As an infant and very young child, you were an animist. Experience was centered in your Body – technically the BodySoul, referring to your essential nature as a human (Body) being (Soul), although at that time the intuitive and introspective powers of your Soul were operating below the range of conscious attention.
BodySoul is the complementarity of consciousness – the ‘Tao’ of your essential nature – with an extraverted and outreaching (more life!) principle of ‘Yang’ in communion with an introverted and inreaching (deeper ground) principle of ‘Yin’.
By two years of age you were on your way to becoming a theist, learning the language of your tribe and finding your place on the social performance stage. Experience now re-centered in your emerging Ego, referring to the self-conscious actor (ego: “I”) who experiments with identity by pretending to be somebody in a variety of roles.
These personas (a term taken from ancient theater for the character masks through which an actor would speak their part) adapted you to the interactive environments of your family and fantasy life. Theism is a type of religion that is socially situated and oriented on the special authority of higher powers – analogs of the taller powers (i.e., parents and other adults) who managed and supervised your theater of identity during childhood.
The religion of theism at the sociocultural level follows the same developmental progression as it did for you growing up. Its initial orientation (early theism) is on god’s authority and will, where devotees are expected to obey, follow the rules, and do what’s right. Theism constructs and clarifies its concept of god using the media of stories (mythology), images (iconography), and ideas (theology).
As constructs of the human mythopoetic imagination, the gods of theism are metaphors of provident authority and personifications of higher power, fashioned on the archetypes of your mother and father in childhood.
You didn’t remain in that posture of obedient dependency, however. As you continued to develop, the relationship to your taller powers also evolved. It’s not that their will and authority no longer mattered, but something else started to shine through – at least we can hope it did, to some degree.
This something else is what we call virtue, referring to their charisma as role models or exemplars of goodness, generosity, integrity, compassion, understanding, and wisdom – to list just a few of the higher character virtues attributed to the gods of theism.
Indeed, these six virtues in particular serve as leading indicators along the arc of human higher evolution. Societies in which theistic religion clarifies these six virtues in its representation of god tend to be far healthier, happier, and more resilient than those with religions that don’t.
This shift or expansion from an early focus on god’s authoritative will to a developing appreciation of god’s virtuous character, marks the progress to high theism where the dedicated effort of a devotee – just as it was for you in middle childhood – advances from a motive to please, placate, flatter and impress the powers-that-be, to an attitude of admiration and worship.
Instead of standing above them in the position of authority, gods of high theism grace the sanctuaries, shrines, and altars of worship, standing before their devotees, inviting praise and veneration of the virtues they personify.
It should be emphasized that high theism has not eclipsed the more Body-centered concerns of animism and early theism – the need of the child/devotee to feel safe, to be seen, and to belong. These needs remain, but they are now, with this shift to more Ego-centered concerns, taking a secondary position to the “higher calling” of becoming – and garnering respect as – a certain kind of person.
In worshipping a god of love, love itself is glorified. What is lifted up before the devotee gradually becomes an aspiration, a fervent desire to be like god.
What happens, psychodynamically speaking, when a virtue such as love, which is perfectly personified in the deity, is glorified in worshipful admiration, to such a point of ardent focus and aspiration where the devotee longs to be like god and love as god loves? The answer, in the context of religion, is that theism – the type of religion oriented on god – begins its final forward shift in development and enters the phase of late theism.
Looking back on your own late childhood and early adolescence, can you recall a time (or period of time) when the virtues you admired in your taller powers started to take root mysteriously inside you as well? It wasn’t just that you were perfectly imitating their example, but rather those very seed-qualities were beginning to awaken in you.
Those virtues – the six we are holding in mind: goodness, generosity, integrity, compassion, understanding, and wisdom – are transpersonal, which is to say they lie at a depth beneath your personality and reach farther beyond your individual ambitions, anxieties, and prejudices.
In late theism, the center of experience and concern “drops” from the Ego to the Soul – technically the BodySoul, though now, in contrast with animism (or pre-theism), the intuitive and introspective powers of the Soul have at last become conscious. Theists of this late phase find it more relevant and meaningful to speak of god less as above them (an authority to obey) or before them (an exemplar to worship) than within themselves, as a presence to be realized (i.e., made real or manifested) in their daily lives in the world.
Are we stepping toward atheism here, or have we inadvertently stumbled into the sinkhole of humanism? Is the end of our path a life without religion and devoid of spirituality?
No. In fact, atheism only makes sense as theism insists on the literal and objective existence of its mythopoetic construct (god). Such a stance already indicates a loss of metaphorical imagination and spiritual freedom. And a chauvinistic humanism, where only human values and interests are respected, is itself a symptom of alienation from the ground of being within us and from the web of life around us.
Late theism and its spirituality of “god within” very naturally spreads its wings into post-theism, where the realized virtues of goodness, generosity, integrity, compassion, understanding, and wisdom conspire to create the provident environments that will support and nurture the faith of those coming up behind you.
In finally breaking through to the liberated life, you help make it more likely that others will one day find their way here as well.
Tracts of Revolution 