13 January 2007

Further to injunctions

Whether or not descriptions are turned into injunctions, the only psychological allusions in Christianity are to psychological events in centralised psychology, subsequent to the rejection of society/other people as a source of significance. As the social environment is by far the most obviously available source of significance, this is a very important watershed, so one might wish for some indication of how to get there. But the descriptions of higher level (centralised) generosity encourage the Christian to focus his attention on interactions with other people and society at large, and to reinforce dependence on them as a source of significance.

In fact, you could say that Christianity (as it is, which seems unlikely to have much to do with what anyone who got a higher level would want to promote) is designed to prevent the development of higher level psychology. People who have some higher level tendencies, without being centralised, are likely to want to see something in it, and be drawn into an occlusive kind of psychology (although certainly no worse than socialist egalitarianism).

We can take it as established that there was a higher level mixed up in the origins of Christianity somewhere, but Vladimir Lossky, for example, seems to prefer the idea that there was no psychological development in the life of Christ. That is, either he was in a deified (higher level) state throughout, or (Lossky’s preferred scenario) in a kenotic deified state throughout, which would appear to correspond approximately to a post-higher level state.

But there are many metaphorical references in the Gospels to the dramatic shifts in perspective that occur in pre-higher level psychology, and the Kingdom of Heaven is something that is "entered into", so it would appear that the person who got the higher level definitely got it at some point, and had not had it before then. It is possible to take all the transitional metaphors as referring to the final acquisition of the higher level, but if you assume that the preceding psychological transitions also occurred, it is possible to find what may plausibly be regarded as allusions to them.