september 23, 1999
prior moments
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On September 23, 11:30am Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), the Sun, appearing to travel along the ecliptic, reaches the point where it crosses the equator into the southern celestial hemisphere. Today day and night are of equal length.
rat haus reality's completion of its fourth revolution around SOL is an expansive time for this ratitor. i am filled with life's grace bestowing many wondrous blessings and gifts. Among other happenings, today marks the formal "hypertext publication date" of my first book, Understanding Special Operations. Additionally, interest in www.ratical.org continues growing to levels not imagined when this began four years ago. The opportunity to publish more and more material for the purpose of encouraging people to see wholistically is one of the greatest gifts life has provided.For ratical's fourth anniverse', a collection of new offerings has been assembled, at the center of which are four core elements. Four directions, four seasons, four elements. i am reminded of Carl Jung's understanding of the number four and its significance as a symbol of wholeness. In spite of the fragmented nature of this time we are living in, my own experience on the threshold of the last autumn of this millennium is one of an unprecedented contemporary wholeness within which radiates outwardly to all my relations, to all in uni verse i am connected with.
At the top of the new list is Understanding Special Operations, And Their Impact on The Vietnam War Era, 1989 Interview with L. Fletcher Prouty, Colonel USAF (Retired). This book was sent to the printer last week, complete with its own Library of Congress Catalog Card Number (LCCN) and International Standard Book Number (ISBN). It is being published through rat haus reality press and will be listed in Books In Print. With luck the first printing's 700 copies will be available for those interested before the end of October.Understanding Special Operations (USO) is a book comprising the 5-day interview i conducted with L. Fletcher Prouty in May 1989. At that point i had been studying the birth, growth and rise of the National Security State in America since 1977. i was very interested in the content of Fletcher's written works and was introduced to him through our mutual friend John Judge.
This is oral history from a person who was present at the creation of the post-World War II system set up to provide military support for the clandestine operations of the U.S. government. After being assigned to the Pentagon in 1955, Prouty describes what then commenced:
I had been there . . . three or four weeks when I received a call to go to the office of the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Thomas D. White. General White's career had been in intelligence. He'd had many other duties and was a very well-trained and experienced intelligence officer.
He told me that the National Security Council had published a Directive -- #5412, in 1954 -- and that Directive defined "Covert Operations" and established how the United States government would perform and support covert operations. It required that the Department of Defense provide the material support, the personnel support, the bases, the equipment for clandestine operations, whether they were to be run by the CIA or by the Defense Department or both. Whatever the clandestine operation, we would provide the manpower and the logistic support. This would require special techniques and special procedures to keep it secret, to pay the bills, and all that sort of thing -- handle people who were killed, and so on.
He said to me, "We have no policy on this. This is new. And you are going to be the `Focal Point' Officer. You'll be given an office and responsibilities in which you will draw up this policy in conjunction with all of the air staff experts that are needed and in conjunction with the CIA."
I had never (other than in peripheral day-to-day work) had anything to do with CIA. But I found out that in that period -- 1955 -- a great number of those people in the CIA were ex-military people, who had the same ideas about combat that I had, and clandestine operations, and things like that. So I sat down and for at least six months worked to draw up the paper, a formal paper, for the "Military Support of the Clandestine Operations of the United States Government."Prouty operated the Pentagon Focal Point Office for the CIA first for the Air Force, from 1955-1960, which was then moved to the Office of the Secretary of Defense (1960-62), and finally for all branches of the military when it was moved to the Office the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1962-63). Our conversation ranged across a vast landscape interspersing Fletcher's recounting his twenty three years service in the U.S. Air Force with related political history including the National Security Act of 1947 and creation of the Department of Defense; the 1948 Dulles-Jackson-Correa Report that was, as Prouty describes it, Allen Dulles' Mein Kampf for what he thought the CIA should become; how the Economy Act of 1932 was used to handle the money to run covert operations; employing the system of reimbursement to fund unaccountable activities; and some of the consequences of the creation of the CIA Focal Point System throughout the Executive Branch, to name but a few points of reference.
The depth of information discussed by Fletcher is dense. Among the many significant areas emphasized, two that stand out, which are included on the back cover, can not be stressed often enough:
To really understand CIA, you have to remember that perhaps its best cover story is that it's an intelligence organization. It doesn't do much intelligence. Intelligence is gathered by other assets throughout the Government, also. The Agency has quite a bit; but that isn't why they were created. Covert operations is their big money deal.There is no law, there is no structure, for covert operations. The Government didn't confront that in 1947 when they wrote the law. There has been no revision of the law to accommodate that. . . . The single primary character of the CIA is Mr. Dulles. There's no question about it, it was his agency. Nobody else has left any mark like his. But you need to see that background to understand what the passage of the National Security Act really meant in 1947. What it says in law is what creates many of these controversies about intelligence today. Because there still is no law that says that the CIA is an intelligence organization -- it says that it is a coordinating agency. There is no law that says it is a covert operations agency.
When i recorded this interview, i never imagined it would someday become a genuine book. i simply wanted to speak with Fletcher about what he had experienced, participated in, and knew about. True, i did create the raw transcripts of the recordings in the months following my visit. But this was done to satisfy my primary interest: to learn more about the how, after the planetary watershed event of World War II, the U.S. government implemented a national security state structure to conduct its domestic as well as foreign affairs.
In 1989 i thought only other people created such vastly involved things as bona fide books. In the intervening 10 years, i expanded inwardly to the point where what had before seemed beyond the realm of my capacities is now an accomplished fact-in-completion. Publishing useful, relevant information about our world and the era we live in is one of the domains i continue to "come of age" within. My gratitude at the opportunity to continue growing in this manner feels increasingly unbounded.
i chose to make the entire book available "for free" on the web in the spirit of The Give Away. This is one of the founding principles of rat haus reality: give as much as possible to the world to enrich and contribute to our human family's further growth and maturation. i appreciate the gathering momentum of the Open Source software movement and its rich potentials for helping transform the way the commerical world operates. Working to expand the presence of community, rather than for accumulation and profit, is the future if we can grow into it.
Second of the four is my sister Patty's Masters in Curriculum and Instruction, A Dynamic Conceptual Blueprint for Spokane Arts in Community School (SpArCS). Despite the fact she's my sister, i knew i wanted to add this into There Are Many Worlds . . . before i was half-way through it as it is a marvelous articulation of the understanding and perception that art sparks learning through the multiple intelligences.If we going to succeed in our present "coming of age" phase of growth as a species ready to accept responsibility for the consequences of our collective choices and actions, then we are now at the threshold of breaking out of the suffocating, dumbed-down, and limiting conformity being imposed on more and more generations of young human beings. What is needed are innovative systems of education that expand the infinite potentials for growth and learning that are the birthright of each of us. Although i'd prefer to insert many parts of the thesis at this juncture, i will limit inclusion to only 5 paragraphs while urging everyone to read the whole of this inspiring-to-extreme paper:
The distinguishing feature of the human being has been identified by philosophers and scientists alike, as "the capacity to create and manipulate symbol systems" (Eisner, 1994). Language and mathematics are just two of the forms through which individuals represent and develop "evanescent" ideas and feelings in a process of creative thinking that makes communication possible.To expose students to experiences that are rich in all of the seven intelligences, so that the inherent strengths of each individual can be "observed, nurtured and engaged". This is what it's all about: to understand another through clear observation, enabling one to then nurture and engage that person in harmony with her unique path of learning and growing further into the limitless divine being each of us is born to manifest.
Music, dance, drama, and visual arts are equally legitimate symbol systems which are used to make sense of and give expression to human experience. These symbol systems have generally been considered of lesser importance than reading, writing, mathematics, and the sciences in the curriculum, largely because they are associated with vague and subjective perception, rather than reason. . . .
Parallels which can be drawn between the arts and sciences provide justification for the arts in education; but the arts should not only be valued for the ways in which they are similar to sciences. Since the earliest humans began the quest for meaning through the creation and manipulation of symbolic forms, the arts have served as a vehicle for exploration into the emotional, intuitive, and irrational realms of existence. Science and technology have become an essential point of reference in our way of life, and we rely on these disciplines in our search for meaning and purpose. It is critical, though, that we step back and acknowledge that we are emotional, intuitive and perceiving, as well as rational beings. Our existence, and the continuation of life on the planet depend as much on the nurturance of the human spirit, as of the human mind. Science and technology can never answer the needs that lie at the core of our humanity. . . .
In his book, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983), Howard Gardner delineates seven distinct areas of human intelligence: linguistic, logical/mathematical, bodily/kinesthetic, spatial, musical, interpersonal and intrapersonal. The "basic skills" that comprise the traditional curriculum, are founded in the linguistic and logical/mathematical intelligences; however, the expanding notion of intelligence that is typified by the research of Gardner and Project Zero, [at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education of which Gardner is co-director --ratitor] provides compelling evidence that, by teaching and learning through the seven (or more) intelligences, our schools can provide all types of students with enhanced opportunities for improved academic achievement.
The arts open up natural pathways to learning through the seven intelligences. Subject matter in all content areas can be taught through the arts which activate and develop the linguistic, logical/mathematical, kinesthetic, musical, visual/spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal intelligences. In Frames of Mind, Gardner discusses the importance of exposing students to experiences that are rich in all of the seven intelligences, so that the inherent strengths of each individual can be "observed, nurtured and engaged" (Missouri Arts Education Task Force, 1990).This paper has expanded my own sense of purpose when i work with the kids in Gary's piano classes. It is the response ability of the person accepting the role of teacher to understand how a specific child learns and then proceed from this to nurture and engage them. i love the way Paula Underwood describes this in her magnificent treatise, A Native American Worldview / Hawk and Eagle, Both are Singing:
There are many kinds of sensitization processes that you have the opportunity to go through if you choose. You get many kinds of testing to evaluate how you think. The idea is that everybody learns, but you need to figure out how a child learns in order to design a learning circumstance in which each individual can teach themselves. The idea is always to teach yourself. In fact there is no word "teach," or there didn't used to be, in the fundamental language.The third element is the hyper-text form of Tom Greco's glorious 1994 book, New Money for Healthy Communities. This is essential and required reading for everyone yearning to manifest a living, sustainable civilization. The opening paragraph of Chapter 2, The Essential Nature of Money, focuses the point nicely:The question, "What is money?" may seem trivial to us, who in this modern day make constant use of it, but it is confusion about the essence of money which has allowed it to be abused and misallocated. Money in classical economics is defined as (1) a medium of exchange, (2) a standard of value, (3) a unit of account, (4) a store of value, and (5) a standard of deferred payment. There are many problems with these definitions, but their primary inadequacy is that they are functional definitions; they tell what money does, not what it is. We need to understand the basic essence of money. Once we have grasped its essence we can begin to design exchange systems which will equitably serve the needs of people and the Earth.i first met Tom at the February Gathering. We both attended the most recent of these held in August. (Carol Brouillet was the heart-and-soul creator of this series, the formal name for which is "Strategies for Transforming the Global Economy.") Tom's background and grasp of the breadth and depth of the subject of fashioning exchange systems to equitably serve the needs of people and the Earth enables him to present a radiantly wholistic perspective that is lucid and intelligible to the lay person. Study the outline presented in the Table of Contents and you'll begin to apprehend more of what i am alluding to here. As described in the Preface,New Money for Healthy Communities is a how-to-do-it manual. It describes exchange mechanisms which have worked in the past, as well as some of the more successful contemporary local exchange efforts. It identifies the pitfalls to be avoided, and it proposes specific methods for transforming the exchange process, methods which are rational, equitable, and empowering, and which can be easily implemented at the local level by small voluntary groups.Just as the work of Project Zero and a host of other programs cited throughout the SpArCS Thesis already exist, are "provably" successful, and are available for others to adapt to their own communities, so it is with the information in New Money.Currently i am involved with the Santa Cruz community currency project which is working to establish a LETS system where i live. We are just such a small voluntary group endeavoring to create a local currency network that generates new wealth and keeps it circulating within the confines of Santa Cruz to support community service organizations, local businesses and everyone who lives in this area. To borrow a sentence from our flyer, Community currencies are not in competition with conventional money, they work with it and improve its manners.
The point is there are many options available to each and every one of us to re-create our world to better serve life's needs which inevitably serve our own. If one relies on the voice of the one speaking to the many manifesting through corporate media, then things will indeed appear hopeless. It is by focusing our awareness and intent on such sources as the above-two that we open to more of life's infinite possibilities for what we can do if we but chose to focus our intent.
The fourth component of this four-year milestone brings us back to one of the founding motivations for creating rat haus reality: the burden we are placing on the future of all life that may follow us here, through the continued development of nuclear power. Thus it is with great appreciation that we present the complete Second Edition of Stan Thompson's extremely helpful monograph, Comments on Nuclear Power. Stan describes his position in the first paragraph of the Introduction:Before 1946 I worked as an engineer on steam and gas turbine power plants. In 1946, after nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I entered the field of "peacetime" nuclear power. As an engineer I wanted to be part of the development of this new "safe" source of electrical energy "too cheap to meter." In 1963, because of safety and economic concerns about nuclear power, I quit the development of nuclear power. Now, in 1997, after over fifty years of observation, I am convinced that human beings lack the capacity to protect life on our planet from the perils of man-made nuclear devices. My common sense feelings, supported by my engineering analyses, recommend that no more reactors be built and that presently operating reactors be terminated as soon as possible.Stan's career, background, and willingness to speak the truth as he sees it, regardless of the price to himself for doing so, makes him one of the many precious elders of our culture who still can hear the Song of Life, as David Korten so beautiful portrays in The Post-Corporate World, Life After Capitalism. For all of us who still have years or decades to go to reach Stan's level of vista and perspective, we will best serve life's interests and needs by attending to such living wisdom.It is an intelligence steeped in honoring and serving life's purpose that articulates the following we all must take inside and live:
The decision whether to cease and desist from nuclear power should not be left to the nuclear "experts." They, and their supporting military nuclear adventurers, have a vested professional interest in its continuation. That crucial decision can be made only by a citizenry as aware as possible of military and civilian nuclear perils, but with a primary vested interest in the continuation of grandchildren and their progeny. People who are not nuclear experts must trust and use their own power of observation, noting that (1) commercial nuclear power is an economic failure without the government subsidy which it gains because of its potential support for military ventures, (2) nuclear reactors, like all complicated technical devices, will occasionally fail, (3) failure of a reactor, as demonstrated at Chernobyl, inflicts abiding radioactive damage on populations and their environment, and (4) successful reactors accumulate an unsafe everlasting radioactive burden for all future generations to accommodate. . . .A segment in the 1979 Foreward to Gofman and Tamplin's Poisoned Power is tremendously germane to the business of those who encourage and promote the creation of more nuclear power systems and precisely whose interests are truly being served by such promotion.
As an engineer developing nuclear power I observed a lack of concern for the potential of nuclear power to destroy life. I believe that my sensitivity to the perils of human use of nuclear processes was enhanced because I took seriously my original assignment to develop "good" nuclear reactors.
Follow my technical discussions only as far as you wish. Please reserve your right to protect our grandchildren based on your own observations of nuclear developments and mishaps as they develop. I enter a plea that, for the sake of your grandchildren and mine, you seriously consider an all-out fight against the continuation of nuclear energy in all of its various "peacetime" and military forms.
I will be pleased if I succeed in sharpening your awareness of the potential harm of continuing nuclear ventures, either civilian or military.There are two possible ways to describe the motives of the promoters of nuclear power, yet either way makes them indictable for crimes against humanity.Fantasies such as Hormesis ("A little radiation is good for you") are the current day fare dished up by those who call for more lethally polluting nuclear energy systems when energy conservation and the further development and growing maturation of soft-energy sources including solar, wind, and biomass point towards life's furtherance and our own continued participation within its design constraints here on Earth.
First, let us assume that they really are ignorant about existing knowledge of the effects of "low" doses of radiation when they say, "We don't really know yet about the effects of `low' doses of radiation." In that case, these promoters of nuclear power are saying in effect, "Expose people first; learn the effects later." There is only one description for such planned mass experimentation on humans -- moral depravity. And such experimentation with "low" doses of radiation can produce irreversible effects not only on this generation, but upon countless future generations of humans who have no voice, no choice. If that is not a crime against humanity, what is?
Alternatively, let us assume that they truly do know the facts about fatal injury from "low" doses of radiation, and yet they are still willing to promote nuclear power. In this case, the charge is not experimentation upon humans, but rather it is planned, random murder. The crime of murder is perhaps worse than the crime of experimentation. ( 1979 Foreward, pp.X-XI )mosa and i are deeply grateful for the opportunity to present Stan's richly detailed monograph for the benefit of others to study and employ in their own work to cease the pursuit of manifesting Pluto's realm throughout our one and only planetary home.
After eight months of putting it off, the latest site traffic statistics have been processed. October and April-or-May have previously been the "peak months" when browser requests reach a zenith. However now we are amazed to see that traffic for July (234670 requests of which 65200 were HTML files) -- normally the heart of the "slump months" when school is out for summer -- came to within 1,993 requests of exceeding the current high-water mark of last April (236663 requests of which 65584 were HTML files). Examining the current raw server logs, it appears September will far and away break all previous records. This kind of "confirmation" is one of the greatest sources of satisfaction manifesting rat haus reality brings.And, of course, there are so many more projects calling out for attention and work. i greatly enjoyed Elisabet Sahtouris' opening presentation on "The Big Picture" at the August Gathering. Following her into the dialogue session immediately afterwards, we decided then and there i would make the initial raw transcript of her talk, recorded by Mariah Gilardin of TUC Radio (Time of Useful Consciousness, "an aeronautical term meaning the time between the onset of oxygen deficiency and the loss of consciousness. These are the brief moments in which a pilot may save the troubled plane."), and then e-mail it to her to polish and decide where to fold in the slides she had worked up to give the hypertext version more of what-all she touched upon.
While we hope to have this ready before too much of the fall goes by, i'm not sure how Elisabet's time is in the near term. (At present she's off in India and i forget when she's returning.) i especially loved the point she made about how we have biologists to study all other life forms and tell us how they practice their living systems of economies while we then have economists as the only ones to study human life forms and tell us how we should practice a wholly different system of exchange that does not acknowledge nor understand the exquisite genius living systems employ to ensure the survival of the whole system. See especially her updated Biology of Globalization paper with such gems as the Main Features and Principles of Living Systems list as well as her new Humanity 3000 Participant Statement, Foundation For the Future.
And coming up much faster than most are cognizant of is the unknown fact of what will happen when the clock clicks to 12 o'clock ante merideim on January 1st. The deeper issue is how we have come to relate to our idea of time itself, to the watch we strap onto our wrist, to the clock and what it tells us about our perception of self and being.
An especially perceptive and relevant work-in-progress is being produced by Paula D. Gordon, Ph.D., Visiting Research Professor and Director of Special Projects in the George Washington University Research Program in Social and Organizational Learning. Published on August 18th, Part 4 addresses the question, The Y2K and Embedded Systems Crisis ~ Why Isn't the Crisis Being Treated as a Crisis as Yet, Nationally or Globally?. After presenting her assessment of Clinton's position,
If the President continues to pursue his present course of restrained activity and if he fails to engage in crisis-oriented action and problem-solving, the Y2K crisis could well go down in history as the worst instance of malfeasance in public office in the history of the nation.she goes into considerable detail about her reasons for this evaluation. Many suggestions for actions the Federal government could take even at this late date are presented but Gordon is not optimistic in view of the apparent policy to avoid disturbing the public and causing economic repercussions. The following comment touches on an extremely important dynamic most people are not yet aware of:The tendency to want to manage and "dumb down" the news so as not to risk engendering panic in the public is making a lot of knowing people very angry and frustrated. It also confuses people and keeps many in the dark. It can perpetuate an erroneous view of reality, which can have decidedly negative psychological and social psychological affects.i can well appreciate what Dr. Gordon is pointing out. For some time i have been exploring what the possibilities are and adjusting to the potential for a very different future that we all may soon enter into. i've actually succeeded in not exceeding 60 miles per hour when i have to drive on the freeway or any road with a speed limit greater than that. It's part of an on-going experiment to find out how to decouple from the increasingly "normal" stress we all seem so utterly thrall to. Driving slower is also preparing for the possibility that gasoline may be only sporadically available. (Not that we have very long before we use up this planetary endowment. See http://www.hubbertpeak.com/ .) At less than 60 mph, with no sudden accelerations at any speed, i so far am getting 43-46 mph in my 10-year-old Honda Civic and thus can travel over 500 miles on one tank of gas. The complement to this is i now exclusively ride my bike (along with a trailer) to get around town. So the car is not needed nor used locally any more.
Withholding the truth is a misguided policy and is a certain recipe for panic in the days immediately preceding and following the rollover. Adopting such a policy of withholding critical information is one thing in a parent-child relationship; it is quite another when the principals include public officials and the adult population of a free nation. The policy will leave the public largely unprepared psychologically or in any other way. The public will be ill-prepared to meet the challenges that are likely with the rollover. A major reason to raise awareness now and encourage constructive actions now, is that in the anxiety of the moment, there will be no time for individuals to go through the long process of getting used to the fact that we are in the midst of a crisis. Time is needed to work through this process and to adjust to a decidedly different view of what the future might bring.But most people are not being informed about what we are approaching and they are not having the time to do their own inner and outer adjusting. At the beginning of Part 4 Gordon points out the following assessment of this crisis from the IEEE:
The Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) sent an Open Letter to Congress on June 9, 1999 expressing the perspective of that organization concerning the seriousness of Y2K. The letter includes a description of Y2K and the embedded systems crisis as "non-solvable" and as a "crisis". It also states that the crisis has not begun to get the attention it deserves. (A copy of the Open Letter is at (http://www.ieeeusa.org/FORUM/POLICY/99june09.html.)Gordon's summation is the most damning commentary on our situation i have seen:Considerable assessment of the challenges posed by the Y2K technology crisis has been done during 1999. Few of these assessments, however, have led to the acceleration of actions that could have a major impact on minimizing the impacts of the crisis.
If those in roles of public and private sector responsibility do not significantly increase their efforts to act to minimize the harmful and disastrous impacts of Y2K and the embedded systems crisis, Y2K may turn out to be the largest, best studied, most assessed, monitored, talked about, and planned for, and, yes, even best understood catastrophic event in the recorded history of humankind. It may teach the lesson that knowledge and understanding are worthless if we do not act in accordance with what we know and understand."Y2K" is one more instance of the lesson that possessing vast amounts of knowledge, which may even produce commensurate degrees of understanding, does not necessarily result in right action. Borrowing on Montaign's "I quote others only the better to express myself," the following passage from Laurens van der Post's Patterns of Renewal is extremely relevant to this situation:
It is one of the laws of life that the new meaning must be lived before it can be known, and in some mysterious way modern man knows so much that he is the prisoner of his knowledge. The old dynamic conception of the human spirit as something living always on the frontiers of human knowledge has gone. We hide behind what we know. And there is an extraordinarily angry and aggressive quality in the knowledge of modern man; he is angry with what he does not know; he hates and rejects it. He has lost the sense of wonder about the unknown and he treats it as an enemy. The experience which is before knowing, which would enflame his life with new meaning, is cut off from him. Curiously enough, it has never been studied more closely. People have measured the mechanics of it, and the rhythm, but somehow they do not experience it (p.3).Part 5 of Gordon's work, In Case of Fire, Yell `Fire' was published on September 17th. It describes "some features that could distinguish these different ways in which the Y2K and embedded systems crisis could unfold. My purpose is to help clarify some real choices that are ours to make concerning the set of problems that is right in front of our noses now." Gordon stresses the critical need for action now by everyone who recognizes the potential damage inaction will produce.
Our future may be in the hands of those who understand the seriousness of the situation that we are in. It may turn on their ability and efforts to educate those in key roles of responsibility to the seriousness of this crisis. Our future may turn on the ability and efforts of such individuals to awaken understanding in others and even assume major roles of responsibility themselves. Those who have insight regarding actions that could be taken to help us get out of this incredible mess simply need to come forward and do what can be done in the time remaining to address the challenges before us. This will likely be no less true in the days, months, and years after the rollover as well.See Helen Calicott's "The accidental Armageddon" article (The Age, 6/20/99) for an explication of one of the most serious "y2k pressure-points": the world's chemical plants, nuclear reactors and nuclear-weapon systems. Among many, two essential right actions everyone can and must take are:learn about the World Atomic Safety Holiday (WASH) Campaign, fill up WASH Petitions, and send them back to Plutonium Free Future Fax Yeltsin/Clinton every day to take nuclear weapons off alert
Each of us is here to find out what the nature of being human means. We have been given these lives to live and discover all we may about who we are and what we can manifest within that then radiates outwardly to every one and every thing with which we connect. i only briefly met Carol Hansen at the August Gathering but experienced a very rich connection with her. She gave me a tape of a workshop she does called "Lighten Up" (see www.openheart.com) which focuses on a practice of unconditionally loving one's self. i've been experimenting with this every day since the middle of August. As Carol states, "This is powerful medicine." Since last spring i have experienced a deepening sense of priority to manifest unconditional love of and for my self in every moment. Things continue to expand with this focused intent.The four core elements above could have been ordered in sixteen different ways. i chose the sequence employed to place the two light-filled sources in the center, bracketed by their dark-side counterparts. The world of euphemism is at the heart of Special Operations. As stated in the Introduction, "The results of deliberately choosing to rename things to prevent their true nature from being correctly perceived is a primary area of focus" of USO. The unnecessary-to-continue man-made radioactive pollution of our biosphere is an equally disconcerting subject.
For me these four elements symbolize a wholeness that can only ever include both the light and shadow, the conscious and the unconscious. Laurens' magnificent biography, Jung and the Story of Our Time contains a passage on the shadow i want to include the beginning of to expand on this point.
He had in this journey into his own unconscious self discovered another archetypal pattern of the utmost significance in this regard. He called it the "shadow" -- a pattern that had at its disposal all the energies of what man had consciously despised, rejected, or ignored in himself. One sees immediately how aptly the term was chosen, because it is an image of what happens when the human being stands between himself and his own light. Whether this shadow should be properly regarded as archetypal in itself, or whether it is another shadow of archetypes themselves, is almost academic. The dark, rejected forces massing in the shadow of the unconscious, as it were, knife in hand, demanding revenge for all that man and his cultures have consciously sacrificed of them in the specialised conscious tasks he has set himself, are real and active enough to keep us too busy for academics and scholasticisms. They show how all our history is a progression on two levels: a conscious and unconscious, a manifest and latent level. Here is another overwhelming example of how he helped my own tentative groping in this direction and how he helped to banish the sense of isolation spoken of in the beginning.
The manifest level provides all the plausible rational justifications and excuses for the wars, revolutions, and disasters inflicted on men in their collective and private lives, but in reality it is on this other latent level where, unrecognised, the real instigators and conspirators against too narrow and rigid a conscious rule above are to be found. There, proud, angry, and undefeated, they move men and women on the manifest level about as puppets in predetermined patterns of their own revengeful seeking, or like a magnet conditioning a field of iron filings on a table above.
That is why all men tend to become what they oppose, why the New Testament exhorted us not to resist evil because what follows logically is that ultimately the dark, dishonoured self triumphs and emerges on the scorched level of the manifest to form another tyranny as narrow, producing another swing of the opposites of which Heraclitus spoke. The answer, as Jung saw it, was to abolish tyranny, to enthrone, as it were, two opposites side by side in the service of the master pattern, not opposing or resisting evil but transforming and redeeming it. These two opposites in the negations of our time could be turned into tragic enemies. But truly seen psychologically and again defined best perhaps in the nonemotive terms of physics, they were like the negative and positive inductions of energy observed in the dynamics of electricity; the two parallel and opposite streams without which the flash of lightning, for me always the symbol of awareness made imperative, was impossible.
Containing those two opposites, putting the light of the superior functions at the service of the dark, bearing all the tensions induced thereby, the individual could grow into a resolution of the two into a greater realisation of himself. One says greater because the self realised thereby is more than the sum of the opposites, because in the process of their resolution the capacity of the individual to join in the universal and continuing act of creation wherein his own life participates enables him to add something which was not there before.
So this role of the shadow in the life of the individual, the life of civilisation, and the reality of religion, not surprisingly, was one of Jung's closest concerns. He demonstrated in a way that cannot be denied how this mechanism of the shadow was at the back of the phenomenon of the persecution of the Jews in history, how Christians for centuries blamed their own rejection of the real meaning of Christ on the Jews who had crucified him, ignoring how they were recrucifying him daily in their own lives. It is an elemental part of the mythological dominants of history, as I called them to myself in the beginning, and gave me a clearer, deeper, and more precise understanding of their working. The mechanism of the shadow, for instance, was the explanation of Hitler and his own persecution of the Jews, and also of all racial, colour, and personal prejudice. Before I knew Jung I had written the essay mentioned in the beginning on how some such explanation could apply even to colour prejudice in my native South Africa.
Jung revealed in great detail how the individual imposed his quarrel with his own shadow onto his neighbour, in the process outlining scientifically why men inevitably saw the mote in the eye of their neighbour. It was not just out of ignorance of the beam in their own but unconsciously to avoid recognising it as reflection of their own. He defined for the first time in a contemporary idiom a primordial mechanism in the spirit of man which he called "projection," a mechanism which compels us to blame on our neighbour what we unconsciously dislike most in ourselves.
All at once it was clear that man could only be well and sane when the quarrel between him and his shadow, between the primitive and the civilised, between the Jacob and the Esau in himself, was dissolved and the two reconciled and together enter the presence of the master pattern as Jung's imagination had already done. Only there and then did he become something Jung called whole. Wholeness was the ultimate of man's conscious and unconscious seeking; indeed, consciousness was so important because it was the chosen instrument of the unconscious seeking the abolition of partialities in a harmony of differences that is wholeness. This wholeness was only possible through a life lived religiously. To heal, or make whole, once more was demonstrated to be a Pentecostal task of the utmost holiness.The capacity of the individual to join in the universal and continuing act of creation wherein her own life participates, enables her to add something which was not there before. We all were born with a yearning to manifest this. Exploring what it means to unconditionally love one's self goes to the heart of projection whereby we each "blame on our neighbour what we unconsciously dislike most in ourselves." To reconcile the fragmentation and conflict we feel engulfed in throughout our world, we must each come home fully to our own complete selves, containing our "two parallel and opposite streams" and dissolving the quarrel that keeps them split off and estranged from each other. In doing so we participate in the act of creating a new union of wholeness greater than the individual forces within of light and dark.
Wholeness includes all our being. Ignoring, rejecting, and/or denying any part fragments our sense of essence and centeredness within. Finding out who we actually are reveals the partial masquerading as if it were the whole. Partial concepts of ourselves and our role in life give way to the illumination that what we are is unknown, but constantly revealing itself. The fact of open-ended and available possibilities is something always calling us to recognize its features and presence. The search for wholeness is as essential to our continued existence as the breathing of our lungs and the beating of our heart.
i increasingly experience a sense of wholeness growing within that appears to be a contemporary form in maturity of what one experiences through the awestruck, opened-ended perceptions lived in childhood. But now, understanding is based on recognition of the fact that in each moment, i choose to interpret what i perceive in precisely the way i choose to interpret it. i choose. No one else is response able for my state of psychic being. This makes me absolutely accountable to my self for the psychic reality i construct in each moment. This response ability exists within each of us. Life perpetually invites us to see and act upon this constantly changing but ever-present opening to greater wholeness. The choice is ours alone to make.