PART
ONE: THE PROBLEM . . . NO WONDER YOU'RE PARANOID!
Feeling
Overwhelmed?
We are bombarded.
No simple life, this . . . at the beginning of the third
millennium.
Though no war has been declared, we feel under attack.
The very circumstances of our life seem to be conspiring
against us. Assaulted
by information, pummeled by complicated procedures, chased into
confusion by infinite choices, and overrun by regulations, we
feel barely able to respond.
The enemy cannot be seen for it is everywhere.
We become despairing, worse still, we become apathetic.
We could add our number to those in the rising incidence
of paranoids, or we can seek to understand the reasons for this
apparent onslaught.
What I am saying is that we live in a unique age —
unlike anything ever known in some very important,
fundamental ways. It
is necessary that we look at these underpinnings of our daily
life to understand our unique feelings in these times.
Powerlessness:
Surrounded by Bozos
Thirtysome years ago there was a best-selling book
called The Peter Principle.
Though it was actually a pretty inane book, it probably
did so well because it addressed the question of why life is so
frustrating.
Its answer was that people around us are
incompetent. We have
the feeling that the world is full of inept bozos — they cut us
off on the freeway, they hang up on us when we are "on
hold," they have to consult with a supervisor before
responding to the smallest request, and they lose our baggage.
The reason the book put forth for this phenomenon was
that people are promoted to the level of their incompetence.
There are flaws in this reasoning, of course; but
I feel the book was successful because it addressed a
fundamental feeling of impotence that people have in dealing
with this modern world. The
idea that the world is a frustrating place because the people in
it are a bunch of incompetent boobs is a cop-out, to be sure,
but at least it was looking at what people are experiencing.
Let us also take a look at those common feelings
of powerlessness and frustration.
In understanding them, let’s see what we can do about
them.
Complexity:
Drowning Folks Grasping at Bucks
First, several factors are coming together to
create an unprecedented situation at this time in history
resulting in people not only feeling powerless but also becoming
alienated and then fixated on money in a way never before known.
Probably the underlying force in this tendency is the
technological explosion of the last century.
This explosion is generating intensified complexity in
our society and culture, and this situation is further
complicated by the population explosion.
These trends work together.
The expansion of technological capability includes
increased medical powers and the ability to prolong life.
Together with the other benefits of modern medicine, this
creates an unprecedented push to expand and populate the entire
globe.
Then, there’s modern telecommunications.
Not only are there more people than ever before, they are
in closer contact with each other than ever due to modern
inventions of telecommunications and mass media, including
satellite TV.
The resulting radiation of cultural elements has
induced a rampant multiculturalism just about everywhere on the
globe and, therefore, an unparalleled cultural complexity in
virtually all societies now existing:
There are no truly "simple" cultures anymore,
and nobody anymore knows what the “rules” are.
Combined with the exploding proliferation of humans
everywhere and the avalanche of technological details, this
multiplex flood of cultural items creates a greater complexity of life all around than has ever before been known.
No one, at any time, in any place, on this planet before
has been forced to navigate through the mass of details
virtually everyone in
the Western world confronts on a daily basis.
Think on that
one, the next time you’re stressed out!
Alienation:
Mystery of the Holy Black Box
This cultural complexity, combined with the
sophisticated technological innovations that are a normal part
of everyone's life, means that not only is life complicated, it
is out-of-control. Technological
innovations are supposed to give us more power.
(He says, as he spends hours in a wasteland of
misunderstanding around the latest computer glitch.)
Instead it seems we've conjured a demon to help fend off
a monster.
We deal with many things in our daily life about
which we have very little understanding.
Take, for example, the tape-recorder that I am using to
record this. Although
it gives me convenience and control in one sense, I haven’t
the foggiest as to how it works.
“How is it done? It’s
fucking magic!” as one comedian puts it.
If it should cease working — as these things (damn them)
often do — I am left throwing my hands up.
But that’s a minor example.
We drive our automobiles everywhere.
If the car breaks down, we’re stranded . . . dependent
upon some tool wizard with a magic hook to come and get us.
The same goes for our houses, not to mention the gadgets
and appliances inside. They’re
all built and maintained by other wizards, other specialists.
So, most of the things we deal with daily are totally
"out-of-our-control,"
because we don’t really understand them and are dependent on
others for power over them.
We’re alienated from these mysterious things because we
have no real connection with them.
Usually, except for the on/off switch, they could as well
be extra-terrestrials.
These are the so-called "black boxes" of
technology— bottled genies we hope will grant our wishes.
But the real power over these “genies” belongs to
other people. The
result is that we must purchase their services in order to have
security, if not power, in relation to these objects.
The focus of control, then, becomes money; the almighty
dollar becomes the new worship, the new ritual.
By comparison, in earlier, "traditional"
societies, people also lacked power over certain things — the
crops and the weather, for example.
This insecurity led them to develop a so-called
"spirituality" — involving the use of rituals and
"magic" — to try to gain some control over these
incomprehensible powers. The
tools they used were ritual, worship, and sacrifice.
This is significant and very interesting because each of
these represents a "payment" in order to achieve power
over things in relation to which these folks were normally
helpless.
Modern
Gods: The Money Religion
In this light we see how little we’ve changed!
In this new experiment of a complex world, we — like
primal ancestors — seek to appease our
gods — who control the mysterious powers:
Just that our
gods are our mechanics, our computer operators, our scientists,
our politicians who understand the political processes we don't
understand, our lawyers who understand the legal procedures and
powers, our tax-preparers and accountants, our VCR-repairers,
our medical doctors, our plumbers . . . the list is endless.
These have become the modern deities.
They’ve got the power over the things before which we
normally tremble with fear.
In days of old the god of thunder, god of rain,
goddess of the Earth held sway.
Now it's the god of plumbing, god of medicine, god of VCR
and computer! And we
continue to pay homage to our gods, indeed we do!
We do it with money; it is ritually proffered,
prayerfully sacrificed, and before it we bow.
Specialization:
Modern Virgin Sacrifice
So we feel powerless because we are separated from
our environment — the mundane objects of our daily lives.
We’re not in tune with our environment and therefore
lack power over it. This
radical alienation exists in many areas of our daily life.
And in order to compensate for this gnawing void, we try
to have expertise in one small area.
We call this a specialization, and then we try getting ours, too, for the
"secret" knowledge that comes from it.
For we know full well that money has become our sole
means of appeasing the gods in the other "secret"
areas.
Now the problem still remaining is that, with all
our specialization, we have security only in a very limited
context, an area of understanding that’s tinier in relation to
the whole of life than for any other human, ever, in the history
of humankind. (Once
again, lucky us!) It
follows that being this alienated from our world we’re doomed
to have feelings of insecurity and powerlessness before it.
Communication:
People Talking Without Speaking
There's yet a whole other aspect to this problem.
It has to do with our growing alienation as well from
one another in this increasingly complex society.
Grock the paradox here:
We have the most sophisticated telecommunications, we can
transmit across millions of miles, in fact, far out into outer
space. Yet we’re
finding that communication between individuals, real
understanding between people, seems inversely correlated with
this growing technical ability!
We can now say it to the world, sure.
But in the process of learning to do this we’ve
forgotten the things worth saying.
We can transmit it to the other side of the globe, but
can’t seem to confer anything meaningful to the lover at our
side.
Limitation:
Seeing a Tree and Not the
Forest
And there's good reason for such alienation
between individuals to be going on.
As mentioned earlier, this increasing technological
refinement has two effects: incredible diminution and narrowing
of focus as we are required to specialize (no one person can
know all that is needed to construct an automobile, whereas
formerly one person could know all required to construct a cart —
and before that one simply had to know the way and how to put
one foot in front of the other!); the other effect is an
enormously complex world with all these new cultural ingredients
in it that are brought about by technology.
So the world has actually become astronomically
bigger in a sense, especially in relation to our increasingly
small view of it. These
are two opposite trends that both work in the same direction:
We've got a bigger world but we're dealing with a smaller
part of it. We're
dealing with more detail about this smaller part of it than is
even imaginable by anyone outside of it; yet we're still only
dealing with a segment, sometimes an infinitesimally small one,
of the whole.
Consequently, people more and more are losing a
sense of the total picture.
Fewer and fewer of us are getting a vision of the whole
works from “above,” so to speak.
To that extent, we find it ever harder to talk to other
people who’re also focusing on equally tiny parts of the great
or larger picture. So
we have ever less in common as a basis of understanding between
us. Our
conversations become limited to the stereotypical and the
trivial — the weather, TV, consumer items, sports, O. J., the
accomplishments of our children, the latest additions to our
homes.
Isolation:
Closed Systems, Closed Souls
Killing
the one-eyed prince. It's
interesting in this regard to give an example from a fairly
recent experience of mine in mainstream academia. What I
found, with the different departments and disciplines, was the
refusal to consider a multidisciplinary perspective and, most
tellingly, the real jealousy and anger directed at any one who
would dare go looking for that larger picture, who would dare
viewing beyond that specialized focus.
It's almost as if these academicians realize,
perhaps subconsciously, that they are at a real disadvantage and
that they’re powerless before or in the face of the whole
working works. So
they’re ragefully jealous of people who try to go beyond that
limitation. No
kidding! Wouldn’t
you think that looking at something from additional perspectives
or being able to bring additional information to bear on a topic
would naturally be considered good?
Well, not in the halls of the narrowly learned.
It is said that in the land of the blind, the
one-eyed man is king. Now,
this is one thing that has
changed, with modern complexity.
The Native Americans called the larger perspective the
“eagle’s view.” But
no longer is a clearer perspective or a better idea valued in
this society, which fearfully seeks to maintain a status quo in
the face of overwhelming technological change.
Thus the self-blinded academicians, afraid to venture
forth or see more, would seek to assassinate any
"prince" who does so.
(Funny how the Lennon and Kennedy assassinations suddenly
pop to mind.)
Circling
the wagons.
So
to that extent the tendency today is to band together and create
"disciplines" — and clubs and professional
organizations — and to set limits to these endeavors.
We refuse to listen to or hear information, even though it may
be much needed, from anywhere outside our
"professional" or trade "boundaries."
So what we need the most, we fear and resist.
What we need, of course, is a glimpse of that larger
picture — an eagle’s eye view — but we create boundaries to
having it. We create
professions and trades, departments and disciplines, and we
rationalize them by saying that people cannot speak credibly
outside of them; or as one book put it: "Closed systems;
open minds." They’ve
actually managed to come up with an entire book of
rationalization for small- (and closed-) mindedness.
But in this swell foop we deny our basic humanity
— our right to face foursquare all of the reality before us!
The point is that we need generalists . . . now, more
than ever!
We need people who can see the working works.
And until we get them we're going to continue to have
this increasing alienation, not only between us and — as I
mentioned earlier — the world of things in which we spend our
daily lives, but also between us and the people that we
associate with on a daily basis.
To this extent, we’re a culture doomed to
creating alienation, loneliness, and increasing neurosis in its
populace. With the
corresponding increase in fear and insecurity, is it any wonder
that there’s a skyrushing use of drugs to block out the
realization of our precarious situation?
Loneliness:
Passive Spectators and Poisoned Marriages
Along with the above scenario, add the impotence
or alienation, referred to earlier, to our personal
relationships, say, that between husband and wife, or between
lovers, or friends. This
general disempowerment that has taken place — this feeling of
being a passive spectator, if you will — has clearly also
undermined the very basic ability to take responsibility for
oneself in a relationship vis-à-vis another person.
I mean there’s a need for everyone to cop to his
or her own unfinished business — in terms of dealing with inner
pain from childhood, for example — and to own up to those
obstacles that keep us from the real and authentic sharing
communication with the beloveds of our lives.
Unfortunately, that same diminution of personality that
characterizes relationship on the professional or
"public" level, as discussed above, tends also to
poison our abilities to take healthy responsibility in our
personal or private relationships.
These things keep us from being active participants in
our relationships; instead we feel like victims.
The
Problem Summarized: The Consumer As Addict
This article is about empowerment of people in a
complex society. As
I’ve said, this unprecedented complexity causes us to retreat
into competence in very narrowly specialized areas, fostering
feelings of powerlessness and alienation overall (or in relation
to the whole). This
subtle yet pervasive insecurity causes an inordinate fixation on
money leading to the greed and materialism we see in modern
times.
Because of this power vacuum, which we are not
really conscious of and can't really define, we are driven to
filling the void with material goods.
We become good consumers, the mystique of capitalism
providing a way to temporarily mask the emptiness, to remedy
that feeling of generalized anxiety or frustration in the face
of non-understandable complexity.
To purchase things becomes also a way of temporarily
salvaging our self-esteem. But
it is important to keep in mind that this is a failed remedy; it
does absolutely nothing towards getting at the root of the
problem; worse, it deadens our perception of it.
PART
TWO: THE ANTIDOTE: AT-HOME-MENT WITH THE WORLD
But there is
a treatment for our addiction.
There is a way of living, even in these strangest of
days, wherein we regain our integrity.
We are humans, deserving of walking tall, in harmony with
the Earth (though not dominating Her).
And we can recover that rightful heritage and those
feelings of nobility, of belonging in the world.
Self-Actualization:
Uncovering the Hidden Secrets of the Not-Conscious World
The answer is simple.
It’s been put forth by humanistic psychologists for
several decades now. It
is called self-actualization.
But I don’t in any way mean
this in the limited sense in which psychologists normally use
this term. Self-actualization
in its normal use means bringing forth into the world, or
manifesting, the good that one has inside oneself. It’s related to the idea of self-fulfillment,
that is, of actualizing one’s unique talents, of bringing
one’s unconscious higher potentials into consciousness and
then acting on them. So
both these words are often thought to have to do with being an
artist or a creative person.
Thought of in this way, though,
self-actualization provides no antidote to our dilemma; it can
even add to it! No,
I’m not saying merely that we should become creative people:
artists, writers, whatever. What we need to do is make the unconscious conscious in
the broadest meaning of the term unconscious imaginable.
What I’m suggesting is close to
psychoanalytic and psychodynamic theories from earlier in
psychology. Many of
them can be summarized in the maxim: “Where id is, let ego be.”
This means that growth occurs by making conscious (ego)
the unconscious (id).
But here again we shouldn’t
limit its definition. By
making conscious one’s unconscious I don’t mean just
remembering one’s dreams or simply uncovering one’s
subconscious contents — which is a lot of what has
traditionally been understood by those terms. No, my meaning of making the unconscious conscious is
that we reach out to those non-understandable areas of our life —
which to us are our unconscious, our “not-conscious” — that we reach out into the incomprehensible and make it familiar, that
we cast light into the “black boxes” of the mysterious that
are important to us and make those areas our own.
So it’s not just the
unconscious part of our personal lives I’m talking about.
Rather, it’s the unconscious part of world as a whole
with a capital W that
we can make ourselves free to roam in. The greatest liberation of all is to feel unafraid to
walk freely through all the rooms of our “mansion” — in
both the inner and the
outer world.
Anything that’s not conscious
is unconscious: That’s
the definition of the unconscious, as Jung once explicitly
pointed out. Put
simply, everything we don’t know is part of our unconscious.
So when we learn how our car works we are making our
unconscious conscious; when we learn how to negotiate our way
around Europe (if that’s something we choose to do) we’re
making our unconscious conscious. The same goes for learning how to row a boat, having our
first experience of a roller-coaster ride, figuring out the
street grid of the city we’ve just moved to, or learning the
use of nutrition and supplements for health and preventive
medicine, rather than relying totally on our doctor for our
body’s health. And
in doing any of these — although, of course, some more than
others — we’re becoming self-actualized and gaining a feeling
of empowerment. We’re
also becoming less “neurotic” and less alienated; we’re
gaining a sense of belonging in this world.
Reveling
in One’s Base Nature: Fix Your Own Car!
Psychologists normally think of
psychotherapy and individual growth in terms of working through
past traumas and understanding one’s motivations, and patterns
of behavior and feeling, and so on.
But we’ve also come to realize
that there are aspects of growth in psychotherapy that deal with
the creative and the need to be creative. We’ve come to know that if the need to be creative is
suppressed it leads to all kinds of neuroses.
So there are some kinds of
psychotherapy that would recommend you tell an unhappy artist to
look into whether she’s doing her art. This is checked into because we understand that there are
certain inner pushes and pulls that people have to be creative,
and that many folks need to follow these impulses in order to
feel good.
This is one way in which these
artists are following the dictum of making the unconscious
conscious; they are bringing those parts of their unconscious
potential into the light, from formlessness into the arena of
form, where it is called their art.
But, you see, one thing that’s
hardly ever understood or even talked about in psychology is
that it may be just as important for one to learn how to do
one’s taxes or to fix one’s washing machine or to care for
oneself when one is sick or to learn how to build a house for
oneself . . . to learn in general how to stand on one’s own feet in this complex world, without having to
be forever reliant on specialists. It may be just as important for many of us to learn how
to do these things — and to become less specialized and more
generalized — if they represent aspects of our unconscious
(not-conscious) in relation to which we feel powerless and which
we feel have control over us. And since we do need to feel that we belong in this world
and that we understand our daily life, growth and “therapy”
might entail learning about these practical matters of our
ordinary mundane reality.
A balanced antidote to our modern
“neurosis” would tell a person, not only to do their writing
or their art, or to practice communication skills, to face their
feelings or to meditate; but it also might tell them to clean up
their house or organize their files, to learn how to “fight
city hall,” to take a course in using their PC, or whatever .
. . i.e., to make those unconscious things conscious that are
impinging on their life.
These “lower” levels of
self-actualization may be just as important as the “higher”
areas. It’s what
should be meant by the common notion of becoming a “fully
functioning human being.” In fact, these “lower” areas may be even more crucial
to our sense of well-being if they are neglected in favor of the
“higher” ones.
The point is that a sense of
happiness, belongingness, fulfillment, and satisfaction — whatever you want to call it
— may entail actualization in all
these areas, may entail elements both “lower” and
“higher,” may include growth “downward” into
groundedness in our daily reality as well as “upwards” into
transcendent insight into encompassing personality patterns.
Finding
a Balance: Having Gods as well as Becoming One!
Granted, we need to make a
trade-off in doing this. In
economic terms, we have to do a cost-benefit analysis of our
current path of choosing money as the answer to our sense of
powerlessness.
The analysis of our cultural
complexity and the ailments that come with it, put forth in Part
One, shows that we can never have enough money to completely
eradicate our sense of alienation and impotence in confronting
our daily world. The
answer that emerges is thus to take back some of the power over
the things of our daily life that we have given up to others.
Yet the world is still too
complex, too “big,” to be able to understand and have power
in all the situations and “black box” areas we encounter on
a daily basis. There
simply wouldn’t be enough time for all that.
Therefore, we have two
complementary approaches available, both of which we can use to
navigate this third-millennial ocean. Since the “world” has become so big, or complex, we
can work to make our personal worlds “smaller.” In other words, we can simplify
our lives down to the manageable; part of this involves placing
some limits on the amount of information we take in on a daily
basis. We simply
can’t integrate all the information we’re bombarded with.
So we have to prioritize what’s important to us, and
set limits on what we take in. (Turn off the
TV and radio and have silence for a change!) Naturally, to prioritize what’s important to us we have
to make an effort to know ourselves.
Of course, this simplifying of
one’s life has it’s disadvantages as well, especially when
taken to an extreme. Still,
one can discriminate and choose from among the daily influx of
trivia those items/tasks/databits that are more important to
one’s sense of power and feeling of with-it-ness. One can prioritize and allocate one’s time accordingly
in going about seeking power in the various areas of one’s
daily life.
An important aspect of this,
though, is that it requires a taking back of time
“offerings” from the money god to be put to one’s own use.
This means a radical re-envisioning of the normal view,
in this culture, of what one is to do with one’s daily time.
Instead of being a slave to a job or career (a
specialization), for example, which leaves little time for
gaining power in other areas of one’s life, one needs to
liberate more of one’s time for understanding in the more
practical or general areas of one’s life.
This, of course, means that one
has to accept the idea of making less money. That is the trade-off that needs to be decided; one needs
to weigh the benefits of groundedness in the world in relation
to various areas, over against the power that can be wielded
with money.
The extent to which one allocates
more time for one’s special task, vis-à-vis aspects of being a
person as a whole, is a completely individual decision. At times one still needs to placate the specialty gods of
one’s culture. Yet
one can go a long way toward freeing oneself from the dominion
of those powers by being aware of this alternative way of being
and doing one’s life. And
the more that one can do this, the more secure and confident one
feels in the world. And
certainly, if nothing else, it helps to know that in this
culture the dominant life model is one, taken to the extreme,
that leads invariably to the alienation, impotence, and
isolation I have described.
PART
THREE: THE CONSEQUENCES: NOBLE BEINGS
The payoff to our efforts in this
process of individuation is that we become more self-assured
individuals, for starters. This
in turn promotes a sense of well-being and belonging in the
world — however complex it may sometimes appear to be.
But the benefits go beyond this.
From this place of self-confidence in relation to the
world, we can reach out in a spirit of cooperation to others.
But we can do it this time not on the basis of either
neediness or exploitation; rather, we can reach out to others as
to beings who are as noble and divine in essence as we are, and
with whom we can now enter into equal relationship. There’s no longer the unhealthy dependency that was the
product of the original conditions described at the outset.
Being
“Grounded”: At Home Both Above and Below
Another aspect of this state of
beingness in the world can be demonstrated by the symbol of
infinity — that connected loop or double loop, a figure eight
on its side. This
can be seen to represent an ideal pattern of growing that
partakes of expanding into the ‘lower” aspects as well as
the “higher” and that suggests how the one can aid our
ability to grow in the other.
That is to say that, although it
sounds very mundane, a person can become solidly grounded and
confident in many of these areas of functioning on the physical
plane — getting on familiar terms with one’s local library or
one’s VCR remote control unit, for example — and that with
this grounding there comes a sense of well-being or inner peace
that naturally fosters more attunement with one’s higher self
when putting energy into expanding in that direction, or on that
side of the loop.
In other words, becoming grounded
can promote more of a “flowing in” of the intuition from the
so-called “higher” realms, which of course are not
“higher” they are simply the other untapped aspects of
ourselves.
At any rate, the entire process
becomes a very natural feedback loop or cross-fertilization
leading to greater and greater at-home-ment in both the world
“above” and the one right here in front of us. As the Moody Blues sang it:
“Come back to Earth, for what it’s worth; for
you’ve been dreaming of a ceiling not a home.” To the extent we do this, then, we can begin to know the
feelings of nobility that characterized our ancestors . . .
those feelings that cause one to walk tall on the Earth . . .
knowing that one belongs here . . . that this place is home
after all.
Copyright © 2004 by Michael D. Adzema
Biographical
Note
MICHAEL ADZEMA is an independent scholar whose articles have appeared
in a variety of international and regional magazines and
journals; on-line his articles have been published on diverse
sites, in several languages. He "specializes" in writing about
psychology, spirituality, current events and culture,
consciousness, new-age and generational change, and
metaphysics. He
is also a primal breathwork facilitator whose experience in experiential
psychotherapies such as primal therapy, rebirthing, and holotropic breathwork
extend over thirty years. He is the founder of SSILLY God Ventures, was the
editor of the print version of the journal,
Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology, which now appears
on this site, and of the magazine Primal Spirit, which likewise appears
on this site, as an e-zine. Michael's extended bio can be found at
Mickel Adzema's writings
. E-mail, click on mickel@primalspirit.com.
** Editor's Note: This
article had previously been published in the magazines: The Rose Garden,
Horizon, and Spirit of Change. [return
to text]