The Dual Brain Religion And The Unconscious

The findings of split-brain research and the mind's symbolic processes are combined to examine the implications for understanding subjective experience of the religious and the sacred.

First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.

Explains how human social evolution has led both to worthwhile achievements and moral horrors and provides perspective on today's planetary crisis by viewing it as a transition within the larger picture of social evolution.

This book is about the pains and pleasures of human interiority and some special ways of dealing with both. The ways are those of religion and the appointed--some might say the self-appointed--guardian of the unconscious, depth psychology. The pains are the pains that accompany our efforts to find peace and ease in the world and that almost invariably attend our attempts to define our own identity or the identities of others. They are the pains of relationships approached but never quite achieved or of relationships achieved and then broken. They are the pains, the deep-down interior pains, of strained parenthood and benighted childhood. They are the pains, all the simple sufferings and the complicated ones, of human sexuality. They are, in sum, the pains that in religion are associated with sin and moral transgression and in depth psychology with neurosis and psychosis.

The authors raise the question of the connection between the brain's drive to seek meaning and reality and religion. Religion, they argue, links what is immediate in our lives with what transcends and transforms them.