THE PRENATAL MATRICES OF HUMAN EVIL: Third Trimester Fetal Suffering Become War, Violence, Greed, Class War, Bigotry, Racism, Paranoia, Intolerance, Phobias, Sexual Abuse, Anti-Semitism, and Tattoos

 

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Prenatal Matrices of Human Evil:

Prenatal Suffering Is the Root of Virtually All Human Atrocity — Greed, War, Torture, Rape, Racism, Murder, Massacre, Bigotry, Pollution, Apocalypse

 

“These imprints of experience — …being compressed and hemmed in, gasping and unable to get our breath as if we’re drowning, feeling poisoned and revolted or disgusted by what comes into us, and feeling dirty or irritated and burning on the surface of one’s body — are molds for what we call ‘human nature.’”

“…evil, as I mean it, is not of a theological or religious origin or intent. Quite simply, evil … e, v, i, l … is the opposite of live … l, i, v, e. Evil is live spelled backward…. There are many things we do on both large and small scales that are anti-life. They lead to death, to unhappiness, to unnecessary suffering, and to all the other things we have attributed to evil…. Evil is an empirical category … closely associated with self-destructive, destructive, and self-sabotaging tendencies in humans.”

 

 

 

 

Over the last five chapters, I disclosed the imprints from our experience of birth which are driving us to kill ourselves. For our birth is unique in Nature in both the amount of trauma attending it and the prematurity of its occurrence. I pointed out that we have experiences in the womb of oceanic bliss, then no-exit claustrophobic feelings, then feelings of struggle and warlike aggression, which is rooted in our actual birth struggle. And finally we have feelings of release and exultation, which is related to our experience of actually being born.

I explained that we act out these early imprints in all kinds of ways. War is a particularly salient one; as in going to war we are re-creating our imprint of the birth struggle and the desire to achieve release and rebirth. We are the only species who has the kind of birth that we do, that is, traumatic; and that has everything to do with the fact that we are the only species to go to war.

The Perinatal Pushes on Human Nature

But let’s back up a bit and put this in context. Because humans stand upright — are bipedal — in the latest stages of gestation/pregnancy the weight of the fetus, now nearly at its largest, presses upon the arteries feeding the placenta and bringing oxygen to the unborn child. Bipedalism causes fetal malnutrition in addition to birth trauma, you see. Of course, this is most pronounced when the mother is standing, as the fetus weighs down upon arteries between itself and the bones of the pelvis. Reduced blood and delivery of vital resources mean the fetus is not getting as much oxygen, or nutrients for that matter, as it wants and could use. The prenate cannot gasp for breath but one can imagine it having a similar feeling … recall the sensation of holding one’s breath under water.

This is an uncomfortable situation for the fetus which goes on for a long time and gives rise to many of our adult feelings of claustrophobia and entrapment, depression, no-exit hopelessness. This is one of those specific birth traumas we humans have acquired because of becoming bipedal that other species, our planetmates, do not have. So birth pain makes humans out of planetmates, essentially. It makes us different and sets us apart from all other species in ways that are not often positive or beneficial, however human. It is something that is crucial to the understandings I bring forth in my books, Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014) and Prodigal Human (2016).¹

Prenatal Matrices

Looking more closely at it, there are four major feeling constellations involved in this late-gestation discomfort. You might say, four blueprints of human consciousness are written in the womb. They, along with other imprints from our prenatal and perinatal experiences, are integral parts of the foundation of our humanness — that part which is normally called “human nature” and is considered to have a basis that is genetic only.

It is a joke to think that just because a trait exists in humans at the time of birth that it is rooted in our DNA alone. That thinking is as archaic as flat-earth theories became after the heliocentric revolution. For there are a full nine months of individual experience prior to birth that, being the earliest influences on all experiences and perceptions after them, are far more important in determining who we become and how we act later on than anything that happens to us after birth, even if it also occurs to us early on, as in infancy or childhood. It is wholesale naïve and rather quaint that esteemed scientists and intelligent lay folk would subscribe to the idea that just because one cannot see something happening with one’s eyes, it does not have observable consequences. By that reasoning, we would never attribute causation to molecular events and would have no science of chemistry.

So, no, there are profound imprints on the way we think; view and interpret our experience; view the world; and act in relation to ourselves, others, and the world which are stamped upon our psyche by our earliest experiences. For now, let us look at the provocative and profound influences from our experiences in the late stages of our womb life. They are especially deep and far-reaching molds for all later experience because they are, in general, the most painful, uncomfortable, and overwhelming experiences we have in the entire first nine months of our physical existence.

Four Blueprints of “Human Nature”

These imprints on our psyche caused by uncomfortable experiences in late gestation that are molds for and roots of a great deal of the later experience and behavior of humans can be put in four categories — crowded, suffocated, disgusted, and irritated. These imprints of experience — let us say, being compressed and hemmed in, gasping and unable to get our breath as if we’re drowning, feeling poisoned and revolted or disgusted by what comes into us, and feeling dirty or irritated and burning on the surface of one’s body — are molds for what we call “human nature.”

Let me explain. There are four important qualities of pain involved in late-stage gestation:

1. The first has to do with being crowded and unable to move freely. The other three come under the category of fetal malnutrition:
2. You get less oxygen because of the reduced blood flow in late pregnancy; you experience lack of abundance and feelings of deprivation, impoverishment, “starvation.”
3. With the reduction of blood, you get a reduction in nutrients and insufficient removal of toxins so that the blood coming into and flowing through you is not felt to be as “pure”; you experience being poisoned, “infected” … prenatal “disgust.”
4. Finally, you experience a buildup of toxins in your placental envi­ron­ment as the reduced blood flow does not remove toxins as efficiently as it previously did; you feel irritated, bugged, “dirty” … prenatally imposed upon by the outside world.

Roots of War, Bigotry, Pollution….

These feeling complexes sculpted by our early, uniquely human, prenatal discomfort and pain mold our politics, shape our wars and conflicts, determine how we treat the environment, and color how we see and treat each other. They are the roots of violence, bigotry, and pollution.

We will now, and in the coming chapters, deal with each of these in turn and discuss the way we act them out as adults politically, environ­men­tally, and interpersonally. To aid us in this inquiry, I thought it a good idea to categorize these different constellations, similarly to the way Grof and deMause have of their patterns of experiences and events in their theories. They separately came up with categories that overlap, with Grof’s describing the birth process from womb to postnatal experience. And deMause contrived categories for stages in a nation’s cycles of peace and war. Keeping in mind that war is the birth struggle projected macrocos­mically, we see that the categories line up neatly. Doing this, provides fascinating insight that they both, Grof and deMause, for ideological reasons that separated them, refused to get into themselves.

Perhaps by laying out their categories side-by-side you might see that better yourself.

Lloyd deMause, in his seminal work, Foundations of Psychohistory, himself encapsulated Grof’s matrices. I point this out because he clearly was aware of them, yet he failed to see the overlap. Let’s look at his words. In describing the basic perinatal matrices, deMause writes that they are,

BPM 1 (Primal Union with Mother): In the womb, fantasies of Paradise, unity with God or Nature, sacredness, “oceanic” ecstasy, etc.

BPM 2 (Antagonism With Mother): Derived from the onset of labor, when the cervix is still closed, feelings of being trapped, of futility, of crushing head pressures and cardiac distress, of unbearable suffering and hellish horrors, of being sucked into a whirlpool or swallowed by a terrifying monster, dragon, octopus, python, etc.

BPM 3 (Synergism With Mother): When the cervix opens and propulsion through the birth canal occurs, fantasies of titanic fights, of sadomaso­chistic orgies, of explosive discharges of atom bombs and volcanoes and of brutal rapes and suicidal self-destruction, all part of an overwhelmingly violent death-rebirth struggle.

BPM 4 (Separation From Mother): Upon the termination of the birth struggle, after the first breath, feelings of liberation, salvation, love and forgiveness, along with fantasies of having been cleansed, unburdened and purged.²

Then deMause sums up his own stages of the process of groups’ and nations’ events, which he calls the fetal stages as,

FS1-STRONG: During the leader’s first year, media fantasy language and cartoon body-images are full of group-fantasies of the great strength of the nation, and of the leader as grandiose, ruthless in defense of the group, and vitally necessary to its national life-blood…. The group in this “strong” stage is felt to be safe in a “strong” womb-surround, so any external disorders which might occur are not seen as threatening enough to require a violent response.³

This “strong” period is clearly a societal equivalent of Grof’s BPM I. Peace and prosperity and strength in the nation aligns with oceanic peace, vibrant growth, and bliss in the womb.

FS2-CRACKING: The deification of the leader begins to fail, with an increase in scapegoating to deflect hostility from the leader. The group’s boundaries are felt to be “cracking,” with images of leaking water and crumbling walls predominating. The leader is seen as weakening and unable to control events. Complaints of being crowded, hungry and breathless multiply, and worries are increasingly voiced that collapse is imminent….⁴

This is clearly equivalent, on the individual level, to Grof’s BPM II where growth is stymied, depression and no-exit hopelessness set in. The words “crowded, hungry and breathless,” which deMause is applying to a social context could as easily describe the fetal situation of BPM II.

FS3-COLLAPSE: The group during this stage experiences extreme anxieties about its collapse of self-image and growing rage toward the leader, who now seems impotent in ending the group’s feeling of pollution, sinfulness and starvation. Group-fantasies of choking, falling, abandonment, disinte­gration, death and explosiveness proliferate in the media…. Free-floating paranoid fantasies of unnamed poisonous enemies multiply, as the group attempts to project its own rage outward…. The “collapse” stage ends only after a “search for a humiliating other” — an enemy who, in a moment of “group-psychotic insight,” is identified as the concrete source of the group’s distress….⁵

Clearly this is describing another aspect of BPM II, the no-exit prior to birth. It would align with the time in the womb leading up to when the birth struggle will begin. It is here and the previous category, FS 2 and FS 3, where deMause breaks down Grof’s one stage of BPM II into two. That increasing distinction of this time by deMause was a stepping-off point for my own theories, where I found four distinct constellations of feelings within BPM II, not just two. We’ll get to that soon, but continuing with deMause, we have

FS4-UPHEAVAL: The “group-psychotic insight” which identifies the delusional poisoner of the group can take one of several forms:

(1) Regicidal Solution-.

(2) Martial Solution — If an external enemy can be located who will co-operate by humiliating the group, it then enters into a trance-like state of sadomasochistic enthrallment towards the enemy, whose totally evil nature makes every rage seem justified and every sacrifice noble.

(3) Suicidal Solution — Suicidal individuals often resolve internal ambiva­lences through a fantasy of a “Hidden Executioner” who helps them in their suicidal effort in killing the bad, polluted part of themselves so that the good purified part can be loved again….⁶

Clearly this stage describing a war or a substitute violent event in the nation’s inner dynamics corresponds to the time of birth, described by Grof.

Finally, deMause, without categorizing it, refers frequently to the time at the end of the war — the time of triumph, or defeat, and the aftermath — as having its own constellation of feelings and events. And it corresponds exactly to Grof’s BPM IV — which is the time of release from the womb, in birth, and right afterward.

Prenatal Matrices of Human Evil

However, another aspect of our unique human birth that is instructive to understanding our current drive to extinction and apocalypse is the time before birth, at the end of gestation. Here, where we do not get enough oxygen because of our weight as a fetus having become such that we constrict the blood vessels around us, we experience a suffocation but also a buildup of toxins, as the blood supply being reduced does not remove our waste matter, particularly carbon dioxide, sufficiently.

As I said above, this period is delimited, roughly, in Grof’s BPM II; but it has two components in deMause’s schema as it manifests in the cycles of national events. As I also said, I see there are four. Beyond that, I see that expanding the category to reveal these four components adds immensely to our understanding of human events through history and currently, particularly as it pertains to the events that demand we call them evil.

Furthermore, employing this fourfold breakdown of BPM II, and the expansion of deMause’s FS2 and FS3, reveals things overlooked in those theories. In my framework, we see clearly that the poisoning in the womb that Grof describes as going on during BPM I and only for some people is in fact routine and occurs during the last trimester and most excruciatingly during the final month. While I do not deny that some feelings of the influx of noxious elements can occur earlier, during the BPM I period, especially if the mother smokes, drinks, or uses drugs, it clearly — adding the research of deMause and my own — is an aspect of everyone’s experience, as you will see….

Also, Grof’s schema calls for scatological feelings as occurring after birth. Whereas with the addition of deMause’s research and insights along with my own, it is clear these feelings of wallowing in feces are actually an aspect of the prenatal immersion in toxins. While I believe it is possible that some people are born into feces, as the mother’s bowels release upon birth, as Grof explains it. Still, the fact that mothers routinely receive a pre-birth enema, yet experiencers feel this constellation of feelings about being surrounded by dirt and feces, is not explained. Not, that is, unless one employs the revised categories of BPM II that I am proposing.

In any case, these categories I am calling the prenatal matrix of human evil.

Evil Defined

I should probably mention that evil, as I mean it, is not of a theological or religious origin or intent. Quite simply, evil … e, v, i, l … is the opposite of live … l, i, v, e. Evil is live spelled backward. That is to say that there are many things we do on both large and small scales that are anti-life. They lead to death, to unhappiness, to unnecessary suffering, and to all the other things we have attributed to evil. Thus, evil is an empirical category; it is one closely associated with self-destructive, destructive, and self-sabotaging tendencies in humans. In no way is my definition a derivative of any “revealed” or authoritarian laws or commandments. No. Evil is what causes unnecessary suffering and death. And great evil is what leads to unnecessary suffering and to death on a massive scale. There is no way to quibble about the suitability of my using the term evil for the events and occurrences I have been and will continue to be pointing to.

Putting it in the context of the categories brought out in the chapter on Thanatos — the death wish, the Will to Die — you might say that this prenatal matrix of evil specifies exactly what that death wish is, where it comes from, and does so much more in elaborating on its aspects, revealing its features. The prenatal matrix of human evil is Thanatos ex­plained. It is the reason we are self-destructive and the ways in which we harm ourselves and others.

It is not a death instinct, however. It is the way we end up after going through some very hellish experiences in the womb in the last trimester. If we did not go through these experiences, we would not have these tendencies to sabotage ourselves and to harm others. In that light, you can see how the death “instinct” or drive becomes simply an aspect of neurosis. Certainly, it is a neurosis that is fundamental and common, nearly universal, but it has roots in experience, not DNA. We know that because by mitigating these early traumas, as we very well are able to, we create people with less of that tendency to want to undermine themselves.

Furthermore, we know this is not genetic because those experiencers who feel through, resolve, and integrate these early traumas have consider­ably less to none of those tendencies. I know. For I did re-experience these traumas in a thorough and comprehensive way over the course of a number of years. And whereas starting out I had my share, more than some actually, of self-sabotaging tendencies, after doing my inner work I no longer do. Rather than being unconsciously self-defeating, I am now — in a sense unconsciously … or at least effortlessly — self-actualizing. Completing and publishing twelve books in the last four-and-a-half years might be taken as testament to that.

The PMEs

In any case, let me explain these prenatal matrices of human evil. I break them down into four categories:

Prenatal matrix of human evil 1 (PME 1) is the time of compression and crowdedness in the womb that begins in the third trimester and is especially difficult in the last month.

Prenatal matrix of human evil 2 (PME 2) is the hypoxia that comes to the fetus as the placenta ages, becomes more fibrous, has increasing calcification, gets increasingly less efficient, resulting in reduced oxygen and feelings of suffocation, gasping, prenatal starvation and oxygen deprivation, and prenatal panic. This is augmented in the last month by the fetal malnutrition come of bipedalism and which is increased by the mother’s standing, rather than lying down, at the end of pregnancy. This also begins in the last three months but is extremely traumatizing in the last month.

Prenatal matrix of human evil 3 (PME 3) is the constellation of feelings during those last three months, especially severe in the last one, where because of the aging placenta’s deficiencies, the byproducts of food conversion, carbon dioxide in particular, are not removed as efficiently. So this toxic waste matter gets “backed up” and recirculated into the fetus. The prenate experiences feelings of being poisoned, of nausea, of being force-fed noxious substances, and of disgust-sickening.

Finally, prenatal matrix of human evil 4 (PME 4) comes about because the fetus is not merely taking in those toxins but is immersed in them. The environment in the amniotic sac, for the fetus, gets increasingly polluted; and this is experienced on the prenate’s skin as a kind of itch that cannot be scratched, an irritation, a burning. It results in feelings of revulsion, creepiness, dirtiness.

As I repeatedly say, war can be considered an act-out of our birth struggle and the desire to be born. However, on a deeper level war is a direct outgrowth of PME 1, for such crowdedness cries out for expansion in an explosive way, like a war.

Now, pertaining to PME 2, PME 3, and PME 4, I’ll give you a look ahead. For this time at the end of gestation, where we feel suffocated and living in a toxic environment, is the root of our unconscious desire to manifest and live with pollution, as well as of a global warming with its buildup of carbon dioxide and global oxygen reduction, which goes hand-in-hand with the increase of carbon dioxide. Much more of the things we have created which are threatening life on this planet, including nuclear radiation, are act-outs of the prenatal trauma built into our beginnings

Our PTSD from the Womb We Confuse as Human Nature

At any rate, the reason we do these self-destructive, indeed, suicidal things is that our psyche tries to heal itself from that birth and prebirth trauma by having us unconsciously re-create that which we could not integrate or face at the time, which left us thereafter damaged and in need of healing. The psyche does this in its unconscious attempt to somehow resolve or heal these traumas by having us continually re-create that which might remind us … at least it re-stimulates this in us … the things inside we need to resolve still. You might think of this mechanism as a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome, which virtually all of us experience, from our births, yes, but at a deeper level, from even before — during the hell of prenatal trauma.

This undergirding of our personalities with a prenatal horror is so prevalent, in fact, that we actually call it our “human nature” — a human nature we say is characterized by aggression, competitiveness, selfishness, and greed. But which my research and that of others in my field has shown to be a product of our birth and prenatal traumatic experiences. And which my research has shown is underlain with a deeper human nature, before that and in synchrony with the rest of Nature, which existed in us before that, before our trauma, which actually is genetic … a true human nature. Another hint of what’s coming: The good news is that we have such a harmonious and cooperative human nature which we can access and so avert our ecocidal plunge.

 

All this being said, let us now take the prenatal matrices in turn, beginning next chapter with PME 1. Which is the constellation of feelings around being crowded, hemmed in, and experiencing a fetal claustrophobia.

 

 

 

 

 

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Prenatal Crowdedness Become War and Violence, PME 1:

Prenatal Matrix of Human Evil 1 … Claustrophobia, Compression, Hemmed In, Oppressed, Enslavement, Imprisonment, Straitjackets … “Back Off!”

 

“The primary thing fetuses experience in the final stages of gestation is compression, crowdedness. We would like the whole world, which for us is the womb, to ‘back off!’ It presses in on us, imposes itself on us, oppresses us. We can no longer move in an uninhibited way. As we get increasingly larger, the womb seems to bear down on us, to ‘prosecute’ us, as prenates, from all sides, restricting our movements, suppressing our freedom. It ‘won’t let us do what we want to do.’ It is ‘out to get us.’”

“…the invention and use of straitjackets shows our preoccupation with the prenatal, especially as concerns our mental health or well-being. For the message there is that if you ‘get out of control’ you will be put back in a place where you will be forced to comply and will have to learn to deal, as all the rest of us do, with the ‘existential fact’ of needing to conform to the dictates of an overwhelming, dominating, and pervasive outer world.”

 

 

First, we experience crowded, restricted conditions in the womb as we get larger and no longer enjoy the blissful uninhibited freedom of the previous time of our short lives. This, for the sake of clarity, I have dubbed prenatal matrix of human evil 1, or PME 1.

Prenatal Matrix of Human Evil 1

The primary thing fetuses experience in the final stages of gestation is compression, crowdedness. We would like the whole world, which for us is the womb, to “back off!” It presses in on us, imposes itself on us, oppresses us. We can no longer move in an uninhibited way. As we get increasingly larger, the womb seems to bear down on us, to “prosecute” us, as prenates, from all sides, restricting our movements, suppressing our freedom. It “won’t let us do what we want to do.” It is “out to get us.”

This is quite a contrast, ever more stark and blatant as we get closer to actual birth, to the earlier euphoric feelings of all the rest of our lives at that point —  that is to say, the previous six-eight months of our lives since conception. This oppression from an overwhelming and pervasive Other is shockingly different from the unrestrained movement of the not long ago, with its gravity-free ecstasy, and blissful unity with an Every­thing, which was not at all threatening but just the opposite: supremely helpful, nurturing, and kind in the most perfect way. We remember the previous “golden age” and its easy, “heavenly” existence. This new existence feels like we have been driven out of Eden, cast out of heaven, and now must struggle and earn survival through the “sweat of one’s brow.”

Politically, as adults we feel we need to push back “lines” of the enemy, to fight off “oppression” (compression), to go to war. We act this out as nations through wars of “expansion” and through “conquering” of new territories … through imperialism. We are always pushing back lines of encroachment from some “enemy” … creating and then railing against the opposition on these “front lines.”

We re-create the switch we experienced in the womb from easy existence to struggle and discomfort by “spoiling” our peace and going to war. No, it is not smart; but it is what we are driven to do because of these patterns from our earliest experience.

The point of knowing all this … the reason I am writing this and sharing this information … is because knowledge of these irrational tendencies is the most important and necessary step in discontinuing them. We can only have hope for our children in going beyond these tendencies in us of tens of thousands of years and longer through actually facing and coming to terms with the absurdity of our “normal human” pursuits … like war.

We act out these same feelings just as illogically and self-destructively in our behavior in regards to the environment. I mentioned how we manifest this crowdedness through overpopulation and that we react to or run away from these feelings through activities like swimming and dancing. Environmentally, we feel the need to push back and pave over Nature all we can.

Remember that, as prenates, the “environment” then was felt to be encroaching and blocking our easy movement. So, with these feelings now deeply ingrained in us as something we call “human nature” we hack back at actual Nature and push it all away to “make room” … excessive room … for ourselves. While conversely, we make sure we will continue to re-stimulate these feelings through overpopulation, city life, dense and crowded neighborhoods, and traffic jams.¹

We put ourselves in human zoos, which we call cities, and we struggle with our neighbors over “boundary lines” and where fences should actually be placed. We gather on freeways with their traffic jams and experience “road rage” at the same time as fighting back against the feelings these situations create through inane environmental undertakings: We remove and destroy all trees to make an empty space, though we add trees after the fact. Does that not strike you as a bit queer?

Environmentally, we destroy forests, we pave over Nature so that we can have huge houses and lawns — the bigger, the better … we want more “womb.” And we cut off others in traffic and feel trapped (encroached upon, constrained or suppressed) by drivers that cut us off and don’t let us “in” (they block us from moving freely) … thus road rage.

Conversely, we take solace in speeding (though we risk tickets). We speed around (the faster and more nimbly, the better) uninhibitedly in our cars (auto-mobile … free moving self … part of self capable of moving freely). Driving in one’s car is a perfect example of re-creating the experience of being in the womb — the car is an enclosed and protective vessel, like the womb — yet being able to move freely. When that free movement is blocked, as in a traffic pileup, it is a re-creation and a triggering of the time in the womb where, after our time of blissful free movement, we were blocked as we got larger and our space, more crowded.

So when we are not re-creating our womb freedom through driving, we take pleasure in watching racing and race car drivers and stunt drivers; also airplane and jet stunts and air shows and fighter pilots and jets, for the reason of experiencing those feelings of free movement vicariously.

In Media

As indicative of PME 1, I would like to refer to a prenatal indicator in the visual media, which has been capturing my attention … seeming to be coming out of the very walls at me! This is — what appears to me to be — a recent and new sort of prenatal symbolism, at least in Western culture.

We have had, over and over again, the image of the “evil fetus” erupting from the abdomen, as in the classic scene from Alien, as well as that of it emerging from the mouth — as examples, the “Firewalker,” 1994, episode of The X Files, and the dance hall scene in Jacob’s Ladder — indicating fetal emergence mixed with ungentle neonatal mouth clearing, as discussed previously. However, this new variation of “fetal emergence” has human faces pushing through membrane-like elastic walls!

Ventura Out of the Womb

A good example of this occurs in the movie, Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, When Nature Calls. In the Ace Ventura movie, Jim Carrey emerges from inside a mechanical rhino with virtually all birth elements evident. He is holed up in a hot and suffocating “womb” — that is, he is inside the rhino.

He becomes engaged in a desperate need to get out. Interestingly, the fan — the source of comfort in the rhino (womb) — stops working after a while. This is exactly analogous to the way, when we are fetuses, the nurturing elements of the mother’s womb “turn off,” in the last stage of gestation, making the womb quite an uncomfortable place indeed.

We see Carrey pushing his face against the elastic, membrane surface of the rhino’s posterior in a way graphically suggesting prenatal compres­sion and discomfort as well as perinatal emergence. The tourists watching this explicitly state that they see it as the rhino giving birth.

We witness the actual “birth”: Jim Carrey (Ace Ventura) struggles to make the opening larger and to come out. Finally, he falls, naked wet and curled up, fetal- or baby-like, to the ground. The hilarious — and outra­geous to the tourists — part is this image of a rhino giving birth to a full-grown naked adult human “baby.”

Couldn’t Fight Your Way Out of a Plastic Bag!

Other examples in media of the PME 1 trauma of crowdedness — with its concomitant that body parts and the face would push against the surface — has individuals completely covered, wrapped head to toe, and suffocated in membrane-like elastic sheets or their equivalent from which they cannot escape and in which they appear agonized and struggling.

Modern movies showing such scenes — or devices or procedures to a similar effect of claustrophobic-like assault — are indicative of these prenatal elements coming to the surface, obviously. One example is The Man in the Iron Mask.

I saw a most potent portrayal of this new prenatal element of faces and body parts pushing through walls in the 1996 movie by Peter Jackson, with Michael J. Fox, The Frighteners. Naturally, what was coming out of the walls was threatening, attacking. It tried to capture and compress its victim, too; just like it might be expected to be feeling itself. Lloyd deMause would call this an example of the evil fetus. It is symbology that arises out of that time of suffering in the womb, showing the pent-up, repressed feelings of anger and revenge that emanate from such a time of persecution in our lives.

This House Will Eat You Alive!

The plot of another movie involved a house being somewhat alive and gobbling people up into the walls. The ingested people would try to emerge from the house’s walls. The walls being like elastic when they would do this, the features of their faces could be seen pushing through to the point even of the individuals being identifiable.²

These swallowed people could not get out of the walls. And they would be the next ones trying to lure their loved ones and friends into being gobbled up by the house — the same having been done to them, which had resulted in their being taken into the walls initially. Sounds like a modern, very perinatal variation on the Pied Piper theme.

But the former victims who, once pulled into the walls, themselves become perpetrators also is a powerful metaphor of the way primal trauma and child abuse of all kinds — including genital mutilation — is passed from one generation to the next. Vampirism has this telling quality as well: Once you are bitten, you are compelled to do it to others. In the same way, all child abusers were abused themselves as children, as any psychologist will tell you.

Womb Symbology — House, Cave, Squids

Anyway, this portrayal of a house that gobbles up its victims, bizarre as it sounds and as it looked, can only be explained by looking into our prenatal imprints; and it is rife with such elements.

To start with, a house — being an enclosure in which humans protect, nurture, and take care of themselves once born into the world — is perhaps the most prevalent womb symbol that exists. It is right up there in importance with caves, oceans, swallowing beasts — especially beasts of the ocean like whales (Jonah), sharks (Jaws), and octopi or giant squids.

There was a movie of this squid variation, which I saw not long ago. Its plot development was of the Jaws genre. But in adding tentacles, it added elements of pubic hair and umbilical strangulation to the normal aspects of womb torture such as simple compression and suffocation.

House; cave; water; devouring dragon, as in Harry Potter; whale or shark; automobile, especially buses or motorhomes; boats, especially submarines; indeed, all vehicles of transition, nonmechanical as well as mechanical as in trains and airplanes; the deep forest, as in Avatar — anything in fact with elements of being surrounding and engulfing of one and as nurturing or threatening one, or both, are womb symbols, as we have known for a long time.

Womb Symbology — Prison, Jail Cell, Schoolroom

In the category of womb symbols that are places that enclose or “house” one that are uncomfortable, constricting, limiting of one’s ability to move around, and in which one is made to suffer, even be tortured; we need to add prisons, dungeons, jail cells, and schoolrooms. Breaking out of prisons, being rescued from tight, enclosing places or situations in which one is not free — that is, cannot “move freely” — are specific portrayals of the birth process itself. Contemporary film is flooded with plots and scenes depicting such escapes and/or rescues.

Any constricting surround is a womb symbol, including oppressive social and political conditions from which one cannot escape and under which one is not able to move freely, to enjoy “freedom”; especially regimented ones under which one is tortured, processed, and treated anonymously and in an unfeeling, insensitive manner.

Schools and schoolrooms are especially strong womb symbols for they are places in which a person is supposedly nurtured and helped along in one’s development, exactly as was the purpose and situation in the womb. When they depict being constricted or made to suffer, it becomes even more obvious, depicting as that does the later stages in the womb which are uncomfortable and often hellacious. Libraries are the benign version of womb-like “schooling” in that the element of volition or choice in the matter exists.

In Events

Even the invention and use of straitjackets shows our preoccupation with the prenatal, especially as concerns our mental health or well-being. For the message there is that if you “get out of control” you will be put back in a place where you will be forced to comply and will have to learn to deal, as all the rest of us do, with the “existential fact” of needing to conform to the dictates of an overwhelming, dominating, and pervasive outer world.

Existential fact is in quotes to point out that this is not an essential fact of existence; rather they seem to be facts to humans because of the experience we share of being in constricting wombs which become uncomfortable and suffocating increasingly near the end. This is an example of what I have termed elsewhere, biologically constituted realities.³

Of course, a similar thing — forcible “re-education” — could be said for the use of jail cells, solitary confinement, and enclosures like “The Hole” during incarceration. Simply the fact that we have a much greater percentage of our population in prisons than any time previously points to our mania for trying to control this aspect of our feelings from our origins … and of an emerging prenatal-perinatal unconscious triggering the reaction.

In a similar respect, I have already mentioned our current preoccupa­tion with water-boarding style torture. In employing suffocation — a PME 2 element, coming up next chapter — as well as maintaining immovability by being tied down (PME 1), it is an effective yet brutally inhuman way of stimulating people’s prenatal pain, just as straitjackets and jail cells are intended to.

In former times, torture apparatus often employed elements of com­pres­sion, suffocation, constriction … of the entire body or just the head … and frequently added the element of prenatal discomfort by adding torture while so enclosed. The Iron Maiden is such a contraption. It is a torture device used during medieval times. Note the feminine being employed in the name itself. Could that be any clearer that it is meant to be a painful, tortuous re-creation of being inside one’s mother? How else are maidens conceived of as being “iron,” let alone enclosing?

Indeed, it was, too. For it was a coffin-like enclosure, with spikes on its interior walls, pointing in. The coffin was shaped, and sized down, so someone would be rather tightly enclosed in it. And when it was shut, the spikes would stab you all around. You don’t want to know how accurately that describes some of our experiences prenatally.

Aw, to Breathe Free

We will continue looking at the ways we act out our early imprints and how we can actually stop continuing this self-destruction which has now reached an apocalyptic peak. Now, though, let us turn to another terrifying feeling we carry over in us from that hellish time as prenates, which we act out, politically and environmentally, in disastrous ways.

Our aggressions against others are of course connected to the long period of difficult immovability in the womb, but we can already see it is related to the reduction of oxygen at that time as well. Looking into the feelings of latent oxygen panic rooted in fetal oxygen hunger, PME 2, we see it has many more political implications, even, than war and aggressions toward others over space … over lines and perimeters and rooted in the feelings of being hemmed in — that constellation of “crowded” feelings I have in this chapter teased out.

We look now at the horrifying feelings of prenatal matrix of human evil 2, of oxygen starvation — gasping, suffocating, and feeling stifled — and the crazy things we do to “breathe free” again.

 

 

 

 

14

 

Prenatal Suffocation Become Greed and Class War, PME 2:

Prenatal Matrix of Human Evil 2 … Gasping, Suffocation, Drowning, Being “Cut Off” Become Greed, Oppression, Conformity … “They’re Sucking the Very ‘Life Blood’ Out of Us!”

 

“The timelessness of prenatal experience at this point — when not getting enough air — feels horrific, an unending nightmare. This part contributes to human ideas of places of forever, endless suffering, for example, hell.”

“The feeling we carry with us, below the surface in life, is of not being able to breathe, to get enough air … like the discomfort we feel holding our breath under water. We have a simmering panic of ‘drowning’ … of our oxygen supply being ‘cut off’ … which is kept constantly in check.”

“…the vast majority of us live our lives with a barely-kept-in-check panic that we will at some point be cut off from something that we need to survive — food, water, air, other people … and their concomitants — land, transportation, money, family….”

“We spend much of our lives struggling to ‘breathe freely,’ to ‘get on top of things,’ to ‘get out from under,’ to ‘be ahead of the pack,’ because of this time in late gestation when we felt stifled and in danger of dying lest our oxygen/blood supply be completely ‘dried up.’ We cannot enjoy the blessings of the moment, for we are forever looking forward, fending off and steeling ourselves for possible unpleasantness in the future.”

 

I mentioned how our human tendency to warring has its roots in the uncomfortable crowdedness we experience in the late stages of gestation, specifically PME 1. This matrix of crowdedness describes a trauma that stays with us for life and drives us to act it out in trying to push back lines and make more room (womb) for ourselves in many areas of our lives, including politically.

Prenatal Matrix of Human Evil 2

I also said our psychological state preceding wars, in line with deMause’s work in this area, is akin to feeling stifled and wanting to “breathe free.” This arises of the second prenatal matrix, PME 2, which is related to early-rooted feelings of suffocation … of drowning. In the “gasping” or oxygen-deprivation trauma of late-stage gestation, beginning usually in the third trimester, we cannot get enough oxygen. The placenta is aging and is not as efficient in providing for our needs.¹ We feel suffocated … suppressed, stifled, repressed, oppressed.

Lloyd deMause does a pretty good job of describing this develop­ment. For that reason, and to respond to those of my readers wondering “just where the hell am I coming up with this shit,” lol, let me lean on him to give you a flavor of what is going on at this point. I quote,

“Although most of these studies have been generally ignored by medicine and psychology alike, some obstetricians have recently begun to draw the same conclusions as I have drawn regarding the womb as a place full of pain as well as tranquility. Albert Liley, while filming with x-rays what he termed ‘frantic’ movements of the fetus during uterine contractions, concluded that they ‘were characteristic of a human being in severe pain, as the fetus threw its arms and legs about and appeared to actively resist each contraction with various contortions of its body.’ If the uterus were not filled with fluid, says obstetrician Robert Goodlin, and if there were air in the womb, the fetus would be heard ‘crying in utero’ much of the time. ln fact, he says, for ‘obstetricians using air amniograms, it is often necessary to caution the mother to assume the sitting or upright position (post air amniogram) for several hours after the amniogram so that the air will be kept away from the fetal larynx; otherwise, the annoyance for the [mother] of hearing her unborn fetus cry. It therefore seems not unreasonable to assume that fetuses are often as uncomfortable (enough to cry) in utero as extra utero [for] it is the intrapartum, not the newborn period, which is filled with pain and stress for the infant.’

“The distress of the fetus is increasingly felt during its third trimester in the womb. As the fetus during this period increases its length from 13 to 20 inches and nearly triples its weight, it is more crowded, more affected by stress including hypoxia, moves less and dreams more, and begins to exhibit a definite ‘personality’ which the mother can now recognize as its own, as it gets upset and vigorously kicks her in response to certain of her actions or positions — for instance, if she is sleeping in a position uncomfortable to the fetus. The crucial problems for the fetus in this new cramped womb lies in its outgrowing the ability of its placenta to feed it, provide it with oxygen, and clean its blood of carbon dioxide and wastes. The placenta not only stops growing during this period, it regresses in its efficiency, becoming tough and fibrous rather than spongy, as its cells and blood vessels degenerate and it becomes full of blood clots and calcified areas. As this happens, the effect on the fetus is to make it even more susceptible to hypoxia than previously.

“Ever since the early research in the 1930s by Anselmino, Haselhorst, Bartels and others, medical research has been puzzled by the low oxygen pressure of fetal blood, which continuously has such low oxygen levels that adults would black out in comparable conditions. This normal condition of low oxygen pressure was termed ‘Mt. Everest in utero,’ with the suggestion that fetal development during the last trimester is analogous to a mountaineer climbing Mt. Everest and experiencing slowly decreasing oxygen levels as the fetus grew bigger and the placenta became less efficient. Although the discovery that this very low oxygen level is somewhat offset by an oxygen affinity of fetal red blood cells that is somewhat higher than adults, even so, it is now recognized by many researchers that this one factor is not enough to completely offset the growing insufficiency of oxygen supply to the brain cells. In fact, the late-term fetus is often extremely hypoxic by adult standards.’ As one obstetrical researcher puts it, ‘the foetus in utero may be subject to great O₂ and CO₂ pressure changes’ which produce frequent hypoxia, ‘the most frequent cause of brain damage in the perinatal period.’

“Recent medical literature is full of admissions of ignorance and calls for more research as to what is termed the ‘puzzling’ ability of the fetus to live with such low oxygen levels and with such an ‘inefficient’ placenta — the oxygen transfer efficiency of which Bartels calls the ‘worst’ of all mammals. Since ‘the asphyxiated fetus has no cerebral regulatory mechanism giving priority to the blood flow of the brain,’ and since the human fetal brain is many times the comparable size of other mammals of equal body weight, ‘the margin of safety of the fetal brain against hypoxia is probably smaller in man’ than in other animals, so any reduction at all of the already very low oxygen level late in fetal life is felt as extremely stressful.

“Therefore, as the third trimester proceeds and birth approaches, as the placenta becomes less efficient and fetal needs much greater for oxygen, nutrition and the cleansing of its blood of carbon dioxide and wastes, the blood becomes more polluted, and every stress becomes magnified and is more painful to the fetus. At this low level of oxygen, even normal contractions (‘practice’ contractions), which produce an increase in uterine pressure and a decrease in oxygen levels of up to 25%, are painful to the fetus — as though the womb were giving it an hourly ‘squeeze’ to get it used to the more violent contractions to come…. [T]wo weeks prior to birth, the fetal oxygen level drops much further, and the fetus’s need for oxygen becomes … critical….

“During labor itself, oxygenation is decreased even further below critical levels, and carbon dioxide in the blood rises. Saling found a level of oxygen in fetal scalp blood at the onset of labor of 23% and just before delivery of 12% (in adults, the central nervous system fails below 63%, findings which have led even the most cautious of obstetricians to conclude that ‘hypoxia of a certain degree and duration is a normal phenomenon in every delivery.’) The effects on the fetus of this severe hypoxia are dramatic: normal fetal breathing stops, fetal heart rate accelerates, then decelerates, the fetus often thrashes about frantically in reaction to the pain of the contractions and the hypoxia, and soon the fetus enters into its life-and-death struggle to liberate itself from its terrifying condition.”²

Suffocation

In addition to the hypoxia come of an aging placenta, near the end of gestation, the mother, when standing, constricts blood vessels to the fetus. This reduces the blood supply to the fetus and thus less oxygen is received. It is what I addressed earlier as fetal malnutrition. The result is that prior to birth we humans experience suffocation and claustrophobic feelings — we “can’t get enough air”! — which seem deadly and unending.

The timelessness of prenatal experience at this point — when not getting enough air — feels horrific, an unending nightmare. This part contributes to human ideas of places of forever, endless suffering; for example, hell.

The feeling we carry with us, below the surface in life, is of not being able to breathe, to get enough air … as I have said it is like the discomfort we feel holding our breath under water. We have a simmering panic of “drowning” … of our oxygen supply being “cut off” … which is kept constantly in check.

As adults our experience is colored through with that feeling in ways so subtle we can no longer tease it out even if we wanted to. Still, the vast majority of us live our lives with a barely-kept-in-check panic that we will at some point be cut off from something that we need to survive — food, water, air, other people … and their concomitants — land, transportation, money, family, and so on.

We act out these fears through excessive control of all these resources and through controlling and sycophantic behavior toward others in order to try to ensure a steady supply of vital resources. Additionally, we unconsciously re-create that situation of panicky suffoca­tion in our environment, in particular with the air we breathe.

Important prenatal influences, specifically of PME 2, are evident in media and film in the frequency of scenes of death by suffocation, in water or otherwise. Remember, we are immersed in water before birth, amniotic fluid.

PME 2 in Human Events and Humanicide

With this overview of the prenatal matrix of human evil 2 in mind, following now in this chapter and the next we will look into some of the psychological dynamics of human events, particularly regarding our air. While we are at it we will uncover rich veins of understanding and possible solutions for certain political and social dilemmas, which we will find are operating dialectically with these dynamics. There are provocative and profound influences from our experiences in the late stages of our womb life on the kaleidoscope of our current postmodern lives.

However, our act-outs of our PME 2 feelings have the most signifi­cant effect on our humanicide through their effects in pushing us to create the environment we have. That is a topic so important I will save it for a few chapters, for the ones on “prenatal Earth,” Chapters 19 through 21. We will look, there, at how our experiences from this time of our lives is implicated in our insane behavior regarding our environment; as well as how an understanding of PME 2, specifically, is crucial to reversing any of our self-sabotaging tendencies there and possible solutions for our current environmental problems.

On Greed and Oxygen

So there’s crowdedness in the late stages of womb life increasing up to the time of actual birth, which is PME 1. Yet also there’s the experience directly related to the fetal malnutrition — the increased pressure on arteries to the placenta, which reduces blood flow, hence the amount of oxygen the prenate receives — that occurs at that time; which is PME 2. One feels “pressured” and “overwhelmed” as one becomes larger in the womb; however one also experiences not getting enough oxygen — the simmering panic of near drowning.

“Can’t Breathe”

There is the state of not moving and crowdedness; but there is also suffocation of sorts. They are related but very different experiential constellations, both of which profoundly affect how humans will see their lives ever after. Both experiences skew our ability to ever see reality accurately — clearly and “unfiltered.” Due to the distinctly different experiences humans have coming into the world — caused by our uprightness, our bipedalism — we are, unlike any other species, riddled with bouts of feeling “pressured” by events, “overwhelmed” by circum­stances, and panicked by thoughts of suffocating for lack of vital resources — food, air, land, water, touch, interpersonal contact, tribal/societal belongingness.

We spend a great deal of our lives struggling to “breathe freely,” to “get on top of things,” to “get out from under,” to “be ahead of the pack,” because of this time in late gestation when we felt stifled and in danger of dying lest our oxygen/blood supply be completely “dried up.” We cannot enjoy the blessings of the moment, for we are forever looking forward, fending off and steeling ourselves for possible unpleasantness in the future.

“They’re Sucking the Very ‘Life Blood’ Out of Us!”

Second, because of pressure on arteries we experience a reduced blood flow and get less oxygen, therefore we experience “stuffiness,” suffocating feelings, feelings of need, want, and lack … and deprivation.

Later in life as individuals we are driven to gobbling up more resources than we need — greed. As nations we are compelled to exploit resources from those conquered territories we “expanded” into — coloni­alism and imperialism. It is fascinating how we act this out on both sides of class war and revolution also.

Oxygen and Oppression

It is out of these feelings carried over and restimulated again and again as adults that we create class wars, revolution, and culture wars. For we feel there to be an oppressive force inhibiting our self-expression, keeping us from “breathing freely.”

But more: On the other side of those panicky feelings of suffocation we are driven to gobbling up more resources than we need — greed. We experienced oxygen poverty in the womb, so poverty and reductions in finances feel stifling and suffocating. It is less desirable to not have money, of course. My point is that this prospect drives us to overreact and build our lives around major act-outs of it, as so:

Suppression, Oppression, “Sucking” From

(1) Being politically oppressed, we feel we can’t move freely, which is the crowded feeling, or PME 1. However, interestingly, we feel we can’t “breathe freely.” We act this out on both sides of class war and revolution: One side always feels this lack because it has roots in the unconscious and cannot be satisfied and so overcompensates and in doing so “sucks” up all possible resources (oxygen) from those lower on the totem pole: It “suppresses” the “masses”; it “sucks from” the masses.

Liberals’ hearts may “bleed” but not conservatives.’ For releasing blood is losing oxygen and conservatives have a prenatal “knowing” that you need every smidgen you can get to survive. You may even go so far as to try to “squeeze blood from a stone,” i.e., the aging placenta.

Sycophancy, Conformity, “Sucking Up”

(2) From another side of this discomfort we have a prenatal sycophancy showing itself. Conforming Underlings, in a country’s economic array, act out their prenatal oxygen panic by investing all their energy in “sucking up” to those above them … seeking to ensure a steady supply of resources (money, oxygen) by sucking from the rich stream (blood stream) of money “circulating” among those on rungs above them on the economic ladder.

Suffocation, Starvation, Being “Sucked From”

(3) And the other component in this political triangle — those poor and working class directly opposed to the greedy forces “sucking up” from the masses — feels this suppression as suffocation, starvation, and stifling unto death. So it wants to “overthrow” or “throw off” the forces weighing down upon and suppressing/suffocating them.

Basically, if you’re not “sucking” resources (oxygen) from below, you are either “sucking up” to those above you or being “sucked from” and wanting to “overthrow” them to “breathe more freely.”

 

 

Revolution, Freedom, and Breathing

This does not mean that revolutionary forces are necessarily act outs of early trauma and not real. Although that is possible. It does not mean that oppression does not actually exist; it does not mean that struggles for economic justice are overcompensations.

Injustice, Inequity, Struggle — Throwing Off

No. It is no more true that these are unreal than that struggles to save the environment are act-outs. For we must remember that the prenatal forces inside us drive us to actually manifest conditions that re-create our womb states. And just as we are driven to despoil our air and waters as act-outs of our fetal malnutrition, so also our fetal oxygen panic causes us to create situations of dire inequity by pushing unnecessary, greedy acts creating gross economic injustice. These are the actions of the Controllers, the wealthy. And these greedy forces are aided in their suppression by their sycophantic underlings, driven by their underlying panic of resource loss. These are the Conforming Underlings. Between the two, our fetal oxygen panic causes us to create situations of dire inequity by pushing unneces­sary greedy acts creating gross economic injustice.

Free Speech — Stifled, Inspire, Expire, Express … to Breathe Free

Interesting aspects of this oppression-revolution dynamic rooted in the fetal dynamic is the focus on free speech: The one side wants to suppress expression (expiration — release of air) of inspiration (to inspire — to take in air), thus directly slowing down the masses’ political equivalent of breathing, “stifling” its expression (its ability to “breathe out”).

The revolutionary side of this wants the opposite: Folks want freedom of speech. They want to be able to speak freely (breathe freely), to be inspired (take in air or spirit), and to express this uninhibitedly (expire, let air out). These same dynamics apply to freedom of religion as well.

The oppressed masses feel they are deprived, cannot get enough of what they need (oxygen), want to “breathe freely,” and so need to assert self-expression, to express (expire) one’s inspiration freely as part of that “struggle.”

Sycophancy and Conservatism

Nevertheless, the basic dynamic is about resources: One side out of oxygen panic wants to suck up resources from everywhere around and wants to keep those resources from others. The other side, the revolution­aries, wants to take theirs back. That third part, the Conforming Underlings, is the fetus hoping to get more resources from “above” … to “suck up” … by not moving too much, by “conforming.”

We all know how movement in a delicate situation might just “make things worse.” That is the basis of why we hold our breaths when we first experience stress. The response of Conforming Underlings to the oppres­sion that pervades societies since civilization is patterned upon that. Their strategy for survival is to stay compliant with outside forces, not be too obvious or “stand out,” and if moving to do so only in ways remem­bered as safe … strictly prescribed, ritualistic ways.

For our prenatal memory tells us that doing so is the way of getting a little more in the way of resources (oxygen). We experienced that by not struggling, by not moving around too much … and further complicating and constricting the blood flow through the arteries to the placenta (the bank) … more oxygen (money) seemed to flow. Also, by not moving too much, by “conserving” our energy, “holding our breath” as it were, we might be able to survive … that being too “radical” and free risked death.

Culture War — Oppressors Orchestrate a Panicked Population for Their Profits

An aspect of this prenatal dynamic as acted out politically is the culture war that comes of it:

The greedy forces manipulate the latent panic of the masses in order to suck more resources by telling each segment of the masses that another sector of the population is actually the part that is sucking all their resources, stealing all their benefits and money (oxygen). So we have the creation of minorities and scapegoats out of this interplay.

Nonetheless, the reason it happens unerringly in societies is because it works so well. And it works so well because the forces of manipulation are orchestrating powerful drives and forces within the masses — tenden­cies of people born of the desperation and panic of catastrophic suffocation, which have their roots in the earliest months of one’s individual existence.

 

Now let us look more deeply into this manipulation of the masses, this scapegoating of minorities. We see how racism, bigotry, and anti-Semitism are themselves constructed out of prenatal cravings and fears. In continuing to direct our attention here, to PME 2, we find out why we look at others the way we do, so that our errant ideas can be further used against us by the greedy ones. And we stumble upon the underpinnings of some of the most curious of human concoctions of thought — as in the ideas of vampires and blood libel.

 

 

 

 

15

 

Prenatal Oxygen Hunger Become Bigotry and Racism, PME 2:

Prenatal Matrix of Human Evil 2 … Deprivation Become Jealousy, Anti-Semitism, Xenophobia, Blood Libel, Anti-Immigration, Vampire Symbolism, Capitalism … “Please, Mother, Might I Have Some More?”

 

“…in ‘evolved’ economic systems, we make certain we will not feel relief from the threat of lack (oxygen starvation/ fetal malnutrition): For we insist on a ‘dog eat dog’ competitive system like capitalism, with its underlying Dickensian threat of an Oliver Twist state of deprivation: We get enough to survive, but it is not free and easy and leaves us always a little starved, wanting ‘some more.’”

 

“…if we had less of these feelings, we would less often create situations that mirrored them. We would more often create our lives out of our earlier joy grids — rooted in earlier times in the womb, which were blissful and proximate to Divinity….”

 

“These joy-prints would be (and can be) our foundation, our template, for living. However, almost invariably we grow our lives and actions out of the soil of our pain grids, the pain templates, if you will, which are created out of these traumatic prenatal experiences.”

 

 

The driving force of this adult behavioral complex of PME 2 is the oxygen deprivation we experienced as prenates during late gestation. This lack involved feelings of desperate suffocation … oxygen starvation … panic … fear of imminent death. Our lives were dependent on getting enough rich blood — blood that was full of oxygen and nutrients … “rich” and “pure.”

Human Rights, Racism, and Oxygen-Rich Blood

Since we needed “fresh” blood to say alive, to breathe, we wished to suck blood from the placenta, like vampires do to live. Since that oxygen was lacking, it opens the possibility that others are sucking the blood we need. For we got it earlier in the womb … what happened? We suspect others are sucking our blood, that which we deserve, are “entitled” to, and is meant for us. This is the basis for our jealousy, bigotry, racism, and anti-Semitism. That is why fairness is a notion never appearing in the motives of bigots.

Hence, there are two parts to this complex — wanting more for ourselves and fearing that others will take that which we have. Just above I discussed how we act out both sides of that politically and in the framework of class war, with one side wanting — indeed, needing — more (deprivation) and the other side “sucking” up all available resources out of fear of the other getting any of what they are hoarding (greed, causing deprivation in others, class war). Let us now see how those same dynamics play into human tendencies to racism, bigotry, anti-immigration sentiments, and anti-Semitism; and how they are revealed in our strange notions regarding vampirism, marital fidelity, the “sanctity” of the family, the purity of hereditary bloodlines, and blood libel.

Vampirism

Due to fetal hypoxia, humans feel they are lacking in air and room and are starving for oxygen and they desire “fresh blood.” More than that, we feel that this desire is connected with our survival. For it was: We needed “pure blood” … or blood with at least the minimal amount of oxygen … to stay alive as fetuses.

Because as prenates we are starved for oxygen and experience the blood we receive to be deficient in providing it, we crave “rich” blood — blood that is full with oxygen and nutrients.

Ideas of vampires and werewolves — beings that need to “suck” on the blood of others in order to live … who “crave” rich blood — come of such unconscious memories of deprivation.

Vampires and Dracula “suck” others’ blood and in doing so make the victims just like themselves — needing to feed on the blood of others forevermore. In this idea, are we not saying that we wish to suck the blood of the Other … the Mother … so that we might live? And even that we will live forever if we continue to do so, as no doubt the fetus feels it needs oxygen-rich blood to live … without which it will die … getting which it will continue living on … “forever,” as far as a fetus feels/knows.

Notice other aspects of this vampirism symbology: Count Dracula lives in a coffin (womb symbol) and always in the dark, as was the case in the womb. Consider also that the vampire/Dracula will die if exposed to the light. Does not the fetus die to the womb state at the time of exposure to light … in other words, at birth? This shows how we remember our time of oxygen (blood) desperation coming to an end at birth: It is the end of living a hellish existence where one is fed by blood in the dark. Birth is a state where one lives in the light and breathes air in an environment where one can move freely, thus the other state is left behind or “dies” upon exposure to the light.

Vampires and werewolves will decompose and die if exposed to light, that is, if they are caught out in daylight: Backing up to political aspects of this, think of the greedy ones of society and their fear that if they are exposed … to the media … they will die. So they must suppress the media, at all costs; and they must keep the “light of day” from ever detecting them … the media “shining” its “light” on them. So, the greed in them has them “sucking others dry,” but they fear that if they do it “in broad daylight,” they will be caught “red-handed” (more blood), and it will be “curtains” for them.

Anti-Immigration Beliefs

This feared Other, who might be taking our desperately needed fetal oxygen, comes out later in life as immigrants. “They’re leeches. They’re sapping our life blood,” we say. This dynamic comes out in the belief that “foreigners” are stealing our jobs, benefits, and resources — “oxygen” — which we need ourselves … for “real” Americans, Germans, whatever … in other words, “pure blooded” ones. We say immigrants are taking all the jobs (we have no money or fuel … nutrients to a fetus … to live, move freely), using up all our resources (oxygen and nutrients for the fetus), being a “burden” (pushing down on the arteries to the placenta which feed the fetus) on the system (cardiovascular one bringing oxygen to fetus). The Germans had similar feelings about Jews.

Bigotry

• We fear others will “suck us dry.”
• We feel we “must destroy those undeserving ones feeding off our hard-earned money!” (blood).

We are forever feeling we cannot get enough resources (money) and that the lack of it means we are suffocated, cannot move freely, cannot breathe freely. We act out this fear in doing all we can to keep other folks from stealing or getting ours — our money … our “pure blood,” our pure children. We express our fear of failing in this with the words that others will “suck us dry.”

Racism

• Children are our “blood line.” We fear we must protect it and keep it “pure.”

We see our children as extensions of our blood (line), so some of us fear that others might want to use them to “feed” on: whether they be “communists,” “hollywood,” social agencies, or schools. We fear they will “suck” the goodness out of our otherwise “pure” children … our blood (lines).

Our children are also aspects of our social surround, our family. This is analogous to our placenta in the womb. This is another reason why we fear our children will have the blood sucked out of them by others.

• For men, wives and family are the placental surround, which we feel must be kept “pure” at any and all costs.

If we are men, our wives are also part of that placental family entity; and we fear other men might take their purity, their innocence, and such, through “impure” acts, “unclean” ones. We symbolize this sometimes with the fear of a vampire “sucking” on such a “pure” woman’s blood … after which they would be “tainted” and “impure” … a placenta lacking in pure blood.

The idea that this attack on our placenta/wife/social-surround would come from another “blood line”/race abounds. Minds on fire with such fears will go to no end of murder and torture against the targets of such furious projections and deem it all justified in light of some higher honor and purity. It inspires the activities of the Ku Klux Klan (the KKK). Their seminal artistic production — the film, The Birth of a Nation — is a robust and thoroughgoing depiction of such “heroic” depravity by white “knights,” carried out within a crazed light of such “honor” and “nobility,” against the concocted threat of a different “blood,” i.e., Blacks, contaminating the “purity” of White womanhood through intercourse — perceived as a pollution of the “superior” blood line.

Anti-Semitism, Blood Libel

And this is an obvious reason that through history we have ideas of blood libel popping up … and being acted on in horrific ways. Blood libel is the idea Christians had that Jews wanted to abduct Christian children to be used as an ingredient in one of their foods … matzos, specifically. The idea was that Jews wanted the “purity” of Christian children to feast on, especially during one of their main holidays, Passover, for they had no pure blood within them. “Bad placenta!”

When I first heard about this, I thought this a rather insignificant, isolated phenomenon until I found out how Jews had historically been put on trial and executed … or simply rounded up and murdered … based on this spurious … this insane … accusation.

Blood libel displays to us how we have this idea that some demonized Other needs to take our “pure blood” — our jobs, benefits … nutrients, oxygen — and will do it in some hideous way. And for this reason these sorts need to be destroyed. Remember, we, as “vampires,” need to suck up all resources around us out of our prenatal oxygen hunger (deprivation). However, in this aspect of that feeling constellation, we want to fight off any and all who might be capable of or thought to be capable of stopping, slowing down, or reducing our resources (blood supply). We act the first out of lack or deprivation, the second out of panic and fear.

Scary Sarah … an Aside

We should not leave this issue without pointing out what this says of Sarah Palin’s use of the term blood libel to defend herself from attacks, which came out in the presidential campaign of 2008, when she was the Republican vice-presidential candidate. She accused those in the media assessing her qualifications for office, in particular her intelligence, of engaging in “blood libel.” She was saying, then, that she is a martyr with pure blood — a “real” American! And that the rest of the country and the media want to feed on her purity for they lack such. Aside from the lurid impertinence of her saying that, it is chilling that this idea is popping up again, considering what it led to historically.

Our Earliest Economics and Capitalism

Yet even as we wrap up so much of our time and energy in these pursuits of greed, oppression-control, and bigotry, we make sure we will feel no relief from their underlying uncomfortable feelings. As in every other of these uncomfortable early feelings, we both seek relief from them and at the same time create the circumstances that give rise to them.

Let me explain how that plays out in the economic systems we choose to meet our needs. In early economic systems — such as a “strong man” economy and feudalism — there is a simplified framework of control-conformity, dominance-sycophancy. All benefit flows from the top … or not. Compare the “trickle-down economics” of Republicans in the U.S. since the 1980s, by the way.

However, in “evolved” economic systems, as well, we make certain we will not feel relief from the threat of lack (oxygen starvation/ fetal malnutrition): For we insist on a “dog eat dog” competitive system like capitalism, with its underlying Dickensian threat of an Oliver Twist state of deprivation: We get enough to survive, but it is not free and easy and leaves us always a little starved, wanting “some more.” We form all kinds of rationalizations for not adopting a more prosperous, more egalitarian, more cooperative, less competitive, and less stressful economic style as exemplified by socialism, for example.

Fetal Malnutrition and Politics

That barely kept in check feeling of being cut off from something we need to survive causes us to insist on economies where the vast majority of people operating in it would feel that they are, for example, only one paycheck away from living on the streets. So, not only do we insist on inflicting this kind of pressure and pain on others — by insisting on a capitalism that keeps the majority in want and by voting for Republicans and their kind in other nations, who represent the interests of the wealthy and who insist on dismantling any societal safety net. But also we unconsciously want to live in such a society for it feels right and familiar that one should be under such threat at all times. Nope. Not rational. But then humans are not.

As for, why socialism? That is because in our natural state in Nature, the forest or other surrounding environment was the safety net. By taking us away from Nature and by denying us access to it, we make it just and right that society should provide that safety net, that sense of ultimately being able to take care of oneself. Yet in current industrialized societies, we not only threaten people with being out on the streets, once they are out there we punish them for being there by preventing their lingering in any public places, from sleeping in view of others, and so on.

Of course, there are societies who have done this historically, that is, have provided the social safety net we need. Many indigenous cultures operate harmoniously this way; and there are societies and cultures that are attempting to create such a workable harmonious system today. Nonetheless, there are reasons why we refrain from wholesale adoption of such easier existences and why we insist on our economic struggles not being alleviated. For to adopt a cooperative socialist framework for meeting our actual needs would be akin to re-creating the earlier style of existence in the womb that was easy and free … the one that was Edenal … in harmony with Reality and Nature. The BPM I state.

That would be smart, of course. Yet as always we insist on our miseries. We are forever doomed to creating situations that confront us with their reality unless or until we actually face and resolve them. So, while we are capable of living in more enlightened styles, we are for the most part going to ensure our existence in a state of struggle. We are the ones who put the angels to guard the gates of Eden.

Why Know This … In Case You’re Wondering

The lesson to be taken from all this is not that our early life mirrors our adult, “real” lives. Something more important is being said: Having our lives suffused with these distorted feelings is not necessary, and the perceptions and deductions one makes from them are not instructive. They are wrong interpretations of what is going on. They are “unreal” … when we once again experience them as adults. They are very early components of what becomes, later, our unreal self.¹

These feelings are rooted in forgotten memories, imprints we carry from early experience, and they are not rooted in actual circumstances. Certainly, we create a reality that matches these feelings, but the feelings are there first. And if we had less of these feelings, we would less often create situations that mirrored them. More often, instead, we would create our lives out of our earlier joy grids — rooted in earlier times in the womb, which were blissful and proximate to Divinity; in our cellular existence, which was at times euphoric; and/or in that state of No-Formity and Divinity before even coming into Form. These joy-prints would be … and can be … our foundation, our template, for living. However, almost invariably we grow our lives and actions out of the soil of our pain grids — the pain templates, if you will — which are created out of these traumatic prenatal experiences.

Next let us consider the third constellation of prenatal feelings, which imprints us for life, under the category of poisoned and disgusted.

 

 

 

 

16

 

Prenatal “Poisoning” Become Paranoia and Intolerance, PME 3:

Prenatal Matrix of Human Evil 3 … “Bad Blood,” Disgust, Nauseated, Sickening Become Homophobia, Smoking, Sadism-Masochism, Addictions, Money Fetish, Air and Food Pollution, Propaganda … “Don’t Feed Me That Bullcrap!”

 

We’re getting some blood, but is it bad blood? How it manifests in our thinking, in psychosis — food, aliens, and tin foil. “Bad blood” aspects of fetal oxygen hunger

 

Prenatal malnutrition and politics. Prenatal roots of war. In collective dreams. How “bad blood” manifests in our doing

 

“With all rationality set aside, we are compelled to poison, infect ourselves again and again with bad air (bad blood). Again, of such depth is the grooves of the imprint created in our prenatal times and along whose lines we make our self-destructive decisions.”

 

 

Outside of PME 1, crowdedness, there are three parts remaining and all three of these are related to the factor of the aging placenta, the hypoxia; in general, to prenatal malnutrition. This pain in the last trimester defines us as humans and creates what we think of as “human nature” and most often as being genetic, but it is not. We have been dealing with the first part of fetal malnutrition — deprivation. That is PME 2, suffocation. We fear there is not enough oxygen/resources coming to us to keep us alive. Another part of this complex of trauma has to do with the toxic quality of the environment we experience surrounding us — which is burning, is irritating. It is something we will get to in the next chapter.

However, the one I want to deal with now is the second aspect of oxygen starvation in the late stages of gestation. It has to do with our prenatal assessment of the quality of the “air” — the oxygen and nutrients — we do get. Not that there is not enough of it.

Prenatal Matrix of Human Evil 3

As just discussed, we carry an underlying panic that our supply will end at any moment. Yet we are getting some oxygen from the blood that comes to us, however reduced its flow. It is the contrast from what we knew that is alarming. Imagine blood that is free- and easy-flowing, rich and bright red with oxygen. Think of it as a bubbling, churning stream … sparkling, clear, pure, healthy.

Now, imagine blood that is more trickling than gushing, more depleted of resources — oxygen and nutrients — tainted, darker, barely able to sustain one’s life…. A stagnant pool, now; a polluted slow-moving river or stream … dank, smelly, unhealthy. The first was our experience of earlier womb life; the second, the way it gradually began being perceived.

To be clear, we cannot actually see our blood flow as a fetus, of course. This is meant to be an analogy giving you an idea of the difference in the feeling experience of the fetus in this changing situation. The metaphor must be close enough to what it actually was like, since out of it we form images and symbols in later life with these differing character­istics, as I will continue to show.

“Don’t Feed Me That Bullcrap!”

So we began feeling poisoned, polluted, decrepit, diseased. Our situation in the womb had portents of death and seemed a dire threat if it were to continue. We received blood sufficient to keep us alive, obviously, but it was felt to be degraded, to be “bad blood.” This has to do with our feelings about the blood we do get: It is tainted, not pure. We began feeling that what we were getting was deficient, even poisoned. The blood that comes is not only barely sufficient to keep oneself as a fetus alive … or certainly it feels that way. But it is tainted, impure … or certainly it feels that way. And one feels not just deprived but attacked.

An interesting aside and look forward into what is coming up is that it is because the Nazis in particular were so caught up in this kind of “bad blood” matrix of feelings in the policies they carried out that they even created the manner of death for Jews that they did — gas chambers. In other words, because they felt the “blood” (money) they were receiving was “poisoned” (tainted, manipulated) by the Jews, it made the most perfect sense then, on an unconscious level, to fight back against these sources of “tainted blood” (Jews) by forcing “tainted blood” into them also, until they died (gas chambers).

Incidentally, it would be interesting to find out what in particular was the cause of such inordinate fixation by Nazis on this aspect of early prenatal pain involving tainted and poisoned blood. For example, did Germans have more of this kind of pain as fetuses because German women did much more standing. It is known, after all, that German women, like the men, were hard-workers and tough-minded, not bothering to let up even when pregnant. That is the nature of the Aryan psyche that was promoted with the Nazi philosophy.

Likely it is, then, that German women would be spending much of the time of their pregnancies on their feet, even in the final trimester. This would only augment the usual prenatal malnutrition for the fetus. In this we have a hint as to why Nazis may have been inordinately caught up in fantasies and delusions emanating from this bad-blood matrix.

And if women doing standing work right up to the time of birth correlates with excessive fetal malnutrition, what of women in primitive agrarian cultures working — in the fields or similar places — until practically the time of birth? Does this have anything to do with the increase in war and conflicts we observe in agrarian cultures over nomadic ones? Is there a corresponding increase in psychosis, ritual, and supersti­tion … scapegoating and sacrifice … as, for example, with the Mayan and pre-Colombian New World cultures? No doubt there are many factors involved in these things, yet are these prenatal contributing factors some important overlooked ones? If so, how important?

Finally, what of the tendency of women today to want to work right up until the time of birth? These are the kinds of things that can make such differences. These are the unexplored aspects of our understandings of why peoples do what they do that are different from other cultures. These are the kinds of considerations which could have us altering our cultural practices around pregnancy and birth in a way that could literally create a world where such horrific doings would no longer ravage us.

Disgusted … Poisoned….

Regardless, in PME 3, the blood we receive is not as good as it was, we feel what we get is “poisonous” … deficient, unhealthy, harmful … even deadly and threatening, as in the feeling we might be being poisoned to death. It is “bad blood.”

This second aspect of fetal malnutrition and the third of prenatal discomfort is the feeling of being force-fed something noxious and deadly. We feel we are being poisoned or infected by what we take in through our breathing or eating. What is coming into us is sour and unhealthy. Think, stuck in a traffic jam and breathing in the exhausts of all the vehicles around. Any wonder road rage?

This is of course related to the previous feeling constellation discussed, wherein we fear we are not going to get enough oxygen and so want “pure” blood.

This sounds like the deprivation/gasping feelings, but though it is related it has a different quality: The difference is between gasping for breath, as in being held under water and feeling one will die for lack of oxygen, versus being in a gas chamber and feeling that the air we breathe is foul, unhealthy, smelly … and is deadly because of its toxicity. They are considerably different in that in one we feel we will die for lack of resources — the outside is withholding something we need. In the other, the outside very much is impinging on us but in a bad way. It is forcing itself on us, and it is felt as an assault.

Fractals, Abuse, Sadism/Masochism

This crops up later … these feelings have fractals at all levels … as the difference between a child being hurt because he or she is ignored, abandoned, unloved, or left alone; versus a child getting “attention” but in the form of assault, abuse, violence, sexual assault. The first is a lack of something; the other is an unwanted getting of the opposite of what one wants/needs. It is the difference between being “starved” for knowledge and being “fed” propaganda, not the “pure” truth.

In the one you cannot get something you need, you are deprived (panic). Indeed, this imprint from PME 2 may be the deepest roots of the panic attacks with which some people are afflicted. In the other — this one of PME 3 poisoning — you get something but it seems intentionally polluted to harm you. Indeed, this may be the deepest roots of the paranoia that pervades the thinking of many folks.

Briefly, the way these matrices manifest in difficult emotions and psychopathology are

PME 1 à aggression, violence, “beating back”

PME 2 à panic

PME 3 à paranoia

To explain the distinction between PME 2 deprivation and PME 3 poisoning-molestation, you can compare it to the difference between being starved for affection as a child versus receiving unwanted attention as in being sexually or physically abused. The reason this can be seen so clearly at a later time of life is because these feeling constellations are fractals of each other: They occur in the same pattern again and again at different times of our lives exactly because of our tendency to re-create, unerringly, the discomfort we could not face originally (primally). The original formulation of this pattern in the womb sets up that we will act out on both sides of tendencies to deprive others of affection, as well as to subtly and unconsciously push others away. And because of the other aspect of it, we will also force unwanted attention on others and will assault them, as well as being unable to avoid such attacks. Traditionally, this last has been discussed under the headings of sadism and masochism.

Having dealt with the deprivation/greed aspect of this in previous chapters, in this chapter we will look at the poisoned and infected feelings and their sadistic/masochistic outgrowths. Unraveling this complex at its primal roots in the womb, we expose some fascinating revelations.

“Bad Blood” and Paranoia

Though not the most common, I must start with the most obvious adult manifestation of this — the curious notion among paranoid psychotics and some obsessive-compulsives that they are being or are in danger of being poisoned. Certainly, through the food they eat, but this also manifests as the idea that “alien” thoughts are being inserted into their minds/brains. I have seen walking neurotics (borderline psychotics) strolling around with wire pyramid or tinfoil hats to prevent this infection from above.

Along these same lines it has come out in the press, just recently, that Donald Trump is exceedingly fearful of being poisoned. It has been reported that Trump — employing the metaphorical equivalent of a wire-pyramid hat with the help of his entourage — protects himself accordingly. This goes along with the fact that he is prone to conspiracy theories and believes all reporting of facts in the media to be “fake news” — probably he feels the reporting to be “infecting” him, certainly he experiences it as “assaulting” him. We see him defending the slightest such incursion upon his psychic domain with his compulsive tweets. While he himself is the largest perpetrator of such “poison” and lies — such “fake news” — into the “bloodstream,” mainstream, of the public at large. Which demonstrates the psychodynamic that that which we do not acknowledge in ourselves we project and inflict upon others.

We have to wonder how much of conspiracy theory is itself skewed by this constellation. It most definitely drove Nazi conspiracy thinking about Jews. I would say you can see elements of it in Trump’s conspiracy theories about Mexican and Muslim immigrants, currently. Indeed, the fact of Trump’s food-poisoning paranoia along with his anti-immigration stance — built as it is upon an idea that “bad hombres,” rapists, and murderers are invading us from the outside — adds further weight to my contention that poisoning fears are related to PME 3, prenatal bad blood, with its paranoia and anti-immigration, ethnophobia. Unfortunately, with Trump’s stolen position as the leader of the United States, his fear of being infected from the outside will have all Americans paying to build a wall on the southern U.S. border … a wall he wishes, unconsciously, he had in the womb to protect him from the bad blood. Amazingly, an entire nation is likely to be involved in the construction of a billions-of-dollars big and metaphorical tin-foil hat on its border because of what its leader experienced in his earliest months of existence.

However, even more blatantly, in some quite popular conspiracy circles of recent years we observe a concoction of the existence of forces that spy on us and influence our actions from behind the moon (behind the placenta) or some other unseen place. The person putting this out is David Icke. This is what happens when big thoughts are channeled through sorry states of mind. What is more significant is that so many folks buy into his insanity, which says everything about their own prenatal traumas. I should mention that Trump supporters embracing his particular brand of psychotic thinking reveals the same thing about them.

In Media — Myth and Fairy Tale

We express these ideas arisen of our PME 3 template in our myths and fairy tales, as well. For they are the collective “dreams” we share to which our unconscious dynamics give rise.

Snow White and the Evil Queen

A salient example is the children’s story, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” Consider her name, and remember the part about the purity of blood and children, which was felt to be our earlier situation in the womb.

In the same consideration of blissful BPM I experiences occurring prior to late stage, BPM II, discomforts, notice that Snow White enjoys an earlier, idyllic time living in communion with planetmates in the forest. She was supposed to be killed (aborted) by the huntsman (god figure); but he falls in love with her and lets her go, telling her to hide. She finds a tiny cottage (blissful womb), where she is aided by and lives in harmony with seven dwarves. The dwarves, as well as the planetmates, represent the forces of Nature aiding exquisitely perfect growth in the early stages of gestation in the womb.

Then, however, BPM II style — specifically in the manners of PME 1, PME 2, and PME 3 — her wicked stepmother wants to crush and poison her, but even notice how.

First the “evil queen” (mother symbol) wants to kill her by crushing her. Think, PME 1, compression, hemmed in, claustrophobia. She ties her tightly in a bodice with stay-laces. Remember that being compressed and crowded was the very first and most obvious aspect of late-stage gestation discomfort.

This compression might result in actual death through her being unable to breathe. Think PME 2, suffocation, gasping. Indeed, the effect of being tied tightly in the bodice is that she faints, just like one might expect to if one were not getting enough oxygen.

And then begin the poisoning attempts: The evil queen tries to kill Snow White by brushing her hair with a poisoned comb. So, what does this mean? Well, our hair comprises thousands of tiny filaments that emanate out from our bodies, just as in the womb we have tiny filaments extending from our bodies — arteries and veins — which connect us to our mothers (evil queen). The wicked stepmother poisoning her by combing her hair is saying she is being poisoned through these filaments of arteries extending from her and to her mother, through the placenta.

Next, the evil queen wishes to get the girl to eat a poisoned apple. Apple is as the penultimate symbol of food, nutrition in Western culture. It was an apple that was eaten in Eden, for example.

Now, why? Remember that a red apple is the same color as blood. So a poisoned apple represents the bad blood in the womb with its poor or “poisoned” nutrients … being given to one by one’s mother. Significantly, there is a white half and a red half to this apple, and the farmer’s wife eats the white half, which is like saying that the mother gets the blood fresh with oxygen. While Snow White eats the red half, which is like saying the child in the womb gets the poisoned blood.

The Mother Proxy

Notice that here as in many fairy tales it is a stepmother … in others it might be a wicked aunt or witch … who does the bad stuff. It has to be a stepmother or aunt, for we wish to preserve the idea that a “good mother” still exists. So we separate out an idea of a bad part of her, just as we come up with the idea of a bad god … a Satan … who is responsible for all the evil things that we cannot abide that a good God would not be … thus preserving the idea of a good God/ good daddy here.

But there’s more. Snow White fainted when she was tightly laced, and she collapsed again after being brushed with the poisoned comb. Yet finally, being poisoned with the apple, she falls into a stupor and appears dead.

Obviously, Snow White represents a prenate struggling with the “groggy” and lethargic feelings associated with being trapped, stifled, and poisoned/drugged. And in modern times, sometimes having ingested actual drugs or toxins from smoking or alcohol through the placenta … poisoned through those tiny “hairs” of arteries.

Appearing dead, she is placed in a glass coffin. Womb symbol, anyone? I have a lot more to say on the meaning of the Snow White tale pertaining to the Electra complex and the primal scene coming up in the next book in this Return to Grace Series. In Volume 12, titled Back to the Garden — as well as in Dance of the Seven Veils I, which is Volume 2 in The Path of Ecstasy Series — we explore that under the title of “The Assault of the Mother.”

In Events

Having looked at how this early experience of blood degradation is manifest in our thoughts, madness, and creative product, let us look into some really important, major act-outs of this prenatal mental framework for construing things. This brings us to the ways we act out these crazy ideas, emanating from early experiences, in major ways as cultures, as societies, and even as nations. We address now the psychotic acting out of these thoughts and feelings — rooted in unconscious discomforts and repressed memory patterns — by insane societies.

War

In this aspect of fetal discomfort, a reduced blood flow to the placenta is experienced as a buildup of carbon dioxide and toxins, since they are not removed as efficiently as they were before. Lloyd deMause explains how this womb situation is universally expressed among humans as a fear of being “poisoned” by “bad blood.” He has found that feelings of being trapped (PME 1, in my categories) and at the same time “infused” with bad blood or toxic energies (PME 3, as I’ve termed it) of some sort precede the outbreak of all wars.

For these wars are the unconscious way humans try to “break free” from these uncomfortable feelings, which are for the most part just early unresolved memories from our beginnings in life. We see “bad blood” as coming from the enemy. We see the enemy as an attacking many-headed monster “encroaching” on the “home”land (PME 1) … a threatening multi-veined placenta, aging and filled with toxins, “filth.” So we wish to attack and destroy the enemy — this placental “monster” — so we can “breathe free” again (PME 2) and escape their “poisonous filth” (PME 3).

Xenophobia

These feelings of being “sickened” at the end of our womb existence are the root of all xenophobia with its creation always of a toxic Other which cannot be allowed to infect the virtue and purity of people of “our blood.”

The perfect example is the German xenophobia that resulted in the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews around the time of World War II. I have already pointed out how these walking psychotics injected poisonous gas into Jews in gas chambers out of these prenatal feelings, which they framed in adult thoughts of being themselves infected with tainted money from these Jews. Let us now look at other act outs of this.

Racism, Intolerance

This matrix is the basis of racism. Blacks are pollutants, as are Jews, is what is thought. Most recently, in America, it is Muslims who we feel defile us. They want to take away our purity — our pure children … blood libel; our women’s pure virtue. And so we need to dress in white (the Ku Klux Klan), indicating “pure” blood, to defend against these incursions (of “bad blood”).

This fetal malnutrition gives rise to bigoted ideas of keeping racial lines “pure.” It insists upon no mixing of the races … or ethnicities … for fear of affecting the gene “pool” (pool of blood), but it is always described in terms of “blood” that will be mixed, tainted, polluted, made impure, or degraded. Can you see how these are all instances of fear of encroachment by another from which one senses a threat of pollution and in conjunction with which one feels suffocated, made helpless, unable to move freely?

Homophobia

We see it in intolerance of all kinds of others. Several years ago, on 12 May 2012, a Baptist preacher from the South made headlines everywhere by announcing from the pulpit that all gays and lesbians should be “rounded up,” placed in an “enclosure,” surrounded by an “electrified fence.” He imagined they could have food air-dropped to them until they died — obviously of an insufficient, oxygen starvation (PME 2) amount … or of a poisoned, bad blood (PME 3) quality. At this point, I do not believe I need to unravel the prenatal qualities of the morass his mind was wading in.

And why all this? His exact words are, because “It makes me pukin’ sick!” what homosexuals do.

Sick, nausea, poisoned. Need I say more?¹

Yesterday, Donald Trump let the world know he thought of Black and Latino folks from Haiti, El Salvador, and African Countries coming into the country as being from “shithole countries.” In this he shows how he sees his White world as being surrounded by filthy others. Again, I mention how this fake president of the United States is peppered by fears of being poisoned. It is all connected. I daresay, the fact that Donald Trump provides an at-hand example in full view of everyone of my theory of the prenatal matrices of human evil, especially PME 3, is perhaps the one good thing come to my mind regarding his having stolen the American presidency.

Classism

This thinking is found in classism as well. Here, royalty call themselves “bluebloods” and only allow marriage between others of their class — from their own nation or another, interestingly, as long as they are of the same class of royalty. Such elites will not allow their “blood” to be mixed with the polluted blood of the masses and “riff raff.”

Elitism

University intellectuals have a more “refined” take on this primal disgust: They set up barriers to academic entrance in order to “keep out the unwashed.” They do so, without a clue they are coming across like scared fetuses inside a virtual womb (academia) trying to protect their continuing flow of blood (money).

Blood Letting

For a long time in Western culture, it was thought that when one got sick that one had “bad blood” coursing through one’s system. The idea was that by bleeding a person one would rid their body of some of this impure blood and the person would get better. This bloodletting was employed for hundreds of years in the face of the evidence to the contrary wherein folks got paler and sicker from this “treatment.” Such is the power of these sorry thoughts rooted in unconscious dynamics.

Smoking

Another thing we do out of this “bad blood” complex is we re-create the atmospheric imbalance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the womb — which is what is meant by the reduced oxygen and buildup of toxic waste matter, primarily carbon dioxide, occurrent to fetal malnutrition — through burning stuff, through creating air pollution. Again, I will have lots more to add on that in Chapter 20, especially, regarding “Prenatal Earth, Life in Gaia’s Womb.”

However, in a similar way the smoking of tobacco and other vegetation can also be likened to our pushes and pulls to re-create the bad “air” of the womb. In ingesting this smoke into one’s lungs, we have a most perfect example of the drive to re-create the uncomfortable feeling of ingestion of “bad blood” — in this case, inhaling, bad air. With all rationality set aside, we are compelled to poison, infect ourselves again and again with bad air (bad blood). Again, of such depth are the grooves of the imprint created in our prenatal times and along whose lines we make our self-destructive decisions.

 

 

How We Make It Worse; How We Re-Create It in Our Environment and Bodies

So we act out this “bad blood” of PME 3 in all kinds of harmful ways, including war and bigotry. It manifests in our paranoia and sadism; and we express it in our creative productions. But more: We re-create it, we make it worse, we manifest it in our lives. Smoking is only one example.

Alcoholism and Drug Addiction

How we add to this today, how we make it worse? Well we do it when drinking and taking drugs, as well. These could not be clearer examples of how we pollute our blood by ingesting poisons. Indeed, we have to wonder how much of alcoholism and addiction is motivated by this complex. For certainly, if you’ve ever had a hangover, you have a taste of what that kind of “bad blood” poisoning in the womb feels like. This is only one of the many experiences we do not like, that we outright hate; yet which we cannot keep from bringing to ourselves, repeatedly, because of the existence of these repressed early traumas.

Medications and Food Pollution

Beyond that, we create and imbibe toxins in our food, our air … and through the medications we use. The whole idea behind “medicine” is that a toxin (all drugs are) administered in a tiny amount will alter our blood constitution in just the exact way to affect some currently felt experience of our blood being bad (sickness).

And in doing these things we reinforce the bad-blood experience of fetal malnutrition that the fetus will experience out of its being human. We insure we will pass along our bad-blood experience to the next generation … we will multiply it even. For the mother’s ingestion of these compounds into her system — smoke, drugs, food additives, air toxins, water pollutants — are felt by the fetus as receiving bad blood, even worse than it would be otherwise just from pressure on the arteries restricting blood flow and dampening the removal of waste. Again, we create that which we need to resolve. Only this time, it is the unborn child who will be “infected” with the bad blood and who will need to face these feelings later in life, again and again.

Genetic Engineering and Propaganda

I cannot leave this without pointing out that, as in environmental pollution and in political oppression, it is not all just a figment of a past memory. There are those of us acting-out this feeling complex by coming up with such odd creations that end up polluting the food of others … as in the tainted food coming out of corporations like Monsanto, with its Frankensteinian concoctions.

There are those, also, who seek to inject alien ideas in others to make us do things we would ordinarily not do — whether that is to buy some unnecessary thing to fatten the wallets of these others (advertising) or to surrender one’s self interest or hand over one’s power and rationality of thought to these others for their political ends — as, for example, in propaganda. In America, this would be Fox News and, most recently, anything coming out of the Trump administration.

 

These things in mind, now, in the next chapter we will look into the fourth aspect of the prenatal matrix of human evil — PME 4, which has to do with prenatal irritation-burning-revulsion.

 

 

 

 

17

 

Prenatal Revulsion Become Phobias and Sexual Abuse, PME 4:

Prenatal Matrix of Human Evil 4 … Burning, Irritation, Itchiness, Creepiness, “Makes Skin Crawl,” Dirtiness, OCD, “Ewww,” Rape, Insect Phobia … “Don’t Bug Me!”

Irritated … dirty … “eeew!” Touch, sex, preadolescent “creepiness” and early roots of rape and sexual abuse

 

“…in this aspect of late-gestation experience, what you perceive around you is a poisonous environment that you feel wants to diminish your purity of self, your integrity, and ultimately would lead to your death. This threatening environment has a characteristic of filling up increasingly with toxins, bad blood…. We have around us something that is building up which is polluting (sinful) and will drag us down (put us in hell), take away our ‘morality,’ our ‘purity,’ our ‘innocence.’”

 

“The reason this happens is that the reduced blood flow in the womb means there is a buildup — slight, but noticeable to a fetus — of toxins. They are not taken away as efficiently through the veins. There is also the factor of an aging placenta. There is a feeling of skin irritation and/or slight burning. There is a sense, for the fetus, of its world not being as vibrant and alive as earlier. Systems are no longer accelerating or peaking, as was the case for the entirety of one’s life previous to that — earlier womb life — but are leveling off. And if one is a delayed birth … one can sense a breaking down of the systems … an entropy that is frightening.”

 

 

The fourth part of late-gestation formative experiences, which I am calling the Prenatal Matrices of Human Evil, and the third part of fetal malnutrition is about irritation-burning. It is about a toxic environment in the womb that surrounds the fetus and is experienced on the skin. To review, back then, inside our mothers,

1. It was tight — “crowded,” oppression — which is PME 1.
2. We felt we were not getting enough air — suffocation, oxygen hunger, deprivation — which is PME 2.
3. We felt what we got was poisonous — “bad blood,” disgust — which is PME 3

Prenatal Matrix of Human Evil 4

Now in this fourth part, prenatal matrix of evil 4, or PME 4, we feel the environment around us is toxic. It is about ickiness, irritation, feeling dirty, burning, uncleanness, yuckiness, filthiness … as teens like to say, “creepy,” and “ewww!” It is all about the surface of the body in this complex, not about what we are taking inside us (bad blood, disgust, PME 3) or not getting to take inside (deprivation, PME 2). And it is not about being pressed in from the outside … crowdedness, PME 1 … but is about irritation and burning on the surface of the skin.

PME 4 refers to feelings caused by the fact that the decreased blood flow — a result of pressure on the arteries providing blood to the placenta and of an aging, less efficient placenta — means that there will be reduced ability of the placenta to remove the byproducts of oxygen combustion by the fetus. These are waste products or toxins of the biochemical process of food conversion into energy that are normally removed by the blood through the veins … to be expelled eventually one way or another back into the environment.

So there will be a backlog caused by the reduced blood flow, and the fetus experiences a buildup of toxins. The prenate feels increased “yuckiness” in its environment that is greater than anything experienced previously. Oh, the garbage man still comes to take out the trash … but think of it as the garbage man coming less often and one still puts out the trash just as frequently. Imagine how one feels watching from one’s window as it piles up on the sidewalk. Perhaps you lived in New York City in 1968 during the huge garbage strike; you would have an even better idea.

So, finally, there is the pain and discomfort of being surrounded by these toxins, forced to live in an environment that is felt to be dirty, “creepy,” toxic, threatening, filthy, slimy … “yucky.” Ugly, as well; that is why we create dystopian societies to live in. Our environments being manifested this way is another example of our re-creating that which we repress, keep out of mind And again PME 4 is related to the previous feeling complex but is different. For one can be forced to take in something noxious, PME 3, or one can be immersed in something that is painful or uncomfortable like a bath that is too hot, as in this one, PME 4. In other words, this pain is on the surface of the body, not of something being forced inside, like PME 3.

How this noxious environment feels to the fetus can be that of irritation, uncomfortable heat, burning, and feelings of threat to one’s survival — thus alarm and panic — which those outside “impositions” bring up in a fetus. Historically this has been acted out on Jews and supposed witches: Jews were placed like firewood in heaps and burned to ashes to get rid of them as the threat they were felt to be. Witches were often immolated at the stake. As in the gas chamber example mentioned last chapter — where Jews were poisoned because of the Nazis’ prenatal “poisoning” — these “ordinary” citizens perpetrated on their Jewish, female, and heretical victims the sort of suffering the murderers felt was actually coming at them. In incidents of burning people to death, the act-out of PME 4, prenatal burning-irritation, is patent.

“Witches” — most often just women a little different, perhaps a tad more free-thinking — heretics, and Jews were felt to pose a threat of burning for the perpetrators. If nothing else in that they could be responsible — in influencing Catholics away from their tortuous beliefs by thinking a little differently — for the murderers themselves burning forever in hell. So they thought, the poor bastards — the conforming and fearful, the religiously bedeviled. The prospect of an unthinkable horror, a hell, projected onto the metaphysical of the grandest scope, forever — which beliefs were firmly rooted in the seemingly endless prenatal suffering they experienced, the crushing, the suffocating, the sickening, the burning — rationalized, indeed compelled, some of the most hideous of human atrocities committed on Earth.

The unfortunates during the Medieval Burning Times and Inquisi­tions acted it out on others as well as themselves. They engaged in self-flagellation of the skin, mimicking their prenatal pain of burning-irritation. They starved themselves (PME 2) through fasting and others through fostering widespread poverty and deprivation. As mentioned, they were among the ones who sickened themselves through blood-letting (PME 3). They not only created tortuous crushing, mutilating, and skin-piercing devices — the Iron Maiden being one — which they inflicted on others (PME 1 and 4). Many of them gathered in dystopian cities, with streets and alleyways running with human sewage (PME 1 and 4). And more.

Incidentally, the fact that Nazis burned their victims, as well as poisoned them, is another indicator of the unusual prenatal trauma of the Germans of their time.

Yet the extreme acting out of PME 4 suffering was not limited merely to folks of former times. No. We have our own ways.

Parts of this PME 4 complex later on can be those of annoyance, yuckiness, being continually distracted by sensations (ADHD), creepiness, dirtiness.

We feel bugged, irritated. We overkill pests and overclean our houses, using an abundance of toxic “product” which only adds to the overall toxicity of our environment. This is the prenatal underpinning of what Freud called anal compulsion. It actually leads to us employing strict toilet-training, if you think about it. Indeed, it manifests especially in draconian punishing of all kinds and in all times. The slightest perceived defect of anyone around is felt as a threat to one’s purity of self and as warranting severe, unthinking, and brutal repression.

We feel surrounded by “dirty” hippies … Jews …  Blacks …  immigrants…. You name it. We feel “imposed on” by others, especially “visitors” who come to our “house” … i.e., toxins who fill up in our womb environment. We know how we feel about guests who overstay their welcome. We call them bums. Our children return home to live with us, and we call them freeloaders.

In psychosis it comes out, not as paranoia, as in PME 3, but in feelings and hallucinations of bugs everywhere, and crawling on one’s body. It is no coincidence that folks withdrawing from addictions, in which essentially they were poisoning themselves, might find themselves wanting to climb the walls because of the skin itchiness-discomfort and the hallucinations of creepy-crawly things over their body. Often, in times of panic, including times like this of detox, folks will have so much PME 3 skin irritation-burning, often combined with PME 1 crowded trauma, that they will remark they want to “jump out of their own skin.”

In Media

Returning to ancient mythology, we have a pretty good description of this prenatal matrix in a Norse myth — the one about Loki — which is said to be one parallel to the Prometheus myth. In this one, “The god Loki (often associated with fire) was bound to a rock. Above him is a large serpent which drips toxic venom upon him. His wife collects the poison in a bowl, but must empty it every time it gets full. As she is in the process of doing this, the snake proceeds to cover Loki in poison. Just as Prometheus gets his liver eaten only to have it grow back again, Loki is temporarily saved from venom only to have it drip on him once more.”¹

So in this aspect of late-gestation experience, what you perceive around you is a poisonous environment that you feel wants to diminish your purity of self, your integrity, and ultimately would lead to your death. This threatening environment has a characteristic of filling up increasingly with toxins, bad blood. As deMause points out, a serpent represents the poisonous placenta, the “bad womb.”² So it makes sense it would be a snake which drips the toxic venom on Loki. Also, in the Loki myth, the wife (the mother, the good placenta, good womb) collects the poison (waste matter not efficiently removed) in a bowl (womb, placental surround), but must empty it every time it gets full (waste material removed).

Similar feelings arise in religious folk who see society as being something toxic around them that is building up and which is polluting (sinful); will take away their “morality,” their “purity,” their “innocence”; and will drag them down … will put them in hell, that place of eternal burning.

The reason these images come to us is that the reduced blood flow in the womb means there is a buildup — slight, but noticeable to a fetus — of toxins. They are not taken away as efficiently through the veins. There is also the factor of an aging placenta. There is a feeling of skin irritation and/or slight burning. There is a sense, for the fetus, of its world not being as vibrant and alive as earlier. Systems are no longer accelerating or peaking, as was the case for the entirety of one’s life previous to that — earlier womb life — but are leveling off. And if one is a delayed birth, as I was, one can sense a breaking down of the systems … an entropy that is frightening.

In Personality

This sort of early experience focused on the skin surface should be compared with the skin trauma and deprivation which Ashley Montagu (1971) has written about in great detail.

Skin Deprivation, Skin Irritation

Montagu argues that skin trauma is related to a deprivation of contact after birth. He has shown how we have as much need for contact and touch as we do for any of our other biological needs, and it is certainly more fundamental than sex.

However, not that his point is not also correct, I would add that the trauma I am talking about is very similar but is an earlier fractal. Just as before we saw how there is trauma from not getting enough resources (oxygen deprivation, emotional deprivation, PME 2) but also from getting plenty but of the wrong kind (bad blood, child abuse, PME 3), so also the skin trauma Montagu is mostly talking about is deprivation of contact. Whereas what I am referring to is about trauma from stimulation of the skin in an unpleasant way.

Sugar and Spice … Snips and Snails

A later fractal of this early skin trauma would be the skin being touched, but in an unpleasant or revolting way … as they say, “Ewww … Don’t touch me with that … That’s gross! That’s creepy.” Pre-adolescent boys get a lot of amusement out of provoking and playing with these feelings in young girls … as at the same time they are working out their own similar feelings but in a counterphobic way.

This common, perhaps universal, behavior is a way that societies have evolved of dealing with these feelings so as to be able to propagate the species. For, obviously, if we acted out of these feelings as adults, no one would want to have sex or pretty much have anything but ungloved contact with the physicality or biology of others. We would have no doctors or biologists!

Rape, Sexual Abuse

When this fractal goes beyond unpleasant (“creepy”) contact to touch that is administered in an aggressive or assaultive way, we have rape and sexual abuse. These kinds of assaults and abuse have roots in this early experience of the prenate. They can occur out of the fact that an individual’s experience of this aspect of gestation was traumatic … along with other contributing factors, of course.

Excuse that I do not mention Donald Trump again. You can draw your own conclusions and notice how all of it is part of the same complex of prenatal trauma, resulting from prenatal malnutrition.

We Are at War with Our Personal Environment

How, in our daily lives, we act out this feeling from the womb of being surrounded by toxins, first and foremost, is in how we feel about our environment on all levels. These poisons threaten us in our homes and communities. That not enough, we re-create such toxicity in our planetary environment.

Obsessive-compulsive cleanliness … severe tidiness.

The environment around us in our homes — for some, more so than others — is always felt to be dirty, polluted. We cannot seem to ever get it clean enough. Any dirt or untidiness reminiscent of our time of built-up toxins in the womb sends us into a flurry of activity to fight it off, lest we ever feel that way again.

We use chemical cleaners and anti-bacterial agents to battle away imaginary threats, which we call viral and bacterial. Yet in doing so we ensure we will actually live in a toxic chemical environment.

We will tolerate pollutants in the air we breathe and the water we drink — after all that merely re-creates the “bad blood” we once experienced — but we will not abide litter or dirty streets. In fact, we see these pollutants of our womb life projected on the people in our cities, so we want to “clean up the streets” … meaning get rid of the homeless and undergroomed.

“Don’t bug me, man!”

We felt “bugged” in the womb, for we were irritated. We cannot abide any creepy-crawly bug-like things around us for they remind us of those “itches we cannot scratch” — that prenatal skin irritation. We over-eliminate spiders and insects from our environments in a way so far beyond what is necessary. We are blind to how they are part of our essential ecosystem.

I don’t like mosquitoes any more than the next person, but I can see that alongside an all-out war on all creepy crawlies we have seen a disappearance of bees, essential for our food production … maybe related, probably not.³

We will not be “bugged.”

My point is that the vast majority of insects are harmless to us and not even bothersome. Yet, let some tiny insect into a suburban home, and you would think it had been invaded by a SWAT team. This is hilarious from the perspective of someone who has done primal work and so is not so “bugged” by the appearance of an insect, or of being a part of its roadway to wherever, or by noticing how some have used our bar-b-que items for temporary landing places or short-lived insect airports. Notice the reaction of some people when an ant or some other insect is observed kiting across a picnic table if you think I am exaggerating.

We are at war with anything that reminds us of those irritating times; we do not want to be “bugged.” And if we are “imposed” on that way, it can send some of us into a fury … or a terror. I have one friend who was once invaded by fleas. She is now terrified of them. I have had similar experiences with fleas. Don’t get me wrong; I do bomb them, when they get to a certain point where they might get out of control. However, I have been in the same environments with this person, as has my wife, and this person’s terror is extraordinary for the situation.

I believe these kinds of phobias — and there are many examples of this fear of insects that could be used — are rooted in this trauma of being irritated in the womb. For it is an uncomfortable situation that went on for an incredibly long time for an extremely young human (a fetus) who had little, if any, sense of time and so of the possible ending of discomfort. 

An extension of that bugged feeling is the way we feel about “messy” Nature and “messy” biology in general. Because of this complex, we will be inclined to war against Nature — seeing it as uncivilized, unclean, and needing our management and “order.” And we will do the same with the Nature in our own persons — our bodies and their natural, bodily functions — sex, waste elimination, bodily sounds and excretions. Farts, burps, masturbation, “bathroom functions,” and more will be seen through this eeewy veil. And we will extend that war on Nature and body to women, who are felt to be inextricably wedded to Nature.

So humans will war on women … and be especially freaked out and horrified by their unique bodily excretions — menses — and their unique biological capacities … i.e., birth and nursing … which will also be seen as “messy.” I mean, “eeeeww.” (lol)

Next — The Itches We Cannot Scratch

So we know what it is … this irritation-creepiness complex. To review, in the womb,

1. We are marinated in toxins and our skin “crawls,” feels irritated, itchy, burning.
2. The toxins surround us and are felt to be dangerous. They are everywhere. They threaten us … our lives, our “purity.” They “irritate” us, emotionally. They “bug” us.
3. We cannot eliminate wastes as efficiently, and we experience a buildup of poisons, akin to a prenatal environmental pollution.

Now let us look at the ways we act out these traumas and the kinds of thoughts and behaviors arising from these imprints in the womb. In the next chapter, we look at number one, above, and we see how we respond to this imprint of itchy and burning skin with some uniquely human cultural behaviors — tattooing, body piercing and adornments, and sun bathing.

Following that, we unravel how we act out these imprints of the threatening and dangerous quality of our surroundings in dire and major ways in relation to our social environment. In looking at this second aspect of it, number two above, we see how we manifest our prenatal discomfort in our homes, communities, and societies — that is, in our attitudes and actions in interaction with other people. This has to do with intolerance. It is how we act it out politically, too.

Finally, in the two chapters after the next, we go deeply into number three above, the buildup of poisons around us in our environment. Being as how this is the most important aspect of PME 4 in relation to the topic of the “psychology of apocalypse,” I devote all of Chapters 19, “Our Prenatal Air”; 20, “Prenatal Earth, Life in Gaia’s Womb”; and 21, “Gaia’s Cries,” to it. We delve into how we manifest a prenatal environmental pollution in our creating a toxic environment in which to live. This quality of PME 4, pertaining to the excess waste around us, relates to how we act this out with our general — our planetary — not social environment … i.e., with environmental pollution. In creating a toxic, sometimes burning, world, we act out our PME 4 trauma of irritation-burning.

Let us take them, now, in turn.

 

 

 

 

18

 

Prenatal Irritation Become Bigotry and Body Adornment, PME 4

Prenatal Matrix of Human Evil 4 … Revulsion, Itchiness Become Racism, Tattoos, Tea-Party Politics, Hippie-Bashing, Genocide … Loss of the “Golden Age”

“We create culture wars and put those other people on the other side — they are hippies, immigrants, minorities — always they are described as ‘filthy’ and ‘dirty,’ which indicates we are seeing them through a veil of perinatal irritation-revulsion.”

“…we fight back against this toxic encroachment like little supermen fighting for some version of the pristine past … for ‘truth, justice … and the American way!’”

“…because of these prenatal formative experiences, we place some folks ‘outside our circle’ and see them as irritating, even revolting. They are ‘disgusting’ (poisonous) abominations of bloodlines … criminals and rapists and ‘bad hombres’ … whether they are Jews (not like the pure Aryans) or Blacks (filthy, lazy, dirty, immoral, it is thought), or Mexicans (dangerous, threatening, violent, encroaching, it is said) who want our fresh pure blood (blood libel), our resources.”

“They are everywhere! We cannot get away from them. They surround us! And they are taking over. They are ‘poisoning’ our way of life. So this is how these early imprints have us seeing others and our society in ways conducive to horrible intolerances and anti-immigration sentiments.”

 

 

First, “We are marinated in toxins and our skin ‘crawls,’ feels irritated, itchy, burning.”

In Culture

Some common ways we behave out of these early imprints from prenatal irritation-burning have to do with obsessions for sun-bathing and tattooing. Body ornamentation, in particular, is one of the cultural universals of humans, which is lacking in our planetmate societies. We will get to the other, more important, cultural manifestations of this early experience shortly, when we discuss intolerance, obsessive-compulsive­ness, and scapegoating and persecution of minorities in societies and the horrid ways we act them out.

Tattoos and Body Adornments

This complex of feelings includes irritation. Think of it as like an itch that one cannot scratch. Pretty unnerving, right? We are focused on our skin in this manner, though we are not aware of these feelings in a conscious way after a while. Imagine an itch that is there all the time, like from a mosquito bite. As they say, if you don’t scratch it, it goes away. Well it is not that the feeling is not there, it is that virtually all feelings fade with time … one gets distracted from them … one “wearies” of it.

Still, that does not mean it is not influencing our actions on a subconscious level. So, we get tattoos and do all kinds of strange things to the surface of our skins and to the outsides of our bodies which only make sense if you look at such people as acting out an ongoing itch that cannot be scratched. Unknown in other species, these rituals are one of our unique human characteristics.

Gen X and Millennial Generation.

When you have sudden eruptions of this kind of behavior in a society, it would be illuminating to look at what changed in that culture’s practices around pregnancy and prenatal care when those adults were in their mothers’ wombs.

A prominent example of this is the fascination and addictiveness that Gen X and the Millennial Generation have with tattooing. This is a distinct contrast with the previous generation, the Boomers, and with generations prior to that. I do not think it is coincidence that these Gen X and Millennial spent their womb-time during a period of a Western avalanche of prescription drug use of all types that was for a long time — and to some extent still is — thought to be inconsequential to the fetus.

Fetal drug irritation … that itch that won’t go away.

When the medical establishment did discuss pharmaceutical use and the fetus, it was talked about in terms of whether the particular compound passed through the “placental barrier.” Unfortunately, the “placental barrier” turned out to not be the major protection to fetuses that Western society wanted it to be in order to continue with this explosive intake of all kinds of medications.¹

And all this intake is quite a bit different from the moderate and minimal medication usage by mothers in all previous generations. These drugs simply did not exist in any earlier time in the abundance they do now.

Extreme examples of this — pathologies rooted in such late-gestation trauma — can manifest as a desire to cut oneself. People who are compulsive cutters say they are trying to feel something, that they feel dead or numb. Well, yes, this is how it feels when one scratches an itch … one has the sense that one does not really feel it until one scratches it. And until then, like bug bites, one does a psychological numbing of the area until one can get to it.

Sun-Bathing

Another way this is felt is as a kind of a burning on the surface of the skin, what we might feel being immersed in mildly acidic water. As always, we re-create these discomforts in an unconscious attempt to try to resolve them.

So we have this curious ritual in some cultures of lying out in the open on sunny days and allowing our skin to be heated and burned. We think this is all about cosmetics, personal appearance, or health, but it is not. Those ideas are rationalizations after the fact. For we even allow the feeling of sunburn, a painful experience, as if it is some kind of fortifying experience. Medically, we now know, these rituals are not healthy at all … contributing to skin cancers and such. A sidenote: One needs to ask if the skin trauma in the womb causes the skin cancer and the sun-bathing is just another act out, but not causative of skin cancer.

And you think this a minor thing? Well for many, yes. Remember, though, that some people revolve their lives around these experiences. George Hamilton comes to mind. They might center their lives on surfing … or being “beach bums.”

I know of one person who has made the major decisions of his life around such rituals and behaviors. He kept finding ways to live near the beach, the ocean, so he could sun-bathe … “take in the rays.” He had his marriage ceremony on the beach; though he was not a beach bum. I also know this person has major skin trauma in his life: He had chicken pox as a baby. It was so itchy, and he so wanted to scratch himself, they actually tied him down so he could not. It makes perfect sense that such preeminent skin trauma has the kinds of deep roots I am talking about here. So this is how such early trauma can be no small matter.

Having looked briefly at the human cultural behaviors that arise from these early perceptions and feelings, let us now delve into some of the bigger and more dire act outs — ones that are more relevant to the apocalyptic topic of this book. Let us see how we act these things out in society in our group behaviors — culture wars — and how we act them out in our interactions with the world of Nature and our environment. We now turn to the issues of scapegoating, immigration, intolerance, racism, culture wars, abortion and contraception, overpopulation, slavery and fascism and genocide. After that, next chapter, we will look at environmental contamination and the depletion of the ozone layer.

In Events

To continue, (2) “The toxins surround us and are felt to be dangerous. They are everywhere. They threaten us … our lives, our ‘purity.’ They ‘irritate’ us, emotionally. They ‘bug’ us.”

“Dirty” Hippies and Other “Irritating People”

It is not just bugs that bug us. We project this primal irritation on others. They bother us, are irritating. Sometimes they are; but sometimes simply the sight of them stimulates our unconscious irritations.

We see them sometimes as “unwashed” and thus irritating. Some folks say other folks are “scum” or “vermin”; or they use similar terms indicating a revolting dirtiness — vile, immoral.

We hate anyone and anything that seems to be on the other side of this war against ickiness. We create culture wars and put those other people on the other side — they are hippies, immigrants, minorities — always they are described as “filthy” and “dirty,” which indicates we are seeing them through a veil of prenatal irritation-revulsion. We are at culture war with elements in society that remind us of this distressing time in the womb.

Creeped Out in the Womb …

This feeling constellation is about the surface of the skin and the revulsion about skin contact, however it is very often augmented by the disgust and poisoning feelings going on (PME 3), which is also a response to a toxic environment. Irritation can be focused just on the skin, but add the disgust come of those same toxins being taken internally, you have the basis of so much of the hatred and violence perpetrated on innocent others.

Nonetheless, the surface of the skin, the irritation, is the primary sense being stimulated to set off the entire feeling complex of being creeped out in the womb, revolted, and disgusted by others enough to want to lash out at them. Add crowdedness (PME 1), which makes us want to push them away, and deprivation (PME 2), which has us thinking they are responsible for us not getting enough, and you have a sadly solid foundation for the atrocities of the ages.

In saying that, I do not want to discount the sense of dis-ease or sickness the fetus experiences in general, for there is the feeling awareness that this situation is different from, is a deterioration of, the “golden age” of well-being and exquisite functioning of systems that was experienced earlier in (womb) life.

Politically — These Poisons Surround Us

There are these poisonous elements — immigrants, communists, socialists, hollywood ideas, teachers, educators, union organizers, activists, “hippies,” beatniks, unemployed, riff raff — who are destroying our “pure” way of life (way of life = blood stream with lots of bright oxygenated blood), and “these influences” are all about us and surrounding us. And we fight back against this toxic encroachment like little supermen fighting for some version of the pristine past … for “truth, justice … and the American way!” 

Prenatal Irritation and Loss of the “Golden Age”

Politically, we scapegoat minorities, gays, immigrants, Jews, Hispanics, hippies, gypsies, witches, as being pollutants to our purity of race, blood. We look out at others as being those “unwashed masses,” who are imposing on our happiness … our “cleanliness.”

But there was a “golden age” before them.

This implies we have a time of purity from the past … the Fifties in America, for example … when only our pure blood existed and life was easy and not filled up with irritating outside elements. And we want to get back to it. In late-gestation discomfort, most of us as prenates actually do have a memory of an earlier time of pristine perfection, harmony, and bliss — BPM I — early womb life.

Yet, now, in adult life, these impure things insert themselves into our lives and disgust us … bad blood. They also surround us … with their filth. In actuality, however, we are merely acting out a time of increasing carbon dioxide, chemical, and waste matter buildup in the late stages of gestation. It is this incursion we are endlessly and futilely fighting off.

Racism, Bigotry, Anti-Semitism, Anti-Immigration

So, because of these prenatal formative experiences, we place some folks “outside our circle” and see them as irritating, even revolting. They are “disgusting” — poisonous — abominations of bloodlines … criminals and rapists and “bad hombres.” Whether they are Jews … not like the pure Aryans. Or Blacks … filthy, lazy, dirty, immoral, it is thought. Or Mexicans … dangerous, threatening, violent, encroaching, it is said. Who want our fresh pure blood — blood libel — our resources.

Notice how this is a veil across how we will see all else outside of our community and nation as well. All these “foreigners” — well, they are just downright irritating! I mean, why don’t they speak the language? And dirty … dirty foreigners we say, dirty French, dirty Jew. Their cultural practices are irritating. I mean, why do they have to wear that thing on their head, dress that way, bow down that way and so many times a day. Best not go into their bathrooms — god only knows what they do there. Seriously, I have a few relatives who tell a story — to them hilarious, to me, just sad — of how they needed to use a bathroom in a part of a city that was predominantly Black … how they ran into the service station rest room, did their business quick as a wink and were out, running to the car, and laughing like they’d made some kind of escape. Why? S’like they thought they would “catch” something.

“Pathetic.”

I know, right?

By contrast to these “dirty foreigners,” we are the “real” Americans. “They,” on the other hand, want to take all that is good … about America, for example … and destroy it; “they” are dragging us down. And they keep coming across our “borders” (placental barrier) and “overrunning” the country (surrounded by toxins in the womb). We think of immigrants as dirty, polluted, and, damn it, they just keep filling up all the space around us. You know, “they’re taking over California, and soon it will be just Northern Mexico!” (And that would be horrible, why exactly?) In the past these same feelings were had by folks in relation to the Irish immigrants, the Polish immigrants, the Jewish immigrants, the Italians….

They are everywhere! We cannot get away from them. They surround us! And they are taking over. They are “poisoning” our way of life. So this is how these early imprints have us seeing others and our society in ways conducive to horrible intolerances and anti-immigration sentiments.

In truth, though, we create our situation in life out of our prenatal matrices and then engage in the drama of acting out against these others by wanting to punish them in a way that mimics how they are making us feel. We experienced our environment as yucky and irritating back then in the womb. So some of us humans, in American times of slavery and Reconstruction, concocted the idea of tarring and feathering these “unclean” others.

The Nazi mind was riddled with this prenatal trauma. They rounded up Jews, ethnic others, and the “undesirables” of their society. They stuffed them (crowded womb) into cattle cars, where many were forced to stand uncomfortably and where they could only defecate on themselves and wallow in their own waste matter (buildup of waste matter in the womb).

I recall seeing a movie — Sarah’s Key, based on an actual event during World War II — where 13,152 Parisian Jews were gathered up and placed in the Vélodrome d’hiver, a sports stadium, for eight days without sanitary facilities until they were processed into even more dire “facilities” at Auschwitz … and murdered.

About the conditions at the stadium, it is written, “The dark glass roof, combined with windows screwed shut for security, raised the temperature inside the structure. The 13,152 people held there had no lavatories; of the ten available, five were sealed because their windows offered a way out, and the others were blocked. The arrested Jews were kept there for eight days with only water and food brought by Quakers, the Red Cross, and the few doctors and nurses allowed to enter.”²

They had no recourse but to fill their own surroundings with waste matter; it was said the stench outside in the surrounding neighborhood was unbearable, quite foul. We see manifest here a pathological imposition of prenatal pushes about being crowded, given very little in the way of resources (oxygen deprivation), in a hot environment (prenatal stuffiness and irritation/burning), and forced to wallow in waste matter (toxic womb).

I have already mentioned the way many Jews were eventually shunted into gas chambers where they were forced to inhale poisonous fumes as a re-creation of prenatal poisoning trauma, PME 3.

At any rate, we feel we need to eliminate these others for “they” want our resources (oxygen). We feel they will use up everything and leave us wanting (deprivation), and left with nothing (oxygen starvation, death). Never mind that in going after them we are looking away from those in society who are actually causing us to struggle for the necessities and to feel deprived. But this has nothing to do with rationality.

The Prenatal Narrative

This prenatal mind has us seeing everything through the fetal narrative: Once upon a time, there was harmony, bliss, perfection. Everyone was happy; we were strong (BPM I).

 

 

But then came change in our lives. Our surroundings became increasingly filled with strange and alien others at the same time as we felt less free and more unhappy (PME 1, crowdedness), our strength waning, and that times had gotten tough: There was less money and we felt unfairly deprived (PME 2, oxygen deprivation).

 

 

We felt that these alien others were infecting our purity of life by imposing upon and inserting themselves into our lives (PME 3, bad blood). Everything around us seemed dirtier and more foul, and they were around us in increasing numbers (amounts of toxins building up), so it was their fault; and their continued presence would eventually kill us (PME 4, poisonous placenta, prenatal irritation-burning). It was they who were responsible for the loss of our pristine way of life. So to do anything about it, it was thought necessary to fight back against this incursion, defend our way of life, family, and the innocents from this “filth,” and shore up the goodness (good blood) and resources (oxygen) we still had. Ultimately, we want to eliminate them, seeing them as the obstacles to returning to that “golden age.” Again, we have another aspect of these matrices coming boldly to light with America’s Trump.

In general, in America this narrative is played out by the right-wing and Tea Party folks: Essentially, they see the world as having gone downhill since a 1950s-style “golden age” when everyone was serene, happy, and prosperous. Never mind that the wealthy at that time paid their fair share of taxes to contribute to a general prosperity, and that these conservatives seek to return to it by having the wealthy pay little to no taxes now. Never mind either that it never really existed the way they think they remember it and that what they want to reinstate is a pasted-together collage of childhood hurts and hopes, bad TV and movies, even worse advertisements and commercials conveying an image of the way Americans really had it (but did not), prenatal imprints, and wudda cudda shudda beens. They see liberals, “bleeding hearts,” hippies, immigrants, and minorities as responsible for preventing a return to that truly mythical golden age. So, these elements are scapegoated for the crimes of the 1%.

In Germany, the same narrative was played out, but their golden age was before World War I. Hitler attained power by promising a return to that time of prosperity, and he scapegoated Jews and other minorities for the German “fall from grace” by pointing to them as blocking a return to national strength and purity.

Thus, sometimes how humans dealt with these threatening incursions of “poisonous” others was with all-out attack … and destruction. Those others were seen to be in the way, so it followed they would need to be eliminated. Yet in the process those “filthy” others would be made to feel the kinds of feelings that their presence was stimulating in the pure ones — the real Germans … nowadays the real Americans.

Remember, these others irritate us and just “burn” us (prenatal irritation/burning). Some say, “It just burns me to look at them!” And folks will act out horribly by killing these others by fire: by burning witches, Jews, enemies in general.

It continues to this day. In the previous chapter I mentioned the Baptist preacher — the one who got “pukin’ sick” at the thought of gays and lesbians — who wanted to surround them with an electrified fence! Not exactly like burning witches, but close enough.

And ultimately … the “Ultimate Solution” … we wish to remove them altogether by burning them up in fires or ovens (prenatal burning/ irritation). This we do either by concentration camps, pogroms, or by the highest tech means of raining fire down upon the undesirables in third world countries.

In modern times, we have rained fire down upon them from aircraft. We have used napalm — liquid fire — and Agent Orange — one of the most toxic compounds created — on these others, who we have called “gooks” and other derisive terms. Bashar Assad has used chemical weapons on his own people, burning away the skin of children. This example, from the war in Syria. These atrocities and prenatal dynamics are hardly limited to the West.

How We Re-Create It in Our Decisions, Ensuring We Will Continue to Feel This Way

These feelings are irrational and not based in fact, of course. We show this in that at the same time as we hate and fight off this incursion into our surroundings, we create overpopulation and a buildup of people who cannot be cared for … who will therefore be the “unwashed,” surrounding us. We fight abortion policies and contraception and so create overpopulation and thus increasing toxicity in our environment.

While we expend our energy fighting reflections of our pain, in the form of other people we create to hate, we bring about the conditions that will keep us feeling the way we do. We create pollution in our environment. We even wish to keep our scapegoats downtrodden and filthy, even though around us and “polluting” us. Our desire is to keep them “dirty,” to keep them as “slaves” and riff-raff. We act to keep them poor, to drive them into the “dirt,” and to keep them from being able to rise above the “squalor.” All so we can continue acting out our prenatal dynamics without being bothered with the raised awareness and personal growth that would come of not scapegoating them … of looking inside for the roots of our discomforts … our irritations, hates, revulsions, and burning angers … our disgusts about what we get, and our panics of not getting/having enough … our feelings of being trapped, hemmed in, and pushed around by the presence of others.

To Summarize

Basically, it comes down to the world being divided into filthy and disgusting things who want our resources (oxygen), and our pearly white threatened selves. Substitute corresponding contrasts for cultures other than American. This is bottom line our feelings of fetal malnutrition and hypoxia creating our prenatal matrix of human evil. It is unfortunately for us projected onto the outside world so strongly we cannot know what is really going on behind that prenatal veil.

Now let us turn to how these prenatal and perinatal screens, the PMEs and the BPMs, have us twisting the reality we see, have us defiling our own homes and aiding our own self-destruction. For toxic womb has been re-created as toxic planet.

 

 

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— FROM *Psychology of Apocalypse: Ecopsychology, Activism, and the Prenatal Roots of Humanicide* by Michael Adzema, coming to print book and e-book format May, 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

https://www.amazon.com/Dance-Seven-Veils-Psychology-Mythology/dp/154243632X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= 

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*Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man* (2016).

At Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Prodigal-Human-Descents-Return-Grace/dp/1530838134/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1485034667&sr=1-1 

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*The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016).

At Amazon —https://t.co/WMyo609jCi

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*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

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*Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation* (2015).

 At Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Funny-God-Minds-Liberation-Return/dp/1499504845/ref=sr_1_7_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485034771&sr=1-7

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*Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness* (2014).

At Amazon — http://amzn.to/2anYVzi

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*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

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Experience Is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor  (2013).

At Amazon — http://amzn.to/2aeeZUA

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 *Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).

At Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-NO-Return-Grace-Book-ebook/dp/B00FG09NNE/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr 

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*Apocalypse Emergency: Love’s Wake-Up Call* (2013).

At Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-Emergency-Loves-Wake-Up-Return/dp/1492810355/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

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*Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”* (2013).

At Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Culture-War-Class-Generations-Obvious/dp/1492864021/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 

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See Michael Adzema at Amazon for any other of the twelve books currently in print.

At https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Adzema/e/B00J7F0URC/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1 

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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

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

https://www.amazon.com/Dance-Seven-Veils-Psychology-Mythology/dp/154243632X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= 

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*Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man* (2016).

At Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Prodigal-Human-Descents-Return-Grace/dp/1530838134/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1485034667&sr=1-1 

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*The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016).

At Amazon —https://t.co/WMyo609jCi

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*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

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*Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation* (2015).

 At Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Funny-God-Minds-Liberation-Return/dp/1499504845/ref=sr_1_7_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485034771&sr=1-7

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*Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness* (2014).

At Amazon — http://amzn.to/2anYVzi

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*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

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 .

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Experience Is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor  (2013).

At Amazon — http://amzn.to/2aeeZUA

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 *Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).

At Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-NO-Return-Grace-Book-ebook/dp/B00FG09NNE/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr 

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 .

 .

*Apocalypse Emergency: Love’s Wake-Up Call* (2013).

At Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-Emergency-Loves-Wake-Up-Return/dp/1492810355/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

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*Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”* (2013).

At Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Culture-War-Class-Generations-Obvious/dp/1492864021/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 

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See Michael Adzema at Amazon for any other of the eleven books currently in print.

At https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Adzema/e/B00J7F0URC/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1 

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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

“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

 

 

 

Click for a free downloadable copy of this excerpt from Dance of the Seven Veils I, with my compliments.

 

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

https://www.amazon.com/Prodigal-Human-Descents-Return-Grace/dp/1530838134/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1485034667&sr=1-1

 

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).

 

At Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Funny-God-Minds-Liberation-Return/dp/1499504845/ref=sr_1_7_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485034771&sr=1-7

 

 

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).

At Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-Emergency-Loves-Wake-Up-Return/dp/1492810355/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

 

 

 

 

 

and *Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).

 

At Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-NO-Return-Grace-Book-ebook/dp/B00FG09NNE/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr

 

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

 

 

.

 

PSPS:

 

DEC 13th THRU DEC 31st… Free copies (e-book/kindle) of *Funny God*, *Wounded Deer and Centaurs*, and *Apocalypse Emergency* by Michael Adzema. 3 of the most recent and recommended.

 

*Funny God:  The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation* is free Wednesday 12-13 thru Sunday 12-17.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Funny-God-Return-Grace-Book-ebook/dp/B00UV83F7Q/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

 

*Wounded Deer and Centaurs:  The Necessary Hero and the Prenatal Matrix of Human Events* is free 12-20 thru 12-24

 

https://www.amazon.com/Wounded-Deer-Centaurs-Necessary-Prenatal-ebook/dp/B01D3PL1Z6/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

 

*Apocalypse Emergency: Love’s Wake-Up Call* is free 12-27 thru 12-31

 

https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-Emergency-Return-Grace-Book-ebook/dp/B00FIV984U/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

 

 

Go to Michael Adzema at Amazon to get the books

 

https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Adzema/e/B00J7F0URC/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_11

 

Go get them, now!

 

 

 

If you appreciate these gifts, and you like the books and you want to show your appreciation, you can do this simply by spreading the word and, even better, by leaving a comment about any of them over at Amazon.

 

Enjoy, with my compliments.

 

*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?”

 

This book will leave you changed and smiling, at least. Some will taste enlightenment; others will sense liberation; and many will feel inspired and enthusiastic about participating in some of the grand and singular undertakings of our current age — an age that Funny God reveals to be affording an opportunity for a life of fulfillment and wonder unlike any since the beginning of time.

 

“these times are the coming together of heaven and earth….

 

“we walk in realms of the mythical, the archetypal….

 

“we are embraced by arms of Divinity … and find ourselves as fingers of God Herself….

 

“we are the myths in motion … are witness to secrets of eternity finally revealed….”

 

“we are players in epic stories of ends of days and beginnings of time….”

 

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

 

https://www.amazon.com/Wounded-Deer-Centaurs-Necessary-Prenatal-ebook/dp/B01D3PL1Z6/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

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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.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-Emergency-Return-Grace-Book-ebook/dp/B00FIV984U/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

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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.

 

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_14?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=michael+adzema&sprefix=michael+adzema%2Cstripbooks%2C269&crid=1EQBOA6ZD0HHA

 

 

“this battle has not gone away at all but is simply being ignored … and consciously *dismissed*”: Culture War, Class War, Occupy Generations

“People like to dismiss efforts such as mine and those of my cohorts at this time as trying to dredge up the battles of the Sixties, to relive or redo the past. This ignores the fact that this battle has not gone away at all but is simply being ignored … and consciously *dismissed*. It is as much here as 200,000 people were there in Wisconsin not long ago, though the media ignored and dismissed that in keeping with their insidious obedience. It is as much here as that we are currently surfing the tsunami of a WORLDWIDE OCCUPY movement addressing all the issues of this culture war, class war. Meanwhile the media exaggerates every Tea Party twitch involving handfuls or at the most hundreds of people and broadcasts far and wide every trivial pronouncement coming from their gang of cartoonish figures. 

“So yes, we are still fighting this culture war. For not only did it never go away, not only has our side not been heard, not only has the other side pounded our positions into rubble; and shouted down, ridiculed, slandered, and misconstrued our points to their own malevolent ends, but …  We ain’t won yet!”

– 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

http://sillymickel.blogspot.mx/2015/09/culture-war-is-class-war-in-disguise.html

#politics #history #book #CultureWar #ClassWar #Occupy #activism #60s

“The last educated generation”: “It had become clear to the people at the top they could better manipulate the masses without free thinkers in the way”

“…the Vietnam War had seen increasingly larger degrees of complaint, criticism, resistance, and defiance to its pursuit from these liberal arts campuses. I was on campus and was part of it. I also saw how the campuses were purged of the liberal thinkers — professors were fired, departments of philosophy, religious studies, history, and the other liberal arts were cut back, often to be eliminated entirely. It had become clear to the people at the top that they could better manipulate the masses without free thinkers in the way. They did not want smart people noticing, that’s for sure…. 

“The result was that the Sixties Generation was the last educated generation. The result was that free-thinking generations would no longer be. They would not be encouraged; they would not be fostered; they would not be tolerated; they would not be *allowed*….”

– 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://www.facebook.com/notes/michael-adzema/culture-war-class-war-the-rise-and-fall-of-obvious-truths-the-book/10151517042708138

#politics #history #book #CultureWar #ClassWar #Occupy #activism #VietnamWar

 

“The fact that Mitt Romney lost is in indication of the “fall of obvious truths”…discussed in…this book and which is the hope abundant in the advance of generations.”

“One of the biggest recent battles in that class war was waged in the U.S. presidential election of 2012. The 1%, having gained an unfair advantage to use their vast wealth unrestrainedly to further their ends electorally, had managed to pollute the electoral process so much that one of its most visible members — Mitt Romney — was able to be one election away from being the most powerful person in the world. Almost one half the American people somehow did not see how that would be a Waterloo for the forces of the 99% and they were okay with that happening. To make things worse, this came on the heels of the one percent’s ongoing effort to dial back the ninety-nine percent’s ability to have a say in their governing with fantastical redistricting outlines and by limiting and harassing voter participation throughout the U.S. with draconian registration requirements and purging of voter rolls. The fact that Mitt Romney lost is in indication of the “fall of obvious truths” that will be discussed in the latter part of this book and which is the hope abundant in the advance of generations.

“Still, the never ending budget battles — which on this very day, incidentally, has led to a shutdown of the U.S. Government because the Republicans do not want to allow health care coverage in America (Obamacare) — and the filibustering and gridlock in Washington on virtually all legislation needed for American advance indicate the battle has not ended the war. Indeed, this one-time “cold war” between the 1% and the 99% has heated up fast. Let us start by looking at its beginnings….”

– 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=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1441898173&sr=1-8

https://www.facebook.com/notes/michael-adzema/culture-war-class-war-the-rise-and-fall-of-obvious-truths-the-book/10151517042708138

for any of Michael Adzema’s books, go to http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Adzema/e/B00J7F0URC/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1

#politics #history #book #1% #99% #CultureWar #ClassWar #Occupy

 

“There are always those, those who have conformed and submitted, who view any who leave the fold as thinking too much of themselves….”

“There are always those, those who have conformed and submitted, who view any who leave the fold as thinking too much of themselves. These conformists have thrown away their pride, self-respect, and mission in life in hopes of being applauded and approved by the very ones, the ones above them, who’ve denigrated them. They sure as hell don’t like seeing any who have escaped that.”

“…these sycophants have repressed their own urges, upon the directions of others, so they can’t stand seeing anyone freer … having the fun … the pleasure … that they can’t have … that they have denied themselves.”

“SillyMickel calls them kitty-drowners and butterfly-mashers.”

“For these people hate the good, they can’t stand to see it, they must crush it to conform to how they had to crush the beauty inside themselves.”

– from “Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation” http://www.amazon.com/Funny-God-Return-Grace-Book-ebook/dp/B00UV83F7Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1441217959&sr=1-1&keywords=michael+adzema

#conformity #spirituality #sycophant #oppression #kentstate #follow #tsu #activist #awakening #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.”

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”:

“…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.

“So, the amount of surplus value in any society is equal to the amount of additional suffering that has been created through hierarchy and coercion. The huge structures of civilization are monuments to, and are equal in size to, the size of the freedom lost. Surplus value equals additional suffering brought needlessly into an otherwise joyous Nature and occurring as a result of human’s completely unnecessary control obsession.

“The size of public edifice is equal to the amount of enslavement. Consider that next time you look in awe at a city’s skyline.

“Not only are such structures representative of the degree of loss of freedom and degree of suffering but also the size of Ego. These monstrosities are monuments to the degree of separation from Nature and to the size of Ego these Large Accumulators have now and have had, since the beginning of sedentary ways.

“So, Marxists go only so far in uncovering the injustice inherent in societies. They want access to that surplus value that is wrought of that misery of having to do, just about all the time, what one does not want to do. Marxists never question whether it is at all worth it; they never look into whether people who are chained to the products of their hands are ever happy or free, regardless how much of that product comes back to those hands.

“It is for this reason that the Marxist experiments in the Soviet Union and elsewhere turned out the way they did — failed. For they are built on the same idea of humans as being cogs and slaves as is their capitalist counterparts. They were still built upon a conceptualization of humans as “economic man,” and consequently a determination of life’s purpose as being merely material.

“For so many thousands of years had humans been enslaved and working under coercion and glee-less, by the time Marxism was being formulated, that a free life — like the one in Nature — was completely inconceivable. So they built their prescriptions upon the wreckage wrought of your falls from grace in Nature, seeking not for human freedom and release from bondage and suffering but rather for a fairer distribution of the products of that bondage and suffering. Efforts like this are sometimes described as “rearranging furniture on the decks of the Titanic.”

“Another reason your best thinkers for economic justice and your best utopian Marxists could not even conceive of solutions that addressed the real injustices of your lives and of the human predicament, in terms of what it had at this point become, is that whatever they imagined was built firmly within the context of human wrong-gettedness. That is to say, Marxists, in looking into the misery and injustice of the world, looked only so far as the suffering and injustice of humans. Sometimes they did not even look at the injustice or suffering of women. They certainly did not see the injustice and misery of children. And most significantly, they completely abjured planetmates: They sought, just like capitalists, to eke out excess goods at the cost of Nature and planetmate suffering.

“The bottom line is that Marxist and utopian theory, up till now, is built upon the superiority of “man” and his dominion over Nature. Marxists, claiming to be atheist and impugning religion as an opiate of the masses, still built their conceptualization of humans in Reality upon the Judea-Christian notion that humans were given, by God, “dominion” over Nature and all of its life. So, unable to see the blatant and egregious egotism involved in that (making them no different from the Large Accumulators they abhor), and instead attempting to erect an edifice fueled by such unholy and desperate self-congratulations, what they constructed was shaky, flawed, and woefully inadequate. You cannot construct an economic utopia upon the misery of anyone, is what they could not see. As we have said, nowhere and at no time have humans been able to see through their wrong-gettedness and have an inkling of the Unapproved and Hidden. Inherent in that is that humans are also planetmates and that non-human planetmates are as alive and deserving of respect and consideration as are humans: Our suffering matters, you see. And Marxists attempted utopian reformulations of the same tired old human breast-thumping, as had been going on for thousands of years.

“At any rate, such efforts, as those of Marxists, were doomed to failure, for they did not address the true human predicament. Their remedy of a “new boss” did not take into account the fact that the new boss would be same as the old boss. For human happiness, pleasure, spirituality, creativity are used to purchase those surplus economic products of hierarchical societies. That surplus does not rise up magically into existence, produced sui generis. Marxists, if they had been as “scientific” as they claimed, would have known the fundamental law of physics that energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be transformed.

“So, no. This surplus value in society is not sprung magically into existence from nothing. No, what one gains in additional good — in surplus — is carved out of one’s soul and purchased with human misery and tragic non-fulfillment in life.

“And where does that surplus come from? Indeed, surplus product is bought at the cost of suffering, work-type suffering. When you added surplus work to your lives, you created surplus suffering equal to that, and then, only after that, surplus product.

“But all this “surplus” is unnecessary … as unnecessary as the suffering involved in its production. People would rather have toys than be happy, is what it comes down to. They would rather be overfed than satisfied. People would rather appear to be having a full and rich life more than they actually want an exquisite existence. And appear to who? Herein we have that sycophancy built upon low self-regard, again. Humans would rather have the “Joneses” be impressed with the amount and quality of their possessions — so that they might think those neighbors approve them, maybe would like them, maybe would look up to and give deference to them — than to actually be happy….”

— from Planetmates: The Great Reveal , which is now available in print and e-book format.  at Amazon 

at  http://www.amazon.com/Planetmates-Great-Reveal-Return-Grace/dp/1496083326/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1399084684&sr=1-1&keywords=michael+adzema

 

Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness — is also available in print and e-book formats.

at   http://www.amazon.com/Falls-Grace-Devolution-Revolution-Consciousness/dp/1499297998/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1400787010&sr=1-3 

 

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.

“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….”

 

.

[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

https://www.amazon.com/Dance-Seven-Veils-Psychology-Mythology/dp/154243632X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= 

.

 

 .

.

*Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man* (2016).

At Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Prodigal-Human-Descents-Return-Grace/dp/1530838134/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1485034667&sr=1-1 

.

 

 .

 .

*The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016).

At Amazon —https://t.co/WMyo609jCi

 .

 .

.

*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

 .

 .

.

*Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation* (2015).

 At Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Funny-God-Minds-Liberation-Return/dp/1499504845/ref=sr_1_7_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485034771&sr=1-7

.

 

 .

.

*Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness* (2014).

At Amazon — http://amzn.to/2anYVzi

 .

 .

.

*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

.

 .

.

Experience Is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor  (2013).

At Amazon — http://amzn.to/2aeeZUA

.

 .

.

 *Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).

At Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-NO-Return-Grace-Book-ebook/dp/B00FG09NNE/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr 

.

 

 .

 .

*Apocalypse Emergency: Love’s Wake-Up Call* (2013).

At Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-Emergency-Loves-Wake-Up-Return/dp/1492810355/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

 .

 .

,

*Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”* (2013).

At Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Culture-War-Class-Generations-Obvious/dp/1492864021/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 

 .

 .

 .

See Michael Adzema at Amazon for any other of the twelve books currently in print.

At https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Adzema/e/B00J7F0URC/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1 

.

.

To purchase a signed copy of any of my books, email me at sillymickel@gmail.com … Discount for blog subscribers.

To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.

Invite you to join me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/sillymickel

friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel

“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”

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

.
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

https://www.amazon.com/Dance-Seven-Veils-Psychology-Mythology/dp/154243632X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= 

.

 

 .

.

*Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man* (2016).

At Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Prodigal-Human-Descents-Return-Grace/dp/1530838134/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1485034667&sr=1-1 

.

 

 .

 .

*The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016).

At Amazon —https://t.co/WMyo609jCi

 .

 .

.

*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

 .

 .

.

*Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation* (2015).

 At Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Funny-God-Minds-Liberation-Return/dp/1499504845/ref=sr_1_7_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485034771&sr=1-7

.

 

 .

.

*Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness* (2014).

At Amazon — http://amzn.to/2anYVzi

 .

 .

.

*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

.

 .

.

Experience Is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor  (2013).

At Amazon — http://amzn.to/2aeeZUA

.

 .

.

 *Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).

At Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-NO-Return-Grace-Book-ebook/dp/B00FG09NNE/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr 

.

 

 .

 .

*Apocalypse Emergency: Love’s Wake-Up Call* (2013).

At Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-Emergency-Loves-Wake-Up-Return/dp/1492810355/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

 .

 .

,

*Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”* (2013).

At Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Culture-War-Class-Generations-Obvious/dp/1492864021/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 

 .

 .

 .

See Michael Adzema at Amazon for any other of the twelve books currently in print.

At https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Adzema/e/B00J7F0URC/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1 

.

.

Invite you to join me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/sillymickel

friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel