Fourth Delivery,
The Method of Psychohistory
Fourth Delivery, The Method of Psychohistory A General Theory of Psychohistory Authority, Violence and Sexuality The National Geographic Society recently published an article on the languages of the world, it found that the language spoken by more people was Chinese Mandarin followed by Spanish, which by one million people was ahead of English in third place. The present author is bicultural and writes both in English and Spanish sometimes without being aware that he has shifted from one language into the other; into a different language. Certain themes suggest the Spanish language and others English yet the author regrets to admit that he does not know Chinese…I would like to take this opportunity to thank my readers for their gracious interest in reading my ideas for which I alone take responsibility. Also I would like to thank their patience if now and then I were to shift from English into Spanish or from Spanish into English. I apologize for not always supplying a translation for it is not always possible to do so because the flow of ideas emerges without warning from the unconscious were they seem to occur in a language that is outside time, all of its own, that claims immediate exposition before it is forgotten. In our essay on The State, La Tarjeta Inteligente found in La Huerta del Macehual, we have covered some of this ground we now wish to make a further investigation on the basic Noumena that have consistently dislocated History. We believe that throughout History there has been operating a collective urge towards liberation, coherence and consciousness. This is the natural consequence of the ongoing process of Knowledge. Athenian Democracy, Roman Law, The Magna Carta, the democratic constitutions of the last three centuries are examples of this fundamental desire for coherence and certainty in social organization. The spirit of consciousness which unites the best qualities of analysis, memory and emotion have been pointing towards perfectibility since late Pleistocene times when the Tabu against anthropophagy began to take hold on the mind of humanity. Today we continue to re-‐ dramatize generation after generation certain grotesque habits that darken the experience of life in this Planet. War, Violence and Torture, or the sadistic pleasure in violence, re-‐dramatizes pain in an endless chain of redress and vengeance. Also the desire to immobilize other human beings for our service which is called power or slavery; the corporate slavery procured by the State or the individual slavery inflicted by emotional dependency can also constitute a form of torture. We could quickly make a historical survey of the origin of these psychohistorical Noumena. At the end of the Matriarchal Age when the first public granaries were established and the distribution of wealth became an occasion for violence. The Patriarchy was born along with
armed guards and bronze weapons. The State was founded and organized violence appeared along with the foundational myths of the patriarchal Judeo-‐Christian tradition. Today the Gordian knot of power, authority, violence and sexuality is an unquestioned fact of life accepted by most people. Specially by its’ more accomplished practitioners who believe in it implicitly as pure ideology: the darker, higher circles of the political class and of organized crime, the oligarchies and plutocracies of our authoritarian democracies. The associated syndromes of violence and power have continued to change and expand in the XXI century from the reality described by Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization and One Dimensional Man. The political reaction of the 1970’s introduced the cult of violence as a response to the pacifism of The 60’s generation. The conservative ideologue William F. Buckley, the Supreme Court Justice Powell and billionaire F.I. Stone promoted the candidacy of Ronald Reagan to subvert Culture and establish a conservative regime based on the cult of violence and political reaction. John Lennon was murdered the U.S. flag appeared in all U.S. films to pass censure, the cult of violence came to the fore personified by actors Clint, ´dirty Harry´, Eastwood, Charles Bronson, Sylvester, ‘rocky’, Stallone, Bruce Willis, et all… With the passing away of the generation of Marlon Brando, Paul Newman and Richard Burton, directors like John Huston and Elia Kazan the American film industry, the number one promoter of popular culture, lent itself whole heartily to political reaction. The spirit of self-‐criticism, the idea that dramatic art is there to help generate a moment of self-‐knowledge through catharsis as the ancient Greek dramatists understood it has nearly passed away from western culture thanks to a generalized political reaction and the fear of excellence in art. We now have the rule of a mediocre bureaucracy of culture, the one that organizes the film festivals and the literary prizes is in league with the plutocracy who desires alienated market consumers and no free individuals with a clear level of political and cultural understanding such as true democratic societies produce, where not only are men and women equal but are also spiritually advanced and possess a certain degree of political conscience and social responsibility. The cult of martial arts, arms trafficking and political reaction perverted a whole generation the world over originating countless civil wars along with grave social dislocation that includes the drug culture of organized crime and gang violence like the Mara Salvatrucha of Central America, one of the byproducts of the civil wars promoted by U.S. led political reaction. This world culture of violence which now saturates the planet is having a special psychohistorical effect in the more vulnerable societies the world over: genocides in Africa by phallic-‐narcissistic goons in Uganda, violent convulsions within Islamic culture, (a theme that will require an extended analysis in a special section of our project to come ), teenage hit men employed by the drug cartels all over the world. The cumulative effect, the expansion and reverberation of all this violence overwhelms the minds of the seriously disturbed creating a reverberating chain reaction to the point of psychotic breakdown as in the case of the student in the Denver, Colorado cinema, the Chechen brothers in Boston, the Connecticut school slayer and the Washington D.C. naval post attacker, the shooting of a woman in a car with a baby by police in front of The White House…
In The Second Delivery of this Project we have already mentioned the cumulative effect and the reverberation of violence as an expanding wave within The Noosphare of the Planet. This is perhaps the single most important Noumena of Psychohistory. The negative Quanta of bio-‐ energy induced by the cumulative effect of mass atrocities and brutalities is still emanating from such places as Auschwitz. None the less, there is a psychogenic transference operating as ‘culture’ and we can observe this in Israel-‐Palestine where this mass psychohistorical quanta of negative energy is being reproduced and perpetuated throughout as a culture of violence that does not accept the existence of the Other, The Enemy. If the populations involved do not come into an understanding of this fact and analyze it and deal with it collectively through special programs of education they will be condemned to re-‐dramatize periodically the same episodes of vengeance sadism and cruelty to the point that after the end of the world the phantoms of a German, a Jew and an Arab will still be chasing each other with a club much like in the paintings of Francisco Goya. Hablar de la violencia necesaria del estado es una aberración bolchevique. A los socialistas que creen en el estatismo les podríamos recordar que sin libertad y democracia el camino conduce al Archipiélago Gulag . O puede ser que como politólogos quieran congraciarse con el régimen para ingresar a la burocracia. Nosotros comprendemos el proceso histórico que vive México es por eso que reconocemos los esfuerzos del gobierno,( octubre, 2013), ante los desastres naturales y la terrible situación de inseguridad creada por más de 100, 000 secuestros en un año. También entendemos el esfuerzo del gobierno por encontrar un equilibrio político dentro del marco del régimen del sistema de partidos pues este es el momento histórico que vive México y le hace bien al país aprender la práctica parlamentaria y la necesidad de la responsabilidad en política. Sin embargo esperamos que el Congreso estudie la necesidad de abrirle el acceso a la administración pública a todos los ciudadanos que no militen en un partido político mediante la creación de una Ley del Servicio Social Voluntario y de La Tarjeta Inteligente que les diera acceso a plazas libres en la administración pública por un corto periodo de tiempo dentro de un sistema rotativo para evitar la creación de sinecuras. También queremos reconocer la moderación que demostró el gobierno de Distrito Federal en su manejo de la crisis magisterial. En ese mismo espíritu podríamos sugerir que a los jóvenes ‘anarquistas´ que se manifiestan violentamente ´cual rito de paso tribal’, empañando aniversarios tan significativos como la Marcha por El 2 de Octubre, se les proporcione acceso a algunos talleres artesanales como los que alguna vez existieron en las unidades habitacionales del IMSS para que aprendan algún oficio, tomen clases de guitarra o de yoga y se socialicen de una manera pacífica. Muchos son rechazados de las Universidades o los que son militantes políticos serios podrían formalizar su perspectiva política mediante un desplegado en algún periódico o en internet para comunicar algún programa político o social y no ser confundidos con otros que tanta droga les impidió concentrarse y terminar sus estudios universitarios. (Se podría negociar con el grupo que t hace algunos años tomó el Auditorio ‘Che’ Guevara para que lo entreguen, que mucha falta le hace a la Facultad de Filosofía y letras de la UMAM. El autor de estas líneas en alguna ocasión disfruto ahí de sendas conferencias dadas por personalidades internacionales como el compositor Karlheinz Stockhaussen y la escritora Susan Sontag, sin mencionar los muchos clásicos del cine que disfrutó presentados por el Cine Club de La Facultad. El autor de estas líneas no comprende porque capricho están ahí esos jóvenes y porque los tolera La Universidad, pero en realidad debo decir que no conozco a estos
grupos, que soy seguidor de Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi y de León Tolstoi y que estoy en contra de la violencia de cualquier género…) Otros politólogos, más generosos, más independientes y menos interesados en formar parte de la burocracia, han dicho, con Winston Churchill, que el sistema político que tenemos, o que padecemos, hoy en día, es el mejor; considerando las alternativas. En un sentido estricto esto es cierto si consideramos los regímenes dictatoriales personales, los caudillos y el fascismo corporativo de izquierda o de derecha que ha padecido Latino América. La democracia electoral de partidos pone a competir a diferentes sectores y grupos de interés de la sociedad que se arrebatan el poder periódicamente en el descontento y en la amargura de la derrota de los perdedores; evitando así las continuas guerras civiles tan prevalentes en el siglo XIX, pero sin erradicar nunca la pobreza y la discordia, tan necesarias para mantener una mano dura y autoritaria y una mano de obra barata en el mercado del trabajo. Este es nuestro presente y ha sido nuestro pasado. Sin embargo se supone que debemos de aprender de la experiencia de la Historia, que nos propone que el hombre es perfectible y que para sobrevivir y vivir en sociedad meditemos sobre la esfera de la ética y así proyectemos y visualicemos sociedades cada vez mejores. Nos movemos hacia ellas buscando el bien común. Es en este sentido que pensamos en una fase superior de la democracia hacia la cual pudiésemos todos transitar pacíficamente poniéndonos de acuerdo como sociedad compleja y plural que somos, gestionando paso a paso lo que valla surgiendo , cada vez con mayor aplomo, perfeccionando nuestras instituciones históricas e invirtiendo toda nuestra atención en la educación de nuestros hijos y nietos . Donde haya hombres y mujeres que sepan convencer con lucidez y con el ejemplo de sus actos por ahí estará la democracia. Por eso el gobierno del futuro podría surgir de las asambleas de barrio, de las juntas de vecinos, de las manzanas o de las cuadras que ante la emergencia del colapso de la política se presentarían como lo más sencillo, lo que está a la mano, como escribiera E.F. Schumacher en Small is Beautiful. Lo curioso del caso es que las asambleas de barrio y las juntas de vecinos no constituyen una utopía, o una forma inocente de idealismo; no, implican la recuperación de un ejercicio perdido, que es la comunicación humana, cancelada por el intenso narcisismo e ensimismamiento de la política en que se ha convertido nuestra cultura mundial contemporánea. Una cultura de marginación y consumo donde la más mínima comunicación espontanea, efusiva y afectuosa se ha olvidado en el primitivo narcisismo de una psique fracturada por el consumo y la manipulación del Estado, que ha alineado al individuo en la envidia permanente, en los celos y en la frustración ante las metas deliberadamente inalcanzables inducidas por la himnopaedia de la publicidad comercial reforzada por la propaganda política que propone una sociedad de clases, meritocrática y jerarquizada. .
El Método de La Psicohistoria: la cuestión religiosa La esfera de lo secular debe de estar claramente diferenciada de la vida espiritual del individuo. Esto ha significado un arduo aprendizaje a todo lo largo de la Historia desde que se dejó de compartir la experiencia enteogénica a finales del pleistoceno. Hoy en día la religión en sus formas exteriores es un fenómeno étnico cultural que ha perdido su origen enteogénico y ya no es compartida universalmente como experiencia interna como se hacía al final del pleistoceno y como se hace hoy en día en las pocas sociedades sobrevivientes que viven la experiencia religiosa de una manera directa con Las Plantas Sagradas Es por eso que hoy en día tenemos que hablar de una sociedad secular necesariamente para defendernos del embate ideológico de las religiones externas corporativas que tienen un origen histórico étnico-‐ geográfico con un fuerte componente racial de supremacía política cultural o explícitamente agresiva e imperialista. Es por eso que en una sociedad laica, en una sociedad libre, en una sociedad democrática que a la vez es plural tenemos que hablar de la libertad de conciencia y del secularismo fundamental en una sociedad democrática. Es el sentido tutelar que asumen las religiones corporativas asociadas al Estado que amenaza la libertad espiritual del hombre contemporáneo con la sombra de la Teocracia, permeando la vida social con un paternalismo autoritario y patrimonialista sobre las almas y las ideas religiosas como en los tiempos de Juan de Palafox y Pedro Moya de Contreras, quienes por cierto no lograron doblegar el espíritu de Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, aunque lo intentaron…. La pluralidad religiosa existente en las democracias avanzadas del mundo garantizada por sus Constituciones, es garantía de diversidad. Dios los hizo Ateos, Budistas, Católicos o Marxistas y tanta competencia los mantiene inspirados para bien de la sociedad que no permite que predomine alguna confesión; que como la política exterior de Inglaterra en los siglos XVIII y XIX, se aseguraba que siempre existiera un balance en el poder, que nadie predominara, que nadie impusiera un orden espiritual totalitario sobre las conciencias -‐ ninguna teocracia para el mundo, entonces, ningún ayatola u obispo virrey. La Espiritualización de la Política está en el fuero interno de cada individuo, si se es religioso u espiritual; en la esfera de lo enteogénico, de la divinidad que mora dentro de nosotros; si se es agnóstico alejandrino o rosacruz etc…, entonces morara en la conciencia de lo político y de lo ético. Pero una sociedad laica y sus necesarios límites a las libertades religiosas es algo que ya se ha acordado en la mayor parte del mundo civilizado. Ha quedado entendido después de innumerables guerras religiosas cuales son los límites de la libertad religiosa. No creo que nadie quiera regresar a las guerras religiosas; por eso el laicismo en política es necesario. Pero también es cierto que hoy más que nunca deseamos que renazca el espíritu de comunidad espiritual universal que es silencioso y telepático porque mora dentro del corazón de cada individuo. En el terreno de la vida social no necesitamos exteriorizar nuestra ideología religiosa si la sabemos expresar con nuestros actos.
Luego entonces La Espiritualización de la Política no tiene sentido si se limita a un ejercicio de buenas intenciones y propósitos humanitarios, eso no funciona en política real. Para asegurarnos que el poder no se eternice en la venalidad tenemos que cambiar de sistema político y así estar seguros que nunca más sea transferida a persona alguna responsabilidad social en un plano de autoridad discrecional sino que la responsabilidad de la gestión de los asuntos públicos de la sociedad sea compartida por todos en términos de igualdad, de autogestión y autogobierno, en juntas vecinales de manzanas, de cuadra o de edificio, en asambleas de barrios o de colonia, en parlamentos delegacionales, distritales, federales, de ciudad y en los consejos de las comunidades étnicas rurales.
The Method of Psychohistory: Imago Imago, in Spanish, mitote, are the many copies of reality, the representations from the Collective Unconscious that help form the many version of history for political purposes and propaganda; the projection, the image-‐idea favored by nationalists and the elaborators of religious ideology designed to perpetuate domination. The image of the Argentinian Jesuit pope standing before a kneeling ‘Mexican’ in the Vatican plaza, surrounded by some of his countrymen wearing the t-‐shirts of the national soccer team, performing an ‘exorcism’, ( or was it an unconscious act of submission reminiscent of conquest ? ), upon a representative of a ‘pagan Indian race possessed by the devil’, ( Mexico, the archrival of Argentina in culture and sports vying for primacy in Latin America)? We have to deconstruct this into the Vatican strategy to preserve its power over the Latin American masses believed to be the last stronghold of a faltering church which has lost its authority and credibility in Europe. The idea, or Imago, of electing an Argentine Jesuit to succeed the resigning Ratzinger was masterminded fairly quickly, probably suggested by Ratzinger himself who pointed out the dire straight in which the church found herself. Apparently the cardinals calculated that the way to hold their sway over the expertly intimidated and suppressed Latin America masses was to have recourse of the wide historical experience of the Jesuit order in this matter, who from the missions of Paraguay to those of New Mexico had had much experience in the past. Why was not a Mexican prelate chosen for this task? Because they have too much Indian blood in them and the Argentines are more reliable because they are solidly Latin and Eurocentric, from the Vatican´s point of view, the most competent representatives of Latin Europe in the American continent. In such a fashion is public opinion created and manipulated, the conservative media quickly responds. But are we here back in the eighteenth century or in the twenty first? Is Latin America going to be seduced by the Jesuit siren call and through it provide the survival of an obsolete religion restrictive of human spiritual expansion, the maintainer of the authoritarian social order and singular prop of the decadent National State? What exactly is the ‘Theology of Liberation’? Instead of defending the rich like the Legionaries of Christ why not defend the poor like father Alejandro Solalinde? We would need whole companies, legions of Solalindes to defeat Organized Crime... Some forty years ago in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico inspired by Erich Fromm who was then living in Cuernavaca, Bishop Sergio Mendez Arceo, Gregorio Lemercier and Ivan Illich proposed the use of psycho-‐analysis in monasteries and seminars of the Catholic Church as they had observed the manifestation of severe psychopathological syndromes like alcoholism, repressed homosexuality, pederasty and other related neurosis and psychoneurosis in young aspirants to the priesthood. The Vatican and the reactionary Mexican clergy furiously fought
such notions as they continued to steer the ship of Catholicism towards the rock of sexuality. Today they are paying the prize as the Church founders in the sea of its veritable nemesis, the incomprehension and repression of sexuality, which places the Church in obsolescence, outside the currents of contemporary society. The Vatican can count on the conservative masses of Latin America who can mobilize thousands of people for a papal visit, and so the Vatican is gambling for a show of power in its outing to Brazil. They have elected a Jesuit pope and they can rely on the discipline of the order to bring into their order the fragile and defenseless new generation of Latin American youth gambling on the atavistic permanence of their catechism and apologetics in the unconscious minds of the masses that the Jesuit order worked so well to introject in the minds of youth at their schools and universities since their early days in Germany with Le Jay, Láinez and Canisius. One thing they have not calculated is their continuous evasion of the problem of sexuality, the very rock towards which the vessel of the church is heading. I ignore if the subject was mentioned in the Manual of Exercises designed by Ignatius of Loyola or in the theology that his delegates expounded at the council of Trent, ( Leopold Von Ranke, Historia de los Papas, FCE pp. 68-‐112), but how can the order and the church think of surviving in the world of international sex traffic, slavery and pederasty in The Net? Are they aware of their own responsibility, how their own ignorance and teaching contributes to sexual ignorance and brutality in the world? An exclusively male society ignores the mechanism of the Oedipus Complex, even the U.S. army is beginning to recognize and accept homosexuality as an established fact of human nature without pseudo moral or ideological posturing. How is it that a society that ‘sublimates’ its generalized homosexuality in vows of chastity and ‘asceticism’ confronts the nature of the human libido which is in operation 24 hours a day every day of our lives by ignoring its existence?
There are signs that Europeans have grown tired of the Catholic Church. Christianity was originally a Mediterranean historical event, it was precisely the Jesuit order who between 1550 and 1773 insisted on making it universal, until the order was suppressed because of its overbearing pretensions and conflicts with constitutional monarchy and the emerging volterian bourgeoisie . The autochthonous, indigenous, populations of the American continent
have never been great fans of Christianity and their sense of identity is growing stronger every day. The criollos and the mestizos of Latin America are constructing a new identity, looking for their roots in the Earth that gave them birth. Why should the Eurocentric Jesuit order come to teach us what to think and exploit the generous innocence of the majority of the people of this continent? The Method of Psychohistory: recurrent syndromes, Sugar and Slavery Drugs and Organized Crime Hernando Cortez’ conquest of Mexico awoke incommensurable greed in Europe. The genocide perpetuated on the Tainos of the Caribbean, and the Portuguese slave traffic introduced a new era of depredation and forced extinction of autochthonous cultures that became a new paradigm for the Americas that survives in many forms and many disguises to this day. It is the ethic of the matador, the machito and the cabrón eulogized in popular social folklore since the XIX century, a Karma that continues to reverberate today as organized crime. The Caribbean Islands were the scene of an experiment in terror, a generalized collective sadomasochism for economic gain was the accepted culture of the day; sheer erotic perversion reaching its apotheosis with the death of hundreds of thousands of transported slaves not to mention the eventual desertification of Haiti as the result of extreme exploitation. This was the legacy of the French, the thirty thousand French slavers who perished at the hands of the rebels in Haiti massacred after the rebellion of Toussaint Louverture in Española, the former home of the original Tainos of pre-‐Colombian days. ( We are reminded of another thirty thousand royalist Frenchmen, men, women and children, killed in La Vendée, in December 1793, by the artillery of general citizen Westermann at Savenay while attempting to cross La Loire on their way to Normandy, hopping for the support of the Royal, ( British ), Navy which never got there. ). The economic impact of slavery has been the subject of many academic investigations yet many forms of slavery persists in our day. We could recommend the excellent History of Cuba by Hugh Thomas. Similar processes were experienced in Jamaica and Haiti and elsewhere in The Caribbean until the abolition of slavery in the latter part of the XIX century. The creation of the market for sugar through the agency of slavery has a similar parallel in the rise of the contemporary market in human traffic for sexual and economic exploitation in conjunction
with the traffic in marijuana and cocaine generated by the inflated prices of these commodities because of their illegal condition. This double ‘opportunity’ of ‘drugs’ and slavery is one of the fundamental combinations that sustain organized crime, this symbiosis is its source of energy as well as its source of liquid cash. In the same manner the questionable or illegal practice of slavery created huge margins of profit in the sugar market in the XVIII and XIX centuries. It is the same opportunistic technique designed by parliaments and governments to maintain the unholy cohabitation between politics and crime. The same situation generated by members of the English parliament who owned sugar plantations in Jamaica during the XVIII century is repeated today by many politicians and bankers who are partners in crime with the drug cartels and who greatly benefit with the ‘illegal’ condition or status of ‘drugs’. Isn’t there a similarity in time-‐space between a clipper slave ship of 1860 and a jungle laboratory producing Cocaine in 2013, the huge profits? The hypocritical insistence on the illegality of Marijuana has made millionaires in all corners of ‘The Americas’. An innocent plant that grows from Alaska to Patagonia has turned millions of people into accomplices in crime and sanctimonious vulgarity; the result of political schizophrenia and cultural double standards… Not until drugs are legalized will we see a return to sanity and real prices. The vested interest by the present political world order in prohibiting ‘drugs’ is to keep prices high, in the streets of New York. Up to twenty seven thousand dollars can be made on a kilogram of marijuana because of prohibition and because of prohibition the apparatus of the state in association with organized crime cam make fabulous fortunes that can hardly fit in the cellars of organized crime and assorted corrupt political operators who stash the dollars in huge bundles inside cardboard boxes, (Chinese goons in Mexico city and politicians in Tabasco). With legalization, markets will be regulated, prices will be more realistic, they will go back to the original 1960’s price of 27 pesos the kilogram of marijuana, just like epazóte and hierbabuena, ( peppermint ), which is what marijuana is in a market sense – another herb. And a true new culture of health in a more lucid civilization will disclose the proper dimension of the so called ‘drugs’ within the frame of a saner society that will be liberated to do more creative things. Laboratories could be licensed, revenues collected, markets stabilized, new legal codes amply debated, instead of being habitually infringed with impunity, with the result that society loses all respect for the law. The lack of an international conference on Drugs is gravely contributing to a deterioration of social relations within the countries that suffer the syndromes of drug trafficking. The more that such a conference is delayed the stronger will organized crime become. The artificially high prizes created by penalization vastly increase the power of organized crime and greater is the universal corruption operated on society as a whole as the new generations sink in a culture of habitual crime. What is even more perverse is the glorification of crime and violence as a way of life that constantly teaches the young and vulnerable that crime pays and that they will do well in life if they join the ranks of organized crime. This is what is happening in the Mexican state of Morelos where after the death of capo Beltrán Leyva who more or less imposed an old style order on the different bands, several new
bands have emerged, some of them composed of teen agers who have scaled to new heights of brutality as they compete with each other for the control of territory, killing innocent bystanders during their gang shootouts and committing more atrocious crimes, ( evidence of several Morelenses in conversation with this author ). The cycle of violence continues because no one has a clear idea of when it started, why it started or what it all mean in a broad social and historical sense. Beyond political posturing is pure economic gain which betrays the complicity of a corrupt political order, morally bankrupt, which has nothing more to give but a lot to take. This is why an international conference on Drugs convening all the nations involved is urgent: to acknowledge the trade, understand its history, its cultural and economic ramifications, its regulation and its place within a new international legal order. The Method of Psychohistory: Self Government versus Party Politics Self-‐Government is an advanced form of electoral democracy. Party politics belongs to another era; to the era of the written press and political journalism, the heyday of ideology. It was the era that began with Daniel de Foe and L’Abbé Prévost and ended with the Internet. Today public opinion is formed via tweeter. The written press is too cumbrous with the extractive paper industry that devours the forests of the planet and the labyrinthine articles and editorials that try to define a political reality that is too exclusive and corrupt for the good of humanity. Town councils are better and get more things done than the ideology of the conservative parties or the liberal parties, the communist and socialist parties all put together because all these parties are self-‐perpetuating organisms that through their bureaucracies exclude everyone else. The electoral system based on party politics is not going to survive through the agency of independent candidates either….The system of party politics has been superseded by the desire to communicate directly through the new media that can quickly mobilize a territorial unit that has nothing to do with ‘ideology’ or ‘class interests’ but with direct, immediate community problems that deal with the living conditions of your city block, neighborhood, township or district. The change to direct democracy would be the affirmation of the idea of community, of the existence of a community…A great renewal. There would be no dislocation in the transition, no chaos. People would gather in some neighbor’s house to represent their block and elect two delegates: one female and one male, to represent them, for a limited time, in the district assembly. Thus public administration would be managed directly at the block level and at the district level through block meetings, ( juntas ), and district assemblies, ( asambleas de barrio o
de distrito ). Each district assembly would then choose eight representatives, four women and four men, to represent them at the state congress. Which will be renamed the community congress or the community parliament to leave behind the political concept of The State and all that it implies and get on with the task of a new redefinition of civilization to be defined by the participants themselves in their new assemblies. It would be 1776 and 1789 and 1821 all over again but more festive because we would have lifted a huge weight from our backs. We will have expanded our consciousness and live in the instant world of direct communication through the new media. We will have created a new political environment at a higher level of consciousness and empathy, closer to direct telepathy, which is an instantaneous mutual agreement of shared enlightenment in social order. A friend has said, quoting Winston Churchill, that the electoral, party democracies that we have today are the best we could hope for, considering the alternatives. And yes, those were the alternatives in the past but they are not what we can do in the future to better our present condition. In Churchill’s time National Socialism, Fascism, dictatorship and imperialism were the alternatives to electoral party democracy; pretty grim indeed; but that has changed, it is not the alternative today. The alternative today is between a mechanized plutocratic state in the manner of George Orwell´’s 1984 and Herbert Marcus’ alienated societies ‘with a lot of security and no liberty’; no matter how light and homogenized it might be made to look by the plutocracies, political scientists and mass psychologists, the possibility that we might enjoy life, freedom and democracy through some form of self-‐ government and direct democracy will be taken away from us by the people who love The System of Power. The Method of Psychohistory: The Vision of Love is the highest form of Consciousness The Entheogenic Theology of Huautla and the Bardo Thödol: Temixoch, el Sueño Florido Los protagonistas enteogénicos son: La Tierra en su modalidad sacralizada por el enteógeno o sea La Diosa Madre Demeter, Guadalupe Tonantzin Cihuacoatl, el enteógeno u Hongo Sagrado, Teonanacatl, ( psilocybe Mexicana ), Peyote, ( losophora williamsii );El Hijo, el iniciante o Mistoi, y el Dios Padre, La Divinidad Inmanente proveedora de la luz, el calor, la llivia y la Telésis, (Gestalt de configuraciones y significados que le confieren unidad y sentido a todos los elementos de la Naturaleza). El Nombre de esta última divinidad es múltiple: El Padre Tláloc, en Sánscrito, Diaus-‐Pithar, para los Griegos, Dionisio, el joven Iacco, que fueran como Xochipili y Quetzalcoatl deidades tutelares del Sueño Florido, Temisoch.
En la Antigüedad el Santuario Enteogénico de mayor influencia durante 2000 años fue Eleusis, sobre el mar Egeo, a quince kilómetros de Atenas; desde la época Micénica 3500 AP hasta su destrucción por el Vándalo Alarico en 396 de nuestra era. El uso de los Enteógenos es tan antiguo como la humanidad misma. Pensamos que Los Enteógenos eran conocidos en Gobekli Tepe, Catal Huyuk, Eridu, en el Egipto predinástico, en la civilización Minoica de Creta y en la cultura pre-‐Helénica de Grecia. Sin duda que Grecia estuvo bajo la influencia cultural Cretense y que la Gran Diosa Madre común a todas las culturas Mediterraneas y del Cercano Oriente también fue venerada en Grecia y que en algún punto se llamó Deméter y que fue reverenciada en Eleusis como La Gran Madre y que es posible que en el Bronze Tardio sus ritos tuviesen influencia Cretense. Lo que si sabemos con más certeza es que a comienzos de la Epoca Clásica en Grecia Pisistrato el tirano de Atenas amplio la pequeña estructura rectangular del antiguo Telesterión de Eleusis con una mayor que después fue destruida por los Persas. También sabemos que el arquitecto Ictinus, comisionado por el gran Pericles, diseño un templo con un pórtico de columnas de mármol y que la parte posterior del Telesterión estaba constituida por una gradería de piedra excavada en la roca viva que otrora habría sido la cantera original y que en tiempos remotos ( 4000 AP ) existió una cueva que bien pudo haber sido el santuario original. Siglo.s después este pequeño acantilado sirvió de pared natural para el templo en épocas clásicas. Esto nos da a entender el patrocinio que ejerció Atenas sobre el Santuario de Eleusis durante la época Clásica Griega y después bajo el imperio Romano hasta el año 396 de nuestra era cuando el Santuario fue destruido por el Vándalo Alarico.
Sabemos que Herodoto, Sófocles, Eurípides, Esquilo, Sócrates, Platón, el emperador Adriano, el escritor Apuleyo autor de Las Metamorfosis, y muchos otros hombres y mujeres de todas las edades y condiciones sociales incluyendo a los esclavos, Las únicas personas excluidas de participar en los ritos Eleusinios serían las que hubiesen cometido delitos de sangre. Los ritos se celebraban bajo la protección de la Gran Madre Deméter, de su Hija Core-‐Perséfone y del Estado Ateniense y fueron de gran influencia en el mundo antiguo para el Helenismo, y de hecho constituyeron el fenómeno central de la religión personal en el mundo antiguo en Asia, Africa y América. ( ver Richard Evans Schultes, Plantas de los Dioses, FCE ) La mejor descripción de lo sucedido al interior del telesterión durante la ceremonia de iniciación en Eleusis esta en Gordon Wasson: El Camino a Eleusis, una solución al enigma de los Misterios, FCE. Lo que puedo decir aquí para no repetir el excelente trabajo que hicieran Wasson y sus colaboradores es que La experiencia Enteogénica profunda de Iluminación y de visiones trascendentales la puede vivir cualquiera que lo desee, que lo halla meditado y que este consiente de su significado, preparado, como se hacía en la antigüedad, con gran respeto y estudio previo a la ceremonia de iniciación con Las Plantas Sagradas. Se puede destacar de todo lo dicho por tantos autores de la antigüedad y de tiempos modernos el valor espiritual transformador que se llevaban los antiguos de su experiencia en Eleusis: la Visión de lo Inefable, La Paz concedida por La Divinidad y su infinita misericordia al concedernos la oportunidad de conocernos a nosotros mismos, al recuperar la línea de nuestra memoria rescatada y reconstruida y contemplar la sobrecogedora unidad y belleza del mundo que nos rodea; el sentimiento de la paradisiaca experiencia que podría ser la vida en esta tierra si tan solo ejerciésemos el autocontrol suficiente para vivir en armonía con la naturaleza y con nuestros semejantes, como lo pintara con gran claridad Hieronymus Bosch en su tríptico del Jardín de las Delicias. Esa era la certeza que se llevaban los antiguos, la convicción íntima de que el paso entre esta vida y la otra constituía Un Continuo Psíquico por el que transitaban. En el momento mismo en que salían de Eleusis los invadía el sentimiento de tener el destino espiritual de sus vidas en sus propias manos y que esta vida era equivalente a la otra y que no había la menor diferencia entre una y otra porque la vida, como dijera el poeta: sueño es y los sueños, sueños son y que la única realidad era La Visión de lo Inefable, inenarrable, que era el mayor tesoro que se llevaban…
The innocence that lies under the skin of the huautleños and the freshness of the mornings in Huautla announce a promise revealed by The Sun. It is a vision of love that recalls The garden of Paradise among the fruit trees of the orchards of Huautla. No words can describe it; or if words are a vehicle to the unconscious we should do well to stand outside time and like the crumbling pigment of ancient buildings retain the pressed images of past lives to live and to witness a simultaneity elongated like the shadow we project from our backs, facing the sun, facing the light. Imagine that at that moment of crossing The Portal , you are presented with a moment of grace, with the eternity of your life opened like the many petals of a lotus flower blending with the beauty of the world that surrounds you. We would then be experiencing The Clear Light of Pure Reality and the very cobble stones that we tread with the pilgrims of Huautla will shine with magnificence revealing the hands that set them, letting us see the presence of the masons of long ago performing the tequio, the hours of communal work. We would then pass from one world to another understanding a long series of events that placed us there at that moment, like the bonding of many lives that suddenly manifest themselves and are understood to be part of the same effort towards redemption through the clarity of The Vision of Love. The trees in the orchard of Huautla will seem friendly to us and the wise huautleños will smile with us assenting, for they are all mushroom eaters, the best of them. We come and go between the worlds parading dawn the street with our friends who accompany us, who are travelling with us along the Luminous Path of The Clear Light of Radiance. We enter the Portal and disappear.
The Meaning of Love is stated by little sign posts along the way, a friendly face, a chance conversation with friends standing at the crossroads, a phrase remembered that clears the meaning of a paradox, will open an unsuspected door, previously unseen, that will lead to joyous gatherings with friends, in this world or in another, it does not matter , it is the same. So we should not fear… Pilgrim on the road, the one who knows the Way, how to find the divinity that dwells inside us? Pilgrim on the road, where does he go, he goes towards the center of his heart to begin the life of consciousness. He will have his life in his own hands and will be responsible for his actions because he knows the Way… that each decision in his life emerges from the clarity of his consciousness for in such a way he increases his spiritual energy and this shows him the Way… The pilgrim chooses the paths that have a heart…that lead to the center of his heart. Thus we read in D.T. Zuzuki’s Zen Buddhism: “In the Sayings of Nan-‐ch’uan we read that, when T’ui governor of Ch’i District, asked the fifth patriarch of the Zen Order-‐that is, Hung-‐jen-‐ how it was that while he had five hundred followers, Hui-‐neng, in preference to all others, was signaled out to be given the orthodox robe of transmission as the sixth patriarch, the fifth patriarch replied: “four hundred and ninety nine out of my disciples understand well what Buddhism is, except one Hui-‐neng. He is a man not to be measured by ordinary standard. Hence the robe of faith was handed over to him.” ‘’Under the fifth patriarch, all of his five hundred disciples, except one Hui-‐neng, understood Buddhism well. The lay disciple, Neng was quite unique in this respect, for he did not at all understand Buddhism. He understood the Way only and no other thing.’’ From D.T. Zuzuki, Zen Buddhism, pp. 27 and 28. Doubleday Anchor Book, 1956.
The highest form of knowledge is a direct vision of reality, when a series of associations are connecting several levels of existence in a broad phenomenological spectrum integrating new discoveries into a unified vision that expands continuously in a continuum of knowledge that is reaching us directly from the unconscious. This is a comprehensive vision akin to Illumination. This vision is not an elaboration of a previously known ideology but is completely spontaneous and original. It does not mean that this original vision does not resemble other previous visions outside the mnemonic content stored by a single individual because it could be said that original vision emerges from the same Universal Source. The Ultimate Vision of Reality is something that we have perhaps experienced before and that we are now remembering. Perhaps this is The Way that Hui-‐neng knew and yet yet he did not know Buddhism ideologically, just as Plotinus might have known The Way even before he studied the philosophy of Plato with his teacher Amonius Saccas. Any man can know the way if he so desires, for we are all pilgrims on the way, peregrinos en el camino. And we come from the same source even though it is not easy to remember. That this Vision of Ultimate Reality is a vision of love is unquestionable, it is in the nature of Telesis that a continuous association of ideas that clarifies some point is inspired by love. Love is the highest form of consciousness, it can become pure knowledge This is indeed the object of science when it wishes to go beyond the limit to expand knowledge around a phenomena; it goes beyond the limits of knowledge to touch a noumena, something previously unknown. Galileo did this, so did Descartes – and Hui-‐neng.
Psychohistory and the History of Religion Ever since Sir James George Frazer’s monumental, The Golden Bough, ( Macmilland, 1922 ), Joseph Cambell’s, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, ( Bollingen Foundation, 1949 ), Claude Lévi-‐Strauss´ La pensée sauvage,( Librairie Plon, 1962 ), Mircea Eliade´s Traité d’histoire des religions, ( Editions Payot, Paris, 1964 ), and E. O. James’ Prehistoric Religion, ( Thames and Hudson, New York ), we posses a well structured road for The History of Religion, albeit the road did not go much further than Sumerian Ur. Then came the description of James Mellart of Catal Huyuk in the April 1964 issue of Scientific American and sometime later the discovery of Gobekli Tepe in southern Turky at the end of last century, a site that has not been fully interpreted and perhaps will remain so for some years to come while excavations continue. We hope to establish a continuity of religious thought from Gobekli Tepe to Catal Huyuk, Eridu and Eleusis…right dawn to Bishop Eusebius and emperors Constantine, Julian, Theodosius and Justinian. It is indeed the History of the Decline of Religion in the West, from the courageous psychonauts of Gobekli Tepe and The Hypogeum of Malta who travelled through The Portal to modern Psychonauts like Terence Mackenna and a few other mystics and poets. Or should we apologize because we are not considering the vast calendar of saints and the battalion of theologians from the Mediterranean world? The Method of Psychohistory: Repressed Homosexuality and Male Hysteria, Sigmund Freud: On Psychopathology, Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality. (The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 10, 1979 ). Leonardo, Sigmund Freud, chap. 3, A Pelican Book 1963. Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis, Farrar, Strauss and Giraud, 1972. Wilhelm Stekel, Sadism and Masochism, The Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty, Liveright Publishing Corporation, New York 1953. Exclusively masculine corporations like armies and corporate religious institutions unconsciously base themselves in paranoid mechanisms derived from the repression of homosexuality, the consequence of a neurotic fixation that can generate mass hysteria, sadism and violence clearly observed during a civil war. A classic example of this was The Spanish Civil War 1936-‐1939, well documented by Hugh Thomas in his monumental History of that war. Another more contemporary case in point is the Syrian Civil war where desperate acts of brutality seen in internet document the terrible contradictions in contemporary Islamic Culture that have been building up since the late XVIII century.
It takes a complete collapse of society to bring out the components of mass psychopathology in psychohistory. The problem of Authority and Power is amplified for us to see. A historical society struggles to find the best forms of social organization, helpless, without the instruments of self-‐ analysis and falls victim to old atavisms and formulas repeated from generation to generation because they seem to have worked in the past. One combatant professes to be fighting for freedom, his opponent, his enemy, is also fighting for freedom, so he is convinced. No matter who wins, in a few years’ time, they, the winners, will have recreated the same conditions of oppression that they fought to liberate themselves from. To understand this is the very purpose of the Method of Psychohistory. A situation is developing in US society created by cultural attitudes that were developed in the last centuries as the result of slavery, slave traffic and a slave powered economy that is now returning as a dramatization of past conflicts unresolved in our collective unconscious; drives that were thought to have been overcome after the struggle of the civil rights movement in the 1960’.The psychohistorical consequences of slavery in the United States are not over and the recent tensions between The Tea Party and President Obama are symptoms of this unresolved conflict that could well lead to civil war. There are unconscious forces not fully understood by the conservative masses that perceive in President Obama a threatening force that could be operating a symbolic mass castration on those elements of society that base their internal psychological security and sense of identity in the fact that they are white and belong to the Judeo-‐Christian tradition and who feel themselves threatened by what they perceive to be the plural, multiracial and multicultural world they do not understand and do not wish to accept. Obama Care is the point of rupture, and they do not want to ‘let go’ because they would then be accepting symbolic castration and loss of power. Millions of people have been conditioned by years of conservative rule and the supremacy of conservative culture that they have The power. They cannot bear to loose it and are showing all the symptoms of great stress that might only be released after great violence. Are the psychotic killers that have been re-‐ dramatizing their fantasies by going out into the streets or cinemas and killing with bombs or guns all the people they can premonitory symptoms of this? Is the United States getting ready for a mass re-‐dramatization of the events of 1861-‐1865? The conditions seem to be there, they seem to be mounting… A culture of a phallic-‐narcissistic character produces phallic-‐narcissistic leaders. The repressed homosexuality, the jealousy and the paranoia remain at bottom the same cultural substratum. The people change but the culture remains, and this occurs all over the world in the same fashion. The Manic-‐depressive and sadistic Ivan The Terrible did not start a trend when he massacred his own people; before that, the Mongols had brutalized the Slavs of the ancient Rus. The ancient Swedes in their journeys dawn the Volga towards Constantinople captured Slavs to sell in the slave markets of Constantinople. Today the Russian mafia travels all over the world looking for captives to sell in the sex markets of five continents… dramatizing again the contempt that phallic-‐narcissistic characters feel for the opposite sex. This is the march of the conquerors and the conquered who do not know anything better other than ‘the lessons of Power’. ( Sigmund Freud op.cit. pp 205-‐208. Wilhelm Reich, op.cit. pp. 219-‐222).
The only thing we can do is to indicate pathogenic tendencies and syndromes, we are not generalizing from a philosophical standpoint; we want to help establish The Method of Psychohistory. But we most warn that this method has elements that are experiential, to a certain extent one has to live these events in order to experience a sudden understanding. The author can narrate one of these moments: in November 1968, in Paris, at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in The Sorbonne, The author participated in several meetings organized by the Trotskyist journal, Rouge, directed by Alain Krivine. This ‘ groupuscule ‘ which controlled The Faculty at the time possessed a ‘service d’ordre’ composed of a group of goons in black leather jackets who were at the orders of a hysterical young man who looked exactly like Trotsky-‐ spectacles, goat-‐tee and all. The service d’ordre would block all the entrances to the conference hall, an imposing oval amphitheater from the XVII Century, while this deputy of Alain Krivine, would harangue the crowded hall with his little Trotskyite gestures and poses. I was then witnessing the genesis of the future political figure and even then I suspected the existence of the phallic-‐exhibitionistic attitude and the general infantilism of politics which made the political discourse hard to believe. In very few people and in very few circumstances have I been moved by political oratory. Very few political figures are free of the expostulation of the narcissistic-‐exhibitionist attitude. What is the origin and the meaning of this posturing? It originated with the earliest kinglets of the first city states in Neolithic times-‐ Those personages who controlled the first public granaries in places like Mohenjo-‐Daro, Eridú and Ur probably already possessed a ‘Service d’Ordre’. Are we going to continue to believe in the system of power and the expostulation of its neurotic-‐hysterical symptoms in politics for another five thousand years? I have already described some of the mechanisms that lead to the formation of the system of power in my book La Huerta del Macehual, La Tarjeta Inteligente, (included in this blog ). All these psychopathological symptoms inherent in politics form part of my criticism of Hans Kelsen’s General Theory of The State, which is a standard reference in many faculties of law and Political Science the world over. Perhaps the time has come to make a critical reading of Doctor Kelsen’s thesis in view of the questionable relevance of electoral democracies and the problem of political representation in our oligarchical societies? One of the fundamental psychohistorical questions is: Can a democratic society be built without the threat of violence and the recourse to authority? Are we sufficiently developed as political societies to organize ourselves in corresponding and harmonious understanding? Is this a desirable end in political organization? If the answer of a majority is yes, how could we proceed to get there? Clearly, education is the only way: to raise the level of consciousness of our populations to the point where a higher empathy, nearer telepathy, is possible as a shared collective experience, when the stratification of class is no longer impressive, new more spiritualized generations will no longer feel the need to differentiate themselves within class structures with all the paraphernalia and nomenclature that give status and hierarchy. The author shared this experience of communion, the bond of tele-‐pathos, with his friends during The Taking of The Sacred Mushrooms in Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, Mexico in the summer of 1968 ( Teonanacatl p. 64, on this blog ) . I believe that this is possible, that it could be possible to teach telepathy to children without using the Sacred Plants: the disappearance
of ego-‐centric tendencies gives way to a feeling of love and compassion, an awareness of the world imbued with generous impulses that could become a new culture. There are systems of Yoga: Raja Yoga and Bhakti Yoga that can be taught to children and which could become a way of life for an entire community…..( Tibetan Yoga and secret doctrines. Edited by W.Y. Evans-‐ Wentz, Oxford University Press, p. 33 ; see also: Aldous Huxley, Island, Penguin Books, and E.F. Schumacher, Lo Pequeño es Hermozo, Herman Blume Ediciones, 1978 ).