is a devolutional look at human’s splitting away from Nature in the creation of a human nature at war with the natural.
The complete book is available online at the links
you can read the book, which is posted on the blog, or you can follow the directions there & download a free copy of *Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man*.
The book, *Prodigal Human*, shows how in our creation of civilization, we locked in a human status that has us either as Controllers, Conforming Underlings, or Authentics.
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We see how that change from our primal, prehistoric profile, has led us to the kind of personality today of folks who are able to end life on this planet, with hardly a second thought.
In doing so, *Prodigal Human* presents a new devolutional theory in anthropology.
The book also explains how our deeper human nature, cooperative with Nature, can be regained and our world saved from apocalypse.
This devolutional theory of evolution demonstrates how bipedalism & the resulting birth trauma led to descents of humans from an original natural state, leading to misogyny, class war, hunting, sedentary living, farming, religion, & more.
you can read the book, which is posted on the blog, or you can follow the directions there & download a free copy of *Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man*.
“Primal/Identity Psychology, Mythology, & Your Real Self
“Adult to Toddler, Veils One-Three”
And which is Volume 2 in The Path of Ecstasy Series
It is time now to regain the primal legacy of belongingness in Divinity & Nature which we lost when we claimed ourselves “crown of creation” & peak of the evolutionary pyramid. This book is a powerful aid in regaining one’s authentic self.
“…if we do not regain our truer & underlying humanity, & instead, coming forth as we normally do, we continue acting out of our pain grids, we are not going to have a ‘human’ experience or even an Earthly life experience to be detailing & exploring, in the future, let alone people to hear about them.”
In looking at these matrices embedded in us through our cellular & womb & birth experiences, it will be possible to have our best chance to get a look at existence outside of these matrices — the No-Form State.”
The complete book is available online at the links.
you can read the book, posted on the blog, or you can follow the directions there & download a free copy of *Dance of the Seven Veils I: Primal/Identity Psychology, Mythology, & Your Real Self*.
The link below is the completed document for “Dance of the Seven Veils I: Primal/Identity Psychology, Mythology, and Your Real Self”
It is a pdf file, & it looks exactly as the book looks.
To read and/or download a copy, click link above.
If you like & agree w these ideas & want more attention on them, feel free to download the book & pass it around, as you wish; use it to share this perspective.
If you like it, I encourage you to comment on it at Amazon, for others’ benefit
& please send any comments/reviews of the book to me at
sillymickel@yahoo.com
The idea being I might be able to use your comments in describing it in my own sharing on social media.
Finally, if what you prefer are paperback or ebook/Kindle versions, you may acquire them at the links below. Also, these are the Amazon links where you could comment on the book.
Psychology of Apocalypse seeks to explain how, with humans on the cusp of the end of all life on this planet, including their own, humans could look away.
In doing so, it presents a major new theory in psychology, the Prenatal Matrix of Evil or the PMEs.
The Prenatal Matrix of Human Evil theory traces our drive to annihilation to the unique human experiences prior to birth, occurring in the third trimester, which arise of the fact that in our evolution humans became bipedal.
“Bipedalism affected human psychology in that the new pelvic structure changed how babies would experience birth & gestation.
“The resulting birth trauma & fetal malnutrition, unique in Nature, accounts for our drive to kill ourselves—humanicide.”
The complete book is available online at the links.
you can read the book, which is posted on the blog, or you can follow the directions there & download a free copy of Psychology of Apocalypse.
There is a pdf file that is there & is downloadable & it looks exactly as the book looks.
To read and/or download a copy, click a link in the thread:
[Continued from above:] Dance of the Seven Veils I is all about pulling back the Veils of anthropocentrism and species-superiority, which is Veil One; the hidden agendas of societies and especially its elites which get construed as rites of passage and initiation into adulthood for young girls and boys and which thus corrupt their personalities along lines not their own, which is Veil Two; and the layers of parental abuse, misdirection, control and direction, for their ends, not our own, which get impressed upon us in infancy, toddlerhood, and childhood, and which coalesce as the primal scene, which is Veil Three. And which tells each and every one of us that we are not going to be loved unless we be something other than what we are, what we were meant to be, and what we were destined to be — which is our real self.
In this Book Two of The Path of Ecstasy Series, titled, *Dance of the Seven Veils I*, I continue the exploration of the screens of distortion across human perception begun in Book One, *The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy*. This time I focus on the ways the crucial events and experiences of our lives create our beliefs in life. In doing so, layer by layer, Veil by Veil, I continue bringing greater, truer perceptions into view of everything beyond.
I show in particular how our ideas about who to be and what to be, as rooted in culture and mythology; what to do, as rooted in early childhood experience; what to believe, as linked to religion, God, spirituality, mythology, good and evil, and much else, are rooted in the patterns of experiences we universally experience over the course of our lives, leading up to adulthood.
Further, I show how peeling back the layers of that onion is ever more liberating, at every step. And where it ultimately leads … what is ultimately true … what is the center of the onion?… Well, the image that emerges is your original face. And your original face is all these things — Divine, true, realer than real, more positive and loving than you ever thought you could be, and more wonderful and exciting than you can imagine. In the same vein as William Blake, I am saying that, when the Veils across perception are pulled to the side, everything appears as it is … infinite.
Dance of the Seven Veils II … Prenatal/Perinatal Psychology, Mythology, and Your Divine Self …
Infant to Prenate, Veils Four-Six. Volume 3. (scheduled 2022)
Dance of the Seven Veils III…Peri-Conceptional/Transpersonal Psychology, Mythology,
and Your Original Face…Cellular to Soulular, Veil Seven and Beyond. Volume 4. (scheduled 2023)
The Hidden Land of Origin:Our Astonishing Inability to Acknowledge Our Earliest Experiences and the Surprising Vista of Knowledge That Doing So Reveals
The Primal Matrix of Mind:We Are What We’ve Experienced — Our Birth, Gestation, and Conception Create Our Windows to the World
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The Prenatal Matrix of “Human Nature”:Third Trimester Experience Configures Our “Evil” … the Roots of War, Bigotry, Pollution, and Our “Oliver Twist” Economies
55
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Womb with a View:Our Concepts-Feelings About the Spiritual and Religious Have Roots in Our Prenatal Experiences
Our Knowledge Is Anthropocentric:Many Beings, Many Worlds … While Our Science Is Built on an Assumption, Rooted in Religion, That Humans Are “God’s Chosen Species”
118
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Our Reality Is Species-Determined:Destroying Worlds and the Relativity of Science … Culturally Constituted Realities, Biologically Constituted Realities, and Biological Relativity
126
12
The Spectrum of Realities:Infinite Worlds … Individually, Bioculturally, and Suprahumanly Constituted Realities … and Ultimate Relativity
Knowledge Begins Where Arrogance Ends:Species Transcendence and How We Might Come to Know … Dropping Our Species-Centrism, We Transcend Scientific Truth
Veils, Myth, and Ritual:Nature, Purpose, Meaning, Multilevel Relevance of Myth, and Rewards of Deeper Understanding … Primal Pain and Demythologizing the World
The Seduction and Stoning of the Maiden:Rites of Feminine Repression, Control, and Shaming in Patriarchal Societies … Serpents, Dragons, Wolves, and Evil Stepmothers
268
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The Sacrifice and Murder of the Virgin:Periconceptional Elements in Ritual, the Meaning of Rape and Killing-Beheading in Female Rites of Passage and Fertility Rituals
Female Servitude and the Abduction into Darkness:Rites of Passage as Ritualized Reduction of Aliveness and Oppression of Self to That of the Norm … the Role of Male Elites in the Creation of Self-Benefitting Cultural Ritual
302
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Blessingways?Oh, the Things Women Do for Men … and More Periconceptional Symbolism
310
27
How We Lose Our Souls, How It is Stolen:In Patriarchal Cultures, the Young Need Be Pared Down to the Level of Its Controlling Adults … Rituals of Diminution and Control
330
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Rituals as Faux Experience:With the Diminished Life Experience Required of Patriarchal Pawns Arise Pale Substitutes for Aliveness and Rituals as Symbolic, not Real, Experience
347
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The Cosmic Tour:Authenticity, Self, and Transformation in Gatherer-Hunter Societies, the Heroine’s Journey, and Individuation
The Birth of the New Maiden:Light and Dark, Suffering and Transformation, and the Actual Building of a Better Girl … and Person
406
34
The Care and Treatment of Dragons:Solar and Lunar Mythologies … Fear and Intellectualizing One’s Inner Life in the Patriarchy Versus Pronoia and Surrender
420
35
Spiritualities of Ego Actualization:A Mystical Machismo Infuses Patriarchal Controlling Mythologies and Paths … New Age Myth and the Fallacy of the Fully Functioning Ego
The Secret of Men:What Patriarchal Cultures Never Tell Women, or Themselves — The Elders’ New Clothes and the Lie of It All
457
38
The Fallacy of Transcendence:The “Giving” of Sacrifice and the Patriarchal Ladder … Men Raise Themselves Upon the Bodies of the Murdered
472
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Identity and the Sea of Potentiality:Our Soulular Constituted Self, Multiculturalism, Staying Afloat and Navigating Amidst Overwhelming Possibility, a Modern Curse, a Modern Opportunity
486
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Overwhelm and Self-Actualization:Openness Is an All or Nothing Thing … The Answer to Overwhelm Is Actualization … The Answer to Karma Is Service
Becoming “Them”:The Cultural Veil, the Primal Scene, Child Sacrifice … The Centaur Stage of Infant and Toddler Learning Involves Learning You Are Not Okay and Continues the Separation from Innate Divinity
513
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Oedipus:The Assault of the Father Expresses the Way Patriarchs Feel About Their Sons
524
43
The Assault of the Father:Perseus, Oedipal Abuse, and Revision of the Oedipus Complex as the Primal Scene
535
44
Electra:Maternal Jealousy and Revision of the Electra Complex as the Primal Scene … The Assault of the Mother Expresses the Way Mothers, in Patriarchy, Are Likely to Feel About Their Daughters.
543
AFTERWORD:Continue with Book Three, Dance of the Seven Veils II, and about The Path of Ecstasy Series
.“If the doors of perception were cleansed, the world would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
— William Blake.
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PREFACE.
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A Dance of the Seven Veils:
The Secret Life of Stones, Womb with a View, Cells with a View, Overview … the Quest for Our “Original Face”.
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“…when the Veils across perception are pulled to the side, everything appears as it is … infinite.”
“Our earliest experiences form, they create, our prejudices about Reality. So what would we see, what Reality would reveal itself, with those constraints pulled to the side?”.
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In this Book Two of The Path of Ecstasy Series, titled, Dance of the Seven Veils I, I continue the exploration of the screens of distortion across human perception begun in Book One, The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy. This time I focus on the ways the crucial events and experiences of our lives create our beliefs in life. In doing so, layer by layer, Veil by Veil, I continue bringing greater, truer perceptions into view of everything beyond.
I show in particular how our ideas about who to be and what to be, as rooted in culture and mythology; what to do, as rooted in early childhood experience; what to believe, as linked to religion, God, spirituality, mythology, good and evil, and much else, are rooted in the patterns of experiences we universally experience over the course of our lives, leading up to adulthood.
Further, I show how peeling back the layers of that onion is ever more liberating, at every step. And where it ultimately leads … what is ultimately true … what is the center of the onion?… Well, the image that emerges is your original face. And your original face is all these things — Divine, true, realer than real, more positive and loving than you ever thought you could be, and more wonderful and exciting than you can imagine. In the same vein as William Blake, I am saying that, when the Veils across perception are pulled to the side, everything appears as it is … infinite.
Book One, The Secret Life of Stones
In Book One, my premise is that there is a secret life in the Universe and that the physical world is an illusion arising from our human perception. I propose that the fundamental reality is consciousness; more correctly, it is experiential. That matter, the physical world, is a projection of human perception thrown upon the formless is the conclusion of quantum physics and our latest consciousness research. Hence all that exists, really, is Experience. Matter is metaphor of that Experience. It is also message of that particular aspect of Experience that we leave out of our awareness in coming into Form, in becoming human.
The Material Veil
What we put into unconsciousness in the process of coming into Form becomes the physical world we experience as unalive and not conscious, though actually it is pregnant with experiential Divinity — Subjectivity, Feeling, Awareness, Bliss … and Love. Correspondingly, the essence of the Universe is found in our direct experience of it, which is our essential Divinity.
The reality outside of that, which we think of as matter and as unconscious and unalive, is merely the aspect of our own reality from which we are temporarily cut off. It is our own consciousness; however it is the part of which we are unconscious. Or as I often point out, it is the part we have forgotten1— perhaps even intentionally, as a choice made by our inherent Divinity. Which choice also we then forget.2
That unknown aliveness is a secret life in the Universe of matter: So in essence there is a secret life of “stones.” Yes, the Universe is alive. And, yes, you are the Universe, you are that aliveness, but you have decided to become less so.
I show, in that work, The Secret Life of Stones, how knowing this changes everything. It is the tipping point revealing a new world — one in which each of us is immersed at every moment, like a fish in water, in aliveness, consciousness, experiential units … and all of it friendly, compassionate, reaching out to us and helping us … even in spite of us.
The Secret Life of Stones presents a logical philosophical journey that wanders and explores the terrain leading up to and supporting such overstandings. Then, it hovers above those astonishing revelations and glories in the implications of them for understanding our Reality, our non-separation from each other, our Identity as Self and Divinity, and for guidance for our lives.
In so doing, we peer through a portal wherein we are again one with the Universe. We find ourselves on the edge of a coming together as grand as that which we experienced at conception. We receive the gift of a heritage we long ago and mistakenly repudiated — a worldview in which we are seen as belonging, at home, and once again noble within the world we inhabit.
The Biological Veil
Most relevant to this book, in Book One, as well, I establish there are biologically constituted realities. These are one of the screens of distortion across our perception of clear Reality. That is to say that reality, for humans, is constructed for us out of our unique biological set from an infinity of everything possible that could be or is in the Universe — something that Aldous Huxley (1954) called, Mind at Large.
I point out that everything that we experience in life, beginning even before conception, before the coming together of sperm and ovum that created us, are learning experiences and are formative. They create imprints that skew all experiences coming afterward; they set templates within which everything that comes after is configured. They determine what we will see; how we will see it; how we will interpret it; what our reaction will be to it; and what we will do about it. We are human and have an experiential awareness extending back into a time prior to appearing on Earth. Then, in coming into Form, what we perceive and how we act are determined not so much by genetics but by prior experience.
Hence, these periconceptional experiences, these absolute earliest experiences of ours in the Form State, are the first of the Veils across our windows to the world, creating the screen upon which we will view our drama of human life.
So it is that our biological and anatomical makeup along with our individual histories prenatally and perinatally, beginning as early as when we were sperm and ova cells inside our parents, determine our human reality. They create the parameters of our experience in Form. They put down the ground rules of the board game of the human life we will experience and in which we will participate.
The Biocultural Veil
I also establish, in The Secret Life of Stones, that there are bioculturally constituted realities. These are the realities that emanate from our biological experiences as they are modified by culture. They come in most especially during out time in the womb, when events are shaped strongly both by biology but also by culture. For culture, as experienced by the mother, begins to heavily influence the experiences the fetus will have.
We all experience a time in the womb. What follows from that, which I say in The Secret Life of Stones, is that there are universal aspects of that experience which determine the human world view: Our feelings of freedom vying with those of constriction and oppression, for example, emanate from this time. Nonetheless, our womb experiences also vary by culture. Different cultures have different ideas about what the mother should be doing during pregnancy, how she will interact with her unborn child, and so on. These all affect the child in ways at least small, but usually in huge ways. These are aspects of the biocultural veil across perception.
To make clear this interplay of biology and culture, let me use an example. In the most egregious instance of cultural influence on our biologically constituted worldview, modern culture has created test tube babies. These are individuals whose early experiences as cells do not even follow the pattern of experience — of sperm traveling to ovum, and so on — that humans have experienced for all our existence and upon which all of what is considered human and human reality has been built. Someday, someone will have to do a study comparing the basic worldviews and mythologies of test-tube conceived humans to those of the rest of us with the normal human beginnings. I predict there will be astonishing differences.
However, in the most common example of bioculturally constituted realities emanating from our early lives, every culture determines the way birth will be experienced by the neonate. Thus, in what is the most studied biocultural of all influences, birth has an impact on our lives in vastly different ways depending upon whether it is harsh, or gentle; induced, or spontaneous; and in every other conceivable way. Prenatal and perinatal psychologists from Arthur Janov — with his definitive and ground-breaking book, Imprints (1983) — to Frederick Leboyer (1975, 2009), to Thomas Verny (1981), to David Chamberlain (1988) have detailed the way our birth and that our birth affects us ever after in life … often in ways that are irreversible and untouchable by any and all later experience and techniques. Before that, even, Otto Rank (1929, 1952), Nandor Fodor (1949), Donald W. Winnicott (1958), David Cheek and Leslie LeCron (1968), and Leslie Feher (1980) added much to our knowledge of how birth creates our underlying feelings and our perceived realities.
Books Two through Four, Dance of the Seven Veils
It is in this book — divided into three volumes — that I do the grand overview of what that all means for understanding our reality and liberating ourselves from limiting perspectives, unconscious prejudices, and denials of the reality before us which would otherwise be obvious. This book is meant to open your mind to what you are standing upon in your stance in life. It takes you back, layer by layer, like an archaeological dig, to the foundations of your being. Just a hint, you will find Divinity there. You will also sense the path to be free, the way of ecstasy.
Book Five, Womb with a View
While our births and our species biology — as exhibited in the species congratulation we do of ourselves, which is called anthropocentrism — are influential veils, distorting our perceptions of reality, still earlier experiences are even more influential. For what happens first lays down the foundation upon which all later prejudices will be constructed.
To this end, several theorists in particular — beginning with Otto Rank as long ago as 1929, with his book The Trauma of Birth, and including Frances Mott (1960, 1964) and Michael Irving (1988), but especially coming out in expansive detail with Stanislav Grof (1970, 1979, 1980, 1985, 1988a, 1993, 1998) — have noted the cross-over of birth experiences and traumas with religious and mythological beliefs and symbols.
Of special relevance is that in Grof’s view they are distinct. That is, pre- and perinatal events are distinct from transpersonal events according to him. Transpersonal in this sense, in line with transpersonal psychology, refers to the spiritual, archetypal, mythological, supernatural, and religious components of experience. Grof’s perspective is that birth events represent a kind of junction spot between the transpersonal and the personal; thus, between the spiritual and individual aspects of experience, or between the collective unconscious and the personal unconscious, to use Carl Jung’s terminology.
Seen Grof’s way, mythological events have an a priori standing; a priori meaning they are not reducible to life events such as the traumas of birth. They arise “of themselves” and have an independent or self-contained quality, not a derived one. According to Grof, transpersonal events are not a posteriori events; they do not “come after.” They are not derived from earlier experience. Which is to say, their existence is not dependent upon — let alone, caused by — the early pre- and perinatal experiences they so express.
While some might say we have the mythologies we do because we all have these early experiences and that is why myths are so similar across different individuals and cultures, proponents of Grof’s view would say that our mythologies are not attributable to our early events and that they exist independently of human life. They are seen as archetypes in the Jungian sense of being outside of and prior to human events. Much like Plato’s Forms, or iconic Ideas, they have a kind of prior and greater reality than the realities that emanate from our events as humans. In fact, the term biological materialism has been used by those in Grof’s camp to describe the idea that birth-like mythological and archetypal symbolism and experiences are derived from birth events. Saying they are derived is saying that they would not occur except for the birth traumas, and to that they do not agree.
The Mythological-Archetypal Veil
I have a different take on it, however. I do not dispute that some of their view is true. I really do not know the ontological status of these birth-like mythological and archetypal symbols. Nonetheless, I view the actual events of one’s life as having strong determination on the way one views and interprets everything that comes after them. That would include these transpersonal and archetypal realities as being at least shaped, if not caused, by our early experiences.
My difference lies in two things: One, that these events shape or they configure our religious and spiritual understandings, especially our religious ones, is what I elaborate upon in the relevant portions of this book and especially the four following it. However, I do not know the extent to which these events create or originate these transpersonal realities. Yet, in view of the findings brought out in my works, Planetmates (2014) and Prodigal Human (2016) — which detail the way humans evolved (devolved) the peculiar kind of birth from which we suffer, which is radically distinct from all of Nature — it is curious to think what it might mean for these events, specifically resonating with our unique birth experiences, to have an existence independent of humans. While this might mean that they are rooted in a kind of collective unconscious that exists prior to and independent of any individual’s experience, still, that collective unconscious is humanly derived; it is distinctly and only human.
In which case, we might wonder about the components of any Reality separate from the human: That is to say, what it is that might be true for humans as well as all other beings in existence, the other planetmates, any life forms on other planets or in other dimensions. In that light, in my endeavor here, in peeling back the pre- and perinatal overlays on human experience — even if they are rooted in some overarching reality, independent of any individual events, like a collective unconscious — I am still aiming for a peek at the reality that exists outside them. It seems to me there is a huge amount to be gained by an attempt at revealing what is Real, what exists, outside the peculiar human perspective on everything that is so taken up, for humans, with our births and prenatal experiences.
The second aspect of my difference with the Grofians’ view lies in that those events that configure our species worldview go all the way back to conception, way before birth. So it is that in Womb with a View I bring out the mythological, psychological, and archetypal elements and relate them to underlying womb, and to some extent birth, events. Yet, in the book following this one in the Series, Cells with a View (expected publication, 2020), I do the same regarding cellular events, our experiences around conception, that is, periconceptionally.
In both cases, wombular and cellular events, my view is that they overlay and configure the way we will view what might be considered truly non-Formular events or entities. What I will say is consistent with what I have laid out in The Secret Life of Stones related to biologically-constituted realities, in particular the bioculturally-constituted realities. Consistent with what I said there, my aim will be to show how by wiping away the distortive effects of biocultural experiences at birth, in the womb, and around conception, we might come closer to purer perception. This is how, indeed, we cleanse the doors of perception; that is, by clearing away the personal pain and pre- and perinatal trauma imbuing and slanting them, if not out and out creating them.
In doing this clearing away of fear- and pain-laden prompts to our perception and interpretations of it, we might approach that view ec-static, that cosmic overstanding that is normally denied us out of the fact that we have such powerful determinants on our perception at the beginnings of our lives as the traumas prenatally and perinatally.
So it is that in Book Five, Womb with a View, I continue the exploration of the Veils across our perception of clear Reality begun in The Secret Life of Stones and continued in these volumes, Dance of the Seven Veils I, II, and III. Specifically, I do this regarding the perceptional configurations arising from our experience in the womb. I touch as well upon some of those emanating from our experience of birth and the events around conception.
However, the elements of mythology surrounding birth are addressed already with thoroughness by Stanislav Grof, so I leave that to him, and I bring his insights forward with appropriate credit. And the elements of mythology periconceptionally, that is to say, emanating from the events around conception, while introduced here, are taken up in greater detail in the book following this one in the Series, to be titled, Cells with a View.
Book Six, Cells with a View
The book following Womb with a View in The Path of Ecstasy Series of books is to be Cells with a View. In it I will show how the events around conception, this time — the periconceptional experiences — configure even more of our biocultural matrix even prior to our “beliefs” about things outside the natural. It is my view that our very perception of Form reality is created there. You might say that is where we not just read the rules of the game we will be playing in life, we imprint them on all of what we will perceive ever after in life.
The Cellular-Formular Veil
So, prior to religious and spiritual beliefs we have seemingly indisputable assumptions impressed on us related to the existence of duality in the world and the existence of space as well as time. If we accept a mystical position that both of those are illusions, then it is my contention that we can look to our pre- and periconceptional experiences and events as to why we have such deep-rooted assumptions about reality, such “illusions” as to the existence of space and time.
This is where — at the periconceptional experiences — we are looking more at the biologically constituted as opposed to the bioculturally constituted realities. For, while our experiences in the womb and at birth are much influenced by the mother’s experience in her culture and thus the way those events are construed in her culture, there is not a lot of influence from culture on the way the conception experiences unfold.
Not a lot, but some. Certainly the health of the father and the mother go into the configuration of these primal events, somewhat, and that is affected by culture. Without doubt, the emotional and psychological characteristics of the parents, which are influenced by culture, influence their very cells, including their sperm and ova. And astonishingly, with test tube babies and other high-tech, modern interventions into the processes of fertilization and conception going on, suddenly there are huge influences on its processes emanating from culture. We can only wonder, at this point, what kinds of beliefs and notions about the Universe will be had by those who come from such laboratory origins.
However, that to the side, there is a great deal of uniformity in our experiences at and around conception. Whereas, there is far more variability and cultural input with each advance of time in gestation. Thus it is that we live in pretty similar physical worlds because we have rather the same experiences, periconceptionally. These events are part of our species makeup, our biologically constituted realities, as opposed to the bioculturally constituted realities, which are more variable and that come in with the influences of culture in later womb life and at birth.
The result and aim of looking at our perceptual prejudices, from birth, womb, and conception, as will be done in the two books — Womb with a View and Cells with a View — is to arrive at something astounding. As I said in The Secret Life of Stones, the way to get a peek outside our biologically-constituted realities, the way to go ec-static, is to drop our vanity and self-congratulation at all levels. But now more.
A Dance of the Seven Veils
For, in these five books — Dance of the Seven Veils I, II, and III; Womb with a View; and Cells with a View — I will show how we can view even beyond that into what is the Nature of Reality. How? By peeling away not just the Veils of ego and vanity — especially as manifest in our universal and utterly intractable anthropocentrism, as I showed in The Secret Life of Stones — but the Veils also of even more fundamental primal pain and early experience. Our earliest experiences form, they create, our prejudices about Reality. So what would we see, what Reality would reveal itself, with those constraints lifted from our eyes?
Whatever it is, it would necessarily be Truth, or truths, far beyond what we come up with enslaved as we are within the boundaries of concepts formed from our early, our profoundly influential, experiences. An example? What is the reality we experience before we have the one of duality when we come into Form as cells, as sperm and ovum? When we experience not just separation, from father and mother, but then duality in the coming together of the two at conception? At that point we have laid — through the experiences we have had there of duality — a foundation for seeing all the rest of the Reality we will experience in life in terms of male and female, separation and union, struggle and peace, pleasure and pain, satisfaction and discontent, inner and outer, and all the rest.
But what was Reality before we stamped that particular cookie cutter on Reality? What was the bigger “game” or the larger reality outside the game before those rules of consensual reality, involving dualism, were initiated? At this point we are metaphorically looking for what the “room” looks like that we are sitting in when we are playing the board or virtual reality game of life. What is the “setting” like? What are we like? Who else is there and what are they like? What does it feel like? What is it all about at that “level”? And more — anything else we will find out when we have removed more than just vanity from our prejudices, but also the formative early experiences, many of them painful, which give rise to all the other prejudices on our perception.
In my works, we pull back at least these seven Veils across Naked Reality, in order to perceive the Truth ec-static, out of Form, untainted, unsullied, in Itself, non-skewed and unslanted and unprejudiced: We need remove, first, the Veil of vanity and Ego of species, i.e., anthropocentrism (see The Secret Life of Stones and Veil One of this book); second, that of cultural identity (see Veil Two of this book); third, that of personal, primal pain (see Veil Three); fourth, that of prenatal and perinatal pain and their mythological-archetypal correlates (see Veils Four, Five, and Six, which are in the second volume of Dance of the Seven Veils); fifth, that of cellular experience and its Form-ular constructions of world (see Veil Seven, in the third book of this); and sixth, that of our biology itself as a species, human, which determines a human Veil, in distinction to all others (see Veil Seven, Dance of the Seven Veils III as well and my forthcoming work, Cells with a View). Finally, as I explain in The Secret Life of Stones, there remains a Veil, a conscious one. It is another Veil that is not a veil for it is chosen, transparent, and conscious.
One can see through it. This is much the same as the way we are able to process through the seven Veils while in life and, afterward, see through them. Hopefully these volumes of Dance of the Seven Veils are helpful, if not instrumental, in that. Though the seven Veils — even with such clarity as I am endeavoring to elicit in you with this work, and which is possible — are in some ways still extant (while in Form); being conscious, no longer are they limiting.
The last no-veil — existing in no-time and no-place — is one we can choose, even in the No-Form State, and consciously. For as Divinity we wish to be less as well as All, to be a part and separate as well as Unity and One. We wish to be less than the All for the fun of it, for the fun of configuration, for the drama of it, even as souls and No-Forms. For the peek-a-boo joy of continually appreciating beauty joy and love by forgetting it so as to discover it again and again, endlessly. It is the Veil of the no-form configuration of the No-Form Self. It is the chosen configuration of spirit, some might call a soul, that we adopt for the purpose of interacting with ourselves as Divinity within the grand expanse of all Experience. That is the final Veil, the no-veil. And beyond that? Well, that would be the “mind” of God, would it not? The Self of God? Brahman?
Yet, one could say that outside our perceptual biases and all our biologically and bioculturally constituted realities, it is nothing. That there is a fundamental nothingness, like some mystical types and their literature profess. However, I contend that is a cop-out. It is easy to say something does not exist — there is “nothing” there — in “places” where we are not able to see at our level of spiritual growth. As I have said throughout my works, all the evidence points to a rich and infinite variety of experience, a colorfully profound and interesting mix, as a more fundamental reality and as the essence of Divinity.
The reason we so cannot see that experience itself is our one and only reality is that we have experienced Pain at our earliest beginnings in coming into life. We cannot hack the idea of that being fundamental because it would mean that pain is — that pain is an essential, or a Divinely planned aspect of human reality. And what we have tried to do instead is to seek to separate from experience … calling this split-off state, transcendence … so as not to have to acknowledge what it feels like inside our bodies. At base, we wish to find a “higher” reality in Mind/mind because it is too painful to find one in body.
Whereas as I (2013d) put it, “Experience Is Divinity.” The “mind” of God is no-thing, but hardly nothing! Indeed, quite the opposite! I deal with this last no-veil in the Epilogue of this work, which is in Dance of the Seven Veils III, as well as in Experience Is Divinity, and in Part Three of Funny God. Its most complete exposition will be in the forthcoming — Book Thirteen in The Path of Ecstasy Series — The Cosmic Overstanding.
This is where we will go in these books. This is the melody that will guide us, move us, direct us. And we will, like Salome, do a Dance of the Seven Veils and find out what Naked Reality is more likely to be like.
So let the music begin. .
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PROLOGUE.
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Primal Psychology and the Farther Reaches of Experience.
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The Hidden Land of Origin:
Our Astonishing Inability to Acknowledge Our Earliest Experiences and the Surprising Vista of Knowledge That Doing So Reveals.
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“There are few people in our current era who can wrap their minds around this idea, however obvious it appears once considered, that the events occurring to prenates are themselves actually learning events that are as formative as any and all learning events that occur to us after birth and in full view of others.”
“…we have both a scientific as well as lay insistence that the beginnings of personality are at birth and that they are laid atop a structure of predispositions emanating from our genetic makeup. Which understanding amazingly leaves out the existences we had in the womb prior to us emerging into the light where we could be seen.”
“We further add to our disinclination to see our existences before birth, let alone the experiences and memories from that time, with bogus assumptions shrouded in scientific jargon….”.
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We must confront an amazing assumption. The basis of all personality, throughout science and for hundreds of years, is thought to be either a product of experiences occurring after birth, from infancy onward, or to be genetic. Astoundingly, with all our sophisticated science, we drive ourselves into this cul de sac of fog and confusion around this idea that because we cannot view the person before birth, whereas we can observe the individual’s acts and events after birth, that the influences that are not readily viewable do not exist … they simply did not happen. Why, how convenient. Certainly our job is easier now.
Hiding Origins
You might not think that kind of assumption to be so astonishing, but then you have been taught to think that way your entire life. Also, your personal experience jives with this view of science: Your view, based understandably on the fact we do not usually remember that time in utero, is that what occurs in the womb — that which happens to us as fetuses or prenates, which we cannot see — is not only not very important, it is non-existent! Yet science is presumed to be truer than our prejudices. Indeed, it has proven to be so in quite a few other areas of knowledge. Still, the fatuous quality of the assumption of the non-existence of events that are out of our view is undeniable. “Out of sight, out of mind” is the stance toward this reality, regardless how unscientific that is. For this attitude is not only inane, childish even, but it is as “convenient” as any rationalization provided by any politician for his or her policies.
You are no doubt so imbued with the incomprehensibility of my position — simply that there are events that happen to us before birth that predetermine and imprint and are precursor to all later experience — that I feel my task here, right here and right now, in getting you to see the obvious inanity of your position and the clear and simple truth of mine to be daunting. There are few people in our current era who can wrap their minds around this idea — however obvious it appears once considered — that the events occurring to prenates are themselves actually learning events that are as formative as any and all learning events that occur to us after birth and in full view of others. Indeed, these gestational events are more formative, far more so.
Be that as it may, I persevere. Not that I have not tackled this dilemma before this time. Oh, I have. In several of my works — in particular Wounded Deer and Centaurs (2016), Falls from Grace (2014), Experience Is Divinity (2013), and The Secret Life of Stones (2016) — I expand upon this curious, almost “instinctive,” or innate, tendency of humans to ignore the most obvious about their beginnings: Which is that human existence begins not at the time adults can first see a baby (duh!) but at a time inside another’s body: That is to say, in a womb. Indeed, as we shall see, it goes back to a time inside our mothers and fathers when we were mere gamete cells — a sperm and an ovum.
Why We Hide Our Origins
The reasons for this innate blindness of humans toward their own consciousness, as I explained much more thoroughly in the works mentioned, have to do with,
a) The fact that these times are so imbued with pain and trauma that everything in us wants to not know of them, so we forget, we suppress, inevitably we repress, all knowledge of them. We are even more stridently averse to acknowledging them in our sciences — our biology and our psychology — because of the discomfort that looking in the direction of these times of our lives brings up in folks, whether they are aware of it or not.
b) The fact that our biological survivability is aided by, and has therefore been naturally selected for, ignoring the consciousness of the unborn. Since to give the prenate all the consideration and attention it would justly deserve, and could use, would further burden parents. Parents will already be responsible for the child after birth in a way that cannot be avoided; yet care for the preborn child is optional, however desirable from the perspective of the prenate. With other survival considerations in the minds of parents, there is disincentive to, and natural selection against, proper acknowledgment of the fully feeling and experiential existence of the child-to-be.
c) The third reason we find it impossible to entertain the notion of prenatal experience is that to do so would be cause for guilt and regret in parents. Parents commonly disregard the feeling awareness of the prenate, for if the unborn child were to be acknowledged, it would follow that one could have helped and nurtured one’s child, but one failed to. So we deny that and any knowledge, however true, that would make us uncomfortable.
d) Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is the fact that the prenatal life depicts the feminine role in creation, and this is something that patriarchies have done all in their power to minimize and eliminate. Yes, I am saying that our current scientific approaches to the psychology of personality are rooted in misogyny. Why not? Why wouldn’t they be, emanating as they do from the pervasive and brutalizing patriarchy of history, including the Middle Ages and Renaissance Europe, which in fact spawned our science?
I say this might be the more important reason, for in cultures that are not as patriarchal, women are given a prominent role in Creation mythology, at least their role is included. Whereas with mythologies of patriarchy, as for example that of Genesis, the world is a product, only, of a male god’s initiative. Notice what Joseph Campbell (1969) — the foremost authority on mythology of the Twentieth Century — says along these lines:
“In many of the myths of India the cut-up man, the primordial, world-creating sacrifice of whom the visible world was fashioned, is called Purusha, which means simply, ‘Man.’ In the ancient Babylonian epic of creation, the figure was a monstrous female, the goddess-mother of the world abyss, Tiamat. In the Australian legend of Karora, this same universal archetype, or elementary idea, of the all-containing primal being has been adjusted to the conditions of the local scene and ceremonial style. There is no glacial cold, as in Iceland; no reference to the Brahmanic sacrifice, as in India; no mention of the female sex, as in all the others. The pattern is exclusively masculine — as in the case of the Hebrew Lord God’s unassisted creation of the world and production without female intervention of Adam, his original son. The Australian rituals of the circumcision and subincision, with their emphatically patriarchal bias, find their validation in a myth of this kind, where the whole life stage of the child with the mother is simply disregarded, and the son is born as the full-grown son of the father in one night.”1
Ignorance and an aversion to prenatal and perinatal roots of personality are a product of a patriarchal elimination of women and Nature in general. It is a way of downplaying and disparaging women’s role in the influences that create the adult human and a way of trying to emphasize the masculine role. This emphasis continues right up to — and in a significant way with — rites of passage of adolescence and young adulthood. In these rites of initiation into adulthood, in the identity of the adult male, but to some extent female, male supremacy is branded upon the psyches and personalities of the young. I will deal with this in more detail in the upcoming part, “Veil Two: Adolescence and Cultural Identity, Diminution … Rites of Passage.”
The Results of Hiding Our Origins
The result is that we have both a scientific as well as lay insistence that the beginnings of personality are at birth and that they are laid atop a structure of predispositions that emanate from our genetic makeup. You might not believe we so routinely do this. Yet think for a second on how we think of the roots of personality; and you will recall that any traits or behaviors are studied as to whether, and then how, such emerge from our experiences after birth or — the only other option thought possible — how they are rooted in our genes, in our DNA. If a trait is there at birth it is genetic, is the way this thinking goes. I have yet to see it otherwise, outside of the field of prenatal and perinatal psychology.
The Fallacy of Nature versus Nurture
This is commonly thought of as the “nature versus nurture” question, and always is it framed around an inquiry as to whether something is the result of after-birth experiences. And if not, then heredity is said to be the root of them. However, this understanding amazingly leaves out the existence we had in the womb, with all of its profuse, varied, and complex experience, prior to us emerging into the light where we could be seen.
Now, what does this have to do with the Veils of perception as found in mythology? Well, here as well the thinking has been that whatever is universally existing as patterns of human myth and belief — if not a product of our lives after we are born — are attributable to “instinct” and their expression as archetypes, as Jung would have it; to “isomorphs,” as gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Kohler would see it; to “elementary ideas,” as put forth by Adolf Bastian (1868); or to supernatural causes, as religious folks would have it. Similar theories about inherited “engrams” and sociobiological factors in personality and behavior are plastered about our fields of both personality and developmental psychology and even transpersonal psychology, to at least some extent. It is the assumed position, never questioned.2
All these theories arise out of a massive, intricate, and comprehensive scientific matrix of hundreds of years of understanding and research which — again, utterly unbelievably — leaves out of consideration the time before we were born when we grew inside our mother’s womb. Hence, what we can actually see the infant (and the child afterward) doing and happening to it is the basis for learning, for virtually all of it — this we assert with all the conviction in us. Yet, what that same organism did and had done to it prenatally — i.e., what it experienced prior to birth — is to this day excluded from that massive matrix of scientific theory and understanding … totally excluded.
Oh, yes, some of you are thinking that what I am saying is so unfair and silly because we know, supposedly, that humans do not have consciousness before birth. We know this without a doubt. Why, it is clear as a bell that consciousness is magically “turned on,” like a switch, upon release into the midwife’s or doctor’s hands; perhaps upon the smack on a butt, which flicks on the screen of awareness; perhaps the first agonizing breath or the cutting of the umbilical cord, which opens the previously dormant mind. And clearly we do not see how silly it is to think such things.
The Vanity of Human Consciousness
We further add to our disinclination to see our existences before birth, let alone the experiences and memories from that time, with bogus assumptions shrouded in scientific jargon: Science once affirmed that consciousness was not possible before birth, for the myelination of the neurons in the brain had not been completed. Why we would think that is anyone’s guess, for when we actually checked to see if that was true, we discovered it was not. The only thing myelination of nerves does is speed up the transmission of nerve impulses. Sure looks like an assumption was jumped to, and then universally accepted, because it fit a pervasive prejudice as well as a desire to beat back knowledge of that time of our lives.
For that matter, even that idea of myelination is based upon the idea that we have to have the thinking and rational kind of consciousness that we think we have as adults in order for learning to happen. Again, another prejudice and self-congratulating-to-intellectuals presumption. Quite ridiculous it is to assume that, when we know that even one-celled animals and inch worms are able to learn from their experience; clearly they have memory. Yet we do not go putting them to the test of whether they are myelinated or not. *sarcasm*
Nonetheless, we insist on this ignorance about our awareness in the womb because, hell, we do not remember it! So it must not have happened. This manages to forget that just about everyone wakes up in the morning and immediately forgets their dreams, thereby making them inaccessible. Yet when we remember them, we know that not only were we conscious and problem-solving during those dreams, but we had memory in them that caused some of the events in them to be decided out of events that happened earlier in them. More clearly, we thought and made decisions in our dreams based on earlier events in them.
Despite this, and being the rational and aware beings we are … ahem! … we most certainly remember the events we experience when we are conscious. This, we, nevertheless, insist to ourselves. No memory of the time in the womb … so there must not be any conscious awareness when it occurred. We maintain this despite the fact that we do not remember our childhoods, usually, before the age of around five. Yet, when we began uncovering the unconscious traumas that inhibit our conscious awareness, which began with Freud, and we discovered that such folks who did so actually began remembering their childhoods, still that did not change our prejudices toward the time before birth. You would think the same rationale would have been applied to that time, too. But, no.
The Prenatal Frontier
Then, when folks began, in the 1950s — coincident with the use of LSD in therapeutic settings and later through all kinds of non-drug modalities such as primal therapy and holotropic breathwork — to remember the time before birth, well we responded, as the scientific community, by simply ignoring the facts that did not fit our prejudices … the facts that were “inconvenient.” Regardless that the latest research in biology and psychology … especially pre- and perinatal and transpersonal psychology … revealed veridical memory extending back not only to birth, not only into the womb, but even to the cellular level; we simply ignored these facts rather than have our precious beliefs be upset.
However, including these new facts has profoundly expanded our understandings of not just consciousness but the nature of ourselves as entities and even the nature of Reality and the Divine. For this, see my The Secret Life of Stones (2016) and my Wounded Deer and Centaurs (2016).
And I will continue that exploration of the implications of the astonishing facts about consciousness and identity derived from our new understandings of our existence, consciousness, memory, and such, here in this book. This work, indeed, will survey extensively what those early experiences do to us … through what we learn from them and carry with us ever afterward … in terms of what beliefs we will have related to the supernatural as well as to the overriding understandings of our role in life and our proper behavior in it — which is to say, our mythologies.
So it is that we will lift the lid of denial laid upon our prebirth lives and we will see what experiences we have there and what learning we derive from them which have laid within us a foundation of what we will think to be true and will believe ever after and will express in all of our creative productions, our dreams, our myths, our rituals, our religions, our art and cultural productions, our spiritual assumptions, our beliefs about the supernatural and the paranormal, and much else that we are not directly able to know and about which we will have assumptions. Indeed, such inquiry as in this book is so valuable just because it addresses those things we assume to be true and in finding out they have roots within our early experience we are able to see beyond them. That is, these ideas-archetypes-assumptions-myths-and-mythologies are derivative, not fundamental. They are a result of learning; they are a posteriori ideas, not a priori ones: They are not innate, instinctive, elementary, Divinely given, or anything else which would assign them a status akin to that of Plato’s iconic Ideas.
In doing this clearing away of the derived and variable, we open upon a Universe in which we might actually know what exists prior to the experiences of our lives. We might know what actually is true … or truer. If there are inherent human ideas or, better, actual truths about the Universe outside our prejudices that we are capable of knowing once the Veils of prejudicial events have been removed, it is here that we might approach them.
So that is the purpose of this work — to find the experiences of our earliest times and to see what ideas we assume that have sprung from them; and to look beyond them, then, to what might actually be true outside ourselves. Remember, as long as we are forming our beliefs based on experiences we have had, whether collectively or uniquely, we are only crafting a visage of ourselves in the process, nothing outside of ourselves. It is only when we can go behind the a posteriori elements of our beliefs — meaning those arising as a result of our experience — that we can clear a screen upon which the a priori elements … which are those existing prior to any influence or arising “of themselves” … if there are any, can emerge.
So, how do we begin? We must review the perinatal imprints on our personality and remember how we are affected, indeed, pushed and pulled, by forces those early events have set in motion. That we do next, beginning with the chapter coming up. Only then can we speculate what might be true outside our prejudices, outside the particular assumptions put into us by our prior experiences in life, in this case, our earliest and most formative ones. Only then can we have a chance of learning what is really true.
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The Primal Ground of Being:
Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and the Mythological Matrix of World.
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“…describing the problems of ‘normality’ as rooted in a deprivational and deformational series of traumas from our earliest biological history … holds out the vision of a new person and new society as an outcome of the efforts directed at the earliest laying down of human experience.”.
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Prenatal and perinatal psychology is the field that deals with the effects of events occurring prior to (prenatal) and surrounding the time of birth (perinatal) upon later life and personality. An ever-increasing amount, though certainly not all, of the information we have about these periods of our lives and their effects is derived through the later and vivid remembering of these events in a phenomenon known as re-experience. All of what are called regression therapies, especially primal therapy, and many breathwork and shamanistic modalities — in particular, holotropic breathwork — allow re-experience of traumatic events of a person’s life, especially one’s birth, by removing barriers normally in place to repress these events from conscious awareness. Entheogens, meaning “toward God,” such as LSD, have also played significant roles in bringing these events into consciousness. Indeed, through these modalities, tens if not hundreds of thousands of folks, to date, have re-experienced aspects of their births and perinatal history. They have integrated these normally unconscious contents, been made more whole by the experiences as well as from the connections and insights into one’s life and behavior they expose, and have been able to report what the experience of being a neonate is like.
Prenatal Origins of World
However, one significant and as yet little explored or understood phenomenon, arising also from the modalities mentioned, is that of prenatal re-experience. In this case, the experiencer reports … and observationally appears to be … experiencing events that happened in utero, sometimes going back as far as sperm, egg, and zygote states.1 These reports of remembering experiences that occurred before birth are at such variance with Western professional and popular paradigms that they are met with near-universal incredulity and, too often, premature dismissal. Yet the evidence from the mounting numbers of experiential reports and empirical studies attests that something which is at least unique and interesting is going on here.
Nevertheless, much of this prenatal information had for a long time been unformulated, untheorized, and unintegrated into a coherent structure for making sense of these experiences. However, my book, Falls from Grace (2014), went a long way toward doing just that — making sense of prenatal experiences and exploring the implications and prospects of the knowledge gleaned from this fascinating new area of research and which arises from the vision that an exposure to this material induces.
Before getting into all of that, let us look for a bit at the history of these latest understandings come to us.
History of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology
While Freud (1927) disregarded major effects of birth on personality, he still saw the birth experience as the prototype of all later anxiety. His overall disregard of birth, however, was largely influenced by the belief — although discredited (see Chamberlain, 1988, and below), still common in mainstream psychology and medicine today — that a newborn does not possess the neurological capacity for consciousness at birth.
Other early psychoanalysts disagreed with Freud on this. Otto Rank is the most notable of these. Following Freud’s basic psychoanalytic reasoning for personality patterns in early infancy, he asserted basic patterns of experience and ideas that are rooted in even earlier experience. Rank (1929) claimed the deepest, most fundamental patterns of these personality constructs originated at the time of birth, which Freud thought was not possible.
Based upon the dream, fantasy, and other patterns of associations arising in his patients in psychoanalysis, Rank postulated a birth trauma, which he saw as a critical event in laying down in each of us particular patterns of thinking, motivation, and emotion for the rest of our lives. Notable among these prototypes was a feeling of a paradise once known but somehow lost, a separation anxiety caused by the separation at birth, and a resulting futile and lifelong struggle to re-unite with that golden age and that early maternal bliss. Essentially, these things together, according to Rank, amounted to an underlying — disguised but prevalent — desire of humans to return to the womb.
Another psychoanalyst, and pediatrician as well, Donald W. Winnicott (1958) also held that birth is remembered and is important. He insisted that the birth trauma is real; he contended that traumatic birth is permanently etched in memory and leaves a lifetime psychological scar. Winnicott also suggested the possibility of prenatal trauma.
David Cheek and Leslie LeCron (1968) used hypnosis to retrieve early memories in their patients. They discovered that memories earlier than what they expected, going back to birth, were possible. Importantly, a relief of symptoms seemed to follow from the re-experience of these birth memories. They concluded that a birth imprint occurs, which is induced by the extreme stress of that time and is resistant to fading from later experience. Further they asserted that this imprint could be the cause of a wide spectrum of psychiatric and psychosomatic disorders.
Leslie Feher (1980) sought to extend the Freudian tradition farther back into areas that, she asserts, were until only recently unknowable. Thus, she describes a natal theory and therapy that includes experiences of cutting the umbilical cord, birth, and even prebirth.
In fact, she considers the cutting of the umbilical cord to be central in her theory of trauma, calling it the crisis umbilicus, and she echoes another prenatal theorist, Nandar Fodor (1949), in claiming that it is the true origin of the castration fears made so much of in psychoanalysis. This is so because, according to Feher, the cord, with its attached placenta, is an object of security and is considered by the fetus to be part of him- or herself. Thus, this cutting represents a supreme threat in being a separation from a total life support system, a major organ, a part of oneself.
In these ways, she also brings forward for renewed appreciation Rank’s speculations on the element of separation trauma as a crucial element of the birth trauma.
Perhaps the major theorist and popularizer of the phenomenon of re-experience … which he termed primaling … Arthur Janov was reluctant to acknowledge the pervasiveness of pre- and perinatal re-experience and trauma. Yet when he did, it was in a major work on birth trauma, which remains as a touchstone in the field in its depth and detail. Imprints: The Lifelong Effects of the Birth Experience, published in 1983, among other things places birth as the determining factor in creating basic personality constructs, called sympathetic and parasympathetic, which roughly coincide with the more common terms introversion and extroversion. Janov’s work is more empirical and neurophysiologically rooted than most in the field, and this was especially true of this work.
David Chamberlain (1988), for many years the president of APPPAH (the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health), has further substantiated the claim of consciousness at birth and the accuracy of pre- and perinatal memory in the phenomenon of re-experience. He reported one study he did in which he compared hypnotically retrieved memories of birth from mother and child and found an astonishing degree of conformity in their responses.
Of note was the degree of inner consistency and originality in these memories as reported by the former neonate. They often contained technical details of the delivery and labor unlike what would be expected of the medically unsophisticated, a perceptive critique of the way the birth was handled, and other details of the event that could not have been known through normal conscious channels.
We see that a substantial body of literature and research — anecdotal, observational, experimental, and empirical — demonstrating the reality of and the importance of birth and its trauma has been going on for almost one-hundred years. Yet others, in time, went beyond birth and began to uncover prenatal influences and memories. This look into events in the womb and their significance for personality, behavior, and thought is what we deal with next.
The Prenatal Matrix
Also a psychoanalyst, as well as being an associate of Sigmund Freud, Nandor Fodor (1949) focused on the reflections of birth and prenatal material in dreams. While Winnicott and some others referred to the prenatal as being significant in development, it is with Fodor, and his follower, Francis Mott, that it is most developed.
Fodor also designed interventions in therapy to release the negative effects of birth and to process prenatal memories. He was the first to mention actual relivings of birth, in which verifiably accurate memories of birth were recovered. He agreed with Rank on many points, however he stressed the origins of consciousness and of trauma being in the prenatal period. He likened birth to death, as he explained that is the way the prenate experiences the drastic change involved in birth; and he claimed that our memory of that death-birth experience is what accounts for our fear of death as adults.
Lloyd deMause (1982, 1987, 2002) was instrumental in establishing the new interdisciplinary field of psychohistory. In his study of historical happenings, he discovered that stages in the progression of public events of national, international scope and of historical importance — including invasions, elections, wars, programs and policies, uprisings, depressions and recessions, and much more — related to stages in the progression of gestation and birth. Which perinatal stages happened to correspond, by the way, remarkably well with Stanislav Grof’s four stages of birth, his basic perinatal matrices, as we shall see.
Lloyd deMause found that natal imagery especially predominates in societies during times of crisis and war, when national purpose and state of affairs are construed as a need to escape or break free from an enclosing and constricting force. He also introduced the suffering fetus and the poisonous placenta as sources of these later metaphors and imagery.2 In fact, in studying the imagery in the national media of various countries he has been able to predict political, social, and economic events such as wars and invasions, recessions, and political downfalls.
His work begins to look at the prenatal influences and imprints and how they related to macrocosmic issues of politics, history, social movements, and issues of war and peace. As importantly, in my opinion, he was the first to stress that prenatal existence, for a good deal of it, is anything but the blissful heavenly time that all earlier researchers assumed of it. Referring to studies of in utero events which employed previously unavailable technologies he showed how the prenatal state, beginning at around the seventh month of gestation, was characterized by times of extreme hypoxia and other stresses on the prenate. This became important in helping me to formulate my prenatal matrices of human evil, as you will see in Chapter 5, of this book, and in Veil Five of this work.
The actual stimulus for a new field of pre- and perinatal psychology and for its major association, the Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH) was Thomas Verny’s work, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child (1981). His book brought together a good deal of the new empirical research that had opened the doors to us on the events in the womb. While himself a practitioner of “holistic primal therapy,” he integrated the accumulating data from the phenomenon of re-experience with the new information from the more traditional, “objective,” scientific research into the prenatal — made possible by the latest advances in technology.
One of his conclusions from this combination of lines of inquiry was that “birth and prenatal experiences form the foundations of human personality.”3 Verny’s other conclusions center on the importance of intrauterine bonding in that his research strongly suggests that the prenate, via pathways hormonal and unknown, picks up on the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of the mother. More importantly, he asserted, the imprint of these factors on the fetus predetermines the later mother-child relationship. He emphasized that positive thoughts and feelings toward the fetus — “maternal love” — acts to cushion the new individual against the normal stresses and unavoidable harshness inherent in birth and early infancy. Yet all of this cannot be completely avoided. “Birth is like death to the newborn,” writes Verny.4
A follower of Nandor Fodor, Francis Mott’s work is less well known even by this field’s standards, yet it is undeniably impressive. Mott’s (1960, 1964) major contribution lies in his focusing on basic patterns of mind and cosmos that correlate with prenatal feelings and states. He traced consciousness back to events around conception and saw these events as instituting patterns affecting all later experience and conceptual constructions. Through dream analysis he elicited these “configurations,” and he demonstrated their manifestation as seemingly universal archetypes in myths and universal human assumptions about the nature of reality. His work has a lot of congruence with the approach I take in this work.
In fact, through his study of womb and conception patterns he claimed to have discovered patterns that underlie and unite all of reality at all levels of manifestation — astronomical, social, personal, cellular, and even nuclear. While this may seem rather grandiose, his work was highly regarded and admired by Carl Jung. That, in itself, is surprising in that his work would provide, in many cases, for experiential explanations for the archetypes that Jung has attributed to “instinct,” or as it is considered more appropriate to say nowadays, to “genes.”
Thus, the universality of Jung’s archetypes can be attributed to universal patterns of experience humans undergo from conception to birth, not to genetics. It is a tribute to Jung that he would acknowledge such work, threatening as it is to his own work, simply on its own merits.
At any rate, Mott carried forward the intimations of earlier prenatal theoreticians, notably Rank and Fodor, on the gestational basis of archetypes. While he does not address or seek to discredit the range of, supposedly genetic, archetypes postulated by Jung, his work is highly suggestive of an experiential, specifically, pre- and perinatal, as opposed to genetic basis for many of these archetypes.
Prenatal Mythology
In this book, I make exactly that claim for the gestational origins of not only all mythology, religion, and archetypes, but even fundamental assumptions about physical reality, such as duality and separation, and about life, such as the creation and perception of time. More later.
Finally, Francis Mott made the postulation that our original expanded capacity to feel is diminished, as he says, “divided,” by experience not increased by it. The idea is that there is a reduction in awareness as a result of early traumatic events, beginning around conception and then on, and not the buildup of consciousness and feeling that we assume from the mechanistic paradigm that sees consciousness as a byproduct of increasing physical, specifically brain, activity during our early years.
This is the position I came up with, independently of and unaware of Mott’s work, and which I published in my book, Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness (2014).
I wish also to point out that this idea of reductions of consciousness over time, in early human development, and not the buildup due to cell growth normally assumed, has remarkable consistency with Bergson’s (1896, 1934) theory of “brain as reducing valve.”5
The reducing valve theory of brain function was supported by experiences in psychedelic states, and, specifically, it was proposed by Aldous Huxley (1954) in his famous work (famous because the Sixties rock phenomenon, The Doors, used its title as inspiration in naming themselves), The Doors of Perception, as a way of understanding how psychedelics can open one up to consciousness and awareness quite beyond what one could possibly know through normal channels. “The doors of perception” as a title of Aldous Huxley’s work came from a poem by William Blake. The line goes, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, the world would appear as it is, infinite.” Still, Huxley’s essay, The Doors of Perception, along with its companion essay, Heaven and Hell (1956) was an icon of counterculture mythology in the 1960s, and it was Huxley’s work which inspired the musicians, The Doors.
According to Huxley, expansion of mind beyond the normal can be a result of consciousness-altering methods, psychedelic drugs being one of them, due to the fact that the “reducing valve,” the brain, is inhibited from performing its function of blocking out the majority of an otherwise overwhelming Reality.6 I continued along those lines, elaborating and speculating on the idea, in my articles, titled, “The Doors of Perception: Each of Us Is Potentially Mind at Large… When Perception Is Cleansed, All Kinds of Nonordinary Things Happen” and “Occupy Science … A Call for a Scientific Awakening: In Tossing Away Our Species Blinders, We Approach a Truth Far Beyond Science.”7
A pioneer in this prenatal and perinatal area is Stanislav Grof. His many works, providing a framework for conceptualizing pre- and perinatal and transpersonal experiences, are a profound and useful starting point for an investigation into this area.8
In his use of LSD beginning in 1956 for psychotherapy, called psycholytic therapy, Grof discovered four levels of experience of the unconscious: the sensory, the biographical, the perinatal, and the transpersonal. He noted a tendency for growth and healing to occur in a progressive way through these levels.
The sensory band is the level of expanded sensory awareness and is usually initially encountered by participants. The biographical band is the realm of the personal unconscious wherein unintegrated and traumatic memories and material from childhood and one’s personal history are retrieved, often relived, and integrated. The perinatal level of experience usually follows after dealing with the biographical material and involves the remembering, re-experiencing, and integrating of material that is related to the time prior to and surrounding birth. The transpersonal band, the level of spiritual experience, is usually reached only after dealing with the other three levels.
Four Modes of Experiencing — the Basic Perinatal Matrices
Grof also delineated four matrices of experience, four general experiential constructs, which he called basic perinatal matrices (BPMs). He discovered that experiences at all levels of the unconscious often group themselves in four general ways that are roughly related to four stages of birth. Thus, Basic Perinatal Matrix I (BPM I) is related to the generally blissful or “oceanic” feelings which often characterize the fetus’s state in the womb in early and middle pregnancy. BPM II is characterized by “no exit,” hellish feelings which are related to the situation of the fetus in late pregnancy, just prior to birth, when the confines of the womb become ever more apparent to the prenate … they become “pressing” concerns … but there is as yet no indication of any possibility of relief. BPM III relates to the birth process itself, the birth struggle, which is still characterized by feelings of compression and suffering but in which there is movement and change and thus hope of relief through struggle. If BPM II can be compared to hell, where there is no hope, BPM III is more like purgatory. Finally, BPM IV relates to the actual entry into the world, the termination of the birthing process, and is characterized by feelings of triumph, relief, and high, even manic, elation.
In his descriptions of the levels of psychedelic experience and the matrices of perinatal experience, Grof has provided useful maps of the unconscious and of experience in nonordinary states, which have incredible heuristic value in our understanding of cross-cultural religious and spiritual experience, psychopathology, personal growth, and consciousness and personality in general. They have been utilized successfully in providing a context and guide for many tens of thousands of participants in his psycholytic and holotropic therapies.
However, while Grof is exhaustive in his descriptions of fetal and perinatal experience, he says very little about the earlier experiences in the womb, the first trimester, and even less about conception and the experiences of sperm and egg — of that which is known as cellular consciousness. Still, this area — the early prenatal and cellular — is being experienced and is beginning to be discussed among his followers. I am one and am not the only one. Currently, through his nondrug modality, called holotropic breathwork, people are accessing these areas and beginning to give word to them.9
Cellular-Soulular Ground of the Human Being
Michael C. Irving (1988) is a primal therapist whose contributions include his relation of these earliest events from sperm and egg through the birth experience to fundamental mythological motifs and images across cultures. The originator of a way of interpretation that he calls natalism, he has brought together a host of artistic and artifactual images from a wide range of time periods and cultures which relate, with an astonishing degree of accuracy, to actual pre- and perinatal events.
In particular, he has traced the universal serpent/dragon motifs and mythology to birth and sperm experience, noting, among other things, that the serpent/dragon shape represents the birth canal or tunnel, that the fire-spewing characteristics of dragons relate to the consuming pain experienced at birth, and that the constricting characteristics of certain snakes correspond to the constriction of the birth canal. Clearly, the shape of snakes and their mode of travel mimic as well that of sperm. Of great interest is Irving’s deduction that the widely prevalent snake and dragon cults, which were especially popular in prehistory, indicate an attempt to deal with such unfinished birth and prenatal trauma material as we are only now, in postmodern times, rediscovering the importance of doing.
While not strictly a pre- and perinatal psychologist, I include this too little-known theoretician and criminologist, S. Giora Shoham, because of the close relationship and influence his work has had upon my own work, specifically Falls from Grace (1994, 2014). Falls from Grace and other devolutional models of consciousness postulate that during life and over time, beginning at conception, we actually are reduced in consciousness and awareness, not increased in it. It corresponds nicely with a “brain as reducing valve” theory of consciousness, as I was detailing above.
Shoham (1979a, 1979b, 1990, 2012) starts his devolutional model at birth and carries it through an oral phase of occasional deprivation in infancy, then to weaning, toilet training, and the Oedipal periods of development. Though I disagree with his model by beginning mine at the creation of sperm and egg — as does other devolutional theorists such as Francis Mott and David Wasdell (1979, 1985a, 1985b, 1990) — in virtually all other major instances his model corresponds to my own if one simply … in keeping with a normal trend in child development in general as it begins to integrate the new pre- and perinatal evidence … places everything back a little farther in time. In this case, that would involve, specifically, taking it one stage back (or three Veils) to conception and the formation of the sperm and the egg.
The deepest reaches of human experience and the fundamental patterns of our human nature, we now know, based on research only possible in the last fifty or so years, occur at the cellular level of consciousness and our earliest womb experience, the first trimester. This makes it consistent with the Tibetan Book of the Dead, incidentally. In this spiritual classic, the bardos, which are stages of experience between lives, overlap in a provocative way with the stages I propose as occurring at around conception (periconceptionally), and then in the womb — both its earlier blissful and its later hellacious varieties of experience.
Lietaert Peerbolte (1954) was one of the earliest theorists to relate spirituality to conception and sperm/egg dynamics. In addition to claiming that a regression to conception is the inevitable result of all prenatal states, he traced the sense of “I” — the “I-function” — back to the egg, existing even in the mother’s ovaries. He further postulated that the spiritual self was invisibly present within the field of attraction between the egg and the sperm. Correspondingly, he was the first to point out that the existence of conception, preconception, and even ovulation symbolism in dreams indicates the existence of a soul. For, he asked, what mind records these events otherwise?
Frank Lake, though less well-known again, has probably been the premier theoretician on the topic of prenatal events during the first three months of gestation. Just prior to his death in the early Eighties, he wrote a culmination of his thirty-year investigation into pre- and perinatal influence in two works titled Tight Corners in Pastoral Counselling (1981) and The First Trimester (1982). In these works, he goes beyond his other works — in particular Clinical Theology (1966) — in placing the roots of all later experience, and in particular, distress, at the first three months of physical existence.
Lake began his investigation of re-experience in 1954. Like Stanislav Grof, he did this using LSD, initially, in the psycholytic therapy that was being developed at that time to facilitate therapeutic abreaction. Later he, like Grof, developed a nondrug modality to accomplish the same thing. His method of “primal therapy,” also called primal integration, employed a type of fast breathing — again, like Grof’s later technique — to access theta-wave brain levels, which are levels of consciousness that he saw as crucial to accessing and integrating these memories.
His thirty-year research led him to the realization of the importance of ever earlier experience. Thus his initial stress on the importance of birth gave way to his later emphasis on the first trimester in 1981, with Tight Corners in Pastoral Counselling, and in 1982, with The First Trimester.
He stressed the maternal-fetal distress syndrome, beginning at around implantation, as a major time of trauma. He also described a blastocystic stage of relative bliss just prior to that.
His one other major disagreement with Grof was his belief that the mythological and archetypal elements described by Grof were a product of LSD and that the first trimester events were the actual roots of much of such symbolism and supposed transpersonal and mythological scenarios.10
Others have speculated on the origins of myth and archetype in womb experience. However, beginning with Lake we have the idea that such symbolism might have some origins even earlier, and even at the cellular level of experience. Indeed, this is something I advanced myself in my Falls from Grace, and is what I focus on in the parts of this work, upcoming, having to do with Veils Six and Seven; as well as in my forthcoming books, Womb with a View, and Cells with a View.
Graham Farrant, a psychiatrist and primal therapist from Australia, is probably the most influential and well-known of those discussing the phenomena that occur at the earliest times of our lives.11
In addition to echoing Frank Lake in describing fetal, implantation, and blastocyst feelings, he has been able to elicit in his clients and to describe sperm and egg imprints. He has found trauma from these earliest events to influence lifelong patterns of personality and behavior. He produced a notable video in which segments from the widely acclaimed movie, The Miracle of Life — which shows actual footage of gamete and zygote events — are juxtaposed via a split-screen with actual footage of a person reliving the exact same events in primal therapy. Importantly, these were primal events for his clients which had occurred before such cellular events were ever able to be seen and recorded. The effect is astounding in the detail in which the relivings replicate the actual cellular happenings.
In addition to his emphasis on cellular consciousness, Farrant has stressed the spiritual aspects of these earliest events. He relates incidents of spiritual trauma at the cellular level in which the individual splits off from Divinity — thus setting up a lifelong feeling of loss and yearning and a desire to return to Unity and the Divine.
Paul Brenner (1991), a biologist and obstetrician, has presented at conferences and in workshops on the idea of the biological foundations of myth. For example, he relates basic biological, cellular events to biblical events described in Genesis. He also links male and female adult behavior to basic patterns of sperm and egg behavior and to events prior to and surrounding conception. He has said that male and female behavior are just sperm and egg activity grown up!
Elizabeth Noble was an educator in the field of pregnancy and childbirth and a student of Farrant’s. She published a comprehensive overview of this new field, titled Primal Connections (1993), in which she does not hesitate to stress the issues of cellular consciousness and the spirituality that appears to coincide with the re-experience of these earliest events. She provides empirical and theoretical avenues for understanding how memory can occur at such early times. Some of these are consistent with mainstream physicalist science; while others coincide with the cutting-edge, new-paradigm discoveries in fields such as biology, physics, and neuroscience.
One of the more exciting theoreticians in this already provocative field is David Wasdell.12 Wasdell’s major contribution lies in his relating these earliest events to social and cultural patterns. He describes a process of devolution of consciousness beginning at around conception and proceeding through other reductions caused by traumas at implantation, in the womb, and at birth.
Wasdell does for periconceptional imprints what deMause does for the prenatal and perinatal. Both show how these imprints manifest in the events of history and contemporary life, culture, and human behavior in groups. Most importantly, Wasdell delineates how the result of this diminution of potentiality is projected outwards into the problems and crises of violence, wars, and the mediocrity of modern personality on the scale of the masses and the macrocosms of the group, society, and global events.
In describing the problems of “normality” as rooted in a deprivational and deformational series of traumas from our earliest biological history, Wasdell emphasizes that this gives us the possibility to change that tragic social and personality outcome by focusing on the prevention and healing of such traumas. Thus, he holds out the vision of a new person and new society as an outcome of the efforts directed at the earliest laying down of human experience.
The work in this field of prenatal and perinatal psychology, described in this very brief overview, led up to my own work in this field. We look at that next.
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The Farther Reaches of Human Experience:
The Prenatal Matrix, the Wombular and Cellular Veils, and Unsullied Experience — Experience Is Divinity.
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“In looking at these matrices embedded in us through our cellular and womb and birth experiences, it will be possible to have our best chance to get a look at existence outside of these matrices — the No-Form State.”
“…if we do not regain our truer and underlying humanity, and instead, coming forth as we normally do, we continue acting out of our pain grids, we are not going to have a ‘human’ experience or even an Earthly life experience to be detailing and exploring, in the future, let alone people to hear about them.”.
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As a theorist and pioneer in this field as well, I need to give an overview of my work.
A Primal Perspective on Spirituality
Having completed primal therapy in Denver, Colorado, I sought, beginning in 1979, to discover whether spirituality and God were real or were results of primal pain, as Arthur Janov contended. While approaching the project from Janov’s perspective and not entertaining spiritual interpretations in the least, I was shocked to both begin experiencing spiritual experiences in my primaling, which could not have roots in my primal pain, and to come across other primalers who were having spiritual, transpersonal experiences in their inner work as well.
I want to stress that I undertook this research not to justify any need or “drive” I had. Or, for that matter, to make sense out of anything that was happening to me. In fact, I had no interest at all in looking into this area of spirituality and was really quite satisfied with the “world” I was living in and the life I was having as a reward for my deep experiential work. I was all set to use my “brain power,” this time, for a university degree that would allow me to get all the “fun coupons” (money) that I could and to enjoy my life in a way far better than I had been able to before therapy. As I saw it, it was nice to have a world with “no ghosts” in it (I had been brought up Catholic) and in which all that mattered was what happened in physical reality. If you can believe this (I hardly can), I was actually pursuing a track of computers, accounting, and finance and was on my way to being just like the other folks I saw around me in America. And this, actually, for the first time in my life.
My research into the validity of transpersonal reality, through the lens of primalers, came about because I had to have a thesis for the completion of a university degree and because of discussions I was having with a housemate. My friend, Steve, was doing primal therapy and had come from a background in meditation and Eastern spirituality; he followed Guru Swami Muktunanda. Unlike what I, in keeping with Janov, believed, Steve was convinced that the processes were identical — the spiritual and primal processes.
Steve explained that he had come into primal therapy because the one, Primal, according to him, aided the other, the transpersonal. It did that by clearing out negative material, unconscious primal trauma and Pain, which otherwise impeded one’s spiritual progress. Through these talks, and because I needed to have a research project, I decided to make it my goal to find out if spiritual-transpersonal experiences were real, were true … or were not, and were simply experiences rooted in primal pain, were coping mechanisms that were essentially delusional.
Validity of Some Spiritual/Transpersonal Experiences
Subsequently, research into the literature and findings of this new field of primal psychology and into corresponding spiritual literature led me to discover, not only that such spiritual experiences were being encountered in deep experiential psychotherapy … Grof’s work was significant here … but also that some primal experiences of the not-so spiritual kind were remarkably like experiences that had been described as being encountered on their spiritual path by enlightened souls both currently and in previous times. Guru Swami Muktananda’s autobiography (1974) was significant in this respect. Had liberated souls gone through a kind of primal therapy on their way to enlightenment? That seemed to be the case.
Also, I found that scientific measurements of brain wave and other aspects of brain function coincided at advanced levels of both the primal and spiritual processes: Both kinds of practitioners — primalers and meditators — had extraordinarily easy access to theta and delta wave patterns, for example. Both also showed remarkable right-left brain integration. Lastly, I was able to show that the terminology — with, at the most, slight adjustments in the perspective — in both spiritual and primal processes corresponded in nearly every case.
Proof of Soul … God?
In the article that resulted from this research — which was published, six years later, in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology (1985) and titled “A Primal Perspective on Spirituality” — I broke from Janov in asserting a valid spirituality and the possible existence of a God or Spirit beyond our physical confines. Remember that Peerbolte pointed out that existence of memory from before conception and at conception indicated the existence of a soul. For what mind records these memories otherwise? he said. As I put it, in words remarkably like his, as quoted from Falls from Grace (2014), where this unusually lengthy journal article ended up being published as Section Two, Chapters 6 through 18 of that book of mine:
“Proof of ‘God.’ Some of these experiences, especially in the parapsychological realm (such as ESP, clairvoyance, and ancestral memories), have even found verification with an astonishing degree of accuracy in Grof’s follow-up research. Even the primal perspective, which points to the existence of memory and consciousness at the fetal, single cell, and sperm and egg level, certainly would have to acknowledge such awareness to have more subtle underpinnings than the brain and spinal cord.
“All of this points to the existence of something that is subtler than the physical body and undergirds the entire length of one’s physical life. The evidence also seems to suggest that this subtler self permeates much of matter and life in realms outside of the personal domain and therefore can be accurately termed transpersonal.”1
Subsequently, primalers had the support they needed to go into the early prenatal, the cellular, and the transpersonal regions to which their primal process was taking them. Previously, because of Janov’s limited paradigm, these experiences were being overlooked or misinterpreted for having prematurely been misclassified as impossible and non-existent, or as having roots in primal pain.2
Indeed, having believed Janov’s paradigm for over six years and for the great bulk of the primal work I would do and having complied with Janov’s dictum in my own primal work and that of others who I had facilitated — by tracing any seemingly transpersonal experiences to primal pain and clearing it out there — I had a special perspective on this point.
Primal Process as Spiritual Process
While I would agree with Janov — as wells as Fodor3 who earlier had made the case for certain kinds of paranormal phenomena having psychological roots — that the majority of what are thought to be religious, spiritual, occult, or transpersonal experiences are, indeed, mere products of psychological events, especially those that are traumatic; still, I was one of those who were enabled in going beyond Janov’s paradigm into actual transpersonal states and experiences by the work and the new paradigm I had asserted in my article. Since I had, and after I had, carried Janov’s contention to their limits and had actual spiritual experiences beyond the ones rooted in primal pain, and I had experienced healing and growth, as a result of these transpersonal experiences, beyond what Janov knew was possible for his therapy; you can see that I was unusually qualified to assert this correction of Janov’s paradigm, which gave validation to some forms of spiritual experience, though by no means all.
The Prenatal Grids on Experience
This research and understanding led directly into my conceptualizations of the “second part of The Cure” and to my subsequent postulations of pain grids, joy grids, and spiritual grids, as being three fundamental phases or modes of human experience and perception, which are accessible through deep Primal and experiential work.4
Pain Grids, Joy Grids, Spiritual Grids
I called them grids, for they were the filters, windows, “frames,” or “grids,” through which we viewed our reality, other people, and in line with which we interpreted our experience. They were grids, because they were both the frameworks upon which we built our life and experience and all other knowledge that came afterwards and which undergirded our entire lives, but they were also the screens we looked through and the framework or grids or matrices through which we interpreted our experience, our lives, and others.
You will notice a similarity these modes have with some of the “Veils” I am presenting for view in this work, Dance of the Seven Veils. They certainly function the same way. That is, as layers or veils blocking out clear perception of Reality and distorting it. The pain grids, collectively, as well, make up The Matrix, which is the artificial reality in which we live, determining and delimiting what we do; thereby preventing authentic beingness. And most assuredly, the pain grids comprise all the painful events that are woven through all overlying Veils down to the level of the prenatal. Then it is at that time — when feeling back to and integrating one’s prenatal memories — that truly one can access one’s joy grids.
Most often the joy grids emerge when one has felt back to the time in the womb before the pain of late gestation has set in. This is usually experienced as a blissful time; Stanislav Grof terms it, Basic Perinatal Matrix I (BPM I). Yet access to that blissful prenatal time and even earlier experience, significantly the period of being a blastocyst — which is oftentimes one of the most euphoric times we know — is a profoundly transformative learning experience which teaches one what is truly good and positive. Experiencing feeling constellations of such harmony, bliss, and euphoria — growing through pleasure this time, not through pain — is something that opens a person’s eyes as to what is possible for them in life, realistically, and most importantly what will make them genuinely happy, for being aligned with what is their deepest desires and joy in coming into this life.
They have had a taste, they sense a direction — which they can take back into their normal life — providing goals, identity, and clarity of purpose. Yet prior to that, these same people had no felt understanding of what it even meant to go about making something positive of or even in one’s life. They were, in a sense, “clueless” about how to really live; instead acting out directives of others, reacting to that emptiness in self-destructive ways, and basically unhappy. Yes, that sorry condition is what Freud considered the natural state of the human. However, it is at the level of the prenatal that one learns that life does not have to be that way. Contrary to the existentialists and the Freudians, one learns that one’s life can be happy, good, satisfying, fulfilling, and filled with love, empathy, compassion, unity with others, and peace.
Furthermore, at this womb level, as well as prior to it — the No-Form State, that is, transpersonal experience — are laid the foundation for our spiritual grids. Our spiritual grids are primarily created in us through our extremely formative experiences at the cellular level, however.
These spiritual grids are fundamental patterns or templates of transpersonal convictions or directives, arising from the spiritual-transpersonal experiences occurring at these deep deep parts of the psyche. As unassailable beliefs which are the product of experience, they act as truly positive channels of growth, directives of how to live one’s life, and, sorta like, “instincts” of how to live spiritually and what that means for one. In fact, experiencing at this level often brings forth one’s atmadharma — that is, one’s spiritual duty, unique destiny, or Divine fate.
Jungians and other transpersonalists might call it the Self. One experiences the pushes and pulls one was meant to experience in life, is directed in positive actions, and finds the entire Universe participating in one’s growth and actions, synchronistically. This living is one that is immersed in the magical, the transpersonal, as a matter of course.
Now, in the primal process, these grids — pain, joy, and spiritual — could not be more distinct. For in a primal session, after accessing and releasing-integrating material rooted in one’s pain grids, one would often find joy grids rising up. Put another way, one would begin a primal session looking at everything in a negative light that fit into overall negative matrices that one carried within oneself for most of one’s life. However, upon accessing deeper experiences, prenatal ones, in which one experienced euphoric, blissful, or contented events, one would, almost magically, view those exact same seemingly negative elements in a different configuration, one which was positive and life affirming.
This positive viewpoint would, not coincidentally, conform to the pattern of the particular positive event that one had felt back to. If one was, during that particular period, accessing blissful womb experiences of harmony, one would often see one’s life in its pattern of interrelations — with humans as well as one’s environment — in that light and be motivated to make changes to bring that harmony and peace more into one’s life. One might move residency to one conducive to serenity; seek a supportive circle of friends; find a more fertile and euphoria-inducing fit for one’s occupation, employment, or projects; or simply rearrange one’s room, apartment, or daily routine to better facilitate that feeling. If one was experiencing euphoric blastocyst feelings of sublime and perfect cell multiplication and of being the initiator of the perfect beginnings of worlds — i.e., one’s own self — one might be motivated to be a channel of creative energy into the world and might find one’s joy in being an artist or writer. Experiencing the euphoria of achievement of the sperm being the one chosen by the ovum might, without trying, flow into one’s life as a basis of supreme confidence upon which to build worthwhile achievements. More on this topic later, especially in Veils Two and Six.
However, the point is that this joy-grid configuration beyond the pain-grid viewpoint gives one hints of different, more positive and workable, strategies for living and for arranging and following through on the details of one’s life which would trigger one again and again back into the blissful, harmonious, or euphoric feelings that truly were at the foundation of one’s self. And this was quite a change from the usual pattern prior to that in which one — whether earlier in therapy or prior to therapy — unconsciously and unerringly brought to oneself negative scenarios emanating from later and more traumatic events, which triggered one back into the same old Pain loops, endlessly. Poetically speaking, in going back further in one’s life, prior to the Pain, and delving deeper into one’s self, one was approaching the Divine. One was realizing one’s truest, rooted in one’s Divinity, intentions for this life. Which is why I call this deepest of all personalities, the Divine Self.
Indeed, in one session of a couple hours, the switch in the way one viewed the world would be drastic … and wonderful. One could say that each experience of transformation was another death-rebirth. For they always begin with the trepidation of going into the unknown, which is followed by surrendering to the process, and then being renewed, or given something positive and unexpected. Essentially the primal process amounted to multitudes of death-rebirths, occurring sometimes several times a day and every day, and at other times, with weeks in between. Yet each of those events of tapping into one’s positive matrices by re-experiencing positive pre-birth events was far more healing and growthful than merely accessing one’s pain grids and releasing the stored energy around them while making the connections that one might use to make better choices in one’s life, as in traditional primal therapy as presented by Janov.
Second Half of “The Cure”
For, in fact, what we found out was that when primal people released their underlying Pain, re-experienced the events that had caused them, and made the connections as to how those events were determining one’s life; still, virtually no one knew what better decisions could be made. Sure, these folks were free, but what to do with that freedom. Wishing to make choices different from the counterproductive ones that had been driven by one’s Pain opened one to an entire world of possible choices.
I described how the process of making better choices was attempted by primal folks. This began, first, with trying to do the opposite of what one’s early experience had led one to do, naturally. If what one did was seen to be an act-out, well, like any “bad habit,” it was deemed a good thing to replace it with its opposite or to simply not do it. However, that tactic would be only another extreme act-out which then itself, in a reverse fashion, triggered one back into the same painful event. Think of that as being analogous to the alcoholic constantly struggling between the poles of drinking and trying not to, with either choice keeping one focused on and immersed in that feverish dynamic. Or the result of that maneuver of reacting to the earlier counterproductive pattern of action would have one do nothing. No change in one’s life. No joy or direction, either.
In either case, folks often felt like they were a “boat without oars” — as one person phrased it to me — or directionless. Many wondered, “Well, now what do I do?” Removing the “devil one knows” from consideration did not automatically conjure the “angel” that could guide one. Not at first and actually not for a long time.
So one was left in a tricky situation. For one familiar with the hero’s cycle as put forth by Joseph Campbell … we’ll get into that in great detail in coming chapters … where there is a cycle of retreat from society and its reality; then a liminal state of inner journey to discover a newer self for going forward; then return to society in a way to bring one’s new self and what one learned back to it — well, primal folks were often left in that liminal state. Having cleared their old selves from consideration, they lacked the spiritual or transpersonal insight or vision around which to build a newer better person. This might also have been due to the fact that Janov’s prescribed route of primal therapy eliminated, even ridiculed, transpersonal or spiritual experience. As I was saying above, it required my reconceptualization of Janov’s theory, as presented in my writing, for some to have the Primal framework that acknowledged their transpersonal experiences and supported them in going forward into them.
What some of us, outside of Janov’s institute, discovered was that it was only when one accessed deeper experiences that were positive … and it did require one to continue the process until those more positive experiences were accessed … that one could have a basis for building a better life and making better decisions. Thus, this phase of the primal process amounted to “the second part of The Cure,” as I termed it.5
Keep in mind how this relates to the Veils. For as we peel away the overlying layers of obfuscation of truth, as we undo the blocking of Reality that the reducing-valve of the brain brings about, it is the early templates that provide better foundations for the choices one makes and the patterns of lifeway and life experience one can create.
At any rate, along with these grids I proposed a revision to the primal therapy as advanced by Janov. Arthur Janov’s program involved only the experiencing of painful events from one’s past — the pain grids. Mine, however, included discovering and re-experiencing aspects of one’s life that were blissful and happy and workable — the joy grids. These were patterns and personal protocols, previously unimagined, which — once accessed and reclaimed — could be brought forward as workable alternatives to the client’s previous self-destructive and maladaptive strategies emanating out of the pain grids.
As I like to quote, “The best way to combat evil is to make energetic progress in the good.” That advice from the I Ching, valuable enough in itself, can be applied to the primal process. As long as one was caught in the dynamic of old personality patterns — doing or not doing them, seen now as counterproductive, self-sabotaging or self-destructive, as anti-life, therefore “evil” as in the opposite of live — one made little progress.
Yet when a template for what is truly “good” becomes available — is seen, understood, and is committed to … in identification and “energetic progress” of it — one truly is lifted out of or past the old dynamic. Eventually the unhelpful patterns fade into insignificance for lack of interest in them. In the example of the alcoholic, this would be the phase wherein the new sober life — with its new patterns of social interaction, new routines of sober activity, and new passions and directions — is arrived at and implemented in one’s life, leaving little interest in retreating into drugs anymore.
The major difference between the Primal evolution I am describing and that kind of development in a 12-step program is that through the primal process one can access one’s truest, one’s deepest and strongest, guidance and passions as to what that new life will be like. Being our deepest and most desired self, when realized, it is much easier to adhere to its patterns. It is, indeed, the source of all the positive passions a person can manifest in one’s life.
Janov would not know of this even truer self — deeper even than the real self, it being the Divine Self — or these deeper patterns of personal being for his paradigm did not include the possibility of these experiences; and his framework did not allow for the deep experiences required or the time needed to access them. For one thing, to access these kinds of experiences one typically had to continue the primal process past the integration of childhood and birth traumas and to begin opening up to experiences that occurred before one’s birth and to the relatively contented state of early womb experience. One might need to re-member one’s euphoric blastocyst experience even further back, and sometimes, even, need to tap in to events and experiences before sperm experience, sometimes to connect with egg (ovum) experiences going all the way back to when one was a cell within the ovarian sac within one’s mother, in order to access these truly transformative reorientations to one’s world.
Furthermore, beyond these joy grids I postulated spiritual grids, which were spiritual and philosophical ways of living and perceiving reality and looking at the world, which were beyond the joy grids in both quality of beneficence and scope and in their access. What I discovered was that living the joy grids led to earlier primal experiences at the cellular level — specifically, sperm, egg, zygote, and blastocyst — which had characteristically spiritual components and that this coincided with life experience which brought those spiritual perspectives into practice and use and expanded and deepened them.
Unconditional Regard and the Primal Process
As for how one accessed these deeper levels of the primal process, I discovered that a radical unconditional acceptance … an unconditional regard bordering upon, if not actually, love … beyond even that advanced by Janov, was crucial in facilitating them. And I proposed to other therapists that this be employed.6
Certainly, Janov employed a radical “client-centered” therapy, using the words of Carl Rogers. Primal states simply cannot be accessed without a radical acceptance by the therapist of all possible feelings and feelings-states that can arise in the client. The facilitator had to be more than just “okay” with the emergence of this widely varied material. That acceptance had to be authentically embodied in the facilitator.
Still, Janov retained a small bit of an authoritarian model in that his version of therapy used “busts” — interpretations inserted by the therapist that are meant to stimulate the therapeutic process and possibly precipitate breakthroughs. Often useful, they come with a caveat: For the therapist must always be correct in such interpretations. Wrong input into the therapeutic process can do significant damage to the healing-growth of the primal process. For busts involve bringing in an authoritarian tone with all the baggage that carries from childhood and the usual experiences one has of know-it-all, judgmental, order-issuing parents. Sure, a misapplied “bust” could lead to more processing and clearing of painful issues, down the line. All experience is helpful to that end. Yet — with issues now projected onto the therapist and the lack of confidence in and disrespect of the facilitator accompanying that — who to lead the client to and through that?
The primary job of the therapist is to be authentic and real and to model that to clients who have no clue as to what that is like or even looks like. This sometimes, though infrequently, involves the therapist deciding correctly what confrontation is therapeutic and necessary … so as not to participate in enabling the client, for one thing. Truth is first and foremost a characteristic of authenticity, and the therapist must provide clear and honest “reflecting back,” although as deftly kind and regardful as possible. However, who leads one “around” a counselor who is him- or herself in the dark and acting out, even if only subtly? It stymies the process. Dead stop. Swirling.
Furthermore, such direction by the therapist-facilitator can lead the client away from where they need to and are able to go — possibly into areas that fit more with the therapists’ paradigm, that fit more with the facilitator’s preconceptions of what is possible and how the client’s process is “meant” to unfold, and not where the client needed or could go. This would not be helpful at all in allowing a therapeutic endeavor that could discover anything new, anything beyond what had been conceived beforehand by Janov. As mentioned above, this would lead clients away from the interpretation of valid spiritual states or the joy grids. They would not happen with Janov’s clients because they would not be thought to be able to happen.
The Tao of Therapy
What I saw that allowed access to these deeper states — access to the joy and spiritual grids — was more along the lines of what was proposed by Janov’s one-time head of training, Jules Roth, and his wife and co-therapist, Helen Roth, and their followers and trainees at the Certified Primal Therapists’ Center in Denver, Colorado.
This is where I experienced the bulk of my Primal work and training. And there, instead of directing ourselves to an elusive primal “moment” with the aid of the therapist, we were allowed to simply “be” more fully where we were already “at.” In doing so we found that feeling states deepened. As was said at the Center, “a feeling, is a feeling, is a feeling.” Meaning that whatever the client was feeling was the correct process, there was no “big primal” to get to, and that the present state, in every Now, was the correct one and was where one needed to be.
We understood that all feelings were equally important and that, as for that dramatic big “primal” — imagined as necessary out of a common misinterpretation of Janov’s wording in his first book — what happened is that when one allowed whatever was going on to happen, those experiences deepened in intensity, in meaning, in insight and connections made, and in healing power. So those deepest, most intense experiences were primals, but all of it was “feeling one’s feelings.” And that — feeling whatever feelings came up — was the crucial and important thing. This tao of therapy (my term, not Denver’s) was expressed in Denver as, “the best way to get to where you are going is to be most fully exactly where you are.”
Alongside this radical acceptance and honoring of the “Now,” was a radical acceptance and empathy, from the facilitator, of whatever came up in the client in the course of a session and in whatever form. Certainly we directed clients to go “deeper,” with whatever was going on, but we did not “bust” — thus we retained a certain degree of humility regarding our supposed therapeutic powers and wisdom, in that respect — and we required of ourselves to have gone far and deep in our own process so that we would not, even unconsciously, seek to direct or derail or channel any feelings of the client’s onto routes more intellectually or more emotionally satisfying to us.
If you think about this kind of radical unconditional regard and you compare it with some of the techniques used on spiritual paths … some of which might involve a truly all-accepting and profoundly loving guru … and you bring to mind the kind of euphoric, all-encompassing acceptance and contentment many of us have experienced in our early womb states — what Grof calls BPM I experience — you might see why our way in Denver might be more conducive than Janov’s in making possible access to earlier states. With those states related, specifically, to joy and to spiritual grids, you can understand how a different and more positive type of “post-primal” person, from that described as resulting from Janov’s method alone, could be brought forth.
Constructing the Matrix — the Four Stages of Forgetting
Following upon these discoveries I realized that there were definite stages in the buildup of these grids and they corresponded to significant events in one’s life: The events are conception, birth, the primal scene, and the Identity stage of life. I called these the four falls from grace. Each event represented a diminution of Self or authentic beingness and a retreat from an innate spirituality and patterns of bliss and expanded perception, which characterizes us all at our beginnings and can actually be called Divine.7
Without being aware of the theories of Mott, Shoham, or Wasdell, and based only on personal experience of deep Primal states and observing and facilitating others in these states, along with relevant real life experience of my self and others and pertinent, salient research, I realized that life was a process of reduction of awareness from an original omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent state — a Divinity, a Divine state, a Godhead, a Source — which sets up the process of Ego construction and human experience.
However, this process of forgetting, as I called it — this “descent” through the four falls from grace, which creates a person’s ego — is essentially a neurotic one. It is neurotic, because it is essentially maladaptive and self-destructive and creates an unreal self (using Janov’s term) which is inauthentic and which ultimately desires its own revolution or destruction in a spiritual process of re-membering and which inevitably, whether in one lifetime or many, brings that about. It is neurotic also in that it is a derailment of one’s healthy unfolding of personality and a deflection of that natural process onto substitute pathways. Which alternate pathways are, for the person, ever more inauthentic, increasingly more self-sabotaging, and pathetically more trivial, at each stage of descent from “grace.”
As I put it, the end result of the neurotic process of diminishment of consciousness through the four falls from grace which creates the Ego and is responsible for the much talked about “ego strength” proposed by Ego psychologists … the end result of all this was an insensitive sort — the kitty-drowners and butterfly-mashers of the world. I feel pretty sure I do not need to define that sort of personality for you.
Thus, the purpose of life was to experience what one would as ego — as seemingly imperfect, muddled, and often out and out seemingly wrong, as that necessarily would be — in order to, by pain and unhappiness, be prodded into a path of return, spiritual return, primal spiritual return, back to Divinity, wholeness, and Grace..
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.You’re born, you become less, you create an ego, separate from the All, you have experiences.
These experiences enrich you, though they seem to be mistakes at the time.
You seek your own destruction through them, as well,
so that in this lifetime or many, you return to the All..
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An Experiential Metaphysical — Experience Is Divinity and Funny God
Subsequent to these discoveries and their eventual postulations as theories, frameworks for understanding, and paradigms, came a further elaboration that involved a description of Reality as essentially Experience, with matter being metaphor for true existence — which was coincident with the findings of quantum physics and Idealistic and panentheistic perspectives of all times. This I did in Experience Is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor (2013). In it, I addressed the metaphysical basis of reality. As I put it, the data from consciousness research calls for an existential metaphysical, one that takes as the basic unit of Reality to be one’s immediate Experience in any moment, with all its components of experience — cognitive, emotional, sensations, feelings, and experiences even subtler, for which there might as yet be no words.
I also put forth an understanding of spiritual or metaphysical reality and the corresponding life program and goals that come from it in Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation (2015). Additionally, I introduced the notion of the No-Form State — as being the state outside of all falls from grace, both prior to Form … that is, before the creation of sperm and egg … and after Form, which is to say, after death.
Based on empirical data of several kinds, I speculated that such a state was an “alive” state, and it was one into which we transitioned after death and is where we exist prior to being reborn.
The Wombular and Cellular Veils of Perception
And now what is at hand, though I have been sharing these ideas widely for decades in both professional and nonprofessional circles, is an understanding of the bases of our understandings of reality as formed by our early experiences, most importantly those in the womb and as cells. This points to a provocative inquiry into the nature of Reality beyond the confines of physical life, beyond the templates laid down in us of early, prenatal, and cellular human experience … beyond the “seven Veils.”
In Dance of the Seven Veils, this work laid out in three books, I describe how our personalities, and especially our basic mythologies, theologies, and beliefs, are laid down in us through our earliest experiences — adolescence, infancy, birth, the womb, and cellular existence, with each stage of development incorporating and reframing the conceptualizations previous. In the next book in this Path of Ecstasy Series, Womb with a View, I will expand on the very important topic, introduced in this work, of womb experiences, which create our world of seemingly irrefutable beliefs, which therefore guide everything we do. Its explication begins, however, in this project in Veil Six.
Then, in Cells with a View, which is the book to follow that in the Series, I will detail how our basic metaphysical assumptions about Reality, especially in its physical aspect, for example, duality, space and time, being and becoming, and so on, are imprinted upon us through our cellular experiences in coming into the world. It also is introduced in this work of Dance of the Seven Veils under the part, “Veil Seven.”
In looking at these matrices embedded in us, especially through our cellular and womb and birth experiences, it will be possible to have our best chance to get a look at existence outside of these matrices — the No-Form State. Just as in the primal process, where each connection allows us the freedom to look at the world differently, and not, for a change, to have to see it through the lenses of our primal pains; so also I hope to show you how the most profound understandings of Reality can come out of removing all matrices of prenatal and perinatal life. What is left is What Really Is.
The Prenatal Roots of Evil and the New Person
In Wounded Deer and Centaurs (2016), I focused specifically on two areas — the roots of evil in the late prenatal experiences of humans and the “necessary hero.” I explained how our imprints from our time of prenatal hell during the third trimester have manifested in the evils of all human times and, most importantly, are bringing about a life-eliminating apocalypse in our lifetimes. I defined the necessary hero as the person required, in our current time of impending apocalypse. I focused on these prenatal influences — especially the imprint of the time in the late stages of pregnancy — on consciousness, society, historical events, and the evil and atrocities of humans. I made the point that that a deeper and more positive human nature exists in all of us prior to that and was crucial to be manifest on a massive scale for the very survival, not just of the human race, but of all life on Earth.
Alongside this I stressed the requirement — emanating from this conjunction of an impending apocalypse and the discovery of a more positive, more cooperative, wiser, and more environmentally protective human nature — that people re-discover that more primal human nature. This nature is akin to the real self of Janov and the true self of Winnicott and is the one emanating from our joy grids and spiritual grids. For, as I am pointing out, if we do not regain our truer and underlying humanity, and instead, coming forth as we normally do, we continue acting out of our pain grids, we are not going to have a “human” experience, or even an Earthly life experience, to be detailing and exploring, in the future, let alone people to hear about them.
In another current work, Falls from Grace (2014), and in upcoming ones, I zero in on the influences of the first trimester and sperm/egg and cellular events, on womb events, and on late gestation events in more detail. In particular, those works forthcoming include Cells with a View, Womb with a View, and The Prenatal Matrix of Human Evil, all forthcoming, as of this date.
Though prenatal influences, especially those of the third trimester, are dealt with in considerable detail in my book, Wounded Deer and Centaurs; now, in these books, Dance of the Seven Veils, I deal with the influences, in particular, that exist in our views of Reality, which come from a more expanded developmental time — adolescence to cellular experience, conception to the Identity stage of life. .
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In this Prologue, we are getting an overview of the territory across which we will journey throughout the rest of these books. To that end, next, here are some things not generally known about our perinatal experience … the events we experience at and surrounding the time of our births.
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The Primal Matrix of Mind:
We Are What We’ve Experienced — Our Birth, Gestation, and Conception Create Our Windows to the World.
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“…our conception, gestation, and birth… can be seen to form our underlying myths … but much more than that. They also create the very foundational templates upon which we build our view of reality — physical, social, emotional, spiritual, and philosophical….”.
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Carl Jung, decades ago, in many thoroughly encompassing works, expressed concepts similar to mine regarding biocultural patterns undergirding reality. He saw them as archetypes and cumulatively they comprised our collective unconscious. Among other things, this collective unconscious was a pattern, common to all humans, underlying and configuring all our thoughts, beliefs, and perspectives on reality. So it is species-specific. According to Jung, the collective unconscious with its archetypal forms shaping how we think comprises the hereditary remnants of and is the human equivalent of what is called instinct in animals.
Our Prenatal and Perinatal Matrix
Without diminishing the historical importance of Jung’s contributions, I need to stress that what I am asserting goes much further than Jung’s contentions. For I believe we biologically determine our view of reality, as a species,
in the biological structures that comprise us and orient us in a world of space;
in the biochemical processes that constitute our changingness and situate us in a world of time;
and, most saliently, in the individual biological history that is universal for us and unique to us as a species.
What I am saying is that our biological structures, processes, and history — history meaning our past experience as individuals — create the worlds of space, time, and memory within which we move and have our existence.
By this last one, memory, however, I mean much more than that our past experience comprises the knowledge base or data bank from which we concoct our life schemes and decisions. I also mean much more than that our past experiences affect us in ways of which we are unaware, that is to say unconsciously … that we are affected by repressed or forgotten memories. No, I mean to go much farther and deeper than that.
I am saying that our conception, gestation, and birth — in general, our earliest experiences as a biological organism — can be seen to form our underlying myths … but much more than that. They also create the very foundational templates upon which we build our view of reality — physical, social, emotional, spiritual, and philosophical. They are the roots of our archetypes and all our mythology. Another way of saying this is that our archetypes and mythologies symbolically express the early biohistorical events of our lives, especially those occurring at conception, during our womb life, and at our births.
Vanity of Rational Supremacy
How is this idea — that we have biological parameters of structure, process, and events experienced (one’s personal history) — different from what you already know and why is it important or helpful to know it this way? Well, we, with our species arrogance, believe we have a mind, intellect, ability to reason and be logical, which is separate from all influences … which is somehow detached or transcendent from Reality and Experience. Sure, we admit this faculty is imperfect. Yet we also believe that we can get it more correct using the methods of science. We believe that its incorrectness lies in faulty logic or faulty data. Both of which are correctible.
Going along with these vanities, we concoct gods with the same characteristics. Like our supposed reason, the Judeo-Christian-Muslim god is one who is separate from all creation, not immersed in it, and is a kind of grand manager of all events … even as we imagine our intellects and reasoning ability to be. Hence, we create a god in our image, not the reverse as we say in our Western theologies.
Incidentally, this is not the kind of god we created during the majority of human experience when we were primal humans. So this egocentric, ratio-centric, if you will, perspective, this ego-aggrandizement is the product of civilized and patriarchal cultures, occurring as our burgeoning controlling fetish came into full bloom. Indeed, the Age of Reason during our Western European history, which set off the modern version of civilization, was the penultimate of this vanity of the power of our reason and will.
That particular view of ourselves reigned supreme until Freud came along during the first half of the Twentieth Century and dispelled that hubris. He let us know we did things very often out of unconscious pushes and pulls that we only after the fact rationalized as being products of our will and reason. Further expansion of our knowledge in psychology and consciousness research pertaining to our motivations have provided ever stronger affronts to our vanities of reason and will.
It follows — and this is something that our science refuses to see — that these early experiences involving our biological events … which are separate and distinct from the early experiences of all other species or types of beings and which shaped all our thoughts afterward … will determine how we interpret our findings and conclusions, even in science. Science clearly does not have a clue about the unconscious forces directing its inquiries and fashioning its findings.
Arrogance, Reason, and Human Wrong-Gettedness
Yet some very few have seen and understood that flaw and so insisted on inner exploration as a concomitant to cultural research. That this self-inquiry and self-awareness is required for good scholarship is evident in that the field of anthropology, even early on, asserted that researchers needed to do their own therapy, uncover their own biases, before they could hope to interpret other cultures. The idea was that one needed to take back one’s personal unconscious projections to understand another culture. Which, by the way, is a shallower version of the message of this work that one must pull back all the Veils of projected early experience so as to better approach any overstanding of any larger Reality.
These early anthropologists — Ruth Benedict (1934), for example — were aware how their own cultures and personal histories influenced what they saw in others … in their case, in other cultures. While they said self-inquiry should be done, it is not done now, if it ever really was. Lacking this self-awareness everything scientists come up with is riddled through with unconscious pain and the seemingly archetypal creations come of them.
Like any other paradigm, these earliest of our experiences will direct and constrain us even in terms of where we will look to explore. They force us to interpret the data we find into constructions of assumptions which skew and often reverse the interpretations that should arise from them. Yes, that should logically arrive from them. Elsewhere I have called this our basic wrong-gettedness.1 Indeed, from the paradigm I am unveiling in which everything we know and feel flows out of what we once felt and experienced, our reason is discovered to be no more than just a product of them, and not separate, and inherently faulty. This perspective reveals our vaunted logic and intellect to be riddled through with a species-arrogance — for reasons I detail in those other works — which often overturns our being able to see what would be obvious to any other species observing the same thing.
Therefore, past experience determines the memory out of which we build our logic and reason. We have no detached reason. We only have a species-arrogance that we do. Which itself emanates from, is determined by, such early experience.
Biology Bridging Cultures
In any case, keep in mind, in asserting all this, that I am having less of a problem crossing cultural and other boundaries than cognitive psychologists or cultural anthropologists. They are academics who in particular criticized Freud for journeying down this road before me.
They were correct. For Freud’s theories were embedded firmly within the cognitive array put up by a particular culture, his Western European and urban one, which limited his theories and understandings. Jung went further, in finding species-wide symbols and archetypes, which were related to universal human experiences. Hence, Jung sought to go outside of culture as well as beyond mere concepts. However, when we get to Arthur Janov, whose findings are rooted in raw experience, emanating from the body and from species-universal facts, we get into theory which can begin to be universally true for humans.
In that tradition of Janov, but taking it further, is where I operate. What I am asserting is rooted in universal human experiences — not just experiences of primal pain, but any and all universal human experience. Hence, I am not like they — cultural anthropologists and cognitive psychologists — who, being academics and intellectuals, get all bogged down in the fact that concepts vary from one entity … from one person or culture … to another. This is because I am operating not out of shared concepts but common experiences, out of which those concepts arise. I might not know exactly what a person from India means when she says dukkha, which is a Sanskrit term and which I can translate into English as meaning suffering. For the person in India, that word might have connotations that I would not get. Yet someone else in that same culture, India, might have a similar problem in not fully understanding exactly what the first person meant by it.
The point is that I know the experience of suffering, and that is common between us. If additionally, I see that person after her loved one has died and she is visibly distraught — which is something I know and comprehend because I act similarly at times and I know how that feels — and she says to me “Life is dukkha,” I believe I might know what she is expressing by that on a deep level that compares with and might perhaps even exceed the understandings of that by someone else in her culture. This would be true, especially, if that other person has not had such tragedy or similar experiences in their lives.
You see, I know what the word denotes — what it means, not relative to other concepts and in a context of the abstract, which would be connotation, but relative to experience … experience which is shared between humans. The word for me is connected to an experiential reality which I have had. It is not just a mere concept connecting other concepts in my mind. That goes for my experience of an emotion or other biological experience, but it can be expanded to mean the experience of the physical world that we share. So when you point to a chicken’s egg and say huevos, I can understand you because I have, in my experience of the world, also the experience of eggs. When you say rojo and you indicate an item that is the color red, I also share an understanding with you.
The same kind of understandings about common biological experiences occur across cultures as well. Having experienced birth, child-“rearing,” pain, death and loss of loved ones, joy of achievement, pleasure of sexuality, friendship, separation and love, and so on, I have a common ground with another human … with any other human. For we have all, more or less, experienced these things. It is on the basis of experience, held in common by all humans, that I build my theories. Those are the closest to any brute facts which might exist in our human reality. They are biologically constituted realities for humans, mixing with culture to create our bioculturally constitutedfacts.2
Our Biohistorical Experiences Determine Our World
Elsewhere I have detailed how our universal but species-specific patterns of biological experience at conception, and throughout gestation, and at birth … and continuing from there but with immensely reduced or nonexistent universality … conditions and shapes all later experience.3
The Past Affects the Present
First, though, do not forget that you already know, and you have no doubt about it, that experiences you have had in the past contribute to what you know, think, and the way you see things in the present. I am not presenting anything strange by looking further back in time to our earliest experiences in Form and unraveling for you how what you learned in your experience at that time has influenced everything you knew and thought, and the way you saw everything, afterward.
You do not remember these experiences, and you think you know and see what you know and see within the context of your memory of what you are consciously aware of. You see your mind as a kind of library of memory from which you choose items to bring to bear in making your decisions. You do not know that there is no “you” separate from those items, nor that that library contains information that is way outside of a person’s ability to access, normally, and that you make your decisions as predictably from earlier experience — both conscious and unconscious — as does a flower in emerging from its stalk.
Freud dispelled the delusion of a separate, “objective,” and unaffected entity of reason, a transcendent Ego, a long time ago. He showed us, in ways that are obvious to us now, how what we experienced early in our lives taught us things that influenced us ever afterward, in spite of the fact we do not remember them. He showed how we are unconsciously influenced by such forgotten experiences.
Our Earliest Events Predispose the Nature of Our Mind
So, when I take this back even further, showing how even earlier experiences than Freud acknowledged have even greater influence on us, for they occurred earlier and all later “Freudian” events were seen through the “knowledge” or template established already by them, I am not doing anything unusual and am operating in such a strong tradition of psychology as well as what we commonly know to be true: Which is that past experience and learning plays greatly into, if not outright determines, what we will see and how we will interpret the present.
The only reason this has not been explored this way before is that it was thought that such early experiences as I describe — conception, womb, birth, early infancy, the prenatal and perinatal, events — could not be remembered or “recorded” by us in a way to influence what comes afterward. It would seem that Freud would have done what I am now doing if our sciences had not already precluded such a possibility for his theoretical base. Even with that, I mentioned in Chapter 2 how theorists, notably Otto Rank, did this extrapolation of psychoanalytic theory that I am now taking up. Which attempt of mine comes with the addition that I am not just surmising or deducing these possibilities, I have experienced them. I have been there. I have made the connections. I have tread the road I am here laying out.
So Freud’s thinking that no learning or consciousness was related to the time at or before birth was a mistaken notion. It is widely known to have been wrong, at this point. For a long time, there was misinformation about myelin sheaths being necessary for memory to occur, by now long debunked. Furthermore, there was an assumption that memory and knowledge needed a substrate of physicality, that is, a brain, in order for events to be “recorded” or remembered. My field of prenatal and perinatal psychology has upended that notion, as well. I say a lot about what we now know in science in this regard in many of my books in which I focus on what we have learned in the field of prenatal and perinatal psychology.4 But this book is not the one to do that. See my others for that.
For here, though, and based on the knowledge that early experiences even at the cellular level of sperm and ova are remembered, we have had revealed to us some astonishing discoveries about fundamental constructions of reality that have their roots that far back. Now, let us look at some of them. In this chapter and the next several, we will do just that.
The Perinatal Matrices
In the next chapter we will dive deeply into the details of the late-gestation prenatal influences on our times and in the creation of our distinctively human Shadow, using Jung’s term. These, in Grof’s terminology, as mentioned in Chapter 2, would come under the events of his BPM II. In my framework they comprise the prenatal matrices of human evil, the PMEs. Which I introduced in Chapter 3 and will expound upon, shortly.
However, first, we need to bring into view the pervasive overall perinatal gestalt, centered firmly on the events of the actual time of birth. For that we must have a better understanding of the perinatal matrices put forth by Stanislav Grof. This is what we look at now.
Unconscious Matrices = “Human Nature”
The elements I here describe are near universally accepted among perinatal psychologists as unconscious forces, factors, matrices that exist in us all as a result of a human birth that is unique, by comparison to all other species, in its degree of trauma and hence of its impact or imprint on what we might call our — dare I say the words — “human nature.”
These perinatal elements of the unconscious have been described most thoroughly be three figures in particular: Stanislav Grof, Arthur Janov, and Lloyd deMause. Arthur Janov brings a revolutionary and expansive look into the effects of the birth experience upon all later personality. Stanislav Grof and Lloyd deMause add to our understanding there; also they conceptualize a structure to these experiential events. In Grof’s terms, he brings forth constellations of experience arising out of our human birth trauma.
There is much overlap between the models of Stanislav Grof and Lloyd deMause. There are, however, differences in emphasis between the two frameworks for understanding. Grof’s schema focuses on the stages and patterns of our early experiential events as they relate to psychological and archetypal elements. Whereas deMause relates these early templates to historical events and the macrocosmic movements of groups, nations, societies, and their leaders. Comparing them we see that Grof’s perinatal matrices coincide with the societal matrices of deMause. Understandable, that is, for the perinatal matrix creates the societal matrix as well as configures the events therein.
We will go more deeply into both of these schema under Veils Four and Five, dealt with in the next volume of this work. In introducing them here, however, we see that there is more elaboration on the part of Grof. So let us use Grof’s schema as a basis.5
The BPMs
Grof’s first matrix — which he calls basic perinatal matrix I or BPM I — concerns the events and the transpersonal and archetypal elements reflecting our experiences in the womb, prior to the onset of birth. This might be characterized as having all needs met … with luck. For this time is usually characterized by peace, belongingness, and even euphoria.
Yet hellacious experiences can occur out of the feelings of the mother toward the fetus — if the baby is not wanted, for example — or because of what the mother ingests. The mother’s use of alcohol, other recreational drugs, pharmaceuticals of many kinds, excessive caffeine, and even environmental pollutants and food additives affect the mother’s psychological state — which is then conveyed to the fetus. However these noxious ingestions also very often cross the placental barrier. Compared to the way the mother experiences them, these substances are even more strongly felt by the prenate, who is more sensitive to such substances.
So, “with luck,” this BPM I period is a blissful time. If not, it is suffused with suffering, for longer or shorter periods. When the hellish misery is overmuch, the embryo or fetus aborts itself; miscarriage results.
This wombular, if you will, matrix is, strictly speaking, part of the perinatal matrices, as Grof denotes. For these early to middling womb events, too, comprise events “surrounding birth.” Specifically, that is, those before birth, the prenatal events. However, I focus on the prenatal events — including that of fetal malnutrition, womb experience, and cellular experience — individually over the next four chapters. They constitute separate Veils of obfuscation in my theoretical model — Veils Five through Seven, actually.
As for Grof’s basic perinatal matrix II (BPM II), it is characterized by no-exit despair, frustration, hopelessness, and pain. This is related, by Grof, to the time just before the onset of labor, before the cervix opens and allows the hope of escape into birth. I unveil this aspect of birth in the next chapter and then go into detail about it in the part, Veil Four, in the next book. In doing so, we see the reflection of virtually all human evils and atrocities. We look into the face of horror there, but in doing this we remove its power over us.
Basic perinatal matrix III (BPM III), in Grof’s schema, has to do with the constellation of experiences related to the time of actual birth. These involve struggle, an all-encompassing fight having a life-or-death urgency to it, strong sexual arousal, and anger. This will be explored in the part, Veil Four, which also is covered in the volume following this one.
Basic perinatal matrix IV (BPM IV) follows this. It is all about the experience of actual emergence at birth. Initial relief and joy upon accomplishing birth is paramount.
However, often — especially in modern times with technologically driven methods, ignorance of the needs and consciousness of the neonate, and hurried medical personnel — it is followed by elements of horror. These include the pain of separation from the mother, insensitive “processing” by attendants, tight swaddling, isolation in maternity wards, lack of physical contact and comfort, an overwhelming onslaught of sensation upon entering the world, and many other agonizing elements. The initial “Hallelujah!” upon release, thus, is often counteracted by the events immediately after birth, which put the kibosh on one’s happy feelings. This has a lifelong effect, for one thing, in terms of how one will feel ever after about achievement and change in general.
Birch coincides, societally, with deMause’s period of the ending of a war. This matrix, as well, will have its time to shine in these volumes in the part regarding the Fourth Veil.
Heaven and Hell
In summary, we have
BPM I. euphoric, oceanic, blissful feelings, sometimes feelings of being poisoned or being in a toxic or polluted environment;
BPM II. followed by crushing, no-exit, depression, claustrophobia, compression, strangulation, and suffocation;
BPM III. followed by struggle, violence, war scenarios, birth/death fantasies, sexual excess;
BPM IV. and finally release, triumph, feeling of renewal or rebirth and a new golden age, but also possibly of being abandoned, tortured, ritually sacrificed, probed medically, and assaulted by sensations.
These are some of the elements which pertain to the experience of the perinatal unconscious.
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The Prenatal Matrix of “Human Nature”:
Third Trimester Experience Configures Our “Evil” … the Roots of War, Bigotry, Pollution, and Our “Oliver Twist” Economies.
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“…there are other important characteristics of this time which affect us for life. I have detailed four, in particular. These have powerful effects on us and are often crucial in our understandings of what makes us distinct from Nature. You might say they comprise the blueprints of ordinary human consciousness and of much of human personality. These four templates for human consciousness and the roots of human evil can be described as crowded-frustration, suffocated-deprivation, poisoned-disgust, and irritated-revulsion. Among other things, they comprise the basis of human’s unique tendencies to bigotry, to battle and aggression, and to environmental destruction.”.
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When we go backward in time to before birth, we enter upon events I elaborated upon in a recent work of mine, Wounded Deer and Centaurs: The Necessary Hero and the Prenatal Matrix of Human Events (2016). I pointed out that we go through specific experiences in the last trimester of gestation which imprint us for life. These experiences create a matrix of human events. We can see them moving within the march of history and stamping its face on their effects. Most importantly, they are the foundation of what humans consider to be evil.
Prenatal Events Configure Our Evil
These experiences of the last three months of gestation include those emanating out of the fact that we uniquely, as a species, undergo trauma at a time of fetal malnutrition. This means that the blood supply, which brings nutrients and oxygen to us at that time, is restricted because of the weight of the fetus pressing on the arteries feeding the prenate through the placenta. This, along with other biological events that contribute to an increasing hypoxia over the last three months of gestation, results in an inhibition of development during that time, which increases during the last trimester and is manifest physically and observably especially in the final month. Lacking resources, the fetus slows its growing noticeably during the last month and does not pick up its rate of growth until after birth; whereupon it catches up to what it would have been.
The experiences involved in this fetal malnutrition and its accompanying hypoxia, which happens for all humans if they have the full term of nine months of gestation,
are suffocation — from reduction in oxygen;
are prenatal poisoning and disgust — from the buildup of waste matters from the blood not taking those toxins away as efficiently and thus not being removed from our bodies as well either;
and are prenatal irritation or burning — from the fact that we exist in a kind of a stew of toxins which affects us as a fetal sort of irritation or burning on the surface of the skin.
Another experience occurring at the same time, though not caused by reduced blood flow, is simple crowdedness in the womb. The prenate is at its greatest size prior to birth. As birth approaches, and especially during that final month with all that restricted blood flow and prenatal malnutrition going on, there is a traumatic amount of discomfort. The world as free — which was comparable at times to floating in space or in water and having the freedom of movement of a gymnast — is replaced by the world as constricting and oppressive. Everywhere and anyway one wishes to move is blocked or difficult. Just hearing this might be bringing up a frustrated feeling in you right now. For it stays with us for life, and we build much of what we think and believe upon the bedrock of such feelings of being oppressed.
All these experiences are unusual in Nature. In fact, fetal malnutrition, corresponding hypoxia, and nearly unbearable crowdedness occur during gestation only to humans, among all other planetmates. These did not happen to our earliest primate ancestors, either. They arise out of the factor of having become bipedal and of having had our pelvic bones become altered in a way that made birth more difficult. This created trauma at birth. Which trauma resulted in bigger brains to deal with repressing the pain of it in order to function in life.
Which bigger brains caused more birth trauma, out of the difficulty of getting a larger skull through a narrower opening. Which led to a compromise where we are born before we are ready — human prematurity — and have a time of excruciating suffering just prior to that birth … fetal malnutrition. All this happened for all the reasons previous, including the mother’s standing up, resulting in a reduction of blood flow to the fetus. You need to look to my Planetmates (2014) and Prodigal Human (2016) for the details of how this happened over the millions of years of our evolution. It also is just too involved for elaboration here, though I will deal with what it resulted in — prenatal hell — under Veil Five, in the next volume.
In any case, in Wounded Deer and Centaurs, I pointed out that these experiences of crowdedness-hypoxia and fetal malnutrition occurring increasingly over the last three months of gestation create a template or psychic stamp upon our minds wherein for the rest of our lives we will be predisposed to various feelings and actions. These include
wars — for we feel we need to expand boundaries in reaction to the crowdedness.
greed — for we feel we must grasp and struggle for more than we need because of fetal suffocation and starvation.
bigotry — for we feel outside and alien presences near us that are irritating, which is the result of prenatal irritation.
paranoia — for we felt that we were being force-fed toxins, caused by prenatal poisoning.
pollution — for we keenly felt our existence in a place that was contaminated because of the buildup of waste matter not sufficiently removed, which we re-create in air and other pollutions.
greenhouse effect — for we existed in an environment that was lacking in oxygen and higher than is optimal in carbon dioxide.
separation from Nature and environmental destruction — because of being at such odds with our environment in the womb and due to its seeming contrary or assaultive relation to us as a prenate, we pave over and are at war with Nature, as a characteristic of our species … alone.
overpopulation of globe and crowded environs, especially in cities — for we re-create the situation of crowdedness in the womb, just prior to birth.
So, here in late gestation, with fetal malnutrition, we have other kinds of bioculturally created realities.
Perinatal Imprints on Human Nature
Let us look at this again, within a larger context, an evolutionary one.
Bipedalism Causes Birth Pain and Premature Birth
Humans are bipedal. In standing up, and over the course of millions of years, the angle and configuration of the pelvic bones changed to accommodate the new posture. Unfortunately, it also resulted in a situation where the pelvic opening was now smaller than the normal circumference of the neonate’s skull.
Human biology compensated for this impossible fit between skull and pelvic ring in a number of ways: These include
the production of female hormones which, released at birth, lubricate the passage of the skull through the pelvic opening;
softer skull tissue to be able to mold itself in a way to make the transition through the ring;
and premature birth so as to leave the womb before the skull becomes too big to make it out at all, even with difficulty.
These adaptations had a cost, however. Most obviously, this was the creation of birth trauma for both mother and infant. With a larger skull than other primates — which, as mentioned, is itself a result of birth trauma — we are in the womb as long as possible, though not as long as other species, relative to development. This longest time possible is still the barely sufficient amount of time for brain development, and yet it is bought at the cost of a difficult entry into the world.
Secondary Altriciality, Prenatal Compression, Hypoxia, and Malnutrition
However, this prematurity of birth had consequences of its own. It resulted in a situation termed secondary altriciality, which means humans are helpless — i.e., altricial — for a time longer than any other species. This secondary altriciality of an extra year — which is the first year after birth — is roughly the amount of time we would ideally be still inside the womb in order for us to be born at the same level of development of our nearest primate relatives. So this time outside the womb is spent inside the womb for the other species closest to us.
Furthermore, because we are already being born premature, we end up staying in the womb the maximum time possible while still allowing the skull to be able to make it through, at birth … which it is barely able to do to begin with! This means that we are in the womb an extra amount of time when it has become excessively crowded and when the placenta is already aging and becoming less efficient.
Thus we are damned if we do, damned if we don’t: With increasing birth trauma and infancy trauma causing larger brains, we suffer exceedingly because we are extra helpless when we are born; we are even more dependent on parental assistance for survival than any other species. Thus we suffer — acknowledged or not — from an imperfect parenting. For even the best of human mothers and fathers cannot compete with the near perfection of an in-womb biological attention to needs as happens to other species. As well, the time in the womb — even though shorter than we would need for comparable, to other species, development at birth of our bigger brain — is still one of excruciating pain due to the extra crowdedness coming as a result of a bipedal mother. For the human mother, standing, compresses the fetus more than a primate mother whose posture, being on all fours, allows the fetus to hang loosely below it. Add that to the fact that a bigger brain itself is taking up space in the womb and contributing to fetal compression.
Finally, what results is that in the third trimester of gestation and especially when the mother is standing, the prenate’s weight bears down and compresses the arteries and veins of the mother bringing nutrients and oxygen. The fetus is thereby deprived of sufficient oxygen and suffers for that. Imagine a situation of being in a stuffy room for a time that seems endless and from which one cannot leave for three months. Reading that statement in itself might have you short of breath right now.
These factors in the third trimester, including placental insufficiency, extreme compression, and hypoxia (low oxygen) — which is a consequence of both the insufficiency and the compression — create a set of peculiarly human experiences prenatally, which I term the prenatal matrices of human evil, the PMEs.
Such events perinatally comprise our distinction from the rest of Nature. They are what makes humans to be humans. And the simmering suffocation from this time in the womb is one of them.
Additionally, this seemingly endless time is characterized by that crowdedness I mentioned. This compression and frustrating inability to move freely causes the no-exit feelings that Grof describes as characterizing BPM II. My difference from him is in showing how this important and pervasive feeling of adults, which creates claustrophobia and panicky feelings of stuckness and being trapped, is not merely a product of a relatively short period of time just before birth and prior to the opening of the cervix. Indeed, the preeminence in human personality of feelings of frustrating inability to move and hellacious entrapment is a result of the fact that this was an experience, prenatally, going on for up to three months before birth.
Prenatal Matrices of Human Evil
However, there are other important characteristics of this time which affect us for life. I have detailed four, in particular. These have powerful effects on us and are often crucial in our understandings of what makes us distinct from Nature. You might say they comprise the blueprints of ordinary human consciousness and of much of human personality. These four templates for human consciousness and the roots of human evil can be described as crowded-frustration, suffocated-deprivation, poisoned-disgust, and irritated-revulsion. Among other things, they comprise the basis of human’s unique tendencies to bigotry, to battle and aggression, and to environmental destruction. Let me say a little bit about them. I deal with them in depth in Veil Five.
Crowded-Frustration, PME 1
The first I have termed prenatal matrix of evil 1, or PME 1, and it is all about the compression and claustrophobic feelings I described as our experience as we push up against the constraints of the mother’s body as we grow. Our blissful time, our “golden age,” of uninhibited growth comes to an end.
Our feelings about everything, as well as ourselves, changes. Once the “golden child” and the offspring of Divinity, we are now “cast into hell,” exactly like in the myth of Lucifer. Sure enough, elements of hell are found within our experiences of this time in our life.
Feeling crowded and stymied in our movements we feel frustration and no-exit panic. We feel like we are going to die. And we wonder what we might have done to create this seeming “punishment.” This is one of the roots of guilt and especially of what we call humans’ “original sin.” The other causes, while not relevant here, are (1) the survivor guilt of being the only one of the multitudes of sperm to survive conception and (2) the experience at birth that our survival was wrought at a cost of pain to our mothers. Those, later.
Immersed in this frustration, however, we want to push everyone and everything away. We are feeling, “Give me some room; give me my space … back off!” There is both anger and helplessness correlated with this experience.
We act out of these feelings throughout our lives. For one thing, we can no longer move in an uninhibited way, and we bring this trauma, since unconscious and unacknowledged, into our reality in the form of overpopulation. Remember, what we do not integrate into consciousness, what remains in our unconscious, therefore, we bring about in our reality. As Jung put it, paraphrasing, what we do not acknowledge, what is unconscious, appears outside us as fate. So it is that we act out these templates through our politics, environmentally, internationally as wars, and interpersonally through aggression and bigotry.
The crowdedness in particular leads to feelings we need to expand and overrun neighboring territories, for we never feel we have enough room. We have wars of expansion and imperialism as a result. We act out this same feeling environmentally because we feel it, too, constricts us. So we lash back at Nature — slashing and burning to create more room, paving it over, assaulting the wilderness for subconsciously wanting anything natural or biological to be trounced. For Nature and biology, in the form of our mother’s body, once hemmed us in. The mother’s body was the environment for us in the womb; it compressed-oppressed us, and ever after we are at war, equally unfortunately, with Nature and with women.
We express this mythologically when we describe Prometheus as being chained to a rock, or Sisyphus pushing a boulder endlessly up a hill, among many other myths of no-exit helplessness. We express this in our cultural tales when we relate how Snow White was constricted and compressed within a bodice with stay laces pulled exceedingly tight, causing her to faint. Worst of all we manifest this in many and diverse cultural practices that involve being buried to death — as when innocent girls are buried up to their chests in Muslim countries and then stoned to death; and in medieval tortures that involve crushing devices and incarceration in dungeons.
Suffocated-Deprivation, PME 2
The second template I call prenatal matrix of evil 2, or PME 2. It is all about not getting enough oxygen, being stifled, gasping feelings, shortness of breath, an intense and seemingly dire want and need.
Ever after we will be driven to compensate for this lack by taking more than we need, as in greed; by encroaching on others — war and aggression; and by feeling ever the victim of unfair forces. Greed is so powerfully motivating for some because, rooted in this time of oxygen suffocation, it can be felt to be as desperate and panicky as a person drowning.
This can lead to extreme selfishness and narcissism. This struggle over resources will come out in many areas of human lives, including oppression, revolution, elitism, and the push for domination of others and hierarchy in society, eventually.
Since this is all about resources and the satisfaction of needs — of oxygen and nutrients in the womb — it comes out in particular around our behavior in regard to the fulfillment of our physical needs as adults, which is economics. There are reasons, for example, why we insist on a dog-eat-dog capitalism or an even more unfair feudalism or strong-man economy. Because it was difficult at this time in the womb and we needed to struggle in order stay alive and merely get oxygen, we feel that struggling and frustration are natural states. We even consider them aspects of a proclaimed-to-be-unchangeable “human nature” … though they are not.
Whereas the time in early gestation, where things were easy and our needs were fully satisfied, would have a societal analogue in a socialist economic system, we cannot abide such a situation without difficulty. Everywhere around, in particular among conservatives of all nations, we hear the same refrain about the “survival of the fittest” and the “cruel” and “unfair” nature of reality. Yet it is not reality that is cruel and unfair. Indeed, we make it so out of our belief, which is rooted in this PME 2 oxygen deprivation wherein reality once was like that.
Beyond that, we are forever fearful of a loss of resources or ability to fill our needs — which comes out in panic about employment, finances, and social status. We are always fearful that we are one event away from “being on the streets”; for, back then, “things were tight.” Notice how our language expresses both PME 1 as well as PME 2 feelings when speaking about resources. Yet we, for the most part in our societies on Earth, refuse to change such a situation and only reluctantly allow entitlements. Indeed, some sectors of society are actively at war with such largesse to those in need. Additionally, folks only occasionally support programs and politicians that contribute to a fairness in taxation that would have those with more ability to help be required to contribute more. Lastly, we show this imprint in that only a small number of nations on Earth have brought in any kind of socialism or safety net for all members of society.
We engage in repetitive struggles to “breathe free.” We feel, unconsciously, stifled, needy, suffocated … gasping. We create our Oliver Twist economies, rooted in selfishness and greed — “Please, sir, might I have some more? — out of this terror of not having had enough in the womb, during the last trimester. We experienced “starvation,” impoverishment, deprivation at that time; and we have unconsciously made a pledge to ourselves never ever to experience that hellish insufficiency again even if it means warring, fighting, scrapping over resources, greed, excessive selfishness, or inhumanity and callousness to our fellow humans and especially to those in need.
Because of this PME 2, oxygen starvation, we have feelings of panicky, near-drowning gasping added to PME 1 feelings of being overwhelmed, pressured, and blocked from free movement, or helplessness.
Additionally, this feeling of underlying desperation keeps us in a fear which has us forever gauging our resources and the satisfaction of our wants and desires. In the extreme, we say someone is fixated on money or is someone who is like Donald Trump (lol). And this keeps us unable to enjoy the other aspects of life or to live in, appreciate, and take pleasure in the present … meaning it keeps us from enjoying our life, really. We might have scrapped and fought to be able to afford fine steaks and expensive foods but be unable to truly taste them, largely because of this distracting fever with its focus on future gain to offset essentially imaginary dire insufficiencies of means.
Another way of putting it is that this hellish template of insufficiency keeps us trapped in acting out of its pain grids rather than being able to move and behave in our life and make choices out of what will actually make us happy, which is our joy grids of early womb life. Living in the present and community belongingness and socialism would represent bringing forth our joy grids, and thus be the basis of our happiness. However because of this template of deprivation and fear, many of us cannot let ourselves have that ease and pleasure … or any for that matter.
It contributes as well to submissive and sycophantic behavior. For out of this fear of dire deprivation we will allow ourselves to succumb to the wishes and desires of higher ups, hoping that they will then take care of and ease those wants. That is to say, out of this unconscious trauma, we “suck up” and relinquish our dignity. In America, we become Republicans. Democrats, at least, know what I am talking about there. How else to explain poor and working-class folks voting for the likes of a daddy Trump? This shows that in acting out of the ignorance that this Veil brings — all Veils obfuscate Reality and thereby create ignorance and so also stupid choices — we actually create that which we fear. Certainly everyone’s greed, cumulatively, results in deprivation all about, which would not otherwise occur. And certainly sycophancy to daddy figures who promise to take care of us results in handing over one’s power to those who will use it for their gains, not yours, and indeed — as the Trump example demonstrates — at your expense.
We express this mythologically when we describe Tantalus being eternally punished by being forced to stand in a pool of water that forever recedes and cannot quench his thirst while meanwhile being unable to reach the low hanging fruit above him, among other examples in fairy tale and mythology of frustration and forever lack and craving: The tale of King Midas with the golden touch, which turned everything into gold and thereby made it unusable, and Aesop’s Fable of the “Fox and the Grapes,” where the fox finds the grapes are out of his reach, come readily to mind.
Poisoned-Disgusted, PME 3
Every time people say, “Don’t give (feed) me that bullshit!”, they are expressing the next, this third, prenatal matrix. I have termed this the prenatal matrix of evil 3, PME 3, for short.
What is involved in this is the factor of the blood flow, constricted and reduced by the compression of the mother’s arteries feeding the placenta, becoming impure for lack of efficient removal of the byproducts of food conversion. It is characterized by feelings of sickening, nausea, disgust, infection, imposition and verbal or indirect attack (paranoia), and victimization. The world is no longer felt as pure. And everywhere in cultures — from evangelical Christians preaching on the downfall into sin of contemporary society, or primitives engaging in regular and intense rituals of cleansing of “pollutions” that are felt to have “built up” in the tribe, to spiritualists and yogis engaging in all manners of complicated, often painfully meticulous, and often excruciating purification practices — we see this matrix, this template being acted out.
It pops up frequently, as well, in the paranoid delusions of both psychotics and neurotics as a fear of someone having poisoned their food. This prenatal experience is the reason that particular fear of poisoning — of all the things possible of which one could conceivably be afraid — shows up so much and is associated so frequently with paranoid delusions. Just look, within right-wing and conspiracy theories, to the pervasiveness of the idea of being poisoned, intentionally — through inoculations and vaccines, by fluoride in water, and so on. While it is an ongoing struggle to keep our food, water, and air free from the pollutants that corporations, cutting corners for profit, are wont to impose on us; still, this realistic threat is amplified and expanded to much else which is innocent or helpful, due to this underlying trauma of being force-fed toxins prior to birth.
We are forever afraid, subconsciously, of having poisons “shoved down our throats,” as the saying goes. For there was a time when we experienced the flow of blood and its nutrients, increasingly over the last three months, to be tainted and impure. It was insufficient in oxygen, as mentioned for PME 2, yet there was also a backlog of toxins from the byproducts of food conversion not being removed adequately. It would be the equivalent of up-chucking one’s stomach contents back into one’s mouth, as we sometimes have the misfortune of experiencing. And if even the thought of that is distasteful to you (sorry about the visual), imagine how the psychic equivalent of that felt to you as an extremely sensitive prenate.
As a consequence of this, we have fundamental feelings of feeling disgusted, which we throw upon our perceptions of elements outside us. This is related to PME 2 oxygen deprivation, for it also involves the blood flow. However, whereas PME 2 is about what we did not get that we needed, this PME 3 is about what we got but did not want! It is the difference between being deprived and being attacked, of being not given attention or the satisfaction of some other need versus receiving attention but it being of a sinister or harmful sort. In deprivation, we live in an emotional desert. In prenatal poisoning we are like one of those families living amid mountains of garbage, in Malaysia and the Philippines, which collapsed and killed them. It is about the difference between being starved in a concentration camp, versus being force-fed noxious gases in the gas chambers of those camps.
These — deprivation and poisoning — are not the only two PME elements acted out by the Nazis, incidentally. For crowdedness (PME 1) and burning (PME 4, coming up) were also characteristically employed by them. Still, in keeping with his food fetishes and his paranoia of being poisoned, Hitler orchestrated the unconscious pain of his contemporaries to bring poison and filth into the lives of his perceived enemies, the Jews, and to kill them. In the way Hitler’s Germany employed pervasive propaganda to bring about his atrocities, we see a reflection of PME 2 poisoning, as well. For being force-fed propaganda is another version of being imposed on and forced to ingest something one does not want and which is toxic.
We express this matrix in universal tales such as Snow White, who is enticed to partake of a poisoned apple, and even in Genesis where Eve is inveigled to eat an apple — which was forbidden and thus “tainted,” thereby ending the human Paradise. Those are among many other narratives of sickening or debasement through injection or consumption.
Irritated-Revulsion … PME 4
Fourth, and finally, in the womb in the last trimester we experience a buildup of toxins in our environment for the same reason as above. The backlog of toxins from insufficient removal of waste comes into us, but is also felt around us in the environment. We must remember that the prenate is much more sensitive than we are and that he or she lives in that environment constantly and without relief for days, weeks, and even months on end.
It is experienced as a kind of irritation or burning on the surface of the skin and, sometimes, with a whole-body reflexive revulsion to the entire experience of it. The other feelings that are part of this complex or matrix are feelings of creepiness, yuckiness, or as adolescent girls say about such smelly, slimy, unpleasant things, “eeeew.” Here we are experiencing more of the revulsion component of its feeling gestalt.
One feels an acidic burning on the skin but also feels dirty and unclean on the outside. This is a purity complex again, however not like on the inside where it is about bodily or soulular pollution but on the outside where it is caught up in cleanliness and OCD behavior. Being irritating on the surface of the skin it comes out in phobias about insects and germs, too.
Additionally, the toxicity of the environment is compounded by the fact that the placenta during late gestation is beginning to age, beginning to break down, to become calcified, and is less efficient. This, in itself, contributes to a feeling of being trapped in a dying environment, with everything around being irritating, old, dull, dumb, and burning. Again, being on the edge of environmental apocalypse and with a society flooded with propaganda and commercials creating a society stupid enough to wish their own demise — voting for a Trump and ignoring environmental collapse, for example — we can see how these buried feelings, unacknowledged, we are manifesting all about us.
This kind of irritation to things in the environment has many act outs as well, many of them also contributing to human evil — such as racism, bigotry, and environmental pollution. For, again, remember we re-create that which we do not feel and integrate. Thus we have manifested a toxic and caustic environment: Acid rain, polluted streams and rivers, acidic oceans, ozone depletion leading to sunburns and cancer, exploding stockpiles of nuclear waste throughout the world, and the potential for nuclear war — which, by the way, would be the ultimate act out of this feeling of burning on the surface of the skin.
Yet this feeling of irritation from the prenatal environment we project additionally onto those in our social environment, and we feel them to be irritating, as well. We call them “dirty” Jews, or hippies, or the homeless. We see them as “lazy” Blacks or gypsies — i.e., a placenta that is not doing its job to remove a toxic buildup. We throw the same kind of prenatal revulsion onto witches. Historically, they were thought to be “polluting” the cultural environment with their dangerous and “burning” — for these ideas were associated with the demonic and hell — beliefs and practices. And we have submitted all these groups to the burning — through immolation at the stake, through burning in Nazi ovens or in heaps at the time of pogroms, and through KKK attacks on and the burning, hanging, and tar-and-feathering of Blacks in America. Tar and feathering, incidentally, is a pretty good metaphor for the feelings of this time of being surrounded by toxic and uncomfortably irritating-burning elements from which there is no escape.
More innocently, and commonly, it is experienced as ADHD and ADD — Attention Deficit Hyperactivity and Attention Deficit Disorders — wherein constant irritations within the body keep one from being able to think and concentrate clearly. This complex is the reason humans have these strange preoccupations of cutting, burning, engraving, depilation and shaving of the skin, tattooing, and all the many customs of human skin decoration, disfiguration, self-flagellation, and deformation of skin and body seen around the world and throughout human history.
Having to do with excessive cleanliness, it is the root of anal compulsion, which has been attributed by psychoanalysts to harsh toilet training. However, if you think of it as a compulsion for excessive tidiness, you can see how it actually causes the unnecessarily strict parenting that involves harsh toilet training.
We express this mythologically when we describe Loki being constrained and having poisons dripped on him forever and Prometheus having his liver eaten daily by an eagle, among many other myths of attack and brutalization, especially in an acidic way, upon the skin..
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There is much more. For now, however, I just want to give you an idea of the critical importance of the understandings ahead. We will take up these matrices in detail when we get to Veil Five. At this time, we need to look further back in time to the influences from earlier in womb life. Next, then, we get a perspective on our existence in the womb: I bring now, to you, a womb with a view.
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Womb with a View:
Our Concepts-Feelings About the Spiritual and Religious Have Roots in Our Prenatal Experiences.
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“…these foundational events shape and inform the myths by which we live, the motives that inspire us, the feelings and emotions that move us, and the attitudes that are our thickly matted screens across our windows to the world, and much else…. These biohistorical experiences delineate the very paradigms within which we live…. There is very little of experiential reality that is not in some way linked, modeled, or bounded by the effects of these events. They are, indeed, as all-inclusive and comprehensive as any matrix, like in The Matrix, and they are just as much exclusive of and blocking or hiding any reality outside of them.”.
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Okay, this is where it starts to get good. You can probably use it about now … after that last chapter. Sure enough, as we continue peeling back layers of the onion, pulling to the side Veil after Veil of corrupting experience distorting the Clear Light, actual Reality, we come to the next and more fundamental imprint than the prenatal matrices of human evil, the PMEs. This undergirding layer of experience is that arising from our experiences during earlier womb life. Let us say, roughly, this is the first six months of gestation. This is, indeed, our “golden age.”
Rank Truthiness
Psychoanalyst Otto Rank, as early as 1929, writes that all religions are an attempt to re-create this situation in the womb, which he considered was invariably pleasurable. And for Rank that included the time which I just described as being hellish and related to the prenatal matrices of evil.
However, Rank, along with everyone else, did not know there was a distinction between early womb life and later womb life. I wouldn’t have to write my books explaining it if they did. Remember, he was writing almost a hundred years ago. Medical scientists, let alone psychoanalysts, did not know at that time all that we do now about the life of the embryo and fetus in the womb. They did not have our medical imaging x-rays, amniograms, and other monitoring instruments. They did not have the benefit of our research on prenatal and perinatal life. They did not, of course, have benefit of our abilities to re-experience these times and recover these memories.
Rank did not know, even, what Stanislav Grof brought forth a half century and more later about the time just before birth, when trapped and suffering in the womb, which Grof calls BPM II. Psychic exploration technologies allowing deep plumbing of the unconscious and introducing us to vivid re-membering of our earliest experiences did not break onto the Western cultural scene till the 1950s. Rank was not aware either of the hypoxia or the poisonous placenta, revealed by research and described so graphically by Lloyd deMause.
Yet these understandable shortcomings to the side, what Rank (1929) describes as being the difference between pleasurable womb life and painful birth can easily be applied, in my model, to the difference between early womb life that was blissful, and later womb life and afterward with its prenatal matrices of human evil and its BPM II no-exit, BPM III birth, and infancy traumas.
Religion from the Womb
Relatedly, much of our beliefs — especially our religious, spiritual, and mythological ones — describe or relate to, are rooted in, this time of the womb. Considering that all later life is begun and founded upon pain, which began in the third trimester … and that all that pain created a number of Veils across our perception of Reality, this is the place — folks getting to and re-accessing this place in their minds related to early womb experience — where Reality … a benign, indeed Divine, a wonderful Reality … begins to smile through.
Rank concurs with my postulation in his pointing out, also, that meditation has a quality and an intent of re-creating the early womb experience. Concerning “yoga practice,” he writes, “The aim of all these practices is Nirvana, the pleasurable Nothing, the womb situation…. The way to it, as in analysis, is the putting oneself into a dreamy attitude of meditation approaching the embryonal condition, the result of which … actually makes possible an extensive reminiscence of the intrauterine situation.”1
Rank even shares that some of the movements occurring during meditation — as described in the ancient Indian spiritual text, the Rig Veda — compare to movements of the embryo in the womb. He writes, “There is clearly described in the Rigveda a position, uttana … which … ‘is similar to certain embryonal positions.’” Furthermore, Rank intimates that these are reached after, or at least concurrently with, the reliving of birth trauma. He writes, “In other places of the Rigveda are mentioned rolling movements of the head and eyes, swinging motions, tremblings and rockings to and fro, all of which again seem to relate to the birth trauma.”2
This is a comparison — between experiences occurring during meditation and those occurring in primal therapy or other birth and prenatal re-experience — remarkably like what I came to much later, which was published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. In “A Primal Perspective on Spirituality” (1985), fifty-plus years after Rank and without having read him on this, I came to the conclusion that the bodily movements that primal and holotropic folks, and other birth re-experiencers, display during their process were the same as movements described in some of the literature on mysticism and spiritual process, particularly that occurring in deep or advanced meditation.
Specifically, I wrote, “Janov’s (1970) position that meditation is simply an attempt at inducing relaxation, which is then called bliss and couched in terms like ‘oneness with God’ … is an uninformed opinion that leaves out of consideration the variety of spiritual experiences that occur during meditation….
“From the writings of Paramahansa Yogananda (1946) and Swami Baba Muktananda (1974), we are able to derive a conception of meditational experiences that is totally at variance with the notion that it is merely an attempt at relaxation or that it is, as Wilber claimed, distinct from ‘pre-’ states. Muktananda writes, for example, ‘Various feelings emerged during meditation,’ and ‘Sometimes I was happy, sometimes sad. Alternating between smiles and tears, I continued my inward journey’….
“He talks about innumerable movements that occur in the process of meditation…. Most interestingly, he notes that these movements are automatic and ‘continued for a prolonged period’…. ‘At times I hopped like a frog. Occasionally my body moved violently as if possessed by a spirit’….
“Muktananda explains that ‘the practitioners of Siddha Yoga have a vast variety of experiences about which one neither hears nor reads’ … that because of this an aspirant might abandon the path out of sheer fright…. Unaware of the variety of emotions and experiences entailed in the spiritual process, expecting perhaps only ‘bliss’ (or relaxation?), the aspirant may think he or she is going insane…. He himself, however, sees all these experiences as part of a natural process that is cleansing in nature and makes possible access to higher levels of consciousness….
“Additional examples of these kinds of meditational experiences are given by Kapleau (1980) and Kornfield (1979). In fact, Kornfield reports that incidences of ‘spontaneous movement’ were the most common experiences reported by beginning meditators…. He notes also that ‘Meditators commonly experienced intense feeling states and frequent dramatic changes of mood,’ with examples of such including ‘screaming mind trips,’ ‘violent crying,’ ‘huge release of anger,’ and ‘heavy sadness’….
“In these descriptions of emotional discharge/release we can see similarities to what is described as occurring in primal therapy….
“But the descriptions of spontaneous and automatic movement are especially interesting. In many respects they recall the experiences that primalers with access to their ‘first-line’ pain (preverbal, usually surrounding birth) frequently encounter. In fact, it is exactly this kind of relation (between the physical and emotional experiences reported by Kapleau, Kornfield, and others and perinatal experiences occurring outside of the spiritual disciplines) that is noted by Bache (1981).”3
Wombular Ways and Means
The methods of attaining such early womb experience and what I call the “joy grids” are blatantly wombular, as well. Rank gives one example that is especially provocative: “The pupil of the sacred Brahmins, the Brahmacarin who tries to absorb the secret magic power, which for the Hindu means the primal cause of Being, during his initiation (Upayana) must experience in the teacher’s womb an hypnotic sleep condition lasting for three days. ‘The Teacher who initiates the pupil makes of him an embryo in his inmost parts. Three nights he carries him in the womb. Then he brings forth him who comes to see the Gods….’”4
Rank adds, “…the novitiate probably sat for three days in a hut, with clenched fists and legs bent upwards in the embryonal position, surrounded with all kinds of coverings (amnion)…. ‘The priests convert that one with whom they consummate the diksa again into an embryo. The hut of sacrifice is for the Diksita (the one offering the sacrifice) the womb; thus they allow him to enter the womb again; they cover him with a robe. The robe is for the Diksita the amnion; thus they surround him with the amnion….’”5
“We have before us here the primal phenomenon of the pleasurable-protecting situation. From this there later emerges, through severance from the mother and transference to the father, the figure of the almighty and all-loving, but also punishing, God, as a religious sublimation by means of projection.”6
Further on, Rank emphasizes this womb-religious connection as so: “The high valuation placed on the child by Christ in the text of the Gospels would further agree with this. Christ himself has ever remained an infant (Pieta).
“In the ancient mysteries every single mystic himself became directly a God. The formula of confession … shows that we are here concerned with regression (and return) into the womb, which the cysta mystica (holy box) is now held to represent…. ‘In taking from the holy box … the image of a womb and slipping it over his body, the mystic is assured of being reborn from the womb of the earth mother, and of becoming her bodily child….’
“It is not a question of mere coitus nor even of a ‘sacred one, in which ‘a numerous crowd’ can be participators, but it is a matter of union with the mother. This is proved not only by the symbol cysta mystica but still more clearly by the realistic Phrygian mystery cult, in which the mystic descends into a grave, ‘where the blood of a slaughtered bull is poured over him. After the rebirth he receives milk nourishment as the God in him or he in the God is yet a child, then he steps up and is worshipped as God by the community.’ The Hindu Yoga practice through mystical meditation likewise enables each individual himself to become God — that is, by entering the womb, by being transformed back into the embryo, he participates in the god-like omnipotence’….
“So the infans — ultimately the unborn — proves to be God … whence it follows that each individual himself was once ‘God’ and can be so again, if or in so far as he can reinstate himself into the primal condition….”7
Our Deeper Human Nature
The conclusion arising from these and other researchers, as well as my own research, is that our early womb time is our truest, deepest human nature as well as our most accurate “philosophy,” if you will, while in Form. Why, you ask? Well because pain causes us to retreat from experience, thus from Reality, and to put up a screen of inhibition and defense which distorts Reality so as to protect us. Whereas here at the BPM I, prenatal-bliss time of our lives, we are not only still somewhat connected to Divinity, in that we are still somewhat identified with Divinity. But also we have corrupted less of our Experience, much less.
This is Experience — essentially our Divinity, as I have expressed it in Experience Is Divinity (2013) — that we were identical with in the pre-birth or the No-Form state. In this “subtle realm of divine and archetypal illumination,” as the Tibetan Book of the Dead phrases it — aware of karma and past lives — we are instructed about destiny and life purpose. This is the chonyid bardo and the collective unconscious.
At this time in our lives, we are apprehending Reality more accurately than we will ever again, for the rest of our lives. That is, unless we go through some psychological and spiritual processes which wipe away the later residues of Pain across our window to the Real. Herein we rediscover our natural selves — a self which is more positive, viable, happy, and Divine than ever after.
Put another way, these bioculturally constituted realities, arising from our birth and infancy traumas — more superficially — alongside our womb experience of bliss and spirituality … on a deeper level … create our human nature. They create the parameters of the Human Game we came here to experience in this world of Form. It is the struggle between the two that we register as our dilemma, caught — like Christ between the good and bad thieves — between the demonic and the better angels of our nature.
However, keeping in mind that our “better angels” are closest to our deeper self, our actual Reality, and our Divinity can make all the difference in the world.
Even Deeper Templates
Many more examples of how our prenatal and perinatal experiences predispose our world — going back, actually, to our existence as sperm and ovum, still inside our parents — could be given. And for a more comprehensive understanding I refer the reader to my books, Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness (2014) and Wounded Deer and Centaurs: The Necessary Hero and the Prenatal Matrix of Human Events (2016). For an even more detailed understanding, keep your eye out for two of my works, which are forthcoming, Cells with a View and The Prenatal Matrix of Human Evil.
However, the point I am making is that those early, universal events predispose the very nature of our mind. They do this both in determining the kinds of thoughts and images we will have as well as in modeling the patterns and the connections, associations, and networks among such elements of consciousness.
The thing of all this that makes them the basis of bioculturally constituted realities and not individually constructed realities is that we all experience these events. We therefore all have these assumptions, attitudes, and beliefs … each of us and in every culture. And we can see that cultures create constructions … culturally constituted realities, or institutionally constituted realities … around and out of these assumptions and beliefs. We base our culturally constituted realities upon understandings (assumptions) that we have a body and a soul (religion); that there is a Divine entity at work in the Universe aiding us (God); that there is separation between people which means there is misunderstanding, necessarily, which means there are differences that must be mediated; that women and men being different and having different roles require different cultural apparatuses as part of that … and so on and so forth.
Those biohistorical events consequently end up configuring our sociocultural structures, which we conceive and modify with less deeply-rooted thoughts and images emanating from idiosyncratic later events. Likewise, these foundational events shape and inform the myths by which we live, the motives that inspire us, the feelings and emotions that move us, and the attitudes that are our thickly matted screens across our windows to the world, and much else. Indeed, in my conceptualization, these biohistorical experiences delineate the very paradigms within which we live.
These early events shape our social, cultural, and physical worlds, which we create with our minds. Therefore, there is very little of experiential reality that is not in some way linked, modeled, or bounded by the effects of these events. They are, indeed, as all-inclusive and comprehensive as any matrix, like in The Matrix, and they are just as much exclusive of and blocking or hiding any reality outside of them.
The Transpersonal Templates
Additionally, our concepts-feelings about the transpersonal — that is to say, the religious or spiritual — have roots in our periconceptional and prenatal experiences. Our experience as a fetus in the womb results in the fundamental concepts and feelings we have about the transpersonal in all kinds of astonishing ways, previously unimagined.
For example, zygote, blastocyst, embryo, and then fetus grow at an incredible pace with an enormous number of biological systems perfectly synchronized. This leads to feelings that there is meaning in all one’s actions — if in tune with the Divine, i.e., the natural order or Nature. Also, that there is perfect synchronicity of external and internal events in one’s world if so attuned is a feeling arisen from this time.
The feeling in the womb of being nurtured, protected, and all needs met — especially through the umbilical cord at the navel — leads,
a)to
feelings that a spiritual state is one of perfect harmony, being protected, and
that the Divine provides for all one’s needs;
b) to
ideas of navel as being “source” of spiritual energy or the place of connection
of soul to body
c) and,
finally, it leads to the flow-in ßà flow-out feelings of proper relationship of person to
society, the Divine, Nature, and Experience.
This is just a sample of how our world as experienced and perceived is fashioned in the process of its being filtered through these Veils of early experience. We will look deeply into this topic when we arrive at Veils Six and Seven, further along in this work, in the two volumes following.
Other Deep Determiners
There are other things, however, that are crucial in the creation of our worldview.
Biology
These include, of course, anatomical, biochemical, and other biological shapers and formers of our reality as we generally perceive it as a species, which have to be seen as even more fundamental — representing more pervasive yet subtler determiners and modelers of all above them. As I said earlier, these are what create the very “hardware” of space and time within which this “software” of experience and memory — culture and the unconscious — runs its “programs” and “applications.”
These would be in the category, then, of species-specific, or biologically constituted realities. One small example of this is the fact of there being a y chromosome in the DNA of males, which might have something to do with the fact that men are more inclined to identify with the sperm memories of struggle and achievement than women are; and vice-versa as pertains to having double xx chromosomes and identifying with peaceful egg or ovum experience for women.
Another biological determiner of the experiential world of humans is related to the simple movement of blood inside the body, which influences our perception of time and even that we have such a temporal conception. The factor of the heart beat relates to our tendency to perceive a cadence within time, meaning we feel punctuation in our events, we sense rhythm inside of an otherwise non-pulsating stream of events. This is the basis of our music and of our desire to apply rhythmic body movement to it — dancing, for example.
Patterns of cycles perceived within our human reality relate also to our inhalation and exhalation. Our respiration, thus, also congeals the elements of our experience in patterns fitting with its profile. And so on.
However, these all intermingle with our early experience, and often they do configure them. Our time in proximity to our mother’s heartbeat — which tapped out our time, creating a rhythmic “soundtrack” to those important life events — accentuates our otherwise keen appreciation for cycles and pulsing of time as prescribed by our blood and breathing cycles.
Transpersonal
Then there are the other universal determiners and/or directors of experience that fall under the rubric of transpersonal and are truly outside our biological parameters. However, there is a completely different “board” for that “game” than the one on which we are working. Specifically, it amounts to “bumping” the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm completely and adopting instead a holonomic perspective like the one I brought forth in the work prior to this in The Path of Ecstasy Series, The Secret Life of Stones.
And the transpersonal indeed will play heavily into what we will be dealing with in Dance of the Seven Veils III, in the Epilogue having to do with the time “after the Veils.” That part is about No-Form existence and correlates with the most “naked” Reality we are capable of apprehending while in Form.
Having reviewed the influences on the world in which we live, the things we do, and the beliefs and thoughts we have, let us now go further back in time, earlier in your existence, to even more profound influences on everything you know and do — your time as cells, your time around conception, periconceptionally.
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Cellular Experience and Creation of the World:
Beginning with Sperm and Ovum Arising Out of No-Formness, Our Experiences and Biology Constitute Our Human Reality.
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We can’t know what we can’t know, but we cannot unknow what we are.
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My contention is that these early, these periconceptional, experience-memory templates are especially related to fundamental constructions of our worldview. In the next two chapters, we take a look at a few salient aspects of that, including our perceptions of duality, gender, sexuality, self-confidence, cooperation, interconnectedness, nonsatisfaction, work and play, guilt, and disillusionment. The influence of this time is hardly limited to these, however. We will expand on this under Veil Seven on spiritual grids and cellular experience near the end of this work.
Conception and Duality in World
We have templates arising from many types of cellular experience—including our experiences as a blastocyst, a zygote, and of being a single sperm and ovum in our parents’ bodies. However, let us take the experience of conception itself, for starters. We’ll get to the rest, later.
Remember that our existences as a sperm and an ovum coming together to create another individual is a truly unique experience for one’s life. We have nothing like it afterwards. Even in marriage, its closest correlate, there is not such a combining as to actually have “two become one” as some marriage vows relate.
So it is that at conception, the sperm-ovum dichotomy of self led us ever afterward to perceive duality in the Universe, where there is not, in actuality. Our universal human experiences of these events at conception cause us to see the world, ever afterward, this way. That is, as dual and separated.
You might ask does duality come from an experience of being a sperm and an ovum at the same time? Meaning, do we experience sperm and egg as dual when it happens, prior to conception, and therefore construe the world as dual and separated? Probably not. However, being as we are barely removed from Divinity at that point, there might be some of that going on. Still, I think we probably do not have a consciousness of the experience of the sperm and of the egg simultaneously before they have joined.
However, ever afterward, from conception on, we are aware that what we are comprises two things coming together. Additionally, we have memory, from that time on, of two different lines of experience … two separate histories … around the same event. Think of it as a couple coming together in marriage, and ever after, the family history they will relate will include that of both of them. However, each spouse will lean toward one family narrative over the other. In the same way a trivial difference in one chromosome of the fertilized egg, or zygote, will determine ever after the gender of that person to be.
We have a memory of having been two separate entities, so that, in a sense, we have two parts to ourselves. That has us thinking we have a dual nature, as adults — that we have a physical, bodily, material self (ovum); and a mental, soul, spiritual self (sperm).
It also means that we will see Reality as being constructed of two parts coming together: There is a physical world, and there is a mental world.
Yet Unity Is Reality
The point of knowing this is that we might use this to help us see that our dichotomous view of our Reality is a false conception based on early early experience. That in fact there is only one world, it is just that it is viewed from two different perspectives. And there is not even just a within or without, those two distinctions are incorrect.
There is actually just direct and indirect perception of Reality … much as there may be direct and a mirrored perception of the same thing. They are different, perceptually, but the Reality is one. Having assumed dualism as well as having assumed separation — both of which are byproducts of our experience around conception — we assume we are separate from each other.
We create the boundaries of self, which we call our bodies. And we leave off direct perception of each other, which would amount to experience-sharing. Ultimately, that would be experience-identity: That is, all experience is “owned” by one “being” — God — and that totality of experience constitutes that being’s identity. On any level less than ultimate, direct perception of each other means shared experience with another, and it is akin to an empathy that is nearly as profound as an identity with another. It also means telepathy. These realities are our common, basic experiences, yet we repress and deny them. For they do not fit with our “assumption” — arising from our experiences at the time of conception — that we are dual … and separate.
Our Divine Choice to Be Dual
But then why would we even want to let go of that assumption of duality that arises from our experiences prior to conception? This is something about which no one ever thinks: Might there be darn good reasons to and/or even a desire to not see Reality correctly as it is? Or more correctly, than we could if we wanted? Are there reasons for the “stupidity” … the ignorance, the illusion, the forgetting involved … of coming into Form?
At this point, we might even be crossing over into the way God would view it. Might we want to re-create the experience of duality, perhaps ever after in life, for reasons not having to do with retreating from trauma and pain, making a “mistake,” or “sinning” — as Genesis phrases it? Or for some other reason implying a bad choice or an unfortunate understanding or simply ignorance? Or because of bad karma as the Tibetan Book of the Dead sees it?
For having those assumptions of duality, might there not be other reasons — Divine or Godly ones perhaps? Ones, which involve us apprehending Reality in a lesser or more diminished way, that are actually decided by us? That are intentional? Consider that, after all, that experience of duality of being a sperm and an ovum made for quite an exciting and profound “story” with an ending that hollywood could not match: The coming together of “worlds”!
I believe there are such reasons and such intentions; and at this point I believe we are bumping up against the very reasons for existence itself as a separate living, breathing being, or for becoming human. You see, there are often good reasons to come to lesser, more constrained, apprehensions of Reality. One might be that by assuming a dualism, or a separation into parts, of Reality, there is, what comes with that, more fun … at least at times, in the experiencing of it. Just as we might arbitrarily accept the rules of a board game (or make them up) for exactly that result — for fun. And by “fun,” I mean a more interesting, engaging story or experience that is illustrative or illuminating of the nature of Reality (or Divinity) in others of its qualities … other than simply Truth.
What do I mean by that, you ask? I mean that, for example, if we, as God, wanted to manifest the experience of love, in Reality, might we not create separation into parts — separate human bodies, in our case — in order to bring out and glorify the nature of Reality (God) which includes love?
Might God not want a duality involving ugliness to make known, to make experienced, the nature of God (Reality) as actually being Beauty?
The same for creating pain, to glorify pleasure; and so on.
Conception and Duality in Self
Another way our experience of sperm and ovum contributes to fundamental constructions of our worldview has to do with the possibility that the event of a duality of sperm and egg coming together and comprising us at conception might cause us, ever afterwards, or at least as adults, to conceive of self as dual. In the instance just related above, it was that we were led to assume that Reality is dual, containing us and others … that there are parts, with boundaries. We are imprinted to think, wrongly, that our experiences of life are not shared or identical; rather that they are like each one of us having different movies playing inside the different “theaters” of our skulls, with the only connection between them coming about through external communication between beings, necessarily flawed or at least not exact.
However, in the idea I am presenting, the experience of duality at conception might contribute to a sense, not just that there is a duality in existence in that there is us and others, but that one’s very self is dual: That is, that we have a conscious and an unconscious self, for example. Or in primal cultures, that there is a “this world” self and a “that world” self, associated with the state after death. Or more simply, that humans have a body and a soul. Or even more commonly, that we have a mind and a body, which are separate entities and must interact.
Note, in relation to this, that going beyond this delusion or early template, which construes and constricts our view of Reality, is vastly important for comprehending the overstanding presented in this book and its companion volumes, in Cells with a View and, especially, in The Cosmic Overstanding (forthcoming), as well as in Part Three of Experience Is Divinity (2013) and in “The Mind’s True Liberation” part (also Part Three) of Funny God (2015).
Scientists Don’t See Themselves
Yet achieving this overstanding — requiring a defiance of or a transcendence of those earliest templates, as it does — has traditionally been nearly impossible for any humans to do … except for mystics and very advanced shamans. It is extremely difficult for contemporary humans to do … even, or especially, scientists. I have discovered it is damn hard for people to see this, understand this, and go beyond their preconceptions of mind-body duality, even when they are claiming to do that.
For example, in science these days, we say there is no mind-body duality. We hear that in psychology and the behavioral sciences, in particular. Yet, most often what these academics are asserting amounts to eliminating the mind part of the duality. We eliminate subjectivity — a person’s lived experience in every moment — out of existence. We think we have solved the Newtonian-Cartesian dichotomy of body and mind by saying one part of that duality simply does not exist, without changing our understanding a wit! For what this claim of non-duality really means is we focus only on the changes in brain and body and thus say no dichotomy, because … abracadabra! … no mind!
Similarly, when we do talk about experience or mental events, we see them as arising out of a physical basis. We say no duality because we acknowledge only one, the physical, and we paint the other, the mental, as a unique and strange outgrowth of that one reality. We as scientists assume that consciousness is a rare and unusual aspect of the physical world and that, in some imagined future, it will be seen to be just as much “physical” as everything else we study and measure.
But what that does not understand about itself is that it is still creating two categories that are separate and that only magically, as it were, interact. Scientists know intuitively that mind is not exactly like body, but in order to eliminate having to deal with mind, they assume what they would like to be the truth. Their model becomes elegant, however wrong.
Moon and Reflection … Direct and Indirect Perception
Whereas what I am saying is quite simple, however hard to grasp: Mind and body are merely two ways of viewing the same thing. Not even two sides of a coin. No. They are exactly the same “thing,” viewed from either inside the individual or outside the individual, and with one, the direct, being a more accurate take on It; and the other, the indirect, being one step removed, with one corruption of symbols, or a Veil, between us and It. Which Veil of symbols — or as I call them metaphors, as in my Experience is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor (2013) — is the material world. Which world of matter is the intentionally “corrupted” perspective we decide to collectively believe in for the purpose of The Game. So, any difference between mind and matter has to do with direct (mind) and indirect (matter) perception, as well as reality as It is, or as It is truer (mind), and Reality shrouded, or hidden from us, or reflected (matter).
It is analogous to the moon being directly perceived, which would be our apprehension of our inner experience or Reality directly experienced within the self; and the moon being seen reflected as on the surface of water, which would be Reality perceived as matter, as physical, as inanimate, and as outside us. That would include the persons outside us, by the way. This last analogy of the moon and its reflection is sometimes used in spiritual texts to point to this problem of one Reality seeming to be two.
Basically what direct and indirect mean is that some knowledge-awareness-experience is accessible and “at hand” and others of It are forgotten or “hidden” from us. We have split off from direct experience of them … we see them not to be us. Hence we project them into a different category, and “outside” of us, which is our experience of the physical world. There is not a physical world and an inner world; there is just the stuff we know and the stuff we have forgotten, projected outside ourselves, which beckons us, every and always, to re-member it as us. To remember It as I. To realize the identity of Atman and Brahman, in Hindu terms.
That the supposedly “external” reality is outside of us and “not us,” and that we need, ultimately, to reclaim it as comprising merely facets of ourselves in order to be liberated from the illusion of Form is exactly the message of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, in fact. Over and over again, in that book, the deceased person is guided to relinquish believing in the after-death phenomena being encountered as real. Instead the person, recently passed, is told, incessantly, to interpret everything seen and occurring to her or him to be aspects of one’s self in order to be liberated and not have to return, to be reincarnated, in this world of Form. The soul is entreated to see the lights and entities … representing outside knowledge, experiences, and events … as emanating from oneself, from, as it says, “the deepest parts of oneself.” One might say that when one can realize one’s identity with Cause, one is no longer buffeted within the winds of the world of Effects — this world.
For now, let me get away with phrasing it that we know our existence through our direct experience of it. That is, our subjectivity tells us of our reality. However, we know of others through our perception of them, through our senses, or by indirect means … not subjectively, therefore, but objectively. We have created this subject-object dichotomy as per the above.
And indirect perception— that arising from the “senses” — is easy to distinguish from direct perception, one’s subjectivity. For indirect perception varies greatly: What we perceive and the interpretation of it changes constantly. However, direct perception is constant. The moon, in the analogy above, remains the same. However, its reflection is distorted by the surface movements of the water — which ripples and waves, by the way, are another way of saying the Veils.
Another way of looking at it: We might not understand ourselves, and we might have different emotional states, but what underlies everything of the contents of consciousness and what we come back to and what they are contained within is a constant apprehension of self. That self is the experience we always retain and find a home in, regardless what we do and even if we go into nonordinary or even drugged states. There are all sorts of people and other beings indirectly manifesting to us infinitely varied experiences of themselves … which we perceive as bodies and external events … yet there is only one “I”.
Inner and outer are not separate, therefore. They are simply general areas of a continuum of our awareness, with what is known being considered inner, and what we are hiding or forgetting for the purpose of our game (the unconscious) being perceived, nevertheless, but as outer … as shrouded and distorted by our unknowing and our forgetfulness. This is how we create a “physical” world, other people, and an “outer.”
We Choose Dualism for the Fun of It
I understand this is practically impossible to grasp the way I am meaning it. However, as you continue with this book and the works following it, you will have quite a bit more ability to envision it. For I peel back the conventions of thought we humans hold that keep us from seeing it. And if you have not yet read the previous volume, The Secret Life of Stones, you should. It lays out the beginning procedures for removing such constraints within our ability to see Reality. If not, an overview of that work is had in the next part of this book, Veil One, which sets up the process of the removal of all remaining Veils across Naked Reality.
Additionally, this might help: One of the implications of this is that if we wanted to view another person directly we would experience their experience and not get second-hand information from the set of defenses that is their body (their current incarnation) as observed from outside of them. Theoretically, one could do this, as we are all One. Yet one does not want to do this. For why else would we be here in Form except to play the game of dualism?
Unchoosing Dualism for the Liberation of It
What follows from this as well is that as long as you have separate people, you have duality of at least that sort. And to truly transcend duality one needs to eliminate the duality of separate experiences and see that there is one experience; just as the scientists are wont to say that there is only one physical world, with mind being some strange appendage to that material world which pops up magically in evolution … and not for all species, mind you.
I wish also to point out that this view fits in with my theory of Falls from Grace.1 In my theory, in a way similar to that of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, all stages of the descent into Form involve a constriction of awareness. That diminution of self continues and advances that reduction of consciousness at conception experience, again through painful womb experiences, again at birth, then the primal scene, and finally the identity-adolescent phases.
Thus, we view subjectively the truth of existence through the lens of all our experiences — cultural and otherwise. However, the experiences that are painful cause us to retreat from the truth (or reality) of existence. Hence, they act as reductive lenses.
And yes, within one’s subjectivity one does have direct access to the Other, the other person, the other anything in the physical universe. Indeed one can even identify with other beings and things, as happens on entheogens or in modalities of nonordinary experience such as holotropic breathwork and shamanism.
Two more fundamental constructions of our worldview arising from our earliest experiences as cells — our separate ones of being sperm and ovum — might be: One, the overstanding we hold of the physical world, the nature of Reality. The second might be the nature of Life. The first one would make a case for a non-material view of the Universe in which Experience is the fundamental monad. Whereas the second would be an overstanding of us as God and what the Cosmic Game is for us. More on those, later.
For now, we look at how, not just our physical world and our self-conceptions are formed here, but also our very attitudes to much of the elements of our lives. We are psychologically predisposed to particular orientations in life, out of which we create our beliefs and within whose outlines we formulate our various cultures. And regarding this, we take into consideration, next, the formative experiences of other aspects of our lives as cells. What did you learn as a blastocyst? This will surprise you, I’ll bet.
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Cells with a View:
The Experience of Conception Results in Fundamental Patterns of Experience and Attitudes to Life
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“You cannot convince a fish it lives in water. You can only give the fish the experience of being in air; then it will understand.”
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Attitudes towards life is another outgrowth of our biohistorical experiences early in life, which create our biocultural realities, in due course. It seems that fundamental patterns of experience, which operate throughout our lives to organize the manner in which our lives unfold, are laid down at this time, too.
Growth Dialectic … Dichotomy of Work and Play
For example, the struggle of sperm as compared with the experience of being the peaceful egg — both having been profoundly experienced — could be the earliest origins of the universally apparent alternating or cyclic character of personal or spiritual growth. Even more commonly, and on a daily basis, the universal pattern of alternating work and play, similar to the dialectic of personal growth, is perhaps created here. Let me explain.
In the most general pattern of personal growth, there is a dialectic of periods of outward activity in interaction with the world and other individuals, during which one comes upon new information and learning and inevitably encounters obstacles … just like a sperm does. This alternates with times of going within oneself to process, to evaluate, and to integrate what was newly taken in, during the venturing without, in a way to form a greater whole of oneself … which is just like the egg did.
The sperm ad-ventures, makes an effort, encounters the new, comes up against obstacles. The ovum stays put, is complete within itself, does not journey outward but to the contrary draws inside itself all that venturing, effort, and information, which arrives in the form of the sperm at conception. The ovum “processes” that information, which is another way of describing actual conception. It “evaluates” the new reality, which is another way of describing a matching up or aligning of chromosomes. And the egg cell integrates the new input, which is another way of saying a combining of chromosomes to form a new and greater whole. Coincidence? Or does our personal growth have the pattern of this same dialectic as I have described it because of our earliest template of “personal growth” at a coming together of sperm and egg at conception?
Put another way, we do it this way ever afterward — we grow this way — and cannot conceive of, let alone do, it any other way, because the first time we had an experience of “personal growth” or work/play occurred this way. Remember, we are no different from a river in which every momentary direction taken determines, not just influences, every direction that can and will be taken afterward. Therefore, the course determinations had at its head are the most influential and are irreversible.
The earliest “experiences” of that stream cannot be decided differently, for they are part of what it has become at every moment. Even were the river to have the vanity of thought and reason, as we humans do, it cannot decide that its experience has been different from what it was. It can no more do that than decide, hundreds of miles from its source, that it might have been a good idea to have headed westward, say, at the beginning, not eastward. A different decision is simply not enough … “hundreds of miles” along, analogically speaking … to take one away from where one has ended up through that process. Wishing simply don’t make it so; apologies to Disney on that.
Primordial Guilt and Disillusionment
Another example of distinct earliest experiences creating templates of experience for the rest of our lives is the fertilized egg’s experience upon its success of conception: Its survival/achievement at conception is bought at the cost of hundreds of millions of others (sperm) dead. This results, ever after, in a primordial guilt about simply being alive. Related to that is the idea that there is a dog-eat-dog quality to existence, a kill-or-be-killed one. It is thought that achievement is had only at others’ expense. The idea of win-win solutions is extremely hard for humans to arrive at because of this early experience.
Because such euphoric union and achievement is followed by such realization of apocalyptic-like death of others, we have within us, as well, a prevalent attitude that accomplishment never brings expected rewards. Disillusionment is felt at a deep level — regardless how we avoid, defend against, or counter it in our thinking — to be an unavoidable facet of human experience.
In fact, such early guilt and disillusionment just might be the first fractal of the diminution of consciousness. For in it, one is already applying the notion of duality in that it is felt that the others are actually separate from oneself. This notion is built, remember, upon the experience of having been separate things, a sperm and an ovum. Zygotic guilt and disillusionment, thus, might be the earliest origin of that sense of fallenness or original sin, which shows up so strongly at birth. Which also is characterized by both duality and guilt. (We’ll get to that.)
Dukkha, Nonsatisfaction as Inherent in Life
Also, the zygote must continue working, must reproduce itself, must move and implant itself … each time or die. This results in an attitude that in life there is no end to struggle, growth, achievement. This quality of life of inherent nonsatisfaction — expressed commonly as Buddhist dukkha or existential angst and ultimate absurdity or Freudian “lives of quiet despair” — is felt as a fundamental fact of physical existence.
Jumping ahead, keep in mind that uncovering these attitudes and perceptions of our lives as being products of our earliest experience allows us to entertain the idea that they are not necessary aspects of experience, or of being, as we have been driven unconsciously to think. Knowing they are merely outgrowths of experience reveals a doorway to a new way of viewing oneself and one’s life where those aspects are not required and to a life in which they might be nonexistent. This is what I was talking about when I used the term biological transcendence, in The Secret Life of Stones. That I just now brought that up in referring to something Buddhists think is inevitable in life, dukkha, points to how biological transcendence is related to what they think of as liberation.
On the positive side, the experience, as blastocyst and fetus, of growing as cells in this precise and perfect way so as to construct ourselves into parts of the body and organs and eventually the whole body with all its finely tuned qualities and abilities might be the basis of a self-confidence in life. Having experienced such perfection and such ability to be doing it, I can tell you that we have forever afterward a felt and unshakeable sense that we can succeed, if we apply ourselves. It is the basis for a supreme self-confidence or belief in oneself. I know, for I experienced it, and that was the result. Whereas before I relived and re-membered that early experience I did not have that complete and total belief in myself, quite the contrary. Indeed, having that experience forty years ago changed my life forever.
Even earlier, there are origins of a similar belief: Which is that we are special and uniquely destined to succeed. For each and every one of us was a sperm who actually did succeed in making it to join with the ovum. Whereas, three-hundred-million others did not. That leaves one feeling special, and destined for something.
Yes, that is the flip side, the perspective one gets after one has re-membered the feelings of guilt and disillusionment come immediately upon conception, cognizant of the death of so many others (sperm). You see, one always experiences the negative or painful parts of every formative trauma — as I like to repeat, one at first sees an angel as a devil — prior to the peek-a-boo realization of the positive and more encompassing view.
But, how that can feel, you ask? The two together, both of them re-membered? Consider the attitude, not that uncommon, especially among creative people, 1) that one is meant to do something unique, and one is capable of it, and 2) that one had better do it, for so many others have sacrificed for that to be possible. So many others, as is often said, didn’t “have the advantages” you do; so one must carry their banner into life, along with one’s own.1 If you think about it, that is a feeling that we carry into our lives and apply to all kinds of later situations, as, for example, at the Identity stage, where many people feel their deepest duty is to carry forward the dreams, intentions, projects of their parents.
Which feeling, by the way, goes all the way back to being a single-celled sperm and ovum, an offshoot of a larger being (one’s mother and father); and one’s duty, much as a seed’s “duty” is to re-create the parent plant, is to bring closer to completion the life purposes of that “larger being” (parent). As that dynamic is expressed in myth, in the Kabbala, it has to do with “mending the catastrophe” of the “broken vessels.” Which “vessels,” by the way, are at their deepest meaning expressing the sperm ejaculated (“broken”) from the testes (vessel) and the ovum ejected (“broken”) from the ovarian sac (vessel). I explain this in Chapter 34 of Falls from Grace (2014). Which is titled, “‘Mending the Catastrophe’ … ‘Original Sin’: The Child Is Tasked with Cleansing the World of a Taint Passed Down from the Beginnings of Time” … and so gives you an idea of what we’re dealing with here.
And again, more on this later. This also is a topic for the seventh Veil.
Back, however, to the feeling of supreme self-confidence attendant upon re-membering one’s achievement of conception, consider: It is like being the one who wins the presidency of the United States … the chances of that happening being similar to that of being the sperm and out of so many others getting to join with the egg. I am not saying everyone experiences this sense of specialness and destiny in later life, for it conflicts with many of the negative things coming out of the painful experiences of our life. Yet I believe it is there inside us, even if it takes therapy to reveal it after clearing up the layers, or Veils, or painful experience and trauma overlying it. Are you beginning to see some of the “primal rewards” gotten on this journey, removing, Veil by Veil, the obstructions to Truth?
The success experience of the singular sperm might also be the basis of the belief in being special and uniquely singled out for attention and concern by a Creator God. Having been helped by the other sperm to succeed … and much like a “chosen people” … we feel that the Universe, in a sense, aids us in our endeavors and wants our success.
And, yes, the other sperm do help. It is not a competition to get to the egg. Rather it is a joint effort, with some sperm throwing themselves on “land mines” — allowing themselves to be eaten up by white blood cells, for example — in order that the sperm-to-succeed makes it … which was you! It could be compared to being a runner in a football game and having blockers who cooperate with you in getting into the end zone. One analogy I read recently of the way the spermular dynamic works is the way bicyclists in a race work together to further themselves as a group by taking turns in the various positions.
Gender and Sex
Let’s look at another fundamental attitude of human existence, this one relating to female and male distinctions. I want to say a little about gender beliefs, gender attitudes, sexual attitudes, and gender relationships.
Matter and Mother, Sperm and Spirit
In this category, we see human realities emanating from the characteristics of sperm and ovum. That is, that the egg being larger than the sperm and so carrying the bulk of the material of existence leads to ideas that the feminine is related to the world of matter or Nature. The ovum’s diameter is thirty to fifty times that of the head of the sperm and contains many thousands of times the amount of mass. So it is that the egg provides virtually all the raw material, or matter, out of which the zygote will be created, while the sperm provides only the chromosomal package. Matter’s etymological root is in fact, mother. That’s no coincidence.
Also, egg as containing the material or resources out of which the newly formed zygote cell grows and multiplies into new cells leads to the beliefs in virtually all cultures that it is the female who is most responsible for the food source. Contrary to what most people think, that the male is the “bread winner,” the fact is that in virtually all cultures that have ever existed, women have provided the basic nourishment or resources for life. Women also do most of the work, including foraging and preparing food. Thus, at conception the ovum provides the physical material — from its actual and much greater amount of cell material — from which all else will be created. In the same way, women, overwhelmingly in societies, bring in the food and other essentials.
Hunting, Gambling, and the Luck of the Sperm
Whereas the pattern for male behavior nearly universally in primal cultures is that while the women stay close to hearth and home, the men are more mobile, just like the sperm was more mobile. The men do the hunting for the most part, and only on occasion, and intermittently, at that. Remember sperm’s motive of hunting or searching out the egg, as related to that. The uncertain nature of the hunt is such that meat, in virtually all cultures, is only considered a treat or a special food and in no way a staple. The odds are not high for acquiring meat; it is more of a “gamble.” The same with fishing, which is also predominantly a male pursuit.
And men, strangely as well, in primitive cultures also tend to spend their time hanging out and often playing games of chance. Astonishingly, we are led to wonder, is that strange pastime, peculiar to men — that is, games of chance — related to the experience of having odds of one in three-hundred million at conception? And having won, remember. What would that result in or feel like?
Well, if at one time one beat odds of one to three-hundred million and it resulted in a prize of life itself, might not one be drawn to continually toy with the fates and be attracted to odds-related activities, forever mining that magical moment of having won in the most unlikely to win lottery of all, one’s conception or combining with an egg to create a new life? Consider that something similar is often what brings people to continually return to gambling. Listen, and you will hear such folks always talk about some unusual bit of extraordinary luck, at the beginning, which got them hooked.
Someone else can look up whether men are more likely to be gambling addicts. Probably true, also. However, I have to keep moving here. I’ll get more into all of this later in this journey, under Veil Seven, as well as in Cells with a View, if you are interested.
Home, Material, and the Peace of the Ovum
While women, on the other hand and in virtually all cultures that have ever existed, predominantly provide the foundation of material nourishment, the staples. Women also, almost universally, cook them. And the women raise the children. These things can be considered aspects of egg experience; that is, the ovum does not travel to accomplish what it needs to do. Similarly, there is most definitely in human societies a tendency for women to attend more closely to hearth and home.
It is significant, also, that the overwhelming majority of societies that have existed have been matrilocal — which means that cultures have deemed that after marriage the couple lives in the family of the woman, more exactly, in the locale from which she comes. Matrilineal succession is also far more common in human societies, although not so since patriarchy and civilization. Which change to patrilineal succession is a whole other story, see my Planetmates (2014) and Prodigal Human (2016). However, the great majority of human societies that have ever been have traced their line of descent through the mother, the woman.
So newly mated couples go to where the wife lives, and they establish lines of descent through the woman. Remember, the egg, periconceptionally, stays in place and spermatozoa come to it! Afterwards, it is the egg’s home that is the basis of their new life as a combined self, as “mated.” And from that place, cell multiplication — or we might say, “lines of descent” — are drawn.
X’s, Y’s, and Tendencies, Not Determiners
Lest there be any misunderstanding, I am aware, of course, that humans, men and women both, are a composite of sperm and egg cells and that each of us have memories of both experiences. Yet the fact remains that men, generally speaking, tend to identify with and have more access to the memory of their sperm experience, whereas women are influenced more by our memories of our ovum experience. There are many reasons why that might be so. Even at that, it is relative to the individual: Some women are more influenced by their sperm experience and vice-versa for men. Perhaps it is cultural influences that cause men and women to be shunted down paths of behavior which resonate more with one half of the dyad than the other.
Yet these experiences of sperm and ovum existed in our unconscious minds long before cultural distinctions arose, thinking in an evolutional sense. So our biology creates our cultural creations, without a doubt. If one wanted to find analogies or markers to indicate why women and men might be differently influenced by their cellular experiences, we could look to the fact that men have an extra y chromosome in their cells, whereas women do not. And remember that the sperm is the cell carrying the y chromosome.
I am not saying that chromosomes create behavior or attitudes later in life, though some would say that. My difference from that is something I explain in detail in The Secret Life of Stones, and it is has to do with material reality reflecting, not causing, events. What I am saying is that the extra y chromosome might be related to different experiences between females and males at the time of conception…. What those different experiences might be, I do not know … yet. And perhaps we will never know.
However, there is much to the drama of conception, much more for a sperm and an egg, while living it, than we could ever deduce from our scientific observations, from the outside, of the cellular behavior of each of them. Perhaps we will never discover what experiences there were at that time that differentiate us, women and men, through the modality of re-experience, either. Yet we can speculate that there might be some connection between the sperm experience and later adult behavior that is indicated by, if not directly caused by, an extra y chromosome in men and the existence of that in sperm.
Keep in mind, however, that potentials to experience both sperm and ovum events exist in males and females, both. In fact, I can tell you that in my own experience, being a man, my first cellular experiences were caught up in the phenomena of sperm experience. These primal experiences went on for a long time, years even. However eventually, and as I learned all that I was apparently meant to from that level of experiencing, my experiences began to be of ovum experience. It seems we feel what we are closest to being able to feel, first.
Or perhaps that sequence has to do with the more painful preceding the more blissful … seeing an angel as a devil … since sperm experience with all its struggle is a more difficult experience than the ovum’s. Which experience is primarily, not just peaceful, but has its origins in a “sisterhood” of like-“minded” cells in the ovarian sac, going back decades. The feeling of solidarity and interconnection with everything and everyone, which is attendant to that state “in the sac,” is a feeling unmatched, and wonderful, and gives rise to many of our feelings of empathy and of unity with others in a common cause, later in life. Don’t we also refer to our pleasureful sleep and/or lovemaking intervals as time spent “in the sack”?
In any case, with pain always preceding joy, this would mean that I was predisposed to look at my life through the Veil of sperm experience primarily, and culture added to that by channeling me in to male-type roles and activities. Yet, the potential to see from the perspective of the ovum — in some ways, then, the perspective of the female — was also in me. Indeed, it might be that my experiencing way down to those levels is what has resulted in my affinity with the perspectives of feminism, which incidentally brought with it all kinds of wonderful feelings of unity in a common cause and, yes, even “sisterhood.” This affinity with feminism also came to me … coincidentally? synchronistically? … at that time of re-membering my ovum experience.
Women Central, Male Peripheral
Another imprint from conception has to do with the universal perception of woman as the center of male attention from many sources. Woman is the desired; man is the desirer. Man seeks out woman. The social configuration, as adults, of women and men, especially as related to the time of courting, is that of individual women surrounded by many men, just as egg was surrounded by many sperm. It is perhaps not also coincidence that a man can pretty much have only one orgasm, without a period of usually considerable buildup, and that the male “shoots” or “drops its load” just as the sperm did its package of DNA. Whereas a female is capable of many orgasms, sometimes in rapid succession, and can therefore match itself with more than one male at a time, just as the egg is surrounded by many sperm.
Also, it is the general and natural pattern that woman is the decider and chooser in the relationship … the one who picks, out of that cadre of males, the chosen one. In the same way, it is the ovum who chooses the sperm that will be allowed inside itself to join DNA with her and create the life form. Contrary to popular belief about conception, which has it that the first sperm to reach the egg is the one who enters and without any say by the woman/ovum — which is a patriarchal notion (a male ego inflation), something that fits with our capitalist achievement ethic, and is also a kind of rape — the egg actually chooses the sperm. It actually refuses entrance to other, earlier sperm who are not the chosen one. Finally, the egg sort of “welcomes” the sperm in … it “eggs it on.”
Then, subsequently, the egg “traps” the sperm who might otherwise push away. Which is a rather provocative notion as part of our templates. But as a man I’m hardly dumb enough to venture down that road. *chuckle*
At any rate, these patterns of experience of sperm and ovum — with female the welcomer and encourager, and male as the striver and achiever — relates to universal human beliefs about women as “cheerleaders,” supporters. There is no greater metaphor of the sperm and egg than that of the football player (the sperm) crossing the “goal” line (the egg’s surface) to deliver the football (the DNA package) into the “end zone” — the zone where the sperm ends its journey, as its head explodes, exemplified by spiking the ball with cheerleaders (the egg) cheering and “egging” him on. This can be compared with the egg welcoming the sperm, egging him on — which, indeed, amazingly, the egg actually appears to do — to cross the cellular barrier and spike that DNA package in the end zone of the egg’s interior, wherein lies its DNA package (the goal posts).
For the First Time, a “Clean Mysticism”
All this said, keep in mind that I am saying that these experiences create our realities and that they are, essentially therefore, delusional. I am saying we are predisposed to think this way, not that these underlying patterns are necessarily good or recommended. They create prejudices about Reality, and like all prejudices, they block clear perception and understanding of what is directly before one. In fact, except for the positive ones, as mentioned above, these early assumptions laid down in us are all hindrances in one’s life. They are part of our diminution from Total Awareness coming into Form. Indeed, the point of unraveling these roots of ideas and attitudes — as we are in these books — is so as to be able to go beyond them to an overstanding of Reality which is not imbued with and slanted by them. One might also say, which is not “tainted” by them. This is the essence and intention of the journey entailed in this work.
John Rowan, referring to my early work in the 1980s, pointed out that what I presented in “A Primal Perspective on Spirituality” allows “for the first time a clean mysticism, not cluttered up with womb stuff, birth stuff, oral-sadistic stuff, Oedipal stuff and all the other unconscious bases for phony spirituality.”2 The exact quote is, “But if we also believe in the importance of the transpersonal, we can go further, and say that the contacting and releasing of the real self is just one stage in a process which, as Wilber (1980) has pointed out, goes much further. As Adzema (1985) suggests:
A primaler also can be viewed as open to subtler energies after having reached a ‘cleared out’ relaxed state via primaling … and thereby to gain access to subtler energies still….
“In other words, dealing in this very full and deep way with the psychological realm enables us to go on and get in touch with the spiritual realm. But if this is the case, why have not more people working in the primal area noticed this? Adzema (1985) suggests that it is because prejudice gets in the way of it being reported, and creates a myth that nothing of this kind happens. But on the contrary:
Some long-term primalers with whom I have contact have talked of receiving love, helping, strength, or bliss that seemed to be coming from a place beyond the scope of their current physical existence, to be emanating from a “higher power” of some sort. Their descriptions have many parallels to some descriptions of spiritual experience….
“If this is so — and certainly this agrees with my own experience — then we can eliminate all the projections which come from unconscious material to plague spiritual life, and have for the first time a clean mysticism, not cluttered up with womb stuff, birth stuff, oral-sadistic stuff, Oedipal stuff and all the other unconscious bases for phony spirituality. As Adzema (1985) says:
…it becomes obvious that the ‘demons’, the ‘monsters’ and the resulting fear are not ‘real’ (in terms of being rooted in transpersonal or ‘objective’ reality). Rather, they are personal elements invading the perception of transpersonal reality….
“Not only this, but primal integration therapy also teaches us one of the prime lessons of all spiritual development — the ability to let go of the ego. There are times in our therapy when we have to take our courage in both hands and just go ahead, taking the risk, as it seems, of losing everything in the process. Many times the image of stepping off a cliff comes up in primal work. And of course this ability to let go, to step off into the seeming void, is crucial for spiritual commitment, as Adzema (1985) reminds us:
Likewise, an important benefit of primal is that it can teach us an attitude of surrender to process. That we can throw ourselves, time and again, into the maelstrom of catharsis and still, somehow, be upheld and even embraced, despite ourselves, gives us confidence in a beneficent universe and allows us to foster surrender in our attitudes to the pushes and pulls of process as it makes itself known to us in our daily life….
“Through primal work we learn how to open up to our inner process. Through spiritual development going on from there, we can learn how to carry on with that same process, into the deepest depths of all.”3
Our Biohistorical Experiences and Biology Determine Thoughts, Attitudes, and Actions
This and the three chapters previous are a cursory overview of what I mean by bioculturally constituted realities as related to cellular and fetal experience. However, I will be expounding on these early biological events and how they shape our worlds and cultures throughout this work — especially in Veils Five through Seven — and in the three volumes following this work in the Path of Ecstasy Series. Which books will be titled, Womb with a View, Cells with a View and The Prenatal Matrix of Human Evil. Look for them. In the meantime, see the Afterword of this book for more about them.
At any rate, it follows that within our societies and cultures, themselves modeled inside these strictly circumscribed, experientially based outlines, we are also influenced concerning the very things we write about, investigate, study, and then discuss … and the manner in which we do so. Thus, all knowledge of all cultures, including that of science, are contained within these templates of ways of seeing, thinking, and experiencing.
Indeed, there is no normal way to see outside these parameters to discover they even exist. You cannot convince a fish it lives in water. You can only give the fish the experience of being in air; then it will understand. Such it is that the only way to know of these constrictions of human apprehension of Reality is via non-normal ways of perception — what Stanislav Grof terms nonordinary states of consciousness, and what others have termed, altered states, or trance states. Virtually all cultures historically have instituted traditional means of accessing these perspectives … and that should be a hint as to their likely importance for humans. Nonetheless we, in Western and worldwide scientific culture and with rare exceptions, do not. That, in my opinion, accounts for our additional inability to see Reality except in the most superficial of material-physical ways.
Thus, the only available ways of breaking out of The Matrix so as to see its configurations, in postmodern societies, lie in new psychotechnologies and age-old, yet predominantly ignored and unused, modalities of trance and entheogenic experience. The first category of which is how I was able to do it, for the most part. Again, that also, for later.
In sum, in all these ways — conscious and unconscious and unknowable — we create our human “world.” So, what can we know? And why? Well, that is what we look at throughout the remainder of Dance of the Seven Veils.
So What Can We Know?
In this Prologue on “Primal Psychology and the Farther Reaches of Experience,” we have had an overview of the many influences on our beliefs and reality assumptions — especially the ones that have been overlooked, the prenatal and perinatal ones. Let us now address this subject of what it is possible to know in more detail.
In the next part, having to do with Veil One and with anthropocentrism, we take a look at the influences we most know about — those influences that are available to us in our consciousness as memory. From there we will, step by step, make our way backward in time, tracing the roots of our beliefs and unassailable assumptions to earlier and earlier experiential events. Where we’ll end up? What will be the “Naked Reality” revealed upon removal of the Seventh Veil? Well, let’s see….
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VEIL ONE.
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Dominion and Species Superiority … Anthropocentrism
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Down the Walls of Prejudice … Between Species!
Toward Species Relativism, Away from Anthropocentrism
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“We are seeing what is going on in Nature through filters biased in our favor, much like being ethnocentric in judging other cultures and “races.” And with a closer look and putting judgment to the side we come up with an entirely different understanding — one that aids the cross-species understanding between humans and planetmates….”
“…you are invited to a return to unity with Nature and a harmonious understanding of our role, perhaps our destiny, in the grand scheme of things.”
“Central to all this is an acknowledgement and understanding of how we have come to set ourselves against Nature and all life on this planet. That is the starting point for a re-visioning of humans in Nature: We must begin with looking at the consequences of our estrangement. Certainly, as in any other process of revelation, seeing clearly allows an opportunity for transformation….”
“…vistas of larger possibilities for humanity abound.”
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What is Real? What is true? And how can we know it? This has been the job of the branch of philosophy termed epistemology. Yet that approach has led nowhere except to the place of its origin. Like a serpent biting its tail, it has revealed only what it first assumed. For primarily this undertaking, classically speaking, has been an intellectual venture. And that mode of questing after truth — an intellectual or rational one — has been discovered itself to be a product of an assumption, an erroneous one.
More than that, we have discovered that the intellectual quest is the outgrowth of itself seeking to hide the truth. Intellectualism is more than just a defense, in Freudian terms; it is a mode of avoiding truth so as to keep one separate from one’s Pain. All defenses are distortions of the truth. It is about time we let that revelation of Sigmund Freud of a hundred years ago inform our quest for knowledge. This book attempts just that: To see what is Real, once the corruptions of thought, created by cultural prejudice and early experience, are removed.
The Red Pill … Away the Matrix.
So it is that in Dance of the Seven Veils I take you on a journey out of The Matrix. We plunge below the obfuscations come of the prejudices of prior experience and culture, both.
Incidentally, this effort could only have been attempted at this point in history. It requires a basis of worldwide integration of cultures as well as the vast understandings of different ways of interpreting Reality for different societies now and throughout history. Only now — with worldwide telecommunication and an anthology of data from cultures of all times and places provided by our social sciences — have we even approached anything like that. It takes the kind of culture we have currently — a worldwide multiculturalism — in order to have even a chance at answering that. For how can something be true if every other culture on Earth — not to mention all the cultures that have existed — thinks of it differently than one’s own culture does?
We say that “science” can accomplish this. Yet even it is skewed by a Western culture of patriarchality, misogyny, a philosophical assumption about materialism, another one about the superiority of elites in hierarchical societies, a prejudice of Western Judeo-Christian notions of Reality over against “primitive” or primal ones, religiously rooted notions of a species-superiority and “dominion” of humans over other planetmates, and more. All of these we will peel back in this book, for a clearer vision. There’s your first look at some of the fallacies comprising the Veils.
Remember, however, that the quest to get below or behind these Veils — thrown up by all prior experience and learning — has been the premier goal of thoughtful, questing humans of all time. What this book offers is a venture in this direction that is aided by all the recent developments and advances in knowledge of postmodern times. These, combined, provide new avenues around and behind previous obstacles to clear perception; and they allow us to overturn those prejudices of culture — even, and especially, those assumed true in our physical as well as social and behavioral sciences.
The First Veil — Anthropocentrism
So it is that we begin with a Veil that is approachable by reason; indeed, science aids in bringing it down. You will see that many of the Veils that follow this one are less accessible that way, requiring more in the way of experiential, not mere intellectual, growth.
So Veil One, you would think would be the easiest; it is not. It is a set of assumptions arising of a peculiarly human Ego which is arrayed against the natural world. And that is hardly easily overcome.
Yet this perspective is possible, not just through reason — reason only confirms it, one must already be ready to take it in — but through heart. It might not require experience, as in the other Veils, however this clearer perception is a perspective arising from a sensitive morality, one that feels for the suffering of others, even of other species. And while that might be intellectually seen, if not felt, it is unlikely to overthrow the normal human callousness with which we confront the world of life outside ourselves on Earth — the planetmates. Yet that we must do.
I suppose you might say you need to be a better kind of a person in order to see through this first Veil. For you need to be able, however you arrive at this, to see the feelings and aliveness — the play, suffering, compassion, love, humor, communication, reasoning ability, memory … consciousness — of the beings around you outside the merely human. You got this sensitivity or you don’t. Or, get yourself something like primal therapy to get it back.
So, can’t help you much here, in this book, on that; and it’s not easy … for too many people. Indeed, the “truthy” antidote to this first obfuscation is so at odds with what humans normally think of themselves, it has gone unnoticed for the entirety of human history. Many earlier cultures — gatherer-hunter societies, primitive cultures — were closer to the truth in this regard, yet even they could not remove this Veil completely.
Consequently, there has been an Unapproved and Hidden in every human society, from time immemorial, containing the knowledge that no human has ever wanted to know, for it not being congratulatory of their species status.1 And congratulation, sadly, is what humans want, pathetically most of the time. Frail and beaten, humiliated and defeated as humans have been by Nature in its form as the female body during birth and in the late prenatal time, humans have everywhere and always, as a way of trying to defeat that knowledge, placed themselves above Nature in importance, specialness, and closeness to Divinity. That is something that probably does not even strike you as odd. You probably are wondering what I could possibly be getting at.
What I am getting at is, that view is the opposite of the truth. As I explain in detail in Planetmates and Prodigal Human, it is humans who are furthest from Divinity. It is the bipedal apeness that is us who are less moral than Nature in more ways than Nature is at all at fault or “evil,” even by our standards, when you think about it.
Take Down the Walls of Prejudice … Between Species!
Let us take a look at what I mean by that. I have heard it said that if we want to find nobility, Nature is hardly the place to look. To support that, this person pointed out that chimps have been known to murder each other and to war with other troops of chimps; that ants, monkeys, and flocks of crows engage in war. It was pointed out that cows engage in female-female mounting during estrus and that chickens rape; that new lions murder all the cubs of their vanquished rivals and “elephant seals roar and batter away at each other like inebriated laborers.” So the assertion was made that animals are the wrong place to look for “honor.”
I understand all this, yet it struck me that this appraisal was not at all even-handed and suffered from some common biases of thought. I believe it is about time we rethink these prejudices, as we go about eliminating half the species on the planet, short term, due to uncontrollable human greed and insensitivity. Further, with the increasing awareness among humans about their own species-centeredness and the most promising rising up of valuing of planetmate consciousness ever in civilization — and the first since that of the Native Americans and other primal cultures — it seems that I should say something to address these common misunderstandings.
Planetmate Sexual Preference
To begin: Cows engage in female/female mounting. So? Why is that not “honorable”? Perhaps you can see what I mean in this obvious example of cultural values and prejudices skewing our interpretations of our Reality in ways that prop up our culturally and experientially derived egos. Another lucky progression in our modern advances in the behavioral sciences and our throwing off of the yoke of inane religious dogma is this realization that sexuality — in this case, homosexuality — is hardly a basis in and of itself for values assessment.
Can you see how something as biologically rooted and irrelevant to any harm of anyone else as the nature of one’s sexuality cannot be used as a slur against anyone? Let alone another species … cows in this example? Put another way, is something that should rightly not be used as a basis of discrimination toward anyone in one’s own culture — let alone another culture — a valid criticism against planetmates? Do you see how our common prejudice against planetmates, which is in the service of raising our own species on high, obscures our ability to reason here?
Similarly, some monkeys have been known to engage in female genital-to-genital stimulation (g-g rubbing, it has been termed) when celebrating. What is wrong with that? I would say humans are the ones who are culturally narcissistic and judgmental … not to mention homophobic. For who do these activities harm? They are physically the equivalent of massaging. But since they do it in contrast to our cultural norms, we call these behaviors dishonorable. So who is not being honorable, really?
That kind of being judgmental about all of Nature, and placing it and all of its millions of species below us and judging them according to our arbitrary cultural standards is what makes humans the ignoble ones. Relative to “dumb animals,” that kind of superior attitude, wrought of neurosis and cultural bias, I would contend also makes us the more moronic of planetmates.
Aggression, Murder, and War
As for murder, yes, chimpanzees have been known, quite uncommonly, to kill one of their own. That is a discovery of rare incidence which, when observed only in recent history, managed to make the rounds rather quickly and to great effect. No doubt it beefed up what scientists and humans wanted already to believe, as justification for the homicidal savagery of humans.
Yet, what is less broadcast is that these supposed homicidal apes are chimps who have lived in proximity to humans. These are not chimps in the wild. Take a look at the movies, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and/or Mighty Joe Young if you want to get an idea of why being around humans might instill murderous rage in an otherwise peaceable primate. While these accounts are fiction, the reality, according to zoologists and primatologists, is no less telling in regard to crazy-making humans and their effects on their neighboring or captive primates. And other than these minor instances of killing among chimps, there is virtually no within-species murder among mammals. Whereas species will kill other species for food … for food and that’s all, mind you … it takes a special kind of planetmate — i.e., humans only — to kill their own … not to mention to kill their own for reasons other than food.
Even the early studies on baboons and their “aggression” in dominance rituals and displays — which have most often been used to support the idea of brutality in Nature — were ultimately found to have been distorted by the male researchers who did them. These primatologists were selective in their picking groups to study; they blew up the significance of the behaviors they witnessed; and they failed to mention behaviors that did not fit their conclusions. So their studies reflected more about the savagery in the human observers who studied them than anything in the baboon planetmates themselves.
As for warring and mass killing, well, no planetmate is doing anything to end life on this planet like humans are at the moment. Nor are any supposed “dumb” animals engaging in world wars or killing off millions of each other for reasons of collective campaigns of aggression, racism, imperialism, sexism, or religious hatred, like we regularly do. Finally: Have you ever heard of a planetmate other than humans who engages in torture?
Projection and Species-Aggrandizement
Essentially, we see in the world of Nature only that which we want to see. And of what we do see, we distort its meaning to rationalize and justify our own worst behavior.
We say that Nature shows a world of “kill or be killed” when in fact that is true for nonhuman species against only certain other species below them in the food chain — often only one other species. Furthermore, such predation is behavior at work for only a fraction of the time of an individual planetmate’s existence. They kill only to eat; otherwise, nothing to see here. For the most part planetmates live in harmony with other species. We indeed know this as we depicted it in our myths describing the various Edens of many cultures. Non-hungry predators have about as much interest in their prey as we do in the foods we store in our freezers.
Additionally and as I said, planetmates do not kill or war against their own, almost universally. Yet we use this supposed axiom — “kill or be killed” — saying it is derived from “Nature”; we call it the “law of Nature.” Why? Well, to justify the very modus operandi of humans in regard, not only to all other planetmates of Nature … notice, not just the one or two that other planetmates might be set against … but also each other! You can see that these chest-thumpings of humans — even the “scientific” ones of us — have nothing to do with truth.
Remove the Veil of Anthropocentrism
However, this is an area — this Veil of anthropocentrism — where reason can be employed to dispel the fog of species-braggadocio obscuring any and all attempts to view Reality.
These self- and species-serving projections are something, as well, which you can remove from your assumptions about Reality without necessarily some kind of experiential modality or entheogenic experience to reveal it to you. Although such transformative, deep inner experiences lead inevitably into this awareness, I should add. Which is how we can know that this perspective is a valid one: For it is upheld by greater understanding, personal growth, wider perceptions of Reality, and the encompassing and integration of greater amounts of facts and data of a scientific or verifiable kind. As a rejoinder to anthropocentrism, species-relativism is confirmed and additionally substantiated by further inquiry into the nature of Reality and Self, is another way of saying that.
The World According to You
My friend, Sonjamarie Weems, provides an excellent example of how we — humans in general — misinterpret Nature’s ways looking through our cultural biases and filters and how, with greater awareness and employing reason, we can change our perspective here. She says, “I remember watching this documentary where a mother elephant killed her baby, and through tears I was thinking that was the cruelest thing I had ever seen another animal do. Years later I watched the same documentary and had a different perspective, because I saw that the herd was starving and that the baby was sick. A pride of lions was already tailing the herd. The mother, knowing that the baby would die first, killed it to likely prevent the agonizing death that she knew was coming to it. It’s hard for us to understand how a mother could do that. Think of the movie Titanic … who wasn’t upset with the mother in Third Class for putting her children to bed in a sinking ship? Makes you think.”2
Or approach our unconscious species-centrism by placing it in the light of understanding wrought from our overthrow of other “centrisms” — ego-centrism, ethnocentrism, racism, misogyny, bigotry, nationalism, for example. White Man used to say Native Americans were savages because they would fight back ferociously in hand-to-hand combat. Indigenous people were depicted as “uncivilized” and as “animals,” who killed in bloody, ghastly ways, too. Apparently when White Man murdered with guns and more sophisticated weaponry it was alright, because it was done in less bloody ways? Further, they never made note of the fact that indigenous people, when they went to war, did very little killing and quite a bit of their “savagery” was merely display.
So White Man wiped out these “savages” and committed genocide on entire societies/cultures of them. And the indigenous peoples … they were the savages?! Well, I want you to consider that we currently have an attitude about our planetmates similar to what White Man has had about indigenous peoples historically. We are the savages seeing “savagery” in other people … and in Nature. That is my contention.
We are seeing what is going on in Nature through filters biased in our favor, much like being ethnocentric in judging other cultures and “races.” And with a closer look and putting judgment to the side, we come up with an entirely different understanding — one that aids the cross-species understanding between humans and planetmates which is now, and none too soon, dawning on us.
Note on Human “Rationality”
Furthermore, I wish to put forth the idea that our sciences are not only anthropocentric but are also built on a highly questionable theological position — a Judeo-Christian-Muslim one — that we are “God’s chosen species.” Another of my readers challenged this notion of religious puffery imbuing our science, exclaiming, “Our science is built on Greek rationalism!” The implication in his statement is that the bases of our sciences — disregarding for the moment the even more egregious fault that the idea of dominion over Nature is central to scientific, not only religious, thinking — is that science is “rational” … hence, irrefutable, it would seem.
My response is that this purported “rationality” of humans, and their sciences, was overturned long ago by Freud and later by the experiential psychotherapies. Even quantum physics demonstrates that we do not view the world at all purely “objectively” in even the most “objective” of sciences. Modern physics has shown that the observer — his or her subjectivity — influences the outcome of experiments of the most elemental kind.
Of course, the human ability of rationality has been proven grossly at fault in the social sphere as well. Witness, in the United States currently, the Tea Party and right-wing rhetoric in general. Look also to the Trump phenomenon. It is perhaps in these obvious examples of common insanity that we might easiest see how much of our “reasoning” is actually moved around and determined by largely unconscious and pervasively irrational forces. And the most telling example of human irrationality of all is a bell I ring incessantly throughout my works: Which is, how is that we can be rational and yet be bringing about, not just the end to all other life on this planet, but also our own?! And in our very lifetimes?
Such it is that the idea of humans being rational is at present a kind of a joke. The idea that we are “God’s chosen species” and magically endowed with the kinds and number of senses and the quality of those perceptions to see Reality better than any other species that we even know of … well, that would be comedic if the inherent arrogance in it were not so un-funny.
Invitation to Nature
In any case, this journey of ours goes a long way toward overturning these and many other biases we have — the self-congratulatory prejudices humans have in looking out at Nature. You will be challenged and confronted to think differently about many things you thought were certain. Attitudes and habits of thought are undermined.
But what remains is something stronger. Among other things, you see humanity in a new light. It is one that opens a door on a reality greater than the one humans have contrived for their benefit alone. In doing this, you are invited to a return to unity with Nature and a harmonious understanding of our role, perhaps our destiny, in the grand scheme of things.
Central to all this is an acknowledgement and understanding of how we have come to set ourselves against Nature and all life on this planet. That is the starting point for a re-visioning of humans in Nature: We must begin with looking at the consequences of our estrangement. Certainly, as in any other process of revelation, seeing clearly allows an opportunity for transformation, whereas staying stuck in counterproductive habits of thought leads only to increasing stagnation of life process and a slow, though feverish, slide to death. Beyond that, vistas of larger possibilities for humanity abound. One might very well see one’s own destiny and future within them.
So, if we are not especially rational and are not specially endowed with correct perception, on what basis do we raise ourselves above the rest of Nature and all other planetmates? On no basis, is the answer. And that is what I will roll out for you in detail in the remaining chapters of this part, Veil One. Here we will see how to drop that first Veil across Naked Reality — that first assumption, that first prejudice and egotism. To foresee a path for ourselves, or humanity, requires not only a conceptualization of a possible goal, but an honest understanding of where we are in relation to it. It is to that, that we now turn.
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Our Knowledge Is Anthropocentric:
Many Beings, Many Worlds … While Our Science Is Built on an Assumption, Rooted in Religion, That Humans Are “God’s Chosen Species”
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“…to suppose that there is, in some magical-mystical sort of way, a kind of authentic, exact replication of the ‘out there’ by our particular sensory apparatus is not only to state more than is conceivably possible to be stated … and to reveal an adherence to a kind of ‘faith’ that is more reminiscent of religion than true science … it is also indisputably anthropocentric. For even our thus limited sensory apparatus informs us of other sentient creatures whose sensory systems are different than our own, indeed, vastly different in some cases.”
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In The Secret Life of Stones, Parts One and Two, titled “Creating Worlds” and “Transcending Worlds,” respectively, I laid down the basis for undermining religious pretentions about human superiority. Such a taking down of our species-centrism pulls back the Veil across true knowing of human’s role in Nature; hence, it reveals us within a context of something better approaching Reality. I will review some of that here to aid this book’s effort to do the same.
The way I developed it there was to point out how such an assumption of being a “chosen” species relies on a belief that our world, and the senses we have to apprehend it, are superior to other species. This is not only arrogant and self-serving to humans — allowing all kinds of atrocities against Nature and the life therein — it is roundly undermined by the most minimal of overviews of the experienced worlds of other planetmates.
Not only do we not fare well in our sensory abilities compared to some other species, we use our capacities often against ourselves — our own survival and happiness. By that last I mean that humans are characterized by self-destructiveness. I will expound on this later in more detail, yet just keep in mind now how we are the only species who murders our own kind, commits suicide, engages in wholesale killing as in wars; and whose “normal” mode of experience is predominantly unhappy, unfulfilled, and felt to be permeated with futility and meaninglessness. I know that is a huge pill to swallow right now. You will see as we continue how the best evidence we currently have bears out all those conclusions.
Our Knowledge Is Biologically Relative
First, however, we must challenge the most common basis of human superiority — human perception as being the standard against which to measure all others. To do that, we look first to science. We find immediately that the results of research from neurophysiology and neuropsychology are that neural “firings” from external stimuli, after they shoot through interior areas of the brain that deal with fundamental physiological processes, arrive in the cortical areas of the brain where they are then interpreted. Therefore, in a purely psychophysiological way, the world “out there” is not defined in and of itself.
Cultures Create Worlds
In fact, ultimately our world is defined in the part of the person that stores cultural information — the cerebral cortex. What this is saying is that cultures create worlds. One’s view of the world, arrived at through the process of enculturation in a person’s development, is determined by one’s culture, by the knowledge and experiences one has had in interaction with one’s society. The experience of hearing a particular sound is not known to be that of hearing someone talking to us until the cortex defines those sounds as words.
Biology Creates Worlds
However, notice that before any cultural interpretation, those “messages” have had a journey through areas of the brain that define them prior to or outside of culture. Before any stimuli are interpreted as words, for example, a part of us determines that they are sounds.
That is to say that the organism does not detect the outside world through its senses, it determines the outside world through them. Or at least it interprets that outside world in a way that is determined by its biological makeup. Whatever is in Reality is being scanned, sorted through: In the process of our perceiving, our senses are picking through an infinity of possibilities of what could be detected in order to select what will be “sensed,” perceived. After that, it is concocted: What the senses have chosen out of everything possible is then determined in terms of its relation to the biology of the organism, meaning what species it is. Then it is interpreted: An understanding of the experience is arrived at which sees it in the context of the culture one is given by one’s society.
A sensation does not discern anything initially, at the moment of sensing. The sensation is interpreted later. The organism does not even distinguish between pleasure and pain — to use one crude but useful example — until afterward. The pattern of neural firings created by any particular set of stimuli is “objectively” neutral until “interpreted” by an organism relative to its physiological makeup, its species.
This, of course, makes perfect sense. There is nothing inherently painful in a stimulus that is produced by something whose molecules are moving at such a speed and manner that one would measure its temperature at, say, two hundred degrees Fahrenheit. That degree of heat is not “objectively” painful. It would be painful to us, to humans, however. Yet, one could easily imagine a species for which that particular vibrational rate would be within its tolerance range. The quality of pain … the very existence of pain, even … is relative to the perceiving organism, its species. It is determined by the species physiology, and in humans this determination is made for us during the journey of the neural firing through interior areas of the brain, far out of our conscious awareness.
Let us take a more subtle example. There is nothing inherently comforting or even pleasurable in a caress — that is, the pattern of stimuli involving the moving of one particular organism’s surface against another’s, in a particular way. Those “particulars,” along with other aspects, are what go into defining caress by means of a complex communication among billions of neural cells and their components inside the brain. One can conceive of some biological organisms who would interpret such touching as a dire threat. Again, the interpretations of external stimuli are relative to the biological makeup of the perceiver — meaning the species of the experiencer — and are decided upon outside of conscious awareness. The qualities of pleasure and all other experience, sensations, and feelings are relative to the perceiver, its biological makeup … generally speaking, its species. Different perceivers, different perceived (experienced) realities.
Our Knowledge Is Anthropocentric
Our examples emphasize that prior to any cultural interpretation — which comes later, during that neural message’s continued journey and now through cortical areas of the brain — a “species” interpretation is made based upon the biological “hardware” of the organism. That is to say that these “vibrational rates” of molecules — using once more the example of temperature — are not in and of themselves even “stimuli” except that certain neurons throughout the body, including “lower” parts of the brain, in a complex intercommunication once again, define them as such:
Vibratory rates “out there” are not patterns of neural firings. And to suppose that there is, in some magical-mystical sort of way, a kind of authentic, exact replication of the “out there” by our particular sensory apparatus is not only to state more than is conceivably possible to be stated … and to reveal an adherence to a kind of “faith” that is more reminiscent of religion than true science … it is also indisputably anthropocentric. For even our thus limited sensory apparatus informs us of other sentient creatures whose sensory systems are different than our own, indeed, vastly different in some cases.
Even among the species that we perceive as having the major five senses as we do, we observe differences: An eagle sees farther and better; its vision is two to four times more acute than humans — certainly its world does not look like ours. A dog hears a much wider range of auditory waves — certainly its world does not sound like ours. The sense of smell in canines is particularly telling. What can we make of a species whose ability in that regard is one thousand to ten million times better than us humans!? One thousand times better than ours at the low end. Using this ability they can even “see” back in time. They can detect for example who passed by a certain area the previous day, what direction they were moving, some of what they were wearing, and other details of the person and his or her behavior.
Can we even imagine what that kind of world is like? And, jumping ahead, tell me exactly how we, humans, are superior to that.
Elephants can hear infrasound, as low as one hertz; dolphins as high as one hundred-thousand hertz. Keep in mind that our range is approximately twenty hertz to twenty-thousand hertz.
What of the abilities of echolocation that dolphins and bats have? They can “see” the objects in their environment using sound. For that matter, what do we make of the ability of fish and amphibious animals, including sharks, bees, dolphins, and platypuses, to sense electrical fields. This is called electroreception. With this sensory ability they are able to sense the electrical impulses of other animals. What is it like living in that world? While I’m sure it is considerably different from this, just imagine what our world would be like if we could see the fields of wifi around us.
Do humans have anything like the ability of some planetmates to detect the Earth’s magnetic field and use it to navigate for migratory and other purposes? Such animals have magnetoreception, which amounts to having compasses built into their cells to point them in the right direction. Amazingly, in addition to migratory animals like sea turtles, this includes fruit flies and even some forms of bacteria.
Some snakes can detect infrared light. Bees can detect ultraviolet light.
As for plants, you thought them dumb? What scientists have discovered is that, amazingly, some have a sensitivity to touch that is finer and more sophisticated than what we have with our fingers; that they communicate with each other, including about a possible threat from a new pest and overcrowding and other matters. They have hormones similar to our own. That not enough, they have vision, all of them! What is the world as experienced by a plant? On what basis do we say that our world is better or closer to apprehending reality than theirs?
Furthermore, what of species whose senses, as nearly as we can determine with our own, are vastly different from and in a way greater than ours? Take, for example, the mantis shrimp, which have sixteen different types of color receptive cones compared to our mere three. What of species with ostensibly lesser numbers of perceptual capacities than ours? What is the “world” of an earthworm like? What, that of an amoeba? Of a bacteria? Real world, please step forward.
Our Knowledge Is Biased
Indeed, can we assume, in fairness, that our own senses are capable of perceiving all major aspects of “objective” reality, granting, even, if in limited or distorted fashion? By analogy, it would be ridiculous to suppose that an earthworm or an amoeba … with apparently few, and more limited, senses … “knows” of the existence of our species in any ways other than, if anything, a series of obstacles, changes in pressure or temperature, or, well, whatever it is that comprises an earthworm’s or amoeba’s “worldview.”
Correspondingly, can we automatically assume that our particular number and set of senses, with their particular ranges, are the endpoint, the pinnacle of what is possible in terms of perceiving “world”? If a sixth, a seventh, an eighth, an nth number of “types” of senses were possible, how would we know of that possibility with our five? Would we not be in a situation analogous to that of the earthworm to us? And how would we know what would be perceived with those senses? Why would we bother to, how could we, even, measure the referents in the “out there” corresponding to such hypothetical senses in a way that they would somehow be included in our science?
Furthermore, keeping in mind that earthworm, we can assume, for the sake of argument, that it perceives a Homo sapiens as something earthwormo-centrically akin to pressure, an obstacle, or earthwormo-molecular vibrations … in other words, earthworm hot-or-coldness. That is how it might perceive us. Are there any among my readers who believe it would perceive us the way we do? I doubt it.
Now, understanding that our senses are not omniscient either — they are limited — how would we perceive beings or entities that are outside of or not sufficiently perceived by our limited senses? Indeed, how would we even know of the existence of such other sentient beings — not to mention other even more unimaginable realities — who or which could hypothetically be outside of the range and/or number of our biologically unique senses?
Would we perceive their existence as human changes in pressure, sound, touch, smell, sight, taste? As atmospheric or environmental “ambiance” changes? As solar activity or astronomical phenomena? As change in mood state, or thought pattern? Or hypothalamic or metabolic or heart or respiratory rate change? As nuemenon, “aura,” Words of God, Music of the Spheres?… Indeed, as leprechauns, ghosts, or elves? Or perhaps as forcible elements in dreams? Inspirational thought or feeling? Poltergeists, angels, “allies,” aliens, psychic phenomena?
Our Knowledge Is Limited
Then again, would we even perceive this other or these other “species” of beings and/or unimaginable realities at all? Would they be totally out of the domain of detection by anything within our experience — whether sensory, cognitive, affective, intuitive, imaginative, hallucinative?
The point is that we have no, absolutely no, way of knowing what is real-ly real, what it “all” real-ly looks like unless we anthropocentrically assume that we are “God’s chosen species,” the summit of creation, and magically endowed with a one-in-nine-million — that is to say, one out of the approximate number of other known species, excluding bacteria — uniquely correct number of sensations and perfect accuracy of perception. We have no way of knowing even whether or not we are in the same “space” at the same “time” … the quotation marks because space and time are sensorally determined in our species’ unique biological way … as other unperceivable beings, even sentient ones. Though with what senses, again, we do not know.
There Are an Infinite Number of Worlds
It should be supremely clear by now, especially among those of us with a transcultural or anthropological familiarity — wherein we are made distinctly aware of the truth-shrouding nature of ethnocentrism — that any serious attempt at discerning truth is not compatible with any variety of self-serving or egocentric agenda, regardless how invisible it might be to us or how unconscious it might be held. And anthropocentrism — the idea that our species, alone, has the inside track, superior to all creation, on perceiving Reality — is such a self-aggrandizing notion.
Thus, it is just as essential to throw off the overweening species-centric intellectual baggage of our Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition … which posits “man” as the ruler over nature and as the summit of created species … as it is essential to strive to drop our ethnocentric blinders. Indeed, making this attempt to view from a neutral, Archimedean, non-anthropocentric “window,” it follows logically that the probabilities are enormous that there are, in fact, other beings, unperceivable entities, unknown and unimaginable realities, and other and different senses … and, yes, as one new physics proposition puts it, an infinite number of “worlds.”
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Our Reality Is Species-Determined:
Destroying Worlds and the Relativity of Science … Culturally Constituted Realities, Biologically Constituted Realities, and Biological Relativity
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We cannot unknow what we know, but we can’t know what we can’t know.
“…to these relativities of space, time, and culture, we must now also include species relativity or biological relativity. That this has not been acknowledged already … can easily be attributed to … our anthropocentrism….”
“…knowing the personally-rooted and arbitrary nature of our beliefs about everything advises us that liberation is dependent upon taking back all the projections we put upon Reality out of our deeper and unconscious selves and upon acknowledging that they have their roots in ourselves, nowhere else. This is when we realize our inherent identity with Divinity. An apprehension of the Clear Light of the Void — or what I am calling Naked Reality and Original Self or Face in this book — is, yes, equivalent to realizing our Divine-rootedness and to liberation.”
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But what of our science, one might ask, which can reputedly extend the range of our senses? Does it not provide accurate-enough “feedback” or “alternative”-enough perspectives to allow us a glimpse of what is, for truth, really real? Let us just look at what modern science tells us about the observations it makes on the world.
Relativity of Science
It is becoming common knowledge that a major underpinning of quantum physics is the realization and discovery that science cannot predict anything, as had been taken for granted, with absolute certainty.1 Relatedly, the new physics informs us that there is simply no way to separate the observed event from the observer. That is to say that the observer is, her- or himself, an inexcludable variable and always affects the results of an experiment. In a very fundamental way, the perceiver influences what is seen in even the most “scientifically” pure observations and experiments: “The new physics … tells us clearly that it is not possible to observe reality without changing it.”2
Take, as an example, that a condition is set up to perceive an event: If it is designed to find waves in light, it discovers waves. If it is designed to find particles, we get particles — in supposedly the same “outside world” … and regardless of the fact that logically light cannot be both a particle and a wave.3 That is the classic example, of course. The structure of the experiment, designed by the observer, determines what will be found. At base, intent is all-important; it leans us toward “discovering” what we are inclined to see.
Now, what is this saying if not just what I have stated in Chapter 10? Is this not the same as saying that we determine ultimately, because of our specific biology, what we sense? That we therein determine the “world” we experience?
Culture, Brute Facts, and Culturally Constituted Realities
Nevertheless, to some extent our social scientists have yet to get that memo from the hard sciences. For example, in line with Elizabeth Anscombe’s (1958) terminology of brute facts, John Searle (1969) claims a distinction between “brute facts” and “institutional facts.” Anthropologist Roy D’Andrade (1984) elaborates on this and goes on to explain what is meant by brute facts: “Not all social-science variables refer to culturally created things; some variables refer to objects and events that exist prior to, and independent of, their definition: for example, a person’s age, the number of calories consumed during a meal, the number of chairs in a room, or the pain someone felt.”4
D’Andrade is describing a difference … no doubt one we all would make … between objects in the world or seeming absolutes, such as numbers, against that which varies by culture — i.e., institutional facts, which are also referred to as culturally constituted facts, or realities. Simply put, culturally constituted realities, or institutional facts, are facts, things, realities that are created by culture. In the terms we used in the last chapter, culturally constituted realities are created in the cortex and they are interpretations of what has been given to the cortex of information concocted by a species biology, in interior parts of the brain, which were fed by neural firings determined by what our senses has selected out of the infinity of possibility of what can be sensed in any particular moment and environment.
Culture is Our Template for Understanding
So, you see, culture is the set of understandings and everything related to them that is shared in common by a group. It is the way a particular group sees, creates, and “furnishes” the world. It is the matrix, grid, or framework that is projected onto Reality, determining what will be perceived and how it will be interpreted. It creates the understandings of our perceptions and experiences, as they are configured within the context created by that culture. It is a group’s “window” on the world; it is the template stamped upon Reality; it is the blueprint out of which our perceptions and understandings arise.
Consequently, culturally constituted realities are realities or facts that are created by individual cultures and which exist only for them. They are distinct from brute facts, which can be said to be realities that exist in all cultures: Brute facts can be said to exist outside of cultures, independent of them, regardless that cultures determine the interpretation or meaning of them.
Some basic culturally constituted realities are the different languages; the various religious notions with their supernatural realities and the cultural items and artifacts they impel; specific but commonly held ideas about governance, justice, appropriate behavior, work, play, ritual, leisure, courtesy, fairness, as well as the conventions, institutions, and material culture propelled by them; and much, much more that is considered real and true in a culture but which is not seen or at least is not seen that way in all cultures.
Now, D’Andrade is saying that not all realities are culturally constituted and that there are realities that are independent of culture, and about which all cultures must make determinations and interpretations or with which they must at least interact. The examples he gives of such realities include things like a person’s age, the number of calories in a meal, the number of chairs in a place, and the pain a person feels.
Total Heritage View of Culture Sees It as the Matrix
D’Andrade is speaking to and critiquing a “total heritage” view of culture, espoused by some anthropologists, which holds that all reality is culturally determined … or constituted … including such “brute facts.” In the total-heritage view — espoused in particular by Marshall Sahlins (1976) — even the things we think to be irreducible or independent of cultural interpretations are indeed created by and patterned by … “constituted” by … culture.
To understand the total-heritage take on things, one might use the analogy of the Matrix, as it is portrayed in the movie of the same name. In The Matrix, people live their lives in a completely constructed world, which includes the physical aspects of it — the buildings, parks, highways, everything else one might think of as real, as physical, as material. Naturally, all that one thinks and imagines is also bounded within that world, knowing no other after all. It is virtually identical to Plato’s cave, in his “Allegory of the Cave.”5
As many of you know, the “Allegory of the Cave” is a classic explanation of our normal illusory state of consciousness. As most philosophies hold, there is a greater reality than what we know as humans. I was saying much along those lines in Chapter 10. And many wise folks have added that knowing that Reality would enable us to grok the things that are otherwise confusing and inexplicable about life.
Now, Plato, in his allegory, compared humans to beings living in a cave and deeming Reality to be the shadows on a wall created by a fire burning behind the participants. The actual reality could be found only by leaving the cave and going into the sunlight outside. So, this allegory is most definitely a total-heritage view, though it does not specify culture as being the factor creating the reflected or illusory quality of our perceptions and understandings. For its part, the total-heritage view — though it considers culture as all-creative of our world, or “cave” — is agnostic about there being any actual reality outside the cave.
In the movie, The Matrix, the only thing other than this comprehensive and totally constructed world that exists, actually exists, are the people in it. However, they exist also in a state outside of the Matrix. Yet they do not have a clue that they have an existence separate. Again, this is like Plato’s cave allegory, where folks do have an existence outside the cave, if they can realize it.
Thus, the total-heritage view of culture sees it as much like the Matrix or the Cave, with our reality — all of it — being culturally constituted. Or at least that we, as humans, embedded in culture, have no possible way of knowing if there are any brute facts outside of the cultural templates we are given by societies to understand and function in Reality.
By contrast to this total-heritage or “matrix” idea of culture, we have the view that there are “brute facts” also which exist outside of culture which are interpreted by culture, not totally concocted by them.
For now, though — and however much I agree with D’Andrade that there are realities separate from cultural ones — from what I have been saying in the previous chapter about species creating their “worlds” through the different percepters they have, we can see that these “brute facts” may not be culturally constituted as he asserts, but they certainly are biologically constituted. For the age in years one has, the numbers of anything, and especially the pain people feel, are all realities relative to humans, and some only to humans. We might remember what I said last chapter about vibrational rates — that is to say, heat — and its relativity to the perceiving organism. In that example I was making the case that the very existence of pain and pleasure is relative to the species in question. Hence, these supposedly brute facts are actually species-specific facts: They are “brute” only in relation to our particular species.
If a Tree Falls in the Forest….
You might acknowledge that relativity to the perceiver is true of pain, but balk about my saying that species-relativity is true as well regarding numbers of things, as in the other examples D’Andrade gives. Let me address that by referring to an analogous situation involving an age-old philosophical question. For it follows from the species-specific angle on reality I am presenting that the new-paradigm answer to that question is clear: If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? That answer, absolutely not! Sound is as much species-relative as the practice of polygamy is culturally relative. In other words, there are species for which sound does not exist. Everything else we consider existing is also only in relation to humans, so it follows that the numbers of anything is a relative “fact,” as well.
What we call “existing” is actually what is reality relative to one species, our species, Homo sapiens. And we are merely one species out of an estimated one trillion species, which includes bacteria this time, on Earth. That does not even take into account species on other planets, even ones we would be able to perceive, if we were there or they came here. It does not even touch the infinite possibilities of beingness, or “species” that we would have no way of knowing or perceiving or that we would perceive but in some way so we would not even know it to be a living thing. Remember that earthworm who might only perceive us as heat or pressure, which I mentioned earlier, and how we are likely in a similar situation relative to some other beings and species.
Similarly, the event that we perceive as sound-tree-and-forest-interacting may be “perceived” as quite something else with different kinds of and/or more “senses” or, one might say, from a different vantage point. Indeed, different concoctions of the event — combinations of its elements — may be carved out of it, being relative to the other-than-human perceiver, creating different elements of the event, different “numbers” of any elements in it, and creating vastly different and totally unimaginable interpretations! As I said, our senses scan and then select out of an infinity of possibilities of what can be perceived. What it “notices” … or “creates”? … is relative to who we are as a species. Even the determination of that falling tree being an event is relative, hence questionable, ultimately. Relatedly, whether or not there is actually even a physical world in which it occurs is suspect. For the thoroughgoing explication that there is not a physical or material world in any way as we normally think of it, see the book previous to this one in The Path of Ecstasy Series, The Secret Life of Stones (2016).
The Bias Invisible in Science
Regardless, the point of all this is that removing our anthropocentric blinders in this way we must conclude that the world, as experienced, is created of realities that are not only culturally constituted, as anthropologists point out. There are also biologically constituted realities. The “brute facts” to which D’Andrade refers are — nothing brute about them — biologically determined facts. How anthropocentrically arrogant for us to think that our brute facts are brute in some conceivable Ultimate Reality that all existing or conceivable living beings or entities share, meaning are able to perceive … indeed are able to perceive … pretty much the way we do!
Yet this is exactly the arrogance that prevails in all our sciences. When we imagine other beings in our Universe, as we do in some of our arts, we anthropocentrically assume they would have human features, with only slight variations, with senses similar to ours and perceiving the exact same world, and that they would have evolved in some manner parallel to the way we did on Earth. That is forgivable in our arts and cinema, as in Star Trek and Star Wars, as they are not claiming to be science.
However, what is damning and is embedded within and constraining the purview of our sciences is this assumption that the Universe as we have come to know it through our science, with its space, time, stars, Big Bang, galaxies, dimensions, planets, and so on, is the Universe in some ultimate way outside of our humanly limited perception.
What? You don’t think so? You think the cosmos we measure with our humanly-created technology and perceive with our human, our limited, senses, is pretty much like the one that exists outside our perception of it? That our perceived and arrived-at cosmos is the Cosmos? No doubt you think it has to be. You have never questioned it.
However, remember that experiment with the particle and wave, where what we look for ends up being what we see. Ponder that and its implications.
Now, think again for a minute, and you will realize that when science uncovers discrepancies or anomalies, incongruent with their abiding theories, the most they will acknowledge is that their concepts of the elements of the Cosmos are open to reinterpretation and re-inclusion in some other, some grander scheme which, they assume, at some point will validate them in some way they do not see at the moment. Nowhere do scientists concede their galaxies, black holes, atoms, matter, space, Big Bang, et al, are realities relative only to humans for all we know. Or, for that matter, that they might not be existing outside of human perception. When it comes to that tree in the forest, there is never any question about it making a sound for scientists. It just does.
Indeed, these are the assumptions scientists all make; except, that is, for a few remarkable ones like Einstein, whose vast perspective on it all led him to conclude there is a spiritual reality for it all beyond and outside of what science can know. Or Roger Jones, the author of Physics as Metaphor (1982), who pulled the blinds to the side on the ultimately empty and insubstantial nature of the concepts assumed in science, specifically its most substantial one, physics.
Other than the few like these, the great majority of less stellar scientists will acknowledge that Reality is indeterminate — as they are prodded by the new physics to admit. Yet they will assume validity for their established understandings, in the face of contrary evidence, if not in the current scheme, then in some other and future one. Which they further presume will be built upon their current assumptions; which at most, at that time, will be refined in parts. Any new paradigm-to-be is thoroughly invisible until suddenly seen in its entirety — like a crystal suddenly emerging from solution. This startling awareness or sudden vision is, indeed, the goal I intend for my readers at some point in their journey with me. Till then, human imagination, including and especially any scientific ones, expects the world to go on as it has and for it to continue to make sense in the way it did … with minor modifications and added to only gradually over time.
Correspondingly, scientists assume the cosmos they peer into, measure, and study is the same one all other species apprehend. This is regardless the vast differences in the way that universe is perceived by the beings we know about or, for that matter, the scope of any particular species’ perception of it — which we know at least sometimes is far far more far-ranging, advanced, than ours. Despite these facts to the contrary, nowhere in science is it advanced that their interpretations of the cosmos are relative to humans only.
Reality as Projection
Thus, science’s reluctant qualification of indeterminacy is quite a bit different from an acknowledgment of what I am putting forth: Which is that there might be a more valid understanding, or perception, by some conceivable other being or species, in which those elements of the universe we consider to be absolute can be seen to be non-existent or radically wrong.
And beyond that … the most important part of this … that in comparison to whom, our interpretations of things are not seen merely to be biased as a result of our species identity, but that the very existence of these supposedly absolute things of our world are found to be projections, in their entirety and thus are completely insubstantial, of our human psyche. To be mere projections of our uniquely human perspective on things … creations purely concocted of the elements of our unique distinction from Nature.
That is a distinction, which I will not elaborate upon now, which has us to be supremely flawed in relation to the rest of Nature and thus unusually ignorant of what actual Reality might be. This is something which I have termed human’s basic wrong-gettedness and have demonstrated in several of my works — in particular, Planetmates (2014) and Prodigal Human (2016).
An Infinite Number of Worlds
Furthermore, consider that physicists talk about the possibility of other dimensions intersecting our world. So these alternate realities share the same time and space … or they share whatever Ultimate Reality we exist in … with us. Yet how could physicists even define these invisible worlds as “other dimensions”? Think about it, are dimensions not also relative to our species, with some other species conceivably apprehending the Cosmos in a completely different way? Is it not possible there are species whose perceptions of Reality — equal to or more valid than ours — would in no way involve those dimensions … perceptions where those dimensions do not exist, as they are overridden by or subsumed within some other perceptual array vastly different from ours? Or, accepting the reality of those dimensions, how can we say with any certainty at all that the brute facts we have in our dimension qualify as brute facts in those dimensions as well?!
At any rate, I am going to leave to the side, for now, the complicating factor of the infinite number of beings and possibilities of existing and perceiving that would exist in each of those different dimensions. I will not even get into the fact that this incredible cosmos with these billions of galaxies — an estimated one hundred billion galaxies with an average of two hundred to four hundred billion stars per galaxy and god-only-knows how many planets coinciding with all those stars, or suns — and infinite numbers of dimensions is still only the cosmos that we … we lowly, humble, and limited perceptually humans … are able to perceive. So how can it not be true that there even more possibilities for ways of perceiving Reality, more possibilities of realities, than even the infinite numbers of them we are able to deduce with our limited senses at this particular time with its limited knowledge as well!!??
And, yes, I realize that some of you readers are jumping ahead and even questioning the reality of entities, beings, perceptions, perceptors, perceivers, percepters, senses, and all else, which I have been leaning on in making my case, and would like to challenge me on that.6 For you will say that they — any being, beings, or entities — also are deduced from what we know from our limited apprehension of the world. So they, too, might be no more than human projections.
Thinking this way, you might say that my theory is empty or insubstantial for it, also, is deduced from our perception of realities, which I am acknowledging to be unspecial and infinitely variable. You might say that even our perception of different and separate perceivers — what I am terming, perceptors — is questionable. How do we know any entities or beings exist, outside of our own one — oneself — if all that we perceive is determined by what we expect and project? Are there even numbers of things — as when D’Andrade asserted numbers were “brute” — let alone beings?
Are we sure that the way we chop up Reality into parts — separate things, separate beings, and so on — so that we might name them and analyze them separately from our perception of them, is anything but a product of our biological programming? Do all possible perceptors see the world in terms of parts? How can we say that is the case? Perhaps, indeed, that separation of ourselves from Reality and doing that dissecting and categorizing of it is just some neurosis or illness … some delusion … that is characteristically human. Perhaps, that it is unique to humans.
Biological Relativity
At any rate, getting back to culturally constituted facts and those “nasty” brute facts, again, I was saying there is nothing “brute” about what humans would call brute facts. Rather, they are biologically determined facts. They are facts relative to our species. These “facts” or truths are biologically relative. They are true, with surety, only in relation to our species. They might exist for other species as well, certainly they are shared by many, but a) they are not shared by all, and b) we must conclude they are not even facts the way we know them, for they are necessarily perceived differently by each and every species. That is to say, if they, indeed, even show up as elements or “facts” in their realities, their perceived realities.
Yes, we have another relativity — species relativity — to include with the others we have been coming up with in the sciences.
Relativisms
Einstein let us know that our space and time were relative, not absolute.
Franz Boas and all anthropologists after him helped us to see that our cultural realities were relative, as well. That means that all we conceive and create as cultural elements can only be understood within the context of the culture within which they exist. Which means that anyone outside that culture — that is, not containing that cultural mental set — will necessarily not quite understand them the way those in the culture do: In fact, in a basic and profound way they will misunderstand them; they will not “get it” the way cultural members do.7 Indeed, many cultural elements are invisible outside the culture in which they exist. Cultural elements are culturally relative, is the way that is expressed. But more than that, cultures create their own elements, unique to them, and these cultural facts are what D’Andrade above was referring to when he mentioned culturally constituted realities.
Species Relativity
Therefore, to these relativities of space, time, and culture, we must now also include species relativity or biological relativity. That this has not been acknowledged already, for it is so obvious, can easily be attributed to the pervasive and unquestioned species-centrism — our anthropocentrism — characteristic of human, especially Western, culture, to date. Again, this is the hidden “flat earth” assumption I was pointing out in Chapter 10, which is reinforced by our religions, especially the Judeo-Christian-Muslim ones, which assert humans to be superior in Nature and having dominion over all others in Nature.
I call anthropocentrism a flat earth assumption because human superiority to all other planetmates is equally as obviously true yet ultimately wrong — as well as having its only legitimacy as being that relative to a perceiver — as is a notion the Earth is flat. Not to mention that seeing Reality outside that assumption of anthropocentrism and acknowledging this species relativity instead would be as momentous and world-changing as was the discovery of the heliocentric nature of our planetary system.
Incidentally, this assumption of species superiority — species-centrism — is also a central component of the Unapproved and Hidden I mentioned earlier, which I describe in others of my works.8 Indeed, the vanity of species-centrism is what creates the species unconscious — containing all truth about humans not knowable by humans, for the reason of being threatening or at least “inconvenient” to that human Ego. Which inconvenient truth, again, I term the Unapproved and Hidden.
To understand species relativity, we can use those same understandings, discussed above, in regard to time, space, and culture relativity. We will see that all those understandings are true, as well, for the realities created or constituted by our specific physical constitution, our biology, separate as it is for each species. This is biological relativity, and what it adds to our understanding when seen as analogous to the other relativities is that it tells us:
Our realities can only be understood within the context of our species … other species could not understand them … and we cannot really understand the realities of other species … lower or higher, if in fact there are such categories for species in Ultimate Reality. In some way, large or small, species will misunderstand each other. In fact, in that species are actually distinct from each other, whereas cultures are not … see Note 7 of this chapter … there is much more to biological relativity than there has ever been to cultural relativity.
Many elements of our human reality will be invisible to or not even exist within the realities of other species — they are biologically constituted realities. Some things, maybe many or all things, which exist within the perceived and understood realities of other species will be invisible to us or not even exist within our possible world: They are species-specific, biologically constituted realities for them, as well.
Bringing this all together, we now see that there are culturally constituted facts: That is to say, facts that are cultural creations and either do not exist or are not perceived or understood the same from other cultural perspectives — in other words, by people from other cultures. And there are biologically constituted realities: That is, there are those supposed “brute facts” for humans that either do not exist or are not perceived or understood the same from other biological perspectives — in other words, by species, beings, or entities other than the human one. These last are as biologically relative as the first ones are culturally relative.
Projection, the Veils, and Liberation
Additionally and on a positive note for the purposes of this book, knowing that the reality that we assume to be indisputably real might very well be a projection — however much shared by others of our species — of our inner and unconscious elements … personal, cultural, and species or biological … supports our quest to look outside such a Matrix. And all layers or Veils of it. It reveals, in a manner exactly like that of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a route to liberation.
In that book, this liberation, which occurs upon the “taking back” of one’s projections, is described as an apprehension of the Clear Light of the Void. You will see — especially in the Epilogue, which deals with it (in Dance of the Seven Veils III) — that my term for “the Void” is the No-Form State or the No-Thing State for very specific reasons having to do with emphasis and connotations. Regardless, knowing the personally-rooted and arbitrary nature of our beliefs about everything advises us that liberation is dependent upon taking back all the projections we put upon Reality out of our deeper and unconscious selves and upon acknowledging that they have their roots in ourselves, nowhere else. This is when we realize our inherent identity with Divinity. An apprehension of the Clear Light of the Void — or what I am also calling Naked Reality and Original Self or Face in this work — is, yes, equivalent to realizing our Divine-rootedness and to liberation.
Another way of saying this is that realizing the projective nature of our understandings — the same as being able to see that there are Veils, or layers, of misunderstanding woven through them and blocking true perception — encourages an open mind to the possibility of discovering a Reality quite different from what one expects. And it gives us a direction for realizing Truth: Which is the taking back of projections thrown upon Reality, as they are seen to be reflections of inner realities and to be insubstantial otherwise. Or, using the metaphor of this book, knowing that our handle on Reality is arbitrary establishes a mental set that is a launching place in the process of pulling back the Veils covering and distorting It.
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The Spectrum of Realities:
Infinite Worlds … Individually, Bioculturally, and Suprahumanly Constituted Realities, and Ultimate Relativity
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“Authentic and convincing experiences of conscious identification with animals, plants, and even inorganic materials and processes make it easy to understand the beliefs of animistic cultures that see the entire universe as being ensouled.” — Stanislav Grof
“…such transpersonal experiences dramatically change our understanding of the nature of everyday material reality … others reveal dimensions of existence that are ordinarily completely hidden to our perception. This … includes discarnate entities, various deities and demons, mythological realms, suprahuman beings, and the divine creative principle itself.” — Stanislav Grof
“…space, including size, is relative to the perceiver…. At the ultimate tiniest [atomic, subatomic], consciousness might come around … and present itself as the hugest consciousness, the Cosmos…. So, literally anything can be.”
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Furthermore, we can see that these realities — these distortive Veils across Reality — exist on a continuum with culturally constituted realities on one end and biologically constituted realities on the other; for there are many in-between facts, which would have to be called bioculturally determined facts or bioculturally constituted realities.
Bioculturally Constituted Realities
How are bioculturally constituted realities defined? Well, they are cultural facts that exist because of the common biology we as a species share, each and every one of us.
These are facts that are relative to the pain and pleasure humans experience and the way and degrees in which we experience them. These are facts relative to the birth and death humans experience and the ways we experience and construe them. These are facts relative to the life cycle and stages of life that are uniquely human and the ways we experience and understand and configure them. Thus, these common biological things and events are facts for the species we call human — they are biologically constituted realities for humans — for they are shared by all humans. Yet they are perceived, construed, interpreted, configured, manifested, acted out, dealt with, responded to, and created around differently by each and every culture, at least slightly differently.
These bioculturally constituted realities are cultural constructions built on and around our biological “facts” … which we have already seen are themselves constructions. The constructions, or “facts,” about or related to our common biological realities that arise from these different cultures are, therefore, biocultural facts or realities. They are bioculturally determined facts. You might remember I introduced them in an earlier chapter in discussing one example of them. Which is the imprints on consciousness we have from our womb experiences — which womb events are affected to some extent by culture, but which are predominantly biological events.
So there are biologically constituted facts, bioculturally constituted facts, and culturally constituted facts all existing on a continuum. That continuum measures the degree to which those facts are “real” … or let us say the degree to which those realities are shared. That continuum tells you the number of “individuals” who share those “facts” … who perceive, hold, and/or engage with those facts, while others do not. Individuals is in quotes in keeping with our analysis that our conceptualization of other members of other species — known and unknown — is based on one of our biologically constituted realities. Separate beings, or “individuals,” itself is a species-relative fact.
As far out as it sounds to say that the idea of there being separate individuals is a species-relative fact, consider one possibility we would never think of except for such a consideration. Can we really say that bees are separate “individuals”? How do we know that bee activity, like the functioning of a body organ, might not be expressing the synchronized functioning of many separate “cells” of one “mind” … the separate bees analogous to “separate” cells. Since that is such a stretch, take an example from a fictional source which has expressed this same idea. Is the Borg … notice that whether to use is or are here is exactly this question … from the Star Trek series, one being or many? That is something that has been used as an arena for much philosophical speculation among fans.
Many other examples can be given of things that function that way in Nature and the Cosmos: They act in concert, with very little individual or no variation from a norm.
So how can one say that the “individuals” we claim as acting within the whole are anything but a biologically constituted perspective come of our species, human, which is itself so separate from Nature that we are defective in seeing the unities within Nature, or even among humans, ourselves? Indeed, in my consideration that everything is one Being, one Experience, shared, with different aspects of it focused on by different “foci” or integrative points within it, then this is true of everything and All. And there are no separate individuals.
Getting back to the spectrum, the more astute of you, I know, have already realized that biologically constituted facts and culturally constituted facts are not even absolute ends of that continuum. That continuum extends out at each of its ends beyond those categories. Do you see that? Do you see how that follows from what I was saying last chapter about many worlds and infinite numbers of perceivers?
Individually Constituted Realities
If not, follow this: Do you see that even the term culture is not a category with clear boundaries? It might pertain to a huge group of individuals, whereas subgroups of that would constitute separate cultures, each slightly different from the rest, so they are themselves considered cultures. These subgroups are sometimes called subcultures.
Yet even subcultures have subgroups and subcultures within them. For a culture is a particular set of understandings or ways of seeing that is held in common by a group. And every group, in that sense, can be considered a culture for, indeed, that is how we define a group: It is a number of people who share a common understanding or way of seeing things, and that might simply be in its intent. However, also, it usually includes the group’s goals, procedures, and more: special language, sometimes called jargon; group constructions — physical and organizational ones as well as temporal ones, i.e., events; as well as ways of behavior, manners of speaking, rules of courtesy, and the like.
So who is still with me? Well, if you followed all that, you would see that such groups can be continually broken down … can be infinitely broken down, you will soon see … into even smaller subgroups. Neighborhoods can be broken down into separate family cultures, for example. And where from there?
Well, we see that, yes, it is true, each and every individual can her- or himself be considered a culture, in that there are understandings, procedures, ways of thinking, and all the rest that are not held in common with anyone else at all but are unique to each individual. That is often referred to as personality, a person’s unique personality, but it goes beyond that to unique facts of each individual that are not even, by other individuals, observable! The difference between individual culture and personality is a matter of emphasis in that individual culture pertains to patterns, realities, facts, and ways of looking at or construing the world primarily from the perspective of the individual; whereas personality usually applies to those things as observed, to the extent they are observed, and referred to by others.
Nevertheless, one might say culture — as it pertains to groups and societies, and reduced to its foundation — is simply another way of referring to individual psychologies, or personalities, but doing it cumulatively. That would be true. Culture is collective psychology, in a sense. It is the obverse of Jung’s collective unconscious, for it is what is known, or at least observable, in a culture, not unknown or unconscious. It could be said that culture is the collective consciousness, viewed in its widest possible way and including all possible elements of a culture, of a group.
Let me give an example to illustrate the difference between a collective consciousness (culture) and the collective unconscious. That the United States and Russia are frequently opposed and that this friction became more intense beginning with the American election of 2016 is a part of our human collective consciousness, if one is the kind of person who is aware of current events. The point about the collective consciousness is that it contains elements that can be known by anyone in that society, if one wants to know them. Whereas the fact that the opposition between entities like the U.S. and Russia reflects archetypal constellations of duality and their interaction, that this duality emanates from opposition of youth to society (Veil Two), of child to parent (Veil Three), of neonate with mother’s body (Veil Four), of prenate with a “poisonous” placenta (Veil Five), and of the duality of sperm and ovum prior to conception are all aspects of our collective unconscious. Such understandings or realizations are not possible for everyone in a society; most often the members of a society know none of this … they are the collective unconscious.
Following that? Okay, then, we can see that this end of the continuum, which we were calling culturally constituted realities, really goes further out from its supposed end point to individually constituted realities. These are realities that are unique to an individual and can only be understood within the context of that individual, and when encountered outside of that individual they are likely to be either misunderstood or not seen at all. For those of you following this, we can see that such personal “cultures,” if you will, comprised of individually constructed realities, are different, individual to individual, and that some of those cultural elements are shared widely, while some of those individuals have personal cultures with elements that are so unique and unshared that we have a special term for those individuals. Of course you know this one. For what if I were to put it another way and ask you, simply, what do we call individuals who we can see are “living in their own world.”
Yes, you are correct. The term for that is psychotic.
No, don’t go. We’re not done yet.
Suprahumanly Constituted Realities
Okay, then, let us look at the antipode of that endpoint, newly seen to be individually constituted realities. On the other end of the continuum, the one we were indicating as biologically constituted realities, we can see that it extends beyond where we thought it ended as well. How, you say?
Well, as I pointed out, biologically constituted realities are those realities shared within a species. Some of these “facts” are shared only among that species. Some are shared to varying degrees, inter-specially, but not to every other species.
However, the category, species, also, is not absolute. There are certainly realities that are unique to entire groups of species that have important qualities in common. Hence the categorization of “species” is not absolute, since we can easily draw a line around groups of species and create other entities, which for all we know create their own “constituted” realities.
There are realities constituted by the fact that the perceiver is from the vegetable kingdom — you might call them vegetablely constituted realities. Or from the animal kingdom … planetmately constituted realities. Or by virtue of being mammalian (you’ve got it from here). Or out of the fact of belonging to one of the many taxonomies or other biological categories of species. Or from the fact that all exist on something that they perceive to be Earth … and so on. For all I know there are realities — shared and indisputably true “facts” to its members — that are shared by all “elements” or “members” (whatever they might be) in our solar system but none other … heliocentrically constituted realities? Or by “members” (whatever they might be) of our galaxy of the Milky Way. But either of which are not seen at all or able to be perceived in other galaxies, other dimensions, or other….
… and here we get into realities we are not capable of knowing exist and are incapable, even, of imagining. Let me say it again: These are realities that no human would ever be able to even imagine exist, let alone, understand.
You say the “higher order” members of categories are not perceivers, however, so they cannot create their own realities out of their perceptions. Good one, on that. But how do you know that is true? As one example, is there not serious consideration to the idea that the Earth itself is a seeing, feeling, perceiving being? A Gaia? How can you say “she” is not? Would it not fit into the category of possible beings who we are not capable of seeing with our percepters? As I said, earthworms might perceive humans as an obstacle or as hot and coldness. So might we not be in the same position relative to these greater beings (if not “greater,” at least, different beings)? So that we as humans are perceiving a planet which is in actuality a form of consciousness (an experiential vantage point, a perceiver), but we mistakenly and “brutely” conceive of it (her) as being lifeless … an Earth that is mere matter and stuff, not conscious or perceiving?
This idea is not so outlandish when you consider that the history of the science of consciousness, within civilization, tells a story of formerly non-sentient or unfeeling life and seemingly soulless beings — such as animals, plants, infants, prenates, and humans from other races and cultures — being revealed to be sentient … just like our precious selves, species, and nations and races. How far does that extend to other “things” which might actually be forms of being? What will the future reveal to us along these lines?
Clearly, humans do not want to acknowledge the awareness, consciousness, or life that is outside them in the Universe and on Earth. For the less life there is, the more special that makes humans. Like tribes or nations who depict their enemies as not human in order to war against them, humans in general would have the whole Universe, other than them, by unalive and not conscious and not intelligent just to set off, as distinct and worthy of boasting, their own “chosen” status, specialness. Which, methinks, is a pitiable result of being so unseen, unacknowledged, and disrespected in the womb, at birth, and in our early lives.
Such a scaffold of hubris we concoct to cover such pain and humiliation at our roots. If I were to describe humans as a single individual it would be as a Donald Trump smothering the entire world with self-congratulatory lies that he won the popular vote, that he had the largest electoral vote margin, that the crowds at his inaugural were greater than Obama’s … all of which are indisputably untrue. Or it would be as a child boasting to its schoolmates how much better it is able to do whatever-it-is and how wrong they are; as a young child wanting and aching to be loved by its mommy and daddy; as a baby screaming out to its mother to please pay attention to it; as a neonate at birth screaming to everyone and all around to please be treated with respect and more kindly; and, ultimately, as a fetus screaming silently to its mother to please notice it is there and not go on with life as if it is as unimportant as any inanimate object in her life. Pretty pathetic, we anthropocentric humans, yes. The only good part of our status at the nadir of nobility in Nature is that we have plenty of room to “grow up.” That we have lots more possible for us and on our horizon through facing the facts of existence and the pervasive aliveness around us rather than to continue our hubris of Universal singularity (specialness) and dominion over Nature.
Furthermore, we are pushed in that admirable advance to nobility in recent years, being helped now by science, not so much hindered as was the case earlier in science’s history. For it is science, now, that has revealed the consciousness of the Universe and of all of Nature … and of matter itself.
And if you got here by way of Book 1 in this Series, The Secret Life of Stones, you know that I contend that all that exists is the animate, the living, and that it is because of our human limitations that we see any matter as “dead” in the first place.
Remember, also, that the majority of humans that have ever lived, which includes many living now, think of, nay, they even have direct experience of, Nature and its aspects as being living and to constitute a living, perceiving being. And they deem that Nature to be even higher, far higher in fact, in its apprehension and consciousness than us.
I want to point out that as odd or fantastical as this sounds, this is exactly the notion coming out of some of the consciousness research of the last fifty years. Stanislav Grof, for one, has found that in his modes of LSD psychotherapy, as well as his non-drug modality, holotropic breathwork, people are able to identify with and experience the consciousnesses not only of other planetmates — that is, other species on Earth — but also are able to merge with and experience the consciousnesses of higher orders of beings: the Earth, individual planets, the galaxy, particular collections of people — such as the women of all time. Note here that the entities do not even have to be alive in this time and place for them to be part of a collective consciousness … the relativity of space and time, remember? And even collectives of supranormal beings and realities — archetypal consciousness and its reality, for example. And it is possible to experience consciousness of supposedly inanimate, non-living forms … the secret life of stones, you see? … and even identify with consciousnesses on the atomic and subatomic levels. Which is something coming up. Hold on.
Putting this rather bluntly, Stanislav Grof concurs, “Authentic and convincing experiences of conscious identification with animals, plants, and even inorganic materials and processes make it easy to understand the beliefs of animistic cultures that see the entire universe as being ensouled. From their perspective, not only all the animals, but also the trees, the rivers, the mountains, the sun, the moon and the stars appear to be sentient beings.”1
Infinite Worlds
Then there is Teilhard De Chardin — someone whom Grof cites as presenting a way of conceptualizing the beings and consciousnesses he has come across in his modalities — who advanced the notion that every integrated whole is in fact a form of beingness and that the degree of consciousness inherent in each is relative to the level of complexity of that integrated whole. This is saying, essentially, that infinite organizations of experience equals infinite beings. And for reasons that will become clearer as we proceed, I would say there is indeed reason to assert that levels of complexity relate to levels of awareness.
Brain-as-Reducing-Valve and Consciousness as Inverse to Complexity
However as for the “higher level” of consciousness being related to the level of complexity — with more complexity being of a higher consciousness than lower complexity — I would say there is evidence indicating the opposite is true. From the perspective of brain-as-reducing-valve, which I will elaborate on shortly, and from the viewpoint brought forth in my books, Falls from Grace (2014), Experience Is Divinity (2013), and The Secret Life of Stones (2016) the simplest organizations, the least complex entities, are the highest orders of awareness, in that each reduction into form and the elaboration of that form is one step further removed from the consciousness of stone, the consciousness of space, of the Void … ultimately, of Divinity.
So physical reality with its myriad and ever-increasing complexities and organizations of complications are steps in removal from unity with Divinity. This follows also from the finding, which is fundamental to my views, that trauma creates greater complexities of consciousness, yet lowered levels of awareness. It takes quite a bit of clear consciousness to get things simply, to see the obviousness of things, or, as they say, to see what is “right in front of your eyes.” Whereas it takes a considerable amount of trauma to come up with the elaborate reality constructions of psychotics, not to mention of the intellectuals who we pass on our way to them. Plainly put, the charming notion that trees, for example, and nonhuman planetmates are closer to the Divine than us might in fact be true.
Indeed, this is not only charming. It is the only way we can make sense of the beliefs which would have planetmates being Divine messengers, being spiritual mentors as in Native American cultures, being Divine helpers, and the lot. The “creatures” of Nature are thought to be aspects of Divinity, not only in fairy tales, but also in cultural systems throughout the world. This is true particularly in the non-“civilized” ones as well as in the common beliefs of spiritual people. It is a pervasive notion that we receive Divine guidance from everything in the world — from random events, words overheard or seen, other people and their appearance or messages to us. Yet also, we even feel that more Divinely sourced are the actions and behavior to us of nonhuman life, our planetmates.
Innocence is equated with Divinity almost universally, however much we might turn that on its head in order to raise our own selves on high. Why else would Jesus say that to achieve higher awareness … “enter heaven,” as he put it … one had to regain the innocence of a child. In any case, this is why I have called our nonhuman planetmates our “angels in Nature,” for one thing.2
All of this is true regardless of the fact, as I pointed out in The Secret Life of Stones, that matter and the “things” of the world appear to “conspire” to synchronize with ourselves, our intentions, our needs, as well. This is known is synchronicity, as explained by Carl Jung. And the awareness of the pervasive existence of this perfect and beneficial congruence of all events is something that is known to occur increasingly the further along the spiritual journey one has travelled.
However, note that my view is quite the opposite of De Chardin’s ideas, which, it is important to point out, are common in the academic circles of transpersonal psychology (for that, read, folks who are spiritual, “in their head”). They are repeated in philosophies of the noetic sciences and are pervasive in many of the New Age circles. And they are found in the works of Ken Wilber — who with Stanislav Grof constitutes the two major figures in transpersonal psychology — as well as John White, a Wilber devotee and someone influential at the Noetic Sciences Institute. For these views would have us (here we go, again) be the convenient end products of a process of evolution beginning with the Big Bang, whose main purpose was the eventual production of oh-so-wonderful us.
I don’t know whether to barf or to cry at such hubris, such bold-faced narcissism, if not intellectual masturbation. Teilhard De Chardin, typified this view — and in a way that was near manic in its euphoria (or was that the pressure of all the unconscious material he needed to keep repressed in order to come up with such a self-congratulatory view) — that humans enjoyed first class booking on a spaceship headed directly to an Omega Point.
Incidentally, the reason this anthropocentric view of human’s centrality to all of existence is not seen for the incredible self-aggrandizement it is can be traced to its consonance with, if not rootedness in, a similar grandiose presumption of Western culture. This is the train Westerners have been riding for thousands of years going back to the Judaic idea of a “chosen people.” Yet even more so to the Christian notion of Christ and his followers as representing a turning point in Universal history. Which makes Christians superior (again, here we go again) to all other peoples of all times and situates them at the launching pad of De Chardin’s spaceship to ever greater magnificence and honor in the eyes of “the Father.”
De Chardin’s Omega Point takes Christian hubris further than the abominable state to which it had already crawled. His Omega Point was like a final and ultimate vindication of human vanity and ego — a kind of attainment of Divinity through the infinite expansion of self-glorification, not the simple and humble surrender to an innate Divinity, which we are part of and have only forgotten. Which less grandiose re-membering, therefore, is available to us, not through some patriarchal task, some masculine hubris of achievement. Rather by the simple, wholly, and planetmate-like surrender to an All That Is that is already perfect … only waiting for us to remember our own perfection within that larger whole and thereby rejoin the rest of the natural, the Divine, universe of beings.
Anyway, clearly, under the category of this Veil One of anthropocentrism — which blinder we are attempting to remove from our vision to see more truly — De Chardin’s position would be the exact opposite of the approach I am proposing.
Nonetheless, regarding the Experience, or Divinity, that physical reality is removed from … and while this is not crucial to the argument being presented here, but as a look ahead … I would say that levels of higher awareness (rather, experience), not physical or energetic complexity, create perceptible and/or conceivable levels of complexity of Experience. That is, that integration of greater and greater complexities of subjective Experience equate to greater levels of consciousness, but that levels of complexity of Experience are an inverse to levels of complexity of matter. But again, that is jumping ahead. Yes, we’ll get to that, as well. Just remember that what I mean by that is only what many folks already believe, which is that the less immersed in and identified with matter or the physical world that one is, the more spiritual one is.
Infinite Organizations of Experience ~ Infinite Beings
Still, I would join with De Chardin in saying that, for all we know, every integrated whole is possibly some form of perceptor, some form of consciousness which is receiving information — “sensory” and otherwise — and combining and integrating it in its unique way.
For example, it is not that strange to believe that each planet is a form of consciousness … just ask astrologers … and that they interact with each other in their own ways. For we see that cells, looking down below us to a microcosm smaller than us, have all the qualities of consciousness — they act, interact, behave, learn, make decisions based on judgments, and so on. So how do we know that planets, galaxies, star systems … the All That Is, itself … would not appear to have the same qualities of an individual actor or perceiver if we were above and able to look down on them, too, just like we do in observing cells and organs? And, in so doing, see what from a higher experiential awareness would be just as much signs of life, consciousness, behavior, intentional interaction, or whatever are the things of perception and beingness at that level that would be similar to the ones we see as indications of life, consciousness, behavior, intentional interactions, and the like at our level … our admittedly non-ultimate level with its limited and ultimately unknowing perception and experience?
As I have said, Grof has reams of evidence that such an amazing possibility is in fact the case.
Ultimate Relativity
Putting this all together, all realities are relative, all facts can only be understood in context; and those facts and realities can only truly be understood by groups who collectively construct them. So there are an infinite number of beings, an infinite number of species … consequently an infinite number of worlds.
Nope, nothing brute about our facts … at all!
The continuum we have constructed has on one end the unique individual with mental and experiential constructions that are not shared with anyone else. So these are called individually constructed realities … related to individual psychology. Yes, yes, I know. Some of you are already breaking down that individual into organs and cells and beginning to see that each of these subgroupings also have their unique constructions — their uniquely held “facts” and realities.” Although I will be toying with ideas of that later, such as, do those realities have an infinite regress into the atomic, and beyond. And, indeed, if time and space are both relative, as they are said to be, does this end of the spectrum, at the infinitesimally small, ever even come fully around again and link up with the realities on the other end, with Ultimate Reality? But that is enough on that end for now.
On the other end of the spectrum we have biologically constructed realities and whatever it might be called for the larger “cultures” of beingness and perception beyond them. This includes the galaxies, dimensions, star systems, and such, especially and including the things we do not know exist for there is absolutely no way humans can possibly perceive or know of them, even with our technology, even with any possible technology that humans could come up with in any possible human future.…
As Grof explains them, “While such transpersonal experiences dramatically change our understanding of the nature of everyday material reality, there are others that reveal dimensions of existence that are ordinarily completely hidden to our perception. This category includes discarnate entities, various deities and demons, mythological realms, suprahuman beings, and the divine creative principle itself.”3
So, we have the spectrum of realities and facts: Which comprises individually constituted realities, culturally constituted realities, bioculturally constituted realities, biologically constituted realities, and near the end of the spectrum, the whatever-constituted realities — let us call them suprahumanly-constituted realities — of “entities” or “members” that comprise those species (or categorizations of beings), in various levels of organizations extending out further than we could possibly see or imagine. The spectrum of realities describes a progression of increasingly valid or “truer” facts and realities. For they are shared with increasingly larger numbers of members who hold them to be true. This spectrum of validity of realities begins with the individually constituted — putting to the side for now, that can be further broken down into groups extending into the subatomic — which has the least number of entities holding them to be true, i.e., only one, an individual. And it extends all the way to the suprahumanly constituted realities, which has the largest group of entities, of members sharing those “facts” and “realities” and holding them to be true.
Naked Reality
And then beyond even that we have what we can postulate to be Ultimate Reality or Naked Reality. Which might not exist, yet the term represents whatever reality is or at least comes closest to having realities that are shared by all the entities in the Universe. Which is to say, that are “facts,” if you will, that are perceived, shared, “gotten” by all individuals … or potentially can be gotten considering the makeup of the species, or entities, involved. Here is where we start to use the word, God.
So on the other end of the spectrum from the subatomic is Ultimate Reality … and does, then, Ultimate Reality and the subatomic end up joining? How would we know? How could we say it would not? Since space, including size, is conceivably as relative to humans as time is to us, why, even that is possible. It boggles the mind.
Also, I should point out that even the subatomic can be further reduced into conscious, experiential beings. That might be hard to understand; but keep in mind our most scientific understanding of the Cosmos has it that at the Big Bang, at the creation of the Universe, everything — the entire Universe we see around us, with all its galaxies — was contained within and emanated out from a spot the size of an atom…. If that can happen, well, if nothing else then, space, including size, is relative to the perceiver…. And this gives further credibility to the idea that, at the ultimate tiniest, consciousness might come around again and present itself as the hugest consciousness, the Cosmos. The ouroboros, or serpent biting its tail, might be the ultimate mandala to express the nature of the Universe. Yes, truly mind-quaking stuff.
So literally anything could be.
Biologically Constituted Realities, Conclusion
Getting back to culturally constituted realities, so do we then, indeed, create our own reality culturally, of which Marshall Sahlins (1976) writes? Marshall Sahlins is a prominent American anthropologist who stressed the power that culture has to shape the world that people discern and act within and is associated with that total-heritage or Matrix view on reality.
Well, yes, I believe we do live within culturally created worlds, separate from other people in other culturally created worlds.
But I believe we do much more than that. I believe we create it biologically too: I believe that our reality is species-determined prior to that. And while that might sound common-sensical, I contend it is a factor affecting our constructions of reality and determining what we think is real that has been overlooked by all our sciences and by all Western overstandings and for all the time of Western civilization. Yet I profess it has huge significance, affecting the very foundations of human knowledge itself.
Relativity: Cultural and Biological
Finally, however, what does this say about cultural relativity, of which so much is made in anthropological circles? I agree with Sahlins’s position on the total and symbolic nature of culture and with it the resulting extreme cultural relativism which he asserts. As D’Andrade (1987) put it, Sahlins’s view is extreme enough that it undermines even science’s claim to validity and makes of our science, “mere ethnoscience.”4 But I do not imply by my agreement that I believe reality is only culturally determined by any definitional stretch of the term cultural that Sahlins, even from his “total heritage” perspective, could have had in mind. I intend to go further.
How so, then, could I claim, at the outset, that I believe both positions can be true? How can reality be so thoroughly “created” — not only culturally but biologically as well — and yet there be universal commonalities on which to base analyses and cross-cultural understanding? Where I disagree with Sahlins and emphatically agree with D’Andrade on the existence of “brute facts” standing outside and separate from cultural constructions is where D’Andrade (1987), in referring to a quote from Sahlins, writes, “I think I agree if … [he] … means that people respond to their interpretations of events, not the raw events themselves. However, if this means that culture can interpret any event any way, and that therefore there is no possibility of establishing universal generalizations, I disagree. I believe that there are strong constraints on how much interpretative latitude can be given to biological and social events. While the letters ‘D,’ ‘O,’ ‘G,’ can be given any interpretation, pain, death, and hunger have such powerful intrinsic negative properties that they can be interpreted as ‘good’ things only with great effort and for short historical periods with many failed converts.”5
With this statement of D’Andrade, I agree also. I believe that there are “intrinsic” (biological) determiners of cultures, which create a basic underlying structure. Indeed, as I was saying above, there are bioculturally constituted realities clustered about those biological “facts” of humans.
However, where I take issue with D’Andrade is that I contend that these “intrinsic” determiners are intrinsic to the species, not to the events themselves, as I was delineating above. These brute “facts” are as much biologically relative as items of culture are culturally relative.
This is as important to point out as it is important in physics to keep in mind that particles and waves only exist in relation to an observer. In this regard, as transpersonal anthropologist Armand Labbe (1991) put it, “Ultimately our physics … is going to demonstrate that essentially there is no such thing as matter. All there is, is mind and motion.”
At any rate, I contend that our biological “infrastructure,” that is, our bodies and the experiences they make possible — which are species-specific as well as common to all humans — results in biocultural, species-specific, and hence transcultural patterns of thought and behavior. Further, these transcultural patterns of thought and behavior create transcultural patterns of social structure, “external culture,” sociocultural behavior, and so on.
What Is, What Is Not
Keeping in mind the immense relativity of all these constituted realities — that is, they are only relative to our species, for one thing — unveils startling understandings and revelations. This Veil of anthropocentrism dropping, more is apprehended. More still is seen clearly to be arbitrary, variable, relative … and thus not-ultimate.
Yet what remains — realities that are true from a cross-species perspective, to the extent we can approach that — is truer than formally thought. They are more reliable viewing spots on which to stand and clearer portals through which to see that which lies beyond merely our species. Removing the Veil of anthropocentrism brings a vision of Reality greater than we had known, though not Ultimate.
We have been delivered here by the paradigm I introduced in Book 1, The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy. As we remove the Veils across the many faces of perception, we continue this dance of Veils. We know not yet What Is, yet we proceed with confidence having at least eliminated What Cannot Be. For What Cannot Be is that which is borne of arrogance — whether of the individual or the species variety. Hubris may or may not, as understood biblically, be the trait central to all crime, to all sin. Yet in the sense of Truth and our quest to approach it, most certainly it is the first obstacle to overcome … it is the first Veil to drop.
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Mind at Large and Levels of Reality Construction:
What We Can Know, Why We Know Not, Paradigm Relativity, and Ultimate Interconnectedness
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Understanding our limitations, we approach the mystical: paradigm relativity and the limitations of science
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one.” — Albert Einstein
“A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.” — Albert Einstein (1945)
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What we have arrived at is that basically our sciences have shown they cannot determine what is real, let alone measure it, because they are extensions of our senses which are themselves imperfect. So we cannot really know what is really real.
Why We Know Not
Further, we find that just as culture creates our reality for us, that prior to that our biology creates the reality upon which culture can build. This means that we are able to understand what is human reality at least, though not Ultimate Reality, by looking at the only reality that all humans share — our biological one.
Additionally, as I showed in Chapters 4 through 8 on the perinatal matrix and bioculturally constituted realities, and will continue to unveil, this means that the way we come into the world — our conception, womb life, and birth — creates the foundations upon which all our other perceptions are built. These being unique to humans means that Homo sapiens will be the only species seeing the world exactly the way we do.
Finally, while focusing on our biology as a basis for understanding what is fundamental about humanness, we are able to compare cultures in relation to that biology, though not in any other way. What we will see this means is that while we cannot compare cultures for the most part — this is called cultural relativity — we can compare them in terms of certain things all cultures share, which have to do with the fact that all humans have the same kind of body and biological history: An example of that would be the way cultures deal with birth, specifically the pain of it.
Neither Ordinary Reality or Science Is Necessarily Real
Let me put it this way. Our combined efforts in psychology, physics, biology, and anthropology … examples of which I have been pointing out … have led us to an impasse. We have been led to conclude that our view of reality is symbolic. We have learned, above all, not what to know, but that we know not … that is to say, that we are incapable of truly knowing.
In anthropology we see this in Sahlins’s (1976) thinking on culture: Cultures create the very realities within which we live, much like The Matrix or The Cave. However, D’Andrade (1987) makes the important point that in Sahlins’s theory the total cultural heritage is a symbolic structure. Thus, Sahlins’s theory is “epistemologically sealed.” Okay, what does he mean by that?
What is meant is that this particular theory of culture sees individuals as existing within a totality that is wholly symbolic. There are no intruding “real world” or “brute” elements. Everything is comprehended through the veil of those symbols, including any competing ideas or elements. There can be no conflicting constructs or challenging elements or ways to evaluate a particular structure when it is thought nothing exists outside that structure. “The Matrix,” you see, cannot be challenged by something that is not seen to exist. Nor can such Matrix be challenged when anything to the contrary, if it is seen at all, is interpreted in a way so as to make it something other than what it is and to become something that fits in with and supports that Matrix or, let us say, which contributes to that dominant and universally held “illusion.”
So D’Andrade does not like the fact that Sahlins can avoid any and all criticism of his theory by simply saying that any challenges to it are not valid for they are products of that system and have no separate validity from which one could compare or evaluate that system.
Indeed, Sahlins’s total-cultural-heritage notion of reality is so hard to understand because, not only do we assume a “real” world, a physical world, of “brute facts,” against which any and all constructions would need to be measured as to their validity, but we also assume a separate status for our reason. We believe logic to be separate and able to evaluate things, being outside of the things that they are dealing with. However, if one were to say, as Sahlins’s theory implies, that both reason and the physical world of brute facts are constructions of our cultures, then no criticism or challenge can be directed at the culture from either quarter, because the basis for each of them, it is said, is the culture … it is not outside of it. There is no Archimedean vantage point. Simply, you cannot truly see something that you are part of, in which you are thoroughly and inextricably enmeshed. You cannot objectively see yourself. What follows also from this total-symbolic-heritage view of culture is that different cultures have different “reason” — different logic and ways of evaluating — and different “worlds.” So all these realities are arbitrary, and there is nothing upon which to stand in making any judgments or analysis or comparisons.
It is a lot like many religions, which interpret everything within its matrix. Even any contrary facts are construed as being in an underlying way faulty because they do not conform to the totality, or are not congruent with all the other elements. Thus, nothing can be challenged, in either the total-symbolic-heritage view or the religious theologies, for any challenge only supports the assumptions being made. In virtually all religions, obedience and adherence to its beliefs are values, and some sort of “sin” is postulated as part of non-compliance or non-adherence. Any challenges are easily subsumed within an understanding that it is not obedient to present them and hence such criticisms are sinful and thus are dismissed out of hand. The challenge only proves the point that sin exists. For the thinking is, “You see! Here is an example of a sin in this impudent statement!”
In the same way, Sahlins’s theory would have it that any challenges are themselves symbolic, that is, not standing upon themselves or having any validity outside the symbolic system of understanding. Criticisms have their roots within the system. Any challenge to the theory is a product of the system that produced it, hence it is not valid.
So no challenges can be made; no contrary reality can intrude. Such reality structures … paradigms we can call them … are as watertight as The Matrix as seen in any of its movies. These systems are “epistemologically sealed” … they cannot be disputed or argued for no reality is acknowledged to exist outside them.
This is also not much different from the way political and national paradigms construe everything within their overarching viewpoints, so any challenges only support their contentions. In a totalitarian state which is assumed to be beneficial and superior to any other way, any challenge to it must be — just like those religious “sins” in the previous example — inherently wrong and dangerous. So, revolutions or even progress can never occur in a system where any revolutionary or contrary sentiment is subsumed under a perception of it as “terrorism.” For any shaking of the status quo is necessarily wrong and hardly necessary in a system that cannot be improved upon. Therefore, nations, political frameworks, religious theologies and their societal paradigms of control … along with cultures viewed in the total-symbolic-heritage way … are unassailable … by definition of them!
My point is that since our total biological heritage is also a “symbolic structure” — in the sense at least that it is a species-relative created reality providing analogous representations, survival-oriented metaphors only of That Which Is — we are “epistemologically sealed” as regards That Which Is and specifically in terms of understanding other known or unknown species. Our reality is symbolic and “sealed” — that is to say, cut off from all else, any other reality that might exist — prior to the cultural symbolism which creates further obfuscation between people in different cultures.
What We Can Know … Mind at Large and Levels of Reality
Let me put this all in context. It might be helpful in understanding this to mention Aldous Huxley’s (1956) way of viewing this matter. In his classic work, The Doors of Perception, he quotes Dr. C. D. Broad on the importance of considering a view of memory and sense perception, originally proposed by Bergson (1896, 1934), in which “the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative.”1
What Is Outside All Paradigms … Really Real
By way of explanation, Huxley (1956), still quoting Broad, writes, “Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.
“The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.”2
Mind-at-Large is “really real.”
Huxley (1956) adds, “According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large.
“But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.”3
This is saying that we can know virtually anything and everything. However — and notice this for it becomes increasingly relevant as we go on — there is an underlying biological rationale for what the brain will end up having us perceive. I emphasize Huxley’s point on the criterion of usefulness in determining what is normally regarded as real and true … and especially this usefulness as being relative to biological survival. For we will see how the same criterion determines the “real-world” information that is the usual purview of our sciences.
The Levels of Reality Construction
The major point I wish to make now is that we may profitably consider each level of reality construction I have been proposing — from the levels of biologically constituted realities down through the various levels of cultural constructions of reality — as levels in the diminution of reality … from Mind at Large down to what is “biologically useful.” This human characteristic of creating the reality to be lived by focusing on the specifics to the exclusion of more wholistic perspectives might, and usually does, have more “biological” usefulness.
The point I would add, by the way, is that any scientific endeavor that would seek to be anything more than merely pragmatic … and instead actually venture after truth … must undo or reverse that diminution. It must indeed be aware of the self-constructed nature of the creations with which it is normally, and inevitably, concerned. More about that in a little.
Paradigm Relativity
In any case, the upshot of all of this paradigmatic way of viewing realities, with each built upon an even deeper one, and each one following subsumed within the one previous, is that the elements … the “particles” as opposed to “fields … operating within any particular paradigm are closed to each other, “sealed.” On the other hand, standing on the basis of a “deeper,” or more encompassing, paradigm, translation, discourse, and transfer of information can truly occur.
As an example, looked at from the arena of culture, we come to the conclusion of epistemological relativism — that is, that cultures are sealed from one another; no genuine dialogue is possible across their boundaries. However, looking at these same cultures within the playing field (the paradigm or “field” … the morphogenetic field is another way of conceiving it) of the physical or biological — that is to say, standing upon those semi-brute facts of biologically constituted realities — we see that discourse, transfer, and translation occur once again.
We have an everyday example of that. This is much the same as saying that it is when we share our feelings and personal experience that we have the greatest chance of sharing across individual or cultural boundaries. It is no coincidence that these — feelings and personal experience — are to a greater extent physical and biological than “mental.”
Another way of understanding this idea of “looked at from the playing field of” or “standing upon the deeper paradigm” is as so: Whenever there is understanding between two entities — be they people, nations, societies, and, here also, cultures — it happens on the basis of common ground. That is to say, this whole idea of “sealedness” assumes actual, separate entities. But this is never ever the case. There is no such thing as a person, society, or culture that does not share some ways of thinking, experiencing, or behaving with other entities of like kind. There are no sealed units of social reality any more than there are hard and irreducible particles of physical reality.
All seemingly singular and separate units are products of our analytical mind’s tendency to “chop up” whole realities into parts that can be compared and evaluated. When actually all seeming units of anything are merely the raised or more apparent characteristics of underlying fields. In this way, elementary particles in physics have been described as “knots,” or raised parts, in underlying fields. Compare this with Bohm’s (1980) analogy of matter being “frozen light.” This thinking is applied to what we are learning about physical reality; I am contending that it can be applied equally well to understanding social realities.
Ultimate Interconnectedness
The important point is that these social realities, too, are aspects of fields which are interconnected … a web of fields that ultimately connects everything in the Universe. There is no such thing, ever, as separation, let alone “sealedness.” No such thing as hard and irreducible “particles,” whether physical, cultural, epistemological, or otherwise. Thus, when I say “standing upon” or “looked at from” I mean that standing within the realities, understandings, or cultural items held in common — metaphorically, the “fields” undergirding them — there is possibility to understand items that are nearby, related, but not shared as much … and out from there, items that are not shared at all.
In the ultimate sense, we can see how this would make even metaphysical or supernatural understandings possible between cultures. For we find that even these things have a common ground — a common core of experiences for all humans.
In the more immediate sense, it means that, for example, I can understand another person when they react to pain, which I also am subject to. So cultures are hardly epistemologically sealed. For experiential realities — which are, remember, related to biologically constituted realities — are shared, overlap, and are common, to varying degrees, even if only minimally. And that from these common understandings, less common understandings are possible, if not completely understood in some mind-meld kind of way.4
Even saying it that way, you see the flaw in the thinking about cultural relativism of the extreme sort. It assumes that cultures are bounded and separate entities, not arbitrarily delineated, changing, and fluid categories. It assumes that a culture that is shared is understood the same way by everyone within it. It assumes further that someone from a different culture might not have more in common — more common ground of experience — with someone in that culture than someone who also exists in that culture but who has little to nothing of the same kind of experiences. It is probably not coincidental that such an idea about cultures as being bounded arose at a time when cultures were much more distinct than they are today and where conflict of cultures was so extreme that actual genocides were perpetrated, as for example upon a multitude of indigenous cultures.
Incidentally, science would have already seen things this way — specifically, that all realities are interconnected on the basis of shared experience and that the addition of experiential realities to the mix satisfies so much of the theoretical problems they come up against — if they weren’t so consumed in the hundreds-of-years-old habit of eliminating subjectivity from any of their calculations and of trying to derive all findings and facts, including that of consciousness, from the workings of what is observable in physical reality, only. I mean, seriously, how can one hope to have anything important to say about consciousness within a paradigm that excludes subjectivity?
Still, it was an admirable attempt which, if it had succeeded, would have been rather interesting at least. I picture scientists rubbing rocks together furiously, attempting to have consciousness pop out, like some genie out of a bottle. lol. Or like alchemists thinking lead can be made gold through some intense effort.
However, in our postmodern world of complex multiculturalism, where folks of all cultures encounter each other everywhere and interact intimately and considerably on social media, the flaws in the thinking on cultural relativism are so readily apparent. Cultures are not sealed any more than people are, from each other. The idea that either of them are “incommensurable” — which is a fancy way of saying, cannot be compared or related across their boundaries — is just some existential nonsense rooted in lots of the pain of loneliness we all experience after birth, being taken away from our mothers.
In any case, looking at culture and shared understandings from the point of view of biologically constituted realities (or species) and even bioculturally constituted realities (cultural items arising from our common biohistorical experience as a species), we can see why it seems that biological anthropologists and primatologists are so much less bothered by issues of epistemological relativism than are cultural anthropologists.
But then, standing on these “brute” (in other words, biological) facts, we are confronted with a new relativism — that regarding the worldviews of one species over against another. We see that species are epistemologically sealed from one another and that a trans-species reality is seen to be as impossible as a transcultural one was while standing within the playing field of culture.
Thus, though each culture is epistemologically sealed in relation to Reality, it is not so in relation to other cultures … at least in a relative sense — that is, relative to our separation from Reality as Such. For all cultures of humans exist within a common biological paradigm that is concerned with all that is related to biological survivability … though not to Reality as Such. It means that cultural paradigms can, after all, be compared in relation to common species-specific factors — biological ones. We will see, as we go, how that might be a basis for cross-species understanding and communication — something I have termed biological transcendence — as well. And, by the way, that, next.
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Biological Transcendence and the Transpersonal Paradigm:
Why We Seek to Know, Usefulness and Limitations of Science, and the Challenge to Know More … Beyond “Flat Earth” Materialism
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A new paradigm emerging: the new evidence, pouring forth from our sciences, has made our common-sense materialistic assumptions about our reality as obsolete as our flat-earth ones.
“…wonder of wonders, finally in our evolution — in this very time of ours — there may be more people who are focusing on those keys to possible biological transcendence than ever before…. All of this despite the fact that within the ‘real rules’ of the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm [those anomalies] have absolutely no possibility of existing or being able to happen…. Yet they do. Similarly, within the ‘real world’ of ‘brute facts’ related to biological survivability they seemingly find no place…. Yet we stumble over them.”
A call to our sciences to embrace the awakening, which it, too, has been resisting
“…although our very survival depends on a paradigm change, or shift … it is being resisted mightily by our communities of scientific researchers. This Scientific Awakening is as much a threat to the corporate hegemony over modern culture as are the social and political Awakenings. There has been as much a battle in science over the last fifty years — a scientific culture war, if you will — as there has been the one in our societies around the world … and for the same reasons. Paradigm shift threatens the status quo.…”
“The crises of our time, it becomes increasingly clear, are the necessary impetus for the revolution now under way. And once we understand nature’s transformative powers, we see that it is our powerful ally, not a force to be feared or subdued.” — Thomas Kuhn
“It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers.” — Thomas Kuhn
“The historian of science may be tempted to claim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. Even more important, during revolutions, scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before. It is rather as if the professional community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well.” — Thomas Kuhn
“‘Normal’ science, in Kuhn’s sense, exists. It is the activity of the non-revolutionary, or more precisely, the not-too-critical professional: of the science student who accepts the ruling dogma of the day … in my view the ‘normal’ scientist, as Kuhn describes him, is a person one ought to be sorry for.… He has been taught in a dogmatic spirit: he is a victim of indoctrination.… I can only say that I see a very great danger in it and in the possibility of its becoming normal … a danger to science and, indeed, to our civilization. And this shows why I regard Kuhn’s emphasis on the existence of this kind of science as so important.” — Karl Raimund Popper
“Well-established theories collapse under the weight of new facts and observations which cannot be explained, and then accumulate to the point where the once useful theory is clearly obsolete.” — Al Gore
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Why We Seek to Know
So, what can we know? And why should we know it? I mean, in view of all that has been said so far, one might ask, if one cannot have any truly accurate conception or even “sense” of what is really real, why then bother to know anything?
Ordinary Reality is Useful
The answer? Well, we bother to know because it is a helpful part of our species-specific worldview to do so. Employing the metaphor I have been using, they are the “rules” of the “game” we have chosen in coming here. And it is nice to know them. More specifically, as humans, we have evolved, as nearly as we can determine, through a process of natural selection based on survival. We are, consequently, the end-product of a biological drive to exist, to live — in all that may biologically, or otherwise, connote. Hence, that which we “know,” in our most refined science and in our daily lives, is that which is, or has been, in some way useful to the biological existence of our species.
This so-called “real-world” information is important because, then, it relates to our very biological aliveness. It has worth, and it has value in that. That which comprises our species-world — as opposed to the “World-In-Itself” — is extremely relevant, indeed, to everything that we think of as living and existing … for our species.
The point I make, however, is that our senses and our sciences — which are extensions of our senses — are not ultimately in any one-to-one relationship to That Which Is. And that our refined as well as cruder perceptions of reality are bioculturally relative. They are even more biologically relative than they are culturally relative in Marshall Sahlins’s allegedly extreme theory.
We see that there are therefore levels of applicability of “knowledge.” We might think of these as paradigms. But as surely as there are cultural paradigms, there are biological paradigms. I am saying that every configuration of spirit that we perceive in the physical world as a species, with each a different biology, represents a separate paradigm for interpreting reality.1
Usefulness and Limitations of Science
In this way we see why investigation of this Newtonian-Cartesian universe that we perceive with our senses and that we have constructed with the aid of our sciences is important. For it can provide additional data that has the possibility of being biologically useful.
Contrary to the conclusion from the total-symbolic-heritage view, science can be seen as more than “mere ethnoscience.” That is to say, science is not, as those critics claim, merely one more part of a culture and with no more claim to validity than any view about the same things from another culture.
Levels of Usefulness, Paradigm Comparisons
It seems to me that science has a greater, though not ultimate, claim to validity to the extent it includes and integrates more experiential “facts” in its reality constructions. And the degree of scientific validity — from good ethnoscience to bad ethnoscience — would be equal to the number of experiential facts it includes and integrates.
If we were talking about people instead of cultures, we would be saying that cultures, to the extent that they integrate more, have greater “ego strength.” Or as I insist it be called, more self. Cultural constructions, including science, that include more facts of existence, rather than freaking out in relation to them … which means, not seeing them, repressing, running away from or ignoring them, or simply not knowing them … have, like persons with more “ego strength” or self, more validity, more “reality.” Cultural constructions can therefore be compared, although such comparisons do not render any one of them, including science, Ultimate Truth, only “righter” in relation to the others, that is to say, more correct.
This is no different from saying, incidentally, that someone who “knows” more things — in terms of particular experiences or experiential things — is likely to be “righter” in their pronouncements than someone who knows little, or less … who is “less experienced” in those matters. Only we are comparing cultures, cultural matrices, if you will, instead of people.
The same would be true if we were to compare biological entities, with one caveat: Since we are human, we simply cannot know how the amount of reality that we are able to perceive compares with the amount any other planetmates are able to apprehend. And that is a huge difference. For as I pointed out a couple chapters back, it is just as likely our brainpower is being used to keep out reality as that it is being used to include it. This is the brain-as-reducing-valve theory. And in this case, the further down the chain of biological complexity and size of brain, the more likely the species is apprehending more reality … though not our reality, or what we humans would be able to see as reality … than bigger-brained and more complex organisms. But, again, that is jumping ahead.
Now, though, following up this idea that apprehending more is “smarter,” what follows is that whoever accepts the “larger,” more encompassing, more inclusive perspective is necessarily the one who has more “power” ultimately; in that this one’s view allows for more accurate predictive and remedial ability. That is why, eventually if not immediately, more inclusive paradigms and their proponents attain dominance. And by power I mean what it is that emanates from a perspective being more useful. And by “useful,” I mean that its effectiveness — i.e., bringing about what is intended — is greater. And that’s all I mean by that. Despite all the flaws of science, it still has incorporated more experiential — “true” or empirical — facts into it so as to make it capable of the technological wonders of the modern world — in medicine, in electronics, in space exploration. No other cultural paradigm has had enough potency — has embraced enough of actually true, empirical-experiential realities — to accomplish as much.
This is not to say, by the way, that new paradigms do always include all facts that old paradigms include. Or, another way of saying that, it does not mean that all facts not included in a subsequent, more “powerful,” paradigm are not real or are not true. As just one example, many Native Americans’ views included some “facts” — good, experientially and perceptually based “objective” (verifiable) facts — that were excluded from the paradigms of the Western conquerors who superseded them.
No, this is just to say that more powerful paradigms are ones containing a greater number of perceptually and scientifically based — albeit human-specific but therefore “objectively” true — facts. It makes no claims as to the relative importance of those facts that are included to those that are excluded; let alone to the value, in terms of moral implications, of one as compared to the other.
Paradigm Clash, the Force Behind Evolution
To continue, then, since persons holding more inclusive paradigms are more “powerful,” eventually if not immediately, their values are more likely to be predominant in that they would be chosen by natural selection. If we would slide back our anthropocentric lenses for a minute and attempt to view all other species as simply other problem-solving beings who, as measured by their success, were employing either better or worse paradigms — that is to say, including more or less experiential “facts” — we might say that this is one way of appreciating the force behind continual evolution for all species.
So science has a claim to validity in relation to our species’ biological survivability. But as emphasized earlier it has no claim in relation to anything other than that. Its truth is but a limited one. Its truth is relative to a biological context, a specific one, that of Homo sapiens.
A Challenge to Know More
Indeed, this fact of limitation needs to be emphasized more heartily in science today. Anthropological thinking has created a legacy where we have been made fully aware of the relativity of culture and the limitations of culturally constituted facts — those “institutional facts” referred to earlier. It seems an equal and parallel effort is warranted — from the ranks of ecosophists, consciousness researchers, ecopsychologists, transpersonalists, and others in the know — to point out the limitations and relativity of our species’ biologically constituted facts — those (not so) “brute facts” of Anscombe and D’Andrade.
The New Evidence and the New Researchers
For unless we do this, unless we keep in mind the limitations of our reality constructions — including our “scientific” ones — we have absolutely no way of understanding certain incorrigible and “biologically useless” facts that intrude upon our “real world” and that are frightened into the light of our biological parameters by our scientific rummaging through the bushes. These “useless” side effects of our scientific enterprise may indeed contain the keys to our venturing forth, to at least some small degree, beyond the biological real-world confines of our predecessors. For just as we have seen that standing on a deeper, more encompassing paradigm than the cultural makes transcultural discourse and understanding possible, so also standing on one deeper than the biological may bring trans-biological understanding closer.
Following the reasoning I have been presenting, one can speculate that the prospects for bridging the boundaries between species — of both the known and “unknown” variety … as well as between our physical reality and other possible “non-physical” ones — are good. That is, if we can find a way to look at that physical/biological — that Newtonian-Cartesian — level from a deeper grounding in spiritual, in transpersonal reality. In fact, the evidence from LSD and entheogenic-psychedelic research, some spiritual literature, and various aspects of “new age” phenomena that are washing up on the shores of a variety of disciplines is exactly to that effect.
Indeed, wonder of wonders, finally in our evolution — in this very time of ours — there are more people who are focusing on those keys to possible biological transcendence than ever before. Additionally, these researchers and seekers are scientifically, empirically, and experientially researching, eliciting, and perceiving many such incorrigible and “useless” phenomena and events. Most importantly of all, they are finding that these events can be intersubjectively validated — can be intertemporally and, indeed, empirically confirmed, demonstrated, and/or significantly correlated, so that they can be proven to have intersubjective and/or replicable validity. All of this despite the fact that within the “real rules” of the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm they have absolutely no possibility of existing or being able to happen…. Yet they do. Similarly, within the “real world” of “brute facts” related to biological survivability they seemingly find no place…. Yet we stumble over them.
If all this were not enough, we find that these incorrigible facts provide more than a pathway to a glimpse outside our biological blinders, more than a puncture in our epistemological seal, and more than a transcendence of our biological paradigm. We find that this information from “outside” the table of our biological board game is less biologically useless than was thought from within the borders of that board game. We find, indeed, that our species’ assessment through natural selection of that which exists beyond it was less than perfect. We find that we are on the verge of re-evaluating that assessment and — to the extent it is possible and driven (once again) by biological survivability — of expanding our biological-cultural constructions to admit and give meaning to some of them. Indeed, this book is nothing if not an attempt in that direction.
The Transpersonal Paradigm Emerging
Stanislav Grof is one such pioneer in this sort of “useless” research.2 Though he is by no means alone, I mention him in that he has achieved far more than simply demonstrating the validity of particular incorrigible facts that turn our familiar, comfy, Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm on its ear. For, additionally, Grof (1985) puts forth a model, a framework for a new paradigm to make sense of them. Bringing together the physicist Bohm’s (1980) model of the universe and the neurosurgeon Pribram’s (1971, 1976) model of the brain, he presents a holonomic “perspective” or “theory” based upon the idea of a hologram. The important aspect of this perspective is that it allows the inclusion and understanding of these new experiential facts, yet it does not contradict the Newtonian-Cartesian view of the world. The model includes the older paradigm, interpenetrating it thoroughly with something approaching a “field model” (my terms) of the universe.
The combined model explains the phenomena of everyday life, of “normal” science, as well as a huge and increasingly accumulating body of unexplainable data and evidence that is continually erupting out of the “new” natural sciences … in physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, anthropology, and psychology, especially transpersonal psychology; out of the human potential phenomenon and new, experiential psychotherapeutic and growth techniques, such as primal therapy and holotropic breathwork; out of psychedelic, consciousness, entheogenic, and brain … especially brain waves … research; out of a half-century-long now Western fascination with and intense engagement with Eastern world-view, philosophy, and spiritual practice; and out of an equally long and parallel interest in the paranormal and the occult.
The holonomic (combined) model is explanatory and predictive. Yet it does so without having to exclude known, observable, empirically validated facts and evidence — without undeservedly casting upon them the light of nonexistence or, worse still, ignoring them, simply because their validity gives rise to a very human “uncomfortableness.” Such data trigger a certain insecurity in that they undermine a familiar, habitual, and thoroughly ego-invested commitment to a view of reality. And as I point out in more detail shortly, this data triggers, in lay and scientific persons alike, the pain of unresolved traumas from our early life — the facing, embracing, and then transcendence of which is the purpose of this book.
However, the purposes of this chapter do not allow an elaboration of either the new evidence or the new paradigm that I have discussed and for that I refer the reader to references being mentioned. Additional good sources are a few of my own works, specifically, Experience Is Divinity (2013), Falls from Grace (2014), and The Secret Life of Stones (2016), wherein I have detailed elaborate overviews of such a paradigm and indicated some of the evidence and research supporting it.
Beyond these works, a good example is found in Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death and Transcendence in Psychotherapy (1985). There, Stanislav Grof presents in the first chapter — which comprises ninety-one pages — an insightful analysis of paradigms and historical process along with an exhaustive sampling of the new evidence from the array of sciences, sociohistorical trends, and cultural processes that I have been mentioning. In addition, Grof (1985) constructs a thorough presentation, delineation, and analysis of the holographic model of a new paradigm. I recommend those pages highly.
On-line at youtube, I recommend a video, titled “Holographic Universe,” which is an excellent overview of the model and makes the clear case that science has most definitely overturned the materialistic paradigm which birthed it hundreds of years ago.3
All that being said, I wish to point out that the recent and rapid emergence of the field of transpersonal psychology itself is pushed by an inability to continually disregard the evidence of our own senses that does not fit with the mechanical paradigms we were taught.
The point I am making in this chapter is that this new evidence, which is pouring forth on the cutting edges of our modern sciences, has made the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm as obsolete as the flat-earth one. It has allowed … it has required … such a book as this one.
Beyond “Flat Earth” Materialism
All this being true, you might wonder why this new evidence and the expanded paradigm it reveals is not more well known in science, if not even adopted by now. There are sad reasons for that.
Why We Refuse to Know
For one thing, the mere existence of this new data — these keys to biological transcendence, these formerly inexplicable anomalies of science — trigger a certain insecurity in that they undermine a familiar, habitual, and thoroughly ego-invested commitment to a view of reality.
I have noticed a fear and hostility toward the new paradigm and its evidence, even among self-professedly open-minded and fieldwork-seasoned academicians and Ph.Ds. After observing and inquiring into this reaction for years, I have consistently uncovered a pattern of irrationality that associates, somehow, all this new stuff with things like having to go to church as a child, hell-fiery father gods, and Pat Robertson. Though nothing could be further from the truth, they confuse this paradigm with right-wing, Tea Party–type politics and evangelical religions. They think it is connected to the attacks on the theory of evolution, the idea of Intelligent Design, and the drives to install Creationism in our schools.
So these people harbor the mistaken notion that spiritual or transpersonal realities have something to do with organized religion, when they are quite different and, indeed, often at odds with each other.4
To Freak, or Not to Freak. That is the Real Question
Furthermore, these scientists and intellectuals are wont to “freak out” at this new information, as I mentioned above. Now, you might wonder why I would use the term “freaking out” here. Perhaps you think me lazy in resorting to the vernacular. However, I employ those words consciously. For what we do in our sciences, as well as our philosophies and psychologies, is not really that different from what the Tibetan Book of the Dead says about misunderstanding the “wrathful” deities one encounters after death … or what someone in a nonordinary state of consciousness might do upon encountering painful unconscious material on an entheogenic drug or during a session of experiential psychotherapy.
The book of the dead advises us continually that all the horrific things seen at that time, between lives, are insubstantial and are essentially just projections of one’s own intellect. It urges one to not run away in fear from these horrifying entities. Remember that in a similar situation when one encounters such horrifying material in an entheogenic experience and mentally runs away into overpowering fear, it is called “freaking out.” Whereas the Tibetan Book of the Dead instead urges the entity in the afterlife to realize the roots of these elements inside oneself, and thereupon, liberation is achieved.
Which is the same thing that needs to be done in life. This is the essence of primal therapy, in fact: to face the horror and pain and feel its origins inside oneself (resulting from past experience) and thereby to remove its power over us as being real in the present context. Indeed, this is exactly what I did at the age of twenty-two in a similar situation — though not while using drugs, incidentally — and it changed my life forever. For it set me on the path of primal therapy.
What happened is that psychic material came up in me while I was alone at work, at night; and my reaction, at the onset, had me fearful. Instead of “freaking out,” however, and remembering what I had read in Janov’s book, The Primal Scream, about feelings, I simply switched my focus from my head and what it was thinking, its fearful thoughts, down to my body and what it was feeling. As soon as I did that, the fear no longer drove panicky thoughts. Instead I discovered that what was actually going on and what was pushing the fear was an incredible belly of hurt inside, which I had not been acknowledging. You see, my wife and I had split, just recently and upon my initiation, though I still loved her (that’s another story). And though I was convinced my boat was steady as I rowed forward into my career, this unexpected anxiety arose that night.
For though it was my decision to part, I still had many feelings about not having in my life a woman who was my first love and who I had shared everything with for five years, which was nearly a fourth of my life at that point. I had not been attending to my feelings reaction, my body’s natural reaction, to such a momentous change, and loss, in my life. Looking into my body that way that night I began sobbing deeply, facing, for a change, this huge turn in my life.
Remembering Janov’s words, I let myself go with that and I continued crying, then. And then I let it happen, as it wanted to do, when I got home and for what ended up being two more weeks, all day every day. For the separation from my wife was not an event in isolation; no event is. It was connected to all kinds of feelings from events of gap or separation with many women in my life … especially my sisters, my grandmother, most importantly my mother. It turned out I needed to process, not just what was going on at that time, but other older separations with which it was similar. Which also had not been acknowledged at the time. For I had done what everyone else did: When heartaches and disappointments happened, I turned from them and moved forward, anyway. After all, that’s what’s called “being strong,” right? That’s “ego strength,” correct? *sarcasm*
The upshot is that beginning that night, primaling spontaneously, I was bathed continually in my first real feeling experiences … lots of them and virtually uninterrupted for fourteen days. Upon doing that one simple thing at work that night of looking within, into my body and its feelings and sensations; not without, as in scrutinizing the world and trying to make sense of the experience intellectually, trying to “figure it out”; my life changed and I understood what “feeling feelings” was all about. “Taking back” one’s projections is the way the book of the dead phrases what I did. There is still a lot more to that story of mine, which I will be happy to share another time.
In any case, since this point of not “freaking out” when encountering unfamiliar and seemingly threatening realities-data-information and instead “taking back” one’s projections is so central to the message of this book, I thought it important to expound a little on it. For what I am trying to help the reader accomplish in this book, at all Veils or levels of obfuscation, is to realize the insubstantiality of the mental constructs, or Veils, which arise from the experiential milestones occurring at each level. And my point right now is that the reaction of our scientists to the information arising from these areas formerly put under categories like the paranormal, the occult, the supernatural, the spiritual, the religious, and such, is no different from the person running in fear after death from her or his own projections, or someone in a nonordinary state of consciousness doing the same.
In all these cases, it is the fear of the unknown, in unconscious memory of early pain, which has its roots in the traumatic events we encounter at the level of each of the Veils, which obscures our ability to realize truth. Or as I like to phrase it, echoing Jung, “One sees an angel as a devil until one is wholly enough to recognize him.” See also Chapter 34 of The Secret Life of Stones, titled, “One at First Sees a God as a Demon: Why We Crucify Our Angels and the Perinatal Veil on the Paranormal … If You Don’t Hear the Heavenly Song, You Need More Spiritual Experience.” Consider this book your invitation to become “wholly” enough to hear that “heavenly song”; hopefully what I write here will help you in that. The result — freedom from fear and realization of one’s essential Divinity — are kinda worth it.
A Call to Know Instead
Keep in mind, this new evidence and new paradigm is not at all at odds, let alone at war with — as much of the constructs of fundamentalist theology are — our traditional scientific ways or findings. For, similar to the way in which the Earth is flat in the particular environs of one’s daily life, and for a considerable distance surrounding, the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm likewise has its limited usefulness. Yet if we are to get moving on our species’ continuing adventure into discovering the nature of Reality, we must acknowledge its limitations.
What bodes ill against this happening is an incredible, Jupiterian weight of egoic, economic, and time investment in the old materialist, the Newtonian-Cartesian, paradigm that pushes most people to insist upon its ultimate validity. Historically, this has been the unfortunate fate of every emergent paradigm facing the entrenched one. Decades and even centuries have often been required while the new worldview has been put “on hold” until entire, invested generations have left the scene … totally regardless of the quality, quantity, or indisputability of the new evidence.5 What a waste! Especially in that when the new ideas are finally accepted and incorporated the effect is that of inspiring a renaissance of new frontiers of research and theoretical enterprise and thus a surging powerfully forth of the released creative tide.6
Let me state emphatically, in the face of such dire historical precedents, that there is no inherent insecurity involved in the new paradigm, or inherent danger (for folks who think that in opening up to their unconscious they will be overwhelmed), or inherent trigger for anxiety (for those thinking that in doing that they will go insane), or even necessary economic disadvantage … assuming one has the capacity to change with new developments and thought. So why do we not, then, get on with the incorporation of this new, heretofore unexplainable, data and with the creation of new paradigm models … not, of necessity, Grof’s or my own … for making sense of it?
I say this in full awareness of, among other things, an anthropology colleague’s argument to me thirty years ago. In his book, which included interpretations of rituals of the Kwakiutl people of the Pacific Northwest, he described ever more examples of people going through circular forms and structures of various kinds. He gave elaborate interpretations leaning heavily on Freud’s theory of early orality. He asserted that the meaning of the rituals of pushing the body through holes or circles had to do with the intake of food. Yet I was aware that he knew about Stanislav’s Grof’s work and had read him.
So I asked him why he did not see these examples, involving the Kwakiutl people ever and again ritually putting their bodies through circular apparatuses, as birth and rebirth symbols. Anyone in prenatal and perinatal psychology, going back all the way to Otto Rank a hundred years ago, would have. He told me that it was going to be hard enough getting those in his field of psychological anthropology to hear what he was saying using psychoanalytic terminology, let alone to go introducing Grof’s ideas about birth.
I have wondered ever since, how many academics are fitting their findings to the paradigms that exist, with personal professional considerations in mind, rather than in mind of the one I would think should be determinant: Whether or not something is true! Or at least what is as close as possible as they know to being true. I can only wonder, in a capitalist system — with its dog-eat-dog mentality for status and income — how many academics, scientists, and theorists are conforming their findings to established paradigms; scientific progress be damned … halted! Certainly, politicians do that, have we all become that? Perhaps these academics are sucking up to former mentors, or they do it out of fear of loss of grants, hiring, or tenureship. Keep this in mind for when we get to Chapter 37, “The Secret of Men.” It sorta all fits together, these different things. It seems the new paradigm I am presenting has long been in the bin, waiting for someone to dare to put it all together and bring it out.
So I wonder, why not rise and reach forth to new and inclusive thought that embraces the facts of existence? Instead of cleaving to a kind of thinking that requires either a psychic numbing to the avalanche of new evidence or a thick and sturdy guard against information from all but thoroughly sanctioned and sanitized, perfectly safe and riskless, or intractably bureaucratized sources?
I must point out that by now many scientists, of diverse fields, have abandoned the old model long ago and, at this point, consider its inadequacy to be well-nigh common knowledge. Having been over to the new paradigm a while, they feel it to be familiar territory; they find it useful (after all!), stable, workable, even pleasurable … and fun! … terrain. They await the rest of us in the adventure of splicing or merging our insights about an explanatory framework that has room for the evidence of the new techniques and sciences; and thereby blowing away the door jammed, opening it wide to the next new phase of discovery of the nature of reality that is called the scientific enterprise.
Scientific awakening is without doubt as crucial for paradigm shift as are the personal, social, and political awakenings, which are now unfolding. Of course, you know by now or you will soon, this book is an aspect of all three of those efforts.
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Paradigm Dolls and the Doors of Perception:
Cultural Transcendence and What We Could Know … Only by Leaving Can a Fish Know It Lives in Water
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“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is … infinite.” — William Blake
Why everything appears infinite when the doors of perception are cleansed: “Mind at Large” and the awakening
Each of us is potentially Mind at Large …
when perception is cleansed, all kinds of nonordinary things happen.
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Now, let us ask the same question — Why do we seek to know? — in a slightly different way. I have been saying that we want to know basically because it is biologically helpful to do so. It contributes to our physical survival, whether as an individual or a group. However, I want to ask in this chapter why should we bother to know anything outside of the biologically useful, outside of our biologically constituted parameters for understanding and determining value. Is there any reason to seek to know anything outside of the pragmatic? Lol, is there any reason to be reading this book or for me to be writing it?
Our Knowledge Is Useful, Not Revelatory
Reviewing, where we have arrived in this book is that the cumulative efforts in our modern sciences point to a symbolic nature to our reality. Discoveries in psychology, physics, especially quantum physics, biology, and anthropology have brought a standstill to our beliefs that we can know anything with any certainty, as their forerunners earlier in science were wont to do. Our latest understandings are not about what we know, but about the fact that ultimately we do not know. More even than that, they bring the harsh revelation that regardless our trying, we are unable ever to know.
So, we cannot know ultimately, but as we discussed in the last chapter, it is helpful to know the rules of the game. That is, that within the paradigm in which we operate, there are potent, beneficial reasons for learning them. These relate to their biological usefulness. The theory I advanced, bringing forth from Huxley and Bergson, was that the Universe is essentially Mind at Large, or what I call, throughout this book, Divinity; and that we are part of that. That we are “capable of remembering all that has ever happened” and “of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe,” as Huxley phrased it. But that “in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive.”
Models of Consciousness
There’s the game, and there’s those rules of the game. Aldous Huxley is saying that in the Form state we have a particular focus different from what is possible for us, for it is immensely reduced down from what is potential for us. Quoting Huxley, to live in this world “Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system.” That the result is only that which is helpful for our survival.
The other analogy being used in science, a more recent one, is to compare the brain to a television receiver. Physicists and consciousness researchers explain that the idea that the brain “produces” consciousness was faulty. That would be like a TV coming up with the shows that play on it. Some scientists are now explaining the way the brain works as being similar to the way your television receives the signal — which would be consciousness or the contents of consciousness in the form of the shows that are possible to you, which in theory would be an infinite number of them. Then the television packages that signal and interfaces with you to view it. An important aspect of this, however, is that the television also selects the channel, that will be viewed, out of many … and in terms of consciousness, out of a virtual infinity of possibilities. I would add that the brain–television receiver has something to do with the “quality of the reception,” as well.
In any case, this is virtually the way I explained it initially in this part, Veil One. In Chapter 10, I pointed out that what our senses (the actual television hardware) do firstly is scan and sort through a vastness of experiential possibilities. In the same way, a television takes the signal it receives from the coaxial cable feeding it and selects from it in line with what channel the viewer has selected. Then our brain concocts it, I explained. This would be analogous to the way the television takes that program, produced and created elsewhere, and turns it into the electrical messages another part of the TV can read and re-create in its interfacing mechanisms with you … in its TV screen, its speaker. The TV takes the signal of the story or program produced elsewhere and turns it into something on the television screen that is viewable.
And finally, I pointed out, the brain interprets it. Which, in the television analogy, would be that which determines the resolution, color, shadings, and so on, which make it clear and understandable to the viewer. This last I compared with culture. The second could be compared to our biocultural realities. The first, the scanning and then selecting, could be compared to our biologically constituted realities. And the viewer selecting the channel and show to watch would be the person selecting the life to live in reincarnating.
In any case, this television analogy is a more refined way of explaining brain-as-reducing valve. However, it fails to emphasize the aspect the earlier analogy did: Which is that whatever signal the television picks up and re-creates to be humanly experienced is selected out of a vastness of what is there or could be. That is to say, there exists a virtual infinity of scripts and stories containing an infinity of experiences and information, analogous to the infinity of possible “channels.” And that the brain is not just “selecting,” but it is also “rejecting” … or eliminating a universe of other possibilities. This is the way the reducing-valve analogy stresses something that is important in this chapter: Which is that there is more “out there.”
I must say, it gets annoying the way our anthropocentric bias suffuses everything we assert. You might say our bias is part of the television that is selecting down from what is possible again. For the television receiver analogy, while more elegant, is also geared to be more palatable. For it panders to human ego to say that the brain is accomplishing something, producing something, in relaying the message or program. The analogy would have us seeing the brain as taking the signal and “doing” something with it to create a channel or viewable program. It still appears to be a brain “creating” something out of random and incoherent data. Whereas actually it is only selecting and tuning into something far beyond itself; that is to say, what is being produced “elsewhere.”
More importantly, the television analogy manages to avoid noticing that the process involves leaving out an infinity of What Is, as well, in doing that. The reducing-valve theory emphasizes there are other possibilities for perception, indeed an infinity of them. Whereas the television-receiver analogy is slanted toward having a brain that creates something out of what would otherwise be incomprehensible to a human.
Both, no doubt, are true. We can say equally that our biologically constituted realities create the reality — the rules of the game — out of an infinity of what is or could be, so enabling us to function and to have that “biologically useful” information needed, which is the selected channel. Whereas they are also restrictive of all other possibilities or potentialities.
What We Could Know
While the previous chapter emphasized “why we seek to know” and pointed out there are biological survival considerations involved; this chapter will emphasize “what we could know” and focus on what else is Real and True and what value that information left out might have for us. Here is a place where we can better see what is revealed in removing the first Veil, anthropocentrism, across our windows of perception. We begin talking about the benefits, of which we otherwise are not aware; and we begin envisioning a view of the horizons beyond, which formerly we could not even imagine.
The previous chapter stressed that a picture is created on the screen. This chapter will focus on the fact that there is much more, equally or more true and valid, which the picture on the screen is leaving out. It focuses on what that might be that is left out, and it evaluates it.
We have gone from, in Chapter 13, “why we know not” and “what we can know.”
To “why we seek to know” despite that, in the last chapter, Chapter 14.
In this Chapter 15, we will look into what follows from that, which is, “what we could know,” “how we could know more,” and “what would be better to know.”
You will see that “Species Superiority and Dominion … Anthropocentrism,” Veil One of this book, will wrap up, in the next chapter, on what everyone will be thinking at that point. Which is, “how we might come to know.”
How We Could Know More
So, we seek to know because it is useful to our biological survival to know. And that which we “know,” in our most refined science and in our daily lives, is that which is, or has been, in some way useful to the biological existence of our species. Our sciences have led us to learn that what we call reality is what we have found to be useful for us as a species, but that it is not necessarily what is True and is certainly not all that is true or real. So we find that the Reality of It All or the All That Is gets reduced down from the immensity, indeed the infinity, of what It is, to the mere snippet of It that we have found to be biologically useful. And from there It is further reduced to what is useful to us as individuals at a specific time in a specific place.
You will see increasingly as we continue that from there it is reduced, by the inevitable traumas of early life, to what reality we can live with, without being overwhelmed with Pain. It is our job after that — something which we are attempting in this book — to reverse all that, to pull back all those Veils covering Reality and regain what we lost.
However let’s now consider the other implication of Huxley-Broad’s theory. For Huxley (1956) points out, “When this is reversed by various methods, and the brain is itself inhibited from its task of reducing awareness so that Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen.”1
“Biologically Useless Things Start to Happen”
So, if we wish to know not merely what is practical but what is actually True or Reality — as I am attempting to do in these books, Dance of the Seven Veils, and for that matter throughout The Path of Ecstasy Series — we need to go way beyond the smattering of facts thrown up by our ordinary senses and the sciences that are extensions of them. There are levels of that diminution of Reality — from All That Is or Mind at Large down through to what the individual thinks to be true. I have been describing them as biologically constituted, bioculturally constituted, culturally constituted, and individually constituted realities.
So to know what is True, beyond merely what is practical; what is helpful; what is powerful for advancing and dominating in this game, on this planet, during this slice of time …
in order to transcend those constituted realities; in order to achieve “biological transcendence”; in order to take a step “out of Form,” so to speak; to go outside our static state; to go ec-static …
we need to reverse those reductions in true understanding.
Helping in that effort is what Dance of the Seven Veils is about. At least, that is to say, in this work the attempt is made to bring forward for inspection the cognitive changes, the mistakes in thinking, the obvious cognitive blinders; and in doing so to pull them away from one’s eyes and ways of thinking.…
However, nothing put in words — this book or any other or any lecture or youtube presentation or seminar talk — can bring about the changes that only experiences can. As this book continues to point out, it is only an experiential route that can be fruitful and transformative. Yet as I also emphasize, words and concepts — and especially overstandings and paradigms made visible — are maps on that experiential journey. And when those overstandings and maps are known and understood, they can have us going back to our life experience with a better orientation, with more fruitful ideas of where to expend one’s efforts, with helpful insights about additional things to notice about where one is — all of which can contribute to the quality of, or can maximize the positive results of, one’s experiential efforts.
At any rate, to this end, we continue….
What Would Be Better to Know
We find that in doing this reversal — even here, only at Veil One — some startling things are revealed.
Paradigm Dolls
To begin, from the perspective of each greater awareness, each more limited perspective becomes understandable and the different ones of those perspectives can be compared. You might say that in the China Doll construction of the universe of knowing, or overstandings, each larger doll is more likely to understand all the other dolls it contains, but will likely vastly misconstrue what the larger doll or dolls would be like within which it is contained. Substitute overstandings or paradigms for dolls, now.
Incidentally, the fact that an included paradigm will misunderstand its including, more encompassing ones — the ones in which it is contained — explains why folks operating in the old Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm are totally unable to understand the transpersonal paradigm, as I was complaining in the last chapter. You might compare them to soldiers not having a clue what the generals are thinking. So not knowing the overall, not simply immediate, reasons why they are doing what they are doing, the value of it, let alone any other options than to do what they have been trained and told to do, they are invariably wrong about what is really going on.
Cultural Transcendence
However, you ask how this works for encompassing paradigms comprehending its included ones? The encompassing ones would be the “generals,” in the example above.
Okay, we know, for example, that it is difficult for one individual to truly understand another. Nonetheless, standing within a knowledge of psychology in general, we have a better understanding of another and we can compare one individual’s reality with another and come up with meaningful and true conclusions, even comparisons and evaluations. That is, indeed, why we have the science of psychology in the first place.
However at the level of cultures, a similar thing happens. Anthropologists come necessarily to the conclusion that another culture cannot truly be understood by someone standing in a different culture. Just as one individual cannot exactly understand another’s reality, it is even more impossible for someone from one culture to be able to truly view the world through the lenses or worldview of those born into another culture. In our example, this would be akin to soldiers with separate orders — being only on a “need to know” basis in this hierarchy of understandings — each not knowing why the other is doing what he or she is doing.
However, here again, we can have a better understanding of each culture and can even compare cultures somewhat when coming from the perspective of our common human biology. For all cultures must relate to the nature of our body and its abilities, senses, and capabilities. All cultures make constructions about, around, and from the particular biological frame that humans have, so cultures can be compared at least in relation to those commonalities of humans.
This would be like the one higher in command who gives the orders, in our example, knowing much more clearly how the actions of each of the soldiers fit into and facilitate each other. The encompassing paradigm clearly perceives the relations of its included elements, but not the reverse.
This means more than just that cultures — when operating from a more encompassing paradigm such as the biology they have in common — can be compared in relation to biological realities like birth and death. For it is even more important and instructive to compare them to more basic realities of human biology such as pain, pleasure, happiness, liberty, and so on. All humans feel and have concepts about these things. There are common human feelings beyond those, too. And following along the lines of my argument so far, we can say that some cultures can be considered to be superior, based upon the way those biological items are handled.
This is not merely theoretical, but has practical implications. You will see how important that becomes when in the next part, Veil Two, we look into the various ways cultures handle the transition into adulthood for its members, through its rites of passage. Some can clearly be seen to be “better” than others.
How can we make these judgments, you ask? Well, since we are operating within a biological paradigm to begin with — one that is necessitated by the fact that we are human, and we find that what knowledge we have is because it is biologically useful — we have to say that implies that life is a value inherent in our paradigm. “Biologically useful,” broken down, means that a fact, or piece of knowledge, lends itself to greater survivability of a biological organism … it furthers, augments, or enhances the life of it.
Now, having life as a value (another way of saying “biologically useful”), we can extrapolate from that, that since life is impeded, reduced, and eventually eliminated by pain, that reduction of pain is a value. This would not always be the case, for a particular pain might eliminate the need for a greater pain, which would be even more life-negating. A prick of a needle, which is injecting a cure or an inoculation, might be a pain that has value if it avoids a greater pain of an illness.
But beyond that, since we are talking about paradigms, and biocultural sets of understanding, this is about knowledge. And greater knowledge has a value, as I was saying above, in that true and actual greater knowledge or encompassing systems facilitate greater power, greater life, and greater longevity. Another way of saying that … lol … is that the general no doubt lives, the soldiers, well, not so much. With this in mind, some pains might actually be life-affirming if they lead to enhancing those values involving nurturing of life. In the case of the general, the stress and struggle of attaining that rank, while painful, might be life-affirming in that this man or woman will not have to be on a battlefield, later.
We only get confused by these things because we have managed to concoct, with civilization, religions and theologies in which these human values of reduction of pain, reduction of suffering, increase of life, increase of pleasure and felicity in life, increase of life fulfillment and enjoyment, increase of life span, and so on, are put on their head. Whether we are talking about a pleasurable activity like sexuality or any number of satisfying life experiences, they are irrelevant to many Western theologies, and often they are demonized … they are considered sinful.
How this is accomplished is by postulating another time, after death, in which the pain and suffering we experience now, or the earlier death or reduced life expectancy, will lead to greater pleasure, “life,” and so on, later, in an afterlife. Keep in mind that even in this, we see that humans, regardless their stripes, are unable to think of any value other than what has to do with happiness; yet when that happiness happens is what is tweaked, with religions.
In this kind of thinking, the suffering, even the facilitation of death, of this world is much like that inoculation — a pain that will prevent a greater pain later, after death. In the soldier-general example, religion would have the soldier thinking that to die on a battlefield would be better than having the safety the general enjoys, for by so dying, one achieves heaven. Apparently, suicide bombers, for one, have actually that motivation.
In the case of sexuality, theologies would have men thinking that by forgoing romantic relationship and sexual union, however miserable, meaningless, and shallow one’s life becomes thereby … or would have women thinking that by undergoing and later inflicting on another the incredible pain of a clitoridectomy during adolescence … one’s reduced and wasteland of a life, like the prick of an inoculation, is worth the pain of it for the greater happiness to be achieved thereby in heaven.
The point is that when you concoct a pain in the afterlife that is of the greatest magnitude and of the longest duration (eternal) … you know I am talking about hell here … you can justify all kinds of horrible and painful actions in life. You can have men thinking they are being “life”-affirming through following orders and killing other humans in war. You can have women rationalizing the pain and reduced life consequent of a clitoridectomy as being a ticket to an afterlife paradise. And, indeed, such horrors — meaning such affronts to life and such justifications, using religion, of incredible pain as being holy — has been done. Witness the Inquisition as just one example.
Nonetheless, the problem is that, looked at in the broadest historical expanse of humans and from the widest array of cultural perspectives now and of all time, those “sinful” pleasurable and life-affirming activities — sexuality, romantic relationship, not killing another or getting murdered in battle — are not considered negative at all!
So you can only propose such a theology by leaving out the evidence of other cultures and other, prehistoric and pre-civilizational, times. And this is exactly what they do. These theologies eliminate outside knowledge and cling to infantile understandings of Reality in order to maintain their dogma of sinfulness.
However, further weight is given to this notion that modern religions have it all backwards in that we can see, even by an understanding of civilizational history, that these religions and notions of morality only came into play with hierarchy in society, come of civilization, when there were higher ups wanting to control those below them. We must suspect the supernatural status of wrongfulness attributed to normally life-affirming or life-neutral acts, when we achieve the understanding that these “sins” are conveniently, and not coincidentally, in the interest primarily of the elite of one’s society.2
Furthermore, such views, keeping out the facts of history, culture, and other people’s experiences and cultural understandings, are then in the category of that paradigm or overstanding that is less powerful because it includes less experiential facts of existence. They necessarily will be superseded; since at some point, even if a long time, truth will out. It cannot be kept out of the awareness of the masses, as attempts in medieval Europe dominated by Roman Catholic orthodoxy, in the Soviet Union during the Twentieth Century, and other such societies have shown. What can be known, once it is known, cannot be forever unknown. The current deterioration in the interest in religion, especially in the United States, shows the ornery assertiveness of truth, as well.
So, a greater understanding of human values shows that, in general, less pain is a value, when comparing cultures. Less death is always a value, when comparing cultures. More pleasure is valuable to the extent it fosters greater life and/or longevity … the same with greater happiness and felicity. Greater psychological sanity, as for example in cultures having superior prenatal and birthing procedures, is a value in that it also facilitates greater life, longevity, pleasure, and less pain. And … this one is very important … greater wisdom or knowledge or paradigm overstandingness is a value in that it facilitates all the rest — less pain, greater felicity, and enhanced life and increased longevity. And for all we know, it results in a more accepting, peaceful death and a better all-around “time” to be had in the No-Form State, after death.
Biological Relativity, Species Relativity
All that being said, we see how non-absolute even these human values and realities are as soon as we look at the realities or consciousness of life forms other than human. Can we truly say that a lizard has a feeling of the pleasure or life-enhancing value involved in liberty? Does it even experience happiness, as we do in the way it enhances and magnifies the life value in our species? Can we say that an amoeba or bacteria feels the pleasure of freedom or the lack of it? We cannot know. They might have elements in their experience of Reality that are analogous or parallel to that which we experience in ours; but a) they would not be identical to our perception of Reality, and b) they might not!
So even these larger — more powerful and more valuable, truer — biological paradigms encompassing the smaller biocultural ones, which encompass the smaller cultural ones … those larger China dolls containing smaller ones … are themselves superseded by a transbiological paradigm relating to all species. Which is a bigger China doll still, in which they are “understood” or “contained.” But within which their elements and components might be devalued, skewed, or even be seen to be irrelevant, wrong, or nonsensical. What that larger paradigm — thoroughly imbued with all the biological paradigms of all the different species yet being something more than its parts — is … well that is what I am leading you toward. You will see this unfold now and over subsequent chapters.
This is to say that within the paradigm encompassing all species just on Earth — not even extending out to all the probable species and beings in existence — human values of life, pleasure, freedom, fulfillment, happiness, and longevity are open to reinterpretation, with greater degrees of reinterpretation applicable the further removed from human experience that paradigm is doing its encompassing. Or, let us say, the bigger the China doll is relative to the human one — i.e., the human biological paradigm — the greater likelihood the human values within ours would be interpreted differently.
Humans, Superiority, Planetmates, and Death
Now, just so this does not sound purely academic, or worse, merely semantic, let me say this: This analysis, this viewpoint or understanding, has value, as one example, in helping us to understand species on our planet who have a different relation to death than us. This is a big one. For it is on this basis that we proclaim our superiority to Nature.
Let me explain. This vanity of superiority to Nature is one of the foundations of theologies and religions. For religions reward the humiliating sycophancy, laborious tasks, and endless requirements demanded of its members with, not only promises of ever after happiness in another time and place (“I’ll be happy to pay you on Tuesday, for a hamburger today.”), but also with grandiose flattery of being of a “chosen species.” Be unhappy, be miserable, allow yourself to be tortured and bullied; but be assured also that you have a special future, a unique and unparalleled-in-Nature destiny, and really supreme and royal privileges, is the unacknowledged thinking here. And to sweeten the deal, have yourself, along with that super-duper importance, an allowance to take and use whatever you want and can extract and can bully from and out of Nature — that “dominion” thing again. That’s quite the package to offer, if one buys into it, in exchange for giving up enjoyment in life and its fulfillment.
So we are pumped up in relation to Nature to reward us for being obsequious to higher ups and religious authorities in our civilized societies. What we have taken from us in societies — with civilization and its elites, whose values are imposed on us through perverse and anti-life theologies — religions attempt to compensate for, with privileges to abuse other planetmates, the environment … and indeed, children. And for men, to abuse women, too.
Corresponding to our human “mutual admiration society,” Nature is denigrated, demonized even, to that much better raise ourselves high. We know that some people will boast their greatness to others to offset their underlying feelings of insecurity and inferiority. (No, I’m not going to make reference to Donald Trump, again. Feel free, on your own, though.) Yet we cannot see that we, as a characteristic of our species since civilization, do the same pathetic bragging of our greatness in relation to Nature. We would be helping ourselves if we were to notice the pathetic and pitiable profile of that behavior of ours.
Well, one of our elements of species braggadocio is that we humans, being special and uniquely valued by Divinity, have souls and have a higher regard for life than the rest of Nature. Oh, by the way, tell that to indigenous societies everywhere. *sarcasm* Oh yeah, that’s right, you can’t. We exterminated them from the face of the Earth.
Regardless, we claim Nature to be brute and untamed because we see it as vicious and brutal in relation to death and pain. We have higher values, you see; we supposedly value life more than these “ignorant brutes.” And this, based on our self-appointed “specialness”; not due to our behavior, as you can see from my example in the last paragraph.
Yet, as I laid out in Chapter 29 of The Secret Life of Stones on planetmates, titled, “The Other Is Our Hidden Face,” their reality — the “values” and approaches to life of our brother-and-sister planetmates — can be seen as superior in value to ours within a paradigm where a) death is not an absolute end of anything, merely a resetting of life and b) pain, within particular ranges and amounts in life, is seen as enhancing of all good values and feelings, and c) a primary value is put on the adventure, fun, or the experiential quality of living not merely its amount of time or amount of pain. You’ll see what I mean, more clearly, if you go back to that chapter.
Therefore, we cannot judge the values and behavior of planetmates.
The point is that our evaluations, wrought from within our biological paradigm, are flawed and open to reinterpretation once we go outside our species paradigm. So in no way can we use them as a basis upon which to evaluate and judge another or other species any more than one culture can legitimately evaluate and judge another culture, except based upon the more encompassing biological paradigm of humans.
Biological Transcendence
However, I believe that there is a way to get around this incommensurability of planetmate and human worldviews. I offer to you that my analysis reveals our most likely road to biological transcendence — for trans-species understanding and for viewing beyond the Veil of anthropocentrism — despite what I said above. We can employ a similar reasoning to that which allowed us to see that transcultural discourse was possible between the worldviews of different groups of people; that is to say, on a basis of a stance that is within a paradigm related to our common biology. Our opening to trans-species commensurability is hinted at, in the example of planetmates’ and humans’ different relations to death. As a teaser, it has to do with a more encompassing transpersonal paradigm … i.e., a spiritual or metaphysical one … in which both humans and planetmates are home.
How do we arrive at it, though? Well, it follows that to understand truth beyond our biologically constituted realities … to be able to get an idea of what reality might be like for entities and life in general and not just humans, we would need to stand inside a paradigm of understanding that would apply to all species — both known and unknown. We would need to take a stance on the foundation of a trans-species perspective — that is, what is true for all species, not just humans. We would need to find a common ground of understanding from which to view what is related to that for both species.
This is what science says it is attempting to do, but it actually does not. Because we have found that sciences can only look in areas that we as humans ahead of time have an idea that something might be. In other words, science is an extension of our senses … our human senses. So to do more, we have to expand our imagination to include what might be the perspectives of other species … other planetmates. This is what we are doing with our attempt to understand planetmate consciousness. Indeed, that is exactly what I lay out in my book, Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014). And this is the adventure we continue in this one. These are the frontiers of what we could know, and what would be better to know, that we will continue to explore … and unVeil.
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Knowledge Begins Where Arrogance Ends:
Species Transcendence and How We Might Come to Know … Dropping Our Species-Centrism, We Transcend Scientific Truth
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Bridging the barriers between species, biological transcendence: This is the place where even hard core “realists” learn how little they know.
“Ultimately this means that now that we know that common-sense materialism is simply a biological construct of the species human, we can relearn that it is Consciousness that is our only knowable Reality.”
“…in tossing away our species blinders, we approach a truth far beyond science, though not overturning science…. In doing this we see that it is the mystics and the consciousness researchers who are likely to have the most accurate angle on Reality.”
A call to end science’s culture war and for a scientific awakening. Consciousness … Experience … is infinite. It is fantastic as well.
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Species Transcendence
But, you say, how can we do that? How can we know the way another being or life form, other than human, might view Reality? We cannot.
True Knowledge Begins Where Arrogance Ends
However, the point is we are more likely to come up with something truer than what we already know when we at least try to do that. I, as a White man, cannot claim to truly comprehend the experience of being a Black man in America. Yet I am likely to come closer to it when acknowledging it is ultimately incomprehensible to me and that my experience is not in any way “superior” to theirs. The same is true for the effort to grok the beingness or experience of other life forms, of other planetmates and beings: Forgoing superiority and arrogance, understanding comes closer; whereas acting out of them, one makes apprehension of others impossible.
Then, dropping species-centrism and knowing something truer we have a chance of opening other doors not seen before, as well. Whereas complicity in the strictures of any prevailing paradigm guarantees stasis and dead ends. Complicity in easy prejudices, such as anthropocentrism, obstructs new knowledge as strictly as adherence to the dogma of Catholicism put the kibosh on intellectual progress for a millennium in Europe during the Middle Ages.
Trying to do that — to find a stance outside one’s species-determined one — means starting with dropping the presumption, the arrogance, that humans have a superior and more real understanding of Reality. When we do that, simply that alone, we find immediately that we have a much expanded understanding of what is really Real. For simply knowing that one’s human view is biased allows one to consider possibilities, wrought of anomalies and inconsistencies in the current paradigm, that the prevailing paradigm overlooks, ignores, puts on a shelf, and covers up.
For even what we are able to know about other species shows us some of the ways they see things differently than us. So simply by not assuming we are the pinnacle of creation and acknowledging that, for example, a dog really does have more accurate smelling and hearing ability and an eagle a greater ability to see, and imagining what that would mean for our reality in relation to theirs or keeping that in mind, we come to an appreciation of ourselves as a part of Nature, not a ruler of Nature. Just as our understandings of the realities-subjectivities-feelings of other humans has led us to know that we are not rulers of other people. Just as our understandings of other cultures have led us to know that one culture is not better, superior to, or more dominant over another.
Let me give a specific example of the greater overstandings made possible by the diminishment of arrogance and ego in the evaluation of the realities of species other than ours.
Culture Versus Instinct
Fortunately, I do not have to go far to come up with one, as this is the most frequently addressed topic when we are comparing our species with other planetmates. That issue is instinct in planetmates versus culture in humans.
To begin, as I have pointed out in several other works, most species are born and are either immediately or soon enough able to fend for themselves. How they are able to do that is attributed to what we refer to as instinct.
We arrive at this determination of a factor of instinct, not empirically, but conveniently. By that I mean that instinct is not a thing-in-itself that we have discovered in Nature. No. We see that other planetmates are able to do all kinds of things without being taught, and since we do not have that same thing we cannot understand it. Not able to understand it, we give it a name — instinct. Problem solved.
But what is it? Well, we say it is genetic. It is behavior laid down in the genes. And we have this further rather magical idea that somehow the pattern of molecules inside a part of the body, inside planetmates, creates behavior. Much like a machine, we imagine that the inner “works” of beings, on the molecular level as DNA, makes them do things just as the tiny gears and such that makes up a watch causes it to move its arms. No consciousness, no subjectivity involved: Things become actions, somehow; physical items in the material body impel beings to do particular things in particular ways … precisely so, and with little to no mental mediation.
Which is like saying that my rock garden … I’ll even give you, the pattern of my rock garden … conceivably makes me, want to or not, get up at seven am, make coffee, put particular and specific clothes on, and travel in a particular car, to a particular place, to engage all day in particular and precise actions, at a particular job. Why, how fantastic!
Not fantastical enough, this behavior is not just of a crude sort, for example, a bird’s ability to create a nest. No, somehow instinct is said to account for the fact that birds are able to, not only fly in formation, but make specific split-second and synchronous movements in full flight among all of them, and to do it always and an infinite numbers of times, all without any blemishes in their choreography, mistake, or the slightest bit of collision with each other. That’s quite the watch!
Supposedly, these genes of millions of years development know when and how each individual bird in flight, throughout that span of millions of years, is supposed to move in any particular millisecond that each individual bird is in flight. Imagine our robotics engineers programming the precise actions of their creations for all possible events to be encountered millions of years into the future. So these genes of instinct evolved over millions of years somehow knew in advance, millions of years before now, what a particular flock of birds was going to do at a particular millisecond of time … not to mention, all birds in all flocks in every millisecond of time over the course of millions of years.
Yet instinct is supposed to be the down-to-earth, real-world, “scientific” explanation for these incredible movements of birds, insects, and other similar planetmates. Instinct implies a kind of foreknowledge, premonition, or clairvoyance wilder than anything imaginable … and all contained within that infinitesimally small package of DNA. But somehow the idea of telepathy — what I call, more descriptively, mind-sharing — is considered unscientific and too fantastical to be believed.
The same with dolphins and fish. We see their precise synchronous movements and we say that is instinctive. We cannot know how they could possibly perfectly choreograph their movements far more precisely than any contestants on Dancing with the Stars are able to, even after much training. Actually it is more like the choreography of groups of humans that is arrived at after months of hard work to get it right. Even then, such dancers are hardly able to maintain that perfect choreography among all of them while spontaneously making random new changes in their movements — unplanned — the way flocks, swarms, and schools of various planetmates do.
Yet flocks of birds have infinitely creative and seemingly random changes — perfectly choreographed into their movements — in their flight. Changes which are instigated by…. Well, here you see again, how magical! Instigated by no one in particular, they just occur for all participants simultaneously, not even a leader or a director in sight. Did you ever see a school of fish, upon a disturbance in the water, instantaneously disappear, altogether, and in perfect synchrony? And who’s the leader in a swarm of bees as they make their perfectly coordinated movements? Yet, imagine those human dancers making endless new patterns in their routines, unplanned, spontaneous, without direction, and perfectly synchronized in the movement and steps among all the participants.
Well, such is instinct … and the power of it … supposedly. Even more disingenuous, we attribute the ability of the dolphins and fish to do that to instinct, and then we do not have to try to understand it anymore. We give something a name and consider it job done.
And then we say the idea of shared mind — a shared field of energy comprised of knowledge or, as I have been asserting, Experience (subjectivity, consciousness), which is the only thing that exists, being shared among multiple perceivers at the same time — which also might explain these wondrous abilities of planetmates, is fantastical, hence absurd. Yet this idea of consciousness shared is an idea that our consciousness research is leading us toward.
In this light, it is likely that ideas like instinct will have as much importance in the future as the convoluted theories of astrologers who, prior to the heliocentric revolution in thought, attempted to make sense out of the movement of the stars employing all kinds of bizarre notions.
Shared Mind
For, consciousness research, with its findings in related fields such as quantum physics, transpersonal psychology, prenatal and perinatal psychology, and the new biology will, in time, demonstrate to all of science … it has been proven to those of us in these fields already … that it is consciousness, Experience, subjectivity, and feelings that are fundamental to Reality. All of science will eventually learn that Experience, Consciousness, and mental-emotional stuff is shared between beings. Beings were formerly, traditionally, assumed to be absolutely separate from each other, though in fact they were not. Science in general will finally be forced to acknowledge that all beings and all the subjective experience of each and every one of them overlaps with other, similar, ones and potentially with all beings and all subjectivities existing. We actually share identity, in a sense; our perception of separate identities is our human illusion.
In correcting these misassumptions of ordinary science, a new-paradigm science will bring clarity to our understanding of these fantastical behaviors of planetmates and make the idea of instinct to be like the emperor with no clothes — sad and laughable.
When the doors of perception are cleansed, the nonordinary happens.
At any rate, what I am saying is that many planetmates have a kind of overlapping of mind; they share mind-stuff. They participate in a kind of field of mind or understanding … and that gives them the ability to know things they were not taught. In a sense, the species did the learning over the course of its evolution, and it is shared mentally by all members. If that sounds unbelievable, realize that what I just described is exactly the way one prominent and highly respected new biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, describes his theory of morphogenetic fields.1
Now, we humans have lost that shared mind. We have lost that ability. More correctly, we believe we have lost it; for we retain some ability of shared mind, or telepathy. However, for the most part we ignore it, dismiss it, or at least downplay it. And if and when it comes out in social intercourse, we have cultural conventions which have us all ignoring that it happened, colluding in its cover-up.
And you think there is no way I could explain this huge difference between humans and planetmates in regard to instincts? Not quite. As I elaborate upon in other works, the difference between us and the rest of Nature has to do with secondary altriciality and culture.2 Let me explain:
In the womb just before birth we experience an hellacious time that splits us off from our connection with Divinity. This is known as fetal malnutrition. And because it is a traumatic time, which we needed to push out of our mind, we suppressed others of our abilities along with it. Among them is that mind sharing with other beings and that felt connection with Divinity. So this is part of why we are not able to mind-share after birth, but then,
Since our brains are too big to be able to stay in the womb for the twenty-one months it would need for us to be born at the level of development comparable to other species when they are born, we are born prematurely with our brains not fully developed enough … perhaps not developed enough to do that “mind sharing” that other species are able to do?
At any rate, then we are born with even more pain, birth trauma. This causes us to lose any last traces of connection with Divinity or the participation of the individual consciousness in that of the group. So, indeed, we are born with a “blank slate.” Not because we have nothing, no instinct, no sense of self, no prior understandings or proclivities, or even instructions. But rather because all that we did have, unlike all other species, was wiped off our “slate” … our consciousness … during those prenatal and perinatal times of excruciating pain, which caused us to block all that out. We are born with a tabula rasa because we have repressed out of our consciousness … and we have created an unconscious out of it that way … all that we are and could be if we had not suppressed, repressed, and forgotten who we are. So that,
Onto this blank slate we pour all the necessary learnings we need to survive; we do this through a process of parenting. Yet, unlike the mind sharing of other planetmates, we are only going to get any learnings we do as funneled through an even more narrowed consciousness, one even more split from Divinity or the mind we share in common with the Universe. And that more narrowed consciousness is that of our caregivers, one’s parents, usually. Thus,
Culture — which is the accumulated, infinitely varied, and unavoidably flawed understandings of how to behave and survive in the world, developed over time, different in every society, and transmitted primarily by admittedly imperfect parents — steps in where mind sharing … what we disrespectfully call instinct … should be.
“Okay,” you say. “Some parts of that I’ve heard before, no big deal,” you might say.
But I ask you: Have you ever heard that described in any way that did not necessarily raise our species onto a pedestal? Be honest and you will see that here is where everyone, including scientists, begin to beat their chests and pontificate on how humans … and that would include them, ahem, ahem, don’t you know … have free will, or choice. Which term, choice, by the way, is the politically correct way scientists phrase it so as not to sound, oops, religious. Scientists bristle at the presumptions of religion, so they are wary of using terms like free will. Yet they hesitate not in asserting a power of choice, using the same lazy illogic running along endlessly overused, deep and chiseled channels of egotism — of the special variety of species-centrism — to give us god-like status above other planetmates with magical capacities for free will and choice, which planetmates supposedly do not have.
So instinct, as framed the way it usually is by scientists, is used as another way of touting our superiority over Nature (again!!!) instead of it being explained in a way that would tell what that substitution of culture for instinct actually is: Culture is an artificial substitute for what we have lost in splitting from Divinity, or shared mind; and it is a sufficient-for-survival construct. However, culture is not as refined, or as close to Truth and Reality, or perfect, even, as what other planetmates have that is called instinct. Culture, in this way, is collective Ego. For Ego can be defined as the artificial consciousness construct that each individual develops to be able to function, after one has lost one’s more expanded consciousness that one had in the womb.
Indeed, in our refusal to frame it in any way that is other than a boast, masquerading as science, we see exactly those kinds of indications of Ego. For Ego, to mention one of its effects only, is the way humans turn all their faults into accomplishments.
Dropping Veil One, Anthropocentrism
Now, the point of this example is to show how much more can be brought into our understandings when we, as scientists and lay folks, lower our collective Ego. And that collective Ego we have reified into culture and, therefore, with that as an excuse, or as a curtain to hide us, we feel we are allowed to boast. This is something we need to push to the side to find truer Truths. This is not different from the fact that a person cannot grow in knowledge until that person lets in information besides that which is self-congratulatory. That is to say, for personal growth to occur, a lowering of one’s ego defenses is required.
The conclusion from all this understanding is that our sciences are important in establishing facts and reality, but the ones they come up with are only relative to our species, not necessarily to any other species, and not necessarily do they give us a true idea of What Really Is. Hardly do they help us in comparing ourselves with other species, either.
A World of Possibilities is Viewed
Conversely, that when one steps outside those species conventions, whose purposes are to buck up species survivability, and opens a non-anthropocentric window, all kinds of possibilities arise. All of which are seen to be obviously more likely than the ones we had that stroked our collective species-“ego.”
You think this is irrelevant to know? Well, to give just one example, think of all our forays into space and our imaginings of other beings from other than this planet. If you take the perspective that I am encouraging here, you will notice how astoundingly naïve are our expectations and how crude the instruments we use to detect other life forms. For they all are built on an expectation of finding beings that are at least somewhat like ourselves.
Scientific arrogance is laughable.
You say, no, our scientists are not assuming other beings of high consciousness would look like us. Yet you should know I mean that in our scientists saying what are the building blocks of life — water, carbon, and so on — they are showing a bias about “life” that it is something like what we know. Notice also that even the idea of a “higher” level of consciousness itself has its roots in this idea that a human consciousness is superior to other kinds of which we know. So these assumptions built into our science are laughable in their arrogance.
In tossing away our species blinders, we approach the mystical.
Meanwhile, in understanding how limited and relative is our human perspective, we are able to imagine other possibilities for life and its variations. We begin to approach the perspectives of mystics. We open to a pantheist revelation. We begin to understand the consciousness of matter … the life that lies in mountains, streams, and planets. We realize how it is not outside the realm of possibility that even what we consider non-life and inanimate to be somehow conscious or a form of consciousness, even if we resist calling it “life.” Which is, we see now, itself, as we normally think of it, part of our limited species interpretation.
Yet, with a flip of the switch in our thinking which would allow a lowering of species-ego, we have cast light upon the cosmic overstanding exposing, for one and all, the secret life of stones. Indeed, one of the revelations in taking this Dance of the Seven Veils with me is the opening onto the vision of The Secret Life of Stones, if one has not already arrived there.
So, in tossing away our species blinders, we approach a truth far beyond science, though not overturning science. What Is ends up not, as fundamentalists might think, opposed to science, rather inclusive of science … but including so, so much more. And in doing this we see that it is the mystics and the consciousness researchers who are likely to have the most accurate angle on Reality.
Transcending our biologically constituted materialism, we relearn that consciousness is infinite, yes … but fantastic as well.
Ultimately this means that now that we know that common-sense materialism is simply a biological construct of the species human, we can relearn that it is Consciousness that is our only knowable Reality. And while that Consciousness — or as I insist it must be called, Experience — is, as I have been showing, infinite, varied, and beyond our ken, still … and this is the point relative to us in all our biological determinedness, which includes values of life, pleasure, and hence interestedness, fun desiring, and curiosity appreciating … it is fantastic as well.
Hence, the attempt to transcend our species parameters is itself driven by that biological existence and its elements. And though it leaves us in a quandary where we see Reality cannot be ultimately known, for it is Infinite, still, it can be experienced. And in being experienced in a way as to attempt to go beyond our arrogance, Ego, and species-constituted and species-constricting Realities, it reveals itself as both wondrous and awe-inspiring. We, as humans, will never be able to apprehend Ultimate Reality. Yet the effort itself takes us beyond where we would be if not making the attempt. And it leads us toward realities that are both infinite … and wonderful.
Anomalies Hold the Key
It is the so called “anomalies” of science that hold the keys to the reality that lies beyond science. Looking at them we see a pattern upon which to stand in bringing together the different viewpoints or paradigms that are not reconcilable otherwise. These different views are the different scientific ones and the different cultural ones as well as the different biological ones — that is, the perspectives or views of different species … the different planetmate views.3
The anomalies that we have found to have the most potential for aiding us in this venture to a greater paradigm or framework within which to comprehend all these smaller views are those that have come out of consciousness research. This research comes from scientific as well as spiritual sources. The findings and discoveries are often experientially based, though they are hardly just anecdotal since these reports are replicable and verifiable and they are often and can easily be collected and collated scientifically.
These scientific approaches to what were once in the realm of just the spiritual or religious are going on more now than ever before in the history of the world. Whether from fields of the new physics, the new biology, or the consciousness branches of psychology and anthropology, they are uncovering more new erstwhile inexplicable data of events that have heretofore been beyond the purviews of our sciences and beyond our common-sense materialism. That is to say, beyond our world of “brute facts,” which we have found are not incontestable or brute at all but are only solidly true in relation to the fact that we are of the species of humans.
Knowledge once considered biologically useless has suddenly become necessary for survival.
We have found that these new facts are not as biologically irrelevant as we assumed, however. In fact, the survival of our species and indeed of the life on our planet probably depend upon us incorporating this information into a newer and more comprehensive understanding of reality — or as I term it, an overstanding … ideally a cosmic overstanding.
As Kuhn (1970) wrote, “The crises of our time, it becomes increasingly clear, are the necessary impetus for the revolution now under way. And once we understand nature’s transformative powers, we see that it is our powerful ally, not a force to be feared or subdued.”4
Fortunately, the construction of this new framework is being carried out. And it and its implications are astounding, revelatory, and revolutionary in all respects imaginable. My takes on, as well as my additions to, this new revolutionary model are revealed in ever increasing detail throughout Dance of the Seven Veils.
The Scientific Culture War
It helps to keep in mind that science is a good candidate for instigating a revolution. For the political and social revolutions, which we are seeing erupt around the world from Arab Springs to American Autumns and in global Occupy movements, have been going on more quietly and for a longer time in our sciences. Indeed, it may be said that to some extent this scientific Awakening preceded and precipitated the social one.
Scientific Awakening
That contemporary “normal” scientists are deaf to the clarion call of revolutionary science has everything to do with retreating from the world-shattering revelations of the recent past into the familiar surrounds of “normal” science, with all of its bland uncovering of that which was already assumed. Beyond some scientific laziness and a lack of the passion for discovery, that cowardice or at least that refusal to be bold has mostly to do with the enslavement of scientific endeavors in the plantation fields ruled by corporate and consumer-driven interests. Real science, in recent times, takes a back seat to practical and applicable science operating to feed the demands of capitalist and ever-hungry-for-trinkets modern societies.
This Scientific Awakening, however necessary, is seen as a threat to corporate hegemony.
Thus — although our very survival depends on a paradigm change, or shift — it is being resisted mightily by our communities of scientific researchers. This Scientific Awakening is as much a threat to the corporate hegemony over modern culture as are the social and political Awakenings. There has been as much a battle in science over the last fifty years — a scientific culture war, if you will — as there has been the one in our societies around the world … and for the same reasons:
Paradigm shift threatens the status quo. It is seen to have the potential to upset the traditional and engrained financial structures and the social stratification built upon them. That is, this scientific culture war is also class war in disguise. Though these new paradigms or overstandings are more life-facilitating or enhancing, and thus have a great value, relative at least to our species, they are not so much a boon for every human in our species. For older overstandings are invested in with the time and energies and lives of humans. Hence, the humans most invested in them will not see any value in anything new, however better.
Indeed, scientists and intellectuals are as much a product of an old paradigm even when they propose to not be. For, often they mis-categorize new developments in their fields within old and outdated dualistic frames. In particular they see the findings of consciousness research and misconstrue it as being within the old science-religion debates and struggles. Hence they look not into it and overlook what otherwise would be obvious.
Thus, they are as unable to see old-paradigm influences on themselves and are as clueless in moving beyond them as are their counterparts in the social, financial, and political arenas. For in these areas, not just old-paradigm right-wing folks are blind to the messages of the Awakening, but even many traditional liberals are unable to see past their time-worn ways of categorizing in order to understand the message and import of the new-paradigm social and political movements of Occupy and Arab Spring. They misunderstood the Occupy movement’s multi-messages and calls for complete re-visioning as being no message. They misconstrued the new-paradigm uprisings for freedom and justice throughout the world and especially in the Arab world in the tired old terminologies of economics and imperialism. They continue to misinterpret heartfelt aspirations for a global coming together and unity of humanity in old-paradigm New-World-Order terms. Being, some of them, bogged down in old-paradigm, reactionary, medieval even, illuminati concepts, they misread new-paradigm seekings for consciousness change and revolution.
A Call for Scientific Awakening
This is a call for sciences to allow themselves to let go of old ways and embrace new visions. In the past, it has taken centuries, at times, for these paradigm shifts to happen. Societies have had to wait, and entire generations have needed to die off, before people could enjoy the freedom of being released from old bindings of thought and graced with the benefits of new revelations. We do not have that kind of time right now.
This new paradigm, gestating within the scientific community for fifty or so years previous to the Sixties — beginning already at the end of the Nineteenth Century — erupted out of their academic container and into the global consciousness, at that time, the Sixties, with the social and cultural revolutions begun then. These revolutionary elements, since then, have done battle within scientific communities as well as in the society-at-large. And in the same way as has those social and cultural movements, they have been beaten back to the peripheries by the overwhelming power of the entrenched interests.
However, entire generations have left the scene by now. New generations — the Millennial Generation and Generation Z (the one following the Millennial) — seeded with the new-paradigm visions rained upon them by elder veterans of the culture war and enjoying fruits of the wisdom plucked from an ongoing though less visible counterculture born in those times have arisen. So, the time is ripe.
The change is necessary. We can no longer afford to hesitate. The time for the Scientific Awakening is now. The time for a Cosmic Overstanding is equally imperative.
And to this we now turn. Having established that our scientific and other realities are relative; that anything we know only has value relative to its being biologically useful, specifically that it enhances life; and that the search for a truth more encompassing requires us to go, not just beyond the constraints of culture but also the constraints of biology (to the extent we can) and that first and foremost in that effort to look outside our biological blinders requires relinquishing the ego-centric, culture-centric, and anthropocentric entitlements that are part and parcel of what constrains our ability to transcend; that any attempt for anything greater must include greater amounts of experiential reality, thus it is driven by findings in consciousness research and psychology; and that in doing so we open to realities fantastic, but also wonderful; we can see that it is not only a worthwhile thing to do, not only a life-affirming and enhancing thing to do … meaning it will make you a better and happier person in some sense … but this effort, this attempt at biological transcendence or, using a word that means the same thing, ecstasy … this effort at cosmic overstanding will be … necessarily …
fun.
Consider this your invitation to join the party. C’mon along as we continue the path of ecstasy to a cosmic overstanding through, first, removing, one by one, the projections we have thrown upon Reality in our Dance of the Seven Veils. Next Veil, the one we conceded to have pulled across our eyes when we were youths — the Veil of cultural identity.
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VEIL TWO.
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Adolescence and Cultural Identity, Diminution … Rites of Passage
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Veils, Myth, and Ritual:
Nature, Purpose, Meaning, Multilevel Relevance of Myth, and Rewards of Deeper Understanding … Primal Pain and Demythologizing the World
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“At each level, or Veil, there is meaning; and deeper interpretations bring more expanded and more felicitous opportunities for living.”
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For the purposes of our demythologizing of the world and a clearer apprehension of Reality or That Which Is, we need to peel back the overlying smokescreens upon our perception — each of which Veils are wrought at a different time of life and correspond to the particular traumas that occurred then. Each of those corresponding traumas have their expressions in the mythologies of the world. Mythology tells the story of our early lives, which we do not remember consciously. And we do not want to remember, for their being too painful … hellacious, even. So myths express the painful experiences of our early lives, though obliquely so as to get beyond the ego defenses and censors of human consciousness.
The Nature and Purpose of Myth and Ritual
For mythology, indeed, is the unconscious way we try to make sense of senseless Pain. Mythologies, exactly as our dreams, are ways we unconsciously capture our unfelt Pain in symbols and patterns of them — myths. Myths are so much like dreams, we can say that they are collective dreams, or dreams that are dreamed by the entire group, or society.
Furthermore, mythologies have their roots in the same psychological mechanisms that create our dreams. Indeed, some of them, if not all, began as dreams had by some individual or other and were then augmented, extended, clarified, and expanded by the dreams of others who came along later and were in the line of those who repeated the story down through the ages. For indeed orally is how myths, for many thousands, even millions perhaps, of years were transmitted.
Of course, the stories were also added to unconsciously in their retelling through personal embellishments and minor changes in wording, focus, intent, slant, and other subtleties. And to the extent such subtleties fit with the unconscious proclivities of later tellers, they became and even strengthened the myth — making it ever more a reflection of the unconscious psychology and the hidden and repressed psychological histories of the maximum number of people in the particular culture that manifested it, in any particular time.
Another aspect of this evolution of specific myths is that the myths and the versions of them which are most shared, most told, most referred to, clearly have something more to say than less popular ones. Thus, the more pervasive symbologies are tapping into and referring to aspects of psychological and developmental history which are more shared, more important … and often, more painful.
As Maps, as the Finger Pointing
However, since myths express our early developmental events and their traumas indirectly, mythologies are layers of obfuscation across our windows to the world. They protect us from feeling our Pain, to some extent; yet they also block out true Reality and actual apprehension of It.
Symbols and mythologies are fingers pointing to Reality. They are the map, not the territory. And they are only a little better than mere words in approaching Reality. In either case, when either words or mythic symbols are focused on and given a status as concrete, as reality — this is sometimes termed fundamentalism — one can no longer see actual Reality. They are the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave.
And when one gives them an ontological status this way, i.e., gives them a status standing on their own and not as being merely pointers to something more real, then true Reality, that which is outside the cave, in Plato’s example, never gets attended to. Indeed, it is not known even to exist. To be caught up in the maya of the shadow symbols never allows one or never forces one to look beyond them.
As Defenses
This is not all defensive, as I will explain shortly, and there is a bodily wisdom and a psychological wisdom in their occurrence. Nevertheless, mythologies mostly are defense systems. For our traumas, seen indirectly this way as symbols — much as Perseus could only see Medusa in a reflection of his shield — are more “manageable.” At least we think so.
That obscuring the events of our lives does not make our feelings more controlled or controllable (repression causes neurosis; it is not managed by it) is part of a great illusion about them, about religions, and about mythologies and personal myths, which this book is attempting to reveal and then dispel. You will see what I mean as we go along; but simply take note, for now, that clearly I see a value in taking away these “defenses” of obscuring symbolism in order to have the Reality that was meant for each of us at our very entrance into Form at the beginning of our lives, which we lost in the course of life. One way I describe that process of removing symbol systems — which are defense systems — or of removing Veils is demythologizing the World.
Mythologies — and the rituals and rites that express them — result in an unconscious attempt to work with our traumas without feeling them, really, like keeping them at arm’s length. Or think of myth and its symbols as tongs or gloves with which we seek to touch and control these unconscious pains. Yet these distancing and avoidance maneuvers, in essence, amount only to some kind or driven, yet futile, attempt to stay above and defend against falling into a reliving of them. Which reliving of the pains — pains which are the very seeds of them — is the only real way to go beyond them to greater wisdom.
So, yes, myths are defenses and mythologies are defensive systems upheld by societies to contain and deal with the energies of unconscious traumas, without feeling and integrating them!
Indeed, this book would not be necessary, perhaps, if these myths and the rituals built around them accomplished what humans needed.
As Sneaky Reminders of Dis-Ease
Another way of saying this is that mythology is the attempt by the unconscious to get through to the conscious mind the facts of the events of our lives that we have tried to not know. It is the unconscious’s “sneaky” way to keep us looking, despite ourselves, in the direction of parts of our past we do not want to remember, let alone deal with or process.
However, notice that in this function of them they are a beneficial aspect of human psychology. For they hold out the hope — much like the hope said to lie at the bottom of Pandora’s Jar, which is an apt symbol for one’s Primal Pool of Pain, incidentally — that one will, at some point or in some time, look beyond the symbols (the Veils). For in doing so — encountering and then experiencing these repressed feelings, feeling the Pain we could not handle at the time — one brings into self what was lost and buried. One re-members split off yet valuable parts of ourselves. Realizing these rewards of actual experiencing (feeling them) — not merely intellectualizing about symbols and myths — frees us from trying to get indirect, symbolic satisfaction for our regrets and pains. Which symbolic acting out is always futile … ultimately if not sooner.
Experiencing the realities, feelings, and pain beneath the Veils of symbolism also opens up vistas beyond — vistas which were hidden by these Sisyphean endeavors and all the mental stratagems, and symbolic and ritual act-outs, surrounding them.
However, this is tricky. For as it commonly happens, myth and its defensive acting out in ritual, whether religious or in psychotherapy, is analogous to a disease calling out for attention whose symptoms are continually alleviated by pills; and one never gets cured. In this example, the illness is the unconscious Pain, and the symptoms are the neurosis and emotional discomforts of normal life when lived with a “normal” personality — i.e., imbued with defenses and the mythologies that support them.
And the cure would amount to not taking the “pills,” meaning not participating in the rituals, and thereby having the “illness” — the repressed painful memories — come out in all it is. When this is done, it demands a psychological response to cope with or process the miseries arisen — one way or the other. Which might lead eventually to an integration of these unconscious Pains in a way that one could truly put them behind oneself. Oh, and by the way, eliminate the need for that set of symbols, those mythologies, or the Veil … and their accompanying rituals.
As Being Unnecessary and Counterproductive
While that might sound complicated, it is really not. I am not surprised that it would sound confusing, for it is rarely ever even thought to be a desirable option, let alone done. Indeed, Janov’s primal therapy is so powerful and so unexpectedly curative just because he took this approach: Which is that all acting out that one does daily needs to be stopped … that includes any and all rituals, religious or secular … so that the Pain driving those fruitless repetitions will come to the surface.
Indeed, to begin traditional primal therapy one stays in one’s hotel room for three weeks, coming out only for sessions, without contact with others, TV, or the outside world … one is not even allowed to read. Sessions, and journaling if one wants, only. When not distracting oneself with the myriad little “rituals” of everyday living — those little things we do routinely to distract ourselves from feeling our lives — one’s real self, one’s real feelings … one’s pain … can arise and be noticed. Believe me, it works.
Correspondingly, Janov also radically proposed — which no one else ever has, then or now — that defenses were not necessary. That includes all rituals and acting out.
Everyone else, following Freud, has been operating on the idea that these defenses, with their overt rituals, were a necessary aspect of personality; consequently, by the way, Freud did not see much hope for happiness in human lives.
Some therapists took a more “refined” approach to the same thing. The crude rituals and defenses of the “normal” person, which had been individually built up, were traded in, by counselors and facilitators, for “higher order” symbols and rituals looking more like personal growth. Or at least looking more intelligent and positive. This would be the therapies of a humanistic, Jungian, gestalt, spiritual, or new-age bent. By nearly everyone — the religious, the spiritual, the new-ager, the common person in the course of secular rituals of avoidance — rituals are thought to be advancing of consciousness, not avoiding of awareness as I am claiming.
As Being “Veils”
So I am expecting some major cognitive dissonance in the reader here. By the way, all this is important for understanding this Veil of the cultural identity, the adult personality, that we are now beginning to explore in this part, Veil Two. For cultural identity or entry into adulthood in every society is probably the most ritualized of all milestones in life. Rites of passage of all sorts are applied here with no one thinking they might be counterproductive. You probably do not agree with me, even now, that they are. Yet you will see what I mean, I daresay, at some point in journeying through this Veil with me.
And, still, while all this that I am saying might sound confusing, it is not much different from what we commonly think about dreams. We know that a dream is much like a ritual, in that it is only a wish fulfillment or an unconscious running-off of neurological patterns that happen to be at the time full of pressure and needing release. Practically nothing is accomplished in untended dreams and typical rituals, regardless how elaborate, frequent, or fervent.
Yet if the dream is interpreted, if one looks to what the symbols mean … and this is best realized by simply looking in the direction of one’s body and how it feels when one thinks about the symbols of the dreams … they can be like a crowbar to wrench up the block to see what is below … and is actual.
Rituals are also gone beyond; however not by interpretation, but by refusal to act them out. Whereupon their “makers” — our unconscious pains — show themselves and can be experienced … much like one digs below the symbols of the dream to feel, and thereby realize, its meaning.
The Meanings of Myth
Multilevel
An interesting aspect of this is that, while these different unconscious traumas are symbolized and constitute a Veil across our understandings, very often the mythologies themselves — symbols being multi-aspected, which is their advantage over mere words, which are intended to denote only one thing — will reveal themselves to have meanings at each of the levels, or Veils. The most powerful of our mythologies — the ones having the greatest hold on human societies within their cultural constructs — often reveal truths at every level, meaning every Veil.
Different Interpretations and Deeper, Better Outcomes
And sometimes — and this is quite important — what they reveal at one level is reversed and leads to a different conclusion and to different responses and actions at deeper levels. This is another reason that revealing and seeing through to deeper Veils brings one closer to a better apprehension of Reality, along with a closer proximity to Divinity. As you will also see, the deeper interpretations open one, increasingly, to better and happier views on one’s life and reality and to more felicitous stratagems and directions for one’s actions. Ultimately, total liberation is possible. It is, after all, the reason for the journey … the Dance … to begin with.
At each level, or Veil, there is meaning, and deeper interpretations bring more expanded and more felicitous opportunities for living.
What I mean by deeper interpretations bringing better and more satisfying results is that while we might interpret a Red Riding Hood tale as a warning to girls against straying from a path of chastity; on a deeper level, it shows a pattern of rebirth which embraces sexuality as an aspect of the full experience of life.
The myth of the happenings in the Garden of Eden on the surface of them are a warning against disobedience against the arbitrary commands of a patriarchal god. However, a deeper interpretation of them — which I will lead you to in this book, as well as direct you to similar rewards of deeper interpretations — shows that we have within us access to a bliss which can be regained once we have reversed, through processing the pain of it, the trauma of birth. Eden can be regained, indeed immortality can be achieved, if one goes deeper within. I doubt you have ever heard anyone say the myth of The Fall means that!
Whereas if one operates within the matrix of the surface interpretation of The Fall, we live in a world where we must struggle and sweat to live, where women are the bad guys for having made it all happen, where we are mortal, where our gods are capricious, punishing, and where we feel ourselves to be guilty and shamed for being only who we are — a member of the human race.
However, if the myth’s interpretation is not at the fundamentalist level — as above, where the symbols are thought to be actual concrete things and people and gods — it is at least at the level of the surface interpretation, which has to do with the meanings given our mythologies as we navigate the adolescent and adult highways of our lives, which are our only exposures to them.
Let me show you what I mean by that. While we, for example, can find the roots of the hero mythology and the hero’s cycle itself, as described by Joseph Campbell (1972), within the neonate’s struggle to be born, fending off the crushing “monster” of the womb, “slaying” — as a knight would a dragon — the encroaching as well as regressive element of the umbilical cord in the slaying of any number of types of serpents and dragons. Still, it is through rites of passage and other such rituals of adult life, not through birth re-experience itself, that people are commonly exposed to our mythologies and have them impressed upon their personalities and woven into their worldviews.
In addition, these rites and rituals — secular as well as religious — are no less the delivery systems for myth than is popular culture, currently. For in modern times, the popular mythology of both adolescent as well as mainstream culture abounds with the mythic. Every time we see a TV, comic book, or cinema hero, or heroine, up against an evil, sometimes depicted as an actual monster, we are receiving our mythic message: Whether the hero is cop, soldier, valiant and persevering ordinary person, or any of the multitude of superheroes being concocted of late, the same theme of the metaphorical “slaying” of a dragon is being depicted every time an evil person, thing, or difficulty is fought and overcome.
In this way, through these mythic re-creations, the values which are required of our youth are being impressed on them, as well as reinforced in all the rest of us adults. The values are: that there are good guys and bad buys and if one would be happy and not persecuted or ostracized one had better act like the “good guy,” not the “bad guy.” Additionally, that acting like the bad guy will get one severely punished, often including getting killed, and that, in essence, “crime doesn’t pay.” That’s it; no more than that is the interpretation. This is why, in medieval times, the popular entertainment of the people was called “morality plays.” Our productions today have a kernel to them that is no different from that, though with quite a bit more elaboration and sophistication.
Yet you will see how even that simple example of popular mythology itself has deeper revelations to be had and more rewarding understandings than what is their intended message. Which message, by the way, amounts only to, “Everybody be good little boys and girls, behave, obey authorities, don’t get in trouble, and turn from temptation, always.”
So while we will, in this book, follow these patterns, laid upon our perceptions of the world, to their deepest roots, it is probably a very good idea to start that “water witching” at the exact spot upon which we stand, the exact focus within the milieu of mythological entrancement that is our beliefs and motives and ideas of values in our daily, not formal, life. In so doing, we look first to the mythology of adolescence and the Identity stage of life. For that is the mythological stance of the adult; it is the place where most adults find the roots of their adult beingness and out of which emanates the patterns of their behavior.
Additionally, it can be said that the identity product itself — the one that is concocted or given at that time of life, i.e., adolescence and young adulthood — is the amalgamation of all the mythologies previously inculcated in one, throughout one’s childhood. It brings it all together. All the value-infused mythical elements of childhood — from Disney and religious instruction, to story books like “The Little Engine That Could,” to the multitude of childhood and adolescent narratives seen on television or presented in schoolrooms, to the sage advice imparted by elders — are brought into a coherent schema for guiding one’s life at the Identity stage of young adulthood or late adolescence.
Yet, by “inculcated” I mean more than what is taught or what one is exposed to. I am referring, just as importantly, to all that one has experienced from the beginning of Form-ly existence, and perhaps even prior to that … prior to our existence in this world. Those influences from our earliest experiences, and even a glance into what might be coming to us from outside or prior to those experiences, is what is the purpose of this book and the ones to follow it.
However, the fastest way to get to where one needs to go is to be most fully where one already is. And where we are, is an adult state, seeing through a matrix of beliefs and assumptions, which coalesced importantly during our adolescent and young adult times of life, with the Identity formation that we all do at that time, necessarily so.
Up next, then, Identity, adolescence, culture, and the patriarchal rites of passage into diminished awareness … and a diminution of self.
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Rites of Passage and the Hero’s Cycle:
Jesus, Joe, the Mbuti, the Millennial Generation, and the Tao of Funny God …
of Heroes, Patriarchal and Other
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“Just the way that planetmates are domesticated in agrarian cultures, so also its young, its children, are ‘domesticated’ to be something of use. Like animals, children are forcibly molded into something utilitarian to be wielded like any other thing, tool, or animal, by a controlling, superior other….”
“…such ‘spoiled’ children — the Baby-Boomer Generation, the Sixties Generation — became the most loving parents ever known in history … on the scale of a generation, that is. Such it is that their offspring, the Millennial Generation, are the most suited ever to follow along a course of adulthood that is more natural than anything in known history, going back to primal days.”
“We would not have the masses in America responding to the bogus paternal enticements and the mind-control of a ‘daddy’ Trump if much of the masses were not still being ‘domesticated’ into the products of use by their parents, as in times of yore.”
“…in the story of Christ, as well as Joe, the immolation is not only voluntary, but, importantly, is not violent. They both represent an actual solution to the problem of the cycles of violence … not its continuation! Fighting a war to bring about peace makes about as much sense as fucking for chastity.”
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The primary mythological motif of modern times, and pretty much throughout human history, is that of the hero’s cycle: It is the pattern embodying the aspirations and duties of everyman/everywoman. Joseph Campbell masterfully delineated it in his work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1972), and by now it is easy to make out in our culture’s symbolism. At its base, it represents the pattern of the solitary individual overcoming whatever obstacles lie in her or his path to be the good person that each society wishes its members to be.
Hero’s Cycle, Rites of Passage
It is the mythology acted out in every patriarchal rite-of-passage in the world. Its sublime representation is that of a hero slaying a dragon, with the hero representing the “healthy”1 ego of the adolescent or young adult, and the dragon … monster, beast, serpent … representing the aspects of the person that are to be left behind, indeed killed, in order to align with the values of the culture and to become something for it, not oneself. For males, the dragon represents the feminine qualities that in coming into manhood, patriarchal cultures insist males not just leave behind, but repress, kill, suppress, and despise.
It is represented by Erich Neumann (1954), “Away from the Mother world! Forward to the Father world!”
In modern culture, as one movie expresses it, one must exert oneself to not feel one’s emotional pain and never look in that direction, or within, again. It is an attitude that leads to total dissociation and acting out. The movie referred to is the 2012 military movie, Act of Valor, which depicted Navy Seals engaged in anti-terrorism activity. At the end, the manner of dealing with pain that was recommended for these American soldiers and “men of valor” was to “Put your pain in a box. Lock it down.” Saying “we are men made of boxes,” the younger man is instructed, about his pain, to “use it as fuel, as ammunition.”
What the younger one is not told is that made invisible this way, it — the pain, that is … not oneself — will do the determining of when and upon whom it will be released, dumped, acted out.
The Alternative to Patriarchal, Repressive, Soul-Stealing Rites
It is not that it has to be this way. There are rites-of-passage into adulthood in some primal cultures that are not like the patriarchal ones come of civilization with their heavy anti-female bias. Keep in mind that the economics and social structure of primal and civilizational cultures are fundamentally different, often in opposite ways.
Patriarchal cultures are anti-female, for with civilization came inequality of resources, domination-submission, and thus the requirement that subordinates conform their behavior to the demands of the higher ups, the elites of every society.2 Whereas, that same, so-called, “weak,” feminine, feeling part of men — which is severely repressed in patriarchal cultures as part of that economic and sociological submission — is not required to be destroyed in more primitive cultures where more of a balance in the personality is allowed. In primal cultures, a relative economic equality fosters an egalitarian social structure, more equal gender relations, and consequently more humane, less repressive, rites of passage for young men, allowing for more of a balanced male-female psychological makeup of its adult males.
In Primal Cultures
Significantly, such primitive cultures allow the emergence of a deeper relation to the Mysterious — specifically, to adulthood and its requirements, more accurately, to life and its opportunities — through rites-of-passage that affirm the relation of the individual to the Other as a whole … not just the male elders, not just the society, even. This can occur through transitional rites of the nature of vision quests, walkabouts, and the like. These are practices that do not require the slaying of the inner self in order to conform to a societal construct that is unlike oneself.
Rather, the personality development these rites allow is to one of a self that emerges from within oneself, not without. It is an identity, a self, aligned with ones’ unique talents and skills, in collaboration with the Other, Nature, the Mysterious. This transformation occurs through the exigencies of a relatively unstructured rite — as exampled in vision quests and walkabouts — in which the Universe is allowed to direct and teach the initiate, rather than the culture doing that … which means, essentially, rather than powerful and dominating old men doing that.
Or else the passage into adulthood in primal cultures is not marked by a radical transformation of the personality into a patriarchal cog but is simply the celebration of an increase in abilities, prerogatives … and responsibilities … which come with an increase in age. In this instance, the later personality is built upon the earlier one. Rather than the childhood personality or stance toward life being completely overturned.
An example I often use of such a humane and celebratory passage into adulthood is that of the pygmy culture of the Mbuti. Many primal cultures view the transition from childhood to adulthood in a festive way; and celebrations of it, for girls as well as boys, are used to mark it. In these cultures, correspondingly, as Colin Turnbull (1961) says of the Mbuti, the activities of childhood play are simply added to and expanded, becoming the daily doings and responsibilities of adulthood. The childhood personality is not systematically disassembled and then reassembled into an adult one, conforming to the dictates of societal elders, particularly male ones. The adult personality in such primal cultures is merely an outgrowth of the childhood one, containing additional opportunities, responsibilities, and abilities, yet retaining earlier sensitivities, perspectives, emotional and feeling capacities, and insights.
When you think about it, such societies assume a basic goodness, responsibility, and empathy to be already inherent in an individual. For it goes without saying that adults will want to take on the responsibilities of family, society, and resource gathering without being forced to. Whereas civilizational-hierarchical societies have no patience for such efforts to come forth naturally from the young and clearly no belief that such a thing would occur. This intolerance built into the culture would seem to be related to the extra degree to which the tasks of the adult-to-be would be along lines not in the interests — psychological, personal, or even familial — of the individual him- or herself but of higher ups. It takes extra force to make folks do what they would not naturally do out of the concern, initiative, and empathy of them. Similarly, increasing control of every factor of life — in this case, the young — correlates with every increase of cultural complexity in societies, all the way to the extremes of control evident in hierarchical ones.
It is significant that a pre-agrarian culture, the Mbuti, would be an example to us of a non-dominated way of being in the world. Others could be used … see Margaret Mead’s work, for example … but all examples are pre-agrarian, notably. For just as an agrarian way of life entailed the “domestication” of animals (planetmates), it brought about a “domestication” of its own young, its children. You see, in this supposed “domestication” of animals, the planetmate must be “broken” if it was once “wild,” as in the case of horses. Or if the planetmate is born and is raised to be domesticated, then the animal is simply never given a chance to be free, to be natural. In either case, the natural being, the planetmate, is forcibly molded into a thing of use to the dominating other, the human.
Well, this is the way as well that these rites of passage work in agrarian and post-agrarian societies for others, for humans, not just farm animals. Just the way that planetmates are domesticated in agrarian cultures, so also its young, its children, are “domesticated” to be something of use. Like animals, children are forcibly molded into something utilitarian to be wielded like any other thing, tool, or animal, by a controlling, superior other: That is to say, by a dominating father, for the son; by a dominating father and mother, later a husband, for the daughter … for girls are no different from chattel in patriarchal societies. You see, the young are not allowed to be something of themselves in these cultures.
In Modern Cultures
And if we are somewhat turning around that brutal manipulation of the young in current cultures, as some of you are no doubt thinking … where even pop culture depicts dramas of youth “trying to find themselves,” and includes benedictions from benevolent elders along the lines of, “I love you just the way you are! I just want you to be happy!” Well, still, that is a movement only arising quite recently, historically.
Predominantly, this development came about only in the last half century; and, notably, its emergence was coincident with the growing influence of that much-maligned generation of “spoiled” children raised “permissively,” of that era. For some of you I know I need to say out loud that I am being sarcastic in the last sentence … the quote marks, see? Which means that I intend the opposite of what I am saying, and I am only restating the commonly expressed misunderstandings put upon that generation during their period of emergence.
Nevertheless, such “spoiled” children — the Baby-Boomer Generation, the Sixties Generation — became the most loving parents ever known in history … on the scale of a generation, that is.3 Such it is that their offspring, the Millennial Generation, are the most suited ever to follow along a course of adulthood that is more natural than anything in known history, going back to primal days.
So, yes, I am acknowledging that we are seeing a turnabout in ideas about rites of passage toward the humane kind that were only found in very early societies — cultures that were notably pre-agrarian … that were nomadic as well as egalitarian.
Of course, I must qualify that by conceding that this healthy development prevails only among the groups on the growing edge of the generations mentioned. This primal return to authentic identity occurs in the ostensibly different-than-normal parts of the Sixties and the Millennial generations. These are the groups and families presenting something new to society and are therefore the parts of society commented upon in the media and most often depicted in television dramas and sitcoms. Whereas regrettably, to a great extent the old-timey patriarchal abuses abound in those generations, still, as they did in all others. We would not have the masses in America responding to the bogus paternal enticements and the mind-control of a “daddy” Trump, if much of the masses were not still being “domesticated” into the products of use by their parents, as in times of yore.
The New Identity, the Necessary Hero
We will see later, and in much more detail, how another alternative is possible to those patriarchal rites, which require submission to and submergence in a daddy figure. Indeed, this alternative rite-of-passage is the one most applicable to modern times, in our current apocalyptic environmental predicament. Astonishingly it is exemplified by Jesus Christ and, of all things, the character, Joe Banks, played by Tom Hanks, in the 1990 movie, Joe Versus the Volcano.
That’s right. No, you don’t need to read that again. I just compared Tom Hanks and Jesus Christ. Now, before you go getting all Beatles-John-Lennon-we’re-bigger-than-Jesus on me, remember: We’re talking about mythology here. I am simply making the point that the story of Joe Banks — as depicted in an American movie of modern times, a comedic, seemingly trite representation — contains the same mythological pattern as the narrative around the drama of Jesus Christ. It is a mythic structure that revolves around the ideas of self-sacrifice for the highest good, that of humanity, that of one’s culture.
By the way, you may be saying to yourself, Well, isn’t that what the patriarchal rites result in? You might, I know, be wanting to give me the example of the product of the boot camp, the soldier, putting his or her life on the line for the community, the society. Well, the answer is yes, there is a similarity in that; there is also a huge difference. The patriarchal role calls for violence as its central requirement — fighting on behalf of another, significantly. Whereas the Joe-Jesus role calls for the opposite, for non-violence, for brave surrender to the forces of violence … doing it on behalf of the community.
Also, in the story of Christ, as well as Joe, the sacrificial role, with its immolation, is voluntarily accepted. Both Christ and Joe Banks chose their role, knowing it would likely lead to their deaths. The Jesus-Joe role is not demanded of one by the society, nor is one coerced into accepting it.4 However, in virtually all other human sacrifices the one to die is selected against her or his will.
In addition, fighting and violence yield for the normal “hero” the ego rewards of approval by society and quite a few extra benefits of a material and social nature. On the other hand, non-violence — regardless that it is in the service of society — gets little to no hero worship or benefits from society, except that modicum of support from parts of it that appreciate or laud the deviantly heroic … or who are united with the “deviant” in the same cause. Indeed, Christ’s reward was to be murdered by his society, just as was the four students killed at Kent State, similarly advocating for peace and in a nonviolent way.
Nonetheless, both the Jesus and Joe myths represent an actual solution to the problem of the cycles of violence … not its continuation!5 For fighting a war to bring about peace makes about as much sense as fucking for chastity. These myths also provide a thoroughly modern and enlightened perspective on identity and roles, which is that they should be voluntary and chosen — ideally in alignment with one’s dharma, fate, talents and capabilities, and/or Divine, not socially imposed, duty.
The Tao of Funny God
This new response to the dilemma of what to do about the evil that exists in the world and how to live a good adult life is the opposite of violence, in fact. In all these examples — Joe, Christ, and antiwar activists as in the example of Kent State — the participants represent staunch resistance to what they face. Yet they depict also a surrender of the use of violence as a response, if necessary even to the point of death, in the face of evil. Not fighting! Not violence! In fact, many historical expositions of the events around the time of Christ focus on the element of it that there was pressure on Jesus of Nazareth to be the same kind of heroic figure — that traditional one, the only one they knew about — who would fight back against Roman rule, be the leader of a revolution, of an armed insurrection against oppression. Some interpretations say that Jesus was murdered just because he did not become this kind of secular revolutionary hero. Which is another odd parallel with the protesters murdered at Kent State. Remember, they were protesting the war, and along with that, resisting being forced into a role where they would have to be the typical patriarchal murdering “hero” in Vietnam.
In fact, that Jesus did not conform to such an ordinary heroic course of action is the most significant thing of the entire Christ story! For the story was signaling, two thousand years before we would need it, the exact course, the only one possible, with any chance of success, for the situation of modern times. It is in this sense, only, that I see meaning in the idea of there being an actual “second coming of Christ,” in our times. At any rate, look to “The Tao of Funny God” in my book, Funny God, for more on what that mode of resistance looks like, as exhibited in Vietnam-era antiwar actions, Occupy events of 2011, the Gezi Park uprising in Turkey in 2013, and other such examples of how to deal with the pressing evils of environmental rape, war, injustice, human rights abuses, and fascism. And see my Wounded Deer and Centaurs, especially the part on The Necessary Hero, for more on what the new hero needs to be and is like.
Wounded Deer and Centaurs
Notice, also, that Greek mythology brings us such an exalted representation of heroism as well. In the figure of the centaur, Chiron, we see again that self-sacrificing, to death, for the sake of the Other … atoning, not for one’s own sins, but for another’s. For Chiron, an immortal, gave his own life to save Prometheus from an eternity of suffering.
Similarly, in recent history, we have representations of this radically new, harder, more noble heroism in the persons of Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Junior. Both of them had to pay the ultimate price for the betterment of humanity — death. Just as Jesus Christ did; just as the murdered at Kent State and Jackson State.
Notice, however, that though this heroic path is more difficult and more dire — sometimes resulting in death, although sometimes not, as we see in the character, Joe … as well as its representatives on the front lines of Occupy and other non-violent resistances currently and in modern times — it is actually successful! The thing that is wrong with the traditional aggressive heroic pattern — which attempts to fight injustice and evil through physical violence — is that, not only does the person become exactly like the evil one is supposedly trying to eliminate, and thus this course of action fails in its intention, right at the get-go. But also it fails ultimately in that it sets in a cycle of resistance, hence ongoing return to violence and evil … endlessly.
Whereas this new heroic response, which I have termed, the tao of funny god, can actually succeed! For it ends the cycle. We see that in the stories of Mahatma Ghandi … for there is no doubt that India received its independence … as well as in the history of Martin Luther King, Junior, and the cause of civil rights. While it is clear that racial equality has not been completely achieved since that time of civil disobedience during the 1960s: We see that today where White racist elements have infiltrated police squads throughout America and are murdering Black civilians on spurious, or no, grounds; and where a racist, Trump, has been installed as president of the United States, with the support of a supremely irate and bigoted populace of old White guys and the Ku Klux Klan. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that racial equality in America has been nearly achieved. This is evidenced by the virtual elimination of racist feelings in the Millennial Generation and the fact that America elected a Black president in 2008.
Versus the Way of Perseus
All this to the side, and regrettably, it is patriarchal cultures that we are familiar with in virtually all cultures of the world in modern times, especially the Western worlds. So, daily on television and movies and throughout the print media, we see depictions of the mythology of adolescence as enforced in a patriarchal culture. For there is always some version of a hero slaying some sort of danger or dragon and in the process becoming a tougher, more insensitive person and thereby reinforcing in the audience or the readers the value of that. We are besieged endlessly with portrayals of the hero person as prone to violence and as someone convinced that violent aggression is the answer to all difficulties, as well as to undesired situations and people.
Indeed, these patriarchal stories predominate because they extend far back into Western history, thousands of years, in fact. Let me show you what I mean. We examine a typical one from our Greek heritage, next.
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The Way of Patriarchal Man:
The World Divided, Origins of Monsters, the Third Fall from Grace, and Patriarchal Fantasy of the Feminine
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For the patriarchal “hero” there is no darkness inside of innocent self and no goodness to be found in one’s evil opponents.
Pedestals, virgins, and “hoes,” oh my!
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In patriarchal societies, aggression and violence are seen as the only possible response, for a reason. This underlying cause also explains why the separation of opposing elements is most pronounced, among such cultures, and why fighting and enmity are most intense.
The World Divided
At the Ego level of development and while encountering the obstacles of life — the difficult emotions, and the cruelties and injustices of society — what one faces are thought to be outside oneself. They are arrayed against oneself as much as a dragon confronts a knight, the Alien confronts Ripley, or a supposed reptile in government is arrayed against a right-winger. The obvious response is to fight, and ultimately kill.
However, it is the mythologies of patriarchal cultures within “civilization” in which this is taken to its extremes, where the world is most irreconcilably divided and strife most ferociously attendant with it. In earlier cultures the exigencies and darkness of life are not seen as such a threat. The Trickster element is more likely employed to explain the contrariness of life, not some unremittingly malevolent other. Yet, the pronounced opposition of forces in patriarchies is understandable. For it arose predominantly after the fall into civilization, with its hierarchies of status, descended upon the horizons of herstory.
With hierarchy, there is more of a cultural division seen to be in the world. Such contention follows from the fact that there is actual threat emanating from its very structure. Those folks who are below on the pyramid know that their lives are not their own and are expendable. Their daily lives are constucted over an abyss of dire uncertainty. Whereas those above in status are conscious — however much they might put it out of mind — that they are setting up countervailing tendencies in the population to the ways in which they are controlling and manipulating them for selfish ends, not ones the people themselves would choose. The masses are required to do what the Controllers want, not what they themselves want. The elite cannot but know there is resentment against them, regardless how they rationalize, to themselves, their “benevolence.”
Patriarchal mythologies reflect this division, this tension between opposing elements; it is in patriarchal cultures that all contrary elements are most at war with each other. In earlier, simpler societies, rebirth motifs predominate in the mythologies. In these, both Trickster elements and an embrace of opposites in the cause of larger wholes is depicted. The central monomyth for non-hierarchical societies surrounds the processes of rebirth, where larger personal integrations, subsuming those seemingly oppositional elements, are the result. This is contrasted with the patriarchal, where the monomyth embodies aggression, dominance, and utter defeat of what is on the other side of every divisional line — whether elements or people — in keeping with a supreme value put upon power.
And wouldn’t one expect power to be all important within a social stratification involving an above and a below, with those above having the only privileges of human choice and the pursuit of individual happiness? This is in contrast to the natural unfolding of, and an integration of, self. This latter is what is the unexpressed though tacit goal of individual, especially ritual, expression in primal societies.
This mode of patriarchies to eliminate opposition … not embrace it … is in keeping with power. Not mere dominance of others is desired, rather complete repression of those elements, as they are projected outside oneself, is the intention. And this brutal suppression is depicted in its mythologies. By contrast, the Trickster element in primal mythologies is saying that while life might seem to be arrayed against one, that one can trust the forces outside oneself, and its seeming opposition is only temporary, perhaps even whimsical. “Lighten up,” is their response to the heavy and dire seriousness of “civilized” ways. Their light-heartedness corresponds, also, to the early societies’ much more favorable view of Nature and the world outside themselves. The outside — the universe or the forest — is frequently seen as benevolent, bountiful, and gracious. It is often depicted as a loving mother.
However, in hierarchical societies, come of “civilization,” the conscious self is most defended and threatened by uncertainties. In the same manner as in its social hierarchies, those above and in control seek to oppress those below and repress their influence. This corresponds, inside the person, to the conscious mind seeing everything outside it as not of oneself. And just as the elites do to the ones below, the conscious mind, as Ego, seeks to control all experiential elements outside it; pushing them out and into the unconscious and striving to snuff them out of existence.
Hierarchical societies are top-down oriented, the above controlling the below, and thus are authoritarian. Consequently, they foster authoritarian personalities in their members, which is doing the same thing inside the person. As well, its mythologies reflect this situation of authoritarianism, where might and right are equated and where power determines all truth, the way all things will unfold, the manner in which all participants will be depicted, and the way the story will afterward be told.
This is so common we do not know it can be otherwise. Yet it was not that way for the ninety-nine percent of human societies that have ever existed, which in general were egalitarian and not severely hierarchical, if at all.
The myth that follows, now, is a product of such a patriarchal culture. That should be kept in mind. There are reasons for the emergence of this particular mythology … compared to mythologies of previous times … which are primarily rebirth-oriented. Rebirth-oriented means the opposing elements are more likely to be seen as necessary aspects of one’s life and as assistive in one’s life-personality-growth, just as pain is seen as part of the trials involved in being rebirthed into modes of being beyond where one is.
Yes, I am saying that patriarchal cultures stunt the psychological growth of its members, whereas primal cultures are more personal-growth oriented. This is what one would expect in a situation where there is no advantage to, or possibility for, greater maturity or selfhood; for one’s life and one’s time are not really one’s own. What one will do will ultimately be determined by those above. Similarly, on the other end of this, for the Controllers, there is hardly an allowance, let alone a thought, for personal growth, either. For, when involved in controlling and dominating others, maturity is hardly a must. To perpetrate such oppression of others requires one not be very personally advanced, actually. This is the reason why evil succeeds and why it is only the good, as they say, who die young. Indeed, one would be considered “weak” if, in a position “above,” one were not so repressive of the forces below. In hierarchical societies, in civilization, where power is the only real value, weakness is the only true sin.
This deadly even cosmically significant opposition, this brutal repression of anything outside of Ego, and the equation of might and right are characteristics of the mythologies, stories, and beliefs of patriarchal societies. The myth of Perseus, following, is illustrative of such myths.
The Way of Perseus
In patriarchies, on the inner plane, the “monsters” or dragons are the “negative” thoughts that new-agers seek to vanquish; feelings and sexual impulses Christians struggle to slay; feminine qualities and bro love of which tough guys are terrified and so need to be stomped down inside, as well as outside, themselves.
And in the outer world, as we see, the dragons and monsters are all those people, ideas, images, and planetmates upon which we project those inner suppressed elements. It is the world and oneself divided up into good guys and bad guys, angel and devil, superego and id, as in virtually every plot ever spun. This includes, of course, an identification or an alignment of oneself with the good guys and as being oh-so-victimized; along with profiles of the bad guys as being totally and irredeemably evil and thus deserving punishment and death.
In this worldview — an Ego one, a patriarchal one — there is no darkness inside of innocent self and no goodness to be found in one’s evil opponents. It is the Manichean cosmology — the ancient view of the world as being a battleground between good and evil, light and dark — again become popular in current time. It is the view Christ was said to dispel.
It favors repression of self, punishment, severe, of “bad guys,” and killing of opponents who are characterized, conveniently, as not human. It is the natural world seen as “wild” and dangerous, with planetmates as “wild animals,” which must be kept away from humans, controlled at all costs, and even extinguished. It is the real reason humans are not any such alarmed at the dying off of species that have been here for millions of years, of an extinction that sees millions of species becoming extinct in our lifetime, with some folks saying, “Aw, we have too many species, anyway.” And others hoping that snakes and insects are included, all of them. And don’t forget the crocodiles … and my neighbor’s dog.
So this Ego stance sees the world as full of evil, and dangerous, against which one’s heroic and special personhood is arrayed. The different supposed evils are what is meant as the dragons and monsters of myth. They are mostly just projections of one’s own self, one’s repressed self, to be sure; but that is not known here and is vehemently denied. In this whole mishmash, real injustice and cruelty creeps out the back door with the gold goblets.
By the way, this point that the dragons and monsters are projections of one’s own denied self has significance far beyond this. For in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the main lesson the newly dead need to embrace in order to achieve liberation is exactly that. The person needs to see that all the horrors, as well as heavens, that come to one at that time — which are seemingly imposed on one, which one suffers from — emanate ultimately from within; they are not coming from without, having sources or causes outside oneself. I do not believe it coincidence that an essence of liberation would be exactly counter to what is thought to be true in patriarchal cultures. Ahem.
Nonetheless, the response to these projected elements of self, painted upon the injustices and cruelties of the world, throughout all patriarchal cultures, has been a soldierly one. It has been a stance requiring discipline and control, conformity of behavior and repression of emotion, and extroversion and avoidance of the inner world and the feelingness, romanticism, idealism, and poetry which are seeded there.
The Ego here is Joseph Campbell’s hero1 and the Perseus of Greek mythology as interpreted by Carl Jung and his followers.2 Campbell, indeed, has used boot camp and going to war as examples of this “heroic” cycle. One should never forget, in espousing this way — a Way of Perseus, let us say — that one is applauding repression of self, supreme insensitivity, and an ability to kill others at the behest of powerful superiors as part of this “achievement.”
The Perseus Story
To make our case, let us bring to mind the elements of the myth of Perseus. Quoting from Wikipedia, about the Perseus myth and on the slaying of the Gorgon, named Medusa:
“Overcoming the Gorgon. When Perseus was grown, Polydectes came to fall in love with the beautiful Danaë. Perseus believed Polydectes was less than honorable, and protected his mother from him; then Polydectes plotted to send Perseus away in disgrace. He held a large banquet where each guest was expected to bring a gift. Polydectes requested that the guests bring horses, under the pretense that he was collecting contributions for the hand of Hippodamia, ‘tamer of horses.’ Perseus had no horse to give, so he asked Polydectes to name the gift; he would not refuse it. Polydectes held Perseus to his rash promise and demanded the head of the only mortal Gorgon, Medusa, whose eyes turned people to stone. Ovid’s account of Medusa’s mortality tells that she had once been a woman, vain of her beautiful hair, who had lain with Poseidon in the Temple of Athena. In punishment for the desecration of her temple, Athena had changed Medusa’s hair into hideous snakes ‘that she may alarm her surprised foes with terror.’”3
And, regarding Athena,
“Athena instructed Perseus to find the Hesperides, who were entrusted with weapons needed to defeat the Gorgon. Following Athena’s guidance, Perseus sought out the Graeae, sisters of the Gorgons, to demand the whereabouts of the Hesperides, the nymphs tending Hera’s orchard. The Graeae were three perpetually old women, who had to share a single eye. As the women passed the eye from one to another, Perseus snatched it from them, holding it for ransom in return for the location of the nymphs. When the sisters led him to the Hesperides, he returned what he had taken.
“From the Hesperides he received a knapsack (kibisis) to safely contain Medusa’s head. Zeus gave him an adamantine sword and Hades’ helm of darkness to hide. Hermes lent Perseus winged sandals to fly, while Athena gave him a polished shield. Perseus then proceeded to the Gorgons’ cave.
“In the cave he came upon the sleeping Medusa. By viewing Medusa’s reflection in his polished shield, he safely approached and cut off her head. From her neck sprang Pegasus (“he who sprang”) and Chrysaor (“bow of gold”), the result of Poseidon and Medusa’s meeting. The other two Gorgons pursued Perseus, but, wearing his helm of darkness, he escaped.
“From here he proceeded to visit Atlas king of Mauritania, who had refused him hospitality; in revenge Perseus turned him to stone.”4
Perseus and the Monster
Looking more closely into the Perseus myth, with its monster, Medusa, reveals interesting elements to highlight the traditional patriarchal hero and its accompanying model for adult identity. The elements of the Way of Perseus, as a directive for dealing with difficulty, are that Perseus kills without looking directly at his opponent. He uses a reflection only … symbolizing the reflecting intellect … to locate her. Subsequently he represses the whole thing, like some kind of early day Iraqi or Vietnam warrior with PTSD come home. But there’s much more to it. Let me explain.
The Father’s Murderous Jealousy
Right at the start we have Oedipal elements where Perseus does not approve of his mother’s suitor, Polydectes, and wishes to keep him away from her.
We deal in more depth with that Oedipal aspect of the Perseus myth in Chapter 43, “The Assault of the Father.” There we take a look at the way the Oedipal dynamic — as explained by psychologists in patriarchal cultures and conforming to the abuse of children in “civilized” societies everywhere — impugns the motives of a son who naturally and simply wants to protect his mother from an abusive and dominating “dad,” or in this case, a daddy figure. I mean, you would, too, right?
Basically, virtually all psychology of all time and including up till today takes the side of the father, who is abusive to the mother and who is wanting to kill or eliminate the son in order to have more sexual and affectional attention from her. The utter inability of psychologists to notice the obvious dynamic here is astonishing. It speaks to the stupifying haze of the patriarchal matrix, with its components of misogyny and child abuse so woven through as to be totally invisible within it.
Astonishingly bereft of acumen as Western psychology has been, it is, I suppose, to be expected in a culture who thinks, as well, that a father wanting to murder his son could in any way be some kind of interaction with God. This is the extent to which child abuse is endemic and unseen in Western civilization. I am referring here to the biblical story of Abraham setting about to kill his son, Isaac, on a sacrificial altar; not realizing that he is having some kind of psychotic episode and instead thinking that a Divinity would actually want that of him. Keep in mind, the abomination of it is not in Abraham’s thinking that, so much, but in the thousands of years of religious thinking that would promote such a story as some kind of moral example!
A similar mistake is made by psychologists in regard to the Oedipus complex. The actual dynamic of it is that the father is jealous of his son’s close and loving relationship to his mother, the dad’s wife. Having himself become insensitive through the traumas and injustices that are perpetrated on children in civilized cultures in the normal course of “development,” the father painfully resents the boy getting what he is not able to get in his relationships with women as well as what he was denied when he was the boy’s age.
So the father wishes to do to the young boy what was done to him; mimicking exactly the way mothers and aunts in some parts of the world will participate in the genital mutilation of their daughters in the unconscious bid to keep their daughters from having the pleasure in their bodies they were themselves denied beginning at that age, as well as removing their daughters as any possible competition for their husband’s affections. It is a ritual whose unconscious intention is to snuff out the aliveness of the young girl, just as it is blossoming, and thereby bring her down to the common misery of the culture. Life, love, joy, spontaneity, play, pleasure, and innocence are hated when seen by those who have been robbed of them. That is why I call such adults kitty-drowners and butterfly-mashers. It is the good, innocent, fresh, and happy that they cannot bear to see and so wish to crush.
The real meaning of the psychologist’s Oedipal complex is revealed when we realize that it emanates from the twisted feelings and the affectional deficits of the father. For the dad slanders the young boy’s natural, innocent, and empathetic desire to protect his mother — his slandering being another example of that kitty drowning, butterfly mashing — and psychologists collude with that scapegoating. Like aunts assisting mothers in mutilating their daughters, psychologists aid the creation of insensitive women-hating emotionally defective adult males. For they claim that the “proper” resolution of the “crisis” is for the child — the young boy in this instance — to “identify with the aggressor,” i.e., the dad.
Now, you would think that phrasing — identification with the aggressor, smacking as it does of the Stockholm syndrome, among other sick results of oppression and torture — would have been a hint to Freud and psychoanalysts that the dynamic emanates from the father, not the son. Nonetheless, they collude with child-abusing fathers in declaring that healthy development for a young boy amounts to surrendering his empathy and instead becoming as equally a grade-A asshole, child-abuser, and woman-hater as the dad. Only patriarchies can see in that outcome some kind of “resolution.”
So, what the Oedipal dynamic really amounts to is that the boy wants to stand between the father and the mother, who is routinely abused in patriarchies. What person — as sensitive, innocent, and loving as young children are — would not do that? Wouldn’t anyone at least wish to protect one’s mother, a woman who only three to six years earlier was so close in feeling to one that one was actually inside her? Do you not think young boys, for that matter young girls, too, do not, out of love for their mothers, wish for peace in their families and for affection to dawn in situations where daily is observed the deprecation, disrespect, and, often, physical and emotional abuse of wives by their husbands in a patriarchy?
Yet it is said about this dynamic, which psychoanalysts term Oedipal, that the young boy wants to eliminate the father and to have the mother sexually. As if psychologists, in particular psychoanalysts, are not capable of entertaining the idea that there is a difference between sex and love, or the difference between familial love and romantic love. As if psychologists and intellectuals for hundreds of years in the Western patriarchy are not capable of noticing, or remembering, that young children of the age of three to six years old, boys or girls, are not even thinking in sexual terms — hardly knowing what it is. Or that the reason they, as psychologists, would think such a thing is because it comes from the fantasies of adults, at a time when their neuroses, as revealed on the psychoanalyst’s couch, will — in that adult neurotic’s fantasies and dreams — symbolize this dynamic of a futile attempt to protect the mother as sexual love and a desire for a young boy to “sexually possess” his mother.
In all seriousness, the blindness put upon men in patriarchies — as shown in this inability of intellectuals and psychologists to recognize ordinary human feelings of love and intimacy, or to see the travesty in the psychologist, Joseph Campbell’s, honoring of murderers as heroes, in his claim about the “hero” cycle as being represented by men being brutalized into being war machines — truly is breath-taking in scope. And honestly, explaining this right now is to me as daunting as one would imagine for someone trying to explain the color, red, to those who’ve never known sight.
The Assignment of Task
Nonetheless, the psychologists’ Oedipal confusion is the huge issue we tackle later, in full, for it is central to the understanding of Veil Three, having to do with the primal scene. Whereas in this part, Veil Two, let us look at what it says for the adolescent and Identity stages, which have to do with taking up a role in life, applying oneself to a task as given by society and culture.
In this light and in response to Perseus’s wish for this guy, Polydectes, to say away from his mother, Polydectes plans to get rid of Perseus. He uses a ruse about gifts to extract a promise from Perseus that he will kill Medusa, who is a Gorgon — a “monster” — who can turn people to stone by looking at her and who, unlike the other Gorgons, is mortal.
Oedipal elements — elements which, as I mentioned, are more accurately related to the Third Fall from Grace at the primal scene5 — abound here: Notice that Polydectes, the father proxy in the story, on his side of the primal-scene/Oedipal dilemma wishes to get rid of Perseus, the proxy son. The son is seen as an impediment to his relationship with his lover, the son’s mother.
The Manipulation of Sons
“He uses a ruse about gifts” is interpreted to mean that, beginning around the time of the primal scene and extending up to this Identity stage, the boy is led to feel inferior and inadequate.
With this inferiority in place, the child has accepted that he will do what the parent wants in order to be accepted by him. Hence the child is ripe and ready to be instilled with a task of the parent’s choosing. The perennial demand of the father for the son to take up the role the father wishes and to act as a man and an adult as the father directs him is expressed in the myth where Polydectes demands of Perseus that he “prove” himself by killing the Medusa. The child takes up the cause of the parent.
Notice that we have here an older male directing a younger man into a battle, more accurately a murder. It is not Perseus’s desire to kill; it is his potential stepdad’s, Polydectes’s, desire. Hence, it is Polydectes’s bidding upon which Perseus takes up the task. Keep that in mind for what follows. Also remember that stepdads in myth, like stepmothers in fairy tales, represent the split-off “bad” and hurtful aspects of fatherhood. The Ego splits it off so it does not have to deal with the conflict of a parent who is supposed to be loving but who does hateful and harmful things to oneself.
So Polydectes is the bad dad, manipulating the son, ordering and demanding of the son, getting the son to act on the older man’s behalf and not on the volition or out of the desires of the son himself. Polydectes thus represents the politicians sending other’s children off to do battle and to be killed in wars as well as the stern father determining the career, profession, or adult roles of his children.
Patriarchal Fantasies of the Feminine
Now, the origin of this supposed monster, Medusa, is telling as well.
The Gorgon, Medusa
Medusa became a monster because she had sex; she engages in an act of Nature. In typical patriarchal fashion, we see a Greek myth where consensual sex is an affront to the gods, where it is a sacrilege. In the patriarchy, women and Nature are reviled and considered not spiritual; whereas the realms of the spirit are divorced from the physical and are deemed “transcendent.” Hence the patriarchy reinforces a strict dichotomy in the world. It divides the world up into good and evil, sacred and profane.
Furthermore, Medusa did not just have sex, she had sex with Poseidon, the god of the sea. Remember, now, that the ocean and the sea represent the vast unknown, the unconscious, and especially the collective unconscious, as well as the sensuous and sexual. So, copulating with Poseidon represents communing with or being close to unconscious knowledge. We see a woman here who is not only sexual, god forbid, but is intimate with inner knowledge. In another age, she would be called a witch and killed for such effrontery. The Perseus story shows sentiments were not much different in archaic times.
Like the Jezebel of the Judeo-Christian tradition, Medusa had the temerity to have some pride in herself. Of course, in a patriarchy, this is seen as vanity. Sure enough, she is said to have considered her hair to be beautiful.
The Virgin, Athena
Then, worst of all, Medusa commits this grievous sexual act smack in the middle of a bastion of Stepford wifery, puritanical fantasy, and arrogant airs of civilization — a temple of Athena. How disgraceful! It would be equivalent to a beautiful young woman cavorting with some hippie or bohemian dude in the bed of her sainted grandmother. Athena is a symbol of morality and civilization and never, in any Greek tale, has a lover or marries. So she represents moralistic (called “holy”) virginal womanhood.
More than that, Athena is a patriarchal fantasy of the feminine. She is a male concoction, a creation — equally as distorted as the other projection of women by men, the Medusa. Indeed, Athena does not have a mother, she is a product only of the father. She comes from Zeus, who is said to have taken Intellect into him, and so can produce a child. You getting the idea yet how men thought of themselves back then? This man alone, because he has combined with Intellect, can produce a woman: How can it not be that she will be a male conceptualization only? That not enough, the bread is baked when we find out about the birth of Athena. She is said to have “popped out fully formed from the forehead of Zeus.” If that is not saying she is not real and is only men’s “projection” — a product only of a man’s thoughts and wishes — I don’t know what is.
So Athena, a male concoction, is propaganda brought to bear in ancient times to keep women in line and faithful and adoring of their men. She is the opposite of the kind of goddess depicted in pre-archaic times and those associated with natural, indigenous, and especially gatherer-hunter societies and cultures. Those goddesses represent Nature, the processes of sex, death, and birth, the forest … and the wild, spontaneous, uncertain, irrational, intuitive, and unpredictable. Athena, however, is said to represent the city, purity, sanitized civilization, “righteous” warfare (George W. would have loved her). She is called “Athena of the city” and “Athena the virgin.”
She is a conservative wet dream. She is woman on a pedestal and all that men would want of women is put upon her. She is the female embodiment of the presumptuousness and vanities of the patriarchy and is said to represent the city, the civilized, law and justice, strength, mathematics, culture.
She is the perfect cheerleader, patron goddess of heroes and applauder of their exploits. She is the companion of heroes providing shrewd and strategic advice, glorifying and enabling strength. She leads battles and is the warrior maiden, but she does her warring in a strategic and disciplined way. Thus she represents the rationalization of violence and war. Southern gentlemen fight each other over the honor of their women with Athena’s blood pumping in them. Yes, she is the goddess of the old-fashioned, murderous hero, a lover of cowboy movies, with a portrait of John Wayne installed in her multi-room gallery featuring dead heroes. Notice that while being the obvious benefactor of Perseus, she is also the helper of Heracles — the paragon of masculinity who slays Hydra heads and chthonic “monsters” and is a champion of the Olympian order and thus society’s class structure, its hierarchical arrangement.
Academics would be alarmed and angered to hear Athena depicted this way. For she is also the feminine backdrop of their aspirations and represents education, wisdom, learning, intelligence, knowledge, creativity, eloquence, truth, justice (and the American way!). Arts and crafts and skill are listed in her column. She is the representative of the presumptions of civilization with its rationality telling it that it can engage in war and killing, and can do it “thoughtfully” and “righteously.” She is the balmy winds blowing for just warfare … as from afar, note that, as it corresponds to her advice to Perseus … and is contrasted with the chaotic, gruesome, bloody, blinding, and darkened engagement in battle, which is represented by the masculine god, Ares (Mars in Roman myth).
Being properly womanly, in a patriarchal sense, she represents humility, too. Women must be self-effacing you see and, like children, seen but not heard. She is the patriarchal anima representing consciousness and cosmic knowledge of the cerebral kind, not the experiential variety. She would be a supporter of Greek philosophers and modern day Ego psychologists and would put up her nose at shamans and psychedelic experience. She is Ken Wilber in a dress.
It is this feminine representation that is at odds with, alarmed, and offended by the more natural, more sensuous, and more “down to ocean” Medusa. It is Athena who is the goddess, the ally, and the cheerleader for Perseus. She is the feminine hand of the patriarchy and, like some kind of archaic Margaret Thatcher, participates in its endeavors and atrocities. She represents power and the rightness of it. She is called independent, clever, and tough, displaying again the masculinity that the patriarchy wants to propagandize with her. She is the opposite of the Earth, the opposite of Gaia; she is womanhood as fantasized by men, sans Nature and all its “irrationality,” intense and unexpected pleasures, bloody and sweaty biology, and exquisite love and belongingness. She is said to be antithetical to Athena Polias, who represents goddess, Earth, and serenity.
Thus, Athena is the post-paleolithic cultured and masculinized version of the goddess, supporter of the hierarchy and its elitism, kind of a Greek Ayn Rand. It is no wonder this remaining element of the old ways and the old goddess, Medusa, is despised by Athena and that she will do all she can to first humiliate and stymie her and later kill her.
The Manipulation of Daughters … “Crime” and Punishment
At any rate, these ancient gods being no less vengeful than their later counterparts in the Inquisition or of puritanical lore, the weight of heaven is brought down on Medusa for such an offense — sex in a temple, oh my! Athena, the virgin Athena, the symbol of civilization, hierarchy, and feminine obedience, like some Muslim aunt or mother bringing genital mutilation — a clitoridectomy — to her daughter or niece, changes Medusa’s beautiful hair to horrid snakes. This will put an end to her dallying, no doubt. For men will henceforth be terrified at her sight. I am reminded how in contemporary times men, and sometimes jealous women, in India and in Muslim countries have taken to deforming women they feel have behaved shamefully by pouring acid on their faces. Same idea, you see? Indeed, the rumor is spread that just gazing upon the Gorgon’s hideousness will turn you to stone or make you go mad. With Medusa deformed and defamed this way, the self-righteous Athena’s job is done. For now.
But then, Perseus is in pursuit of the Gorgon, so this represents an opportunity for Athena. Having painted the poor Medusa as slut and whore, this symbol of holy womanhood, Athena, has little trouble going beyond that in assisting in her death.
Incidentally, in this vicious opposition between Athena and Medusa, see the obvious conflicts between the appropriate ways of womanhood. Naturally, since the split was created by men, both concoctions — slut and virgin — express men’s psychic distortions of women. Still, there must have been quite a conflict inside of women, too. Forced to comply with the male concept of womanhood as Athena, no doubt the real part of them needed to be repressed. So when it appeared to counter the sanitized but boring persona one was aping, it would by contrast be a “monster.” This is a common dynamic: By splitting the world into good and evil and proclaiming one side naively as good and the other as evil, the repressed side will be distorted; it will become a “monster” … it will be perceived that way.
Back to Athena. As is her wont with patriarchal warriors, Athena advises Perseus. This merely says the conforming female in a patriarchal society will be complicit in the diminution of the son. And this we see in cultures the world around. The women might not be central in the male rites of passage, which are meant to disfigure the boy’s soul to the patriarch’s liking; yet they will be included in some peripheral way. Often the mothers will participate at the beginning. Like a father giving the hand of his daughter in matrimony, the mothers are required to hand over their charges to the fathers. Where they will be assaulted. And, yes, mothers will often do it reluctantly. Often they will weep; sometimes in great distress and for long periods. But it they must do.
So Athena is complicit with Polydectes’s stratagem for Perseus’s deformation from a “magical child”6 to a patriarchal shill. First, she helps Perseus get the necessary weapons to kill a Gorgon.
In the next chapter, we see how Athena and the patriarchal gods manipulate the young hero, like elders do of youth in patriarchal societies everywhere, into the adoption of their wishes, not his. They ply the youth with rewards, initiate him into “secret knowledge,” and imprint upon his mind the mores, morals, and a manner of being conducive to their peace of mind, not his. The warrior way is hammered upon the tender psyche of youth in boot camps and initiation rituals of all varieties. Perseus fares little better in his mythological one.
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How Men Are Taught to Not Seek Happiness:
Mythological Boot Camp and Arsenals of the Patriarchy … Deception, Repression, Rationalization, and Inauthenticity
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“Put your pain in a box. lock it down.” Corporate and patriarchal masters profit from a population that is repressed and unfeeling and enamored of its chains.
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Athena instructs Perseus to seek out the Graeae. These are three sisters of the Gorgons, appearing as very old women.
Ends Justify Means for Patriarchal “Heroes”
In typical patriarchal fashion, Perseus gets the information he wants from the Graeae through trickery. He is already showing the patriarchal pattern of deception — of presenting one face, but having another. He is becoming more unreal, less authentic. He steals something from the Graeae, an eye that they share, and keeps it from them; holding it for ransom in exchange for their providing information on the whereabouts of the nymphs, the Hesperides. In using blackmail to achieve his ends, he is also sketching the outlines of the patriarchal hero’s way; he is demonstrating the belief that the ends do justify the means.
Egotistical and arrogant, patriarchal heroes deem they know better than anyone what is right and what is wrong — the Manichean separation of the world into absolutes of good and evil, you see. They see no problem in straying over lines to get what they want. We see that element in virtually all tales of patriarchal heroes. It is so much a part of our thinking we fail to notice any problem when the tough guy police officer on the silver screen beats a confession out of the supposed bad guy or gets him to offer up the location of his buddies, the bomb, the body, or the loot by using what amounts to torture. The cops can blow things up, crash cars, kill people in crossfires, and more, because it is all in the service of “the good,” we are led to believe. We see that plot portrayed thousands of times over the course of our lives and never question it.
In the same way, we turn our heads at Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo is justified because we have a War on Terror. And patriarchal heroes, followers of the Perseus way, are especially gifted in the knowledge of what is terror — that the suffering they perpetrate in the world, through their wars and torture, are not terror but that the enemy’s actions are. This is no different from the cavalry knowing damn well sure that the “indians” are savage and so having no problem carrying out a genocidal murder of them. Similarly, in full knowledge of the supposed rightness of his actions, Perseus is able to pressure and trick old and feeble women to do his bidding, with no sense of conscience.
Tools of the Patriarchy
Continuing the story, the nymphs, the tenders of the goddess Hera’s gardens, are found with the help of the old women. And from these nymphs, Perseus receives additional help.
Knapsack of Repression … the Unconscious
The Graeae provide the designated hero with a kibisis, which is a knapsack, in which to contain the head of Medusa after she has been killed. A container of any kind — something in which contents can be put away out of sight and hidden — is a symbol of repression and suppression. A knapsack represents the ability to hide one’s own deeds from oneself, to fend off self-awareness. In general, the sack represents the existence of the unconscious — the dark and out of sight place into which the things we do not want to acknowledge are put. Often such a container represents repressed sexuality; and it is similar, that way, to a jar or a box, as was given Pandora.
So, from the nymphs Perseus receives the ability to put the murder of Medusa out of his mind. For anyone being reminded constantly that one is a murderer, by a bloody detached head of ghastly snakes in full view, might indeed go mad … or actually learn from his mistakes. But neither of these are very convenient for a patriarchal hero.
Indeed, this ability to repress is a part of Perseus’s training in his armed services of the gods. How this is common in the trainings of all soldiers of patriarchy is seen in the movie I referred to earlier on the exploits of some modern day Perseuses, Navy Seals, in Act of Valor (2012). One of these elite fighters of America’s “terrorists” left a letter for his young son to be given to him if his father should die in battle. The letter reads:
“Remember, you have warriors’ blood in your veins. The code that made your father who he was is the same code that will make you a man he would admire, respect. Put your pain in a box. Lock it down. Like those people in the paintings your father liked, we are men made up of boxes — chambers of loss and triumph, of hurt and hope, and love. No one is stronger or more dangerous than a man who can harness his emotions, his past. Use it as fuel, as ammunition, as ink to write the most important letter of your life.”
The message in the letter from the dead hero provides a good example of the manner in which new generations of Perseuses are instructed by father figures. Notice that the metaphor of box is used instead of knapsack, and keep in mind that this is an elder instructing his son on how to be a man.
Like the gods for Perseus, the son is instructed by his father to pick up the sword and repress everything into a box, for the sake of some masculine good. Notice also that the boy’s feelings of low self-esteem are played upon in getting him to take up his own task of Perseus. The father points out that the son’s being like his dad will “make you a man he would admire, respect.” Traditionally, that father dangling the reward of respect is the same one who instilled the craving for it in the child by denying it earlier.
Substitute Rewards … the Patriarchal “Blessing”
Notice also the fate imposed on the younger man, or boy. In patriarchal societies — where the role of men in general is to be pawns in the service of the elite or others simply higher in the hierarchies that come with civilization — men are beaten into things that can be used, tools, and are taught that happiness, or even pleasure, is not to be a goal in life. The goal instilled in a man is to serve the higher ups, and, in so doing, receive the paternal approval — of actual male authority figures or their proxy, the society as a whole.
The aim of a man is to get the pat on the head, receive the gold watch, be featured in the company newsletter as the employee of the month or as the upcoming corporate star. He is told he will be “remembered” after life as payment for his giving up his happiness. Somehow getting one’s name on the Vietnam Wall or some other war memorial is some kind of offset for the suffering, pain, lost life, and the death a man incurs and regardless that the soldier, now dead, will never know of it.
So it is that instead of felicity, happiness, personal relationships involving love, and so on, the aspiration of a man’s life — albeit hidden by all, and never expressed — is to be applauded by others … in life or afterwards.
If you think that trite, notice how pervasively that is shown in modern times. For virtually all hollywood feel-good movies have such an ending. A man, much less often a woman, finds himself at the end surrounded by his friends and community. All the events of the conflict have unfolded, and the loose ends are all being tied up. Amazingly, as can only happen in hollywood and fairy tales, the entire community sits in rapt attention, listening in silence to it all as if they have nothing better to do with their lives. Everything is explained to the attending audience, and the character is revealed to be the honorable person he is and his motives are deemed to have been true. At least they have been in keeping with the desires and wishes of the community, and that is the thing of most importance for the patriarchal pawn.
In this process of justification of the suffering hero — much like some kind of Day of Judgment before the Throne of God in which one is deemed deserving of entrance to heaven — the formerly embattled hero is at long last redeemed, is finally understood, and … most noticeably … is applauded. Cheers, sometimes, and even hugs follow. Significantly, there is at least one paternal figure who “blesses” the man or boy, finally, by expressing approval, extending praise, offering some kind of reward, perhaps an advancement in position … whereas that same man might have been the primary adversary and belittler of the character throughout the story!
The world is set right, and, finally, everybody likes and understands him. This is the case in all these feel-good rites-of-passage-type movies, from It’s a Wonderful Life to Water Boy. From Jerry Maguire to The Return of the King. In fact this plotline in movies and other media is so boringly common, one might wonder if it is unconsciously serving to try to bring to a modern world — which is said to be mostly lacking in rites of passage into adulthood, as we see in virtually all other, all non-modern cultures — some kind of substitute; however much the transformation of the character in the movie is only vicariously experienced by the theater-goer or couch-sitter.
Branding
In a patriarchal culture, that a man’s life and his happiness is not to be his own is everywhere stressed to boys and young men. The act of circumcision provides a concrete example of just how men are to behave instead: They will need to conform themselves, just as the penis’s form is made into another kind of shape. Men’s pleasure is to be stunted … cut off, a semi-castration … and not for their ends, mind you. After all a man’s penis is not really his own. No, it belongs to the society, which means the elites. And in this way the man is told that they will decide what to do with it; the higher ups will. As well he will be told toward what end he is to apply his power, as well as what he is to do with his pleasure — how it is to be channeled and directed … how it is to be eliminated.
This message, unconsciously imposed, is given through the practice of circumcision, but even more brutally it is delivered in practices of subincision and other penis mutilations — occurring often in primal and primitive societies — that boys and young men must undergo as part of their being shaped. It must be admitted that while primal cultures are predominantly egalitarian, especially when they are nomadic; still, being as how they express such a vast array of possible ways of being human, some of them are even more brutally patriarchal than civilized societies are as a matter of course. In addition, many such cultures, while deemed “primitive” in relation to modern times, are also agrarian, not gatherer-hunter. They are planter cultures and must stay in place to till and reap from the soil. So they exemplify the torture and blood that set in with sedentary living; differences in the amount one could own and store; and thus, hierarchy, with its attendant brutality. Being sedentary, which allows some to store and own more than others, thus creating inequality, is the crucial thing in the creation of dominance-submission, with its cruelty.
The message of subincisions and circumcisions is the same: Men are owned by another or others; they do not own themselves. Just as cattle are, men are to be branded. And in the pain and brutality of these practices of branding, men are taught — just as the pain of birth creates in the mind a sense and a fear of ever going back there — to never transgress the rules and never defy the admonitions of the patriarchs. Their lives are not their own, and they have impressed upon them the unwavering understanding that their lives can be easily taken, as well as fostered, and either way completely at the behest of the powers that be, the male elders.
Indeed, circumcision’s intended effect, which is to “cut back” on the pleasure that a man might have for himself in life, is parallel to the intended effect of clitoridectomy for a young girl — which is for the girl to not have too much enjoyment or pleasure in life, so as not to offend the elders — this time, the women — who also were “cut back” when they were younger. But not just the women’s feelings are being protected, so also men’s, whose intention through such practices of genital mutilation is that such women would be shaped in a way that their pleasure would not be their own, but be put into service of society and one’s future husband. More on that in the upcoming chapter on women’s rites of passage, “The Seduction and Stoning of the Maiden,” Chapter 22.
Under this category of elements of the patriarchy involving branding, I need to at least mention the use of tattoos and other deformations of the skin, the body, and its organs. These are often chosen, sometimes imposed. And they are applicable to women as well as men. If not imposed, instead voluntary … tattoos are a good example of that … the practice is signifying that the submission to the mind of the other — whether a singular other or a group — has been embraced.
Sword of Analysis, of Rationalization
Back to the example of the Perseus myth, adding to the nymphs’ help with the knapsack — with its ability to keep knowledge of murder and other bad deeds repressed and not bothering the “heroic” killer afterwards — the patriarchal god, Zeus, himself comes to the aid of Perseus. Zeus, this Commander-in-Chief of the gods, provides both a sword and a helmet.
The sword is a symbol for intellect — the ability to analyze and cut up the world into its components. The patriarchy highly values that, for in seeking to separate from the world of Nature and unmuffled experience, it is good to have a weapon by which to reduce overwhelming reality down to size as well as keep it safely at a distance and not touching oneself. And such an implement, the tool of intellectualization and rationalization, is readily available in the arsenals of the patriarchy. It provides plenty of rationalizations for all kinds of horrible actions that it perpetrates.
For in positing a reality separate from the one of Nature, in proposing an imaginary world of spirit which transcends the real one of actual experience with its suffering as well as pleasures, it makes possible any action in this immediate world by saying it is different in the imaginary world or it leads to something that is good there. This is the old saw of the ends justifying the means again — that favorite song of the self-righteous.
Helmet of Darkness, of Inauthenticity
Turning to the meaning of the helmet, now; well, it is a helmet of darkness, which had belonged to Hades, the god of the underworld. Using it, Perseus can hide and not be seen.
Interestingly, as we will see some chapters from now, Hades represents the brutalizing masculine persona. It is Hades who rapes Persephone and abducts her to a life of darkness and misery, the underworld, in a mythic re-creation of the lot of women in patriarchal societies. Hades also depicts the corresponding role of men. That is, to be desensitized to feeling and capable of a male role that is vicious, brutal, oppressive, sexually using and abusing, controlling, and dominating of women … and unhappy. Remember, males are not allowed to be happy in patriarchal cultures, which is itself symbolized by the underworld to which Hades, meaning patriarchal man, is assigned.
It is this role, this “helmet,” that men receive in exchange for doing the dirty work of the elders. Which makes sense. For in giving up oneself and carrying out the wishes of the elders — let us say, raping a woman and/or killing a man in war — one cannot live with one’s conscience. So one needs to look away from it, to find some way to repress it, to block it out of mind.
There is perhaps nothing better to accomplish that repression-diversion than to be given a role different from what one is, a helmet. For helmet = hat = symbol of what one does in life, one’s role. One says, “put on my thinking cap.” Or that one dons the hat of another of one’s roles in life: I put on my writer’s hat and at other times my editor’s hat. And notice how hats are used to distinguish roles in society: Firemen, construction workers, police officers, and so on — all have different hats to proclaim the role of the man or woman wearing it. And each hat is telling the world that the body below it conforms to its dictates from “above” — those of its role, originating in the wishes of the powers-that-be — as symbolized by the hat. Putting on “the hat” means any and all individuality will be suppressed and subsumed to it, at least while “on the job.”
A clearer description of defensiveness and inauthenticity is hard to find. Patriarchal types indeed are repressed and hardly forthcoming. Living their lives fed by a root of fear and suspicion, they are loathe to tell you much about themselves lest they be exposed and feel vulnerable. They are quite unlike the free spirits, creative artists, and growing edge of a recent generation who proclaimed, “Let it all out.” Not to mention, who fastidiously refused to wear most hats and, indeed, who let down their hair, who “let their freak flags fly.”
To the contrary of “let it all out,” patriarchs espouse, as one of their staunch conservative proponents, Pat Buchanan, once wrote in reaction to that generational cry, “No, leave a little in!” You see, patriarchs put the truth in that “box” along with their Pain, as we saw above with the patriarchal Navy Seals. Whereupon, they justify their lies, as Buchanan did in the article of that same name — that is, “No, Leave a Little In!” For Buchanan listed all the “good” reasons for doing the dishonest thing. In this way, this patriarchal conservative guy demonstrated the rationalizing of everything they say and do in which patriarchal folks are ever engaged.
For this constant propagandizing to the world, as well as oneself, serves to keep one from realizing anything that would bring insight to oneself and thus threaten one’s status with the “father.” As well it keeps away the revelation, otherwise naturally arising, regarding the dishonesty of one’s life. For that knowledge would be supremely painful, telling one, as it would, how much one has been duped and how much of life one has had stolen from one, how much one has missed of what could have been.
So, patriarchal Zeus provides the helmet of darkness with which Perseus can hide himself. It is no surprise that such helmet has its source in the god, Hades, ruler of the underworld and darkness and the land of misery and suffering. For in repressing anything and putting it in darkness where it festers, one has indeed created that hell of which religions speak. Similarly, using deception to achieve one’s ends — as I pointed out is characteristic of the patriarchal — is equivalent to “going over to the Dark Side.” Which, by the way, makes the Sith emperor in Star Wars to be a modern analogue to the Polydectes of old. For he also gives the young Darth Vader a task which sets him to fall, like Hades, like Perseus, away from the world of light.
The helmet then, is much like the ring that is given Frodo, in J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy, Lord of the Rings. As connoisseurs of Tolkien know well, the ring is forged in the fire of Mount Doom, deep in the heart of the land of the evil ruler, Sauron, in the land of Mordor. Compare the land of Mordor to Hades. Put another way, it comes from hell.
Also, the ring hides Frodo, very much like the helmet of darkness hides Perseus. Using it, Frodo is able to become invisible temporarily. Think about it: Being able to become invisible is equivalent to being able to lie and get away with it … which is also temporary. It also relates to the putting on of masks and roles, in a patriarchy, where one’s obligation to be authentic, real, and transparent in relation to the world is abandoned.
However, the Lord of the Rings story or myth goes deeper than the Perseus myth in revealing the truth about using the ring or the helmet of darkness. For every time Frodo uses the ring, every time he hides, he becomes more visible to the Lord of Darkness, Sauron, he becomes more like the Dark Force … borrowing again from Star Wars, which also has parallels to these two stories. Or using the metaphor from the movie, The Mask, as one uses the mask, at some point it can no longer be removed. In the same way, as one dissembles to the world, eventually one can no longer stop and does not even know one is doing it. Thus it is that one becomes darker, more miserable, more alone and alienated, the more that one is fake to the world and hides one’s true self from others. Eventually one becomes a pathetic Gollum. Or a Darth Vader, not much different.
So this helmet of darkness is typical patriarchy, rationalized perpetually as being a good thing. For it sure as hell aids the patriarchal elite. In the trilogy of the rings, that would be Sauron. In reality, that would be the capitalist masters and corporate decision-makers who profit from a populace that is repressed and unfeeling … and therefore unthinking … and amenable to being utilized for the ends of wealthy overlords. People enamored of their chains, you see. The kind of submission and acquiescence to demands that fathers seek to instill in sons, as we see with Perseus, is sought of populations by their patriarchs and wealthy.
At any rate, with all these falls from grace into a proper patriarchal pawn — capable of killing at the behest of another in authority — after this mythological boot camp, if you will, Perseus can face the Medusa. That’s next.
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Rites of Passage into Neurosis in Patriarchies:
The Slaying of a Dragon … How Sympathetic and Caring Boys Become Killers and Sycophants
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Cutting centaurs in two: In obeying the daddy figure, doing its bidding not one’s own, a boy or young man becomes split off from his feeling self, his spirituality, and his inner direction and creativity.
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In this example of mythical monster-slaying, Perseus, the hero of Greek mythology, is given the task to kill the Medusa. Medusa, a Gorgon, is a feminine monster, with a horrible face and a head surrounded by a corona of serpents. How the narrative unfolds is as so: Perseus goes to the Gorgon’s cave. Naturally you would find such an evil hidden in another symbol of repression and the unconscious, a cave. Further, the cave points to one of the deepest roots of unconscious fear and pain — things that one does not want to know — that is, the womb.
Perseus Slays Medusa
The Medusa is a birth symbol, also, you see: The pain of birth is symbolized by her hideous face and the snakes around her head. The snakes also depict pubic hair ringing one’s entrance into the world. In another place, Michael Irving (1988) has shown how snakes have their deepest understandings to be about birth. For snakes, in their shape, represent birth canals. Also, they shed skin and are reborn. Some of them squeeze and crush their victims, which is our experience before and during our births.
Snakes represent umbilical cords, according to deMause, which is another natal element. I believe he is correct, also. It is no wonder that matriarchal societies and their religions are so taken with snake imagery — in that they are more concerned with the forces of birth, rebirth, and transformation, than they are in obedience or other masculine values. So this matriarchal symbol, Medusa, is ringed with serpents.
On another level, the Medusa head represents the poisonous placenta, according to deMause. This is something I will bring up and elaborate on when I take this myth down to the level of mythology emanating from our time of fetal malnutrition, or Veil Five. For the Medusa head is the poisonous placenta or the “bad mom”/“bad womb” of one’s prenatal existence. And the serpents would then be the veins and arteries of the placenta. The Medusa is to the bad mom/bad womb; as the World Tree is to the good mom/good womb. Notice how World Tree, Medusa, many-headed Hydra, and even a head of hair as in the story of Snow White (that’s coming up, too) have the same pattern of something which is surrounded by arteries, limbs, branches, hairs coming out from it…. When we get down to the cellular level we will see this same pattern in that of the egg surrounded by the many sperm. Sperm is another thing that serpents represent, by the way.
At any rate, Perseus cuts off the head of the supposed monster, Medusa, without looking at her. He can see her reflection, only, in the polished shield given him by his patriarchal sponsors. That is a pretty good depiction of someone unthinkingly following through on the wishes of another: That is to say, not looking into the matter oneself but seeing the world and its evil as depicted in the shield — that is, as the propaganda and rationalizations, polished through time and provided by one’s patriarchal culture and its supposed authorities.
A Patriarchal Pawn on a Mission
The Medusa is sleeping, no big threat, but that is irrelevant to a patriarchal pawn on a mission. Perseus cuts off Medusa’s head, and a winged horse, Pegasus, and the horse’s brother, Chrysaor, a man, spring from the stump and are born. Other versions have Pegasus and Chrysaor being born of Medusa’s blood, drops of which fall into the sea. At any rate the killing of Medusa results in a fantasy concoction, a winged horse, and the equivalent of a Centaur cut in two — a horse and a man. The killing of this remaining goddess element, Medusa — dishonored and distorted from actuality as it is — results in a separation of man from horse. This represents a split of humans from Nature, with the patriarchal act of killing the matriarchal symbol, Medusa. Why?
With horse representing instinct, feeling, the matriarchal, and in its winged aspect, the creative and the spiritual, we see that in obeying the daddy figure, doing its bidding not one’s own, a boy or young man becomes split off from his feeling self, his spirituality, and his inner direction and creativity. This is rationalized as a “rite of passage” by patriarchal apologists.
Furthermore, the remnants of those Divine and transpersonal elements are reduced into a fantasy form, a winged horse. The man no longer has access to his inner promptings, intuition, and feelings, but finds inspiration in this split off concoction. In this way, young men, with their minds fixed on flags, stars and stripes, visions of military glory and honor — these convenient enticements of the patriarchy along with others of their ilk, these winged Pegasuses — are pliable for use by society’s elders and no longer have much of themselves or their Divine direction, meaning, and dharma.1
Patriarchs Associate Matriarchy with Madness … Conveniently
Jungians, for example, Erich Neumann (1954), have used Perseus’s slaying of the Medusa … the “dragon” again, you see, in this case, as monster … as a depiction of how one safely approaches unconscious materials — those obstacles of self and cruelties and injustices of society. The myth says, and Jungians concur with it, that one will be “destroyed” by looking directly at the Medusa and it would cause one to go mad.
A more accurate take on it, however, is that looking at the Medusa would be a psychic equivalent to jumping directly into a volcano (to save a community) as in the Joe Versus the Volcano story, or to opening and peering into a Pandora’s Jar (to better understand oneself) as it also is depicted in myth. So, it would be a metaphorical jumping into a volcano — a putting of one’s body on the line for the sake of a higher good in the service of life or on the inner plane a surrender to emotions and feelings and inner directives in order to be taught by them — as opposed to slaying a dragon or Medusa in Perseus style at the behest of those outside oneself.
It would be standing in front of a tank, as was done at Tiananmen Square; or looking directly into the faces of the boys in blue on the police line, perhaps placing a flower in a bayonet, as was done in anti-war demonstrations in the Sixties; perhaps hugging a police officer, grinning at them in clown face, or reading to the line from a book of philosophy, as was done in Turkey in 2013 during the Occupy Gezi resistance. In general, looking into the face of Medusa would be approaching evil with nonviolence and humor — a Tao of Funny God2 — rather than taking up arms against it, which is the Way of Perseus.
In actuality, looking directly at the Medusa also could be compared with looking closely into problems to accurately discern their roots before acting. Or it could be compared with taking a good look at those affected by one’s actions and actually seeing their suffering … the poor people of society, the homeless, the helpless, the elderly, the children. For when they are not seen, the villagers and innocents become mere “collateral damage” in a war, for example. And actually discerning the real reasons that supposed injustices exist might cause one to be paralyzed with indecision about following through on an aggressive attack against its most visible components.
One might, for example, come to a better understanding of a supposed problem of race in learning that there are powerful and moneyed interests who are actually responsible for one’s reduced opportunities in life, not minorities; and that one is being directed to rain one’s anger on such scapegoats so that the actual, filthy rich perpetrators can continue unscathed. Looking directly at the Medusa could be compared to actually looking at the women and children in villages who will be obliterated by the bombs one is dropping from the sky, a safe distance away from the sight of carnage. Or actually knowing of the life, loves, aspirations, and sufferings of the man who in battle one has been directed to kill — again, by higher ups having reasons different than the ones one has been told — could leave one paralyzed, frozen with indecision.
Opening Pandora’s Box … Looking at Medusa
On another level, looking at the Medusa actually would reveal that the goddess is not hideous at all. It would open one to the revelation that all the pronouncements of patriarchal societies are lies and propaganda for the purpose of controlling oneself and others.
The Goddess Is Not Hideous at All
It would reveal, as became clear to an entire generation in the Sixties and Seventies, that Nature, the body, sex, birth, death, and all the rest associated with the goddess are not things to be suppressed and slain — either outside or inside oneself. And that they were taught those derogatory and slanderous things about Nature and the feminine because of the handed-down fears and anxieties of generations of patriarchs instilling their neuroses and phobias into their children to better control them and to make of them mini-me’s — carbon copies of the generation before in all its insanities, prejudices, ritualistic substitutions for self, and aggressions.
Looking into the Medusa face would reveal that the patriarchy, along with all its presumptions and its controlling of self and Nature, is a pathetic and unnatural substitute for an authentic beingness, which is more associated with the goddess and Earth than with some split off bearded fellow on a throne in the sky.
What the Perseus myth actually says, however untrue, is that looking at the Medusa monster, daring to open Pandora’s jar, actually looking at the consequences of one’s unwholly actions, could cause one to go mad or to be destroyed. For this, you can hear echoes of conservative voices of all cultures telling young ones to obey authority, not question it, not look too deeply into the motives of one’s elders — or the deepest roots of one’s act outs — for to do so is dangerous and harmful. It is reminiscent of the movie, Reefer Madness, and all those hysterical warnings from societal elders of the dangers in opening up to the unconscious or to the alternative spiritualities and “new age” through mind-expanding drugs. That was in the Fifties and Sixties.
Now they are claiming those same “new age” and alternative spiritualities, along with the stirrings of an entire generation not long ago, are products and projects of a mythical Illuminati. We see here currently the birth of the latest Medusa — the latest bogeyman or monster, the Illuminati, to scare you away from looking deeply into yourself and to keep you in line with the patriarchy and its current patron religion, conservative Christianity.
An Enticement of “Winged” Words
Of course, those going through the patriarchy’s actual boot camps have drilled into them even more explicit and harsher demands to not disobey or question authority, which are couched in “winged” words such as honor, loyalty, valor, and discipline. This is exactly what one would expect in the training of young Perseuses who will actually be entrusted with commissions not that far removed in reality from that which was demanded of Perseus in the myth.
Getting back to Perseus, though, this mythic “hero” looks away from the Medusa and, using his shield as a mirror, reflects the visage of the monster, so he can then use his sword to kill her. How odd that we have brought that so accurately into realization with modern day warfare, which sees its targets, often and from afar, as radar signals or electronic images of questionable clarity … and the most hideous example, drones, which kill from so far away and are set in motion by folks sitting in comfortable chairs and very little seeing of any of their consequences.
Medusas Are Put to Scare You into Compliance
We observe the same pattern in the cultural arena, where right-wing Perseus-style warriors, self-styled Illuminati “killers,” are taught not to look into those elements of alternative spirituality and the “new age” lest they be “ensnared.” Ensnared by who? Why, by Satan, of course. They will put a Medusa to scare you into compliance anywhere they can.
Sure enough, these culture warriors of the Right see no problem slashing away at the cultural elements of the matriarchal as it arises in the form of new-age and alternative spiritualities, without a shred of understanding of that which they seek to destroy. Not looking directly at what they oppose, following the advice and direction of patriarchal elders — authorities in their church, self-serving right-wing and libertarian politicians and Fox News commentators and faux “prophets,” such as Glenn Beck, David Icke, Alex Jones, Donald Trump — hardly are they aware that the founder of the religion that sets their minds afire now and sends them into battle, in modern times, was founded on principles which in those days were an attempt to modify the patriarchy with some feminine values — love, not aggression; peace, not war; turning the other cheek and forgiveness, not revenge and retribution; tolerance, not blame; understanding, not being judgmental; charity and generosity, not accumulation and protection of wealth at all costs to the unfortunate…. Yes, Jesus was a veritable “bleeding heart” and in many ways matriarchal, for sure. He certainly espoused “feminine” values and countered the “masculine” ones of his day.
However, remember, Medusa here represents unconscious materials, as well. She stands for the things about ourselves and the world we want to keep out of consciousness, to not know, and to forget because they are painful to know or look at. In the case of one’s “enemies” in the world, this knowledge of their true natures, if made conscious or known, might ultimately impede one’s ability to act, especially to act along the intentions of another, a higher up. Meanwhile, in relation to the not known, or unconscious, elements within oneself, it is no coincidence that the Medusa is female, either. For a wider understanding of the unconscious includes knowing that it includes the feminine in the world … seen as dangerous only because linked with one’s painful birth.3 The Medusa, as the unconscious, also represents the world of Nature. Which is linked with the feminine and the biological — both highly feared by the unreal and unenlightened, and irredeemably patriarchal, Ego.4
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The Seduction and Stoning of the Maiden:
Rites of Feminine Repression, Control, and Shaming in Patriarchal Societies … Serpents, Dragons, Wolves, and Evil Stepmothers
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“…the message is the same, young girls must be demure, plain, non-sexual, non-attractive, and in all ways not threatening to older women. Older women still crave the attention of men, so younger women must not present competition for those affections.”
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed woman’s is removed.
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Just as young boys in patriarchal societies are instructed to fight, in keeping with the wishes of the elders, young girls also are channeled into conforming roles, compatible with the desires of older others. In this case, it includes women and men doing the imposition upon the girls.
The Sadly Evil Stepmother
For not only must women be servants and sex toys for men — “properly” sexual at times, prudently chaste at others — but they must not offend, either, the sensitivities of their mothers and aunts. Young girls must learn to be chaste and sexually repressed, so as not to offend their future husbands with infidelity, yet they also must be repressed and meek so as not to take male attention away from older females.
We see this in the way girls are frightened so as not to get seduced by the “wolf”: Notice here that not only does this show up in the tale of Red Riding Hood, but the term, wolf, is used for sexually predatory males in the English-speaking world. Also, the girl is frightened and instructed to not get “seduced” by a serpent, like Eve was in Genesis. Men later, in being seductive and predatory and deceptive, will be referred to as snakes and such behavior described as slimy, as creepy.
We see the true intentions of the women, however, in the many stories of evil stepmothers, queens, and witches. Whether it is the evil witch in “Hansel and Gretel,” the wicked stepmother in “Cinderella,” the evil queen in “Snow White,” the Ogress Queen Mother in “Sleeping Beauty,” or the jealous and oppressive Dame Gothel in “Rapunzel,” the message is the same, young girls must be demure, plain, non-sexual, non-attractive, and in all ways not threatening to older women. Older women still crave the attention of men, so younger women must not present competition for those affections. Just as well, older women have been forced, when they were girls, to do the same and to repress the fullness of their personalities, so they do not want to be reminded of the injustice done them by seeing girls or young women getting away with what they were not allowed.
Also, the reason for that is that women have been told their only value lies in being sexual playthings, workers, and objects to be both admired but also used, as one would use a tool. Since one of women’s main sources of social value is in their appearance, patriarchies turn women into evil stepmothers, jealous of their daughters, wanting to know if they still “got it” and “who is the fairest one of all.”
The Electra and Oedipal Precursors to Adolescent Mythologies
I need to acknowledge that this depiction of the mother-daughter relationship is a kind of reverse image of what is normally termed The Electra complex. “The Electra complex, as proposed by Carl Gustav Jung, is a girl’s psychosexual competition with her mother for possession of her father.”1 Obviously, the difference between the two conceptualizations of this dynamic — mine and Jung’s — is that the traditional understanding places the motive in the heart of the daughter, seeking to possess the father and remove and replace the mother. Whereas I am locating the center of the dynamic squarely inside the mother, directly upon the mother’s wishing to get rid of the child; for the child is a threat to the mother’s continued receiving of affection from her husband.
Now, the reason for this is easy enough to see. The logic goes much along the same lines as I have been tracing in describing the mythology of the male adolescent. For, that Identity stage for boys, symbolized by the slaying of a dragon-figure, has its roots earlier in the boy’s life, just as the Electra complex is said to be a development around the ages of three to six for the girl. The full immersion of the boy into the “father-world” at adulthood began when the boy was supposedly undergoing an Oedipal conflict, at around the same age as the girl’s Electra, i.e., three to six years old.
In both cases, the young child is seen to be the cause of the problem. This is a relic of a civilizational way of raising children in which the young are brutally handled, projected upon, and blamed for all the ills which are more correctly attributed to the parent — the mother or the father. Just as the mythologies and the fairy tales and religions of cultures reflect the desires of its elites, for it is the elites who determine what will be shared, what will be allowed to be believed. So also does a culture’s versions of events — as expressed mythologically, religiously, and even scientifically — reflect the viewpoints of the parents. For they are the ones who will describe the dynamic. It is only adult viewpoints that will ever be written down and shared.
This is especially true if it arises in a Victorian context, like Freud’s did, where the intrusive mode of child-“rearing” predominated. Lloyd deMause’s intrusive psychogenic mode is described: “The intrusive parent began to unswaddle the infant. Since infants were now allowed to crawl rather than being swaddled, they had to be formally ‘disciplined,’ threatened with hell; use of guilt. Early toilet training, repression of child’s sexuality, end of swaddling and wet-nursing, empathy now possible, rise of pediatrics.”2
In the intrusive mode of parenting, the child is seen as evil and full of “the devil.” The “beast” in children needs to be, if not beaten … and sometimes that, i.e., “spare the rod, spoil the child,” and all … then rigorously trained out of them. Clearly it is “that damn child! Not me!” who is seductive. More about the hidden incest within parents, coming up.
Furthermore, fictions such as fairy tales can sometimes reveal truths not allowed openly, and they can be critiques of the ordinary ways of thinking and of doing things. We see this in all the fairy tales showing wicked stepmothers and evil queens, fearsome ogres and brutal and cruel kings — where the truth about childhood throughout history is brought out.
Yet, when it comes to most of the ritual and myth of a culture, it is the elders who decide what will be done and what will be told. Not to mention, they, usually adult males, determine the very important wishes and desires of the adults and parents that will be stamped upon, if necessary with brutality and much suffering, the psyches of its impressionable young. Modern psychology, arising out of this ancient mix of neurosis and codified patriarchal abuse, displays this weakness at its roots. It walks hand-in-hand with the societal defense mechanisms of common myth and belief put in place to protect adults, males, and elites from complaint that would otherwise arise from its dominated sectors — children, women, the lower classes, and the powerless and downtrodden unwealthy.
For, expressions of the dynamic of the Electra complex and the Oedipal conflict are concocted by adults, who are often parents. Their perspective and interpretations have, certainly, nothing to do with the way the young child or adolescent sees the same dilemma. As an example of that, see the Abraham and Isaac myth, from The Old Testament. The father of Judaism, Abraham, is told by Jehovah, his god, to kill his son, Isaac. The story is supposedly depicting the religious relationship to the Divine of faith, which has been defined, within Western religions, as meaning unthinking obedience. The traditional interpretation has it that Abraham is the penultimate faithful human — “properly” fearful of and obedient to God. However, these are the pronouncements of adults.
From a child’s perspective, such as Isaac’s, Abraham is a horrible murdering father, completely unseeing of others around him including his own son, and terribly narcissistic and self-obsessed. I would challenge anyone to argue that the meaning of the Abraham and Isaac story is still about faith, once one removes the patriarchal component — in which everything that is said and done is from the perspective of or is to the benefit of males. Especially that view is seen to be “conveniently” skewed in only one participant’s favor when one includes the perspectives of an outsider, or of all outsiders, including the son, Isaac. In a similar way, regarding the claim of psychiatrists and psychotherapists that there are Oedipal and Electra complexes, I would question anyone to tell me how a young child of three is going around wanting to possess a mother or father. Is it wrong to want to be loved?
No, actually it is only adults, as evidenced in their romantic and sexual relationships, who want to go around “possessing” anybody. Which accounts for common jealousy and for the insistence on marital fidelity, equally unseen and unacknowledged for what they are. Same also with rulers and dominators who want subjects — slaves, virtual or literal. Who want to own them, possess them, allow them no independent status as a conscious being, much the way folks have traditionally “possessed” children, treating them like chattel.
However, clearly a person wanting to be loved, and to love, in a healthy way, is the essence of the dynamic from the child’s perspective … and rightfully so! After all, with the parents and other adults construing such wishes of the child — to receive affection, nurturing, and attention such as one actually needs at that time — in all kinds of scurrilous ways … including sexual … of course the child is even more desperate. This reversed way of viewing the supposed “complex” or “conflict” — which is in line with the more enlightened child-caring come of the era of the Sixties and beyond — is expressed more accurately under the rubric, the primal scene, as explained by Arthur Janov (1970). We will deal with that way of looking at it, in detail, when we get to the Veil coming up, Veil Three.
With the child-“rearing” practices of all cultures kept in mind and seen to be the neurotic factories they are, and in keeping with the neurotic frailties and wishes of adults driving them to pop out endless lines of “product” (offspring) to be used as they wish,3 it is hard to not realize that these supposed complexes of psychoanalysts, the Electra and Oedipal, are simply rationalizations — covering up parental culpability and implicating the child instead — of the unjust and damaging events that occur in early childhood leading up to the primal scene. For through those harsh parenting practices of infancy and toddlerhood, the child’s real self is robbed from her or him, and the parents in some part of themselves know they are guilty; though they would never allow themselves to realize that. The point for here at Veil Two, Identity and adolescence, is that the same dynamic of liability, guilt, and coverup arises here, as well, with the brutal rites of passage of patriarchal cultures. Herein, also, the child’s adult life is beaten into a shape to be of service, ever afterward, to dominant others.
The Seduction of the Maiden
So it is that essentially the father, in patriarchal societies, wants to possess his daughter, but it will not be allowed to be seen this way. As I pointed out elsewhere, there is not an incest avoidance among humans, there is a denial of incest that is prevalent. Humans, unlike our primate cousins, actually engage in incest, whereas primates do not. The incest-taboo claim is a species-congratulation of itself, functioning as part of a cover-up of what is true but would be uncomfortable to be acknowledged.4
If there were not a secret desire of the father to possess the daughter, there would not be such a to-do made by fathers over the suitors the daughter might bring home or in whom she might be interested. The father secretly feels the daughter’s suitor to be a threat and a competition for the daughter’s affections in all ways, including sexual. Many are the paternal rationalizations for this “concern,” however. All of them … natch … glorify the dad’s intentions. We have a clearer picture of the actual motives of fathers, in controlling a daughter’s suitors and sexuality, if we look cross-culturally to pervasive incest in societies and historically to the use of daughters as possessions and as chattel to be traded for promotions in status and wealth.
So while the Electra complex is resolved, in a way parallel to the Oedipus complex, by the daughter identifying with the mother — psychoanalytically termed, the identification with the aggressor — something similar to that, an amplification of that, occurs in adolescence. If childhood can be seen as the arena in which the “magical child”5 — girl or boy — is transformed into the same-sex parental mini-me, adolescence can be seen as the arena where it is the societal aggressor with whom one will be required to be identified. At adolescence, the personality imposed on the child by the parents, earlier on, is augmented with the imprint that the group, the community, wants of its members. None of this is in the interests of young boys or girls.
The Stoning and Shaming of Girls
So just as in the brutal patriarchal rites of passage for the adolescent boy, those for the adolescent girl involve a thorough inculcation into the reduced role for girls that will be allowed them by the women of the community, backed up by the men … and basically, instigated originally by the men. At adolescence it is not just the mother’s limited life potentials that will rein in the girl. Rather, the diminution of potentials, even more reduced now for the group — later this will be called “normality” — are what circumscribes, further confines the potentials of the woman-to-be. Here again, we reenact the traumas of earlier in life, which, at each stage, further diminished the prenate or child from its identity with Divinity.
Evidence for this are the practice of clitoridectomy and the predominance of shaming of the sexuality of girls. The cultures of modern times have managed to get their entire societies to participate in the use of mocking words like slut, cunt, bitch, whore — or their other-than-English equivalents — to keep the girl in line with the wishes originating initially in the mother, who wants the girl to deny her sexuality and charm so as to not threaten the mother. See also Jezebel, from biblical lore, and Medusa, as explained above and especially as related to Athena, on the punishments put upon women for taking pride in their physical appearances, and as meted out in similar ways by women, just as much as men.
The message evidently is, be sexually alluring to men in a way as to not piss off one’s mother. Good luck with that, by the way. However, the society will reinforce and further mold the natural desires of a girl in ways so as to fit into patriarchal cultures where both sexual availability as well as marital fidelity are demanded. Both of these are expressions of men’s desires for and demands on women and together constitute the unfortunate double bind put upon women during youth.
While this contrary message to girls is a part of the “rites of passage” in this culture, rituals of adolescent transition in more traditional cultures, and in keeping with their patriarchies as well, are used to implant similar contradictory values: The girl is let know, in no uncertain terms, that her role will be to be attractive and sexual … but not too…. To be demure, self-sacrificing, cheerfully obedient, not appear to be too smart, to be powerless and in general to be as innocuous and inconsequential as can be. To be lucy-fied.6 Evidence for the success of this throughout the world is seen in how his-story contains no her-story. History excludes the events of women, for the most part.
Regardless, at adolescence the now “one-eyed” girl — partially blinded by the mother and older female relatives — has her other eye darkened as well, in conformity with the others in the “land of the blind.”
Of course, that desire by the mother to not have a competitor is reinforced by the father who does not want a suitor competing with him for the girl’s love. So his neurotic and selfish aim is allied with the mother’s. And finally, the suitor, and the potential suitors, will use this shaming to keep their lovers and wives in line and not “unfaithful.” By humiliating the lover or wife, the intention by the male is to lower the girl or woman’s self-esteem enough to make the female submissive and obedient to the male’s wishes.
So, at the later, adolescent stage, the rite of passage for women, whether marked in any way or not, involves the shaming of the girl to force her into compliance with the wishes of all members of the circle of friends and family. Even other girls will participate in this shaming as a kind of social control over other women or girls who are felt to be a threat of “stealing” the affection of one’s lover or male friend. It involves also the brutalization of the genitals, at times, as in clitoridectomy. For the same reason, the young girl might be shamed about her menses, told it is dangerous, making her feel inferior, dirty, deformed … eventually submissive.
All these forms of shaming have their purpose to lower self-esteem in the girl and make her more manipulatable. The use of even more dire practices of girl-woman control is possible, too, as we see with the emergence of the accusation of girls as being witches, during the Burning Times of the Middle Ages, in which case (no pun intended), they are murdered. Similarly, and equally horrible and continuing up till the present, is the practice of the stoning to death of girls for alleged sexual infractions in Muslim and historical Mideastern cultures.
Beyond all this and in general, the young woman’s, the adolescent girl’s, sexuality is seen as a threat to everyone. And everyone, including teachers, pile onto the shame wagon. Catholic nuns might brutally shame their girl charges, out of angry and threatened feelings of themselves having had to be very repressed in that regard. This is an exact parallel to clitoridectomizing mothers and aunts in some other, especially Middle Eastern, countries.
However, remember that both of these — shaming and clitoridectomy — are the final stage of a process that began at the ages of three to six, which are called the Electra complex, and for boys, the Oedipal conflict. But which those of us who are aware of the feeling and experiential component of life might follow Arthur Janov, as I do, in labeling it the primal scene. We’ll get into that in detail in the next Veil, which deals with the mythology of infancy and childhood.
Beware the Wolf … Serpent … Dragon
However, let us continue exploring the mythology of this adolescent and Identity stage for the young woman, the girl. Representations abound in fairy tales, which are intended to instill the fear of following one’s sexuality. A good example is the Red Riding Hood tale.
In all these examples, there is a parallel to the boy’s adolescent monomyth of a prototypic knight slaying a dragon to save a damsel. On the female side of that, the girl is pressured to not be seduced by the dragon … the snake, the wolf, and so on.
Notice that the aggressor always has a phallic quality, a wolf, its nose; a serpent, its shape; a sword, its shape and the fact it can be pushed into another body.
Other mythologies are equally pressuring the girl, as in the Jezebel myth, and even Medusa. We can use the Perseus myth described in previous chapters to draw out the feminine correlate. It is represented in the figures of Athena as well as Medusa. As I said in that chapter, Medusa, like Jezebel, is said to have taken some pride in her appearance. This accounts for her great “sin.” Again, like Snow White, a young girl’s beauty is a threat to a mother-figure, Athena.
Then her punishment is tied up with snakes, phallic symbols, as well. The Medusa’s head becomes ringed with snakes … not much differently from the way an ovum is surrounded and touched by myriad sperm, prior to conception.
For Eve in The Bible, the eating of the fruit has often been seen as a warning about women’s sexuality and the pressure on them to not be unfaithful. And the punishment for her is telling. Henceforth, as The Bible says, “The woman’s desire shall be for her husband, and he will rule over her.” This is the men of the culture talking, in a patriarchy, not Jehovah, and using threats to keep their daughters under their thumbs and their wives in line. As I said above, the mother, unfortunately, will also see an advantage in repressing her daughter. So there will be no corner from which can come a counter to this injustice. In patriarchal cultures, it is in the interest of all parties, save the actual girl, for this brutal mind-fuck of the girl to be brought about.
Infidelity and the Roots of Jealousy
Why all this focus on marital fidelity on the part of the woman? It has its roots in our early infancy deprivation, partly. For no mother can attend to an infant’s needs in the first year of life the way the baby requires and the way that other planetmates have their needs near perfectly met at a comparable stage of development, by Nature, by biology, inside the womb. So, as traumatized adults, suffering the aftereffects of infancies where severe emotional deprivation left an imprint, both men and women will seek to control the other, the lover or spouse, to be the kind of mother they did not have — ever there, ever attentive, always serving, and “having no other ‘god’ (lover) before Him” (the husband or the wife).
Also, this male jealousy has roots extending all the way back to conception. I’ll discuss it more there, in Veil Seven, with you, but just to say: At that time, with three-hundred-million sperm vying to join with one egg, failure was fatal. Each of us did succeed, or else we would not be here. Still, we have an imprint that if someone else were to have been the one to unite with the ovum, we would die.
Such jealousy, especially by males, but also by women — after all, all of us, women included, were sperm at one time, though men tend to identify more with the sperm experience of the gestalt and women with the ovum experience — amounts to a feeling that if one’s wife/husband (ovum) has intercourse with another man/woman (joins with another sperm), then one’s existence as the one who gets to live (the spouse, the sperm who united) is over. The feeling of jealousy around sexual betrayal is an apprehension of death all around; one thinks one’s life is over. Sadly, that is why we see so many murder-suicides around this dynamic in adults.
Sorry, as I cannot help feeling upset here, having observed, on news reports, so much of that just recently in America, with bloody and tragic consequences; in one instance spilling over to the murder of a child, as well, in a class room; in another to the death of an elderly Black man, selected randomly, whose shooting was posted by the killer for the world to see on Facebook. Another involved a man, sitting calmly in a lounge chair by a swimming pool, murdering bystanders, again randomly, while conversing with his girlfriend on his cell phone. This all occurred in the span of only about a week. There is a surge of these tragedies currently, wrought of powerful human jealousy and hurt, making me fully and emotionally aware of the sad consequences of events put upon girls and boys in adolescence, which itself is built upon the powerful dynamics at the very beginnings of our lives, at conception.
By the way, another common way this control of girls and women is brought about is through the deadly enforcement of rules having to do with men’s secrets not being revealed. Women are to be kept in terror, you see, in all kinds of ways, to make them compliant, to make them servants, to make of them sexual playthings. So a way that the men, in many cultures, add their pressures to those of the threatened and jealous older women and mothers is to concoct serious and brutal consequences, for women only, for straying over rather arbitrary lines. Much more on that, by the way, coming up in the chapter on “The Secret of Men,” where we look behind the curtain of those proscriptions of men.
In the same way that a conquering army might gather up a few sample citizens to murder in full view in order to elicit compliance from the rest of the townsfolk … using the victims as an example to others of the consequences of disobeying … so also women and girls are selectively brutalized. We see this with the labeling and murdering of women as witches, the shaming of girls in junior high who are labeled sluts and whores, the murder of women for “learning” anything of men’s secrets, the pregnancy out of wedlock, the stoning to death of women for reputed sexuality in the Arab world, the use of girls as sacrifices and so being murdered in rites of protection of the group as well as enticements to the gods to bring forth abundance, and so on.
In patriarchal societies, virtually all men are brutalized, as adolescents and young adults, to make of them malleable, easily controlled and manipulated tools, puppets of the all-powerful male elders. Correspondingly, in patriarchal cultures selective women are brutalized even more severely, including murder, as a way to keep all girls and women from asserting themselves outside the bounds of men’s prerogatives and wishes.
Sadly, there are other reasons women in patriarchies will be targeted for assault … and murder … as we will now see.
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The Sacrifice and Murder of the Virgin:
Periconceptional Elements in Ritual, the Meaning of Rape and Killing-Beheading in Female Rites of Passage and Fertility Rituals
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In the land of the guilty, the innocent woman gets crucified.
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So it is that a huge component of the mythology of adolescence and identity for a woman, beyond that of seduction and sexuality, pertains to the idea of the sacrificial virgin or maiden. Mythological examples abound … Persephone, Iphigenia, and so on.
The Sacrifice of the Maiden
In many mythologies about women’s adolescence, in patriarchal cultures, a woman is seduced, sometimes raped. In its ritual enactment, often this is done brutally and sometimes by all the male participants. Afterwards, in the mythology and sometimes in the re-creation in ritual, the girl is killed; and then her body becomes the substance, figuratively, from which the food of the community originates. And sometimes her actual body is literally consumed by the ritual participants.
Cannibalism and Periconceptional Ritual
Examples of rituals where girls are raped and/or cannibalized are found in Joseph Campbell’s Primitive Mythology (1959, 1969). One example is that of the Marind-anim society of Dutch South New Guinea. Reporting the findings of Paul Wirz, a Swiss ethnologist, Campbell describes an astonishing ritual. I’ll let Mister Campbell tell it in his own words, for any who might think I must be making this stuff up! Joseph Campbell writes, “…in a two-volume work on the myths and customs of these head-hunting cannibals, [Paul Wirz] tell of their gods — the Dema — who appear in the ceremonies, fabulously costumed, to enact again (or rather, not ‘again,’ because time collapses in ‘ceremonial time’ and what was ‘then’ becomes ‘now’) the world -fashioning events of the ‘time of the beginning of the ‘world.’ The rites are performed to the tireless chant of many voices, the boom of slit-log drums, and the whirring of the bull-roarers, which are the voices of the Dema themselves, rising from the earth. The ceremonies continue for many nights, many days, uniting the villagers in a fused being that is not biological, essentially, but a living spirit — with numerous heads, many eyes, many voices, numerous feet pounding the earth — lifted even out of temporality and translated into the no-place, no-time, no-when, no-where of the mythological age, which is here and now.
“The particular moment of importance to our story occurs at the conclusion of one of the boys’ puberty rites, which terminates in a sexual orgy of several days and nights, during which everyone in the village except the initiates makes free with everybody else, amid the tumult of the mythological chants, drums, and the bull-roarers — until the final night, when a fine young girl, painted, oiled, and ceremonially costumed, is led into the dancing ground and made to lie beneath a platform of very heavy logs. With her, in open view of the festival, the initiates cohabit [Notice: cohabit is the reflection Campbell saw in his shield, being afraid to turn to face the word, fuck], one after another; and while the youth chosen to be last is embracing her the supports of the logs above are jerked away and the platform drops, to a prodigious boom of drums. A hideous howl goes up and the dead girl and boy are dragged from the logs, cut up, roasted, and eaten.”1
In this ritual we see elements of both the rape of the maiden as well as the murder and sacrifice of the virgin. There is a reason why they are often combined. The reason cannot fully be known until one traces the roots of this pattern all the way back to the beginnings of our physical life. And while this is not our concern here, at this level, Veil Two, still, it might be necessary to provide such a context now, so that we might see what has become of that original imprint at this level.
While we will see many examples of this, what I call, periconceptional symbolism — “peri” meaning surrounding, “conceptional” meaning biological conception — as we continue, this is perhaps the clearest re-creation of the events of conception, at least of which I know. The wild orgy part of the ritual of the Marind-anim symbolizes the copulation of the World Parents — meaning one’s own parents who were engaged in the making of you. And no doubt, thought of as a re-creation of the moment sperm and ovum came together to create the cell that would eventually become us, this would most definitely be a re-enactment of “the world-fashioning events of the ‘time of the beginning of the ‘world.’” Furthermore, the fact that there are “many voices,” with “numerous heads, many eyes … numerous feet pounding the earth” is a pretty good depiction of the brouhaha of the sperm — approximately three-hundred million of them in an ejaculation — during the journey to the egg and upon reaching it.
Afterward, the many boys surround the girl, much like the sperm surround the ovum at our life’s beginnings. Then they all have sex with the young girl, exactly like the many sperm interacting with the surface of the one ovum.
Eventually only one boy is left in the embrace of the girl, much as only one sperm of many combines with the egg. Then, in the ritual, there is the sudden death — the dropping of the heavy logs, crushing the girl and boy — which is an enactment of actual conception, the suddenness of the event equating psychologically with the exploding of the head of the sperm cell, once inside the ovum. The explosion of sound at the time of the deaths symbolizes the momentous importance of the event — the creation of a new life, from two. And the death of the two … well, at conception, the sperm and ovum die as single cells. The sperm’s head exploding and releasing its DNA, chromosomes combine and create the zygote; yet as single cells, they are dead.
Finally, out of the combined entity, the zygote, all the subsequent cell divisions emanate to create the “world.” Just as the ritual participants feast on the flesh of the boy and girl — taking thus the bodily substance of these sacrificial “lambs” into the creation of their own bodies — so also, periconceptionally, all subsequent cells emanate originally from, are “fed by,” the first cell, the zygote, which comprises the “bodies” of the sperm and ovum.
The Sacrifice-Murder of Innocents
This symbolism of new life or of new benefits to the community arising from the murder of innocents includes, sometimes, the body of a boy. I will give an example of that shortly, however here I wish to note that this fact shows it is not the feminine element that is the essential part of this mythical-ritual pattern. Rather it is that the sacrifice be of someone who is young, virginal, in a sense, chaste, innocent.
In modern times, we have many examples of an innocent being required to die for the sake of the community: We depict it in our narratives, as well. I remember, for example, an incredibly powerful scene in the television series, Game of Thrones, broadcast 7 June 2015, which many of you also might recall.2 It is where Princess Shireen Baratheon, the daughter and only living child of Stannis and Selyse Baratheon, is burned at the stake by her own father so as to change the weather and allow them to continue their advance in war.
Described as the “most disturbing death scene yet,” the daughter’s innocence is central to the story: “Stannis (Stephen Dillane) ordered his young daughter Shireen (Kerry Ingram) burned at the stake, and did not show mercy [as] she screamed for her father to help. The scene was made all the more painful because the last few seasons have established Shireen as one of the only characters whose innocence hadn’t been taken away by the grim world in which they live. She suffered from greyscale [a disease which deformed her face, making her, also, a wounded sacrificial hero], had distant parents and was confined to a tower…. She was relatively happy, and still engaged in a childlike love for storybooks. She even developed an adorable relationship with fan favorite Davos (Liam Cunningham), teaching him to read.”3
This is an amazing correlate to the ancient Greek myth of Iphigenia, by the way. Iphigenia is another innocent, said also to love her father. Also, like the story in Game of Thrones, she is duped and betrayed by her dad. Interesting as well, she is murdered as a sacrifice for the purpose of changing the weather and so as to allow an advance in war. These stories are compelling expressions demonstrating that the reasons for the assaults upon and diminutions of both young boys, as we saw last chapter with Perseus, as well as young girls, as we see here with Shireen and Iphigenia, are rooted in patriarchal and egoic notions of manly aggression, war, and conquest. All of which are a consequence of “civilization.” We see this degradation of familial happiness and rise of child abuse over and over as we switch from “primitive” gatherer-hunter to “civilized” sedentary-hierarchical societies.
In the story of Iphigenia, the Greeks cannot advance against Troy to rescue Helen, the wife of Menelaus, who was Iphigenia’s uncle and the brother of her father, King Agamemnon, due to a deathly calm upon the seas. They are stuck at port at Aulis, because the lack of wind prevents their ships from setting sail. A seer named Calchas informs Agamemnon that only a sacrifice of his daughter will appease Artemis, who is holding back the winds, in retaliation for what, in some versions, is considered to be the king’s hubris: He had bragged he was a better shot with the arrow than Artemis.
Furthermore, this need to change the weather was, just as in “The Dance of Dragons” episode of Game of Thrones, a ruse brought by an insidious element, and one — as it turns out, in both cases — who was not necessarily someone to whom one should listen. In Game of Thrones it is Melisandre, the advisor to would-be king Stannis, and a mystic devotee of the Lord of Light, who insists the sacrifice of someone of Stannis’s blood be made so the army might advance toward the castle at Winterfell, might take it, and Stannis be installed to the kingship. Which, as the brother next in line to the accidentally-on-purpose slain King Robert, Stannis feels he is rightful heir. However, in fact, though the weather does change (weather does tend to do that), the army’s advance leads not to victory but to a wholesale slaughter — everyone, including the aspiring king, Stannis, is brutally murdered. In the story of Iphigenia it is Calchas, another supposed oracle, who comes up with this solution to their dilemma; however she is said to have been a spy of the enemy, Troy.
The main difference in the two stories lies only in that Iphigenia is said to have “volunteered,” so as to prevent a kind of civil war that was brewing over the question of her “sacrifice.” Though how one can say one has any choice — making it “voluntary” — in a situation that has already been decided by one’s father, is clamored for by all one’s people, and which, if resisted, would have led to a bloodbath, is debatable. Indeed, in the fact that Iphigenia, in the end, is said to have been spared a horrible death by being whisked away to another place by Artemis and an innocent doe sacrificed in her stead, at the moment of the falling of the knife and the rousing of the fire, we see the kind of rationalization of brutality that patriarchies do for the sins of “the father,” as we saw earlier with Abraham and Isaac.
In an actual, not mythological, sense we act out this sacrifice of the innocents in sending boys into wars so as to protect the privileges of the elite, as well as in killing protesters for the exact same reason, and so on. The archetypal pattern of that is of a “virgin” — a young girl or boy — being sacrificed to the “dragon” to protect the community. I explained earlier how the movie, Joe Versus the Volcano, employs that dynamic, however with the twist that the role is voluntarily chosen, not imposed. That is a new and enlightened version of an age-old mythical pattern. Indeed, it is a fractal representation of our earliest experience as a sperm volunteering to sacrifice his life, and having his head explode, for a “higher cause” — the unity of opposites.
Nevertheless, the older pattern where the role is imposed predominates, especially historically.
A Sacrificial Boy
Campbell provides another myth, where this time, a boy is sacrificed for the benefit of a community. Citing the work of Theodor Koch-Grunberg, he tells a story of the Yahuna people, from the upper Amazonian basin. This tale is meant to explain the origin of particular foods that play an important part in their culture, as well as the creation of the musical instruments — flutes and reeds, of remarkable quality — which incidentally are played at the first-fruits festival, where those foods are celebrated.
The myth tells of a “little boy who sang so beautifully that many people flocked from near and far to see and hear him.”4 However, those who heard him, upon returning to their homes and eating fish, died. They blamed the boy, whose name was Milomaki. And the relatives of those who died decided to kill the boy, who by now had grown to young adulthood.
So, notice that depiction of “little boy” or youth, for it is always the pure and young, like innocent sacrificial lambs, who are sought. The relatives consider the boy to be “dangerous,” which shows also how these figures, these unblemished scapegoats of purity, are used as empty screens … “empty” for they are not seen at all for who they are … upon which to project the blemishes of the community. Fearing the boy — like Trump would one of his “bad hombres” of current times — they decide not only to kill but to cremate him by burning him alive.
Reminiscent of the witch-burnings of another time, which also have to do with the killing of innocents to “protect” the society — innocents who also have had the unconscious blemishes of the community projected on them — Milomaki is put upon a pyre, to which fire is set. The boy, pure and innocent as ever, continues singing his beautiful song even as he is consumed in the fire. “And when his body was swelling with the heat, he still was singing in glorious tones…. And his body bursts.”5
Notice here again that the death, which will give new life, climaxes in a burst, which reflects the head of the sperm exploding upon having made it into the ovum. The new life to come of his death is as so: While his “soul” goes to “heaven,” from his ashes grows “a long, green blade.”6 This depicts the fact that after conception, there is cell multiplication (growth) and the resulting blastocyst implants into the uterine wall. From there, experiencing a vegetative existence … as a plant in the uterine wall … we grow into an embryo, which is depicted in agrarian mythologies worldwide as the rising up of the crops.
Eventually the blade of new life (embryo) results in a huge paxiuba palm tree, which is a version of the World Tree, which signifies the placenta, which also is an outgrowth of that “seed.” However, firstly, it brings forth the food for the community. Just as above, in the first ritual I described, we saw that the girl’s body was consumed to feed the community; in this version the dead boy’s ashes become the plant that provides food for the community. For the green blade becomes the first paxiuba palm “in the world”; the paxiuba palm is a rather tall tree. The wood of that tree brings forth cultural benefits as well in that its wood is fashioned into the flutes, which “to this day” are blown upon when the fruits are ripe. “They dance, while doing so, in memory of Milomaki, who is the creator and giver of all fruits.”7
A Sacrificial Girl
Another tale brought by Campbell shows the sacrifice of a girl again as being something required, just as the young girl at puberty will be required to give up her self, her individuality, to be a servant to the community and family. This one is from the Aztecs:
In September, they fast for seven days, then have a great festival. A slave girl of twelve or thirteen years old is chosen. She is said to represent the Maize Goddess Chicomecohuatl. Indeed she is treated like a goddess for days. She is bedecked, outfitted, ornamented in extravagant and regal ways. “They chose a girl of tender years to play the part of the Maize Goddess. The whole long day they led the poor child in all her finery, with the green plume nodding on her head, from house to house dancing merrily to cheer people after the dullness and privations of the fast.”8
At midnight of that day, they bring out a palanquin, which is “bedecked with festoons of maize-cobs and peppers and filled with seeds of all sorts.”9 The girl is required to get on top of the palanquin, after being led there by priests and dignitaries, and with all manner of solemnity and ritual spectacle. A lock of her hair containing a green feather is cut and offered to the goddess. The girl descends then, and she spends the rest of the night elsewhere.
The people keep watch throughout the night. In the morning, with the crowds still present the priests bring out the girl, again, and again costumed as the goddess. She again mounts the framework. The elders lift the entire palanquin on their shoulders, and with great fanfare, she is carried in a procession. She descends the framework again.
The young innocent is made to stand upon heaps of corn and vegetables, and there, standing, she is made offerings by elders and nobles, in the manner of a goddess. She is made offerings of their very blood, dried, in full humility and obeisance, bowing before her, as befits a goddess. Again, we see an ovum being surrounded by sperm and being offered something of their very bodies. The women of the community, then, also do the same offering, standing in a line, one by one with the same degree of abject humility and subjugation. All assembled make such an offering of their very blood to the innocent representation of the goddess.
After this the participants have another feast. They rest again that night, the second night, now, and the following day they return to the temple for the finale of the festival. “And the end of the festival was this. The multitude being assembled, the priests solemnly incensed the girl who impersonated the goddess; then they threw her on her back on the heap of corn and seeds, cut off her head, caught the gushing blood in a tub, and sprinkled the blood on the wooden image of the goddess, the walls of the chamber, and the offerings of corn, peppers, pumpkins, seeds, and vegetables, which cumbered the floor.”10
Notice that the “chamber” represents the ovum. The girl becomes at this point the sperm inside the ovum. And inside it — the ovum, chamber — with blood, are all the elements from which all the good things of life emanate, just as all other cells arise from this first one, the zygote.
The ritual continues. However, my point here is to make this comparison between rituals of death and sacrifice with young girl and boy mythology as well as pointing to the deep deep basis of this myth in the primary event of our earliest lives, conception. For even in the fact that the girl’s head is cut off, we see a reflection of the fact that the sperm’s head explodes prior to combining of the DNA, zygote formation, and then cell multiplication. Let me be clear. I really am saying that this ritual of the Aztecs re-creates the events of conception, right down to a reenactment of the combining of the DNA of the sperm and ovum, with the sperm inside the egg, now, with the beheading of the girl, just as the sperm’s head explodes once it is inside its “chamber,” the egg.
Such bounty and the offering of Nature coming from the bodies of young, innocent boys and girls … i.e., sperm and ovum … always symbolize the cell multiplication that is the result of the end of the two worlds of girl and boy, sperm and ovum; in the creation and growth of a new world through cell multiplication; implantation as a vegetative-type being; and the eventual growth of the embryo; and the World Tree, as the placenta.
Plant and Periconceptional Mythology
A simplified version of the process is described by Campbell. Of course, he doesn’t have the conception symbolism, that is my addition. Nevertheless, Campbell (1969) writes, “One version of the mythological event at the beginning of time which supplied the model for this rite tells that as the goddess Tlalteutli was walking alone upon the face of the primordial waters — a great and wonderful maiden, with eyes and jaws at every joint that could see and bite like animals — she was spied by the two primary gods Quetzalcoatll (the Plumed Serpent [notice here the equivalence of serpent and sperm]) and Tezcatlipoca (the Smoking Mirror); whereupon, deciding that they should create the world of her [notice that a world is formed of her], they transformed themselves into mighty serpents [more sperm symbolism] and came at her from either side [sperm surround the egg]. One seized her from the right hand to the left foot, the other from the left hand to the right foot, and together they ripped her asunder. From the parts they fashioned not only the earth and heavens but also the gods.”11
This last part refers to the ovum, for the ovum dies and the material of “her” body is used in the creation of the zygote. He continues, “And then to comfort the goddess for what had happened to her, all the gods came down and, paying her obeisance, commanded that there should come from her all the fruits the men require for their life. And so, from her hair they made trees, flowers, and grass; from her eyes springs, fountains, and the little caves; from her mouth rivers and the great caves; from her nose valleys, and from her shoulders mountains. But the goddess wept all night, for she had a craving to consume human hearts. And she would not be quiet until they were brought to her.”12
This last part sets up the re-creation of the myth in the Aztec ritual where, from then on, young girls and boys and human sacrifices are required, just as she, the goddess, was sacrificed for them, in the creation of their “world.” Says Campbell, “Nor would she bear fruit until she had been drenched with human blood.”13
And in this — where until she is satisfied, the world will not bring forth fruit — we see a recollection and tie-in with the myth of Demeter and Persephone on the other side of the world. That’s coming up, too.
So these are examples of rituals and myths where girls, and sometimes goddesses or boys, are raped and/or murdered, are sometimes cannibalized or in some other way the substance of their bodies is used for the betterment of the community.
The examples so far given are provided by Campbell, yet Robert Lawlor (1991) gives us another example of this type of ritual with a twist that is significant. Again there is the seduction, if not the rape aspect; again there is the sperm-ovum symbolism of a girl (ovum) being surrounded by and interacting with a myriad of males (sperm) And again it is a rite of passage into womanhood.
The seduction-rape of the virgin is embodied in this ritual reported by Robert Lawlor, having to do with a girl’s rite of passage into adulthood in aboriginal societies in Australia. He reports that the girl — at a certain age and on a certain night — has sex with all her male cohorts. The event goes on all night. While this is reportedly something that the girl looks forward to and is said to enjoy, so it is not technically a rape, it is a seduction. And it, as well, has the profile of our conception experience of one ovum being surrounded by a multitude of sperm. Over and again we see this periconceptional symbolism uniting the rituals and mythologies of adolescent rites of passage and the rituals and mythologies surrounding fertility and the goddess.
However, you are not meant to know of this primal, this original, fractal of mythologies, which occurs out of our conception experiences. Not now. I will get to that in Veil Seven, just prior to the dropping of the last membrane across your view to Naked Reality. We have a long way to go before you can truly appreciate what will be unVeiled there. Here, at Veil Two, however, we are needing to see this in the light of the ways young boys and girls are reduced in their experience of life — they are given “little deaths” — to be that of which society can make use.
Let us look more deeply into that aspect of the “sacrifice” of the young for the (questionable) “benefit” of the community. In the next chapter, “The Planting of Girls in the Creation of the World,” we explore how we are mythologically and biologically disposed to see creation as arising from the death of another, in particular a woman or girl. We see, additionally, how conception and planting symbolism infuse these mythologies. Then, in the chapter following that, on “Female Servitude and the Abduction into Darkness,” we look at how the quality of diminution of personhood, reflective of these symbolic deaths of women, is attendant upon the rites of passage, which correspond to these myths.
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The Planting of Girls in the Creation of the World:
Women’s Mythologies and Rites Depicting Martyrdom, Descent Under Ground … What This Has to Do with Conception
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“Deep in the darkness of our unconscious being we are predisposed to think that it requires sacrifice of one’s very self — a killing, a rape, a degradation of some sort, which often follows immediately upon an exaltation of that person — to produce benefit to society.”
“…we see everywhere around the world, most notably beginning with agrarian cultures and then patriarchal, ‘civilized,’ ones, that good things are elicited from the diminution of others. And this is reflected pervasively in culture’s rites of passage into adulthood, for both boys, but also, most tellingly, for girls. Why more so for girls, the feminine? Our entire early form was created out of the stuff of the ovum (the feminine), multiplied endlessly; so also each of our bodies grew within and thereby were fed and nurtured within the ‘soil’ of our mother’s body.”
“Campbell glosses over any reasoning on why this would be the case — why death and murder would be involved in the sexual creation of a new being out of two, let alone be reflected in vegetation symbolism. Which, as I say, is explained readily by the death of gamete cells at the time of conception, in the creation of a new ‘world,’ a new being, and on the way the new being’s implantation into the uterine wall, and corresponding cell multiplication.”
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Whereas the ritual performed by the Marind-anim, described at the beginning of the last chapter, is said to be for the purpose of the boys’ initiation into adulthood — their rite of passage — it has many elements of a girl’s rite of passage. I’ll get to one of them, specifically, in a little, and show you what I mean.
Death and Creation
However and in general, a girl’s initiation into adulthood, which corresponds as well to fertility rituals around the world, has to do with a pattern of myth most identified with the story of Demeter and Persephone in Greek mythology. “Agricultural peoples usually sense a parallelism or harmony between their two categories of fertility — human and botanical — desiring growth and abundance in both.”1 And the examples given in the previous chapter for rituals exemplifying Veil Two, Identity and rites of passage, are interpreted, quoting Campbell, thusly: “These rites are but the renditions in act of a mythology inspired by the model of death and life in the plant world.”2
The typical pattern of the myth is that a girl is “taken to the underworld,” dies, and is reborn in the vegetation that arises from her body. We saw that in the Marind-anim ritual in that the girl was both gang raped (would anyone seriously have preferred I followed Campbell’s lead and written, “gang-cohabited”? lol) and killed, and her body became the substance that was shared among the community.
Hainuwele and the Creation of the World
Campbell describes another myth which brings out additional elements of this conformity between origin stories, fertility rituals, the transformational rites of girls into adulthood, and corresponding periconceptional underpinnings. It is from the culture of a society on an island, West Ceram, which is near New Guinea; and it concerns the mythological maiden, Hainuwele. By the way, the girl’s name means “frond of the cocopalm,” and that is significant, in that she is depicted as a part of a plant. The maiden is one of three virgin Dema, who are greatly respected by the tribes of that region.3
The story begins with nine families, who had emerged from clusters of bananas (don’t ask.) Among them was Ameta — which means dark, black, or night — who was a man with no children or wife. Jumping ahead — for this deals with reality beyond the Seventh Veil — consider that Ameta represents the No-Form State, the state of no-thingness prior to everything, i.e., the “dark.” Also, “with no children” clearly means nothing, as yet, manifested in the Form State; no “wife” represents this is prior to conception, where the ovum and the sperm are paired.
Anyway, Ameta went hunting, took his dog. The dog sensed a wild pig. However, the sow jumped into a pond, began swimming, became exhausted; it drowned. Yet the hunter pulled it from the water and on its tusk discovered a coconut … there had been no cocopalms in that part of the world, previously.
Now, Ameta, the man, went home and inside his dwelling he placed the coconut on a stand — much like putting an ovum, or a woman, on a pedestal. And he covered it with a “cloth bearing a snake design,” which for that you can interpret as sperm (the snake), surrounding (the cloth) the ovum, (coconut). We are seeing here the emanation of Form out of No-Form, sperm and ovum from no-thingness. And with the sperm surrounding the ovum, conception.
Ameta, during a dream that night, was advised that he needed to place the coconut in the earth … much as a blastocyst must implant in the uterine wall. He is told, otherwise it will not grow. Thus, planted, the palm shoots up and in three days it is huge. This is much like the embryo develops, which is gigantic, fifteen thousand to eighteen thousand cells, at fifteen days after fertilization. This is compared to the mere one hundred to three hundred cells in its blastocyst stage, at about seven days. Later in gestation, this tree represents the placenta, symbolized the world around and throughout human existence as the World Tree.
In another three days Ameta’s cocopalm tree is bearing blossoms, which is a fitting symbol for the growth of additional cells. Hence, this is much like the embryo continuing its cell multiplication to create all the different parts of the body, which emerge as organs and limbs and, with increasing cell multiplication, continue to define the parts to its body.
Now, Ameta climbs the tree to get some of those blossoms to prepare a drink, for that you can read the embryo needs to feed off the uterine wall. I quote, “uterine secretions nurture the tiny embryo.”4 Later it will be the placenta as the “middle-woman.”
However, he cuts his finger and blood falls on a leaf. In a few days the blood and the leaf have created the face of a person…. You can see here the increasing differentiation of the embryo. In another three days, he finds the trunk of the person along with the face … which means, increasing cell multiplication and embryo differentiation, here. And finally, in another three days there is a girl that has developed from the drop of blood (drop of blood would represent the sperm) and the leaf (a symbol of a cell, in this case the ovum again).
The same man who had come in his dream to tell of placing the coconut in the ground, now returns in another dream to tell Ameta to take that damn cloth again, with the snake (sperm) design … okay, maybe he didn’t use those words exactly … and “wrap the girl of the cocopalm in the cloth carefully, and carry her home.”5 This is another re-creation of conception in the same way. This time it is the girl as the ovum, but the same cloth with the serpent represents the mass of sperm surrounding the ovum just prior to conception.
Ameta does this, takes the girl home; and he names her Hainuwele.
She, too, grows quickly and within only three days is a “nubile maiden. But she was not like an ordinary person; for when she would answer the call of nature her excrement consisted of all sorts of valuable articles, such as Chinese dishes and gongs….”6 You see here, again, how conception symbolism leads to the growth of all the things that create the world as a byproduct of the mere growth of the zygote, blastocyst, and embryo through cell multiplication and increasing differentiation of anatomical parts. In this, note, firstly, that initially the beneficial products are all the cells, then the parts of the body. In much of mythology the body and the world are equated, and here this is the case. The myth corresponds to this, showing an increasing size and importance of gifts.
For the myth continues: A great Maro Dance lasting nine nights is now to be celebrated in the place of the Nine Dance Grounds. Nine months of gestation perhaps? This dance has the form that the women sit in the center … figure they are ovum symbols again … and they offer betel nut to the men, much like the ovum welcoming the sperm. Meanwhile the men, “form, in dancing, a large ninefold spiral,”7 around Hainuwele … much like sperm swirling, spiraling around and surrounding the ovum just prior to conception. Hainuwele stood in the center of this Maro festival, passing out betel nut to the men”8 … accommodating as any ovum to being “impregnated” with a lucky sperm of her choosing.
The next night, and in a different place, again Hainuwele is placed in the center and instead of betel nut, she gives coral to the dancers. We see here increasing size, from a seed-like thing, like a cell (the betel nut), to a blastocyst-like thing, coral, as well as increasing importance or value. In a third place on the third night, in the center again, Hainuwele gives porcelain dishes, which shows greater differentiation, still, over nuts and coral, and interestingly the item is something from which food is served. This is perhaps significant in that the ability to get nourishment is very important to a growing blastocyst or embryo. The emerging placenta also has dish and vessel-like characteristics.
The fourth night, another different place, she gives bigger dishes; on the fifth night, another place, great bush knives. This shows increasing differentiation, this time as tools … representing limbs of the fetus perhaps? On the sixth night, boxes of copper … organs of the body? On the seventh, golden earrings, showing additional refinements of the bodily parts, much as accessories on a person’s body. On the eighth night, glorious gongs. Are we seeing here the rudiments of the organs of communication, that which will make sound, the voice box, and so on? “The value of the articles increased, that way, from night to night”9 Just as the embryo then fetus grows increasingly large and differentiated with each passing month, so also the “offerings” get greater in value.
However … and here we go again, thinking back to Makata, the sacrificial boy depicted last chapter … the people are jealous of such a person who can have and give so much wealth. Yes, you’re right, they decide to kill her, too.
On the ninth night, the girl Hainuwele “was again placed in the center of the dance ground, to pass out betel nut, the men dug a deep hole in the area. In the innermost circle of the great ninefold spiral [again the ovum is surrounded by sperm, “spiraling”] the men of the Lesiela family were dancing, and in the course of the slowly cycling movement of their spiral [expressing undulations of sperm in surrounding ovum] they pressed the maiden Hainuwele toward the hole and threw her in.”10 This last would seem to represent death of the ovum, as ovum only, again upon conception. However, symbolizing plant fertility, at the same time, it is akin to a seed being planted in the ground. The hole is significant, additionally, as anything going into the underground, the underworld, into holes or caves or openings in the earth represent an incursion back into the womb or at least they signify events happening in utero.
“A loud, three voiced Maro Song drowned out her cries. They covered her quickly with earth, and the dancers trampled this down firmly with their steps. They danced on till dawn.…”11 Of course we see the obvious planting symbolism in the tamping down of the earth, much as one does after planting a seed. The equation of girl … sometimes pig or other animal … with ovum, with seed of a plant, is pervasive in mythology; we see it here.
Now, Ameta, noticing that his daughter, Hainuwele, failed to return, took nine branches of a bush-like plant, which was often used for casting oracles, and within his own home he simulated the nine circles of the Maro Dancers. From this he was able to determine that his daughter had been murdered in the Dancing Ground; and, taking nine fibers of cocopalm leaf, he heads off to the Dancing Ground. There, he sticks the fibers into the dirt, one after the other. Ameta gets to the innermost circle and sticks the ninth fiber into the earth. When he pulls the fiber out, then, it brings with it some of the blood and hairs of his daughter.
Are we seeing in these descriptions of his use of simulation — both in the necromancing of the nine branches as well as the nine fibers of cocopalm leaf — how ritual is used in cultures? Notice how his simulations partake of the structure of the Maro Dancer ritual, yet also they re-create the silhouette of the events of conception — with items or actors who surround circles, and movement, often spiraling, being dominant elements. For rituals rely on mythological images and patterns which themselves express and re-create the events of our earliest lives in the womb, especially the happenings around conception.
So, then again, rituals re-create these patterns, in the movements of the participants, the ritual items, the placing of personnel upon the event stage, and the interactions of those items and participants. All of which are meant to conform to, or capture, the morphic pattern of early events and partake, through morphic resonance, of its field of energy. Is this not much as Ameta symbolically conjures, using various items but manipulating them in a way so as to simulate the events that happened and thereby is able to bring forward elements of truth of what happened at that time? As well as causing the rising up of the energies that were encapsulated in that event and stored, ever after, in the deepest recesses of unconscious memory?
In any case, continuing with the myth, in what follows we see the cell multiplication and the origin of the “world” one more time. For Ameta then digs up Hainuwele’s corpse and cuts it into many pieces; just like the ovum’s body creates the raw material out of which all cells will later come. He buries the pieces, again. Whereupon, shortly, “the buried portions of Hainuwele … were already turning into things that up to that time never existed anywhere on earth — above all, certain tuberous plants that have been the principal food of the people ever since”12
The myth has many more elements that follow, some of which depict the actual birth, but the main message is that more of the world comes into being. The death, as before, creates another world, or what that really means, a new human being. “And ever since that day there have been not only men but spirits and animals on earth, while the tribes of men have been divided in the Fivers and the Niners.”13
Deep in the darkness of our unconscious being we are predisposed to think that it requires sacrifice of one’s very self — a killing, a rape, a degradation of some sort, which often follows immediately upon an exaltation of that person — to produce benefit to society. While there is probably a lot to that message on a personal level, when it is accepted voluntarily, it has unfortunately fed the notion of the sacrifice of others to that aim.
Thus we see everywhere around the world, most notably beginning with agrarian cultures and then patriarchal, “civilized,” ones, the notion that good things are elicited from the diminution of others. One wonders how much the fact of hierarchy in those societies, with those above benefitting off the diminishing of those below, has contributed to this idea.
In any case, this institution of a societal “food chain” is reflected pervasively in such cultures’ rites of passage into adulthood, for both boys, but also, most tellingly, for girls. Why more so for girls, the feminine? Well, our entire early form was created out of the stuff of the ovum (the feminine), multiplied endlessly. So also each of our bodies grew within and thereby were fed and nurtured within the “soil” of our mother’s body.
Conception and Myth
Campbell continues with a related myth, which provides additional elements, and more periconceptional symbolism:
The Creation of the Moon from the Death of a Divine Maiden
In Primitive Mythology, Campbell tells the tale “of the remaining divine maiden, Rabia, who was desired in marriage by the sun-man Tuwale. But when her parents placed a dead pig in her place in the bridal bed, Tuwale claimed his bride [yeah, I know, one has to wonder what Campbell thought the professional consequences might be if he were to use the word fuck, or even sex] in a strangely violent manner, [seduction and rape of the virgin] causing her to sink into the earth among the roots of a tree [descent into darkness]. The efforts of the people to save her were in vain: they could not prevent her from sinking even deeper. And when she had gone down as far as to the neck, she called to her mother: ‘It is Tuwale, the sun-man, who has come to claim me. Slaughter a pig and celebrate a feast; for I am dying. But in three days, when evening comes, look up at the sky, where I shall be shining upon you as a light.’ That was how the moon-maiden Rabia instituted the death feast. And when her relatives had killed the pig and celebrated the death feast for three days, they saw for the first time the moon, rising in the east”14
Campbell, in explaining the myths above, corroborates what I am saying on several counts: “The leading theme of the primitive-village mythology of the Dema is the coming of death into the world, and the particular point is that death comes by way of a murder. The second point is that the plants on which man lives derive from this death.”15
Then, nodding in the direction of periconceptional symbolism, Campbell tells how such symbolism is explained, second-handedly, as sexual symbolism: “As we learn from other myths … the sexual organs are supposed to have appeared at the time of the coming of death. Reproduction without death would be a calamity, as would death without reproduction.”16 Asserting this way, Campbell glosses over any reasoning on why this would be the case — why death and murder would be involved in the sexual creation of a new being out of two, let alone be reflected in vegetation symbolism. Which, as I say, is explained readily by the death of gamete cells at the time of conception, in the creation of a new “world,” a new being, and, on the way, the new being’s implantation into the uterine wall, and corresponding cell multiplication.
Rape, Death, and the Creation of the Seasons
Meanwhile, Bruce Lincoln (1991) describes the myth of the rape of Persephone and speculates that it was originally a part of a girl’s rite of passage into adulthood, which later became the center of the rites of the Eleusinian mysteries. In this myth, and relatedly in the proposed ritual of initiation, the girl is abducted, taken “below,” to the underworld, raped by Hades, the god of the underworld. Death occurs throughout the world, nothing will grow, as her mother, Demeter, in sorrow, searches the world for her. This is said to be the origin of the seasons; and the time of “death,” or the inability of plants to sprout and grow caused by Demeter’s grief, is related to winter.
In a complicated arrangement, at the instigation of the father god, Zeus, Persephone is allowed to return to her mother for six months out of the year. And with Demeter’s grief dispelled, the crops and flora sprout and grow again. This is said to be responsible for the growing seasons during the milder months, or summer.
Girls’ Rites of Passage Related to Conception
I have to say again that these are the most obvious examples in all of mythology of conception symbolism. I do not want to disclose it all here, but merely point to the adolescent aspects of the mythology and their accompanying rites. However, your interest has been piqued, and you are pressuring me for a hint. “I get it.” Lol.
Okay, on the level of cells, that a young girl is seduced reflects the ovum combining with the sperm at conception. That the girl might need to engage in sex with many has to do with the fact that at conception, many sperm surround the egg.
That afterward the girl is killed represents the fact that both ovum and sperm cease to exist, they die, so that their combined form can live. That this is sometimes acted out by having the girl’s head cut off is an exact re-creation of the fact that the sperm’s head explodes prior to the combining of DNA.
That after the ritual the body of the girl is put in the ground is an exact re-creation of the implantation of the fertilized egg, at this point become a blastocyst, in the cell wall. That out of the body emanates food and sometimes the creations of all the world has to do with a) the fact that the material of the ovum is the material out of which all cells will be made, not the sperm substance, which is negligible, thousands of times less in amount. And b) that such a multitude and creation of diverse beings are made of the girl’s body has to do with the robust cell multiplication which happens once implantation in the uterine wall has been achieved. Furthermore, it relates to the differentiation of organs, limbs, and body parts out of all those cells.
The Multilevel Meanings of Myth
Similarly, there are deep wombular and perinatal underpinnings to the adolescent aspect of the seduction, but for this you must wait. I will be bringing them out in great detail in upcoming chapters and especially in the books following this in The Path of Ecstasy Series — in particular, Dance of the Seven Veils II and Womb with a View.
As we go back further in time in the history of our lives, we see these mythic elements have deeper and deeper roots. For example, while Red Riding Hood is a tale of warning about sex on the level of the adolescent girl, and the hunter is the good suitor to protect the maiden from the bad “masher” or casanova; it is also a tale about rebirth on the level of the perinatal: The wolf eats the child, but the child is reborn from the wolf’s belly through the intercession of the hunter with sword. Whereas on the adolescent level the hunter’s sword is phallic, on the perinatal it takes on an entirely different meaning. It becomes the knife of the doctor or midwife, cutting the umbilical cord and sometimes, as in a cesarean section, actually cutting open the abdomen to release the child; exactly as the hunter does in the story, opening the belly of the wolf to release Red Riding Hood.
Now, even deeper in the unconscious on the level of the prenatal, the girl represents a sperm cell, for it is swallowed up by the wolf, which is now the ovum, disguised as a grandmother. This is telling, for indeed the egg or ovum goes all the way back to the grandmother. The egg began as a cell inside the ovaries of the mother when the mother was still a fetus inside the grandmother. In any case, the result of the swallowing, after released by the hunter, is a new being, a new girl. This is exactly as happens when egg and sperm come together in conception, with qualities of both innocence (the girl) and now wisdom (the grandmother). That is to say, a new being as the zygote, eventually the blastocyst, and then the fetus and child. Consider that as simply a taste, a teaser as to what is coming.
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Female Servitude and the Abduction into Darkness:
Rites of Passage as Ritualized Reduction of Aliveness and Oppression to the Norm … the Role of Male Elites in the Creation of Self-Benefiting Cultural Ritual
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“…at adolescence, the earlier pattern of the egg becoming the substance out of which the rest of the world is created, her serving in that way, her becoming the basis of food and nourishment for the community, is distorted into the young girl becoming the handmaiden, the servant, the sexual toy, the woman robbed of self, the demure and self-effacing, the nun who gets ‘none,’ and so on.
“This is what the patriarchal rite does of the patterns of cellular experience laid down in all of us. It slants those proclivities to ends of its own. Whereas, it does not have to be that way. The young girl can be brought into adulthood in a way that is positive and which does not crush her, does not defile her pure (virginal) capabilities and talents and natural empathies. For we are naturally giving and kind and compassionate, we do not have to be forced to be that way.”
“…we academics and scientists, in rubber stamping all practices that simply exist, are merely ourselves obeying our distinct cultural programming, handed down by strongman societies throughout history down to today, to obey our elites in not casting aspersions on them, and to participate in their oppression by helping with the cover-up of their many and common everyday crimes.”
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However, at adolescence … back to this now … additional mythological elements pertain. Many of them have to do with turning the girl, who might otherwise become a rather assertive, creative, and independent woman, into something that can be used both by the patriarchal elders, in the guise of society; and by the future husband, into something like a sex toy, a thing, and an object to induce and satisfy the lust of men.
Abduction into Darkness
“Taken to the underworld” in the Persephone myth is significant in that it represents not merely the suffering involved in many rites of passage, but also the dimming of the light of authenticity, often spoken of as purity … virginity, and so on. This component of dampening down the aliveness of girls is the most frequent component of girls’ initiation, for only rarely are girls actually killed, though it happens.
The Slaying of the Virginal
This, then, is the slaying of the maiden, the sacrifice of the Virgin. For the Virgin symbolizes all that is good and pure of self, before it is defiled. The archetype of the Virgin represents a capacity for the creation of goodness, kindness, and creativity, which comes from such a place of a person who has not been traumatized … yet.
In previous chapters I brought out how the rape and death of the Virgin has its deepest roots in periconceptional events. However, the abduction into darkness is an additional twist which points to the influence of an additional package of prenatal events. The descent to the underworld is a parallel to what happens to us all in the womb where the earlier blissful time of BPM I ends at some point during the third trimester, leaving us ever longing for a return to the “golden age” of our earlier womb experience.1 The horrors that we go through in the months before birth are the origins of our ideas of hell. So it is that we re-create this in women’s rites of passage where the “pure” girl is both defiled and put on a pedestal, in other words, becomes more of a “thing,” an object. This is exactly as we become less alive through our experience of prenatal hell and through the arising of the prenatal matrix of human evil during the third trimester of gestation.2
Coercion into Servitude
However, this “fall” into a darkness, an underworld, is the structure of women’s rites of passage. We see it in the myth of Persephone, which is the prototypical ritual myth for women. She is abducted. She is raped (defiled); this corresponds to the engagement with the prenatal matrices of evil of the third trimester, in my formulation; or BPM II, in Grof’s. She is taken into the underworld — she becomes less alive. Indeed, the underworld is said to be where the dead reside.
Later, upon returning to Earth, her reappearance is associated with the renewal of the world, the springtime, and the growth, again, of vegetation and crops. That is to say, like a woman given only the role of sexual plaything, birthing mother, and mother breastfeeding, she is reduced to a thing, out of which the rest of the world is fed, as well as continues itself.
So, at adolescence, the earliest periconceptional pattern of the egg becoming the substance out of which the rest of the world is created — her serving in that way, her becoming the basis of food and nourishment for the community — is distorted into the young girl becoming the handmaiden, the servant, the sexual toy, the woman robbed of self, the demure and self-effacing, the nun who gets “none,” and so on.
This is what the patriarchal rite does of the patterns of cellular experience laid down in all of us. It slants those proclivities to ends of its own. Whereas, it does not have to be that way. The young girl can be brought into adulthood in a way that is positive and which does not crush her, does not defile her pure (virginal) capabilities and talents and natural empathies. For we are naturally giving and kind and compassionate, we do not have to be forced to be that way. I will elaborate more on that as we go along and especially in the chapter upcoming, Chapter 29, titled “The Cosmic Tour.”
In the same way that the more authentic version of puberty rites for boys, which would be something having the elements of a vision quest or walkabout, is seen only rarely in cultures and for the most part the boy’s experience of life is diminished through the ritual or passage; so also in the vast majority of cultures the young girl would be turned into something that would be as controlled as planetmates are in their being forced to serve. That is, the serving will be done at the orders and to the liking of dominant others, particularly the male ones. It will not be allowed merely to be given voluntarily, in a manner that arguably might be ever more forthcoming than service that is demanded and coerced … just as sexuality that is proffered is so much more than what can be coerced or forced.
Rites of Passage as Institutionalized Diminution of Self
Such a conclusion on the use of ritual, mythology, religion, and rites of passage as additional forms of Oedipal or Electra act-outs of adults — where adults can act out their desires to possess and control the young — is not easily come to the mind of an academic. My primal perspective allows it of me. Yet others are finally seeing through the façade.
Bruce Lincoln (1991) is one. Having written a widely-read book on women’s initiation practices, in the revised version of the book written ten years later — and helped, he admits, by his wife’s influence — he confesses his seduction to the power of patriarchal mythology and presents his view past the patriarchal Veil in phrasings I could have chosen. I include his own words in order to show the contrast between the traditional and this new-paradigm, revisionist, view which I advance.
Here the contradiction is in a single person, having changed his own view over time. It is a strikingly poignant and a rare confessional for academic work. Lincoln writes, “I have come to view as immoral any discourse or practice that systematically operates to benefit the already privileged members of society at the expense of others, and I reserve the same judgment for any society that tolerates or encourages such discourses and practices. By these standards few, if any, rituals of women’s initiation fare very well, and looking back, I fear that in some measure I was myself seduced by the elegant structures, well-wrought symbolism, and complex ideologies that are found within these rituals. Accordingly, I glorified their ability to create coherent and profound — that is, persuasive — systems of meaning, and overlooked the way in which even the most pacific and seemingly benevolent of these rituals still serve to produce subjects who will thereafter accept the positions, statuses, and modes of being that society desires for and demands of them: persons whom it can use for its own purposes, as productive workers, for example, docile spouses, nurturant mothers, or anaesthetized lovers (in the last case, I think particularly of the many initiatory rituals that feature clitoridectomy). In truth, persuasion can be more insidious than coercion, for while the latter generally provokes some measure of resentment and resistance, skillful persuasion can avoid sowing these seeds of future struggle, insofar as it leads its subjects to desire (or think they desire) for themselves precisely what society desires of them.”3
He adds, “In light of these observations, rituals of women’s initiation appear — to substitute a decidedly industrial trope for that of the chrysalis — as one of the central crucibles in which society takes persons possessed of two X chromosomes and works on them in order to transform their raw material into a finished product: persons who will conform, first, to that society’s images and expectations of what a “woman” ought be, and second, to that society’s needs and purposes. We thus need to ask very specifically and very pointedly just what kind of a woman it is that a given society strives to produce through its initiatory rites, and we need to assess the answers that this question evokes in a highly critical fashion, for even when they seem most simple, they will always be instructive, complex, and politically loaded.”4
That said, I wish to point out that these initiation practices from widely disparate cultures are only in the last few decades receiving any critique. Two things needed to happen: the feminist revolution and the cause of children’s rights. It is only when the well-being of oppressed minorities or brutalized and dominated sectors of the population are brought to bear, that the normally staid and conservative academic and/or anthropologist might be pressured to look again at cultural relativism’s dictum against analyzing elements of culture for their suitability.
For if a society that engaged in slavery and regular brutalization of a minority can be criticized … and I dare any academic try to defend that cultural mode! Then cultures that are oppressive of women and brutal to the young are equally fair targets for applying ethical considerations. Else we academics and scientists, in rubber stamping all practices that simply exist, are merely ourselves obeying our distinct cultural programming, handed down by strongman societies throughout history up to today, to obey our elites in not casting aspersions on them, and to participate in their oppression by helping with the cover-up of their many and common everyday crimes.
This kind of ethical evaluation of cultural practices is more than just frowned upon in academic anthropology, it is outright put down! Yet Bruce Lincoln’s conclusions and mine are the same: Political considerations come into play here. When you have a situation where the entire culture is mismanaged for the sole benefit of elites, can we really keep saying that its rituals to keep its members in enslavement are above reproach? Can we really continue asserting that the cultural practices of all societies are instrumental to social maintenance when that explanation equates society with its elites, who are the only ones benefitted?
Now, I realize that in order to make this judgment on the suitability of a culture’s rites of passage, one would have to do two things: a) be able to provide a contrasting way of accomplishing the same thing which would benefit the participants, as well as the society as a whole … not simply the elites, and b) have a basis for judging, a moral yardstick along which to evaluate.
False modesty aside, and with some help, I provide both of them. I have been talking, in the previous chapters on male rites of passage, about humane, even transformative, practices that are possible and are actually more beneficial to the individual and society, both. I have pointed to practices, particularly, in primitive, nomadic groups. Vision quests are one; celebrations of coming into womanhood are another; and ones that are simple, non-ritual processes of increasing capabilities and responsibilities accompanying age — as in the Mbuti, as I described in Chapter 18 — are another.
For the second requirement, I provide a natural morality as a guiding vision for evaluation on them. My “natural morality” is identical or at least aligned with a “feminine morality,” like the one described by the renowned feminist historian, Marilyn French (1985), in her landmark work, Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals. In this natural, or feminist, morality it is deemed good to reduce unnecessary suffering and to promote happiness and felicity and life. This foundation of life-valuing differs from a masculine morality which, as French stresses, is rooted solely in power. And I would add, in its correlate, control. So it is, then, that through the lens of such a natural morality as I propose, these female rites of passage measure up, as Lincoln put it, “fairly poorly.”
And as I pointed out, all of this and all its injustices can be and is being changed and altered optimally to the benefit of current and future generations. We have an evolution in child-caring going on, for hundreds of years, as documented by Lloyd deMause. We have experienced, as well, an acceleration into its most felicitous mode, beginning in the Sixties, as documented by both deMause and in a more detailed way, by Glenn Davis (1976). Still, we need to keep our past in mind, for we cannot undo our mistakes if we do not know them and learn from them.
Blessingways
I need to add, however, that whereas most women’s rituals have not, in Bruce Lincoln’s phrasing, “served them very well,” still, there are some rituals of womanhood and corresponding mythologies that celebrate the passage into female adulthood. Those cultures, correspondingly, have milder, if not totally beneficial, female initiation rites. Significantly, also, these rites of passage appear to be associated with matrilineal or matrilocal cultures. Note — not patriarchal. And a significant correlate to them is that in the society involved, menses is not seen as evil or dangerous. In the Navajo, for example, it symbolizes power — good and beneficial power — as emanating from the Goddess.
So just as there are better, optimal even, ways for young men to grow into good adults, as in vision quests, there are less harsh, perhaps even beneficial ways of attending to a girl’s real needs. I say “perhaps,” for, as Lincoln points out above, even the best of them have elements of coercion into reduced adult roles. Subtle are many of the ways this is accomplished.
Becoming the “Goddess”?
One of the milder forms of this is found in the rite of initiation into adulthood of the Navajo. The Navajo are a matrilocal as well as a matrilineal culture. Yet we see here that even though descent is from the mother and upon marriage residence is taken up on the side of the mother, there is no female domination here — which would be the definition of matriarchy. And it is doubtful that the culture is skewed along lines to benefit women primarily, either. The ritual shows this, in that through its process properly obedient and smiling self-sacrificing workers for the society are produced. And the ones most to benefit from that are the men, in particular the male and usually elder elite. I’ll explain it, and you can see for yourself.
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Blessingways?
Oh, the Things Women Do for Men … and More Periconceptional Symbolism
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“Scarification is thus intended to produce Tiv women who are both attractive and attracted to men. And as in the case of the cheerful, hardworking Navajo woman, we must pause to ask, ‘Who is it that benefits most from the creation of such persons?’” — Bruce Lincoln
“The idea is that the girl, in this state of vulnerability or softness, can be shaped into the kind of body of a woman who would be considered desirable in that society. We have to wonder here how much of male desire’s and lusts have impregnated or influenced the ritual.”
“…notice … how the cross symbolism in the swastika-like representations predominates along with the swirling and circular elements. This is significant for at conception, with the coming together of sperm (the bird and serpent symbolism seen as swirling) and ovum (the circular elements, especially at the center of the mandalic representations) there is the beginning of a duality … a coming together of sperm and ovum which creates the duality of Form and No-Form, male and female.”
“…initiation … thus produces Navajo women who will put their abundant labor at the disposal of others: husbands, children, friends, relations. It produces women who serve food, keep house, tend children, till the land, herd the animals, and what is more, who learn to derive satisfaction and pride from all this….” — Bruce Lincoln
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Taking a closer look at the practices in a traditional Navajo culture, I will rely on Bruce Lincoln’s rendering of it in his book, Emerging from the Chrysalis: Rituals of Women’s Initiation (1991).
Becoming the Goddess
The Navajo rite of female initiation into womanhood is initiated by the onset of the girl’s menses. And as I mentioned, contrary to so many cultures and virtually all patriarchal ones, this event, among the Navajo, is a cause for rejoicing. The initiation rite is termed the Kinaalda, which means “first menstruation” or “house-sitting.” The latter term refers to the fact that the girl stays in her house, her family hogan, throughout the time of the ritual.
Blessing and Enemy Ways
It is interesting to notice that the Navajo have two song complexes, used in differing rituals, which are called the Blessingway and the Enemyway. The songs differ markedly, with the Blessingway songs used at more felicitous ceremonies, such as a wedding, the birth of a child, the erection of a new dwelling, and anything having to do with the creation and preservation of peace, harmony, or well-being. Meanwhile, the Enemyway songs are used for ritual events that are concerned with more serious, even dire, happenings — wars, exorcism, healing of illness, and in general for dealing with adversity. Importantly, the songs used for this rite of passage for girls are exclusively Blessingway songs.
In terms of prenatal symbolism, clearly the Blessingway song cycles resonate with the peaceful time in the womb, BPM I. Indeed, “Blessingway deals with the birth of a goddess, Changing Woman … detailing how she was born, grew to maturity, and became the mother of the twins whose exploits are related in Enemyway.”1 Clearly this is reflective of earlier embryonal existence, which is relatively blissful and is caught up in the growth of the new life form in the first six months of gestation. Yet, as it was said, she is the mother of the two characters of the Enemyway mythology, exactly as the magical and blissful time in the womb is superseded by the prenatal hell of the third trimester, whose two protagonists are the fetus and the placenta.
Your BFF in the Womb
This idea of us having been twins in the womb is a common notion, by the way; many in prenatal psychology have reported on it. It appears to correspond to the fact of there being a fetus and a placenta, and that the placenta is considered to be a kind of BFF to the fetus. Just as the umbilical cord is experienced by the fetus as being a part of itself, like an additional limb … or phallus (which accounts for the importance placed on phallic symbolism in mythologies throughout the world). Only that the placenta is like another self, or soul… indeed, it is like the “son of god” (daughter of goddess, to be specific) … through whom one needs to go to interact with the goddess (one’s mother).
The correspondences to the Son of God in Christianity — being Christ is said to be the only one through whom one can approach the Father — is significant here. This is also an interesting parallel to the myths of Romulus and Remus2 of Roman mythological lore and Gilgamesh and Enkidu3 of Sumerian-Babylonian origins.
Sure enough, “Enemyway tells of the twin culture heroes and how they vanquished all manner of threatening monsters….”4 Incidentally, notice how the Enemyway cycle — just as are the Gilgamesh-Enkidu and the Romulus-Remus myths — is reminiscent of male mythologies and rites of passage: The “slaying of a dragon” and all that. The fact that there are two cycles of songology, corresponding to separate feminine and masculine ways, is telling. And considering what will ensue in the chapters beginning with 34, “The Care and Treatment of Dragons,” which have to do with feminine and masculine mythologies — lunar and solar, to be specific — this is significant, as you shall see.
However, concerning the Kinaalda, “As a part of the Blessingway complex, Kinaalda is directed toward the obtaining of good fortune, happiness, and perfection; all mention of anything related to illness, conflict, or unpleasantness is strictly forbidden.”5 This would make it like some kind of enforced “positive thinking,” in the words of our day. “In the course of the ritual, which lasts four nights and five days, only Blessing Songs are sung, ‘which are the holiest….’”6
Also significant, for it contrasts strikingly with male rites of passage, is that the entire process takes place inside the girl’s family home. Male rites invariably involve removing the boy from his former place of residence, so as to create a split with that time in his life, his childhood, which is deemed related to his mother and the feminine. These male-female patterns also conform to a tendency for motility and outgoingness to be associated with male rites and stationary or domestic-orientedness, that of female rites. This is much as sperm are motile and mobile and must journey to the ovum; whereas the ovum stays put, serene within itself, until the arrival of the sperm hordes.
“An ‘all-night sing’ fills the final night of the Kinaalda. The first songs sung are called Hogan Songs… By means of these songs, the mythic characters First Man and First Woman sang the primordial hogan into existence.”7 Substitute sperm and ovum for First Man and First Woman, and womb for primordial hogan, and you will see what I am thinking here. Note also that the first hogan is said to have been located at “Emergence Rim.” How’s that for a description for the “place” of the coming into Form from No-Form existence with the creation of the sperm and egg.
Within the girl’s family hogan, she is bedecked as … and is said to transform into … the goddess, Changing Woman. The goddess is who originally went through the event, in their mythology, upon which the ritual is said to be based and whose experience is intended to be re-created in its elements. Indeed, the girl initiate is said to become Changing Woman for the duration of the ritual.
The Things They Do for Men….
When the girl has been dressed and decorated to personify Changing Woman, she receives a vigorous massage by older female members of the tribe. This is considered “molding” her. The idea is that the girl, in this state of vulnerability or softness, can be shaped into the kind of body of a woman who would be considered desirable in that society. We have to wonder here how much of male desire’s and lusts have impregnated or influenced the ritual.
And lest we think we are much different, Lincoln comments on this aspect of the ritual as well as a corresponding element of the rite of passage in another culture, the Tiv culture. For the Tiv rite is also concerned with the beautification of women for the benefit of men. In another part of his book, Lincoln writes, “Similarly instructive is Tiv scarification, a practice that is supposed (i.e., both believed and intended) to make women ‘beautiful.’ Accordingly, specialists work on the bodies of young girls through the deliberate rending and infection of their skin, gradually turning it into an object that will give pleasure to others, a pleasure that is aesthetic in the first instance, and decidedly erotic in the second. For the scars not only provide visual decoration for a woman’s abdomen, but they are also said to make it more sensitive and excitable, such that a properly scarified woman ‘will demand more sexual attention.’ Scarification is thus intended to produce Tiv women who are both attractive and attracted to men. And as in the case of the cheerful, hardworking Navajo woman, we must pause to ask, ‘Who is it that benefits most from the creation of such persons?’
“Although obvious enough, it is still worth noting as a side point that phenomena of this sort are hardly restricted to the arcane practices of exotic peoples. To be sure, we have our own ritualized methods of producing women who embody culturally selected and politically charged images of ideal being. For instance, dieting and workout equipment, like the whalebone corsets and spike-heeled shoes of an earlier age, no less than Tiv razors and Navajo “molding” serve to create bodies that give visible testimony to the pain their owners have endured in order that they might: (1) conform to ideal types of health and beauty; (2) give aesthetic pleasure to others who value those same culturally constructed ideals of bodily existence; and (3) suggest the promise of erotic delights for those who find them particularly attractive.”8
More Periconceptional Symbolism
The Navajo ritual continues, after this molding, with the girl standing, facing east, at the western end of the hogan, and greeting visitors one by one that come in. The initiate physically lifts them up. It is thought that she is powerful, like the goddess Changing Woman, so she is to impart that energy to others.
Becoming a “Hard Worker”
Afterward she runs a race with other young people, leaving her home to do this. The race is said to represent her pursuit of the sun; and she must lead and race toward the sun, initially, then westward home to the hogan. One can hardly not notice the periconceptional re-creation involved in a group of girls (representing sperm) pursuing a disk (the sun, the ovum), with its requirement that the initiate — who indeed as a sperm was in the lead, allowing her to be the only one to impregnate the ovum at conception (as we all were) — being in the lead. In all, the girl must run three times a day.
There is not much else involved for these days, except she is required to grind an immense amount of corn for a huge cake that she will bake as part of the ceremonies. This is a daunting amount of work. “Running and grinding are both strenuous, and the girl is expected to work hard at them. Part of the reason for this is the explicit desire to make her industrious in later life,”9 so much so that one ethnologist categorized the ritual as among the “work complex” varieties of girls’ initiation rites. However, the intention is to remake the girl along another direction, resulting in a kind of rebirth into a new person who is both more physically beautiful, as a result of the “molding,” and is more work-oriented in character … willing to work hard to serve her family and community.
On a side note, building a huge round cake — approximately six feet across — from which all will feed, has resonance at the cellular level in that we each, in constructing ourselves as the ovum, create a huge round cell, thousands of times more in bulk than the sperm. Which ovum (“cake”) is the substance out of which is created the later cells … i.e., all cells emanating from the ovum “feed” from it. This, then, is another re-creation of periconceptional events, as we have seen such rites do. Specifically, the ovum becomes the material for the zygote (the fertilized egg) out of which all cell multiplications and the “whole world” arises. You might now be thinking how much of an improvement it is to be using large cakes as the substance to “feed the world” — rather than to be using the bodies of murdered young girls and boys, as in previous examples. I certainly am.
More and More Periconceptional Symbolism
On the fourth day, the men dig a huge pit, six feet across and circular. This is dug immediately east of the hogan, and a fire is kept lit in it continuously. “Toward evening the fire is allowed to die down, and the ashes are raked out. The kinaalda girl places a cross made from four husks of corn at the center of the pit…. From this cross, the women lay a network of husks over the bottom of the pit with all of the tips pointing sunwise, and an enormous quantity of sweet cornmeal batter is poured in until the pit is filled. This batter is made from the corn that the kinaalda girl has been grinding…. Water, sugar, and raisins are added, and also a bit of corn pollen, ‘the emblem of peace, of happiness, of prosperity.’ The initiand herself mixes this batter, but others carry it to the pit and pour it in, being careful to pour it in a sunwise circular direction.”10
Over and again we see this pattern of swirling motions around or directed to a circular or central item, like we did in the mythology of Hainuwele, a couple chapters ago. If you remember, the emphasis there was on circling and “spiraling” dancers, fibers, sticks, and so on. This symbolism, I claim, is some very fundamental conception symbolism — as in hordes of sperm oriented toward and moving in undulating fashion around an ovum.
Such iconography — while not understanding the periconceptional symbolism involved — Joseph Campbell has found expressed in myths and images in far-reaching cultures, in both paleolithic and neolithic cultures. That is, they were found among the artifacts of gatherer-hunter as well as agrarian societies and from very early prehistoric times.
The figure found prevalently is somewhat like a swastika. Says Campbell, “We find certain symbols in the centers of these designs that have remained characteristic of such organizations to the present day. In the Samarra ware, for example, there occurs the earliest known associations of the swastika with the center of a circular composition (there is, in fact, only one earlier known occurrence of the swastika anywhere: on the under-wings of an outstretched flying bird carved of mammoth ivory and found in a paleolithic site not far from Kiev). We find the Maltese cross, too, in the centers of these earliest known geometrical designs — occasionally modified in such a way as to suggest stylized animal forms emerging from the arms; and in several examples the figures of women appear, with their feet or heads coming together in the middle of the circular design, to form a star. Again, the forms of four gazelles may circumambulate a tree.11 A number of the bowls show lovely wading birds catching fish.”12
Importantly, they are found prominently in agrarian in addition to hunter-shamanistic cultures, showing that their origins are not linked solely with agricultural processes. As mandalas, they are found as well in civilizational-hierarchic societies, further reinforcing the idea of their importance and prominence in our psychological life.
Joseph Campbell relates the myth concerning the world creator, Black Hactcin, of Apache mythology. Black Hactcin initially created a bird by fashioning mud, which is pretty much a universal idea — beings created from dirt or mud. Though I have mentioned the symbolism of coming from the “dark,” in the Hainuwele myth, and from Emergence Rim, in the Navajo mythology, there is probably no better symbolism for our coming into Form from No-Form existence prior to conception than beings being formed from formless mud … or dirt or clay as in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Campbell writes, “Then he took the bird and whirled it around rapidly in a clockwise direction. The bird grew dizzy, and, as one does when dizzy, saw many images round about.”13 We see here how the life of all beings involves a diminution of consciousness. One gets “dizzy”; or as I am wont to say, “We are drunken gods; we are God when He’s trippin’.” This represents our stepping down from our innate identity as Divinity for the purpose of glorifying Existence and Experience through our unique experiential addition to “It All” in the course of our lives. This is also reminiscent of the “fainting” theme, in myth and fairy tale, that goes with our prenatal trauma, out of which all the evil of the world is created.
Campbell continues, “He saw all kinds of birds there, eagles, hawks, and small birds too, and when he was himself again, there were all those birds, really there. And birds love the air, dwell high, and seldom light on the ground, because the drop of water that became the mud out of which the first bird was made fell from the sky.
“The clockwise whirling image from which the birds of the air were produced suggests those designs on the earliest Samarra pottery of the Mesopotamian high neolithic (c. 4500-3500 B.C.) where the forms of animals and birds emerge from a whirling swastika, and it is surely by no mere accident or parallel development that similar designs — as those in the figures below [directly above and below, in my text] — occur among the prehistoric North American mound-builder remains, or that in the ritual life and symbolism of the present Indians of the Southwest — the Pueblos, Navaho, and Apache — the swastika plays a prominent part. This circumstance, however, may supply us not only with additional evidence of a broad cultural diffusion, but also with a clue to the sense of the swastika in the earliest neolithic art and cult, both in the Old World and in the New.
“The creator whirled the bird in a clockwise direction and the result was an emanation of dreamlike forms. But swastikas, counter-clockwise, appear on many Chinese images of the meditating Buddha; and the Buddha, we know, is removing his consciousness from just this field of dreamlike, created forms — reuniting it through yogic exercise with that primordial abyss or “void” from which all springs.
‘Stars, darkness, a lamp, a phantom, dew, a bubble,
‘A dream, a flash of lightning, or a cloud:
‘Thus should one look upon the world.’
“This we read in a celebrated Buddhist text, The Diamond-Cutter Sutra, which has had an immense influence on Oriental thought.
“Now I am not going to suggest that there has been any Buddhist influence on Apache mythology. There has not! However, the poignant thought that Calderon, the great Spanish playwright, expressed in his work La Vida es Sueno (“Life is a Dream”), and that his contemporary, Shakespeare, represented when he wrote
‘We are such stuff
‘As dreams are made on, and our little life
‘Is rounded with a sleep,’
“was a basic theme of the Hindu philosophers in the earliest phase of their tradition; and if we may judge from the evidence of certain little figures in yoga posture dating from c. 2000 B.C. that have been found in the ancient ruins of the Indus Valley, this trance-inducing exercise must already have been developed in the earliest Indian hieratic city states. One of the best-known forms of the Hindu deity Vishnu shows him sleeping on the coils of the cosmic serpent, floating on the cosmic sea and dreaming the lotus-dream of the universe, of which we all are a part. What I am now suggesting, therefore, is that in this Apache legend of the creation of the bird we have a remote cognate of the Indian forms, which must have proceeded from the same neolithic stock; and that in both cases the symbol of the swastika represents a process of transformation: the conjuring up (in the case of the Hactcin), or conjuring away (in the case of the Buddha), of a universe that because of the fleeting nature of its forms may indeed be compared to the substance of a mirage, or of a dream.”14
Campbell also makes the connection of these symbols to mandala symbols and suggests that they are apparently the first examples of mandala-like artistic representations.
So, Campbell is saying that such mandala, swastika, and conception-like iconography conform generally to mythologies of coming into Form from No-Form, which is the clockwise representations. On the other hand, counterclockwise, mandala-like imagery is generally associated with the idea of liberation of the individual from this Form existence, back into the Void, no-thing, or what I call the No-Form State.
Clockwise, to the right, brings ensnarement and diminution into matter. Counterclockwise, to the left, means liberation from the dense and intense of human existence into the free and ethereal No-Form. Man, that’s a whole new dimension to the phrase, “righty-tighty, lefty-loosey”! For all we know, we tend to make things that have to be turned to the right to tighten them, and to the left to loosen them out of such early early imprints, as also manifest these iconographies. Everything is connected. Everything. Everything is perfect.
We will look at this iconography and these ideas of liberation versus incarnation in more depth under Veil Seven, in Dance of the Seven Veils III. It will deal with the Veil of coming from No-Form into Form, the creation of sperm and ovum, and the specific events around biological conception.
Blessingways?
Back to the Navajo, now, more corn husks are used to cover the batter, and in the center of the batter, the girl must place another cross of corn husks. By the way, notice also how the cross symbolism in the swastika-like representations predominates along with the swirling and circular elements. This is significant for at conception, with the coming together of sperm (the bird and serpent symbolism seen as swirling) and ovum (the circular elements, especially at the center of the mandalic representations) there is the beginning of a duality … a coming together of sperm and ovum which creates the duality of Form and No-Form, male and female. The symbolism of a cross, as in Christianity, is associated the world over with the duality of the world, the need for integration of the opposites, and the suffering, like Christ, in the midst of them … as the characteristic of Form-ular life.
After this, in the Navajo ceremony, the entire cake is covered with moist earth, and another fire is built atop it, which is meant to bake the entire cake. The fire must be kept blazing throughout the night for the cake to bake.
Now, on the evening of the fourth day, the ritual is coming to a head. Everyone involved so far in the ritual congregates at the hogan at approximately eleven p.m., and the entire night is taken up with singing the sacred songs of the Blessingway. The participants must sit in a specific circular-like seating pattern, prescribed ritually, with the mound of earth in the center. “Once all the participants have arrived the hogan is blessed with corn pollen, which is then passed in a sunwise circle so that all in attendance may bless themselves.”15
“When these songs are concluded the sun is rising, and the chief singer introduces the Dawn Songs or Washing Songs. The latter name is due to the fact that while they are sung the hair and the jewelry of the kinaalda girl are washed — that is, the features by which she has been physically identified with Changing Woman are cleansed and renewed. A final race is run, accompanied by Racing Songs which chart the initiand’s progress on her course. Another Twelve Word Song brings the all-night sing to a close.”16
At this point, finally, the cake is served. “Once unearthed, the cake is cut into pieces, the first being taken from the eastern edge, with the knife always traveling in a sunwise direction. As the pieces are lifted out, the kinaalda girl gives one to everyone, although she herself may not taste of it, despite the fact that throughout the ceremony she is forbidden to eat everything except foods made from corn.”17
In discussing the meaning of the ritual, Lincoln offers a quotation from Gladys Reichard which is telling in regard to conception symbolism and the coming of Form out of No-Form. She says about Changing Woman, who is the center of the ritual and the goddess with whom the initiand is identified throughout, “No matter how much we know about her the total is a great question mark. She is the mystery of reproduction, of life springing from nothing [Form from No-Form], of the last hope of the world, a riddle perpetually solved and perennially springing up anew.”18
In this we see reflections of the endless cycles of birth and death as taken on by the Goddess, or by God … as I explain in Funny God and Experience Is Divinity … for the purpose of glorifying Existence itself. Which I equate with an ultimate and singular subjectivity, which I call Experience, and of which we are all sparks or emanations.
Lincoln continues, immediately upon the quote, saying, “Her name, which might be translated more literally as ‘the woman who is transformed time and again….”19 Lincoln’s words here are in keeping with my idea of Changing Woman being about endless rebirth of the Divine Principle, Form out of No-Form, and conception.
“Just Put on a Happy Face”
Now, having indicated the powerful energies these rituals conjure through mythic patterns of resonance with our earliest origins in Form, let us see how those energies are hijacked and applied, not to the transformation and personal spiritual advancement of the participant but toward the supposed betterment of society for which she will henceforth by mere servant, handmaiden … thing. This we will look at in the next chapter. Conversely, in the chapter upcoming titled, “The Cosmic Tour,” Chapter 29, we will take a look at how, against all odds, such energies might be fortuitously engaged, instead.
As I said above, Lincoln is one of the few academics bold enough to bring ethical and political light to bear on society and culture, and he does so concerning this ritual. In his Afterword, written as I said twenty years after the first publication of his book, he brings his more mature and feminist awakening to bear on the “elegant” structures of the rituals and their associated myths, so full of meaning, which had so “seduced” him earlier.
Of the Navajo rite of passage, in particular, he writes, “Consider, for instance, the Navajo Kinaalda, which explicitly aims at producing an industrious woman. I am struck by the words of a young Navajo who had just completed her initiation, and in passing I would stress how important it is to listen to the voices of the initiands as well as to the more official and authoritative voices of the initiators. When asked what this ritual had accomplished for her, this woman replied: ‘Well, if you’re cheerful four days [the length of the ceremony] maybe you get the habit of it, doing it all your life. And if you put the food before the people all the time and try to help around the house, you’ll be willing to do those things for the people wherever you go…. You know, when you grow up, you got to learn sometime. You get most of those things out of those four days. As a woman. I mean most of the things you got to do as a mother.’ Here, we confront a young and vulnerable person as she somewhat reluctantly struggles to internalize the demands of a society that insists not only that she work and work hard at ‘the things you got to do,’ but that she also be cheerful about it. Successful initiation (but ‘successful’ for whom and by what standards?) thus produces Navajo women who will put their abundant labor at the disposal of others: husbands, children, friends, relations. It produces women who serve food, keep house, tend children, till the land, herd the animals, and what is more, who learn to derive satisfaction and pride from all this, for in so doing, they live up to the demanding expectations that others harbor of them in specific and of women in general.”20
In the next chapter, we delve more deeply into exactly how the rites at adolescence, the world around, diminish the human personality and how, in consequence, we lose our souls. We will also see revealed what might be a more authentic way and better for all concerned.
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How We Lose Our Souls, How It is Stolen:
In Patriarchal Cultures, the Young Need Be Pared Down to the Level of Its Controlling Adults … Rituals of Diminution and Control
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With “civilization” comes brutal rites of adulthood and excessive “masculinity.”
“The individual, in order to belong to the mass … has had to … divest himself of that substantial reality which was linked to his initial individuality…. The incredibly sinister role of [society’s media] consisted in passing that original reality through a pair of flattening rollers to substitute for it a superimposed pattern of ideas, an image with no real roots in the deep being of the subject….” — Gabriel Marcel: Man Against Society1
“‘Fie! how that Duckling yonder looks; we won’t stand that!’ And one Duck flew up at it, and bit it in the neck.
“‘Let it alone,’ said the mother. ‘It does no harm to anyone.’
“‘Yes, but it’s too large and peculiar,’ said the Duck who had bitten it, ‘and therefore it must be put down.’
“So it went the first day; and afterwards it became worse and worse. The poor Duckling was hunted about by everyone; even its brothers and sisters were quite angry with it, and said, ‘if the cat would only catch you, you ugly creature!’
“And the mother said, ‘if you were only far away!’
“And the ducks bit it, and the chickens beat it, and the girl who had to feed the poultry kicked at it with her foot!”—Hans Christian Anderson: The Ugly Duckling2
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We need to keep in mind, and we will see this in much more detail in the next Veil coming — which is that of the primal scene — that this diminution of personhood at adolescence has its beginnings within the family unit. The process that rites of passage display — diminishing the self and harnessing its energies for the benefit not of the person but of society — was earlier set in motion at the primal scene.
How We Lose Our Souls
The primal scene was when the child gave up its natural tendencies for growth of a unique self — comprising thoroughly singular talents, drives, and destiny — in order to align with the ego of the parent of the same gender. This is done for all the reasons mentioned having to do with the traumas of infancy and toddlerhood, wherein the child is let know it will not be loved for who it is and it will be all alone, and even attacked, were it to continue as the unique entity it ultimately is and wants to be.
Becoming “Adult”
Incidentally, the end-result of this fear of parental abandonment and non-approval — this “identification with the aggressor,” instead — is what Freud calls the resolution of the Oedipal conflict. This splitting of self, consequent repression within, then unwitting projection outside corresponds to and is an earlier fractal of the process that pertains during the rites of passage of puberty and adolescence.
However, this process has fractals at previous levels, all the way back to our cellular beginnings. It is no wonder that when it is set in motion by either the parents, at the primal scene, or the group at puberty, that it has such far-reaching consequences and is ultimately so tragic. For at this point — that of the adult, that is, the end product of its adolescent and young adulthood initiations, and its pubertal rites of passage — the child no longer identifies with God (pre-conception), with mother (pre-birth), with body and its feeling experience (pre- primal scene), or even with his or her best idea, one’s philosophic ideal (pre- pubertal rite of passage). The child identifies instead with the same-sex parent, the representative of the social order. Later it will become a pawn, a cog, in a much larger context, the social one, which is ultimately woven and spun out of the desires of that society’s ruling elites.
Thus, she or he becomes totally Other: totally separated from his or her own mind (pre- puberty rite); from her or his body with its exquisite sensory and feeling product (pre- primal scene); from his or her destiny, karma, dharma, duty, and purposiveness (pre-birth); and from God (pre-conception). As I continue to assert, the end product of all these falls from grace is the creation of the “kitty drowners and butterfly mashers” of the world. Surely you grok what I mean by that.
Every Parent’s “Atman Project”
This pattern — this doomed and illusory “atman project” wherein the parent seeks to immortalize her- or himself and to redeem his or her life — is of course obvious in the situation of the son “following in his father’s footsteps” in taking over the family business or occupation; and in the daughter’s emulation of her mom, traditionally, in the role of wife and mother. Yet there are many subtler versions of this “identification,” and it happens even in situations where it seems it would most definitely not.
For example, Kenneth Keniston’s (1968) study of young radicals of the Sixties — the epitome of rebellious youth, you say — were found to be very much in agreement with their parents’ values. In fact, their rebellion was essentially in seeking to put into practice and actually live out what they saw as unlived values and philosophies — hence the charge of “hypocrite” often expressed by them — in compromised and compromising parents. Note again the theme of living out the unlived dreams of the previous generation — here, even in spite of the conscious stance of those youth.
Cross-culturally and traditionally, however, we see this pattern in perhaps its most rudimentary and clearest form. In a great many cultures, the rites of passage into adulthood embrace the function of bestowing upon and initiating the recipient into the social roles and functions as decided by the tribe and family. For most, then, there is little of self in the decision of who to be; it is decided outside of oneself. Corresponding with this, in relation to the marital role, in many cultures the choice of spouse is also decided by others.
One does not have one’s own mind. One takes up the “mind” of the parents, and of society. One continues their dream, society’s dream. One’s Divine uniqueness fades into insignificance in the pattern of the social consensual reality.
Becoming “Borg” … Serving the Collective
At any rate, the upshot of all this is that at the rites of passage into adulthood, the self is split again. It is required to give up even “its own mind,” its own concept of itself. As I mentioned above, it loses its “philosophic ideal,” using Ken Wilber’s (1977) terminology.
Originally one’s Divinity was given up — this occurred with the coming into Form out of the No-Form State … that is to say, becoming sperm and ovum. What was given up specifically was our knowledge of ourselves as no different from what we call the Divine, with its capacities for all-knowingness (omniscience), all-powerfulness (omnipotence), and everywhere-existingness (omnipresence). We “forget” these abilities intentionally in order to begin the game of separation into parts, with the capacity for each element to manifest and glorify individual components of The All. So that is what we lose, actually leave behind on purpose, in coming from No-Form into Form with the creation of sperm and egg.
After that, one’s deepest transpersonal directives and organismic unitary awareness were left behind. This loss was not intentional, not decided. So it came as a surprise. Although in our all-knowing state — which, remember, we had at this point split away from or become reduced or dimmed down from — we of course knew all of this was part of the package, part of the experience and journey away from godhead we had decided on. Hence, leaving behind our omniscience as part of “the plan,” we find ourselves surprised and confused in the midst of the hellish travails we experience during the third trimester.
After that, one’s biological rhythms, one’s sense of flowingness and inner-directed purposiveness were lost. This occurred to us as a consequence of the trauma of birth.
Subsequently, one’s feelings about self and other were relinquished. This happened as a consequence of the primal scene.
Finally, one is required even to give up the best possible ideas one can have about oneself and one’s relationship to and actions in the world. This last one occurs at the Identity stage around adolescence through the traumas usually inflicted by rites of passage and initiations. One represses one’s own decisions, initiatives, evaluations, and self-images in conformance to other-directed wants and needs, the result of others’ unfulfilled ambitions. These are presented to one by one’s parents; however they represent, by extension, the other-directed wants and needs of the collective, of the prevailing fear-pushed and desire-pulled economic constraints … of the socially-constructed reality in general — usually as fashioned by its elites.
Elites these are, by the way, who also are ultimately faultless in the whole cosmic unfolding. For they, having left godhead just like you, are equally unaware and unconscious of the cosmic overstanding that we divinities have secreted away inside ourselves. Which overstanding, by the way, this book is part of an attempt to help reveal again.
A “darkness” develops.
Aminah Raheem (1991) describes the result thusly: “When the soul becomes so covered over by conditioning that it cannot shine through, when personality completely dominates, a ‘darkness’ develops within the person, characterized by mental or emotional dullness, physical deterioration, accidents, depression, or ‘bad luck.’ Such a person seems asleep or unconscious while walking around; she has gotten off her own soul path.”3 Or in my words, such people become the “kitty-drowners and butterfly-mashers of the world.”
And what happens to these repressed dreams, aspirations, initiatives, and values is that, as at previous levels, they are repressed, then projected outside of oneself. Thenceforth they are seen in the world as the “Shadow.”
Every Society’s Culture War
Unfortunately, to the extent that we disown and fight these potentials in ourselves, we fight and hate them when we see them outside ourselves. People — or “ducklings,” remember quote beginning chapter — who embody such freedom felicity and aspirations become targets. We beat down outside of ourselves those people and elements reminiscent of those corresponding aspects of ourselves that were required to be beaten down, repressed inside. This, then is the meaning of the metaphors of drowning kitties and mashing butterflies.
There will be no rising above the status quo, the “normality” of the masses, in civilizational cultures. Exceptionalism will not be valued in hierarchical societies, the cultures come of civilization. Why? Well, such ability and wisdom might be an advantage in primal cultures — where brilliance and uniqueness of individuals elevates everyone beyond themselves and their circumstances. However, in mass society — much as the way of the Ugly Duckling at the start of this chapter — it is anything but a boon.
In complex societies, the only extraordinariness that will be valued will be that which happens to coincide with the narrow wishes of its elites, who orchestrate cultures along their lines. That, indeed, might be why you thought my statement above wrong-headed. “Exceptionalism not valued?” you probably thought. “Why, do not modern economies and capitalism open their doors for the creator of the best mouse trap? Is it not socialism that reduces down to the boring average whereas capitalism encourages individuality?” No doubt initially you looked to all the rewards showered upon the innovators and notables of history. “What about science?” you might also be thinking. “What about all the advances that have led to our incredible technological culture?”
In response, however, notice that those are gains that fit with the desires of the elite and so they occur in only one dimension of existence — the material. They may benefit you, but only second-handedly, only in one aspect of your being, and only if it conforms to the wishes of the powerful. For that last — and even in the material realm, this is — realize we would already have eliminated cancer and solved the environmental problems with alternative energies, by now, if there were not powerful pharmaceutical companies not supporting, even suppressing, research not favorable to its profits and there were not huge oil interests and their wealthy backers caring only for their short-term gains while the entire world is in the balance, environmentally. Those are just two of many examples I could give.
Whereas this is quite different from primal cultures where each one’s gain is everyone’s gain; and each one’s needs desires and wants are general, naturally rooted … not perverted by pandering profit and privilege as of our civilization’s elites … and they partake of the full gamut of human aspirations and feelings, not merely the survival ones.
Perhaps also it has to do with the fact that people in primal societies, who work on average only three to four hours a day, have so much extra time for the more expanded reaches of the psyche.4 Certainly they spend so much more of their time in festivities, spiritual pursuits, trance and ritual, and even just hanging out, than we do. Who today can afford to take weeks off for the preparation and participation in elaborate festivities or days- or weeks-long weddings or rituals of initiation? Remember, it is only when civilization brought with it oppression from the elites that folks needed to work, not only more than would be needed just to survive themselves — for the masses were supporting as well all those above them in the hierarchy — but also were forced to engage in work as decided by their needs and wants, the higher ups, not one’s own.5
In any case, brilliance and extraordinariness, with civilization, are hated for even existing. Exceptionalism among the masses threatens the positions of elites. As such it will be, and routinely has been, crushed by them. Often killed. Jesus of Nazareth is only one of thousands of examples available from history, which would include Galileo Galilei, and in modern times Wilhelm Reich and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (the one dubbed “Osho” after his passing). Jesus was freer in his espousal of love, in contradistinction from the Pharisees’ reliance on ritual and the Romans’ overriding secularism. Galileo threatened, with his heliocentric world, all the elaborate culture, religion, pomp, and privilege dependent on a universe that was flat-earthed and knowable by the Catholic Church. And in the Twentieth Century, both Reich and Rajneesh were imprisoned for what came down to being philosophies associated with encouraging freedom around sexuality — which is extremely threatening and envy-arousing for the repressed and oppressed.
Correspondingly, what will not be allowed to the masses in general will bring jealousy if allowed for some others of them. This alone explains the culture war in America which began in the Sixties with the rise of the counterculture and continues today in the deep divisions between Democrats and Republicans, and especially Trump supporters and pretty much the rest of the world. For to witness the extraordinary, not to mention to see it allowed and not crushed, cannot help but point out the shallowness of one’s own life, by contrast, and bring awareness to the oppression about which one is trying all one can not to think. Other’s expansiveness cannot but remind of that precious self of one’s own that was required to be slain, the restriction of personality one was “disciplined” into accepting as all that could be, as well as of the freedom and felicity that …. oh … could have been. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed woman — much like the swan who is seen by others to be an ugly duckling — is killed.
This is why an alarming number of folks cheered at the deaths of those four antiwar protesters at Kent State in 1971 and agreed when newspapers called them “bums.” One only has to look to the nightly news to see that pattern of events continually played out.
This accounts, undoubtedly, for the fury with which people will attack and seek to suppress certain individuals and groups who may represent, for example, disowned artistic or creative potentials, disowned aliveness and “charisma,” disowned sexuality, disowned intellectual or bohemian dreams, simple disowned “feeling” in general, and anything that smacks of an idealism or freedom or joie de vivre that needed especially to be slain in the self in order to make the identification with another’s dreams.
This is commonly referred to in literature as “selling one’s soul.” And, creating in this way the kitty-drowners and butterfly-mashers of the world, it amounts to a fourth fall from grace, further splitting the personality from what it had been at the earlier falls from grace of conception, birth, and the primal scene. With this — using Ken Wilber’s terms — the quaternary dualism is complete.
At this point, then, there is very little Self left. In discharging the life that remains — so totally other-directed and other-programmed — one may as well have commissioned an android. Thus we have the endpoint of the spectrum’s “evolution” — from Divinity to machinery, from pure-Bliss-Consciousness to cybernetic control.
Rites of Reduction, of Expansion
So it is that by adolescence “civilized” children are programmed. This is not necessarily the case in primal societies. For often, in indigenous cultures — especially the most “primitive,” the nomadic, the gathering-hunting ones — inner experience is cultivated. For example, it is much more common in primal cultures for a lot of attention to be brought to one’s dreams. They are frequently shared, talked about, and mined for any wisdom they might convey. This is just one example. Another one is the greater frequency of rites of personal initiation come of supernatural forces, such as the vision quests and walkabouts to which I often refer. However, there is a general tendency in that direction, the simpler the society is.
Let me show you exactly what I mean by that. In this example you will see what I mean in saying that “civilization” brings brutal rites of passage and fear of the supernatural, whereas the people of Nature just laugh at those valuing cruelty and living in such terror.
We are investigating, here, the manners in which people become adults in different societies, around puberty, which I have termed the fourth fall from grace. This is the time when the Ego is consolidated around a specific identity, task, role that marks her or him for life.
Once again, Turnbull’s (1961) report on the Mbuti provides a fitting example. This instance is especially illuminating in that he was able to observe and note differences between the gatherer-hunter Mbuti and the nearby villagers with whom they had occasional contact. Since the villagers were agrarian and definitely not gatherer-hunters, he was able to study and show us any differences between these two lifestyles — agrarian and gatherer-hunter — and their possible differences in worldview, side-by-side. What he found, for starters, was that forest and village worldviews — which we might liken to primal and civilizational — are directly at odds.
Indeed, Turnbull shows that these differences not only exist but that we see them distinctly in connection to the rites of passage that are undergone respectively in each culture.
The brutal rite of passage in question is called the nkumbi and is conducted by the villagers. The Pygmies — the “forest people” — undergo it, at a certain age, in order to gain certain respect and privileges in their dealings with villagers, as they must often have for various reasons. Nonetheless, of their own the Mbuti have no such rite of passage, certainly nothing severe and harsh like that of the villagers.
On the other hand, Turnbull (1961) describes the villagers’ nkumbi: “The physical ordeals sometimes start out as games but develop into cruel tests of physical endurance. A crouching dance that might be fun for a few minutes becomes agony after half an hour. A mild switching on the underside of the arm with light sticks is of no concern until, after several days, the skin becomes raw. And then the villagers notch the sticks so that they fold over and pinch the skin sharply, often drawing blood. When the boys have become used to being beaten with leafy branches, thorny bushes are substituted.”6
Dominant societies try to instill fear of the supernatural to control their underlings.
Turnbull also explains the villagers’ beliefs concerning this rite of passage and its effect and purpose: “The villagers believed that the initiate, Pygmy or otherwise, is everlastingly bound thereafter by all the laws of the tribe, sacred and secular. He is put into direct relationship with the supernatural, whose representatives on earth are the villagers themselves. If any Pygmy initiate offends a villager, therefore, he is also offending the supernatural — the ancestors — and will be duly punished by them. The villagers live in such fear of the supernatural, with its power to bring down on an offender the curses of leprosy, yaws, dysentery and other diseases or to cause him to be injured by a falling tree, that they cannot conceive of any initiates daring to offend the ancestors.”7
Primal folks laugh at the fears of “domesticated” humans and delight in flaunting their customs.
But offend the ancestors they do, these Pygmies, and with apparent relish. They do not share the villagers fearful view of the world. They cannot imagine any good reason to inflict these tortures on each other. They laugh, secretly, behind the villagers’ backs, at them. Turnbull (1961) writes, “Both the boys and their fathers enjoyed the chance to make fun, in a friendly way, of the villagers, but that was not their sole reason for deliberately breaking all the taboos. They behaved as they did because to them the restrictions were not only meaningless but belonged to a hostile world. The villagers hoped that the nkumbi would place the Pygmies directly under the supernatural authority of the village tribal ancestors; the Pygmies naturally took good care that nothing of the sort should happen, proving it to themselves by this conscious flaunting of custom.”8
Incidentally, if you think that disparity odd, consider, for a minute, how that is exactly the division of the modern culture war, at its base. We have fearful “villagers” not wanting to offend “ancestors” and customs of old — seeking essentially to return to a mythically construed version of the 1950s in America, for example. And on the other side, we have liberal-minded, often bohemian or hippie sorts, who laugh at such fear, inhibition, and general “up-tightness.”
Similarly, we “hippies,” and just like Turnbull’s Forest People, might undergo the “rites of passage” of the “villagers” — in our case, of the conforming “normals” of Western society — by going to university and getting degrees, for instance. However, we will most assuredly not take the fear and demands of the establishment world seriously. We also will laugh at them, those enmeshed in the Matrix … as we currently roflol at Trump, the current icon of such “villager” fear.
We, like the Pygmy, might go through the games and rituals of society only so as to obtain certain privileges or influence come of them. Nonetheless we will trounce the injunctions and proscriptions attendant to them whenever they come up against our deeper felt values of felicity of life, love and enjoyment of other and within oneself, participation in community and the sense of belongingness, and most importantly, whatever individual creative direction is unique to us and pushing us for its manifestation in the world. This last is where it relates directly to one’s identity.
Building the Better Human – Entry into Adulthood
Concerning the villagers’ rite of passage, Turnbull writes, “To the Pygmies this all seems harsh and unnecessary, and as far as their own children are concerned they keep a strict watch over them to see that the villagers do not go to the length that they sometimes do with village children, even if this brings them into some contempt. Yet to the villager this toughening-up process is essential and does not come naturally in the course of village life. The child has to be fitted for adult life, and this is what the nkumbi sets out to achieve. In a few months a boy becomes a man, tough and strong, physically and mentally. The process is not a pleasant one, but it is the only way in which, under tribal conditions, the goal can be achieved.
“The Pygmy can understand and appreciate this, but the very nature of his own nomadic hunting and gathering existence provides all the toughening up and education that are needed. Children begin climbing trees sometimes before they can walk. Their muscles develop, and they overcome fear in a number of daring tree games. Adult activities are learned from an early age by observation and imitation, for the Pygmies live an open life.
“Their life is as open inside their tiny one-room leaf huts as it is in the middle of a forest clearing, and so the children have no need of the sex instruction which forms so large a part of the teaching given to village boys during the nkumbi.
“Far from illustrating the dependence of the Pygmies upon the villagers, the nkumbi illustrates better than anything else the complete opposition of the forest to the village. The Pygmies in the forest consciously and energetically reject all village values. When they are in the village they temporarily adopt its values and customs, not wanting to desecrate their sacred forest values by bringing them into the village. That is why they never sing their sacred songs in the village the way they do in the forest, and why they refuse to consecrate the nkumbi with special music, although every other event of importance in their lives is marked in this way. There is an unbridgeable gulf between the two worlds of the two peoples.
“The Pygmies have their own way of growing naturally into adulthood. A boy proves himself capable of supporting a family when he kills his first real game, and proves himself a man when he participates in the elima.”9
By adolescence in “civilized” societies most children have had the “still small voice” programmed out, whereas in primal cultures it is valued.
Aminah Raheem (1991) supports Turnbull in the idea that rites of passage, while crushing in most cultures, especially civilizational ones, can actually by transformative. She gives a final example of how this stage can be different in other cultures: “By the onset of adolescence, most children are intricately programmed into the cultural complex of their time and place. The ‘still small voice’ of the soul is rarely heard and, when it is, it is usually discarded as fantasy or nonsense. For example, when I worked with late adolescents, I found that they often received deep soul promptings through dreams of visionary experiences. These numinous events seemed to contain valuable guidance for direction in their lives, but usually they were discounted by the dreamers and their peers as fantasy. By contrast, in American Indian culture such experiences are valued as clear messages of life purpose, especially when they appear during puberty.”10
Patriarchal Culture, the Second Retreat
So it is that in civilization one gains the world in exact proportion to which a man has relinquished his soul. Correspondingly, having split away from soul, ritual steps in to fill the void and manage the discomfort. For the basis of ritual is the attempt to control something symbolically, indirectly that one has split off from. It is a poor substitute, however, for one’s real potential of at-one-ment with reality. That is to say, of identifying with and acting in accord with one’s truest reality, one’s deepest and most authentic self. The tragedy of all this is that the indirect attempt, of ritual, pre-empts and thus makes impossible the true relationship and true accord, the at-one-ment, that could otherwise be.
Second Retreat from the Natural Self
Now, patriarchal cultures, along with their patriarchal religions, follow a parallel but different pattern from the matriarchal ones, as discussed in the example of the villagers, who were an agricultural people. Whereas matriarchal cultures are associated with horticultural lifeways and thus are tied to the Earth and to sedentary living, patriarchal cultures are said to be associated originally with nomadic lifestyles. I say nomadic, but I do not wish to confuse it with the nomadic ways of the forager and gatherer-hunter cultures. Our earliest lifeways were nomadic in the sense of following the food source. They were not nomadic by choice.
However, the later nomadic cultures of which I speak, and the great patriarchies, evolved on the vast plains of Eurasia. In these societies, the disconnection from the land involved in animal husbandry, in particular sheep herding, gave rise to nomadic warrior lifestyles and a conquering mentality. There are, nevertheless, other reasons why this sort of consciousness arose.
Parallel to the matriarchal cultures splitting off from true connection with Nature as Mother — that is, adopting agriculture and thus controlling, and alternately appeasing, the Nature which they at one time followed — patriarchal cultures entail a splitting off from oneself as Father, as Spirit, and a consequent need to act out and appease those energies. To understand this better, let us back up a little bit.
Primal peoples enjoy a spiritual freedom we don’t know.
In gatherer-hunter cultures, we tend to have shamans as religious practitioners. These shamans can often journey in nonordinary states of consciousness, can journey in the cosmos so to speak. Thus, although such people, as all of us, are ordinarily limited in time and space, they have a freedom of spirit — a spiritual freedom — quite unlike anything we know.
Corresponding to this, it is true that some gatherer-hunter societies focus a great deal more on their inner states and on altered realities. Their much-noted interest in dreams and their engagement with various trance practices and entheogenic substances are examples. The notable instance of this is the Australian aboriginal culture. Not only do these most “primitive” of all spend a good deal of their day in reflection on and sharing of their dreams, but their evenings are spent in ritual and dancing which usually goes on all night long. They tend to sleep in the mornings and get up around noon, which is something I am sure many of us can appreciate.
Hence, these practices involve a democratization, if you will, of shamanic experience. All aboriginal people attend to their dreams; many go on walkabouts, or as in the case of Native American cultures, on vision quests. Many other examples of profound spiritual journeying — often involving hallucinogens — could be given that are available to most if not all members of indigenous cultures.
In patriarchal cultures, inner journeying is replaced with outer conquering.
However, patriarchal cultures tend to be hierarchical and specialized. This means that spiritual journeying is relegated to a select few, a specialized sect of priests. The vast majority of individuals in patriarchal cultures live onerous and oppressive lives that do not allow much in the way of spiritual journeying.
Is it any wonder then that these cultures are nomadic? Is it any wonder that they are conquering? The usual pattern is that when some inner potential is split off from and repressed — when one disidentifies with it — that one begins acting it out in the external world. So we find that the inner potential for spiritual journeying and growing is acted out in patriarchal cultures in the form of nomadic wandering and conquering. The direct relationship with Spirit, with Father, which characterizes the gatherer-hunter, is repressed in patriarchal cultures; and Spirit and Father are projected outside of oneself where one must now seek to enter into a relationship with It.
In later centuries, nomadic wandering became nomadic invading and conquering, exploration of the New World and murder of its populations, and ultimately imperialism. In all of these an inner journey into the self is replaced by a desire to extend one’s ego boundaries outward over greater and greater expanses of territory. The amount of territory gathered outside is equivalent to the amount relinquished inside, for what one doesn’t know inside, one fears. And what one fears, one wishes to control and subjugate.
So the fears of inner forces motivate the expansion outward. One projects one’s inner “unknowns” onto the vast unknown outside oneself, in the physical world of land and people, of geography and society. “What does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?” is instead: One gains the world in the exact proportion to that which a man has relinquished his soul.11
Thus, in patriarchal cultures there are religions which seek to relate to and appease gods which represent their forgotten and repressed inner potentials of fate, destiny, spiritual growth, and adventure — their inner “fire.” The fire or light that one has dimmed within is sought without; one cannot help but do so. Since one cuts oneself off from one’s core creative and authentic decision-making center one feels oneself in the hands of a whimsical fate that is outside of oneself … and that is called Father and God, and is that which one must seek to appease.
As for the burning fire of destiny and purpose extinguished within? Well, it might be seen outside oneself and indirectly, within a burning bush; inside a demagogue like Hitler, Mao, Mussolini, James Jones, Ghenghis Khan, Kim Jung Un, or a Donald Trump; behind the golden shining altars of churches or embodied in some cross, icon, or statue; or shining in the person of some guru, teacher, or mentor. None of that ends well, as far as the Self is concerned, however. For all represent another Veil across the reality of the inner Self, and they block its reemergence. There is no “bending the knee” to anything on the outside that does not take away from the greater Self one is, inside.
The Nature of Ritual
So the pattern is the same in both matriarchal and patriarchal cultures. It is the same pattern of disidentifying with some inner potential, repressing it, being forced to act it out symbolically in the outside world, projecting it outside oneself as an external force or power, and then seeking to enter into a symbolic relationship with it wherein one can hope to have some indirect control over it since one has lost one’s direct relationship with it. And the reason for doing all this, in either case, is the same: It is fear, mistrust of the Universe, in either the Universe’s maternal or paternal aspects … or, of course, both.
As Symbolic Obfuscation and Addiction to Control
The patriarchal person is fearful of the spiritual forces within him- or herself. Hence she or he disidentifies with them and projects them outside of him- or herself where they must be related to symbolically. The matriarchal person — meaning the one arising of economies of farming, which constrained the wanderings of nomadic gatherer-hunter ancestors — mistrusts the Natural world and disidentifies with It, and with the physical body which is a part of It, in an attempt to control It. In doing so, these natural forces are projected outside of oneself where they can then only be related to symbolically.
Realize that both matriarchal rituals of control of agriculture and body, and patriarchal ones of control of all and everything for the benefit, ultimately, of elites are steps down from primal cultures where ritual is minimal and is individually oriented toward a betterment of self. In either case, it is this attempt to control something symbolically, indirectly, that is the basis of ritual. In both instances — lunar and solar, or matriarchal and patriarchal — ritual is a poor substitute for the real potential of identifying with and acting in accord with that reality that is rooted within, ultimately in one’s Divinity. Which would amount to feeling one’s feelings; to being rooted in and responsive to one’s body with its needs, its perceptiveness of reality, and its intuition; and to allowing oneself to flow with and be immersed in one’s experience, taught and guided and led by it. These, as opposed to attempting to manage one’s body and one’s experience from the control center of the mind. And in each instance — which I have termed the matriarchal mistake and the patriarchal mistake — what is ultimately so tragic is that either of these diversions substitute for, and so drive out any possibility of realizing, an actual attunement, an authentic at-one-ment and reconciliation with a deeper and more expanded Self and Divinity.
As Compared to Authentic Beingness
You think this is of no consequence, this understanding? Okay, I hear your resistance. Notice this, however: As long as you keep trying to balance opposites — as one example of trying to manage one’s experience with one’s mind, one’s ego — as your response to the duality of life, you will suffer, just as Christ suffered between the good and bad thieves at Calvary. However, suffering ends, as it did for Christ, when one gives up that struggle, as Christ did, and one acknowledges, “I and the Father are one.” Or, in my words, when one realizes that one’s essential, one’s deepest, truest, and most potent identity is Divinity.
Following one’s integration of this realization, life is forever changed. For in doing this, one’s approach to all of life is one of surrender to one’s process, to one’s fate, and to one’s deepest nature, which is Divine, knowing that one can only be perfect no matter what one does. For all, including evil and mistakes, are known to be perfect in Divine consciousness … as well as it was decided by oneself at one’s innermost Self at the time that was No-Time and in the place that is No-Form.
Now that is a serenity, a freedom from fear, and a blessed feeling of cosmic belongingness that is second to no other way of being. If you can, take this reward for your passage in this journey, so far. Much else coming, as we uncover the Veils; yet this realization is the core of it all. It merely gets better, as we go deeper.
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Rituals as Faux Experience:
With the Diminished Life Experience Required of Patriarchal Pawns Arise Pale Substitutes for Aliveness and Rituals as Symbolic, not Real, Experience
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“…people are led to believe they are having the feelings being symbolized, when in actuality they are not!”
“… in truth, and especially in initiatory rituals and rites of passage, we ‘die’ to our real self and are remade into something society can use.”
“…in rituals we pretend we are dealing with our feelings and our real experience; yet rituals are no more spiritual experiences or dealing with feelings than alcoholism is a spiritual quest or getting drunk is dealing with feelings. Ritual is a substitute for ‘spiritual’ (or real) experience just as addiction is a substitute for spiritual experience.”
“…one discovers one’s feelings to be a roller coaster of ever greater learning, synchronicities abounding, and multiple and frequent peek-a-boo reminders that the Universe not just loves but blesses one, and teaches one, in everything that happens.”
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I wish to share this dream I had, for it is instructive.
Dream of 14 November 1991:
In this dream I was with a large group of people. There were all kinds of complicated goings on and much vivid detail in the dream prior to the most important part of it, which had to do with a ritual. At a certain point I was required to go to this church, and I had to stand in a particular place. It was like standing at the entrance to the church but just inside. There were quite a few of us, and we were all in lines, like two lines; and we had to go down the aisle toward the front of the church.
As Faux Experience
Many things happened then. There was superb richness of detail, a baroque-like texture to everything — scenes, sets, items, and events. I don’t remember all that transpired. It was very interesting, fascinating. There was color, art, multiple goings on, lots of “special effects.”
One part of it stood out, however. I was alternately involved in the events as well as watching it all, as I had been at the beginning when I was watching from the back of the church. In this part, however, I was involved and was going back down the aisle from the altar at the front of the church, where a lot of the events had happened. There were a few of us proceeding down the aisle, and we had on flowing robes. I could almost sense artificial wings on me, attached to my back. The powers-that-be were also suspending each of us in mid-air so that, as we proceeded, we were almost floating! We were held up by wires, which were also attached to us — much like a Peter-Pan in a stage production — and we were floating, slowly, down the aisle.
As Act-Out of Early Traumatic Experiences
And in the dream I was thinking: “I get it. This is supposed to be a wedding. But since becoming married is a transition in one’s life, one needs to die to one state and be reborn in another. So, what was being enacted here was something approaching the BPM IV constellation of feelings involving being born. Like where Michael C. Irving (1988) talks about the symbolism of angels coming in. Because BPM IV represents feeling free again, being released. So you have the halo because of the birth experience and all those feelings of being in air, which gets symbolized as angels flying.”
By that I mean that in Stanislav Grof’s matrices of the birth experience, which we re-create throughout our lives, Basic Perinatal Matrix IV (BPM IV) has to do with actually being born, coming out of the womb. And since it involves becoming free, moving freely like as in flying, and happens miraculously and as a blessing, it is the basis for our ideas of coming out into the light and of angels — the wings representing being able to move freely. While halos are symbols of the pressure on our head as it moves through the birth canal and represents the first sensation we have of becoming free … being “blessed” … being “crowned.”
So what they were doing in this wedding was re-creating, symbolically, all the aspects of birth from BPM I through IV. BPM I is that state of oceanic ecstasy and bliss in the early months of being in the womb when one can move freely and senses a loving connection (ideally) with one’s mother. This feeling is akin to that of romance and the feelings of lovers, which in the dream would be the ones about to be married. And this feeling of bliss is continued in the acts of coming into the church — a womb symbol — and going down the aisle, basking in the approving smiles of loved ones. All those feelings and experiences are part of the blissful BPM I constellation of experience.
Now, BPM II, by contrast, is the time in the womb when things have become cramped, and one cannot move freely. So one has feelings of compression and depression — a kind of stuffiness as well, due to getting less oxygen because the arteries are constricted and so bringing less blood, hence oxygen, to you.1 In the dream this would be the part of the wedding where the couple to be married is at the front of church, now, and they are constricted in their every act and movement. They must behave, must stand straight and unmoving — another BPM II feeling. For to move too much in the womb only further disturbs the blood-oxygen flow.
It is stuffy in the church, also — is that not one of the main complaints people have of churches and of having to sit through ceremonies there? This feeling is shared by everyone in the church, including the bride and groom. So this indicates how all the participants in the church are to some extent being put through an enactment of the birth ritual, too. Don’t think so? Some of you might remember the euphoric feeling upon being released from Mass, as a kid, or from any other church events where one is forced to stay inside, be quiet and unmoving, and be, essentially, bored out of one’s mind. No doubt about it, Sunday church services are pale reflections of, pathetic attempts at simulating, the powerful death-rebirth experiences of earlier, more natural, cultures.
Other BPM II elements for the ones to be wedded include waiting in discomfort and anticipation … the much-talked-about nervousness of the couple at the altar … for release.
BPM III in our birth process is the time of actual struggle to be born, when there is, symbolically, a “light at the end of the tunnel.” In this wedding ritual, that would be the actual time becoming wedded, the saying of the vows. For release is near, and there is now active participation. And when the ring is put on the finger, it is akin to the baby coming through the ring of the birth canal, the pelvic ring. The ritual kiss immediately after becoming wedded is even a symbolic re-creation of the way, in an ideal birth, there is a bonding between baby and mother immediately after birth, involving — no less! — a baby’s first attempts at suckling … the kissing, you see?
So, by the time of walking back down the aisle to go out into the world the bride and groom are re-creating BPM IV — that is, actually being out of the womb and having those feelings of elation that come with being released and having survived what seemed to be a threat of death. I remembered, in the dream, those few of us floating down the aisle between those two lines of people and saw it as a re-creation of a baby coming out between two legs of the mother.
Ritual Is Hardly Transformation.…
In sum, the entire wedding experience is a symbolic re-creation of the birth experience. And we know we re-create these same death-rebirth patterns in all kinds of rituals involving transitions in one’s life. We do this because we are driven to re-create that which we could not complete at the time. Wedding rituals like this evolve out of those drives and feelings in people; and all the detail and ritual of them is an unconscious attempt to give people a feeling of going through a death-rebirth experience.
However, the actual yearning in people is to go deep inside and have this intense experience and reliving of the trauma of birth and then to come out again and have the feeling of being freed. Societies manifest cultural forms that either do that — as in the case of the shamanic and other practices of many indigenous cultures — or they fashion symbolic affairs that mimic it … that fake it … by putting on a show of doing it … for reasons we get to in a minute.
Anyway, when it was all over and I arrived back at the entrance to the church, having floated down the aisle, there were so many people there — family, friends, and such. But there wasn’t one person there with whom I could share my understanding of the experience, as I just described; and that was really depressing. It was distressing not to have anyone to share it with because I had had this incredible insight about it all, and I was so excited because I really understood it all. I realize, now, in my waking state, that this sense of isolation was a memory of my own birth experience, in which I was not allowed to connect with my mother after birth but was taken away and left to be alone for a long time.
Ritual as Addiction to “Pretend Experience”
And what I understood was what I had said at the beginning of this: That rituals are substitute experiences. By that I meant that I realized the following: When people were trying to enact a ritual, did this mean they are getting in touch with those feelings symbolized and their actions are helping them in any way? And then it immediately came to my mind: No, this does not mean that people get in touch with those feelings. Rather, it means that people are led to believe they are having the feelings being symbolized, when in actuality they are not!
Fake actions override, block out, and thus substitute for authentic experience. One must stop doing the nonsensical, so as to leave a space for something unexpected, and real, to arise. One must let the tension be there; let it coalesce into something unplanned, something given from outside one’s controlling ego … from the Universe, or Divinity, as it were.
As Attempt to Fool the Psyche
And we know that people are not really feeling the feelings symbolized because that is the major thing of all act-outs — they take up the experiential space in that moment which might otherwise become the portal through which the Universe can come to us, so to speak. And we know act-outs do not work, because one can repeat them forever, yet that does not change the feeling or stop one from having that discomfort within and that subtle drive to project and then act out our births in so much of what we do.
Whereas if one truly relives the feeling, the unconscious trauma, in a conscious way in a therapeutic setting — which can occur in any of the modalities or by any of the means I have been mentioning, as, for example, primal therapy, holotropic breathwork, entheogenics, psychedelics — those feelings do change. Indeed, they go away completely at times. The person is truly transformed, becoming a different person … as a death-rebirth experience should bring about.
However, when people go through weddings and other kinds of rituals it is like they are trying to fool their psyche into thinking they are dealing with their real experience and their underlying transformative needs. Yet they, in actuality, are not. For, in fact, ritual is nothing more than elaborate act-out; that is all it is. And acting out of a feeling and not feeling the feeling is substituting a ritual for real experience.
As Tool of the Patriarchy
Whereas, in truth, and especially in initiatory rituals and rites of passage, we “die” to our real self and are remade into something society can use. Thus, the reason societies have these reenactments is for the person to bring forward and bring to bear in the present those memories of an important and traumatic time and to associate them with coming more into alignment with society and its needs … that is, as if to die a little more to one’s real self and to create or birth a fake self in line with and to the liking of one’s culture … more accurately, the wishes of its higher ups. In this instance, the ritual takes up the entire experiential space and directs it along lines not our own. This precludes the experience — authentic and unique to oneself — which might, provided by “the Universe,” otherwise arise in us.
Allowing the stillness, magic arises of no-thingness.
When I received training as a community organizer, I was told that if you stepped in and did what was needed in an unexpected situation, arising during an event, folks in the community would not learn to assert themselves to take action on their own, without you. Our job was to facilitate the emergence of activism and initiative in the community which might bear all kinds of fruit down the line, not merely get everything perfectly addressed in every happening. You know that saying about giving a person a fish versus teaching the person to fish. Well, same thing.
Also comparative is the situation in psychotherapeutic settings and in rituals of all cultures. The major difference between, say, a ritual and an authentic experience, has to do with how one reacts to that emptiness inside the immediate moment where nothing is planned, expected, and where there is uncertainty, a little fear of the unknown, perhaps. It is that tension of stillness, like in the eye of a storm, which must be allowed to be, if something new and given is to arise.
This is for example what could happen on a vision quest; a hitchhiking trip around a continent; a walkabout; a meditation which is not programmed with things to do and to focus on ahead of time; a psychotherapeutic session, especially a primal or holotropic one, where issues to be addressed are not decided ahead of time; a journey into and living in another culture; a psychedelic, entheogenic, or some other drug experience in which one is taken out of ordinary reality into an unknown … things like that. Where there is no protocol, to-do list, agenda, or preset intention, well, the new can arise, virtually out of nothingness, much as we emerged as ovum and sperm out of no-thingness, the No-Form State.
I must tell you, that putting oneself in situations where one leaves oneself open to anything the Universe will bring allows one to experience the truly magical. Anyone who has done any lengthy hitchhiking knows what I am talking about: In this unexpected re-creation of a vision quest — one arising in our culture and time — one discovers one’s feelings to be a roller coaster of ever greater learning, synchronicities abounding, and multiple and frequent peek-a-boo reminders that the Universe not just loves but blesses one, and teaches one, in everything that happens.
You know, folks do such things to “find themselves.” And the reason they do that is because that often is exactly what happens. You see, we know these things intuitively. In a part of ourselves, we grok what is involved in real and authentic growth; we know that it cannot be garnered out of a regimen, a protocol or program, or can be brought about through insertion on one’s to-do list: “Tuesday, 2 pm: Find oneself.” No.
So the difference has to do with what is done about that place of nothing happening. Is one so anxious and controlled that every moment has to be filled up? With something to do? There can be no unplanned moment? There can be unregimented experience? This panic around the untended moment is feared, by some, in much the same way as the “dead air” that might happen on a radio show is at all costs to be avoided. This anxiety is quite common and is why so many people have such a hard time on vacations — unless their time is so programmed and anally detailed in a way to guarantee no untended moment. This is why some folks will die right after retirement, as happened to one of my acquaintances. This person had a heart attack and died the very next day after the one on which he retired. Such amazing, and pitiful, things I have heard happen to others, too.
Well, in that case, because of this anxiety of what might “come in” if every moment is not controlled and preordained, folks will create rituals and psychotherapeutic sessions where they are given something to do. It does not help the client or the initiand, but it takes the attention away from the facilitator or ritual conductor. It also helps the person in authority in that it masks their presence there in a veil of authoritativeness, which enhances their esteem (and their self-esteem, no doubt). However, it places the guidance for the event in the outside, and not the inside, where the experiencer might come up with something on their own. Bad facilitators, therapists, and ritual officiants simply do not allow the experiencer to simply be. They always step in, making themselves look good, no doubt, but ripping off the experiencer from something real, something new, something growthful, or something healing to happen.
Rituals bring outside agendas to pregnant moments, precluding the magic.
Well, act-outs are something like that, when it comes to the real self, to Divinity acting within our lives. Only, with act outs, the thing “stepping in” is not anything of us at all but of outside ourselves — someone else’s agenda, desires, intentions for us. Or else it is something decided by our egos and in line with its defensive function to keep Pain, and thus truth, from arising. Or else it is something of us, but not of this time — something that was decided, put in place, and rehearsed endlessly, at another time, in another place, and arising out of an equally unique situation; thus precluding something new from occurring, precluding personal or spiritual growth from happening. The reason it is called an “act out” is because it is a situation where what is inside is gotten rid of by throwing it “out” into the world, through some kind of action or behaviors, as a way so as not to have to actually be with it, feel it.
The most obvious example of the way ritual is used by society to direct folks into conformity with others’ designs is the way men and women are turned into killers and pawns of the elites through the elaborate rituals of becoming soldiers, as in boot camp. This is exactly the opposite of real inner transformation which happens, in a non-ritual-like manner, and in which one “dies” to some elaborate act-outs in society and culture — as they say, the giving up of introjected “desires” or the relinquishing of false hopes and cherished dreams — and is reborn into one’s real self, rediscovering one’s real potentials and connection with Nature and the Divine … one’s real desires, even. I will have a lot more to say about this further on.
As Substitute for Authentic Experience
At any rate, in rituals we pretend we are dealing with our feelings and our real experience; yet rituals are no more spiritual experiences or dealing with feelings than alcoholism is a spiritual quest or getting drunk is dealing with feelings. I remember at a Primal convention, years ago, how one particular individual was facilitated in a mock re-creation of carrying his father to his grave, assisted by oh-so-solemn and eagerly helpful ritual participants.
Before going any further and so as not to confuse the reader, I need to explain that it is my experience and observation of quite a bit of “primal” experience, in many different places, that much of what is called “primal therapy” is, sadly, no more than faux Primal. This is for reasons that I elaborate on elsewhere, and it has to do with peculiarities in the history of Primal as a psychotherapy. Clear to me, it is, that ritual is hard to relinquish and the untended moment difficult to abide, for even most Primal succumbs to it.
In any case, this particular time at the convention, in what I would consider to be an example of “faux Primal,” the idea, for the re-creation, was that in doing so the workshop participant would be able to put his feelings of hurt and his issues with his dad behind him. I am tempted to laugh right now, yet it is quite tragic. Indeed the ritual did nothing to stave off the heart attack that would later take this man’s, a friend of mine’s, life; though truly feeling his feelings might have.
Tragic, it is, for one can only fool oneself through these machinations and symbolic actions for a small period of time. Endlessly such Pain arises, ever anew, until one lies down and feels through, emotes, the grief pain and anger of what happened so long ago, which one has been running away from and avoiding ever since.
Essentially then, ritual is a substitute for “spiritual” (or real) experience just as addiction is a substitute for spiritual experience. The “shock and awe” of ritual is intended to make up for its lack of substance. It is there to fool the people. To keep the people complacent and in line. To make them enamored of their chains. Keep that in mind the next time you are in awe at the elaborate clothes, lavish adornments, and expansive, ornate settings of ceremonial and public events. Similar to the way the skylines of cities, as I have stated elsewhere, are a measure of the enslavement of the populace, such pomp and puffery of ceremonies are a measure of the shallowness of people’s lives and the inauthenticity of their lived experience. As Shakespeare wrote, they are “much ado about nothing,” and, “sound and fury signifying nothing.”
As “Bread and Circuses”
Indeed, at times ritual and ceremony come across like the bread and circuses of Roman times. That is, they seem to have a quality of making a show, making a drama, attempting to stir up the lives of desensitized minds and deadened senses. Why? Perhaps for the same reason: To keep people in line, especially in societies of larger numbers of people where individuality is that much more subsumed to other values such as social order facilitating governing from above. And especially where the majority of them are dominated and robbed of their authentic experiences coming of their independent choices. In those instances, the bread and circuses of ritualized and ceremonial events act as soothing diversions from the efforts … and joys! … of having a real life.
The reason, then, would be to keep such people distracted from the pain of their knowing how shallow is their existence. This is no different from folks having a big blowout, at times in their lives. During Greek times, this was done on a huge scale with Dionysian festivals, to offset the grinding routine of civilized existence. For a college student, this might involve a weekend crash-and-burn to make tolerable the overwhelming feelings of needing to repress one’s urges and channel all impulses into studious activities that are anything but exciting. Usually, that is; for my experience at universities was far far different than that. Indeed I came more alive in such intellectual environments. However, I also “drew outside the lines” of the curriculum — following my studies and research wherever they wanted to go, and fashioning my curriculum out of them, not my life out of any given program.
Saddest of all, though, are the weekend plans of the suburbanites, thinking that ball games, tail-gating parties, weekend getaways, or backyard bar-b-ques sanctify with aliveness the otherwise weekly drudgery and empty experiences of the rest of their time in the Form State.
As Mode of Repression
And at base, such ritual is meant to keep folks from having their unconscious Pain rising up inside their consciousness, and subsequently stirring up their lives, causing “trouble” … and stimulating personal growth in the direction of authenticity. Essentially, then, to keep such people content within their inauthentic lives and inside the arena of their oppression from on high.
I am reminded of a meme — one I particularly liked. Showing Queen Elizabeth in full royal garb and crown, it read, “Never doubt the power of a great costume to fool a great many people.” Well, I view ritual as the same kind of thing. The same sentiment was expressed famously by Carl Jung, as so, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imaging figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
Which is a perfect segue into our next several chapters. For the difference between ritualized experience and authentic experience is the same as the difference between oppressive and transformative rites of passage, as well as between controlling and surrendering mythologies — and the spiritualities, psychotherapies, and modalities that bring them into practice. In the first case, the controlling, we manipulate what we do in line with objectives we have in mind before the fact. In the second, the surrendering, we discover them within the process. One uses rituals in our attempts to control experience. For one is fearful of what one would do in any particular situation otherwise. One is thus fearful of oneself, is fearful of the rising up of a split-off self that one is aware, consciously or unconsciously, one is unfairly and unhealthily repressing.
Whereas authentic experience amounts to surrendering to experience so as to discover reality, and what will happen is not decided ahead of time. Authentic or “real” experiences arise out of a philosophy, a sentiment actually, about Reality that it is good, that it is beyond oneself in wisdom, and that it is helpful to one if one attends to, surrenders to, It.
Let me show you what I mean….
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The Cosmic Tour:
Authenticity, Self, and Transformation in Gatherer-Hunter Societies, the Heroine’s Journey, and Individuation
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“Gatherer-hunter culture and egalitarian nomadic lifeways versus hierarchical society and patriarchal civilization; free-thinking and free-spirited youth of a counterculture revolution versus World War II Generation and its conscription in the ranks of overlords; the Occupy movement versus its critics — the song is the same.”
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There are rites of passage for women which are not as reductive of the girl’s potential, as most are as I have been explaining. Indeed, these other processes seem to expand them. In these, the rite of passage has the same structure as a vision quest, in a way. For the descent to the underworld, which might also include an ascent to realms “above,” is akin to an experience which expands, not limits, a girl’s horizons….
Such truly transformative rites of passage for girls have been compared, by Lincoln, to the experiences of a young American woman hitchhiking in Europe after high school, a once common experience. For both are potentially dangerous as well as powerfully growthful and life enriching … and certainly they are packed with unexpected events and learning experiences given from the Universe and not planned or programmed ahead of time. These rituals of personal benefit and spiritual growth tend to be associated with gatherer-hunter cultures and to have been extinguished beginning with humanity’s affliction of civilization, where hierarchy and its elites brought such forces as power, prestige, and the oppressive demands of Controllers into the mix, instead.
Whereas the purpose of authentic and transformative rites, of any kind, is to push the individual out of his or her regular rut of routine and daily experience into liminal states of consciousness — that is to say, ones outside the norm and therefore on the peripheries (liminal) of life — where an opening is provided for something outside the normal to come in and enrich. This is done by radically altering the circumstances of the initiand, to create the possibility of something new happening, but also something enriching, original, needed, beneficial, even Divine or supernatural, to come through.
Rites of Belittlement, Rites of Enrichment
These enriching rites of passage — I refuse to call them rituals as they are deep inner processes about which one cannot simply go through the motions — show a different possibility for the inner templates and forces given to us all in our experience of biological conception at the very beginnings of our lives. As I showed in Chapter 24, mythologies have multilevel interpretations. I gave the example of the fable of Red Riding Hood, which can be seen as a warning to young girls about sexuality and the often hidden motives of men regarding them and their bodies. Yet, it also can be seen as a description of a process of psychospiritual death and rebirth of a positive nature — the girl is eaten yet is reborn when the “chrysalis” of the wolf body is removed by the Hunter.
So also these girl’s processes of initiation — harnessing powerful prenatal energies as they do — can be approached in several ways, corresponding to the different levels of interpretation of the underlying dynamics, with deeper levels being more beneficial and transformative. On the most superficial level the power of these unconscious “bots,” if you will, can be commandeered by societies and individuals in ways to hijack such deep powers of periconceptional experience — experience which is the very stuff, the very roots, out of which all the rest of our life experience emanates — for the benefit of others in society, which usually ends up rooted in the desires of elites. On the other hand, and in alignment with deeper level dynamics of them, they can be employed for transformative ends, which benefits individuals. In this latter way, they can be beneficial to society … if beneficial to society they must be … second-handedly in that such individuals make better social actors and create more felicitous and enlightened cultures and societies.
This dichotomy of ends for rites of initiation and transformation is parallel to the way in which in modern times the energies of education — which tap in to our natural, prenatally based, feelings of wanting to expand, extend outward, embrace more, contain more, experience more, know more, and go toward the light, toward unity and love — are hijacked by corporate entities and societal elites to transform eager and bemused youth into yuppies treading narrow career tracks with nary any personal growth benefit or felicitous engagement. Whereas at one time … and I know for I lived and participated in it … education was seen in the classic way and as per its definition. Educate is from the Latin, educere, meaning to “bring out, lead forth,” which combines ex, meaning “out,” plus ducere, meaning “to lead.” Hence “to educate” means, in its original sense, “to bring forth that which is within,” as a way to bring out the goodness and talents of each unique individual, to embellish and refine them, and thereby to indirectly benefit society in the quality of clear-minded, broadly sighted, and goodness-oriented citizens it produces.
Such is the meaning and intent of liberal arts education which arose out of the Age of Enlightenment in Western history and continued, in America, into the 1960s … when the wider and grander understanding of a liberal arts education as creating widely and liberally knowledgeable citizens reached its peak. Into the Sixties, where a liberal-arts style education was valued both by individuals and society, until the powers-that-be saw that as something which threatened their profits. For in its producing free-thinking, broad-minded youth, liberal-arts education created a segment of the population who would not be complicit in their wars, would not go along with the moneyed class’s inclinations toward repression and fascism, and would not be duped by their mesmerizing concoction of cultural untruths geared to highlighting them — the elite — their actions, and their wealth.
For how the reversal in the intentions for education were put in gear beginning in 1971 in America, thrust into drive in the Reagan-era Eighties, and stomped into overdrive during the tax breaks for the rich and the continued trickle-down economics of the Bush and — if The Donald succeeds in his agenda — Trump, eras, see my work Culture War, Class War (2013). As one piece of evidence, statistics reveal a burgeoning popularity of liberal arts majors in colleges during the 1960s in America. There were more enrolled in liberal arts than ever before, both cumulatively and percentage-wise. However, in a matter of a few decades, the Eighties, this was replaced by massive admissions into programs of business administration — also in greater numbers than ever before seen.
Suffice it to say here that the Sixties generation was the last “educated” generation — in the true meaning of the term education. That thereafter, because of the outbreak at that time of “excess democracy” — as Nelson Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission termed it — actual “education” was throttled back at the university level and channeled to the practical ends of the moneyed elites. That, correspondingly, it no longer served individuals themselves who might — by becoming better, at least more knowledgeable and well-rounded, people — bring lightness and ease, freedom and fairness and rationality, into their societies in a more general way. Which contrasts with the benefit it became of only a specifically financial one, and only for a segment of the population, as began in the Eighties.
We see the results of that increasing with every decade since. We can see today, with the rise of Trump and the institution of his “idiocracy,”1 how detrimental it was overall to have only such goals for education, since 1971, as, merely, the benefit of the moneyed elite, the corporate overlords. It is a hard thing come to the minds of such people how a society infused with the idealism and rationality and liberal-mindedness of its citizens might also be beneficial to them, in creating a better society for all. Rather than those individuals being reduced into economic units with only short-term monetary benefit. It takes the likes of a Warren Buffet, an extremely wealthy yet surprisingly modest-living and gracious man, espousing higher taxes on his own social class, in order to benefit society, to be able to apprehend this principle. Yet how alone he is in that view among the members of his elite class.
The point is that just as rites of passage — as in the example of higher education above — can be controlled and directed toward the ends of the societal elite, they also have a chance, particularly in non-hierarchical societies (understandably), to be constructed and participated in so as to foster the initial personal thriving of its young, as well as the society at large inevitably. And the difference between the two could not be clearer. It is much like the difference between interpreting a rebirth mythology like Red Riding Hood as a method of social repression, specifically of women, or instead as a rebirth — and thereby harnessing those energies linked ultimately to ones’ birth into the processes of spiritual rebirth. We have had several chapters of examples of young girls being stifled and shunted into compliance with ends other than their own. Let us now look at how that might be differently apprehended, if not perfectly enacted. Naturally, actual rebirth intent will now accompany the birth symbolism in these cases.
The Cosmic Tour
Bruce Lincoln (1991) provides a girls’ rite of passage from another culture — the Tukuna of the Northwest Amazon — to show an example of a different mode of initiation based on a correspondingly different kind of mythology. Understandably, by now, you can guess that it is a gatherer-hunter society which performs the ritual.
The mythology first: Tukuna lore contains the myth of Ariana. Quoting from Lincoln’s quote come originally from the work of Curt Nimuendaju (1952) in his work, The Tukuna:
“There was a little girl who had been an orphan since her infancy. The uncle and his wife with whom she lived did not like her. She walked alone along a jungle path and wept. Ta-e came to her, but the little one did not recognize here. ‘Why do you cry?’ asked Ta-e. ‘Mother,’ answered the little girl, ‘my uncle does not like me and treats me very badly!’ ‘Come to my arms!’ said Ta-e. She embraced the little one, and without the child’s noticing anything they ascended to heaven. She washed the little girl, gave her the name of Ariana, and reared her.
“Ariana became a very pretty woman. Many men of the celestial people desired her, and she had love affairs with many of them; but because of this she also had many enemies, some of whom invited her one day for a stroll. They went with her to where the upper world ends, where they suddenly transformed themselves into toads, hopped in all directions, and disappeared, leaving Ariana alone.
“Ariana took the shape of a swallow and flew up to the Sun. Flying just above him, she plucked out a lock of red hair and one of blue hair. With these Ariana attempted to decorate her armbands, which would make her even prettier and irresistible. The Sun, however, exasperated at her audacity, fetched her such a kick that she went flying through heaven and earth, finally stopping in the underworld called Nechaku. When she returned from there, she brought maize for the inhabitants of the earth.”2
First off, notice the similarity between the Ariana myth and the fable of Snow White in Western culture. Both Ariana and Snow White, starting out, are unhappy and not wanted. Both go into a womb place … forest for Snow White, heaven for Ariana. And both are disturbed, as we all are after our normal six months of bliss and unity with All in the womb, with an attack of huge injustice. This is exactly as we felt when the bad times of the third trimester in the womb began, leaving us wondering what we could have possibly done, in our innocence, to warrant the assault; and leaving a belief, ever after and deep within, that life is ultimately unfair, random, and capricious, much as we describe our gods (or God) to be.
Notice also the correlates of the myth with our wombular life. In the myth, the prenatal hell part begins with Ariana’s being led astray by ugly toads. Toads and frogs are frequent prenatal images; some might think they represent the fetus or embryo. However, who thinks that is an intellectual who is looking at the entire process from the outside, noticing the similarities between the physical appearances of toads and prenates. From the experiential viewpoint, where one is the fetus, one cannot see what one looks like. There are no mirrors that we know of in the womb. Ariana, additionally, who actually represents the prenate, is separate from the toads, after all. She observes and interacts with these toad-like entities.
Clearly, then, the ugly toads are an imaginal reflection of the now calcified and recalcitrant placenta, symbolized in the lumpy bumpy froggy skin. Not only is the placenta of the third trimester less than “personally fit” at this point, it is a misbehavin’. The toads go jumping all about. That is a placenta that is not doing its job efficiently and behaving as it should. Notice that the toads were perfect companions during their “stroll” together until they reached the place “where the upper world ends.” Which is not a bad description for the time in the womb when the good times, the heaven of the blissful womb, ends and the prenatal hell begins. And sure enough, this change in her circumstances happens at the end of Ariana’s stay in “paradise,” just as the third trimester of hell follows the first two of bliss in the womb.
Notice, as well, that prenatal time is often associated with frog-like elements and actions in other ways: Frogs hop and kick with their legs just as we do with our legs in the womb … except we don’t hop, of course. Yet we kick in the womb … and at birth, by the way, in order to get out. At least we kick wildly in our re-experiences of birth, at which time we find ourselves doing with our body what we were not allowed to do at the time, even if just because of the space constraints then. We kick also at conception — and in our re-experiences of it — as sperm with undulating tails…. Sperm also have other qualities of reptiles, which a frog is.
Notice also that Ariana’s response to the aloneness she feels, after the misbehavin’ toads leave, is to go towards the light, i.e., the Sun. In the same way, our response to our prenatal hell can only be to become born … into the light. Indeed, Ariana becoming a bird, a swallow, is a pre- and perinatal symbol relating to both the earlier period of freedom in the womb, characterized often by weightlessness along with freedom, as well as the freedom we experience at birth, whereupon finally leaving the crush of the uterus and then the vulva one can move uninhibitedly in air, much as birds and angels do in flight.
Lincoln continues, in his own words now: “Ariana succeeds in traversing all the cosmic realms, and as a result of her travels she wins a gift of inestimable value for mankind. From earth she ascends to the heavens, and beyond them to the sun. From the sun she descends to the underworlds, and from them back to earth, bringing corn with her. The myth recounts something similar to the experiences of a young woman at initiation, who also succeeds in traversing the cosmic realms and winning gifts of enormous value.”3
Lincoln goes on, expanding upon his explanation of the parallelism between the Ariana myth and the girls’ rites of passage among the Tukuna. In both of them there is a descent into a womb-like place, an underworld, as well as a flight to the sun, or the overworld … a cosmic tour for each. And in each, the result of the cosmic tour is to bring back something to the world of society something of benefit to it — indeed, an item of “inestimable” value.
The Hero’s Cycles
Those familiar with Joseph Campbell’s (1972) hero’s cycle will clearly see the same pattern here … regardless that Campbell himself, unfortunately, saw his cycle to be mainly, if not exclusively, about men. Maureen Murdock (1990) makes this observation about Campbell’s cycle and relates a direct conversation with Joseph Campbell, where he expresses exactly that opinion. As Campbell put it, as quoted by Murdock, “In the whole mythological tradition, the woman is there. All she has to do is realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.”4 Hence women don’t need a hero’s cycle.
Clearly, Campbell — rooted in his era of pre-feminist awakening — did not see that the reason the woman is there is because these mythologies were of patriarchal cultures, where the myths were exclusively about men’s roles, goals, and struggles in life, and where women were seen as props. Of course, they were “there,” for they were placed there by men for their ends, were used as literary devices for men’s narratives, were perceived as symbols of a man’s goals — which frequently included to embrace more of his feminine within — and all in complete disregard of any personhood, personality, intents, or feelings of the women of the culture. Such women in Campbell’s mythologies were usually distant reflections of mothers and their influences on young boys, now grown. Not real people.
Naturally, Murdock was unsettled by Campbell’s answer. Her words about it are telling and shed quite a bit of light on the different aims of such processes, the traditional nature of women’s rites, and the implied sexism of classical Jungian thinking — which is “solar,” as we shall see shortly, and revolves around men’s roles, with women on the sidelines. She writes, “This answer stunned me; I found it deeply unsatisfying. The women I know and work with do not want to be there, the place that people are trying to get to. They do not want to embody Penelope, waiting patiently, endlessly weaving and unweaving. They do not want to be handmaidens of the dominant male culture, giving service to the gods. They do not want to follow the advice of fundamentalist preachers and return to the home. They need a new model that understands who and what a woman is.”5
In this we see a description of the kinds of rites of passage for girls that I have been describing in previous chapters, which diminish, derail, and use them. Whereas the way Murdock and other feminists she quotes see it is much in line with the rites of enrichment I have been extolling. She says of a woman’s journey or quest, “It is a very important inner journey toward being a fully integrated, balanced, and whole human being. Like most journeys, the path of the heroine is not easy; it has no well-defined guideposts nor recognizable tour guides. There is no map, no navigational chart, no chronological age when the journey begins. It follows no straight lines. It is a journey that seldom receives validation from the outside world; in fact the outer world often sabotages and interferes with it.
“The model of the heroine’s journey is derived in part from Campbell’s model of the heroic quest.”6
Because of this disregard of women’s actual needs and purposes, Murdock was compelled to write a book on the female hero’s, i.e., heroine’s, journey and quest. And in it she describes processes of transformation that are similar to the hero’s cycle but with a particular caveat: They are about transformational spiritual processes, not deformational, belittling social ritual processes, which most often men’s rites of passage and “hero’s cycles” tend to be.
In any case, in Murdock’s description of the heroine’s cycle, or journey, as she calls it, she relates a pattern much like the one in the myth above for Ariana. Think about it, you can see that it is much like the rites of passage for boys in some gatherer-hunter societies which have as their aim the boy’s direct access to supernatural forces beyond him, as in vision quests and walkabouts, as opposed to a boy’s being hammered into a useful implement to societal, which is ultimately, to elite’s ends, not the boy’s own.
Remember, a society allowing an initiation with results not controlled by them has to be a fearless and confident one — secure enough in itself that whatever comes forth from the upcoming generation is okay, is at least manageable by society, or will be ultimately, without knowing what will come forth ahead of time. Exactly that is what was missing in the society and older generations of the Sixties, especially their elites, who freaked out so much at the thriving individuality and blossoming consciousness of its youth. Indeed it is true that such vision-quest-type initiations can only arise in societies, unlike the America of that time, that at some level — agreeing with our own young today, by the way — truly feel, and believe, that “It’s all good!”
So we see these patterns in the processes of recent history in America and somewhat throughout the world in the Sixties Revolution and its being crushed by moneyed elites, fearful for their wealth in the face of outpourings of freedom, democracy, and self-expression. Gatherer-hunter culture and egalitarian nomadic lifeways versus hierarchical society and patriarchal civilization; free-thinking and free-spirited youth of a counterculture revolution versus World War II Generation and its conscription in the ranks of overlords; the Occupy movement versus its critics — the song is the same.
Getting back to the Amazon, now, we see that both the Ariana myth of the Tukuna and their rite of passage for girls — termed the the Festa das Mocas Novas — are consonant with vision quests, Campbell’s hero’s cycle, Murdock’s “heroine’s journey,” the Persephone myth (that coming), perhaps the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece (coming also) … and others, too. One of note is the mythological tale of the descent of Inanna, for example. In each and every one there is a descent into darkness, oppression, and horror; plus an ascent, which usually follows the descent — however in the case of Ariana it precedes it (we’ll get to that ) — and the acquiring of an item of “inestimable value” which one brings back to one’s community.
In each, the descent into darkness is a time characterized by pain, suffering, depression. One might think of it as being akin to being purified by fire, like lead into gold … being focused and rooted by suffering. For in each a greater personhood, one more empathetic, wise, free, fearless, uninhibited, and generous is achieved.
Let us take each of these narratives in turn, lay them beside each other, and see what that reveals.
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Death-Rebirth Cycles and the Heroine’s Journey:
The Hero’s and Heroine’s Cycles, Prenatal Persephone, the Descent to the Underworld, Girls’ Initiation, and Abortion of Cultural Rebirth
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“In all these — the myth of Persephone of ancient Greece, the myth of Ariana of the Tukuna, Campbell’s hero’s cycle, the Eleusinian Mystery rites, and, arguably, Sixties revolution — there is the same pattern of descent (and/or ascent) into the unknown for the purpose of and with the result of retrieving something of ‘inestimable’ value for society, and sometimes, something that had been lost, along the way, by humankind. “
“This lord of the underworld takes Persephone below to where the dead are — which is a way of expressing the diminishment of aliveness that comes both in the womb during the third trimester and to girls, and boys, at adolescence. They, too, are deadened, not so alive.”
“Deadening ourselves, indeed, is our primary response to overwhelming pain. That was no less the case for us in the womb.”
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Joseph Campbell explains the monomyth of the hero’s quest in his seminal work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1972). The hero’s cycle is a monomyth because it is like a template, like a pattern that is seen in hero’s — and we’ll see next, in heroine’s — tales throughout the world. They all have the same components.
The Hero’s Cycle
They all begin in a humble setting — a common, ordinary, everyday place, doing usual and seemingly inconsequential things. These seemingly innocuous doings have enormous consequences, though. One might be picking flowers, chasing a rabbit, discovering that one’s dog has bitten a neighbor, following a ball that has fallen and rolled away, staring into a stream, traveling a road to Damascus, walking to grandmother’s house, and so on.
However, within this ordinary set of circumstances, the extraordinary intrudes. One follows the rabbit and it goes into a rabbit hole which leads to a wondrous world. One’s house is caught up in a tornado and one finds oneself deposited, along with one’s beloved pet dog, in a green celestial city, above the clouds, or “over the rainbow.”
Or in dramatic fashion the earth opens up and this dark stud of a god rushes out upon a golden chariot. Or one is in a garden and goes into a trance in which one has a vision of the Blessed Mother who gives instructions on one’s life.
Or one is lying in bed on a hot summer night with the air conditioner too loud, keeping one from drifting off, and a comforting woman’s voice comes from nowhere and takes one on a journey through history and one’s past lives. One might be fooling around on Facebook and discover that one’s relationship status was mysteriously upgraded, might find oneself undergoing a symbolic death by melting and getting licked up by one’s pet cat, and end up in a celestial place, where one is informed of the knowledge of the ages, which one is instructed then to share with others…. You get the idea.
Struggles Abounding, Blessings Bestowed
What follows in the monomyth is that the seemingly trivial event is followed — much like one’s blissful time of early womb experience is itself superseded — by all manner of struggles, trials, oftentimes pain and suffering, by means of which one is taught, grows larger in personality, more mature and wise.
In the process one acquires, or is given, a gift or gifts of “inestimable value,” which is of benefit to oneself as well as to one’s community. You can see already how we seem to be describing vision quests, mythologies like that of Ariana’s, spontaneously occurring “rites of passage,” and even the events that characterize a modern mid-life crisis that has a growthful outcome.
Descent and Return
The end of the cycle, or journey, is when one brings what was bestowed on one back to the world, and one enriches one’s community by sharing it, as one’s talent, one’s knowledge, or one’s fated role and lifetime service.
The point is that the cycle is one of descent and return. A person goes into an other-worldly place — often a dark, foreboding, even painful one — where adventures are had, struggles are engaged in, abilities are realized, one’s mind is opened, and one expands in knowledge, wisdom, maturity, and is given a unique item to bring back. Often at some point, like the Cosmic Tour described in the last chapter, one is taken to an overworld or heavenly realm, much as one is saved from prenatal hell by becoming born into the world at the beginning of each of our lives. Which release is felt as heavenly, all the angels singing, church bells ringing, motherly abundance overflowing, and sweet love and freedom to be tasted and explored.
Heroine’s Journey, Cultural Death-Rebirth
Now, let us take a look at the heroine’s journey, as described by Maureen Murdock (1990). Of course it would be much the same. However, while Murdock sees the heroine’s journey as something which, as Jung also did for his process of individuation, most often occurs during the “second half of life” — and is precipitated by tragedy, sickness, loss, or some other major derailment of one’s normal routine of barreling, unwittingly, toward goals as given by one’s society — it is also the same process of transformation as we see occurring in every psychospiritual experience of our modern psychotechnologies, in every shamanistic experience of other cultures and times, in the transformational girls’ rite of passage I am describing, in Native American vision quests and aboriginal walkabouts, and in Campbell’s hero’s cycle: Always there is the descent into the underworld and then a return to the light; much as a regression to the womb and a reenactment of birth and emergence into the light, a death-rebirth. Personally, I image it as a deep-sea diver, plunging below the waves and into the depths to seek out a precious pearl, and returning with it to offer to the world. Though, strictly speaking for the hero’s cycle, the diver would probably fall in, because of some minor mishap on his boat; it would not be intentional.
Murdock writes, “Women find their way back to themselves not by moving up and out into the light like men, but by moving down into the depths of the ground of their being…. The spiritual experience for women is one of moving more deeply into self rather than out of self.”1 We can ignore her comparing one aspect of the process of transformation — coming out into the light — with the other aspect of it … that is, descending into darkness … as being masculine and feminine when they are actually two parts of the same process. In fact all transformational rites, whether for women, men, girls, or boys, have the same pattern of the cosmic tour. Murdock is being prodded, apparently, by her understanding of masculine and feminine mythologies, which are, respectively, solar and lunar ones. Don’t worry we’ll get into that in a few chapters.
She is also being skewed through her immersion in the scholasticism of an archetypal paradigm — rooted in Jungian psychology and the patriarchy of the first half of the Twentieth Century — which saw such a separation between masculine and feminine beingness in a way as to think they needed “balancing” within the personality. Which saw them as distinct and opposite poles of something, not different shades of the same thing, with many tones in between.
And Girls’ Rites of Passage
Importantly, Murdock compares her heroine’s cycle with the myth of Persephone, who also went to the underworld and came back, and which myth is also the structure of some girls’ rites of passage … and in this case, transformations. In the same way, Lincoln also sees the Persephone myth to have been enacted both in rites of passage for girls in ancient Greece as well as to have been the basis for the mysterious yet widely popular Eleusinian Mysteries of that time.
In all these — the myth of Persephone of ancient Greece, the myth of Ariana of the Tukuna, Campbell’s hero’s cycle, the Eleusinian Mystery rites, and, arguably, Sixties revolution — there is the same pattern of descent (and/or ascent) into the unknown for the purpose of and with the result of retrieving something of “inestimable value” for society, and sometimes, something that had been lost, along the way, by humankind.
Cultural Revolution, “Moratorium,” Refusal of the Task
Incidentally, if you do not clearly see this aspect of the counterculture of the Sixties, notice how that era was overseen by the omnipresent peace symbol. Which symbol, a cross in a circle with its arms down, is a symbol of action in the world ceasing and of going within … of “moratorium,” as it was also called.2 Much of American society of that time, and in particular the youth generation, saw the Vietnam War as exactly that kind of errant event or mishap — like an individual’s illness, failure, or personal loss precipitating their inner journey — requiring a leaving off of activity in a normal sense and a going inward to discover deeper values and ways of proceeding optimally.
Indeed, the entire society, the whole world around,3 was at that time in the process of going through a death-rebirth process that would have resulted in a cultural leap forward, if it had not been aborted by the powers-that-be. In my book, Culture War, Class War (2013), I explain how the filthy rich elite of that era freaked out at the advance in culture that was transcending them and their entrenched interests — “the establishment” — and how, consequently, they waged a fierce resistance to change, still ongoing throughout the world.
In that book, also, I tell how such an Aquarian Age, once aborted, still in its” womb” in the 1970s, resulted in something, on a societal scale, akin to what Campbell (1972) has called, the “refusal of the call.”4 And, as Campbell explains for such an abortion of the spiritual process on the individual level, I explain how such a societal derailment of a culture’s natural tendency to grow in response to changing technological, psychological, and cultural circumstances has had grave consequences … and will continue to, until the time that the forces of resistance die off. That is, if life on this planet continues long enough for that to happen.
For our purposes here — comparing the processes of ritual death-rebirth, psychospiritual death-rebirth, and cultural death-rebirth with our actual time of seeming death in the womb, during the third trimester, then actual birth — we can see why part of the profile of such a cultural abortion includes this irrational compulsion to want to return to a 1950s-style America, seen as some kind of golden age. That mythology has always been in the minds of conservatives and reactionaries and has most recently and prominently of all come out in the administration and aspirations of Donald Trump. One book currently out explains how his ideas are framed about an ideal world supposedly existing in 1950s America … with all its racism, sexism, repression, but not — note well — with its high taxes on the wealthy, which created the prosperity and stability of that time. So, such Trumpsters, such alt-right, such reactionaries and troglodytes are more than “conserve”ative, they are backwards-thinking, past-aspiring. Yet, since the way they understand that time is an idealized version of what it really was, they are fantasy-wishing. Another word for that is delusional.
However, they are also understandable. I have explained how their feelings are alike to the feelings of the prenate when it is in the midst of its prenatal hell: It wants to return to that time of blissful harmony and thriving progress. Indeed, we create time itself — a future to want to be in instead of the now, built upon the idea of a past, idealized — out of that trauma. If you consider that any derailment of this natural process of seeming death followed by rebirth on any level — social, individual, therapeutic — has consequences similar to what one can imagine for a fetus being held in the womb, indefinitely, within that state of prenatal hell, not being allowed to move forward, not being allowed to be born…. Well, do that, and you might appreciate why these times are so strange; so twisted; so dark; so overcast with clouds of extinction, humanicide, and death; and so seemingly hopeless.
Prenatal Persephone and Girls’ Initiation
Back to our focus on the rites of passage fractal of this death-rebirth process, let us look, then, more closely at the Persephone myth, especially as related by Joseph Campbell himself, in his works, Primitive Mythology (1969) and Occidental Mythology (1964). Doing this, I will show how an understanding of the prenatal elements of such a mythology show a different possibility, a more positive one as concerns the initiate, and one that is more aligned with non-civilizational groups and cultures. Just as the Red Riding Hood fable can be interpreted several ways — with more superficial understandings benefitting outside interests only and deeper perspectives bringing growth and expansion to both individual and, indirectly, society, so also can the structure and elements of the comparable mythologies of Persephone and Ariana be seen that way.
First off, notice the parallelism of both these myths with the tale of Red Riding Hood. Just as we can see Red Riding Hood — and the fable of Snow White, for that matter, which also has these same elements and structure — as either a morality play of repression and control, befitting a civilizational society built on oppression and hierarchy, or as a tale … a map, if you will … of the way the exigencies and uncontrolled aspects of life integrate eventually into a higher, more gracious beingness. So also Persephone’s tale is on the surface about initial sexuality, a rape in this instance, which leads to seeming disaster yet is later the seed of higher order awareness and benefit to the world. How so, you say?
Well, as always, transformation begins, as it did in the womb, in a place of bliss and harmony. Which is disrupted, forcing one into an underground, a darkness, or a sort of prison — all of which are representations of the “dark night of the womb,” i.e., the time of the PMEs (as explained in Chapter 5).
In Persephone’s case, she was picking flowers in a meadow with her friends, the daughters of Okeanos. Now, Okeanos is god “of the all-embracing sea,” as Campbell phrases it, which signifies a comforting surrounding abode, much as our earlier, our BPM I, time in the womb. However, like nearly everyone else — Red Riding Hood, Ariana, Eve, Prometheus, Loki, others … all except Snow White — Persephone succumbs to a temptation which has fateful consequences. This can be related to the onset of the PME trauma of the third trimester. Let me explain.
The Special Message of Snow White
First, though, it is interesting to notice the exception to this pattern, which is evident in the Snow White fable. She also, initially, is in a beautiful and comforting womb surround. Snow White is to be discovered, blissful and singing, in the forest. Just before the arrival of the huntsman, who carries a knife, we see her — interestingly, exactly as Persephone, just before her intrusive event — picking flowers and surrounded by helpful planetmates.5 Which planetmates represent the helping nurturing biological forces of Nature for a fetus in utero, i.e., the perfectly assistive and encouraging womb.
Alternately Snow White has been serviced, by the queen, to work as a scullery maid. Which makes sense. For in the womb we must make our daily effort to thrive and survive, merely in the tasks of taking in nourishment and using it to build cells. Notice that a scullery maid works in a kitchen, which is involved in food preparation. Still, this is pleasant, even blissful work for her, just as it was for us in the womb. We watch her singing and surrounded by helpful attentive doves. Not a bad image for being nurtured within the womb surround by the forces of Nature, Herself.
She might not be getting any attention from the queen, or the fetus from the mother, yet she, like the prenate, is content in her tasks. She sings and is ever surrounded by birds or other planetmates, who act as companions and helpers. These surrounding blessings from the world of Nature symbolize the sustaining forces of Nature, and specifically, in the womb, all the nurturant biological forces aiding the fetus’s growth.
In the blissful bountiful forest Snow White’s peace is disturbed by an intrusion from a huntsman, sent by her stepmother, the evil queen. Specifically, the huntsman was enlisted to take Snow White even deeper into the forest, where he is supposed to kill her. This discrepancy in the Snow White structure, from similar tales, having to do with the fact that the change emanates out of pure innocence and is completely uninstigated — compared to it being a consequent of a derelict act, a result of succumbing to a temptation — seems clearly to be depicting a situation where the child in the womb is not wanted.
While that flies in the face of popular sentiment, it is true, nevertheless, that babies being unwanted is an event of such common occurrence, it would seem to warrant its being reflected in myth. Indeed, the queen, or evil stepmother, does not want Snow White to be alive — meaning to be born, in my interpretation — and that is why Snow White is exiled into the forest in the first place. The Evil Queen dismisses her stepdaughter, much as some mothers do not want to have a child and so put it out of their mind and do not attend to its presence in the womb.
And just as someone might want to perform, then, an abortion, the evil queen has directed the huntsman to end Snow White’s life. The huntsman spares her, however, taking pity on her; much as a Divine or other beneficent influence might buck up any unwanted fetus desiring birth despite the difficulties.
As might be expected, her exile, much like Persephone’s descent to the underworld, is immediately fraught with dangers, threats, fear, anxiety, and darkness. We see her going through a literal “dark night,” surrounded by threatening sounds and sights. After a period of feverish panic, she screams … which is the right thing to do in such circumstances, during a “dark night of the soul,” by the way. Whereupon, she faints, which is something we see will be a real pattern for her. Not coincidentally, though, for with each trauma, during our early life, we die a little more, become a little less alive, a little more numb … symbolized nicely by fainting. Again, that would be much the same for an unwanted fetus in the womb.
Yet, subsequently, Snow White regains that blissful surround, again in the forest. It begins for her in the morning, after her “dark night”: It is after all always darkest before the dawn, and this shows, importantly, how all traumas, all little deaths, can be followed by little rebirths. However this time, in this new life inside a forest, she is surrounded by dwarves. These represent, as the planetmates did initially, the supportive biological forces of Nature. This reflects a relatively blissful time in the womb — against all odds, it would seem.
Yet it is changed, has been affected by humanity, meaning the mother’s attempted “abortion,” or murder, and her not wanting the child. This element disturbs the innocence, tweaks it somewhat. Thereby it changes the planetmates not only into humans, but into working humans — ones who must labor to live, whistling, as they are wont to do, while they are working, unlike the feeling of ease and blessing and all things provided that would be in the womb of a mother who wanted her child. The dwarves are human, little in stature though they be, like helping but barely observable forces of Nature and biology. And in that they work, we see that Snow White’s existence is now wrought with a measure of effort, much as one might need to buck up one’s own self, psychologically, in the womb, when absolutely no help is coming from one’s mother.
Later developments for Snow White involve the onset of the seeming attacks from the environment of the womb, the PMEs, during the state of prenatal hell. Some of this is symbolized, fittingly enough, in the attacks on Snow White’s life, through compression as in PME I … the bodice cinched tight with stay-laces … and through poisoning, PME 3, by way of a poisoned comb and then a poisoned apple. As well as, of course, these attacks on the authentic self, the pure and innocent self (Snow White), relate to the processes of diminution of personality at the primal scene and adolescent stages of life. We’ve seen that diminution to be true for adolescence. And in the Veil following this one, I explain it in relation to the primal scene. In Veil Five of the next volume, which is about prenatal “hell,” we will see how the hellacious time in the womb is depicted, in the Snow White tale, in even more detail, and how every time it is followed by a diminution of consciousness, symbolized by fainting.
Oh, That “Original Sin”
However, disregarding the special instance of Snow White, which relates to an unwanted baby in the womb, meaning her sequence of events is completely uninitiated by anything she has done, the other myths point to a sense of having done something wrong — the baby in the womb has, that is — to set them off: Stealing a precious flower, fire, a tuft of hair; eating a forbidden apple as Eve did; wandering too far afield in pursuing a bunny; or trespassing onto the grounds of a gingerbread house. This sense of culpability for events that happen to one shows that during the third trimester in the womb we are seeing that our actions have consequences. After all, we built our body out of what seemed to be our own intentions, if not efforts. Cause, effect; we’re knowing that.
We are identified with the processes of growth in the womb and, as many myths of magical bringing into being by simply willing it — notable among them being Genesis, where “on the first day, God” did this, “on the second day,” that, and so on — we feel one with the forces of creation, rooted ultimately in Divinity. If you want to remember what that feels like, and you have experience of being an artist, writer, or other creative person — taking a position on the borderline of non-existence and existence, bringing from the world of nothingness and No-Form into the world of manifestation and Form ever again in the creative process — you can get an idea of this.
So it is that by the third trimester, after all our initiatives have been met with wonderful success, suddenly they seem associated with horrible circumstances. It is as if we have stolen something, from the “gods” (one’s mother), and we are being thrown into darkness, a prison, or an underground or underworld because of it — all of which situations describe the quality of our existence during the third trimester.
Continuing now, with Persephone, what she does that she is not supposed to is to pluck the flowers of a particularly glorious plant, with a hundred blossoms and a heavenly fragrance. Indeed, much as the wolf disguises itself as her grandmother, in Red Riding Hood, the flower also was a setup to seduce poor Persephone. Of course it would be the god of the underworld, Hades, who would have set the trap, acting not much different from a wolf, an evil queen, an old witch, some bumpy loathsome toads, or what have you.
Thereupon the earth opens, and Hades comes forth in a golden chariot, to all appearances alike to modern-day lotharios deeming that fast shiny sport cars are the required down payment on “getting the chicks.” This lord of the underworld takes Persephone below to where the dead are — which is a way of expressing the diminishment of aliveness that comes both in the womb during the third trimester and to girls, and boys, at adolescence. They, too, are deadened, not so alive. In the case of Show White, as I explained, she keeps “fainting”; and eventually, after the third attack, going into a comatose state. Always and everywhere in these mythologies — Snow White, Persephone, Red Riding Hood, Ariana, Prometheus, Loki — there is a dampening of aliveness, a numbness or deadness, consequent of these times of life: Conception, birth, the primal scene, and adolescence — which I call the “falls from grace.”6
At any rate, Hades scoops up Persephone and carries her down to the underworld — i.e., she becomes less alive with the onset of prenatal hell in the third trimester. Indeed, it is said she is taken to the land of the dead: Deadening ourselves, indeed, is our primary response to overwhelming pain. That was no less the case for us in the womb.
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Demeter, the Daughter, and the Down Below:
Separation and Despair, the Ultimate Quest, and Persephone — the Real yet Hidden Person and the Inner Child
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“…this variety of interpretation, as superficial as that of Riding Hood seen as about sexuality, fails to grok that the story, on a deeper level, is saying that we can regain our real self, our innocent self, become as little children, and so on … and that in doing so, endlessly, we can live forever. That nothing wonderful is ever lost.”
“…we have a tale — being like myths are, so multileveled and aspected — describing the loss of a daughter to a cruel world infected with the misogynistic lusts and powers of men.”
“…on another level, it is about a woman’s loss of herself as she gets older. On another, it is about the ‘loss of innocence’ in the womb which happened at the onset of the prenatal hell of the PMEs. And in still another of its aspects it is reflecting a mother’s loss of connection to a daughter, because of any of the falls from grace.”
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An important aspect of the Persephone tale is the prominence that her mother, Demeter, plays in it. For it is Demeter’s feelings and experiences that are described, while her daughter has her residence “down below.”
Demeter, da Daughter, and da “Down Below”
For, after Persephone’s abduction, Demeter nearly dies of grief and she scours the world looking for her “daughter.” For nine days, she searches. It is said she, mourning, dons a dark headdress. Using torches to light her way and never stopping to eat, bathe, or drink, she wanders and looks everywhere. Concerning Demeter upon her daughter’s abduction, Homer writes, “sharp sorrow seized her heart, and she rent the headdress round her ambrosial hair with her own hands, and she threw a dark veil over both her shoulders.”1 Demeter “was unlaughing, and did not partake of food or drink, as she was wasting away with yearning for her deep-girt daughter,”2 we read in the Homeric Hymn. In fact, Demeter only eats when her searching brings her to Eleusis, and a servant girl, with a really ribald remark, causes Demeter to laugh.
Other details of Demeter’s story are significant in the rituals that will harken back to it. One is how she breaks her fast. Forgoing the wine offered her, she calls for water with barley, mixed with fresh pennyroyal. “And she [Metaneira] prepared this kykeon for the goddess, as she [Demeter] had requested. And Deo, the lady of many, accepted it for the sake of the rite.”3
The drink is referred to as the kykeon, as you see. A drink, designated the same way, plays an important, according to some a crucial, role in the Eleusinian Mysteries founded on the story. For it is speculated that a particular entheogenic substance was mixed into the concoction so as to facilitate the nonordinary state of consciousness seeking to be brought about through the rite.
So Demeter’s grief is abated via some silly jesting … for that, refer to my Funny God, more on that in a little … and a psychedelic substance. “Lighten up, dour Demeter, and here, have a nice cup of this, which will help you better integrate your problems” seems to be the message of the myth, here.
The Quest and the Real, Divine Self
The intensity with which Demeter does her searching clearly reflects the tragic passion of a soul, in general, missing its real self, its Divine self. The fact that we hear mostly about Demeter’s adventures and travails is telling us quite a bit, as well.
For the down below is always the unconscious. Hence any split of the personality, where the self is raped, oppressed, punished, put below one, or what have you, ends up with the real self, the Divine self, in the unconscious “down below” and out of reach. Whereas what is left of the personality, the “conscious” part, the part comprising all the Ego defenses of the personality, is “above ground.”
It is not uncommon, then, that, like Demeter, the life in the seeming light is characterized by confusion, questioning, searching. Human protagonists are depicted as being Hamlets, Gilgameshes, Arjunas, Narcissuses, Alexander the Greats, Ponce de Leóns, Juan Quixotes, Knights of the Round Table, Platos … and Demeters, too … in relation to the Holy Grails, flowers of immortality, Seven-Sided Diamonds, gods, goddesses, fountains of youth, secrets of the Universe, atmadharma … and Persephones, now, too … secreted below in the darkness. Wondering, what is the meaning, who am I, to be or not to be, what to do, to go into battle or to give up, and who to be, now; when otherwise, without our falls from grace, all that would be known.
So just as the male rites of passage turn women, in men’s eyes, into slutty Medusas, Barbie-doll lucy-fied Stepford women, and thingified icons with no substance like Athena; so also the female rites of passage send the real personality, the Persephone aspect of a woman, into the darkness, whereupon the part of herself, the only part, that will be allowed above ground is that which relates her womanly role to that of mother, hard worker, and food dispenser, the Demeter part of women. Just as men must connect with a feminine within, an anima, so as to heal the split forced on them through the Identity processes of most cultures, so also must women reconnect with a feminine within. The woman “above ground,” the Demeter, the self-sacrificing mother “goddess” needs regain her lost and inner child — her “kore,” girl, maiden … the Persephone down below. Her innocent self. Her uncorrupted self. Her “virgin” self, in the symbolic meaning of that.
Incidentally, in this we see a pervasive pattern in mythologies: The above ground god or goddess represents, often, a glorified Ego, like the king who would claim to be a god. Whereas the god or goddess below is the real one, the real self, the substance of which the other is just the perverted outer reflection. Just as our egos are distorted outer reflections of our inner and true divinities, and just as the moon reflected in a lake is a scaled down and often distorted replica of the real and magnificent Thing-in-Itself.
This is what Murdock means by her heroine’s journey as she artfully and passionately portrays it in her book as a quest for a split-off and authentic part of a woman’s self. And this is why, in a way more consistent than Campbell’s, Murdock’s depiction is one describing the healthy death-rebirth cycle of the growing person, regaining her or his authentic self, and why it reflects the unsullied version of the hero’s cycle. That is to say, Murdock’s portrayal of the heroic quest, as heroine, applicable to men and boys as well, is the one where the boy or man is initiated and instructed by his inner Self, not by outer designs. For women, it is how they seek to go beyond the cage of slut, chaste, lucy-fied Stepford wife, and pedestal statue, into which they have been placed by patriarchal societies
So we can see why the male and female quests — for the Holy Grail, the Divine Mother, the blessing, for men, which is the anima, compared to Demeter’s search for Persephone — are the same. They are all so desperate, tragic, and all-consuming — much as Demeter’s agonized searching — because both men and women lose their souls through their “socialization” into the family neuroses and the cultural protocols. And all of us are desperate to regain our authentic selves; or we are whenever it finally occurs to us how much we have been had, how deeply we have been consumed by the Matrix, and consequently, how much we have lost.
Why is Demeter’s searching for Persephone actually a journey in search of her real self? Well, for one thing, as scholars have pointed out, Demeter and Persephone are ostensibly one person.4 Persephone does not have a name, initially, she is called simply kore, which means “maiden.” Which would be quite a generic way of referring to someone, like saying someone’s name is girl. As Lincoln points out, except for one questionable piece of text of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, she is never referred to as Persephone until the moment she is to return to Earth, when Hermes arrives in the “down below” to get her. So, the entire time both before her abduction and while sojourning in the darkness she is merely, “girl,” the “inner child,” one might say, to the named Demeter … whose name, incidentally, means “the mother.”
Thus, with her appearance back on Earth — and now being regularly referred to as Persephone — this is much like the naming ceremonies which often accompany rites of initiation. Naming ceremonies are ways of “branding” a person into membership with a group aligned with interests other than one’s own. Persephone would, thus, in a soul-stealing rite of initiation, represent the more “thingified” version of the girl, of the kore, the inner child. However, in a positive and successful version of the death-rebirth cycle — as I am expanding on in this chapter — she represents the reborn Demeter … as when Jesus of Nazareth, after his resurrection, became “the Christ.” Persephone thus represents the post-quest person, the “returned” person, the post-primal person. Which is the Self (using Jung’s terminology) in whom the real self dominates and actively interacts with the Divine Self — as muse, as Inner Guide, or as god, goddess, ideal, higher calling, atmadharma, fated task, or greater cause.
Another way of saying this, and I will get into this in more detail in discussing the next Veil, kore is the word for the girl as separate from Ego and reified as an aspect of the unconscious, where it is now an object to be attained, an inner girl, inner child. If it were in a man it would be the anima. Yet women also must reunite with a feminine within — an unsullied one. So it is the self one needs to regain. And since it is separate it is generic, a kore, the inner “girl.” It is the Divine, or real self, the goddess, residing, appropriately, one third of the time in the No-Form State. Whereas Demeter is the name for the unreal self, the Ego, the one seen and identified with, the one “above ground.”
One third of the time “below ground” and two-thirds “above”? Yeah, as a creative person, I can tell you, that is pretty much exactly the amount of time I must spend in either world in order to accomplish the tasks of both. But I digress….
By the way, it is amazing how virtually everyone misses the connection of these myths with actual personal transformation. You would think that the fact that this mythology surrounding Demeter-Persephone was the core (not kore, and no pun intended) of the Eleusinian Mysteries would have been a clue that they had something to do with personal growth. You would think that Jungians distinctly aware of the overriding arc of individuation in one’s life, and Campbell followers aware of the hero’s or heroine’s cycle, would have made the connection to personal transformation. Yet, this is all missed, especially by men. The notable exception is Maureen Murdock, who sees the Persephone myth as a metaphor for a woman’s awakening, and reconnection with her mother, and her real self.
For predominantly, what we hear of this mythology and the Eleusinian rites built around it is that these symbols are primarily concerned with the awareness of the dawn of agriculture and its wonders. Kind of like a celebration of having made it out of gatherer-hunter darkness and “savagery” to be promoted to the elect of those who know the secrets of agriculture — that one can plant and reap grain and thus control one’s food source.
This is about as trivial an understanding of a profound mythology as the one about the alchemists, saying they were all about an attempt to turn lead into gold. For that interpretation misses that such narrative was a symbolic cover story — especially needed in an era dominated by a churchy and dogmatic theology — for a deeper quest of the transformation of self. This was a profound meaning of their efforts in which the base self or unreal self … the lead, you see … is purified in the fire of suffering to become the gold of the authentic self. Jung was only the first of many to reveal this often hidden side to the alchemical venture. He did this in his book, Psychology and Alchemy (1953, 1968). Others who have elaborated on this idea include Stanislav Grof and especially Johannes Fabricius (1996), in a rather monumental work.
Indeed, virtually all anthropologists will paint the mythology and the complex iconography and ritual around Demeter as being some kind of self-congratulation about being able to grow grain, however much they couch that in glorious sounding words about revelations on the “creative power of Nature,” the “eternal cycle of death and rebirth” of Nature, and so on. It is said by these sorts of scholars that at the culmination of the Eleusinian rite, it is a shaft of grain that is revealed. Similarly, a pervasive understanding of the mythology of Demeter-Persephone has it that it is telling the story of the seasons — with kore, the girl or maiden, being underground in the winter, much like a seed, when things do not grow, and Persephone above ground representing the growing season.
Certainly there is something to this. As I continue to repeat, myths are multidimensional, multi-aspected, and so warrant many interpretations on different levels of understanding.
However, this variety of interpretation, as superficial as that of Riding Hood seen as about sexuality, fails to grok that the Persephone story, on a deeper level, is saying that we can regain our real self, our innocent self, become as little children, and so on. And that in doing so, endlessly, we can live forever. That nothing wonderful is ever lost. Like wonderful aspects of self relegated to the unconscious by the conscious mind — which would be the Zeuses, Hadeses, and even Demeters of the world — and repressed through harsh cruel and painful means as would be any rape; still they are not lost. The Vietnam War veteran can regain his humanity, when he breaks down and cries, as I heard a few evenings ago on the nightly news. He wandered America in post-Vietnam PTSD despair. Much like a modern day and male Demeter. He even bicycled across the country, mimicking the Chinese person wandering over all of China looking for the donkey he was riding. Yet when this veteran was working as a laborer years later, and a documentary was broadcast on television about Vietnam, he broke down and cried for hours. And, as he put it, he was finally healed; his PTSD ended. He had regained his self.
In any case and for other reasons, we have a tale — being like myths are, so multileveled and aspected — describing the loss of a daughter to a cruel world infected with the misogynistic lusts and powers of men. This is at the most superficial level. Just like the Red Riding Hood tale, the obvious and most at-hand interpretation has it to be about sex. Probably this pattern in stories has something to do with the fact that Freud saw everything as imbued with sexual meaning, only. We can give Freud great credit for having descended at least this one level down into the cellar of the mind.
However, on another level, it is about a woman’s loss of herself as she gets older. On another, it is about the “loss of innocence” in the womb which happened at the onset of the prenatal hell of the PMEs. And in still another of its aspects it is reflecting a mother’s loss of connection to a daughter, because of any of the falls from grace. This is an aspect that a woman like Maureen Murdock was keen to notice. She was bewailing the fate of girls in patriarchal societies being programmed to masculine ethics and constraints, grilled to be obedient and serving of the male elites and elders in corporations and society, and losing both her self, but also her connection to her mother. You see, male ethics sees relationship as inferior and to be thrown below one in the quest for achievement and reward in a male world.
However I would add that, vice versa, the mother also loses connection with her daughter. We know this happens on the flip side of the daughter-mother dynamic when the young woman takes off into the sterile world of society. Yet it happens even earlier, the later loss is only the more discernable fractal of what has already been. This early early fractal occurs when the daughter, as prenate, has her existence taken up with the suffering of the prenatal hell. Mothers have an intuitive link with the unborn. So it is something to consider what might be the feelings of the mother while her baby is undergoing such hell.
It is said, we are “marinated in the unconscious of the mother,” in the womb. Yet this is only the half of it. I will speculate that the mother, on some level of awareness, picks up on the distress of her baby. Certainly, when the baby kicks a lot, during the third trimester, the mother is aware that the baby is not having such a happy time in there. I have heard mothers tell their stories of what they felt and what they did when they were aware their prenate was upset in the womb. I have related elsewhere how one doctor had his patients sit up straight after an amniocentesis to save the mother from the truly heart-breaking sound of her baby crying … while still in the womb! In any case, this awareness by the mother that her baby inside her is taken up with distress and has lost her connection to her is the earliest fractal of a Demeter losing her kore.
So it would seem that to some extent the mother’s blissful time of connection with her baby also is diminished when the prenate is turned away from a connection with her to a full on struggle to survive, to breathe, to tolerate nausea and burning and oppressive, claustrophobic-like containment. This pattern is only repeated in modern times at a woman’s time of youth, when the daughter goes off into the world, leaving behind an empty nest and a mother alone.
Indeed, in this conceptualization, sexual intercourse during this time in the womb as well is extremely traumatic to a prenate, much like a dark god appearing out of an opening in the earth into one’s wombular surround, where one is busy picking flowers, which is to say, multiplying cells endlessly — the hundred-petaled narcissus — in this grand creation of oneself as a Formular being.
Then at a later fractal, mothers also lose connection with their daughters at the time of the primal scene, which, in this case, is seen to be perpetrated primarily by the father. For it was Zeus who arranged for Hades to abduct Persephone — with Hades, again, representing the god’s, i.e., Zeus’s, darker self, much like all gods must be split up into dark and light to keep us from being conflicted about our parents, and to maintain a positive image of our fathers … oh, and of our god. Clearly, at the primal scene the daughter identifies with the mother, traditionally. However, the usual reason for this is often because of the irrational controlling, demands, and, often, abuse, even sexual, of the daughter by the father. Indeed, in a great many instances more than we would ever want to know, Hades raping Persephone, while she still a kore, a maiden, a girl, is representing the actual situation of fathers sexually using their daughters. This has special credibility in that it is a myth that came out of an era in history and in a place, Greece, where children were routinely used sexually.5
And of course, in its most obvious correlation with this Veil — that of Identity and the rites of passage in patriarchal cultures especially — it represents the daughter being taken away from her mother at adolescence. The four- or five-year-old girl may have become identified with the mother at the primal scene, yet that early blissful and happy relationship, which some mothers have with their daughters in infancy and childhood, is usually lost once the girl’s attention is forced — at the instigation of men, notice, Zeus and Hades — into a focus on her role in society, which in the nearest and most obvious instance has to do with the husband or lover. Yes, Demeter’s longing for her daughter is also representing, on its surface, a mother losing her daughter in marriage, too.
Our Prodigal Wandering
Lastly, the deepest fractal of all has the wandering of Demeter representing our initial removal of Divinity when coming into Form from No-Form. This has everything to do with the final Veil — Veil Seven, which we get to in the third book of Dance of the Seven Veils — which is about conception and specifically the arising of sperm and ovum from no-thingness. In this fractal, Demeter represents the generic Ego of all of us, frantic and searching after having been robbed of Self and having such a precious thing— one’s Divine and real self — be associated with a dark and dirty place a hell or underworld and a Hades figure or a devil, when, unsullied, it is actually our Divinity. Or, as I, following in Jung’s footsteps, am wont to repeat, “One first sees an angel as a devil.” In this distortion, if nothing else, one is left looking in the wrong direction one’s entire life, for the goal is kept hidden behind the darkened Veil, much the same as the way Demeter pulls a veil over herself prior to her wandering.
The rest of the Demeter-Persephone myth has to do with, as I mentioned, mostly what Demeter goes through above ground. While Persephone, below, is rarely seen or heard of. She is described once as being in bed, beside a lounging Hades but being none too happy about it. While at this time Demeter, searching madly, looks everywhere, prays to everyone, beseeches and reprimands the gods, especially Zeus. She does not refresh herself — eat, drink, bathe, or change her clothing — and she travels from Athens to Eleusis, searching “the whole world.”
Divinity Remembered
Indeed, and this is significant, she takes up as a nursemaid in a home, the court of Keleos and Metaneira. She forgets herself as being a goddess, immersed fully in her role. This symbolizes how we forget our Divine status through the pain and travails of life, especially that of losing ourselves at the primal scene and Identity stages of life.
It is only after Demeter has been challenged about her seemingly reckless actions regarding the child for whom she is providing care, named Demophon … about which action she knows better than her critic, Metaneira, on an intuitive level … that she, in anger, reveals herself. In revealing herself she remembers herself.6 Again and again we see this pattern, as well, where someone is triggered into a display of real and authentic emotion — righteous rage and indignation, grief and weeping — and only then comes back to his or her real self … realizes their Divinity, as in this case … comes hOMe to themselves, and is healed, centered again at the axis mundi of the world as rooted in themselves, and becomes whole.
The Tao of Funny God
Another important incident that happens along the way, in Demeter’s state of forgetfulness about her Divinity, relates somewhat to what I have termed The Tao of Funny God. In this — seminal ideas of which include “silliness is next to godliness,” the Cosmic Giggle, the peek-a-boo nature of life, and the need to “lighten up” in response to darkness — we discover the highest and most Divine response to tragedy is, in fact, comedy. This occurrence — causing Demeter to smile and breaking her cloud of gloom, just before breaking her fast — happens with the jesting of Iambe, who in Clement of Alexandria’a rendition of the myth is called Baubo.
This is the Joker, or Trickster, aspect of mythology and comes out in all kinds of ways, often ribald and insulting in a raucous and teasing way. It is the way the game of life is revealed to be a game and to be arbitrary and ultimately inconsequential. For we are all immortal, and what we think is real is all, merely, the struttings of peacock actors upon an ephemeral stage engaged in the play for the simple fun of it. Whereas Reality is ultimately Being Awareness Bliss (Sat-chit-ananda), and all painful dark suffering aspects of it are merely the distortions seen in the reflections of that in the pond of human existence.
The Return
Other things to notice in this creation of a “hero’s” cycle in the form of a girl’s experiences in early life, include, for starters, that the mother’s longing is partially satisfied. In the myth, because of the mother’s insistence, Demeter’s insistence, Persephone is allowed to come back to Earth, but only for two-thirds of the year, which is symbolized as the seasons of growth and harvest. Whereas she must live in darkness the rest of the time.
This is saying that usually the mother rebonds with her daughter after her daughter’s marriage through the alignment of their roles and their common tasks as women and their common experiences as a mother and parental family member. At this time, the identification with the mother begun in childhood, catalyzed by the primal scene, is now at its greatest, as much in alignment as it will ever be.
It is also saying that the myth, depicting a girl’s rite of passage, has her emerging back into the light, into society, but now she is returned to Demeter; she is identified with her role as mother, not just wife, and as the myth tells it, the crops grow, the flowers bloom, the trees bear fruit, it is springtime blossoming, and summertime booming, and life goes on — held aloft and immortal by the efforts of women in their bringing ever new life into the world and by their labors, ever creating and processing the food that will sustain the rest of those in their societies.
Yet, like Riding Hood and others, there is a deeper meaning, one that is consistent with this deeper interpretation of the myth as that of a person searching for her real and authentic self — her Divinity.
It is in this interpretation of the myth that it carries over, not merely as a rite of passage for young girls into womanhood, but into a process of personal transformation — a great mystery. For this tale of Demeter and Persephone is the structure of and was re-created endlessly in the most popular esoteric rites of ancient times — the Eleusinian Mysteries.
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The Blessing, the Ultimate Gift, and the Return:
The Eleusinian Mysteries and Immortality, Vision Quests and Walkabouts, Reunion with the Real Self
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“…there are bad ways and good ways to go about this process of transformation, of passage from one state to another. Wrong-headed ways correlate with patriarchal cultures and rob a person of one’s true self, in conformity with someone else’s. Whereas authentic ways manifest the real self … or they take one in that direction or reorient one to face toward it. In any case, they do exactly the opposite.”
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The ancient Greek rites, the Eleusinian Mysteries, were performed for approximately two thousand years, beginning as early as the sixteenth century BCE. Demeter, who, along with Persephone, was the central figure in the Mystery was worshipped at Eleusis, in fact, even longer, up till the Nineteenth Century.
The Eleusinian Mysteries
The rites, centered in Greece, and in particular Eleusis, were performed for participants over a great expanse of the ancient world. A surprisingly large number of people participated in them, as they were open to most classes of the population. Anyone who spoke the Greek language, with the one exception of murderers who had yet to make amends, could take part in them. The ranks of the participants included many notables, including Plato, Epictetus, Plutarch, and Socrates, philosophers; the playwrights, Euripides and Sophocles; Cicero, the statesman; the poet, Pindaros; and Alcibiades, a military leader. As many as three thousand people at a time went through the initiation.1
Its Origins
Lincoln makes the case that they were originally rites of passage for girls that became widespread and democratized to all citizens with the transition from a tribal to an urban society. He speculates that these rites for adolescent females — with other participants, including men, taking on different roles in it — were performed in prehistory as early as 1800 BCE.2 In his words, “these tribal initiations were transformed, becoming elective cults into which individuals might be inducted and through which they would be promised salvation. In other words, puberty initiations became Mystery initiations.”3 If he is correct, we must assume such pubertal rites of passage were of a particular kind, quite unusually productive of authentic transformation. You will see what I mean as I describe what happened during the rites, and you apply the idea that young women had perhaps undergone it, initially.
Campbell, for his part, relates this comparability between the Eleusinian Mysteries and women’s rites by stating simply that the Mysteries have the same structure as the Thesmophoria festival. That is a women’s festival which dates back to pre-Homeric times, prior to the rise of the later robust patriarchality of Greece with its dominance of male gods. Hence, it goes back to the time of the reign of the goddess, during the Pelasgian period of the bronze age when Crete and Troy were at their apex of influence and power.4 Thus Campbell does not advance a claim that the one morphed into the other. He simply states that both existed, one more prevalent earlier in time, and that they have great similarities.
Its Re-Creation of the Myth
In these Mysteries, the ritual participants reportedly go through a re-creation of Persephone’s descent into the underworld, and, by some accounts, they observe her ascension back to Earth to remarkable effect. At the beginning of the rite, they re-create Demeter’s wandering from Athens to Eleusis in search of her daughter in a ceremonial procession of fourteen miles which re-creates several events of the myth along the way.
Just before reaching the temple vicinity at Eleusis they cross a bridge, and in a sort of re-creation of the part of the myth where Iambe — or Baubo, depending on the version — engages in obscene jesting which breaks Demeter’s gloom, the most important of the participants are mocked and insulted. People, with their heads covered, show up to take part in this aspect of it, and, like some kind of ancient “roast,” they jest obscenely, mocking the “celebrities” and powerful, to the amusement of all.5 This amounts to a breaking down of class and status barriers — a form of social inversion — which we see frequently in ancient rituals. It is as if for a time the tension within hierarchic societies is eased, which is a benefit to the community for the greater stability that comes from such an occasional catharsis. My guess is that it is something which also aids in the psychospiritual process to come, for it would seem such notables would need the most help in surrendering their considerable egos to the visionary experiences that will be elicited.
The Mystai in the earliest re-creations of Demeter’s wandering are dressed in black for their journey, similar to Demeter; and they proceed carrying torches, at the end of the journey, just as Demeter did. They participate in a fast for the duration of the rite, nine days, just as Demeter did not eat for that period. And they end their fast with the reputedly psychedelic concoction, the kykeon. Just as Demeter, it was a drink of water and barley, though with a bit of mint.
Its Catalyst
I need to make note here, for those not already aware of it, that fasting creates a really powerful psychoactive state, very conducive to entering into nonordinary states of consciousness. Refraining from food is a technique used the world around as part of this pulling to the side the Veil between the natural and supernatural in such events, as I will explain in a bit, as it occurs in vision quests also.
Furthermore, it is widely speculated that the drink given the participants, a re-creation of the drink, the kykeon, given Demeter by Metaneira, was a psychoactive substance. Grof relates how it might have been something similar to LSD and that it was likely something containing alkaloids of ergot.6 Such compounds are found naturally in the fungi that grows on barley. Others have proposed different entheogenic agents; Terence McKenna was among those who claim it was a variety of magic mushrooms.
Its “Big Reveal”
Thus the Mystai — which is the term used for the participants in the rites — undergo an initiation akin to a heroine’s journey or heroic quest. In it, they, identified with Demeter, and at other times Persephone, confront their inner darkness — go into the “land of the dead” — and then have revealed to them the immortal nature of all beingness. Like the Thesmophoria, the ancient seed-time festival, which had three components of “downgoing,” termed Kathodos; “fasting,” termed Nesteia; and “upcoming,” termed Anodos, the Mysteries also were structured about a symbolic death and rebirth, a downgoing and upcoming, a Kathodos and Anodos.7
Thus it is likely — a case Lincoln astutely advances — that it is Persephone who comes forth, at the end of the Eleusinian rites, not merely, or at least not only, a shaft of wheat or a phallus. I need to agree in that I hardly think that a mystery going on for two millennia and practiced widely throughout the ancient world was simply a variation on an Octoberfest, a Greek Festivities or Sea Food Celebration — as some places might celebrate their heritage or their primary commercial product — nor a Garlic Celebration, as they might have around the town of Gilroy, California, accenting its primary agricultural one.
That a shaft of wheat, alone, would be the culmination of a several-week-long ordeal, including fasting, psychedelics, and much preparation and effort in its execution clearly amounts only to the musings of dimly imagining and secular academics, fearful of venturing outside their paradigm of economic forces — fitting with a capitalist system. One based, as it is, as well on productivity and industry, and seeing the entire ancient world as a step-by-step progression to our “glorious” present in the ability to acquire “things,” that is, goods, and consumables. Thus, they would see the advent of agriculture as the big event being revealed. That is a paradigm we have gone way beyond by now, in understanding the farther reaches of human experience and the psyche. Nevertheless, scholarly circles remain burdened with both capitalist as well as dogmatic Christian notions, which hardly embrace possibilities of psychedelic experience, nor of spiritual transformation under a “pagan” aegis. So it is unlikely they will get it right, when their prejudice would be to downplay, or even disparage, these ancient goings-on.
Alternately it is said that what is revealed is a phallus. Of course this would make it at least acceptable to psychoanalysts who — following Freud in attributing to everything only that first level down of understanding, where everything appears to be about sexuality — would see a prick, a dong, a dick as being the “big reveal.” It strikes me as a strange consistency that an academic paradigm that would step back in alarm upon reading the words fuck, screw, and even make love … and instead need to look indirectly at sex through a polished mirror of a shield and dub such activities as cohabiting, or “laying with her,” or “claiming his bride” … would, ignoring the obvious spiritual transformation, find a great revelation in a direct acknowledgment of our sexual selves. This, however much they too might couch the appearance of the phallus in words putting it in the heavens as some Divine Creative Principle. We will see in a chapter forthcoming how one’s words, when lacking in substance, often get capitalized so as to obscure their inconsequential nature … Divine Masculine, Divine Feminine, Adult, Child, Parent, and so on.
An example of this kind of embellishment of a trivial thought — this time in relation to the shaft of wheat — is where the early Christian bishop, though with no personal experience of it, wrote that what was produced at the end was an ear of grain, “that great and marvelous mystery of perfect revelation, a cut stalk of grain.”8 Such hyperbole reminds again of the meme mentioned earlier about Queen Elizabeth: “Never doubt the power of a great costume to fool a great many people.” I suppose this is on my mind for in Campbell’s many works that I have read he does quite a bit of this. How I know this is that where there is clearly a prenatal or perinatal component or origin to the thing in question, which I can see clearly, he, lacking this perspective, or timid about advancing it within an academic paradigm that does not acknowledge it, falls in line with other of the patriarchal scholars of his era and resorts to quite a bit of exaltation of the unimportant. Quite tedious. Sorry. Had to get that off my chest.
No. Rather it is Persephone herself who appears at the end of the ritual — in dramatic fashion, with extraordinary stage lighting, a loud and reverberating strike upon a huge gong, many special effects, you see — as the changed woman, reunited with her real self, i.e., her mother, Demeter … her Divinity, the Goddess. Lincoln explains, “Such a gong was used in Athenian theater to simulate the crash of thunder, and in the Eleusinian context … it signified the bursting open of the underworld. The fire that Herakles refers to … seems to have been dramatic stage lighting for the goddess’ epiphany. This spectacle must have excited awe and reverence in the Mystai, who, having become Demeter, mourned as she mourned, searched as she searched, suddenly received their daughter back in a blaze of light.”9
While it is true that other accounts have it that a shaft of wheat is what is displayed to great awe and acclaim at the culmination, it is speculated that both were part of the reveal. For in both cases, the mystery revealed is that of immortality.
Immortality and the Eleusinian Reveal
It is no coincidence that Plato, who underwent the Eleusinian ritual, believed also in the transmigration of the soul, or reincarnation. It is said that the ultimate revelation of the Mysteries was that death does not exist and that only transformations occur in Nature; that we humans are immortal souls temporarily fit in seemingly mortal bodies; that humans when ceasing to exist in one dimension are born into another plane of existence or some other body. This is the significance of the shaft of wheat which, as a seed, shows that the plant continues on, is immortal. And that we are as well.
At the risk of a distraction, I wish to share my own thoughts on this, which I found, after the fact, were remarkably alike to what I think is being shown through the presentation of the seed, or shaft of wheat, in the Mysteries. This is from my book, Funny God (2014), in a chapter title, Chapter 18, that is itself informative, “Death, Dying, and Immortality: Human’s Big Mistake and the Misunderstood Tragedy of Human Gilgameshs.”
In this Funny God book, I advance an argument about how plants and seeds are messages about reincarnation and human immortality. I say this message is embedded in the Gilgamesh myth, where he is told that a particular plant contains the secret to immortality. In the text, we are in a classroom setting and are discussing Gilgamesh’s procurement of a boxthorn plant, which he was told contained the secret to immortality. As I explain it there,
“Okay, well each of the berries have those ten seeds. Those berries fall from the bush. Did the bush die? No, of course not. It is still alive in its present form, plus the seeds are still alive … for they each can grow into another plant. When the bush actually is taken away … I won’t say dies … well, does it not still exist? Those seeds still exist. Some have become plants themselves.
“So, did the plant die and another one, separated from it, come into being? No, right? But that’s the way we think of it. We are always focusing on what is left behind, those corpses, those tossed off skins, those cocoons.… In this case, we say the plant dies because we observe the shriveled up dry remains of what the seed was … ‘in its former life.’
“[Silent pause.]
“Okay, maybe that wasn’t very clear. Let’s say the plant transforms, like a snake does. Follow the journey of the seed, to make this clearer. Is the plant having ‘offspring’ … seeds and small plants … separate from it, after which it dies? That’s how we humans think of ourselves, of course. Or is the seed continually finding ways, by growing new plants … a lot like the snake grows new skin … to keep itself alive forever. From the perspective of the seed, it transforms into a plant, which transforms into a seed, again, round and round again, endlessly, making it immortal.
“So the plant … every plant … demonstrates exactly what Gilgamesh said he wanted. He wanted to become young again … thriving, strong, and good lookin’ … again and again, endlessly. That’s pretty much exactly what in the book it says he wanted. And Gilgamesh was told that the plant contained the secret to eternal youth. Well, didn’t the plant, the flower, have exactly that quality? Did it not, in simply being itself, demonstrate the secret of immortality?”10
This in mind, I have no problem that a shaft of wheat was a revelation. However I believe it would only have been supplemental to, and demonstrative of, the principle of immortality. Which would have been most awe-inspiringly revealed in the appearance of someone acting as the reborn Persephone. Her reappearance shows that, having gone to the “underworld,” the “land of the dead,” someone does not actually die. Indeed, one is eternally reborn. Death is not the end, it is a migration to another “place,” from which one steps back, then returns, again and again. In my terminology, one is forever going from the No-Form State to the Form State. And why? Well, we Divinities do it for the fun of it. And no, I am not being facetious; I explain that theory in several of the works of mine already mentioned.
The Eternal Reset
The other revelation of the Mystery apparently had also to do with what I was referring to last chapter about Persephone representing the original self, which, though defiled, could be again regained. Indeed, Plato’s words on the rite are that “the ultimate design of the Mysteries … was to lead us back to the principles from which we descended, … a perfect enjoyment of intellectual [spiritual] good.”11 How that corresponds with the revelation about immortality is that it is saying not only are we immortal but we also are capable of an eternal “reset.” We can return to a more pure, undefiled … authentic, real, or Divine … state of being. Apparently that we do that unendingly, with each reincarnation. And since we, through the process of experiencing our life, “descend” from such a Divine state, Plato’s words are another way of describing the Falls from Grace, which I have proposed as the way that happens.
In any case, it is the same revelation, when you consider it, whether it is the appearance of Persephone, arisen from the land of the dead, the underworld; or the unveiling of a shaft of wheat — which would be the world-at-large marker of her return to Earth. The stalk of wheat shows that life goes on, it does not end. It is hardly just about having invented agriculture! No, its meaning is the important one: Whether it is death, or suffering, or initiation into other ways of being, life does not end; it simply morphs and transforms.
Indeed, it was said that the Mysteries “main gift” to its participants was the awareness that death does not exist, that it is an illusion. For life does not end, it only transforms, changes shape. Beyond even that, it grows and gets better in the process of these transitions. Compare this to how the girl herself is transformed, through tragedy, and is not lost, despite everything. So the shaft of wheat, in addition to immortality, also represents growth. For despite all its tribulations of planting — going “down below” again, its Kathodos or “downgoing”; its sprouting, like having a revelation in a Nesteia state; and then its struggling up out of the earth, its “upcoming” again, or its Anodos — much still will come from the tiniest of its seeds.
Death and Rebirth Pattern
The point of all this is that whether in rites of transformation, as in the Eleusinian Mysteries, or some particularly profound rites of passage for girls, the pattern is the same:
The process of death and rebirth not only shows up again and again but it is the natural way, the authentic way of growing, the authentic manner of a rite of passage…. It is the authentic way to bring girls into womanhood and to being members of their society and families as fully alive persons, and not as cogs in some male-dominated cultural concoction, which are put in place through the machinations, over time, of powerful elites, controlling the populace for ends that exalt and benefit merely themselves.
Vision Quests and Walkabouts
Finally then, and with the Eleusinian Mysteries and its messages in mind, let us take a look at the structure of the vision quest. I have discussed, in previous chapters, how the heroine’s journey and the authentic hero’s cycle have elements, like the pattern in the Eleusinian Mysteries, of descent and return, of “downgoing” and “upcoming,” of death and rebirth. Now, the vision quest is the prototypical example of the death-rebirth cycle as carried out throughout the world. While it is associated with Native American practices, forms of it appear in various cultures; arguably, the Australian walkabout is one of them. We will see in the next chapter how its pattern of death-rebirth forms the structure of a girl’s rite of passage in an Amazonian culture, no less.
In the vision quest, like the examples given so far — Ariana’s journey, the hero’s quest, the heroine’s journey, the tale of Persephone, the Eleusinian Mysteries — we have this same pattern of going into a place away from society (into a liminal state), confronting hardship suffering darkness, receiving a blessing, a gift of inestimable value, and returning it to the world to share. The Australian walkabout, as a boy’s rite of passage, has the same structure and function.
The vision quest is a generic term for a number of initiatory practices, typically associated with Native American cultures, which have particular components. Most often, the vision quest is undertaken by a young man entering adulthood as a rite of passage. Although it can be taken up for all kinds of reasons and purposes at other times of one’s life, it is most often to do with establishing a male adult identity or role in the community.
What typically happens in a vision quest is that the initiand, supported by his tribe, will go off by himself into a natural setting, where he himself alone will be. Sometimes the site is one that is used for these purposes, in which case it might be a place used for generations. This is not always the case, however. It always involves a complete fast, typically for four days and nights, though that varies, and it might be undetermined.
The young man will leave himself open to be taught by the supernatural forces. In the case of a rite of passage, what is sought is advice on what should be his role in the community, his purpose in this life. The quester might call out to spirits and/or pray for a vision for help in this decision. Oftentimes the response will be in the form of some kind of Nature symbolism — an “animal,” i.e., a planetmate, might come in some form of vision. Later this planetmate will likely be at least one of the “power animals” that the man might rely on throughout his life. The revelation might instead, or additionally, involve forces of Nature.
Very often the result will be the revelation of some bit of knowledge, known or unknown, of benefit to the community. Which knowledge the young man is designated to bring back and share with his tribe; perhaps for the rest of his life it will engage him. The knowledge received might also direct him to apprenticeship with someone who has mastered the particular skill or occupation to which the quester is being directed. This part is akin to the hero’s cycle where at the midpoint or climax of the experience, an item of “inestimable value” is acquired. Regardless, the pattern, like all the rest, including the Eleusinian Mysteries, is one of going out or away or “down below”; followed by trials and suffering and very often including a leaving off of any food; and completing with a coming back to the community, an ascension or “upcoming,” and bringing back something acquired, which is of personal, and often community, benefit.
Now, the walkabout, associated more with Australian aboriginal societies than anywhere else, is similar. The walkabout also typically — though like the vision quest it can be entered into at any age — is taken up at the Identity stage of life for an aboriginal youth, usually between the ages of ten and sixteen. What happens in a walkabout is that the initiand will leave his tribe and go off into the wilderness, sometimes for as long as six months. It is considered a rite of passage into manhood, and it is considered conducive to the spiritual, as well as community-related, transformation of the person.
The purposes of the walkabout go far beyond merely becoming a man, for they include healing, spiritual awakening, even enlightenment. As with the vision quest, it is the liminal state — the one outside the community that is not structured in any predetermined way — which allows for the new and transformative to enter. Usually the seeker will fend for himself during the period. Clearly they will undergo trials and some amount of suffering, which has a function of focusing the mind, purifying it of the trivial and inconsequential of life. They will leave themselves, like the vision quest, open to learn.
And they will expect that they indeed will learn through their experience — undetermined and decided only by fate as it necessarily will be. Dreams and visions will play important parts in their enlightening. So they will return having been somewhat transformed, perhaps having had some revelation or other. Again, like all the rest, there is the pattern of leaving off of society, journeying and suffering alone, being taught by the Universe and given to from the supernatural, and returning in a better state of being or with some new knowledge, direction, understanding, or the like.
The Good and the Bad, the Lunar and the Solar
The point I am making in all these examples is that there are bad ways and good ways to go about this process of transformation, of passage from one state to another. Wrong-headed ways correlate with patriarchal cultures and rob a person of one’s true self, in conformity with someone else’s. Whereas authentic ways manifest the real self … or they take one in that direction or reorient one to face toward it. In any case, they do exactly the opposite of the former.
Also, I am making the case that whether it is bad or good depends upon the kind of interpretation given to the corresponding mythology — a more superficial one, one that is convenient to those in power in the culture, and a deeper one, one that is in an alignment with supernatural powers beyond oneself, one’s deepest self, one’s Divinity, and is beneficial to the person directly and to society indirectly.
I explained how Red Riding Hood and Snow White have superficial understandings that are actually counterproductive to an enlarged overstanding, yet which aid authorities in either the enculturation they are trying to bring about or in the coverup of their deeds they are always keen to facilitate. I discussed above how scholars themselves have this tendency to trivialize the revelations of the Mysteries as to make it about the advent of agriculture, or about sexuality, only. And I pointed out how that fits with the prejudices and desires of a dominating paradigm, truly ignorant of and undesiring of anything approaching the esoteric or spiritually transformative.
Yet with these surface interpretations, opportunities for profound enhancement of self are missed; deeper meanings are not realized; and the benefits and blessings of prior generations, not to mention of the supernatural Itself — both of which are embedded in these stories — are as wasted as seed thrown upon the driveway … or pearls tossed in front of swine. To reap these rewards is in itself a good reason to see through the Veils, as this Dance of the Seven Veils is intended to help bring about in the reader.
In any case, this duality of intention accounts for the fact that we see both types of interpretations and understandings throughout cultures. I daresay we can evaluate cultures, as Lincoln would have us do, based on the kind of interpretation made — either higher or lower — of similarly structured myths and their corresponding rituals.
Indeed this book is about learning to peel back such layers to get to the deeper meanings — or to pull to the side the Veils of more superficial and convenient-to-others understandings of processes around us — so as to enable us to align with deeper, more personally transformative overstandings and revelations.
We will see, in the chapters forthcoming on solar and lunar mythologies, theologies, psychotechnologies, and modalities, how distinct such interpretations are and how crucial it is to choose one over the other. For one of them diminishes the self and constrains societies along lines decided in the past and for established interests whereas the other expands and transforms the self, and by extension, society. And this latter corresponds to a society that is bountiful and beneficent to its members and open to their unique personalities and abilities.
However before that, let us take a look at that girls’ rite of passage mentioned — the one where these forces are harnessed and allied with a positive trajectory and which results in a self, not constrained to an elite’s purposes, but to the revelation, like that of Persephone to the eyes of the congregation of the initiands, of the birth of a new maiden … the birth of a transformed person, one as worthy of a separate name — as a kore is into a Persephone — as is a caterpillar into a butterfly.
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The Birth of the New Maiden:
Light and Dark, Suffering and Transformation, and the Actual Building of a Better Girl … and Person
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“One cannot help but see this as the ideal pattern of all positive growth, in fact: One does this in psychotherapy where clients confront their inner demons accompanied by the soothing presence of the facilitator. It also is what ideally should happen at birth, where neonates suffer so much to be born, and postnatally; yet if they are aided and comforted by the helping presence, embrace, soothing words, and nursing of the mother, and other attendees, it can be quite a positive experience.”
“Suffering precedes and brings forth not only wisdom, ideally, and access to the supernatural; it also creates openings to unexpected knowledge … those gifts of ‘inestimable value.’”
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We continue now with the Tukuna girls’ rite of passage, which is thought by them to be a re-creation of the myth of Ariana, as described in Chapter 29. We see parallels with the Persephone-Demeter myth and the other processes I have been describing. Notice especially the descent into the underworld and how that corresponds to a regression to the womb, for the purpose of a higher or expanded sense of self. Not coincidentally, then, its name expresses its result — the birth of a new girl, a new, now experienced, maiden, rather, adult woman.
The Process of the New Maiden
The Tukuna rite of passage is called the Festa das Mocas Novas, meaning “festival of the new maiden”; it is also referred to as voreki cheii, translated as “drink of the initiand.” In this process, which goes on for over three days, the girl is thought to be open to supernatural powers, as wombular experience tends to be. She is also threatened by dangerous beings, as happens to us all in utero as we take up our third trimester of residence there. These demons are called the Noo, and the girl is said to be in danger of having them “kill her, suck the viscera from her body, and carry her empty body to their domain.”1 Now that’s some pretty dang poisonous placenta there!
The Ascent to the Overworld
On the other hand, such supernatural powers include celestial forces, much as Ariana’s “tour” included a residence in a heavenly realm above. Such beings of the overworld — like the spirit forces and animal spirits as divined by vision questers — bring knowledge, solace, and advice. Indeed the experience might include, as did Ariana’s, being taken up to the home of the immortals.
This aspect has even more parallels with vision quests. As Lincoln relates, “This tradition of immortals appearing to the young at puberty has played a crucial part in Tukuna messianic movements, almost all of which began with a vision experienced by a pubescent girl or boy. In such visions, immortals appear and give the girl or boy instructions for the assistance of their people. Standing at the threshold between childhood and adulthood, the young are thought to be receptive to the supernatural presence, and the supernatural realms are particularly accessible to them.”2
The Wombular Vehicle
Now, the initiand, who is called the voreki, begins her journey in a particularly wombular place. Much as primalers might go into a primal box3 to access their inner issues and to re-experience the traumas that have been unconsciously moving within them and compelling their self-sabotaging actions and emotions, the Tukuna voreki is placed in a “seclusion chamber.” The chamber is constructed inside the family’s home, much like a womb is inside a mother. It is made to be over six feet (approximately two meters) across, is circular thus wombular, and contains nothing but a small hammock for sleeping. The girl will be in insolation here.
While anthropologists once mistakenly … and in retrospect, laughably and revealingly … thought of this chamber as being defensive to keep out the evil forces, the Noo, the actual meaning of the name of the seclusion chamber, which is na-pi i, is “to go into the underworld.” Hardly a moat, this seclusion chamber, it is more a portal.
This mistake is similar to the one meditators make about mandalas when they see them as places, or “containers,” within which one must place one’s consciousness to be protected from “evil forces” and “demons,” versus as portals to other realms. Indeed, as I pointed out in The Secret Life of Stones, mandalas — especially when noticed to be three-dimensional, spherical — represent and actually serve as vessels into other dimensions. I likened mandalas to spaceships.4 However, and although a space craft’s hull is constructed to protect its occupants from the threat of death in space — much like a primal box or a voreki’s chamber might buffer sound and other sensory interruptions from without — the main purpose of the spaceship is not to protect one, but to get one someplace! The protective function is ancillary, a necessary element to accomplish another intent. Same thing for primal boxes and the seclusion chamber. They are vehicles to other realms of existence.
Sure enough, the na-pi i of the voreki is the vessel in which, like a spaceship, she will be transported to supernatural realms — both heavenly and demonic, exactly like a primaler’s primal box. For she will be required to not merely descend to the underworld but, like Ariana, ascend to celestial realms. This fact is inscribed in symbols on the outside of the chamber. “The point is clear: when the girl exits from the underworld, she enters a totally different realm, the realm of the above.”5
The Symbolism of Surrender — Deer
One of those symbols is that of a deer, which in my opinion represents the attitude of surrender to the entire process. Vigilant, watchful surrender. This coincides with my conceptualization of the wounded deer as the precursor to the wounded healer, or centaur, or Chiron, as I explain in my book, Wounded Deer and Centaurs (2016). Truly the universality of our understandings of so much or our symbolism is astounding. We seem all to have the same inner code, inner language, regardless our heritage or culture.
Why, you ask? Well, we have pretty much the same outside world, populated with pretty much the same creatures, and, now this, pretty much the same inner world of feelings and life experiences, regardless the widely varying ways these realities are expressed in language. It should not be as surprising as it has been to see this. For one thing, the perinatal, and especially prenatal, experiences of us all, which are the root of all this symbolism, are relatively unvarying across cultures.
Similar to my interpretation, in Tukuna culture the deer is a symbol also of something that brings gifts to humanity … remember that part about the item of “inestimable value” that is part of this cycle? At any rate, further consideration of the deer symbolism has it that it represents a switch from a “wild, uncivilized state to one of peace, well-being, and productivity.”6 So again, as in all the processes mentioned where pain precedes euphoric integration — as in primal therapy, descents to the underworld such as Persephone’s, Red Riding Hood’s, or the pattern of a holotropic breathwork experience or an Eleusinian Mystery rite — we see that unruly, chaotic, and uncomfortable states come before blissful expansive ones. That the path to “heaven” leads through “hell.”
The Symbolism of Birth — Birds and Butterflies
Wombular and perinatal symbolism abounds in the Tukuna circumstances. After the girl emerges from her isolation, the song that’s sung goes, “our voreki has come among us, all covered with plumage.”7 Which plumage signifies the amniotic sac as well as the thick, white, phlegmy, cheese-like layer on the baby and prenate called the vernix caseosa, which covers one before and after birth. The vernix is a sealant against the drying effects of amniotic fluid in utero, and it dries into a powder that acts as a kind of talcum after birth. Consider that it has a visual and functional resonance with bird feathers.
Similarly, the initiand’s release from the seclusion is symbolized by birds and flight, just as our birth is signified the world around. Additionally, “like a caterpillar [in chrysalis] our voreki was placed in seclusion by us!”8 is more of the song. Which also shows the death-rebirth symbolism, i.e., the chrysalis, that is being worked here. As Lincoln writes, “The chamber is thus compared to a cocoon, into which the girl went as a caterpillar, immature, plain, and terrestrial, and from which she emerges a butterfly, mature, beautiful, and celestial.”9
The First Trimester and Embryo Symbolism
Backing up, let us take a look at the beginning of the process. It is instigated by the onset of menses; whereupon, as per custom, the girl retreats to the forest … another womb symbol. She hides, and her mother, like some Amazonian Demeter in search of her Persephone, seeks her out in the forest. The girl is not unlike an embryo in the womb wishing to be discovered by its mother. To be found, the girl — mimicking the beating of a heart, it would seem — taps two sticks together rhythmically to call out to her. I see in this a fetus hoping its heart beat will awaken the mother to its separate existence within her.
The girl is found, in this way. The mother takes the girl back to the maloca, which is the family home, and is placed in the chamber constructed within it. This is much like a mother having a baby inside her — as home is a symbol of mother — and specifically inside her womb, the seclusion chamber. Here it will gestate as a fetus, or in the case of the initiand, be transformed. Thus begins the voreki’s seclusion within the chamber, in which, like Christ in the tomb, she remains for three days, cut off from the outside world.
The Prenatal Hell Symbolism
Sure enough, again like Christ descending into hell during his three days after death, during these three days she is thought to have gone into the underworld, and to be surrounded by those dangerous Noo, just like we are surrounded by our poisonous placenta during our prenatal hell. It is said the Noo threaten her life, which most assuredly is the way we felt in the womb as we struggled in the cramped place, lacking sufficient oxygen, and were both filled up with and surrounded by “blackness,” the backed-up toxins come of insufficient blood flow. (Recall the PMEs, as described in Chapter 5.)
Also similar, the danger for the initiand, like it is for us in the womb, is said to increase over the approximate three days (akin to three months in a womb, a trimester) until it is worst at the end.
The Symbolism of the Comforting Mother
In a charming addition to the entire process, at night the girl is aided during this process by the playing of sacred and secret music near her, just outside the chamber. Like some kind of kindly mother’s voice coming to us in our dark nights of our wombs, the music is played at the most difficult of times for the voreki to endure. “It’s always darkest” … and all. You know.
Indeed the instruments used to comfort abound with prenatal symbolism — turtleshell drums, like wombs and ovum, and bamboo horns and stamping tubes, like sperm. The music is described, as would also be a mother’s heart beat heard inside the womb, as “highly rhythmic in nature.” Again, like the soothing music, the rhythms are expected to have protective, perhaps comforting, qualities, as any letup is thought to increase the threat to the girl from the dangerous Noo. I would not be surprised to learn that someone’s re-experience of their prenatal pain to have included their mother’s heartbeat as a soothing refrain throughout the difficult time, though that is not within my re-membered experience or observation.
The ritual is even more suggestive of this time of pain inside the womb, with threats to one’s survival bringing terror, mixed with the comforting awareness of a mother’s heartbeat, indicating a Divinity’s, or Goddess’s, closeness. For the rhythmic music, which Lincoln acknowledges may have “an apotropaic function” — i.e., to ward off evil or bad luck — is alternated with music that represents the threat of the Noo. These sounds are created by wind instruments called uaricana, and are thought to be the voices of the Noo themselves. Lincoln describes this demonic element, so reflective of our time in the womb, as so, “These massive instruments produce an eldritch sound [meaning weird, sinister, ghostly], truly unearthly, and they have been described as the ‘acoustic presence’ of the spirits.”10
As one would expect, corresponding to Ariana’s cosmic tour which included sight-seeing in both celestial and darkened realms, the girl, after her period of seclusion, essentially “comes out into the light.” This is just as we all do at birth, after our experiences of prenatal hell during the final trimester.
Sequences of Heaven and Hell
Now, considering this, one might wonder why it would be that the myth of Ariana has her going to celestial realms prior to the underground. Whereas in all the others, one starts in an innocent and everyday place, is thrust into the underworld, sometimes dragged there, and only later ascends.
The answer is interesting and sheds light on the relation between myths, rites of passage, processes of psychospiritual growth, and our events, as we experienced them, in the womb. For, sure enough, if you consider Ariana’s journey, it represents the sequence of events as they happened in our lives. That is, we had a blissful time in the womb — a sojourn in “celestial” realms — which was followed by a “descent to the underworld” — that is, the onset of the PMEs, or, using Grof’s terminologies, the agonies of no-exit BPM II and the frightful struggles of BPM III.11 Being a myth, and Ariana a sort of goddess, it is no wonder it tells the story from a detached or outside place, much as a historian might relate a tale.
Whereas in our rites of passage and psychospiritual experiences of death and rebirth we begin solidly within ourselves as mortal beings, having already fallen from grace, and needing, seeking therefore, the return to the womb that might bring forth the new beginning, the new self … much like a reset of one’s wifi not working or an alt-ctrl-del to restart one’s pc when it freezes up or develops a computer glitch. Only that in human terms, what we re-emerge with is a new self, one better and more expanded than before, not merely regained. For we do not simply reset ourselves when we restart. In going back to a place of supernatural accessibility and Divine proximity, we acquire something new and of “inestimable value.” Now, if my computer did the same, I’d have something approaching an artificial intelligence by now, for how many times I’ve restarted it.
Additionally, we see that the Tukuna people themselves … well they clearly have no problem seeing the parallelism between Ariana’s journey and the process the girl undergoes. The differing sequence is not confusing to them. It is of no count; even while Ariana goes first to heaven and then to “hell,” whereas the initiand experiences first the secluded and suffering part and afterward, as I will show you shortly, the heavenly release part.
I believe the reason for that is that the Tukuna know on an intuitive level that the method of all personal growth — as we primalers and breathworkers discover in each and every one of our primal or breathwork experiences — is one in which pain precedes euphoria, struggles precipitate growth, and trials are followed by accomplishments. In the experiential psychotherapies, we know this to be the case. And we might, as I do, see our experiences in growthful terms that have us every time beginning where we are — not in the womb, but in ordinary life — and being thrust up against sorrow, trauma, and difficulties. Which derailments of the daily routine result in a retreat from life, ultimately a “regression to the womb” from which we emerge, then, much as we did at birth, into the light. So the myths are all the same, and their sequence only varies depending on where the starting point is assigned — as an adult or an embryo.
In this view, we can understand why the cycle of Ariana is the mythology — for myths often describe what actually happened to us prenatally and perinatally. And so there are no constraints upon their proceeding exactly as they did for us at the time. Whereas the rite of passage, built upon the myth, has a different purpose, that of regaining that which was lost at that time … or put another way, being expanded and revitalized by being re-freshed and re-membered by a journey back there. That is why the rites and the pattern of the processes of growth are called cycles. They take us from where we are, back into the womb, and then they bring us out again, having won something from the darkness in the process. We can merely be grateful to be illumined by mythologies which relate to us, as a story, what actually happened to us historically.12
Heaven, the Sun, and the New Maiden
Toward the end of the second day, the initiand, breaking her seclusion for this purpose only, is bedecked and festooned in a particular way. The girl had been terrified, continually, by Noo and by the frightening sounds of the instruments, which mingled with the comforting and protecting sounds of the instruments: Much as one might be both terrified by the crowdedness and lack of oxygen in the womb yet comforted by one’s mother’s heartbeat and … ideally … her soothing voice and comforting songs directed at one. (Which is another reason, the most important one, that one should speak and sing to one’s baby in utero, as we, like our “primitive” ancestors, are finally relearning to do in recent times.)
Additionally, at this point in gestation we experience the buildup of the irritating toxins surrounding us as prenates (PME 4). And much as tar and feathering, which was at one time a punishment, was a re-creation of that PME 4 time, so also the initiand is covered and surrounded by a blackness during her period within. Indeed, Lincoln tells us the girl’s skin had, during that time, been blackened with genipa dye. Then, more of icky surround was added after two days when, being dressed and decorated by her attendees, her skin is also “painted with red urucuo, onto which hawk plumage is glued.”13
You see, the toxic surround of the womb is re-created in the black genipa dye of the first two days. But by the end of the second day, elements of change and of brightening prospects are inserted — red urocuo paint and hawk plumage. Let me share Lincoln’s words on this. We can see the elements of rebirth, of BPM IV and its sense of freedom, like that of birds or angels flying, emerging. Note also in this that the dress and adornment represents a transition from the darkness of the womb, to the light of birth: It is a transitionary stage much as BPM III, or the actual struggle to be born, is the transition from the hell of the PMEs and BPM II to the euphoria of BPM IV, i.e., being born.
He writes, “Toward the end of the second day the initiand is decked out in her ceremonial regalia, which is extremely elaborate and beautiful. Her skin … is painted with red urucu, onto which hawk plumage is glued. She wears a short cotton tanga or skirt with a wide belt, from which hang strings of glass beads. Glass beads are strung into pectorals and necklaces, and bark-cloth tassels and fringe also adorn the voreki. Two or more strings of these tassels stretch from the girl’s neck to hips in front and back, each strip also containing fifteen to twenty spectacular feathers from a toucan’s tail, along with white abdominal feathers from the same bird. More toucan feathers are woven into bracelets along with long macaw feathers and bark-cloth fringe, and other plumage is scattered about the costume.”14
Note the heavy emphasis on the gluey coverings of paint, signifying amniotic fluid, the vernix, the amniotic sac, and the toxic surround; and eventually, after birth, the vernix again. Notice that the colors of the paint are black, first — symbolizing the prenatal pain and the toxins — and then red, which represents the coming out into light, dawn, birth. Pay attention as well to the significance of the feathers representing release from the womb, along with the headdress of feathers signifying the same as well as the “crowning” of the neonate upon its moving through the pelvic ring.
Lincoln continues, “Most spectacular, however, is the headdress that the voreki wears, made primarily from the brilliant red [red is the color of dawn and so is related to spiritual awakening in Hindu culture] tail feathers of the macaw, along with a few other feathers from the heron and royal hawk. Feather headgear is encountered with some frequency throughout South America and is usually worn by shamans, who hope to take on the avian mode of being and be assisted in their ecstatic ascent into the heavens.”15
Indeed these elements demonstrate the connection between the pattern of the rite of passage of this culture and that of shamanistic experiences and thus of personal growth or of hero’s cycles, vision quests, mystery rites, and the like. Of course I am adding to the understood meaning of feathers that of birth and of achieving the sense of flying and that of heaven, or euphoria, that is achieved upon birth.
“Such an undertaking is possible only for the most accomplished, and the donning of a feather crown carries with it great responsibility. Occasionally such crowns are worn by chiefs, elders, or other men of responsibility, but throughout the continent it is extremely rare for women ever to put on such an ornament.
“Beyond this general significance of feather crowns, the crown of red macaw feathers has a very specific meaning among the Tukuna and among many other tribes, particularly those of the Tukanoan language family, in which Tukuna is classified. The Desana, for instance, who regard the macaw as an embodiment of the creative energy of the sun, have a special crown made only of red and yellow feathers which may be worn by none except their priests and which they call abe bero, “sun-circle.”16
Remember that Ariana was said to have plucked, similarly, locks of red and blue hair from the Sun at the time of her flight above even the celestial plane.
Lincoln explains: “Similarly, the Koto have a special red feather crown which may be worn only by the heads of families; they call this crown maa haro, ‘feathers of the sun.’ Tukuna informants state that the sun itself wears a headdress of red macaw feathers, ‘similar to that used today by a virgin at her puberty festival.’ The crown is thus a solar diadem, by means of which the initiand partakes of the solar nature and ascends to the sun. The detailed manipulation of this crown during the Moca Nova is of the utmost importance for understanding the ceremony’s symbolism.
“According to Schultz, great care is taken, even before the voreki is dressed, that she not be permitted to see the sun. This prohibition also influences her dress, for when the feather crown is placed on her head it is pulled down over her eyes. After she has been dressed, the girl must remain in seclusion until the early morning of the ceremony’s third day. At that time her father’s brother, his wife, the initiand’s mother, and other maternal relatives enter the chamber. Her uncle cuts it open — like a cocoon — and leads the girl out, all of the relatives holding her tightly to protect her from the danger of the Noo, which is greatest at this moment.”17
The Birth of the New Maiden
Notice how it is like a birth, a good, one, in which all the pain, fear, and suffering of the preceding time is soothed and comforted away. This is much the way a newborn is, ideally, to be cuddled, comforted, and nursed by its mother after birth — called the process of bonding — so as to soothe it from all its recently experienced hell.
“These relatives dance with the girl until dawn, warding off constant assaults by the masked demons.
“Shortly before dawn, the dance swirls outside the maloca and continues there until the sun rises. At daybreak the dance halts, the girl is released by her protectors, and the feather crown is lifted from her eyes. A shaman presents a firebrand to the girl and instructs her, ‘Throw it at our enemy.’ Performance of this gesture is sufficient to break the power of the Noo, and afterward the voreki can move freely without the protection of others.
“The meaning of these gestures and peregrinations appears to depend upon a homology drawn between the local Tukuna environment and their map of the universe. If the seclusion chamber is seen as the underworld, then when the voreki steps into the maloca she effectively emerges from the subterranean realms to the earth’s surface. Here, she stands between the realm of the Noo and that of the sun, still subject more to the former than the latter [as we might be exactly at the time of birth] and still threatened by them. But with another movement — the dance procession outside the maloca — she ascends further, to the realm of the sun. This interpretation is supported by three details. First, the ceremony is orchestrated so that the girl will be outside when the sun rises, sunrise being the crucial moment when she (who heretofore was the passive victim of demonic aggression) suddenly counterattacks against her oppressors [much like we are helpless before birth but during birth we participate in the struggle]. Second, at this moment the feather crown, emblem of the sun, which served to shield her eyes from the sun, is lifted, so that she sees and basks in the full glory of the solar realm. Finally, the firebrand that she receives is a solar weapon, containing the sun’s fire, and it is with this weapon from the above that she overcomes the demons from below.”18
Lincoln goes on to explain the subsequent elements of the rite, which occur after the emergence from seclusion, now outside and in the sun … i.e., “born.” I won’t at this time go into the continued birth symbolism involved in it all or into how it lays out the exact kind of experiences we all experience after we are born, and how we typically feel about them, as one can discover upon reliving one’s birth. Maybe another time. Suffice it to say that is what is shown.
Patterns of Positive Growth
The point I am making is that what we see overall is the same pattern — as in the hero’s cycle or the heroine’s journey, the Eleusinian Mystery or a vision quest — of a descent into darkness, where suffering occurs, and through which one is transformed. In the case of the girl, the voreki, in this rite of passage we can assume this transformation. For, how would one not be changed by three days in a box with harrowing things going on? It would have to be like one’s being thrust up against all one’s fears and insecurities. Which is interwoven with copious doses of the comforting things of the world, as provided by her attendees, her community members, who are singing and playing supportive music outside her chamber.
One cannot help but see this as the ideal pattern of all positive growth, in fact: One does this in psychotherapy where clients confront their inner demons accompanied by the soothing and encouraging presence of the facilitator. It also is what ideally should happen at birth, where neonates suffer so much to be born and then again postnatally. Yet if newborns are aided and comforted by the helping presence, embrace, soothing words, and nursing of the mother, and other attendees, it can be quite the positive experience.
In the case of the initiand, then, surely the girl comes out more mature, wiser, and probably blessed. Very likely she also receives knowledge from all that, perhaps new knowledge of a sort to bring back to her community that benefits it. For this is what happens in the vision quests of adolescent boys of some Native American cultures, which have a strikingly similar structure and sequence of experiences. Suffering precedes and brings forth not only wisdom, ideally, and access to the supernatural; it also creates openings to unexpected knowledge … those gifts of “inestimable value.”
Solar-Bad, Lunar-Good
In all these things, notice that such beneficial and transformative processes — rites of passage, shamanic experiences, hero’s and heroine’s journeys, psychospiritual experiences in experiential therapies, and entheogenic experiences — all contain elements of darkness and light combined. Of lunar and solar one might say.
Notice also how different this is from rites of passage that would have one eliminate the darkness — slay it, so to speak, not look at it, or if so only indirectly — and seek to erect worlds, personalities, and thought processes only of “light.”
Of light, where pain, the darkness, is put “in a box” and “locked down,” never opened, and from which only the nervous energy of which, amorphous and rooted in unconsciousness, is “used as fuel” to “write the story of one’s life.”19 This, regardless how ultimately futile that is … possibly successful only in a delusional sense. Which delusions — with all their attendant hypocrisy and “obvious” but fake truths — also are instilled. And, much like those winged words and false honors of the patriarchy, are meant to offset all that one loses in the slaying of one’s self (along with the dragon).
Of “light”? Or one might say, to construct perspectives and behaviors that are in keeping with dictates handed down by the powers-that-be and tilted toward winning favor from those above — elites, who might shine their “glorious light” upon one when one is behaving, when one is performing as the childish good little boys and girls of society in the form of conforming underlings, sycophantic adults.
So, solar-bad; lunar-good. Let’s look at more along that line, next.
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The Care and Treatment of Dragons:
Solar and Lunar Mythologies … Fear and Intellectualizing One’s Inner Life in the Patriarchy Versus Pronoia and Surrender
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Creation of dragons in the patriarchy, rearranging furniture on the decks of the Titanic, and treading Buddha’s cartography in comfortable chairs
Going from the age of darkness and fear to the new awareness of pronoia requires faith that one will not be destroyed in the process.
“…recent explorations in consciousness bring forth the revelation that with surrender and trust one can approach the psyche … and God, for that matter.”
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Veritably all Ego psychologists and Jungians, many new-agers and spiritual adepts, and most transpersonalists espouse that one must turn away from actual immersion in the unconscious elements of self as well as of Self in the world. Operating on an assumption that if one does not “look away” one will be “destroyed” or “go mad,” they rely, instead, on the reflective power of “consciousness.”
When we look at what such psychologists and seekers actually do, however, what we see they mean by consciousness — even awareness, which is another hackneyed term explaining everything … and nothing — amounts merely to intellect and, essentially, Ego. They, being intellectuals — and thus identifying with that particular defense against their primal pain — would, understandably, think it so, would think it necessary, the only way.
Then, they say, the “evil,” the dragon, the Medusa, the obstacles of self, the injustices and cruelties of society, the feminine, feelings, birth, biology, sex, death, and the natural world can be dispatched … or handled, managed, sublimated, balanced, channeled, worst of all, controlled … using, like Perseus, the “sword” of analytical power. Meaning they can think it through, their issues, with their accompanying disruptive feelings and emotions.
Psychologists, Apologists for Patriarchy
If this is not readily apparent, in viewing Jungian thinking and other such perspectives, let me note a few things so you see what I mean.
The Reflective, yet Separating, Intellect
For, this is exactly the way the Jungian, Erich Neumann (1954), described the process in his book, The Origins and History of Consciousness. Using the Perseus myth — it is from his interpretation of Perseus that I got the notion of the reflecting consciousness in personal growth — he describes the process of individuation. He asserts that this process of personal growth is one wherein one cannot face the unconscious, represented by the Medusa, but must instead look indirectly, through a reflective shield, as one were a Perseus. Which reflective “shield,” Neumann says, is that of the intellect. Keep in mind he is using, as a model of personal growth, this patriarchal myth, which happens also to be a description of the deformation and diminution of personality that adolescents in patriarchies must undergo the world around. A description of a psychological “fall from grace,” or the erection of a Veil across true perception, as a model of personal growth? Something wrong there.
Then, Neumann proclaims, one is able to analyze, at a distance and from a detached or “transcendent” place — which, incidentally, is neither and is merely separated — the meaning of the reflections. Which representations arising of the reflective intellect are the particular symbols and archetypes that are indicators of, and denuded expressions or encapsulations of, actual, harder to face, feelings and emotions. Archetypes and symbols for the Jungian, thus, are the funnels through which the materials of the unconscious are accessed. They are the lenses, or the portals, or the windows … I would say the Veil … through which we look to see the contents of the unconscious — elements which if faced, reputedly, as Neumann stresses, are not only dangerous, but, as in the Perseus tale, can drive one insane or turn one to stone.
Experiential Immersion
Now, the contrary approach would be a Primal or experiential approach which dips below the symbols to the actual feelings and repressed memories and traumas which are the very roots of these symbols and archetypes — as you see in this book and as I will continue to make clear as we proceed in it. That is, in fact, the essence of this book: To demythologize Reality, to remove the archetypes, symbols, concepts, words, representations, all of which, like the finger pointing to the Ultimate Reality or like the map of the territory, of Reality, are not Reality itself. The Reality itself is, and can only be, one’s immediate reality, in every Now, in every moment of present, as experienced. That is why I say Experience Is Divinity. It is the Ultimate Reality … It is all we can ever know.1
So Jungian thinking — as well as most contemporary spiritual promulgations and the assumptions of all Ego psychologists and most transpersonal psychologists — stands upon and is an apologist for the kind of patriarchal thinking and attitudes of our archaic past as exemplified in creative expressions like Greek myths.
If you are wondering how Jungians can make this mistake, keep in mind that both the myths and the psychologists who interpret them are products of patriarchal cultures. One will naturally interpret what is given and handed down at its face value. Transpersonal psychologists, especially Jungians, are not any the less gullible in absorbing the mistakes of prior generations than the rest of us.
Additionally, they are products of academics steeped in stuffy old traditions bucking up an age-old “good ol’ boys” club of repressed, and mostly arrogant and self-satisfied, intellectuals and “bean counters.” You rarely find such folks in the ranks of the revolutionaries or free-thinkers, for the academic process itself drives any of that out of them: It rewards mediocrity, conformity, sucking up, obsequious sycophancy to patriarchal mentors. Academia is an arena of “old bulls,” who never assign accolades, tenure, employment, or publication to new persons with fresh ideas. For to do so would threaten their own status and their own deeply held beliefs and theories; for which they, themselves, have had to sacrifice so much of themselves to the patriarchal mentors of their own.
Two Recent Developments Reveal the Mistake
Indeed, it takes two developments to come to a different conclusion than theirs: One pertains to the external world, society; and it has to do with the realization that modern civilization is failing humans and planetmates throughout the globe and is resulting in humanicide, ecocide, and rampant injustice, oppression, and needless suffering. So, one must be able to criticize one’s society for starters. One must be able to stand outside it. One must, as Erich Fromm pointed out long ago (The Sane Society, 1955), be able to see the insanity in one’s culture. And a few chapters back we saw an example of one person, Bruce Lincoln (1991), who was doing that on the basis, as I also do, of the measure to which a society functions to serve and benefit primarily its elites, with all others required to submit and forgo pleasure and happiness in life for their sake.
Secondly, one must know of a different inner way that is not fearful of unconscious contents and knows that the psyche is helpful and comforting, not to be feared. Just as in the chapter in which I pointed out that, together with an objective moral ruler along which to evaluate practices, there has to be available a contrasting better way of doing the same thing. So also there has to be a workable mythological framework, psychological reality, and basis in reality that would allow the better way to be successful.
Admittedly, this different and better way could only come to us with the developments of the modern experiential therapies and consciousness modalities such as holotropic breathwork, primal therapy, and so on; with recent explorations employing varieties of psychedelics; with some of the understandings of philosophies from India or Asia; or with shamanic practices and psychedelics, as utilized in former times and in some indigenous cultures today.
Solar and Lunar Theologies
Let me be clearer in providing context. Note that Jungian thinking does not look into the pre-archaic or primal and shamanic mythologies, which may be likened more to goddess and matriarchal stances … and experiential ones. Indeed, Jung and neo-Jungians have been criticized for espousing a solar theology. That is to say, a male one. One which equates Divinity with a type of spirit split off from, separate from the body, the physical world, the world of Nature, and the suffering, evil, and “darkness” that are part of life. Reliance on the myths of extremely patriarchal and male-dominated cultures such as the Greek and Roman — cultures with values excessively masculine and in which women were not merely suppressed and degraded but actively despised — lends itself to such a bias, to say the least.
Whereas there are lunar theologies espousing much the opposite. In fact, most of the history of the human race has seen us in love and in awe with the world of Nature and finding the Divine Beneficence and Grace within it. These “theologies,” which see Divinity as immanent in the body, Nature, and the physical world — which see the hardships and exigencies of life to be instructive and necessary, not as indications of evil — are associated virtually universally with gatherer-hunter societies and feature shamanic practices and practitioners in their spiritual and numinous endeavors.
Their focus is on experiential aspects of the journey, learning through personal experience as opposed to written word. Their practices might include vision quests, walkabouts, and deep trance states induced by psychedelics or other primitive psychotechnologies — dancing, fasting, ordeals of endurance, for example. Their icons, when they have them, are related to Nature and the feminine — representing birth, sex, death, the mother, planetmates … both fauna and flora, reptilian and insectoid … and the processes of growth and decline and of Nature.
Solar Societies, Masculine Cultures … The Creation of Dragons
However in solar theologies, that “lunar” approach is not only not utilized but it is actively repressed and killed off in any of its forms. It might be called pagan, heathen, barbaric, primitive, savage, witchcraft, sorcery; and — if managing to seep into the “civilizations” of cultures with solar and masculine presumptions — worst of all, it might be labeled blasphemous and heretical. At any rate, in solar cultures and religious pursuits, one represses and is fearful of the world of Nature and the body, with its feelings. One discerns the truth indirectly and intellectualizes about it, separating oneself from the body and the emotions … along with its subtler relatives, one’s feelings. One becomes enamored of word and concept over the wisdom wrought through actual experience of life … is more likely to thump a Bible than hug a child.
In these societies, the realities of life and Nature get held at a distance, not touching oneself to the extent possible. This is exactly the way Jungians view an approach to the unconscious. They see the memories needing to be resolved and relived, which would involve actual direct experience of feeling and emotion, indirectly through the lenses of symbols and archetypes. Just as in the way Perseus can only see the Medusa through the image reflected in his shield.
The result, from whatever corner, is that sex becomes repressed, is often demonized. Birth is handled by medical practitioners and staff who are often not even really known to the mother and family; and it becomes routinized and mechanized and pharmacalized, removing as much as possible any immersion in the experience. Death is not talked about in polite company; it happens behind doors, if at all possible; and the body’s disposal is done out of sight. And women — being central figures in birth and sex and being more feeling, emotionally expressive, connected to biological rhythms and in all these ways become associated with Nature and a life of actual experience — are repressed, abused, and denigrated, along with all the rest of natural life.
In this stance of holding reality at arm’s length and playing with concepts of it only … intellectualizing about it … exemplified by Perseus, one does not feel one’s fear and pain, not in an embracing and integrative way. One does not let oneself be swamped by them, and emote and express them. Rather, one looks into art, the symbols of dreams, and similar creative productions of self, which point, indirectly, at those hard-to-face elements … which therefore symbolize them. One does not feel one’s fear, one analyses the dragons, monsters, and other symbols of one’s dreams and society, which point to those fears. One idolizes the stoical figure with the unmoving face, unaffected by his or her experience, and untouched by human emotion, its own or another’s — a Clint Eastwood, Spock, or John Wayne type. Or one adores a perpetually grinning Tony Robbins or Joel Osteen, whose sunshine faces are almost as much unaffected and detached from real experience.
In this mode, one does not actually engage with the poor or suffering, but complains about and bemoans their plight as depicted on screen, net, social media and television; or as in poetical, artistic, or other products of the comfortably detached intelligentsia. All one’s actions are indirect and at a distance. One might use the “sword” of prayer to apply to all the sufferings of others but never do service work to alleviate it. One might hold meditations to save the world but refrain from direct activism about it. One might bemoan the plight of the poor from the pulpit or on Facebook, but god forbid one should break down in one of their neighborhoods or need to use a toilet at their gas stations.
In the social-political arena the same kind of thing is done. However, in that realm those denied feelings of self — the unadmitted anger, repressed emotion, unacknowledged pain — emerge as “dragons” depicted as Illuminati, minorities, Jews, “reptiles,” “hollywood,” “bleeding hearts,” feminists, and gays … or (lol) “Hillary.”
Solar Therapies … Masculine Spiritualities
In either case, one maps the interactions of these unconscious elements with other unfelt, unfaced, unembraced elements of one’s self. In this stance in relation to the inner world, one does not feel one’s feelings, one intellectualizes about them and analyses and seeks to understand them in reflected form — as symbol, myth, dream, concept. One might talk about, espouse, and envision an Inner Child, but one is hardly become child-like of emotion — silly and easy to weep and laugh, spontaneous and innocent — for one would not want to be seen as “childish.” One might feel resonance with and perceive Divine and Creative principles in cultural projections — art, theater, movies, internet — but not identify and engage with them through becoming an artist oneself. Aspects of self, rather than being felt, become concepts of Adult, Parent, Child and, at a safe distance and hiding behind the shield of the concept, get routed like planes from the control tower of the mind, however impotently.
And everything gets CAPITALIZED, but not felt. Feelings of anger and rage and controlling inside oneself become the “Divine Masculine.” Feelings of nurture, the emotional release of weeping, compassion, unity with others become the “Divine Feminine.” And as concepts these things are orchestrated, balanced, and managed … yet not experienced and felt. One’s inner deception about oneself and fleeing from one’s personal truth gets made larger than life, capitalized, and theologized … and thus reinforced.
In this stance in the outer world, one does not immerse oneself in and engage with the injustices of life, as in becoming a midwife, living with and helping the poor, or some other hands-on involvement with injustice and suffering. Instead one might serve on a board that does fund-raising of money that gets to the poor, after, on the way, a hefty surcharge to one’s own organization. One might be engaged in policy about providing needed services to the underprivileged yet never oneself step into their neighborhoods.
This Way of Perseus has one fiddling with the unpleasantness of life — inside and outside — however indirectly, at a distance, second-handedly, without the mess of personal involvement or real commitment. And as mentioned in relation to the mode of engagement with inner material, it is only slightly better, if that, than a stance of outright ignorance and unconsciousness of self as exhibited by the stances of the majority of people in their lives of striving for money, power, and control through economic, familial, and relationship effort and manipulation.
Treading Buddha’s Cartography in Comfortable Chairs
Ego psychologists and Jungians, therefore, are only slightly less militaristic in their views than is Joseph Campbell, as evidenced by his hero’s cycle, which glorifies military indoctrination and brutal patriarchal rites of passage as examples of it. Never pointed out in the adoration heaped upon this authoritative WWII Generation scholar, Joseph Campbell, is how his view, surprisingly, finds positive value and personal growth in the brutalization of young men, and in their participation in ghastly, bloody wars. Campbell employs the all-forgiving and euphemistic brush of “rite of passage” to whiten the most dastardly and black of brutal cultural practices and societal engagements. In the same vein, Jungians are only slightly less enslaved by their emotions and the powers that be. Jungians and Ego psychologists are only marginally more “awakened.” With everything on the line, at this time in history, it is time we did better than that.
So it is understandable that Jungians and archetypal transpersonalists are the cheerleaders of self-aggrandizing intellectuals, armchair theologians and philosophers, and suburban spiritual “adepts” — meticulously treading Buddha’s cartography of self in softly cushioned, air-conditioned, media-saturated homes. Ego psychologists also fertilize the ground of the technologies of consciousness control, masquerading as new-age or evangelical.
In others of my works, I detail how these efforts are parts of a personal and spiritual growth or quest at the psychodynamic or second-line level.2 That is to say, these techniques are employed in the “care and treatment” of aspects of self that can be remembered intellectually from childhood, young adulthood, and adulthood … they are “second line,” using Janov’s terminology … or can be garnered and deduced from soundings of the psyche through dreams, art, image, and personal myth in a psychodynamic process. This is the arena of psychospiritual quest and personal growth knee-deep with a chaotic and confused swamp of self-analysis, affirmations, life coaching, and garden-variety counseling and personal-improvement programs.
Nonetheless, whether one can effectively bring about personal change at this level or one merely postpones the greater encounter with self for another time is an open question. My take on it is that these techniques of supposed self-improvement and consciousness “awakening” are Ego stunts. They give a semblance of growth while mesmerizing one in a way only slightly less all-encompassing or trance-like than the state of being completely unconscious and in denial of these hidden aspects of self and of these feelings. Which last, of course, is the point of departure.
Intellectualizing One’s Inner Life
Indeed, this intellectualizing of one’s inner life is often as bad if not worse than being completely oblivious to the promptings of self, where we all start. For one can convince oneself of the rightness and importance of an active and all-out war with the elements of self — fending off ferociously any immersion in and feeling of them. One is fortified in one’s repression of real feeling by telling oneself it is a “pity pot.” One can avoid realizations for they are preceded by “negative” thoughts. One is supported in not being “weak” or of “digging deep” in oneself, when it is surrender and letting go that would bring the greatest releases and the darker deeper waters are where is realized the true awakenings.
Conversely, one fails to see the suffering of others, looking through that same filter. For it labels their communications as “whining” or “complaining” and to be ignored, even put down. For such “weakness” is some kind of evil, they feel.
Meanwhile, one is patted on the back for being a hard-worker, when it is merely reinforcement of being sycophantic and slave-like and is cowardly about the real “work” (the “play,” actually … or dance) of inner awareness. For any kind of growth requires leaving off of the defenses of overwork and taking time for oneself instead.
One is lauded for trying hard, with nonsensical platitudes like “You can be anything you want, if you try hard enough” … “You can accomplish anything through hard work” … “Your biggest dreams can be realized through perseverance and determination.” When in actuality, failure is a necessary corrective on everyone’s path; accomplishing what one wanted in childhood and earlier in life might not be all that grand an achievement for an adult; and, most importantly, surrender and letting go are precipitated, always, by obstacles and are necessary components of spiritual and personal growth. For it is only in those fallow periods, that ebbing, those valleys and down times, that one gets taught and is directed more accurately toward the goal.
Lastly, and sadly, in actuality you can only amount to in your life, regardless how hard you try, what the elites of one’s society support or at least allow. If one’s success hurts the egos or profits of powerful others, dream all you want, you must accept success only in the pleasure of the journey and the satisfaction of pursuing, without external reward, the directives of one’s innermost self … one’s dreams.
Positive Thinkers Are the Best of Slaves
All in all, in these masculine approaches to individuation one is roundly supported in being uncomplaining, incommunicative, stoical, unfeeling, insensitive, unassuming, unemotional, lucy-fied, impassionate, unobtrusive, and, in actuality, as invisible as can be. This is true regardless that all those things are aspects of an extreme repression of selfhood and personality; and their only real value is in aiding others, especially higher ups, in their wishes to be self-centered and focused on their own needs … Ego and egotistical ones … and not bothered by any intrusion from “the likes of you.” In all these ways, supposedly spiritual and helpful promulgations and efforts are or become antithetical to true spirituality and/or personal growth. However, their existence fits perfectly with the unreal wishes of others, who would have the opposite of you — would have you as sycophant, servant, and slave … seen but not heard.
So, these mental rearrangements of thoughts, thinking one can create one’s reality by reasoning correctly and focusing on the correct words of wisdom and affirming the most brilliant of sayings, can be seen, as we say, as about as effective as “rearranging furniture on the decks of the Titanic.” As Freud noted long ago, intellectualization and rationalization (not much different) are defenses against reality and the truth of self. While the good doctor saw them as necessary — going along with the idea that facing the actual things to which they pointed, the cruel realities, painful feelings and emotions, facing the “Medusa,” jumping into the volcano … opening “Pandora’s box,” you see … is dangerous or suicidal — he did that in an era scarce with and unknowing of the experiential possibilities of exploration of self that exploded in the Sixties, catalyzed by the entheogenics of shamanic lore and especially this new one, this powerful psychedelic, LSD.
“Medusa” Rising
As a point of historical note, which is of particular relevance here, the history of psychoanalysis begins with a period when Freud and his early colleague and mentor, Josef Breuer, used cathartic techniques, such as we see today in primal therapy and the experiential psychotherapies. They had great success, and both were giddy at the prospects this contained for healing and for relieving mental illness. However, as should be expected, considering neither of them actually went through such an experiential program themselves, at a certain point their cathartic techniques released, in their patients, energies, emotions, and feelings, that these fervid counselors knew not how to handle.
Such it is that for the next nearly one hundred years of psychoanalysis and psychology their fear and lack of skill or knowledge in handling the unconscious became the dogma that such materials could not be handled. Certainly this also played into the stances of Jung and Campbell, both of whom clearly took their lead from Freud. It took Arthur Janov and Stanislav Grof, beginning in the Sixties and Seventies, to show how such materials could be experienced, resolved, and integrated through merely surrendering to them and allowing them to come up, immersing oneself in them and thoroughly feeling them, as opposed to trying to control or manage them or figure them out: All of which, showing their ineffectiveness over time, were the downfall of those early psychoanalysts.
Pronoia
These developments, these expansions in the exploration of consciousness and the nature of Reality itself, have had profound consequences. For they lead to a new awareness that the psyche is something that can be approached with surrender and trust, not requiring fear and defenses, as if oneself, Reality, and the Universe were all against one. One might say that recent explorations in consciousness bring forth the revelation that with surrender and trust one can approach the psyche … and God, for that matter.
Granted, Jung set the stage for this better understanding with his postulation of spiritual and beneficent components of the unconscious. It is as if Jung said, “Yes, the unconscious, the unknown … good stuff there. But be careful not to look at it. Handle with tongs, only.” Hence, Jung was the go-between from the age of darkness and fear to the new awareness of pronoia — which is the understanding that the Universe is out to do you good and fosters surrender to process, not control of it. In the arena of social action, such a pronoia implies an attitude toward one’s life and its expression on the “front lines” as the Tao of Funny God. As I pointed out in my tome, Funny God, such a tao amounts to confronting the illness and dragons of the patriarchy with a humorously detached, thus transcendent, approach.
Hence, the outcome of the advances in inner exploration that erupted in the Sixties and the rediscovery of the shamanic mode of experiencing led to the experiential modes of personal growth. It paralleled an appreciation of an experiential mode of social action through confrontation with society’s ills which also arose then. The approach of primal therapy and various experiential modalities such as holotropic breathwork is to surrender to the “volcanic” upsurge of emotion and be taught by it. But it requires faith that one will not be destroyed in the process.
The Way Forward Is All the Way In
Similarly, the Tao of Funny God, like the experiential approach in personal-spiritual growth, has the necessary hero fully committed, standing in the face of evil on the protest lines, corporate board rooms, and governmental agencies — speaking truth to power however without a speck of defensiveness, and ideally with love — thereby practicing a “transcendent” way while immersed within action toward progress.
This can be contrasted with the more common, the indirect, approach where one keeps life and its problems at arm’s length: One convinces oneself one can have a positive effect on society second-handedly by oneself making money in the stock market or bowing to corporate masters, rationalizing that one will be a good and generous person once one has established oneself upon a continually readjusted upward platform of prosperity and wealth … at a time which is also ever receding and indeed, rarely ever comes. It can be contrasted with a surrender to the social vanities of job and family, while giving to The United Way; meanwhile using up one’s free time as an intoxicated observer of others, who are engaging in sport; or titillating the senses only while on family vacations in which one drowns in the excesses of food and drink, does cursory surveys of the art, landscape, architecture, and artifact of foreign lands, with no real cultural or social involvement in the people there or their ways.
Nevertheless, findings from the front lines of loving social activism and experiential exploration of self say there is another way of life, of growth, and of approach to problems … a way that actually works.
The best way to get to where you are going is to be most fully exactly where you are. The way forward is all the way in!
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Spiritualities of Ego Actualization:
A Mystical Machismo Infuses Patriarchal Controlling Mythologies and Paths … New Age Myth and the Fallacy of the Fully Functioning Ego
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“Crazy” and transcendent are not opposite as Ego psychologists conveniently proclaim.
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It seems a helpful way to show the difference between ritual and authentic behavior, with its corollaries of control versus surrender, and solar and lunar, would be to show how these contrasting ideas have arisen in our current times. In transpersonal psychology — the branch of psychology that deals with spiritual experience and mystical and transcendent notions — such differing perspectives align perfectly with the contrasting views put forth by Stanislav Grof, who expresses a surrendered, non-ritualized approach; and Ken Wilber, whose theories support a ritualizing and controlling approach.
In the field of transpersonal psychology, there seems an inability to accept a “surrendered” spiritual path — a visceral, energetic, cathartic, “Dionysian,” spiritual path … a shamanistic one. Instead we see a tendency to opt for “Apollonian” head trips, mere relaxation and visualizations, cybernetic ego programming and affirmations, and rational-intellectual metaphoristics — a “controlling” path. We see what has been referred to as “cybernetic dreaming,” which is rooted in what has been termed, “the linear fallacy.”1
We hear that one must have an Ego before one can lose one … as if we all, from birth, don’t have some kind of Ego! We hear that there are “healthy” Ego defenses to have … as if all defenses are not in some way the avoidance or distortion of truth. And, by the way, that it blocks out truth answers the question as to why the folks who espouse this Ego way do not know of its inherent fallacy.
And in keeping with the linear fallacy — which is woven through the writings of Ken Wilber and Ego psychologists, in general, and which amounts to the idea that growth is attained incrementally and gradually over time and in a pattern that is much like a ladder to success — it is thought one can approach liberation the way one goes about getting a college degree, building a house, advancing in the corporate world, or indeed, shoveling manure into a pickup truck. However, spiritual growth is hardly linear, as Grof points out and I continue to explain. Nor can you put “enlightenment” on your to-do list or schedule it into your evening or weekend activities.
Ken Wilber’s Fallacy
Interestingly, Ken Wilber — who, along with Stanislav Grof, is considered a fountainhead of modern transpersonal psychology — has been, at different times, on both sides of this development. His change of position from The Spectrum of Consciousness (1977) to The Atman Project (1980) is, in my opinion, regrettable. Obviously, from the analysis presented in this book, it is clear that I believe his stance at the outset, in The Spectrum of Consciousness, is closer to the truth. For his later thinking, based on the idea that the prepersonal realms and the transpersonal realms are opposite, which he terms the “pre/trans fallacy,”2 is not at all accurate. For the prepersonal and the transpersonal are not even separate.
Along these lines, I agree with Michael Washburn (1990) that Wilber’s (1982) espousal of a prepersonal/transpersonal distinction — which predicates his change of position — “assumes a major point at issue,” specifically, that “‘pre’ and ‘trans’ states are totally unrelated, and are in fact opposites,” and that Wilber does not establish this position empirically.3 Similarly, while I deplore the use to which Kirk Schneider (1987) puts this information, I concur with him that “a careful reading of the case evidence does not — as Wilber . . . would have it — clearly differentiate (prepersonal) psychotics from truly (transpersonal) visionaries.”4
In sum, Ken Wilber’s pre/trans distinction does not fit with the evidence. The operative factor in Wilber’s change of position, which is also a basic building block of all his later theory — that is to say, the pre/trans distinction — does not fit with the evidence from the spiritual or psychiatric literatures. It certainly does not fit with the evidence of experiential psychotherapy and pre- and perinatal psychology. Finally, as Epstein and Leiff (1981) pointed out, neither does his hypothesis appear to fit with the evidence of meditation research.5
Rather than a ladder-like progression where one begins in the prepersonal and advances to the transpersonal, one actually returns to the beginning, again and again. I believe Grof (1985) explained this well. He wrote, concerning Wilber’s pre/trans distinction: “My own observations suggest that, as consciousness evolution proceeds from the centauric to the subtle realms and beyond, it does not follow a linear trajectory, but in a sense enfolds into itself.
“In this process, the individual returns to earlier stages of development, but evaluates them from the point of view of a mature adult. At the same time, he or she becomes consciously aware of certain aspects and qualities of these stages that were implicit, but unrecognized when confronted in the context of linear evolution.
“Thus, the distinction between pre- and trans- has a paradoxical nature; they are neither identical, nor are they completely different from each other.”6
Ken Wilber’s Fall from Grace
Indeed why Wilber, while acknowledging Grof at least, would choose not to incorporate the findings of prenatal and perinatal psychology and would opt instead for a Piaget-based theory of development that begins (1) at birth7 and (2) with the self as identified with matter that is defined as lowest consciousness8 — a Piaget-based theory that is radically altered by prenatal and perinatal psychology and consciousness research in general9 — is a mystery in itself.
Is it perhaps that Wilber, as he proceeded in his studies, was pulled away from a surrendered, experiential path because he himself was not inclined to undergo such a “crisp trip,” as Ram Das phrased it?10 It requires the relinquishing of one’s ego. And, as we will see, that is the hardest thing to do in life. It is much easier, if one is a renowned professor and intellectual, to conform one’s theories to one’s predilections and fears, instead.
The Alpha and the Omega meet.
What I mean is that (1) Wilber ignores the first nine months of an individual’s life, as if those experiences — which others, and myself, have shown to be all-important — are not only not influential but non-existent!
By that I also mean that (2) Wilber (1980) claims that at birth the self is identified with matter,11 which he calls the pleroma and which he states is a gnostic term for the virgo mater or materia prima.12 First of all, my reading of gnosticism does not tell me that the pleroma is a primal matter, a physical or material substance, but rather is a primal spiritual source from which all else — specifically, matter — devolves. Yet, confusing such a spiritual source with a material one is the most common fallacy you see in philosophy or transpersonal psychology today. For it fits with the scientific worldview we have been enculturated into, all of us. That worldview has the universe’s source being a Big Bang of matter out of which all else evolves. It has humans arising out of a dead inanimate world of matter, adding consciousness to the mix at some “magical” time … as if at some impossible point in the increasing complexity of organisms some light in the brain is accidentally switched on. How silly. But I digress….
In any case, gnostic writings tell that, in fact, the creation of matter and the world occurs later, much later in the course of devolution than the “spiritual” pleroma. They tell also that the material universe comes in only with the creation of the inferior god, the Demiurge (the Ego); and that it is a flawed creation — one might say it is one that no longer adequately reflects spirit and that it has “fallen from grace.”13
“God is all there is.”
This may seem a minor point; however, its implications are huge for Wilber’s theory and it indicates exactly where we differ. What I am saying is that, from a particular perspective — one might say a gnostic one — matter is from spirit (or Consciousness, or what I term, Experience) and that it is of the same stuff as spirit (Consciousness, Experience) except that it is flawed. That really and truly what we see “out there” is spirit and is no different from what we experience “in here” save that our sensory experience is an imperfect — one might say, reflected or indirect — experience … but of the same thing!14 This is the position expressed in philosophy as an Idealist stance and spiritually it comes under the banner of panentheism. This is indeed the implication of the new physics and the new psychology. As one song, a Hindu bhajan, sums it up: “God is all. God is all there is.”15
Now, Wilber knew this in The Spectrum of Consciousness (1977); he espoused this perspective in that book. He advanced these notions further, two years later, in his No Boundary (1979). That he later turned from this radical spiritual perspective on matter … this mystical, Eastern, quantum, psychedelic, holographic, Idealist, pantheist, panentheist, and Platonic perspective on the material world and sensory experience . . . well, one might say he himself “fell from grace.”
The Stormy Path to Self
As Grof (1985) has pointed out concerning Wilber, “It is . . . somewhat surprising that he has not taken into consideration a vast amount of data from both ancient and modern sources — data suggesting the paramount psychological significance of prenatal experiences and the trauma of birth.”16
Further, concerning Wilber’s theoretical system Grof writes, “The complexity of embryonic development and of the consecutive stages of biological birth receives no attention in this sophisticated system, which is elaborated in meticulous detail in all other areas.”17
It seems that Wilber (1980, 1982), however — as one of the chief proponents of the ego-quest-as-precondition-to-spiritual-quest school of transpersonal thought — has made the mistake of constructing his transpersonal argument within the gravitational field of the Western Ego psychologists. Thus it ends up helplessly skewed in that direction. He completely ignores the evidence cross-culturally for the ego weakness that most often characterizes mystical adherents and religious practitioners.
You can’t “program” your way into transcendence.
Hence, Wilber’s overall position appears to be a cop-out, and it is muddied in contradiction. See, for example, A Sociable God (1983). Here Wilber says adolescence includes previous structures: “As the adolescent mind emerges, it destroys the exclusive identity with the body but does not destroy the body itself; it subsumes the body in its own larger mental identity.”18
Now, compare that with The Spectrum of Consciousness (1977) in which he contends that each stage splits off from and represses previously “owned” realities making them unconscious.
There are no two ways to interpret this: In the earlier work, he saw a reduction, or devolution, in consciousness with each subsequent stage in consciousness — exactly the position I espouse in my works, and most specifically address in my Falls from Grace (2014). Whereas by the latter work, A Sociable God, he himself has become more conforming with societal beliefs, more “sociable,” and becomes an apologist for the status quo. He begins rationalizing — as people tend to do as they get older and more split off from their real feelings — that it was not “all that” repressed after all when one went from one stage to the other of the spectrum.
This is the transpersonal psychology equivalent of the older person, tired of the emotional baggage carried from a traumatic childhood, resigning herself to saying that, well, Daddy (or Mommy) actually did love her “in his (her) own way.” The point is, this is not about truth anymore. It is about giving up the struggle for truth and conforming to whatever beliefs make life easier … or in Wilber’s case, facilitate one on the “ladder” of fame and renown.
Transcendent states require pre-egoic integration.
At any rate, I think the integration of Wilber’s work with that of Grof, primal psychology, Masters and Houston (1966, 2000), and the new prenatal and perinatal information from many sources helps to clarify some of the confusion resulting from his change of position.19
My hope also is that my work in this book, and especially some of my others,20 in integrating all of the above, including Wilber’s schema, goes at least some part of the way toward correcting the misunderstanding that arises from his omissions.
Ego-Weak Mystics and Shamans
I am aware that to some this might seem a minor issue. Actually it is the major one in the transpersonal movement. It determines the direction one should face and progress, in fact — “up” or “down.” To be clear, I would say outward in all directions at once. And it pervades all spiritual paths, currently. Indeed, a supremely defended Ego is the aim of modern “sanitized” spirituality, in my opinion. It is one where the unconscious is “thrown beneath the bus,” only indirectly related to, and is the corpse upon which one seeks to attain higher consciousness. Hence it is no different a paradigm than the wrong-headed one employed in patriarchal, solar, societies, in general.
I maintain that the paths espoused today, for the most part, go against the spiritual injunctions and wisdom of the ages. I believe they are another example of wishing to “tread one’s journey in comfortable chairs.” Need I point out that the “holy fools” of mystical history would not fare well in front of a psychiatrist? That without doubt they would be medicated, perhaps even locked up … “for their own good” … ahem.
That this mistaken notion is pervasive is something I want to address; I think you will see in what follows some familiar ideas, however wrong they actually are … and thoroughly debunked by now. John White (1990) expresses many of those commonly understood truisms that are simply untrue. He follows and continues Wilber’s mistake in his work, The Meeting of Science and Spirit. He does this by not realizing that the sharp distinction between the sacred and the profane that we observe today is a product of recent history.
While White refers to early mystics in making his case for what a unitive state of consciousness entails, he does not seem to notice that these people, in terms of his proposition of developing a fully functioning Ego as a necessary prerequisite to transpersonal realms, would not only fail in this regard but that by his criteria the kind of odd and extremely eccentric behavior of holy people in the past would be considered insane.
My point is that in neither White’s nor Wilber’s limited Western viewpoint is there any allowance for that kind of “regressive” behavior on the spiritual path. I quote Feuerstein (1991) as an antidote to this omission: “It is true that when we look at crazy adepts like Drukpa Kunley or Nityananda, we see phenomenal feats of renunciation. But we also see behavior that, certainly in the eyes of a psychiatrist, at times borders on the neurotic, if not psychotic. Some of these holy fools have in fact wondered about their own sanity. The saintly Ramakrishna, teacher of the world-famous Vivekananda, is a case in point. For a period of time he ceremonially worshipped his own genitals, and on other occasions he installed himself on the altar of the temple where he served as head priest.
“Such behavior is certainly not ‘normal.’ Nor is sitting on garbage heaps or sexually fondling women and girls, as has been reported of several contemporary Hindu adepts.”21
The “Fully Functioning Ego”
Thus, I re-iterate, as White (1990) himself points out — he writes, “I elaborate on this central point throughout the book”22 — central to White’s argument that we are evolving into a new species of human at this time in history is that the characteristic Western Ego “development” — one could as easily say (and some have said), “ego-dissociation” — is a necessary prerequisite to higher consciousness. Thus he marshals in, to support his proposal, the concept of the “fully functioning Ego” which Wilber has unfortunately popularized.
White’s mistake, then, is the same as Wilber’s. However understandable is this fault — in that it is as egoistic, self-obsessed individuals we start the quest — still, it is the same fallacy in that it stretches human anthropocentrism, ego-centrism, and the claim to dominion over Nature across the sky, crowning us with a spiritual superiority akin to that of our supposed material, scientific, technological one.
It is the same mistake, also, as that made by Teilhard de Chardin — as I explained in Chapter 12 — who anointed humans as the vehicles and prime recipients of a Divine compulsion toward some Universal Omega Point of ultimate glorification and mastery. This common fallacy of self-glorification under the guise of scholarship is evident, as well, in those entertaining the Anthropic Principle. Within that school of thought, as explained by Theodore Roszak (1992, 2001), the emergence of the human is the be-all and end-all of the entire Universe. Put simply, that view has it that “things are as they are because at the instant of creation they had to get here, to us.”23 Excuse me while I cringe in empathy with the embarrassment that should accompany such uninhibited and loud proclamation of one’s own narcissistic self-deification. Or, criticizing with less chagrin, we can appropriate Stephen Hawking’s comment on it: The Anthropic Principle “would claim that this whole vast construction exists simply for our sake. This is very hard to believe”24
This is why I claim that, in truth, the goal of most modern spiritual pursuits — sanitized as they have become to warrant inclusion in the narcissistic modern’s box of OCD tools to ward off intense experience — is that of a supremely defended Ego, a split off one, a transcendent one, a dissociated one … and that’s all.
What these transpersonal theorists are claiming then, in deference to mainstream psychology which is dominated by Ego psychologists, is that a fully functioning Ego is necessary to develop before one can go on to transpersonal pursuits. My research and experience, confirmed by that of Stanislav Grof and supported by the theory of Michael Washburn (1988) and others, tells me they are wrong in this espousal and that in fact what they are talking about developing is merely a supremely defended Ego. It seems that what they would wish to develop is high self-esteem as a prerequisite for higher consciousness.
However, the idea of necessary defenses is itself questionable and is a relic of antiquated Freudian thinking, as I pointed out earlier. After Freud’s initial venture into a cathartic — i.e., a “stormy” — path of healing, he turned from all that and in the process left out, and in his own way denigrated, all of what would be considered shamanic, experiential, let alone, “stormy,” modalities and psychotechnologies of expanding awareness.
Wilber’s and White’s pronouncements, following him, are no more than the outgrowth of that early Freudian timidity and lack of confidence in how to deal with unconscious contents. As I have been pointing out, as long as one sees a Medusa, when looking within, one is only going to approach the unconscious and unknown facing the opposite direction and unseeing, carrying a shield (defenses), and swinging a sword (a fully functioning Ego) with which to try to kill “her.” Though were one really to look and comprehend such Gorgon monster, one would embrace this goddess.
My research indicates all this fear and defensiveness is a legacy from Freudian thought which claimed that defenses are necessary. To the contrary, what we have learned from primal therapy and the other experiential, feeling psychotherapies is that defenses are not necessary.
Self-Esteem Versus Self-Regard
Furthermore, research by Gergen and Marlowe (1969) points out that there is a difference between high self-esteem and high self-regard. High self-esteem, which we might liken to positive thinking — in that both require the suppression of contrary elements of consciousness — distorts reality for the gain of temporary pleasantness and outer achievement. Whereas, oppositely, high self-regard refers to a stance of consciousness that involves openness to the unpleasant of reality and is a concomitant of personal growth — spiritual and otherwise.
Essentially — something that is only now, after the “high self-esteem” education protocols of the Eighties have run their course, beginning to be understood — high self-esteem involves the use of defenses that deny and avoid aspects of reality, whereas high self-regard is based on an openness to and acceptance of those same kinds of unpleasant aspects of reality. Self-esteem and the fully functioning Ego is based on distortion of reality and falseness relative to the Self. Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, especially Donald Trump, are noted for having high self-esteem. Ted Bundy, the serial killer, would have to be seen in the same light — equally confident and unquestioning of the rightness of his actions. James Alex Fields — who not long ago plowed his car into a crowd of people protesting White supremacy and neo-Nazism, killing one and injuring dozens, in Charlottesville, Virginia — would also be in the category of someone with high self-esteem. Most definitely he had an unflinching belief in his convictions and an uncritical assessment of himself in order to bring himself to that. Self-doubt and self-criticism, rather than self-esteem, would have served him, and us all, much better.
Yet since self-esteem, like theirs, is built upon the denial and repression of so much inner and outer reality, none of those three American presidents — let alone Bundy, Fields, Hitler, or any other perpetrator of truly nefarious deeds — have ever been mistaken for someone having a tight grasp on the facts, or a solid residence within reality.
Whereas, to the contrary, high self-regard is rooted in painful and not necessarily so functional … or “normal” … acceptance of reality in its dark and light, pleasant and unpleasant facets. Indeed, attunement with the higher Self involves a diminution of the Ego, a reduction of Ego defenses, not a glorification of them.
Similarly, there is a difference between what is often called ego strength and what is meant by the fully functioning Ego. For ego strength, as Erikson (1968, 1985) uses it, for example, is really a consequence of being in tune with the higher self, which is in fact not ego strength at all. On the contrary, this kind of attunement with the higher self (or Self) represents a diminution of the Ego, a reduction of Ego defenses. It is akin to what Jung refers to as Self, in contradistinction from Ego, and to what Janov calls the real self, in contrast to the unreal self. It is more clearly described as embodying high self-regard. Which is something that involves an openness to one’s darker side and one’s unflattering perceptions of oneself along with an overall acceptance, a “regard,” and a love of oneself with all of one’s only too human and unavoidable flaws, and primal pain.
Madness and Genius … Madness and Mysticism
Going back historically, what is noticeable about mystical adepts … not always their followers, interestingly, see Hesse (1930, 1951), for example … is their lack of ego, often from a very early age, and how they are closer to their mystical promptings because of this. This pattern also relates to creative people and to the process of creativity. For creative people from all times quite often exhibit this “poorly functioning” Ego that has often been associated with mystics. Because of this, people are familiar with the connection between madness and genius as well as the one between madness and mysticism.25
The point is that in neither of these cases is there the development of this recent prescription: “the fully functioning Ego.” In fact, a fully functioning Ego is the last thing a person with mystical promptings would want to develop. There is no way the Ego, fully engaged with the insanity of normal life, would ever wish to forgo that, let alone have time to forgo that. All things considered, a “fully functioning Ego” actually precludes, rather than precipitates, the mystical.
An Anal-Compulsive Control of Inner Life
One begins to suspect that what these transpersonal theorists and their legions of followers are really saying is that they really do not want to surrender to mystical promptings or to surrender to the Divine. Affirmations, ritual, and the like are hardly surrender; nor do they facilitate openness to Divine, or mystical input. Rather, they are capitulations to the controlling Ego and a flight from true spiritual-mystical surrender … insight … and revelation.
What this kind of thinking says about these erstwhile spiritual adepts is that they want to continue to do their controlling; they want to continue to do their affirmations; they want to control their inner life. Certainly there are fear reasons why they would want to avoid the path of spiritual surrender and would wish to carry their controlling and defensive ego over with them into the transpersonal realms. And my devolutional model of consciousness26 with its understanding of and inclusion of the traumas of our early lives — prenatal hell, traumatic birth, conception, deprivational infancy, and so on — helps us to see the very deep roots of that fear and makes this entire transpersonal gambit quite understandable. It leaves us sympathetic to those driven to waste their time with it.
Worst of all, these beliefs have roots in racism and Western supremacism.
Still, the dictates of truth, and of real spirituality, require that these fearful prescriptions and their illusion-weaving proselytizers be spotlighted for what they are. For it is tragic enough when one is self-deluded. It is purely unacceptable, though, when one seeks to foist one’s ego defensiveness onto the spiritual pursuits of others. It is worse still when institutions, such as the psychiatric and psychological, are reinforced in their antiquated and soul-destroying methods by such efforts and beliefs. However it is worst of all and an outright abomination when these beliefs support the kind of unconscious racism and denigration of other-than-Western-cultures that has caused so much suffering historically.
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Control Versus Surrender Mythologies:
Whereas Surrender Spiritualities, Believing in Ultimate Goodness, See Controlling as the Problem
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“In history, the surrender spiritualities have had correspondences in myth in which the dragon is not fought, conquered, and slain, but rather is either tamed and becomes one’s ally or one’s pet…. Or else one is swallowed by the “dragon” or monster and, after a while, is reborn.”
“…you just cannot take both pills.”
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What people like White and Wilber simply do not get is that spirituality is not a matter of further Ego-actualization … that spirituality involves surrendering the ego, letting go of one’s ego. Instead they would have us construct, control, strive, to build a “super” Ego … even become “master”ful at it.
Self-Actualization Versus Ego-Actualization
Whereas spirituality is about self-actualization, not Ego-actualization, and that makes all the difference in the world. One will not become more mystically enlightened to the extent one has become more functional or achieving in regard to the social pursuits and values into which one was born. However one does approach liberation through the encounter with and expression of one’s unconscious material of all kinds. And involved with that might be some amount of ability to negotiate the varying cultural waters in which one finds oneself. Yet it might not. That aspect of Ego might be minimal or even non-existent.
Homo Noeticus Is Actually Homo Ego
Again we can look to John White to provide an example of this mistaken conflation of Ego and Self. He claims we are advancing toward a Homo noeticus that is along the lines of spiritual attainment. Yet the Homo noeticus that White (1990) describes in his book, The Meeting of Science of Spirit, shows instead the error that is possible with this Ego-highlighted model of human development. His Homo noeticus might better be termed “Homo ego.” For indeed, what he offers us is a continuation of the Promethean hubris that has — in environmental and political ways — brought us to our current apocalyptic pass.
What White offers us is the same kind of patriarchal attitude toward the inner world as we have taken towards the outer world, the same kind of advance and conquer, the same kind of control tactics. He shows the glorification of Ego tactics that are much like those of the outside world in his espousal of techniques of “mastery,” of all kinds of realities. Whereas I maintain that is the opposite of the “surrendering” that is an actual spiritual stance in relation to Reality. In support of this I note that while White uses the terms control and master often — in describing higher states and enlightenment — he uses the terms surrender and letting go only once. In White’s universe, it seems the meek do not inherit the earth.
Transpersonal Athleticism and Mystical Machismo
This entire attitude of patriarchal emphasis on mastery, discipline, and control as contrasting with surrendering, acceptance, and non-judgmental loving, is reminiscent of a book from 1974 — reputedly a “consciousness classic” now — titled The Master Game by Robert S. de Ropp. Theorists like de Ropp, White, and Wilber have never quite understood the idea that this whole spiritual trip is not a matter of transpersonal athleticism, mystical machismo, or jocko-militaristic “mastery,” let alone “games” … even though one be so vain as to dub one’s own particular avoidance of reality as the “master” one.
Indeed, it is obvious that White has this same attitude in his espousal of the martial arts. It is understandable he would see spirituality this way in that he is a former military man. Ken Wilber has a strong connection to the military, as well, having been brought up in such a family. Seriously, now, should we really be getting our spiritual advice from the armed forces? Remember what I have been saying about patriarchal rites of passage — especially as found in military programs — and how they diminish, not foster, consciousness.
It is equally clear that White does not quite understand the concept of the surrender of ego. For, even in his very espousal of Jesus, he does not accept Jesus’s attitude of non-violence or “turn the other cheek.” Of course these pacifistic attitudes would not make sense in a spiritual program like his which involves the aggrandizement of the Ego and its defense at all costs.
Spirituality is actually attunement with God, the giving up of Ego struggles.
These sorts of would-be spiritual teachers also, in line with the kind of thinking I have described, are the ones who are wont to point out the dangers of regression to “pre-” states and so forth. Once again, in doing so, they acknowledge their fear of loss of ego in their espousal of so-called “higher” or “transcendent” striving. “Pre-” states they clearly see overshadowed by a Medusa. They do not understand that spirituality is, in reality, a matter of attunement with God, attunement with All That Is … is a giving up of Ego struggles, and a letting go into All That; as opposed to a control, a “mastery,” a striving, or a transcendence of it all. Or a “slaying” of a dragon or a Medusa.
Control Versus Surrender
Essentially what I am saying is that there are two paths of so-called “spirituality.” One of these might be described as going up the “hierarchy of defenses” and the other as undercutting or going below such “act-outs” or spurious “atman projects.” Another way of saying this is that there are “control” spiritualities and “surrender” spiritualities, with rarely the twain meeting.
Control spiritualities are Atman Projects, involving religion and building a hierarchy of defenses — an egoic Tower of Babel. Control spiritualities are adapted to patriarchal cultures and involve the use of the Ego to “control” and be in charge of even the realms of the supernatural. This is so because an ultimate evil — a devil or Satan — is postulated, which is given equal weight along with God in determining one’s ultimate fate. This type of spirituality is normally what is called religion.
However, there is another brand of spirituality, rarely identified as religion, that is based on a belief in the ultimate goodness and rightness of All That Is. Since these surrender spiritualities are founded on the idea of the Ultimate or God as being good, as well as being The All, controlling is seen as the problem, not the solution.
God’s goodness being essentially the dominant force in the Universe, herein it is considered safe to “surrender” in one’s relation to Reality, to expect that one will be guided correctly, in fact perfectly, in the act of letting go. Thus, letting go is not to be feared … as it is in the control spiritualities … but is to be practiced and fostered.
“Control” and “Surrender” Psychotherapies
Of course, these two approaches to spiritual growth represent two approaches to psychotherapy as well. The control attitude is the dominant mode of psychoanalytically-based approaches … in which the “demon” of the id is postulated. The attitude of “letting go” and “surrender,” on the other hand, is the modus operandi of the experiential psychotherapies. Which are themselves rooted in the tradition of humanistic psychology with its belief in the ultimate goodness of the human organism, and which thus allows a faith in the ultimate rightness of human processes.
The traditionally understood hero’s journey is a “control” psychotherapy.
Since the control attitude, in any of its manifestations, requires the postulation of an ultimate evil against which one must remain vigilant and must fight, the common “hero’s journey” myth — with its typical fighting and slaying of supposedly evil parts of the personality and reality symbolized as dragons and other monsters — is a prevalent focal myth to this attitude. Corresponding to this myth are the emphasis on disciplines and practices seeking to develop the Ego and the will … over against the dangers that are postulated to exist in the universe requiring these disciplines and, so-called, Ego “developments.”
Since the “feeling” therapies and the other spiritual and experiential psychotherapeutic modalities with which they are allied are so different in attitude to the traditional “control” attitude, should there not be corresponding differences in myths to exemplify them? Indeed, there are.
A different heroic response is called for in “surrender” paths.
In history, the surrender spiritualities have had correspondences in myth in which the dragon is not fought, conquered, and slain. Rather the hero is swallowed by the supposed monster, as befits a position of surrender. Or the dragon is tamed and becomes one’s ally or one’s pet. Or both. Saint Margaret is the prime example in the West of the taming of a dragon, which then became her pet; but this is a depiction prevalent in the East.
Notice, correspondingly, how serpent — a form of dragon — iconography predominates in Asian and indigenous understandings of the supernatural and as a symbol of a kind of ultimate reality or god. As well it pervades historical matriarchally-oriented cultures of Neolithic times in Europe as well as around the world of all times. Herein the serpent or dragon is understood to represent wisdom, higher consciousness, as when it is related to a kundalini awakening in Eastern Tantric thinking.
Again and again in these mythologies of other-than-Western cultures there is clearly the intimation — there, if only shrouded — that serpents and dragons only appear dangerous at first. Perhaps this, as a way to keep out the unworthy. It certainly blocked the understandings of Wilber, White, and the Ego psychologists. But that, hardly dangerous, dragons represent the ultimate boon of an enlightened consciousness and immortality. In this respect serpents, like butterflies, symbolize rebirth in that they perpetually renew themselves in shedding their skin. It is only in the Western world dominated by Judeo-Christian prejudices — replete as they are with misogyny, patriarchality, and a fear of and belligerence toward Nature and the Goddess — that one sees the serpent as a tempter and as evil, as in Genesis and in relation to Eve.
By contrast, such mythologies of non-Western cultures see serpent/dragons as symbols of strength and of beneficent power, however dangerous for the unqualified to be around. In this regard, note the nature of the dragons in the currently popular television series, Game of Thrones. Indeed, we can see Daenerys Targaryen — the rightful queen and heir to the throne of the Seven Kingdoms — as a recent variation of a Saint Margaret. It is no coincidence that Daenerys’s ascendance to her position of allegiance with, indeed mothership of, dragons … as well as of leader of nations … was precipitated by much suffering and trials, including a death-rebirth kind of event.
I mentioned above how such processes as I am espousing amount to a kind of “purification by fire,” through suffering, specifically. Sure enough, Daenerys suffers greatly in her being traded for a promise of allegiance; forced to endure rape; in her undergoing a trial involving eating a stallion’s heart; and ultimately she is consigned to be burned to death in a huge inferno. However, the fire does not harm her — showing indeed the Primal discovery that feeling and processing one’s primal pain does not destroy one … let alone cause one to “go mad,” or “turn to stone.” Instead, such surrender to unavoidable suffering — as is also the case in Primal experiences — is what brings about the hatching of the dragons. Remember those blessings of “inestimable value” to which I’ve been referring?
In mythologies, the surrender approach is also depicted where the hero/heroine is swallowed by the “dragon” or monster and, after a while, is reborn. Jonah is the prime example in the West for this latter depiction. I mentioned also how such a pattern is embedded in the Red Riding Hood fable. But again, this reaction to the fearful dissociated aspects of the personality, or the Shadow, is not a common one in the Western patriarchy. However, it is rather prevalent in traditional cultures … especially in shamanism … and in the Eastern world.
“Healthy-Mindedness” and the “Sick Soul”
These two spiritual paths — the controlling and the surrendering — were rather distinctively set out over a hundred years ago by William James (1899) in terms of the spirituality of “healthy mindedness” and that of “the sick soul,” in his classic study, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
The path of “healthy-mindedness” involves an athletic or gymnasium approach to spirituality and is based on exercising and reinforcing habits of supposedly correct living and thinking. Oh, how upstanding and correct, don’t you know. Techniques of mental control, mental and physical discipline, and the thingification of one’s self involved in variations of cybernetic programming of oneself are central components. It reflects a materialistic and technological culture dominated by elites. For one views one’s self and psyche as another thing, like one were a computer or a machine, which is to be managed, programmed, or tuned and oiled to run smoothly efficiently, and strongly, in accordance with wishes handed down from “on high.” Which is most immediately one’s ego (in the form of one’s superego), but which ultimately emanate from the higher ups of one’s society and the powerful in one’s culture.
You see clearly how this way reflects the supposed “spirituality” of martial arts, of boot camps and patriarchal initiations, of a fear-ridden “sackcloth and ashes” religiosity, and of psychotechnologies involving affirmations, self-hypnosis, and self-denial. And how it would affirm a benefit of a “fear of God” in the efforts involved in all this. In this approach, one pounds and hammers one’s personality and even one’s inner life and sense of reality into a shape decided outside oneself, deeming that to be “gooder” and holier than one’s otherwise “despicable” self, as also determined from without. One can see the affinity this approach has with severe parenting of an intrusive, punishing, and managerial kind. No doubt that is what accounts for its dominant position in ideas of spirituality, religion, and personal growth in general.
As for that of the “sick soul,” remove the stigma around “sick” and what you see James means is the path that involves a “dark night of the soul,” which is another, more Christian, way of referring to the processes of death-rebirth, of surrender, which I have been espousing for chapters now. Dark night of the soul, lunar, matriarchal, death-rebirth, experiential — these are its components. And on this path one’s self is not blacksmithed into compliance with an outer ideal but is discovered within oneself, held and contained there waiting for oneself to discover it through the ordinary processes of life with its trials, exigencies, losses, pains, disappointments, failures, and shortcomings. Such dark-night or lunar aspects of reality, each and every time confronted, amount to a death of one aspect of one’s “cherished illusions and false hopes” … often as planted and set within one from the outside … and a rebirth into something totally new and given — not from outside, this time, but as blessing from within, from the grander Universe, from “God,” from the All That Is.
About these two ways as described by William James, my point is that this bifurcation between views of the proper response to unconscious materials as set forth by Stanislav Grof and Ken Wilber was in play, was seen, and was unveiled that long ago.
The point is that the one — the “healthy mindedness” or control spirituality — involves a kind of mental Ego-actualization, Ego-aggrandizement. And the other — the “sick soul” or surrender spirituality — involves an honest dealing with and processing of the unconscious and all that it is. Going back to 1972, I termed this approach of trying to build a bridge over the uncomfortable through controlling techniques of consciousness, the patriarchal mistake.1 The “patriarchal mistake” involves struggling to keep out “negative” thoughts…. It is a mistake for, as Carl Jung wrote, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” It is interesting that the one way of dealing with rising unconscious materials and feelings can always be distinguished from the other in the false one’s emphasis on discipline, indicating its militaristic attitude of fearfully defending against unwanted negative thoughts, and such, and attempting to control them.
So, whereas the patriarchal mistake in spirituality involves mental tricks of dispensing with unwanted or contrary thoughts — tricks hidden beneath salutary sounding rubrics like discipline and mastery and strength — true spirituality entails experiencing “hell” before getting to “heaven.” Authentic spiritual advance is a matter of surrender and letting go, as opposed to control and “healthy-mindedness.” The one is a matter of surrendering to All That Is; whereas the delusional path of misdirected masculinity is a matter of defending the ego, continuing Ego defenses to keep out negative thoughts, and so on.
As I said above, these two radically different views of spirituality are exemplified in the transpersonal psychology movement in that surrounding the ideas of Stanislav Grof and that surrounding the ideas of Ken Wilber. It is clear that rarely does the one movement ever refer to or revere the insights of the other. For example, in his book, The Meeting of Science and Spirit, John White (1990) does not mention Stanislav Grof at all. Yet he genuflects at the altar of Ken Wilber frequently.
To transcend or not to transcend, that is the question.
In this respect, also, we have White’s inconsistency in his analysis of the meaning of repent, where he refers to the terms tob and metanoia .
In White’s pointing out that the original Aramaic term for repent was tob he says that it means “to return” or “to flow back to God.” This is fine so far. We see the U-turn back to the ground of Being, to the prepersonal implied in this. However, White then states that the Greek translation of tob is metanoia which means “to transcend.” And it is this latter understanding, one step removed from the original, that he embraces.
He apparently forgets the original meaning, disregards it, and builds a theory upon the latter term — meaning that we are to strive, struggle, and travel upward. The entire meaning and significance of returning or flowing back — which would serve to undermine both Wilber’s and his theories in its espousal of the significance of the “pre” state — is completely ignored.
To this move I say, you simply cannot have it both ways: You cannot ascribe some type of greater validity to an earlier term as being closer to the original meaning — metanoia over repent — while at the same time ignore or dispute the relevance of the even earlier term, in fact the original one, tob, just because to do so would undermine the argument you wish to present!
And the Frantic Thinking Between Paradigms
All this notwithstanding, perhaps John White’s biggest theoretical inconsistency is his assertions of a dual nature to the universe — Matter and Spirit — with them “interacting,” by the way.
Dualism and Ghost-in-the-Machine Spiritual Thinking
Which White lays alongside his assertion that “God is all.” He presents therefore a dualistic view of reality much reminiscent of ghost-in-the-machine thinking, with his supposed big advance being that the ghost is just as important as the machine.
In this respect then, White fails to make the transition to a new-paradigm view. He seems hopelessly caught between the views of irreconcilable worlds, trying to assert competing claims, trying to keep his old world from falling apart while still wanting to follow the light he sees ahead. Although he claims to voice it, he does not present a new-paradigm vision.
Spirit and matter are as indistinguishable as ocean and waves.
The point is — as opposed to the old paradigm which says that the world is basically matter and that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter — that the new paradigm reveals the world as basically consciousness or as a subjectivity that encompasses All; and it understands the material universe to be an epiphenomenon of that subjectivity. In this new overstanding or worldview one does no more need to assert a difference between spirit and matter any more than one can assert a primary distinction between ocean and waves. In this respect we have Sathya Sai Baba’s statement that: All there is, is the “I” or the Atma and that this is the foundation for everything else; that everything else is illusion. All that really exists is the “I.”
This is the same as saying, in Western philosophy, that subjectivity is the only true reality. This is in line with the philosophical position that objective reality — the reality of “objects” — is indirect perception and is dependent upon subjective reality. So, subjective reality is the only true reality that can be known.2
Unfortunately, White’s view is directly contradictory of this. Apparently aping the style of politicians … or of conciliatory academics who want to appease disparate elements in their fields … he writes that there is danger in “seeing one or the other (matter or spirit) as illusion or delusion.”3 This he does despite the fact that this contention on the ultimate phenomenal nature of mundane “common sense” reality is the major conclusion of most of the world’s religions, of much of traditional and Platonic philosophy, and more recently, even of the new, quantum, physics.
In response to Wilber and White, I wish to say, asserting what you want to be true simply doesn’t make it so. Indeed, it is exasperating — especially when one has some anthropological training as I do, which involves an awareness of the widely varying ways of being and thinking of Earth’s multitudinous cultures — to see what purports to be universal revelations on Beingness itself and maps of potential liberation and mental enlightenment contorted to fit into pedestrian and common-sensical notions, into an unusually materialistic Western culture, and into capitalist habits regarding goals and life direction of our current era in history and of only a portion of the world’s population. The hubris one perceives in this is daunting, simply overwhelming. Whereas, even setting to the side the revelations I mentioned above of Eastern philosophy, fully ninety-nine percent of the cultures that have ever existed would disagree with Wilber and White in asserting a contrary pantheistic perspective and a surrendered, not egoistically masterful, approach to spiritual advance.
Akin to the Convoluted Theories of Pre-Copernican Astronomers
In essence then, White’s volume presents an example of the kind of frantic, painfully distorted theorizing that is known to characterize the transition phase between paradigms. In a way akin to the convoluted theories of pre-Copernican astronomers, who struggled fervidly in re-arranging and making room in obsolete theories and concepts for the ever-new astronomical data that was pouring in, who were doomed to failure and obsolescence by their inability to grasp the central organizing principle or concept of an Earth that is both spherical and not the center of the universe; so also White’s ideas, lacking any valid new-paradigm integrating vision, finds itself twisted about itself trying to keep one foot in old-paradigm concepts and theories while stepping with the other into new-paradigm facts and data.
However, when it comes to paradigm change, you just cannot take both pills.
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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
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“…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.”
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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 feelingfrom 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.
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The Fallacy of Transcendence:
The “Giving” of Sacrifice and the Patriarchal Ladder … Men Raise Themselves Upon the Bodies of the Murdered
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“…the meaning of the practice remains clear: In order to be a mover-shaker one must not be “weak” … one must be above ordinary feelings of empathy and compassion.”
“One needs to step upon the bodies and broken careers of others to attain the highest status is the thinking there. There are no molly-coddlers among the movers and shakers, no bleeding hearts. That is the dominant theme. Like the pigs and people slain in the ancient rites, with … each another rung higher on the ladder to transcendence, in the corporate milieu, each person passed, put below one, or thrown under the bus is another level higher on the Tower of Babel of corporate achievement … leading nowhere but to the grave.”
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There are other falsehoods woven into the fabric of patriarchality with its ascension of the few at the expense of the most and its split of the personality into the part that benefits the higher ups and the part that is denigrated yet real.
Raising Oneself on High — “Transcendence”
This chapter was stimulated by what I was reading from the book Primitive Mythology (1969) by Joseph Campbell. He writes that “with this, I believe, we have our final clue to the ritual sacrifice of the royal tombs of Ur, as well as to the ‘fury for sacrifice’ that beset, at one time or another, every part of the archaic world in the various high periods of its numerous cultures. A magical power is gained according to the measure of one’s sacrifice. The ultimate sacrifice is, of course, one’s self; yet the value even of this self is to be measured according to the orders of sacrifice accomplished during life and made by one’s survivors at one’s mortuary feast. The most potent supporting offering of this sort is another human being — one’s son, one’s slave, one’s prisoner of war. But the next in order is some beast that one has raised oneself and cared for as one’s own. Moreover, wherever such animal offerings are rendered, the beast is of a species mythologically associated with deity….
“The offered beast is a quantum of divine power, which, through its sacrifice, is integrated with the giver. The giver climbs, so to say, on the rungs of his sacrifice….”1
I think of the scene in the movie, Scrooged, with Bill Murry. He is talking to his brother:
James Cross (the brother): A little bit rough on her out there, weren’t you? You know what they say about treating people badly on the way up?
Frank Cross (the “Scrooge”): Yep. You get to treat them badly on the way down, too. It’s great! You get two chances to rough ‘em up!
Over Their Dead Bodies, He Will
Jokes aside, this points to the dominating theme of ladder-climbing in a corporate world … or advance in any hierarchical society: You get ahead by stepping upon the backs … and dead bodies … of others.
The passage from Joseph Campbell indicates how this idea of getting more power at the cost of others’ suffering — whether a “beast,” an enemy, a slave, a prisoner of war … or one’s own son — is rooted deeply in our cultural practices from the times of early civilization. Notice also that the more “immoral” the sacrifice — in other words, the greater the harm done to others — the higher the bump in status. Killing one’s son gives one a bigger jump in power than merely killing one’s pig. Don’t let that dastardly fact slide by you. This has implications!
So it is that in this way, through such practices and their reflections throughout culture, our “ritual” sacrifices of others takes the deep spiritual understanding of the sacrifice of the ego one must make to attain spiritual advancement … the relinquishing of pride, accomplishment, reward, even the ends of one’s efforts, surrendering them … and perverts that into the sacrifice of another to attain the same. No. It does not work. But it is what we have been acting out from time immemorial: Men seek to raise themselves upon the bodies of the murdered.
Furthermore, I want to point out how this dynamic of raising oneself by stepping on others is a distant relative to what we think we are accomplishing in war, unconsciously. Nations think they can elevate themselves standing upon the ruins and the mangled bodies of those of other nations. As if by destroying a country and killing its people one has acquired the released mana or spirit-power from the souls of all those dead.
Yet, again, that is not true. One would be hard pressed to find a war that did not take more economically and in resources to wage than was acquired, even if won. Although, as we see with the Gulf Wars made for the benefit of oil tycoons, it is ever attempted. The idea that energy interests would be able to set up Western control of the oil of the Middle East region was the driving force behind those wars. Though it was anything but a noble goal, still, that is what was thought and attempted. And, like the delusions of other wars — look to Hitler’s wars and his delusions of grandeur as another example — we see how poorly that worked out.
The Patriarchal Fallacy of “Sacrifice”
Why has the distinction in ritual and history between sacrifice and murder not been seen before? Well, look back to the passage I quoted at the start of this chapter of Campbell from his Primitive Mythology. Now notice how Campbell follows a patriarchal habit in his describing this process: He sees things from the perspective of the patriarchs, the authorities, the higher ups, the ones who would pass along the narrative of such events to others…. Over and again Campbell uses the words sacrifice and offerings. But sacrifice of what? He says the ultimate sacrifice is of self, yet he puts that in the same category of “sacrifices” of “another human being — one’s son, one’s slave, one’s prisoner of war.”
What is the patriarch sacrificing then? This is not sacrifice, this is murder. This is not an “offering” of something owned, rather it is a taking, and using, of something to which one has no right. And these underlings and “properties” are used as substitutes for, and indirect ways of avoiding, the “sacrifice of self.” These higher ups are not “sacrificing” their underlings, they are using them. A ruler’s sacrifice of a slave, a prisoner of war, a woman, a child, anyone other than oneself is employing them as tools in one’s ego agenda and are no more a “sacrifice” than are soldiers one sends into war to be killed for one’s ends, or flour used in the making of one’s bread. You don’t go saying you are going to “sacrifice your flour” ‘cause you want to make a cake. You say you are going to use it. “Use it up,” maybe. But use it.
Sacrifice implies some sort of personal loss involved in the process. As a child I might have sacrificed the eating of sweets or of meat during Lent. This meant that I accepted a little suffering in forgoing the pleasant thing for an end beyond it. On the other hand, one is not “sacrificing” one’s money when one purchases a car, a meal in a restaurant, an iPad. One uses one’s money that way. Yet this “fallacy of the sacrifice” is rooted firmly in Western culture. And all because Western culture emanates out of the desires of those at the peak of the pyramid.
We see a clear and early example of this in The Bible where we have a story about an Abraham and an Isaac and a “sacrifice” that supposedly Abraham was told to make of his son, Isaac. In all my sixty-seven years of life I have never heard this story depicted in terms where the perspective of Isaac is seen and this is noted to be a murder of the son and the mere use of the son for the ends, supposedly spiritual, of the father. Never is it seen as the brutal transaction it is, the payment of son for favor with Jehovah. We see here how deeply the use and abuse of underlings is ever and again seen as some inconvenience to the one doing the abuse. “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you” comes to mind. Which is what a parent might say during an act of corporal punishment, beating or spanking, of his or her child. Or, “Oh, poor Abraham, he might lose his son,” in the biblical example. Sorry, but as for myself, I refuse to empathize with homicidal maniacs.
This is no different from war profiteers and their lackeys in government detailing the events and experiences of war from the detached perspective, protective of their sensibilities and benefiting their interests, which leaves out of consideration the losses of the soldiers and civilians who are killed or have their lives destroyed. No, they are mere “collateral damage” in their ends, and the war is seen in “strategic” terms where one uses one’s power in various ways to outwit the enemy. We say “pawns are sacrificed” when in actuality this displays a detached and unfeeling perspective. No. Pawns are killed, in war. They sacrifice their lives; the ones who order their deaths are not losing the lives of their underlings, for they never had them. They had and controlled their bodies, and those bodies are used in war and the other agendas of the wealthy that are carried out by folks other than themselves.
Yet this is not seen. Campbell certainly does not see it. In any of the many books on mythology I have read of his he never once notices that the murder of another is another category than a sacrifice of something of one’s self. He never sees the distinction between transactions, involving the gaining and losing of items, and actual sacrifice, where one forgoes some desired experience or personal attainment for a higher end — meaning benefiting something beyond oneself … or some others, people “beyond oneself.” Such is the degree to which patriarchality and the hidden agendas of those higher in the hierarchy are woven into the fabric of Western culture and history so as to be invisible … right up to the current time!
You see, maybe, how this again is the solar way? How it is about separating oneself from life, its events, so as to better manage it? Better manage it in a way more fitting to one’s ego, and thereby to one’s “betters” in society with whom that ego is geared to be complicit? How it involves turning from Reality, like Perseus does Medusa, and seeing It instead in the reflected analytical images appearing upon one’s “shield,” which is metaphorical for one’s defenses? One’s defensive self? What Janov called the unreal self.
Slaying Maidens, Sacrificing Pigs
This idea of supposed “sacrifice” of another for the benefit of oneself is related to the idea of transcendence. In the practice that Campbell describes — where pigs or maidens or slaves are sacrificed … killed … for the attainment of the one seeking power — at the end of the ritual, the one for whom it is being conducted is raised on a platform, high above the others. He actually resides on that rostrum for as long as thirty days, as if marking his territory. Looking up to him there, god knows he must be better than us, huh? This practice symbolizes being raised to the heavens. It means the person, at the cost of the lives of the others, has attained god-like status and power.
I ask, how is that example of the murder of others so as to attain higher status any different from someone gunning down another as the ticket, the initiation, into gang membership, which we hear goes on in the big cities. It might equally be alike to advancement in the Mafia. Is a gang member “sacrificing” or is he murdering his victim for his ends? You see how we slant and phrase these things differently depending upon whether we are talking about someone above us — who we don’t want to offend — or someone below us?
Yet this is not science, social science, scholarship, or even very good research. For to frame the injustices of the world in words protecting perpetrators is not only to protect barbaric people by covering up their deeds with euphemisms, it is also simply not true in its being an accurate representation of the event: For it covers up as much or more than it reveals. How is it good scholarship to relay a few facts that are set in a frame that gives of them meanings one would not otherwise … opposite meanings, even?
Indeed such erstwhile scholarly description only assists the ruthless in their own many efforts at self-congratulation for their nefarious deeds and their own tendencies to deflect any criticism of themselves through references to their own privileged status and through compliments on their own, ahem, “nobility” in the performance of them all. Notice in previous chapters how this same kind of distortion has been done by anthropologists as a matter of course when it comes to brutal rites of passage. Compare also how it is similar, by taking the peculiar perspective of the perpetrator in describing the event, to the complaints of brutalizing parents decrying the inconvenience of having to “discipline” their children. Is that any different from going along with brutal and murdering rulers in their claims that in taking and murdering the lives of others it is themselves who are making a “sacrifice” … who are “offering” something? To equate such trivial inconveniences of corporal punishment of one’s child or murderous theft of another’s life with “sacrifice” distorts, covers up, and is sycophantic to brutal daddies and psychopathic homicidal rulers everywhere.
Whereas, it doesn’t take an academic to see the truth of the Abraham story, it would be more clearly seen by a child. It doesn’t take an anthropologist to see the intention of the elders in patriarchal societies and their use of its members for their advance. Instead, ask the downtrodden initiands themselves. Remember that this is how we were able to see through to the actual intentions of the Navajo rite of passage, the Kinaalda. In Chapter 26, “Blessingways?” I pointed out how its actual profile was revealed when one of the girls was asked about her experience during it, and she related a bit of resigned complaint— “Well, if you’re cheerful … [about] what you got to do….” and so on.
The Vampire Analogy
This idea of higher, god-like status being attained upon the bodies of the slain is related also to the idea I discussed above of the power supposedly contained within the bodies of powerful personalities, which, as mentioned, is reflected in our cults of celebrity and the glory of kings and tyrants. Here it is thought that in a powerful person’s, usually a man’s, controlling of more people — that is, taking their energies and orchestrating them — one has power within one’s own body, much like in the primitive instance one was raised on a platform.
One increases in power to the extent one diminishes the lives of others.
We see how in criminal groups that mana, that charisma is related to the ruthlessness of a person’s dealings. Again, one achieves not just higher status, a higher platform closer to the “gods” standing upon the bodies of the slain; but one ingests or appropriates the life force of the people one has caused to be murdered, as well as one balloons oneself out in power from the amount of joy, happiness, and pleasure one subtracts from one’s subjects — by controlling their lives to one’s own ends, not theirs.
Similar, this is, to what I said in Prodigal Human, that the monuments of civilization, reaching for the sky — the pyramids, the castles, the skylines of cities — equals the amount of suffering added to that society, of folks doing things they did not want to do and were forced to in their construction. Just that here we see that the glory, the personal mana or mojo, of the powerful is extracted from the happiness that would otherwise have been enjoyed by their subordinates. Simple example, the more powerful slaveholder is seen to be the one who is the most oppressive of the most people — the one who has removed, or destroyed, the most joy or life from others; the one who has been the greatest of them all in being a “kitty-drowner, butterfly-masher.”
This is why we attribute power and “leadership abilities” to those most ruthless. For power, at its base, means the ability to get people to do what you want, not what they want, and not allowing them any choice in the matter. Hardly conducive to their happiness. So, men raise themselves in power on the backs of others’ unhappiness and suffering, as well as their murdered bodies. “You get two chances to rough ‘em up!”
The Tower of Babel
How is any of this different from the Tower of Babel of mythology which was another instance where folks tried to raise themselves up to the heavens? It is said that people of the distant, mythical past tried to build a tower to reach to God. They failed, because they ended up fighting with each other, for they had different designs, and this was the origin of humans’ many languages. Still, in this way, they thought spiritual power could be attained by material achievement.
Historically we see this in Calvinism, where it is thought that wealth and fortune in this life is an indicator of favor with God. Don’t tell that to the naked, wandering mystic in India, however. Or, actually, have some of the powerful in America who subscribe to such a Calvinistic belief have a sit-down with one of them. We’d all benefit.
“Transcendence” as Ego Attainment Not Spiritual Attainment
What this analysis is telling us is that this supposed “transcendence” or advance at the cost of others’ lives or sufferings, while it might “work” in a this-worldly sense of power — though at what cost, that also (“what does it merit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?” and all) — is nevertheless hardly a spiritual attainment. It is an external substitute for the inner relinquishing of Ego pursuits on the path of greater re-union with the Divine, with one’s higher Self. It is Ego attainment, not spiritual attainment.
It is Ego glorified — like all corporate climbers, tyrants, kings, and elites — at the cost of all those below. This is true regardless how you spin it in theological or mythological jargon, how high you raise your tyrants on platforms above the people, how much you empathize with the “hard work” of the ogre oligarch, or how many times you frame the brutality of the higher-ups as an “inconvenience” or a “sacrifice” to them, or how much gold you surround and colorful vestments you attire them.
So, the secret of higher ups?
It’s a lie.
There is no secret of those higher in status.
The Secret of “the Holy”
This also relates to spiritual and religious beliefs about the “mastery” of self, which includes a killing of passion, a detachment from the senses. You see this with priests and monks, with New Age adepts and ascetic supposed “mystics,” with the fervently religious of all ages, with self-flagellating Catholics and self-martyring mothers. This is the equivalent of the killing of the animal within oneself, the body, the biological.
While one might think that to be a great thing, one should remember that the body, with its feelings, is the seat of empathy, compassion, the feeling of unity with others. It is the seat of love. To kill those feelings — Spock-style — is the same kind of repression and killing of feelings that tyrants, Trumps, and corporate yuppies do for the achievement of their this-worldly ends.
Spiritual or secular, the same mistake is made: Nature is killed, rather than ego. And ego is advanced at the cost of Nature, at the cost of feeling, at the cost of real spiritual advancement and greater expansion of love, feeling, compassion, and unity with all and the larger Self or God.
So, the secret of “the holy”?
It’s a lie.
There is no secret of “the holy.”
The Killing of the Body — Repression
Abraham and Isaac
We see this acted out in the Abraham-Isaac myth, too. For when Abraham is blocked from killing his son, he kills a ram instead. This symbolizes that when we do not sacrifice others, we still sacrifice Nature; and we sacrifice the Nature inside us, our body and its feelings.
This is only marginally better than killing one’s children. It is still about ego expanding itself upon the bodies of the slain … even if the slain is one’s own compassionate, loving empathetic self … or an animal. And in the sacrifice of the ram, do you not see that, as a symbol of Nature — the life besides ourselves on Earth, of our planetmates — it is saying that from the beginnings of history, our advance was made upon the destruction of the other beings on Earth?
Essentially, we have psychologically been raising ourselves upon “transcendent” platforms built of the death of Nature since civilization began. We continue, as we eat hamburgers and drive our automobiles while species go extinct by the hundreds of thousands and even millions. Are we “sacrificing” these planetmates? We hardly feel any loss when eating meat or cruising about town. No. The planetmate has done the sacrificing; the Earth is doing the sacrificing. It is experiencing a loss. Their loss is our gain and not our sacrifice. So, indeed the opposite is true.
If all the above does not make my point, consider: Would you say that America and the Bush administration “sacrificed” Iraq in its pursuit of oil profits? If you would, how presumptuous? And perhaps you should ask an Iraqi citizen if they feel the same? Would you say that Western civilization was bought with the “sacrifice” of the lives of indigenous peoples? Same thing. Ask them. Oh, that’s right, you can’t, we killed them. As always, we fail to see this issue clearly when looking only through the lenses of the dominators, the oppressors; we ignore the voices of the oppressed.
Warriors
You don’t think that a repression of the body and its passions is a killing of empathy? How do you think they are able to get men to march to the tune of others’ commands and murder upon their direction? Every skein of empathy and compassion must be slain inside soldiers first before they can kill others. Just like when we first began killing planetmates, we were able to murder other humans. When we first began killing our conscience, our empathy — stoically repressing our bodies and its feelings … including any guilt come of the hurting of other beings — we were only then able to kill others.
So, the secret of warriors?
It’s a lie.
There is no secret of warriors.
Mafia, Gangs, Cartels, and Other “Secret Men’s Societies” of Our Times
These practices are acted out in all kinds of men’s societies — fraternity groups, mafias, gangs, cartels, and secret societies.
It is said of those wealthy elite who attend the annual Bohemian Grove ceremonies in the Russian River countryside of California that at one point an infant is killed, symbolically. Obviously, this demonstrates our unconscious knowledge that we have neonatal pain pushing us. Yet the answer in masculine rituals, as shown here, is to repress and kill it. Although that — much like their wars and monetary policies — also fails, as one’s primal pain whack-a-mole emerges in another place.
But more obviously the ritual of symbolically murdering an infant represents slaying the feelings of weakness, the “softness” in oneself, the dependency, nurturing qualities, one’s compassion, the relational qualities, the … horror of horrors … “feminine.” Most importantly, it is a way of desensitizing oneself to the oppression, murder, and suffering of others, especially underlings. For if one can kill a baby, without remorse, that is considered a sign of advancement in cultures of masculinity. And such coldness comes in handy for what these wealthy will do in their stations of power.
Now, some conspiratorial psycho-jobs say it is an actual baby that is used. But then these same folks think there is sexual predation, carried out by the elite, going on in pizza shops. They prefer to think that, to find objects to hate and direct their discomforts, instead of looking at their own prurient desires for their very own children. So the practice at Bohemian Grove is done, apparently. But it is carried out with a child substitute like a doll, from what I understand. It is bad enough, what this practice means. We do not need to cover it over with our own repressed pain from childhood, which only blocks it out with a wall of conspiratorial stupidity, which causes most other folks then to look away.
However, the meaning of the practice remains clear: In order to be a mover-shaker one must not be “weak” … one must be above ordinary feelings of empathy and compassion. I understand a similar practice is enacted at the secret initiation rites of university societies such as “Skull and Bones,” which America’s “esteemed” president George W. Bush participated in.
The Corporate Ladder
The most prevalent example, however, is that of the corporate world, to which the quote from Scrooged pointed. One needs to step upon the bodies and broken careers of others to attain the highest status is the thinking there. There are no molly-coddlers among the movers and shakers, no bleeding hearts. That is the dominant theme, exactly like the pigs and people slain in the ancient rites, with, as Campbell pointed out, each murder another rung higher on the ladder to transcendence. In the corporate milieu, each person passed, put below one, “voted off the island,” or thrown under the bus is another level higher on the Tower of Babel of corporate achievement … leading nowhere but to the grave.
So, the secret of the tough and emotionless?
It’s a lie.
There is no secret of the ruthless.
The Slaying of the Feminine
The Repression of Self and Feeling
The point is there is a repression of self and feeling built into the foundations of patriarchy. This suppression of feeling is the equivalent of the killing of the biological, the Nature, inside of humans … symbolized by Abraham killing a ram; and in other cultures, an animal of some sort.
Since women are associated with Nature, this brings about the suppression, even murder, of women throughout history. It is most definitely related to the rampant misogyny, witch-burnings, women-hating, and domestic violence we have seen in patriarchal cultures: For the message is the same, kill the body, kill the feelings, murder the “feminine” within oneself, slay one’s weakness, one’s softness … and inevitably despise, hate, … even murder and rape the symbols of such feelings outside — women.
The Murder of Nature
And all that is allowed in service to this higher good of transcendence, of being above the body and Nature…. Regardless the end result of that war on, repression of, and despising of Nature is currently leading to the end of all such bodies today — apocalypse … the end of all human bodies, humanicide.
We see this attitude blatantly in reactionary types in these times. With all the machismo they can muster, such conservatives boast, in the face of Earth apocalypse, “Hey, we’ll beat it till the wheels fall off!” Thinking this way, they, like Donald Trump, will deem it a good idea to outlaw the ideas and science of climate change and to put at the head of the department to protect the environment, the EPA, someone who does not believe there is an environmental problem and wants to squeeze of the Earth’s resources all that can be of riches, as long as we are able.
Similarly, their counterparts on the lower level — their masculinizing, macho, and sycophantic underlings — defy our problems buying gas-guzzling Humvees and ridiculing environmentalists as “tree-huggers.” The worst of them, Tea-Baggers and such, have been known to go around driving semis with exhausts made to be super polluting as their way of giving a middle finger salute to our bleeding heart, liberal … “feminine” … efforts to save ecosystems and lives. Including theirs, don’t you know.
The Murder of Everything
So the murder of Self, of body, of individuality — acted out in patriarchal cultures since the dawn of civilization and with roots in primitive psychological urges to better oneself, not upon one’s own efforts, but upon the suffering of others — has led to the imminent murder of everything. This is perhaps the part of this male dynamic, manifesting most prominently in patriarchies, that is most relevant to our environmental collapse. For apocalypse is rooted in the male, in a patriarchy, being forced to be insensitive, coerced into repressing the feelings of his body, taught to be unemotional, stoic, and cold; along with the outward destructions that emanate from this … the murder (“sacrifice”) of animals, women, their children, and ultimately the world of Nature, which is the world of life outside the patriarchy and its “secrets.”
Yet it does not have to be that way. Pulling back the Veil of cultural identity manifesting as patriarchal obeisance we find the resources to live and love, as well as to know. With that in mind, we continue. Turning from the patriarchal mode of domination and ignorance, the question arises as to what mode to apply to life instead. How to live, what to do with one’s life, who to be, along with the kind of knowledge one needs to make the most out of one’s life and to fulfill oneself — these are what we look at next.
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Identity and the Sea of Potentiality:
Our Soulular Constituted Self, Multiculturalism, Staying Afloat and Navigating Amidst Overwhelming Possibility, a Modern Curse, a Modern Opportunity
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“The Universe is an experiential sea of infinite potentiality that we are immersed in and interconnected with. Though we potentially can access all of it — and porosity and mutability of personal boundaries make for a truer, more authentic constitution of self… — still, we do not wish to be all these things. Not while in Form.”
Swimming in a sea of potentiality. Staying afloat in a sea of potentiality.
“…alienation was truly only the expression of the liminality naturally arising in a transformation to greater selfhood. That is to say, these youth of the Sixties were manifesting the kind of inner looking that is the necessary borderland, the liminal, of society … indeed, the field of potentiality … that one must cross, prior to arriving at the oasis of self-actualization.”
“…that is a beautiful, a wonderful, an eminently rewarding thing to do: to resolve those issues. That is why we come into this life. Still it can be paralyzing in its being so overwhelming when it arises along with the other potentials one has to choose among within Reality.”
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All these things said — how young boys and girls, via ritual and mythology, are led one step further down the path of diminution by being inducted into lives that are not their own — we have yet to look at what might be a good way to deal with these transitions at adolescence. For only by contrasting what is, with what could be, can we really see how inferior is our current ways. In this chapter and the next, I address the subject of Identity — why and how a person becomes someone one chooses to be.
Our Soulular Constituted Self
First, let us start with the state of being prior to emergence in Form: That is to say, where we were prior to making any choices at all. Imagine a No-Form State, where all is still unactualized, unmade. In that state, we have access to all lives, potentially, with their infinite varieties of darkness as well as light. The Universe is an experiential sea of infinite potentiality in which we are immersed and with which we interconnect.
Though we potentially can access all of it — and porosity and mutability of personal boundaries make for a truer, more authentic constitution of self, more deeply rooted in the All That Is and more open to direction and assistance from that All, from Self — still, we do not wish to be all these things. Not while in Form.
I don’t believe even in No-Form, for the most part. I do not think our soulular-constituted self — including the movement of the Universe we call “I” as existing in both Form and No-Form Realities — wants to be All … or even “a lot.” Where’s the fun in that? Except maybe at times, which I want to point out we are already doing even while limited, for it all happens simultaneously. So we exist at levels of awareness of the most high, Divinity, as well as the absolute lowest, as well as every place in between, simultaneously. And since ultimate awareness, or that of Divinity, is already an achieved state for us in that respect, it is hardly our soulular goal. Something else is what moves the Universe, is what inclines us as Divinity to be in Form.
It appears, when you look at the infinite variety of It All in the Cosmos — even the limited part we can see as our Universe — that we as Divinity desire diversity of Experience, more than anything else, more even than goodness, love, or light. Beyond even that, and as always, we gods just want to have fun.
So, we — each “I” of us and at all levels of beingness — are an intention of the Universe … each of us, individually. As Jung said, each of us is an “experiment in Truth.” That is to say, we, as essentially God, wish to limit our perspective, to limit our range of vision, to create all these Veils of diminution of Reality to something manageable, or focused, however much not ultimately true or real. Or, as I laid out in my book, The Secret Life of Stones, out of a desire for Experience we, as Divinity, create all the constituted realities I elaborate there — the culturally constituted realities, bioculturally constituted ones, biologically constituted ones — each of which limit our range of choices by determining the parameters within which any will be made, increasingly as these build up, one after the other, in the course of growing up.
However, these are reality limitations which, now, we see include even the soululary-constituted realities we create in the course of our experience over lifetimes. Indeed, this fact of existence — our Sea of Experience which we all have access to, our identity as Divinity — we must limit to something … it cannot be everything … especially while in Form.
Paddling the Sea of Potentiality
This conscribing of the Sea of Experience is sometimes a problem in youth; sometimes we carry the struggle throughout our lives.
Pitfalls and Problems
I wrote about this pitfall in the first book I ever wrote, at the age of twenty, which I titled The Dangers of Mysticism for Modern Youth (1970). There are dangers herein, for at our Identity stage of life, in youth, we are necessarily open to many potentials, and it is from them that we need to choose. We have to choose something to actualize — at least temporarily, even if we change course later, and maybe often — out of that Infinite Sea of Potentiality.
Rites of Passage and Identity
In many cultures, this “problem” is “solved” by forcing the youth into a straitjacket role decided upon by the culture. This is done through an initiation ritual, specifically, a rite of passage into adulthood. However, these sorts of rituals — particularly the patriarchal ones — tend to be brutal, assaultive … damaging of both body as well as mind. Being such an affront to the psyche, and containing little of real self in their results, these rites of passage or modalities of Identity formation are anything but a happy fit on the souls of humans.
By contrast, in other societies, some primal ones, the role is not enforced … “inflicted” upon the youth … but is arrived at through some kind of experience within Reality and Nature. The Native American vision quest is the penultimate example of that, as I recently explained. It is the ideal way to handle this, for then the “experiment in truth” that one actualizes in life is decided not by another but by the individual him or herself and in actual collaboration with the All That Is. Which is the way it was “decided” before this life … in the very decision to come into Form (again), to incarnate, in the first place.
Of course, brutal initiation rituals, rites of passage, are seen in their worst form in the indoctrination a youth must go through to be beaten into the mold of a military member. All over the world and throughout civilized time, youths with access to all of the potential of the Universe, are shunted onto narrow tracks of other-decided action for the enactment of murder and war. For the purposes of others, their minds, reflective ability, decision making, desires, dreams, and visions are blasted out of these young ones. They are whack-a-moled into utter quiescence; which is called training, lauded as being “obedient” and conforming, but is indeed a murder of soul. In carrying out the depraved desires of folks higher on society’s scales, mindlessness is instilled in such underlings. This is the antipode of one’s Divine Identity. One cannot get further away.
An aside: Still, all lives are equal. Divinity wants that, too. Murderers. Warriors. Hitlers and Genghis Khans. These represent those darker colors demanded of the Divine Masterpiece to manifest its beauty. The thing to see in this is that it is hardly what society purports those lives to be. Though such warriors and soldiers are Divinity, too, I never thank them for their service; yet society does. Society values its sanctioned, controlled murderers and puts to death its uncontrolled ones. Both are equally removed from Divinity, and perhaps the military member even more so. Society tells he or she that they are great, are heroes. They are, thus, further from realizing the diminished quality of their lives. So they are an unawares evil. Much harder to see the Divine from that place. Yes, they are part of Divinity’s Grandeur and Glory, too. But one should not make a fucking religion out of them.
In fact, their actual role in the Magnificence? More exactly they are the darkness by which the light is much brighter seen. They are the black frame setting off Divinity’s Portrait. They are the percussion woven through the Heavenly Opus, marking the beat against which one composes one’s own song of simple kindness and yearning for unity, quavering though it be with poignancy.
A Modern Blessing
Back to my “story,” there is still another aspect to this process of configuring a Form-ular self. What I am getting at is that, in terms of the pitfalls of configuring one’s Identity in Form, at that stage of life called youth, in modern times we have a situation unlike any other time in history or in any other culture. Modern youth are exposed to a vast ocean of information and possibilities for being and existing throughout their childhood and have, usually, an incredibly large array of possible paths to choose from in continuing their lives, as adults.
Nothing wrong with that. That, in itself, is a wonder of our times, with its multiculturalism. Such multiculturalism makes possible a better fit between one’s soulular and one’s Form-ular selves than ever before in history. It is important, as well, in that we need to access and align with our Divinity more than ever, in these times. It is our natural inclination to grow toward that, toward Divinity. Just like a flower grows to face the sun. And, while most people will not take that path of expansion of self into Self; still, with the potential for it to happen being there more than ever, more folks will be inclined along their truer soulular way than in any previous time.
That makes the modern situation to be bringing out, ideally, the beneficent results similar to that which a vision quest does. That is to say, a youth’s role and path, in modern times, can — more possibly than any time we know of save that of those Native American and similar cultures — be a collaboration between her or his real self and the Divine, the Ultimate Self. It may be why so many have chosen to incarnate now.
A Modern Curse
However, there is a tendency to feel overwhelmed in such a situation and especially at a particular time — during youth. If, on top of that, one opens up to even greater possibilities and potentials through mind-expanding drugs or the occult or mysticism, one can feel even more overwhelmed, unable to integrate, and one can feel like one is drowning in a sea of potentiality. Difficult to come into Form when flooded with such No-Form potentiality. This was a common occurrence in the Sixties among the youth of my time. Of course, I felt it as well. How else could I write insightfully about it?
Importantly, we see a reflection today of that which happened considerably in the Sixties — that paralysis and terror in the midst of overwhelm. It is important to note that the Sixties was the first postmodern era. It was the first one characterized by multiculturalism, with the disintegration of staid personality and Ego constructs come of it. That is something to keep in mind as a huge factor, as well, in contributing to the paralysis and overwhelm, which often at the time was termed alienation.
We see that arising again today. Understandably, for we remain in a postmodern world of overwhelming possibilities; of ever increasing multiculturalism, catalyzed, more so, by the Internet; and of collapsing cultural barriers alongside erosion of national, religious, familial, and community identity.
Not complaining. I see those to be wonderful things, much needed now — at a time when we need global and universal identities, not ethnocentric or national ones, for peace. Veritably, just to survive. However, this expansion of identity — this establishing of one’s sense of self in identification with larger units such as humanity, all life on planet Earth, or the Universe, the All That Is — comes with its problems. Nothing less than that, it requires a period of adjustment, which is necessarily turbulent, difficult, tricky, and could use some help from culture and society.
And just as in the past — those glorious days of worldwide awakening, just past the midpoint of our previous century — we see such a problem, today. Interestingly it is coming about after the huge push by the elites, the filthy rich and their social programmers, in the Seventies and Eighties, to bring conformity and traditional, straitjacket roles back to youth, and to the adults they would become. Certainly, these societal helmsman and manipulators were alarmed, if not terrified, to see such radical change in the world they had invested in and helped to create. They sought to and unfortunately succeeded in bringing this about, this return to traditional roles, through a massive reorganization of society begun, in America, in 1971.1
The Liminal — Pros and Cons
However, something is arising, now, in reaction to that abysmal repression of potential during the mid-Seventies and the Eighties, and continuing.
As Prerequisite for Authentic Postmodern Identity
Yes, that campaign of societal reorganization and massive misinformation for the purpose of reversing the clock on the evolution that was occurring in the Sixties did reverse the tendencies toward alienation of the previous lot, the Sixties Generation, for the one following it, Generation X. But at what cost?
For alienation was truly only the expression of the liminality naturally arising in a transformation to greater selfhood. That is to say, these youth of the Sixties were manifesting the kind of inner looking that is the necessary borderland, the liminal, of society … indeed, the field of potentiality … that one must cross, prior to arriving at the oasis of self-actualization.
This was strikingly represented by the peace symbol that was manifest everywhere at the time and continuing directly into today. This symbol, said to represent peace, but also “moratorium,” is a cross within a circle with the cross’s “arms” pointing down. These downward arms — compared to upward arms, which indicate expression — symbolize withdrawal from the world and into self. The peace symbol means cessation of activity, hence peace, when action is clearly counterproductive, or meeting with horrific results. Thus, retiring from action, “moratorium,” is what was being advocated by the antiwar movement of the time.
Correspondingly, in their personal lives, these youth of the Sixties were going inward to seek out better solutions for self and society in radically changing times characterized by overwhelming cultural, personal, and historical input. They were evolving perfectly in response to the first ever situation of a sea of information allowing for the most optimal alignment of self with atmadharma — which is to say, one’s unique, soulularly-aligned, spiritual duty in life — with Self, with universal intention.
At any rate, subsequently, during the mid-to-late Seventies and Eighties, there was the response of repression to this “frightening” (to the elite) evolution. This repression of potential was instilled all too successfully in the crop of youth designated as Generation X.
Cons — The Conspiracy Cul de Sac
Since then, however, another movement arose. It emanated from a cohort populated predominantly by Gen X folks and the most disaffected, and oftentimes abused, of the Millennial Generation. So that today, we see this disaffection, formerly called alienation, arising in the fascination these youth, and their older compatriots, have with occult conspiracy theories.
To be clear, I am firmly in the camp of those aware that there has been some massive hocus pocus on the national and world scenes in the last half century, convincing entire populations of blatant lies for the purpose of manipulating mass action.2 I have just pointed out my version of one of them, having to do with the retaking of society by the elite beginning in 1971. This was exemplified by and manifesting the twisted “findings” of the Trilateral Commission of July, 1973.
The killing of the Sixties.
The Trilateral Commission was a non-governmental think tank, or discussion group, founded by David Rockefeller, and intended to bring together, for cooperative action, the interests of the major Western powers — throughout North America, Western Europe, and Japan. As Noam Chomsky said, summing up the purpose of its “findings,” the Trilateral Commission “was concerned with trying to induce what they called ‘more moderation in democracy’ — turn people back to passivity and obedience so they don’t put so many constraints on state power and so on. In particular they were worried about young people. They were concerned about the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young (that’s their phrase), meaning schools, universities, church and so on — they’re not doing their job, [the young are] not being sufficiently indoctrinated. They’re too free to pursue their own initiatives and concerns and you’ve got to control them better.”3
It was said that the problem with the Sixties was there was an “excess of democracy” and folks were “too free.” The times were “suffering” from that problem. We had no real problems, you see. Nothing to be concerned about — like wars, hypocrisy, environmental pollution, or social and cultural issues, such as racism, inequality and the like — but just too much attention to them, too much action on pressing and vital concerns … too much “democracy.” As for “too free,” well, hey, folks need always a certain amount of enslavement, right?
So this is hardly speculation, what I am unveiling — this effort by the powers-that-be to repress the growing edge of the world’s societies. Indeed, there was even a memorandum distributed widely to the wealthy elite at that time describing the reactionary path that these societal controllers should take … in detail!
Still, this effort was effectively a conspiracy. The media did not inform its populace of this massive reorganization of society underway. Indeed, the media participated in its cover-up, claiming a “conservative backlash,” at the time, which did not exist at all, except in the hopes and intentions of the societal orchestrators. The media, indeed, colluded by putting a virtual stop on coverage of protests and demonstrations, thus bolstering the false argument that there was a backlash. And they contributed by producing and promoting books and other media, such as news reports, that hammered this lie into American minds. Still not dislodged.4
Furthermore, I am fully aware of the legitimacy of some other conspiracies for control and manipulation of the people, in particular the American people. The most obvious ones of those being the JFK assassination and the Twin Towers massacre — both of which were brought about by forces other than what was announced and promoted publicly. And both were perpetrated for the purpose of wrestling social change along avenues contrary to what was naturally unfolding and instead along roads from which the elites could profit.
Cons — The Paranoia Pit
But we also see currently many young and not so young adults, disaffected, alienated, awash in the immense sea of misinformation mixed with information which characterizes the current scene. We see them drowning in satanic, Illuminati, Rothschild, anti-Semitic, Alex Jones–style, Glenn Beck–murkied, climate-denying, New-World Order conspiracy thinking that is driving an ambulatory insanity in many cases. Which in some cases is tossing aside all rationality and concern for life and ethics as they act within an imaginal world, a world of delusion, built of the girders of quotes from Revelations and painted with the dispensations for all wrongdoing of an imminent Rapture.
We have already seen eruptions of some of this in mass murders in recent years, by people taken over by these ideas. Turning their particular illness, and their individual suffering, into contagions of insanity affecting us all. These folks are no less insane than ISIS sympathizers like Omar Mateen who last year massacred forty-nine people, seen to be gay or somewhat “pink,” in an Orlando nightclub, The Pulse.
Examples of these include Jared Lee Loughner, who killed six people, wounded thirteen, near Tucson, Arizona, in January, 2012, and grievously wounded Congressperson Gabrielle Giffords. And Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who murdered 168 folks in the Oklahoma City bombing in April, 1995 for “anti-government” reasons.5 And in Oslo, Norway, there was Anders Behring Breivik, who on 22 July 2011, massacred seventy-seven innocents, perceived by him to be leftists, in advancing his right-wing, admittedly fascist, agenda.
There’s a bad moon on the Right.
These unthinkable massacres exemplified several others of recent years. They all have typical right-wing motives — anti-government, anti-liberal, anti-women, anti-“socialism,” anti–gold standard, and so on. They speak of New World Order and Illuminati conspiracies and receive inspiration in the writings and media of right-wing ideology of various sorts. These atrocities were perpetrated by right-wing, Revelations-misunderstanding, conspiracy-mired folks infused with the ideas of the likes of Alex Jones, David Wynn Miller, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and such.
This includes, we find out now in 2017, the Russian government — aiding and abetting all varieties of fake news, as disseminated by their colluders in America, some of whom I have just mentioned, others of which they make out of whole cloth. Which not uncommonly and as if coordinated then ends up spouted from the mouths of Alex Jones, the Breitbart group, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and now, Donald Trump, and others in that camp.
Loughner’s motives are revealing. In describing his political positions, I quote, they were a “hallmark of the far right and the militia movement…. In the aftermath of the shooting, the Anti-Defamation League reviewed messages by Loughner, and concluded that there was a ‘disjointed theme that runs through Loughner’s writings,’ which was a ‘distrust for and dislike of the government.’ It ‘manifested itself in various ways’ – for instance, in the belief that the government used the control of language and grammar to brainwash people, the notion that the government was creating ‘infinite currency’ without the backing of gold and silver, or the assertion that NASA was faking spaceflights.”6
Further, part of Loughner’s motive for going after Giffords was misogynistic. He believed positions of power should not be held by women. He was involved in a message board that discussed conspiracy theories. Loughner espoused theories about the 9/11 attacks and a New World Order and believed in a 2012 apocalypse.7
The reason these are not true or legitimate conspiracies, by the way, is because they are concoctions comprised of many promoted yet fraudulent ideas, seeded by right-wing elements, propounded by filthily moneyed interests for the purpose of keeping the active edge of the masses, the youth, paralyzed with misinformation.… And concocted and disseminated by Putin’s government, in Russia, for the purpose of destabilizing America’s democracy in a way to benefit his interests.
These are not even issues for the populace, at all! They are misinformation campaigns conducted for the benefit of the elites. For, who the fuck benefits from a return to a gold-silver standard, for example? You? With all your huge stash of gold? Think!
Who benefits from reduced taxes — another right-wing theme — you? With your huge income? And investments?
Who the fuck benefits from Agenda 21 misinformation — which is an environmental program of the UN, not even being implemented (and I wish it were) — you? With all your land, your holdings, and your investments and your profits depending on despoliation of the environment. Are you the Koch Brothers, then?
Who the fuck benefits from chemtrails misinformation, which takes the incredible destruction we are doing to the stratosphere through one million air flights a day, worldwide, and misdirects the environmental awareness required for our survival into a government conspiracy? Think!
For that matter, who the fuck benefits from denying the reality of climate change except the huge polluters? *cough* Are you going to benefit when the oceans rise sixty to one hundred feet, city-leveling storms are unleashed on the planet, and there are mass migrations and food shortages? Which also contributes to worldwide virulent epidemics. While the temperatures rise, making Maine the place to be, Florida unlivable. And the oceans die off, taking away our primary source of oxygen for the planet. *gasp!* You? Are you then a plant who needs no oxygen, doesn’t live in a city, doesn’t need to eat food or get human diseases?
Who the fuck benefits from a belief in a fakery of NASA space flights except flat-earth believers. lol. Is that you?
So there’s “my” conspiracy theory! *snicker*
Openness — Pros and Cons
I want to add that opening to one’s “unconscious” in this way, risking overwhelm from both information and misinformation, is tricky. Be clear that, in all this, it is one’s unconscious to which one is opening. For the unconscious of one’s self, and Self, includes everything that is not in one’s consciousness. It is everything that is not part of the area of identity one has staked out for oneself at any particular time.
Remember, the unconscious is the other half of our Divinity.
Cons — Influx Is as Much of Misinformation as of Wisdom
Unfortunately, it also includes these tsunamis of misinformation, for they also are “facts” in that they exist as lies. Lies which must somehow be forded or dealt with successfully. Misinformation and lies contribute to overwhelm even more than the truth does, for there is cognitive dissonance involved in it. Lies inevitably conflict with the truth that also exists. This creates confusion. This is a responsibility, demanded. This puts a burden on those seeking to find a foundation of understanding to stand upon from which to fashion one’s life.
Is as much of pain as euphoria.
In addition, opening to this sea of possibilities also means opening to one’s personal Pain in this life, for it also is part of one’s unconscious. Indeed, it is for this reason it is so easy to understand how folks overwhelmed with misinformation might also act out violently, as was done in the horrendous killings I have mentioned.
It includes opening, even, to traumas carried over from other lives. For they, too, are the “unconscious,” now. So, opening to the unconscious happens in the same way that Arthur Janov says that opening to feelings is an all-or-nothing thing. That opening to one’s Pain, as in his primal therapy, means opening to one’s ability to enjoy life, means opening to one’s sexual feelings, means opening to one’s love; but means opening to one’s frustration and anger, too. Opening is simply opening, for all are part of existence, and life.
Pros — Is to Soulular Identity, Divinity, and Atmadharma
The same thing is true for the unconscious as a whole. Indeed, the repressed Pain that Janov speaks of is a person’s personal unconscious, and the feelings a person is accessing have been split away from and constitute that unconscious personal self from this life. It includes as well, out from that, everything else that one is not conscious of in all of Reality and the Universe, including one’s Divine Identity, one’s soulular configuration, one’s dharma, one’s duty, one’s fate.
Now, that is a beautiful, a wonderful, an eminently rewarding thing to do: to resolve those issues. That is why we come into this life. Still it can be paralyzing in its being so overwhelming when it arises along with the other potentials one must choose among within Reality. It can seem a veritable opening of a Pandora’s Jar.
It is fitting, then, that the problem of overwhelm and what to do about it is what we look at next.
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Overwhelm and Self-Actualization:
Openness Is an All or Nothing Thing … The Answer to Overwhelm Is Actualization … The Answer to Karma Is Service
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“First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is” — Donovan, from “There Is a Mountain” on Mellow Yellow, 1967
“Before enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water.” — ancient Zen proverb.
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The fact that overwhelm is prevalent today is indicated by the rise in demand for and usage of all kinds of antidepressants and pharmaceuticals to deal with it. Overwhelm is a close companion to depression.
The Problem of Overwhelm
It afflicts youth, but many throughout society. The mid-life “crisis,” or, optimally, “adjustment,” is another of those times when one opens to vast potentiality and is in danger of overwhelm. At mid-adulthood and afterwards, I should point out. For oftentimes the crisis is not resolved at the time it occurs. Indeed, that is one of the drawbacks in the usage of pharmaceuticals for dealing with events, “crises,” that should be worked out psychologically, spiritually. Drugs keep one stuck in the problem. The problem is put in abeyance, unresolved and ever ready to reoccur.
In any case, here in mid-life, and afterwards, in people’s lives, oftentimes there is a flood of drug use of all kinds — legal and illegal, addictive and not so much. I had a front row seat on this sad mass development during my years as a psychotherapist. And I did a “healthy” amount of “participant observation” of this problem before that and earlier in my life.
However, in reaction to the suffering of paralysis come of that overwhelm, some folks can make even worse decisions than merely repressing it with drugs. They can make these wrong choices even more readily when there are — as indeed there are now — outside interests actively seeking to manipulate them for their own benefit.
And you better believe that moneyed interests are benefited by a massive misinformation that gives them, among other things, a paralyzed populace for the most part; a radical edge ostensibly insane, with all those “alternative facts,” to point to in discrediting accurate and legitimate dissent; and points of explosive violence to motivate repressive measures, overwhelming furies of prison punishments, draconian and violent responses, societally condoned, of police and right-wing citizens — all of which are “instruments” in the societal philharmonic they are orchestrating to bring forth the music sweetest to their ears. And their ears alone. Which not coincidentally has the same snake-charming tones that conjures enlargements of their bank accounts.
Self-Actualization and Atmadharma
In any case, this all brings us back to this point that one can have access to the entire Universe; but while in Form, one not just should but has actually come here to do some aspect or part of that, only. One has one’s dharma, one’s duty arisen out of who one is, and not anyone else’s. This is called one’s atmadharma.
So it is good, in fact imperative, to open oneself to all kinds of potentials. But if one does not express it, does not bring it out, positively, creatively — and in a fulfilling and socially satisfying way… like a tree does in taking the nutrients it pulls out of the soil to manifest in leaves and blossoms and limbs — one is like a drowned plant, underwater in a swamp … unfulfilled, depressed, unhappy. At best, one is in an oar-less rowboat, directionless and drifting, in the middle of an infinite sea.
This peek into immersion in the Cosmic Soup is instructive. It says something about the spiritual process, the primal process, and the Identity processes of life, especially in the places where they all overlap.
It says it is not enough to bring down the Veils on awareness and the limitations of self, constructed of pain and trauma, through feeling and integrating one’s Pain, alone, for example. For that expands one’s potentialities, yes. But that is a state of non-actualization similar to a No-Form state. Yet here in Form is where it is our purpose to experience Form. Meaning it is our duty to limit that ultimately infinite potentiality down to something small and doable. And it is in this sense that the dangers of “mysticism” are not just for “modern youth” but for all. There is the danger of “swimming in a sea of potentiality” and thereby losing one’s enjoyment of life in a Form state.
One must limit in order to enjoy. The Game can only be fun with established parameters. Otherwise, not so fun. That too — such “unfun” suffering in the soup of potentiality — is a valuable experience of Experience necessary in the glorification of the All. However, in a practical sense, one would do well to know that one has the potential to enjoy life and have fun by engaging in actualization.
“Promises to Keep”
Yes, eventually we want to drop all “games”; we have completed ourselves. Inevitably we long for hOMe, but it is unwise to embrace that path before its proper time. I am reminded of Robert Frost’s poem, “Stopping by Woods, on a Snowy Evening.” The point I believe it makes is that even in the cold and bluster of a snowstorm, we sense a feeling of calm and longing. Frost’s words are, “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.”
In this chapter, however, we are reflecting on the truth he expresses in the rest of that: “But I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep.” We need be aware that actualization of self is why we came here, not just to leave it.
Yes, we want rest amid the turbulence of life. But if we seek that before its time, this longing turns a spiritual quest into a cowardly escape from life. At its worst, it becomes suicide.
However, retreat has nothing to do with spirituality. That is a common, sadly, a prevalent, misunderstanding. A clearer look at what is entailed in a spiritual life reveals something quite different from retreat. It involves a requirement that we be purified by the fires of life, and action. One need only look to the Bhagavad Gita.
In the Gita, Arjuna expresses this desire to refrain from engaging in his duty. Whereas Krishna, as deity and guru to Arjuna, guides him to take up his task. To fulfill his destiny. A parallel development is narrated in The Bible when Jesus prays in the Garden of Gethsemane to be relieved of his duty, his destiny. We don’t know what the Divinity said back to him, but right afterward Jesus takes upon himself his purpose and fate.
You see, we come into Form for a reason. We choose to do it; our fate is involved in it. Our only goals in life, really, are to discover, to re-member, our reason for arising in this collective Game and then to actualize it. We are a singular tone brought into the symphony of existence, and if we do not express it the Universe is a less beautiful melody for it.
Still, many folks fail in that in life when they jump the gun on that seeking of an end to the drama of their existence. We are actors on a stage, and they would refuse their lines; and they would make their exit before the script says to. Certainly then, they are fulfilling their “destiny” to fail in life and to have a life where one learns from that, from failure. Perhaps the soulular self of them is having a life somewhere else that needs to feel the consequences of cowering from one’s destiny here in order to actualize one there. All things happen simultaneously, remember, since there is no time.
However, if you are reading this, there is a good chance that kind of learning through failure is not what is meant for you here and now. I do not believe anyone hears words such as I am writing here unless they are meant to.
Naturally, we cannot expect not to wish a surcease of experience when our life is characterized by pain and difficulty. When we suffer, we long for an end to it, and often that takes shape as a desire for an end of our existence. In these cases, we might be attracted to spiritual paths that express that return to nothingness as their goal.
Yet, especially when we are younger, it might be that in taking those roads we are ignoring or running from our reason for being here. Sometimes our fates are difficult; often they can seem overwhelming. And always are we here to learn and grow. Yet we do that only by moving out of our “comfort zone,” which means dis-comfort; it means suffering.
This does not mean a spiritual path has to wait till the end of life, either. Or even the second half of life, as Jung claimed was necessary. How else could it be that Krishna was an aid to Arjuna in his prime. Certainly, the Bhagavad Gita is a pillar in the spiritual edifice because it brings such wisdom about the necessity of pursuing one’s duty, of actualizing the potential one has brought into existence.
This mistaken idea that transpersonal consciousness need wait till later in life emanates from Jung and Ego psychologists in the West; in the East it can arise out of the notion of there being four stages of life, of which the fourth is the spiritual one. In an earlier chapter, we looked at how this faulty belief led Ken Wilber and John White to claim, upon no evidence, that “One needs to have an Ego, before one can lose one.” Yet all the great mystics were mystics nearly all their life, virtually none waited till the second half of life.
It occurs to me that there is a profit-related motive involved in why societies would want to encourage folks to think only of spirituality after one’s productive years are over. If you think about it, the books that would encourage folks to give up their lives and their authenticity to the social collective in their adulthood would be unconsciously chosen to be published, to be favorably reviewed, to be promulgated. A materialistic culture, feeding on productivity and consumerism, is likely to promote creative products buttressing that view; it is hardly likely to advance philosophies and spiritual paths proposing rejection or transcendence of itself. Therefore, the view that points out that our most admired holy people refused the yoke of collective, “commercial,” or materialistic responsibility is not something you are likely to hear outside of this.
Destiny to Pursue
Hermann Hesse, in his novel, Siddhartha, provides insight and a tip in this regard. Siddhartha’s illumination, far from occasioning retreat from life, precipitates instead his taking up his “destiny” and participating in the “stream of life” and events. He is motivated by his liberation to do the opposite of splitting off from life into cave-like and mute inaction, as mystics are most often portrayed doing. In his own life, Hesse clearly adhered “religiously” to his dharma, his duty, to write the wonderful things by which we can learn at this very moment. That is telling us something about that mellifluous Universal music to which we are asked to add our own song, in coming here.
Still, such an inner journey — a retreat from the world — can be part of one’s awakening, as it was, as well, for Siddhartha, in Hesse’s novel. In the same way, the hero’s journey, as described by Joseph Campbell (1972), is a necessary retreat from the world, in order to disclose what light one needs to reveal to oneself that one needs to bring back to the world. And just the same way as on a vision quest or walkabout, one retreats from ordinary activity in order to open self to the potential the Universe wants to actualize through one. Indeed, that is the “discovery” part of the quest I mentioned. One needs to actualize, but first one needs to “discover” what that unique thing is that one is to do. The thing one is to actualize. Just you alone.
And therein is the problem on that end. For too often that period of discovery is not done and one finds oneself to be unhappy throughout life, having taken up roles not meant for one. Hence, one is learning in this life, through failure again. Through losing one’s way, one impresses upon oneself the knowing, helpful later in this life or in some other, that one must seek self in life — one’s true identity — and not go along with the ego insisted of one by others, which is the socially-constituted self.
Spiritual wisdom comes in to teach us this as well. We are told that “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is,” as Donovan expressed it in song. Out of Asia it is expressed more clearly in that “Before enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water.” What is implied is the time of enlightenment, while seeking self-discovery, where one necessarily desists from worldly activities. The time when “there is no mountain.”
What these quotes are expressing is that there is a process of normal life, then retreat from life, and then return to life with a higher calling … with more composure, more direction, more peace; but no less adherence to one’s duty, in fact more. For now it is felt as one’s dharma, one’s duty in relation to self, Self, and the All, all at once.
In that book, Siddhartha, Hesse’s exact phrasing is that “Siddhartha ceased to fight against his destiny.” After he experienced oneness, Siddhartha embraces “the stream of events.” His soul finds harmony with “the stream of life, full of sympathy and compassion, surrendering himself” to it. That describes anything but an escape from life.
Remember also that at the time when Krishna advised Arjuna to go into battle — as explained in the Bhagavad Gita — Arjuna was delaying and doing his best imitation of Hamlet. Mired in questions of acting or not acting of “being or not-to-being,” Arjuna was despairing at the karma that action inevitably brings.
Nishkam Karma and the Answer to Karma
In the same way that Krishna advised Arjuna to go into battle, to do his duty, and not to refrain from life out of despair at the karma it inevitably brings, Sathya Sai Baba pointed out, about karma, that it is inevitable that while in Form there is action, hence karma. In a teaching he gave to hundreds of thousands of us at Puttaparthi, India, in 1989, he said that even the action of the heart’s pumping has consequences.
He related how in a body, movement is unavoidable, hence karma is inevitable. He then explained that the accumulation of negative results from such actions can however be prevented by offering the consequences of one’s actions to God, to Divinity … to one’s higher power, in whatever way one wishes to imagine it. He gave examples such as becoming a doctor but dedicating that work to the Divine by giving those skills over to the service of the poor, freely.
For, Sai Baba pointed out, those skills do not come of oneself, of one’s efforts, either solely or predominantly. He pointed out that all that goes into making a doctor involves the efforts of thousands and millions of souls who came before, giving rise to the knowledge that is put into practice. Further, that even the instruction received through both primary and secondary education, as well as that of the university, are products of society and the efforts, sweat, thoughts, and skills of many others.
True enough, that is. For we receive the results of the cumulative efforts of millions of forebears — with most of what is given us offered freely by them, as gifts to “the world,” to posterity, out of their passion and their conviction about the benefit they were doing. Out of their own and unique atmadharma and duty. How, then, is it correct that a doctor or any professional should seek to reap the fruit of that tree of all the accumulated efforts, put a price on it, sell it, and keep all the benefit? That is the same kind of unethical as bottling air to sell … or marketing someone else’s invention.
No, the only fair thing is to give as much back to society as one can of the reward one receives from one’s profession and activities. To give it as freely back as those who came before us, gifting us, through their actions, with our state of accumulated knowledge and technology.
As for the institutions that arose around this knowledge or grew out of it, well, society creates and maintains those institutions — the libraries, the schools at all levels, the great majority of the research. One benefits from all those, so one should not think one’s skills to be one’s own. To do otherwise is to be that wave of Ego, again, thinking that it, on its own power alone, gets itself to shore.
Liberation
On the contrary, a dedicating of one’s efforts to the Divine is — analogously then and using the metaphor of a planet and a star — represented by the planet, separated from and orbiting its star, but with its face to its sun and lit by it. This — being God-conscious, Divinity remembering, higher-power acknowledging, muse attending — is how we, while still in Form, can be freed from the dark sojourn fitted for humanity. This is how we can be liberated from our lives on the dark side of the moon.
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VEIL THREE.
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Infancy and Childhood, the Split … the Primal Scene
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“‘Child sacrifice’ — the natural self slain, the ego ‘is rewarded for being obsequious while the real self seethes in the prison of loneliness.’”
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However important the Veil we just reviewed — that of adolescence and Identity — it, itself, is built upon an even earlier and more influential Veil. This earlier fall from grace represents an even more fundamental illusion of self and perversion of personality. For one needs to be prepared, to be readied, as it were, to be able or be amenable, to giving up one’s self to a culturally constructed one, especially one that is chosen for one.
How is that readiness brought about? Well, before one is willing to give up self and hand over one’s life to authorities, bosses, and to the protocols of society, one needs to have an experience of having already lost oneself at one time … of having already given up oneself. More than that, one needs to have had an experience where such a selling of Self, or soul, was imposed upon one … was “an offer one cannot refuse,” so to speak. This experience is what happens around the ages of four and five in a specific way; and it is stretched out more generally over the period three to six years old.
The primal scene — that definitive event that encapsulates the process in one distinct and memorable scene — occurs around four or five years old. This event creates what Janov termed the split. The split is the final creation of a self — termed by Janov the unreal self — that is inauthentic and in keeping with parents’ wishes; and one that is hidden, repressed, yet authentic, which Janov termed the real self.
However, the Oedipal and Electra crises, which are the larger categories of this process — regardless how outdated and misunderstood those concepts are — occurs over the period three to six.
Nonetheless, the basis even of that goes further back. It all begins in infancy, even as a neonate, where one, upon coming out of the womb, discovers one’s needs are not going to be adequately attended to. They will not be very well noticed. You will not be all that important to “them.” Not as important as you should be, if you were to get your needs satisfied and to thrive. Since the definition of being loved is having one’s needs taken care of, you will not feel loved for who you are.
With that in place in infancy, it is only a matter of time before one will begin to turn that into, “I cannot be loved for who I am, so who should I be, then?” These are the philosophic bands that arise at birth. One’s earlier human nature and innate Divinity are forgotten in the trauma of birth, leaving one an ego, one that is blank, a tabula rasa. And upon that blank slate will be imprinted the behaviors and messages from those behaviors that one gets from one’s parents, especially one’s mother.
This part of the book, Veil Three, will be considerably shorter than the last one, or, for that matter, than any of those to come. For this is the Veil that is most commonly known in psychology already. Arthur Janov detailed it exquisitely, especially in his first book, The Primal Scream (1970). He elaborated upon that one in many more over the last half century, directly up to today.
Alice Miller popularized the basic understandings of this Veil in her many works, as well. Alice Miller’s titles themselves are instructive — Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’sBetrayal of the Child; For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Childrearing and the Roots of Violence; Prisoners Of Childhood: The Drama of the Gifted Child and the Search for the True Self; The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness; Breaking Down the Wall of Silence: The Liberating Experience of Facing Painful Truth; Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries; The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting; among still others.
Similarly, John Bradshaw (1988, 1990) has brought these issues into the common discourse. Others addressing this problem of the split, and its healing, include Jean Jenson, with her book Reclaiming Your Life: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Regression Therapy to Overcome the Effects of Childhood Abuse (1996); Paul J. Hannig, with his book, Feeling People (1982); Elizabeth Noble, who wrote Primal Connections: How Our Experiences From Conception to Birth Influence Our Emotions, Behavior and Health (1993); and J. Konrad Stettbacher, the author of Making Sense of Suffering: The Healing Confrontation With Your Own Past (1991); among others.
Much earlier than all of these, we had the beginnings of this kind of thinking with Winnicott and his true self and false self; with the others along with him which I addressed in Chapter 2, dealing with the overview of the field of prenatal and perinatal psychology; and with Wilhelm Reich, especially regarding the way sexual repression, as a part of “normal” parenting, creates the “armored” personality. And many more.
While societies still have a lot to learn in regard to this Veil and about being more loving and less controlling and punishing of their children so as to optimize their life potentials and overall felicity; still, it is not a topic that needs addressing and bringing to awareness on the scale that all the other Veils do, which I cover in this three-volume work, Dance of the Seven Veils. Indeed, all the other Veils are addressed primarily, or solely, by myself, the one exception being Grof’s exposition of the Veil around birth; we’ll get to that in the Dance of the Seven Veils II. And while I add a different dimension to what he offers regarding Veil Four — birth and the perinatal — there is really no other person saying what I am regarding the Veil One of anthropocentrism; the Veil Two of Identity and wrong-headed rites of passage; Veil Five of prenatal hell; Veil Six of wombular templates on reality and religion; Veil Seven on the periconceptional structuring of human reality; nor of the No-Form State prior to that. And certainly no one puts it all together in this comprehensive way, which constitutes a new-paradigm of understanding, unto itself.
So I will address the issues of this Veil which has to do with the creation of the primal split and the loss of the real self at the primal scene; but I will focus on the aspects of it that need correction, elucidation, or which benefit from their inclusion in this larger context of Seven Veils. For the rest, I refer the reader to the books by the authors mentioned, whose seminal works have been restated as well by still others.
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Becoming “Them”:
The Cultural Veil, the Primal Scene, Child Sacrifice … The Centaur Stage of Infant and Toddler Learning Involves Learning You Are Not Okay and Continues the Separation from Innate Divinity
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The newborn is the Centaur — half human, half animal … half human, half Divine: The biosocial bands … the cultural veil.
At the age of four or five, giving up, we become “them”: Life is passed “performing rituals and mouthing incantations” in the service of others’ requirements.
Having become “them,” we are left forever asking “Who am I?” … the philosophic bands.
If not my self, who then to be? Surrendering one’s natural self and imprisoning Divinity in a Pandora ‘s Box within, one is plagued with wondering who to be.
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The dynamic of feeling that one has to be someone else in order to get love is laid down early, right after birth. Before getting to the part where this entire process of increasing inauthenticity and forgetfulness of Self manifests as an “Oedipal conflict,” an “Electra complex,” and culminates in a defining moment of stark and dark revelation or a need to give up Self in order to survive, it might be good to overview the events leading up to it, starting after birth. Let’s begin with a look at that.
The Biosocial Bands
We are born, and beginning immediately we have the arising of what Ken Wilber (1977) has termed the biosocial bands of consciousness. These arise out of the postnatal, infantile, and early childhood experiences. While Wilber has a narrower conceptualization of them than I am advancing, his elaboration on them still holds. He writes, “The Biosocial Band, as the repository of sociological institutions such as language and logic, is basically, fundamentally, and above all else a matrix of distinctions, of forms and patterns conventionally delineating, dissecting, and dividing the seamless coat of the universe.
“Thus the Biosocial Band, if it isn’t directly responsible for all dualisms, nevertheless definitely reinforces all dualisms, and so perpetuates illusions that we would ordinarily see through…. The Biosocial Band, as a matrix of distinctions, is thus like a vast screen that we throw over reality.”1 The biosocial bands, then, in Wilber’s words are “a vast screen that we throw over reality.” Or one might say, as I am, this introjection of social and relational information, creates a Veil across reality.
Biosocialization
Language is important in structuring experience, as well as are all the other factors of socialization alluded to by Wilber above.
Nursing and nurturing events create templates for later language and logic.
However, the fundamental biosocialization occurs at the mother’s breast, so to speak. Postnatal hospital experiences and nursing experiences are foremost events in the structuring and patterning of all later form, including that of language and logic. After that, weaning, toilet training, and other infant and early childhood experiences have secondary but still immensely strong influences in shaping the very way that reality is perceived and reacted to.
The Cultural Veil
However, compared to earlier experiences, which are biologically and bioculturally determined, these postnatal experiences are heavily culture-rooted. Therefore, they are hugely variable.
And these experiences in interaction with the outside world, which is predominately the family at this point, in turn serve eventually to shape the exoteric contents of culture. This is to be contrasted with biocultural influences at the transpersonal bands, the womb level, where (relatively) universal biology makes for relatively universal patterns and structures.2 Don’t worry, we’ll get to that.
This postnatal body-ego is “animalian” compared to “vegetative” in the womb.
At birth we have the beginnings of the idea that is the Ego. Yet, Wilber (1977) points out this is initially a body-ego. Therefore, if the womb could be called vegetative, this state of body-ego could be called animalian. The child is severed from direct transpersonal access, but these realities exist as bodily felt feelings. Through the emergence of the biosocial bands, however, that sense of bodily and transpersonal awareness is increasingly replaced with Ego consciousness and consciousness of cultural form.
The Centaur is the toddler — half human, half animal … half human, half Divine.
So this initial socialization is patterned upon a foundation of bodily feelings. This bodily “intuition,” if you will, itself comprises the remnants of transpersonal realities left after the birth trauma has obliterated direct access to the Divine.
It is fitting, therefore, that the symbol Wilber (1977) uses for this psychological stage, or state of consciousness, is the Centaur. The Centaur is half human, half animal; which is a way of saying that here, after birth, the conceptual, cultural, “civilized” portion, which we are here calling the biosocial bands and the cultural veil, is melded, as it were, to the remnants of transpersonal reality, which at this point are only experienced as bodily pushes and pulls, patterns of feelings, “instincts.”
Essentially, with body and animal — in this instance, horse — containing the transpersonal, the Centaur represents being half human and half Divine, as well. Which, incidentally, fits nicely with the mythology of the Centaur. For indeed, the most famous centaur is Chiron, who, being the son of a Titan and a sea nymph, could be said to be partially Divine and partially human.
The relation to transpersonal realities here is far from identification. We talk instead of attunement to cosmic rhythms or living in accordance with natural cycles. Relating developmental stages to cultural-historical ones, this corresponds to an agrarian type of culture. For such an “archaic” person — the person of pre-historical, what has been called matriarchal, cultures — these rhythms may be seasonal and related to agricultural processes and cycles of Nature and time.
The “archaic” person is to cycles of Nature as the baby is to mother’s routines for caring.
For the young child, these rhythms are biological and cultural. The newborn must find a way to strike a balance between its own cycles of hunger, thirst, sleep, defecation, play, and needs for touch and affection, and the cycles of its caretaker — whose rhythms, even under optimal conditions, are not going to synchronize with the newborn’s as perfectly as was the case in the womb.
It is no wonder that in its devolutional form, that of the prehistorical agrarian human, it is characterized by sacrifice, prayer, ritual, and worship — all directed toward getting in touch with the Divine forces of Nature and/or of orchestrating such forces toward desired results.
Becoming Other Than “I”
This tension, then, pushes the emergence of the biosocial bands. For with the passage of time this discrepancy widens. At first the parent makes an attempt to cater to the newborn’s requirements and its rhythms of needing. Yet more and more the infant is required to conform to external cycles: from feeding on demand to on a schedule, from nursing to weaning … eventually there is toilet training. At each stage the child is told, in unmistakable ways, that he or she is not okay the way that she or he is, that she or he must conform to outer patterns. This continues throughout the infant and toddler years until the age of about four or five.
Infancy and early childhood is about learning to forget and forgetting how to feel.
Thus, this process of layering of bands of biosocial learning — of learning to forget and forgetting how to feel one’s inner pushes, pulls, and feelings — widens, with each new repression, the wall between self and Divinity. And this depiction characterizes the state from birth on and through the infant and toddler years. It extends up until the time of another, even greater, separation — another major splitting or fall from grace, the creation of another major duality in consciousness. This phase occurs around the age of four or five and is called by Arthur Janov (1970) the primal scene.
The Primal Scene
The primal scene occurs at around the age of four or five years. It corresponds exactly with Wilber’s tertiary dualism, as also it correlates with the Oedipal struggle, using Freudian terms. It consolidates the formation of the Ego against the body, severing the Centaur into “a horseman divided from his horse”3 It may be likened to a third shutdown, a third stage in the removal of self from Divinity, a third denial of God — this time under the terrorizing influence of what might be called social or relationship trauma.
The Natural Self Is Slain
According to Arthur Janov (1970), at around the age of four or five there occurs a point at which the child perceives the hopelessness of ever being loved for him- or herself and becomes instead what the parents … and, by proxy, society … want. Their needs become her or his needs.
The real self — the “child within,” the natural self, our innate Divinity, the God within — is slain and buried in the unconscious, once again, and becomes the unconscious self. Janov (1970) explains this process of losing the real self in a systematic and detailed manner. He writes brilliantly and poetically in his description, and I will let his words do most of the talking here.
Janov points out, first of all, that “We are all creatures of need. We are born needing, and the vast majority of us die after a lifetime of struggle with many of our needs unfulfilled. These needs are not excessive — to be fed, kept warm and dry, to grow and develop at our own pace, to be held and caressed, and to be stimulated. These Primal needs are the central reality of the infant. The neurotic process begins when these needs go unmet for any length of time….
“Since the infant himself cannot overcome the sensation of hunger (that is, he cannot go to the refrigerator) or find substitute affection, he must separate his sensations (hunger; wanting to be held) from consciousness. This separation of oneself from one’s needs and feelings is an instinctive maneuver in order to shut off excessive pain. We call it the split.”4
The split evolves into the permanent disconnection between the real and the unreal selves — between the real, needing, “feeling” self and the self we must pretend to be in order to try to get some our needs satisfied.
“Demands for the child to be unreal are not often explicit. Nevertheless, parental needs become the child’s implicit demand. The child is born into his parents’ needs and begins struggling to fulfill them almost from the moment he is alive. He may be pushed to smile (to appear happy), to coo, to wave bye-bye, later to sit up and walk, still later to push himself so that his parents can have an advanced child. As the child develops, the requirements upon him become more complex. He will have to get A’s, to be helpful and do his chores, to be quiet and undemanding, not to talk too much, to say bright things, to be athletic. What he will not do is be himself. The thousands of operations that go on between parents and children which deny the natural Primal needs of the child mean that the child will hurt. They mean that he cannot be what he is and be loved….”5
The Prison of the “Body Snatchers”
The upshot of this process, then, as Sam Keen (1972) described it: “He knows he cannot both be himself and be loved. So he splits into a real and an unreal self. His real feelings are sealed in the throbbing vault of the lonely inner self and he begins to tailor his conduct to the expectations of his parents. His watchword becomes: I will be what you want me to be if you will only love me. Although I feel hurt, alone, fearful, and unlovely, I will act trustworthy, loyal, helpful…. Henceforth the budding neurotic child gets plastic approval but no genuine love. His unreal self is rewarded for being obsequious while his real self seethes in the prison of loneliness.”6
The primal scene itself, however, is that crystallizing event that for the child symbolizes the essential truth of all the accumulated interactions that from birth on have demonstrated that in order to get a semblance of one’s needs fulfilled one cannot simply be oneself but must instead struggle to please another — for now a parent or parents, later it will be a lover, a spouse, a boss, society in general.
Giving up, we become “them.”
Janov (1970) describes this primal scene: “As the assaults on the real system mount, they begin to crush the real person. One day an event will take place which, though not necessarily traumatic in itself — giving the child to a baby sitter for the hundredth time — will shift the balance between real and unreal and render the child neurotic. That event I call the major Primal Scene. It is a time in the young child’s life when all the past humiliations, negations, and deprivations accumulate into an inchoate realization: ‘There is no hope of being loved for what I am.’ It is then that the child defends himself against that catastrophic realization by becoming split from his feelings, and slips quietly into neurosis. The realization is not a conscious one. Rather, the child begins acting around his parents, and then elsewhere, in the manner expected by them. He says their words and does their thing. He acts unreal — i.e., not in accord with the reality of his own needs and desires. In a short time the neurotic behavior becomes automatic.
“Neurosis involves being split, disconnected from one’s feelings. The more assaults on the child by the parents, the deeper the chasm between real and unreal. He begins to speak and move in prescribed ways, not to touch his body in proscribed areas (not to feel himself literally), not to be exuberant or sad, and so on. The split, however, is necessary in a fragile child. It is the reflexive (i.e., automatic) way the organism maintains its sanity. Neurosis, then, is the defense against catastrophic reality in order to protect the development and psychophysical integrity of the organism.
“Neurosis involves being what one is not in order to get what doesn’t exist. If love existed, the child would be what he is, for that is love — letting someone be what he or she is. Then, nothing wildly traumatic need happen in order to produce neurosis. It can stem from forcing a child to punctuate every sentence with ‘please’ and ‘thank you, to prove how refined the parents are. It can also come from not allowing the child to complain when he is unhappy or to cry. Parents may rush in to quell sobs because of their anxiety. They may not permit anger — ‘nice girls don’t throw tantrums; nice boys don’t talk back’ — to prove how respected the parents are; neurosis may also arise from making a child perform, such as asking him to recite poems at a party or solve abstract problems. Whatever form it takes, the child gets the idea of what is required of him quite soon. Perform, or else. Be what they want, or else — no love, or what passes for love: approval, a smile, a wink. Eventually the act comes to dominate the child’s life, which is passed in performing rituals and mouthing incantations in the service of his parents’ requirements.”7
Isaac’s “primal scene” shows real meaning of “child sacrifice.”
A good mythic reflection of the dynamics of this third fall from grace with its aftermath of a Third Veil hiding what is real, or what is Naked Reality, is the Abraham and Isaac story in Genesis. In the story, God “tempts” Abraham by telling him to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. Therefore, the altar Isaac is to be sacrificed on is that of the parent’s own misapprehended growth needs.
Moreover, just as Isaac, the son, the child, is to be offered in sacrifice to Abraham’s relationship to the divine, to his supposed spiritual needs; so also we, the “vast majority” of us, are asked to forgo our own dreams, our own unique directions, for the unfulfilled dreams, desperate hopes, and ego vanity of another — usually the same-sex parent.
Philosophic Bands: Who to Be?
After the consolidation of the Ego, the unreal self, at the primal scene and its consequent severing of even the felt connection to transpersonal realities by way of the body through severance of Ego from body, one is no longer concerned with addressing one’s reality — that is to say, in terms of attempting to secure even the satisfaction of felt needs.
Since one has given up on being one’s self, all that remains is to decide who to be. In the struggle to decide who to be (in order to be loved), we have the emergence of Wilber’s philosophic bands. We have “developed” from the biosocial bands that began being laid upon our apprehension of reality after birth; through the primal scene, where the remainder of the real self is left behind, in favor of “getting by” somehow in the social arena given one; to the philosophic bands where one is then wondering, if one cannot be oneself, who then should one be?
Identity and Unmet Needs
However, the search for Identity is pushed by the pressure of all prior unmet needs. The emergence of this drive to find out who to be — these philosophic bands, or Veil, across reality — is driven by the built-up pain of deprivations and abuses:
At the stage of adolescent Identity formation, which creates Veil Two, this force comprises needs for simple acceptance, belongingness, self-esteem.
Further back, this compulsion to discover who to be, i.e., Identity, has roots in the energy of unmet biological needs at infancy and early childhood, which comprises Veil Three.
Even farther back, it is driven by the repressed dynamo of the fear of death inherent in the birth trauma, which encompasses Veil Four.
It is augmented and corrupted by the experiences that give rise to Veil Five, that of our prenatal hell.
Further back still, it arises from the energy — which is that of Pain and lost potential — of unaddressed transpersonal yearnings and directives which we still had access to in the womb, which is Veil Six.
In fact, this drive to discover who one is originates all the way back in the energy of the original act of creation of Wilber’s primary dualism, which as you will see is our coming into Form from No-Form in the creation of sperm and ovum around the event of conception … Veil Seven. Hence, we are driven by needs for acceptance, belongingness, self-esteem, at all stages of life, which are rooted in the energy of our personal “big bang” — our coming from No-Form into Form.
Furthermore, all our needs at later stages — outgrowths of our original intention in coming into Form — are corrupted in the process of the building up of the Veils. To discover who we are, we need to undo that corruption, to pull back those Veils to uncover clearer, more heart-driven, nobler, more Divine identities.
Recapping, the primary dualism is simply the creation of Form out of No-Form. More specifically, it is the emerging of sperm and ovum, of Form out of no-thing-ness. Which emergence, interestingly and from this perspective on the other side of all the subsequent blockages and repressions of Energy, is beginning to look like some kind of “big bang” at one’s absolute earliest beginnings.8
Divinity in Drag – the Id
However, at this point all this accumulated energy that pushes the emergence of the philosophic bands is called libido. Libido is the corrupted outgrowth of our original Divine identity, with all its powerful charge in coming into Form and its imprint of intention for being, which is called mission or destiny.
The natural self is relegated to a Pandora prison.
And as for the pitiful remnant of the Real in the personality — that is, of Mind, of Absolute Subjectivity, of archetypal pattern, of karmic direction and dharmic purposiveness, and of heartfelt human feeling: Well, that is relegated to a locked and dirty Pandora’s box called id — a shabby and distorted remnant, Divinity dressed in demonic drag clothing.
Summarizing, these years of childhood — marked by the defining event of loss of the real self at the primal scene — continue until the time at which culture and society, the Other, make another significant departure from the reality of self, requiring another radical adaptation. The latest and final duality, the fourth separation, splitting, and shutdown — and the Second Veil — occurs around the time of puberty. That is the Identity and adolescence phase of life, marked by its own kernel of an event — rites of passage. We saw what that amounted to in the part previous to this one, which dealt with Veil Two, about adolescence and cultural identity and the rituals of initiation into adulthood.
Now, in this part, let us look more closely at some of what amounts to the mythology around the primal scene and the Oedipal conflict. Naturally, we start with the ancient story of Oedipus.
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Oedipus:
The Assault of the Father Expresses the Way Patriarchs Feel About Their Sons
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“…because they are crushed, they must crush the child. They are kitty-drowners and butterfly-mashers, and the child, the son, represents all the innocence, feeling, thriving, and felicity they cannot have. So it must be killed.”
“…the Oedipal conflict is not universal, but it is a constant in patriarchal cultures for indeed the father wants to kill the son … that is why the son wants to be with the mother and kill the father: For the father brutalizes both mother and son.”
“…at this point, having repressed how one was abused and robbed of a happy life, for no reason other than that it would be offensive to the feelings of the father, who had himself been deprived, one becomes another paternal abuser and thief of happiness for the next generation of sons.”
“…all this can be summed up as the assault of the fathers….”
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You see how these Veils across reality represent, each, a further removal from an innate Divinity — one that is feminine, felicitous, and kind — to an increasingly neurotic condition, in which the inner Divinity is replaced by a patriarchal god figure, existing somewhere outside oneself. This god represents both a distorted version of innate Divinity as well as the combined results of the parental Veil, occurring at the primal scene, and the community Veil, imposed on the personality at the adolescence and Identity stage of life. This god outside is a not-too-disguised amalgamation of one’s own parents — in particular, one’s father — and the profile being demanded of all members of the community at the time they are to enter adulthood.
Societal God
It is in the sense of this interpretation, then, that it can be said that the god outside oneself, who is, for example, the Yahweh of Abraham, is the god of Society — that is, of economic reality, of survival in this material world.1 More than that, however, this god represents conformity to that unreal reality as it was set up by a hierarchy with strongmen at the top and fathers at the peak of a corresponding pyramid in the family. Essentially, then, this patriarchal god is a product of the elites, creating, for the purposes of wealth and power, such a cultural-economic situation where survival would be linked with their largess … or at least, with their permission. Even further it is seen to be a result of an aggression by the father figure, mirroring the cultural vise of hierarchical societies constraining him, and so, acting out the overlooked side of the Oedipal crisis.
The Oedipal Conflict
With that context, let us look more deeply into this Oedipus complex. Traditionally, this Oedipal conflict, which is derived from Freud, involves the boy wanting the full attention of his mother, wanting indeed to sexually have his mother, and wishing his father dead and out of the way. This has been roundly disputed since Freud’s presentation of it. And by now, certainly, by looking cross-culturally we can see that the complex is a product of patriarchal cultures … only.
Why only patriarchal cultures? Well in all cultures there is this split of the real self from the unreal self at the primal scene. That is simply a product of not getting one’s needs completely met or not getting seen and attended to sufficiently by one’s parents. Always there is at least some gap between need and satisfaction, for reasons I get into, in particular, in Planetmates and Prodigal Human.
“Spoiled” Children
Now, while I do not want to distract the reader from our line of thinking about the primal scene being misconstrued as an Oedipal crisis, unfortunately I need to stress that less of a needs-satisfaction gap is better. Put another way, that more satisfaction of needs is better than less. For I need to beat back an objection in many minds, arising from this lingering notion that harshness, brutality, and deprivation are actually good for a person, making them … “tougher.” “Spare the rod, spoil the child” and all that.
I can hear the shouts in some readers’ minds of “spoiled brats!” at this very moment. For these folks are convinced it is greater gratification that is the problem, when actually it is greater identification with its loss of self that is the crux of adult dilemmas. Such people know not that “spoiled” children are a particular category of deprivation, where physical-material needs are maximized to offset the extreme emotional-affectional deprivations coming from what are often wealthy, disinterested, uninvolved, and aloof parents. The lack of love and attention is the deprivation, and it cannot be made up for with “toys.”
The fact that the parents of such children are often well-to-do — hence, focused on material things — would suggest that they likely “thingify” their children, as they do everything else in their lives. Such parents will often “manage” their children’s needs — having others to care for, breastfeed (wet nurses), and educate their children — and will be derelict in giving personal time and attention to their children, with their emotional and physical needs. The births and infancies of the children of the wealthy are often handled in the most “efficient” and least time-consuming ways and its tasks are routinely farmed out to strangers.
Traditionally, right up to modern times, the upper class will send their children off to be raised by others, too; and eventually off to boarding school, as was done with Donald Trump, who at the age of thirteen was enrolled in the New York Military Academy. The fact that these parenting practices of the wealthy have filtered down to the upper middle class and the middle classes of modern advanced societies — with earlier and earlier daycare becoming the norm … so as to “keep up” with the demands of highly competitive societies in creating better and more efficient cogs, as early as possible — is a sad fact of our times.
You see, “spoiled” children are the result of less attention to the needs of girls and boys and not more; never do loved children, of “permissive” parents become spoiled children. We can only wish Donald J. Trump would have had “permissive,” loving, and attentive parents; so we would not all now be subjected to his whining for attention and approval on a world stage, while enacting policies designed to punish and deprive the masses the way he was deprived, and specifically, not given attention or love by his father.
In addition, what often prevails in such situations is that the “spoiled” child is actually modeling the adult. You can say “Do as I say, not as I do” all you want, but children will do what you do. So it might be that what these folks are seeing in “spoiled” children are actually split off and repressed parts of their own personalities which they make sure never to notice about themselves. In which case, do not worry, when these children are older they will have all of their parents’ faults and personality deficits. And if you were privy to this development, you could conclude the parents’ to have been successful … in having produced junior sociopaths, just like them.
However, this deficiency of empathy — which is actually what is at the heart of the “spoiled brat” personality, and in this you can see how it would represent the earlier version of what will be the adult sociopath — could also be from traumas occurring not directly out of observable events; not obviously from nurture. There could easily be severe prenatal-perinatal trauma that “spoiled” children endured which could account for their actions now. The problem of becoming “spoiled children” often is a result of inhumane birthing practices and poor prenatal care and awareness. And this cannot be made up for afterward, after the child is born: It needed to be taken care of back then. If not, too late. Too bad. Such trauma is stamped upon their souls for life and cannot be undone with material possessions … or even love.
The effects of harmful events occurring in the womb or at birth can only be lessened, not eliminated, with optimal parenting. Still, there is never any time nor any childhood in which more loving parents and better emotional-needs satisfaction is not assistive to the child — if not completely curative — as well as helpful to society in that these young ones will someday act within it. Let not that important detail be overlooked.
In any case, while the gap between emotional needs and the satisfaction of them can be mitigated by attentive parents, it occurs to at least some extent. And it will continue to. That is, until we have societies, as well as families and parents, that foster human expression and are human-value-oriented and loving. Not dominated by strongmen, wealthy elites, and their metaphysical ploys — the transcendent gods.
Assault of the Father
However, it takes the further devolution to a patriarchal society for innocent four-year-old boys, as depicted in the Oedipal conflict, to be so threatening to the fragile ego of the male parent. Men in civilization are humiliated outside the family unit, having to be sycophantic to higher ups. In ways subtle and not so subtle, they must deny their feelings and self-respect in conformity to those on whom their survival depends, of course, but also in other ways. They will, for example, be further abused and humiliated by clerical authorities and their anti-feeling and anti-body religious dictums; and they will be oppressed by the overwhelming load of work required for survival, as piled on them by their Controllers.
Because of these humiliations arising out of the many constraints on the aliveness of men arising with civilization, men feel deprivation to be their natural state: Think about it, expressed another way, this accounts for and can be described as the stoicism, unfeelingness, humorlessness (“don’t be silly!”), and self-denial required of them. Men will thereby be primed for jealousy of anyone not so oppressed, which includes their own sons in childhood. By contrast, there was never before, not in prehistory, such jealousy by fathers of the freedom, joie de vivre, cheeriness, and playfulness of their sons as there began to be with these patriarchal developments occurring in sedentary-hierarchical societies.
However, that is not the way Freud saw it. Still, he might have. For in Oedipus Rex — which informed Freud’s ideas on this — the father of Oedipus, King Laius, fearing his son, as a mere baby, pierced his ankles and tied them together so he could not crawl. Before you go providing dispensation for this and an apologia for the father, note here how, just like in the Abraham story, the telling of it leaves out the obvious: For Abraham, that was that he was a murderer. In this one King Laius is clearly revealed as a child abuser … horribly so, horribly abusive … in a way that would have gotten him put in prison, today.
Yet patriarchal cultures are wont to cover up the “sins of the father,” and this is what that is about. If nothing else, such complacency toward and dispensation of fathers undoubtedly is what kept Freud from seeing this obvious hint about the real message of the story.
Anyway, back to it. King Laius had received a prophecy that his son would kill him, so he, much like Abraham, again, who thought it okay to kill his son because of these supposed “supernatural” messages … which actually are some kind of psychosis … set out to kill his son instead. After the horrific tethering of the baby, he instructs a servant to leave the baby exposed to die on a mountainside. Quite the father. Yeah, I know.
Amazingly, this assault — actually this attempted homicide of the son by the father — did not either provide a clue to Sigmund Freud who first theorized the Oedipus complex. Child abuse and attempted murder, yet somehow the Oedipus complex for Freud centers on the son’s seemingly warrantless murder of the king. It even posits a hidden agenda to the child — a desire to possess the mother — when in truth it is parents who are crushed and pushed by hidden agendas, not relatively innocent four-year-olds.
These feelings of the father about the son are expressed, as well, in the Oedipus story, and in a stunningly revelatory way. For the father is killed, unwittingly, during a quarrel between the two, which occurs at a crossroads. Consider, any crossroads is going to suggest choices one has to make in one’s life. And, clearly, the most important choice involves who to be — to be oneself or to be a fake, a copy of someone else, even if it is one’s father.
Sure enough, the fight was about who should go first down the road. In this it is readily apparent the question is whether Oedipus should follow in his “father’s footsteps,” in allowing his father to go first, which means to lead, in life. Or whether Oedipus should take off on his own direction and wherewithal and go first and leave his father in his dust.
Well, clearly, Oedipus wants to be his own man (boy). Yet his father wants Oedipus to follow behind him and walk in his shadow. How perfect is that scene for bringing out the feelings of the father on his side of the Oedipal conflict. He wants his son below … or at least behind … him: Him in the lead; him getting the attention; his son being unseen and — if the father is lucky — so crushed (and abused) as to not present any competition to the father.
Father’s Jealousy and “Breaking” the Son
With this diminution of the paternal personality with patriarchy, fathers are not only jealous of their sons, they also cannot bear the message that in childhood their sons are enjoying the kind of life they secretly want but cannot have, wanted but were denied, by all the forces mentioned. In a sense, fathers’ fear of being “killed” by their sons is a symbolization of their fear that they will — as Nature demands — be replaced by their sons at some point.
Every son born is another reminder to a father of his mortality. For each new addition to another generation means that the ending of one’s own generation, and of one’s life, are ever more in sight. Whereas prior to this, as young men, the possibility of death could not be further from mind. So the invincibility that is assumed by all young men is, with the birth of a son, suddenly weakened, even lost. This happens in a way parallel to a mother’s feeling that a birth of a daughter augurs the end of her days of sexual desirability and male attention. We’ll get to that in a couple chapters, when we look at the Electra complex.
In any case, because fathers are crushed themselves, they must crush their sons. They are kitty-drowners and butterfly-mashers; and the child, the son, represents all the innocence, feeling, thriving, and felicity they cannot have. So that aliveness must be killed in the son; perhaps the son himself must be killed. The father might try to hobble the son — that is, put obstacles to growth and happiness in the boy’s way — like King Laius did in tying the child’s ankles together to prevent crawling. The father might, further, block the child’s success in a path of the boy’s own choosing — alike to blocking the road the son wants to go down, which happened to Oedipus at the crossroads.
But above all — and in a way exactly parallel to the way the Evil Stepmother at first tried to kill Snow White, then poisoned and crushed her, so as to remove her as a competitor (as we see in more detail coming up) — all else failing, the child must be killed. At least his life force, the son’s aliveness, must be. This is an intent often expressed in patriarchal cultures of fathers toward their sons, especially in mythology and in particular in the Abraham and Isaac one, the Oedipus one, and the Perseus-Polydectes one.
If a father is prevented from killing his son, he can ease his jealousy by killing the boy’s spirit. Just as with domestication of animals, where we humans took the wild horses and other planetmates of Nature and broke their spirit … demanding they be as unfree and miserable as our constrained, sedentary, trapped, and fearful selves … so also we “broke” our children for the same reason.
In sum, the Oedipal conflict is not universal, but it is a constant in patriarchal cultures for indeed the father wants to kill the son … that is why the son wants to ally with the mother and “kill” the father: For the father brutalizes both mother and son. And the son, while still free and unblinkered, can see this. Being sensitive and empathetic still … until such “softness” is beaten and broken out of him … naturally the son wants to protect the mother.
The child wants to do this for the same reason that Enkidu wanted to block Gilgamesh from raping the bride in that story, as mentioned in Chapter 37. And just as the narrator of that story, as I explained, does not understand why Enkidu would be upset about the bride being raped … after all, the gods! ordained it to be so … so also, after the “successful” breaking of the boy into the “man”ipulated man, adult males cannot see how they have been duped and ripped off of the actual felicity possible to them in life, but also of their inner Divinity … once again! At birth, once, and now, sadly, again.
So at this point, having repressed how one was abused and robbed of a happy life — for no reason other than that it would be offensive to the feelings of the father, who had himself been deprived — one becomes another paternal abuser and thief of happiness for the next generation of sons.
Now, all this can be summed up as the assault of the father. It is the actual genesis of the Oedipal crisis, which patriarchally damaged men like Sigmund Freud and Joseph Campbell and virtually all mainstream psychologists and psychiatrists mistakenly claim has its origins in the feelings of the child wanting to replace the father.
The Family Revolution
Yet we can see that desired overthrowing of oppression in the family by the son, that “revolution,” only arises in response to the father’s aggression.
Not knowing this, however, traditional understandings have it that this time of the boy wanting to overthrow the father receives a “healthy” resolution with the conceding of self to the father. That is to say, it is resolved through abject surrender; the son, like the horse, is broken. In the Oedipus myth, this would be symbolized in an event where Oedipus did end up conceding the road to his father.
What this “resolution,” this abandonment of self involves in actual life, however, is the repression of any of the natural and healthy urges for realness, felicity, authenticity, and pleasure in life in favor of the unreal neurotic society and its damaged product, the father. I cannot help but think about the way the elders of American society proclaimed that my Sixties generation of youth would “grow out” of all that idealistic stuff as we became older. As if we would with time become more “reasonable” … meaning (ahem) more like them … would follow down the “road” they had taken.
What they actually expected is that we — as they had done with their elders in their own youth — would concede to them and abandon our authenticity … “sell out.” We did not. Though that story will not be told for reasons I get into in Culture War, Class War. For one thing, beginning in 1971 in America the elderly elites sought and gained total control of all society’s information systems — media, education, religion. Indeed, with their money trumping our numbers, they retain them still. So this positive development — an evolution of consciousness, happening among the youth of that time — is not wanted by the powers-that-be; they will hardly broadcast its existence.
Regardless, in current times, we can see this entire dynamic of the familial “culture war” from another angle. Primal therapy and the primal scene in particular provide crucial keys in our understanding.
An interesting sidelight of this, by the way, is that these particular parents to the Sixties Generation were of the World War II Generation. That generation, in particular, was denied a chance at an adulthood, an identity, uniquely their own. More than most, they were required to relinquish any desires for personal fulfillment in order to mold themselves into what society needed: Which was warriors overseas and compliant obedient servants of the war effort at home — in whatever capacity they could.
Clearly and quite poignantly, this scenario is exactly portrayed in the beloved movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, with which most folks are familiar. The reason the movie so tugs at our heart strings is that we all — and the WWII Generation, especially — have had to give up our dreams, to at least some extent, in growing up. This happens for virtually all of us at the primal scene and for the vast majority of us in an even more constraining way at the Identity stage. The reason we somehow feel lifted up by the movie is that it identifies the common person’s tragedy and regret, then the movie goes on to comfort, like the fairy tale it is, by saying that it was all for the best, anyway. In other words, despite the lost potential and crushed dreams of everyone, they all lived “happily ever after,” in this concocted utopia of American community life of the 1940s.
Perseus … Oedipus Complex Revisioned
The revision of psychological dogma I am engaged in might be hard going down for the reader. Cognitive dissonance is a painful feeling, keeping us from growing. It is easier to rationalize the experiences one has had as being beneficial and the beliefs one has as being true, rather than — when confronted with the truth upending those “alternative facts” — to change one’s direction, one’s view. For to do that requires a lowering of Ego, which wants to control and master. Yet in this book we are learning how much we were taught was “ass-backwards,” as they say where I grew up. One has to experience the pain of cognitive dissonance and that of a lowering of Ego to be able to take in what is coming up here in the text.
For what becomes clear, from my analysis, is that Oedipus should not have been the model of the primary conflict of childhood for the boy. Electra should not have been the mythology exemplifying the girl’s dilemma. No, the proper mythologies are, among others, Perseus and Snow White, respectively. For these myths show the deeper truths of childhood dynamics. They should replace the patriarchal concoctions of Oedipus and Electra, in psychology, which arose out of male ego and its rationalizing of itself, its protection of itself, its defensiveness.
Oedipus
Reiterating about Oedipus, he is a fifth century BCE mythological figure who slew his father and married his mother. Thus the myth is said to exemplify the supposed desires of the boy child, between the ages of three and six, to possess his mother sexually and eliminate his father.
Whereas the correct reflection of the dynamics therein is portrayed in mythology, too … in Perseus and Snow White, among others. As we saw in other places, mythology gives us our truths, even if we do not understand them … just as dreams do. And perhaps it is only under different circumstances and different times, thousands of years distant … like today … that those messages of ancient stories can be seen, and those truths come to light.
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The Assault of the Father:
Perseus, Oedipal Abuse, and Revision of the Oedipus Complex as the Primal Scene
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“…the monster is really the father. Yet the father avoids being the target by redirecting that naturally occurring vengefulness and angst of the boy toward another target, who is made to be the monster. This is how men redirect the anger of youths, which would more appropriately be directed toward them, the male elders, instead toward women.”
“We must implicate proxy dads, and evil kings, foreign enemies and minorities, to portray the father we cannot bear to know really existed.”
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So it is that the Perseus myth is the one, not the only one though, which actually reflects our childhood dynamic of the primal scene.
Perseus
The Perseus myth, as we explored it in Chapter 19, is about a man who is tricked by his mother’s lover into making a mistake. You see, the older man wants more time with his amour, the younger man’s mother. Whereas, Perseus, the young man, does not approve of his mother’s suitor, Polydectes, and wants him not to come around so much. How Oedipal of him, right? The kid wants to “remove” or kill the “father” so he can “possess,” have sex with his mother, have her all to himself.
Nonetheless, from the revisionist psychology I am presenting, that desire to keep the man away from his mother is understandable. As I said, the child, clear-eyed seeing, would not approve of the way men treat women in a patriarchy any more than Enkidu did. And just like Enkidu, who also was given a “job” once he became seduced into civilization; as we saw in Chapter 19 about “the task,” the response of the patriarchy is to give the child something to do, to keep him busy, so he won’t be an element hampering the proclivities of the patriarch in regard to the mother. In the Gilgamesh epic, Enkidu is even further enlisted, once “tamed” or “broken,” this time into doing assaults on Nature and the Divine that he would have once abhorred doing. In the same way, young boys as well are given the tasks of manhood — of hard work, masculinity, feelings repression, and aggression — to take their minds off feelings, inconvenient to the elders, of empathy and morality.
Sure enough, for Perseus, this is what happens. According to the myth, with a ruse Polydectes manipulates Perseus into a task which requires him to leave and go off on a long journey. It gets him out of the way, you see? It is here where more clearly we see the assault of the father I have advanced. Importantly it is not only trickery that the father-figure uses, but the dissembling has to do with gifts. Let me explain why that is significant.
“He uses a ruse about gifts” as explaining the myth can be interpreted, in terms of the primal scene, to mean that the child is led to feel inferior and inadequate. Many sons know this strategem of the father, where the elder instills in the child that he is not living up to what is expected of him. The put-downs of the parent create an inferiority in the child. And at the primal scene — the “resolution” of the Oedipal crisis — the child accepts this evaluation of himself.
Rather than getting the necessary gift — which is respect and love from the father — the boy receives a fake substitute, which he is told to consider to be “love.” However, it far from fulfills the need that sons have at that age. This ploy of the father is familiar to many men and has been imposed on most. It gets even more specific. The elder instills in the child that he is not living up to what is expected of him. Some “gift,” huh? Not quite the support and encouragement all of us need at times in our lives.
At any rate, the put-downs of the parent create inferiority feelings in the child, along with a budding despair. Then at the primal scene — the supposed “resolution” of the Oedipal crisis — the child, feeling all is lost and there is no hope to be loved as he is, surrenders. It is not even begrudging surrender; it is total, without a shred of the light of Self in him. And so he accepts this evaluation of himself. We are speaking of sons here, as in the myth, but a parallel thing happens with girls and their parents, as I will get into next chapter with the Electra complex and Snow White.
The Revision
Now, from the perspective of the assault of the fathers, we see in all this the reflections of the Perseus myth where Perseus is given a task that he, by his father-proxy, Polydectes, has been “fooled” into doing. So the task is a trick, as parents of both genders are wont to do in raising their children, to deflect attention away from the father figure’s actual intentions.
The task is to kill the Medusa, a monster, a Gorgon; Medusa is the defamed image of the feminine, the downward distortion of the patriarchy. This is telling us that the boy must begin the change of thinking and perception desired of men in a patriarchy regarding women — they are sluts and evil and dangerous. Yes, the supposed rites of passage of males includes an indoctrination into misogyny. And of a most severe kind, which involves women-hating, women-despising, and … my god this too is true … aggression against the female in all its forms — literal and symbolic.
Remember, Medusa is said to have become so ugly — she has a headful of serpents instead of hair, for one thing — as a punishment for that grave sacrilege of sleeping with Poseidon in Athena’s temple. Athena’s temple, no less. Athena the virgin, the male idea of “perfect” womanhood. It would be like having sex in the bed of a nun. She had sex with the god of the sea, Poseidon, too. Slumming it, anciently so.
Anyway, like Jezebel in The Bible, Medusa is crafted as a slut.
The rest of the Perseus story has all the elements of the psychological destruction a boy must do to himself in a patriarchy — i.e., learn to lie and cheat; learn to repress his feelings; learn to look away from the facts of things and to instead be directed by the reflected images of truth as come from the mouths of authorities; and most importantly, learn to kill. For the whole story, see my chapters on Perseus in Funny God. Also, refer back to Chapter 19 and subsequent chapters of this book, where I deal specifically with the elements of Perseus which have to do with the tasks as taken up in adolescence. Whereas here we are looking at its deeper fractal at the primal scene.
However, clearly you can see that this myth depicts a boy being forced out of the way by a father who is the one who actually wants to possess the woman who is the boy’s mother. It is significant that it is accomplished through trickery. Compare this with what was said in the chapter on “The Secret of Men.” Remember, the secret of men? It’s a lie. And it’s a falsehood intended to fool you into compliance.
As for someone wanting someone dead — as it is said sons want of their fathers — well, it is the father here who in putting the young man to a dangerous task is liable to get the kid killed! For fathers, whether the child dies or becomes just like him are the only two desired options. In either of them the boy is out of the way: The boy is either killed, or his soul, his actual identity, is murdered. Thereafter, he is daddy’s bitch … the paterfamilias’s little mini-me. Not a threat anymore, for he is simply now an extension of oneself. And he can be used now as chattel, as property, and to carry out the father’s wishes, not his own … just as the father must do in relation to the elites of the society in which he moves, outside the family.
A Dearth of Intimacy
A sad yet significant aspect of this entire process is that it is not just that fathers want to bully their sons away from their mothers, through rites of passage, it is that fathers are jealous of the close relationship their sons have with their wives. I mean that males — diminished as they have been in their own ways — are as adults socially disabled, intimacy-challenged, you might say, so they feel left out of the family affection. Yes, this too is what society does to men.
Then tragically, out of that emptiness and jealousy fathers concoct rites to associate femininity and the mother with everything horrible … they create Medusas … as well they try to take over the role of the mother in the son’s life. They want the son to love them, and not the mother. Fine in the first part, creepy in the second. And how pathetic. Oh, what a horrific sight it is to overview the empty expanse of men’s inner lives and to see the trivialities, the windmill-tilting, the insanities and “alternative facts” they will raise up and deem important so as to hide from their inner despair.
Interesting it is, in that respect, that — as anthropologists in studying the brutal rites of passage of men will stress — boys’ rites of passage involve a man being born of men, not of women. Thus, a re-creation of birth is brought about in the rites — through men, this time. Circumcision and other penal mutilations involved in rites of passage, for example, have their natal analogue in the cutting of the umbilical cord. The umbilical cord was also thought of as part of oneself, like another limb. Hence a penis is its postnatal equivalent, and cutting the penis is cutting the umbilical cord and is a symbolic birth. Anthropologists relate how the words used by the cultural members often state exactly that: That through these rites the boy has been reborn, this time of men. For the reasons of the previous paragraph, again, how sad and pathetic.
The Wonder Years
I had a dream recently that graphically portrayed what I am getting at in this chapter. In it, I was trying to explain how war and such happens, to someone who was like a friend of mine from childhood. He is a friend who represents to me a person who rose up in life without a glitch, through childhood and adolescence, without a complaint on it all; therefore, someone thoroughly besotted and conforming. I was telling him how war is rooted in this Oedipal mind fuck….
I attempted to get my point across by trying to describe the young boy’s reality from before the brutal rites of passage. I described a boy, who had several brothers and several sisters, and who had this wonderful love with his sisters. With as much detail as I could I was trying to portray to him the richness of a life lived in communion with mutually loving siblings and the kind of world they viewed from that perspective: Which was alive and full of wonder and surrounded by waves of comfort and fun, smiling and embrace.
And I was about to describe what happens … as in, “away from the mother-world, forward to the father-world,” as Erich Neumann phrases it1 … where through one brutality after another sometimes going on for days, things like the subincision of the penis, the boy’s natural affection for and empathy with women is destroyed and is replaced by a substitute rage against others, including a deformed image of the feminine, just like Perseus was against the Medusa.
In the dream I was trying to convey to my friend the injustice and stupidity of the normal Oedipal resolution … the actual horror and injustice of it … through a narrative arrangement that began the story inside the family dynamic of harmony between male and female, boy and girl, before male adults come in with their neuroses to fuck it up. Perhaps I was trying to help him remember what he more than anyone had managed to completely forget. The feeling I had in the dream, which I was trying to convey to him, concerned the incredible contrast between the two worlds — let us call them matriarchal and patriarchal, or women and men’s — and the bluish cool blissful numinosity of the world before it has been trammeled into a brownish hazy daily grind of despair. Or of Neumann-osity, lol.
Clearly, this contrast between the world of the magical child and the crushed, conforming child explained both how men could war, kill, and rape — having been, like Persephone, relegated to such an underground themselves as children — as well as the tragedy … and yet promise! … of what was lost. But could now be regained.
“Oh, The Things We Do” … To Avoid Cognitive Dissonance
An important aspect of this is the way the father is depicted as a father proxy, not the biological father, in the Perseus myth. Here we see the common ploy of implicating a father substitute, rather than the father himself. Remember that father substitutes in myth, like stepmothers in fairy tales, represent the split-off “bad” and hurtful aspects of fatherhood, as the Ego’s way of trying to fend off the tragic realization of how his own father betrays him. The Ego splits it off so it does not have to deal with the conflict of a parent who is supposed to be loving but who does hateful and harmful things to one.
For to have that realization of the father’s actual betrayal — the father’s actual lack of love and respect for the son — would be the equivalent of a primal reliving of the primal scene and an emotional life-changing catharsis. Such knowledge, well, handle with gloves, let us say. However, it is the crucial connection and realization — tipping the scales away from the unreal self in the direction of the real one — to be had in deep experiential psychotherapy. It is the one, without which, nothing else.
Notice also, in all this, that the ogre is really the father. Yet the father avoids being the target by redirecting that naturally occurring vengefulness and angst of the boy toward another target, who is made to be the monster. This is how men redirect the anger of youths — which would more appropriately be directed toward them, the male elders — instead toward women. Men do to their male children in a way highly reminiscent of the way that elites contrive scapegoats and minorities to blame for their thievery. That is to say, covering up what would be righteous class conflict with bogus cultural divisions, i.e., with culture war. So here we have another example of how the sociocultural context of the male in a hierarchical-patriarchal society, which predicates particularly brutal and deformed personality sets upon its men at the Identity-adolescent stage, is replicated in the family even earlier, at the primal scene and all the events around it.
Also, notice how this paterfamilias is replicated at the adolescence and Identity Veil by the elder males in societies towards the larger world. In patriarchal societies, the elite, who are usually old men, redirect the anger — which should rightfully be directed at them — toward the men of other societies in war. They channel the youth’s natural anger toward them for the lack of needs satisfaction and the even greater affront of having been tricked and manipulated — just like Enkidu was tricked into civilization — into becoming something other than what they wanted to be. They channel and direct it toward an enemy comprised of other males. To sweeten the pot, after having made women an additional target, the Controllers allow that rape will be a reward for killing. As Marilyn French has written, “the enticement of rape has been the motivation of virtually all wars.”
And do you see also how in doing this the dad figure is split into good and bad and the bad placed elsewhere so as to shield the correct perpetrator? In the same way as in the childhood dynamic of sons, the wealthy in all societies will direct the natural anger, vengeful feelings, and angst of the population, arisen of the manipulation they do, into scapegoats in society. Class war is disguised as culture war. So the economic injustice of societies, just like the personal injustice perpetrated on sons and boys, will be redirected toward “monster” males — often depicted as raping, murdering (cf., Trump and Mexican “bad hombres”) — and to women characterizes as “whores” and “sluts” (no doubt, who therefore are open to having their pussies grabbed, as Trump so memorably explained to us).
Regardless, morality will be conjured — that of a sexual “morality” — to hide the economic injustice going on. Slutty women (“pussies,” in Trump’s mind) and raping, murdering men (“bad hombres,” in Trump’s mind) will be invoked to put up the smoke screen to the actions of the super-rich, who we can picture standing behind ordinary folk and picking their pockets … along with their self-respect, authenticity, and nobility, just as their fathers did to them.
So Polydectes is the bad dad, manipulating the son, ordering and demanding of the son, getting the son to act on the older man’s behalf and not on the volition or out of the desires of the son himself. Polydectes represents the politicians sending other’s children off to do battle in and be killed in wars as well as the stern father determining the career, profession, or adult roles of his children. And, essentially, well, just not loving his son. Not really. Not the way children, both little girls and little boys, need to be loved, respected, and appreciated for who they are … as we are only now in this century beginning to remember.
In any case, just as we must construct a devil, or a Satan, in order to be able to handle the atrocities we see in life … we cannot bear the thought that a god we say is loving might be responsible. So also we must concoct step-fathers to turn blame away from the real culprit. And in society, we will construct scapegoats, so folks will not see the rich as the real causes of their misery. We must implicate proxy dads, and evil kings, foreign enemies and minorities, to portray the father we cannot bear to know really existed.
We must also concoct stepmothers and evil queens for the same reason. Which we look at now.
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Electra:
Maternal Jealousy and Revision of the Electra Complex as the Primal Scene … The Assault of the Mother Expresses the Way Mothers, in Patriarchy, Are Likely to Feel About Their Daughters
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“We have had mothers insisting their daughters be silent, be submissive, be non-obtrusive, be quiet and unassuming, be obedient to their mates, and limit their aspirations no higher than their mother’s, to raise their vision not above that of family life and child-caring and food processing. We have had mothers luci-fy their daughters, modeling how to ape non-intelligence and helplessness, silly as a Lucy Ricardo … and just as annoying … rather than blossom and bloom in all their potentiality. For that is what was done to them.”
“These cases together are the modern analogue to child sacrifice done at early times of history….”
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Sure enough, a more accurate reflection of the primal scene, for the girl, is seen in mythology, too … more correctly, in a fairy tale. It is not Electra that reveals the truth of childhood dynamics for the girl but Snow White.
Electra Complex Revisioned
Briefly, the Electra complex, which was coined and proposed by Carl Jung, is related to Electra, in Greek mythology, who plotted to kill her mother, Clytemnestra, to avenge her mother’s participation in killing her father, King Agamemnon. You know what they say about the apple not falling far from the tree, heheh. Anyway, the psychological dynamic it represents is a mirror image of the Oedipus complex for the boy. The girl of three to six is said to want to kill and replace her mother in her father’s affections.
Snow White
Now, let us compare that to what is really going on for girls at that age. In looking around, we find that a correct interpretation of the dynamics of the primal scene, erroneously expressed as an Electra complex, is found in the myth of Snow White. First, harkening back to what I wrote at the end of last chapter about Polydectes … about the “bad dad,” needing to be portrayed as a step-father or some other proxy dad figure … we see a parallel thing in Snow White.
As I am sure you remember, Snow White’s mother also was a step-parent. She is sometimes called the stepmother; sometimes, the evil queen. We see clearly the Ego here trying to not see what indeed it is trying, on the other hand, to tell itself with the story. Like myths, such stories reveal the truth, but it is hidden in a way to keep away the ones who are not ready to know it. Which, as we can see from the utter inability for anyone to have seen what is in this fairy tale, means people in Western society are not ready. Something to expand on later….
Maternal Jealousy
So, this evil step-mother is jealous of the young girl. Sound familiar? The mother wants all the attention. She cannot bear the thought that the girl might be more beautiful than her. The fragile ego of the mother abounds here: Being deprived herself in childhood, she is still wanting the attention she did not get then. She is emotionally infantile … more common than any of us wants to know, by the way.
To continue, you know the drill, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all.” And at the point when the daughter actually becomes a rival, the mother sets out to kill her.
The Assaults of the Mother
Her evil royal-ness sends one of her male underlings, the Huntsman, to kill the child. Later, she herself, disguised as an old peddler, comes by to offer silky laced bodices to Snow White. Getting her to try one, she pulls the stay-laces so tight it causes Snow White to lose consciousness. The dwarves come home and loosen the stay laces. So, that failing, the evil queen arrives in the guise of a comb seller. She brings a poisoned comb to the girl. That also failing, finally she resorts to a poisoned apple.
It is to be noted here how each time the “step” mother (actually the mother) conceals herself as someone else to do it. This is the same way children must believe the bad things done them by their parents are really the perpetrations of someone else … some scapegoat, some “illuminati,” some liberals or hippies or hollywood. This is just the way mothers and fathers help young ones in that projection onto others, onto scapegoats, to cover up their own not-too-good actions against their children. And just the way, this is also, the elite blame scapegoats in society and create culture war between society’s elements to cast the eyes of the populace away from their red hands in the society’s dirty doings.
In any case the assaults of the mother unfold as follows. First, the evil stepmother, concealed as a comb seller, combs the child’s hair with a poisoned comb. This causes Snow White to faint. She does not die.
Subsequently, the step-evil-mother-queen disguised as a peddler selling lacy bodices, wraps the child up tight in a bodice inlaid with hard-as-bullets whale bones. This could not be a clearer depiction of how parents try to fit their children into personalities of the parents’ choosing, which are not fitted to the child at all … and the constrictions of which are painful to the child. With the squeezing of the child by the bodice — just as parents squeeze the life force, happiness, and joy juice out of their children, with hard as whalebones prohibitions and tight-as-bodice rules — the child’s life force, its joy of living, its natural happiness, love, and empathy for all and everyone, is diminished. Understandably, for this is exactly as happens in real life. Again, Snow White faints.
You see, Snow White faints in each of these attempts on her life — the poison of the comb and the constriction of the bodice. In the same way, each of us has the “little deaths” of shocking events of disrespect, abuse, and evidence of non-love and not being seen in infancy and toddlerhood prior to the big split at the primal scene.
Eventually the stepmother comes to the child as a farmer’s wife, disguised again, and deceives the child — remember how Perseus also was conned by the adult figure on the male side of this dynamic — into eating an apple. Quite the con, the farmer’s wife allays the child’s to-be-expected wariness by cutting the apple in two and eating the unpoisoned half.
The Diminution of Self, the Narrowing of Experience
Now, this sends Snow White into a stupor, this time. In this last and seemingly successful attempt, Snow White goes into a coma. Just like in the primal scene, the child succumbs to all the abuse and says, “Okay, you win. I’ll stop trying to be all I can be. I’ll limit myself to the amount of aliveness you can handle, way down there with your deathliness. I will kill my emotions, my feelings. I will slink back into the wallpaper and not be obvious, not be seen. I will die inside. And you can be the one who shines and gets the attention. I will not compete.”
So, the coma is the psychological equivalent of the aftermath of the primal scene for young girls. This could not more perfectly depict the young girl’s childhood and adolescence forthcoming. Inculcated with ideas about sexual repression and elimination of all non-lady-like behavior and mannerisms — all of which, when you think about it, are personality traits that would be threatening to the mother wishing to retain her supremacy as the desired female and the one upon which all attention should be directed — the girl has a period of morose suspension between the primal scene and the time at which she will leave the family cauldron. She lies in silent suspension, unmoving. Not literally, but, psychologically, yes.
Even psychoanalysts recognize this aspect of childhood, where the child is in a post-primal-scene shock, of sorts. Though they misunderstand its origin and evaluate it disastrously, they do portray in pre-adolescence a time of subdued “libido,” which they call the latency period. A reduced libido, which I would call a retreat of the child from his or her realness and selfhood — akin to the coma of Snow White.
In all kinds of ways, like boys, girls are told to not experience life, to hold back, and definitely to not experience pleasure and instead to project images of decency and self-sacrifice. And to attend to the wants and needs of the men in their lives.
We see this in the practice of clitoridectomy in a most brutal and extreme form….
In any case the girl is told to not have pleasure in life. And at least, in a way parallel to the boy, to not have any more than the mother was allowed to have in life. If adult males can be called kitty-drowners and butterfly-mashers, perhaps we can call such adult women flower-crushers and inspiration-snuffers.
If the girl does not submit, well, she is in the Medusa camp, you see. And if she does, she is Athena, that patriarchal wet dream, that doll of a person … not quite real, but pretty to look at. Women as eye candy and servants only.
The Girl’s Primal Scene
We see that the story of Snow White is full of psychological wisdom about the female primal scene. It says our infants and toddlers are hidden behind a mirror reflecting only the caregiver’s countenance — her needs — to herself. Just as Abraham, looking at Isaac, saw only a tool in his agenda with his deity, our babies are not often really seen by us; their needs are dimly ascertained, mixed and diluted thoroughly with our own.
“Who is the fairest one of all?” expresses that women are threatened by their babies, and jealous of them. For how dare these young girls come into the world, being beautiful and delightful and having needs of their own, when the mothers, in their obvious beauty and charm, still have not managed to get all they needed back then (or now)? The stepmother wants to hang on to being the desired one, the noticed one, the wanted one … in this fairy tale. In the same way, in real life, mothers and fathers, caregivers and adults of all kind, are ever and too caught up in their own struggles to be noticed, attended to, appreciated, and wanted, to really see another; let alone a struggling, needy, and crudely assertive other — a child. Remember how Isaac, directly in front of Abraham, was invisible to the older man; who was seeing only, as in a mirror, himself. The many dreams that folks have of being invisible, even in public places, traces back to this dynamic of early childhood. In our unconscious self, we all know we were not really seen.
Meanwhile, children are new to the attention and Ego games of adults, unpolished in their communications to express their needs, and riddled with mixed messages about whether they should even express them. So how can they compete with adults, who have decades of experience and thousands of hours of practice in the confused and complicated requirements of these games?
Guaranteed, children will be, to inhabit the bottoms of all totem poles and to be last on all lists of concern. Still, gifted with hereditary traits of charm and appeal, and extra abilities of cunning and excess mentation to devise new schemas of attracting needs attention, they have a fighting chance. And struggle they must, be clever they must, for all parenting is suffused with the emotional deprivation and resulting twisted consciousness of parents.
Pure and guileless babies, white as snow in intention and closest to Divinity, are offered the apple of nurture and need satisfaction, but it is poisoned. They are attended to by fully growns, however that attention to their bodily needs — like the comb is for Snow White when evil stepmother attends to her hair — is poisoned with the tainted intentions and self-centeredness of the caregiver.
And parents outfit children with a way of being — a skill and personality set like their own — to allow them to go out into the world and with which to interact with it. Yet, like the bodice given Snow White, it does not fit. It is too tight; it is laced in a way to be too constricting. It says “You can be who you want, but only to the extent I will allow. By fitting you in a bodice, I set the limit of your growth.” Unfortunately, for most young girls becoming women, that limit, like a tightly laced bodice, is set so close as to make movement impossible. Fainting, that is to say, dying a little inside, is the only response possible.
And how can it not be? For it is not crafted to fit the child, it is made to suit the adult: These are Ego, personality, and skill sets that the caregiver would impress upon the child to mold them into something which is desired by the adult and rarely wanted or helpful to the child him- or herself.
In all these ways, as expressed in the fairy tale, is shown the hidden desire to get rid of the child, indicated, historically, by infanticide and abandonment. Additionally, in all times and currently, the stepmother’s intentions are demonstrated by child abuse, child neglect, and poor parenting. If not in blatant ways, this ambivalence toward the child, containing the annoyance and irritation, as well as the even more secret jealousy and hatred, shows itself in the simple reluctance to attend to the needs of the child by having the baby “cry it out.”
It is seen in the decision to not breast feed the child at all; and if it is done, by pushing the weaning process. It manifests in the insistence on toilet training … not necessary in Nature or even among gatherer-hunter societies. And even early toilet training. Babies must poop properly! And they must learn to do it right away!
It is evident in circumcision and female genital mutilation and in all the many, many ways children are beaten into shape by humans to mold them into something not conducive to their thriving or happiness but simply to make them, for adults, less burdensome, less intrusive, more appealing, and … finally, even this — more useful.
The Pandora’s Jar of Childhood
Childhood, especially infancy, becomes that unseen, unknown land that we, as adults, seek to put behind us and push below us … happy just that we managed to get through it. We cannot remember much of our childhood, and almost nothing before the age of five. Why? Because we do not want to. We cannot bring it to mind, but a part of us is aware that it was difficult. Perhaps another part of us creates a rosy fantasy about it so as to repress the truth further down. That part pushes our mind to cover up those years, placing them behind and under a thick cloak of confabulation, heart shapes and unicorns, revision, and rationalization.
On the individual level, our childhood is a perfect Pandora’s Jar — something we fear, something that a part of us knows contains all the troubles of our lives, were we to open it. We sabotage ourselves this way: fleeing from the past only to manifest it, ever and again, as fate.
We have forgotten that this myth advises us on a more fruitful attitude toward this time. That is, that in opening the jar, or box, the troubles of the world — our world — come forth, yes. But in the myth, the last thing to come out of Pandora’s Jar, the thing lying at the bottom, is hope. The myth is telling us that it is futile to fear and repress our history, our actual one — not the fanciful, sugar-coated version we have come up with in order to kick out of our minds the truth. It is telling us that real change and progress can only come about through opening the jar and freeing the darkened impulses, thus bringing them into the light of day, of consciousness, where they can be seen and let go of. And that in doing this process, eventually … not immediately or even soon for anyone … real hope and real transformation can arise.
Death of a Girl’s Soul
However, while this process is occurring in childhood, this inability of the parent to see past their needs to those real and crucial needs of the child diminishes the daughter or son. It bludgeons their vitality and life force. Not quite killing the body, it murders the soul instead. In the tale of Snow White, we notice that each time Snow White is poisoned, or constricted with the tight lacing of the bodice, she faints. She does not die, but she becomes less alive. Sure enough, after the final attempt with the poisoned apple — akin to her primal scene, then — Snow White ends up in a deathly state because of all this. She exists in a coma-like state, which is a pretty good description of the kind of trance state that this kind of tainted parenting produces in the child.
The fairy tale then expresses the effect this primal scene has upon our adult personalities. For, in fact the dwarves think she is dead. Actually, we are told that the dwarves are unable to revive her. We see in this that all the good stuff inside her, all that was laid down in her through the good and nurturing experiences of her life, especially that in alliance with the good womb as a fetus, is of no avail in giving a girl life — i.e., happiness, joy, confidence in self — against the onslaught of all these attacks of the mother. She is even placed in a glass casket. Any of you thinking “seen but not heard” at this? Well, that would be accurate. For indeed young girls are told to look pretty and be demure — like the pinup models on the man-caves of men — but, more and more so as they get older, to not to be alive in any way threatening to older women, or any of men, either.
For the tale says Snow White remains in this half-alive state until she is awakened by the Prince. How this happens, well, wouldn’t you know it? He is attracted by her beauty. I mean she’s practically dead and she’s living in a coffin of restrictions on her aliveness imposed by the deadening influences on her short life, but damn, she’s pretty! That’s quite a telling depiction of the state of young romance after patriarchy.
In any case, “enchanted” by her beauty, the Prince falls in love with Snow White and engages with the dwarves to let him take her — mimicking the negotiations of men over young women, treated as property, down through history. In a coffin, mute and unmoving, the girl has absolutely no say in it. However, when the Prince goes to make off with the coffin … and picture the pathos in that, won’t you? As for men addicted to porn, the woman does not even have to be alive!
When the prince is moving the coffin, the poisoned piece of apple falls from Snow White’s mouth and she wakes up. No doubt many women can relate to this as being that time in their lives of their first love partnering. Finally free of the tight bodice of the natal family — and having been physically moved from the family by the intentions of the “enchanted” male, traditionally — for a spell she has a time of a reawakening of her aliveness, formerly suppressed. This coming to consciousness is had in the form of pleasure, sexuality, with luck some tenderness and attention, perhaps even some sort of love. All of which had been missing, however much desired, in her childhood.
So, Snow White wakes up. She says, “Where am I?” This expresses not only the fact that where she will live will not be determined by her, rather by the men in her life, but also something about the question we are all — male and female alike — left with after the primal scene. The question, after having been robbed of who we could have been in life and who we were destined to be — coming in with the unique set of skills and aspirations we each bring to the world — is, well then “Who am I?” Snow White’s “Where am I?” is only a second thought away.
Dispensation for the Mother … Identification with the Aggressor
Certainly this depicts the primal scene. The fairy tale says that upon awakening the Prince declares his love, a wedding is planned, and then this: The tale even stipulates that the wicked stepmother is invited to the wedding. So, just like after the primal scene, the perpetrator is forgotten to be who she or he is. Instead the young girl, and boy in the parallel development, puts the entire unwholly, unjust, and painful episode behind them and proceeds as if it never happened. Normality is forced down upon the spikes of early Pain, “killing” our children, but covering it up nicely with a concocted fairy tale ending of a young love that lasts forever, with the evil mother being now an applauding supportive mother at the wedding. And we might wonder if, in the child now being out of the picture through marriage and no longer a rival, this transformation of the mother into a supportive one might now, with marriage, finally be possible.
In any case, this awakening by a prince shows exactly how we project all of our childhood deprivations onto the love projects of our adult lives, seeking to garner from them what we could not get as children. We want our adult lovers to give us what we did not get as a child and thus save us from the diminished and numbed life that came of it.
Hence, like Snow White in this scenario, young girls do not die, but their souls are murdered. They become less alive. And these traits in the child are passed along, not through natural selection, but through the fact that the numbed child will become the adult who will do the same to his or her own child: It is passed on down through the generations unconsciously and through example. And the young girl, the snowy white and innocent self, will become the jealous evil mother to her own daughter, and eventually, the cycle coming round again, sit at her daughter’s wedding, only then relieved of the conflict.
This Electra complex, then, is really all about the parent; it emanates from the mother’s jealousy and fear. Just as the Oedipus complex is about the father and his jealousy and fear, which pushes him to diminish his son and then send him away.
In my saying the child becomes less alive, or numbed, I mean that the intensity of experience of life, natural in us all as children, is dampened, nearly extinguished, through the mechanisms of the primal scene and the other traumas and injustices of childhood and adolescence in “civilized” societies. By that I mean that with the excessive stipulations and pressures put upon our personhood that came with hierarchical societies, including today’s, our experience — along with our needs, emotions, and aliveness — became muted, dampened. Repressed and numb, our experience lacks the color, the extra flavors and magnificence, and intensity of our lives in Nature. We have no idea what we are missing in our lives. Though some folks will acknowledge a hole in their being, something pale or not real about their lives. Which, of course, is a realization that is put out of one’s mind as fast as possible. We have not an inkling how we cuddle with our chains and contribute to our increasing numbification over the course of our lives.
So, it is soul death, we are talking about. This is how we see in Snow White the true psychodynamics of childhood for little girls. There is more on this, relating to Snow White, in Funny God, too. And you can go there, for it. Here, however….
Love Them, Instead
In these examples we see how, for the boy, it is the father who wants all the attention of the child’s mother, his wife or lover, and wants to kill the child, not the other way around. We can see how it is, for the girl, the mother who, her bloom a fading by the year, desperately wants to maintain her central role in the father’s desires, so is jealous of her daughter and wishes her gone.
These truer depictions show how the child is innocent, until corrupted by the same processes that are employed to get the child away from the mother or the father. In this we see the essence of the rites of passage of all ages. These are rites that men and patriarchs — and sometimes mothers as in practices of clitoridectomy — concoct, the world around, to massage their fragile damaged egos and to eliminate the child of the same gender from the scene so they will not represent competition. And this, instead of the way one should parent a child — which is to be with them, give them attention, listen to them …
love them.
We see how instead fathers and the authorities in society want to send the young men off to do battles for them in order to get the son out of the way of the father possessing the mother. This is exactly the dynamic of the other side of the Oedipal conflict. We have sons being sent off to war, enlisted in all kinds of programs and schooling and military academies, not for them, not for their benefit; but mostly so the parent can get them out of the way….
We have mothers, more so than recently … and that should be a hint on who should be leading our cultural changes … We have had mothers insisting their daughters be silent, be submissive, be non-obtrusive, be quiet and unassuming, be obedient to their mates, and limit their aspirations no higher than their mother’s, to raise their vision not above that of family life and child-caring and food processing. We have had mothers luci-fy their daughters, modeling how to ape non-intelligence and helplessness, silly as a Lucy Ricardo … and just as annoying … rather than blossom and bloom in all their potentiality. For that is what was done to them.
These cases together are the modern analogue to child sacrifice done at early times of history….
Just as tragic….
Just as unnecessary….
End of Innocence — Perinatal Matrices
However, prior to this, this struggle was all laid down in an even more shattering event. Something has happened prior to the buildup of the Third Veil of the primal scene across the window to Reality and obscuring the doors to the experience of that greater Existence possible for us. This is according to biologists, pre- and perinatal psychologists, and the reports of experiential pioneers.
It involves what I have termed, the Second Fall from Grace,1 as it happens in the course of time after the first fall into existence of coming into Form from No-Form at conception. Reversing that, now, as we proceed “backwards in time,” figuratively speaking, and in the opposite direction of returning to awareness of that greater Reality once again, it involves the pulling to the side of the Fourth Veil. This has everything to do with the experience of birth. That’s next.
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AFTERWORD.
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Continue with Dance of the Seven Veils II and about The Path of Ecstasy Series
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This book, while the first of three in Dance of the Seven Veils, is also one volume out of a series of books begun, and planned, which I am titling, The Path of Ecstasy Series. Which series is separate from and paralleling the one series of mine already well along — the Return to Grace Series of fifteen volumes of which nine are in print at this time. I wish, here, to share with my readers what they can look forward to in this series, The Path of Ecstasy.
Book One, The Secret Life of Stones
This was the first book in The Path of Ecstasy Series. Being the launching point, it introduced and touched on many of the new perspectives developed and elaborated in the subsequent works. It presented a comprehensive new overstanding of Reality — a new map, if you will — comprising elements usually categorized under Idealism, in philosophy; and pantheism and panentheism, in religion. The essence of this new-paradigm view is that Reality — the Universe in its totality — is basically Consciousness or Subjectivity and that the seemingly physical part of It is a mere epiphenomenon of that all-inclusive Beingness … a Beingness which I have termed, Experience.
Coinciding with that perspective is a perceived awareness that such Subjectivity undergirding the material universe is not separated into parts, as we think normally — with different experienced realities whirling away inside the separate “boxes” of different physical bodies. Rather this Subjectivity is not only shared, it is singular. There is only one of It. And we, immersed in this Universal pool of Experience, are merely areas of It which are “lit” in our own uniquely configured way, through our focus on and participation in those elements within It. We are different experiential regions of It, though we are not separate from each other. Rather we are overlapping experiential fields, ultimately interconnected with All.
This way of looking at things is in direct contrast to the dominant materialist old-paradigm stance of modern times, which holds that the world is basically matter. Regarding consciousness? Well, it is thought to be an epiphenomenon of matter — an offshoot of it. Which consciousness, by the way, springs inexplicably into existence at some point, yet unknown, along the billions of years trajectory of biological evolution.
Meanwhile, the non-separation involved in the new cosmic overstanding, which has Experience as Reality’s base, is demonstrated empirically. This has been revealed in quantum physics as well as the new biology — where the phenomena of morphic resonance and morphogenetic fields point to a sharing of subjective space, or fields, or a Common Intersubjectivity. As the quantum physicist, Schrödinger, put it, “The number of minds in the universe is a total of one.”
Various other experiences of “experience-sharing” are verifiable — such as the trans-species experience and identification with aspects of the so-called “material” world. Both experiences of being other animate beings as well as being parts of the physical world have been described by Stanislav Grof in his many works as occurring quite frequently.
And, yes, for those who are waiting, in this last — identification with and experience of aspects of the material universe — is where we encounter the consciousness of matter … “of stones,” metaphorically speaking. It is here where we get a peek into “the secret life of stones.”
We find that we understand and partake of the inner experience of Nature — animate and inanimate — in at least some way that is not so much less than we partake of and are able to understand the experience and inner states of other humans. The extent of similarity between people is what accounts for the degree of accuracy in our abilities to do that, in the normal sense of ordinary consciousness, which is called empathy. Though in the sense of it occurring in a nonordinary state of consciousness, well even the amount of similarity, or difference, between such units of being is not such a barrier.
Indeed, the history of science in the last hundred years has amounted to a gradual giving back to Nature of its status as aware and conscious, which was initially taken away by Western hubris in regard to Nature. So, we have animal rights, the “secret life of plants,” and so on, in a gradual procession of acknowledgment over the decades. I need to add that, sadly, before that we even needed to bring awareness to the facts of children’s and babies’ consciousness. Remember, there was a time when it was thought that newborns do not feel pain. That is merely one example.
Even, if you can believe it, Western culture needed to acknowledge women’s feeling consciousness. In a similar way, in fact, some societies have considered folks in other societies as lacking in feeling awareness. And some strata of society have denied the feeling consciousness of certain “lower” segments of the population … or even of other races, as when we had slavery. I am reminded of recently hearing the pronouncements of a political figure and industrial mining titan of early Twentieth Century America rationalizing his insensitive treatment of workers as that they do not experience suffering … not really. Hard to believe, isn’t it?
Thus, my book, The Secret Life of Stones, only continues the reversal of such abject greed and cruelty manifesting as the lack of empathy and the stupidity as we see in the examples above. Still, it seems the understandings of the consciousness and aliveness in the inanimate world, the world of matter — which are the most recent and necessary conclusions, arising from the findings of quantum physics and modern consciousness research — are the most difficult of which to grasp.
Yet, matter is alive, is conscious. Our sciences do tell us. There is an awareness in the physical world which is beyond our imagining. The Universe is at base Consciousness, Absolute Subjectivity, Experience, or mind-stuff. This is the finding of quantum physics and Consciousness research. Does that not imply that matter and stones are, somehow, aspects of that Consciousness, mind-stuff, Experience?
No doubt about it, there is a secret life in the Universe. It is found everywhere and in the most unlikely places. The physical world is an illusion arising from our human perception, we have found; and the fundamental reality is consciousness; it is experiential. When you look at a mountain you are seeing Experience, in some indirect way. This is the conclusion of the new physics and our latest consciousness research. There is a secret life of stones.
The Secret Life of Stones is a journey that explores the territory approaching and bordering that overstanding of matter being alive. Not just humans, plants, and animals, but all the physical world is alive. This vision of a world pregnant with Being, beyond our imagining, is the catalyst for the revolution needed in our times. It does change everything we think we know, in science, and otherwise. It brings forth a perception of reality as something in which we are immersed that is on our side, blessing us, supporting us, encouraging us — in all ways, large and small. Regardless our actions, our successes and failures, we are part of an aliveness interpenetrating us and connecting us with alive beings, experiential unites, and higher realities. It is a web, unable to be broken, in which the spot of it we see in life — with all its drama, dead ends, seeming fragmentation, circularity, and meaninglessness — is revealed to be perfect in every detail, in spite of us.
More even that that, it brings the blessing that we can be proud and noble in our rightful and truly honored place in the Universe. We can feel, rather than the cosmic aloneness to which we have relegated ourselves, the joy of cosmic belongingness, which is the right of all beings.
To our astonishment, the discovery of modern times and current science is that the boundaries of self are arbitrary and mutable. Quantum physics and modern consciousness research have revealed the possibility, once again — using psychotechnologies such as entheogens, holotropic breathwork, shamanism, deep experiential therapies, past-life regressions, and expanded forms of primal therapy — that we are not just the All, in potential, as in an experience of “becoming one with God” or in an opening to the All That Is. Along with and more easily than that, our sciences and psychotechnologies have revealed that we can take up one of the infinite foci already existing in Reality, or in potential within It, and actually be, for a time, another entity … be it an insect; a star system; a single celled animal; a sperm or egg cell; a planet, such as Gaia, the Earth; and anything in between. And amazingly, even far beyond.
Using these rediscovered and newly invented psychotechnologies, people are able to identify with and experience the consciousnesses not only of other planetmates — that is, of other species on Earth — but also are able to merge with and experience the consciousness of higher orders of beings: the Earth; individual planets; the galaxy; individual collections of people, such as the women of all time; and even collectives of supranormal beings and realities, including archetypal consciousnesses and their subjective experience. It is possible to experience consciousness of supposedly inanimate, non-living forms and even identify with consciousnesses on the atomic and subatomic levels.
Not only is the Universe alive and we are interconnected with it, but we find we can experience it. We can expand our boundaries or pass through them into the experiential realms of seemingly separate beings and Realities. And we discover we are all alike, inside, though we act and exist within different forms. Therefore, we can grok the inner realities of others, animate and inanimate. So trees bloom for the joy of it. Bees delight in their tasks. The ocean is deep, wise, and comforting. And the Universe is pervaded by love, which we erroneously label gravity. This is what we know because we are part of Reality, part of Nature, part of Divinity and not superior to it as the Judeo-Christian religions presume…. Or fallen from it like we are some kind of alien fruit that was somehow projected out of a tree, a Nature, that we have no part of, as fuddy-duddy scientists assume.
The Secret Life of Stones explains how all of this is so and reveals the profound implications that has for us and for how we live our lives. This book can be described as an adventure in logic surrounding an investigation into the discoveries on the cutting edge of our sciences, bringing forth the most profound and comprehensive philosophy, to date. We walk hand-in-hand through that new and wondrous country; we follow all the paths we find there, brought into view by this new cosmic overstanding.
Book Two, Dance of the Seven Veils I:
Identity/Primal Psychology, Mythology, and Your Real Self
Adult to Toddler, Veils One-Three.
This book, the second volume in The Path of Ecstasy Series, is the first of three parts on this topic of the Seven Veils. This first part answers the questions, who to be? And, what is the real self? It deals with our stage of adulthood and goes back to that of toddlerhood. It is all about pulling back the Veils of anthropocentrism and species-superiority, which is Veil One; the hidden agendas of societies and especially its elites which get construed as rites of passage and initiation into adulthood for young girls and boys and which thus corrupt their personalities along lines not their own, which is Veil Two; and the layers of parental abuse, misdirection, control and direction, for their ends, not our own, which get impressed upon us in infancy, toddlerhood, and childhood, and which coalesce as the primal scene, which is Veil Three. And which tells each and every one of us that we are not going to be loved unless we be something other than what we are, what we were meant to be, and what we were destined to be — which is our real self.
Book Three, Dance of the Seven Veils II:
Prenatal/Perinatal Psychology, Mythology, and Your Divine Self
Infancy to Prenate, Veils Four-Six.
The Series continues with the second of three parts of Dance of the Seven Veils. This book, the third volume in The Path of Ecstasy Series, answers the questions, what is the Divine Self? Do we have such an inner core of being? If so, how did we lose it, so that we think we do not? And, how can we get it back?
This book is concerned with the time of our lives around birth; however it traces the psychological imprints from that time back into the womb. This work’s elucidation of the experiential realms of the prenatal is, in fact, that which distinguishes it from what has been said about this time around birth, previously, in the field of prenatal and perinatal psychology.
Just as fresh to the field, it adds to that discipline by exploring the influences from our time of “prenatal hell,” during late gestation. That is something never really dealt with before and only written about by one other.1 So it is that this book has to do with the time after birth — the newborn and infancy periods — yet it extends back to the time before birth, the prenatal. However, the prenatal is divided into two separate Veils, which could not be more contrasting. There is the time of blissful existence during the first two trimesters of gestation. This is the basis of much of what I call the joy grids — which is the substratum of each human’s personality having to do with what gives them pleasure, joy, fulfillment, ecstasy, and bliss. It is our deepest self in this lifetime, and it is interconnected with the Divine. From which we had only a little time earlier separated, keep in mind.
It also expands on what happens, generally speaking, during the third trimester, when the fetus’s larger mass, in conjunction with the bipedal stance of humans, results in constriction of the blood vessels going to the prenate. The extreme compression experienced by the unborn baby at this time already causes increasingly more difficulty in movement and pressure from all sides on the body. This crowdedness in the womb brings forth claustrophobic-like feelings in the prenate of wanting to explode, yet being unable to do anything about it. No exit.
Then, because of the inefficiency of the blood flow in bringing nutrients to the fetus, which includes, most importantly of all, oxygen; it is characterized by feelings of suffocation along with the cramped feelings. Finally, because the reduced blood flow means the toxic byproducts of food conversion will not be removed as efficiently, we routinely experience feelings of being force-fed toxins, waste matter, and “poisons.” This is accompanied by feelings of nausea, sickness, and — because it seems to come from all around and yet from nowhere in particular — paranoia, the sense of a dire threat which can come from anywhere at anytime and is directed in particular at oneself.
Also consequent to this buildup of toxins in the amniotic surround is a feeling of burning or irritation on the surface of the skin. These feelings are the basis of the human evil of all times, and I call them the prenatal matrices of human evil, or the PMEs. Comprising, as they do, the greatest amount of the trauma and pain of our early lives, they are pretty much congruent with what I call the pain grids.
One of the major points of the book is that in any growth — spiritual, personal, or psychotherapeutic — the goal is to go through the pain grids, by facing, acknowledging, experiencing, and reliving them, and tapping into the joy grids beneath them. Which “joy grids” I liken to our deeper human nature. This deeper self or personhood is interconnected with and interacting with the Divine — which is a state of beingness that is the experience of that time as well as is a quality of everyday consciousness that embraces one when one reconnects with these repressed experiences in the process of personal growth as an adult.
Dance of the Seven Veils II also lays out, for consideration and integration into the larger overstanding being presented, the aspects of the perinatal matrices of experience. These are matrices that have been discovered and presented to our collective understandings by Stanislav Grof.
Another aspect of this book is that it brings out the truly amazing coincidence of the events of these times with the religious ideas, theologies, iconographies, and beliefs of all cultures of all times. We discover the roots of many of the archetypes here. We can discern the imprints of that time playing into both the positive and negative proclivities of religious behavior. Naturally, these early prenatal-perinatal matrices all together — both Grof’s and mine — are the patterned substratum which gets ever and over again reflected in our basic beliefs, which we conceptualize and narrate in our mythologies.
In terms of the sequence being laid out in Dance of the Seven Veils, the time of birth itself — including the postnatal period, with its graces or horror … depending — is what I term Veil Four. The time of prenatal malnutrition and our experience of third trimester hell, with its four aspects, the PMEs, comes under the heading of Veil Five. Lastly, the time of, optimally, early blissful womb experience, connection with Divinity, and experience of harmony and buoyant optimism, confidence, and delight is what I call Veil Six.
All of these, whatever their experiential qualities — pleasureful or painful — are Veils. They are films across our comprehension because they are imprints about what Reality is that arises of our unique human experience — either individually or collectively. Thus, being a consequence of early, quite variable, quite unique (in comparison to other species) events, they cannot truly be considered accurate about what exists outside the parameters they most definitely inscribe. They comprise hard and fast prejudices about what is True and Real.
So, what is Real, then? What is Reality prior to the events which skewed our understandings of What Is so that It is a particular thing, not any other things. What actually is Naked Reality? Who were you before you were you as you think you are? What is your “original face”? Well that is what we look at in the next book.
Book Four, Dance of the Seven Veils III:
Transpersonal/Periconceptional Psychology, Mythology, and Your Original Face
Cellular to Soulular, Veil Seven and Beyond.
In the third book of Dance of the Seven Veils, which is Volume 4 in The Path of Ecstasy Series, I take on the most profound of all human questions, which has to do with what is really really real. What is Reality? That is a question that lies deep at our roots, and deep in our souls.
It is no coincidence its discovery might lie at a consideration of those deepest parts of our selves. Indeed, having removed six overlying Veils upon Reality — Veils which were projected out onto our screens of perception and understanding as a result of prior experience, especially traumatic and deeply affecting ones — this is our best chance to remove the last Veil. That is exactly the purpose of all the preceding pages in these volumes and all the prior ideas which — one by one — were used to pry back the boards upon which we stand which unthinkingly create our arbitrary platform within Reality. The culmination and purpose of this entire journey approaches its fruition here.
In this third book of Dance of the Seven Veils, then, we look at the last Veil, which has to do with our periconceptional experiences. That is to say, the experiences around conception. Periconception extends back to our emergence into Form with the creation of ovum, first, and then sperm. It continues with the actual events of the coming together of ovum and sperm at conception. It passes on into the events of the fertilized egg, the blastocyst, of implantation, and finally, of early embryonal existence. We find the deepest imprints on our human reality here, periconceptionally. Hence it is our first, our deepest, our initial Veil across our ultimate identity as Divinity and our experience in the No-Form State.
This Seventh Veil — the first reduction from Cosmic Awareness, the first cookie cutter on the dough of our physical reality — establishes our physical world, in many ways. We find here the creation of duality as perceived in the world, of thing and no-thing, of self and other, of forward and backward. We discover here the philosophical basis of our human reality. These are the things we believe, without any doubt. It will require the removal of all the preceding, and overlying, Veils to have a chance to grok what is to be gotten here. For at this point we border on the truly astounding and mind-blowing. All else may be interesting, is no doubt instrumental, is most of it useful; that is, in a practical psychological or spiritual sense. But here is where we “get real.” That phrase will be seen to never have been so true and profound as it is in its applicability here.
This third book of Dance of the Seven Veils pulls to the side the final Veil on Naked Reality. We see the soulular, the No-Form State, the face of Ultimate Divinity. And … we find … our Original Face, which is discovered to be part and parcel of all of that. Knowing this thing, one knows everything.
So this is where we will go in those books. We will, like Salome, do a Dance of the Seven Veils and find out what Naked Reality is more likely to be like.
Book Five, Womb with a View
The next volume in The Path of Ecstasy Series will be titled, Womb with a View, and it will continue this exposition. Much of it is already written, so I can tell you a little about what it will contain.
In Womb with a View, I will continue this look into the screens of distortion across human perception by focusing on the ways our womb experiences — our prenatal events and traumas — create our beliefs in life. You will notice that this is something I will have addressed, at this point, in Book 3, or Dance of the Seven Veils II; yet here is where I will unfold the premises and revelations therein. It will focus exclusively on this time in utero, which is the foundation of all our most profound religious beliefs.
We have already seen how our experiences of the events of this time create our beliefs about the supernatural. Here is where I will present the grand matrix of our prenatal basis of beliefs in goodness, joy, God, fulfillment, and life. Which I term the joy grids. We will see what that is in us; how it affects us in every moment of our lives; what its greatest profile is, collectively; how we have expressed it in religions, mythologies, and theologies; and most importantly, how this knowledge can be used to provide our truest direction in life and the path to our greatest fulfillment and joys.
It represents, as well, the passage beyond the constraints of our pain grids. This is the road to freedom. Many talk about it; many yearn for it. In this book I will show you what it is, where it is, and how to get to it. This is the heaven attainment. It is still one step removed from enlightenment, which is a going beyond all the Veils, including this one. Still, not bad. This is the basis for a happy life.
Book Six, Cells with a View
I have presented for your consideration in this current book many examples of the way fundamental and mostly unvarying events around conception arise and configure so much of our ritual and mythologies in widely varying cultures, often widely separated in time. I have shown how much alike they are, and I have expressed to you my incredulity at the fact that their remarkable consistencies have not been catalyst for research about that previously. Which congruence of patterns cross-culturally can finally — with the understandings I present of the prenatal and perinatal precursors of them in mind — garner some possibilities for comprehension, if not ultimate conclusions.
Regardless, it would seem culture in and of itself does not exert as large an influence on cultural patterns of belief as was once thought. Nor does cultural transmission account for all similarities. We have a common substratum of being, you see, arisen of our common biological experiences as humans.
Cells with a View will dive deeply into the deepest underpinnings of our reality, as laid down in us through our absolute earliest experiences in Form. In so doing we can expect to reveal the most fundamental matrix, the deepest template of our mind, and the seeds, if not foundations, of all human beliefs and culture.
We can expect that what we see here will be at least interesting; more likely it will be enlightening of much beyond it.
Book Seven, The Prenatal Matrix of Human Events
Following Cells with a View, I have plans to write a more elaborate exposition of the “prenatal matrix of human events,” as I introduced it in my recent work, Wounded Deer and Centaurs: The Necessary Hero and the Prenatal Matrix of Human Events. Which I also expanded on here in several of the chapters, especially, Chapter 5, “The Prenatal Matrix of Human Nature,” and which I will, at the time of this book’s publication, have explored in Dance of the Seven Veils II, dealing with the prenatal and Veil Five.
There is much more to be said on this topic, and it is vitally important. As I explained in Wounded Deer and Centaurs, this prenatal matrix is virtually the root of the evil that humans distinctively manifest, out of all of Nature. More than that, it is essential we see it and remove those weeds from the meadow of human personality if life is to continue on Earth. This book, Book Seven, like Wounded Deer and Centaurs, will elaborate on why and how that can be done.
Book Eight, The Centered Path Through Hell
Beyond these first seven — i.e., this one, the other two in the Dance of the Seven Veils, The Secret Life of Stones, Womb with a View, Cells with a View, and the one elaborating on the prenatal matrix — six more works are in this queue, at this time. These include one that would be about the centered path through hell. This one follows logically the one elaborating the prenatal matrix and explaining the source of human evil. For this one begins discussing the path that is necessary in order to go beyond those hellacious influences. It is one that involves facing and going through them in order, like Dante proceeding through Inferno and Purgatorio, to release oneself from their influences.
This work will include important corrections to common spiritual thinking, including my stressing the truth that the path to liberation involves facing the darkness. Unless one deals with the pain-evolved proclivities in one’s personality, one might simply become a calmer crazy person, with spiritual or religious practice. Or, as Jung put it, “One does not become enlightened by imaging figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” This book, as well, will highlight a fundamental acknowledgment that the path to authenticity, to rootedness in Divinity, is not a ladder-style one, as Wilber and transpersonal Ego psychologists think of it. Rather, an authentic spiritual path embraces, as Hesse phrased it, “seeking the depths.” As Jung also wrote, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” My book on the centered path through hell, correspondingly, acknowledges that “the way forward is down.”
This work reveals the equally disastrous matriarchal and patriarchal mistakes that are made in the spiritual quest. And in noticing the mistakes to the left and to the right of true-footedness it carves a road, a centered path, avoiding them. It shows how to keep oneself centered and unharmed while also proceeding in the direction down, into one’s feelings, into life experience, hence metaphorically, into “hell.” This book would be Beatrice to Dante in his Divine Comedy.
So this work focuses, for one thing, on the matriarchal mistakes we make on the path, which delays or blocks our progress. These matriarchal mistakes have to do with opening to overwhelm through various reckless means, at the times when actualization, not more access to potentiality, is what is warranted, as I explained in Chapter 39 on “Identity and the Sea of Potentiality.” At this time, I expect to include, additionally, in this particular book some of the ideas I was laying out in that chapter on Identity and potentiality about the dangers of mysticism for “modern” youth. So “the centered path through hell” book will also deal with Identity, potentiality, rites of passage, youth and mid-life and other liminal crises, drugs and their effect on the process, multiculturalism, the occult, and generations — mine of the Sixties and the ones subsequent.
However even more importantly this work on the centered path through hell deals with the much more widespread patriarchal mistakes we make. Especially in that we live in a patriarchal world, almost totally, and going back ten thousand years and more in some places, the patriarchal mistakes virtually riddle our religious and spiritual beliefs and even our ideas of personal and psychological growth. These patriarchal mistakes predominantly involve the use of control, versus surrender, and mastery, versus vulnerability, on the path. These are Ego mistakes, they are ones that are ladder-like and intellectual and are rooted in a false reliance on “rationality” as a tool of spiritual growth. Which “rationality” is an aspect of Ego, as opposed to intuition, faith, guidance from within and without, and grace.
Book Nine, The Journey of Re-Membering … The Four Phases of Self-Awareness
After this in line is a book on the “the journey of re-membering,” with a title something like that. Following the corrections to the misunderstandings of spiritual evolution unveiled in the previous book on the “centered path,” I have laid out a volume detailing the path to ecstasy and Self, or Divinity, as it proceeds in four stages, which are four completely different orientations to life itself.
These are four truly distinct phases of self-awareness that those who become liberated embody and go through in this life and over the course of their incarnations. It is the path involved in moving out from the prejudices and the evil that accrue to us all, as described in the first seven books of this Path of Ecstasy Series. The book previous to this one, the eighth volume, dealing with the “centered path,” focuses on the mistakes common on the road of self-actualization. Whereas this one, on stages, takes a look at what that path entails. So this book, by contrast to “centered path,” is the one that will depict the true and authentic route of realization — the one avoiding the pitfalls of matriarchality and patriarchality which in one way or another keeps one stuck in hellish misery.
Once one realizes the way of the centered path through hell, then, there are four phases of expanding self-understanding that are related, roughly, to four stages of life, correctly lived. More importantly these four phases are related to levels of the unconscious — each deeper and more expansive than the previous. Thus they lead to the superconscious, once those levels are embraced, incorporated, and gone beyond.
These phases of self-awareness were inspired by Masters and Houston (1966, 2000) in their seminal work, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience. These levels — congruent with Masters and Houston’s model of the entheogenic experience itself — are the sensory, the recollective-analytic, the symbolic-existential, and the integral. Don’t worry I’ll come up with “sexier” labels for them by print time. lol. At any rate, these stages are found in virtually all valid spiritual, psychological, transpersonal paths of evolution or growth to liberation. Therefore, they provide a yardstick against which one can evaluate one’s progress. They can provide direction, when needed; and confirmation, when that is what would help.
Book Ten, Primal Spirituality and the Primal Process … The Second Half of “The Cure”
The book following that, a tenth book in the Series, is the one I am anxious to bring to print. It is on “primal spirituality.” I have several parts of it currently online, including “Only Half a Cure: Unconditional Acceptance and the Primal Process” (1993); “Reunion with the Positive (Self), Part 1 (1995); and “Creating Positive Scenarios” (1995).2 These are ideas that have already melded into the culture of the field of primal therapy, by now, as I brought these ideas out initially in the early Nineties. But I have much much more to say on them. And it is very important.
For one thing, the fact that it is radical unconditional acceptance that truly allows growth, that truly heals, is hardly known. Outside of the primal modality, and unfortunately sometimes even under its aegis, it is missed. If it is known, it is rarely understood sufficiently for it to bring about the powerful transformation it can. This of which I speak goes way beyond Carl Rogers’s (1961) admirable therapeutic advances termed client-centered, by the way.
However, it is truly difficult for facilitators to apply it without having done considerable deep experiential work themselves. For, predictably in a patriarchal culture and a capitalist system of economy, everything pushes in the direction of a medical-type model of growth and healing; where facilitators can get paid to give direction, provide advice, and so on … to be authorities and to be esteemed and paid that way. Fine for them, but basically that usurps the growing person’s primary mechanism for growth — which is the self-realization coming from within. Beyond that, the authority-citizen, the teacher-student, the doctor-patient mode is the only one that a person, whether counselor or client, has encountered in life, usually. The client expects it; the counselor often does not know there is anything wrong with it. Hell, what else would they be getting paid for? Why else should folks give them money except for they telling them what they need to know and fixing them wherever one thinks one can?
Nonetheless, there is a mode of radical unconditional acceptance, as we learned it in primal therapy. It is close to what Tav Sparks — the current director of Grof Transpersonal Training — is getting at in his manual Doing Not Doing: A Facilitators Guide to Holotropic Breathwork. Hard to explain, it is, but I will in my forthcoming book. For now I offer this as analogy: I am reminded that as a one-time community activist I was taught that organizers do not succeed by doing what is needed to be done, but rather by encouraging others in the group, and then stepping to the side when an event arises, so that those in the community can be motivated to step up and can learn to be leaders and initiators of change. That in no case should one step in, even if failure results, for that precludes people finding their own power, their own ability to lead and initiate progressive action.
Well, the vast majority of healers and psychotherapists are way behind the curve in learning this, unfortunately. The temptation of wanting to be seen as an authority, to be able to label oneself a “professional” … the ego and the remuneration involved in that … is virtually impossible for most would-be healers to forgo. So, that point is important to bring out in this upcoming work.
The other aspect of this book, which I see now is also very very important … I think even more so as time goes by … has to do with the final movements in the spiritual symphony. This is where so many get stuck. My experience is that even primal people, not to mention folks in virtually all spiritual and psychological paths, get this wrong. If you have come here by way of The Secret Life of Stones, think back to what I said about the spherical path versus the circular ones, in Chapter 31 of that book. Virtually all spiritual and psychological modalities see everything in terms of “balancing” opposites or “integrating” dualities within the person. And there is a huge flaw in that. I want to make a joke and say it implies that being an asshole is fine as long as one does it only half the time. And while that hits on part of it, the problem far surpasses that.
Even in my “centered path” book, I stress that it is not about “balancing” or “integrating” matriarchal and patriarchal ways but forgoing them, for what good is it to make two mistakes, however equally? One is not benefited by opening to overwhelm, a matriarchal mistake, and then alternately enlisting ruthless body-bullying will power, a patriarchal error. What is best is to avoid both blunders and learn to surrender to an inner flow that has one naturally unfolding and effortlessly actualizing, not in a “balanced” way but in a seamless way.
Hence, as one would expect in models that are circular, indeed yes, they go round and round and go nowhere. For they are ever trying to fix the person prior to or outside the person’s engagement in the world. This is another aspect of the medical model. For the medical model does not only have the problem of authoritarianism coming about because of its paid authorities, but it also has a category of “sickness”; hence, withdrawal from the world is included as an aspect of that. So also do virtually all spiritual paths involve such a retreat from life. This is the “monastery” stage — the contemplative or meditative or therapy arc of the process of growth.
Now, certainly it is important to have liminal times for growth. I stressed that repeatedly in this book under Veil Two, especially when I referred to experiences mimicking vision quests or hero’s cycles. But there is a problem in this as well. For what usually happens is those liminal times get clung to by sick people. Then to add to that, these folks are encouraged in their dependency by professionals who can hardly keep from operating out of motives of financial gain, since they live in and are constantly pressured by the demands of a capitalist system. Dependent clients make for steady streams of income, you see.
So a huge realization is missed: It is what I call the second half of the cure. And it is embodied in this statement, that:
It is only when one aligns oneself with a cause beyond oneself that one is truly healed.
For in doing so, one is lifted out of oneself into a larger, and higher, reality in which one’s Pain is not focused on, is inconsequential, hence becomes forgotten.
Another reason this is not seen is that professionals who might lead — whether in psychotherapeutic or spiritual milieus — are often ones who are themselves stuck. Indeed, they then are pied pipers. They are blocked themselves, are often unhappy and unliberated, yet they feel the need to pass on what has not worked for them … for regardless its barrenness of results, hell, they worked and paid hard for it! They tell themselves that it is okay for them to do that, for — with faith as blind as any fundamentalist — surely they will at some point, somewhere in the future, sometime, succeed in what they have been trying to achieve.
What is funny is how they sometimes will try to convince others — they will brandish it as some kind of badge of courage — that there are no real answers, as a way of rationalizing to themselves their failure and avoiding the necessary correction in their path that their failure is trying to reveal to them. Saying silly things, meant to come across as bravado, like “the only answer is there are no answers,” and such, they affirm their dead end in growth as a value. And they hate like hell any insinuation that there are actual answers and that they have simply been failures in finding them in this life.
This cul de sac is often the street signed, Existential Circle. Folks living there do not know of the freeways beyond where they live and try to convince you to live there with them. They would have you believe the “no exit” and “dead end” signs you notice are just more proof of their hardiness in living there anyway. Though perhaps being tough-minded in a losing cause is not very smart? However macho it might seem to be in some kind of existential no-nonsense “real-world”–worshiping way?
The other reason the second half of the cure — the one involving higher causes, fate, actualization, destiny, and atmadharma — is missed is related to that monkish mistake in that once retreat is taken as a value, one finds all kinds of ways to deprecate more active paths, paths of activism and service in this world. You will hear such folks decry politics, as in some egoic way of trying to put out that they are above that stuff, would not get their hands dirty. They refer to politics as “negativity,” perhaps, or “drama.” And they proclaim how they are superior in “not getting caught up in that” — those “petty concerns of this world.” However, in truth, it is simply that they are fearful of venturing outside their cocoon of the monastic, the fearful, the narcissistic, the self-obsessed — that hypochondriacal cul de sac they have made a home and rationalized as a value.
Regardless the reasons, all these folks miss the culmination of the healing process, which is expressed in the final stage of the hero’s cycle, when one brings back to the world what one has learned in the liminal state. It is related to what Maslow called self-actualization. It is parallel to what Sathya Sai Baba called the path of service (of seva, in the Sanskrit), which according to him was far far superior to the meditative route. Indeed, Sai Baba explained how the meditative route was not a properly fruitful spiritual route at all. That it was just a kind of way of doing mental spring-cleaning, so to speak. That it was only the paths involving service in the world and to society or to something beyond oneself that are any kind of spiritual paths. Castaneda in enjoining one to choose “a path with a heart” was saying something similar. In any case, this is what I agree with, what I think it is vitally important for folks to know, and what I bring out in the ideas on “the second half of the cure.”
So in terms of being healed, it is true in practice that one will not be really complete or authentic until one finds a way to bring what one has learned out into the world in some kind of helpful way, often by applying it to some cause of importance, often involving the relief or prevention of suffering to some beings other than oneself, for a change. This actualization of what was discovered within is clearly evident in vision-quest sorts of experiential cycles; it is the final stage of the Hero’s Cycle; Janov has alluded to it in his explanation of the “dialectic” between feeling feelings and action in the world; and I have written at length — in Wounded Deer and Centaurs, especially — how the myth of Chiron as the ever-suffering centaur, become the “wounded healer, is showing us this need.
And, yes, this activism is the missing component in virtually all spiritual and psychological paths. I touched on it in the first book, as well, in The Secret Life of Stones. There, I wrote about the bodhisattva path, for example. But again there is far far more to be said about it. What I want folks to get out of this upcoming book on primal spirituality and the primal process is the release into knowing that one gains oneself when one gives oneself. That sickness and neurosis and Pain cause one to look inward — that is fine. But staying constrained and fearful keeps one stuck in misery and neurosis, in directionlessness and meaninglessness. What I want folks to know is that there is a grand and beautiful and fulfilling world out there in which to participate. And that at a certain point, far earlier than most folks know, the way to grow is to stretch out to it, to stretch past one’s Pain. And to align with something that measures up suitably with what one discovered within.
It is because spiritual paths tend to draw to them introverts that this is not seen. Introverts hate like crazy having to do anything that would seem to require something like extroversion. Understandable, of course. However, they then rationalize it is not needed and is inferior to them and their path. But this is out of a mistaken notion of what activism or a higher cause is. So this is their fear or prejudice that they need to put behind them in order to feel free.
By the way, though I am not planning a book on it, extroverts, who naturally embrace activism as a matter of course, have the complementary problem in the way they pooh pooh inwardness. Yet, as I have been saying in my books, especially Funny God, that is their tragic mistake, as well. And it is the one needing correction in order for actual success on the pressing problems of the world to be had.
Now, this notion regarding a necessary engagement in the world and alignment with a cause greater than oneself is something I did actually say a bit about in The Secret Life of Stones in the chapter on gods being seen as demons, Chapter 34. I pointed out the hero’s cycle aspects of the alien abduction phenomena. And quoting Joseph Campbell (1972) and Keith Thompson (1989), I was making the point that a liminal time — a time of social “alienation” and living on the borders of one’s group, of retreat and reevaluation, of moratorium — is an absolutely essential stage in the cycle. But that if one does not come back to the world … one is “harassed night and day by the demon within.”
This problem of emotionally sick people clinging to the liminal world — spending one’s time immersed in fantasy and in wishing things were a different way is the way this commonly manifests — is in the camp of what Campbell (1972) called the “refusal of the return.” Similar, though different, is something I dealt with in this book in detailing what happened in America when the counterculture revolution and awakening was crushed by the fearful and the powers-that-be of the second half of the Twentieth Century, which is in the category of Campbell’s “refusal of the call.”
The point is that one needs to take what one learns and bring it back to the world. It is only then, with the cycle complete, that one gets relief. Indeed, one gets liberation. And more important than those, one feels fulfillment in the surety that one has been helpful; and one is rewarded being at home in a place among the noble ones who have lifted the suffering of the world a tad. Knowing that, is the wholiest blessing of all.
So, in summary, the book on primal process will explain how to traverse the path of Re-Membering described in the previous book on the four phases of self-discovery. It will explain the process, its permutations; and it will show how to “go in” — that unconditional acceptance and the primal process. But also it will unveil how to “come back out” — the second half of the cure.
Book Eleven, Authenticity Rising
The book planned for after that is one about current times and its cultural changes which involve a shift to the importance and valuing of authenticity. It is a book on “authenticity rising.” And it will show how the current state of the world in so many aspects — multiculturalism, mass media, social networking and the internet, and the environmental and political and civil crises of the day — is pushing for more and allowing for more in terms of personhood. I will show how this powerful and promising trend is raising itself up, as well I will show the powerful forces seeking to push it back down … to snuff it out. There is authenticity vying with conformity and the status quo. There is original and dharmic roles and living going head to head with the incessant, relentless demands of a material industrial corporate culture and its governments, geared to keep the masses compliant, unmoving, uncomplaining … but also ungrowing. Only time will tell who will win out.
Book Twelve, Return to Grace … The Crisis and Opportunity of End Times
What follows naturally from a book on current times and its craving for authenticity is the outer — or the social, historical, current events aspect of that. For not only is there an increasing hunger for realness and truth, the times themselves are demanding genuineness and integrity of us. No less than the survival of all life on this planet is at stake. This is the greatest crisis.
However, it is also the grandest opportunity for folks to find themselves and to participate in a cause beyond themselves. There has never been a time so ripe for personal fulfillment alongside and within a time so dire and having such momentous consequences. There has never been a better time for heroes to come forth and rainbow warriors to awaken. This is the grandest adventure of all time, the greatest story ever being told on Earth, and it is happening in our lifetimes. We are lucky to be here, despite the dark cloud of gloom and doom approaching. For we can never be better than we are able to be now. The brightest angels of our beings are being summoned at this exact time, like never before.
So this book, Book Twelve, will explore the unique and apocalyptic character of our times … in all its wondrous implications.
Book Thirteen, The Cosmic Overstanding … You, God, and Identity
The final book in this series, at least the way it is all being envisioned at this time, not only caps off the entire series in a kind of culmination, but it brings it back around again to some of the themes of the first volume, The Secret Life of Stones. For Volume I of The Path of Ecstasy Series dealt with the nature of Reality in all its components. And it pointed to some implications of that for one’s life.
Well, in this final book, I will put forth the greatest overstanding — The Cosmic Overstanding — of us in relation to the Universe as revealed in that first book, especially, but also all subsequent volumes. Whereas The Secret Life of Stones (2016) was about the nature of matter and Divinity, the final book will be about the nature of The Game, our script, and how we can be liberated within it. It will expand the ideas of “The Mind’s True Liberation” as put forth in Part Three of Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation (2015), as well as conveyed in Part Three, “Experience Is Divinity” of the book by the same name (2013).
It will do far more than explain the path of liberation, though. Let alone, give you steps to achieve it — that kind of direction and to-doing of you is something I would never do. Rather, it will embody it … embody liberation. It might also open your eyes to the realization that you already are.
The Path of Ecstasy Series, Summary
In summary these books are:
Book 1. The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy. It dealt with the metaphysical nature of Reality as Idealist and panentheistic, as an experiential pool in which you, along with everyone and everything else is immersed. In which you belong, are never alone, and are noble. And in which ultimately, you are Divinity.
Book 2, this one: Dance of the Seven Veils I: Primal/Identity Psychology, Mythology, and Your Real Self. It answers the questions, who to be? And, what is the real self? And it is concerned with our anthropocentric bias as a human, and the time of our adulthood back to our time as a toddler. Which is Veils One through Three.
Book 3. Dance of the Seven Veils II: Prenatal/Perinatal Psychology, Mythology, and Your Divine Self. It will be concerned with the questions, how to be happy? And, what is the Divine Self? It deals with the pain grids as laid down in us through our prenatal and perinatal experiences. Importantly, though, it reveals the joy grids, deep inside us and imprinted in us through our early womb experiences. This is Veils Four through Six.
Book 4. Dance of the Seven Veils III: Periconceptional/Transpersonal Psychology, Mythology, and Naked Reality. This book will look into the actual nature of Existence. More importantly it will answer the questions, what is Naked Reality? And, what is our existence in the No-Form State? Which is the state in the place that is no-place and the time that is no-time both before and after this current incarnation. Naturally, it is the no-place, since it is outside of Form, or physical reality, and one can be everywhere in a place that is nowhere. However, since time is an illusion, it is also in no-time, which means an aspect of yourself exists in it right now.
The book also addresses what is the nature of No-Form beings and our existence in our No-Form aspect, our soul. Additionally, Dance of the Seven Veils III reveals the spiritual grids, which are the absolute earliest imprints we have while in Form, and which themselves need to be journeyed beyond. These spiritual grids are concerned with our cellular and soulular existences, and so, with Veil Seven, and beyond it.
Book 5. Womb with a View. This will be about how our womb experiences create our religions and supernatural beliefs and how those pre- and perinatal experiences show up in our mythologies, our spiritualities, and our theologies.
It will get into biology as both metaphor and mythology to elaborate upon what our bodies and our early biological experiences tell us about life, Reality, and our purpose and meaning of life … and how that is reflected back again upon us in our mythologies and religious beliefs.
Book 6. Cells with a View. This work will tell how our earliest experiences of life at the cellular level create our physical world and our deepest assumptions about Reality. It will uncover how these early imprints show up in the makeup of the world of matter and Nature, which we share; and of the time, cosmos, and supernatural that we assume.
Book 7. On the prenatal matrix of human events. Here will be laid out for review and insight how our late-stage gestation experiences configure our actions … how they give rise to human evil … how they are the origins of the brutality and atrocities of all time and how they are hence not our true human nature. So they can finally be gone beyond when that is recognized and addressed.
Book 8. On the centered path through hell and the way forward is down. This work will take up and strip away the matriarchal and patriarchal mistakes which mar a true apprehension of our journey. Hence it will also unveil a centered and safe navigation of our way through our Pain and dis-ease on the way to our liberation.
Book 9. On the journey of re-membering and the four phases of self-discovery. This one delineates the path of ecstasy to Self, or Divinity, as it is found in the transpersonal paths of all times and places. It shows how each of us travel from Pain and darkness to ecstasy and reunion, from the prenatal matrix to the cosmic overstanding.
Book 10. On primal spirituality and the primal process. It will reveal how radical unconditional acceptance heals and how anything less hurts or diverts. More importantly, it will unveil the necessary stage, the second half of the cure, which involves aligning with something greater than oneself — a cause, a principle, a duty, or a blessing — as the way to finally achieve release from the tortuous prison of ego, of primal pain.
Book 11. On authenticity rising. This book will dive deep into some auspicious trends in our postmodern society involving the goals that the masses are fashioning and the feelings and personalities that are being valued. This craving for genuineness, this adherence to only the real, this no-nonsense insistence on truth … “Just give me some truth!” as John Lennon asserted it … could not have happened at a better time. And it is none too soon.
Book 12. On return to grace and the crisis and opportunity of end times. This book will bring out the unparalleled fortune of our times even as we stand on the brink of disasters as great as eco-apocalypse.
Book 13. Finally, The Cosmic Overstanding: You, God, and Identity will present the good news involved in a new paradigm as it rises up from all these understandings, and more. Consistent with consciousness studies and quantum physics, yet revealing a friendly and loving reality, it says what we can rely on, why we should have hope, and how there is no reason not to be happy and free, at this time, even as we apply ourselves. For we are always and everywhere assisted and saved, uplifted and loved, even “in spite of ourselves.”
Other Books and Series
Just an fyi, I have intentions for other series — some of which I have done already considerable work on.
The Stages of Re-Membering Series
For a very long time — for forty-five years, in fact — in the works has been the elaboration, in four volumes, of the phases of re-membering or the four stages of self-understanding. These ideas, at this time hopefully, will have already been published initially in one work, as Book 9, above. These four volumes expanding on the earlier one — this Stages of Re-Membering Series — would include, again with sexier titles by print time:
Book 1. The Sensory. This describes the place from which we all start. It is a way of apprehending world and life where sensory experiences are all that matter and the sensory and the material are all that has value. Regardless what “religious” beliefs people have, we start with a “fundamentalist” view of the world of it being comprised of things. We might be the average person seeking, in the “venerable” words of George W. Bush, to “throw food on their families” (lol). We might be the careerist. We might be the religious-minded, thinking that God created us five thousand years ago in a Garden of Eden, who can’t wait to get lifted up in the skies physically when the Rapture comes. It could be the Catholic thinking that at the end of time God is going to raise all the bodies from the graves, refurbish them somehow, and then the lucky of us are going to get to hang out in “heaven” in those bodies. I just hope they have grilled cheese sandwiches, in that case.
And regardless, what is valued as a goal is the accumulation of sensory experience in life, as much as possible. So it is aligned with the struggle for wealth, as well, in that it is seen that it is money that allows more sensory experience — whether that is the finest vacations, the most elegant residences, the most sophisticated dining, or the most daredevil of stunts … or having the most accomplished of sexual partners, the most variety and amount of sexual experiences.
At this level of personal development, or spiritual advance, if there are any goals beyond surviving and increasing the pleasure quotient of life to the max, they center around stuffing as much as possible of different experiences into one’s life, having the longest “bucket list” and accomplishing them. The more parties, the more sexual partners, the more cars, the more planes jumped out of, the more motorcycles raced, horses rode, medals won, the more lavish repasts and exotic locales visited, the winner … or as they boast, those who are at this level, “the one with the most toys at the end wins.”
This is the sensory level of evolution back to Grace. This is where we start after having been diminished by the four falls from Grace as we came into this world. It is the one everyone knows; it is the one you are the most familiar with, even if you have grown past it. For we each contain it even if we supersede it. For these levels are not about different stops on a bus route, they are about expanding outward in all directions at once. So the innermost circle, this sensory one, is encompassed in all beyond it. It is integrated within one’s personality, even if one has reached past it to place the focus, the interest, of one’s life elsewhere and beyond it, in the domain of one of the outer rings from it.
As a stage of life, the sensory level is childhood. Regardless how we evolve afterward, virtually every one of us in childhood apprehends the world this way and has these kinds of values. As a spiritual experience, it is the one most are aware of, where there is enhanced sensory experience; sensory experience that is open and wonderful as a child’s, but which doesn’t go beyond that.
Book 2. The Recollective-Analytic. Some folks, however, enter upon a search for Identity in youth that involves more than simply finding out what route one might best take to acquire the materials of life and to draw to oneself the sensory experiences desired — the pleasures of the world including all the above from stage one as well as sex, spouse, family, and friends. Such individuals, instead, seek a grander identity and wish to know a more ultimate truth. And it might arise at any time of life, actually, not just youth. Especially so it might arise after the occurrence of a life-shattering tragedy. Often it emerges in mid-life, as Jung chronicled, when life’s material and sensory attainments are revealed as the shallowness they are. Nevertheless, it is an Identity stage that contains all the components of the one at youth, and some folks in youth do embark on it.
People often do not choose it — this opening into self-reflection. It is frequently forced upon one, rather, as a result of a tragedy: One experiences a serious illness or the death of someone close to one or has an accident, a career disaster, a heart-breaking love disappointment, or some other major misfortune. And this unexpected stumbling block on one’s well-planned route to material, sensory, and social success, this enforced “moratorium” from life, causes the initial inward turning. One wants to know “Why?” As in “Why me (Lord)?” “What’s it all about?” “What’s wrong with me?” “What did I do to deserve this?” In response one becomes reflective. One turns self-analytical. One begins the process of self-inquiry that is the initial and necessary stage of any and all spiritual or personal evolution.
This stage of spirituality has its corollary in the life stages as the student phase of life. Indeed, often this quest begins in college. However, the recollective-analytic as a spiritually evolutionary phase involves more of a vision quest, or of an existential search for meaning, than occurs for the average youth or student. And all things considered, this search for identity, for who to be in life and what to do, takes on the character mostly of a more profound and wider search — that for self-understanding.
Book 3. The Symbolic-Existential. This phase of spiritual evolution comes about after one has discovered some aspects of self (and Self) on the inner plane, through the previous stage, that one wishes, rather needs, to express and bring to the world. I talked above how this is a necessary stage in the primal process. Indeed it is, but in all other processes of growth it is vital as well. In terms of the primal process, the therapy stage would be the recollective-analytic above, from Book 2 of the Stages of Re-Membering Series; and this book would be the actualization phase required, or, as explained above, “the second half of ‘the cure.’”
This stage is existential for it involves immersing oneself fully in existence, in the game here and now that one came to human form on Earth to play. It is symbolic as well, for it has mythological overtones. This is the phase often depicted in mythologies, which portray the path, the journey, of everyman-woman through life. It is the life as lived by the “hero of a thousand faces,” as Campbell laid it out, and as exists in all cultures and is available for all peoples.
It is the facing of challenges, the overcoming of obstacles, the expression of what was discovered within and now in the context of society and the rest of life and the world. From stage one to stage two it was a leaving of the fold, the community, society. From stage two to stage three it is a returning to the fold, the community, the society, although perhaps not the same one. For as Tom Wolfe said, “one can never go home again.” In that case it is about finding one’s tribe and then participating in it.
It is dramatic; it is the grandest theater, for the stakes are high. It is the life that is worthy of a soundtrack, so to speak. For it is urgent and necessary to bring to the world what one uniquely can. No one else can do it. And if you fail in it, the world will simply lack forever whatever it is you came here to contribute.
This stage of spiritual evolution is full and fulfilling but stressful, intense, and all-encompassing. Failure in one’s task is the thing most feared. Not loss of material things or lack of avenues for sensory gratification. Not either is the problem that of confusion and wondering about “it all.” One does not feel here that one lacks meaning in life or considers life to be empty. There are always periods of self-reflection and re-evaluation at every stage. But in this one, one is not obsessed by that, is not paralyzed by that. One does not retreat from the world; one throws oneself into it … eager to do and belong in it. For here, at this stage, one knows enough about “it all” to know that the world lacks and needs what one can uniquely bring it. So responsibility is laid upon one’s actions as well.
It is the heroic quest, thus mythologically important, and is in that sense “symbolic.” It is immersion in life experience; it is the experiential path of evolution, it is one where one is lined up with a cause higher than oneself … thus it is existential.
It corresponds to the adult time of life, though few adults in any society bring adulthood to fruition in the way it needs to happen in order for it to be a stage in liberation. But some do. Creative and spiritual people in particular know what I am talking about here. And when one fulfills one’s life and purpose in this grandest of fashions, the next ring of the circle of growth becomes accessible. That’s a crucial point of this whole series, by the way: Which is that one cannot “jump” to the final stage from the first or second stages, but must traverse each of them, all three of them, before the doorway to the final way of being opens.
Notice, these are rings outward, with each one encompassing all the ones that preceded it. They are not rungs of a ladder in which each step takes one further away from what was below and wherein the earliest efforts are left behind and forgotten, no longer feeding or fulfilling the ones following, no longer being a headspring for ever greater wisdom. No. Each phase is enclosed within every level following it. Each way of being, with all its advancing vision and expanding awareness, is integrated within more comprehensive and truer stances in life, that it is to say, in larger wholes.
So one edges outward along the circumference of one’s self, bordering on the Divine. Here is where the magic is palpable. One has grown in purpose to the point where it brings about the next stage, the Integral.
Book 4. The Integral. This is the one the spiritual literature talks about. It corresponds to the sannyasi stage of life in the Indian culture. It corresponds to Jung’s Wise Old Man and Crone archetypes, framed as stages of life and spiritual evolution. At this point one has fulfilled oneself in relation to the society; one has done one’s Atmic duty. One approaches the Cosmic. It is not about getting anywhere at this point, it is about being here.
As I said in a previous chapter, first there is a mountain, that is the Sensory. Then there is no mountain, that is the Recollective-Analytic. Then there is … this is the Symbolic-Existential. And at this stage of the Integral one has gone beyond even that, and one has merged into Self. And if still alive, one expresses and operates out of that Source. This is the stage of the individuated person, using Jung’s terminology. In the spiritual literature, much more is said about this stage of spiritual evolution than any other, for it is the one wherein one is on the doorstep of the “goal.”
However, that reveals a mistake as well. For although in Hindu culture these stages are reflected as the four stages of a human life, if one looks in the spiritual literature it is as if this is the only stage and one can attain liberation from any of the other stages of life. Whereas that is not the case.
We now know that one cannot jump from sensory experience to enlightenment. If one takes an entheogen at that first stage, the Sensory one, all one can expect is enhanced sensory experiences. At the most there is possible an opening to the Recollective-Analytic. The experience might lead to deeper self-reflection and/or the undertaking of a spiritual quest for understanding and liberation. It might even lead to a break-down that hopefully, sooner or later, will be seen to be the break-through it in actuality is. In such case it is termed a spiritual emergency, and it is not at all pleasant or comfortable … one’s self-esteem gets wrecked, for one thing … regardless how growthful and necessary it turns out to be. In any case, that is just the beginning.
Similarly, one cannot expect to jump from the Recollective-Analytic, the monastic, the student phase directly to liberation. That is what I was stressing in what I said regarding the book that will be about the second half of the cure. One needs to bring one’s re-freshed, re-newed, re-born self into the world and add what one can to it, in engagement with the community of souls and the life on this planet. One can do that in parts, for one should always keep one foot in the world of self-evaluation, but one needs to embark on self-actualization where and when one can. It is the dialectic between the two that catalyzes growth. One goes from self-understanding to worldly actualization and inevitably confronts obstacles. Leading one back for more self-inquiry; then out into the world again, to expression and participation; which sooner or later finds stumbling blocks. Leading one inward again for another stint at the drawing board, followed by another ad-venture, and round and round again.
Nevertheless, this fruitful and often ebullient process is not the Integral stage. The Integral stage is the dawning of wisdom, or at least the beginning of that. It is open-hearted beingness in the world; palpable reunion with all life, all Experience; it is both cosmic and community belongingness at once. And that can only come about through participation and immersion, fully, in the pulsing phases of expansion, previous.
The Quadrilogy, Remembering
The other series I have planned at this time has to do with the quadrilogy, the novel in four books that I have worked on over the years. The name of the quadrilogy is Remembering. It comprises four books. Book One: Leaving. Book Two: Looking. Book Three: Arriving. And Book Four: Being Here.
Perhaps these titles make sense after what I was just relating about the four stages of re-membering above? In any case, it is true these novels are fictional expressions of the ideas of the four stages of self-understanding of the Journey of Re-Membering Series described above.
Finally, I have plans to fill out the ideas of Falls from Grace (2014) in a series of four books covering each of the phases: The First Fall, Conception. The Second Fall, Birth. The Third Fall, the Primal Scene. And The Fourth Fall, Identity. And more immediately in the future, are the books in the Return to Grace Series, titled, Psychology of Apocalypse; Back to the Garden; Primal Return; Primal Renaissance; The Necessary Revolution, and Return to Grace. Also, with no apparent series for them to find a home, are these six books in process: Prenatal Earth; The Primal Matrix of Being; Who to Be; An Existential Metaphysical; The Psychology of Generations; and The Secret of Men.
I am not going to say any more, and I have already said too much. For these plans are likely to change, indeed they undoubtedly will. What usually happens is these plans expand as put into practice, so that more books will be added. But you see here the grandest overview possible of what you can look forward to in the upcoming years. This is a look at what is enroute and will appear, barring unforeseen circumstances. That is, as they say, this is what will arrive, “the Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.” Lol.
We will see what the Universe wants and what it will support. So far, It has wanted and has supported a prolific amount! As for the future, well, stay tuned.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.
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For assistance in the massive undertaking of this three-volume work, as always I wish, most importantly, to express my gratitude to my wife, Mary Lynn Adzema. She is my constant companion in all I do; together we breathe the heady air as this project evolves.
I wish to express my gratitude to my friend and colleague, Graham Farrant. He also, both before and after his death, shared these etheric realms.1 He saw all this, like a trailblazer comes across a hidden valley. And he had all the plans in the world to go down into this place. The book he was working on, which never was completed because of his passing, was titled, From Soul to Cell. Our work resonated together before we ever met; it was that which brought us into correspondence initially. And only after that did we realize we were viewing the same new world.
Though Graham Farrant oversaw the terrain of this new pre- and perinatal, this cellular-soulular, this periconceptional paradigm; like Moses, he was not destined to live to venture far into it or witness its integration into contemporary intellectual and philosophical discourse. I carry his intention with me, and I am buoyed up by his support and inspired by his courage — sensing his presence even — as I continue my journey.
He provided input and encouragement on this project even after he had passed away. That is a story I explain in The Secret Life of Stones, so I won’t repeat it here.1
Also, to thank, Shirdi Sai Baba, Terry Larimore, Martha Delores Ello, Peter Lavender, and the handful of other people who have encouraged and supported my drive to bring words to this new paradigm, which many sense but few overstand at the moment.
I wish to include Ceila Starshine Levine in my expressions of gratitude. She also, through very many conversations, heard from me these visions and perspectives as they were coming to me, and she discussed with me the topics of these works.
My stepson, Peter Radford, the same. He also is someone with the inner perception of the prenatal and perinatal, who also has a full appreciation of its overarching influence on us and of its alignment with the spiritual and transpersonal. I want to extend a personal thank you to Peter for his assistance on the cover, as well. He brought his insight and his skills to bear there, as well, to help create what we both felt to be just right.
This work could not even have been conceived, either, without the work of several important figures, some of whom I know only through their writings. These would include Arthur Janov, Stanislav Grof, Lloyd deMause, Elizabeth Noble, Sathya Sai Baba, Hermann Hesse, and Paul J. Hannig. I find I have woven many strands, in making this tapestry; many of which originated in sources, like the ones mentioned, other than me and were offered freely to the world through the hard work and dedication of scholars, researchers, and theorists in many fields.
Finally, for personal reasons related to this work, I want known my gratitude to Jarvin Heiman, Donald Tuzin, Sharon Coggan, Fitz John Porter Poole, Jim Moore, Richard French, Colleen Youngblood, Jeanne Levine, Lynn Radford, and Warren H. Baker. And, as always, for a blessing unequaled, my best always to Mary Elisabeth Dupont … in whatever state of Form or No-Form you are currently existing.
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Preface
1. For the process of forgetting in coming into Form, see my Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness (2014) and my The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy (2016).
2. For the metaphysics of coming into Form pertaining to its being an intention of Divinity to become less in the process and for what reasons, see my Experience Is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor (2013) and my Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation (2015).
Chapter 1
1. Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology, 1969, pp. 107-108.
2. See Joseph Campbell, ibid., pp. 31-35 for the references mentioned, as well as for comparison on this part. Note that Campbell titles the chapter in which this is found, “The Enigma of the Inherited Image.” He thereby broadcasts that this idea is relevant to what I am writing here in this chapter, as well as in the entire book. His rendering of this topic demonstrates how backwards has been our thinking on this subject directly up to the present. For, outside of the field of prenatal and perinatal psychology, any and all understandings for the basis of personality, or for that matter mythological concepts, leaves out the prenatal and perinatal time of our lives.
Chapter 2
1. Regarding prenatal re-experience and especially that of sperm, egg, and zygote states: In addition to my work, Falls from Grace (2014) and as seen in this work (next volume) in “Veil Six: Joy Grids And Heaven … Embryo And Early Fetal Experience,” see also Buchheimer (1987); Farrant (1987); Grof (1979, 1985); Hannig (1982); Janov (1983); Lake (1981, 1982); Larimore (1990a, 1990b); Noble (1993); and Larimore and Farrant (1995).
2. For deMause’s writing on poisonous placenta, fetal malnutrition, and related matters, two good sources are his seminal work, The Foundations of Psychohistory (1982), and his piece in Verny’s (1987) anthology, Pre- and Perinatal Psychology: An Introduction, titled “The Fetal Origins of History.”
3. Thomas Verny, 1981, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, p. 118.
4. Thomas Verny, 1984, “Birth and Sexuality,” p. 48.
5. The idea of “brain as reducing valve,” goes back to Henri Bergson (1896, 1934) as well as to William James (1899). It was brought forward by Aldous Huxley (1954) to explain the expanded awareness that comes about in psychedelic states.
6. As Huxley (1954) explained it in his work, The Doors of Perception (p. 23): “Reflecting on my [mescalin] experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad,
that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.
According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.”
7. Both of these articles — “The Doors of Perception: Each of Us Is Potentially Mind at Large… When Perception Is Cleansed, All Kinds of Nonordinary Things Happen” and “Occupy Science … A Call for a Scientific Awakening: In Tossing Away Our Species Blinders, We Approach a Truth Far Beyond Science” — are available online in several places including one of my blogs, The Great Reveal by SillyMickel & the Planetmates, and in my book, Experience Is Divinity (2013). You may google the blog articles
8. Among Stanislav Grof’s many works are Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research (1979); LSD Psychotherapy (1980); Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy (1985); The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration (1988); and The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives (1993). See References in this book for additional works by Stanislav Grof.
9. See, for example, Barbara Carter (1993).
10. Frank Lake, 1981, Tight Corners in Pastoral Counseling, p. 35.
11. For Farrant’s important work, see “Graham Farrant Interviewed at Appel Farm, Sunday, August 31, 1986,” Buchheimer (1987); “Cellular Consciousness,” Farrant (1987); Larimore, 1990a and 1990b; and “Egg and Sperm Memory: Universal Body Movements in Cellular Consciousness and What They Mean,” Larimore and Farrant (1995).
12. For Wasdell’s work, see “Toward a Unified Field Theory of Human Behavior” (1979); “Primal Perspective” (1985a); “Foundations of Psycho-Social Analysis” (1985b); and “The Roots of Social Insanity: The Pre- and Peri-Natal Ground of Socio-Political Dynamic” (1990).
Chapter 3
1. Michael Adzema, Falls from Grace, 2014, pp. 81-82.
2. For Janov’s theories on the roots of transpersonal experience and the paranormal in primal pain, see, among his other works, The Primal Scream (1970), The Anatomy of Mental Illness (1971), The Primal Revolution (1972), Primal Man (1975), Prisoners of Pain (1982), Imprints (1983), and his writings in The Journal of Primal Therapy (1973-1978).
3. For Nandor Fodor, see Search for the Beloved (1949) and New Approach to Dream Interpretation (1951).
4. For spiritual grids, joy grids, negative grids, pain grids, and positive grids, see — among other places, including unpublished manuscripts and Veil Six of this book — “Reunion With the Positive (Self), Part 1: The Other Half of ‘The Cure’” in Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology, Vol. 1, No. 2, Autumn 1995, pp. 72-85; and online at
5. For the idea that accessing deep positive experiences on the prenatal level is the foundation for creating positive scenarios for one’s life, see, among other places, including unpublished manuscripts, my “Creating Positive Scenarios: The Other Half of ‘The Cure,’” in Primal Feelings Newsletter, Spring, 1995. Available as well online at
6. In several places, online and in print, I made this assertion that “unconditional acceptance” was necessary for “the second half of the cure.” See, for example, Michael Adzema, “Only Half a Cure: Unconditional Acceptance and the Primal Process” (1993). See as well, referencing this perspective, Paul Hannig’s “Borderline Personality Disorder: Profile and Process of Therapy” (1995) at
7. See especially, for falls from grace, my Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness (2014).
Chapter 4
1. For my ideas on human’s basic wrong-gettedness, see my Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014).
2. For a fuller, a complete, explanation of biologically constituted realities, bioculturally constituted facts, and the concepts and realities related to them, see my The Secret Life of Stones (2016). Also, note my explication of those ideas in the next part of this book having to do with the First Veil, anthropocentrism.
3. The works in which I have detailed how our conception, gestation, and birth condition and shape all later experience are Womb with a View: Spiritual Aspects of Intrauterine Experience (1981); Cells with a View: Spiritual and Philosophical Aspects of Sperm and Egg Experience (1984); “A Primal Perspective on Spirituality” (1985); Falls from Grace: Spiritual and Philosophical Perspectives of Prenatal and Primal Experience (1994); Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness (2014); and Wounded Deer and Centaurs: The Necessary Hero and the Prenatal Matrix of Human Events (2016). Look also to updated and readily available versions of Womb with a View and Cells with a View which I will be bringing to print quite soon, probably in 2018-2019; as well as Veils Six and Seven of this work, also to be published in that time frame in Dance of the Seven Veils II and III.
4. A good place to start in looking into what we now know about the influences from the womb on later personality and the ability to remember extending that far back is Thomas Verny’s The Secret Life of the Unborn Child (1981). That, along with the publications from the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH) and from its many members — as well as the works of mine detailed in the note above, which give an overview of the field — are pretty good correctives to our common mistaken notions about unconsciousness and lack of memory in the prenate and about how far back we can go in looking at the earliest influences on our lives.
5. For Stanislav Grof’s ideas, check into Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research, New York: Viking Press, 1979; LSD Psychotherapy, Pomona, CA: Hunter House, 1980; Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985; The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988; The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993; as well as others of his works.
Chapter 6
1. Ott Rank, The Trauma of Birth, 1929, 1952, location 1207 of e-book format, from Amazon.com.
2. Ibid., location 1223.
3. From my Falls from Grace, 2014, pp. 45-48, where my article, “A Primal Perspective on Spirituality,” 1985, was published as several chapters.
4. Rank, op. cit., location 1215.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., locations 1223-1231.
7. Ibid., locations 1303-1319.
Chapter 7
1. See my book, Falls from Grace, 2014, or the earlier Master’s thesis version of it, with the same name, from 1994.
Chapter 8
1. If you truly do not understand this attitude, or feeling, of carrying into life the intentions of others who have sacrificed for you to be able to do what you need to do, you can look to The Centaur (1962) by John Updike. For that is the message of that work. Indeed, the meaning, for Updike, of the centaur — half horse, half human — is that the upper or human part, which in his mind was the Sixties generation and the creativity of which they were capable, is melded to and sits upon and is lifted higher by the horse part, the practical part, the part which “sacrificed” their potentials and “died,” in a way, which he saw as the World War Two Generation, specifically as represented by the character’s own father.
2. From John Rowan, “A New Look at Primal Therapy,” Aesthema: The Journal of the International Primal Association, 11. June 1998. His article is found online as well at
1. For a thorough explication of the Unapproved and Hidden, see my Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014), in particular.
2. Sonjamarie Weems, personal communication.
Chapter 11
1. A highly readable and popular overview of the new physics and one I recommend is Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wuli Masters (1979).
2. Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, 1979, p. 30.
3. Ibid., pp. 30-31.
4. Roy D’Andrade, “Cultural Meaning Systems,” 1984, p. 92.
5. See “Allegory of the Cave” in The Republic of Plato, by Plato, with Allan Bloom (trans.), 1991.
6. I need to explain my use of the terms perceptor and percepter, which I use quite a bit in this part. I use perceptor to mean a being who perceives, also could be called an experiencer. In the dictionary a perceptor is defined as “that which perceives,” a receiver, an imbiber, and, in Spanish, a recipient. I need to acknowledge this term, for it is not even included in many of the most popular dictionaries. But it is in some, and I needed to use this term, even if I would have had to coin it, in that I needed a word for being, entity, person, animal, experiencer, and so on. I needed a term that would encompass all those possible receivers or beings who experience, without any of the differing connotations each of them bring. All have connotations I want to exclude. For in making my case, as you will see, I need to define something … not necessarily anything that we can imagine to be a being … something that is a receiver of perceptions. An experiencer comes closest, but that, too, has all kinds of connotations I do not want. So perceptor it is; plural is perceptors.
Now, in terms of percepter (with an e instead of an o), I did have to coin a word for the sense organs that such a perceptor might employ, and I needed to avoid the connotation that, as in sense organ, they would necessarily relate to a body or an organ, or anything connoting human, bodily, or even physicality. For what I am talking about is not necessarily even “embodied” in any sense I am using. What I am indicating with my term, percepters, is the unimaginable “sense organs” of a perceptor … which are not necessarily physical and so are not really “organs.”
Now, if we consider an alien, a planet, or some being we are unable to perceive, except in its effects in our world and which is therefore invisible to us, something ghost-like that way, but living and experiencing, who therefore perceives and uses whatever they do to perceive with — and some of my examples of possibilities of perceptors are that far out there — then it would be ridiculous to talk about the “sense organs” of an invisible or planet-like being… lol. You see, sense organs or senses assume a physical world as well as one that is distinctly divided between living and non-living things.
So, I coined the term percepter to mean whatever is used by a perceptor to perceive. And the plural of that is, of course, percepters. None of the possible terms for this — receptors, senses — say what I am trying to. For they either indicate a specific cellular area that receives stimuli — which implies a body, again — or they refer to the character of the stimuli that are received. Senses are hearing, touch, and so on. However, a percepter would be the sensory organ that picks up the sound. But it would also be applicable to whatever a not-embodied or not-imaginable being would have that would sense an aspect of Reality.
Thus, perceptors are beings who perceive, and they use percepters to do that.
7. While this is not important to point out for the purposes of this book; in this analysis, in order to be consistent, I need to say that the idea that cultures are separate and that they cannot be understood outside of them — which is the traditional anthropological understanding, coming down from Boas — is full of logical lapses as well. For, is there anyone even within a culture who does not see that culture as different from any other one in that culture?
I mean, at base, is not culture reducible to personality and to individual psychology? In which case, there is as much relativity to individual culture, to “personality” culture, if you will, as there is to collective culture, what we call culture. And it follows from this, conversely, that there is potentially as much reality or truth — as well, then — to someone from another culture’s interpretation as is from someone within the culture under discussion.
To see this, compare someone outside that culture who is imbued with the cultural understandings of that culture relative to someone within that culture who for some reason is lacking in understanding of their cultural elements or is misunderstanding, or alternately understanding, that culture from the way the majority of that culture is understanding it. So this idea of cultural relativity is itself relative as truth. For it is based on a reified construction of culture as being something absolute with distinct boundaries. Which is not and is nowhere true in Reality. The boundaries of culture are permeable and overlapping, like so many other realities, entities, and items we mistakenly think of as distinct for the sole purpose of being able to talk about them.
8. I define and describe the Unapproved and Hidden in several of my works, but especially, and initially, in Planetmates, The Great Reveal (2014). For here, note that the Unapproved and Hidden is the species unconscious for our species, humans, which exists in all cultures, for all times. It is pretty much the same in all cultures, based as it is on both a common human biology as well as a common human psychology — specifically having to do with our unique psychological invention of Ego. Indeed, the Unapproved and Hidden can be considered one of those brute facts, those species-specific facts, I have been referring to.
Another way of looking at it is that whereas the personal unconscious is that part of the person’s individual reality kept out of consciousness; and the collective unconscious is that part of humans’ reality kept out of consciousness, according to Jung, and particularly related to religion, spirituality, and mythology; the Unapproved and Hidden is an unconscious, a Homo sapiens’ unconscious, come of all that humans universally repress and keep out of consciousness, resulting from humans’ split from Nature. It is more encompassing than the collective unconscious. Also, whereas the collective unconscious is knowledge that humans share, which is not completely known to any one individual or to any particular culture, the Unapproved and Hidden is truth, especially about humans, that no humans, let alone cultures, have … contain and/or share. The Unapproved and Hidden is truth that is unconscious to all humans, to date. As my book Planetmates demonstrates, the Unapproved and Hidden would conceivably be known of humans and be observable about humans by other planetmates, yet would be nearly impossible to see by humans themselves.
Chapter 12
1. Stanislav Grof, The Cosmic Game, 1998, p. 17.
2. See my Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014) on planetmates being our “angels in Nature.”
3. Ibid. p. 86.
4. Roy D’Andrade, “Anthropological Theory: Where Did It Go? (How Can We Get It Back?), 1987, p. 5.
5. Ibid, p. 6, emphases mine.
Chapter 13
1. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, 1956, p. 22.
2. Ibid., pp. 22-23.
3. Ibid., p. 23.
4. “Mind-meld,” for those not familiar with the term, is a term popularized by the Star Trek series. The character, Spock, would be able to do a complete merging of his mind with another’s and be able to experience their actual thoughts, feelings, and images in the way they did.
Chapter 14
1.This perspective has much in common with Wilber’s (1977) spectrum of consciousness view of reality. Though, for reasons which will become clear as we proceed, I must stress that this position does not synchronize with Wilber’s later formulations (e.g., 1980, 1981), where he has conformed his view to the more traditional and presumptuous Western biases. And these biases are distinctly at odds with an essential point I have emphasized in this section of making diligent our attempts at wiping away any ethnocentric as well as anthropocentric residue from our lenses if we are to have any chance at all for even minimal success in our venturing into Reality. (Cf. Winkelman 1990; Adzema 1995a)
2. Some of Stanislav Grof’s work and findings can be found in Grof, 1970, 1979, 1980, 1984, 1985, 1988a, 1988b; Grof and Grof 1980, 1989, 1990; and Grof and Halifax 1977. He has more recent works as well, extending over a period up to the present.
3. For the video, “Holographic Universe,” check online at
4. For a discussion of this subject of the difference between the new transpersonal paradigm and the old religious one, and how they are, against all the facts, confused, see my article “Christ’s ‘Religion’ — The Spiritual Practice of Jesus,” 2009. Online at
5. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970).
6. Thomas Kuhn was an American science historian and science philosopher who held that science was not a steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge but is “a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions.” Here are some especially prescient and relevant quotes from and about Thomas Kuhn:
“Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition.”
“Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.”
“In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds.”
“Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist’s position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.”
“Scientific development depends in part on a process of non-incremental or revolutionary change. Some revolutions are large, like those associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, or Darwin, but most are much smaller, like the discovery of oxygen or the planet Uranus. The usual prelude to changes of this sort is, I believe, the awareness of anomaly, of an occurrence or set of occurrences that does not fit existing ways of ordering phenomena. The changes that result therefore require ‘putting on a different kind of thinking-cap,’ one that renders the anomalous lawlike but that, in the process, also transforms the order exhibited by some other phenomena, previously unproblematic.”
“The success of the paradigm … is at the start largely a promise of success…. Normal science consists in the actualization of that promise…. Mopping up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers. They constitute what I am here calling normal science…. That enterprise seems an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all. Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others.” — Thomas Kuhn
And more recently, from Carl Sagan: “At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes — an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.”
Chapter 15
1. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1956, p. 26.
2. See my works, Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014) and Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man (2016), especially on this topic of how morality gets construed along lines beneficial to elites with the beginnings of hierarchical societies.
Chapter 16
1. For Rupert Sheldrake’s ideas see, among others, Sheldrake, 1981, 1991a, 1991b, and 1995.
2. For my ideas on secondary altriciality and culture, see my works, Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014) and Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man (2016).
3. For an idea of “the different planetmate views,” see my work, Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014). Incidentally, if you are on Facebook, it might interest you to check out my group there, titled, Planetmate Views, at
4. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1970.
Chapter 18
1. The reason for the quote marks around “healthy” (ego) will become clearer as we proceed.
2. See Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man (2016), for my theories and thinking on hierarchy and civilization. Also, you can look to my Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014).
3. For how this evolution of child-caring is going on, and details of its course through history up till today, see the ground-breaking work of Lloyd deMause and that which is going on in the field of psychohistory, which came of deMause’s work. Especially see deMause’s History of Childhood: The Untold Story of Child Abuse (1988), The Foundations of Psychohistory (1982), and “The History of Child Abuse” (1994). See also Childhood and History in America, by Glenn Davis (1976), another psychohistorian.
4. For my expanded take on this issue of voluntary roles versus enforced scapegoating, see the Afterword of my book, Apocalypse NO, titled, “Centaurs, Shamans, Sacrificial Lambs, and Scapegoats: Reflections on a Collective Shadow and Experience as
5. For the most excellent portrayal of the only workable response to violence, which actually ends the cycle of violence in oneself and in society, I recommend Thea Alexander’s incredible novel, 2150 A. D. She is the only one I have read who truly faces the issue squarely and comes to the only logical conclusion. By comparison, everyone else is afraid to say what she does, yet it is what anyone seriously considering the issue of violence must necessarily consider. I resist explaining her “solution,” so as not to spoil the ending; however, it is in the tradition of Jesus and Joe. Which is to say, of surrender to violence and voluntary acceptance of death; rather than conceding to the predominant social forces advocating more violence as a response to violence.
Chapter 19
1. See Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1972). See also “Joseph Campbell” at Wikipedia at
5. For the Third Fall from Grace at the primal scene, see my Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness (2014).
6. For the meaning of “magical child,” see Joseph Chilton Pearce’s The Magical Child (1980).
Chapter 21
1. For elaboration on this diminution of self at the Identity stage, beyond this book, see my Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness (2014).
2. For more on the Tao of Funny God, see my Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation (2015).
3. For why the feminine is seen as dangerous and how it is related to birth trauma, you can look to my works, Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014) or Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man (2016).
4. For the feminine and Nature, and why they would be feared by patriarchal folks, again see, Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014) or Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man (2016).
3. For scholarly support and deeper understanding of this perspective on parenting as having been, historically, motivated by parental desires to control and to have, essentially, servants and workers and of how this has led to the child-“rearing” practices of cultures universally amounting to cauldrons of neurosis, see especially the works of Lloyd deMause (1982, 1987, 1988, 1994, 1995, 2002); Arthur Janov (1970, 1971, 1972, 1975, 1982, 1983, among others); and Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (1990); Prisoners of Childhood: The Drama of the Gifted Child and the Search for the True Self (1996); The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self (1997); Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child (1998); and The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting (2005); among others of hers. Look also to my works, Planetmates (2014), Falls from Grace (2014), and Prodigal Human (2016).
4. The books in which I especially take up the issue of it being a coverup of all too common incest, not an incest taboo, that is universal among human societies are Prodigal Human, Falls from Grace, Planetmates, and the soon-to-be-released, Back to the Garden.
5. Again, see Joseph Chilton Pearce, Magical Child (1980), as well as others of his works, especially The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (2002).
6. For lucy-fied, to be like Lucy Ricardo. Lucy Ricardo, played by comedian Lucille Ball, was a character in the extremely popular American sitcom, I Love Lucy. See, also, lucy-fied in Terms Used.
Chapter 23
1. From Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology, 1969, pp. 170-171.
2. The scene from Game of Thrones I am referring to, for those of you interested enough to check, is in episode 9, of season 5, titled “Dance of the Dragons.”
3. From Aaron Couch, “Did ‘Game of Thrones’ Go Too Far With Latest Death?” in The Hollywood Reporter, 7 June 2015; available online at
1. Bruce Lincoln, Emerging from the Chrysalis, 1991, p. 50.
2. Campbell, op. cit., p. 171.
3. Ibid., pp. 173-176.
4. Scientists have discovered, only rather recently, that the embryo does feed off the uterine wall prior to the development of the placental mechanism for dealings between the fetus and mother. From an online medical source:
“The mechanism by which embryos receive nutrition during the first 11 weeks of pregnancy has been revealed.
“Writing in the April 2015 issue of the journal Placenta, researchers showed how glucose and other nutrients are delivered in the early stages of pregnancy before the fetus is large and developed enough to receive a direct blood supply from the mother.
“This stage is crucial for the implantation of the embryo onto the wall of the placenta and a successful pregnancy…
“The scientists discovered that gland cells in the lining of the uterus store glucose in the form of glycogen. This is then delivered to the placenta together with glycoproteins to be used for energy and converted into the amino acids, which are the building blocks for further growth of the embryo.
“Once a direct blood supply from the mother’s circulation to the placenta is established after 11 weeks, the supply from the gland cells tails off.
“Dr. Carolyn Jones, from the University of Manchester’s Institute of Human Development, led the study with Professor John Aplin. Professor Aplin says, ‘A newly-created embryo could not survive the full force of arterial blood from the mother. Although it has been known for some time that uterine secretions nurture the tiny embryo, the mechanism whereby the nutrients leave maternal cells and are delivered to the placenta has not been understood.’”
This is from “How Embryos Get Nutrients from Mom,” from the site, Myria, of 1 May 2015, which is available online at
1. For the BPMs, the basic perinatal matrices as derived by Stanislav Grof, remember back to Chapter 4, “The Primal Matrix of Mind.” As well, this will be elaborated on under Veil Four, which concerns birth, in the volume following this one, Dance of the Seven Veils II.
2. For prenatal hell and the events of the third trimester, especially as I explain it related to the PMEs, or the prenatal matrix of human evil, refer back to Chapter 5, “Prenatal Matrix of Evil.” As well, it will be elaborated in depth under Veil Five, having to do with prenatal hell and third-trimester malnutrition and hypoxia.
3. Bruce Lincoln, Emerging from the Chrysalis, 1991 p. 112.
4. Ibid., p. 112f.
Chapter 26
1. Ibid., p. 18.
2. The mythology of Romulus and Remus contains startling parallels to Cain and Abel and the Enemyway mythology of the Navajo. This is something I will deal with in more detail in the next volume under the category of Veil Five, prenatal hell, which deals with poisonous placenta and PME symbolism found in myth.
3. For my take on the mythology of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, which is quite distinct from the normal interpretation, see especially my Psychology of Apocalypse, which is scheduled to be published sometime in 2018. Also, see my Funny God, which contains a detailed elaboration of the true meaning of the myth.
4. Lincoln, op. cit., p. 18.
5. Ibid., emphases mine.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., p. 19.
8. Ibid., p. 113f.
9. Ibid., p. 20.
10. Ibid., p. 21.
11. Campbell provides several examples of these images in his book, Primitive Mythology (1959, 1969). Pages 142 and 233 have drawings of some. I have provided those and others, mixed in with the text, in this chapter.
12. Campbell, op. cit., p. 141f.
13. Ibid. p 232.
14. Ibid., p. 232ff.
15. Lincoln, op cit., p. 22.
16. Ibid., p. 23.
17. Ibid., p. 24.
18. Ibid., p. 25, emphasis mine.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., p. 113.
Chapter 27
1. As quoted in S. Giora Shoham, Salvation from the Gutters, 1979/2012, digital, location 4607.
2. Ibid.
3. Aminah Raheem, Soul Return, 1991, p. 31.
4. See Marshall Sahlins, “Notes on the Original Affluent Society” (1968) and Stone Age Economics (1972). Also, see Nurit Bird-David, “Beyond the Original Affluent Society” (1992).
5. See my Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man (2016) and/or my Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014) on the invention of “work” that came with civilization.
6. Colin Turnbull, The Forest People, 1961, p. 225.
7. Ibid., p. 224.
8. Ibid, pp. 225-227.
9. Ibid., p 227.
10. Raheem, op. cit., p. 29.
11. Cf., my “Enlightenment Lobotomies – White Color Slavery” in my Culture War, Class War (2013) and online at
1. In this description, written in 1991, I refer to the experiences characteristic of BPM II, as described by Stanislav Grof. For it was much later that I expanded that constellation of experience in constructing the PMEs — the prenatal matrices of evil, as described earlier in this book. You will notice the elements of the church experience — crowdedness, suffocation, and so on — which I mention here as being BPM II components, more definitively understood as elements of PME 1, PME 2, and such.
Chapter 29
1.Idiocracy is an extremely funny 2006 movie in which the protaganist is accidentally suspended in a comatose state and wakes up in the future. The future is one of rampant ignorance: People think crops are to be irrigated with Gatorade because “it has electrolytes,” which is something everyone says but no one knows the meaning; that water is only used in flushing toilets; where a president is a gun-wielding, motorcycle riding, excessively muscled dufus; where court decisions are arbitrary and trials are a comedy of nonsense; and where garbage dumps pile up in huge mountains surrounding cities, which sometimes landslide into the streets and homes and into people’s living rooms, for no one knows what to do with the waste; and where reality shows feature stunts like men filmed in the act of inexplicably crushing their own balls in various ways, which is incredibly funny for those of the future. In other words, the movie is a warped and distant mirror of what is already going on today, especially since the installation of Donald Trump as president of the U.S.
2. Lincoln, op. cit., p. 52.
3 Ibid.
4. Maureen Murdock, The Heroine’s Journey, 1990, p. 2.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 3.
Chapter 30
1. Ibid., p. 89.
2. See p. 493 in Chapter 39 for a representation of the peace symbol or click here.
3. Not commonly known is that the Sixties revolution was a worldwide phenomenon occurring in hundreds of nations at the same time. See Arthur Marwick, The Sixties (2000).
4. Campbell describes the “Refusal of the Call,” in Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1972, pp. 59-68.
5. Along with traditional versions of the Snow White fable, I include the Disney movie version from 1937. They are pretty much the same. Where there are slight differences, I wish to point out that the Disney version has as much value as a source as the others. For it is not the fact that a tale is merely old that makes it significant in the minds of humans … i.e, that it has withstood the tests of time,’ as they say. That it has “withstood time’s tests” is merely another way of saying that it has profoundly impacted and been passed along by a great many people, so it must have some sort of strong psychic resonance. Yet, remember, there are twice as many people alive now as the total of all who have ever been alive in all of human history and prehistory. I believe, therefore, that the Disney version — having familiarity to and psychic resonance with, arguably, billions of people — stacks up quite well alongside the millions who have passed it along over the centuries in any of its other forms.
6. For “falls from grace,” as at conception, birth, the primal scene, and adolescence, see my Falls from Grace (2014).
Chapter 31
1. from Homer, as quoted in Lincoln, op. cit., p. 76.
2. Ibid., p. 80.
3. Ibid.
4. Lincoln and Murdock have both elaborated on this identity of Persephone and Demeter. Lincoln, op. cit., on pp. 79. Murdock, op. cit., on pp. 95f. Joseph Campbell has, as well, in his Occidental Mythology, 1964, pp. 47ff, where he also makes reference to Greek scholar, Jane Harrison’s, words, “Demeter and Kore [Persephone] are two persons though one god.”
5. We can thank Lloyd deMause for his courage in looking unflinchingly into these discomforting items of the historical record and his scholarly bravery in making the case for the pervasiveness of incest throughout history and especially in Greece. It is no exaggeration to say that he and his students have suffered considerably from academic disdain, disregard, and popular snubbery, much as Freud, Rank, Reich, Janov, and even Jesus did before him, for bringing to human awareness what humans do not want to know about themselves. You can go to deMause’s works, in particular, History of Childhood and Foundations of Psychohistory. One particularly riveting description of his relates to the way the patrons in the classical era of ancient Greece saw children as sexual objects. They were called “little fishes,” by one renowned figure from that era, for the way young boys and girls, mere children, were viewed as surrounding one below the waist, eager to nibble and provide sexual services.
6. Murdock, op cit., p. 97.
Chapter 32
1. Stanislav Grof, The Cosmic Game, 1998, p. 259.
2. Lincoln, op. cit., p. 72ff.
3. Ibid., p. 73.
4. Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology, 1959, 1969, p. 184.
5. Lincoln, op. cit., p. 86.
6. Stanislav Grof, The Cosmic Game, 1998, p. 260.
7. Campbell, op. cit., p. 185.
8. Ibid.
9. Lincoln, op. cit., p. 89.
10. Michael Adzema, Funny God, 2014, p. 162f.
11. Wikipedia, “Eleusinian Mysteries.”
Chapter 33
1. Lincoln, op. cit., p. 52.
2. Ibid., p. 53.
3. For those unfamiliar with the term, a primal box is something that many primalers own for the purpose of processing their feelings. It is a large piece of furniture, roughly five feet wide by eight feet long and five feet high … or big enough to hold a person lying down and someone sitting for them, usually. Incidentally, considering that some of that is taken up by thick padding on its sides, it is much the same size on the inside as the seclusion chamber of the Tukuna. The two main purposes of the primal box are to keep the experiencer safe and to keep his or her emotional cries, fist poundings, wailings, and screams — which are oftentimes loud — from either disturbing neighbors or resulting in their interfering, thinking something violent is going on. It is padded on the inside on all sides, usually even including the roof, to accommodate a primaler’s sometimes wild movements of kicking, pounding, and such, which is the form some feelings require they be emoted and released. So in many ways the primal box is like the Tukuna initiand’s seclusion chamber. I had one and used it fruitfully for many decades. It is most definitely a portal to other realms.
4. On the topic of three-dimensional mandalas and mandalas as portals to other dimensions and as analogous to spaceships, see Chapter 30 of my The Secret Life of Stones, “Universe Calling, Says It Wants to Help,” especially, “Mandalas as Gateways, Portals” (p. 398ff); as well as Chapter 31, “Transition, Belongingness, and Spherical Experience,” especially from “Spheres Unify Dimensions” (p. 416ff) and on.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 54.
7. Ibid., p. 55.
8. Ibid., bracketed words, Lincoln’s.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 56, [bracketed words, mine].
11. On an even deeper level, Ariana’s sojourn in celestial realms can be compared to our existence in the No-Form State prior to birth into the world. Between lives, you might say. In this case, her descent to the underworld represents our incarnation into this world. This is in keeping with my theory of the cyclical nature of Divine consciousness — the devolution and revolution of consciousness, as I explain it in my works, Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness (2014) and Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation (2015), among others. I will deal with this idea of our natural state as being of a Divine no-formity from which we “descend” into Form, endlessly, to create the game of thingness, especially under Veil Seven of this work. Which deals with the final Veil, the one lying on the borderline of thingness and no-thingness, the Form State and the No-Form State.
12. While not relevant for the argument in the text, on a side note I need to share that I myself wrote such a mythology describing the sequence of prenatal experience and birth in the order it happens. It is a “mythology” built upon my experiences of re-experiencing my birth and womb stuff in the course of my primal therapy. Sure enough, my short story starts in a blissful place, a celestial place, much like Ariana’s … I wrote it forty-five years before I ever read the Ariana myth, by the way … and it proceeds to a difficult place of increasing suffering, and ends with coming out into the world, actually of going into a different world, a “lower” world, from which the protagonist had been, much like Ariana’s tale. My short story is called “Birthing, Forgetting” and was published in Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology. As well, it can be found online at
19. This refers to words said in the movie Act of Valor. I elaborate on them and on the film, in Chapter 18, “Rites of Passage and the Hero’s Cycle.”
Chapter 34
1. See my Experience Is Divinity (2013) and/or The Secret Life of Stones (2016).
2. For more on the difference between modes of engagement at the second-line/psychodynamic level of dealing with unconscious material versus the first-line/perinatal, see my works, Apocalypse NO (2013) and Falls from Grace (2014).
Chapter 35
1. See “Cybernetic Dream,” Berman (1986).
2. Ken Wilber, “The Pre/ Trans Fallacy,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 22(2), 1982.
3. Michael Washburn, 1990, “Two Patterns of Transcendence.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 30(3), p. 94.
4. Kirk Schneider, 1987, “The Deified Self: A ‘Centaur’ Response to Wilber and the Transpersonal Movement.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 27(2), p. 202.
5. M. Epstein and J. Leiff, 1981, “Psychiatric Complications of Meditation Practice.” Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 13(2), p. 140.
6. Stanislav Grof, Beyond the Brain, 1985, p. 137.
7. Ken Wilber, The Atman Project, 1980, p. 6.
8. Ibid., p. x and p. 7.
9. For how Piaget-based theories of child development are radically altered by prenatal and perinatal psychology and consciousness research in general, see Stanislav Grof’s writings and Joseph Chilton Pearce’s Magical Child, 1980.
10. Baba Ram Das (Richard Alpert), Be Here Now, 1971.
11. Wilber, 1980, p. x and p. 7.
12. Ibid., p. 20.
13. See J. M. Robinson (ed.), The Nag Hammadi Library in English, revised edition (1988).
14. I explain how matter can be spirit, except viewed differently and in a flawed way, in my book, The Secret Life of Stones (2016).
15. For my views on “God is all there is” and related topics, especially as related to an Idealist paradigm, see my Experience Is Divinity (2013) and my The Secret Life of Stones (2016).
16. Grof, op. cit., 1985, pp. 135-136.
17. Ibid., p. 136.
18. Ken Wilber, A Sociable God, 1983, p. 104.
19. The new prenatal and perinatal information is referenced many times in this book — see especially the Prologue — as well as in publications and conferences of the Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH); the writings of Thomas Verny (1981, 1987); the evidence from primal therapy, rebirthing, holotropic breathwork, and psychedelic research, published in places too numerous to mention; and so on. See also this book’s References.
20. Those works include especially The Secret Life of Stones (2016), Experience Is Divinity (2013), and Falls from Grace (2014).
21. G. Feuerstein, G., “For God’s Sake: Reflections on Religious Extremism.” The Quest, 4(3), 1991, p. 21.
22. John White, The Meeting of Science and Spirit, 1990, p. xxiv.
23. Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth, 2001, p. 127.
24. Ibid., p. 128.
25. On the similar personality structures and dynamics of madness and mysticism, or madness-genius, see Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther (1962).
26. For my devolutional model of consciousness, see my Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness (2014).
Chapter 36
1. I expound on the patriarchal mistake in The Centered Path through Hell (1972), which is an unpublished manuscript, planned for publication in approximately 2019 or 2020.
2. See my Experience Is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor (2013) and The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy (2016) on this point.
3. White, op. cit., p. xv.
Chapter 37
1. See, as one variation on this type of ritual, “Masculinization or Dehumanization? The Sambia Tribe of Papua New Guinea,” available online via search.
2. For an explanation and description of cargo cults, one can check out Wikipedia, online, at
3. The works in which I elaborate on Gilgamesh and Enkidu and the corresponding moralities based upon patriarchal rules, benefiting elites, and that based upon human feeling and morality, the “natural morality,” are Funny God (2014) and the forthcoming Back to the Garden: The Psychology and Spirituality of Humanicide and the Necessary Future. In Funny God, see chapter 18; in Back to the Garden, look to the chapter titled, “Civilization and the Travesty of Morals: Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Uncivilized ‘Civilized’ Man,” which is currently Chapter 9.
Chapter 38
1. Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology, 1959/1969, p. 449f.
Chapter 39
1. For more on the reorganization of society that was begun in America beginning in 1971, see my Culture War, Class War (2013).
2. For more on this, see Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2006).
3. On The Trilateral Commission, the quote in the text is from Michael Kasenbacher, 24 December 2012, “Work, Learning and Freedom,” in New Left Project.
A humorous, albeit telling, additional quote from that work: “Conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer sardonically alluded to the conspiracy theories when he was asked in 2012 who makes up the ‘Republican establishment,’ saying,
Karl Rove is the president. We meet every month on the full moon… [at] the Masonic Temple. We have the ritual: Karl brings the incense, I bring the live lamb and the long knife, and we began… with a pledge of allegiance to the Trilateral Commission.”
From “Trilateral Commission,” on Wikipedia, online at
1. Ken Wilber, The Spectrum of Consciousness, 1977, p. 135.
2. It must be admitted that these biological underpinnings, as universal as they would seem to be, are to some degree culturally affected. These biocultural influences arise through what the mother eats, drinks or doesn’t drink, smokes or doesn’t, uses or doesn’t, thinks, and feels during the course of the pregnancy. For these biocultural influences on consciousness see Verny (1981, 1987), Noble (1993), Janov’s later writings (e.g., 1972, 1975, 1982, 1983), the Journal of Primal Therapy, and publications of the Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH), especially the Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Journal.
3. Wilber, op. cit., p. 149.
4. Arthur Janov, The Primal Scream, 1970, p. 22.
5. Ibid., p. 25.
6. Sam Keen, “Field Report: Janov and Primal Therapy,” Psychology Today, February 1972, p. 46.
7. Janov, op. cit., p. 25f, emphases mine.
8. In regard to a connection between our personal experience and the way we see the physical world — as in this example, conjuring the idea of a “Big Bang” origin — see Experience Is Divinity (2013), Part 2, “Matter As Metaphor,” especially Chapter 22, “The World Is Rife with Messages — Personal and Universal — Regarding the Meaning of Existence, Our Place in the Universe, and Guidance for Getting Us hOMe.” Also see Roger Jones’s (1982) Physics as Metaphor.
Chapter 42
1. Cf., Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1961).
Chapter 43
1. From Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (1954).
Chapter 44
1. For the Second Fall from Grace, which occurs at birth, again see my Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness (2014).
Afterword
1. To my knowledge the only other pre- and perinatal psychologist, outside myself, who delves into this time of prenatal malnutrition, occurring during the third trimester of gestation, is Lloyd deMause. See his works in References for more on this.
2. These initial publications of my ideas regarding “primal spirituality” can be found online at these locations:
“Only Half a Cure: Unconditional Acceptance and the Primal Process” (1993) at
1. For how Graham Farrant “shared these etheric realms” with me after his death, see Chapter 32 in The Secret Life of Stones, which is titled, “‘Something Wonderful’ Is Already Happening: Reunion with The Universe — UFOs and the Coming Together of Heaven and Earth, Jacob’s Ladder, Contact Between Form and No-Form … a ‘Family’ Reunion.” As incredible as the story is, it would be too much of a diversion to be addressed again here.
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Wilber, Ken. 1983. A Sociable God. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publishing.
Winkelman, Michael. 1990. “The Evolution of Consciousness: An Essay Review of Up from Eden (Wilber 1981).” Anthropology of Consciousness 1(3-4), 24-31.
Winnicott, Donald. W. 1958. Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-analysis. New York: Basic Books.
Yogananda, Paramahansa. 1946. The Autobiography of a Yogi. Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship.
Zukav, Gary. 1979. The Dancing Wu Li Masters. New York: W. Morrow.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR.
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Michael Adzema is an author, ecoactivist, philosopher, psychologist, former university instructor, and psychotherapist, now retired, who specialized in primal therapy, breathwork, and rebirthing. He is a pioneer in the field of pre- and perinatal psychology and was the editor of Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology — a professional journal of psychology. He was the first person in the United States to teach prenatal and perinatal psychology at the university level, which he did at Sonoma State University in the early Nineties; he was one of the first in the United States to receive a graduate degree in pre- and perinatal psychology.
Michael also did doctoral work in psychological anthropology at the University of California, San Diego; as well, he did graduate work in history, philosophy, Eastern philosophy, religious studies, and humanistic psychology. He served for years on the Board of the International Primal Association; he contributed by giving workshops and lectures at their conventions and conferences; and he was on the Board of Editors of the journals, Anthropology of Consciousness, published by the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness; and Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Journal, put out by the Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health.
In the early Eighties, working as an anti-nuke activist with Oregon Fair Share, he was one of a small group of people whose actions led to the lawsuit that put a stop to nuclear plant construction in the United States.Michael did training under, among others,
Stanislav Grof, Jules and Helen Roth, Graham Farrant, and Thomas Verny.
In the early Eighties, working as an
anti-nuke activist with Oregon Fair Share, he was one of a small group of
people whose actions led to the lawsuit that put a stop to nuclear plant
construction in the United States.
He has been a regular contributor to Extinction Radio, broadcast by Activate Media, formerly Occupy Boston Radio. His voice can be heard on other broadcasts, as well, speaking on topics of activism, spirituality, ecopsychology, the environment, prenatal and perinatal psychology, metaphysics, politics, primal psychology, and philosophy.
His voice can be heard on youtube and
other broadcasts speaking on topics of activism, spirituality, ecopsychology,
the environment, prenatal and perinatal psychology, metaphysics, politics,
primal psychology, and philosophy.
The book, Dance of the Seven Veils II:
Prenatal/Perinatal Psychology, Mythology, and Your Divine Self…Infant to Prenate is scheduled to be in
print by the end of 2022 or early 2023; with Back to the Garden: The Psychology and
Spirituality of Humanicide and the Necessary Future, which is the next
volume in Return to Grace Series, and Dance
of the Seven Veils III: Periconceptional/Transpersonal
Psychology, Mythology, and Your Original Face … Cellular to Soulular, the next volume in The Path of
Ecstasy Series, both due in 2023. Michael, now retired, is
compiling and releasing the fruits of his fifty-three years of research in as
timely a manner as possible, as he settles into his community activities and
international efforts in his beloved city of Eugene, Oregon.
Since 2008, Michael has been disseminating, on social media, the results of his forty-seven years of research. Since 2013, he has been encapsulating that research in the books mentioned — sixteen, to date — with dozens more still in the queue. (See Afterword.) Concerning Michael Adzema’s life and work, the most recent and informative interview, available online, can be watched on youtube at https://youtu.be/2mm9OBbYjRE (titled “Michael Adzema talks to Michael Harrell ~ Unfolding our Primal Gifts,” if you need to google it).
His books can be found at Amazon, are available on Kindle as well, and can be ordered through any major book outlet. For any published or forthcoming works by Michael Adzema, one can visit his Author’s Page at Amazon, for current listings and information.
Our Global Multiculturalism Directs Us to the Roots of Our Beings as Foundation for Answering the Primary Concern of Human Life, “Who to Be?”
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“One is not just better off being who one most is in potential; the Infinite opera of the All That Is demands it of us; it is the sweetest and most perfect symphony of all when one adds one’s unique contribution to it. Without your part, the harmony of the Universe is less for it.”
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PREFACE
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The Crisis of Humanity and the New Hero’s and Heroine’s Cycle:
Our Global Multiculturalism Directs Us to the Roots of Our Beings as Foundation for Answering the Primary Concern of Human Life, “Who to Be?”
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What does one do in a postmodern, complex, multicultural world in which the options are so numerous and enticing as to paralyze one’s actions? How does one live a good life, a fulfilling life? What actions, commitments, careers, causes, service are most likely to return happiness? These are questions we all need to address in our youth, yet throughout our lives as well. They come out again specifically during mid-life, and particularly during the mid-life crisis.
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wallup.net
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Identity
The primary question of human existence is, “Who am I?” It is the starting place of philosophy as well as one’s identity. The question following that … number two in priority in a human’s life, since we are act-ors as well as be-ings … is, then, “Who to be?” We seem to have an inbred knowing that these two are connected: That what one does should be at least somewhat related to who one is.
While throughout human history those are the fundamental concerns of life, they have been taken care of quite readily through the mechanism of culture. Culture is your society’s way of being in the world, its way of thinking, its way of making a pattern out of the infinite possibilities of Reality to provide guidance and orientation in life and in relationship to all around us. It plays into one’s identity … who to be … in a huge way. From birth on — even before birth as the experiences a mother has are constituted by culture and affect therefore what a prenate experiences to at least some degree — culture puts a stamp on us. The cultural impression delimits the profile of our being and constrains our actions while facilitating others of ours. It opens and closes doors at the same time.
Within the outlines of that template, however, we are required to operate and make less fundamental choices. Those choices, patterned and restrained by one’s culture, vary from the most trivial … what to have for breakfast … to the profound and life-altering. This, for example, would involve decisions about career and spouse. And something has happened in the current historical era … something integral to these times being labeled postmodern … that has made those choices more difficult than they ever have been in history. Yet potentially more freeing, more fruitful, more productive of freedom and felicity, more fulfilling and satisfying can those decisions be than ever before. For in these times — immersed in a multicultural soup with near infinite numbers of potentials and choices — we are responsible, more than ever before, and not as much culture-family-society, for choosing and creating our identity, our path in life.
And our partner. And this last is something unique to modern times. It has been noted that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet — in which young lovers are tragically blocked by culture and family from choosing each other — presents a dilemma unique to history. While we have always had at least some say in who we marry or partner with — and more so in our primal times, i.e., when we were nomadic foragers or merely gatherer-hunters — with civilization and its hierarchical societies that choice has been largely determined by the surrounding cultural actors, not oneself. Parents or other societal proxies have most often, with civilization, decided with whom one was to spend one’s adult life.
Similarly with career, craft, or occupation, historically children are born into the occupations they will adopt in life. Tinker, tailor, spy, or blacksmith, the boy takes up the craft of the father; the girl takes up the family roles and tasks as modeled by the mother. And by the way, that last crinkle in this is telling: The fact that women, in postmodern times, have taken back the freedom to choose careers and service of their own is an aspect of this explosion of cultural possibilities.
All this is a product of an upsurge of technological innovation in the areas of communication and travel — specifically, telecommunications, electronic media, social media, and modern travel allowing much more contact between individuals of different cultures — which have revolutionized our way of life and made possible a new paradigm of participation in our societies and of personal identity and style. This new paradigm of personality construction within an overarching and worldwide culture — becoming virtually identical everywhere and with an increasing consolidation of language — has been termed postmodern. For it partakes of all the influences and possibilities of all cultures — both modern and traditional. It creates a multicultural mishmash of endless possibilities for being and doing, never been possible before. This is invigorating.
It can also be overwhelming.
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Crisis
Along with this we have another entirely new development of postmodern times: a monolithic worldwide culture. It is hard to view the world and its people and not notice that the great majority of the nearly eight billion people on our planet currently have some major things in common. Everywhere you will see the same kinds of clothes, of a most definite Western style — from Indiana to Indonesia, from Kenya to Columbus, Ohio, we see much the same. Particularly this is true in the more populated areas, which means the majority of humans are included in this phenomenon. Shorts, pants, sandals, shoes, socks, suits, dresses are pervasive. Indeed, actual clothes items emanating from the Western wealthy societies are passed down to others around the world. It is not uncommon to see a t-shirt touting the Chicago Bulls on an adolescent in Rwanda, for example.
Clothes styles, but also everything else — most notably American and Western media and entertainment — inform and impress themselves upon all the world. This phenomenon would be unimaginable in all earlier societies. Indeed, most earlier societies would not even know of the expanse and multitude of cultures and societies that existed in their time. It is amazing to me that, among all the factors of modern-postmodern civilization that are discussed and are dug into so as to find solutions for and understandings of our current dilemmas, hardly is this factor of a strange coexistence of pervasive multiculturalism set within an overarching monolithic worldwide culture ever noticed or discussed. Yet this cultural framework is not only a novel development in our multi-millions years of human evolution but is a powerful one.
The consequences of pervasive multiculturalism are obvious and make our nightly news. It is at the root of both our newer immigration problems as well as our perennial problems of racism and religious bigotry. The benefits of multiculturalism are less talked about, though. Yet it is the advance of notions of mutual tolerance and the embrace of cultures and people unlike ourselves which provide the context against which the fear and bigotry stand out and demand solutions. Nonetheless, the potency of a worldwide monolithic culture for eliciting massive changes in human personality, destiny, and potential is rarely seen; yet it cannot be overestimated. It most certainly could be more utilized; it could open upon an entire new motherlode of resources for us in our times.
To some extent this positive trend of a monolithic culture and the reduced bigotry and racism come of multiculturalism is being felt on social media and the internet. While those involved are rarely aware of the revolutionary nature of their involvements therein, still the effects of such pervasive sharing of culture and beliefs has had its consequences of huge historical import. And some are overtly revolutionary as in the uprisings during the Arab Spring of 2011, which was shared by many millions of people throughout the globe. Indeed, I myself, sitting in my travel trailer in California and hooked up to wifi presenting a portal to the world’s mind, was able to participate. I was caught up in the euphoria and terrors of others whose language and cultures I would not, previous to the internet age, have had access to or been able to fathom.
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Authenticity
So there is near-infinite variety and possibilities for choice in the decisions of what to do and who to be, in these postmodern times, along with an increasingly consolidated worldwide culture. It would seem a paradox, until you realize that worldwide culture is this massive amalgamation of all cultures currently, as well as their traditional antecedents. We are settling on a worldwide identity that partakes, for its elements and its composition, of near infinite variation of cultural possibilities gleaned from throughout the world.
It would seem daunting, no?
And that is the reason for this book.
You might say that this book attempts to survey this postmodern terrain for the advantages and advice it can provide about who to be. As well as what to do and how to decide on that, and what are the considerations one might have in being able to choose more fulfilling and felicitous paths in one’s life.
And this is how it relates to the question of authenticity, which is the second of the foci presented in the subtitle of this work … Identity, Authenticity, and Crisis. For without doubt the most authentic choices for oneself are also the most fulfilling and most felicitous. One is happiest when one is who one is. And this is a notion known to us. One of the elements of this worldwide culture is this radical new notion that one should be who one is, not who one is told to be by the outside, not someone or thing that is decided by someone else. This is amazing and momentous: Our postmodern monolithic culture provides the context and instigation for the most creative and authentic of choices in who to be than has ever been.
This book overviews and maps this exciting new terrain and indicates the potential it has for maximizing one’s felicity and authenticity in life. It points the reader to the advantages now available as never before and stimulates the inner wisdom and knowing that one might need to make better life choices.
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Atmadharma
The bottom line is that one might be virtually able to be anything one wants to be — one might be able to partake of infinite possibilities within our postmodern multicultural surround — but in life we have to choose. I daresay each of us is here to be that who one is most meant to be. One’s duty, dharma, mission in life is one’s own, one’s own alone; and it is founded upon what talents and abilities one brings, with all one’s unique-as-a-snowflake set of inherent potentialities combined with what one becomes as confronted by one’s earliest experiences, the life circumstances into which one is born, and the skandhas, or leftover skeins of proclivities, arisen of one’s karma, that one brings forward from what one has been in Infinity. One is not just better off being who one most is in potential; the Infinite opera of the All That Is demands it of us; it is the sweetest and most perfect symphony of all when one adds one’s unique contribution to it. Without your part, the harmony of the Universe is less for it.
This is where one’s identity is related to one’s dharma, as well. Dharma is a word used in India to mean one’s profound duty in life. And it is where who one is to be coincides with spiritual and ultimate concerns. One has a duty arising out of who one is to be it; that is, to manifest it. A Sanskrit term expresses that notion — atmadharma. It means that one has a dharma, a duty or task or way of being in the world, that is directly related to one’s soulular identity — one’s Atma. In the West we say merely that it is connected to who one uniquely is.
This perspective is the spiritual aspect of Identity. For indeed one’s decision of who to be roots us not only in our culture and society, but in the Universe and in relation to one’s inner psychological dynamics and all the metaphysical accouterments of destiny, service, beliefs, and that amorphous thing related to what one needs to do arising out of karmic and personal growth needs and requirements. All these play into what one does and needs to do.
So one’s atmadharma says something about the spiritual process, the primal process, and the Identity processes of life … especially in the places where they all overlap.
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The Cosmic Soup
Yet arriving at that is another thing. Certainly throughout our lives, and especially in our youth, we must expose ourselves to the different possibilities for us so as to “find ourselves.” One’s life is limited, and it is hard to be anything but unhappy when carrying out preordained directives — prescriptions and proscriptions — given from the outside. That has contributed to many lost lives and miserable existences for far too many of us throughout history. Yet there might have been no alternative to that.
Today, not only is there no excuse not to seek a happy life in alignment with what one is most able and wants to do, it is tragic if within this Universal Soup of potentialities — wrought of the postmodern coming together of all cultures and knowledge — one allows oneself to be carried along in dismal obedience to the failed initiatives and fearful injunctives of those around us, of those who controlled and directed us at the time in our life when we had little say in things.
To go beyond that is a must if one is to experience fulfillment in life; and to do that one must experiment with life and experience outside the bounds of what one is given. We get a lot out of this immersion in the Cosmic Soup of Experience of what is possible. This is often the task of youth, yet it can occur throughout one’s life: trying out different experiences and possibilities of life.
Nevertheless, one must make something out of what one experiences. This is one of the most important themes of this book. In order not to spend one’s life in depression, one is required to bring out what was garnered through that life research and experimentation, positively, creatively — and in a fulfilling and socially satisfying way … like a tree does in taking the nutrients it pulls out of the soil to manifest in leaves and blossoms and limbs. If one does not, one is like a drowned plant, underwater in a swamp … unfulfilled, depressed, unhappy. At best, one is in an oar-less rowboat, directionless and drifting, in the middle of an infinite sea.
Yet there is the important question of how to determine these things. Of all that one can be, all that one could actualize in life, which are the few to which one addresses one’s precious time and efforts? Destiny, fate, and luck determine much, yet there remains an arena in which one can operate and make choices. Here, Abraham Maslow is the best guide.1 The primary determinants of who to be are the inner potentials, skills, talents, unique abilities, and other positive proclivities of the individual. For potential determines actualization. As Maslow emphasized, if one has a strong ability to do something, one has a powerful motivation to do that thing; and one’s rewards for doing that, not something else, are overflowing. Character is not destiny as much as ability is. This is a central point in this endeavor of who to be.
Hence, this new and expansive take on Identity, as presented in this work, is related not just to “who one is” or simply “being myself,” it is related to one’s inmost potentials, talents, and proclivities. It is related to this new child-caring emerging out of the Sixties and throughout the world embracing these radical new parenting notions of “I just want you to be happy.” “I will love you regardless of what you choose.” And simply supporting the young in being “who they are.” Interestingly this can be compared to the traditional goal of education, whose root words indicate it is about “bringing out what is inside.”
Secondly, one needs to look at how these choices of who to be are differently configured at the various stages of life and in relation to its multitudinous exigencies. For indeed these requirements change as one traverses the stations of the life cycle and as one encounters distinctive life events, such as unexpected deaths and divorces, tragedies and the calamities that befall one, fickle fame and unforeseen fortune, and so on. This book addresses that as well.
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The Challenge
Making wise choices implies that wrong ones are also possible. Hence there is the question of neurosis and of lost or misdirected lives. They are the Scylla and Charybdis of this journey. They are the rock shoals and whirlpools to avoid lest one’s destiny be merely to fail. Which, by the way, is a needful life trajectory for some and in some lives, if we consider the reincarnational nature of life. That is to say, in some lives we are meant to grow by experiencing failure and the consequences of wrong decisions. How else to appreciate making correct and happy life choices in other lives?
More frequently even than that, we may find ourselves in lives caught up in the limitations and proclivities of dominant others. No doubt we need to learn the miseries of domination and enslavement to better understand the value of freedom and free choice and authenticity of self in other lives and circumstances.
However it is doubtful any one reading this is in either of those camps. For this book makes it more likely you will not make such mistakes. Which is another way of saying that those reading this are more likely to be in lives where they are here to learn the benefits of authenticity of identity, success in one’s life mission not failure. Let’s put it this way: This book will make it harder to screw up in your decisions in life of who to be.
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Resources and Helpful Things
This book addresses the question, “Who to be?” Meaning, “What should I do with my life?” “How do I decide?” “What are the most important and satisfying goals in life?” “How do I live a life that I will not regret at the end of it?” “How do I live wisely and happily in these most unusual of all times?” “What factors should guide me in choosing a fulfilling path in life?” “Why have humans since civilization been so unhappy and unfulfilled in life, as Freud said, humans live lives ‘of quiet desperation?” “What is our most fundamental and unshakeable self, the one upon which we can build a life that is strong, purposive, loving, and satisfying?” “What needs to change for us to have the lives of aliveness, belonging, purpose, satisfaction, and fulfillment that humans lost once we began living in settled groups, where hierarchies meant all lower on the totem pole would need to constrain their felicity to benefit those higher up?” “How important is committing to a cause or doing service work in making decisions about what to do?” “How does one balance ‘idealism’ and practicality in making one’s decisions?” “How does one prioritize the multiple aims of life?” Simply, “What is important, generally speaking?” As for what is important to you in particular, this book provides the perimeters and layout of the garden of experience you cultivate through your major life decisions.
You will find a trove of information here related to those questions. In addition to this book’s value in the information itself that is provided — regarding a new-paradigm overstanding of human development, enriched by the understandings coming out of the new fields of consciousness research, prenatal and perinatal psychology, transpersonal psychology, quantum physics, and the new biology — this is a good work to have in an “existential crisis,” a spiritual emergency, a mid-life crisis, between jobs-careers-marriages, and especially for young adults making their way through their Identity process, deciding on paths and goals worthy of one’s efforts and attention in life. Similarly, it shines a light on proper and harmful ingredients in child-caring, so it would be invaluable to any parent.
Most of the material in the foregoing has been included in other works. Specifically, they are Prodigal Human, Planetmates, Psychology of Apocalypse, Dance of the Seven Veils I, and the forthcoming (expected sometime in 2021) Back to the Garden. I have focused on this topic somewhat in Wounded Deer and Centaurs, as well, where I related it to the changing personality structures coming of postmodern times and their relation to pre- and perinatal influences, the environmental crisis, and activism. Others of my books have traveled through this terrain at times, too.
Nonetheless, it seemed a good idea to bring all this material together around this theme of Identity, to re-slant them, and to see what would come of it. The issue of who to be is one of the primary concerns of humans; it is vitally important to address it now and at this time in history with the stakes so high and the need to bring forth a new vision of who to be in line with what we need if we are to survive patriarchy, environmental collapse, and the rising worldwide fascism coming up as a direct reaction to the fear come of multiculturalism, identity loss, and identity confusion.
There is new material here as well, as fits the topic; additional research directly related to its topic has been done; and the previous material is expanded, restructured, and elaborated, as befits this particular work. Still, faithful readers of my work will notice some repetition, though I daresay will come away with a new appreciation and new insights in their journeying through this material put together in this different way and focused on such a primary concern of all of us at any stage of life and especially amidst the extraordinary worldwide changes in just about everything (environmental, cultural, societal, and personal) which are going on right now. The fact that chapters are taken from both the Return to Grace Series and The Path of Ecstasy Series of my books is also the reason it is a stand-alone book, not included in the two series of books I have been developing and publishing since 2013.
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Descents from Grace, Human Devolution
Before wandering into these lanes and byways, peeking into these corners, and digging below ground to the foundations of our existence — upon which we can make a proper stand and experience an ecstatic, fulfilled life — let us take a look at the long trajectory of human evolution. This is an evolution which I deem to be a devolution from our natural state and our fundamental self within Nature. A devolution which has gotten us into such a complicated and confusing state on the proper way to be in life … and the worthwhile things to do … as to require such a book as this.2 For we find that our fall from grace in Nature, leaving us forever after uncertain of our proper place within it or the optimal trajectory of a human as opposed to a planetmate life, began when we were still apes — prehomonids is the usual way of saying it — and still living harmoniously with the rest of the world.
So yes, we are starting at the real beginning — not just of you, but of our species — for insight into and a foundation upon which to construct the most fulfilling and unshakeable of identities, the most authentic of selves, the happiest and most ecstatic of life journeys, and the most satisfying and purposive of things to do in life. Clearly, with our planet on the brink of worldwide ecocide, and our species permitting an odd hara-kiri of itself — for no reason other than being truly demented about the major things of life, like survival — there is something awry in who we have become. How else do we explain our modern materialistic and consumer-oriented style of being that would value drinking out of plastic bottles, even as it contributes to the deaths of our children? How did we become “suicidal ape”?3
Indeed we find there are factors arising of our evolution that have compelled us to turn on our own existence. Furthermore, those developments have determined our status as the philosophical ape, forever uncertain of our status in Nature, our role in the Universal scheme, and the optimal activities of human life. Our fall from grace has made us varied, confused, and trying to figure it out, as well as humanicidal. Yet we were not always that way. We were planetmates once, too, and we participated in a natural not cultural stream of events.
However, from that Edenal time there was a step-by-step descent from that state of grace till we arrive at our situation of industrial civilization today. There were developments that increased our split from Nature. It happened over time, gradually, imperceptibly. This supposed evolution, actually a devolution, is related to birth pain … indeed, they are all direct results of birth trauma. For that trauma results in fear and insecurity. And the response to fear and insecurity is a drive to control. That drive to control is another way humans are different from all other species. It is also a way humans in the modern era are different from prototypical humans, from primal humans.
Let me explain. Let us go back, now, millions of years, to our most ancient of parents. Beginning at the beginning, let us make our way through the descents of “man,”4 which deposit us where we are today.
*An Aborted Changing of the Guard—Attack of the Body-Snatchers* … Another reason these terms depicting cultural division, specifically, *generation gap* and *counterculture*, went into disuse was due to the mobilization of the World War Two Generation — after their initial phase of somnolent confusion over the events that were emerging in the Sixties which left them paralyzed and watching, growing in irritation and anger — into a comprehensive counterattack against the Sixties Generation, using all the Nixonian-like tactics in their arsenal … understandably, since Nixon was of that generation and his tactics were typical of the defensive style of his contemporaries.
*Lassoing the Universities*
In the early Seventies, the World War Two Generation used their power and wealth, being themselves in the triumphant phase of their lives, to put pressure on colleges and universities, nationwide, to discontinue the programs, courses, and the professors that they felt were responsible for the youth’s rebellion. Their targets for destruction included such noteworthy “dangers” as liberal arts programs in general, and especially “highly revolutionary” philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, and humanistic psychology courses. A transformation of colleges and universities into “career mills” — whose primary function was to prepare the young for practical and skill-oriented jobs and professions — was called for … or else! Or else these World War Two alumni would discontinue their contributions to these educational institutions. The “bottom line” being threatened in this way, no university administration, to my knowledge, withstood their demands for very long, if at all.
it is termed a *spiritual emergency*, and it is not at all pleasant or comfortable … one’s self-esteem gets wrecked, for one thing … regardless how growthful and necessary it turns out to be. In any case, that is just the beginning.
Similarly, one cannot expect to jump from the Recollective-Analytic, the monastic, the student phase directly to liberation. That is what I was stressing in what I said regarding the book that will be about the second half of the cure. One needs to bring one’s re-freshed, re-newed, re-born self into the world and add what one can to it, in engagement with the community of souls and the life on this planet. One can do that in parts, for one should always keep one foot in the world of self-evaluation, but one needs to embark on self-actualization where and when one can. It is the dialectic between the two that catalyzes growth. One goes from self-understanding to worldly actualization and inevitably confronts obstacles. Leading one back for more self-inquiry; then out into the world again, to expression and participation; which sooner or later finds stumbling blocks. Leading one inward again for another stint at the drawing board, followed by another ad-venture, and round and round again.
Fourth Descent — Fetal Malnutrition* … Another development that came with bipedalism is that in the late stages of gestation, the prenate would be so large that it would press against the blood vessels in the surrounding environment and inhibit the blood flow to the extent that nutrients and oxygen were not supplied sufficiently. A big part of that reduction of blood flow came out of the fact that standing up magnified that constriction of blood vessels. By contrast, the fetuses of our four-legged primate cousins hang loosely below the mother, not impeding the blood flow.
Because of this reduction in the supply of nutrients to the fetus, the arc of growth, at the end of gestation, flattens out and does not catch up and begin retracing the curve established earlier in gestation until after birth. The prenate’s growth, measured by its weight, as well as body length, slows significantly beginning in the third trimester and especially during the last four weeks of gestation and resumes its spurt only when it is no longer in the womb. By comparison, our ape relatives, not to mention other planetmates, do not have that prenatal arrest of development.
Thus, we were beginning to have *fetal malnutrition*, because of our upright gait, which was another source of hellacious pain for us as neonates having vast consequences for human psychology. We stood up, and our soon-to-be-born children got really crowded in the womb. They were suffocating and starving in there, too.
*Cathartic Meditation: “At Times I Hopped Like a Frog … Between Smiles and Tears, I Continued my Inward Journey.” – Guru Muktananda.*
*The Path Is Different from the Goal: The Truth About Meditation Can Only Now Be Told — Real Meditation Is About Letting Go and Experiencing Not About Controlling Oneself*
*What Really Happens in Authentic, Deep Meditation*
*The Yogic Experiences No One Tells You About*
Muktananda explains that “the practitioners of Siddha Yoga have a vast variety of experiences about which one neither hears nor reads”; that because of this an aspirant might abandon the path out of sheer fright. Unaware of the variety of emotions and experiences entailed in the spiritual process, expecting perhaps only “bliss” (or relaxation?), the aspirant may think he or she is going insane. He himself, however, sees all these experiences as part of a natural process that is cleansing in nature and makes possible access to higher levels of consciousness.
The bliss and equanimity described in the spiritual literature are thus associated most strongly with the advanced stages of meditation and should not be confused with the experiences entailed in the process of getting there.
*Real Meditative Experience May Not Be So Relaxing*
Thus, it appears that the techniques of relaxation have to do with attempting to still the vagaries of pain-derived tension, the internal dialogue, so as to gain access to areas of consciousness that are “outside” and more fundamental than these vagaries. And contact with those areas may not be so relaxing!
“Cleaning Up the Streets” … But yes, they will also see the world through this veil of “sewage” and so direct their efforts in ways to remove the “impurities” of others. Indeed, think again about those atrocities of humans, mentioned above, and you will see that almost always the people perpetrating the acts have rationalized to themselves their actions by claiming they are “cleaning up” or helping to “purify,” or “save,” the world.
If you think this only happened in previous times — Nazi Germany, The Burning Times in the Middle Ages, the times of slavery in America and elsewhere — consider how all of the “good” humans throughout the world today support the efforts to “clean up the streets,” to “keep out the riff raff,” and to “keep out the unwashed” without ever, in any instance, considering the people affected and how their efforts might be burdening and in some cases ending the lives of those poor souls — those ones simply more unlucky than oneself. These efforts are not far removed in quality — if not in quantity — from those of former times to maintain “purity” in the ranks, to suppress “heresy,” to “crack down” on some group or other of society, or to “eliminate” the “undesirables”; and even in current times, the term ethnic cleansing expresses it and demonstrates its ongoingness. Need I mention Donald Trump, his bigoted proposals, and the surprisingly large number of Americans subscribing to them? Probably not. Yet keep in mind from many quarters these sorts of citizens are deemed the “good people” of contemporary society.
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