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“One could not enjoy the blessings of wandering into delightful glades if one did not travel twisted, darkened paths at other times.”
The Planetmates on pleasure, pain, hell, Satan, salvation, birth, mother: “You spoil even the experience of pleasure, while you amplify the misery of pain”:
“We know of life as being an alternation of pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. But this is no big problem for us,because overall this flux of darkness and light is what makes life that much more enjoyable. In a game one would not enjoy victory or making a good play if one did not also experience being scored against and losing occasionally. Life would have none of its exquisite sense of surprise and discovery if there were not twists and turns in it. One could not enjoy the blessings of wandering into delightful glades if one did not travel twisted, darkened paths at other times.Life would simply not be much of a story or worth playing if there were not drama in it.
“We see that you have, however,made this simple fact into the biggest dilemma for you. For you have magnified the pain of life to an amazing extent. Light requires a darkness for it even to be seen; one would not know pleasure except in contrast to pain. But you would wish to have only light, only pleasure, always. This is because, for reasons having to do with the twisted consciousness you carry from your abnormal beginnings — the pain you have in birth — you go through life terrified you will once again experience such pain as you had at your beginnings. You see all life through such a darkened filter. You live in trepidation of the ending of your happiness, when you could be enjoying it, and in terror that your pain,when it comes, will never be followed by happiness ever again. So you spoil even the experience of pleasure, while you amplify the misery of pain.
“You once experienced pain in such an assaultive way that you feared it would never end. At your beginnings, you have an abnormal amount of experience of feeling trapped and suffocated; and you, in your premature state yet still coming into the world, are not aware yet of the ending of pain, of the fact that it is not possible without pleasure.You experience such overwhelming pain in your coming into the world that ever afterward you believe it is possible that you could at any time experience pain greater than is possible for you to bear. And because you also at that early time mistakenly thought that it is possible that pain will never end, you believe that such a thing is possible in life … even in afterlife. So, unlike us planetmates, you amplify life’s pain with your fear that it can ever be more than you could bear and with this belief that, beyond that, it could be unending.
“To add to all that, because in your beginnings you experienced these things while in close proximity to a seemingly all-powerful Other — that is, they happened while inside your own mothers or while being born from her — you have the feelings that there can bean intention or an actor behind the events of your life — including its pain —like your mother to a small extent was around your birth events. The whole world for you being Mother, at that time, and experiencing her as the only other actor in that drama of your birth, you attribute some of the inordinate pain of that time to that fact: that it is related to this Other, who was also World to you, and who you sensed as Mother. So, experiencing these imagined magnifications of life’s pains in relation to her, throughout your life it is possible that you can even think there might be an intent or actor behind your experiences of pain and suffering then also. And since you have made such pain and suffering to be wrong, as well as horrifying, you of course can think of this actor as being malevolent, calling it devil or Satan.
“For these reasons you have made the darkness-pain of life that much darker. But in doing so, you have set up the possibility of experiencing a greater pleasure or brightness in contrast to it. You have made the darkness, darker; the light potentially brighter. For if you could imagine being freed from your self-imposed hell, for a second, can you not imagine what a relief and pleasure it would make of your life ever after that? This is a greater pleasure than we can have. So there is undoubtedly more to it than even we can know … it is probably “lighter” or more wonderful than we can imagine. You have made life into something horrible from which you need a “saving.” This “salvation” is therefore one experience you have created for yourself that we cannot have, and because of the way duality works in life, it cannot help but be that much more exquisite….”
[31st Prasad — Pain. 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.
To purchase a signed copy of any of my books, email me at sillymickel@gmail.com … Discount for blog subscribers.
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“Culture proclaims and it lies…. Culture provides the opiate for the dis-ease of humanness, as well as it covers up the dis-ease and precludes any cure.”
The Planetmates on culture and its “good, law-abiding, God-fearing, hard-working” people
“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, and then oneself.
“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. Yes, they 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” the world.
“If you think this only happened in previous times, 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.
“But these good citizens—as deemed by your 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 the 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 culturally approved and applaudable activities such as repeating to themselves truly insignificant sports statistics. These are all ways that they canprove to themselves that they are okay, 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 that 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 you lie, essentially.
““Good” people are to be pitied for the degree of fear and sycophancy within them; that is true. But they are not 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”?
“So 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 in a previous example, 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.
“So, within the definitions of culture, such folks are considered good people. That “good” is often followed by “law-abiding, God-fearing, hard-working” (people). But along the measure of real Truth, this is only true in relation to other, more obvious, “bad” people. And, being a good person often means being the best possible sycophant. You would be “good little boys and girls” and behave and do whatever you 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; 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 your, so-called, “good” people in your societies.
“So culture proclaims and it lies. Culture is the external manifestation of multitudes of Egos; it is the accumulation of their actions. Culture substitutes for the “instinct”—the natural in you that you have lost. And in inserting itself into all aspects of your lives it pushes away the possibility that you will ever feel that instinct arising in you or find your 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….”
[Pt 3 of 27th prasad — Culture. More coming…
“This upstanding citizen…this ‘positive thinker’ is really not whole or positive at all but is a fearful sycophant”
The Planetmates reveal culture and its “good” people, positive thinking, hypocrisy, the hidden hostility of ordinary folk and its resulting historical atrocities
“…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” but 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.
“So, 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.”
“So, this person is a narcissist, 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.
“And 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 it, but they, being often sycophantic, are busy telling themselves the sewage they see is really flowers.
“So this is an example of how wrong-getted you are able to become and how it spreads. You can see how culture aids and reinforces your wrong-gettedness and separation from the Truth of you.
“The same is true for such a person’s “holy” and “upstanding” acts. Such a person might put out their hand to another, but they are thinking, “I will be nice to you, so that I do not hit you.” Yes, these people are what you call hypocrites.
“You are thinking, they are holy and good people and are not having the thought, “I want to hit you.” But 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 you as a species have done in creating and then acting out the Unapproved and Hidden, which belongs to you, collectively. But 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 your 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 your unconscious, though, and extending back tens of thousands of years. You put out your 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 you knows that deep inside you would as soon hit another as anything else, would you go through all this social ritual of hand-shaking and its variants? All of its variants say similar things.
“So it is that in real life that deeper message is inaccessible to you and what you might be aware of that goes on in you—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 your actions in spite of you. The “negative” thought—“I want to hit you”—might arise in the form of irritation, repulsion, or dislike … or a simmering anger. You can actually feel that, but you will rarely admit that they occur in you … forcing yourself, instead, to “think flowers,” again. You know what we mean.
“In any case, such things in people are examples of the kinds of hidden hostility and aggression that are buried within “good” people. While you think this is far-fetched, perhaps, think honestly about and explain to us how your kind, at the hands of all your “good” people, have been able to participate in lynch mobs, the rounding up of Jews for genocide, the piling up of Jews like firewood to be burned, the torture and burning to the death 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 humans. (Insert your favorite human abomination here.)
“So, are these “holy” and wholesome people, these “good citizens” and “patriots” and “salt of the earth”—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.
“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 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, and then oneself….”
[Pt 2 of 27th prasad — Culture. 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.
To purchase a signed copy of any of my books, email me at sillymickel@gmail.com … Discount for blog subscribers.
Invite you to join me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/sillymickel
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel
Free Your Mind, Your Ass Will Follow: Paranoia and Progressives — Fear Makes Right Wing Fools Out of Even the Most Intelligent of Us.
People Can Kiss Their Chains, But They Look Awfully Silly Doing It. How Is It Supposedly Rational Progressives Can Believe in a Devil?
Check this out. These quotes were shared today on Facebook and liked by sixteen progressive friends of mine.
“If the Devil finds a Man idle, he’ll set him at Work…” ( J. Kelly, in Scottish Proverbs, 1721)
“An idle brain is the devil’s workshop…” (H. G. Bohn, Hand Book of Proverbs, 1855)
” The devil tempts all, but the idle man tempts the devil…” (Kurdish/Arab/Turkish proverb)
So. What is it with progressives … many of whom are atheists … who don’t believe in God but DO believe in a devil!?
What is it, progressives can’t accept anything good? only see their own shadow? are merely paranoid?
It is not just the quotes above. I have for years detected much paranoia on the left—much of it warranted, I grant you—but erupting in florid supernatural fantasies of a dark nature.
So I don’t just mean “the devil” in a classical sense: as Satan, and such. For do progressives who believe in the Illuminati, Satanic rituals of Masonics, reptilian people in government or spying on us from behind the moon not realize how much they sound like Church Lady?
Remember when your mother used to scare you into behaving by telling you “the boogeyman will get you”?
How is it some folks, no matter their intelligence, still operate at such a childish level?
It doesn’t speak well of progressives. I hope there are lots of other ones who aren’t so paranoid. I feel out of water around supposedly enlightened folks who are taken in by such right wing religious propaganda.
Fear is one thing intelligence cannot seem to budge. Maybe that is why only crying—that is, feeling one’s feelings—works to free one from insanity. I can tell you this as a trained primal therapist and holotropic breathwork facilitator of many decades experience.
There is no devil. There is only fear of devil. And that has been put into humans to control them for as long as there has been civilization by those who have more. (See The Great Reveal, Chapter Twenty-Five: The Seventeenth Prasad. Nascent Class War 20,000 BC and The Great Reveal, Chapter One: Recalling the Riotous, Exciting First Days.)
Does it not occur to any of the progressives who have liked the quotes above that all three quotes are used to keep people compliant and working hard as slaves … obedient and docile as sheep … for the benefit of the Overlords … of all times? Liking the quotes above is like being enamored of one’s chains.
Does it not occur to anyone how the same rationale is used today by the 1% to keep people down and from being able to fight back or revolt? Drive them into poverty, instill in them the value of hard work, and leave them no time to think. That way they will never awake to their servitude or if they do will be too tired and beaten down to do anything about it.
I mean, you can kiss and cuddle with your chains, as in falling for the self-flagellating quotes above. But realize you are looking awfully silly doing it.
Continue with We Are All Turks Today and The Tao of Funny God: Why Turkey and What Andy Kaufman and the Turkish and Occupy Protesters Teach Us
Return to The Great Reveal Epilogue, Part Fourteen – Four Falls from Grace … And Back Again: Becoming Human Is Love’s Supreme Act of Recklessness, and Death to Everyone … Makes It Fun
Notes
1. How can progressives believe in one supernatural being (devil) if you make fun of those who believe in another one (God).
Or, putting it another way … if you’re going to go believing in supernatural fantasies, why in hell would you choose the most horrible one imaginable to believe in?
… which makes it more a psychological problem, it seems to me.
2. Illuminati Theory — Racism Cloaked?
Like and share this if you are proud to be “illuminati.” What’s happening is vile and racist.
Illuminati Theory — Racism Cloaked?
Do an image search on Google for Illuminati Members. You will find 90% or more are pictures of blacks. No rich folks, except one liberal one.
Listen up, if you’re just tired of the right wing blaming “hippies” for everything that’s wrong with the country for the last fifty years….
Listen up, if you want to help stem the tide of this modern witch-hunting … if you want to help block the slide into a time of modern inquisitions where people with enlightened views are scapegoated and “burned at the stake” to divert from the crimes of the modern “aristocracy”….
Uneducated people tend to include any educated people in that term, *illuminati*. They think everything they don’t understand is “illuminati” and is against them. They call anything above what they were taught as “gobbledygook” and attack the messengers. They don’t go after the real rich people who are running the world. It is part of that cultural division the filthy rich create to distract folks from the class war that is going on against them.
Notice who’s left out in this chart. Any fundamentalist or evangelical religion or tea party groups. Notice it is only liberals who are targeted, whether in religion or education.
Notice who’s left out, John Birch Society, KKK,….
Notice who’s left out. ANY huge multinational corporation, ANY energy giants who are destroying this planet, ANY right wing political organization … or NRA, ANY rich folk or Koch Brothers, et al.
Notice who’s targeted: Labor unions, new age groups, any religion other than fundamentalist christian, peace groups, environmental groups, and “Esalen” (these idiots don’t even know that Esalen was only an important part of the new age fifty years ago and no longer is), and Unitarians!
Included in this are attacks on any better parenting organizations, anything that might improve the self-esteem of ordinary folks, anything that might alleviate the conditions of overpopulation and squalor in which many people live. They want to keep us down, demoralized, and unable to fight back.
And if we do fight back, they have the most gullible of us going after those of our own who have dared to rise above our stations and would wish to reach a hand back to do the same for our brothers and sisters.
This has a long history. If you look into illuminati you will see they are what the Renaissance folks were called, the revolutionaries who founded America, and the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution. Union organizers. The Knights Templar, who were murdered across Europe on Friday the 13th by the Catholic Church, any educated Catholics such as Jesuits. Any liberal christian branch.
This new stuff is just part of the age old effort of the aristocracy in collusion with the Catholic Church to divert attention away from themselves and keep themselves from being overthrown by getting the uneducated to be at war with those of them who might be trying to improve their lots.
Us liberals-feminists-unionists-new-agers-free-thinkers-environmentalists they are calling “illuminati” now. In the past we were called “witches” and “heretics” and burned at the stake and tortured mercilessly.
I am an environmentalist, a feminist, a liberal, a new ager, a hippie, someone who went to and facilitated at places like Esalen, and a believer in world peace. Call me “illuminati” and I will wear the badge proudly….
Included in this are attacks on any better parenting organizations, anything that might improve the self-esteem of ordinary folks, anything that might alleviate the conditions of overpopulation and squalor in which many people live. They want to keep us down, demoralized, and unable to fight back.
And if we do fight back, they have the most gullible of us going after those of our own who have dared to rise above our stations and would wish to reach a hand back to do the same for our brothers and sisters.
it just occurred to me these folks, tea party types or those who don’t know any better among progressives, would be like the house “blacks” (to avoid the N word) of the South … siding with their enslavers against any outsiders or “uppity” blacks.
My friend Ka’t Pleiadean Mandu said, “Well isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black. I came across a youtube video where they were trying to tell us that reptilians and pleiadeans were the same. Bahahaha.”
Yes, that is exactly the kind of ignorance I’m talking about. Reptilians and pleiadeans the same. It’s just paranoia, where everything is a threat that they don’t understand.
what I am saying is that these people who think they are “awakened” because they have swallowed this drivel are being led by the nose to their slaughter.
These rich folks take away people’s real self-esteem and then play on the egotism that results. Telling them they are “awakened” for being duped is part of the way these uneducated are “played.”
Religion is a great tool for it does both of those things I was talking about above: It drives people’s self-esteem into the dirt and then lifts their egoism to a high point once they go along with the drivel. Their “being saved” is as much a way to play them like violins as “being awakened” is for this group above.
Addendum: it was posted on an Occupy page … which is *very* disturbing.
It just conceptualizes the things I’ve been told on many pages/groups, and read in articles all over the internet.
I’ve personally been called “illuminati” many times for not having traditional christian religious views. Yeah, me. living on social security.
The parts of the chart that actually include rich people and the Vatican is how the right uses some of the truth to get people to going along with their wishes and against their own. Alex Jones is a good example of that. There is plenty of truth in conspiracy theories, but notice above how it is being used to go against unions. Yeah, big tool of rich people … trade unions. See what I mean? The best propaganda is that which frames the truth in a way which they can use it to entice and enslave.
This chart, if you look at it, is an attack on all kinds of free-thinkers and searchers. it is an encouragement for people to live in the comfort of their ignorance … and fears … and basically feel good in the righteousness of their servitude.
I think that these things are the “screens” they put up to hide behind. The enemies are right in front of us. We shouldn’t be wasting our time on “mythical” ones … it is too easy for folks to be manipulated that way … cause then they can say ANYthing! And they have already shown, with their use of Glen Beck, Alex Jones et al, to use plenty of righteous sounding ego-placating misinformation to seed the collective mind into its current confusion.
Paul Theriault responded, “I have to agree. I remember one time someone said to me, when they were in obvious psychiatric danger, that they wouldn’t go see a psychologist or psychiatrist, as they all were members of the illuminati.
It also excludes a lot of concepts from serious evaluation because all contrary evidence is assumed to be an illuminati plant.
I remember some telling me once that baking soda cured cancer and the illuminati suppressed the evidence. That’s just plain not true.”
I responded to Paul, It is stuff like that which I’ve heard over the years and has built up in me to motivate me to do this post today. It is sad. This stuff borders on the psychotic … and some of it is….
Paul Theriault well, a fair amount of conspiracy theory is probably generated by people with schizophrenia. At least from what I can tell via their interviews. Not to mention the shoddy reporting.
Michael Adzema hmmm. i was suspecting that myself. I have a stepson who *is* schizophrenic. And this stuff sounded at times like the *kind* of stuff he would say.
there are *real* problems and *real* evil. Fitting them into a Christian mythical structure linked to a particular religion’s theology does not help us see them and fix them … and KEEPS us from doing anything about them.
I wish I had a nickel for every time I have heard that we couldn’t do anything about such-and-such because it was all part of God’s or Lucifer’s “plan.” *sigh*
If I have any intention, though, it is to bring light to false stories that are very, very dangerous. At one time, over the course of 300 years, 30 million women were horribly tortured and then burned alive for having views like we hold. And it looks like America is heading in that direction again …
On the flip side, this is the grandest time to be alive. The most important time in recorded history. All threads are coming together now, from all times and places, and we are in the center … getting to be a part, participate, choose, have a role and an effect….
yes, “a great passion play” … for sure
Bob Conway said on this:
While it surely is true that some wealthy and powerful people conspire to keep their wealth and power and indeed acquire more of it at our expense, the scope and breadth of the paranoia with which some other people approach that simple fact is truly astounding. They’ll lump just about anybody with whose views they disagree in with their enemies and call them “Illuminati” or “New World Order” or something and blame them for everything bad in the world. Such conspiracy theorists pose a great danger to all of us, including themselves.
And –
Neo-McCarthyism is what it is. 60 years ago there was a “Commie” lurking under every bed. Now the paranoid right insists that the “Illuminati” are hiding under your bed with a fleet of black helicopters coming to take away your Bible and your guns and put you in a FEMA camp after implanting a RFID chip in your neck and polluting your precious bodily fluids with fluoridated water.
I would add –
It was said that the only ones who are interested in denying conspiracy theories are the perpetrators of the conspiracies … which set off in me this response:
Seriously? You don’t think people who want to know the truth might also have an interest in denying that conspiracies *that* don’t exist … don’t exist? Not all conspiracy theories are valid. That is a recipe for the psychosis we see on FB … where some people actually think the world is hollow … and there’s some big effing illuminati coverup of that …. and that Nazis live in Antartica … dominator reptiles live on the moon and Sandy Hook never happened!!
Look, I am convinced 911 was an inside job and JFK was killed by powerful people in our government as well. But, Jesus! What bothers me is the free rein that has given for nuts to come up with all kinds of things out of thin air … aided and abetted and “seeded” by the likes of Fox News, Glenn Beck, and Alex Jones and the like … who we *really* should be looking at if we want to find evil conspirators…. imho….
3. This is why New World Order and Illuminati stuff is bullshit and is right-wing propaganda. It is rooted in the anti-communism of the 50s and the John Birch Society; and it is vehemently anti-progressive.
From the group description at We Are Change:
“During the 20th century, many statesmen, such as Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill, used the term “new world order” to refer to a new period of history evidencing a dramatic change in world political thought and the balance of power after World War I and World War II. They all saw these periods as opportunities to implement idealistic or liberal proposals for global governance only in the sense of new collective efforts to identify, understand, or address worldwide problems that go beyond the capacity of individual nation-states to solve.
These proposals led to the creation of international organizations, such as the United Nations and NATO, and international regimes, such as the Bretton Woods system and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which were calculated both to maintain a balance of power as well as regularize cooperation between nations, in order to achieve a peaceful phase of capitalism. These creations in particular and internationalism in general, however, would always be criticized and opposed by the American Old Right on isolationist grounds and by New Right on benevolent imperalist grounds.
In the aftermath of the two World Wars, progressives welcomed these new international organizations and regimes but argued they suffered from a democratic deficit and therefore were inadequate to not only prevent another global war but also foster global justice. Thus, activists around the globe formed a world federalist movement bent on creating a “real” new world order. A number of Fabian socialist intellectuals, such as British writer H. G. Wells in the 1940s, appropriated and redefined the term “new world order” as a synonym for the establishment of a full-fledged secular, social democratic world government.
During the Red Scare of 1947–1957, conspiracy theorists of the American secular and Christian right increasingly embraced and mongered unfounded fears of Freemasons, Illuminati, and Jews being the driving force behind an “international communist conspiracy”. The threat of world communism in the form of a state atheistic and bureaucratic collectivist world government, demonized as a “Red Menace”, therefore became the main focus of apocalyptic millenarian conspiracism.
In the 1960s, producerist groups like the John Birch Society and the Liberty Lobby disseminated a great deal of right-wing conspiracy theories focused on the United Nations as the vehicle “internationalists” would use to create the “One World Government”, and contributed to a conservative movement for United States withdrawal from the U.N. American writer Mary M. Davison, in her 1966 booklet The Profound Revolution, traced the alleged New World Order conspiracy to the creation of the U.S. Federal Reserve System in 1913 by international bankers, who she claimed later formed the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921 as the shadow government. At the time the booklet was published, “international bankers” would have been interpreted by many readers as a reference to a postulated “international Jewish banking conspiracy” masterminded by the Rothschilds.
Claiming that the term “New World Order” is used by a secretive elite dedicated to the destruction of all national sovereignties, American producerist writer Gary Allen, in his 1971 book None Dare Call It Conspiracy, 1974 book Rockefeller: Campaigning for the New World Order and 1987 book Say “No!” to the New World Order, articulated the anti-globalist theme of much current right-wing conspiracism in the U.S.. Thus, after the fall of communism in the early 1990s, the main demonized scapegoat of the American far right shifted seamlessly from crypto-communists who plotted on behalf of the Red Menace to globalists who plot on behalf of the New World Order. The relatively painless nature of the shift was due to growing right-wing opposition to the globalization of capitalism but also in part to the basic underlying apocalyptic millenarian paradigm, which fed the Cold War and the witch-hunts of the McCarthy period.”
So, if you are an illuminati theorist seeing illuminati under every bed, know you are in the great tradition of McCarthyites who saw communists under every bed, Nazis who saw Jews as the perpetrators of all their problems, the Vatican who saw heretics behind every free thought, and the people of the middle ages, who saw witches behind every expression of happiness or pleasure … and killed them.
Enjoying the company you’re keeping?
4. i’m not afraid of being culled by the government. i’m afraid of psychotic NWO fanatics seeing illuminati under every bed just like they once saw communists in the 50s and witches in the middle ages. this illuminati stuff is bullshit, but worse it is dangerous psychosis. people have already died because of believing this bullshit. people have been killed!!
Laughner, the guy who killed all those people, including children and shot Gabrielle Giffords through the brain, in Arizona, was all pumped up on this Alex Jones nonsense. I’m more afraid of stupid conspiracy nuts than i am any “elite” or government.
Herne Webber: We could use a One World Government by, of and for the people, one that is Anarchistic, granting local rule, with overarching Ideals of Socialism and Green to protect human and civil rights, as well as the environment. It is amazing to me the number of Progressives who nevertheless fall for Right wing propaganda, such as the Illuminati, the lizard aliens, etc..
Michael Adzema: exactly, Herne. nice to hear your voice of clarity on this. i get so tired of coming up against the propaganda and misinformation of people who then claim to have the “true knowledge” and to be “awakened” when the words they speak come from the minds of the Koch Brothers and those like them. For example, these people have no clue of the connections between the Koch Brothers and Ron Paul/Alex Jones/Glenn Beck. You’d think that Glenn Beck thanking the “Koch Brothers for this information” on his show would be a hint, but nooooo … and they think others are the sheeple. ha!
Michael Adzema mccarthyism not much different than the illuminati madness of today, except it was worse than what we are seeing right now. but it is where I fear we are heading. and the right will have us by the noses again, progressives herded like the sheeple they claim not to be… delusional….
what scares me is i see those super rich using their money to seed misinformation into the movement. i see people adopting anti-environmental stances saying that they have been “awakened.” Being against the UN’s Agenda 21, for example. And I say, you’re not awakened, you’re being played like a violin to help the Koch Brothers trash the economy. that kind of awakening is stupid. but people, especially young folks, will know (or be told) one thing and think they know everything.
right wingers have always hated the United Nations because it is the one of the most powerful impediments corporations have to doing whatever they want. you go against the UN and you are sweet music to the Koch Brothers, the polluters, and those that want to make you consumer slaves. it is right-wing mythology rooted all the way back in middle age witch hunting and conservative catholic ideology that went against the ideas of the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment.
5. Here’s more proof of what I am saying. it is anti-semitic, anti-environmentalist and anti-United Nations, and nowhere does it target corporations, like folks think it does. Its roots are in the inquisition that put down heretics and women in the middle ages. Do people realize that in backing NWO/illuminati conspiracy they are acting like modern inquisitors and modern McCarthyites? Do they realize that they are speaking the lines of the John Birch Society? Does any of them know what that means? Does anyone care? Here’s more proof:.
“HELLO, I AM EVELYN DE ROTHSCHILD!…>- My Family is the Richest Family of the World!…- We Own the US Fed, the Bank of America, and Entire World’s Banking System!…- We are the Bankers of the Royal Familiy and of the Vatican!…- We Financied Democracy, Communism and Nazism Also!…- We Financied the American Revolution!… But We Were Also Commissioned by Royal Inglish Familiy to Put Down the American Revolution!…- We Financied the French Revolution!- We Financied the Communist Revolution in Russia!…- We Destroyed the State of Palestine to Create Israel!…- We Were Behind 9/11 and Resulting Wars!…- We Control Obama, Democratics, Republicans and the US Governement and State!… – We Own the Associated Press and Reuters and Control Everything in Your Media.- We Are the Hereditary Supreme Chiefs of Almost the Entire World Freemasonry!…- We Are the Hereditary Supreme Rabbis of Almost all of the World’s Jewish People!…- We All Worship Lucifer – Satan the Devil ! Our True God!…- We Are New World Order and Plan to Enslave the Entire Human Population, Killing 90% and We Will Do It Legally Through the United Nations!…”
The above is from some propaganda that was being passed around on “illuminati”/jew-hating groups on FB. If you believe that nonsense, then you won’t have any trouble with what else is being tossed around – that the Rothschilds owns 72% of the wealth in the world and 500 trillion dollars. If you can believe that ANYone can without being seen own 72% of all wealth and 500 trillion dollars, then i’m not surprised you could believe in reptiles peaking at us from behind the moon. btw, how much for the green cheese you have for sale?
the fact that folks seeing illuminati everywhere are also attacking personal spirituality is an indication that these things go back to conservative Catholic tyranny of the middle ages, where they had inquisitions for the “illuminati” of their day … calling them witches and heretics. 30 million killed over a 300 year period. only it is conservative Christian dogma and evangelism that is behind this modern day witch-hunting. never again!!
in the book None Dare Call it Conspiracy, theses “elites” are said to be behind unions, feminists, hippies, etc….. everything but evangelical religion and the right. When the opposite is true. The point is NWO and conspiracy nuts are being seeded with right wing propaganda and are taking it out on their brothers in the left. The real elites have, with this NWO stuff and through the Alex Jones and Glenn Becks of the world, got progressives looking under beds instead of at rich folks.
6. It is this typical illuminati bullshit about Rothschilds and freemasons and Jews that led to the holocaust and the rise of Nazism. And you NWO theorists think you are *fighting* fascism!? You are being led down the blood-soaked path, actually. I quote:
“Antisemitic conspiracy theories
Antisemitism has, from the Middle Ages, frequently taken on characteristics of conspiracy theory. Antisemitic canards continue to circulate. In medieval Europe it was widely believed that Jews poisoned wells, had killed Jesus, and consumed the blood of Christians in their rituals (despite the fact that human and animal blood are not kosher).
In the second half of the 19th century conspiracists claimed that Jews and/or Freemasons were plotting to establish control over the world. The most famous text alleging the existence of this Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A more modern manifestation of such ideas is the myth of a Zionist Occupation Government.
Various conspiracy theories have been advanced regarding Jews and banking,[32] including the myth that world banking is dominated by the Rothschild family,[33] that Jews control Wall Street,[33] and that Jews control the U.S. Federal Reserve System.[34] A related myth is that Jews control Hollywood or the news media.[35][36]
Most Holocaust denial claims imply, or openly state, that the Holocaust is a hoax arising out of a deliberate Jewish conspiracy to advance the interest of Jews at the expense of other peoples,[37] and to justify the creation of the State of Israel. For this reason, Holocaust denial is generally considered to be an antisemitic[38] conspiracy theory.[39]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conspiracy_theories
7. illuminati conspiracy stuff is basically Nazism I’m finding out. though I’m not jewish, I’ve just been called jew-this and jew-that and that wikipedia is jewkipedia and etc etc etc in an “illuminati” group. So, though everyone might think it is true, it is because the Nazis and fascists have taken over in this country and are determining what people think. that’s why. add to that the dumbing down of America.
It is something we need to fight…. certainly not be part of….
read the rest of it. they want to include socialists, marxists, revolutionaries, hippies, all renaissance thinkers…. my generation saw through all this when they came out with the book None Dare Call it Conspiracy, which was a way the right wing tried to blame hippies for all that was wrong and make the changes in society part of a communist conspiracy. but generations have come after us who have been duped.
So, this is the kind of stuff that the Nazis did. This NWO stuff is the same stuff that led to the rounding up of the Jews. That’s how dangerous this is.
What the Germans believed prior to the Jewish roundup WAS this NWO bullshit about Jews controlling the world through their banks? THIS CONSPIRACY STUFF LED TO THE HOLOCAUST
And in the same way as the Nazis directed attention away from themselves by targeting the Jews as scapegoats, these same kinds of people are targeting hippies, feminists, unions, and environmentalists as illuminati.
The problem is that folks think like I that there is an elite of rich people. While what these NWO folks are targeting is YOU as some elite. Look at the chart above. And read my comment about it.
8. i don’t disagree with anything anyone says about the rich folks controlling things and there being dire threats right now. Shit! I’ve written four books trying to rally folks about this in the last two years alone!!
the problem is that there’s so much truth in all of what they are saying in conspiracy circles …. and then they turn around and say hippies, new-agers, communists, feminists, hollywood, unions, etc. etc. are the ones responsible. they’ve been doing this since the 60s. None Dare Call It Conspiracy came out in the early 70s and we saw right then how they were tying in the entire counterculture of my generation with some bullshit communist plot to take over the world. i still hear to this day that the Rockefellers are responsible for making me a hippie. how stupid!!!
as if hippies are the center of the financial engines for the world. lmao!!
While New World Order and illuminati junkies go around thinking they’re clever in divining the intentions behind world events, they are blind to the 50% die-off of species in the next 20 to 50 years, the irradiating of the planet, the massacre and brutality of tyrants against their own people, and the fact that we are on an ecocidal and humanicidal brink, looking at the possibility of the end of all life on this planet in our lifetimes, from any one or combination of many environmental assaults. I say that the prospect of aliens-reptiles-illuminati is a comforting fantasy for those who do not want to look at our real problems.
As one of my friends put it, “I would love to be able to buy into that whole NWO/conspiracy crap, which is probably comforting? Well, it enables believers to divorce themselves from any sort of responsibility.
I added that it is typical scapegoating. finding imaginary things to blame has two sides, as you are indicating. the one is misdirection of focus on a false target. the other is having that focus not on oneself. that is plain and simple the function of scapegoating as a tool in society. How many people who are finding illuminati and Rothschilds behind everything are doing anything to save our precious planet? I haven’t found one who is. they are too busy denying climate change at the behest of the Koch Brothers and other polluters…. sheeple
i said there is no illuminati. i’m the first to point out there is lots of problems and evil. you show me one illuminati. I’ll show you some real Koch Brothers. it is insanity. take it or leave it.
Jung talked a lot about the Shadow … as well as the collective unconscious. Folks who do not look at their own “dirty laundry” within see darkness behind every rock outside of themselves. Also, my experience with these folks in general, and too many politicos on both sides of the spectrum, is that they are very disinclined to look at themselves and have very little self-awareness (much more for the right than the left, of course). They tend to pooh-pooh psychology, calling it “psychobabble” … sound familiar? And they tend to see and act in the outside world their own inner conflicts from their families of origin.My point is there is evil in the world. But those who do not look at their own darkness are liable to end up tilting at the *wrong* windmills outside themselves.Don’t get me wrong, I understand folks resisting this. It is far more terrifying to find out the boogey-man doesn’t exist. Because that means that if you still think there is one, you’re one sick puppy…..
i don’t disagree with anything you say folks say about a rich elite controlling the world. And that’s the problem. there’s so much truth in it all …. and then they turn around and say hippies, new-agers, communists, feminists, hollywood, unions, etc. etc. are the ones responsible. they’ve been doing this since the 60s. None Dare Call It Conspiracy came out in the early 70s and we saw right then how they were tying in the entire counterculture of my generation with some bullshit communist plot to take over the world. i still hear to this day that the Rockefellers are responsible for making me a hippie. how stupid!!!
as if hippies are the center of the financial engines for the world. lmao!!
The Matrix is a great movie. i’ve seen it several times and enjoyed it. it makes for a poor substitute for reality, however.
Indeed, my impression from a lot of these folks is that they are confusing reality with movies..
9. The problem i have with criticizing Obama is the crowd of assholes i end up in when i do that. i am angrier at this right wing NWO bullshit and propaganda that targets environmentalists (like me), hippies (like me), union folks (like me), and feminists (like me), than I am at Obama. I see the Koch Brothers hand behind a lot of this and so I wonder at the criticism I read about Obama. i don’t know what to believe of it anymore. Read the article and you might do the same.
there is plenty of blame that is due Obama. But the problem with paranoids is they end up being lousy prophets. I’m still waiting for the “certain” invasion of Nicaragua that my progressive friends said was coming while Reagan was in power. the U.S. didn’t need to invade Nicarauga, that is true. But my “progressive” friends did not see that … blinded by the certainty of their paranoia. They were predicting this invasion after the other elements were known.
The story above is another example. I saw an article today predicting just the opposite: that the case for the Keystone pipeline finally fell like a house of cards and that Obama will not ok it.
I’m angry, too, and want better from my own side. But my anger has not yet made me stupid enough to help my opponents in trying to bring down those on my side … including myself!
I’ve already seen this movie. Back in the 70s with Carter. I regret very much not defending him against the mass of innuendo and misinformation that ended up bringing Ray-gun into power and ending progress in America. This is not my first rodeo. I refuse this time to help the forces of evil, even when I am discouraged and frustrated at the competence or pace of progress of those who represent my interests.
I finally voted for Carter, but i went to an Anderson function and toyed with the idea of supporting him. I lost hope in Carter and didn’t defend him after a while … the exact way i’m feeling about Obama of late, and am today trying to change. But, we had no idea how much worse it could get.
i think that is what we have to keep in mind now: how much worse it can get still if we do not fight back against the filth of innuendo and lies that are raining upon is in progressive circles..
the right uses any weakness on our side to attack and make gains. they seed doubt and misinformation to feed those weaknesses. they insert their lies into any cracks in our alliance. thus, they have made gains continuously over the last 40 years.
the point is that Obama is not evil he is he simply lacking in being bold. That is a huge difference from his enemies.
As a psychotherapist, I understand him psychologically. We should have known when he was trying to get us to see that we could be a united country not split into red and blue states that, while it sounded good, it was delusional. He was acting out his childhood wish to bring his parents together. And the way he tries to placate the Republicans. it is clear he wants to please daddy and is acting out of all kinds of unconscious pain of his dad leaving him.
Hell, Obama is not my generation: We, who faced down authority, who spoke truth to power. He was born in the first wave of folks that the right wingers created to counter us: the yuppies.
So, Obama is between two worlds: his black liberal views and his yuppie white collegiate ones.
But there are no leaders that don’t have their psychological drawbacks … as we see from the leftist leader of Brazil right now.
Jung also talked a lot about the Shadow … as well as the collective unconscious. Folks who do not look at their own “dirty laundry” within see darkness behind every rock outside of themselves. Also, my experience with these folks in general, and too many politicos on both sides of the spectrum, is that they are very disinclined to look at themselves and have very little self-awareness (much more for the right than the left, of course). They tend to pooh-pooh psychology, calling it “psychobabble” … sound familiar? And they tend to see and act in the outside world their own inner conflicts from their families of origin.
My point is there is evil in the world. But those who do not look at their own darkness are liable to end up tilting at the *wrong* windmills outside themselves.
they were the ones in college and investment firms during Reagan’s presidency, and statistics show they were crucial in Reagan winning both times…. NOT my generation.
I saw the way the filthy rich changed the universities in 71 and 72 so there would never be a free thinking generation again. i was there. we saw documents. we fought it by trying to hire the professors they were firing with our own “quarters” and have them conduct classes on the lawns outside the classrooms….
People are wont to criticize Obama using the quote from Edmund Burke: “All that’s necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” ….
They never tell you what he said next: “But if you really want to speed evil along, join with it and kick the hesitant good men in the teeth.”
10. I’ve been asked if I know about “The Georgia Guidestones.
The answer is that of course i do. i agree with them. who could disagree with working to bring us to a population growth that would have our planet survive? what kind of paranoid idiots thinks that this means someone wants to kill people?
Have these right-wingers throwing this stuff around as propaganda done anything to limit population growth? No! they are too busy killing abortion doctors.
Would these folks bring a child into the world if it meant the death of the child, themselves and all of their friends? …. well, yes, they are that stupid. So i retract the question.
Do the people who are terrified of The Georgia Guidestones know about Planned Parenthood is what i want to know.
it tells you a lot about the mindsets of people when the only way that even occurs to them as a way of solving the population problem of the planet is to kill people.
So I’m with Yoko Ono and all those other environmentalist “hippies” who think it is a good idea to save the planet and to do that we need to stop overpopulating the Earth by putting restraint on the number of people we bring in here.
10. As for seeing some kind of NWO conspiracy behind the aspirations for revolution of the peoples of the world, especially those in the Middle East … to those people who see the need to piss on the heartfelt aspirations and dearly paid for advances of those countries, I say, you keep seeing people behind every aspiration for freedom in the world. go ahead. meanwhile tyrants butcher their own people.
As for myself, I’m with the Libyan, Turkish, Brazilian, Egyptian, and Syrian people. Assad is a murderer of 100,000 men, women, and children. do lives not figure into your complex mental machinations of geopolitical intrigue and conspiracy theory?
In particular about Syria, i don’t know what to believe anymore. i was involved in both Libya and Syria … it was all part of a globalrevolution. then as soon as we gave them the help that saved Libya from the slaughter, the progressives suddenly started saying Gaddafi was a good guy. i still have friends in Libya and Syria. I trust their instincts for revolution and yearnings for democracy far more than back-stabbing Western intellectual progressives who are never satisfied and people die because of their infantile petulance.
Bottom line is I don’t believe anything anymore. but i do know who is evil and who is not. being a psychotherapist for 40 years helps that. and when people start sounding like Glenn Beck, Fox News, or infowars, i consider them deluded.
But in general, I get past all the intellectualization and spin by putting things in human terms. This I find especially helpful when looking at the Middle East. As so:
When 33 million out of 84 million population come out in the street to redress something, it is the will of the people when it gets redressed. (Egypt)
Also, when a leader of a country kills 100,000 of his own people to stay in power, that leader is not expressing the will of the people, no matter what geopolitical alakazam is proposed to defend it. (Syria)
It’s easy for me: the one with the most people on their side and least suffering and murder deserves to win, in my book.
11. The Illuminati Threat? Yea, and I’ve got some “rich” teachers, union folk, and college-educated who are out to get you, too.
Based upon what I read, the article below, about the Illuminati:
(1) Where do I join?
(2) The people who would oppose such an organization sound like they would be tea-baggers, Beck-aloytes
(3) I don’t think they would let Bush be a member (c’mon! Eastern spirituality and Enlightenment philosophy!!! … Bush!? He’d only get a C on the entrance exam if he did try, and that would hardly be “illumined” enough)
(3) Yes, this stuff has been around. It is called the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Age of Enlightenment
(4) Its principles would have been responsible for the American Revolution and the French Revolution. I only hope that OWS is so inspired
(5) It WOULD be the kind of thing that would be hated by the Catholic Church and they WOULD spread lies throughout the ages to misinform on it, to attribute their own vile agenda TO IT, and to link it with Satan, and thus reverse the blame that should go to them.
(6) It sounds like they would lump the entire New Age movement and all its thought – Jungian, Gnostic, human potential, etc. – into it
(7) Sounds like they were the original “dirty hippies” (and so I would have been one)
(8) when it comes to standing with Roosevelt, Obama, Clinton, George Washington, Marxism, and Benjamin Franklin or standing against them with assorted Bible-thumpers and the Catholic Church, I’d be with Benjamin Franklin’s group. In fact, I was sent on my quest for truth at the liberal arts college that Ben Franklin founded (Franklin and Marshall College) which had such a tradition of scholastic inquiry until the Seventies when it was taken over by the Right-Wing who hated the anti-war protesters that were coming out of it and it was turned into a career mill instead.
So (9) MAYBE I AM ONE and don’t know it!
(Damn. If I could find a 10th, I’d have a new article: “10 Things You Didn’t Know About the Illuminati But Would Never Hear About in the Right-Wing (Propaganda) Media” #ahI’mtoobusyalready)
http://www.examiner.com/progressive-in-new-orleans/tales-from-the-crypt-is-the-illuminati-real
Some more thoughts.. (maybe the #10 hehe) –
Bart Boeckholt – I can tell you first hand that the free masons have been, and are involved in many great things including the founding of this great nation.
Michael Adzema – You just triggered a fascinating thought in me, Bart. Is not the Free Masons like the first unions? And so, is not this anti-illuminati crap like the first tea-bagger kind of rhetoric?
Bart Boeckholt – The Free masons were indeed a guild of operative Masons in ancient times.
Michael Adzema – We hear the same rhetoric today against smart folks. pin-heads, Northeast liberals. The right-wing has apparently always used this tactic: keep people dumb (in the past it was the Catholic Church) today they have purged the campuses of liberal arts then, (2) rile up the uneducated people this creates against the more educated of them — thus pitting one part of the 99% against another part — and this leaves the 1% untouched and just watching and enjoying the show … the culture war created.
The anti-union bashing is just another way, like the one against the educated, to pit slightly better off 99% ers against those who would be jealous of that and leaves the ones in power (the Catholic Church of the past and the 1%, the filthy rich, of today) untouched.
Tales from the Crypt: Is the Illuminati Real?
From http://www.examiner.com/progressive-in-new-orleans/tales-from-the-crypt-is-the-illuminati-real
Original article at http://sillymickel.blogspot.com/2011/11/based-upon-what-i-read-article-below.html
12. Big Lies…Big Ones!
We listen in as local TV anchors Dave and Katie recall the amazing day, a month previous, when the world changed drastically forever, practically overnight. They replay the TV news highlights of those incredible few days when miraculously the world’s human population was released from the Biggest Lie of all time, in fact the longest lasting—25,000 years in fact.
But the world changed because it was the most hideous lie. It had made humans miserable throughout their lives and caused them to be terrified to live, terrified of acting or even speaking. And after such a life of paralyzing terror, at death’s door, it caused untold trillions of humans to be freaked out of their gourd and to go nearly insanely brain scramblingly, nose drippingly mad as they approached the threshold.
God Will Punish You Forever in Hell…Stiiiiiilll, He Loves You!
The Big Lie, the incredibly long cover-up?
It turns out that some quite insanely controlling and pompously superior types had long ago concocted the idea of Hell—this place of endless and unbearable suffering that would last for all time. And then as the ultimate in mind scrambling irrationality, attributed its existence to God, who was also claimed to be all-loving and all-merciful.
A Wildly Successful Mind-Fuck
So it was the biggest, stupidest, and meanest mind-fuck of all time, concocted to keep people so terrified they would be easily manipulated by the controlling Meanies.
But it succeeded wildly beyond all expectations in that it could not definitely be disproved. And with the penalty of not believing in it so unbelievably huger than any person’s worst nightmare magnified times infinity, it held fast in people’s minds for 25,000 years with barely a soul ever courageous enough in that time to speak up and say what a rotten crazy notion it was…. [Keep Reading – Breaking News — Hell Doesn’t Exist: Good—God! Hell—No! … the Comedy]
Continue with We Are All Turks Today and The Tao of Funny God: Why Turkey and What Andy Kaufman and the Turkish and Occupy Protesters Teach Us
Return to The Great Reveal Epilogue, Part Fourteen – Four Falls from Grace … And Back Again: Becoming Human Is Love’s Supreme Act of Recklessness, and Death to Everyone … Makes It Fun
Invite you to join me on Twitter:
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The Cycle of All Events, the Evolution of Parenting, and Auspicious Collective Regressions: Being Crazy in an Insane World Might Mean You’re the Sane One
What’s Involved in Stopping War and Ecocide and the Necessary Mess of Transformation: Hard to Believe, But We’re Getting Saner
Chapter Nine: Regressions in the Service of Society — Messy Healing
There Is a Cycle to All Events … The Spiral Dance, Why We Can’t Get No Satisfaction, and Where There Is Real Hope
The Spiral Dance – The Cycle of All Events: Wedded to Rebirthing Rituals, the Inevitability of Disappointment, and Where There is Real Hope
Wedded to Rebirthing Rituals
At the point when the perinatal unconscious arises, individuals — and collectively, society — have the choice to turn toward the emergence of these feelings or to turn away from them.
In turning toward these feelings we embrace, feel, and if we go deeply enough into that, we relive the roots of them and resolve them finally.
In turning away from them we shun them, act them out, and are enslaved by them…thus we act unconsciously, trance-like, zombie-like.
If we face these inner forces—we call that feeling them…in this instance, feeling through or reliving one’s birth—we integrate them and heal the underlying trauma, the perinatal trauma.
Or the individual and society can avoid this going within—as depicted in the peace symbol—and can choose instead to act them out, which is the peace symbol upside down—the Satan symbol, the pentagram.
In acting them out, one distracts oneself from the uncomfortable feelings, which though not focused on, are still there. 
One tries to be “strong” in the face of feelings but one is actually driven and directed by them—they “take over one’s mind.” 
This is the source of the idea of spirit possession and in general of the idea that a devil or Satan can take over one’s soul.
So in running from our feelings we are captured and enslaved by them, we are forced to act them out in ways we would not otherwise choose which are negative to horrible but in all cases self-sabotaging. Of course war is the most horrible, most self-sabotaging, greatest, and most all-consuming form of such acting-out…the greatest struggle.
Humans are characterized by a particular kind of birth process.
It is a coming into being that is traumatic and which is related to our distinction of standing upright and thereby decreasing the pelvic opening as well as suffocating the fetus prior to birth. The fact is that because of this “distinction” we are destined to go through periods of rebirthing purificatory rituals, whether for good or ill. [Footnote 1]
For we are psychologically wedded to reliving that which we could not fully experience at the time because of the overwhelming quality of pain associated with it.
A “Spiral Dance”
These rebirthing rituals we are doomed to repeat, one way or the other. We are going to act out this primal pain—this birth trauma—in an unending cycle of feelings having these components
- Periods of feelings of expansion
- Closedness or entrapment, guilt, and depression
- Aggression
- Release
Then back around again.
In winning the “war” or having the success or achievement, there begins the same cycle of expansion followed by entrapment. Losing the war…the struggle, the battle…is akin to death, even if there is no death. There is numbness and repression…akin to a kind of “limbo”…before life can begin anew. A reconception is necessary.
The Pattern of Our First Nine Months Imprints Us For Our Entire Human Lives
The reemergence of hope in individuals and societies is biologically equivalent to conception. And following this reconceiving, there is a similar cycle of reemerging strength—akin to the expansion that follows winning. 
Then there is continuing depression or overarching gloom and helplessness feelings coupled with revenge feelings and blame as individuals and societies stew in the vessel of indecision, inaction, and doubt. This is quite like the closedness and guilt which follows achievement-success-victory. Note, however, that the revenge and blame feelings here are aspects of the BPM II matrix, just as is closedness and guilt.
Can’t Get No Satisfaction
And then the cycle is the same again. Specifically, there is aggression against the oppressor (War and revolution both see the foe as an oppressor, even if one is actually the one who is the aggressor.) What follows upon fighting is release or “death”; and so on around. The “happily ever after” that inspires such battle truly only exists in fantasies and fairy tales. Prosperity and feelings of success are unfortunately doomed, on this physical plane of existence, to be short-lived.
Where There Is Real Hope
It would seem we are fated to never be happy, for long. But progress is possible; 
herein lies our only real choice in the entire scenario. For we either work through these cycles in some deep psychologically 
transformative way that helps us deal with and pass beyond the difficult and painful parts of the cycle as well as helps to fade the imprints’ potency in determining our behavior 
or we are doomed to act them out in the external world in ways that we are blindly unaware are not congruent with the actual facts of our circumstances and are harmful to ourselves and others around us.
We are fated to experience these cycles of birth, and we will either act them out disastrously or we find ways 
of dealing with them inside of ourselves in some way—and some ways are better than others for doing this—so that we can have some inner distance from these patterns and therefore some conscious ability or choice around our actions when these pushes and pulls arise.
Railing Against the Darkness: The Vanity of Will, The Impotence of Reason, Progress Requires Regress, and Healing Is Nothing if Not Messy
Railing Against the Darkness, The Vanity of Will, The Impotence of Reason, and Social Progress Requires Regression
The Vanity of Will, The Impotence of “Reason”
What we absolutely don’t have, yet arrogantly think we do, is the ability—through will or reason alone—to choose light over darkness, to replace these inner veils of distortion with clarity of thought and perception and hence of positive behavior and actions while in the midst of them.
Trying to reason with and to obtain truly desired outcomes is about as possible as trying to reason with a lizard and convince it to conform to one’s wishes for its behavior. For good reason: Indeed our rational mind is as split off from the “reptilian brain” inside us within which these imprints circulate and from which they arise as are we from the consciousness of a gila monster.
What We Call “Reason” Is Largely Just Rationalization
This impotence of intellectual understanding in the face of these patterns of self-destruction occurs because 
these schemas are rooted in memories existing in an emotional and entirely dissociated part of the brain, which is hardly touched by neocortical admonishing of any kind. As deMause correctly points out,
[The fetus’s] “early experiences have been found to be recorded in a separate early neural network—a dissociated emotional memory system centering in the amygdala, quite distinct from the declarative memory system centering in the hippocampus that is established in later childhood.” [Footnote 2]
Disclaiming these cycles, which inevitably pass through darkness, and reliance on “will-power” to change one’s patterns, which includes self-sabotage, has been exposed in its impotence in modern times. We see as evidence the growing acknowledgment of the ineffectiveness and, indeed, counter-effectiveness of psychoanalysis. [Footnote 3]
Railing Against the Darkness
So the question begging to be asked is “What do we do about it?” What do we do about these pernicious cycles?
And when these elements erupt in society in harmless, possibly healing ways, how do we view them? Do we, as Mayr and Boelderl do in their article, “The Pacifier Craze: Collective Regression in Europe,” decry the regression…as if by disclaiming it we could somehow keep the cycle from happening? [Footnote 4]
Mayr and Boelderl write, for example, that the situation of collective regression in Europe “strikes us as being high-explosive [sic] and bitter enough.” [Footnote 5]
In another place they exclaim, “What is horrible about this insight [about the increasing collective regression in Europe] is the additional observation that regression is becoming still more radical.” [Footnote 6]
This response of railing against the “Darkness” is a Freudian response. Yet it is not even a neo-Freudian one, since regression in the service of the ego—which began to be seen as ever more important by neo-Freudians—is not acknowledged, let alone considered.
Social Progress Requires Regression
That regression in the service of the ego is not considered is confirmed by Mayr and Boelderl in their statement that “[R]egression by definition is a process of repression and a defense mechanism.” [Footnote 7]
These are surprising words, in light of the concept of regression in the service of the ego and awareness of the clinically based evolution of psychotherapeutic theory since Freud’s original postulations, over a half-century ago.
They are even more awry if one considers the universal, cross-cultural, implementation by societies of rebirthing rituals to handle the same kinds of forces we are confronted with. 
The anthropological literature is rife with these accounts.
Further, Grof has meticulously shown that regularly going into altered states of consciousness where one confronts this material is a prime function of cultures, and it occurs nearly universally although it is woefully lacking in Western culture for the most part.
Moreover, these words by Mayr and Boelderl indicate a conflict with or ignorance of the fact that deMause’s theory of evolution of historical change requires regression on the part of parents, while parenting their children, as the primary “engine” of sociopsychological progress.
For deMause writes,
“[T]he ultimate source of all historical change is psychogenesis, the lawful change in childrearing modes occurring through generational pressure…. Psychogenesis depends upon the ability of parents and surrogates to regress to the psychic age of their children and work through the anxieties of that age better the second time than in their own childhood.” (op. cit., 1982, p. 135, emphasis mine.)
But this mistake by these two social scientists would not be all that important if it was not the perfect example of the kind of uninformed attitude we have, generally speaking, in Western societies about these forces. This attitude is reinforced by a Judeo-Christian tradition of specialness and scapegoating in the West. It is a pervasive feeling about these things; specifically it, itself, is the actual defense. While this is a widespread reaction to our inner realities it is far from science, and even further from the truth or reality about these things.
“Stop It!” … Yeah, That’s Gonna Work
At any rate, if we adopt this Western, Judeo-Christian, Freudian tactic of decrying the darkness, we are as effective in derailing the cycle of violence and war as Freudians are in what amounts to admonishing their clients to “stop it!” when it comes to their neurotic self-sabotaging.
For people cannot will themselves to merely stop their cycles of neurotic self-sabotage and self-destruction, which are the individual manifestations/ acting out of their birth traumas. As mentioned these directors of action operate out of a different part of the psyche, and brain, than one’s conscious willing part. They are simply not accessible, so hardly amenable, to rational or willful input. And changing one’s thoughts to affect them is about as helpful as rearranging the furniture on the deck of the Titanic.
Being Crazy in an Insane World Might Mean You’re the Sane One: Auspicious Collective Regressions
People Who Have It All Figured Out Are the Ones to Watch Out For … Emotional “Sickness” Might Indicate More “Wellness”
Regression in the Service of the Ego
With the exposure of the ineffectiveness of the Freudian tactic of intellectual understanding has come the Freudian movement’s disintegration into schools advocating various other strategies for change.
These schools/strategies include the psychiatric—the use of drugs; the neo-Freudians who acknowledge and use regression in the service of the ego 
and abreaction; the humanistic-existential approaches, stressing the “experiential”; and the Jungians and neo-Jungians, who would seek the resolution of these cycles in their inner archetypal acting out, resulting in an eventual rootedness of the ego in a higher Self (a spiritual center) beyond or transcending the cycles. [Footnote 8]
Other approaches include the bulk of the spiritual, new-age, or transpersonal means that are flourishing these days. These alternative paths basically differ from all others in their belief that one can simply 
bypass these perinatal pulls and pushes and go directly to the Light or the Self by dismissing the birth cycles, or the Darkness or Shadow, through affirming the Light, meditating the Darkness out or the Light in, changing one’s thoughts, creating one’s reality, and various combinations of these.
Finally, these newer schools and strategies for healing include those of what might be called experiential psychotherapy, which includes primal therapy, holotropic breathwork, some forms of (experiential) meditation (Vipassana meditation, for example), Reichian and 
bioenergetic approaches, some forms of hypnotherapy—experiential ones—ones that involve reliving traumas—and virtually all the techniques, treatments, and correctives that are espoused in the field of pre- and perinatal psychology.
The point is that from a good number of these other-than-Freudian perspectives—and all of those that acknowledge the importance of 
regression in the service of the ego—and from the perspective of the entire field of experiential psychotherapy, the answer to the cycles of violence, war, and death-rebirth is to stop the acting out, not 
by simply intellectually decrying it—as if one can actually talk oneself 
out of one’s inner fears and one’s Darkness/Shadow—but by reliving those cycles of violence at their origins…their primal roots. In the case of perinatal forces, those forces from “the dark side,” this is accomplished by reliving the violence of birth, a perinatal trauma that is thoroughly and masterfully delineated by Grof and deMause. [Footnote 9]
Auspicious Collective Regressions
But from this perspective of experiential psychotherapy—one completely 
congruent with and grateful of deMause’s contributions in psychohistory as well—regression, in Europe, or elsewhere, is not seen as something to decry, disclaim, be horrified of, or be seen as dangerous but is seen as an opportunity. Regression is certainly not seen as a form of defense but as the opposite of that. Regression is part of a process of diminishing one’s defenses against one’s internal reality of pain and trauma.
Thus, examples of blatant collective regression as in Europe—more so to the 
extent they are relived, released, and integrated—are entirely auspicious for the eventual elimination of war as a collective device of acting out—defending against—the painful feelings coming from one’s personal history which one carries around, all unknowingly, and which pervade, in one way or another, in forms subtle and not so subtle, every moment of one’s consciousness in the present.
From this experiential psychotherapeutic perspective, we have a different feeling about developments like those that Mayr and Boelderl describe as collective regression in Europe and Lawson describes as occurring at rock concerts. [Footnote 10]
From a more enlightened viewpoint these cultural phenomena should have us, if not dancing in the streets, at least hopeful of a gradual decrease in the use of war and violence. 
Why? It is because the youth who display this “regression” so blatantly were brought up by an “advanced” form of child-rearing than that of previous generations, that they have fewer defenses, fewer layers of obfuscation covering up their unconscious psychodynamics; consequently the regression is seen more clearly in their behavior. [Footnote 11]
Unflinching Belief Related to Total Dissociation
Why is this important? DeMause points out that people do go to war, and that 
prior to it their perinatal dynamics come to the fore, as evidenced by perinatal-laden words and images in the media and in leaders’ speeches used to describe the situation and its dynamics. Thus, our leaders take us into war, they act out their perinatal dynamics…and we in following them act out ours…in such gruesomely overt ways because these dynamics are so hidden, repressed, and overlaid with defenses that the conscious mind has absolutely no access to, and hence insight into, them as being part of one’s unconscious dynamics.
Consequently the conscious mind is completely able to convince itself that those dynamics are actual, real, and doubtless parts of the situation and therefore require an actual, real, and extreme response. The amount of resolve required to act out war can only be wrought of an unflinching belief in the rightness, the absolute correctness of one’s perspective of the situation and therefore of that extreme course of response. And that can only be brought about by a total dissociation from one’s perinatal traumas, and a complete and utter projection of it on the outside—the enemy, to be specific.
Blatant “Sickness” Related to Being Real
The contrary is also true: When there does not exist that total and complete dissociation of the perinatal trauma—when it is, as in Europe and rock concerts currently, closer to the surface, less defended against, less repressed and, hence, more blatant—it is more accessible to consciousness and less likely to be acted out in the extreme as in war. Instead it is more likely to be acted out in less extreme forms, such as jumping into mosh pits, carrying pacifiers, listening to baby tunes about the, very real, difficulties of being a baby, and so on.
Finally, it is more likely to be actually allowed to emerge in consciousness and be relived, and thereby “healed”…and gone beyond, to be replaced by something more benign and more socially constructive, and thus to be removed forever as a motivation to war or violence. This is the auspicious view of the developments described by Mayr and Boelderl. [Footnote 12]
Janov was the first to point out that a permanent resolution of underlying trauma initially entailed an aggravation of symptoms and symbolic acting out. That is to say, the underlying dynamics become more blatant and apparent in behavior. [Footnote 13]
Janov was also the first to note that the acting-out and overt neurotic was closer to being “real,” and therefore really sane, than his or her highly functioning and “normal,” but repressed, rigidly defended, and unfeeling neighbor. [Footnote 14]
The Most Evolved Parenting … Boomers and Millennials … and The Cyclical Nature of History: I Know It’s Hard to Believe But We’ve Been Getting Saner
Thanks to You We’re Getting Saner: The Most Evolved Parenting … Boomers and Millennials … and The Cyclical Nature of History
Evolution of Parenting – We’ve Been Getting Saner
Finally, the correctness of the view that being “crazy” in an insane world might be more sane has been borne out in recent history. DeMause describes an evolution of parenting from ancient times to the present which involved ever decreasing psychosis and violence and increasing caring and consciousness of the needs of children. He connects this decrease in violent child caring to ever decreasing violence and psychotic acting out in societies.
DeMause labels the most common modern parenting mode the socializing mode. Short of the quite recent helping mode—which only really rose to prominence in the last three decades—the socializing mode is the most advanced and most humane.
Lest there be any confusion, I wish to point out that my own theoretical 
understanding differs from deMause’s in one important respect. While I agree with his evolution of child-rearing over the course of civilization and within recorded time, I believe he is wrong about prehistory and what primal peoples were like and the kind of child-caring they engaged in. He depicts prehistoric societies as psychotically oblivious of the needs of children, engaging in, first, infanticidal; then, second, abandoning; then, third, ambivalent modes of child-rearing. Whereas it seems to me the overwhelming evidence and increasing numbers of anthropologists point to a natural “organic” child-caring being employed in the the mists of the past quite a bit more “advanced” than even many modes employed today.
I believe the change from the loving parenting we see in many primal peoples and in Nature among many of our planetmates to the infanticidal, abandoning, and ambivalent modes he has described for early historic cultures is a product of that ever increasing control of Nature that went into full gear with the agrarian revolution, some ten to twenty-five thousand years ago. So, I am saying that brutal parenting was a consequence of “civilization” and was at its worst at the beginnings of recorded time.
But I agree we have been gradually evolving to better modes of child-caring over the history of civilization to the most sane and psychologically beneficial modes employed in recent decades, which, you might want to note, are very much like the modes of the earliest humans. I describe why and how we lost our connection with Nature and loving ways of parenting—how we left “Eden”—in my book and blog “The Great Reveal.”
The Cycles of Time
I believe my understanding shows once again how much of what modern folks thought of “development”—including it being linear and increasing from “darkness” to “light” with ourselves always at the top (conveniently)—is wrong and merely part of an anthropocentric bias and an ethnocentric heritage. For more and more, as we lay down those blinders to reality, we notice the evidence of the cyclical nature of everything—from our lives (ashes to ashes) to the physical Universe’s expansion and contraction, to the vibrations at the subatomic level, the waves in the sea, the turning of the Earth and the revolutions of the solar systems, and I contend now also, the so-called “history” of our species on Earth. This is the thoroughly postmodern idea that human time is also cyclical, with over and again peoples returning to earlier halcyon times only to “fall” away from them.
The Worst of Times Quality of Current Events
This idea of time as cyclical not linear is in keeping with Eastern philosophies, as well as indigenous ones. Hindu thinking currently has us at the depths of the Kali Yuga, the worst part of the cycle right now, with matters to be reversed very soon and the best of times just ahead. And, as I have been describing in my books Falls from Grace and Primal Renaissance and will be directly pointing out in my upcoming book, Primal Return, we are currently seeing a most necessary return to a more harmonious way of being and a more natural self. And with it, requiring it, to some extent preceding it, we are evolving to the most advanced mode of loving parenting.
The “Best of Times” Nature of Our Parenting
Psychohistorian Glenn Davis, following deMause, analyzed the most advanced form of child-caring short of the most recent helping mode—the psychogenic parenting mode deMause termed socializing—and found that it comprised four submodes. In order, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century and each one a more “evolved” and humane one than the previous one, they are the submodes of psychic control, aggressive training, vigorous guidance, and delegated release. [Footnote 15]
Oh, Be-HAVE. WWII Generation … Received Aggressive-Training and Vigorous-Guidance Parenting
Davis concluded that in America the Vietnam War was perpetrated by individuals belonging almost entirely to the aggressive-training and vigorous-guidance psychoclasses. [Footnote 16]
Questioning Authority and Oneself Is Good. Boomers … Received Delegated Release Parenting
Yet the Vietnam War was brought to an end largely as a result of the efforts of an antiwar movement whose largest component was a Sixties youth brought up under a more advanced delegated-release child-caring mode. [Footnote 17]
The delegated release mode, which resulted in the phenomenon of Sixties youth and the counterculture, is the most “advanced” mode short of the helping mode.
“Let’s Collaborate” – Millennials. Received the Most Advanced Parenting – Helping … “We Just Want You to Be Happy.”
The helping mode is the child-caring mode employed widely by the Sixties generation for their children, the Millennial Generation, also known as Generation Y. So, a helping mode of parenting was enjoyed by the children of a delegated-release psychoclass, the Boomers. Sixties youth are seen, psychologically, to have the most the most “advanced” ego structures short of their children taught within a helping mode. [Footnote 18]
What’s Involved in Stopping War and Ecocide – Peace Is Painful: But Better Psychotic Than Warring
![100604-hitler-020_thumb[1]](http://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/100604-hitler-020_thumb1.jpg "100604-hitler-020_thumb[1]")
Ending War and Humanicide—Peace Is Worth its Price of Suffering: Better “Emotionally Disturbed” Than “Healthily” Fighting in War
![rock concert_thumb[2]](http://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/rock-concert_thumb2.jpg "rock concert_thumb[2]")
Walking In Another’s Moccasins
![clip_image008[1]](http://www.donaldedavis.com/DEC99NEW/GOPDEMO.jpg "clip_image008[1]")
It is obvious that these Sixties youth did not have the same unflinching and unqualified belief in the absolute rightness of their country’s position in Vietnam as did many of their parents. ![clip_image009[1]](http://s1.hubimg.com/u/4766428_f260.jpg "clip_image009[1]")
This is obviously the case in a psychoclass of youth chanting a generational mantra, “Question authority!” and whose more extreme members would at times even go over to the perspective of seeing the war from the eyes of the “enemy,” the Other.
As I mentioned earlier, among the Sixties Generation we saw Jane Fonda’s journey to Hanoi, the waving of North Vietnamese flags by protesters, ![clip_image011[2]](http://theodoresworld.net/ExtremeRedZone/kerry_vc-vi.jpeg "clip_image011[2]")
and the carrying of little red books on the sayings of Chairman Mao. These are obvious indicators that the generation as a whole was open to seeing the war from the North Vietnamese perspective: That is, as a conflict perpetrated by a foreign nation that was hypocritical in its espousal of democracy in that it prevented democratic elections that would have without doubt elected Ho Chi Minh and instead it installed a puppet-ruler in the South, making Vietnam a virtual colony of the United States. From this perspective, the ![clip_image013_thumb[3]](http://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/clip_image013_thumb3.jpg "clip_image013_thumb[3]")
Vietnam War was for the Vietnamese as much a war for independence as the American Revolution was for the U.S.
This is just an example of how there are two sides to every issue and how an attempt at empathy or “walking in The Other’s moccasins”—made possible by a closeness to a perinatal unconscious that is also an opposite perspective than that of the conscious mind—can lead, at the minimum, to the reluctance necessary to prevent engaging in at least the most blatant and horrific forms of violence…against others, but consider also, against Nature.
The Perinatal Generation
At any rate, is there evidence that this undermining of the self-righteous position necessary for the instigation and carrying out of war and ecocide—this ability to see at least somewhat from The Other’s perspective and not just one’s own—is in truth correlated with a closeness to perinatal dynamics, a closeness to the unconscious for that generation of youth, those of the Sixties? The answer: Absolutely yes!
As mentioned in a previous part, sociologist Kenneth Keniston did psychological studies of members of the Sixties Generation.
He was inspired to do so through his noticing that he was seeing something really unusual and radically different in these youth than what he had ever seen. This led to his fascination with discovering what made them so different. And he documented his findings in two books—The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society and Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth. Roughly speaking he chose to study the unconscious dynamics of both the “alienated-hippie” and the “activist” sectors, respectively, of that generation. [Footnote 19]
Blushing Troll-Handlers
At the risk of repeating myself, I wish to remind the reader that a reading of his books—keeping in mind that Keniston knew nothing of perinatal dynamics at that time, and few people did, for that matter—reveals a degree of perinatal imagery, fantasy, and acting out—especially among “the uncommitted”—enough to make a troll-handling, pacifier-wearing, mosh-pit jumping youth of today to blush! [Footnote 20]
Self-Analysis and Psychological-Mindedness
Because of this peculiar perinatal access, I don’t believe it is any coincidence that Keniston also found an unusual amount of inner reflection—questioning oneself—alongside the more well known questioning authority. This he labeled “overexamined life” for the alienated sector and “psychological mindedness” for the activists.
![goths_thumb[2]](http://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/goths_thumb2.jpg "goths_thumb[2]")
![The Wall Movie 1982 (3)_thumb[2]](http://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/the-wall-movie-1982-3_thumb2.jpg "The Wall Movie 1982 (3)_thumb[2]")
Better Emotionally Disturbed Than “Healthily” Engaging in War
So, being close to one’s perinatal imprints, being less defended against one’s inner unconscious painful memories, leads to one being able to question not just oneself—and therefore to be a catalyst to personal growth and a quest for truth—but also the actions of one’s society. It is a counterbalance to our tendency to act out in violence to others as in war and to Nature as in ecocide. It means people will suffer more inner turmoil and pain, will feel more psychologically “disturbed,” and will be less likely to take it out on others, will be less likely to make others or the environment “pay” for what happened to them.
Let us contrast that with its opposite. DeMause writes,
Hitler’s projection of his fears…into Jews and foreigners helped him avoid a psychotic breakdown and enabled him to function during his later life, as long as others shared his delusion of poisonous enemies.
Therefore acting out collectively, as in war, can prevent a psychotic breakdown in certain individuals.
Better Psychotic Than Waging War
But when the consequences of acting out one’s birth trauma, collectively, is millions of people—including oneself—dead, not to mention the uncountably large loss of material and personal resources, it is clear that by comparison a psychotic breakdown is a more benign alternative for either the individual or the society in which that or those individuals act.
Similarly, not providing the outlet of war as a collective birth ritual…oftentimes, for the soldier involved, euphemistically called a “rite of passage”…would allow the genuine neurotic breakdowns, the collapse of people’s defenses, and their opening up to their underlying perinatal dynamics. Thus accessed, they can be healed, or in the least they would prevent the kind of unflinching belief or self-righteousness required for war and violence.
Some folks might even be motivationally paralyzed—receiving information from the unconscious that contradicts and undermines the stance and beliefs of their conscious ego. But when that egoistic stance is slanted, commonly, towards war, violence, selfishness and greed and corresponding environmental apathy, then better one would be indecisive, overwhelmed, and doing nothing.
The Price of Emotional Pain Is Minuscule Compared to That of War
Yet it is true that this neurotic breakdown, of at least a small amount, on the scale of society would result in the kind of collective regressions that Mayr and Boelderl, and Lawson describe. That is, the cause of peace, of the saving of human lives, requires that people pay the price of encountering their primal pain.
![PercyJackson_Characters_thumb[2]](http://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/percyjackson_characters_thumb2.png "PercyJackson_Characters_thumb[2]")
![clip_image019[1]](https://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/clip_image0191.jpg?w=375&h=248 "clip_image019[1]")
By all measures, this peace price is minuscule. It is even more worth it when you take into account the fact that many people, after initially “breaking down” for lack of a collective…and highly destructive…act-out like war/aggression, will actually succeed in reconstructing a self more in line with reality, through the dynamics and means categorized under the term regression in the service of the ego, desccribed above. Regardless of professional help…which would be nice but is not always available or practical…some people just find a way.
![world-peace-090420e_thumb[1]](http://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/world-peace-090420e_thumb1.jpg "world-peace-090420e_thumb[1]")
Continue with Chapter Ten: Where There Is Hope, Cultural Rebirthing
Return to Apocalypse No! Chapter Eight:
Derailing the Cycles of War and Violence
Footnotes
1. A. Briend, “Fetal Malnutrition: The Price of Upright Posture?” British Medical Journal 2 (1979): 317-319.
2. DeMause, op. cit., 1995, p. 12, emphasis in original.
3. See, for example, Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, trans. by Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, especially “Vantage Point 1990,” pp. vii-ix.
4. Daniela F. Mayr & Artur R. Boelderl, “The Pacifier Craze: Collective Regression in Europe.” The Journal of Psychohistory 21 (1993): 143-156.
5. Ibid., p. 144.
6. Ibid., p. 148, emphasis mine.
7. Ibid., pp. 149-150.
8. Regarding the “experiential,” I should make clear that this approach is, from the perspective of the experiential psychotherapeutic approach I will be describing shortly, actually the superficial symbolic acting out of these underlying and powerful cycles in a way that is only a little less impotent than the Freudians.
9. DeMause, op. cit., 1995.
10. Alvin H. Lawson, “Placental Guitars, Umbilical Mikes, and the Maternal Rock-Beat: Birth Fantasies and Rock Music Videos.” The Journal of Psychohistory 21 (1994): 335-353.
11. Mayr and Boelderl claim quite wrongly and quite strangely—as if to make the facts not conflict with DeMause’s psychogenic theory, or as if to cover up some hole in their analysis—that those caught up in the pacifier craze were raised under the intrusive and socializing parenting modes (op. cit., 1993, p. 145) and yet, in 1992, were between the ages of 15 and 30 (Ibid., p. 143). This is hard to understand because these youth would have been born between the years 1962 and 1977 in advanced Western countries of mostly Western Europe—Italy, Germany, Austria, all of Europe, and even the U.S. (Ibid.).
However, the intrusive and socializing modes are associated, by DeMause, with the eighteenth century and the nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, respectively, in the Western world (DeMause, op. cit., 1982, p. 62). On the other hand, the helping mode begins mid-twentieth century in the Western world (Ibid., p. 63).
The conclusion from this is that these youth, described by Mayr and Boelderl, would have been greatly influenced by the helping mode. They would be expected, at least, to have received the most advanced methods of child-caring overall in the world at this time—considering DeMause’s theory—since they are the most recent progeny of the Western world!
Indeed, if these cannot be considered products of the helping mode, who can be? In order for Mayr and Boelderl to dispute this and claim they were exceptions to the rule and were raised under intrusive and socializing modes, they would have had to do a study demonstrating this, or at least cite one done. And this they do not do.
12. Michael D. Adzema, “Reunion With the Positive (Self), Part 1: The Other Half of ‘The Cure.’” Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology 1(2): 72-85. Reprinted on the Primal Spirit site.
13. Arthur Janov, The Primal Scream: Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis. New York: Dell, 1970.
15. Glenn Davis, Childhood and History in America. New York: The Psychohistory Press, 1976.
16. Ibid., especially Ch. 7, “The Great Society and the Youth Revolt,” and p. 240.
19. Kenneth Keniston, The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society. New York: Dell, 1965; Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968.
20.While these aspects of youth are laid out by Keniston, a fuller delineation of these dynamics are to be seen in my work-in-progress, tentatively titled The Once and Current Generation: “Regression,” Mysticism, and “My Generation.” [Stay tuned.]
Continue with Chapter Ten: Where There Is Hope, Cultural Rebirthing
Return to Apocalypse No! Chapter Eight:
Derailing the Cycles of War and Violence
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Cycles of War, Cycles of Birth … What Can Be Done: Changing the Patterns of Millennia Requires Learning That Feeling Good Is Not Bad
Derailing the Cycles of War and Violence: What Say We Leave a Planet For Our Offspring? And Can You Handle Happiness?
Apocalypse No! Chapter Eight:
Derailing the Cycles of War and Violence
Men Would Rather Be Manly Than Alive and What Say We Leave a Planet for Our Offspring?
Why We Invite War, Allow Fascism, and Pollute: Our Coming Into the World Makes Us Want to Leave It
The question posed at the end of the last chapter was whether we had opened the door to an unimaginable armageddon or were experiencing the birth pangs of a massive consciousness transformation and subsequent Earth rebirth. Are we going to self-destruct, bringing death to the entire planet along with us, or will we become good citizens of this planet and our species continue on?
What Say We Leave a Planet For Our Offspring?
Most folks would think there would be only one answer to that question desired by virtually all humans. 
But in previous chapters, especially Apocalypse Emergency, Chapter Five: Death Wish – Thanatos Walking, I showed how, and why, that common-sense notion would, amazingly, be wrong: We saw how there is a huge percentage of our human Earth citizens, and a part of all of us, that wants to “throw in the towel.” This has always been true of humans, but it is of critical importance only now.
But I will assume anyone reading this will at least consciously be wanting our vital question to be answered in the affirmative. You know as well as I that the folks on the other side of this question are doing vastly different things right now than us and are nowhere to be found around here.
How Do We “Like” Life?
So the next thing to be addressed is how we might change our fortunes and live. Since continuing on is not just of matter of deciding it—voting “like” on it or checking its box—as we saw in Chapter Five: Death Wish, how can we get around this part of ourselves and our population that wants to do us all in? We need to know how to derail our perpetual cycles of war and violence. We need know how to quit bringing pollution and suffering on us. We have to know how we can stop our secret desire to take comfort in failure, how to “unlike” self-sabotage on our inner “profile.”
How Do We “Unlike” Fascism?
I have written a great deal on this question, including an entire book in 2011 on the way we act out this masochistic tendency politically and culturally by taking comfort in totalitarianism and embracing fascism. [Footnote 1]
For our purposes presently I will focus on the element of it all that is critical to answering our question. So we first need to look into the place from which emanates our dilemma. I showed that this bugaboo is our Will to Death.
Our Coming Into This World Makes Us Want to Leave It
Now we need to get more specific on this negative inclination of ours. As we have seen this Will to Death arises from human’s unique-among-all-species primal pain rooted in our singular way of coming into the world, our unique human birth.
We Need Look Deeper
We need to look deeper into the elements of that part of ourselves that would have us take us all down. We need inquire into that tendency of ours to choose pollution over health, tyranny over freedom, war over peace, enslavement over autonomy, violence over pacifism, oppression over liberty, misery over happiness. We must derail the cycles of war, violence, and fascism. We must know how to “like” happiness.
We Need Know Where Exactly to Focus Our Efforts to Be Successful
To do so, we must separate the skeins of this inner entanglement and shed light into this darkness within. We need to know specifically, precisely where to place the lever of effort we will apply to truly move the world, to derail it from its current acceleration into oblivion.
So we look now into the elements of that perinatal unconscious manifesting currently as a will to die on the grandest scale imaginable.
Cycles of War, Cycles of Birth
We find there are two researchers who are particularly relevant to our understanding of the elements of the perinatal unconscious in a way as to avert collective, worldwide disaster. These are Stanislav Grof and Lloyd DeMause. [Footnote 2]
Men Would Rather Be “Manly” Than…Alive…
DeMause writes,
[T]he group-fantasy shared prior to wars expresses the nation’s deep feeling that the increase in pleasure brought about by the prosperity and progress that usually precede wars “pollutes” the national blood-stream with sinful excess, making men “soft” and feminine”—a frightful condition that can only be cleansed by a blood-shedding purification. [Footnote 2]
Men are more terrified of appearing “feminine” than of losing their lives. Why we invite war.
DeMause is saying we go forever into war because after a while peace makes men feel guilty, “sinful.” Men have uncomfortable, even shameful…homophobic…feelings of being “soft” or “feminine” when their lives are good. So men choose the “purifying,” masculinizing ritual of war to fight off these feelings. Nothing distracts one from looking inward better than a “good, old-fashioned” life-or-death struggle, and war is the most all-encompassing of them.
Men are more terrified of appearing “soft” than having the boot of totalitarianism on their neck. Why we allow fascism.
What DeMause says about bringing war upon us can be said also about allowing fascism, inviting totalitarianism. For whether we are fighting enemies of another nation or struggling to survive against oppression at home, we are involved in a daily struggle. Secret to us, we feel better being engaged in a dramatic battle, though it brings us suffering and misery.
We simply can’t hack peace for very long. We feel guilty, for some reason, lolling on the beach. You ever notice how at the end of your vacation time, you are anxious for it to be over and to get back to work? That feeling—that one where we feel…guilty?…uncomfortable…tense?…unfulfilled?…(you tell me)—that’s it. That’s the one I’m talking about.
It happens the same way collectively after we have experienced a “vacation” of national peace—for example, in the Nineties when we were prosperous and mostly peaceful under Clinton. At the end of it, with Bush, we ended up getting the misery and struggle many in America were driven to want, though no one would ever admit that.
A quick aside. The fact that the majority of Americans actually didn’t vote for Bush and so tried to choose happiness over struggle is a source of hope for us in all this. That’s a hint of what’s coming.
Cycles of Birth, Cycles of War … The Four “Colors” of the Perinatal Veils and Why Women Fear Fatness and Men Fear Femininity
Four Kinds of Early Experience Color Our Adult Experience in Four Distinct Ways … Cycles of Birth and War
Four Kinds of Experiences in Our First Nine Months Imprint Us for Four Feeling “Flavors” as Adults
But for now, let us get back to this opening provided us. We can make better use of deMause’s insight on the birth feelings that take us into war using Stanislav Grof’s delineation of this birth unconscious of ours. Let us review as described earlier and further stipulate on them: Grof explains we are moved as adults by four specific kinds of drives emanating from our earliest experiences. These specific tendencies in us relate to four different times in the birth process which involve four radically different kinds of experiences.
Grof uses the term, basic perinatal matrices (BPMs), to refer to these four aspects of our inner urges. I will describe them here and refer to them along with DeMause’s cycles of social-historical violence and war to pull apart the roots of our current apocalyptic dilemma. [Footnote 3]
Our Tendency to Always Screw Up a Good Thing, BPM I
The first of Grof’s aspects of our unconscious he terms Basic Perinatal Matrix I, BPM I for short.
Prosperity and Progress Equal Feeling “Soft” and “Feminine”
Grof’s BPM I is sometimes described as “oceanic bliss” and involves the experiences and feelings related to the relatively undisturbed prenatal period. On the social, macrocosmic level, it is the period described in the quote by deMause above in which there is a period of “prosperity and progress” and feelings of being “soft” and “feminine.”
The strong connection between individual experience (personal psychology) and collective realities (social-historical events and elements) is patent here since in BPM I experience the individual is still in the mother’s womb and to some extent shares her identity, which is of course feminine. Being unborn and not having gone through the “toughening” experiences of birth and later trauma, which predominantly create one’s defenses, the individual is also “soft,” in other words, undefended.
“No Pain, No Gain,” Hell, Satan, and Poisonous Placenta; BPM II
“No-Exit” Claustrophobia
To further review Grof’s schema and its relation to deMause’s cycles of war, I want to remind you that BPM II is related on the individual level to the time near the end of pregnancy when the fetus is no longer rocking blissfully on the waves of oceanic bliss but is trapped in an ever more confining womb. As the fetus grows in size, the suffering becomes greater; no doubt this is the source of the common-sense belief that growing has to involve suffering, for example, “No pain, no gain.” At any rate, the feelings are those of claustrophobia and “no exit.”
There is heavy non-agitated depression here, since there appears to be no hope, no change in the situation that would indicate a way out of the suffering. Indeed, this period continues practically right up to the time of birth, ending only when the cervix becomes dilated and, experientially speaking, there appears suddenly to be a “light at the end of the tunnel” and therefore hope.
Where the Hell We Get the Idea of Hell
However, up until that time there are feelings of being totally unempowered, completely in the hands of an entity—the womb—that imposes a horrifying reality that appears to be unending and eternal. Herein we have the psychological roots of notions of hell and Satan. Feelings associated with this state include despair, victimization, blame, and guilt.
“You’ll Wallow in Your Shit, and You’ll Think You’re Happy.” – Kurt Cobain, from the Song, “Sad”
As birth comes nearer, “fetal malnutrition” increases, since the neonate’s increasing size and weight press down on and constrict the blood vessels that carry blood to and from the placenta, when the mother is standing. The decreased blood supply means a reduction of life-giving oxygen as well as the buildup of toxins that would otherwise be taken away by a normal blood flow. So feelings of suffocation as well as skin irritation and other feelings of wallowing in waste matter—deemed poisonous placenta by deMause—increase. [Footnote 4]
“You’re Really in a Laundry Room.” – Kurt Cobain, from the Song, “Sad”
As I have said previously, deMause has found that these feelings exist to an extraordinary degree in a society and its leaders prior to its engaging in a war. Similarly, they precede, and obviously can be held to be accountable for, individual acts of violence—including everything from murder and rape to unfortunately all-too-common and ordinary spousal and child abuse in the household, and of course everything in between.
Bloody War, Bloody Birth — BPM III
BPM III is birth. Its social analogue is war or violent assault. Feelings that accompany this state on both the individual and societal level include rage and intense aggressiveness, all-encompassing struggle, and sexual excess.
Nothing’s Ever Good Enough, BPM IV
BPM IV relates to the time of actually coming out of the womb and the post-natal period. On the societal level it is the ending of a war.
“Busting Out All Over”
Feelings of expansiveness, release, exultation, coming finally out into the light and/or being “on top” of things, and victory are feelings associated with this matrix, whether in the individual birth or the collective war cycle.
As I said the societal analogue to BPM IV, or actually being born, is a war’s end. It is no coincidence that in triumph or peace, the two-finger peace symbol is used. What better way to signal we have come from constriction into openness, specifically through the vise of a mother’s cervix, out from between two legs. As John Lennon so aptly put it, using the peace sign frequently, “War is over (if we want it).”
Mission Accomplished … Not!
Interestingly, just as in recent times harsh modern obstetrical practices and the removal of the baby from the mother can leave lifetime feelings of success not bringing with it the expected rewards and thus a post-accomplishment sort of depression, so also the ending of successful wars sometimes also leaves a society with a sort of letdown. For example, the euphoria following George H. W. Bush’s Gulf War—which catapulted his approval ratings into the ninety percent range in 1991—was followed, only a year later, by the increasing agony of a recession and Bush’s defeat at the polls.
Cycles of Birth, Cycles of War
All of this is to say that in society, as in the womb, a period of uninterrupted and relatively undisturbed feelings of growth leads to feelings of depression—being too “soft” and “feminine,” but also “too fat” in the womb and, therefore, extremely constricted and compressed.
Why Women Fear Becoming Fat and Men Fear Appearing “Feminine”
Another way of saying this: feelings of expansion are followed by a fear of entrapment. And I agree wholeheartedly with deMause in saying that it happens this way in a nation’s cycle of feelings because it happened that way to us prior to and during our births. We have these patterns of feelings as collective groups of individuals because our first experience of expansion was followed by extreme depression, guilt, despair, and then struggle and something bloodily akin to war—our actual births.
What to Do to Stop War and Violence: Changing the Patterns of Millennia Requires Learning That Feeling Good Is Not Bad
To Derail War and Violence, Replace Self-Sabotaging With Self-Actualizing … We Can No Longer Afford Our Delusional Ways
What Can Be Done?
So knowing this, how can we use it? In previous chapters, I explained how and why we see the dynamics of this perinatal unconscious, not coincidentally right now, on the ascendance, just at the time when it is crucial we deal with it to survive. I called this an emerging perinatal unconscious, and I went into detail about why it is happening now, what it means, and how we should take advantage of the opportunity it brings that could aid us in our current dilemma.
For now, I need only remind that is imperative we face these unconscious forces instead of turning away from and thereby insuring our continued ignorance of them and helpless acting out of them.
So, how do we consciously participate in these drives, not merely be driven by them?
Lloyd DeMause, in his article, “Restaging of Early Traumas in War and Social Violence,” printed in the spring 1996 issue of The Journal of Psychohistory, called for kinder and gentler birthing and child-caring practices to mitigate the ferocity of these forces within humans and help us avoid an otherwise inevitable planetary disaster. He was restating what other pre- and perinatal psychologists…I am 
one, by the way…including Thomas Verny and Stanislav Grof assert. [Footnote 5]
However, I believe we need to go further than that. I, along with Grof, call for a larger awareness of and efforts in the direction of healing these perinatal elements in the consciousness and unconscious of those already alive right now. For unless we act to heal the people currently inhabiting this planet, we might not leave a planet that babies can be born into!…let alone people to conceive and give birth to them. Healing the perinatal traumas can be accomplished through, at this point, thoroughly tested and effective techniques of experiential regression and emotional release.
But it is impossible for everyone to take advantage of these techniques, especially in the short time we have to make the changes. But something short of that ideal may be sufficient to stave off otherwise inevitable doom.
Let me explain what I mean by that.
Finding the Weakest Spot
Of course only time will tell what will be the result of this emerging perinatal unconscious for our species.
Real, not blindly delusional, action is required.
But to get an idea of what we might hope for, given a readiness to actually do something about this, I offer a perspective. This understanding requires we remember some critical aspects of the cartography of the psyche described above. Looking into them we might begin to see where are the openings allowing for realistic action to be taken to bring about true, not just blindly delusional, change for our species.
We can no longer afford otherwise.
For our purposes here, the most important part of the cycle is BPM I. Societies, according to deMause, go through these cycles of war and peace and have been doing so for as long as we know. But we can no longer afford these wars, as World War I and World War II have shown—with each one being an increase in our ability to destroy and to commit atrocities. We cannot afford to have a World War III as that most likely would end life on our planet.
Indeed, as I’ve been pointing out, we cannot even afford the less extreme forms of acting out of perinatal trauma that we have been doing in our poisoning of the earth and air, global overpopulation, and the ongoing regional wars to give just a few of many examples I could have used. These things, along with many other current quite insane tendencies of ours, have the capacity to end our species and possibly all life on this planet.
Feeling Good Is Not Bad
So the cycle of societal perinatal acting out must be stopped. And the most obvious place to derail the insidious cycle is at the point of societal prosperity and progress. Feeling soft, undefended, and feminine are, rationally speaking, not things to be alarmed about.
Quite to the contrary, it is rational that prosperity should make people feel good. It is rational that feeling soft should be a source of contentment, sensitivity, and intimacy with others. It makes sense that men should have no shame about feeling feminine because that only means that they have access to sensitive and nurturing feelings that are a source of joy, “color,” and fulfillment in life.
Changing the Patterns of Millennia
But how do we do this? How do we convince people that feeling good is not bad? For these unconscious forces, these cycles of violence, have been pulling our strings for at least tens of thousands of years. How can we change such an engrained pattern?
Chasing the Mirages of the Future
Well, again, we get our leads from the experiences of individuals undergoing experiential psychotherapy.
“It’s never enough.”
For individuals also, if they are to heal themselves, have to learn how to appreciate success and to stop sabotaging themselves in the myriad of ways they do. Individuals act out their mini-cycles of “war” in their struggles to achieve. And people are driven to struggle to achieve because they cannot be pleased with what they have.
Relating back to deMause’s societal schema, people cannot simply enjoy their “prosperity.” People cannot stop to smell the roses occasionally. We cannot count our blessings and feel contented with what we have. Nor can we enjoy the natural pleasure of being alive in the moment.
“Wrong…It IS enough.”
No, instead what characterizes we humans—for the most part because of our having birth trauma—is a persistent drive to always have more than we do. We find that every accomplishment or success is short lived, with inexplicable depression following it. For each new attainment does not bring the expected (unconscious) rewards and leads us almost immediately to a new struggle, a new accomplishment to be sought.
Humans are driven to chasing mirages of better times somewhere off in the future, and we fail to live in the present. We feel unsatisfied with what we have and are continually deluded that some new possession, accomplishment, or love “conquest” will bring with it the missing happiness.
Becoming Self-Actualizing Instead of Self-Sabotaging
When people are aware of the way they unconsciously sabotage their happiness, they sometimes seek help. And if they seek help in the experiential psychotherapies, they are enabled to work through their birth trauma so that they are no longer driven out of the moment, with its pleasure and pain, into an imagined but never attainable pleasureful and happy future.
Learning that it is enough
So people derail their cycles of drivenness and their tendencies to sabotage their successes by learning to enjoy their “prosperity,” even if it is the simple pleasure of being alive. And when they act to add to that pleasantness, they do so, not out of drivenness, but out of feelings of flow and the simple joys of acting and actualizing one’s tendencies, talents, and desires. They become self-actualizing instead of self-sabotaging.
Can You Handle Happiness? What to Do – We Get By With a Little Help, from Our Nature … Stand in the Place Where You Are
A Hierarchy of Healing … Becoming Human Beings (Not Doings): Removing the Hood from Homophobes, A Hard Rain, and Stand
OK, knowing this, one might ask if I am suggesting that to save our species everyone needs to get into experiential therapy. While that would be nice, it is not practical.
But I believe it is not necessary either. There is an element of that societal period of prosperity that can be used and focused on in order to make the societal change of pattern, the societal derailing of the tendency to self-sabotage through war-making.
Getting By, With a Little Help From Our Nature
And that element is this: During times of prosperity, when one is less engaged in a struggle to survive, we find that one’s body will naturally try to heal itself of unresolved and somatically imprinted trauma by bringing into consciousness the repressed traumatic memories needing resolution.
Hierarchy of Healing
This occurs in a manner similar to that of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Basically, one’s needs to “grow emotionally”…i.e., clear away the unresolved trauma…can only come to the fore when one’s physical survival needs are relatively taken care of. And arise they unerringly do, given any opportunity to do so.
“Don’t just do something, STAND there!”
However, when these traumatic memories come up seeking resolution, they, also unerringly, bring with them the associated feelings of depression, unease, and pain. But because these feelings are anything but pleasant, to their detriment most people seek to avoid these feelings through addictions and other forms of “acting-out” behavior. So addictions and acting-out behavior emerge after periods of relative stability precisely because that stability allows unresolved feelings an opening for emergence and a possibility of resolution and healing.
Allowing Our Society to Be Honestly, Blatantly “Sick”
So there you have it; that is the crux. The period of societal prosperity can be maintained and added to if that society refuses to run away from the negative feelings that come up with success. As I have said, one needs to get “sicker” in order to get really well.
“Stand in the Place Where You Are … Just Stand.”
Societally, we need to allow the social, formerly repressed, “sicknesses,” negativities, and the pain that comes with them to arise and be socially worked out, to be hashed out, rather than to escape them by resorting to scapegoating enemies and waging war against them. [Footnote 6]
Are We Doing This?
But can societies do this? Are they doing this?
Apparently Not
It does not seem so at the moment. For we have extreme acting out going on from Tea Party type elements. The homophobia that characterizes them is an indicator of the degree to which they are fearful of that feeling of being “soft” and “feminine,” I mentioned.
But Then Again…
However there is a pattern in change that things can not really change until the negative slide has “hit bottom.” These negative forces cannot be gone beyond until they have wasted themselves in desperate acts. At this time also, positive forces are strengthening in the wings, burnishing their skills, tempering their character and nobility, fully capable when the time comes to take over. There are so many examples of this in social and individual histories, but not to get bogged down, I will mention one powerful one—Nelson Mandela. You can take it from there.
The more common thing to mention about change is that prior to a major paradigm shift, the forces on the decline always wage a fierce, desperate battle…a bloody retreat, a burning of the fields, near suicidal and totally reckless forays.
We see people do this, too, just before they are about to change. We see people who self-destruct being the ones whose last desperate battle before awareness can dawn being something that takes their life and perhaps others with them.
We currently can point to Gaddafi, Assad, and other tyrants. We can observe reckless tea-baggers willing, as in the debt ceiling clash, to bring down the country for ideals that, however rationalized and spun, are at their roots as simple and crude as jealousy—of those smarter and more capable; hatred—of minorities, the poor, the “dirty,” the “slobs,” the “lazy”…basically all the scapegoats society allows them to vent the rage of their inner fears and hurt on; and homophobia—that fear of being “soft,” feminine, unmasculine, and being willing to kill or be killed rather than to let oneself be seen that way.
Homophobes Don’t Fear Homosexuals … They Fear What’s Inside Themselves
Before continuing, one big misconception around that last point needs clearing up: homophobia is at base not fear/hatred of homosexuals, it is terror/hatred of the “feminine” and “softness” inside of the man himself who is homophobic. And this is the result of tens of thousands of years of “civilization,” still continuing, in which men are threatened with disapproval, ostracism, ridicule, attack, or worse for not repressing their softer sides down to the level of the norm of their group.
Boys Learn They Must Be Less Alive to Survive
Boys learn they must constrict their potentials and diminish themselves to that which coincides with—and does not threaten—the older males in their group or face severe punishment. Boys learn the consequences for not becoming less than they could be are severe, often from their own fathers.
Girls Learn They Must Feel Less Pleasure to Be Liked
And by the way, something similar goes on with young girls and the reduction of their potentials. We see a blatant example of this in the practice of cliterectomy—also called female genital mutilation—in some cultures. In this practice the older women—mother and aunts usually—are responsible for this brutal and extremely painful and bloody attack. It tells little girls they will have no pleasure more than that which was allowed the older women, themselves, in that patriarchal world. So girls must diminish themselves in order to not be hated and ostracized by the women of the group, who, already having been diminished, would be jealous of someone being allowed to have what they have not. This is an exact mirror image of the process that goes on in the diminution of the personalities—the potentials—of young boys.
A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall
Now to continue: So seeing so much of this pathos, hate, and bitter fear and anger is hopeful for us to be near the end of the cycle. Certainly it could get worse. But I personally don’t see how we could go much further on this path to oblivion without going past the point of no return. Perhaps we are not meant to succeed. Perhaps we are doomed. But I know in my own life, and that is the only true basis anyone can have for knowing how things really work, that, without fail, every seeming “loss of ground” was a prelude to an even bigger “advance.”
As Jung said, we need to take two steps backward to make a big leap forward. That is the way individuals are. And societies and populations are just collections of individuals. As the Tao symbol depicts, the seed of light is in the depths of darkness. So we can hold on to that, for one thing.
So Let Us See. A Scenery of Healing?
With these considerations in mind, the next chapter will evaluate our current social-cultural scenery for our prospects. In Rebirthing Rituals – The Sometimes Messy Scenery of Healing—we will look for any indications that this standing firm in the face of the rising up of the repressed social Shadow—allowing the pain of it and facing it foursquare, hashing it out—is to be found in the current social arena.
If we can find this being done, we may allow ourselves at least the hope for a change in consciousness radical enough to save us from extinction. On the contrary, if we find little or no evidence for this kind of auspicious, fruitful healing activity, we might as well consider ourselves doomed.
Continue with Apocalypse No! Chapter Nine: Regressions in the Service of Society — Messy Healing
Return to Apocalypse No, Chapter Seven: Through Gaia’s Eyes – Nature Balances HerSelf
Footnotes
1. The book mentioned was posted online in two places in August, 2011: Culture War and Culture War, Class War.
2. Lloyd deMause, “Restaging of Early Traumas in War and Social Violence.” The Journal of Psychohistory 23 (1995): 2. Reprinted with permission on the Primal Spirit site.
Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research. New York: Viking Press, 1975; LSD Psychotherapy. Pomona, CA: Hunter House, 1980; Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985; The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988; The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.
3. I explain this in more detail in Chapter Seven: We Ain’t Born Typical under the heading “Elements of Birth Experience.”
4. “You’ll wallow in the shit and you’ll think you’re happy” and “You’re really in a laundry room” from, and with appreciation to, Kurt Cobain. These are lyrics in his song, “Sad.” The video and lyrics are reproduced again here for your convenience:
Nirvana – “Sad” (also “Sappy” and “Verse Chorus Verse”) – Lyrics
And if you save yourself You will make him happy He’ll keep you in a jar And you’ll think you’re happy He’ll give you breathing holes Then you’ll think you’re happy He’ll cover you with grass And you’ll think you’re happy Now You’re really in a laundry room, You’re really in a laundry room Conclusion came to you, oh And if you cut yourself You will think you’re happy He’ll keep you in a jar Then you’ll make him happy He’ll give you breathing holes Then you’ll think you’re happy He’ll cover you with grass Then you’ll think you’re happy Now You’re really in a laundry room, You’re really in a laundry room Conclusion came to you, oh (x2) And if you fool yourself You will make him happy He’ll keep you in a jar And you’ll think you’re happy He’ll give you breathing holes Then you will seem happy You’ll wallow in your shit Then you’ll think you’re happy Now You’re really in a laundry room (x3) Conclusion came to you, oh Alternate lyrics: And if you kill yourself You will make him happy
5. Lloyd deMause, “Restaging of Early Traumas in War and Social Violence.” The Journal of Psychohistory 23 (1995): 2. Reprinted with permission on the Primal Spirit site.
Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research. New York: Viking Press, 1975; LSD Psychotherapy. Pomona, CA: Hunter House, 1980; Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985; The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988; The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.
6. “Stand in the place where you are…just stand” from and with appreciation to R.E.M. While it seems no one understood the group’s huge initial release, “Stand,” it is quite meaningful in the current context. A video and lyrics are included here for your consideration:
R.E.M. – “Stand” … lyrics
Stand in the place where you live
Now face North
Think about direction
Wonder why you haven’t before
Now stand in the place where you work
Now face West
Think about the place where you live
Wonder why you haven’t before
If you are confused check with the sun
Carry a compass to help you along
Your feet are going to be on the ground
Your head is there to move you around
[repeat 1st verse]
Your feet are going to be on the ground
Your head is there to move you around
If wishes were trees the trees would be falling
Listen to reason
Season is calling
[repeat 1st verse]
If wishes were trees the trees would be falling
Listen to reason
Reason is calling
Your feet are going to be on the ground
Your head is there to move you around
So Stand (stand)
Now face North
Think about direction, wonder why you haven’t before
Now stand (stand)
Now face West
Think about the place where you live
Wonder why you haven’t
[repeat 1st verse]
Stand in the place where you are (Now face North)
Stand in the place where you are (Now face West)
Your feet are going to be on the ground (Stand in the place where you are)
Your head is there to move you around, so stand.
Derailing the Cycles of War and Violence – Audiocasts
“Part 1; What Say We Leave a Planet for Our Offspring?” – the audio by SillyMickel Adzema
For the author’s reading, with elaboration, of this part, click on the link to the audio site above or click the audio player here:
http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=pffbztrfkv
“Part 2; Can You Handle Happiness (And the Pain That Comes With It)?” – the audio by SillyMickel Adzema
For the author’s reading, with elaboration, of this part, click on the link to the audio site above or click the audio player here:
http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=syglfhsvld
Continue with Apocalypse No! Chapter Nine: Regressions in the Service of Society — Messy Healing
Return to Apocalypse No, Chapter Seven: Through Gaia’s Eyes – Nature Balances HerSelf
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Religions Are About Control; Spirituality, Surrender. Let Go, Let God to Correct an Arrogant Modern Ego
Yes, Tina Turner, We Do Need Another Hero … a Different Kind. Dreaming Out Loud, Part 2: The Path to Heaven Leads Through Hell
The Path to Heaven Leads Through Hell
Those in the know about the pervasive pre- and perinatal influence on personality and behavior, and especially those of us actively engaged in working through the effects of such early traumas, are fully aware, like Dante, that the path to heaven leads through hell. We have found that the path to the transpersonal light leads through the psychodynamic and perinatal darkness, that the path up and the path down are parts of the same path outward. [Footnote 2]
A Dark and Hideous Shadow World
Our experience has been that the information avalanche and multicultural onslaught have eroded our personal boundaries to an influx, not only of transpersonal bliss-love-compassion, but equally—and very often, initially—to a dark and hideous shadow world, a backwards bizarro world, of pernicious and insidious disorganized feelings comprised of elements ancient, infantile, pathological, biological, scatological, and perinatal. These are some of the forms spiritual emergence can take, especially initially. And they are the ones most likely to be seen as spiritual emergencies.
Pre- and Perinatal Themes in Cinema
Therefore, it is interesting to see these views confirmed by the bubbling up of psychodynamic and perinatal themes in our collective consciousness as evidenced by current films, books, and music. I have mentioned the pre- and perinatal themes and symbolism in films and explained why, along with other elements of postmodern times, they are evidence of something significant occurring in the consciousness of our age—an emerging perinatal unconscious.
But there is another element evolving in current films which has to do with a changing or evolving collective attitude toward these perinatal elements. And along with a changing attitude, there is evidence pointing to an evolving collective response to it.
Control vs. Surrender, Death vs. Life
“Control Spiritualities” and Patriarchal Cultures
Specifically, a different kind of heroic response, which characterizes the perinatal arena, can be said to characterize the postmodern movies replete with perinatal symbolism. Most striking of all, this different kind of heroic response corresponds to a different kind of spirituality than what is commonly portrayed in this society, or at least has been the norm up until now.
For basically there are “control” spiritualities and “surrender” spiritualities, with rarely the twain meeting. “Control spiritualities” are adapted to patriarchal cultures and involve the use of the ego to “control” and be in charge of even the realms of the supernatural. This is so because an ultimate evil—a devil or Satan—is postulated, which is given equal weight along with God in determining one’s ultimate fate. This type of spirituality is normally what is called religion.
“Surrender Spiritualities” and God As Being Good
But there is another brand of spirituality that is based on a belief in the ultimate goodness and rightness of All That Is. God’s goodness being essentially the dominant force in the Universe, herein it is considered safe to “surrender” in one’s relation to Reality, to expect that one will be guided correctly, in fact perfectly, in the act of letting go. Thus letting go is not to be feared—as in the control spirituality—but is to be practiced and fostered. In this perspective, which we might call surrender spirituality, control is seen as the problem, not the solution.
“Control” and “Surrender” Psychotherapies
Of course these two approaches to spirituality represent two approaches to psychotherapy as well. 
The control attitude is the dominant mode of psychoanalytically-based approaches—those in which the “demon” of the id is postulated.
The attitude of “letting go” and “surrender,” on the other hand, is the dominant mode of the experiential psychotherapies, which are themselves rooted in the tradition of humanistic psychology with its belief in the ultimate goodness of the human organism and which thus allows a faith in the ultimate rightness of human processes.
“Hero’s Journey” As “Control” Psychotherapy
Since the control attitude, in any of its manifestations, requires the postulation of an ultimate evil against which one must remain vigilant and must fight, the common “hero’s journey” myth—with its typical fighting and slaying of supposedly evil parts of the personality and reality symbolized as dragons and other monsters—is a prevalent focal myth to this attitude. Corresponding to this myth are the emphasis on disciplines and practices seeking to develop the ego and the will…over against the dangers that are postulated to exist in the Universe requiring these disciplines and, so-called, ego developments.
A Different Heroic Response in “Surrender” Paths
Since the “feeling” therapies and the other spiritual and experiential psychotherapeutic modalities with which they are allied are so different in attitude to the traditional “control” attitude, should there not be corresponding differences in myths to exemplify them? Indeed, there are.
In history, the surrender spiritualities have had correspondences in myth in which the dragon is not 
fought, conquered, and slain, but rather is either tamed and becomes one’s ally or pet—Saint Margaret is the prime example in the West, but this is a depiction prevalent in the East—or else one is swallowed by the “dragon” or monster and, after a while, is reborn.
Jonah is the prime example in the West for this latter depiction. But again this reaction to the fearful dissociated aspects of the personality, or the Shadow, is not a common one in the Western patriarchy, and it is much more common in traditional cultures and in the East.
A Shift to “Surrender” As a Corrective to a Western Overweening Ego?
All of this may be changing in recent times in the West, as once again the humanistic attitude and the new spiritual perspectives, as well as the experiential psychotherapies such as primal therapy, make us increasingly aware of the ultimate beneficence of the body, and of the Universe beyond even that, and of the importance of surrender and letting go as a corrective to the overweening control and defensiveness of the diminutive Western ego.
Footnote
2. See, for example, Michael Adzema, “A Primal Perspective on Spirituality,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 25(3), 83-116. Reprinted online at the Primal Spirit site at “A Primal Perspective on Spirituality.”
Continue with The Necessary Hero and Descent Into the Underground–When There’s “Nothing But Trouble,” You Know You’re in The Perinatal Below
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The Spiral Dance – The Cycle of All Events: Wedded to Rebirthing Rituals, the Inevitability of Disappointment, and Where There is Real Hope
Rebirthing Rituals, Part One: There Is a Cycle to All Events … The Spiral Dance, Why We Can’t Get No Satisfaction, and Where There Is Real Hope
Wedded to Rebirthing Rituals
At the point when the perinatal unconscious arises, individuals — and collectively, society — have the choice to turn toward the emergence of these feelings or to turn away from them.
In turning toward these feelings we embrace, feel, and if we go deeply enough into that, we relive the roots of them and resolve them finally.
In turning away from them we shun them, act them out, and are enslaved by them…thus we act unconsciously, trance-like, zombie-like.
If we face these inner forces—we call that feeling them…in this instance, feeling through or reliving one’s birth—we integrate them and heal the underlying trauma, the perinatal trauma.
Or the individual and society can avoid this going within—as depicted in the peace symbol—and can choose instead to act them out, which is the peace symbol upside down—the Satan symbol, the pentagram.
In acting them out, one distracts oneself from the uncomfortable feelings, which though not focused on, are still there. One tries to be “strong” in the face of feelings but one is actually driven and directed by them—they “take over one’s mind.” This is the source of the idea of spirit possession and in general of the idea that a devil or Satan can take over one’s soul.
So in running from our feelings we are captured and enslaved by them, we are forced to act them out in ways we would not otherwise choose which are negative to horrible but in all cases self-sabotaging. Of course war is the most horrible, most self-sabotaging, greatest, and most all-consuming form of such acting-out…the greatest struggle.
Humans are characterized by a particular kind of birth process. It is a coming into being that is traumatic and which is related to our distinction of standing upright and thereby decreasing the pelvic opening as well as suffocating the fetus prior to birth. The fact is that because of this “distinction” we are destined to go through periods of rebirthing purificatory rituals, whether for good or ill. [Footnote 1]
For we are psychologically wedded to reliving that which we could not fully experience at the time because of the overwhelming quality of pain associated with it.
.
.
A “Spiral Dance”
These rebirthing rituals we are doomed to repeat, one way or the other. We are going to act out this primal pain—this birth trauma—in an unending cycle of feelings having these components
- Periods of feelings of expansion
- Closedness or entrapment, guilt, and depression
- Aggression
- Release
Then back around again.
In winning the “war” or having the success or achievement, there begins the same cycle of expansion followed by entrapment. Losing the war…the struggle, the battle…is akin to death, even if there is no death. There is numbness and repression…akin to a kind of “limbo”…before life can begin anew. A reconception is necessary.
The Pattern of Our First Nine Months Imprints Us For Our Entire Human Lives
The reemergence of hope in individuals and societies is biologically equivalent to conception. And following this reconceiving, there is a similar cycle of reemerging strength—akin to the expansion that follows winning. Then there is continuing depression or overarching gloom and helplessness feelings coupled with revenge feelings and blame as individuals and societies stew in the vessel of indecision, inaction, and doubt. This is quite like the closedness and guilt which follows achievement-success-victory. Note, however, that the revenge and blame feelings here are aspects of the BPM II matrix, just as is closedness and guilt.
Can’t Get No Satisfaction
And then the cycle is the same again. Specifically, there is aggression against the oppressor (War and revolution both see the foe as an oppressor, even if one is actually the one who is the aggressor.) What follows upon fighting is release or “death”; and so on around. The “happily ever after” that inspires such battle truly only exists in fantasies and fairy tales. Prosperity and feelings of success are unfortunately doomed, on this physical plane of existence, to be short-lived.
Where There Is Real Hope
It would seem we are fated to never be happy, for long. But progress is possible; herein lies our only real choice in the entire scenario. For we either work through these cycles in some deep psychologically transformative way that helps us deal with and pass beyond the difficult and painful parts of the cycle as well as helps to fade the imprints’ potency in determining our behavior or we are doomed to act them out in the external world in ways that we are blindly unaware are not congruent with the actual facts of our circumstances and are harmful to ourselves and others around us.
We are fated to experience these cycles of birth, and we will either act them out disastrously or we find ways of dealing with them inside of ourselves in some way—and some ways are better than others for doing this—so that we can have some inner distance from these patterns and therefore some conscious ability or choice around our actions when these pushes and pulls arise.
The Vanity of Will, The Impotence of “Reason”
What we absolutely don’t have, yet arrogantly think we do, is the ability—through will or reason alone—to choose light over darkness, to replace these inner veils of distortion with clarity of thought and perception and hence of positive behavior and actions while in the midst of them. Trying to reason with and to obtain truly desired outcomes is about as possible as trying to reason with a lizard and convince it to conform to one’s wishes for its behavior. For good reason: Indeed our rational mind is as split off from the “reptilian brain” inside us within which these imprints circulate and from which they arise as are we from the consciousness of a gila monster.
Footnotes
1. A. Briend, “Fetal Malnutrition: The Price of Upright Posture?” British Medical Journal 2 (1979): 317-319.
Continue with Railing Against the Darkness: The Vanity of Will, The Impotence of Reason, Progress Requires Regress, and Healing Is Nothing if Not Messy
Return to Can You Handle Happiness? What to Do – We Get By With a Little Help, from Our Nature … Stand in the Place Where You Are
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Four Kinds of Early Experience Color Our Adult Experience in Four Distinct Ways … Cycles of Birth and War: Derailing War and Violence, Part 2
Cycles of Birth, Cycles of War … The Four “Colors” of the Perinatal Veils and Why Women Fear Fatness and Men Fear Femininity
Four Kinds of Experiences in Our First Nine Months Imprint Us for Four Feeling “Flavors” as Adults
But for now, let us get back to this opening provided us. We can make better use of deMause’s insight on the birth feelings that take us into war using Stanislav Grof’s delineation of this birth unconscious of ours. Let us review as described earlier and further stipulate on them:
Grof explains we are moved as adults by four specific kinds of drives emanating from our earliest experiences. These specific tendencies in us relate to four different times in the birth process which involve four radically different kinds of experiences.
Grof uses the term, basic perinatal matrices (BPMs), to refer to these four aspects of our inner urges. I will describe them here and refer to them along with DeMause’s cycles of social-historical violence and war to pull apart the roots of our current apocalyptic dilemma. [Footnote 1]
Our Tendency to Always Screw Up a Good Thing, BPM I
The first of Grof’s aspects of our unconscious he terms Basic Perinatal Matrix I, BPM I for short.
Prosperity and Progress Equal Feeling “Soft” and “Feminine”
Grof’s BPM I is sometimes described as “oceanic bliss” and involves the experiences and feelings related to the relatively undisturbed prenatal period. On the social, macrocosmic level, it is the period described in the quote by deMause above in which there is a period of “prosperity and progress” and feelings of being “soft” and “feminine.”
The strong connection between individual experience (personal psychology) and collective realities (social-historical events and elements) is patent here since in BPM I experience the individual is still in the mother’s womb and to some extent shares her identity, which is of course feminine. Being unborn and not having gone through the “toughening” experiences of birth and later trauma, which predominantly create one’s defenses, the individual is also “soft,” in other words, undefended.
“No Pain, No Gain,” Hell, Satan, and Poisonous Placenta; BPM II
“No-Exit” Claustrophobia
To further review Grof’s schema and its relation to deMause’s cycles of war, I want to remind you that BPM II is related on the individual level to the time near the end of pregnancy when the fetus is no longer rocking blissfully on the waves of oceanic bliss but is trapped in an ever more confining womb. As the fetus grows in size, the suffering becomes greater; no doubt this is the source of the common-sense belief that growing has to involve suffering, for example, “No pain, no gain.” At any rate, the feelings are those of claustrophobia and “no exit.”
There is heavy non-agitated depression here, since there appears to be no hope, no change in the situation that would indicate a way out of the suffering. Indeed, this period continues practically right up to the time of birth, ending only when the cervix becomes dilated and, experientially speaking, there appears suddenly to be a “light at the end of the tunnel” and therefore hope.
Where the Hell We Get the Idea of Hell
However, up until that time there are feelings of being totally unempowered, completely in the hands of an entity—the womb—that imposes a horrifying reality that appears to be unending and eternal. Herein we have the psychological roots of notions of hell and Satan. Feelings associated with this state include despair, victimization, blame, and guilt.
“You’ll Wallow in Your Shit, and You’ll Think You’re Happy.” – Kurt Cobain, from the Song, “Sad”
As birth comes nearer, “fetal malnutrition” increases, since the neonate’s increasing size and weight press down on and constrict the blood vessels that carry blood to and from the placenta, when the mother is standing. The decreased blood supply means a reduction of life-giving oxygen as well as the buildup of toxins that would otherwise be taken away by a normal blood flow. So feelings of suffocation as well as skin irritation and other feelings of wallowing in waste matter—deemed poisonous placenta by deMause—increase. [Footnote 2]
“You’re Really in a Laundry Room.” – Kurt Cobain, from the Song, “Sad”
As I have said previously, deMause has found that these feelings exist to an extraordinary degree in a society and its leaders prior to its engaging in a war. Similarly, they precede, and obviously can be held to be accountable for, individual acts of violence—including everything from murder and rape to unfortunately all-too-common and ordinary spousal and child abuse in the household, and of course everything in between.
Bloody War, Bloody Birth — BPM III
BPM III is birth. Its social analogue is war or violent assault. Feelings that accompany this state on both the individual and societal level include rage and intense aggressiveness, all-encompassing struggle, and sexual excess.
Nothing’s Ever Good Enough, BPM IV
BPM IV relates to the time of actually coming out of the womb and the post-natal period. On the societal level it is the ending of a war.
“Busting Out All Over”
Feelings of expansiveness, release, exultation, coming finally out into the light and/or being “on top” of things, and victory are feelings associated with this matrix, whether in the individual birth or the collective war cycle.
As I said the societal analogue to BPM IV, or actually being born, is a war’s end. It is no coincidence that in triumph or peace, the two-finger peace symbol is used. What better way to signal we have come from constriction into openness, specifically through the vise of a mother’s cervix, out from between two legs. As John Lennon so aptly put it, using the peace sign frequently, “War is over (if we want it).”
Mission Accomplished … Not!
Interestingly, just as in recent times harsh modern obstetrical practices and the removal of the baby from the mother can leave lifetime feelings of success not bringing with it the expected rewards and thus a post-accomplishment sort of depression, so also the ending of successful wars sometimes also leaves a society with a sort of letdown. For example, the euphoria following George H. W. Bush’s Gulf War—which catapulted his approval ratings into the ninety percent range in 1991—was followed, only a year later, by the increasing agony of a recession and Bush’s defeat at the polls.
Cycles of Birth, Cycles of War
All of this is to say that in society, as in the womb, a period of uninterrupted and relatively undisturbed feelings of growth leads to feelings of depression—being too “soft” and “feminine,” but also “too fat” in the womb and, therefore, extremely constricted and compressed.
Why Women Fear Becoming Fat and Men Fear Appearing “Feminine”
Another way of saying this: feelings of expansion are followed by a fear of entrapment. And I agree wholeheartedly with deMause in saying that it happens this way in a nation’s cycle of feelings because it happened that way to us prior to and during our births. We have these patterns of feelings as collective groups of individuals because our first experience of expansion was followed by extreme depression, guilt, despair, and then struggle and something bloodily akin to war—our actual births.
Continue with What to Do to Stop War and Violence: Changing the Patterns of Millennia Requires Learning That Feeling Good Is Not Bad
Return to Men Would Rather Be Manly Than Alive and What Say We Leave a Planet for Our Offspring? Derailing War and Violence, Part 1
Footnotes
1. I explain this in more detail in Chapter Seven: We Ain’t Born Typical under the heading “Elements of Birth Experience.”
2. “You’ll wallow in the shit and you’ll think you’re happy” and “You’re really in a laundry room” from, and with appreciation to, Kurt Cobain. These are lyrics in his song, “Sad.” The video and lyrics are reproduced again here for your convenience:
Nirvana – “Sad” (also “Sappy” and “Verse Chorus Verse”) – Lyrics
And if you save yourself
You will make him happy
He’ll keep you in a jar
And you’ll think you’re happy
He’ll give you breathing holes
Then you’ll think you’re happy
He’ll cover you with grass
And you’ll think you’re happy
Now
You’re really in a laundry room,
You’re really in a laundry room
Conclusion came to you, oh
And if you cut yourself
You will think you’re happy
He’ll keep you in a jar
Then you’ll make him happy
He’ll give you breathing holes
Then you’ll think you’re happy
He’ll cover you with grass
Then you’ll think you’re happy
Now
You’re really in a laundry room,
You’re really in a laundry room
Conclusion came to you, oh (x2)
And if you fool yourself
You will make him happy
He’ll keep you in a jar
And you’ll think you’re happy
He’ll give you breathing holes
Then you will seem happy
You’ll wallow in your shit
Then you’ll think you’re happy
Now
You’re really in a laundry room (x3)
Conclusion came to you, oh
Alternate lyrics:
And if you kill yourself
You will make him happy
Derailing the Cycles of War and Violence – Audiocasts
“Part 1; What Say We Leave a Planet for Our Offspring?” – the audio by SillyMickel Adzema
For the author’s reading, with elaboration, of this part, click on the link to the audio site above or click the audio player here:
http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=pffbztrfkv
“Part 2; Can You Handle Happiness (And the Pain That Comes With It)?” – the audio by SillyMickel Adzema
For the author’s reading, with elaboration, of this part, click on the link to the audio site above or click the audio player here:
http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=syglfhsvld
Continue with What to Do to Stop War and Violence: Changing the Patterns of Millennia Requires Learning That Feeling Good Is Not Bad
Return to Men Would Rather Be Manly Than Alive and What Say We Leave a Planet for Our Offspring? Derailing War and Violence, Part 1
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Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Ten: Of Cigarettes, Lucifer, Prometheus, and Icarus—Why Humans Are Addicted to Burning Things … And Its Dire Prognosis
Sorry, Billy Joel, But We Did Start the Fire: Why Humans Are So Big on Burning … And Its Apocalyptic Prognosis For Us Today: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 10
Why Humans Are So Big on Burning
Humans did not always do things to adversely affect the air they breathe, however. We were not always fire burners or food cookers. 
It is common knowledge that at a certain point in our evolution, we began harnessing fire for warmth, for cooking, and for other purposes, including entertainment. Consider that fact for a second…why are we the only species to do this? (And we are.) Now consider the aspect of our uniquely human fetal malnutrition as neonates and prenates we’ve been looking into.
No other species needs to “burn” carbon-based fuels for survival; we only need a tiny amount of air to stoke our “inner fires” when converting food to energy. Yet we have added that incredible weight of setting things ablaze and burning fuels to our burden on the planetary resources and the environment ever since we began using fire.
Consider if the fetal malnutrition/oxygen starvation we created for ourselves as unborns by standing upright might be manifesting itself as the need to burn stuff and thereby decrease the oxygen in our immediate environment, and increase the toxins there. Is it possible that fetal malnutrition, which is the result of bipedalism, contributed later to our use of fire? For, as I continually point out, we are triggered into our unfaced early pain, 
at the same time as we seek to run from it, while we unconsciously act to bring it about, so we might at some point face it and heal ourselves 
(though we rarely do).
You think it a strange idea that we might be unconsciously wanting to re-create the “stuffiness” in the womb by burning stuff and creating air around us that mimics that state? Really? 
Do you think it normal for someone to create tiny “fire sticks” and “suck” the bad air they produce?
Do you not wonder why we are the only ones to burn tobacco and other vegetation so we might inhale the exhaust from it, the smoke from the fire we 
create? If we came across a culture where they built fires and stood around sticking their faces in the smoke to inhale it, how would we view that? How is cigarette smoking different? Yes, we are the only species that has that invention of cigarettes (cigars, pipes, hookahs….and so many more). And you think MY hypothesis odd?
..
..
..
Yes, Billy Joel, We DID Start the Fire
Is it any wonder we portray hell as one of eternal fire? Not only does it coincide with the prenatal feelings of burning on the surface of the skin, which I’ll soon explore in more depth.
But in that human beings are the ones being referred to when we speak of the myth of Lucifer; it makes sense that Lucifer’s home after being cast from heaven would be one of fire. Satan is always pictured in a “cave”—another womb symbol—of sorts with fires all around him. Humans compulsively create environments in which they are surrounded by fire. Just look around you…automobiles, heaters, electrical energy created by combustion….
We also have myths that tell us alternately that use of fire is the great break with Nature that makes us humans, as well as myths saying that our being too reckless and getting too close to fire is what causes our downfall. When you think of it, am I not saying both of those?
Many ethnographies tell of Creation Myths that include a hero that brings fire, therein getting things started for those peoples as a distinct culture. [Footnote 1]
In Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire for humans from the gods and was punished by being tied 
to a rock and forced to endure eagles picking away at his entrails for eternity… Maybe it is true that cooking food was not a great health step forward as many nutritionists schooled in naturopathy and wholistic health and enjoining about the benefits of raw foods have been pointing out. [Footnote 2]
As I’ve said, meat was the apple in the Garden of Eden and killing of planetmates was the first step in our downward slide into savagery. Since the primary difference that the use of fire made to the life ways of humans was allowing the cooking of meat—which 
helped preserve it and made it more storable, perhaps this myth of Prometheus is also referring to that negative turn in our diet … and nutritionists will tell you that meat eating is the primary cause of all the gut ailments we have—colon cancer and the rest—and that a diet high in it correlates with a sharp reduction in the intake of roughage and fiber, with all their health benefits.
And sure enough, we find that the nomadic, foraging early humans left waste material high in roughage—of indigestible cellulose and vegetative matter. Indigenous societies even today have strikingly different diets than more “civilized” ones. Medical anthropologists long ago determined they eat so much more non-meat foods that the average time it takes for food to pass completely through their body is 24 hours, whereas it takes the average Westerner 72 hours for food to be eliminated. 
They view this difference as the main reason indigenous cultures have so much less colonic ill health than modern societies in which gut ailments are rampant. Perhaps the Prometheus myth is detailing where we took that wrong turn and the health consequences we were punished with thereafter.
And then there are the myths of being reckless regarding fire. One example, in a Greek myth, Icarus was given wings to fly, pasted on with wax. He did fly. But in getting too close to the sun…that big fire in the sky…the wax that held his wings melted, he lost his wings, and plunged to Earth and to his end. Might this not be a metaphor for so-called human “evolution”? 
Might it not be 
predicting the apocalyptic end we see before us, because of our misuse of fire of all kinds—the manic firing up of fossil fuels, the insane powering up of the atom for doomsday bombs and nuclear plants, and so on?
Continue with Why Humans Are the Sorriest of Species … Apocalyptic Foretellings Hidden in Myths of Eden, Prometheus, Pandora, Icarus, Cain and Abel: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 11
Return to People Are Already Dying Because of Oxygen Deprivation … Global Oxygen Loss Has Dire Significance Physically AND Psychologically: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 9
Footnotes
1. On the theft of fire and the beginnings of culture in world mythology:
- According to the Rig Veda (3:9.5), the hero Mātariśvan recovered fire, which had been hidden from mankind.
- In Cherokee myth, after Possum and Buzzard had failed to steal fire, Grandmother Spider used her web to sneak into the land of light. She stole fire, hiding it in a clay pot.[22]
- Among various Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest and First Nations, fire was stolen and given to humans by Coyote, Beaver or Dog.[23]
- According to some Yukon First Nations people, Crow stole fire from a volcano in the middle of the water.[24]
- According to the Creek Native Americans, Rabbit stole fire from the Weasels.[25]
- In Algonquin myth, Rabbit stole fire from an old man and his two daughters.[26]
- In Ojibwa myth, Nanabozho the hare stole fire and gave it to humans.
- In Polynesian myth, Māui stole fire from the Mudhens.[27]
- In the Book of Enoch, the fallen angels and Azazel teach early mankind to use tools and fire.
From Prometheus in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus
2. Promethean parallels in other mythologies include
- In Georgian mythology Amirani challenged the chief god and for that was chained on Caucasian mountains where birds would eat his organs.
- In Norse mythology, the god Loki (often associated with fire) was bound to a rock. Above him is a large serpent which drips toxic venom upon him. His wife collects the poison in a bowl, but must empty it every time it gets full. As she is in the process of doing this, the snake proceeds to cover Loki in poison. Just as Prometheus gets his liver eaten only to have it grow back again, Loki is temporarily saved from venom only to have it drip on him once more.
From Prometheus in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus
Regarding the the Norse myth, remember what was said in a previous post about one of the feeling complexes in late gestation being the discomfort of being in a toxic womb environment. I will discuss this feeling constellation in more detail in an upcoming post, where this myth will be even more illustrative.
Continue with Why Humans Are the Sorriest of Species … Apocalyptic Foretellings Hidden in Myths of Eden, Prometheus, Pandora, Icarus, Cain and Abel: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 11
Return to People Are Already Dying Because of Oxygen Deprivation … Global Oxygen Loss Has Dire Significance Physically AND Psychologically: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 9
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