Last night I dreamt I was giving a room full of people a talk about death, the Self, the greatness of Bob Dylan, and a lot of other things…

“When you die, don’t start running around in a panic, hollering for Jesus or your guru or mom and dad. Just stand where you are. Just stand perfectly still…and wait.”

That’s the best advice I’ve ever heard. And what do you know, I said it myself…in a dream!

Elias

Interview with yours truly

I was going to keep my mouth shut about politics. This blog, to date, has been about recollecting a life and a journey, perusing old notebooks, and reflecting on this moment and the death sentence we all face in this moment. It is also a discussion of the non-existent separation between “this world” and “the next world".

But right now, in America, we have reached a kind of spiritual crisis, embodied in our politics and free market economics. And into the midst of this crisis has come B.H. Obama, a young master of cult psychology and “political nuance.” So I am writing this essay, which is a revised version of one I recently posted on the new lightmind forums.

As Obama campaigned, I watched with fascination. He was quite charismatic, but I was disturbed by his background in Chicago politics, especially his long association with William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn of the Weather Underground terrorist group.

(Dohrn famously said of Charles Manson and the Tate-Bianca murders, “Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in pig Tate’s belly. Wild!” Sharon Tate was over 8 months pregnant at the time of her death. Dohrn made her astonishing statement in a 1969 speech to 400 people in Flint, Michigan.)

What further amazed me was the way that journalists in the “mainstream media” brushed off the Obama-Ayers association, as well as virtually every other serious question about Obama’s past. Obama had confessed to hard drug use during his years at Columbia University, but the news media was content to let this period of his life remain unexamined. It struck me that if any of Obama’s opponents had similar involvement with hard drugs, the “investigative journalists” would have gone forth in droves to dig up the facts, the names, the sources of the drugs, etc. Indeed, there would have been front page articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times on the subject. Instead, there was nary a whisper.

Obama’s intellectual influences were also well known and of the radical left. Frank Marshall Davis, Saul Alinsky, and Reverend Jeremiah Wright are three of them. When Obama’s friend Bill Ayers stood next to Hugo Chavez on a stage in Venezuela, heaping praise on the budding dictator, I thought “ooh boy…we are in for trouble now.” But again, all of this went unnoticed or purposely ignored by the media.

Still, I got it that Obama was playing a political game in Illinois, and probably was using (and manipulating) associates like Ayers, who had established a certain legitimacy for himself since his Weatherman days. Obama was a genius at seducing people by making himself a blank slate, letting others project their fondest dreams upon him. He even confessed as much, saying that he was a symbol on which people could project their hopes and dreams, and “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America.”

The so-called “New Age” spiritual movements bought into Obama The Symbol. Ken Wilber and his acolytes began talking about Obama as “transcending politics” and “the first integral president.” You would meet intelligent people – friends, even – who had become totally starry-eyed about Obama, clearly emotionally involved with him as messiah figure, a man who would combine politics and some kind of breakthrough in consciousness.

I am sorry to say I didn’t see him as anything but a skillful politician. I also saw that these people, including my friends, were involved in a cult of personality, and that they were hugely unaware of how they were being driven by their own projections.

I suspected that Obama represented not transcendence, not unity, but an attempt by a collectivist archetype to take control of American government. But I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and to wait and see how things would fall out.

Now, one month into the Obama reign, and we have seen the outlines of his hidden agenda emerging. And what we have seen is not very pretty.

I have a lot to say on this, but I’ll start with a basic observation – that Obama is using classic cult psychology in his attempt to steer the country toward Democratic socialism. Behind the rhetoric and the pleasing mask, operates nothing less than an ancient and obsolete archetypal complex bent on devaluing and sucking the life out of individualism. This archetype is actually the enemy of America, not its friend, not its salvation. The principles of free individualism, enterprise, and creativity that have built America and made it great are absolutely opposed by this archetype.

It is, curiously enough, a new incarnation of the classic pyramid power model which I have tried to deconstruct on this “notes and comments” blog over the last year or so.

The pyramid scheme in politics and religion is a psychological seduction game whereby individual energy and self-worth are projected into a leader, the iconic “I” at the top of the pyramid. It is an ancient social model and it “worked” for thousands of years, all the while creating vast suffering and enslavement.

In the last few decades we have seen this archetype at work in the guru cults – virtually every one which ended up destroying itself and its leader. Of course there’s nothing so dramatically religious in the Obama cult – although you can feel something like that in the videos of his rallies, where he gins up the crowd and gets “empowered” by their church-revivalist affirmation of him as “the one". You can also see it in the media, where a number of “journalists” are still working overtime as apologists and apostles for the intellectual fantasy they have projected into him.

One of the principle methods of drawing forth the messiah projection is by painting a future of doom, which only faith in the great leader will resolve. The phony gurus have often built their authority on such dark prophecies, part of an open invitation to escape into the irresponsible relationship of being an eternal child at the feet of a “parent God".

Sometimes the gurus have partially lived up to their followers’ expectations, by being great thinkers and visionaries (even though they ultimately surrendered to inflation and megalomania). In Obama’s case, I think, what we have instead is a weak and undeveloped man in the grip of the power archetype, whose conscious mind is not fully aware of the goal that is driving him. But he knows how to serve that unconscious impulse by wile, the parsing of language, and with false promises.

In other words, he is a liar – a classic lying politician whose “means” are the seduction of crowds to an end he doesn’t yet want to totally acknowledge or understand.

You catch a serious glimpse of that end in his constant bad-mouthing of capitalism and the future of free markets, and his repeated advocacy of government control as the only solution to this apocalyptic scenario. If we don’t hand over more control to the government, there is going to be a “catatrophe". Indeed, things are “already worse than the great depression” and so forth. Where is the “hope” for the American spirit? Well, by his lights it rests in giving over more power to the government and to him as its noble Lincoln-like leader.

Why would anybody want to give over the spirit of free individualism to this man? He is spiritually dark, an ominous finger-wagging actor pretending to be the authority figure you always needed. As somebody pointed out, when he does his frowning & hectoring schtick, Obama is like Max Von Sydow portraying some bleak Lutheran minister in an Ingmar Bergman movie.

The sham is totally obvious to anyone not enthralled by that kind of “authority figure” – but it is also rather scarey, when you notice how many people have fallen for it. (How many of you are in its thrall, I wonder?)

Sure, I still have some audacity to hope that this inexperienced neurotic kid will learn on the job and turn into the Lincoln he imagines himself to be. But so far he hasn’t demonstrated that he is inclined in that direction – nor in the direction of much maturity and responsibility. What he is demonstrating, in fact, is an inclination to irresponsibility, immaturity, and a kind of self-referential narcissism one associates with the “New Age” hangover.

Also, his message about the coming apocalypse is strangely (or not so strangely) Marxist. Capitalism is about to die, the banks are about to be nationalized, and the parent state is about to give you a lifetime of handouts. Bye bye the motivation to survive, innovate, and conquer.

Welcome to the great test of the American spirit.

Elias

Here is an interesting picture I found pasted into a notebook from the 1980s. That’s me on the left and my mother on the right. I am not sure what the occasion was for this curious snapshot, but it almost seems to have captured something happening on another plane of existence! (H.G. Wells eat your heart out!)

My mother was a troubled intuitive all her life, a woman who couldn’t reconcile her devout Catholicism with her unmediated occult perceptions. A long time back – around the time I was in the monastery – I dreamt that I laid hands on her and she was transformed from a troubled middle-aged woman into a luminous child.

This strange photo seems to have captured something of that prophetic dream. Wow.

~E