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The Eighteenth Descent — Culture: The Matrix — “Wrong-Gettedness” and the A-mazing Cultural Maze … Strutting and Fretting, Signifying Nothing
The Eighteenth Descent — Culture:
The Matrix — “Wrong-Gettedness” and the A-mazing Cultural Maze … Strutting and Fretting, Signifying Nothing
— which is Chapter 26 of *Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man* by Michael Adzema
26
The Eighteenth Descent — Culture:
The Matrix — “Wrong-Gettedness” and the A-mazing Cultural Maze … Strutting and Fretting, Signifying Nothing
“Such a fury we unleash, so as to create the smoke and mirrors of distraction and to keep us from the otherwise insidious trickling knowing of our horrifying creations and the gnawing abyss of dissatisfaction and unknowing inside us.”
The expulsion from Paradise that came with sedentary ways demanded increasingly complex, however vapid, entrancements — ritual and mores — of culture as compensation, however empty, for the loss.
In becoming increasingly dominating, sycophantic, and emotionless, we created an emptiness within. To compensate, we created outside us in our social environment a maze-like, fantastical panorama — likened most recently to a matrix.
In this chapter I disclose the horror we do not want to know about ourselves and our beliefs.
Wrong-Gettedness … Culture
So the advantage to the survival of the individual newborn — however rooted, as it was, in the twisted motivations of the adults tending to them — of learning to be obsequious, inauthentically pleasing, and repressive of one’s needs and expression became also the backbone of what humans call culture. For the lack of direct inner knowledge — the lack of connection to instinct, for example — that characterizes humans and was increasingly selected for with the predominance of controlling-conforming-appealing-nonexpression traits in humans, led to the ever-expanding overcomplexity of the obvious simplicity of existence. Humankind grew ever more fanciful and unnecessary traits, needs, desires, behaviors, wants, obsessions, compulsions, beliefs, visions, and thoughts — all subsumed under Ego — out of this separation from natural ways, this split from Nature, this estrangement from the Divine, this “expulsion from Paradise.”
On the societal level, the cumulative result, or manifestation, of all individual egos — with all their infinite, however twisted, complexity — is what we term culture. Culture is the human substitute for the instinct we would otherwise have, just as Ego is the substitute for Self — Self meaning identity with Divinity. Being a separation from Divinity and Nature, culture is a separation from Truth as well. The Unapproved and Hidden — the Truth of humans not contained in any culture and whose essence is revealed in this book — is Truth that we do not know … cannot and will not know. Culture is what we erect in its stead: It is the overt representation of wrong-gettedness.
Is Culture Untrue?
“Is culture all untrue?” you are thinking. Well, no. It is true in a limited way. It is true in the same way the world is known to be flat. That is, within certain limitations it has its truth and hence its usefulness. Yet it is set in a context that is not true … not at all. And that context skews the results of all the contents of culture, making them of dubious worth.
At this point you should have a pretty clear understanding of what I mean by that, as I have given many examples. For instance, that life is hard and a struggle is true for virtually all civilized folk of all time. Yet it is given a different light when it is known that it does not have to be, is not in Nature, and was not even for us for most — in fact, for ninety-nine percent — of our existence as a species. That life is a struggle is not true in the larger context of what is possible and natural for humans and what is true for virtually all life of all times, except for humans in the few thousand years of civilization.
Language Helps and Hinders
Similarly, language is an aid in communication, yes. But from the larger perspective of the Unapproved and Hidden, it is a flawed substitute, a symbolic and roundabout way, of conveying messages: Not only does it confuse and obscure as much as it reveals and conveys, but the psychic, direct transmission of information that is its alternate in Nature is far easier and far more accurate.
Not only the mind-sharing of Nature is superior, but human mental confusion keeps us from another of our planetmates’ advantages. For planetmates do not need language for they know more clearly what is going on without it being needed to be communicated. They can pick up instantly from the body language, the scent, and the facial and muscular expressions of others, together with the positioning of every element in any scene, more than could ever be communicated, by one to another, in language about what is going on in that scene.
For one thing planetmates can deduce far more accurately what is going on, since it is not being skewed or spun through the personality or agendas of any other. Added to this, they have far more information being conveyed to their senses, other than what could come from language. We can see this in the way canines are able to discern many thousands of times — up to a million times! some researchers report — more information from scent. Still, that is only one sense of many used by planetmates. We say animals can “smell fear.” That is a trite example of the fact that planetmates are sensing far more of what is going on than humans are and they cannot be dissembled to … unlike humans with their language abilities who are so easily able to be fooled. So what would need to be communicated if it is already known? And known more accurately than one would get it as once removed, communicated to one through another?
Thus, human language is an aid in communication in the smaller context of human relationships and in that of being able to be written down and “stored” for use at a later time and to be disseminated to others, sometimes many others, without direct contact. However it is perhaps not an advantage, more likely it is a hindrance, in relation to the one-on-one communication that is possible otherwise for beings on Earth.
Culture Substitutes Itself for Natural Morality
Another instance: Remember I was saying, using the example of Abraham and Isaac, how if we had not been convinced otherwise by our pedagogy we would naturally see an example in that story of a murder being espoused by a supposed “god” and a sacrifice that would not be one for Abraham, predominantly, but for Isaac, who would lose his life? A grade-schooler hearing this story for the first time does not see in this any kind of interaction with a Divine being, rather one of murdering impulses within a person in a way that later the term psychotic could be applied. That is, until culture comes along to “teach” the child otherwise.
Like planetmates, children have a natural morality — where suffering, pain, and death are bad, and pleasure, freedom, and happiness are good — until forced to think otherwise … until “enculturated.” For, within the domains of culture, no one questions Abraham’s behavior as being holy or righteous; nor the interaction with the “supernatural” as being anything but with a “god.” However, in the larger context of feeling — the natural morality built upon innate empathy, love, and caring — which any planetmate or child would apply here, it is viewed as nothing less than insanity.
Similar things could be said for our understandings of love, our conceptualization of God, our feelings about extending kindness, and what it means to be a good person: All are what we think them to be, but only within a particular context. Beyond that, they are seen to be false, twisted, and corrupted.
The “Good” Person
Let us take one of those and using it as an example make it clearer what I mean. Let us look at what, in the context of culture, we proclaim to be a good person: The “good” people of our cultures put a lot of effort into doing the “right” actions and thinking the “right” thoughts. They engage in endless hours of religious nodding, bowing, and mumbling — what we call ritual and prayer — to “please” these Phantom gods of ours. Very few people would not attribute qualities of “holiness,” goodness, and even saintliness to such people. But are they good?
“Good” people will also work, uncomplainingly, at the tasks assigned to them by controlling others, whether that be higher ups in the society — the Large Accumulators, the Controllers — or in the family, where that role is taken by husband and father in his dealings with his “good” housewife and his “good” and obedient children. Very few people would consider such compliant people to be other than the “salt of the earth,” good housewives, well-behaved boys and girls, “hard-working, god-fearing, real” Americans … Germans … (insert your nationality here).
And Sycophancy, Thought Control, Obedience, and Self-Control
However, from what I have been telling you, it should be clear that the deferential and obedient of us, in the context I am presenting, can be seen as fearful sycophants who are confusing childhood admonitions — backed by terrorizing threats — to “be good little boys and girls and behave” with adult nobility and spirituality. Yet one might ask, what is wrong with that? Are they not “good little male and female adults”?
Well, yes and no. Here is where something is true within a certain limited area, within a narrow context, but is not true when viewed against the totality of Truth. For these people will seek to wrestle with their very thoughts so they will not have “bad” ones. They will repress any urges to complain, in adherence to a cultural value system that embodies obedience and control.
We say that their control of themselves — inside and out — their discipline, their conformity make them wholesome, “holy,” or “good citizens.” But, for starters, how can a person have only good thoughts and not bad ones? In actuality, we have no control over our thoughts at all. We have only some control over our actions; we can act or not act upon our thoughts. Hence anyone telling us they have control over their thoughts is really saying they are liars — to themselves, as well as the rest of the world — about what goes on inside them.
One cannot unthink a thought. What happens is, some thought occurs to us, which we, according to the morals instilled in us, deem “not good.” It has happened, the thought; one cannot unthink it. But these sorts of people will then have a fearfulness, however un-acknowledged and blocked from their awareness, that arises in them directly after that thought. That fearfulness comes from those forces I have been describing: It is a fear about pleasing more powerful others, and it has its roots in childhood, going all the way back to infancy, and even before. It is a fear of being punished or deprived of things for what one simply is … in this case, just having a thought that arises unintended — “naturally.” And one cannot help having this fear of the Other. It might even be said such fear is “natural” for humans, considering what all we have become as a result of our hellish womb experiences, traumatic births, and deprived infancies.
On Sewage and Flowers
So we have a random but natural “bad” thought and an unfortunate but natural fear arising in us. But what does this “holy” and “good” person do? This holy person tries to force the mind to go onto another thought that is not a “bad” one. It is like the first thought, using an analogy, would be “sewage.” The next thought would be “oh, no!” The next thought, the concocted or replacement thought, would then be “flowers.” But here is where the lie is. For the person keeps telling themselves they are thinking “flowers,” however they are lying about the fact that they are really thinking “flowers not sewage,” “flowers not sewage,” “flowers not sewage,” over and over again, trying to push the first thought out of their mind, and along with all that having a feeling of fear and trepidation.
Clearly, this upstanding citizen, this self-sacrificing mensch, this “good” father, this “good” mother, this “holy” thinker, this “positive thinker,” is really not whole or positive at all. This person is a fearful sycophant, acting fearfully out of early experiences which they will never, ever remember, spending so much time thinking, “I will not think sewage, I will think flowers,” that they will never, ever find out what the thought after “sewage” might have been, if they had not fought it so much. And, yes, on its own, it just might have actually been “flowers.” And I can tell you, sooner or later it would have been … and sooner than comes of fighting it.
This person is a narcissist, therefore, caught up in a focus only on themselves and how they might be coming across to others; is a sycophant trying to please imaginary others by conforming their behavior to them; and is a liar, not telling the truth about their experience inside of themselves to either themselves or anyone else. In the next chapter on soul murder, we will look at how this can even extend into sociopathy.
Oh, you think good people and sociopaths are on the opposite ends of a continuum? You have probably also been confused as to how sociopathic killers — the Ted Bundys, Jeffrey Dahmers, John Wayne Gacys, and their ilk — can come across as such well-behaved and “nice” citizens. You probably are not either seeing how some politicians and CEOs are getting their power by seeming to be so upstanding but are at the same time working behind the scenes to take all they can at anyone’s expense and regardless who or how many die of it. More in the next chapter.
For now, the saddest part of all this is that this person, in holding back “sewage,” becomes full of “sewage” … all the while she or he is thinking they smell like and are full of “flowers.” The people around them know they are full of sewage. But those others, being often sycophantic also, are busy telling themselves the swill they see is really flowers.
Here we have an example of how wrong-getted we are able to become and how it spreads. We can see how culture aids and reinforces our wrong-gettedness and separation from the Truth of us. By this I mean that cultural values — concurrent with civilization and not with nomadic and presedentary ones — have become construed along lines to honor and reward the sycophantic, inauthentic, lying, and manipulative; and to punish the noble, authentic, the honest, and the guileless.
“Good People” Games … “Good” Actions and Hypocrisy
However, not just thoughts are controlled by “good” people. The same is true for such a person’s “holy” and “upstanding” acts. Such a person might put out their hand to another, but on some level they are thinking, “I will be nice to you, so that I do not hit you.” Yes, these people are what we call hypocrites.
You might be thinking, they are holy and good people and are not having the thought, “I want to hit you.” Still, this is what happens when the “sewage” gets backed up. A stored-up reservoir of unapproved thoughts ever pushes for release by any means, for attention from consciousness at all costs, even if they have to come out in a distorted form — an impulse/thought to hit another. On the macro scale, this is what we as a species have done in creating and then acting out the Unapproved and Hidden, which belongs to us, collectively. This end result — the Unapproved and Hidden — is the product of the billions of unallowed thoughts, lies, and denials of all the “good” people of our culture.
The example of the hateful urge to hit, rather than lovingly help, is only a crude example, of course. It does have roots deep in our unconscious, though, and extending back thousands of years. We put out our hand to shake another’s, for example. What this is really saying is, “My hand is not a fist. I will not hit you.” “My hand is open to you — in giving and receiving mode, sharing mode — and not in a competitive or aggressive mode.” “In putting out my hand I will connect with you, and not use it to fight you.” Lastly, and most recently, “My hand does not contain a weapon.” Now, why, unless a part of us knows that deep inside we would as soon hit another as anything else, would we go through all this social ritual of hand-shaking and its variants? All of its variants say similar things.
On another note, why, unless a part of us knows deep inside that we are as likely to be attacked by Other as friended by it, do we feel such relief upon the offering of said gestures? This goes to the inherent defensiveness of “normal” and “good” people that other “good” people know they had better appease by offering their hand … for reasons not much different than a primate would offer its behind to an aggressor.
By the way, that unusual defensiveness of humans arises from those early human experiences of feeling attacked by Other through the traumas prenatally and perinatally, which are then reinforced in infancy, childhood, then again in cultural rites of passage. Note that this human defensiveness is unusual in its occurrence, happening much more frequently than in planetmates. For it arises in all social situations, all, even one-on-one interactions and not just in situations of actual potential aggression, as in primates.
In any case, it is that in real life those deeper messages of wanting to hit and fearing one will be hit are inaccessible to us. What we might be aware of that goes on in us — but rarely are — is less obviously hostile. It is more subtle, is most often unconscious, and becomes increasingly more unconscious over time, in the course of one’s life … hence more likely to direct our actions in spite of us. The “negative” thought — “I want to hit you” — might arise in the form of irritation, repulsion, or dislike … or a simmering anger. We can actually feel that, but we will rarely admit those feelings occur in us … forcing ourselves, instead, to “think flowers,” again. You know what I mean.
Meanwhile, the negative thought or feeling, “you are going to attack (are attacking) me!” is not felt either. Rather, it comes out elsewhere, too. It is channeled unconsciously into all kinds of behaviors of introversion as well as defensive communications and passive-aggressive behaviors. Essentially, folks retreat from others and society, holed up in themselves; and/or they get revenge sneakily — without their even being aware they are doing it; and/or they react to all kinds of things said to them, even communications that are quite matter-of-fact or innocuous and perhaps not even pertaining to, let alone directed at them, with responses that are variations of “Well, that doesn’t apply to me! I’ll tell you a thing or two. How dare you say that! Let me explain how you’re wrong. And I’m smart! (You’re not.)” And the like. Check out the tweets of Donald Trump, and you’ll have clarity and even better examples of this.
In any case, such things in people are examples of the kinds of hidden hostility and aggression, and defensiveness, that are buried within “good” people and covered up assiduously by all kinds of cultural means. While you think this is far-fetched, perhaps, think honestly about and explain to me how our kind, at the hands of all our “good” people, have been able to participate in lynch mobs; the rounding up of Jews for genocide at the time of Nazi Germany; the piling up of Jews like firewood to be burned during medieval times with its pogroms; or during The Burning Times, the torture and immolating at the stake of women who had some “free” thoughts — in other words, not controlled and then lied about thoughts, as the “good” people setting fire to them have and do. This unacknowledged and hidden hostility explains all the horrific, yet otherwise unexplainable, actions of “normal” humans including bigotry and racism, child battering and sexual abuse, anti-immigration sentiments, genocides, police brutality and murder of people of color, wife-beating, and … (insert your “favorite” human abomination here).
So now, are these “holy” and wholesome people, these “good citizens” and “patriots” and “salt of the earth” — who are properly fearful and sycophantic, on the inside as well as the outside — really “good” and “wholly”?
For the more they tell themselves they think and feel one thing while actually thinking and feeling something else the more split down the middle they become. Till after a while, they have no clue who they are. They are liars to themselves and to all the world.
Self-Defeating Beliefs and Defenses
They cannot even become good people over time. Their disease, at all costs, fights against its cure. Indeed, it is like cancer, in that way. For to become a good person, one would have to know where one is being or has been a bad person and then change that. Such a person, however, is ever fighting to convince themselves they are full of “flowers,” so how can they possibly do anything about the “sewage” that is actually in them?
Of such “good” people, the religious of them say that such thoughts about where they are being “bad” in their seemingly “good” actions and thoughts are instances of “doubt” and “lack of faith.” So, rather than inform and do service towards becoming a greater “good,” these inconvenient thoughts are done battle with as being demons, devils, and even the product of a Satan. So, no, in battling ceaselessly against the “bad” within themselves, they cannot actually become good. For they truly do not understand the nature of their bad enough to change it. Battling it, they keep it ever at a distance, giving it a status of devil, demon, Satan, and never acknowledging that these are simply — mostly innocuous and often innocent — parts of oneself that have been made “bad” by culture, then later, oneself.
Purification Rituals
What has been said about the effort to control thoughts — “positive thinking” — can be applied analogously to the many ritualistic behaviors “good” people engage in — secular as well as religious. A part of them knows they have sewage within themselves, so they are led to ever “purify” themselves … and the world by extension.
Yes, they will participate in repetitive confessionals; sacrifices of themselves and others; ritual purifications; self-flagellation; self-destructive behaviors to unconsciously punish themselves; obsessive-compulsive grooming and bathing, maybe even hand-washing; obsessive neatness of person and surroundings; perfectness of dress, outfit, adornment, and perfume; obsessive cleaning of their homes and cars; the persnickety grooming of their lawns, intensive control of all the things and of the nature on their grounds, including the shaping of any foliage there; and the obsessive organizing and cataloging of their items and the recording of their actions and intentions, i.e., obsessive planning. Nothing of their lives can be out of their control lest they be reminded of their “inner sewage” or it be revealed to others. They will be mortified if a spot, a stain, or dirt appears on their clothing, unconsciously feeling they have been “found out.”
“Cleaning Up the Streets”
But yes, they will also see the world through this veil of “sewage” and so direct their efforts in ways to remove the “impurities” of others. Indeed, think again about those atrocities of humans, mentioned above, and you will see that almost always the people perpetrating the acts have rationalized to themselves their actions by claiming they are “cleaning up” or helping to “purify,” or “save,” the world.
If you think this only happened in previous times — Nazi Germany, The Burning Times in the Middle Ages, the times of slavery in America and elsewhere — consider how all of the “good” humans throughout the world today support the efforts to “clean up the streets,” to “keep out the riff raff,” and to “keep out the unwashed” without ever, in any instance, considering the people affected and how their efforts might be burdening and in some cases ending the lives of those poor souls — those ones simply more unlucky than oneself. These efforts are not far removed in quality — if not in quantity — from those of former times to maintain “purity” in the ranks, to suppress “heresy,” to “crack down” on some group or other of society, or to “eliminate” the “undesirables”; and even in current times, the term ethnic cleansing expresses it and demonstrates its ongoingness. Need I mention Donald Trump, his bigoted proposals, and the surprisingly large number of Americans subscribing to them? Probably not. Yet keep in mind from many quarters these sorts of citizens are deemed the “good people” of contemporary society.
Denial Activities — How “Good” People Keep Realization from Happening
Yet these good citizens — as deemed by our cultures — also spend a great amount of time involved with activities of denial: They might spend hours sitting quietly at meaningless church ceremonies … telling themselves it is really “flowers” they are seeing — you catching my drift? Or they might work themselves to death in a job.
They might fill up their time with chores around the house which are for the most part unnecessary and insignificant. Or they might immerse themselves in empty but culturally approved and applaudable activities such as repeating to themselves and others truly insignificant sports statistics; keeping up with the details of current fashion or the latest minutiae of celebrity lore; filling their minds and communications with the intricacies of auto mechanics, vehicle specifics and terminology; or showing they know what is new in financial and corporate trivia. These are all ways they can prove to themselves that they are okay and “regular” people — not the way they thought of themselves in infancy — and that others like and approve of them, not the way they felt others thought about them in infancy.
Whether they are trying to assure themselves they are “a regular guy,” “salt of the earth,” a loving and self-sacrificing mom, a “hard worker,” a patriot, good citizen, or “god-fearing” person, it is all the same: They are trying to beat back that nagging feeling that they are full of “sewage” and trying to keep others from knowing that about them. These cultural activities are the way we lie, essentially.
Pathos and “Civility”
“Good” people are to be pitied for the degree of fear and sycophancy within them; that is true. It is sad how much life they have wasted striving to abide by the unjust dictates of a culture geared to higher ups, only. Yet they are hardly to be thought of as examples of integrity, wholesomeness, wholeness, or saintliness. They only appear that way for being so afraid to be otherwise and for imposing an amount of control upon themselves equal to that fear.
Certainly, whatever wrong they do is not “obvious” wrong, most of the time. They distinguish themselves from out-and-out “bad” people, like criminals. Though, the line between the two is most often blurred and many actions are in fact criminal. They get away with them, however, occurring as they do within the context of an appearance of outward “civility,” which they take great pains to maintain. So compared to criminals, are they “good”? Or are they just better, slicker, in hiding or covering up their “bad”?
Indeed, these good and holy adults are actually pathetic — trying to be “good little boys and girls” in obedience to invisible others. They are narcissistic, being unable, like Abraham, to see the others around them and their needs, and only seeing their own “needs” … their sycophantic, fearful ones. They are liars and hypocrites; and they are anything but wholly or having integrity, they are split and deceptive.
“Good, God-fearing, Law-Abiding, Hard-Working”
Thus, within the definitions of culture, such folks are considered good people. That “good” is often followed by “law-abiding, God-fearing, hard-working” (people). However, along the measure of real Truth, this is only true in relation to other, more obvious, “bad” people. Hence, being a good person often just means being the best possible sycophant. We would be “good little boys and girls” and behave and do whatever we are told (whether it is actually good or bad), as adults, rather than be noble and authentic, and have integrity; real, empathetic love; true giving (without thought of reward); and be truly good adults.
Such “good” people of culture and society have been the good Nazis, in the past. They are the good soldiers mowing down villagers. Which is another great example of how “culture” operates to skew reality so as to cause you to do things you would not do if you were seeing reality directly, not through it. As well, they are the good citizens of society, imposing the most severe penalties upon all who stray over any lines, no matter how inconsequential, simply because people with wealth, and thus power, have drawn those lines. These are our, so-called, “good” people in our societies.
So culture proclaims, and it lies.
What Is Culture?
What is culture, then? Culture is the external manifestation of multitudes of egos; it is the accumulation of their actions. Culture substitutes for the “instinct” — the natural in us we have lost. In inserting itself into all aspects of our lives it pushes away the possibility we will ever feel that instinct arising in us, or find our body and mind becoming whole, natural, healed. Culture provides the opiate for the dis-ease of humanness, as well as it covers up the dis-ease and precludes any cure.
An Amalgamation
Culture is also the amalgamation of all that one has been told is real and true over against what one can see, discern, or would be obvious otherwise. Here’s a good way to see it. You know that in reading this book it has come up against practically everything you believed to be true. Yet if you are honest, you know this makes much more sense, and it probably even corresponds to what you sensed to be true, but could not let yourself believe, let alone assert to others … could not “say out loud.”
It’s simple, culture is that whole, that composite of all that has been put inside you for you to use in your understanding of all outside you, which is in complete contrast to what you are learning in this book or would see on your own without those inserted prejudices. That’s a good way to see it, right at hand. And that is why you have felt so uncomfortable hearing so much of this.
A Matrix
Essentially culture, like I said earlier, is the matrix. For it is all the ways we have been taught to see and interpret things, over against what we would on our own. And remember why and how there is such a disparity. Not only have we been separated from authentic apprehension of reality, but we have been encouraged and reinforced in that by outside interests with intentions to have us see and interpret things along ends to suit themselves … i.e., the wealthy, the elite.
Here is an example of that. Culture tells us the wealthy are wealth creators. If we saw clearly we would see that they are wealth takers, actually. It would be obvious to us, sans “culture,” that it is the small operator who is more motivated to maximize her or his investment and thus create jobs, and “wealth,” not someone who has so much that each dollar created is not seen as another addition in one’s efforts to be wealthy but simply one, along with so many others, which can sit there, for all one cares, and does not need to be reinvested. Culture, also, is what tells Trump supporters that a billionaire like him can be on the side of the “little guy,” and take on “the establishment,” and right the injustices set up by a society favoring the rich. Astonishing, eh? This power of culture?
It is that planetmates do not have culture, by the way, that is another reason they do not need language so much. For what is conveyed through language is filtered through the intentions and agendas of others, the composite of which is slanted, then, away from seeing reality as it is. With no culture, planetmates do not need language as much for they are not seeing reality so unclearly that they would need the communication of language to interpret it.
Furthermore why would any planetmate want the confusion of others’ interpretations about what one is able to see clearly? When that is offered to us humans, we say it is “bullshit,” you see. Yet if we do not see it as nonsense, it still contributes only to our endless confusion about reality and who we are. Theologies relentlessly have engaged in the actions that have caused folks such confusion about their feelings and perceptions, being as how they concoct interpretations that are only consonant within realities that are imaginary, often having psychotic roots. Similarly, endless reams of philosophy have emanated from this pattern of folks — and religions, and culture — telling other folks that what they are seeing and experiencing is other than what it obviously is.
Outside the Matrix –> The Unapproved and Hidden
By contrast to culture is The Unapproved and Hidden, which is the truth of reality outside the matrix. It is the way reality is seen with culture — all that accumulated product of slanted intentions and skewed agendas of others — removed. It is what is left when looking at all those same realities without such agendas or motives of others. Or oneself, for that matter — this is where the pre- and perinatal and infancy pain contributes its part, by the way, in skewing our interpretations and distorting our realities. Planetmates, remember, do not have that, either, further adding to their clarity about the reality they perceive.
So, yes, again, this book is an opening on The Unapproved and Hidden. I understand you do not know how lacking in agenda I am, how I get nothing for doing this, how I am not influenced by anyone higher up, or any of that; though I am unusual in being in a position in which that is all true. You do not know how my deepest rooted yet most accessible motivations are caring and love for others, concern and heartache over the unnecessary and self-imposed suffering I see; and with all that an irrepressible desire to step in, where no one else is doing it and so it is direly needed, and to do and say what only I, of all who I know, can say and do … and only that. You do not know that my only reward, now or expected, is the feeling of knowing I have helped, done the part that only I could do, and the hope it helps relieve someone’s suffering or misery now, in the future, or after I am dead. And that’s all.
You do not know all that about me, but at least notice this: That in contrast to this, to all I am writing, you can discern in what you have been by culture indoctrinated to believe quite a bit of agenda, self-serving beliefs, and “convenient” truths. If you want you can easily see that quality in all those commonly held assumptions — the superiority of man over other planetmates being the deepest but only one of them — that my writing in this book addresses and comes up against, conflicts with. If you cannot discern my lack of guile, at least notice the agendas of those who concocted and orchestrated your beliefs and your actions that came of them. Take at least that, for certain, from your own apprehensions and interpretations of your direct experience here.
Strutting and Fretting
In sum, the Divine is Ultimate Truth. Whereas, culture is the societal embodiment of the separation from the Divine. Hence, culture contains some pretty a-mazing untruths and empty rituals. They are amazing because they are fantastical — colorful psychotic fabrications, if you will. They are a-mazing also because they are manifestations of our confused and twisted consciousness and bring us ever back to the maze — in an endless trudge through labyrinthine passages of a journey that is ultimately futile, guaranteed for failure — which is our life.
Culture Is a Weed Without Roots, the Fury We Create to Block Out Our Emptiness
You see, our gradual changes from natural life involved two things, basically: A growing ability to survive biologically, physically at whatever cost to our happiness, along with a separation from our natural inclinations and felt Divine guidance. And our ever-widening separation from the Divine meant a constant hole in the felt meaning of our existence.
Lacking roots in Nature or the Divine, we were like a weed without roots, growing madly above ground, reaching out vainly in all directions for sustenance because of the lack of direct connection to our deeper truth. This expanding outward desperately in all directions creates our culture — which is the artificial substitute and the dim empty reflection of existence.
Culture — our “matrix” — is the “much ado about nothing” and the “strutting and fretting upon the stages of life” and “sound and fury signifying nothing” of which Shakespeare wrote. Culture is a magnification of our overcomplexity of the obvious simplicity of existence, and it is the overblown array of our defenses to keep at bay our realization, our “enlightenment.” Culture brings meaning to our lives, but it is a false one. It provides us motives, and it supports and sustains our efforts; but they are vain and empty goals and futile and meaningless rituals, only.
So, after the fall into sedentary-agrarian ways which multiplied the branches of culture a-mazingly, providing the opiate for our feelings of loss and the substitute for more natural ways, more of our newborns would live. As I have said, they would be given economic value — as a commodity — within that trance life or matrix we have erected. Our children would be allowed to live, but what was distributed among them was this watered-down offering, of a life drained of meaning and “juice” but mostly lacking the “colors” or “flavors” of experience we enjoyed as humans in Nature and containing instead the apprehension of the outlines of living not the immersion in its profound and lush plenitude.
This tendency for our lives to be bleached of real appreciation yet multiplied maniacally grew steadily over time coinciding with the aforementioned rise in the predominance of the traits of controlling, conforming, sycophantic and desperate striving to please and to be appealing, and nonexpression of needs become repression of personality and cobbling of ability to participate in existence’s Divine creative stream. We built increasingly a false matrix in which to dwell, substituting it for the richness of experience of our Edenal existences.
Ignorance of the Divine Makes for Some Pretty A-Mazing Untruths and Empty Rituals
All in all, driven by this inner abyss of unknowing, our outer behavior expanded in spurious and fanciful activity and productions of all kind. With time, our vapid nature would spin out unnecessary personality traits, hollow and unsatisfiable needs, fetid desires, furious but vain behaviors, insubstantial wants, blind obsessions, uncontrollable compulsions, fantastical beliefs, painfully burning visions, and tortured thoughts … of all kinds and all of it magnified, then multiplied, then repressed and fought, then struggled with … and all this in grandiose dramas that are further multiplied, exaggerated, over-dramatized, and so on round again.
Such an overcomplication of life’s simple existence and beingness we create to keep from knowing the horror of us. Such a fury we unleash, so as to create the smoke and mirrors of distraction and to keep us from the otherwise insidious trickling knowing of our horrifying creations and the gnawing abyss of dissatisfaction and unknowing inside us.
In all of these, we journeyed ever further from our roots in Nature and the Divine and made Edenal existence the most distant memory and the most certain component of everyone’s Unapproved and Hidden.
Inevitably, all these ways came back to oneself. As we faded from natural and felt existence and — driven by pain, fear, and the resulting controlling mania — succumbed to ever more entrancing substitutes, we ourselves faded from existence, in a sense. This increasingly ghostly existence amounted to soul murder, then. It is to it, we now turn.
— from Chapter 26, titled “The Eighteenth Descent — Culture: The Matrix — “Wrong-Gettedness” and the
A-mazing Cultural Maze … Strutting and Fretting, Signifying Nothing”
— of *Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man* by Michael Adzema, now available in print and e-book formats.
Click for a free downloadable copy of this excerpt from *Prodigal Human*, with my compliments.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR, Michael Adzema. Video below … interviewed by Michael Harrell
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https://youtu.be/2mm9OBbYjRE
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— Related: See also other published versions of these ideas….
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*Dance of the Seven Veils I* (2017).
At Amazon at
*The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016).
*Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness* (2014).
*Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).
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*Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”* (2013).
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Ego as Opiate for Disease of Humanness … Turns Flaws Into Supreme Accomplishments, Wrong-Gettedness: The Sixth Prasad from the Planetmates (updated)
Planetmates Aren’t Holding Back: “Your Ego is an Opiate for the Disease of Humanness,” They Say.
The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Sixth Prasad: Ego as Opiate
Planetmates Release The Sixth Prasad
Twisted Unwholesome Roots, Wrong-gettedness
Below is the entire text of what I received. Oh, yes. I’m sure everyone will just love the hell out of what the planetmates are saying now!! (ha ha ha!!!)
Fox was First Consciousness at The Sixth Prasad.
"This mitigation [of your lack, your scar] is accomplished through the creation of an alien consciousness construct which serves to both separate humans from the realization of your lack...also it serves as an alternate but OPPOSITE construction of self—opposite from the truth of your nature...."
The Sixth Prasad – Ego as Opiate for Disease of Humanness
So instead of the truth that, for reasons unknown, you were unfortunate enough to be deprived of the full and perfect nurturing of a near perfect divine Nature, as other species are, until they are ready to be in flesh… instead of the obvious truth — obvious to all other species — that this prematurity leaves a scar of hurt and rejection,
for starters;
but also, helplessness and hopelessness, second; and third, that this occurs right at the beginning of known flesh existence so as to create the very unusually twisted unwholesome roots of humans; but then, fourth, this lack must be somehow mitigated for the species to not die out of pure despair, right at the outset. This mitigation is accomplished through the creation of an alien consciousness construct which serves to both separate humans from the realization of your lack, to essentially muffle
or obscure your horrible and precarious plight from your awareness, acting like what you would call an opiate essentially, but also it serves as an alternate but OPPOSITE construction of self — opposite from the truth of your nature — taking all your flaws, like language, and turning them into supreme accomplishments, in this way acting as a euphoriant. This alien consciousness construct, this child as well as parent of all your wrong-gettedness, is what you call Ego.
Video Commentary by SillyMickel Adzema
What follows is a video of a reading of The Sixth Prasad, with commentary, elaboration, and context, by SillyMickel Adzema.
“The Sixth Prasad” From The Great Reveal by The Planetmates
– the audiocast
The link above takes you to the audio-only version of my commentary on The Sixth Prasad, exactly as is in the video. Click on the link to go the the audio site, or you can listen to it here using the audio player below.
http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=hqdpnglkqz
Image of The Sixth Prasad, Of “The Great Reveal” By The Planetmates
Paraphrase/Elaboration of “The Sixth Prasad” – by SillyMickel Adzema
So your superiority “complex” covers up your truth: The truth is that, for whatever reason, you among all the species on Earth are damaged in not receiving the perfect nurturing of a most benevolent power higher than yourself before you were born. This is a truth clear as can be to all other species that observe you. 
You, like us, would have remained in relative contact with and communication with this Totality — taught and nurtured by it — until you were ready to be in the world of flesh and matter. Your every need would have been taken care of perfectly; you would have a foundation of bliss, belongingness, and expansion of consciousness to carry forward with you into your life after birth.
The truth is that instead you are scarred and hurt by this lack. You have instead a foundation of rejection and pain, a feeling of being cast out of Nature, ejected from that Eden, and you feel at base a sense of wrongness: that either you are “wrong” or something is wrong or off. You call this Original Sin, in some of your conceptualizations of it. You are the prodigal son of Nature, the rebels in the house of the Divine. You are not individually responsible for this feeling, it is a product of who you are as a species. It is a consequence, as we will show you, of what your forebears did millions of years ago. It is not that what they did was wrong. It is that it was different, and it had this result that made you different … and basically unhappy. And it is not that it was wrong in an ultimate sense, either. We do not know that; that is beyond even our knowledge of the All. For the All has Divine and perfect reasons for everything, so it is conceivable, and likely, that even your straying was part of a greater pattern, an even more wonderful one. Indeed, we consider that is a part of why this all happened. We will get into that later, but one thing we do know for sure, and you do as well if you think about it outside of your ego and arrogance, is that it has led to the possibility of a great wrong happening now — for you and all planetmates. And it is in relation to that, that it is an aberration. We will show you how it has also led to more than just unhappiness at your root, but it has resulted in your doing much harm to the rest of Nature, and injecting much suffering into it, throughout your time on this planet.
At any rate, the truth is that you feel, at the core of your being, a sense of hopelessness and loneliness in relation to all of Reality. So, if you sometimes feel this stark aloneness, not only is it not surprising, but it is closer to the truth than the way you normally think and feel about yourself.
Since this happens at the very beginning of your life, its effects mold and define all later experience in your life, which occur out of and are interpreted in light of this misapprehension of Reality. So, it could not be more significant or of consequence.
It is a shock to the system of your early physical self, and in response to it you create really quite convoluted thoughts and attitudes, as ways of dealing with it. It comprises your very twisted roots — out of which grow everything else of you and which form in every way everything you will think and experience.
It is such a shock and so conducive to pain and misery, when brought into awareness, that your kind would die in infancy if you had not developed ways of dealing with it. This is that Ego again — your way of distancing yourself from your painful experience and seeming hopelessness. Despair, occurring at the beginning of your life, would cause you to fail to want to live, you would not thrive, you would die. Though this does happen to some of you, others of you survive through the creation of this construct of Ego and separation from painful Reality.
But this construct, though it saves you, is alien to all of Reality and it misconstrues it. It takes the vast expanse of Reality, which you experienced prior to it and which we experience to a greater degree than you, and funnels it through all kinds reducing valves, all of which are filters to the greater Reality, to leave you with that which will at least keep you alive. It takes all of consciousness and diminishes it to that which is practically useful, taking beauty and wonder and soul and giving it a life of plodding drudgery.
Disastrous as this is for your enjoyment of life, it accomplishes the two most important things for you to survive psychologically: It covers up the knowledge of your dire and precarious circumstances. It muffles and obscures the horribleness of your existence in relation to what it is for all others. Thus it represses much of the true knowledge of you, beginning the creation of that Unapproved and Hidden, and in so doing acts like an opiate.
The other thing it does is it takes what awareness is left, after this filtering and repression of a greater Reality, and makes of it something to rival and surpass all else that was lost. In becoming less than God, you defend against that lack by deeming yourself gods. Everything else about your situation is spun that way, too. 
These components are used to create this alien self, this consciousness construct separate from Nature and from true understanding. So your understanding of yourself and of Reality is for the most part the opposite of What Is. It takes your deficiencies, your feeling of lack and deprivation, and turns them into accomplishments. It is your species-wide acting out in reaction to cognitive dissonance. That is to say, you are sometimes aware — at least the psychologically knowledgeable of you — of this mechanism of yours to justify anything you have done and anything you have experienced — whether sought or not, whether it was actually beneficial or not — as being good or beneficial. You justify even your hardships and pain as being what was good for you, and unfortunately, too. For in this misconception of them, you then seek to inflict them upon others, in particular your children, as good for them, too! But these actions are simply to make acceptable, after the fact, what happened to you.
So also, you as a species do this about your early experiences and the plight you are in because of them. Not only do you justify them as being good for you — you say, for example, that the slapping of an infant fresh out of the womb helps it to get its breath going and is good in other ways, however much your senses decry and show the lie to that — but you raise them up as accomplishments over the experiences and Reality of the rest of Nature, and you along with them. Thus, this Ego acts as a euphoriant as well as an opiate. The drug reference is more than apt, for certainly, not only did it act as a “medicine” to save your life in the beginning, but it leads you down dark and twisted pathways of desperate seeking … it becomes an addiction for you, as you will see.
So, this consciousness construct is the product or child of your wrong-gettedness as a species, of your aberrant relation to Nature. It becomes then also the parent or creator of that much more of your wrong-gettedness. These twisted roots create the labyrinthine pathways of all later consciousness and the misguided, and often hurtful and damaging, actions of your lives.
Continue with The Great Reveal from the Planetmates: The Seventh Prasad – Becoming Human, Bipedalism Caused Birth Pain
Return to The Great Reveal from The Planetmates, The Fifth Prasad: Your “Wordism,” A Word Cave Prison
To Read the Entire Book … No Cost, On-Line … Go to The Great Reveal from The Planetmates
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
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The Origins of Human Ego in Inferiority Feelings Relative to Other Species – The Fourth Prasad from The Planetmates (updated)
The Discomfort of Being Half-Born Is Covered Up by Inflation of Self and Superiority Relative to All of Nature: Humans Tout Their Flaws as Accomplishments, Say Planetmates
The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Fourth Prasad: Origins of Ego
Planetmates Release The Fourth Prasad
Inferiority Feelings – Humans
Swan is First Consciousness at The Fourth Prasad.
"[T]his superiority defense against the underlying inferiority feelings is built up increasingly to beat back into the Unapproved and Hidden the nagging reality of your confused, unsteady consciousness."
The Fourth Prasad – Origins of Ego
BEING HALF-BORN CREATES INFERIORITY FEELINGS. HUMANS EVERYWHERE REPRESS THIS DISCOMFORT THROUGH INFLATION OF SELF AND AN OVERWEENING SUPERIORITY APART FROM AND AGAINST ALL OTHER BEINGS AS WELL AS THE ALL-THAT-IS, OR NATURE-GOD ITSELF. HUMAN DIFFERENCES, E.G., LANGUAGE, ARE TOUTED AS PROOF OF SUPERIORITY, NOT FLAWED SUBSTITUTES FOR DIRECT COMMUNICATION.
This peculiar trait of being half born is nowhere, among humans, seen to be of any consequence. When noted, it is spun as evidence supporting your belief in your superiority over all others.
But the belief itself was a spawn of that difference of being not ready at birth, dependent and vulnerable, and therefore owing one’s very life to the sufficient ministrations of fully growns.
Nonetheless, this superiority defense against the underlying inferiority feelings is built up increasingly to beat back into the Unapproved and Hidden the nagging reality of your confused, unsteady consciousness.
Video Commentary by SillyMickel Adzema
What follows is a video of a reading of The Fourth Prasad, with commentary, elaboration, and context, by SillyMickel Adzema.
“The Fourth Prasad” From The Great Reveal by The Planetmates – the audiocast
The link above takes you to the audio-only version of my commentary on The Fourth Prasad, exactly as is in the video. Click on the link to go the the audio site, or you can listen to it here using the audio player below.
http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=ngmswxxwjc
Image of The Fourth Prasad, Of “The Great Reveal” By The Planetmates
Paraphrase/Elaboration of “The Fourth Prasad” — by SillyMickel Adzema
The fact that you are born premature and helpless—far more helpless than any of your other brother-sister species—means you will experience a lack. For if you had the kind of extended development before birth, during gestation, in the loving and perfect arms of Benevolence Itself, as we do, you would have received both the fundamental knowledge we have about ourselves and our relation to What Is as well as the foundation of secure beingness in the world we feel. You would possess the unshakeable confidence we do and the lack of doubt about our actions, the lack of questioning ourselves. But your beginnings—with half … compared to other species … of the development of your brain coming after birth and not under the tutelage of What Is and instead being imprinted with the random and misconceived anxieties and wrong-gettedness of your fully growns—lay down for you instead a feeling of lack. You have a pronounced feeling of unsureness and uncertainty that underlies you all. You feel unstable at your root—a feeling of wobbliness leaving you in desperation for something to prop you up lest you fall … fall where?.. fall somewhere horrible and hellacious, and eventually you feel your existence is constructed over a pit or abyss.
Indeed, it is, in the sense we are telling you. You build all your life above a Void, a vast hole of unknowing.
So in desperation you indeed create such a support for yourselves. You build a false floor beneath your consciousness on which to stand and to block out the abyss you would apprehend otherwise. You will know in a part of you always that there is a seething cauldron beneath you, but you overcompensate for that fear and insecurity, making it part of that floor or false support. Your overcompensation takes the form that, no, you are not weak, helpless, unsure, uncertain, and confused. You tell yourself that you are the opposite of all those things: That you are strong, competent, confident, self-assured, and aware. In relation to what? Well, ultimately it will be in relation to Everything—not just all Nature and all other planetmates but also in relation to others of you. But, for starters, knowing, right from your beginnings, that your consciousness is different from all other planetmates—which is possible because you partake of the same Consciousness that includes us—you will think this is in relation to all other species in Nature.
Hence, being born premature creates inferiority feelings in humans relative to us planetmates. And those uncomfortable feelings of inferiority—and the unsureness, confusion, and desperation that come of it—are universally repressed and compensated for through an inflation of self and the creation of a fundamentally precarious and false, but supremely defended, meticulously and elaborately constructed, and massively fortified conception of self, which you call Ego.
Subsumed within this illusion are the rethought conceptualizations of all the contrivances you have created in your desperation to buttress yourself. You are separated from Nature and each other, so you need a way of relating to both, however artificial, indirect, and flawed. You create this symbol system—symbolic meaning it is removed from actuality and only pointing vaguely to it—and you call it language. You develop this schizoid elaboration of this word web which is you attending to the infinitesimal details of a map while ignoring the “territory” it is about—that is to say, your actual reality which is directly before you, ignored. Then, you notice you have this aberration of, this cancerous deformity upon, your being, as a species, and relative to all others, and you conclude conveniently and in accordance with your keeping at bay the true and uncomfortable awareness of you, that you are special, blessed, and superior and, correspondingly, that the rest of Nature is inconsequential, profane, and below you … far below you, in fact.
So, indeed, this knowledge of you regarding your language is a component of the Unapproved and Hidden, which displays what we mean about its not even distantly being included in your understandings anywhere at any time by anyone. For there is not, nor has there ever been, any of you to think that your language, as in this example, is a flawed and inferior, and meager and pathetic in comparison to all other beings, way of connecting with all outside yourself. There is not now anyone, nor has there ever been a human, to conceive that it is anything but proof of an advance or “evolution” over the rest of Nature. And there are consequences and considerations following from this determination of yourselves as “evolved” which lead to that much more and varied elaborations of your delusions relative to yourself. Those delusions and convoluted amplifications of your flaws we will reveal to you as this progresses.
It is not that these flamboyant distinctions from the rest of Nature are not something in and of themselves, that is, in comparison to others of you and other societies of humans. For, compared with themselves or things like them in the world of humans, these differences have substance and a sort of value. One can be learned in words and be more aware and able to discern actual reality than one of you not learned in words, but that is only relative. In relation to actually getting it, understanding Reality, even a learned person is crippled and deluded.
But as all aspects of your ostentatious Ego, the grandiose estimation of these differences between us and you blocks from you the understanding of what might be the alternative to these things … as exists in Nature. You absolutely cannot see the way Nature accomplishes the same things in ways that are simpler, and actually, superior. Indeed, you have no way of seeing your “accomplishments” in comparison to the workings of the All-That-Is or Nature-God Itself, as you have, blinded by the glory of you, blocked It and Its ways from your view. The true ways and designs of Nature are completely invisible to you; they are part of your Unapproved and Hidden.
But remember that all these embellishments of ego are products of that fundamental fact of your difference of being not ready for life at birth and scarred by that. These vanities are the un-wholly spawn of the fact that, being dependent and vulnerable after birth, you are in the hands of less than ideal fully growns and left needy and wanting because of the deprivations you suffer from that. Naturally, added to the motivation for this creation of ego is the extreme anxiety left in you for life out of the fact that, being undeveloped and unready for life at birth, you are also even more unable to handle the pain of the birth itself and so become traumatized by the event, unlike any other species.
So, though this trait of being half-born is deemed an advantage or is never even seen by you, let alone as having any repercussions for you, it results in an uncomfortableness that you can scarcely notice for lack of any experience, at least in this life, with which it can be contrasted and compared. And this underlying dissatisfaction, feeling of something being wrong or lacking, even misery, stimulates the construction of this sense of false superiority in relation to All Nature. This delusion of overestimation of self in relation to all is exorbitantly elaborated and built up in order to not realize what you know about yourself and your unhappiness. This insistent, nagging knowing of your actual reality is used to motivate your endless reinforcement of your ignorance and the creation of the Unapproved and Hidden.
Thus the fact of your confused and unsteady consciousness, though a part of your every waking and even unwaking moment, is made increasingly unseeable, unfeelable, and unknowable, and you replace it with its opposite—an Ego with an overestimation and a false sense of clarity, sureness, power … and increasingly, as we will help you to understand, entitlement.
Continue with The Great Reveal from The Planetmates, The Fifth Prasad: Your “Wordism,” A Word Cave Prison
Return to The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Third Prasad: Humans Only Half Ready for Life at Birth
To Read the Entire Book … on-line, no cost at this time … Go to The Great Reveal from The Planetmates
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
Invite you to join me on Twitter:
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A Re-Visioning of “Civilization” in Light of Impending Apocalypse … Prometheus Made us “Civilized” … And Doomed: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 13
Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Thirteen: On Defiance, Alienation from Nature, “Civilization,” Apocalypse, Marxism, OWS, and Ayn Rand
Will “Progress of Man” Be Humanity’s Epitaph?
All of the “achievements” of “civilization,” these increases of control over Nature, are traditionally seen as the “progress of man,” the advance and evolution of humans. On the brink of ecocide and 
humanicide as we now are as a result of these developments, we have a unique vantage point for re-visioning these changes. Are these vaunted human “achievements” so great if they lead to species annihilation, species suicide, as is becoming increasingly likely?
We now continue to look into these questions. And the very next thing we see is that even the myths from ancient times give us evaluations and prognoses on us that are surprising in light of our current rationalizations of ourselves as a species.
Defiance, Alienation from Nature,
“Civilization” … Apocalypse
Defiance = Birth Pain = Separation From the Real
![254_thumb[1]](http://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/254_thumb1.jpg "254_thumb[1]")
Other aspects of the Prometheus and Eden myths fit with the interpretation I am making of it: Stealing fire/ eating the apple/ eating meat is the great act-out of the primal birth pain we created for ourselves by standing upright. It was a defiant act against Nature and Universal harmony, but it set us on the human path of being distinct from all other species. Without real access/ connection to the Real, we created substitute realities—culture, structured societies, status, language and writing, power relations, and abstract creative products. [Footnote 1]
Prometheus Makes Us “Civilized” … And Doomed
Fitting with that, Prometheus is given the central role in making humans distinct from all species, creating humanity, in giving defining attributes to humans to set us apart from all species and these are said to be fire and all the civilizing skills.
Prometheus is credited with, not only securing meat, fire, and all ailments and troubles (with Pandora), but also with bringing civilization and all its components of science, agriculture, mathematics, medicine, art, and literature…fine things no doubt, but all being aspects of control of Nature, opposition to the natural, abstraction and alienation from the divine, and not harmony with it or balance in relation to it. ![imadgfhfjgjkl;'ges_thumb[1]](http://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/imadgfhfjgjklges_thumb1.jpg "imadgfhfjgjkl;'ges_thumb[1]")
And only now are we beginning to understand the price that comes with these, as indeed we are suffering the penalties allotted Adam and Eve, Icarus, and Prometheus for their over-reaching and hubris. We are nearing the end of the slide into apocalyptic oblivion that Prometheus, Adam and Eve, and Pandora set us on (poetically speaking).
![prometheus400_thumb[2]](http://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/prometheus400_thumb2.jpg "prometheus400_thumb[2]")
The Answers
![pandora__s_jar_by_a2010l-d33mfhw_thumb[2]](http://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/pandora__s_jar_by_a2010l-d33mfhw_thumb2.jpg "pandora__s_jar_by_a2010l-d33mfhw_thumb[2]")
![pandora__s_jar_by_xxdigipxx-d3100pj.png_thumb[1]](http://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/pandora__s_jar_by_xxdigipxx-d3100pj-png_thumb1.jpg "pandora__s_jar_by_xxdigipxx-d3100pj.png_thumb[1]")
But within these myths lie the answers to our dilemma as well. These products of the consciousness of billions of previous humans—added to and refined over the millennia—prophesize the ![pandora__s_jar_by_shadow_lust-d31v87l_thumb[3]](http://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/pandora__s_jar_by_shadow_lust-d31v87l_thumb3.jpg "pandora__s_jar_by_shadow_lust-d31v87l_thumb[3]")
apocalypse looming before us, but these ![Nine-Days-of-Creation_thumb[5]](http://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/nine-days-of-creation_thumb5.jpg "Nine-Days-of-Creation_thumb[5]")
tensions cannot exist in myth except being inextricably entwined with the very means of their release and resolution. So they lay before us the way home for us as well; and they predict our redemption and how it will happen. It is to this we now turn.
![36323_333303780056719_100001312988366_820573_1707092110_n_thumb[2]](http://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/36323_333303780056719_100001312988366_820573_1707092110_n_thumb2.jpg "36323_333303780056719_100001312988366_820573_1707092110_n_thumb[2]")
Before looking at the resolutions of the uniquely human apocalyptic dilemma we have created, let me address something that is no doubt on many readers’ minds.
How Promethean “Heroism” Set Off Our Slide Into Alienation and Apocalypse … His “Rebellion” Was an Abomination, Not a Blessing
I know you are not used to hearing the Prometheus myth interpreted as a defiant act not a heroic act. It is never compared with 
the defiant acts portrayed in the Eden or Icarus myths as I am here doing. Icarus is rightly said to be a tragic example of hubris or failed ambition, high-flying ambition. In Eden, Adam and Eve defy the sole divine commandment. But they can all be seen as acts of over-reaching, certainly as acts of hubris. And in all of them punishment follows the selfish act; there is karmic retribution for upsetting the natural or divine order.
Prometheus Is a Criminal Not Heroic Figure…On Over-Reaching and Hubris
But remember that hubris and over-reaching was actually the earliest understanding of the Promethean act. It appears that time, understandably—as it does—provided a rationalization of the defiant act. [Footnote 2]
As with everything else—language, culture, hierarchical society, and the 
like—humans turn their faults into achievements, their crimes into heroism, their cowering before truth into brave creations of castles in the sky. So it is that the Romantic poets Shelley and Byron saw this myth as a reflection of defiance against an oppressive authority, as in their time was the Church; 
French Revolutionaries saw it as a poke in the eye to the parasitic blue bloods of their age; and Marxists and other activists find inspiration in it for struggle against the suffocating prerogatives of capitalism and imperialism.
They are fine to find inspiration where they can. I submit, however, that a deeper and more currently relevant understanding is the one I am presenting here and which was the earliest understanding. 
And despite all the rationalizing that’s been done on it, this earlier understanding—the one making it analogous to the Eden and Icarus structures—does shine through at times. In my opinion, Mary Shelley understood its real meaning when in 1818 she subtitled her masterpiece novel, Frankenstein “The Modern Prometheus.” In it, she demonstrates a remarkably current,
postmodern theme of the dangers of human hubris, of
taking us into arenas of knowledge that we are nowhere near capable of managing … doing again, as we did at the beginning in taking from the divine the determination of life and death over the flora, fauna,
and even other humans at times, mucking with the divine order by stirring 
up the forces deep within the atom and the DNA, opening more and more of Pandora’s jars, which can no longer be closed, many of them. So, yes, Shelley’s understanding is closer to my interpretation of the meaning of bringing these “civilizing arts” … In other words, they are in their essence and therefore their ultimate fruits abominations!
If my interpretation of Prometheus is still not understood and one wishes to follow Marxist, revolutionary, romantic, and modern interpretations of Prometheus as a righteous defier of injustice and heroic bringer of boons—in a way as to make him a model for our real occupy wall street and Arab Spring heroes 
today—than consider why it is that the person on the extreme other side of this revolutionary ideology, Ayn Rand, uses Prometheus as a model for her ideology of rapacious 
individuality, which she does in her novels Anthem and the fanatically worshipped, Atlas Shrugged. So, no. Ayn Rand’s rendering shows the myth to be, at its base, depicting the ultimate perversion of a natural benign order and a criminal defiance of 
Nature—as the industrialists and polluters of today show us—and not the revolutionary overthrow of an oppressive rule, as Marxists, Romantic poets, and French Revolutionaries saw it. [Footnote 3]
Continue with Enter the Centaur: Wherein Lies Real Hope – Sixties and Millennial Generations Are Shamans for Deluded Promethean “Fathers”: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 14
Return to Deep Thoughts on The Fall – On Sacrifice, Dominion Over Death, Meat, and Murder … Beginning Our Apocalypse: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 12
Footnotes
1. See The Great Reveal, Chapter Thirty-Five: The Twenty-Seventh Prasad. A-mazing Cultural Maze.
2. On “time, understandably, as it does, provided a rationalization of the defiant act,” see “A Blessing for You…To Choose or Refuse”—The Great Reveal from The Planetmates: The Complete Prasads, especially
3. Regarding the glow-in-the-dark cats shown in the photo, see “12 bizarre examples of genetic engineering” at http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/photos/12-bizarre-examples-of-genetic-engineering/glow-in-the-dark-c
Continue with Enter the Centaur: Wherein Lies Real Hope – Sixties and Millennial Generations Are Shamans for Deluded Promethean “Fathers”: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 14
Return to Deep Thoughts on The Fall – On Sacrifice, Dominion Over Death, Meat, and Murder … Beginning Our Apocalypse: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 12
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The Sixth Prasad, of “The Great Reveal” by The Planetmates
The Sixth Prasad
Fox Was First Consciousness at The Sixth Prasad
So instead of the truth that, for reasons unknown, you were unfortunate enough to be deprived of the full and perfect nurturing of a near perfect divine Nature, as other species are, until they are ready to be inflesh…
instead of the obvious truth — obvious to all other species — that this prematurity leaves a scar of hurt andrejection, for starters; but also, helplessness and hopelessness, second; and third, that this occurs right at the beginning of known flesh existence so as to create the very unusually twisted unwholesome roots of humans; but then, fourth, this lack must be somehow mitigated for the species to not die out of pure despair, right at the outset.
This mitigation is accomplished through the creation of an alien consciousness construct which serves to both separate humans from the realization of your lack, to essentially muffle or obscure your horrible and precarious plight from your awareness, acting like what you would call an opiate essentially,
but also it serves as an alternate but OPPOSITE construction of self — opposite from the truth of your nature — taking all your flaws, like language, and turning them into supreme accomplishments, in this way acting as a euphoriant.
This alien consciousness construct, this child as well as parent of all your wrong-gettedness, is what you call Ego.
(to be continued)
What follows is a video of a reading of The Sixth Prasad, with commentary, elaboration, and context, by SillyMickel Adzema.
The Fourth Prasad of “The Great Reveal” by The Planetmates
The Fourth Prasad:
Swans Were First Consciousness at The Fourth Prasad
BEING HALF-BORN CREATES INFERIORITY FEELINGS. HUMANS EVERYWHERE REPRESS THIS DISCOMFORT THROUGH INFLATION OF SELF AND AN OVERWEENING SUPERIORITY APART FROM AND AGAINST ALL OTHER BEINGS AS WELL AS THE ALL-THAT-IS, OR NATURE-GOD ITSELF. HUMAN DIFFERENCES, E.G., LANGUAGE, ARE TOUTED AS PROOF OF SUPERIORITY, NOT FLAWED SUBSTITUTES FOR DIRECT COMMUNICATION.
This peculiar trait of being half born is nowhere, among humans, seen to be of any consequence. When noted, it is spun as evidence supporting your belief in your superiority over all others.
But the belief itself was a spawn of that difference of being not ready at birth, dependent and vulnerable, and therefore owing one’s very life to the sufficient ministrations of fully growns.
Nonetheless, this superiority defense against the underlying inferiority feelings is built up increasingly to beat back into the Unapproved and Hidden the nagging reality of your confused, unsteady consciousness.
(to be continued)
What follows is a video of a reading of The Fourth Prasad, with commentary, elaboration, and context, by SillyMickel Adzema.
The Great Reveal by SillyMickel & the PlanetMates 