Posts Tagged hell
blasphemy? meh. “we talk about fear of God as being a good thing…God–stern, fatherly, punishing…sin…Well, all of that is wrong….”
Posted by sillymickel in awakening, books, consciousness, Funny God, God, Michael Adzema author, Patriarchal culture, spirituality on September 9, 2015
“We have ideas like blasphemy because of the old and mistaken notions of hell but even more so of God being stern, fatherly, and punishing. We have notions of sin because of both of those. And we talk about fear of God as somehow being a good thing.
“…because of our mistake we have cast the world — this one and the one “beyond” — in this oh-so-serious light….
“Well, all of that is wrong. As we now know. And in with those things that are legacies from those wrong, and unfortunately tragic, ideas is the idea of blasphemy. As we found out, God is bigger than we thought. Loving. All-Merciful. And God hardly cares about things like sins and blasphemy. Because it is not like God is some insecure childish king demanding nobody say anything disrespectful about Him….”
– from “Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation” http://www.amazon.com/Funny-God-Minds-Liberation-Return/dp/1499504845/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
https://www.facebook.com/notes/michael-adzema/we-have-learned-that-god-is-not-separate-from-us-is-not-punishing-and-hardly-car/10152582167133138
For any of Michael Adzema’s books, go to http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Adzema/e/B00J7F0URC/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1
#consciousness #spirituality #blasphemy #God #sin #follow #tsu #hell #awakening #GodIsNotChildish #Funny God
To most Christians, and many conspiracy theorists, I want to say, you way OVER-estimate humanity….
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, Culture, globalrevolution, nonconform, philosophy, psychology, spirituality on April 1, 2014
To most Christians, and many conspiracy theorists, I want to say, you way OVER-estimate humanity, and yourself, to think you need a Devil to explain evil in the world.
You way UNDER-estimate humanity, and yourself, to think you need a Hell in order to get people to be loving or to behave.
Your “wound” is the wall you get to push against in life to build up your spiritual “muscles”: Planetmates reveal love, woundedness, relationships, real healing, real transcendence….
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Culture, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, philosophy, psychology, spirituality on March 6, 2014
“…You wish to turn your infants into the parents you wished you had. You love your children to the extent that they hold out the hope that they will become that — your longed for parents. But, no, you cannot bear the thought that your love is tainted with selfishness this way.
“Still, can you notice how this kind of parental love becomes the template for all that you see to be love? We have described how you have created your gods in the image of your parents in infancy — making them capricious, as your parents were, and yet potentially nurturing (if only you could be a certain way) as you wished they had been. Do you see that you view all your relations, and your love, through the veil of these deprivations?
“You choose your lovers and mates out of these same deprivations: You are drawn to those who are imperfect and capricious in their caring — in a way matching or reminiscent of what you received in childhood and infancy — but you pick them out by seeing in them the behaviors and ways that for you are a hope that you will actually get what you needed long ago. You pick out partners who are imperfect in a way similar to what your parents were, so that you can continue the unreal struggle — which you failed at as an infant — to turn these imperfect people into the kind you really need. This struggle is rooted in an understandable reluctance to accept that what you got was not only less than ideal, but was traumatic. So ever after you try to make those events as if they did not happen — which is an impossible and unreal struggle.
“So, to the extent that your adult partners do not match up with those hopes for them to be what you needed back then (and think about it, how can they? … being both like your parents but you’re thinking they will not be like them) you seek to change them in ways that they will be the end of your lonely years of yearning and unfulfillment. So you see your adult loved ones and partners the same way you see your infants and children: You seem in them what you need and you seek to make of them that which will lead to the healing of those long ago hurts.
“And so you are ever doomed to failure. You cannot change people into who you want, any more than you could your parents. In fact, a characteristic pattern of humans is for you to begin having infants at exactly that point in a relationship with a partner — in a marriage, for example — when one realizes that one is going to fail at turning that person into the longed for parent. It is no coincidence that one’s attention will go, at that point, toward seeing if those long ago hurts can be quelled through an infant instead … or, for some people, through another lover … and thus you have infidelity or serial monogamy.
“In this situation, the spouse does not satisfy, or quell, those pangs emanating from hidden and long ago deprivations, so babies and children are wanted, or another lover. Later, when the child comes up short … and it will because a child cannot be a parent, really (I mean, seriously now) … people often turn to religion to continue the unreal struggle to satisfy those needs. That is why humans often turn to religion later in life, seeking to find in the Phantom deity what they failed to find anywhere else in life. They come to religion after exhausting all possibilities for correcting an injustice which happened long ago.
“When religion also fails, that is a time when one might possibly be open to hearing us and facing the truth that one cannot make of one’s life whatever one wants. That life is full of pain, disappointment, and injustice.
“And not that that is right or okay, but simply that it is not that big of a deal: Life is magnificent whichever way it goes. For whether struggling to be free, pushing against limitations, strengthening oneself and alternating between frustration and accomplishment, it is all experience, it is all marvelous adventure.
“The purpose of life is not the to reach the goal, for it takes many lifetimes to return to divinity. And in the meantime, the goal is not even what would be desired. For the journey is all. And it is in making mistakes that one continues the journey. The imperfections of life are the rails upon which life’s journey rolls along. They are necessary, however much at some point you will want to go beyond them.
“At any rate, when it comes to seeking satisfaction of early deprivations in others—whether romantic partners, children, or the Phantom in religions—you are doomed to failure. For you cannot remake people. In addition, you cannot satisfy those needs of long ago, not fully, even if you do get in the present what you needed then. You cannot undo a wound by not getting hurt again in the present. These early deprivations are a wound upon which and around which you have built your personality and your entire life plan. It has been cauterized and set long ago. So, you cannot rid yourself of it, and the ache of it, by simply not being further wounded.
“Certainly, you are better off by not drawing to yourselves, as you will, those who will continually reopen that wound, who will continually mimic the primal events and retrigger the pain. But, like you express in your myth of Prometheus, this is a wound that will never heal; it becomes you; it is the wall you get to push against in life in order to build up your spiritual “muscles.”
“But, you can at least progress in life beyond the unconscious and tedious re-creation of hurts and re-invigoration of old and hurtful patterns. It is better to not draw to you that which will continually trigger you, but you cannot do that by denying your woundedness. And it is for that reason — in order to stop the cycles of hope and then hurt — that it is better you face and embrace your woundedness. For in denying and repressing it, you are forever doomed to recreating it. By reversing that separation from body and, feeling the body and its aches and pains and urges again, reconnecting with your woundedness, re-member-ing yourself, you have at least the knowing making you capable of choosing something different. In this way you can free yourself.
“And the more you re-member yourself, the freer you can be. That is the true “transcendence”: It is one rooted in a re-feeling of and re-membering of the hurts and pains in one’s body that is left over from the past and not a separating away from and a denying of that stored pain … as if one is above body and Nature … and confusing that self-congratulation and ego aggrandizement with enlightenment….”
— 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
*The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016).
*Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness* (2014).
*Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).
,
*Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”* (2013).
.
Invite you to join me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/sillymickel
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel
“You care for children desperately hoping they will fill the huge hole of unloving you carry from infancy”: Unreal love and roots of woundedness … “babies having babies” … parental love … what the planetmates reveal
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Culture, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, philosophy, psychology, spirituality on March 5, 2014
“So, non-expression of needs became of survival value in a species who were reluctant to care for their young because of their own unmet needs from infancy and childhood. And cuteness and adorability — smiling more as opposed to less, fussing less, being engaging, attentive, and entertaining, connecting more with the eyes — was of survival value for the same reason but also for another. This has to do with what you call love, in particular, parental love.
“Remember, you have an emotionally damaged adult — one who unconsciously seeks the satisfaction of needs left over from childhood in all the activities of his or her life and whose motives and intentions are ever skewed in ways symbolic or reflective of those needs. So, how do you suppose this adult views a tiny, unformed Other (a baby), who is dependent upon them? This adult also sees its newborn through its veil of emotional thirst and deprivation.
“This part is perhaps the hardest for you to see, for it is here that you lay down the gauntlet — here, if nowhere else … and both women and men alike — about your superiority to Nature. If you have been able to agree with us so far, this is the acid test of your ability to view reality and yourself outside of Ego — outside of your emotional deprivations and their consequent overcompensations of self-congratulation. For this apperception of yourself is easily taken as an affront to that which is at the core of — now, even your women’s — ego esteem: That is, the idea of human love, especially parental love, being pure and, again, transcendent, and above and making one superior to a supposedly unfeeling and brutish Nature.
“It is not that humans are not capable of love. You are, of course. But you would not need to defame Nature’s love and to glorify one’s own if your love was as untainted with selfishness and as transcendent as you profess. As we have been detailing (see the 4th Prasad, especially), this congratulation of yourselves on this point serves to offset the basic inferiority you feel in comparison with Nature and its planetmates. But beyond that this vanity about the quality of your love does yeoman’s duty toward helping you to forget and deny the pain and deprivations you yourself endured under the “care” — as infants — of those who were deluded similarly to the way you now yourself cling to being deluded — your own mother and caregivers.
“Having been seen, as infants, through the famished eyes of adult caregivers who noticed in you the traits, behaviors, and characteristics of you that were reminiscent of the satisfaction of their needs, you felt the incredible hurt of not being truly seen: You experienced that your own needs were not going to be attended to — they would not even be noticed — unless they fit in somehow with your parents’ woundedness or could be made to be seen by them, somehow, as potential relief of your parents’ suffering. You experienced that whatever needs were noticed by the Other would be reinterpreted along lines to fit their needs, not your own. Unseen at times and misunderstood at others, you felt most alone, and you carried forward that hurt as central to your construction of an adult personality.
“So, when you yourself had a child, that child would be seen and understood primarily to the extent that and in the ways that your child’s behavior and ways fit with your leftover desires to be seen … in a vicious circle … from generation to generation. Quite simply, your babies would be seen and loved to the extent that they mirrored for you the parents you wished you had. And your children, being unseen and deprived this way, would grow up to be adults who, having their babies, would see and attend to them to the extent they mirrored what they wished you had been like.
“Again, you are babies having babies. You will attend to the needs of your young ones, at least to the minimum needed, if it seems they will fill that huge hole of feeling unloved that you carry from your infancy. You will nurture and foster the thriving of your children, to the extent that it seems they will have the qualities that you wished had been in your caregivers in infancy. And when those characteristics are lacking, you will seek to plant them into your young ones and/or develop them along those lines … lines which are in accordance with the relief of your hurts and the satisfaction of long ago needs. You wish to turn your infants into the parents you wished you had. You love your children to the extent that they hold out the hope that they will become that — your longed for parents. But, no, you cannot bear the thought that your love is tainted with selfishness this way….”
— 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
*The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016).
*Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness* (2014).
*Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).
,
*Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”* (2013).
.
Invite you to join me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/sillymickel
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel
Tribes and Wonder Versus Civilization and Suffering: More Nestling Up With the Implicate Order, Or Before and After the Western Fall (Split)
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Class, Culture, economics, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, occupywallstreet, philosophy, Politics, psychology, science, spirituality on January 7, 2014
The Priests in the Church Were Keeping Out All the Screaming People, Forcibly Repressing, Refusing to Acknowledge It: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Seven
(continued from The Bliss of Connection with Others … But There Is a Pain in Unexpressed Love: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Six — Womb with a Review [Footnote 1])
More Nestling Up With the Implicate, Or
Before and After the Western Fall (Split) (June 19, 1992)
This is a holotropic session of this day:
It started out when the music was very rhythmic, and the hands were doing a lot of fertilized-egg kinds of movements and embryonic kind of stuff. And sometimes I was having images of Prague and of inside the city—especially Old Town Square and the towers. [Prague is where the holotropic workshop was being held.]
And I kept having pictures of people who had lived here, and all the suffering that had gone on here, and the striving. I kept picturing the people who had lived and written books and everything, plays and philosophies, inside their little rooms—all the different kinds of lives that people had here [Prague].
I kept picturing Swami [Sathya Sai Baba] and kept saying: “Oh Swami,” as if I were feeling and acknowledging what had gone on here: the feelings and desires, the struggles and the yearnings, and all those human things and feelings that had passed through this place. And I felt sad for all these people, the hardship they had gone through and all the feelings. And then I got up and went to the bathroom.
And when I came back it was just very peaceful. The drumming and everything was just something that was there. And I enjoyed parts of it: There were African parts, and they would have drumming and I would understand what it would be like to be an African person in a tribe.
At one point, however, the African tribe music sounded different or not good. And I had the feeling that this was singing from another tribe, not my own, an enemy tribe or something; I didn’t like it.
And then as it went off into different phases of music I would often feel very good—very interesting and beautiful in a certain way. And then it went into Native American chanting; and I thought that was incredible, that I must have been an indigenous American at one time … just wonderfully beautiful.
And it was either just before or just after that there was this Gregorian-type Church music. And one of the things that I kept having—scenes from Prague going through my head the entire time—and one of the scenes was the inside of a church.
And when the Gregorian music came on, I pictured the inside of that church again. And one of the interesting things was I realized at a certain point that people in the room around me were screaming [they actually were, in reality]—and there was a lot of that going on—and I had this feeling as if—when the Gregorian music was on—that the people in the church, the priests that is, that they had this reality going on in which they were keeping out all the screaming people, they were keeping them all outside the church, trying to repress that, trying to deny the reality of that. And so I felt like I was tuning into the reality of this place: That they [the priests and ecclesiasts] would forcibly try to repress this other element and keep it out of their consciousness, would refuse to acknowledge, let alone deal with it.
An Afterthought
As many as 30 million women were murdered horribly over a period of 300 years during the middle ages for having any trace of free-mindedness. This was done under the direction of the Catholic Church. They were often burned at the stake.
It is no coincidence that what followed for next four hundred years of Western “civilization” was a pall of Stepford wifery unparalleled among the cultures of humans, which we are only with great difficulty over the last hundred years awakening from.
Yet these forces of repression and murder continue with us today wishing to take us back to such middle age benighted views. They exist in the anti-abortion movement, even among mainstream Republicans, again with women as the direct target. And they exist in the tea party and conspiracy circles, even among some progressives, where feminism and progressive-liberal ideas are called “illuminati” — showing again that free-thinking women and enlightened views will not be tolerated … and will be scapegoated for all the horrors of the 1% and the powers that be, just as they were in the times of Catholic tyranny.
By the way, I’ve been misunderstood if anyone thinks this is just an attack on the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church was the primary evil then. I mentioned Western civilization. There are many more evil perpetrators today. It is not about blaming any institution. This is a product of our “civilization” and its anti-body, anti-sexual, anti-Nature insanity and the inherent evil of hierarchical societies in general.
Continue with Biology as Metaphor and Mythology, Part One: “The Map Is Not the Territory” and Biological Phases As Levels of Consciousness
Return to The Bliss of Connection with Others … But There Is a Pain in Unexpressed Love: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Six — Womb with a Review
Footnote
1. Cellular/ Transpersonal Experiences
Having established the legitimacy of transpersonal aspects of prenatal, and especially cellular, re-experience, it remains to be seen what light this new perspective throws upon traditional formulations. I suggest to you that this perspective is a catalyst to a radical reformulation of traditional concepts of consciousness and development. My understanding is that it supports a view compatible with Eastern, Platonic, and “primitive” philosophical renderings—which can be characterized as Emanationist —and completely undermines the dominant Western evolutionary paradigm. I delineate such a perspective, which I call the Falls from Grace Theory, beginning in the next chapter.
However, let us first take a look at a sampling of the kinds of experiences and perspectives that are possible at this cellular and prenatal level of re-experience before attempting to see deeper into the structure of consciousness and development, presented immediately afterwards, which contains and makes sense of them. The current chapter—A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness—contains transcripts of cellular/transpersonal experiences I had through the modality of holotropic breathwork. In order to retain the flavor and potency of the raw experience itself, these transcripts are only slightly edited and are from the descriptions of my experiences I recorded immediately after having them.
Continue with Biology as Metaphor and Mythology, Part One: “The Map Is Not the Territory” and Biological Phases As Levels of Consciousness
Return to The Bliss of Connection with Others … But There Is a Pain in Unexpressed Love: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Six — Womb with a Review
To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Falls from Grace
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:
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Keep on Cosmic Giggling and HumanLand — Fun, New Amusement Park: Experience is Divinity, Part Thirteen — Fun Times Waking from Nightmares
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, globalrevolution, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, philosophy, psychology, science, spirituality on December 27, 2013
Human Darkness, The Cosmic Game, and Why God Is LHAO: Life Is Like God’s Joke, Requiring that She Forget the Punch Line in Order to Enjoy It.
The Cosmic Game
Keep on Cosmic Giggling
So you might think of it as the game, the Cosmic Game…the only game that God can play in which there is such high drama and all the pizzazz that goes with that, and in which, at times, all these different viewing points are created, these different beings or foci of awareness, like different camera angles on the Thing as a Whole. And they all witness different perspectives on it all.
Additionally, the human view has it that they are individual, separate actors going through different experiences, suffering from a very fun idea of having free will and being actual creators—little mini-gods, if you will—of what they view.
Human Darkness, God’s Nature, and Why God Is LHAO
So the one that’s human is where you have the delusion—the darkness—that will allow you to have the biggest, whooping, howling, wake-up of all when you realize it’s not real. So life is like God’s joke, requiring that He forget the punch line in order to enjoy it. Like I said, God’s nature, and ours, is laughter. And that’s what He wants.
That’s why She created us, why She created humans. Because there’s beauty, and all that, in all the rest of creation. But it’s only through becoming much less than Herself and totally forgetting who She is and becoming us, that when She remembers…when He/She remembers…that She can go, “Wow!!!! THAT was FUN!!!”
(From a Billboard in Heaven:) HumanLand — Fun, New Amusement Park
I mean, we are God. And what did we create? Amusement parks! What do amusement parks do? Lots of peek-a-boo, don’t they?
So much of it is set up to scare the hell out of you. You go on a roller coaster. It’s going up and then reaches the top. Then it drops. You feel a rush that you are going to die. You scream….
But nobody’s going to die. Nobody dies. And we say it’s fun!
Why We Insist on Haunting Houses
But, there’s more obvious ones. How about that haunted house thing? Where it’s like do-de-do-de-do-de-do-de.… And you’ve got all these scary things. You’re trapped inside and you can’t get out. Oh, and they will get you! And surely you will die, you will be haunted forever….
You’re thinking, “Oh, my god! Oooohh!! Nooo!”
And then what? Suddenly it’s all over and you walk out and it’s sunshine, it’s Disneyland, and people are eating cotton candy… So, it’s like, “Holy fuck!”
You see? But you see you have to really believe it for it to be so much fun. Unless you forget… If you go in there knowing it’s an amusement park…. Well, it’s not so much fun! Right?
Fun Times Waking from Nightmares
But when you do allow yourself to put your awareness on the shelf for a while and get in to it as if it IS real, then it’s an in-cre-di-ble fun. It’s like the most fun. It’s like when you have a nightmare. You ever have a dream that was sooo horrible… that you were sooo glad it was a dream when you woke up?
Tae Kwon Horror Movie — New, Fun Spiritual Practice
Well, that’s a taste of it, too. How about…and of course this is not exactly forgetting…but we have a taste of it every time we go to a horror movie. Why would we even invent them? We have horror movies because we are practicing that thing of being terrified, yet having faith that the thing that we’re seeing will not harm us and we’ll be ok. It’s actually a practice…a spiritual practice…of seeing horror, but not giving it strength, not giving it reality.
And in life we do the same thing. The horrible things we create for ourselves, for our amusement as God, are ultimately not real. And it is only when we give these things reality, or “energy,” that we actually react to them and act them out! But even then, we are, in acting them out, experiencing things. And that is part of the journey, too. As I said, all roads lead home and every path is magnificent. There is no such thing as a short or a long time for returning to Divinity.
So that’s why we can talk about there being no high or low, about there being no good or bad, ultimately.
The Dream Is Over.
But, you know, at some point we want to go back.
Pretty much when we’re talking like this, we’re tired of it … we’re tired of the whole thing, all the drama, the Cosmic Dream. We’ve had enough of it, and we want to go back. We’re ready. We’re ready to understand, to remember again….
Continue with “You Lose Your Form, You Lose Your Fear”: Experience Is Divinity, Part Fourteen — The Dream Is Over, Liquid Memories, and THE TRUTH
Return to Mind and Motion ~ Being and Forgetting; We Are Stardust … Sorta; and Where the Poignancy Comes In: Reality Is a Funny God
To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Experience Is Divinity
To purchase Experience Is Divinity, or any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
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What the planetmates really think of us, the latest: On human “evolution,” control, conformity, birth…”controlling your young”
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, occupywallstreet, philosophy, Politics, psychology, science, spirituality, uniqueness on December 14, 2013
The Twentieth Prasad — Controlling Your Young
Humans are defined by the fact of your prematurity and the consequent long period of dependence on fully growns for survival. In the light of your continued descent into ever more controlling of all aspects of your surround — as we’ve seen, your ways of having your survival needs met, your lifeways (nomadic to sedentary), the Fauna Empire of planetmates around you, the Flora Empire of planetmates, others of your own species, and even your own selves, your own otherwise authentic beingness — all coming under control over time, and over time increasing control of all these — it is not surprising, however sad, that this obsessive control would be applied to your offspring in their dependent state as well. Remember, your newborns, prematurely born, helpless, and thrown out of Nature’s divine blueprint for perfect nurturing would die out of pure despair if not for the creation of the alien construct of Ego. And the delivery system of this Ego is predominantly the fully growns who are attendant upon the needs of the helpless prematures.
Paraphrase/ Elaboration of Twentieth Prasad by Michael Adzema:
Keep in mind that it is the mania to control your lives excessively that separates you from Nature and makes of you a consciousness opposed to the natural. For you set yourselves apart and above Nature to control Her. The core of that drive to dominate and what distinguishes you as humans and separates you from the other planetmates, as we have been saying, is your aberration of premature births—relative to the rest of us planetmates—with its result that newborns are dependent on adult caretakers for, relatively, an exceedingly long time. It is how we define you, in fact: Humans are the planetmates who experience a brutal birth, far before they are ready, which sets off a crazed overcompensation of mental activity to defend against the pain of it. Additionally, humans are the planetmates who have an excessively long infancy, where their needs are only partially met, which results in extreme controlling behavior applied to every aspect of life and all other beings in their world afterwards, in adult life.
Now, a special example of your increasing controlling-dominating behaviors involves the way you see your children. Controlling and dominating your young is special because, remember, it is because of the characteristics of your infancy and birth that this devolution of yours away from Nature began. Your prematurity and dependency as infants causes the feeling of lack, of insufficiency, that in life pushes you to mistrust and control:
Your earliest learning of this world was that you did not get what you needed when you needed it (as an infant) and that you were left all alone to stew in that misery. So you fear, forever after, that you will not get what you need, again, and that you will die of that. Without really deciding it, driven by fear, you focus nearly all your energy and thought upon making sure those terrorizing feelings of hunger and abandonment will never happen again, in any possible future, by controlling all you possibly can that is happening around you in the present. Your intent in dominating all aspects of your surround is to wage war against a feared scarcity or shortage of life-sustaining resources, which you once experienced and—rightfully so—felt to be the gravest inequity and deadliest injustice.
But that urge to control—having its roots in your infancies—you turn around and direct back at your own infants, in their turn. For all kinds of reasons arising from that early experience of intense craving and longing—which we will elaborate upon shortly—you further hinder your children’s satisfaction of their early needs from what it would be for them otherwise. Thus you increase their drive to control everything around them when they become adults … in a vicious circle.
So, sure enough, in your “progress of man,” your own infants became the next category of beings to come under your maddened gaze as targets for your controlling. They were convenient candidates for domination, being, as they are, completely dependent upon your fully growns for survival for that long period in infancy; and being that, to a lesser extent, for their entire childhood, they are very little able to fend for themselves without the assistance of adults.
To backtrack, your “evolution” … actually your fall from Nature … amounts to an increasing controlling fetish. We have been detailing how it began—pushed by that overheated brain and feelings of inadequateness of needs met in infancy—with a drive to control your food resources as adults. Mistrusting Nature to provide for your sustenance—as it had done for you in the past and as it does for all other planetmates—you began expanding the area of your control over food gathering by including planetmate flesh in your diet. You began hunting fauna and killing the animate planetmates for your pleasure and to beat back those dreaded uncertainty feelings.
The next stage of your taking over the details of the ways in which you would sustain yourselves involved your dominating the Flora Empire. You invented horticulture, and through farming you were able to control the lives of plant beings and suit them to your increasingly unnatural tastes and to add to your food resources.
Your descent into ever more controlling of all aspects of your environment next involved corralling planetmates. With husbandry, you took away their freedom and saw them as little different from the plants you grew and consumed. Plucked from their habitats in Nature, Fauna planetmates were, as it were, “grown” in your circumscribed habitats to be used as slave labor and/or to be parted out as food and other objects for your use.
Notice how each of these steps involves an increasing inability to view other life as sentient and deserving of respect or consideration. Under the self-centeredness of Ego consciousness, you were seeing all about you as having their reason for existence as being you.
These developments required a sedentary mode of living, for you could not continue your natural nomadic ways while seeking to grow in place planetmates of either the vegetative or the warm-blooded variety. And this switch to a fixed domicile allowed you to act out, through excessive storage and over-accumulation, your paranoid fears of excruciating want.
Sedentary living also allowed you full sway of your defensive mania of creating substitute projects for the real adventures of life, which, now being sedentary, you could say you owned … for you had a place to put them and they did not have to be carried. So, you could go wild in your frenzies to possess and to build edifices and contraptions, equal in magnitude to your fears, that could serve in staving off that feared future of insufficiency and the dreaded pain of want. You became big on creating implements to expand your powers of control and to aid you in your outer defensiveness against your inner fears. You built structures, furnishings, tools, and devices—while sedentary—in the hopes of avoiding that sense of extreme, life-or-death need while being totally helpless to do anything about it, which you experienced in infancy. You owned, built, controlled, invented, and dominated all about you out of your terror of an imagined helplessness in the face of possible death.
Again, Ego’s demands were to fortify itself against any and all threats to survival—imagined or real. This time, excessive accumulation and manic struggle in the creation and possession of items that might serve as insurance against future discomfort was the manner of your waging war with uncertainty. Though this lifeway satisfied these irrational desires and lusts to have and to control, it was unnatural for you, relative to what you truly wanted and needed; and it required a further diminishment of your experience of life. Specifically, sedentary living took the joy of play and adventure out of your lives and substituted sameness and drudgery—all under the promise of avoiding a lack or insufficiency of resources that was almost entirely imaginary.
So, with increasing accumulation—allowed through sedentary living and control and domination of food sources—your next “advance” of control could manifest: You began to seek power over and to determine the behavior of other humans. The hunger games gave way to controlling-conforming ones. Status and hierarchy became the symbolic representations of your unease and insecurity—your nagging sense of lacking something you needed. And women were the ultimate targets for domination in these games, for all men could put themselves above at least these, as their reward for conformity to others.
The methods of your control over other humans extended into cruelty, torture, and killing, in order to extract obedience. Again, your conscience allowed this through your continued removal of the idea of aliveness to all in your environs but yourself … but your Ego. In seeing all life around you as unfeeling, as not conscious or not having a soul, you had no tether on your, now thoroughly, insane and twisted proclivities for manipulation, use, and abuse.
All of this led, in time, to your seeing even those aspects of yourselves that were outside of your Ego as being a threat. You were at odds with the natural in you—that is, that which could not come easily under control or domination. Your natural self—your real self—includes everything involving your biology … sex, for example … and the parts of your mind that naturally rebel at your sycophancy and domination in relation to others … your errant or “negative” thoughts and your doubts, for example. You could not as easily deny consciousness or aliveness to parts of yourself in order to make them “deserving” of control, so you did the next best thing and saw them as being not you and as alien. If you had to acknowledge their status as conscious and intentional, you would put yourself above them by thinking of them as subhuman or bestial … and eventually you amplified that to their being evil and demonic entities … thus further increasing your imagined distance from them. So if you were to grant their existence as being real and as in you, you saw them to not be part of you, really; you labeled yourself “possessed” and gave these parts of you a separate identity of devil.
The result is that you deemed aspects of your personhood to be targets for control and domination, too: You sought to control your sexuality, your biological functions, and your thoughts, as aspects of your controlling-conformity. Putting them outside of what you told yourself was you, they also could be put below you, as you had your women. Very similar to women also, you ascribed them a status as parts of the natural world, which you felt had ejected you (at one time) and now, as retribution, would come under your thumb. In seeking to control yourselves this way, you were rewarded also by the fact that the feeling of dominating and bullying your own body compensated for your submissive and humiliating behaviors toward those above you in status who dominated and controlled you.
All told, you sought to align your minds, even, with “transcendent”—but actually unnatural, sterile, and unalive—principles beyond your body, which actually were unconscious alignments with controllers above you. Thus, you sought to control your thoughts, your sexuality, and your bodies—along now with your external behavior—in your excessive sycophancy and burgeoning inauthenticity.
Let us explain that last part in more detail: You had a tendency to conform to the wishes of those who had power over you, especially those who wielded that power through excessive accumulation—those who were “richer” than you. You controlled your external behavior to match what they wanted. But in doing so, you caused a split within you. Part of you did not want to be inauthentic—the part of you that was natural. So there was conflict within you; one part of you put out complaints at what you were doing. It wanted to rebel, and it sent out disturbances in your mind as its way of undermining your efforts at subservience and inauthenticity. Basically, being a suck up was disagreeable to the real part of you.
So, to continue your conforming behavior and to have any semblance of peace with yourself you needed to find a way to deny that part of you that was real. You needed to repress its complaints. You did this by rationalizing your sycophancy as being a value and your rebellion as an evil. You created what you call “sin.”
You see how the outer dynamic of controlling-conforming was being brought inside you and you were beginning to reflect inside you the hierarchical arrangement outside? Inside yourself, you created your own representation of a controller who demanded conformity and obedience of those below “it”—that is to say, the unacceptable, rebellious, and natural parts of you.
But it did not stop there. For naturally the dictates you would give yourselves on the inside would be personal introjections of the demands of your superiors. What came under scrutiny were the parts of you that were unacceptable or simply not advantageous in your dealings with your higher ups. Importantly, however, these items of your personhood not advantageous to those you depended upon for survival began to include more than simply behaviors they did not like, but indeed, anything natural or biological. It was “inconvenient” to them that you might have needs; in their minds you were not quite alive, after all … you were relegated to the realm of “things” to be used as was your females and all planetmates. They would enslave you, like you were doing with planetmates, if they could. And they often did. They would provide for you and allow you to have only the bare minimum as was needed for physical survival … also as was done with kept planetmates … and all too often, kept women. Any more was too much a bother, and, after all, would reduce what they had. And their greed was as uncontainable as the fear that fueled it.
So, your real needs were an inconvenience to those above you intent on satisfaction of their needs: You could not be loud, sexual, obtrusive, angry, too noticeable … you could not be too alive. You could not be emotional—becoming sad or tearful, after all, would be a way of saying you had needs, too … and they did not want to be reminded of that. To the contrary, only they would be allowed to feel life, you would be told to “control yourself,” “be a man (woman),” “be brave,” be strong,” “not be such a baby.” To such an extent was emotion beaten out of you that, amazingly, becoming a human adult became equal to the extent to which one could keep one’s face from moving. Having a “stone face” and being unemotional were considered by you, “mature.” Meanwhile laughter, frivolity, expressiveness, happiness, upset, and tears—all strongly evident in facial features—were to become considered childish and infantile. Indeed, those were considered bad things, which when you think of it, they need not necessarily be.
But then, we are talking here about the way you added controlling your young, your children, to your list of domination “accomplishments.” So, being child-like—while we would see that as vivacious, fresh, and creative, in our young and not-so-young, and often, even, envied; or being creative, expressive, and/or emotion-full—while we would see that as indicating deep experience of life and passion—were instead, among you, put down severely. Being deemed childish was made as much to be mortifying for you as was being seen as feminine, for a man, was … and for exactly the same reasons: Child-like and feminine traits were both reminiscent of the Nature in you … the biological and “inconvenient.”
So, these predilections of the higher ups to wish for others to be less alive was for the purpose of making it so you could be more manageable (and usable) to them. Also, they did not want to see in you reminders that you were actually alive and feeling, for they wished to control you even to the extent of wanting you to act in a way as to not remind their consciences of their atrocious behavior. This would be reflected by you in your dealings with your young, when inflicting corporal punishment, as “Don’t you dare cry; I’ll give you something to cry about” … as “This hurts me more than it hurts you” … and simply “Don’t cry.” In essence, the parent as controller insists that child not be so inconvenient as to do anything that would trigger a conscience or awareness in the adult … a knowledge that one is, as you say, “being a dick.”
This wanting for you to not be “inconvenient” and for you to be more usable and manageable in this very day arises in the effort to make people more machine-like or robot-like. Certainly this was wanted of you in recent times for the purpose of you being usable cogs in the industrial machinery. But in this time, amazingly, you are so estranged and have become so complicit in your abject subservience that you are trying to link yourselves, your minds and your senses, to machines, computers and the like … you fantasize becoming computers, in a sense, even, calling it transhumanism and thinking you would have more power that way … again, more power meaning being even more controlling in your behavior. It is trans-human, yes, but only in the critical and disapproving way we have been describing you as humans. In yearning to be machines, and thus the ultimate in unalive and non-feeling, to such an extent have you forgotten your natural selves and succumbed to sycophancy in the service of your overlords.
Your kin and family relations would also be seen as inconvenient … for what was wanted was that you satisfy the needs of someone else, not yourself … so any distractions from that were not wanted … were not allowed … and to the extent they could be … were stomped down and eliminated in you.
At any rate, transgressions of the overlord’s demands for you to be undemanding and unneedy … unalive … were handled by them with a degree of humiliation and, often, cruelty, equal in size to their fear of “losing control” of you.
Tragedy enough, that was. But worse, the parts of you that were unacceptable to higher ups outside of you thus became unacceptable to you inside of you, too. You sought to align your inner reality with your outer one. Keep in mind that everyone else in Nature seeks to align their outer reality with their inner one. Quite simply, beings in Nature seek to manifest a world that is conducive to the fulfillment of their needs and the expression of their inspirations. You did the opposite: You sought to deny your needs and to stifle any expression of yourself … indeed, you sought to not be inspired and certainly to not appear to be inspired … for that also would be inconvenient to your higher ups.
You evolved certain cultural mechanisms to help you in estrangement from yourself. Chief among these is what you call, “religion.” Through religion you could erect an edifice outside yourself to support your inner struggle to keep from being too real, too inconvenient.
With religion, you could create a transcendent ideal—that is, an ideal separate from your biology or your personhood … something detached from reality, actually. You could strive to achieve a separation of yourself from yourself, in particular the natural parts of you, and rationalize it as being better and superior. On the other side of this, you would diminish, repress, control, and subjugate all the “less transcendent” aspects of yourself. You would do to yourself on the inside what you were allowing to be done to you by higher ups on the outside, as well as what you were doing to those below you in status and, if you were a man, to the women in your life.
But therein you see the illusion and wrong-gettedness of your thinking. For indeed this transcendent ideal—furiously upheld by your religions—was nothing other than the introjected desires and demands of the controllers above you. You were telling yourselves that you were obedient to God and “properly” fearful of God, but it was only your sycophancy and your conformity behavior in regards to the Large Accumulators that you were justifying.
It is understandable, then, how so much of your religious dictates … “commandments,” for example … were thinly veiled expressions of the desires of Large Accumulators. You were told “not to covet your neighbor’s goods,” and in this way the Large Accumulators would have their riches protected and have you feeling guilty about your desires to rebel at this inequality of ownership. We will tell you more about that later.
The upshot of all this was that you sought absolute determination and control over your lives through an insular, defended Ego. You sought control over everything outside of it, whether that was in your environments and whether they were things or people, or whether they were inside of you and they were desires, inspirations, emotions, biological needs, or even just “negative thoughts — which is to say, thoughts that at their root where inconvenient to your higher ups and would work to your disadvantage with them if they were ever discovered. In doing all this, then, you obliterated the last of any possible authentic beingness for you.
And with each fall from grace and over time you enlarged your capacity for and appetite to control.
Keeping these deleterious developments in mind—with all things coming under control over time, and over time there being increasing control of them—it was sadly inevitable that this obsession would reach into that dominion you have over your young ones in their dependent state at the beginnings of their lives. The repression, control, domination, and denigration that you brought to bear on all of Nature, on those below you in status, on women, you now brought to bear upon the most vulnerable of you … the easiest and most easily manipulated of targets … the weakest and most dependent of the beings so far being put “under management.”
So, however sad, it is not surprising that your obsessive controlling would be applied to your offspring in their dependent state. Keep in mind that your newborns, unlike any others of us—planetmates who have not split from Nature’s perfect ways—require careful nurturing by caregivers. Your newborns cannot cling to their mother’s fur after birth, as your nearest relative’s newborns can. Nor can they search for and acquire nourishment from their mothers’ breasts, as can other planetmates.
Yet your newborns’ requirements are even more excessive, since you are burdened, in infancy as well as throughout your life, with a residue of trauma from birth. You say some of you suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), because of traumatic and inordinately painful and psychologically unmanageable events that happen to some of you in adulthood. How little you realize that your entire species is exactly so traumatized at that very time of your life, birth, when you are least able to integrate a shock to your systems.
Hence your newborns require even more of comfort and bonding with caregivers and mothers, and even more attention to their needs, and nurturing, than the rest of us; yet you receive less.
Being prematurely thrown out of the womb, your newborns are abjectly helpless. And then they have to confront a processing at birth that one of your fully growns would label torture, if they had to undergo it. Not only are they subjected, while still naked, to a much colder environment than the ninety-eight degrees they are used to in in the womb, they are sometimes hit or slapped. Many of your cultures have this idea of “toughening” the newborn by immersing it immediately after birth in freezing cold water or subjecting it to some other mind obliteratingly painful experience.
Newborns are almost always confronted with blazing lights and thunderous and assaultive sounds. Remember this is all comparative to what they experienced in the womb. Don’t your eyes smart and burn when coming into a bright sunlight from a dark place? A tiny example, that is, but try keeping that in mind and applying that in trying to understand your neonates’ first experiences of life in the world, after a full nine months of total darkness and relative quiet.
Then, your neonates have fingers and instruments roughly inserted into their mouths, stretching the mouth wide as if to rip off the jaw, to remove mucus. To a neonate who had nothing in the womb even close to that experience, it is felt as an oral assault … as rape.
The cord is cut early leaving them gasping for breath. They are separated ruthlessly from the entire world they had known for nine months and with no substitute connection yet in the world outside … an experience of sterile and cutting aloneness which wounds as deeply as the knife itself. Yet when they scream in horror, your fully growns laugh and smile and applaud themselves on having a healthy baby with “good lungs.” Do you have any idea, or memory, of how you feel when confronted with such insane human behavior—so insensitive, so unseeing of you—as your first experiences with humans and your future caregivers, your parents? Do you really think that you could maintain after that, if you even had it before, the trust that any of your other needs will be cared for by what seems to you to be residents of an insane asylum?
You are taken from your mother—the whole world to you up till that very moment—and immersed into, often cold, water, to “bathe” you. You are prodded with needles and have things stuck up your bum. You are rubbed with harsh cloths or something similar right away, too. Do you think you might at this point be wondering what the hell is wrong with you the way you are? Do you suppose you might be getting a feeling that you are not acceptable in the world of the living unless you are cleaned up and careful of your appearance? Or that there is something different about you … and “inappropriate” … that you must hide or cover up?
You, as newborns, are often, at some point, placed on a cold metal scale and/or other hard surfaces for additional “processing.” Do you suppose that being handled like a thing, right at the beginning, might impress in you the idea that maybe you are of that little worth? And at a time when your natural self is aching, intensely, for bonding, for the feeling of warm and accepting flesh against your ravaged body, and for the comfort of suckling, so as to provide a connection to aliveness in this outside world to compensate for the one brutally taken away, you instead find yourself predominantly in contact with things and an inanimate world. Add to this the fact that your experiences so far with the “living” world has been seeming like a violent assault, and do you suppose you might be having stamped upon your tender psyche an imprint of bonding with things … the material world … a feeling that that is the place, the only place, of support and comfort in life?
Eventually, you might be wrapped tightly in blankets or other cloths, which take away the one advantage you did manage to get in coming out of the womb—your feeling of free movement. Do you suppose you are really thinking that life and humans are at all on your side?
Very often you are then even taken away from your mother. You might be left somewhere, totally alone, tightly wrapped, with unfamiliar and loud noises and bright lights around you at all times, for a time that seems interminable. You moan and complain when you are separated from a loved one as an adult … even more so when you lose that loved one to another. How do you suppose you felt when everything in the world you knew—your mother—was taken from you … who was also your sole source of comfort and nourishment and connection to life and warmth for the entirety of your life, up to that point? Do you have any remembrance of the total abject terror you experienced? Can you at least imagine?
Usually you numb yourself at this point, as a newborn, wanting to die. You begin, at the start of your life, to try to kill yourself to escape from this world of horror you have fallen into … this apparent hell. They think you are sleeping comfortably. They do not know you are trying to die.
And in subsequent days … days which seem an eternity … as they are interspersed with bright light/darkness; coldness/warmth; being tightly wrapped, then allowed to move; being fed, then starving; and moved roughly around and manipulated, then left totally alone … you come to know the terror that death, and even worse, torture, is at hand at any corner or with any change in life. Do you have an inkling of how that felt or how it might feel? Do you think you would be open to a life of change and adventure after that? Do you suppose you might, as we have been saying, be determined for the rest of your life to never, ever, ever let anything be out of your control again … not anything? And that to the extent you needed to control all and everything about you to insure that, you would? And would you not feel sure that you would need to insure everything? For do you really suppose, after all the above, you could expect anything good to happen without actually making it happen? Would you not cling fanatically to a determination that you will always and forevermore do whatever you need to do … collateral damage be damned … fully focused on your desperation to never fall again into that pit of excruciating darkness, pain, and aloneness … and not even noticing those around you that your self-obsessed mania might be hurting or stomping upon.
So, all in all, with despair and misery at hand on a constant basis, in those earliest moments of your time on Earth, you forge a resolve, out of fear, that you will fight back whoever and whatever you need to, forever! … lest you are put “under the knife” once again. And this resolve is the beginnings of your Ego … this resolve to control, to have power over, to conquer, to push all and everyone else to the side … for your survival.
You do that. Or you do die. The pain is too overwhelming or for some reason you cannot muster the resolve, and you just succumb to death, out of your utter despair and misery. And they tally you up as a crib death.
So Ego saves your life … but at great cost. For to erect the construct of Ego you need to split off from all that is good, natural, and easy in you, and loving; and instead focus around a drive to live at whatever cost. For at your youngest you are closest to Nature, your real self, and the Divine. Except for harsh experience and the trainings and teachings of those in your societies who in later life reinforce the split, you would, like us, know it, be it … you would be the Divine, you would be one with Nature. Indeed, to the extent that you can refrain from losing that child-likeness of soul and spirit, you will be closer to Divinity throughout your life.
But as a newborn even you will contribute to your ejection from that Edenal realm. It is you who will place the angels of death at the gates to Paradise. Forever after, the knowledge of that blessed experience before birth and the Divine Awareness you had of the Larger Reality of Beauty, Bliss, and pure Love, will lie on the other side of the deathly terror, the mind-numbing fright, of your experiences of birth and the time immediately afterward. So you will never look in that direction again. You will block out of your memory, even, that such a thing ever existed, having had imprinted in your flesh though not allowed into your conscious mind that that time is associated with the most excruciating and hellacious events you have ever experienced—your time in birth and as a newborn.
Your newborns would, thus, out of despair even die off if not for splitting off from their misery through your construct of Ego.
And how will you construct such an Ego? The only thing you know of in your world at this point are your attendants—your caregivers and parents, in particular your mother. So what you learn from them is the only thing you even have available from which to build your new and unreal self. So, at the beginning only just from example, they and their behavior are your guides. Indeed, since you are so dependent upon them for life, the first thing you learn is who to be in order to get your needs at least met enough to keep you alive.
This is the beginning of that controlling-conformity behavior that follows you throughout your life: Your resolve is to control; your deepest drive and motivation is to dominate and have power over all the factors that influence your life so that you will live and never experience that terrifying helplessness and fear ever again. But in order to live, to just simply live, to get the basic minimum for survival—of food, warmth, comfort, rest … and all the rest of that—you need to conform. You need to carefully observe and monitor what it is that will result in your receiving something life supporting and what it is that you do that results in something harsh and painful. Like a pigeon pushing a lever to get a pellet, you learn quickly and well. And you build your entire modus operandi for life out of these early lessons.
Thus, in your early lives, dependent on adult caretakers, it is those fully growns attending you that guide you. They, with all their insanity and their inability to truly take in or really notice much in the world outside of their Egos, must now attend to you. And, being as they are the sole models for the Ego of the child at that time, they also will be the delivery systems for that unusual human construction of Ego. Your adults, in particular the parents, will be the major instruments in creating this strange and abominable thing of consciousness, this Ego.
***
You may have wondered how we could be so forgiving of you after all you humans do to us planetmates. Maybe now, with your seeing how much we see of you and how much we realize the unusual and horrific things you go through, you might begin to understand. For none of us would wish your lot on any of us. We get it; we get exactly why you have become the savage species you are. Indeed, we have a feeling in looking upon you very much the same as the way you view some of the most unfortunate of your own: “There but for the grace of God, go I.”
To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time, of which this is an excerpt … Go to The Great Reveal from The Planetmates
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Life Is a Sickness … for the Purpose of Getting Us Well: A Foray Into Cellular/ Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Three — There Is Always Grace
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, globalrevolution, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, philosophy, psychology, spirituality, uniqueness on December 9, 2013
Love Is “Just a Membrane” Away: No Matter How Bad It Gets, There Is Always Something to Keep You Here … to Comfort You When You Really Need It
(continued from We Are Always and Only “Just a Membrane Away” … from Understanding Everything: A Foray Into Cellular/ Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Two — “Juicy Caring” and the Answer to Pain [Footnote 1])
The Real Reasons for Being Alive
Another thing I was thinking about in the course of my session was what good work this holotropic breathwork is and how—regardless of what I had been thinking about it when I was doing it with Stan Grof a couple of weeks ago—that I feel like this is certainly taking me to all kinds of goddamn places. It’s certainly getting me past where I was in primal, getting me beyond that; so certainly it’s damn good stuff.
.
I mean I just kept thinking that this is something that reminds people of the real reasons for being alive; and if that’s not important, nothing is. But, if nothing else, I sure as hell felt: it works! The music was great; it did all kinds of wonderful things to me, taking my mind into all kinds of incredible places; it was almost like being stoned or like being on acid.
Cosmic Frown
I remember thinking at one point about Mary Lynn and the cat and the dog that I had when I was a kid. I was thinking about how much pain there is in 
existence, and how my life has been in pain. For example, there was one time when my face just 
went into this incredible frown, and I was crying and crying after the frown happened. I began to realize how that was my essence: this Frown, a big part of me—there’s just so much sadness in my life. I was thinking about what just happened recently with my father and all kinds of stuff. There was just so much sadness.
But There Is Always Grace
I was grieving hugely for that, and then I was also thinking about how there were also things in my life that were good—like Mary Lynn and the cat. And I was thinking about our trailer, and about the kind of a life I have now, the cozy times we have. And then I was thinking about how there was that dog when I was younger, various cats, and so on. And I was thinking about that time in Puttaparthi when that cat came to me, and I realized how there had always been something—that no matter how much pain there was, there was never too much pain. That’s when I got into the feelings about the membrane, or maybe that wasn’t when I got into those feelings.
Life Is a Sickness … to Get Us Well
It was as if your needs are taken care of in some way or other. Life really was a sickness. But the sickness was for the purpose of you getting eventually healthy, that you weren’t given more sickness than you could handle; there was always something to alleviate the pain, to enable you to continue on; that you would always be able to stay one step above the “pit” so to speak. You would be kept above it.
The Fact That You Only Get as Much as You Can Handle Is Evidence of the Divine in Life
Your purpose here was not to be “tortured” or irrevocably damaged by pain—it was to be able to learn from pain, but mercifully so, so there was always something to keep you here and to comfort you when you really needed it. And I was feeling like that was God’s evidence in our lives, that He’s always just a membrane away making sure it doesn’t get too extreme here.
Joyful Compassion
One last thing I should mention is that after this final crying during my breathing session—about all these people in my life and my connection with them and that juicy feeling I had when I was a kid caring for everybody, really wishing I could do something to help all my family, and not feeling that I was helpless, but really caring, really wanting to help—well there was this feeling of huge compassion, and it was a good feeling. I mean it was actually joyful—it’s hard to describe.
A Place on Which to Stand
But anyway after that I was left with this huge, very deep feeling of relaxation like I have rarely experienced, if ever. And I didn’t want to come out of it. I lay there for a while after that feeling like I was an energy field, especially in my hands. I felt like a locked-in energy field just buzzing, and I didn’t want to come back. I was so calm, not in pain, so comfortable that I felt like I wanted to keep this feeling with me always; it would be a wonderful place to come from in the world, to have inside me, to stand on, from which to view the world …
Continue with Past Lives, Other Lives, and The Vast Hole of the “Not the Tribal”: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Four — Sidling Up to the Implicate Order
Return to We Are Always and Only “Just a Membrane Away” … from Understanding Everything: A Foray Into Cellular/ Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Two — “Juicy Caring” and the Answer to Pain
Footnote
1. Cellular/ Transpersonal Experiences
Having established the legitimacy of transpersonal aspects of prenatal, and especially cellular, re-experience, it remains to be seen what light this new perspective throws upon traditional formulations. I suggest to you that this perspective is a catalyst to a radical reformulation of traditional concepts of consciousness and development. My understanding is that it supports a view compatible with Eastern, Platonic, and “primitive” philosophical renderings—which can be characterized as Emanationist —and completely undermines the dominant Western evolutionary paradigm. I delineate such a perspective, which I call the Falls from Grace Theory, beginning in the next chapter.
However, let us first take a look at a sampling of the kinds of experiences and perspectives that are possible at this cellular and prenatal level of re-experience before attempting to see deeper into the structure of consciousness and development, presented immediately afterwards, which contains and makes sense of them. The current chapter—A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness—contains transcripts of cellular/transpersonal experiences I had through the modality of holotropic breathwork. In order to retain the flavor and potency of the raw experience itself, these transcripts are only slightly edited and are from the descriptions of my experiences I recorded immediately after having them.
Continue with Past Lives, Other Lives, and The Vast Hole of the “Not the Tribal”: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Four — Sidling Up to the Implicate Order
Return to We Are Always and Only “Just a Membrane Away” … from Understanding Everything: A Foray Into Cellular/ Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Two — “Juicy Caring” and the Answer to Pain
To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Falls from Grace
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
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What I Can Tell You About the Seed of Light in the Deepest Darkness: The Witness Self, The Beneficence of Experience, and the Secret About Oneself One Dares Never Reveal
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, globalrevolution, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, philosophy, psychology, spirituality, uniqueness on September 25, 2013
Experience Is Divinity, Part Ten – The Truth One Dare Not Speak: How Evil Is Reality? How Much Fear Is Real?… Even in the Seemingly “Darkest” of Places, There Is Light.
Acquired Taste?
But what many of you are thinking is, what about the horror? About that part—where we as Divinity experiment with things that are very painful or horrid, which we would never want to do again…. I don’t know enough about this to know if it becomes an acquired taste for Divinity. I don’t even think that that would be very “healthy,” if you know what I mean … in a universal sense. This is where being human and less than Divinely aware, I have to stop. I cannot cross this line.
So, no, I do not believe the Divine desires horror. An enjoyment of extreme experience, perhaps. But an acquired taste for like evil or for darkness? I do not see how the “friendliness” and compassion that characterizes existence coincides with a “creepy” Divinity. But, I don’t know, I really don’t. Here I have to go with a more traditional explanation that horror is allowed not sought for. And that since it is ephemeral and passing and ultimately insubstantial it qualifies as more “spice” of existence and for Divine inconsequential status.
The Truth One Dares Not Speak
The other part of this, though, the part of it that I am reluctant to speak, is that we do not know how much horror really exists, for we magnify the darkness of existence in our imagination. As I said earlier, that is how we create the ideas of hell and Satan. It is part of the game we play.
I do not want to say this part “out loud” because it goes up against one of the most enforced of social sanctions. We have people who cause suffering and are insensitive, and we have those who wish to relieve the suffering of others. 
Of course, every one of us thinks we are the second type. Even the most horrible acts are rationalized by their perpetrators as somehow being good. I’ll save getting into that for another time, though.
But we also have those in the second camp, the “caring” and “sensitive,” secretly aware that they have some of themselves that is like the other and so are ever vigilant to scan for and “rouse the masses” upon any sign of the first type. That is how they are able to deflect attention away from themselves as possible perpetrators. It is why we have had stonings and witch burnings. It is the way those with insufficient self-knowledge defend against the darkness they have inside themselves—that is, by raising a ruckus around any perceived darkness around them. Hence what I am going to say will by those fearful people put me in the first group, the insensitive, and anything I say afterward will not be read or heard. But I persevere.
To start, I wish to say that we exaggerate the pain of ourselves and others for many good reasons that have to do with trying to sway the actions of others and thus future events; exaggeration is one of the defenses we use against possible pain. If we tell others our pain is unbearable, we know it is less likely it will actually become unbearable. We know there is a lag time between when we express something and the social environment around us responds. Exaggeration is one of the defenses we use against the horror we imagine actually happening! And if you take note of the amount of words of complaint that are expressed, complaint being one of the forms of this exaggeration defense, you will see how often we do that.
It is similar with the pain of others. We know there is plenty of insensitivity in humans, so we overcompensate by dramatizing the suffering of others. It is a way of fighting back at that insensitivity … hopefully the world will be swayed and the suffering we imagine in others will be lessened or not occur.
And at this point is where most people, and most of my readers, are found shouting out, “No! MY pain is horrible! You have no idea.” Or, “You have no idea how much these people suffer,” etc., etc., etc. And from the first group we have cries of, “Yes! They are all just cry-babies!”… “sitting on the pity pot”… and so on… BOTH of these are ways of not understanding what I am saying.
Let me tell you how I know that the exaggerated pronouncements are not exact statements of reality—something that I am taking the risk to attempt here—but are intended to have an effect and to influence the quality and nature of the upcoming course of events whenever they are asserted. I can tell you that a) I have gone through the most intense psychotherapy involving feeling the deepest and most traumatic pains that we experience in life …. especially that coming into the world. b) I have lived through the most horrible events, including almost dying several times. And c) I have lived in the most squalid of conditions, including years of homelessness, and endured extreme deprivation of many kinds. Indeed, in trying to make a life based on truth work, I have been able to manage to be in poverty in almost the entire of my sixty-two years. You have to really despise money—or actually what you have to become in order to get it—to be able, with the intelligence and skills I have been blessed with, to succeed in pulling that off.
At any rate, I can tell you that the most amazing thing of all of these is they were never as bad as I imagined. Indeed, the fact that they were not was a cause of a little joy of its own.
1) I found that in my deepest re-livings of primal pain, there was an undisturbed self, an observing self, that was completely untouched by it all.
Some people call this the Witness Self. And, indeed, its serenity, calm, and quiet joy were made the most evident in contrast to the turmoil and agony I was experiencing for the most part. This is the seed of light in the deepest darkness: There is a drop of joy even in agony, even if it is only that in feeling agony one feels at least alive!
And this is without even touching on the delight that comes with learning the real truth of one’s existence or the pleasure one feels in throwing off one’s chains.
2) In coming close to death—for example, being in a car accident where the car rolled three times and I found myself face down on the road, banged up and with some stripped skin—I never felt any pain!! There was discomfort afterwards, certainly, but ever since then I have not feared death, for I feel that death is not the painful thing I, and I think most of us, think it is! I have come to believe that the body only registers pain within the acceptable or manageable spectrum and beyond that it shuts down or fails to relay it to consciousness. I was napping in the car before the accident, while my wife drove. I woke up feeling my face against the asphalt and not having a clue who I was, where I was, or what this reality was. I had slept through the entire horrible event! And to this day, I cannot tell you what my body went through. It was as if my consciousness was transported from a time before the accident to a time right afterwards and was not there during the event. Both then and now, considering what my body must have gone through, I consider that an incredible blessing.
I can make a similar case for the beneficence of Experience using examples of the pain and suffering I went through, and the near-death, in my experiences of and with alcohol/drug addiction. That is an even longer story that will have to wait for another time.
About that, I can tell you about one time, though, which is illustrative for the exposition here. Once in particular, for an entire day, I experienced such pain that I had all I could do to keep from jumping in front of a car or in some way ending it immediately, for good. I remember the minutes ticking by so excruciatingly slow. I would look up, thinking and hoping that fifteen minutes had gone by, only to find that it had not even been two. This made the pain seem interminable, so that I thought I would lose my mind.
In fact, I felt then and afterwards and to this day, that the pain was so severe that if I could know ahead of time that I would ever again in my life have to go through that again, even just once again, life, no matter its joys or the amount of time I would have in it, would not be worth living, weighed against the suffering of such a day again. And though I still feel that way, still I have come to the conclusions and hold the beliefs about pain and suffering and the Divine that I am here expressing. And that was hardly my one experience with overwhelming pain and agony, but enough said for now.
3) I have lived on the streets, been poor, been abused, been taken advantage of, been robbed … you name it. I can tell you that the most amazing thing of all that, too, was that there was a part of me that I was aware of that I can honestly say appreciated at least the novelty of the experiences I went through. A big part of that was realizing that life, even in its seemingly “shadier” of places, still contained the light, that is, love, compassion, wisdom, and all the rest was found there, too … indeed was almost more evident there, and beautifully poignant, than in the more “defended” and sanctioned of society’s places. That is to say, for example, that I often found more love, compassion, and tolerance among the “least” of us than was to be found among the “churchly.” Jesus well understood this in his day.
So, part of my quest to understand pain and fear has been to go into darkness and to see how much fear and pain there really is in existence… to see just how “bad” …or “good” Existence, God, or Reality is, to see how much fear is warranted. It has been an ongoing and increasing joy to find that, while darkness, pain, and fear exist, there is less than what one imagines and that even in the seemingly “darkest” of places, there is light. Or, what one might say is I went to find out if really God was everywhere and found out that, indeed, She was!!
And there is also a certain pride in succeeding at being happy in circumstances that one knows that others would be terrified to be in. And sometimes what was enjoyable was unveiling the novelty of experience that a life lived as mosaic revealed.
I will have lots more to say about this at a later time when I can think of a way to express it that will get past the “guards” of moral outrage that virtually all people have erected against this notion that pain and suffering are not as bad as we say they are.
I’m only bringing it up now because we are looking at this idea of the horror of existence, and I have to put out, for those with ears to hear, a reminder that it is our “human nature” to magnify and exaggerate all our experiences when we are expressing them to others, for many reasons. But that in order to look at the ideas of suffering and pain vis-à-vis God and a compassionate universe, the truly enlightening revelations come when one is the absolutely most honest about one’s experience and with absolutely no ulterior motive to defend against or sway the effects of one’s expression or future events from it. So the upshot of my saying the above is to raise the point that in talking about the suffering and horror that God allows (or causes) in life, virtually no one, not even philosophers, evaluates it free from the constraints of bowing to social appropriateness in magnifying the pain and horror that God supposedly is causing or allowing.
There is a societal taboo, coupled with strong individual disinclination along the lines that one dare not “tempt fate.” I don’t know anyone who does not feel that if one were say “out loud” that one’s fate is easy (or enjoyable), that one’s pain is manageable (let alone secretly pleasurable at times), or that one is really happy and has it good in life, that one would like a wack-a-mole be slapped down by the Universe or the people around into the common required understanding that life is overall a struggle, painful, and miserable … and often overwhelming and unbearable at times … except for the occasional “vacations” we can win by complaining how bad it is for us. By “praying” and complaining to the Universe and others around us, we seek to better our lots in life; and we invariably pick out the worst parts to better make our case.
On the other hand, we cannot help but feel that if we actually acknowledge the goodness of life, we will be setting in motion the forces to bring about the opposite of that. No doubt this is why the poona avatar, Sathya Sai Baba, would say that gratitude is the highest prayer, actually, the only worthwhile (honest?) one.
There are reasons, rooted in our experience of coming into the world, that have us thinking that we tempt fate by acknowledging goodness, which I deal with elsewhere.
But you don’t have to go quite this far to get my main point.
The Darkness Getting Blacker Means the Lightness Becoming Brighter
Backing up, it follows that by experiencing in life even the “horrible” things, so to speak … and really being rooted in them and experiencing them, kind of knowing them … that then one would experience the opposite of it, the love and bliss, as being all the more wonderful … beautiful … exquisite. It is all the more of a deep experience of beauty because you have the deep experience of the other which contrasts.
That is the meaning of the metaphor of having a darkness or blackness which the light is made brighter by.
Continue with Every Path Is Magnificent and Maximizing Your Poignancy: Time and Uncertainty Are the Screens We Erect to Block Out Knowing Everything
Return to When Life is Ever New, a Revelation, One Has Turned the Good into the Wonderful: Experience Is Divinity, Part Nine — God Invents Joy by Forgetting.
To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Experience Is Divinity
Invite you to join me on Twitter:
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SillyMickel Adzema
Culture War, Class War 
Like reading a letter from a wise, old friend….
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Culture, globalrevolution, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, philosophy, psychology, spirituality on March 3, 2014
By M.E.W. on February 5, 2014
I’ve recently finished reading Experience Is Divinity, by Michael Adzema.
If you ever have one of those days (weeks, months?) where it just doesn’t want to fit together, you really can use this.
Find a quiet space, fix a nice big mug of tea, and grab “Experience Is Divinity”.
You almost don’t need to use your brain. You just sort of let it absorb. Every once in a while, you find yourself thinking, ” Why wasn’t that simple thing already in my brain?”
None of Adzema books will lecture you; no heavy handed persuasion. You simply get a sense of his quiet confidence that he has something meaningful and he wants to share it with you. You won’t find psychobabble or cult like preaching; just a sort of, “This is what I think makes a lot of sense”, attitude.
The books sort of distill the most profound realities. You lay the book down, having a sense of simplicity and clarity and the chaos just sort of begins to fit. Nothing is different; it’s more that it’s OK that things are as they are.
More info and to order: Experience Is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor. Return to Grace, Volume 8
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1492932213/ref=dra_a_rv_ff_fx_it_P2000_1000?tag=dradisplay-20
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
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