>DENIAL: The 51st State
By Paul Levy
What the underlying military-industrial-financial crime syndicate that
controls our government is doing, both domestically and
internationally, is so horrifying (please see my article Homeland Insecurity
http://www.awakeninthedream.com/insecurity.html) that it is literally
traumatizing to consciously bear witness to it, to experience it. When
we become traumatized, we become stuck, literally “frozen in time,” as
our ability to creatively respond and mobilize ourselves in the present
moment into effective action in the world becomes in-operative. When we
become overwhelmed by trauma, we are not able to creatively express our
internal experience in a way that dis-charges what has been triggered
in us. We feel impotent. We are unable to give voice to our experience,
as our power to be ourselves has become foreign to us. We become mute.
When we become traumatized, we lose touch with our inner voice, which
is our guiding spirit, our true genius.
Bush and his regime could only be getting away with the atrocities they
are perpetrating not only because there are an insufficient number of
people who see what they are doing, but because there are enough people
who see what is happening and remain silent (please see my article
Breaking the Vow of Silence
http://www.awakeninthedream.com/vow.html). To
quote Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Abuse, “The ordinary response
to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations
of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the
meaning of the word unspeakable.” When our nation is seen as a family
system composed of interrelated roles that do not exist in isolation from
each other but rather in co-relation to one another, the people in the
role of the abuser, Bush and his regime, depend upon the tendency for
most people to split-off from and deny the horror of the atrocities they
are perpetrating to be able to get away with them. When we deny what
is
happening, we are not able to speak about it, for to speak about what
is happening is to invest our experience with a living reality, which is
the very thing our denial ensures doesn’t happen.
As perpetrators of the abuse, the Bush regime will do everything in
their power to promote our denial, pretense, and silence. Our becoming
silent is the very thing which allows them to literally get away with
murder. They need to induce our denial, which is an internal cover-up, as a
necessary requirement for them to act out their role as “perpetraitor.”
Denial is an integral dynamic which sustains the pathology of the
victim-perpetrator collusion.
The abuser’s refusal to hear the voices of those they are exploiting is crucial to their continued domination.
When the abuse is so horrific, it forcibly overwhelms the human psyche
so as to split the psyche from itself and shatter its wholeness, which
is the very root of trauma. When the atrocity is so inhumane, we
dis-associate from the experience, creating a self-protective amnesia for
ourselves. An (arche)typical response to trauma is to simply “forget about
it” and try to go on with our life. Like Bush himself counseled us
after 9/11, we should just continue shopping. It is the strangest
experience to walk around town and see so many people just going about their day, drinking their cup of coffee in their favorite café and reading the
sports page as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening, while in the
same moment on another part of the planet bombs are being dropped on
innocent people with our names on them. A more perfect image of
collective denial is hard to imagine. “Hey, did you hear the Yankees took two
yesterday?”
To be in denial is both an unconscious, primitive, and magical defense,
as well as on some level also being a conscious choice. There is a
collective denial that most of us support by acting out our own personal
denial in our individual lives, which in turn simply feeds into our
collective madness. To the extent that we aren’t completely outraged with
what our government is doing, we are in denial, for what could we
possibly be thinking? To the degree we are in denial about the horror that is
playing out in our world, we are, to that extent, complicit.
When the abuse is so overwhelming, we become numbed, desensitized, and
anesthetized, as if a psychological “operation” (psy-ops) is being done
on us (please see my article The War on Consciousness
http://www.awakeninthedream.com/warconsc.html). Instead of being
enlivened by the abuse, we become “deadened,” as if we have become
dehumanized. Devalued, we become incapable of “feeling.” In this covert
operation, our ability to respond creatively and responsibly becomes disabled.
We can become incapacitated with inexpressible rage, hopeless despair
and a feeling of worthlessness. The worst of the abuse isn’t even so much
what the external abuse actually is, but what it creates in us
internally.
When we are overwhelmed by abuse, we are literally coerced to disavow
our perceptions, which is to betray ourselves. To quote the late Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr., “At some point, silence before a lie becomes
betrayal.” Betraying ourselves, we become a stranger to ourselves,
forgetting who we are. We become disoriented, as our bedrock connection between psyche and reality has been severed. Moment by moment we insist on building a wall between our inner selves and the outer world. Splitting off
from the abuse, we invariably internalize the abuser and police
ourselves. We lose our connection with our inner nature, as well as with
nature itself. Our sense of meaning, and our identity as sovereign
meaning-generators, becomes scrambled. When the nightmare that is playing out is so horrible, we marginalize and deny our very experience itself, as we
literally “split” (which means both “in two,” and “leave” – i.e., go
far away from the present, as well as from our true selves). A part
of us pretends that what is happening is not really happening.
A specific example of denial in our current day and age are people’s
reactions to 9/11. The most superficial inquiry into the facts reveals
that there is no doubt whatsoever that the government’s official story
about 9/11, a crazy conspiracy theory if there ever was one, is not only
not true, but is covering up what really happened. Who knows what
really happened on 9/11, but when the evidence is studied, it is beyond any
reasonable doubt that the same criminal enterprise that has infiltrated
the highest levels of our government also had its hands in creating
9/11.
The underlying military-industrial-financial crime syndicate was the
only organization that had the motive and the ability to pull-off,
cover-up and capitalize on the “opportunity” of 9/11. To go down this
rabbit hole and see what the criminal forces that have taken over and
control our government are capable of is to unravel and shatter many of our naïve illusions, which is why many of us deny and simply refuse to
look at the evidence. It is clear that the same underlying criminal syndicate that was
behind 9/11 is using 9/11 as a catapult to further expand its domination and
extend its tentacles to the furthest reaches of not just the planet,
but space itself. If you think I am exaggerating or being paranoid when I
point this out, I would respond by simply inviting you to open your
eyes and explore the ample evidence, which is readily available and
overwhelmingly convincing (see www.911truth.org). Besides being utterly
traumatic to realize, another reason the truth behind 9/11 is so hard to see
is because it is everywhere we look, literally staring us in the face.
If we don’t realize the truth behind 9/11, it is because we are in
denial.
When we realize that 9/11 was an “inside job” perpetrated by our own government against us, we step out of denying what deep down we know to be true.
9/11 was a wake up call for the American people and the world
at large, and it has the potentiality of snapping us out of our spell so
that we can begin to see what is actually happening in our world.
Looking beneath the superficial “official” explanation for 9/11 begins an
initiatory process of reconsidering the way the power structure of our
nation and the world operates. People who have woken up to the truth
behind 9/11 are very much like people who have had a kind of spiritual
awakening, in that having snapped out of the consensus trance, they are
recognizing a deeper, more fundamental process that is in-forming and
giving shape to events in our world. Like a person who has had a spiritual
awakening, people who have realized the truth about 9/11 have stepped
out of their denial and snapped out of an illusion.
When we are in denial, we avert our gaze, which is a reactive form of
psychic blindness. When we get stuck in and embody the madness of
denial, we become psychologically deaf, as we are not able to hear any
“informing” influences from the outside world which reflect back to us our
unconscious state. Falling into denial, we become psychologically deaf,
dumb and blind. We see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.
When we are riddled by denial, we hold contradictory viewpoints
simultaneously, while splitting off from the underlying contradiction, which
is a self-induced, trance-like dissociated state, in which we have
fixated our attention, restricted our own awareness and hypnotized
ourselves. When groups of people (or a nation) collectively fall into a mass
en-trance-ment together, they reinforce each other’s unconscious denial,
which feeds the zombie-like madness of the group. The name of this
phenomenon is “collective psychosis,” and this is what is presently
happening in the United States of America (please see my book The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of our Collective Psychosis, to read the
first chapter, click
http://awakeninthedream.com/georgew.html).
The underlying culture and field in which and from which we dissociate
conspires with us in our betrayal of ourselves. We are in-formed by and
receive feedback from the abusive family system, in this case, our
nation, that it is not OK and actually quite dangerous to be ourselves,
which only reinforces the trauma, ad infinitum. Part of the abuse in our
country is that, like an unrestrained malignant narcissist, the
criminal enterprise that controls our government has let it be known that it
will destroy anyone who tries to stand up to it (please see my article
George Bush is a Malignant Narcissist
http://www.awakeninthedream.com/bushnarc.html). This threat itself is a
form of terrorism, as it creates terror in US. As a result, for the
ordinary person, the utter evil of what is playing out in our country is
better left unsaid, so as to not cause trouble or rock the boat, which,
Titanic-like, is sinking due to our passivity and silence.
When the horror is so overwhelming, we become alien to ourselves and
deny our own experience. We then deny our denial and fall into the
depraved state of lying and actually believing our own lies. This is a state
of complete and utter self-deception. When we are in denial, we are in
the perverse state of fooling ourselves, while pretending we are not
fooling ourselves. This is to have fallen into a diabolically
self-perpetuating feedback loop, an infinite regression in which we deny that we are denying and then we deny that, and on and on, ad infinitum. This is
called “the state of being in denial,” which is the 51st state in the
US.
[Virginia's note: THIS is called DELUSION, and is a mark of ADVANCED addiction .. in this case to an unsustainable way of "life" - read: empire]Once we fall into the state of denial, we become invested in not only
keeping ourselves asleep but we also seek out others in the same state
of denial with whom to join forces. Once our mass unconsciousness gains
enough self-generating momentum, our denial has an inductive, magnetic
effect of entraining others into a similar state of unconsciousness as
our own.
Our somnambulism has a bewitching effect on others, while at
the same time their unconsciousness strengthens our denial, in a
self-reinforcing web of mutual conditioning. Falling into and supporting each other’s collective denial, we become infected by, while concurrently
infecting the field around us with a self-created, but very contagious,
psychological “virus.”
This is an immaterial, psychic “bug” that insinuates itself into and
operates through the psyche by distorting and manipulating our
perceptions so as to feed itself, while at the same time veiling that it is doing this so as to keep itself invisible. Jung never tired of warning us
that psychic epidemics such as this, which spread and replicate themselves
through our unconscious blind spots, were the greatest danger facing
humanity. In a crazy-making loop that both produces and is an expression
of madness, the denial in the underlying field feeds our denial, while
at the same time our denial feeds the denial in the underlying field.
When we live in the state of denial, we are investing all of our
psychic energy into a lie to protect ourselves from the awful shock of
stepping out of our denial and consciously experiencing both the lie that we have been living and the reality we have been avoiding. Once our denial becomes invested with enough energy, a counter-incentive to step out of our denial arises, as we become highly motivated in sustaining the lie
that is fundamental to our denial, for the trauma of consciously
realizing the perverse state we have fallen into is too much for us to bear.
Once our denial solidifies its reign, it literally rules over us, as we
become obedient to it, as if we are its slaves and it is our master.
When we repress something from our consciousness, we unwittingly invest
it with power over us. Once we become sufficiently corrupted by our
denial, we become dedicated to preserving it at all costs. Once we become
tied, attached and bound to our denial, our entire modus operandi
is to do whatever it takes to continue the charade of hiding from ourselves.
At a certain point, we literally become taken over, as if possessed, by
our compulsion to avoid relationship with ourselves. We are then not
able to help ourselves from compulsively acting out our unconscious
denial, a perverse state for which we are ultimately responsible. Being in
the state of denial, we are not in our right mind, and we are not even
home in our own bodies. In this state, we can be of no help to either
ourselves or to others, as we ourselves are the ones increasingly in need
of help. Having fallen into a truly pathological state, we have become
addicted to our denial, which we then embody and act out in our lives,
as our denial continually in-forms us. Once this pathological process
develops a sufficient inner sovereignty, it “colonizes” our psyche and
we fall into becoming an unwitting instrument for what is called “evil”
to act itself out in our world.
We have then attained what political philosopher Hannah Arendt saw as
the fundamental characteristic of evil: the incapacity for thought. When
we are in denial, the primary thought we can’t think about is
ourselves, which is to say we are incapable of self-reflection, as if we are not
able to bend around backwards and see our reflection in the mirror of
life. When we are in the state of denial, we are “not ourselves,” but
rather, are “beside ourselves.” Instead of associating with all of
our-selves, we imagine that we exist separately from the world out there, of
which we are desperately afraid. This is an outer reflection of the
inner process of being terrified of a part of ourselves, which is the
dynamic which precipitated our denial in the first place.
As this inner pathological state takes us over, it develops a seemingly
autonomous life of its own, animating and playing itself out in the
most unconscious, and hence, destructive of ways, creating violence,
abuse, and terror, whether it be within ourselves or in the outside world.
Anyone who points out or reflects back the pathology is demonized,
pathologized, criminalized, and seen as the enemy.
People in denial react violently when they see someone who does not share their denial, as it secretly reminds them of
how sick they are.
When we are in the state of denial, we lose our ability to discern what
is really going on. For example, when we are in denial, we are unable
to discern whether or not others are in denial. When other people are
actually in denial, it has a resonance with our own denial and, insanely,
we see them as expressing the truth and being enlightened. At the same
time, people who aren’t in denial we see as being crazy. When we are in
denial, we live in an inverted world, blindly imagining others to be
the ones who are blind. We project the face of our own unconscious onto
the world, which simply mirrors it back to us, confirming our delusion.
To step out of our denial is the scariest thing imaginable to the part
of us that is in denial. To snap out of our denial is a form of
“death,” as it is to “die” to the fantasy world in which we imagined we lived.
This is why people will “defend” their denial to the point of death,
often in the most aggressively “offensive” of ways. People in denial will
actually create “explosions” in the outside world as distractions so as
to protect themselves from inwardly “imploding” at the sight of
themselves.
People cherish their illusions, which they hold dear to
themselves, as if their illusions are their most sacred possession. To be in
denial is to live in an illusion, and the system which produced this
pathological state is only too happy to configure itself to support the abuse
by supplying all the evidence needed to strengthen the denial and
confirm the illusion. Our denial allows the abuse to continue to be
perpetrated and perpetuate itself, while at the same time the abuse
facilitates our denial in a reciprocally co-arising, circular (as compared to
linear) and self-generating feedback loop that is truly pathological. When
we are in denial, the system which precipitated our denial gets dreamed
up to collude with, nourish, nurture and justify our denial, creating a
psychological black hole: a true dis-ease of the psyche, in which no
light escapes or is emitted.
DENIAL IS ITS OWN MEDICINE
When we are taken over by the pathological state of denial, we embody
and incarnate it, becoming agents by which it propagates itself, as we
collectively act out our inner, unconscious state of denial on the outer
stage of the world. This is to say that the inner state of our
unconsciousness is actually being dreamed up into full-bodied form and
reflex-ively played out in the theater of the outside world. Just like in a
dream – where the outer dreamscape is a reflection of the inner psyche –
our unconscious has spilled out from the boundaries of our skull and is
materializing itself in, as, and through the seemingly outside world.
Not limited by the conventional laws of time and space, our unconscious
has changed channels and is nonlocally giving shape and form to itself
by synchronistically arranging events in the outside world so as to
express and reveal itself to those that have the eyes to see. The fact
that there is a synchronistic correlation and correspondence between
the unconscious process going on inside of our psyche and
what is playing
out in the outside world is not an accident, as this mirroring is
reflecting something back to us that is most important for us to know. Encoded in the outer manifestation of our unconscious denial is the key to
its resolution.
Collective events in our world are the expressions of our inner state
of unconsciousness, while simultaneously being the revelation of the
very unconsciousness of which they themselves are an expression. What this
means is that events in our world, while being manifestations of our
unconscious, are at the same time potentially the liberator and
liberation of the very unconsciousness of which they themselves are a
manifestation.
The malevolent events that are literally being unconsciously acted out
on the world stage are at the same time speaking to us symbolically,
which is the language of dreams. Seen as symbols that unite the
opposites, these events reflect back to us our inner state of unconsciousness,
while simultaneously revealing to us, and hence potentially
transforming, the very unconsciousness of which they are an unmediated
manifestation. Recognizing what is being revealed instantaneously, in no time whatsoever, transforms our unconscious, our experience of our world, and
ourselves, which empowers us to be a genuine agent for positive change in
the world.
Seen symbolically,
events in our world are
simultaneously
the problem and the solution
co-joined in
one phenomenon,
and how they manifest depends
upon
how we dream them.
Our world crisis is the problem, while at the same time it is the revelation of the solution, as it unveils the unconscious part of ourselves, which is the source of our current world crisis. Once we recognize what is being revealed, our consciousness has expanded itself through this realization, thereby transforming both our unconscious and the world crisis simultaneously.
Seen as symbols in a dream, the malevolent events in our world are potentially expanding our consciousness so as to heal the very pathology which is at the root of their malevolence. Something is revealing itself to us as it acts
itself out through our unconscious. Recognizing what is being revealed
changes everything, for then all bets are off, as anything becomes possible.
We only suffer from a failure of imagination.
The collective denial and madness
that is playing itself out
in our world
is
paradoxically
ts own medicine.
How the events in our world actually manifest and what effect they have
on us, either continuing to traumatize us, or wake us up, depends upon
whether or not we recognize what they are revealing to us about
ourselves. Events in our world are being dreamed up to reflect back to us that
we ourselves are responsible for how we moment by moment collectively
dream up our world.
All six and a half billion of us are moment by moment collaboratively
dreaming up this universe into materialization, as if we are co-creating
a mass, shared dream. Once we realize this, we literally snap out of
the illusion of thinking we exist separate from each other, and recognize
we are “relational beings,” i
nterdependent parts of one another, which
is to say we are “related,” members of a greater family. We are a part
of the whole but not “a-part” from the whole. We are interconnected
aspects and unique expressions of the whole.
To consciously realize our
wholeness is to heal our disassociation from each other as well as from
ourselves. Once we snap out of the spell of imagining we are separate from each
other, we can get in sync with each other so as to awaken “eros,” which
has to do with being able to relate with each other through a deeply
shared
feeling of the heart called love. Reciprocally co-inspiring each
other, we mutually help one another plug into and activate our collective
genius, as if collectively awakening a higher strand of our DNA. Once
our awakening attains a certain momentum, we become instruments through
which something greater than ourselves is able to inform and give shape
to our world. We are then able to nonlocally effect the entire
universe, which is to say we can literally make a positive difference in the
world.
Putting our lucid awareness together, we synergistically activate our
inherent God-given power of being able to consciously co-create reality
in a way that serves our highest, evolutionary unfoldment. We discover
that we can enter into an engaged, intimate, and conscious partnership
with each other, as well as with the universe as a whole. Once our
intention is to serve what is best for the whole, we become inspired by
something greater than our own ego. We become imbued with life, as we
become guided and animated by a creative, and whole-making spirit. As
compared to the spirit of division and destruction, this is the spirit of
integration and creation. This is the point where we are able to join
together and, not just in imagination, but in seemingly real time and
space, change the collective dream we are having. Instead of destroying
ourselves, we can actually create the world in which we want to live.
Recognizing what is being revealed, we become students of history, as
we become educated by our experience, learn from our mistakes, and
organically grow. Stepping out of our shared delusion that we exist separate
from each other, we discover that we can co-operatively help each other
to evolve to greater orders of freedom and ever-deepening degrees of
compassion. Cultivating our shared awakening, we naturally change the
world in the process.
Paul Levy is an artist and a spiritually-informed political activist. A
pioneer in the field of spiritual awakening, he is a healer in private
practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dream-like
nature of reality. He is the author of The Madness of George Bush: A
Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis, which is available on his website
www.awakeninthedream.com. Please feel free to pass this article along to
a friend if you feel so inspired. You can contact Paul at
paul@awakeninthedream.com; he looks forward to your reflections.
© Copyright 2007.
As I post this I have No. 100 of my hit parade playing in the background,
Metalica's ONE ...
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