“One could not enjoy the blessings of wandering into delightful glades if one did not travel twisted, darkened paths at other times.”

 The Planetmates on pleasure, pain, hell, Satan, salvation, birth, mother: “You spoil even the experience of pleasure, while you amplify the misery of pain”:

 “We know of life as being an alternation of pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. But this is no big problem for us,because overall this flux of darkness and light is what makes life that much more enjoyable. In a game one would not enjoy victory or making a good play if one did not also experience being scored against and losing occasionally. Life would have none of its exquisite sense of surprise and discovery if there were not twists and turns in it. One could not enjoy the blessings of wandering into delightful glades if one did not travel twisted, darkened paths at other times.Life would simply not be much of a story or worth playing if there were not drama in it.

“We see that you have, however,made this simple fact into the biggest dilemma for you. For you have magnified the pain of life to an amazing extent. Light requires a darkness for it even to be seen; one would not know pleasure except in contrast to pain. But you would wish to have only light, only pleasure, always. This is because, for reasons having to do with the twisted consciousness you carry from your abnormal beginnings — the pain you have in birth — you go through life terrified you will once again experience such pain as you had at your beginnings. You see all life through such a darkened filter. You live in trepidation of the ending of your happiness, when you could be enjoying it, and in terror that your pain,when it comes, will never be followed by happiness ever again. So you spoil even the experience of pleasure, while you amplify the misery of pain.

“You once experienced pain in such an assaultive way that you feared it would never end. At your beginnings, you have an abnormal amount of experience of feeling trapped and suffocated; and you, in your premature state yet still coming into the world, are not aware yet of the ending of pain, of the fact that it is not possible without pleasure.You experience such overwhelming pain in your coming into the world that ever afterward you believe it is possible that you could at any time experience pain greater than is possible for you to bear. And because you also at that early time mistakenly thought that it is possible that pain will never end, you believe that such a thing is possible in life … even in afterlife. So, unlike us planetmates, you amplify life’s pain with your fear that it can ever be more than you could bear and with this belief that, beyond that, it could be unending.

“To add to all that, because in your beginnings you experienced these things while in close proximity to a seemingly all-powerful Other — that is, they happened while inside your own mothers or while being born from her — you have the feelings that there can bean intention or an actor behind the events of your life — including its pain —like your mother to a small extent was around your birth events. The whole world for you being Mother, at that time, and experiencing her as the only other actor in that drama of your birth, you attribute some of the inordinate pain of that time to that fact: that it is related to this Other, who was also World to you, and who you sensed as Mother. So, experiencing these imagined magnifications of life’s pains in relation to her, throughout your life it is possible that you can even think there might be an intent or actor behind your experiences of pain and suffering then also. And since you have made such pain and suffering to be wrong, as well as horrifying, you of course can think of this actor as being malevolent, calling it devil or Satan.

“For these reasons you have made the darkness-pain of life that much darker. But in doing so, you have set up the possibility of experiencing a greater pleasure or brightness in contrast to it. You have made the darkness, darker; the light potentially brighter. For if you could imagine being freed from your self-imposed hell, for a second, can you not imagine what a relief and pleasure it would make of your life ever after that? This is a greater pleasure than we can have. So there is undoubtedly more to it than even we can know … it is probably “lighter” or more wonderful than we can imagine. You have made life into something horrible from which you need a “saving.” This “salvation” is therefore one experience you have created for yourself that we cannot have, and because of the way duality works in life, it cannot help but be that much more exquisite….”

[31st Prasad — Pain. More coming….

To see the entire book, to which this will be added eventually (book is two-thirds updated), go to http://mladzema.wordpress.com/the-great-reveal-book-6/ …

Planetmates: The Great Reveal is now available in print and e-book format.  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

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 

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.

 

Invite you to join me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/sillymickel

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“You would have the Divine, like your children, kowtow to your wishes…. You are someone who thinks they can, and should, “domesticate” the gods.”

The Planetmates on evangelical religion as voodoo and humans seeking to “domesticate” God … on “animals,” Nature as “wild”: “To re-unite with the Divine, in this way, means you get the Divine to merge with you! With your Ego.”

The Planetmates on evangelical religion as voodoo and humans seeking to

“domesticate” God … on “animals,” Nature as “wild”: “To re-unite with the Divine, in this way, means you get the Divine to merge with you! With your Ego.”

 

“All of that notwithstanding, you like to think of yourselves, in your morality, as above us planetmates. You refer to us as “animals,” as “beasts.” We are “wild”-life. You think of us as alternately controlled by instincts and yet wild. That should tell you something. But then, ignoring the magnificent perfection of Nature, you think of Nature as “wild,” too.

“Is Nature wild? If you think of it, it is only in relation to you and your wants that it is seen that way. Your poets, artists, and mystics see in Nature something else entirely. They see a beauty that inspires them to think of Divinity. They are on to something.

“But they, too, are unlikely to see that perfection, as well, in the Earth’s “animal”-life … or their own children — who they think of as “wild” and needing to be “tamed.” So we see that you think of wild as being out of your control. It might be “controlled” — within its own process and in relation to the rest of Nature — but it does what “it” wants, not what “you” want. Nor does it abide by your laws. It is “wild.”

“So “beasts,” “animals,” “wild”-life refer to things that have not yet come under your thumb. It is no coincidence that such terms are also used by you to refer to all of your own kind that are inconvenient to your wishes. Any who have different thoughts — your revolutionaries, hippies, and gypsies — are “wild” to you. Any who are in the minority of your societies or are poor or belong to other cultures are similarly “beasts” and “animals.” Of course, those existing outside of your laws, your criminals, are “animals,” you think. This is why you bristle at the idea that your planetmates are your angels in Nature, as we have said. For, to you, to see in us higher or benevolent consciousness is akin to bowing down to a beast.

“So, anything that is not in your power is “beast,” “animal,” “wild.” And ultimately what is not in your power is anything that is considered Nature. As you have with planetmates and your cultivated plants, you would “domesticate” — meaning force into conformity with your sedentary lives, with its fixed domiciles, controlled families, and restrictions — all of Nature, if you could.

“But is not the Divine also out of your control? Not subject to your power? You would not spend all the time you do in ritual and prayer if it was doing what you wanted, would you? As we have said, through prayer and ritual, you try to control the Divine. So do you see that you are someone who thinks they can, and should, seek to “domesticate” the gods? You would have the Divine, like your children, kowtow to your wishes and be another cog within the “machinery” of your life. To re-unite with the Divine, in this way, means you get the Divine to merge with you! With your Ego.

“Consider, at least, that this says of your way of thinking about yourself and your life that you know everything — that you are God Itself — and do not need to learn anything. Your awareness is supreme … it must be … for otherwise you would wish to merge with a higher reality or wisdom and learn from It, or at least, if separate, want to discern Its will and thus adhere to it. But in the thinking that you developed with sedentary ways, and driven by fears of deprivation, you moved over to the position that God should do what you want, should be one of your achievements or accomplishments. When you think about it, all of your modern science and technology is the penultimate of such an attitude toward Nature … toward God.

“Another example of this god control is your evangelical religion of recent times. It is thought in these circles that if one can be the best possible sycophant and not have any contrary “bad” thought , …  but only think positive thoughts … and have supreme confidence in the outcome … that one can get the grace of the Divine and that miracles can be forced to occur. This is all based on certain scriptures from the Bible where it is said that if one has supreme faith one can move mountains, and such. So, to begin with, it is taking a metaphor of the magical and blessed things that can occur because one has faith that one is always in God’s care and turns it into a prescription or recipe for control. Seriously, how can you know that God wants that particular miracle or healing to take place or that it is Its will or is part of Its Divine plan. These folks take what are more accurately termed blessings emanating from the grace of God — meaning that there is a Divine entity who is an actor with volition of Its own, separate from one’s own will — and thinks of them as achievements — occurring as non-volitionally as water flowing out when one tips a cup … or the gold medal one gets upon winning the race.

“This view completely removes the soul or aliveness of God and reduces Him to something like a principle of physics. This kind of “god” folks can control and order around by certain strenuous efforts of “will” (which is at base merely an outgrowth and reaction to one’s fear) to keep thoughts out of the mind. It is attractive to those “good” people of society, described above, for it brings to bear their good practice elsewhere in their “positive” thinking, which keeps learning and personal growth from happening and strives to be witless. Similarly, this concoction of “blessings” requires a skill in keeping out the contrary thoughts and doubts which are part of growing in wisdom in life. So these “miracles” are in no way the result of any kind of morality, kindness, compassion, or love. These folks think they can get what they want and perform miracles by the concentration of thought — the limiting of thoughts, again, not allowing any “bad” thought or “doubt” in — so, again, God has no say in it. It is another magical prescription, another hocus pocus not much different from black or white magic, voodoo, or science….”

 

[Pt 1 of 29th Prasad — Tool Use. More coming….

To see the entire book, to which this will be added eventually (book is two-thirds updated), go to  http://mladzema.wordpress.com/the-great-reveal-book-6/ …

Planetmates: The Great Reveal is also scheduled for print and e-book publication in April, 2014]

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

Those who want signed copies of any of my books, email me directly … sillymickel@gmail.com … Discount for blog subscribers.

Invite you to join me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/sillymickel 

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

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

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

Planetmates Release The Thirteenth Prasad

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

Duck is First Consciousness at The Thirteenth Prasad.

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

The Thirteenth Prasad – Breaking with Divinity

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

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

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

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

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

Video Commentary by SillyMickel Adzema

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

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

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

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

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

Paraphrase/Elaboration of The Thirteenth Prasad — by SillyMickel Adzema

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … Go to The 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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Cycles of War, Cycles of Birth … What Can Be Done: Changing the Patterns of Millennia Requires Learning That Feeling Good Is Not Bad

Derailing the Cycles of War and Violence: What Say We Leave a Planet For Our Offspring? And Can You Handle Happiness?

Apocalypse No! Chapter Eight:
Derailing the Cycles of War and Violence

Men Would Rather Be Manly Than Alive and What Say We Leave a Planet for Our Offspring?

Why We Invite War, Allow Fascism, and Pollute: Our Coming Into the World Makes Us Want to Leave It

The question posed at the end of the last chapter was whether we had opened the door to an unimaginable armageddon or were experiencing the birth pangs of a massive consciousness transformation and subsequent Earth rebirth. Are we going to self-destruct, bringing death to the entire planet along with us, or will we become good citizens of this planet and our species continue on?

What Say We Leave a Planet For Our Offspring?

Most folks would think there would be only one answer to that question desired by virtually all humans. But in previous chapters, especially Apocalypse Emergency, Chapter Five: Death Wish – Thanatos Walking, I showed how, and why, that common-sense notion would, amazingly, be wrong: We saw how there is a huge percentage of our human Earth citizens, and a part of all of us, that wants to “throw in the towel.” This has always been true of humans, but it is of critical importance only now.

But I will assume anyone reading this will at least consciously be wanting our vital question to be answered in the affirmative. You know as well as I that the folks on the other side of this question are doing vastly different things right now than us and are nowhere to be found around here.

How Do We “Like” Life?

So the next thing to be addressed is how we might change our fortunes and live. Since continuing on is not just of matter of deciding it—voting “like” on it or checking its box—as we saw in Chapter Five: Death Wish, how can we get around this part of ourselves and our population that wants to do us all in? We need to know how to derail our perpetual cycles of war and violence. We need know how to quit bringing pollution and suffering on us. We have to know how we can stop our secret desire to take comfort in failure, how to “unlike” self-sabotage on our inner “profile.”

How Do We “Unlike” Fascism?

I have written a great deal on this question, including an entire book in 2011 on the way we act out this masochistic tendency politically and culturally by taking comfort in totalitarianism and embracing fascism. [Footnote 1]

For our purposes presently I will focus on the element of it all that is critical to answering our question. So we first need to look into the place from which emanates our dilemma. I showed that this bugaboo is our Will to Death.

Our Coming Into This World Makes Us Want to Leave It

Now we need to get more specific on this negative inclination of ours. As we have seen this Will to Death arises from human’s unique-among-all-species primal pain rooted in our singular way of coming into the world, our unique human birth.

We Need Look Deeper

We need to look deeper into the elements of that part of ourselves that would have us take us all down. We need inquire into that tendency of ours to choose pollution over health, tyranny over freedom, war over peace, enslavement over autonomy, violence over pacifism, oppression over liberty, misery over happiness. We must derail the cycles of war, violence, and fascism. We must know how to “like” happiness.

We Need Know Where Exactly to Focus Our Efforts to Be Successful

To do so, we must separate the skeins of this inner entanglement and shed light into this darkness within. We need to know specifically, precisely where to place the lever of effort we will apply to truly move the world, to derail it from its current acceleration into oblivion.

So we look now into the elements of that perinatal unconscious manifesting currently as a will to die on the grandest scale imaginable.

Cycles of War, Cycles of Birth

We find there are two researchers who are particularly relevant to our understanding of the elements of the perinatal unconscious in a way as to avert collective, worldwide disaster. These are Stanislav Grof and Lloyd DeMause. [Footnote 2]

Men Would Rather Be “Manly” Than…Alive…

DeMause writes,

[T]he group-fantasy shared prior to wars expresses the nation’s deep feeling that the increase in pleasure brought about by the prosperity and progress that usually precede wars “pollutes” the national blood-stream with sinful excess, making men “soft” and feminine”—a frightful condition that can only be cleansed by a blood-shedding purification. [Footnote 2]

Men are more terrified of appearing “feminine” than of losing their lives. Why we invite war.

DeMause is saying we go forever into war because after a while peace makes men feel guilty, “sinful.” Men have uncomfortable, even shameful…homophobic…feelings of being “soft” or “feminine” when their lives are good. So men choose the “purifying,” masculinizing ritual of war to fight off these feelings. Nothing distracts one from looking inward better than a “good, old-fashioned” life-or-death struggle, and war is the most all-encompassing of them.

Men are more terrified of appearing “soft” than having the boot of totalitarianism on their neck. Why we allow fascism.

What DeMause says about bringing war upon us can be said also about allowing fascism, inviting totalitarianism. For whether we are fighting enemies of another nation or struggling to survive against oppression at home, we are involved in a daily struggle. Secret to us, we feel better being engaged in a dramatic battle, though it brings us suffering and misery.

We simply can’t hack peace for very long. We feel guilty, for some reason, lolling on the beach. You ever notice how at the end of your vacation time, you are anxious for it to be over and to get back to work? That feeling—that one where we feel…guilty?…uncomfortable…tense?…unfulfilled?…(you tell me)—that’s it. That’s the one I’m talking about.

It happens the same way collectively after we have experienced a “vacation” of national peace—for example, in the Nineties when we were prosperous and mostly peaceful under Clinton. At the end of it, with Bush, we ended up getting the misery and struggle many in America were driven to want, though no one would ever admit that.

A quick aside. The fact that the majority of Americans actually didn’t vote for Bush and so tried to choose happiness over struggle is a source of hope for us in all this. That’s a hint of what’s coming.

Cycles of Birth, Cycles of War … The Four “Colors” of the Perinatal Veils and Why Women Fear Fatness and Men Fear Femininity

Four Kinds of Early Experience Color Our Adult Experience in Four Distinct Ways … Cycles of Birth and War

Four Kinds of Experiences in Our First Nine Months Imprint Us for Four Feeling “Flavors” as Adults

But for now, let us get back to this opening provided us. We can make better use of deMause’s insight on the birth feelings that take us into war using Stanislav Grof’s delineation of this birth unconscious of ours. Let us review as described earlier and further stipulate on them: Grof explains we are moved as adults by four specific kinds of drives emanating from our earliest experiences. These specific tendencies in us relate to four different times in the birth process which involve four radically different kinds of experiences.

Grof uses the term, basic perinatal matrices (BPMs), to refer to these four aspects of our inner urges. I will describe them here and refer to them along with DeMause’s cycles of social-historical violence and war to pull apart the roots of our current apocalyptic dilemma. [Footnote 3]

Our Tendency to Always Screw Up a Good Thing, BPM I

The first of Grof’s aspects of our unconscious he terms Basic Perinatal Matrix I, BPM I for short.

Prosperity and Progress Equal Feeling “Soft” and “Feminine”

Grof’s BPM I is sometimes described as “oceanic bliss” and involves the experiences and feelings related to the relatively undisturbed prenatal period. On the social, macrocosmic level, it is the period described in the quote by deMause above in which there is a period of “prosperity and progress” and feelings of being “soft” and “feminine.”

The strong connection between individual experience (personal psychology) and collective realities (social-historical events and elements) is patent here since in BPM I experience the individual is still in the mother’s womb and to some extent shares her identity, which is of course feminine. Being unborn and not having gone through the “toughening” experiences of birth and later trauma, which predominantly create one’s defenses, the individual is also “soft,” in other words, undefended.

“No Pain, No Gain,” Hell, Satan, and Poisonous Placenta; BPM II

“No-Exit” Claustrophobia

To further review Grof’s schema and its relation to deMause’s cycles of war, I want to remind you that BPM II is related on the individual level to the time near the end of pregnancy when the fetus is no longer rocking blissfully on the waves of oceanic bliss but is trapped in an ever more confining womb. As the fetus grows in size, the suffering becomes greater; no doubt this is the source of the common-sense belief that growing has to involve suffering, for example, “No pain, no gain.” At any rate, the feelings are those of claustrophobia and “no exit.”

There is heavy non-agitated depression here, since there appears to be no hope, no change in the situation that would indicate a way out of the suffering. Indeed, this period continues practically right up to the time of birth, ending only when the cervix becomes dilated and, experientially speaking, there appears suddenly to be a “light at the end of the tunnel” and therefore hope.

Where the Hell We Get the Idea of Hell

However, up until that time there are feelings of being totally unempowered, completely in the hands of an entity—the womb—that imposes a horrifying reality that appears to be unending and eternal. Herein we have the psychological roots of notions of hell and Satan. Feelings associated with this state include despair, victimization, blame, and guilt.

“You’ll Wallow in Your Shit, and You’ll Think You’re Happy.” – Kurt Cobain, from the Song, “Sad”

As birth comes nearer, “fetal malnutrition” increases, since the neonate’s increasing size and weight press down on and constrict the blood vessels that carry blood to and from the placenta, when the mother is standing. The decreased blood supply means a reduction of life-giving oxygen as well as the buildup of toxins that would otherwise be taken away by a normal blood flow. So feelings of suffocation as well as skin irritation and other feelings of wallowing in waste matter—deemed poisonous placenta by deMause—increase. [Footnote 4]

“You’re Really in a Laundry Room.” – Kurt Cobain, from the Song, “Sad”

As I have said previously, deMause has found that these feelings exist to an extraordinary degree in a society and its leaders prior to its engaging in a war. Similarly, they precede, and obviously can be held to be accountable for, individual acts of violence—including everything from murder and rape to unfortunately all-too-common and ordinary spousal and child abuse in the household, and of course everything in between.

Bloody War, Bloody Birth — BPM III

BPM III is birth. Its social analogue is war or violent assault. Feelings that accompany this state on both the individual and societal level include rage and intense aggressiveness, all-encompassing struggle, and sexual excess.

Nothing’s Ever Good Enough, BPM IV

BPM IV relates to the time of actually coming out of the womb and the post-natal period. On the societal level it is the ending of a war.

“Busting Out All Over”

Feelings of expansiveness, release, exultation, coming finally out into the light and/or being “on top” of things, and victory are feelings associated with this matrix, whether in the individual birth or the collective war cycle.

As I said the societal analogue to BPM IV, or actually being born, is a war’s end. It is no coincidence that in triumph or peace, the two-finger peace symbol is used. What better way to signal we have come from constriction into openness, specifically through the vise of a mother’s cervix, out from between two legs. As John Lennon so aptly put it, using the peace sign frequently, “War is over (if we want it).”

Mission Accomplished … Not!

Interestingly, just as in recent times harsh modern obstetrical practices and the removal of the baby from the mother can leave lifetime feelings of success not bringing with it the expected rewards and thus a post-accomplishment sort of depression, so also the ending of successful wars sometimes also leaves a society with a sort of letdown. For example, the euphoria following George H. W. Bush’s Gulf War—which catapulted his approval ratings into the ninety percent range in 1991—was followed, only a year later, by the increasing agony of a recession and Bush’s defeat at the polls.

Cycles of Birth, Cycles of War

All of this is to say that in society, as in the womb, a period of uninterrupted and relatively undisturbed feelings of growth leads to feelings of depression—being too “soft” and “feminine,” but also “too fat” in the womb and, therefore, extremely constricted and compressed.

Why Women Fear Becoming Fat and Men Fear Appearing “Feminine”

Another way of saying this: feelings of expansion are followed by a fear of entrapment. And I agree wholeheartedly with deMause in saying that it happens this way in a nation’s cycle of feelings because it happened that way to us prior to and during our births. We have these patterns of feelings as collective groups of individuals because our first experience of expansion was followed by extreme depression, guilt, despair, and then struggle and something bloodily akin to war—our actual births.

What to Do to Stop War and Violence: Changing the Patterns of Millennia Requires Learning That Feeling Good Is Not Bad

To Derail War and Violence, Replace Self-Sabotaging With Self-Actualizing … We Can No Longer Afford Our Delusional Ways

What Can Be Done?

So knowing this, how can we use it? In previous chapters, I explained how and why we see the dynamics of this perinatal unconscious, not coincidentally right now, on the ascendance, just at the time when it is crucial we deal with it to survive. I called this an emerging perinatal unconscious, and I went into detail about why it is happening now, what it means, and how we should take advantage of the opportunity it brings that could aid us in our current dilemma.

For now, I need only remind that is imperative we face these unconscious forces instead of turning away from and thereby insuring our continued ignorance of them and helpless acting out of them.

So, how do we consciously participate in these drives, not merely be driven by them?

Lloyd DeMause, in his article, “Restaging of Early Traumas in War and Social Violence,” printed in the spring 1996 issue of The Journal of Psychohistory, called for kinder and gentler birthing and child-caring practices to mitigate the ferocity of these forces within humans and help us avoid an otherwise inevitable planetary disaster. He was restating what other pre- and perinatal psychologists…I am one, by the way…including Thomas Verny and Stanislav Grof assert. [Footnote 5]

However, I believe we need to go further than that. I, along with Grof, call for a larger awareness of and efforts in the direction of healing these perinatal elements in the consciousness and unconscious of those already alive right now. For unless we act to heal the people currently inhabiting this planet, we might not leave a planet that babies can be born into!…let alone people to conceive and give birth to them. Healing the perinatal traumas can be accomplished through, at this point, thoroughly tested and effective techniques of experiential regression and emotional release.

But it is impossible for everyone to take advantage of these techniques, especially in the short time we have to make the changes. But something short of that ideal may be sufficient to stave off otherwise inevitable doom.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

Finding the Weakest Spot

Of course only time will tell what will be the result of this emerging perinatal unconscious for our species.

Real, not blindly delusional, action is required.

But to get an idea of what we might hope for, given a readiness to actually do something about this, I offer a perspective. This understanding requires we remember some critical aspects of the cartography of the psyche described above. Looking into them we might begin to see where are the openings allowing for realistic action to be taken to bring about true, not just blindly delusional, change for our species.

We can no longer afford otherwise.

For our purposes here, the most important part of the cycle is BPM I. Societies, according to deMause, go through these cycles of war and peace and have been doing so for as long as we know. But we can no longer afford these wars, as World War I and World War II have shown—with each one being an increase in our ability to destroy and to commit atrocities. We cannot afford to have a World War III as that most likely would end life on our planet.

Indeed, as I’ve been pointing out, we cannot even afford the less extreme forms of acting out of perinatal trauma that we have been doing in our poisoning of the earth and air, global overpopulation, and the ongoing regional wars to give just a few of many examples I could have used. These things, along with many other current quite insane tendencies of ours, have the capacity to end our species and possibly all life on this planet.

Feeling Good Is Not Bad

So the cycle of societal perinatal acting out must be stopped. And the most obvious place to derail the insidious cycle is at the point of societal prosperity and progress. Feeling soft, undefended, and feminine are, rationally speaking, not things to be alarmed about.

Quite to the contrary, it is rational that prosperity should make people feel good. It is rational that feeling soft should be a source of contentment, sensitivity, and intimacy with others. It makes sense that men should have no shame about feeling feminine because that only means that they have access to sensitive and nurturing feelings that are a source of joy, “color,” and fulfillment in life.

Changing the Patterns of Millennia

But how do we do this? How do we convince people that feeling good is not bad? For these unconscious forces, these cycles of violence, have been pulling our strings for at least tens of thousands of years. How can we change such an engrained pattern?

Chasing the Mirages of the Future

Well, again, we get our leads from the experiences of individuals undergoing experiential psychotherapy.

“It’s never enough.”

For individuals also, if they are to heal themselves, have to learn how to appreciate success and to stop sabotaging themselves in the myriad of ways they do. Individuals act out their mini-cycles of “war” in their struggles to achieve. And people are driven to struggle to achieve because they cannot be pleased with what they have.

Relating back to deMause’s societal schema, people cannot simply enjoy their “prosperity.” People cannot stop to smell the roses occasionally. We cannot count our blessings and feel contented with what we have. Nor can we enjoy the natural pleasure of being alive in the moment.

“Wrong…It IS enough.”

No, instead what characterizes we humans—for the most part because of our having birth trauma—is a persistent drive to always have more than we do. We find that every accomplishment or success is short lived, with inexplicable depression following it. For each new attainment does not bring the expected (unconscious) rewards and leads us almost immediately to a new struggle, a new accomplishment to be sought.

Humans are driven to chasing mirages of better times somewhere off in the future, and we fail to live in the present. We feel unsatisfied with what we have and are continually deluded that some new possession, accomplishment, or love “conquest” will bring with it the missing happiness.

Becoming Self-Actualizing Instead of Self-Sabotaging

When people are aware of the way they unconsciously sabotage their happiness, they sometimes seek help. And if they seek help in the experiential psychotherapies, they are enabled to work through their birth trauma so that they are no longer driven out of the moment, with its pleasure and pain, into an imagined but never attainable pleasureful and happy future.

Learning that it is enough

So people derail their cycles of drivenness and their tendencies to sabotage their successes by learning to enjoy their “prosperity,” even if it is the simple pleasure of being alive. And when they act to add to that pleasantness, they do so, not out of drivenness, but out of feelings of flow and the simple joys of acting and actualizing one’s tendencies, talents, and desires. They become self-actualizing instead of self-sabotaging.

Can You Handle Happiness? What to Do – We Get By With a Little Help, from Our Nature … Stand in the Place Where You Are

A Hierarchy of Healing … Becoming Human Beings (Not Doings): Removing the Hood from Homophobes, A Hard Rain, and Stand

OK, knowing this, one might ask if I am suggesting that to save our species everyone needs to get into experiential therapy. While that would be nice, it is not practical.

But I believe it is not necessary either. There is an element of that societal period of prosperity that can be used and focused on in order to make the societal change of pattern, the societal derailing of the tendency to self-sabotage through war-making.

Getting By, With a Little Help From Our Nature

And that element is this: During times of prosperity, when one is less engaged in a struggle to survive, we find that one’s body will naturally try to heal itself of unresolved and somatically imprinted trauma by bringing into consciousness the repressed traumatic memories needing resolution.

Hierarchy of Healing

This occurs in a manner similar to that of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Basically, one’s needs to “grow emotionally”…i.e., clear away the unresolved trauma…can only come to the fore when one’s physical survival needs are relatively taken care of. And arise they unerringly do, given any opportunity to do so.

“Don’t just do something, STAND there!”

However, when these traumatic memories come up seeking resolution, they, also unerringly, bring with them the associated feelings of depression, unease, and pain. But because these feelings are anything but pleasant, to their detriment most people seek to avoid these feelings through addictions and other forms of “acting-out” behavior. So addictions and acting-out behavior emerge after periods of relative stability precisely because that stability allows unresolved feelings an opening for emergence and a possibility of resolution and healing.

Allowing Our Society to Be Honestly, Blatantly “Sick”

So there you have it; that is the crux. The period of societal prosperity can be maintained and added to if that society refuses to run away from the negative feelings that come up with success. As I have said, one needs to get “sicker” in order to get really well.

“Stand in the Place Where You Are … Just Stand.”

Societally, we need to allow the social, formerly repressed, “sicknesses,” negativities, and the pain that comes with them to arise and be socially worked out, to be hashed out, rather than to escape them by resorting to scapegoating enemies and waging war against them. [Footnote 6]

Are We Doing This?

But can societies do this? Are they doing this?

Apparently Not

It does not seem so at the moment. For we have extreme acting out going on from Tea Party type elements. The homophobia that characterizes them is an indicator of the degree to which they are fearful of that feeling of being “soft” and “feminine,” I mentioned.

But Then Again…

However there is a pattern in change that things can not really change until the negative slide has “hit bottom.” These negative forces cannot be gone beyond until they have wasted themselves in desperate acts. At this time also, positive forces are strengthening in the wings, burnishing their skills, tempering their character and nobility, fully capable when the time comes to take over. There are so many examples of this in social and individual histories, but not to get bogged down, I will mention one powerful one—Nelson Mandela. You can take it from there.

The more common thing to mention about change is that prior to a major paradigm shift, the forces on the decline always wage a fierce, desperate battle…a bloody retreat, a burning of the fields, near suicidal and totally reckless forays.

We see people do this, too, just before they are about to change. We see people who self-destruct being the ones whose last desperate battle before awareness can dawn being something that takes their life and perhaps others with them.

We currently can point to Gaddafi, Assad, and other tyrants. We can observe reckless tea-baggers willing, as in the debt ceiling clash, to bring down the country for ideals that, however rationalized and spun, are at their roots as simple and crude as jealousy—of those smarter and more capable; hatred—of minorities, the poor, the “dirty,” the “slobs,” the “lazy”…basically all the scapegoats society allows them to vent the rage of their inner fears and hurt on; and homophobia—that fear of being “soft,” feminine, unmasculine, and being willing to kill or be killed rather than to let oneself be seen that way.

Homophobes Don’t Fear Homosexuals … They Fear What’s Inside Themselves

Before continuing, one big misconception around that last point needs clearing up: homophobia is at base not fear/hatred of homosexuals, it is terror/hatred of the “feminine” and “softness” inside of the man himself who is homophobic. And this is the result of tens of thousands of years of “civilization,” still continuing, in which men are threatened with disapproval, ostracism, ridicule, attack, or worse for not repressing their softer sides down to the level of the norm of their group.

Boys Learn They Must Be Less Alive to Survive

Boys learn they must constrict their potentials and diminish themselves to that which coincides with—and does not threaten—the older males in their group or face severe punishment. Boys learn the consequences for not becoming less than they could be are severe, often from their own fathers.

Girls Learn They Must Feel Less Pleasure to Be Liked

And by the way, something similar goes on with young girls and the reduction of their potentials. We see a blatant example of this in the practice of cliterectomy—also called female genital mutilation—in some cultures. In this practice the older women—mother and aunts usually—are responsible for this brutal and extremely painful and bloody attack. It tells little girls they will have no pleasure more than that which was allowed the older women, themselves, in that patriarchal world. So girls must diminish themselves in order to not be hated and ostracized by the women of the group, who, already having been diminished, would be jealous of someone being allowed to have what they have not. This is an exact mirror image of the process that goes on in the diminution of the personalities—the potentials—of young boys.

A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall

Now to continue: So seeing so much of this pathos, hate, and bitter fear and anger is hopeful for us to be near the end of the cycle. Certainly it could get worse. But I personally don’t see how we could go much further on this path to oblivion without going past the point of no return. Perhaps we are not meant to succeed. Perhaps we are doomed. But I know in my own life, and that is the only true basis anyone can have for knowing how things really work, that, without fail, every seeming “loss of ground” was a prelude to an even bigger “advance.”

As Jung said, we need to take two steps backward to make a big leap forward. That is the way individuals are. And societies and populations are just collections of individuals. As the Tao symbol depicts, the seed of light is in the depths of darkness. So we can hold on to that, for one thing.

So Let Us See. A Scenery of Healing?

With these considerations in mind, the next chapter will evaluate our current social-cultural scenery for our prospects. In Rebirthing Rituals – The Sometimes Messy Scenery of Healing—we will look for any indications that this standing firm in the face of the rising up of the repressed social Shadow—allowing the pain of it and facing it foursquare, hashing it out—is to be found in the current social arena.

If we can find this being done, we may allow ourselves at least the hope for a change in consciousness radical enough to save us from extinction. On the contrary, if we find little or no evidence for this kind of auspicious, fruitful healing activity, we might as well consider ourselves doomed.

Continue with Apocalypse No! Chapter Nine: Regressions in the Service of Society — Messy Healing

Return to Apocalypse No, Chapter Seven: Through Gaia’s Eyes – Nature Balances HerSelf

Footnotes

1. The book mentioned was posted online in two places in August, 2011: Culture War and Culture War, Class War.

2. Lloyd deMause, “Restaging of Early Traumas in War and Social Violence.” The Journal of Psychohistory 23 (1995): 2. Reprinted with permission on the Primal Spirit site.

Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research. New York: Viking Press, 1975; LSD Psychotherapy. Pomona, CA: Hunter House, 1980; Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985; The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988; The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.

3. I explain this in more detail in Chapter Seven: We Ain’t Born Typical under the heading “Elements of Birth Experience.”

4. “You’ll wallow in the shit and you’ll think you’re happy” and “You’re really in a laundry room” from, and with appreciation to, Kurt Cobain. These are lyrics in his song, “Sad.” The video and lyrics are reproduced again here for your convenience:

Nirvana – “Sad” (also “Sappy” and “Verse Chorus Verse”) – Lyrics

And if you save yourself You will make him happy He’ll keep you in a jar And you’ll think you’re happy He’ll give you breathing holes Then you’ll think you’re happy He’ll cover you with grass And you’ll think you’re happy Now You’re really in a laundry room, You’re really in a laundry room Conclusion came to you, oh And if you cut yourself You will think you’re happy He’ll keep you in a jar Then you’ll make him happy He’ll give you breathing holes Then you’ll think you’re happy He’ll cover you with grass Then you’ll think you’re happy Now You’re really in a laundry room, You’re really in a laundry room Conclusion came to you, oh (x2) And if you fool yourself You will make him happy He’ll keep you in a jar And you’ll think you’re happy He’ll give you breathing holes Then you will seem happy You’ll wallow in your shit Then you’ll think you’re happy Now You’re really in a laundry room (x3) Conclusion came to you, oh Alternate lyrics: And if you kill yourself You will make him happy

5. Lloyd deMause, “Restaging of Early Traumas in War and Social Violence.” The Journal of Psychohistory 23 (1995): 2. Reprinted with permission on the Primal Spirit site.

Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research. New York: Viking Press, 1975; LSD Psychotherapy. Pomona, CA: Hunter House, 1980; Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985; The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988; The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.

6. “Stand in the place where you are…just stand” from and with appreciation to R.E.M. While it seems no one understood the group’s huge initial release, “Stand,” it is quite meaningful in the current context. A video and lyrics are included here for your consideration:

R.E.M. – “Stand” … lyrics

Stand in the place where you live
Now face North
Think about direction
Wonder why you haven’t before
Now stand in the place where you work
Now face West
Think about the place where you live
Wonder why you haven’t before
If you are confused check with the sun
Carry a compass to help you along
Your feet are going to be on the ground
Your head is there to move you around
[repeat 1st verse]
Your feet are going to be on the ground
Your head is there to move you around
If wishes were trees the trees would be falling
Listen to reason
Season is calling
[repeat 1st verse]
If wishes were trees the trees would be falling
Listen to reason
Reason is calling
Your feet are going to be on the ground
Your head is there to move you around
So Stand (stand)
Now face North
Think about direction, wonder why you haven’t before
Now stand (stand)
Now face West
Think about the place where you live
Wonder why you haven’t
[repeat 1st verse]
Stand in the place where you are (Now face North)
Stand in the place where you are (Now face West)
Your feet are going to be on the ground (Stand in the place where you are)
Your head is there to move you around, so stand.

Derailing the Cycles of War and Violence – Audiocasts

“Part 1; What Say We Leave a Planet for Our Offspring?” – the audio by SillyMickel Adzema

For the author’s reading, with elaboration, of this part, click on the link to the audio site above or click the audio player here:

http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=pffbztrfkv

“Part 2; Can You Handle Happiness (And the Pain That Comes With It)?” – the audio by SillyMickel Adzema

For the author’s reading, with elaboration, of this part, click on the link to the audio site above or click the audio player here:

http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=syglfhsvld

Continue with Apocalypse No! Chapter Nine: Regressions in the Service of Society — Messy Healing

Return to Apocalypse No, Chapter Seven: Through Gaia’s Eyes – Nature Balances HerSelf

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
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To Derail War and Violence, Replace Self-Sabotaging With Self-Actualizing … We Can No Longer Afford Our Delusional Ways

What to Do to Stop War and Violence: Changing the Patterns of Millennia Requires Learning That Feeling Good Is Not Bad*

What Can Be Done?

So knowing this, how can we use it? In previous chapters, I explained how and why we see the dynamics of this perinatal unconscious, not coincidentally right now, on the ascendance, just at the time when it is crucial we deal with it to survive. I called this an emerging perinatal unconscious, and I went into detail about why it is happening now, what it means, and how we should take advantage of the opportunity it brings that could aid us in our current dilemma.

For now, I need only remind that is imperative we face these unconscious forces instead of turning away from and thereby insuring our continued ignorance of them and helpless acting out of them.

So, how do we consciously participate in these drives, not merely be driven by them?

Lloyd DeMause, in his article, “Restaging of Early Traumas in War and Social Violence,” printed in the spring 1996 issue of The Journal of Psychohistory, called for kinder and gentler birthing and child-caring practices to mitigate the ferocity of these forces within humans and help us avoid an otherwise inevitable planetary disaster. He was restating what other pre- and perinatal psychologists…I am one, by the way…including Thomas Verny and Stanislav Grof assert. [Footnote 1]

However, I believe we need to go further than that. I, along with Grof, call for a larger awareness of and efforts in the direction of healing these perinatal elements in the consciousness and unconscious of those already alive right now. For unless we act to heal the people currently inhabiting this planet, we might not leave a planet that babies can be born into!…let alone people to conceive and give birth to them. Healing the perinatal traumas can be accomplished through, at this point, thoroughly tested and effective techniques of experiential regression and emotional release.

But it is impossible for everyone to take advantage of these techniques, especially in the short time we have to make the changes. But something short of that ideal may be sufficient to stave off otherwise inevitable doom.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

Finding the Weakest Spot

Of course only time will tell what will be the result of this emerging perinatal unconscious for our species.

Real, not blindly delusional, action is required.

But to get an idea of what we might hope for, given a readiness to actually do something about this, I offer a perspective. This understanding requires we remember some critical aspects of the cartography of the psyche described above. Looking into them we might begin to see where are the openings allowing for realistic action to be taken to bring about true, not just blindly delusional, change for our species.

We can no longer afford otherwise.

For our purposes here, the most important part of the cycle is BPM I. Societies, according to deMause, go through these cycles of war and peace and have been doing so for as long as we know. But we can no longer afford these wars, as World War I and World War II have shown—with each one being an increase in our ability to destroy and to commit atrocities. We cannot afford to have a World War III as that most likely would end life on our planet.

Indeed, as I’ve been pointing out, we cannot even afford the less extreme forms of acting out of perinatal trauma that we have been doing in our poisoning of the earth and air, global overpopulation, and the ongoing regional wars to give just a few of many examples I could have used. These things, along with many other current quite insane tendencies of ours, have the capacity to end our species and possibly all life on this planet.

Feeling Good Is Not Bad

So the cycle of societal perinatal acting out must be stopped. And the most obvious place to derail the insidious cycle is at the point of societal prosperity and progress. Feeling soft, undefended, and feminine are, rationally speaking, not things to be alarmed about.

Quite to the contrary, it is rational that prosperity should make people feel good. It is rational that feeling soft should be a source of contentment, sensitivity, and intimacy with others. It makes sense that men should have no shame about feeling feminine because that only means that they have access to sensitive and nurturing feelings that are a source of joy, “color,” and fulfillment in life.

Changing the Patterns of Millennia

But how do we do this? How do we convince people that feeling good is not bad? For these unconscious forces, these cycles of violence, have been pulling our strings for at least tens of thousands of years. How can we change such an engrained pattern?

Chasing the Mirages of the Future

Well, again, we get our leads from the experiences of individuals undergoing experiential psychotherapy.

“It’s never enough.”

For individuals also, if they are to heal themselves, have to learn how to appreciate success and to stop sabotaging themselves in the myriad of ways they do. Individuals act out their mini-cycles of “war” in their struggles to achieve. And people are driven to struggle to achieve because they cannot be pleased with what they have.

Relating back to deMause’s societal schema, people cannot simply enjoy their “prosperity.” People cannot stop to smell the roses occasionally. We cannot count our blessings and feel contented with what we have. Nor can we enjoy the natural pleasure of being alive in the moment.

“Wrong…It IS enough.”

No, instead what characterizes we humans—for the most part because of our having birth trauma—is a persistent drive to always have more than we do. We find that every accomplishment or success is short lived, with inexplicable depression following it. For each new attainment does not bring the expected (unconscious) rewards and leads us almost immediately to a new struggle, a new accomplishment to be sought.

Humans are driven to chasing mirages of better times somewhere off in the future, and we fail to live in the present. We feel unsatisfied with what we have and are continually deluded that some new possession, accomplishment, or love “conquest” will bring with it the missing happiness.

Becoming Self-Actualizing Instead of Self-Sabotaging

When people are aware of the way they unconsciously sabotage their happiness, they sometimes seek help. And if they seek help in the experiential psychotherapies, they are enabled to work through their birth trauma so that they are no longer driven out of the moment, with its pleasure and pain, into an imagined but never attainable pleasureful and happy future.

Learning that it is enough

So people derail their cycles of drivenness and their tendencies to sabotage their successes by learning to enjoy their “prosperity,” even if it is the simple pleasure of being alive. And when they act to add to that pleasantness, they do so, not out of drivenness, but out of feelings of flow and the simple joys of acting and actualizing one’s tendencies, talents, and desires. They become self-actualizing instead of self-sabotaging.

Continue with Can You Handle Happiness? What to Do – We Get By With a Little Help, from Our Nature … Stand in the Place Where You Are

Return to Cycles of Birth, Cycles of War … The Four “Colors” of the Perinatal Veils and Why Women Fear Fatness and Men Fear Femininity

Footnotes

1. Lloyd deMause, “Restaging of Early Traumas in War and Social Violence.” The Journal of Psychohistory 23 (1995): 2. Reprinted with permission on the Primal Spirit site.

Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research. New York: Viking Press, 1975; LSD Psychotherapy. Pomona, CA: Hunter House, 1980; Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985; The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988; The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.

Derailing the Cycles of War and Violence – Audiocasts

“Part 1; What Say We Leave a Planet for Our Offspring?” – the audio by SillyMickel Adzema

For the author’s reading, with elaboration, of this part, click on the link to the audio site above or click the audio player here:

http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=pffbztrfkv

“Part 2; Can You Handle Happiness (And the Pain That Comes With It)?” – the audio by SillyMickel Adzema

For the author’s reading, with elaboration, of this part, click on the link to the audio site above or click the audio player here:

http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=syglfhsvld

Continue with Can You Handle Happiness? What to Do – We Get By With a Little Help, from Our Nature … Stand in the Place Where You Are

Return to Men Would Rather Be Manly Than Alive and What Say We Leave a Planet for Our Offspring? Derailing War and Violence, Part 1

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The 13th Prasad. “The Great Reveal” by The Planetmates: “Resisting Divine Assistance”

The Thirteenth Prasad

Duck Is First Consciousness at The Thirteenth Prasad

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

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

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

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

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

(to be continued)

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