Prenatal Imprints of “Human Nature”: Four Programs of Human Personality Are Written Into Us in the Womb

Four Earliest Roots of War, Bigotry, Capitalism, and Pollution: Blueprints of Human Nature and Prenatal Personalities … Profound Sculpting of Who We Are Occurs at a Time We Cannot See

Wounded Deer and Centaurs, Chapter Four: Prenatal Imprints of Our Unnatural Self

The Perinatal Pulls of Pollution: Air Pollution and Fetal Oxygen Starvation

Increased Carbon Dioxide, But Also Decreased Oxygen

One overlooked, but hugely pervasive perinatal element of these strange days is connected to the increasing carbon dioxide concentration in our atmosphere called “the greenhouse effect” which occurs alongside the curiously overlooked yet necessarily corresponding decreases in oxygen levels. There is increasingly less oxygen as we use it up burning carbon-based fossil fuels and making carbon dioxide. [Footnote 1]

We have more carbon dioxide for that reason and also because we are stupidly destroying the Earth’s mechanisms for turning that carbon dioxide back into oxygen…forests and ocean plankton, for example. This increased carbon dioxide is called “the greenhouse effect.” While this has been looked at from the perspective of it creating global warming and climate change, there are even stronger corporate (profit-motivated) as well as personal psychological reasons why we do not look at its most immediate effect on humans—the amount of oxygen we get from the air we breathe. We will steal at least a brief glance into some psychological reasons now and while we are at it uncover rich veins of understanding of and possible solutions for not only our current environmental problems but certain political and social dilemmas which we will find are operating dialectically with them. For there are provocative and profound influences from our experiences in the late stages of our womb life on the kaleidoscope of our current postmodern lives.

Air Pollution Bring Up in Us Uncomfortable Feelings From Our Births

For the increased carbon dioxide and reduced oxygen of the globe is analogous to the situation of “fetal malnutrition,” described by Briend and DeMause, that occurs prior to birth, and which is the basis for DeMause’s explanation of poisonous placenta symbolism. Keep in mind in particular that we experience this reduction in oxygen and increase in carbon dioxide in the form of air pollution, which is most pronounced in larger cities. [Footnote 2]

The Perinatal Pushes on Human Nature

Bipedalism Causes Birth Pain

But let’s back up a bit and put this in context. Because humans stand upright—are bipedal—in the latest stages of gestation/pregnancy the weight of the fetus, now nearly at its largest, presses upon the arteries feeding the placenta and bringing oxygen to the unborn child. Of course this is most pronounced when the mother is standing, as the fetus weighs down upon arteries between itself and the bones of the pelvis. Reduced blood and oxygen means the fetus is not getting as much oxygen as it wants and could use. The fetus cannot gasp for breath but one can imagine it having a similar feeling…recall the sensation of holding one’s breath under water.

Birth Pain Makes Humans Out of Planetmates

This is an uncomfortable situation for the fetus which goes on for a long time and gives rise to many of our adult feelings of claustrophobia and entrapment, depression, no-exit hopelessness.This is one of those specific birth traumas we humans have acquired because of becoming bipedal that other species, our planetmates, do not have. It makes us different and sets us apart from all other species in ways that are not often positive or beneficial, however human. It is something that is crucial to the understandings I bring forth in my book, The Great Reveal (See “Bipedalism and Birth Pain“).

Four Blueprints of Human Consciousness Are Written in the Womb

Looking more closely at it, there are four major feeling constellations involved in this late gestation discomfort. They, along with other imprints from our prenatal and perinatal experiences, are integral parts of the foundation of our humanness—that part which is normally called “human nature” and is considered to have a basis that is genetic only.

These Aspects of Late Gestation Pain—Crowded, Gasping, Poisoned, Dirty —Are Important Molds For Human Nature, Which Scientists Have Heretofore Naively Labeled Genetic

It is a joke to think that just because a trait exists in humans at the time of birth that it is rooted in our DNA alone. That thinking is as archaic as flat earth theories became after the heliocentric revolution. For there are a full nine months of individual experience prior to birth that, being the earliest influences on all experiences and perceptions after them, are far more important in determining who we become and how we act later on than anything that happens to us after birth, even if it also occurs to us early on, as in infancy or childhood. It is wholesale naïve and rather quaint that esteemed scientists and intelligent lay folk would subscribe to the idea that just because one cannot see something happening with one’s eyes, it doesn’t have observable consequences. By that reasoning, we would never attribute causation to molecular events and would have no science of chemistry.

So, no, there are profound imprints on the way we think, view and interpret our experience, view the world, and act in relation to ourselves, others, and the world, which are stamped upon our psyche by our earliest experiences. For now let us look at the provocative and profound influences from our experiences in the late stages of our womb life. They are especially deep and far-reaching molds for all later experience because they are, in general, the most painful, uncomfortable, and overwhelming experiences we have in the entire first nine months of our physical existence.

Four Blueprints of “Human Nature”

These imprints on our psyche caused by uncomfortable experiences in late gestation that are molds for and roots of a great deal of the later experience and behavior of humans can be put in four categories:

Crowded … “Back Off!”

First, we experience crowded, restricted conditions in the womb as we get larger and no longer enjoy the blissful uninhibited freedom of the previous time of our short lives.

I discussed in a previous section how we manifest this through overpopulation and then react to or run away from those feelings through activities like swimming and dancing. For now, suffice it to say we act this out as nations through wars in general (pushing back “lines” of the enemy), especially wars of “expansion.” Environmentally, we feel the need to push back and pave over Nature all we can. We’ll get more into these sorts of things soon.

Stifled… Gasping … “They’re Sucking the Very ‘Life Blood’ Out of Us!”

Second, because of pressure on arteries we experience a reduced blood flow and get less oxygen, therefore we experience “stuffiness,” suffocating feelings, feelings of need, want, and lack…and deprivation.

Later in life as individuals we are driven to gobbling up more resources than we need—greed. As nations we are compelled to exploit resources from those conquered territories we “expanded” into—colonialism and imperialism. It is fascinating how we act this out on both sides of class war and revolution also; that part is coming up soon. For now I just want to give you an idea of the critical importance of the understandings just ahead.

Disgusted… Poisoned … “Don’t Feed Me That Bullcrap!”

Third, the blood we do receive is not as good as it was, so we feel what we do get is “poisonous”…deficient, unhealthy, harmful…even deadly and threatening as in the feeling we might be being poisoned to death. It is “bad blood.” This sounds like the deprivation/gasping feelings, but though it is related it has a different quality: The difference is between gasping for breath as in being held under water and feeling one will die for lack of oxygen, versus being in a gas chamber and feeling that the air we breathe is foul, unhealthy, smelly…and is deadly because of its toxicity. They are considerably different in that in one we feel we will die for lack of resources—the outside is withholding something we need. In the other the outside very much is impinging on one but in a bad way; it is forcing itself on us, and it is felt as an assault.

This crops up later…these feelings have fractals at all levels…as the difference between a child being hurt because he or she is ignored, abandoned, unloved, or left alone versus a child getting “attention” but in the form of assault, abuse, violence, sexual assault. The first is a lack of something; the other is an unwanted getting of the opposite of what one wants/needs. It is the difference between being “starved” for knowledge and being “fed” propaganda, not the “pure” truth.

An interesting aside and look forward into what is coming up is that it is because the Nazis in particular were so caught up in this kind of “bad blood” matrix of feelings in the policies they carried out that they even created the manner of death for Jews that they did—gas chambers. In other words, because they felt the “blood” (money) they were receiving was “poisoned” (tainted, manipulated) by the Jews, it made the most perfect sense then, when it occurred to them, to fight back against these sources of “tainted blood” (Jews) by forcing “tainted blood” into them also, until they died (gas chambers). [Footnote 3]

Irritated… Dirty … “Eeew!”

Fourth, there are feelings caused by the fact that the decreased blood flow caused by pressure on the arteries providing blood to the placenta means that there will be reduced efficiency in removing the byproducts of oxygen combustion by the fetus. These are waste products or toxins of the biochemical process of food conversion into energy that are normally removed by the blood through the veins…to be expelled eventually one way or another back into the environment.

So there will be a backflow caused by the reduced blood flow, and the fetus experiences a buildup of toxins…think stuck in a traffic jam and breathing in the exhausts of all the vehicles around…any wonder road rage? The prenate feels increased “yuckiness” in its environment that is greater than anything experienced previously. Oh, the garbage man still comes to take out the trash…but think of it as the garbage man coming less often and one still puts out the garbage just as frequently. Imagine how one feels watching from one’s window as it piles up on the sidewalk. Perhaps you lived in New York during the huge garbage strike; you’d have an even better idea.

So, finally, there is the pain and discomfort of being surrounded by these toxins, forced to live in an environment that is felt to be dirty, “creepy,” ugly, toxic, threatening, filthy, slimy, yucky. And again this is related to the previous feeling complex but is different. For one can be forced to take in something noxious, or one can be immersed in something that is painful or uncomfortable like a bath that is too hot. In other words, this pain is on the surface of the body, not being forced inside, like the other.

How this noxious environment feels to the fetus can be that of irritation, uncomfortable heat, burning, and feelings of threat to one’s survival—thus alarm and panic—which those outside “impositions” bring up in a fetus. Historically this has been acted out on Jews and witches: They were placed like wood in heaps and burned to get rid of them as the threat they were felt to be. As in the gas chamber example, they perpetrated on the victim the sort of suffering the murderers felt was actually coming at them…witches and Jews were seen as a source of burning…if nothing else in that they could be responsible for one burning forever in hell.

And parts of this complex later on can be those of annoyance, yuckiness, being continually distracted by sensations (ADD), creepiness, dirtiness.

We feel bugged, irritated. We overkill pests and overclean our houses, using an abundance of toxic “product” which only adds to the overall toxicity of our environment. This is the perinatal underpinnings of what Freud called anal compulsion. It actually leads to us employing strict toilet-training, if you think about it.

We feel “imposed on” by others, especially “visitors” who come to our “house.” We feel surrounded by “dirty” hippies… Jews… blacks… immigrants…. You name it.

Roots of War, Bigotry, Pollution….

These feeling complexes sculpted by our early, uniquely human, prenatal discomfort and pain mold our politics, shape our wars and conflicts, determine how we treat the environment, and color how we see and treat each other. We will now deal with each of these in turn and discuss the way we act them out as adults politically, environmentally, and interpersonally.

Crowdedness, Packed Together “Like Sardines”

Can’t Move Freely – “Back Off!”…Cast Out of Heaven, Driven Out of Eden

The primary thing fetuses experience in the final stages of gestation is compression, crowdedness. We can no longer move in an uninhibited way. As we get increasingly larger, the womb seems to press in us, as prenates, from all sides, restricting our movements, suppressing our freedom. It “won’t let us do what we want to do.” I discussed this the previous chapter and how we manifest it through overpopulation.

This is quite a contrast, ever more stark and blatant as we get closer to actual birth, to the earlier euphoric feelings of all the rest of our lives at that point—that is to say, the previous seven-eight months of our lives since conception. This oppression from an an overwhelming and pervasive Other is shockingly different from the unrestrained movement of the not long ago, with its gravity-free ecstasy, and blissful unity with an Everything which was not at all threatening but just the opposite: supremely helpful, nurturing, and kind in the most perfect way. We remember the previous “golden age” and its easy, “heavenly” existence. This new existence feels like we have been driven out of Eden, cast out of heaven, and now must struggle and earn survival through the “sweat of one’s brow.”

Reactions – Swimming, Dancing, Mosh Pits, Religious Fantasy

I mentioned previously how our activities like gymnastics, flying, and skydiving are reactions to these uncomfortable feelings; they are attempts to run away from this discomfort as we continue to re-experience it as adults. I explored how we re-create and re-stimulate those blissful feelings in us through adult experiences of weightlessness, swimming, dancing, surfing, hot tubbing. I need to add loving sexuality to that—particularly in its re-stimulating blissful memories of re-union with an Other who is all-accepting, all-embracing, and eminently kind. I have explored how we seek resolution of these uncomfortable feelings through mosh pit “rebirthing” and warm water “rebirthing.” I need to add to that the seduction of the experience of being religiously “reborn.” [Footnote 4]

I wish to add now, since it becomes especially relevant to what follows from here on, the specifically environmental and especially political aspects and act outs of these early uncomfortable feelings.

Politically, As Nations – Wars of “Expansion”

Politically, as adults we feel we need to push back “lines” of the enemy, to fight off “oppression” (compression), to go to war. We act this out as nations through wars of “expansion” and through “conquering” of new territories…through imperialism. We are always pushing back lines of encroachment from some “enemy”…creating and then railing against the opposition on these “front lines.”

We re-create the switch we experienced in the womb from easy existence to struggle and discomfort by “spoiling” our peace and going to war. No, it is not smart; but it is what we are driven to do because of these patterns from our earliest experience.

The point of knowing all this…the reason why I am writing this and sharing this information…is because knowledge of these irrational tendencies is the most important and necessary step in discontinuing them. We can only have hope for our children in going beyond these tendencies in us of tens of thousands of years and longer through actually facing and coming to terms with the absurdity of our “normal human” pursuits…like war.

Environmentally – “We Paved Paradise; Put Up a Parking Lot”

We act out these same feelings just as illogically and self-destructively in our behavior in regards to the environment. Remember that, as prenates, the “environment” then was felt to be encroaching and blocking our easy movement. So, with these feelings now deeply ingrained in us as something we call “human nature” we hack back at actual Nature and push it all away to “make room”…excessive room…for ourselves…while conversely we make sure we will continue to re-stimulate these feelings through overpopulation, city life, dense and crowded neighborhoods, and traffic jams. [Footnote 5]

We put ourselves in human zoos and struggle with our neighbors over “boundary lines” and where fences should actually be placed…we gather on freeways with their traffic jams and experience “road rage” at the same time as fighting back against the feelings these situations create through inane environmental undertakings: We remove and destroy all trees to make an empty space, though we add trees after the fact. Doesn’t that strike you as a bit queer?

Environmentally, we destroy forests, we pave over Nature so that we can have huge houses and lawns (the bigger the better…we want more “womb”) and speed around (the faster and more nimbly the better) uninhibitedly in our cars (auto-mobile…free moving self…part of self capable of moving freely)… we cut off others in traffic and feel trapped (encroached upon, constrained or suppressed) by drivers that cut us off and don’t let us “in” (move freely)…thus road rage

Conversely, we take solace in speeding (though we risk tickets) and we take pleasure in watching racing and race car drivers and stunt drivers; also airplane and jet stunts and air shows and fighter pilots and jets.

Next: Our Repetitive Struggles to “Breathe Free”

We will continue looking at the ways we act out our early imprints and how we can actually stop continuing this self-destruction which has now reached an apocalyptic peak. But now let’s turn to another terrifying feeling we carry over in us from that hellish time as prenates, which we act out, politically and environmentally, in disastrous ways. We look now at the horrifying feelings of oxygen starvation—gasping, suffocating, and feeling stifled—and the crazy things we do to “breathe free” again.

“Please, Sir, Might I Have Some More?”—The Psychological and Economic Repercussions of Fetal Malnutrition

There are four important qualities of pain involved in late stage gestation. One has to do with being crowded and unable to move freely. The other three come under the category of fetal malnutrition: (1) You get less oxygen because of the reduced blood flow in late pregnancy; you experience lack of abundance and feelings of deprivation, impoverishment, “starvation.” (2) With the reduction of blood, you get a reduction in nutrients and insufficient removal of toxins so that the blood coming into and flowing through you is not felt to be as “pure”; you experience being poisoned, “infected”…prenatal “disgust.” (3) Finally, you experience a buildup of toxins in your placental environment as the reduced blood flow does not remove toxins as efficiently as it previously did; you feel irritated, bugged, “dirty”…prenatally imposed upon by the outside world.

Oxygen Starvation

So there’s crowdedness in the late stages of womb life, increasing up to the time of actual birth. But there’s the experience directly related to the fetal malnutrition—the increased pressure on arteries to the placenta which reduces blood flow hence the amount of oxygen the prenate receives—that occurs at that time. One feels “pressured” and “overwhelmed” as one becomes larger in the womb; but one also experiences not getting enough oxygen—the simmering panic of near drowning.

We Feel Recurrently Pressured, Overwhelmed, and Panicked

So there’s not moving; but there is also suffocation of sorts…they are related, but very different experiential constellations, both of which profoundly affect how humans will see their lives ever after … both experiences skewing our ability to ever see reality accurately—clear and “unfiltered.” Because of the distinctly different experiences humans have coming into the world—caused by our uprightness, our bipedalism—we are, unlike any other species, riddled with bouts of feeling “pressured” by events, “overwhelmed” by circumstances, and panicked by thoughts of suffocating for lack of vital resources—food, air, land, water, touch, interpersonal contact, tribal/societal belongingness.

The Struggles We Create to “Breathe Free”

We spend much of our lives struggling to “breathe freely,” to “get on top of things,” to “get out from under,” to “be ahead of the pack,” because of this time in late gestation when we felt stifled and in danger of dying lest our oxygen/blood supply be completely “dried up.” We cannot enjoy the blessings of the moment, for we are forever looking forward, fending off and steeling ourselves for possible unpleasantness in the future.

The lesson to be taken from this is not that our early life mirrors our adult, “real” lives. Something more important is being said: Having our lives suffused with these feelings is not necessary, and the perceptions and deductions one makes from them are not instructive … they are wrong interpretations of what is going on; they are “unreal” … when we once again experience them as adults.

These feelings are rooted in forgotten memories, imprints we carry from early experience, and they are not rooted in actual circumstances. Sure, we create a reality that matches these feelings, but the feelings are there first. And if we had less of these feelings, we would less often create situations that mirrored them.

Gasping

The feeling we carry with us, below the surface in life, is of not being able to breathe, to get enough air…as I have said it is like the discomfort we feel holding our breath under water. We have a simmering panic of “drowning”…of our oxygen supply being “cut off”…which is kept constantly in check.

As adults our experience is colored through with that feeling in ways so subtle we can no longer tease it out even if we wanted to…that is, unless we go through deep experiential psychotherapy, wherein we discover this to be the case. But the vast majority of us live our lives with a barely-kept-in-check panic that we will at some point be cut off from something that we need to survive—food, water, air, other people…and their concomitants—land, transportation, money, family, and so on.

The Oliver Twist Economies We Insist On…”Please, Sir, May I Have Some More?”

We act out these fears through excessive control of and storage of all these resources and through controlling and sycophantic behavior toward others in order to try to ensure a steady supply of vital resources.

Prenatal Feudalism

Yet even as we wrap up so much of our time and energy in these pursuits, we make sure we will feel no relief from their underlying uncomfortable feelings…as in every other of these feelings, we both seek relief from them and at the same time create the circumstances that give rise to them. In early economic systems, such as a “strong man” economy and feudalism, there is a simplified framework of control-conformity, dominance-sycophancy.

Prenatal Capitalism

But in “evolved” economic systems, we make certain we will not feel relief from the threat of lack (oxygen starvation/ fetal malnutrition): For we insist on a “dog eat dog” competitive system like capitalism, with its underlying Dickensian threat of an Oliver Twist state of deprivation—We get enough to survive, but it is not free and easy and leaves us always a little starved, wanting “some more.” We find all kinds of rationalizations for not adopting a more prosperous, more egalitarian, more cooperative, less competitive, and less stressful economic style as exemplified by socialism, for example.

Prenatal Socialism

Of course, there are societies who have done this historically — many indigenous cultures operate harmoniously this way; and there are societies and cultures that are attempting to create such a workable harmonious system today. But there are reasons why we refrain from wholesale adoption of such easier existences and why we insist on our economic struggles not being alleviated. For to adopt a cooperative socialist framework for meeting our actual needs would be akin to re-creating the earlier style of existence in the womb that was easy and free…the one that was Edenal…in harmony with Reality and Nature.

We’re the Ones Who Block a Return to Eden

That would be smart, of course. But as always we insist on our pains; we are forever doomed to creating situations that confront us with their reality unless or until we actually face and resolve them . So, while we are capable of living in more enlightened styles, we are for the most part going to ensure our existence in a state of struggle…we are the ones who put the angels to guard the gates of Eden.

Coming Up, Why We Steal Fire

In the next chapter we will look more closely at how we re-create our early pain in one specific area that has dire significance today, for it concerns what we are doing to our atmosphere. We are driven to want to suffocate ourselves, and we will see how this is rooted in our particular human beginnings, making us the one and only species on the entire planet that is so enamored of making fire. For from the earliest campfires to the nuclear power plants of today, humans are seen to like to burn things. What we discover is there are reasons, deeply rooted in our psyche, that would make us the penultimate Prometheans of Earth.

Continue with Global Oxygen Loss, Fire, and Prenatal Oxygen Hunger: Why Humans Are So Big on Burning, So Reckless About Polluting … Why We’re Globally Suffocating Ourselves

Return to The Primal Screen: The Doors of Perception Stormed and The Perinatal Rising — A Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life

Footnotes

1. This obvious though insistently overlooked fact has scientific support, of course:

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….

Read more: “Atmospheric Oxygen Levels Fall as Carbon Dioxide Rises” http://blogcritics.org/scitech/article/atmospheric-oxygen-levels-fall-as-carbon/#ixzz1ru2460V8

2. A. Briend, “Fetal Malnutrition: The Price of Upright Posture?” British Medical Journal 2 (1979): 317-319.

3. It would be interesting to find out what in particular was the cause of such inordinate fixation on this aspect of early prenatal pain…. For example, did Germans have more of this kind of pain as fetuses because German women did much more standing…being hard workers, perhaps…in the late stages of pregnancy than others? Such are the kinds of things that can make such differences.

And if women doing standing work right up to the time of birth correlates with excessive fetal malnutrition, what of women in primitive agrarian cultures working—in the fields or wherever—until practically the time of birth? Does this have anything to do with the increase in war and conflicts we observe in agrarian cultures over nomadic ones?… is there a corresponding increase in psychosis, ritual, and superstition…scapegoating and sacrifice…as, for example, with the Mayan and pre-Colombian New World cultures? No doubt there are many factors involved in these things, but are these prenatal contributing factors some important overlooked ones? If so, how important?

4. I differentiate between legitimate attempts at birth pain resolution—primal therapy, holotropic and other breathwork, water and breath “rebirthing”/vivation, and mosh pit “rebirthing”—from false ones like being religiously “reborn” or otherwise experiencing a “second birth” as in some social initiation. In the first instances, there are continual attempts to resolve something that needs such attention and in fact can never be fully resolved. In the second instance, there are actual feelings of rebirth, when one is religiously reborn; it is true. I know. I experienced it as my first experience of rebirth forty-four years ago.

The problem with religious “rebirth” has to do with this idea of trying to recapture ever afterward what is essentially a one-time experience and yet taking steps to insure no further such experiences or transformations will occur. One loses the feeling, feels “sinful” again (see upcoming posts on the BPM II elements of “bad blood” and “dirtiness” or review the overview of this in this chapter) and because one has barely touched it, let alone resolved the pain, needs “saving” over and over again, futilely. The fact that is not really resolved is proven in that the proponents of religious rebirth need to convert others to the experience in order for them to feel they have achieved it; this would not be necessary if one had. Further, the other components of birth pain seem to be more, not less, prevalent after religious “rebirth.” One feels “sinful,” “dirty,” and that others are “dirty,” “defiled,” “filthy,” “unwashed,” “toxic,” “impure,” and more. Again see upcoming chapters for details.

So it is not that religious experiences of being “reborn” are not legitimate and part of a psyche seeking healing and growth. It is that the experience is hung on to, looked back on; one is stuck in it. One says Christ will do it for one (He has died for one’s sins), so one does not have to experience the discomfort of facing these pains and discomforts from the womb oneself. The experience is institutionalized and never experienced again, though one surrounds oneself with true believers affirming the opposite, along with this idea that one does not have to suffer again…Christ has done it for one; or one can confess sins and the priest will take care of it…and so one is distracted from the discomfort that precedes any more growing or being born or transformed any further. As I like to say about such glancing experiences of real truth: Yes, it’s legit. But don’t make a fucking religion out of it.

Worst of all, the institution or social group takes over and restructures one’s self along the lines that will benefit it, not oneself, so one is not reborn into one’s real self but into an inauthentic fabrication benefiting some manipulative social group—Marines, evangelical group, secret society, ethnic group, or simply the normal adult neurosis of one’s culture.

5. As concerns creating the situations that bring up these early discomforts, as in unconsciously being drawn to create traffic jams, notice as I have, when you’re driving, how often folks will have two or more lines to go to, in traffic especially but sometimes in retail establishments as well, and will line up behind each other in one line, foregoing the empty ones. Not everybody does that; but explain the ones creating that line…what is driving them to act like lemmings and feel restrained when they could have it easier? This is not restricted to queues however, as we will see it is a metaphor for human irrationality rooted in these imprints.

Continue with Global Oxygen Loss, Fire, and Prenatal Oxygen Hunger: Why Humans Are So Big on Burning, So Reckless About Polluting … Why We’re Globally Suffocating Ourselves

Return to The Primal Screen: The Doors of Perception Stormed and The Perinatal Rising — A Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life

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Wars, Imperialism, and Why We Live in “Human Zoos”: The “Crowded” Feelings of Late Gestation—BPM II—and Their Political and Environmental Expressions: Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Six

Imprinted in the Womb for Wars of Expansion, Deforestation, Cities, Imperialism, and Road Rage—Crowded—”Back Off!”: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 6

Crowdedness, Packed Together “Like Sardines”

Can’t Move Freely – “Back Off!”…Cast Out of Heaven, Driven Out of Eden

The primary thing fetuses experience in the final stages of gestation is compression, crowdedness. We can no longer move in an uninhibited way. As we get increasingly larger, the womb seems to press in us, as prenates, from all sides, restricting our movements, suppressing our freedom. It “won’t let us do what we want to do.” I discussed this in a previous section and how we manifest it through overpopulation.

This is quite a contrast, ever more stark and blatant as we get closer to actual birth, to the earlier euphoric feelings of all the rest of our lives at that point—that is to say, the previous seven-eight months of our lives since conception. This oppression from an an overwhelming and pervasive Other is shockingly different from the unrestrained movement of the not long ago, with its gravity-free ecstasy, and blissful unity with an Everything which was not at all threatening but just the opposite: supremely helpful, nurturing, and kind in the most perfect way. We remember the previous “golden age” and its easy, “heavenly” existence. This new existence feels like we have been driven out of Eden, cast out of heaven, and now must struggle and earn survival through the “sweat of one’s brow.”

Reactions – Swimming, Dancing, Mosh Pits, Religious Fantasy

I mentioned previously how our activities like gymnastics, flying, and skydiving are reactions to these uncomfortable feelings; they are attempts to run away from this discomfort as we continue to re-experience it as adults. I explored how we re-create and re-stimulate those blissful feelings in us through adult experiences of weightlessness, swimming, dancing, surfing, hot tubbing. I need to add loving sexuality to that—particularly in its re-stimulating blissful memories of re-union with an Other who is all-accepting, all-embracing, and eminently kind. I have explored how we seek resolution of these uncomfortable feelings through mosh pit “rebirthing” and warm water “rebirthing.” I need to add to that the seduction of the experience of being religiously “reborn.” [Footnote 1]

I wish to add now, since it becomes especially relevant to what follows from here on, the specifically environmental and especially political aspects and act outs of these early uncomfortable feelings.

Politically, As Nations – Wars of “Expansion”

Politically, as adults we feel we need to push back “lines” of the enemy, to fight off “oppression” (compression), to go to war. We act this out as nations through wars of “expansion” and through “conquering” of new territories…through imperialism. We are always pushing back lines of encroachment from some “enemy”…creating and then railing against the opposition on these “front lines.”

We re-create the switch we experienced in the womb from easy existence to struggle and discomfort by “spoiling” our peace and going to war. No, it is not smart; but it is what we are driven to do because of these patterns from our earliest experience.

The point of knowing all this…the reason why I am writing this and sharing this information…is because knowledge of these irrational tendencies is the most important and necessary step in discontinuing them. We can only have hope for our children in going beyond these tendencies in us of tens of thousands of years and longer through actually facing and coming to terms with the absurdity of our “normal human” pursuits…like war.

Environmentally – “We Paved Paradise; Put Up a Parking Lot”

We act out these same feelings just as illogically and self-destructively in our behavior in regards to the environment. Remember that, as prenates, the “environment” then was felt to be encroaching and blocking our easy movement. So, with these feelings now deeply ingrained in us as something we call “human nature” we hack back at actual Nature and push it all away to “make room”…excessive room…for ourselves…while conversely we make sure we will continue to re-stimulate these feelings through overpopulation, city life, dense and crowded neighborhoods, and traffic jams. [Footnote 2]

We put ourselves in human zoos and struggle with our neighbors over “boundary lines” and where fences should actually be placed…we gather on freeways with their traffic jams and experience “road rage” at the same time as fighting back against the feelings these situations create through inane environmental undertakings: We remove and destroy all trees to make an empty space, though we add trees after the fact. Doesn’t that strike you as a bit queer?

Environmentally, we destroy forests, we pave over Nature so that we can have huge houses and lawns (the bigger the better…we want more “womb”) and speed around (the faster and more nimbly the better) uninhibitedly in our cars (auto-mobile…free moving self…part of self capable of moving freely)… we cut off others in traffic and feel trapped (encroached upon, constrained or suppressed) by drivers that cut us off and don’t let us “in” (move freely)…thus road rage

Conversely, we take solace in speeding (though we risk tickets) and we take pleasure in watching racing and race car drivers and stunt drivers; also airplane and jet stunts and air shows and fighter pilots and jets.

Next: Our Repetitive Struggles to “Breathe Free”

We will continue looking at the ways we act out our early imprints and how we can actually stop continuing this self-destruction which has now reached an apocalyptic peak. But now let’s turn to another terrifying feeling we carry over in us from that hellish time as prenates, which we act out, politically and environmentally, in disastrous ways. We look now at the horrifying feelings of oxygen starvation—gasping, suffocating, and feeling stifled—and the crazy things we do to “breathe free” again.

Continue with 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

Return to Blueprints of Human Nature and Four Earliest Roots of War, Bigotry, and Pollution: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 5

Footnotes

1. I differentiate between legitimate attempts at birth pain resolution—primal therapy, holotropic and other breathwork, water and breath “rebirthing”/vivation, and mosh pit “rebirthing”—from false ones like being religiously “reborn” or otherwise experiencing a “second birth” as in some social initiation. In the first instances, there are continual attempts to resolve something that needs such attention and in fact can never be fully resolved. In the second instance, there are actual feelings of rebirth, when one is religiously reborn; it is true. I know. I experienced it as my first experience of rebirth forty-four years ago.

The problem with religious “rebirth” has to do with this idea of trying to recapture ever afterward what is essentially a one-time experience and yet taking steps to insure no further such experiences or transformations will occur. One loses the feeling, feels “sinful” again (see upcoming posts on the BPM II elements of “bad blood” and “dirtiness” or see the overview in the previous post) and because one has barely touched it, let alone resolved the pain, needs “saving” over and over again, futilely. The fact that is not really resolved is proven in that the proponents of religious rebirth need to convert others to the experience in order for them to feel they have achieved it; this would not be necessary if one had. Further, the other components of birth pain seem to be more, not less, prevalent after religious “rebirth.” One feels “sinful,” “dirty,” and that others are “dirty,” “defiled,” “filthy,” “unwashed,” “toxic,” “impure,” and more. Again see upcoming posts for details.

So it is not that religious experiences of being “reborn” are not legitimate and part of a psyche seeking healing and growth. It is that the experience is hung on to, looked back on; one is stuck in it. One says Christ will do it for one (He has died for one’s sins), so one does not have to experience the discomfort of facing these pains and discomforts from the womb oneself. The experience is institutionalized and never experienced again, though one surrounds oneself with true believers affirming the opposite, along with this idea that one does not have to suffer again…Christ has done it for one; or one can confess sins and the priest will take care of it…and so one is distracted from the discomfort that precedes any more growing or being born or transformed any further. As I like to say about such glancing experiences of real truth: Yes, it’s legit. But don’t make a fucking religion out of it.

Worst of all, the institution or social group takes over and restructures one’s self along the lines that will benefit it, not oneself, so one is not reborn into one’s real self but into an inauthentic fabrication benefiting some manipulative social group—Marines, evangelical group, secret society, ethnic group, or simply the normal adult neurosis of one’s culture.

2. As concerns creating the situations that bring up these early discomforts, as in unconsciously being drawn to create traffic jams, notice as I have, when you’re driving, how often folks will have two or more lines to go to, in traffic especially but sometimes in retail establishments as well, and will line up behind each other in one line, foregoing the empty ones. Not everybody does that; but explain the ones creating that line…what is driving them to act like lemmings and feel restrained when they could have it easier? This is not restricted to queues however, as we will see it is a metaphor for human irrationality rooted in these imprints.

Continue with 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

Return to Blueprints of Human Nature and Four Earliest Roots of War, Bigotry, and Pollution: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 5

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Earth Aroused: It may be just the kind of global situation we see now around us that Nature would need to create to save “HerSelf”

Apocalypse No! Chapter Twelve:
Through Gaia’s Eyes, Nature Heals HerSelf

Things Never Before Seen

“Tinkle-Down” Economics

“This land is your land,” they sing. Taking them at their word, my wife and I spent a year, in the early Nineties criss-crossing our land in a twenty-three-foot Prowler travel trailer, pulled by an old but ambitious Oldsmobile with way too little horsepower. Our idea was to attend conventions and trainings in our field before we had to be in Northern California, by September 1992, where I had accepted admission into a graduate program. [Footnote 1]

So West and East, North and South we went—there was much to see…all too much to be alarmed about. This was, after all, in 1991-1992, the final year of the Reagan-Bush era when Reagan’s voodoo economics had played its course in distributing the wealth upward to the wealthy where it could be squandered on luxury items like yachts and overpriced objects of art and the trickle-down theory had shown itself to be a piss on the poor or, let us say, “tinkle-down” reality.

Correspondingly, the 1980s “party” was over. It left little money for government to do its job properly, though. The National Debt, after all, had nearly been quadrupled in this Reagan-Bush give-away to the rich. Budget cutbacks at all levels of government were in effect…and these cutbacks were grossly evident in what we saw.

“Neutron-bomb turf”

Similarly, the suckers…or coke-heads, or both…who had bought into the false prosperity promised by the Robin-Hood-in-reverse fiscal policies of the Eighties were now waking up from their mania with the hangover of ill-conceived schemes in ruins surrounding them. This was apparent in the places we traveled as well. All over Florida and Georgia, for example, we saw shopping centers looking half like ghost towns—evidence of recent bankruptcies or, my wife wondered, is it possible those spaces were never leased?

The only thing comparable in my experience I could think of was Springfield, Oregon, during the recession of the early Eighties. I remember well, while doing door-to-door anti-nuclear canvassing, how up to half the houses in a given neighborhood would be empty and unoccupied…the continual frustration of nobody answering doorbells leaves an imprint, I suppose…. We used to call it “neutron bomb turf”; and it almost—but not quite—served as an excuse for not making “quota.”

In Springfield, where the lumber industry was taking a beating because of the lack of new housing starts caused by the recession, people had moved out of town to look for work where it still existed.

But in the South in the early Nineties it was somehow different. My wife and I wondered if this plethora of vacancies had something to do with the S&L scandal: all those boondoggles…all those poorly conceived investment projects gone belly up, leaving only haunted shells as evidence of that mania.

Budget Cutbacks

Rest areas

Throughout the South, evidence of the cutbacks in services was everywhere. Too often we found rest areas along the highways so overcrowded we had to drive on for lack of parking. We saw tractor-trailers forced to park along exit routes, or side roads—anywhere there was space. Some rest areas had “two hour limit” signs—something else I had never come across—and others were closed down completely…”for cleaning,” allegedly.

I half expected to see truck wrecks littering the roadsides as I envisioned the plight of truckers pushing on in bleary-eyed exhaustion for lack of some place to pull over; or raising themselves up from a dead sleep, in a fog, with an alarm clock set to abide by the two-hour limit. I myself was rather dangerously dazed several times when, in the wee hours, we were forced to continue past eagerly anticipated rest areas that turned out to be barricaded or otherwise unavailable.

These imaginings of sleep-driving truckers barreling, obliviously, across medians and into oncoming traffic it turns out were premonitions, as a few years later they were proven to be horrifyingly correct. In 1998 to be exact, this problem became big enough to finally become a story in the mainstream media. Highway deaths, caused by a lack of places for sleepy truckers to park, were piling up in numbers too large to ignore any longer.

Of course, the media provided an alternative to fully acknowledging this truth—as they are wont to do—by laying alongside the actual facts a concocted theory that some trucking companies were at fault, for pressuring truckers to meet unreasonable deadlines for delivery. Regardless, scores of cars and other trucks have been involved in some of these accidents, including head-on collisions, with people dead and many injured.

But in ’91-’92, these realities had not been statistically blatant enough to make the evening news and went unnoticed. However our U.S. Congress was not completely oblivious to such effects of its cutbacks. “America can no longer afford to maintain its infrastructure,” they said in 1993 when they had the chance to appropriate money for ordinary maintenance. To get themselves off the hook, they dared to call these highway and infrastructure funds “pork barrel.” And instead they wrote laws to crack down on the truck drivers and their employers for overtime driving…now that’s gonna find ‘em a place to pull over!

Roads

In our travels we also found that roads were often bumpy and wavy—“these are supposed to be freeways,” I mused,” not side roads.” The “deteriorating infrastructure of America,” they called it.

Signs

Related to this, we found many roadways were not clearly marked and signs were out of date. In trustingly following them, we got lost a number of times. It seemed nobody cared out there; nobody was paying attention. I lost count of the number of side journeys and turnarounds we were forced to make. I don’t remember ever—in my fifteen or so transcontinental adventures over twenty-three years—having so much trouble with signs.

Often we were forced to return to the point of departure from the true course, and I’d examine the sign that led us astray. “Yes, dammit, the sign does indicate to turn here for that route.” I wondered if perhaps that was once the correct way but had since been changed without the sign being corrected.

Some joke

And then I imagined all the other cars, of all those others who didn’t just so happen to live in the area and be aware of this anomaly, traveling up that side road and turning back around again…almost as if that were part of the route—to make that kind of loop before proceeding.

I pictured a local watching these cars, one by one, turning around in the course of a day. “Check it out, Mabel,” he’d chuckle. “We got another one.” Or, “Strangers in town! Strangers in town!” It is something to behold…smacks of human futility and ridiculousness.

Some loss

I thought of the gallons of gas wasted in this way…of the jobs in maintaining these services—to keep things in working order and correct—that no doubt were lost.

I thought also of the huge sums of money now gone that could have been spent this way—money which was wasted instead for weapons to fend off a Red Menace that turned out to be a straw man. I recalled with anger how the warhawks tried to take credit for the downfall of Communism by claiming it a victory for their weapons-production policies, how I never heard it pointed out that the fact that Communism collapsed from within indicates a tremendous waste of money and poor policy to think that we needed to prepare to fight it from without.

But the Pentagon was not the only “bottomless well” in the Eighties. I thought of all the money funneled into the coffers of the wealthy in the orgy of extravagance that we taxpayers got the bill for as the S&L scandal. I thought how that money could have been used not only for signs, for roads, for rest areas…but also for all the pressing needs of our people, so neglected in the Reagan-Bush years.

So much for being the “wealthiest nation in the world.”

State parks

And then there was the situation in the state parks. More than once we were prevented from camping for a night. We arrived too late at a park and were unable to enter—an iron gate barring the driveway.

We found other evidence of cutbacks: a cutback in employees; areas roped off and blockaded, not to be used. My mind liked to break into a “This Land Is Your Land” melody when encountering such barriers and fences; the overall effect would be altogether depressing.

Overpopulation

All this of course in addition to the other signs of deterioration: pollution of the countryside, over-industrialization, wilderness areas turned stinking and worn by commercial interests.

On one occasion while hiking in a Florida park, once more due to a lack of signs we lost our way. During the inadvertent nine-mile hike back to our campsite, we saw signs…at least there was money for these…indicating how the dunes should not be walked on because the sea oats would be worn down and killed—resulting in sand drifting, blowing around, killing trees, and destroying campgrounds.

And indeed everywhere we walked it appeared as if thousands of people had stamped beneath the trees, so that even the space between them looked like trails. I began to speculate on just how many people there are on the planet. Clearly the basic problem was there were too damn many of us here!

Nature Balances HerSelf

How Far Astray

I began to consider how far we’ve gone astray from any meaningful or sustainable path for our species on this planet. I reflected on how the effects of the changes we’ve made—for example, the reduction of oxygen in the atmosphere that goes with the increase of carbon dioxide, known commonly as the greenhouse effect—how it’s been discovered that these effects keep people close to their unconscious pain, closer to their unconscious in general.

It is as if we as part of Nature are also regulated by Nature, that the very effects of our overpopulation and our straying from a cooperative ecological niche for our species result in consequences that are inevitably going to bring us back into line …one way or the other!

Going inward

Knowing as I do that environmental pollution and lowered oxygen levels promote diseases, general illnesses, hay fevers, epidemics of allergies, and a general weakening of our immune system–all of which, since the Reagan eighties, we are seeing in abundance—I realized that people are more and more being forced to go inward because they are less and less able to go outward in a healthy manner.

Chastened by the environment we’ve created

Another factor in this is that the deteriorating quality of air and the increasing levels of toxins that we ingest are also attacks on ego defenses, which has important yet previously unexplored implications.

As I said previously, both Stanislav Grof and Arthur Janov—and others as well, I am told—at one time used carbon dioxide to take people into a nonordinary state of consciousness where people would be more open to their repressed traumas, to their unconscious mind. They did this to help these people heal these traumas.

They found that slight increases in carbon dioxide inhalation invariably brought up primal pain and birth-trauma feelings—that is, repressed painful feelings from our experiences of birth and infancy that our ego defenses normally keep “safely” tucked away in our subconscious.

Consider for a moment what that means for those trapped in the pollution-ridden cities!..though keep in mind that increased carbon dioxide is an atmospheric problem that affects everyone on this globe. I recall a TV report when I lived in the air-chunk-city of Denver, Colorado, in 1978. At the time, Denver’s air was rated as being the second worst in the country, behind Los Angeles, partly because the high altitude made for thinner air and thus higher percentages of toxins relative to normal air. Anyway, the TV report proclaimed how the number of hospital admissions for spouse abuse, child abuse, alcoholism, and related violence would soar on days when the air pollution index was high.

Air pollution as a psychedelic

Apparently, the reduction of oxygen in these situations acts similarly to a reduction of blood sugar or glucose to the brain, which results in an inhibition of the ego’s defensive ability to keep out unwanted information. Coincidentally, research has shown that this same kind of reduction of glucose to the brain is instrumental in producing the effects of certain psychedelics, including mescaline and marijuana.

But this reduction in defenses is not experienced or understandable only by those who have experimented with psychedelics. In fact, in at least minor ways we have all experienced it.

The workings here are similar to those in the common experience of being more cranky; irritable; irrationally emotional; more prone to depression, anger, and tears; more excitable; and in general, closer to one’s “shit,” when one is tired, overworked, or just gotten up from a sound sleep. In these situations as well the brain is inhibited—here because of fatigue—from being able to effectively fend off unwanted information, impulses, and emotions.

The evidence concerning heavy metal toxicity indicates that it, also, can have a similar effect at times on one’s mental and emotional state.

Global cabin fever

Also, there is the experience of “cabin fever,” which many people are familiar with. We like to think that simply the fact of being cooped up for a long period of time psychologically leads to wanting to break out and be free, to be irrational and highly prone to emotional outbreaks, and in the extreme to result in delusions and hallucinations. But obviously this is not the case or else these symptoms would be rampant in other situations where one is contained for a long period of time, and they are not. It turns out that there are biochemical reasons—not simply the fact of being cooped up—which account for cabin fever symptoms.

Consider that cabin fever describes a situation, most often, in which one lives in an environment that is insulated against cold winter weather—thus keeping out fresh air. And in which very often oxygen is further depleted by the burning of oxygen-consuming wood fires in fireplaces or woodstoves, or oxygen-consuming coal fires…whatever. With this in mind one can easily understand that that environment is going to be increasingly deficient in its oxygen level as time goes on. Add what we now know about lowered oxygen levels leading to lowered defenses and eruption of unconscious content, and we can see how such environments can lead to the symptoms that, combined, we call cabin fever.

When you consider that on a smaller scale, with the greenhouse effect, we are globally setting up the same conditions as that of cabin fever, we can see why there would be an emerging perinatal unconscious occurring.

With the entire world suffering a low-level cabin fever, it becomes even more understandable why there is the current fascination with escaping the Earth and setting up colonies on other planets and in other solar systems. This idea we see in science fiction scenarios of all kinds—consider the popularity of the Star Trek programs and movies. But I’ve also recently heard it coming out of the mouths of NASA spokespersons.

At NASA, they have considered building colonies on Mars! A multibillion dollar project—talk about high-cost housing! But this fascination and irrationality is understandable when you think of it as a symptom of a global cabin fever. Apparently, we not only wish to be break out and be free in traffic jams, we have magnified it to wanting to break free of our planet itself—as if Gaia, Mother Earth, were some confining, stifling Mother-womb that we needed to bust out of or die!

Of course, the other symptoms of cabin fever—being highly emotional, irrational, delusional, and prone to hallucinations—we have already discussed as being part of the furniture of our current global reality, so we need not go into them here.

Back to the drawing board for our species

But the consequences of all these factors taken together are inescapable: As we edge our way, in a myriad of ways, toward global destruction, we increasingly “sicken” ourselves both physically and emotionally/mentally in the process. And this “sickening” is one of an eruption of unconscious material that causes us to psychologically “return to the drawing board” and seek solutions—both inner and outer—to our misery.

Down Can Be Up

Specifically, I am saying that inhibited brain functioning—whether through oxygen depletion, heavy metal toxicity, or other environmental anomalies—has the effect of heightened “mind” functioning…in the sense, at least, of lowered ego and defensive functioning. Thus, in the same way that psychedelic substances can open us to repressed perspectives by inhibiting “brain” activity, these environmental changes can be helpful in the sense of opening us up to suppressed individual…and global/universal…truth.

Therefore this “sickening,” this seeming decline or going down, can really be an “up”—in other words, it can be viewed as part of a necessary “negative” retreat for the purpose of bringing in new information and re-evaluation. And we may then create anew our more harmonious ecological role based upon this more accurate information.

Now, I am not espousing environmental poisoning as a technique of higher consciousness. But I am saying that apparently Nature…and we are part of Her…has ways of balancing HerSelf.

Death As An Ally

In this respect I might note that our co-habitation with the bomb and with environmental destruction is a spur to our growth of consciousness in a way akin to the traditional spiritual paths that speak of the catalyzing power of “having death as an ally.” That is, that the realization of the imminent possibility of death, which is in truth our existential condition, has been known to act as a spur to taking life seriously, and spiritually, and to “waking up” in general.

“Pay attention!”

The power of this spiritual attitude can be imagined by considering how one would live one’s life if one constantly asked oneself: “If I knew I was going to die tomorrow…or in an hour, or next minute, et cetera...how would I live this day…hour, minute…before me?”

Indeed, a lot of the transformative power of near-death experiences is known to come from their ability to jog one into awakening to the fact of one’s mortality—the precariousness of one’s biological existence. In this light, we might view environmental damage on a global scale, then, as analogous to the bonk on the head from the stick of a Zen meditation teacher, telling us to “pay attention!”

The upshot of all this is that with this degradation of the external environment we are forced to go inward, to go back to the drawing board, so to speak, whether we want to or not. Illness in general and lowered oxygen levels in particular lead to a rising up of people’s repressed emotional pain, and they force us to confront the roots of our motivations and patterns of cultural engagement as well as our social and relational styles.

Moratorium

This “turning inward” is the essential meaning of the “peace” symbol, when you think of it. The upside-down cross pointing downward in a circle has rightly been used to symbolize “moratorium”—in other words, a period of halting of action in the world because nothing worthwhile can result from the ways we are currently doing things, and a turning away from the external world and looking inside to reevaluate. It is as if Nature, completely unbeknownst to us, balances us, pushes us down to our deepest programming and back to our earliest “grids,” individual by individual, and that this forces us to reassess our lives and causes us to create more meaningful lifestyles, more synergistic patterns.

So in a sense Nature’s reaction to our misconduct is to cause us—by means of the psychological effects induced by the biochemical alterations that are the result of environmental changes—to create new social and cultural forms. We cannot help but do this. And collectively, cumulatively, it cannot help but result in massive cultural changes of one form or another.

Our Need to Control

Now, many have proclaimed, in these strange days, that it is our Western estrangement from Mother Natureo—our particular need to control—that is at the core of the threats to the end of life on this planet. In such a case, one needs to regain harmony with Nature and acquire a consciousness of cooperation, not control.

As Grof has claimed—and my personal experience attests—such a cooperative human nature is indeed our most fundamental human nature. In contrast to the “me versus them,” aggressive, and competitive imprint that is derived from our traumatic and premature human births, this more fundamental human nature is the result of a more fundamental imprint of symbiosis with the Other, as was the case in the womb surround during the relatively blissful prenatal period. The relation of the fetus to the mother at that time is one of cooperation, all needs met, flow in <——> flow out, and synergy of intents.

And when, as an adult, we reconnect with this more fundamental human nature, this more fundamental imprint, it manifests in us as a tendency toward that same kind of reciprocal relationship—cooperative, synergistic, and mutually beneficial. Only, as an adult, the Other with which this reciprocal relationship is had is Society and Nature. For these bear the same characteristics and relation to the adult as the womb did to the fetus.

Furthermore, as Grof and I and many others have discovered, such a more positive human nature occurs naturally in a person when they have faced, reexperienced, and integrated their perinatal unconscious…as opposed to what is usually done, which is, completely denying it, projecting it on a scapegoat or enemy and engaging in wars and social violence.

So it is the recovery of this sort of more fundamental human nature—one in which we are in cooperative and mutually beneficial relationship with Nature, all life on this planet, and other humans—that would remove us from the brink of extinction.

Looking Through Gaia’s Eyes

When you think of it, when you consider that all of Nature—the whole planet, Gaia—is threatened by the actions of our species, and that that Nature would want to avoid this by balancing the elements that are currently skewed, it may be just the kind of global situation we see now around us that Nature would need to create in order to save “HerSelf.” It’s simple: We either change or die. Hey, why the long face!? If Gaia doesn’t look out for HerSelf, who will?

Acting Out

Granted, some people are not dealing in a healthy or positive way with the material that is arising. Instead of re-doing their basic programming, these people “act out.” Thus we have increased crime, aggression, hostility, one person against another.

And this fact is glaringly apparent in our big cities, where many who are not integrating this emerging information from outside their ego boundaries—from the unconscious—sadly are instead venting the energy of their pain—which our degenerating environment is opening up to them or giving them access to—in violent, destructive, wasteful, self-destructive, and pathetic ways.

One can also look to the grasping at racism, nationalism, and fundamentalism, which are not primarily urban phenomena by any means. These conduits of hatefulness are also a response that people are using to the feelings of pain, uncertainty, insecurity, and doubt that rise up, especially initially, in conjunction with these emerging truths.

Similarly, a great majority of people in general in our society are using drugs of one form or other to gloss over and obscure this emerging material rather than facing and integrating it. All in all these kinds of responses add up to a tragedy. And it is something that, if these reactions end up prevailing, could actually do everyone of us in. [Footnote 2]

Helping Out

But about these others, what can we do—those of us who are changing our programming and creating new cultural patterns? It may be practical and advisable much of the time to just get out of their way if the ones acting out choose to kill each other off.

But we are often not able to “get out of the way” of those who are trapped in negativity. In addition, since we are all interconnected, we are bound to at least be indirectly affected by their actions.

And most importantly, since we are One and these others are actually ourselves in different garb, to the extent we are able to show compassion and be of assistance, we should not always want to step aside. I begin taking this up in the next chapter, “Derailing the Cycles of War and Violence.” I discuss more fully how exactly we can be helpful to these others, in both small and large ways.

“Eve of Destruction” or Scenery of Healing?

To put the current chapter’s theme another way: If we were to concoct a world situation in which we would be forced to take a quantum step in consciousness evolution by healing the nefarious elements of our perinatal unconscious, would not that world situation look something like what we see around us today? Would it not be a world rife with obvious perinatal elements…and influences…with some people resolving and thus being healed of them? While others would act them out and self-destruct because of them…not to mention contributing to our collective global self-destruction, as mentioned earlier?

In other words, the situation today, as it looks, could as easily be seen as a prologue to an apocalypse and just as easily be seen as a healing crisis preceding a massive consciousness transformation. Put another way, this same situation can be seen by one person as the “eve of destruction” and another as the “scenery of healing on the pathway to peace.” So which will it be?

In the next and final chapters of this book we will take a look at what are the most likely possibilities for ourselves and our planet, considering all that has been said so far. We will bring together all that we now know to conjecture: Apocalypse? Or Earth rebirth?

Continue on this site with
Apocalypse – No! Chapter Thirteen:
Derailing The Cycles of War and Violence

Footnotes

1. “This Land Is Your Land” is most often used, rather pathetically, in a form of denial and jingoism to counter the reality of what we are doing to our land and our country in the US. The lyrics, as Woody Guthrie wrote them, are anything but that. The same thing has happened with Bruce Springstein’s “Born In the USA,” by the way. It has been harder to distort the meaning of John Mellencamp’s “Little Pink Houses,” thankfully. Anyway, here is the unsanitized version of Woody Guthrie’s sarcastic “anthem.”

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.
As I went walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway
I saw below me that golden valley
This land was made for you and me.
I roamed and I rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
While all around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me.
When the sun came shining, and I was strolling
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
A voice was chanting, As the fog was lifting,
This land was made for you and me.
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing;
This land was made for you and me.

Woody Guthrie has a variant:

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.
“But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

It also has a verse:

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I’d seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?

From Wikipedia, “This Land Is Your Land“

2. I wish to draw your attention to something I posted in the last year bringing together these aspects of rising prescription drug use and rising social, political hatred-idiocy. It was in response to an article announcing evidence that antidepressants, specifically, Paxil, make one more “normal.”

“Is Paxil creating more people who aren’t self-reflective? More “Conservatives Without a Conscience”? Happy Idiots?”

Copyright © 1999, 2011 by Michael Derzak Adzema

Continue on this site with
Apocalypse – No! Chapter Thirteen:
Derailing the Cycles of War and Violence

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Apocalyptic Meditation .. A Dire Reverie

Apocalypse – No! Chapter Two:
Apocalyptic Wake-Up Call

There are topics you will rarely if ever hear in the mainstream media. It is not that they’re not true; it is that these true things are…well, is there such a thing as too true? Truth that the vast majority of people will either not hear, or will distort, will deny, will conveniently find hard to understand—that is, they will retreat into confusion—and so many other things. Obviously, by the title, you already know the kinds of truths I’m referring to.

Your Child Will Die, How Can You Turn Away?

Our species has never been confronted with such truths—facts about the inevitable demise of our entire species in short order, unless something on a massive scale is done. And it seems our systems have no capacity for it. For indeed such an event has never occurred on our planet in its entire multibillion year history. [Footnotes 1 and 2]

So the fact you are even listening, fully aware of the title, proves you are one of the few who are opting to know the truth—however disturbing—rather than turn your head, as an unbelievable number of people are currently doing, to the likelihood of apocalypse….sorry, that’s not something people want to know. But ecocide, planet death, apocalypse will be a certainty unless people get the courage to do something, which necessarily of course starts with LOOKING at the problem! [continued after audio]

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“Apocalypse Emergency: The Apocalypse Will Kill Your Child, How Can You Turn Your Head?”

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 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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OK, I’ll try again, this isn’t easy for me either. The cumulative scientific evidence relating to the fate of this planet has been accelerating in the direction of there being little to no hope that there will be much, if any, life on this planet, at some point only twenty to fifty years from now. So as I was trying to say above, many people are currently turning their head to the likelihood that we will all be dead in what will probably seem the fastest decades ever.

What makes this likelihood so disturbing is that many people know this and yet don’t care. Some even get a charged up thrill, or sense of power at the prospect. And many others just can’t wait! Sadly they have certain misguided religious beliefs—for example, “the rapture”—that have rationalized and made desirable this most abominable thing—wiping out the efforts and strivings and occurrences of billions of years and over eight billion human souls alone in current time, and negating the passionate struggles of billions of humans prior to us who wanted more than anything else to leave the world a better place. But take a cynical—maddened—generation or two, and they may as well never have lived.

Why am I saying this? If you have children, or grandchildren, even if you might not see it, what kinds of parents exist now that blithely turn away from the trillion-alarm fire that is already waging, which will consume their beloveds in ways too horrible to contemplate? I do not understand it; for in any other situation where they would be threatened, wouldn’t many even risk their own lives?

I need to say this because, despite the madness surrounding us in the minds of people stressed with problems of all kinds that are now at unprecedented levels, I have faith in God and in the nobility of Humans at their base. I believe that more and more will not only face this horrible darker-than-night cloud looming and rushing us from the horizon, but will deem it to be the one worthy thing left to do, whichever way it goes.

I am using my God given skills of communication and intellect, along with a lifetime of study into the human mind and its healing, to try to reverse our current plunge. I know there are others like myself right now attempting to wake up the noble spirited, the heroic among us, who once convinced will add whatever unique qualities God has blessed them to this once in a multibillions chance to be good, kind, brave, hard working, sympathetic, heartful, strong, God-loving, life embracing, laughter, song, and children loving humans again. [Footnote 3]

To be humans again, not greedy beasts of prey with green in their eyes and their blood, who have been taking over this planet for several decades now, for idiotically selfish ends. So maddened are they, we have already seen the first incredible detonation of their unconcern for this planet—all God’s creatures on it, and even their own offspring—in this collapse of an entire global economic system in what seemed practically to be overnight in 2007. So insane they, we have seen the consequences of their greedy craving in the increasing radiation of the planet, through accidents like Fukushima, and the dying of the oceans—our oxygen source—with the Gulf Oil Spill.

So when I think the media is soft peddling this dire and vital truth of the approaching death of all as if providing the opium of pleasant reverie to a sick person, instead of providing the truth and giving the person the less pleasant and more strenuous options of fighting for one’s health; when I think of them as deciding for us, as if we are dying children, who they think they are being compassionate to when saying what amounts to “you’re going to be just fine,” and such, even as we, the children, take our last breath, I think of that syrupy mealy-mouthedness, that “comforting,” as enabling us in an addiction and even covering up the suffering that might get us well. Taking a look at the media in this light, I am offended and feel disrespected. For I am not one who appreciates being pampered and protected from upset when it means that it will guarantee my death, do you?

For if a great many people do not quickly and radically reverse their lives—and no I’m not talking boy scout recycling efforts. I am talking about the gearing up and urgency that would need to be far greater than that of the last world war—how can it not be seen that the Nazi holocaust will seem a tea party alongside what’s coming?

But it is not warriors we need. That is part of the problem. We do need people as disciplined and caring, not just of their buddies but of all life, human and nonhuman, of all creation that God in his/her great love for us and all life masterfully crafted, slowly, carefully, meticulously, over a near eternity this incredible planet, as finely balanced and perfect and precise, and wondrous and beautiful in infinite ways, precisely moving in perfect harmonious exquisite synchronicity of infinite living elements through the seasons, over the years, languorous and slow and allowing for a plenitude of experience, of possibilities for joyous play, exuberant and bountiful youthful sense of power, pride, belonging—for ALL creatures, and an infinite number of them—each of them single individuals sharing with us this possibility of joy, wonder, happiness, laughter, pain, grief, wisdom….this divine adventure taken by so many humans even, each doing their best between the poles of the monstrous and the angelic, creating in the end, whatever the outcome, lives as different, as unique, as incomparable as any snowflake to another.

And all the while, surrounded from birth, breathing the divine. God always so close you can’t see. But in every little thing pushing you to the exquisite slow, painful then wonderful unfolding into greater and greater wisdom, goodness, love, truthfulness and loving of truth—no matter how long it takes, or even lifetimes—slowly, slowly, turning, turning, expanding, flowing ever outward in wider and wider encompassing surrounds of wisdom and love—no matter how long it takes.

And on the way the dawnings of blissful openings of being, leaving the darkness of pain and ignorance more and more at our roots. Just as the lotus grows out of the muck of the dirty swamp, feeding on that muck for sustenance. Just as our hardships, mistakes, even our cruelties lead us in time that much more beautifully and committedly loving of love, of life, of goodness, of God.

And our eyes ever more aware of the beauty always there but more and more radiant as the darkness slowly dissipates, and the lotus reaches its tender shoot higher and higher into the murky water. It too in time becoming increasingly aware of light that is above and that the darkness is more and more in behind it.

Until, just as we, there is that moment of arriving on the water surface and feeling and breathing being free and so joyous, blissful, and understanding of the marvelous divine perfection of the experience, even when it seemed hopeless, just as we. And in gratitude and glory it unfolds its perfect, delicate pleasure in the expressions of joy that are the splendid beauteous aromatic creations that we call its many petals, but for the lotus is its song of gratitude. As much as our unfolding may open our hearts so deliciously loving and alive that we must sing to God, to Love, to the Consciousness that is the only Existing thing and equally coursing its wondrous way throughout all creation—lotus, Human, in the loving ministrations of all God’s creatures toward each other as we feel the attraction of like to like, of divine to divine…..

And would this wonderful incredibly sweet sound of God’s Life in us and around us, harmonizing over billions of years and to the ends of the Universe, the chorus of the divine, the harmony of the spheres, this grand, often dramatic and percussive symphony, the only reality, the only one really desired, the home of all whose sound is even telling you it is Om, where one belongs, where one loves and is loved and dualism-nondualism are irrelevant for equally delightful are the movements of this endless ever changing symphony, which must be separate and forgetful and also awake and one for the sheer beauty of it, for the sheer pleasure of remembering again the most wonderful truth of oneself, and then maybe again.

Of such possibilities and perceptions are the expanses outside, outside one’s skin. As one’s identity is not merely that within the gushing palpitation below the skin but expands to include spouse, family, children, others, all creatures, all beings known and unknown, with malice toward no one. As such unity is our food our destination our bliss our home…

Oh so sad and yet tender and beautiful and juicy we take our prodigal souls ever home. And more and more recognizing our brothers and sisters on the way, delighting in the exquisite separation that we will continue to enjoy until ready to release, to let go. Like a swimmer letting go of the side of the pool to sink deep into the crystal water, where it is then all the Universe that one experiences and then one becomes aware that one is just as much of it as in it.

And slowly delightfully then just not conceiving of any boundaries and the swimmer disappears to those still holding on to the delightful game of pretending that there is any such thing as a thing, as boundaries, as nations, as bodies… Fun, that game of thingness… for a while…

For it is just a game, a made up concocted set of parameters, boundaries, and rules. That we sit down on a pleasant Sunday afternoon to play, to enjoy the amazingly creative plays, humorous remarks, and outright belly-whomping creative utterances that our playmates entertain with and we enjoy also performing as things we do and say come so perfectly from, well, … it’s just there.

We just are, we can’t help be, and whether irritated or laughing uproariously or snickering secretively as we plan our next play…in sweet anticipation of the reactions, surprise! befuddlement! or knowing smiles from another…it is all unknown and to be discovered.

So who would spoil such fun by ever letting on, even, or especially, to oneself that it is all known, there is no separation. Why we even might enjoy it more if we allow ourselves to suppose that the stakes are real—at which point we know we have taken the wondrous forgetfulness game of humanness. One only does that to enjoy the sweetest waking of all, that from the soundest and most undisturbed of all possible dreamings.

However you conceive it, though. You needn’t buy my reverie. In fact how could you? Though you and I could be mirrors to each other it is the absolute knowing that we cannot be the same snowflake. No. You have your world, and your unique way of enjoying sweet existence.

But is it God’s, yours, mine, anyone’s plan that this multi-billion year sweet symphony of consciousness expressing itself as beauteous Nature is suddenly, in eternal time, within the last second or two, to be stomped, crackled, and crashed by the Caterpillar boots of newbie humans? The skin-bound ones. I mean, reaaalyy skin bound.

As for me such horrible catastrophic cacophony of destruction is about as creative and delight inducing as a slow wonderfully silent drive through a countryside in late spring. Fragrant, aromatic…feelings of gratitude to the All That Is. And hearts overflowing in appreciation of the company of such remarkable, loving, and brilliant of friends.

So slowly meandering in fragrant meadows and moisty tart forests, one just regrets that the vehicle will have to stop to be charged in a little bit. That’s pleasant to me, maybe it is or isn’t to you.

But who among us would wish for the ride, the symphony, the song, the journey, the adventure, the whatever’s finale to be a split second of angry irritation and then an all too easy wander off of the freeway home? Such that before one is even aware, oneself and one’s friends and God’s delightful chorus is composed…. the ending, sixty-six miles per hour, six friends, the unmovable concrete of an overpass’s supports kissing all six’s bloody bags of waters, water-balloon style erased on the slab. And the percussive sounding to mark the end, over before you even realize it’s begun.

But when you in your awestruck wonder slow it to single frames, that sound…that sound so hideous, containing so many others within its one-second elapse. But you hear there are billions. You hear, trillions, more, infinite. Crashing, metal, but within it mixed…why, that is that hell that some speak about.

All those voices crying out in loss, in anger: How have you the right? Why have you robbed….? And all creatures that have ever lived here crying out in pain at the same time. Such things well… not fun… not, well… anything.

It seems we were even given the warning so that we could come up with a much better drama, more fun for all for every place in consciousness throughout the Universe. For the Universe has already experienced such a bummer of a symphony, which is now just a red planet…. It was much more fun, filled with life, creative divine noises, and manic whacky Chaplinesque movements, sounds, color, laughter, laughter, laughter. Not fun that one. [Footnote 4]

Why not a hero’s tale; no solitary hero, but billions and billions of heroes. Showing the Universe the story of the impossibly death-defying grasping at life, even as being thrown over the cliff. The solidarity in flesh, as united as in divine state, grasping single-handedly a bit of root protruding from the very edge above the abyss. And with mighty, united, happy, joyous, then singing, mighty and strong, pulling up, scraping knees, chins, shins, no matter, such incredible unity of peoples around the Globe as hasn’t been seen since the time before that Tower, that time called Babel.

That was a time when flesh decided to really stray from remembering and to really become solitary and alone, creating the darkness, which the light is so much sweeter by. Creating the horrible endless times of struggling, of violence, of ego over ego, with no one hearing, no one listening. But every one simply babbeling out THEIR world, their sounds, “The song must be like this!” “It is my song.” “I am divine, who the hell are you to sing while I’m composing my next chorus!?”

And so it began, with the blissful knowledge of Unity with All That Is turning psychotically into

I AM the Unity, I am all that is. I am hardly experiencing the flows of consciousness that you are. For I AM the only consciousness.

How could you be? You don’t look like me; yet I am conscious and I am the Decider.

So since I look like this and I act, and you look different, as different as I look compared to a pile of rubble, so you must not feel. You must be props for me to use.

And yet you jabber on, even as I am thinking, ever more, always thinking. I can’t stop this thinking; I don’t remember the world too well. That must be the price of being the only real living feeling existing thing here.

So it went. I don’t know why. But then there is that thing about it all being about greater wisdom.

And perhaps, I think this a better story than a one-second sounding of the Universe in Pain…. For nowhere in that Universe would there be a being saying,

Now that was one great species! Really so godlike. Incredible. They lasted for one nanosecond and then simply slammed their entire species—even taking with them every other of the millions of different kinds of beings that Consciousness was tripping around with, in checking out.

No. I don’t see our ending that way as being any more entertaining or enlightening than the shortest of all short stories about a man who walked across a busy freeway. Cleverly he avoided every car. He got increasingly adept and nimble. In his happiness he jumped to safety and stabbed himself to death with a knife. I told you, pretty dumb story.

I’d rather see people becoming the best humans that have ever lived on this planet at one time. And working together, not knowing even if they would make it, but knowing that the laughter of children depended on it. That laughter of children would be never again. And, in fact, who can say that it ever existed really?

So, if you feel like I do. If you would rather write, together with eight billion others, a story that will thrill God Herself, won’t we be thrilled and never forget: How we took the best they had. They misinformed, spent untold huge amounts on those whose souls could be bought. And many there were, to deny, to repress, even when the rest of the world was waking up and looking to us for leadership.

And America did not merely back off and, inexplicably, turn to throw back at the world a big ol’ middle finger salute, grimacing, then turn and walk away. America, the wealthiest country in the world at that time (well at least its rich elite made it so, for its standard of living was getting lower by the year since the institution of the new slogan of democracy which was redefined in the early 1980s as, “of the people, by the people, to benefit the rich.”), left the rest of the world to suffer and meet and discuss.

And all the time the world knew that they were like employees having a meeting without the boss showing up…. Nope, more like they were like the citizens who lived in a beautiful lake area, which had once been a pristine lake. But now the lake was dead, there were no fish living, lots of gooey seaweed though. And sure they all contributed something to polluting that lake they did. But what was going to be done having meetings that had no representatives of the lumber milling company that sat on a good stretch of lakeside frontage and mindlessly had been spewing the most god-awful chemicals in the lake? It was going to be sickening the citizens soon. But this lumber operation also confused any deliberations that might have been fruitful by its habit of tossing around such huge gobs of money at selected groups of citizens. So that’s us, the fat bastards.

I put whatever energy I can towards educating people about the dangers leading to apocalypse. I am trying to help folks to understand they are not really believing apocalypse because it is too huge to comprehend. I try to get people to see that though they do not want to entertain the thought of apocalypse, it is real. Apocalypse is as real as your child suddenly lurching out of your hand to rush into the street just as a car is speeding there and getting killed. [Footnote 5]

I am hardly the only one saying this. For, there are lots of people now, more than ever before, who are fed up of being coddled from the truth and manipulated by lies and misinformation. Having been water boarded so many gallons of lies over Bush’s eight years, they are showing the starvation they’ve been feeling for truth. Folks are painfully jonesing for something authentic in a number of ways.

Most spectacularly, Americans showed their craving for authenticity in the overwhelming 2008 turnout for Obama. At the time, Obama, over everyone else, was someone radiating realism, accountability, and authenticity.

More recently we see this desperation pushing people to the Tea Party. Though sadly lacking in facts, fed misinformation by moneyed groups, manipulated, and directed to action by forces arrayed against their interests, Tea Party folks are newly birthed into politics following a burning knowing that something is terribly wrong and that they are being lied to. Like newly hatched ducklings, they are bonded to their corporate Mommies, who they follow blindly, fighting against those who would help them. On the other side, we see this eruption of truth-valuing in that, despite Tea Party’s misguided actions, the polls show that Republicans, the party of organized deception in allegiance to interests of a global clique of “filthy rich,” are seen to be more like fools than as credible opponents. [Footnote 6]

Still, facing the facts of the likely End of All Time, Doomsday, or Apocalypse—however you choose to phrase it—is not in anyone’s hardwired capacities to handle. We are like ants suddenly confronted by a huge lumberjack’s boot about to come smashing down on their meticulously created universe of AntHill. I doubt they, let alone we, have ever been programmed for such contingencies. [Footnote 1]

But humans are supposed to have the capacity to reason, to go beyond pure instinct, and to be able to prepare for the totally unprecedented. So far, our much-vaunted rationality is seeming like a pretty convenient rationalization to enable us to kill without conscience, for any reason we choose, the other species on this planet.

How would our planetmates see it? Perhaps something like:

Humans Adopt Superiority Over All, Basing It On Their Inability to Keep Their Psychotic Minds from ever Stopping the Onslaught of Mental Verbiage. [Planetmate Views. Nowtime. Everyplace, Earth.] Humans have created a bizarre separate and solitary view, which keeps them from seeing Reality, let alone God, who is directly before them. But they are committed to this psychosis of generating such a mental screen of words, which they mistake for actual reality.

Living in their self-imposed tortuous hell of verbal-mental realities, having nothing to do with reality, they neither see God, nor us planetmates, nor do they really hear each other. For humans pretend to listen but are really thinking of what they are going to say when it is their turn. So humans come away from conversations having only heard themselves.

And now, their delusion is having them kill themselves all off; and they are not even all that concerned.

Unfortunately, they are taking ALL the rest of us, planetmates, indeed everything alive on this planet, down with them. Many of our fellow planetmates, in light of this, are questioning our compassion for their sorry half-born asses and our tolerance over the past twenty-five millennia.

You don’t believe our planetmates? Natch. Didn’t expect you to—sprung on you like that.

But if what the planetmates say just for a moment pisses you off enough to say “NO, We are not stupid ape.! We are rational!” Then you cannot be consistent without using some of that, ahem, ahem, so-called “reason.” For before you can say NO to Apocalypse you have to let yourself KNOW Apocalypse. Now, how many of you have the cajonies or ovaries for that?!

Sting sang, “We could be heroes…just for one day.” Wow, that just occurred to me. It also occurred to me that being heroes just for one day never made any sense to me until just about, oh, like two seconds ago.

Well, I’m no hero. I just fucking care. Sorry if caring offends people so much they have to put down feeling people by saying “kumbaya moment.” Sorry if caring offends so much they have to put down people who have hearts by saying “bleeding hearts.” Or even when we have a President who sheds a tear and says in all sincerity, “I feel your pain,” the cynical have to rake him over the coals for it and put it down in the history books as a calculated, planned, political move.

I’m sorry for people like that who have no felt connection with others. Such kitty-drowners and butterfly-mashers have no hearts and so do not understand those of us who do.

Before I took my personal journey inward and opened up to my feelings and eventually to the love that lie deep inside, I was more of a mental machine than a man. Now, I am happy to be flesh and blood and feeling and organic—I cry, fart, burp, laugh uproariously sometimes, actually, rolling on the floor. I see, hear, and notice people and think they are just fascinating. I can’t imagine life back in the world of the machine-minded, bragging how they can multi-task, so they can fuck up more things at the same time. But never can such automatons focus on one thing at a time and completely take it in, in all its complexities.

But this isn’t about the ones who will never hear me. It is about those who are just as much flesh and blood as I. You are the ones who will understand that I do this because, I just, well, really love.

I’ve got a young god-daughter; she reminds me what being straight and honest is. She also reminds me what love is, and how tender is the simple appreciation of one being for another. In my mind, my god-daughter is beautiful inside and out and talented and sensitive. She is God’s work of art. I don’t think there is a parent alive who doesn’t know those kinds of feelings.

So, I don’t know about other people, but with her in mind, among many others that I love, I find it hard to simply ignore the things that the scientists are saying are happening on this planet. Perhaps the most horrible for me to comprehend is the predicted massive extinction that is underway and is expected to reach a fifty percent die-off (forever, folks) of species on this planet in twenty to fifty years. You thought the bees disappearing was news!? Only if you can understand it as the canary in the coal mine.

We Got Too Many Species?

A fifty percent extinction of life-forms on this planet within a few decades, many of which have been around for millions of years. And, are you thinking, hell, we got way too many species anyway? I know, dumb! But someone actually said that to me during the Q & A after a presentation I gave on this. And many in the audience seemed to think she had a point!!

Well, the planet is an ecosystem; it is like one giant life form. And it was once really healthy, perfectly balanced, like I said, a wonderful creation of God. It was an exquisite creation, reminding us that God is well, really, I mean, really, really, good!

Nope, not being facetious; just making my point in response to the general idea out there about God. That is, this insane prevailing notion that God is Infinite Goodness and Mercy beyond all human understanding, yet this Good God would create a hell where all but a lucky few would live, without being able to die, in hideous unbearable agony forever. Christ! I just heard myself realize that and if I were a kid I would’ve pooped my pants!

Ok, finishing up here. If you care about what’s going on and think we should wake up, naturally you’re discouraged at how little consciousness there is about an environmental collapse that has already begun. But there is hope at least in certain things. I’ve mentioned the craving for the real and the true. This powerful urge has toppled Bush, birthed an awkward tea-party movement, and shown the light on right-wing idiocy, in this country.

Around the world this explosive force manifests along with its correlates, the needs to express and share this truth in free speech and to have human rights to not be punished for that, as well as to have power for one’s truth to effect one’s life and circumstances, so there is the need for democracy. So in the Mideast and North Africa we see dictators being confronted and overthrown, and in China and similar totalitarian systems we see people risking and sacrificing their lives rather than be living beneath a cover of lies, behind a matrix of the contrived. [Footnote 7]

As to where this effort will lead…. Well, the hopeful question is: Who knows how many others are also feeling like we don’t have a second to lose, and it might already be too late? Who knows what kind of actions might be needed to be done, and what kind of word might need to get out, or whatever?

So, if you care, we might as well start making that network now. And I know there are others. But there can never be too many connections bringing together all of us who care.

Don’t forget we’re going up against a bunch who DON’T care, but who are, as they termed them, not me! “Filthy Rich.” And great power they have indeed for you know how many there are who are for sale and how cheaply souls are going for these days.

But we have, if we choose it, the power of solidarity, truth, and—if we can awaken enough people—the power of great, great, grand numbers on a scale that also has never been possible before.

So, I urge everyone to remember that they are in the midst of a trillion-alarm fire. The emergency is upon us; unfortunately it is not being broadcast. But some of that is because it is too dire for the media to want to touch.

So it is up to us. We must remember that it has always been the common people of the world uniting in great numbers that have accomplished the things of greatest value to the world. If we must once again, and without the support even of the media, rise to the biggest challenge of all, then why would we not be the better ones to face it?

For the elite have already shown that they care little for anything but their profits.

Whereas it is the common people of the world, taking their pleasure in their pride of work, and especially their families, who have put themselves always on the line. We need only remember that it is not for us, or even for all the innocent creatures of the world—though that would be huge motivation for many—but if only so that our children and grandchildren will not suffer, will get to live, and hopefully will be awarded at least the chance that other generations got for a full life, we must give our all.

I cannot believe that the masses of people in the world, were they ever to come to understand the true consequences—the life and death ones—for their immediate family—would not do everything including risking one’s own life, for something so precious—the continuation of family…the laughter of children, the innocence of a babe, and above and beyond everything, the continuation of Love, sweet, sweet, ever growing and expanding Love, under the blessings and grace of The All that Is, whose substance is just that—Love.

Future Earth Rebirth—the Primal Landscape

Copyright © 2009, 2011 by Michael Derzak Adzema

Continue on this site with
Apocalypse – No! Chapter Three:
A Conversation on the Eve of Apocalypse

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Footnotes

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

The psychology 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]

2. 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 five-hundred million species). From “No other time was like this. We live knowing of the very real possibility of ending our species in our lifetime.”

3. I wrote a considerable amount on this in the Nineties, including at least one online book directly taking up the topic titled Apocalypse, Or New Age? . Another book, available online, Primal Renaissance: The Emerging Millennial Return is extremely important to this topic, and Falls From Grace (a published thesis as well as online book) is also relevant. It is no coincidence that at that time, the Nineties, we had a Democrat in the White House.

But since Obama has come in to office alone I have put up a number of sites to help raise awareness on this and related issues. I have been setting up and working on websites for purposes of education and support (Apocalypse Emergency , Apocalypse-NO at apocalypseknow.wordpress.com , The Great Reveal by SillyMickel & the PlanetMates at angelsinnature.wordpress.com, Apocalypse Know, SillyMickel’s Calling the Noble in Spirit: Wake Up Sounds). And I’ve been expressing these ideas in blogs (SillyMickel’s Blog of the Obvious Unspoken Things at sillymickelsapocalypticwakeupcall.wordpress.com, SillyMickel’s Blog: Things That Want to Be Said , Truth Will Out , and Sillymickel’s Journal—The Things Nobody Seems Willing to Say).

But I had been writing about these things on SillyMickel MySpace Blog and Facebook . I’m quite active, especially of late, tweeting about this and related topics on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sillymickel. And since the 90s I’ve been discussing these issues on my oldest website Primal Spirit, where I have been trying to raise awareness.

I have a youtube channel where I place videos to educate on this–SillyMickel & The Planetmates http://www.youtube.com/user/sillymickel. I have got seventy-plus online audio casts in several Hark collections where I take up this subject: the aforementioned SillyMickel’s Calling the Noble in Spirit: Wake Up Sounds , as well as SillyMickel’s Mystic Crystal Revelations , The Once and Future NewsHistory Unspun—the Smoke, Lies, and Revelations , “Look at Us! God’s ROFLHAO!” , and Michael Jackson and the Authentic Life.

In addition to places mentioned, I’m discussing the spiritual aspects of the changes we need to make on the sites, Primal Spirituality and Falls From Grace; and the philosophical paradigm shifts needed are scattered in the various places as well as, specifically, at Matter as Metaphor. The political perspectives on these changes are found on a number of sites mentioned, as well as on Smoke, Lies, and Revelations and Culture War . Eventually the websites Primal Return, and Natural Self will contain the resources that we have in mind for them as well.

Join with me or not as you will. I mention my efforts only to indicate the efforts of one person who has been awakened to this horrifying vision. Keep in mind there are others doing far more than me, for a longer time, and at greater risk. Volunteers working with Greenpeace, Earth First, and similar organizations place their bodies directly in front of the attackers in a manner just like those prodemocracy activists living under dictatorial and totalitarian regimes who, Ghandi-style, stand in front of tanks and place their bodies before onslaughts of anti-aircraft weaponry (as happened recently in Libya).

There are others whose work also deserves more attention than mine, and in other places they are and will continue to be mentioned. But for purposes here, you get the point: The point is that no one can know how great are the forces of light arrayed against those of darkness on this issue, for the moneyed interests do not find it at all helpful to their side to allow the media to broadcast or highlight these efforts. Rather, the media will exaggerate the activities and viewpoint of the opposition to these efforts, those that support the continued march toward Doomsday whose road they collect heavy tolls from people on which make up the obscenely exorbitant and evil profits they receive. They blow up the activities, viewpoints, and (mis)information in the exact same manner as in the past year or so they have, for example, amplified attention of, even promoted, Tea Party rallies attended by, mostly paid, hundreds while ignoring true grass roots action, as in Wisconsin, where a rally of two hundred thousand barely was mentioned. This is perhaps the meaning of the saying, “The revolution will not be telecast.”

In this obscurity of our efforts and its results lies our hope. For we simply will not know until later, maybe not even until an “afterward,” assuming there is one, just how great are the efforts of the unheralded numbers involved in this undertaking.

Finally, looking over my efforts alone, one might even be thinking I am overdoing it. But consider that I believe what I’m saying: A trillion-alarm emergency, the lives of my loved ones at stake. Now, if you knew what I knew, would you do less?

But this isn’t about me, I am only mentioning my work alongside the fact that I felt finally like I could speak out in this country only when Obama was sworn in as President. Who knows how many efforts are going on, how many kinds of things people are doing to stave off this Unthinkable Nightmare? Now, not with Bush in power, when finally we have the world and its efforts, however difficult they still will be, at least not being actively undermined by a Bush administration, we have a time where we have more hope that our efforts will succeed based upon the good will of the participants, without worrying excessively that the mighty U.S. will at some point either secretly or overtly throw the grandest of all monkey wrenches in to shatter the work of the good people of the world working heartily on the side of Life. [return to text]

4. To glimpse the unimaginable future past the time that we kill off ourselves and all life on this planet and become like Mars, I offer this fantasy around a musical scrap:

About our extinction. We’re gonna eliminate 50% of 500 million earth species in 50 yrs & we’ll be alive. Ha!

This is an original song-chant—written and composed by SillyMickel Adzema. All rights reserved. Copyright © 1993 by Michael Derzak Adzema:
It is a Requiem for Earth, a metaphysical view, an eerie emotional raw sound. It is sung by two of the last survivors of Earth—from all appearance it would have been the composer SM Adzema and his beloved wife, Mary Lynn Adzema—obviously not professional singers—but heartfelt nonetheless, giving us a glimpse into the profound sadness that must have hung over those last survivors after it became clear that Earth’s ecological balance so shattered, there would be no life at all to survive the strange behaviors of what Earthologists have begun calling “the suicidal ape”—referring to the species that alone brought down the entire planet.

Indeed this song, as an electronic scrap mixed in with an island of Earth debris discovered by spacepreuners hurtling swiftly through the Verse not far from the star system’s outer reach—the one that had once contained the fabled Earth—is one of the few very rare looks into the hearts and minds of those people as they watched, helplessly, as their planet’s delicate life sheath imploded with a gathering rapidity. Some who have heard this musical scrap claim that it supports the more radical theory of this event of a planet murder-suicide—the theory that the suicidal ape was divided on this global murder-suicide, with a goodly number of this species working furiously to save the planet even as stronger, more powerful forces, for reasons still not understood, continued their secretive sabotage of the other side’s efforts, ensuring the downfall of all, including the saboteurs themselves. At first hearing, this song seems to be expressing an awareness of the sadness that would accompany such a horrific event, at odds with the stories of “suicide ape’s” gleeful festive behavior in the midst of the massive killing and suicide.

“Requiem for Earth / We Are Stones.” A Song-Chant Relic by SillyMickel Adzema. Sung by SillyMickel and Mary Lynn Adzema

Click link above for the audio site, or click the audio player below to listen to it here.

http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=wrbjcmgycy
Image of Requiem for Earth / We Are Stones. A Song-Chant Relic by SillyMickel Adzema. Sung by SillyMickel and Mary Lynn Adzema

5. Earlier versions of this piece have been posted on these sites, Apocalypse Emergency, Primal Spirit, Apocalypse No!, Amplify, Truth Will Out, and Things That Want to Be Said. The unrevised version of Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth? (titled Apocalypse, or New Age?) is at http://www.primalspirit.com/emerging_perinatal_book.htm . A “webmap” 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]

6. An example of this came out in the wake of the Fukushima reactor blow-ups. Republicans said a number of stupid and insensitive things, which were widely shared and roundly ridiculed. Among those tidbits of foolery was Ann Coulter’s public statement that “Radiation is good for you.”Ann Coulter: “Radiation Is Good For You” at http://front.moveon.org/ann-coulter-radiation-is-good-for-you/?rc=fb.fan [return to text]

7. Consider the timing: Only a little over two years ago we had a change in administration in Washington away from a deranged Republican administration that was staunchly anti-environmental. While I’ve worked on these issues for thirty years and I was one of those who brought nuclear power plant construction in the US to a halt in the early 80s (http://bit.ly/BL-an , http://bit.ly/OB-an , http://bit.ly/AN-an , http://bit.ly/PT-an , http://bit.ly/AM-an ), I did not feel hopeful about working on these issues again until the Democrats gained the US presidency and there was hope for progress again.

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“Apocalypse Emergency: The Apocalypse Will Kill Your Child, How Can You Turn Your Head?”

Listen in on SillyMickel’s own impassioned rendition of this blog, called “Apocalypse Emergency”:

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 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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Continue on this site with
Apocalypse – No! Chapter Three:
A Conversation on the Eve of Apocalypse

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