Lakeman
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I think we need to be very, very careful when we claim to see “evil influences” at work in others. There are both moral and psychological dangers here.
One thing we ought to have learned from Carl Jung is the ease with which the human mind, disdainful of what it regards as its own imperfections, casts off those unwanted characteristics and, projecting them upon others “out there”, labels and vilifies them as “evil”. This is what he called the “Shadow”. Jung noticed this tendency particularly strongly among his patients just prior to the buildup and outbreak of the second World War, when that evil—that which is manipulating the élite, keeping us from our true destiny, hoarding the secrets of knowledge and success—was finally identified by Hitler and his henchmen: “The Jew”. The rest, as they say, is history—or rather, nightmare.
Today we are very close to this same kind of social paranoia that is fertile ground for fascism. Years ago (in 1964), the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter identified what he aptly dubbed “the paranoid style in American politics”, which could be generalized to American culture. There are conspiracies afoot everywhere, the élite are once again in the grip of the devil, and the truly righteous folk (who? why, us, of course!) are threatened on all sides by those élites who would dupe the masses and keep the keys to the kingdom for themselves. No one in our time has yet produced the equivalent of “The Jew”—though David Icke’s lizard aliens and (at least according to Lyndon Larouche) the Queen of England are right up there as prime candidates.
Pity poor Patrick McGoohan, the late actor and artist who created the hit 1960s television series, “The Prisoner”. McGoohan was virtually drummed out of England for suggesting (in the final episode to the series) that the mysterious, evil “Number One” who had imprisoned “Number Six” in the Orwellian “Village” was none other than a split-off (Shadow) part of Number Six himself. In other words, we imprison and manipulate ourselves. The real enemy--the real tyrant and manipulator--is within: our own (especially unconscious and therefore unexamined and unquestioned) belief systems and fears.
This is one key reason why Bob Monroe’s work is so valuable, and also perhaps why TMI, as an institution, is a place that attracts all sorts of unconscious projections, both positive and negative in character. For in his exploration of human consciousness, Monroe deliberately eschewed not only the belief-systems of mainstream materialist science, but also those of all esoteric and exoteric religious traditions, both eastern and western. He thereby produced a neutral vocabulary, innocent of the assumptions and prejudices of those same belief systems, for describing experiences of expanded awareness. In addition, of course, he also helped to devise practical methods for achieving those states.
Adherents of such belief systems invariably are proselytizers. Monroe himself was no proselytizer. “Belief” comes from the old Germanic word “lief” which means “love”—our beliefs are beloved to us, as the physicist David Bohm points out. “The danger in belief should therefore be clear,” he writes, “for when the ‘love’ for a set of assumptions and their implications is strong, it may lead to playing false to defend them.”
As per The Bard, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Let us look no further than the mirror to find our devils.
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