The Cultural Maze: Ignorance of the Divine makes for some pretty a-mazing untruths and empty rituals – The 27th Prasad from The Planetmates

Expulsion from Paradise and Cultural Overcompensation

Signifying Nothing .. Strutting and Fretting

Planetmates Release The Twenty-Seventh Prasad

The expulsion from Paradise that came with sedentary ways demanded increasingly complex, however vapid, entrancements—ritual and mores—of culture as compensation, however empty, for the loss.

Peacock is First Consciousness at The Twenty-Seventh Prasad.

Controlling-conforming-appealing-nonexpression traits…led to…increasing overcomplexity of the obvious simplicity of existence.

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.” (to be continued)

Paraphrase/ Elaboration/ Abstract of “The Twenty-Seventh Prasad” — by SillyMickel Adzema. A-mazing Compensatory Cultural Mania

Ignorance of the Divine makes for some pretty a-mazing untruths and empty rituals.

Your gradual changes from Natural Life involved two things, basically: A growing ability to survive biologically, physically at whatever cost to your happiness along with a separation from your natural inclinations and felt Divine guidance. Your ever widening separation from the Divine meant a constant hole in the felt meaning of your existence. Lacking roots in Nature or the Divine, you were like a weed without roots, growing madly above ground, reaching out vainly in all directions for sustenance because of the lack of direct connection to your deeper truth. This expanding outward desperately in all directions creates your culture—which is the artificial substitute and the dim empty reflection of existence. It is the “much ado about nothing” and the “strutting and fretting upon the the stages of life” and “sound and fury signifying nothing” of which our mutual friend Shakespeare wrote, having learned much from us. So, more of your newborns would live, but what was distributed among them was this watered-down offering, of a life drained of meaning and “juice” but mostly lacking the “colors” or “flavors” of experience we planetmates enjoy and containing instead the apprehension of the outlines of living not the immersion in its profound and lush plenitude.

This tendency for your lives to be bleached of real appreciation but multiplied maniacally grew steadily over time coinciding with the aforementioned rise in the predominance of the traits of controlling, conforming, sycophantic and desperate striving to please and to be appealing, and nonexpression of needs become repression of personality and cobbling of ability to participate in existence’s Divine creative stream.

So, driven by this inner abyss of unknowing, your outer behavior expanded in spurious and fanciful activity and productions of all kind. With time, your vapid nature would spin out unnecessary personality traits, hollow and unsatisfiable needs, fetid desires, furious but vain behaviors, insubstantial wants, blind obsessions, uncontrollable compulsions, fantastical beliefs, painfully burning visions, and tortured thoughts…of all kinds and all of it magnified, then multiplied, then repressed and fought, then struggled with…and all this in grandiose dramas that are further multiplied, exaggerated, over-dramatized, and so on round again: Such a fury you unleash, so as to create the smoke and mirrors of distraction and to keep you from the otherwise insidious trickling knowing of your horrifying creations and the gnawing abyss of dissatisfaction and unknowing inside you. (Footnote 1)

In all of these, you journeyed ever further from your roots in Nature and the Divine and made Edenal existence the most distant memory and the most certain component of everyone’s Unapproved and Hidden.

Continue on this site with
The Great Reveal, Chapter Thirty-Six:
The Twenty-Eighth Prasad from The Planetmates

Footnotes

1. Check out this song by Jeffrey Lewis on his existential experience, which explains rather well—and artistically and humorously I might add—what I am talking about in terms of the apprehension of inner meaninglessness. As I have been explaining, such an apprehension is a result of our separation from the Divine and our abnormal birth. The name of the song is “The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane.”

Jeffrey Lewis is not unusual in such perceptions and experiences. I know exactly everything he is talking about in the song, and it did not come from any LSD experience as his did. This is not a drug-limited experience we are talking about. Entire movements in philosophy—existentialism—as well as society—the Beats—have their roots in apprehensions like these.

The lyrics are what is important in the song. I’ve included the lyrics below, so you can see what I mean. It is extremely courageous of the artist to put this out and it demonstrates true pure genius in the result.

Lyrics to The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane:
It was a night in July, I think six years ago
Why did I eat the acid? I don’t know
I wasn’t thinking and I wasn’t scared
Why did I eat the acid? I wasn’t prepared
The last time I did acid I went insane

I was hanging with some friends just getting loaded
When all of a sudden my mind exploded
I had a flash that I was gay and I got paranoid
I was sitting on the floor listening to Pink Floyd
The last time I did acid I went insane

And I was drawing crazy pictures and before I was done
The pictures started pulsing like an alien lung
And I said ‘oh my god this is just begun’
And it was twelve more hours before I was done
We were up on the rooftop and I’ll tell you the truth
I was convinced I’d already fallen off of the roof
And these weird metal things rolling around in outta space
Were teleporting me from place to place
The last time I did acid I went insane

So we ran back downstairs where it was better to be
But I was trapped in spiral staircase infinity
And when we got to the door I couldn’t go inside
Cos it was the gates of heaven and I had died
The last time I did acid I went insane

And this kid named Graham he punched a cat in the head
He could read my thoughts, that’s what he said
And he described what it was like but I didn’t believe it
Like lifting a rug and seeing stars beneath it
Ooo-ooo

And the first rule of tripping was
Don’t be with people you don’t trust
The second rule of LSD
The rooftop is not a good place to be
The third rule is to be prepared
The fourth rule is to not get scared
The fifth rule is to stay serene
Turn off your mind and float downstream

The sixth rule’s to have a good friend at hand
The seventh, I hope that you understand
Is not to look to deep into your soul
Or you might find a hideous, hopeless hole
Of hatred, hunger, infinite, idiot
Mindless, meaningless, nothingness, nothingness
Nothingness, nothingness, nothingness, nothingness
Nothingness, nothingness, nothingness, nothingness
Nothingness
And that’s what I did

And every aspect of life that I selected
Was instantly and brutally dissected

I saw the horrible emptiness within
The reasons behind everything
And it was at that moment that I went insane

Cos I figured why bother doing anything again
I didn’t understand my thoughts revealing themselves to be
The truth behind everything I’d ever wanted and believed
Revealed itself to be
Unwinding

I Stood up
I brushed
My head
I turned
To my right
All in my eye
And I said

There are things which we feel to be so terrifically true
That what were all but madness
For any good man in his own proper character
To utter or even hint of them

I’ve just discovered the meaning of life
I’ve just discovered the meaning of life
I’ve just discovered the meaning of life
I’ve just discovered the meaning of life

Lyrics www.allthelyrics.com/lyrics/jeffrey_lewis/

But see also what I say about drugs and consciousness, in this regard, in Chapter Three of Culture War, Class War: Drugs of Choice and Generational Cultures – Opposing Worlds. See especially the sections on marijuana and LSD use. For your convenience, I include some suggestive parts of the text here. Under the heading of marijuana effects:

Eventually.

Robert Masters and Jean Houston, in their book, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, provided an architecture of the psyche, derived from their study of the effects of LSD, that is useful in understanding what can happen eventually with continued use of marijuana. They conducted “depth soundings” of the LSD experience and discovered that there were four levels of the experience: the sensory, the recollective-analytic, the symbolic, and the integral. While marijuana is not as powerful in its effects as LSD, it has a similar effect on consciousness; one might say it acts in the same direction as LSD. In contrast to drugs like alcohol and nicotine, which serve to aid repression and to help to numb or reduce one’s perception of both inner and outer reality, both marijuana and LSD have the effect of opening or enhancing one’s awareness of inner and outer reality.

However, the effects of marijuana are complex because they do not as consistently open one to inner realities as does LSD. Pot opens or enhances one’s experience of the sensory world initially, and as long as it does just this it can be used as a drug of avoidance of painful (inner) reality just like alcohol and nicotine do. That is, one with sufficient repression and defenses can use marijuana to flee from inner pain, depression, or whatever, into an enhanced, pleasurable sensory world that does not trigger one’s pain. At this stage, only, pot can be used to defend against pain and can be psychologically addictive in providing a palliative to pain. Once again, it can do this because it serves only to “bend” not to bust one’s defenses against one’s pain.

Yet for some people this effect of marijuana changes with continued drug use. It is as if the continued “bending” of defenses can eventually lead to a “loosening” of them, and with that loosening comes the deeper level of experience described by Masters and Houston and termed the recollective-analytic. At this level, enhanced sensory experience opens the door, so to speak, to enhanced inner awareness. This enhanced inner awareness can include the awareness of the underlying motivations of oneself and others, and this is mostly not pretty.

Because the normal person is motivated mostly by past, or primal, pains or traumas and is acting out scripts or roles that are pathetic attempts to re-create or struggle with events that happened a long time ago, the normal person is not really IN the present. The person is, as the great religions have described it, in ignorance, in samsara , in dukha, and is basically unreal. The person, as humanistic psychologists have described, is inauthentic and is acting out games or scripts, which they are totally unconscious of. They have identified with these scripts, roles, goals, and motivations—the outgrowth of a completely unique set of past experiences of pain and trauma—and haven’t a clue as to their arbitrary character, let alone of the fact that other people are similarly acting out their own unique roles which are just as arbitrary and, well yes actually, pathetic.

However, pot, just like LSD, can eventually (sometimes even initially for persons who are, perhaps because they are young, or whatever, are unusually undefended, more sensitive, and more open to actual reality) open one to the horrifying perception of the inauthentic and unreal nature of ordinary social behavior. In this state of heightened awareness of the inner world of oneself and others, one perceives oneself and others as puppets or windup dolls, pathetically seeking to satisfy very old needs, which are totally irrelevant to the present context, with others who are similarly and robotlike also seeking to satisfy very different past deprivations. In common parlance, it is said that most actions of people are just “games.” So, part of the horrifying nature of this perception, on the recollective-analytic level of awareness, is that indeed people are not truly relating to each other at all, that they are like people trapped in spacesuits trying to communicate with each other through the layers of barriers between them. [Footnote 3]

What follows from this perception is the conclusion that people are basically phony, or plastic; that life is unreal; that normal motivations in pursuit of normal social values such as achievement, status/popularity, and pleasing appearance are meaningless rituals—games—that are totally irrelevant to the true nature of one’s being or reality; and that one is trapped in this prison of unconscious scripts, with no chance of release or true perception of reality.

For more: Culture War, Class War, Chapter Three: Drugs of Choice and Generational Cultures – Opposing Worlds.

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The Great Reveal, Chapter Thirty-Six:
The Twenty-Eighth Prasad from The Planetmates

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That Ego That You Do, You Do So Well: According to our planet mates, humans secretly think, “There’s nothing really alive but me” – The 26th Prasad

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

Planetmates Release The Twenty-Sixth Prasad

Newborns were seen in exactly the same way as other beings being controlled—as just as worthy an investment as raising kidnapped Earth citizens.

Moon Jellyfish were First Consciousness at The Twenty-Sixth Prasad.

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.

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. (to be continued)

Paraphrase/ Elaboration of “The Twenty-Sixth Prasad” — by SillyMickel Adzema. Ego Changes Everything.

You see that your so-called evolution in consciousness has been largely to do with an expanding obsession to bring everything under control of your Ego. You display an ever-increasing fever to dominate and determine all aspects of your reality.

Previous prasads have dwelled, one-by-one, on these different spheres of your mania for management. We have also explained how this obsession brings with it an ever-increasing amount of effort. And we have discussed the ways these have interacted with each other in terms of a push as well to bring other beings—adult and young—into the effort of the adult Ego to manage and manipulate all things that can be influenced.

So, everything that was not seen as Ego was targeted for control. You changed your stature to upright and this led eventually to a change in the way you would be born. Your abnormal life entry led to an apprehension of mind. Out of such fear you chose to control your food source, which was vegetation—the Flora Empire. This led to your extending your net of control over the Fauna Empire—members of which you corralled, began using as a food source, and deemed yourself superior enough to, to make life and death decisions regarding.

Following this, you were able to bring yourself to making life-and-death determinations about even other humans of you. You developed a hierarchy of humans centered around strong men, with ever lower levels of rings of conforming, sycophantic underlings spreading out from that. From there, pushed both by cravings for control and accumulation and the burgeoning work load that came with that, you extended your reach of resource revaluation and control to include your young as well.

You even attempted to control things that could not be influenced. We have a lived spirituality, in that we do not feel separate from All or each other. For what reason would we wish to control, cajole, or even appeal to a higher order of knowing, which has our overall goodness in mind…is as you say, God, or good itself?

But as a consequence of your separation from All, you began using ritual, instead of your felt experience, to connect with the Divine. At first it was simply to seek to discern the Divine Will, which you had made distant from you in all the other ways mentioned, so that you might act in accordance with it. Later it was to seek to control—again that thing of you—the will of the Divine, including all of its manifestations as in the forces of Nature, the weather, fate, destiny, luck, providence for oneself and the extension of one’s Ego, the family. Your prayer—the spoken or linguistic form of ritual—was employed for the same purpose: To sway the Divine to itself bend along the outlines of one’s (perverted) will…actually, one’s predilections.

And what is the form of this ritual and prayer? As damaged and sycophantic adults–no one of you having received adequate nurturing and caring as infants and children and instead having been taught that some satisfaction of those needs could be had by pleasing and appeasing one’s adult caregivers—you would act out that training in seeking to gain boons from the Divine. Indeed, you would deem this Divine to be blown up versions of the child’s and infant’s caregivers—mothers and fathers become Mother and Father. And you would seek to garner boons and satisfaction of desires from these early figures projected onto the Unknown in the same way you learned you could elicit them from the early entities: through meaningless or distantly removed (symbolic) behaviors, repeated maniacally.

Your adult caregivers trained you as children to be conforming underlings, so you might be enlisted in their overblown schemes and phantom struggles; and now you would demonstrate to the creations you project onto the Universal screen that indeed you are a sycophantic underling—as sycophantic as can be. You seek to receive “compensation” from the Unknown for demonstrating those things that worked as children with caregivers: You express undying devotion, love, and allegiance to this Universal Phantom Mother/Father. Just as you needed to ally with the caregivers—your actual mothers and fathers—in their schemes against all others, so also you think you can garner good will by demonstrating your alliance with this Phantom against the Phantoms of all others.

So, you think that you “please” this Phantom—which you mistakenly call “God” but who is not (for it is not Good)—by taking up arms against the Phantoms of others and their allies. You have projected your early family drama as a child onto the heavens. And you seek to use Conforming Underling behavior—sycophantic, mindlessly obedient, repetitive, most often nonsensical (to you), expressive of “love,” devotion…what you call “worship”…and alliance against all others…which you mistakenly link with faith, as in “keeping the faith” and “defending the faith”—to procure “boons” to alleviate the anxieties you have created for yourself about this life as well as to relieve your overblown fear of death and an afterlife. You seek relief from the misery you have created for yourselves—unique to all planetmates—from this Phantom in this life as well as afterward. This is the real meaning of your ritual and prayer.

And by the way, if you ask then how we can disembowel ritual and prayer—the essence of religion—this way, yet still allude to an All That Is with a Benevolent Consciousness? If you wonder how we could even be communicating with you if such Phantoms are only projections of unmet need, you are not remembering what we have been telling you about your sense of a separated self. For while the essence of religion is appeasement and appeal, the essence of what you refer to as spirituality and mysticism is surrender and mergence…re-union.

Religion is a product of the separation from unity with the All That Is or the Divine, and its individual observances of ritual and prayer only reinforce that separation. Whereas, the essence of mysticism and spirituality is to dissolve that barrier to the Divine—existing in your perturbed mind—and to re-acquire your true identity, which is at-one with that…to achieve at-one-ment (atonement).

To this end you have shamans and priests who encourage your separation—what you call religion—and you have shamans, guides, and helpers of all kind around you everywhere (as “provided” by that Divine) whose conscious as well as unconscious intents and behaviors serve to aid you in removing that separation.

If you should, finally, question the existence of the Divine Itself, thereby removing the separation artificially by removing, in one’s beliefs, that Other from which one has become separated—if you remove the separation by simply denying the existence of half of it—then “the proof is in the pudding,” as they say. For while religion depends on believing the unbelievable, which can’t help but be constantly under assault from Reality Itself in that it is erected against and in opposition to that Reality, which you mistakenly refer to as faith, spirituality requires no sycophantic obedience. Since the Truth is that Ultimate Reality cannot be anything but helpful in that It is you—and why wouldn’t you help yourself?—why would it withhold anything that would aid you in tossing off your enslavement?

So it is that by simply trying out the idea that there is a benevolent Universe, one finds that one receives help, assistance, and experiences that reveal that Other and, although it doesn’t need to at this point, proves it. This is what is meant by, “Seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you….” Reality does not require of you blind obedience and sycophantic worship. Now why would a Benevolent God—one you say correctly is all-merciful, all-compassionate—want that of you? No, the Divine—your denied Self—is as accessible to you as it is to us. And, as we have said, it is part of a felt knowing of our consciousness that we cannot doubt.

As for evidence for this, how do you account for the very things you are hearing right now? They are meant to relieve your unnecessary suffering and free you. Of course it is meant to have you turn to an actual discomforting problem. But even that it is only meant to ennoble you and free you from the diminished life and futile dramas you have created as substitutes for such a grand and fulfilling role and script—one that is part of a more exciting and profound Divine Play that is being offered you.

But how do you account for hearing these words right now, so at odds with so much of what you have been taught and so promising to you…but most of all from a source that in your Reality would not even be possible? Consider the blessing of the Prasads themselves, as evidence of this Benevolent Reality, this God. For indeed that is the meaning of prasad: it is a blessing from Divinity or a Divine Being. Why would you be receiving these helpful words—right at this moment especially, which you know is just perfect for you—if Reality is not Benevolent? Does it not feel like a blessing to you? A prasad? And how could you be receiving this message from this consciousness that is not you as you have defined yourself? Is that not proof that this Benevolent Thing is also “higher” than you—a higher power?

But these are only the faintest glimmerings of the evidence in your experience, the blessings and guidance, the teachings and knowings that come—miraculously it seems—to you once you give the Universe a chance…once you give the Universe a chance to reveal it as it is (not as you want it to be, out of your fevered mania)…once you give the Universe a chance to actually be benevolent, not just as you are coerced into saying it is in your current unaccepting-of-actual-blessedness state, you find that it is, more so than you have ever imagined it could be.

It must be kept in mind that this control at each point required that correspondingly there would need be intensifying control over your inner life. So you set your wrestling- into-submission fever upon aspects of your very selves, even, that the “management” of consciousness, the Ego, deemed “inappropriate,” but was actually feared.

For you to be able to conceive of doing this, you needed to have a rationale that justified it. You needed to be able to turn it into a correct thing to do; you needed to be able to fool yourselves. So, in order to deny the ability of the consciousnesses around you to have inclinations (desires, tendencies, will, self-determination) of their own, you needed to insist that they were not capable of such decisions. It would follow that by removing the ability of intention from everything around you, you would not only be allowed to control, you would be required to. So to remove will and other-determination from the Universe you needed to deny consciousness in all of it, except yourself. It would be true that the extent that you would be able to deny consciousness in any aspect of the Other was the extent that you would be able, “in good conscience” (sarcasm intended), to control and dominate there.

The upshot of this entire process is a separation from all else in order to control it. In separating from all else, you, of course, separate from the Divine in that the Divine is exactly that: All That Is or all that exists including yourself.

So in total separation from All That Is, or the Divine, and certainly from Nature, and other humans, including your own families and others in your social units, you created the ultimate in isolation for yourself. And in this isolation you created your extra-natural ability for alien and backwards conception, thinking, and perception. This embodiment of a vortex of phantasms is your singular consciousness construct—again, that Ego that you are able to do.

(That ego that you do, you do, so well. 😉 )

Returning to the development of family in your species, however, remember that it is based on your expanding addiction to control which has now infected your view, even, of your own offspring. You see them, as well, as things. You attribute as little of consciousness to them as you can possibly rationalize to yourselves. Your children are viewed, for the vast majority of you humans and over the near entirety of what can be counted as the time of your existence, as having as little consciousness as the planetmates and other Earth citizens that you kidnap and control for your ends. That is, little or no independent intention or sentience is bestowed on them in your estimation.

Having achieved such a narrowing of apprehension of the true nature of the reality around your ego—inside as well as outside—you give yourself maximum rein in reckless determination. Like trigger-happy cowboys on crack, you fill the world with you. You see no existence outside your window of temporal craving…

…hence no consequences of the exercise of your lusty appetites outside the perimeters of your perceivable pain. And even that, your pain, you seek to deny and diminish so you can have even greater sway in your bumbling amidst Nature’s otherwise exquisite china shop.

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The Great Reveal, Chapter Thirty-Five:
The Twenty-Seventh Prasad from The Planetmates

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Ego Above All: According to our nonhuman brothers and sisters, humans secretly think, “There’s nothing really alive but me“ – The 26th Prasad from The Planetmates

The Family Fortress – Allies in the overblown struggle for survival were more easily born and raised than won over…more so for Small Accumulators – The 25th Prasad from the Planetmates

Every Family a Citadel

Planetmates Release The Twenty-Fifth Prasad

Offspring were increasingly seen as foot soldiers in the fight to maintain and defend so much accumulation.

Porcupine is First Consciousness at The Twenty-Fifth Prasad.

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.

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. (to be continued)

Paraphrase/ Elaboration/ Abstract of “The Twenty-Fifth Prasad” — by SillyMickel Adzema

The more you added to your survival burden by controlling your food sources rather than accepting Nature’s bounty and providence, the more work you created for yourself. While the phenomenal dependency of your offspring was an added burden in that effort, under certain kinds of conditions, sedentary ones, offspring could be seen as additional assistance in your tussle with your imagined threats. This was especially true if that dependent state was used to mold these children into the ideal conforming underlings for you.

Those who were Large Accumulators could “bribe” additional efforts from others to aid them in their dramas, but even those with lesser means—virtually all of you—had the ability to gain obedient subordinates through procreation. Large families were thus selected for. The larger the family, the better, as long as each subsequent child could within a sufficiently short period come to add more resources to the collective family struggle than would be removed from the total by the (minimal) survival of that child.

Large accumulation was increasingly linked with large families. A brood of offspring could act like a small gang, army, or employees in the gathering, processing, and accumulating of extra, hoarded resources, but they could also aid in the defense and protection of such hoarded wealth against other accumulators with green eyes and needy, famished hearts.

This was so much your view of the way of things that your Ten Commandments—a rather good abstract of your fearful imaginings and your feverish, heavy-handed control—contains not only such reinforcement for the strong men of the society as “have no god before Him,” not only such protections for your authoritarian families as “honoring father and mother” and codification of the elements of resource management to benefit the ones who already have as “shalt not steal” and “shalt not bear false witness” but even includes two entire commandments to cover jealousy. It is called “coveting” and has to do not only with protecting the hoarded wealth—“shalt not covet neighbor’s goods”—but defending the engines of that production as well—“shalt not covet neighbor’s wife.”

So, it is understandable how all threats to the fantastical survival competition are fought in all such manners: Monogamy would be elevated to a divine status—“shalt not commit adultery”—as part of the accumulation ordeal. Further, it is no coincidence that your male reproductive capacity is referred to as “family jewels.” While humorous, it is starkly accurate in the way you humans think on a level of your unconscious mind inaccessible to you—again, that Unapproved and Hidden.

Altogether, with conforming underlings bought, bribed, or paid for to be allies in your war over resources, with children conceived and raised to be obedient soldiers in its battles, and with tenets and social codes enforced with extreme severity so as to wrangle extreme conformity to social ways benefiting the Large Accumulators and the petty tyrants heading families, you had created a full on assault against your imaginary fears of death, your strange abhorrence of more adventurous, uncontrolled life, which you felt as uncertainty, any pain—which we see as guides in our living, but which you perceive as reminders of that death you fear so intensely.

All in all, this added up to a wrong-gettedness in relation to life. Whereas we are ever reminded of our divine surround through the challenges and discomfort of life and are directed in this way in an ever-expanding, numinous path of divine return, you erected walls of fear-rooted control around your fleeting havens of ease and you cut off your roots into the divine, unshakeable peace to which you are entitled. A big part of this effort you called “family” and you erected a shrine to it equal to your exaggerated terror of the uncontrolled.

Continue on this site with
The Great Reveal, Chapter Thirty-Four:
The Twenty-Sixth Prasad from The Planetmates

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The Family Investment – Over time, humans saw some minimal benefit in keeping newborns alive – The 24th Prasad from the Planetmates

Ambivalence Regarding Children

Planetmates Release The Twenty-Fourth Prasad

Care-giving was tainted and minimal, and it fostered traits reflective of the emotional deprivations of the adults.

Arctic Grey Wolf is First Consciousness at The Twenty-Fourth Prasad.

However confused the grown Humans, over time they came to understand that for their own survival there is benefit to the investment in these dying, desperate prematures.

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.  (to be continued)

Paraphrase/ Elaboration/ Abstract of “The Twenty-Fourth Prasad” — by SillyMickel Adzema

Your children were hurt by this early inattentiveness to their needs. All parenting was suffused with the emotional deprivation and resulting twisted consciousness of your fully growns. However far from ideal nurturing and what is possible in Nature, such care-giving was sufficient, barely, for species survival.

But such a corruption of nurturing continued to infuse and mold the personalities of your children in unnatural ways. More and more, it pushed toward characteristics that mirrored the darker impulses of your adults; it manifested the repressed undersides of fully growns, which was comprised of early unmet needs and corrupted desires.

So there was ambivalence in the desire for children. Your species swayed back and forth about what to do with them—between the poles of infanticide and abandonment on one side and acceptance and nurture on the other—for the longest period of your fully human existence. It follows that humans did not thrive during this period. You survived, barely; but your numbers were not large compared to other species and your species and its strange proclivities did not matter much in the grand scheme of things. You were no great harm and caused no widespread suffering to the many outside of yourselves.

But as your species turned its back on its nomadic roots and, blinded by an unnatural fever, pursued a circumscribed and strenuous sedentary lifeway, this stasis in your numbers began to change. You began to see some benefit in having offspring. You perceived survival advantages in family status and larger broods of children.

Of course, for most of this time the greater majority of you still did not come to the appreciation of the family burden, still there was ever-growing understanding of such as worthy of investment. And this changing view correlated predominantly with sedentary lifestyles and accumulating/conforming ways.

To clarify, your crazed non-sedentary forebears still were ambivalent about children and perceived families as a burden in relation to their overblown perception of the struggle to survive. Alongside this, in the world of Nature, there was neither a disinclination for offspring nor an overinvestment in them. Bonding and affection with Nature’s young rose from the correct, biologically constituted, appreciation of the offspring, and this more individually so. Nature’s parents do not view their children through a dark, crazed veil of dry and thirsty deprivation nor a floral, milky gleam of vain and pathetic estimation. In contrast to both of these, agrarian anchors and accumulating, conniving modes fostered appreciation of increases of population, specifically, families, as beneficial in the struggle for survival. It follows that attention and energy would be put into these extra beings, seen increasingly as resources in the struggle against the monstrously over-apprehended fear of death.

The upshot is that in your ever-increasing sedentary numbers, children were considered advantageous against that imagined encroaching darkness you carried. So the life of your otherwise doomed, helpless newborns was valued more often than not. You desperate suffering half-borns would increase your numbers as a defense against your personal demise.

Continue on this site with
The Great Reveal, Chapter Thirty-Three:
The Twenty-Fifth Prasad from The Planetmates

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Parental "Love”? – Fully growns seek need satisfaction from their young in exchange for care – The 23rd Prasad from the Planetmates

Parental Care? The “Love” Contract

 

Planetmates Release The Twenty-Third Prasad

What you place on high, use to boost your estimation of yourself over all other living beings, and attribute to divine origins even is most often just this swirl of ritualistic craving and trickling satisfaction set in motion by keenly felt but supremely denied hurt.

Lion is First Consciousness at The Twenty-Third Prasad.

What you call “love” towards your young was at first simply the desperate hope they would eventually become the “parents” who did not love you as a child.

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 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. (to be continued)

Paraphrase/ Elaboration/ Abstract of “The Twenty-Third Prasad” — by SillyMickel Adzema

Since your adults were disinclined to put in the huge sacrifice required to care for young who were for an exceedingly long time in a dependent state, the survival or your species required the evolution, through natural selection, of certain qualities. These elements further distinguished your species from all others.

These differences, for one thing, had to do with survival value being attached to non-expression of needs. For certainly if it was the excessive neediness of your young that disinclined adults to want them, then if a baby had less of those qualities or seemed to have less they would be less likely to be shunned or abandoned, thus more likely to survive.

A dependent young one suppressing its needs would manifest in it crying as little as possible, being as “unfussy” as could be. But it was not just seeming to be not a burden that was advantageous. For your adults’ psyche being so much founded on not getting early needs met, you would crave anything holding out hope, however futile, of getting anything resembling that kind of satisfaction in the present.

So babies who had other qualities appealing to the adult—such as “cuteness,” smiling more, or anything in the category of “adorability” or being “entertaining” or otherwise attractive to an adult or reminiscent of the satisfaction of those early deprivations—would make that young one more likely to thrive. It would increase the overall amount of vital care it would receive from fully growns.

Since many of those early lacks had to do with being cared for, nurtured—what is commonly called “love”—it was any qualities of the newborn that seemed to hold the prospect of easing those cravings that were desired and thus were to being selected for and become more prevalent over time. So if a child displayed behavior that was at all resembling what a truly nurturing parent would be like, he or she would attract more of that kind of attention in return.

This was the unspoken “love contract” that developed between dependent young ones and fully grown attendants: If a child would act less like it had needs and more like it could satisfy needs it was more likely to actually receive some attention to its needs, however inauthentic and agenda-oriented that attention would be.

So the origins of what you call your unusually strong parental “love” is in this never-acknowledged “love” exchange. What you place on high, use to boost your estimation of yourself over all other living beings, and attribute to divine origins even is most often just this swirl of ritualistic craving and trickling satisfaction set in motion by keenly felt but supremely denied hurt.

Continue on this site with
The Great Reveal, Chapter Thirty-Two:
The Twenty-Fourth Prasad from The Planetmates

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Conformity Beginning at Birth – To Survive, newborns learn they had better be adorable – The 22nd Prasad from the Planetmates

Smiling Babies Through Natural Selection…Neonatal Conformity

Planetmates Release The Twenty-Second Prasad

Traits in helpless newborns making them seem less burdensome or more appealing were selected for.

Butterfly is First Consciousness at The Twenty-Second Prasad.

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.

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. (to be continued)

Paraphrase/ Elaboration/ Abstract of “The Twenty-Second Prasad”
— by SillyMickel Adzema

Your extremely controlling proclivities reached a peak with your agrarian and sedentary lifestyles. Of course the flip side of controlling was conforming or sycophancy. An offshoot of these tendencies was that newborns were considered a burden, which meant that non-care, abandonment, and death for your most dependent was common and ever increasing.

Self-absorbed and/or controlling adults—riddled with imaginary fears from early perinatal traumas—would be more likely jealous than caring of even needier newborns and toddlers. So murder of newborns—infanticide—became ever more a possibility.

So these traits were not conducive to the vitality of your species and they would have ended your line if not for a few factors and developments. One is that not all of your humans were as crazed as those who would kill or abandon babies. Your species still had access to biological impulses for affection and spiritual ones of unity with the psyche of the Other. It was because of these that a sufficient number of your young made it to reproductive maturity, enough to save your species from extinction. They would be able to have young of their own upon maturity, so you did not die out.

But there was another thing that was quite important. Half-born human infants are, in all of Nature, the neediest young ones, and the most helpless. This makes their care indeed quite a chore. Through natural selection, you would have more and more newborns with appealing traits. Non-fussiness, repression of needs, extreme tolerance for discomfort and pain, and traits that adults would find appealing were all selected for in your young. So these traits also became more pervasive in your species.

Newborns were a burden in the unnaturally intense race for survival you created for yourselves out of pain. However, to the extent that these young had traits that fit with the unnatural needs or wants of your manic adults, they would better survive and more likely grow to have offspring themselves. All in all, your species would be increasingly characterized with traits that had roots in your neonates’ needs to win its beauty pageant and congeniality contest, or else.

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The Great Reveal, Chapter Thirty-One:
The Twenty-Third Prasad from The Planetmates

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Children a Burden … Unfit Parents: Children Became the Ultimate Repository for the Suffering Resulting from Social Conformity and Its Humiliation, Say Planetmates in the 21st Prasad

“You are Babies Raising Babies”: Consumed with Baseless Terrors and Caught up in Relentless Mental Machinations, Humans Are Hardly Fit Care-Givers, According to the Planetmates 

The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, the Twenty-First Prasad: Children a Burden … Unfit Parents

Planetmates Release The Twenty-First Prasad

Fully Growns Hardly Fit Care Givers for Newborns

Tree Frog is First Consciousness at The Twenty-First Prasad. 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.

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.

Paraphrase/Elaboration of the Twenty-First Prasad — by SillyMickel Adzema

Now, let us look at childhood from the perspective of your fully growns.

For your adults are not passive actors in these developments. As we have been saying, this is the ultimate and easiest arena of control for humans.
Sure enough, your adults consciously and unconsciously foster and constrain the Ego creations of your young ones in the course of their care giving.

You know how you seek to do it consciously. You call it “raising” your children; again, you show how you objectivize the world and how its people look to you like things to be grown for your use and consumption, much like your crops or chickens. More kindly, you view it as “training” them; though you would never acknowledge, however true, that your aim is to mold and force upon them a shape that makes of them just another extension of you … a mini-me. Again, there is that Ego of you. And here you see how your effects on your children begin to become unconscious influences: You affect them in ways of which you are completely oblivious and always and everywhere have vehemently denied. Still, we must tell you, for those who, because of the pressing and intense nature of these times and their unusual sensitivity to the needs of those beyond just themselves, are able to hear it.

What you are always and everywhere ignorant of is your biological, species-determined inability to give adequate care to those dependent on you. You are, for all the reasons we have been listing, “not quite here,” virtually all of the time.

You are distracted and self-obsessed. While responsible for tending the young’s needs,
you are forever distracted by your controlling and conforming obsessions; you are continually derailed and led astray by your backward thinking. You are barely able to focus outside of yourselves, as you are constantly consumed by the alien and crazed, overstimulated consciousness that characterizes you.

You cannot help but be poor caregivers, with all these other things going on inside you. For children require attentiveness and focus on their needs, and you are ever self-obsessed, and your minds are busy building walls to buffer reality and bridges over unpleasant Nows to fantastical and ever receding futures of ease.

Looking back at the deepest origins of that feverish controlling and fearful conforming we remember that it is rooted in and driven by your underlying — exaggerated and foundationless — fears of death — the supposed end of your beingness.
This fear for your survival is made keen by your incessant paranoia of becoming deprived and of facing uncertainty, as you actually did, in most horrifying ways, as infants.

So, the very same deprivations and uncertainty we planetmates embrace as providing the spice and delightful play of life for you are the forces to drive your obsessive controlling. Furthermore, as you became more “human,” you became that much more, not less, fearful of death; you became ever more terrified of an imaginary future containing uncontainable levels of pain of not getting what you want. You became ever more deranged when confronting uncertainty in your present.

So, consumed with baseless terrors and caught up in your relentless mental machinations around them, you cannot bear the thought of adding the burden of children to all that.

Hardly able to focus outside yourselves and lost in a matrix of long-ago schemas of feelings (from infancy and birth)—pushing and pulling you all about regardless of what you are confronted with in the present—you are babies raising babies.

You would like to make up for your inability by having your newborns simply grow up faster and not be such babies for so long. For after all, it is only their neediness that offends you. It drags you down and requires that you leave off some of your activities and thoughts in the efforts of defense and come out of yourself to heed another’s needs. “If only they would cry less”; “If only they would sleep through the night”; “If only they would poop in the right place.”

Forever falling short of filling your needs in the present, as you go about doing that along with attempting to fill the ever present list of imaginary “needs” left over from your past, you cannot be good caregivers for needy others. Put another way, burdened as you are with imaginary struggles, it does not behoove you to attend to another’s real needs.

Bad enough, all this was when you were nomadic, gatherers and hunters, but all of this was made worse by the switch to sedentary living. For with fixed abodes, inequality of stores, and the resulting social hierarchy came all its requirements to conform increasingly to the demands of a social arena for the satisfaction of one’s needs. Remember that in Nature you enjoyed a relative independence of action in satisfying your basic needs. In Nature, you knew the relative self-assurance that one could always fend for oneself, if need be. 

But hierarchy and increased specialization of function—which was a narrowing of the fullness of life experience down to a focus on the aspect of it which could be traded in society for survival—made one dependent on the good will of others for survival. It re-created the state of infantile dependence on one’s care-givers. You were thrust ever, triggered ever, into feelings of helplessness vis-à-vis the Other, which now would include the social matrix within which you were nurtured and fed.

We will leave for later how this, in itself alone, transformed your ideas of Divinity, again … this time it took on more of the qualities of the ones you were most dependent upon—strong men or a man, patriarchal elders, and chiefs—instead of the forces of Nature and its central experience of rebirth. For now it is more important to notice that the major effect this fundamental helplessness in relation to society had upon your feelings and thoughts was the requirement, always, that one’s actions be not just sufficient (for survival) but pleasing (to Other). So, to a consciousness caught up in pushes and pulls left over from early deprivations and trauma in interaction with an inattentive, sometimes harsh, Other (one’s caregiver/parent) was added the pushes and pulls to appeal to, and be approved by, similar unconcerned, careless, sometimes brutal Others in the present, which were one’s higher ups.

This could not help but make it even more difficult to attend to the needs of your young. In the drama of intrigue and chicanery, which erupted out of the necessary interaction for fulfillment of needs with increasingly larger numbers of similarly helpless and equally desperate others in society, you were engaging the majority of the attention and focus you did have. Caught up in the necessary wiles of life left you with little over. The persistent and undeniable needs of children, arising at any time of the day or night, was an unwanted addition to the increasing demands and complexities of daily life.

The result? From the preceding prasads it can easily be guessed what transpired: Children were the lowest in the hierarchy of importance in any society—they were often abandoned or even killed, oftentimes right at birth—for they were the least able to defend themselves and represented the biggest additional outlay of resources and effort of anything coming into an adult’s life. But they were under the most pressure and were the most scapegoated in the hierarchical societies which came with sedentary living.

In ways very similar to the change in the perceptions of women, with hierarchy—that is, with there being controlling and demanding persons ever above one—came incredible pressure to extract from others below oneself amounts of complicity and service equal to what was being demanded from above. It was the unconscious trade-off that men sought for the sacrifice of their energy, time, and self-esteem to those above.

By that we mean that men knew and secretly resented the fact that they needed to put time and effort into the needs and wants of those above them, rather than their own. They felt they could live with that as long as they could balance that suck of energy from them to above with acquisition of unworked for boons from those below. More simply, if you had to suck up to those above you, you could console yourself with the fact that others below you sucked up to you. This was all decided unconsciously, of course. So men used women and controlled them in an amount equal to that which they themselves felt controlled and dominated from above. Men knew they were humiliated and denigrated to an intolerable degree by those above, but they were able to live with that if at other times they also could dominate and bully.

And, of course, women were always targets for all this scapegoating and abuse. But even further down—and available to be scapegoated even by women—were the children. So, again, children were felt to be both the one excludable variable in life’s burdens as well as the ultimate repository for the suffering brought about by such burdens. They were not wanted and were killed or abandoned, being felt to be additional burdens on psychologically and economically distracted adults. But if they were allowed to live, their needs would be set aside in accordance with the pathetic needs of caregivers who desperately sought dependent underlings (of any kind, women or children, fringe group or subservient class) upon which to balance the injustices of one’s adult life.

It is no coincidence, either, that women, being the easiest ones to burden, the ultimate societal scapegoats, would have thrust upon them the burden of caregiving that men did not want. Being the child-bearers they were obvious candidates; but these societal pressures that came with sedentary living increased and reinforced that relation. And men were both more anxious as well as more able—more easily beginning with sedentary life—to cut themselves away from any such responsibilities regarding children. However, they heaped extra pressure on women. For the fact that women, being lowest on the totem pole, were the most supervised of all sectors of adults meant that although men would not want to help in child caregiving, they certainly did not want women to be so cavalier about it.

So, women were in the worst situation. Being the repository of the suffering of their men, who themselves were the repository of the misery of the strong men above them, women carried the heaviest burden yet were left with no one below them to pass along the burden of caregiving.

Further, this task of attentiveness to children is a complication that just adds to your considerable discomfort around not knowing things, not being able to control things … around uncertainty. For while you sought to control everything about you, your children would be the one major factor upsetting your carefully made plans and throwing the monkey wrench into any laboriously constructed ease you were able to carve out for yourself.

So while your newborns required more, you would prefer to give less. Your newborns required ever longer periods in the dependent and helpless state as you changed over time, while
with your increasing fears you felt it risky to focus on a helpless other and away from your attention to warding off present and future imaginary threats.

This reluctance to care for your newborns only became truly apparent and blatant after your transition from nomadic ways to sedentary ones, however.
For this switch allowed full rein to your mania to
accumulate and control and,
with this increased separation from the natural, a greater state of ordinary madness. You peaked, at this point, as far as your desires for controlling. So the unpredictability brought by newborn others was that much more unappealing.

Continue with The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, the Twenty-Second Prasad: Perinatal Conformity and The Earliest Beauty Contest

Return to The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, the Twentieth Prasad: Obsessive Control — Controlling Your Young

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Moving the World – Don’t Expect to See it on the Cable News

Apocalypse – No! Chapter Eighteen:
Moving the World – A Race Against Time

Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth?

The Evidence for Change Occurring

Finally it is time to answer the question posed by this book: Apocalypse? Or Earth rebirth? Knowing apocalypse, we can now declare a hearty No! to apocalypse.

Our answer begins by pointing out that we have discovered, in this book, that there are things that can be done to prevent our extinction and, on the contrary, bring in a new dawn of harmonious cooperation with the forces of Nature. In the last four chapters we have seen that there is evidence of a collective change in consciousness occurring. A radical change in our attitudes to war, racism, the environment, and even spirituality—and thus to the very way we live our lives—is manifesting in our culture, the youth of the world, our children, and is even popping up in our collective dreams.

Natural Law

In addition we are aided by some fundamental processes of natural and cosmic law. In preceding chapters I have pointed out how both our nature inside and Nature outside seem to be conspiring to force us into the changes necessary. From this perspective we are in the hands of natural law, and its homeostatic mechanisms may bring us into line in ways unimaginable, beyond even the speculations I put forth in our attempt to see “through Gaia’s’ eyes” in Chapter Twelve.

Visible and Invisible Allies

Furthermore we may be aided by unseen forces and entities of which we know not and may be incapable of knowing. Though I think it foolhardy to sit on our hands and hope that some intergalactic or spiritual cavalry will arrive to save the day at the last moment. Still it is eminently reasonable, considering the minuscule knowledge we have in relation to the immensity of All That Is, to put aside our familiar hubris and at least consider the possibility of aid from higher forces or entities.

Indeed, there are many people in this day and age who believe that particular forces have come together at just this juncture in time to aid us and to ensure our success. Who knows why?

Perhaps it is because our interconnectedness with Everything requires that we not fail, for it would have detrimental effects on things of which we do not know. I must confess that I myself have received knowledge of such help being given us. [Footnote 1]

Similarly there are others who believe that God will not allow His/Her creation to be destroyed and has in fact come in the flesh to ensure its success. [Footnote 2]

Cosmic Law

And there may even be cosmic laws at work. “Truth has its own momentum,” said one of our workshop participants. My wife and I conducted workshops in what we call primal breathwork, which is based on the Holotropic Breathwork™ of Stanislav Grof. In these workshops, which involve access to all aspects of the unconscious, including the spiritual/transpersonal, the biographical-psychodynamic, and the sensory, as well as the perinatal, it is not unusual for us to witness people being motivated, because of their profound transformative experiences, to commit themselves with all their being, talents, and resources, to aid in the processes of renewal on this planet.

But Is It Enough?

Don’t Expect to See It on Cable News

But some might argue that there are not enough people changing. You might easily get that impression if your prime source of information is the mainstream media of the cultures of the world. For it is in the interest of the dominant media of all lands to support the status quo—for economic, as well as political reasons. They are not likely to report the new and controversial.

In fact, the proof of this is that when truth is truly democratized and shared freely, as on the World Wide Web, the information that comes out is drastically different from the sanctioned news sources. Indeed, we have seen the internet leading in many areas, from Wikileaks to Mideast revolt, everywhere and anywhere. Like a tail wagging a dog, the internet has been the first to expose information that the controlled media, who knew of it but repressed the information, only afterwards were forced to present.

So don’t expect the paid-for media to give you an accurate portrayal of what is truly new and breaking or for them to accurately reflect cultural changes as they occur. And don’t either expect for them to present the news of positive developments occurring—especially when those positive developments threaten an entrenched status quo. No, the official information sources of the status quo are the last to report such changes, and they do so only when they absolutely have to.

The Peace Symbol—Moratorium—Reversed

Meanwhile, from my vantage point, I would answer the query that there are not enough people changing by reiterating that, in fact, there are many of us who are integrating this emergent material, who are regaining our truth and the truths of this Earth and the Universe, who are expanding our consciousness to include this information, and who are carrying that information forward into positive action to heal ourselves, the people around us, humanity at large, and the planet.

This response of constructive action is exquisitely expressed when the peace symbol is reversed and symbolizes a human figure with arms upstretched—meaning the expression into the external world of what was discovered within.

Putting Out Our Hand By Creating Healthy Alternatives

An answer to the question of what will happen is that we can hope that the forces of integration are more successful than those of disintegration and reaction in the face of this influx of material, for one thing. In addition, those of us who are dealing positively with these emergent truths can help to build societal structures and processes that make it easier for others less fortunate to face and deal positively with their environmentally enforced psychological transitions.

Those of us who can should put out our hand to our struggling sisters and brothers. If we can set up and provide accessible alternatives to the ones of reaction and acting out that now exist, we’re going to make it more likely that those more prone to reaction and avoidance will instead also grow in response to these eco-apocalyptic, bio-noetic changes.

Facing the Monster Is Always Better, Often Beautiful

For, contrary to what many believe, the evidence from the experiential modalities involving the perinatal, and my own experience, concludes that the dangers of not accessing the perinatal unconscious are much greater than the ones of attempting to access them. For our residual birth issues influence us one way or the other. If we deny them, we can be deluded into acting them out, completely unconsciously, without an insight or a clue, in a “fetal trance state,” in the form of war, social violence, spouse abuse, sexual promiscuity resulting in the contraction of AIDS, and a myriad of other destructive and self-destructive ways.

Whereas if we turn to face this supposed “monster,” with only a tad of insight into these forces that direct our life, we are at least able to avoid the most horrific of the destructive acts that keeping it unconscious can cause us to participate in.

And then, on the more positive side, fully working through these seemingly hellish inner traumas can result in a transformation of the person and a lightness, peace, beauty, and fulfillment of life unlike anything that can be imagined beforehand.

A Race Against Time

Regardless of whether we succeed, we must try. As Stanislav Grof put it in his conclusion to an article on this global crisis: For our very survival,

We seem to be involved in a race for time that has no precedent in the entire history of humanity. What is at stake is nothing less than the future of life on this planet. If we continue the old strategies, which in their consequences are extremely destructive and self-destructive, it is unlikely that the human species will survive. However if a sufficient number of people undergoes a process of deep inner transformation; we might reach a level of consciousness evolution that will bring us to the point of deserving the name given to our species, Home sapiens, i.e., wise humans. [Footnote 3]

“The Leaven In the Dough”

Of course, I do not expect that the sort of application of experiential techniques Grof hopes for above can occur on the massive scale that would seem to be necessary to avoid apocalypse in the short period of time that we have left. Yet it might be that we would be lucky enough for that not to be necessary.

It is possible that simply a significant fraction of the world’s population—like the “leaven in the dough”—can make all the difference in the world, literally, by tipping our course one way as opposed to another, especially if these people—because of their healing and their awareness of the crisis—are motivated to place themselves in positions of influence and education, or to put their efforts toward healing, on individual and collective levels, in larger numbers than the average populace would. In other words, not just the leaven in the dough but as persons, standing in the right place and with the lever big enough, who can move the world.

Continue with the book –
The Great Reveal by SillyMickel and the Planetmates

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Footnotes

1. See “Sure It’s Hard! But Always Are We Here Helping You” section in “Chapter Two: Culture As Moonview” of my book, Primal Renaissance: The Emerging Millennial Return, on the Primal Spirit site. [return to text]

2. See “Sathya Sai Baba, Avatar” by Mary Lynn Adzema, on the Primal Spirit site. [return to text]

3. Stanislav Grof, “Planetary Survival and Consciousness Evolution: Psychological Roots of Human Violence and Greed.” Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology 2(1): 3-26, p. 25. Article reprinted, with permission, on Primal Spirit site. [return to text]

Copyright © 1999, 2011 by Michael Derzak Adzema

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Nothing But Shiva Dancing Above the Dissonance – A Rising Moon of Promise and Possibilities

Apocalypse – No! Chapter Seventeen: Dreaming Out Loud: Peaceful Warriors and Silly Heroes

Joe Versus the Volcano

Volcano-Jumping: A Different Heroic Response

The different kind of heroic response, which characterizes the perinatal arena, is exemplified in another contemporary movie. In “Joe vs. the Volcano,” the main character, played by Tom Hanks, is given a heroic task. But unlike a typical hero’s cycle task which stereotypically involves the slaying of a fire-spewing dragon, Joe is asked to give up his life by jumping into a fire-erupting volcano.

The connection between volcano and dragon is that at the second-line or psychodynamic level the fire-spewing aspects of the perinatal, which might be compared to a volcano, can be seen as “embodied” or reduced in the form of a dragon. In the same way, the volcanic energy of perinatal feelings is initially embodied in easier-to-face and “dragonized” psychodynamic, second-line, or childhood traumas and feelings.

You Just Can’t Slay a Volcano

But what may seem to work at the second-line or psychodynamic level—the conquering or slaying of negative feelings…and notice that I said “seem”—has no place at all at the perinatal. For here the pain energy is overwhelming and pervasive. Thus the difference is analogous to that between facing the energy of a dragon and facing that of a volcano.

First Anima, Then Community

Keep in mind that this movie shows Joe, earlier on, going through all the major stages of the hero’s cycle—the retreat from mundane reality, the sailing off into a new and exotic realm of existence and adventure.

It even depicts a typical hero’s conquering of inner fears and risking of one’s life for another that results in the uniting with anima energy–the saving of the damsel. So earlier on there is a dealing with psychodynamic energy, just as in “Nothing but Trouble” Chevy Chase deals with psychodynamic material by risking his life to rescue Demi Moore from a giant chopping machine. But, also similarly, this results in the opening up of another level. Thus, in “Joe Vs. the Volcano,” Joe is asked to give up his life to save an entire community, not merely to risk his life to rescue his anima, his feeling self.

Risking It All

The ensuing plot has interesting elements as it shows Joe having to decide whether to sacrifice his newly won relationship with his anima ally for the benefit of an entire—but anonymous—community. This demonstrates that at a progressed level of the spiritual process—that having to do with one’s inter-connection with the larger community of living things, not just one’s personal unconscious—one must risk even one’s newly regained creativity, inner child playfulness, and personal feelings.

But in telling fashion, in order to make the higher “community” sacrifice the elements that have been let go of, symbolized by Meg Ryan as the anima damsel, end up going with Joe to his chosen fate and are borne up, renewed, along with him.

Borne Up by a Beneficent Universe

On Joe’s part, the climax shows the same quality of a beneficent Universe aiding a true and dharmic heart. Joe (with his anima) face what they think is death. Instead they find themselves “borne up” by the volcano, not consumed; and they are deposited (reborn) in a typical perinatal watery surround—the ocean, symbolizing therefore a spiritual birth.’

“Away From the Things of Man”

In the end, the main characters are floating in the middle of a wide open sea—signifying the immensity of potentiality that is now open, and facing a gigantic moon on the horizon—symbolizing the beneficent nature of the Universe to which they are opening, that is, it is beautiful and lit with possibilities.

They are seen sitting on only their luggage—symbolizing the “stripped down” nature of the self, that is, stripped of ego trappings of status, vainglory, defenses, and so on. Their final comment at the very end of the film is that they do not know where they’ll end up but only that it will be “away from the things of man”—indicating their desire to never go back to the drama of ego and its puerile catacomb pathways of darkened experience.

The Universe Is You

We see then that in this movie, like “Nothing but Trouble,” the heroic response required is surrender, not resistance or control, and that the response from the Universe is cooperative and helpful, and hardly antagonistic as was feared, especially at earlier levels.

This is in keeping with the discovery at the perinatal, which borders it on the transpersonal, that in fact the Universe, not only is not antagonistic, not only is beneficent and helpful, but in fact is no different from oneself, indeed is oneself…and one begins to wonder why one would ever expect not to be borne up by a Universe that is now seen as inextricably united with one’s Self.

Responses to the Perinatal

Returning now to “Nothing But Trouble,” an aspect of it that has significance for dealing with perinatal issues is the way different characters are shown responding to the embodiment of arbitrary justice, the judge. In the wonderfully Kafkaesque courtroom scenes, we see several different types of people—representing different responses to unconscious material—hauled before the judge. The musicians, signifying artists, creative people; the hedonistic criminals; and the main characters, representing average people, each present distinct attitudes, which are responded to differently by the representative of the unconscious, the judge.

Jiving With Your Monsters

The musicians are able to create rhythm and flow. Therefore they are able to get through the experience unharmed. Indeed, they are even able to elicit a response from the judge—getting him to join in. In this way we see how creative people can actually use perinatal material and get it to cooperate for desired ends. We might consider how this relates to the writing of “Nothing but Trouble” itself.

Peter and Dan Aykroyd, in creating this movie, are, like the musicians in the movie, getting the unconscious to “play along,” to create something beyond what either the writer or the unconscious could accomplish separately. Much of what is interesting in art is done this way: The deeper fear-evoking material is allowed to come in and enrich, enliven, freshen with new ideas and perspectives, stimulate, and invigorate the creative production.

Beware the Tar Baby

On the other hand, the arrogant banker contends with evil, and, like Brer Rabbit with tar baby, gets stuck. Notice also that the really contentious ones—the alcoholic drug-using criminal hedonists—are completely lost. Thus the two extremes, as well as the average person are depicted.

Lighten Up!

But the truly striking element that indicates an advanced way of dealing with the perinatal material is shown in the genre of the movie itself. As a comedy, it shows a non-attached and transcendent approach. Chevy Chase and Demi Moore, especially Chevy Chase, show an aloofness and silly playfulness in the face of horror and death that has spiritual implications. Like a Tibetan mystic, Chase refuses to get sucked in to the involved drama confronting him. Like a Christian saint about to be martyred, he jokes, teases, and gets silly with the instruments of horror and evil. Similarly, Demi Moore humors and plays cards with her would-be monsters.

Silly Heroes

Standing within the Witness higher self, they are able to take the entire situation lightly—acting and reacting in the moment to each unique situation as it presents itself. One moment Chevy Chase is confronting his own demise, the next moment he is in a love scene. He alternates a frightful encounter with relaxing and smoking a cigar.

If we want to know what real and transcended behavior is, we might do well to get our hints in the depictions of unattached playfulness—as presented by modern Western actors like Bill Murray, Demi Moore, Tom Hanks, Chevy Chase, Robin Williams, Bruce Willis, and Jim Carey—rather than in the repressively calmed not-with-it-ness—not-witness—that is sometimes mistaken for spiritual attainment.

Darkening Down

Incidentally, this element of humor shows an entirely different way of dealing with the perinatal than most other movies that deal with this kind of material. The movie, “Brazil,” is a good example of this difference. Not only is “Brazil” cast in an eerie, somber, and tragically hopeless and futile air—indicating that one’s response here is to “believe in” the reality of such material—but the only escape in this movie is in a purely conceptual, fantasy way.

The main character cannot face the horror ultimately. He flips out into a reassuring dream sequence brimming with BPM I and BPM IV imagery. Interestingly, reflecting the pattern of progression of our expressions in feeling therapies, the dream includes a BPM III scenario to get him to those later bucolic realms.

But in “Brazil” these are only day dreams. This fact shows a refusal to face this perinatal material or to surrender to it. Rather, in fantasy, one overcomes the horror. It is as if one continues using familiar ego techniques—hero’s journey methods, dragon-slaying methods—for dealing with material on a deeper level where they no longer work—where they are in fact counterproductive.

Thus, these techniques can only succeed in dreaming. Terry Gilliam, the creator of “Brazil,” shows us that the hero, in reality, is doomed. [Footnote 1]

Evolution In Attitudes to the Perinatal?

However, in “Nothing but Trouble,” the main characters do face and deal with all the material. Sometimes they fight it; sometimes run from it; sometimes play with it; sometimes joke, tease, spar, or get silly with it; sometimes are swallowed by it and carried along…but always they are creatively facing and dealing with it. This different air about and attitude towards the perinatal material can be said to be an advance from the earlier movie, “Brazil,” representing perhaps a progression of our collective consciousness in our attitudes and manner of dealing with the perinatal.

Dancing Above the Dissonance

Such a prospect is, indeed, the auspicious legacy of such a creative project. Though it is doubtful they did so consciously, the Aykroyd brothers and the producers of “Nothing But Trouble” deserve our gratitude for their efforts in lighting forward our collective reality endeavor.

Beyond that, we can take hope in the possibility that Western culture may be rising itself, however minimally at first, above the dramas of light and darkness that have plagued it for so long. The Manichean tendency can lead only to ever-spiraling cycles of resistance and assault. Yet we are seeing currently, not only an erosion of defiantly uni-dimensional ego perspectives, not only a movement toward facing and dealing with our inner darkness, but an integration of opposing forces, a dancing above the leela—the play—of light and dark.

The Universality of Divinity Remembered

The perennial understanding of the universality of divinity, both within and without us, in the lowest as well as the highest of places, is the bright at the center of the perinatal bedlam about us. We are guided as well by this gleaming, a rising moon of promise and possibilities.

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Apocalypse – No! Chapter Eighteen:
To Move the World – A Race Against Time

Footnotes

1. However, one might interpret the main character’s escape into fantasy as a victory over evil forces. That the ending lends itself so readily to such an interpretation is a telling indictment of the state of progress of some of us in dealing with perinatal material. Apparently, there are those so lost that the only success possible seems to be in insanity or death. [return to text]

Copyright © 1999, 2011 by Michael Derzak Adzema

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Atman Projects and Surrender Solutions – How can you be borne up if you won’t let go?

Apocalypse – No! Chapter Sixteen: Dreaming Out Loud, Atman Projects vs. Surrender Solutions

Nothing But Trouble

A Perinatal Flick

A film of postmodern times, available at video rental outlets, “Nothing but Trouble,” is an especially potent example of both the different heroic response and of the rising pre- and perinatal influence in the media that is allied with it. It is all this, plus a twist—as a comedy it represents an unlikely approach to such material and themes. More about that later. It was produced and written by Peter and Dan Aykroyd and stars Dan Akroyd, Chevy Chase, Demi Moore, and John Candy.

The Lure Into the Underworld and Call to Adventure

The perinatal adventure of “Nothing but Trouble” begins innocuously with the main characters “leaving the beaten path” on a rather ordinary trip out of the city. Interestingly, the Brazilian couple who have forced themselves on the main characters of Chevy Chase and Demi Moore in making the trip act as impish other-worldly instruments in the change of route.

Joseph Campbell pointed out that the “call to adventure,” which marks the beginning of the descent into the transformative nether regions, may be instigated by the merest chance or blunder. [Footnote 1]

Campbell also writes that the heralds of such a rite of spiritual passage are often loathly and underestimated characters. The Brazilian couple—as gaudy, overbearing, quirky, and from “down under”—perform just this function of luring into the underworld. Thus, they remind us that it is the quirky yet underestimated element in our familiar daily experience that opens us up to the process whose ramifications are huge by comparison.

The Merest Blunder, The Adventure Begins

Sure enough, this innocent-appearing outing is soon disturbed. The merest blunder of map reading results in an ominous tour of an eerie town and its somber and menacing-looking inhabitants. This is followed by a high-speed car chase as the police attempt to pull the innocents over for a bogus traffic violation.

In the tour of the town, it is as if the ego is shown getting a preview or having a precognition of what lies ahead and attempts to flee back into its safe familiar environs. But of course, this emerging piece of unconscious material will not be denied and is able to capture the fleeing ego that we see safely ensconced in its trappings of status and power—symbolized by the BMW with car phone. At this point the main characters, representing the ego, are led, under guard, into the bizarre town of Valkenvania—the encounter with unconscious perinatal begins.

Perinatal Elements

The Junkyard of the Psyche

Campbell says that in the unconscious deep, to which one is beckoned, “are hoarded all the rejected, unadmitted, unrecognized, unknown, or undeveloped factors, laws, and elements of existence.” [Footnote 2]

Likewise, the set in “Nothing But Trouble” is replete with refuse. Bits of history—of rusted and broken refrigerators, automobiles, kitchen appliances, assorted junk, and pieces and parts of all the preceding…the wreckage of the past—are strewn about as well as heaped in clusters to construct the architecture and delineate the outlines of the drama. The correlation with subconscious remnants of forgotten memories and past emotional experiences is obvious.

Thus the drama evolves in the dumping ground and junkyard of the psyche—where all the rejected tidbits of experience have been relegated.

Stripped of Ego, Perinatal Begins

After being separated from the automobile—i.e., the ego stripped of defensive trappings of status and worldly position—the characters are rather quickly shuttled into encounters with a myriad of perinatal elements. A few of the obvious ones are as follows:

• Mr. Bonestripper, which is a roller-coaster type ride whose entrance is a large vagina dentate mouth that swallows, chews up, and kills. Notice the roller-coaster ride aspect of Mr. Bonestripper, which reflects the emotional extremes and changingness of perinatal, specifically Basic Perinatal Matrix III (BPM III), events. [Footnote 3]
• The chutes inside the house and of Mr. Bonestripper indicate birth canal symbolism.
• Sexual elements, indicating BPM III influence, are manifest in the scantily clad heroine and the penis-nose of the judge.
• The dark foundry symbolizes the foundation work of the psyche as well as the ominous and eerie aspects of perinatal experience.
• The slave labor surroundings represent similar feelings in the enforced and helpless character of doings just prior to and at the time of birth.
• Notice that the body—the car, the “Beamer”—gets trimmed down, the excess removed, symbolic of the cutting away of past attachments and concerns of a worldly nature, one’s “status” reduced.
  
• Chevy Chase as the main character is at one point forced into a marriage with a huge woman, who is tellingly androgynous in that she is played by John Candy. In her threatening and suffocating embraces we see symbolism of the crushing womb.
  
• The entire site of these doings is surrounded by a watery trench. This obviously reflects the amniotic surround in the womb.
  
  
• Police and guns point to the authoritative character of perinatal doings—i.e., do, or else!
• Death/rebirth symbolism of the perinatal exists in the form of skeletons and huge piles of skulls and bones.
• Scatological, that is to say, fecal symbolism is seen in the “bat-room,” which contains an enormous pile of wet bat-shit…excuse the wording, but it really is shit and not feces.
  
  
• The arbitrary nature of justice in the courtroom speaks to that perinatal feeling that one tiny thing, event, or action, has huge and horrifying ramifications.

Big Babies

The most obviously perinatal element, however, is the gargantuan and grotesquely flabby infant twins in diapers. Perinatal feelings are indicated in their extreme crying neediness. Their freshly newborn quality is evident in their fleshiness, which reminds one of the overweight appearance of some newborns, which is usually lost a little later on in infancy. The glossy, waxy sheen on their bodies is reminiscent of the skin of a newborn, which, fresh out of the womb, is wet and slippery, covered in amniotic fluid and cervical mucosa.

A Transpersonal Interface

An interesting aspect that indicates the transpersonal interface with the perinatal is an attic room—a higher mind of memory, kind of like an Akashic record—where all past IDs—identifications—and reports of them—newspaper clippings—are displayed.

Though, interestingly enough, in true perinatal fashion, a macabre lens is used to view these lives—only the reports of their tragic disappearances are seen. I believe that this is a wonderful depiction of how transpersonal information is distorted by perinatal material—the implications of which are far reaching for the pronouncements of so-called spiritual, or psychological, authorities who have not dealt with their perinatal undersides.

Multilevel Feelings

Just When You Thought….

However an important element in this movie, which is different from artistic representations that deal with only the personal or psychodynamic, is the way the ending opens up under it to a new level, a whole new arena, of issues. Those of us in experiential therapies or breathwork are only too aware of how the perinatal opens up to one, revealing a greater expanse and pervasiveness of dis-ease, at a certain point after dealing with the personal and the psychodynamic.

This layered, or multilevel quality of the movie is shown when the main characters, having heroically escaped through personal effort, find themselves returning to the perinatal realm. Thinking that they have the forces of authority and light on their side, they expect this time to be able to put the evil away once and for all.

But When All Seems Lost….

To their immense surprise, it appears that the whole world has been conspiring against them—a telling perinatal feeling. The evil is discovered to be pervasive, as if infiltrating every corner of the universe—another perinatal feeling. Even the thoroughly trusted elements of light turn out to be on the side of the darker forces—a vantage point that is part of the hopelessness that characterizes the classic no-exit BPM II scenario. And just like in the womb, then, when all seems lost, something new happens, an explosion or eruption of sorts, which brings down the old world and its structures in a violent conflagration.

Atman Projects Versus Surrender Solutions

This hopeless and futile aspect of the perinatal realms—as opposed to the merely personal or psychodynamic ones—lends itself to its distinctive response—which is surrender, not resistance. Unlike the hero of Campbell’s hero’s cycle whose task is to slay the dragon using the sword of analytical or cognitive powers, the correct solution here at the perinatal is to let go of all designs, manipulations, and attempts at control and to put oneself into the hands of the seemingly irrational and chaotic Universe, come what may.

How Can You Be Borne Up, If You Won’t Let Go?

The Universe’s response in the movie—the upsurge of fire from below the earth that brings down the evil structures—demonstrates the theme of being saved by higher forces when one finally is able to surrender. In the same way, in our perinatal experiences, we find ourselves “borne up” and elevated when we once are able to submit to the upsurge of fear-evoking perinatal emotion.

Indeed, when Chevy Chase is seen rolling and setting fire to barrels of oil in a superhuman nick-of-time rescue attempt—in typical “hero’s journey” style—I had an odd disjointed sense that we had switched modes. The element seemed incongruous.

Say “Good Night,” John Wayne

But, then again, not so. For the movie shows that the successful escape performed through one’s own effort is, in actuality, futile. In perinatal terms, such heroics are illusory “atman projects” that ultimately fail against the onslaught of perinatal material, which must be surrendered to, not heroically resisted or conquered.

Interestingly, the eventual surrender solution is echoed earlier on when Chevy Chase is about to go through the chomping jaws of Mr. Bonestripper, the devouring womb. His response, at the prospect of his imminent failure, is to pray—to call on higher forces.

Trusting in Higher Forces

Amazingly, the machine breaks at that moment, signaling the response of such “external” or higher forces. He alone, of all the others who have faced that fate, goes through the machine unscathed. Notice also that he says “Thank you, Lord” afterwards.

Thus it is not on one’s own powers that one makes it through perinatal material, rather it is by the relinquishing of such attempts at control and the relying and trusting in higher forces. We are reminded that Dante required the angelic Beatrice to show the way through purgatorio and inferno to paradisio.

The Message

In the next chapter, we will use another postmodern film to expand on these themes. This will allow us to fill out an emerging pattern, as we then compare it with “Nothing But Trouble” and other perinatal evidence.

So let us watch, now, as the pattern, like a photo emerging in solution, reveals to us its features, thus delivering to us the message it has come to bring.

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Apocalypse – No! Chapter Seventeen:
Dreaming Out Loud – Peaceful Warriors and Silly Heroes

Footnotes

1. Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968, p. 51. [return to text]

2. Ibid., p. 52. [return to text]

3. As a reminder, BPM III events (Basic Perinatal Matrix III events), using the typology set forth by Stanislav Grof in his many works, are the events surrounding the actual birth struggle of the infant during delivery. These parts on the perinatal in film make mention also of BPM II, which is related to the time of severe compression and constriction of the fetus in the latter stages of pregnancy and prior to the actual onset of delivery—which are characterized by feelings of “no-exit”; of BPM IV, which is concerned with the feelings of release, triumph, being saved, and whatever else occurs immediately after delivery; and of BPM I, which is related to the state of the fetus earlier in pregnancy—prior to compression—which is often conceived to have “oceanic” and “blissful” qualities, though not always. [return to text]

Copyright © 1999, 2011 by Michael Derzak Adzema

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Apocalypse – No! Chapter Seventeen:
Dreaming Out Loud – Peaceful Warriors and Silly Heroes

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