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APOCALYPSE – NO! Page 19 …pushed our connection with Nature and the Universe into unconscious memory. There is a plethora of more recent films rife with perinatal elements: Notable are the Matrix series, “Total Recall,” the Star War series, “Dark City,” “The Lathe of Heaven,” the Alien series, “The Tree of Life,” “Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls,” the Batman series, the Hannibal Lector series, “Suckerpunch,” and the Star Trek series. There are too many more to mention. In addition to its prevalence in science fiction movies, it is replete in the symbolism of horror movies. When you understand this symbolism, you find it saturates the silver screen, popular television, music video and imagery, and the electronic media and arts.
Thus, oxygen insufficiency, or oxygen “malnutrition,” for the prenate, or “fetus” is what Briend was bringing to our awareness. Elsewhere, I have pointed out, bringing in research from anthropology and related fields, how this fetal malnutrition is a product of our standing upright, becoming bipedal.5 I have explained how this is the major difference between humans and all other planetmates. Humans are the ones who suffer. Homo sapiens is the traumatized species ... the one with birth pain. Thus, it is the neurotic one. At birth and before, we experience pain unparalleled in the world of Nature and other species. This vast difference is metaphorically represented by the story in Genesis, wherein we are cast out of the Garden ... no longer to enjoy and benefit from the… “...the major difference between humans and all other planetmates [is] humans are the ones who suffer. Homo sapiens is the traumatized species ... the one with birth pain. Thus, it is the neurotic one ... we experience pain unparalleled in ... Nature.... This is metaphorically represented in Genesis, wherein we are cast out of the Garden.” WOMB WITH A VIEW — THE PRENATAL AND PERINATAL UNCONSCIOUS Page 46
FUNNY GOD Page 48 …world, to leave the world a better place — are most often embodied in easier to do and indirect modes of participation, with no real commitment on one’s part. Rather than stand up for injustice, one gives money to the starving in Africa. Rather than put oneself on the line for the planet as the Greenpeace, Earth First, and environmental activists do, one might sponsor a middle schooler in an Earth Day 3k, driving one’s car to get her there. One can support litter pickup and recycling or expound on the social media about the stupidity of others in not saving the planet, while gathering up one’s throwaways in polyethylene bags. One can claim to be making the world a safer place, while slaughtering innocents in far off lands under the direction of wealthy overseers. For the outer world and its horror ... handle with tongs, only. You Just Can’t Slay a Volcano But what may seem to work at the second-line or psychodynamic level — the conquering or slaying of negative feelings ... and notice that I said “seem” — has no place at all at the perinatal ... or, in the case of the world, at the actual. For here, in terms of one’s feelings, the pain energy is overwhelming and pervasive, more than can be dealt with…
But it logically follows that there is a limit to which gestation can be allowed to go on without itself becoming an economic disadvantage to the female — certainly the proposed gestation period of two years — twenty-one months to be exact — for full precociousness at the level we see in nonhuman primates would be a substantial economic hardship on the female. Thus it would be selected against, in evolutionary terms. Furthermore, increasing bipedalism was always at work against the larger pelvis. A narrower pelvis aided ambulation. Better abilities for running and darting about most definitely were survival ad- vantages. In particular, a mother having her arms free so as be able to carry her infant, while dashing away from a danger, would assist in natural selection toward bipedalism. A mother being able to run with an infant, as opposed to having the infant in the womb at that time, would no doubt also have contributed to survival. Thus there were pushes on natural selection in the direction of increasing bipedalism and decreasing durations of pregnancy. In any case, the demands of survival worked against such a long gestation of even twelve months. Homonin females would have fared poorly by being inhibited this long from foraging and other activities important for survival. They would have died off. THE SECOND DESCENT — BIRTH TRAUMA Page 15
Take Down the Walls of Prejudice ... Between Species I have heard it said that if we want to find nobility, Nature is hardly the place to look. To support that, it was noted that chimps have been known to murder each other and to war with other troops of chimps; that ants, monkeys, and flocks of crows engage in war. It was pointed out that cows engage in female-female mounting during estrus and chickens rape; that new lions murder all the cubs of their vanquished rivals and “elephant seals roar and batter away at each other like inebriated laborers.” So the assertion was made that animals are the wrong place to look for honor. Preface Page xv
— well, primal folks were often left in that liminal state. Having cleared their old selves from consideration, they lacked the spiritual or transpersonal insight or vision around which to build a newer better person. This might also have been due to the fact that Janov’s prescribed route of primal therapy eliminated, even ridiculed, transpersonal or spiritual experience. As I was saying above, it required my reconceptualization of Janov’s theory, as presented in my writing, for some to have the Primal framework that acknowledged their transpersonal experiences and supported them in going forward into them. What some of us, outside of Janov’s institute, discovered was that it was only when one accessed deeper experiences that were positive ... and it did require one to continue the process until those more positive experiences were accessed ... that one could have a basis for building a better life and making better decisions. Thus, this phase of the primal process amounted to “the second part of The Cure,” as I termed it.5 Keep in mind how this relates to the Veils. For as we peel away the overlying layers of obfuscation of truth, as we undo the blocking of Reality that the reducing-valve of the brain brings about, it is the early templates that provide better foundations for the choices one makes and the patterns of lifeway and life experience one can create. At any rate, along with these grids I proposed a revision to the… PROLOGUE: PRIMAL PSYCHOLOGY, FARTHER REACHES OF EXPERIENCE Page 34
Consciousness, Begrudgingly Conceded You will notice a pattern in our acknowledgment of consciousness as existing in the world outside of ourselves — the nonhuman world: Consciousness outside of humans is a gradual and reluctant acknowledgement throughout Western history. Rooted as it is in medieval Christian notions of dominion over Nature and of humans as being uniquely endowed with souls, science is not the least guilty here. Indeed, its crimes in this regard are epic. The denial of consciousness in planetmates, which is embedded in science from its Newtonian beginnings, is the basis for our modern ability to thingify all of Nature as resources and items of consumption; thus allowing the torture and abuse of all planetmates to our ends — as food, as ingredients in manufactured items, as brutally treated and bloodily used test subjects, and worse. Pseudo-scientific notions regarding relative levels of consciousness in humans has supported the Nazi holocaust and slavery, as well; just as faux religious notions of the diminished status of females and the nonhuman world of Nature… PREFACE Page xv
“...when the Veils across perception are pulled to the side, everything appears as it is ... infinite.” “Our earliest experiences form, they create, our prejudices about Reality. So what would we see, what Reality would reveal itself, with those constraints lifted from our eyes?” In this Book Three of The Path of Ecstasy Series, I continue the exploration of the screens of distortion across human perception begun in Book One, The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy, and Book Two, Dance of the Seven Veils I: Primal/Identity Psychology, Mythology,… PREFACE. A DANCE OF THE SEVEN VEILS Page xix
6. FIFTIES GENERATION, MARIJUANA, AND CAFFEINE Page 89 “The Sixties Generation — also called the Vietnam Generation and the Baby-Boomers — would make a complete break with the dominant culture. They would create a counterculture. They would redefine everything; they would seek to start everything over again, in view of the corruption and conformity they discovered all around them in the form of the establishment.”
“One is not just better off being who one most is in potential; the Infinite opera of the All That Is demands it of us; it is the sweetest and most perfect symphony of all when one adds one’s unique contribution to it. Without your part, the harmony of the Universe is less for it.” What does one do in a postmodern, complex, multicultural world in which the options are so numerous and enticing as to paralyze one’s actions? How does one live a good life, a fulfilling life? What actions,.. THE CRISIS OF HUMANITY AND THE NEW HERO’S AND HEROINE’S CYCLE Page xi
“The most important revelation of this new ecopsychology made possible by the twin factors of a collapsing environment and an advanced form of child-caring, in the last fifty years, creating the sanest generations to date is that the opposite of insanity is not normality ... at all! The only sane response in an apocalypse emergency — a situation analogous to one’s house on fire — is activism!” “The only sane response to an emergency is activism ... and the sanest response is heroism.” Theodore Roszak, in his seminal work, The Voice of the Earth, introduced the civilized world to the term ecopsychology. INTRODUCTION. ON SANITY, INSANITY, AND ECOPSYCHOLOGY Page 1
I. APOCALYPSE AND INSANITY Page 26 Nuclear Radiation, Nuclear Power, and Humanicide If you have a problem with the notion that it is all life that is at risk, as most people do and do not want to know otherwise, remember that, first off, virtually no life can live in an environment of radiation. As I pointed out, the tardigrades, those microscopic “water bears,” are the only known biological beings who are able to survive radioactive habitats. They not only survive inside the radiation of volcanos but can live in the cold and irradiated vacuum of space. No doubt this was the stimulus for the recent (2016) episode of Star Trek: Discovery which had one particularly large, cow-sized tardigrade surviving while floating in space. With tardigrades’ unique resiliency, they might actually be the forebears of any life forms who survive the apocalypse we are bringing down on all other life on Earth. Being as how they can survive space, it might be some evolved version of them, not us, who makes it to explore the stars. I have this amazing vision of tardigrade descendants moving and maneuvering in space like we do in water. As bizarre as that sounds, an episode of the television show Vice dealt with tardigrades being extraterrestrial. The point is that it is only such a unique and rare, possibly extraterrestrial type of organism that could survive what we are bringing down upon ourselves. As for the rest of life on Earth, no dice.
“...the materialism the Fifties Generation members were nurtured in after World War II — as a reaction to the fear and uncertainties their parents had because of the Depression, the war, and The Bomb — would be replicated in their children.” 8. CASTLES IN THE SKY ... COCAINE AND BOOZE Page 113
“...there must be something awry in humanity to have brought about the end of life on Earth.... And for us to be blithely going about our days as if nothing is going on.” I wish now to advance just one aspect of our problem. You’ll see what I mean. This one alone ends our species, brings down life on this planet.... It is one, only, of several other extinction-level events that have already occurred. This has to do with the increasing nuclear radioactivity of the Earth. 3. CRISIS WITHOUT END Page 25
8. CASTLES IN THE SKY ... COCAINE AND BOOZE Page 113 “The Fifties Generation have kept themselves as invisible as possible but running things from behind the screen, since they took over conservatism and greed from the WWII Generation and upped the ante. Witness the Koch Brothers — Charles and David Koch, born 1935 and 1940 respectively — both of whom are Fifties Gen members. Indeed, Fifties Generation members values manifest today in the difference between traditional Republicans — those called RINOs (Republicans in name only) by MAGAts — and the MAGAts or Trumpers themselves. These RINOs are folks like the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Mitch McConnell, Ron Paul, and John McCain. They have been the ones behind the curtain — old-school Republicans, who have more of a World-War II Gen mindset. “Whereas nearly all the folks fighting them and wanting to be even more reactionary and fascistic are the MAGAts/Trumpers, the reckless ‘wacky wabbits’ of the Gen X/Yuppie/13th Generation. These include Trumpian MAGAts like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan, and Josh Hawley. These latter have more of a Yuppie/Gen X mindset in being irrational, reactionary, and sarcastically obstructionist.”
“...there must be something awry in humanity to have brought about the end of life on Earth.... And for us to be blithely going about our days as if nothing is going on.” I wish now to advance just one aspect of our problem. You’ll see what I mean. This one alone ends our species, brings down life on this planet.... It is one, only, of several other extinction-level events that have already occurred. This has to do with the increasing nuclear radioactivity of the Earth. 3. CRISIS WITHOUT END Page 25
8. CASTLES IN THE SKY ... COCAINE AND BOOZE Page 113 “The Fifties Generation have kept themselves as invisible as possible but running things from behind the screen, since they took over conservatism and greed from the WWII Generation and upped the ante. Witness the Koch Brothers — Charles and David Koch, born 1935 and 1940 respectively — both of whom are Fifties Gen members. Indeed, Fifties Generation members values manifest today in the difference between traditional Republicans — those called RINOs (Republicans in name only) by MAGAts — and the MAGAts or Trumpers themselves. These RINOs are folks like the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Mitch McConnell, Ron Paul, and John McCain. They have been the ones behind the curtain — old-school Republicans, who have more of a World-War II Gen mindset. “Whereas nearly all the folks fighting them and wanting to be even more reactionary and fascistic are the MAGAts/Trumpers, the reckless ‘wacky wabbits’ of the Gen X/Yuppie/13th Generation. These include Trumpian MAGAts like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan, and Josh Hawley. These latter have more of a Yuppie/Gen X mindset in being irrational, reactionary, and sarcastically obstructionist.”
PROLOGUE: PRIMAL PSYCHOLOGY, FARTHER REACHES OF EXPERIENCE Page 60 …compete with the near perfection of an in-womb biological attention to needs as happens to other species. As well, the time in the womb — even though shorter than we would need for comparable, to other species, development at birth of our bigger brain — is still one of excruciating pain due to the extra crowdedness coming as a result of a bipedal mother. For the human mother, standing, compresses the fetus more than a primate mother whose posture, being on all fours, allows the fetus to hang loosely below it. Add that to the fact that a bigger brain itself is taking up space in the womb and contributing to fetal compression. Finally, what results is that in the third trimester of gestation and especially when the mother is standing, the prenate’s weight bears down and compresses the arteries and veins of the mother bringing nutrients and oxygen. The fetus is thereby deprived of sufficient oxygen and suffers for that. Imagine a situation of being in a stuffy room for a time that seems endless and from which one cannot leave for three months. Reading that statement in itself might have you short of breath right now. These factors in the third trimester, including placental insufficiency, extreme compression, and hypoxia (low oxygen) — which is a consequence of both the insufficiency and the compression — create a set of peculiarly human experiences prenatally, which I term the prenatal matrices of human evil, the PMEs.
Yet this is exactly the arrogance that prevails in all of our sciences. When we imagine other beings in our Universe, as we do in some of our arts, we anthropocentrically assume they would have human features, with only slight variations, with senses similar to ours and perceiving the exact same world, and that they would have evolved in some manner parallel to the way we did on Earth. That is forgivable in our arts and cinema, as in Star Trek and Star Wars, as they are not claiming to be science. But what is damning and is embedded within and constraining the purview of our sciences is this assumption that the Universe as we have come to know it through our science, with its space, time, stars, Big Bang, galaxies, dimensions, planets, and so on, is the Universe in some ultimate way outside of our humanly limited perception. What? You don’t think so? You think the cosmos we measure with our humanly-created technology and perceive with our human, our limited, senses, is pretty much like the one that exists outside our perception of it? That our perceived and arrived-at cosmos is the Cosmos? No doubt you think it has to be. You have never questioned it. I. BEING SHIVA — DESTROYING AND CREATING WORLDS Page 16
VEIL FOUR. PERINATAL SHOCK ... BIRTH TRAUMA Page 6 …researchers in particular: These are Stanislav Grof, Arthur Janov, and Lloyd deMause. I call on the findings of all three researchers in constructing my theories. You might recall my referencing Lloyd deMause’s work already: I touched upon the aspect of our development he brings to light — fetal malnutrition and hypoxia — several times in this work. That would be in Dance of the Seven Veils I. You will see how, soon, we go more deeply into those ideas. Elsewhere I pointed out, bringing in research from anthropology and related fields, how this fetal malnutrition is a product of our standing upright — becoming bipedal — for that affected the configuration of our pelvic bones; thus, it affected a mother’s ability to give birth. This I did in my works, Planetmates: The Great Reveal, and Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness, both released in 2014. More recently, I detail this in my book, Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man (2016). I explain in these places how this fetal distress, the result of bipedalism, is the major difference between humans and all other planetmates. Humans are the ones who suffer. Homo sapiens is the traumatized species ... the one with birth pain and fetal malnutrition. Thus, it is the neurotic one. Are you beginning to see how we might be the deluded one? The suicidal one, even?
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