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Laing said psychiatry is an institution [1] which like families, are groups whose members are ‘pledged to resist and stifle insights and tendencies towards human growth that might threaten their own power and expose them to attack from without.’
Strange as it may seem, Laing said one should not expect psychiatry to support liberation which I take to mean individuation. According to him, institutions use mystification and manipulation to condition their members, and so effective is this that the members even condition themselves when there is no management around. He makes us aware of the deeper problem of a false consciousness at the heart of institutions.
False consciousness: In Marxist theory, a failure to recognize the instruments of one's oppression or exploitation as one's own creation, as when members of an oppressed class unwittingly adopt views of the oppressor class.
Laing held that groups possess two complementary means by which to guard against the perceptions of reality, which are censorship and ideology. He believed the primary function of censorship is not to keep information from outsiders, so as to forestall attacks on the group; but to keep it from group members to forestall their possible apostasy.
Apostasy (… meaning a defection or revolt …) is a term generally employed to describe the formal abandonment or renunciation of one's religion, especially if the motive is deemed unworthy. In a technical sense, as used sometimes by sociologists without the pejorative connotations of the word, the term refers to renunciation and criticism of, or opposition to one's former religion. http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/apostacy
The symbol telepathy [2] comes up often and is linked this time to the scientist and mystic E. Swedenborg.
Telepathy can be defined as a power of knowing what is happening at a distance’, or ‘the communication between people of thoughts, feelings, desires, etc., involving mechanisms that cannot be understood in terms of known scientific laws.’ Also called thought transference. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/telepathy
Now if we look at the evidence based on twins, and take our own personal experiences into account, then we should be asking ourselves: why are we not talking this obviously innate mental faculty more seriously? Most people experience it in small things such as reaching for your phone to call someone just as they are calling you, or thinking about switching on the radio only to have someone do it for you …
The third symbol: The black dove [3] was given by Horapolo to represent a widow remaining faithful to death. This is significant because it introduces the mystery Language of the birds which is apparently the oldest Hellenic oracle and one that that is linked to the mother goddess or Gaia [www.Answers.com].
Dòdònè in Greece was a prehistoric oracle devoted to a Mother Goddess … Herodotus follows with what he was told by the prophetesses, called peleiades ("doves") at Dodona: that two black doves … from Thebes … one to Libya and one to Dodona; the latter settled on an oak tree, and there uttered human speech, declaring that a place of divination from Zeus must be made there; the people of Dodona understood that the message was divine, and therefore established the oracular shrine.
The synthesis points to a network of minds, to the interconnectedness of everything, to Gaia. This is significant because it directs us to acknowledge the link between the mother goddess, the rising feminine and our psycho-perceptive potentials. Is it possible to conceive of how telepathically transmitted thoughts are a form of subliminal conditioning linked to the false consciousness of groups; The notion that my thoughts are influencing the behaviour of another at an unconscious level is not new but this links our thoughts to negative conditioning.
Anger [4] is introduced here to explore the problem of this form of control: Gestalt psychologists see the passage from the state of seeking to that of anger as the break-up of one form and the re-constitution of another. … Satre writes that ‘anger or fear is used by unconscious urges to achieve symbolic satisfaction, to break unbearable tension. He explains that essential characteristic of emotion is that it is ‘suffered’, that it surprises, and develops of itself … His functional concept of anger relates to Janet’s distinction between the superior kind of behaviour and the inferior. He says that it is ‘we who put ourselves into a state of inferiority, because at that very low level our demands are smaller; we satisfy ourselves at less cost.’ … He also makes the point that anger can signify sadism, which we need to link to masochism and group dynamics.
The link between anger and the first three symbols can be interpreted as the emotion one experiences when the illusion breaks down, as with a betrayal. Believing that one thinks in natural language such as English is an illusion. The truth is that we hear our thoughts as they cross from the unconscious mind and that there is a mystery language at work behind the scenes. It is this unconscious mind that may be represented here as the rising feminine that Jung warned about.
As a consequence of becoming aware of the inferior nature of anger one moves to channel this energy to a superior behaviour referred to here as an authentic swing [5]. The symbol uses a golf swing to explain the attraction of the game: the world’s most popular game should be viewed as a projection of one's higher potential; it presents golfers with peak experiences for them to acknowledge that they have a brain-mind capable of making fantastic calculations. The tragedy is in not acknowledging one's true potential.
The fictional character Bagger Vance says ‘we are speaking about a State of , which is by definition an aspect of the divine. You have blundered through this portal in the past, … by happy accident, as every golfer has. Now observe it with eyes open. Learn from it …'
Reanney The responsibility we have is to see the illusion of separateness [6] for what it is, that it is anchored in self which is anchored in time and is the source of sorrow. The truth is that in reality, nothing is separate, but this is of course difficult to prove. We need to accept that it is impossible to explain the inner sensation that reflects and communicates a state of near perfect communion with all creation using normal language. We must rely on artists and poets to try. Music is a powerful medium to help transcend consciousness into a more perfect state.
Reanney wrote ‘The return to everyday mode, … is a Fall, … back into time. … The essence of the human quest is to break free of time, to reconnect to the eternal in all of us … we are all time travelers; we are all lost children seeking home’.
Henri Beaunis (1903) explored sleep [7] and claimed that recall is better if someone wakes dreamer. He concluded that dream content was determined as much by intrinsic factors as by the nature and quantity of previous experience. Modern technology gives us the dream-mask and other systems to make it easier access into this dream state. The problem with this outcome is that most of us fail to follow through because it is quite difficult and time consuming, so we need to find an easier way.
The advice given here is to overcome one’s conditioning by practicing to look at things from a different perspective [8], such as Leonardo da Vinci. We need to develop depth perception and an intuitive "feeling" for size and space variation. Eye level is essential so learn look at things from different angles. I suppose piercing the veil may be compared to changing one’s focus to see those hidden 3-D images (autostereograms).
Nuclear matter [9] of the type that we are taught in school is a form of matter that can only exist under very special conditions, whereas the rest of the matter in the universe is very different. So different in fact that scientists are forced to keep changing perspective from classical to quantum to string to … One needs to adopt a flexible attitude to adapt to new truths.
The right-action is to recognize terminology [10] as a barrier (jargon of an institution [1]). To share knowledge we need to use everyday speech.
Collingwood wrote ‘speak with the vulgar and think with the learned’ … ‘philosophical language’ commits the user, possibly even against his will, to accepting the philosophical doctrines to which it has been designed to express, so that these doctrines are surreptitiously and dogmatically foisted upon anyone disputant who will consent to use the language: … to keep the discussion open and above-board and to get at the truth.
We should learn from history that the religion and war has given us nuclear weapons. Awakening calls for a better understanding of morality [11] and who better to look too than Kant and laugh at the irony of trying to simply anything he wrote:
what is it, then, that justifies a morally good disposition, or virtue, … It is nothing less than the share it affords a rational being in the giving of universal laws, … as law giving in the kingdom of ends - as free in respect of laws of nature, obeying only those which he himself gives … nothing can have a worth other than that which the law determines for it … But the lawgiving itself, … must for that very reason have a dignity, … Autonomy is therefore the ground of the dignity of human nature and of every rational nature.
Kant, Groundwork for the metaphysics of morals.
One really needs to meditate on this; imagine you as the fifth ape in the evolutionary chain; and ponder what consciousness implies; and whether it means going off to conquer the world.
The objective is to set the benchmark on human potential – the superman [12] Nietzsche’s work, like Marx, appears to have been misquoted and manipulated by institutions [1] such as the Third Reich etc. Nietzsche wrote of the beauty of the warrior … that man’s deepest longing is “will to power.” The Germans changed it to will to dominate and gave us a world war.
The final outcome is to have the flame [13] within reach. states that to work for humanity one must be enlightened. That once enlightened we no longer rely on our little ego but on a power which is greater than ourselves. … the living flame of love ... the mystical flame sometimes drives hermits or solitaries into action.
