thenatureofmind

Weaving our models

A noiseless Patient Spider
By Walt Whitman

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated.
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever reeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where do you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Ryokan's Opinion

Everything turns out false;
Everything turns out true
According to your way of thinking.
Falsehood does not exist outside truth
Nor truth lies outside falsehood.
Fellow truth-seekers,
Why do you seek after truth only?
I'd rather ask you if your mind
To seek after truth is true or false.

From: The Zen Fool Ryokan tr. Misao Kodama & Hikosaku Yanagishma

Minding the Darkness (Exerpt)

By Peter Dale Scott

...the problem has always been

how do we live with evil

        we can profit from it

    we can preach against it

but if we write poetry

        how not to misrepresent

    the great conspiracy

of organized denial

        we call civilization?

Bush, the US and Archetypal Inflation

If you had a friend and he came to you and told you that he had been talking with God and that God told him to run for president, how would you react? If you were a normal person you would probably think that your friend was losing it. I think most people would pat their poor friend on the head and suggest that he find professional help or at least a spiritually oriented retreat where he could explore the conversation further.

"I feel like God wants me to run for President. I can't explain it, but I sense my country is going to need me. Something is going to happen... I know it won't be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it."

- George W. Bush to James Robinson

..."God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them."

- George W. Bush - Ha'aretz, 06.25.03

"...the archetype of the Self is also capable of triggering possession, the effect of which is that an individual identifies himself or herself with the inner "great man" or "wise woman" and as a result becomes hopelessly inflated. Every madhouse has a few Jesus Christs, Napoleons, presidents of the United States, and Virgin Mary's. When people are outright mad, the danger ends there. However, there are many people who only in secret overestimate themselves through identification with a Self figure. In such cases they just feel a little too much in the right, and this is one of the worst things that can happen. They become secretly inhuman as a result of some fanatical conviction or self-righteous attitude. Exactly this lies behind many of the massacres of our time, far more than the emotional outbreaks of single individuals that we are familiar with as the cause of murder and manslaughter. Most of those who set off bombs in public places have some 'righteous' conviction in their heads, which in their eyes justifies what they do.

All ideological fanaticism and every overwhelming affect arise from the constellation of an archetype. The archtype of the Self is no exception to this. It too can produce these sorts of effects. Thus we must have great respect for the old Eskimo shamans, who in relating to the world of the spirits were able just to be healers and not let themselves be possessed by its powers. Those who became possessed by the spirits were sick in their eyes. They caused schisms in the community rather than helping it."

- Marie-Louise Von Franz - Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche

"George sees this as a religious war. He doesn't have a p.c. view of this war. His view of this is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we as the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know."

"The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty," authors Peter and Rochelle Schweizer

Where we find ourselves is in the situation where each side is projecting it's evil on the other. In Iran we are called the great satan. We have fanatics of every stripe willing to die in order to inflict some damage on the other side. We have each side claiming direct inspiration from God and casting themselves in the light of rightousness. It's like a rather fabulous mirror in which each sees himself transformed into something evil and each declares that he will not cease until all evil is destroyed. When all evil is destroyed, all good will have been destroyed as well as the minds that created good and evil.

Bush, the United States and the Shadow

“And my answer is, there's evil in the world. But we can overcome evil. We're good. We're good-hearted people, and the boys and girls of America are showing the world just that.”

-George W. Bush

How we organize our information involves matching the perceived data against our conceptual patterns, which are often unconscious. One of the archetypal patterns often involved in this process is known as the shadow.

As defined by Carl Jung, the shadow is the receptacle for all of that which we have for one reason or another disowned. It is the repository for all that is unpleasant in us that we wish to avoid. It is also the place where those things which are inconvenient and do not fit into our world view are placed. Also, in many cases, attempts by children to develop certain capabilities or talents are discouraged as not being “practical”. So these talents would be repressed falling into the shadow. All that constitutes the shadow is not evil or harmful; there is a mixture of the unpleasant with things that are extremely valuable.

… no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real.

- Carl Jung, Aion

The reason integrating the shadow into the conscious mind is so difficult is due to the mechanism of projection. The process of pattern matching external data against an unconscious archetypal pattern is known as the mechanism of projection.

Projection is defined as “the situation in which one unconsciously invests another person (or object) with notions or characteristics of one’s own: e.g. a man, fascinated by a woman because she corresponds to his anima, falls in love with her. Feelings, images, and thoughts can be projected onto others. One also projects negative feelings: e.g. a woman has a grudge against a friend, so she imagines that her friend is angry with her.”

- Graeme Wilson

Although, with insight and good will, the shadow can to some extent be assimilated into the conscious personality, experience shows that there are certain features which offer the most obstinate resistance to moral control and prove almost impossible to influence. These resistances are usually bound up with projections, which are not recognized as such, and their recognition is a moral achievement beyond the ordinary. While some traits peculiar to the shadow can be recognized without too much difficulty as one’s own personal qualities, in this case both insight and good will are unavailing because the cause of the emotion appears to lie, beyond all possibility of a doubt, in the other person. No matter how obvious it may be to the neutral observer that it is a matter of projections, there is little hope that the subject will perceive this himself. He must be convinced that he throws a very long shadow before he is willing to withdraw his emotionally-toned projections from their object.

- Carl Jung, Aion

This is an evil man that we're dealing with. And I wouldn't put it past him to develop evil weapons to try to harm civilization as we know it.

- George W. Bush

As we know, no such weapons of mass destruction were ultimately found in Iraq. Clearly, the need to project the darker part of George Bush’s shadow and the shadow of the US is represented here. Is it not ironic that a president and a government that decides to abrogate the signed nuclear test ban treaties and to continue development of weapons of mass destruction see those very weapons in the hands of the leaders and governments that we choose to project our shadow upon?

In 1997 President Clinton’s administration agreed to declassify documents detailing the US government’s involvement in the genocide in Guatemala. In 1999 President Clinton issued a formal and unequivocal apology for the US involvement in Guatemala. During that involvement the US overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala, trained and equipped the army and trained an army of clandestine terrorists who were responsible for the assassination and genocide that resulted in the deaths and disappearances of over 200,000 people. I could detail numerous other involvements of the CIA and the US government in the overthrow of democratically elected governments. The shadow we cast as a nation is long and dark with many untold secrets. In fact secrecy is the hallmark of our government. The pervasive need for secrecy hides things that a vast majority of civilized people would find unacceptable. But the secrets are our secrets and we cannot expunge them from our collective unconscious by projecting them on “terrorists”. Until the secrets are unearthed and presented in the light of day and “owned” by the American people, we will continue to battle the hidden forces of darkness that are nothing more than a mirror of our own fears.

The first to benefit from a free Iraq would be the Iraqi people, themselves. Today they live in scarcity and fear, under a dictator who has brought them nothing but war, and misery, and torture. Their lives and their freedom matter little to Saddam Hussein -- but Iraqi lives and freedom matter greatly to us.-

- George W. Bush February 26, 2003