Like Jacob Wrestling the Angel, in Your Switch to Sedentary Life You Confused Divine Assistance with Evil: “You Saw Difficulties … Deprivations, and Pain as to Be Avoided Instead of as the Blessings of Divinity.” (updated)

With Sedentary Ways, Humans Began Wrestling Their Angels, Say Planetmates in the Thirteenth Prasad: Resisting Divine Assistance and Roots of the Apocalypse Today

The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Thirteenth Prasad: Breaking with Divinity, Resisting Divine Assistance

Planetmates Release The Thirteenth Prasad

Nomadic to sedentary switch was significant for two reasons with long-term dire consequences for all Earth Citizens including you.

Duck is First Consciousness at The Thirteenth Prasad.

"You saw difficulties, obstacles, even struggles, deprivations, and pain, as to be avoided instead of the blessings of Divinity, who through these means directs, teaches, and guides us...."

The Thirteenth Prasad – Breaking with Divinity

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

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

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

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

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

Video Commentary by SillyMickel Adzema

What follows is a video of a reading of The Thirteenth Prasad, with commentary, elaboration, and context, by SillyMickel Adzema.

The issues highlighted in the commentary relate to further separation from Divine Providence—a product of our desire to obsessively control—to reframe life as a pursuit of avoidance of exigencies, obstacles, and pain instead of the way seen by Planetmates wherein all these things are embraced as Divine teachings/guidance of a very personal and loving kind.

“The Thirteenth Prasad” From The Great Reveal by The Planetmates – the audiocast

The link above takes you to the audio-only version of my commentary on The Thirteenth Prasad, exactly as is in the video. Click on the link to go to the the audio site, or you can listen to it here using the audio player below.

http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=qqrgzdtgkk
Image of The 13th Prasad. “The Great Reveal” By The Planetmates: “Resisting, Defying Divine Assistance”

Paraphrase/Elaboration of The Thirteenth Prasad — by SillyMickel Adzema

Foraging fell to hunting; hunting made murder of your own possible; these abilities to determine death along with its illusion of control of life descended to horticulture; horticulture led to “domestication” of “animals” (enslaving of planetmates); and agriculture and animal husbandry required a sedentary mode of living. All of these are falls from the Divine; they are stages of your gradual separation from Divine Providence, but more:

Keep in mind that while they represent decreasing connection with the All That Is, they demonstrate also increasing control of what reality you have left. They are a profile of the ouster of a Benevolent Reality as the “ruler” of lives and the center of Nature, and its replacement with the oafish, savage image of the human.

Life in Nature is about awareness, play, unity, belongingness, and nobility. Its love is quietly confident and blissful, not maudlin and ostentatious, covering up its absence in actuality. It contains the heights of enjoyment while embracing the uncertainty required for that. Its pain and discomfort are essential components of its larger, more encompassing Pleasure and Beauty.

We have been describing your, humans’, increasing straying from that sort of life and the institution, in its stead, of a life reframed as a pursuit of avoidance of exigencies, obstacles, and pain. Whereas planetmates do not seek out hardship … why would we defy Divine Providence in making our lots more painful or difficult? … neither do we overreact to it. For these more bracing aspects of Reality are simply the darker side, we know, of a greater “light.” That is, all experiences not immediately warranting appreciation are the doorways, we know from experience, to greater awareness and bliss, later.

They are not only promises of greater rewards to come, they are the ways we are taught and guided by the Divine. Not only are we taught and guided, but through these exigencies of fate and these variables of experiences we are reconnected with, reassured in, and remembered of that source and of its very personal and loving nature.
Indeed, whereas life is adventurous, playful, and enjoyable for us, its inconveniences, discomforts, and hardships we see as “audiences,” if you will, with our highest and most enlightened self, which we know to be no different from the self of All. You might say that when we perceive that life is not the exuberant flow it is normally and instead presents blocks, bumps, and diverting events, that we are aware that it is a time of “promotion” for us … that we are “being kicked upstairs,” so to speak. It is through the details of the difficulty that we are, as it were, called to the “head office,” that we get to commune with our best friend, the Divine, and that we are instructed for steps to come. We know that when life slams into a wall, it is time to “reframe” or “remap.” And we have no doubt that we will be shown how to do that.

You knew this for most of your existence, too. It is only now, in this five minutes before midnight in the twenty-four hour expanse of your “day” of existence that you even took to horticulture, to expanding your controlling obsession over Flora. Previous to that, though you began separating from Divinity with the birth pain and prematurity that came with bipedalism, which indeed defines you and started your “day,” you sought your assistance from your divine surround. You searched for food in your immediate surroundings — foraging and hunting, as it were — not doubting your success. You reveled in the plenty served up by that Divine. It was your Edenal existence, you lived in Bliss like us. And as soon as events and circumstances changed and became harder, discomforting, you knew it was time to move on.

You saw difficulties as signals to switch to a place of greater ease. You advanced to a place, sure enough, where the circumstances of your existence were easy and festive again. Times were good; you played; you loved. In this way, you were confirmed always that any choppiness in life’s waters were the prelude to even swifter, smoother sailing beyond them. Yes, you knew the light that follows the darkness as surely as you knew the dawn follows the night. You knew the beatific face of pain and the wisdom, guidance, instruction, and elevation as a person and spiritual being that it brought with it. You knew that every hardship was another clue on your way home, back to the full embrace of the Divine … as do we. It could not be more clear to you that difficulties were a preparation, an initiation from the All That Is, setting the stage for your grand Re-Union, and one by one taking you through the doorways that separated you from it … as it is for us.

Your veering off from that knowing in the last few minutes of your “day” of existence is startling. You are like a species that lived one day and in the last five minutes of it contracted a deadly disease. We see this and deem that it might signal your end, your death. But we, as kindly physicians, are here to nurture you through it on the assumption that you are meant to live and be even the better for it. For why would this time of darkness be any different from all those others we experience … all of them opening to a greater light?

You might say that life is Bliss, and that our spiritual path to greater awareness of that Bliss is through pain. We are mightily surprised that so many of you would think the opposite of that, seeing greater spirituality and awareness to be products of being extremely good in not being aware of the seeming negatives of existence and being excellent at keeping all intense feelings and experiences away from you. In this way, you take the worst and most cowardly quality of you, the source of all your grief, and you elevate it to a spiritual principle!

To the contrary, we know that darkness precedes every light. That the journey to greater light or Bliss and Awareness follows a trail where shade and sunlight alternate, where steps to anything further along require “backward” steps to better make the leap ahead, and where going “up” and going “down” are simply aspects of the same expanding “outward.”

We know that your early experience with darkness and pain at birth has caused you to be continually forgetful of the beatific other side of distress, and so to project a greater darkness ahead of you, conducive to dread. Because your beginnings are traumatic and were overwhelming and seemed unending, you are ever fearful that any moment that can reoccur. You lack the nonchalance and simple, undoubting confidence and security we have in the unfolding of events and of the rightness, even kindness of their manner of doing that.

But in all these ways, culminating in this sedentary life, you sought to expend greater effort toward fighting off an imagined darkness, which is impossible to exist the way you think it might, rather than to face the experience in front of you in the present, whether enjoyable or unpleasant. Your sedentary life was the equivalent of building a fortress to keep out those imagined threats. It was not you building up a better life but your retreating into a cave, of sorts, in fleeing from it. It is where, inside, your hurt, angry, defiant self was determined to “make a stand” to fend off the Divine. As we said earlier, your Ego caused you to mis-perceive everything, including your mistaking aid/assistance for attack. The Divine’s attempts to come to your aid and to take you beyond where you are into something always better were seen by you as attacks from Reality Itself. You imagined a devil in the divine countenance, quite the contrast to our perceiving on the opposite side of every face of fiendishness a beatific one.

So essentially, your change from nomadic to sedentary lifeways had two significant effects on your species, each of which have been instrumental in creating the apocalypse emergency facing you and all other Planetmates today. The first effect was that of severing your connection with the Divine, what you call God, to the point of near total separation. As your Michelangelo painted it, you and the Divine touch the end of a fingertip.

This is about right, and quite the fall from grace from what had been and the way it is for ALL other Earth Citizens. Divine Providence serves all Planetmates in two major mays. The first of these is the continued — continued from the womb and birth — the continued perfect direction and guidance of our lives toward the growth and life ways that are the best, as determined by God or the All That Is, for our ultimate fulfillment and spiritual progress. The Divine Hand guides and teaches us along perfect pathways through the exigencies of what you call “fate.” We see difficulties, obstacles, struggles, deprivations, and pain as the teaching tools of the Benevolent Teacher, guiding us toward lives where we end up ever closer and more understanding of our rootedness and, eventually, even identity with God.

Whereas, because of your crazed, backwards thinking and your insistence on trying to control your own destinies — however much more difficult that would be since you resisted and even defied Divine Assistance — you did all in your power to avoid the Divine lessons brought to you through the adventures and exigencies of life — what you call hardships and suffering.
So, your radical separation from the Divine caused you to mistake always the Divine lessons and blessings for evil, for wrongness. In this way you guaranteed your failure in the game of life; as a species your cumulative failures you piled one upon another as if they were progressive achievements, not the increasing web of disaster that is reaching its culmination today.

Continue with The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Fourteenth Prasad: Eating the “Apple,” Defying Divine Assistance

Return to The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Twelfth Prasad: Husbandry and Sedentary Ways – Enslavement of Earth Citizens

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Consciousness Evolution from the WWII to the Millennial Generations: A Hierarchy of Healing, a Global Healing Crisis, and the Unseen Revolution

Psychology of Generations —The Changing of the Generational Guard: Why There Is Less Violence but More Depression…. And What’s Good About That

Wounded Deer and Centaurs, Chapter Fourteen: Psychological History of Today’s Generations and Changing of the Guard

Healing Crisis Means Needing to Get “Sicker” Before We Can Be “Weller” and Making It When You DON’T Fake It: Centaurs, Wounded Deer, and the Consciousness Revolution, Untold

What’s in Your Head, Zombie? Being Really Sick, But Denying It — WWII Generation, Nazis, KKK, Right Wing, Tea Party

Birth Woes ~ World Wars and Can’t Know What You Don’t Know … What’s in Your Head, Zombie?

Getting Sick In Order to Get Well

What does this all mean? What does this portend? What might be the outcome of this emerging perinatal unconscious? In other words, consciousness evolution or apocalypse? And what is the meaning of this change in consciousness and of these wounded deer and centaurs? Is there hope in this development?

To answer what is the portent of these wounded deer and centaurs and what the emerging perinatal unconscious might mean on a macrocosmic or societal-global scale, it is helpful to look at what an emerging perinatal unconscious portends on the individual or microcosmic level.

What we have learned from the experiential modalities—holotropic breathwork™, primal therapy, rebirthing, vivation, and others like them—is that unerringly people need to get “sicker” before they can get well. This should not be news to psychoanalysts or any of the other mainstream psychotherapists or counselors either.

Healing Crisis

Basically, the underlying repressed material must come to the “surface,” must become more conscious…and obviously when it becomes more conscious its accompanying symptoms are exacerbated. This can be called a healing crisis in that the symptoms get worse, more obvious, more blatant; and there is a period of acting them out before integration and resolution happens.

One Must “Die” to One’s Sickness Before One Can Be “Born” Well

When Grof talks about birth/death scenarios in the perinatal unconscious, he is including these sorts of healings, where one must “die” to one’s sickness before one can be “reborn” into another way of being, without those sick patterns or symptoms.

Degrees of Disease

Dissociation – Completely Split Off

It’s YOU! YOU’re the f&^$#r!

We see a progression over the last century in which there was complete dissociation from the perinatal unconscious by those of the Fifties, the World-War-Two, and previous generations—hence complete projection of it on The Other—to lesser dissociations from it by the generations since, baby-boomer and afterward, which involve more awareness of it as being a part of oneself and less projection of it on The Other.

Wounded Deer

In this latter instance, there is more suffering from it and more individual acting out of it, so that in a sense one appears “sicker”—the perinatal is more obvious in one’s behavior, taking more individual forms, and it is more easily recognized and seen to be a personal problem…a “sickness.” Earlier I described this consciousness as being the way of the centaur, for it reflects Chiron, in ancient myths, having an ongoing wound but eventually becoming a teacher and healer.

To understand the ways the perinatal manifests depending upon one’s “closeness” to it, let us contrast the two extremes of being split off from it and being close to it.

Being Really Sick, But Denying It: WWII Generation, Nazis, KKK, Right Wing, Tea Party

Can’t Know That You Don’t Know

First let us take a look at what the perinatal appears like when it is completely split off from one’s conscious personality. This complete splitting off from the perinatal entails a complete repression and denial of it. Consequently, one has absolutely no access to it, and thus one is in total ignorance of the underlying motivations of one’s actions. One unconsciously acts out perinatal elements and traumas and manifests them in one’s behavior, rationalizing all the while that one has really good—non-perinatal, “real world”—reasons for why one is doing the things one is doing.

What”s in Your Head, Zombie?

Psychohistorians deem this state to be such an oblivious one that they use the term trance-state for it, fully intending all the implications and connotations that term engenders. That is, they are saying that people who are this repressed and split off do their acting zombie-like and out of motivations completely hidden from themselves. [Footnote 1]

Birth Woes ~ World Wars

In such total ignorance, and of course being totally ignorant that one is in ignorance, people in the past century have been able to act out their perinatal underbellies in ways to make such hideous and all-encompassing wars as World War I and World War II possible.

Leaving aside for a moment the myriad ways the perinatal has unconsciously been acted out in this century in creating the current situation in which we are on the brink of extinction—which can be considered the most serious consequences of this splitting off imaginable—simply focusing on this century’s major wars as evidence of perinatal acting-out alone is instructive.

The Nazis, in particular, were extreme in their dissociation from their perinatal, in their projection of it onto the Jews, and their consequent ability to act it out in horrific ways on them and others. Alice Miller and Lloyd deMause have each detailed the psychodynamics of this projection of primal pain—both perinatal and childhood—in the creation of the people that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis became in their adulthood. [Footnote 2]

The Nazis present us with the patterns of these processes of dissociation and projection in blatant and obvious relief. The way Nazis, especially in concentration camps, acted out perinatal trauma on their prisoners has been described in great detail by Grof as well. [Footnote 3]

Wounded Deer and Centaurs – Being “Weller,” But Appearing Sicker – Perinatal Awareness of Boomers and Beyond

Perinatal Boomers and Beyond—We Know THAT We Don’t Know…We Could Be Wrong.… But You Certainly Are

Being “Weller,” But Appearing Sicker—Generations Since

As I said, contrasted with being completely split off — dissociated — from one’s perinatal unconscious, as the Fifties and WWII Generation are predominantly, is being less cut off from it and having some access to its energies. This means that rather than being totally and blindly driven by these forces, which are acting on one indirectly, one actually feels them somewhat: One has a sense of their being a part of one’s experience as opposed to living within them so thoroughly that one has not a clue of their existence.

This means that one has more options than to act them out, but it also means they make one aware of one’s perinatal sickness. One feels them, suffers from them, struggles with them.

On the other hand, one does not suffer or struggle from unconscious energies that one is compliant with and that are completely manifest and supported in one’s social and cultural environments (for example, the worlds of the WWII and previous generations), however destructive that makes one’s actions.

Trancing Vs. Suffering

This difference may be likened to the difference between being a fish in water and totally oblivious to that fact versus living out of water and experiencing a downpour. When one is in less of a trance state, one is aware of alternative ways of being; in the example, that would be being dry. Consequently, one suffers and struggles amidst these forces and options…and one has at least some ability to choose one’s actions.

I do not believe it is simply coincidence that we are currently going from the Piscean Age — symbolized by fish in water — to the Aquarian Age — symbolized by a water bearer. This change was a big part of the consciousness during the Sixties, and I think we are beginning to see why: Going from a state where one is oblivious to the forces around one to a state where one can see the things one is dealing with (carrying the water) is no small thing.

It seems everything about evolution in humans has something to do with being between two mediums and the advance/the added perspective that comes with that, going all the way back to being the only ape to take to the water so much as to become partly aquatic—placing our species between water and land, halfway between a dolphin and a chimpanzee. I think we are heading toward being like the fairies and angels we imagine—halfway between land and air—but that is a whole other post.

Another analogy I’ve heard of this difference between the two modes of being completely oblivious and somewhat aware of one’s unconscious is that between living full-time in an arctic environment where one has to wear a heavy coat versus living in a milder climate. In the warmer climes, one is both aware of what it is like to not have a coat—one has capacity to feel better ways of being—as well as how bulky, obstructing, and uncomfortable it is to have the coat on—suffering more from it, suffering from one’s perinatal memories. Finally one is better able to decide when to have it on and not—one has more options. At some point I will discuss what this has to do with the increase of bipolar disorders, but not now.

One analogy I find especially provocative is the difference between watching a movie and being fully engrossed in it so that one does not know it is a movie, which is equivalent to acting out unconsciously from one’s early imprints. Compare this to watching the same movie with equal interest, but being aware that one is in a theater. You can see where in the second instance one would feel there are more options; and one would feel that one could step back before finding oneself caught up in horrific actions.

Wounded Deer and Centaurs

However, being aware of one’s discomfort (having “more access” to the perinatal), one suffers like the wounded deer—the innocent who feels things and so struggles with society’s sickness that many others are unconsciously perpetrating. But, with time and success in handling this pain, one can become the wounded healer—the Centaur.

Now, why and how would this occur? As I’ve said, some access to the perinatal and more blatant and direct acting it out is exhibited by many of the baby-boomer generation. This is in large part due to their having been raised in a way that required less in the way of ego defenses to keep their primal pain suppressed. Psychohistorians like Glen Davis and Lloyd deMause have detailed a slow advance of child-caring techniques, with generations since the WWII Generation being raised with more attention to their needs and less harshness and cruelty…increasingly more love.

“What the World Needs Now, Is…”

Before anyone begins thinking “permissive” or “spare the rod, spoil the child,” let me point out that I will be continually stressing how this development is not only a good thing (why wouldn’t love be good?) but is one of the few sources of hope for our future we really do have.

For less childhood pain and trauma means one is stronger and more able to face the even deeper perinatal pain.

Choosing Lesser Evils

At any rate, the extreme acting-out and total dissociation from the perinatal exhibited by the World-War-Two Generation was followed, in the generations coming after, by less relative dissociation and less horrific forms of acting it out. Quite simply, generations as a whole had better ability to refrain from the more blatantly evil act outs—wholesale murders and world wars, pogroms and genocide, inquisitions and witch-burning, racism and slavery. They were more able to choose seemingly milder forms of suffering and self-destruction — polluting the atmosphere, water, and food; population explosions and crowding of cities; and traffic jams.

The common everyday traffic jam is especially instructive of perinatal dynamics as traffic congestions replicate asphalt birth tunnels where one not only breathes exhaust fumes from trucks and other autos—fetal malnutrition—but also can become gridlock at any moment, thus re-creating the intense frustration and no-exit hopelessness, and rage, of BPM II.

Baby-Boomer Perinatal Awareness

Other examples of the scenery of modern times where the perinatal is manifesting but is less projected onto another:

We Know THAT We Don’t Know…We Could Be Wrong.

Many baby-boomers had enough access to their perinatal underbellies to question the absolute rightness of the Vietnam War and so they campaigned against it. This is indicative of closeness to the perinatal because it shows an ability to doubt one’s egocentric defenses—as given by society and family of origin—and to look at situations from the eyes of the Other.

So much was this evident in boomers that some were even able to see the Vietnam War through the eyes of the enemy—exemplified by Jane Fonda’s trip to Hanoi, the waving of North Vietnamese flags at demonstrations, and the carrying of little red books of the sayings of Chairman Mao tse Tung.

But It’s Clear You’re Wrong.

The baby-boomer—or Sixties—generation also indicate their closeness to their perinatal in their campaigns against some of the act-outs of the perinatal mentioned above: These include actions against pollution; a rejection of city life, with its gridlocks, pollution, and crowding , and a return to the country, in communes or otherwise; an awareness and rejection of polluted foods and creation of a natural and organic foods movement; and actions against global overpopulation including support for birth control, a pro-choice stance on abortion, and delaying of baby-making on their own parts along with a reduction in the size of their families.

The sexual excess that is characteristic of the perinatal, specifically BPM III, was evident in boomers’ free love and promiscuous sexual behavior.

Many more examples could be given. But the proof of their closeness to their unconscious dynamics lies not only in their actions—as mentioned above, in their more blatant acting them out or in their actual actions against the blatant acting out, both of which indicate closer access—but also in the study of their unconscious dynamics. As mentioned in Chapter Twelve, Kenneth Keniston found in his study of the psychodynamics of the Sixties generation when they were in their youth an unusual amount of perinatal symbolism and self-analysis. (See “Raging to Reenter, Digging Under Ground.”)

Boomer Rage, Perinatally So

We Shall Overcome.

We also see perinatal feelings in the focus of the baby-boomers on empowerment. This word appears to come up in every area of their lives. It can be seen as the natural focus of a generation that feels itself inside to be a helpless fetus facing an overpowering obstruction of a womb.

Hence baby-boomers are of course also closer to the frustration, rebellion, and yes, rage, that is part of the perinatal complex. We saw it exhibited by them in their anger at authority in the Sixties, their rebellion against the Vietnam War.

“Get the &%$ OFF Me!”

Keep in mind that a huge aspect of the perinatal is feelings of restriction, thus frustration, and, consequently rage against large entities of obstruction—like the womb was in relation to the small and helpless fetus. In doing so, we see that the reason for their rage is simple and understandable.

Baby-boomers, characterized as being closer to their unconscious, especially the perinatal, have more access to their anger: This means they feel their anger and are less likely to act it out in more hidden, disguised, and dire ways such as war-making, racism, and anti-Semitism.

This does not mean their rage would not be troublesome. The perinatal lets no one get off scot free. We see lots of pre- and perinatal anger coming out in the last few decades in the phenomenon of the “angry electorate.” Let’s look at that next.

You Didn’t Really Believe Elections Had Anything to Do With Issues, Did You? Biting the Feeding Hand … Perinatal Rage and Panicky Electorate

Seriously? You Actually Think Elections Have Something to Do With Issues? Biting the Feeding Hand … Perinatal Rage and Panicky Electorate

More recently these baby-boomers have been coming into the triumphant phase of their lives. They make up the largest sector of the electorate, and their influence is reflected more as they come into positions of power in the media and elsewhere.

The Angry Electorate and Boomers

But their influence has been diffused and confused because of the anger of some of them. Their irrational rage—combined with the reactionary consciousness of the Fifties Generation, many of the Fifties Gen children of Yuppies-Gen Xers, and the remaining WWII folks—has most often skewed election results against the Boomers interests and their true desires. Though not the majority of boomers, enough of them expressed their rage to swing election results in favor of the other side.

1992 – “Mad as Hell”

Beginning in the 1992 and 1994 national elections, these baby-boomers exhibited their perinatal influences in contributing to the totally unexpected phenomenon of the “angry electorate.”

At the time, pundits and media analysts were at a total loss to explain the rage of the electorate that was affecting these elections. In 1992, they were totally surprised by the showing of three men in particular—Jerry Brown, Pat Buchanan, and Ross Perot—who seemed to have one thing in common: the angry tones and rebelliousness that characterized their speeches, as compared to others. [Footnote 4]

The demeanor of these candidates was at such odds with the other candidates that when Bill Clinton one night responded angrily to a comment by Jerry Brown about Hillary, Clinton’s wife, it was that part of the debate—of Clinton being angry, all issues aside—that made the news that night!

Though the rage of the electorate in 1992 caused the Brown, Perot, and Buchanan phenomena, it was split among them, so Clinton ended up winning. This of course was also OK with the baby-boomers in that (1) Clinton and Gore were baby-boomers like themselves and (2) in the race against Bush, Clinton was the challenger, and thus the rebel; and Bush was the “bum to be thrown out.”

However, this rage did not go away after the election, which highlights its having perinatal origins. In fact, after the shortest “honeymoon period” in history, by some accounts, it became directed at the most likely target/center—the President, Bill Clinton, himself.

We all know how despite the successes and progress of Clinton’s first year, he was especially singled out for ridicule and denigration by the media. He could not seem to do anything right, and the most incredibly outrageous behaviors were attributed to him.

1994 – “Throw the Bums Out … Again.”

This rage spilled over into the next year and, sure enough, during the midterm election—the issues be damned—the angry electorate was in a mood to “throw the bums out” again. It did not matter the party….I do not claim that all those of my generation are always as politically astute as they are angry.

The Republicans called it a “revolution.” It was simply the acting out of an electorate in the throes of perinatal feelings—that is, feelings of frustration, being “tied up” by red tape, an inability to go forward…that is, up the economic ladder—wages had been stagnating since the early 80s…being overcontrolled and pushed around by regulations…big government being the big mother womb keeping the fetus locked in and unable to move…and out of all this, the consequent anger and rage.

1996 and 1998 — “To Hell With You!”

At any rate, succeeding elections bear out this analysis of an angry electorate. In 1996, despite the much ballyhooed “Republican Revolution,” sure enough, the electorate was spoiling to “throw the bums out” again—only this time it was the Republican Congress. So there were Democratic gains at the time.

And in 1998, when everything pointed to a huge Republican landslide because of the Lewinsky scandal, the electorate again showed their rebellion and anger toward both the pundits and the Republicans who had been lambasting them with details of the scandal for nearly a year by giving the Democrats gains again! [Footnote 4]

2006, 2008, and 2010 — Panicky Electorate

In 2006, 2008, and 2010, it was an angry electorate reeling against oppression; and in the case of 2010, doing it mindlessly, against their own interests. If there were not perinatal charge to all this, Americans would not be so irrational about their choices.

Perinatal Rage

People have had good reasons to feel oppressed since the Eighties when Reagan began the giveaways to the rich and the budget cutbacks, continuing to this day, that have caused the masses to feel constricted and oppressed.

Yet, if this did not result in their being perinatally overloaded so that they cannot reason, they would not have been able to be led to fight their own interests as they were in 2010 and in an ongoing way as exemplified by the Tea Party and the success of right-wing agendas.

Reacting, Too Angry and Confused to Think

Another aspect of this irrationality on both sides of the political spectrum has to do with this idea that there is no difference between the two major parties. Feeling oppressed perinatally is characterized by a pressure from all sides simultaneously. There is an inability to distinguish or discriminate between forces that are helpful and those that are dire, as any and all developments seem threatening in situations of crisis. In a situation of overwhelm, further, there is an inability to think clearly. One just fights back, explodes, reacts. It’s no coincidence that righties are called reactionaries.

Biting the Feeding Hand

The upshot is an inability, under the pressure of perinatal feelings, provoked endlessly by actual oppression economically, environmentally, socially, and culturally, to rail against any authority, to bite the hand that feeds one. This is exactly like the panicked swimmer who in danger of drowning fights off his or her rescuer.

Can anyone at this point still maintain that the politics of the last few decades had anything at all to do with ideology or issues?

Millennials and Their Opposites – Fifties Generation Tea Partyers … How OWS and Tea Party Movements Are Generationally and Perinatally Different

Millennial Gen Occupiers and Eisenhower Gen Tea Partyers Are Perinatally As Well As Generationally Opposed

Right-Wing “Hate Groups,” the Tea Party, and the Fifties Generation: Perinatally Oblivious

One might also note the rise of “hate groups” occurring at the same time as the phenomenon of the angry electorate. Hate groups fill their ranks from folks on the extreme right and their actions are exemplified in the Oklahoma bombing tragedy and more recently in the Tea Party.

Perinatally Clueless

But notice again then that these hate groups are always on the extreme right of the political spectrum and thus exemplify a World-War-Two mindset in relation to their perinatal unconscious: Specifically, the mindset is one of being completely cut off from one’s unconscious dynamics and being in total denial of unconscious motivations so that one can have the complete certitude—lacking any access to the unconscious which would give rise to doubts—that makes violent actions possible.

However the reason for bringing up the hate groups is to show how much their actions as well are dominated by perinatal—in their case, totally unconscious—dynamics.

For without exception their reasons for rising up against the government—representing the overwhelming womb—has to do with frustrations, like the trapped fetus feels, in regards to “oppressive” taxes, governmental red tape, laws, and other regulations that they feel restrict their freedom…to move freely, as one wanted to but couldn’t, in the womb.

Tea Party and hate group ranks are prevalent with Fifties Generation folks. The Eisenhower Generation — after the WWII Gen and before Boomers — were born just before or during WWII. They are mired in prenatal fears coming from the fact that their parents were living through such distressing times as WWII and the Great Depression when they were inside their mothers. They were “marinated” in the womb with fear and insecurity. They also were not brought up with the societal advance in child-rearing the next generation of boomers, and those afterward, would be granted. So it is understandable they would be both cut off from perinatal access yet full of perinatal pushes and pulls to act out in confused and self-destructive ways.

Perinatal Access of Millennials

Being Boomer Kids, Wouldn’t You Kind of Expect That?

Now on the other end of this perinatal spectrum we have the most recent generational cohort to be making a mark. The Millennial, or Baby-Boomer Echo generation, show the same inner access as their Boomer parents. They demonstrate as well their parents’ consequent refusal to act it out on a larger scale: It has been said that the greatest concerns of those in this generation, now in their twenties and thirties, are the environment and racism-bigotry.

Activist, Progressive

They show the progressive bent of their parents, also, in their having a lot to do with giving America its first African-American president. And to the environment and minority rights, we need to add classism, economic fairness, and human rights because of their phenomenal outpouring of support in the past year for Occupy Wall Street and for union rights in Wisconsin and other states. They are showing global strength in opposing fascism, economic injustice, political oppression, and human rights abuses in Occupy and Arab Spring movements. They’ve filled massive demonstrations against the draconian economic policies of Republicans in Wisconsin.

Climate Change and The Environment

We know how pollution and action against pollution indicates a closeness to one’s perinatal. To put it another way, it is clear that only a total denial and disconnect between one’s consciousness and one’s unconscious perinatal dynamics would allow one to act it out unconsciously in the creation of pollution and in the denial of it as a problem or a mindless neglect of it. So the fact that these Baby-Boomer children, the Millennials, are so cognizant, concerned, and active in relation to global pollution and climate change shows their lack of denial of this perinatal act-out.

Multicultural, Resisting Racism and Oppression

But what of racism and bigotry? How is this an indication of a closeness to the perinatal. There are several ways in which this is so. As mentioned, a closeness to the perinatal allows one to doubt one’s given defenses and to glimpse alternate perspectives—in particular to look at things from the eyes of The Other.

In this way, the baby-boomer echo generation are able to see oppression, injustice, and unfairness as it is played out in the lives of minorities who don’t share their (predominantly) middle-class advantages. They simply don’t “get” racism, sexism, or bigotry of any kind; it is incomprehensible to them. They strongly oppose imperialism, colonialism, or oppression of any kind. Relatedly, they support animal rights and oppose animal abuse and cruelty. They don’t understand torture and violence against fellow planetmates.

Naturally they were helped in that awareness by the gains of previous decades, beginning in the Sixties, which had them growing up with diversity of racial and ethnic heritages—seeing things multiculturally not narrowly—in their schools and in the omnipresent media. They grew up with the environmental awareness that was set in motion in the Sixties; they don’t know of a world before recycling and energy conservation. Activism, demonstrations, and political action have been a part of their lives since they were born, unlike the several generations that preceded them and even their Boomer parents who grew up in a politically castrated Fifties.

But there is another, stronger element. This is the factor of oppression and unfairness itself. We experience compression (oppression), and frustration at our attempts to go forward, and what feels like hopeless unfairness and injustice, when in the throes of BPM II birth trauma. To see these facets of the fates of minorities, as in racism, or gender or sexual bias, points to this echo generation’s closeness to their own perinatal oppression; hence their ability to empathize with oppressed minorities.

This ability to realistically sense and respond to oppression is also the reason they would throw themselves in heartily in defense of unions, an increasingly oppressed middle class, and public sector employees.

Of Goths, Gen X, Anti-Abortionists, Pacifiers, and a Hierarchy of Healing … You Make It When You DON’T Fake It

Flaunting One’s Sickness Is Healthier Than Hiding It … Gen X, Goths, Pacifiers, and The Hierarchy of Healing

A Hierarchy of Healing?

This idea that those close to their unconscious conflicts are more likely to act them out blatantly goes completely against one of DeMause’s tenets. He wrote, “The higher the psychogenic mode of the psychoclass, the less it is necessary for it to act out its conflicts.” [Footnote 5]

However this is exactly the crux of my difference with his theory and is a central point I am making. For from my perspective, the higher the mode of child-caring equals the less the defenses. Hence, the more it is likely that that generation’s conflicts will be close to the surface, seeking resolution … like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory. We might want to call it a hierarchy of healing theory. [Footnote 6]

In other words, our observing the supposed “acting out” of an underlying trauma does not mean that the group or person in question is actually or, at least completely, “acting it out” and defending against it. It may be that that group is resolving, healing, or integrating it—taking it inward rather than acting it out…in the world, on others…whether to a small or great extent. Using the analogy of Pandora’s Jar, described earlier, they are opening the jar, at least a little. And I disagree with deMause in that I wish to stress that it is healthier by far to do that. Let me explain:

The difference between acting out and resolving is whether the actions are done in total dissociation from the unconscious dynamics, that is to say, in a trance state—as explained earlier in regard to the World War Two generation and the Tea Party—or whether there is at least a modicum of insight into it occurring as a result of things inside of oneself, not completely projected onto the outside.

The attitude that leads to total dissociation and acting out was expressed in a recent 2012 military movie, Act of Valor, which depicted Navy Seals engaged in anti-terrorism activity. At the end, the manner of dealing with pain recommended for these American soldiers and “men of valor” was to (paraphrasing) put all the pain in a box, shut it tight, press it down till it is smaller and smaller, and never, under any circumstances, let it out!

However, in non-acting-out—“acting inward” or taking back the projection—there is a tad of insight, as, for example, in the “overexamined life” of the “uncommitted” and the “self-analysis” of the young radicals of the Sixties generation. Similarly, the rock concert revivication of all current generations except the Fifties and WWII ones, as I’ve mentioned, is about personal experience and growth, and it is not about acting out on another; whereas an example of the extreme other end of that would be engaging, trance-like, in a mass killing against a perceived political enemy, as Loughner did, and as we do as nations in wars.

Another example of complete dissociation are the anti-abortion folks. They don’t have a clue of the connection between their own unconscious prenatal pain and the feelings they have about unborn others. They are not wrestling with their feelings, they are trying to change the world to conform to their defenses around those feelings—that is, they want the world to suppress that womb time out of existence like they have done to it in their own minds. The proof that it is acting out is that it is all about changing others’ behavior, and it involves imposing one’s inner pain on others forcefully and aggressively—which we have seen in its extreme form with the murders of physicians committed by anti-abortionists

Flaunting One’s Sickness Beats Hiding It—Generation X

The self-analysis of the Sixties Generation was followed by a different mode of struggling with perinatal pain by Generation X, which continues in abated form with the Millennial Generation. It was manifest rather strikingly with the Goth phenomenon and the vampire fascination that began in the Eighties, coincident with Gen X’s coming of age. Goth and vampirism show blatant perinatal dynamics that are not unfelt and completely repressed as in dissociation with its trance-state aggression against others. An example of Gen X perinatal acting out of these dynamics in total dissociation and trance state was given above in the anti-abortionists. But Goth and vampire culture show folks feeling and immersed consciously in these pushes and pulls and wrestling with them, trying to work them out as opposed to act them out.

Hey, It Was Tough!

This is rather clearly shown in looking at the “regression” in Europe, described by psychohistorians, which occurred in the Nineties. This behavior showed a bit of insight…and resolution happening…in that the baby song being hummed was about the very real hardships of being a baby. Therefore, an actual truth about their own lives was being faced there by those singing along with it. The song was not being used to deny or defend against those traumas.

One might suspect that as well in carrying around such blatant examples of regression as a pacifier. For someone in a more defended mode would be highly threatened by such an obvious symbol that they are really needy children inside. More defended folks would be terrified such overt behavior would make them look wussy or sissified—that is, look like that vulnerable, frightened baby that they really feel themselves to be but are doing their damnedest to hide from everyone. Imagine how those Navy Seals described above would feel walking around sucking on a pacifier, for example.

So in actually carrying around a pacifier these youth were not only displaying an insight into their feelings of sometimes being needy babies, on the inside, but are actually flaunting this awareness, as if to shame, or slap the face of, or be “in the face” of a generation of their parents—the Fifties Generation for the most part—who did not see their needs when they were babies—however effortfully and obviously they sought to demonstrate them. Thus the symbols needed to become more and more shocking and obvious.

Look at What You Did to Me!

For example: the jeans with requisite holes around the knees was screaming out, “You did not take care of me; you made me feel like a poor, orphaned, ragamuffin child.”

The piercing of mouths, nose, ears, and even tongues shouted,

“I am in pain, dammit! Can’t you see that when you stick needles in me as a little baby that I hurt? How can you be so insensitive? Can’t you see that when you refuse to breastfeed and thus nurture me orally that I am forever damaged there, ever painful there? What does it take, my sticking pins—safety pins make the point even more that it was when I was in diapers—in myself to make you see that I hurt there?”

And, of course, the black clothes, the hideous macabre makeup, and depressed, sullen expressions was exclaiming,

“Look, you might think we’re a wonderful family and everything is hunky-dory here; but I wish I were dead! I’ve felt so much pain, from in the womb, at birth, and right after birth, that I wish I’d never been born.

“Also, somehow in courting death, I have the feeling that I might somehow be reborn again into a good life, not like this place of torture and tears, right from the beginning, where my welcome into the world consisted of being drugged, handled like an object or piece of meat, blasted by bright lights, scrubbed by rough cloths, having needles and suctions stuck in me, blasted with noise, made to lie on cold stainless steel surfaces, and then bundled like a tamale so that I could not move…making me feel again like I was back in the hellish womb where in the later stages, for a time that felt like an eternity, I felt unable to move and was suffocating for lack of sufficient oxygen…and the only action that was possible was for me to scream my bloody head off for long periods of time or go into a stupor—which is what I did, alternating between them.

“Can’t you see that I’d rather be dead than live in such a world of insensitive zombies like you. Hell, in fact, to further drive the point home, I’ll even look and act like a zombie, I’ll try to appear as unfeeling and morose as you all seemed to me, especially at my birth. And I’ll go a step further and mirror yourselves back to you by becoming enamored of vampires….

“Can’t you see that you sucked my very life force, my blood, and turned me into an unfeeling vampire like you, by suffocating me in the womb, poisoning me with your toxic blood which you both sucked from me and then forced down my throat!”

The Consciousness Revolution They Don’t Want You to Notice. It’s Inconvenient for Them, Initially Hard for Us, and Hopefully Not Too Late

The “Inconvenient” Revolution – Unacknowledged Consciousness Evolution from the WWII Generation to the Millennials … More Suffering, Less Killing

Different Levels, Different Defenses

It is instructive at this time to note that Arthur Janov once compared the defenses that characterized the youth of the time—the late Sixties, early Seventies—with those of their parents and older people in general and came up with findings that amplify my own assertions here.

“Mind’s Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me With the Facts!”

Specifically, Janov found that older people—clients of his as well as others of whom he was aware—were characteristically more repressed, more split off, more prone to dissociation, more defended and, most importantly for our uses here, tended to use defenses of denial and obfuscation against inner information and impulses. Correspondingly, they tended to use drugs that repressed and blotted out reality, such as alcohol and nicotine; and they tended to be sexually repressed. They were also more compulsive. They tended to suppress their tension and hold it in for all their worth.

“How Can You Have Any Pudding if You Don’t Eat Your Meat?”

Truth was greatly feared, and all attempts were made to fend off incoming information that might threaten the delusional reality set of the conscious mind. This left them open to the characterization: “My mind’s made up! Don’t confuse me with the facts!” which was leveled at them by anti-Vietnam War protesters. In more recent years, it is no wonder they have engaged in a war against education and against Hollywood, as really they are at war with new information. Consequently, Janov found that the dominant mode of reaction, when threatened, was to act out aggressively against the supposed “oppressor.” Like prenates up against an overpowering womb, they are in constant war with overwhelm.

“Peace, Out.”

On the other hand, he found that his youthful clients—under 30—tended to use defenses of excess, release, and addiction, or to be unusually lacking in defense mechanisms. They were more impulsive. They tended to have weak barriers to incoming information, to be open to negative unconscious content, even at the expense of their self-esteem, and to be tension expressers. They were therefore more likely sexually promiscuous than repressed, and they tended to drugs that opened them to information and unconscious knowledge – such as marijuana and LSD.

Consequently they were less split off from their unconscious truth…though it made them uncomfortable…were less repressed, and, if anything, used defenses of masochism, self-denial, and self-inflicted aggression or depression. Truth was more important to them than emotional comfort. They tended to go out of their way to dig up negative information about themselves, and they accepted the low self-esteem and sense of self-worth that came with that kind of openness to truth.

Their delusional reality set — if it could be called that — entailed taking on the worries and cares of the world as their own, since their openness to their own cares and worries allowed them to empathize with others in obviously similar situations. When triggered into their pain, their dominant reaction was to take it inward and to take it out on themselves causing depression. In doing so they showed they would rather hurt themselves than hurt another.

Generation Gaps … Again

I don’t believe you need to be a rocket scientist to see that Janov was discovering an historical — one might say millennial — ”changing of the guard” as regards access to the unconscious, openness to personal truth, and lessening of the tendency to act out early trauma in violent or belligerent ways. The older generation had more tendencies to blame others, to find scapegoats for their ills, and to act out violently on them. The younger generation had more tendencies to look inward and to blame and punish themselves … and to prefer to hurt themselves before hurting another. They would more likely cut themselves than cut another; they would more likely commit suicide than kill.

The youthful generation might also become alcoholic, addicted to drugs, or do something else to injure themselves…rather than act it out on another.

Less Wars, More Suicides

And this “acting in,” as opposed to acting out, is indicated as well in the rise of teen suicides in recent decades. So you might say that the tradeoff we are currently getting is a reduction in the use of wars and racism to solve problems—that is, a reduction in the tendency to act out one’s Pain on others and to scapegoat. But, since the perinatal trauma is still there, and one is even more conscious of it, we have increased suicides. We have not had a world war or dropped a nuclear weapon on people since World War II; but we suffer unceasingly from relatively less loss of life in regional conflicts and the self-inflicted harm of air, water, and food contamination and from radiation poisoning from nuclear power plants. We have not had millions killed in genocides or purges since World War II, but we have suffered lesser loss of life in uprisings for democracy in China, Iran, Syria, Southeast Asia, and the Arab world. We have not had lynchings and racial riots have ceased, but we have suffered less lethal damage from culture and class wars, increased incarceration, creeping fascism, and struggles for economic justice.

Overall then, less death, more suffering. Less killing in wars, more suicides. Less large scale atrocities, more depression. On a collective level, we are taking our conflicts increasingly inward.

As deMause pointed out,

Those considered ‘neurotic’ in each age may often be a higher psychogenic mode than those considered ‘normal,’ only they must stand the anxiety of not sharing the group-fantasies of the age. [Footnote 7]

Away From Hubris: Nature Balances HerSelf

In this part on healing crisis, we have seen how perinatal acting out can be of two kinds: totally unconscious and trance-like, or semi-conscious with at least some access. We have looked at how a progression to more access to one’s perinatal underbellies has led to more acting in than acting out. We have seen how it has led to less violence and more depression.

Suffering Beats Dying.

At this point, one could make the point that the tradeoff is worth it: That individuals suffering more emotional pain and trauma is preferable to the horrors of world war and nuclear or genocidal holocaust…put bluntly, suffering beats dying.

But we are still looking at the situation from the microcosmic scale. We are talking and acting here like we are the only ones on Earth that matter.

This is natural of course, in that this is always the way we have thought of things—that is to say, as if all things were to be considered around the concerns of humans. This is called anthropocentrism—a form of species-centrism—in which Homo sapiens is considered the reason for the existence of the rest of the Universe.

With the Universe as awesomely and unimaginably large as it is, one might wonder at our hubris in our considering things in only this way—that is, from our perspective.

Likewise, with a mind-boggling number of species living or having lived on this planet alone—species numbering in the hundreds of millions, if not trillions—again one might question the validity of choosing the perspective of our species alone in making our analyses.

How ‘Bout We Step Outside?

Yet this is the way we have always done it. And this is the way I have been slanting my perspective so far in this book.

But now let us do something radically different. Let us walk out of ourselves — figuratively speaking — and seek to stand upon that Archimedean point from which we might view the events currently transpiring.

From such an attempted non-species-centric viewpoint let us view this emerging perinatal unconscious, with its wounded deer and centaurs, as it is currently manifesting in humans. However tenuous our attempt, let us at least try such a new-paradigm viewpoint. For certainly all old-paradigm ones—containing all the hubris of anthropocentrism that they do—have failed in their attempts to save our species and indeed have contributed to such a likelihood.

Let us attempt to see through the eyes of Gaia, now—from the viewpoint of Earth itself—as we look at how the current human predicament may in fact be an example of Nature balancing HerSelf. With both perspectives in mind, we can have a complete picture. We will return then to look at where there is cause for hope, what we are doing wrong as well as where there are positive trends and forces at work, and how we might let go of the self-defeating and instead apply ourselves to fostering the forces of good going on in global consciousness and the globe itself.

Continue with Eden Arise and a Message to All Wounded Deer and Centaurs: It’s a Consciousness Revolution, Aided by Gaia We Are Rediscovering Our Natural Self

Return to We Have Manifested a World That Mirrors and Re-Creates Our Traumatic Human Births: Life or Death Matters We Need to Face to Survive

Footnotes

1. “Zombie” by the Cranberries lyrics:

Another head hangs lowly
Time is slowly taken
And the violence causes silence
Who are we mistaken?
Let he see, it’s not me
It’s not my family
In your head, in your head
They are fightin!
With their tanks, and their bombs
And their bombs, and their guns
In your head, in your head
They are cryin!
In your head! In your head!
Zombie! Zombie! Zombie!
Whats in your head, in your head?
Zombie! Zombie! Zombie!
Another mother’s breaking
Heart is taken over.
When the violence causes silence
We must be mistaken.
It’s the same old theme
Since 1916!
In your head, in your head
They’re still fightin!
With their tanks, and their bombs
And their bombs, and their guns
In your head, in your head!
They are dyin!
In your head! In your head!
Zombie! Zombie! Zombie!
What’s in your head, in your head?
Zombie! Zombie! Zombie!

2. Alice Miller, For Your Own Good. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984; and Lloyd deMause, “Restaging Early Traumas in War and Social Violence.” The Journal of Psychohistory 23 (1995): 344-391. Reprinted, with permission, on Primal Spirit site as “Restaging Prenatal and Birth Traumas in War and Social Violence”)

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. 23. (Article reprinted, with permission, on this Primal Spirit website).

4. See “It’s the Attack on Privacy, Stupid! What Republicans and Pundits Don’t Get About Clinton’s Support,” on the Primal Spirit site, for more on the angry electorate and how it played out in the 1996 election.

5. Lloyd deMause, The Foundations of Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots, 1982, p. 139. See also “Are Some ‘Sick’ People More Healthy Than Normals?”

6. See also “Are Some ‘Sick’ People More Healthy Than Normals?” on the Primal Spirit site.

7. Lloyd deMause, The Foundations of Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots, 1982, p. 143.

Continue with Eden Arise and a Message to All Wounded Deer and Centaurs: It’s a Consciousness Revolution, Aided by Gaia We Are Rediscovering Our Natural Self

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Healing Crisis Means Needing to Get “Sicker” Before We Can Be “Weller” and Making It When You DON’T Fake It: Centaurs, Wounded Deer, and the Consciousness Revolution, Untold

Wounded Deer and Centaurs: The Hierarchy of Healing, An Inconvenient Revolution, and Flaunting One’s Sickness Is Healthier Than Hiding It

Apocalypse No! Chapter Eleven:
Healing Crisis – Getting “Sick” To Be Well

What’s in Your Head, Zombie? Being Really Sick, But Denying It — WWII Generation, Nazis, KKK, Right Wing, Tea Party

Birth Woes ~ World Wars and Can’t Know What You Don’t Know … What’s in Your Head, Zombie?

Getting Sick In Order to Get Well

What does this all mean? What does this portend? What might be the outcome of this emerging perinatal unconscious? In other words, consciousness evolution or apocalypse?

To answer what an emerging perinatal unconscious might mean on a macrocosmic or societal-global scale, it is helpful to look at what an emerging perinatal unconscious portends on the individual or microcosmic level.

What we have learned from the experiential modalities—holotropic breathwork™, primal therapy, rebirthing, vivation, and others like them—is that unerringly people need to get “sicker” before they can get well. This should not be news to psychoanalysts or any of the other mainstream psychotherapists or counselors either.

Healing Crisis

Basically, the underlying repressed material must come to the “surface,” must become more conscious…and obviously when it becomes more conscious its accompanying symptoms are exacerbated. This can be called a healing crisis in that the symptoms get worse, more obvious, more blatant; and there is a period of acting them out before integration and resolution happens.

One Must “Die” to One’s Sickness Before One Can Be “Born” Well

When Grof talks about birth/death scenarios in the perinatal unconscious, he is including these sorts of healings, where one must “die” to one’s sickness before one can be “reborn” into another way of being, without those sick patterns or symptoms.

Degrees of Disease

Dissociation – Completely Split Off

It’s YOU! YOU’re the f&^$#r!

We see a progression over the last century in which there was complete dissociation from the perinatal unconscious by those of the Fifties, the World-War-Two, and previous generations—hence complete projection of it on The Other—to lesser dissociations from it by the generations since, baby-boomer and afterward, which involve more awareness of it as being a part of oneself and less projection of it on The Other.

Wounded Deer

In this latter instance, there is more suffering from it and more individual acting out of it, so that in a sense one appears “sicker”—the perinatal is more obvious in one’s behavior, taking more individual forms, and it is more easily recognized and seen to be a personal problem…a “sickness.” Earlier I described this consciousness as being the way of the centaur, for it reflects Chiron, in ancient myths, having an ongoing wound but eventually becoming a teacher and healer.

To understand the ways the perinatal manifests depending upon one’s “closeness” to it, let us contrast the two extremes of being split off from it and being close to it.

Being Really Sick, But Denying It: WWII Generation, Nazis, KKK, Right Wing, Tea Party

Can’t Know That You Don’t Know

First let us take a look at what the perinatal appears like when it is completely split off from one’s conscious personality. This complete splitting off from the perinatal entails a complete repression and denial of it. Consequently, one has absolutely no access to it, and thus one is in total ignorance of the underlying motivations of one’s actions. One unconsciously acts out perinatal elements and traumas and manifests them in one’s behavior, rationalizing all the while that one has really good—non-perinatal, “real world”—reasons for why one is doing the things one is doing.

What”s in Your Head, Zombie?

Psychohistorians deem this state to be such an oblivious one that they use the term trance-state for it, fully intending all the implications and connotations that term engenders. That is, they are saying that people who are this repressed and split off do their acting zombie-like and out of motivations completely hidden to themselves. [Footnote 1]

Birth Woes ~ World Wars

In such total ignorance, and of course being totally ignorant that one is in ignorance, people in the past century have been able to act out their perinatal underbellies in ways to make such hideous and all-encompassing wars as World War I and World War II possible.

Leaving aside for a moment the myriad ways the perinatal has unconsciously been acted out in this century in creating the current situation in which we are on the brink of extinction—which can be considered the most serious consequences of this splitting off imaginable—simply focusing on this century’s major wars as evidence of perinatal acting-out alone is instructive.

The Nazis, in particular, were extreme in their dissociation from their perinatal, in their projection of it onto the Jews, and their consequent ability to act it out in horrific ways on them and others. Alice Miller and Lloyd deMause have each detailed the psychodynamics of this projection of primal pain—both perinatal and childhood—in the creation of the people that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis became in their adulthood. [Footnote 2]

The Nazis present us with the patterns of these processes of dissociation and projection in blatant and obvious relief. The way Nazis, especially in concentration camps, acted out perinatal trauma on their prisoners has been described in great detail by Grof as well. [Footnote 3]

Wounded Deer and Centaurs – Being “Weller,” But Appearing Sicker – Perinatal Awareness of Boomers and Beyond

Perinatal Boomers and Beyond—We Know THAT We Don’t Know…We Could Be Wrong.… But You Certainly Are

Being “Weller,” But Appearing Sicker—Generations Since

As I said, contrasted with being completely split off — dissociated — from one’s perinatal unconscious, as the Fifties and WWII Generation are predominantly, is being less cut off from it and having some access to its energies. This means that rather than being totally and blindly driven by these forces, which are acting on one indirectly, one actually feels them somewhat: One has a sense of their being a part of one’s experience as opposed to living within them so thoroughly that one has not a clue of their existence.

This means that one has more options than to act them out, but it also means they make one aware of one’s perinatal sickness. One feels them, suffers from them, struggles with them.

On the other hand, one does not suffer or struggle from unconscious energies that one is compliant with and that are completely manifest and supported in one’s social and cultural environments (for example, the worlds of the WWII and previous generations), however destructive that makes one’s actions.

Trancing Vs. Suffering

This difference may be likened to the difference between being a fish in water and totally oblivious to that fact versus living out of water and experiencing a downpour. When one is in less of a trance state, one is aware of alternative ways of being; in the example, that would be being dry. Consequently, one suffers and struggles amidst these forces and options…and one has at least some ability to choose one’s actions.

I do not believe it is simply coincidence that we are currently going from the Piscean Age — symbolized by fish in water — to the Aquarian Age — symbolized by a water bearer. This change was a big part of the consciousness during the Sixties, and I think we are beginning to see why: Going from a state where one is oblivious to the forces around one to a state where one can see the things one is dealing with (carrying the water) is no small thing.

It seems everything about evolution in humans has something to do with being between two mediums and the advance/the added perspective that comes with that, going all the way back to being the only ape to take to the water so much as to become partly aquatic—placing our species between water and land, halfway between a dolphin and a chimpanzee. I think we are heading toward being like the fairies and angels we imagine—halfway between land and air—but that is a whole other post.

Another analogy I’ve heard of this difference between the two modes of being completely oblivious and somewhat aware of one’s unconscious is that between living full-time in an arctic environment where one has to wear a heavy coat versus living in a milder climate. In the warmer climes, one is both aware of what it is like to not have a coat—one has capacity to feel better ways of being—as well as how bulky, obstructing, and uncomfortable it is to have the coat on—suffering more from it, suffering from one’s perinatal memories. Finally one is better able to decide when to have it on and not—one has more options. At some point I will discuss what this has to do with the increase of bipolar disorders, but not now.

One analogy I find especially provocative is the difference between watching a movie and being fully engrossed in it so that one does not know it is a movie, which is equivalent to acting out unconsciously from one’s early imprints. Compare this to watching the same movie with equal interest, but being aware that one is in a theater. You can see where in the second instance one would feel there are more options; and one would feel that one could step back before finding oneself caught up in horrific actions.

Wounded Deer and Centaurs

However, being aware of one’s discomfort (having “more access” to the perinatal), one suffers like the wounded deer—the innocent who feels things and so struggles with society’s sickness that many others are unconsciously perpetrating. But, with time and success in handling this pain, one can become the wounded healer—the Centaur.

Now, why and how would this occur? As I’ve said, some access to the perinatal and more blatant and direct acting it out is exhibited by many of the baby-boomer generation. This is in large part due to their having been raised in a way that required less in the way of ego defenses to keep their primal pain suppressed. Psychohistorians like Glen Davis and Lloyd deMause have detailed a slow advance of child-caring techniques, with generations since the WWII Generation being raised with more attention to their needs and less harshness and cruelty…increasingly more love.

“What the World Needs Now, Is…”

Before anyone begins thinking “permissive” or “spare the rod, spoil the child,” let me point out that I will be continually stressing how this development is not only a good thing (why wouldn’t love be good?) but is one of the few sources of hope for our future we really do have.

For less childhood pain and trauma means one is stronger and more able to face the even deeper perinatal pain.

Choosing Lesser Evils

At any rate, the extreme acting-out and total dissociation from the perinatal exhibited by the World-War-Two Generation was followed, in the generations coming after, by less relative dissociation and less horrific forms of acting it out. Quite simply, generations as a whole had better ability to refrain from the more blatantly evil act outs—wholesale murders and world wars, pogroms and genocide, inquisitions and witch-burning, racism and slavery. They were more able to choose seemingly milder forms of suffering and self-destruction — polluting the atmosphere, water, and food; population explosions and crowding of cities; and traffic jams.

The common everyday traffic jam is especially instructive of perinatal dynamics as traffic congestions replicate asphalt birth tunnels where one not only breathes exhaust fumes from trucks and other autos—fetal malnutrition—but also can become gridlock at any moment, thus re-creating the intense frustration and no-exit hopelessness, and rage, of BPM II.

Baby-Boomer Perinatal Awareness

Other examples of the scenery of modern times where the perinatal is manifesting but is less projected onto another:

We Know THAT We Don’t Know…We Could Be Wrong.

Many baby-boomers had enough access to their perinatal underbellies to question the absolute rightness of the Vietnam War and so they campaigned against it. This is indicative of closeness to the perinatal because it shows an ability to doubt one’s egocentric defenses—as given by society and family of origin—and to look at situations from the eyes of the Other.

So much was this evident in boomers that some were even able to see the Vietnam War through the eyes of the enemy—exemplified by Jane Fonda’s trip to Hanoi, the waving of North Vietnamese flags at demonstrations, and the carrying of little red books of the sayings of Chairman Mao tse Tung.

But It’s Clear You’re Wrong.

The baby-boomer—or Sixties—generation also indicate their closeness to their perinatal in their campaigns against some of the act-outs of the perinatal mentioned above: These include actions against pollution; a rejection of city life, with its gridlocks, pollution, and crowding , and a return to the country, in communes or otherwise; an awareness and rejection of polluted foods and creation of a natural and organic foods movement; and actions against global overpopulation including support for birth control, a pro-choice stance on abortion, and delaying of baby-making on their own parts along with a reduction in the size of their families.

The sexual excess that is characteristic of the perinatal, specifically BPM III, was evident in boomers’ free love and promiscuous sexual behavior.

Many more examples could be given. But the proof of their closeness to their unconscious dynamics lies not only in their actions—as mentioned above, in their more blatant acting them out or in their actual actions against the blatant acting out, both of which indicate closer access—but also in the study of their unconscious dynamics. As mentioned in Chapter Nine, Kenneth Keniston found in his study of the psychodynamics of the Sixties generation when they were in their youth an unusual amount of perinatal symbolism and self-analysis. (See “Raging to Reenter, Digging Under Ground.”)

Boomer Rage, Perinatally So

We Shall Overcome.

We also see perinatal feelings in the focus of the baby-boomers on empowerment. This word appears to come up in every area of their lives. It can be seen as the natural focus of a generation that feels itself inside to be a helpless fetus facing an overpowering obstruction of a womb.

Hence baby-boomers are of course also closer to the frustration, rebellion, and yes, rage, that is part of the perinatal complex. We saw it exhibited by them in their anger at authority in the Sixties, their rebellion against the Vietnam War.

“Get the &%$ OFF Me!”

Keep in mind that a huge aspect of the perinatal is feelings of restriction, thus frustration, and, consequently rage against large entities of obstruction—like the womb was in relation to the small and helpless fetus. In doing so, we see that the reason for their rage is simple and understandable.

Baby-boomers, characterized as being closer to their unconscious, especially the perinatal, have more access to their anger: This means they feel their anger and are less likely to act it out in more hidden, disguised, and dire ways such as war-making, racism, and anti-Semitism.

This does not mean their rage would not be troublesome. The perinatal lets no one get off scot free. We see lots of pre- and perinatal anger coming out in the last few decades in the phenomenon of the “angry electorate.” Let’s look at that next.

You Didn’t Really Believe Elections Had Anything to Do With Issues, Did You? Biting the Feeding Hand … Perinatal Rage and Panicky Electorate

Seriously? You Actually Think Elections Have Something to Do With Issues? Biting the Feeding Hand … Perinatal Rage and Panicky Electorate

More recently these baby-boomers have been coming into the triumphant phase of their lives. They make up the largest sector of the electorate, and their influence is reflected more as they come into positions of power in the media and elsewhere.

The Angry Electorate and Boomers

But their influence has been diffused and confused because of the anger of some of them. Their irrational rage—combined with the reactionary consciousness of the Fifties Generation, many of the Fifties Gen children of Yuppies-Gen Xers, and the remaining WWII folks—has most often skewed election results against the Boomers interests and their true desires. Though not the majority of boomers, enough of them expressed their rage to swing election results in favor of the other side.

1992 – “Mad as Hell”

Beginning in the 1992 and 1994 national elections, these baby-boomers exhibited their perinatal influences in contributing to the totally unexpected phenomenon of the “angry electorate.”

At the time, pundits and media analysts were at a total loss to explain the rage of the electorate that was affecting these elections. In 1992, they were totally surprised by the showing of three men in particular—Jerry Brown, Pat Buchanan, and Ross Perot—who seemed to have one thing in common: the angry tones and rebelliousness that characterized their speeches, as compared to others. [Footnote 4]

The demeanor of these candidates was at such odds with the other candidates that when Bill Clinton one night responded angrily to a comment by Jerry Brown about Hillary, Clinton’s wife, it was that part of the debate—of Clinton being angry, all issues aside—that made the news that night!

Though the rage of the electorate in 1992 caused the Brown, Perot, and Buchanan phenomena, it was split among them, so Clinton ended up winning. This of course was also OK with the baby-boomers in that (1) Clinton and Gore were baby-boomers like themselves and (2) in the race against Bush, Clinton was the challenger, and thus the rebel; and Bush was the “bum to be thrown out.”

However, this rage did not go away after the election, which highlights its having perinatal origins. In fact, after the shortest “honeymoon period” in history, by some accounts, it became directed at the most likely target/center—the President, Bill Clinton, himself.

We all know how despite the successes and progress of Clinton’s first year, he was especially singled out for ridicule and denigration by the media. He could not seem to do anything right, and the most incredibly outrageous behaviors were attributed to him.

1994 – “Throw the Bums Out … Again.”

This rage spilled over into the next year and, sure enough, during the midterm election—the issues be damned—the angry electorate was in a mood to “throw the bums out” again. It did not matter the party….I do not claim that all those of my generation are always as politically astute as they are angry.

The Republicans called it a “revolution.” It was simply the acting out of an electorate in the throes of perinatal feelings—that is, feelings of frustration, being “tied up” by red tape, an inability to go forward…that is, up the economic ladder—wages had been stagnating since the early 80s…being overcontrolled and pushed around by regulations…big government being the big mother womb keeping the fetus locked in and unable to move…and out of all this, the consequent anger and rage.

1996 and 1998 — “To Hell With You!”

At any rate, succeeding elections bear out this analysis of an angry electorate. In 1996, despite the much ballyhooed “Republican Revolution,” sure enough, the electorate was spoiling to “throw the bums out” again—only this time it was the Republican Congress. So there were Democratic gains at the time.

And in 1998, when everything pointed to a huge Republican landslide because of the Lewinsky scandal, the electorate again showed their rebellion and anger toward both the pundits and the Republicans who had been lambasting them with details of the scandal for nearly a year by giving the Democrats gains again! [Footnote 4]

2006, 2008, and 2010 — Panicky Electorate

In 2006, 2008, and 2010, it was an angry electorate reeling against oppression; and in the case of 2010, doing it mindlessly, against their own interests. If there were not perinatal charge to all this, Americans would not be so irrational about their choices.

Perinatal Rage

People have had good reasons to feel oppressed since the Eighties when Reagan began the giveaways to the rich and the budget cutbacks, continuing to this day, that have caused the masses to feel constricted and oppressed.

Yet, if this did not result in their being perinatally overloaded so that they cannot reason, they would not have been able to be led to fight their own interests as they were in 2010 and in an ongoing way as exemplified by the Tea Party and the success of right-wing agendas.

Reacting, Too Angry and Confused to Think

Another aspect of this irrationality on both sides of the political spectrum has to do with this idea that there is no difference between the two major parties. Feeling oppressed perinatally is characterized by a pressure from all sides simultaneously. There is an inability to distinguish or discriminate between forces that are helpful and those that are dire, as any and all developments seem threatening in situations of crisis. In a situation of overwhelm, further, there is an inability to think clearly. One just fights back, explodes, reacts. It’s no coincidence that righties are called reactionaries.

Biting the Feeding Hand

The upshot is an inability, under the pressure of perinatal feelings, provoked endlessly by actual oppression economically, environmentally, socially, and culturally, to rail against any authority, to bite the hand that feeds one. This is exactly like the panicked swimmer who in danger of drowning fights off his or her rescuer.

Can anyone at this point still maintain that the politics of the last few decades had anything at all to do with ideology or issues?

Millennials and Their Opposites – Fifties Generation Tea Partyers … How OWS and Tea Party Movements Are Generationally and Perinatally Different

Millennial Gen Occupiers and Eisenhower Gen Tea Partyers Are Perinatally As Well As Generationally Opposed

Right-Wing “Hate Groups,” the Tea Party, and the Fifties Generation: Perinatally Oblivious

One might also note the rise of “hate groups” occurring at the same time as the phenomenon of the angry electorate. Hate groups fill their ranks from folks on the extreme right and their actions are exemplified in the Oklahoma bombing tragedy and more recently in the Tea Party.

Perinatally Clueless

But notice again then that these hate groups are always on the extreme right of the political spectrum and thus exemplify a World-War-Two mindset in relation to their perinatal unconscious: Specifically, the mindset is one of being completely cut off from one’s unconscious dynamics and being in total denial of unconscious motivations so that one can have the complete certitude—lacking any access to the unconscious which would give rise to doubts—that makes violent actions possible.

However the reason for bringing up the hate groups is to show how much their actions as well are dominated by perinatal—in their case, totally unconscious—dynamics.

For without exception their reasons for rising up against the government—representing the overwhelming womb—has to do with frustrations, like the trapped fetus feels, in regards to “oppressive” taxes, governmental red tape, laws, and other regulations that they feel restrict their freedom…to move freely, as one wanted to but couldn’t, in the womb.

Tea Party and hate group ranks are prevalent with Fifties Generation folks. The Eisenhower Generation — after the WWII Gen and before Boomers — were born just before or during WWII. They are mired in prenatal fears coming from the fact that their parents were living through such distressing times as WWII and the Great Depression when they were inside their mothers. They were “marinated” in the womb with fear and insecurity. They also were not brought up with the societal advance in child-rearing the next generation of boomers, and those afterward, would be granted. So it is understandable they would be both cut off from perinatal access yet full of perinatal pushes and pulls to act out in confused and self-destructive ways.

Perinatal Access of Millennials

Being Boomer Kids, Wouldn’t You Kind of Expect That?

Now on the other end of this perinatal spectrum we have the most recent generational cohort to be making a mark. The Millennial, or Baby-Boomer Echo generation, show the same inner access as their Boomer parents. They demonstrate as well their parents’ consequent refusal to act it out on a larger scale: It has been said that the greatest concerns of those in this generation, now in their twenties and thirties, are the environment and racism-bigotry.

Activist, Progressive

They show the progressive bent of their parents, also, in their having a lot to do with giving America its first African-American president. And to the environment and minority rights, we need to add classism, economic fairness, and human rights because of their phenomenal outpouring of support in the past year for Occupy Wall Street and for union rights in Wisconsin and other states. They are showing global strength in opposing fascism, economic injustice, political oppression, and human rights abuses in Occupy and Arab Spring movements. They’ve filled massive demonstrations against the draconian economic policies of Republicans in Wisconsin.

Climate Change and The Environment

We know how pollution and action against pollution indicates a closeness to one’s perinatal. To put it another way, it is clear that only a total denial and disconnect between one’s consciousness and one’s unconscious perinatal dynamics would allow one to act it out unconsciously in the creation of pollution and in the denial of it as a problem or a mindless neglect of it. So the fact that these Baby-Boomer children, the Millennials, are so cognizant, concerned, and active in relation to global pollution and climate change shows their lack of denial of this perinatal act-out.

Multicultural, Resisting Racism and Oppression

But what of racism and bigotry? How is this an indication of a closeness to the perinatal. There are several ways in which this is so. As mentioned, a closeness to the perinatal allows one to doubt one’s given defenses and to glimpse alternate perspectives—in particular to look at things from the eyes of The Other.

In this way, the baby-boomer echo generation are able to see oppression, injustice, and unfairness as it is played out in the lives of minorities who don’t share their (predominantly) middle-class advantages. They simply don’t “get” racism, sexism, or bigotry of any kind; it is incomprehensible to them. They strongly oppose imperialism, colonialism, or oppression of any kind. Relatedly, they support animal rights and oppose animal abuse and cruelty. They don’t understand torture and violence against fellow planetmates.

Naturally they were helped in that awareness by the gains of previous decades, beginning in the Sixties, which had them growing up with diversity of racial and ethnic heritages—seeing things multiculturally not narrowly—in their schools and in the omnipresent media. They grew up with the environmental awareness that was set in motion in the Sixties; they don’t know of a world before recycling and energy conservation. Activism, demonstrations, and political action have been a part of their lives since they were born, unlike the several generations that preceded them and even their Boomer parents who grew up in a politically castrated Fifties.

But there is another, stronger element. This is the factor of oppression and unfairness itself. We experience compression (oppression), and frustration at our attempts to go forward, and what feels like hopeless unfairness and injustice, when in the throes of BPM II birth trauma. To see these facets of the fates of minorities, as in racism, or gender or sexual bias, points to this echo generation’s closeness to their own perinatal oppression; hence their ability to empathize with oppressed minorities.

This ability to realistically sense and respond to oppression is also the reason they would throw themselves in heartily in defense of unions, an increasingly oppressed middle class, and public sector employees.

Of Goths, Gen X, Anti-Abortionists, Pacifiers, and a Hierarchy of Healing … You Make It When You DON’T Fake It

Flaunting One’s Sickness Is Healthier Than Hiding It … Gen X, Goths, Pacifiers, and The Hierarchy of Healing

A Hierarchy of Healing?

This idea that those close to their unconscious conflicts are more likely to act them out blatantly goes completely against one of DeMause’s tenets. He wrote, “The higher the psychogenic mode of the psychoclass, the less it is necessary for it to act out its conflicts.” [Footnote 5]

However this is exactly the crux of my difference with his theory and is a central point I am making. For from my perspective, the higher the mode of child-caring equals the less the defenses. Hence, the more it is likely that that generation’s conflicts will be close to the surface, seeking resolution … like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory. We might want to call it a hierarchy of healing theory. [Footnote 6]

In other words, our observing the supposed “acting out” of an underlying trauma does not mean that the group or person in question is actually or, at least completely, “acting it out” and defending against it. It may be that that group is resolving, healing, or integrating it—taking it inward rather than acting it out…in the world, on others…whether to a small or great extent. Using the analogy of Pandora’s Jar, described earlier, they are opening the jar, at least a little. And I disagree with deMause in that I wish to stress that it is healthier by far to do that. Let me explain:

The difference between acting out and resolving is whether the actions are done in total dissociation from the unconscious dynamics, that is to say, in a trance state—as explained earlier in regard to the World War Two generation and the Tea Party—or whether there is at least a modicum of insight into it occurring as a result of things inside of oneself, not completely projected onto the outside.

The attitude that leads to total dissociation and acting out was expressed in a recent 2012 military movie, Act of Valor, which depicted Navy Seals engaged in anti-terrorism activity. At the end, the manner of dealing with pain recommended for these American soldiers and “men of valor” was to (paraphrasing) put all the pain in a box, shut it tight, press it down till it is smaller and smaller, and never, under any circumstances, let it out!

However, in non-acting-out—“acting inward” or taking back the projection—there is a tad of insight, as, for example, in the “overexamined life” of the “uncommitted” and the “self-analysis” of the young radicals of the Sixties generation. Similarly, the rock concert revivication of all current generations except the Fifties and WWII ones, as I’ve mentioned, is about personal experience and growth, and it is not about acting out on another; whereas an example of the extreme other end of that would be engaging, trance-like, in a mass killing against a perceived political enemy, as Loughner did, and as we do as nations in wars.

Another example of complete dissociation are the anti-abortion folks. They don’t have a clue of the connection between their own unconscious prenatal pain and the feelings they have about unborn others. They are not wrestling with their feelings, they are trying to change the world to conform to their defenses around those feelings—that is, they want the world to suppress that womb time out of existence like they have done to it in their own minds. The proof that it is acting out is that it is all about changing others’ behavior, and it involves imposing one’s inner pain on others forcefully and aggressively—which we have seen in its extreme form with the murders of physicians committed by anti-abortionists

Flaunting One’s Sickness Beats Hiding It—Generation X

The self-analysis of the Sixties Generation was followed by a different mode of struggling with perinatal pain by Generation X, which continues in abated form with the Millennial Generation. It was manifest rather strikingly with the Goth phenomenon and the vampire fascination that began in the Eighties, coincident with Gen X’s coming of age. Goth and vampirism show blatant perinatal dynamics that are not unfelt and completely repressed as in dissociation with its trance-state aggression against others. An example of Gen X perinatal acting out of these dynamics in total dissociation and trance state was given above in the anti-abortionists. But Goth and vampire culture show folks feeling and immersed consciously in these pushes and pulls and wrestling with them, trying to work them out as opposed to act them out.

Hey, It Was Tough!

This is rather clearly shown in looking at the “regression” in Europe, described by psychohistorians, which occurred in the Nineties. This behavior showed a bit of insight…and resolution happening…in that the baby song being hummed was about the very real hardships of being a baby. Therefore, an actual truth about their own lives was being faced there by those singing along with it. The song was not being used to deny or defend against those traumas.

One might suspect that as well in carrying around such blatant examples of regression as a pacifier. For someone in a more defended mode would be highly threatened by such an obvious symbol that they are really needy children inside. More defended folks would be terrified such overt behavior would make them look wussy or sissified—that is, look like that vulnerable, frightened baby that they really feel themselves to be but are doing their damnedest to hide from everyone. Imagine how those Navy Seals described above would feel walking around sucking on a pacifier, for example.

So in actually carrying around a pacifier these youth were not only displaying an insight into their feelings of sometimes being needy babies, on the inside, but are actually flaunting this awareness, as if to shame, or slap the face of, or be “in the face” of a generation of their parents—the Fifties Generation for the most part—who did not see their needs when they were babies—however effortfully and obviously they sought to demonstrate them. Thus the symbols needed to become more and more shocking and obvious.

Look at What You Did to Me!

For example: the jeans with requisite holes around the knees was screaming out, “You did not take care of me; you made me feel like a poor, orphaned, ragamuffin child.”

The piercing of mouths, nose, ears, and even tongues shouted,

“I am in pain, dammit! Can’t you see that when you stick needles in me as a little baby that I hurt? How can you be so insensitive? Can’t you see that when you refuse to breastfeed and thus nurture me orally that I am forever damaged there, ever painful there? What does it take, my sticking pins—safety pins make the point even more that it was when I was in diapers—in myself to make you see that I hurt there?”

And, of course, the black clothes, the hideous macabre makeup, and depressed, sullen expressions was exclaiming,

“Look, you might think we’re a wonderful family and everything is hunky-dory here; but I wish I were dead! I’ve felt so much pain, from in the womb, at birth, and right after birth, that I wish I’d never been born.

“Also, somehow in courting death, I have the feeling that I might somehow be reborn again into a good life, not like this place of torture and tears, right from the beginning, where my welcome into the world consisted of being drugged, handled like an object or piece of meat, blasted by bright lights, scrubbed by rough cloths, having needles and suctions stuck in me, blasted with noise, made to lie on cold stainless steel surfaces, and then bundled like a tamale so that I could not move…making me feel again like I was back in the hellish womb where in the later stages, for a time that felt like an eternity, I felt unable to move and was suffocating for lack of sufficient oxygen…and the only action that was possible was for me to scream my bloody head off for long periods of time or go into a stupor—which is what I did, alternating between them.

“Can’t you see that I’d rather be dead than live in such a world of insensitive zombies like you. Hell, in fact, to further drive the point home, I’ll even look and act like a zombie, I’ll try to appear as unfeeling and morose as you all seemed to me, especially at my birth. And I’ll go a step further and mirror yourselves back to you by becoming enamored of vampires….

“Can’t you see that you sucked my very life force, my blood, and turned me into an unfeeling vampire like you, by suffocating me in the womb, poisoning me with your toxic blood which you both sucked from me and then forced down my throat!”

The Consciousness Revolution They Don’t Want You to Notice. It’s Inconvenient for Them, Initially Hard for Us, and Hopefully Not Too Late

The “Inconvenient” Revolution – Unacknowledged Consciousness Evolution from the WWII Generation to the Millennials … More Suffering, Less Killing

Different Levels, Different Defenses

It is instructive at this time to note that Arthur Janov once compared the defenses that characterized the youth of the time—the late Sixties, early Seventies—with those of their parents and older people in general and came up with findings that amplify my own assertions here.

“Mind’s Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me With the Facts!”

Specifically, Janov found that older people—clients of his as well as others of whom he was aware—were characteristically more repressed, more split off, more prone to dissociation, more defended and, most importantly for our uses here, tended to use defenses of denial and obfuscation against inner information and impulses. Correspondingly, they tended to use drugs that repressed and blotted out reality, such as alcohol and nicotine; and they tended to be sexually repressed. They were also more compulsive. They tended to suppress their tension and hold it in for all their worth.

“How Can You Have Any Pudding if You Don’t Eat Your Meat?”

Truth was greatly feared, and all attempts were made to fend off incoming information that might threaten the delusional reality set of the conscious mind. This left them open to the characterization: “My mind’s made up! Don’t confuse me with the facts!” which was leveled at them by anti-Vietnam War protesters. In more recent years, it is no wonder they have engaged in a war against education and against Hollywood, as really they are at war with new information. Consequently, Janov found that the dominant mode of reaction, when threatened, was to act out aggressively against the supposed “oppressor.” Like prenates up against an overpowering womb, they are in constant war with overwhelm.

“Peace, Out.”

On the other hand, he found that his youthful clients—under 30—tended to use defenses of excess, release, and addiction, or to be unusually lacking in defense mechanisms. They were more impulsive. They tended to have weak barriers to incoming information, to be open to negative unconscious content, even at the expense of their self-esteem, and to be tension expressers. They were therefore more likely sexually promiscuous than repressed, and they tended to drugs that opened them to information and unconscious knowledge – such as marijuana and LSD.

Consequently they were less split off from their unconscious truth…though it made them uncomfortable…were less repressed, and, if anything, used defenses of masochism, self-denial, and self-inflicted aggression or depression. Truth was more important to them than emotional comfort. They tended to go out of their way to dig up negative information about themselves, and they accepted the low self-esteem and sense of self-worth that came with that kind of openness to truth.

Their delusional reality set — if it could be called that — entailed taking on the worries and cares of the world as their own, since their openness to their own cares and worries allowed them to empathize with others in obviously similar situations. When triggered into their pain, their dominant reaction was to take it inward and to take it out on themselves causing depression. In doing so they showed they would rather hurt themselves than hurt another.

Generation Gaps … Again

I don’t believe you need to be a rocket scientist to see that Janov was discovering an historical — one might say millennial — ”changing of the guard” as regards access to the unconscious, openness to personal truth, and lessening of the tendency to act out early trauma in violent or belligerent ways. The older generation had more tendencies to blame others, to find scapegoats for their ills, and to act out violently on them. The younger generation had more tendencies to look inward and to blame and punish themselves … and to prefer to hurt themselves before hurting another. They would more likely cut themselves than cut another; they would more likely commit suicide than kill.

The youthful generation might also become alcoholic, addicted to drugs, or do something else to injure themselves…rather than act it out on another.

Less Wars, More Suicides

And this “acting in,” as opposed to acting out, is indicated as well in the rise of teen suicides in recent decades. So you might say that the tradeoff we are currently getting is a reduction in the use of wars and racism to solve problems—that is, a reduction in the tendency to act out one’s Pain on others and to scapegoat. But, since the perinatal trauma is still there, and one is even more conscious of it, we have increased suicides. We have not had a world war or dropped a nuclear weapon on people since World War II; but we suffer unceasingly from relatively less loss of life in regional conflicts and the self-inflicted harm of air, water, and food contamination and from radiation poisoning from nuclear power plants. We have not had millions killed in genocides or purges since World War II, but we have suffered lesser loss of life in uprisings for democracy in China, Iran, Syria, Southeast Asia, and the Arab world. We have not had lynchings and racial riots have ceased, but we have suffered less lethal damage from culture and class wars, increased incarceration, creeping fascism, and struggles for economic justice.

Overall then, less death, more suffering. Less killing in wars, more suicides. Less large scale atrocities, more depression. On a collective level, we are taking our conflicts increasingly inward.

As deMause pointed out,

Those considered ‘neurotic’ in each age may often be a higher psychogenic mode than those considered ‘normal,’ only they must stand the anxiety of not sharing the group-fantasies of the age. [Footnote 7]

Away From Hubris: Nature Balances HerSelf

In this part on healing crisis, we have seen how perinatal acting out can be of two kinds: totally unconscious and trance-like, or semi-conscious with at least some access. We have looked at how a progression to more access to one’s perinatal underbellies has led to more acting in than acting out. We have seen how it has led to less violence and more depression.

Suffering Beats Dying.

At this point, one could make the point that the tradeoff is worth it: That individuals suffering more emotional pain and trauma is preferable to the horrors of world war and nuclear or genocidal holocaust…put bluntly, suffering beats dying.

But we are still looking at the situation from the microcosmic scale. We are talking and acting here like we are the only ones on Earth that matter.

This is natural of course, in that this is always the way we have thought of things—that is to say, as if all things were to be considered around the concerns of humans. This is called anthropocentrism—a form of species-centrism—in which Homo sapiens is considered the reason for the existence of the rest of the Universe.

With the Universe as awesomely and unimaginably large as it is, one might wonder at our hubris in our considering things in only this way—that is, from our perspective.

Likewise, with a mind-boggling number of species living or having lived on this planet alone—species numbering in the hundreds of millions, if not trillions—again one might question the validity of choosing the perspective of our species alone in making our analyses.

How ‘Bout We Step Outside?

Yet this is the way we have always done it. And this is the way I have been slanting my perspective so far in this book.

But now let us do something radically different. Let us walk out of ourselves — figuratively speaking — and seek to stand upon that Archimedean point from which we might view the events currently transpiring.

From such an attempted non-species-centric viewpoint let us view this emerging perinatal unconscious as it is currently manifesting in humans. However tenuous our attempt, let us at least try such a new-paradigm viewpoint. For certainly all old-paradigm ones—containing all the hubris of anthropocentrism that they do—have failed in their attempts to save our species and indeed have contributed to such a likelihood.

Let us attempt to see through the eyes of Gaia, now—from the viewpoint of Earth itself—as we look at how the current human predicament may in fact be an example of Nature balancing HerSelf. With both perspectives in mind, we can have a complete picture. We will return then to look at where there is cause for hope, what we are doing wrong as well as where there are positive trends and forces at work, and how we might let go of the self-defeating and instead apply ourselves to fostering the forces of good going on in global consciousness and the globe itself.

Footnotes

1. “Zombie” by the Cranberries lyrics:

Another head hangs lowly
Time is slowly taken
And the violence causes silence
Who are we mistaken?
Let he see, it’s not me
It’s not my family
In your head, in your head
They are fightin!
With their tanks, and their bombs
And their bombs, and their guns
In your head, in your head
They are cryin!
In your head! In your head!
Zombie! Zombie! Zombie!
Whats in your head, in your head?
Zombie! Zombie! Zombie!
Another mother’s breaking
Heart is taken over.
When the violence causes silence
We must be mistaken.
It’s the same old theme
Since 1916!
In your head, in your head
They’re still fightin!
With their tanks, and their bombs
And their bombs, and their guns
In your head, in your head!
They are dyin!
In your head! In your head!
Zombie! Zombie! Zombie!
What’s in your head, in your head?
Zombie! Zombie! Zombie!

2. Alice Miller, For Your Own Good. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984; and Lloyd deMause, “Restaging Early Traumas in War and Social Violence.” The Journal of Psychohistory 23 (1995): 344-391. Reprinted, with permission, on Primal Spirit site as “Restaging Prenatal and Birth Traumas in War and Social Violence”)

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. 23. (Article reprinted, with permission, on this Primal Spirit website).

4. See “It’s the Attack on Privacy, Stupid! What Republicans and Pundits Don’t Get About Clinton’s Support,” on the Primal Spirit site, for more on the angry electorate and how it played out in the 1996 election.

5. Lloyd deMause, The Foundations of Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots, 1982, p. 139. See also “Are Some ‘Sick’ People More Healthy Than Normals?”

6. See also “Are Some ‘Sick’ People More Healthy Than Normals?” on the Primal Spirit site.

7. Lloyd deMause, The Foundations of Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots, 1982, p. 143.

Continue with Apocalypse – No! Chapter Twelve: Through Gaia’s Eyes – Nature Balances HerSelf

Return to Apocalypse No! Chapter Ten: Birth Wars, World Woes

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Giving the Finger to Armageddon – Some People Are Just Tougher Than Death … Or So They Think: A Conversation on the Eve of Apocalypse

Conversation on the Eve of Apocalypse Between a Boomer and a Gen Xer:
An Anatomy, in Story Form, of the Machismo Attitude Toward Our End

Facing Apocalypse, People Are Becoming Zombies

People are becoming zombies in the face of their death, their own upcoming suffering, not to mention the death of all life on this planet. Do an internet search on apocalypse and note how little, if anything, is posted about the urgency or emergency of our current situation.

It comes across as a big party on a South Pacific Island in a hotel that everyone there knows will not survive the incoming tsunami or killer hurricane. But in the meantime they’re drinking themselves silly, drugging…gonna party their way to the end. That is not a rational response to the end of all life.

Other responses on the apocalypse have machismo aspects to them. In fact, most sites about apocalypse have a macho message in common.

Macho, Macho Man

You are not going to believe it, but check it out: The theme…now look deeply, if you’re not used to picking up on people’s motives off hand…the theme goes something like this:

Well, folks, we’re all gonna die. But big deal. I’m so fucking macho, I laugh at death! Here, let me prove it to you. Come here, death, right up to my face!

See, everybody. How I look directly into this face, this face of death! Now watch. Watch as I spit, spit directly into this face. Ptoo! (spits) See that? So who cares!? Not convinced? Then watch and I’ll show you. See the face of death that I’m holding and facing? Watch as I laugh in its face, laugh directly in its face. HA! Hahahahahaha! See? Told you.

Doing it, Tron style

Well, that is the way it comes across: “Apocalypse? Let me show you how tough I am.” Not, “What can we do about it, to stop it?”

So, dear listeners, are you able to make out the distress beneath such pronouncements? Granted, this bravado is worthless as to either reversing apocalypse or even showing some sort of inspired vision in which it can be made acceptable or noble if not avoidable. For those who do not see it yet, in this chapter and its accompanying video I try a little fantasy dialogue to bring out what I think is going on, much of the time, and keeping us from acting rationally about this imminent emergency of all dire emergencies possible.

Witness me as I trip over in cyber-land to something I call Amalgamated Macho-Apocalypto-dot-com. I’m about to go over to the webmaster of that site, in imagination and, well, just run a question or two past him. Tune in and catch what ensues. It should be revealing. So you click on the gadget above, while I fly myself over. See you there!

Spitter Dude

Ok, I’m here. “Hey, yo dude! Deathface spitter and laugher!”

“You… You know me…?”

“Hell yea. You’re in Google, you know. I understand you’re surprised because, believe me, tagged with apocalypse, like you, well, let’s just say I don’t have to lock the doors either. But there’s probably more interest in you than what I do.”

“Really, more interest in me? I like that! What do you do then?”

“On my site I tell the truth: you know, tell them that it’s very very bad and looks impossible unless people wake up on a massive scale and decide unequivocally to live. Stuff like that.”

“Ha. Hahahahaaha.”

“Ok, but just no spittin. I’ve seen your routine.”

“No, no. Nothing of the sort. No, really, I thought that kind of stuff died in the Sixties with all the ‘kumbaya’ and ‘we shall overcome’ baloney.”

Why’s Everybody Hatin’ on Kumbaya?

“Well, not that it’ll make a difference on you, but yeah, I’m that old and have had many high moments of unity in among the angels of humans coming forth to reunite—what you refer to as kumbaya. And by the way, I like the song, I like the Lord, what’s everybody pissed at? As for the other, we overcame. I’ve really dug being me because I’ve had the pleasure of being part of the things that made the world better; and I can’t imagine a better high or feeling of fulfillment.

“But I’m not here to dispute with you. I’m an old fart who got to live in rich times and participate in them. You’re a young, well, younger-than-me person, who was apparently born at around the time all the things my kind were working for were deemed a threat to the status quo. And so the powers-that-be created the misinformation, scapegoating, and slander of my generation. Then they delivered to generations following mine the machismo cynicism with its connotation that it was better to have that than feeling life. They seeded you with the idea that those who experienced life…as opposed to those who accepted their prepackaged attitudes of cynicism and mean-spiritedness…well, we were wusses, saps, effeminate, feminate, and all that.

“So, sorry, that my generation’s threat to the moneyed powers was so scary to them that they reacted with the all out effort to create a generation that would be the opposite of us, and so you were brainwashed and misinformed and lied to. So, so very sorry. I wish I could say, “my bad,” but well it was “our good” that resulted in “their bad,” and I don’t want to be like them and continue to uphold their matrix of misinformation. So, anyway, sorry.”

“Well, I shoulda Tivo’d that for later. That was waaaay too much and too many twist and turns for me to follow. But you called yourself an old fart. That part I got. So since you’ve placed yourself below me, I guess I’m at ease with your being here, whatever it is.”

Who Ya Talkin to, Dude?

“Well, your Dudeness, your Fearlessness Most Strong and Mighty, I have a few humble questions to ask of you,” I say.

“Ok, old fart, go ahead.”

“I see clearly that you’re showing the world you don’t fear death. But how is that going to help the world any. I mean if everyone felt like you…let’s say that was your aim…well then we’d all go down, patting each other on the back on how it doesn’t matter, but never to be heard of again!”

“Your point?” he says, irritated.

“Are you saying my site isn’t offering anything to the world? So who the hell says a site has to be doing anything for anybody or anything? Let alone this world…

“This is me! I’m expressing me! What else is there to do?”

“Ok, thank you. That explains a lot. But something comes to me. May I?”

“Sure,” says he.

“You say that, ‘this is me.’ Number one. Right?”

“Right.” Annoyed again.

“Ok. Now, you know there are not a lot of people watching. But your intention is not to influence any people. Number two, right?”

“Yep, that’s right.”

“But you wouldn’t be putting up a website if you didn’t want somebody to know who you are. I mean, you could say it in the mirror, or in your bedroom. You wouldn’t be making it available unless there’s somebody, persons, that you hope would hear you. Would that not be number three, right?”

“Well, you old farts really are big on this self-analytical crap, aren’t you? Well, I ain’t no pussy, but I am man enough to say that I couldn’t escape that logic that…yea, I am, inside, wanting to share, and share myself to some, to some…well, I guess, I just wouldn’t mind if, uh,really by accident of course, some people, who never got to know me this way, might see me and understand…well, uh…”

Let’s Play a Mind Game.

“Oh, understand. Nothing wrong with that. But, uh, how ’bout you indulge an old fart and just try out something that I think will be a real gas for you, er, perhaps I should say, phat, er, uh…. Look, you can trust me to take the time to play a little, let’s say, mind-game. It’s lots of fun.”

“Haha. Suure, ok. You crack me up, ya old fart. Gonna be a real gas. Ya can bet your damn asscrack that you’d lost me for sure until you’d made real quick to explain that one, hehe.”

So, I say, “Yep, that’s a little mind-game prank that was played on me. Well, anyway, uh…. Well, uh, I just want you to allow yourself to open your mind to the greater intentions—intentions you have for doing this, the greater visions. Now, don’t think just yet, you’ll only try to make things up. This is easier than that.”

“Ok.”

“Ok, now. You say that…being honest and only rational after all…that of course you wouldn’t be doing this expression of yourself on the internet if you didn’t have some desire to share or show this part of you with somebody or somebodies in the world…right? So far?”

“Yea, get on with it, I’ve already said that.”

“Ok, fine. Now, here’s the fun part. I want you to have that desire…to have it clearer…the clearer you can make it, y’know, the more likely it will happen. So let me help you a little here. Now just clooose your eyes. No, no, don’t look that way at me, nothing fishy going on…. You just ain’t going to be able to see your desires with all the distractions that the sights around us present. Give it a chance. Believe me, I’m not trying to lay any trip on you….”

“Ok, that’s better.”

Who’s Your Real Audience?

“Now. On the internet, we never see our audience. But we all imagine and wonder who they might be and what kind of people they are. Don’t you, too?”

“Yea, sure.”

“Well, we’re gonna try do something like that. Instead of an internet with no audience, well, imagine you’re in an auditorium. It can still be an internet to you…and you’re making the same points…and you’re really getting into it, like: I SPIT (ptoo!) in the face of death…and I LAUGH uproariously in the face of death.”

“How’s it goin?”

“Yea, I’m doing it, really into it…like it!”

“Ok. How does it make you feel?”

“Strong, fucking strong, damn fucking strong.”

“Greeeat. You’re feeling strong, real fucking strong. Feel as fucking strong as you can!”

“Great, yea, all right, I’m so fucking strong, ain’t no mother-fucking dudes as strong as me…I spit, I laugh….”

“Very, very wonderful. Enjoy, enjoy that! … Now… add one more thing…. One more thing, make it even better…. Remember, you’re in an auditorium, and here you can see your audience. Stay with that ‘spittin at death’ strength. You’re strong! … Now, containing all that strength…all that bigger than death power…cast your eyes down below you to the people in the audience…you’re at your peak!…the people that you really wanted to show. You’re strong, you’re powerful, more powerful than death, right?”

“Fucking right, I am.”

“Ok, now. Show them, and tell me who they are…one by one…look around…slowly…who do you really…really want to show who you really are…who couldn’t see this before in you…but now, they wouldn’t be able to miss it? Take your time….”

“No need to take time! Ha! I’m fucking really strong now. And there’s my bitch ex-girlfriend. Ha! Now, she doesn’t seem so high and mighty. She looks scared now. Ha! She left me. Took off with some some guy who did some kind of daredevil or motorcycle stunts. Sorta like saying to me, that, I wouldn’t be there for you…. Well, she didn’t get it then, but she’s gettin’ it now…how much braver it is to stare down death than to face some motorcycle risks. Ha! Yea, I’m gettin’ it. This is fun. You’re an old fart, but you got some tricks…good tricks….”

“Ok, now,” I say. “Look around, who else?”

“Well, there’s several other girlfriends. Wow! How great to see the look on their faces now.” (chuckling) “And there’s my two older brothers. I really wanted to be like them, and…hang out with them. But they made it like I wasn’t big or tough enough. Boy, am I showing them now. How fucking glorious. Even they are scared; they are tooo chickenshit to do what I’m doing. Ha! I’m showing them…he he he…..”

Those Damn ‘Ghostly’ Others

“Keep looking,” I say.

“Ok, well, there’s…there…. No. No…what the fuck, what the fuck’s he here for?”

“Who’s that?” I say.

“Why my dad…and my mother too. My dad always made me feel like I was weak just ’cause I was a kid. Why wouldn’t I be weaker than a grown man!? That bastard never gave me credit for having the strength I’ve got. Yet how strong is he? Just because he can put down my mom and…who would never fight back….”

I say, “Look into his face. Did you show him? Does he finally see?”

“Not sure…. He’s, he’s kinda lookin’ down….”

“Look more closely. Zoom in.”

“OK…. Oh my god, that mother-fucking bastard, that prick!”

“What’s going on?”

“Well, he’s even angrier now. He’s thinkin’: ‘What kinda pussy son he’s got who’s play-actin’ all over the internet about how tough he is…but that’s not bein’ tough,’.he’s thinkin’…. Why that fuck! He never did understand anything I did, he put down everything I did. I tried, but no matter. I could never be man enough…in his eyes….”

I say, “That’s rough, dude, rough. That’d be hard for anyone to live through….”

“Yea.” Beginning to choke up. “Yea…” he says…he’s sobbing now.

“That mother…. All those years I had to live with that fuck! hope and try and not getting anything back….my God!…except… scorn! Gaaa! Scorn! Scorn and Hate! It’s you who’s face I spit in, you‘re the fuckin’ death, I hate you!…. I’m bigger than you. I survive you. I laugh! Ooooh…” Openly crying.

And, he broke off crying.

You’re never gonna win, pal, give it up already.

Well. I did what I could for him…and stayed with him and hung out with him for a while…. Really not a bad guy at all. He seemed to really get it, too, that he didn’t need to do things to prove to his dad anymore, because he could clearly see there was no extreme he could ever go to or ever go through that would make a dent in his father’s attitude of despising him.

I explained that while it is hard to accept that his father really did despise him, that he will find it easier than most, because he at least knew it…and didn’t try to pretend it wasn’t true. But that he just hadn’t gotten it out of his craw that even in some imaginary way he could get something that he just wasn’t meant to get in this life. And I explained that, that is the way with all of us. There’s always something that’s not part of the perfect family portrait, or there’s some elephant in the room.

I explained that, while he didn’t have to prove anything anymore to his father that, while he was doing it, it led him to learn a lot about the internet and such, and he could apply that to something new.

So when I was leaving, he said something. It gave me a happy thought. He said:

“You know. Now I don’t need to show anybody anything. What a waste of time that was.”

What to Do, When You Don’t Have to Do

And he continued, “It occurs to me, then…’What the hell to do’? Then it occurs to me, ‘Well, if you got nothing to prove, and you really don’t want the world to end, actually.’ In fact, it is pretty scary.”

“And I’m thinkin’ of all the innocents…like my mom…being put down by big scary men whose only strength lies in putting down little kids, and their wives…so they can feel strong. Hmm….”

“So I think, ‘No, there’s no changing my dad.’”

“But the next thing I have is…while my mother isn’t here anymore, ‘There’s lots of helpless innocents out there, like her, who aren’t being helped…about what’s coming down.’ They’re even being prevented from knowing, by other chickenshit men like my dad, who are only out for themselves and it doesn’t matter who they hurt…s’long as they get their profits.”

How DARE They?

“So, I’m thinkin’ this, and I’m real surprised because I feel myself breathing deeper. And I feel some anger coming, like, ‘How DARE they?!’ “

“And then some strong feelings of manliness…my heart crying out…like to my mother. Even choking up a little, thinkin’ like, ‘I’ll take care of you, young mother, little sister, little brother, little baby child. I’m bigger, I’m stronger. I’ll protect you from harm’…like no one protected me. And now I know how horrible that was. And, how I could do nothing to…and how I would do anything to stop that from happening to others. I really would. And I got all psyched! Y’know?”

Guaranteed to Bring Out the Best in You

“I’m sorry for putting you down about wanting to help the world. Cause I see that’s the best place to put your strength and to be a real man…. Y’know? To have a just cause…put all your strength into it…whether you win or not. Just to be on the right side! And in the meantime to stand between any hardship and those innocents…and to comfort their sorry hearts. It seems like there’s no other worthy thing to do.”

Well, I expressed how that was really wonderful. And I said, to confirm for him, I said how this is the biggest struggle this planet has ever faced.

And, he’s right. It is the worthiest effort that one can imagine. And guaranteed to bring out the best in us…and to make us better…as well as the worst in us…which we can at least know and struggle with to keep those things from undermining the good in us.

Freed From a Prison

Well, after that we talked about how we individually and together could do things in the future, and…. It gladdened my heart to see him freed from the prison of striving forever for a love that would never be and…to be learning, already, that true love is in giving.

That true love is in giving.

Finding love, in giving love

No doubt, if he continues like this, he’ll soon learn that in giving love, he finds more love than his heart can contain, coming his way, without his expecting, asking, or even seeing it coming. I wouldn’t be surprised if he comes over to my site to contribute, share, and even join in solidarity.

Could Be Real Men, Instead of Performers for Phantom Puppeteers

Well, that’s one take on why people are not reacting to the seriousness of the end of all life on this planet. I think it’s a rather pervasive one. And I’m sure there are others. And I just wish it would be that easy to turn these people around to see how they could be real men, how they could be real heroes, how they could be really strong. Instead of performing for some “ghostly” others…who aren’t there, and…who aren’t going to be impressed anyway.

Take my word for it or not. That’s the way I see it.

Other Takes on This

Other irrational responses and reactions to the end of all time are discussed in the next two chapters, “Death Wish — Zombies and Sad Proselytists,” and “The Will to Die — Thanatos Walking.”

Continue with Apocalypse – No! Chapter Four:
Death Wish – Zombies and Sad Proselytists

Return to Apocalypse – No! Chapter Two: Love’s Wake-Up Call – Apocalypse Emergency

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Healing Crisis, Part 2: Wounded Deer and Centaurs – Being “Weller,” But Appearing Sicker – Perinatal Awareness of Boomers and Beyond

Getting Sick to Be Well, Part Two: Perinatal Boomers and Beyond—We Know THAT We Don’t Know…We Could Be Wrong.… But You Certainly Are

Being “Weller,” But Appearing Sicker—Generations Since

As I said, contrasted with being completely split off — dissociated — from one’s perinatal unconscious, as the Fifties and WWII Generation are predominantly, is being less cut off from it and having some access to its energies. This means that rather than being totally and blindly driven by these forces, which are acting on one indirectly, one actually feels them somewhat: One has a sense of their being a part of one’s experience as opposed to living within them so thoroughly that one has not a clue of their existence.

This means that one has more options than to act them out, but it also means they make one aware of one’s perinatal sickness. One feels them, suffers from them, struggles with them.

On the other hand, one does not suffer or struggle from unconscious energies that one is compliant with and that are completely manifest and supported in one’s social and cultural environments (for example, the worlds of the WWII and previous generations), however destructive that makes one’s actions.

Trancing Vs. Suffering

This difference may be likened to the difference between being a fish in water and totally oblivious to that fact versus living out of water and experiencing a downpour. When one is in less of a trance state, one is aware of alternative ways of being; in the example, that would be being dry. Consequently, one suffers and struggles amidst these forces and options…and one has at least some ability to choose one’s actions.

I do not believe it is simply coincidence that we are currently going from the Piscean Age — symbolized by fish in water — to the Aquarian Age — symbolized by a water bearer. This change was a big part of the consciousness during the Sixties, and I think we are beginning to see why: Going from a state where one is oblivious to the forces around one to a state where one can see the things one is dealing with (carrying the water) is no small thing.

It seems everything about evolution in humans has something to do with being between two mediums and the advance/the added perspective that comes with that, going all the way back to being the only ape to take to the water so much as to become partly aquatic—placing our species between water and land, halfway between a dolphin and a chimpanzee. I think we are heading toward being like the fairies and angels we imagine—halfway between land and air—but that is a whole other post.

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Another analogy I’ve heard of this difference between the two modes of being completely oblivious and somewhat aware of one’s unconscious is that between living full-time in an arctic environment where one has to wear a heavy coat versus living in a milder climate. In the warmer climes, one is both aware of what it is like to not have a coat—one has capacity to feel better ways of being—as well as how bulky, obstructing, and uncomfortable it is to have the coat on—suffering more from it, suffering from one’s perinatal memories. Finally one is better able to decide when to have it on and not—one has more options. At some point I will discuss what this has to do with the increase of bipolar disorders, but not now.

One analogy I find especially provocative is the difference between watching a movie and being fully engrossed in it so that one does not know it is a movie, which is equivalent to acting out unconsciously from one’s early imprints. Compare this to watching the same movie with equal interest, but being aware that one is in a theater. You can see where in the second instance one would feel there are more options; and one would feel that one could step back before finding oneself caught up in horrific actions.

Wounded Deer and Centaurs

However, being aware of one’s discomfort (having “more access” to the perinatal), one suffers like the wounded deer—the innocent who feels things and so struggles with society’s sickness that many others are unconsciously perpetrating. But, with time and success in handling this pain, one can become the wounded healer—the Centaur.

Now, why and how would this occur? As I’ve said, some access to the perinatal and more blatant and direct acting it out is exhibited by many of the baby-boomer generation. This is in large part due to their having been raised in a way that required less in the way of ego defenses to keep their primal pain suppressed. Psychohistorians like Glen Davis and Lloyd deMause have detailed a slow advance of child-caring techniques, with generations since the WWII Generation being raised with more attention to their needs and less harshness and cruelty…increasingly more love.

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“What the World Needs Now, Is…”

Before anyone begins thinking “permissive” or “spare the rod, spoil the child,” let me point out that I will be continually stressing how this development is not only a good thing (why wouldn’t love be good?) but is one of the few sources of hope for our future we really do have.

For less childhood pain and trauma means one is stronger and more able to face the even deeper perinatal pain.

Choosing Lesser Evils

At any rate, the extreme acting-out and total dissociation from the perinatal exhibited by the World-War-Two Generation was followed, in the generations coming after, by less relative dissociation and less horrific forms of acting it out. Quite simply, generations as a whole had better ability to refrain from the more blatantly evil act outs—wholesale murders and world wars, pogroms and genocide, inquisitions and witch-burning, racism and slavery. They were more able to choose seemingly milder forms of suffering and self-destruction — polluting the atmosphere, water, and food; population explosions and crowding of cities; and traffic jams.

The common everyday traffic jam is especially instructive of perinatal dynamics as traffic congestions replicate asphalt birth tunnels where one not only breathes exhaust fumes from trucks and other autos—fetal malnutrition—but also can become gridlock at any moment, thus re-creating the intense frustration and no-exit hopelessness, and rage, of BPM II.

Baby-Boomer Perinatal Awareness

Other examples of the scenery of modern times where the perinatal is manifesting but is less projected onto another:

We Know THAT We Don’t Know…We Could Be Wrong.

Many baby-boomers had enough access to their perinatal underbellies to question the absolute rightness of the Vietnam War and so they campaigned against it. This is indicative of closeness to the perinatal because it shows an ability to doubt one’s egocentric defenses—as given by society and family of origin—and to look at situations from the eyes of the Other.

So much was this evident in boomers that some were even able to see the Vietnam War through the eyes of the enemy—exemplified by Jane Fonda’s trip to Hanoi, the waving of North Vietnamese flags at demonstrations, and the carrying of little red books of the sayings of Chairman Mao tse Tung.

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But It’s Clear You’re Wrong.

The baby-boomer—or Sixties—generation also indicate their closeness to their perinatal in their campaigns against some of the act-outs of the perinatal mentioned above: These include actions against pollution; a rejection of city life, with its gridlocks, pollution, and crowding , and a return to the country, in communes or otherwise; an awareness and rejection of polluted foods and creation of a natural and organic foods movement; and actions against global overpopulation including support for birth control, a pro-choice stance on abortion, and delaying of baby-making on their own parts along with a reduction in the size of their families.

The sexual excess that is characteristic of the perinatal, specifically BPM III, was evident in boomers’ free love and promiscuous sexual behavior.

Many more examples could be given. But the proof of their closeness to their unconscious dynamics lies not only in their actions—as mentioned above, in their more blatant acting them out or in their actual actions against the blatant acting out, both of which indicate closer access—but also in the study of their unconscious dynamics. As mentioned in Chapter Nine, Kenneth Keniston found in his study of the psychodynamics of the Sixties generation when they were in their youth an unusual amount of perinatal symbolism and self-analysis. (See “Raging to Reenter, Digging Under Ground.”)

Boomer Rage, Perinatally So

We Shall Overcome.

We also see perinatal feelings in the focus of the baby-boomers on empowerment. This word appears to come up in every area of their lives. It can be seen as the natural focus of a generation that feels itself inside to be a helpless fetus facing an overpowering obstruction of a womb.

Hence baby-boomers are of course also closer to the frustration, rebellion, and yes, rage, that is part of the perinatal complex. We saw it exhibited by them in their anger at authority in the Sixties, their rebellion against the Vietnam War.

“Get the &%$ OFF Me!”

Keep in mind that a huge aspect of the perinatal is feelings of restriction, thus frustration, and, consequently rage against large entities of obstruction—like the womb was in relation to the small and helpless fetus. In doing so, we see that the reason for their rage is simple and understandable.

Baby-boomers, characterized as being closer to their unconscious, especially the perinatal, have more access to their anger: This means they feel their anger and are less likely to act it out in more hidden, disguised, and dire ways such as war-making, racism, and anti-Semitism.

This does not mean their rage would not be troublesome. The perinatal lets no one get off scot free. We see lots of pre- and perinatal anger coming out in the last few decades in the phenomenon of the “angry electorate.” Let’s look at that next.

Continue with You Didn’t Really Believe Elections Had Anything to Do With Issues, Did You? Biting the Feeding Hand … Perinatal Rage and Panicky Electorate: Healing Crisis, Part 3

Return to Healing Crisis, Part 1: What’s in Your Head, Zombie? Being Really Sick, But Denying It — WWII Generation, Nazis, KKK, Right Wing, Tea Party

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Our Family in Nature and Jacob’s Ladder. Part Five of 33rd and Final Prasad from Planetmates – Something Wonderful

Jacob’s Ladder and Return to Nobility. Part Five of Elaboration of The Thirty-Third Prasad. “Something Wonderful Is Going to Happen”

Once you have stopped struggling with the Divine, fighting off Omnipresent Providence, the heavens open. Never again can those gates be closed to you. As in your Jacob’s vision, there is no separation any longer “between heaven and Earth”; there is a going to and fro between humans and all the angels in Nature and the Divine….

Part Five of Paraphrase/ Elaboration of “The Thirty-Third Prasad”: Rejoining Our Family in Nature and Jacob’s Ladder

For what is opening to you is for you to rejoin your family in Nature. If you are not one of those few whose highest good at this time, strangely enough, lies in agonizing as others act and decide, this is nothing but good news. This is the sign on the road telling you that just before you lies the return home to the noble core within you. The most fantastic and fulfilling life lies just before you. You return to connection with all of Nature, and this unity is felt as the most sublime and wonderful Love. That is true whatever the outcome.

But even more is possible, if there is a sufficient number of you. If you are hearing this, let yourself be motivated by the awareness that you can be one of those making of this drama the most incredible story of the coming together of all species on behalf of Divine Nature. Be aware that awareness of unity far beyond what you have known as isolated beings in a solitary species is on the horizon. Once you have stopped struggling with the Divine, fighting off Omnipresent Providence, the heavens open.

Never again can those gates be closed to you. As in your Jacob’s vision, there is no separation any longer “between heaven and Earth”; there is a going to and fro between humans and all the angels in Nature and the Divine, which you have so long excluded. Know that this experience of inter-being consciousness, this Unity, is the must exquisite experience and is unimaginable; you might liken it to Love expanded infinitely. Yes, that particular plot is available to you. And if you, as a species, take up your role in it, life on this planet will go on. This Earth will continue in alliance between all planetmates…and something wonderful is going to happen….

The Thirty-Third Prasad: Something Wonderful to Happen

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

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

Continue with Creating Worlds: Biologically Constituted Realities, Part One

Return to Let Go, Let God – You Can’t Imagine Darkness Away. Part Four of  33rd and Final Prasad from Planetmates — Something Wonderful

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Ecocide – How Dare We Be Species Suicide-Bombers?

Eight Billion Neros Fiddling

It’s a Trillion-Alarm Fire, Not a Boy-Scout Litter Campaign

A Trillion-Alarm Fire—You Don’t Stop at the Grocery on Your Way Home!

I compare what is happening right now to cause planetary death in the relatively near future to a trillion-alarm fire with everyone looking the other way. I say you need to respond to this with the urgency of being in a world war, marshaling all available national and world resources to bear on it, and not with the complacency of a boy-scout litter pick up campaign.

When you get a call at work that your house is on fire, you rush home worrying about whether your family is alive or dead, what, if anything, remains of your precious keepsakes, and so on. And you don’t, this time, stop on the way home to have a short visit with your mother at the nursing home, grab a few things at the grocery store, or even fill up your tank at the gas station! YOU GO STRAIGHT HOME AND TRY TO SAVE YOUR FAMILY AND HOME! [Footnote 1]

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“Apocalypse Emergency: The Apocalypse Will Kill Your Child, How Can You Turn Your Head?”
– audio presentation by SillyMickel Adzema

http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=rmcffzyvrk
Image of Apocalypse Emergency: Apocalypse? Or, New Dawn? by SillyMickel Adzema

You REALLY might want to listen to the audio above. It is a loose reading of this page, more entertaining than simply reading the text, is more conversational, contains extra information, and is framed by the feelings of the author/ audio presenter, so is altogether more accessible than the text alone, and I think an easier and more fun way to take in this upcoming chapter.

Click for audiocast by clicking player above or the link to the audio site below:

Apocalypse Emergency. The Apocalypse Will Kill Your Child, How Can You Turn Your Head?
– audio presentation by SillyMickel Adzema

---

Oil Spills and Reactor Blowups

“Where is the fierce urgency of Now?!!!”

I can’t believe the nonchalance around the huge environmental catastrophes that have gone on in just the last year alone—specifically, the Gulf Oil Spill and the Fukushima Japan nuclear disaster. When the BP disaster was ongoing and gushing devastating amounts of oil into the Gulf, Donna Brazille, frustrated with the Obama Administration’s response to the Spill, fumed aloud, “Where is the fierce urgency of Now?!!!

But these hugely unprecedented environmental catastrophes, daily spreading the damage to our planet, are just two canaries in a coal mine.

We are just beginning to understand the immensity of the damage to our planet the Fukushima disaster did. We will probably not be told the degree of radiation exposure from it we are receiving until long after people have been dying in droves from it.

The BP oil spill of 2010 is, similarly, presenting ongoing planetary damage, which, like the Japan nuclear disaster, is, as I speak, not being reported. At this moment, in fact, dolphin carcasses in the hundreds are washing up on Gulf beaches, birds are dying and some are simply dropping dead out of the sky, and we know for sure of at least one dead zone caused by the BP oil spill—a dead zone being an area in the ocean where nothing can live for lack of oxygen—which is a hundred miles long and twelve miles wide. I have heard reports of other dead zones cropping up in the Gulf, and it has been said they are growing in size with time. Beyond these we have to wonder how many more there are, yet unknown, and how great is the ongoing damage.

But none of these dire events are being mentioned much in the media. We hear the reports, but then the media directs our attention to something else. When Fukushima was being actively monitored by the media not long ago, I heard reported on CNN some very apocalyptic developments occurring there. Immediately afterward, CNN directed our attention to some in-depth reporting on a snake that had gotten loose in New York City. Now that snake made me sooo scared, I don’t know why!? *sarcasm*

So we cover our eyes to what is going on. *sigh*

We dismiss these events assuming that someone higher up than us is surely attending to the problem (dream on!). Though we would never admit it, we take comfort in thinking that people more in the know and influential—people with more status, degrees, power—are on the front line and will certainly make better decisions than we ever could. So doing, we blind ourselves to the fact that these people in charge are blinded and made stupid by their greed and self-interest. They see dimly, if at all, through that screen at the dire prospects they are juggling with. With such tunnel vision, they are hardly capable of seeing the interests of humanity, let alone acting on them. Furthermore, they console themselves with the thought that someone else higher up—or not, often just someone other than them—is “certainly” taking care of “the big things.”

Ultimately, people are passing the buck ALL the way up…to God. Seriously, this theological cul-de-sac is the ultimate, most reliable, place of retreat for the theistic as well as most of the non-theistic, if people were to be honest about their thoughts. But this is the most comforting of cop-outs and the greatest excuse to carry on acting recklessly out of all-too-trivial motivations of unhinged greed and blind self-interest.

What is worse is these things are only the tiny beginnings of much more that is bound to happen. If we do not listen up, and wake up, we’ll be just as unprepared and helpless when the even more dire and apocalyptic events unfold. This is not a time to curl up under the covers.

OR, Have you heard the new version of the 12 days of Christmas? It ends with “8 billion Nero’s fiddling.” But no one lives long enough to finish it… ever.

Scientists are saying we will see a fifty percent die-off rate, extinction, of species within the next twenty to fifty years. That is to say, within that time half the species we see now—well actually about five years ago—will be gone forever. [Footnote 2]

To think that we will be around after that, even to watch video games of the wildlife that once was, is the same as a doctor saying to someone: “Sorry, within twenty to fifty years, half of the organs in your body will be gone. They’ll die and ‘fall’ away, and you’ll be DISABLED” (! hardly just “disabled” tho).

OK, now you tell me how we’re going to be alive to even see what happens after that kind of extinction?! Does no one realize how much death that means? Does no one see any interconnections between us and planetmates? The world will come to an end if bankers don’t get money, they tell us. And if they did away with roads, or trucks…it’s Mad Max time, right? Well, how about when the bees didn’t show up? One species out of a scientifically estimated five-hundred million species and our economy was going ape shit! What happens with two-hundred-fifty MILLION species gone forever?! [continued after video]

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Tom Waits – “Earth Died Screaming”

Tom Waits sings, “The Earth died screaming, while I was dreaming… dreaming of you….” [Footnote 3]

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Ecocide

Global, Universal Death/Extinction Isn’t Just Death, Suicide; It Is MURDER, Of a Kind So Evil, Nazis Look Like Mother Theresas by Comparison

Concerning extinction of species—ourselves and other species—which is going on, an idea was put forth to me that we are assuming death is evil. This person intended, considering the context, for this to be taken spiritually, philosophically.

Re: The psychology of Extinction: Murder of untold billions through greed, laziness, egotism..well, I say, EVIL!

My reply was: You make the point that needs to be considered as it sits deep down in the hidden center of this particular wordpool. It’s a mind-bender and mind-stretcher when you stray down your road for sure. But after having been down it a fair number of times, both on my own as well as with companions, I find one tangible, unshakable thing, only, to still and focus my vision and guide my stance, actions, and position with surety. It is this:

I, for one, am not assuming death is an evil. I do not believe death is evil at all, quite the contrary. That is a spiritual perspective. And that is a perspective about death in its essence.

It is a vision from a spiritual stance—rooted in science, philosophy, and Eastern mysticism—as well as from a traditional religious view, where it is held that one’s life in the body is only a try-out for a better, “real” life in “heaven.” [Footnote 4]

However, you are mistaking, as analogy, the beautiful precise utility of a finely honed and balanced knife—metaphorically speaking—with what is really important and what is so hard to look at or fathom or even let into one’s thoughts: That is, the horrific, ghastly, unbelievably bloody and messy, grotesque, garish…infinitely hellacious and mind-drippingly insane scene that is right in front of all of us: that of the angelic young girl and her vulnerable innocent and kind-hearted mother, their bodies slashed, cut up, stabbed, gouged, even chopped and minced, and strewn widely and randomly in this ungodly lake of blood framed within this just recently homey, comforting surround of simple comfortable living room furniture and accouterments, which now, however, are awash and stained and forever nightmarish as they record in blood, guts, and other of that ilk, but of which we do not want even to know, the violence, wild aggression, horrible pain, fear, terror, and trauma of the event—the murder… the murder that was so precisely perfect in its nightmarishness as it was aided in its perfect horror by such a beautifully crafted, finely honed, exquisitely and marvelously sharp, perfectly balanced and joyous to feel, hold, and use KNIFE.

What I am saying is, OK death is beautiful, in essence. And going back to God is, my belief, the highest accomplishment and culmination of a life lived well. But we are not talking about my death or your death. We are talking about you and I deciding, by refusing to fight back the apocalypse—which could be taken up merely by changing some of our greedy, wasteful, egoistic ways—the death of untold trillions of other living conscious beings, indeed, of conscious things that we are not evolved enough to even be aware of. We are deciding that THEIR death, because of our actions…well, that’s not so evil, eh?

Well, that’s easy for US to say. But how about them? Don’t you think they might be a tad upset that we would be deciding this FOR THEM…(Jonestown-style)?

So, you bring up the point that needs to be addressed before we can really commit ourselves to the fight and the struggle to change that is being required of us. But I offer that I have never found anyone able to shake or even threaten the principle I have found to stand on: God’s creation, which includes death, in Her (His) time and in the way He (She) would have for each of us, is beauteous perfection. But, MURDER…that is, MY deciding…or ANYONE (but God) deciding for another that death is good, well… well… Is not that what Hitler did? What the Nazis did?

Death—not evil—may be beautiful.

Murder of untold multi-billion-trillions through greed, laziness, egotism, hubris, and extreme lack of empathy and feeling for the feelings/consciousness of those others…. well, I say,

EVIL!!!

Evil beyond all imagining. Evil beyond anything ever conceived or acted ever before in the uncountable billions of years of existence of this planet.

EVIL! Even the killing of the planet—its systems so perfectly balanced, so far beyond our understanding—of a nature that is beyond our comprehension, which, for all we know, is akin to a higher consciousness, a deva, a god, goddess.

Yes, EVIL to murder. Incredibly evil to bring to an end such things so far above and beyond our understanding that we cannot even comprehend the magnitude of that evil.

Now, that is my conclusion. I deem that murder on a scale so huge as to be inconceivable, of numbers of beings so great we have no way of knowing the hideous magnitude of the crime, not to mention eight billion alone of our own species, and laying to waste the dreams, efforts, and results of multibijillions of past lives on this planet of all species IS EVIL!

That is something I do not want to ever think I helped to happen…. Indeed it is EVIL so huge that I think I would not feel right, ever again, in the consciousness forever after this life and after my death, if I did not expend every ounce of my energy while I still can/could to try to prevent, to try to stop, to work against, to struggle to keep it from happening.

I think that consciousness cannot be destroyed—so death is not “evil.” But as we stand on the precipice of this planet murder and hugest crime of all time as far as we know before us and with us, as a species, being the cause of it… Well, I can only say the worst thing that I can imagine is having an eternity of consciousness knowing that I could have been part of the solution, but I trivialized it, I used a convenient spiritual belief/teaching/awareness to rationalize it so that I could continue asleep and unaware of the horror I participated in as I chose, through being afraid to look at the immense suffering involved, to blind myself with distractions—the perfect knife, the death that is not evil. And so instead of an eternity of peace knowing that I stood against the greatest evil ever known and fought as hard as I could, although we failed… instead it could be an eternity of regret and loathing not being able to be unaware that I was a part of the horror, the monster, participated in the killing, and helped others to also, by participating in the feel-good cover-up, the blinding of eyes, the zombification of brains. As the deepest darkness ever known gradually but unmistakably arose on the horizon and came toward us, increasing in speed, becoming more fiercesome, detailed, clear, unmistakable, unavoidable, and ever harder to be blind to, ever clearer in its brutality and the suffering, and unimaginable pain in its aftermath. And so I would spend an eternity knowing, not being able to not know that I WAS it, that I became it, helped it…that I was, er, “part of the problem”… and I didn’t have to be.

And for everyone else I would ask: Care to choose what you’d like to have sitting around in that imperishable unending forever consciousness we’re “blessed” with?

Species-Suicide Bombers

The End of the World

A correspondent of mine emailed me to recommend a book by John Leslie titled, The End of the World.

More people living now than the grand total of humans who have ever lived!

She said the book makes a disturbingly solid case for our extinction, saying that we are among the last generations of humans. Part of this reasoning involves a complex mathematical determination of our trajectory, which includes the interesting calculation that there are twice as many humans alive, right now, THAN THE GRAND TOTAL OF HUMANS THAT HAVE EVER LIVED. That last is a provocative finding, to say the least.

However, his whole premise got me to thinking. Of course, what I know confirms his conclusions in spades, but I couldn’t help feeling irked by his all-too-familiar perspective. For, to me, it is not just about our species. It is not just about our extinction. It is not just suicide, but murder. My correspondent, “Open Intelligence,” has used the term, “ecocide,” to make this kind of point.

Ok we’re commiting species-suicide; but how DARE we become species-suicide-bombers killing all OTHER life with us

Recently, I checked on the actual number of species that currently are on our planet, and the number was estimated at five-hundred million SPECIES. I think the whole problem IS that we only see “life” in terms of “our” life—our species. Indeed, some people think in terms of life being only for those of their religion, nation, social group, tribe, family, or even just oneself—all of which aid the murder of those who are “not life.”

So, Leslie is apparently thinking along the lines of many others who are not seeing the tragedy we are perpetrating to those other than our species, which is a milder form of the bigotry and prejudice we hold for one human against another type of human. I think that is a shame. [Footnote 5]

But then we cannot seem to even wake people up to saving themselves or their children, so how can we get them to empathize with the trillions upon trillions of other lives and the multi-hundred-millions of other life forms we share this planet with?

I guess that is my problem with his approach: It comes from my feeling that –Ok, we are committing suicide, but maybe we fucking deserve it. But how DARE we “blow up”—like a species suicide bomber—without a second thought for their pain or their lives—which we are only too dumb, and ego- species-centric, bigoted to see, let alone empathize with—as simple “collateral damage,” innumerable multi-bijilliion-trillions of innocent souls/ life forms and hundreds of millions of other entire species of them with us. That is murder of the highest degree, and an evil that this planet has never imagined before this time.

But, again, I see the point of talking to people where they are coming from as a starting point, as Leslie is doing. But shouldn’t we try to raise as much awareness as possible of, to me, the much greater evil that we are committing, for those who can hear it? I say, if we want to kill ourselves off, fine. But how dare we sink to becoming the biggest mass murderers of all time, by a multi-multi-trillionfold? We are currently making the Nazis look like Mother Theresas by comparison. Can you say, “Gulf Oil Spill dead zones,” just for starters!

Apocalypse Emergency

Suicidal Apes and Our Future as Mars

If you care about your children, you’ll “man up,” “woman up,” “cowboy up,” whatever…anything but cover up…and face the horror, become the noble humans we are capable of being, and join with others to pull off the most heroic actions of all time…

Or else we’ll be deemed throughout the Universe as “suicidal ape,” and our portrait will be no different from Mars.

The better angels of our beings urge us to pay attention to what is being said in the audio clip and writing below.

Consider the Topic and then that By the Ending I Was Feeling Euphoric,
Having Just Stared Deeply Into the Most Horrible Likely Future Conceivable.

MEANING:

Either you really should be checking this out…
Or I Should Be Getting Checked Out… but seriously folks…

Now you’d THINK this would be a morose piece. I am the author and I fully expected this to be a wake-up call that only the brave or the Goths would listen to. But honestly, I have to confess that the writing that came out of me and that I then expanded upon further in the reading over of it afterward was beautiful and led to a conclusion that inspired me (that’s not supposed to happen!) and left me feeling calmer than I have been for a long time.

What’s in the Audio

Ok, Ok, so you want to know what’s in here, especially the audio? I’m tempted to say “grab bag” and split, figuring to let Higher Power decide who gets to hear this. Sure this is in me; but there is more here in this audio than I, well at least thought, was in me.

No, I’ll give you the poop: It’s about a frightening global predicament that everyone seems to be aware of, but which few people are giving the attention and seriousness it deserves. I liken it to a thousand-alarm fire going off right now, with everyone looking away. I talk about why people would do that, why the media would be inclined to shy away. Basically it’s understandable because we simply have no way of comprehending the magnitude of what is happening and how fast, since no living thing on this planet in its multibillion year history has had to face what we are. [Footnote 6]

I found compassion, not blame.

I use spiritual fantasy and real world analogies to help us get a handle on what we’re facing. In jumping into these “waters,” I expected to be emotionally beat up. But instead I came to many understandings, and found I saw the positions of many who aren’t helping right now somewhat through their eyes, and found compassion, not blame.

Now that I think of it, I am having the realization that the reason for my serene, compassionate, and loving feelings while doing this parallels why I felt there was hope in the end.

I realize that facing dire challenges—and this being the most dire of all—brings out the best in Humans. It always has. Though this has been put off so long we might not do anything substantive till it’s too late, I realize that a political change away from the George W. Bush debacle in Washington may be having unknown but positive ripple effects around the world. In essence, it is only now that either Americans or those around the world can feel they can apply themselves to tackling this biggest of all challenges, for the previous US administration was disheartening and disillusioning to people of the globe who cared about the crisis, and of course to us in America, who felt that any efforts we could make would be quickly outswamped by the massive anti-environmental policies (sneakily disguised in environmentally positive sounding labels).

Not that everything has changed and corporations are back on their heels in their attempts at thwarting our wills to life, still, when Bush was US president, it was hopeless. It is very disheartening when your own government seems to consider your life completely expendable when it comes to short term gains for the Bushie’s—the corporate and “filthy rich” FOB’s.

The ending lifted me.

As for the ending which lifted me up in a way that I haven’t felt in a long time on this matter, I can only say that my long term study of humans—as a depth psychotherapist and as a student of other cultures across all time periods, that is, anthropology—informed my conclusions, shaped them, and took me to visions of possible futures that I did not expect, but seem, if not as likely, then at least as worthy of the human spirit as we deserve.

And for all we’ve done it seems we have called down upon ourselves to be tested and to be found either worthy, or deserving of the grave we’re digging.

I’ve said too much. The piece is complete in itself, and if you dare, you may find yourself strangely invigorated. At least I hope you get some, if not a lot, of the benefits and positive attitude adjustment that I received.

“We’re all in this together.”

I left the piece feeling so much love and unity with all humans and living things, for I knew that at no other time in the history of the world was the truth of the saying “we’re all in this together” more patently true.

“Apocalypse Emergency” is the preface to my book, Apocalypse—No! which is being revised and uploaded here at the present time. [Footnote 7]

Apocalypse—No!

Apocalypse—No! goes back and forth between the horrors that are possible and, well, let us say, this unique situation with the potential so strong to bring Humans to raise themselves up and be led by their better angels more than any other time. What it will mean could be exciting and triumphant beyond belief as humans come out of their puerile adolescent phase and become united and shaped for millennia by this great struggle. We could also die trying our mightiest, which has a nobility to it.

Currently we are looking like the stupidest beings ever to dream the dream of thingness and duality.

It’ll be scary and interesting, and you’ll be helped if you have a strong faith in a Higher Power.

Beyond that, it will be the biggest adventure that that the entire globe ever faced together, and the outcome could be just about anything.

Reversing Babel

But don’t get the popcorn, you won’t be sitting for this one; no one will. Indeed, if we succeed, we will look back at such terms as “couch potato” and wonder at the lost, unfulfilled lives they describe, which will seem a strange thing in a future that will require all of us to come together in a way that we haven’t seen since before—metaphorically speaking of course—The Tower of Babel.

So success could be wondrous beyond all belief; at the same time the odds will be against us, and even certain segments of humanity will want to monkey wrench our positive efforts.

Continue on this site with
Apocalypse – No! Chapter Two:
Apocalyptic Wake-Up Call

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“Apocalypse Emergency: The Apocalypse Will Kill Your Child, How Can You Turn Your Head?” – audio presentation by SillyMickel Adzema

http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=rmcffzyvrk
Image of Apocalypse Emergency: Apocalypse? Or, New Dawn? by SillyMickel Adzema

You REALLY might want to listen to the audio above. It is a loose reading of this page, more entertaining than simply reading the text, is more conversational, contains extra information, and is framed by the feelings of the author/ audio presenter, so is altogether more accessible than the text alone, and I think an easier and more fun way to take in this upcoming chapter.

Click for audiocast by clicking player above or the link to the audio site below:

Apocalypse Emergency. The Apocalypse Will Kill Your Child, How Can You Turn Your Head?
– audio presentation by SillyMickel Adzema

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Footnotes

1. What follows, from May of 2010, is an example of the attitude of dealing with global apocalyptic events as if, like in this case, they are of similar importance to a plane going down. My point, of course, is that we should be dealing with them will all the urgency of a “trillion-alarm fire” happening. For each of these are disasters contributing to an ongoing catastrophic ecocidal process, the tip of which, only, we see in the Fukushima reactor blowups and the Gulf Oil Spill:

Matthews: “four-alarm fire” in Gulf! Landrieu smirks. Matthews: There are ways to suck up oil…it is a US emergency not just a BP business problem

May 25, 2010. Today, Chris Matthews likened the Gulf Oil Spill to a four-alarm fire. While Senator Mary Landrieu smirked, Matthews said, “I don’t know what the legality of this is, but the President of the United States has got this challenge, not just BP. BP has got a business challenge; we have a national challenge. North America that we inherited and would like to pass on to our future generations is in big trouble.”

Earlier, in answer to a question by Matthews as to whether there’s “anybody in the world that can come and collect petroleum…that’s out there in the Gulf right now…anybody that can collect it?” Landrieu responded saying, “Well, first of all, Chris, just let me say this: If Delta Airlines…plane goes down, I don’t think we necessarily call all the airlines to come in and help in this very specific way. Now, I will tell you, that all the oil companies have been helping since day one, informally….”

Are you as concerned as I am hearing that kind of cavalier attitude about human life?

2. While the severity/seriousness of our predicament is considerably watered-down and glossed over for the sake of consumption in the following report, it is instructive nevertheless. It shows the extent to which our precarious situation is known—and even communicated among the educated—albeit in a manner as to not threaten or scare the audience (into action to stop it!):

Has Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?

ScienceDaily (Mar. 5, 2011)—With the steep decline in populations of many animal species, from frogs and fish to tigers, some scientists have warned that Earth is on the brink of a mass extinction like those that occurred only five times before during the past 540 million years.

Each of these ‘Big Five’ saw three-quarters or more of all animal species go extinct.

For more: ScienceDaily:

3. Lyrics for “Earth Died Screaming” by Tom Waits:

Rudy’s on the midway

And Jacob’s in the hole

The monkey’s on the ladder

The devil shovels coal

With crows as big as airplanes

The lion has three heads

And someone will eat the skin that he sheds

And the earth died screaming

The earth died screaming

While I lay dreaming of you

Well hell doesn’t want you

And heaven is full

Bring me some water

Put it in this skull

I walk between the raindrops

Wait in Bug House Square

And the army ants

They leave nothin’ but the bones

And the earth died screaming

While I lay dreaming of you

There was thunder

There was lightning

Then the stars went out

And the moon fell from the sky

It rained mackerel

It rained trout

And the great day of wrath has come

And here’s mud in your big red eye

The poker’s in the fire

And the locusts take the sky

And the earth died screaming

While I lay dreaming of you

4. Not long ago I was sitting in a doctor’s waiting room and watching CNN reporting on the Fukushima reactor developments. I heard this sort of “religious” viewpoint from a stranger. We agreed on the magnitude and severity of this Fukushima event and that of the Gulf Spill, among others. We agreed even on the cause of such events and the way we are being misinformed on them—partly as patronizing misdirection, partly as cover-up. But where we disagreed was on whether it was important or not to do anything about them. As he put it, in his superior but cynical tone, “What can you do? We can’t do anything about it, besides it doesn’t matter anyway, it’s not THIS that is important…but only after death,” pointing heavenward at that. (*sigh*)

5. On the subject of not being able to handle such a huge concept as mass extinction, my correspondent phrased it this way:

The pyschology of tragedy—Extinction? I’m afraid haven’t got time for it.

Mar 20, 2010 2:18pm by Open Intelligence. “The economy works by making people selfish. Mass extinction is merely collateral damage.”

The link shared—to an article by Simon Barnes writing for The Sunday Times, of London, on March 20, 2010—reads:

Species are going extinct because humans can’t see it happening, and therefore we can’t believe it is happening. It is as simple as that.

Believing that the elephant will no longer be around is like believing that one day the sun will rise in the west and the stars will fall as rain.

We can only really get a handle on the short-term. A generation at most. Long-term planning means the next year or two. Our minds can’t cope with anything longer. That’s why we choose to govern ourselves by means of a comfortable timescale. Four years, five years: that’s Politician’s Time.

Extinction is a happening thing, as I have pointed out more than once before. But it is happening in slow motion: you don’t see a monkey turn into a man, and you don’t see an animal go extinct. It’s just that one day you notice that they haven’t been about for a few years. The current rate of extinction is one species an hour,

Which brings us to the disaster of Cites….

Read more “Extinction? I’m afraid we haven’t got time for it” at http://thetim.es/fJOE7L [return to text]

6. The idea that there was no other time where any human lived knowing of the very real possibility of ending our species in its lifetime was criticized as follows:

No other time has been like this, but there have been plenty of times in the history of the human species where we have been met with the ability to and possibility of our ending—from when we were a few dozen leaving the mythological savanna of Eden to the discovery of the forging of Bronze to the hypothetical Event that led to the Dark Ages, the Apocalypse has been Nigh. It ain’t happened yet.

I responded: I have no idea of what time in our evolution that, other than modern times, our species even knew that it was a limited species on a limited globe and had any idea that its actions could wipe out what it thought of as itself as a species when we did not conceive of ourselves as a limited species in any of those time you speak of. We, with our science and technology are able to know of those times and ourselves. But hell, only in the last five hundred years did we find out we lived on a globe or lived in a solar system! Before that how could anyone in any culture know where either their ability to roam ended or their species no longer existed!

So you miss the point, which is, “no other time” did humans live “KNOWING” that THEY could bring, not only themselves, their families, or their cultures to an end but THEIR ENTIRE “SPECIES,” to an end “in”…their “lifetime” (not to mention the other estimated 500 million species). From “No other time was like this. We live knowing of the very real possibility of ending our species in our lifetime.”

7. The unrevised version of is titled Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth? Some of it was published in 1999 in the book, Apocalypse, or New Age?

A “webmap” of some of my online works on this topic is at Re the book: “Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth” – a webmap, “owner’s manual” ..Something wonderful is going to happen [return to text]

Continue on this site with
Apocalypse – No! Chapter Two:
Apocalyptic Wake-Up Call

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