PART FOUR
The Necessary Hero
CHAPTER 25
Activist Imperative of Prenatal/Perinatal Understanding:
How Crazy Is Insanity … How Deadly is Dead
Humanicide and Omni-Extinction … and a Sane Response: What I Found Out
At this point in the book, let us summarize some of what I have said so far and begin to look at what can be done about all this.
Our Situation Is Dire
What did I find out, especially as it pertains to this book? I found out that we are in a unique time in history … a time unlike any other in the multibillion year history of this planet. And we are of a unique species where we are capable of ending all life on this planet very soon. And we are likely to do that.
I found out that this situation is especially dire because we have not merely crazy people in charge and insane societies, as Fromm (1955) long ago pointed out and more recently deMause (1982, 2002) has been reminding us. We find that the starting point for doing anything about our precipitous plunge into oblivion is essentially a psychotic culture. We need to get there, from here. And here is a place where the overwhelming proportion of people are looking away from a threat that will shorten their lives, kill off their children before their time, and most likely end all life on this planet in their lifetimes.
We Are Insane
Still, you balk at the word psychotic in describing current cultures and societies? First, remember that the definition of psychotic is not what comes to people’s mind … someone in a straitjacket pounding one’s head against a wall … a street person collapsed, unconscious, drooling, sitting up against a wall on a city street. No. the definition of psychotic is someone in their own world, one that is divorced from reality. Quoting now, psychosis is “a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality.” Psychotic societies and peoples would be groups who are divorced from reality, collectively.
Now, would you refrain from using that word to describe a culture and people who could murder millions upon millions of Jews and others of nationalities or physical makeup dissimilar to themselves? I doubt you would have a problem labeling psychotic a Nazi society who went about systematic murder on such a grand scale. Now, you tell me how it is not psychotic — that is to say, completely dissociated from reality — to continue along with normal life with a holocaust of much greater magnitude approaching rapidly?
Just Call Me Neo. Lol.
The only reason people do not recognize themselves as psychotic is that they cannot see themselves from a point outside of their disease; they are immersed in it and confuse it with reality. Think, The Matrix, for example. One has to be outside it to see it. I dare say that it is only because I have gone through a lengthy process of primal therapy, of being unplugged from the “matrix,” as it were, that I am able to see it. This is what I mean when I say that in the process of becoming saner and saner about ourselves in primal therapy, we eventually became saner about society and reality in general. Exotically speaking, we saw reality from outside the Matrix.
It Will Be Difficult
At any rate, in that we do live in psychotic societies, to address this problem of omni-extinction is necessarily going to be difficult. It is harder than it would otherwise be, because we cannot help but feel ourselves to be alienated from the larger society and culture when we go about doing exactly that which is in that larger society’s and culture’s interest and which they should be doing, or at least supporting us in doing. We cannot help but even question ourselves, our motives, even our sanity in this situation where to be sane means to have to split off so much from our social context — a context decidedly insane.
What is the definition of insanity, after all? Well, as Einstein saw it, insanity is continuing to do the same thing, which has failed, expecting different results. What else is it but insane to go about, in Icarus style, proceeding with the construction of nuclear plants, Chernobyl and Fukushima in our rear-view mirror; going along with the use of fossil fuels, unprecedented weather patterns and Hurricane Katrina just behind us; not addressing the plight of millions of species of planetmates going extinct at a rate one-thousand to ten-thousand times normal, in awareness that our survival depends on them; ignoring the collapse of an ecosystem in full swing, one in which we are immersed and upon which we are fully dependent; and simply not changing our normal lives, even as we know that unless we do, it will have mortal consequences for ourselves and all life we know, including our loved ones?
Just How Crazy Is Insanity?
Not insane enough? How about the fact that to top off all that ignore-ance we pat ourselves on the back, even deem ourselves especially “strong” in our “ego strength,” in being able to keep the awareness of the danger threatening our lives out of our minds … congratulating ourselves that we are “compartmentalizing” it? Does it, let us say, make any sense to continue working in one’s office in one’s house, while one’s house is on fire … saying we are “strong” and “healthy” for being able to do that?
No. Of course not.
So we have to save ourselves and the life around us, but in doing so we are going to come up against the insanity of our cultures and societies. We are going to be in conflict with them, and we are going to be stymied and set upon by our social environments, even as we attempt to address the fate of our physical environment — one in which they, as well, are immersed and upon which they are dependent.
How It Is I Was Able to Find It Out
Let me tell you that my unique understanding of our danger is rooted in the therapies and the prenatal and perinatal understandings I have been delineating in this book.
After Physician Healing Herself….
For, as I said, early in my life I, like many of my generation, saw the problems and realized we had to go inward, first, before we could address them. We had to fix ourselves, first. I and the others of my cohorts who went into primal therapy got saner and saner in the process of it. We were able to “fix” ourselves. But something else happened.
As I just said, those of us who became saner and saner through this process of facing the truth about ourselves also became clearer and clearer in realizing the truth about the world, which is the knowing that everybody else is denying. Emboldened through facing ourselves, you might say, we were enabled to face as well other hard truths about realities outside ourselves. Just as in therapy people uncover the things about themselves that they have been hiding from themselves, so also, after a bit, we were able to encounter and face the truths that the world is hiding from itself.
Just How Deadly is Dead?
The most important of those truths is that we are rapidly going extinct … we are rapidly ending life on this planet. Within anywhere between fifteen to thirty-five years half of the species now existing are going to be extinct.
There are estimated to be nine million species, excluding bacteria, on Earth. Another estimate has it at five hundred million; I assume that would have to include all kinds of things that are considered living, including species of bacteria. But still, nine million, at least. And consider that roughly half of them, or four and a half million of them, are supposed to be gone, to be extinct within mere decades … and likely within our very lifetimes.
As for the exactness of those figures … the actual amount of extinction and the time frame … well, they are hardly relevant, though many reading this would want to take up that train of thought to avoid knowing this hard reality. Why? You see, the actual figures are not relevant, as there is no need to quibble about how many species when any amount of extinction in any way in the same universe of these figures would be equally dire.
For we are part of a fragile ecosystem. Do we really think we are going to be alive at that point, after anywhere near that level of extinction? Do we think that losing a good proportion of the species on this planet — many of which have been here for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years — within a few short decades, within our lifetime, is not going to have consequences for our own lives? And what will be the extinction rate afterward? Do we think such a dying off of life on this planet would not accelerate thereupon, as the very ecosystem of this planet implodes with ever more consequences and increasingly less support for the life and species remaining?
Quibble if it makes you feel better to do so, but realize also that the extinction scenario is a barometer of an even larger problem. Rather, problems. For the extinction rate is just one of the many things that are going on that are signs of omni-extinction and ecosystem collapse. You just have to think of the many new things we are putting into our environment that have never existed before and that will not go away or decompose, some of them, for hundreds or thousands of years. Plastics are only one example. All kinds of new, man-made, chemicals, with long-term effects unknown or deadly, we are pouring into our environment with about the level of concern of a drunken canine. It is no coincidence that currently we are inundated with zombie images and movies. A part of us knows how unconscious are the great majority of humans at this time.
Furthermore, we are still dangling on a thread, facing a nuclear apocalypse at any time. With the crazy people who are running the governments of the world, anything can happen. Additionally, we have Fukushima — an extinction level event — at this very moment radiating the planet and poisoning us to death. We have managed to construct numerous avenues to apocalypse. Global warming; nuclear radiation and war; uncontrollable outbreaks of new diseases now resistant to our antibiotics; continued loss of the ozone layer, making our very sunshine an increasing threat; dying off of the phytoplankton in the oceans, our oxygen source, leading to suffocation and death of all oxygen breathing species; ongoing deforestation augmenting that oxygen loss and suffocation; release of massive amounts of methane from melting polar ice caps, added to the already number one cause of global warming, the methane released because of animal husbandry — that is to say, “meat farming” — causing our weather and ocean levels to spiral increasingly out of control; and on and on.
The Activist Imperative
The point I am making is that, where I come from, not only have I been, in that aspect of it, facing the truth about, and trying to alert others to facing things we need to face, but I have also been an activist. I have been involved in the environmental movement for many decades. I was involved in the anti-nuclear campaign back in the Eighties.
Whoops!!
Back then, I was on the staff of Oregon Fair Share and was canvassing door-to-door on the anti-nuke issue. At that time, the nuclear power plants that were being built, in Washington State, were the WPPSS plants (Washington Public Power Supply System). They were facetiously called “whoops” plants, because they were way, way, way over-budget, over-cost, and they were going to end up costing the people in the Northwest part of the country roughly twelve-thousand dollars per household, over time, of course, through increases in their utility bills.1 And that price tag was just to mothball the plants, that is, to put the construction done on them at that point under wraps for a time when the construction might be able to be completed. Keep in mind, this cost to the residents of the Northwest would not get them any power for their money. We would be paying to cover the costs of the bad decisions made by those investors and municipal and regional officials who had decided on building them.
Well, we created an uprising in the early Eighties, in Springfield and Eugene as well as around the state, that resulted in the city of Springfield, in 1983, refusing to shoulder those costs and taking the loss in their bond rating that resulted. Specifically, our community activism precipitated a lawsuit, which, winning, caused the city of Springfield to default on the bonds issued to fund the plants. The lawsuit hinged on a piece of information dug up by the research arm of Oregon Fair Share: The City Charter of Springfield stipulated that its citizens could not be indebted above a particular specified amount without a vote of the people. The cost overruns at the WPPSS plants were such an exorbitant indebtedness, way above what the City Charter allowed. Since there had been no vote in Springfield, default on the bonds was the only legal course. Once Springfield defaulted, many other municipalities in the Northwest United States followed suit. The investors had to swallow the consequences of their bad investment.
Bailouts Do Not Foster Wise Decision-Making in Future Investments
If you do not see the magnitude of that, consider an analogy from more recent history. What if, rather than bailing out the banks, in 2008, from their bad investments that caused the Great Recession, which began at that time, the people of the United States had not ponied up their trillion dollars plus and instead made the investors suffer their loss? Remember, when the United States bailed out the banks, it was with taxpayer money. So we all suffered, and paid, for the bad investments of those financial “wizards.” Indeed, this refusal to capitulate to financial blackmail is along the lines of what Icelanders did about that same situation in their country, with phenomenally good results for their economy coming forth from it. What I am saying is, rather than continuing to be under the threat of further financial boondoggles in future times, emanating from a moneyed elite convinced they can risk others’ money without consequences, might we not be in a better situation now if the United States had done something like what Springfield did decades earlier?
But more than that, would not an action by the United States in 2008, similar to Springfield’s, have sent a clear message to the moneyed elite that if they did not make better decisions in this regard in the future, the people of the United States were not just going to roll over when told to? That investors would have to be wiser in their decisions? For then they would be risking all of their investment?
Well, that is what happened with nuclear plant investment after Springfield. Since it was clear as day to fat cats that entire communities were willing to lose their bond rating rather than submit to such robbery by the 1%, they stopped pursuing it.
Essentially that is what happened with nuclear plant construction from the Eighties on. With the investors being made to absorb the consequences of their misjudgment of investing in nuclear energy, no more applications to build nuclear power plants were submitted after that. Our actions in Oregon resulted in bringing down nuclear power plant construction in the United States. No more applications were filed, because power producers realized nuclear energy was not going to be cost effective. We stopped nuclear power in the United States.
The point for my purposes here is, however, that we were against nuclear energy — a dire threat to our environment — and we did something about it. Many of those involved, including myself, were not so much concerned about it costing too much but rather because it is just one more nail in the coffin of our extinction. I mean, we can see that with what happened with the Fukushima plants. We were predicting such an event as happened at Fukushima, an earthquake creating a nuclear catastrophe, back then, in the Eighties.
The point also is that we were successful in changing our future only by taking action on the issue. In Oregon, we changed things. In Iceland things changed. But after the Great Recession bailout, we are in the same situation in the United States in being threatened by future financial mismanagement, because the Bush Administration at that time kowtowed to corporate and elite interests.
Activist Imperative of Prenatal/Perinatal Understanding
You see, I have been involved in therapy and have been a therapist, facilitator, and teacher; I am involved in psychology, spirituality, and higher consciousness and have been an academic and researcher; but I am also an activist.
If you have been asking yourself, is this book an activist book? Or is it a book on theoretical psychology? Here is where I am trying to clarify that for you. For this book needs to be both. One cannot be at all effective as an activist if one does not truly address the problems at their actual roots or at least consider and include those understandings in one’s approach. On the other hand, one should not care about just knowing anything if one does not include in that to apply it to bettering the condition or situation of others in this world.
Don’t Be a “Brain-Sucker”
Having knowledge without putting it into use or action leaves one depressed, overwhelmed, and dull. In fact, knowing without action is lazy, selfish, and is a form of intellectual self-abuse. I know, for I found many of these pseudo-intellectual sorts during my evenings “on the turf” when I was doing my anti-nuke canvassing. We used to call them “brain suckers,” for they would want more and more and more information … and they would argue about all of it … and they would say they have to look over the materials before doing anything, regardless how small. But rarely did they take any action. The actual number of those who did was roughly one in one hundred. So these brain-suckers merely got in the way of those of us who were trying to help and wasted our time.
No doubt they never heard, or took to heart, what we used to say, “Either lead, follow, or get out of the way.” Nor either had they considered what we also used to say (and I hope some folks still do), “You are either part of the solution. Or you are part of the problem.” Both of those things are as true as they ever were, and yet there are many folks who would benefit from learning them, but they refuse to.
So, no, this book is not for them; it is not for the “brain suckers.” Indeed, this book is dedicated to folks who are not like them (see Dedication).
Thus, this is an activist book that presents a major theory in psychology … one needed for activism to truly be effective.
Also, it is a book in theoretical psychology, which has an activist slant. For one should not merely know this, without putting it to use in one’s life. In truth, I doubt that anyone reading this could learn these things without wishing to put them to use. For they are too compelling and provocative; they provide the necessary urgency and the required hope for success.
The point is that when one is really looking at oneself, one also encounters the truths about us all. And that is another reason that this book is, and needs to be, as it is.
CHAPTER 26
Crisis and Opportunity:
The Better Angels of Our Nature Are Being Summoned
Angels and “Demons”
Our Situation Is Dire, Yet It Presents an Opportunity
We are going over a cliff, yes. But I am all about making it the greatest adventure of all, making it the grandest thing, making it the most momentous raising of consciousness imaginable. We are all in this together for the first time ever, because all of our lives are at stake. Our children’s lives are at stake. There has never been a better time to raise ourselves to be the better angels of our nature. Indeed, this book shows just where those better angels of our nature lie within us!
No, there is no time like this. You think about all the other things that we are involved in … the petty disputes between countries and the economic this-and-thats. All of that pales in comparison with the end of all life, the dying of our children, within our lifetimes.
The Better Angels of Our Nature
I mean, there will be the dying of ourselves, and many folks will adopt a macho air that they are above caring about their own mortality. Still, I suppose we can venture to say that most folks can go a little bit beyond themselves and care about their children and their family’s lives, at least. But even though their children are going to die and they are going to have to witness that, it remains to be the rare parent who is at all concerned or addressing this problem of our impending omni-extinction.
We can ask ourselves, instead, wishing to right that wrong, what can this fact that we are facing the demise of all on this planet … what can that bring out in the human spirit? How can we make this the grandest adventure, even if we are heading into an abyss of oblivion?
Regardless of what happened in decades past, and the success we had there, what I find, in 2016, is I find us in dire straits. My main thing is I want to see some kind of activist response. I have not given up hope. I know that it looks bad, impossible, actually. If you “crunch the numbers” we do not have much chance to reverse our course. Still, I think there is a grand opportunity in all this to do something important. I think the best response to an emergency is an heroic action, especially when other people’s lives are on the line. You know we have loved ones. It is not just our own demise we are talking about; we are facing the snuffing out of life of the innocents, that of the babes in arms, the children.
You know, do we really want to just give up the world and let them suffer? To suffer an untimely death? Or just not to get to live out the lifespan that we enjoyed?
I don’t think we do. I cannot imagine any parent not wanting to put their own life on the line to save their child. To throw their body in front of a moving car, if need be. And we are in that kind of a situation right now where things are so bad. Apocalypse is approaching like a freight train. And I do not see why, if people were to understand how serious it is, they would not do everything in their power to avert it. I mean they would expend themselves, not to get that extra dollar or that promotion or whatever, but to save the planet. To put some energy into consciousness raising. To do whatever their skills would allow them to do that would be helpful.
Oh, But Those Troglodytes
We, indeed, are in such dire straits; this goes far beyond the danger of the last world war. At that time entire societies and nations were enlisted in a war effort, and all of our nation’s productivity was targeted at winning the conflict. The threat at that time could not be more real, and dire. For millions died. Millions were killed.
But that is nothing compared to the end of all life on this planet we are facing now. Yet, though more is required than at that time, are we marshaling anywhere near the kind of response it would take to even have a chance?
No. Instead, what we are allowing in our ordinary lives is actually helping to bring about the unthinkable. We need to change our lifestyles, our cultures; we need to be active and confront the forces of annihilation and corporate greed; we need to raise consciousness, to bring awareness to our apocalypse emergency, on a massive scale; we need to enlist the media and to become the media to spread the word of what we are facing; yet we are doing only a smattering of what is necessary.
Meanwhile, from many sources, radiation is filling the globe. Not just from Fukushima, which alone would suffice. We have had nuclear storage leaks. Hanford comes to mind. But there have been others. There is the fact that nuclear power plants leak radiation under the best of conditions. We allow it.
And Their Misinformation
Part of our problem in doing something, of course, is due to the misinformation being put out by corporate interests and the wealthy elite, blinded by their greed and invested in the status quo, who are putting their money and their efforts toward encouraging complacency and denial in the face of our threats. Some true troglodytes, somehow managing to get on stage in the national media and/or to run for and even attain public office, have it that radiation is good for you. They do not know about the difference between alpha radiation put out by plutonium which can puncture cells and alter DNA, for example, and other forms of radiation. Such alpha particles blow holes in cells and chromosomes, causing cancers and mutations. Yet these opportunists and blindly self-obsessed ones confuse alpha particle radiation with the little they know about gamma radiation, as put out by the sun, which passes through you without being able to disrupt cells. Though even too much of that is not a good thing and causes cancer.
So there is the problem of nuclear waste and its storage. Nuclear waste has plutonium emanating alpha radiation. There is currently one hundred million gallons of nuclear waste in the United States alone. Over a million gallons were released from the Hanford, Washington, storage facility in just one accident, though there were others. A mere one gallon of that, evenly distributed and ingested, would kill all humans on earth.
Just How Long Can You Not Step In It?
What are we doing? For 25,000 years some of this radiation — as from plutonium, but there are others of even longer half-life — has to be guarded. This is just the nuclear waste, mind you. We are not even factoring in radiation losses from leaks, disasters, or nuclear weapon exchange. Furthermore, for 250,000 years nuclear waste is still deadly. Think, now, we have vastly different cultures and societies forming and morphing by the decade. Certainly we are nothing like what we were like 25,000 years ago. How can we expect societies of the future to maintain what we set into motion here and now? Can we even be sure they will know about us? Or remember us and the concerns of our moment?
Just what are we screwing with here? How dare we doom life, 25,000 years into the future? And do we really think there is going to be any future for anyone on this planet when we are doing that? When we are putting our planet in that kind of a situation? I mean it is not just humans that die from radiation, it is all life. There are only a few micro-organisms that can live around radiation.
Yet, this is the story no one wants to hear. No one wants to know this. Many would rather get reassurances from insensitive right-wing politicians and troglodyte pundits.
Crisis and Opportunity
Despite all this, in telling this story, I like to point out the positive side of it. For whenever there is a crisis there is also an opportunity.
And in this situation, we have the chance to be the best humans that have ever existed.
Always Are We Here Helping
I had an experience back in 1980 where I received some information “psychically” … let’s put it that way … where I was shown what we have done to this planet over the course of thousands of years. I was shown it. Then I was told that many are being called upon now to do something about our situation. I will be specific about this experience in a chapter to come, Chapter 28.
At the time, and before the experience, I was feeling a lot of despair. Like, what do we do? I know a lot of people who are coming across this material now are going to feel considerable hopelessness. They are going to think it is impossible. This cannot help but bring up in us our BPM II pain of hellacious no-exit frustration, fear, doom. In truth, that is the way I was feeling at the time. Yet what I was told in that singular and profound experience was “Sure, it’s hard, but always are we here helping you.”
It was as if I was told that humans are not alone in this whole thing. Keep in mind, we can only see the entities around us. We are genetically programmed as humans to perceive only within a certain spectrum of human apprehension … perception. Only that. You know we simply cannot know of all of the life that exists in the Universe. Quantum physicists tell us there are many other dimensions, for example. All I know is I was told by this source, or sources, that we are not alone.
It is even possible that what we are doing in this part of space and in this dimension, having to do with nuclear and with climate change, if not other things we are doing, might have repercussions on life and entities that we cannot know or perceive. They might have a vested interest in having us succeed at turning this around. It is also possible that there are supernatural helping forces at work here. I do not know. But what we are doing has such wide ranging consequences in areas, dimensions, and times that we cannot comprehend or even know about, so that anything like that is possible.
There Are Many of Us
Not only was I told we are and will be receiving help, but it was made clear to me that that I was not alone in my concern … or in terms of my action to do something about it. I was told there are many of us humans right now taking up this challenge, making use of this opportunity to be the best that they can be.
That is the other thing about this. We simply do not know how many people there are like us out in the world who want to make a change. We do not know that because it is not like the media is going around saying, “Hey, we’ve got a big problem. And here’s the people who are working on it.”
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
The media is completely ignoring our situation for reasons having nothing to do with our survival … but theirs, as ongoing profit producing entities and corporations without conscience. So we will never know until the end … or until it is over, let’s put it that way, how many people are working right now to change things on this planet.
We will never know. It’s like it is going on under the surface, and at a certain point could very well act like the “leaven in the dough,” for it can affect everything. Our individual efforts might be cumulative in ways we cannot know or imagine. The results of our actions to change might then reach a certain tipping point, where everything changes. It could happen in an instant.
Some of my other experiences have led me to believe that there is a possibility it could happen that fast. Not as fast as the opposite of that, abject failure, as depicted in the dream of mine I relate below, but virtually overnight. Think, the hundredth monkey.
Revelations and Possible Futures
In my altered state experiences of various kinds, I have seen things and received information on these matters and our possible futures. You know, I have been heavily involved in holotropic breathwork and nonordinary states of consciousness work. It amounts to going into transpersonal spiritual states and getting information … mostly about oneself and about one’s growth and evolution, but also in general and about major concerns and challenges facing our humanity as well as important, necessary, and timely knowledge.
One cannot know exactly how reliable this information is, and I take it all with a grain of salt and subject to further exploration and research. Not all of what I have learned is true, at least not in the way I originally thought of it. Still, I have found much of it to be true and helpful, and what I cannot verify for sure, some of it, might just be very reliable.
If you think that’s crazy, just consider the times! I’ll wager any day my altered states information against the supposed sanity of the average person walking around in their daily life as if nothing is happening, when their very lives and that of their children are hanging in the balance … and it could happen at any time.
The point I am making is that … the information I got … is that “Sure it’s hard, but always are we here helping you,” but not only that, “but you’re not the only one doing it … there’s many others doing it at this time in history.”
Death as an Ally
Beyond this we are helped by the fact that in this emergency — when we finally realize it is an emergency — we can take advantage of the fact that the best of humans, their highest selves, show up in emergencies. That is what is being called forth now.
I pointed out earlier that there is a spiritual practice of having death as an ally. It is a very common one. It is one of the most common things that primal, unsanitized religions and robust spiritualities do. They take people close to death, to give them a death-rebirth experience. This is the original practice of baptism and similar death/rebirth rituals. Before the whole thing became watered down (no pun intended) and ineffective, the intent behind baptism was to take folks close to drowning, whereupon they would feel their mortality. This would lead one to wake up to the seriousness of life and to connecting with the deepest parts of oneself, which we might call God or Source. It had the same structure and intent as near-death experiences. They were meant to induce a rebirth by bringing one close to death.
What you can say happens is that when you face your imminent demise all of a sudden the things you think are important become trivial … because they are trivial. And the things that you thought were trivial, that really are important, become important. So it resets your priorities … in a good way.
The Bomb as Spiritual Catalyst
Now this kind of having death as an ally or being in the shadow of death is unprecedented to be happening as it is, now. This has never happened on a global scale. We have never had to have this happen on a global scale before.
Nevertheless, ever since the Fifties, with nuclear weapons and other doomsday projects as part of our everyday awareness, people have more and more and more been becoming aware that their end could occur at any moment. There has been a consequent increasing pressure for a spiritual awareness or consciousness awakening. This has been going on since the Fifties. Since the Bomb.
The Reality of Nuclear Apocalypse We Refuse to See
Now, the Bomb is a terrible thing. You can barely get your mind around it, this idea of nuclear devastation. Indeed, depictions of it we see on television, even the supposed documentaries, come nowhere near showing the destruction in the graphic detail it would actually entail. We simply cannot comprehend this situation of there being a desolation so vast, apocalyptic, and long-lasting that you could only survive by staying underground for years. And even then, when you surfaced you would without a doubt die shortly … one simply cannot remain underground for tens of thousands of years.
Yet depictions of this, as for example the TV show, Jericho, show people having nuclear fallout and then it being washed away by a rainstorm and then a few days later they are outdoors having a picnic … as if life actually would go on … that humans would persevere … along the manner of any major catastrophe … a hurricane, tornado, earthquake, or such.
But humans would not go on. There would be no picnics, there would be no children playing … ever again! There would be no people! There would be no planetmates, no ecosystem!
Yet folks will only look at it from this sanitized perspective. And though some would say that any looking at the problem is better than nothing at all, I would contend that any presentation of or depiction of it that does not contain an accurate representation of the absolute horror … and evil … of such an occurrence is worse than nothing. For it leaves people with the comforting feeling that life goes on … even if there are deaths, even if one dies, that life goes on somewhere somehow and that the human species survives. Or as one person put it to me once, the Earth goes on and on, there just aren’t any people on it.
Well, this is not true at all. For we are talking about such a total ruination that we would be reduced to the ecosystem of something like the moon … or Mars. Indeed, I am aware of at least one theorist who claimed there is evidence that Mars did experience such a nuclear devastation at one point.
The problem with any depiction of nuclear holocaust that does not call forth the total horror of such an occurrence is that it enables people in their complacency; it derails any spiritual awakening that would arise out of a clear view of our situation; it mutes the response required of us for humanity to survive; and it encourages a superficial or wrong understanding of our predicament that enables people to go about their business as usual … the business as usual that is precipitating the environmental collapse.
The Horror Revealed
Let me give you an example of a realistic emotional reaction to our current environmental-nuclear state, with the end of all life at any time being possible. This is a dream I had a few years ago. An unusually vivid dream. In it, I and a group of others were aware of an imminent danger to all life on this planet. If you have seen the movie, Melancholia, think of a situation like that.
However, unlike the movie, our danger was something we could at least try to do something about and a group of us were so engaged in that. Desperately engaged, in fact. I was moving from place to place in this and that kind of vehicle, some of them quite odd, as dreams can be. I was engaging with people, interacting and working with them, and finally showing up at the place of a device that held a hope of stopping the imminent apocalyptic event.
The point is that I was crying my eyes out the entire time. I was seriously “primal-crying” … like very deep, intense, and flowing with tears. In the dream, I was, that is.
This, incidentally, is something I have done at other times, and it seems that while I no longer primal, that after all this time of doing it, I have acquired the ability to take care of primal material in a dream state. Not unconsciously, by the way, as these dreams are invariably vivid and I wake up having made the proper primal connections necessary to take me beyond whatever painful awareness came out in the dream.
Back to the story, however, while weeping piteously, I was totally aware of our situation and its consequences: I was aware of the immense, incalculable tragedy of the ending of life and how it had repercussions on all that had come before, wiping out the results of all that had ever been done, and had put the category of futility upon the efforts of all beings on Earth, particularly humans, of all times.
Despite this, I was completely and effectively engaged — while at the same time immersed in the full release of deep primal and tearful wailing — with averting the catastrophe and was part of the team to stop it. I am reminded of the heroic figure, vastly misunderstood, portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in the movie, Strange Days (1995). He also was fully consumed in his emotions, showing how one does not have to harden or toughen oneself in order to take positive, even heroic actions, while he fully and courageously faced and dealt with every threat and evil that came to him. I thought at the time how this sort of action, while retaining one’s full humanity, and one’s feminine and feelings side, was the kind of heroic attitude we needed today. For certainly macho, unfeeling demeanors and personalities in confronting the evils of the patriarchy only reinforce the problem.1
In any case, near the end of the dream I was at a device involved in the triggering of the event. I was trying to tinker with it to stop the imminent annihilation. The clock was ticking down on the device, and it was a race against time. I was making hopeful progress, but we were getting dangerously close to zero.
As it ticked off its final seconds and hit zero, I was a bit astonished because this time, this countdown, went nothing like all the movies where the miraculous happens and the device stops ticking with only seconds to spare, saving everyone. No. This clock just went plodding straight to zero without even a nod to hollywood. It simply had no interest in our human delusions. Reality itself is hard, decisive, and irreparable, unlike our fantasies and films.
There was one poignant second after that device registered zero. Only one. Then there was an incoming instantaneous approach of something from the horizon and a flash.
And it was all over. Just like that.
What happened after that was rather interesting, too, and I will talk about its meaning when we are focusing on transpersonal and metaphysical aspects of our situation closer to the end of this book. It is not really relevant to my point here, but suffice it to say that I immediately felt myself “rolling forward,” as it were, into another life, another reality … just like that! There was not so much as a hiccup of a delay. I did not even know what kind of lifeform or species I had become. Simply, consciousness-Experience did not end. Like a river, it just kept rolling forward into something new. And when I awoke after that, and subsequently as well, I felt like I have gotten an idea what death is like, and I have lost a great deal, if not all, of my fear of it.
How Long Can You Stay Under Ground?
Back to the point, the problem with the sanitized depictions of our situation, as well, is that they give rise to such notions as was put forth by Thomas K. Jones, the man Ronald Reagan had appointed Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces. He said, “If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it…. It’s the dirt that does it.” His comment was famous and led to at least one book which used it in its title; it was called, With Enough Shovels (1983). Jones asserted that “with enough shovels” we could withstand a nuclear war with Russia, and his remark was said to encapsulate the attitude of the Reagan administration toward nuclear war and the Soviet Union.2
Yes. I know what you’re thinking.
His insane thinking had him imagining that we could cover ourselves with dirt when the radiation came; three feet of dirt and a couple of doors will do it…. Until it passed. I’m thinking of a line from Bill Cosby, “Noah, how long can you tread water?” And my take on it is to ask Jones, “T.K., how long do you think you can survive under a blanket of dirt? Twenty-five thousand years?”
Jokes aside. This is a man who was at the center of government, smack in the middle of decision making about war and nuclear policy, who could be so cavalier about the murder of billions of people! If you look at the Republican Party’s offerings of politicians these days, especially Tea Party ones, you can see the situation is no better now and has actually gotten worse!
Troglodytes … remember?
The upshot of all this is that humans have simply no way of comprehending the magnitude of the tragedy we are rapidly bringing upon ourselves. Like tinkering with DNA, which we are also blithely and stupidly engaged in, dabbling in the release of forces of the atom is not anything that humans are capable of doing responsibly. At least, not at our stage of evolution … as you can see from the picture I have painted of our psychological underbellies, our human unconscious, as laid out in this book in chapters previous.
The Awakening
So the Bomb is a horrible thing, but one thing it told us was, “Hey! Wake up! Now is the time to wake up. Now is the time to open that mind and become enlightened, become awakened, whatever.”
And I am not talking about awakened as in some intellectual sense or in some “woo-woo” sense. Awakening is not about just knowing these things I am telling you.
What I am referring to when I say awakening, and what is required for our survival if you think about it, involves a change in the person, not merely a shoveling of additional facts and ideas into one’s “brain pan.”
What I think awakened involves is becoming one’s higher Self, or becoming more aligned or in tune with it, anyway. It is becoming the best of that humanity that we are. It is about becoming that more fundamental human nature which is characterized by cooperativeness. The human nature that is tied up with the joy grids; that emanates from the true self, the creative self, of Winnicott; that is in tune with reality like the real self of Janov. The self that is self-confident, contented within itself, creative, and active in a hopeful and positive way. This is our more fundamental human nature. This is what we would all be if we did not go through the hellacious experiences of our prenatal and perinatal beginnings.
For this self is, if you were to think about it, what you would be and do if you were going to die in another day. In fact, give it a thought for a moment. What would you do if you knew your time was up?
Most likely you are going to be thinking about your loved ones. Most likely you are going to be thinking about what you might do for them. You might be thinking about what you might want to tell them before you go.
There are a lot of things you might want to do, but I think what would happen with most people, if they were going to die soon, if they knew their end was imminent, they would start doing the things they have been putting off that involved their compassion, their love, their heart … and their heroism.
They would start to take risks to do things for a higher cause that they have always wanted to do but have been reluctant to do and have been putting off.
The Necessary Hero
And what I am saying is that is what we need. These are the necessary heroes; we need … awakened ones. Awakened, compassionate, dedicated, active.
Right now, there is this coming together of a dire, deadly catastrophe … which is in the making, that is happening right now. It is going on. Extinction is going on at this incredibly rapid rate. So fast that we have been talking about the likely loss of half the lifeforms we are aware of within mere decades. And the oceans are dying. The oxygen producing plankton and the basis of all life on this planet is dying off, and all that.
At the same time, we have a growing awareness, since the Fifties, that is causing people to be more spiritually awakened. They realize they have to do this incredible thing of which they are capable within this lifetime. Because this is the lifetime to do it in; it can no longer be put off. This is the final act, you might say, in a play of many lives for a great number, if not all of us. And we have to do it, not just for ourselves, but for our loved ones. And it is going to bring out all the best that we are capable of. It is going to bring out the best of us, our best selves, our highest beingness … those better angels of our beings as well as including us in the ranks of a new humanity for the world.
So how is it going to go? How is it going to end up? Will we survive?
I don’t know.
But it’s going to be an incredible … story … if nothing else.
And I think it’s going to be incredible to be part of.
CHAPTER 27
The Necessary Hero — Wounded Deer and Centaurs
The Opportunity — The Solution to Misery and the Way to Happiness
Wounded Deer and Centaurs
There are the people facing the problems of themselves and the world who are willing to take upon themselves the burdens of their societies and cultures rather than to act them out. They know that folks have been acting out their inner turmoil on innocent others and in dubious worldly campaigns from time immemorial and that this is what has gotten us into our current crisis of civilization.
Wounded Deer — Sensitive and Hurt
Initially, however, facing and knowing these things is a depressing state of affairs. The problems of society, deeply rooted in oneself, are not easily gone beyond. I call these people wounded deer. You know them; you may see yourself as one. Wounded deer describes them. They are both sensitive … but obviously hurt. They do not seem to respond to the common remedies of normal cultures. For good reason. They are not dealing with ailments that involve not being in tune with or in touch with the culture around them. Very often, in fact, these people are the ones who excelled at the “games” of society and culture earlier in their lives. They are anything but disconnected from reality; if there is an opposite to psychosis, this is it.
But their “ailments” are intractable because they go up against the parts of society and culture that, by contrast, truly are ill. So, not only do they suffer for reasons they should ideally not have to … and a part of them knows it … but they often magnify that by the fact that they refuse to accept the common remedies. Something strong in them tells them that it is not them who needs to change; it is society. And that their instincts are true.
So, these are the wounded deer. Picture them as hurting … and sensitive … and refusing to opt for the normal act outs of society that would allow them to be “healed” in society’s eyes, but which they know would not be true or authentic.
Centaurs — Wounded Healers, Necessary Heroes
Now, centaurs. Centaurs are the people who are then taking that horror and applying themselves toward doing something positive in the world … becoming healers … activists. Thus, wounded healers are the necessary heroes…
Nevertheless, the path from one’s status quo in society to becoming a wounded healer is one of depression and, sometimes, hopelessness. Centaurs start out as wounded deer.
The Opportunity. The Seed of Light in the Center of This Darkness
I should know. As depressed as I became when I first learned of these threats to our existence and their immensity many years ago, now this awareness has enriched my life. For one thing, if nothing else, I know I am part of something big in doing something about our situation. And I know that people who are aware of these things, who get involved and take some action about them, when they align themselves with a higher cause like this, they realize they are a part of something important.
Think for a minute on how many people actually have lived lives where they were part of something important and whose lives were thereby enriched. Do you realize how many people there have been, and are now, living lives where they were doing something they felt was unimportant? Remember Freud’s take on the human condition, which is that we live lives of “quiet desperation.” (And there is a BPM II statement if there ever was one, by the way.)
On the contrary, there is nothing more important than this challenge to save life on this planet. Nothing. Never has been.
It Brings Out Our Best and Even Magnifies Our Abilities
In fact, knowing an end is imminent can have a contrary effect of inspiring us in powerful new ways. We see that humanity blossoms in emergencies. For people put their all into their response.
You see, it is not just that the sense of emergency and the awareness of the closeness of death brings out our compassion, our love, and all that. It also brings out our power; it magnifies our abilities. A father might be able to pick up a car, if it falls on his child. In an emergency like, for example, an auto accident, a parent might be able rip open a car door to free their daughter or son. I have heard stories like this. It has happened to people in my family; it is really common.
One can get kind of like these “superhuman” powers when you are in crisis, because all your being becomes focused on that, and only that.
Now, to a certain extent the more we realize how dire our planetary situation is, the more we discover that it brings out our greatest skills, our greatest talents, our greatest focus … our most powerful and effective selves.
So there is hope in all of that — the way people reassess their priorities toward compassionate and heroic ends and how folks have their abilities at their peak in an emergency. Not just in the way we feel about matters and the love we exude, not just that it brings out the best of us that we have to give, but crisis brings out our best efforts toward those important ends.
What’s It All About, Planetmate?
Let us put that in context. We come into this Earth every time, with each reincarnation, we come here to express whatever skills we are bringing in to that life and to manifest what can come from them.
So that’s what life is all about. Each life is an “experiment in truth,” as Jung phrased it. We bring in certain skills that maybe we have accumulated from previous lifetimes or whatever. These are skills, or tendencies, or desires that we come in to realize … that we come in to try them out.
Well, in this lifetime, with humanicide towering above us, we have the greatest push to bring forward that essential I, to manifest those unique qualities more fully than ever. It is a strangely beautiful thing that in this shadow of death, this emergency, we are being drawn to experience our humanness in the grandest of ways. Even to shift to what is beyond that humanness. More about that in the final chapter, when I place this entire thing into its metaphysical context.
The Opportunity. The Solution to Misery and the Way to Happiness
So, for all I say about how dire our predicament is, I also see it as the most hopeful thing in the world, because a lot of spiritual practices, especially indigenous ones, emphasize the benefit of having death as an ally and/or to face death to experience rebirth. Indeed, there is nothing like thinking about your own end, your own demise, to spur you to a more serious or spiritual appreciation of life. I mean, if you were to say to yourself, what would I do if I were going to die in ten minutes, you would certainly think of something important!
What if I was going to die in another day, in another week? What if my child was going to die? The point is that, just like the Chinese symbol for crisis, which is also a symbol for opportunity, every emergency is also a chance for us to grow. Endlessly we are called upon in life to reframe things, as psychologists say, to make “lemonade out of lemons.” Well in this situation, we are challenged that way to the utmost … to be the best that we can be, for nothing less will do.
You can look at this one of two ways: It is the end and you can be all depressed and morose. Or we can see this as the greatest opportunity ever to raise ourselves up to our higher nature, to be aligned with a higher cause.
The thing that really makes people happy and fulfilled, the real answer to all our personal misery is tied in with exactly this.
I have been researching and practicing psychology all these many years. I have done and facilitated all this psychotherapy. I have looked long and hard and afar into all possible ways of growing and healing and helping and facilitating others. I have been student, and teacher, in this area; I have been facilitating healing and I have been writing prodigiously about it. And out of all that, I will let you in on a secret. This is the thing very few in the consciousness raising or personal growth paradigms know … and rarely acknowledge. It is most definitely alien to pseudo-intellectuals and armchair academics … those “brain-suckers.” Here it is:
The thing, the only thing, that brings people out of their own misery … finally and irrevocably … like nothing else … is aligning themselves with a higher cause. No, not just having a higher power, or higher Self, or aligning with the outlines of such. Rather, what takes people out of their deep unhappiness is identifying with and participating in something beyond themselves that is good, is positive, is helpful …. and is important! Aligning ourselves with efforts beyond ourselves lifts us up out of ourselves and has us move in clarified air and archetypal circles. Our actions become mythic, in a sense. We are most definitely close to Source and inspired by it in everything we do.
Now, consider, there is no higher cause than saving the life on this planet. There has never existed a higher cause than this. This is something … that we can do … that’s important!
How Do You Want to Spend Your “No-Form”-ity
It has never been clearer. We can go off into the No-Form State … you know, out of this physical realm … we could go out in to the beyond this life, whatever that may be, regretting and saying “My God, we let it all happen! And we didn’t do anything, and we were just greedy till the end!”
We could go through eternity knowing that. Or we could go through our No-Form-ity knowing that, even if we failed, “Hey, it was the noblest undertaking, it was the most heroic thing that we did, and we united with people in a grand cause.” And even if we failed, we had this incredible adventure. We turned it into this magnificent undertaking that will make one of the most inspiring stories that will be heard throughout the Universe!
I Would Prefer We Be Heroes
Consider this: It is awfully strange. I mean the figures are that there are twice as many people now alive as has ever existed or as many as has ever existed, depending upon what you consider to be humans, in our prehistoric ancestry.
That is a pretty astonishing statistic, when you think about it. I mean there are just so many people alive! That is the first thing that hits you. The second thing that might occur to you … or that comes to me, anyway … is that it is like we all showed up! To see the end of the movie. Or to be part of it.
We all reincarnated to be here now, as if this is the most crucial time. And we are all going to be here to either watch the spectacle of the end or to help avert it … to be a hero in it. Or heroine?
I would like us to be heroes. I would like us to be the best people that have ever existed. And hopefully we have all showed up to be that.
CHAPTER 28
For Earth’s Sake, Get Real!
“Sure It’s Hard but Always Are We Here
Helping You”
Let us, at this point, talk about what we are up against, what are our prospects for success, and a little about what we need to do and what will be required. Also, we should think about where are our windows to hope, to inspiration, to encouragement.
This chapter lays out the difficulties involved in consciousness evolution and personality change required of us now, pointing out that it is necessarily going to involve hopelessness, even despair, at times. Further on, it details the spiritual experience I had in 1980, when I was taken up by such feelings, which set me on this path to help the planet and the planetmates.
I was shown by unknown beings or the voice of the Divine 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 — all of us engaged in this tremendous undertaking — 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.
The Spiritual Quest, for Earth’s Sake!
Now, let us back up a bit: In my book, Experience Is Divinity, I stressed the point that virtually all rituals are mechanical act outs of the structure of spiritual and transformative experiences, but they are not transformative or growthful for they preclude actual transformative experiences happening. In this sense, rituals, like Freud said of religion, are palliatives, and as Marx concurred, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” To contrast with this, I pointed to actual spiritual-transformative experiences coming under the headings of primal and indigenous experiences like vision quests, walkabouts, experiences of nonordinary states through psychedelic substances, and in current times and culture, under the headings of primal therapy, holotropic breathwork, and some of the experiences catalyzed by certain mind-expanding drugs.
But if it is true, as I say, that ritual is a substitute for real, or actual, spiritual experience, what does true spiritual experience look like? What follows is an example of a spontaneous, unritualized, authentic spiritual experience. It is not one for which I went to a church or attended a workshop. No. It came, using the old-fashioned word, as a “blessing.” But first let me put it in its context.
We Must Do What Has Never Been Done Before
It is no surprise that the activist sensibilities, especially around the anti-nuclear and environmental issues, have married so well with the spiritual/human potential ones. It used to be that activists did not take too much to that “spiritual mumbo jumbo.” In previous generations, activists’ ranks were often comprised of atheistic secular types of progressives who would ridicule involvement in inner pursuits as more woo-woo stuff, not much different from the major religions. And following Marx, who called them “opiates of the masses,” they would pity, if not cast outright scorn upon, any of their members who might have such leanings.
On the other hand, what was often true is that those involved in inner pursuits, and consciousness evolution, would be reluctant to “dirty their hands” in crass political and movement work or activities. Among human potential, growth, or new age groups, to get involved in crude group and political activity was considered too “negative” and too confrontational.
Indeed, this division showed up in the countercultures of the Sixties and Seventies in the sense that there were two distinct alternative lifestyles — hippies, centered on the West coast mostly, and activists, centered on the East coast. And we still see a lot of this division going on today.
Beginning with a “Marriage” of Movements … a Melding of Inner and Outer Paths
But not as much. For beginning back then, coincident with a growing environmental awareness, there was more overlap in these two approaches than had been in previous generations. For it became clear quite early on that any change in human activity that would be effective would have to look to habits of human behavior going back thousands of years. Our problems did not spring up overnight and are rooted in a “human nature” — more accurately, what was thought to be that — that humans have exhibited throughout known history. Indeed, this need to look inward to find the roots of our problems is what a lot of this book addresses.
The Sixties changed that huge distinction between inner and outer ways. It might be because psychedelics opened formerly hard-core activists to spiritual dimensions that they would not have accessed otherwise. Perhaps it was because the environmental movement, following up the activity around The Bomb in the Fifties, touched so much upon human mortality and our existential situation and opened up heretofore unthinkable questions such as the possible ending of life on this planet, so that it opened upon spiritual dimensions. For whatever reason, we saw this early on, with the Beatles, especially John Lennon, who was vigorously involved in the arenas of culture and music, and spirituality … as for example, his involvement in transcendental meditation. He was equally committed to social causes and was an activist; he was involved in politics and movements of all sorts, including the environmental. George Harrison similarly, while noted for his spiritual pursuits, was involved in politics and social issues as well, as in his efforts in the Concert for Bangladesh. At any rate, in John Lennon there was no distinguishing hippie or revolutionary. He was both.
Thus, while the division between secular and spiritual, radical and hippie, persisted, these camps overlapped and “intermarried” more and more over the years, often pushed by the nuclear issue.
Along with this we had the feminist movement and the consciousness raising in general about overcoming inequality in gender relations. Activists and the human potential movement became equally involved in creating new-age, fulfilling relationships based upon equality, honest communication, sexual fulfillment, personal growth, and the freedom from restrictive sexist roles and so the blurring of tasks.
The point is that though all of these involved monumental changes in society, they also required major changes in personality. Consciousness raising and consciousness evolution were set alongside social evolution and cultural revolution … countercultural revolution.
We saw John Lennon go off into primal therapy, along with his political activities against the war and for social justice. The inner and outer paths were seen as equally necessary by many. As I said, the Sixties saw the first activist generation deeply aware of the maxim of physician healing thyself, first.
Still, No Thing Has Ever Been More Difficult Than Changing the Patterns of Millennia
Well, this is where I come in, for I was deeply involved in all of those movements and continue to be today. I was on the cutting edge of the experiences of those times. I can speak to the difficulties involved in taking all these changes upon ourselves.
For, beginning at that time, we realized that we needed to end the cycles of kill and be killed in our own selves and hopefully in one generation. Notice: Intentionally I am saying “kill and be killed” and not “kill or be killed,” which is what one usually hears. For part of the new awareness, as I show in detail in Planetmates (2014), is that thinking that it is a matter of killing or being killed is the problem. One does not save oneself by killing; one damns oneself for not being able to imagine a nonviolent solution. A clearer understanding is that killing promotes more killing. It does not reduce killing, as in the thinking that one might temporarily save one’s life by killing another. For killing begets killing and eventually comes back around to one. Or as they say, one lives and dies by the sword. Indeed, that is exactly the vicious cycle that needs to end. It has always been killing and being killed; hurting and then inflicting hurt; being abused by parents and then abusing one’s children; and so on.
However, the specter of nuclear and environmental catastrophe is pushing and is speeding up this evolution-revolution to this new understanding. We know we need to end those cycles going back many thousands of years in our lifetimes, or not have life after ours. So to do what has never been able to be done, to go beyond the powerful pulls to be drawn into acting the way we always have, using violence, do we think that can be easy? The point is that it was hard… necessarily hard. And it remains a difficult thing to do. The point is that it involved sacrifice, and it continues to require that.
Ending the cycles of violence is and was fraught with emotional upheaval and difficulty on all fronts — in relationships as well as in other consciousness changing, as well as in facing the frustrations of societies that refuse or are reluctant to change, even as injustice and economic inequality deepens and the oppression of the circumstances of “normal” life become ever more apparent. There is also the frustration of confronting culture and human behavior that refuses to change even as we are on the brink of humanicide within our lifetimes. Put bluntly, there is the context of abject stupidity in which we must swim, in which we must do our work. These all add to the difficulty.
Looked at another way — as Ken Keyes (1982) pointed out in The Hundredth Monkey — the threat of nuclear disaster … we need also mention global environmental destruction … is a challenge to all of us. It is a challenge to go beyond the “us vs. them” kind of consciousness which has led us to the brink of catastrophe. As many of us know, we must raise our consciousness in a way that has not been demanded of humankind, as near as we can determine, on this planet ever before.
But Many of Us Are Now Working to Get Beyond “Eye for an Eye” Thinking
Now, many people have been working hard to do just that. Many of us have been working on ourselves to break free from those patterns of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” or, what it comes down to eventually, those patterns of “kill and be killed.” We have been doing it in many different ways.
As for myself, as I revealed earlier in this book, I have been involved in spiritual pursuits since 1968, especially meditation. As well, I have been intensively working on unraveling my negative patterns through the powerful experiential modalities of primal therapy, rebirthing, and holotropic breathwork beginning back in 1972. These, especially primal therapy, have been my ways of dealing with the particular negative conditioning into which I was “raised” and which kept me stuck in behaviors and feelings that too often undermined my efforts to live a fully spiritual, a full loving life and to be active, constructive, and successful in our societal efforts to change and have peace. Peace and love, though much espoused, “don’t come easy,” as even Ringo acknowledged.1
However, we all have our ways of trying to grow beyond that kind of negative programming. It is important to recognize that each of us is working in that same direction however we go about it.
Sure It’s Hard. The Task Is Immense for Our Point of Departure Is a Psychotic Culture
As most of us have come to realize who have been on this path for a while . . . who have been working at changing ourselves for a while . . . it is no easy task to change those very deep grids or programs. Rather, we discover that it requires a lot of work, dedication, and time.
The psychiatrist Theodore Isaac Rubin (1983), in his book on relationships titled One to One, points out that the divisive competitiveness and us-versus-them striving that we see predominating around us in Western culture is learned. He writes, “We compete, we fight wars, we are compulsively concerned about our hierarchical position relative to the next person, because we learn to be so through a psychotic culture passed on from one generation to the next.”2 I will not quibble about when we learned that … obviously this book contends that we learned those things much earlier than he or anyone else would imagine … in the womb and at birth. Still in general I agree with him.
The point is that this is where we are coming from. Our point of departure is a psychotic culture or, as Erich Fromm (1955) put it, an “insane society.” Many of us are trying to reverse this violent and crazy trend, but it is understandable that it would be hard to make a 180-degree turn in orientation — from aggression to peace, from competition to cooperation, from fear to love. Furthermore, as my work shows, while these intractable, self-negating, and “psychotic” tendencies have roots deep within us, they are not instinctive or part of our underlying human nature as was thought. Yet, they cannot be changed and gone beyond through simply educating our children better, as Rubin implies. They have deep roots and require more thorough-going, even psychotherapeutic, efforts, to effectively undo them. Therefore, our culture is gradually coming to the realization that we are involved in a difficult process, and understandably so. Our culture is starting to realize the immensity of the task we are undertaking in trying to change our inherited and deleterious patterns.
“To Think That It Is Easy Is Probably to Be an Impostor”
Along these same lines, Herb Goldberg (1983), a psychologist, points out in his book, The New Male-Female Relationship, especially in his section on “Transitions,” that to think that it is easy is probably to be an impostor.3 He asserts that the people who are really making the changes in male-female relationships and becoming fuller human beings, you can expect, are struggling to do so . . . that it is a difficult process and takes time. In fact, Goldberg discusses at length his contention that real growth takes a lot of time and struggle, whereas “pseudo-growth” is the only kind of growing that occurs “overnight” and easily.4 That should be especially important to know for those newbie “aware” ones, who, having read a book or seen a youtube video, automatically go thinking they are “awakened” and that the rest of the world is stupid and sheep-like for not knowing that one thing that they learned.
The upshot is that not only does it take time, but we discover that it is hardly ever pleasurable. What most of us have discovered is that the path to bliss and contentment leads sometimes through despair and hopelessness. As Hermann Hesse (1965) described it in Demian: the bird, in pecking his way out of his shell, must destroy a world before discovering a new one. No, it is not often pleasant to confront some of the darkest things within ourselves, as we must do if we are not to continually project them onto others and onto the world around us.
We Were Once Noble Humans
All these things in mind, what I would like to share, now, is an experience that happened to me while I was in the midst of this very difficult process of trying to root out some of my own none-too-helpful social conditioning and primal traumas. Bob Dylan sang, “Don’t wanna learn from nobody, what I gotta unlearn.” Of course, we know that learning what we later need to unlearn is something hardly any of us are able to avoid in growing up in modern cultures. So, those of us serious about making change find we must change. We become involved in a lengthy, painful, and often onerous task of unlearning of what we “learned” in order to do that. I believe that that this experience I will now share may be helpful to others in their own struggling to be their better selves … the higher angels of their beings … their deepest and truest human nature.
A Cosmic Slap on the Back
In the course of my own struggling to change, in primal therapy, I was at a particular place in 1980 where I was very much in despair at the immensity of the task of changing the programming that was dragging me down — that was keeping me from being the full human being that I could see lying there in potential. It was therefore an encouragement to me when I had the experience that follows — like receiving a cosmic slap on the back, a gift from the Universe, and it helped me through that time. But I am convinced this experience has relevance also for all who are working hard at growing beyond their limited selves. I feel it might especially be of use to someone in a similarly hopeless-seeming place.
Before relating what happened, I want to say that although some might be tempted to call this experience a fantasy or a dream, it certainly did not feel that way to me at the time. I cannot doubt that an unusual thing happened to me, which was unlike anything else that I had experienced prior to it or since. It was related to certain experiences I was having in my primaling but was very different from “having feelings.” I was not under the influence of any drugs, nor had I been previous to the incident. I had one beer that night.
One other note: I will also leave the determination of who the “she” and the “we” were in the experience to the interpretation of the reader. I certainly do not know for sure who she and they were, though I have my ideas — all of them highly positive. Also, the following, except for some minor editing and for changing the name of my companion, is exactly the way I wrote it the morning following the 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.”
The Sins of the Fathers
That concludes the entry of that day. Regardless of how you may wish to label the preceding experience, it remains one whose message has stayed with me through all the intervening nearly thirty-six years. It is a message that has rung true and helped me through other difficult spaces. In fact, I still reflect on it and cannot 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, us wounded deer and centaurs 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. We are all in this together, and many of us really know that now.
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 am 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.” (“Now, get to work.” lol.)
CHAPTER 29
Hopeful Things …
Psychedelics and the Worldwide Mind … Things to Foster:
The Profound Significance of Knowing and Experiencing Alternatives …
for the First Time in History
How Do We Pull Off the Most Exhilarating Revolution in Consciousness in Human Evolution?
So our task is hard, more difficult than any of us could have imagined at the start, still, how do we do it? And how do we succeed? In the next three chapters, as we are nearing the end of this book, let us take at least a brief look at what might be done to help along the process of consciousness change, personality change, and reconnection with our deepest human nature that this book is saying we must have in order to truly change the world … save the world. In works to be published in the next few years, I deal with this in greater detail.1 For now, let us consider at least some obvious things. What might make it easier and what could speed up the process, as it is imperative we do to survive? What are the catalysts for change around us; what are the resources available to us; and what are some of the hopeful and helpful things to have in mind?
I have written over and over in this book how primal therapy and holotropic breathwork were helpful, indeed instrumental, to me in changing. My first recommendation to anyone is to do what I have done, of course. Holotropic breathwork, for one, is readily available and relatively inexpensive.
Yet I realize not everyone can do … or can afford … that kind of commitment, especially as regards primal therapy. As well, we need this change to happen fast. We are in a race against time, as Grof wrote.2
In this chapter I want to present some thoughts on this and to point out a few avenues of possible light.
Psychedelic Drugs
Can mind-expanding drugs be used to speed up or facilitate the process of getting past one’s primal and perinatal pain to be better able to access true spirituality? Can they help to transform consciousness quickly on a mass scale so as to save our species, our planet, and all the life — our planetmates — on it?
This is something I have thought a lot about. I have also researched it a fair amount.
First, I hope that some of that drug/psychedelic experience can work and will be used … for we need something badly. It has to happen more easily and more quickly than has been the case in the past. The fate of the world and all life on it depend on something happening quickly.
Remember, Stanislav Grof’s work began with his LSD research in the Fifties, as incidentally, did Frank Lake’s. Indeed, what Grof did afterward in developing his modality of holotropic breathwork was to try to find a way to get the benefits of non-ordinary states of consciousness … where healing occurs and where access to spiritual/transpersonal consciousness is had … without the risk or the messiness of the drug experience.
Profound Importance of Knowing Alternatives
Many drugs, in fact, give folks at least an opening and a vision of something better than they have ever known, which is an incredible thing in itself. For when one knows that one is fucked up, that there are better ways of being and states of feeling and consciousness outside of that of which one is familiar, and what a better way of being feels like, one has both the knowledge and direction to guide one, going forward.
Keep in mind, such a knowing has been impossible in former times, in many ways. Though, in long ago times and cultures far removed from the Western, access to psychedelic experience was greater, there was a huge block to knowing a better way of being for oneself or to imagining solutions to problems of self. This block is unassailable culture. This governor on personal growth is omnipresent culture, which surrounds, comforts, protects and stymies and blocks as thoroughly as any matrix … as represented in the movie of the same name.
As I just said, personal growth is only possible when one knows it is needed. In more isolated societies, where one is mostly unfamiliar with the alternatives that other cultures have for satisfying human needs and desires and for beingness itself, one cannot know very well that one’s culturally derived way of being is anything less than ideal, let alone know what is otherwise possible, no matter how onerous is that beingness or how evil and counterproductive are the acts of one’s own and the other personalities in one’s community.
One accepts whatever one has experienced and been taught through one’s culture as, not just familiar, which is a strong deterrent to change in itself, but also as unchangeable and unavoidable. This way of seeing everything is felt to be as final and unmovable as the stars in the skies. Quick examples: Even in modern, but less multicultural times, Freud did not know of any “normal” way of being other than one of “quiet desperation.” And Nazis, regardless of the brutality of their acts or the assaults they had upon one’s conscience, if one had one, or upon one’s humanity, could go about their abominable tasks thinking there was little alternative to do otherwise. One could also point to American culture in the South in the time of slavery. More about this in just a little bit when I discuss the hopeful spreading of multicultural awareness, worldwide.
Profound Importance of Experiencing Alternatives
Here, my point is that altered or nonordinary states of awareness provide a kind of multi-beingness, if you will, which for some can give rise to notions of what freedom, happiness, contentment, fulfillment, awareness, and the other goals of life truly are like, as experienced … not just as concepts or vague enticements. Alongside this, one can be enabled, through the experience of different feeling states, in finding pathways to such elusive human aims that one would never have been able to come up with through reason alone.
However, ideally, we would have a world where folks like myself, and others who are trained in facilitating others in nonordinary states of consciousness, would be allowed to give LSD in guided, supportive sessions in safe and open environments. Perhaps some other drugs will be discovered to have even greater potential to take us forward. DMT is currently being touted as the “spirit molecule.”3 Ecstasy has also been used for purposes of personal growth.4 Specifically, MDMA (ecstasy) has a significant, though underreported, history of use in psychotherapy.4 Amphetamine has also been used by many to give such a taste of another and happier way of being … but it is highly risky. Still, to be honest, amphetamine can provide openings to more loving ways of being, if it is not abused. And when abused, its effects can very often be the exact opposite of what is needed here.
There are other compounds being brought to worldwide attention, which can be thought of as resources toward these ends. This includes ibogaine. Ibogaine is a compound from a plant found in Africa and is said to be able to help folks get over addictions in a fast and effective way. Ibogaine and compounds of similar effect might help those who have driven into the ditch — a not uncommon thing — in their efforts to evolve.
Drugs of the psychedelic variety would certainly be so much faster and so much less expensive than the route I took … primal therapy, holotropic breathwork, meditation … and that others have been forced to, here to date.
What seems to be called for at this time in history is the same kind of effort that was brought to bear to “advance” civilization in the material and the technological sense to be focused on “advancing” human consciousness … er, actually, reversing human consciousness … to bring it more in line with our natural selves. To do so might bring about what is needed — a consciousness, and personality, that could navigate, negotiate, and rearrange the technological Pandora’s Jar we have opened in a way that it fosters and assists life, rather than undermines it as is currently happening. This coming together of a deeper human nature — an “advanced” consciousness for us at our current stage — and the technology we currently have in a way that they synergize rather than conflict is exactly what is meant by a primal renaissance, as I will explain more fully in a little bit.
However, working against this are the drugs being espoused currently by Western culture and being frantically sprinkled about to keep people in line and too content to object or to act on our dire problems. Antidepressants, specifically SSRIs, act to put blinders on minds. They are known to “help” people to be more “normal” — in the worst sense of that word. Indeed, what was discovered — Paxil was the specific SSRI studied — is that they reduce urges to act against any circumstances that are oppressive and induce a “conservative,” a conforming mindset.5 So just to note that is what we are up against.
Is LSD a Timely Gift?
As for the mind-expanding not mind-constraining drugs, if we consider what I was saying in the last chapter about the possibility that we might be being aided by beneficial powers or forces outside of our understanding, one might speculate that the timely discovery of these substances, LSD, in particular, might not have been just lucky or random. Certainly there is a spiritual way of looking at all events — one that is married well with the wounded deer and centauric mental set — which notices there is a perfection manifest in the Universe, which is only hidden from humans. But it is a perception that is pronoiac. This way of interpreting all events is the opposite of the paranoiac. In other words, as I demonstrate and elaborate upon for huge sections of my works, Experience Is Divinity (2013) and Funny God (2014), the feeling of pronoia is that the Universe is out to do good to you.6
This spiritual appreciation, characteristic of centaurs, is an apprehension that there is a superb synchronicity to all events, beyond anything we are capable of imagining. And that everything is a grand and precise symphony, of sorts, which we are better able to overstand and experience the further along we get in our personal and spiritual growth. From this perspective, we might see the emergence of and the understanding of the uses of these mind-expanding substances as being blessings, or aids, in pulling off this greatest of all, and most necessary of all, revolutions in consciousness and evolutions in our expanding to the feelings of compassionate unity, which is our essence, and which is our deepest human nature … our Divine human nature.
The Internet, the World-Wide Mind (WWM), Multiculturalism
One powerful but often overlooked factor in consciousness change has to do with our modern media and telecommunications and our postmodern multiculturalism. They are so pervasive and so woven through with our postmodern daily lives that we usually do not consider how much we are affected by them. And to see these forces, again, a contrast is needed.
I have a little help with that in having been around on this planet for a fair spell of time, sixty-five years, so I have experienced differences in my earlier years to what is pervasive and considered normal now. You can probably understand that in my knowing of an age before television, email, smart phones, and the internet, and instead with newspapers, “dumb phones,” and the postal service as the only means of connection across culture, space, and personality, I experienced a vastly different world and culture than we have today.
The amount of information one received in those times, especially of a kind that was different or even opposed to one’s cultural notions, was immeasurably less. Similarly, in the era before civil rights and feminism, the evils and injustices of racism — rampant at the time — and ethnocentrism, and misogyny … not to mention dominion over planetmates and separation from Nature, which are still pervasive … were virtually universally woven into one’s socialization.
Socialization is another word for enculturation, which is the gradual process though which, growing up, people learn the tenets and requirements of their surrounding cultures and acquire the behaviors and values necessary or appropriate to their culture. And during the time I was going through that, in the Fifties, such woefully dangerous and hateful cultural elements such as racism, sexism, gender bias, religious and sexual bigotry … including homophobia … ethnocentrism, and dominion over Nature were instilled in us all. These nefarious cultural elements determined one’s ideas and behaviors; and, what was worse — but is, happily, no longer true — one had little awareness of there being an alternative to that (an alternative to those ideas and behaviors) … let alone, as we have today, good and effective alternatives.
Again, Profound Importance of Knowing Alternatives
It is often the ones who are on the borderlines of cultures and ways, who have a contrast, who are most aware of cultural differences and are able to conceive of creative alternatives. These are also the qualities that stimulate genius, as Kuhn (1970), as well as others, have noted. One finds that it is often the one who bridged cultures or stages of life in her or his upbringing who becomes the anthropologist. The one who can lead others beyond their limitations is usually someone with this advantage as well. See, for example, Barack Obama, who experienced both African-American and Anglo ways growing up. The fact that we have increasingly more people aware of cultural alternatives is a reason for hope.
Strangely, however, this phenomenon is thought of as a development bringing danger and as fraught with what is thought to be reasonable foreboding. It is called “loss of national identity” or “loss of cultural identity,” when cultures get “watered down” or mixed this way. But the danger being feared is exactly of the kind of healing crisis I have been describing as being necessary. For culture, in this way, where it is more straitjacket than helpful, is simply the grander version of personal ego, which, now necessarily, must receive a thoroughgoing unraveling and replanting, more in line with our actual human nature, not our culturally taught one.
Psychologists also complain about loss of cultural identity because their values are rooted in a capitalist system that does not value personal growth or long-term happiness but values productivity and temporary relief of or freedom from symptoms in order to bring about the behaviors of work and conformity to society that bring about such productivity. But in postmodern awareness — an understanding that sees beyond the constraints put upon us by economic systems — we, as psychologists, can assert that there is nothing at all negative in loss of cultural identity when it is replaced by an expanded identity with humanity and a global transnational consciousness and an identity united with Nature and cognizant of the consciousness and beingness of all life forms. Indeed, we as ecopsychologists need to set the record straight with traditional psychologists — particularly ego psychologists who support the idea of an ego strength being necessary — that ego is of no help in these times when the fate of the life on this planet is at stake.
Multiculturalism and the Worldwide Mind (WWM)
So among the hopeful and helpful things is this most recent phenomenon of full-gallop multiculturalism and a pervasive and interconnected worldwide mind (the wwm). They go together because the internet and social media, with convenient online applications that for the first time in history are able to translate from one language to another and to allow communication across cultures never before possible, contributes exponentially to understanding between peoples of different cultures and to the merging and intermixing of cultural elements.
Again, whereas conservative-minded and fearful academics and psychologists, operating in the paradigm of the “modern,” following very old-fashioned information from Freud and the newer proclamations of the same sorts of things put out by ego psychologists, would contend that this undermines the consolidation of ego and so weakens the necessary ego strength, a more postmodern and primal understanding is that such coming together of elements contributes to grander integrations of personality and even “ego.” In such individuals, barriers between peoples and cultures are easily transcended and new cultural and personality items created that are more in line with the needs of the moment. Obviously this kind of malleable ego, open to change — as opposed to the strong but defended and defensive ego, which characterizes the culturally monolithic — is more likely to be helpful and appropriate in our current emergencies of all kinds — cultural, political, and environmental.
Quite Simply,
Walk Away
In a very compelling way, Tom Robbins demonstrates this different, less culturally bound, individual in the character of Alobar from his novel, Jitterbug Perfume (1984). He dramatizes the perfect postmodern response to problems resulting from cultural prescriptions and proscriptions which do not mesh with reality as seen from the perspective of many cultures not just the blinders of one. Quite simply, the answer is, “Don’t do it!” Don’t participate in the insanity. Walk away from it.
Expressed in a real world way, the same idea comes out in the idea put out by peace movements everywhere, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” In Robbins’s novel, it might be phrased, “What if in India they gave a suicidal burning to death for the widow of a recently deceased man and the widow said, ‘No’?” Or, “What if a society had a practice of killing its leader at the first sign of old age, and the ruler simply snuck away?” You see what I am getting at?
Yes, Alobar simply walks away. In the same way, wars would end if young men and women would be more exposed to other cultures, especially that of their enemy, and they would simply not show up for or participate in their militaries. This kind of exposure to other cultures is fed by the knowledge coming forth in the social sciences — particularly anthropology and sociology — but beyond the academy it is flooding all societies and cultures with a mixing of peoples and their ways and a dialogue, via the internet and social media, across and integrating all cultures. These factors contribute to understanding across cultures and between genders and individuals. In facilitating a mutual or shared understanding outside of cultural dictates, it makes possible creative, postmodern, and workable solutions to the world’s problems, not just the concerns of the singular individual, the interests of one gender over another, or the views of one nation as opposed to another. This is the main reason conservatives of all times have been at war with new information and have sought to suppress it.
So, there is hope in this positive coming together of peoples, cultures, and personalities. It catalyzes a process of going beyond the constraints and counterproductive strategies of cultures — strategies that fit with modern and premodern times and peoples but would be suicidal if continued in the face of a changing world with too many people in it, who are thrust together and forced to scramble over dwindling resources, and all within an environment perilously close to implosion.
Not So Relative Culture
What is unique about the perspective being advanced in this book is that it is directly at odds with the common pretensions of social science and psychology. These include the idea in anthropology of cultural relativism — that all cultures are equal and cannot be compared, for in the sense that they exist and continue, they are considered “successful.” The “sanity” of a culture or society is, then, defined as the fact that it exists and persists over time, thereby organizing and at least minimally “satisfying” the needs of its members. I feel an urge to make a snide comment that Hitler was also rather successful, as was Nazi society and culture. So also was the pre-emancipation South in America.
Now that that is off my chest, let me continue by saying that supporting cultural relativism, the question is often put out, “From the mores of which culture would one evaluate another culture anyway?” The idea is that to avoid ethnocentrism, cultural value judgments cannot be made. Indeed, anthropologists often contend that cultures are totally incommensurate with each other: They are likened to enclosed systems, with no one from one culture truly being able to understand another’s.7
However, this tenet in anthropology was embraced in an era before we realized just how insane cultures and societies can be. How would one judge? Well, if a culture or society is leading to worldwide murder, suicide, and ecocide, it is about time we claim a universal value around minimalizing pain and of the value of life as opposed to death that transcends cultural relativism and would be applicable in evaluating all societies. In that sense, we must look at the long-term sustainability of a culture. One that leads to the death of its members, that is, the extinction of its society, at some point in the future, might be considered less viable than (less “successful” than), and can be judged from, a culture that has longer term viability.
Certainly, along that measure, Nazi culture and Southern culture are lacking. Indeed, one might use the same measuring stick to evaluate civilization itself — which is a kind of meta-culture. As compared with the meta-cultures of our earliest forebears — who had a subsistence, a non-sedentary, a non-hierarchical one, and one in which goods were not accumulated and stored for long periods of time, all of which are distinctly at odds with civilization, and which relied on gathering and hunting as an economic system and was nomadic — civilization comes up severely lacking. For hunter-gatherer meta-culture served humans for hundreds of thousands of years. Meanwhile, civilization seems to be the poison pill that will destroy all life within a mere ten-thousand years or less of its dominance as a way for humans to be.
As I wrote in Experience Is Divinity (2013), from within the domains of culture, there needs to be a cultural relativity and there is no basis for comparison of cultures … they are incommensurate. But standing upon the deeper paradigm of our common biology, our species biology, comparisons can be made … and should be made, actually. For a culture that fosters inordinate pain, suffering, and or death, and the injustice that would have to be coincident with that, can be seen to be less or lacking in comparison to the culture that provides a harmonious union of needs, felicity, and cultural items.
This problem arises in the first place out of patriarchal values — culturally rooted ones themselves — which has it that power and efficacy are the predominant or only values as opposed to felicity, pleasure, and life-valuing, which are “feminine” values. It is part of the separation from Nature that characterizes civilization and its “transcendent” (separate from Nature and the body) values … in this case the abstracted intellectualizations of academics. For only patriarchal, abstracted, separate-from-the-body-and-Nature-type folks could manage to not notice the body with its pain, birth, death, emotions, and suffering and not see that all cultures must have a relation to them, must deal with them, and that some do better than others and that that is an, external to culture, “good” thing to do! It is a basis for comparison of cultures … they are “commensurate” … that is, they are measurable and comparable, “point by point.”7 Those points especially being biological facts related to suffering, pain, and death.
So cultural relativists do not realize just how culturally ethnocentric they are being in proposing radical cultural relativism. They are actually espousing a kind of transcendence beyond the physical, an espousal of transcendent platonic principles outside of culture related to power, efficacy, and productivity, which are actually the values of very limited patriarchal societies and cultures. “Matriarchal,” feminine values, in contradistinction, are those of felicity, peace, pleasure, love, compassion, life as opposed to death, contentment and other things related to states of the body, which all humans, in all cultures experience … to greater or lesser degrees.
Not So Out-of-Bounds Leaders and Nations
The tenet that this book’s perspective challenges in psychology is the one that has it that psychologists cannot … actually, if they were to be honest, should not … engage in psychoanalysis or any kind of interpretation or analysis, psychologically, of leaders, groups, and so on. However, this proscription came out of political considerations to begin with.
Operating within a supposedly “democratic” system where leaders are chosen by the vote, a kind of “equal time” provision, similar to what is adopted in television to help toward fairness in coverage of candidates, was marshalled in to psychology as well. It was advanced, and then embraced, that since any side could put out propagandists to discredit the other side’s leaders, that psychologists should not get involved in looking into the early childhood and histories of its leaders for clues about the decisions they make while in power. In this sense, psychologists, seeking to avoid the messiness of conflicting and politically motivated analyses, chose instead to run away from confrontation.
So, this was not a scientific decision but a psychological one — one rooted in personal dynamics of particular individuals who feared confrontation in their personal lives and had not the time or the inclination to be themselves politically aware. It might also have received help from the fact that psychologists, like academics in general, are dependent upon moneyed interests for their funding. Looking into the dark undersides of political figures aligned with those moneyed folks would hardly fit with the profitability or advancement of their careers, and psychologists and all academics know this. Thus, psychologists rationalized turning their personal preferences and their financial and career interests into psychological tenets that others were supposed to adhere to. Again, as in the cultural example from anthropology, the reformers ended up instituting the very “diseases” their proscriptions were meant to allay.
Beyond their personal lives, they sought, as well, to avoid political controversy and confrontation in their associations and organizations. I have much personal experience with this as it comes out in associations. What that proscription of political awareness or communication is really about is that these organizations seek to expand their ranks and attract people to their field by putting on airs of detached professionalism … to those ends as well as for personal ego reasons … rather than go after truth which might have one venturing into areas that are controversial, confrontational, and messy … regardless of their being so much more interesting! In this sense, then, such associations are directly at odds with a work such as this which insists that knowledge requires an activist response and is of no use in isolation from society.
Similarly opposed to this notion that foreswears inquiry into the personalities of leaders and the psychological patterns of national events, we have the field of psychohistory and the fields of social commentary in which Lloyd deMause, Erich Fromm, and Alice Miller write. DeMause’s psychohistory aims to put “society on the couch,” for example. Erich Fromm (1955) in writing The Sane Society directly challenged the idea that cultures should not be investigated as to their rightness, or their desirability. Alice Miller wrote detailed analyses of Nazi society and culture and related it to patterns of child-”rearing” in German culture.8 The field of psychohistory has published much along the same lines regarding Nazi culture and the psychological roots of its insanity, along with analyses of many other nations and leaders and national events. Stanislav Grof, to some extent as well, has written on the psychological underpinnings of Nazi and other cultures. Such critiques of cultures are implicit in his findings regarding individual psychology and health and are scattered through his works.
At any rate, this approach has it, resonating with my assertion of there being an underlying biological paradigm of pleasure-pain and life-death against which cultures can be compared, that there are biological and psychological needs that provide markers against which one can evaluate societies and leaders.
Next, Helpful Things
In sum, to the category of hopeful things … things to foster, we need to include the factor of the psychedelics, which allow people to experience alternatives to the experiential set dictated by their personalities, as imprinted by their early experiences. As well, we need to consider the influence of the postmodern revolution in telecommunications and the electronic media, especially the Internet, the WorldWide Mind, in facilitating a coming together of all thinkers globally, and along with it precipitating an erosion of ego, national, and other strict views, which leave out or cast aspersions on others, including other life forms (species).
To these hopeful things, let us now look at some helpful things, things that are already in motion, catalysts for change and things we can rely on. In the next chapter, Chapter 30, we look at the influence of television which unwittingly has introduced better ways of parenting, better communications between people, better ways of being with each other and of being in relationship, and evolved attitudes toward race, religion, sexual preference, and gender differences to a worldwide audience comprising all classes of people … for the first time ever in history.
CHAPTER 30
Helpful Things and Catalysts … Sitcom Socialization and Talk-Show Soul-Searching:
Television and a “Quantum Leap” in Parenting … the Cultural Evolution Curmudgeons Cannot See
Television’s Profound … and Misunderstood … Role
Regarding the positive effects of this explosion of technology in the areas of telecommunications and media and the positive elements involved in exposure to contrasting cultural elements and even cultural items in direct conflict with one’s own, I wish to share one more personal story. This has to do with the effect of television on cultural and personal evolution as well as with what is often considered to be mindless, even “sappy,” sitcoms of TV’s earliest era.
I feel compelled to say this because of a fatigue I have with the tedious old complaints of adult generations who are perennially up in arms over new cultural elements, forever pointing out the trite qualities, if not outright devilish designs, of such cultural changes. Curmudgeonly responses to changing cultural elements are hardly science; irritated expressions of doom and dismay put out by obviously frustrated and overwhelmed old farts of different generations and their conforming underlings of younger generations are hardly wise, let alone intelligent. Yet here we have decades of social science and social and political commentary decrying the cultural effects of low-brow culture, especially that of reality shows, talk shows, and the much maligned sitcom.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I hate most sitcoms just as much as the next person. And I would find myself just as nauseous to be forced to sit through an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians as the best of us. Yet in Apocalypse NO (2013), I pointed to reality shows and talk shows as two of the cultural forces that are aiding our personal and cultural changes to the new forms required for survival. And to this I added sitcoms. Let me tell you why.
Societal Self-Analysis
We see the workings of opposing tendencies to look away from problems — denial and stagnation — or to embrace them — personal growth and cultural change and progress — by examining the reactions in America in the Nineties to the collapse of the Soviet Union just prior to that. On the side wishing denial and continued ignorance, the disappearance of this huge object for distraction from inner unhappiness, an entity about which one could rationalize the use of defensiveness and scapegoating, led to continued turning away from personal and cultural problems through the emergence, in America, of a search for other societal scapegoats and therefore the “Republican revolution.” Culture War replaced the Cold War as the way one could be comfortably ignorant of one’s insides and self-assuredly distracted, self-righteously engaged.
However, another tendency — one toward growth and change — was also born. In America, we saw, beginning in the Nineties and significantly after the removal of the collective punching bag or scapegoat of the Soviet Union, a healthy turning toward the “darkness” within and a collective self-analysis in America. This reaction brought to the fore many of our social and political shortcomings, however woefully inadequate it showed itself to be in addressing our environmental problems.
Indeed, these two different reactions to the loss of a scapegoat actually was the culture war being proclaimed at that time.
Talk Show Soul-Searching
For evidence of the second, the healthier, response we notice beginning in the Nineties the rise of the talk show; the rituals of nationwide self-examination over issues of sexual harassment, spouse abuse, and race relations played out in the Anita Hill – Clarence Thomas hearings and the O. J. Simpson trial; the hashing out of controversial and formerly hidden personal issues around sex, lies, and marital fidelity, played out in the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal; the reevaluation of matters of faith precipitated by priestly sexual abuse; and many other such national psychodramas staged on cable news networks and the magazine-style, documentary-type TV shows like Frontline, Nightline and the like.
We also witnessed the rise of reality shows as part of this societal pull to see beneath the covers of what is thought to be real. Now, progressives and intellectuals have lots of fun vamping about how superior they themselves are to such interests, as exemplified in reality shows. This can only be the position of elitists out of touch with the ways ordinary folks live their lives.
Sitcom Socialization
To make my point, let me back up a bit. The swagger that the Left, and intellectuals in general, display around reality shows is the same superiority they have expressed for decades concerning sitcoms. First, let me say that I consider most sitcoms and reality shows to be rather boring and a bit inane with their laugh and soundtrack framing.
Yet, when I was a child, growing up in a medium-sized city in the coal country of Pennsylvania and coming from a very traditional family, it was only through such sitcoms that I had a chance to find out what a different style of family and parenting would be. Today, I would laugh at a Father Knows Best. Actually, it would bore me to tears. But when I was a grade-schooler, what I saw on the show was a step up and into better socialization from the “Father Knows Little” or “Father Not Around” of many in my social stratum when I was a kid. This exposure allowed me, and many of my generation, to seek for more in our life and for better interpersonal family relationships … and eventually better parenting.
This presentation of better alternatives — middle-class, liberal, “hollywood” ones — to everyone in America has a lot to do with the fact that the Sixties were so explosive. It was the first decade after the introduction of a national culture through the medium of television. Much has been made of the fact that newscasts brought information into living rooms for the first time in that era — which is the factor in the change that was observed that academics and intellectual elitists will focus on, blinded by their quaint beliefs that humans are rational actors. It takes an experiential psychologist and social scientist like myself to notice that most folks act out of ideas and attitudes that are rooted in experiences and information that are hardly rational.
So, the modeling of a more “advanced” way of family life — not perfect but for many better than the traditional ways they had known, which included things like spanking and attitudes like “children are to be seen not heard” and “spare the rod, spoil the child” — through the TVs and cinemas of America was vastly more influential in changing society than newscasts, whose information could just as easily have been shared through the print media. The sitcoms brought liberal middle-class values, especially those relevant to a more advanced child-caring, to everyone in America who owned a TV set; and this was a huge step forward at the time. And this is exactly why conservatives turned red at the thought of it.
A Modern “Priesthood”
This is where Righties are correct when looking to “hollywood” for many of the changes in our culture over the last sixty years … though they see that as a negative influence. But intellectuals and Lefties blow an opportunity and lose support among ordinary folks through an unconscious haughtiness and a cultural snobbery they are blind to but display in their turning up their noses at popular culture. Luckily, as an anthropological social scientist, I can study popular culture and get away with it, though not without some snide commentary coming my way from progressive and professional circles.
They simply will never understand an intellectual who can speak to working folks because he is one of them. They simply do not get my attempts to package the crucial understandings of modern science and social sciences, on which the existence of our very world depends, in words that are not primarily directed to and meant to appease the gods of academia. They consider themselves important within their tiny professional circles, thinking they are changing the world, when no one even knows what they are doing beyond that constrained perimeter.
Keeping the People Down
Indeed, the attitude of academics and progressives about popular culture, especially talk and reality show TV programming and although they would be appalled to ever think it, is no different from the attitudes of the Catholic Church and the clergy about matters of faith during medieval times. There, too, we had an elite wanting to “keep out the unwashed.” There, too, we had a distinction between people in the know and the rabble, with the anointed ones requiring ordinary folks to go through them for matters of truth and faith. We had then also this sharp distinction between the “high culture” of the Church and aristocracy — exemplified in the chamber and symphony music of the time — and the “low culture” of the masses — exemplified by the folk music of the troubadours of that day.
Nowadays this poo-pooing of TV culture by intellectuals is the same kind of attempt to funnel reality to the masses, this time through the filters of a new “priesthood.” The cultural purists and intellectual elites would prefer that for truth you go through them in academia, where you have to pay a toll of course, just as the priests of the Middle Ages required you to pass their way on the road to the Divine.
Therapy for the Masses
At any rate, throwing off the snootiness of intellectualism, I contend, allows us to notice that sitcoms, reality shows, and talk shows serve functions in society that are, overall, beneficial in advancing our culture and catalyzing increased growth. They may not reflect, yet, where intellectuals and progressives think we should be, but for many they show something beyond where they are.
We should know that they are overall helpful in our cause from the fact that conservatives want to attack hollywood and limit freedom of expression on any airwave. That many reactionaries want to keep their children out of schools, home-schooled, and away from TV sets should be telling progressives something about the value of popular culture.
Rebirth Denied
My point is that the rise in reality and talk shows are coincident with a need for a kind of societal “therapy” that came about when America took back its projections from the Soviets and was forced to look at itself. I am saying this was a healthy way of doing it, and this was helping us, though it was tumultuous and difficult, in the Nineties. It is unfortunate — though it suited the forces of war and fascism — for the 1% to bring forth in the millennium the bugaboo of terrorism. Terrorism served perfectly in bringing about another endless feud with another concocted enemy to project our own darknesses onto so we could escape from having to notice them ourselves and bring about actual personal growth and cultural advance … let alone the cultural rebirth that has been trying to happen for decades.
American Rehab
Reality shows are like watching group therapy happening. It is not surprising that there was even one reality program that was about therapy — Celebrity Rehab. Reality shows also expose ordinary folks to what amounts to crude but informative sociological experiments. If academics could see beyond their pretensions they would applaud this sort of, however haphazard and imprecise, understanding of group processes and individual psychology arising in the masses.
If reality shows did not exist, folks would have a harder time knowing appropriate ways for men and women to act with each other. The gains of feminism would not have spread so widely or as fast if they were not being modeled and reinforced repeatedly on talk and reality shows.
The same thing applies to civil rights and to combatting racism. That is another development raising the ire of Righties. Reality shows demonstrate respectful and effective ways for men and women to interact; they show a racial and sexual preference neutrality that is laudable and ahead of and leading the rest of Western culture; and they depict parenting and social skills — “politically correct” ones, in the good sense — to folks who would otherwise not know any better than to behave crudely and abusively. This powerful catalyst for change on social issues such as these infuriate people who are terrified of change … another reason for reactionary rage over TV and hollywood. Lefties should keep in mind from whose camp — a right-wing, conservative one — they are sallying forth in their charges against the popular media.
Overall, the much maligned reality, sitcom, and talk shows bring the world, geography, travel, and history to the masses. In this sense they are powerful in bringing down the walls of monolithic culture and catalyzing the multiculturalism of such bright promise!
Intellectuals quibble about the quality of that information, which whining comes across as quite childish. For it arises as if out of a jealousy of others getting the attention academics want and out of a fear of competition for informational matters around science, culture, and humanities. It strikes me as more than ironic that those on the Left who would wish people to wake up from their zombie slumber would want to push programs of literature or drama where truths are filtered through the consciousness, and unconscious, of the artist, while wishing to deprive folks of a direct look — however contrived, it is actual reality and not scripted — at the world around them and at people’s actual unplanned behavior and spontaneous reactions to unusual events. Such knowledge, indeed, is more likely to stimulate artistic expression rather than induce people to be passive consumers of culture created by another elite — artists and writers.
Seeing people’s behavior in some of these reality shows does often remind me of the dynamics I have seen in therapy groups, and some of the personal changes in the participants mirror some of the evolutions I have watched unfold in folks undergoing deep experiential psychotherapy. The audience participation part often sounds like group therapy or an intervention. I have been struck by how some of the group processes in the shows remind me of family day in rehab, with folks reflecting back what they see in each other and how others’ behavior has affected them. These are all things that conservatives cringe at … actually hate. Yet liberals, except for notable exceptions like Jerry Springer, are not seeing the opening they have here. Lefties are fighting rather than using these forces, which are in the direction of personal growth and, cumulatively, much needed societal change.
As a psychologist and simply someone who loves people, I am fascinated by some of the things I see in these shows. They can be heart-wrenchingly real at times. So it occurs to me that folks who disparage these shows, comparing them with literature and dramatic productions, is another thing where some are wanting to have their reality filtered, managed, and packaged for them, lest it be too “disruptive” to their prejudices of things.
Television and a “Quantum Leap” in Parenting … the Cultural Evolution Curmudgeons Cannot See
The point I am making is that television has been a powerful force in fostering better parenting — which, as deMause astutely noted, is the “driving engine” of cultural progress — and that I can attest to that personally. Indeed, all my brothers and sisters parented their children vastly differently from the way we were ourselves raised. Astonishingly, their parenting styles represented that leap in human consciousness that we are wanting in the area of environmental awareness at this present moment. While not perfect, the way my nieces and nephews were nurtured and cared for throughout their childhoods and adolescences was a quantum leap in evolution forward from what we had learned through our experiences in childhood.
This is one concrete example of the tendency I am calling for to end the cycles of viciousness in general in society with folks individually saying, “Let the madness end with me,” and thereby taking the pain inside themselves rather than acting it out. These changes by my siblings could not have come easily. For no kind of change or creative responses to problems come easy. However, they were aided by models of parenting that we all got from our TV sets growing up and those much maligned sitcoms. Later they were informed by talk shows and to some extent reality shows.
The contrast of upper-middle-class culture, if you will, as presented by hollywood, with our lower working class upbringing was acute, but it had powerful positive effects. I can only assume these processes have been going on in other families and that they continue today, catalyzed even more powerfully by the internet and the pervasive multiculturalism of postmodernity.
Thus, in terms of helpful things, things that are in motion, that we can rely on, we must think of the influence of television which unwittingly has introduced better ways of parenting, better communications between people, better ways of being with each other and of being in relationship, and evolved attitudes toward race, religion, sexual preference, and gender differences to a worldwide audience comprising all classes of people … for the first time ever in history.
While all that is not directly related to environmental awareness, and admittedly a focus on the environment in these shows is minimal, though it is there, it is all change in the correct direction of awareness of increasing compassion toward each other, understanding of each other, reduction of ego, lowering of defenses, and thus facilitates the connection with that harmonious, deeper human nature we have, not the egoistic one.
It’s Only Natural
A special case is that acknowledgment of the injustices we have traditionally heaped upon minorities and women is a gigantic step toward the one of seeing how we have done the exact same thing toward planetmates and the world of Nature. When we acknowledge the feeling consciousness of planetmates, as well as indigenous and primal peoples, we are reminded of our deeper, more natural human nature as well. For we, like planetmates, are Nature, at our base, though we put ourselves above it out of fear and ego.
This separation from Nature, however, is so embedded in us that even those espousing a “return to Nature,” or a reunion, a reconnection with it have scarcely any idea what that means. Though our acknowledgment of planetmates and primal peoples could instruct them. If you want to “get in touch with Nature,” you are better off feeling for the plight of planetmates and your fellow humans and giving five dollars to a homeless person or playing with a kitty than simply going through the motions of unity with Nature by camping out, hiking, or hugging a tree.
Nature is not “the woods”! Nature is the nature of your body, our biological functions and feelings, which we have split off from. Any corporate or academic cog can spend a weekend in the forest or on the beach, but to really re-unite with Nature, can they cry for the injustices of others? Or even for the struggles of their own children? Can they laugh uproariously? Can they burp and pass gas without embarrassment or feeling they need to go to another room? Can they fuck uninhibitedly?
Can they participate in the birth of their child? Can they unashamedly curse and engage in sexual talk and banter without feeling they have to show their distance from and superiority to that by putting their nose up at it? Can they let themselves be a little dirty without feeling they need to wash their hands and shower about it? Can they refrain from the dictates of fashion and the push to fit in by wearing comfortable clothes and shoes, abhorring the deformation that comes with high heels and the discomfort that comes with tight clothing? Can they let hair grow on their body without feeling it is some kind of vermin or bacteria that needs to be beaten back and shaved away? Similarly, do they need to use “product” on hair, skin, or underarms before they can be in public? Do they need to paint their faces and have their hair and teeth perfect? I mean, can they be natural … or just ape it by going to scenic places … worse, taking pictures of them?
Are they able to blush when embarrassed? Or is their aim to maintain a professional “adult” stone face, like any Spock or Clint Eastwood, showing the world how much they can look and act like robots rather than fleshy humans or the furry planetmates of Nature? Can they swoon, caught up in love and desire? Can they join hands with others on the front lines of a cause to stop the desecration of the planet, to save the planetmates? Can they hug? Or do they have to handshake? If they hug, can they do so for more than a second? Without maintaining an A-frame stance or melding it with a handshake, like “bro’s” do, with their hands in front keeping their lower bodies apart as if genitals are radioactive? Can they fall on the floor laughing? Crawl and roll around on their lawns playing “horsey” with their toddlers? Can they goof and be silly? Can they bawl their eyes out at the death of a loved one? Can they suffer for the extinction of species and/or give a tear witnessing the killing and bombardment of folks in third-world countries?
You, see? I gotcher real Nature, right here! And it is our deepest human nature, too!
Next, Things to Put in Motion
All that being said, let us now expand our survey of hopeful and helpful things … solutions and antidotes … to items related to direct actions individuals can take to raise consciousness for themselves and others. Let us look, now, in Chapter 31, at some catalysts and resources available to us … some things to put in motion, some things to initiate … in pulling off this most exhilarating revolution in consciousness in the entire history of humanity on Earth.
CHAPTER 31
Resources … Things to Put in Motion:
How Do We Pull Off the Necessary Change in Human Nature Within a Matter of Mere Decades?
Breathwork, Shamanism, and Other Primal Ways
Another thing that seems to have potential to take folks into the places they need to truly change are related to the kinds of spiritual experiences I have mentioned above that are truly effective. These are the ones that involve access to authentic experience, not preprogrammed or ritualized ones, and they are almost always of the kind that have been used by humans throughout prehistory, before we became “civilized.” These would include sweat lodges, vision quests, walkabouts, ayahuasca and peyote ceremonies, firewalking, I suppose, and other forms of shamanic practice and journeying. In this category we might include milder consciousness altering practices such as immersion in evocative music, drumming, and energetic and/or lengthy periods of dancing. Meditation is a special category as it is of two kinds, the kind whose goal is simply a very relaxed state and the kind, in the category of watchfulness, which facilitates self-understanding and awareness … and personal growth. The relaxation or hypnosis or thought controlling variety is often married with positive thinking, use of affirmations, and focuses on attaining secular goals such as wealth, love, fame, power, sex. Thus it reinforces the separate and defended self, the ego, and is counterproductive to expanding to embrace and include the higher, and lower (more fundamental), self.
Naturally, the current versions of these “primitive” practices, these primal ones, reformulated for us postmodern humans, are something to keep in mind. However, one should look out for and stay away from those that have been watered down and ritualized to make them more palatable (and more lucrative). Still, holotropic breathwork is one such open-structured, “spontaneous” modality, reflective of the ones of our primal ancestors, which is also extremely powerful.
A Primal Renaissance
This perspective points to another bright avenue in our otherwise darkening world. I termed this phenomenon, primal renaissance, in 1995, in my self-published book, as well as the journal of psychology I edited, each of which I gave that title.1 The point I am making is that in all these changes that are needed, we are aided by knowledge of the ways of pre-civilized times.
I will use my words of before, for the most part, as they are just as relevant now and they could not be more apt, here, considering what I have just written in this and in the previous two chapters.
Are We Entering a Primal Renaissance?
We live in exciting times. Information hams it up before us at every turn. This unparalleled info-glut brings fascination, paralysis, agony, insight, change, renewal, and inspiration. In some ways it looks like a renaissance — take the incredible proliferation of technology, for example . . . the mind-boggling advances in computers. But a renaissance of the “primitive,” the “uncivilized” . . . a primal renaissance? How can that possibly be?
Paleolithic Consciousness … Eden
For weeks I had been working on several articles, my ardor suspending me above the landscape of a natural consciousness, a hunter-gatherer one. Called paleolithic consciousness by one contemporary theorist, this mindstyle is reputed to exist among our hunter-gatherer progenitors and among some current “primal cultures.” It is characterized by greater attunement with body and Nature, greater relaxation and well-beingness, more loving child-caring, greater sensory and aesthetic appreciation, more expanded psychic openness, fuller emotional and relational capacity, and greater “with-it-ness” (Witness) with reality in general.
The Earliest Yuppies and the Agrarian Revolution … Out of Eden
I was also focusing on how our civilization came to lose that primal expansiveness of soul — a la “ejection from the Garden of Eden.” An increasing mistrust of Nature — and an inexplicable rebellion against an eternally old “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” philosophy — led to attempts to control Nature, and consequently body as well. The supposed big “advance” of these earliest yuppies was the domestication of plants and animals. In history, this first major “upwardly mobile” turning is known as the agrarian revolution, and it occurred variously between ten- and twenty-five-thousand years ago.
Renaissance
All of a piece it came to me that what was going on now, in Western culture, was exactly parallel to what had occurred during the Renaissance of the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries. At that time, you may recall, the Catholic Church’s intellectual hegemony was loosening, which allowed ancient Roman and Greek texts preserved in the monasteries to be released into the collective culture. There, our formerly repressed and forgotten “classical” heritage combined and cross-fertilized with views prevailing at that time to create the incredible flowering of culture and human potential that the word renaissance now conveys.
The View from the Brink of the Nuclear Abyss and Ecological Annihilation
It occurred to me that night how we, in the consciousness and ecology movements, are becoming ever more aware, once again, in diverse and various ways, of the vast legacy of feeling, perception, human fulfillment, and spiritual awareness and viewpoint that current child-“rearing” practices cause us “normally” to leave behind. Similarly, we come to realize how much our species lost in coming into its much-vaunted “civilization” in its evolutionary history. The view from the doorstep of nuclear and ecological annihilation allows such perspectives.
Yet, through our different ways of healing ourselves, and to extents greater and lesser, we retrieve that lost and repressed legacy.
Multiculturalism
And we are, happily, not alone in that retrieval. Increasingly it appears that our age is characterized, on a global scale, by an unprecedented multiculturalism wrought of technological advances in telecommunications and transportation. Consequently, we are pushed to enjoying an ever growing awareness of the legacies of primal cultures, both current and historical.
Xenophobia Dissolving and “Ego” Eroding Information
At the same time and not coincidentally we observe our own religious, scientific, and Western-cultural hegemonies collapsing under that same weight of contrary and both xenophobia and “ego” eroding information.Moreover, this collapse is aided by momentous and far reaching occurrences as diverse as our mistaken engagements in third-world countries — our misadventures in Iraq and Vietnam, for example; the technological crisis of credibility wrought of the global ecological crisis; and the discoveries of the new physics with their concurrent death-blow to the pretensions of common-sense materialism.
Re-Integration of the Primitive and Primal … Return to Eden
It became clear to me that just as centuries ago we came out from under the thumb of a brand of cultural repression that scapegoated and repressed former cultures — specifically, the Greek and the Roman legacies, calling them pagan and heathen — we were now coming out from under the thumb of a cultural repression and consequent scapegoating of even longer duration — one extending back ten- to twenty-five-thousand years! Along with this we were seeing not only the limitations and inadequacies of the Western civilization and technology which so many had sacrificed for, and killed for; we were seeing also the reintegration of long-lost knowledge and worldview — which formerly had been obscured and hidden beneath such pejoratives as primitive, savage, and uncivilized.
Shamans, Vision Quests, Sweat Lodges, and Drums
Some of us were learning this only too well, as it seemed necessary to search out the earliest or least “civilized” cultures possible for the only pertinent tips we could find on sane and healthy child-caring techniques.
But the rest of our culture is catching on too, and in a big way! Shamanistic practices, rites of passage, and indigenous rituals are enjoying great popularity. Workshops on everything from vision quests, firewalking, and Native American sweat lodges . . . to nature treks, drumming, and “sacred arrow” ceremonies have begun popping up. And currently we are even recognizing our Western patriarchal culture’s evil hand in the extermination of society upon society of indigenous peoples; we were rewriting the history books on the legacy of Columbus even as we passed the five-hundredth anniversary of his landing in America.
A Flourishing of Culture?
What’s more, in a manner analogous to the cross-fertilization of ideas that led to the medieval Renaissance, our culture is expanding and becoming richer through the inclusion of these alternate perspectives. Those of us on the healing edge are uniquely able to sense the potential of this inclusion as we experience the effects that this kind of appreciation of the feeling, the affectionate, the intuitive, the natural, the body, and the senses has had upon our individual lives. Why would we not think that this kind of cross-fertilization of repressed heritage would lead to a flourishing of our culture in the same way that it is has led to a blossoming in our lives?
This primal renaissance is indeed one happy prospect coming out of our postmodern times. And, as I explained, the book that will top off the Return to Grace Series, Book 11, Primal Return: Renaissance and Grace, will focus heartily on this phenomenon, among other hopeful ones.
The Brightest Light on Our Cultural Horizon
Indeed, many of us do feel that a “primal renaissance” is occurring on our planet. Furthermore, many of us believe that this occurrence may be, in truth, the brightest hope on what otherwise can appear globally to be a rather bleak social and cultural horizon.
So let us not lose this opportunity to midwife the emergence of this primal renaissance, and, germinal as it may appear at this time, to nurture it to its fullest flowering. We cannot change the past, of course. But our efforts will work — one small measure at least — for righting the many wrongs of those who have come before us toward those earlier primal societies, and the deeply felt ideas and cultural ways they held dear.
Morphic Fields
There is another hopeful stimulus that I need to mention, an unseeable catalyst, if you will: That is, that what seems to be happening around this revolution in consciousness involving opening to prenatal and perinatal states is a kind of morphic resonance phenomenon. Put simply, morphic resonance is the experimentally validated discovery that the more often a particular thing has been learned or experienced by a species, the more readily or easily it is able to be learned and/or experienced by others of that species … without any physical contact or communication between the individuals involved. It points to a field theory … it is called a morphogenetic field … of Reality and knowledge (or Experience). It has been advanced and developed as a theory by Rupert Sheldrake in his many and profound works, going back decades. It is consistent with quantum physics, as well as with my theories as laid out in this and many other of my books, especially Experience Is Divinity (2013) and Funny God (2014).
Be that as it may, how it applies here is that when I first had sperm experiences, I was one of the handful of people in the world who had such experiences. I re-experienced being a sperm prior to conception for the first time in 1984.
By the way, egg experiences, zygote experiences, and blastocyst experiences are all possible, as well. I have experienced them all; and they have been well documented in the works of Frank Lake and others, going back to the Sixties.
Well, it has seemed to be that the more that folks are having these experiences, the more that other folks are able to access them, too. Indeed, something similar to that happened earlier on with my having birth experiences. At one time, in the Sixties and Seventies, actual birth re-experiences (primals) were rare. But that changed in the course of a mere decade. Birth re-experience is not yet common in psychotherapeutic rooms and, for many reasons, it is not something to be sought out. In particular, there should never be an attempt to induce it outside of the natural spiritual and therapeutic growth process. But it does occur; and it occurs more often than ever, for reasons that I have stipulated in this book and especially in my work, Apocalypse NO (2013), which includes in its subtitle, The Emerging Perinatal Unconscious.
So also now, with even deeper experiences, more folks have been able to experience these realities than ever before in history, and they occur more easily and sooner. And this has nothing to do with suggestion.
Though it might have something to do with the fact that folks might be able to interpret these experiences this way because they know that it is a possibility than if they thought it not. Indeed, I pointed out how many of the experiences of Swami Guru Muktananda (1974) might be able to be re-interpreted in ways other than what he did at the time, now that we are aware of this ability to re-experience such early events in our lives, going all the way back to and before conception.2
Expanding the Potentials of Humanity Within Our Lifetimes?
Finally, I want to say that there is something wonderfully hopeful to be gleaned from all this. That is, that because of the number of experiencers doing this work and being healed and “enlightened” by these profound experiences, at this time in our evolution as humans, we may be on the verge of expanding the potentials for what humans are able to experience in spiritual and nonordinary states of consciousness. Astoundingly, we might be speeding up the process for, and extending the possibilities of, human growth towards liberation in one lifetime, far beyond anything that has been possible in the history of humanity.
And none too soon.
New Birthing Awareness and Procedures. New Prenatal Awareness and Bonding
Beyond considering the remedial, as in what social and cultural forces are or should be in play to facilitate solutions and what personality and consciousness benefiting techniques and therapies are available to heal individuals, we can still consider the preventative. Those being born today, with luck, will have an effect on the course of our planet and its ecology. This is true even if we just consider that it could begin for them while they are in their teens, and most certainly within eighteen to twenty-two years when they are in college. Doing our best to nurture, bond with, and parent in the most loving ways these new societal members will help us all and eliminate the need for the time-consuming and exhausting remedial measures to which the rest of society, those of us born previous to now, must apply ourselves.
Remember that the best way to manifest that more fundamental human nature of cooperation, feeling, and conscience is in the first place to not facilitate the ugly “human nature” of competition, insensitivity, and violence to which prenatal and perinatal traumatic events give rise. There is indeed more hope in this than was thought to be for us when it was thought that we had base instincts of destruction, aggression, and outright insanity and psychosis, which could only be gone beyond or thwarted by a ruthless reeducation campaign, social and behavioral re-engineering, and a constant barrage of cultural affirmations, propaganda to be civil, if you will, which in the past was put out by the incessant drumming of religious and civil entities.
With this new information about the true roots of aggression and insanity in humans, we know there does not have to be a continual struggle to fix or control the behavior of adults, if we simply bring children into the world who will naturally have the opposite inclinations. Good-natured children, Divine-natured children, even, do not have the negative pulls we damaged adults do to egoistically contend with our social and physical environments; they do not need to run away from confronting the harsh realities we need to face in order to survive; and they are not driven by any “death instinct” or Thanatos to act against their own interests, their own survival and that of their families and to be suicidal and self-destructive. No. As we bring them into the world … and we have begun to do that … we will find increasingly that they will have much more to teach us about how to be real and how to survive and to face crises and problems and find solutions to them than we can teach them.
Keep in mind that what constitutes our human psychology and what makes up our human nature can be seen as fortuitous, in that there is hope therein … for our previous understandings of psychology, human nature, and our place in the Divine scheme of things did not lend itself to a very optimistic outlook. For the idea of a savage nature, and a genetic “kill or be killed” motive for existence, not to mention a view of humans as at base competitive, non-cooperative, aggressive, and greedy, while it provides a justification for a capitalist framework for economies, does not offer any hope. Hence, most folks have heretofore considered that we cannot survive. Or else they assume that surviving would entail some kind of totalitarian New World Order to control all humans, seen as irredeemably wayward.
My books are saying that, simply, that is not the case, that those viewpoints were rationalizations for the status quo and were cultural creations which have a purpose of justifying the actions of an elite. But since they are wrong about what humans are like, then there is hope.
Compare what I am saying with the hope that is said to be at the bottom of Pandora’s Jar … or box. First notice that the original Greek understanding has it as a jar, an apt metaphor, because of its shape, for a woman’s body and in particular the womb. Through our understanding now, as laid out in this book as the prenatal matrix of human events, we can see why it would be a jar, for our “evils” do emanate from such a jar-like womb. That it became thought to be a box is an indication of our increasing separation from our primal selves and our bodies over time. Second, notice what an incredible metaphor for our damaged human nature is this Pandora’s Jar! Wrought of the stealing of fire, thus, civilization, this ugly human nature, riddled with prenatal pain, contains all the evils, sicknesses, and troubles of life. Yet there is, set at the bottom of it, hope. For that hope, you can read our more fundamental human nature.
And there is further hope in that our cultures are changing in ways to amplify those fortuitous possibilities. Where I live, in Eugene, Oregon, I was struck by a sign on a bus pointing out that in Oregon, one in five babies are born at home and with the assistance of professional midwives. Births facilitated in this manner are much more likely to foster children in tune with that positive human nature than babies born into insensitive, sterile, cold, and unfeeling hospital environments.
Many other developments, besides midwifery, are in play currently to bring positive changes to the ways we treat our newest members both in the womb and at birth as well as later in the ways they are parented and educated. Better prenatal care and bonding with our prenates is going on. More humane and gentle birthing procedures are being adopted and espoused. More advanced parenting — emphasizing loving attention rather than dictatorial control … not to mention foregoing corporal punishment such as spanking — is being embraced and utilized by parents of all social classes … and this for the first time ever in history.
For that last part, we can thank the informational flood of awareness being catalyzed by television, as I was pointing out above, and the electronic media of all kinds. Much more in this direction needs to happen, but we must not forget that these forces are at work and that we have had some success in making the cultural changes that would facilitate the continuation of life on this planet of ours.
The Occupy Movement
You say you want more direct and immediate things that can be done and that perhaps you can do? No problem.
Hey, occupy Earth, for one. The Occupy movement, which began in October of 2011, was a firestorm of response to frustration about changing. And it was the first worldwide movement for progressive change seen since the Sixties. If you think it has gone away, you have not been looking. It fostered ongoing action for change in many disparate but all progressive ways. Furthermore, its mode of discussion as practiced in its General Assemblies represents a model for egalitarian dialogue and decision-making that goes far beyond the competitive and disputative modes (or the authoritarian, patriarchal ones) of virtually all other decision making groups, whether corporate and secular or civil and governmental.
However, much more needs to be done to help the world, and Occupy needs to have a grander role and influence in bringing that about; and maybe it is you who is needed to help. (You can’t blame me for trying. lol)
Democratic Socialism
Political and economic changes need to happen, as well. They should not be overlooked, for the effect of small changes in political and/or economic processes are profound. They are wider ranging than ever imagined and are longer lasting than the influences of any individual or group. Any changes in the actual system, once it is established, effects change on an ongoing and automatic basis, requiring no additional personal or group effort to bring it about.
This is one of the true benefits of activism over against mere personal growth. Civil rights movements do not have to be continually redone once its tenets have made it into law. The effects can also be unwritten and be equally long lasting. Once we halted nuclear plant construction in the United States with that lawsuit, it did not need to be re-stopped. Though of course that can change, as is true of any systemic progress. Still, institutional change is the longest lasting of all and is far superior, in changing a world, than any effects of individuals, however cumulative. For even those must result in institutional and legal change eventually.
So we need political and economic change, for it is the most powerful and longest lasting of all. But what kind of political change? What kind of economic?
It should be clear that capitalism is the epitome of civilization, with all of the faults civilization has that are contributing to our humanicide and the world’s ecocide — hierarchy, insensitivity to the needs of the individual, inequality, domination and submission, dependence on the value of power and control, and greed and the profit motive not just adopted, but actually enshrined … worshipped, even. On the other hand, at this very moment, Bernie Sanders, in America, is presenting a model of Democratic Socialism that would help, if ever adopted.
Not coincidentally his proposals include a robust program addressing climate change. This should not be surprising, for our interests — survival, the health of our children — are obvious and ever more pressing, and real people, actual people, cannot help but respond to them. It is primarily the mindless monster of the corporation, feeding itself on greed and self-interest, that is the barrier to real change. So anything that takes the seat of decision making out of the hands of those whose only interest is profit and the material advance of themselves alone — which cumulatively create the monster with no conscience whatsoever, the corporation — is a helpful and hopeful thing.
The point is that socialistic and utopian schemes can work, if we focus on a parallel consciousness revolution and an environmental campaign to save the planet to go along with the political ones. This brings in the Marxist material for a complete rebuilding, not a mere tune-up. For indeed, socialist revolution was itself founded upon understandings of humans and human nature and of our relation to Nature that, while the movement was considered utopian, were wrong and were doomed to failure. You cannot build a utopia peopled with folks motivated in the way we have been seeing them in modern societies, which is to say, as self-obsessed and materialistic.
So, only a thorough reformulation of what is human and what is human nature and what are the possibilities for consciousness change and what are the possible ways of facilitating changes in consciousness on a mass scale (See Chapters 32 and 33) can provide what is needed for a radical restructuring of societies and economies in a way that would save the planet.
Next Stop: The Everything
As I mentioned earlier, this topic of solutions will be addressed again and again in my many works, as well as that most solutions are embedded within the problems themselves. For most deleterious processes and events the answer is simply, “Stop it!” as comedian Bob Newhart once so humorously put it.3
Yes, to put an end to most things that are taking us to oblivion, the solution is to simply stop doing them. Beyond that, one need only look to any of the readily available alternatives to any such procedures or practices. Still, as I said above, I will address these topics of solutions and ways and visions and possible futures in my works, Prodigal Human and Primal Return, which are to be brought into print in the next few years. Furthermore, my book already in print and the one previous to this in the Return to Grace Series, Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious speaks to this topic and points out some hopeful and helpful developments in postmodern times, resting alongside the growing problems.
For now, however, I want to take this entire discussion even further. In the next two chapters, the last two in the book, I want to place this entire unprecedented dilemma and challenge within its proper metaphysical context. For these times have significance far beyond ourselves and our trivial concerns. Affecting the planet and the entire biosphere and being the most significant lifetimes for us out of many, we are uplifted and comforted knowing that our actions fit into a cosmic, or metaphysical, and certainly meaningful, pattern, within which we find vision, direction, and encouragement. Beyond this we find that our roles have consequences and importance beyond what we could ever imagine. As I put it, and it is particularly relevant here again, in Funny God (2015):
“…many will feel inspired and enthusiastic about participating in some of the grand and singular undertakings of our current age — an age that Funny God reveals to be affording an opportunity for a life of fulfillment and wonder unlike any since the beginning of time:
“these times are the coming together of heaven and earth….
“we walk in realms of the mythical, the archetypal….
“we are embraced by arms of Divinity … and find ourselves as fingers of God Herself….
“we are the myths in motion … are witness to secrets of eternity finally revealed….”
“we are players in epic stories of ends of days and beginnings of time….”
CHAPTER 32
Centaurs, Shamans, Sacrificial Lambs, and Scapegoats:
Reflections on a Collective Shadow and Experience as Primary
I Am You, and You Are Me, and We Are We, and We Are All Together
In one final look into hopeful and helpful things, this chapter addresses that larger theme of self-sacrifice … central to this book … in a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious context: Are there people who take on the “sins” — or “Pain” — of others? For while Wounded Deer and Centaurs is hardly a religious text, it does address the theme of certain people, like Chiron, the centaur, from mythology, sacrificing themselves for others, for others who cannot help themselves.
But now let us look at this idea in an even larger, spiritual context. Are there people who take on the karma — in an Eastern sense — or the mistakes and evil of others who are not able to handle the consequences of their actions? Is the Divinity inherent in the Cosmos compassionately concerned enough to manifest or call forth individuals to take on the same kind of task that Christ, in a most extreme brutal form, demonstrated? This chapter is not about Christ but about that theme of extraordinary individuals with a Divinely-inspired mission of suffering for the sake of others … others who cannot “help” themselves out in raising themselves above the consequences of their ill deeds. For are not people of all times and cultures children of the same Divinity, some would say “sparks” of that same Divinity, which others, including myself, have theorized is commensurate, that is, equal, to all of Nature, including humanity — each and every one of us?
Assuming this, in this part I discuss this phenomenon of people taking on, willingly and unwillingly, the pain and sins of their society — from the small tribe to that of all of humanity. And I put forth the proposition that there is a collective “pool of pain.”
Janov, in The Primal Scream (1970), introduced the idea of a primal pool of pain, which each of us has and which is built up out of the unfelt traumas and pains of our early lives. It is something we each need to access, release, and integrate in order to be well, or at least weller. The thesis I am proposing is along those lines, except I am suggesting there might be a collective one which we all, somehow, share and which needs some ones — heroes? centaurs? chirons, perhaps? — to address and release, and thereby to help us all out, make us all “weller.”
The idea of a collective pool of pain is not as strange as it might at first sound as something like this has been advanced by Jung in his writing on a possible collective Shadow, even a national one. While to my knowledge he never advanced the idea, as I am doing here, of individuals helping in the resolution of that Shadow — this was, after all, in the era before we knew of the kind of resolution of pain that is possible, as we see in primal and similar modalities — he saw there were patterns of pain and integration that transcended time in the lives of nations. Others have used this idea, however metaphorically or speculatively, to bring otherwise unseeable insight into the events of nations unfolding in the course of their histories. My suggestion, also, is that we think of it as a humanity-wide phenomenon as well, a species-wide one. Considering Jung’s ideas of collective unconscious, collective consciousness, and collective Shadow, it is a speculation I think Jung would heartily approve.
This is relevant for our purposes here in several respects. I mentioned earlier this need to “wash away” and even to “atone” for the “sins of the Fathers” — that is, the acts of hundreds of generations of promethean humans, in particular, male ones … “fathers.” Saying we must atone for or redeem the efforts of promethean fathers is significant, for indeed these ultimately planet destroying ways of greed and domination of Nature are interwoven so thoroughly into patriarchal ways of being as to not be visible. Certainly, war against Nature and other humans was not a part of our earlier matricentric and more “feminine” ways of being, which were characterized by harmony with Nature, sustainability, and more feeling and egalitarian modes of interaction.
At any rate, now, I am asking you to consider something beyond that, beyond mere self-sacrifice to compensate for the unwitting actions of forebears: In that ultimately the distinctions between people are illusory, that we are all One, all interconnected, then both the evil, as well as the good, of each of us is both the result of the collective actions of us all as well as being a part of the consciousness that we all share — more correctly the One Consciousness that each of us is.
Let me relate how I first began to think about this notion. It goes back several decades to a conference I had attended in my field of holotropic breathwork.
The Community’s Inner Dragon
She’d experienced being raped was what she’d told us. This veteran consciousness explorer and trained facilitator had also done a lot of regression work on herself. Yet she related how, in one of her breathwork sessions, she’d definitely had those feelings of rape . . . despite the fact that she’d not been sexually abused in this life. And this last part she knew. It was not denial or repression.
The conference attendees were shaken. It did not coincide with any common psychological, or even transpersonal, models concerning healing or experience they had ever heard. But in her response, the panelist offered the idea that there is a kind of storehouse of experience of collective pain that anyone can tap into, if one is sufficiently open … and ready.
Since this type of thing has come up, as well, in my own inner journeying, I would like to suggest that what we are dealing with is a possibility, based on the evidence, of a sort of collective shadow unconscious, a collective pool of pain, if you will, which has been built up currently and in the past of distress that needs to be released.
I remember that a Santa Barbara–based spiritual teacher expressed a similar idea. As she put it, after you clear out your own stuff, then you do it for the rest of the species, then for all living beings in this world, then for living things in other worlds, then for all entities, and then so on, and on, and….
Shamans, Sages, Tribal Kings, and Prophets
Similarly, from history, the spiritual literature, and anthropology we hear of certain people — shamans, tribal kings, prophets, saviors, sages, gurus — who, after dealing with their own inner dragons, can access this collective pool and thereby help other people. In resolving the negative material, releasing it and integrating it, they can have a positive effect on their community, and even the Universe as a whole.
I am reminded of how certain African tribal “kings” (they are called “kings,” but chieftains would better describe them), tribal leaders, and “clan kings” would be sacrificed for their tribes to the point of and including actual physical death. Similarly, shamans would take on psychic tasks that they would consider to be too dangerous or difficult for members of their tribe to do. In this way of looking at things, it is as if there is a group mind, and that the shaman’s duty is to resolve the collective issues, to work through the unfelt feelings, so that the rest of the tribe can function better.
Along these lines, I can tell you that I have experienced what appears to be this phenomenon on more than one occasion. It is quite common to pick up on, and feel, the feelings of those for whom one is “sitting,” facilitating, in deep experiential psychotherapy. One can call this empathy, of course. Nothing necessarily unusual with that. However, I have also experienced where someone I was facilitating was unable to feel the events they were remembering. They were obviously too horrible and painful. One occasion I remember vividly was when a client was relating how she and her sister had been raped at gunpoint by two men. She could not emote about it, but I did. Of course I did not do that in a way as to interrupt her process, but in a quiet way at the time — tears and the like — and afterwards, uninhibitedly, I did. And no, I had not been raped in this lifetime either. (Another lifetime? That’s another story.)
If nothing else, there is a kind of field of energy that both sitter and experiencer share. Many psychotherapists know this. I am talking about when it is that, but it goes beyond that — to where the primal work, the healing work, that is too overwhelming for the experiencer to embrace and feel, at least at that time, seeking release as it will, finds its way out — expressed, emoted — through the sitter. It is as if the sitter functions as a kind of vent pipe or overpressure plug on a pressure cooker. Writing this, I am reminded of some of the functions of shamans when they attend to the sick. In at least some versions of this, they participate in the experience of the sick person, they might even take on some of the symptoms or, perhaps this is metaphoric, enter the consciousness of the afflicted, find the lost soul, and bring it back.
Similarly, it was not uncommon for me to begin experiencing the primal pain and symptoms of those I was sitting for in primal therapy. One primal buddy of mine had tremendous asthma, which went back to his being in the womb when, as a tiny fetus, he had a major trauma that entailed a rupture along what was his just forming chest. He responded at the time, saving his life, by making a desperate and intense effort to contract the tissues of his fetal chest to bring the cells together to be reknitted. This contraction of his chest was the way he responded to all stress from then on, thus asthma. During my time of buddying with him, I began having asthma symptoms in my own primaling as well. It was as an adjunct to the other material that was coming up and out of me; it got included in it, you might say. Yet never before or afterward did I have those symptoms of asthma in any primal or other experience.
From these things, it appears as if everyone in a community does not have to, or is not able to, “work” all of their own stuff. It seems that a certain person can volunteer to face some of those inner demons for the entire group, or at least for those having difficulty.
Ah, But Scapegoats As Well
In this respect I believe it is possible to make a fascinating, albeit disturbing, connection between this idea and scapegoats. In the case of scapegoating, particular individuals are selected to be this kind of lightning rod for the group’s pain and psychic distress.
So there seems to be both this tendency for people to adopt this role for themselves and for societies to put people in these roles whether they want it or not. This indicates some kind of social, human need, or at least a fundamental human expediency, that is to say, ego defense.
It would seem, in any case, that there is a right way and wrong way to do this. And we can deduce that these attempts can have either beneficial or negative transpersonal and psychological effects depending on which way it is done. Obviously there is a huge difference between a guru or a savior taking the “sins” of their group upon themselves to release their people in that manner, versus a scapegoat being chosen to dump all the group’s unwanted feelings and Shadow material on.
Sacrifices — Animal and Cucumber
Other fascinating perspectives on this arise from study of one of its variations: This is the widespread phenomenon of sacrifice, and in particular, animal sacrifice. The Nuer of Africa, for example, as well as the neighboring Dinka, created rituals for many of life’s events around the killing of sacrificial oxen. If no oxen were available, a cucumber was often used; in other cultures, lambs or other animals may be used. At any rate, when the ox was slain, the carcass was then split, with one half being consumed and the other half thrown away from them into the bush . . . reputedly taking with it the sins, indiscretions, and wayward elements of all those assembled. Higher forces were then called forth and entreated to remove the carcass/transgressions; indeed, at times they were directly invoked, then subsequently admonished to “go away” and “be gone!”
Since the group or individual is said to be identified with the animal, it is interesting to consider the possible message here that one takes into oneself and incorporates, or integrates, only half of that which is of oneself; but one seeks the Universe’s help in disposing of the other half, relegating it to “the bush.” And for the bush, we can read the Unconscious or the Universe or the All That Is. That is, everything truly outside oneself.
Consider also the prevalent idea of “turning it over” to the divinity or the item of worship … as in “let go, let God,” as another variation on this pattern. In the same light, we might look at the recovery prayer, which asks to be given “the serenity to accept the things I cannot change” (turning it over), “the courage to change the things I can” (incorporating half), “and the wisdom to know the difference.” So here also, the bush is asked to take half and we are responsible for “consuming” the other half, and integrating it.
It is fascinating to think of the common use of prayer in this respect, that is, prayer where one invokes the Divine to take away or to “handle” those things in life, or the parts of those things, that one is incapable of handling oneself. Apparently it is the rare individual who completely integrates her or his Shadow … or one’s primal, one’s prenatal/perinatal Pain.
Perhaps doing this integration, for oneself and others, is behind the meaning of someone being “a saint.” Perhaps this is what is involved in becoming “enlightened.” I don’t know.
At any rate, it is something worthy of speculation. It is something of which wounded deer and centaurs should be aware.
Experience Is Primary
Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that all of this idea of a group psyche is built upon a perspective, a paradigm, in which subjectivity is primary: Experience or Mind being the only reality. Such speculation as engaged in here is not even conceivable within the dominant materialistic paradigm. Yet these possibilities have long . . . far longer than this upstart of “objective materialism” has been around . . . have long been the common currency of our species, and have been so in the vast majority of human cultures that have ever existed. To consider it again is part of that primal renaissance I mentioned earlier, in fact. It is something we lost in venturing into our rationalistic, our “civilized,” humanity.
Lastly, these ways of seeing Reality are consistent with the furthest reaches of our understandings of physical reality itself, as we are learning from quantum physics. And there are other modern scientific discoveries bringing forth these “primal” understandings of the primary nature of the Universe as Mind or Experience and the interconnection of all things and beings.
Shared Experience: Morphic Resonances and COEX Systems
Let me explain. Earlier, I brought forth this phenomenon of someone experiencing trauma that had not happened to them, this idea of experience being shared. Now, I must tell you that a similar idea has been coming out of people having rape fantasies, both men and women, where apparently there has been no sexual abuse. It is becoming ever more common. I can tell you this from my many decades of experience in psychotherapeutic circles, groups, conferences, conventions and from talks with colleagues.
It leads me to ask, is it that in some way when we are violated as children, psychologically and emotionally, that it is part of a gestalt or resonance — Stanislav Grof would say a COEX system; Rupert Sheldrake would say a morphogenetic field or morphic resonance — that includes actual physical violations from a collective pool of pain?
Also we should consider all the current stories of people being sexually abused; there seems to be an epidemic of people claiming to have been sexually molested as infants by their parents. No doubt much more than we want to know of this is true. The evidence is there to confirm it. Nevertheless, is it also possible that people in processing their primal pain, especially their prenatal and perinatal pain, or coming close to these repressed feelings, are at times tapping into transpersonal resonances that are only similar in quality to the corresponding real-life trauma? This is a possibility we should consider; for I know it to be the only plausible one in my own case, in the case of the panelist mentioned at the outset, and in the cases of several others whom I know personally or whose cases have appeared in print.
UFOs: Is That Gaia Calling?
Another item related to this pattern is the current UFO abduction experiences — the incidence of which is also increasing. One interesting explanation for such experiences of being abducted and then examined, probed, and sampled — which corresponds to this collective pool of pain theory — is derived from the idea that, literally, the Earth herself (Gaia) has consciousness and is therefore part of a collective consciousness to which we also belong. This idea of an Earth hologram is propounded by Goddess theorists and by others as well. Joseph Chilton Pearce (1980) claims we have primary access to such an Earth hologram as children and lose it later through our normative indoctrination into society.
He writes:
The brain as a hologram is representative of the Earth. So long as this is undifferentiated, the personality, or consciousness within that brain, receiving its perceptions from that brain, is literally an undifferentiated part of the hologram effect. It is part and parcel of the world system, which, because it radiates out from the child, places him at the center of thought, with the world a body extending from him. The clarification of the hologram (to use that model) is a period of breathless wonder and excitement for the child because he is discovering his larger self….
The primary process is the function through which we are conscious of the Earth as a thinking globe, the flow of life, the general field of awareness, and almost surely, even larger ecologies of thought. The primary process is also past, current, and potential possibility and experience. Other cultures have maintained a much greater openness to the primary process than Western culture has….
Nevertheless, the potential for access to this “primary process” always exists, since it is repressed but continues to exist in the unconscious.
With these things in mind, is it possible that UFO abductees may be inadvertently stumbling into primary Earth process and picking up on the feelings of Earth herself as she is being poked, violated, measured, and having things inserted into her in this modern, high-tech, resource exploiting era.
If so, one has to wonder whether some of the feelings of the Earth, or Gaia, might not be being expressed or be trying to be integrated by her through these people. Is it possible that these people have become unwitting channels for Mother Earth’s pain — to help to express and integrate it — as she is systematically being defoliated, polluted, violated, and destroyed?
This may sound farfetched, but then, considering our actions in the face of global disaster . . . well, so are the times! Furthermore, I helped facilitate at least one inner journeyer whose experience was exactly this. Her interpretation of the powerful experience my wife and I both witnessed was that she was feeling and releasing pain and distress of all women throughout history and then Mother Earth herself. What gave extra credibility to her experience for me was that I observed what looked like her experiencing the pain of women in birth. Yet, like the rape reliving that was not of this life I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, this woman had never given birth herself … not in this life, anyway.
Volcano-Jumping for Bliss and Profit
For whatever they are worth, I offer these speculations in the hope of stimulating renewed appreciation of the roles of journeyers and shamans — as they have reemerged in their modern form in the deep experiential growth modalities such as holotropic breathwork and primal therapy, among many others in these days of primal renaissance.
As for its connection to the role of wounded deer and centaurs as related to our promethean fathers and to the others around us who cannot or will not awaken and be of use here, it may be that we have as well taken on an ancient role. That is, that in all cultures of all times there have been that small minority who, it seems, are destined to be the ones facing the underbellies of their cultures, for the rest of their society cannot. The others have not the capacity or ability to do that.
Furthermore, if it is true, as I am saying here, that we are all interconnected and that our pains, problems, and past actions are shared and are a common responsibility, not an individual or personal one, then two things follow: 1) We are adopting an ancient and necessary role and can consider ourselves to be like shamans, even in our activist roles, in rectifying the results of actions of truly culpable others. And since we are all interconnected, there is nothing unfair or even strange about that. And, 2) we can expect that our efforts toward those salubrious ends will be magnified, even multiplied, beyond any expectations that we could possibly have. This would pertain, because any progress, changes, or healings of our own consciousness, and the actions that result from them, flow into and enhance the consciousness and abilities of others and the humanity around us in ways that are seeable and measurable, yes, but also in ways that are not visible and that are merely, albeit profoundly, psychic or of the nature of our consciousness, our direct Experience, our common Subjectivity: We are One.
CHAPTER 33
Funny God … the Cosmic Overstanding:
Our Deepest, Compassionate Human Nature Abhors the Murder Implicit in Ecocide … It’s All in You and Up to You
Now, dear reader, this is the chapter where I set all of this — all this pre/perinatal psychology and activism — inside a metaphysical framework which adds immeasurably to our understanding of both thrusts of this book — the consciousness expanding and the activism encouraging. This is the final chapter where I give you the “best stuff,” shake you by the hand or give you a fist bump, and pat you on the back/ slap you on the butt: “Go get ‘em, champ!” As I send you out the door to be your own raging maniac of change, hope, and planetary and planetmate survival.
Funny God
Last year, 2015, I published my book, Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation. Briefly, it is a macrocosmic look at our times and our challenges. It is the highest overstanding of our situation. Some of its ideas are relevant here, as well.
Still, some of its notions might seem at odds with what is being said here. I can easily see that someone who would understand the idea, put forth there, that we, and all life, are essentially immortal for they (we) are all aspects of a One Consciousness, a One Experience, which has no beginning or end and which only changes and transforms, might wonder then at why we should at all be concerned with this dying off of life on our planet. One might be tempted to cop a pseudo-spiritual or transpersonal stance to bolster one’s dark forces of denial and complacency and might feel that my work supports such apathy, such cowardice. That is hardly the case, and here I will explain why.
God Is Us
You say, “funny god”? God is funny?
While I think there is something to that — to God being funny as in having a sense of humor — which I get into in other places, the main point I am making with funny god is that God’s a trip, to put it in the vernacular. More accurately, God is funny, because we’re fallible, we’re funny, and God is us. God is funny because we as God are pathetic, dramatic, foolish, forgetful of our true nature as Divinity, and more. We “ape” that we are intelligent, superior to Nature, and transcendent to Nature with our pretension of having the ability to reason. Yet, as I said in Chapter 15 about the “gods” reaction to us as we continue our blind plummeting into an environmental abyss, with the evidence of our mistaken ambitions all around us, they are no doubt laughing at us. Yes, we are ultimately God, but damn we’re funny as humans!
You see, in addition to Funny God, I wrote Experience Is Divinity (2013). From my experience and understanding … experience and understanding that is not that uncommon in these psychedelic and mystical days … the highest truth that we can know is that we are all One and that One is the All That Is. And that All That Is includes us.
I mean, we say, “We are stardust.” Well, like, so what? I mean physically we are stardust, but the important thing about being stardust is that we are part of the Universe. We are part of the Reality of the Universe.
We are not separate trying to get to heaven. We are not separate, trying to get to God. We are part of … God. God is the All That Is, and we are part of that. We are not “above” Reality, looking down on it — the way we imagine of that deity of ours, who we say we are not yet act like we are in trying to control everything around us. No. Big surprise, we are part of Reality. And Reality is the manifestation of God, it is God, seen from our diminished human perspective. Reality is not some separate, machine-like thing which a different “thing,” a God, sets in motion, adjusts, and repairs, like some gigantic watch maker in the sky.
Our misconceived and fraudulent religions have us thinking that we are separate from Reality and separate from God, and that we have fallen.
No, we are part of God. Always have been; always will be. But what we have done is that we have forgotten that we are God. Consider how much we forget about our deeper human nature of cooperation and joy in the process of going through the prenatal/perinatal pain and trauma that I have delineated in this book. Now, consider that part of that pain, as well as even earlier trauma that I get into in Falls from Grace (2014), has us forgetting our even deeper Divine Nature, actually Identity, as well.
Forgetting (Voluntary Limitations) Make Life Fun
So I see Reality in terms of funny gods, and a Funny God. Basically God is funny because we, as God, each one of us, decided to forget that we are God, so as to have a trip — the human trip.
It is kind of like playing a game. You know, when you play a board game, you forget that the real world exists out there. You’re playing Monopoly or whatever, and that’s your reality for that moment. You have certain rules.
And you are operating with other people, other entities. It is a back-and-forth kind of thing, action and reaction, communication and response, play and counter-play. And it’s fun. We are engaged and wanting to see what our opponents are going to do. What will be their next play? How will we react to it?
But, in order, for it to be fun, we have to forget that it is not real, that there are no real, or at least very important, stakes. If it is a card game, we have to forget that we could walk over behind our opponent and look at the cards in their hand. We have to refrain from knowing their next play by staying on our side of the table. Those are the rules.
Similarly, in the game of life, we have to forget that we know it all. We have to keep out of our mind, while playing, that there actually is no duality, there is no I and them, there is no time, that everyone is One and all time is Now and all awareness is within us. We have to forget all that and pretend there are limitations and separations and that we do not, indeed, know it all, including the next “play.” Though we do! In a part of us, which again we have forgotten, we do!
In this play of life, we know even what our opponents are going to do. Indeed, a part of us knows the entire script of our lives as well as everyone else’s. But what fun is it to read a novel that you already know by heart and whose ending is clear in your mind?
No. It’s not going to be fun if you know what their next play is going to be.
So, we know even what our fellow players, our other us’s, are going to do, yet we have to limit ourselves in order to fully participate in the game … the experiment in truth that is each individual life … in order to enjoy it. And enjoying, despite all we have been told, is the essence of God, is our true essence, and is the only reason for existing and for Existence Itself.
Let us take another analogy — that of a play. In this sense, being alive is like being an actor on a stage. So we are an actor on a stage, playing a part. But we have forgotten that our Divine Nature is that we are everything and that we know that we are on a stage and all that is involved with that. A part of us knows that is the truth of our situation, but we block out that truth to better play our parts … just like actual actresses and actors must consciously do to better perform their parts.
So that’s what is Funny God and why we’re funny god and why God’s funny. Remember that funny is fun, is laughable, but also is odd or strange. “That’s a funny way of doing things,” one might say. “Something smells funny,” that is, strange or odd. Well, God is funny, also, because we as God do a “funny” thing in creating life. We turn ourselves into beings who, especially human beings, forget who they are in order to make infinite stories and thereby glorify existence. And we invent time so as to better savor those stories. Just like a book contains all the narrative in its many pages, but we read through it, over time, beginning to end, one sentence at a time, in a way that it is appreciated and the enjoyment of it magnified.
More interesting that way. More enjoyable. Still, a funny thing for an all-knowing being to do, wouldn’t you say?
Next time I see God, I’ll tell Her, “You became human! What a funny thing for you to do!” lol.
Experience Is Divinity
Furthermore, Funny God is the idea that what exists is pure consciousness, or is … what I call it … is Experience. I stress this difference, because consciousness is not something just “mental.” It’s what we feel. It is all that we feel.
When we have an experience, like in a breathwork experience or some other experience that we say is growthful, it is the entire feeling gestalt — including all mental, perceptual, emotional, and aware, and only somewhat aware, components — that we are talking about.
All of life is just experience. And that experience overlaps with other people.
I mean, all of us together is just one infinitely large “ball” of Experience. Yet we think we are separate.
We have roped off separate areas of that. But those “things” of us — our experiences — they overlap and mix. That’s why there is telepathy. That’s why there are all those other things of the paranormal. That’s why you can feel unity with other people … empathy, compassion … why their pains and joys can become yours.
And ultimately you can feel that unity with God. Because we are part of that All. Our boundaries can be limited to our human form or they can be expanded so as ultimately to include the All That Is.
So that’s what Funny God is. Funny God is about us … about the fact that we leave the Godhead … for the fun of it. And why? Because it makes the whole even grander, more glorious.
Knowledge by itself is just knowledge. It is not all that interesting. But Knowledge + Time equals Experience. And that’s us. That’s God become us. Being facetious, you might say that God, like myself, also does not believe there is much value in knowledge for its own sake and holds that one must put it into action.
We, as God, wanted to make everything greater, for God is nothing if not the greatest. (Apologies to Muhammad Ali, by the way, who will have to settle for just being good.) So we forget, so as to create Experience, as well as to manifest this incredible infinite variety of experience, which is God’s grandeur.
There is No Death
Now, none of this — though mostly wrought of the discoveries coming from modern consciousness research — is all that dissimilar from the spiritual literature, the stories you get out of India, and so on, going back thousands of years. They tell of life and immortality and how we come into and out of life as in the blinking of an eye. They acknowledge our Divine Identity … Atman is Brahman, is the way that is expressed … which is to say, “I am That.” In other words, our individual identity is commensurate with, is equal to, the All That Is, or Brahman, or Reality, or God. Like ancient quantum physicists, these wise scribes of long ago reveal to us that time is an illusion … that it is a construct … a mental thing that we concoct for reasons that have to do with our beingness as humans.
Breadcrumbs from Ourselves as the Divine
So, in these tales, we are telling ourselves something. Our collective psyche, outside of time and space, comes through to remind us of our origins, our true Nature, and the direction in which to go in order to re-member that again and become One. There is something in us ever telling us, putting out, like, little bread crumbs from the Divine within us, to show us the way home. It keeps putting out the information in every form around us, if we are watchful, if we are aware. Kind of like it gives us hints that “This is the real truth. Here. Look over here!”
It is like there are all these clues to tell us— that we as God have put for us to tell us — that this is all just an illusion. It is as illusory as any dream seems to us when we awaken at dawn. These clues say, “You’re all just playing a game. You’re each just having an ‘experiment in Truth.’ Every one of you is adding to the infinity of Experience that is Divinity and thereby magnifying, indeed glorifying, the All. More than that, you are each, by being forgetful of the All, creating actions, experiences, events that would not be possible without this game of duality and separateness. Thereby you are bringing joy into it, en-joy-ment; bringing passion, emotion, excitement, and drama into it, making it interesting; bringing fun into it, making it funny; and bringing pain and separation into it, creating that beautiful pain of poignancy, so as to better appreciate the joy, the fun, the pleasure, the love … of it.”
We tell ourselves our true Nature even in the things we like to do, the things we invent, too. There are so many analogies I could use, so many “bread crumbs.”
For example, take amusement parks. You know? We go on a roller coaster, or we traipse through a haunted house, all the while knowing it is not real. The coaster is not really going to crash. There are no real ghosts in that house. So why do we do it? For fun! We invent a set of parameters within which we have an experience, and in a sense we pretend that those parameters map out a real thing, something with real consequences. Though there are none. And we do it all to maximize our en-joy-ment, our pleasure, our fun.
Or take the example of watching a horror film. Oh, it’s horrible. Oh, it’s scary. Yes, we’re tense. We find ourselves gripping the arms of our seat, in spite of ourselves.
But then, why are we watching the darn movie?
Well, because it’s stimulating. It’s titillating. It gives you an experience out of your normal life, providing contrast to that life so as to better appreciate the serenity and lack of real horror in most people’s actual reality. The flick kind of gets you excited. It’s interesting!
Similarly, God does all these horrible things, including the painful and gruesome things of life, because She knows there are no real consequences. He knows there is no actual evil, only seeming ones. There’s a part of us who knows there’s no permanent harm in anything that ever happens and that sadness and pain are ultimately just experiences to bring out, by contrast, real happiness and pleasure in our life experiences and, as God, to glorify Existence by infinitely expanding the manifestations of Experience, which is God’s essence.
There Are Only Seeming Tragedies
Part of that is the notion of death. One of the parameters of this game is this mistaken belief in an end to our experience, our consciousness, our existence. But just as there is no way to end consciousness and no time, there is also no death. And what that means is that ultimately everything is a comedy. Yes, funny god, again. There is no tragedy. There are just seeming tragedies.
Those Butterfly Eyes
My friend, Peter Melton, from Extinction Radio/Activate Media,1 talks about this phenomenon of being aware of your immortality while still alive as having your “butterfly eyes.” That is, while one is still the caterpillar. Clearly he is saying that a caterpillar with “butterfly eyes” knows that it is not going to die when it stops being a caterpillar, it is going to become something greater; it is going to transform. He is making the analogy that some humans, too, might have butterfly eyes in realizing, also, that there is no death or ending of consciousness, only transformation, only changes of states, status, or dimensions, as quantum physicists and scientists in related fields are beginning to say.2
To that I add that, yes, there is no death, only transformation. But the way I picture it is that when we do “die,” when we become that “butterfly,” and we realize our immortality and look back at our lives, we’re laughing our butts off!
We’re thinking, “Man, that was a trip!” That is another reason why I call it, Funny God. For what I am saying is that the thing that we share with the Divine is laughter.
Why? Because it is like we, as God, but thinking we are human, are constantly goofing on ourselves, forever playing this game of Divine peek-a-boo. You know, like we are constantly scaring ourselves with the things we bring to ourselves in life, the experiences we have.
But then, at some point — and maybe for some especially tragic events in our lives it can only happen after death — it comes to us, there was no reason to fear. We think, “There’s no problem. It’s fine.” How many times has that happened in your life, you know? How many times have you thought something was horrible and never ending and that your life was irreparably changed and then, all of a sudden, the clouds part, the sun shines through, and you’re happy again. And you go “Wow. Okay, that was all just to get me here.”
Suddenly all that we abhorred has meaning for we see what part it played in our becoming who we are. Sometimes we can even acknowledge that if it had been us creating a plan to get us to where we needed to go as a person, to learn and become what we needed to, we might ourselves have chosen those same events for ourselves. (We did, by the way.) We see a pattern in our lives that is meaningful. Indeed, we see it all as perfect.
Of course no one sees that for all the experiences of their lives, except maybe the truly enlightened folks. Some events are left causing us anguish when we think of them, and we do not see any meaning in the pain that happened or any benefit in them toward making us a better person or anything. Still, remember that many of the painful experiences of our lives did not reveal their meaning or value to us for a long time … sometimes decades, sometimes not till the end of our lives. We needed to learn more. We needed to have other experiences to get us to a place where we would be able to understand their meaning. I am asking you to entertain the idea that for those events of which we can fathom no meaning or value there will be revealed exactly that in some “time” beyond this time, after “death.”
Therein we have those butterfly eyes. We see death as a transformation that makes sense of our lives: We view it as the event after which we become all happily zig-zagging butterfly-like, leaving behind the plodding and slow self, which we now see to be dull, dim-witted, by comparison … and thoroughly not getting it — though the truth was only a membrane, an instant experience of death, or in the case of the caterpillar, a cocoon experience away.
How Gilgamesh Misunderstood His Bread Crumbs
In fact, I have used the analogy of the butterfly myself, in writing about death and immortality, in my book, Funny God (2015). I also used the analogy of a snake shedding his skin in that book.
I wrote about the story of Gilgamesh and how we completely got that story wrong.3 Gilgamesh was looking for his immortality and the traditional understanding is that there was none to get and that instead one should focus on the projects of one’s life that will live on after them.
Totally wrong. No. Gilgamesh actually got the immortality he desired. Rather, he had it all along and the forces in his story (today we would say, the Universe, the All That Is … or God) tried to get him to see that.
Oh, it was a tragedy, for sure. Traditionalists got that right, though in the wrong way. For the tragedy was not that he failed to achieve immortality but that he did not realize that he had it all along and could not possibly even lose it!
How did the Universe do that? Well, It showed him a snake slithering away from a skin that it had shed.
Now, a snake shedding its skin is a symbol of immortality, because it is kind of like when we have a life and we die, supposedly, it is like the shedding of a skin. We just go into another “form” … more accurately no-form state. And the thing that we leave behind is the corpse … the skin.
What I was saying in Funny God is we look at the corpse/skin and we say, “Oooh, he’s dead, he’s gone,” you know? “The person’s gone.” But it is only because we cannot see the new “snake” that remains. We cannot see what the deceased person has transformed into.
From the perspective of caterpillars as regards butterflies, you can just imagine the caterpillars hanging out. And this one caterpillar’s making its cocoon. And the friends of busy caterpillar are going “Aw, he’s going to die. He’s caught that cocoon-making malady we’re seeing so much of these days. He’s going to be gone. She’s going to be gone. She’s making her coffin. Aaaaww. Too bad.”
And why? Because they don’t see the butterfly that emerges later. You can imagine that they, like us, do not have it within their species-determined perception set to see it. The butterfly might as well be invisible, a ghost. The caterpillars do not know what happens after cocoon comes and spirits their friend away. They don’t have their own butterfly eyes, if you will. So they don’t know. They think it’s the end.
Now, wouldn’t that make them a lot like us? After all, we only see the things that we are programmed to see. If we are not used to seeing “butterflies,” so to speak, we are only going to see dead “caterpillars” and coffins … or “cocoons.”
So we are convinced there is an end to consciousness at death. But there are people, now, at this stage in history with advanced medical technology making possible ever more instances of people being brought back to life after clinical death, who have found their butterfly eyes. There are people who have had near-death experiences (NDEs) as well as death-death experiences (DDEs) — as one of my friends who experienced it insists it should be called — who are aware of and indeed are in ongoing contact with people in the No-Form State. There are others; there are legitimate mediums, in fact, who are aware of people in that other dimension and can even communicate with them. Still others, whose special gift is unaccounted for, have back-and-forth communication with those who have passed on, usually close relatives, spouses, or friends.4 The instances of such occurring that I am personally aware of are so astonishing that I am wary of telling of them lest I lose any credibility I might have left. lol. Perhaps another time; perhaps it will be a book.
Put simply, these folks can tell you about the deceased: They’re not gone! They are simply in a different place. One “deceased” man told his distraught wife, in a vision, “Why do you grieve? It is only like I have gone into the next room.” As I said earlier, some ideas coming out of quantum physics are that death is about going into another dimension.2 My own grandmother told a story almost exactly like that, throughout her life, about her own daughter, who passed away as a child, appearing to her at her gravesite to comfort her … and to tell her she was not gone, just in a different, a better, place.
So the dead are alive. They’re “here,” in a sense. Just that we can’t see them. Just like those caterpillars can’t see the butterflies.
Then, Is Earth Life Unimportant?
How I think this all fits together with the extinction thing is that I believe we are being spurred to these realizations by the fact that it is so important that all our focus becomes on this lifetime to get it right. To get right what in other lifetimes we did not.
As I said in Chapter 3, my generation and I have been trying to get it right since the Sixties. Even for things that had been wrong for thousands of years, we wanted to see if we could get it right. And we’re still trying to.
But anyway, as an entire globe now, we’re trying to get it right, or else! What I am saying is that part of that death as an ally thing — with annihilation on our doorstep — is that we are having these realizations … profound realizations of all kinds unlike anything before, indeed only possible now. And some of us are realizing our butterfly eyes while we’re still the caterpillar, okay?
More and more of us are realizing we are immortal.
Our Higher Self Abhors Unnecessary Pain and Suffering. It Is Compassion and Love
Now, does that make it, like, oh it doesn’t matter if the life on Earth goes away? Like, there is no death, so what’s the problem? Just drive it till the wheels fall off? It doesn’t matter if everybody dies?
Noooo. Because also our higher self, our immortal and Divine self, interwoven as it is with our deeper human nature, is also our compassionate self. It is love. And of course as love we don’t want suffering. Unnecessary suffering, we detest the most.
So, since we don’t want suffering, death is still not a good thing because it’s a painful thing.
Our Higher Self Abhors Murder
I mean death could be fine. It could be just a transition. It could be a “graduation.” But when it is going to happen for billions of people, and if it is going to happen for the estimated nine million non-bacterial species, it’s no longer just “Oh, I’m accepting death.” I’m just all spiritual and above all such concerns.
NO! It’s frickin’ murder … murder on a scale beyond our wildest imaginings.
Now I personally do not want to go into the afterlife or into the No-Form State with that on my “mind.” I don’t want to spend my no-form-ity knowing that I was part of the murder of an entire planet because I didn’t do anything to help at the time. Do you?
So I think that, yeah, we realized we’re actually free from death … there’s nothing to worry about in that respect. But at the same time knowing that brings out our higher self to want to make this story, this life, the best one that can be … the one in which we have contributed most to reducing the inherent suffering of life … and not one where we have aided in the near infinite magnification of that suffering … throughout humanity, across all species, and for all we know for multitudes of unknown beings. Yeah, I think the second possibility to be a “bad” thing.
But to aid us in making the right decision, we have our deeper human nature filling us with compassion. With love and compassion. And with that in us, we cannot help but align ourselves with the forces on Earth working for life, for sustainability, for stopping the out-of-control extinction. We are compelled to do everything in our power … now or never.
In an on-air comment, Peter Melton (2015) phrased it, quite well indeed, this way:
Understanding the urgency and the emergency will bring that [higher self] out in you…. Our culture is so death phobic and grief phobic we think that [grief and pain] are bad feelings to have. But what we’re coming to remember, slowly but surely, is that those things actually spark this new aspect, this grander aspect of humanity … is this remembering that it is temporary for us individually and that that sparks us to live more passionately5
You see, we have been taught that human nature is riddled with aggression, competition, selfishness, even murder, and all kinds of other hunter-like and patriarchal qualities. However, truly, even more basically, below the pain or prior to the pain, our actual human nature, which we share with many of our planetmate relatives, by the way (see Planetmates, 2014.) brims with love, is cooperative, self-sacrificing, empathetic of others, and Divinely beautiful.
And that’s linked in with the necessary hero.
It’s All in You … And Up to You
We are going into a stage in history — hopefully not an all-too-short one — where there will be heroic people who are going to do incredible things and make a grand story….
Or else we’re not….
In which case we’re going to be some footnote in the Universal registry.
You can imagine beings of the future zipping by the planet, its epitaph reading “Stupid ape.”
Or, like the gods laughing at us now, they will be or have been entertained spectators of our trials and tribulations. A horror story, for them … nay, a disaster movie.
Sadly not a good one, though. One and a half stars.
”Lousy ending, nobody lived!”
“Hell, they even killed off the heroes! Who does that?”
“No sequel, that’s for sure.”
However, what I believe is actually going to happen in these times is this: People like you, you wounded deer, you centaurs, are going to reconnect with your deepest and most beautiful human nature and be redeemed and freed from conflict and petty strife. You necessary heroes are not going to shirk doing self-sacrificing things. You may very well perform acts of pure heroism, knowing that all else, all life, depends on it. And together we are going to be lifted up into the grandest and most fulfilling cause this world has ever seen.
It is all in you … and up to you.
AFTERWORD
Continue with Book Six, Planetmates, The Great Reveal, and About the Return to Grace Series
Right now the important thing to do is to address the crisis of our times, the environmental one. It is dharmic to do that. For if we fail there, theoretical psychology will not matter and there will be no one around to read about or learn about these subjects.
Planetmates: The Great Reveal
With that in mind, in the next book in this Return to Grace Series of eleven books titled, Planetmates: The Great Reveal, I introduce you, readers, to the voice of the planetmates. We share this planet, Earth, with numerous other life forms. We have species numbering up to nine million and up to five hundred million, if you include bacteria. In Planetmates these other species tell us what they think of what we are doing to the planet we share with them; they tell us what they think of us; they tell us how they have viewed us for millions of years and how they view us now. They tell us how we became human, what are the roots of the apocalypse we are facing … they relate it to a factor in our evolution occurring millions of years ago. But most of all they let us know where we went wrong and how we could go right again.
While I use the voice of the planetmates to make our environmental case, this book, next in the series, is more than just an exhortation. It is a sweeping overview of our evolution and an incisive autopsy of what became of us and how we are different from Nature. While this isn’t pretty, it is helpful. And the end of the book presents a prophecy from the planetmates: “Something wonderful is going to happen.”
Planetmates also brings perinatal understandings of the origins of human consciousness, human separation from Nature, and human neurosis — as being a result of a fetal malnutrition which was the result of the bipedalism we uniquely experienced in our evolution — to bear upon our current environmental crisis.
I relate the process of evolution from our pre-primate forebears through prehistory to civilization and then to current days, through the lens of perinatal trauma and the current apocalypse. With “planetmate assistance,” I detail how we lived initially in a state of Nature; but then, as a result of an “aquatic ape” phenomenon, we gained an evolutionary advantage by becoming bipedal while foraging in water, which eventually and gradually led to being bipedal on land. I describe how this resulted in pelvic bone changes; a birth trauma that is unparalleled in Nature, which resulted in a bigger brain to manage the trauma and keep memories repressed, creating an unconscious; which larger skull resulted in more birth trauma; widely varying terms of gestation; secondary altriciality, which is that half of the brain’s growth is accomplished outside of the womb, and, importantly, under the direction of all too flawed humans, as compared to other species for whom that development occurs en utero and with a kind of a biological near perfection.
I show how this birth trauma has led to humans being the crazed and overly intellectual species, capable of incredible achievements of creation of civilization as well as destruction of life and self. In this book, Wounded Deer and Centaurs, I have shown that humans are crazy and what are the roots of that, in each of our lives, and how it goes back to our time in the womb, especially late gestation, and at birth. In Planetmates, I unfold the story of how that all came to be in our evolution.
I link our evolutional story to common human understandings and misunderstandings that are at odds with our planetmates. I show what we lost … but what we could also get back, if we lower our species hubris a tad. Along the line I account for many of our common understandings, which differ from the world of Nature and the rest of our planetmates, of work, play, life, death, faith, trust, truth, religion, emotion, feeling, sexuality, and so on, as being an outgrowth of this primary trauma.
The Return to Grace Series
This is a good place to give an overview of the totality of the Return to Grace Series of books. You can see where this book and the one to come, Planetmates, fit into the overarching narrative of a “return to grace.”
The Return to Grace Series is a sequence of eleven books I am bringing to print in the years 2013 through 2017. Wounded Deer and Centaurs is the eighth book completed. What remains to be put to paper are three books — Book 2, You Say You Want a Revolution?; Book 10, Prodigal Human: The Descent of Man; and Book 11, Primal Return: Renaissance and Grace. In this series of books, I lay out in great detail where we are, how we got to where we are, why we are here, why we need to change from being here, and where to go from here … and how to do that.
Book One
Book One: Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths” describes where we are politically as a result of recent history. We are in a dire state — politically and environmentally — because a natural evolutionary development of consciousness and generational succession, begun in the Sixties, was derailed by moneyed interests with a profit motive. Because of this advance being monkey-wrenched by selfish interests, we are in a quandary in all areas of public and environmental life.
Book Two
Book Two, tentatively titled You Say You Want a Revolution? or The Monster Is the Corporation is not yet in print but exists on line as Chapters 17 through 32 of Culture War, Class War, at the site of the same name.1 It elaborates on the dire quality of our times, requiring drastic measures at all levels and in all areas … a new paradigm of economics, politics, individual life purpose, human achievement, and relation to Nature.
Book Three
Our environmental predicament, in particular, is introduced in all its severity and urgency in Book Three: Apocalypse Emergency: Love’s Wake-Up Call. This book is both an appeal to our highest beingness and a call to action, wrapped in a psychological and spiritual look at why we are not alarmed at the moment, though we should be.
Book Four
Book Four: Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious details an alarming and yet possibly opportune development of our times, existing alongside our current environmental and sociopolitical dilemmas. It shows how, through means apparently generational and psychological as well as environmental, we are seeing a rise of perinatal material in the consciousness, motives, and personalities of ourselves and everyone around, including and significantly those in power in these times.
I show how we both manifest and act out our perinatal pain in our physical environment, but also in our social environment at all levels, from individual, to group and to national, as exemplified in our politics, and to international. I show where we can place the lever of human effort and activism in order to bring about the change we need in order to survive. It is revealed within our perinatal patterns.
Book Five
In this book, Book Five: Wounded Deer and Centaurs: The Necessary Hero and the Prenatal Matrix of Human Events, I carried those themes forward, focusing on two factors in particular — the deepest roots of those perinatal-apocalyptic upsurges occurring in modern life … and I trace them to actual late-gestation prenatal events of even more significance than the birth elements … and the phenomenon of the self-sacrificing individual required to take us forward from these times.
This necessary hero, it turns out, is not only apparently coming to our aid and is manifesting in greater numbers, but is imbued with just the kind of access to their own pre- and perinatal material as to make possible their leading us beyond these ties — these prenatal traps keeping us in bigotry, violence, greed, and fear and away from our deeper nature of love and compassion — which have been holding down humanity from real progress for thousands of years.
Book Six
In Book Six: Planetmates: The Great Reveal, as I have said, I have all of these — a plea from our planetmates for us to wake up; a vision of who we are in Nature and in relation to them that shows how and why we have strayed and how it has to do with perinatal factors; a revolutionary view on civilization and evolution that puts us in a new and non-complimentary light but also reveals places for change and renewal never before seen; a new-paradigm understanding of a way of being in the world and in Nature that is more natural, primal, and in touch with our basic nature; and a prophecy that in humans taking up the challenge presented, “Something wonderful is going to happen.”
Book Seven
Book Seven: Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation describes the new paradigm of activism required of the necessary hero as the “Tao of Funny God,” which has it that only true and radical responses not rooted in the paradigms we confront can be effective. It details old paradigm patriarchal perspectives and how they are wrong and why they need to be gone beyond. And it explains matriarchal new paradigm ones that are needed.
In its second part, it lays out, in story format, a prophecy and a vision of a potential wondrous future, coming soon, something along the lines of that “something wonderful” of Planetmates. This vision is consistent with the findings about Nature, reality, and psychology, which I advance in other parts of the series. And in its final part, “The Mind’s True Liberation,” Funny God presents an expansive, indeed, towering, overstanding of human life and its purpose in a cosmic, a Divine scheme, along with a vision, a revelation on the nature of God, human life, life purpose, and on existence itself.
Book Eight
Book Eight: Experience Is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor, explains the nature of reality and human consciousness that is consistent with the views of quantum physics and modern consciousness research, especially that of the kind I have experienced in deep experiential psychotherapy and especially in nonordinary states of consciousness brought about spontaneously and via primal, meditation, and breathwork experiences of many years.
Book Nine
In Book Nine: Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness I bring to light the devolutional model of consciousness. It tells how we got to where we are in each of our individual lives and where we need to address our attention to return to the state of grace, which is our birthright, indeed, is our true identity.
Book Ten
In Book Ten: Prodigal Human: The Descent of Man I bring together the ideas of Falls from Grace and Planetmates in describing the evolutionary/devolutionary arcs of humanity and the individual, founded upon growing edge views from our current sciences. Beyond that I outline our possible return — that “something wonderful” again — and show why it is necessary as well as how it is truly possible, as seemingly impossible as the notion might seem at the outset.
Book Eleven
At this time there is also a plan for a Book Eleven of the Return to Grace Series to be titled Primal Return: Renaissance and Grace.
It will detail the specific ways we might change our current trajectory and it will paint a compelling, a comprehensive vision of a possible society, a possible humanity, a possible Earth, and a possible future congruent with and enlightened by the prenatal and perinatal understandings that have heretofore been overlooked in previous attempts to present a workable model for humanity.
For comparison on what this work will be like, see the worker’s utopia proposed by Marx. My vision will be different from his, for his was merely an addendum to the unnatural plight of “civilized” man — a man still beholden to the hierarchy, but himself a dominator of women, indigenous cultures, and planetmates and utilizing, still, those as resources to fuel selfish gains and advantages, regardless how equitably distributed, or “fair,” they would be. A more just slavery, coinciding with oppression and exploitation of others outside the group of male human slave worker “elites” is hardly compelling, let alone utopian.
My utopian vision, to the contrary, will be constructed on our actual human nature, our primal one … which happens also to be congruent with what we have learned about ourselves from prenatal and perinatal psychology. And I will fashion a template of where we could, and should, ideally end up …. as a vision to pull us forward and aspire to. Also I will detail the steps we can take to get from where we now are to there.
Return to Grace
That is the overview of Return to Grace, the series. There is also an idea to condense the entire eleven books into an abridged version of Return to Grace, as a single book. For Return to Grace, the book, think of it as a kind of “favorite hits” book.
Next, They’ve Got Something to Say
For now, however, I wish to bring your attention to an astonishing development. This “development” could not be better timed as after reading about our predicament in this book, and being aware of what we are up against, a fair number of readers might be kinda bummed. You know how that goes. It’s hopeful to be given the knowledge so you can do something. But I’m sure we all have that feeling right after hearing something like we have in this book, which is, “Yeah, I’m better off for knowing; but I sure felt better when I was dumber.”
Wounded deer most certainly will be taking these problems of all problems of all times to heart. Indeed, how can anyone be unaffected by knowing our plight? But, at least at this point don’t let yourself wallow in despair. In the process of going from wounded deer to centaurs, to applying oneself to the problem, the next book can actually be helpful. For though our planetmates go even deeper into unraveling the problem for a clearer look, I daresay this message from our globe-mates is actually positive and good.
Realizing the positives in truth, especially dire truth, sometimes takes time. Let me explain how I see our situation based on what I have been saying in this book and what is coming in the next.
First, our planetmates show us where we foolishly rebelled against a beneficent Universe, or God — one that is equated with Nature and Reality. We chose instead to take over, to control, basically because we hated the one stipulation imposed by that Universe — which stipulation was in retrospect so trivial, being analogous to having to wait until Christmas morning to open one’s gifts. So this is a message of good news. Actually, if we could accept only that some disruptions in our lives chosen now are far better than our untimely deaths, not chosen, occurring at any time — what could be more reasonable? — we’d have a chance.
But, then, many of us know how insistent people are in their refusal to look at this…. And if that prospect comes across to you as more hopeless than hopeful, as it does to me.… well, I’ve got something that’s seeming far better and more hopeful.
Spirit “Word” Has It: Earth Citizens Planning The Great Reveal
I want to tell you about some big news I received that could be really, really good. I have gotten word that the Earth Citizens are planning The Great Reveal, as they put it. From what I’ve been told, it goes further in giving us insight into the matters that humans have struggled for centuries to understand. All I can say, for now, is that you may be surprised afterwards as to who are the “dumb animals” on this planet.
You Will Need to Choose
Sounds harsh, but I’ve been given some idea of it, and, well, if Jesus, or Mohammed, or Abraham, or Shiva, or well, you fill in the blank, came to us in this time of extreme need, in the form of an animal, and was able to help you to understand and to take you beyond your previous ideas about God, goodness, and so on, and show you something much more wonderful, and yet much more in keeping with science and with what we’ve come to know to be true and to be more reasonable, not containing the nonsensicals of many religions that we are told we must accept on “faith” … well, would you listen? Would you accept the benefit…?
Or opt for the familiar?
Unfortunately, we humans have a huge tendency to be afraid of change even when it seems really positive and when the alternative, which we know, is very bad.
That’s how we’ve ended up in this situation — where we put off changing for so long that now it’s more hopeless the longer we wait. But, just keep that in mind. For that is what I suppose the majority of people on this planet are going to have to do — get used to change, and try to remember that it’s change that’s good, and not what we’re used to or familiar with.
Would You Be the Hero?
So, that in mind: Would you be the hero, the individual, who wouldn’t be able to turn her or his back on Greater Truth, and facing it, it would be yours?
And would you see your initial isolation in viewing it that way as a great opportunity to tell others the good news?
Or would you turn away? Would you leave it to others … or to no one … to do what is needed to be done to save your family, your children, the life on this planet, yourself?
Give that all the thought you need. But remember, the planetmates are waiting.
In the meantime, and if you dare, I urge you to turn, now, to the message from our planetmates in Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014).
See you there.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
the doorway is hardly the creator of those who walk through
This book was forged in fire in more ways than I dare reveal. This is the only time, within these pages, you will hear me withholding anything.
Okay. I’ll relent. A little. Let me just say that the heart of it — the prenatal matrix — was written in the middle of some very trying circumstances in the spring of 2013. These circumstances had nothing whatsoever to do with the book, for the book came plodding through, day by day, undeterred by the events of that time. I was astonished. Some of it was written on a shoulder of Interstate 5 in a stifling metal box — which at other times we called a 1966 Aristocrat travel trailer — waiting for assistance in nearly one-hundred-degree heat. A good chunk of it was written in the lot of a Ford dealership in Firebaugh, California.
Unexpected angels nurtured it, unknowingly, by helping my wife and me along. They will never know what they contributed to; they will never know the depth of my gratitude. One in particular was Debra Mendoza, a sales manager at Westside Ford in that town. She and her husband, Jose, played crucial roles, though we did not know them beforehand and our meeting was simply the winds of fate swirling us together for a bit. Yet their assistance persisted for over a year, in one particular way.
A most unusual angel was Carmella Abbattista, who ran a tiny Mexican restaurant, El Buen Comer Taqueria, on the corner of 8th and N Streets, right next to the dealership. She provided wholesome and delicious complimentary meals to me and my wife over that two-week period, yet we had been total strangers heretofore.
Some of this book was uploaded to my blogs and social media using borrowed wifi from the West Hills College Coalinga, North District Center, building on the corner of 9th and O Streets in Firebaugh, as I sat with my laptop outside in my car or at one of the metal tables near its entrance. Jimenez, the maintenance man at the community center, ever smiling and helpful, played a role in bringing this about.
For two weeks, my wife and I had a startlingly unusual life that fate alone orchestrated. While it should have been a horrible time for us, we were held above it and carried forward. We crowd surfed these events, held aloft by these angelic hands. And throughout, with a mind of its own, this material of “Part Two: The Prenatal Matrix of Human Events,” showed up every morning inside of the twelve by seven confines of the trailer we were living in while on the road.
Those days were the birth of this book. You might say it was midwifed by these unexpected angels. Of course the majority of its growth came afterward over the following nearly three years.
So you might say its infancy and childhood were assisted by my wife, Mary Lynn Adzema. Ever stalwart and unfailing, she lent me her strength at its birth, in Firebaugh. She is the only person I know who uses the phrase that someone is “a real trooper.” Not coincidentally, I am amazed at how, her age notwithstanding, she embodies that, herself. She also held its hand as it grew. She listened and gave feedback, supported and nurtured both it and me.
However, the book’s conception came much further back, in the Sixties. It was conceived in the erotic heaving of an astonishing age, as I explain in Chapter 3. The spirit of those times made centaurs of so many of my generation. The personalities that in particular aided my transformation included an Albert Sallitt, my high school wrestling coach and guidance counselor. I tell the story of his assistance in Chapter 3, as well.
Others who played crucial roles at that time are Jan Chwiej and an upper-class floor monitor, his name long ago forgotten, at my freshman dormitory at East Stroudsburg University. I am surprised I do not recall his name. I should. For not only did he inspire Jan and I initially in the arena of philosophy and spirituality — he turned us on to Plato, for one, and other philosophers — but, his father being a bail bondsman, he traveled all the way up to Port Jervis, New York, and stood with us in front of the judge and got us out of jail … suspended sentence. That was the morning after a night where a drunken Jan and I did what we thought inebriated eighteen-year-olds were supposed to do during a night on the town. We had watched too many cowboy movies in our childhood, that’s for sure. In our defense, we at least didn’t have six-shooters. Now, it’s just downright funny (god). Especially it is hilarious to remember the way Jan and I, in separate cells, sang Simon and Garfunkel and Beatles songs together, hours into the night, until an unappreciative “audience member,” a guard, told us to shut the hell up!
It is about time I thanked Joe Rose for his part in my life. Here it is appropriate for, not only was he my friend beginning in the first grade, he was my companion during a hugely important time in my life. Together, we made the necessary pilgrimage, of my generation, to California, in 1969. Together we were mocked by a pickup truck full of rednecks in Texas, because we wore shorts; together we were chased out of a convenience store in Oceanside, California, by the owner with a shotgun, because we had long(ish) hair. Together, we were stormed by the California Highway Patrol, CHP, with a crowd of other hippies, on the avenue outside the Newport, California, rock festival. Together, we experienced the euphoria of the love fest inside, as everyone held hands out to and assisted each other. And by the way, CHP and hippies, outside and inside, contrast much? Together, we saw Joplin and Hendrix there. And together, later that night in our motel room in Long Beach, we took our first acid trip … one of only several that I’ve had.
Like many folks who do interesting things, we thought at the time that our hitchhiking journey to California, our adventures in California, and the rides and people we encountered as we “thumbed” our way back cross country had the makings of a book. That was, of course, before more important things to write about began arising in me. In the last correspondence with him, a Christmas card in 1975, he toasted our life and good times. Well, here’s to you, Joe Rose, wherever or everywhere you are. Damn, they took you too soon.
Charlie Pikas is another friend from childhood I want to acknowledge as having played a role in those important times in California. Then, and again in 1973 when I, my brother, Jim, and his friend, Ed Geiser, were traveling from Santa Cruz, California, to Mexico, and then back to Pennsylvania in my VW bus, he was an important actor. He, also, shared our experience with the CHP and Newport, though not the acid trip. Thanks for bribing that guard to get us into the festival, by the way, Charlie. And let me tell you, you were the funniest of cheerleaders. I’m serious. He really was.
Other classmates at East Stroudsburg University and King’s College, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, played crucial roles in the “making of one centaur,” this one, as also I tell in that chapter of the same name. Peter Lehmann and my classmates at Franklin and Marshall College had similar helpful roles, mostly in the deep conversations we shared, where every aspect of existence, politics to war to God, received, at the minimum, the light of our attention.
And very importantly, Professor Richard French began this entire journey and revealed the first map of it with his course, “Religious and Psychological Approaches to Self-Understanding,” in 1969, and other courses and independent studies after that in the years 1969 through 1972. Yes, this book was a lifetime in coming. I will merely say thanks to him here. For he is the unnamed professor I refer to in Chapter 3.
I need to mention from those times and that institution, F&M, also the inspiration of Professor Charles H. Holzinger, who inspired in me a lifelong interest in anthropology. Also, his speech at a teach-in on the war was instrumental to my getting a different understanding of that conflict from what the media was giving me. To hear a person of such high intelligence and acumen address the issues of that conflict in such a thoughtful, measured, and rational way truly opened my mind on the war, yes, but showed me the alternative view, which, on all matters, is needed for growth, as I explain in Chapter 29.
I can still remember some of what he said. He addressed the war issue informed by his multicultural understanding, steeped, as it was, in anthropology. I was able to see the conflict as though with the eyes of a neutral observer, a world observer, if you will, and not just through those of a working class white American male growing up in the very traditional and religious coal country of Pennsylvania. I can still see him in my mind’s eye giving his talk at that teach-in. Indeed, he and the others who spoke began my activism career: first, against the Vietnam War and, later, with environmental causes.
I have praise and thanks to send the way of Professor Thomas Hopkins, at F&M as well, who did the same for my fascination with Eastern spiritualities and philosophies. I have to laugh when I remember his reaction to my explaining my understanding of spirituality and reality — one which forty-three years later evolved into the book Experience Is Divinity: Matter as Metaphor (2013). He paused for a second … thoughtful. Then he said, “Why can’t all of my students see it that way?” lol
John Lennon later inspired a major turning, when he and Yoko Ono revealed their participation in primal therapy. Others whose influence was especially significant include Arthur Janov, who brought primal therapy to the world; Jules and Helen Roth, who fostered it, and me, at the Certified Primal Therapists’ Center in Denver, Colorado; Warren Baker, M.D., who was my primal therapist for my Intensive and was friend and counselor for my many years there; and Kathy Buchenauer, who also was a primal therapist there and dear friend, counselor, and inspiration.
With Emily Easton I did the majority of my primal work. We “sat” for each other virtually daily, 1975-1976, sometimes two to three times a day, for almost a year, sometimes emerging from the rooms at the primal center as long as six hours after going in. That kind of dedicated primal work for that length of time, I believe without a doubt, is what accounts for the depth of my primal work, which is far beyond what most people get out of it. I also learned the bulk of my skills in facilitating primal therapy with her, as well. Thank you, Emily Easton, wherever you are.
The late Peter Lavender, a very dear friend and primal buddy, as well, helped me through some of the most important experiences of my life as he sat for me in a number of primal sessions. He was also instrumental in helping me to tap in to those “joy grids,” you hear about in this book. It was through my interaction with him that the ideas came to me that became “Unconditional Acceptance and the Primal Process” and “The Second Half of ‘the Cure.’” I will have to give special thanks to him in the books, Primal Spirituality: Primal Process and the Rest of “the Cure”; Womb with a View; and Cells with a View, forthcoming, which evolved from that work as well. And he gave surprising assistance to me after his passing.
Steve Dott, another primal friend and housemate, steered me, with our many substantive conversations, into looking more deeply at the spiritual components of my primal path, crucial to my understanding of the “spiritual grids.” And Sharon Coggan, from my bachelor’s committee, a philosopher and friend, a confidant and supporter, through many meetings helped me to formulate my primal and spiritual understandings and encouraged my sharing my work professionally, in scholarly journals.
I want to thank Hollis Orr for her role in my continuing primal growth — for she and I also “buddied” together — and for her companionship at an important transition in my life — from Denver, Colorado, to Eugene, Oregon … from primal person and taxi driver to anti-nuke activist with Oregon Fair Share.
Which reminds me, I am forever indebted, for their influence on my transformation into activist, to Sinde Fitz, Gary Kutcher, Michael Carrigan, Shirley Chase, Bruce Stockton, and Laurie Hoffman — all of whom worked with me at Oregon Fair Share. The memories and experiences I have had with each of them are chiseled in my mind and my heart. When Neil Young sings, “There is a town in North Ontario, Dream comfort mem’ry to spare, And in my mind I still need a place to go, All my changes were there,” my mind goes to Eugene, Oregon, and those times I shared, on the turf and off, with those friends there. I will never forget you guys, and I am forever grateful for what I learned with you and for the growth I had with you there.
Robin McGinn, another friend and primal buddy, midwifed my earliest sperm experiences and a past-life memory. In that and many other ways, she had a huge influence on the making of this centaur, on my life. Bruce Stockton, a good friend, housemate, and fellow activist, was the first to hear about and validate those sperm experiences. I need to thank him and Rich Platz for their friendship at important times of my life
During my experience as a doctoral student in psychological anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, I was especially touched by the mentorship and personalities of Fitz John Porter-Poole (psychological anthropology) and the late Marc Swartz (cultural anthropology), as well as Jim Moore (physical and biological anthropology). I am also grateful to Don Tuzin (social anthropology), also now deceased, and my doctoral student colleague at the time, Ken Kroesen.
During my Santa Barbara days, where I truly connected with my spirituality with the assistance of Sathya Sai Baba, I was immensely influenced by Muriel Engle, his sincere and wise devotee. She helped Mary Lynn and me; in fact she introduced us, and she officiated at our wedding, for which she also provided her house and grounds. We miss you, Muriel. Tim Conway, author, Women of Power and Grace, friend, and teacher of mine at World University, Ojai, California, comes to my mind in gratitude for our talks and the spiritual views I learned and shared with him. Patty Kelly, now deceased, shared with me and my wife her friendship, her ideas and passionate inspiration, and often her house as a place to stay when we visited Santa Barbara later in life. John Steensma is someone I wish to thank for his friendship during those days, as well. And, of course, I, like millions of others, am grateful to Sathya Sai Baba for the influence he has had, past and continuing, on my life and my works. His wisdom continues to inspire and guide me, particularly in times when none other fits or works.
I want to single out for mention two of my mentors at Sonoma State University, who were on my Master’s committee and who oversaw my work on my thesis, which later became the book, Falls from Grace (2014). Phil Clayton (philosophy) signed on first and foremost to encourage my, at the time, rather unusual work and path. Brock Travis (humanistic psychology) was eminently helpful and supportive, also. Gardner Rust (interdisciplinary studies) and Diana Divecha (developmental psychology) also played important roles at SSU, for which I am grateful.
The late Graham Farrant, M.D., primal therapist in Australia, played astonishing and helpful roles both before and after his passing and was my first true colleague in the arena of cellular consciousness. We came upon our discoveries and insights completely independently. It was an entire decade before we found out about each other and were able to cross-fertilize those ideas. For a while there, it seemed we were the only two people in the world who “got it.” In time, more and more people were discovering these things and coming to nearly identical conclusions. Some of them I mention by name in Chapter 7. My wife and I also did some training in primal therapy with him.
One of those who got it was Elizabeth Noble. Educator and author of Primal Connections, she inspired and helped through the knowledge she shared with me, through her friendship, and through her writing. The late Jeanine Parvati Baker, midwife, teacher, and author, Conscious Conception and other books, also assisted both before and after her passing.
The late Terry Larimore, a primal therapist and primal colleague who worked closely with Graham Farrant, also assisted, with her friendship and through the work my wife, Mary Lynn, and I did closely with her in the International Primal Association (IPA) and especially at its conference in San Francisco, in 1996, which the three of us put together. She initiated my becoming the editor of the IPA’s journal, which we titled, Primal Renaissance; she publicized the work of Graham Farrant on cellular consciousness, some of it with my assistance, with several highly important articles; and she had a hand in helping me and my work after her passing as well.
I want to mention the late and ever jovial Louis Mezei; our dear friend, Mary Thompson, primal therapist, deceased as well; the dear Barbara Bryan, primal therapist and close friend; and Dan Miller, (for brevity sake just keep including “dear” for the rest, lol), primal therapist, friend, and author, The Unseen Universe: Of Mind and Matter. Alec Rubin, primal therapist and director of New York’s The Theater Within, is someone I will never forget for the inspiration I received from him. I wish to acknowledge the mentorship and warm friendship of Arnold Buchheimer, who was the IPA’s journal editor before me. And Barbara Findeisen, friend, primal therapist, breathwork facilitator, and founder of the therapy and educational center, Pocket Ranch, Geyersville, California, was important in our personal and in my professional life.
William R. Emerson, therapist, educator, and innovator of perinatal remedial therapy for children was ever so helpful through our talks and the assistance he gave in renting us our workshop space till we had our own. I want to thank Barbara Findeisen and William R. Emerson for their agreeing to guest lecture each semester in the class in Pre- and Perinatal Psychology I taught at Sonoma State University.
All of these “primal people” played important roles in my understandings and personal growth during those days with the IPA and at SSU and were the best of all possible friends. Let me just mention a few more of their names, there are many others: Stephen Khamsi, primal therapist; Belden Johnson, primal therapist and author; Paul Hannig, author, The Feeling Child, and primal therapist in Los Angeles; Agnes and Ernst Oslender, primal therapists, British Columbia; Brian Scheffer, primal therapist, Olympia, Washington; and the late Lance Wright, primal therapist, New York.
Stanislav Grof was and continues to be a huge influence and inspiration, both through his works as well as through the training my wife and I did with him. The late Christina Grof as well had a role both before and after she had passed on. Holotropic breathwork facilitator, director of training, and author of The Wide Open Door and other books, Tav Sparks had a significant and positive role in my holotropic life, as did his wife, Cary Sparks. In that regard I must mention, Jarvin Heiman, M.D., holotropic breathwork facilitator in Santa Monica, California, for his mentorship along those lines in 1989. Diane Haug, holotropic breathwork facilitator, and Jane Hollister, holotropic breathwork facilitator, Tampa, Florida, are two others I am grateful to for the same reason. During my days of training in holotropic breathwork I worked with, trained under, and learned much from Amber Kim Williams and Karen Pearle, to both of whom I owe a debt of gratitude.
I give a nod to the late and beloved Alice Miller, author of the book The Drama of the Gifted Child and many others, for the immense inspiration I received from her books as well as the nudge she gave me late one night, as she called from Paris about my work with primal and the journal of primal psychology I edited. Jean Liedloff, author of The Continuum Concept, garners my thanks for the same two reasons — her inspiration and our conversation. I apologize to the many others, authors and therapists and friends, who also helped, but I have not the room here to mention. Still, I am grateful for all they have given me and contributed to this work.
Lloyd deMause played a great part in my understanding through his books as well as personally. As I mention frequently through this book, the approaches and understandings of Stanislav Grof and Lloyd deMause, as well as, of course, Arthur Janov and Sathya Sai Baba, comprise the foundation, along with my personal experience and my professional work, upon which this work, this book, are built.
I want to acknowledge Jim and Sharon Adzema, my brother and sister-in-law, for everything they have done to assist me and support me and Mary Lynn. Always a haven, their home and hearth have provided a warm womb of family to mend in, be nurtured in, and be supported and loved within. Jim also played a highly significant role in my learnings during the Sixties and early Seventies; he was there for a lot of it and we learned a lot together. Not the least of those learnings was how to rebuild the engine of a VW bus alongside a stream off the road of Interstate 80 near Donner’s Pass in record-breaking time of two weeks, while hitchhiking to Reno for parts and one time lugging the crankcase to be machined … leaving as the snows were just beginning to fall for the season. Getting dark, snow falling, and facing a fate similar to the Donner Party … except, god forbid, for the “feasting” … we were shocked that the engine fired up. One more “peek-a-boo” in life. Thanks, Jim, for all you are, all we’ve shared, and all you will always be to me, my brother.
Mary Elisabeth Dupont had a huge influence on my work since she entered my life in April of 2014. The full story of her contribution to my life and work is the only other thing I will need to withhold here, for now. At some point the entire story will be told. It is too amazing to share, just yet. I feel I am already stretching the credulity of my readers with what I have presented so far … and in this book. Love and eternal gratitude, now and for all no-form-ity, is what I wish upon this colleague and multi-lifetime friend.
Debbie Condon, my very dear friend, facilitated the completion of this work. Over the course of three years we discussed these ideas. She assisted with feedback and comments at every stage of it — from the initial blog posts of sections of it to the completed draft. She provided much insight and has been the strongest supporter of all my work. It was while my wife and I stayed with her in Ensenada, Baja, Mexico, in the fall of 2015, that the final form of this book was conceived and received its gestation. While there, she participated in readings of parts of it, which were recorded along with her and my wife’s comments. Some of those recordings are available at this time on youtube. I am ever so grateful for all of her assistance.
Some of this book’s content had its earliest incarnation with Peter Melton, when he interviewed me several times in 2015 for his segment of the radio show, Extinction Radio, which is broadcast by Activate Media, formerly Occupy Boston Radio. I can only thank him for his continuing friendship and for his assistance in the ongoing work we are doing together.
Michelle Apparcell, Kevin and Tracy Crockett, Ceila Levine, Pete Radford, Erv Singer, Kathy Smith, Julia Sloane, and Deane Lange all played crucial roles in this book’s coming into adulthood, becoming its final form, that is, through assistance that was provided my wife and me at the time, just recently. Most of them have little to no knowledge they are contributing toward this work as well as us. I wish to thank my friends, Gib Hayes, Will Winget, Anand Holtham-Kealey, Star Holtham-Kealey, Ambrose Holtham-Kealey, Katherine Catherwood, and Kelsey Weilbrenner for their friendship and for the lift above circumstances that they provided, though they knew not what else they were contributing to at the time, either.
Last but not least I need to acknowledge my mother. After all, who but her informed me initially about my prenatal experiences? And Doctor Fischer played a role at my birth, which led to many understandings in this book, however unconsciously he performed it. As for my mother, whose mother is perfect? Yet my mother was loving, sweet, delightfully childlike at times, and wise … and much better than most.
In fact her loving nature was clearly born of the influence of her own mother, my grandmother, Mary Derzak, and her father, my grandfather, Andrew Derzak. So acknowledgements need to go to Mary Derzak for radiating the love that was passed through generations … she is the only true “saint” that I have known personally. And I can never sufficiently thank my grandfather, Andrew Derzak, the first “sillygod”/”funny god” that I knew, for his love, his light-heartedness, and his sometimes silly, and always welcome, humor. Certainly my grandparents’ love and humor were powerful propellants to the life I have lived and the work that came of it, particularly this book.
Back to my mother, her role was the most important before I was born, of course; but she also had a small part in my work after her passing, amazingly, as did my father, Joseph Adzema. By the way, thanks for letting me know, Dad. It is help I carry with me, now.
To these and to many others whose influence went into this book, many more than I can mention, I am grateful. Like this book, my adulthood has been forged in fire — much of that being of another tumultuous time, the Sixties. Yet about that, I feel damn lucky. My generation and their acts and inspiration provided the “good womb” to offset the earliest one. I was fed and nurtured by wounded deer and centaurs, activists and healers, thinkers and experiencers, everywhere and at all times around me. My ideas were gestated in a wondrous world, with beaming and brilliant people, during amazing times. I am blessed, there is no doubt.
***
The Doorway Is Hardly the Creator of Those who Walk Through
The ultimate in ego-loss, return to grace
is when you realize your only job is to witness
when you realize that you are not the navigator, controller, director, or ANYthing
that you are the leaf, forgetting it is part of the tree
that you are the wave, forgetting you are really the ocean, and thinking that it is under your power and through your decisions you make it to shore
that does not mean you do not act…
it means you participate fully
but not with any attachment to consequences … for good or ill…
you can forgive yourself for your shortcomings, knowing whatever was done was you in the process of getting somewhere further along
you cannot really take credit for your charms or your accomplishments, though…
for you are only the final doorway into manifestation of much activity of the Universe that was actually responsible for what came through you.
NOTES
Chapter One
- For my previous works on our apocalyptic situation today, see Apocalypse Emergency (2013), Apocalypse NO (2013), and Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014).
- For more on morphic resonance and morphogenetic fields, see any of Rupert Sheldrake’s many works, which include his books, A New Science of Life (1981) and The Rebirth of Nature (1991), and his articles, “Is Nature Alive?” (1991) and “Nature As Alive” (1995).
Chapter Two
- My blogs, currently, in order of priority, include
Michael Adzema, Author at
http://sillymickel.blogspot.com/
Culture War, Class War at
https://culturewarclasswar.wordpress.com/
Becoming Authentic at
https://mladzema.wordpress.com/
The Great Reveal by SillyMickel & the Planetmates at
https://angelsinnature.wordpress.com/
Apocalypse NO at
https://apocalypseknow.wordpress.com/
SillyMickel’s Blog of the Obvious Unspoken Things at https://sillymickelsapocalypticwakeupcall.wordpress.com/
Funny God at
https://funnygod.wordpress.com/
For many of my blogs, sites, and social media, I use the pseudonym, sillymickel, incidentally.
In order of my involvement in them, my main social media pages are
Facebook … https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel
Tsu … http://www.tsu.co/sillymickel
Twitter … https://twitter.com/sillymickel
youtube … https://www.youtube.com/user/sillymickel
Google Plus … https://plus.google.com/+MichaelAdzema/posts
Linked In … https://www.linkedin.com/in/mickeladzema
soundcloud … https://soundcloud.com/michael-adzema
Though I have for years now directed my activity toward my blogs and social media, much material is still extant at these older sites:
Primal Spirituality at
https://sites.google.com/site/primalspirituality/
Apocalypse Emergency at
https://sites.google.com/site/apocalypseemergency/
SillyMickel Adzema’s Life — Autobiography at
https://sites.google.com/site/sillymickeladzemaslife/
My original site, Primal Spirit, which was online for two decades, is now defunct and the material is for the most part in the newer sites and blogs and is spread throughout social media.
I have much other content and writings spread throughout the web in places too numerous to mention.
And the Michael Adzema Author’s Page on Amazon, where all of my books are listed and can be purchased is at
http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Adzema/e/B00J7F0URC/
Or simply google/search me using, in order of priority: Michael Adzema, sillymickel, SillyMickel Adzema, Mickel Adzema, Michael Derzak Adzema.
Chapter Three
- This is the book by Todd Gitlin, Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987).
- I can point to one account that captures it the way it was. An absorbing account that speaks to the character of the times that I think is most important is David Farber’s The Age of Great Dreams: American in the 1960s (1994).
- Culture War, Class War (2013). Also see “The Last Educated Generation: It Had Become Clear to the People at the Top They Could Better Manipulate the Masses Without Free Thinkers in the Way” on my blogs, Michael Adzema, Author and Culture War, Class War, among other online sites.
- The Jetsons is an American animated sitcom produced by Hanna-Barbera, originally airing in primetime from September 23, 1962, to March 17, 1963, then later in syndication, with new episodes in 1985 to 1987 as part of The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera block. It was Hanna-Barbera’s Space Age counterpart to The Flintstones.
As explained by Wikipedia, “While the Flintstones live in a world with machines powered by birds and dinosaurs, the Jetsons live in a futuristic utopia of elaborate robotic contraptions, aliens, holograms, and whimsical inventions.” This is from “The Jetsons,” on Wikipedia.com.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jetsons
- The “adventurous, the creative, and the foolhardy” quite often went together in single individuals, in a way not at all negative. Foolishness for some folks can be merely the perception by others, or even oneself, of stages in a process of creativity or adventure. More about this later when we talk about wounded deer, centaurs, and the characteristics of recent generations in Part Three: Global Healing Crisis.
- For a true picture of the Sixties as a worldwide phenomenon, see Arthur Marwick’s (2000) The Sixties: Cultural Transformation in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c. 1958 – c. 1974.
- See “John Lennon: The Rolling Stone Interview,” by Jann S. Wenner. 21 January and 4 February 1971. The entire two articles, and a podcast, are now available on line at
http://imaginepeace.com/archives/4385
- Gandhi’s autobiography; Edgar Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet by Jess Stearn; Fromm’s The Art of Loving; Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.
- Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by Paul Reps; Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” in his Republic; Watts’s The Wisdom of Insecurity.
- While in 1975 I began the process of publishing that work, The Dangers of Mysticism for Modern Youth, subsequently, and especially after having gone through primal therapy, I decided to refrain from publishing it. While its ideas were later espoused by Ken Wilber in many of his works and received renown, I knew that primal therapy changed everything and that I and Ken Wilber, and Carl Jung, for that matter, were wrong in some major respects.
My idea was based on the Jungian tenet that the process of encountering the unconscious and starting the process of individuation must wait till the second half of life, after one had established enough ego strength to be able to handle it. This was based on the idea that the encounter with the unconscious, and especially the Shadow, was dangerous. Jungians have all kinds of ideas that the unconscious cannot be encountered directly but only indirectly, as through its symbols, dream interpretation, analysis, and so on.
However, in primal therapy I learned that the unconscious is only “dangerous” when it is not felt. It only seems dangerous. It is actually just one’s Pain … one’s primal pool of pain, as Janov phrased it. That feeling one’s feelings, surrendering to them, was the technique to handle one’s Pain at any stage of life … indeed, it worked better, or maybe only, for those who took it on earlier in life, before one’s defenses had become too embedded in oneself to change, as usually happens after the age of fifty. Note that this encrustation of ego defenses is what Jungians are referring to as ego strength. Sadly, it is that in former times, before primal therapy, it was thought one had better wait till the time of life at which one could get the least from the process of individuation in order to begin it.
You might say that Jungians have a Pandora’s Jar version of the unconscious and do not understand the part about there being hope at the bottom of the jar. They also do not know about the body and its wisdom, that one need only surrender to be healed. So in not knowing this, they feel that the ego and consciousness needs to control, not surrender to, what lies deep within. Along those lines, it makes sense that one should not open oneself to the unconscious or the Shadow while one is already undergoing, in youth, what already amounts to an encounter with the unconscious in going through the identity stage of life, at that time. This was the thesis of that first work
All that being true, Jungians were wrong; Ken Wilber and ego psychologists are wrong; I was wrong. Still, I might yet publish a version of that book for archival or historical purposes. There is still much to be said about the fact that inner work must needs be married with action or self-actualization, which is the way I, following Maslow, put it at the time. As I said in the closing sentence of the book, encapsulating the heart of the book’s message: “Cosmic consciousness is dependent upon self-actualization.” There is still much to be said of value around that idea.
- See, to compare, “The Last Educated Generation,” in Adzema, Michael, 2013, Culture War, Class War, p. 13.
- See John Updike’s (1962) The Centaur for this idea of a centaur representing a younger generation’s “sitting” upon the achievements of the generation, or generations, before.
- For more in relation to my years of deep inner mending, see especially Chapter 8, “Return to Grace,” and Chapter 28, “For Earth’s Sake, Get Real!”
- Seven books published so far are Culture War, Class War (2013); Apocalypse Emergency (2013); Apocalypse NO (2013); Experience Is Divinity (2013); Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014); Falls from Grace (2014); and Funny God (2015). These are all from the Return to Grace Series.
Not included in the list above are The Dangers of Mysticism for Modern Youth (1970, 1975), which are as yet unpublished manuscripts, and Primal Renaissance: The Emerging Millennial Return (1995), self-published.
In addition there are the books still to come in the Return to Grace Series, You Say You Want a Revolution (2011), available at this time online as chapters 17 through 32 on the blog, Culture War, Class War, and Prodigal Human: The Descent of Man, forthcoming, with some of it available now on the blog, Becoming Authentic.
Other works forthcoming in the next few years are Primal Return: Renaissance and Grace; Authenticity Rising; Primal Spirituality; Womb with a View; and Cells with a View. In the works, with much work done on them, for future years are The Centered Path through Hell; Regression, Mysticism, and My Generation; Smoke, Lies and Revelations; Conception: The First Fall from Grace; Birth, The Second Fall from Grace; Primal Scene: The Third Fall from Grace; Puberty/Identity: The Fourth Fall from Grace; The Four Stages of Self-Understanding; Sensory: The Return to Self, Stage One; Recollective Analytic: The Return to Self, Stage Two; Symbolic-Existential: The Return to Self, Stage Three; Integral: The Return to Self, Stage Four; and the four books of my novel, Remembering, which are Leaving, Looking, Arriving, and Being Here.
We’ll see what kind of time the Universe provides me to finish it all. lol. There’ll be others, natch … ones that will appear along the way and demand expression.
Chapter Four
- Regarding re-experience appearing to represent something new in our culture in terms of both a way of approaching knowledge and in terms of the kinds of information that are discovered, see Grof (1976, 1985); Hannig (1982); Janov (1971); Lake (1966/1986); Noble (1993); and Stettbacher (1991), among many other works and authors, which could have been named.
- Concerning prenatal re-experience and especially that of sperm, egg, and zygote states, in addition to my work, Falls from Grace (2014) and here as seen in Chapter 8, “Return to Grace,” see also Buchheimer (1987); Farrant (1987); Grof (1976, 1985); Hannig (1982); Janov (1983); Lake (1981, 1982); Larimore (1990a, 1990b); and Larimore and Farrant (1995).
- For deMause’s writing on poisonous placenta, fetal malnutrition, and related matters, two good sources are his seminal work, The Foundations of Psychohistory (1982), and his piece in Verny’s (1987) anthology, Pre- and Perinatal Psychology: An Introduction, titled “The Fetal Origins of History.”
- See, A. Briend, “Fetal Malnutrition: The Price of Upright Posture?” British Medical Journal 2 (1979): 317-319.
- The works where I explain in the most depth, using research from anthropology and related fields, how fetal malnutrition is a product of our becoming bipedal are Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014); and Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness (2014).
- Outside of what is coming in this book, for more on how our difference from other planetmates in Nature, that is, our birth and prenatal pain, is resulting in ecocide and humanicide at the moment, see Apocalypse Emergency (2013); Apocalypse NO (2013); and Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014).
Chapter Five
- See, Casriel, Daniel, M.D. (1972), A Scream Away from Happiness. Note, this is the way he advertised his therapy: “Now you can release pent-up pain, anger, and fear through Dr. Casriel’s own technique of ‘scream therapy’ — often more effective and less expensive than traditional methods.” New York Times Book Review, October 8, 1972, p. 14.
Chapter Six
- Thomas Verny, 1981, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, p. 118.
- Thomas Verny, 1984, “Birth and Sexuality,” p. 48.
- The idea of “brain as reducing valve,” goes back to Henri Bergson (1896, 1934) as well as to William James. It was brought forward by Aldous Huxley (1954) to explain the expanded awareness that comes about in psychedelic states.
- As Huxley (1954) explained it in his work, The Doors of Perception (p. 23):
Reflecting on my [mescalin] experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, “that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.” According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.
- Both of these articles — “The Doors of Perception: Each of Us Is Potentially Mind at Large… When Perception Is Cleansed, All Kinds of Nonordinary Things Happen” and “Occupy Science … A Call for a Scientific Awakening: In Tossing Away Our Species Blinders, We Approach a Truth Far Beyond Science” — are available online in several places including my blog, The Great Reveal by SillyMickel & the Planetmates, and in my book, Experience Is Divinity (2013).
- Among Stanislav Grof’s many works are Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research (1975); LSD Psychotherapy (1980); Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy (1985); The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration (1988); and The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives (1993). See References in this book for additional works by Stanislav Grof.
- See, for example, Barbara Carter (1993).
Chapter Seven
- Frank Lake, 1981, Tight Corners in Pastoral Counseling, p. 35.
- For Farrant’s important work, see “Graham Farrant Interviewed at Appel Farm, Sunday, August 31, 1986,” Buchheimer (1987); “Cellular Consciousness,” Farrant (1987); and “Egg and Sperm Memory: Universal Body Movements in Cellular Consciousness and What They Mean,” Larimore and Farrant (1995).
- For Wasdell’s work, see “Toward a Unified Field Theory of Human Behavior” (1979); “Primal Perspective” (1985a); “Foundations of Psycho-Social Analysis” (1985b); and “The Roots of Social Insanity: The Pre- and Peri-Natal Ground of Socio-Political Dynamic” (1990).
Chapter Eight
- Michael Adzema, Falls from Grace, 2014, pp. 81-82.
- For Nandor Fodor, see Search for the Beloved (1949); and New Approach to Dream Interpretation (1951).
- For spiritual grids, joy grids, negative grids, pain grids, and positive grids, see, among other places including unpublished manuscripts, “Reunion With the Positive (Self), Part 1: The Other Half of ‘The Cure’” in Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology, Vol. 1, No. 2, Autumn 1995, pp. 72-85; and online at
http://www.primals.org/articles/adzema01.html
- In several places, online and in print, I made this assertion that “unconditional acceptance” was necessary for “the second half of the cure.” See, for example, Michael Adzema, “Only Half a Cure: Unconditional Acceptance and the Primal Process” (1993); as well as Paul Hannig, “Borderline Personality Disorder: Profile and Process of Therapy” (1995).
- See especially, for falls from grace, Michael Adzema, Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness (2014).
- The aquatic ape theory was proposed by Elaine Morgan and was brilliantly presented in a number of works, including The Descent of Woman (1972); The Aquatic Ape (1982); The Scars of Evolution (1994); The Descent of the Child (1995); and Aquatic Ape Hypothesis (1999).
Chapter Nine
- This chapter is titled with appreciation and admiration to The Kills for their recording, “U R A Fever.” The lyrics go, “I am a fever, you are a fever, we ain’t born typical….” and so on. The music video accompanying it is similarly brilliant and tells the story I am telling about the link between perinatal pain and our insanity in a much more provocative and entertaining way. The video contains levels of meaning that are only obvious on subsequent viewings.
- In the Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Newsletter I was applauded for being the first person in the United States to teach the subject of pre- and perinatal psychology at the university level and — as it was said, remarkably — for doing it while still a student. I did this at Sonoma State University, in Rohnert Park, California, in the years 1994 and 1995, beginning while I was a graduate student there.
My graduate thesis became the book, Falls From Grace: Spiritual and Philosophical Perspectives of Prenatal and Primal Experience, which is listed in Wikipedia as a reference under the topic of prenatal and perinatal psychology.
Subsequently, I became the editor of the professional journal, Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology, formerly published by the International Primal Association. Much of the contents of its issues were later posted to my website, Primal Spirit, and from there some of them made it into my books, blogs, and social media.
I have had my writings published in The Journal of Psychohistory, including some that later became part of this book. In fact, I presented the material of this book originally at an Institute for Psychohistory Association convention; and its earliest publications were in The Journal of Psychohistory under the title, “The Scenery of Healing: Commentary On deMause’s ‘Restaging Prenatal and Birth Trauma’s in War and Social Violence’” 23/4, 395-405.
These are among my many credentials in this field of pre- and perinatal psychology, where I have studied, facilitated, and trained from 1972 till this day.
- Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research. New York: Viking Press (1975); LSD Psychotherapy. Pomona, CA: Hunter House (1980); Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press (1985); The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press (1988); The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco (1993).
- Lloyd deMause, “Restaging Early Traumas in War and Social Violence. “The Journal of Psychohistory 23 (1995); The Foundations of Psychohistory (1982); and The Emotional Life of Nations (2002).
Chapter Ten
- For an analysis of the pre- and perinatal elements of “Independence Day,” see Anne Marquez’s article: “‘Independence Day’: Pre- and Perinatal Adventure in Film,” Primal Spirit magazine, spring, 1995.
- The text for “Birthing, Forgetting” can be found at “My Beginning, At Least the Part Anyone Could See: Birthing … Forgetting (a short story)” on my site, SillyMickel Adzema’s Life – Autobiography. The url is
https://sites.google.com/site/sillymickeladzemaslife/Home/Birth-Forgetting
It was originally published in Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology, 1996, as “Birthing, Forgetting (a story).”
- Pics of the mouth eruption scene from The Outer Limits can be seen on my blog at the url
https://angelsinnature.wordpress.com/2012/12/13/projecting-the-perinatal-zeitgeist-everything-youve-managed-to-forget-about-being-born/
Or google my name and “Projecting the Perinatal Zeitgeist: Everything You’ve Managed to Forget About Being Born.”
The episode that the pics are taken from was broadcast 6 April 2001, titled “The Surrogate.”
- See “Part 1: Reality, Human and Otherwise — Biologically Constituted Realities,” of Experience Is Divinity (2013). See, also, my “Biologically Constituted Realities: An Anti-anthropocentric and New Paradigm Perspective” in Primal Renaissance (1995).
- I saw this movie in the Nineties, and for the life of me I cannot find it now. In it, people are sucked into the walls of a house. Anyone who knows the film, please contact me — sillymickel@gmail.com or Michael Adzema on Facebook — so I can add its name.
- See Stanislav Grof on this point that our species survival requires integrating with our perinatal material at “Planetary Survival and Consciousness Evolution: Psychological Roots of Human Violence and Greed,” in Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology, spring, 1996.
Chapter Eleven
- For perinatal elements in UFO abductions, see Alvin H. Lawson, “UFO Abductions or Birth Memories?” Fate, March 1985, pp. 68-80; and Alvin H. Lawson, “Perinatal imagery in UFO abduction reports,” in T. Verny (ed.): Pre- and Perinatal Psychology: An Introduction (1987).
- For perinatal elements of rock concerts, see Alvin H. Lawson, “Placental Guitars, Umbilical Mikes, and the Maternal Rock-Beat: Birth Fantasies and Rock Music Videos.” The Journal of Psychohistory, 1994, pp. 335-353.
- For my prophecy regarding Jacob’s Ladder and my use of it as a metaphor for our imminent future, see Funny God (2015) and Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014).
Chapter Twelve
- This obvious though insistently overlooked fact has scientific support, of course:
According to a study conducted by scientists from the Scripps Institute there is less oxygen in the atmosphere today than there used to be. The ongoing study, which accumulated and interpreted data from NOAA monitoring stations all over the world, has been running from 1989 to the present. It monitored both the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the decline in oxygen. The conclusion of that 20-year study is that, as carbon dioxide (produced primarily by burning fossil fuels) accumulates in the atmosphere, available oxygen is decreasing.
Carbon dioxide seems to be almost the total focus of attention in the climate change model as it exists today. After reviewing the results of this study and talking with Dr. Ralph Keeling (one of the lead scientists on the study), it seemed to me that the consequences of atmospheric oxygen depletion should be included in any discussion of atmospheric change….
For the rest of this article, google: “Atmospheric Oxygen Levels Fall as Carbon Dioxide Rises” or use the url
http://blogcritics.org/scitech/article/atmospheric-oxygen-levels-fall-as-carbon/#ixzz1ru2460V8
- For how birth pain makes us human and separate from all other planetmates, see the Seventh Prasad: “Becoming Human — Bipedalism, Big Brains, and Birth Pain,” in Adzema (2014), or do an internet search for “Bipedalism and Birth Pain” and my name.
- It would be interesting to find out what in particular was the cause of such inordinate fixation by Nazis on this aspect of early prenatal pain involving tainted and poisoned blood. For example, did Germans have more of this kind of pain as fetuses because German women did much more standing … being hard workers, perhaps … in the late stages of pregnancy than others? Such are the kinds of things that can make such differences.
And if women doing standing work right up to the time of birth correlates with excessive fetal malnutrition, what of women in primitive agrarian cultures working — in the fields or similar places — until practically the time of birth? Does this have anything to do with the increase in war and conflicts we observe in agrarian cultures over nomadic ones? Is there a corresponding increase in psychosis, ritual, and superstition … scapegoating and sacrifice … as, for example, with the Mayan and pre-Colombian New World cultures? No doubt there are many factors involved in these things, but are these prenatal contributing factors some important overlooked ones? If so, how important?
Finally, what of the tendency of women today to want to work right up until the time of birth?
- I differentiate between legitimate attempts, conscious or unconscious, at birth pain resolution — primal therapy, holotropic and other breathwork, water and breath “rebirthing”/vivation, and mosh pit “rebirthing” — from false ones like being religiously “reborn” or otherwise experiencing a “second birth” as in some social initiation. In the healing modalities, there are continual attempts to resolve something that needs such attention and in fact can never be fully resolved but only improved upon. In the second instance, there are actual feelings of rebirth, when one is religiously reborn; it is true. I know. I experienced it as my first experience of rebirth forty-four years ago.
The problem with religious “rebirth” has to do with this idea of trying to recapture ever afterward what is essentially a one-time experience and yet taking steps to insure no further such experiences or transformations will occur. One loses the feeling, feels “sinful” again (see upcoming posts on the BPM II elements of “bad blood” and “dirtiness” or review the overview of this in this chapter) and because one has barely touched it, let alone resolved the pain, needs “saving” over and over again, futilely. The fact that it is not really resolved is proven in that the proponents of religious rebirth need to convert others to the experience in order for them to feel they have achieved it; this would not be necessary if one had. Further, the other components of birth pain seem to be more, not less, prevalent after religious “rebirth.” One feels “sinful,” “dirty,” and that others are “dirty,” “defiled,” “filthy,” “unwashed,” “toxic,” “impure,” and more. Again, see upcoming chapters for details.
So it is not that religious experiences of being “reborn” are not legitimate and part of a psyche seeking healing and growth. It is that the experience is hung on to, looked back on; one is stuck in it. One says Christ will do it for one (He has died for one’s sins), so one does not have to experience the discomfort of facing these pains and discomforts from the womb oneself. The experience is institutionalized and never experienced again, though one surrounds oneself with true believers affirming the opposite, along with this idea that one does not have to suffer again … Christ has done it for one; or one can confess sins and the priest will take care of it … and so one is distracted from the discomfort that precedes any more growing or being born or transformed any further. As I like to say about such glancing experiences of real truth: Yes, it’s legit. But don’t make a fucking religion out of it.
Worst of all, the institution or social group takes over and restructures one’s self along the lines that will benefit it, not oneself, so one is not reborn into one’s real self but into an inauthentic fabrication benefiting some manipulative social group — Marines, evangelical group, secret society, ethnic group, or simply the normal adult neurosis of one’s culture.
- Quote is from Joni Mitchell, on her song, “Big Yellow Taxi,” released 1970, on her album, Ladies of the Canyon. I wish to note the environmental concern expressed in other of her lyrics of that song:
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique
And a swinging hot spot
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone
They took all the trees
And put them in a tree museum
And they charged all the people
A dollar and a half to see ‘em
Hey farmer farmer
Put away that D.D.T. now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees
Please
- As concerns creating the situations that bring up these early discomforts, as in unconsciously being drawn to create traffic jams, notice as I have, when you’re driving, how often folks will have two or more lines to go to, in traffic especially but sometimes in retail establishments as well, and will line up behind each other in one line, foregoing the empty ones. Not everybody does that; but explain the ones creating that line … what is driving them to act like lemmings and feel restrained when they could have it easier? This is not restricted to queues however, as we will see it is a metaphor for human irrationality rooted in these imprints.
Chapter Thirteen
- See O2xygen Therapies by Ed McCabe (1988). See also, online,
http://www.oxygenhealth.com/
- See Nutrition and Your Mind by George Watson (1972). See also, online,
http://naturalbias.com/your-nutritional-individuality-and-unhealthy-emotions/
- As reported in the article, “Atmospheric Oxygen Levels Fall as Carbon Dioxide Rises” at
http://blogcritics.org/scitech/article/atmospheric-oxygen-levels-fall-as-carbon/
It reads partly as follows:
According to a study conducted by scientists from the Scripps Institute there is less oxygen in the atmosphere today than there used to be. The ongoing study, which accumulated and interpreted data from NOAA monitoring stations all over the world, has been running from 1989 to the present. It monitored both the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the decline in oxygen. The conclusion of that 20 year study is that, as carbon dioxide (produced primarily by burning fossil fuels) accumulates in the atmosphere, available oxygen is decreasing….
Carbon dioxide seems to be almost the total focus of attention in the climate change model as it exists today. After reviewing the results of this study and talking with Dr. Ralph Keeling (one of the lead scientists on the study), it seemed to me that the consequences of atmospheric oxygen depletion should be included in any discussion of atmospheric change … .
… we are losing nearly three O2 molecules for each CO2 molecule that accumulates in the air….
Since the beginning of the industrial revolution we have removed .095% of the oxygen in our atmosphere. True, that is only a tenth of one percent of the total supply, but oxygen makes up only 20% of the atmosphere. I looked up safety rules regarding oxygen concentrations and according to OSHA rules on atmospheres in closed environments, “if the oxygen level in such an environment falls below 19.5% it is oxygen deficient, putting occupants of the confined space at risk of losing consciousness and death.” What happens if the world’s atmospheric levels of oxygen fall to 19.5% or lower? Are we all going to have to carry little blue oxygen tanks with us to survive? Not a pleasant possibility….
Plants and certain bacteria take in carbon dioxide, combine it with water to form glucose and produce oxygen as a byproduct in the photosynthesis reaction. The current increase in carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere indicates that this cycle is no longer in balance. It shows that we have reached the point where the biosphere of the planet can no longer process all of the carbon dioxide that we are producing….
We currently make estimates of how many years we have left before excess carbon dioxide becomes a bigger problem than it already is but we aren’t really sure of their accuracy. However, to the best of my knowledge, we don’t have estimates of how long it might be, if oxygen continues to be depleted at its current rate, until it might become a problem. After all, while most of us may be willing to wait out the effects of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for a time just to see if we really do get warmer weather and more abundant crops out of the deal; how many of us want to wait and see how little oxygen we can survive on?
Read more:
http://blogcritics.org/scitech/article/atmospheric-oxygen-levels-fall-as-carbon/
- On the theft of fire and the beginnings of culture in world mythology:
- According to the Rig Veda (3:9.5), the hero Mātariśvan recovered fire, which had been hidden from mankind.
- In Cherokee myth, after Possum and Buzzard had failed to steal fire, Grandmother Spider used her web to sneak into the land of light. She stole fire, hiding it in a clay pot.
- Among various Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest and First Nations, fire was stolen and given to humans by Coyote, Beaver or Dog.
- According to some Yukon First Nations people, Crow stole fire from a volcano in the middle of the water.
- According to the Creek Native Americans, Rabbit stole fire from the Weasels.
- In Algonquin myth, Rabbit stole fire from an old man and his two daughters.
- In Ojibwa myth, Nanabozho the hare stole fire and gave it to humans.
- In Polynesian myth, Māui stole fire from the Mudhens.
- In the Book of Enoch, the fallen angels and Azazel teach early mankind to use tools and fire.
From “Prometheus” in Wikipedia at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus
- Promethean parallels in other mythologies include
- In Georgian mythology Amirani challenged the chief god and for that was chained on Caucasian mountains where birds would eat his organs.
- In Norse mythology, the god Loki (often associated with fire) was bound to a rock. Above him is a large serpent which drips toxic venom upon him. His wife collects the poison in a bowl, but must empty it every time it gets full. As she is in the process of doing this, the snake proceeds to cover Loki in poison. Just as Prometheus gets his liver eaten only to have it grow back again, Loki is temporarily saved from venom only to have it drip on him once more.
From “Prometheus” in Wikipedia at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus
Regarding the Norse myth, remember what was said in the previous chapter about one of the feeling complexes in late gestation being the discomfort of being in a toxic womb environment. I will discuss this feeling constellation in more detail in an upcoming chapter, where this myth will be even more illustrative.
Chapter Fourteen
- In Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014), I go to great lengths to detail and explain this devolution of humans through the stages of foraging, hunting, agriculture, and husbandry.
See, also, “From Hunting and Gathering to Sowing and Reaping” by Kat Morgenstern. In her words,
Cultural evolution can be defined as the process of developing the tools and skills to deal with certain challenges. Therefore challenges present the key stimulus for any kind of development. The challenge to survive as a hunter/gatherers is not inconsiderable – and early humans met the challenge for hundreds of thousands of years, without depleting their natural environment. Agriculture was invented about 10000 years ago and many of the environmental crisis we face today are directly related to this paradigm shift, from the destruction of the world’s forests in order to grow crops, to the depletion of land due to monocultural plantations, to salination and a thousand other woes.
Early humans were nomads. They roamed within a certain range. Trespassing into another group’s range could result in conflict. However, due to population limits, each group’s range was quite extensive. It is often assumed that finding food must have been incredibly challenging and time consuming, yet, research has demonstrated that in favourable habitats only an average of 3h per day are needed to collect food, plus some more time for preparation. Anyone who has ever even partially lived on foraged foods knows that nature supplies plentifully – each thing in its season. It is also a popular idea to imagine that people were moving around constantly, only remaining in one place for a matter of days. But there is no reason to assume such restlessness. It seems far more likely that people would move from campground to campground in accordance with the seasons, in tune with the things they would find in each place. And it seems reasonable to assume that they would remain in each place long enough to gather and process for transport whatever gifts Mother Nature had offered. Only in areas that are particularly hostile, such as deserts or the circumpolar regions, would frequent moving be necessary since food supplies are less abundant.
At the 1966 ‘Man the Hunter’ conference, Marshall Sahlins presented a paper entitled, “Notes on the Original Affluent Society,” in which he challenged the popular view of hunter-gatherers living lives “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” as Thomas Hobbes had put it in 1651. According to Sahlins, ethnographic data indicated that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well. Their “affluence” came from the idea that they are satisfied with very little in the material sense. This, he said, constituted a Zen economy.
More at “From Hunting and Gathering to Sowing and Reaping” at
http://www.sacredearth.com/ethnobotany/food/civilization.php
- See the Twenty-Seventh Prasad chapter in my work, Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014). You could also check out that chapter’s online version doing a search for “The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Twenty-Seventh Prasad: A-mazing Cultural Maze” or by using this url:
https://angelsinnature.wordpress.com/prasads-chs-33/ch-35-twenty-7th-prasad/
- On “time, understandably, as it does, provided a rationalization of the defiant act,” do a search for my work online titled “A Blessing for You … To Choose or Refuse” — The Great Reveal from The Planetmates: The Complete Prasads,” or find it at this url:
https://angelsinnature.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/the-prasads-of-the-great-reveal-from-the-planetmates-complete-and-by-themselves-a-blessing-for-youto-choose-or-refuse/
At that location, you will find an overview of the Prasads from the planetmates, and you can click the links to go to the full text of them. You can see the progression, or devolution, of humans as we became increasingly more controlling and rationalizing of our defiance. See especially, the Fourth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Twenty-Sixth Prasads. Better yet, look to the finished versions of those parts in the book, Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014), under the titles
- 4th—Ego: The Origins of Ego: Human Superiority a Defense Against Actual Inferiority Relative to Planetmates
- 13th—Resistance: Breaking with Divinity, Resisting Divine Assistance … Roots of Apocalypse
- 14th—Apple: Defying Divine Assistance … Eating the “Apple” … Human “Sickness”
- 26th—Arrogance: That Ego That You Do, You Do So Well: Ego Towers Over Everything
Chapter Fifteen
- On youtube, check out “The Wayseer Manifesto” (2011) by Garret John. This particular video has gotten a lot of attention and rightfully so. Garret John wonderfully captures the feeling of being a centaur, as a Wayseer. Search for it or use the url:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPR3GlpQQJA
- These legends are as described by Franz Kafka (1929), as related in “Prometheus” at wikipedia.com.
- Every time I look at this, it looks worse than I thought. This one makes me think there’s no way any of us will survive this. And if we do, then our children won’t. It’s that bad. And what pisses me off is that progressives want to poo-poo this.
Chapter Seventeen
- Pastor Worley’s actual words were
Of our president getting up and saying it was all right for two women to marry, for two men to marry, I tell you right now, I was disappointed bad. But I’ll tell you right there, it’s as sorry as you can get. The Bible’s agin’ it, God’s agin’ it, I’m agin’ it, and if you’ve got any sense, you’re agin’ it.
I had a way, I figured a way out, a way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers, but I couldn’t get it passed through Congress. Build a great big large fence, 100..50 or 100 miles long. Put all the lesbians in there. Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals. And have that fence electrified ‘til they can’t get out. And feed ‘em. And you know what? In a few years they’ll die out. Do you know why? They can`t reproduce.
If a man ever has a young ‘un, praise god it’ll be the first one. All of these … It’s just as well … I’m gonna preach the hell out of all of them. Hey I’ll tell you right now. I ain’t gonna vote for a baby killer and a homosexual lover!
You said, ‘Did you mean to say that?’ You’d better believe I did!
God have mercy it makes me puking sick to think about … I don’t even know whether you ought to say this in the pulpit or not. Could you imagine kissing some man? My god I love you fellas, but not that much.
Chapter Eighteen
- The quote about Loki is from “Prometheus” in Wikipedia at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus
- The quoted section that follows makes an important part of the case, focusing on environmental pollutants, but the same thing goes for drugs, medications:
The Myth Of The Placental Barrier
Your baby’s first environment isn’t as toxin-free as you might think. Here’s how to shelter him from harm.
Tucked inside you like a walnut in its shell and cushioned by amniotic fluid, your baby seems safe and secure. Sure, the outside world is filled with environmental threats, but isn’t it the job of the placenta to filter out substances that can harm the fetus? Well, yes — but. While the placenta does a crackerjack job of screening most infectious agents — rubella and HIV are notable exceptions — it’s permeable to most pollutants, including pesticides, PCBs, perchlorate, bisphenol A (BPA), lead and mercury. Unfortunately, the placental barrier that protected a Pleistocene pregnancy from menace is no match for today’s man-made toxins.
When researchers examined the umbilical cord blood of 10 U.S. babies born in August and September 2004, they found a total of 287 industrial chemicals. Of those, 180 were carcinogens; 217 were toxic to the brain. “Numerous environmental contaminants can cross the placental barrier,” a National Institutes of Health report noted. “To a disturbing extent, babies are born pre-polluted.” Of course, just because a newborn has carcinogenic or neurotoxic chemicals in her cord blood doesn’t mean she’ll develop cancer or learning impairments. Still, most of us would prefer to err on the side of caution. That means pregnant women should avoid environmental toxins as conscientiously as they avoid cigarettes — except that it’s a lot easier to turn down a smoke than it is to say no to contaminants.
“Even people who pursue green lifestyles and organic diets have toxic chemicals in their blood,” says ecologist Sandra Steingraber, whose book Having Faith (Berkley Trade) chronicles the effects of pollution on fetal development. “When pregnant, our bodies become an interior ecosystem that exists in communion with the exterior ecosystem we inhabit. Whatever is in our food, air, water or house dust gets inside us.”
More at
http://www.fitpregnancy.com/pregnancy/health/myth-placental-barrier
- For a related perspective, see my work, Experience Is Divinity, Chapter 24: “The Rest of the World, Given the Chance, Is Out to Love You: Expect Less … and More … from Your Wasps.” Or check out an online version of it by searching “Expect Less … and More … from Your Wasps” or use the url
https://apocalypseknow.wordpress.com/2013/05/22/matter-as-metaphor-part-three-expect-less-and-more-from-your-wasps-the-rest-of-the-world-given-the-chance-is-out-to-love-you/
- Quote is from the article, “Vélodrome d’hiver,” published at Wikipedia.com.
Chapter Twenty
- See my book Culture War, Class War, or my blog of the same name, especially Chapter 2: “Matrix Aroused, the Sixties”; Chapter 4: “Drugs of Choice and Generational Cultures – Concocted Worlds”; and Chapter 5: “The King Won’t Die – An Aborted Changing of the Guard.”
- These aspects and generational phenomena are spelled out in more detail in my work-in-progress, Regression, Mysticism, and “My Generation (1993). Right at hand, however, you can read an elaboration of some of these ideas in the chapters mentioned in Culture War, Class War — especially Chapters 1 through 7 and the post, “Awakening Millennial Generation Occupy Global Revolution.” You can google it or use the url
https://culturewarclasswar.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/awakening-millennial-generation-occupy-global-revolution/
Chapter Twenty-One
- Quote is from page 23 of Stanislav Grof’s article, “Planetary Survival and Consciousness Evolution: Psychological Roots of Human Violence and Greed,” It was published originally in Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology and the article was subsequently reprinted, with permission, on my Primal Spirit site.
- For how birth trauma actually contributes to child abuse, in that traumatized, hurt infants and toddlers are necessarily more difficult and can provoke additional abuse from their parents, see Aletha Solter, “Tears For Trauma: Birth Trauma, Crying, and Child Abuse” in Primal Renaissance (1996).
- For deMause’s psychogenic modes, see The Foundations of Psychohistory (1982), and “The History of Child Abuse” in Aesthema #11 (1994).
Chapter Twenty-Two
- “Zombie” by the Cranberries expresses this state of dissociation, characteristic of the severely repressed and projecting types — those like the World War Two Generation. The lyrics go
Another head hangs lowly
Time is slowly taken
And the violence causes silence
Who are we mistaken?
Let he see, it’s not me
It’s not my family
In your head, in your head
They are fightin!
With their tanks, and their bombs
And their bombs, and their guns
In your head, in your head
They are cryin!
In your head! In your head!
Zombie! Zombie! Zombie!
Whats in your head, in your head?
Zombie! Zombie! Zombie!
Another mother’s breaking
Heart is taken over.
When the violence causes silence
We must be mistaken.
It’s the same old theme
Since 1916!
In your head, in your head
They’re still fightin!
With their tanks, and their bombs
And their bombs, and their guns
In your head, in your head!
They are dyin!
In your head! In your head!
Zombie! Zombie! Zombie!
What’s in your head, in your head?
Zombie! Zombie! Zombie!
- For psychohistorical analyses of the Nazis by Alice Miller, look to For Your Own Good (1984). For that by Lloyd deMause, see, among others, “Restaging Early Traumas in War and Social Violence.” in The Journal of Psychohistory (1995).
- For Stanislav Grof’s look at the psychology of Nazis, see “Planetary Survival and Consciousness Evolution: Psychological Roots of Human Violence and Greed” (1996), in Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology.
- See Glenn Davis’s, 1976, Childhood and History in America, especially Chapter 7, “The Great Society and The Youth Revolt.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
- 1. From Lloyd deMause, The Foundations of Psychohistory, 1982, p. 139.
- Ibid, p. 143.
Chapter Twenty-Five
- We had, at the time, estimated it would be a debt of $8,000 per family in the Northwest to mothball the plants. Another estimate, in 2000, put it at even more, $12,000 per customer to … remember … get no power. See “Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) at HistoryLink.org, The Free Online Encyclopedia of Washington State University. Search or use the url,
http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&File_Id=5482
Chapter Twenty-Six
- For the kind of non-patriarchal heroic attitude being call for today to deal with our problems successfully, once and for all, see, especially, in Funny God (2014), “Part One: The Tao of Funny God.” I point out that only actions that embody a new-paradigm approach, that is, one that partakes of matricentric values, feminine values, can expect to be effective. For approaches that use the same patriarchal kill-and-be-killed, macho attitudes of that which we oppose ensure that, even if they overcome in the short term, they only bring about another version of that which was resisted.
- From the book, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War by Robert Scheer, 1983, p. 18, I quote,
Thomas K. Jones, the man Ronald Reagan had appointed Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces, told me that the United States could fully recover from an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union in just two to four years. T.K., as he prefers to be known, added that nuclear war was not nearly as devastating as we had been led to believe. He said, “If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it.” The shovels were for digging holes in the ground, which would be covered somehow or other with a couple of doors and with three feet of dirt thrown on top, thereby providing adequate fallout shelters for the millions who had been evacuated from America’s cities to the countryside. “It’s the dirt that does it,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
- “It Don’t Come Easy”—written and sung by Ringo Starr (Richard Starkey) kind of says it:
It don’t come easy
You know it don’t come easy
It don’t come easy
You know it don’t come easy
Got to pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues
And you know it don’t come easy
You don’t have to shout or leap about
You can even play them easy
Open up your heart, let’s come together
Use a little love and we will make it work out better
I don’t ask for much, I only want your trust
And you know it don’t come easy
And this love of mine keeps growing all the time
And you know it don’t come easy
Peace, remember peace is how we make it
Here within your reach if you’re big enough to take it
Got to pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues
And you know it don’t come easy
You don’t have to shout or leap about
You can even play them easy
Peace, remember peace is how we make it
Here within your reach if you’re big enough to take it
I don’t ask for much, I only want your trust
And you know it don’t come easy
And this love of mine keeps growing all the time
And you know it don’t come easy
- Theodore Isaac Rubin, 1983, p. 184.
- Herb Goldberg, 1983, p. 134.
- Ibid., pp. 134-141.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
- Works to be published in the next few years include, specifically, Prodigal Human: The Descent of Man and Primal Return: Renaissance and Grace.
- Grof wrote
We seem to be involved in a race for time that has no precedent in the entire history of humanity. What is at stake is nothing less than the future of life on this planet. If we continue the old strategies, which in their consequences are extremely destructive and self-destructive, it is unlikely that the human species will survive. However if a sufficient number of people undergoes a process of deep inner transformation; we might reach a level of consciousness evolution that will bring us to the point of deserving the name given to our species, Homo sapiens, i.e., wise humans
From Stanislav Grof, 1996, p. 25.
- See DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences by Rick Strassman (2001). Along the same lines, see the documentaries, From Neurons to Nirvana(2013), Oliver Hockenhull, Director, Mangusta Productions; and DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2010). Mitch Schultz, Director. available on Netflix and youtube, among other places. For the latter, search or use the url,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtT6Xkk-kzk
- MDMA use is also covered in From Neurons to Nirvana (2013), as listed above.
- See Tang, et al (2009).
- For my lengthy expositions of a pronoiac perspective on Reality, see my works Experience Is Divinity (2013), and Funny God (2015). An article on pronoia is in Wikipedia, as well, available on line at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronoia_(psychology)
- Re incommensurate, I found this explanation rather good:
The observation that human communities differ in how they see the world is a truism bordering on the trite, but the consequence of this state of affairs can be profound when moral orders come to clash. Pro-life and pro-choice forces may disagree on whether abortion should be legal, but their respective positions on this issue rest on very different moral orders. Thus, arguing abortion is useless when the two sides share no common way of resolving the issues. Herein lies the essential problem of moral conflict: The parties have incommensurate moral orders.
I take the term incommensurate from Thomas Kuhn (1970), who applied the term to competing scientific paradigms, the logics of which cannot be mapped onto each other. The vocabulary, categories, and logical relations of one paradigm do not permit straight-across translation to those of the other. The two systems of thought cannot be compared point by point. Richard Bernstein (1985) applied the term to philosophy and social theory, noting that incommensurate systems cannot be compared, but only by moving to larger, transcendent categories that require understanding each moral order on a deeper level.
From Erika L. Kirby, Stacey M.B. Wieland, and M. Chad McBride, 2013, p. 396. Also available online, search or use url,
https://books.google.com/books?id=XutyAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA396&lpg=PA396&dq=cultures,+incommensurate&source=bl&ots=SOBn-jadW9&sig=QTY9FJ6Td6X2mcziT46E3dcflPc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiGx7bg6s_KAhUUTmMKHVSXBKYQ6AEIJDAB#v=onepage&q=cultures%2C%20incommensurate&f=false
- See, especially, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (1984).
Chapter Thirty-One
- Those publications I used the term primal renaissance for are Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology (1995, 1996) and Primal Renaissance: The Emerging Millennial Return (1995).
- On reinterpretation of Swami Guru Muktananda’s (1974) spiritual-therapeutic experiences, see my article “A Primal Perspective on Spirituality” (Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 1985) as well as my republication of it as Section Two (Chapters 6 through 18) of my book Falls from Grace (2014) titled “The Legitimacy of Prenatal Spirituality”)
- Okay, a note that contains a recommendation? I simply must. It will bring clarity and simplicity to what I am saying. Listen in to Bob Newhart and Mo Collin’s hilarious video on youtube. It was originally broadcast on Mad TV. Search for “Bob Newhart – Stop It” on youtube or use this url:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow0lr63y4Mw
Chapter Thirty-Three
- For Activate Media (formerly Occupy Boston Radio) and Extinction Radio use these links:
http://www.activatemedia.org/
http://www.extinctionradio.org/
https://soundcloud.com/xtinctionadioorg
Or, simply google them.
- There are a number of angles on this new scientific thinking that death is an illusion and that consciousness persists. Most of them are based on Multiverse Theory. For good overviews or places to start, check out, “Quantum Theory Proves that Consciousness Moves to Another Universe after Death.” Google it or use
http://www.learning-mind.com/quantum-theory-proves-that-consciousness-moves-to-another-universe-after-death/
Or look into the youtube video on it, “Quantum Theory Shows that Consciousness Moves into Another Universe after Death.” Search for it, or use
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgtz_G2Je88
- The Epic of Gilgamesh is considered the first great literary work, dating back approximately five-thousand years. Wikipedia has a good overview of it. Search or try
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh
- For just one example of someone having ongoing and detailed communication with a loved one, in this case, a brother, after death, take a look at The Afterlife of Billy Fingers: How My Bad-Boy Brother Proved to Me There’s Life After Death (2013), by Annie Kagan, foreword by Raymond Moody.
- Peter Melton’s comment on Extinction Radio (Activate Media) can be heard on the archived podcast, minutes 35:10 and on, on Episode 30, October 18, 2015, at
https://soundcloud.com/xtinctionadioorg/extinction-radio-episode-30-10-18-2015
Afterword
- For a look at the current version of what will be Book Two, You Say You Want a Revolution? do a search for my blog, Culture War, Class War, and check out chapters 17 through 32. I authored it using my pseudonym, SillyMickel Adzema. You can also use this url:
https://culturewarclasswar.wordpress.com/
REFERENCES
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Adzema, Michael. 1972b. The patriarchal mistake. Unpublished paper. sillymickel@gmail.com.
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Adzema, Michael. 2011. You Say You Want a Revolution? Return to Grace, Volume 2. Forthcoming. Current version available online at Culture War, Class War blog as chapters 17 through 32.
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Adzema, Michael. 2013. Apocalypse Emergency: Love’s Wake-Up Call. Return to Grace, Volume 3. Eugene, OR: Gonzo Sage Media. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and at book stores.
Adzema, Michael. 2013. Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious. Return to Grace, Volume 4. Eugene, OR: Gonzo Sage Media. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and at book stores.
Adzema, Michael. 2013. Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths.” Return to Grace, Volume 1. Eugene, OR: Gonzo Sage Media. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and at book stores.
Adzema, Michael. 2013. Experience Is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor. Return to Grace, Volume 8. Eugene, OR: Gonzo Sage Media. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and at book stores.
Adzema, Michael. 2013. Prodigal Human: The Descent of Man. Return to Grace, Volume 10. Forthcoming; scheduled for release in 2016. Current version available online at Becoming Authentic blog at
https://mladzema.wordpress.com/
Adzema, Michael. 2014. Planetmates: The Great Reveal. Return to Grace, Volume 6. Eugene, OR: Gonzo Sage Media. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and at book stores.
Adzema, Michael. 2014. Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness. Return to Grace, Volume 9. Eugene, OR: Gonzo Sage Media. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and at book stores.
Adzema, Michael. 2015. Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation. Return to Grace, Volume 7. Eugene, OR: Gonzo Sage Media. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and at book stores.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Adzema is a writer, activist, teacher, and psychotherapist, specializing in primal therapy, breathwork, and rebirthing. He was the editor of Primal Renaissance — a professional journal of primal psychology — and was the first person in the United States to teach prenatal and perinatal psychology at the university level, which he did at Sonoma State University in the early Nineties. In the early Eighties, working as an anti-nuke activist with Oregon Fair Share, he was one of a small group of people whose actions led to the lawsuit that ended nuclear plant construction in the United States.
Currently he is a regular contributor to Extinction Radio, broadcast by Activate Media, formerly Occupy Boston Radio. His voice can be heard on other broadcasts, as well, speaking on topics of activism, spirituality, ecopsychology, the environment, pre- and perinatal psychology, metaphysics, and philosophy.
Over the last fifteen years, Michael Adzema has managed and authored a number of popular websites and blogs, including Primal Spirit; Becoming Authentic; The Great Reveal by the Planetmates; Apocalypse NO; Culture War, Class War; and Michael Adzema, Author. One can find a number of his videos on youtube, as well.
In addition to Wounded Deer and Centaurs, he has authored the books, Funny God; Falls from Grace; Experience Is Divinity; Planetmates, The Great Reveal; Apocalypse NO; Primal Renaissance; Culture War, Class War; and the companion volume to Apocalypse NO, titled Apocalypse Emergency — Love’s Wake-Up Call.
Along with all the books mentioned above, except Primal Renaissance, three more books are to be published in his Return to Grace Series, for a total of eleven volumes, being released in 2013 through 2017. Their titles, tentatively, are You Say You Want a Revolution?; Prodigal Human: The Descent of Man; and Primal Return: Renaissance and Grace. His books can be found at Amazon and ordered through any major book outlet.
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Becoming Authentic 