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The Proper Response to Insanity: Ethics in an Era of Trumpism and the Difficult, yet Profoundly Fruitful, Task of Loving Your Dragons
Posted by sillymickel in 1%, activism, America, apocalypse, awakening, book, books, Class War, climate change, Culture, Culture War, ecocide, ecopsychology, environment, extinction, History, humanicide, Michael Adzema author, nuclear, occupy, occupywallstreet, Personal Growth, philosophy, Politics, psychology, sixties, sociology, spirituality, The Tao of Funny God, totalitarianism, transpersonal psychology, Wounded Deer and Centaurs, youtube on March 4, 2018
The Proper Response to Insanity: Ethics in an Era of Trumpism and the Difficult, yet Profoundly Fruitful, Task of Loving Your Dragons
— Which is Chapter 56 of *Psychology of Apocalypse* by Michael Adzema
56
The Proper Response to Insanity:
Ethics in an Era of Trumpism and the Difficult, yet Profoundly Fruitful, Task of Loving Your Dragons
“We no longer have the luxury of ‘business as usual,’ with its daily creature comforts.”
“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!” — Mario Savio
“…stand within the circle of the good-hearted people of this world, wanting the world’s and their children to be happy and not to suffer. In this way, be lifted up in solidarity with us, with all the rest of us, realizing the comfort in the saying, ‘we’re all in this together.’”
“The best way to combat evil is to make energetic progress in the good.” — I Ching
Whether we have a chance to actually make of these developments something, to have a kind of death-rebirth, is unlikely. But we do not know the future.
What Do We Do?
Well, I can tell you that a tendency to go nuts and to want to die is characteristic of people just before they make a breakthrough to wellness. As I elaborated on in Part Three of this book, it is called a healing crisis. This healing crisis is also evident in the processes of societies and cultures as displayed in the patterns of historical change.
One Must “Die” to One’s Sickness to Be “Born” Well
So there is hope in that we see in the worst of times the seed of healing. However, we can lose heart in a pendulum swinging so far to the Right we fear it will never swing back again. Yet we know of an overarching pattern that might buck us up during such a seeming regression. The pendulum does react to extremes and move to correct itself. We see that in the Women’s Movement globally responding to all kinds of fascist tendencies in America and throughout the world.
We can take heart in that tendency mentioned of the need to step back a couple prior to a leap forward. Or, as I like to say, we do not progress in a straight line, in our personal-growth processes, but outward in all directions simultaneously, like an expanding circle. In which case, every progression further to the Left — as in Bernie Sanders campaign — partakes of elements of the Right: It is at least informed and made stronger through awareness of the nature of the Right’s ignorance. That overlap also explains why so many Righties — as shown by polls at the time — would have voted for Sanders, given the chance.
Relatedly in terms of evolutionary theory, there is the idea of punctuated evolution. Anthropologists have noted years and years of buildup of energy pushing toward change prior to a sudden release. In a relatively short period, then, massive changes unfold, resetting and reconfiguring everything for the next long period of gradual buildup. This has been applied to Earth changes but also all kinds of evolutionary developments. And Thomas Kuhn (1970) in his study of the evolution of ideas has described the same kind of thing in regard to scientific paradigms. Prior to any major new overstanding dawning in science, there is a long period of repression of anomalous facts, ridicule of new ideas, and ostracism of new-paradigm visionaries. Until in a scientific moment, a new map for interpreting everything is adopted; much as old kings are deposed by new ones, bringing in new eras and fresh ideas. And of course, there is the healing crisis I have been describing, which is the same kind of thing occurring in people’s lives.
What Does This Mean for Me?
None of this tells us what we, individually, should do in this crisis. What most folks want to know is, what does this mean for me? How can I apply it today, this very minute even? What should I do right now? For, as we sit here in this darkness of unknowing, it is likely we will despair.
Yet in this darkness we have no way of knowing the future. In that unknowing lies our thread of hope. It is what can motivate us, regardless our hopelessness, to take that one action as I was talking about earlier. Do one thing to raise human consciousness. Post about this book or something about any of the environmental crises to Facebook, Twitter, or the social media of your choice. Let one little ray of sunlight into your darkness. Feel comforted in the company of people, like you, who care.
That is the short answer. The longer answer must address how we respond to a situation of decline into fascism in the midst of an overall collapse of the environment which will now, not only not be addressed, it will be pushed along! Because of Trump, the apocalypse will be driven forward. Just as much as a bus approaching an abyss which is suddenly taken from first gear to fourth, in the blink of an eye, and the accelerator stomped upon. We see this already in Trump’s first year in office. He seems determined to defy science and the gods. And Mother Nature, with unprecedented environmental calamities, is giving him an appropriate middle finger. Meanwhile the scientists’ Doomsday Clock, which is their overall evaluation of the likelihood of human annihilation — as reported by the New York Times on 25 January 2018 — has been moved closer to midnight.1 It is now only two minutes from doomsday; it has not been this close since 1953 at the height of the Cold War, a time overshadowed by concern about the Bomb.
How Do We Respond to Evil?
Yet in the middle — Trump ignoring Gaia’s cries, Mother Nature pissing on him — are we. So how do we respond to evil? For if this be about the end of life, then what we are in is the opposite of life … it is evil, live spelled backwards.
This takes us to a question of ethics in the face of fascism and destruction. In my books, I stress a natural morality. It is easily explained: Value is placed on life, reduction of pain and suffering, and promotion of happiness. That’s what to do in a natural morality. As for what not to do, it is summed up: You can do anything you want as long as you don’t hurt anyone. Roughly speaking, these two comprise the morality humans basically have lived by for 99.6 percent of our existence, going back one-and-one-half-million years. Then civilization came along, robustly, at around five thousand BCE, with its social hierarchy and the creation of an elite class, comprising the filthy rich of every age and every society.
As I was saying in the chapter, Chapter 6, on the descents of man and on civilization and the moral plunge it induced, with civilization all of that changed. There are now values geared to Ego, and not even the Ego of all, but merely the egos of the elite. To this end, evil enters, it being the opposite of life. Life is not valued over death; less suffering is not valued; respect for rights is not valued; harmony with the environment is not more desirable. All this is reversed by the elites.
For the benefit of the egos of the elites, murder and death are often portrayed as a good thing, especially in wars and in terrorizing the populace into compliance. Suffering is very often a good thing for it keeps the people down, obsequious, eager to serve for fear of punishment or worse … conforming, obedient, and “in line.” Respect for rights? Well, the only rights that are truly defended are those of the haves, while small benefit to the elite is weighed higher than any number of important and essential rights of the people at large. To that end, there is no limit of brutality to be brought to bear against underlings. As for harmony with the environment, with civilization Nature and the environment are used up, raped, and destroyed for the temporary “glory” or smallest of pleasures for the elite. In considerable detail, I elaborate on this “travesty of morals,” as I call it, beginning with civilization, in the book following this in the Return to Grace Series, Back to the Garden. It is scheduled for publication the same year as this one, 2018, though in the second half of it.
As I explain in it, with civilization, ethics, like morals, are tortured, just like the masses, into compliance with the wishes of the powerful. For law, ethics, and morals are made by, enforced by, and serve primarily the interests of society’s elites, the richest of the rich. Much more about that appears in the next book, where I talk about it going all the way back to Gilgamesh — a king who was memorialized in the first great work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, almost five thousand years ago. So with civilization comes patriarchy and domination by elites. With it and its modern spinoff of fascism, laws and ethics do not have to be reasonable or to conform to our natural morality, our own sense of right and wrong.
You don’t think we have that embedded in our culture? Well, then how is it we are able to induce soldiers to kill? They must obey, regardless how they feel. The same with police. Religion tells us that if a god were to tell you to kill your child, you should obey, no matter how you feel about it, until told differently. That is what The Bible tells us in the story of Abraham and Isaac. What about parents? What does, “do as I say, not as I do, imply.” Obey! Regardless. It does not have to make sense. Again, obedience trumps feelings of compassion and empathy. Now, who do you suppose this focus on obedience … and its corollaries, loyalty, honor, glory, and so on, all that patriarchal bullshit … who do you suppose it benefits to have a populace obedient and unthinking?
You can see how convenient having such a populace believing in a morality of obedience would be for the purposes of warring on others; or for staying silent as hundreds of thousands of planetmate species go extinct, crushed under the Caterpillar boots of corporations. Yet notice also how that works toward the masses obeying in all matters resulting in profit to the elite, or to their ego-inflation.
Loving Your Dragons
So how do we reverse such a long standing and powerful force pushing us to both domination as well as submission. Just how do we right the wrongs of millennia of foreparents, passing on their Pain and their sins.
Well, if we are truly going to succeed in reversing ten thousand years of oppression and an elitist morality privileging the wealthy at the expense of the lives of all below, we will have to embrace the hardest ethic of all. Jesus espoused it. The world has yet to get it. It is a morality that goes beyond even transcendental humor in the face of evil, as I was describing in Part Four and concerning “playing cards with your dragons.” For it involves the unbelievable: “Loving your dragons.”
It is consistent with the rise of the Divine Feminine, who as Kwan Yin is ever weeping for the suffering and ignorance of humans. It is Jesus saying on the cross, “Father, forgive them. For they know not what they do.” It is the ending of 2150 A.D., about refusing, even at the cost of one’s own life, to participate in the evil and instead to exemplify the only other alternative — loving resistance. It corresponds to the deeper template in humans I have been talking about. It goes all the way back to No-Form re-union and the periconceptional dynamics, which involve brotherhood and unity.
It is about the need to go beyond simply transcendental humor in the face of evil but to actual love, the Christ kind of love involving “loving one’s enemy” and “loving your neighbor as yourself.” This is founded upon the principle arrived at through experience of our prenatal connection with Divinity as reflected in the flow-in ßà flow-out symbiosis with our mothers. Yet even more so, it has roots in our feelings at conception. The egg and you are one. The sperm and you are one.
So also we, as sperm, are united with three hundred million other sperm in the grandest of causes — the creation of a new “world.” And there’s another thing, the template of being part of a higher cause, even if one oneself dies.
More profoundly, and deeper into the spiritual grids, lies the reconnection with our overstanding of Reality in the No-Form State. Which is to say that each of us is the other in different garb: I am you and you are me and we are all together. Unity is Divinity. It is experienced as empathy. We are all in this together.
No, It Don’t Come Easy
Still, this ability to love one’s enemy is something that is so difficult virtually no one does it. Christ was so so far ahead of his time in espousing it. It might only be in this age on the edge of the abyss we will even be motivated to try.
And it is something we are constantly confronted with. In our daily lives, people irritate us, slight us, insult us. One should of course assert oneself, stand one’s ground. Yet how often can we do so lovingly? In awareness of the imperfections of the other, who is actually only ourselves in another state. Acknowledging that we also are blind at times and so have hurt others, might actually be the one doing it at that moment.
You see, we get a myriad of opportunities to work on it, to try to perfect it in ourselves, to practice it and to get better at it and be part of the paradigm of new understanding and the new template. Outside of activist situations and more frequently and commonly, one can work on this and practice it and in this way be both part of the solution, not the problem, and in one’s own life make energetic progress in the good.
My wife, Mary Lynn Adzema, expressed the practicality of this loving unity, “When we feel pain at another’s pain, and more difficult, joy at another’s joy, then we can know that we are experiencing the divine unity.” She quotes Sathya Sai Baba, in the same chapter, on this: “Even when you laugh at me or hate me, even when I seem to be on the opposite side of the earth. I am in you. You are in me. Don’t forget that. We cannot be separated.” He was referring to himself as Divine. However, in that his message is we are all ultimately Divine, or sparks of Divinity … or “children of God,” as Christians say … the same thing applies to all of us. Or, as the quantum physicist Schrödinger phrased it, “The total number of minds in the universe is one.”
“How Can I Do This”
This is the most difficult thing of all and to all appearance is the last barrier to unity, which is Divinity, and to enlightenment.
Thea Alexander writes, “The only way to cancel negative hate-filled actions is by responding to them with positive love-filled actions. As long as micro man demands an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth he merely continues his negative karma.…
“All the ills of micro man are caused by his own self-hatred which he attempts to deny by displacing and projecting it on others, either in the form of violence or the normal everyday selfish micro behavior that denies adequate food, shelter, and loving care to his fellow man and permits the ugly and eventually lethal pollution of his planet.”3
So, most difficult of all it is, for to do it one must set aside the parts of a person that one is angered by or upset by and focus instead on the qualities of others who hurt us that are human, and then realize that the other part of them, that is angering us, is simply their poor and inexperienced response to their primal pain … that they are doing the best they know how, tortured by uncomfortable feelings. That we need to look at the sick insanity in others as simply that, a sickness. Knowing we cannot change them, only love them.
You Are Your Enemies … and Your Heroes
Ultimately, as both Stanislav Grof, in his holotropic breathwork, and Roger Woolger, in his past-lives therapy, have discovered, we have had many lives and been both king and pauper, thief and priest, rapist and abuse victim, sinner and do-gooder, Hitler and Martin Luther King, Jr. Each of us is Martin Luther King, Jr., inside, that is why we are so inspired and attracted to him. Yet each of us is also a Hitler. That is why we need to forgive, even love, everything and everyone. For we are them and we have done and are doing all that … too.
And that is the hardest lesson of all: That we are both the worst as well as the best of that which we see in others.
We should never intentionally harm another. For a part of us is always like them. Certainly, we must protect the innocents, yet there are many ways to do that short of violence. We can be clever, we can hone our skills in being loving while also properly asserting ourselves, speaking truth to power, protecting the helpless from harm, and standing between the innocent and evil. Mahatma Gandhi showed how this works and how effective it can be.
The thing to keep in mind is that we project onto the world what we are not connected with inside and thereby we draw it to us. We bring it to us in an indirect effort to reconnect with it on the inside.
So whatever another presents us with is either an instigation for a new course in our miraculous journey back to Divinity. Or it is a review, and further spiritual practice in, a course we needed and completed in this life. Practice makes perfect, you know.
The Other is us in different garb, manifesting what lies within us behind a wall of repression. Therefore, whatever and whoever we encounter brings a piece of something we need. That is, indeed, why they — the people coming to us or the feelings arising in us — have manifested in our reality, our consciousness.
The insides of us are seen reflected in the outsides of us. The total number of minds in the universe is one, which is manifesting as many, to magnify the glory of existence and expand infinitely the potentials for Experience. Which the Divinity within us experiences as fun, in its light and darkness, ignorance and wisdom, heaven and hell, suffering and euphoria dancing with each other in infinite variations. With the contrasts, as in the myriad colors of a painting — the bright and the blackish — making for a masterpiece. As a whole, seen as beautiful.
Thea Alexander writes, “How long it has taken me to learn that all failure is success, — all death is birth.”5
In another place she offers, “…nothing is terrible from the sub-macro view. Things can only be terrible from the micro perspective which is too limited to see that we live in a perfectly just and balanced macrocosm in which we experience only what we have caused and chosen.”4
She gives an example. It is something hard for you to swallow. I have yet to encounter a soul who can accept his or her suffering and pain as being self-inflicted or deserved. Yet Sathya Sai Baba provided a similar example. In his, a person afflicted with a daughter with a twisted body, wondering why, was shown herself in another life as someone who tortured and maimed. He explained that in in being confronted with someone who needed constant care he neededshe needed to learn to care . An Inquisitor during medieval times, punishing sexuality and warring against the pleasures of the body, might find himself on the other side of that. Born into a severe religious upbringing in a current life, with an unjust punishing father, providing the course materials for a life of learning compassion and forgiveness. As Grof said, a Nazi might be reborn as a Jew. Woolger has offered that a selfish and wealthy person might be born as a pauper in a poor family. In these examples, brought to mind somehow, we cannot be the victim, for we know we are also, have also been, the perpetrator.
In Alexander’s novel, her character, Jon, and his beloved, Carol, have been stoned to death in a most brutal way by the inhabitants of Micro Island through the actions of the characters, Elgon and Sela. At his moment of death, Jon hears the voice of his teacher, “In ancient Judea, Jon, the souls of Carol and yourself incarnated into a fierce and proud family. You grew up to be beautiful to look at but vain and proud. You were quick to condemn and more than once self-righteously joined in the stoning to death of those you condemned.”
And after death, in another place, Jon shares his realization: “I no longer condemn or feel any anger toward Elgon, Sela, or anyone on Micro Island, for I realize that I have nothing to forgive them since I myself chose and caused my painful experiences. Anger, like all other violence, is always a last desperate attempt by micro beings to deny their own self-hatred by displacing and projecting it on others. Violence will, therefore, continue as long as anyone desires to deny his past and the macrocosmic oneness of all.”
So, this ethic goes way beyond we are our brother’s keeper. No, we are our brother. So be kind to yourself, you are everyone. Love your neighbor as yourself, for she is.
I am you, and you are me, and we are all together.
Ethics in the Era of Trumpism
Now, what does this have to do with Donald Trump, the currently installed president of the United States?
Resistance
Well, quite simply, the question of ethics in a Trump era is the same as of ethics when Hitler came to power….
Now, before you go freaking out about my using the H word … I know it’s overused, and folks want to say nothing quite so evil as Nazism and on such a scale can ever go on in our day … let me share a few facts….
Every time there’s a change, in America, from a Democratic to a Republican leadership, millions of people die. Millions die worldwide. The changes in foreign and other policy, even if they seem small, have huge ramifications throughout the world, especially in the most dependent and poorest of countries, not to mention among the poorest and most vulnerable people of my own country.
And climate change? Trump is accelerating that, with an all-out assault on the environment … return to fossil fuels … and reversal of any environmental progress we’ve made….
Trump denies there’s global warming. Yet he’s got plans to drill in an Arctic Ocean made suddenly accessible with the melting of the polar ice cap … which is brought about by that global warming!
Experts are saying we’ve got only about ten years before humans go extinct and that it’s inevitable. Some are saying it will be all over in a matter of only eighteen months to four years.
My response to that is that we should throw all our energy into keeping that from happening, regardless we’ll probably fail. We might at least limit some of the suffering, if we try.
With Trump at the wheel, though, he’s blindly determined to drive us into an abyss, killing us all. So it seems we might as well throw in the towel.
Then there’s nuclear radiation. Trump has already said he’s going to build up America’s nuclear arsenal. Which leads to …. more arms races, including countries in addition to the US and Russia. During the presidential campaign Trump said he’s got no problem with Iran and North Korea having nukes.
Trump also said, about nuclear weapons, “What do we have them for if we can’t use them?” And sure enough, after the election, he is threatening nuclear destruction of North Korea for it having acquired nuclear weapons. I know. But the inconsistency is his, not mine.
He’s said we need to build up our arsenal of nuclear weapons in the U.S. … already capable of eliminating life on Earth hundreds of times over … “until the world wakes up”!!!
Trump supports nuclear power plant construction as well … which we in Eugene, Oregon, put to an end here in the United States in 1983. As I explained earlier in the book, I was involved in that. No doubt with Trump, that victory will be taken from us….
So this man will be responsible for many millions of lives lost ….
Many many more than Hitler and most likely all of us, all seven and one half billion of us….
With that … well, Hitler comes across as Mahatma Gandhi by comparison….
What folks don’t realize is, you don’t have to look like Adolf Hitler to act like one … you don’t need a strange symbol on your armband … you can even have orange skin and yellow hair and be a Hitler…. And you are no more special than the people of Germany in the 1930s; it can happen to you. Living in modern times is no defense against unimaginable horror.
So what do we do?
We resist…
That is the only ethical response left…
For if ethics is not about human life and reducing human suffering … if it’s only, as some people think, about imposing your do’s and don’ts on your children and on people you don’t like … then you don’t have ethics, you’ve got dogma and oppression, masquerading as morality.
Whereas the natural morality I espouse, and which is shared with the humans over ninety-nine percent of our history, involves promoting life and reducing suffering as its bottom line….
The other part of this natural morality is that actions taken to save lives and to reduce suffering are all the more praise-worthy. There’s the morality of what not to do … the “Thou shalt nots” … then there’s the morality of what would be good to do, which is sometimes called heroic, if it involves some kind of self-sacrifice.
So, ethics in an age of Trump? The only ethical response to the future horror being brought by a President Trump is resistance. Mario Savio phrased it during the free speech movement at Berkeley in December of 1964: “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
Now, does that mean you really have to stand in front of a tank?
Maybe.
Or maybe … in your own unique and special way … you need to do something similar to what I’m doing,
Being an author, psychotherapist, anthropologist, and ecopsychologist, I have been dedicating all my time … for years now … toward placing my words of hope and help in front of a world gone mad….
We no longer have the luxury of “business as usual,” with its daily creature comforts.
The only ethical response left is a spiritual one: What do you do in the face of horror and death, not just of yourself, but of your children and loved ones, the innocents, the planetmates?
I mean, if you don’t care about their deaths and suffering, you are not moral … nor ethical … though you might be moral-izing.
As opposed to what you do not do … which is the traditional morality of the Thou Shalt Nots … what you do … in this new and retrograde era of Trumpism, has suddenly become all important. We’re traditionally taught to not disobey, to respect and follow authority, blindly and trusting. However, in the current era it needs to be about what we do … we need to question authority, if necessary we need to disobey authority. You’d better be part of the solution, in whatever way you can or you want to. Or else you’d better get used to watching your children and loved ones suffering … probably dying … and knowing you are partly responsible for it, and there no longer being anything you can do about it.
I suggest you get yourself into action … do something about the horror approaching in whatever way you can …
Stand within the circle of the good-hearted people of this world, wanting the world’s and their children to be happy and not to suffer. In this way, be lifted up in solidarity with us, with all the rest of us, realizing the comfort in the saying, “we’re all in this together.”
Never walk, when you can dance
Never talk, when you can sing
Never place it, when you can toss it there
Never angry, when you can be silly
Never apathetic, when you can be a part
Never indifferent, when you can care
Make your work, your play
*Groove* the ride
and laugh
Remember, the best way to combat evil, is to make energetic progress in the good.
— from Chapter 56, titled “The Proper Response to Insanity: Ethics in an Era of Trumpism and the Difficult, yet Profoundly Fruitful, Task of Loving Your Dragons”
— of *Psychology of Apocalypse: Ecopsychology, Activism, and the Prenatal Roots of Humanicide* by Michael Adzema, coming to print book and e-book format March-April, 2018.
Click for a free downloadable copy of this excerpt from Psychology of Apocalypse, with my compliments.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR, Michael Adzema. Video below … interviewed by Michael Harrell
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— Related: See also other published versions of these ideas….
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*Dance of the Seven Veils I* (2017).
At Amazon at
*Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness* (2014).
*Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).
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*Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”* (2013).
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“The Secret of Men: What Patriarchal Cultures Never Tell Women, or Themselves — The Elders’ New Clothes and the Lie of It All
Posted by sillymickel in 1%, activism, anthropology, authenticity, awakening, book, Culture, Culture War Class War, education, free, History, indigenous peoples, Patriarchal culture, Politics, religion, science, sixties, truth, videos, Vietnam War, youtube on December 13, 2017
“The Secret of Men: What Patriarchal Cultures Never Tell Women, or Themselves — The Elders’ New Clothes and the Lie of It All
— Which is Chapter 37 of *Dance of the Seven Veils I* by Michael Adzema
37
The Secret of Men:
What Patriarchal Cultures Never Tell Women, or Themselves — The Elders’ New Clothes and the Lie of It All
“…a big inducement they had for coming forth with the truth was the guilt they felt, in the rites, at having to follow through on inflicting suffering and torturing the younger men, all the time knowing the truth and the fact that there was no reason to be doing it. They said they simply could not bear the guilt, or the burden of lying anymore.”
“With their sights no longer in the heavens, they could finally observe the tribesmen before them.”
This overall masculine and controlling pattern of behavior — exhibited in our religious, transpersonal, and scientific priesthoods — has remarkable parallels to something which happened in recent history … several decades ago … among a particular culture. When I was in graduate school, pursuing a doctorate in psychological anthropology, in one colloquium I attended, an esteemed professor in the department — Don Tuzin, and this was at the University of California at San Diego, in the year 1987 — presented to the department, faculty and grad students, on an experience he had upon his last visit to his particular place of field work. This was a group in Papua New Guinea.
His story was fascinating for what it displayed that no one had ever ever come across. It was an example of cultural change unlike anything ever written in ethnographies, or histories.
The Secret of Men
The particular tribe of which Tuzin spoke had from time immemorial perpetuated a sequence of male rites of passage beginning with adolescents of a certain age. The rites were especially brutal and humiliating, including the infliction of physical pain and deprivation and repetitive oral sex to be performed by the initiates for the pleasure of the elders.1
They conducted many of these rituals throughout a man’s life, beginning at puberty. The good professor had participated in them to some extent, as part of his participant observation, which anthropologists do. These rites were merciless, but in the course of them, the initiates were led to believe that great value would come from their endurance of the humiliations. For they would be given certain aspects of “secret” knowledge. At each one the participants were let in on some, a little each time, of the “secret knowledge,” had by only the eldest males in the tribe — the ones who had completed all the rites.
Furthermore, they were informed of the various other stages in the rites, which they would need to go through in the course of their life. Each of which would be excruciatingly painful. Yet each of which would be rewarded with a little more of the secret knowledge until, near the end of one’s life, one would be instructed into the highest knowledge of all: This was the knowledge that was the possession of only the most elderly males, the most “advanced” in said knowledge, in the culture.
The practices were severe, and women were not only left out of them, they were in danger of death if they were ever to learn any of what the men did or what they were taught … if they were to discover any of the “secret knowledge.” It follows that the whole truth was only known by the elders of the tribe.
The Elders’ “New Clothes”
Now, this anthropologist observed these ceremonies, studied them, and was let in on particular aspects of them. He could not be told “the whole truth” of course; for that was reserved for the elite, the elders — only those who had successfully completed all the stages of the ordeal, only those who had sufficiently suffered. Doctor Tuzin studied other aspects of the culture and returned again and again over the course of several decades.
However one time when he returned after a several year absence, he was to find everything changed.
The elders no longer ruled with an iron hand, in fact they were despised and openly rebuked, especially by women. The initiation ceremonies were no longer carried out. The women had more power … the elderly men were in shame. What had happened was that the elders — the ones who knew the “whole” truth — had confessed publicly, in a gathering of all the tribe, that there was no secret knowledge. There was none; there had never been any; it was all a ruse. The last secret to be conveyed in the final ritual was that there was no secret. It had all been a charade that had been carried on from time immemorial as part of the elders’ way of wielding power in the group and abusing and manipulating the younger men, keeping them subservient and afraid. No doubt also it served the function of keeping women as second-class citizens — in fear and under their thumb.
The elders revealed that the entire deception of “the secrets” had been maintained for the purpose of getting younger men to go through the ceremonies — with the inducement of greater and greater rewards — and in order to ensure their power and status in the community. Essentially, these elder men “fessed up” that the only last secret to be told was that there was no last secret; that it was all a sham; that the entire foundation had nothing beneath it — like a house of cards built in the middle of the air; that the center of the onion, after peeling back layer after layer, was in fact nothing.
Now, how do we know the elders were telling the truth this time? The elders confessed with all manner of shame. And they admitted that they were driven to reveal the truth because they could no longer bear the guilt of abusing the younger men, in these rites, knowing it was all a manipulation. They could no longer keep up the pretense.
Not only did they know it was a fraud, but the rest of the story is that the culture had been increasing its contacts and ties with the outside world, which held other beliefs — beliefs completely different from the ones that directed their own lives. One of those was a cargo cult that had become popular in their region.2 There were other signs to the community of another world out there beyond that of their tribe, as well.
Apparently the elders, knowing that reality did not have to be construed the way it had been for them and the way they had been impressing it on the younger — that is, knowing there were alternatives to their cultural beliefs, which were just as credible, or more so, than their own — and tormented by their secret feelings, come of their own aversion to inflicting punishment and suffering on the younger ones, gave in to their guilt about it all, came clean.
When I first heard this story, I could not help but think about its striking parallel to my situation in graduate school, where I happened to be at the time as a first-year doctoral student. Most of all this story reminds me of what Roger S. Jones (1982), a physicist, wrote about his colleagues — those scientists who through the suffering of years of tortuous graduate study and the equally challenging hoops of research, obtaining grants, and university tenure tracks are led to face the foundations of their beliefs as being as equally insubstantial as those tribal elders knew theirs to be. In this respect, Jones’s book, Physics as Metaphor, in which he revealed that secret, is practically the Western equivalent of such a confession as those tribal elders put before their people. Indeed, his feelings at carrying around the lie, the “deception” or “swindle,” are remarkably akin to those of the guilt-ridden tribal elders, so many thousands of miles and so many millions of cultural beliefs distant.
Anyway, for the Papua New Guinea elders, well, afterwards, rather than the respect they had enjoyed for practically forever, they were openly rebuked by one and all, including women.
In this light, it was speculated by anthropologists that this awareness of realities other than that of their own culture — the one that they were indoctrinated and tortured into accepting — may have had something to do with their losing faith in their way of doing things. It was suggested by such observers of the phenomenon that this had led to the elders finding themselves having remorse about such things as hurting other people. For they would now know that there are other ways of living and being; that everyone does not believe and live as they do in their own culture. Hence that the torture and suffering they inflicted were not absolutely necessary … as they had once rationalized, and then continued to convince themselves. It might be said that losing ultimate, or “Divine,” justification for their actions caused them to view their cruelties in the human context of the here-and-now relation. With their sights no longer in the heavens, they could finally observe the tribesmen before them.
Transformative Power of Multiculturalism
Before continuing, I want to point out the congruence of this pattern with the example I was giving before about the ways that religions are able to espouse life-negating beliefs, and the actions emanating from them, by positing another realm where the good is made bad (like hell) and the bad, good (like heaven). Only in this case in Papua New Guinea the justification of the bad, which made it “good,” was to be had at that time, not in an afterlife, but at the culmination of the rites when the secret would finally be revealed that there was no secret. Suffering was made okay in the present through it being said to be the only way to a greater good.
As I said, looking cross-culturally is a great assistance to seeing beyond such flawed understandings and to bringing one’s understandings of things in line with one’s natural conscience, rooted in quite ordinary, and profound, empathy. As an example, religions that encourage war, clitoridectomy, witch-burning, lynchings, and pogroms, viewed in multicultural context, lose their potency in driving such behavior when their rationalization that such atrocity is rectified, indeed made superlative, in some bizarro afterlife where the bad is made good (wars, witch burnings, clitoridectomies) and the good is made bad (sexuality, for example) are seen in contrast to the beliefs of other peoples. Given alternatives, through multicultural understanding, and diluting the power of an unassailed belief system to force compliance of cultural atrocity, one is left to rely on simple conscience and fellow feeling. And this changes everything … and for the better.
Another parallel to Western culture that I see is to that which happened in the Sixties, at the beginning of the postmodern era. For indeed that was a time when the truisms of Western material culture and capitalist-imperialist worldwide hegemony, married with conventional religious orthodoxy, would be broken down and left in tatters in its confrontation with a multicultural world and an influx of scientific findings which challenged all orthodoxies. The international event that would precipitate this awareness would be the Vietnam War, of course.
Here also it was the exposure to an outside world of many cultural understandings that was the precipitating event. And, it would have a similar result: People knowing that alternative ways were possible would question old ways that involved violence that their consciences cringed at but which previously they carried through on when they thought there was no alternative. What followed that reevaluation was an extravaganza of national finger-pointing and soul searching and a quest to find deeper foundations for right action and life purpose.
Truth Is Liable to Break Out
Anyway, getting back to Papua New Guinea, this is a true story. Still, it can be seen as a parable or metaphor for many things currently arising and especially so in the sciences. In addition to what it tells us about knowledge and epistemologies, the last part especially might be telling us a lot about the effects, one might say benefits, to be wrought, in terms of truth, by this century’s increasing mixing of cultures and races and by the worldwide emergence of a multiculturalism as a common basis of global belief.
We might also relate its message to the inauthentic nature of ritual and of initiation. For such rites bring about individual actions contrary to one’s desires, intents, or conscience; and they substitute those of culture and society, especially the elite sectors of that. Without such brutal insistence by outside forces, these actions would not come forth. They simply would not happen under the aegis of one’s empathy, conscience, and fellow feeling. This story also says something about how when belief and ritual are removed, real feelings, authentic feelings are possible.
This might be considered a directly opposite interpretation of the normal explanation of ritual/religion/beliefs and their relation to feeling, by the way. The usual explanation is that without such traditions of ritual, religion, and beliefs, people are left at the mercy of their aggressive and incestuous inner natures. Thus, when religion breaks down, all hell breaks loose — and then the situation in modern urban societies is usually pointed to, to bear this out.
However my interpretation is that belief/religion/ritual keep real feeling from happening. They also keep truth from happening. They keep spontaneity and authenticity from happening. Therefore, when religion breaks down, all truth is liable to break loose. And this is bound to be a bit disruptive at first — as it is true that any dam that holds a river in check is going to see that river explode across the countryside at first until it finally comes to rest in its normal stable peaceful courseway!
“Alternative Facts”
In several other of my works,3 I expound on the story of Gilgamesh — the ancient hero of mythology, exalted in what has been called the first true classic of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, predating even The Bible. I point out that in the story, Gilgamesh is portrayed as a murdering, raping king, and that he is allowed to be that way by a fearful populace and a set of codes and “morality,” sanctioned by “the gods,” that justified and allowed anything he would wish to do. I contrasted that with the “natural morality,” as I termed it, of his counterpart, Enkidu, who was a man of Nature. In the story, Enkidu’s inclination is to block Gilgamesh from harming and raping another, to fight him so as to protect the innocent.
What I bring out in my exegesis on the narrative is that nowhere, among all the scholars over the course of thousands of years — all being patriarchal ones, and that is significant — has there been any question of Gilgamesh’s supposed “right” to rape and murder. Like the murdering and raping of king’s and rulers throughout history and in their many campaigns of violence and wars, the assumption of thinking people in patriarchal cultures is that kings have the right to destroy and use others for arbitrary ends; much as one overlooks those caught in the crossfire of police shootouts, or those killed and maimed in police chases, or innocent women and children murdered in war as “collateral damage.”
This is analogous, as well, to the way the unprivileged voters in modern America allow the wealthy patrons of politicians to benefit themselves with tax breaks and corporate subsidies of extravagant amounts at the cost of their own lives and happiness at the lower end on the totem pole. It is akin to the way powerful authorities in society — usually men — are allowed, without consequence, their use and abuse of those below them in status. Much as the fact that Donald Trump being a sexual predator and promoter of sexual assault against women was of no consequence in blocking his ascendancy to the most powerful position in the world, just recently.
And as for the toadying academics throughout history, the literary critics of the renowned epic? Quite frankly, scholars have simply bought into the rationalizations within the story itself and expressed confusion as to why Enkidu would even consider blocking Gilgamesh from engaging in rape. Saying what amounts to, “Doesn’t Enkidu know that the gods allow Gilgamesh that right?” they show their inability to buck the justifications put upon them by patriarchal rulers from time immemorial. One notices here also a similarity with the way scholars, hiding behind a dogma of “cultural relativity,” rubber-stamp the oppressive tactics, rites, and rituals of cultures who suffocate their young and lowly along lines to benefit only that society’s elites, as we looked into previously.
My point here is to say that just as we saw through Gilgamesh’s conscious or unconscious wielding of directives from the “gods” allowing him to go raping women … ahem, “requiring” him to … everywhere about us there are elites supporting their power upon the backs of untruths, slight truths, outright lies … or, the more current phraseology, their “alternative facts” … much as those conniving and lying elders from Papua New Guinea.
In any case, this story about cultural change and the secrets of men from the other side of the world stayed with me throughout the decades as a powerful metaphor of what I observed all around in patriarchal cultures:
The secret of men?
Well, it’s a lie.
There is no secret of men.
The Secret of the Wealthy
Lest one think the above is only an isolated incident, I wish to bring to mind how this is acted out daily on our news programs where the agendas and policies of the elite — the “men,” the patriarchs and elders of our culture — are laid out for us, are imprinted on us.
“Obvious Truths” — “Wealth Creators”
We hear in the commentary and talk show segments of such programs this common assumption that those with power and money are, in the words of media pundits and political personalities, “wealth creators.” This “obvious truth,” as I pointed out in my book, Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths,” is a lie. Not only has it never worked out that way, when the wealthy have had heaped upon them all kinds of riches — as for example in the low taxes during Hoover’s time, the tax cuts of Reagan, or the surplus giveaway through tax cuts of George W. Bush. But each time it had horrible consequences for one and all — including them! The results were the Great Depression, the Reagan-Bush recession of the late Eighties and early Nineties, and the Great Recession beginning in 2007 after Bush’s slicing of tax rates and mishandling of the nation’s wealth during his reign.
That it did not and never works is another example how — just like wars that never produce prosperity or gains, but only deplete a nation’s resources and set them back decades — still these gambits are put in motion. For the wealthy are every bit, if not more, driven by their unconscious pain — their prenatal and perinatal dynamics — as the rest of us. That they do their failing on a grand scale and — never learning from their mistakes — make their ludicrous pronouncements with the loudest of speakers only gives the rest of us examples in plain view of our own “normal” irrationality.
In fact, the wealthy are even more likely to make this mistake in that they are wedded to the mythology of a patriarchy, necessarily, whose values are those of domination and power. Not only would that preclude their ability to come up with stratagems and financial goals that would involve empathy with the downtrodden others, however much it would benefit themselves (Warren Buffett is one of the few in modern times who bucks that tendency). But also, to them, it is power and kingly royalty that are values. The well-being and financial security, let alone happiness, of any other than them is not even a factor in their equations.
Also, their values in this respect come of being aligned with “the father,” and his values, which involve this idea of superiority, a corollary of domination. Inherent in this idea is that power alone — their power in particular — is what is effective. Even if it is not. Their vision is of a patriarchally led society, with corporations and wealthy titans creating what is needed using the resources of all below and raining bounty upon all about … well, they’ll get around to that eventually they tell themselves. It is no wonder it was called “trickle-down economics.”
They truly believe in the power of masculinity to create; that it is the only power that can do that, the only fount of affluence and wealth. The idea that the masses — which to them represent the disorganized, the rabble, chaos, the natural, the feminine, and so on — can create, like a bounty of flora arising naturally from the multitudinous nutrients and potentiality of the Earth, is not only inconceivable to them, it is overlaid with outright contempt. Not only do they hate the feminine, for the reasons I have brought out, but they see only a top-down, a managed, a controlled, a made-to-happen creation of anything to be what is possible. For patriarchal is also authoritarian, controlling, dominating, enforcing, and Ego. They cannot see it otherwise.
The natural rising up of wealth out of the unorganized and self-interested efforts of the conscious decisions of the millions making up the masses is not only not conceivable to them, but, since it is not something controlled and smacks of uncontrolled Nature, anarchy, and the processes of the feminine such as birth, it is thought to be impossible. “Nothing comes from nothing.” “There is no free lunch.” These are sayings of the patriarchy, where there is no “feminine” grace, bounty, or unworked for rewards. Contrasting greatly with the worldview of the gatherer-hunters who see the world-at-large as the bounteous and freely giving Mother, or Goddess, these spawn of hierarchy, wealth, and patriarchy see nothing of any good that is not made to happen. We see the manifestations of Ego in that. By the way, such values never come up against the knowledge that their wealth to begin with is inherited and not earned. Such is the way Ego rationalizes to its own advantage, denying facts that might challenge or be contrary to what benefits one in believing it.
The Fall of “Obvious Truths”
As I pointed out in Culture War, Class War (2013), the rich are hardly wealth-creators for the reasons of simple psychology and commonly understood economics. Economically, the theory of marginal returns tells us that as wealth is attained, each additional dollar spent on the outer edge of its growth brings back less return … diminishing marginal returns it is called. In terms of wealth and jobs that breaks down to the fact that riches given to the already wealthy, i.e., “marginally,” has less return of jobs or more wealth. Why? Well, for the simple psychological reason that the wealthier one is, the less one is motivated to increase that wealth. So the less one is motivated to invest that wealth in a way that would increase employment.
While the science of economics is based on a model of an “economic man” with infinite wants, it fails to include that humans have limited ability, time, energy, desire to bring about the fruition of those wants. Thus there are actually limitations on wants, which never show up in economic models. For it would be too unwieldy to try to include psychological factors into sterile and discompassionate economic models. Yet the model showing diminishing returns demonstrates this psychological tendency to have less desire for more when one already has so much.
What is left out of their models is that for the wealthy there is less at stake. There is also increasingly more work involved in controlling the movement and management of wealth, at the extremes. Hence, increasing effort at the ends of the spectrum, combined with diminishing returns for that extra effort, why, that is the reason the wealthy fail at being wealth-creators. That is why throwing more dollars at those who already have plenty benefits only the few.
Whereas, as I pointed out in the book, using my own father as an example, a poorer person, not having achieved yet a “comfortable” status, is exceedingly more motivated to bring back as much as that person can from that same dollar that is casually overlooked by a wealthy person. Each dollar, for someone who has little, is sweated over and maximized. The specter of failure, which is outlined by that of concern about survival itself, is a much stronger motivation for focus and effort than is any motive involving additional power and wealth for those who are already “comfortable” in their financial circumstances, not to mention way beyond that.
So it is that, for the wealthy, such extra dollars were, historically, and still are, thrown away on luxuries and passive investments — art, yachts, rare objects and artifacts, and the like — none of which create wealth. Many of which are only embellishments to their egos, visible evidence of their claimed superiority over the rest of us.
Regardless, we hear endlessly how they are wealth-creators, better money-managers, and so on; and the majority of us swallow it whole. We do not question their wealth-making ability, not seeing these emperors have no clothes.
Thus, the wealthy and powerful attribute to themselves special power and special knowledge, and clearly we underlings fall for it; even more shamefully than those tribe folk duped in Papua New Guinea. For we could, if we wanted, know better. Nevertheless, we are told they are better than us, wiser, even godly; and most of us bend our knee.
However, none of that is true, relatively speaking. We see this in the way the wealthy bust their budgets and balloon the deficit, while claiming all the while, that they — Republicans in this example — are not only better for business but that they are better money managers and are “fiscal conservatives.” A prime example is American president, Ronald Reagan, whose election in 1980 was driven by a pledge to balance the budget. Whereupon, after his election and his enactment of a “Robin Hood in reverse” tax scheme, he fattened the wallets of the wealthy and elite of which he was a member. Did his policies create wealth? Hardly. Between he and his protégé, Bush the elder, his policies nearly quadrupled the National Deficit in a mere twelve years and set off one of the most severe recessions America has ever had. We are still paying interest, through our taxes, for that money given to the filthy rich back then, for their “partying.”
Meanwhile the Democrats — claimed by Republicans to be fiscally irresponsible and budget-busting, allegedly tossing money away on unneeded liberal programs — created, under John F. Kennedy and using the same high tax rates that had caused prosperity in the Fifties, the most prosperous America that has been so far, in the Sixties. A few decades later, Democrat Bill Clinton actually succeeded in Reagan’s supposed goal of balancing a budget. Indeed more than one. He created, actually, a budget surplus, lowered the National Debt, and left office with such a surplus that a topic of discussion among the talking heads and powerful in America at that time was what to do with all the extra money.
So, the wealthy? They are not wealth-creators they are wealth-spenders. The only wealth they create is borrowed from future generations to pay for their fatter bank accounts, extravagant parties, and frivolous spending today. They are wealth-keepers, they are wealth-grabbers, is what all their actions are geared toward. And those actions, like the elders of Papua New Guinea, include any and all lies — facts and statistics and history be damned — that increases their power and wealth.
So, the secret of the wealthy?
It’s a lie.
There is no secret of the wealthy.
The Secret of the Powerful
So, we are told that the elite, the wealthy, have this “special knowledge,” which is like a special personal power or charisma, accruing to the powerful, to bring things about that ordinary folk cannot. Apparently, humans have a psychological tendency to impute spiritual or magical power to those who wield secular power. We see this in the way it was once thought spiritual power resided in the bodies of those at the top of the social pyramid in ancient times. It comes out as a belief in the kind of mojo that was thought to build up in the bodies of chieftains in the South Seas. The Polynesian word that was used for it is mana. It was a power that could be both transferred, through touching the person, but could also be harmful with which to be in contact. The more powerful the person, the stronger the mana, thus the greater danger and benefit that could accrue through proximity or touch.
The same peculiarity regarding the powerful and famous is to be found everywhere and always; we see it in modern societies in the cult of celebrity. Check out any of the magazines — People magazine, for example — in your supermarket check-out line. Also, you only have to notice how often folks will boast about having seen, rubbed shoulders with, shaken hands with, stood in a picture with … touched … some entertainment or political celebrity. They are saying that makes them important — you are to see them as a little more powerful for the incident — as if some of that personal electricity was transmitted to them through contact.
Of course, there is the obvious corollary of the presumptuous royalty of history identifying themselves as gods. More accurately it is analogous to the fact that the masses would fall for such a pretention. Perhaps the people demand it of their rulers, according to the analysis I am giving. Why would plebeians be so ignorant as to want their rulers to be superhuman, you ask?
Well, for many reasons, including the cognitive dissonance come of being subjugated and humiliated and at the same time seeing the obvious flaws, if not downright cruelties, of the overlords. Commoners are not merely frightened into looking away from the faults of their emperors, they know that to acknowledge the foolishness of their idols would be to concede their own stupidity, and cowardice, in not having seen it sooner. (Queue Donald Trump supporters, again.) The confusion, the cognitive dissonance of trying to hold both those facts in mind at the same time can be resolved if one attributes godly status to the ruler. Then, not only does the ruler not have to make sense but even his punishment and cruelty can be rationalized as some kind of warped “blessing.” His “rod and his staff,” oh, “they comfort me.”
It is no coincidence that civilizational theologies have gods like that, as well, thus priming the populace to sycophantically bow to unjustified abuse from their secular potentates. This reason is a popular one, as well, for it is exactly what we, most of us, do at the time of the primal scene. This is what we will look at in the next part of this book, Veil Three, having to do with “Infancy and Childhood, the Split … the Primal Scene.”
Another reason ordinary folk want to attribute godly status to their rulers is the “escape from freedom” come of a subservience that is embraced. It simplifies one’s life to not have to make major decisions and instead to let a higher up, like was the case in one’s authoritarian family growing up, do that for you. This one in particular we see in Trump supporters today, for they are practically defined by the fact that they embrace authoritarianism as the way to go since that was what they were required to accept in their childhoods.
Quite simply they do not want the responsibility of a life with choices; they want daddy to tell them what to do. Not only can they get “patted on the head” that way, they do not have to deal with the confusion come of the “philosophical bands” … we will come to that topic in the next part, too, the next Veil. The philosophic bands of consciousness arise with the split at the primal scene which has people — having abjured their real self with its bodily felt directives — feeling confused and beaten and in a situation where they would otherwise need to deal with difficult questions of “who to be” … if one were not told what one has to be.
Still another is the benefit, if one is lucky, of being physically close to that power and of having some of it accrue to oneself by proximity. Consider how fortunate Kellyanne Conway feels now with her newly acquired status and fame. One can “ride the coattails” of power and celebrity for which one has not risked nor brought about oneself, yet still — as sycophants everywhere think — garner some of the prestige and be the first dog in line for the scraps falling from the table.
We see it as well in the importance people put upon family names, upon lineages. As if there is some magical power inherent in what someone is called. As if they do not fasten their overcoats one button at a time like the rest of us. As if their underwear does not also need laundering. But when we look more deeply into their lives, we see they are as vulnerable, crass, morally challenged, and human as the rest of us.
So, the secret of the powerful?
It’s a lie.
There is no secret of the powerful.
— from Chapter 37, titled “The Secret of Men: What Patriarchal Cultures Never Tell Women, or Themselves — The Elders’ New Clothes and the Lie of It All”
— of *Dance of the Seven Veils I: Primal/Identity Psychology, Mythology, and Your Real Self* by Michael Adzema, as of December 2017, now available in print and kindle/e-book versions at Amazon at
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR, Michael Adzema. Video below … interviewed by Michael Harrell
— see also other recent published versions of these ideas….
*The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016).
At Amazon —https://t.co/WMyo609jCi
And *Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man* (2016).
At Amazon at
and *Wounded Deer and Centaurs: The Necessary Hero and the Prenatal Matrix of Human Events* (2016).
At Amazon at
https://www.amazon.com/Wounded-Deer-Centaurs-Necessary-Prenatal/dp/1499653999?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc
and *Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation* (2015).
and *Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness* (2014).
At Amazon — http://amzn.to/2anYVzi
and Experience Is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor (2013).
At Amazon — http://amzn.to/2aeeZUA
and *Apocalypse Emergency: Love’s Wake-Up Call* (2013).
and *Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).
and *Planetmates: The Great Reveal* (2014). At Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Planetmates-Great-Reveal-Return-Grace-ebook/dp/B00JZ418DA?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc#nav-subnav
See Michael Adzema at Amazon for any other of the ten books currently in print.
At https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Adzema/e/B00J7F0URC/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1
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*FUNNY GOD: THE TAO OF FUNNY GOD AND THE MIND’S TRUE LIBERATION* is a composition in three movements. It is activism, a prophecy, and a vision — integrated by the idea of Funny God.
“The Tao of Funny God” (Part One) unveils the necessary hero and understanding to face the imminent problems of humanity — environmental, political, and social … issues of peace and war, planet and life. Lunar and solar theologies and the rise of the Goddess and its meaning are brought into focus.
“Breaking News” (Part Two) is prophecy and good news framed as fiction … and some comedy. We see a coming together of heaven and earth unfold in the near future. With the pulling back of the curtain on the No-Form state of existence, brought about by very real near-death and death-death experiences, humanity finds itself on the brink of re-union with the rest of the consciousnesses of the Universe, which is revealed to be a Universe of Experience, shared.
“The Mind’s True Liberation” (Part Three) is vision — philosophy, spirituality, and the answers to the questions and problems of Existence mixed with humor. It describes and elicits an attitude and understanding of life and action that is good-hearted, transcendent, and liberating. You will find yourself saying, “My God, that makes sense! Why have I never heard that before?”
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“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….”
https://www.amazon.com/Funny-God-Return-Grace-Book-ebook/dp/B00UV83F7Q/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
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*WOUNDED DEER AND CENTAURS: THE NECESSARY HERO AND THE PRENATAL MATRIX OF HUMAN EVENTS* is about the environmental crisis, activism, and psychology. It presents a major new theory in psychology, specifically in prenatal and perinatal psychology. This new understanding is the one crucial to saving our planet, our children, and ourselves. This book, also, reveals the ones — people probably like you — who are here now and destined to save this planet … or die trying.
This book is about the environmental crisis, activism, and psychology. It presents a major new theory in psychology, specifically in prenatal and perinatal psychology. This new understanding is the one crucial to saving our planet, our children, and ourselves. This book, also, reveals the ones — people probably like you — who are here now and destined to save this planet … or die trying.
For this book, Wounded Deer and Centaurs, confronts a situation in current times where we are on the brink of an apocalypse of unimaginable dimensions. We are bringing about both a suicidal-style ending of humans on Earth, a humanicide, as well as are taking down with us all other life on this planet … we are committing an ecocide.
This impending eco-humanicide requires of those currently alive to sacrifice on a scale previously uncalled for to forestall the consequences of the actions of generations of ancestors. This book deals with these elements of sacrifice; it shows where we have gone wrong; and it reveals where we could finally, after thousands of years of failure in righting the wrongs of evil, greed, injustice, war, and barbarity, finally, finally get it right.
We can finally understand the roots of the evil that lies within humanity. We can see how and why they come into being within humanity … and within humanity, alone, of all species. And we find those discoveries of the causes of evil in humanity lie alongside the happy revelation that that evil within humanity is not part of our deepest humanity, so it is not inevitable that we act it out! Humanity can do better. And we need to!
Luckily, there is a movement afoot in global humanity giving rise to individuals uniquely qualified, able, and willing to be the self-sacrificing ones required right now. This book introduces these personalities — these ones who, rather than act out the traumas and pain handed down for thousands of years, instead say “Let it end with me.” These wounded deer and centaurs are spotlighted in this book.
Generation after generation of humans have passed down their personal pain and trauma, in some form or other, onto their offspring. Back into unrecorded history this vicious cycle has perpetuated itself. But many of us in these extraordinary times, and goaded on by the specter of global catastrophe, are saying, “Let us not continue this madness any further!” Attempting to break the cycle of hurting and then inflicting hurt, attempting to halt the prevailing insanity, we make the Gandhian effort to take the energy into ourselves, to change ourselves lest we, also, be like the generation before — forever passing on the insane legacy.
This book reveals the deepest roots of that human insanity that would end our species. They are found in the experiences in the womb and at birth. We see here how they have led to the atrocities and wars of all time, and how they can be finally gone beyond.
We discover, in these chapters, how these earliest of human experiences set humans up to be the species separate from Nature. We can understand through these pages how and why exactly we as humans are insisting on self-annihilation. We can grok why we do not heed the warnings and continue depleting the Nature upon which we depend, even though it guarantees the end of humanity and the likely death of our children before their times.
Revealed here are the origins of the rapacious greed infecting hierarchical societies, from the beginnings of civilization, which today has created a two-tiered global society of haves and have-nots, with 1% shoring up their wealth at the expense of the lives and livelihoods of the remaining ones.
In these pages we can behold what needs to be done, how we can save our children, our planet, and even ourselves. Herein we receive the encouragement and spiritual conviction to take up our roles as the necessary heroes of our times — to right all these wrongs, to protect our precious Earth and its inhabitants, to save the lives of our children
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*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY: LOVE’S WAKE-UP CALL* is about a frightening global predicament that everyone seems to be aware of but which few people are giving the attention and seriousness it deserves. Why people would do that and why the media would be inclined to shy away is understandable.
We simply have no way of comprehending the magnitude of what is happening—the end of life on Earth—nor how fast it is occurring—likely in our lifetime—since no living thing on this planet in its multibillion year history has had to face what we are.
The environmental collapse now occurring can be compared to a trillion-alarm fire with everyone looking the other way. We need to respond to it with the urgency of being in a world war, marshaling all available national and world resources and not with the complacency of a boy-scout litter pick-up campaign.
“Love’s Wake-Up Call” goes back and forth between the horrors that are possible and this unique situation with the potential so strong to bring humans to raise themselves up and be led by their better angels more than any other time. At no other time in the history of the world was the truth of the saying “we’re all in this together” more patently true.
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To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, currently there are ten of them, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
Drugs and Generations … Boomers: Drugs of choice were pot and LSD … no coincidence that Sixties values emphasized spiritual access, pacifism, authenticity, sensory openness, community
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, Culture, Culture War, Culture War Class War, Michael Adzema author, psychology, sixties on October 27, 2015
Vietnam-Era Generation — “Wow, Man!” “Just Do It” “Go With the Flow”
The Vietnam-War, or Baby-Boomer, Generation was noted for their use of a number of drugs. Marijuana, wine, “speed” (amphetamines), “downers” (for example, “ludes” or qualudes, also “reds” — that is to say, barbiturates), LSD, other hallucinogens such as mescaline, “magic mushrooms,” psilocybin, and peyote were all in use. It was a culture of experimentation in all areas, including drugs, which grew out of beliefs (following in the footsteps of the Beat Generation) that normal life/people were characterized by phoniness (plastic was the Vietnam-era Generation’s word for it), alienation, conformism, robotism, and lack of feelingness … and hypocrisy.
Though the Sixties Generation (another term used for this generation) experimented widely with drugs, their predominant drugs of choice were “pot” (marijuana) and LSD. Alongside this sort of drug use were attitudes of activism, free love, love as the ultimate value and/or as equivalent to God, pacifism in regards to the war, the valuing of openness, authenticity, “real” communication, and passion and/or feelingness, including sensory awareness or heightened perception of the physical world.
It is easy to make the connection between the spiritual access capable with LSD and the emphasis on feeling, community, communication (‘rapping”), transcendence, and sensory enhancement that characterized the Sixties Generation. On the negative side, there was sometimes apathy and defeatism, like the Beat Generation, associated with marijuana use.
– excerpted from “Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of ‘Obvious Truths'”
http://www.amazon.com/Culture-War-Class-Generations-Obvious/dp/1492864021/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
https://culturewarclasswar.wordpress.com/culture-war-is-class-war
For any of Michael Adzema’s books, go to Michael Adzema at Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Adzema/e/B00J7F0URC/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1
#Sixties #LSD #pot #activism #pacifism #community #openness #communication #authenticity
We’d rather cuddle with a statue: “Emotions having become soured in us … we strive to empty ourselves of them. Our cultures, similarly, glorify the unaffected personality….”
Posted by sillymickel in books, consciousness, Culture, Experience Is Divinity, Funny God, God, Michael Adzema author, Patriarchal culture, personality, spirituality on September 21, 2015
“Why We Think Less Is More: There is a good reason why we make the mistake of confusing unfeelingness and a vapid personality and life experience with a greater and more Divine one. We are so traumatized by things that have been done to us in early life … maybe we had an angry daddy, a cruel mommy … that we get comfort only in imagining a Divine with no emotional qualities. We would rather cuddle with a statue, cozy up to a piece of granite, or be enamored of an empty concept or an ambiguous image or symbol than expose ourselves to what we feel to be the only alternative. That is, that Divinity might come crashing down on us like a thunderbolt … something perhaps our parents did. Because life was threatening to us, once, we seek to create a Divinity, thus, a Reality, that will not be, cannot be.
“Emotions having become soured in us, in our religious and spiritual pursuits we strive to empty ourselves of them. Our cultures, similarly, glorify the unaffected personality; and we wish to put ourselves above our feelings and to train our children out of their emotions….”
– from “Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation”
http://www.amazon.com/Funny-God-Minds-Liberation-Return/dp/1499504845/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1442668372&sr=1-1&keywords=michael+adzema
https://www.facebook.com/notes/michael-adzema/wed-rather-cuddle-with-a-statue-we-remove-the-essence-of-divinity-from-our-ideas/10152677583538138?pnref=lhc
#spirituality #consciousness #experience #God #divinity #follow #tsu #personality #spirit #emotion
“While they were lynching and beating innocents, they were secretly seeing themselves applauded and approved….”
Posted by sillymickel in activism, Civil Rights, Culture, Culture War, occupy, occupywallstreet, Police brutality, psychology, sociology, War on September 6, 2015
“While they were lynching and beating innocents, they were secretly seeing themselves applauded and approved, finally, by their fathers and the daddy surrogates of their lives. Having been beaten down themselves, they saw themselves as finally right and okay when they brought themselves to then beat down others. They had become like daddy, and like society, wanted … finally they felt themselves safe and belonging.
“When you see anger all around you, and you have had it directed at you when you were young, you feel safe when you can deflect it to scapegoats. Your anger becomes, then, your protection from yourself being the target.
“When you allow yourself to forget the natural morality, inherent in everyone’s conscience, that pain inflicted is wrong, whereas that love, forgiveness, tolerance, mercy, and all the other things they claim of their god, is good, then you are capable of anything. And you are able to pat yourself on the back for atrocity…..”
– from “Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation” http://www.amazon.com/Funny-God-Minds-Liberation-Return/dp/1499504845/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
#police #brutality #war #kellythomas #lynching #follow #tsu #activist #civilrights #occupy
“People who are chained to the products of their hands are never happy or free, regardless how much of that product comes back to those hands.”
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Culture, economics, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, occupywallstreet, philosophy, Politics, psychology, spirituality on June 4, 2014
The Planetmates reveal why civilization equals suffering, Marxism, free life and human misery, enslavement: “The huge structures of civilization are monuments to, and are equal in size to, the size of the freedom lost”:
— from Planetmates: The Great Reveal , which is now available in print and e-book format. at Amazon
Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness — is also available in print and e-book formats.
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
To purchase a signed copy of any of my books, email me at sillymickel@gmail.com … Discount for blog subscribers.
Invite you to join me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/sillymickel
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel
“With defense of stores, or “investment,” we have another reason children were more desired, after you became sedentary. They act like little soldiers.
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Culture, economics, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, philosophy, Politics, psychology, spirituality on April 28, 2014
“At any rate, in addition to all the extra work you brought into Nature through your controlling ways as it expressed itself in food production and storage, there is additional work involved in defending those stores. Unlike the “possessions” of those in Nature, which are easily acquired and just as easily discarded for they can be easily acquired again, this new classification of possessions that are your “stores” represent a dearly acquired (through “work”) collection of things. They are the physical manifestation of human suffering. Hence they are valued highly for the fact that they are not easily or quickly replaceable. Hence also, they represent quite a concentration of labor, wrought of suffering, which, if acquired, would reduce the amount of such suffering (labor or work) for someone else. So, they are viewed with extreme attraction by equally famished … and suffering … others. With these concentrations of labor-suffering — these stores — then, comes the need to defend them from those others.
“With defense of stores, or “investment,” we have another reason children were more desired, after you became sedentary. Children are not just extra hands in the extra work you have created in your descent into ever more controlling, they are enlisted in keeping others from stealing it. They act like little soldiers.
“So, with humans we have this added labor, this added, actual, work. Your Marxists like to talk about the surplus value of worker’s labor and how the capitalist owners take that. They say it really belongs to the workers. But they have never looked deeply into its nature.
“They say there is an additional value that is created through collective endeavors over what would be created individually. What they are saying is that if one adds up the value of what people create, working individually and being self-determining, it is a certain amount — say, the total number of chairs that can be fashioned by that group in that amount of time acting on their own. However, if those workers are organized and working collectively, they produce that amount, plus more — say, the number of chairs produced by that same group acting on an assembly line.
“Anyone who has ever worked in a team knows this. Imagine you are clearing land for farming. You are leveling trees and pulling out stumps. Obviously, you can accomplish a lot more having workers collectively hauling heavy logs than if each worker is on his own straining away. Surplus value is, also, evident in Amish barn-raisings, where working together, structures can be thrown up in a day that would take weeks or months working on one’s own with one’s own strength and energy.
“This is, indeed, a benefit that accrues to humans living in groups of any kind, and it was a huge benefit of tribe life.
“But with sedentary-agrarian ways and hierarchical societies you have an additional surplus value, for humans can be organized around projects in greater numbers and working in tandem and cooperatively. Combining their strength they are able to do things that simply cannot be done, no matter how long one worked away at it, individually or in small groups.
“This is how the pyramids were built. It explains why such things were not done previous to hierarchical societies … they simply could not be.
“Further, with different units applying themselves to specific tasks within the project while other units focus on others, these units become more skilled, more efficient, and more productive in those tasks. This is the “benefit” of division of labor and, in the public sphere, of specialization in regards to task.
“These factors are realized most clearly in industrialized societies; they are the reason the assembly line and manufacturing are so much more productive than the cottage industry of previous times.
“No doubt, right now, you are thinking what a great idea this is. You see it as people having it easier because they are working together to accomplish more.
“Well, not only does that surplus value not come to the workers — this is the essence of the Marxists’ complaint — for it goes to the ones at the top, the ones doing the organizing, the ones doing the enslaving; but it is the product of effort that is onerous because it is coerced. You simply do not have people agreeing to link themselves together hour after hour — perhaps day after, day, perhaps month after month — pulling together against heavy loads. You do not have anyone, of their own volition, wanting to, over and over again, hour after hour, repeat the same simple actions, perhaps actions that are part of the creation of a product that they never see completed, so never getting even the satisfaction and pleasure of manifesting something in reality that was not there before.
“So not only are such workers deprived of the satisfaction of seeing something manifest out of nothingness through the efforts of one’s own hands, they are even ripped off of the pleasure of its completion. They are coerced into giving up their time, their life, in the carrying out of activities in which they find no real pleasure or joy. They hardly appreciate the product that results from their efforts. Not only was the actual decision to create what was created not theirs … it did not spring forth from their desires, their “instincts” … but they were allowed to participate in only a tiny part of its creation. It is about as pleasurable as chewing food that someone else has picked out for themselves, which one does not get to swallow, having to be turned over to the “employer” when one is done.
“So with hired, coerced labor, we have an example of work and free will versus “instinct.” The upshot is that for the worker, that pure pleasure involved in creating something out of relatively nothing, that feeling of awe and magic that one has for that moment identified with the creative principle of the Universe, bringing something from no-thingness into thingness, and had a sense of divinity that way, is denied them.
“There is no planetmate who is similarly deprived….”
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[Pt 4 of 25rd prasad — Family Fortress.
— excerpted from Planetmates: The Great Reveal – now available in print and e-book format.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, Michael Adzema. Video below … interviewed by Michael Harrell
.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2mm9OBbYjRE
.
.
— Related: See also other published versions of these ideas….
.
*Dance of the Seven Veils I* (2017).
At Amazon at
*The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016).
*Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness* (2014).
*Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).
,
*Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”* (2013).
.
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
“To the extent one lowers the barriers of early pain and the mental defenses from it, you also can feel such Divine instruction, as “instinct,” say Planetmates
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Culture, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, philosophy, psychology, spirituality on April 25, 2014
“…there would be much more “instinctual” knowledge available to you — and is available to you — were you, for reasons of your birth and infancy and the way they have caused you to run away from the feelings in your bodies, not split off from them. Indeed, to the extent that you have not run away from such pain, or to the degree that one has turned and faced and integrated that pain and reconnected with one’s body, you do feel and receive such specific “instinctual” instruction.
“In fact, think of it, when we say we do not know where those messages come from, which we experience in the body, do you see that, to be more specific, we know them to come from the “divine”? For they are “instructions,” as it were, that guide us in the care of ourselves in life and the carrying out of our life’s actions along lines most beneficial and pleasurable. And other than a force that is comforting, beneficial, and wiser than our limited selves, what else is the Divine? For certainly that is enough for us. Keeping that in mind, do you not see that it is the same for you? And that to the extent that one is able to lower the barriers of early pain and the mental defenses that arose from it, you also can feel such Divine instruction … of an increasingly more specific quality … and become more “instinctual.” Or, in your words, divinely inspired or guided by God.
“Backing up, so you denigrate our experience as “instinctual,’ when it is no different from your own experience of life … and if there is any difference it has to do with the greater access we have, the stronger and clearer connection we have, with a wisdom and beneficence beyond our limited selves, which you have separated from, but which is still accessible deep inside you, below the levels of your early pain. Just because we have more access to Mind at Large, which contains all information and knowledge, does not mean we are mindless, feelingless machines. Does it not mean the opposite? Indeed, we are your angels in nature, as we said earlier.
“So, keep in mind, our “instinct” is what guides us in having the experiences of the joy, pleasure, and happiness of life … something you have lost so much of. And it hardly matters where it “came from.” Certainly, the fact that we are more divinely inspired is no reason to trivialize our experience, or our knowledge … any more than you should demean the brilliance of your Shakespeare or Einstein or Jesus just because they happened to have found a way to stay or become sensitive to the wisdom of the Universe and the Divine, which is everywhere around, but which you, most of you and for the most part, block yourself from feeling.
“And for us this pleasure and joy, this “instinctual” guidance, includes having offspring. It is another capacity that wants to be actualized, which, in doing so, planetmates feel pleasure. It also is not a chore, or work, which for you it has often become.
“But you also know what life is that is lived under the direction of the Divine instead of the direction of higher ups, extracting from you the suffering equivalent to the control of you, which is termed work.
For, you ask a child digging in the sand with a shovel if that is work. Ask the athlete if clearing the bar when pole vaulting is work. Ask if it is work to sidestep all tacklers and throw oneself over the goal line. Ask the sculptor if fashioning stone and watching her or his vision of it emerge from it is work.
“Lion cubs fight and wrestle with each other. You say they are just preparing themselves for an adult life of struggle and fighting off predators. Really? Do you really think they are taking it on like a class, or exercise regimen, and not just having fun?
“At any rate, creative people know what we are talking about. They know about the work that is not work, that is actually play and conducive to joy. And they know about that magical, “instinctual” knowledge that comes to one precisely and specifically. For they know that their “works” (their “plays”?) have to be just so. When it fits with their “instinct” — their unconscious knowing which only comes out in actions of following it or expressing it — they know it is done and it cannot be any different. As Amadeus, in an ironic tone, said in the movie when someone criticized his composition for having “too many notes,” “Just exactly which notes would you have me take out?”
“So for the artist in any medium, the creative product arises as if it was done somewhere else, by someone else, and one is just the channel for it. Upon its completion, it feels as if it had come forth perfect and precise in all its details … springing, as it were, “fully formed from the forehead of Zeus.” So this is instinctual knowledge, of a sort, which ultimately comes from a place beyond themselves and ourselves.
“But with sedentary ways you forgot all that and you created work, which is the non-divine actions emanating as urges, not from the inside and the body (ultimately the Divine), but from the outside, driven and pushed by coercion. Rather than the positive reinforcement one receives in following one’s “instinctual” guidance, which makes of one’s life a happy one, acting in response to the promptings of the outside is largely a product of negative reinforcement. One is not, as in Nature, just rewarded when one follows its promptings, one is punished when one does not. Overall, such a life is not a happy one….”
Pt 3 of 25rd prasad — Family Fortress. .
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, Michael Adzema. Video below … interviewed by Michael Harrell
.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2mm9OBbYjRE
.
.
— Related: See also other published versions of these ideas….
.
*Dance of the Seven Veils I* (2017).
At Amazon at
.
.
.
*Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man* (2016).
At Amazon at
.
.
.
*The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016).
At Amazon —https://t.co/WMyo609jCi
.
.
.
At Amazon at
.
.
.
At Amazon at
.
.
.
*Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness* (2014).
At Amazon — http://amzn.to/2anYVzi
.
.
.
.
.
At Amazon — http://amzn.to/2aeeZUA
.
.
*Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).
At Amazon at
.
.
.
At Amazon at
.
.
,
*Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”* (2013).
At Amazon at
.
.
.
See Michael Adzema at Amazon for any other of the twelve books currently in print.
.
.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2mm9OBbYjRE
*The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016).
*Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).
,
*Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”* (2013).
“What you have so forgotten, astonishingly, is how life’s pleasure is involved, not just in sensory satisfactions, but in using the skills latent in you … your ‘instinct’”: The Planetmates reveal instinct and “free will”
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Culture, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, philosophy, psychology, science, spirituality on April 16, 2014
“All planetmates come into the world with unique skills. Humans, as well. What you have so forgotten, astonishingly, is how life’s pleasure is involved, not just in sensory satisfactions, as in passing substances over the surface of your taste buds, but in using those skills latent in you. Athletes and artists know what we are talking about. But, look into Nature and you will see planetmates, from birth, reveling in the use of the skills and unique abilities—like the cat’s skills in going after prey—they are born with, which you say is attributable to “instinct”—as if it matters where it came from.
“For what is instinct, after all? You say it is a knowing that is programmed into us, passed down through our genes, pushing us to do things at certain times and guiding our actions in how to do it. Any way you look at it, you see us as little different from machines or computer programs going through their processes, or like the inanimate forces of Nature interacting according to laws of physics. This is part of the way you have removed spirit and consciousness from the rest of Nature, so you could raise your own up higher. For, amazingly, you say that you do not have such “instinct,” you say you have “free will”!
“Because it does not fit with your constant need to pump up your Ego, you have not considered how we feel or what our experience is in going about these “instinctual” “tasks.” And yet you could. Despite your vanities, you are part of Nature, too. You are not much different from us, so you have overlap with the Reality we experience and ingress to the way we experience it.
“Assume that you are not so different from us, for a second, and see if you can understand what “instinct” really is. Okay, you eat, for example. But why? Well, you know you have certain urges within your experience, which become more noticeable and then even painful the longer you fail to respond to them. They are called hunger, or you might say you have a craving. You do not “choose” these events or experiences. Are they not something like instinct?
“Not quite getting it, I see. Okay, consider also what you do, then. You bring that urge or hunger to an end by satisfying it. You do this by eating something. And do you need to tell yourself how to eat? You have mouths, teeth, throats, and stomachs. Does your free will come up with the idea of how to use them, or are you “instinctual,” too? Was swallowing some invention one of you had at one point, which was then taught to generation after generation?
“Still is not completely clear? Alright, then think what is your experience when you eat. When you satisfy that urge, called hunger, you experience what you call pleasure. Put it all together and what do you have? You have an experience which directs you to do something, at particular times, and guides you in the exact ways of doing it, which you do until you achieve pleasure, or at least satisfaction. Sounds like “instinct,” does it not?
“But you say we have more specific directions on things to do and when to do them. You say one of our bird planetmates knows “instinctually” how to build a nest, whereas you have to learn how to fashion your house. But consider that your desire to build a shelter does not have to be learned. You would say that it comes naturally out of the experience of existing in the open, encountering inclement weather, and wanting to be comfortable (to not be in pain because of it), and possibly as being proactive against the threat of predators. Have you not considered that our actions might also come from exactly the same kind of experiential pushes? Just because you, standing outside of us, do not see this does not mean it is not going on for us.
“But more. You may be someone who is naturally strong. Where does the desire to use that strength come from? You may be someone with a sweet voice. Where does the urge to sing come from? You may be someone with a knack for understanding the workings of things. Where does the “instinct” to delve deeply into matters and “research” them come from? Where does that “curiosity” come from? Do you see that many of the things you do in life—from being able to eat and breathe to individual skills like singing—arise out the fact that you are born with the capacity or ability to do them? Do you see that the potential for something gives rise to its actualization? And that experientially this comes across, just like hunger and eating, as an urge (seemingly coming out of nowhere), containing within it exact conceptualizations or imaginings on the possible fruition or manifestation coming from that urge, leading to what you call a pleasure when you are following through on that forethinking or imagining and especially upon its completion? But, if we viewed things the way you do, why would not we, looking at you doing this, think you are acting “instinctually”?
“So you and we are the same experientially. We do our lives carrying out actions that arise out of messages from our bodies (and from where they come, neither you nor we exactly know), which provide the satisfaction and pleasure of life in their manifestation.
“How specific those messages are is not a huge dividing line between us, as the fact that we often are much more precise in the actions we carry out is easily explained by the fact that you are more split off from such sources of information. You also have many things you do out of unconscious knowledge, coming to you as feelings in your bodies, which you do not see and do not want to notice … preferring the self-congratulation of crowning yourselves with “free will,” instead. And there would be much more “instinctual” knowledge available to you—and is available to you—were you, for reasons of your birth and infancy and the way they have caused you to run away from the feelings in your bodies, not split off from them. Indeed, to the extent that you have not run away from such pain, or to the degree that one has turned and faced and integrated that pain and reconnected with one’s body, you do feel and receive such specific “instinctual” instruction….”
Pt 2 of 25rd prasad — Family Fortress.
— excerpted from *Planetmates: The Great Reveal* … now available in print and e-book at Amazon.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, Michael Adzema. Video below … interviewed by Michael Harrell
.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2mm9OBbYjRE
.
.
— Related: See also other published versions of these ideas….
.
*Dance of the Seven Veils I* (2017).
At Amazon at
*The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016).
*Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness* (2014).
*Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).
,
*Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”* (2013).
.
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
Those who want signed copies of any of my books, email me directly … sillymickel@gmail.com … Discount for blog subscribers.
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“You could not let it be easy…. Your single-minded attention to filling your stores as a hedge against incursion of imagined darkening … brought additional work to your lot in life”
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Culture, economics, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, occupywallstreet, philosophy, Politics, psychology, science, spirituality on April 12, 2014
The Planetmates reveal the origins of work, what a Planetmate’s life is like, control, and the suffering humans brought to Nature
“The more you added to your survival burden by controlling your food sources rather than accepting Nature’s bounty and providence, the more work you created for yourself. All the things Nature does automatically, effortlessly, and joyously in the creation of its cornucopia of bounty, you increasingly took upon yourselves. You no longer simply had to focus on moving yourself and a few belongings — in the company of dear friends and family members, your tribe — to follow the food supply. Instead, you stayed stubbornly put, and dug into, cut up, carved out, and prodded, as it were, your Mother, the Earth, to extract every item of sustenance you needed rather than allow it to simply fall into your lap, as when you were nomads.
“Beyond simple sustenance, your single-minded attention to filling your stores as a hedge against the incursion of the imagined darkening, all about, of Nature, with its unpredictability, added additional work to your lot in life. Difficult enough, it was, to supplant Nature Herself as the manager of all the minute details of turning dirt of the Earth into edible food, but you had to build storehouses for such acquisitions. You needed to fashion and acquire tools for such work, too.
“Formerly, what you consumed was mostly fresh; it was recently acquired from Nature. You did not need refrigerators. In keeping with the way in which you thingify Nature, consider that, as hunters, the meat you would consume did not spoil beforehand, for Nature in her kindness had provided for it these mini-fridge units, which themselves gathered their own power to keep themselves running. They are called “animals” — specifically, the ones who keep themselves alive and their “meat” fresh until you “take it out of the fridge” (you hunt down and kill the animal) and cook it up for yourselves.
“However, you could not let it be that easy. After you took over control of all of the aspects of your food’s production, you needed to preserve what you were able to bully out of Nature, for those times, out-of-season, when nothing would be forthcoming. Endless hours of work were involved in this processing.
“You required the construction of domiciles now, not just shelters, to house yourself, your workers — usually your children — and all the excess implements needed for farming, food processing, and food storage. There is considerable work involved in “protecting one’s investments.”
“Husbandry — the corralling, enslavement of planetmates for your use — was also incredibly labor intensive. Not only did you need to build enclosing structures to bring this about, but you needed to feed your captives. Feeding was work, and it was taxing. For there was no personal leeway allowed in this chore. One could not be lax or casual about it, getting around to it when one felt the urge to. No, if your planetmates were not cared for on a daily basis, without fail, you would lose your investment. So their biological requirements were added, as extra responsibility, to your own.
“Where did this additional labor come from — this huge extra workload that humans brought to the lives of the living on planet Earth? Was it produced out of the air? Actually, the additional work manifested in Nature is exactly equal to the additional amount of control you brought to Nature. And that is control that is emanating from your pain. So the extra labor is equal in measure to the extra pain you have manifested in Nature, oh, suffering planetmate.
“Care of enslaved planetmates provides a good illustration of that. The planetmates you kidnapped needed to be housed, fed and watered, their sicknesses taken care of, and cleaned up after. That is a lot of work. Now, consider if that was needed to be done if they had not been corralled. Of course it was needed. Planetmates in Nature still have to eat.
“But is there work involved? Well, for humans, obviously not; the planetmates have to do it. But even for planetmates there is virtually none, for all these things that humans have taken on to do for kept planetmates are done by planetmates in Nature out of their own desire and joy.
“You say the life of those of us in Nature is brutish and tough, with a do-or-die quality to it. In fact, that is the opposite of the truth. But, in your wrong-gettedness, you need to keep telling yourself that, for, as always, you need to project your own flaws and depravities into Nature, both to not see them and to continue suffering in “blissful” ignorance, as well as to build up your superiority defense against the inferiority you feel in that part of you that knows the truth.
“But in Nature, life is not difficult, as you need to believe so as not to despair about the onerous quality of your own. Look at it this way. For humans it would be like the difference between doing something you call work — meaning you do not want to do it — versus your hobby or your creative work — things you do for the joy and satisfaction of them. Well, nobody is standing over planetmates insisting they take care of themselves. It is what we do! It is what we enjoy doing! It is all either pleasurable, or satisfying, or it is at least engaging … as one feels involved in a game or sport. It is interesting. Interacting with Nature and the rest of life is also awe-inspiring, beautiful, and often fantastical. We hardly want to stay home, sit on virtual couches, and not go “out” … or to stay home from “work.”
“Many of you have cat planetmates. Do you suppose they consider it work to go after mice and small critters? You know the answer. But if not, consider how they continue to enjoy, whatever their age, engaging in play around those same activities — going after a string, for example. If it was not enjoyable for them to hunt for the purpose of feeding, why do you suppose they would want to do it when they did not have to? On the other hand, you don’t see human truck drivers driving their rigs around after work just for fun….”
Pt 1 of 25rd prasad — Family Fortress.
— excerpted from *Planetmates: The Great Reveal* by Michael Adzema … now available in print and e-book formats at Amazon
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, Michael Adzema. Video below … interviewed by Michael Harrell
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https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2mm9OBbYjRE
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— Related: See also other published versions of these ideas….
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*Dance of the Seven Veils I* (2017).
At Amazon at
*The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016).
*Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness* (2014).
*Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).
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*Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”* (2013).
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SillyMickel Adzema
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