANE GOD

Formless God is one and yet infinite in numbers all the same and unified. This God is
sane. Only an insane God cast Maya on itself and now denies its truth of union and sees
itself as separated and do the awful things we do on earth, all in misguided pursuit of
separation. A Course in Miracles is correct in stating that the son of God, a part of God
that sought separation is insane, hence the world is an insane place. Man is an insane
creature that needs his insanity healed, via return to unified state (which is sanity). The
sane God remains sane (is always unified, with his sons, his parts), while an aspect of it, a
part of it dreams that it is separated, insane (us). The part that dreams insane it,
separation, must be brought to know union hence become sane.

IDEALISM IS MAGICAL THINKING

Idealism is magical thinking, it is effort to use the insane mind that seeks separation to
make the insane separated self and other selves and the world seem perfect and ideal. It
is a power trip. Ideal and perfection can only exist in unified spirit state, not in the world
of separation. Therefore the idealist is fighting for a thing that could never come into
being ideal state on earth. Idealism is ego wishing power to recreate itself into a better
ego hence gives the ego reason for being. Idealism gives the ego meaning and purpose,
worth and value for it is playing God. But only God can give real meaning and purpose,
that is, only union and love can give real purpose.

PEACE AND HAPPINESS LIES IN NO EGO SELF

No one can have peace and happiness as long as he seeks to affirm his separated ego self.
Peace and happiness lies in jettisoning the ego separated self and not defending it
psychologically. Let go of your ego self. You already have it; hence you are already
disturbing your peace and happiness. Let it go and then experience peace of body and
mind, for as long as you live in ego-body, form. Then die, that is enter spiritual form and
ultimately recognize that all forms, spiritual or material are dreams, illusions and awaken
to formless spirit self, know you as part of God.
No ego self is the condition for happiness and peace. But we made body to house a
sense of separated self and make the body pained and weak, tense to make it seem real
hence feel lack of peace in us.

NO EGO DECISION MAKING

In God the individual no longer makes decisions via his ego or I ego idealism, he decides
through the Holy Spirit, God in us. He does not plan what he is going to do on ego terms
but lets his God plan his days for him; he does what God tells him to do. God plans his
day for him; that is, his right mind, love, plans his days and activities for him and he gets
what he needs to live on planet earth, effortlessly, too. This is what a course in miracles
means by saying do not make decisions with your conscious ego minds, for the ego is not
conscious, it is unconscious mind. Our world is an unconscious mind whereas the real
conscious mind is unknown to us. Let the conscious mind plan your day’s activities for
you.

IS THERE AN OPPOSITE OF OUR WORLD?

We all know what our world is like: space, time, matter; separation between people,
multiplicity, differences, inequality, pursuit of individual self interests, private thinking,
ideational etc; we all also know the consequences of this divided self and its divided
world: conflict and tension. The question that arises is; is there an opposite self and
opposite world to our present self and world? This question may seem trivial but it is on
it is rested on the attraction of religion and metaphysics. Religion, in whatever forms it
takes sells to people the idea that there is another self and world that is the opposite of the
self and world we know about. Our present self is mortal and religion sells an immortal
self; our world is changeable and religion sells changelessness. Religion is predicated in
marketing the opposite of the self and world we know. Our world is temporary,
transitory, ephemeral, divided, separated into units and bits, people have limited
knowledge etc, religion presents the opposite of that self and world: permanency,
changelessness, eternity, immortality, unified, all knowing, peaceful, happy etc.
 Is there an alternative to our world? I do not know. The other day I woke up
thinking: wouldn’t it be nice if we c old have the opposite of our selves? I thought, the
self is conceptual, an idea, is ideational. People behave on the bases of their ideas of who
they think that they are. Without having an idea of you there would be no behavior. The
self concept precedes behavior, but once behavior is engaged in it reinforces that self
concept. Okay, suppose the individual has no self concept would there be behavior? If
the self concept is giving up there would be no behavior. But how does one give up the
self concept? Most of us are afraid of dying, losing our self concepts. In fact, fear is the
primary human affect; fear is used to protect and defend the separated self concept. If one
did not have fear one would not defend the separated self and would no doubt die, and
exit from this separated world. The question then is whether one would then cease from
existing or whether one would regain the awareness of unified self, the opposite of
separated self as some teachers of God tell us? Do what teachers of God tell us exist?
Does the opposite of our world exist?
If the individual were to perform this experiment, give up whatever self concept he
has and assume that he has no self and do not defend any kind of self concept at all, he
would experience peace and joy. He would feel like he does not exist. This experiment
lasts only for a short period of time for if the individual were to continue with it for hours
and not defend his ego self he would die. So if he dies where does he go to?

AFRICANS DID THIS TO THEMSELVES

(Africans are responsible for their miserable fate)

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

If you have eyes to see you probably see that in the extant world African peoples, in
Africa, in the Americas and in Europe are second class citizens. Everywhere black
persons are found they are not treated as the equals of other people.
Not too long ago, Africans were overt slaves of other races (slaves of Europeans in
North America and slaves of Arabs in Arabia).
This apparent anomaly calls for explanation. Our (Africans, that is) superficial
explanation is that we are innocent victims unto whom others do bad things to. Tons of
books have been written from this perspective. Their thesis is always the same: Africans
were minding their own business when Arabs descended on them and enslaved them and,
later, Europeans did the same to them. Africans are innocent; Arabs and Europeans are
evil.
Africans are masochists and Arabs and Europeans are sadists. The sadist inflicts
pain on the masochist. Pity Africans; have compassion on these innocent victims of other
people’s depredations.
This was how I saw Africans until I began to interact with them more intensely. For
almost two years I interacted with Africans at various Internet sites. What I found out
about Africans disabused me of my belief that they are innocent victims of other persons’
mischief. I found out that Africans are their own worst enemies. They are evil beyond
belief. They hate themselves as no other race do. Their whole existence seem motivated
to attack and destroy each other. If they cannot attack you physically, they would do so
psychologically. They say awful things about you with the sole intention of degrading
and humiliating you. They seldom do anything to uplift any one; their stuck in trade is to
degrade each other.
At the political level, Africans are not motivated to help their people become
developed. Oh, they make a show of it; talk about their intentions to develop Africa. But
give the African who talks about developing his people money to do so and he redirects
that money to his personal pockets and could care less about his peoples suffering. On the
streets of Lagos poor people die and their bodies lay on the streets and people walk over
them and few would do anything about it. There are practically no public health officials
to come and remove such bodies. (On paper officials exist, but you first have to bribe
them to care to do their jobs.)
As I observed Africans, closely, I began to learn that they are not other people’s
victims. They, in fact, did this to themselves; they brought about their own enslavement
and in the here and now world currently marginalize themselves to second class
citizenship.
African people have an inner compulsion to do things that would place them as
second class persons. They choose to be second class persons. Other people did not
choose this for them, they chose it for themselves. (However, what one chooses for ones
self is simultaneously what other people choose for one and in that sense you could say
that other people choose for one.)
As Africans chose, other people go along with their choice and place them in
second class citizen status.

All human beings make existential choices. Black persons chose to be masochists.
White folks chose to be sadists.
The sadist and the masochist meet and each enacts his wish, plays his role, dances
their bizarre dance and that is what their earthly lives is all about. Earthly living is a
macabre dance, an absurd dance of master and servant, lord and servant, leader and led
sadist and masochist.
The world is a bizarre dream where the children of God come to suffer, by their
choice. We did this to ourselves. We have no one to blame but ourselves.
The good news is that what we did to ourselves we can undo. If other people did
this to us then we cannot undo what they did and have a different life. The good news
given the world by Jesus Christ (and his guide, the Holy Spirit) is that the children of
God, us, did this awful thing to us, brought our pain unto us, and, as such, can undo what
we did to us.
(If you doubt this proposition then give Africans well organized organizations to run
and see what happens; in a few months, they would destroy it, manage it to the grave;
they would steal most of the money and resources meant for running the organization;
they aim at destroying everything they touch. Observe South Africa. In a few more years
Africans would drag it to the mud; they would do what would destroy that thriving
economy. They will take it down because their fate is to bring down whatever they
touch.)
Do Africans consciously do this to themselves? It depends on what you mean by
consciously. At the ego conscious level they desire the best for themselves.
 They bring pain and suffering to themselves at the ego unconscious level (which
really is conscious level).
At their ego unconscious level Africans chose to be slaves and second class citizens
(just as at the ego unconscious level white folks chose to be sadists and racists).
Human beings make their choices at the unconscious level and disguise them at what
they call their conscious minds.
Unconsciously, black folks choose masochism; unconsciously, white folks choose
sadism. Each hides what he chose and pretends its opposites.
A white person must be racist towards blacks for that is his choice at the
unconscious level, even though at the conscious level he may pretend to be fair to blacks.
The fact is that whites are meant to discriminate against blacks and blacks are meant to be
discriminated against by whites. This is their existential choices, their game and their
dance.
They must dance this sick dance until some one teaches them differently, as I am
doing here.

Having chosen to be maltreated by other people, Arabs and whites, Africans are
maltreated by those people. They then see themselves as innocent victims of others
maltreatment and feel angry at them. Part of the egos game is to do something and then
see itself as the victim of others behaviors so as to justify anger and attack at them.
Arabs and Whites in the meantime see themselves as innocent and fair when, to any
one with eyes, everything they do towards blacks is discriminatory.
These two insane groups, blacks and whites, must do to each other what their ego
unconscious desires that they do. Whites would keep abusing blacks and blacks would
keep been abused until the role is reversed and blacks abuse whites.
Within two hundred years blacks would be governing whites. The white world is at
the last gaps of its bizarre anti social civilization.

So how did it come about that Africans chose to suffer social humiliation and see
themselves as victims of other people’s abuse? This is a good question. To answer it we
need a bit of metaphysics.
All metaphysics is metaphor, an attempt to represent the truth in language.
Metaphors are not the truth they are trying to capture in words. Nevertheless, please
consider the following metaphor, it approximates the truth, but since the truth cannot be
articulated in words, is not the truth.

WHY THE WORLD IS THE WAY IT IS

In eternity (if you like, heaven) all are spirit. Spirit has no form (body). Spirit is one
and infinite in numbers. One spirit is simultaneously infinite spirits.
Spirit is the same everywhere it is. Spirit’s infinite numbers are all equal with each
other.
All spirits are joined as one spirit. Each spirit is in other spirits, as they are in it.
There is no space and gap between spirits. Where one spirit ends and another begin is
nowhere.
 If you like, you can call spirit God. God is one and has infinite parts to him. God
and his infinite parts are the same and co-equal. The difference is that God created his
children and they did not create him or create themselves and create each other.
God is in his parts and his parts are in him and in each other. God and his parts are
joined as one self (and they have one joined mind).
Peace and harmony can only obtain where things are the same, equal and joined. In
heaven all things are the same, equal and joined hence there is perfect peace and
happiness in heaven. The peace and joy of heaven is inconceivable by our earthly
separated minds.
THE OPPOSITE OF UNION IS SEPARATION

The parts of unified spirit decided to experience their oppose state. They are joined
and wanted to experience separation; they are the same and wanted to experience
differences; they are equal and wanted to experience inequality; they are immortal and
wanted to experience mortality; they are permanent and changeless and wanted to
experience impermanence, and change.
What they wish to experience, the opposite of heaven, opposite of love, opposite of
God, opposite of their true self is incapable of been done. Reality is forever joined unified
spirit with its unified mind.
Nevertheless, they wanted to experience it. As it were, they cast a powerful charm,
magic, spell, Maya on themselves and caused themselves to forget their reality and
experience a different reality.
Another way of putting it is that they went to sleep and in their sleep dream a
seeming different reality, our world. They fell into a state of ignorance and forgetfulness.
Our empirical world is the world of self forgetfulness, the world of Maya, the world
of dreams. Here we experience the opposite of our true nature.

The world was designed for it to be the opposite of heaven. Our reality is total joy.
We chose the world of pain. In pursuit of that pain we housed our selves in body and
made it receptive of pain. Thus, our bodies feel pain and feeling pain we defend against
whatever causes us pain. In defending against perceived source of pain we separate from
it hence maintain separation and separated selves.
For our present purposes, because we came here to experience pain we assigned
ourselves to roles that would inflict and receive pain. Thus in the extant world we
assigned some the role of inflicting pain to others.
White persons were assigned the role of inflicting pain on black persons. The black
race was assigned the role of receiving pain.
Both the pain giver and the pain receiver are, of course, in pain. (White persons are
the most miserable human beings there are on this planet. This paper is not focusing on
white persons but black persons.)

The children of God made choices as to what role they would play and, as it were,
went to sleep and in their sleep dream and in that dream each enacts the role he chose and
that others chose for him.
In the world’s dream, Black people chose masochism and suffering, white people
chose sadism and the givers of pain.
 These choices are hidden in people’s ego unconscious. From there, they guide our
behaviors.
If you are a black person here is the fact that you must deal with. A white person
must always discriminate against you and all black persons, for that is how the dance is
designed to be. Do not deceive yourself by a white person’s seeming overt good gestures.
He chose to abuse and oppresses you, and so must he do, for so he is programmed. By the
same token, you, a black person chose to be abused and must be abused.

The purpose of this essay is to enable you, black persons, to choose differently. To
choose differently you must understand what is in your ego unconscious, what you chose
before going to sleep and hide in your unconscious. You are the one, who chose to be
abused and oppressed.
Please accept this fact for nobody else chose for you. Nobody can do to the son of
God, you and I, what he does not want to experience. We, Africans, chose to experience
abuse and abuse ourselves and are abused by other people. We did this to ourselves. The
good news is that what we did to ourselves we can undo and do differently.

AFRICANS CHOICE OF BAD GOVERNMENTS

Africans chose to govern themselves badly. As things stand, Africans cannot govern
themselves well. They cannot govern themselves well because they chose not to be able
to do so. Obviously they are as intelligent as other people.
All the children of God are the same; the same intelligence, God, is in all people.
Nevertheless, each of them chooses how to misuse the intelligence in him.
We Africans chose not to be able to do anything right. We chose to suffer. We chose
to be in pain.
We chose to see ourselves as victims of other people’s abuse. We chose to complain
about what other people do to us.
While complaining about what whites did to us, if given the opportunity to improve
our lives we mess it up, for we choose to suffer. Our existence is guided by our
existential choice for suffering.

We must, therefore, understand this choice. As noted, Whites chose their own fate
and that fate is catching up with them, too. Those they chose to abuse are soon going to
come at them with total vengeance (unless we change the parameters of the game, as I am
trying to do here). All the nuclear bombs third world persons are trying to develop will be
exploded in the Western world. Folks get what they chose. Whites chose to do evil and
chose to receive the evil from others coming at them. It is as simple as that.

We do reverse roles. Those who choose sadism in some life times choose
masochism in other lifetimes. Leaders in some life times are the led in other life times.
The rich in some life times are the poor in other life times. The sons of God experience
everything in their world, good and bad, by their choice.

Until the present, Africans chose oppression, abuse and social marginalization and
the question is what are we going to do about it?
 The answer is obvious. Choose differently. Make a choice that is in accord with
heaven. Reverse the decision to live the opposite of heaven and now choose to
approximate heaven.
Heaven is love (love is union). Choose love over hate; choose union over
separation. Choose to live the opposite of our world’s reality.
Look at our world, see it as it, as it is, and choose to live its opposite. See what your
realistic ego tells you are the real world and do its opposite.

For example, the ego shows you a world where other people do bad things to you
and asks you to defend yourself. In this world we are involved in offense and defense,
attack and counter attack; bearing grudges for the evil other people do to us. Bearing
grievances and seeking revenge are the ego mind’s hall mark. We feel attacked, feel
grievances and seek vengeance. We do attack those who attacked us. We do seek
punishment for those we consider our enemies.
In the empirical world, white people attack black people and black people feel
grievance against them and want to counter attack them and punish them. That is the
nature of the world.
Now do the opposite of the world’s reality. Forgive those you see do bad things to
you. Black persons see whites discriminate against them. Now forgive them.
To forgive those who wronged you is to love them. Just let go of your desire for
vengeance. Forgive white people. They are operating at the level of apes and monkeys; if
you see it that way it becomes easier for you to forgive them. Animals have no
conscience so forgive them their evil behaviors.
Forgiveness gives you peace and happiness. Forgiveness also gives the person you
forgive some peace and happiness. A forgiving person, that is, a loving person, brings
peace to this conflicted world.

When you forgive (which does not mean tolerating attack, we forgive the past not
the present, in the present you do that which protects love, insist on loving behavior from
all) you have made the world approximate the world that God created. However, you are
not yet in the world God created. The world that God created is spirit, formless, not in
forms, bodies. Forgiveness merely makes us, while still in forms, bodies, to approximate
heaven, but not be in heaven. To be in heaven we must be formless, not live in bodies.
Forgiveness metaphorically brings us to the gate of heaven. Heaven’s gate is a
metaphor for a forgiven world that is relatively peaceful and happy, but not as peaceful
and happy as in formless spirit- heaven.
Our world needs to be forgiven, hence brought to heaven’s gate, and made peaceful
and happy before it ends. Our present function is to forgive the world, to make the will of
God come to the world and to transform the kingdom of man to the kingdom of God (a
world ruled by Christ…not Jesus, Christ is our higher self, and his Holy Spirit).
A forgiven world becomes a happy dream, still a sleep-dream but a happy dream; it
is still an illusory world but now pleasant illusion. From this pleasant illusion, happy
dream the world is translated into real joy, real peace. The world ends.
Actually the world has never existed. It exists as a dream. We merely awaken from
the dream see that the world we had thought is real is not real, that where we had seen
seeming solid matter nothing existed, it is matter in dream state.
 Our world has its own categories and while in it seems real but there are other forms
of existence. In heaven all is spirit and there is no matter.
We are always in heaven, spirit, and, as it were, tune it out and see ourselves living
in what we call our material universe.
Just as we tuned out heaven, we can tune out the world and return to unified spirit.
We awaken from this world, a nightmare and résumé awareness of blissful eternity.

The point I am making is that we African chose our fate. This is a fact, not
conjecture. We chose it and hide it in our unconscious minds. At the conscious level we
see ourselves as victims of others attacks and abuses, but at the unconscious mind level
we asked other people to oppress us.
In a just world no one can do to us what we do not want to experience. If what we
did not want to experience can happen to us then the world is unjust and if the world is
unjust spirit does not exist.
If you think that our African fate is in other people’s hands, so why are you, an
African refusing to dedicate yourself to governing Africa and dragging it o the same level
as the West? Why do you steal too much and redirect money that could have helped your
people to your Western bank accounts? You do so for you intend to help give your
fellow Africans poverty and pain. You are evil for the ego is an evil thing. (Whites are
evil, but we are not dealing with them).

Please understand the dynamics of your unconscious and conscious mind and
choose to change it. In your unconscious is the choice to suffer. That choice was made
when you chose to live the opposite of heaven. Now change the choice. Choose not to
suffer.
To not suffer you must live in accord with heaven; to not suffer you must obey
God’s will.
God’s will is love. You must obey it and love all people.
To love is to forgive all. On earth, love means working for social good. Do all you
do for all the people around you? Work for Africa’s development. Do not steal, not even
a penny from the public, for the theft of a penny is as grievous as the theft of billions of
dollars. Forgive those who wronged you.
Love and forgive and work for social interest and see Africa transformed in this
century. On the other hand, if you chose to retain your old African ego self and produce
suffering for your fellow Africans, that too is your choice.
I am merely explaining the dynamics of your ego mind to you. You are not a victim
of others but a person who deliberately victimizes yourself and ask other people to
victimize you. Stop your foolish game and love all Africans and work for Africans well
being.
But to change you must acknowledge your past mistakes; accept that you chose to
inflict pain on you, did so and now regret it. Change and start working for Africa. If you
do, like the prodigal son you have decided to return home. Home is love.

NOTHINGNESS AND IDEALISM

 Here are some related ideas in the world view that I am teaching. We find out that
people are doing nothing (meaningless and purposeless world) and want to make them do
something worthwhile and meaningful. Our idealism is meant to replace a meaningless
world with an ego ideal meaning that seem to satisfy and obviate the meaninglessness of
the world.
What our ideals wish for cannot come into being, for whatever is in flesh is nothing,
is useless and impermanent. Life in flesh is nothing. Only life in spirit can be something.
(If it does not exist, then existence is nothing.)

If evolution is true and produced people then life is nothing and has to be done
away with, for it does not matter. At best the individual enjoys the nothingness without
taking it seriously. Pass through the world without taking it seriously, without disturbing
your peace.

THE FUNCTION OF BODY

We chose to live in bodies and program our bodies (via the information we placed in
our DNA) to feel pain. We feel pain and weaknesses and struggle to reduce that pain and
weakness. Our lives are geared towards reducing the pain and diseases of the body.
In the meantime, pain and weakness makes our bodies seem real to us. We defend
our bodies and in doing so make what we defend, body, and the separated ego self it
houses seem real in our awareness. In making the separated ego self and its body real we
forget our reality, formless, bodiless, unified spirit.
The greatest surprise of our lives is the realization that we are not body that body
does not, in fact, exist, except as in a dream state. What exists is formless spirit.
We use pain, weakness and sickness to make our bodies, hence separation seem real
in our consciousness.
The other means of making body seem real is food and sex. Eating food makes body
real. Sex arouses the body and makes it real. In sex people think that they are bodies. In
fact, the pursuit of sex is pursuit of body reality hence ego reality. Average persons like
sex for they like to feel that they are bodies. They want to feel orgasm, that is, feel
intense bodily reality. These people are at a lower level of spiritual evolution; in fact,
they are closer to animals than true human beings. Gay and lesbian folks practically exist
to experience the intense sexual arousal they give to each other. In their crazed sex, they
forget that they are spirit and affirm their bodiless. (Spiritually developed persons do not
engage in sex; they do not over affirm their bodies.)

EACH PERSON WILL DIE WHEN HE IS MEANT TO DIE

Each person is exactly where he is meant to be, doing what he is meant to be doing
and will die when he is meant to die. It is all preplanned. Who preplanned it? His ego did,
his unconscious mind planned it out for him. His life is like a drama he wrote and plays
out.
Please understand what you are doing and live peacefully and die peacefully. You
cannot alter peoples scheduled times to die or what would happen to them.
 PEACE LIES IN HAVING NO SELF CONCEPT

To have peace the individual must give up his psychological self concept and not
defend it. He must not have a sense of separated ego self and must not defend it (though,
obviously, he must wish to defend his body. There must be a wish to live as a separated
self to cause the body to defend itself in a seemingly involuntary manner. Without that
wish the body dies and one returns to undifferentiated spirit state. No self concept means
peace and joy.

PAIN LIES IN HAVING SELF CONCEPT

To have pain is to have a separated self concept and defend it. We defend the
separated self at two levels, the physical level (which seems involuntary but actually is
voluntary, for a wish to live in body keeps it going and if that wish is removed it stops
defending the body) and the psychological level. In the here and now it is the
psychological wish for separation that can be removed and therefore reduce ones pain by
fifty percent.

GOD’S GUIDANCE

In the ego the individual has the illusion of self determination and self guidance
hence feels pain. If he lets go of his ego he must accept God guiding him, have no ego
plans but have the Holy Spirit, his higher self, a deeper part of his self guide him. Here he
is guided to have pleasant dreams.

CONCLUSION

I do not, for a minute, presume that this essay would make sense to you. I expect
your ego conscious mind to see it as silliness and reject it. I have been there and done
that.
Our egos like to see us as innocent victims of others evil behaviors (while ignoring
our own evil behaviors….Africans ignore the fact that they do not help their people while
harping on what whites did to them).
Go ahead and deny reality and see yourself as good and see others as bad. Go
through that trip for as long as you want. You assume that those you see as bad feel guilty
and that you could manipulate them with your guilt; the fact is that white folks are mostly
sociopath and have no guilt feeling, no remorse for their wrongs, no sense of right or
wrong and cannot be manipulated by your trying to guilt trip them.
You are therefore left no option but to accept responsibility for your life. Accept that
you, an African, did this to your self. Then decide to undo what you did. Decide to
change and work for Africa’s good, and not give Africans suffering, as we currently give
our fellow Africans suffering.
I know that you cannot accept my thesis until you are ready to accept it. If you are at
the animal level of existence you would deny the thesis and keep screwing up and
blaming others. You are where you are and that is all there is to it.
 My function is to explain reality to you. It is left to you to choose to behave
differently. I cannot choose for you. I can only choose for me. What I asked you to
choose: love and forgiveness and dedicating yourself to working for public good etc are
what I have chosen for me.
I choose for me and my choice affects you. Your choice affects me, too, for we are
living in an inter-dependent world. I hope that you choose love and work for Africa’s
good.
.
Ozodi Thomas Osuji
January 15, 2007.

EXISTENTIAL DEPRESSION, ESCAPE INTO FANTASY AND REALISM

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Sooner or later, all human beings experience existential depression. Some

experience it sooner than others. In fact, some experience it in childhood (by age six it is
already evident in them).
In existential depression the individual appreciates that his self (ego) and body is
worthless and valueless, and that his life is meaningless and purposeless. He sees no point
to life and living. He experiences an urge to kill himself and get it over with.
As the individual sees himself he sees other people, for other people and the world
are the individual writ large, his self concept and self image projected out and seen as if it
is outside him.
As the individual thinks and believes he sees manifested in his world, for the
individual’s world reflects his beliefs and thoughts; his thinking translated into images for
him to see.
Simply stated, in existential, as opposed to clinical (major) depression, the
individual evaluates the entirety of human existence and recognizes the utter
meaninglessness of existence. What most people find enjoyable, say, food, sex, work,
clothing, pursuit of power and prestige in society etc he finds silly and not worth
pursuing. He despairs from just thinking about the nature of being: we are food being
prepared for worms; our bodies are nothing more than meat for other animals to eat and
when we die we rot and smell like feces. He despairs just contemplating human life.

NEUROTIC IDEALISM AS ESCAPE FROM EXISTENTIAL DEPRESSION

The existentially depressed, however, avoids giving up hope by seeking fantasy

solutions to life. The neurotic is such a person. (For a good description of what a neurotic
is, see Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth; also see Alfred Adler, The Neurotic
Constitution.)
The neurotic to be child (by age six, if not earlier) sees himself, other people and
the world as totally worthless and meaningless. We can speculate on why he reached this
conclusion…such as Adler’s thesis that it has to do with inherited inferior organs and
Horney’s view that it inheres in maltreatment of the child by what Harry Stack Sullivan
calls the child’s significant others; that the child rejects himself and aspires after
becoming an ideal, superior self that society would approve etc. Personality theory is
mostly speculations on the etiology of the human self, most of them without proof. For
now, it is not important what the causal factor of neurosis is; what is salient is the
conclusion the neurotic child reached about himself, his life and life in general.
The neurotic does not accept the bleak picture of himself and life he has. Instead of
accepting this negative assessment of our earthly reality, he denies it or hides it in his
unconscious mind. He makes every effort not to even be aware of his negative perception
of human existence, drives that perception into his subconscious mind from which it
nevertheless affects his behaviors.
At the conscious level, he constructs (ala George Kelly) and juxtaposes an ideal self
concept for himself, ideal concepts for other people and ideal social institutions and ideal
world and pursues them. The pursuit of the ideal self and ideal everything is in place in
the neurotic child at age six.

THE FUNCTION OF IDEALISM FOR NEUROTICS

The pursuit of a wished for superior, ideal self gives the neurotic child reason for
living. As long as he is pursuing those ideational fantasies he engages in action (praxis).
He works hard at school, and eventually as an adult works hard at his line of work etc, all
in an effort to attain his ideal alternatives to his perceived worthless and meaningless
existence.
He may engage in this futile effort to seem ideal and make the world over into an
ideal picture until he dies. Some people, that is, idealistic neurotics, pursue ideals until
their old age, even to age 100. One can think of the aging socialist who is still struggling
to bring about an ideal society and a new human being; a human being that “from each
according to his abilities and to each according to his needs”.
Of course, neurotics are not going to actualize their ideals. Why? For one thing, the
ideal is a mental construct, a concept, an ideation; ideas cannot be fully realized in the
world of space, time and matter. In thinking we can construct imaginary perfections but
in the real world those ideals are checked by the laws of physics. Physics (laws of
aerodynamics) determines that those constructed without wings cannot fly, and no
amount of wishing to fly would make one fly. Simply stated, the real world limits what
we can attain in it.
Given the realities of the environment, the neurotic cannot attain his ideals, and if he
insists on realizing them must necessarily die a frustrated human being.
(If he gives his ideals up and adapts to the real world, he becomes a peaceful and
happy human being; the goal of psychotherapy, by and large, is to persuade neurotics to
give up their neurotic ideals and fantasies and adapt to the realities of this world; to
enable them live with their existential depression and make the most of their meaningless
existence without taking flight into impossible ideals, be it ideal self or ideal society.
Human beings must adjust to their worthless, valueless, bodies and their meaningless and
purposeless lives and still do what they have to do to live. In “Civilization and its
Discontents”, Sigmund Freud alluded to the fact that the healed neurotic is a person who
lives with human imperfection without the illusion that perfection is possible in a world
where folks must always kill themselves because they have inherited propensities to
aggression, territoriality and polymorphous perverse sex drive.)

ESCAPE INTO SOMATIC FANTASY

Some persons with existential depression seek escape in alcohol, drugs and sex
(pornography). Alcohol drugs and sex stimulate the human body. In the state of high
somatic arousal such persons are trying to induce self forgetfulness in them. As it were,
they are trying to forget their existential angst and return to pure animal state of being.
If you deaden your mind with alcohol, drugs, food and sex you are, more or less,
now like a sheep and live without the burden of your mind.
The exaggerated addictive behavior found in the West: addiction to food, alcohol,
drugs, sex etc are all futile efforts to return to a lower level of existence when human
beings were pure animals and did not have to think about their existential
meaninglessness.
This problem is particularly so in sex addiction. In having sex or watching
pornography, the individual momentarily forgets the absurdity of being a human being, a
creature whose body is food for worms, whose ego self concept is make belief, worthless
and valuelessness, a person who is no more than a puff of smoke that dies with his
physical death; in sex and addiction to sex, the individual forgets the purposelessness and
meaninglessness of his life.
The growth of homosexuality (so-called gay and lesbian sex) is also part of this
return to animal stage of evolution. The homosexual lives to seek sex, and to stimulate
his body and in doing so forget the psychological pain he lives from the awareness of his
nothingness. Most homosexuals are actually depressed human beings; they are only a
few feet away from committing suicide; their seeming acceptance and love of their
bodies is no more than a desperate man’s narcissistic grasp at the straw. (How could these
people do the awful things they do, put their penises into other folk’s anuses, and call it
having pleasure? Only a depressed person could find pleasure in smearing himself with
feces.)
Sex, gay or straight, is a childish effort to escape from what it means to be human:
living with absurdity.
One is not moralizing, for one understands that people are at different stages of
psychological evolution and will do what their stage of development disposes them to do.
When psychological pain becomes unbearable folks will over eat, or drink too much, or
do drugs, and or indulge in sex and pornography.
These activities are part of what it means to be a human being. We should leave
folks to do what they have to do to cope with their absurd existence; we should not judge
their behaviors right or wrong or moralize about them but just understand them. What is
understood is forgiven.
Those capable of thinking will use their minds to understand their absurd behaviors
and moderate whatever fantasies they escape to. The philosopher will not take refuge in
alcohol, drugs, food or sex; he tries to live with his absurd life as it is without escape into
fantasy: mental or somatic. (Pornography is contemporary Western man’s opium for
dulling his pained existence, as religion used to be his parents opiate for tolerating their
meaningless existence.)

RELIGION AS NORMAL PERSONS ESCAPE INTO SUITING FANTASY

Whereas the neurotic (and or psychotic…psychosis is extreme neurosis)

appreciates the utter worthlessness and meaninglessness of being and seeks pseudo
rational idealistic fantasy to replace such a world, some persons do so in the world of
religion. These escape into religious idealism and hope that religion would give them an
alternative acceptable worthwhile and meaningful world.
Whereas neurosis is the adaptation to the world by the thinking type of person, the
religious approach to existential depression is generally engaged in by the less thoughtful
and or poor breed of humanity.
In third world countries and the inner cities of first world countries, poorly educated
people, perceiving no hope for making it in this world, latch unto religions that offer
them hope in a future ideal world. The poor follow charismatic religious leaders who
propose to lead them to religious Eldora do.
In Africa’s emergent urban centers the abjectly poor generally escape into American
styled Pentecostal religions (such as Aladura, Cherubim and Seraphim) where they
believe that fervent praying and taking the Bible literally would prevail on God to make
them rich.
Of course, religion does not improve the lives of these people, though it often gives
them a neurotic (that is, false) sense of being superior to other people, superior to those
who do not believe in their particular theology. Despite their flailing around in their
squalid churches, Nigerian religionists, for example, still die of diseases from
malnutrition and germs.
Natural calamities, such as infestations of bacteria, fungi, virus; hurricanes, floods,
tornadoes, draught, famine, earthquakes, volcanoes etc kill human beings as they kill
other animals and trees. Recently (2004), a tsunami killed over 200, 000 people in East
Asia.
Simply stated, praying to God does not make the universe treat people as if they are
special and protected by a loving and kind God. Nature treats people as it treats
mosquitoes; both seem to have no worth, value and significance to nature; both seem
accidental production of the workings of natural evolution and destined to die.
The earth and the other planets in the solar system seem destined to die when the Sun
becomes a supernova and engulfs all its planets and explode into star dusts.
Indeed, the universe itself seems destined to die either a fiery death or in a big chill.
It is bleak all around and escape into fantasy does not seem to change any thing.

NEW AGE RELIGION AS SOPHISTICATED ESCAPE INTO FANTASY

In the West, the educated middle class often resort to what they call metaphysics as
an aid in helping them cope with the utter meaninglessness and worthlessness of this
world. When these people recognize the absurdity of being human beings, they take
refuse in metaphysical mumbo jumbo.
 An astute American Jewish clinical psychologist, Helen Schucman, in her book, A
Course in miracles, provided middle class escapists with a seeming sophisticated
religious fantasy.
Dr Schucman studied Hinduism and Buddhism and translated them into
Christological categories, hence made them palatable to Westerns who had been raised
on Christianity, though now apostate Christians. The scientifically educated Westerner
cannot accept Hinduism on Indian terms. Witnessing Hindus engaged in their religious
ceremony called Puja is like witnessing primitive persons trying to placate imaginary
gods, to get them help them cope with the exigencies of an impersonal world. Hinduism
had to be presented in a language that the West could accept Christianity and psychology.

Dr Schucman offered the educated Westerner a sophisticated escape into religious

fantasy. She, in effect, told them that this world is hopeless and that they should not seek
hope where there is no hope, our world. Instead, they should seek hope where real hope
lies, in God.
She presented an imaginary counselor to guide people to God. The Holy Spirit and
his most human manifestation, Jesuits Christ, are supposed to guide folks back to their
source, God.
The function of the Holy Spirit and Christ is to guide folks away from this worthless
and meaningless world into another world, a heaven where there is real worth and
meaning.

In the meantime, folks are not to do what adapts to this material world and generally
end up poor. As in Hinduism, Dr Schucman got her perpetual students to escape from the
world of the here and now and focus on the after death world. She enables people to
negate this world and not do what they have to do to adapt to the exigencies of this harsh
world and therefore end poor.
(Many of her students, of course, have to make a living in this world. However,
instead of seeking careers that pay well, they perform menial jobs just so that they have
enough money to pay their bills. And what is left of their meager incomes, they use in
attending their unending workshops on their Bible, A Course in miracles. Their teachers,
like clergymen every where, are parasites and get these misguided religionists to support
them via attending their useless workshops. Some of these workshops can be expensive;
some run around five hundred dollars for a weekend talking rubbish.)

These new age gurus and their students stopped trying to adapt to this world;
instead, they focus on how to escape from this world and in so doing live in poverty, as
Hindus, despite possessing the best minds in the world, live in poverty. Only science and
technology gets people out of poverty, not religious mumbo jumbo.

Hinduism and its Western child, ACIM, teach that our real home is heaven and that
in heaven we are in being.
In God we do not work; God provides for us. Heaven is abundance itself. The
children of God do not have to do anything to earn their living; their all powerful father
does everything for them. Indeed, in heaven, in God, they do not have to think; God
thinks for them. They share the same self and same mind with God and God thinks
through them and for them. Their sin (the cause of this world’s existence) is that they
want to separate from God and think for themselves.

As Helen Schucman sees it, the children of God rebelled against the world of their
father and sought its opposite. Their father’s world is the world of union, joining,
sameness and equality. God is in his children and they are in him and in each other. There
is no space and gap between God and his children.
In this unified world, the children of God are required to acknowledge that God
created them and that they did not create themselves. Apparently, they decided to rebel
and go seem to create God, create themselves and each other.
Instead of living in the abundance of heaven, now they live in the world of scarcity;
instead of been fed by God they seek to feed themselves.
On earth we must work to make a living. Our work and struggling is brought about
by our rebellious spirits. We suffer poverty and pain because we are the oppositional
defiant children of God.
All we have to-do to end our suffering is give up our rebellion and accept God as
our creator, give up the separated self concepts, egos, we invented to replace the unified
self that God created us as, and return to God’s world of union and abundance.
To return to God’s world of abundance we must give up our ego separated self
concepts and stop thinking from ego perspectives; we must forgive and overlook
whatever is done in this world and remain silent and in our silence God does everything
for us, including guiding us to where we would obtain our material needs.
Alas, this waiting for God to give us what we need to adapt to this world does not
produce the desired help (unless you are clever enough to provide workshops on
metaphysics and cajole fools to go work and give you their money as their workshop
leader).
Students of A course in miracles die from all the diseases that kill all of us; their
God does not make an exception for them. Indeed, Helen Schucman herself died of
cancer. Apparently, the God she labored for ten years writing his book for him could not
save her from the common lot of mankind: suffering, disease and death.
Essentially, A course in miracles urges people to give up this world and its scarcity
principle (economics 101 teaches that we live in a world of scarce resources) and die and
return to the world of abundance, which exists only in spirit. It is, as far as this world is
concerned, a nihilistic philosophy.
It can be summarized as telling people: do not think; let the Holy Spirit and Jesus
Christ think for you. And since they ask you to let go of this world, and not do what you
have to do to adapt to this world, construed as fantasy, illusion, dream, you must
therefore die; in its language, awaken to the world of God, said to be blissful, peaceful
and happy, the opposite of our suffering world.

INTELLIGENCE, CONSCIOUSNESS, LOVE AND GOD

There is nothing that I have said that proves that God does not exist. Any which
way we look at it, there is intelligence at work in this agent. The information in the DNA
appears to be the function of an intelligent universe. However, the problem arises when
we try to understand the nature of that intelligence.
There is consciousness in the universe. Human beings, for example, are conscious
creatures. Whether their consciousness is epiphenomenal or not is beside the point. The
point is that the universe produced consciousness; it produced creatures that are aware of
themselves. If the universe can do so in the case of man it has consciousness in it. The
problem is that we human beings are not yet able to understand whether consciousness
exists outside our brain boxes or whether only our brains produced it.
There is good and bad in this world; there are good and loving persons like mother
Teresa. These people dedicate their lives to serving other people, to improving the
general welfare of humanity. On the other hand, there are evil persons like Adolf Hitler
who dedicate their lives to causing other people pain and suffering and, indeed, take
sadistic pleasure in doing so. We do not need be naïve and deny evil, for there are evil
human beings in this world. Moreover, nature sometimes treats human beings in the most
heinous manner.
When we combine the presence of intelligence, consciousness and love we are
tempted to conclude that there is an agent called God in the world. Our ancestors
appreciated these factors and ran to the conclusion that there must be an all powerful
person whom they called God. They then threw themselves on his feet, worshipping him
and begging him to help them improve their miserable lot. We all know that no amount
of begging of that presumed God improved the lot of our ancestors. They still died from
diseases and starvation. It was only the advent of science and technology, in the past four
hundred years, that has dramatically improved our human existence. Clearly, our best
hope lays in science and technology, not misguided and self defeating attempts to placate
imaginary gods.
Nevertheless, it would be presumptuous to conclude that there is no God. Richard
Dawkins, in a recent book, The God Delusion, called the belief in God a delusion.
Delusion is the psychiatric concept of believing what is not true as true and acting as
such. If you believe that some one is out to kill you, and hide from him, is defensive,
when that person does not have such intention, you are delusional. In effect, we believe
that there is God, behave as if there is God when there is no God, ergo we are delusional.
Richard Dawkins is childish. His evolutional biology has not proven the existence of
God or his non existence. The study of the brain, neuroscience, merely shows us how
messages are relayed from one neuron to another but has not proven how we think.
Thinking may exist outside, as well as inside, the brain? All we can say for certain is that
what we currently know about God seems false. This does not mean that there is no such
thing as God. There may well be a God, perhaps, an impersonal God that Buddha talked
about? One does not know enough about this subject but nothing one knows convinces
one that God, whatever that is, does not exist or does exist. An agnostic open mind seems
the best approach to this subject.

DISCUSSION

There is no doubt that a clear eyed appraisal of this world shows it to be worthless,
valueless, meaningless and purposeless. Our world, as Gautama Buddha said, 2500 years
ago, is a place of suffering, pain and death.
 One is not arguing with empirical facts. As I see it, our world is a place human
beings come to suffer and die. In general, only a few human beings have clarity of
vision, and have clear awareness of the absurdity of being human being.
Generally, at any point in time, no more than five percent of the population are
psychologically sophisticated enough to recognize the bizarreness of this world.
Ninety five percent or more of the people, as it were, are like sheep and cattle,
animals, and do not appreciate the stupidity of their lives.
In the language of Hinduism and A course in miracles, the majority of the people
can be seen as sleeping and dreaming and in their dreams take the foolishness called our
world as important.
These sleepers and dreamers study science and engineering etc and work hard to
understand and adapt to this world. They take the world as worthwhile and pursue its
goals, as if, in fact, they are worthwhile.
They work hard understanding science and devising technologies to improve their
existence. Alas, implicit in that understanding of how the world is put together is
knowledge of how to destroy the world. If science and technology continues unabated,
and it should, within a century human beings would have discovered a cheap means to
end their lives on planet earth.
That which shows folks how to kill germs hence improve their lives also shows them
how to destroy themselves. A universe where people learn how to destroy themselves is,
indeed, an absurd universe; would you not say so?
It actually figures that people ought to learn how to destroy themselves more
efficiently for their lives are worthless and meaningless. Perhaps, we ought to figure out a
way to wipe out the absurd animal called human beings; we ought to help them put an
end their miserable existence?

One is not cynical and does not want to escape from this world, as painful as the
world is. One is interested in how to adapt to this world even though one understands its
utter worthlessness and meaninglessness.
How should one adapt to a meaningless self and a meaningless world? How can we
live in this world without escape into neurotic fantasy or religious fantasy?
How can one look at the world and accept it, as it is, without illusions and still do
something to live well on earth?
How can one figure out something that people need, something that is good for them
in the here and now world, do it, and sell it to them and in doing so make a decent living
and live out ones meaningless and purposeless existence on earth without becoming a
burden on other people to support one.

How can one accept ones existential depression (without resorting to taking
antidepressants, as childish Americans do…Americans seek solution to existential issues
in chemicals, in drugs, in altering their brain biochemistry with cocaine, amphetamines,
alcohol, heroine, morphine, caffeine, nicotine, and, now serotonin blocking medications,
such as the anti depressants).
How can one become a realist and accept the world as it is, awful, and live? How
can one look a meaningless self and life in the face and still go out there and work to
make a living to support that useless life? And what line of work is that?
 One does not have to be dishonest and tell people that life is a rose garden; on the
other hand, one does not have to depress people by constantly harping on the fact that life
is meaningless.
How can one be realistic and still do what is useful for people, sell it and make a
living? This is the real question facing honest men.

Existentialist thinkers like Sartre, Camus, Heidegger and Jasper harped on the
depressing aspect of life. Reading their books makes one depressed. Therefore, people
not wanting to be depressed stopped reading them, though they were writing the truth.
People sought happiness in namby-pamby new age religions, the type that only
childish Americans can come up with. Americans are like cattle; they do not like to think;
they are mind dead; their so-called leaders continually feed them with rubbish and they
live on it. Having avoided using their minds to solve problems, when life confronts them
with its absurdity, they seek solution in the bottle and drugs.
I often wonder whether Americans are sub-human beings. Their contempt for
thinking makes them seem despicable. They only grasp unto the practical and pragmatic
such as science, especially applied science, with which they have improved their lives
and become like well-fed animals, and also developed the means to put their miserable
lives out of existence. One of these days, a depressed American president and or military
leaders would unleash the weapons of mass destructions they have accumulated on them
and end their worthless existence. And from the ashes of that mind dead civilization, may
be a new breed of humanity, ones that enjoy thinking, would rise up?

One should not do what existentialists did: depress folks; nevertheless, one must
accept the truth that this life is meaningless and then find a way to live with that fact
“meaningfully”…self determined meaning, that is…such as the study of science and
psychology.
How should one live in an absurd world? How could one be happy in a meaningless
world?

I must emphasize that it is not other human beings that made the individual
existentially depressed. It is his level of biological and psychological development that
made him aware of the utter worthlessness and meaninglessness of being on earth.
Therefore, the individual should not seek explanations for his existential depression in the
foolishness called Western world view.
An individual is existentially depressed because his mind is able to see the utter
foolishness of being.

CONCLUSION

If you had sought escape from the meaninglessness of being in neurosis (idealism)
and or religion (fantasy of an after death world), do not blame yourself for doing so, for
we all do so.
Neurosis is an attempt to improve this hopeless world; it cannot succeed. Religion is
an attempt to improve this hopeless world, it, too, cannot succeed.
 Neurosis, psychosis and religion are fantasies and will not change this world; they
will not improve anything.
You might as well give up your interests in neurotic idealism and or religious
idealism, for both are fantasies, escapes into the impossible.

What should you do? It would be nice to tell you to seek solace in science and
technology. But experience shows that scientists and technologists are normal human
beings; folks who are like sheep and cattle and are not yet aware of the utter foolishness
of the world they live in.
It takes a sleeping person to discover the means to efficiently destroy his own life,
as scientists are doing and consider their insanity achievement!
So escape into science is not the solution. Leave science, a necessary endeavor to
normal sleep-dreaming persons.
If you are beginning to awaken to the fact that the world is foolish, you can seek a
realistic solution to it in mature thinking, in existentialism with a happy face.
You probably think that I see religion as foolishness, right? You are wrong. Mature
religion, what I call spiritual psychology, is actually necessary for dealing with the
absurdity of this world.
It is in writing and teaching spiritual and scientific psychology that I find meaning
and purpose in a meaningless and purposeless world. This is meaning given to oneself by
ones self.
It is the individual who must decide in an honest manner what makes sense to him
and throw his life into doing it and using it to serve all mankind. The musician uses his
music to console all of us; the novelist uses his writing to entertain us, help us kill time
and, perhaps, learn a thing or two; the scientist enables us to understand how nature
works; the technologist enables us to manipulate nature and put it to our advantage.
The critical thing is for the individual to do something that he finds meaningful, and
useful in helping other people improve their own lives. In Abraham Maslow’s terms, the
rational and healthy individual lives to actualize his inherent potential, not what other
people tell him is his potential but his abilities, as he knows them to be. This is just about
all that the individual can do in this world, and that is good enough.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD

February 1, 2007

FURTHER READING
(Add for print magazine)

NEITHER PUNISHMENT NOR FORGIVENESS CHANGES THE PAST

 In Nigeria politicians are looting the national treasury. Abacha and Babangida send
billions overseas. They use that money to train their children and make life good for
them. If you were to arrest them today and punish them you would not change the fact
that millions have already died from starvations due to their lot or that their children have
already benefited from their loot. Adolf Hitler already killed millions and if you punish
him that is not going to change a thing, will not bring them to life. Thus punishment is
largely a waste of time. Forgiveness is always a waste of time in that it does not change
the past.
For ones mental good (peace and happiness) though one should overlook the past,
forgive it and love in the present, work for common interest. This is not to change the
past but to have good mental status. Of course the evil looters of Nigeria can be arrested,
tried and jailed; it makes no difference. It stops their looting in the present but does not
correct their past looting.
The only thing that would help is to end the human race, wipe them out so that their
reign of evil is stopped once and for all. It is sentimental; the neurotic wish for an ideal
self and ideal other society and ideal world that makes one think that punishment or
forgiveness would change society. Human beings are hopelessly evil and the only thing
hat would help is to get rid of them. Hurry and discover nuclear weapons that would end
the human race and end their sorry stay on planet earth. People decry the end of the
world; I say it is the best thing that would happen to the world.

To apprehend and punish folks may instill fear into the minds of would be criminals for a
few days then they forget it and go back to doing evil things. At any rate nature it does
evil things, kill people randomly. Thus punishment does not eliminate evil; nor does
forgiveness. All that forgiveness and love does is making you peaceful and happy in an
evil world, it does not change the world nor does it give you food…actually it is objective
behavior, not forgiving behavior that places food on the table.

The sentimental type of person sees an evil world, social and natural and is seeking an
ideal alternative to it via his mentally constructed ideal self, ideal people and ideal social
institutions, all unrealistic. What is realistic is arrest and punishment of evil folks not
because it would bring about permanent peace but because it buys some time, breather
before man or nature commits the next evil.

MEANINGLESSNESS AND THE ETIOLOGY OF MENTAL DISORDERS

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

 We live in a world where Eurocentric ideas shape our understanding of phenomena.
Most of us were schooled to accept what our masters, Europeans and North Americans,
told us are true. We seldom question our masters’ ideas of the truth.
Like most Africans, I was schooled to accept Euro-American conception of reality as
reality. After graduate school, I assumed that I was educated and worked in the mental
health field. By some peoples account, I had extraordinary understanding of Western
mental health categories and was successful at my work: at age thirty four I was already
the executive director of a large mental health agency. But something was not quite right.
It gradually dawned on me that the psychiatric and psychological ideas we applied
to the patients and clients that came to our various clinics were not working for them. I
learned how useless what they taught students at universities were.
I will put it bluntly: Western Psychiatry and Psychology has no track record of
healing mentally ill persons! This assertion is based on twenty plus years of working in
most mental health settings: inpatient and outpatient. I will make bold to further assert
that with the exception of a few, such as R.D. Laing, Western mental health professionals
are worthless. When it comes to healing the mentally disordered, Western mental health
professionals have no clue what they are talking about.

Having convinced myself that the West is as good as useless in helping the mentally
ill, I left the field and decided to go do my own thinking and writings on it, unburdened
by the rubbish one saw practiced in the field or written in the field’s so-called academic
journals. These people do not know what they are talking about and it is time we, non-
Westerners, postulated our own ideas on mental illness and stopped wasting our time and
energy fooling around with Western mental health categories.

Let me make it clear what I mean. Western Psychiatry and Psychology has done an
excellent job describing the various mental disorders. What is described in the American
Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (see the latest edition) is
accurate representation of the various mental disorders. I know so because I have worked
with the mentally ill of all categories and their symptoms are pretty much like what is
described in DSM IV. One accepts these descriptions as true. What the West has
woefully failed at is in understanding the etiology of mental disorders and what to do to
heal them.

In this paper, in a summary form, I will provide what seems to me the correct causal
factor of mental disorders. My thesis is that mental disorders arise from individual’s
adjustment to living in a meaningless and purposeless universe. Mental disorders, all of
them, from minor ones like personality disorders to anxiety disorders to the psychoses,
such as schizophrenia, delusion, mania, depression etc are attempts by individuals to cope
with their living in a meaningless and purposeless world.

Let me briefly review some Western etiological approaches to mental disorders.

The formal study of mental disorders began in the late nineteenth century.
Schizophrenia (Bleuler came up with the name schizophrenia) was considered biological
in origin. However, this view was not pursued, for Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic
crowd soon dominated the field and essentially chased out all explanations of mental
processes that did not agree with their fairy tales.
Freud posited many fanciful hypotheses on the origin of neurosis and psychosis all
of which turned out useless. Whereas, it is a waste of time reviewing Freud’s ideas, let us
just mention that he believed that people were born with what he called ID instincts (for
sex and aggression) and that those struggled with society’s attempt to organize itself.
Society posits laws permitting certain behaviors and punishing others. For example,
there are laws delineating appropriate sexual behavior. People are supposed to grow up
and marry and limit their sexuality to their spouses. Since the sexual instinct, ala Freud,
is polymorphous perverse, indiscriminate, it follows that people have conflict with social
norms.
Internalized norms, which Freud called the Superego, fight with the Id. Conflict is,
therefore, generated in the individuals psyche, mind.
A sort of referee, the Ego (ala Freud) tries to balance the needs of the superego and
the Id. Where it succeeds the individual is said to be normal and where it fails he is said
to be neurotic.
If neurotic, the individual is prevailed upon to come to Papa Freud and his disciples,
and tell them what forbidden desires he has but hid in his ego unconscious. He is
supposed to free associate, say that he wanted to have sex with his mother, sisters and
neighbors wives. He is to see the psychoanalyst as a surrogate father and engage in
transference relationship with him, project to him, tell him everything he would have
liked to tell his father if he had the courage to do so; curse him, his father, that is, for
preventing him from engaging in sex with his mother (oedipal complex).
The analyst is to analyze these subterranean issues that were dug up from the
patient’s unconscious mind and get them cathected them, and help the patient to come to
terms with social reality.
But before the patient resolves his oedipal complex he must first own what is buried
deeply in his unconscious, for if not accepted and worked through they make the
individual behave irrationally despite his best intention to be rational.
Freud’s disciplines such as Adler, Jung, Horney, Sullivan, Fromm etc provided their
variations on the theme that he had posited: that unconscious forces; what is repressed,
affects the individual’s conscious thinking and behavior.

Freud concerned himself primarily with neurotics, that is, normal persons with
anxiety issues. In his few foray into abnormal psychology, aka psychosis, he said little of
consequence, though that little, believe it or not, still influences his disciples’
psychoanalytic practices today.
In his analysis of the autobiography of a German judge, Schreber, a paranoid
schizophrenic who liked to dress as a woman, Freud hypothesized that paranoia is caused
by repressed homosexuality. (If so, what caused homosexuality itself?)
Clearly, paranoid persons tend to feel inadequate and compensate with desire to
seem over adequate, powerful and fear been seen as weak, which means that they fear
been seen as weak women. Nevertheless, one does not see how a man wearing women’s
clothes would lead to the conclusion that paranoia is caused by repressed incipient
homosexuality?
Schreber probably was a transvestite, in addition to his schizophrenia, paranoid type.
 For all intents and purposes, Freud was irrelevant in enabling us understand
psychosis, even neurosis. He simply did not know what he was talking about. He filled
his little head with fairy tales and thought that his mythologies are scientific facts.

The irrelevance of psychoanalysis led to a reaction against it. Behaviorism

emerged and decided that since we cannot demonstrate the truth of any thing
psychoanalysis said that if we wanted to understand human psychology we had better
concentrate on man’s observable behaviors, only.
Empirically, we all can ascertain that people do learn some of their behaviors.
Behaviors that are reinforced tend to be repeated. Thus, Pavlov, Watson, Skinner and
other behaviorists concentrated on observable behaviors.
Through their classical and operant learning modalities they hoped to encourage
people to form socially accepted habits and extinguish socially inappropriate ones.
Behavior modification technology was designed to change people. Alas,
behaviorism, like psychoanalysis before it, is full of smoke, is hall and mirrors. Man
clearly is more than his learned behaviors. Human beings do think, and upon settling on
some thoughts as right, beliefs, act on them.
If you want to understand people you must look at their behaviors, as well as their
thinking, not just one. Behaviorism, like psychoanalysis, engaged in unacceptable
reductionism: reducing a complex creature, such as man, to this or that simplistic
causation. Behaviorism is useful for teaching children; parents/teachers have to reinforce
appropriate behavior, praise pro-social behavior etc. However, it is hardly useful for
changing adults’ behaviors; adults think and on the basis of their thinking decide what to
do.
Behaviorism has no track record of healing any mentally ill person.

Like psychoanalysis before it, observers reacted against behaviorism. This time,
observers looked at the human nervous system as the possible causation of human
behavior.
Psychologists began to study the human brain in their efforts to understand the
genesis of mental illness. We are still in the midst of neuroscience, the scientific study of
the brain.
We have learned a lot about the brain, its structure and how nerves relay messages
from one to another. We have learned about the electrical ions involved in the
transmission of information from one neuron to another.
We have learned a lot about the various neuro-transmitters involved in message
transmission. We know a lot about dopamine, acetylcholine, serotonin, GABA,
endorphin etc.
Medications that work to either increase or reduce the various neurotransmitters have
been designed. Some of these medications seem to help in the treatment of mental
disorders.
The various neuroleptic medications acting on dopamine receptors to reduce the
level of dopamine in the brain seem to reduce the gross symptoms of psychosis
(hallucinations and delusion); the various anti mania medication seem to reduce the
symptoms of mania (euphoria and delusion) by reducing acetylcholine; the various
antidepressant medication seem to increase the levels of serotonin in the brain and in
doing so reduce depression. The various Anxiolytic medications seem to increase the
levels of GABA in the brain and in doing so reduce anxiety.
There is no doubt whatsoever that psychopharmacology seems useful in treating the
mentally ill, but they do not heal mental illness.
They do not heal mental illness largely because mental illness is exactly that,
disorders of mentation, thinking disorders. While manifesting in the brain, mental illness
is caused by the individual’s perception that his life and life in general is worthless,
valueless, meaningless and purposeless and his efforts to deny that truth and posit what
makes life seem meaningful, what makes his worthless existence seem worthwhile.

MENTAL RESPONSES TO WORTHLESSNESS AND MEANINGLESSNESS

Existentialist writers like Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Jasper and Heidegger
have said it all. Let me summarize what they said. A rational appraisal of the human
condition shows that people’s lives are at the individual and collective level worthless,
valueless, meaningless and purposeless.
Where is the evidence that people have no worth and value? See, any human being
who so wishes to kill others can do so. If people had intrinsic value no one would be able
to kill them. Adolf Hitler decided that he liked to kill people and went ahead and killed
millions of people; only the determined efforts of other people stopped him; no divinity
stopped him. Natural calamities, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tsunamis,
floods, tornadoes, germs, plagues destroy people, as if they are no more important than
rats, and they are not more special than rats. Their self value is self conferred and is make
belief; nature does not respect it.
Of course, people do delude themselves into believing that their lives have worth
and meaning but a disinterested appraisal shows that people are living a worthless and
meaningless existence. They are born and grow and must die. Their bodies are food for
worms. They live and do not know why they live.
People have a whole bunch of rationalizations for why they live, such as the
excuses offered them by the various religions of mankind. But an impartial observation
shows that people really do not know why they are living. Apparently, they have an
inbuilt desire to live, to survive and to do so at all costs.
They would even use other people to obtain the means to survive and, indeed, would
kill other people if in doing so they make their own survival possible. They have a history
of enslaving their fellow human beings; they do whatever makes them survive.
But survive for what they do not know. They survive because they haven an urge to
survive and fear to die.

Simply stated, human beings have no apparent worth and value; their sense of
worth and value are pretended and make belief; ideas they conjured out of nowhere and
seem to believe them. These ideas are mostly delusional for there is no proof of the
reality of any of them. Consider the idea of living after they die. That idea is believed by
many religionists but there is no proof that there is life after death; it is an idea that
people employ to avert feeling of oblivion and finitude, feelings that are depressing.
 The human person confronts a world that does not make sense to him and he tries
to make sense of if it. If he is one of those persons who can accept what his people’s
culture tell is the truth, especially the prevailing religion of his people, he is saved a
whole lot of mental anguish.
If, on the other hand, he is unable to accept prevailing ideas on reality, he is forced
to come up with his own ideas. Generally, mental illness emanates from efforts to explain
reality and make sense of it. Those who become mentally ill are those who for any
number of reasons do not accept their people’s (cultures) explanation of what reality is
and are disposed to do the explanation for them selves.
These people are generally very sensitive people who appreciate the
meaninglessness of the world they live in and try to use their thinking to come up with
what seems to make sense to them. What they come up with as meaningful are no more
than fantasies that suite their psychological pains. Those fantasies, idealism and
perfections are escape from a meaningless self and a meaningless world.

The schizophrenic to be child sees a meaningless self and world and tries to escape
from that world; he makes sense of his absurd world by inventing his own replacement
ideal world and ideal self. The new self and world are not true.
Belief in the unreal produces hallucinations. Delusions and hallucinations give the
schizophrenic a sense that his world is meaningful.

In paranoia the individual confronts a world where he feels inordinately

inadequate and does not like it; he resents the fact that his world makes him feel small
and powerless. He tries to invent a self and world that he would feel adequate, important
and powerful in. He uses his thinking and imagination to invent a different (now deluded)
self concept for himself, one that makes him very powerful and existentially important.
Whereas reality, as it is, had made him unimportant and not special now his imaginary
new self makes him very powerful, so powerful that he is the lord of the universe. No
wonder the paranoid person does not want to give up his new deluded self construct for
to do so is to become aware of his smallness, a self he does not like; to give up his
delusions is to become conscious of a meaningless self and he does not want that
meaningless self.

In mania the individual, as in paranoia, feels like he is not special. He uses his
thinking and imagination to invent a very special self and identifies with that self.
Whereas before he is a nobody, now he is the mot famous person in his world (in his
imagination, wishes, he is now Jesus Christ, Bill Gates, Elvis Presley, the Beetles etc).
This person rejects his real self for it is a nothing self and identifies with a wished for
important self, a fantasy important self and that wished for self is so grandiose that it
actually inflates his body and makes him euphoric and excited.

In depression there is a bit of honesty involved. The individual accepts his self
perception, his inadequate, inferior self; he accepts his perception of a meaningless world
and tries to live with it. Unfortunately, the perception of the self as inferior and the
perception of the world as a meaningless world is ego dystonia and no one can be happy
with such negative self view hence the depressed person’s unhappiness, his desire to kill
his self and get it over with. If he latches unto a religion/philosophy that tells him that he
is important and that life has meaning he probably would not harm himself. Religion
saves many people than we know it. Religion gives people meaning, false or true.

In anxiety disorders the individual sees a meaningless self and a meaningless world
and feels fearful. Meaninglessness makes us fearful, for no one can accept a meaningless
world and be happy with it. Fear and the various anxiety disorders (social anxiety,
agoraphobia, panic disorder, generalized anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder etc) are
rooted in the individual’s perception that his life and life in general is meaningless. If you
can convince the anxious person that he has meaning and that his existence has meaning
you would enable him reduce his fears.

Personality disorders are rooted in the perception of a meaningless self and a

meaningless world.
The schizoid person responds to a meaningless self and world by keeping to himself
and wanting nothing to do with other people, people he sees as foolish.
The schizotypal person responds to a meaningless world by constructing her own
ideas of meaning, odd and eccentric, and latching unto them.
The paranoid person sees himself as small and invents a self and world where he
seems big and important and devotes his energy to defending his imaginary important
self.
The narcissistic person sees a world were he is nothing special and invents a self
where he seems special and seeks admiration from other people to make him seem
important.
The histrionic person sees a world where she is nothing and obtains silly importance
by being the drama queen, always seeking all persons’ attention, wanting to be told that
she is beautiful while lacking genuine love for other people.
The borderline person fails in obtaining social sense of importance and degenerates
to asking other people to serve her and in been served feels important.
The antisocial person sees a meaningless world and gives himself pseudo meaning
and importance by stealing and hurting other people.
The avoidant person feels that his real self is important and seeks to give himself
imaginary worth by withdrawing from other people; in social avoidance where nobody
rejects him he feels important and godlike in his self evaluation.
The dependent person feels weak and contrives to have other people take care of him
and from that feels important and special; in a world he does not feel important and
special he must be important for other people to provide for him and protect him.
The obsessive-compulsive person sees a meaningless world and hopes to make it
meaningful through obsessive thinking and behavior; obsessive thinking is used to seek
ideals, to seek a perfect self, perfect people and perfect world that is not going to come
into being.
The passive aggressive person feels that if he asserts himself that other people would
reject him and in rejection not feel important; so he is unassertive but nevertheless finds
ways to get back , get even with those he believes push him around, hence feel important.
 Mental illnesses are responses to a self and world perceived as meaningless. This
perception is made at the mental level and is reflected in the individual’s body, his
biochemistry.
What you think affects your brain chemistry. If you are fearful your brain chemistry
would change and make you seem to lack GABA and have more norepinephrine hence if
neuroscientists were to observe your brain they would say that your anxiety disorder is
caused by chemical imbalances in your brain. They are descriptively correct; they place
the cart before the horse.
It is thinking, mind, that causes the body to have altered chemistry. Thinking is what
makes us who we are, not our bodies.

PSYCHOTHERAPY

Western talk based psychotherapy does not heal any one; Western medicine based
psychotherapy does not heal any one. Filling people’s bodies up with psychotropic
medications, at best, calms their agitated soma, but does not heal them. Indeed, these
medications have such terrible adverse side effects that they destroy the bodies of those
who take them and eventually kill them.
Those who take anti mania medications, such as Lithium, generally have collapsed
kidneys later in life.
Those on antidepressants tend to have a whole lot of problems including male
erection problems.
Those on the various neuroleptics are essentially destroying many organs in their
bodies.
The anti anxiety medications produce the same effects as alcohol. Take them and
become addicted to them and when you try to withdraw from them, you experience all
the withdrawal symptoms alcohol addicts experience, the least of which are visual and
tactile hallucinations, heart palpitations etc.
Of course, the agitated mentally ill person needs medications, if only for temporary
relief of his symptoms.

The mentally ill needs psychological intervention. The real intervention they need is
for some one to enable them redefine what life is all about so that they see some sort of
meaning in life.
If these people could study philosophy and come to use their minds to deal with
their issues in a rational manner they would be healed.
What we can do are show people how they can live with their meaningless world.

In this paper, I do not intend to provide a philosophy to live by; that would take us
too far a field and requires hundreds of pages to do justice to it. I want to keep this paper
to less than ten pages. Elsewhere, I have grappled with the meaning of life.
For now, suffice it to say that if the individual can find a way to love himself, love
other people and forgive those who wronged him that he is on his way to becoming
mentally healthy.
 Regarding ultimate meaning, if the individual can find some sort of God and belief
in an after life he is served well.
If the individual can see the universe as a whole and his self as a part of that whole
and recognize that at the moment he seems a separated part and that he needs to rejoin the
whole, he is on his way to health. As long as the individual construes himself as separated
from the whole he is sick (unhappy and lacks peace); it is only when the individual
construes himself, and eventually comes to know himself as part of the whole and loves
the whole that he is whole (healthy)

MEDITATION AS A MEANS TO MENTAL HEALTH

To rejoin the whole it is necessary to de-emphasize the separated parts and stress
the whole. In meditation the individual consciously rejects his ego separated self and ego
based thinking and accepts unified self and its unified thinking as his reality.
If the individual lets go of his identification with the separated self and accepts
himself as part of a unified whole he tends to experience peace and happiness.
Whatever makes the individual to see himself as part of the whole and work for the
common good of the whole human community is good for him.
To be sick is to be separated from the whole; to be healed is to rejoin the whole. See
yourself as part of the human whole and work for our common interest and you are on
your way to wholeness, to holiness, to mental health.

SEPARATION VERSUS WHOLENESS

Psychotherapy is any thing that enables the individual to deemphasize his

separation from the whole and emphasize his union with the whole. If the individual
identifies with the whole and works for the whole he tends to find meaning from doing
so. Any philosophy that teaches union over separation gives people meaning and in
doing so heal their mental illness.

WHAT IS MENTAL HEALTH?

Mental illness is any thought that accentuates the individuals’ separation from the
whole (other people and the universe). Conversely, mental health lies in any thought that
emphasizes the individual’s oneness with the whole, union with all there is, the universe.
We are one at the physical as well as the non-physical (spiritual) level.
Any thinking that affirms separation leads to mental disorder and any thinking that
affirms union of all leads to mental health. Thoughts of separation produce a sense of
meaninglessness whereas thoughts of union produce a sense of meaningfulness in life.
Separation is meaninglessness; Union is meaningfulness. Ultimately, union exists in a
non-material state, in spirit; mental health lies in spirit.

CONCLUSION
 Human beings are those animals that ask philosophical questions, such as: who am I;
why am I here and where am I going when I die. Why do I die any way? Why do I live,
do living have any meaning and why should I tolerate a seeming meaningless existence?
These questions are asked with differing urgency by different persons. Some begin to
ask them even as early as age six, whereas others seldom ask them at all, at least not
overtly.
Those who ask these questions with especial urgency tend to be those who develop
what the psychological and psychiatric establishment call mental disorders.
Those who do not ask these questions with similar urgency are the so-called normal
population; the mass of humanity that seem to be sleeping and dreaming and taking their
dreams as real.
Those who ask these questions with all seriousness need urgent answers. Since, by
and large, there are no satisfactory answers, and to the extent that there seem answers,
those answers are not available to them, they may seek answers in imaginary ideals and,
ultimately, in fantasy.
These people use their minds to construct what seems to them as answers to the
problem of living in a meaningless and purposeless world. Their answers seem to them
to be better than no answers, and certainly better than the silly answers that normal
society assumes are rational answers to the problems of being.

All mental illnesses are attempts to find meaning in a meaningless world. Mental
illness is the construction of what seems useful answers to critical questions, but what
turns out as fantasies, ideas that suite our psychological pains but that are not realizable in
the world of space, time and matter.
One may wish to fly but only animals with wings, birds, can defy the laws of
gravity and fly. Man cannot fly unless he studies science and uses its technology to
devise mechanical contraptions (airplanes, rockets) that enable him to fly.
Science and technology is the only answer available to us. By science, I mean
studying the world as it is, studying the world on its own terms, without escaping into
wishful thinking; by technology, I mean using applied science to doing those things that
adapt to the realities of this world.

Those who for any number of reasons do not have access to science and technology
but instead use their imaginations and thinking to come up with idealistic, wishful
solutions to the problems of this world, solutions that do not take into recognition the
realities of physics, are generally those we call the mentally ill.

I have studied the mentally ill for over twenty years and one thing is common in all
of them. They are sensitive persons seeking answers to the meaningless and
purposelessness world they find themselves in. They use their minds and imaginations to
construct fantasies of their selves and the world that seem meaningful to them and when
the stresses of living in this world rise they escape into their fantasy selves and worlds,
their castles in the sky.
Unfortunately, castles in the sky are exactly that, magical thinking, not real castles.
Fantasies do not adapt to the exigencies of this world though they give their makers a
sense of adapting and power.
 It feels powerful to reinvent the world in ones imaginary terms and escape into it. In
constructing fantasizes and ideals neurotics and psychotics seem powerful and
omnipotent; in living in their imaginations insane persons seem godlike in their own eyes.
Alas, they are not really powerful; they are merely satisfying themselves with
wishful thinking. Wishful thinking does not change reality. What copes with reality is
science and technology.

Science and technology, unfortunately, does not answer the question of meaning.
Traditionally, religion gives people some meaning and purpose. But now we know that
most extant religions are fairy tales.
So what should folks do? I do not know. I think that finding a way to combine
scientific psychology with speculation on possible non-physical realities, what I call
spiritual psychology, may be a way to go.
In as much as there are things we do not know, we will speculate about them. As
long as our conjectures are within the realm of possibilities, I do not see why we should
not speculate, provided that we know the difference between speculations and facts.

To find meaning in this meaningless world, I think that we have to combine science
and spirituality (the later being mostly speculative).
Some speculations give people peace of mind. Buddhism and meditation, for
example, gives folks peace of mind and happiness. Therefore, embracing aspects of
Buddhism seems to me a rational thing to do, for peace and joy seem needed in this world
at war with itself.
My spiritual psychology combines Science, Hinduism, Buddhism and Christian
Gnosticism. If it gives some persons peace of mind, as long as they are rooted in the
world of science and technology, I think that it is useful. In the long run, however, one
accepts that we live in a meaningless and purposeless world; one does not have a need to
escape into some religious or neurotic fantasy of what the self and world ought to be like.
Those who escape into an imaginary ideal world are insane persons; those who deal with
this sorry world as it is are normal persons.
Healthy persons are those who while adapting to this sorry world accept the
possibility of a unified non-physical world and use that belief to get them to serve all
human beings.

There are biochemical correlates in all mental disorders. If you examined the brain of
the schizophrenic you would see certain brain configurations. The same goes for mania,
delusions, anxiety etc.
Thinking produces chemical changes in the brain. Therefore, concentrating on using
medications to change the altered chemistry of the mentally ill, while useful, would never
heal mental illness.
One is not disputing the obvious: that there are biological precursors of the various
mental disorders. There are biological markers in all mental disorders. I would even go
one step further and say that people inherit biological dispositions to the various mental
disorders.
For example, if you are anxious you probably inherited a body that is quick to
somatic arousal etc. The issue here is not the correlation of body and mental disorders
but the fact that, biological taken as a given, it is thinking that activates those disorders. If
thinking patterns change biological states change.
One is not anti medications; if you have physical and or mental disorders please see
your medical doctor for help and take the medications he prescribes for you. We eat food
to live and need medications to supplement what is lacking in our nutrition.
Without denying the role of biology in mental states, the point that I hope to have
made is that the individual thinking in response to perceived meaningless universe is
what, in the present, cause mental disorders, and that, ultimately, it is changed thinking
patterns that heal mental disorders.
If the individual has loving and forgiving thinking and behaviors he tends to be
happy and peaceful.
Love (that is, desire for union with all people) is what gives us meaning; love is what
heals all mental illnesses. Medications and other forms of psychotherapy are adjunct.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD

February 2, 2007

FURTHER READING
(Add to edited version for print media)

DOES THE WORLD HAVE A PURPOSE?

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

A purposeless and meaningless world produces fear and confusion; so, we try to
come up with purpose and meaning, fantasy, for our existence.

Have you found yourself asking: why does the world exist? What is the reason for
the existence of the world? What is the purpose of the world? What is the meaning of
the world? Why do I live on earth?
Many people ask these questions and grapple with them. They think of many reasons
why the world exist, many purposes for the world’s existence, many meanings why we
exist etc, but upon further refection they find that none of the reasons they come up with
holds water.
From the perspective of pure reason, there simply is no convincing purpose for the
world’s existence. Thus, many people give up asking why questions and simply live, and
do their best with what they are given, and let it go at that.

The world is causeless and is effectless. The world has no reason for existing. The
world has no purpose for existing. The world just exists.
The world exists because the children of God had an insane idea, the idea that it is
possible to separate from their father and from each other.
 It is impossible for the children of God to separate from their father and from each
other. It is impossible for them to create themselves or create their father.
However, what is not possible in reality can be dreamed of. Thus the children of
God dream and in their dream the impossible seem to have happened. In their collective
and individual dreams they see a world that seems separated from God.
However, what is seen in a dream has not occurred. Whereas dream events last for
as long as the dreamer is sleeping they have not occurred, in fact.
What has not occurred or seem to have occurred in a dream has no effect. The
world and its activities occur in a dream and have no effect on reality. Reality is unified;
reality remains as God created it, unified and dreams do not change it.

What has no effect has no cause. The cause of the empirical world is an insane wish
hence is not a rational cause. Though an insane wish causes the existence of an insane
dream, the dream is lacking effect, thus nullifying the cause.

If you see what people are doing on earth and ask yourself: why do they do it? What
is the point? What is the purpose of their behaviors? The answer is that there is no
purpose to what people do; there is no reason why people do what they do; there is no
meaning to what people do; there is no cause to what people do; there is no effect to what
people do.
People are insane and are dreaming separated, special selves and world. You cannot
explain an insane, purposeless world and the most that you can do is forgive it, overlook
it and love the children of God who are having that insane dream.

The only seeming purpose in the world is forgiveness and love. Forgive and love
all and you awaken to unified spirit. The desire to awaken from the dream is real
purpose.

The neurotic sees a meaningless, purposeless world and tries to find purpose in it. He
sees a meaningless world and uses his imagination to come up with what seems an
alternative meaningful world to the meaningless world he sees; he sees a purposeless
world and uses his mind to come up with what seems a purposeful world; he sees a world
that exists for no reason and tries to come with reasons why it exists; he sees people
doing purposeless things and tries to explain why people do them. (For example, he sees
homosexuals and asks why they do what they do. Is there any logic to what these people
do? It is absurdity at work.)

The neurotic must fail in his efforts to find why people do what they do or why the
world exists, for you cannot find purpose and meaning in a purposeless and meaningless
place (dream); you cannot find reason in an irrational dream, the world.
Give it up and accept real purpose and meaning: love and forgiveness; these lead to
awakening to the reality of unified state and in the here and now give peace and
happiness while we are still in the dream world of separation.

CONSCIOUSNESS USES ELECTRICITY TO WORK BUT IS OUTSIDE IT

 Electricity is in every thing (as part of the atom, electron part of the atom) and, as
such, is inside the human body.
Consciousness uses electricity to do work inside the human body, to transmit
messages from one nerve to another, but is itself outside the human body and electricity.
You can stay calm and observe electrical movement in your brain and body; this
means that you are different from the electrical movements; you are different from your
body. You are the observer of what is going on in your body and is not your body.

IDEALISM WANTSTO KILL OFF THE REAL EGO SELF AND REPLACE IT WITH
A BETTER EGO SELF

The ego represents the wish of the son of God to kill his father, himself and other
children of God and replace them with another self, a self he invented, the special
separated self.
In the egos world that the son of God invented, that wishes to destroy what is and
replace it with another continues. Now the wish sees the ego self that was invented by the
son of God as imperfect and wants to kill it and replace it with a better self.

The ego idealist hates the real ego self and its body and wants to kill it and replace it
with what seems an ideal ego self, ideal other people and ideal world.
The ego, therefore, not only wants to kill the real son of God, he also wants to kill
the ego the son of God made to replace his real (unified spirit) self. The spirit that
produced the world: the desire to replace what is with another continues in the egos
world.

In the here and now, the ego ideal wants to kill your ego, kill other people’s egos,
destroy all society and replace them with an imaginary ego ideal self and ideal society.
Just as the ego real self is not real, the ego ideal self is not real; both are
unattainable.
The world is a place where illusions clash; the real son of God, and unified spirit
remains as part of God and all creation, spirit.

The pursuit of the ego ideal, like the pursuit of the ego real gives human beings
neurotic and psychotic reason, that is, false purpose for living; gives them false meaning,
false reason for living.

MEANING DERIVED FROM INSANE IDEA IS INSANE MEANING

Assuming that one obtains ones meaning for living on earth by pursuit of the ego
ideal, one must remember that a rational person should not predicate his meaning and
purpose on false, impossible, psychotic grounds. A false meaning is not real meaning; a
false purpose is not the best reason for living.
One either lives for a real purpose; love and forgiveness of the illusion, or not.
Forgiveness is not real love (real love obtains only in spirit) but it approximates love for
it brings folks to love’s gate. Forgiveness gives people some peace and happiness while
they still live in the illusion of specialness and separation. Real peace and joy lay only in
unified spirit, not on this separated world.

The person who pursues the neurotic ideal self and its ideal world is unable to adapt
to the imperfect world of the here and now; he continually wishes for the impossible ideal
and despairs of attaining it while not doing anything realistic to adapt to the real here and
now world.
Despite the illusion of power that pursuit of ego ideal gives you, give up the pursuit
of ego ideal self and adapt to the ego real; ultimately, give up the pursuit of ego real and
return to unified spirit and know total peace and happiness, bliss.

THE WORLD IS SEEN THROUGH ONES SELF CONCEPT, SELF IMAGE; NO

SELF CONCEPT, SELF IMAGE AND THERE IS NO WORLD TO SEE

Each of us creates a self concept and self image in childhood. Subsequently, the
external world is seen through the prism of that self concept and self image. The
individual distorts the world to fit his self concept/image. He does not see anything as it
is.
Normal persons have flexible self concepts and see the world from the prism of that
flexible, but still unreal self concept. Neurotics have inflexible self concepts and try to
distort the world to fit their inflexible self concepts. Psychotics see the world from their
insane self concepts and self images.

Self concepts and self images are continually changed and to the extent that they are
improved ones perception is improved. Nevertheless, all perception, even at its corrected
best (seeing with forgiveness and love), is still false.

SALVATION IS GIVING UP ONES SELF CONCEPT

When the individual lets go of his self concept and self image he exits from this
world and enters the non-conceptual, non-imagery and non-perceptual world; the world
religionists call the world of God.
You cannot come to God/heaven with any self concept or self image; you must
come without the self that you yourself defined, the self you made to replace the self God
created you as.

In meditation one tries to let go of ones self concept and self image and exit the
conceptual/perceptual world altogether and enter the non-conceptual, non-perceptual
world.

THE SELF CONCEPT/IMAGE WAS CONSTRUCTED BY THE SON OF GOD

The son of God, unified spirit, in his desire for specialness and separation constructs
the self concept and self image. He uses our biological constitutions and social
experiences to construct his self concepts.
 In the here and now world, it is body and social experience that seems the producer
of the self concept. You cannot understand your self concept without understanding your
body.

However, since body and society do not exist or exist only as in dreams the material
used in constructing the self concept does not exist and the self concept does not exist.
Since to be on earth one must believe that one has a separated self concept housed in
body, very well, then study that seeming self concept, the human personality. Understand
your personality. After you have understood it then let it go. It was better if you did not
bother studying it but in as much as you think that you have it, study it and then
relinquish it. It is upon relinquishing it that one obtains peace and happiness. If you
affirm your ego you are in pain.

DEFENSE OF THE SELF CONCEPT MAKES IT SEEM REAL

The self concept is unreal and must be defended to seem to exist. If you did not
defend it, it would not exist for you.

SEPARATION MEANS NOT KNOWING ABOUT OTHER SELVES THINGS, EVEN

THE SELF

The moment one separates from other people and builds a wall of flesh around one,
one can no longer know about other people. Separation produces the world of
unknowing.
Not knowing we then speculate about what other people are and what they are
thinking and who they are. We also speculate about what animals, trees, mountains, star
etc are.
The world of separation is the world of speculation and unknowing. To know one
must relinquish separation and return to unified state; it is in unified state that one knows
all people for they are all one self.

DEFENSE OF THE IMPORTANT SEPARATED SELF LEADS TO LACK OF

SPONTANEITY

If you fancy yourself a very important person and defend it, you seem important in your
mind; in doing so, however, you kill your spontaneity and enjoyment of life.
Conversely, if you give up the sense of important self concept you simply enjoy this
world and eventually awaken in spirit.
If you construe your self as a very important self, that is, you want to be a very
important self you would spend most of your psyche energies defending that important
self; you would find it difficult to do things for fun; you would no longer be spontaneous.
You would be rigid and inflexible.
To be spontaneous and humorous etc you must have a flexible self concept that does
not want to be very important.
Ultimately, to be totally spontaneous and happy you would have to let go of all
ideas of the self you have and return to spirit unified state, to perfect peace and joy.
 WE ARE ALL SELLING IDEAS; WHAT IDEA ARE YOU SELLING?

To be on earth is to sell something to other people; and if what you are selling to
them is what they need to survive they would buy it from you, and you would make
money.
Every one is selling something; every one is teaching something to other people,
whether he knows it or not.
What you sell, what you teach is what you believe to be who you are, your identity
(ego or Christ).
So stop and have clarity as to what you are selling to the world; what you are
teaching other people. What are you selling and is there a demand for it? It is only if
people need what you are selling that they would buy it and you would make profit.

SELLING EGO, EGO IDEALISM AND LOVE

Hitherto, I was trying to sell ego idealism. I saw a meaningless self and its world
and came up with an alternative that seems to make meaning for me: idealism, and tried
to sell it to people.
Idealism is interesting but does not adapt to the realities of this world so no body is
buying it from me.
I used my idealistic standards to judge real people and myself and make living
painful for all of us.

Idealism leads to waiting until the world and people become perfect (and judging
them as imperfect) but to not doing something to incrementally improve this world.
Normal persons do not sell ideals but merely do what the here and now needs. Build
hospitals for sick people etc but do not wait until people are perfectly healthy for if they
are healthy they would need no hospitals.

IDEALISM GIVES FALSE POWER

Idealism is very difficult to get rid of because it gives its owner a false, neurotic
sense of superiority and power; after all he has a good idea in his head, an idea with
which he wants to change the world; and in changing the world become very powerful, as
powerful as God, for now he has recreated the world to fit his image of how it ought to
become.
Alas he cannot improve the world and does nothing for the world of the here and
now.
Sell realistic ideas, ideas such as making the most of this world scientifically and
technologically; ideas of relative love, not perfect love, for perfect love lies only in non-
separated spirit state; on earth, people must have self interests and place others interests
below theirs.
Sell ideas of forgiveness but not perfect forgiveness, for perfect forgiveness leads to
death and return to spirit world. As long as people desire to be in this world they cannot
forgive entirely; Jesus forgave entirely and died and left this world and returned to
heaven. If all people forgive entirely the world ends and they return to unified spirit; the
ego idea that it is good to forgive a bit, and to not forgive some sins, to punish some
sins, leads to the existence of this world; let it be so, for folks have a right to be here on
earth, in the dream, until they want to leave it and at that point they would forgive
entirely, give up all ego defenses and awaken in unified state; each person chooses when
he would forgive all and awaken.

Johnson tried to sell perfection, ideals and died poor. Only imperfect ideas that cope
with an imperfect world sells.

THE EGO WAS MADE OUT OF HATE NOW HAVE AFFECTION FOR IT

The ego, that is, the special separated self, was made out of hatred for ones real self,
the unified self. The same hatred that led to its inception continues and one sees the egos
faults (all the things it does, defecation, weakness of body, vulnerability etc) and one
hates it and imagines a better ego self, a better body. It is not the egos fault that it is
weak, we made it to be weak, being weak it is defended and in defense make it seem
real, so do not blame it.
When we hate and reject the ego and body because of what it is and seek ideal self
and ideal body, the pursuit of the ideal self makes one perpetually dissatisfied and
unhappy.

But God wants one to be happy, even in ones dream world. Now treat the ego with
affection and some love and like it; accept it despite its vulnerabilities and imperfections.
It is still unreal, a dream self, an illusion that does not exist but as long as you still want
to sleep and dream separated self then love the ego and other egos and the world of egos.
You might as well have a happy dream by loving the ego and its body, as it is, not as you
imagine that it could become. No matter what we do the ego would never become
perfect, as we want to become; we want it to become as perfect as the real self, the
unified self, so that it actually replaces that real self, the self God created. Only the real
self, the unified self, a spirit self, is perfect. An illusion, ego, cannot be made perfect.

If you do not want the ego and its body then wake up, right now. You wake up by
not defending the ego and its body, now, and you die and wake up in unified spirit. But
as long as you still wish for separated self, as long as you are still in a dream that the
impossible is possible, then have a happy dream by loving the dream self, the ego and
human body.
Why make yourself unhappy by hating the ego/body, hating nothing, hating what
does not even exist? Hating what does not exist makes it exist for you. It does not exist
but you think that it exits then like it, like the illusion, the dream and have a happy dream.
Forgive all attacks (and keep some to be in this world… if you forgave all attacks,
you would die and awaken to glory, to grace, to unified self, to bliss).

If you forgive all and die, the world would still be an unloving place where evil
exists. The death of Jesus did not stop evil in the world. The world continues to exist,
giving others the opportunity to forgive and awaken. The world would exist until all
people forgive all people and awaken.

REACTION: FROM EGO OR CHRIST?

Life is such that things are always happening to each of us; the environment, other
people are always impinging on us. We are always reacting to what happens to us. We
either respond from the ego or from the Christ (represented by the Holy Spirit). If
somebody does something to you, if something happens to you, pause and find out from
whose stand point you are responding to it.
Given that we all initially identified with the ego, otherwise we would not be in this
world, you would respond from the ego (feel attacked and defend yourself); stop and now
feel attacked and forgive the attacker, love the attacker. Do not engage in ego analysis to
find out who is to be blamed; no blaming, no defenses, just forgive. Keep quiet and
forgive; ask the Holy Spirit or your higher self, Christ or Jesus Christ to guide you, to
show you how to respond to every situation that you find yourself in.

WHY DO PEOPLE DO WHAT THEY DO?

People do what they do because of their personality. Personality determines

behavior. Personality itself is determined by biology and social experiences.
However, in the long run people do what they do because of insanity. They are on
earth because they are insane and do what they do because they are insane. As insane
persons they are not going to change. You would be foolish to expect people to change
their behaviors; insane persons do not change their behaviors and become sane in their
behaviors. Until human beings become sane their behaviors would be insane. Accept
them as they are, insane. Smile at people’s foolishness and do not let it bother you. Ignore
their foolishness and don’t even bother responding to them. You do not need to respond
to illusions if you know that they are illusions.

PERPETUAL PEACE AND JOY

If you understand the nature of reality, unified spirit, and the fact that this world is
an insane dream, an illusion, you forgive the world and what people do in it; you see the
world as a dream and see people as dream figures.
With such mental attitude, you would be perpetually peaceful and happy. You would
be so happy that you would become like the manic person and jump up and down,
wanting to share your joy with all people.
However, the joy of the person of God is differentiated from the euphoria of the
psychotic manic by the presence of peace in the person of God. The manic and all
psychotics are restless and agitated for they are trying to make illusions, false ego selves,
real; the person of God does not want to make his false ego self real; he relinquishes it
and in its absence feel the peace of God that human beings cannot understand..
 PETER DRUCKER DEVOTED HIS LIFE TO STUDYING ORGANIZATIONS AND
THEIR MANAGEMENT

Lately, I have been reading Peter Drucker’s books. He devoted his life to studying
organizations and their management and in the process formed a new profession, the
study of management. He was in the right place at the right time; big corporations
emerged in the early part of the twentieth century and he began to study organizations
and how to manage them; if big business organizations had not come along in America,
he would not have done what he did.
So do what your own life presents you to do, not what others lives presented them
to do.
Drucker asked people to do what they would like to be remembered for when they
die. So what would you like to be remembered for when you died? What do you live for?

Understanding people, normal, neurotic and psychotic is what I would like to be

remembered for when I died.
Understanding the fact that neurotic ideals are power drive that produce nothing and
leave folks poor is my contribution to psychological understanding of human beings.
People have to be accepted as they are, imperfect, and make the most of it; no
judging of people as good or bad.
This type of self understanding and understanding of people leads to inner peace
and happiness; use that knowledge to give people peace and happiness; sell that idea and
it is a worthwhile contribution to society; people need to hear it and would by it. There is
a market for that idea, so sell it and make a living from so doing. I have an amazing
insight into human psychology, sell it and make a living from doing so. This then is my
profession.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

February 7, 2007