History As Parabox (9)
©
The
West—and by now the East as well—are constructing our civilization from the
glaze of a superego. This process has a life of over a thousand years. The
Superego is a creature that is not alive, but is an icon of icons, a negative
“artifice of eternity” (W.B. Yeats) created by governments during
our historical period best described as a parabox https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evmonek8_bw.
The
icon of icons, the monster which the populations of Earth sees when waking in
the morning and going to bed in the evening are not images ordinary artists
dare to portray. The only ones - who successfully portray the superego are untutored
and naïve teenagers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3I7Et9lG2g
.
We may
wish to ask ourselves why the Western Superego echoes back to the West as a
Japanese monster or Godzilla?
The
answer is surprisingly simple: the Western Superego is a monster because the
wise men of the Western world project it by means of an ineffective word. The
wise men of the West speak of love, of love thy neighbor, of love thy neighbor
as thyself. While such love may happen in the secrecy of private life, it never
happens in public life. Why does love not project itself in the public light?
Here
the answer becomes complex. The Japanese child when born, comes into the world
and is immediately put into a Zen Budhist straightjacket http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKHvPkGqfuU
. A child born in the West is, to the contrary, put in a straightjacket inside
a babel of words https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__AhDt9TA_Q , and
the result is about the same as that of Zen: a blank mind before mind came into
existence, but once in existence, it immediately goes into overdrive.
For
example: Because ‘loving my neighbor as myself’ may also mean that I love
myself to such a degree that when I see my neighbor suffer and endure a life
that I am sure that I would not want to endure, I express my love by killing
myself in protest over his-her suffering. That is to say, by my death I hope to
cause the creator of the cause of my neighbor’s suffering to desist from
causing him-her and me further pain. Nothing could be more direct and plainer.
Of
course, the creator of pain may (and usually does) ignore me and simply shrugs
shoulders. At which point another person may intercede, both, on mine and my
neighbor’s behalf. However, if such an intercession has no results, then there begins
a game of chess grounded on the premise that my neighbors, who see my sacrifice
as ineffective, form an attitude of rejection of the individual who causes the
pain and orders (in the name of sanity) such an individual expelled from the
community. If the expulsion of the violent one is rejected, and to the contrary
initiates further aggressive behavior from him-her, then physical punishment (up
to capital punishment) may be in order.
It is
at this juncture of self-sacrifice unto death and capital punishment for daring
to disregard the dictates of the superego that the battle over the kind of
civilizations we live in ensues. Will humankind decide that civilization
henceforth will proceed according to law, which is backed by capital
punishment, even the outbreak of war, or will capital punishment continue to be
exercised—until the enforcer of the ‘love thy neighbor’ civilization declares
him- herself willing to sacrifice his-her life to put an end to that
civilizations nonsense?
The
last is best illustrated by imagining Stalin, the heir of the Soviet Revolution,
announce that he will leave his post of “General Secretary of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party” by dying a sacrificial death. Had it occurred to Stalin to do so, he
would most likely have had a chance to continue the Revolution by popular
demand no less. In this instance, none who had suffered as a consequence of his
leadership could argue that he had endured less sacrifice than the public.
The
survivors of the Revolutionary ordeal would be proud over having been
privileged to be part of the Revolution; provided, of course, that Stalin was
followed by a leader equally dedicated to leadership through self-sacrifice.
Several post Stalin names come to mind: Khrushchev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin;
also the Pope, Dalai Lama, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Xi
Jinping,
etc.
Unfortunately,
self-sacrifice has fallen out of favor. Elsewhere, I have suggested that its
disregard is traceable not only to personal fears of death or cowardice, but to
the imposition on the mind of a meme of fear https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO70ZjZ0wrw
, which for obvious
reasons holds self-sacrifice in low esteem. One such fear is the fear of death
itself.
When
and how the fear of death began is now beyond tracing. However, it is not
difficult to imagine that it may be the result of fear of torture and death by
slow torture.
Some
will protest that fear of death is natural to consciousness itself. This raises
the question of whether a fearful consciousness is not a consequence of deliberate
emotional unbalancing and a deliberate creation of schizophrenia http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/schizophrenia/DS00196
. Such a fear may result when a safe environment is destroyed and causes one to
discover one’s self unprotected. An illustration of this exists in Genesis 3:7,
where Adam and Eve not only discover themselves naked, but where their
condition is aggravated by a description of nakedness as sinful. Instead of
nakedness causing Adam to get an erection and fondling Eve and Eve tempted to pet
the erection and her fondler, they try hide from each other, because both are a
priori enlightened that too much ‘multiplying’ will lead to overpopulation and
murder. Because the implanted sense of guilt becomes so great, neither Adam nor
Eve dare imagine themselves playing games in which ‘penetration’ is avoided as
a matter of a radically different perspective on sexual enjoyment.
Perhaps
sometime in the future when the fear of death is overcome, we will be able to engage
our minds in discovering how it came about. At this time, however, it will
suffice to point out that not all human beings have been fearful of death at
all times. For example, at the Hindu festival of Juggernaut http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggernaut
, pilgrims are known to have sacrificed themselves to this God of relentless
forward movement of their own will and without anyone urging them to do so.
At the
same time, there should be no doubt that the neo-Christian-led cult of fear of death
was in the early days of the cult enforced by the execution of the
practitioners of self-sacrificial death. True, the neo-Christians justified
their actions by claiming they were stopping child sacrifice, for which I agree
there is no justification. However, there are no studies of whether the
sacrifice of children, animals, and prisoners was perhaps not begun at a time
when an older civilization had come under attack of an age cynical about the
nature and purpose of death, and sacrifice of others than one’s self was a
consequence of a later and secondary cause.
Such
an attack on death is traceable to an age that preceded neo-Christianity or was
somehow conflated with it. Re: “The pre-Christian religions of the Germans and
Celts conflated capital punishment with human sacrifice. Criminals condemned
for different classes of offenses were sacrificed to different gods by
different methods, among which were drowning, hanging, buried alive and the
sword (Ward 1953). A similar differentiation is visible among the executions
that are such a prominent feature of British and European history: hanging for
commoners, beheading for nobles executed for treason, and burning alive for
heretics and witches.”*
Still,
death as a key personal freedom is vociferously denied by governments addicted
to life in the post natural urban desert. This is illustrated by an article by
Sally Quinn in the Washington Post of May 11, 2013 http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/the-dalai-lamas-compassion-disconnect/2013/05/10/076bc91a-b8d5-11e2-b94c-b684dda07add_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines
.
Ms Quinns question: “Isn’t self-immolation the very
antithesis of what Buddhism is about?” speaks volumes on behalf of fundamentalist neo-Christian
conceits. It comes with the ID tags of a superego trapped and dead in an inverted
parabox.
(To be continued.)
*Felix Padel, The
Sacrifice of Human Being, Oxford
(To be continued.)
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