Religion

Why do people feel a need to believe in religion? Walking around South East Asia there are temples everywhere. In small communities of less then 150 residents that I visited, a village that does not have running water, electricity, internet or paved roads there is a buddhist enclave and a modest temple. Around Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, any corner that has some significance to someone you will find a little offering left over for the gods. There are prayer niches everywhere. Small peaked wooden columns, some only inches high while others are about 5 feet tall adorn the side of streets.

Sometimes painted in garish colors, these spirit houses  are dotted all over the landscape. Companies have them outside their offices to protect their business. They are prevalent in Asia and also in Africa. While in Europe there are effigies of saints dotted all around sometimes in street corners fulfilling the same promise of protection. People leave offerings of food and sometimes briefly pray in front of them.

There is a human need to relate to an external entity that resides close to us. In our geography. When Carl Jung discussed religion he assumed that it was collective unconscious. Sigmund Freud on the other hand believed that religion was a collective neurosis. Freud was strongly anti-religious. But Jung, as the only son of a Protestant pastor with eight of his uncles being pastors,  his interpretation was less flippant than Freud's. Jung believed that religion gave us an ideal, an archetype. Jung argued that this helps us in individuation--trying to become who we truly are. The archetype is an ideal that we aim to become. We honor the dead with a tomb, head stones or a stupa (below) as a way of remembering those that passed.

Some of us need to remind ourselves of the legacy that they left behind. Some of these remembrance might be hubris, the fear of death and finality, or erecting an edifices for your continued immortality. All of these reasons for erecting reminders of dead people are valid.  There are also other reasons. Some want to promote a cause, to promote a religion as with the legacy of Indian Emperor Ashoka (273—232 BCE). In Ashoka's example he wanted to promote Buddhism and he did this by erecting such reminders of the prophet.

Initially the body of Buddha was cremated in the Indian town of Kushinagar and the ashes divided and buried under eight mounds (stupas) with two further stupas built to encase the urn and the embers. According to Buddhist tradition, Ashoka  recovered the relics of the Buddha from these stupas (except for one), and erected 84.000 stupas across Asia including Laos. The national stupa in Laos the Pha That Luang whose image can be found on all government emblems and also represented on its money is so revered that it signifies the Laotian national identity. It is believed to house the  breastbone of Lord Buddha despite historical evidence that Buddha was cremated.

Similar edifices exist for all religions across the world. Body parts of saints or holy men (rarely but sometimes women) enshrined and edified. How we interpret these behaviors  in the age of the internet remains a quandary.

Philip Sherrard  wrote about Jung's interpretation of religious symbols and concluded that all of religion is within the psychology of people, that there is no higher truth. As a psychologist he sees religion as a result of psychology. Theologians on the other hand contest this since they are used to thinking in ultimate truths. Both views are relative to their discipline. An undeniable fact emerges that most people around the world need to have this ideal. A god of some sort. Someone or something that we look up to as an ideal. In the process we also revere those that remind us of attaining or persevering to reach this ideal.

In the Buddha Park in Vientiane, Laos, there is a statue of a four-faced buddha with four outreached arms signifying the basis for life: earth, wind, water and fire. Around the sculpture arranged in a circle are statues of men in all walks of life, from an frail older man bent over his walking stick, to generals and important statesman in their fineries.The message is that this life is transient that we are temporarily in passage through this life to another life. This is the state of Samsara an unenlightened state (the opposite of Nirvana that state of being enlightened.) We can decide to go through it in one form, but eventually we will all die. On top of the heads of the Buddha are other layers, an abbreviated Buddhist wheel of life with five or six realms. The skulls depicting the pain of hell (yama) and the eternal suffering of the those who experience greed, ignorance and hatred. The second tier is crowned by regular faces depicting life on earth and of all the animals with humans have the best chance for enlightenment. The third tier is toped by monsters as gods, or devas, or as angry gods, called Titans or asuras.These live longer than humans but are not immortal. Atop of these are snakes that lack the awareness to be enlightened. Right at the top are the angelic faces of enlightenment.

One can easily see the influence on psychoanalysis, especially Freudian analyses. The angry ghosts, normally depicted by having small mouths and big bellies, whose desires cannot be satiated, easily fits into Freudian repressed desires that created the need for the id, ego, and superego as dynamic forces. Although religions mix and match among each other, there is a certain consistency to them that Jung grappled with. For him it was easy, he believed in a god. For Freud, it was difficult to address it intellectually as he found it to be below intellect, but more in the realm of primitive desires and needs. But both are right...there is a primal need to aim for an ideal. Not perhaps we are spiritual or higher beings, but perhaps that is how our brain works. We develop a perfect model of the world inside our heads. In this model, everything is perfectly balanced and is accumulated from a lifelong interaction we have with the world, with our environment. From the very first moment of our birth to the last moments of our death we interact with the world and we adjust and modify this model. Within this perfect Xbox we have a role for perfect things because they fit nicely into our scheme of things. Religion and deities fit in perfectly. We yearn such perfect entities as they are easily accommodated in how we view the world, how the world should be: just and orderly. Even in towns without running water, electricity or cellular networks, the need to honor this perfect world that we have inside our brain is great enough for people to represent it in their small community by creating a representation of what is in their mind. Every time I see these spirit houses or niches adoring some deity I think about the perfect world that each of us carries with us in our head.