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“You sought to train your children to be better investments, more useful tools or pawns, in your survival struggles”: The Planetmates on thingification, the economic lodestar, children as commodities, large families, child labor, Nature’s parents
“So, in this mode, children get to live, but only at the behest of their caregivers. For as long as there have been humans, children have been poisoned through interaction with the unconscious of their parents, and they subsequently manifest the repressed undersides of fully growns, which is comprised of early unmet needs and corrupted desires. However, with this “advance,” this step in human “evolution,” children are actively molded—intrusively—to ends not their own, as well.
“Notice that with Abraham, at this point in history, humans are agrarian: They keep flora and fauna planetmates; they raise crops and they herd sheep. And this is a clue to how, from here on, children will be seen.
“Children will be allowed to live, but only to the extent that they further the agenda and ends of the adult. Children become chattel. They can be utilized, like any resource or investment, and much as humans use animal planetmates, for economic reasons and as little slaves. They can be sold and traded—and this you did and still do. So children are seen not much different from the way humans see the rest of Nature (including planetmates, flora, fauna, and even your women), that is, as investments. They are seen as tools, also. More about that later, in the 29th Prasad.
“Fundamentally, children are thought of as investments. They are commodities. You evaluate everything in the world along cold economic lines. Why? Because of your unnatural fears of deprivation and death, you have built your entire world and your entire consciousness oriented toward that—your economic lodestar. And with a sedentary/agrarian lifeway, there is more work, tedious and hard work, than when you were nomads and gatherers. Your living is harder, but it is more certain, as we have been saying.
“So, on this altar of certainty and increasing control, you sacrifice your children. You see them not just in terms of their level of burdensomeness, not just along the lines of getting a smattering of your unconscious needs fulfilled, though those are influences that always exist. Rather you focus all your intentions on what kind of person you can make of your children for your use later. Barely are you training them in ways to benefit themselves when they get older, but of course, you will do that, for language and primitive interpersonal skills are necessary for any human to function … and to be of use. Rather you are seeking totrain them to be better investments, more useful tools or pawns, in your survival struggles.
“This is why you might call this an intrusive mode of parenting. In this, you wander boldly and blindly into the soul of your child and you rearrange its elements in a way that you can use it. At this point, you have gone from infanticide and abandonment, to soul murder, to children being seen as things … as inanimate … not as live or animate beings with intention … but as objects in space, matter to be used. This is called thingification, and it represents a more separate state from Nature than even soul murder.
“So, it behooves you to intrude upon and dominate that innocent child consciousness, to train that “investment,” in order to maximize its usefulness when it is older. This is very much as you might put money into stocks and bonds as an investment in hopes of a future return. Your mind is calculating how much of physical resources you might need to “invest” in your child and how much “return” you might get … and when. And if there is not a profitable payoff, you are unlikely to do much more than trade, sell, or abandon your child.
“For the first time, then, sedentary/agrarian ways do provide advantages to people with children. Not one child, but children are wanted, for they can be workers. A larger brood of children becomes, with this lifeway, economically advantageous; whereas in your gathering and hunting, nomadic days, an extra child would be seen as another one to be carried along with the group and another mouth to feed, while providing little in exchange, until much later.
“But with large families, you have your little bands of workers and slaves. They are the best “employees” for they can be coerced to work and payment need only be in the amount of food and basic necessities that child might need to survive. You cannot get cheaper labor than that. Furthermore, they can begin to help at very early ages, thus expanding their years of economic value for you. Thus child labor becomes prevalent along with the tendencies toward larger families.
“To clarify, your crazed non-sedentary forebears still were ambivalent about children and perceived families as a burden in relation to their overblown perception of the struggle to survive. However since this burden was lessened through tribe membership and sensible birth control methods and family management, children who were born were—relative to later and to today—wanted, appreciated, and more seen and attended to.
“Alongside this, in the world of Nature, there was neither a disinclination for offspring nor an overinvestment in them. Bonding and affection with Nature’s young rose from the correct, biologically constituted, appreciation of the offspring, and this more individually so. Nature’s parents do not view their children through a dark, crazed veil of dry and thirsty deprivation nor a floral, milky gleem of vain and pathetic estimation.
“In contrast to both of these, agrarian anchors and accumulating, conniving modes fostered appreciation of increases of population, specifically, families, as beneficial in the struggle for survival. It follows that attention and energy would be put into these extra beings, seen increasingly as resources in the struggle against the monstrously over-apprehended fear of death.
“The upshot is that in your ever-increasing sedentary numbers, children were considered advantageous against that imagined encroaching darkness you carried. So the life of your otherwise doomed, helpless newborns was valued more often than not. Your desperate, suffering half-borns would increase your numbers as a defense against your personal demise….”
[Pt 7 of 24rd prasad — Family “Investment”. More coming….
To see the entire book, to which this will be added eventually (book is two-thirds updated), go to http://mladzema.wordpress.com/the-great-reveal-book-6/ …
Planetmates: The Great Reveal is now available in print and e-book format. at Amazon
Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness — Michael’s latest book – is now available in print and e-book formats.
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
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“For most of your existence … your experience was much more intense, alive, and interesting than it is for you now”: The Planetmates on sex, happiness, the tribe, the nuclear family, and the “intensity of experience” of life
“…there was much more happiness attendant upon the state of being a child — being free and open, not just to the awesomeness of the physical world and world of Nature, but to the love, pleasure, fun, and interactions of the social world, as well, with its fascinating array of human behavior and emotion, and the brilliance and marvel of its “magical” members.
“Correspondingly, as nomadic humans, while there was marriage, you were less monogamous. You had various forms and varieties of sexual interactions and marital arrangements. Monogamy was most common, but even then it was less constrained. Sexuality was not the hoarded and jealously guarded commodity it became later for you. Marriage ties were more about the children — their care and the primary responsibilities for them. Additionally, it had to do with societal and cultural concerns, such as expanding kinship opportunities for the relatives of the married couple, and maximizing the circles of sharing and reciprocation. It had virtually nothing to do with establishing lines of heredity or kinship. For owning little (and needing little), you had no concerns about passing possessions or property along. And the mother being the child-bearer led most often to lines of descent being calculated primarily through her, and there was no need, or desire, to upset that natural configuration.
“At any rate, you had much freer ideas about sexuality. Not only did this contribute to the spice of life and the intensity of human experience in general — for women as well as men — but it contributed to the caring of children. Let us explain:
“By “intensity of experience,” we mean that with the excessive stipulations and pressures upon your personhood that came with hierarchical societies, including today’s, your experience — along with your needs, emotions, and aliveness — became muted, dampened. Repressed and numb, your experience lacks the color, the extra flavors and magnificence, and intensity of our lives in Nature. You have no idea what you are missing in your lives. You have not an inkling how you cuddle with your chains and contribute to your increasing numbification over the course of your lives.
“Yet for most of your existence, which preceded your controlling-conforming-sedentary times, your experience was much more intense, alive, and interesting than it is for you now. And what added to that intensity and color, that exquisiteness and pleasure of your experience, was a freer and less constrained sexuality … among many, many, many other things, by the way.
“And how it contributed to the care of children is that it allowed — in that there would be no deprived party — for those times of sexual abstinence after the child was born and during the pregnancy itself. This kind of sexual abstinence would be a product of the sexual disinterest the mother often had while engaged in devoted attention to a young child. The mother derives much sensual satisfaction and emotional fulfillment from nursing, which for one thing pushes other kinds of sensual desire to the side. Other aspects of motherhood and the caring and nurturing of children are also both pleasurable and desirable as well as completely engrossing. So sexual disinterest is much more likely to happen for the mother in the period after childbirth. And as we have said, this contributes to a longer interval between births, and therefore an exceedingly needed and beneficial attention to the most recent newborn.
“Freer sexuality and looser or nonexistent constraint on sexual partners contributed to human satisfaction and social/marital stability for another reason. For sexual disinterest leading to sexual abstinence also occurs for humans for many other reasons: It often occurs during the times of and in the course of spiritual pursuits — not as a result of intention, for as we have said, self-denial is counterproductive to spiritual progress, but because of the degree of engagement and immersion in other-than-bodily pursuits at those times. A person might feel a pull toward taking on something with the total engagement of self that occurs, for example, in a vision quest or walkabout. A looseness of constraints on sexual partners can only facilitate the ability of tribe members to take such things up, being as how it leaves no sexually deprived other, so there is no pressure from another to refrain from following one’s spiritual or creative inclinations.
“Similarly, sexual disinterest occurs, sometimes, during periods of personal transformation, which occur naturally and spontaneously to Authentic humans in the course of their lives. For these might require their full engagement and attention. Other times disinterest might occur is because of ritual or cultural involvement, during periods of grieving upon the death of loved ones, advancing age, sickness, and simply the changing feelings of the partners toward each other over the course of time.
“For all of these reasons and in all these instances, the loose constraints on the sexuality of your earliest forebears and the relative non-exclusivity of sexual partnership meant that the individuals involved were not pulled away from total immersion and focus on these experiences because of a sexually deprived and demanding spouse. In addition to the examples given, consider how, freed from sexual obligations, one could allow oneself to fully and thoroughly grieve, when needed, or allow complete immersion in any comparable emotional experience. This, in its own way, and being at the core of mental health and personal growth, contributed to greater overall happiness, life fulfillment, and expansive abilities to experience life.
“All things considered, more free flowing attitudes toward sex allowed for amplification of life experience, greater spiritual and personal transformation, overall greater happiness, less personal conflict and neurosis, and, importantly, benefit to children. Not only were children helped by the care and attention they wrought of mothers who were not having additional newborns requiring their attention until they, the older ones, were much less emotionally needy, but they were better off due to the fact that they lived in family and tribal groups which were composed of more loving, giving, happy, and affable human adults, because of their overall better fulfillment and experience of life.
“But then you became sedentary and lived in hierarchical societies and all of this changed. With agrarian economics, suddenly, there was more focus on the immediate family. Living permanently on land that one claimed ownership to and which one farmed separated your tribal human group of before into nuclear family units. You did not own the land in common and farm it in a communal style. No. For part of this war against uncertainty and increasing fear of deprivation, which manifested in your having become agrarian and sedentary, was mistrust and fear, not just of Nature, but of each other. You had increasing alienation from each other, greater possessiveness of all things, and increasing greed. What came of such inner forces was that the nuclear family established borders around the land it cultivated and built walls of emotional avoidance between itself and the rest of the community.
“It was families against the world….”
[Pt 5 of 24rd prasad — Family “Investment”. More coming….
To see the entire book, to which this will be added eventually (book is two-thirds updated), go to the blog page at http://mladzema.wordpress.com/the-great-reveal-book-6/ …
Planetmates: The Great Reveal is also scheduled for print and e-book publication in April-May, 2014 ]
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
Those who want signed copies of any of my books, email me directly … sillymickel@gmail.com … Discount for blog subscribers.
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On soul murder, the adult trance state, more. What the Planetmates tell us about poisonous pedagogy, tainted parenting, fairy tales, and how human children became different from the children of Nature
“You are needy, and this lack of need satisfaction has made you, for one thing, insensitive. And while you wish to raise a child who attends to you and behaves loving toward you, you do it in an insensitive way, for you cannot be other than yourself. Try as you might to yourselves be like your ideal parent, if you do not have it in you, you cannot possibly give it. So, does the child end up being what you want … loving, attentive, and need fulfilling? Or does the child become like you … insensitive, aloof, and numbed down? Well, you know the answer. For the parent cannot teach love when the parent does not know real love.
“This is another reason the skill and personality set does not fit the child, as exemplified by Snow White and the bodice. For it is not just consciously constructed in the image of the parent, that is, attempting to pass on positive traits of the parent, it is unconsciously constructed of all the unwanted qualities of the parent as well: It, too, is poisoned. The parent says, “Don’t you dare hit your sister!” while smacking the child. This is poisonous pedagogy. And this is what is meant.
“Sure enough, while it does not kill the child anymore, that is to say, this ambivalence is a step above infanticide and abandonment, which is your first and earliest response to having a child; still, it diminishes them. It bludgeons their vitality and life force. Not quite killing the body, it murders the soul instead. In the tale of Snow White, we notice that each time Snow White is poisoned, or constricted with the tight lacing of the bodice, she faints. She does not die, but she becomes less alive. Sure enough, she ends up in a deathly state because of all this. She exists in a coma-like state, which is a pretty good description of the kind of trance state that this kind of tainted parenting produces in the child.
“The fairy tale then expresses what we have been telling you of the effects this has upon your adult personality. For the tale says Snow White remains in this half-alive state until she is kissed by the Prince. She then wakes up. This is exactly what we have been saying about how you project all of your childhood deprivations onto the love projects of your adult life, seeking to garner from them what you could not get as a child. You want your adult lovers to give you what you did not get as a child and thus save you from the diminished and numbed life that came of it.
“The only thing not true about the fairy tale is the ending. For waking up, because of one’s relationship with a partner, a Prince or Princess, is what you wish. But it does not happen. Fairy tales always hold out the hope of happily ever after. They reflect what you do and how you feel in your life. They do not show correct solutions to your problems or your pain. Indeed, that is why you call them, fairy tales, with all that connotes of being not real and being simply wish fulfilling. Fairy tales are the way you solace yourself about your human predicament. They demonstrate the wrong-gettedness of your thinking. They mirror the impossible struggles of your lives, but provide a denial at the end … a psychological defense against realizing your truth. So, they reflect real things, then lie about them … just like all your good defense mechanisms and techniques of denial do.
“Summarizing, your children became different from the children of Nature, because their care was different and was influenced most strongly by shortcomings in their human caregivers. In order to survive, infants developed more traits of adorability and of both clever communication skills to get needs met as well as non-expression of needs so as to not be a burden. Failure in these, early in your history as humans, would lead most likely to infanticide or abandonment, so these traits increased in your babies as well as in your adult population in that they became permanent elements in your personalities — insensitivity, dissembling, sycophancy, concealing intentions for the purpose of manipulation, unfeelingness, aloofness, controllingness of self and domination of others, alienation, and separation from others and Nature. The parenting modes — if they can be called that — that were instrumental in bringing about these changes were those of infanticide and abandonment.
“In addition to these traits, additional traits which varied more by caregiver were inculcated in the child. The caregiver told him or herself that they were instilling in the child traits and behaviors that were for the child’s ultimate benefit, but in actuality a good deal of what was instilled sought to put into the child those qualities that might satisfy their own deprivations. Furthermore, without being able to help it, they influenced their child in ways that reflected also their own woundedness. The parenting mode at play in these influences on the child was that of ambivalence. In this mode, the fashioning wand is not the one of child murder or abandonment, influencing your generations of children through natural selection. No, the conductor of these changes are the conscious intentions and the unconscious needs and qualities of the caregiver — both good and ill. So, like Snow White, in this scenario, the child does not die, but its soul is murdered. It becomes less alive. And these traits in the child are passed along, not through natural selection, but through the fact that the numbed child will become the adult who will do the same to his or her own child: It is passed on down through the generations unconsciously and through example.
“So there was ambivalence in the desire for children. Your species swayed back and forth about what to do with them — between the poles of infanticide and abandonment, on one side, and acceptance, engagement, and nurture, on the other — for the longest period of your human existence….”
[Pt 3 of 24rd prasad — Family “Investment”
To see the entire book, to which this will be added eventually (book is two-thirds updated), go to the blog page at http://mladzema.wordpress.com/the-great-reveal-book-6/ …
Planetmates: The Great Reveal is also scheduled for print and e-book publication in early April, 2014 ]
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
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Forgotten childhood, hope and real transformation, parenting and the unconscious…. latest from the Planetmates: “The child is marinated in the unconscious of the parent.”
“…No one ever thinks, and certainly never expresses, what this fairy tale is really saying about you: That in your treatment of your young, it is you, not “animals,” not planetmates, who, being conflicted, are often cruel.
“No, childhood, especially infancy, is that unseen, unknown land that you, becoming older, seek to put behind you and push below you … happy just that you managed to get through it. You cannot remember much of your childhood, and almost nothing before the age of five. Why? Because you do not want to. You do not remember it, but a part of you is aware that it was difficult. That part pushes your mind to cover up those years, placing them behind and under a thick cloak of confabulation, heart shapes and unicorns, revision, and rationalization.
“On the individual level, your childhood is a perfect Pandora’s Jar — something you fear, something that a part of you knows contains all the troubles of your life, were you to open it. You sabotage yourself this way: fleeing from the past only to manifest it, ever and again, as fate.
“You have forgotten that this myth advises you on a more fruitful attitude toward this time. One which we are helping you to see, by means of these revelations: That is, that in opening the jar, or box, the troubles of the world — your world — come forth, yes. But in the myth, the last thing to come out, the thing lying at the bottom, is hope. The myth is telling you that it is futile to fear and repress your history, your actual one — not the fanciful, sugar-coated version you have come up with in order to push out of your mind the truth. It is telling you that real change and progress can only come about through opening the jar and freeing the darkened impulses, thus bringing them into the light of day, of consciousness, where they can be seen and let go of. And that in doing this process, eventually … not immediately or even soon for anyone … real hope and real transformation can arise.
“Getting back to the nature of your parenting, it is important to realize that however far from ideal nurturing and what is possible in Nature, such care-giving was sufficient, barely, for your species’ survival. On the other hand, such a corruption of nurturing served to infuse and mold the personalities of your children in unnatural ways. And not just unnatural ways, more and more, this corrupted parenting pushed toward characteristics in the child that mirrored the darker impulses of your adults.
“You are probably asking, why would a parent’s attempts to mold a child to make of them something positive and good in the world — however much it might be like oneself — end up manifesting one’s own undesirable self? This question shows how this entire process is not quite being understood. For we have been saying how the parent seeks to make the child into a) something not bothersome or burdensome, b) something engaging and appealing, and c) something that is like what one wanted from one’s own parents, that is to say, someone loving, attentive, and focused on oneself. None of these are about helping the child acquire workable tools for later in life; they are not even about making the child to be like oneself. The fact is that though you tell yourselves that you are trying to make the child into the best person he or she can be in the world — with yourself as the only good model of that — you are actually trying to turn them into something helpful to your psychological woundedness, not themselves. So to a, b, and c, we must add a d, which is related to the ways children are shaped and twisted unconsciously by your adult caregivers and in ways you do not wish, but cannot help.
“Here it is good to remember your saying, “Do as I say, not as I do.” This saying expresses the idea that you wish your children to be something better than you. However, it is meant to be an ironic expression, because it points to the actual fact that children end up being taught just as much, if not more, from example as from direction. The fact is that children end up picking up both desirable and undesirable, effective as well as counterproductive, ways from the parent.
“And the undesirable and counterproductive ways that are found in the adult are exactly reflective of that adult’s early unmet needs and corrupted desires. That is to say, all that self-centeredness and emotional thirst in the adult, which infects their parenting, comes out as negative and undesirable actions vis-à-vis the child or are displayed in the child’s vicinity and are observed by the child. For the adult does not acknowledge his or her selfish or needy intentions regarding the child. No, they are always unconscious, hidden, and unapproved.
“That is why we know you are so resistant to hearing what we are saying right now. For your fragile egos are dependent on this idea that you are unconditionally loving; it is built upon this notion that your giving is pure and magnanimous. You are not aware of how you display and act out your early deprivations in your actions toward your children, so these are unconscious tendencies in you; indeed, they configure your unconscious. And this unconscious is not seen by you, but it is has a huge effect on your child: It is most definitely seen and picked up by them, both consciously and unconsciously.
“So, as it is said, “the child is marinated in the unconscious of the parent.” That is to say, the child becomes, not just what you want it to become, but exactly that which you deny in yourself and so, naturally, do not want it to become as well. You are needy, and this lack of need satisfaction has made you, for one thing, insensitive. And while you wish to raise a child who attends to you and behaves loving toward you, you do it in an insensitive way, for you cannot be other than yourself. Try as you might to yourselves be like your ideal parent, if you do not have it in you, you cannot possibly give it. So, does the child end up being what you want … loving, attentive, and need fulfilling? Or does the child become like you … insensitive, aloof, and numbed down? Well, you know the answer. For the parent cannot teach love when the parent does not know real love….”
[Pt 2 of 24rd prasad — Family “Investment”
To see the entire book, to which this will be added eventually (book is two-thirds updated), go to the blog page at http://mladzema.wordpress.com/the-great-reveal-book-6/ … Planetmates: The Great Reveal is also scheduled for print and e-book publication in mid-March, 2014 ]
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
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The Planetmates on real love, the “love contract,” adorability in infants, parental “love”: “Love” is often just a swirl of ritualistic craving and trickling satisfaction set in motion by keenly felt but supremely denied hurt.”
“…the more you re-member yourself, the freer you can be. That is the true “transcendence”: It is one rooted in a re-feeling of and re-membering of the hurts and pains in one’s body that is left over from the past and not a separating away from and a denying of that stored pain … as if one is above body and Nature … and confusing that self-congratulation and ego aggrandizement with enlightenment.
“To reprise then, your differences from other planetmates, stemming from your relation with your mothers and caregivers as infants, have to do largely with survival value being attached to non-expression of needs. For certainly if it was the excessive neediness of your young that disinclined adults to want them, then if a baby had less of those qualities or seemed to have less they would be less likely to be shunned or abandoned, thus more likely to survive. A dependent young one suppressing its needs would manifest in it crying as little as possible, being as “unfussy” as could be.
“But it was not just seeming to be not a burden that was advantageous. For your adults’ psyche being so much founded on not getting early needs met, you would crave anything holding out hope, however futile, of getting anything resembling that kind of satisfaction in the present. So babies who had other qualities appealing to the adult — such as “cuteness,” smiling more, or anything in the category of “adorability” or being “entertaining” or otherwise attractive to an adult or reminiscent of the satisfaction of those early deprivations — would make that young one more likely to thrive. If a baby was more engaging with you (as your own caregiver had not been with you), if it was happier and more noticing of you (as your parent failed to do), and of course to the extent that it would be as little a burden on you, it would increase the overall amount of vital care it would receive from you, from your fully growns, in general. So, any traits in infants that for the adult caregiver held out the prospect, however dimly, of the fulfillment, through the newborn, of their own early deprivations were to increase in humans through the process of natural selection.
“Since many of those early lacks had to do with being cared for, nurtured — what is commonly called “love” — it was any qualities of the newborn that seemed to hold the prospect of easing those cravings that were desired and thus were to be selected for and become more prevalent over time. So if a child displayed behavior that was at all resembling what a truly nurturing parent would be like, he or she would attract more of that kind of attention in return. If fully growns could see a dim hope, from their own newborns, of getting the nurturing that they did not get from their own parents, they would feel more inclined to extend caring to such of their children and increase their survivability over their children who did not hold out such a hope.
“This was the unspoken “love contract” that developed between dependent young ones and fully grown attendants: If a child would act less like it had needs and more like it could satisfy needs it was more likely to actually receive some attention to its needs, however inauthentic and agenda-oriented that attention would be. And what you call love is at its inception simply the desperate hope that your infants will eventually grow up to become the parents that you wished you had had, instead of the ones you had, who did not love you sufficiently when you were small.
“So the origins of what you call your unusually strong parental “love” is in this never-acknowledged “love” exchange. This “care contract” explains how your children managed to survive, with everything going against them. However, on your evolution to a purer love—one of Nature and built once again upon feelings of unity with Other and truly feeling along with another, not just in hopes of receiving in return—you would do well to look deeply into the inauthentic nature of what passes for love for you.
“You are, like all of us, capable of true and unconditional loving. Indeed, you have it in you to have that feeling toward all of Nature, toward all of Reality, even. But you cannot achieve that while caught up in and blind to the hidden agendas and self-seeking desperation which mars your love and while braying to the world about your supposed superior capacity for and the supreme purity of your love. What you need to acknowledge, to start, is how what you place on high, use to boost your estimation of yourself over all other living beings, and attribute to divine origins even … how this supposed “love” … is most often just a swirl of ritualistic craving and trickling satisfaction set in motion by keenly felt but supremely denied hurt….”
[More coming…. ]
To see the entire book, to which this will be added eventually (book is two-thirds updated), go to the blog page at http://mladzema.wordpress.com/the-great-reveal-book-6/ … Planetmates: The Great Reveal is also scheduled for print and e-book publication in mid-March, 2014
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
Invite you to join me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/sillymickel
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Children a Burden … Unfit Parents: Children Became the Ultimate Repository for the Suffering Resulting from Social Conformity and Its Humiliation, Say Planetmates in the 21st Prasad (updated)
“You are Babies Raising Babies”: Consumed with Baseless Terrors and Caught up in Relentless Mental Machinations, Humans Are Hardly Fit Care-Givers, According to the Planetmates
The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, the Twenty-First Prasad: Children a Burden … Unfit Parents
Planetmates Release The Twenty-First Prasad
Fully Growns Hardly Fit Care Givers for Newborns
Tree Frog is First Consciousness at The Twenty-First Prasad. Alongside the increasing time of helplessness and dependence of newborns was the increasing reluctance of fully growns to jeopardize their survival for their own newborns.
The Twenty-First Prasad – Children a Burden
But the fully growns are at the same time consumed by the controlling, conforming, backwards thinking, and the alien and crazed overstimulation of consciousness that we’ve been describing.
In this state they are hardly fit to be good care givers to newborns. Remember that fear for your survival—of deprivation and uncertainty—drives your obsessive controlling and conforming. So there was an increasing tendency, 
as you became more “human,” as we’ve defined you, to not want to add the 
burden of caring for dependent young ones to your already uncertain state. Alongside the increasing time of helplessness and dependence of newborns was 
the increasing reluctance of fully growns to jeopardize their survival for their own newborns. These reluctant feelings did not fully manifest, however, until around the time of ultimate control and crazed beingness that occurred with the switch to sedentary and accumulating-conforming ways.
Paraphrase/Elaboration of the Twenty-First Prasad — by SillyMickel Adzema
Now, let us look at childhood from the perspective of your fully growns.
For your adults are not passive actors in these developments. As we have been saying, this is the ultimate and easiest arena of control for humans.
Sure enough, your adults consciously and unconsciously foster and constrain the Ego creations of your young ones in the course of their care giving.
You know how you seek to do it consciously. You call it “raising” your children; again, you show how you objectivize the world and how its people look to you like things to be grown for your use and consumption, much like your crops or chickens. More kindly, you view it as “training” them; though you would never acknowledge, however true, that your aim is to mold and force upon them a shape that makes of them just another extension of you … a mini-me. Again, there is that Ego of you. And here you see how your effects on your children begin to become unconscious influences: You affect them in ways of which you are completely oblivious and always and everywhere have vehemently denied. Still, we must tell you, for those who, because of the pressing and intense nature of these times and their unusual sensitivity to the needs of those beyond just themselves, are able to hear it.
What you are always and everywhere ignorant of is your biological, species-determined inability to give adequate care to those dependent on you. You are, for all the reasons we have been listing, “not quite here,” virtually all of the time.
You are distracted and self-obsessed. While responsible for tending the young’s needs,
you are forever distracted by your controlling and conforming obsessions; you are continually derailed and led astray by your backward thinking. You are barely able to focus outside of yourselves, as you are constantly consumed by the alien and crazed, overstimulated consciousness that characterizes you.
You cannot help but be poor caregivers, with all these other things going on inside you. For children require attentiveness and focus on their needs, and you are ever self-obsessed, and your minds are busy building walls to buffer reality and bridges over unpleasant Nows to fantastical and ever receding futures of ease.
Looking back at the deepest origins of that feverish controlling and fearful conforming we remember that it is rooted in and driven by your underlying — exaggerated and foundationless — fears of death — the supposed end of your beingness.
This fear for your survival is made keen by your incessant paranoia of becoming deprived and of facing uncertainty, as you actually did, in most horrifying ways, as infants.
So, the very same deprivations and uncertainty we planetmates embrace as providing the spice and delightful play of life for you are the forces to drive your obsessive controlling. Furthermore, as you became more “human,” you became that much more, not less, fearful of death; you became ever more terrified of an imaginary future containing uncontainable levels of pain of not getting what you want. You became ever more deranged when confronting uncertainty in your present.
So, consumed with baseless terrors and caught up in your relentless mental machinations around them, you cannot bear the thought of adding the burden of children to all that.
Hardly able to focus outside yourselves and lost in a matrix of long-ago schemas of feelings (from infancy and birth)—pushing and pulling you all about regardless of what you are confronted with in the present—you are babies raising babies.
You would like to make up for your inability by having your newborns simply grow up faster and not be such babies for so long. For after all, it is only their neediness that offends you. It drags you down and requires that you leave off some of your activities and thoughts in the efforts of defense and come out of yourself to heed another’s needs. “If only they would cry less”; “If only they would sleep through the night”; “If only they would poop in the right place.”
Forever falling short of filling your needs in the present, as you go about doing that along with attempting to fill the ever present list of imaginary “needs” left over from your past, you cannot be good caregivers for needy others. Put another way, burdened as you are with imaginary struggles, it does not behoove you to attend to another’s real needs.
Bad enough, all this was when you were nomadic, gatherers and hunters, but all of this was made worse by the switch to sedentary living. For with fixed abodes, inequality of stores, and the resulting social hierarchy came all its requirements to conform increasingly to the demands of a social arena for the satisfaction of one’s needs. Remember that in Nature you enjoyed a relative independence of action in satisfying your basic needs. In Nature, you knew the relative self-assurance that one could always fend for oneself, if need be.
But hierarchy and increased specialization of function—which was a narrowing of the fullness of life experience down to a focus on the aspect of it which could be traded in society for survival—made one dependent on the good will of others for survival. It re-created the state of infantile dependence on one’s care-givers. You were thrust ever, triggered ever, into feelings of helplessness vis-à-vis the Other, which now would include the social matrix within which you were nurtured and fed.
We will leave for later how this, in itself alone, transformed your ideas of Divinity, again … this time it took on more of the qualities of the ones you were most dependent upon—strong men or a man, patriarchal elders, and chiefs—instead of the forces of Nature and its central experience of rebirth. For now it is more important to notice that the major effect this fundamental helplessness in relation to society had upon your feelings and thoughts was the requirement, always, that one’s actions be not just sufficient (for survival) but pleasing (to Other). So, to a consciousness caught up in pushes and pulls left over from early deprivations and trauma in interaction with an inattentive, sometimes harsh, Other (one’s caregiver/parent) was added the pushes and pulls to appeal to, and be approved by, similar unconcerned, careless, sometimes brutal Others in the present, which were one’s higher ups.
This could not help but make it even more difficult to attend to the needs of your young. In the drama of intrigue and chicanery, which erupted out of the necessary interaction for fulfillment of needs with increasingly larger numbers of similarly helpless and equally desperate others in society, you were engaging the majority of the attention and focus you did have. Caught up in the necessary wiles of life left you with little over. The persistent and undeniable needs of children, arising at any time of the day or night, was an unwanted addition to the increasing demands and complexities of daily life.
The result? From the preceding prasads it can easily be guessed what transpired: Children were the lowest in the hierarchy of importance in any society—they were often abandoned or even killed, oftentimes right at birth—for they were the least able to defend themselves and represented the biggest additional outlay of resources and effort of anything coming into an adult’s life. But they were under the most pressure and were the most scapegoated in the hierarchical societies which came with sedentary living.
In ways very similar to the change in the perceptions of women, with hierarchy—that is, with there being controlling and demanding persons ever above one—came incredible pressure to extract from others below oneself amounts of complicity and service equal to what was being demanded from above. It was the unconscious trade-off that men sought for the sacrifice of their energy, time, and self-esteem to those above.
By that we mean that men knew and secretly resented the fact that they needed to put time and effort into the needs and wants of those above them, rather than their own. They felt they could live with that as long as they could balance that suck of energy from them to above with acquisition of unworked for boons from those below. More simply, if you had to suck up to those above you, you could console yourself with the fact that others below you sucked up to you. This was all decided unconsciously, of course. So men used women and controlled them in an amount equal to that which they themselves felt controlled and dominated from above. Men knew they were humiliated and denigrated to an intolerable degree by those above, but they were able to live with that if at other times they also could dominate and bully.
And, of course, women were always targets for all this scapegoating and abuse. But even further down—and available to be scapegoated even by women—were the children. So, again, children were felt to be both the one excludable variable in life’s burdens as well as the ultimate repository for the suffering brought about by such burdens. They were not wanted and were killed or abandoned, being felt to be additional burdens on psychologically and economically distracted adults. But if they were allowed to live, their needs would be set aside in accordance with the pathetic needs of caregivers who desperately sought dependent underlings (of any kind, women or children, fringe group or subservient class) upon which to balance the injustices of one’s adult life.
It is no coincidence, either, that women, being the easiest ones to burden, the ultimate societal scapegoats, would have thrust upon them the burden of caregiving that men did not want. Being the child-bearers they were obvious candidates; but these societal pressures that came with sedentary living increased and reinforced that relation. And men were both more anxious as well as more able—more easily beginning with sedentary life—to cut themselves away from any such responsibilities regarding children. However, they heaped extra pressure on women. For the fact that women, being lowest on the totem pole, were the most supervised of all sectors of adults meant that although men would not want to help in child caregiving, they certainly did not want women to be so cavalier about it.
So, women were in the worst situation. Being the repository of the suffering of their men, who themselves were the repository of the misery of the strong men above them, women carried the heaviest burden yet were left with no one below them to pass along the burden of caregiving.
Further, this task of attentiveness to children is a complication that just adds to your considerable discomfort around not knowing things, not being able to control things … around uncertainty. For while you sought to control everything about you, your children would be the one major factor upsetting your carefully made plans and throwing the monkey wrench into any laboriously constructed ease you were able to carve out for yourself.
So while your newborns required more, you 
would prefer to give less. Your newborns required ever longer periods in the dependent and helpless state as you changed over time, while
with your increasing fears you felt it risky to focus on a helpless other and away from your attention to warding off present and future imaginary threats.
This reluctance to care for your newborns only became truly apparent and blatant after your transition from nomadic ways to sedentary ones, however.
For this switch allowed full rein to your mania to
accumulate and control and,
with this increased separation from the natural, a greater state of ordinary madness. You peaked, at this point, as far as your desires for controlling. So the unpredictability brought by newborn others was that much more unappealing.
Continue with The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, the Twenty-Second Prasad: Perinatal Conformity and The Earliest Beauty Contest
Return to The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, the Twentieth Prasad: Obsessive Control — Controlling Your Young
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By Adolescence, “Civilized” Children Are Programmed … Whereas in Primal Societies Inner Experience is Cultivated: Return to Grace, Part Four — Puberty, Becoming Adult
“Civilization” Brings Brutal Rites of Passage and Fear of the Supernatural: The People of Nature Just Laugh at the Townsfolk Living in Such Terror and Valuing Cruelty
Finally, let us investigate the fourth fall from grace, the time around puberty when the ego is consolidated around a specific identity, task, role that marks her or him for life. Can this be otherwise?
Forest and Village Worldviews are Directly at Odds
Once again, Turnbull’s (1961) report on the Mbuti provides a fitting example. This example is especially illuminating in that he was able to observe and note differences between the hunter-gatherer Mbuti and nearby villagers with whom they had occasional contact. Since the villagers have to be considered post-agrarian and definitely not hunter-gatherers, we are able to study any differences between these two lifestyles and possible differences in worldview, side-by-side.
With “Civilization” Comes Brutal Rites of Adulthood and Excessive “Masculinity”
Indeed, Turnbull shows that these differences do exist, and we see one distinctly in connection to the rites of passage that are undergone respectively in each culture.
The rite of passage is called the nkumbi and is conducted by the villagers. The Pygmies undergo it, at a certain age, in order to enjoy certain respect and privileges in their dealings with villagers, as they must often have for various reasons. Of their own, the Mbuti have no such rite of passage, certainly nothing severe and harsh like that of the villagers. Turnbull (1961) describes the villagers’ nkumbi:
The physical ordeals sometimes start out as games but develop into cruel tests of physical endurance. A crouching dance that might be fun for a few minutes becomes agony after half an hour. A mild switching on the underside of the arm with light sticks is of no concern until, after several days, the skin becomes raw. And then the villagers notch the sticks so that they fold over and pinch the skin sharply, often drawing blood. When the boys have become used to being beaten with leafy branches, thorny bushes are substituted. (p. 225)
Dominant Societies Try to Instill Fear of the Supernatural to Control Their Underlings
He also explains the villagers beliefs concerning this rite of passage and its effect and purpose:
The villagers believed that the initiate, Pygmy or otherwise, is everlastingly bound thereafter by all the laws of the tribe, sacred and secular. He is put into direct relationship with the supernatural, whose representatives on earth are the villagers themselves. If any Pygmy initiate offends a villager, therefore, he is also offending the supernatural—the ancestors—and will be duly punished by them. The villagers live in such fear of the supernatural, with its power to bring down on an offender the curses of leprosy, yaws, dysentery and other diseases or to cause him to be injured by a falling tree, that they cannot conceive of any initiates daring to offend the ancestors. (p. 224)
But Primal Folks Laugh at the Fears of “Domesticated” Humans and Delight in Flaunting Their Customs
But offend the ancestors they do, these Pygmies, and with apparent relish. They do not share the villagers fearful view of the world. They cannot imagine any good reason to inflict these tortures on each other and laugh, secretly, behind the villagers’ backs, at them. Turnbull (1961) writes,
Both the boys and their fathers enjoyed the chance to make fun, in a friendly way, of the villagers, but that was not their sole reason for deliberately breaking all the taboos. They behaved as they did because to them the restrictions were not only meaningless but belonged to a hostile world. The villagers hoped that the nkumbi would place the Pygmies directly under the supernatural authority of the village tribal ancestors; the Pygmies naturally took good care that nothing of the sort should happen, proving it to themselves by this conscious flaunting of custom. (p. 224)
Building the Better Human – Entry Into Adulthood
To the Pygmies this all seems harsh and unnecessary, and as far as their own children are concerned they keep a strict watch over them to see that the villagers do not go to the length that they sometimes do with village children, even if this brings them into some contempt. But to the villager this toughening-up process is essential and does not come naturally in the course of village life. The child has to be fitted for adult life, and this is what the nkumbi sets out to achieve. In a few months a boy becomes a man, tough and strong, physically and mentally. The process is not a pleasant one, but it is the only way in which, under tribal conditions, the goal can be achieved.
The Pygmy can understand and appreciate this, but the very nature of his own nomadic hunting and gathering existence provides all the toughening up and education that are needed. Children begin climbing trees sometimes before they can walk. Their muscles develop, and they overcome fear in a number of daring tree games. Adult activities are learned from an early age by observation and imitation, for the Pygmies live an open life.
Their life is as open inside their tiny one-room leaf huts as it is in the middle of a forest clearing, and so the children have no need of the sex instruction which forms so large a part of the teaching given to village boys during the nkumbi. (pp. 225-226)
Far from illustrating the dependence of the Pygmies upon the villagers, the nkumbi illustrates better than anything else the complete opposition of the forest to the village. The Pygmies in the forest consciously and energetically reject all village values. When they are in the village they temporarily adopt its values and customs, not wanting to desecrate their sacred forest values by bringing them into the village. That is why they never sing their sacred songs in the village the way they do in the forest, and why they refuse to consecrate the nkumbi with special music, although every other event of importance in their lives is marked in this way. There is an unbridgeable gulf between the two worlds of the two peoples.
The Pygmies have their own way of growing naturally into adulthood. A boy proves himself capable of supporting a family when he kills his first real game, and proves himself a man when he participates in the elima. (p. 227)
By Adolescence in “Civilized” Societies Most Children Have Had the “Still Small Voice” Programmed Out, Whereas in Primal Cultures It is Valued
Aminah Raheem (1991) gives a final example of how this stage can be different in other cultures:
By the onset of adolescence, most children are intricately programmed into the cultural complex of their time and place. The “still small voice” of the soul is rarely heard and, when it is, it is usually discarded as fantasy or nonsense. For example, when I worked with late adolescents, I found that they often received deep soul promptings through dreams of visionary experiences. These numinous events seemed to contain valuable guidance for direction in their lives, but usually they were discounted by the dreamers and their peers as fantasy. By contrast, in American Indian culture such experiences are valued as clear messages of life purpose, especially when they appear during puberty. (p. 29)
Continue with What Does the Natural Self Look Like? The State of Not Losing the Soul Is Emotional Openness and Joy, Being Equally Free in Tears and Laughter
Return to Return to Grace, Part Three — The Primal Scene and the Divine Child: Hierarchical Societies Demand Conformity All the Way Down the Line
People of Programming … “Civilized” Ways
People of Nature … “Primal” Ways
Primal Ways and “Civilized” Ways Colliding Create Culture Wars
Continue with What Does the Natural Self Look Like? The State of Not Losing the Soul Is Emotional Openness and Joy, Being Equally Free in Tears and Laughter
Return to Return to Grace, Part Three — The Primal Scene and the Divine Child: Hierarchical Societies Demand Conformity All the Way Down the Line
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Return to Grace, Part Three — The Primal Scene and the Divine Child: Hierarchical Societies Demand Conformity All the Way Down the Line
Becoming “as a Child” and Building the Better Human — Childhood: The Ego Is Sycophantic to Someone and “The Word” — What Those Voices You Hear Really Are
Let us turn now to the third fall from grace, that time when the child’s potential is reduced to the acceptable spectrum, only, that reflects the socionormative constructs of the society. Can this be different?
Primal Scene — We Give Up
Remember that at the primal scene, occurring around the age of four or five, we become “them.” We give up. We see our attempts to interact as ourselves with our parents and the world extending out from them as being utterly futile. We feel it is better to get at least something by being someone they want rather to get nothing and to seethe in loneliness and inattention being the unique person we were meant to be.
The Unreal Self, the Ego, Is Sycophantic to Someone
So, we cater to others’ requirements and lose connection with our own wants and needs … their needs become our needs.
We develop an unreal self which is concocted to please others and comprised of bargaining chips to procure approval from others. Our self is sycophantic to someone. Even if that self contains elements of “toughness” or independence, those traits came into being to placate another, usually the same-sex parent.
“Child Sacrifice”
I say it is comparable to “child sacrifice” and is exemplified in Western culture in the Biblical story of Abraham being told by “God” to sacrifice his son, Isaac. For “God,” you may read the insane workings of the mind in adult life once one has lost a real and felt connection to the transpersonal by means of these falls from grace. You see here, over and again, that we do to others what has been done to us. Having been forced to give up ourselves we are compelled … by “God,” but actually by the end products of emotional pain … to slay that same thing in our children when it presents itself.
I say it is the fall from grace that occurs as a result of relationship trauma. Indeed, it is that which develops at the time when the child is beginning to connect with the wider world beyond Mother. The earlier traumas and splittings from innate divinity come about in relation to the mother or other primary care-giver. They happen at and around birth and for a while afterward through the interaction of the infant with mother around gestation, actual birth, and then, bonding, nursing, feeding, toilet training, and so on.
While this pressure to split off from the body and its needs and the transpersonal and its directives and guidance continues into toddlerhood, more and more the child interacts with siblings, other children, the father, the other figures in the social unit.
So, as with the mother, the natural child will seek to have its needs satisfied. Earlier this was for biological needs. Now this is for relational needs … connection with others, interaction, mutual recognition. So over time the biological and affectional needs develop and become related to ways of behaving and interacting around needs of belongingness and connection with loved ones in the immediate family. Ideally these needs are met through mutual recognition and appreciation between distinct human personalities.
Hierarchical Societies Demand Conformity All the Way Down the Line
However, in complex, hierarchical societies and just like in the Abraham and Isaac myth, the parents will seek to have their children behave and appear to be like miniature versions of themselves … mini-me’s. Like Abraham, the adult is not really seeing the child and its needs as separate from his or her own. Rather the parent is caught up in the mental byproducts of unmet needs from his or her own childhood. Indeed, the child becomes a byproduct of the adult’s attempt to orchestrate the emotional pain within him or herself.
“The Word”: Those Voices You Hear … What They Really Are
How that manifests is that the adult—all the while proclaiming to be doing this “for the child’s own good”—will seek to carve a reflection of him or herself into the precious sensitivity of the toddler and preschooler.
Without a doubt, the adult thinks it is doing this in obedience to voices coming from outside. For they are the pushes and pulls of his or her own unmet needs in childhood, which—repressed because of the pain associated with them and existing in a portion of the consciousness … and brain … not accessible to consciousness—now have influence seemingly from the outside.
The fact that the adult will feel that these unconscious forces have the force of a higher power … a deity in Abraham’s case … is because they indeed are the remnants of instructions, nonverbal messages, and admonitions given to that adult as a child from his or her own parents. Coming from outside oneself they seem to come from a supernatural source. Coming from one’s parents they seem to come from a higher source … one requiring strict obedience … one’s parents.
The “Commandments” and the Culture’s Shared Neurosis
Beyond that, they appear to come from a higher authority since these “commandments” from the parents are reflective of the society as a whole. For the cookie cutter that is pressed upon the precocious personality of the young one and which is in the shape of the parent is somewhat like the cookie cutters of that culture in general. That is to say, the neurotic proclivities of an adult in any society are of course going to be similar to those of the others in that society, for indeed neurosis is all about conformity with others. Put bluntly, the way the parent’s soul has been disfigured is roughly in the manner of the way others in that society have been disfigured.
“Doctrine” of Infallibility
So, being reflective of the larger society, again the patterns of this unreal self have that sense of being from “above”—from outside oneself and from higher up. Thus, these distorted orchestrations on the self from the outside carry with them all the weight and validity as from an infallible source … though of course that is anything but true.
I should at least mention at this point that the reason this process of losing one’s self in conformity to supposedly higher others is more extreme in complex, “civilized,” societies is because the hierarchical nature of such societies imposes itself upon all elements of its corresponding culture. Specifically, in such societies virtually all adults are pressured into conformity with higher ups of some sort or other and are sycophantic in relation to them. Naturally this pattern of oppression in the greater society will be reflected in the patterns of relationship in the family as well.
Building the Better Human — Childhood
A Child Wants to Be of Service by Nature
Now, by contrast to Western attitudes to young children, Liedloff (1977) describes the kind of trust in the innate sociality of the child and the “respect” for the child and for his or her “inclinations” that characterized the Yequana:
Perhaps as essential as the assumption of innate sociality in children and adults is a respect for each individual as his own proprietor. The notion of ownership of other persons is absent among the Yequana. The idea that this is “my child” or “your child” does not exist. Deciding what another person should do, no matter what his age, is outside the Yequana vocabulary of behaviors. There is great interest in what everyone does, but no impulse to influence—let alone coerce—anyone. A child’s will is his motive force. There is no slavery—for how else can one describe imposing one’s will on another and coercion by threat and punishment? The Yequana do not feel that a child’s inferior physical strength and dependence upon them imply that they should treat him or her with less respect than an adult. No orders are given a child that run counter to his own inclinations as to how to play, how much to eat, when to sleep, and so on.
But where his help is required, he is expected to comply instantly. Commands like “Bring some water!” “Chop some wood!” “Hand me that!” or “Give the baby a banana!” are given with the same assumption of innate sociality, in the firm knowledge that a child wants to be of service and to join in the work of his people. No one watches to see whether the child obeys—there is no doubt of his will to cooperate. As the social animal he is, he does as he is expected without hesitation and to the very best of his ability. (pp. 90-91)
An Example of the Adult Role Containing Within It Also the Real Self, the Child
In a similar fashion, the Mbuti, as described by Turnbull (1961), hardly notice a difference from child roles and expectations and adult ones:
And one day they find that the games they have been playing are not games any longer, but the real thing, for they have become adults. Their hunting is now real hunting; their tree climbing is in earnest search of inaccessible honey; their acrobatics on the swings are repeated almost daily, in other forms, in the pursuit of elusive game, or in avoiding the malicious forest buffalo. It happens so gradually that they hardly notice the change at first, for even when they are proud and famous hunters their life is still full of fun and laughter. (p. 129)
The Divine Child
The holy man from India, Sathya Sai Baba, echoes these perspectives of the child as presented by Pearce (1980) and demonstrated in nonliterate cultures. He says, “The human child sees itself as the center of the universe and the world as an extension of its being. This divine child knows that it is so” (1991, p. 295).
Kasturi (1991), Baba’s editor and translator explains,
Children are most concerned with the Now; Baba reminds us the past is past; do not turn back and look wistfully or wailingly on the road you have traversed already. Children do not see the world as fragmented by walls: Chinese, Berlinese, or erected just to tease; they are involved in everything and with everyone; they represent true innocence, love, forgiveness and fraternity. The child has no conceit or contempt of gender; this divine child [referring to the avatar, Sai Baba] affirms: “Among men I am man; among women I am woman; among children I am a child.” (p. 295)
This child [meaning Sathya Sai Baba] inspires us to become children again so that we might be ever with Him, of Him, in Him. (p. 295)
Continue with By Adolescence “Civilized” Children Are Programmed … Whereas in Primal Societies Inner Experience is Cultivated: Return to Grace, Part Four — Puberty, Becoming Adult
Return to Changing the Human Condition Starts with Birth: The Most Precocious, Brilliant, and Advanced Children Were Treated Differently as Newborns
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Apocalypse No: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious … the book
Apocalypse No:
Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious
Complete Book Chapters with Links
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These are the strangest of days. We live in a time in which ending our species in our lifetime, even eliminating all life on this planet, are very real possibilities. The awareness of this acceleration toward an “end of days” — while so horrifying that we are in denial of it and hardly speak it — hangs over us and affects us in ways singular and fantastic.
This book — Apocalypse No, Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious — awakens us to the unique character of our times. There are powerful factors and unconscious influences erupting into our world now which are changing the Earth and us in radical ways … for good and ill. This unprecedented era in history is rife with the perinatal, that is, with repressed memories locked into us arising from our experiences of birth. We see that our impending apocalypse has to do with birth feelings, birth trauma — an emerging perinatal unconscious.
Herein is revealed the underbelly of our modern world and life and the impetus behind our self-destruction. We see primal forces arising and exposed. We begin to understand how and why this is happening now. Knowing this gives us the power to do something about our dire situation. Finally, we can direct our attention to the roots of our drive to apocalypse and reverse it.
More than that, this awakening provides a way of transformation for ourselves. For we see that in the heart of this darkness we are bringing down upon us lies the most incredible opportunity for taking a leap beyond what we think of as human nature. This time calls for a new hero’s cycle — one that leaves behind the thuggishness of the old one. We are lifted beyond ourselves in a higher calling and a transcendent yet deeply rooted spirituality.
We realize that the necessary answer to the dilemma of apocalypse or Earth rebirth lies, not only in the resurrection of a new Earth, but in the dawning of a new self as well.
We will either heroically, somehow, save our species and our planet, which will require a change of our human nature unlike anything that has been asked of our species ever before, or we will be witnesses to the elimination of life on this planet in some way that we cannot imagine but can only be horrific in the extreme. This book is about facing, not denying, the uniquely dire character of our times and finding out what it says about us and requires of us.
There is much here to see, and so much of it the mainstream would never touch for fear of creating a panic. Still, to survive our species must face our problems, not look away. And there is a nobility in doing that, which is unlike any kind of nobility or heroism that has been asked of our species before.
However, this time brings with it an advantage and opportunity also unprecedented: Never before has it been more clear what is right and what is wrong, what is worthwhile and what is not, what is life … what, death, and what is noble and what evil. At no other time has a higher calling or a path of true nobility of soul been more visible. To align oneself with this cause lifts one out of oneself and one’s petty concerns into a heady and invigorating life purpose. We might die in our efforts. There is every likelihood that we will be unable to reverse our dire trajectory. Still, should that occur, those who face and take up this challenge will not suffer the agony of regretting that one could have done something but did not.
On the other hand, though we will need many noble souls to reverse our current downslide into oblivion, it is possible that simply a significant fraction of the world’s population—like the “leaven in the dough”—can make all the difference in the world, literally, by tipping our course one way as opposed to another, especially if these people—because of their healing and their awareness of the crisis—are motivated to place themselves in positions of influence and education, or to put their efforts toward healing, on individual and collective levels, in larger numbers than the average populace would. In other words, not just the leaven in the dough but as persons, standing in the right place and with the lever big enough, who can move the world. I hope, for the sake of us all, that you are one of those heroes.
Chapter Two: “We Ain’t Born Typical””
Chapter Three: The Perinatal Media
Chapter Four: Twenty-First Century Life – Table of DisContents
Chapter Five: Birth Wars, World Woes
Chapter Six: Healing Crisis – Getting “Sick” To Be Well
Chapter Seven: Through Gaia’s Eyes – Nature Balances HerSelf
Chapter Eight: Derailing the Cycles of War and Violence
Chapter Nine: Regressions in the Service of Society
Chapter Ten: Where There Is Hope, Cultural Rebirthing
Chapter Eleven: Control Versus Surrender … Heaven Leads Through Hell
Chapter Twelve: Atman Projects Versus Surrender Solutions
Chapter Thirteen: Peaceful Warriors and Silly Heroes
Chapter Fourteen: To Move the World – A Race Against Time
Continue with Book Five: Wounded Deer and Centaurs
Return to Apocalypse Emergency – Book 3
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The Most Precocious, Brilliant, and Advanced Children Were Treated Differently as Newborns: Changing the Human Condition Starts with Birth
Building the Better Human … We Do Not Need to Traumatize Our Babies: Return to Grace, Part Two — Doing Better About Birth
Let us look at some of the evidence for a more fortunate and favorable human condition and some of the factors correlated with it.
So Much About Smiling
We can start with the example of “social smiling.” Mainstream psychology and child development claim that “social smiling” does not occur in the infant until about four or five months, that even “true” pleasure smiling does not develop until around ten weeks, attributing any smiling that occurs before that either to “spontaneous discharge in lower brain regions” or “to gas.” (Sroufe et al, 1992, especially pp. 196-201).
Yet, Leboyer (1975) reported that babies who had entered the world in the humane manner of delivery he developed smile frequently and often from the day of birth. These babies also show physical and emotional advantages way above average. At any rate, it is hard to believe that newborns with the physical and emotional advantages of such a loving and beautiful welcome as is described and attested to for Leboyer babies are having all that much more gas than babies given the normal, harsh hospital welcome.
Our Arrogant Inability to Impute Consciousness to Beings Other Than Us
In addition, the research used to support this idea that infant smiling is not indicative of pleasure has to do with the fact that this smiling occurs regularly for the infant upon going to sleep and that “If their smiles are a sign of pleasure, why don’t they occur when infants are wide awake as well?” (Sroufe et al, 1992, p. 197).
This statement is laughable considering only what I have said so far. For we know that babies do smile when awake, in fact a lot of the time, viz, Leboyer babies. But beyond that, the reasoning involved in it clearly displays some of the problems with the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm I mentioned previously. It seems we find it extremely hard to impute consciousness and awareness to beings other than ourselves . . . and that the furthest from our normal state another conscious state is, the more likely we are to deny its existence.
Feeling That We Have Been Forced to Give Up Our Awareness, We Want to Deny Awareness in Others.
The reasons for this refusal to acknowledge awareness should be apparent from the devolutional model, where we see, for example, that with each additional splitting of consciousness, at each, so called, “stage of development,” the individual is further reduced in awareness until, as Huxley (1954) put it, “all that remains is the measly trickle of awareness necessary for survival on this planet.” So it makes sense, feeling that we’ve been forced to give up our awareness, we will want to deny awareness to others. And, of course, we can get away with this all the more with those most unlike us, where we can expect community support in this kind of mutual illusory neurosis and scapegoating.
But keep in mind that we are attempting here to maintain the new-paradigm insistence on the prior reality of consciousness. So let us not stray from that and let us see just what is implied by this statement from the mainstream that babies don’t feel pleasure because it happens regularly when they are falling off to sleep. To put it bluntly, if I smile every time I have an orgasm, with strict conformity to certain specific neurophysiological characteristics each and every time, does that mean my orgasms are not pleasurable?
Don’t We Have a Say in How We Feel?
Well, if I were a mainstream psychologist I might have to say, yes, it means that they are not pleasurable. Looking at me from the outside, and not including the factor of my subjectivity—which would cause them to ask me whether or not it was pleasure, to grant me that much respect—they would have to conclude in the negative. However, I would have to disagree with them. And I feel the newborn would probably disagree with them also, if she or he could but speak.
Since he or she cannot, I submit that we should at least leave the question open, rather, that we should assume it is not all that much different from our own experience of smiling and pleasure rather than to err in the direction of concocting bizarre explanations whose main benefit can only be to prop up crumbling and outdated paradigms.
Building the Better Human — Birth and Infancy
But to continue, on this same issue of smiling, we get support cross-culturally that the human condition, as I have described it above, mostly for Westerners, can be different. Pearce (1980) writes concerning the supposed lack of intelligence and lack of social smiling in the Western newborn:
No less than Jerome Bruner of Harvard’s Center for Cognitive Studies, surely one of our more brilliant researchers developed this idea. The assumption is terribly wrong, but the academic rationale growing around it began to include more contradictions blithely ignored because once an idea is accepted into the body of knowledge, everyone “knows” and no one questions it. Everyone “knew” that no smiling occurs for some ten to twelve weeks because infants are born prematurely and have no intelligence during that time. If a mother reported smiling before that acceptable date, the cryptic diagnosis was “gas pains.” (p. 42)
Can it be otherwise? Looking cross-culturally, it appears to be so. Pearce (1980) writes further,
[I]n 1956, Marcelle Geber . . . made a momentous discovery. She found the most precocious, brilliant, and advanced infants and children observed anywhere. These infants had smiled, continuously and rapturously, from, at the latest, their fourth day of life. Blood analyses showed that all the adrenal steroids connected with birth stress were totally absent by that fourth day after birth. Sensorimotor learning and general development were phenomenal, indeed miraculous. These Ugandan infants were months ahead of American or European children. A superior intellectual development held for the first four years of life. . . .
These infants were born in the home, generally delivered by the mother herself. The child was never separated from the mother, who massaged, caressed, sang to, and fondled her infant continually. She slept with her infant. The infant fed continuously, according to its own schedule. These infants were awake a surprising amount of time—alert, watchful, happy, calm. They virtually never cried. Their mothers were bonded to them . . . and sensed their every need before that need had to be expressed by crying. The mother responded to the infant’s every gesture and assisted the child in any and every move that was undertaken, so that every move initiated by the child ended in immediate success. At two days of age (forty-eight hours) these infants sat bolt upright, held only by the forearms, with a beautifully straight back and perfect head balance, their finely focused eyes staring intently, intelligently at their mothers. And they smiled and smiled. (pp. 42-43)
Continue with Return to Grace, Part Three — The Primal Scene and the Divine Child: Hierarchical Societies Demand Conformity All the Way Down the Line
Return to Civilization, Culture, and the History of Our Falls from Grace in Nature … Primal Peoples Had a Nobleness We Don’t Know: Return to Grace, Part One — Can It Be Otherwise?
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Continue with Return to Grace, Part Three — The Primal Scene and the Divine Child: Hierarchical Societies Demand Conformity All the Way Down the Line
Return to Civilization, Culture, and the History of Our Falls from Grace in Nature … Primal Peoples Had a Nobleness We Don’t Know: Return to Grace, Part One — Can It Be Otherwise?
To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Falls from Grace
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The Great Reveal by SillyMickel & the PlanetMates 
