Blog Archives
Life or Death Matters We Need to Face to Survive: We Have Manifested a World That Mirrors and Re-Creates Our Traumatic Human Births
What We Encounter in the Process of Psychological Death and Rebirth in our Visionary Experiences Make Today Our Evening News: Birth Wars ~ World Woes
Wounded Deer and Centaurs, Chapter Thirteen: Birth Wars ~ World Woes … Life or Death Matters
Our Global Crises Are Manifesting Our Unfaced Painful Experiences: Birth Wars ~ World Woes
“Hellacious Birth Traumas Making Headlines Worldwide!” Film at Eleven
Perinatal and Global Situation Mirroring Each Other
We Interrupt This Book for a Breaking News Bulletin: “Hellacious Birth Traumas Making Headlines Worldwide!” Film at Eleven.
The connections between the physical conditions and symbols discussed in previous chapters and the perinatal unconscious should be obvious and may have already to some extent been spelled out. But let me finish connecting the dots, so to speak:
As Stanislav Grof put it,
[W]e have exteriorized in the modern world many of the essential themes of the perinatal processes that a person involved in deep personal transformation has to face and come to terms with internally. The same elements that we would encounter in the process of psychological death and rebirth in our visionary experiences make today our evening news. This is particularly true in regard to the phenomena that characterize what I call BPM III.
We certainly see the enormous unleashing of the aggressive impulse in the many wars and revolutionary upheavals in the world, in the rising criminality, terrorism, and racial riots. Sexual experiences and behaviors are taking unprecedented forms, as manifested in sexual freedom of youngsters, promiscuity, open marriages, overtly sexual books, plays, and movies, gay liberation, sadomasochistic experimentation, and many others. The demonic element is also becoming increasingly manifest in the modern world.
A renaissance of satanic cults and witchcraft, the popularity of books and horror movies with occult themes, and crimes with satanic motivations attest to that fact. The scatological dimension is evident in the progressive industrial pollution, accumulation of waste products on a global scale, and rapidly deteriorating hygienic conditions in large cities [Footnote 1]
Grof is saying, then, that we have manifested an external modern world that mirrors and re-creates some of the hellacious circumstances surrounding our traumatic human births.
No-exit Car Jams and People Clusters
In addition to the myriad of ways that Grof has detailed…and there are many more he could have mentioned…I would like to add a few obvious commonplace examples.
We re-create on a daily basis in major cities the no-exit frustration-depression-rage prior to birth in the traffic jams and gridlock of commuter traffic.
Another one: the population explosion. Simple overpopulation of the globe sets up scenarios exactly analogous to the negative conditions that existed toward the end of pregnancy when we grew/expanded too much to be any longer comfortable in the womb. The way this global overpopulation impacts us: the overpopulation and frenzy in a big city, manifesting the situation of a crushing womb.
Global “Therapeutic” Carbon-Dioxide Chamber
I have already mentioned reduced oxygen in the atmosphere and its relation to fetal “malnutrition.”
However, there is an interesting sidelight to this. For both Arthur Janov and Stanislav Grof, at one time early on, experimented with a 
technique of carbon dioxide ingestion for getting people into primal and perinatal states. In fact, at the time—in the late Sixties, early Seventies—though not on a large scale, a number of professionals were experimenting with this procedure and even offering it as a means of 
“expanding consciousness.”
The point is that increased carbon dioxide and decreased oxygen naturally stimulate perinatal feelings. Lucky us, as we continue to turn the entire atmosphere of the Earth into such a “therapeutic” carbon-dioxide chamber.
“Don’t Cut Me OFF, Man!”
After all this, if you still do not believe that a perinatal unconscious is emerging at this time in history, I ask you how else to explain how the simple act of being “cut off” 
in traffic can trigger so much perinatal “no 
exit” frustration as to enrage an “otherwise normal” person to pull out a gun and blow another’s life away. Incidentally, I myself had a shotgun pulled on me in such a situation and only escaped through a high-speed car chase.
Birth Wars ~ World Woes
The upshot of it all is that somehow or other we have managed to create a world situation that mirrors in a way unlike any other time in history our perinatal imprints and thus triggers the emergence of this perinatal unconscious.
Or, you might reverse that and say that an emerging perinatal unconscious—brought about by other factors, improved “child-caring” methods perhaps…more about that later—has resulted in our creating a world situation manifesting or acting out those unconscious perinatal elements, which are having increasing influence on our consciousness and on our behavior.
I suspect both of these processes are occurring—each one augmenting the other.
Can You Look Your Belly in the Face?
Noticing Our Underbellies … What It Is That’s Happening Here
Noticing Our Underbellies
Let me make this latter scenario clearer. What I am saying is that we all have birth trauma and we must distance ourselves from this birth trauma so that we can function. If the birth trauma is extreme, or if subsequent child-caring is abusive and neglectful
[Footnote 2]—as is the case in any of the “less enlightened” of deMause’s psychogenic modes of child-rearing [Footnote 3]—or both, then complete splitting, repression of the perinatal, and dissociation from the perinatal occurs. Thus a person can project his or her perinatal unconscious onto the world and be completely unaware that it has anything to do with him- or herself.
Can You Look Your Belly in the Face?
However, with more humane child-caring modes—deMause’s latest psychogenic mode, for example [Footnote 3]—less repression, and less defenses, are necessary and total dissociation does not occur.
In this situation, the perinatal is not completely projected onto the outside world. We have more access to it, hence we act it out and manifest it in lesser ways, which reflect back to us, for the times when we are able to see them, our perinatal underbellies.
On the one hand, the world is becoming increasingly perinatal and thus is stimulating more of the perinatal unconscious than previously. On the other hand, we have more access to and are closer to our perinatal unconscious so that we exhibit it more blatantly in our behavior and cultural creations and thus stimulate, again, in ourselves and others, the underlying perinatal matrices.
This is a chicken-and-the-egg process. And I suspect, in the same way, that these processes are going on simultaneously and hence augment each other.
Life or Death Matters
In an earlier section, We Are a Fever, Part Five, The Perinatal Unconscious: Why We Are Committing Ecocide and Seeking Species Suicide, we entertained the notion that the reason things seem so much different nowadays than anytime we can imagine from the past is because they are different. We have looked at how the character and events of our age are remarkably like the feelings and events surrounding our births and, unfortunately: traumatic births, traumatic times! Lastly, we have considered a few reasons…more coming…as to why these times might be uniquely imbued with our perinatal events.
“Waiter, Check!”
Still, the biggest questions lie begging: What does this all mean for us? Is it the “end of the world,” really, like some are claiming? Or are we seeing the “dawning of a new age”? (Now why is it that I cannot restrain the strains of the group The Fifth Dimension, in full orchestration no less, intoning in my mind the song “The Age of Aquarius” as I write this!?)
What Can You Me Do?
These are not unimportant questions. And they have all the implications of life or death, again indicative of the perinatal, about them.
Will we live? Will we survive? Or are we doomed? Kinda important to think about, don’t you agree?
And if it is within our power to decide our fate, well, just what the hell are we going to do about it? What can be done about our situation? What can each of us—you…me—do?
What It Is That’s Happening Here
We will begin addressing these questions in “Part Three: Global Healing Crisis,” beginning with this chapter. There are some processes of change in these times—processes of change unlike any that we normally encounter—that will weigh heavily on the outcome of the current emerging perinatal unconscious. These include not only the concepts and processes of the healing crisis—as stipulated in the next chapter, “The Changing of the Generational Guard” — but also that of macrocosmic processes beyond our human scope, as will be explained in “Chapter Sixteen: Eden Arise —Aided by Gaia We Rediscover Our Natural Self.”
Apocalypse, Or Earth Rebirth?
Finally, having considered the perinatal nature of our times in Part One: A Womb with a View—The Prenatal and Perinatal Unconscious (Chapters One and Two), and then the corresponding unique processes at work in these times in Part Two: 21st Century and Its Discontents (Chapters Three through Twelve), we can look at some likely propensities for our future (Chapters Fourteen through Sixteen). Considering what we know at that time, we will see that there are also some directions in which to look for a solution. We will then be able to look deeper, daring to ask: Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth? And we will see how crucial are the roles of our postmodern “wounded deer” and “centaurs” and why their appearance may be the brightest hope for humanity at this time.
But next we need to consider how in order to save ourselves we need to bring to the surface all the rotten ugliness of perinatal trauma that for millennia our species has been keeping inside.
Continue with Psychology of Generations —The Changing of the Generational Guard: Why There Is Less Violence but More Depression…. And What’s Good About That
Return to Perinatal Printouts Of Sixties, X, and Millennial Generations: No-Exit Wombs, Vampire Apocalypse, Drug Use, and Being Gratefully Dead
Footnotes
1. Stanislav Grof, “Planetary Survival and Consciousness Evolution: Psychological Roots of Human Violence and Greed.” Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology 2(1): 3-26, p. 23. Article reprinted, with permission, on Primal Spirit site.
2. See Solter, Aletha, (1996), “Tears For Trauma: Birth Trauma, Crying, and Child Abuse” on Primal Spirit website on how birth trauma sometimes contributes to and/or triggers child abuse.
3. For an at-hand description of DeMause’s psychogenic modes click on “The History of Childhood As The History of Child Abuse” for deMause’s article on Primal Spirit.
Continue with Psychology of Generations —The Changing of the Generational Guard: Why There Is Less Violence but More Depression…. And What’s Good About That
Return to Perinatal Printouts Of Sixties, X, and Millennial Generations: No-Exit Wombs, Vampire Apocalypse, Drug Use, and Being Gratefully Dead
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“Sure It’s Hard! But Always Are We Here Helping You,” Part Three: Sins of the Fathers. Our Combined Energies Constitute an Incredible Force.
“Sure It’s Hard! But Always Are We Here Helping You,” Part Three: Sins of the Fathers. Our Combined Energies Constitute an Incredible Force.
Summary of “Sure It’s Hard But Always Are We Here Helping You”: 
This details the spiritual experience I had in 1980 which set me on this path to help the planet and the planetmates. I was shown by certain entities the path of our devolution as a species, thousands of years ago, and was told that we need to turn this around immediately. 
I was told that there were many others at work right now doing the same thing, so I need never despair, at the immensity of the task. 
Most importantly, I was told that we are receiving help… always…in our efforts. I was led to believe that these higher powers, of which we are yet to know, are fully engaged in our endeavor on this planet and assisting us at every turn. [Footnote 1]
Sins of The Father
Regardless of how you may wish to label the preceding experience, it remains one whose message has stayed with me through all the intervening years, a message that has rung true and helped me through other difficult spaces. 
In fact, I still reflect on it and can’t help believing there is a lot to it. Consider: Generation after generation of Western culture has engaged (with little awareness of the consequences) in passing down their personal pain and trauma, in some form or other, onto their offspring. And they in turn dump it on theirs. We know that child abusers were themselves abused as children; but this is just a very blatant example of how the pattern operates. On and on and back through into hazy unrecorded history this situation has existed; this vicious cycle has perpetuated itself.
But many of us in these extraordinary times, and goaded on by the specter of global catastrophe, for one thing are saying: “Let it end with me!”; “Let us not continue this madness any further!” 
Attempting to break the cycle of “kill and be killed,” of hurting and then inflicting hurt, attempting to halt the prevailing insanity, we make the Gandhian effort to take the energy into ourselves, to change ourselves lest we, also, be like the generation before — forever passing on the insane legacy.
So why should we think this would be easy?! We are trying to bring to an end, in our single lifetimes, the accumulated results of untold generations of our ancestors dumping their pain and insanity onto their descendants.
But Always Are We Here Helping
So of course it’s hard! And for me to realize this fact allows me to accept it. That is, it allows me to accept this task and to take up my place in the ranks of those arrayed in the purpose of undoing the craziness rather than to turn away in despair at the immensity of the task or to quaver in paralysis before it.
This experience has also provided me with a wonderful outlook on the people around me. I look around to the many people who are working spiritually to change themselves and this crazy world — who are serving, 
mending, and healing others and themselves. In doing so I have this sense of brother/sisterhood — that we are all engaged in an immense undertaking . . . that we are synergizing our energies in an endeavor which is not merely crucial, it is imperative . . . not just for our personal growth, for our personal satisfaction or well-being — although that’s not to be discounted — it is necessary for the very survival of this planet.
I feel that if this task had been easier it would have been done long ago by well-intentioned ancestors. Indeed, it may only be because the survival of this planet is now at stake that substantial numbers of us have at this point, finally, accepted the challenge.
Many of us are aware of the seeming intractability of the situation we face — both personally and globally. But what I feel now is not so much the despair at the difficulty of the task but rather, because of what I was taught through this experience, I feel a sense of belongingness, 
cosmic belongingness, if you will . . . a sense that I’m not alone. I feel that many others are working at this same thing in this day and age. Our combined energies — along with the energies of the Universe that are working with us — together constitute an incredible force. Confronted with the enterprise we have before us, this force may just be sufficient to do on this planet what has never been done before here (as far as we know).
So to all who occasionally despair, I can only repeat, “Sure it’s hard, but always are we here helping you.”
Continue with We Are a Fever, Part One: Perinatal Psychology, the Phenomenon of Re-Experience, and my Personal Involvement with This Research into Our Actual “Human Nature”
Return to A Cosmic Slap: I Was Told “Once There Lived “Noble” Beings” and Now Is the Time for a Regeneration of Peoples to Regain What We Lost.
Footnote
1. Journal Entry Complete. Just as it was written over thirty years ago. For those interested in hearing the entire experience:
Journal Entry of June 28, 1980:
I was lying in bed last night with Maddie. Couldn’t sleep, air conditioner too loud. Suddenly I was aware of all this energy coursing through my body. Was really scaring me. My body zinging, intense ringing (buzzing?) in my ears, rushes flowing through me. Was scared I was going crazy, would hurt Maddie, would become possessed or something, etc. Tried focusing on my third eye so as to control it like I did in Portland.
That may have helped some, but I could sense, and was scared of, other “presences” in the room. I thought I heard a woman’s voice behind me over my left shoulder and that scared me. Without realizing the transition, I found myself projected into this panorama of history and a woman’s voice was narrating.
She described how once there had lived “noble” beings. I could see vast and colorful panoramas of peoples exuding “nobility” and “integrity” (for want of better words to describe what they were like). They walked and paraded before me and were all around me. Then the woman explained that the peoples degenerated and, as if in demonstration, I began seeing battles and wars played out before my eyes. I was in the midst of them!
However, I was still aware that I was in my body lying on my bed, because I could feel myself against it. Even so I was afraid that I would begin taking on the bodies of participants in the battles and would feel pain like they were obviously feeling. This feeling was especially strong when I was in the midst of the convergence of two groups of warring parties (their garb reminded me of Israelites or people of Biblical times or something). The group I was facing were going at each other with hatchets and I was afraid of becoming a participant and possibly feeling an ax chunking into my neck or skull. But although it was happening all around me, nobody in the crowd noticed me; it was as if I wasn’t there. In fact at one point I believe they actually may have passed through me!
This scene passed, along with other dramas, and it was explained to me that now it was time for a regeneration of peoples on this “plane[?]” to regain their former “nobility[?],” “integrity[?]” (again for lack of better words).
Still feeling that I was conscious, i.e., knowing that it was all happening to me while I was really lying in bed; I let myself walk through many landscapes and terrains, which I felt I could easily have lived in at one time and which I felt had all existed at some time or place or did now exist somewhere in the world or Universe. I walked through small shack towns. I remember a small group of bedraggled people huddled together in one. There were many kinds of pastoral settings also: some beautiful with rolling, lush hills, and some not as beautiful — rocky terrain, etc. All seemed to be viable habitats for different people. I had the thought that these may have been places/lives that I had lived in at one time.
Certain places brought up bad feelings in me, foreboding, scared feelings. In fact it can be said that the whole time it was happening I was scared about the experience. I feared meeting some dangerous and evil entity or being stuck in an undesirable place. When I was in one particular environ/habitat that wasn’t very pleasant, I remembered something that Seth had said about consciously altering and changing his environment. In line with that I decided to stop believing in the one that I was in and see what happened.
What happened was that environment went away and then there was a blank grayness as I waited for a new scene to appear. I continued to be aware that I was in a trancelike state and that I had a body lying in bed. I would at times vaguely return to the feeling in my body and would feel myself on my back, hands and arms outstretched, mattress against my back, in a very deep state of relaxation and suspended animation which had a feeling of heaviness or deadness about it. My body didn’t need to move and it was perfectly comfortable.
I could hear the air conditioner running, also, and even Maddie’s breathing next to me. Several times, I don’t remember exactly when, Maddie had reached over and put her arm around me, both times only for an instant, before she rolled back away from me. Neither of the times did it disturb the deep state that I was in or cause me to rise at all out of it. I simply felt warm and good towards her at the affection she was showing me. I even had the thought that, considering the fact that she only did it for a moment before turning away, that somehow she knew what was going on, in some deeper, nonconscious part of herself, and was reassuring or encouraging me.
Anyway, I was securely very deep and felt that I wasn’t going to be suddenly disturbed from it unless, perhaps, I let it. But I really didn’t want to do that. I was rather scared and apprehensive most of the time, as mentioned, but, more importantly, it was all so damned interesting! There is no doubt that I was thoroughly enjoying the color, the panorama, the expanse and freedom of consciousness, the fact that I was experiencing something important and that I had never experienced before, so that I dearly wanted to stay there despite the fear.
Sometime after the gray place, I believe it was, I was aware of some kind of light far off in the distance that I could travel to if I liked. At around that time I could hear Maddie saying to somebody (about my body in bed): “Is he moving at all? Is he breathing? Do you think he’s dead?” and so on. I remember thinking to myself how silly that sounded and that “No, I’m not dead, I’m just in this deep trance and everything.” But then suddenly I began to wonder if maybe I was dead! It had all been so strange that maybe I had actually died in my sleep!
At that point I recalled the accounts I’d heard and read about of people dying and not knowing they were dead, how they would often hang around and watch other people’s reaction to their death (and this could go on for days). I remembered how Steve had once told me something to the extent that if that should happen that one shouldn’t get carried away and fascinated by the after-death state but that one should “get down on one’s knees” (figuratively speaking) and search out the source and the presence of God. Thinking that was perhaps when I actually looked around and saw the light.
At any rate, I found myself wondering if I wanted to be dead. This place was certainly an interesting one, even with the apprehensions. And it sure seemed to be a change (so far, anyway) from the constant struggling to survive and grow. But I also felt that there were just so many loose ends left unresolved in my life. There were so many areas that I’d made good progress in but had not yet taken to completion. My love for Maddie (next to me), which was only just beginning, came to my mind as an example.
And so I decided to find out if I was dead or not, both to know if I should go heading for the light (if I was) or to reassure Maddie (if I wasn’t). I determined to get into my body and, with an effort and strain, I forced myself up from the depths, forcing my body to move and sit up. I was mildly surprised to find that I was able to do this, bringing myself into physicality and into a half-sitting position. In this position I looked over to see Maddie sleeping next to me, I could hear the air conditioner whining, and so forth. I realized then that she hadn’t “physically” been sitting over me, talking about me, but I also felt that some part of her must have. (We used to have this thing when we slept together that often we would feel like we had been communicating with each other on some kind of subconscious level the whole night long. We wouldn’t ever remember all that we had said but we would often both remark about it the next morning).
Realizing that I wasn’t dead, I lay back down and let myself drift back into the deepness. All I remember, after this point, is talking to Maddie, probably about what had happened to me, explaining it to her, though I’m not sure that was all of it. Also I remember at least one other time, maybe two, forcing myself to waking consciousness to see if Maddie was awake (as if in an experiment), because it really seemed that we were actually, physically awake and talking to each other. I thought we were lying in bed physically talking. It was hard to believe it when I forced myself awake only to find her lying beside me asleep.
After that there were some actual dreams, quite different from what had been going on earlier. I fell into sleeping and dreamed of being in my Grandmother’s home. I remember reading a book, sitting in a chair in her kitchen. There were other people there also; they were sitting in the same kind of straight-backed, none-too-comfortable wooden chairs.
I remember that early on, when I was doing all the traveling and stuff, that I didn’t know how I’d possibly remember all the experiences that happened to me and all the things that I saw and learned. It seemed like a lot of time was crammed into that short period. I remembered hoping just that I would retain as much of it as I could, especially hoping that I wouldn’t just blot it all out as it felt important.
Don’t Despair, There Are Others Doing It With You, and We’re Here, Too
I feel like the meaning of the part about the regeneration of the peoples on this plane was an answer to my despair at working on getting through my feelings. It’s like it was 
saying: 
“Sure it’s hard! What you’re talking about is the reversal of hundreds of generations of degenerate and violent habit, custom, and activity. But we’re talking about changing that also, and you’re not the only one working at it. There are many others in your time period struggling to do it just like you.”
And the feeling that left me with was/is “So don’t despair. There are others like you doing it, and we’re (out here) helping you too.”
Continue with We Are a Fever, Part One: Perinatal Psychology, the Phenomenon of Re-Experience, and my Personal Involvement with This Research into Our Actual “Human Nature”
Return to A Cosmic Slap: I Was Told “Once There Lived “Noble” Beings” and Now Is the Time for a Regeneration of Peoples to Regain What We Lost.
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Our Global Crises Are Manifesting Our Unfaced Painful Experiences: Birth Wars ~ World Woes
Birth Wars ~ World Woes: Life or Death Matters We Need to Face to Survive
“Hellacious Birth Traumas Making Headlines Worldwide!” Film at Eleven
Perinatal and Global Situation Mirroring Each Other
We Interrupt This Book for a Breaking News Bulletin: “Hellacious Birth Traumas Making Headlines Worldwide!” Film at Eleven.
The connections between the physical conditions and symbols discussed in previous chapters and the perinatal unconscious should be obvious and may have already to some extent been spelled out. But let me finish connecting the dots, so to speak:
As Stanislav Grof put it,
A renaissance of satanic cults and witchcraft, the popularity of books and horror movies with occult themes, and crimes with satanic motivations attest to that fact. The scatological dimension is evident in the progressive industrial pollution, accumulation of waste products on a global scale, and rapidly deteriorating hygienic conditions in large cities [Footnote 1]
Grof is saying, then, that we have manifested an external modern world that mirrors and re-creates some of the hellacious circumstances surrounding our traumatic human births.
No-exit Car Jams and People Clusters
In addition to the myriad of ways that Grof has detailed…and there are many more he could have mentioned…I would like to add a few obvious commonplace examples.
We re-create on a daily basis in major cities the no-exit frustration-depression-rage prior to birth in the traffic jams and gridlock of commuter traffic.
Another one: the population explosion. Simple overpopulation of the globe sets up scenarios exactly analogous to the negative conditions that existed toward the end of pregnancy when we grew/expanded too much to be any longer comfortable in the womb. The way this global overpopulation impacts us: the overpopulation and frenzy in a big city, manifesting the situation of a crushing womb.
Global “Therapeutic” Carbon-Dioxide Chamber
I have already mentioned reduced oxygen in the atmosphere and its relation to fetal “malnutrition.”
However, there is an interesting sidelight to this. For both Arthur Janov and Stanislav Grof, at one time early on, experimented with a technique of carbon dioxide ingestion for getting people into primal and perinatal states. In fact, at the time—in the late Sixties, early Seventies—though not on a large scale, a number of professionals were experimenting with this procedure and even offering it as a means of “expanding consciousness.”
The point is that increased carbon dioxide and decreased oxygen naturally stimulate perinatal feelings. Lucky us, as we continue to turn the entire atmosphere of the Earth into such a “therapeutic” carbon-dioxide chamber.
“Don’t Cut Me OFF, Man!”
After all this, if you still do not believe that a perinatal unconscious is emerging at this time in history, I ask you how else to explain how the simple act of being “cut off” in traffic can trigger so much perinatal “no exit” frustration as to enrage an “otherwise normal” person to pull out a gun and blow another’s life away. Incidentally, I myself had a shotgun pulled on me in such a situation and only escaped through a high-speed car chase.
Birth Wars ~ World Woes
The upshot of it all is that somehow or other we have managed to create a world situation that mirrors in a way unlike any other time in history our perinatal imprints and thus triggers the emergence of this perinatal unconscious.
Or, you might reverse that and say that an emerging perinatal unconscious—brought about by other factors, improved “child-caring” methods perhaps…more about that later—has resulted in our creating a world situation manifesting or acting out those unconscious perinatal elements, which are having increasing influence on our consciousness and on our behavior.
I suspect both of these processes are occurring—each one augmenting the other.
Can You Look Your Belly in the Face?
Noticing Our Underbellies … What It Is That’s Happening Here
Noticing Our Underbellies
Let me make this latter scenario clearer. What I am saying is that we all have birth trauma and we must distance ourselves from this birth trauma so that we can function. If the birth trauma is extreme, or if subsequent child-caring is abusive and neglectful [Footnote 2]—as is the case in any of the “less enlightened” of deMause’s psychogenic modes of child-rearing [Footnote 3]—or both, then complete splitting, repression of the perinatal, and dissociation from the perinatal occurs. Thus a person can project his or her perinatal unconscious onto the world and be completely unaware that it has anything to do with him- or herself.
Can You Look Your Belly in the Face?
However, with more humane child-caring modes—deMause’s latest psychogenic mode, for example [Footnote 3]—less repression, and less defenses, are necessary and total dissociation does not occur. In this situation, the perinatal is not completely projected onto the outside world. We have more access to it, hence we act it out and manifest it in lesser ways, which reflect back to us, for the times when we are able to see them, our perinatal underbellies.
On the one hand, the world is becoming increasingly perinatal and thus is stimulating more of the perinatal unconscious than previously. On the other hand, we have more access to and are closer to our perinatal unconscious so that we exhibit it more blatantly in our behavior and cultural creations and thus stimulate, again, in ourselves and others, the underlying perinatal matrices.
This is a chicken-and-the-egg process. And I suspect, in the same way, that these processes are going on simultaneously and hence augment each other.
Life or Death Matters
In Chapter Six, “Strange Days,” we entertained the notion that the reason things seem so much different nowadays than anytime we can imagine from the past is because they are different. We have looked at how the character and events of our age are remarkably like the feelings and events surrounding our births and, unfortunately: traumatic births, traumatic times! Lastly, we have considered a few reasons…more coming…as to why these times might be uniquely imbued with our perinatal events.
“Waiter, Check!”
Still, the biggest questions lie begging: What does this all mean for us? Is it the “end of the world,” really, like some are claiming? Or are we seeing the “dawning of a new age”? (Now why is it that I cannot restrain the strains of the group The Fifth Dimension, in full orchestration no less, intoning in my mind the song “The Age of Aquarius” as I write this!?)
What Can You Me Do?
These are not unimportant questions. And they have all the implications of life or death, again indicative of the perinatal, about them.
Will we live? Will we survive? Or are we doomed? Kinda important to think about, don’t you agree?
And if it is within our power to decide our fate, well, just what the hell are we going to do about it? What can be done about our situation? What can each of us—you…me—do?
What It Is That’s Happening Here
We will begin addressing these questions in “Part Two: What It Is That’s Happening Here,” beginning with the next chapter. There are some processes of change in these times—processes of change unlike any that we normally encounter—that will weigh heavily on the outcome of the current emerging perinatal unconscious. These include not only the concepts and processes of the healing crisis—or as stipulated in the next chapter, “Getting Sick in Order to Be Well“—but also that of macrocosmic processes beyond our human scope, as will be explained in “Chapter Twelve: Through Gaia’s Eyes, Nature Balances HerSelf.”
Apocalypse, Or Earth Rebirth?
Finally, having considered the perinatal nature of our times in Part One, The Perinatal Unconscious (Chapters Seven, Eight, and Nine), and then the corresponding unique processes at work in these times in Part Two, What It Is That Is Happening Here (Chapters Ten, Eleven, and Twelve), we can look at some likely propensities for our future (Chapters Thirteen thru Eighteen). Considering what we know at that time, we will see that there are also some directions in which to look for a solution. We will then be able to look deeper, daring to ask: Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth?
But next we need to consider how in order to save ourselves we need to bring to the surface all the rotten ugliness of perinatal trauma that for millennia our species has been keeping inside.
Continue with Apocalypse No! Chapter Eleven:
Healing Crisis – Getting “Sick” To Be Well
Return to Apocalypse No! Chapter Nine: Twenty-First Century Life – Table of DisContents
Footnotes
1. Stanislav Grof, “Planetary Survival and Consciousness Evolution: Psychological Roots of Human Violence and Greed.” Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology 2(1): 3-26, p. 23. Article reprinted, with permission, on Primal Spirit site.
2. See Solter, Aletha, (1996), “Tears For Trauma: Birth Trauma, Crying, and Child Abuse” on Primal Spirit website on how birth trauma sometimes contributes to and/or triggers child abuse.
3. For an at-hand description of DeMause’s psychogenic modes click on “The History of Childhood As The History of Child Abuse” for deMause’s article on Primal Spirit.
Continue with Apocalypse No! Chapter Eleven:
Healing Crisis – Getting “Sick” To Be Well
Return to Apocalypse No! Chapter Nine: Twenty-First Century Life – Table of DisContents
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Something’s Happening Here – Strange Days: Facing Square Our Apocalypse — For the Heroic and Most Caring Only
Apocalypse No! Chapter Six: Strange Days
Wtf? Strange Days, The End Being Nigh … Facing Square Our Apocalypse—For the Heroic and Most Caring Only
Something’s Happening Here
“Nobody Told Me There’d Be Days Like These” – John Lennon
We live in unprecedented times—times in which the possibility of ending our species in our lifetime, 
even eliminating all life on this planet, are very real possibilities. No other time has been like this. And the effect of this possibility of the actual end of days, so to speak—while so horrifying that we are in denial of it and hardly speak it—hangs over us and affects us in ways unique and fantastic.
We will either heroically, somehow, save our species and our planet, which will require a change of our human nature unlike anything that has been asked of our species ever before, 
or we will be witnesses to the elimination of 
life on this planet in some way that we cannot imagine but can only be horrific in the extreme. This book is about facing, not denying, the uniquely dire character of our times and finding out what it says about us and requires of us. But it is also about what it is about our species that we—of all the other species here—are the ones, the only ones, who would bring about such a possibility. [continued after video]
Strange Days. Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth?
by SillyMickel Adzema
For the author’s reading of this chapter click on the link to youtube above or click the video player here:
Why Do We Poop Where We Sleep?
Just what is it about us that could allow us to so violate our home as to make the death of us all possible? This is something that somebody should be addressing, don’t you think? I will begin that here. Come along, if you dare.
But this is not for those who would prefer to keep their heads in the sand and to sleepwalk through life. Certainly that is part of the reason we could get to this pass But it is doubtful that such people, in such deep denial of the signs around them, would be able to hear what is here being brought to light. If instead you are of the type that would wish to look fiercely at the truth, no matter how horrifying it might be, and to truly witness and be awake in these most fantastic of times, then listen up.
Gaia’s Calling You.
There is much here to see, and so much of it the mainstream would never touch for fear of creating a panic. 
Still, to survive our species must face our problems, not look away. And there is a nobility in doing that, which is unlike any kind of nobility or heroism that has been asked of our species before. I hope, for the sake of us all, that you are one of those heroes. For we will need many noble souls to reverse our current downslide into oblivion.
“Strange Days, Indeed. Most Peculiar, Mama!” – John Lennon
Something’s Happening Here
What it is ain’t exactly clear.
“Something’s happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.” So goes a hugely popular song from the sixties by Buffalo Springfield. Meanwhile Jim Morrison of the rock group The Doors sang, “Break on through to the other side.” [Footnote 1]
A decade later John Lennon sang “Strange days, indeed…most peculiar, mama!” That was in the late seventies; not long afterwards Lennon was murdered. In the nineties, the group R.E.M. enjoyed enormous success singing, “It’s the end of the world, as we know it”; then, singing parenthetically, “and I feel fine.” [Footnote 2]
Break On Through to the Other Side.
My point is that there is something happening here…something unprecedented in the entire history of this planet, as far as we are able to know. There are powerful factors and influences at work in our world now that have the capacity to change us and our world in radical ways…for good or ill. My point also is that this unprecedented situation, like the “break on through to the other side” lyric indicates, has something to do with birth feelings, birth trauma—an emerging perinatal unconscious. [Footnote 3]
What I have in mind in the ensuing parts on this topic is to attempt to reawaken you to the unique character of our times. Then I expect to persuade you that this unprecedented era in history is rife with the perinatal, that is, with things having to do with the time around our births.
“We Ain’t Born Typical.”
This contemporary age is permeated by perinatal symbolism, elements, evidence, behavior, rituals, and situations—in other words, I expect to show that the events of these “strange days” are being sculpted by an emerging perinatal unconscious—an unconscious that was created out of the trauma of our entering into this world, our birth trauma. The Kills, with their release in 2008, enjoyed huge success singing, “You are a fever. You ain’t born typical.” That’s what I’m talking about. [Footnote 4]
Finally, I intend to say a few words about what might be the outcome of these emerging perinatal trends—Earth rebirth or apocalypse.
Wtf? The End Being Nigh – Strange Days
The End Being Nigh – Strange Days
Strange Days
For most people, I would assume I am not saying anything new in pointing out that our times are unique. For that matter, all times are unique—unlike any other. But what no other time has seen is the actual—not imagined—possibility, even likelihood, of the “end of the world.” That is to say, we are facing the end of our species and maybe all life on this planet along with us. Considering just one scenario, we have the capacity, with only a minuscule amount of our nuclear weapons, to wipe out all life on this planet. We all know this.
“The End Is Nigh!”
I used the phrase, just now, “end of the world,” deliberately. For I expect that it will evoke in some a reaction that what I am going to say from here on will be a drawn-out verbal version of a familiar cartoon, depicting a bearded and bedraggled man on a street corner, carrying a sign or wearing a clapboard proclaiming, 
“The end is near!” and that what I will say will have just about as much credibility as that man’s would.
I take that chance to make my first point…which is: The fact that we can so easily dismiss, ridicule, and smugly deride such ideas of apocalypse points to our complacency with these strangest and most precarious of days. In fact, we have lived with this unprecedented situation—dangling on a thread, as it were, above the abyss of nuclear annihilation, to name just one of the possible forces of extinction…we’ve lived with it for so long as for it to seem commonplace—as part of the normal and familiar furniture of our daily lives.
Wtf?
Heads in the Sand
It has become so much a part of our daily lives, in fact, that we hardly give it any thought anymore. But for a moment, let us just imagine a person from a previous time in history being somehow transported into this time and being made to understand the impending forces: environmental collapse, species extinction, nuclear threat, population explosion, virulent epidemic, possibly human-created earthquakes and thus tsunamis, planet poisoning, and so on.
Unless this person was Nostradamus, we can imagine this person would be hugely alarmed, to say the least. This person might well wonder at our nonchalance, or should we say apathy, in the face of such likely, not just potential, apocalypse. [Footnote 5]
So I won’t waste time pointing out the statistics that prove the premise that the current trends we are following are apocalyptic.
We need simply to look to our daily headlines. Need I remind of the dangers from catastrophes like Fukushima and the Gulf Oil Spill? [Footnote 6]
Care for Some Radiation with that Milk?
We have radiation mixing into the world ecosystem as I write. Fukushima 
alone is spreading radiation that’s off the charts into food, air, oceans, and has made it to the East Coast of the U.S. and beyond in just a short time. We also know that nuclear waste needs to be guarded for 25,000 years because of its toxicity…it is still deadly for 250,000 years. Yet we continue to excrete massive amounts of it into our globe and even after the Fukushima meltdowns to push for building more plants. [Footnote 7]
Dead Zones and Dolphins
We have watched baby dolphins by the hundreds washing up on Gulf coasts and the creation of hundred mile dead zones in our seas. 
BP stupidly used toxic chemicals to disperse the oil rather than to collect it. The dispersants themselves are toxic, but the much bigger crime was to make sure the even more toxic oil, which depletes the oxygen in the water and thus creates the dead zones, would be spread far and wide throughout the global water. Good for BP shares looking like they could fix it, bad for survival of oxygen-breathers on Earth.
So BP’s egregiously criminal move was the equivalent of sweeping dirt under the rug to clean up. 
Unfortunately there is no “away” in which it can “go.” So we have, in this incident alone, precipitated greatly the dying off of the life of the oceans—the oxygen-producing plankton—and, hence, the basis of all life on this planet.
*Cough, Cough*
To this ravaging of the lungs of the planet add worldwide runaway deforestation, already in full swing. I am practically choking as I think how we then stink up the air with industrial emissions and auto exhausts. Living in the LA area, I can tell you that I feel my mouth is sealed to the end of an exhaust pipe most of the time. So to the dangers bringing on our demise we need to add globally increasing air pollution.
Forget Your Sunscreen, We’re All Gonna Fry.
Environmentally also, we have the greenhouse effect—global climate change or warming—the depletion of the ozone layer, and so on. [Footnote 8]
Al Gore is owed the gratitude of the world informing us of climate change in his book and documentary of the same name, Inconvenient Truth.
Meanwhile lots of folks think we have solved the ozone layer problem. We banned fluorocarbons, and we don’t hear much about this problem anymore in the media.
Environmental nay-sayers are arguing that we “fixed” this problem, as part of their stance that we need not worry about what we’re doing to the planet. But not long ago—April 2011—CNN broadcast the news that the ozone had been depleted by 40% in the last two months alone! They immediately then turned to an item of dire importance—a snake had gotten loose in New York! [Footnote 9]
Only One Earth, Don’t Blow It!
Nor need I elaborate on the the nuclear threat–whether precipitated by terrorists, rogue nations, or accident. We know, but don’t want to, of the possibility of any one or more of these mad actors employing weapons of mass destruction, 
possibly leading to ever-mounting rounds of retaliation with eventually no one left standing. Relatedly we push out of our minds the threat of other kinds of weapons–such as biological weapons–getting out of control and creating a worldwide epidemic or holocaust.
Eight billion and Counting…Now Let’s Attack Planned Parenthood! *sarcasm*
Need I mention the continuing explosion of the world’s population leading to likely famine, wars, diseases, and so on? We have twice as many people alive now as the combined total of all humans who have ever lived! We are no different from bacteria who overrun their petri dish only to die off. We certainly aren’t showing ourselves to be any smarter than that. [Footnote 10]
Outbreak
How about the possibility of virulent epidemic that cannot be cured? Does that catch your fancy? Strains of micro-organisms are evolving that are immune to our much-touted antibiotics.
You Sure You Should Be Reading This?
What Island Were You Stranded On?
But why go on? If you are not aware of these things, you are from some other planet. If you are dismissing these facts, you are in actual psychological denial of your dire situation. If you are not paying attention, you are spending your life desperately running away.
No, I won’t go into stats and figures to support the premise. The evidence and statistics are there for all to see, crying for attention, put out, published, and promulgated by the best scientists of our time, mixed in with the more mundane messages of our daily newspapers and nightly newscasts, though we mostly turn our ears from them.
We’ll Try to Save You, Too.
In fact, if you are not already aware of the global crisis that besets us, I do not think you will get much out of reading further in this book and would probably better spend your time doing something else. There will always be those that will have their heads in the sand and will be cast about like flotsam upon the waters by the events swirling around them–impotent in the face of them and dependent upon other’s actions for the result. If you are one, know we’re trying to save you, too.
Facing Foursquare the Darkness – Not for Cowardly or Uncaring Humans – Strange Days
Facing Square Our Apocalypse—For the Heroic and Most Caring Only
There will always be those that will have their heads in the sand and will be 
cast about like flotsam upon the waters by the events swirling around them – impotent in the face of them and dependent upon others’ actions for the result. If you are one, know we’re trying to save you, too.
Assuming you are not one of them–a good bet, if you’ve managed to get to this paragraph–there is much to say about the current apocalyptic trends.
Facing Foursquare
But even those of us aware of this crisis hardly think of it. Of course it is our normal psychic defenses that operate to keep this huge awareness out of our daily minds; we must do this in order to be able to function.But perhaps, for some of us, our defenses work too well–so much so that we unthinkingly participate in and contribute to our own demise. This is classic neurotic self-sabotaging, self-destruction on a macro scale.
However, psychologists, historians, psychohistorians, and scholars and the educated public claim not to be like that. It is their job, or their claim, to be looking squarely into the face of these forces of denial and potential apocalypse and to be seeking to understand the human condition and human psychology in light of them. It is their duty then to inform the rest of us about what they see so that we might have a chance of reversing our self-destructive tendencies.
If You’re Not Alarmed, You’re Not Paying Attention.
Whether the educated public and the multitude of scholars actually are 
fulfilling their mission in these times is debatable. 
Regardless, my thesis is that when we do this, when we look foursquare into the face of the global crisis and its accompanying denial, we find that these unprecedented global factors contribute to a unique and unprecedented human condition and psychology. I have seen a bumper 
sticker around, in California where I live, that proclaims, “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention!” It could as easily say, however, “If you’re not alarmed,” fearful, anxious, depressed . . . you name it, “You’re not paying attention!”
To Face These Maddest of Days and Minds
So then let us pay attention. This book is about facing foursquare into the 
fantastic circumstances and situation in which we find ourselves, watching, 
like a photograph emerging in solution, as the face of these times slowly comes into view, and then waking up to the meaning of the message, perhaps the warning, it brings us, so that we might live most fully and take up our roles consciously amid these unprecedented unfoldings. What is required of us now, then, having turned to receive the message, is to look deep into the features of our age. Let us begin.
Continue with Apocalypse – No! Chapter Seven:
“We Ain’t Born Typical””
Return to Apocalypse No! Chapter Five: Death Wish – Thanatos Walking
Strange Days. Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth?
by SillyMickel Adzema
For the author’s reading of a version of this chapter, click on the link to youtube above or click the video player here:
Footnotes
1. Stop, Children, What’s That Sound – Buffalo Springfield – Lyrics
There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me i got to bewareI think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going downThere’s battle lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behindI think it’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going downWhat a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our sideIt’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going downParanoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you awayWe better stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Stop, now, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
2. It’s the End of the World as We Know It – R.E.M. – Lyrics
That’s great, it starts with an earthquake, birds,
snakes, an aeroplanes, Lenny Bruce is not afraid.
Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn – world
serves its own needs, dummy serve your own needs. Feed
it off an aux speak, grunt, no, strength, Ladder
start to clatter with fear fight down height. Wire
in a fire, representing seven games, a government
for hire and a combat site. Left of west and coming in
a hurry with the furies breathing down your neck. Team
by team reporters baffled, trumped, tethered cropped.
Look at that low playing! Fine, then. Uh oh,
overflow, population, common food, but it’ll do. Save
yourself, serve yourself. World serves its own needs,
listen to your heart bleed dummy with the rapture and
the revered and the right, right. You vitriolic,
patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty
psyched.[Chorus:]
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.Six o’clock – TV hour. Don’t get caught in foreign
towers. Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself
churn. Locking in, uniforming, book burning, blood
letting. Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate.
Light a votive, light a candle. Step down, step down.
Watch your heel crush, crushed, uh-oh, this means no
fear cavalier. Renegade steer clear! A tournament,
tournament, a tournament of lies. Offer me solutions,
offer me alternatives and I decline.[Chorus 2x]
The other night I dreamt of knives, continental
drift divide. Mountains sit in a line, Leonard
Bernstein. Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester
Bangs. Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom! You
symbiotic, patriotic, slam book neck, right? Right.[Chorus 2x]
3. Break on Through to the Other Side – The Doors – Lyrics
You know the day destroys the night,
Night divides the day
Tried to run, tried to hide,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side, yeah.We chased our pleasures here,
Dug our treasures there,
But can you still recall the time we cried?
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side.Yeah!
C’mon, yeah.Everybody loves my baby,
Everybody loves my baby.
She gets
She gets
She gets
She gets higghhhh!I found an island in your arms,
A country in your eyes,
Arms that chained us, eyes that lied.
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through, wow, oh yeah!Made the scene week to week,
Day to day, hour to hour,
The gate is straight, deep and wide,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through,
Break on through,
Break on through,
Break on through,
Break, break, break, break,
Break, break, break, break,
Break.
4. U.R.A. Fever – The Kills – Lyrics
Walk you to the counter
What do you got to offer
Pick you out a solder
Look at you forever
Walk you to the water
Your eyes like a casino
We ain’t born typical
Find a piece of silver
Pretty as a diagram
And go down to the Rio
Put it in my left hand
Put it in a fruit machine
Everyone’s a winner
Laughing like a seagull
You are a fever
You are a fever
You ain’t born typical
You are a fever
You are a fever
You ain’t born typical
Living in a suitcase
Meet a clown, fall in love
went down to have you over
Going ’round a break up
Take you to a jukebox
That’s the situation
Pick you out a number
And that’s our arrangement
Dancing on the legs of a new-born pony
Left right left right
Keep it up son
Go ahead and have her
Go ahead and leave her
You only ever had her
When you were a fever
I am a fever
I am a fever
I ain’t born typical
I am a fever
I am a fever
I ain’t born typical
We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical
We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical
We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical
We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical
5. An example of what we should be doing. These are the kind of public figures and pundits we need.
If the bees disappeared, then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man. – Albert Einstein
Vanishing bees is “just a sign” of what is going on, as they point out. The canary has died, and we cannot just leave the coal mine.
So we owe gratitude to Ellen Page and Bill Maher for setting an example for the kind of discourse we could and should be having in the media.
6. Gulf Oil Spill, Fukushima meltdowns, nuclear radiation, toxic nuclear waste, HAARP, killing off of the ocean–destroying oxygen in it, dead zones with no oxygen, dolphins washing up, birds falling out of the sky, bees disappearing, ozone depletion at the rate of 40% in the last two months alone, and a massive 50% species extinction in the next few decades, i.e., in our lifetimes! (now, enjoy your hamburger.)
7. Helen Caldicott compares our complacency in the face of these dire happenings to the parents who respond emotionless when she has to tell them their child has leukemia. She says, “Get mad. Get emotional.” She urges us to take back our governments from these mad perpetrators of the darkest doom imaginable. And, in the least, occupy! She proclaims,
It’s time you took your country back…. Use your bodies like they did in Wisconsin. Do a Tahrir Square here. Take back New York. Take back the Congress. Invade the Congress! Those people belong to you. They are your representatives, and you are their leaders. But you’ve got to have some guts! And stop being so goddamn polite all the time! And don’t need approval. Step up to the plate….
We’ve got to be emotional…. It’s time we used our emotions and become incensed! Otherwise we’re not going to make it.
8. “We’re all gonna fry.” With appreciation to Scout Niblett, “We’re All Gonna Die/ Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death”
9. “We Lost 40% of Ozone Layer Last 3 Months” proclaimed CNN in April, 2011 — “Ozone Depletion Over Arctic ‘Unprecedented’ This Winter“
My take on this: CNN reported this month that 40% of the ozone layer over the Arctic was depleted from December 21st, 2010 to March 31st, 2011–roughly three months. I heard a CNN anchor report this, with some alarm. I also watched as this anchor continued, after a few sentences on this, to another news item–about a snake getting loose in New York, if memory serves me. Guess life on this planet not as big a deal.
Btw, if you want to dismiss this by consoling yourself that it is “only” happening over the Arctic, consider what is happening in parts of the globe that aren’t being actively monitored. Seems to me if the lake goes down on the other side, the water is lower on my side as well. [return to text]
10. John Leslie, The End of the World.
Continue with Apocalypse – No! Chapter Seven:
“We Ain’t Born Typical””
Return to Apocalypse No! Chapter Five: Death Wish – Thanatos Walking
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Birth Wars ~ World Woes, Part Two: Noticing Our Underbellies … What It Is That’s Happening Here
Birth Wars ~ World Woes, Part 2: Can You Look Your Belly in the Face?
Noticing Our Underbellies
Let me make this latter scenario clearer. What I am saying is that we all have birth trauma and we must distance ourselves from this birth trauma so that we can function. If the birth trauma is extreme, or if subsequent child-caring is abusive and neglectful [Footnote 1]—as is the case in any of the “less enlightened” of deMause’s psychogenic modes of child-rearing [Footnote 2]—or both, then complete splitting, repression of the perinatal, and dissociation from the perinatal occurs. Thus a person can project his or her perinatal unconscious onto the world and be completely unaware that it has anything to do with him- or herself.
Can You Look Your Belly in the Face?
However, with more humane child-caring modes—deMause’s latest psychogenic mode, for example [Footnote 2]—less repression, and less defenses, are necessary and total dissociation does not occur. In this situation, the perinatal is not completely projected onto the outside world. We have more access to it, hence we act it out and manifest it in lesser ways, which reflect back to us, for the times when we are able to see them, our perinatal underbellies.
On the one hand, the world is becoming increasingly perinatal and thus is stimulating more of the perinatal unconscious than previously. On the other hand, we have more access to and are closer to our perinatal unconscious so that we exhibit it more blatantly in our behavior and cultural creations and thus stimulate, again, in ourselves and others, the underlying perinatal matrices.
This is a chicken-and-the-egg process. And I suspect, in the same way, that these processes are going on simultaneously and hence augment each other.
Life or Death Matters
In Chapter Six, “Strange Days,” we entertained the notion that the reason things seem so much different nowadays than anytime we can imagine from the past is because they are different. We have looked at how the character and events of our age are remarkably like the feelings and events surrounding our births and, unfortunately: traumatic births, traumatic times! Lastly, we have considered a few reasons…more coming…as to why these times might be uniquely imbued with our perinatal events.
“Waiter, Check!”
Still, the biggest questions lie begging: What does this all mean for us? Is it the “end of the world,” really, like some are claiming? Or are we seeing the “dawning of a new age”? (Now why is it that I cannot restrain the strains of the group The Fifth Dimension, in full orchestration no less, intoning in my mind the song “The Age of Aquarius” as I write this!?)
What Can You Me Do?
These are not unimportant questions. And they have all the implications of life or death, again indicative of the perinatal, about them.
Will we live? Will we survive? Or are we doomed? Kinda important to think about, don’t you agree?
And if it is within our power to decide our fate, well, just what the hell are we going to do about it? What can be done about our situation? What can each of us—you…me—do?
What It Is That’s Happening Here
We will begin addressing these questions in “Part Two: What It Is That’s Happening Here,” beginning with the next chapter. There are some processes of change in these times—processes of change unlike any that we normally encounter—that will weigh heavily on the outcome of the current emerging perinatal unconscious. These include not only the concepts and processes of the healing crisis—or as stipulated in the next chapter, “Getting Sick in Order to Be Well“—but also that of macrocosmic processes beyond our human scope, as will be explained in “Chapter Twelve: Through Gaia’s Eyes, Nature Balances HerSelf.”
Apocalypse, Or Earth Rebirth?
Finally, having considered the perinatal nature of our times in Part One, The Perinatal Unconscious (Chapters Seven, Eight, and Nine), and then the corresponding unique processes at work in these times in Part Two, What It Is That Is Happening Here (Chapters Ten, Eleven, and Twelve), we can look at some likely propensities for our future (Chapters Thirteen thru Eighteen). Considering what we know at that time, we will see that there are also some directions in which to look for a solution. We will then be able to look deeper, daring to ask: Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth?
But next we need to consider how in order to save ourselves we need to bring to the surface all the rotten ugliness of perinatal trauma that for millennia our species has been keeping inside.
Continue with Healing Crisis, Part 1: What’s in Your Head, Zombie? Being Really Sick, But Denying It — WWII Generation, Nazis, KKK, Right Wing, Tea Party
Return to “Hellacious Birth Traumas Making Headlines Worldwide!” Film at Eleven: Birth Wars, World Woes, Part 1
Footnotes
1. See Solter, Aletha, (1996), “Tears For Trauma: Birth Trauma, Crying, and Child Abuse” on Primal Spirit website on how birth trauma sometimes contributes to and/or triggers child abuse. [return to text]
2. For an at-hand description of DeMause’s psychogenic modes click on “The History of Childhood As The History of Child Abuse” for deMause’s article on Primal Spirit. [return to text]
Continue with Healing Crisis, Part 1: What’s in Your Head, Zombie? Being Really Sick, But Denying It — WWII Generation, Nazis, KKK, Right Wing, Tea Party
Return to “Hellacious Birth Traumas Making Headlines Worldwide!” Film at Eleven: Birth Wars, World Woes, Part 1
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Wtf? The End Being Nigh: Strange Days, Pt 2
The End Being Nigh:
Strange Days, Part Two
Strange Days
For most people, I would assume I am not saying anything new in pointing out that our times are unique. For that matter, all times are unique—unlike any other. But what no other time has seen is the actual—not imagined—possibility, even likelihood, of the “end of the world.” That is to say, we are facing the end of our species and maybe all life on this planet along with us. Considering just one scenario, we have the capacity, with only a minuscule amount of our nuclear weapons, to wipe out all life on this planet. We all know this. [continued after video]
Strange Days. Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth?
by SillyMickel Adzema
For the author’s readingof this part, click on the link to youtube above or click the video player here:
“The End Is Nigh!”
I used the phrase, just now, “end of the world,” deliberately. For I expect that it will evoke in some a reaction that what I am going to say from here on will be a drawn-out verbal version of a familiar cartoon, depicting a bearded and bedraggled man on a street corner, carrying a sign or wearing a clapboard proclaiming, “The end is near!” and that what I will say will have just about as much credibility as that man’s would.
I take that chance to make my first point…which is: The fact that we can so easily dismiss, ridicule, and smugly deride such ideas of apocalypse points to our complacency with these strangest and most precarious of days. In fact, we have lived with this unprecedented situation—dangling on a thread, as it were, above the abyss of nuclear annihilation, to name just one of the possible forces of extinction…we’ve lived with it for so long as for it to seem commonplace—as part of the normal and familiar furniture of our daily lives.
Wtf?
Heads in the Sand
It has become so much a part of our daily lives, in fact, that we hardly give it any thought anymore. But for a moment, let us just imagine a person from a previous time in history being somehow transported into this time and being made to understand the impending forces: environmental collapse, species extinction, nuclear threat, population explosion, virulent epidemic, possibly human-created earthquakes and thus tsunamis, planet poisoning, and so on.
Unless this person was Nostradamus, we can imagine this person would be hugely alarmed, to say the least. This person might well wonder at our nonchalance, or should we say apathy, in the face of such likely, not just potential, apocalypse. [Footnote 1]
So I won’t waste time pointing out the statistics that prove the premise that the current trends we are following are apocalyptic.
We need simply to look to our daily headlines. Need I remind of the dangers from catastrophes like Fukushima and the Gulf Oil Spill?
Care for Some Radiation with that Milk?
We have radiation mixing into the world ecosystem as I write. Fukushima alone is spreading radiation that’s off the charts into food, air, oceans, and has made it to the East Coast of the U.S. and beyond in just a short time. We also know that nuclear waste needs to be guarded for 25,000 years because of its toxicity…it is still deadly for 250,000 years. Yet we continue to excrete massive amounts of it into our globe and even after the Fukushima meltdowns to push for building more plants. [Footnote 2]
Dead Zones and Dolphins
We have watched baby dolphins by the hundreds washing up on Gulf coasts and the creation of hundred mile dead zones in our seas. BP stupidly used toxic chemicals to disperse the oil rather than to collect it. The dispersants themselves are toxic, but the much bigger crime was to make sure the even more toxic oil, which depletes the oxygen in the water and thus creates the dead zones, would be spread far and wide throughout the global water. Good for BP shares looking like they could fix it, bad for survival of oxygen-breathers on Earth.
So BP’s egregiously criminal move was the equivalent of sweeping dirt under the rug to clean up. Unfortunately there is no “away” in which it can “go.” So we have, in this incident alone, precipitated greatly the dying off of the life of the oceans—the oxygen-producing plankton—and, hence, the basis of all life on this planet.
*Cough, Cough*
To this ravaging of the lungs of the planet add worldwide runaway deforestation, already in full swing. I am practically choking as I think how we then stink up the air with industrial emissions and auto exhausts. Living in the LA area, I can tell you that I feel my mouth is sealed to the end of an exhaust pipe most of the time. So to the dangers bringing on our demise we need to add globally increasing air pollution.
Forget Your Sunscreen, We’re All Gonna fry.
Environmentally also, we have the greenhouse effect—global climate change or warming—the depletion of the ozone layer, and so on. [Footnote 3]
Al Gore is owed the gratitude of the world informing us of climate change in his book and documentary of the same name, Inconvenient Truth.
Meanwhile lots of folks think we have solved the ozone layer problem. We banned fluorocarbons, and we don’t hear much about this problem anymore in the media. Environmental nay-sayers are arguing that we “fixed” this problem, as part of their stance that we need not worry about what we’re doing to the planet. But not long ago—April 2011—CNN broadcast the news that the ozone had been depleted by 40% in the last two months alone! They immediately then turned to an item of dire importance—a snake had gotten loose in New York! [Footnote 4]
Only One Earth, Don’t Blow It!
Nor need I elaborate on the the nuclear threat–whether precipitated by terrorists, rogue nations, or accident. We know, but don’t want to, of the possibility of any one or more of these mad actors employing weapons of mass destruction, possibly leading to ever-mounting rounds of retaliation with eventually no one left standing. Relatedly we push out of our minds the threat of other kinds of weapons–such as biological weapons–getting out of control and creating a worldwide epidemic or holocaust.
Eight billion and Counting…Now Let’s Attack Planned Parenthood! *sarcasm*
Need I mention the continuing explosion of the world’s population leading to likely famine, wars, diseases, and so on? We have twice as many people alive now as the combined total of all humans who have ever lived! We are no different from bacteria who overrun their petri dish only to die off. We certainly aren’t showing ourselves to be any smarter than that. [Footnote 5]
Outbreak
How about the possibility of virulent epidemic that cannot be cured? Does that catch your fancy? Strains of micro-organisms are evolving that are immune to our much-touted antibiotics.
You Sure You Should Be Reading This?
What island were you stranded on?
But why go on? If you are not aware of these things, you are from some other planet. If you are dismissing these facts, you are in actual psychological denial of your dire situation. If you are not paying attention, you are spending your life desperately running away.
No, I won’t go into stats and figures to support the premise. The evidence and statistics are there for all to see, crying for attention, put out, published, and promulgated by the best scientists of our time, mixed in with the more mundane messages of our daily newspapers and nightly newscasts, though we mostly turn our ears from them.
We’ll Try to Save You, Too.
In fact, if you are not already aware of the global crisis that besets us, I do not think you will get much out of reading further in this book and would probably better spend your time doing something else. There will always be those that will have their heads in the sand and will be cast about like flotsam upon the waters by the events swirling around them–impotent in the face of them and dependent upon other’s actions for the result. If you are one, know we’re trying to save you, too.
Continue with people attending to political action but ignoring the environmental catastrophes rising up around us
Return to Something’s Happening Here: Strange Days, Pt 1
Strange Days. Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth?
by SillyMickel Adzema
For the author’s reading, with elaboration, of this part, click on the link to youtube above or click the video player here:
Footnotes
1. Gulf Oil Spill, Fukushima meltdowns, nuclear radiation, toxic nuclear waste, HAARP, killing off of the ocean–destroying oxygen in it, dead zones with no oxygen, dolphins washing up, birds falling out of the sky, bees disappearing, ozone depletion at the rate of 40% in the last two months alone, and a massive 50% species extinction in the next few decades, i.e., in our lifetimes! (now, enjoy your hamburger.) [return to text]
2. Spent Nuclear Fuel a Danger 250,000 YRS!
Spent nuclear fuel needs to be guarded for 24,000 years just to reach its half-life; needs to be kept away from humans for 250,000 years; and it is still highly radioactive after that.
Guess I’ll have to stay up late!
My comment: Oil Spills and Reactor Blowups: “Where is the fierce urgency of Now?!!!” I can’t believe the nonchalance around the huge environmental catastrophes that have gone on in just the last year alone: specifically, the Gulf Oil Spill and the Fukushima Japan nuclear disaster. When the BP disaster was ongoing and gushing devastating amounts of oil into the Gulf, Donna Brazille, frustrated with the Obama Administration’s response to the Spill, fumed aloud, “Where is the fierce urgency of Now?!!!”
But these hugely unprecedented environmental catastrophes, daily spreading the damage to our planet, are just two canaries in a coal mine.
We are just beginning to understand the immensity of the damage to our planet the Fukushima disaster did. We will probably not be told the degree of radiation exposure from it we are receiving until long after people have been dying in droves from it.
The BP oil spill of 2010 is, similarly, presenting ongoing planetary damage, which, like the Japan nuclear disaster, is, as I speak, not being reported. At this moment, in fact, dolphin carcasses in the hundreds are washing up on Gulf beaches, birds are dying and some are simply dropping dead out of the sky, and we know of at least one dead zone–caused by the BP oil spill–a dead zone being an area in the ocean where nothing can live for lack of oxygen–which is a hundred miles long and 12 miles wide. That is the only one that is being reported on, who knows how many more there are and how great is the ongoing damage?
But none of these dire events are being mentioned much in the media. We hear the reports, but then the media directs our attention to something else. So we cover our eyes to what is going on. We dismiss these events thinking that someone higher up than us is surely attending to the problem (dream on!). What’s worse is these things are only the tiny beginnings of much more that is bound to happen. If we don’t listen up, and wake up, we’ll be just as unprepared and helpless when the even worse and more dire events unfold. This is not a time to curl up under the covers.
For more: The Time Danger of ‘Spent’ Nuclear Fuel [return to text]
3. “We’re all gonna fry.” With appreciation to Scout Niblett, “We’re All Gonna Die/ Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death”
[return to text]
4. “We Lost 40% of Ozone Layer Last 3 Months” and from CNN in April, 2011 — “Ozone Depletion Over Arctic ‘Unprecedented’ This Winter“
My take on this: CNN reported this month that 40% of the ozone layer over the Arctic was depleted from December 21st, 2010 to March 31st, 2011–roughly three months. I heard a CNN anchor report this, with some alarm. The clip provides confirmation. I also watched as this anchor continued, after a few sentences on this, to another news item–about a snake getting loose in New York, if memory serves me. Guess life on this planet not as big a deal.
Btw, if you want to dismiss this by consoling yourself that it is “only” happening over the Arctic, consider what is happening in parts of the globe that aren’t being actively monitored. Seems to me if the lake goes down on the other side, the water is lower on my side as well. [return to text]
5. John Leslie, The End of the World. See, Ok we’re commiting species-suicide; but how DARE we become species-suicide-bombers killing all OTHER life with us! [return to text]
Strange Days. Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth?
by SillyMickel Adzema
For the author’s reading, with elaboration, of this part, click on the link to youtube above or click the video player here:
Continue with people attending to political action but ignoring the environmental catastrophes rising up around us
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Something’s Happening Here: Strange Days, Pt 1
Strange Days, Part One: Something’s Happening Here
Something’s Happening Here
“Nobody Told Me There’d Be Days Like These” – John Lennon
We live in unprecedented times—times in which the possibility of ending our species in our lifetime, even eliminating all life on this planet, are very real possibilities. No other time has been like this. And the effect of this possibility of the actual end of days, so to speak—while so horrifying that we are in denial of it and hardly speak it—hangs over us and affects us in ways unique and fantastic.
We will either heroically, somehow, save our species and our planet, which will require a change of our human nature unlike anything that has been asked of our species ever before, or we will be witnesses to the elimination of life on this planet in some way that we cannot imagine but can only be horrific in the extreme. This book is about facing, not denying, the uniquely dire character of our times and finding out what it says about us and requires of us. But it is also about what it is about our species that we—of all the other species here—are the ones, the only ones, who would bring about such a possibility. [continued after video]
Strange Days. Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth?
by SillyMickel Adzema
For the author’s reading of this part click on the link to youtube above or click the video player here:
Why do we poop where we sleep?
Just what is it about us that could allow us to so violate our home as to make the death of us all possible? This is something that somebody should be addressing, don’t you think? I will begin that here. Come along, if you dare.
But this is not for those who would prefer to keep their heads in the sand and to sleepwalk through life. Certainly that is part of the reason we could get to this pass But it is doubtful that such people, in such deep denial of the signs around them, would be able to hear what is here being brought to light. If instead you are of the type that would wish to look fiercely at the truth, no matter how horrifying it might be, and to truly witness and be awake in these most fantastic of times, then listen up.
Gaia’s calling you.
There is much here to see, and so much of it the mainstream would never touch for fear of creating a panic. Still, to survive our species must face our problems, not look away. And there is a nobility in doing that, which is unlike any kind of nobility or heroism that has been asked of our species before. I hope, for the sake of us all, that you are one of those heroes. For we will need many noble souls to reverse our current downslide into oblivion.
“Strange Days, Indeed. Most Peculiar, Mama!” – John Lennon
Something’s Happening Here
What it is ain’t exactly clear.
“Something’s happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.” So goes a hugely popular song from the sixties by Buffalo Springfield. Meanwhile Jim Morrison of the rock group The Doors sang, “Break on through to the other side.” [Footnote 1]
A decade later John Lennon sang “Strange days, indeed…most peculiar, mama!” That was in the late seventies; not long afterwards Lennon was murdered. In the nineties, the group R.E.M. enjoyed enormous success singing, “It’s the end of the world, as we know it”; then, singing parenthetically, “and I feel fine.” [Footnote 2]
Break on through to the other side.
My point is that there is something happening here…something unprecedented in the entire history of this planet, as far as we are able to know. There are powerful factors and influences at work in our world now that have the capacity to change us and our world in radical ways…for good or ill. My point also is that this unprecedented situation, like the “break on through to the other side” lyric indicates, has something to do with birth feelings, birth trauma—an emerging perinatal unconscious. [Footnote 3]
What I have in mind in the ensuing parts on this topic is to attempt to reawaken you to the unique character of our times. Then I expect to persuade you that this unprecedented era in history is rife with the perinatal, that is, with things having to do with the time around our births.
“We ain’t born typical.”
This contemporary age is permeated by perinatal symbolism, elements, evidence, behavior, rituals, and situations—in other words, I expect to show that the events of these “strange days” are being sculpted by an emerging perinatal unconscious—an unconscious that was created out of the trauma of our entering into this world, our birth trauma. The Kills, with their release in 2008, enjoyed huge success singing, “You are a fever. You ain’t born typical.” That’s what I’m talking about. [Footnote 4]
Finally, I intend to say a few words about what might be the outcome of these emerging perinatal trends—Earth rebirth or apocalypse.
Continue with
Wtf? The End Being Nigh: Strange Days, Pt 2
Return to The Only Important Question and About That Inner Monster of Yours: Thanatos Walking, Pt 4
Strange Days. Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth?
by SillyMickel Adzema
For the author’s reading, with elaboration, of this part, click on the link to youtube above or click the video player here:
Footnotes
1. Stop, Children, What’s That Sound – Buffalo Springfield – Lyrics
There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me i got to bewareI think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going downThere’s battle lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behindI think it’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going downWhat a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our sideIt’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going downParanoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you awayWe better stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Stop, now, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
2. It’s the End of the World as We Know It – R.E.M. – Lyrics
That’s great, it starts with an earthquake, birds,
snakes, an aeroplanes, Lenny Bruce is not afraid.
Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn – world
serves its own needs, dummy serve your own needs. Feed
it off an aux speak, grunt, no, strength, Ladder
start to clatter with fear fight down height. Wire
in a fire, representing seven games, a government
for hire and a combat site. Left of west and coming in
a hurry with the furies breathing down your neck. Team
by team reporters baffled, trumped, tethered cropped.
Look at that low playing! Fine, then. Uh oh,
overflow, population, common food, but it’ll do. Save
yourself, serve yourself. World serves its own needs,
listen to your heart bleed dummy with the rapture and
the revered and the right, right. You vitriolic,
patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty
psyched.[Chorus:]
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.Six o’clock – TV hour. Don’t get caught in foreign
towers. Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself
churn. Locking in, uniforming, book burning, blood
letting. Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate.
Light a votive, light a candle. Step down, step down.
Watch your heel crush, crushed, uh-oh, this means no
fear cavalier. Renegade steer clear! A tournament,
tournament, a tournament of lies. Offer me solutions,
offer me alternatives and I decline.[Chorus 2x]
The other night I dreamt of knives, continental
drift divide. Mountains sit in a line, Leonard
Bernstein. Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester
Bangs. Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom! You
symbiotic, patriotic, slam book neck, right? Right.[Chorus 2x]
3. Break on Through to the Other Side – The Doors – Lyrics
You know the day destroys the night,
Night divides the day
Tried to run, tried to hide,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side, yeah.We chased our pleasures here,
Dug our treasures there,
But can you still recall the time we cried?
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side.Yeah!
C’mon, yeah.Everybody loves my baby,
Everybody loves my baby.
She gets
She gets
She gets
She gets higghhhh!I found an island in your arms,
A country in your eyes,
Arms that chained us, eyes that lied.
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through, wow, oh yeah!Made the scene week to week,
Day to day, hour to hour,
The gate is straight, deep and wide,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through,
Break on through,
Break on through,
Break on through,
Break, break, break, break,
Break, break, break, break,
Break.
4. “U R A Fever” Is What I’m Talking About
Lyrics – U.R.A. Fever – The Kills
Walk you to the counter
What do you got to offer
Pick you out a solder
Look at you forever
Walk you to the water
Your eyes like a casino
We ain’t born typical
Find a piece of silver
Pretty as a diagram
And go down to the Rio
Put it in my left hand
Put it in a fruit machine
Everyone’s a winner
Laughing like a seagull
You are a fever
You are a fever
You ain’t born typical
You are a fever
You are a fever
You ain’t born typical
Living in a suitcase
Meet a clown, fall in love
went down to have you over
Going ’round a break up
Take you to a jukebox
That’s the situation
Pick you out a number
And that’s our arrangement
Dancing on the legs of a new-born pony
Left right left right
Keep it up son
Go ahead and have her
Go ahead and leave her
You only ever had her
When you were a fever
I am a fever
I am a fever
I ain’t born typical
I am a fever
I am a fever
I ain’t born typical
We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical
We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical
We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical
We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical
[return to text]
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Wtf? The End Being Nigh: Strange Days, Pt 2
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Strange Days. Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth?
Strange Days. Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth?
More at Something’s Happening Here: Strange Days, Pt 1
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Something’s Happening Here .. If You’re Not Alarmed, You’re Not Paying Attention
Apocalypse No! Chapter Six:
Strange Days
Something’s Happening Here
“Nobody Told Me There’d Be Days Like These” – John Lennon
We live in unprecedented times—times in which the possibility of ending our species in our lifetime, even eliminating all life on this planet, are very real possibilities. No other time has been like this. And the effect of this possibility of the actual end of days, so to speak—while so horrifying that we are in denial of it and hardly speak it—hangs over us and affects us in ways unique and fantastic.
We will either heroically, somehow, save our species and our planet, which will require a change of our human nature unlike anything that has been asked of our species ever before, or we will be witnesses to the elimination of life on this planet in some way that we cannot imagine but can only be horrific in the extreme. This book is about facing, not denying, the uniquely dire character of our times and finding out what it says about us and requires of us. But it is also about what it is about our species that we—of all the other species here—are the ones, the only ones, who would bring about such a possibility.
Why do we poop where we sleep?
Just what is it about us that could allow us to so violate our home as to make the death of us all possible? This is something that somebody should be addressing, don’t you think? I will begin that here. Come along, if you dare.
But this is not for those who would prefer to keep their heads in the sand and to sleepwalk through life. Certainly that is part of the reason we could get to this pass But it is doubtful that such people, in such deep denial of the signs around them, would be able to hear what is here being brought to light. If instead you are of the type that would wish to look fiercely at the truth, no matter how horrifying it might be, and to truly witness and be awake in these most fantastic of times, then listen up.
Gaia’s calling you.
There is much here to see, and so much of it the mainstream would never touch for fear of creating a panic. Still, to survive our species must face our problems, not look away. And there is a nobility in doing that, which is unlike any kind of nobility or heroism that has been asked of our species before. I hope, for the sake of us all, that you are one of those heroes. For we will need many noble souls to reverse our current downslide into oblivion.
Apocalypse, Or New Dawn? – “Strange Days”
– an audiocast by SillyMickel Adzema
For the author’s reading, with elaboration, of this chapter, click on the link to the audio site above or click the audio player here:
http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=qynqmjwlmk
Image of Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth? Ch 1 Strange Days by SillyMickel Adzema
“Strange Days, Indeed. Most Peculiar, Mama!” – John Lennon
Something’s Happening Here
What it is ain’t exactly clear.
“Something’s happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.” So goes a hugely popular song from the sixties by Buffalo Springfield. Meanwhile Jim Morrison of the rock group The Doors sang, “Break on through to the other side.” [Footnote 1]
A decade later John Lennon sang “Strange days, indeed…most peculiar, mama!” That was in the late seventies; not long afterwards Lennon was murdered. In the nineties, the group R.E.M. enjoyed enormous success singing, “It’s the end of the world, as we know it”; then, singing parenthetically, “and I feel fine.” [Footnote 2]
Break on through to the other side.
My point is that there is something happening here…something unprecedented in the entire history of this planet, as far as we are able to know. There are powerful factors and influences at work in our world now that have the capacity to change us and our world in radical ways…for good or ill. My point also is that this unprecedented situation, like the “break on through to the other side” lyric indicates, has something to do with birth feelings, birth trauma—an emerging perinatal unconscious. [Footnote 3]
What I have in mind in the ensuing parts on this topic is to attempt to reawaken you to the unique character of our times. Then I expect to persuade you that this unprecedented era in history is rife with the perinatal, that is, with things having to do with the time around our births.
“We ain’t born typical.”
This contemporary age is permeated by perinatal symbolism, elements, evidence, behavior, rituals, and situations—in other words, I expect to show that the events of these “strange days” are being sculpted by an emerging perinatal unconscious—an unconscious that was created out of the trauma of our entering into this world, our birth trauma. The Kills, with their release in 2008, enjoyed huge success singing, “You are a fever. You ain’t born typical.” That’s what I’m talking about. [Footnote 4]
Finally, I intend to say a few words about what might be the outcome of these emerging perinatal trends—Earth rebirth or apocalypse.
Strange Days
For most people, I would assume I am not saying anything new in pointing out that our times are unique. For that matter, all times are unique—unlike any other. But what no other time has seen is the actual—not imagined—possibility, even likelihood, of the “end of the world.” That is to say, we are facing the end of our species and maybe all life on this planet along with us. Considering just one scenario, we have the capacity, with only a minuscule amount of our nuclear weapons, to wipe out all life on this planet. We all know this.
“The end is nigh!”
I used the phrase, just now, “end of the world,” deliberately. For I expect that it will evoke in some a reaction that what I am going to say from here on will be a drawn-out verbal version of a familiar cartoon, depicting a bearded and bedraggled man on a street corner, carrying a sign or wearing a clapboard proclaiming, “The end is near!” and that what I will say will have just about as much credibility as that man’s would.
I take that chance to make my first point…which is: The fact that we can so easily dismiss, ridicule, and smugly deride such ideas of apocalypse points to our complacency with these strangest and most precarious of days. In fact, we have lived with this unprecedented situation—dangling on a thread, as it were, above the abyss of nuclear annihilation, to name just one of the possible forces of extinction…we’ve lived with it for so long as for it to seem commonplace—as part of the normal and familiar furniture of our daily lives.
Heads In the Sand
Wtf?
It has become so much a part of our daily lives, in fact, that we hardly give it any thought anymore. But for a moment, let us just imagine a person from a previous time in history being somehow transported into this time and being made to understand the impending forces: 
environmental collapse, species extinction, nuclear threat, population explosion, virulent epidemic, possibly human-created earthquakes and thus tsunamis, planet poisoning, and so on. Unless this person was Nostradamus, we can imagine this person would be hugely alarmed, to say the least. This person might well wonder at our nonchalance, or should we say apathy, in the face of such likely, not just potential, apocalypse. [Footnote 5]
So I won’t waste time pointing out the statistics that prove the premise that the current trends we are following are apocalyptic.
We need simply to look to our daily headlines. Need I remind of the dangers from catastrophes like Fukushima and the Gulf Oil Spill?
Care for some radiation with that milk?
We have radiation mixing into the world ecosystem as I write. Fukushima alone is spreading radiation that’s off the charts into food, air, oceans, and has made it to the East Coast of the U.S. and beyond in just a short time. 
We also know that nuclear waste needs to be guarded for 25,000 years because of its toxicity…it is still deadly for 250,000 years. Yet we continue to excrete massive amounts of it into our globe and even after the Fukushima meltdowns to push for building more plants. [Footnote 6]
Dead zones and dolphins
We have watched baby dolphins by the hundreds washing up on Gulf coasts and the creation of hundred mile dead zones in our seas. 
BP stupidly used toxic chemicals to disperse the oil rather than to collect it. The dispersants themselves are toxic, but the much bigger crime was to make sure the even more toxic oil, which depletes the oxygen in the water and thus creates the dead zones, would be spread far and wide throughout the global water. Good for BP shares looking like they could fix it, bad for survival of oxygen-breathers on Earth.
So BP’s egregiously criminal move was the equivalent of sweeping dirt under the rug to clean up. Unfortunately there is no “away” in which it can “go.” So we have, in this incident alone, precipitated greatly the dying off of the life of the oceans—the oxygen-producing plankton—and, hence, the basis of all life on this planet.
*cough, cough*
To this ravaging of the lungs of the planet add worldwide runaway deforestation, already in full swing. I am practically choking as I think how we then stink up the air with industrial emissions and auto exhausts. Living in the LA area, I can tell you that I feel my mouth is sealed to the end of an exhaust pipe most of the time. So to the dangers bringing on our demise we need to add globally increasing air pollution.
Forget your sunscreen, we’re all gonna fry.
Environmentally also, we have the greenhouse effect—global climate change or warming—the depletion of the ozone layer, and so on. [Footnote 7]
Al Gore is owed the gratitude of the world informing us of climate change in his book and documentary of the same name, Inconvenient Truth.
Meanwhile lots of folks think we have solved the ozone layer problem. We banned fluorocarbons, and we don’t hear much about this problem anymore in the media. Environmental nay-sayers are arguing that we “fixed” this problem, as part of their stance that we need not worry about what we’re doing to the planet. But just this month—April 2011—CNN broadcast the news that the ozone had been depleted by 40% in the last two months alone! They immediately then turned to an item of dire importance pertaining to business. [Footnote 8]
Only one Earth, don’t blow it!
Nor need I elaborate on the the nuclear threat–whether precipitated by terrorists, rogue nations, or accident. We know, but don’t want to, of the possibility of any one or more of these mad actors employing weapons of mass destruction, possibly leading to ever-mounting rounds of retaliation with eventually no one left standing. Relatedly we push out of our minds the threat of other kinds of weapons–such as biological weapons–getting out of control and creating a worldwide epidemic or holocaust.
Eight billion and counting, now let’s attack Planned Parenthood! *sarcasm*
Need I mention the continuing explosion of the world’s population leading to likely famine, wars, diseases, and so on? We have twice as many people alive now as the combined total of all humans who have ever lived! We are no different from bacteria who overrun their petri dish only to die off. We certainly aren’t showing ourselves to be any smarter than that. [Footnote 6]
Outbreak
How about the possibility of virulent epidemic that cannot be cured? Does that catch your fancy? Strains of micro-organisms are evolving that are immune to our much-touted antibiotics.
What island were you stranded on?
But why go on? If you are not aware of these things, you are from some other planet. If you are dismissing these facts, you are in actual psychological denial of your dire situation. If you are not paying attention, you are spending your life desperately running away.
No, I won’t go into stats and figures to support the premise. The evidence and statistics are there for all to see, crying for attention, put out, published, and promulgated by the best scientists of our time, mixed in with the more mundane messages of our daily newspapers and nightly newscasts, though we mostly turn our ears from them.
You sure you should be reading this?
In fact, if you are not already aware of the global crisis that besets us, I do not think you will get much out of reading further in this book and would probably better spend your time doing something else. There will always be those that will have their heads in the sand and will be cast about like flotsam upon the waters by the events swirling around them–impotent in the face of them and dependent upon other’s actions for the result. If you are one, know we’re trying to save you, too.
Assuming you are not one of them–a good bet, if you’ve managed to get to this paragraph–there is much to say about the current apocalyptic trends.
Facing Foursquare
But even those of us aware of this crisis hardly think of it. Of course it is our normal psychic defenses that operate to keep this huge awareness out of our daily minds; we must do this in order to be able to function.But perhaps, for some of us, our defenses work too well–so much so that we unthinkingly participate in and contribute to our own demise. This is classic neurotic self-sabotaging, self-destruction on a macro scale.
However, psychologists, historians, psychohistorians, and scholars and the educated public claim not to be like that. It is their job, or their claim, to be looking squarely into the face of these forces of denial and potential apocalypse and to be seeking to understand the human condition and human psychology in light of them. It is their duty then to inform the rest of us about what they see so that we might have a chance of reversing our self-destructive tendencies.
If you’re not alarmed, you’re not paying attention.
Whether the educated public and the multitude of scholars actually are fulfilling their mission in these times is debatable. Regardless, my thesis is that when we do this, when we look foursquare into the face of the global crisis and its accompanying denial, we find that these unprecedented global factors contribute to a unique and unprecedented human condition and psychology. I have seen a bumper sticker around, in California where I live, that proclaims, “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention!” It could as easily say, however, “If you’re not alarmed,” fearful, anxious, depressed . . . you name it, “You’re not paying attention!”
So then let us pay attention. This book is about facing foursquare into the fantastic circumstances and situation in which we find ourselves, watching, like a photograph emerging in solution, as the face of these times slowly comes into view, and then waking up to the meaning of the message, perhaps the warning, it brings us, so that we might live most fully and take up our roles consciously amid these unprecedented unfoldings. What is required of us now, then, having turned to receive the message, is to look deep into the features of our age. Let us begin.
Continue on this site with
Apocalypse – No! Chapter Seven:
“We Ain’t Born Typical”
Footnotes
1. Stop, Children, What’s That Sound – Buffalo Springfield – Lyrics
There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me i got to bewareI think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going downThere’s battle lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behindI think it’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going downWhat a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our sideIt’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going downParanoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you awayWe better stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Stop, now, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
2. It’s the End of the World as We Know It – R.E.M. – Lyrics
That’s great, it starts with an earthquake, birds,
snakes, an aeroplanes, Lenny Bruce is not afraid.
Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn – world
serves its own needs, dummy serve your own needs. Feed
it off an aux speak, grunt, no, strength, Ladder
start to clatter with fear fight down height. Wire
in a fire, representing seven games, a government
for hire and a combat site. Left of west and coming in
a hurry with the furies breathing down your neck. Team
by team reporters baffled, trumped, tethered cropped.
Look at that low playing! Fine, then. Uh oh,
overflow, population, common food, but it’ll do. Save
yourself, serve yourself. World serves its own needs,
listen to your heart bleed dummy with the rapture and
the revered and the right, right. You vitriolic,
patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty
psyched.[Chorus:]
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.Six o’clock – TV hour. Don’t get caught in foreign
towers. Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself
churn. Locking in, uniforming, book burning, blood
letting. Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate.
Light a votive, light a candle. Step down, step down.
Watch your heel crush, crushed, uh-oh, this means no
fear cavalier. Renegade steer clear! A tournament,
tournament, a tournament of lies. Offer me solutions,
offer me alternatives and I decline.[Chorus 2x]
The other night I dreamt of knives, continental
drift divide. Mountains sit in a line, Leonard
Bernstein. Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester
Bangs. Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom! You
symbiotic, patriotic, slam book neck, right? Right.[Chorus 2x]
3. Break on Through to the Other Side – The Doors – Lyrics
You know the day destroys the night,
Night divides the day
Tried to run, tried to hide,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side, yeah.We chased our pleasures here,
Dug our treasures there,
But can you still recall the time we cried?
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side.Yeah!
C’mon, yeah.Everybody loves my baby,
Everybody loves my baby.
She gets
She gets
She gets
She gets higghhhh!I found an island in your arms,
A country in your eyes,
Arms that chained us, eyes that lied.
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through, wow, oh yeah!Made the scene week to week,
Day to day, hour to hour,
The gate is straight, deep and wide,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through,
Break on through,
Break on through,
Break on through,
Break, break, break, break,
Break, break, break, break,
Break.
4. “U R A Fever” Is What I’m Talking About
Lyrics – U.R.A. Fever – The Kills
Walk you to the counter
What do you got to offer
Pick you out a solder
Look at you forever
Walk you to the water
Your eyes like a casino
We ain’t born typical
Find a piece of silver
Pretty as a diagram
And go down to the Rio
Put it in my left hand
Put it in a fruit machine
Everyone’s a winner
Laughing like a seagull
You are a fever
You are a fever
You ain’t born typical
You are a fever
You are a fever
You ain’t born typical
Living in a suitcase
Meet a clown, fall in love
went down to have you over
Going ’round a break up
Take you to a jukebox
That’s the situation
Pick you out a number
And that’s our arrangement
Dancing on the legs of a new-born pony
Left right left right
Keep it up son
Go ahead and have her
Go ahead and leave her
You only ever had her
When you were a fever
I am a fever
I am a fever
I ain’t born typical
I am a fever
I am a fever
I ain’t born typical
We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical
We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical
We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical
We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical
[return to text]
5. Gulf Oil Spill, Fukushima meltdowns, nuclear radiation, toxic nuclear waste, HAARP, killing off of the ocean–destroying oxygen in it, dead zones with no oxygen, dolphins washing up, birds falling out of the sky, bees disappearing, ozone depletion at the rate of 40% in the last two months alone, and a massive 50% species extinction in the next few decades, i.e., in our lifetimes! (now, enjoy your hamburger.) [return to text]
6. Spent Nuclear Fuel a Danger 250,000 YRS!
Spent nuclear fuel needs to be guarded for 24,000 years just to reach its half-life; needs to be kept away from humans for 250,000 years; and it is still highly radioactive after that.
Guess I’ll have to stay up late!
My comment: Oil Spills and Reactor Blowups: “Where is the fierce urgency of Now?!!!” I can’t believe the nonchalance around the huge environmental catastrophes that have gone on in just the last year alone: specifically, the Gulf Oil Spill and the Fukushima Japan nuclear disaster. When the BP disaster was ongoing and gushing devastating amounts of oil into the Gulf, Donna Brazille, frustrated with the Obama Administration’s response to the Spill, fumed aloud, “Where is the fierce urgency of Now?!!!”
But these hugely unprecedented environmental catastrophes, daily spreading the damage to our planet, are just two canaries in a coal mine.
We are just beginning to understand the immensity of the damage to our planet the Fukushima disaster did. We will probably not be told the degree of radiation exposure from it we are receiving until long after people have been dying in droves from it.
The BP oil spill of 2010 is, similarly, presenting ongoing planetary damage, which, like the Japan nuclear disaster, is, as I speak, not being reported. At this moment, in fact, dolphin carcasses in the hundreds are washing up on Gulf beaches, birds are dying and some are simply dropping dead out of the sky, and we know of at least one dead zone–caused by the BP oil spill–a dead zone being an area in the ocean where nothing can live for lack of oxygen–which is a hundred miles long and 12 miles wide. That is the only one that is being reported on, who knows how many more there are and how great is the ongoing damage?
But none of these dire events are being mentioned much in the media. We hear the reports, but then the media directs our attention to something else. So we cover our eyes to what is going on. We dismiss these events thinking that someone higher up than us is surely attending to the problem (dream on!). What’s worse is these things are only the tiny beginnings of much more that is bound to happen. If we don’t listen up, and wake up, we’ll be just as unprepared and helpless when the even worse and more dire events unfold. This is not a time to curl up under the covers.
For more: The Time Danger of ‘Spent’ Nuclear Fuel [return to text]
7. “We’re all gonna fry.” With appreciation to Scout Niblett, “We’re All Gonna Die/ Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death”
[return to text]
8. “We Lost 40% of Ozone Layer Last 3 Months” and from CNN in April, 2011 — “Ozone Depletion Over Arctic ‘Unprecedented’ This Winter”
My take on this: CNN reported this month that 40% of the ozone layer over the Arctic was depleted from December 21st, 2010 to March 31st, 2011–roughly three months. I heard a CNN anchor report this, with some alarm. The clip provides confirmation. I also watched as this anchor continued, after a few sentences on this, to another news item–about an unrelated business development or some such. Guess life on this planet not as big a deal.
Btw, if you want to dismiss this by consoling yourself that it is “only” happening over the Arctic, consider what is happening in parts of the globe that aren’t being actively monitored. Seems to me if the lake goes down on the other side, the water is lower on my side as well. [return to text]
9. John Leslie, The End of the World. See ,Ok we’re commiting species-suicide; but how DARE we become species-suicide-bombers killing all OTHER life with us! [return to text]
Continue on this site with
Apocalypse – No! Chapter Seven:
“We Ain’t Born Typical”
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The Great Reveal by SillyMickel & the PlanetMates 