[Note: The following is based on my notes taken at a continuing education seminar in Everett, WA on May 19, 2016, resented by Dr. Angelo Pezzote.]

Chronic Stress

The human body is not designed for chronic stress, which is ubiquitous in our culture and throughout the world. All levels of society are affected. Chronic stress damages the brain and is implicated in all causes of death. Chronic stress kills.

There are many contributors to chronic stress. Only one in five Americans exercise enough to overcome the buildup of stress toxicity. Four in five Americans are not sleeping enough. There is little or no brain protection for the chronic stress effects of red wheat, bad fats, sugar, salt, and fast foods in the American diet. Eight out of ten Americans are addicted to various things that contribute to chronic stress. Almost all stress factors are treated with medications when the root causes are life-style behavior. Medications induce their own degree of stress, addiction and contributing factors to over-all chronic stress. Addiction to the Internet in its various forms is causing additional chronic stress overload. Brain studies show that the Internet “lights” up the emotional control centers and dampen the rational brain centers. This is a perfect storm for addiction and addictive stress and it is getting worse over time. This is particularly damaging for the child’s and the teen-age brain. Children and teenagers whose brains do not fully mature until age twenty will suffer permanent brain injury and increasing susceptibility to chronic stress in the future. The brain centers underlying addiction processes do not habituate. There is no “off” button.

Chronic stress leads to dysfunction of the immune system which produces increasing degrees of inflammation, and this leads to disease in all its various forms.

In the US, one in five children is molested. One in four is beaten by a parent or parents. One in four are addicted to alcohol and other drugs. One in three adult couples engages in physical violence. More than 70% of adults are suffering from some form of untreated trauma. We are not a “trauma conscious” country. Inner experience is avoided and deadened by the use of drugs and alcohol and other addictions (including work addiction). There is no education in schools or in the health care system for how to become resilient in relation to stress and trauma.

There is little or no place in the biomedical model for the healing effect of touch.

There is almost no awareness or knowledge of how to work with transgendered individuals. More than 20% suffer severe trauma from harassment, 2% are assaulted in doctor’s offices and hospitals, and 41% attempt suicide.

The Childhood Adversity Scale shows that how children are treated and raised (from trauma to diet) is the number one health issue. A score of 4 or more on this scale in childhood is the most accurate predictor of early death from all causes. Nothing is being done about this at all. Childhood stress is a major contributor to later susceptibility to illness and disease.

In general, medicines are useless in relation to treating causes.

In studies comparing straightforward “objective’ treatment and treatment where the doctor expresses kindness and compassion, the kindness-compassion group showed a drop in primary care visits by 35% over the next year compared to the objective group. When the doctors show real care and concern for the patient, the patient responds better by 80% than in the “objective” group in relation to prescribed treatments. This illustrates that a major factor in treatment response is the patient’s experience and belief factors—not the medications themselves.

The health care system is lessening the degree to which doctors can be involved in compassionate care and thus disabling a major health benefit. This is one reason why results of health care are worsening while costs are increasing.

Doctors must begin to learn what is important and crucial to the patient and not just fill in computer forms.

Mediterranean diet continues to show the best health benefits of all diets.

Relaxation response is the most effective personal device one can use against stress aside from turning off stressors themselves.

Do not let computer reality replace reality itself. There is no substitute for person-to-person conversation, eye-to-eye contract and touch. The brain responds differently to reality than virtual reality.

I recently attended a seminar focused on recent research and developments related to inflammation, chronic illness and the brain. This information is so important, I wanted to share it with all members of the blog. Part two of this post will be posted later.

Health Care

Dr. Pezzote began the seminar by saying that it is urgent and necessary to put “care” back into the health-care system. Since the advent of the well-intentioned HIPPA mandates for electronic medical data, an unintended consequence has been a decline in the quality of care. Routinely, doctors will be eye-to-eye with their computer screen while talking with the patient. Recent studies are showing that this is degrading patient care. Patients report increasing frustration with doctors and “the system.” Treatment outcomes are more negative. There is an increase in misdiagnosis. The doctor-patient dyad has become fragmented by demands dictated by regulations (HIPPA) and decisions by others (insurance). Medical error is now the third leading cause of death and accounts for more than 10% of all deaths.[2]

Recent studies show that when the doctor interacts face-to-face and eye-to-eye with patients, patients will do better, be diagnosed with less error, and these better outcomes will persist over time. Dr. Pezzote encouraged everyone to insist on being related to in a direct manner by all health care providers.

The Central Importance of Inflammation

Inflammation underlies all chronic illness. However, medical treatment, including the use of drugs, focuses on symptoms resulting from inflammation rather than on treating the causes of inflammation itself. The causes of inflammation involve some degree of exhaustion, malfunction, or breakdown in the immune system. It is the immune system which must be restored to health and kept functioning at optimal levels. Much of modern life works to compromise the immune system. Restoration of the immune system is more an issue of life-style than medical interventions. However, much of what can be done to improve the integrity of the immune system generates little or no profit. In our “profit-first culture,” there is little incentive for promoting what would be most beneficial.

Life expectancy in the United States is 79 years, yet the US ranks only 34^th in the world, while spending the most money on health care and being inefficient to an extreme degree. In contrast to other countries, little or no money is spent in the US on prevention, life-style, meaning and the integration of body-mind-spirit—all factors that have profound effects on inflammation through promoting health and integrity of the immune system.

The US health care system is geared toward profits. There is self-interest in the whole system at all levels for maximizing profit. This is characteristic of all aspects of the culture, not just the health care system. There is much more money to be made from treating the symptoms of illness, than caring for the integrity and vitality of the immune system, most of which can be done in non-medical ways and “for free.” One might say that the health care system in the US is dangerous to your health and well-being. Studies show that 40% of all medical treatments are a result of treatment, through error and factors unrelated to the initial reasons for treatment.

In the United States, seven of the top ten causes of death are due to inflammation-based chronic illness. Twenty percent of all deaths are attributed to inflammation caused by smoking. Twenty percent of all deaths are caused directly by inflammation produced by fat cells resulting from obesity. Obesity is implicated as a factor in seventy percent of all deaths. The obesity epidemic is out of control.

Since 1999, the rate of suicide has increased dramatically. While inflammation is not causally linked to suicide, studies now show that with the rise of the Internet, social media, and economic stress, depression is increasing—despite massive use of anti-depressants. Pain- killer drugs and other drugs are being used as a way to reduce the emotional pain associated with all illness and life difficulties. Alcohol use in relation to this increases the degree of inflammation resulting from all these various factors. Opioid addiction is out of control and is involved in more deaths than guns and automobiles combined.

Stress as a Major Factor in Immune System Risk

Stress is increasing at all levels in our culture and the inflammatory consequences are severe. The emotional pain resulting from stress (just as important as any physical pain) leads to chronic illness via inflammation resulting from the effects of the hormone cortisol. Chronic high levels of cortisol can damage all organ systems, including the brain.

As stress increases, unintended accidents increase. Much of this results from anger that gets out of control, expressing itself in violence, risky behavior, and overdose. The harm to children and domestic partners is extreme and the incidence is rising exponentially. Abuse of various kinds is epidemic.

Stress is promoting addictions at all levels: work, food, drugs, sex, internet, cell phones, TV. The contents and marketing to consumers is directed toward increasing addiction. Nearly 40% of all internet traffic is pornography. People are living to work, rather than working to live. The corporate profit structure contributes to this problem in many ways that are hidden from view and without accountability.

The military provides a good example of the difficulties in dealing with problems. Eighty-seven percent of military personnel report some degree of emotional distress. An equal percentage believes that getting help will ruin their career. As the emotional pain escalates, suicides increase. More military personnel die of suicides than die in battle. Yet, little or nothing is being done about this. Sexual trauma in the military is another result of these pressures. More than 50% of reported rapes are male-male, with 92% of the perpetrators being officers. Only 3% are prosecuted. Of the victims, most are discharged dishonorably, or demoted in rank. Only 15% of reported rapes are against women, but it is estimated that this number is vastly underreported. Rape is mostly an expression of male rage and power and not sexual in nature, though acted out sexually. A third of PTSD cases result from how people are treated in the military rather than from battle-related experiences.

Placebo as Natural Healing Process

For approval, FDA requires only two studies showing stronger results for a drug than for a placebo control. Many studies may be done that do not yield positive results. Once a drug is approved, the FDA sequesters the non-confirming studies in their archives, which remain secret. Some of these studies have been released by court order. In comparing all studies, the effectiveness of the approved drugs has an edge of only 51% to 49%. Considering the alarming side effects of many drugs and the escalating costs, it appears that effective placebo conditions may be a healthy and less expensive alternative than the prescribed drugs. The reason for this is that placebo conditions tend to recruit the body’s natural healing mechanisms, while the prescription medication shifts “belief” to the drug and away from the body itself. It is clear that financial considerations are a primary driver of how drugs get approved and how they get used. There is no money to be made from placebo treatment.

An Interesting Case

Studies show that Ketamine in low doses is having profound effects on severe depression with just a few treatments and with no side effects and no addictive consequences. Insurance will not pay, even though the cost is very low in comparison with anti-depressants. Some special Ketamine clinics are being set up to make this treatment available with safeguards and low cost. Even the American Psychiatric Association cannot ignore these results and has set up a task force on Ketamine use as a treatment for severe depression. Drug companies are rushing to “take over” this use of Ketamine as are other profiteers. Beware of Ketamine scams which are proliferating. Ketamine is a street drug and date-rape drug as well. It is known as “Special K.”

The Key Role of Dental and Oral Health

It is now clear that a primary source of infection that can impact cardiovascular and other systems (including the brain) is the breakdown in the health of teeth, gums and the oral cavity. Poor health and obesity in children is now seen as resulting from poor dental practices and infrequent dental examinations and cleaning. (Most children and adults in poverty cannot obtain good dental care and do not have good habits of self-care. This begins a process of the breakdown of the immune system from early age and insures the development of chronic health problems.) Based on research findings, the recommended protocol for good oral hygiene is to brush upon awakening, brush after each meal, brush before sleep, use a power flosser at least twice a day, and have the teeth cleaned and oral cavity examined by a dental hygienist a minimum of three times a year. The degree of compliance with this protocol is estimated to be 10% at best for the whole population. Insuring proper dental health would reduce overall health care costs by billions of dollars. Much of this can be accomplished by adequate life-style changes involving diet and following the recommended protocol.

[My notes from the second half of the seminar have gone missing. I’ll complete this post when I have found them.]

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[1]Notes from a seminar presented by Dr. Angelo Pezzote, Everett WA, May 20, 2016. Dr. Pezzote’s website is available at http://www.doctorangelo.com/SpringAhead.en.html The material summarized here is for educational purposes only and is not intended nor to be construed as medical advice. Consult your health care provider for any questions.

[2]According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

Coming soon:

Inflammation, Chronic Illness and the Brain. I’ll report on an advanced seminar I recently attended involving the latest research in these areas.

Five Keys for the Future of Dreams. What will be necessary if dreams are to inform our collective fate in the coming time.

John Woodcock has recently reviewed an important film and he has graciously given me permission to share it with you. For access to John’s many published articles and books, log into his website at:

http://www.lighthousedownunder.com

THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY: A Review by John Woodcock

I’ll begin with the official synopsis.

In the tradition of The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything and A Beautiful Mind, The Man Who Knew Infinity leaps straight from the history books to the big screen to deliver an amazing true tale about the genius of one man. The story of self-taught mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan teaches us not only a story of numbers, but one of determination, passion, spirituality and the power of love & friendship. Driven by his destiny for a greater calling, Ramanujan’s life was turned upside down when Cambridge professor, G.H. Hardy discovered his talents and plucked him from obscurity in his homeland of India. The pair would go on to become unlikely friends and make up one of history’s most bewildering and productive collaborations. As mathematicians they worked on the most complex problems known to man and much of Ramanujan’s work is still relevant in math and science today.

A self-taught mathematical genius! What kind of “teaching” could this be? When Ramanujan finally reveals his secret to his Cambridge collaborator, Hardy could not believe it, and refused to believe it, being a dedicated atheist. Can any modern person believe it? Ramanujan said he received the formulas complete, from the goddess, claiming “to dream of blood drops that symbolized her male consort, Narasimha, after which he would receive visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.” His long-time English colleague Hardy put it this way:

they (the formulae) were "arrived at by a process of mingled argument, intuition, and induction, of which he was entirely unable to give any coherent account." He (Hardy) also stated that he had "never met his equal, and can compare him only with Euler or Jacobi." (Wikipedia)

He simply spoke what the goddess told him. He had gaps in his knowledge of the various methods of mathematical proof developed laboriously in the West, and yet could deliver solutions to the most complex pure mathematical problems in the world. Hardy knew that, as brilliant as his Indian colleague surely was, nobody would accept his formulae unless he could prove them to the satisfaction of the skeptical (and envious) mathematical community at Cambridge. Hardy therefore set about teaching Ramanujan how to prove his formulae in the traditional way and so they collaborated until his work was acknowledged and he was accepted as a Fellow of Trinity College at Cambridge.

This review is not another celebration of genius, however. While seeing the movie I apperceived a “background” movement as reflected in the “text” of the movie, one that speaks to an urgent issue of our modern times. So while I will be using the language of the art form, I want to simultaneously say what spoke to me through the vehicle of the art form, i.e., this remarkable movie.

Hardy lamely describes the core of the phenomenon of Ramanujan’s genius as inspiration mingled with argument and induction, lacking any coherent account. Yet Ramanujan’s account is perfectly coherent when understood from within its terms, i.e. as a thought of god. Accompanying this self-presentational thought is a mood of devotion, surrender and humility, and a non-acquisitional attitude which we could call gratitude. Ramanujan spent many years from about the age of ten learning the language of mathematics and this work prepared him (with the appropriate concepts) to become an adequate vessel for the “inspirational” message from the goddess, in the form of 3 complete formulae that were independently verified by others subsequently. Ramanujan’s cultural practice of devotion to the goddess could not be understood let alone received by the Cambridge dons. He was forced to learn their accepted cultural practice, which is rooted in skepticism and the principle of falsifiability. There is a ruthless aspect to this kind of “testing the claims to knowledge,” even a sadistic pleasure, in seeking not merely to falsify but to destroy Ramanujan’s impertinent, unproven claims. This was portrayed so well in the movie. As a result of the onslaught of unmitigated attacks, Ramanujan’s health began to fail. Although medical reasons were found for his early death at 32 years old, the fact that Ramanujan was uprooted from his own culture, separated from his child-bride, and forced to assimilate uncompromisingly to another, alien cultural practice that had nothing to do with love, submission, humility and gratitude—these facts are enough for me to conclude that Ramanujan was, in fact, killed.

A vessel for Love is killed off! No one is to blame. It is a matter of privileged cultural practices! Love and innocence are a deadly combination today, in a world ruled by Power. Ramanujan was inducted, if you like, into a modern culture that says, in effect: Oh, you think you can bring Love innocently into our world. Well, let’s show you what happens! And he was shown—envy, greed, exploitation, power, resentment, downright hatred was all presented to this Innocent. Hardy, his only friend there at Cambridge had no idea of the human catastrophe in the making. His response to the attacks was to show Ramanujan how to toughen up: learn how to prove your results. They will listen to you. I will make them listen to you. He is right, of course, but he could not see the human price of such a demand. Ramanujan’s results were greedily appropriated to the Western “Cause” (e.g. his formulae are being used to study Black Holes today) but nobody seems to have noticed the dead body, or to care how it got that way.

The speed with which the gift of Love seeking entry in the world today is appropriated by Power and/or destroyed by Hatred is breath-taking. Yes, we have the gold but the vessel has gone missing. Too bad, let’s just go on with what we have and use it for our own purposes. No one asks if the goddess has another purpose in mind i.e. other than exploitation by humans, for their own purposes, in so gifting this young man Ramanujan with her exquisite formulae.

Does Love have another purpose in seeking incarnation through the human vessel?

We can get a clue from this profound movie. In one scene of his early life, Ramanujan describes his relationship to his inspirations. His passion and engagement with mathematics lay in a love of Form. Now, as it happens, I studied and taught mathematics and I know this kind of love. I could do algebra easily because it was never a matter of calculation but a matter of recognizing form. For example, I could “see” the binomial form appearing from within the most complex arrangements of symbols.

It is beautiful!

Ramanujan could perceive this beauty of the mathematical world on a scale that only Euler and Jacobi could match. Beauty is Love made visible in the phenomenal world, in this case, the world of mathematics. Suppose the goddess, or as we might say today, the other, wished to enter Creation through the vehicle of Ramanujan’s psyche. He wanted only to serve and so Love was able to emerge as Beauty in his chosen cultural practice of mathematics.

But what happens when this innocent Love seeks to enter the modern material world 4 as represented by Cambridge? It collides almost immediately with Power and its institutional interests. Ramanujan met this force with no defenses, and was destroyed by it. The level of hatred aimed at him and his “methodology” was portrayed in all its menace and destructive power. The damage went to his body and he died a year or so after becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society, at age 32.

You might say that Beauty was ravaged where a being of love might have been created. Can you imagine what might have happened if Ramanujan had been received with human love and understanding and allowed to become the spokesman of Love that he truly was? He could have initiated hundreds of students into the discipline of mathematics as a form of Love incarnate in the world, displayed carnally as the real person, Ramanujan! Hardy loved mathematics too, but his love was decidedly disincarnate. He lived in a world of Platonic Forms, an ideal world that preempted the human world of appearance and error. So, for example, he could not relate to Ramanujan as a human individual. He barely noticed that Ramanujan was seriously ill and failed to notice entirely that British racists had beaten him up, leaving bruises over his face. There is a split in Hardy’s kind of love. It is the split between a preferred ideal or perfect world of mathematical form opposed to a devalued world of appearance now ruled by Power that can treat people brutally, without feeling. This split in the West killed Ramanujan.

What is the background movement that is “shining” through the text of this movie? Love is seeking incarnation into material existence. This “innocent” love does not know about the loveless, power driven conditions of material existence today, even though this existence is Love’s creation. Keats put it exquisitely when he asked, and answered, the question, why this world of suffering or vale of tears: “Call the world if you please ‘the vale of soul making’ then you will find out the use of the world … Sparks of the Divinity are not souls until each one is personally itself” (abridged). For him, the world and its suffering and death is the agency that brings the pure and innocent intelligence into full incarnation as the transformed individual, who is now able to speak for Love in the real world, even as it is today, so driven by Power’s purposes. Ramanujan was crushed by this real world. Yes, his formulae remain, abstract idealized things of beauty, to be used as tools by others, gladly. But the human vessel was destroyed and so Love could not complete its descent into a personal soul identity, i.e., the individual Ramanujan, as Keats says.

We lost a living incarnation of Love in the realm of mathematics and only a living incarnation can initiate others into the realm of Love in a personal, human way, so that actual humans begin treat one another lovingly, valorizing beauty over efficiency and utility in the pursuit of their chosen cultural practice, while at the same time being well equipped to deal with the machinations of Power in this world.

 

What if we could peek inside our brains and see our dreams — or even shape them? Studying memory-specific brain cells, neuroscientist (and ex-hacker) Moran Cerf, found that our sleeping brains retain some of the content we encounter when we're awake and that our dreams can influence our waking actions. Where could this lead us?[1]

Moran Cerf’s TED talk can be accessed here:

http://www.ted.com/talks/moran_cerf_this_scientist_can_hack_your_dreams

Advances in technology are enabling neuroscientists to interact with the brain on a cellular level making possible the mapping of the brain’s response to specific stimuli. Conversely, the brain’s behavioral output on a cellular level can be learned by computer. Feeding this learning back into the brain’s cells enables the computer to “control” the dream. A simple example is a patient suffering from war-related PTSD triggered by the sounds of war in his dreams. The methodology makes possible overlaying the dream sounds with pleasant stimuli. When awake, the anxiety formerly aroused by the dream is reduced and over time may be eliminated entirely. As Cerf says, “Neuroscientists are now giving us a new tool to control our dreams, a new canvas that flickers to life when we fall asleep.”

Note that Cerf says this tool is being given to “us.” So, what are we to do with such a tool and all that the further development of such a tool implies?

Before responding to that question, I want to bring in another development. Major technology CEOs and others are investing heavily in the “next big thing,” which is virtual reality (VR) in its various forms. VR is an immersive technology which “creates” a three-dimensional world that one is immersed in. Programming content for VR will be unlimited. While the impact of VR on the brain is only beginning to be studied, it is already clear that immersive experience has a sizeable effect on reducing pain. The exact neural nature of this effect is not yet clear, but the phenomenon itself is what is prompting huge financial investment. Chronic pain can be relieved by immersive experience in VR.

Now imagine, if you will, computer programming of immersive experience while dreaming. One might say that dreams are already immersive and from the perspective of consciousness, a kind of virtual reality itself. But these ideas are not accurate because consciousness is missing. We already know about lucid dreaming where consciousness is present while dreaming. The new technologies promise that computer-controlled dreaming would make possible “being there” as well.

Ultimately what is being promised is the replacement of what we now call “real” experience with programmed virtual experience.

All of this, and more, is coming about with exponential speed.

In his book, The American Replacement of Nature: The Everyday Acts and Outrageous Evolution of Economic Life,[2] William Irwin Thompson argues that we are in a time where “history is replaced with movies, education is replaced with entertainment and nature is replaced with technology.”

As I noted in an earlier blog post, we are now deep into the robotic replacement of humans. One step along the way, will be the robotic replacement of dreams and as this unfolds dreams will be monetized. You will soon be able to buy the dreams you want. Or, as advertising becomes ever more successful, you will want to buy what others want you to dream.[3]

Be ready!

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[1] From advertisement for Moran Cerf’s TED talk. Filmed February 2016.

[2] William Irwin Thompson. The American Replacement of Nature: The Everyday Acts and Outrageous Evolution of Economic Life. New York: Doubleday, 1991.

[3] Russell Arthur Lockhart. Commodification of Desire. In progress.

Samuel Beckett's absurdist play, Waiting for Godot, was voted the most significant play of the twentieth century. Over the years, I have read the play several times, but I had never seen a production. With my mind full of reflections, considerations and dreams relating to the Sixth Extinction, my Ragnarök poem, as well as the contemporary geo-political climate, I decided to watch the play.

I do not wish to add to the endless commentary and critique of this work,[1] but I do recommend that you watch this play. A good version of it is available at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wifcyo64n-w

Try to forget analyzing, interpreting, or even understanding the play. None of that is the point of absurdist art in any event. Instead, attend to what rises up spontaneously in you: thoughts, feelings, memories, images, emotions, impulses, dreams. The play is psychoactive, and that is the point.[2]

I must admit that my favorite genre of art and literature is absurdist in nature, as well as its many related and ancillary forms.

By what I have said already, you can presume that I do not favor traditional analysis (of any sort), but I do favor focusing on what is engendered spontaneously on an individual basis. Like a dream, such responses may appear “absurd.” This, of course, is why they take a back seat to more “rational” approaches. What faces us in the coming “collapse of everything” (the fact of collapse) is not absurd.[3] But I must admit to my haunting sense that the conscious collective responses to the collapse can be considered absurd at almost all levels and in all directions.

Rather than falling into nihilism, or paralyses of one sort or another, I experience the abundance of absurdity at the present time as an opportunity to develop a more radical individual effort in response. So what does one do from this perspective?

Waiting for Godot is, without doubt, expressing a demand for what Keats called “negative capability.”[4] Instead, almost all contemporary commentary and critique expresses that “irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Underlying this irritability is fear, and most especially the fear of the “unknown.” Most people have the same response to a dream—preferring to embrace the known (interpretations, analyses, understandings) rather than stay with the tensions of uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts until these tensions give birth spontaneously and autonomously to something hitherto unknown—most particularly, the future.[5]

Thus, one thing “to do” while waiting, is to perfect the art of negative capability, to learn to dwell there, whether one is confronting a dream, political turmoil, or ecological disaster.[6] Heidegger, more than anyone, has given us a veritable instruction manual in achieving dwelling amid the din of conflicting “choruses of certainty”[7] ripping at the very fabric of culture and civilization.[8]

The first necessity in developing the art of negative capability is to “take time.” One must go slowly, withdraw from the frenzy, and tend to what is “presented” from the interior. Immersion in the fast and frenzied distractions of collectivity destroys the possibility of dwelling.

Another help in achieving dwelling is to simplify. We are all doing too much, have too many things to deal with, our plates are too full, our information diet too seductive, our feelings of responsibility too heavy. In my lectures in 1982, which became the book Psyche Speaks in 1987, I wrote the following:

The phrase “I have no time” in its various forms has become so common, such a carrier in all aspects of our life, it is perhaps time that we began to listen to what we are literally saying: we have no time. We live under the triple burden of speed, surface, and survival. We are so busy surviving the pressures of modern life that we haven’t the time to go beneath the surface, and we speed from one thing or person to another. Recall again what Wordsworth said when he saw this coming: “The world is too much with us.” [9]

I wrote that paragraph thirty-four years ago! Before the Internet, before smart phones, before everything and everyone was “connected.” All this connectedness has not increased the reality of eros in our time. Even more so now, it is the absence and poverty of eros that is so striking in almost all departments of the human enterprise. It is well to remember the mythological stories (as stories): Chaos is mother of Eros in one version, Poverty is mother of Eros in another. As I said in those lectures, the ubiquity of chaos and poverty gives us some basis for expectation of seeing the birth of Eros in our time, as Æ called for in his Pilgrim of Eternity, as Merezhovsky called for in his Third Testament of the Holy Ghost, as Freud called for Eros to come battle with Thanatos, as Jung called for in the Coming Guest.

As one simplifies, one also turns more local. Less dependence on the far-away leads as well to more human-to-human contact as distinct from virtual contact. This is turn leads to small as distinct from the many and big. Facebook is not a substitute for face-to-face, nor book-in-hand. As dwelling with negative capability increases with taking time, being-with locally, simplifying, manifesting what comes from such dwelling becomes ever more possible. What is born from negative capability is creative in ways not imagined before. This is partly true because deep dwelling in the spirit of negative capability gives one access to the deeper portals of imagination. This becomes the true immunization against viral mimetics which are serving the robotization of humans and maximizing malignant narcissism. These powerful factors increase inequality and must eventually lead to an inevitable conflict with those more immersed in “realities” of poverty, exclusion and devaluation.

The monetization of robotizing humans, the malignant narcissism that increasingly underlies celebrity and advertising, and the centrifugal pull on everyone to participate, sets the stage for its own collapse, its own demise. To substitute these things for a meaningful life is absurd.

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[1] There is a veritable industry of commentary and critique in relation to this play: hundreds of books, thousands of articles, and untold numbers of performances.

[2] Having psychoactive experience is crucial but not complete in itself. One must also act in relation to such experience, no matter how absurd such experiences may seem. I’ll go into this further in a subsequent post.

[3] I will be using “absurd” in varying senses. To value the absurd, in art, literature, and dreams, for example, does not commit one to absurdist, existentialist or nihilistic philosophies of existence. Facts as such cannot be ignored, although how they are related to and used can be misguided, limited, or even absurd. Even though facts cannot be ignored, they often are, and this too leads to phenomena that are absurd. To judge relation to fact as absurd in the pejorative sense, does not contradict finding value in something absurd when that absurdity opens the way to deeper and especially psychic depth. Even things judged absurd in the pejorative sense may be setting the conditions for the emergence of something of far greater value.

[4] Keats, in a letter to his brother, had written: “At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

[5] One of the best treatments of Waiting for Godot in relation to negative capability, is to be found in Chapter 21, “The Implied Critic’s Decision Style,” in Reuven Tsur’s Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics. Sussex Academic Press, 2008. This chapter is a republication of his earlier article, “Two Critical Attitudes: Quest for Certitude and Negative Capability.” He proposes an “axis” with negative capability as one pole and factualism as the other.

[6] Even when critics allow for negative capability, they tend to ignore the birth potential of this state of tension and its implied individual birth in the reader or member of the audience. There remains a striving for collective factualism which undermines the value of “the absurd.”

[7] I use this phrase to highlight a feature of the present day, where it seems doubt has been banished and one must express only certainty. This feature is always at the forefront in times of religious war, threat to government hegemony, and threat to economic privilege.

[8] Martin Heidegger. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” In Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971. Also available on the net at http://mysite.pratt.edu/~arch543p/readings/Heidegger.html

[9] Russell Arthur Lockhart. Psyche Speaks: A Jungian Approach to Self and World. Wilmette: Chiron Publications, 987. (Reprinted Everett: The Lockhart Press, 2014)

In a recent post (Celebrating “Ragnarök” & the “Coming Guest"), I conjectured that "The psyche may not be just a human attribute." Paco Mitchell sent me a thought-provoking commentary entitled, "Crocodile Dreams: Thoughts on the Possible Extinction of the Psyche." I want to share this with all subscribers to the blog. What follows is the full text of Paco's commentary.

CROCODILE DREAMS

Thoughts on the Possible Extinction of the Psyche

 

Q: If humans become extinct, is it possible for the psyche to become extinct as well?

A: I don’t know, of course; but a few thoughts, observations, reflections and questions do occur to me:

 

INSTINCTS—MATERNAL AND OTHERWISE

Many years ago I watched a nature program on TV that demonstrated, to my mind, the presence of maternal instincts among scorpions and crocodiles (or were they alligators?).

1. A mother scorpion gives live birth to hundreds of baby scorpions per brood. In the documentary, I watched the mother scorpion carrying a multitude of the tiny, freshly-born babies on her back, her tail arched above them, the poison stinger in a position to protect them from harm.
2. A mother crocodile buries her clutch of eggs—as many as eighty—in a sandbank near the river where she lives. When it comes time for the eggs to hatch, the mother croc gathers the babies, up to fifteen at a time, in her long mouth, where they are surrounded by her razor-like teeth and fangs, her powerful jaws. It looks like she is going to eat them. Instead, she carries them gently to the river and deposits them in the water.

I was impressed by these demonstrations of such profound solicitude, which seem to provide evidence of a maternal instinct extending far back into evolutionary time. According to fossil records, reptilian crocodiles have been on the earth, in some form, for around 200 million years (cf. the Jurassic Period); scorpions, having 8 legs, are arachnids, related to spiders, and have been on earth for around 430 million years (cf. the Silurian Era). To me, these archaic manifestations of instinctual life-forms, with all the implications of maternal solicitude so visible on the TV program, suggest the existence of psychic patterns from the most archaic of times (see comment #2 below on Jung’s view of instinct and archetype).

Human beings, in their recent homo sapiens form, may have speciated a couple of hundred thousand years ago. Though the exact details of our “origins” are still in dispute, there is no question that we are late arrivals on the evolutionary, instinctual scene of life on earth—we are carryovers from long ago.

Therefore, it seems most likely that psychic life among animals far preceded psychic life among humans. In other words, instinct did not begin with us; archetypes did not begin with us; psyche did not begin with us. These manifestations of psyche were well developed by the time we stopped dragging our knuckles on the ground and took up our bipedal stance.

ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

In Jung’s many writings on the nature of archetypes and the collective unconscious, he emphasizes the virtual identity between archetype and instinct, the one being a reflection of the other. (When the “later Freud” described the “heavenly Eros,” he was describing something profoundly instinctual and therefore, effectively, “eternal.”)

ANIMAL DREAMS

The widespread evidence of REM sleep among mammals (dogs, cats, bears, etc.) and other animals, possibly even birds, all of whose presence on earth predates humans by millions and millions of years, suggests that the dreaming psyche of animals predates the dreaming psyche of humans by millions of years. It is this tremendous fund of time and experience that Jung posits as the basis for archetypal images, the virtually limitless scope of the collective unconscious, and, I would add, the super-intelligence to be regularly found in dreams and in the form of “animal wisdom.”

If we accept Jung’s hypothesis that archetypes are inherently expressive of instincts—and we accept his generalization that there is an archetype at the core of each complex and an instinct at the core of each archetype—then this is one more reason why we do well to imagine the archetypal psyche of the collective unconscious as derived from the archaic regions of life on the planet. We cannot say how far back in time the phenomenon of what we call “psychic life” goes—especially psychic life as reflected in the form of archetypal images—but if bears, for example, have been hibernating and presumably dreaming for several million years, I would have no trouble assigning the likely existence of archetypal images in animal dreams—in bear dreams—to an equal period of several million years, at least.

LIFE AFTER A GREAT EXTINCTION

“Our very knowledge will slay us.”

—Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man

A small but increasing number of well-informed and concerned individuals have reached the conclusion that humans are generating the conditions for a thorough-going self-extinction. This is being heralded by the widespread, human-generated extinction of animal species that is already well under way (an estimated 150-200 species per day are disappearing from the earth).

Because we have entered the phase of irreversible, “runaway feedback loops in nature” that Gregory Bateson warned against in the mid-1960s (and others far earlier), these runaway feedback loops reflect a profound disturbance of the planet’s ability to maintain the homeostasis (the balance) necessary for life, and therefore the “loops” threaten us with many forms of inevitability.

[NOTE. Dr. Guy McPherson has estimated that there may now be as many as 46 different climate and environmental feedback loops that have reached the irreversible “runaway” mode.]

Even if human extinction per se does not consummate itself in the near future, the necessary pre-conditions for it are already in place, and are accelerating with shocking speed.

The causes of the five previous “great extinction” periods on earth have been due to cold, heat, prolonged volcanism and a great asteroid impact. Today we are witnessing the only massive extinction process caused by human interference in natural cycles, due largely to technology and its consequences. [Bateson expands this causation factor by adding the element of “conscious purposiveness.”)

The dogged, obtuse commitment of humans to their ego-consciousness, its “progress” and the dominion of its works seems like a natural imperative to most of us. We even wrote the Book of Genesis around this notion of “dominion.” We tend not to see how demonic—even evil—are our claims to supremacy over every other form of life and existence on the planet.

[NOTE: cf. Walter Wink’s trilogy, The Powers That Be, in which he redefines the nature of Satanic evil as “the spirit of malignant narcissism” to which individuals unconsciously contribute their own “anxious narcissism.” As far back as biblical times, “Satan” was regarded as “the ruler of this world.” According to Wink, we must now look in the mirror of self-awareness, recognizing the evil that we contain, and that we are imposing on the world itself in every direction.]

Whether we regard a human fate of “self-extinction” to be justified or not, if we want to form a picture of what the planet would look like afterwards—after we’re “gone”—we can gather a few clues by looking back at the five previous “great extinctions” that Elizabeth Kolbert has detailed in her recent book, The Sixth Great Extinction.

In one great extinction, 250 million years ago, about 96 percent of marine life went extinct, along with about 70 percent of land species. The dinosaur asteroid-extinction 65 million years ago cleared the planet of the great lizards, and paved the way for little mammalian lemur-like creatures—who surely had a maternal instinct, and who most likely dreamed—to evolve in the direction of primates and, eventually, into humans.

SPECULATIVE CONCLUSION.

The sixth, great (human-driven) extinction, may end up exceeding the five previous global extinctions, in terms of the sheer percentage of species-loss—on land, in the air and in the sea. Conceivably, conditions could even reach an irreversible point where the entire biosphere could be destroyed. But short of a total destruction of all forms of life, if there remained even as many as, say, ten, twenty or thirty per cent of extant species, I would assume that the “maternal instinct” that we saw above among the scorpions and crocodiles, backed by two to four hundred million years of instinctual evolutionary patterning, would still exist. Therefore, to my way of thinking, the “psyche” would still exist, even though all of our human-reptile brain stems would have passed from the scene.

In other words, I assume that a considerable range of archetypal images and patterns, impulses and behaviors, would still condition the imagining and dreaming life-forms that remained, however “primitive” they might be.

What kind of “psyche” would that be? Primitive, to be sure. What kind of dreams would it manifest? Archetypal images of some sort, I would guess.

Does that mean there would be crocodile dreams on an earth without humans? Scorpion dreams? Worm dreams? Cockroach dreams? Collective ant colony dreams of numinous queen-figures laying eggs? Who knows?

But if, for example, the scorpions survived the Fourth, Fifth and now the Sixth Great Extinctions, why wouldn’t the same stream of imaginal patterns and instinctual energies that flowed from the scorpions of 430 million years ago to the scorpions of today, have a chance of enduring long after humans had quit the scene?

I recall a young man in his early thirties, telling me a dream of his that featured a scorpion-woman or scorpion–queen of some sort, who lived deep beneath the sea. Was she the embodiment of some sort of psychic energy several hundred million years old, surging through the deepest reaches of the human dreamer’s reptilian brain?

We don’t know yet if there can be any evolutionary recovery from a Sixth Extinction, but if scorpions and crocodiles survive, I wouldn’t count out the old maternal instincts—those extraordinary solicitudes—and therefore the psychic patterns, and perhaps the dreams, that belong to them.

 

 

 

 

 

“Story teller, mythmaker, and destroyer of the living world.”

So begins Edward O. Wilson’s Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life.[1] The renowned biologist, in his most fervent work, proposes giving back half the planet’s surface to nature. Only in this way can life, aside from microbes, jellyfish and fungi, be saved from mankind’s failure to serve as loving steward of the earth.

Jackson Browne sings: “The world’s going to shake itself free of our greed somehow.”[2] Critics see this line as indicating “hope” in his otherwise dark lament. But one cannot escape the other possibility, that the earth’s shaking, in what scientists are now calling “the coming cascade of mega-quakes,” may in fact shake the world free of our greed, “to shake itself all the way free somehow.”

After one of the major earthquakes in California, I did a survey of university student’s dreams and fantasies upon awakening. What I found was that more than 80% had dreams or fantasies or feelings that the earthquake was “revenge.” Some of these experiences were highly personal, others more collective.[3] More than likely, deep in our own psyche, we already know that the earth will “get back” and cost us dearly for our transgressions.

The machinations of greed are increasingly entrenched, increasing in degree and scope, and so blinded to the consequences for themselves, others, life itself and the earth, that nothing short of something that would “shake the world” is going to lead to any consequential changes. Whether such mega-quakes occur in the earth itself, or the world’s financial system, or some other world or human disaster, my dream tells me that Ragnarök is coming—the final Ragnarök. One way to take this is that we are in fact in the sixth extinction, one that will lead to the end of much of life on earth—including humans. Ragnarök belongs to the world’s “death of gods” mythology and all such mythologies point to a subsequent rebirth of the gods. There are two ways to take this.

One is that a final Ragnarök would be the last death of gods and there would be no future rebirth of gods because people would be no more. The question of whether this means the psyche would be no more must be left an open one, because we simply do not know the full extent and depth of the psyche-as-reality and how it might manifest in such a future. The psyche may not be just a human attribute.

The second is that what would follow would be “something else”—something other than what we know as gods of myth. The Coming Guest is one such possibility. I wrote Psyche Speaks to suggest that the Coming Guest would be Eros, not as concept, not as myth, but as the fully realized manifestation of the psyche in the world. Until then, as an earlier poem suggested, “madness” will be psyche’s only nurse.[4]

So, in this sprit, I will toast the final Ragnarök and the Coming Guest—as soon as I get some Blavod, which, so far, is not possible to get where I live.

There are some who see clearly the state of the world and what is coming and who are trying to tell others the truth. As Ben Franklin said, “Honesty is the best policy.” But this has not been the policy at all, and this failure of honesty has played a key role in bringing us to our present state. I say “us,” because we are all complicit in playing along with the untruths disguised as truths. Few of us can “get off the train” of this truthless track we are living.

Here are some links to things that convey a good dose of truth you will not be hearing on the TV news or in your local newspapers.

1. http://guymcpherson.com

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCeADT8Y8Pw

3. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31661-mass-extinction-it-s-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwhh7xBj-Cg&feature=youtu.be

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[1]Edward O. Wilson. Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation (W. W. Norton & Company), 2016.

[2] Jackson Browne. “If I Could Be Anywhere.” Filmed November 2010, at TEDxGreatPacificGarbagePatch. https://www.ted.com/talks/jackson_browne_if_i_could_be_anywhere#t-51079

[3] The day before this earthquake, I had workmen cut down a glorious pine tree whose roots were about to break apart the swimming pool. I felt bad about having to do this. At 6 am the next morning, I was roused by an intense earthquake (the “Sylmar Quake,” February 9, 1971). While the quake was still in progress, I lurched to the patio windows with strong images of the swimming pool cracking, the tree taking its revenge. It did not crack, but I stood there watching the water thrown up at me from the pool. I was quite shaken, literally and emotionally. It was this experience that gave me the idea to survey my students that day.

[4] I realize that these two ways of looking at “final” are sketchy at best. I am working on a future post that will go into these things more fully. Watch for, “Where do the gods go; where is the coming guest from?”

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Stress is ubiquitous. Health-damaging reactions to stress are epidemic on a global scale. Many factors contribute to stress, and the reactions to stress—particularly chronic stress—increase susceptibility to stress and damage our resiliency to stress. The physiological, immunological and neurological reactions to stress are implicated in all major health problems. Aside from health problems per se, the effects of stress are damaging to functioning in all areas of life.

The psychology, physiology and neurophysiology of stress are revealing the extreme degree to which stress is a major causal factor in a wide variety of illnesses, disorders, and breakdowns. When these problems develop, the problems themselves begin to increase further susceptibility to stress as well as amplify the impact of stress. This creates positive feedback loops that exacerbate the breakdown of resilience to stress as well as to decrease the individual’s ability to deal with stress at all levels. The negative effects of stress radiate to every dimension of one’s life.

Stress is not only a problem for individuals, but it is clear that stress is rampant in groups, institutions, governments, and cultures world-wide. These in turn feed back to the individual level, amplifying the destructive effects of stress, in an ever-amplifying loop.

The lack of attention to this crisis mirrors the lack of attention and inaction in relation to the global environmental crisis.

“Storyteller, mythmaker, and destroyer of the living world.”

So begins Edward O. Wilson’s Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. The renowned biologist, in his most fervent work, proposes giving back half the planet’s surface to nature. Only in this way can life, aside from microbes, jellyfish and fungi, be saved from mankind’s failure to serve as loving steward of the earth.

How likely is that? Given the current state of things, it is highly unlikely, and for this reason, we are all marching toward the abyss, as if drugged.

But the microcosm of this larger macrocosm, lies in how each of us deals with the increasing stress arising from all fronts. Perhaps healing ourselves individually is the only path to changing the larger and ever more certain calamities facing us.

The latest research on stress reduction and on increasing stress resiliency, focuses on four issues: the quality of sleep and dreaming, the quality of diet, the quality of exercise and the quality of expression. I emphasize the importance of quality here to make clear this issue is not superficial, surface-level, or trivial. The changes necessary to achieve quality in these areas go deep, require effort, and discipline; anything short of this is an inevitable, if slow, suicide.

Sleep. Quality of sleep requires seven to eight hours of sleep. Only in this way can one obtain the full complement of deep sleep and REM-sleep patterns. Several deep sleep cycles are necessary for the full restorative effects of sleep on all body systems. Without this, all body systems become weakened and become susceptible to damage from internal and external sources. Dreams cycles are required for fully preparing the brain for dealing with problems and enhancing creativity when one awakes. Brain health, including resistance to dementia processes, requires quality sleep and dreaming. Brain health is vital to the health and vigor of the immune system, limiting the damaging effects of cortisol (the “stress hormone”), and increasing the resistance to chronic infection.

Stress plays a large part in developing a large number of sleep disorders. One of the typical behavioral ways of dealing with stress is to reduce the amount one sleeps. This not only increases stress, but sets the stage for damaging sleep disorders that further degrade the quality of sleep. Sleep disorders are epidemic and underlie many health issues and contribute to the enormous costs of the consequent health problems.

Sleep and dreams are now known to be essential to health. Developing a healthy relation to stress begins in getting enough sleep. Go to sleep around the same time every night (ritual helps induce quality sleep). Do not drink or take drugs at least three hours before sleep (alcohol and drugs disrupt deep sleep and REM-sleep; best to sleep in a slightly dehydrated state). Sleep in a cool (65 degrees) environment. Make sure your sleeping room is dark. No lights. No computers or phones. No TV (all these things interferes with sleep patterns). Spend the last hour of the evening before sleep shutting off external input and focusing on connecting with yourself (this inward turn facilitates deeper sleep and dreaming). Make sleep an absolute priority.

Diet. About 80-90% of the typical modern-day, stress-infused, lifestyle diet is damaging to health. Among the culprits are alcohol, drugs, and medications. Using alcohol and drugs in response to stress, not only increases stress, but also increases the incapacity to deal with stress effectively as well as contributing directly to a large range of health consequences. In addition, while medications are increasingly prescribed for physical and mental health problems, the side-effects of medications account for about two-thirds of unintended complications that increase the effects of stress and reduce one’s capacity to deal with stress. In addition, processed foods are directly related to increasing stress because of both genetically altered real foods, and the added chemicals are aggregated in such a way as to increase desire for such un-natural food. A healthy diet is essential to mitigating the impacts of stress (as well as enhancing the capacity to sleep well). The simplest “cure,” is to eliminate processed foods, eat real food, eliminate wheat, refined sugars, refined salts, and drink 64 ounces of water a day. Coffee is OK if you stop drinking it at noon. Otherwise, it will disrupt sleep patterns severely.

Exercise. It is clear now that the human body is meant to move in order to achieve optimal functioning at all levels. Just how important this is goes well beyond “heart health.” It is brain health, immune health, cognitive health, sexual health, and everything else health. That’s how important it is—no matter how old one is, or how disabled. It is also clear now that there are certain “minimums” of movement to keep catabolic (“breakdown”) processes at bay. Exercise is crucial for dealing with stress and all its destructive effects. But it’s not just exercise per se. Using all muscles in a variety of ways is as important as what we typically think of as exercise. For example, writing by hand in composing a letter, lights up the brain in ways that tapping on a keyboard does not. Painting with a brush on a canvas has the same effect in comparison to using a stylus on the computer screen. Getting your whole body into moving underlies the importance of expression (see below). It is now clear that more frequent and shorter periods of exercise (whether walking or running or stretching) are more beneficial than longer periods of strenuous effort. It’s also clear that ritualizing exercise and movement enhances the effect on stress reduction. The everydayness is important. A quick way to determine if you are getting a minimum of exercise is to use a pedometer and set it accurately and try for 10,000 steps a day. But keep in mind the idea of moving all your muscles. After typing on your keyboard, take a time out, and flex your fingers while you move your hands and arms through the air. And watch yourself doing this; then do it with your eyes closed. The brain lights up differently in these two conditions and so this helps your brain to incite neurogenesis (growth of new brain cells). Create a standup computer work station so you can move while working—turning yourself round and round until you get dizzy is a great exercise.

Expression. Expression is the newcomer to the basics of health. Expression means “from inside out.” This is counterpoised to the ubiquity of “from outside in” (think TV, internet, social media, cell phones, about 99% of our daily experience). Expression takes many forms, but the basic idea is expressing in movement, singing, making music, making art, writing something original, and many other ways as well. Along with this, studies are showing that entering into imagination triggers the brain in productive ways that form the basis of new experience as well as enhancing neurogenesis. Expression in various ways every day will help develop an immunity to stress and this will in turn enhance stress resilience.

For most of us, what we encounter in our everyday lives conspires to increase stress and degrade our resilience to stress. In many ways, we are complicit in this through denial, short-term thinking, and putting our own welfare on the back burner. We are doing ourselves in. How we treat our own body, our own “earth,” is very similar to how, as humans, we have treated the earth itself. And the reasons for not doing something about it are the same. As I said above, not doing something about this can no longer be considered a viable option. It is slow suicide.

In Freud’s seminal paper, “The Ego and the Id,” published in 1923, he distinguished between two instincts: the death instinct, “the task of which is to lead organic matter back to the inorganic state,” and Eros which “aims at more far-reaching coalescence of the particles into which living matter has been dispersed.” Earlier, Wilhelm Stekel had called the “death wish” by the name Thanatos. Freud never used this term for the death instinct because of his dislike of Stekel. Freud continued to develop his conception of this duality between Eros and the death instinct, to the point where he wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents in 1930:

The fateful question of the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent the cultural process developed in it will succeeded in mastering the derangements of communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction… Men have brought their powers of subduing the forces of nature to such a pitch that by using them they could now very easily exterminate one another to the last man.

Freud here suggests that the combination of the death instinct and human ingenuity could lead to the extermination of the human species. This was before the possibility of nuclear extermination and before any apprehension about the ability of the planet to sustain human life given man’s destructive effect on the environment and other life forms.

This raises a question. It is clear that the “return to inorganic matter,” is the fate of each one of us individually. This is a biological given and each of us must come to terms with our life’s end in our own way. But can it be that the species itself harbors a “death wish” for the species as a whole? Would that be the final Ragnarök? This idea has more “explanatory” power than we might wish to acknowledge.

Freud concludes his essay with this extraordinary statement:

And now it may be expected that the other of the two heavenly forces, eternal Eros, will put forth his strength so as to maintain itself alongside of his equally immortal adversary.

It is fascinating that Freud here raises Eros and Thanatos—previously referred to as human instincts—to heavenly forces (Freud’s emphasis). Freud here is speaking of Eros as an immortal force beyond the human which will be putting forth his strength so as to “maintain itself” against Thanatos, its immortal adversary.

What is it that led Freud to expect Eros to exert itself in this way? Whatever it was, something else happened to Freud which led him two years later to write in his New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis:

“…our best hope for the future is that the intellect—the scientific spirit, reason—should in time establish a dictatorship over the human mind. Whatever…opposes such a development is a danger for the future of mankind.”

I wrote in Psyche Speaks, some 34 years ago, when first commenting on Freud’s conclusions:

Here Freud seems to forget his call to Eros and falls into the typical stance of siding with reason against the soul. I feel that Freud’s earlier stance was more correct, that the battle is not between Eros and Logos, but between Eros and Thanatos. Thanatos seems ever present in today’s world. But where is Eros?

If anything, the world has grown darker since I wrote those words, and Eros seems even less visible and present. Psyche Speaks was my effort to point to Eros as what the world needs. In his 1960 letter to Herbert Read, Jung called what was needed, was a “great dream.” Jung said that such a great dream has always spoken through the artist as “mouthpiece” proclaiming the arrival of the coming guest. It is the artist’s love and passion (the human eros) that needs to be listened to in order to proclaim and welcome the coming guest (the heavenly Eros). In my view, it was the artist in each of us that would be the source of what was necessary to welcome the coming guest. But we seem far from such a realization and manifestation.

The earlier Freud expects the arrival of the heavenly Eros. The later Jung expects the arrival of the coming guest. I think both great men are talking about the same thing.

Thus, in the face of the final Ragnarök, which seems ever more certain, one may either give up in despair, entertain oneself to death, or manifest ever more fully the human Eros that is love and passion and generative creativity. One must perhaps, celebrate both the final Ragnarök and welcome Eros, the coming guest.

How this might be done I’ll turn to in the next post.

As a brief interlude from my dour posts of late, I will post, “Jung In China,” as a kind of Easter egg. There is growing interest in Jung in China as evidenced by the recent launching of a new journal and an ambitious plan for translating Jung’s work into Chinese. The editor of the new journal asked Rob Henderson to interview a Jungian analyst in the United States to talk about introducing Jung to a Chinese audience. Rob asked me if I was interested in doing an interview and I said yes. At the time, I was working on an etymological approach to the I Ching that would enable English readers to become more aware of the images embedded in the I Ching’s pictographs which were derived from ancient oracle bone script. So, I eagerly accepted Rob’s invitation. My work on the etymology of the I Ching had since gone a bit fallow, but I have just now returned to it. With Rob’s kind permission, I am posting the interview in English. It is published in China in Chinese.

Jung in China

RH. Russell Lockhart is a Jungian analyst living in in the northwest corner of the United States, in Everett, Washington. He has been immersed in Jungian psychology for more than 50 years, coming to his own understanding of what Jung was about and what he tried to contribute to the world and to life. People in China, who have never heard of Jung, will be reading this journal. Russell, in your own words, distilled from your years of experience, I would like to invite you to share what you know of Jung that would be essential for people in a far different culture interested in learning about Jung’s work.

RL. Thank you, Rob, for inviting me to address a most daunting question. Strangely enough, your question might also be how to introduce Jung’s work to the Western world, for in spite of more than a hundred years of historical development, Jung and his contribution remains known only to a minuscule number in the West. With psychology being overtaken by neuroscience, therapy and analysis being overwhelmed by cognitive-behavioral methods, and by the ubiquity of pharmaceutical prescription for an ever-increasing panoply of conditions, the long, deep, arduous work of “know thyself” that characterizes Jungian work, is ever more off-limits to insurance, ethical, and legal mandates. It is against this glum background, that I find interest in Jung in “foreign” cultures to be of great interest. Yet with the increasing inter-connectedness of world cultures, the very idea of “foreign” is becoming obsolete. Designations like “East” and “West” will eventually fall away. But for now, these concepts are still meaningful currency. For China, the best possible introduction to Jung is already a part of the long history of Chinese culture. I am referring to Yin-Yang, the ancient concept of the complementarity of opposites; to the I Ching (Book of Changes), embodying the autonomy of the intention of the “other” as a source of wisdom, and The Secret of the Golden Flower, portraying and personifying a yoga of meditation, breathing, and imagination. In the West, these concepts and texts are generally taken up only after considerable immersion in Jung’s psychology. I feel that immersion in these texts prior to immersion in Jung is a more generative foundation for the study of Jung if for no other reason than these sources emphasize the imperative of experience. Trying to understand Jung only conceptually without grounding in personal experience will prove of little benefit and value. Each of these sources from the East, from China, were crucially important to Jung, primarily because of their grounding in experience.

RH. What does it mean to experience Jungian psychology?

RL. Your question covers a lot of ground so I’ll make some differentiations, sign posts, as it were, in the geography of your question. The secondary literature of Jungian psychology consists of hundreds of books and thousands of journal articles. This includes biographies of Jung, textbooks and surveys of Jung’s work, applications of Jung’s work in many areas, and a prolific quantity of ancillary studies ranging from clinical applications to the explication of Jung’s ideas on a great range of topics. I mention this way of experiencing Jung’s psychology first, because it is generally in the secondary literature where one first encounters Jungian thought. The primary literature of Jung’s psychology consists of Jung’s work itself, which is published in the Collected Works, the seminars and miscellaneous writings as well as several volumes of Jung’s correspondence, and Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. The experience of Jung’s psychology is quite different in the primary and secondary sources. Many will find reading Jung too difficult and will take up the secondary sources with a certain relief. In general, I believe this is a mistake. What I have always recommended to serious students is to begin with Memories, Dreams, Reflections and then to take up Jung’s direct work in chronological order while following along synchronously with the correspondence. This is a long and arduous journey and not to be taken lightly if for no other reason than that Jung’s work is often psychoactive. This means that one’s own psyche will begin to stir in ways that are unexpected and startling. Jung’s work itself stirs not only the intellect, but resounds throughout the body and the depths of one’s experience. This is often something that goes missing, when Jung’s work is being “translated” into the “about” mode. With the publication of Jung’s Red Book and the coming publication of his “Black Books,” we enter a third mode of experiencing Jungian psychology. This mode is something I call the rhizome level of direct experience. This is the mode where Jung encountered the deeper regions of his psyche, the depth below the personal, the depths that he came later to call the “collective unconscious.” Jung’s experiences in these unfathomable depths were recorded in conversations and images that constitute the material of the Black Books and The Red Book. Jung’s work here is not “about,” but reveals his direct expression of his embroilment with the living psyche. This is crucial to realize because, as Jung said, all his later work came from these experiences. It has been my experience in spending time with The Red Book that this is the closest one can get to experiencing the essence of Jungian psychology. It must be said, however, that what one encounters in this material is not for mimetic purposes. Each one of us has a rhizomic layer, each one has their own ways of access, and what one experiences there is not to “reproduce” The Red Book, but indeed to engage in those depths and to bring to fruition what wants to spring from there for each individual. That is the deep secret of what Jung’s psychology points to. It is in that place where one can most deeply experience Jungian psychology and is the most important part of the answer to your question.

RH. What would be one way that you feel Jungian psychology would help a person with their life?

RL. Jung’s psychology is often pictured as so esoteric that it has no practical implications at all. Yet, there are many aspects of Jung’s psychology that have profound implications for human development, social interaction, and the meaning and purpose of one’s life. Becoming aware of one’s shadow, and integrating it in a genuine way, leads to a more complete ego development. The ego’s awareness of its typology and where it needs development of its inferior function, will pay off handsomely in one’s awareness of oneself, and better social relations when one knows how to navigate typological differences, as well as better intimate relationships when one knows how typology impacts eros, empathy and compassion. But these practical implications pale in relation to the ultimate “meaning” of one’s life. Here, Jungian psychology makes a profound contribution because the meaning of life is not found in the ego’s aspirations and collective achievements, but in the degree to which the ego serves the realization of the Self. This cannot be done in ways that are quick, surfacy, or faddish. This is unique to each person. So much of our development in the family and then in school and then as we take up our place in the culture is so over-determined by collective values, the power of others’ images of what we are to become, that it is a wonder at all that one can achieve any connection with the Self, let alone serve its uniqueness. That uniqueness is what underlies the value and importance of dreams and visions, that is, as providing the portal and the hints necessary for ego to finally take up its task of individuality.

RH. Do you feel it is important for people to try to remember their dreams?

RL. Not just "try" Rob, but to make every effort. Think about how people are so much in thrall to celebrity, fame, fortune, and all manner of collectivity. I think this is true for the East as much as the West, as true for China as for the US. The dream is a primary source of the "subversive" in the service of the individual against the power of the collective.

The dream is the surest ground that forces us to look at who we truly are. Yes, we experience how much more desirable it is to be "like" someone we see in films, or on TV, or on the Internet, or in the news. But for the most part, this is the effluence of the "malignant narcissism" about which Walter Wink writes so persuasively.

Much of psychoanalytic psychology and therapy is in the service of adapting to the collective demands of the day. Jung's psychology works differently by seeking "something else." That something else is the individuality I spoke of above. Paying attention to dreams—which begins in remembering them—is a major way to develop this individuality. Scanning the behemoth of collectivity, you will scarcely find dreaming on the radar. This is true the world over. To me, it is terribly sad.

RH. When we visited China a few years ago, I heard some of the elders who were critical of the younger generations and their efforts to dress in individual ways instead of wearing the Mao coat which they felt contained the important cultural symbols that would help carry on the Chinese culture. A battle between the individual and the collective. Why is individuality important?

RL. The typical bias is that the East is highly regimented by authority and tradition (as personified by the Mao coat), while the West is free and creatively chaotic. I call this a bias because deeper analysis reveals the west to be as regimented as the East—only in different ways and by different institutions of power. One need only look at the degree to which advertisement leads to mimetic and cloning “self-regimentation” under the influence and control of corporate powers in the West to see this in plain view. To the degree that the young in the East begin to follow the West’s lead in this regard, they would simply be substituting one form of regimentation for another, with the illusion of freedom. This brings us to why individuality is important. It is only via a true individual spirit that one can escape the regimentation of the state, military, industrial, corporate, educational, political or any other forms of powers that control. Walt Disney, that Western icon of “healthy” entertainment, argued that it was through entertainment that the masses could be controlled more effectively than through any other means—a distinctly unhealthy idea. Yet it is precisely this idea that has overwhelmed current culture with ever increasing depth and breadth, that is, the Internet. Everyone is becoming tethered to it. The dark side of this is the high degree of regimentation embodied in this no matter the degree of good or value that it enables on a large scale. Over time, this fact alone will work against genuine individuality whether in the East or the West. As I have made clear above, I think that it is the dream that is most subversive to this leviathan of collectivity. It is the dream that carries the seeds of true individuality.