A Re-Visioning of “Civilization” in Light of Impending Apocalypse … Prometheus Made us “Civilized” … And Doomed: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 13

Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Thirteen: On Defiance, Alienation from Nature, “Civilization,” Apocalypse, Marxism, OWS, and Ayn Rand

Will “Progress of Man” Be Humanity’s Epitaph?

All of the “achievements” of “civilization,” these increases of control over Nature, are traditionally seen as the “progress of man,” the advance and evolution of humans. On the brink of ecocide and humanicide as we now are as a result of these developments, we have a unique vantage point for re-visioning these changes. Are these vaunted human “achievements” so great if they lead to species annihilation, species suicide, as is becoming increasingly likely?

We now continue to look into these questions. And the very next thing we see is that even the myths from ancient times give us evaluations and prognoses on us that are surprising in light of our current rationalizations of ourselves as a species.

Defiance, Alienation from Nature,
“Civilization” … Apocalypse

Defiance = Birth Pain = Separation From the Real

Other aspects of the Prometheus and Eden myths fit with the interpretation I am making of it: Stealing fire/ eating the apple/ eating meat is the great act-out of the primal birth pain we created for ourselves by standing upright. It was a defiant act against Nature and Universal harmony, but it set us on the human path of being distinct from all other species. Without real access/ connection to the Real, we created substitute realities—culture, structured societies, status, language and writing, power relations, and abstract creative products. [Footnote 1]

Prometheus Makes Us “Civilized” … And Doomed

Fitting with that, Prometheus is given the central role in making humans distinct from all species, creating humanity, in giving defining attributes to humans to set us apart from all species and these are said to be fire and all the civilizing skills. Prometheus is credited with, not only securing meat, fire, and all ailments and troubles (with Pandora), but also with bringing civilization and all its components of science, agriculture, mathematics, medicine, art, and literature…fine things no doubt, but all being aspects of control of Nature, opposition to the natural, abstraction and alienation from the divine, and not harmony with it or balance in relation to it. And only now are we beginning to understand the price that comes with these, as indeed we are suffering the penalties allotted Adam and Eve, Icarus, and Prometheus for their over-reaching and hubris. We are nearing the end of the slide into apocalyptic oblivion that Prometheus, Adam and Eve, and Pandora set us on (poetically speaking).

The Answers

But within these myths lie the answers to our dilemma as well. These products of the consciousness of billions of previous humans—added to and refined over the millennia—prophesize the apocalypse looming before us, but these tensions cannot exist in myth except being inextricably entwined with the very means of their release and resolution. So they lay before us the way home for us as well; and they predict our redemption and how it will happen. It is to this we now turn.

Before looking at the resolutions of the uniquely human apocalyptic dilemma we have created, let me address something that is no doubt on many readers’ minds.

How Promethean “Heroism” Set Off Our Slide Into Alienation and Apocalypse … His “Rebellion” Was an Abomination, Not a Blessing

I know you are not used to hearing the Prometheus myth interpreted as a defiant act not a heroic act. It is never compared with the defiant acts portrayed in the Eden or Icarus myths as I am here doing. Icarus is rightly said to be a tragic example of hubris or failed ambition, high-flying ambition. In Eden, Adam and Eve defy the sole divine commandment. But they can all be seen as acts of over-reaching, certainly as acts of hubris. And in all of them punishment follows the selfish act; there is karmic retribution for upsetting the natural or divine order.

Prometheus Is a Criminal Not Heroic Figure…On Over-Reaching and Hubris

But remember that hubris and over-reaching was actually the earliest understanding of the Promethean act. It appears that time, understandably—as it does—provided a rationalization of the defiant act. [Footnote 2]

As with everything else—language, culture, hierarchical society, and the like—humans turn their faults into achievements, their crimes into heroism, their cowering before truth into brave creations of castles in the sky. So it is that the Romantic poets Shelley and Byron saw this myth as a reflection of defiance against an oppressive authority, as in their time was the Church; French Revolutionaries saw it as a poke in the eye to the parasitic blue bloods of their age; and Marxists and other activists find inspiration in it for struggle against the suffocating prerogatives of capitalism and imperialism.

They are fine to find inspiration where they can. I submit, however, that a deeper and more currently relevant understanding is the one I am presenting here and which was the earliest understanding. And despite all the rationalizing that’s been done on it, this earlier understanding—the one making it analogous to the Eden and Icarus structures—does shine through at times. In my opinion, Mary Shelley understood its real meaning when in 1818 she subtitled her masterpiece novel, Frankenstein “The Modern Prometheus.” In it, she demonstrates a remarkably current, postmodern theme of the dangers of human hubris, of taking us into arenas of knowledge that we are nowhere near capable of managing … doing again, as we did at the beginning in taking from the divine the determination of life and death over the flora, fauna, and even other humans at times, mucking with the divine order by stirring up the forces deep within the atom and the DNA, opening more and more of Pandora’s jars, which can no longer be closed, many of them. So, yes, Shelley’s understanding is closer to my interpretation of the meaning of bringing these “civilizing arts” … In other words, they are in their essence and therefore their ultimate fruits abominations!

If my interpretation of Prometheus is still not understood and one wishes to follow Marxist, revolutionary, romantic, and modern interpretations of Prometheus as a righteous defier of injustice and heroic bringer of boons—in a way as to make him a model for our real occupy wall street and Arab Spring heroes today—than consider why it is that the person on the extreme other side of this revolutionary ideology, Ayn Rand, uses Prometheus as a model for her ideology of rapacious individuality, which she does in her novels Anthem and the fanatically worshipped, Atlas Shrugged. So, no. Ayn Rand’s rendering shows the myth to be, at its base, depicting the ultimate perversion of a natural benign order and a criminal defiance of Nature—as the industrialists and polluters of today show us—and not the revolutionary overthrow of an oppressive rule, as Marxists, Romantic poets, and French Revolutionaries saw it. [Footnote 3]

Continue with Enter the Centaur: Wherein Lies Real Hope – Sixties and Millennial Generations Are Shamans for Deluded Promethean “Fathers”: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 14

Return to Deep Thoughts on The Fall – On Sacrifice, Dominion Over Death, Meat, and Murder … Beginning Our Apocalypse: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 12

Footnotes

1. See The Great Reveal, Chapter Thirty-Five: The Twenty-Seventh Prasad. A-mazing Cultural Maze.

2. On “time, understandably, as it does, provided a rationalization of the defiant act,” see “A Blessing for You…To Choose or Refuse”—The Great Reveal from The Planetmates: The Complete Prasads, especially

• The Great Reveal, Chapter Twelve: The Fourth Prasad – Origins of Ego; Human Superiority a Defense Against Actual Inferiority Relative to Planetmates (Animal Kingdom)

• The Great Reveal, Chapter Twenty-One: The Thirteenth Prasad. Breaking with Divinity, Resisting Divine Assistance

• The Great Reveal, Chapter Twenty-Two: The Fourteenth Prasad. Eating the “Apple,” Defying Divine Assistance

• The Great Reveal, Chapter Thirty-Four: The Twenty-Sixth Prasad. Ego Towers Over Everything

3. Regarding the glow-in-the-dark cats shown in the photo, see “12 bizarre examples of genetic engineering” at http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/photos/12-bizarre-examples-of-genetic-engineering/glow-in-the-dark-c

Continue with Enter the Centaur: Wherein Lies Real Hope – Sixties and Millennial Generations Are Shamans for Deluded Promethean “Fathers”: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 14

Return to Deep Thoughts on The Fall – On Sacrifice, Dominion Over Death, Meat, and Murder … Beginning Our Apocalypse: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 12

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Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Twelve: Deep Thoughts on The Fall – On Sacrifice, Dominion Over Death , Meat, and Murder… How We Started Our Slide Into Savagery

Deep Thoughts on The Fall – On Sacrifice, Dominion Over Death, Meat, and Murder … Beginning Our Apocalypse: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 12

Deep Thought on the Falls – Meat, Sacrifice, and the Determination of Death

The Fall After Eden—Meat-Eating is the Issue with Cain And Abel’s Divine Offerings, Just as it Was with Prometheus’s

There are more parallels between the Eden and Prometheus myths and tie-ins to the issue of meat-eating.

Cain Killed Abel, Sedentary Farmers Superseded Nomadic Gatherers

Some scholars see the Cain and Abel struggle as representing that between nomadic hunter-gatherers and the first settled farmers. Abel is the “righteous” man, a herder of sheep, and a nomadic type. He has an affinity with planetmates being a shepherd. Later, Christ is compared with Abel as being a martyr but notice also that Christ is known as the Good Shepherd—that is, caring of animals, too.

We need to think of the different ways herders and agriculturalists might view animals. The herder needs to raise and care for planetmates, regardless that they will eventually be killed. The farmer can view planetmates as a means only to an end—as slave labor or soul-less tools to be used in the raising of crops.

The Gods Want Meat = The Gods Want to Retain Determination of Life and Death

And in the Cain and Abel story, we have the same idea of an offering of a meat and a non-meat to a god, just as in the Prometheus myth. Again, meat is the accepted and more desired sacrifice by the divine.

The Gods Want Humans to Offer Meat – to “Sacrifice” That Right of Determining Life/Death

In the Prometheus myth, it all went awry because Prometheus did NOT offer the meat he should have to God. As I said, offering the meat as a sacrifice is the same as saying that it is left to God to determine the life and death of the planetmates (animals), not humans. And in Abel’s giving up of a lamb to the Divine, the message is that the humans represented by Abel, the nomadic herder-gatherers will be willing to not eat meat, to forego it, to “sacrifice” it.

Cain’s Story of Not Sacrificing Determination of Life/Death to the Divine = Humans’ Increasing Control Over Nature

But with Cain, the farmer, it is all about control. Cain does not offer an animal. Like Prometheus he gives the divine a lesser offering—not quite a tricking of the divine as Prometheus did but close to it; he is not willing to sacrifice as much. In giving up much more abundant grain and vegetables, the price he’s willing to pay is much less than Abel’s offering of a fellow planetmate, a lamb, raised and cared for from birth. The unspoken part in this myth is provided by way of the Prometheus myth. For in not offering meat to the Divine, the assumption is that Cain will be keeping the meat for his own consumption…and by inference that Cain is keeping for himself the determination of life or death of fellow planetmates instead of putting that responsibility where it belongs—in the hands of Nature/ the Divine.

Deep Thought on the Falls – Murder

It’s No Wonder Cain’s Making of Life-Death Decisions of Animals Leads to His Doing That For a Human

Finally, the controlling, savage, and murderous qualities that come with increasing control over Nature—as I have described at length elsewhere—show up in that it is the sedentary, more controlling tiller of the soil, Cain, who has become capable of taking now, even, a human life. In The Great Reveal, I showed why that also follows: For once humans became capable of killing and eating planetmate flesh, it was not long before humans were able to kill each other.

Will “Progress of Man” Be Humanity’s Epitaph?

But all of these developments, these increases of control over Nature, are traditionally seen as the “progress of man,” the advance and evolution of humans. On the brink of ecocide and humanicide as we now are as a result of these developments, we have a unique vantage point for re-visioning these changes. Are these vaunted human “achievements” so great if they lead to species annihilation, species suicide, and ecocide as is becoming increasingly likely?

We now continue to look into these questions. And the very next thing we see is that even the myths from ancient times give us evaluations and prognoses on us that are surprising in light of our current rationalizations of ourselves as a species.

Continue with A Re-visioning of “Civilization” in Light of Impending Apocalypse…Prometheus Made us “Civilized”…And Doomed: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 13

Return to Why Humans Are the Sorriest of Species … Apocalyptic Foretellings Hidden in Myths of Eden, Prometheus, Pandora, Icarus, Cain and Abel: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 11

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Why Humans Are the Sorriest of Species … Apocalyptic Foretellings Hidden in Myths of Eden, Prometheus, Pandora, Icarus, Cain and Abel: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 11

Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Eleven: Prometheus, Meat-Eating, Pandora, Eden, the Apple, the Fall, Cain, Abel, and When and Why Human Life Became All About Work

Meat-Eating and Apocalypse…First Falls and Last

After writing the previous section on fire, meat, Prometheus, and Icarus, and in subsequent research into the Prometheus myth, I found there is far more connection in the myth to the eating of meat than I realized. Also, the myth’s elements underscore the idea in the previous article that in stealing fire/ eating meat, we set off the developments that would lead to our apocalyptic prognosis today. Further, it is clear that the Prometheus myth is the Greek analogue to the Judaic myth of Eden and the Fall, which supports my thinking that the apple in the Garden of Eden represents meat—meat eating…hunting…killing of planetmates.

The Greek Fall from Grace—Prometheus

Prometheus’s Meat Trick

In the Prometheus myth, the fire stealing started with a trick that Prometheus played on Zeus. Prometheus—midway between gods and men, a Titan—gave the god two offerings from which Zeus was to choose. He gave meat and bones. Zeus chose the bones, supposedly because it was packaged more attractively. This is said to be the basis for why humans eat meat, according to ancient understandings.

Zeus—Not Amused

But when Zeus realized the trick, he was pissed … understandably. He hid fire from humans in retribution. Subsequently, Prometheus stole the fire and gave it to mankind. But this angered Zeus even more. So, this time to take revenge, he sent the first woman, Pandora, to live with men.

Ha Ha … Very Funny, Zeus. Thanks a Lot for the Pandora

Pandora literally means “all gifts.” So it is that Pandora represents all the blessings that come with human advancement, represented by harnessing fire. But Pandora, as we all know, brings all troubles as well. She carries a jar that, opened, releases all “evils, harsh pain and troublesome diseases which give men death.”

Pandora shuts the jar but it is too late, and many of the evils had already escaped. Interestingly, what remains in the closed jar along with the rest of the evils is hope. This is a theme that I return to again and again in this book and the subsequent one, The Great Reveal, in discussing what we need to do about our dire situation: That is, turn and face it, delve deeper into it and not turn away, for therein lies our only real hope.

Eden – the Biblical Fall – Life Becomes Endless Work and Struggle

But notice the parallels with the myth of Eden. In the Biblical rendering, the eating of the apple—which I say represents eating meat—results in the end of easy existence and that from then on humans survive only through “the sweat of one’s brow.”

The Original “Leisure Society”

Sure enough, the end of the nomadic and vegetarian existence of early humans—called the first “affluent society” because it required only three hours a day of work to garner what was needed for survival—occurs with the introduction of hunting, then agriculture, then husbandry. [The Great Reveal and Footnote 1]

Strenuous Living, Slavery to Survival

And in the Bible, we notice that immediately after Eden, the “second generation” of humans is seen working strenuously to survive as represented by Cain and Able, who were one a tiller of the soil and the other a herder of animals.

That not bad enough, but then after Cain slew Abel, like a second fall from grace God added an even greater load of hard work. Cain was told that to punish him, the earth that had soaked up the blood he’d spilled would resist aiding him in producing his crops and he and those who came after him would have strenuous work in eking sustenance from her and a hard life in simply surviving.

As an aside, notice how whenever we talk about the deepest structures of our mind—and myths provide a glimpse into that—we see the perinatal gestalt. For the Earth here—the placenta—is no longer rich, nourishing, and helpful but, as is the case for the prenate in the late stages of gestation, is impoverished of oxygen and nutrients and less vital, less supportive of one’s continued living.

Promethean Fall – Defiance is Punished by Hard Work, Like in Eden

And the Prometheus myth also has this same sequence as in Eden and the Fall of a defiance of the ways of Nature and God followed by a punishment and suffering, but also by strenuous work as being the lot of humans from then on. For as Hesiod relates the myth, Zeus did more than take fire from humans in revenge for being tricked out of the meat that Prometheus first deprived him of (and for that you can read that humans took from God/Nature the determination of life and death, which in our deciding to kill planetmates, we most assuredly did, see next post), but Zeus also took from humans “the means of life.”

And the consequences of this are similar to being cast out of Eden. For if fire had not been stolen…meat not eaten by humans…humans not adopted hunting, horticulture, husbandry, as Hesiod puts it, “you would easily do work enough in a day to supply you for a full year even without working; soon would you put away your rudder over the smoke, and the fields worked by ox and sturdy mule would run to waste.”

Continue with Deep Thoughts on The Fall – On Sacrifice, Dominion Over Death, Meat, and Murder … Beginning Our Apocalypse: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 12

Return to Sorry, Billy Joel, But We Did Start the Fire: Why Humans Are So Big on Burning…And Its Apocalyptic Prognosis For Us Today: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 10

Footnote

1. Excerpted from “From Hunting and Gathering to Sowing and Reaping”

Cultural evolution can be defined as the process of developing the tools and skills to deal with certain challenges. Therefore challenges present the key stimulus for any kind of development. The challenge to survive as a hunter/gatherers is not inconsiderable – and early humans met the challenge for hundreds of thousands of years, without depleting their natural environment. Agriculture was invented about 10000 years ago and many of the environmental crisis we face today are directly related to this paradigm shift, from the destruction of the world’s forests in order to grow crops, to the depletion of land due to monocultural plantations, to salination and a thousand other woes.

Early humans were nomads. They roamed within a certain range. Trespassing into another group’s range could result in conflict. However, due to population limits, each group’s range was quite extensive. It is often assumed that finding food must have been incredibly challenging and time consuming, yet, research has demonstrated that in favourable habitats only an average of 3h per day are needed to collect food, plus some more time for preparation. Anyone who has ever even partially lived on foraged foods knows that nature supplies plentifully – each thing in its season. It is also a popular idea to imagine that people were moving around constantly, only remaining in one place for a matter of days. But there is no reason to assume such restlessness. It seems far more likely that people would move from campground to campground in accordance with the seasons, in tune with the things they would find in each place. And it seems reasonable to assume that they would remain in each place long enough to gather and process for transport whatever gifts Mother Nature had offered. Only in areas that are particularly hostile, such as deserts or the circumpolar regions, would frequent moving be necessary since food supplies are less abundant.

(At the 1966 ‘Man the Hunter’ conference, Marshall Sahlins presented a paper entitled, “Notes on the Original Affluent Society,” in which he challenged the popular view of hunter-gatherers living lives “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” as Thomas Hobbes had put it in 1651. According to Sahlins, ethnographic data indicated that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well. Their “affluence” came from the idea that they are satisfied with very little in the material sense. This, he said, constituted a Zen economy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer)

More at “From Hunting and Gathering to Sowing and Reaping” at http://www.sacredearth.com/ethnobotany/food/civilization.php

Continue with Deep Thoughts on The Fall – On Sacrifice, Dominion Over Death, Meat, and Murder … Beginning Our Apocalypse: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 12

Return to Sorry, Billy Joel, But We Did Start the Fire: Why Humans Are So Big on Burning…And Its Apocalyptic Prognosis For Us Today: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 10

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Oxygen Starvation and the Oliver Twist Economies We Are Imprinted in the Womb to Insist Upon … Prenatal Capitalism: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 7

Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Seven: “Please, Sir, Might I Have Some More?”—The Psychological and Economic Repercussions of Fetal Malnutrition

There are four important qualities of pain involved in late stage gestation. One has to do with being crowded and unable to move freely. The other three come under the category of fetal malnutrition: (1) You get less oxygen because of the reduced blood flow in late pregnancy; you experience lack of abundance and feelings of deprivation, impoverishment, “starvation.” (2) With the reduction of blood, you get a reduction in nutrients and insufficient removal of toxins so that the blood coming into and flowing through you is not felt to be as “pure”; you experience being poisoned, “infected”…prenatal “disgust.” (3) Finally, you experience a buildup of toxins in your placental environment as the reduced blood flow does not remove toxins as efficiently as it previously did; you feel irritated, bugged, “dirty”…prenatally imposed upon by the outside world.

Oxygen Starvation

So there’s crowdedness in the late stages of womb life, increasing up to the time of actual birth. But there’s the experience directly related to the fetal malnutrition—the increased pressure on arteries to the placenta which reduces blood flow hence the amount of oxygen the prenate receives—that occurs at that time. One feels “pressured” and “overwhelmed” as one becomes larger in the womb; but one also experiences not getting enough oxygen—the simmering panic of near drowning.

We Feel Recurrently Pressured, Overwhelmed, and Panicked

So there’s not moving; but there is also suffocation of sorts…they are related, but very different experiential constellations, both of which profoundly affect how humans will see their lives ever after … both experiences skewing our ability to ever see reality accurately—clear and “unfiltered.” Because of the distinctly different experiences humans have coming into the world—caused by our uprightness, our bipedalism—we are, unlike any other species, riddled with bouts of feeling “pressured” by events, “overwhelmed” by circumstances, and panicked by thoughts of suffocating for lack of vital resources—food, air, land, water, touch, interpersonal contact, tribal/societal belongingness.

The Struggles We Create to “Breathe Free”

We spend much of our lives struggling to “breathe freely,” to “get on top of things,” to “get out from under,” to “be ahead of the pack,” because of this time in late gestation when we felt stifled and in danger of dying lest our oxygen/blood supply be completely “dried up.” We cannot enjoy the blessings of the moment, for we are forever looking forward, fending off and steeling ourselves for possible unpleasantness in the future.

The lesson to be taken from this is not that our early life mirrors our adult, “real” lives. Something more important is being said: Having our lives suffused with these feelings is not necessary, and the perceptions and deductions one makes from them are not instructive … they are wrong interpretations of what is going on; they are “unreal” … when we once again experience them as adults.

These feelings are rooted in forgotten memories, imprints we carry from early experience, and they are not rooted in actual circumstances. Sure, we create a reality that matches these feelings, but the feelings are there first. And if we had less of these feelings, we would less often create situations that mirrored them.

Gasping

The feeling we carry with us, below the surface in life, is of not being able to breathe, to get enough air…as I have said it is like the discomfort we feel holding our breath under water. We have a simmering panic of “drowning”…of our oxygen supply being “cut off”…which is kept constantly in check.

As adults our experience is colored through with that feeling in ways so subtle we can no longer tease it out even if we wanted to…that is, unless we go through deep experiential psychotherapy, wherein we discover this to be the case. But the vast majority of us live our lives with a barely-kept-in-check panic that we will at some point be cut off from something that we need to survive—food, water, air, other people…and their concomitants—land, transportation, money, family, and so on.

The Oliver Twist Economies We Insist On…”Please, Sir, May I Have Some More?”

We act out these fears through excessive control of and storage of all these resources and through controlling and sycophantic behavior toward others in order to try to ensure a steady supply of vital resources.

Prenatal Feudalism

Yet even as we wrap up so much of our time and energy in these pursuits, we make sure we will feel no relief from their underlying uncomfortable feelings…as in every other of these feelings, we both seek relief from them and at the same time create the circumstances that give rise to them. In early economic systems, such as a “strong man” economy and feudalism, there is a simplified framework of control-conformity, dominance-sycophancy.

Prenatal Capitalism

But in “evolved” economic systems, we make certain we will not feel relief from the threat of lack (oxygen starvation/ fetal malnutrition): For we insist on a “dog eat dog” competitive system like capitalism, with its underlying Dickensian threat of an Oliver Twist state of deprivation—We get enough to survive, but it is not free and easy and leaves us always a little starved, wanting “some more.” We find all kinds of rationalizations for not adopting a more prosperous, more egalitarian, more cooperative, less competitive, and less stressful economic style as exemplified by socialism, for example.

Prenatal Socialism

Of course, there are societies who have done this historically — many indigenous cultures operate harmoniously this way; and there are societies and cultures that are attempting to create such a workable harmonious system today. But there are reasons why we refrain from wholesale adoption of such easier existences and why we insist on our economic struggles not being alleviated. For to adopt a cooperative socialist framework for meeting our actual needs would be akin to re-creating the earlier style of existence in the womb that was easy and free…the one that was Edenal…in harmony with Reality and Nature.

We’re the Ones Who Block a Return to Eden

That would be smart, of course. But as always we insist on our pains; we are forever doomed to creating situations that confront us with their reality unless or until we actually face and resolve them . So, while we are capable of living in more enlightened styles, we are for the most part going to ensure our existence in a state of struggle…we are the ones who put the angels to guard the gates of Eden.

Continue with Oxygen Hunger, the Greenhouse Effect, and Fetal Malnutrition … The Latent Worldwide Oxygen Panic We Don’t Want to Notice: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 8

Return to Imprinted in the Womb for Wars of Expansion, Deforestation, Cities, Imperialism, and Road Rage—Crowded—”Back Off!”: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 6

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Wars, Imperialism, and Why We Live in “Human Zoos”: The “Crowded” Feelings of Late Gestation—BPM II—and Their Political and Environmental Expressions: Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Six

Imprinted in the Womb for Wars of Expansion, Deforestation, Cities, Imperialism, and Road Rage—Crowded—”Back Off!”: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 6

Crowdedness, Packed Together “Like Sardines”

Can’t Move Freely – “Back Off!”…Cast Out of Heaven, Driven Out of Eden

The primary thing fetuses experience in the final stages of gestation is compression, crowdedness. We can no longer move in an uninhibited way. As we get increasingly larger, the womb seems to press in us, as prenates, from all sides, restricting our movements, suppressing our freedom. It “won’t let us do what we want to do.” I discussed this in a previous section and how we manifest it through overpopulation.

This is quite a contrast, ever more stark and blatant as we get closer to actual birth, to the earlier euphoric feelings of all the rest of our lives at that point—that is to say, the previous seven-eight months of our lives since conception. This oppression from an an overwhelming and pervasive Other is shockingly different from the unrestrained movement of the not long ago, with its gravity-free ecstasy, and blissful unity with an Everything which was not at all threatening but just the opposite: supremely helpful, nurturing, and kind in the most perfect way. We remember the previous “golden age” and its easy, “heavenly” existence. This new existence feels like we have been driven out of Eden, cast out of heaven, and now must struggle and earn survival through the “sweat of one’s brow.”

Reactions – Swimming, Dancing, Mosh Pits, Religious Fantasy

I mentioned previously how our activities like gymnastics, flying, and skydiving are reactions to these uncomfortable feelings; they are attempts to run away from this discomfort as we continue to re-experience it as adults. I explored how we re-create and re-stimulate those blissful feelings in us through adult experiences of weightlessness, swimming, dancing, surfing, hot tubbing. I need to add loving sexuality to that—particularly in its re-stimulating blissful memories of re-union with an Other who is all-accepting, all-embracing, and eminently kind. I have explored how we seek resolution of these uncomfortable feelings through mosh pit “rebirthing” and warm water “rebirthing.” I need to add to that the seduction of the experience of being religiously “reborn.” [Footnote 1]

I wish to add now, since it becomes especially relevant to what follows from here on, the specifically environmental and especially political aspects and act outs of these early uncomfortable feelings.

Politically, As Nations – Wars of “Expansion”

Politically, as adults we feel we need to push back “lines” of the enemy, to fight off “oppression” (compression), to go to war. We act this out as nations through wars of “expansion” and through “conquering” of new territories…through imperialism. We are always pushing back lines of encroachment from some “enemy”…creating and then railing against the opposition on these “front lines.”

We re-create the switch we experienced in the womb from easy existence to struggle and discomfort by “spoiling” our peace and going to war. No, it is not smart; but it is what we are driven to do because of these patterns from our earliest experience.

The point of knowing all this…the reason why I am writing this and sharing this information…is because knowledge of these irrational tendencies is the most important and necessary step in discontinuing them. We can only have hope for our children in going beyond these tendencies in us of tens of thousands of years and longer through actually facing and coming to terms with the absurdity of our “normal human” pursuits…like war.

Environmentally – “We Paved Paradise; Put Up a Parking Lot”

We act out these same feelings just as illogically and self-destructively in our behavior in regards to the environment. Remember that, as prenates, the “environment” then was felt to be encroaching and blocking our easy movement. So, with these feelings now deeply ingrained in us as something we call “human nature” we hack back at actual Nature and push it all away to “make room”…excessive room…for ourselves…while conversely we make sure we will continue to re-stimulate these feelings through overpopulation, city life, dense and crowded neighborhoods, and traffic jams. [Footnote 2]

We put ourselves in human zoos and struggle with our neighbors over “boundary lines” and where fences should actually be placed…we gather on freeways with their traffic jams and experience “road rage” at the same time as fighting back against the feelings these situations create through inane environmental undertakings: We remove and destroy all trees to make an empty space, though we add trees after the fact. Doesn’t that strike you as a bit queer?

Environmentally, we destroy forests, we pave over Nature so that we can have huge houses and lawns (the bigger the better…we want more “womb”) and speed around (the faster and more nimbly the better) uninhibitedly in our cars (auto-mobile…free moving self…part of self capable of moving freely)… we cut off others in traffic and feel trapped (encroached upon, constrained or suppressed) by drivers that cut us off and don’t let us “in” (move freely)…thus road rage

Conversely, we take solace in speeding (though we risk tickets) and we take pleasure in watching racing and race car drivers and stunt drivers; also airplane and jet stunts and air shows and fighter pilots and jets.

Next: Our Repetitive Struggles to “Breathe Free”

We will continue looking at the ways we act out our early imprints and how we can actually stop continuing this self-destruction which has now reached an apocalyptic peak. But now let’s turn to another terrifying feeling we carry over in us from that hellish time as prenates, which we act out, politically and environmentally, in disastrous ways. We look now at the horrifying feelings of oxygen starvation—gasping, suffocating, and feeling stifled—and the crazy things we do to “breathe free” again.

Continue with Oxygen Starvation and the Oliver Twist Economies We Are Imprinted in the Womb to Insist Upon…Prenatal Capitalism: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 7

Return to Blueprints of Human Nature and Four Earliest Roots of War, Bigotry, and Pollution: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 5

Footnotes

1. I differentiate between legitimate attempts at birth pain resolution—primal therapy, holotropic and other breathwork, water and breath “rebirthing”/vivation, and mosh pit “rebirthing”—from false ones like being religiously “reborn” or otherwise experiencing a “second birth” as in some social initiation. In the first instances, there are continual attempts to resolve something that needs such attention and in fact can never be fully resolved. In the second instance, there are actual feelings of rebirth, when one is religiously reborn; it is true. I know. I experienced it as my first experience of rebirth forty-four years ago.

The problem with religious “rebirth” has to do with this idea of trying to recapture ever afterward what is essentially a one-time experience and yet taking steps to insure no further such experiences or transformations will occur. One loses the feeling, feels “sinful” again (see upcoming posts on the BPM II elements of “bad blood” and “dirtiness” or see the overview in the previous post) and because one has barely touched it, let alone resolved the pain, needs “saving” over and over again, futilely. The fact that is not really resolved is proven in that the proponents of religious rebirth need to convert others to the experience in order for them to feel they have achieved it; this would not be necessary if one had. Further, the other components of birth pain seem to be more, not less, prevalent after religious “rebirth.” One feels “sinful,” “dirty,” and that others are “dirty,” “defiled,” “filthy,” “unwashed,” “toxic,” “impure,” and more. Again see upcoming posts for details.

So it is not that religious experiences of being “reborn” are not legitimate and part of a psyche seeking healing and growth. It is that the experience is hung on to, looked back on; one is stuck in it. One says Christ will do it for one (He has died for one’s sins), so one does not have to experience the discomfort of facing these pains and discomforts from the womb oneself. The experience is institutionalized and never experienced again, though one surrounds oneself with true believers affirming the opposite, along with this idea that one does not have to suffer again…Christ has done it for one; or one can confess sins and the priest will take care of it…and so one is distracted from the discomfort that precedes any more growing or being born or transformed any further. As I like to say about such glancing experiences of real truth: Yes, it’s legit. But don’t make a fucking religion out of it.

Worst of all, the institution or social group takes over and restructures one’s self along the lines that will benefit it, not oneself, so one is not reborn into one’s real self but into an inauthentic fabrication benefiting some manipulative social group—Marines, evangelical group, secret society, ethnic group, or simply the normal adult neurosis of one’s culture.

2. As concerns creating the situations that bring up these early discomforts, as in unconsciously being drawn to create traffic jams, notice as I have, when you’re driving, how often folks will have two or more lines to go to, in traffic especially but sometimes in retail establishments as well, and will line up behind each other in one line, foregoing the empty ones. Not everybody does that; but explain the ones creating that line…what is driving them to act like lemmings and feel restrained when they could have it easier? This is not restricted to queues however, as we will see it is a metaphor for human irrationality rooted in these imprints.

Continue with Oxygen Starvation and the Oliver Twist Economies We Are Imprinted in the Womb to Insist Upon…Prenatal Capitalism: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 7

Return to Blueprints of Human Nature and Four Earliest Roots of War, Bigotry, and Pollution: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 5

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21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 5: Blueprints of Human Nature and Four Earliest Roots of War, Bigotry, and Pollution

Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Five: Psychological and Political Repercussions of the Four Parts of Prenatal Pain—Crowded, Stifled, Disgusted, Irritated

Four Blueprints of “Human Nature”

These imprints on our psyche caused by uncomfortable experiences in late gestation that are molds for and roots of a great deal of the later experience and behavior of humans can be put in four categories:

Crowded … “Back Off!”

First, we experience crowded, restricted conditions in the womb as we get larger and no longer enjoy the blissful uninhibited freedom of the previous time of our short lives.

I discussed in a previous section how we manifest this through overpopulation and then react to or run away from those feelings through activities like swimming and dancing. For now, suffice it to say we act this out as nations through wars in general (pushing back “lines” of the enemy), especially wars of “expansion.” Environmentally, we feel the need to push back and pave over Nature all we can. We’ll get more into these sorts of things soon.

Stifled… Gasping … “They’re Sucking the Very ‘Life Blood’ Out of Us!”

Second, because of pressure on arteries we experience a reduced blood flow and get less oxygen, therefore we experience “stuffiness,” suffocating feelings, feelings of need, want, and lack…and deprivation.

Later in life as individuals we are driven to gobbling up more resources than we need—greed. As nations we are compelled to exploit resources from those conquered territories we “expanded” into—colonialism and imperialism. It is fascinating how we act this out on both sides of class war and revolution also; that part is coming up soon. For now I just want to give you an idea of the critical importance of the understandings just ahead.

Disgusted… Poisoned … “Don’t Feed Me That Bullcrap!”

Third, the blood we do receive is not as good as it was, so we feel what we do get is “poisonous”…deficient, unhealthy, harmful…even deadly and threatening as in the feeling we might be being poisoned to death. It is “bad blood.” This sounds like the deprivation/gasping feelings, but though it is related it has a different quality: The difference is between gasping for breath as in being held under water and feeling one will die for lack of oxygen, versus being in a gas chamber and feeling that the air we breathe is foul, unhealthy, smelly…and is deadly because of its toxicity. They are considerably different in that in one we feel we will die for lack of resources—the outside is withholding something we need. In the other the outside very much is impinging on one but in a bad way; it is forcing itself on us, and it is felt as an assault.

This crops up later…these feelings have fractals at all levels…as the difference between a child being hurt because he or she is ignored, abandoned, unloved, or left alone versus a child getting “attention” but in the form of assault, abuse, violence, sexual assault. The first is a lack of something; the other is an unwanted getting of the opposite of what one wants/needs. It is the difference between being “starved” for knowledge and being “fed” propaganda, not the “pure” truth.

An interesting aside and look forward into what is coming up is that it is because the Nazis in particular were so caught up in this kind of “bad blood” matrix of feelings in the policies they carried out that they even created the manner of death for Jews that they did—gas chambers. In other words, because they felt the “blood” (money) they were receiving was “poisoned” (tainted, manipulated) by the Jews, it made the most perfect sense then, when it occurred to them, to fight back against these sources of “tainted blood” (Jews) by forcing “tainted blood” into them also, until they died (gas chambers). [Footnote 1]

Irritated… Dirty … “Eeew!”

Fourth, there are feelings caused by the fact that the decreased blood flow caused by pressure on the arteries providing blood to the placenta means that there will be reduced efficiency in removing the byproducts of oxygen combustion by the fetus. These are waste products or toxins of the biochemical process of food conversion into energy that are normally removed by the blood through the veins…to be expelled eventually one way or another back into the environment.

So there will be a backflow caused by the reduced blood flow, and the fetus experiences a buildup of toxins…think stuck in a traffic jam and breathing in the exhausts of all the vehicles around…any wonder road rage? The prenate feels increased “yuckiness” in its environment that is greater than anything experienced previously. Oh, the garbage man still comes to take out the trash…but think of it as the garbage man coming less often and one still puts out the garbage just as frequently. Imagine how one feels watching from one’s window as it piles up on the sidewalk. Perhaps you lived in New York during the huge garbage strike; you’d have an even better idea.

So, finally, there is the pain and discomfort of being surrounded by these toxins, forced to live in an environment that is felt to be dirty, “creepy,” ugly, toxic, threatening, filthy, slimy, yucky. And again this is related to the previous feeling complex but is different. For one can be forced to take in something noxious, or one can be immersed in something that is painful or uncomfortable like a bath that is too hot. In other words, this pain is on the surface of the body, not being forced inside, like the other.

How this noxious environment feels to the fetus can be that of irritation, uncomfortable heat, burning, and feelings of threat to one’s survival—thus alarm and panic—which those outside “impositions” bring up in a fetus. Historically this has been acted out on Jews and witches: They were placed like wood in heaps and burned to get rid of them as the threat they were felt to be. As in the gas chamber example, they perpetrated on the victim the sort of suffering the murderers felt was actually coming at them…witches and Jews were seen as a source of burning…if nothing else in that they could be responsible for one burning forever in hell.

And parts of this complex later on can be those of annoyance, yuckiness, being continually distracted by sensations (ADD), creepiness, dirtiness.

We feel bugged, irritated. We overkill pests and overclean our houses, using an abundance of toxic “product” which only adds to the overall toxicity of our environment. This is the perinatal underpinnings of what Freud called anal compulsion. It actually leads to us employing strict toilet-training, if you think about it.

We feel “imposed on” by others, especially “visitors” who come to our “house.” We feel surrounded by “dirty” hippies… Jews… blacks… immigrants…. You name it.

Roots of War, Bigotry, Pollution….

These feeling complexes sculpted by our early, uniquely human, prenatal discomfort and pain mold our politics, shape our wars and conflicts, determine how we treat the environment, and color how we see and treat each other. We will now deal with each of these in turn and discuss the way we act them out as adults politically, environmentally, and interpersonally.

Continue with Imprinted in the Womb for Wars of Expansion, Deforestation, Cities, Imperialism, and Road Rage—Crowded—”Back Off!”: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 6

Return to Air Pollution, Fetal Suffocation, and Human Nature: Profound Sculpting of Who We Are Occurs at a Time We Cannot See : 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 4

Footnote

1. It would be interesting to find out what in particular was the cause of such inordinate fixation on this aspect of early prenatal pain…. For example, did Germans have more of this kind of pain as fetuses because German women did much more standing…being hard workers, perhaps…in the late stages of pregnancy than others? Such are the kinds of things that can make such differences.

And if women doing standing work right up to the time of birth correlates with excessive fetal malnutrition, what of women in primitive agrarian cultures working—in the fields or wherever—until practically the time of birth? Does this have anything to do with the increase in war and conflicts we observe in agrarian cultures over nomadic ones?… is there a corresponding increase in psychosis, ritual, and superstition…scapegoating and sacrifice…as, for example, with the Mayan and pre-Colombian New World cultures? No doubt there are many factors involved in these things, but are these prenatal contributing factors some important overlooked ones? If so, how important?

Continue with Imprinted in the Womb for Wars of Expansion, Deforestation, Cities, Imperialism, and Road Rage—Crowded—”Back Off!”: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 6

Return to Air Pollution, Fetal Suffocation, and Human Nature: Profound Sculpting of Who We Are Occurs at a Time We Cannot See : 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 4

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Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Four: Pollution and The Greenhouse Effect Pushes Up Perinatal Pulls and Political Palpitations…and Vice Versa

Air Pollution, Fetal Suffocation, and Human Nature: Profound Sculpting of Who We Are Occurs at a Time We Cannot See : 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 4

The Perinatal Pulls of Pollution: Air Pollution and Fetal Oxygen Starvation

Increased Carbon Dioxide, But Also Decreased Oxygen

One overlooked, but hugely pervasive perinatal element of these strange days is connected to the increasing carbon dioxide concentration in our atmosphere called “the greenhouse effect” which occurs alongside the curiously overlooked yet necessarily corresponding decreases in oxygen levels. There is increasingly less oxygen as we use it up burning carbon-based fossil fuels and making carbon dioxide. [Footnote 1]

We have more carbon dioxide for that reason and also because we are stupidly destroying the Earth’s mechanisms for turning that carbon dioxide back into oxygen…forests and ocean plankton, for example. This increased carbon dioxide is called “the greenhouse effect.” While this has been looked at from the perspective of it creating global warming and climate change, there are even stronger corporate (profit-motivated) as well as personal psychological reasons why we do not look at its most immediate effect on humans—the amount of oxygen we get from the air we breathe. We will steal at least a brief glance into some psychological reasons now and while we are at it uncover rich veins of understanding of and possible solutions for not only our current environmental problems but certain political and social dilemmas which we will find are operating dialectically with them. For there are provocative and profound influences from our experiences in the late stages of our womb life on the kaleidoscope of our current postmodern lives.

Air Pollution Bring Up in Us Uncomfortable Feelings From Our Births

For the increased carbon dioxide and reduced oxygen of the globe is analogous to the situation of “fetal malnutrition,” described by Briend and DeMause, that occurs prior to birth, and which is the basis for DeMause’s explanation of poisonous placenta symbolism. Keep in mind in particular that we experience this reduction in oxygen and increase in carbon dioxide in the form of air pollution, which is most pronounced in larger cities. [Footnote 2]

The Perinatal Pushes on Human Nature

Bipedalism Causes Birth Pain

But let’s back up a bit and put this in context. Because humans stand upright—are bipedal—in the latest stages of gestation/pregnancy the weight of the fetus, now nearly at its largest, presses upon the arteries feeding the placenta and bringing oxygen to the unborn child. Of course this is most pronounced when the mother is standing, as the fetus weighs down upon arteries between itself and the bones of the pelvis. Reduced blood and oxygen means the fetus is not getting as much oxygen as it wants and could use. The fetus cannot gasp for breath but one can imagine it having a similar feeling…recall the sensation of holding one’s breath under water.

Birth Pain Makes Humans Out of Planetmates

This is an uncomfortable situation for the fetus which goes on for a long time and gives rise to many of our adult feelings of claustrophobia and entrapment, depression, no-exit hopelessness.This is one of those specific birth traumas we humans have acquired because of becoming bipedal that other species, our planetmates, do not have. It makes us different and sets us apart from all other species in ways that are not often positive or beneficial, however human. It is something that is crucial to the understandings I bring forth in my book, The Great Reveal (See “Bipedalism and Birth Pain“).

Four Blueprints of Human Consciousness Are Written in the Womb

Looking more closely at it, there are four major feeling constellations involved in this late gestation discomfort. They, along with other imprints from our prenatal and perinatal experiences, are integral parts of the foundation of our humanness—that part which is normally called “human nature” and is considered to have a basis that is genetic only.

These Aspects of Late Gestation Pain—Crowded, Gasping, Poisoned, Dirty —Are Important Molds For Human Nature, Which Scientists Have Heretofore Naively Labeled Genetic

It is a joke to think that just because a trait exists in humans at the time of birth that it is rooted in our DNA alone. That thinking is as archaic as flat earth theories became after the heliocentric revolution. For there are a full nine months of individual experience prior to birth that, being the earliest influences on all experiences and perceptions after them, are far more important in determining who we become and how we act later on than anything that happens to us after birth, even if it also occurs to us early on, as in infancy or childhood. It is wholesale naïve and rather quaint that esteemed scientists and intelligent lay folk would subscribe to the idea that just because one cannot see something happening with one’s eyes, it doesn’t have observable consequences. By that reasoning, we would never attribute causation to molecular events and would have no science of chemistry.

So, no, there are profound imprints on the way we think, view and interpret our experience, view the world, and act in relation to ourselves, others, and the world, which are stamped upon our psyche by our earliest experiences. For now let us look at the provocative and profound influences from our experiences in the late stages of our womb life. They are especially deep and far-reaching molds for all later experience because they are, in general, the most painful, uncomfortable, and overwhelming experiences we have in the entire first nine months of our physical existence.

Continue with Blueprints of Human Nature and Four Earliest Roots of War, Bigotry, and Pollution: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 5

Return to Crushing Populations and Its Relief—Perinatal Pulls of Public Life, Sky Diving, Dancing, Swimming, and “Birth”Day Parties: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 3

Footnotes

1. This obvious though insistently overlooked fact has scientific support, of course:

According to a study conducted by scientists from the Scripps Institute there is less oxygen in the atmosphere today than there used to be. The ongoing study, which accumulated and interpreted data from NOAA monitoring stations all over the world, has been running from 1989 to the present. It monitored both the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the decline in oxygen. The conclusion of that 20 year study is that, as carbon dioxide (produced primarily by burning fossil fuels) accumulates in the atmosphere, available oxygen is decreasing.

Carbon dioxide seems to be almost the total focus of attention in the climate change model as it exists today. After reviewing the results of this study and talking with Dr. Ralph Keeling (one of the lead scientists on the study), it seemed to me that the consequences of atmospheric oxygen depletion should be included in any discussion of atmospheric change….

Read more: “Atmospheric Oxygen Levels Fall as Carbon Dioxide Rises” http://blogcritics.org/scitech/article/atmospheric-oxygen-levels-fall-as-carbon/#ixzz1ru2460V8

2. A. Briend, “Fetal Malnutrition: The Price of Upright Posture?” British Medical Journal 2 (1979): 317-319. [return to text]

Continue with Blueprints of Human Nature and Four Earliest Roots of War, Bigotry, and Pollution: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 5

Return to Crushing Populations and Its Relief—Perinatal Pulls of Public Life, Sky Diving, Dancing, Swimming, and “Birth”Day Parties: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 3

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Disposable Truth: What They’ve Succeeded in Getting Us to Forget

What They’ve Succeeded in Getting Us to Forget – Disposable Truth:
Part Three – Reality Transplant, The Media

Reality Transplant, The Media

Are they so immersed in Republican culture?

Why commentators would be so easily forgetful and then complicit is the question. We were wondering if perhaps it is the continual bombardment of untruth they are under. In such a setting, required to stay immersed in Republican culture so much more than the rest of us, maybe they would find it nearly impossible to be as questioning and confrontational as would be required if they were to truly do their job in helping to clarify events.

Besides, they know these Republican mouthpieces socially; they play golf, have drinks with them, and more in their off hours. Of course these media types want to be seen as civil people, too. So they don’t want to say, on their TV program, “Aw, c’mon. That’s bullshit, man!” They’re not going to say that. They might think it’s bullshit, but they’re not going to tell us!

Are you reeling in the years?

And it’s going to keep the American people confused. If the obvious lies of the right-wing politicians and propagandists are not pointed out by the reporters who are questioning them, well then you only have the Democrats to counter these untruths.

And if these pundits are also saying that the Democrats and the Republicans are equally the same and that all politicos are corrupt and such, well, after a while, when you hear that enough, you’re not going to have really any basis for discerning the truth. You’re not going to be seeing what’s actually been going on over the years.

What they’ve succeeded in getting us to forget

In the last century, Democrats were responsible for the most influential and most popular public policy developments: they brought in social security, medicare; they supported the unions and minimum wage measures that boosted the lifestyles of the American worker. So consider the right wing and media achievement in getting Americans to forget all that? Wow.

Narrative for the new history…Why that’s one dumb Republican!

We even had one Republican, Steve Austria, who not long ago found himself in the spotlight. He was an elected Congressional representative…god only knows how that happened. He was talking on economic policy. He was changing history to fit his argument, which they do, you know.

But this guy really believed it! He was saying how it was Roosevelt who caused the Great Depression! He actually maintained it was Roosevelt who was in power when the Great Depression hit. He said the Depression was caused by tax and spend.

No, it was Hoover. Monetary policy favoring the rich caused and kept the Great Depression going; tax and spend, e.g., social security, is what got us out of, not into, the ditch. All this is part of history that is practically—except for you, Steve–common knowledge. There were what were called Hoover, not Roosevelt, camps full of the poor unemployed. Wow.

Dogma for the new religion. “Obvious truths” from on high

How did people become so dumb all of a sudden? Anyway, I think a lot of it has to do with these things being repeated over and over again until people think they’re true. And it’s unnecessary to ponder or question them.

It seems as if the pundits felt this way after a while, to the point that when the Republican or conservative would say her or his talking point, it was almost as if that frequently heard statement was gospel. Seeing the media’s response, you would think that drivel had been carried down from Mount Sinai, engraved on a stone tablet. It didn’t have to be reasoned about; it was given down from “on high.” Over and over and over again.

Smoke and lies around unions. Truth taken out at the knees – unions are the new rich fat cats.

So the lie, the mantram, the notion at one time in my life, was nonexistent. At another time, quite the opposite, it was all pervasive.

At one time folks believed that unions represented working people like themselves, more than anything else. At the later time and now, the exact opposite of the truth–that union workers are the wealthy and their leaders are now the fat cats, to hear people tell it.

The truth—unions represent otherwise powerless workers.

But well, of course it was the original view that was true: It is the American worker who is represented by unions, for they carry their voices.

The Republican line, the lie, that unions are entities equally as small and distinct from our society of people as are corporations, and are therefore “special,” and that what is good for unions is bad for people, for ordinary citizens, somehow given Frankensteinian life, jolted large and menacing by incessant repetition into zombified minds, blotting out the truth like a monster would the sun, and terrorizing, so they run away and fight, the very folks that now muddied truth would lift up.

Continue with The REALLY Special Interests. People’s Lives Are Not Even a Chip in the Negotiations Anymore: Only the Game Remains, Part 1

Return to The Corporate Feast: When you’re feeling pissed on, they’d like you thinking it’s really money raining down.

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The Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths,” Part Two
an Audio Reading by SillyMickel Adzema

Here is an audio of the author’s impassioned reading of this part. Though it is of the first, unedited and unpolished version, and it does not contain all the detail of its current form below, it does capture the flavor of it all. I offer it here for your listening pleasure. For the reading of this part, “The Rise and Fall of ‘Obvious Truths,’ Part Two,” click on the link to the audio site above or click the link to the audio player below.

http://cdn.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=dhvsqlbnjl
The Rise and Fall of Obvious Truths, Part 2. by SillyMickel Adzema

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Continue with The REALLY Special Interests. People’s Lives Are Not Even a Chip in the Negotiations Anymore: Only the Game Remains, Part 1

Return to The Corporate Feast: When you’re feeling pissed on, they’d like you thinking it’s really money raining down.

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“A Blessing for You…To Choose or Refuse”—The Great Reveal from The Planetmates: The Complete Prasads

The Prasads of The Great Reveal from The Planetmates – Complete and By Themselves: “A Blessing for You…To Choose or Refuse”

Part One: Humans Defined

The First Prasad – “The Unapproved and Hidden”

DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS OF HUMANS

There were always those of you, many from even the past, whose names and words you would know; these trailblazers into truth’s jungles, these gardeners of consciousness, brave, even foolhardy, deep-sea divers into the black waters of the Unapproved and Hidden of virtually all the numberless and diverse societies and cultures existing and transforming over the course of innumerable millennia, are even better known to us.

We thought it would help if in all their reports to you–strangely enough, among all those maddeningly different ways of life, and kinds of people, and uniquely lived lives—that the one and only constant you would find among them was the hole in their understanding of the Nature of All.

The Second Prasad – The Truth Become “Increasingly Invisible”

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE HUMAN SPECIES HAS BEEN HIDDEN IN THE VAULT OF THE “UNAPPROVED AND HIDDEN” THAT EXISTS IN EVERY CULTURE THAT HAS EVER EXISTED SINCE THE BEGINNING OF THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION, APPROXIMATELY 25,000 YEARS AGO.

A multitude of understandings of your Nature spread widely into every corner of possibilities by virtue of randomness of culture multiplied by randomness of personality and finally multiplied by the randomness of changes in societies and humans occurring over many millennia so as to fill out and seep into and saturate every seeming possibility of existing as a human, leaving no possible human experience unexplored…except, that early on Unapproved and Hidden!

Further, the early on Unapproved and Hidden, with time, have added to them the increasing weight of time, peoples, and individuals coming and going with never a challenge to their exclusion ever arising…and never named, nor pointed out, nor in any way indicated, so, becoming increasingly invisible.

The Third Prasad – Common Nonsense and Humans Only Half Ready for Life at Birth

HALF-BORNS

With more time, and despite the myriad experiences and changes of the multitudinous and diverse (and mostly spread out and separated, never touching or knowing each other, on a massive planet) peoples and cultures, the Unapproved and Hidden are, because of a peculiarity of them, everywhere and always among all the many evolving and refining definitions of Human, Reality, Life — different as they could possibly be — never for a second, or even slightly, partially, or indirectly, included in that light of the obviously true, the common-sensical, by any culture. Part of this peculiarity — the relative upstart humans have another common defining characteristic: only half-ready for life at the time of birth (relative to all other brother-sister species comprising the citizens of Earth), they are, humans alone are, totally dependent for their survival upon the good will of the fully grown — often parents, but not of necessity and certainly not always.

Part Two: That Ego That You Do, You Do So Well

The Fourth Prasad – Origins of Ego

BEING HALF-BORN CREATES INFERIORITY FEELINGS. HUMANS EVERYWHERE REPRESS THIS DISCOMFORT THROUGH INFLATION OF SELF AND AN OVERWEENING SUPERIORITY APART FROM AND AGAINST ALL OTHER BEINGS AS WELL AS THE ALL-THAT-IS, OR NATURE-GOD ITSELF. HUMAN DIFFERENCES, E.G., LANGUAGE, ARE TOUTED AS PROOF OF SUPERIORITY, NOT FLAWED SUBSTITUTES FOR DIRECT COMMUNICATION.

This peculiar trait of being half born is nowhere, among humans, seen to be of any consequence. When noted, it is spun as evidence supporting your belief in your superiority over all others.

But the belief itself was a spawn of that difference of being not ready at birth, dependent and vulnerable, and therefore owing one’s very life to the sufficient ministrations of fully growns.

Nonetheless, this superiority defense against the underlying inferiority feelings is built up increasingly to beat back into the Unapproved and Hidden the nagging reality of your confused, unsteady consciousness.

The Fifth Prasad – A Word Cave Prison

Your Wordism, e.g.— while actually an aberration, a flaw in your reality perceptors, causing you to never really hear or understand each other, let alone other beings or forms of life energy— is touted as a supreme accomplishment! Whereas, your minds—suffused and distracted with a non-stop stream of non-sensical repetitions of word symbols— imprison and isolate you in a world of swirling mental “bookmarks” of reality, tagged to, but only dimly reflective of What’s Real, and keeping you blind to the wondrous reality itself in which other beings live in clarity of purpose and life meaning, and with direct intra- and interspecies and inter-entity communication. And this you misconstrue as a benefit in awareness, while actually it serves to cover up your lack of knowledge of your meaning or reason for being as well as the fear that abides with that.

The Sixth Prasad – Ego as Opiate for Disease of Humanness

So instead of the truth that, for reasons unknown, you were unfortunate enough to be deprived of the full and perfect nurturing of a near perfect divine Nature, as other species are, until they are ready to be in flesh… instead of the obvious truth — obvious to all other species — that this prematurity leaves a scar of hurt and rejection, for starters; but also, helplessness and hopelessness, second; and third, that this occurs right at the beginning of known flesh existence so as to create the very unusually twisted unwholesome roots of humans; but then, fourth, this lack must be somehow mitigated for the species to not die out of pure despair, right at the outset.

This mitigation is accomplished through the creation of an alien consciousness construct which serves to both separate humans from the realization of your lack, to essentially muffle or obscure your horrible and precarious plight from your awareness, acting like what you would call an opiate essentially, but also it serves as an alternate but OPPOSITE construction of self—opposite from the truth of your nature—taking all your flaws, like language, and turning them into supreme accomplishments, in this way acting as a euphoriant.

This alien consciousness construct, this child as well as parent of all your wrong-gettedness, is what you call Ego.

The Seventh Prasad – Becoming Human, Bipedalism Caused Birth Pain

Instrumental in creating this Ego are the caretakers, the fully growns, often but not always the parents, especially the mother initially. The fully growns become both the models and the delivery systems for this diminishment and perfect wrongness of Consciousness.

Of course, humans were not humans for millions of years; your predecessors were Planetmates and Earth Citizens like us. There came a time when small groups of your forebears, living near swamps and oceans and gathering their food in the shallow waters, spent long periods of time in that water and found it easy and beneficial to lift themselves up on their hind legs, more and more. Over millions of years, this activity led to bipedalism on land as well.

Unfortunately, this supposed benefit over time created narrower pelvic bones and narrower pelvic/vaginal openings in your females. There was a time preceding this when your females had pelvic bones that were wide enough to give birth to twenty-month old newborns. These newborns were as ready as Earth Citizens for physical existence when they were born, and they were born without the difficulties and pain that characterizes human birth, for both mothers and fetuses. 

The Eighth Prasad – Straying from Nature

All these factors acted on each other for millions of years: Wide-pelvis mothers giving birth to healthy, twenty-month gestated newborns vied against the economic pressures for females to give birth earlier and become more productive as a forager sooner as well as to be bipedal and be able to carry more with the hands and to move, even run, more quickly while holding your young, who born prematurely could no longer hang on to mother and even later when able to grasp found little hair to cling to, though the hair on the mother’s head was helpful when in the water with her .

So giving birth prematurely and bipedalism had survival advantages. More and more, over a long, long period of time, the survival advantages won out over healthy, happy newborns and relatively easy, painless births with long gestations and fetuses nurtured near perfectly in the womb by a divinely designed biological process.

It is at the point when narrow pelvises, nine-month gestations, birth pain and trauma for mothers and newborns, and dependency on caregivers for survival for the first few years of life became the norm that you began to be separate from all other Earth Citizens and began the process of becoming human. But this early humanoid type was still a far cry from what all Earth beings – humans and nonhumans – think of as human today. 

The Ninth Prasad – Eden and The Fall

For a very long period these early humans lived in harmony with Nature as foragers and nomads and as non-savage Earth Citizens. Your earliest ancestors did not even eat Earth Citizen flesh; while even some Planetmates do that.

But this long tranquil time was destined to end. As gestations became shorter and more time was needed in the dependent state before the newborn could function much for itself, the gap between natural functioning and twisted, backwards human functioning widened. For the rest of your lives, the pain and trauma of birth and from the time in the dependent state after birth pushed tension, anxiety, overstimulated brains and states of consciousness, and behavior more and more disparate from Nature’s easy, simple flow. And the biggest part of that crazed behavior pushed by fear and anxiety emanating from the roots of your being was your ever stronger drive to control. 

The Tenth Prasad – Becoming Controlling, Becoming Killers; Meat was the Apple in the Garden of Eden

Rather than the natural state of being, awareness, and bliss, your state of omnipresent fear caused you to be ever more unable to accept the gifts of life and survival on Nature’s terms, which were uncertain, but on the other hand, adventurous and surprising. It is the state we enjoy and find blissful and playful and always interesting. Your fear made you unable to bear the uncertain state. So, being impatient, and therefore unwilling to receive sustenance and nurturing on Nature’s timetable, you first began taking control of when you would be nourished by adding planetmate flesh to your former vegetarian diet.

Your descent into aggression and savagery started here, because when you learned how to kill fellow planetmates, which had not been in your nature prior to the prematurity trauma and your constant adult state of tension, it was not too long before you began to be able to kill each other. Continuing to lose faith in the reality of divine perfection, love, and nurturing, which all other planetmates know without doubt, you thought you needed to  compete over resources and sometimes to kill your own to keep from starving, or to keep from being killed. The first was your delusion, the second was your delusion made real among yourselves. 

The Eleventh Prasad – “Agrarian Revolution”

Once you started hunting planetmates for food and killing your own out of fear of scarcity of resources, the next step towards ever more control of what Nature/the Divine provide naturally was facilitated. In terms of the well-being of planetmates, the planet, and the survival of humans, this was the direst development.

Borne of increasing lack of faith in Divine Providence, you next expressed your impatience with the divine flow by controlling the vegetarian side of your food resources by instigating horticulture. Through horticulture you extended your control — we would say interference — in Nature’s perfect ways by deciding what, when, how, and where to grow the Flora Empire of Earth Citizens. About 25,000 years ago, increasing numbers, though not all, of your kind took over the divine plan for these Earth-rooted beings. You determined their life cycles and fates and set them to your ends, rather than Nature’s ends. You call this “the agrarian revolution.”

The Twelfth Prasad – Husbandry and Sedentary Ways

Incidentally, it was not long after this “conquering” of the Flora Empire that you began to extend your control over some Planetmates in exactly the same way. You captured, enslaved, and set their life cycles to fit yours. The who, what, when, where, and how of their lives were plucked from Nature’s perfect blueprint and set to your ends—the ends driven by your fear, obsession to control, and crazed, backwards, and overstimulated brains, borne of early trauma. No longer content merely to hunt Planetmates who were living their divinely ordained lives in the perfection of Nature, you corralled and kept them for any number of ends that you would choose, including, usually, their being killed and eaten, without having to hunt them first. However, your control of both Flora and Fauna in this way required the most drastic change in your way of life—one that would be the sole root of the apocalypse that we see looming before us all. For horticulture, and to some extent “herding” of planetmates, required the end of your nomadic lifestyles and the establishment of sedentary ones. 

The Thirteenth Prasad – Breaking with Divinity

This drastic switch from nomadic to sedentary life ways was significant for two crucial reasons, each with dire consequences for the long term of all Earth Citizens, including yourself:

The first crucial reason is that the ending of your nomadic life meant a near total break with Divine Providence—whose purposes are twofold:

First and foremost the continued perfect direction and guidance of lives towards the growth and life ways that are optimal to each Earth Citizen, as determined by the Divine, what you call God —

For by Divine Guidance all Earth Citizens in Nature are led to their ultimate fulfillment and spiritual progress through the exigencies of what you call fate but what is actually the Divine Hand of Guidance and benevolent Teaching. Hereafter, with your crazed, backwards thinking, you would determine your ends, and would resist Divine attempts to assist you.

You saw difficulties, obstacles, even struggles, deprivations, and pain, as to be avoided instead of the blessings of Divinity, who through these means directs, teaches, and guides us in lives to where we end up ever closer and more understanding of our rootedness, rather, identity with the Divine.

The Fourteenth Prasad – Defying Divine Assistance

Second, Divine Providence is perfect providence, in ways that you cannot see ahead of time. You are not only taught, but your physical needs for food, water, shelter, and so on, are more perfectly provided by Nature in the ways most beneficial to the health of both your minds and bodies.

When you controlled your diet, you dismissed Divinity’s perfect banquet…perfect in the sense of its effects on your primary purposes in being alive, not just existing. It is for this reason that you have myths of very early ancestors living to ages of up to one thousand years, which was more nearly possible than today, but for reasons that will be clear later, not particularly desirable.

So, in determining your much less diverse and unhealthy diet, because of your insistence on your own ideas for sustenance over the sustenance perfectly provided by Nature for your nomadic, foraging forebears, you created diseases you never had before. 

The Fifteenth Prasad – Planetmates’ Compassion, Planetmates’ Pity

Adding to your creation of new diseases for yourself was, of course, the constant ill-at-ease state that characterizes you because of your early trauma.  So the result of your decisions to separate from Divine Providence and seek to control your fates was the creation of lives of near unmitigated suffering. To us, you were the suffering Planetmate.

And for a long time, despite your cruel ways to both the Flora and Fauna Empires of planetmates, there was more pity and compassion toward you than any other feeling.

In fact, some Planetmates even chose lives as species where they could help and comfort you—your pets and, so called, domesticated animals, being prime examples of that—solely out of pure, simple compassion for the unfortunate lots you had created for yourselves. 

The Sixteenth Prasad – Accumulating Things, Dominating Others

The other dire consequence of your adoption of sedentary, non-nomadic life ways was the ability to gather more “things”—not just food but all kinds of “things”—for you did not have to carry what you owned, like a nomad would. When you ceased wandering and set up more permanent abodes, you enabled the gathering and storage of much more than you could possibly need.  This had effects on your unplanetmate-like greed and your unplanetmate-like desire to control, now–sadly, even this—others of your own species.

Those of you who gathered more or accumulated more, by whatever means, could have more “say” and would have more sway over those who gathered less. Big Accumulators were able to control the actions and behavior of Small Accumulators because of their ability to use their excess accumulation to gift or reward those whose actions fit with their ends. 

The Seventeenth Prasad — “Nascent Culture War, 20,000 B.C.

Making matters worse, both conforming behavior and controlling behavior had survival advantages over more natural and authentic behaviors. Not only did Big Accumulators and their conforming underlings have the benefit of access to more of the resources of physical survival, but Big Accumulators, out of that same uncertainty and fear rooted in early birth trauma, would be pushed to deprive others in their sphere of influence of these survival resources.

Big Accumulators could do this because they derived excessive strength and power combining their own power with the power of their conforming underlings.

Big Accumulators would do this because their crazed brains saw no end to their fear of deprivation, got no relief from their blown up fear of uncertainty, hardship, pain, and struggle, and so saw no end to their desire to drive others into states of deprivation that would make them more amenable to control and to also becoming conforming underlings, doing their bidding and serving the ends, not of themselves, but of their high accumulating overlords.

The Eighteenth Prasad – Inauthenticity Rising

So, Controllers and Conformers had survival advantages over more authentic and less conniving humans. The traits that characterized them, therefore, were to increase in humans as they would pass these traits to their offspring through both example and heredity, and these offspring would be both greater in number and have survival advantages themselves over those more authentic humans. Thus, the twisted behaviors and minds that define your species began the final evolution to the most inauthentic and unwholesome beingness that characterizes you today and creates this rare, nearly unprecedented possibility of planet death in a relatively instantaneous future.

The Nineteenth Prasad – The Ultimate Opposite

The twin aberrations of conforming one’s behavior to suit another or others instead of one’s own inner divine visions, directions, and flow and obsessive controlling of others to further one’s unnatural ends of staving off the hardships, struggles, and obstacles that are part of divine guidance are born of this ability to over-accumulate, which sedentary lifeways make possible. This marked, then, the ultimate in a break with the Divine and the construction of an opposite construct of being and of consciousness. It was the ultimate evolution of Ego to be a thing opposite to and arrayed against the Divine, against the natural, against Nature, against the ways of all other Planetmates and other non-Earth beings and entities, and ultimately, as you are now finally seeing in the most stark and blatant forms, against the survival of your own selves, both individually and as a species.

Part Three: Wrong-Gettedness

The Twentieth Prasad – Controlling Your Young

Humans are defined by the fact of your prematurity and the consequent long period of dependence on fully growns for survival. In the light of your continued descent into ever more controlling of all aspects of your surround—as we’ve seen, your ways of having your survival needs met, your lifeways (nomadic to sedentary), the Fauna Empire of planetmates around you, the Flora Empire of planetmates, others of your own species, and even your own selves, your own otherwise authentic beingness—all coming under control over time, and over time increasing control of all these—it is not surprising, however sad, that this obsessive control would be applied to your offspring in their dependent state as well. Remember, your newborns, prematurely born, helpless, and thrown out of Nature’s divine blueprint for perfect nurturing would die out of pure despair if not for the creation of the alien construct of Ego. And the delivery system of this Ego is predominantly the fully growns who are attendant upon the needs of the helpless prematures. 

The Twenty-First Prasad – Children a Burden

But the fully growns are at the same time consumed by the controlling, conforming, backwards thinking, and the alien and crazed overstimulation of consciousness that we’ve been describing. In this state they are hardly fit to be good care givers to newborns. Remember that fear for your survival—of deprivation and uncertainty—drives your obsessive controlling and conforming. So there was an increasing tendency, as you became more “human,” as we’ve defined you, to not want to add the burden of caring for dependent young ones to your already uncertain state. Alongside the increasing time of helplessness and dependence of newborns was the increasing reluctance of fully growns to jeopardize their survival for their own newborns. These reluctant feelings did not fully manifest, however, until around the time of ultimate control and crazed beingness that occurred with the switch to sedentary and accumulating-conforming ways. 

The Twenty-Second Prasad – Newborns Had Better Smile

It was around the time of ultimate control occurring with agrarian and sedentary-accumulating-conforming ways that non-care and death for newborns was common. Newborns were often and routinely abandoned, deprived, even killed. Your species could not, of course, thrive during this period; and you would have died off if not for the fact that some of your humans were not as crazed as others and so carried out at least the minimal amount of care-giving for some newborns to reach maturity and themselves have offspring. During this period, also, there were advantages for survival of newborns who had certain characteristics. Since newborns were increasingly seen as handicaps in the survival competition you created among yourselves, those that had traits fitting with the crazed perceptions of the fully growns were selected for survival increasingly. So traits in helpless newborns that made them either seem less burdensome or more appealing were selected for and increasingly prevalent.

The Twenty-Third Prasad – The Care Contract, Parental Love?

Such traits in newborns as non-expression of needs—in other words, non-”fussiness” or non-crying—were selected over traits of expression of needs. Traits of “appeal,” “cuteness,” smiling more as opposed to less, or anything that held even slightly the prospect of the fulfillment of the fully growns’ own early deprivations, through the newborn, were selected for. This last meant that if fully growns could see a dim hope that they could get the nurturing—from their own newborns, now—that they did not get from their own fully growns when they themselves were newborns, they would feel more inclined to extend caring to such newborns and increase their survivability over other newborns. What you call “love” towards your children was at first simply the desperate hope that these newborns would eventually grow up to become the fully growns – “parents”—that they had wished they had but who in actuality did not care for them…did not “love” them sufficiently…when they were small.

The Twenty-Fourth Prasad – Children As Investments

So all care-giving was tainted with this early deprivation and self-centeredness of the care-givers and so, while it did not serve the newborns needs for perfect nurturing, it allowed for some, at least, minimal nurturing for survival. Meanwhile, it acted on the newborns so that such traits that were even dimly reflective of the satisfaction of the fully growns’ own early deprivations were selected for in newborns. This period of ambivalence over newborns and what to do with them characterized your species for a very long period, relatively, and your species remained a small and insignificant part of all Earth planetmates because of this. This only began to change when you began your sedentary-accumulative-conforming ways. So, however confused the grown Humans, over time they came to understand—and it’s to be noted that in some types of cultures it took a great deal of time to get to this understanding—that there is benefit to the investment in these dying, desperate prematures, for their survival. 

The Twenty-Fifth Prasad – The Family Citadel

At this point, with agrarian culture on the increase, raising humans to aid in the work of accumulation began also to be seen as a survival advantage. For it takes a lot of investment in time and effort to control so much and to maintain and defend so much accumulation against competitors. Conforming underlings were allies in such huge efforts, but increasingly offspring began to be seen as cheap and easily manipulated conforming underlings who, in time, would be even greater allies in the fight against the blown up fears of nonsurvival—i.e., death, uncertainty, and the obstacles, challenges, and pain you increasingly avoided in your increasing wrong-gettedness as to your reasons for existing…which were meant to serve as guides in your evolution back to divine rootedness, divine identity, like the rest of planetmates. 

The Twenty-Sixth Prasad – Ego Above All

All these controlling tendencies of all-seen-as-not-ego were alike in their estimation and implementation: control of life ways; all Earth Citizens—Fauna and Flora; other humans; and dependent newborns. They were all seen increasingly as “things” to be manipulated and used for Ego survival. They were all gradually deprived of their status as being conscious, of having consciousness, as being akin to self and one’s consciousness. So separation from the Divine meant separation from all else, all others, even one’s own offspring; and increasing isolation, increasing reinforcement of the alien, backwards, consciousness construct, Ego. Newborns were seen in exactly the same way as other beings being controlled: That is, they were viewed as just as worthy an investment, and little more, as the raising of kidnapped Earth citizens and their forced enlistment in the survival schemes of the rootless, directionless Humans.

The Twenty-Seventh Prasad – Signifying Nothing…Strutting and Fretting

So the boon to the survival of the individual newborn—however twisted the reasons—became also the boon to what humans call “culture.” For the lack of direct knowledge that characterizes humans, and was increasingly selected for with the predominance of controlling-conforming-appealing-nonexpression traits in humans, led to the increasing overcomplexity of the obvious simplicity of existence. Your kind grew ever more fanciful and unnecessary traits, needs, desires, behaviors, wants, obsessions, compulsions, beliefs, visions, and thoughts out of this separation from natural ways, this split from Nature, this estrangement from the Divine, this “expulsion from Paradise.”

Part Four: Death and “Evil”—Opposite of “Live”

The Twenty-Eighth Prasad – “Family Farming”

What we end up with, without going through the long and circuitous routes of each of these supposed human “truths”—which are all seen to be in the light of clear Earth citizen consciousness, overly complicated and therefore, well…. Would we have a concept for “stupid” before we saw the behavior of Humans? No, probably not at all. So let’s say we would see this overcomplication as humorous and silly, demented, ignoble, as being random and rootless and temporal as compared to the eternal or at least perennial truths which stabilize, root, in fact, define us. What we see: Humans in ways that cover the entire range from caring to cruel and even tortuous, “raise” your children very much akin to the ways that we see you humans “raising” your unfortunate, captive brother-and-sister creatures—your planetmates, us.

The Twenty-Ninth Prasad – Child Abuse and Tool Use…The Abominable Human

So for your young the necessities of survival are provided – your captive comrades, ditto.

You spend time teaching, training, molding, and trying to produce of these young things the kinds of older things that you need and can use – for your captive comrades, ditto. We also are trained, molded; sometimes even beaten and tortured to become the kinds of things that would be seen as somehow useful.

Sure enough, we watch as humans raise their dependent half-borns, very often using torture, violence, and all kinds of things that the other Earth Citizens would never imagine doing. 

The Thirtieth Prasad – “Kill or Be Killed”

First off, we would not imagine keeping and using another Earth Citizen.

Certainly, we find that the Reality that sustains us includes a plan wherein some of us prey upon others and the others try to get away. The prize for winning, if one is the predator, is food, which extends one’s life; the prize for winning, if one is the prey, is escape from becoming food, which extends their life.

But in that all lives end; and most are not very long at all; and because there is no reason to not expect that this Reality that suffuses and defines us is anything but Beauty, in that our abode of existence is paradisiacal in its beauty, complexity, and qualities of change and surprise which are, along with our imagination, the foundation of a lifetime of entertainment, engagement, and joy, losing is of no more consequence to losing any other kind of game. And since new games can begin at any time, i.e., consciousness continues and takes on new forms always, and can never really “die” or be destroyed, there is nothing dire about it; it is seen as simply another game beginning. 

Part Five: Human Redemption-Salvation and Something Wonderful

The Thirty-First Prasad – Light-Darkness, Happiness-Pain

Thus in life we en-joy. There is darkness and lack of pleasure, but that we know is the requirement for overall enjoyment. Light is brighter contrasted with darkness. And our pain is never as painful as humans’ pain, since it cannot cross our mind, even for a second, that it might not end or that it might have a conductor with ends malevolent for us and seeking to take us beyond that which we can handle.

We know that change is the quality of existence, so darkness and light are in constant flux. We know that in your denying this fact, in running from darkness and seeking to create a forever light, you have only made the darkness darker. You have also made the lightness brighter. Making the dark more dreadful and, by contrast then, the light greater is what you do; it is the one unique quality of you. Yet it is that which holds the key to your survival…actually, your redemption.

The Thirty-Second Prasad: Human Redemption – Facing Darkness

For you have damned yourself in what you have done, and you are pulling all of Nature on this planet in with you. So you need the saving and the reconciliation with Nature implied in redemption. For that, you need face and embrace your plight. You need look into the darkness you have created.

Only by turning toward the darkest of nights that you have pulled over us can you discern the brightest of brights that lies at its center. Your evil is capable of catapulting the greatest of good. This we need you to do for the sake of all. But the most important thing is that in this way lies your salvation.

Thirty-Third Prasad – Something Wonderful

In not choosing you have actually chosen your demise. We have come to remind you, to pluck your memory, to wake you, and to warn you. The rest is up to you, and we will all feel the results of your indecision quite soon if you do not heed us.

However, if you choose to be noble planetmates again and join with Nature in its defense, we will continue on in greater alliance together. The Earthly adventure can continue virtually without end. For in this case, something wonderful is going to happen.

Pt2-5 Prasads Complete & By Themselves

Birth, Death, Hell…Roots of Depression and Fascism…And Freedom’s Just a Membrane Away: Perinatal Media, Part 7

Perinatal Media, Part Seven: Aliens, Abductions, Hell, and Fear: Freedom Is Just a Membrane Away

 

This idea of birth trauma has been vigorously resisted in our culture ever since it was first presented by Otto Rank. And we can attribute that resistance to accepting its reality to the fact that it triggers so much fear in people to even consider these perinatal influences.

Love, Fear Relationship

To put it another way, considering, as we now are, how imbued with death, fear, and pain is this time of our life, we are capable of seeing that there are good reasons why otherwise logical people would at all costs resist the idea of birth trauma and perinatal influences, the evidence be damned. We are fascinated by this time of our life. We play it out endlessly in our imaginations and collective dreams and, as we shall see in the next chapter, in our everyday lives. But we are utterly terrified of it. Indeed it is, as Janov once put it, the only time for most people that in life we come so close to death, other than our actual demise.

To Hell With It…

So to acknowledge birth is to face death and an inner memory of horror and a hell-like experience. These aspects of it are not going to lend to its being readily accepted among our intellectual currency.

Clients in the therapy rooms only face their perinatal memories when all other interpretations, memories, and early experiences have been made and integrated. The perinatal is the last and most gruesome of truths to face. It is faced only when all other options are gone and the truth alone will do.

In the same way—since it is not easy truth—its acceptance into the arena of our common knowledge has awaited its necessity to be known and acknowledged. It has required our species survival being at stake for us to consider the deepest roots of our problems. [Footnote 1]

Face Me, or You’re Mine!

And this book is primarily about that necessity to face the ultimate and horrible truths if we are to save ourselves. Not only are we closer to our perinatal unconscious these days, we are—because of the precarious nature of our times, which our ignorance and denial of the perinatal heretofore has set up for us—required to face the perinatal “monster” or we are doomed. It is now the time to uncover the truth, to get to the root of the problem, or there will simply, eventually, be no problem, because there will be no people to have a problem or to recognize a truth or root of a problem.

Fear and freedom…only a membrane away

Be that as it may, this recent development in perinatal imagery involving a membrane barrier between us and the perinatal realm is closer to our actual perinatal reality than any of the previous symbols put out in earlier times which showed a barrier between us and the perinatal. So this membrane depiction of the perinatal suggests an increasing closeness to the perinatal unconscious.

Perinatal Spamming

We have progressed in our collective consciousness beyond hard walls or mirrors separating us from our perinatal memories (and horror), now they are just a membrane away. They are only a thin, elastic membrane away. And from the other side this part of ourselves calls out to us, pushing its face through—like the computer push technology, with all its annoying pop-up consoles and screens that won’t go away. Our births come spamming through to tell us what we need and to call us back to a realization of the truths we need to hear to save ourselves.

Getting back to the membrane symbol itself, the perinatal elements of this new depiction are rife. Obviously the late stages of pregnancy have one in an enclosed elastic, membrane container—the womb—from which one cannot escape. Also, the fetus’s features in the latest stages are somewhat evident, can be seen and felt, on the surface of the mother’s belly, something like faces pushing out of elastic walls. And one struggles agonizingly during birth and endures intense suffocation through a great deal of it, just like those in movies who are surrounded by elastic sheets.

All of this is then, in Western civilization, compounded after birth with tight swaddling. The newborn, curiously, is wrapped like a tamale in a way that he or she cannot move freely. So rather than remember the earlier womb experience of blissful freedom and euphoria, it has its most recent hellish experience of the late stages of gestation and birth reinforced. There is no doubt that we are letting our newest members know they will not be able to move freely in life, have freedom, or express themselves freely. It is no wonder that depression is a pandemic in modern society and antidepressants are sprinkled over the masses like holy water.

Baby abductees and masked medical aliens

Finally, a later perinatal element is inserted in the “Fire In the Sky” scene in that the struggling abductee, covered in the elastic membrane sheet, is lying on an alien’s medical table. In the same way a baby, right after birth, endures the struggle for breath, caused by premature umbilical cutting, as it lies on the medical table and receives “processing” by medical personnel who to the fetus are alien-looking—that is, they have prominent eyes and lower face not pronounced because covered with surgical mask.

The point of bringing out the occurrence of these media images is that the projective systems of our culture—our art—are reflecting our collective changes in consciousness: Specifically, the evolution of our consciousness as it is confronted by this unconscious pre- and perinatal material…or, as some psychohistorians would have it, the “collapsing” of our “ego strength” as we are “threatened” by these “dangerous” perinatal elements.

Birthing Into Everyday Life

Whether these images are indicative of a healing crisis or are the opening of a Pandora’s box—that is to say, Earth rebirth or apocalypse—will be something for us to consider further on.

Meanwhile, let us look at how these elements, not only show up in our collective media dreams, but fashion the very furniture of our everyday reality.

Footnote

1. See Stanislav Grof on this at “Planetary Survival and Consciousness Evolution: Psychological Roots of Human Violence and Greed“ [return to text]

Continue with Apocalypse No! Chapter Nine:
Twenty-First Century Life –
Table of DisContents

Return to Through the Looking Glass Into Parallel Universes…But “There’s No Place Like Home”: Perinatal Media, Part 6

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