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“You will feel you have come home. You will feel like you understand your life. You will not want to leave it — this place of comfort”: Planetmates reveal what it feels like to become natural and planetmate once again.
Planetmates describe the process of reconnecting with your soul, with Nature, with truth, with the Unapproved and Hidden, with God and Reality: “The more you give up trying to determine who you are, the more you discover who you are”:
Planetmates describe the process of reconnecting with your soul, with Nature, with truth, with the Unapproved and Hidden, with God and Reality: “The more you give up trying to determine who you are, the more you discover who you are”:
“…in order to realize and reconnect again with your Self, you must surrender your frantic “trying to figure it out.” You must stop believing in the demons that you have used to help explain that which you cannot, because you have refused to see it. Rather, it is more important that you stop trying to understand and to control. You must allow, at least for that moment, that you might actually learn something, that you might be taught. You must let go, at least for that moment, of your sense of self-importance, and any thoughts about how you might be appearing to anyone outside of you. At least for that moment … give yourself at least that … you must “give up.”
“Just give up.
“You must “let go.”
“You need only stop looking outward and let yourself be simply aware of your body, how it feels. Look down toward it, not out into the world of symbols and reflections and struggles of the mind.
“You must only let whatever feeling there is in your body to arise….
“You must let yourself feel … .
“You will cry.
“You will weep …
“ … and weep.
“No doubt you will cry, for the first thing that will arise in you is the sadness of your disconnection from all that you really cared about in life. You will see clearly how you have become lost. You will begin to remember what was important to you in childhood and your heart will ache, seeing, in your mind, each step, each permutation, across the years of your life, of your fall from that innocence.
“You may cry for a long, long time, as it all becomes clear to you. As all those things you pushed to the side as unimportant — all your emotional attachments, your family, friends, and relationships, all your feelings about your endless treadmill in your world of struggling and sorrow — are remembered by you.
“You may even get angry and want to rage. Let yourself, for now, do that. No, we do not mean allow yourself to act it out on someone else. Just, like the crying, let it out. You may cry out, groan, even scream.
“It is no big deal. It will not harm you. You must learn now how to be taught, to be receptive. Let yourself get, for a change, instead of do. Let it come to you. Trust that something will come. Trust what comes. Watch as it comes, reconnects with the rest of you, and then more rises up and dawns upon you. You may actually feel like parts of your body and your brain are reconnecting; you might feel surges of energy; your body may jerk; you may have muscle twitches as the parts of your body and mind are snapping back into each other, making you whole. Similar, subtler feelings might occur of the upper and lower parts of your brain clicking back together. You might imagine your “inner wiring” — your electrical connections between brain and body — rearranging itself, linking together, and straightening along the length of your body.
“You might feel your body wanting to go through movements of its own, as if an alien thing had taken over it. This is nothing to be afraid of. That “alien” thing is really the larger you, trying to heal itself in the ways that it knows — more than your egoic mind ever possibly could — exactly how to do it. Your body-mind becomes whole in as precise and perfect a manner — as instinctual a manner — as a physical wound heals itself. You do not need to direct it. In fact, any attempt to push or guide this healing of soul only derails the process. You need only let go, and trust.
“And you will feel comforted. You will feel in your body the easing of all those years of deprivation, aching, wanting, and struggling. You will feel you have come home. You will feel like you understand your life. You will not want to leave it — this place of comfort — as you look all about you at all the efforts and empty achievements that have become your life and which take up all the activity of everyone around you.
“Your process of becoming planetmate again, of reconnecting with your soul, with Nature, with truth, with the Unapproved and Hidden, and with God and Reality will take a long time. It might even require more than this life. You did not become crazy overnight. While you cannot unthink your insanity, neither can you will sanity into existence and simply decide it. If you think you have awakened and it happened in a flash, then that is just the beginning. You are probably only becoming aware of the Abyss that exists. You have much further to go. It will take as long as it takes. And it does not matter how long it takes. The important thing is that you have given up trying to control it. You are allowing yourself to be taught by your inner guide, in its own way, and at its own pace. The practice of giving up trying to hurry anything along or direct it is part of what allows it to happen. The more you give up trying to determine who you are, the more you discover who you are….”
[Pt 4 of 28th Prasad — Family. 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
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.
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“You are looking in the wrong direction. You should be looking not outward into the world of symbols and reflections, but inward into the pleasure, pains, urges, and feelings of the body.”
“felt connection” with the Divine, meaning of Minotaur and labyrinth, impulses “getting out of control,” meaninglessness and the Abyss, the unreal demons, the process of becoming real again. What the Planetmates say, today
[Pt 3 of 28th Prasad — Family. 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 https://www.createspace.com/4691119
and at Amazon at
Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness – Michael’s latest book – is now available in print and e-book formats.
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
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel
“Raising up walls of possessions, captive planetmates, and conforming underlings — including women and children —and retreating from the more magnificent and magical expanses of self, you sought to make a stand against real life”
Planetmates reveal the family fortress, conforming underlings, Commandments of society’s elite, the “family jewels,” more:
“…Humans would rather have the “Joneses” be impressed with the amount and quality of their possessions … than to actually be happy.
“Look again at that work you created in the care and feeding of kept planetmates—husbandry: The work has to be done, they need to be fed, or you lose your investment. If you were sick, tired, or simply disinclined, it did not matter and you had to forego an ease and pleasure in your body as you bullied it into submission, just as you do the Earth. You needed to make your body move and work, regardless of how you felt or how you suffered or how much ill health would be incumbent upon such stresses and strains and unhappiness in your physical selves.
“Similarly, at certain times of the year, such as harvest, you worked under extreme pressure. The demands of completing the harvest and storing what was wrought before weather might come in and, again, neutralize all the results of one’s efforts made for very long days of back-breaking work. In these ways, in addition to all the others we have mentioned, you split off from Nature, for your body is Nature, and you operated it in spite of and often in opposition to its cries and screams, its promptings and messages to you. Is it any wonder then that you lost your ability to feel the fainter urges of the “instinct” within your body?
“At any rate, it is supremely ironic how your insistence on taking over the reins of your sustenance through horticulture and farming, which was pushed by your desire to not be dependent on Nature and to be free, made you shackled to work loads and time constraints, and found you burdened under a multitude of demands and responsibilities and pressures. Good job getting that freedom you wanted!
“All in all, then, while the phenomenal dependency of your offspring was an added burden in your lives, in general, that effort, under certain kinds of conditions, these sedentary-accumulating ones, children could be seen as additional assistance in your tussle with your imagined threats and brought in to share with you all that additional suffering you created in Nature through trying to control everything..
“This was especially true if that dependent state, especially in infancy but in childhood as well, was used to mold these children into the ideal conforming underlings for you.
“And so you did to your children what you had done to the Earth and to your own bodies: You brutalized them into submission.
“Those who were Large Accumulators could “bribe” additional efforts from others to aid them in their dramas, of course, but even those with lesser means — virtually all of you — had the ability to gain obedient subordinates through procreation. Large families were thus selected for. The larger the family, the better, as long as each subsequent child could within a sufficiently short period come to add more resources to the collective family struggle than would be removed from the total by the (minimal) survival of that child.
“Thus, large accumulation was increasingly linked with large families. A brood of offspring could act like a small gang, or crew of employees in the gathering, processing, and accumulating of extra, hoarded resources, but they could also serve as a small army and aid in the defense and protection of such hoarded wealth against other accumulators with green eyes and needy, famished hearts. Raising humans to assist with accumulation began to be seen as a survival advantage, but also, children, after the agrarian revolution, were increasingly seen as another category of conforming underlings — the least costly and most manipulatable ones of all — who would be even greater allies in the fight against the ever expanding threats to your survival.
“This was so much your view of the way of things that your Ten Commandments — a rather good abstract of your fearful imaginings and your feverish, heavy-handed control — contains not only such reinforcement for the strong men of the society as “have no god before Him,” not only such protections for your authoritarian families as “honoring father and mother” and codification of the elements of resource management to benefit the ones who already have as “shalt not steal” and “shalt not bear false witness,” but even includes two entire commandments to cover jealousy. It is called “coveting” and has to do not only with protecting the hoarded wealth — “shalt not covet neighbor’s goods” — but defending the engines of that production as well — “shalt not covet neighbor’s wife.” So, it is understandable how all threats to the fantastical survival competition are fought in all such manners: Monogamy would be elevated to a divine status — “shalt not commit adultery” — as part of the accumulation ordeal.
“Further, it is no coincidence that your male reproductive capacity is referred to as “family jewels.” While humorous, it is starkly accurate in the way you humans think on a level of your unconscious mind inaccessible to you — again, that Unapproved and Hidden: A human’s reproductive capacity began to be seen as an avenue of potential wealth, insurance against want or insufficiency, and even a ticket to possible Controller status and inclusion in society’s elite.
“For children began increasingly to be thought of as mere extensions of you, of your Ego. And the family unit that came of such expansion of fear and self-congratulation (Ego) was no longer harmonious with Nature; it had ceased being, even, interconnected with the tribe. It was not about individuals in relation to community. No. This nuclear family represented another advance in mistrust and fear, a further retreat into an ever diminishing circle, a fortress. With the creation of the family citadel, it was you against the world.
“Altogether, with conforming underlings bought, bribed, or paid for to be allies in your war over resources, with children conceived and raised to be obedient soldiers in its battles, and with tenets and social codes enforced with extreme severity so as to wrangle extreme conformity to social ways benefiting the Large Accumulators and the petty tyrants heading families, you had created a full on assault against your imaginary fears of death, your strange abhorrence of more adventurous, uncontrolled life, which you felt as uncertainty and pain — which we see as guides in our living, but which you perceive as reminders of that death you fear so intensely.
“All in all, this added up to a wrong-gettedness in relation to life. Whereas we are ever reminded of our divine surround through the challenges, obstacles, and discomfort of life and are directed in this way in an ever-expanding, numinous path of divine return, you erected walls of fear-rooted control around your fleeting havens of ease, and you cut off your roots into the divine, unshakeable peace to which you are entitled. Raising up walls of possessions, captive planetmates, and conforming underlings — including women and children — and retreating from the more magnificent and magical expanses of self, you sought to make a stand against real life. A big part of this effort you called “family,” and you erected a shrine to it equal to your exaggerated terror of the uncontrolled….”
[Pt 6 of 25rd prasad — Family Fortress. More coming….
To see the entire book, to which this will be added eventually (book is two-thirds updated), go to the blog page at http://mladzema.wordpress.com/the-great-reveal-book-6/ …
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
“Just because we have more access to Mind at Large … does not mean we are mindless, feelingless machines”: Planetmates on work versus instinct, happiness, joy, creativity being like instinctual knowledge, play, Divine inspiration, and fun. Planetmates say, “We are your angels in Nature”
“…there would be much more “instinctual” knowledge available to you — and is available to you — were you, for reasons of your birth and infancy and the way they have caused you to run away from the feelings in your bodies, not split off from them. Indeed, to the extent that you have not run away from such pain, or to the degree that one has turned and faced and integrated that pain and reconnected with one’s body, you do feel and receive such specific “instinctual” instruction.
“In fact, think of it, when we say we do not know where those messages come from, which we experience in the body, do you see that, to be more specific, we know them to come from the “divine”? For they are “instructions,” as it were, that guide us in the care of ourselves in life and the carrying out of our life’s actions along lines most beneficial and pleasurable. And other than a force that is comforting, beneficial, and wiser than our limited selves, what else is the Divine? For certainly that is enough for us. Keeping that in mind, do you not see that it is the same for you? And that to the extent that one is able to lower the barriers of early pain and the mental defenses that arose from it, you also can feel such Divine instruction … of an increasingly more specific quality … and become more “instinctual.” Or, in your words, divinely inspired or guided by God.
“Backing up, so you denigrate our experience as “instinctual,’ when it is no different from your own experience of life … and if there is any difference it has to do with the greater access we have, the stronger and clearer connection we have, with a wisdom and beneficence beyond our limited selves, which you have separated from, but which is still accessible deep inside you, below the levels of your early pain. Just because we have more access to Mind at Large, which contains all information and knowledge, does not mean we are mindless, feelingless machines. Does it not mean the opposite? Indeed, we are your angels in nature, as we said earlier.
“So, keep in mind, our “instinct” is what guides us in having the experiences of the joy, pleasure, and happiness of life … something you have lost so much of. And it hardly matters where it “came from.” Certainly, the fact that we are more divinely inspired is no reason to trivialize our experience, or our knowledge … any more than you should demean the brilliance of your Shakespeare or Einstein or Jesus just because they happened to have found a way to stay or become sensitive to the wisdom of the Universe and the Divine, which is everywhere around, but which you, most of you and for the most part, block yourself from feeling.
“And for us this pleasure and joy, this “instinctual” guidance, includes having offspring. It is another capacity that wants to be actualized, which, in doing so, planetmates feel pleasure. It also is not a chore, or work, which for you it has often become.
“But you also know what life is that is lived under the direction of the Divine instead of the direction of higher ups, extracting from you the suffering equivalent to the control of you, which is termed work.
For, you ask a child digging in the sand with a shovel if that is work. Ask the athlete if clearing the bar when pole vaulting is work. Ask if it is work to sidestep all tacklers and throw oneself over the goal line. Ask the sculptor if fashioning stone and watching her or his vision of it emerge from it is work.
“Lion cubs fight and wrestle with each other. You say they are just preparing themselves for an adult life of struggle and fighting off predators. Really? Do you really think they are taking it on like a class, or exercise regimen, and not just having fun?
“At any rate, creative people know what we are talking about. They know about the work that is not work, that is actually play and conducive to joy. And they know about that magical, “instinctual” knowledge that comes to one precisely and specifically. For they know that their “works” (their “plays”?) have to be just so. When it fits with their “instinct” — their unconscious knowing which only comes out in actions of following it or expressing it — they know it is done and it cannot be any different. As Amadeus, in an ironic tone, said in the movie when someone criticized his composition for having “too many notes,” “Just exactly which notes would you have me take out?”
“So for the artist in any medium, the creative product arises as if it was done somewhere else, by someone else, and one is just the channel for it. Upon its completion, it feels as if it had come forth perfect and precise in all its details … springing, as it were, “fully formed from the forehead of Zeus.” So this is instinctual knowledge, of a sort, which ultimately comes from a place beyond themselves and ourselves.
“But with sedentary ways you forgot all that and you created work, which is the non-divine actions emanating as urges, not from the inside and the body (ultimately the Divine), but from the outside, driven and pushed by coercion. Rather than the positive reinforcement one receives in following one’s “instinctual” guidance, which makes of one’s life a happy one, acting in response to the promptings of the outside is largely a product of negative reinforcement. One is not, as in Nature, just rewarded when one follows its promptings, one is punished when one does not. Overall, such a life is not a happy one….”
[Pt 3 of 25rd prasad — Family Fortress. More coming….
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.
We’ve Fallen and We Can’t Get Up: Like Chiron, We Need to Take Inside Us the “Sins” of Promethean Fathers to Stop Millennial Cycles of Suffering
We Are the Centaurs, My Friends: We Are the Necessary Heroes for Deluded Promethean “Fathers,” Open the Jar, Pandora, and Why the Gods Are LOL
Wounded Deer and Centaurs, Chapter Seven: Return of the Centaur and How We Look to the Gods
Enter the Centaur: Wherein Lies Real Hope – Sixties and Millennial Generations Are Shamans for Deluded Promethean “Fathers”
Blind Hope vs. Real Hope … Chiron Is Martyr for The Sins of the Fathers
Prometheus Brought Us Blind Hopes
Another aspect of this is that Prometheus is said to have “caused blind hopes to live in the hearts of men.” Indeed, we are also now seeing how blind was our reliance on technology and the vaunted but vain “rational mind”—which has now been seen to be a rationalizing mind.
For we realize this self-congratulatory thinking has been keeping out uncomfortable truths and building illusory, manic Atman projects of escape from the consequences of our actions. None of which, we are now finding out, are capable of working.
Enter the Centaur: Real Hopes – Chiron
But to jump ahead. There is hope in the Prometheus myth as well. There is shown a way forward for humanity, which at this particular time in history appears to have been prophetic. For Prometheus is saved from his sufferings by the Centaur, Chiron. Chiron sacrifices himself—Christ-like—taking on Prometheus’s suffering and dying in his stead.
Return to The Centaur
Earthy, Sensual, Noble
The Centaur — half human, half animal — does not, like Icarus, paste on wings and try to separate from groundedness in the Earth. No. 
Centaur qualities are earthy, sensual, sexual. They embrace the noble qualities of 
the horse … reminding us that as primal beings, early humans, we were noble humans … as they say, a bit ethnocentrically, “noble savages.” We once stood, sure-footed and tall, and we walked confidently upon the Earth, knowing we belonged here.
Wounded Healers, Shamans, Gardeners of Consciousness, Poets … Brave and Foolhardy Journeyers Into the Unapproved and Hidden
Traditionally associated with intoxicants and with the bacchanalian, centaurs can see into other realities, nonordinary ones. They are open to altered states of consciousness. They are not averse to looking into their deeper natures, their “undersides,” their unconscious; that is how they came to be 
one with Nature in the first place.
Indeed, Chiron is also known as the wounded healer and is associated with the shamanic. Being, like Chiron, healers, centaurs are skilled in both physical and mental health. Thus they are wholistic and psychotherapeutical. They are philosophical. Plato was one. Walt Whitman was one. They are poetic.
Mystics, Scapegoats, Natural … A-mused and A-musing Not Deluded and A-mazed
They are scapegoated, like Chiron was, for the sins of society, and in modern times they have scornfully been referred to as “hippies” and 
“beatniks” — but they include the bohemian types of all times. Being rooted in a more fundamental nature or reality they are mystic. Jesus was one. Following a “different drummer,” as it were, they are the Wayseers.
Connected to the real source of truth in Nature and the Divine, 
they are in touch with their muse … and are both a-mused and a-musing…but they are not into the maze of culture, the matrix, they are not fooled or a-mazed.
The Centaur is completely in tune with her 
and his planetmate-nature, the Divine and Natural 
order—as in the Jungian and mystic understandings of individuation as being a re-uniting with a fundamental and earlier reality — returning home, humble and prodigal-son like.
The Opposite of Ordinary Folks…Who Build Stairways to Heaven and Towers to Their Vanity
This is the opposite of most folks who spend their lives seeking to vainly build stairways to heaven, Towers of Babel to the divine, to be muscular Nietzchian supermen, or to struggle up Wilberian ladder-style paths for imaginary achievements and to an understandably elusive “enlightenment.”
We Are the Centaurs, My Friends
This self-sacrificing tendency in humans I will be talking about at length at the end of this book where I point out how we need to stop acting out and begin taking back the projections we make onto the Unknown and 
thereby stop the Promethean cycles of 
suffering going on for millennia. We need to, like Chiron, take upon ourselves the “sins of the fathers.” As Tom Waits sang it, “I’m gonna take the sins of my father (mother, brother, sister), down to the pond…I’m gonna wash them.”
Exactly that. We must make the heroic sacrifice of taking inside ourselves those perennial urges to act out on others what was done to us. In environmental terms we must make the sacrifices of lowering our standard of living 
and cutting back on the lavish appetites and lazy indulgences fed 
by excessive technology, cultural trinkets, and superfluous commercialism, which other generations were allowed to take to the limits of their times. For if we do not, then there will be very little left for future generations—assuming there’ll be any.
These cultural “achievements” — wrought of burning of fossil fuels, release of fiery energy from the atom, and despoiling of natural resources — all of them in some way rooted in the theft of fire long ago, 
which started it all, must be let go of. We 
must refrain from being driven by these addictions and substitutes for actual felt experience, take the “fire” within instead of burning it up without. 
So in 
physical terms we must bring those excessive urges home within ourselves and ground them in Nature, bring them back into our physical bodies, we must be Centaurs. And within our bodies experience the discomfort of such a monumental millennial turnabout.
So, no. This is not easy or comfortable.
No. Not easy or comfortable.
Real Hope Lies in Pandora’s Jar and Return of the Centaur … Since the Last Time Was 1961, It’s None Too Soon
Open the Jar, Pandora, and Return of The Centaur … Wherein Lies Real Hope
Open the Jar, Pandora
In psychological terms, real change lies in peering deep into the Pandora’s jar of the 
unconscious to recover the real hope that is there. Remember, Zeus punished humanity for Prometheus’s theft by sending Pandora. Pandora opened the jar she was told never to look into—another broken law of the Divine, like that of Eve and Prometheus—and out came all the ailments that now plague humankind. It is said Pandora tried to close it but “it was too late.” Still, the legend tells us what was left inside was hope.
I don’t think you have a better description of the way most folks, including most psychologists, handle the discomfort of early pain: 
They can’t help but be affected by it…some of it does “leak out.” But they expend all kinds of efforts toward bottling it up as much as possible, suppressing, repressing, using all kinds of defenses—including what mainstream psychotherapists call “healthy” ones.
Well, There’s No Sense Going Half Way!
Yet I can tell you as a primal therapist, breathworker, and primal person that is the exact wrong thing to do. 
From the perspective of deep experiential psychotherapy and Holotropic Breathwork one must open the “jar” all the way up. One must surrender to the discomfort within—not acting it out but acting it in…or rather, surrendering to the feelings that come up and expressing them (opening the jar wide).
The jar is the personal unconscious, and what we find is that the only answer to all these troubles is to look deeply into them; for when we do we find the real hope that lies beneath the pain. Or as I have phrased it, there comes a time when one feels through the “negative grids” (the “pain grids”) to the “positive grids” (the “joy grids”). Therein is the hope.
What we find is that when one has faced and integrated perinatal pain, then the blissful experiences from earlier in womb time opens up. In Grof’s terms referred to earlier in this book, when one allows oneself to experience the depression of BPM II (constricted womb) and the tribulations of BPM III (birth itself), then one is open to the euphoria of BPM I (early womb experience). Rather than seeing through a veil of perinatal negativity and illusion and acting out from the unreal self or ego, one is getting closer to one’s real self as a positive, truly creative being, .
This is not a fleeting experience, for it allows a completely new perception on one’s life, vastly different from what one normally thinks. One has access to positive patterns laid down at earlier and more fundamental times in one’s life. One can build a life that works, for once. One can make choices that trigger one into happiness, not ones that are self-destructive and conducive to unhappiness.
This is true in therapy and on the spiritual path but also in ordinary life. For any time one confronts or looks deeply into one’s discomforts there is a time when there is release from it, there is a time when one is in a better place for having faced it. As the Tao symbol indicates, there is a seed of light in the depths of darkness.
Additionally I can tell you that opening up even more to the reality of consciousness, as opposed to constructing egoic “castles in the sky,” leads to uncovering the “spiritual grids” beyond even the “positive grids.” That is 
when we go beyond even hope 
to actual redemption, re-union with estranged divinity, faith, empathy, love, and finally compassion. And that is when we as Centaurs go from being just wounded and suffering to being, like Chiron, healers…and caring teachers.
So, for centaurs, for those who take this path, it is more depressive than aggressive. And up to the euphoric culmination I described above, it is painful and ongoing as well, just as 
Chiron’s wound was incurable and tormenting. These become the shamans and wounded healers, like Chiron, throwing 
themselves into the fire, rather than shooting fire all about themselves at others. Centauric folks take on the suffering lest they end up being like all those before them who sheepishly and selfishly passed the burden down.
Return of the Centaur
In another part of this book I point out how there are, beginning with the Sixties, now generations who are doing just that—working out these pains, not acting them out.
I just recently delineated the way these primal pains are emerging and how they are being worked through, not acted out, in younger generations and in alternative, rock music, and therapeutic cultures for a number 
of decades now.
Finally, in a related work of mine, Culture War, Class War, I have written how the Sixties Generation is a centaur generation and how the millennial generation is continuing that tradition. I’ve pointed out Sixties folk are centauric in standing upon (sitting upon) the achievements of previous generations but also reversing the perverse Promethean human direction by reuniting with our rootedness in Nature.
Chiron Return…Every Fifty-One Years
This humble and correct primal returning has been done, is continuing to be done, and will keep on being done as the Sixties generation continues working out its power struggle at the top, but now aided by a Millennial 
generation—comprised mainly of their 
daughters and sons — who are rather centaur-like themselves … as this book and the related works continue to show.
And who, because of this, following different stars grounded in realities both deeper and higher, they boldly confront their societies, bringing about change, creating rapid evolution, revolution; and in doing this they have already created an 
Arab Spring and an Occupy Wall Street movement. They will bring about profound change in that they are opposed to the powers 
that be, just as their parents were opposed to the “establishment” of their day and created a “counter” culture.
The Chiron cycle is fifty-one years, meaning the last time we had energies like we do now in 2012 was in 1961. 
If you lived through or know about that decade, you know that 1961 through 1971 were 
among the most transformative, progressive, and revolutionary years in the history of the world…and it indeed was a worldwide phenomenon. Considering the dire developments and challenges being laid at our feet, as this book has been laying them out…and requiring as much social but personal change as well…the centaurs couldn’t have returned any too soon.
How We Look to the Gods and Prometheus Redux … Building More Nukes and Drilling More Holes – Icarus Keeps Flapping and the Gods Can’t Stop Laughing
![6488199-vector-colorful-illustration[2]](http://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/6488199-vector-colorful-illustration21.jpg "6488199-vector-colorful-illustration[2]")
View From the Heavens and Prometheus Redux … Icarus Is Flapping and the Gods Are Laughing as We Build Nukes and Drill Holes
Prometheus Redux
Before leaving Prometheus for good, let us consider some other interesting 
aspects of its rendering that provide insight into this book’s exploration of the deepest psychological—perinatal—roots of our apocalypse now:
There are four legends of the Prometheus myth—all of them are reflected, coincidentally, in themes in this and its related books, Culture War, Class War and The Great Reveal. They are
- According to the first, he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed.
“Betraying the secrets of gods to men” includes the biggest divine prerogative—dominion over death. Also, this implies that humans were given the forbidden knowledge which humans are incapable of controlling, which I dealt with at length in a previous section, using as modern examples our stirring up the forces of the atom and the secrets of the DNA.
- According to the second, Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.
One of the results of Promethean hubris 
was control of Nature but therein also detachment from Nature. As I have been showing, our birth pain led us to the Promethean mistake of fire and meat. Both of these contribute to what I have called the thingification of humans, especially in 
modern/postmodern times. By that I mean our extraordinary pain coming into the world and then in general in life causes us to split off from the feelings in our bodies. We objectify all of Nature: We remove all its feeling and spiritual components and leave Things as the only reality, including ourselves and other humans. We “thingify” our babies; and as adults we embrace thingification (repression, detachment, estrangement, suppression, alienation) as a way of defending against this pain.
- According to the third, his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years, forgotten by the gods, the eagles, forgotten by himself.
This separation from the pain creates the personal unconscious. But as a species, we have created a collective unconscious—what I have called the Unapproved and Hidden of all cultures. And as I have said, the truth became increasingly invisible over time…our real nature, what we did, and the true cost of our estrangement became ever more buried, obscure…eventually unknowable.
- According to the fourth, everyone grew weary of the meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily.
This refers to what happens when we face these uncomfortable truths and resolve them. Ultimately we leave behind these dramas when we have dealt with them so much they no longer have any charge for us… in other words, they become boring… we “weary.” The patterns are still there, but they contain no charge for us.
So the first legend asserts that we are damaged and pained as karmic retribution 
for our defiance of Nature. And in these last three legends we have the ways we have reacted to the Promethean wound within us: ”We become unfeeling, detached, rock-like. We become one with our defenses, thingified.
The second says that we repress this information and it becomes increasingly hidden (“forgotten”) as our species has “evolved,” but also individually, as we get older in life. This is generally what is done with the Promethean wound of birth pain. The third says that some of us face and deal with the wounds. Eventually they are gone beyond, truly gone beyond, as eventually all the charge on them disappears, they have no more control over us or pull on us, as we just naturally weary of them…they dissipate.
- There remains the inexplicable mass of rock. The legend tried to explain the inexplicable. As it came out of a substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable.[28]
Finally, inexplicable substratum of truth is a pretty damn good description of the Unapproved and Hidden … also known as the Collective Unconscious… But in my rendering of it—dealing with our species unconscious, not just personal, “racial,” societal, or cultural—it contains much more than Jung imagined and because of that reverses many of the interpretations and meanings arising from it from what the Jungians, Joseph Campbell, or Freud understood.
Finally – Futility… The Gods Are Laughing at Us
One final message can be taken from these ancient minings of unconscious Truth which is also a commentary on our current mainstream reactions to the dire developments which are now reaching an apocalyptic peak:
Icarus Flapping – LOL
In the Icarus myth, “Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realized that he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his bare arms.” I don’t 
think there is a better image for the way we look in our actions in the face of apocalypse. The gods, 
aliens, Titans, angels, and the planetmates must be laughing their asses off at the sight of 
humans continued “flapping” about with ever more technology, pushing ever forward into the face of doom and apocalypse—the sun, the fire for Icarus—even as the Earth below us continues to fail, disintegrate, get polluted and poisoned, and no longer support our continued hubris.
We’re Falling and We Can’t Get Up
Oh, yes, we’ve started the Icarus fall…our wings of technology are “melting”
—literally in the case of Fukushima—but ever faster we “flap”—seeking to build more nuclear plants, hiding from the populace the extinction level events that are happening RIGHT NOW at Fukushima, seeking to drill ever more even with the BP spill clear as can be in the rear view mirror, 
lining the Koch Brothers pockets in touting the benefits of coal as an energy source, melting the rocks around natural gas so that our tap water catches fire and poisons folks who drink it, and so much more. So, yes, even more furiously we flap, the harder for every increase in our fall.
We furiously pick up litter as our organs rot from radiation poisoning. Oh, yes, we’ll die. But where we fall it will be tidy. We register voters and sign petitions as our organs rot from radiation poisoning. Oh, yes, we’ll die. But we’ll all be able to vote. [Footnote 1]
View From the Edge
We’ve had a long journey through the world of ancient myths and prehistory in delving into the way our prenatal state of 
oxygen insufficiency has pushed us to make fire and polluted environments attractive to us. We’ve seen how these early pushes have set us apart from all other species and placed us on an inexorable slide—which we in good time embraced and claimed as a goal and achievement even—to the edge of an apocalyptic abyss.
Next we look at how this unconscious state of an Oliver Twist style of oxygen deprivation affects us politically and socially…no matter any conscious or moral rearranging of “furniture” on the decks of our individual Titanics.
Continue with Prenatal Hunger Games and “Blood Wars”: The Fetal Fight About “Pure Blood” We Act Out in Politics, War, and Oppression … Class War, Culture War, Revolution….
Return to Will “Progress of Man” Be Humanity’s Epitaph? Apocalyptic Foretellings Hidden in Myth and a Re-Visioning of “Civilization” in Light of Impending Ecocide
Footnote
1. Every time I look at this, It looks worse than I thought. This one makes me think there’s no way any of us will survive this. And if we do, then our children won’t. It’s that bad. And what pisses me off is that progressives want to poo-poo this.
Continue with Prenatal Hunger Games and “Blood Wars”: The Fetal Fight About “Pure Blood” We Act Out in Politics, War, and Oppression … Class War, Culture War, Revolution….
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Sure It’s Hard! But Always Are We Here Helping You,” Part Two: A Cosmic Slap. We Were Once Noble Humans and Now Is Time for Our Regeneration, They Said
A Cosmic Slap: I Was Told “Once There Lived “Noble” Beings” and Now Is the Time for a Regeneration of Peoples to Regain What We Lost.
Summary of “Sure It’s Hard But Always Are We Here Helping You”: 
This details the spiritual experience I had in 1980 which set me on this path to help the planet and the planetmates. I was shown by certain entities the path of our devolution as a species, thousands of years ago, and was told that we need to turn this around immediately. 
I was told that there were many others at work right now doing the same thing, so I need never despair, at the immensity of the task. 
Most importantly, I was told that we are receiving help… always…in our efforts. I was led to believe that these higher powers, of which we are yet to know, are fully engaged in our endeavor on this planet and assisting us at every turn.
What most of us have discovered is that the path to bliss leads sometimes through despair and hopelessness. As Hesse (1965) described it in Demian: the bird, in pecking his way out of his shell, must destroy a world before discovering a new one. No, it is not often pleasant to confront some of the darkest things within ourselves, as we must do if we are not to continually project them onto others and onto the world around us.
A Cosmic Slap on the Back
At any rate, in the course of my own struggling to change, in primal therapy, I was at a particular place in 1980 where I was very much in despair at the immensity of the task of changing the programming that was dragging me down — that was keeping me from being the full human being that I could see lying there in potential.
It was therefore an encouragement to me when I had the experience that follows — like receiving a cosmic slap on the back, a gift from the Universe, and it helped me through that time. But I am convinced this experience has relevance also for all who are working hard at growing beyond their limited selves. I feel it might especially be of use to someone in a similarly hopeless-seeming place.
For these reasons I wish to share this experience. You can do with it whatever you like.
Before relating what happened, I want to say that although some might be tempted to call this experience a fantasy or a dream, it certainly did not feel that way to me at the time. 
I can not doubt that an unusual thing happened to me, which was unlike anything else that I’d experienced prior to it or since. It was related to certain experiences I was having in my primaling but was very different from “having feelings.” I was not under the influence of any drugs, nor had I been previous to the incident. I had one beer that night.
One other note: I will also leave the determination of who the “she” and the “we” were in the experience to the interpretation of the reader. I certainly don’t know for sure who she and they were, though I have my ideas — all of them highly positive. Also, the following, except for some minor editing, is exactly the way I wrote it the morning following the experience.
Journal Entry of June 28, 1980:
I was lying in bed last night with Maddie. Couldn’t sleep, air conditioner too loud. Suddenly I was aware of all this energy coursing through my body. Was really scaring me. 
My body zinging, intense ringing (buzzing?) in my ears, rushes flowing through me. Was scared I was going crazy, would hurt Maddie, would become possessed or something, etc. Tried focusing on my third eye so as to control it like I did in Portland.
That may have helped some, but I could sense, and was scared of, other “presences” in the room. I thought I heard a woman’s voice behind me over my left shoulder and that scared me. Without realizing the transition, I found myself projected into this panorama of history and a woman’s voice was narrating.
She described how once there had lived “noble” beings. I could see vast and colorful panoramas of peoples exuding “nobility” and “integrity” (for 
want of better words to describe what they were like). They walked and paraded before me and were all around me.
Then the woman explained that the peoples degenerated and, as if in demonstration, I began seeing battles and wars played out before my eyes. I was in the midst of them!
However, I was still aware that I was in my body lying on my bed, because I could feel myself against it. 
Even so I was afraid that I would begin taking on the bodies of participants in the battles and would feel pain like they were obviously feeling. This feeling was especially strong when I was in the midst of the convergence of two groups of warring parties (their garb reminded me of Israelites or people of Biblical times or something). The group I was facing were going at each other with hatchets and I was afraid of becoming a participant and possibly feeling an ax chunking into my neck or skull. But although it was happening all around me, nobody in the crowd noticed me; it was as if I wasn’t there. In fact at one point I believe they actually may have passed through me!
This scene passed, along with other dramas, and it was explained to me that now it was time for a regeneration of peoples on this “plane[?]” to regain their former “nobility[?],” “integrity[?]” (again for lack of better words).
Still feeling that I was conscious, i.e., knowing that it was all happening to 
me while I was really lying in bed; I let myself walk through many landscapes and 
terrains, which I felt I could easily have lived in at one 
time and which I felt had all existed at some time or place or did now exist somewhere in the world or 
Universe. I walked through small shack towns. I remember a 
small group of bedraggled people huddled together in one. There were many kinds of pastoral settings also: some beautiful with rolling, lush hills, and some not 
as beautiful — rocky terrain, etc. All seemed to be viable habitats for different people. I had the thought that these may have been places/lives that I had lived in at one time…. [For the full text of the journal entry see Footnote 1]
Don’t Despair, There Are Others Doing It With You, and We’re Here, Too
I feel like the meaning of the part about the regeneration of the peoples on this plane was an answer to my despair at working on getting through my feelings. It’s like it was 
saying: 
“Sure it’s hard! What you’re talking about is the reversal of hundreds of generations of degenerate and violent habit, custom, and activity. But we’re talking about changing that also, and you’re not the only one working at it. There are many others in your time period struggling to do it just like you.”
And the feeling that left me with was/is “So don’t despair. There are others like you doing it, and we’re (out here) helping you too.”
Continue with The Sins of the Fathers: I have This Sense of Brother/ Sisterhood — That We Are Engaged in an Immense Undertaking … Necessary for the Survival of This Planet.
Return to For Earth’s Sake, Get Real Already: “Sure It’s Hard! But Always Are We Here Helping You,” Part One
Footnote
1. Journal Entry Complete. Just as it was written over thirty years ago. For those interested in hearing the entire experience:
Journal Entry of June 28, 1980:
I was lying in bed last night with Maddie. Couldn’t sleep, air conditioner too loud. Suddenly I was aware of all this energy coursing through my body. Was really scaring me. My body zinging, intense ringing (buzzing?) in my ears, rushes flowing through me. Was scared I was going crazy, would hurt Maddie, would become possessed or something, etc. Tried focusing on my third eye so as to control it like I did in Portland.
That may have helped some, but I could sense, and was scared of, other “presences” in the room. I thought I heard a woman’s voice behind me over my left shoulder and that scared me. Without realizing the transition, I found myself projected into this panorama of history and a woman’s voice was narrating.
She described how once there had lived “noble” beings. I could see vast and colorful panoramas of peoples exuding “nobility” and “integrity” (for want of better words to describe what they were like). They walked and paraded before me and were all around me. Then the woman explained that the peoples degenerated and, as if in demonstration, I began seeing battles and wars played out before my eyes. I was in the midst of them!
However, I was still aware that I was in my body lying on my bed, because I could feel myself against it. Even so I was afraid that I would begin taking on the bodies of participants in the battles and would feel pain like they were obviously feeling. This feeling was especially strong when I was in the midst of the convergence of two groups of warring parties (their garb reminded me of Israelites or people of Biblical times or something). The group I was facing were going at each other with hatchets and I was afraid of becoming a participant and possibly feeling an ax chunking into my neck or skull. But although it was happening all around me, nobody in the crowd noticed me; it was as if I wasn’t there. In fact at one point I believe they actually may have passed through me!
This scene passed, along with other dramas, and it was explained to me that now it was time for a regeneration of peoples on this “plane[?]” to regain their former “nobility[?],” “integrity[?]” (again for lack of better words).
Still feeling that I was conscious, i.e., knowing that it was all happening to me while I was really lying in bed; I let myself walk through many landscapes and terrains, which I felt I could easily have lived in at one time and which I felt had all existed at some time or place or did now exist somewhere in the world or Universe. I walked through small shack towns. I remember a small group of bedraggled people huddled together in one. There were many kinds of pastoral settings also: some beautiful with rolling, lush hills, and some not as beautiful — rocky terrain, etc. All seemed to be viable habitats for different people. I had the thought that these may have been places/lives that I had lived in at one time.
Certain places brought up bad feelings in me, foreboding, scared feelings. In fact it can be said that the whole time it was happening I was scared about the experience. I feared meeting some dangerous and evil entity or being stuck in an undesirable place. When I was in one particular environ/habitat that wasn’t very pleasant, I remembered something that Seth had said about consciously altering and changing his environment. In line with that I decided to stop believing in the one that I was in and see what happened.
What happened was that environment went away and then there was a blank grayness as I waited for a new scene to appear. I continued to be aware that I was in a trancelike state and that I had a body lying in bed. I would at times vaguely return to the feeling in my body and would feel myself on my back, hands and arms outstretched, mattress against my back, in a very deep state of relaxation and suspended animation which had a feeling of heaviness or deadness about it. My body didn’t need to move and it was perfectly comfortable.
I could hear the air conditioner running, also, and even Maddie’s breathing next to me. Several times, I don’t remember exactly when, Maddie had reached over and put her arm around me, both times only for an instant, before she rolled back away from me. Neither of the times did it disturb the deep state that I was in or cause me to rise at all out of it. I simply felt warm and good towards her at the affection she was showing me. I even had the thought that, considering the fact that she only did it for a moment before turning away, that somehow she knew what was going on, in some deeper, nonconscious part of herself, and was reassuring or encouraging me.
Anyway, I was securely very deep and felt that I wasn’t going to be suddenly disturbed from it unless, perhaps, I let it. But I really didn’t want to do that. I was rather scared and apprehensive most of the time, as mentioned, but, more importantly, it was all so damned interesting! There is no doubt that I was thoroughly enjoying the color, the panorama, the expanse and freedom of consciousness, the fact that I was experiencing something important and that I had never experienced before, so that I dearly wanted to stay there despite the fear.
Sometime after the gray place, I believe it was, I was aware of some kind of light far off in the distance that I could travel to if I liked. At around that time I could hear Maddie saying to somebody (about my body in bed): “Is he moving at all? Is he breathing? Do you think he’s dead?” and so on. I remember thinking to myself how silly that sounded and that “No, I’m not dead, I’m just in this deep trance and everything.” But then suddenly I began to wonder if maybe I was dead! It had all been so strange that maybe I had actually died in my sleep!
At that point I recalled the accounts I’d heard and read about of people dying and not knowing they were dead, how they would often hang around and watch other people’s reaction to their death (and this could go on for days). I remembered how Steve had once told me something to the extent that if that should happen that one shouldn’t get carried away and fascinated by the after-death state but that one should “get down on one’s knees” (figuratively speaking) and search out the source and the presence of God. Thinking that was perhaps when I actually looked around and saw the light.
At any rate, I found myself wondering if I wanted to be dead. This place was certainly an interesting one, even with the apprehensions. And it sure seemed to be a change (so far, anyway) from the constant struggling to survive and grow. But I also felt that there were just so many loose ends left unresolved in my life. There were so many areas that I’d made good progress in but had not yet taken to completion. My love for Maddie (next to me), which was only just beginning, came to my mind as an example.
And so I decided to find out if I was dead or not, both to know if I should go heading for the light (if I was) or to reassure Maddie (if I wasn’t). I determined to get into my body and, with an effort and strain, I forced myself up from the depths, forcing my body to move and sit up. I was mildly surprised to find that I was able to do this, bringing myself into physicality and into a half-sitting position. In this position I looked over to see Maddie sleeping next to me, I could hear the air conditioner whining, and so forth. I realized then that she hadn’t “physically” been sitting over me, talking about me, but I also felt that some part of her must have. (We used to have this thing when we slept together that often we would feel like we had been communicating with each other on some kind of subconscious level the whole night long. We wouldn’t ever remember all that we had said but we would often both remark about it the next morning).
Realizing that I wasn’t dead, I lay back down and let myself drift back into the deepness. All I remember, after this point, is talking to Maddie, probably about what had happened to me, explaining it to her, though I’m not sure that was all of it. Also I remember at least one other time, maybe two, forcing myself to waking consciousness to see if Maddie was awake (as if in an experiment), because it really seemed that we were actually, physically awake and talking to each other. I thought we were lying in bed physically talking. It was hard to believe it when I forced myself awake only to find her lying beside me asleep.
After that there were some actual dreams, quite different from what had been going on earlier. I fell into sleeping and dreamed of being in my Grandmother’s home. I remember reading a book, sitting in a chair in her kitchen. There were other people there also; they were sitting in the same kind of straight-backed, none-too-comfortable wooden chairs.
I remember that early on, when I was doing all the traveling and stuff, that I didn’t know how I’d possibly remember all the experiences that happened to me and all the things that I saw and learned. It seemed like a lot of time was crammed into that short period. I remembered hoping just that I would retain as much of it as I could, especially hoping that I wouldn’t just blot it all out as it felt important.
I feel like the meaning of the part about the regeneration of the peoples on this plane was an answer to my despair at working on getting through my feelings. It’s like it was saying: “Sure it’s hard! What you’re talking about is the reversal of hundreds of generations of degenerate and violent habit, custom, and activity. But we’re talking about changing that also, and you’re not the only one working at it. There are many others in your time period struggling to do it just like you.”
And the feeling that left me with was/is “So don’t despair. There are others like you doing it, and we’re (out here) helping you too.“
Continue with The Sins of the Fathers: I have This Sense of Brother/ Sisterhood — That We Are Engaged in an Immense Undertaking … Necessary for the Survival of This Planet.
Return to For Earth’s Sake, Get Real Already: “Sure It’s Hard! But Always Are We Here Helping You,” Part One
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Religions Are About Control; Spirituality, Surrender. Let Go, Let God to Correct an Arrogant Modern Ego
Yes, Tina Turner, We Do Need Another Hero … a Different Kind. Dreaming Out Loud, Part 2: The Path to Heaven Leads Through Hell
The Path to Heaven Leads Through Hell
Those in the know about the pervasive pre- and perinatal influence on personality and behavior, and especially those of us actively engaged in working through the effects of such early traumas, are fully aware, like Dante, that the path to heaven leads through hell. We have found that the path to the transpersonal light leads through the psychodynamic and perinatal darkness, that the path up and the path down are parts of the same path outward. [Footnote 2]
A Dark and Hideous Shadow World
Our experience has been that the information avalanche and multicultural onslaught have eroded our personal boundaries to an influx, not only of transpersonal bliss-love-compassion, but equally—and very often, initially—to a dark and hideous shadow world, a backwards bizarro world, of pernicious and insidious disorganized feelings comprised of elements ancient, infantile, pathological, biological, scatological, and perinatal. These are some of the forms spiritual emergence can take, especially initially. And they are the ones most likely to be seen as spiritual emergencies.
Pre- and Perinatal Themes in Cinema
Therefore, it is interesting to see these views confirmed by the bubbling up of psychodynamic and perinatal themes in our collective consciousness as evidenced by current films, books, and music. I have mentioned the pre- and perinatal themes and symbolism in films and explained why, along with other elements of postmodern times, they are evidence of something significant occurring in the consciousness of our age—an emerging perinatal unconscious.
But there is another element evolving in current films which has to do with a changing or evolving collective attitude toward these perinatal elements. And along with a changing attitude, there is evidence pointing to an evolving collective response to it.
Control vs. Surrender, Death vs. Life
“Control Spiritualities” and Patriarchal Cultures
Specifically, a different kind of heroic response, which characterizes the perinatal arena, can be said to characterize the postmodern movies replete with perinatal symbolism. Most striking of all, this different kind of heroic response corresponds to a different kind of spirituality than what is commonly portrayed in this society, or at least has been the norm up until now.
For basically there are “control” spiritualities and “surrender” spiritualities, with rarely the twain meeting. “Control spiritualities” are adapted to patriarchal cultures and involve the use of the ego to “control” and be in charge of even the realms of the supernatural. This is so because an ultimate evil—a devil or Satan—is postulated, which is given equal weight along with God in determining one’s ultimate fate. This type of spirituality is normally what is called religion.
“Surrender Spiritualities” and God As Being Good
But there is another brand of spirituality that is based on a belief in the ultimate goodness and rightness of All That Is. God’s goodness being essentially the dominant force in the Universe, herein it is considered safe to “surrender” in one’s relation to Reality, to expect that one will be guided correctly, in fact perfectly, in the act of letting go. Thus letting go is not to be feared—as in the control spirituality—but is to be practiced and fostered. In this perspective, which we might call surrender spirituality, control is seen as the problem, not the solution.
“Control” and “Surrender” Psychotherapies
Of course these two approaches to spirituality represent two approaches to psychotherapy as well. 
The control attitude is the dominant mode of psychoanalytically-based approaches—those in which the “demon” of the id is postulated.
The attitude of “letting go” and “surrender,” on the other hand, is the dominant mode of the experiential psychotherapies, which are themselves rooted in the tradition of humanistic psychology with its belief in the ultimate goodness of the human organism and which thus allows a faith in the ultimate rightness of human processes.
“Hero’s Journey” As “Control” Psychotherapy
Since the control attitude, in any of its manifestations, requires the postulation of an ultimate evil against which one must remain vigilant and must fight, the common “hero’s journey” myth—with its typical fighting and slaying of supposedly evil parts of the personality and reality symbolized as dragons and other monsters—is a prevalent focal myth to this attitude. Corresponding to this myth are the emphasis on disciplines and practices seeking to develop the ego and the will…over against the dangers that are postulated to exist in the Universe requiring these disciplines and, so-called, ego developments.
A Different Heroic Response in “Surrender” Paths
Since the “feeling” therapies and the other spiritual and experiential psychotherapeutic modalities with which they are allied are so different in attitude to the traditional “control” attitude, should there not be corresponding differences in myths to exemplify them? Indeed, there are.
In history, the surrender spiritualities have had correspondences in myth in which the dragon is not 
fought, conquered, and slain, but rather is either tamed and becomes one’s ally or pet—Saint Margaret is the prime example in the West, but this is a depiction prevalent in the East—or else one is swallowed by the “dragon” or monster and, after a while, is reborn.
Jonah is the prime example in the West for this latter depiction. But again this reaction to the fearful dissociated aspects of the personality, or the Shadow, is not a common one in the Western patriarchy, and it is much more common in traditional cultures and in the East.
A Shift to “Surrender” As a Corrective to a Western Overweening Ego?
All of this may be changing in recent times in the West, as once again the humanistic attitude and the new spiritual perspectives, as well as the experiential psychotherapies such as primal therapy, make us increasingly aware of the ultimate beneficence of the body, and of the Universe beyond even that, and of the importance of surrender and letting go as a corrective to the overweening control and defensiveness of the diminutive Western ego.
Footnote
2. See, for example, Michael Adzema, “A Primal Perspective on Spirituality,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 25(3), 83-116. Reprinted online at the Primal Spirit site at “A Primal Perspective on Spirituality.”
Continue with The Necessary Hero and Descent Into the Underground–When There’s “Nothing But Trouble,” You Know You’re in The Perinatal Below
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Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Sixteen: View From the Heavens and Prometheus Redux … Icarus Is Flapping and the Gods Are Laughing as We Build Nukes and Drill Holes
How We Look to the Gods and Prometheus Redux … Building More Nukes and Drilling More Holes – Icarus Keeps Flapping and the Gods Can’t Stop Laughing: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 16
Prometheus Redux
Before leaving Prometheus for good, let us consider some other interesting aspects of its rendering that provide insight into this book’s exploration of the deepest psychological—perinatal—roots of our apocalypse now:
There are four legends of the Prometheus myth—all of them are reflected, coincidentally, in themes in this and its related books, Culture War, Class War and The Great Reveal. They are
- According to the first, he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed.
“Betraying the secrets of gods to men” includes the biggest divine prerogative—dominion over death. Also, this implies that humans were given the forbidden knowledge which humans are incapable of controlling, which I dealt with at length in a previous section, using as modern examples our stirring up the forces of the atom and the secrets of the DNA.
- According to the second, Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.
One of the results of Promethean hubris was control of Nature but therein also detachment from Nature. As I have been showing, our birth pain led us to the Promethean mistake of fire and meat. Both of these contribute to what I have called the thingification of humans, especially in modern/postmodern times. By that I mean our extraordinary pain coming into the world and then in general in life causes us to split off from the feelings in our bodies. We objectify all of Nature: We remove all its feeling and spiritual components and leave Things as the only reality, including ourselves and other humans. We “thingify” our babies; and as adults we embrace thingification (repression, detachment, estrangement, suppression, alienation) as a way of defending against this pain.
- According to the third, his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years, forgotten by the gods, the eagles, forgotten by himself.
This separation from the pain creates the personal unconscious. But as a species, we have created a collective unconscious—what I have called the Unapproved and Hidden of all cultures. And as I have said, the truth became increasingly invisible over time…our real nature, what we did, and the true cost of our estrangement became ever more buried, obscure…eventually unknowable.
- According to the fourth, everyone grew weary of the meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily.
This refers to what happens when we face these uncomfortable truths and resolve them. Ultimately we leave behind these dramas when we have dealt with them so much they no longer have any charge for us… in other words, they become boring… we “weary.” The patterns are still there, but they contain no charge for us.
So the first legend asserts that we are damaged and pained as karmic retribution for our defiance of Nature. And in these last three legends we have the ways we have reacted to the Promethean wound within us: ”We become unfeeling, detached, rock-like. We become one with our defenses, thingified.
The second says that we repress this information and it becomes increasingly hidden (“forgotten”) as our species has “evolved,” but also individually, as we get older in life. This is generally what is done with the Promethean wound of birth pain. The third says that some of us face and deal with the wounds. Eventually they are gone beyond, truly gone beyond, as eventually all the charge on them disappears, they have no more control over us or pull on us, as we just naturally weary of them…they dissipate.
- There remains the inexplicable mass of rock. The legend tried to explain the inexplicable. As it came out of a substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable.[28]
Finally, inexplicable substratum of truth is a pretty damn good description of the Unapproved and Hidden … also known as the Collective Unconscious… But in my rendering of it—dealing with our species unconscious, not just personal, “racial,” societal, or cultural—it contains much more than Jung imagined and because of that reverses many of the interpretations and meanings arising from it from what the Jungians, Joseph Campbell, or Freud understood.
Finally – Futility… The Gods Are Laughing at Us
One final message can be taken from these ancient minings of unconscious Truth which is also a commentary on our current mainstream reactions to the dire developments which are now reaching an apocalyptic peak:
Icarus Flapping – LOL
In the Icarus myth, “Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realized that he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his bare arms.” I don’t think there is a better image for the way we look in our actions in the face of apocalypse. The gods, aliens, Titans, angels, and the planetmates must be laughing their asses off at the sight of humans continued “flapping” about with ever more technology, pushing ever forward into the face of doom and apocalypse—the sun, the fire for Icarus—even as the Earth below us continues to fail, disintegrate, get polluted and poisoned, and no longer support our continued hubris.
We’re Falling and We Can’t Get Up
Oh, yes, we’ve started the Icarus fall…our wings of technology are “melting”—literally in the case of Fukushima—but ever faster we “flap”—seeking to build more nuclear plants, hiding from the populace the extinction level events that are happening RIGHT NOW at Fukushima, seeking to drill ever more even with the BP spill clear as can be in the rear view mirror, lining the Koch Brothers pockets in touting the benefits of coal as an energy source, melting the rocks around natural gas so that our tap water catches fire and poisons folks who drink it, and so much more. So, yes, even more furiously we flap, the harder for every increase in our fall.
We furiously pick up litter as our organs rot from radiation poisoning. Oh, yes, we’ll die. But where we fall it will be tidy. We register voters and sign petitions as our organs rot from radiation poisoning. Oh, yes, we’ll die. But we’ll all be able to vote. [Footnote 1]
View From the Edge
We’ve had a long journey through the world of ancient myths and prehistory in delving into the way our prenatal state of oxygen insufficiency has pushed us to make fire and polluted environments attractive to us. We’ve seen how these early pushes have set us apart from all other species and placed us on an inexorable slide—which we in good time embraced and claimed as a goal and achievement even—to the edge of an apocalyptic abyss.
Next we look at how this unconscious state of an Oliver Twist style of oxygen deprivation affects us politically and socially…no matter any conscious or moral rearranging of “furniture” on the decks of our individual Titanics.
Continue with Hunger Games: Prenatal Oxygen Hunger and Its Political Imprints – Greed, Oppression, Sycophancy, Class War, Revolution: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 17
Return to Real Hope Lies in Pandora’s Jar and Return of the Centaur … Since the Last Time Was 1961, It’s None Too Soon: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 15
Footnote
1. Every time I look at this, It looks worse than I thought. This one makes me think there’s no way any of us will survive this. And if we do, then our children won’t. It’s that bad. And what pisses me off is that progressives want to poo-poo this.
Continue with Hunger Games: Prenatal Oxygen Hunger and Its Political Imprints – Greed, Oppression, Sycophancy, Class War, Revolution: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 17
Return to Real Hope Lies in Pandora’s Jar and Return of the Centaur … Since the Last Time Was 1961, It’s None Too Soon: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 15
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Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Fourteen: Blind Hope vs. Real Hope … Chiron Is Martyr for The Sins of the Fathers
Enter the Centaur: Wherein Lies Real Hope – Sixties and Millennial Generations Are Shamans for Deluded Promethean “Fathers”: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 14
Prometheus Brought Us Blind Hopes
Another aspect of this is that Prometheus is said to have “caused blind hopes to live in the hearts of men.” Indeed, we are also now seeing how blind was our reliance on technology and the vaunted but vain “rational mind”—which has now been seen to be a rationalizing mind.
For we realize this self-congratulatory thinking has been keeping out uncomfortable truths and building illusory, manic Atman projects of escape from the consequences of our actions. None of which, we are now finding out, are capable of working.
Enter the Centaur: Real Hopes – Chiron
But to jump ahead. There is hope in the Prometheus myth as well. There is shown a way forward for humanity, which at this particular time in history appears to have been prophetic. For Prometheus is saved from his sufferings by the Centaur, Chiron. Chiron sacrifices himself—Christ-like—taking on Prometheus’s suffering and dying in his stead.
Return to The Centaur
Earthy, Sensual, Noble
The Centaur — half human, half animal — does not, like Icarus, paste on wings and try to separate from groundedness in the Earth. No. Centaur qualities are earthy, sensual, sexual. They embrace the noble qualities of the horse … reminding us that as primal beings, early humans, we were noble humans … as they say, a bit ethnocentrically, “noble savages.” We once stood, sure-footed and tall, and we walked confidently upon the Earth, knowing we belonged here.
Wounded Healers, Shamans, Gardeners of Consciousness, Poets … Brave and Foolhardy Journeyers Into the Unapproved and Hidden
Traditionally associated with intoxicants and with the bacchanalian, centaurs can see into other realities, nonordinary ones. They are open to altered states of consciousness. They are not averse to looking into their deeper natures, their “undersides,” their unconscious; that is how they came to be one with Nature in the first place.
Indeed, Chiron is also known as the wounded healer and is associated with the shamanic. Being, like Chiron, healers, centaurs are skilled in both physical and mental health. Thus they are wholistic and psychotherapeutical. They are philosophical. Plato was one. Walt Whitman was one. They are poetic.
Mystics, Scapegoats, Natural … A-mused and A-musing Not Deluded and A-mazed
They are scapegoated, like Chiron was, for the sins of society, and in modern times they have scornfully been referred to as “hippies” and “beatniks” — but they include the bohemian types of all times. Being rooted in a more fundamental nature or reality they are mystic. Jesus was one. Following a “different drummer,” as it were, they are the Wayseers.
Connected to the real source of truth in Nature and the Divine, they are in touch with their muse … and are both a-mused and a-musing…but they are not into the maze of culture, the matrix, they are not fooled or a-mazed.
The Centaur is completely in tune with her and his planetmate-nature, the Divine and Natural order—as in the Jungian and mystic understandings of individuation as being a re-uniting with a fundamental and earlier reality — returning home, humble and prodigal-son like.
The Opposite of Ordinary Folks…Who Build Stairways to Heaven and Towers to Their Vanity
This is the opposite of most folks who spend their lives seeking to vainly build stairways to heaven, Towers of Babel to the divine, to be muscular Nietzchian supermen, or to struggle up Wilberian ladder-style paths for imaginary achievements and to an understandably elusive “enlightenment.”
We Are the Centaurs, My Friends
This self-sacrificing tendency in humans I will be talking about at length at the end of this book where I point out how we need to stop acting out and begin taking back the projections we make onto the Unknown and thereby stop the Promethean cycles of suffering going on for millennia. We need to, like Chiron, take upon ourselves the “sins of the fathers.” As Tom Waits sang it, “I’m gonna take the sins of my father (mother, brother, sister), down to the pond…I’m gonna wash them.”
Exactly that. We must make the heroic sacrifice of taking inside ourselves those perennial urges to act out on others what was done to us. In environmental terms we must make the sacrifices of lowering our standard of living and cutting back on the lavish appetites and lazy indulgences fed by excessive technology, cultural trinkets, and superfluous commercialism, which other generations were allowed to take to the limits of their times. For if we do not, then there will be very little left for future generations—assuming there’ll be any.
These cultural “achievements” — wrought of burning of fossil fuels, release of fiery energy from the atom, and despoiling of natural resources — all of them in some way rooted in the theft of fire long ago, which started it all, must be let go of. We must refrain from being driven by these addictions and substitutes for actual felt experience, take the “fire” within instead of burning it up without. So in physical terms we must bring those excessive urges home within ourselves and ground them in Nature, bring them back into our physical bodies, we must be Centaurs. And within our bodies experience the discomfort of such a monumental millennial turnabout.
So, no. This is not easy or comfortable.
Continue with Real Hope Lies in Pandora’s Jar and Return of the Centaur … Since the Last Time Was 1961, It’s None Too Soon: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 15
Return to A Re-Visioning of “Civilization” in Light of Impending Apocalypse … Prometheus Made us “Civilized” … And Doomed: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 13
No. Not easy or comfortable.
Continue with Real Hope Lies in Pandora’s Jar and Return of the Centaur…Since the Last Time Was 1961, It’s None Too Soon: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 15
Return to A Re-Visioning of “Civilization” in Light of Impending Apocalypse … Prometheus Made us “Civilized” … And Doomed: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 13
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Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Nine: Reductions in Global Oxygen, While Calculated as Small, Are Already Taking a Toll in Deaths and Physical and Mental Suffering
People Are Already Dying Because of Oxygen Deprivation … Global Oxygen Loss Has Dire Significance Physically AND Psychologically: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 9
In the previous section I discussed the worldwide increases of carbon dioxide and the consequent decreases in global oxygen levels, and I pointed out how they mirror the fetus’s environment in the womb in late gestation, which is known as fetal malnutrition. At the end I made note of the facts that, first, people are actually dying as a result of dips in the oxygen content of their immediate environment, resulting from the intentional burning of fuels. Second, I said that even the minute changes in our global atmosphere on the whole are having 
pervasive and dire consequences. Third, I queried why we of all species are the only ones to engage in burning things outside our bodies so as to increase carbon dioxide and reduce oxygen in our environments. Let us look more closely at each of these statements in turn:
People Are Dying, Yes
People DO die for lack of oxygen and conversely carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide buildup in their cars, homes, and in cities…sometimes intentionally, most often not. If it is not the sole cause of death, it is a contributing factor, as in the widespread and mounting deaths from restricted oxygen intake caused in cities worldwide—especially noticeable on severely air-polluted days. We do not generally consider these deaths to be directly related to air pollution or reduced oxygen, for they are listed as caused by increased heart attacks and other fatal concomitants of bad air.
We also avoid the harsh truth by not wanting to look into how dips in air quality/ oxygen concentration affect our overall health in terms of greater rates of emphysema, allergies, and stresses to the heart—among effects too numerous to mention—which have effects on our longevity. Translation: Bad air kills folks sooner than they would die otherwise. So, people are dying, yes.
How Big a Deal Is a Minute Change in Atmospheric Oxygen
Now let us consider how important this tendency of ours is for us. How greatly does this reduction in oxygen affect us when the levels of overall effect are small enough to be usually considered insignificant?
The Greenhouse Effect Shows Us Small Changes in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Are No Small Matter
First, remember that when we consider the other half of this equation, the carbon dioxide levels, minute changes of their levels are having major changes on our planet. We exist in a delicate ecosystem, finely tuned to operate perfectly but only within very narrow parameters. You go outside those finely drawn lines and you have major complications and developments, with minor changes here having major consequences there.
In the Lab, Tiny Changes in Oxygen/ Carbon Dioxide Determine the Rise and Fall of Bacterial “Civilizations”
As an example, specifically as regards the oxygen—carbon-dioxide ratios, remember that we are composed of cells…cells that take in oxygen and give back carbon dioxide. Bacteria also are cells. Many of them do better with increases of carbon dioxide and die when there is more oxygen; these bacterial organisms suck up carbon dioxide and spit out oxygen. So we find that if we create a Petri dish colony of bacterial cells and carefully monitor its oxygen/carbon dioxide ratios, minute increases in carbon dioxide have major effects on the colony: 
It will explode in growth and quite soon overgrow its Petri dish environment. Meanwhile if the reverse situation is created and the oxygen level is raised, the millions of bacterial cells will die off in short order, as if infected with the plague to end all plagues.
We Are Losing Three Molecules of Oxygen for Each Increase of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
Now, remember that we are a collection of many cells as well. 
What do you suppose is happening with minute changes in the overall level of oxygen we get; or conversely the increased carbon dioxide? The book I mentioned by McCabe—O2xygen Therapies—goes into great detail explaining how we are seeing increases in cancer, viral 
and bacterial, and fungal infections — all of which do better in high carbon dioxide/ lowered oxygen levels. And we are noticing booming algae growth in areas of our oceans and are expecting flourishing vegetative growth on our lands because of the increases in carbon dioxide in each of them. Why would we not be experiencing effects on the other side of the equation—the loss of oxygen. Remember, as the Scripps Institute study discussed in the previous section detailed, for every increase of one molecule of CO2, we are getting a loss of almost three molecules of O2.
We’ve Already Lost a Fifth of the Amount of Atmospheric Oxygen Than Would Knock Us All Out
But I am adding the psychological effects of this oxygen loss to the already considerable statistically verifiable harm being registered to us physically. What decrease in oxygen stimulates prenatal memories of oxygen near-panic? 
Well, consider that a reduction of oxygen of only .5% is enough to cause unconsciousness and sometimes even kill a person—from 20% which is optimal down to 19.5% which is dire. So how much of a reduction is merely noticeable and uncomfortable? How much of a change means we will experience “stuffiness”…assuming we have a point of comparison…when there exists “outside” air that is different? It can’t be all that much, right? Not if a .5% reduction would darken our lights.
If ALL the Time You’re Getting Less Oxygen, How Would You Know? Wouldn’t You Think It Normal?
Ok, but there’s more to it. Now ask yourself how you consciously know you are experiencing stuffiness or suffocation when there is no basis of comparison. If you experience reduced oxygen every instant of your life, do you consciously know it? I think not. So “stuffiness” that is our ordinary situation does not register to us as being stuffy. It can’t. But that does not mean our bodies are not registering a change and that we are not unconsciously being stimulated into psychological states, like I have been mentioning. 
And would these psychological states then also, with no basis of comparison now either because of it being an ongoing situation, not themselves be thought of as “normal,” though they would be somewhat altered from the way humans may have felt on our planet in earlier centuries?
Fetal Oxygen Hunger Compels Creation of Our Oliver Twist Atmosphere…Where We’re Always Wanting “Some More”
So, environmentally — with oxygen starvation and air pollution — I submit we act out our unconscious memories of fetal suffocation by burning up fossil fuels, further reducing oxygen in the environment, destroying forests which release oxygen, moving to cities that have little in the way of trees or Nature, and allowing cities to bulldoze all Nature away and create suffocating sterility. 
We continually re-create the discomforts we have not faced. There is no escape from the things we have “put out of our mind.” That is the closest thing to hell that exists, though there is redemption in it.
Sure, we want oxygen, but we keep removing oxygen from our environment to put us back in that state in the womb when we needed air (oxygen) but didn’t get enough leaving us asking, “Please, mother, might I have some more”?
Continue with Sorry, Billy Joel, But We Did Start the Fire: Why Humans Are So Big on Burning…And Its Apocalyptic Prognosis For Us Today: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 10
Return to Oxygen Hunger, the Greenhouse Effect, and Fetal Malnutrition … The Latent Worldwide Oxygen Panic We Don’t Want to Notice: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 8
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The Great Reveal by SillyMickel & the PlanetMates 