A couple of weeks ago, I asked a friend/mentor of mine what the definition of insanity was. As an answer to my question, he sent me an article he has written recently. I really liked what he had to say on the subject and, with his permission, I am going to post it on my blog.
Your thoughts, personal experiences are always welcome. If you find the information useful, please pass it along to friends and family. No sharing on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or any social media, please, only post on your personal blogs. Thanks.
If you want to explore in depth the human condition and predicament, I suggest you read his book, “The Land of Po” You can find it on Amazon- a very interesting and revolutionary reading.
04/21/2020 Land of Pō R. A. Jurgensen
Difficult Times
Fear and Loathing in the time of COVID-19
Fear
Before masks and 6 feet of separation were ordered, I was shopping at Costco and watching anxious people pushing carts filled with toilet paper, bottled water, and high-calorie, comfort food. I ran into a friend who has held some responsible positions in state government. After greeting, our conversation turned to comments about stressful times and frantic people.
The casual mention of “crazy” came up. Since crazy is a personal and professional favorite of mine and has provided me with a lifetime of employment, two quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche came to mind. For those unfamiliar with Nietzsche, he was a brilliant 19th Century German philosopher, composer, poet, and an astute observer of human nature:
1. When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another.
Nietzsche’s quote implies that most of us have an individual mind. When we join a group, we stop thinking for ourselves and turn our attention to conforming and striving to establish our place in the hierarchy. This is a natural instinct for all herd animals, including humans, and is motivated by the need for community and survival. In the same way that sheep and wolves congregate, people merge their minds, create a group reality, and become either a herd of sheep, a pack of wolves, or most exciting of all, a herd of sheep managed by a few wolves.
Over time, most people become totally dependent on The Group for validation, their identity, and their truth. A consensus reality of convenience and control becomes the bedrock of social reality with a little r. So, there we are. What’s could possibly go wrong?
2. Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. [my emphasis]
Insanity
When I repeated a semblance of this quote to my friend, his face went blank and then puzzled— a sign of cognitive dissonance. That means that he was being confronted with an idea that is 180 degrees out of phase from his “normal” and socially correct thinking. It had never occurred to him that the very institutions he had honorably worked for could be insane.
He recovered enough to speak and said, “Why would that be?”
The middle of a busy aisle of Costco isn’t the best place for a discussion that is any more complicated than “Where is the gluten-free bread?” so I muttered that long-established group realities aren’t based on Truth but on lies to calm people by telling them what they want to hear and lies to frighten the flock in the desired direction.
Once lying starts, it has to continue or The Lie is exposed. Eventually, the group reality becomes so twisted by its acrobatic lying that it becomes dysfunctional and then certifiably mad (which interestingly means both “insane” and “enraged”). At this point, the same mental-health categories used to describe individuals are directly applicable to the mental health of the collective mind—words like anxious, depressed, paranoid, psychotic, and psychopathic.
Back in Costco and standing in the way of aggressive people on survival missions with shopping carts, my friend and I feared for our survival, so the discussion lapsed and our conversation ended with some socially correct pleasantries.
What’s the takeaway? Unstable times come and go within a person, within families, villages, and countries, but this time, because of our transportation and technology, the destabilization is global. The collective truth has been twisted so many times that it is badly out of alignment with natural law and demonstrates why civilizations throughout history collapse from within. It doesn’t take much imagination to guess what happens to the people who depend on the group for their safety, truth, and sanity as the collective mind spirals downward into darkness and destruction.
Just seeing how and why societies become insane and die isn’t enough. In fact, the awareness of this creates more anxiety and fear. What is the antidote that society uses to combat fear and existential helplessness?
Loathing
After people are herded together by fear, a popular, time-tested antidote is applied. At that point, the narrative is flipped in order to change the fear into hatred toward another group or an individual. Hatred works because it is a strong and aggressive emotion which obliterates fearful helplessness, but only temporarily, so it has to be applied over and over, again, to keep The Lie from falling apart. Unfortunately, the long-term side effects of obsessive hatred and lying are the erosion and eventual obliteration of the soul (consciousness) of a person and a society.
Maybe there is a solution better than a scorched earth populated by the walking dead. [smiley face with N-95 mask]
Dreams
We spend a fourth to a third of our lives asleep so the body can recover from the day’s activity. More important, taking a break from waking life for 6 to 8 hours a day allows the Universe to take us on adventures in dimensions not available to our self-absorbed and defended egos.
Dreams disappear quickly, so write down an occasional dream and relive it several times while awake, and you will initiate a natural process of healing and transformation. “Analyzing” a dream is of little value because it turns the dream over to your awake ego, which is spending most of its time avoiding and escaping from insights and truths that daily life and dreams offer.
Instead of analyzing dreams, reexperience them, feel the emotions, and let them affect you. Dreams are gifts that are designed just for you by an intelligent Universe. This style of dream work activates consciousness and reveals attachments that are obstructing your growth while at the same time, balancing and fine tuning your mental, emotional and physical bodies.
Of course, some dreams are frightening, but don’t throw them away with the standard “It isn’t real.” and “It’s just a dream.” Record them even if you have no clue about their meaning and value. Disturbing dreams reveal essential issues at the deepest part of your psyche and can prove invaluable as their meaning unfolds over your lifetime. In the book, Land of Pō, I included dreams in the context of my life to encourage others to do the same, hoping that they will reap the benefits that I have.
If you sincerely engage the process suggested, you will undergo a gradual and relieving withdrawal from your addiction to a deluded society. Then, when people around you become frightened and paranoid, you won’t unwittingly be swept up and drowned in the psychic wave of mob consciousness.
If being a vector and a victim of the current mind virus spreading throughout the globe is too stressful and no longer serving your best interests, you have a choice. All the while that you are being entertained, mesmerized and terrified by the social/political dramas in front of you, there is
a doorway behind you. Turn around and step onto the path that leads away from the madding crowd.
Your dreams will reflect this as you find yourself leaving houses, schoolrooms, offices, and institutions behind and travel on paths and roads that take you to meadows, forests, and oceans filled with creatures. You will find yourself flying like a bird and breathing underwater like a fish, indications that your consciousness has attained some freedom from its self-imposed confinement in the socialized mind.
Eventually you will find creative-energy fields of color and sound—consciousness beyond the storyboard dramas of a confused and self-destructive species.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness … it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness … we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was … like the present period.
A Tale of Two Cities
—Charles Dickens
In the present period, like all periods, you are offered a choice: wisdom, Light, and Heaven or foolishness, Darkness and Hell. Complicated times aren’t really that complicated after all.
The Road Home 