Birth, “Intelligence,” and Culture … Out of Eden, Part Three: Birth Pain Causes a Feverish Human Mind, Struggling Against Nature and the Divine, Which We Call “Intelligence”

Bipedalism Caused Painful Births, Which Caused Bigger Brains, Which Caused “Intelligence,” Which Caused Culture: Birth Trauma Makes Us Humans … and Mistrustful of Everything

The more civilized the people, the more the pain of labor appears to become intensified. – Grantly Dick-Read, M.D. Childbirth Without Fear.

Giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head. – Unknown

To the woman He said, “I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children; Yet your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you.” – Genesis 3:16

Basic Trust, Basic Mistrust, and Birth

As I have said the worldview of our hominid and hunter-gatherer existences was trusting of Nature. The world is felt to be good, not antagonistic, so dependence on it is not seen as a problem and makes life overall easier than what we know beginning with the agrarian revolution and the rise of “civilization.” Our primal forebears had a “basic trust” in regards to Nature.

But the agrarian revolution and all “advances” after that imply a “basic mistrust.” What happened to make us more fearful, more anxious about our human condition?

These differences of basic trust versus basic mistrust are fascinating considering their possible relation to birth trauma.

Our Experience of Birth Determines Ever Afterward Our View of the World

Erik Erikson proposes that the earliest relation of the infant with the mother sets the foundation of the later attitude toward the world. A caring, sensitive, and responsive environmental and caretaker response, in particular, the mother’s, can be the basis for an attitude of basic trust toward the world … a fundamental faith in its goodness. While a harsh and insensitive early experience — wherein the child begins to feel it cannot get its needs met — becomes the basis for a feeling of unshakeable mistrust toward the world.

However, with our understanding of the influence of our first experiences of the world — that is, postnatally, usually in a delivery room and hospital nursery — on our basic attitudes toward it, we realize that these fundamental orientations are formed much earlier. Importantly, birth is a huge influence on that primary stance of trust or mistrust. First impressions are hard to overcome, as they say. Sure enough, if the first encounter with the world outside the womb … immediately after birth … is painful, and characterized by harshness, insensitivity, and unresponsiveness to one’s needs, then the infant comes to view the world mistrustfully and feels it to be a hostile place. [See Leboyer, Birth Without Violence, 1975].

What also of the pain of birth itself in setting up an attitude of trust toward the world or mistrust of it? The cold, hard fact is that our experience of our birth — that is, the amount of pain and discomfort we experience in the process of delivery as well as those first crucial moments and hours of our “introductory” experience of the world outside the womb — determine ever afterward in our lives the degree of positivity or negativity with which we will view the world and other people. [See, also, Janov, Imprints: The Lifelong Effects of the Birth Experience , 1984]

And this is where it gets interesting in seeing how we became humans and different from all other species.

Skull Size, Pelvic Size, and Birth Pain

In this regard, it is interesting to note biological anthropologist Jim Moore’s (1987) comments in a talk given at the University of California, San Diego, concerning pelvic size, birth, and secondary altriciality. Jim Moore pointed out that the paleontological evidence from the bone records of our hominid line show several fascinating developments occurring simultaneously and over the course of millions of years. We are going back as long as six to seven millions here. One is an increase in skull size. Another is a decrease in the size of pelvic bones, which occurs alongside and is a consequence of our gradual evolution to bipedalism from being, like our primate relatives, quadrupeds. [Footnote 1]

Most folks know about the increase of skull size that occurred over the course of our evolution. However, what is only rarely considered is what effect this increase has on the process of birth. Nor has this been laid alongside the other factor of reduced pelvic size. But doing so leads to some fascinating conclusions.

To begin, it is reasonable to suppose that this increased skull, and brain, size in hominids contributed greatly to birth pain, for both mother and infant. This is so for the obvious reason that the size of the head is the determining factor in the size of the vaginal opening required for delivery. That is, because skull bone is mostly unyielding when pressured from outside, its diameter must be less than or equal to the maximum diameter of the vaginal opening through which it must pass at birth. If the skull is too big for the opening, the child simply cannot get out. And the factor that most determines the maximum diameter of the vaginal opening is the configuration of the bones, especially pelvic bones, that are involved.

Keep in mind that this kind of birth pain would not have occurred when the skull was smaller. A smaller head would pass, in general, with considerably more ease for infant and mother. In support of this we note that this is exactly the case for all our primate relatives, all of whom have proportionately smaller skulls. Note they also have larger, wider pelvises, proportionally, than us, and thus pelvic openings at birth time. Correspondingly, they do show observably much less difficulty and pain in birth, for both mother and newborn. So, along with this trend to increasing skull size in humans and reduced pelvic size we can surmise a corresponding trend to increasing birth pain, birth difficulties, and, consequently, increasing birth trauma for hominid newborns. [See Footnote 2]

The Vicious Cycle of Skull Size and Birth Pain

Brain Size and Primal Pain: Brain Size Related to Degree of Unconscious Pain Needing to Be Repressed

About this factor of birth trauma, keep in mind that it is demonstrated neurophysiologically (Janov, 1971) that much of the increased brain size in humans is tied up with processing unconscious pain. That is to say, that we require the expanded capabilities inherent in neocortical expansion and larger brains to keep traumatic experiences repressed. A bigger brain is needed to keep our primal pain from overwhelming us.

Bipedalism –> Narrower Pelvic Opening –> Birth Pain –> Increased Brain Size –> Increased Skull Size –> Birth Pain

What I am saying is that increased brain size and painful birth become, then, phylogenetically linked in a vicious cycle — one producing the other. Said another way, over the course of millions of years skull size and birth pain increased each other: Greater pain in birth requires, later on, greater repression of pain in order to survive, which leads to the development of greater neocortical capacities for processing and keeping that pain repressed. This leads to actual physical neocortical expansion, which results in greater skull size. Then, that bigger head causes greater pain in childbirth for both mother and infant. This increased birth pain causes greater birth trauma in neonates. And finally, this birth trauma leads to greater repression of pain, then, to expanded brain size, then, increased birth pain, birth trauma, a need for more repression … round and round and round again. And this goes on imperceptibly over an extremely long time in the course of our evolution.

But keep in mind, also, that this is a chicken-and-the-egg correlation. There is no way of knowing what came first. Whether changes in skull size and expanded neocortical capacity (as for example, in the development of tool use), or greater repression of feelings and pain (possible as a consequence of increased social behavior, requiring increased repression/ control of individual behaviors), or increased birth trauma (either on its own, for some unknown reason, or more likely because of skeletal changes occurring through increasing bipedal locomotion and upright posture) came first is irrelevant. These are mutually arising causative factors. It is enough that we notice their interrelationship.

Birth Pain Makes Us Humans

Birth Pain Caused the Feverish Minds of Humans, Which We Call Intelligence

To continue, remember that what is universally acknowledged to distinguish humans from other species is our intelligence and the elaboration of culture that comes from that. But with the understanding of skull size, birth, and repression described above, we see these much-touted distinctions and claims to superiority to be merely the byproduct of our neocortical attempts to deal with unconscious pain, specifically, that of birth trauma.

Birth pain caused the feverish minds of humans, which we call our intelligence. “We ain’t born typical,” as The Kills phrased it. And those spinning excess wheels of mental fibrillation, driven by human birth trauma, are the gears in the machine of our manic material culture.

Continue with Why We Can’t Get No Satisfaction and What It Has to Do With Being Born Helpless: Out of Eden, Part Four — Secondary Altriciality and the Origins of Culture

Return to We Once Had the Run of the Forest and the “Original Affluent Society”: Early Human Savagery Is a Patriarchal Myth Rationalizing Our Descent Into Civilization

Footnotes

1. On bipedalism and pelvic bone changes, at “Wanna Be an Anthropologist“:

Bipedal Adaptations in the Hominid Pelvis

INTRODUCTION

Two major features are unique to humans among all the living primates: A very large brain, and moving about upright on two legs exclusively. One of these, bipedalism, appeared long before the other. Many anatomical features of Australopithecus afarensis anatomy demonstrate habitual bipedal locomotion, and the 3.6 million-year-old footprints discovered by Paul Abell at Laetoli in 1978 confirm it unequivocally (White, 1980). Not until the appearance of Homo erectus, some 1.7 million years later, could hominids be considered on their way to being large-brained (Stanford, et al., 2006).

While certain adaptations seen in the knee (e.g. the valgus angle), in the foot (such as a fully adducted hallux), and to a lesser extent in the cranium (a fully inferior foramen magnum) are all strong indicators for bipedalism (Lewin and Foley, 2004), the most interesting evolutionary changes necessary for upright posture occurred in the hominid pelvis. All of these adaptations are present not only in the pelves of modern humans, but also in all members of the Genus Homo, and in the earliest known hominids, the Australopithecines.

PELVIC ADAPTATIONS FOR BIPEDALISM

The hominid pelvis displays many unique features (when compared to that of quadrupedal primates) that support bipedalism. The major adaptations are seen in the sacrum and the ilia, as well as in the overall configuration and orientation of the pelvic bones….

2. On brain size and secondary altriciality in humans at Human Development:

Human babies enter the birth canal from the womb in the same way a chimp does but just before the actual birth the skull rotates 90 degrees in order to exit the rounded birth canal that humans have evolved. In Homo Sapiens, evolution reached a compromise that favored even bigger brains at a further cost to birthing and efficient walking. The Homo Erectus pelvis was very narrow. Humans are unique among mammals in the extent to which the brain keeps growing well after birth. The scientific terms for this is secondary altriciality. It involves accelerating the birthing process and arresting the development until after birth. Monkeys and apes are born with brains half as heavy as they will ever be. A chimpanzee brain, for example, will weigh perhaps 7 ounces at birth and about 14 ounces as an adult. Human brains are about a third of their final size in newborns; they more than double in size in the first year after birth. On average, human babies are born with a brain that weighs 14 ounces but reaches 35 ounces in one year. It will continue to grow until it reaches about 45 ounces in size (at age 6 or 7).

Gestation in humans should be about 21 months rather than the normal 9 we think in terms of. This is the process of accelerating the birthing process to enable the enlarged brain to escape the birth canal. Development of the brain then continues external to the womb for well over the first several years. What this intense development means is that a human infant is born relatively helpless. A baby can neither stand up or in any way fend for itself for a long time. Stephen Jay Gould has written our sexual maturation comes almost absurdly late in a Darwinian world supposedly regulated by a constant struggle to secure reproductive success and pass more genes along to future generations….slower development must provide some power advantage to evolve, in the face of its obvious drawbacks. In fact, must of what makes us human in the end may stem from this unnaturally long period of helplessness in the very early part of our lives.

http://web.mesacc.edu/dept/d10/asb/origins/development.html

3. On prolonged postnatal brain growth at Unique to Humans –

This is one of the most dramatic distinction between humans and other mammals (including primates). In all precocial mammals other than humans, at around the time of birth there is distinct slowing down in brain growth relative to body growth. In altricial mammals, the switch to diminished brain growth occurs at a developmental stage comparable to birth in precocial mammals. In humans, substantial brain growth relative to body growth continues for approximately a year after birth before a marked slow-down occurs. Because of this human neonates are unusually dependent on parental care in comparison with other primates for the first year of postnatal life, and sometimes labeled as “secondary altricial”.
Martin RD. The evolution of human reproduction: a primatological perspective. Am J Phys Anthropol. 2007;Suppl 45:59-84.

And on postnatal brain growth at The Rise of Homo sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altricial

http://books.google.com/books?id=pZHtlD7Ife8C&pg=PA109&lpg=PA109&dq=secondary+altriciality&source=bl&ots=v9JqxVagV5&sig=lYR3itn84ezye8erarirpRRv5YA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=zFosUqnXEcn9iwLvsIDoCg&ved=0CGoQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=secondary%20altriciality&f=false

Continue with Why We Can’t Get No Satisfaction and What It Has to Do With Being Born Helpless: Out of Eden, Part Four — Secondary Altriciality and the Origins of Culture

Return to We Once Had the Run of the Forest and the “Original Affluent Society”: Early Human Savagery Is a Patriarchal Myth Rationalizing Our Descent Into Civilization

For an Overview and Links to Other Parts of This Work-in-Progress, Go to Prodigal Human: The Descent of Man

Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness – Michael’s latest book – is now available in print and e-book formats.

at http://www.amazon.com/Falls-Grace-Devolution-Revolution-Consciousness/dp/1499297998/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1400787010&sr=1-3

Planetmates: The Great Reveal is also available in print and e-book format. at https://www.createspace.com/4691119

and at Amazon at

http://www.amazon.com/Planetmates-Great-Reveal-Return-Grace/dp/1496083326/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1399084684&sr=1-1&keywords=michael+adzema

To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.

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Birth — An Awakening or a Forgetting? Out of Eden, Part One — Is Birth the Beginning of Consciousness, as We Assume, or Is It the Forgetting of Innate Divine Awareness

We “Fall from Grace” at Birth: “The Child in the Womb Is in Soham (I am He); But, When It Is Born … It Starts the Question, Koham, Who Am I? For It Forgets Its Truth” — Sathya Sai Baba

Falls from Grace, Prodigal Human, Primal Return … Overview

The book that precedes this one, Falls from Grace, has not presented an optimistic portrait of the human condition. The question might arise, is this scenario true for all people? Has it always been true? Is it this way in all cultures? What are the roots of this dismal human predicament? Finally, and not the least of these, is there anything we can do about it … what is the alternative … what would something better look like in our current situation?

This book, Prodigal Human, and the one to follow, Primal Return, will address these questions and those like them.

We begin by looking more closely, in Prodigal Human: The Descent of Man, at the “evolutionary” and historical aspects of this situation. If the previous book could be said to describe the ontogenetic or “developmental” arc of the devolution of consciousness that has led to our estranged state, this upcoming part can be called the phylogenetic arc of that perspective—the falls from grace, not occurring in one’s individual history, but unfolding over the course of prehistory for our species, human.

Therefore, the next few chapters will address the questions of origins and cultural variations. I follow that with relating the historical and cultural variants to the contemporary situation in putting forth a cultural solution.

But the most thorough response and effort at solutions will be brought out in the next book. Primal Return: Return to Grace will carry the threads of solution forward and weave them into a tapestry of an understanding of what an alternative might look like.

In surveying the phylogenetic and historical terrain immediately before us, however, I will employ the myth of Abraham and Isaac as the primary viewing-rock from which to make out the relevant features. While Biblical renderings are not historically accurate, they provide poetic, allegorical reflections of our possible prehistory and evolution. I could have used mythical accounts from any number of other cultures to provide this heuristic, but it makes sense to use one that is most widely known and has a long tradition of scholarly use in Western culture.

Other aspects of the Genesis account of creation, from The Bible, will also serve as vantage points in our understanding of how we have come to be at this particular pass. That includes the Cain and Abel story and the myth of Eden and The Fall.

The Garden

We begin at a familiar starting point: Let us recall these words from Genesis concerning our fall from grace and expulsion from Eden:

Unto the woman he said,
I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception;
in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children;
and thy desire shall be to thy husband,
and he shall rule over thee.

And unto Adam he said,
Because thou has hearkened unto the voice of thy wife,
and hast eaten of the tree,
of which I commanded thee, saying,
Though shalt not eat of it:
cursed is the ground for thy sake;
in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life:
thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee;
and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,
till thou return unto the ground;
for out of it wast thou taken:
for dust thou art,
and unto dust shalt thou return.

And Adam called his wife’s name; because she was the mother of all living.

Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.

And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:

therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

So he drove out the man: and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. (Genesis, 3: 16-24)

One common interpretation of the Garden of Eden myth in the Genesis book of The Bible concerns God’s direct communication with Adam and Eve prior to the Fall. It is said that Original Sin occurs out of the fact that Eve begins talking to the serpent and making decisions of her own without consulting God — keeping Him “in the dark,” so to speak.

Thus Original Sin occurs out of our separating ourselves from God, turning from Him, as it were, to the things of the world and leaving off direct communication with Him. The result is that we are banished from Eden — the place where we “walked with God” — and are thrust out on our own, “in the sweat of thy face,” to work it out by ourselves.

Birth — An Awakening or a Forgetting?

Birth Is a Forgetting of Innate Divinity: “Like a prodigal child, I had run away from my macrocosmic home and imprisoned myself in a narrow microcosm” — Paramahamsa Yogananda

Now, the obvious psychological corollary to this pattern of falling from grace in Eden is that of one’s birth into this world. Prior to birth, many of us have a relatively direct relationship to the Divine.

The “first major shutdown” has not occurred — that is, the first major time that we have retreated from our roots in the infinite because of our entanglement in the pain of physical existence (Adzema, 1985).

We know this from our re-experience in the various forms of experiential psychotherapy, especially primal therapy, and from the various spiritual growth modalities going under the rubric of “breathwork,” especially holotropic breathwork (Farrant, 1987; Grof 1976, 1985, 1988; Hannig, 1982; Janov, 1983; Lake, 1981).

But we also see this in the spiritual literature. Sathya Sai Baba (1984), for example, put it:

When you are immersed in your Self, you are happiest. The child in the womb is in Soham (I am He); but, when it is born in the world, it starts the question, Koham, who am I? For it forgets its truth; it identifies itself with the body and the senses. Until it becomes a Jnani, it will never regain the Soham knowledge. (p. 111)

By “I am He,” Sai Baba is indicating the identification of the self with the Divine essence of all. So he is saying we are identified with that essence, or God, in the womb but that when we are born we forget this identification — wondering afterwards, “who am I?”

Similarly, Swami Paramahansa Yogananda (1946) wrote about his experience of returning to a physical body in his reincarnation on earth. He described it: “Like a prodigal child, I had run away from my macrocosmic home and imprisoned myself in a narrow microcosm” (p. 46, emphases mine).

Birth trauma causes this first major shutdown, this first major forgetting of our divinity. After birth we no longer “walk with God” as easily, like most of us did in the womb. We are too caught up in the world, its play of pleasure and pain, our survival in it.

Birth Is the Beginning of Human Consciousness? Addressing the Old Paradigm Understanding of Birth

Mainstream psychology disputes this on two counts — in both cases keeping with Freud: It contends that such a change does not occur in the direction I am proposing, that is to say that consciousness is not reduced through such early experience but is increased (Sroufe, et al, 1992, chapter 8). And further it asserts that it doesn’t occur at the time I am suggesting, by which I mean such change of consciousness, in whichever direction, is not related in any way to the birth event but is stretched out over time in infancy and early childhood (Mahler, et al, 1975; Peoples & Parlee, 1991).

We (Adzema, 1985; Chamberlain, 1988; Janov, 1983; Grof 1976, 1985, 1988; Lake, 1981; Verny, 1981; to name just a few), however, disagree with mainstream psychology based upon our evidence, which they, as yet, continue to ignore. On both counts — the direction and the time — our evidence is overwhelming that it is as I’ve stated: We “fall from grace” at birth. The fact that mainstream psychology is reluctant and inefficient in its methods of admitting new data and better interpretations should not, I feel, be allowed to inhibit the progress of science: Specifically, in this case, paradigm entrenchment should not preclude our efforts to evaluate these findings in the field of prenatal and perinatal psychology and to follow them to whatever other new truths they may lead.

I should point out that I do not object to mainstream psychology limiting the range of what it considers to be valid and credible evidence to a certain small spectrum of “hard” data. But what I do object to is that when they stray into areas … and they inevitably do … about which there is no hard evidence, perhaps because there can be no such evidence in such an area—for example, what might be the subjective experience of birth for the infant—they project into those areas their “scientistic” biases and prejudices. This they do, completely ignoring the vast amount of evidence of a less-than-hard variety that would completely dispute their biases. So doing, we end up with psychologists of the status quo putting out self-serving rationales and rationalizations for their beliefs and lifestyles, couched in scientific language. And that is anything but the empiricism they proclaim.

For how anyone could judge the (often voluminous, meticulously recorded, and researched) “softer” data that is available (we’re not talking about wrong data) at a lower value than no data is a mystery. This is understandable, I suppose, only by a reading of Thomas Kuhn on paradigm entrenchment and resistance to new data that implies paradigm shift (1970). Here we see a situation where the old adage that religion takes over where science leaves off remains true. Only it is “scientistic” religion that is taking over to color those areas where they cannot dare to tread on purely empirical grounds.

This would be bad enough, but for the fact that not all the evidence that is ignored in this manner is even of the “softer” variety. Much of it is hard evidence, scrupulously grounded in strict empirical methodology. But this “baby” is also thrown out with the supposed “bathwater” of the anecdotal “softer” data. In addition to that evidence erupting in the field of prenatal and perinatal psychology, there is the evidence in related fields, the research on morphic resonance and morphogenetic fields is one such example, previously explored.

So apparently, in self-appointed “reputable” psychological science, there are sanctioned sources and unsanctioned sources for one’s information. Again we need Kuhn (1970) to help us understand this. But it has nothing to do with science and everything to do with politics and psychology—that is, it has to do with human failings and arrogance.

At any rate, this book, Prodigal Human, and its accompanying volumes, may be considered part of the effort to evaluate the evidence ignored by the mainstream. Further, the attempt to reconcile these findings, to accommodate mainstream constructs to these discoveries, is an ongoing effort on our part.

Birth Is the Next Major Diminishing of Consciousness After the One at the Beginning — Around Conception: In the Womb, One Is Still Conscious of Divinity

At any rate, technically speaking, birth is the first major narrowing of consciousness after the one at conception. Of course, we are speaking generally here, for there is a great deal of individual variation in this depending upon the events in the womb. These are complicating issues that would not be profitably addressed here but are elsewhere (See, for example, Falls from Grace).

Therefore, to all intents and purposes conception is the first shutdown, technically the first fall from grace. But at this point, after that first fall, and while in the womb, many people are still relatively open to the Divine. There is the awareness of separation from Divinity, and the creation of form, at the creation of sperm and egg. But the second duality, the second split has usually not occurred — that of separation from the present, and the creation of time, which occurs at birth (Again, see Falls from Grace).

This is what happened to us in our individual lives. Now, let us look at how this same kind of fall from grace or “ejection from Eden” has played out over the eons in the creation of what we know today as the species, human.

Continue with We Once Had the Run of the Forest and the “Original Affluent Society”: Early Human Savagery Is a Patriarchal Myth Rationalizing Our Descent Into Civilization

Return to Book 9—Falls from Grace

For an Overview and Links to Other Parts of This Work-in-Progress, Go to Prodigal Human: The Descent of Man

Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness — Michael’s latest book — is now available in print and e-book formats.

at http://www.amazon.com/Falls-Grace-Devolution-Revolution-Consciousness/dp/1499297998/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1400787010&sr=1-3 

Planetmates: The Great Reveal  is also available in print and e-book format.  at https://www.createspace.com/4691119

and at Amazon at

http://www.amazon.com/Planetmates-Great-Reveal-Return-Grace/dp/1496083326/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1399084684&sr=1-1&keywords=michael+adzema

To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.

To purchase a signed copy of any of my books, email me at sillymickel@gmail.com … Discount for blog subscribers.

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Inauthenticity Rising and Why Women Came Under Attack: The Controller-Conformer Alliance Won Out Over More Authentic Humans, Say Planetmates in the 18th Prasad

Nature, Misogyny, and How Women Got Blamed for Everything: The More Twisted of You Beat Out More Authentic Humans, Resulting in the Environmental Crisis Today

The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Eighteenth Prasad: Inauthenticity Rising

Planetmates Release The Eighteenth Prasad

The Controller/Conformer alliance dominated in the struggle humans created.

Giraffe is First Consciousness at The Eighteenth Prasad.

[T]he twisted behaviors and minds that define your species began the final evolution to...you today and creates this rare, nearly unprecedented possibility of planet death in a relatively instantaneous future.

The Eighteenth Prasad – Inauthenticity Rising

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

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Paraphrase/Elaboration of The Eighteenth Prasad — by SillyMickel Adzema

One extremely important facet of this Controller-Conformer-Authentic dynamic concerns your females. Remember that at this point of your separation from Divinity through excessive controlling activity and ego-aggrandizement you, having focused on conquering and controlling everything about you in Nature, were beginning to dominate and control each other in the same way. You focused on Small Accumulators, especially the Authentics among them, but a huge part of that group were your females. So your women became targets for all aspects of this controlling mania — domination, denigration of character, diminution of personhood, coercion, attack, corralling, enslavement, abuse, murder, and so on.

Now, why your females would be singled out might not be apparent initially. You would think that they would be as likely to be Controllers as your males. Some, indeed, were Controllers, though not many. For there is something that sets women apart in this entire dynamic, making them less likely to become Controllers, more likely to be Authentic, and to be special targets for attack and controlling by the Controller-Conformers.

What sets women apart is their special connection with Nature and birth. Keep in mind that all of this controlling has its roots in birth trauma and infancy deprivation. Keep in mind also that all of this is about controlling all aspects of the natural world. Quite simply, because your females figured so prominently in both the birth trauma as well as the infancy trauma, they would unconsciously be blamed for it all. In attacking women, both women and men would act out their early pain. They would transfer their intensive efforts to beat back the residues, inside themselves, of their painful pasts, onto the outside and would beat back the symbol of that pain — women.

Humans are the only misogynistic species, because humans are the only species with excessive birth and infancy trauma. Among all of Nature, the female of the species prevails — that is to say, is central, more important, and usually dominates, if there is any inequality of genders. However, in humans, at birth, you experience a struggle with the female body to be born, more so than any other species. You would continue that struggle with, beating back at, and attack upon the female body later in life. After birth and in early infancy, you were left wanting in having your needs sufficiently satisfied. In particular, you craved nursing, feeding, and attentiveness from your mothers. Since you could not help be at least somewhat dissatisfied with what you received — even the best mothers cannot respond perfectly, like Nature and biology can — you would for the rest of your life first think of your females as being the source of your dissatisfaction. Women would be scapegoated for all human ills.

It was not women’s fault, of course, that they would be associated with these traumas. You would call it being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Indeed, if justice and reason ruled emotions, women would have been rewarded and appreciated for their roles in taking on these difficult times and tasks in your life. They, after all, suffered severely during birth, just as you did as a neonate. They, though not perfectly, worked hard to fill your needs after birth. So, they are like the doctor who might get blamed for the disease, the hospital that might be targeted as being the cause of death since so much of it occurs there, the fireman who might get blamed for the fire … heck, there’s always one when he’s around, coincidence? … or the police officer responding to the crime who might get accused of it — because he was there. Simply through association, and quite unfairly, women would be targeted as the source of all your ills. You would associate women with eating an apple that would end the earthly paradise, with a jar which when opened released all evil into the world. Amazingly, but understandably, you would create images of the female vagina as ringed with voracious teeth — a perfect depiction of the pain you felt when you first came through that doorway into the world.

So, women, first and foremost, after Nature itself, would be attacked and corralled in your controlling mania as it began being directed now even at yourselves.

But there was another reason why women would come under attack. Being associated with those times of pain was the driving force behind your targeting women for enslavement and abuse. But also, those very fundamental aspects of being female — giving birth and nurturing infants — are the very connections with Nature that you can never deny. You can and did try to separate yourself from all aspects of Nature, to set yourself apart and above. But in the activities of birth, sex, and infancy, you are most clearly part of Nature — down here on Earth with the rest of us planetmates. You may not acknowledge it, but you cannot but know it.

So, females, in being primary participants in birth and infancy, have a connection with Nature that is harder for them to deny; and it is a connection that your males would be aware of as well. In being connected to Nature, your females would be more likely to be like those Authentics — that is, more interested in emotional, relational, and spiritual, rather than in power and controlling pursuits. Burdened with giving birth and having a greater role in parenting, they would be more likely to be Small Accumulators, too. So, they would be singled out for excessive coercion and demands for conformity by Controllers for those reasons — that is, being more akin to Authentics and more likely a Small Accumulator.

But in the fact that men would know that women have a special connection to Nature, your females would be lumped in with Nature as another thing to control. Indeed, since sex is the major aspect of adult life that men experience as being related to Nature and to be unable to be controlled — at least, not with a lot of difficulty, for the sex act requires loss of control, as does loving in any form — and men would associate sex with women, that would be another reason women would be controlled. For in controlling women, men could, again, work to deny their connection with and dependence on Nature.

Now, these special characteristics of women and the extra coercion that would be brought to bear upon them because of those characteristics would split women along two lines of behavior. These would be sets of behaviors, but also, and for the most part, they would be ways that both women and men would come to see women. One set of behaviors and perceptions of women would be the Conforming ones. In these behaviors and attitudes women would succumb to the coercions and become obedient. They would become as sycophantic as can be. They would adopt the perceptions of themselves as being less than human because of their association with Nature. They would go along with what was being demanded of them and would become docile, subservient, “domesticated” — just like the “animals” that were owned. Indeed they would go along with being viewed as possessions and things and would become self-hating and obsequious to the values of power, control, and masculinity.

The other set of behaviors and perceptions are what might be called Authentic. In this choice, women would not concede personhood. They would not want men or others controlling their freedom, bodies, sexuality, relationships. They might, for the sake of their relations with their children, ape all the mannerisms of conformity and submission when necessary, but they would resent it. They really were still closer to their natural selves and to Nature and could not or would not deny it, regardless the pressures to conform and the punishments for non-conformance. Women would know their power, however secretively. On the other hand, men would perceive this assertion of the natural in women as the gravest offence and affront to all their efforts at controlling and dominating. So men’s view of these women had them being lumped in with all their other distorted views of Nature: by men, women were, like Nature, seen as wild, uncontrollable, bestial, animalistic, uncontrolled. They were associated with those forces in Nature that resisted domination and murder, too, as, like Nature’s planetmates who did so, they were considered vicious and unforgiving — furious and Furies.

Thus, there was a polarity evident in women’s feelings and in the perception of them in society: One matches up with the Conformers and was the pull of obedience, for the women, and the perception of their docility, by others. The other was in resonance with the Authentics — and all the natural and beneficent forces of the Divine — and resulted in women’s desire to be free, noble, and self-determining, like humans in general once were. And this was perceived, especially by men, as rebellion, license, viciousness, and evil (the opposite of live) — which is exactly the opposite of what it was, for the Authentic urge was life-affirming and felicitous, loving as well as free.

This is how your females became the most important and obvious expression of the Controller-Conformer-Authentic dynamic. In it you can see all the elements of persuasion, coercion, obedience, sycophancy, rebellion, jealousy, and humiliation that were at play in all of your, human’s, efforts at extending your controlling insanity into the realms of humans, too, beginning with the most natural of you.

All of these pressures toward conformity and sycophancy in humans could not help but make for the dominance of Controller-Conformer numbers, and thus traits, in your populations. Remember, that conformity and controlling behaviors were aligned not only in their ends but within the person. For every conformer is a wannabe controller. And every conformer would be rewarded for their obedience by getting to be controlling in some other area of their life. In fact, the pressure on women to be conforming was so great because it was the place where conforming men, if nowhere else in society, were given free rein as controllers. Just as in the societal hierarchies that developed out of this Controller-Conformer dynamic it would have those on one level sucking up to those above while being rewarded with sycophantic behavior from those below them, so also conforming behavior for all men would be rewarded with sycophantic behavior by women, who would be everywhere at the bottom of all hierarchies.

Of course, women would seek reward for their conformity, too. People or planetmates lower on the totem pole could always be invented. Women could participate vicariously in their husband’s rewards of obedience from those below him; they could derive it from other women, under certain circumstances; they could wield it in their relations with their children, and often did, which is a whole other issue important enough to be discussed on its own (See The 22^nd Prasad); and if nothing else there were always the planetmates and Nature that would be bent into service to satisfy these unwholly, unnatural “needs” (actually, desires) to be deferred to and to scapegoat others for one’s own circumstances.

If human females chose to accept none of these outlets for their resentment and they insisted on being Authentic and living along the lines of Nature, they suffered. And many of your women did just that.

In being connected to Nature through birth and nurturing, through parenting and family relationships, they would be ever reminded of those values of Nature and of their natural ways. Values of intimacy, love, full experience of life, and felicity would make those of power and domination seem pale by comparison.

So, just like compassionate planetmates who took on lives of service to suffering humanity, a great many of your women did, too. They suffered for being Authentic. Because of this, your females are always and everywhere more likely to suffer from unhappiness, depression, anxiety. Indeed, women actually are more like planetmates, they are more like “animals”; but this is meant in the most salutary way: that your females are closer to Divinity, to natural life, and more likely to take on suffering rather than participate in the power and punishment games.

Still, though slumbering in the hearts of many women and some unusual men — the Authentics — natural and authentic traits would wane as being characteristics of humans. For, of course, those of you who accumulated more and controlled others allied with their conforming, sycophantic underlings would be able to win out in the struggle over resources over those more authentic and less conniving of you. For these traits of unnaturalness do provide a temporary edge in the competition you created for yourselves. You created unreal struggles, and imaginary achievements and defeats, out of your crazed and fearful brains; and the ones who went along most with those unnatural pursuits and forged personalities to fit it could not help but dominate in those contests. Essentially, because of these ruthless traits the more twisted of you would be able to win out more often in the struggle for survival over more authentic humans.

These ways succeeding, controlling and conformity traits would ascend as traits in your population. For, not only would these dominating and subservient traits be passed along to your children through heredity, but also through nurture and example. Your children could not help but be lured from their pulls toward natural ways, which they, by Nature, experience more strongly as they are younger and more recently removed from Divinity. Your offspring with such traits would end up being great in number and your population would increasingly see and produce such inauthentic, more twisted humans.

In this way, your evolution to the depths of depraved Nature that we observe in you today was brought about. This was the final fall in your devolution from wholesome beingness to the twisted and inauthentic state you find yourselves in today — a state so unwholesome as actually to be capable of bringing down all life on this planet, along with your own, in as short a time as just an instant.

Continue with The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Nineteenth Prasad: Over-Accumulation, Ego, and Attaining Ultimate Unnaturalness

Return to The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Seventeenth Prasad: Nascent Class War … 20,000 BC

To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … Go toThe Great Reveal from The Planetmates

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Class War, 20,000 BC: In the 17th Prasad, Planetmates Report Big Accumulators Created Scarcity, Needlessly, and Oppressed Small Accumulators to Convert Them to Being Conforming Underlings

Class War Divided People, Creating Culture War: Three Groups Emerged—Controllers (Big Accumulators), Conforming Underlings (Small Accumulators, Wannabe Controllers), and Authentic Humans (Small Accumulators by Choice, Keepers of the Old Ways)

The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, the Seventeenth Prasad: Nascent Class War … 20,000 BC

Planetmates Release The Seventeenth Prasad

Big Accumulators deprived others of resources to make them able to be manipulated towards the Accumulators’ ends.

Controlling and conforming traits won out, in the struggle for survival, over natural, authentic traits. For Big Accumulators and their conforming allies could combine their power to harness even more excessive resources. Driven by unreal fears of uncertainty and death from deprivation, they went even further to garner power and resources through gobbling up all they could and leaving others in states of severe neglect. Then surrounded by people in severe deprivation, they could call any tune they wished, for those in deprivation would be more amenable to themselves becoming conforming underlings and serving the Big Accumulators ends, thus further increasing their power and excessive accumulation.

Lion is First Consciousness at The 17th Prasad.

"Big Accumulators...saw no end to their desire to drive others into states of deprivation that would make them more amenable to control and to...serving the ends...of their high accumulating overlords."

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

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

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

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

Video Commentary by SillyMickel Adzema

This video is a reading of The Seventeenth Prasad, as received from The Planetmates—what I’m calling “Nascent Culture War, 20,000 B.C.”—with additional explanation, context, and some commentary by SillyMickel Adzema.

The issues highlighted in the commentary concern the way the sedentary lifeway and the possibility of storing and owning more
than one needed led not only to a division among humans into Big Accumulators and Small Accumulators, but also into Controllers, Conformers, and Non-Conformers. The natural alliance between Controllers, i.e., the Big Accumulators, and their conforming sycophantic underlings gave them survival advantages over natural, authentic Non-Conformers. How human’s birth pain and its increased anxiety led to the Controller-Conformer alliance to seek to swallow up or eliminate all Non-Conformers is explained, along with the consequences this has had ever since for societies and the divisions between them and within them.

The Seventeenth 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 Seventeenth 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=rblvjmffjp
Image of The 17th Prasad “Nascent Culture War, 20,000 B.C.” Of “The Great Reveal” By The Planetmates

Paraphrase/ Elaboration of  The Seventeenth Prasad: Nascent Culture War, 20,000 B.C.” — by SillyMickel Adzema

What followed is that there was pressure on Small Accumulators in a number of ways. Remember, Small Accumulators were what you originally were and describes the state in which your kind were happy. So, Small Accumulators were embodiments of the “old ways” … the natural ways. They were “more conservative” in seeking to choose richness of life experience over possession of things. But their numbers became fewer and the old ways increasingly sank into oblivion for these reasons:

The major way Small Accumulators began to disappear is through their accommodation to the power of the Big Accumulators: They covered up their desire for a more authentic and richer life. Small Accumulators by choice became fewer in number as many sought to be Big Accumulators.

But, Small Accumulators we have always with us. That is true. So, outside of those choosing to be Small Accumulators, in awareness of the broader life experience it makes possible, there were and will be always those who, for reasons of fate, Divine intention, inordinate fearfulness, and/or inability to be or “bad luck” in becoming Big Accumulators would be small accumulating not out of choice. These Small Accumulators — who would if they could be Big Accumulators — would be easily swayed to conform to the wishes of the Big Accumulators.

Why is that so? Why would those wishing to themselves dominate and control end up becoming submissive and allowing themselves to be dominated? It sounds contradictory. But, quite simply, in allying with the Big Accumulators, such wannabes of accumulation could maintain the hope — most often illusory — that they could become the same. Like dog planetmates who at times have gathered around the tables of humans, hoping for scraps, such Small-Accumulators-by-fate would be attracted to Large Accumulators. Indeed, a pseudo-religious quality came to be attached to Large Accumulators, by them. It was thought Big Accumulators — in particular, the “strong man” most in control among them — had a sort of power or energy that they contained to a great degree — far more than ordinary humans — which it was possible to feel when in proximity with them. It was even thought that it could “rub off” on others. So this purported power was, essentially then, a symbolic rationalization of this idea of thinking that one could become a Big Accumulator — sooner or later, one way or the other — through proximity to and alliance with Big Accumulators.

That is why such Small Accumulators would submit to the wishes of Big Accumulators. They would become the best and most loyal allies to the ones who had more. In deferring to them … repressing their own individuality in order to do that … they would maintain their hope of satisfying their own greed at some point. This is what is meant by their becoming conformers.  They would alter their behavior in a way to be pleasing to their overlords, and they held little value in having their outer behavior match their inner experience. They would be liars to themselves and the world, narrowing the purview of their life from the richness of experience that is possible to a focus on physical survival alone. Again, early deprivation created excessive fear of being wanting in life, leading to extreme measures. And these included loss of self. These Conformers would become solid, albeit often sycophantic, allies with the Big Accumulators or Controllers.

So there were, and are still among humans, these three styles of being human: Big Accumulators or Controllers; Small Accumulators by choice, keepers of the Old Ways, who might be called Authentic Humans; and these would-be Big Accumulators, these loyal sycophants to the folks who had more, who might be called Conforming Underlings. Notice that the desires and designs of these three groups are split along a particular line. Controllers and Conformers are allied in their aims, and those aims are directly opposed to those of Authentics. So, though Big Accumulators were far smaller in numbers to Small Accumulators, their alliance with Conforming Underlings gave them power far beyond their small numbers. This Controller-Conformer alliance would, nearly everywhere, come to dominate in the struggle for resources over those Small Accumulators who sought to hang onto more natural and authentic behaviors and lives.

This is how they accomplished that: Naturally this alliance would mean their numbers would be greater. But the power that came with control of great resources allowed them also higher degrees of organization. For humans could be organized along lines not to their choosing, rather in accordance with the designs of those at the top through the power of gifts and rewards from the Big Accumulators. You would these days say that rich folks can pay others to do their bidding and work toward their ends and not the ends that people would choose if not coerced and bribed that way. So coercion through distribution of resources by the few allowed greater organization of activities along the lines beneficial to the elite.

But the Controller—Conformer alliance would be even more successful because they would go further than that. Not only could they organize the activities of large numbers of people to benefit the Controllers in the acquisition of greater amounts and storage of resources, thus increasing their power and ability to do that all the more, in vicious cycles of greed and power. Not only would this in itself allow them to rise in dominance over the more natural, individualistic Small Accumulator — the Authentics. But their raging fears of want and deprivation had no bounds; they expanded their control over other humans way beyond what was involved in simply winning out in the resource contest. Their crazed and fearful brains pushed them to seek god-like, total control.

Backing up, remember that the Big Accumulators (the Controllers) shared something with the Conformers — an excessive fear, again from that early birth trauma, of lack of resources and its ultimate consequence, death. The Authentics risked more, in pursuing the ends of the soul, so they either had less fear, for whatever reason, or their desire for a richer experience of life was greater and caused them to take on the burden of that fear. 

But the Controllers and Conformers — fearing death, deprivation, and uncertainty to an extreme degree — would feel that nothing less than the control of all resources and the conformity of all other humans to their will and ends was required. With excessive fear, or diminished appreciation of life in itself, or both, they felt that the only way to find relief from their overpowering anxiety about existence came in attempts to control everything, to control all variables of existence, especially the ones related to accumulation, and all the humans in any way involved with any of this.

So the Controllers and Conformers would not merely seek to gather and accumulate resources, they would seek also to eliminate any competition for these resources, however slight or inconsequential, however small or disorganized that competition might be, in the form of the natural, authentic, but also individualistic Small Accumulator.

They did this in a number of ways, beginning with gathering and hoarding as much of the available resources as they could.

Hoarding in this way would leave the non-conforming Small Accumulator — the Authentic — with less than enough even to survive. So the Controller-Conformers would create scarcity. They created also starvation and death for the Authentic.

Think back, now, scarcity does not exist in Nature. You can see that if you but look. Imagine any natural setting. The only way that you can view that environment as not prodigious with possibilities for sustenance, shelter, or any of the physical needs is if one has narrowed one’s understanding of what satisfies one’s needs. Looking at any environment from the perspective of seeking one or a few items in particular is the only way most environments can be seen to be at all lacking. But expanding one’s understanding of what can be used to satisfy one’s physical needs to what is usable and possible, one cannot help but see Nature as a cornucopia. In your mythologies you display your lost understanding that Nature is really that way, and that you have simply stopped seeing that.

No. What you have dreamed up instead is this idea of scarcity. But scarcity is not a true perception of Nature, it is one that has been perpetrated by humans themselves — in particular, the Controller-Conformer alliance — for their ends alone. How better to persuade authentic Small Accumulators to become Conformers or at least to bend to Controller’s wills than to make it that they have no recourse of resorting to Nature on their own — whether true or not? And, indeed, the Controller-Conformer alliance, in gathering and hoarding resources well beyond any need, they sought to create that scarcity in reality. They would elicit compliance by eliminating alternatives.

This was in many ways the same as the way humans elicited compliance from other planetmates — “domesticating” them — by corralling them and eliminating their possibilities of sustaining themselves except through the controlling humans. The obvious difference is that humans, in general, would not be corralled … well, not in any obvious way. We will leave out for now the creation of urban centers and the enforced dependence of the population on city and village economics for the satisfaction of needs. But, at least ostensibly, authentic small accumulating humans were not corralled. They, at least initially, had freedom of movement, however self-enslaving they were to their domiciles and in their sedentary lifeways. 

But a virtual domestication of humans by the Controller-Conformer alliance could be brought about by limiting resources available to any but them. By creating scarcity in the environment, in general, they could make all humans in that environment dependent on and looking to them who had stored and had gathered those resources.

But they went even further: The Controller-Conformers would employ other stratagems to persuade the non-conforming to become “domesticated” — just like the planetmates humans had corralled. Causing deprivation was the stick, but persuasion to become Conformers and to enjoy the benefits of “social conformity” was the carrot. The values of

 social conformity would be paraded about for all to see. It became ever more important to display such differences in status through ostentatious dress and possessions.

Fancy dress would say two things: For the Conformer, it would say, “I am better than you.” In this way it would reward the conformer for her or his sycophancy by providing its opposite — an ego inflation — in relation to other people. And to the Authentic or the Small Accumulator of any sort it said, “You can have this if you obey.” That is to say, conform and be rewarded. Further, that not only can you increase your possessions by conformity, but also you can increase your status and have other Small Accumulators be sycophantic to you, too.

So, ostentatious dress and elaborate displays of possession and domicile established hierarchies of importance, with each level garnering for its members the psychological satisfaction of being sucked up to from those below, while the members of each level would be led to feel inferior to, jealous of, and so persuaded to emulate and suck up to, those on the level above. 

Humiliation, jealousy, dominance, submission, power, obedience were all orchestrated in these games of hierarchy. But the bottom line was that Authentics were pressured both by being starved and beaten into submission with the stick of scarcity and by being persuaded into conformity using the carrot of status, possessions, and the reward of psychological tokens in the new game of one-up-manship.

And if neither worked — the stick of scarcity or the carrot of status and conspicuous consumption — then there was harassment, scapegoating, belittlement, ostracism, and ridicule. 

If conformity could not be persuaded it would be demanded and coerced. Controller-Conformer elites would create and sustain sets of rules to suit their ends, to which at least Small Accumulators must be obedient. Creating law in this way, they created outlaws. Defining criminality, they created criminals. For laws and rules would not be to benefit the greater good of all but simply that of the Controllers. So hardly would such rules sit neatly upon the desires of the members of society themselves, in particular, the Authentics. So the establishment of societal codes was a covert way by which the Controllers could mark the Nonconforming Authentics as criminals. And this was helpful to them for, by rationalizing it as “law enforcement,” it enabled them in the use of physical force, capture, enslavement, physical punishment and torture, and even death.

So the third way Small Accumulators had their numbers come under pressure — outside of desertions to the ranks of Conformers and the persuasive forces of scarcity and reward — was through outright attack and brutality. 

In the last analysis, the Controller-Conformer alliance could eliminate any use of resources by anyone with ends of their own and not of the alliance through torture, imprisonment, and death.

So Controllers and Conformers would have extreme advantages over Non-Conformers and they would dominate in the circles of increasing densities of societies. They would reduce the numbers of any opposing them, that is to say, any with traits or qualities that were not controlling or sycophantic, by persuading them, by killing them, or through the fact that Authentics would move away. Authentics would succumb to the wishes of the Controllers or they would be enslaved and killed, thus dying out, or they would run away to live in groups farther and farther away from the reach of the Controller-Conformer populations.

All in all, over time and in these ways, the old ways that were harmonious with Nature gave way to new ways of dominance, power, sycophancy, repression of personhood and emotion, and enslavement … with much smaller groups of Authentics living either silently or away from the population centers.

Continue with The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Eighteenth Prasad: Inauthenticity Rising

Return to The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Sixteenth Prasad: Greed and Oppression — The Rich Begin Calling the Tune, 25,000 B.C.

To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … Go toThe Great Reveal from The Planetmates

To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.

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Early Humans, Foragers, Harmony with Nature … the Fall: The Tranquil Time Ended … the Gap Between Natural Functioning and Twisted, Human Functioning Widened. (updated)

The End of Innocence – As Early Humans with an Increasing Obsession to Control Everything, We Kicked Ourselves Out of “Eden,” According to the Planetmates

The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Ninth Prasad: Eden and the Fall … Harmony with Nature, Early Humans, Foragers

Planetmates Release The Ninth Prasad

Harmony with Nature, Early Humans, Foragers

Toad was First Consciousness at The Ninth Prasad.

"[T]his long tranquil time was destined to end...the gap between natural functioning and twisted, backwards human functioning widened."

The Ninth Prasad – Eden and The Fall

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

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

Video Commentary by SillyMickel Adzema

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

“The Ninth 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 Ninth 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=lvlhqsnhzv
Image of The Ninth Prasad. “The Great Reveal” By The Planetmates

Paraphrase/Elaboration of “The Ninth Prasad” — by SillyMickel Adzema

So, all these changes happened gradually over a very long time. You were once a part of Nature, and you remained that way for millions of years, even as your body changed. Even when you became human, as we have just defined you, your ancestors still lived in harmony with Nature. Bipedalism was now fully in place and functional; birth pain had increased; you were living in stable social units that supported the excessive dependency of your children; and your brains were at the size, roughly, that they are today. Your mind was fevered and crazed, caught up as it was with the after-effects of your early birth trauma and your infancy deprivations, that is true.
You began engaging in strange and unusual behavior to deal with these compulsions and delusions. You began fashioning items and art that harkened back to those days of pain. You began engaging in unusual and repetitive behaviors that involved these objects. Having had such a trying experience at your birth, many of these actions and items involved your re-creating that time, for in this way you could acquire some relief from the feverish thoughts. The excess items of your mental peregrinations could be completed somewhat. Completion brought temporary relief from their assaults in the mind.

At this time you lived by foraging, like all the rest of Nature. Your food sources were what could be acquired among the Flora Kingdom as well as what could be gathered from water — those “vegetables of the sea”: shellfish and fish, for example. However you did not eat flesh. Your harmony with Nature was such that you refrained from the killing of life forms resembling your own — warm-blooded ones of the Fauna Kingdom — for you still felt kinship with them. They were still, to you, your brothers and sisters from all kinds of other mothers. You were not inclined to kill. In fact, though even some warm-blooded Earth Citizens will use other warm-blooded species as a food source, you were not among them. Your diet included vegetation, insects, lizards, snakes, shellfish, turtles, fish, and the like; but it did not include what you call “meat” — that is, planetmate flesh. You were anything but savage; you were peaceful.

You maintained this way of living even as your forebears migrated more and more away from the places of water. A change in environment led the ones who would end up being you today to go inland for fresher water and eventually, after a long time, out onto the vast plains, whose resources involved changes in your diet. This whole time you were foragers, and in following the food supply you were nomadic.

You were like this for hundreds of thousands of years and it was a relatively tranquil time. You followed your body’s promptings in healing the effects of your early traumas, which gave you relief from your overheated brain … for your body, like all of Nature, has its ways of healing itself if you simply allow it. Indeed, these strange and repetitive behaviors and these items you created to which you gave so much attention … very strange to us, seemed to help you stay in harmony with the rest of us. You were not alien; hardly were you at war with us, as you later became and are today.

And, sure enough, this long Edenal period began to change. Your females had now the shorter times of carrying your young in the womb, and your infants had now that extremely long time of dependency and nurture as your brains finished developing, outside of the womb. So these inner fevers were constantly pushing your minds along darkened and twisted paths. You had anxiety and fear that we do not know, even to this day.

Such fear, after-effects from your abnormal beginnings, clouded the way you saw everything and you were less able to simply accept the easy flow of Nature and its Providence. Fear led to worry. Worry led to mistrust. You exaggerated the down side of every activity and minimized the more fortuitous and likely aspect of it.

You were beginning the separation from the rest of us. You were our troubled brothers and sisters who were going astray. You were our backward cousins, not quite getting it. It was clear that you were more tense and anxious than any of us and so less able to take in the simple pleasure of aliveness. Your mind was actively putting the world at a distance, as if you were afraid of it … No doubt your earliest experiences with that outside world, as in the way you first encountered the Other during the process of birth — which made you feel that it was characterized by difficulty and pain and was alien to you and not in accord with you — and in your interactions with it as an infant — which would obviously make you feel that the outside world could not be counted on to satisfy one’s needs, that it was random and unpredictable, and that it was only minimally attentive to one’s needs and not necessarily on one’s side — would lead you as adults to mistrust the world as well.

Divine Providence is there for all of us, but you began forgetting or not seeing it. You began to take into your own hands the satisfaction of things that would otherwise have been taken care of for you in the process of things. You have a saying, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”; but indeed that is exactly what you did. Your overstimulated brains and fevered states of consciousness would push you to tinker with things that were just fine the way they were. In doing so, you would inevitably “break” them — that is, you would screw them up. Your “improvements” upon Nature and its ways would most often bring side effects that themselves became new problems to solve. You managed to muck up the ordinary flow of things. We saw you as crazed and distant in the world of Nature. You were separating from us more and more. You were ejecting your own self from the Edenal existence we enjoy. You were setting up struggles for yourself — totally unnecessary ones — which caused you to have to overwork. It seemed, sure enough, that you desired to be caught up in struggles with the things of the world and with each other as if to relieve your fevered brain. Indeed, you seemed to be doing as adults what you needed to do as a fetus trying to make its way into the world. Just as you had to struggle at that time with the Other, seeing it as an opposing force, you were now struggling with the world around you and everything in it. You were fighting off and challenging even any aid that was coming your way, as you would misinterpret it.

So your birth seemed to imprint you to struggle throughout life; and your early infant experience of insufficient satisfaction of needs, because of all too imperfect caregivers, caused you to mistrust that you would get your basic needs met throughout your life. You worried and you struggled.

And you controlled. This was the beginnings of your loss of Edenal existence. You no longer allowed the All That Is to give you what you needed, you, mistrusting that, would expend all kinds of extra effort in determining that your needs would be met, but also the how, the when, and so forth, of that. This was a big part of that mucking with things that did not need fixing … and sure enough … as we will continually demonstrate to you … it has had consequences worse … eventually far worse … than if you had just been able to let things be as they would be.

Continue with The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Tenth Prasad: Descent Into Savagery Begins … Becoming Controlling, Becoming Killers

Return to The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Eighth Prasad: Straying from Nature – Prosperity Won Out Over Happiness for Early Humans

To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … Go to The Great Reveal from The Planetmates

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Straying from Nature: In the Eighth Prasad, Planetmates Tell How Economic Pressures Won Out Over Happiness for Early Humans (updated)

“Stay-at-Home” Moms Were Under Pressure Even Hundreds of Thousands of Years Ago! For Early Humans, Prosperity and Survival Advantages Won Out Over Healthy, Happy Newborns

The Great Reveal from the Planetmates. The Eighth Prasad: Straying from Nature – Prosperity Won Out Over Happiness for Early Humans

Planetmates Release The Eighth Prasad

So giving birth prematurely and bipedalism had survival advantages….

Survival won out over healthy, happy newborns and relatively pain-free births.

Leopard was First Consciousness at The Eighth Prasad.

"It is at the point when narrow pelvises, nine-month gestations, birth pain and trauma for mothers and newborns, and dependency on caregivers for survival for the first few years of life became the norm that you began to be separate from all other Earth Citizens and began the process of becoming human."

The Eighth Prasad – Straying from Nature

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

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

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

Video Commentary by SillyMickel Adzema

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

“The Eighth 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 Seventh Prasad, exactly as is in the video. Click on the link to go 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=wkrvwhfyzf
Image of The 8th Prasad. “The Great Reveal” By The Planetmates

Paraphrase/Elaboration of “The Eighth Prasad” — by SillyMickel Adzema

It took millions of years for all these factors to play out. They vied with each other and your proto-human bodies changed in ways that tended in one direction and then another, sometimes back and forth, in accordance with changes in your environs and through the processes of natural selection which would have the most adaptable of those body changes increasing, in relation to the changing environment; and the least adaptable body changes decreasing out of the fact that those who had them would be less likely to have children, so there would be less offspring containing those body changes.

The factors of a wide pelvis, where gestations would be longer and where births would be less painful, vied against the needs for females to spend less time in pregnancy in order to better fend for themselves in survival, especially in being more successful at foraging, where gestations would be shorter and births would be more painful.

The factors of a wide pelvis and easier birth vied against the advantages of a narrower pelvis and the increased facility that came with that for bipedal locomotion and the new advantage of having the upper limbs available to perform additional functions of carrying and object manipulation.

The factors of a wide pelvis and a healthier, happier baby vied against those forces involving increased ability of the mother to forage, better locomotion for the mother, and the survival advantages that came with increasing use of the upper limbs as hands.

The body changes that were occurring in accordance with these factors, other than the size and shape of the pelvic bones, included increasing brain size to deal with psychological pain of birth and post-natal deprivation, and an increase in the amount of time outside the womb during which that brain size could happen. This last put pressures on the external nurturing environment to find a way to deal with it, that is to say, the mother and the social group had to go through changes. We will discuss the changes needed in the social structure later — for example, the need for additional attentiveness to the needs of the infant and mother both during gestation but also for years afterward that would be aided by supportive others in the social environment, whether that was the father being more involved in caring for the mother or the social environment being more conducive to the development of families and supportive of those giving birth and doing child caring. For now, though, we will describe the physical changes in the mother that were brought about by these pressures.

As mentioned, the mother, with increasing bipedalism, would have new facility in the use of the upper limbs and hands. These were advantages in survival, for they aided in foraging, especially in a water environment where food items needed to be reached for and grabbed — these food items would be underwater most of the time — and not just grabbed and manipulated with the mouth and paws in the open air, as most mammals do. Certainly your nearest relatives have use of the hands, for those hands would be especially helpful in a tree-dwelling species where tree limbs could more easily be grasped with them.

But the use of the hands and the uprightness of the body which freed the upper limbs, would have even more advantage in a water environment and thus would stimulate their increasing development. Hands that were more dexterous and more sensitive could more easily feel under water that could not be seen through to better identify, dislodge and or capture, and thus acquire the food being gathered there. Certainly, there is less need for the sense of smell in a water environment and so that ability diminished in you. But there would be an increase in the need for the hands to be better able to feel, find, and manipulate food. So your forebears became less able to smell in general and that would apply to less ability to identify food sources but they became instead more sensitive in sensing the environment with the hands and more able in their use with increasing dexterity and the development and refinement of the fingers.

But there was an additional advantage that corresponded nicely with the pressure to have births earlier and the fact that the infant would be more helpless after birth and more dependent after birth for a longer time while the brain increased in size and was developing. These, as mentioned, would create a need for the mother and/or caregivers to be more attentive to the needs of a very needy infant; they would also need to become better at nurturing; and they would need to do it for a much longer time. One of the obvious things was that the baby, having even less ability for independent movement than other planetmates, would need to be carried and moved. The increasing freeing up of the hands with bipedalism and the increasing dexterity of those hands both facilitated that ability to carry and move the infant.

Another part of this was that in a water environment, hair and fur were not as advantageous as the nakedness that you began to have, which all aquatic mammals have in order to facilitate their movement in the water. Your nearest planetmate relatives have young who, being more developed after birth, are able to cling to the fur of their mother while the mother is foraging or attending to other matters. What would happen with the mother losing its fur and the baby less able to hang on anyway? Well, the answer is that the mother would have to hold the child. No other planetmate has to spend so much time holding its offspring as do humans. So, the mother would be aided in doing that with increasing ability to use the upper limbs, thus pushing for more bipedalism, and with increasing dexterity in the hands: The baby having less ability to hold on, the mother would have to make up for that with its ability to grab, contain, and manipulate the newborn.

Additionally, the baby being dependent longer, needing to be nurtured and fed and unable to do that well, and needing to be held for the infant cannot hold onto fur, the mother would be able to do that better by holding the baby in front of her. The baby would need to nurse and the mothers with larger breasts would be better able to accommodate that — larger breasts would be closer to an infant’s mouth with the infant in arms and the infant would not need to be lifted up to feed. So your kind began having larger breasts than any other planetmate.

Another body change that corresponded to all this is that while you were losing hair in an aquatic environment to better adapt to that, still there was a survival advantage to having hair on the head while in the water. At a certain age, babies would be better able to hold on, and when they would be taken to forage with the mother in the water, there would be an advantage to mothers with longer hair on the head for the baby to grab onto to stay in contact with the mother and to not be separated, which could be fatal. The head, after all, would be the only part of the body that would need to be out of the water while foraging.

There were other survival advantages — that came with the other factors of loss of fur, greater dependence of babies, and so on — to bipedalism, having better facility in the upper arms, and having better dexterity in the hands that had to do with the mother being able to move and run more quickly, when needed, while holding and carrying the infant. All those changes in the body would make those who had them more likely to survive in general, but especially, in an environment that would have predators, would increase the likelihood of those having those changes to have both the mother and the child of that mother to survive. So those body changes would increase among proto-humans.

But, as mentioned, all these changes had the cost of increasing birth pain; prematurity of infants, with the consequence that your kind would be deprived, compared to us, of the near perfect gestation, and guidance, by Nature for about half of your brain’s development; and increasing non-ideal of the satisfaction of biological needs after birth. Put simply, your young would suffer more. Your advantages to survival after birth would be bought at the cost of having happy, healthy newborns and painless births.

And since that suffering would be overwhelming for a neonate and infant, both at birth and for the period after, it would be repressed, and its existence as an unconscious component for the rest of your lives would mean, not only that your babies would be unhappier, but you would be unhappier throughout your lives. Hence, we would see you not just as naked ape but as suffering ape. For you would stand out against all planetmates as being the ones with the most misery and the least ability to participate in the enjoyment of life.

Your survival, therefore, was bought at the cost of both increased pain for your newborns and babies as well as increased unhappiness for adults.

So, these are the ways you became separate from all other planetmates and how and why they happened. They define you as human. They happened over the course of millions of years, so your earliest ancestors were a far cry, quite distant in all ways from the way you are today … indeed they were just like the other planetmates and Earth Citizens you see around you today. But, these changes occurring over vast expanses of time, you did become gradually separate from Nature and all of its ways.

It is at the point when all these factors had reached the point of development roughly like what they are for you today, that we can say you were human. Being human occurred for the ape that once was you when you had nine-month gestations; had narrow pelvises and facile bipedalism and use of hands and arms; had an unusual and overwhelming amount of pain at birth for the child, but also for the mother; had large brains full of ways to keep the vestiges of your painful beginnings at bay throughout life to survive, regardless of the convoluted and bizarre thoughts and misinterpretations of Reality that would come out of that excessive ideation; and had an exceptionally long time of helplessness after birth — the first few years of life — requiring an extraordinary amount of care from caregivers and investment of time in this task. It is when these became the norm for you that you could be considered human.

And these things would be the foundation upon which all your other changes would be built. They are the basis upon which all your other “accomplishments” in becoming human could happen. But to us, they are the branching off from the tree of Nature upon which all the other abnormalities that you developed in alienation from Nature could grow … and would be needed.

Continue with The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Ninth Prasad: Eden and the Fall … Harmony with Nature, Early Humans, Foragers

Return to The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Seventh Prasad: Becoming Human, Bipedalism Caused Birth Pain

To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … Go to The Great Reveal from The Planetmates

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Apocalypse No: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious … the book

Apocalypse No:
Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious

 

Complete Book Chapters with Links

This book is being offered in its entirety online, free of charge and with complete graphics and audio-visual media, at this time. This policy may need to change when it is published separately and offered for sale in the very near future.

These are the strangest of days. We live in a time in which ending our species in our lifetime, even eliminating all life on this planet, are very real possibilities. The awareness of this acceleration toward an “end of days” — while so horrifying that we are in denial of it and hardly speak it — hangs over us and affects us in ways singular and fantastic.

 

This book — Apocalypse No, Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious — awakens us to the unique character of our times. There are powerful factors and unconscious influences erupting into our world now which are changing the Earth and us in radical ways … for good and ill. This unprecedented era in history is rife with the perinatal, that is, with repressed memories locked into us arising from our experiences of birth. We see that our impending apocalypse has to do with birth feelings, birth trauma — an emerging perinatal unconscious.

Herein is revealed the underbelly of our modern world and life and the impetus behind our self-destruction. We see primal forces arising and exposed. We begin to understand how and why this is happening now. Knowing this gives us the power to do something about our dire situation. Finally, we can direct our attention to the roots of our drive to apocalypse and reverse it.

More than that, this awakening provides a way of transformation for ourselves. For we see that in the heart of this darkness we are bringing down upon us lies the most incredible opportunity for taking a leap beyond what we think of as human nature. This time calls for a new hero’s cycle — one that leaves behind the thuggishness of the old one. We are lifted beyond ourselves in a higher calling and a transcendent yet deeply rooted spirituality.

We realize that the necessary answer to the dilemma of apocalypse or Earth rebirth lies, not only in the resurrection of a new Earth, but in the dawning of a new self as well.

We will either heroically, somehow, save our species and our planet, which will require a change of our human nature unlike anything that has been asked of our species ever before, or we will be witnesses to the elimination of life on this planet in some way that we cannot imagine but can only be horrific in the extreme. This book is about facing, not denying, the uniquely dire character of our times and finding out what it says about us and requires of us.

There is much here to see, and so much of it the mainstream would never touch for fear of creating a panic. Still, to survive our species must face our problems, not look away. And there is a nobility in doing that, which is unlike any kind of nobility or heroism that has been asked of our species before.

However, this time brings with it an advantage and opportunity also unprecedented: Never before has it been more clear what is right and what is wrong, what is worthwhile and what is not, what is life … what, death, and what is noble and what evil. At no other time has a higher calling or a path of true nobility of soul been more visible. To align oneself with this cause lifts one out of oneself and one’s petty concerns into a heady and invigorating life purpose. We might die in our efforts. There is every likelihood that we will be unable to reverse our dire trajectory. Still, should that occur, those who face and take up this challenge will not suffer the agony of regretting that one could have done something but did not.

On the other hand, though we will need many noble souls to reverse our current downslide into oblivion, it is possible that simply a significant fraction of the world’s population—like the “leaven in the dough”—can make all the difference in the world, literally, by tipping our course one way as opposed to another, especially if these people—because of their healing and their awareness of the crisis—are motivated to place themselves in positions of influence and education, or to put their efforts toward healing, on individual and collective levels, in larger numbers than the average populace would. In other words, not just the leaven in the dough but as persons, standing in the right place and with the lever big enough, who can move the world. I hope, for the sake of us all, that you are one of those heroes.

Chapter One: Strange Days

Chapter Two: “We Ain’t Born Typical””

Chapter Three: The Perinatal Media

Chapter Four: Twenty-First Century Life – Table of DisContents

Chapter Five: Birth Wars, World Woes

Chapter Six: Healing Crisis – Getting “Sick” To Be Well

Chapter Seven: Through Gaia’s Eyes – Nature Balances HerSelf

Chapter Eight: Derailing the Cycles of War and Violence

Chapter Nine: Regressions in the Service of Society

Chapter Ten: Where There Is Hope, Cultural Rebirthing

Chapter Eleven: Control Versus Surrender … Heaven Leads Through Hell

Chapter Twelve: Atman Projects Versus Surrender Solutions

Chapter Thirteen: Peaceful Warriors and Silly Heroes

Chapter Fourteen: To Move the World – A Race Against Time

Afterword: Centaurs, Shamans, Sacrificial Lambs, and Scapegoats: Reflections on a Collective Shadow and Experience as Primary

Continue with Book Five: Wounded Deer and Centaurs

Return to Apocalypse Emergency – Book 3

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Having Become “Them,” We Are Left Forever Asking “Who Am I?” The Third Fall From Grace, The Primal Scene, Part Two — The Philosophic Bands

If Not My Self, Who Then to Be? Surrendering One’s Natural Self and Imprisoning Divinity in a Pandora’s Box Within, One Is Plagued with Wondering Who to Be

Philosophic Bands: Who to Be?

After the consolidation of the ego, the unreal self, at the primal scene and its consequent severing of even the felt connection to transpersonal realities by way of the body through severance of ego from body, one is no longer concerned with addressing one’s reality (in terms of attempting to secure even the satisfaction of felt needs).

Since one has given up on being one’s self, all that remains is to decide who to be. In the struggle to decide who to be (in order to be loved), we have the emergence of the philosophic bands.

Driven by Needs for Acceptance, Belongingness, Self-Esteem Rooted in Our Personal “Big Bang”

Their emergence is pushed by the force of unmet needs, which at this point stem most immediately from needs for simple acceptance, belongingness, self-esteem; but farther back have roots in the energy of unmet biological needs at infancy and early childhood; in the repressed dynamo of the fear of death inherent in the birth trauma; in the energy of unaddressed transpersonal yearnings and directives; all the way back in the energy of the original act of creation of the primary dualism (the creation of sperm and ovum, of form out of no-thing-ness) which, from this perspective on the other side of all the subsequent blockages and repressions of Energy, is beginning to look like some kind of “big bang.” [Footnote 1]

Divinity in Drag – the Id

Nevertheless, at this point all this accumulated energy that pushes the emergence of the philosophic bands is called libido.

Natural Self Relegated to a Pandora Prison

And as for the pitiful remnant of the Real in the personality—that is, of Mind, of Absolute Subjectivity, of archetypal pattern, of karmic direction and dharmic purposiveness, and of heartfelt human feeling . . . well, that is relegated to a locked and dirty Pandora’s box called id—a shabby and distorted remnant, divinity dressed in demonic drag clothing.

And so these years of later childhood continue until the time at which culture and society, the Other, make another significant departure from the reality of self requiring another radical adaptation. This latest and final duality, this fourth separation, splitting, and shutdown is what I call the fourth fall from grace; and it occurs around the time of puberty.

Footnote

1. In regard to a connection between our personal experience and the way we see the physical world—as in this example, conjuring the idea of a “Big Bang” origin—see Experience Is Divinity, Chapter Three, “Matter As Metaphor,” especially The World Is Rife with Messages — Personal and Universal — Regarding the Meaning of Existence, Our Place in the Universe, and Guidance for Getting Us hOMe. Also see Roger Jones’s (1982) Physics As Metaphor.

Continue with Resistance Is Futile … One Doesn’t Have One’s Own Mind … One Takes Up the “Mind” of the “Collective”: The Fourth Fall From Grace — Rites of Passage, Becoming “Adult”

Return to At the Age of Four or Five, Giving Up, We Become “Them”: Life Is Passed Performing Rituals and Mouthing Incantations in the Service of Others’ Requirements

To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Falls from Grace

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When Everything Appears to Be Conspiring Against You, You Might Want to Stop Fighting Rebirth: Atman Projects Versus Surrender Solutions and a Different Hero’s Journey

How Can You Be Borne Up, If You Won’t Let Go? Spiritual Experience Is Distorted by One’s Birth Trauma … The Necessary Hero Descends Into the Perinatal Below

Apocalypse – No! Chapter Twelve: Atman Projects vs. Surrender Solutions

The Necessary Hero and Descent Into the Underground–When There’s “Nothing But Trouble,” You Know You’re in The Perinatal Below

A Different Kind of Hero’s Journey for Our Times Is Depicted in the Cult Classic, “Nothing But Trouble”

A Perinatal Flick

A film of postmodern times that is bold with revelation for us is the cult classic, “Nothing but Trouble,” which was released in 1991. It is an especially potent example of the rising pre- and perinatal influence in the media we’ve been discussing as well as the different heroic response required in these strangest of days because of it. It is all this, plus a twist: As a comedy it represents an unlikely approach to such material and themes. More about that later.

It was produced and written by Peter and Dan Aykroyd and stars Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Demi Moore, and John Candy.Its reception by modern audiences mirrors exactly the perception in general, to date, that has been had of the perinatal material it depicts so well. For despite the movie’s star power and the popularity of its co-creator, Dan Aykroyd, it was met with overwhelmingly negative reviews and received six Razzie nominations, garnering one. I fully expect that until we know better I can expect much the same kind of reaction to this book, because of the perinatal perspective it is revealing of the dark underside of everyday pleasantries and sugar-coated media realities. Yet there is hope for all that we will integrate this hard-to-face yet redemptive material in the fact that the movie does have a strong following among some in our population, just as at present there are some who are not in denial of the bittersweet perinatal vision being revealed.

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The Lure Into the Underworld and Call to Adventure

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

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

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

The Merest Blunder, The Adventure Begins

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

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

Perinatal Elements

The Junkyard of the Psyche

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

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

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

Stripped of Ego, Perinatal Begins

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

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

Big Babies

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

A Spiritual Interface

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

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

Trusting Higher Forces: Say “Good Night,” John Wayne, and How Can You Be Borne Up If You Won’t Let Go? When All Seems Lost…. You Might Want to Stop Fighting Rebirth

When It Appears the Whole World Has Been Conspiring Against You, You Might Want to Let Yourself Be Blessed

Multilevel Feelings

Just When You Thought….

However an important element in this movie, “Nothing But Trouble,” which is different from artistic representations that deal with only the personal or psychodynamic, is the way the ending opens up under it to a new level, a whole new arena, of issues. Those of us in experiential therapies or breathwork are only too aware of how the perinatal opens up to one, revealing a greater expanse and pervasiveness of dis-ease, at a certain point after dealing with the personal and the psychodynamic.

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

But When All Seems Lost….

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

Atman Projects Versus Surrender Solutions

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

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

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

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

Say “Good Night,” John Wayne

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

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

Trusting in Higher Forces

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

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

The Message

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

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

Footnotes

1. Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968, p. 51.

2. Ibid., p. 52.

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

Continue with You Just Can’t Slay a Volcano: The Necessary Hero Uses Surrender, not Struggle … For Why Would You Not Be Borne Up by a Universe That Is You

Return to Apocalypse – No! Chapter Eleven: Control Versus Surrender … Heaven Leads Through Hell

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Rebirthing Rituals, the Hard Rain Fallin’, and the Value of Popular Culture in Awakening: The Price of Peace Is Inner Sight … Better Hitler Had Jumped Into Mosh Pits

Where There Is Hope and What Did You Expect Awakening to Look Like? Look Hard Enough, You Just Might See the Seeds of Light Amidst the Darkness Surrounding.

Chapter Ten: Where There Is Hope, Cultural Rebirthing

Societal Self-Analysis and Talk Show Soul-Searching for Peace … Sorry, I Know You Wanted to Hate Reality Shows.

The Price of Peace Is Inner Sight: Societal Self-Analysis, an Internet Reformation, and Talk Show Soul-Searching for Peace

Societal Self-Analysis

Culture War Replaced Cold War

We see the workings of these opposing tendencies to look away from problems or to embrace them by examining the reactions in America to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The disappearance of this huge object for distraction from inner unhappiness, about which one could rationalize the use of defensiveness and scapegoating, led to continued turning away through the emergence, in America, of a search for other societal scapegoats and therefore the “Republican revolution.” Culture War replaced the Cold War as the way one could be comfortably ignorant of one’s insides and self-assuredly distracted, self-righteously engaged.

This removal of a collective punching bag or scapegoat also resulted in a healthy turning toward the darkness within and a collective self-analysis in America. This reaction has brought to the fore many of our social and political shortcomings.

Talk Show Soul-Searching

For evidence of this latter response we notice beginning in the Nineties the rise of the talk show; the rituals of nationwide self-examination over issues of sexual harassment, spouse abuse, and race relations played out in the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings and the O. J. Simpson trial; the hashing out of controversial and formerly hidden personal issues around sex, lies, and marital fidelity, played out in the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal; the reevaluation of matters of faith precipitated by priestly sexual abuse; and many other such national psychodramas staged on cable news networks and the magazine-style, documentary-type TV shows like Frontline, Nightline and the like.

We also witnessed the rise of reality shows as part of this societal pull to see beneath the covers of what is thought to be real. Now, progressives and intellectuals have lots of fun vamping about how superior they themselves are to such interests, as exemplified in reality shows. This can only be the position of elitists out of touch with the ways ordinary folks live their lives.

Sitcom Socialization

To make my point, let me back up a bit. The swagger that the Left, and intellectuals in general, display around reality shows is the same superiority they have expressed for decades concerning sitcoms. First, let me say that I consider most sitcoms and reality shows to be rather boring and a bit inane with their laugh and soundtrack framing. Yet, when I was a child, growing up in a medium-sized city in the coal country of Pennsylvania and coming from a very traditional family, it was only through such sitcoms that I had a chance to find out what a different style of family and parenting would be. Today, I would laugh at a “Father Knows Best.” But it was a step up and into socialization from the “Father Knows Little” or “Father Not Around” of many in my social stratum when I was a kid. This exposure allowed me, and many of my generation, to seek for more in our life and for better interpersonal family relationships…and eventually better parenting.

This presentation of better alternatives—middle-class, liberal, “hollywood” ones—to everyone in America has a lot to do with the fact that the Sixties were so explosive. It was the first decade after the introduction of a national culture through the medium of television. Much has been made of the fact that newscasts brought information into living rooms for the first time in that era—which is the thing that intellectual elitists will focus on, blinded by their quaint beliefs that humans are rational actors. It takes an experiential psychologist and social scientist like myself to notice that most folks act out of ideas and attitudes that are rooted in experiences and information that are hardly rational. So, the modeling of a more “advanced” way of family life—not perfect but for many better than the traditional ways they had known, which included things like spanking and attitudes like “children are better seen not heard” and “spare the rod, spoil the child”—through the TVs and cinemas of America was vastly more influential in changing society than newscasts, whose information could just as easily have been shared through the print media. The sitcoms brought liberal middle-class values to everyone in America who owned a tv set; and this was a huge step forward at the time.

A Modern “Priesthood”

This is where righties have it right when targeting “hollywood” for many of the changes in our culture over the last half century…though they see that as a negative influence. But intellectuals and lefties blow an opportunity and lose support among ordinary folks through an unconscious haughtiness and a cultural snobbery they are blind to but display in their turning up their noses at popular culture. Luckily, as an anthropological social scientist, I can study popular culture and get away with it, though not without some snide commentary coming my way from progressive and professional circles. They simply will never understand an intellectual who can speak to working folks because he’s one of them. They simply don’t get my attempts to package the crucial understandings of modern science and social sciences, on which the existence of our very world depends, in words that are not primarily directed to and meant to appease the gods of academia. They consider themselves important within their tiny professional circles, thinking they are changing the world when no one even knows what they are doing beyond that constrained perimeter.

Keeping the People Down

Indeed the attitude of academics and progressives about popular culture, especially talk and reality show tv programming and although they would be appalled to ever think it, is no different from the attitudes of the Catholic church and the clergy about matters of faith during medieval times. There, too, we had an elite wanting to “keep out the unwashed.” There, too, we had a distinction between people in the know and the rabble, with the anointed ones requiring ordinary folks to go through them for matters of truth and faith. We had then also this sharp distinction between the “high culture” of the Church and aristocracy—exemplified in the chamber music of the time—and the “low culture” of the masses—exemplified by the folk music of the troubadours of that day.

Nowadays this poo-pooing of tv culture by intellectuals is the same kind of attempt to funnel reality to the masses through the filters of a new “priesthood.” The cultural purists and intellectual elites would prefer that for truth you go through them in academia, where you ‘d have to pay a toll of course, just as the priests of the Middle Ages required you to pass their way on the road to the divine.

Therapy for the Masses

At any rate throwing off the snootiness of intellectualism, I contend, allows us to notice that sitcoms, reality shows, and talk shows serve functions in society that are, overall, beneficial in advancing our culture and catalyzing increased growth. They may not reflect, yet, where intellectuals and progressives think we should be, but for many they show something beyond where they are.

We should know that they are overall helpful in our cause from the fact that conservatives want to attack hollywood and limit freedom of expression on any airwave. The fact that many reactionaries want to keep their children out of schools, home-schooled, and away from tv sets should be telling progressives something about the value of popular culture.

Rebirth Denied

My point is that the rise in reality and talk shows are coincident with a need for a kind of societal “therapy” that came about when we took back our projections from the Soviets and were forced to look at ourselves. I’m saying this was a healthy way of doing it, and this was helping us, though it was tumultuous and difficult, in the Nineties. It is unfortunate, but it suited the forces of war and fascism, for the 1% to bring forth in the millennium the bugaboo of terrorism…perfectly bringing about another endless feud with another concocted enemy to project our own darknesses onto so we can escape from having to notice them ourselves and bring about actual personal growth and cultural advance…let alone the cultural rebirth that has been trying to happen for decades.

American Rehab

Reality shows are like watching group therapy happening. It is not surprising that there was even one reality program that was about therapy—Celebrity Rehab. Reality shows also expose ordinary folks to what amounts to crude but informative sociological experiments. If academics could see beyond their pretensions they would applaud this sort of, however haphazard and imprecise, understanding of group processes and individual psychology arising in the masses.

If there weren’t reality shows, folks would have a harder time knowing appropriate ways for men and women to act with each other. The gains of feminism would not have spread so widely or as fast if they were not being modeled and reinforced repeatedly on talk and reality shows. They demonstrate parenting and social skills—“politically correct” ones, in the good sense—to folks who would otherwise not know any better than to behave crudely and abusively. They bring the world, geography, travel, and history to the masses.

Intellectuals quibble about the quality of that, which comes across as quite childish, for it arises as if out of a jealousy of others getting the attention they want and out of a fear of competition for informational matters around science, culture, and humanities. It strikes me as more than ironic that those on the Left who would wish people to wake up from their zombie slumber would want to push programs of literature or drama where truths are filtered through the consciousness, and unconscious, of the artist, while wishing to deprive folks of a direct look—however contrived, it is actual reality and not scripted—at the world around them and people’s actual unplanned behavior and spontaneous reactions to unusual events.

Seeing people’s behavior in some of these shows does often remind me of the dynamics I’ve seen in therapy groups, and some of the personal changes in the participants mirror some of the evolutions I’ve seen in folks undergoing deep experiential psychotherapy. The audience participation part often sounds like group therapy or an intervention. I’ve been struck by how some of the group processes in the show remind me of family day in rehab, with folks reflecting back what they see in each other and how others’ behavior has affected them. These are all things that conservatives cringe at…actually hate. Yet liberals, except for notable exceptions like Jerry Springer, are not seeing the opening they have here. Lefties are fighting rather than using these forces, which are in the direction of personal growth and, cumulatively, much needed societal change.

As a psychologist and simply someone who loves people, I am fascinated by some of the things I see in these shows. They can be heart-wrenchingly real at times. So it occurs to me that folks who disparage these shows, comparing them with literature and dramatic productions, is another thing where some are wanting to have their reality filtered, managed, and packaged for them, lest it be too “disruptive” to their prejudices of things.

The Price of Peace Is Inner Sight

The upshot of all this is to say that just as a lack of a Cold War caused both collective acting out—another war, a Culture War—and collective inner searching via television talk shows, documentaries, and such. So also the prevention of “hot” wars on an international, not just intercultural, scale and the cause of peace in general require such inner soul-searching and such confrontation with one’s darker sides. And if we must, it is better to endure the psychotic acting out of a culture war—with its battles played out on the airwaves—than an actual war.

For is there any doubt that either of these or any combinations of these alternatives, however uncomfortable and even violent…on a smaller scale…at times, is a small price to pay compared to the price of outright war and violence which, by any measurement, is a cost horrifyingly huge and unacceptable?

America Currently Refusing to Pay Such Price

The converse of this is also true: When the dramas wanting to be discussed are suppressed in the mainstream media, it is as stifling of the growth of a nation as an individual’s growth. Unfortunately we have seen this as well recently. There have been massive worldwide and nationwide Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, massive Wisconsin union outpourings, and events in Japan and about Fukushima that the American people really want to and need to know and discuss, but they are being blacklisted from being broadcasted on. There has been a change in government in Iceland, with banksters being jailed, that Americans are not hearing about; there have been demonstrations in Japan about their insane response to their tragedy, which Americans won’t be told about; there have been massive demonstrations in Israel against the colonial policies of their own government that curiously do not make it into the offerings of news programs. These are things that in the Nineties would have fed the talk on tv and stimulated the necessary societal hashing out for there to be a chance of going beyond them.

What Is the Cost of Denial? Of Complacency?

It is hard to know, though, what happens when the natural urges of a nation to grow and change are thwarted. While I discussed this abortion of cultural renewal and the abomination that results from it at length in Chapter Seven of a companion book to this one, Culture War, Class War, under the title Cultural Rebirth, Aborted, the question remains what happens when this societal “rebirthing” is more urgent than ever. What happens when—for the sake of the survival of the human race and of the planet—it is necessary that this growth happen and instead it is continuously derailed and snuffed out of the light of collective consciousness?

Internet Revolution Is Another Reformation

Luckily all this is changing as the internet and social networking have upended the academic elitists, swarming around and over their petty barriers of intellectual privilege. The blogsters and “rabble” of the net have taken over the cultural dialogue of the time as assuredly as Martin Luther and the Reformation changed religion forever and helped to bring to an end the cultural stagnation of the Middle Ages and to ignite an Age of Reason and of Enlightenment.

We Could Use More “Narcissistic” Generations: Know Thyself … Let the Buck Stop Here!

Moratorium … Let the Buck Stop Here! We Could Use More “Narcissistic” Generations

“Know Thyself” ~ “Narcissistic”?

Self-Discovery, Soul-Searching, Psychological-Mindedness, Self-Analysis – Sixties Generation

So, we have taken a look at the need for societies to “do therapy” on themselves, to hash out and process, however messy that might seem to be, the perinatal projections from the unconscious, as they manifest in the tribulations of the times—both profound and mundane. It must be kept in mind that it is the products of nearly the most “advanced” mode of child-caring—the delegated-release subclass of the socializing psychoclass — who have proved most willing to pay such prices for peace, as for example, in increased soul-searching. In fact they would be later stigmatized for just this quality of introspection, this supposed fault of looking into themselves, through the derogatory appellation, narcissistic.

Indeed, Keniston foresaw this when he studied the Sixties generation as college students. Observing the amount of inner exploration they engaged in during their quests for self-discovery, he would describe this attribute in a biased way as “the overexamined life,” and more fairly, for the activist youth, as a “psychological-mindedness” and “self-analysis.” [Footnote 1]

“Let It All Out? No, Leave Some of It In!” – Pat Buchanan, Fifties Generation

No doubt those who criticized these youth in the past are some of the same ones or their surrogates who, now older, are wrongly castigating the self-analyzing characteristics of contemporary society as the Sixties generation is now in its “triumphant” phase—the time when as adults a psychoclass takes over the reins of society and most strongly influences it. I have already taken note of the tendencies of the right to rile against the collective processing that is happening in their attacks on popular culture and in particular what they call “hollywood.” They express their desire that “such matters” not come to public light, for they deem them “offensive” or an affront to their (oh so delicate) sensibilities. They sense a threat to the precious untruths that prop up their self-destructive way of life, woven through as it is with war, fascism, planetary and planetmate annihilation, and the other horrors mushrooming about them in the postmodern era. [Footnote 2]

These highly defended and fear-minded conservatives, prone to projection, are incapable of appreciating the integrity of an inner-thinking generation like the Boomers are. These outer-minded authoritarians would not get, would outright hate those who “questioned authority” in the Sixties.

These defended entrenched egos would be secretly jealous of and overtly aggressive to a generational emergence that since the Sixties has been psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually working on themselves to be free of inner tyranny. As one of their exemplars, Pat Buchanan, long ago phrased it, “Let it all out? No, leave some of it in!”

Let the Buck Stop Here!

Nonetheless this cadre of kindred Sixties spirits would in their actions declare for the first time in history as a generation, “Let the buck stop here!” And they would seek to turn themselves, and by extension their children and society-at-large, into a more loving, wise, and less acting-out humanity…most importantly, one willing to cooperate rather than war with Nature, or other nations.

If Not Us, Who? If Not Now, When?

What virtually all the folks outside “my generation” never get is the unimpeachable vision we had of the complete and utter wrongness of the path and tendencies of modern times and the abyss toward which civilization was heading. We were proven right, of course, as especially in the last decade we have seen the disintegration wrought of those tendencies on all fronts—political, environmental, personal. The Sixties generation saw modern civilization as being unreformable and needing complete remaking, so that everything we did was an attempt to create reality and culture from scratch, sans tradition.

We had seen normal ways of doing things to be impotent and often dangerous and most importantly leading to apocalyptic endings in our near future. This understanding is what was responsible for all the “non-normal” behaviors my generation displayed—communes, confrontations, clothes, relationships, organics, alternative ways of everything…an entire counterculture. We have been laughed at for essentially being ahead of the curve on the messages of modern events. We have been called crazy for our inconvenient prophecies, virtually all of which are now coming to pass.

While I and my cohorts, to use just one example, spoke out on the dangers of nuclear energy and in particular the insanity of building plants on fault lines, the professional pundits scoffed and boasted they lived near nuclear plants. This was thirty years and more before the world ever heard the word, Fukushima. The examples like this are endless. We saw all these unworkable endings and asked ourselves, “What would be a real way of doing that?” “What would be a workable, sustainable way?” “What would be a sane and happy life, ethic, and lifestyle.” “What would be a loving, peaceful mode of being?”

While we sought to redo culture from scratch, building it on perennial and unimpeachable principles, the threatened elders and the jealous youngers, who would soon enough come behind, poked fun from within the confines of their assured and comfortable wrongness. They called us narcissistic for thinking we could look at ourselves and the world and dare to think we could change it from ancient ways. They thought we were making ourselves important that way, putting on airs, even. Actually we were shouldering responsibility we did not want—yearning for a simpler, less serious time—but which we accepted for the sake of all those who would come after, knowing their very existence depended on our actions. We took faith in the touchstone of love itself—the only thing that did not crumble under examination—and sought to bend all emerging along its outlines.

So our seeming impertinence was born of an inconvenient prompting, an unwanted vision now proving prophetic. It was hardly selfish, as many of the best of my generation paid the ultimate price and are no longer with us or they are imprisoned. It was hardly narcissistic as it was done out of love…for each other, for the peoples of all the world and of all the religions, for our children, for the planetmates and for the Nature of which we learned we were a part, and for the generations unborn.

What others will never get is that our “overexamined life,” our “psychological-mindedness,” our perinatal propensities, and our soul-searching and self-analysis were not about being narcissistic. It was about needing to start everything anew as a rational response to the horrors we saw about us in our culture and in the world… horrors which we were correct in trying to address at the time. For their existence today, because of our inability to be completely successful in remedying them, are bringing about all the political, economic, and environmental armageddons I’ve been discussing in this, and its related, books. And we knew, and still know, that only some change huge and radical will help us, and for that we need to find and stand upon the deepest and firmest of ground within us. That is what we’ve been looking for, are still looking for…only now we have lots of company .

Better Hitler Had Jumped Into Mosh Pits: A Drive to Healing, the Hard Rain Fallin’, and Millennial Promise

A Drive to Healing and What Did You Expect Peace to Look Like? Better Hitler Had Jumped Into Mosh Pits

A Drive to Healing

We cannot expect that everyone will heal their birth traumas when they arise into consciousness during periods of peace. However, we can expect—especially now that there is understanding of these dynamics and there are techniques and modalities available for healing them—that some people will!

Furthermore, even the more ritualistic and superficial yet blatant regressions to infancy, birth, prenatal, or even prior to that—for example, as Mayr and Boelderl describe in Europe—are not the indication of a “death drive” or “death instinct” as these researchers claimed. [Footnote 3]

These highly symbolic collective rituals are instead the manifestations of a drive to healing—a drive to regressing to early traumas and to reexperiencing the events that occurred then and thus recapturing an integrity of self that existed prior to the dissociation that happened as a result of those traumas. This drive to regression is no more a “death wish” than the mystical or spiritual quest is a “death wish,” and for the same reasons, as Jung correctly admonished Freud a long time ago. And we can expect that more good than bad can come, eventually, from engaging in them.

What Did You Expect Peace to Look Like?

Better Hitler Had Jumped Into Mosh Pits

In conclusion, when we see blatant collective regressions, by the sorts of people mentioned, to these perinatal dynamics in undisguised, and relatively harmless, social rituals—as described by Mayr and Boelderl, and Lawson—we can expect that, because of their closeness to their unconscious pain, they are likely—even if only a little more likely because of their more advanced mode of child-caring—to have insight into these dynamics and to resist acting them out in a more extreme form, like war, global pollution, and overpopulation.

To put it another way, I would have preferred that Hitler had acted out his craziness by jumping into mosh pits, humming baby tunes, wearing a pacifier…or even engaging in sexual orgies…than the way he did.

.

So these current signs of blatant regression by youth and others in Europe or the US, or in fact anywhere in the world as in rock concerts, are not signs of an impending war. What did you expect peace to look like? You might call it messy, but it is the scenery of human healing, we should expect to be seeing, on the pathway to an Earth rebirth.

What Might We Expect?

Millennial Promise

What might we expect from the future? Well if ecological/environmental consciousness and refusal to use projection onto others is accepted as evidence of perinatal access, as I have been asserting, then the current generation of youth and young adults—the Baby-Boomer Echo Generation, also called the Millennial Generation, whose two main concerns, as I have mentioned, have been polled as being the environment and racism—may also be expected to be more open to their perinatal trauma, and hence more likely to resolve it and further the gains of their parents against war and global apocalypse.

“A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”

For, as Janov has pointed out, closer to one’s Pain—one’s unconscious—is closer to being real. And this closeness holds out the possibility both of healing…and of self-destruction.

From the roads and TV screens of America the scenery can often appear bleak. Sure, heavy changes are coming down…but what should we expect? “A hard rain’s gonna fall,” sang Bob Dylan. And that’s what it takes to blossom the spring. Look hard enough, you just might see the seeds of Light amidst the darkness surrounding.

Evidence in Our Collective Dreaming

Next we will take a look at one of the projective systems of our society, specifically, our cinema, to see if it shows evidence of the change of consciousness that we have here been describing as necessary to derail the cycles of war and violence that have plagued our species for millennia uncountable and have led us to the brink of extinction.

Films are both the collective dreams of our society as well as the only truly widely shared method of collectively experiencing a nonordinary state of consciousness. Thus they are telling, in the messages they contain, as well as powerful in their impact on the audience, who in this mild nonordinary state of consciousness are more open to suggestion and to receiving mental impressions and information.

We will look to examples from films of the last few decades for indications that our collective consciousness is actually changing and that there are grounds for hoping that we will be able to stave off apocalypse…creating instead the quantum leap to an Earth rebirth.

Footnote

1. For “overexamined life”see Keniston, op. cit., 1965; for “psychological-mindedness” and “self-analysis” see Keniston, op. cit., 1968, especially p. 81.

2. Davis, op. cit., especially Ch. 7, “The Great Society and The Youth Revolt.”

3. Mayr and Boelderl, op. cit., p. 149.

Continue with Apocalypse – No! Chapter Eleven: Control Versus Surrender … Heaven Leads Through Hell

Return to Apocalypse No! Chapter Nine: Regressions in the Service of Society — Messy Healing

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