Nobody knows trouble I’ve seen -- Nobody knows but Jesus.

We really are finite beings adrift in an dangerous world, beset consistently by tragic human triad of suffering, guilt and death. George Santayana, brilliant Harvard philosopher wrote;

Life is neither entertainment nor a feast but a predicament to be resolved in face of enormous difficulties.

Most of us do indeed live out at least some portions of our lives in quiet desperation. As many as one person in five suffers from serious mental or spiritual health disorders at times. In addition, we are all caught up in frustrations of life virtually all our days.

During my half century of psychospiritual research, this puzzle emerged from writings of men and women like Soren Kierkegaard, Carl Jung, Karen Horney, Otto Rank, Laura Perls, Abraham Maslow Melanie Klein and many others. Some of them started as agnostics or atheists who like Sigmund Freud thought God was a security myth, religion a fraud, worship and prayer naively subjective and faith, hope and love meaningless illusions. I understand their skepticism. How could any serious scholar want anything to do with state controlled churches of their day -- as clergy pandered to nobility and betrayed families into poverty and slaughter in religious and financial wars? Nevertheless, as they matured personally and professionally, when everything psychological had been researched, after they’d reached limits of psychotherapy, incredible insights in following paragraph appeared regularly in many of my most influential scholars’ lectures, therapy sessions and books.

To mature beyond neurotic anxiety, to cope with existential alienation, to live purposefully and win consistent satisfaction, each person must develop a faith as if God were real. We scholars can find no God -- religion probably panders to human weakness, prayer and worship are frauds, Nevertheless, to avoid crippling our souls, we must pretend that God exists and offer devotion to this myth because doing so gives us a crucial sense of security in a dangerous world. We can then live with illusions of faith, hope and love that are essential for a meaningful life.

Oh my -- how wondrously droll, how deeply self-serving, how terribly convoluted! Fortunately, there is a much better way, for according to William of Occam, with all factors being equal, simplest solution to a problem is usually best one. Soren Kierkegaard, always brilliant and forever relevant godfather of modern psychology, most equal of my score or so authors, along with Ernest Becker, saw life more clearly than most. The Danish philosopher of First Industrial Revolution, when writing about satisfaction reported;

The only way we humans can find contentment in a commercial society is through a self-transcending faith in God that lifts us beyond a fearful, frustrated and meaningless existence. We must become Knights of Faith.

You must understand this;

In this seminar I examine aspects of human personality and experience that are filled with painful and self-defeating elements. It is worse than useless to ignore our problems when every newspaper exposes us to a flood of human disasters. Nevertheless, my approach is spiritual and positive when followed through to end. I shall try hard to teach you how to peer into your souls, to balance knowledge and wisdom, psychology and philosophy and earthy elements of psychotherapy with cosmic elements of worship -- in order to deal with human suffering and to make life come out well along way. I use term psychospiritual with a full understanding of its dual implications of emotional and philosophical elements.

SECOND -- THE CONTRITE SPIRIT The next astonishing consensus to emerge from my brilliant psychological giants is necessity of personal repentance in deliverance of one’s soul.

To resolve our spiritual difficulties, to succeed in our quest for liberation, we must successfully pass through major emotional crisis of human liberation. During this conflict, soul with its unconscious scar tissue; repressed, anxious, subjective and frozen at core of our being, must surrender itself. Selfishness must yield to generosity. We must mature beyond immature attitude of I - MYSELF ALONE. The seeker after freedom, to use St. Paul’s concepts, must nurture a contrite attitude in order to regret and abandon personal selfishness. In psychoanalytic terms, self must sacrifice ego in order to become free of its tyranny. Only after we have removed our emotional armor, have matured beyond egoistic self-deception and often gone past assistance psychotherapy can give us to connect consciously with God, can we find deliverance. We have too many primitive homosapien traits to break free in our own strength. We need assistance to mature beyond our posturing and pretension, past our repressed killer-ape paranoia and nagging anxieties, beyond our compulsive defenses. We must abandon such baggage to escape through prison bars we ourselves have erected for ego protection against our anxiety and guilt. Only then can we find courage, knowledge and wisdom to become spiritually and emotionally free as Jesus, St. Paul, Augustine, Martin Luther King and Sister Theresa among many others were liberated souls -- were Kierkegaard’s Knights of Spirit. .

Our search for freedom via repentance of our failures, with sincere contrition, creates several crucial questions to be answered as we seek liberation from our homosapien anxiety and rage through faith and self-awareness. We must ask ourselves;

How can I end my self-defeating ego defenses, remove my emotional and cultural armor to become loving parent, supportive spouse and faithful friend I yearn to be?

How shall I courageously stand in my quaking and bleeding nakedness - my ego crying out for esteem regardless of who is abused, without being overwhelmed by cruelties of life?

How can I, a mere mortal already living under a death sentence, in a prison of my own making, successfully make my way through this con- fusing maze of suffering, guilt and death that is unavoidable tragic triad of existence?