On the Terrorizing of Soul

Robert Sardello

Terrorism cannot be looked at in isolation. There is a larger, all-encompassing terror, a crisis of civilization, in which the soul lives in a constant state of constriction. Some of the marks of this crisis are: materialism gone wild, loosened morality coupled with rigidified morality, the exchange of freedom for arbitrariness, dominance of the lie, unrestrained sensuality, and the exploitation of countries for their resources by global corporations. Under these circumstances, the soul lives in a constant state of terror. We cannot consider terrorism without the context of this destabilization of society – our own, as well as those countries from which violent terror originates.

The purpose of terrorism is to produce a world condition of permanent chaos where negation of spirit and soul rules. A world of no reverence, no honor, no truth, no morality, no unity, no imagination, no ideals. It is the soul, the individual psyche, first and foremost that lives in terror because its life is being cancelled out. Violent acts of terrorism are merely the visible seal, the stamp of negation replacing the values of life with the power of death.

The word terror means the instilling of fear. Terror is of a completely different order than fear. When we experience fear, some of our soul life is still able to respond, we are not completely overtaken. Terror instills fear within the whole of our soul being. It erodes the soul’s functions of imagination, creativity, memory, love, longing, dreaming, deciding, willing, wishing, wanting . . . and most of all, inwardly experiencing the presence of the divine, unmediated by organized religion or outer structures.

Terror terrorizes the soul because there is no way out of the presence of the negation of life. Someone else’s destruction spreads itself beyond itself and incorporates those not involved. The soul severely contracts under ongoing attacks of this sort, and before long the inner qualities of soul life diminish and we even forget what those qualities were like.

For the soul, terror is felt when access to the presence of the inner experience of what C. G. Jung spoke of as the realms of the ‘numinous’ are severely restricted. A materialistic outlook or global world-view accomplishes this contraction. We can readily see that there are two forms of terrorism. Many of the people from regions that seem to be most directly responsible for outward terrorists attacks live a peculiar materialism of the spirit. They are so severely restricted in their material lives that they have come to imagine that all the material things they could every desire become available by sacrificing their lives and going to a place, a heaven, of material pleasure. This is a materialism of spirit. The very presence of this outlook in the world brings about a constriction of the soul of everyone, for it is an anti-soul imagination. By negating the material realm through violence, a better material realm is gained, according to this ideology.

There is a second and equally powerful form of materialism within which soul cannot live. This form can be termed the “spirit of materialism.” This outlook says that complete satisfaction of all our material desires is all that is needed for a full life, and conveys the silent message that there is no need for the life of the soul. Soul cannot be seen, measured, and, if it exists, it has nothing to do with this world. Thus, for example, president Bush’s first response against violent acts of terror against America was not to suggest that we pray, but rather to declare that we should all go out and shop or go to Disneyworld, a perfect metaphor for the fantasy of a complete materialistic world. But, our finest science also denies the existence of soul and belongs to this same radical materialism. To see these two forms of terrorism of the soul – the materialism of spirit and the spirit of materialism, makes it possible to realize that the ongoing low grade fear we feel is first of all the soul’s fear of its demise, long before it is fear for our physical being.

The constant presence of terror makes us encounter and question everything we identify ourselves with, for it is all subject to negation in a second. If we do not undergo an inner development through which we come to realize that we, in our essential being, are infinitely more and different than what we identify ourselves with, terror increase. Also, in gradually removing our sense of constructed identity, terror exposes us to the forces of the unconscious without the means to understand what is happening. When these attacks on the soul are coupled with the ongoing soul restriction brought about by the global forces of terror spoken of above, a profound inner transformation takes place. The sense of ourselves is gradually replaced by a second self through a process of doubling.

Doubling is a process, well documented in the research of Robert J. Lifton on terror in Nazi Germany. The atrocious acts of terror on others were due to the presence of terror within the perpetrators, which shows up as doubling. His research describes five characteristics of the doubling process: (1) A second self forms autonomously alongside the ordinary self. (2) The second self comes about as a direct result of living in an ongoing state of terror. (3) The second self gives coherence to living with ongoing fear. (4) The second self performs unacceptable and atrocious acts. (5) Conscience is transferred to this second self. Students of Lifton have shown this same process operating with other groups, for example, with fundamentalists. Thus, ongoing fear does not just result in numbing, but begins to turn those subjected to terror into terrorists, whatever form this may take. Once this process is recognized, we must extend the definition of terrorism to include all acts that bring about severe constriction of soul life.

A double has no soul; it looks and acts human, seems to others to be human, but is no more than a kind of automaton – extremely clever, able to survive, but always at the expense of others. Doubling has advanced so far in this country, that it is not seen as an illness, but rather as a mark of success – for individuals, corporations, and government. The process of doubling has nothing to do with dissociation, multiple-personality states, or borderline states. The potential for losing the sense of who we are exists for anyone living with an overwhelming sense of ongoing fear. To live with only those capacities of consciousness that understand material reality, to lose the capability of conscious, individual soul and spirit life, opens the gateway for the entrance of the double.

With the presence of ongoing fear, we lose the sense of our spiritual individuality. However, when the fear of pure negation is faced, rather than reacted to, we become more fully ourselves. When we inwardly experience the full impact of complete oblivion, we become conscious in that part of ourselves that can never be obliterated, our spirit-self. Fear, then, can awaken us to the inner life. We make a horrendous psychological error if we assume that measures can be taken to restore terrorized individuals or society to a former state of comfort. That fantasy is the operation of the terrorism of the spirit of materialism. We must be clear that terror is different than fear and requires completely different modes of treatment. Terror uses fear to accomplish what it wants. What it wants is the total annihilation of the soul and of the spirit. It wants the de-individualization of the human being. It wants thinking and imagining to become fanatic and the will to become despotic and tyrannical. It wants thinking and imagining to turn literalistic, narrow, sober, dry, and the will to turn animalistic, greedy, and nervous.

It wants us to lose connection with the spiritual worlds and come to think that there are only two realities – the material world and death.

Since terror closes the soul off from its spiritual life by fostering the two kinds of materialism already described, these two archetypal forces of materialism cannot be defeated by opposing one against the other. The conflagration not only intensifies, terror enters the entirely new level of ritual abuse and ritual murder, which we are now witnessing with the treatment of prisoners by both sides of the present conflict in Iraq. The use of fear as a tool to instill terror turns into fear-lust. Fear-lust can only increase the problem of doubling, for when terror achieves this level, the symbolic murder of a few affects a culture far more than open war. Only a stance that leads to the mutual cancellation of the two archetypal destructive forces can lead us out of this inevitable direction of terrorism.

The mutual cancellation of two terrors facing each other requires the development of a spiritual psychology and practice that recognizes and knows how to work with the attacks on the invisible elements of our being. It requires a psychology that can differentiate trauma and trauma treatment from the needed non-sectarian spiritual work in relation to terror and does not try to put something entirely new into modes of treatment that are essentially unsuitable. The mutual cancellation of terror requires recognizing that the level this problem needs to be worked on is cultural rather than only individual, and that by treating terror trauma as if it were the same as any other trauma, we unwittingly are letting doubling infiltrate the culture, so that the ultimate terror will come from within.