Stray thoughts: Tillich, Peck, Non-being

Whatever it is that has brought me to look into this topic, began I think with the discovery of Paul Tillich's book "The Courage to Be". Since that time I have not bothered to investigate Tillich's systematic theology, nor has that book been something I've wanted to return to. Instead, it served as a jumping-off point about the idea of "being". Perhaps not in a philosophical sense, but out a dark period of depression, understanding what it might like to be a "non-being". At the time, I interpreted the isolation and despair as something existential. Though in the 2.5 years since then my certainties and beliefs about God and reality have shifted, they have not radically changed. I now understand most of the despair as the result of a very skewed perception of myself, the result of a hyper-analytical mind turned on itself. There are many other aspects to that. My relationship with my parents that was somewhat enmeshed, making it difficult throughout my life to express my own individuality. I experienced intense guilt and shame at any point of opposition with them. What I experienced during this time (or at least, the vocabulary I encountered at the time) was, as M. Scott Peck might put it, a shifting of my cognitive map of reality. We develop a map that defines our perception of life, but at some point, we find our map is asked to change because it is incomplete. It does not match reality. In a book on Religion and Spirituality in the Life Cycle, James Gollnick puts it this way:

"First human beings are not born with such maps, a great deal of effort is required to construct a moral and cognitive map of reality. The more we are able to perceive and appreciate reality, the more accurate the map will be. Peck maintains that many are

unwilling or unable to expend the time and energy to make the necessary changes to

the reality maps as life continues to unfold."

This process is also very tied to the necessity of courage, as the changing of cultivated ideas about oneself, the world and God are incredibly difficult to transform with new information about reality. In the midst of my mental map being challenged, my responses were childlike, a breadth of concerns and anxieties that asked for parental-like assurance. What I gained instead was the robust insistence of a counselor for "Courage!"