April 14, 2016

April 14, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

In “Religion as Schedule-Induced Behavior” (2009) Strand describes what has been described as ‘a seeker’s dark night of the soul’, “religious dark periods” which involve “continued effortful behavior without the foundational, induced behavior.” It is, of course, a religious person’s negative private speech, which we refer to when we speak of perseverance “with a calling in the absence of the felt grace of God” (italics by me). Rather than the absence of a non-existing God, it is the absence of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), the spoken communication in which the speaker can become bonded with the listener and the listener can become at any time the speaker, which brings isolation, loneliness, depression and despair. Moreover, negative private speech didn’t arise on its own as it was always preceded by Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) public speech. The person, who experiences SVB on a continuous basis, has no negative self-talk to get rid of and is therefore not prone to any superstition, which is what effortful religious behavior is.

“Induced religious behavior is apparently more rewarding than acquired religious behavior.” The person who experiences a lot of SVB will realize that genuine religious behavior is in fact based on communion, on the joining of speaking and listening behavior. For the person who knows the distinction between SVB and NVB, each period in which we have NVB is a dark period, regardless of whether we experience this alone as our negative private speech or together as negative public speech. It is not the absence of God, which causes the speaker’s dark period, but the absence of the listener. 

Actually, the grandiose speaker, who speaks AT the listener, may think that he or she is like God, but he or she is not really present either, for he or she acts like an unconscious, mechanical communicator. The tenacious belief that we cause our own behavior sets the stage for NVB. In NVB, the speaker is not really speaking and the listener is not really listening. In NVB we are disconnected from each other and from ourselves and we are not real. Our conversation with an imaginary God is just as unreal as our conversation based on an imaginary behavior-causing self; both are always NVB. It is not the grace of God, which cannot be grasped, but the listener, who cannot be forced. Forced listening will always elicit a non-religious pattern of behavior.