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Birth, “Intelligence,” and Culture … Out of Eden, Part Three: Birth Pain Causes a Feverish Human Mind, Struggling Against Nature and the Divine, Which We Call “Intelligence”
Bipedalism Caused Painful Births, Which Caused Bigger Brains, Which Caused “Intelligence,” Which Caused Culture: Birth Trauma Makes Us Humans … and Mistrustful of Everything
The more civilized the people, the more the pain of labor appears to become intensified. – Grantly Dick-Read, M.D. Childbirth Without Fear.
Giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head. – Unknown
To the woman He said, “I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children; Yet your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you.” – Genesis 3:16
Basic Trust, Basic Mistrust, and Birth
As I have said the worldview of our hominid and hunter-gatherer existences was trusting of Nature. The world is felt to be good, not antagonistic, so dependence on it is not seen as a problem and makes life overall easier than what we know beginning with the agrarian revolution and the rise of “civilization.” Our primal forebears had a “basic trust” in regards to Nature.
But the agrarian revolution and all “advances” after that imply a “basic mistrust.” What happened to make us more fearful, more anxious about our human condition?
These differences of basic trust versus basic mistrust are fascinating considering their possible relation to birth trauma.
Our Experience of Birth Determines Ever Afterward Our View of the World
Erik Erikson proposes that the earliest relation of the infant with the mother sets the foundation of the later attitude toward the world. A caring, sensitive, and responsive environmental and caretaker response, in particular, the mother’s, can be the basis for an attitude of basic trust toward the world … a fundamental faith in its goodness. While a harsh and insensitive early experience — wherein the child begins to feel it cannot get its needs met — becomes the basis for a feeling of unshakeable mistrust toward the world.
However, with our understanding of the influence of our first experiences of the world — that is, postnatally, usually in a delivery room and hospital nursery — on our basic attitudes toward it, we realize that these fundamental orientations are formed much earlier. Importantly, birth is a huge influence on that primary stance of trust or mistrust. First impressions are hard to overcome, as they say. Sure enough, if the first encounter with the world outside the womb … immediately after birth … is painful, and characterized by harshness, insensitivity, and unresponsiveness to one’s needs, then the infant comes to view the world mistrustfully and feels it to be a hostile place. [See Leboyer, Birth Without Violence, 1975].
What also of the pain of birth itself in setting up an attitude of trust toward the world or mistrust of it? The cold, hard fact is that our experience of our birth — that is, the amount of pain and discomfort we experience in the process of delivery as well as those first crucial moments and hours of our “introductory” experience of the world outside the womb — determine ever afterward in our lives the degree of positivity or negativity with which we will view the world and other people. [See, also, Janov, Imprints: The Lifelong Effects of the Birth Experience , 1984]
And this is where it gets interesting in seeing how we became humans and different from all other species.
Skull Size, Pelvic Size, and Birth Pain
In this regard, it is interesting to note biological anthropologist Jim Moore’s (1987) comments in a talk given at the University of California, San Diego, concerning pelvic size, birth, and secondary altriciality. Jim Moore pointed out that the paleontological evidence from the bone records of our hominid line show several fascinating developments occurring simultaneously and over the course of millions of years. We are going back as long as six to seven millions here. One is an increase in skull size. Another is a decrease in the size of pelvic bones, which occurs alongside and is a consequence of our gradual evolution to bipedalism from being, like our primate relatives, quadrupeds. [Footnote 1]
Most folks know about the increase of skull size that occurred over the course of our evolution. However, what is only rarely considered is what effect this increase has on the process of birth. Nor has this been laid alongside the other factor of reduced pelvic size. But doing so leads to some fascinating conclusions.
To begin, it is reasonable to suppose that this increased skull, and brain, size in hominids contributed greatly to birth pain, for both mother and infant. This is so for the obvious reason that the size of the head is the determining factor in the size of the vaginal opening required for delivery. That is, because skull bone is mostly unyielding when pressured from outside, its diameter must be less than or equal to the maximum diameter of the vaginal opening through which it must pass at birth. If the skull is too big for the opening, the child simply cannot get out. And the factor that most determines the maximum diameter of the vaginal opening is the configuration of the bones, especially pelvic bones, that are involved.
Keep in mind that this kind of birth pain would not have occurred when the skull was smaller. A smaller head would pass, in general, with considerably more ease for infant and mother. In support of this we note that this is exactly the case for all our primate relatives, all of whom have proportionately smaller skulls. Note they also have larger, wider pelvises, proportionally, than us, and thus pelvic openings at birth time. Correspondingly, they do show observably much less difficulty and pain in birth, for both mother and newborn. So, along with this trend to increasing skull size in humans and reduced pelvic size we can surmise a corresponding trend to increasing birth pain, birth difficulties, and, consequently, increasing birth trauma for hominid newborns. [See Footnote 2]
The Vicious Cycle of Skull Size and Birth Pain
Brain Size and Primal Pain: Brain Size Related to Degree of Unconscious Pain Needing to Be Repressed
About this factor of birth trauma, keep in mind that it is demonstrated neurophysiologically (Janov, 1971) that much of the increased brain size in humans is tied up with processing unconscious pain. That is to say, that we require the expanded capabilities inherent in neocortical expansion and larger brains to keep traumatic experiences repressed. A bigger brain is needed to keep our primal pain from overwhelming us.
Bipedalism –> Narrower Pelvic Opening –> Birth Pain –> Increased Brain Size –> Increased Skull Size –> Birth Pain
What I am saying is that increased brain size and painful birth become, then, phylogenetically linked in a vicious cycle — one producing the other. Said another way, over the course of millions of years skull size and birth pain increased each other: Greater pain in birth requires, later on, greater repression of pain in order to survive, which leads to the development of greater neocortical capacities for processing and keeping that pain repressed. This leads to actual physical neocortical expansion, which results in greater skull size. Then, that bigger head causes greater pain in childbirth for both mother and infant. This increased birth pain causes greater birth trauma in neonates. And finally, this birth trauma leads to greater repression of pain, then, to expanded brain size, then, increased birth pain, birth trauma, a need for more repression … round and round and round again. And this goes on imperceptibly over an extremely long time in the course of our evolution.
But keep in mind, also, that this is a chicken-and-the-egg correlation. There is no way of knowing what came first. Whether changes in skull size and expanded neocortical capacity (as for example, in the development of tool use), or greater repression of feelings and pain (possible as a consequence of increased social behavior, requiring increased repression/ control of individual behaviors), or increased birth trauma (either on its own, for some unknown reason, or more likely because of skeletal changes occurring through increasing bipedal locomotion and upright posture) came first is irrelevant. These are mutually arising causative factors. It is enough that we notice their interrelationship.
Birth Pain Makes Us Humans
Birth Pain Caused the Feverish Minds of Humans, Which We Call Intelligence
To continue, remember that what is universally acknowledged to distinguish humans from other species is our intelligence and the elaboration of culture that comes from that. But with the understanding of skull size, birth, and repression described above, we see these much-touted distinctions and claims to superiority to be merely the byproduct of our neocortical attempts to deal with unconscious pain, specifically, that of birth trauma.
Birth pain caused the feverish minds of humans, which we call our intelligence. “We ain’t born typical,” as The Kills phrased it. And those spinning excess wheels of mental fibrillation, driven by human birth trauma, are the gears in the machine of our manic material culture.
Continue with Why We Can’t Get No Satisfaction and What It Has to Do With Being Born Helpless: Out of Eden, Part Four — Secondary Altriciality and the Origins of Culture
Return to We Once Had the Run of the Forest and the “Original Affluent Society”: Early Human Savagery Is a Patriarchal Myth Rationalizing Our Descent Into Civilization
Footnotes
1. On bipedalism and pelvic bone changes, at “Wanna Be an Anthropologist“:
Bipedal Adaptations in the Hominid Pelvis
INTRODUCTION
Two major features are unique to humans among all the living primates: A very large brain, and moving about upright on two legs exclusively. One of these, bipedalism, appeared long before the other. Many anatomical features of Australopithecus afarensis anatomy demonstrate habitual bipedal locomotion, and the 3.6 million-year-old footprints discovered by Paul Abell at Laetoli in 1978 confirm it unequivocally (White, 1980). Not until the appearance of Homo erectus, some 1.7 million years later, could hominids be considered on their way to being large-brained (Stanford, et al., 2006).
While certain adaptations seen in the knee (e.g. the valgus angle), in the foot (such as a fully adducted hallux), and to a lesser extent in the cranium (a fully inferior foramen magnum) are all strong indicators for bipedalism (Lewin and Foley, 2004), the most interesting evolutionary changes necessary for upright posture occurred in the hominid pelvis. All of these adaptations are present not only in the pelves of modern humans, but also in all members of the Genus Homo, and in the earliest known hominids, the Australopithecines.
PELVIC ADAPTATIONS FOR BIPEDALISM
The hominid pelvis displays many unique features (when compared to that of quadrupedal primates) that support bipedalism. The major adaptations are seen in the sacrum and the ilia, as well as in the overall configuration and orientation of the pelvic bones….
2. On brain size and secondary altriciality in humans at Human Development:
Human babies enter the birth canal from the womb in the same way a chimp does but just before the actual birth the skull rotates 90 degrees in order to exit the rounded birth canal that humans have evolved. In Homo Sapiens, evolution reached a compromise that favored even bigger brains at a further cost to birthing and efficient walking. The Homo Erectus pelvis was very narrow. Humans are unique among mammals in the extent to which the brain keeps growing well after birth. The scientific terms for this is secondary altriciality. It involves accelerating the birthing process and arresting the development until after birth. Monkeys and apes are born with brains half as heavy as they will ever be. A chimpanzee brain, for example, will weigh perhaps 7 ounces at birth and about 14 ounces as an adult. Human brains are about a third of their final size in newborns; they more than double in size in the first year after birth. On average, human babies are born with a brain that weighs 14 ounces but reaches 35 ounces in one year. It will continue to grow until it reaches about 45 ounces in size (at age 6 or 7).
Gestation in humans should be about 21 months rather than the normal 9 we think in terms of. This is the process of accelerating the birthing process to enable the enlarged brain to escape the birth canal. Development of the brain then continues external to the womb for well over the first several years. What this intense development means is that a human infant is born relatively helpless. A baby can neither stand up or in any way fend for itself for a long time. Stephen Jay Gould has written our sexual maturation comes almost absurdly late in a Darwinian world supposedly regulated by a constant struggle to secure reproductive success and pass more genes along to future generations….slower development must provide some power advantage to evolve, in the face of its obvious drawbacks. In fact, must of what makes us human in the end may stem from this unnaturally long period of helplessness in the very early part of our lives.
http://web.mesacc.edu/dept/d10/asb/origins/development.html
3. On prolonged postnatal brain growth at Unique to Humans –
This is one of the most dramatic distinction between humans and other mammals (including primates). In all precocial mammals other than humans, at around the time of birth there is distinct slowing down in brain growth relative to body growth. In altricial mammals, the switch to diminished brain growth occurs at a developmental stage comparable to birth in precocial mammals. In humans, substantial brain growth relative to body growth continues for approximately a year after birth before a marked slow-down occurs. Because of this human neonates are unusually dependent on parental care in comparison with other primates for the first year of postnatal life, and sometimes labeled as “secondary altricial”.
Martin RD. The evolution of human reproduction: a primatological perspective. Am J Phys Anthropol. 2007;Suppl 45:59-84.
And on postnatal brain growth at The Rise of Homo sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altricial
Continue with Why We Can’t Get No Satisfaction and What It Has to Do With Being Born Helpless: Out of Eden, Part Four — Secondary Altriciality and the Origins of Culture
Return to We Once Had the Run of the Forest and the “Original Affluent Society”: Early Human Savagery Is a Patriarchal Myth Rationalizing Our Descent Into Civilization
For an Overview and Links to Other Parts of This Work-in-Progress, Go to Prodigal Human: The Descent of Man
Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness – Michael’s latest book – is now available in print and e-book formats.
Planetmates: The Great Reveal is also available in print and e-book format. at https://www.createspace.com/4691119
and at Amazon at
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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Out of Eden—Agrarian Revolution … Return to Eden—Primal Renaissance: The Earliest Yuppies, 25,000 Years Ago, Cast Us Out of the Garden. We Are Returning … Now
Primal Renaissance: Our Greatest Hope May Be the Flourishing of Culture as We Reintegrate Long-Lost Knowledge and Worldview, Formerly Ridiculed as “Primitive”
Falls from Grace, Epilogue: Are We Entering a Primal Renaissance?
We live in exciting times. Information hams it up before us at every turn. This unparalleled info-glut brings fascination, paralysis, agony, insight, change, renewal, and inspiration. In some ways it looks like a renaissance — take the incredible proliferation of technology, for example . . . the mind-boggling advances in computers. But a renaissance of the “primitive,” the “uncivilized” . . . a primal renaissance? How can that possibly be?
Paleolithic Consciousness … Out of Eden
For weeks I had been working on several articles, my ardor suspending me above the landscape of a natural consciousness, a hunter-gatherer one. Called “paleolithic consciousness” by one contemporary theorist, this mindstyle is reputed to exist among our hunter-gatherer progenitors and among some current “primal cultures.” It is characterized by greater attunement with body and nature, greater relaxation and well-beingness, more loving child-caring, greater sensory and aesthetic appreciation, more expanded psychic openness, fuller emotional and relational capacity, and greater “with-it-ness” (Witness) with reality in general.
The Earliest Yuppies and The Agrarian Revolution
I was also focusing on how our civilization came to lose that primal expansiveness of soul — a la “ejection from the Garden of Eden.” An increasing mistrust of nature — and an inexplicable rebellion against an eternally old “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” philosophy — led to attempts to control Nature, and consequently body as well. The supposed big “advance” of these earliest yuppies was the domestication of plants and animals. In history, this first major “upwardly mobile” turning is known as the “agrarian revolution,” and it occurred variously between 10 and 30 thousand years ago.
Renaissance
All of a piece it came to me that what was going on now, in Western culture, was exactly parallel to what had occurred during the Renaissance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At that time, you may recall, the Catholic Church’s intellectual hegemony was loosening, which allowed ancient Roman and Greek texts preserved in the monasteries to be released into the collective culture. There, our formerly repressed and forgotten “classical” heritage combined and cross-fertilized with views prevailing at that time to create the incredible flowering of culture and human potential that the word renaissance now conveys.
The View from the Doorstep of Nuclear and Ecological Annihilation
It occurred to me that night how we, in the consciousness and ecology movements, are becoming ever more aware, once again, in diverse and various ways, of the vast legacy of feeling, perception, human fulfillment, and spiritual awareness and viewpoint that current “child-rearing” practices cause us “normally” to leave behind. Similarly we come to realize how much our species lost in coming into its much-vaunted “civilization” in its evolutionary history. The view from the doorstep of nuclear and ecological annihilation allows such perspectives.
Yet, through our different ways of healing ourselves, and to extents greater and lesser, we retrieve that lost and repressed legacy.
Multiculturalism
And we are, happily, not alone in that retrieval. Increasingly it appears that our age is characterized, on a global scale, by an unprecedented multiculturalism wrought of technological advances in telecommunications and transportation. Consequently, we are pushed to enjoying an ever growing awareness of the legacies of primal cultures, both current and historical.
Xenophobia Dissolving and “Ego”-Eroding Information
At the same time and not coincidentally we observe our own religious, scientific, and Western-cultural hegemonies collapsing under that same weight of contrary and both xenophobia- and “ego”-eroding information. Moreover, this collapse is aided by momentous and far-reaching occurrences as diverse as our mistaken engagements in third-world countries — our misadventures in Iraq and Vietnam, for example; the technological crisis of credibility wrought of the global ecological crisis; and the discoveries of the new physics with their concurrent death-blow to the pretensions of common-sense materialism.
Re-Integration of the Primitive and Primal … Return to Eden
It became clear to me that just as centuries ago we came out from under the thumb of a brand of cultural repression that scapegoated and repressed former cultures — specifically, the Greek and the Roman legacies, calling them “pagan” — we were now coming out from under the thumb of a cultural repression and consequent scapegoating of even longer duration — one extending back ten to thirty-thousand years! Along with this we were seeing not only the limitations and inadequacies of the Western civilization and technology which so many had sacrificed for, and killed for; we were seeing also the re-integration of long-lost knowledge and worldview — which formerly had been obscured and hidden beneath such pejoratives as “primitive,” “savage,” and “uncivilized.”
Shamans, Vision Quests, Sweat Lodges, and Drums
Some of us were learning this only too well, as it seemed necessary to search out the earliest or least “civilized” cultures possible for the only pertinent tips we could find on sane and healthy child-caring techniques.
But the rest of our culture is catching on too, and in a big way! Shamanistic practices, rites of passage, and indigenous rituals are enjoying great popularity. Workshops on everything from vision quests, fire-walking, and Native American sweat lodges . . . to nature treks, drumming, and “sacred arrow” ceremonies have begun popping up. And currently we are even recognizing our Western patriarchal culture’s evil hand in the extermination of society upon society of indigenous peoples; we are re-writing the history books on the legacy of Columbus even as we passed the five-hundredth anniversary of his landing in America.
A Flourishing of Culture?
What’s more, in a manner analogous to the cross-fertilization of ideas that led to the medieval Renaissance, our culture is expanding and becoming richer through the inclusion of these alternate perspectives. Those of us on the healing edge are uniquely able to sense the potential of this inclusion as we experience the effects that this kind of appreciation of the feeling, the affectionate, the intuitive, the natural, the body, and the senses has had upon our individual lives. Why would we not think that this kind of cross-fertilization of repressed heritage would lead to a flourishing of our culture in the same way that it is has led to a blossoming in our lives?
The Brightest Light on Our Cultural Horizon
Indeed, many of us do feel that a “primal renaissance” is occurring on our planet. Furthermore, many of us believe that this occurrence may be, in truth, the brightest hope on what otherwise can appear globally to be a rather bleak social and cultural horizon.
So let us not lose this opportunity to midwife the emergence of this primal renaissance, and, germinal as it may appear at this time, to nurture it to its fullest flowering. We cannot change the past, of course. But our efforts will work — one small measure at least — for righting the many wrongs of those who have come before us toward those earlier primal societies, and the deeply felt ideas and cultural ways they held dear.
Continue with Book 10 — Primal Return: The Prodigal Awakening
Return to Planet of the Apes? Thunderdome? No. But Only If We Are Lucky: Our Primal Return May Indeed Be a Primal Renaissance
To Access the Entire Book, of which this is an excerpt, Go To Falls from Grace
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Continue with Book 10 — Primal Return: The Prodigal Awakening
Return to Planet of the Apes? Thunderdome? No. But Only If We Are Lucky: Our Primal Return May Indeed Be a Primal Renaissance
To Access the Entire Book, of which this is an excerpt, Go To Falls from Grace
Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
Planetmates: The Great Reveal — Michael’s latest book — is now available in print at https://www.createspace.com/4691119
and in print and e-book format at Amazon at
Planet of the Apes? Thunderdome? No. But Only If We Are Lucky: Our Primal Return May Indeed Be a Primal Renaissance
A Grand Synthesis of Natural and Technological Consciousness Is Possible … But the Ego Fights to the End: Beware of Skinhead Spirituality
The Primal Renaissance
So what I am saying is that our advanced technology, itself a product of an unhealthy dissociated ego state that is called Western consciousness, seems, simply fortuitously … or through the grace of God … to be having the effect of intense consciousness change—yes! . . . but essentially back in the direction of what has been normal for our species for at least sixty thousand and possibly millions of years but, this time, while retaining … if we are lucky … the boons of technology.
Planet of the Apes? Thunderdome? No. But Only If We Are Lucky
Some people think that the only way our consciousness will return to normal is with the loss of technology and the re-creation of the primal state. Thus they picture “Planet of the Apes” and post-nuclear “Thunderdome” scenarios.
But I believe that we may just be lucky enough … God may be merciful enough … to allow us to keep the fruits of the extended Western aberration of consciousness; we may just be allowed to keep some of the toys we acquired from our prodigal days.
There is nothing written in stone, after all, that says that people cannot enjoy the benefits of things produced from “unholy” vessels. Indeed, in the perfect universe that we are beginning to finally re-apprehend, it is clear that all things are useful and to some good end in God’s universe.
For example, the legacy and benefits of democracy that we enjoy are not lost or neutralized by our realization that our founding American fathers were chauvinists and slave-owners.
So basically I am saying that I disagree that we are evolving into a new, advanced species, a Homo noeticus. For one thing, it has been pointed out that brain size has actually declined slightly over the past 100,000 years (Winkelman, 1990, p. 28).
The Primal Return
No. What I believe is that in fact consciousness change is happening … especially in Western culture … but in the direction of a return to a more truly human and natural state—one that characterized our species for millions of years.
I am asserting that our Western mental illness, our cultural aberration of consciousness is reversing and healing. However we may be keeping with us, along with our natural self, some fruits of that extended aberration. And these boons we may only fortuitously or through God’s grace … and not through any particular heroics or “super”man virtue … be allowed to keep.
Now, that combination of a healthy consciousness and advanced technology may be truly new on this planet. And even of that we cannot be sure. For certainly—and White would agree—likely it has occurred in other places of the universe many times—so that there is no need for species-ego-aggrandizement here, by any means.
A Grand Synthesis of Which We Should Only Be Grateful
Still certainly this possibility of a grand synthesis of natural consciousness and scientific-technological acumen is reason for excitement and rejoicing. It is without doubt something we should seek. But there is no need to march in the streets or “we’re number 1!” about it. If this is our fortuitous outcome, we have just been lucky. We can only be grateful to the Universe for conspiring to correct our transgressions before we, indeed, “killed us all off”!
In Light of the Pre- and Perinatal, Spirituality Re-Visioned
In closing, I wish to say I hope I have conveyed why I believe that the exclusion of the prenatal and perinatal information from Wilber’s otherwise comprehensive and laudable schema of transpersonal development leaves it lacking and flawed. I feel that this entire area of integration between the two—the prenatal/perinatal and the transpersonal/spiritual—is considerably more complex and important than has been assumed … certainly that it should not be dismissed, or ignored. Indeed, I feel that the inclusion of pre- and perinatal evidence is crucial for any map of consciousness that purports to be a guide to spiritual evolution.
Cosmic consciousness is not aided by a “fully functioning ego” or by ego-actualization. The age-old admonitions against the lures and enticements, the devices and strategies of ego are as apt in this day as they’ve always been.
The Ego Fights to the End
The ego does not surrender easily. It sends out its emissaries of diversion and disruption, of fear and insecurity, to trip up the gullible and the arrogant. Yet surrender is what is required. The tendency to try to control and to ritualize our native experience is what is to be resisted. Banners such as “Homo noeticus” and “fully functioning ego” may bring temporary relief from the difficult task of ego resistance, dismantling of ego defenses, and confrontation with the painful aspects of the unconscious, the Shadow, in the ego-inflation inherent in such standards.
Beware of Skinhead Spirituality
But it is as wise to align oneself with these tokens to fend off one’s necessary insecurity (see Watts, 1951) as it is a good idea to join up with the KKK or the skinheads as a way of dealing with the same kind of insecurities of changing … and growing … sociopolitical, cultural, and economic events. In fact the responses are much alike. And they should be equally resisted.
THE END
Continue with The Earliest Yuppies, 25,000 Years Ago, Cast Us Out of the Garden. We Are Returning … Now: Out of Eden—Agrarian Revolution … Return to Eden—Primal Renaissance
Return to It’s Pure Egoism to Think We’re Evolving to a New Consciousness. If We’re Lucky We’ll Regain the One We’ve Lost
To Access the Entire Book, of which this is an excerpt, Go To Falls from Grace
Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness, by Michael Adzema, will be published and available in print and e-book format in May, 2014
Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
Planetmates: The Great Reveal — Michael’s latest book — is now available in print and e-book format. at https://www.createspace.com/4691119
and at Amazon at
“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.”
Those who want signed copies of any of my books, email me directly … sillymickel@gmail.com … Discount for blog subscribers.
“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.
“For most of your existence … your experience was much more intense, alive, and interesting than it is for you now”: The Planetmates on sex, happiness, the tribe, the nuclear family, and the “intensity of experience” of life
“…there was much more happiness attendant upon the state of being a child — being free and open, not just to the awesomeness of the physical world and world of Nature, but to the love, pleasure, fun, and interactions of the social world, as well, with its fascinating array of human behavior and emotion, and the brilliance and marvel of its “magical” members.
“Correspondingly, as nomadic humans, while there was marriage, you were less monogamous. You had various forms and varieties of sexual interactions and marital arrangements. Monogamy was most common, but even then it was less constrained. Sexuality was not the hoarded and jealously guarded commodity it became later for you. Marriage ties were more about the children — their care and the primary responsibilities for them. Additionally, it had to do with societal and cultural concerns, such as expanding kinship opportunities for the relatives of the married couple, and maximizing the circles of sharing and reciprocation. It had virtually nothing to do with establishing lines of heredity or kinship. For owning little (and needing little), you had no concerns about passing possessions or property along. And the mother being the child-bearer led most often to lines of descent being calculated primarily through her, and there was no need, or desire, to upset that natural configuration.
“At any rate, you had much freer ideas about sexuality. Not only did this contribute to the spice of life and the intensity of human experience in general — for women as well as men — but it contributed to the caring of children. Let us explain:
“By “intensity of experience,” we mean that with the excessive stipulations and pressures upon your personhood that came with hierarchical societies, including today’s, your experience — along with your needs, emotions, and aliveness — became muted, dampened. Repressed and numb, your experience lacks the color, the extra flavors and magnificence, and intensity of our lives in Nature. You have no idea what you are missing in your lives. You have not an inkling how you cuddle with your chains and contribute to your increasing numbification over the course of your lives.
“Yet for most of your existence, which preceded your controlling-conforming-sedentary times, your experience was much more intense, alive, and interesting than it is for you now. And what added to that intensity and color, that exquisiteness and pleasure of your experience, was a freer and less constrained sexuality … among many, many, many other things, by the way.
“And how it contributed to the care of children is that it allowed — in that there would be no deprived party — for those times of sexual abstinence after the child was born and during the pregnancy itself. This kind of sexual abstinence would be a product of the sexual disinterest the mother often had while engaged in devoted attention to a young child. The mother derives much sensual satisfaction and emotional fulfillment from nursing, which for one thing pushes other kinds of sensual desire to the side. Other aspects of motherhood and the caring and nurturing of children are also both pleasurable and desirable as well as completely engrossing. So sexual disinterest is much more likely to happen for the mother in the period after childbirth. And as we have said, this contributes to a longer interval between births, and therefore an exceedingly needed and beneficial attention to the most recent newborn.
“Freer sexuality and looser or nonexistent constraint on sexual partners contributed to human satisfaction and social/marital stability for another reason. For sexual disinterest leading to sexual abstinence also occurs for humans for many other reasons: It often occurs during the times of and in the course of spiritual pursuits — not as a result of intention, for as we have said, self-denial is counterproductive to spiritual progress, but because of the degree of engagement and immersion in other-than-bodily pursuits at those times. A person might feel a pull toward taking on something with the total engagement of self that occurs, for example, in a vision quest or walkabout. A looseness of constraints on sexual partners can only facilitate the ability of tribe members to take such things up, being as how it leaves no sexually deprived other, so there is no pressure from another to refrain from following one’s spiritual or creative inclinations.
“Similarly, sexual disinterest occurs, sometimes, during periods of personal transformation, which occur naturally and spontaneously to Authentic humans in the course of their lives. For these might require their full engagement and attention. Other times disinterest might occur is because of ritual or cultural involvement, during periods of grieving upon the death of loved ones, advancing age, sickness, and simply the changing feelings of the partners toward each other over the course of time.
“For all of these reasons and in all these instances, the loose constraints on the sexuality of your earliest forebears and the relative non-exclusivity of sexual partnership meant that the individuals involved were not pulled away from total immersion and focus on these experiences because of a sexually deprived and demanding spouse. In addition to the examples given, consider how, freed from sexual obligations, one could allow oneself to fully and thoroughly grieve, when needed, or allow complete immersion in any comparable emotional experience. This, in its own way, and being at the core of mental health and personal growth, contributed to greater overall happiness, life fulfillment, and expansive abilities to experience life.
“All things considered, more free flowing attitudes toward sex allowed for amplification of life experience, greater spiritual and personal transformation, overall greater happiness, less personal conflict and neurosis, and, importantly, benefit to children. Not only were children helped by the care and attention they wrought of mothers who were not having additional newborns requiring their attention until they, the older ones, were much less emotionally needy, but they were better off due to the fact that they lived in family and tribal groups which were composed of more loving, giving, happy, and affable human adults, because of their overall better fulfillment and experience of life.
“But then you became sedentary and lived in hierarchical societies and all of this changed. With agrarian economics, suddenly, there was more focus on the immediate family. Living permanently on land that one claimed ownership to and which one farmed separated your tribal human group of before into nuclear family units. You did not own the land in common and farm it in a communal style. No. For part of this war against uncertainty and increasing fear of deprivation, which manifested in your having become agrarian and sedentary, was mistrust and fear, not just of Nature, but of each other. You had increasing alienation from each other, greater possessiveness of all things, and increasing greed. What came of such inner forces was that the nuclear family established borders around the land it cultivated and built walls of emotional avoidance between itself and the rest of the community.
“It was families against the world….”
[Pt 5 of 24rd prasad — Family “Investment”. 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/ …
Planetmates: The Great Reveal is also scheduled for print and e-book publication in April-May, 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.
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On soul murder, the adult trance state, more. What the Planetmates tell us about poisonous pedagogy, tainted parenting, fairy tales, and how human children became different from the children of Nature
“You are needy, and this lack of need satisfaction has made you, for one thing, insensitive. And while you wish to raise a child who attends to you and behaves loving toward you, you do it in an insensitive way, for you cannot be other than yourself. Try as you might to yourselves be like your ideal parent, if you do not have it in you, you cannot possibly give it. So, does the child end up being what you want … loving, attentive, and need fulfilling? Or does the child become like you … insensitive, aloof, and numbed down? Well, you know the answer. For the parent cannot teach love when the parent does not know real love.
“This is another reason the skill and personality set does not fit the child, as exemplified by Snow White and the bodice. For it is not just consciously constructed in the image of the parent, that is, attempting to pass on positive traits of the parent, it is unconsciously constructed of all the unwanted qualities of the parent as well: It, too, is poisoned. The parent says, “Don’t you dare hit your sister!” while smacking the child. This is poisonous pedagogy. And this is what is meant.
“Sure enough, while it does not kill the child anymore, that is to say, this ambivalence is a step above infanticide and abandonment, which is your first and earliest response to having a child; still, it diminishes them. It bludgeons their vitality and life force. Not quite killing the body, it murders the soul instead. In the tale of Snow White, we notice that each time Snow White is poisoned, or constricted with the tight lacing of the bodice, she faints. She does not die, but she becomes less alive. Sure enough, she ends up in a deathly state because of all this. She exists in a coma-like state, which is a pretty good description of the kind of trance state that this kind of tainted parenting produces in the child.
“The fairy tale then expresses what we have been telling you of the effects this has upon your adult personality. For the tale says Snow White remains in this half-alive state until she is kissed by the Prince. She then wakes up. This is exactly what we have been saying about how you project all of your childhood deprivations onto the love projects of your adult life, seeking to garner from them what you could not get as a child. You want your adult lovers to give you what you did not get as a child and thus save you from the diminished and numbed life that came of it.
“The only thing not true about the fairy tale is the ending. For waking up, because of one’s relationship with a partner, a Prince or Princess, is what you wish. But it does not happen. Fairy tales always hold out the hope of happily ever after. They reflect what you do and how you feel in your life. They do not show correct solutions to your problems or your pain. Indeed, that is why you call them, fairy tales, with all that connotes of being not real and being simply wish fulfilling. Fairy tales are the way you solace yourself about your human predicament. They demonstrate the wrong-gettedness of your thinking. They mirror the impossible struggles of your lives, but provide a denial at the end … a psychological defense against realizing your truth. So, they reflect real things, then lie about them … just like all your good defense mechanisms and techniques of denial do.
“Summarizing, your children became different from the children of Nature, because their care was different and was influenced most strongly by shortcomings in their human caregivers. In order to survive, infants developed more traits of adorability and of both clever communication skills to get needs met as well as non-expression of needs so as to not be a burden. Failure in these, early in your history as humans, would lead most likely to infanticide or abandonment, so these traits increased in your babies as well as in your adult population in that they became permanent elements in your personalities — insensitivity, dissembling, sycophancy, concealing intentions for the purpose of manipulation, unfeelingness, aloofness, controllingness of self and domination of others, alienation, and separation from others and Nature. The parenting modes — if they can be called that — that were instrumental in bringing about these changes were those of infanticide and abandonment.
“In addition to these traits, additional traits which varied more by caregiver were inculcated in the child. The caregiver told him or herself that they were instilling in the child traits and behaviors that were for the child’s ultimate benefit, but in actuality a good deal of what was instilled sought to put into the child those qualities that might satisfy their own deprivations. Furthermore, without being able to help it, they influenced their child in ways that reflected also their own woundedness. The parenting mode at play in these influences on the child was that of ambivalence. In this mode, the fashioning wand is not the one of child murder or abandonment, influencing your generations of children through natural selection. No, the conductor of these changes are the conscious intentions and the unconscious needs and qualities of the caregiver — both good and ill. So, like Snow White, in this scenario, the child does not die, but its soul is murdered. It becomes less alive. And these traits in the child are passed along, not through natural selection, but through the fact that the numbed child will become the adult who will do the same to his or her own child: It is passed on down through the generations unconsciously and through example.
“So there was ambivalence in the desire for children. Your species swayed back and forth about what to do with them — between the poles of infanticide and abandonment, on one side, and acceptance, engagement, and nurture, on the other — for the longest period of your human existence….”
[Pt 3 of 24rd prasad — Family “Investment”
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/ …
Planetmates: The Great Reveal is also scheduled for print and e-book publication in early 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.
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Planetmates reveal the truth about human communication, the “games people play,” human “intelligence,” the roots of war, domestic brutality, genocides, and enslavement in self-denial, and more
“Of course, there had to be a combination of both expression of needs as well as non-communication of needs in order to survive. There has to be a combination of unfeelingness-numbness and effusive entertaining adorability. And every baby who survives develops this — it is the major practice of every day of its life — to an at least sufficient degree … sometimes to a masterful level. Amazingly, human babies must learn to both communicate directly as well as to dissemble, to be both responsive as well as repressed. Human babies must learn to direct, but not appear to. They must be charming, but not obtrusive; seen, but not heard. Through this charm and manipulation offensive, these little politicians must bring about the satisfaction of their deep desires and needs, yet appear to be “above” such concerns. Again we see the factors which pushed the twisted consciousness and behavior of humans. Humans have “hidden agendas.” They might say one thing, and the other human must figure out what that human is really meaning … which might be the opposite of that.
“Some cultures would develop this to an insanely and mind-bendingly elaborate social ritual. “No, thank you, I don’t want any” might mean “Yes. I want. But ask again.” Or “Please, no. Don’t bother” could mean “I wish you would. But I want you to insist on doing it.” The actual meaning might need to be deduced through masterful and intricate discernment of the context of the statement and its tone and manner of inflection, and so much more.
“Indeed, much of the extra communication humans have developed, compared to other planetmates, has to do with this added dimension of confusion. A planetmate might meow or grunt its desire. It is not confusing. It says, “I want.” A human hearing a communication of need must often discern it through a maze of possibilities of what that expression mightmean … other than what is meant on the surface. And much more of language is elaborate convolutions of thought built around and upon such confusion.
“Indeed, much of the extra “intelligence” you humans credit yourselves with — accounting for the extra brain growth, size of head, birth pain, and then extra information processing involved in repression of that pain, in a vicious circle — has to do with this extra mentation involved in dealing with your confusing communications and relationships with each other. Your extra brain growth is because of the extra maze of neural pathways required to keep yourself buffered from remembering your painful past, required to keep you confused, and part of this … an example of this … is just this confusion around communication with each other and the excessive thought processing involved with handling it appropriately, which has its roots in early infantile need deprivation and the mental machinations around it.
“So humans have these, “games people play.” Planetmates sure as hell do not get it. We watch you engaged in all these rituals as if you are beings on opposite sides of a wall, unable to see each other, communicating elaborately and madly with movement and sound — all of which are severely constrained in some places and consequently overdone and dramatized in others. How hard you work. How tiring you seem to us. How complicated your life. How haphazard and inept your connections with each other.
“Meanwhile, Nature implies the idea of everything being interconnected. Needs and satisfaction are two sides of the same coin. By separating them — aching, urges, and wants, on the one hand, and satisfaction, relief, and pleasure, on the other — so far from each other, you widened your separation from all of Nature, made yourself more isolated, and contributed to your being the most suffering of all planetmates. You call this ability a delay of satisfaction, a delay of pleasure, and you tell yourself it makes you superior to Nature. Adorning yourself with this crown of extra control of yourself, you make your dissatisfaction and suffering an accomplishment. But you never notice how this power over is bought at the cost of interaction with — interaction with, your body … engagement with, Nature and reality … connection with, humans and other living beings in harmonious accord.
“This separation of you from satisfaction means you push the world away and retreat into a fortified circle, a command center of the mind, allowing survey and oversight of the experiences of the body, but not immersion in those experiences … not really feeling them. You tell yourself you are free from the urges and pushes of the body, this way; you say that you “are not an animal” or “beast” in having this seeming control of these needs. But you never see or acknowledge how this control is paid for with irrationality and uncontrollable acts afterward, often around other events and behaviors. By this we mean you may control your sexual urges only to end up beating your women and children and going to war. You might play the “heroic,” strong and silent type, or the suffering martyr, but, caught up in your inner suffering, you may not notice those around you needing your assistance … you might be insensitive to their cries of pain … you might run roughshod over their lives and forget that there is life force and divinity in them, as well. Your long history of war, torture, domestic brutality, religious atrocity, rape, enslavement, and genocides should be telling you something about yourself in these regards.
“You want us to be clearer on how you are different from other planetmates regarding the satisfaction of needs? Okay, take one example. In Nature, one of the dog planetmates might get hit or bit and would yelp. Whereas a human might get hit and not cry out. It might repress that need to express pain — and it is a need — because it has learned, in infancy, that to cry out when hurt brings even more hurt later. This failure to respond in the present to the urges … “instincts” … of the body leads to manic mental activity afterward. The repressed need drives extraneous thoughts which keep one enslaved in the mind and separated from experience in Reality. It should be clear how repression of any other biological needs — sex, food, water, freedom of movement, comfort — does the same thing.
“One is often blocked from the immediate satisfaction of needs, that is true; and that applies to all planetmates, including humans. Being frustrated from satisfaction is one of those exigencies of life and fate which teaches us. What makes you different is your self-denial when there is no need for it. Again you have taken over the determination of your spiritual path. Again you show how you defy the Divine by seeking to control It (just as you sought to control your caregivers as babies), instead of learn from It. Rooted in your infancy and the inadequate and capricious qualities of your care and need satisfaction then, you seek afterward to deny yourself, again, in an unconscious way of seeking divine reward. Your denial, suffering, praying, and self-flagellation — figurative and literal — are ways you seek to bring forth advantage later … they are sad and distant reflections of your baby attempts to influence the Great Mom….”
[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/ … Planetmates: The Great Reveal is also scheduled for print and e-book publication in mid-March, 2014
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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With the Apocalypse Looming as a Result of Your “Evolution,” It Must Be Blatantly Obvious — Oh, “Crown of Creation” — of the Lie of Your Illusion, Say Planetmates in the 19th Prasad: Lucifer Is Us
The Perfectly Unnatural Ego: “Twin Aberrations of Controlling and Conforming Marked the Ultimate Break with the Divine and the Ultimate Opposite Construct of Self”
The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Nineteenth Prasad. Over-Accumulation, Ego, and Attaining Ultimate Unnaturalness … Lucifer Is Us
Planetmates Release The Nineteenth Prasad
This one is about the ultimate evolution of Ego to be a thing opposite to and arrayed against the Divine.
Polar Bear is First Consciousness at The Nineteenth Prasad.
This marked...the ultimate in a break with the Divine and the construction of an opposite construct of being and of consciousness....as you are now finally seeing in the most stark and blatant forms, against the survival of your own selves, both individually and as a species.
The Nineteenth Prasad – The Ultimate Opposite
The twin aberrations of conforming one’s behavior to suit another or others instead of one’s own inner divine visions, directions, and flow and obsessive controlling of others to further one’s unnatural ends of staving off the hardships, struggles, 
and obstacles that are part of divine guidance are born of this ability to over-accumulate, which sedentary lifeways make possible. This marked, then, the ultimate in a break with the Divine and the construction of an opposite construct of being and of consciousness. It was the ultimate evolution of Ego to be a thing opposite to and arrayed against the Divine, against the natural, against Nature, against the ways of all other Planetmates and other non-Earth beings and entities, and ultimately, as you are now finally seeing in the most stark and blatant forms, against the survival of your own selves, both individually and as a species.
Paraphrase/ Elaboration of The Nineteenth Prasad — by SillyMickel Adzema
Your separation from Nature and defiance of the Divine left you, thus, with two abnormalities relative to that Nature. The first unnatural development in you, having to do with your separation from the Divine, is conformity. You would change your behavior along lines to fit with what you thought others would wish.
The second perverse development is domination. On the flip side of conformity, you sought to have other people behave in ways which matched your wishes and pleased and satisfied you, not them.
Conformity is a split with the Divine, for in doing it, you must separate yourself from and even deny … you must ignore … your own inner, Divine visions, directions, and flow.
Whereas, through domination you defied the Divine assistance that comes to all planetmates through fate or the exigencies of life and fortune. We feel Divinity in and around us. But being in form, we cannot be fully knowledgeable all the time. Our existences here are for the purpose of bringing us to be aware of more of the grandeur and designs of the Divine. And the connection we have to the Divine, the stopgap one, which comes into play in those areas where we are still learning and growing, is through fate. It is through life’s events, brought seemingly randomly and unexpectedly into our lives, that we are made greater, instructed, and ultimately are led, guided, back to Divinity from which we all come. Struggles and obstacles — the exigencies of life — are, to us, the promptings of the Divine as it leads in the mutual dance of Life.
In dominating others and Nature, however, you seek to keep those uncertainties of life, and the wisdom which comes from them, at a minimum. You turn your back on a dance with God; and you snub the Divine’s offer to teach you beyond what you already know. No planetmates want hardship. Indeed, we go out of our way to avoid it as well. But in your making control of events the major thing of your life — eliminating the adventure, fullness of experience, satisfaction, passion, intimacy, love, and enjoyment of life … or at least forgoing them when they conflict, as they very often will, with control of events — you show your ingratitude and you defy the Divine. In these instances, you choose to be driven by fear rather than expand into love. You choose hardship over enjoyment.
This you do in all your controlling activities, so also in your obsessive seeking to control other humans. By coercing others into submission to your will and your desires, you are seeking to reduce your dissatisfaction at their expense. Whether those others are those lower in the hierarchy, your women, people of other groups, people who you have made into slaves, or people who are physically different from you, you sacrifice their independence and soul upon the altar of your self-indulgence and fear.
So, in dominating, you sought to increase that split with the Divine by avoiding even the divine guidance that would bring you back into line — Divine guidance that occurs through the hardships, obstacles, and struggles of life.
The immediate cause of these aberrations-abnormalities of conformity and domination, what makes them possible, what allows their existence, is the over-accumulation of things.
And, as we have been saying, this over-accumulation was itself only made possible … it requires … sedentary living.
So sedentary living involved the triumph of control over adventure, and it was your ultimate break with the Divine. Another way of saying this is that your controlling/conforming behaviors represented a final break with Divine Consciousness.
Indeed, it can be said that these two behaviors or tendencies of consciousness — that is to say, out of fear, to see others as people to be placated or manipulated — define human Ego. So you can see how human Ego, far from being the tool or asset toward greater intelligence you think it is, is actually the substitute for the natural consciousness, the greater awareness, and the Divine nature, which you have turned your backs upon.
Essentially, these behaviors of sycophancy and domination, conformity and control, delineated the outlines of the consciousness you created instead of your Divine nature of Being, Awareness, and Bliss. So Ego is an opposite construct of consciousness to the Natural and stands against both the Divine and Nature.
In your “evolution” — we would say devolution — along this path of increasing control, then, and increasing Ego, you have at this point reached a point of having created the ultimate opposite to Nature and God. 
This complete opposite construct of being, called Ego, is the antipode to the natural and the ways of all Planetmates as well as other non-Earth beings and entities.
Whereas we search for and embrace inner directives and we do not shy from the meanings and promptings of outer events, human Ego fights these. Ego is afraid of inner directives, Divine ones. It fights off and sees as alien the natural promptings and inner impulses coming from within you. You say planetmates have “instinct.” We say, where is yours? You are like a ship having cut away its anchor, wondering why it drifts—why your mind is restless and finds no home or solace. Even more, you are like that same ship, having scuttled its sails, wondering how it is that it cannot get anywhere by manipulating its rudder—your so-called “reason”—alone.
Ego is not just separate from God and fighting the Divine, Ego is pitted against Nature. Ego does not just fight off the direction that comes with interconnectedness with All, it wages war with it. Ego, to all extents and purposes, is arrayed against all else in Creation.
You do not know this. You have been thinking the opposite. You have been thinking you are, through Ego, uniquely able to have dominion over all Nature. Your Ego has you thinking you are the crown of creation as well as the pinnacle of evolution. And, you not only consider yourselves above Nature, you deem yourselves to be the engine of re-creating Nature. Again, putting your Ego in the seat reserved for the Divine, you — not seeing yourselves as imperfect — flatter yourselves that you can improve upon Nature, seeing It as imperfect and needing your attention. In your better moments of this mania of grandiosity, you assign yourselves as the shepherd of Creation. But who would shepherd you? You see yourselves as the caretakers of Nature, though you are crippled from you own lack of caregiving in your early lives … more than any of us in Nature.
How can this ultimate opposite of the truth not be seen you? If it has never been possible before, surely it must be blatantly obvious — because of the ecocidal and humanicidal brink we are on, with the veritable apocalypse looming as a result of your “evolution” … oh, “pinnacle” … oh, “crown of creation” — of the flaw in your thinking, the lie of your illusion.
Remember that, alongside your tendency to store and control more than you need are the ideas of ownership and possession — which are also unique fevers of human consciousness. The sense of possession, of power over something means, to you, that you can use and abuse it to any extent. It also is central to the armageddon you are bringing about. For you have grown in such a way as to think the entire world, except yourself, has no Consciousness, thus, no feelings, thus, no rights. Thus it can be owned. You practice this individually with small items, on a personal scale. However, the cumulative result of all these single actions, whether by individual actors or by group or corporate actors, based upon the idea of ownership, is that you have no restraint whatsoever from abusing the planet as if it is owned as well. So your mistaken idea of possession has allowed you without conscience to speed headlong into the destruction of all and everyone.
You seek to destroy yourselves because you wish to punish yourselves. You wish to punish yourselves because it is the way you came into the world. And in re-creating that punishment, now, you somehow think you will get the love you needed then, but did not get.
That is why some of you — so many of you, whether religious or not — have been interpreting this abominable thing of the end of all life on Earth as some kind of opening of the heavens or rising up to the heavens, returning to God. Oh, you are going to return to God all right. But you are deluded in thinking that the All That Is is at all pleased at your ultimate sacrifice of yourselves in an insane effort to get the things and satisfactions you were denied in your early life. For your self-centeredness and alienation from Nature has you thinking you are the only actors here, the only things alive. How felicitous or pleased would a Divine be, seeing, not only that you have thrown away the gift of life given you by that Divine and committed a suicide, but also that you have, without even a twinge of conscience, brought down all other life that Divinity has wrought on this planet and committed a mass murder on a scale never known?
And do you think you will be all that self-congratulatory and proud when, in returning to the Divine after death and realizing once again the nature of Reality as being life and Consciousness, you realize that you failed to see that in life? Indeed, how delighted in yourself do you suppose you will be in your eventual awakening state knowing that, in this blindness to the aliveness in everything about you, you had set yourself against it? Do you suppose you will be proud knowing that your major achievement of your most recent spiritual adventure in form was to bring down, in its entirety, the magnificent and exquisite edifice of Earthly life — the product of Divine workings over many billions of years?
At any rate, we are here now communicating to you for the time is ripe for you to finally see your wrong-gettedness, manifested now in the most stark and blatant ways, in the foul world you have created around you. Your ways and your delusions of grandeur have caused you to immerse yourselves in poison and to create of this Earth, which is set to sustain us, a dire and deadly habitat. Regardless of the harm you have perpetrated on Earth and all its planetmates in your doings, you can now see that it is you, ultimately, that you oppose. In opposing, in the most extreme manner, Nature, you have set your lance against your own survival. For however much you deny it, you are part of Nature, you are inextricably linked with Nature. What you do to all, you do to yourselves.
So Ego, in the final analysis, is pitted against your personal survival; it is arrayed against each and every one of you. Human survival is at stake; Ego’s ultimate victim is the entirety of humanity itself.
Continue with The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Twentieth Prasad: Obsessive Control – Controlling Your Young
Return to The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, the Eighteenth Prasad: Inauthenticity Rising
To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … Go toThe Great Reveal from The Planetmates
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
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The Great Reveal by SillyMickel & the PlanetMates 
Like reading a letter from a wise, old friend….
Feb 27
Posted by sillymickel
By M.E.W. on February 5, 2014
I’ve recently finished reading Experience Is Divinity, by Michael Adzema.
If you ever have one of those days (weeks, months?) where it just doesn’t want to fit together, you really can use this.
Find a quiet space, fix a nice big mug of tea, and grab “Experience Is Divinity”.
You almost don’t need to use your brain. You just sort of let it absorb. Every once in a while, you find yourself thinking, ” Why wasn’t that simple thing already in my brain?”
None of Adzema books will lecture you; no heavy handed persuasion. You simply get a sense of his quiet confidence that he has something meaningful and he wants to share it with you. You won’t find psychobabble or cult like preaching; just a sort of, “This is what I think makes a lot of sense”, attitude.
The books sort of distill the most profound realities. You lay the book down, having a sense of simplicity and clarity and the chaos just sort of begins to fit. Nothing is different; it’s more that it’s OK that things are as they are.
More info and to order: Experience Is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor. Return to Grace, Volume 8
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1492932213/ref=dra_a_rv_ff_fx_it_P2000_1000?tag=dradisplay-20
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
Invite you to join me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/sillymickel
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel
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Posted in Anthropology, authenticity, being yourself, Birth, Child Abuse, Consciousness, Environmentalism, Evolution, God, individualism, life, meaning, Metaphysics, Mystical, nonconform, Philosophy, Primal Spirit, Primal Spirituality, Psychology, Religion, Spirituality
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