Ritual As Shadow Experience, Part Five: So, What Is Real, Unritualized Spiritual Experience? … An Example of Primal Spirituality, The Moments After Birth

Ritual As Shadow Experience, Part Five: What Real and Unritualized Spiritual Experience Looks Like — An Example of Primal Spirituality

When people go through weddings and other kinds of rituals it’s like they are trying to fool their psyche into thinking they are dealing with their real experience and their underlying transformative needs, but they in actuality are not . . . because in fact ritual is nothing more than elaborate act-out…. And acting out of a feeling and not feeling the feeling is substituting a ritual for real experience.

Why societies have these reenactments is for the person to bring forward and bring to bear those memories of an important and traumatic time and associate it 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. The most obvious example of that is the way men and women are turned into killers and pawns of society 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 “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.

From—Ritual As Shadow, Part Four: Ritual Is Hardly Transformation … In Actuality, We “Die” to Our Real Self and Are Remade Into Something Society Can Use

So, if ritual is a substitute for real spiritual experience, what does real spiritual experience look like? What follows is an example of a spontaneous, unritualized spiritual experience. But first let me put it in its context.

An Example of Primal Spirituality — Unritualized Spiritual Experience

These videos provide a rare peek into a phenomenon which for forty years has been overflowing with misunderstanding, misinformation, and a cloud of mystery — much of which could have been dispelled by videos such as the ones being offered for the first time here. These looks into primal experience have been verboten because the people involved have been well aware that most of the time they will be misperceived or misinterpreted. So it is no small thing that my wife, Mary Lynn, and I, the facilitator and the experiencer in these videos respectively, make these videos of very personal and private experience available to anyone in the world to watch.

We accept the misunderstanding and even ridicule that will come from some uninformed and deluded quarters for the greater good of providing for those who have eyes to see some understandings that the world can no longer afford not to know.

Don’t Try This at Home?

Something like this usually is preceded by “Don’t try this at home.” I don’t think that could apply here in any way that I can foresee. For the videos depict the experiences of a person who is not influenced by any drugs but simply through prior primal sessions has become more open to letting her body/spirit/soul heal itself … in allegiance to her “inner authority” and with commitment to the truth, and in Mary Lynn’s case, with faith in God. Also, I as the facilitator have forty years experience in this modality, and its nearest cousins, and what I do and say comes out of that accumulated experience: What I say is, every word, though it might not seem so, precise, intentional, and done in full consciousness of its possible effects on the experiencer.

This is exactly not to say that the words are directional or meant to bias or guide; but rather that I am highly trained in saying that which might open up, that which might support, that which might lead the person to discover their real inner self (which is not known to me). Indeed, I am trained in helping people to go into areas inside themselves where they will discover things that neither of us know in advance. The biggest part of this sort of training is about how to keep one’s ego completely out of the person’s’ inner journey, while at the same time being able to surf along empathetically with their experience. Therefore, based on my year’s of experience, I might at times have suggestions as to where an experiencer might want to look, what she might want to try, and so on, because of a developed intuitive sense. But the idea is to do this while being completely nonattached to any particular outcome … or even that there be an outcome … and never presuming to know what will work or not, in advance. Most of all, the facilitator learns to stay completely out of the process when the experiencer’s Inner Guide is fully in charge, and then just to be supportive and accepting of wherever that might lead the experiencer to go.

So, “don’t try this at home”? Ok, read the above. Now you can see why there is hardly any danger of that.

Part One: Video of Actual Primal Re-Experience of the Moments after Birth

The experiencer, Mary Lynn Adzema, who was born caesarean and thus before she was ready, re-experiences the pain of the umbilical cord being cut too early and of being swaddled tightly so that she cannot move. She connects this to feelings of being held back throughout her life. This is only the first part from a much longer session; there are four more videos coming.

It was a spontaneously occurring experience. What is not caught is only how this primal was triggered and the very beginning of it, which was much like what is seen at the start of the video. How this event was triggered is brought out and explained shortly, together with the videos of the events that followed the ones seen here.

The events in this video many will see as being painful, perhaps strange, gruesome, excruciating, torturous, or worse. Over the years many extreme adjectives have been used to describe what primal experiences look like to an outsider who has never experienced a primal; including the very bizarre—for example, demonic, possession, Satanic. That is one of the reasons that only now, after nearly forty years, as far as I know this is the first time that a video is being published to the public at large—leaving it open to the projections of the extreme crazies in our world, who, full of their own Pain, are prone to seeing their own craziness in such an event as this and to attack upon what is different and scary to them.

Yet, it is new and strange; and Westerners who are largely cut off from deep experiences compared to virtually all of the cultures of the world that ever existed, might be tempted to view this negatively, to miss the healing that is occurring; in general to be turned off and to turn away; perhaps scared; perhaps thinking that the experiencer is being tortured.

To those, and to those of those who are capable of hearing and learning something outside of their normal experience, grant me your trust—which I will prove to you is warranted very soon—that these negative feelings and/or perceptions of yours are easily, and will soon be, thoroughly dispelled. In fact, they will be replaced by a perception and understanding of great wonder, beauty, and Divine Love.

First: Trust me that the experiencer is undergoing no real “pain” as it is normally thought of. She is “in” her experience and is releasing Pain from a long time ago. And though that release might look painful, gruesome, or torturous, the experiencer is feeling great relief at releasing it from her system. The experiencer—and I have had thousands of these experiences myself over the course of 40 years—is actually feeling more alive than normal, very happy—on a level within—that true answers to life long questions are finally coming forth, and while expressing the Pain in a way that might seem very dramatic, the experiencer is actually not reliving the Pain of that earlier time in the exact painful way that it occurred and which was traumatic.

I like to say it this way: The experiencer is getting to experience the Pain for the first time because when it originally occurred, it was too overwhelming to be handled and was suffered through, not experienced or felt. If it had been felt and processed at the time, it would not have lingered on to affect the person from that time forward. No, what I like to tell clients is that “You couldn’t feel it back then, you were only a child (a baby, were prevented from feeling it by someone else, or whatever it was), but now you, as an adult can resolve it the way you wished you could have then.” And it is quite a relief to be able to fight back, to get angry, to cry, and so on—all the things adults do to cope—for the first time about an experience, never resolved, that has been sticking in one’s craw so long it is often forgotten. But when one remembers one remembers it has always been there in the background. It is quite a relief to—metaphorically speaking—get to scratch an itch that was layered so deep it just made one uncomfortable throughout one’s life without any recourse.

So, though this may look torturous, trust me that these are great discoveries for the experiencer and the chance to do something about them, though it might seem gruesome, is the release of a lifetime of wanting to do something about a thing that has until the moment you observe been unable to be reachable and only caused one misery.

Finally, if you get through this first video based on what I have told you. Go to the next ones, and you will see that I have not really adequately put in words how actually wonderful and beneficial these experiences are from the experiencer’s point of view.

Those few who are familiar with these types of deep experiences, please excuse the above explanations. Realize that the vast majority of Westerners do not live lives like we do, experience the things we do, and are for the most part very alienated from deep experiences—something that is not their fault—and so they need education, explanation, and understanding of where these events come from.

OK, enough on that. As I was starting to say at the outset, as for the four videos after this one of the events that come later, these experiences are part of process. In fact, in the very next video, part two, the experiencer reports spiritual experiences of a comforting nature occurring. I don’t want to say any more, because I don’t want to spoil it. Prepare to have your prejudices challenged and to come back a little changed (for the better) for watching what evolved in the course of this session.

Finally, lest this part not have been made clear, I, Michael Adzema, aka sillymickel, am the disembodied voice in the video. That means I am the facilitator.

First video: Mary Lynn’s attempt to look inside to answer a question as to why she lied about something, especially when it was completely inconsequential, leads to a spontaneous “regression” to a time right after she had been removed by c-section from her mother’s womb. You see her here only a few minutes after that question elicited a response from her that she thought it had to do with the fear of the obstetrician after being born. In a previous session, she had realized that she thought the doctor was going to murder her, after she came out of the womb. Meanwhile, in the present, noticing in her behavior the signs of something about to happen, I, her therapist and husband, encouraged her to lie down. No sooner did she do that than she went into the kind of emotional release … I did not say another word; she needed and received no prompting … much like you observe at the outset of the video, which is about two or three minutes after her lying down.

Needless to say neither this experience nor the recording of it were planned, let alone scripted. It is only by chance that a camera happened to be nearby when it happened. We had been recording Mary Lynn’s regularly scheduled sessions, with the idea they might be helpful in educational or training endeavors in the future, and so this struck me to record as part of adding to that record.

Continue with Love’s Comforting Surround and the Beauty of It All Behind the Pain: Ritual As Shadow Experience, Part Six, and What Real Spiritual Experience Looks Like

Return to Ritual As Shadow, Part Four: Ritual Is Hardly Transformation … In Actuality, We “Die” to Our Real Self and Are Remade Into Something Society Can Use

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March 24, 2013 Posted by sillymickel | Activism, Anthropology, ecocide, Environment, globalrevolution, History, newearth | birth, Consciousness, control, CULTURE, death, environment, fear, fetus, God, health, hell, human, human rights, humans, life, nature, pain, perinatal, philosophy, prenatal, psychology, religion, science, society, species, trauma, truth, unconscious, womb | Leave a Comment

People Are Led to Believe They Are Having the Feelings Being Symbolized, When in Actuality They Are Not: Ritual As Addiction to “Pretend Experience”

Ritual As Shadow, Part Four: Ritual Is Hardly Transformation … In Actuality, We “Die” to Our Real Self and Are Remade Into Something Society Can Use

When people go through weddings and other kinds of rituals it’s like they are trying to fool their psyche into thinking they are dealing with their real experience and their underlying transformative needs, but they in actuality are not . . . because in fact ritual is nothing more than elaborate act-out…. And acting out of a feeling and not feeling the feeling is substituting a ritual for real experience.

Why societies have these reenactments is for the person to bring forward and bring to bear those memories of an important and traumatic time and associate it 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. The most obvious example of that is the way men and women are turned into killers and pawns of society 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 “desires” or the relinquishing of “cherished illusions and false hopes”—and is reborn into one’s real self, rediscovering one’s real potentials and connection with Nature and the Divine.

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 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.

In either case, it is this attempt to control something symbolically, indirectly that is the basis of ritual. In both cases ritual is a poor substitute for the real potential of identifying with and acting in accord with that reality. And in each instance, the tragedy is that the indirect attempt pre-empts and thus makes impossible the true relationship and true accord, the at-one-ment, that could otherwise be.

Ritual As Addiction to “Pretend Experience”

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 the dream, 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.

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 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, and we had flowing robes on. 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 we were almost floating down the aisle! 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.

And 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 BPM IV, like where Michael C. Irving 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.”

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. Halos are symbols of the pressure on our head as it moves through the birth canal and is the first sensation we have of becoming free … being “blessed.”

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.

BPM II 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. In the dream this would be the part of the wedding where the couple to be wedded is at the front of church, now, and they are constricted in their every act and movement. They must behave—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—isn’t that 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. Other BPM II elements for the ones to be wedded include waiting in discomfort and anticipation… nervousness…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 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 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 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.

So, 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. So wedding rituals like this evolve out of those drives and feelings in people, and all the detail and ritual is an unconscious attempt to give people a feeling of going through a death-rebirth experience. 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; and 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 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 I could share it with; 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 now. I realize, now, this 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.

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 that: “When people were trying to enact a ritual, did this mean that those people are getting in touch with those feelings and that that’s 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 those feelings, when in actuality they are not.”

And we know that people are not really feeling the feelings symbolized because that is the major thing of all act-outs of those early experiences: One can repeat the act out forever and it does not change the feeling or stop one from having it. Whereas if one relives the feeling 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 (for example, primal therapy, holotropic breathwork, psychedelics), those feelings do change, go away completely at times, and the person is transformed, becoming a different person…as a death-rebirth experience should bring about.

But when people go through weddings and other kinds of rituals it’s like they are trying to fool their psyche into thinking that they are dealing with their real experience and their underlying transformative needs, but they in actuality are not . . . because in fact ritual is nothing more than elaborate act-out, that’s all it is. And acting out of a feeling and not feeling the feeling is substituting a ritual for real experience.

And why societies have these reenactments is for the person to bring forward and bring to bear those memories of an important and traumatic time and associate it 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. The most obvious example of that is the way men and women are turned into killers and pawns of society 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 “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. I will have a lot more to say about this further on.

At any rate, in rituals we pretend we are dealing with our feelings and our real experience; but 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.

Continue with Ritual As Shadow Experience, Part Five: What Real and Unritualized Spiritual Experience Looks Like — An Example of Primal Spirituality

Return to The Second Retreat from the Natural Self — Patriarchal Culture: One Gains the World in Exact Proportion to Which a Man Has Relinquished his Soul

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February 24, 2013 Posted by sillymickel | Activism, Anthropology, ecocide, Economics, Environment, globalrevolution, History, newearth, News, occupytogether, occupywallstreet, ows, Politics, taxtherich | birth, Consciousness, control, CULTURE, death, die, fear, fetus, God, health, human, humans, inner transformation, life, matrix, nature, pain, perinatal, politics, prenatal, psychology, religion, society, species, spirituality, trauma, truth, unconscious, womb | Leave a Comment

Four Programs of Human Personality Are Written Into Us in the Womb: Prenatal Imprints of “Human Nature”

Four Earliest Roots of War, Bigotry, Capitalism, and Pollution: Blueprints of Human Nature and Prenatal Personalities … Profound Sculpting of Who We Are Occurs at a Time We Cannot See

Wounded Deer and Centaurs, Chapter Four: Prenatal Imprints of Our Unnatural Self

The Perinatal Pulls of Pollution: Air Pollution and Fetal Oxygen Starvation

Increased Carbon Dioxide, But Also Decreased Oxygen

One overlooked, but hugely pervasive perinatal element of these strange days is connected to the increasing carbon dioxide concentration in our atmosphere called “the greenhouse effect” which occurs alongside the curiously overlooked yet necessarily corresponding decreases in oxygen levels. There is increasingly less oxygen as we use it up burning carbon-based fossil fuels and making carbon dioxide. [Footnote 1]

We have more carbon dioxide for that reason and also because we are stupidly destroying the Earth’s mechanisms for turning that carbon dioxide back into oxygen…forests and ocean plankton, for example. This increased carbon dioxide is called “the greenhouse effect.” While this has been looked at from the perspective of it creating global warming and climate change, there are even stronger corporate (profit-motivated) as well as personal psychological reasons why we do not look at its most immediate effect on humans—the amount of oxygen we get from the air we breathe. We will steal at least a brief glance into some psychological reasons now and while we are at it uncover rich veins of understanding of and possible solutions for not only our current environmental problems but certain political and social dilemmas which we will find are operating dialectically with them. For there are provocative and profound influences from our experiences in the late stages of our womb life on the kaleidoscope of our current postmodern lives.

Air Pollution Bring Up in Us Uncomfortable Feelings From Our Births

For the increased carbon dioxide and reduced oxygen of the globe is analogous to the situation of “fetal malnutrition,” described by Briend and DeMause, that occurs prior to birth, and which is the basis for DeMause’s explanation of poisonous placenta symbolism. Keep in mind in particular that we experience this reduction in oxygen and increase in carbon dioxide in the form of air pollution, which is most pronounced in larger cities. [Footnote 2]

The Perinatal Pushes on Human Nature

Bipedalism Causes Birth Pain

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

Birth Pain Makes Humans Out of Planetmates

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

Four Blueprints of Human Consciousness Are Written in the Womb

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

These Aspects of Late Gestation Pain—Crowded, Gasping, Poisoned, Dirty —Are Important Molds For Human Nature, Which Scientists Have Heretofore Naively Labeled Genetic

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

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

Four Blueprints of “Human Nature”

These imprints on our psyche caused by uncomfortable experiences in late gestation that are molds for and roots of a great deal of the later experience and behavior of humans can be put in four categories:

Crowded … “Back Off!”

First, we experience crowded, restricted conditions in the womb as we get larger and no longer enjoy the blissful uninhibited freedom of the previous time of our short lives.

I discussed in a previous section how we manifest this through overpopulation and then react to or run away from those feelings through activities like swimming and dancing. For now, suffice it to say we act this out as nations through wars in general (pushing back “lines” of the enemy), especially wars of “expansion.” Environmentally, we feel the need to push back and pave over Nature all we can. We’ll get more into these sorts of things soon.

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

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

Later in life as individuals we are driven to gobbling up more resources than we need—greed. As nations we are compelled to exploit resources from those conquered territories we “expanded” into—colonialism and imperialism. It is fascinating how we act this out on both sides of class war and revolution also; that part is coming up soon. For now I just want to give you an idea of the critical importance of the understandings just ahead.

Disgusted… Poisoned … “Don’t Feed Me That Bullcrap!”

Third, the blood we do receive is not as good as it was, so we feel what we do get is “poisonous”…deficient, unhealthy, harmful…even deadly and threatening as in the feeling we might be being poisoned to death. It is “bad blood.” This sounds like the deprivation/gasping feelings, but though it is related it has a different quality: The difference is between gasping for breath as in being held under water and feeling one will die for lack of oxygen, versus being in a gas chamber and feeling that the air we breathe is foul, unhealthy, smelly…and is deadly because of its toxicity. They are considerably different in that in one we feel we will die for lack of resources—the outside is withholding something we need. In the other the outside very much is impinging on one but in a bad way; it is forcing itself on us, and it is felt as an assault.

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

An interesting aside and look forward into what is coming up is that it is because the Nazis in particular were so caught up in this kind of “bad blood” matrix of feelings in the policies they carried out that they even created the manner of death for Jews that they did—gas chambers. In other words, because they felt the “blood” (money) they were receiving was “poisoned” (tainted, manipulated) by the Jews, it made the most perfect sense then, when it occurred to them, to fight back against these sources of “tainted blood” (Jews) by forcing “tainted blood” into them also, until they died (gas chambers). [Footnote 3]

Irritated… Dirty … “Eeew!”

Fourth, there are feelings caused by the fact that the decreased blood flow caused by pressure on the arteries providing blood to the placenta means that there will be reduced efficiency in removing the byproducts of oxygen combustion by the fetus. These are waste products or toxins of the biochemical process of food conversion into energy that are normally removed by the blood through the veins…to be expelled eventually one way or another back into the environment.

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

So, finally, there is the pain and discomfort of being surrounded by these toxins, forced to live in an environment that is felt to be dirty, “creepy,” ugly, toxic, threatening, filthy, slimy, yucky. And again this is related to the previous feeling complex but is different. For one can be forced to take in something noxious, or one can be immersed in something that is painful or uncomfortable like a bath that is too hot. In other words, this pain is on the surface of the body, not being forced inside, like the other.

How this noxious environment feels to the fetus can be that of irritation, uncomfortable heat, burning, and feelings of threat to one’s survival—thus alarm and panic—which those outside “impositions” bring up in a fetus. Historically this has been acted out on Jews and witches: They were placed like wood in heaps and burned to get rid of them as the threat they were felt to be. As in the gas chamber example, they perpetrated on the victim the sort of suffering the murderers felt was actually coming at them…witches and Jews were seen as a source of burning…if nothing else in that they could be responsible for one burning forever in hell.

And parts of this complex later on can be those of annoyance, yuckiness, being continually distracted by sensations (ADD), creepiness, dirtiness.

We feel bugged, irritated. We overkill pests and overclean our houses, using an abundance of toxic “product” which only adds to the overall toxicity of our environment. This is the perinatal underpinnings of what Freud called anal compulsion. It actually leads to us employing strict toilet-training, if you think about it.

We feel “imposed on” by others, especially “visitors” who come to our “house.” We feel surrounded by “dirty” hippies… Jews… blacks… immigrants…. You name it.

Roots of War, Bigotry, Pollution….

These feeling complexes sculpted by our early, uniquely human, prenatal discomfort and pain mold our politics, shape our wars and conflicts, determine how we treat the environment, and color how we see and treat each other. We will now deal with each of these in turn and discuss the way we act them out as adults politically, environmentally, and interpersonally.

Crowdedness, Packed Together “Like Sardines”

Can’t Move Freely – “Back Off!”…Cast Out of Heaven, Driven Out of Eden

The primary thing fetuses experience in the final stages of gestation is compression, crowdedness. We can no longer move in an uninhibited way. As we get increasingly larger, the womb seems to press in us, as prenates, from all sides, restricting our movements, suppressing our freedom. It “won’t let us do what we want to do.” I discussed this the previous chapter and how we manifest it through overpopulation.

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

Reactions – Swimming, Dancing, Mosh Pits, Religious Fantasy

I mentioned previously how our activities like gymnastics, flying, and skydiving are reactions to these uncomfortable feelings; they are attempts to run away from this discomfort as we continue to re-experience it as adults. I explored how we re-create and re-stimulate those blissful feelings in us through adult experiences of weightlessness, swimming, dancing, surfing, hot tubbing. I need to add loving sexuality to that—particularly in its re-stimulating blissful memories of re-union with an Other who is all-accepting, all-embracing, and eminently kind. I have explored how we seek resolution of these uncomfortable feelings through mosh pit “rebirthing” and warm water “rebirthing.” I need to add to that the seduction of the experience of being religiously “reborn.” [Footnote 4]

I wish to add now, since it becomes especially relevant to what follows from here on, the specifically environmental and especially political aspects and act outs of these early uncomfortable feelings.

Politically, As Nations – Wars of “Expansion”

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

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

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

Environmentally – “We Paved Paradise; Put Up a Parking Lot”

We act out these same feelings just as illogically and self-destructively in our behavior in regards to the environment. Remember that, as prenates, the “environment” then was felt to be encroaching and blocking our easy movement. So, with these feelings now deeply ingrained in us as something we call “human nature” we hack back at actual Nature and push it all away to “make room”…excessive room…for ourselves…while conversely we make sure we will continue to re-stimulate these feelings through overpopulation, city life, dense and crowded neighborhoods, and traffic jams. [Footnote 5]

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

Environmentally, we destroy forests, we pave over Nature so that we can have huge houses and lawns (the bigger the better…we want more “womb”) and speed around (the faster and more nimbly the better) uninhibitedly in our cars (auto-mobile…free moving self…part of self capable of moving freely)… we cut off others in traffic and feel trapped (encroached upon, constrained or suppressed) by drivers that cut us off and don’t let us “in” (move freely)…thus road rage

Conversely, we take solace in speeding (though we risk tickets) and we take pleasure in watching racing and race car drivers and stunt drivers; also airplane and jet stunts and air shows and fighter pilots and jets.

Next: Our Repetitive Struggles to “Breathe Free”

We will continue looking at the ways we act out our early imprints and how we can actually stop continuing this self-destruction which has now reached an apocalyptic peak. But now let’s turn to another terrifying feeling we carry over in us from that hellish time as prenates, which we act out, politically and environmentally, in disastrous ways. We look now at the horrifying feelings of oxygen starvation—gasping, suffocating, and feeling stifled—and the crazy things we do to “breathe free” again.

“Please, Sir, Might I Have Some More?”—The Psychological and Economic Repercussions of Fetal Malnutrition

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

Oxygen Starvation

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

We Feel Recurrently Pressured, Overwhelmed, and Panicked

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

The Struggles We Create to “Breathe Free”

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

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

These feelings are rooted in forgotten memories, imprints we carry from early experience, and they are not rooted in actual circumstances. Sure, we create a reality that matches these feelings, but the feelings are there first. And if we had less of these feelings, we would less often create situations that mirrored them.

Gasping

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

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

The Oliver Twist Economies We Insist On…”Please, Sir, May I Have Some More?”

We act out these fears through excessive control of and storage of all these resources and through controlling and sycophantic behavior toward others in order to try to ensure a steady supply of vital resources.

Prenatal Feudalism

Yet even as we wrap up so much of our time and energy in these pursuits, we make sure we will feel no relief from their underlying uncomfortable feelings…as in every other of these feelings, we both seek relief from them and at the same time create the circumstances that give rise to them. In early economic systems, such as a “strong man” economy and feudalism, there is a simplified framework of control-conformity, dominance-sycophancy.

Prenatal Capitalism

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

Prenatal Socialism

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

We’re the Ones Who Block a Return to Eden

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

Coming Up, Why We Steal Fire

In the next chapter we will look more closely at how we re-create our early pain in one specific area that has dire significance today, for it concerns what we are doing to our atmosphere. We are driven to want to suffocate ourselves, and we will see how this is rooted in our particular human beginnings, making us the one and only species on the entire planet that is so enamored of making fire. For from the earliest campfires to the nuclear power plants of today, humans are seen to like to burn things. What we discover is there are reasons, deeply rooted in our psyche, that would make us the penultimate Prometheans of Earth.

Continue with Global Oxygen Loss, Fire, and Prenatal Oxygen Hunger: Why Humans Are So Big on Burning, So Reckless About Polluting … Why We’re Globally Suffocating Ourselves

Return to The Primal Screen: The Doors of Perception Stormed and The Perinatal Rising — A Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life

Footnotes

1. This obvious though insistently overlooked fact has scientific support, of course:

According to a study conducted by scientists from the Scripps Institute there is less oxygen in the atmosphere today than there used to be. The ongoing study, which accumulated and interpreted data from NOAA monitoring stations all over the world, has been running from 1989 to the present. It monitored both the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the decline in oxygen. The conclusion of that 20 year study is that, as carbon dioxide (produced primarily by burning fossil fuels) accumulates in the atmosphere, available oxygen is decreasing.

Carbon dioxide seems to be almost the total focus of attention in the climate change model as it exists today. After reviewing the results of this study and talking with Dr. Ralph Keeling (one of the lead scientists on the study), it seemed to me that the consequences of atmospheric oxygen depletion should be included in any discussion of atmospheric change….

Read more: “Atmospheric Oxygen Levels Fall as Carbon Dioxide Rises” http://blogcritics.org/scitech/article/atmospheric-oxygen-levels-fall-as-carbon/#ixzz1ru2460V8

2. A. Briend, “Fetal Malnutrition: The Price of Upright Posture?” British Medical Journal 2 (1979): 317-319.

3. It would be interesting to find out what in particular was the cause of such inordinate fixation on this aspect of early prenatal pain…. For example, did Germans have more of this kind of pain as fetuses because German women did much more standing…being hard workers, perhaps…in the late stages of pregnancy than others? Such are the kinds of things that can make such differences.

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

4. I differentiate between legitimate attempts at birth pain resolution—primal therapy, holotropic and other breathwork, water and breath “rebirthing”/vivation, and mosh pit “rebirthing”—from false ones like being religiously “reborn” or otherwise experiencing a “second birth” as in some social initiation. In the first instances, there are continual attempts to resolve something that needs such attention and in fact can never be fully resolved. In the second instance, there are actual feelings of rebirth, when one is religiously reborn; it is true. I know. I experienced it as my first experience of rebirth forty-four years ago.

The problem with religious “rebirth” has to do with this idea of trying to recapture ever afterward what is essentially a one-time experience and yet taking steps to insure no further such experiences or transformations will occur. One loses the feeling, feels “sinful” again (see upcoming posts on the BPM II elements of “bad blood” and “dirtiness” or review the overview of this in this chapter) and because one has barely touched it, let alone resolved the pain, needs “saving” over and over again, futilely. The fact that is not really resolved is proven in that the proponents of religious rebirth need to convert others to the experience in order for them to feel they have achieved it; this would not be necessary if one had. Further, the other components of birth pain seem to be more, not less, prevalent after religious “rebirth.” One feels “sinful,” “dirty,” and that others are “dirty,” “defiled,” “filthy,” “unwashed,” “toxic,” “impure,” and more. Again see upcoming chapters for details.

So it is not that religious experiences of being “reborn” are not legitimate and part of a psyche seeking healing and growth. It is that the experience is hung on to, looked back on; one is stuck in it. One says Christ will do it for one (He has died for one’s sins), so one does not have to experience the discomfort of facing these pains and discomforts from the womb oneself. The experience is institutionalized and never experienced again, though one surrounds oneself with true believers affirming the opposite, along with this idea that one does not have to suffer again…Christ has done it for one; or one can confess sins and the priest will take care of it…and so one is distracted from the discomfort that precedes any more growing or being born or transformed any further. As I like to say about such glancing experiences of real truth: Yes, it’s legit. But don’t make a fucking religion out of it.

Worst of all, the institution or social group takes over and restructures one’s self along the lines that will benefit it, not oneself, so one is not reborn into one’s real self but into an inauthentic fabrication benefiting some manipulative social group—Marines, evangelical group, secret society, ethnic group, or simply the normal adult neurosis of one’s culture.

5. As concerns creating the situations that bring up these early discomforts, as in unconsciously being drawn to create traffic jams, notice as I have, when you’re driving, how often folks will have two or more lines to go to, in traffic especially but sometimes in retail establishments as well, and will line up behind each other in one line, foregoing the empty ones. Not everybody does that; but explain the ones creating that line…what is driving them to act like lemmings and feel restrained when they could have it easier? This is not restricted to queues however, as we will see it is a metaphor for human irrationality rooted in these imprints.

Continue with Global Oxygen Loss, Fire, and Prenatal Oxygen Hunger: Why Humans Are So Big on Burning, So Reckless About Polluting … Why We’re Globally Suffocating Ourselves

Return to The Primal Screen: The Doors of Perception Stormed and The Perinatal Rising — A Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life

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This Is the Place Where Even Hard Core “Realists” Learn How Little They Know: A New Paradigm Emerging—Bridging the Barriers Between Species, Biological Transcendence

The Challenge to Know More: 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

Biologically Constituted Realities, Part Six

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.

Preface and Summary: 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 viewpoints 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.

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 comes from scientific as well as spiritual sources. It is often experientially based, though it is hardly just anecdotal since these reports are replicatable 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 formerly inexplicable data of events that have heretofore been beyond the views of our sciences and beyond our common sense materialism—our world of “brute facts,” which we have found are not incontestable at all but are only solidly true in relation to the fact that we are of the species of humans.

We have found that these new facts are not as biologically irrelevant as was assumed by us, 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. 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. This new revolutionary model is unveiled in more detail in this article.

A New Paradigm Emerging

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 scared 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 if we can find a way to look at that physical/biological (Newtonian-Cartesian) level from a deeper grounding in spiritual (or transpersonal) reality. In fact, the evidence from LSD research, some spiritual literature, and various aspects of “new age” phenomena that are washing up on the shore 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 may be 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 replicatable 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 of 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’s 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.

Stanislav Grof (1970, 1975, 1980, 1984, 1985, 1988a, 1988b; Grof and Grof 1980, 1989, 1990; Grof and Halifax 1977) is one such pioneer in this sort of “useless” research. 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. Additionally, Grof (1985) puts forth a model, a framework for a new paradigm. 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 existential facts, yet 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, and of 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; out of psychedelic, consciousness, and brain (especially brain waves) research; out of a decades-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.5 The purposes of this article do not here allow an elaboration of either the new evidence or the new paradigm that I have discussed.6 Suffice it to say 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.

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.

Continue with Why We Know Not and A Call to Know Instead: Beyond “Flat Earth” Materialism—Scientific Awakening Is as Crucial for Paradigm Shift as is the Social and Political Awakenings

Return to How We Might Come to Know: In Tossing Away Our Species Blinders, We Relearn That Consciousness Is Infinite, Yes … but Fantastic as Well.

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January 21, 2013 Posted by sillymickel | Activism, Anthropology, ecocide, Economics, Environment, globalrevolution, History, newearth, News, occupytogether, occupywallstreet, ows, Politics, taxtherich | branches of psychology, brute facts, climate, Consciousness, consciousness research, CULTURE, earth, environment, extinction, flat earth, God, history of the world, human, humans, life, matrix, new paradigm, new physics, planet, psychology, religion, science, species, spiritual sources, truth | Leave a Comment

Biologically Constituted Realities, Part Five – Paradigm Relativity and the Limitations of Science: Understanding Our Limitations, We Approach the Mystical

How We Might Come to Know: In Tossing Away Our Species Blinders, We Relearn That Consciousness Is Infinite, Yes … but Fantastic as Well.

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.

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, but also that it is Infinite, yes, but Fantastic as well.

Summary: 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 what it is to the snippet of it that we have found to be biologically useful.

But if we wish to know not merely what is practical but what is actually True or Reality, 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 down through what the individual knows to be true. So to know what is True, we need to reverse those reductions in true understanding.

We find that in doing this reversal, some startling things are revealed. For example, from the perspective of each greater awareness, each more limited perspective becomes understandable and the different ones of those perspectives can be compared. For example, it is difficult for one individual to truly understand another. However, 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.

But 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.

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 have to 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 means more than just that cultures can be compared in relation to biological realities like birth and death, for it is even 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. However, we see how non-absolute these 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 concept about liberty or happiness? Can we say that an amoeba or bacteria feels freedom or the lack of it.

It follows that to understand truth beyond our biologically constituted realities … to be able to get an idea of what reality might be 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. This is what science says it is attempting to do, but it actually does not. Because we have found out 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. 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 our doing with our planetmate consciousness … our Planetmate Views. It is what The Great Reveal is all about.

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 can’t. But 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. And trying to do that means starting with dropping the presupposition, the arrogance, that humans have a superior and more real understanding of Reality. And when we do that, simply that alone, we already find we have a much expanded understanding of what is really Real. 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 ability and an eagle a greater ability to see, and imagining what that would mean for us or keeping that in mind, we come to an appreciation of ourselves as a part of Nature, not a ruler of Nature; just as in our understandings of the realities-subjectivities-feelings of other humans led us to know that we are not rulers of other people; just as our understanding of other cultures have led us to know that one culture is not better, superior to, or more dominant over another.

The conclusions 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.

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. You say, no, our scientists aren’t assuming other beings of high consciousness would look like us. But you should know I mean that in our scientists saying what are the building blocks of life–water, and so on–they are showing a bias about “life” that it is something like what we know. Notice also that even the idea that a “higher” level of consciousness itself has its roots in this idea that a human consciousness is superior to other kinds we know of.

So these assumptions built into our science are laughable in their arrogance. 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 begin to understand 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 cannot call it “life”—which is, we see now, itself part of our limited species interpretation.

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.

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, but also that it is Infinite, yes, but Fantastic as well.

“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)

How We Might Come to Know

In light of what I said earlier concerning the underlying “biological” rationale for the “real-world” information that is the usual purview of our sciences, I emphasize this point of Huxley’s 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.

The Levels of Reality Construction

The point I am making is that we may profitably consider each level of reality construction—from the levels of biologically constituted realities down through the various levels of cultural constructions of reality—as levels in the diminution of reality (cf., Adzema, 1991). This focusing on the specifics to the exclusion of more wholistic perspectives may have more “biological” usefulness. But the point is that any scientific endeavor that would seek to be anything more than merely pragmatic (and actually venture after truth) must undo or reverse that diminution—must indeed be aware of the self-constructed nature of the creations with which it is normally concerned.

Paradigm Relativity

The upshot of all of this is that the elements (“particles”) 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 playing field of culture, we come to the conclusion of epistemological relativism—i.e., 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 of the physical or biological (i.e., standing on those “brute facts”), we see that discourse, transfer, and translation occur once again. [Footnote 4]

For this reason also, 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” (i.e., 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 be compared in relation to common species-specific factors.

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, science as being merely one more part of a culture and with no more claim to validity than any other view.

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 . . . the degree of scientific validity—from good ethnoscience to bad ethnoscience—being the number of experiential facts it includes and integrates. 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, i.e., more correct.

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 power. That is why, eventually if not immediately, more inclusive paradigms and their proponents attain dominance.

That is not to say, by the way, that new paradigms do always include all facts that old paradigms include . . . just that they often include “more” experiential—thus, “objectively” true—facts. As just one example, many Amerindians’ views included some “facts” that were excluded from the paradigms of those that superseded them.

Paradigm Clash, The Force Behind Evolution

But to continue, since persons holding more inclusive paradigms are more “powerful,” eventually if not immediately they are more likely to predominate 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 (i.e., 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’s 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, tranpersonalists, and others in the know—to point out the limitations and relativity of our species’s biologically constituted facts—those (not so) “brute facts” of Anscombe and D’Andrade.

Footnote

4. It is much the same as saying that it is when we share our feelings and personal experience (no coincidence that these are to a greater extent physical and biological than “mental”) that we have the greatest chance of sharing across individual or cultural boundaries.

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The Perinatal Unconscious Driving Our Humanicide: Human Birth Is Unique in Nature in Its Trauma and Its Role in Creating Our “Human Nature”

We Are a Fever, Part Five, The Perinatal Unconscious: Why We Are Committing Ecocide and Seeking Species Suicide

I believe that this prenatal area in particular is ripe for reaping what it can teach us about what is human, about “human nature.” While Stanislav Grof and Lloyd deMause have written on the implications and ramifications of birth on society, culture, history, and current events, not much has been said on the prenatal influences on our world, with the few exceptions mentioned in the overview in this chapter, especially David Wasdell. However, prenatal influences, especially those of the third trimester, are dealt with in considerable detail in this book, Wounded Deer and Centaurs. In upcoming works and one previous one, Falls from Grace, I discuss the influence of first trimester and sperm/egg and cellular events.

What I put forth in the current work is my understanding of how both these perinatal and prenatal events shed so much light on what that “human nature” is that is bringing about our environmental and global crises, which currently have a life and death urgency about them. I believe we need to understand these factors to survive. For I am convinced they are the forces that are strongest in shaping our present times and its events, creating an ever more discernible perinatal zeitgeist for postmodern times.

“Perinatal” = “Surrounding Birth”

“We Are a Fever”

Let us start with birth and its effects on shaping our current global crises. To do that we need to first look more deeply at what constitutes our perinatal influences.

So, how are we to characterize these strangest of days and the current unprecedented global condition? As I have said, they are driven by what I call an emerging perinatal unconscious. As The Kills sing it, most aptly, “We ain’t born typical.” [Footnote 1]

Perinatal Unconscious

Why perinatal? First, let us remind ourselves that perinatal means, literally, “surrounding birth.” As a one-time university instructor of pre- and perinatal psychology and as an editor of a professional journal concerned with perinatal psychology— as well as a psychohistorian, let me explain what might be considered elements of a perinatal unconscious. [Footnote 2]

Unconscious Matrices = “Human Nature”

The elements I will 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—dare I say the word—our “human nature.”

These perinatal elements have come to our understanding through the efforts of both the inner explorations of experiential pioneers into the perinatal, as well as the hard empirical work of pre- and perinatal researchers. I might also point out that I, myself, have forty years of experiential exploration into these perinatal elements, in addition to my scholarly work and research in this field. My experiences confirm, in my own mind, their absolute validity, as well as validating for myself the theoretical constructs put forth by others to describe and explain them.

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Pre- and Perinatal Psychology, Experiential Voyagers

Be that as it may, these perinatal elements of the unconscious have been described most thoroughly be three figures in particular: Stanislav Grof, Arthur Janov, and Lloyd deMause. It might help, also, to keep in mind that entire new fields of pre- and perinatal psychology, primal psychology, and to some extent, transpersonal psychology have grown up around the existence of these perinatal factors. Entire modalities of healing tap in to and are based on the existence of this perinatal unconscious, including primal therapy, holotropic breathwork, and rebirthing, to name just the few that I happen to be trained in. These unconscious perinatal elements have, at this point, been confirmed by thousands of researchers and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of experiential voyagers into the perinatal unconscious.

Elements of Birth Experience

Based upon all this, then, let us look at some of the elements, in general, that characterize this perinatal unconscious.

Perinatal Matrix ~ Societal Matrix

Stanislav Grof describes basic perinatal matrices (BPMs)—in other words, typical experiential constellations related to our births. These happen to be very much akin to deMause’s perinatal schema, with some slight differences in emphasis, and more elaboration on the part of Grof. So let us use Grof’s schema as a basis. [Footnote 3]

All Needs Met . . . With Luck – Matrix 1

Grof’s Basic Perinatal Matrix I, or BPM I, involves the experiences and feelings related to the sometimes, or at least relatively, undisturbed prenatal period. The prenatal period is that time in the womb sometimes characterized by feelings of peace, complete relaxation, and a feeling of all needs met, or “oceanic bliss.”

BPM I corresponds to deMause’s societal periods of “prosperity and progress,” which he claims are accompanied by feelings and fears of being “soft” and “feminine” — understandably here, for in BPM I, that is, prenatally, the fetus is largely identified with his or her mother and is very much “soft,” i.e., undefended.

Since the time in the womb may also be disturbed by toxic substances that the mother ingests—drugs, chemical additives, and so on—as well as by disturbing emotions that the mother experiences, which release stress hormones into the mother’s bloodstream, which then cross the placental barrier and affect the fetus, BPM I is also sometimes characterized as feelings of being surrounded by a polluted environment and being forced to ingest noxious substances, toxins, and poisons, which sickens the fetus.

No-Exit Despair – Matrix 2

In Grof’s schema, BPM I is followed by BPM II—that is, Basic Perinatal Matrix II—which are experiences and feelings related to the time of “no exit” in the womb and claustrophobic -like feelings occurring to nearly all humans in the late stages of pregnancy and especially with the onset of labor, when the cervix is not yet dilated. Since there does not seem to be any “light at the end of the tunnel”—metaphorically speaking—it is characterized by feelings of depression, guilt, despair, and blame, and a characterization of oneself as being in the position of “the victim.”

It is very much like DeMause’s period of collective feelings of entrapment, strangulation, suffocation, and poisonous placenta, which he has found to precede the actual outbreak of war or other violence. [Footnote 4]

Birth Wars – Matrix 3

This of course is followed by BPM III (Basic Perinatal Matrix III), which involves feelings and experiences of all-encompassing struggle and is related to the time of one’s actual birth. Characterized also by intense feelings of aggression and sexual excess—in the position, now, of “the aggressor”—it is related directly, in deMause’s schema, to a time of actual war.

Hallelujah! . . (I think. . . . ) – Matrix 4

Basic Perinatal Matrix IV (BPM IV) follows this. It corresponds to the time of emergence from the womb during the birth process and is characterized by feelings of victory, release, exultation.

But sometimes, that initial relief is followed by depression. For too often, and especially in current Western culture, the struggle of birth does not bring the expected rewards of reuniting with the mother and the comfort of nursing. Instead, during modern obstetrical births, the neonate is harshly treated and then taken away from the mother, disallowing the bonding which should occur, naturally, immediately after birth.

In my own experience, the exultation and relief of release was replaced suddenly by feelings of being assaulted by the attendants at my birth … which of course they thought of as “attending” to me … as they went about roughly removing mucous from my mouth; prematurely cutting my umbilical cord to leave me struggling for breath; scrubbing, weighing, measuring, and otherwise probing me; and wrapping me like a tamale and taking me away from all I had previously known … that is to say, my mother. This felt like ritual abuse to me, and I have often likened it, after the intense period of compression and crushing before birth, to a situation of “going from the frying pan into the fire.”

At any rate, this experience of actual emergence or birth coincides, societally, with deMause’s period of the ending of a war.

Heaven and Hell

In summary, we have euphoric, oceanic, blissful feelings, sometimes feelings of being poisoned or being in a toxic or polluted environment; followed by crushing, no-exit, depression, claustrophobia, compression, strangulation, suffocation, and being force-fed by a poisonous placenta; followed by struggle, violence, war scenarios, birth/death fantasies, sexual excess; 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 that characterize the experience of the perinatal unconscious.

For Dreaming Out Loud! Projecting the Perinatal Zeitgeist

In the next chapter, we will take a look at how these elements have erupted into our collective dreams in recent history. By this I mean, we will see how our artists and creative people have projected them into the media, movies, and TV–in which we all participate–and how our fascination with them, because these artists are reflecting things that exist deep inside of ourselves as well, has caused them to grow, creating the dominant underlying zeitgeist of our time.

Continue with Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Being Born … Playing Now, in Theaters Near You!

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Footnotes

1. Chapter titled with appreciation and admiration to The Kills for their recording, U R A Fever. The lyrics go, “I am a fever, you are a fever, we ain’t born typical….” and so on. The music video produced is similarly brilliant. Together, it is a production bordering on genius. The video contains levels of meaning that are only obvious on subsequent viewings. The video and its lyrics follow:

Lyrics – U.R.A. Fever – The Kills

Walk you to the counter
What do you got to offer
Pick you out a solder
Look at you forever

Walk you to the water
Your eyes like a casino
We ain’t born typical

Find a piece of silver
Pretty as a diagram
And go down to the Rio

Put it in my left hand
Put it in a fruit machine
Everyone’s a winner
Laughing like a seagull

You are a fever
You are a fever
You ain’t born typical

You are a fever
You are a fever
You ain’t born typical

Living in a suitcase
Meet a clown, fall in love
went down to have you over

Going ’round a break up
Take you to a jukebox
That’s the situation
Pick you out a number
And that’s our arrangement

Dancing on the legs of a new-born pony
Left right left right
Keep it up son

Go ahead and have her
Go ahead and leave her
You only ever had her
When you were a fever

I am a fever
I am a fever
I ain’t born typical

I am a fever
I am a fever
I ain’t born typical

We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical

We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical

We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical

We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical

2. In the Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Newsletter I was applauded for being the first person in the United States to teach the subject of pre- and perinatal psychology at the university level and—as it was said, remarkably—for doing it while still a student. I did this at Sonoma State University, in Rohnert Park, California, in the years 1994 and 1995, beginning while I was a graduate student there and continuing afterward.

My graduate thesis became the book, Falls From Grace: Spiritual and Philosophical Perspectives of Prenatal and Primal Experience, which is listed in Wikipedia as a reference under the topic of prenatal and perinatal psychology.

Subsequently, I became the editor of the professional journal, Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology, formerly published by the International Primal Association. Much of the contents of its issues were later posted to my website, Primal Spirit, where they can still be viewed.

I have had my writings published in The Journal of Psychohistory, including some that later became part of this book. In fact, I presented some of my original thinking on these matters at an Institute for Psychohistory Association convention, and those parts were also published in The Journal of Psychohistory under the title, “”The Scenery of Healing: Commentary On DeMause’s ‘Restaging Prenatal and Birth Trauma’s in War and Social Violence’”” 23/4, 395-405.

These are among my many credentials in this field of pre- and perinatal psychology, where I have studied and trained from 1972 till this day.

3. Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research. New York: Viking Press, 1975; LSD Psychotherapy. Pomona, CA: Hunter House, 1980; Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985; The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988; The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.

4. Lloyd deMause, “Restaging Early Traumas in War and Social Violence.” The Journal of Psychohistory 23 (1995): 344-391. (Reprinted, with permission, on the Primal Spirit website as “Restaging Prenatal and Birth Traumas in War and Social Violence“)

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December 13, 2012 Posted by sillymickel | Politics, Economics, History, News, Environment, Activism, occupywallstreet, globalrevolution, newearth, ecocide, Anthropology | apocalypse, birth, cellular events, centaurs, climate, Consciousness, CULTURE, current-events, death, die, environment, extinction, fear, fetus, global condition, global crises, health, hell, human, humans, life, matrix, nature, pain, perinatal, planet, postmodern times, prenatal, prenatal events, prenatal influences, present times, psychology, research, science, society, species, Stanislav Grof, trauma, truth, unconscious, war, womb, youtube | Leave a Comment

Biologically Constituted Realities, Part 4 — “Mind at Large” and The Awakening: Why Everything Appears Infinite when the Doors of Perception Are Cleansed

The Doors of Perception: Each of Us Is Potentially Mind At Large… When Perception Is Cleansed, All Kinds of Nonordinary Things Happen

Summary: Our combined efforts in psychology, physics, biology, and anthropology 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 . . . i.e., that we are incapable of truly knowing.

So, if we can’t know, why then bother to know anything? We seek to know because it is useful to our biological survival to know. 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.

Each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. 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. 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

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.”

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is … infinite.” – William Blake

Why We Seek to Know

Ordinary Reality is Useful

In view of all this, 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? Well, we bother to know because it is a helpful part of our species-specific worldview to do so. We have evolved, as nearly as we can determine, through a process of natural selection based on survival. We are, consequently, the endproduct 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.

Ordinary Science is Useful

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”), indeed, is extremely relevant 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 . . . that our refined as well as cruder perceptions of reality are bioculturally relative—even more biologically relative than they are culturally relative in Marshall Sahlins‘s allegedly extreme theory.

Though We Know Not

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 indicated in this article) 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 . . . i.e., that we are incapable of truly knowing.

In anthropology we see this in Sahlins’s (1976) thinking on culture. But D’Andrade makes the important point, as mentioned earlier, that in Sahlins’s theory the total cultural heritage is a symbolic structure. Thus, his theory is “epistemologically sealed.” 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” prior to the cultural symbolism that creates further obfuscation between people in different cultures.

Paradigm Relativity

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 biological configuration of spirit represents a separate paradigm for interpreting reality. [Footnote 3]

The Awakening … A New Paradigm Perspective

It might be helpful to mention 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, in which “the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative” (p. 22).

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. (pp. 22-23)

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. (p. 23)

When the Doors of Perception Are Cleansed, The Nonordinary Happens

Furthermore, 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” (p. 26).

Continue with How We Might Come to Know: In Tossing Away Our Species Blinders, We Relearn That Consciousness Is Infinite, Yes … but Fantastic as Well.

Return to We Are What We’ve Experienced and The Perinatal Paradigm: Our Conception, Gestation, and Birth Create Our Windows to the World

Footnote

3. 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; biases that are distinctly at odds with an essential point I have emphasized in this article 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 1991)

Continue with How We Might Come to Know: In Tossing Away Our Species Blinders, We Relearn That Consciousness Is Infinite, Yes … but Fantastic as Well.

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December 12, 2012 Posted by sillymickel | Activism, Anthropology, ecocide, Environment, globalrevolution, History, newearth, News, occupywallstreet, ows, Politics, taxtherich | aldous huxley, Consciousness, control, CULTURE, death, die, doors of perception, God, human, humans, life, nature, planet, psychology, reducing valve, religion, science, society, species, truth, unconscious, useless things, william blake, worldview | Leave a Comment

Our Reality Is Species Determined … The Relativity of Science: Biologically Constituted Realities, Part Two

We Can’t Know What We Can’t Know but We Cannot Unknow What We Are: Our Reality Is Species Determined and the Relativity of Science

Summary: What I’m saying in this part is that basically our sciences have shown they can not 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 real. 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.

We will see shortly that means that the way we come into the world—our conception, womb life, and birth—create the foundations upon which all are other perceptions are built, and these being unique to humans mean that humans will be the only species seeing the world exactly the way we do.

Further, 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.

“Ultimately our physics . . . is going to demonstrate that essentially there is no such thing as matter. All there is is mind and motion.” – Armand Labbe

Relativity of Science

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.

According to Zukav (1979), author of a widely read overview of the new physics, a major underpinning of modern physics is the realization and discovery that science cannot predict anything, as had been taken for granted, with absolute certainty. Relatedly, it 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” (Zukav, 1979, p. 30).

Zukav (1979) takes, 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 (pp. 30-31). That is the classic example, of course. The structure of the experiment, designed by the observer, determines what will be found.

What is this saying if not just what I have stated above: that we determine ultimately, because of our specific biology, what we sense; that we therein determine the “world” we experience.

In line with Anscombe’s (1958) terminology of “brute facts,” Searle (1969) claims a distinction between “brute facts” and “institutional facts.” D’Andrade (1984) explains,

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. (p. 92).

From what I have been saying, we can admit that these “brute facts” may not be culturally constituted as D’Andrade asserts, but they certainly are biologically constituted. They are species-specific facts—”brute” only in relation to our particular species.

Thus, the new-paradigm answer to the age-old philosophical question is clear: If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? 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. Similarly, the event that we perceive as sound-tree-and-forest-interacting may be “perceived” as something quite different with different and/or more kinds of “senses” or, one might say, from a different vantage point.

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; there are also biologically constituted realities. The “brute facts” to which D’Andrade refers are—nothing brute about them—biologically determined facts. Indeed, there are biologically determined facts, bioculturally determined facts, and culturally determined facts—all existing on a continuum.

So do we then, indeed, create our own reality culturally, of which Sahlins (1976) writes. Yes, I believe we do. But I believe we do much more than that. I believe we create it biologically too—that our reality is species determined.

Relativity: Cultural and Biological

So 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 the resulting extreme cultural relativism. As D’Andrade (1987) put it, Sahlins’s view is extreme enough that it undermines even science’s claim to validity (p. 5). 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 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. ( emphases mine, p. 6)

With this statement of D’Andrade, I enthusiastically agree also. I believe that there are “intrinsic” (biological) determiners of cultures, which create a basic underlying structure. Where I feel I take issue with D’Andrade is in contending that these “intrinsic” determiners are intrinsic to the species, not to the events themselves. 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 Armand Labbe (1991) put it at a Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness conference, “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 this biological “infrastructure” results in biocultural, species-specific, and hence transcultural patterns of thought and behavior. Further, these transcultural patterns create transcultural patterns of social structure, “external culture,” sociocultural behavior, and so on.

Continue with We Are What We’ve Experienced and The Perinatal Paradigm: Our Conception, Gestation, and Birth Create Our Windows to the World

Return to Creating Worlds: Biologically Constituted Realities, Part One

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December 7, 2012 Posted by sillymickel | Activism, Anthropology, ecocide, Environment, globalrevolution, newearth | Anscombe, anthropocentrism, anthropology, Armand Labbe, behavior, biological history, biologically constituted realities, biology, birth, brute facts, conception, Consciousness, cultural relativism, cultural relativity, culturally constituted realities, CULTURE, D’Andrade, death, die, earth, environment, event, experiment, fetus, history, human, human reality, humanity, humanness, humans, hunger, imperfection, knowledge, light, matrix, matter, mind, modern physics, motion, nature, new paradigm, observation, observed, observer, pain, particles, patterns, perception, perceptions, perinatal, philosophy, physics, planet, prenatal, psychology, real, reality, relativity, Sahlins, science, science summary, Searle, senses, social science, Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness, species, species relativity, species specific, symbolism, symbols, total heritage perspective, trauma, truth, ultimate reality, unconscious, validity, vatiable, wave, womb, world, Zukav | Leave a Comment

The Spiritual Quest, For Earth’s Sake! … “Sure It’s Hard! But Always Are We Here Helping You,” Part One

For Earth’s Sake, Get Real Already: “Sure It’s Hard! But Always Are We Here Helping You,” Part One

Summary of “Sure It’s Hard But Always Are We Here Helping You”: This details the spiritual experience I had in 1980 which set me on this path to help the planet and the planetmates. I was shown by certain entities the path of our devolution as a species, thousands of years ago, and was told that we need to turn this around immediately. I was told that there were many others at work right now doing the same thing, so I need never despair, at the immensity of the task. Most importantly, I was told that we are receiving help… always…in our efforts. I was led to believe that these higher powers, of which we are yet to know, are fully engaged in our endeavor on this planet and assisting us at every turn.

The Spiritual Quest, For Earth’s Sake!

If ritual is a substitute for real spiritual experience, what does real spiritual experience look like? What follows is an example of a spontaneous, unritualized spiritual experience. But first let me put it in its context.

We Must Do What Has Never Been Done Before.

It is no surprise that the anti-nuclear and environmental movements have joined forces with the spiritual/human potential ones. For as Ken Keyes (1982) points out in The Hundredth Monkey, the threat of nuclear disaster (we need also mention global environmental destruction) is a challenge to all of us . . . a challenge to go beyond the “us vs. them” kind of consciousness which has led us to the brink of catastrophe. As many of us know, we must raise our consciousness in a way that has not been demanded of humankind, as near as we can determine, on this planet ever before.

But Many of Us ARE Now Working to Get Beyond “Eye for an Eye” Thinking.

Now, many people have been working hard to do just that. Many of us have been working on ourselves to break free from those patterns of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” or, what it comes down to eventually, those patterns of “kill and be killed.” We’ve been doing it in many different ways.

As for myself, I have been involved in spiritual pursuits since 1968, especially meditation. As well, I have been intensively working on unraveling my negative patterns through the powerful experiential modalities of primal therapy, rebirthing, and holotropic breathwork beginning back in 1972. These, especially primal therapy, have been my ways of dealing with the particular negative conditioning into which I was “raised” and which keeps me stuck in behaviors and feelings that too often undermine my efforts to live a fully spiritual and loving life.

However, we all have our ways of trying to grow beyond that kind of negative programming. It is important to recognize that each of us is working in that same direction however we go about it. What I would like to share is an experience that happened to me while I was in the midst of trying to root out some of my conditioning. I believe that it may be helpful to others in their own struggling “heavenward.”

Sure It’s Hard

As most of us have come to realize who have been on this path for a while . . . who have been working at changing ourselves for a while . . . it is no easy task to change those very deep grids or programs. Rather, we discover that it requires a lot of work, dedication, and time.

The Task Is Immense for Our Point of Departure Is a Psychotic Culture.

The psychiatrist Theodore Isaac Rubin (1983), in his book on relationships titled One to One, points out that the divisive competitiveness and us-versus-them striving that we see predominating around us in Western culture is learned. He writes, “We compete, we fight wars, we are compulsively concerned about our hierarchical position relative to the next person, because we learn to be so through a psychotic culture passed on from one generation to the next” (p. 184).

The point is that this is where we are coming from. Our point of departure is a psychotic culture or, as Erich Fromm (1955) put it, an “insane society.” Many of us are trying to reverse this violent and crazy trend, but it is understandable that it would be hard to make a 180-degree turn in orientation — from aggression to peace, from competition to cooperation, from fear to love. Therefore, our culture is gradually coming to the realization that we are involved in a difficult process, and understandably so. Our culture is starting to realize the immensity of the task we are undertaking in trying to change our inherited and deleterious patterns.

“To Think That It Is Easy Is Probably To Be an Impostor.”

For example, Herb Goldberg (1983), a psychologist, points out in his book, The New Male-Female Relationship, especially in his section on “Transitions,” that to think that it is easy is probably to be an impostor (p. 134). He asserts that the people who are really making the changes in male-female relationships and becoming fuller human beings, you can expect, are struggling to do so . . . that it is a difficult process and takes time. In fact, Goldberg discusses at length his contention that real growth takes a lot of time and struggle, whereas “pseudo-growth” is the only kind of growing that occurs “overnight” and easily. (pp. 134-141)

So not only does it take time, but we discover that it is hardly ever pleasurable. What most of us have discovered is that the path to bliss leads sometimes through despair and hopelessness. As Hesse (1965) described it in Demian: the bird, in pecking his way out of his shell, must destroy a world before discovering a new one. No, it is not often pleasant to confront some of the darkest things within ourselves, as we must do if we are not to continually project them onto others and onto the world around us.

Continue with A Cosmic Slap: I Was Told “Once There Lived “Noble” Beings” and Now Is the Time for a Regeneration of Peoples to Regain What We Lost.

Return to Wounded Healers, Heroes, and the Group Mind: The Universe Bears Up and Rewards with Renewed Life Those who Voluntarily Sacrifice Themselves for All

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November 3, 2012 Posted by sillymickel | Activism, Anthropology, ecocide, Environment, globalrevolution, History, newearth, News, occupytogether, occupywallstreet, ows, Politics, taxtherich | aggression, angels, anti nuclear, apocalypse, assistance, authenticity, birth, bliss, catastrophe, climate, competition, conditioning, Consciousness, cooperation, cosmos, crazy, CULTURE, current-events, death, demian, despair, devolution, die, difficultry, dream, earth, ecocide, entities, environment, Erich Fromm, experience, experiential modalities, extinction, fear, fukushima, generations, grids, growth, health, hell, Herb Goldberg, Hermann Hesse, higher power, holotropic breathwork, hopelessness, human, human rights, humanicide, humanity, humans, humanticide, Hundredth Monkey, imposter, insanity, Isaac Rubin, Ken Keyes, life, love, matrix, movement, negative material, nuclear, nuclear disaster, occupy wall street, One to One, ows, pain, patterns, peace, perinatal, philosophy, planet, planetmates, politics, prenatal, primal therapy, process, programming, pseudo growth, psychologists, psychology, psychosis, realization, relationships, religion, Republicans, science, society, species, spiritual, spiritual quest, spirituality, task, The Hundredth Monkey, The New Male-Female Relationship, The Sane Society, transitions, trauma, truth, unconscious, unritualized, vision, war, Western culture | Leave a Comment

Birth Wars ~ World Woes: Our Global Crises Are Manifesting Our Unfaced Painful Experiences

Birth Wars ~ World Woes: Life or Death Matters We Need to Face to Survive

“Hellacious Birth Traumas Making Headlines Worldwide!” Film at Eleven

Perinatal and Global Situation Mirroring Each Other

We Interrupt This Book for a Breaking News Bulletin: “Hellacious Birth Traumas Making Headlines Worldwide!” Film at Eleven.

The connections between the physical conditions and symbols discussed in previous chapters and the perinatal unconscious should be obvious and may have already to some extent been spelled out. But let me finish connecting the dots, so to speak:

As Stanislav Grof put it,

[W]e have exteriorized in the modern world many of the essential themes of the perinatal processes that a person involved in deep personal transformation has to face and come to terms with internally. The same elements that we would encounter in the process of psychological death and rebirth in our visionary experiences make today our evening news. This is particularly true in regard to the phenomena that characterize what I call BPM III.

We certainly see the enormous unleashing of the aggressive impulse in the many wars and revolutionary upheavals in the world, in the rising criminality, terrorism, and racial riots. Sexual experiences and behaviors are taking unprecedented forms, as manifested in sexual freedom of youngsters, promiscuity, open marriages, overtly sexual books, plays, and movies, gay liberation, sadomasochistic experimentation, and many others. The demonic element is also becoming increasingly manifest in the modern world.

A renaissance of satanic cults and witchcraft, the popularity of books and horror movies with occult themes, and crimes with satanic motivations attest to that fact. The scatological dimension is evident in the progressive industrial pollution, accumulation of waste products on a global scale, and rapidly deteriorating hygienic conditions in large cities [Footnote 1]

Grof is saying, then, that we have manifested an external modern world that mirrors and re-creates some of the hellacious circumstances surrounding our traumatic human births.

No-exit Car Jams and People Clusters

In addition to the myriad of ways that Grof has detailed…and there are many more he could have mentioned…I would like to add a few obvious commonplace examples.

We re-create on a daily basis in major cities the no-exit frustration-depression-rage prior to birth in the traffic jams and gridlock of commuter traffic.

Another one: the population explosion. Simple overpopulation of the globe sets up scenarios exactly analogous to the negative conditions that existed toward the end of pregnancy when we grew/expanded too much to be any longer comfortable in the womb. The way this global overpopulation impacts us: the overpopulation and frenzy in a big city, manifesting the situation of a crushing womb.

Global “Therapeutic” Carbon-Dioxide Chamber

I have already mentioned reduced oxygen in the atmosphere and its relation to fetal “malnutrition.”

However, there is an interesting sidelight to this. For both Arthur Janov and Stanislav Grof, at one time early on, experimented with a technique of carbon dioxide ingestion for getting people into primal and perinatal states. In fact, at the time—in the late Sixties, early Seventies—though not on a large scale, a number of professionals were experimenting with this procedure and even offering it as a means of “expanding consciousness.”

The point is that increased carbon dioxide and decreased oxygen naturally stimulate perinatal feelings. Lucky us, as we continue to turn the entire atmosphere of the Earth into such a “therapeutic” carbon-dioxide chamber.

“Don’t Cut Me OFF, Man!”

After all this, if you still do not believe that a perinatal unconscious is emerging at this time in history, I ask you how else to explain how the simple act of being “cut off” in traffic can trigger so much perinatal “no exit” frustration as to enrage an “otherwise normal” person to pull out a gun and blow another’s life away. Incidentally, I myself had a shotgun pulled on me in such a situation and only escaped through a high-speed car chase.

Birth Wars ~ World Woes

The upshot of it all is that somehow or other we have managed to create a world situation that mirrors in a way unlike any other time in history our perinatal imprints and thus triggers the emergence of this perinatal unconscious.

Or, you might reverse that and say that an emerging perinatal unconscious—brought about by other factors, improved “child-caring” methods perhaps…more about that later—has resulted in our creating a world situation manifesting or acting out those unconscious perinatal elements, which are having increasing influence on our consciousness and on our behavior.

I suspect both of these processes are occurring—each one augmenting the other.

Can You Look Your Belly in the Face?

Noticing Our Underbellies … What It Is That’s Happening Here

Noticing Our Underbellies

Let me make this latter scenario clearer. What I am saying is that we all have birth trauma and we must distance ourselves from this birth trauma so that we can function. If the birth trauma is extreme, or if subsequent child-caring is abusive and neglectful [Footnote 2]—as is the case in any of the “less enlightened” of deMause’s psychogenic modes of child-rearing [Footnote 3]—or both, then complete splitting, repression of the perinatal, and dissociation from the perinatal occurs. Thus a person can project his or her perinatal unconscious onto the world and be completely unaware that it has anything to do with him- or herself.

Can You Look Your Belly in the Face?

However, with more humane child-caring modes—deMause’s latest psychogenic mode, for example [Footnote 3]—less repression, and less defenses, are necessary and total dissociation does not occur. In this situation, the perinatal is not completely projected onto the outside world. We have more access to it, hence we act it out and manifest it in lesser ways, which reflect back to us, for the times when we are able to see them, our perinatal underbellies.

On the one hand, the world is becoming increasingly perinatal and thus is stimulating more of the perinatal unconscious than previously. On the other hand, we have more access to and are closer to our perinatal unconscious so that we exhibit it more blatantly in our behavior and cultural creations and thus stimulate, again, in ourselves and others, the underlying perinatal matrices.

This is a chicken-and-the-egg process. And I suspect, in the same way, that these processes are going on simultaneously and hence augment each other.

Life or Death Matters

In Chapter Six, “Strange Days,” we entertained the notion that the reason things seem so much different nowadays than anytime we can imagine from the past is because they are different. We have looked at how the character and events of our age are remarkably like the feelings and events surrounding our births and, unfortunately: traumatic births, traumatic times! Lastly, we have considered a few reasons…more coming…as to why these times might be uniquely imbued with our perinatal events.

“Waiter, Check!”

Still, the biggest questions lie begging: What does this all mean for us? Is it the “end of the world,” really, like some are claiming? Or are we seeing the “dawning of a new age”? (Now why is it that I cannot restrain the strains of the group The Fifth Dimension, in full orchestration no less, intoning in my mind the song “The Age of Aquarius” as I write this!?)

What Can You Me Do?

These are not unimportant questions. And they have all the implications of life or death, again indicative of the perinatal, about them.

Will we live? Will we survive? Or are we doomed? Kinda important to think about, don’t you agree?

And if it is within our power to decide our fate, well, just what the hell are we going to do about it? What can be done about our situation? What can each of us—you…me—do?

What It Is That’s Happening Here

We will begin addressing these questions in “Part Two: What It Is That’s Happening Here,” beginning with the next chapter. There are some processes of change in these times—processes of change unlike any that we normally encounter—that will weigh heavily on the outcome of the current emerging perinatal unconscious. These include not only the concepts and processes of the healing crisis—or as stipulated in the next chapter, “Getting Sick in Order to Be Well“—but also that of macrocosmic processes beyond our human scope, as will be explained in “Chapter Twelve: Through Gaia’s Eyes, Nature Balances HerSelf.”

Apocalypse, Or Earth Rebirth?

Finally, having considered the perinatal nature of our times in Part One, The Perinatal Unconscious (Chapters Seven, Eight, and Nine), and then the corresponding unique processes at work in these times in Part Two, What It Is That Is Happening Here (Chapters Ten, Eleven, and Twelve), we can look at some likely propensities for our future (Chapters Thirteen thru Eighteen). Considering what we know at that time, we will see that there are also some directions in which to look for a solution. We will then be able to look deeper, daring to ask: Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth?

But next we need to consider how in order to save ourselves we need to bring to the surface all the rotten ugliness of perinatal trauma that for millennia our species has been keeping inside.

Continue with Apocalypse No! Chapter Eleven:
Healing Crisis – Getting “Sick” To Be Well

Return to Apocalypse No! Chapter Nine: Twenty-First Century Life – Table of DisContents

Footnotes

1. Stanislav Grof, “Planetary Survival and Consciousness Evolution: Psychological Roots of Human Violence and Greed.” Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology 2(1): 3-26, p. 23. Article reprinted, with permission, on Primal Spirit site.

2. See Solter, Aletha, (1996), “Tears For Trauma: Birth Trauma, Crying, and Child Abuse” on Primal Spirit website on how birth trauma sometimes contributes to and/or triggers child abuse.

3. For an at-hand description of DeMause’s psychogenic modes click on “The History of Childhood As The History of Child Abuse” for deMause’s article on Primal Spirit.

Continue with Apocalypse No! Chapter Eleven:
Healing Crisis – Getting “Sick” To Be Well

Return to Apocalypse No! Chapter Nine: Twenty-First Century Life – Table of DisContents

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September 20, 2012 Posted by sillymickel | Activism, Anthropology, ecocide, Economics, Environment, globalrevolution, History, newearth, News, occupytogether, occupywallstreet, ows, Politics, taxtherich | 60s, abuse, access, agression, anthropology, apocalypse, Arthur Janov, basic perinatal matrices, basic perinatal matrix, behavior, birth, birth trauma, birth traumas, BPM, bpm III, car, carbon, carbon dioxid, carbon dioxide, chamber, child care, child-caring, city, climate, commuter, Consciousness, consciousness expansion, CULTURE, current-events, death, death and rebirth, DeMause, depression, die, dioxide, dissociation, earth, emerge, environment, expanding, extinction, fate, feelings, fetal, fetal malnutrition, fetus, freedom, fukushima, gaia, gestation, global, global crises, globe, gridlock, Grof, healing crisis, health, hell, hellacious, history, human, human births, humane, humans, imprint, industrial pollution, jam, Janov, life, Lloyd Demause, macrocosmos, malnutrition, matrices, matrix, millennia, modern, modern times, nature, neglect, New Age, no-exit, nuclear, overpopulation, ows, oxygen, pain, people, perinatal, planet, population explosion, postmodern, pre-, pregnancy, prenatal, primal, process, projection, psychogenic, psychogenic mode, psychogenic phase, psychological, psychology, racial riots, rage, rebirth, repress, revolution, revolutionary upheavals, road, satanic, satanic cults, scenario, science, Seventies, sixties, society, species, split, Stanislav Grof, strange days, symbol, times, traffic, traffic jam, transformation, trauma, unconscious, underbelly, vision, visionary, visionary experiences, war, womb, world | Leave a Comment

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About SillyMickel

“Don’t mind me, folks. Just thought I’d try taking my head out of the sand for a while and see if anything new is going on. ‘Let ya know if anything’s up.”

Writer, independent scholar, primal therapist, breathwork facilitator, & political activist. Expertise: fields of Pre- and Perinatal Psychology; Primal Psychology; Humanistic Psychology; Cross-cultural Religious Practices & Rituals; Great World Religions & Theologies; Spirituality; Altered States of Consciousness Research; Asian, especially Indian Religious Philosophy and Culture; Politics; Sixties Politics, Culture, Movements, and People. Journeyman scholar: fields of Economics, Anthropology, Psychological Anthropology: Environmental Studies.

Things I’m proud of: Being one of the group of people who worked to bring nuclear power to a halt, in Springfield, Oregon, early 80s, and succeeded. My reasons: the apocalyptic dangers of nuclear energy. My part: going door-to-door every night for a few years in Springfield and towns up and down the Willamette Valley educating people about the dangers of nuclear and the financial scandal of the WPPPS plants. How it was done: Enough grass roots pressure was brought to bear. The organization I worked for, Oregon Fair Share, discovered Springfield law that stipulated that its citizens could not be indebted/taxed over a certain % without a vote of the people; there had been no vote; the costs overruns of WPPS would have led to indebtedness of approx. $8,000 per household throughout the Northwest – just to “mothball” the plants. This led to a lawsuit. Current US Congressmen Representative Peter deFazio became involved and helped in the lawsuit, which was taken on, pro bono, by an attorney, whose name I’ve forgotten. We won, creating the largest bond default in U.S. history. Other municipalities followed suit. Nuclear power was shown up to be the financial gravy train for investors and the financial ripoff for consumers that it is. No applications to build a plant were filed after that.

Other things I’m proud of: all of my writings; any way I’ve helped clients in therapy; any way I’ve helped students when I taught at the university; my websites and blogs, the fact that I was a hippie and a young radical and antiwar activist in the Sixties; the fact that I lived during the incredible Sixties and got to experience and get bitten by the idealism and global visionary bug, which I hold fast, to the this day; and the fact that I was the perfect age to understand and experience it – in my late teens and early twenties; the fact that I had the sense and courage to do thorough primal therapy in Denver during the years 1975-1980; my wife, Mary Lynn, my stepson, Peter, my brothers and sisters, my nieces and nephews, in particular, still growing up, Timothy; and especially my Godchildren, JoAnn, Tyler, and still growing up, eleven year old, smart, athletic, and amazingly for her age, sensitive and loving, Elizabeth.

I’m also proud of my ability to be silly as hell without caring, to be madcap, to make people laugh, to be rational, to wake people up, to be comedic, to be able to write more wisely than I have any realization of knowing, to notice the person left out in a group and to include that person, to care about the suffering of people I don’t know, as well as those I do, and to feel their pain, to care about the plight of our planetmates, the other beings on this planet who don’t have to resort to rarely effective language in order to communicate, to be able to forgive, to be tolerant, to be non-judgmental about what people do that doesn’t effect others, and to be able to be on any person’s level – from child to working stiff to university prof to corporate cog – and to hear, understand, and share with them in their language.

The most fun I’ve had: playing with nephew, Timothy, and Goddaughter, Elizabeth, and being in their world and playing with them and sharing with them my ability to make up wild outlandish fantasies of reality that we’d laugh and play around with, at the same time giving them the support, love, role model, advice, and acceptance of the adult I am; also the “work” I did with the developmentally delayed and emotionally disturbed, where I found that they had more ability to share in laughter and to be funny and clever, and to be loving, than most “normal” people – child or adult.

Another thing I’m proud of: Learning through the work above that everyone, no matter their level of intelligence or their emotional problems, are beautiful sparks of divinity with bits of genius, and certainly unique wonderful qualities, that make them delightful to be with.

My main mission in life: Searching for truth in world of Lies, Liars; wanting to help as we kill the planet, all of us, all our children, grandchildren, and all the planetmates, all the beings, of which God made millions of species, who have lived and had a home on this planet until only lately, the planet-killing half-borns, the species, Homo Sapiens, evolved, to the extreme detriment of the millions of other planetmates.

Damn good example of why you should get references, ALWAYS, before allowing anyone to move in.

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Elephants in the Room. Got Truth?

Ritual As Shadow Experience, Part Five: What Real and Unritualized Spiritual Experience Looks Like — An Example of Primal Spirituality

An Example of Primal Spirituality — Unritualized Spiritual Experience

Don’t Try This at Home?

Part One: Video of Actual Primal Re-Experience of the Moments after Birth

Continue with Love’s Comforting Surround and the Beauty of It All Behind the Pain: Ritual As Shadow Experience, Part Six, and What Real Spiritual Experience Looks Like

Return to Ritual As Shadow, Part Four: Ritual Is Hardly Transformation … In Actuality, We “Die” to Our Real Self and Are Remade Into Something Society Can Use

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Ritual As Shadow, Part Four: Ritual Is Hardly Transformation … In Actuality, We “Die” to Our Real Self and Are Remade Into Something Society Can Use

Ritual As Addiction to “Pretend Experience”

Dream of 14 November 1991:

Continue with Ritual As Shadow Experience, Part Five: What Real and Unritualized Spiritual Experience Looks Like — An Example of Primal Spirituality

Return to The Second Retreat from the Natural Self — Patriarchal Culture: One Gains the World in Exact Proportion to Which a Man Has Relinquished his Soul

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Four Earliest Roots of War, Bigotry, Capitalism, and Pollution: Blueprints of Human Nature and Prenatal Personalities … Profound Sculpting of Who We Are Occurs at a Time We Cannot See

Wounded Deer and Centaurs, Chapter Four: Prenatal Imprints of Our Unnatural Self

The Perinatal Pulls of Pollution: Air Pollution and Fetal Oxygen Starvation

Increased Carbon Dioxide, But Also Decreased Oxygen

Air Pollution Bring Up in Us Uncomfortable Feelings From Our Births

The Perinatal Pushes on Human Nature

Bipedalism Causes Birth Pain

Birth Pain Makes Humans Out of Planetmates

Four Blueprints of Human Consciousness Are Written in the Womb

These Aspects of Late Gestation Pain—Crowded, Gasping, Poisoned, Dirty —Are Important Molds For Human Nature, Which Scientists Have Heretofore Naively Labeled Genetic

Four Blueprints of “Human Nature”

Crowded … “Back Off!”

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

Disgusted… Poisoned … “Don’t Feed Me That Bullcrap!”

Irritated… Dirty … “Eeew!”

Roots of War, Bigotry, Pollution….

Crowdedness, Packed Together “Like Sardines”

Can’t Move Freely – “Back Off!”…Cast Out of Heaven, Driven Out of Eden

Reactions – Swimming, Dancing, Mosh Pits, Religious Fantasy

Politically, As Nations – Wars of “Expansion”

Environmentally – “We Paved Paradise; Put Up a Parking Lot”

Next: Our Repetitive Struggles to “Breathe Free”

“Please, Sir, Might I Have Some More?”—The Psychological and Economic Repercussions of Fetal Malnutrition

Oxygen Starvation

We Feel Recurrently Pressured, Overwhelmed, and Panicked

The Struggles We Create to “Breathe Free”

Gasping

The Oliver Twist Economies We Insist On…”Please, Sir, May I Have Some More?”

Prenatal Feudalism

Prenatal Capitalism

Prenatal Socialism

We’re the Ones Who Block a Return to Eden

Coming Up, Why We Steal Fire

Continue with Global Oxygen Loss, Fire, and Prenatal Oxygen Hunger: Why Humans Are So Big on Burning, So Reckless About Polluting … Why We’re Globally Suffocating Ourselves

Return to The Primal Screen: The Doors of Perception Stormed and The Perinatal Rising — A Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life

Footnotes

Continue with Global Oxygen Loss, Fire, and Prenatal Oxygen Hunger: Why Humans Are So Big on Burning, So Reckless About Polluting … Why We’re Globally Suffocating Ourselves

Return to The Primal Screen: The Doors of Perception Stormed and The Perinatal Rising — A Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life

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The Challenge to Know More: 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

Biologically Constituted Realities, Part Six

A New Paradigm Emerging

Continue with Why We Know Not and A Call to Know Instead: Beyond “Flat Earth” Materialism—Scientific Awakening Is as Crucial for Paradigm Shift as is the Social and Political Awakenings

Return to How We Might Come to Know: In Tossing Away Our Species Blinders, We Relearn That Consciousness Is Infinite, Yes … but Fantastic as Well.

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How We Might Come to Know: In Tossing Away Our Species Blinders, We Relearn That Consciousness Is Infinite, Yes … but Fantastic as Well.

How We Might Come to Know

The Levels of Reality Construction

Paradigm Relativity

Usefulness and Limitations of Science

Levels of Usefulness, Paradigm Comparisons

Paradigm Clash, The Force Behind Evolution

A Challenge to Know More

Footnote

Continue with The Challenge to Know More: 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

Return to The Doors of Perception: Each of Us Is Potentially Mind At Large… When Perception Is Cleansed, All Kinds of Nonordinary Things Happen

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We Are a Fever, Part Five, The Perinatal Unconscious: Why We Are Committing Ecocide and Seeking Species Suicide

“Perinatal” = “Surrounding Birth”

“We Are a Fever”

Perinatal Unconscious