Dear readers,
I have long been an admirer of the work of Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of depth psychology. He understood and defined the collective unconscious, and he clearly explained how themes and archetypes of human behaviors are shared by peoples and cultures all over the world. He also understood that all human beings carry a shadow – a significant part of awareness that influences our behavior all while lying below the surface of our conscious thoughts and behaviors.
In America today, we live in a culture that is imploding on itself. This collapse is due to a number of factors, the greatest of which is the intentional repression of the Sacred Feminine. This hatred and fear of feminine energies began long ago and is at the foundation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Today, whether you lead a secular or religious life, you are influenced by a culture that is so out of balance with reality, yet most likely, you do not realize it. This is where the collective unconscious becomes a powerful engine for either social chaos or social change.
I believe that in order to evolve as societies, to become more peaceful and humane, we need to be able to look inward and to mature. Yet today, in America, it is difficult to find a mature human being, at any age. Our movies promote irresponsible childlike behaviors where being married or being a responsible parent is considered lame and stupid. Our television shows are full of senseless violence and idiotic entertainment. We go on-line to find love, and for the most part, on dating sites, we find people who cannot stomach intimacy. Texting is the preferred mode of communication over telephone conversation or meeting up in person, because it is so distant and discharged of emotion and accountability.
Pornography, abuse of others, and self-abuse have replaced communication, affection, emotional closeness. Chris Hedges graphically explains in his 2009 book “Empire of Illusion: the end of intimacy and the triumph of spectacle” how today’s pornography has amped up violence against women to such an extent that there remains nothing but degradation and brutality. One of the porn film actors and producers interviewed in the book explains that male consumers of porn are purchasing revenge against the women they feel would never be interested in them. So in return, they indulge in a sense of personal power by watching women be victims of gang-bangs, brutal rape, strangulation, and nauseating abuse. The women, for the most part, are addicted to drugs and alcohol to numb themselves from the abuse, all while believing they are not worthy of anything better. Boys as young as 12 are already targeted consumers of these brutal films, easily available on-line. What does this say for the future of love, families, relationships? Hedges explains that men who are frequent consumers of porn are unable to engage in real relationships, expecting real women to behave like the women in the films, who appear to be enthusiastic partners in the abuse.
We are encouraged to emulate and adulate celebrities and to believe that we too can achieve all of our desires. Our corporations exploit people, animals, our home planet, Earth. Everything has a price, and living beings are commodities. Power and money are worth more than life itself, and our culture blows its rotting wind of death over everything it touches. How and why did this decomposition happen?
I personally believe that American culture is fizzling out and will soon implode on itself. It is not a sustainable system or philosophy. The end game of capitalism, as we can all see today, is oligarchy. The top 1% of our society enjoy obscene wealth and a life of ease and pleasure, paid for by the exploitation of the remaining 99% and by the cruel and massive theft of resources and exploitation of people in poorer nations around the world. We live in one the most culturally primitive and brutal societies on Earth, and this fact has been somewhat carefully hidden from most by an effective propaganda strategy which has used entertainment on all levels to distract people from awareness of the collective reality that has been forced upon us.
Capitalism is a brutal economic system whose primary value is to make profits, at any cost. In its current form, global corporate capitalism values nothing other than money and the power that money brings. But capitalism is one of the end results of a monotheistic culture which effectively has intentionally destroyed the Sacred Feminine. This is the basis of the degradation that we experience today, the endless wars for profit, the selling out of government, formed to support community and the collective good, to corporations, and the end of family, community, culture, and emotional intimacy.
The Sacred Feminine is an aspect of our collective unconscious which is far from dead, but which is buried deep within each of our minds and hearts. The Sacred Feminine is the love for our Mother Earth – her love of humanity, and our love for her abundance, beauty, and wisdom. It is embodied in the beauty of motherhood and family. The Sacred Feminine cherishes life in all of its forms and acknowledges that all humans, animals, plants, insects…all that exists is family. The power to heal our own bodies and to be in constant contact with our intuition, with the voices and knowledge of plant, animal, mineral life are all present in our DNA and in our connection to Earth. There is no hierarchy in the Sacred Feminine. Everyone and everything is equally valuable and equally important. In some ways, it would seem that the Sacred Feminine is the opposite pole to the Sacred Masculine. The truth being that both are crucial aspects to our personal and collective well-being.
By brutally censoring the Sacred Feminine from our religions, from our homes, from our businesses, from our relationships with one another, with plants and animals, and with the planet itself, we have deprived ourselves of a very key aspect of our own being. We have suffocated the hearts of our communities. We have created divisions, such as racism and economic inequality, where there should and could easily be unity and cooperation.
We cannot heal our societies and families torn by divorce, addiction to violent and degrading porn and hook-ups, our constant wars and police brutality, widespread addiction to prescription drugs and illegal narcotics and even cell phones until we look deep inside ourselves and wake up. People cannot grow until they are willing to take responsibility for their own personal shadow and for the collective shadow which is darkening our societies and making them terrible places where we merely survive and do not thrive, care for one another, or live out our dreams.
We cannot avoid charismatic and narcissistic potential dictators or authoritarian leaders such as Trump or Duterte in the Philippines if we insist on playing the victim and choose to blame others for our misfortunes. When we abdicate self-responsibility and hand over power to an individual who will assuredly abuse that power, we willingly go along with childish and cruel outcomes which involve choosing scapegoats to pay for our own fears and alleged shortcomings. We need to grow up, to mature, and to stop blaming others for our problems.
Equally disturbing than these authoritarians is the faceless totalitarian system in which we currently live. It is more challenging for many to notice that the face of democracy has been transformed below the surface into a military style dictatorship. The Clintons are an excellent example of the multi-headed yet faceless hydra of organized crime which is global corporate capitalism. Immune from any consequences of their decades of money laundering, traffic of influence, immense charity fraud, voter fraud, abuse and trafficking of drugs and sex, the Clintons live happily and wealthily above the law. They and their friends who “pay to play”hold no respect for human life and dignity. They are sociopaths.
The end game of capitalism is to live in a world run by malignant narcissists,psychopaths and sociopaths. This is the society we have created: one in which the ability to create images to replace reality, to charm others based on lies, and to manipulate people, animals, land, and collective resources for personal profit are more important than character, integrity, or the ability to feel empathy for others. If there is a true conspiracy against the American people and the peoples of the world , in my view, it would be the concerted suppression of the Feminine by our governments, religions, economic systems, and popular culture.
This society is on the verge of collapse. At lease part of the population now sees through the propaganda and endless distractions offered by video games, consumer culture, pornography, cell phones, social media, reality TV, scapegoating, and foreign wars. We see the corruption and abuse of power. We see that we are struggling to survive while a few live in impunity and with a level of wealth that has little precedent on this scale in human history.
If you are one of those few people who still feel empathy for others, compassion for the plights of farm animals, awareness that plants are living and conscious beings, as is our planet, then you can work to spread this awareness. Maturity is rare in this day and age, and people who are able to perceive reality as it is and not how it is fed to us, have a gift. It is our job to spread the light. It is our job to reawaken and bring to consciousness the sacred feminine. It is up to us to rebuild community, to help people to understand that we are all one family. It is up to us to rekindle kindness and to bring back the sacred to relationship, love, and sex. It is up to us to teach people to stop hating themselves and hurting themselves and one another with plastic surgery, drugs, and pornography.
This is not about value judgments. It is about valuing life and cherishing self and one another. We have been taught to treat our fellow man as an object or commodity, because this is how we have been treated by the corporate state. If you can get away with breaking the law and not paying the price, breaking up with someone via text message, not keeping your word, or firing an employee just because you can, more often than not, people will think of you as being successful today. Strength is brutality, and vulnerability is seen as weakness. At work, we can be thrown away without notice. Our skills and talents, our time, our care and investment into a company mean nothing to corporations. If we want our children to lead happy and fulfilled lives, we need to stand up for love, for nurturing, for connectivity, for empathy. If we want our bodies to be healthy and to eliminate much of the stress of the deceitful lifestyles modeled by our culture, then we need to make significant changes to the choices we make and the thoughts that we think.
It is time to stop degrading ourselves and our planet. The time has come for humanity to step up, to grow up. It is time to bring back awareness of the beauty and wisdom that is grounded in Mother Earth. Religions that rise up to spirit only are missing out on half of the spiritual world and life. Down below our feet is the Sacred Feminine. In this half of the cosmic energies are rooted so much wisdom and power. A human being is grounded in the Earth, and raised up to the ethereal energies above. Both are necessary, and we have been deprived, consciously, of so much beauty, wonder, and power. There is darkness and light in both the masculine and the feminine. It is only in the lifelong process of self-awareness and self-responsibility that we can grow and be our best selves.
adamevenevenadam 