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

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….

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

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The Spiritual “Code” That Is Written In Reality: Matter As Metaphor, Part Four — In the Tiniest Details — Mushrooms, Fire, Butterflies, and Morphogenetic Fields

“Listen Better!”: Physical Reality Is as Symbolic as the Images in Dreams… and Can Be as Readily Interpreted for Understanding Oneself and for Guidance on One’s Path

“Listen Better!”

The physical world and all its events are metaphor for consciousness; they are indirect spiritual perception, as we are seeing. We are taught in observing and letting the world and our Experience teach us. But, as Vasudeva encouraged Siddhartha, we must “Listen better!”

The Spiritual Code Written Into Our Reality

Mushrooms and Butterflies

When we do take in the world’s messages, we see that even the tiniest details of reality—of its architecture and components—are instructive to us on our journey. One example of how such teaching is to be found in even the most trivial of details of the physical world is discovered by reflecting on the shape of the “lowly” mushroom.

While the explanation to follow came to me on my own, many decades ago, I was to find confirmation of it years later in the thoughts of another writer as such:

Everyone knows that a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, and for ages the chrysalis process has been a charming metaphor for transformation. But what does a mushroom turn into, except for the ground?

A mushroom, as Alice discovered, can turn us into all kinds of new forms. But whether we shrink or expand, grow as tall as the sky, or become as short as a blade of grass, isn’t as important as the process of turning inward — the spiritual conversion of turning toward and into the inner life. What really matters is this inner change, a changing of attitudes, spirit, perception. In this light whole worldviews can be transformed in an instant.

The mystical experience has been described as “becoming one with the ground.” (Schiff, 1991, p. 9)

Thus, mushrooms, in their umbrella shape, are symbolic of the U-turn that is necessary in our spiritual evolution in returning to the ground of existence. They are “road signs” for the way hOMe.

This is interesting, more so, because mushrooms do in fact have psychedelic properties and they do, indeed, return us to the “ground,” as McKenna (1991), among others, so poetically explains.

The point is that not only is this U-turn necessary in spiritual evolution but that physical reality teaches us this, that physical reality, if we notice it, is constantly teaching us and guiding us . . . physical reality is metaphor and is as symbolic as the images in dreams. Indeed, one’s physical reality can be interpreted as readily as dream images in understanding oneself and seeking guidance on one’s path.

Fire

Another example is that of fire. Fire is a changing of matter into energy. It is no coincidence that it has become a universal symbol for the process of transformation wherein one goes from one’s personal, ego-based, desires and programs to transpersonal concerns and rootedness. For, indeed, is this not also a kind of going from matter (sensory awareness) and ego (body focusing) to spirit (consciousness) and energy (feeling awareness)?

Morphogenetic Fields

It should not be surprising, considering the foregoing, that when there are changes in psychic structures, there will often be noticeable physical changes which correspond to the psychic ones.

Brain Is the Tip of the Iceberg of Consciousness

In a way, this is the implication of Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field theory. On the simplest level of this, scientists tell us that when learning takes place, evidence can be found of corresponding changes in the physical brain. Not surprising. Scientists are not able to reduce learning to physical changes in the brain: They cannot locate specific memories in the brain, and will never be able to completely do that, if we are not completely mistaken here. For the physical changes observable in the brain are merely the tip of the iceberg of the phenomenon of learning/memory. The real stuff is going on “below.” Or more correctly, the events of learning/memory/consciousness go on “inside” or “within” — which is, actually, even more correctly, the true “outside,” the true “without” or “objective” reality.

What Occurs in Psychic Reality Manifests Physically

On grosser levels of physical reality—other than brain—in the world, this is also true, according to Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenetic fields. For every physical form … in the explicate order (borrowing from David Bohm‘s terminology) has its morphogenetic field or pattern in the implicate order. And since this implicate order is identical with what we normally call “consciousness” … as we have been establishing … a subset of which is thought or psyche or the mental, then what occurs in the realm of the psychic will often manifest (to us) in physical reality.

This perspective is fruitful for understanding many common but otherwise unexplainable events, such as synchronicity.

In Observing the World, We Are Observing Mind

Further, the idea that physical reality is comprised of psychic events means something astounding. What this means is that Reality has the same substance as do dreams: Material Reality has psychic substance. And literally, as the mystics say, life IS a dream. When we look at Reality we are observing the workings of Mind.

Or as some people would say, the workings of God.

Continue with Are Crop Circles Messages from Our Higher Self Urging Us to a Primal Return to Nature to save Ourselves? Crop Circles, UFOs, and the First Fall from Grace in Nature

Return to The Rest of the World, Given the Chance, Is Out to Love You: Matter As Metaphor, Part Three — Expect Less … and More … from Your Wasps

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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 Fifteen: Open the Jar, Pandora, and Return of The Centaur … Wherein Lies Real Hope

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

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.

Continue with 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

Return to Enter the Centaur: Wherein Lies Real Hope – Sixties and Millennial Generations Are Shamans for Deluded Promethean “Fathers”: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 14

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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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A Re-Visioning of “Civilization” in Light of Impending Apocalypse … Prometheus Made us “Civilized” … And Doomed: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 13

Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Thirteen: On Defiance, Alienation from Nature, “Civilization,” Apocalypse, Marxism, OWS, and Ayn Rand

Will “Progress of Man” Be Humanity’s Epitaph?

All of the “achievements” of “civilization,” these increases of control over Nature, are traditionally seen as the “progress of man,” the advance and evolution of humans. On the brink of ecocide and humanicide as we now are as a result of these developments, we have a unique vantage point for re-visioning these changes. Are these vaunted human “achievements” so great if they lead to species annihilation, species suicide, as is becoming increasingly likely?

We now continue to look into these questions. And the very next thing we see is that even the myths from ancient times give us evaluations and prognoses on us that are surprising in light of our current rationalizations of ourselves as a species.

Defiance, Alienation from Nature,
“Civilization” … Apocalypse

Defiance = Birth Pain = Separation From the Real

Other aspects of the Prometheus and Eden myths fit with the interpretation I am making of it: Stealing fire/ eating the apple/ eating meat is the great act-out of the primal birth pain we created for ourselves by standing upright. It was a defiant act against Nature and Universal harmony, but it set us on the human path of being distinct from all other species. Without real access/ connection to the Real, we created substitute realities—culture, structured societies, status, language and writing, power relations, and abstract creative products. [Footnote 1]

Prometheus Makes Us “Civilized” … And Doomed

Fitting with that, Prometheus is given the central role in making humans distinct from all species, creating humanity, in giving defining attributes to humans to set us apart from all species and these are said to be fire and all the civilizing skills. Prometheus is credited with, not only securing meat, fire, and all ailments and troubles (with Pandora), but also with bringing civilization and all its components of science, agriculture, mathematics, medicine, art, and literature…fine things no doubt, but all being aspects of control of Nature, opposition to the natural, abstraction and alienation from the divine, and not harmony with it or balance in relation to it. And only now are we beginning to understand the price that comes with these, as indeed we are suffering the penalties allotted Adam and Eve, Icarus, and Prometheus for their over-reaching and hubris. We are nearing the end of the slide into apocalyptic oblivion that Prometheus, Adam and Eve, and Pandora set us on (poetically speaking).

The Answers

But within these myths lie the answers to our dilemma as well. These products of the consciousness of billions of previous humans—added to and refined over the millennia—prophesize the apocalypse looming before us, but these tensions cannot exist in myth except being inextricably entwined with the very means of their release and resolution. So they lay before us the way home for us as well; and they predict our redemption and how it will happen. It is to this we now turn.

Before looking at the resolutions of the uniquely human apocalyptic dilemma we have created, let me address something that is no doubt on many readers’ minds.

How Promethean “Heroism” Set Off Our Slide Into Alienation and Apocalypse … His “Rebellion” Was an Abomination, Not a Blessing

I know you are not used to hearing the Prometheus myth interpreted as a defiant act not a heroic act. It is never compared with the defiant acts portrayed in the Eden or Icarus myths as I am here doing. Icarus is rightly said to be a tragic example of hubris or failed ambition, high-flying ambition. In Eden, Adam and Eve defy the sole divine commandment. But they can all be seen as acts of over-reaching, certainly as acts of hubris. And in all of them punishment follows the selfish act; there is karmic retribution for upsetting the natural or divine order.

Prometheus Is a Criminal Not Heroic Figure…On Over-Reaching and Hubris

But remember that hubris and over-reaching was actually the earliest understanding of the Promethean act. It appears that time, understandably—as it does—provided a rationalization of the defiant act. [Footnote 2]

As with everything else—language, culture, hierarchical society, and the like—humans turn their faults into achievements, their crimes into heroism, their cowering before truth into brave creations of castles in the sky. So it is that the Romantic poets Shelley and Byron saw this myth as a reflection of defiance against an oppressive authority, as in their time was the Church; French Revolutionaries saw it as a poke in the eye to the parasitic blue bloods of their age; and Marxists and other activists find inspiration in it for struggle against the suffocating prerogatives of capitalism and imperialism.

They are fine to find inspiration where they can. I submit, however, that a deeper and more currently relevant understanding is the one I am presenting here and which was the earliest understanding. And despite all the rationalizing that’s been done on it, this earlier understanding—the one making it analogous to the Eden and Icarus structures—does shine through at times. In my opinion, Mary Shelley understood its real meaning when in 1818 she subtitled her masterpiece novel, Frankenstein “The Modern Prometheus.” In it, she demonstrates a remarkably current, postmodern theme of the dangers of human hubris, of taking us into arenas of knowledge that we are nowhere near capable of managing … doing again, as we did at the beginning in taking from the divine the determination of life and death over the flora, fauna, and even other humans at times, mucking with the divine order by stirring up the forces deep within the atom and the DNA, opening more and more of Pandora’s jars, which can no longer be closed, many of them. So, yes, Shelley’s understanding is closer to my interpretation of the meaning of bringing these “civilizing arts” … In other words, they are in their essence and therefore their ultimate fruits abominations!

If my interpretation of Prometheus is still not understood and one wishes to follow Marxist, revolutionary, romantic, and modern interpretations of Prometheus as a righteous defier of injustice and heroic bringer of boons—in a way as to make him a model for our real occupy wall street and Arab Spring heroes today—than consider why it is that the person on the extreme other side of this revolutionary ideology, Ayn Rand, uses Prometheus as a model for her ideology of rapacious individuality, which she does in her novels Anthem and the fanatically worshipped, Atlas Shrugged. So, no. Ayn Rand’s rendering shows the myth to be, at its base, depicting the ultimate perversion of a natural benign order and a criminal defiance of Nature—as the industrialists and polluters of today show us—and not the revolutionary overthrow of an oppressive rule, as Marxists, Romantic poets, and French Revolutionaries saw it. [Footnote 3]

Continue with Enter the Centaur: Wherein Lies Real Hope – Sixties and Millennial Generations Are Shamans for Deluded Promethean “Fathers”: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 14

Return to Deep Thoughts on The Fall – On Sacrifice, Dominion Over Death, Meat, and Murder … Beginning Our Apocalypse: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 12

Footnotes

1. See The Great Reveal, Chapter Thirty-Five: The Twenty-Seventh Prasad. A-mazing Cultural Maze.

2. On “time, understandably, as it does, provided a rationalization of the defiant act,” see “A Blessing for You…To Choose or Refuse”—The Great Reveal from The Planetmates: The Complete Prasads, especially

• The Great Reveal, Chapter Twelve: The Fourth Prasad – Origins of Ego; Human Superiority a Defense Against Actual Inferiority Relative to Planetmates (Animal Kingdom)

• The Great Reveal, Chapter Twenty-One: The Thirteenth Prasad. Breaking with Divinity, Resisting Divine Assistance

• The Great Reveal, Chapter Twenty-Two: The Fourteenth Prasad. Eating the “Apple,” Defying Divine Assistance

• The Great Reveal, Chapter Thirty-Four: The Twenty-Sixth Prasad. Ego Towers Over Everything

3. Regarding the glow-in-the-dark cats shown in the photo, see “12 bizarre examples of genetic engineering” at http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/photos/12-bizarre-examples-of-genetic-engineering/glow-in-the-dark-c

Continue with Enter the Centaur: Wherein Lies Real Hope – Sixties and Millennial Generations Are Shamans for Deluded Promethean “Fathers”: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 14

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Why Humans Are the Sorriest of Species … Apocalyptic Foretellings Hidden in Myths of Eden, Prometheus, Pandora, Icarus, Cain and Abel: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 11

Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Eleven: Prometheus, Meat-Eating, Pandora, Eden, the Apple, the Fall, Cain, Abel, and When and Why Human Life Became All About Work

Meat-Eating and Apocalypse…First Falls and Last

After writing the previous section on fire, meat, Prometheus, and Icarus, and in subsequent research into the Prometheus myth, I found there is far more connection in the myth to the eating of meat than I realized. Also, the myth’s elements underscore the idea in the previous article that in stealing fire/ eating meat, we set off the developments that would lead to our apocalyptic prognosis today. Further, it is clear that the Prometheus myth is the Greek analogue to the Judaic myth of Eden and the Fall, which supports my thinking that the apple in the Garden of Eden represents meat—meat eating…hunting…killing of planetmates.

The Greek Fall from Grace—Prometheus

Prometheus’s Meat Trick

In the Prometheus myth, the fire stealing started with a trick that Prometheus played on Zeus. Prometheus—midway between gods and men, a Titan—gave the god two offerings from which Zeus was to choose. He gave meat and bones. Zeus chose the bones, supposedly because it was packaged more attractively. This is said to be the basis for why humans eat meat, according to ancient understandings.

Zeus—Not Amused

But when Zeus realized the trick, he was pissed … understandably. He hid fire from humans in retribution. Subsequently, Prometheus stole the fire and gave it to mankind. But this angered Zeus even more. So, this time to take revenge, he sent the first woman, Pandora, to live with men.

Ha Ha … Very Funny, Zeus. Thanks a Lot for the Pandora

Pandora literally means “all gifts.” So it is that Pandora represents all the blessings that come with human advancement, represented by harnessing fire. But Pandora, as we all know, brings all troubles as well. She carries a jar that, opened, releases all “evils, harsh pain and troublesome diseases which give men death.”

Pandora shuts the jar but it is too late, and many of the evils had already escaped. Interestingly, what remains in the closed jar along with the rest of the evils is hope. This is a theme that I return to again and again in this book and the subsequent one, The Great Reveal, in discussing what we need to do about our dire situation: That is, turn and face it, delve deeper into it and not turn away, for therein lies our only real hope.

Eden – the Biblical Fall – Life Becomes Endless Work and Struggle

But notice the parallels with the myth of Eden. In the Biblical rendering, the eating of the apple—which I say represents eating meat—results in the end of easy existence and that from then on humans survive only through “the sweat of one’s brow.”

The Original “Leisure Society”

Sure enough, the end of the nomadic and vegetarian existence of early humans—called the first “affluent society” because it required only three hours a day of work to garner what was needed for survival—occurs with the introduction of hunting, then agriculture, then husbandry. [The Great Reveal and Footnote 1]

Strenuous Living, Slavery to Survival

And in the Bible, we notice that immediately after Eden, the “second generation” of humans is seen working strenuously to survive as represented by Cain and Able, who were one a tiller of the soil and the other a herder of animals.

That not bad enough, but then after Cain slew Abel, like a second fall from grace God added an even greater load of hard work. Cain was told that to punish him, the earth that had soaked up the blood he’d spilled would resist aiding him in producing his crops and he and those who came after him would have strenuous work in eking sustenance from her and a hard life in simply surviving.

As an aside, notice how whenever we talk about the deepest structures of our mind—and myths provide a glimpse into that—we see the perinatal gestalt. For the Earth here—the placenta—is no longer rich, nourishing, and helpful but, as is the case for the prenate in the late stages of gestation, is impoverished of oxygen and nutrients and less vital, less supportive of one’s continued living.

Promethean Fall – Defiance is Punished by Hard Work, Like in Eden

And the Prometheus myth also has this same sequence as in Eden and the Fall of a defiance of the ways of Nature and God followed by a punishment and suffering, but also by strenuous work as being the lot of humans from then on. For as Hesiod relates the myth, Zeus did more than take fire from humans in revenge for being tricked out of the meat that Prometheus first deprived him of (and for that you can read that humans took from God/Nature the determination of life and death, which in our deciding to kill planetmates, we most assuredly did, see next post), but Zeus also took from humans “the means of life.”

And the consequences of this are similar to being cast out of Eden. For if fire had not been stolen…meat not eaten by humans…humans not adopted hunting, horticulture, husbandry, as Hesiod puts it, “you would easily do work enough in a day to supply you for a full year even without working; soon would you put away your rudder over the smoke, and the fields worked by ox and sturdy mule would run to waste.”

Continue with Deep Thoughts on The Fall – On Sacrifice, Dominion Over Death, Meat, and Murder … Beginning Our Apocalypse: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 12

Return to 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

Footnote

1. Excerpted from “From Hunting and Gathering to Sowing and Reaping”

Cultural evolution can be defined as the process of developing the tools and skills to deal with certain challenges. Therefore challenges present the key stimulus for any kind of development. The challenge to survive as a hunter/gatherers is not inconsiderable – and early humans met the challenge for hundreds of thousands of years, without depleting their natural environment. Agriculture was invented about 10000 years ago and many of the environmental crisis we face today are directly related to this paradigm shift, from the destruction of the world’s forests in order to grow crops, to the depletion of land due to monocultural plantations, to salination and a thousand other woes.

Early humans were nomads. They roamed within a certain range. Trespassing into another group’s range could result in conflict. However, due to population limits, each group’s range was quite extensive. It is often assumed that finding food must have been incredibly challenging and time consuming, yet, research has demonstrated that in favourable habitats only an average of 3h per day are needed to collect food, plus some more time for preparation. Anyone who has ever even partially lived on foraged foods knows that nature supplies plentifully – each thing in its season. It is also a popular idea to imagine that people were moving around constantly, only remaining in one place for a matter of days. But there is no reason to assume such restlessness. It seems far more likely that people would move from campground to campground in accordance with the seasons, in tune with the things they would find in each place. And it seems reasonable to assume that they would remain in each place long enough to gather and process for transport whatever gifts Mother Nature had offered. Only in areas that are particularly hostile, such as deserts or the circumpolar regions, would frequent moving be necessary since food supplies are less abundant.

(At the 1966 ‘Man the Hunter’ conference, Marshall Sahlins presented a paper entitled, “Notes on the Original Affluent Society,” in which he challenged the popular view of hunter-gatherers living lives “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” as Thomas Hobbes had put it in 1651. According to Sahlins, ethnographic data indicated that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well. Their “affluence” came from the idea that they are satisfied with very little in the material sense. This, he said, constituted a Zen economy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer)

More at “From Hunting and Gathering to Sowing and Reaping” at http://www.sacredearth.com/ethnobotany/food/civilization.php

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Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Ten: Of Cigarettes, Lucifer, Prometheus, and Icarus—Why Humans Are Addicted to Burning Things … And Its Dire Prognosis

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

Why Humans Are So Big on Burning

Humans did not always do things to adversely affect the air they breathe, however. We were not always fire burners or food cookers. It is common knowledge that at a certain point in our evolution, we began harnessing fire for warmth, for cooking, and for other purposes, including entertainment. Consider that fact for a second…why are we the only species to do this? (And we are.) Now consider the aspect of our uniquely human fetal malnutrition as neonates and prenates we’ve been looking into.

No other species needs to “burn” carbon-based fuels for survival; we only need a tiny amount of air to stoke our “inner fires” when converting food to energy. Yet we have added that incredible weight of setting things ablaze and burning fuels to our burden on the planetary resources and the environment ever since we began using fire.

Consider if the fetal malnutrition/oxygen starvation we created for ourselves as unborns by standing upright might be manifesting itself as the need to burn stuff and thereby decrease the oxygen in our immediate environment, and increase the toxins there. Is it possible that fetal malnutrition, which is the result of bipedalism, contributed later to our use of fire? For, as I continually point out, we are triggered into our unfaced early pain, at the same time as we seek to run from it, while we unconsciously act to bring it about, so we might at some point face it and heal ourselves (though we rarely do).

You think it a strange idea that we might be unconsciously wanting to re-create the “stuffiness” in the womb by burning stuff and creating air around us that mimics that state? Really? Do you think it normal for someone to create tiny “fire sticks” and “suck” the bad air they produce? Do you not wonder why we are the only ones to burn tobacco and other vegetation so we might inhale the exhaust from it, the smoke from the fire we create? If we came across a culture where they built fires and stood around sticking their faces in the smoke to inhale it, how would we view that? How is cigarette smoking different? Yes, we are the only species that has that invention of cigarettes (cigars, pipes, hookahs….and so many more). And you think MY hypothesis odd?

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Yes, Billy Joel, We DID Start the Fire

Is it any wonder we portray hell as one of eternal fire? Not only does it coincide with the prenatal feelings of burning on the surface of the skin, which I’ll soon explore in more depth. But in that human beings are the ones being referred to when we speak of the myth of Lucifer; it makes sense that Lucifer’s home after being cast from heaven would be one of fire. Satan is always pictured in a “cave”—another womb symbol—of sorts with fires all around him. Humans compulsively create environments in which they are surrounded by fire. Just look around you…automobiles, heaters, electrical energy created by combustion….

We also have myths that tell us alternately that use of fire is the great break with Nature that makes us humans, as well as myths saying that our being too reckless and getting too close to fire is what causes our downfall. When you think of it, am I not saying both of those?

Many ethnographies tell of Creation Myths that include a hero that brings fire, therein getting things started for those peoples as a distinct culture. [Footnote 1]

In Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire for humans from the gods and was punished by being tied to a rock and forced to endure eagles picking away at his entrails for eternity… Maybe it is true that cooking food was not a great health step forward as many nutritionists schooled in naturopathy and wholistic health and enjoining about the benefits of raw foods have been pointing out. [Footnote 2]

As I’ve said, meat was the apple in the Garden of Eden and killing of planetmates was the first step in our downward slide into savagery. Since the primary difference that the use of fire made to the life ways of humans was allowing the cooking of meat—which helped preserve it and made it more storable, perhaps this myth of Prometheus is also referring to that negative turn in our diet … and nutritionists will tell you that meat eating is the primary cause of all the gut ailments we have—colon cancer and the rest—and that a diet high in it correlates with a sharp reduction in the intake of roughage and fiber, with all their health benefits.

And sure enough, we find that the nomadic, foraging early humans left waste material high in roughage—of indigestible cellulose and vegetative matter. Indigenous societies even today have strikingly different diets than more “civilized” ones. Medical anthropologists long ago determined they eat so much more non-meat foods that the average time it takes for food to pass completely through their body is 24 hours, whereas it takes the average Westerner 72 hours for food to be eliminated. They view this difference as the main reason indigenous cultures have so much less colonic ill health than modern societies in which gut ailments are rampant. Perhaps the Prometheus myth is detailing where we took that wrong turn and the health consequences we were punished with thereafter.

And then there are the myths of being reckless regarding fire. One example, in a Greek myth, Icarus was given wings to fly, pasted on with wax. He did fly. But in getting too close to the sun…that big fire in the sky…the wax that held his wings melted, he lost his wings, and plunged to Earth and to his end. Might this not be a metaphor for so-called human “evolution”? Might it not be predicting the apocalyptic end we see before us, because of our misuse of fire of all kinds—the manic firing up of fossil fuels, the insane powering up of the atom for doomsday bombs and nuclear plants, and so on?

Continue with Why Humans Are the Sorriest of Species … Apocalyptic Foretellings Hidden in Myths of Eden, Prometheus, Pandora, Icarus, Cain and Abel: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 11

Return to People Are Already Dying Because of Oxygen Deprivation … Global Oxygen Loss Has Dire Significance Physically AND Psychologically: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 9

Footnotes

1. On the theft of fire and the beginnings of culture in world mythology:

• According to the Rig Veda (3:9.5), the hero Mātariśvan recovered fire, which had been hidden from mankind.
• In Cherokee myth, after Possum and Buzzard had failed to steal fire, Grandmother Spider used her web to sneak into the land of light. She stole fire, hiding it in a clay pot.^[22]
• Among various Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest and First Nations, fire was stolen and given to humans by Coyote, Beaver or Dog.^[23]
• According to some Yukon First Nations people, Crow stole fire from a volcano in the middle of the water.^[24]
• According to the Creek Native Americans, Rabbit stole fire from the Weasels.^[25]
• In Algonquin myth, Rabbit stole fire from an old man and his two daughters.^[26]
• In Ojibwa myth, Nanabozho the hare stole fire and gave it to humans.
• In Polynesian myth, Māui stole fire from the Mudhens.^[27]
• In the Book of Enoch, the fallen angels and Azazel teach early mankind to use tools and fire.

From Prometheus in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus

2. Promethean parallels in other mythologies include

• In Georgian mythology Amirani challenged the chief god and for that was chained on Caucasian mountains where birds would eat his organs.
• In Norse mythology, the god Loki (often associated with fire) was bound to a rock. Above him is a large serpent which drips toxic venom upon him. His wife collects the poison in a bowl, but must empty it every time it gets full. As she is in the process of doing this, the snake proceeds to cover Loki in poison. Just as Prometheus gets his liver eaten only to have it grow back again, Loki is temporarily saved from venom only to have it drip on him once more.

From Prometheus in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus

Regarding the the Norse myth, remember what was said in a previous post about one of the feeling complexes in late gestation being the discomfort of being in a toxic womb environment. I will discuss this feeling constellation in more detail in an upcoming post, where this myth will be even more illustrative.

Continue with Why Humans Are the Sorriest of Species … Apocalyptic Foretellings Hidden in Myths of Eden, Prometheus, Pandora, Icarus, Cain and Abel: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 11

Return to People Are Already Dying Because of Oxygen Deprivation … Global Oxygen Loss Has Dire Significance Physically AND Psychologically: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 9

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Prenatal Imprints for Air Pollution and the Greenhouse Effect … Fetal Malnutrition, Oxygen Starvation, and the Global Environment: Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Eight

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

Let us now turn to how we bring this prenatal oxygen struggle, termed fetal malnutrition, into our adult attitudes toward and interactions with our planetary atmosphere and global environment.

Latent Worldwide Oxygen Panic?

The Fetus’s Latent Oxygen Panic

Remember, what the fetus experiences in the late stages of development in the womb is a state of a reduced oxygen, which causes subtle but simmering uncomfortable feelings of suffocation and a feeling of latent oxygen panic. Keep in mind also that this lessening of oxygen intake correlates necessarily with an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the prenate’s blood supply.

These changes from the optimal might seem minuscule to us as adults, but we need to consider that the unborn child is living 24/7 in this environment. It might be thought of as comparable to being stuck in a cramped room in which the air has become stuffy and gets increasingly so…and one is not even able to open a window occasionally for some relief. Think about that situation and especially how it keeps getting worse, and you may already sense the beginnings of a panic. That is what I am talking about. And remember that you as a prenate had no way of knowing that you were not, in fact, dying; you could not either, as you can now, console yourself with the thought that you could go out and get yourself more air at any point if it got too uncomfortable.

Gag Me With Exhaust—The Greenhouse Effect

So, the prenatal situation is analogous to our current environmental one. In both of them there is an increase in carbon dioxide—called “the greenhouse effect” when referring to the atmosphere. Perhaps these reflections between the prenatal and the planetary are not made often enough because in each case there is a tendency to focus on different halves of the equation: In terms of the prenatal situation, it is more common to think about the oxygen reduction; whereas when discussing the planetary situation it is almost always talked about as an increase in the carbon dioxide.

That We Don’t Want to See

In each case this seeing with blinders on seems unconsciously calculated to avoid another and perhaps harder to face unpleasantness involved. In the prenatal situation it is the increased carbon dioxide, mentioned above and analogous to the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere and air pollution in the cities…this will be dealt with below under the category of “bad blood.” In the planetary it is the reduced oxygen involved that is never brought up; this is the part that is directly analogous to the “fetal malnutrition” as it is normally thought of, that is, as just a deficiency of oxygen.

Oxygen Insufficiencies

At any rate, by this atmospheric rearrangement I mean that, while we reputedly have, and need, an oxygen concentration of twenty percent in our atmosphere, concentrations of oxygen these days, especially in heavily industrial areas, have been measured at much lower levels. For example, an industrial section of Gary, Indiana, was recorded at levels below that able to sustain human life.

Affecting Bodily Health

This is as reported in the book, O2xygen Therapies by Ed McCabe. Other examples of lowered oxygen levels in various arenas of our lives are given in the book as well, and the book is thoroughly documented. It makes a convincing case for the lowered oxygen levels as they relate to the rising statistics of a number of diseases. [Footnote 1]

Affecting Mental Health

The connection I am making here of this reduced availability of O2 to psychological states and mental screens of perception is my own addition. However, I am informed as well by an understanding of intake of toxins as they relate to mental and psychological states, which I first found detailed in George Watson’s rare and astonishing work, Nutrition and Your Mind. [Footnote 2]

Global Oxygen Hunger

Regardless of these blatant situations of oxygen insufficiency—related to particularly adverse environments—and their effects on the bodily health of humans, there is an overall global decrease in oxygen, which, while not as extreme, is so pervasive and inescapable that it has profound consequences for all life on this planet.

Ocean Oxygen—Dead Zones and Overall Depletion

To get an idea of the distinction I am making, let us compare this atmospheric oxygen distribution with what we know of what is happening in the planet’s water supply, its oceans. The first instance of inordinate oxygen deficiency might be likened to the “dead zones” we know to exist in the seas. In these huge areas, some of them hundreds of miles in length, no life exists for there is no oxygen in the water. The second instance might be likened to the overall reduction in oxygen in oceans with the destruction of the oxygen-producing plankton and the other environmental pressures to lower the oxygen levels of the oceans worldwide. So there are wide variances of oxygen concentration in our oceans inside of a lowering of its oxygen level overall.

Atmospheric Oxygen

Similarly, there has to be wide variance in oxygen levels in air. Simply think of the differences we are aware of from indoors to outdoors, from one room, say one with an oxygen consuming fire blazing in the hearth, to another, say, with its windows wide open. So while there are wide variances in oxygen levels from location to location—some so deficient as to sicken, cause unconsciousness, and in extreme situations kill people—there is also the reduced oxygen levels, on average, throughout the globe—caused by our uniquely human compulsion to burn carbon-based fossil fuels—which though minute, is both increasing and has subtler but more pervasive and so more dire implications.

Globally, Beginning to Gasp for Air

The results of one study were released not long ago by the Scripps Institute. The Scripps study monitored the oxygen in our atmosphere on the whole over a twenty-year period. It found a .1% decrease in global oxygen by 2005 since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the late 19^th century. [Footnote 3]

So let us deal with each of these points in turn: that people are dying because of our insistence on burning stuff; that the overall global decrease though minute is serious and is having noticeable worldwide effects even as I write; and that this compulsion to burn stuff is uniquely human and what are the implications of that.

Continue with People Are Already Dying Because of Oxygen Deprivation … Global Oxygen Loss Has Dire Significance Physically AND Psychologically: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 9

Return to Oxygen Starvation and the Oliver Twist Economies We Are Imprinted in the Womb to Insist Upon…Prenatal Capitalism: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 7

Footnotes

1. O2xygen Therapies by Ed McCabe. 99-RD1 Morrisville, NY 13408: Energy Publications, 1988. See also http://www.oxygenhealth.com/

2. Nutrition and Your Mind by George Watson, 1976. See also http://naturalbias.com/your-nutritional-individuality-and-unhealthy-emotions/

3. As reported, as follows, in the article, Atmospheric Oxygen Levels Fall As Carbon Dioxide Rises at http://blogcritics.org/scitech/article/atmospheric-oxygen-levels-fall-as-carbon/. It reads partly as follows:

According to a study conducted by scientists from the Scripps Institute there is less oxygen in the atmosphere today than there used to be. The ongoing study, which accumulated and interpreted data from NOAA monitoring stations all over the world, has been running from 1989 to the present. It monitored both the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the decline in oxygen. The conclusion of that 20 year study is that, as carbon dioxide (produced primarily by burning fossil fuels) accumulates in the atmosphere, available oxygen is decreasing….

Carbon dioxide seems to be almost the total focus of attention in the climate change model as it exists today. After reviewing the results of this study and talking with Dr. Ralph Keeling (one of the lead scientists on the study), it seemed to me that the consequences of atmospheric oxygen depletion should be included in any discussion of atmospheric change….

… we are losing nearly three O2 molecules for each CO2 molecule that accumulates in the air….

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution we have removed .095% of the oxygen in our atmosphere. True, that is only a tenth of one percent of the total supply, but oxygen makes up only 20% of the atmosphere. I looked up safety rules regarding oxygen concentrations and according to OSHA rules on atmospheres in closed environments, “if the oxygen level in such an environment falls below 19.5% it is oxygen deficient, putting occupants of the confined space at risk of losing consciousness and death.” What happens if the world’s atmospheric levels of oxygen fall to 19.5% or lower? Are we all going to have to carry little blue oxygen tanks with us to survive? Not a pleasant possibility….

Plants and certain bacteria take in carbon dioxide, combine it with water to form glucose and produce oxygen as a byproduct in the photosynthesis reaction. The current increase in carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere indicates that this cycle is no longer in balance. It shows that we have reached the point where the biosphere of the planet can no longer process all of the carbon dioxide that we are producing….

We currently make estimates of how many years we have left before excess carbon dioxide becomes a bigger problem than it already is but we aren’t really sure of their accuracy. However, to the best of my knowledge, we don’t have estimates of how long it might be, if oxygen continues to be depleted at its current rate, until it might become a problem. After all, while most of us may be willing to wait out the effects of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for a time just to see if we really do get warmer weather and more abundant crops out of the deal; how many of us want to wait and see how little oxygen we can survive on?

Read more: http://blogcritics.org/scitech/article/atmospheric-oxygen-levels-fall-as-carbon/

Continue with People Are Already Dying Because of Oxygen Deprivation … Global Oxygen Loss Has Dire Significance Physically AND Psychologically: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 9

Return to Oxygen Starvation and the Oliver Twist Economies We Are Imprinted in the Womb to Insist Upon…Prenatal Capitalism: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 7

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Ecocide – How Dare We Be Species Suicide-Bombers?

Eight Billion Neros Fiddling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Oil Spills and Reactor Blowups

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tom Waits – “Earth Died Screaming”

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

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Ecocide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death—not evil—may be beautiful.

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

EVIL!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Species-Suicide Bombers

The End of the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apocalypse Emergency

Suicidal Apes and Our Future as Mars

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

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

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

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

MEANING:

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

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

What’s in the Audio

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

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

I found compassion, not blame.

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

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

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

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

The ending lifted me.

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

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

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

“We’re all in this together.”

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

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

Apocalypse—No!

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

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

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

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

Reversing Babel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Footnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Has Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?

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

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

For more: ScienceDaily:

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

Rudy’s on the midway

And Jacob’s in the hole

The monkey’s on the ladder

The devil shovels coal

With crows as big as airplanes

The lion has three heads

And someone will eat the skin that he sheds

And the earth died screaming

The earth died screaming

While I lay dreaming of you

Well hell doesn’t want you

And heaven is full

Bring me some water

Put it in this skull

I walk between the raindrops

Wait in Bug House Square

And the army ants

They leave nothin’ but the bones

And the earth died screaming

While I lay dreaming of you

There was thunder

There was lightning

Then the stars went out

And the moon fell from the sky

It rained mackerel

It rained trout

And the great day of wrath has come

And here’s mud in your big red eye

The poker’s in the fire

And the locusts take the sky

And the earth died screaming

While I lay dreaming of you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings us to the disaster of Cites….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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