What is the divinity-mortality split?
Michael Picucci, author of The Journey toward Complete Recovery, coined the term ‘sexual-spiritual split’ to identify “a deep psychic schism” endemic in human culture. I’d like to expand on Picucci’s vision by recognising another psychic fault line, the ‘divinity-mortality split.’
Picucci gives the origin of the sexual-spiritual split as “early religious and cultural training, which teaches that God, love, and family are good while sex is dirty, bad and perverse.”
The divinity-mortality split is similar, except that the axis of contention is death. It is our point of separation from the Singularity of existence.
What is the Singularity?
The concept of a universal singularity is not scientifically recognised.
Yet Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger stated that “The total number of minds in the universe is one… Consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings.”
Schrödinger is not alone in this view.
In The Universal One (1927), Walter Russell writes that “everything that is, is of everything else that is… Mind is that universal One thing which man calls ‘God.’”
Russell argues that all visible matter originates in universal oneness, acquires the illusory and temporary appearance of separation, then returns to its source:
“‘Creation’… is a periodic change of state of the One unchanging substance. It is evolution. De-creation is… apparently integrated things returned to that substance.”
Does the Singularity exist?
Questioning the existence of the Singularity is a symptom of the divinity-mortality split. But perhaps asking whether it exists, in empirical terms, is the wrong question?
Instead, consider the human fingerprint. Wikipedia: “Human fingerprints are detailed, unique, difficult to alter, and durable over the life of an individual, making them suitable as long-term markers of human identity.”
There is no agreed scientific view on how billions of unique fingerprints are created. Wikipedia lists a variety of genetic and biological factors affecting their creation, yet they all seem to assume they’re unique through randomness and not through design.
What if the Singularity is capable of deliberately producing such a feat of biological engineering? What evidence do we have that empirical science, where every experiment returns the same outcome, is a sophisticated enough tool to recognise a consciousness that produces billions of unique results?
It’s like trying to disassemble a Swiss watch with an adjustable spanner. An adjustable spanner is an excellent thing, but it’s far too crude a tool for the job.
So, we have no evidence the Singularity is measurable with our current tools.
Does this matter? Russell writes that “Man is omnipotent when he but knows his omnipotence. Until that day he is but man.” To dismiss the Singularity dismisses the potential for that omnipotence.
OK, so what is the divinity-mortality split?
To rephrase Picucci’s definition of the sexual-spiritual split, the divinity-mortality split is “a deep psychic schism within almost everyone in our culture which causes us to regard ourselves as separate from and inferior to perceived divinity, making us devalue our own existence and long for death to end the pain of separation.”
Subconscious experience of this split pushes people in two directions:
- Denial of the existence of the Singularity (‘God’)
- Mystical longing for reunion with the Singularity
The extent to which the split affects people is, as always, determined by sensitivity.
This split manifests on social media when rationalists/atheists attack people who profess to spiritual beliefs. What’s noticeable is the irrational heat that rationalists exhibit, as if the mere existence of such beliefs was painful to them.
When we’re comfortable with our truths we’re comfortable with the truths of others. No one in human history was ever emotionally triggered without an underlying pain point.
Mystical longing manifests in religious phraseology, firstly in the ‘our god’ construct (as if there could be multiple) and secondly in prayers directed to God ‘out/up there’—i.e., as a separate entity who is entreated to wave a magic wand at various situations.
Again, the pain behind the separation is heartfelt and tangible. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1932), psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich writes that “mysticism’s function is… to divert attention from daily misery.”
Mystical longing offers a clue to the origins of the split.
Where does the divinity-mortality split come from?
The same place as Michael Picucci’s sexual-spiritual split, of course. While Picucci attributes this to “early religious and cultural training,” in fact both this and the divinity-mortality split go way back to profound changes in human physiology that happened due to climate change from around 4000 BC to the early modern period.
Both of these fractures are aspects of what I call the ‘mother wound,’ a fundamental rupture of genuine emotional nurturing that happened across a wide belt from the Sahara, through the Middle East, Arabia, and into central Asia.
In The Fall, Steve Taylor writes: “The main event in human history is a sudden, massive regression—a dramatic shift from harmony to chaos, from peace to war, from life-affirmation to gloom, or from sanity to madness” that began around 4000 BC.
Separation from the cosmos
In What is the mother wound? I describe the 6-way fragmentation of healthy, feminine-masculine balanced physiology into the masculine-dominant psyche we assume to be ‘normal’ human functioning.
One of these fragments is separation from the cosmos—the Singularity, the One, the All, God, whatever you want to call it. I write:
“The mother wound manifested in the overthrow of peaceful fertility cults by tribes with male war gods. They legitimised slaughter and conquest for survival and accumulation, as antidotes to fear and anxiety.
Humanity no longer revered Nature as sacred, meriting a capital letter. Divinity became an entirely abstract concept. This later gave rise to monotheistic religion.
This abstracted view migrated into the scientific paradigm that saw the world as the outcome of mechanical processes.
If we are the result of accidental processes, with no connection to nature in either the physical or cosmic sense, we can avoid emotional responsibility for our own lives, those of others, and the sustainability of the planet.”
And this is why the Singularity is important.
Making gods
French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote that “the universe is a machine for making gods.” This is Russell’s concept of omnipotence again.
If our evolutionary potential is to truly achieve godlike creative powers, the divinity-mortality split stands as a mute barrier to our progress. Instead, it fosters emotional irresponsibility, regards sustainability with indifference, and promotes ignorant ‘rage against the machine’—the psychic prison of the Patriarchal Operating System.
The divinity-mortality split is perhaps not as obvious, pervasive, and damaging as Michael Picucci’s sexual-spiritual split. Yet it is another layer of pain and separation from the truth of the human condition and its potential—whatever that might be.
Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash