Here is a fruitful review of what is happening now.
Please watch the whole presentation ... it is bout 20 minutes or so.
Here is the link to a very useful website and YouTube channel.
Like the delta variant of Covid-19, the alternative reality virus (ARV) is
spreading wildly and becoming more virulent while the mainstream powers
push to open “the economy.”
Denial of reality carries serious consequences. It is not simply a different
Opinion or viewpoint or political perspective. At the core of the ARV is
a pervasive suicidal impulse. The death imagery, slogans and memes among
those infected with ARV is clear. The ARV seems to have excited Kali in
major degree.
For previous posts on ARV, use the search box.
Join Fex & Coo at fexandcoo.wwebsite
The alternate reality virus continues to spread unabated.
I eagerly look for what might counter this infection and find nothing.
There is no treatment. There is no vaccine mental or otherwise.
Everyone is at risk of the virus itself or its consequences from others.
Below is One One of my reflections. In Part Two, I'll continue to explore
the consequences of this plague and what, if anything, one can do in the
face of it.
The Alternative Reality Virus (ARV): Part One
The ancient Rule of Three enables an understanding of things more than when attention has a singular focus.
For example, right now, most everyone is focused on the pandemic caused by the Corona Virus. What else is going on synchronously? One thing is the financial fallout from the pandemic, which is causing economic harm on a large scale at all levels (countries, corporations, small businesses, individuals). Countries and central banks are scrambling to bring economic relief before the world-wide economy spirals into recession, or deeper into depression. As bracing as these realities are, my sense is they may pale in light of what I will call the “alternate reality” virus (ARV).
As background, I encourage you to read a sample of my work on this, in blog posts entitled, "They Say," “Return to Normal?,” “Collapse,” “Mind Parasites.” and “The Meaning of Not Human.” You can access these pieces here:
http://ralockhart.com/WP/?s=virus
My work on the "Trump" pieces has followed from an overflow of inchoate intimations concerning the present state of the world and its future. At all levels, I see the regressive pull of the past, from wanting to return to some prior glory to trying to understand the present situation through the vehicles of past understanding. We cannot go back and we cannot understand the future while looking backward. We can only open ourselves to witnessing the full horror that is happening in and to the world, in and to human beings, in and to the rest of life on earth. There is an enormous fear of and loathing for the strange, for otherness, for difference, for incongruity, for disparity, for doubt—all those qualities that Keats pointed to as characterizing "negative capability." If we don't welcome these things, as Baucis and Philemon welcomed the "strangers who were gods," then we will experience the fate of the villagers who locked the doors, who sent the strangers away, who did not welcome the divine visitors? Their fate was to die in a great flood, leaving only the generous-hearted Baucis and Philemon alive. And, yes, I am aware of the irony of referring "back" to Baucis and Philemon. It's like the "hope" left in Pandora's box. My deeper intuition, however, is that hope is gone as well. "Something else" is in store. Of this, I am convinced.
Mental viruses such the ARV are contagious almost beyond comprehension, particularly with the mechanisms of the internet enabling the spread in unpredictable and unstoppable ways. There is no sure way to diagnose ARV, there is no way to stop it, and there is no treatment. Some regular features of ARV are the denial of reality, the denial of facts, denial of truth, certainty and conviction of the truth of conspiracies, a mounting degree of emotional intensity leading to absolute intolerance of anything and everything outside the bubble created by the ARV.
The ARV disables rational thought and excites emotional reactions beyond normal boundaries and advocates physical actions to force the alternate realities on everyone, including violence and willful law-breaking.
The president of the United States, Donald Trump, embodies all of these features of the ARV and is a prime example of the disorder and destruction that follows from the combination of power and infection with ARV.
The ARV is a normal feature of human behavior, limited generally to a small percentage of the population. But ARV, like all viruses, mutates and has the potential of becoming more infectious leading to large numbers of carriers as well as those exhibiting full-blown symptoms of the ARV. One can be a carrier as well as suffering the consequences of infection without any realization of this. Generally, self-reflection is one of the first casualties of infection. Without self-reflection, consciousness becomes increasingly degraded and becomes a casualty of the infection. Impenetrable unconsciousness then becomes the dominant feature. When this is so, any form of rational argument or persuasion becomes ineffective.
Social attraction of those infected by ARV increases, so that further loss of individuality becomes another casualty. Groups ensure even further infection of ARV until mass-mindedness becomes complete. When mass-mindedness becomes coupled with power in the form of organization, money, politics, etc., the degree of collective damage that results can be extreme. This can become a factor in societal and cultural collapse.
In Part Two, I will take up the issue of what can be done—if anything— to lessen the power of those infected with ARV and to limit the damage that is inevitable if ARV is unchecked.
The ancient Rule of Three enables an understanding of things more than when attention has a singular focus.
For example, right now, most everyone is focused on the pandemic caused by the Corona Virus. What else is going on synchronously? One thing is the financial fallout from the pandemic, which is causing economic harm on a large scale at all levels (countries, corporations, small businesses, individuals). Countries and central banks are scrambling to bring economic relief before the world-wide economy spirals into recession, or deeper into depression. As bracing as these realities are, my sense is they may pale in light of what I will call the “alternate reality” virus (ARV).
As background, I encourage you to read a sample of my work on this, in blog posts entitled, ”They Say, “Return to Normal?,” “Collapse,” “Mind Parasites.” and “The Meaning of Not Human.” You can access these pieces here:
http://ralockhart.com/WP/?s=virus
My work on the "Trump" pieces has followed from an overflow of inchoate intimations concerning the present state of the world and its future. At all levels, I see the regressive pull of the past, from wanting to return to some prior glory to trying to understand the present situation through the vehicles of past understanding. We cannot go back and we cannot understand the future while looking backward. We can only open ourselves to witnessing the full horror that is happening in and to the world, in and to human beings, in and to the rest of life on earth. There is an enormous fear of and loathing for the strange, for otherness, for difference, for incongruity, for disparity, for doubt—all those qualities that Keats pointed to as characterizing "negative capability." If we don't welcome these things, as Baucis and Philemon welcomed the "strangers who were gods," then we will experience the fate of the villagers who locked the doors, who sent the strangers away, who did not welcome the divine visitors? Their fate was to die in a great flood, leaving only the generous-hearted Baucis and Philemon alive. And, yes, I am aware of the irony of referring "back" to Baucis and Philemon. It's like the "hope" left in Pandora's box. My deeper intuition, however, is that hope is gone as well. "Something else" is in store. Of this, I am convinced.
Mental viruses such the ARV are contagious almost beyond comprehension, particularly with the mechanisms of the internet enabling the spread in unpredictable and unstoppable ways. There is no sure way to diagnose ARV, there is no way to stop it, and there is no treatment. Some regular features of ARV are the denial of reality, the denial of facts, denial of truth, certainty and conviction of the truth of conspiracies, a mounting degree of emotional intensity leading to absolute intolerance of anything and everything outside the bubble created by the ARV.
The ARV disables rational thought and excites emotional reactions beyond normal boundaries and advocates physical actions to force the alternate realities on everyone, including violence and willful law-breaking.
The president of the United States, Donald Trump, embodies all of these features of the ARV and is a prime example of the disorder and destruction that follows from the combination of power and infection with ARV.
The ARV is a normal feature of human behavior, limited generally to a small percentage of the population. But ARV, like all viruses, mutates and has the potential of becoming more infectious leading to large numbers of carriers as well as those exhibiting full-blown symptoms of the ARV. One can be a carrier as well as suffering the consequences of infection without any realization of this. Generally, self-reflection is one of the first casualties of infection. Without self-reflection, consciousness becomes increasingly degraded and becomes a casualty of the infection. Impenetrable unconsciousness then becomes the dominant feature. When this is so, any form of rational argument or persuasion becomes ineffective.
Social attraction of those infected by ARV increases, so that further loss of individuality becomes another casualty. Groups ensure even further infection of ARV until mass-mindedness becomes complete. When mass-mindedness becomes coupled with power in the form of organization, money, politics, etc., the degree of collective damage that results can be extreme. This can become a factor in societal and cultural collapse.
In Part Two, I will take up the issue of what can be done—if anything— to lessen the power of those infected with ARV and to limit the damage that is inevitable if ARV is unchecked.
The insulation against sorrow wears thin.
Breathe in, out.
Repeat, while you can.
Yes, I know.
There are no boundaries.
No limits.
No constraints on human folly.
Nothing to stop the seduction of denial.
Or the self-satisfying freedom loosed by the power of lying.
Nothing at all to end the spread of the all-consuming alternate reality virus.
Except—
It’s brewing now.
Not yet visible.
Not yet knowable.
Even in nightmares.
It is coming, nonetheless.
Rue and worse will lie in its wake.
It will break over everyone and everything.
Taking our future who knows where.
The collapse of fixity and the rise of fluidity puts everyone "at sea" and faced with the consequent loss of stability of most everything. Blog member John Woodcock references this in his comment on the recent blog post by George Mecouch, entitled, "Why Not Ask for a Dream?"
From John Woodcock:
Very interesting dreams to read and also a relief to hear that they are being taken seriously. I have seen some videos of COVID nightmares and the predominant professional advice seems to be how to reduce the nightmares, even stop them, not to seek their wisdom.
The dreams seem to highlight the supreme danger of “fixing” or reifying the source of evil (whether as the COVID or men in suits, wolves of Wall Street, or whatever). “Ellen” is caught in a vicious and violent cycle with “an ancient evil force” i.e. caught in the processes of the psyche until she is stopped by the little girl so that she can be taught “ strategy and math” via the game of Othello,. If you just saw the game without knowing the rules, you would see a very mysterious fluid process of discs flipping from black to white, etc.—a simplified version of what “Ellen” was going through with the “evil force”. She has to learn the rules (make conscious) of being in such a fluid state—they are not the same as the rules of materialism or fixed reality. And I will add we are ALL having to learn the rules of this new mode of being, i.e. with reality increasingly becoming fluid, not fixed—the reality of the imagination, if you like.
The whole notion of evil now has to be reworked but we still collectively and obsessively search for a fixed source of the evil causing the strife in the world (target zero or the virus or Trump’s pathology, corporations, etc.) It may well be that the attempt to “fix” or reify (any aspect of) fluid reality may ITSELF be the source of evil now. “Ellen” pursues this notion of a fixed source of evil and so finds an anvil. The dreamer seems to believe that its putrefying sickness could be strengthened by others (by the habit of reifying what needs to be kept fluid?) so she single-handedly decides to take it up in her arms and carry it away. In doing so she feels its unbearable weight. This dream fact may be a clue or hint for the dreamer and us.
Fixing evil into an “entity” becomes an unbearable weight (of responsibility or guilt?). And of course there is the precision of that image as an ANVIL to consider too. The word springs from a meaning of “beating”—Ellen's “vicious and violent cycles”? Is this what happens when we attempt to fix meaning or reify the psyche? We get beaten on?
Our times point to a breakdown in a fixed stable reality (the reality of opposites) in favour of a more fluid reality that has come upon us and we all must learn its “strategy and math” in order to synchronize with it rather than getting beaten on by its insistence.
Here is a new essay by blog member Dr. George Mecouch author of While Psychiatry Slept: Reawakening the Imagination in Therapy. [This book is available at Amazon using this link: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=while+psychiatry+slept&ref=nb_sb_noss ]
In this essay, the question is posed: Why not ask for a dream? Dr. Mecouch provides rich examples of this approach in relation to two patients.
Why Not Ask for a Dream?
The world is in crisis: systemic racism confronts us with our long-simmering national
shadow, a viral pandemic reveals our naivete in thinking we had the forces of nature in our scientific back pocket, the long-term effects of climate change denial loom in our near future, and out of control political tribalism prevents us from reasonable solutions. Where can people turn for answers? In this day and age, it is often to therapists, who find themselves inundated with patients coming to their office with increased panic, anxiety, depression, and a sense of emotional overload. Most of these well trained and compassionate healers will then use their skills in empathy, active listening, CBT, mindfulness, and breathing methods to name just a few of the techniques in the modern-day therapy arsenal. Some practitioners may even respond to all the new course offering on the internet, hoping to gain further certification in anxiety and trauma work in this time of overwhelming angst.
All the above methods are quite useful and can help many a patient with their personal
struggles and symptoms. But what if there is one bit of training that most of these well-meaning therapists are missing. When patients came to Jung and would ask what to do, he would often state that he knew no more than they did about what the problem needed. Instead, he would say, “what if we turn to the 2,000,000-year-old man or Old Woman of Days and see what they have to say.” Here he meant the ancient wisdom of the collective unconscious that can be revealed through dreams. I would like to tell you about two women patients that I have been seeing in my analytic practice, who when feeling overwhelmed in this current time, listened to my suggestion of, “Why not ask for a dream?”
Ellen is a woman in midlife, who came back to see me after many years, hoping to
resolve issues with depression and anxiety. She had been doing some wonderful depth work but one night found herself emotionally overwrought after days on end with the kids at home from school, sheltering in place and watching the news of black deaths at the hands of police and the countrywide protests in response. Going into her room crying, she sat on the edge of her bed and used the old Asklepion healing technique of incubating a dream. She imagined what she was feeling and asked if a dream might help her to understand these emotions. This was her dream:
I'm in a row house that is centuries old. Outside the house paces what looks like a man but is actually an ancient evil force. I realize that I'm a time traveler that can also change forms, just like the entity outside. I travel forward and backwards through time, changing my forms between man and woman. The entity follows, doing the same. We battle together after each jump. Sometimes it wins and sometimes I do, but it's a viscous and violent cycle that never ends, regardless of time and form. Sally suddenly appears and takes my hand. We are standing in the row house. She says "Stop" and pulls me down into the basement. There are tables set up facing a giant whiteboard. A mixture of unfamiliar children and adults sit at the tables. Their clothing indicates that they are from different time periods. Sally and I sit and look at the white board. A man stands in front of the white board. At times he looks young and vibrant, but then flickers
and looks old and stooped with long white hair and a matching beard.
On the whiteboard are rows of black and white dots, and it reminds me of the game Othello. The man is talking about strategy and math. I look over at Sally and she is drawing her own version of the whiteboard. She hands me a pen
and paper so I can do the same.
The patient asks for a dream to help her with her overwhelming emotions and the Old
Woman of Days says to her, “this is bigger than you. This has been going on for thousands of years, this fight between light and darkness, good and evil, meaning and meaninglessness.” Jung says in Memories, Dreams, Reflections: “the world into which we are born is brutal and cruel, and at the same time of divine beauty. Which element we think outweighs the other, whether meaninglessness or meaning, is a matter of temperament. If meaninglessness were absolutely preponderant, the meaningfulness of life would vanish to an increasing degree with each step in our development. But that is—or seems to me—not the case. Probably, as in all metaphysical questions, both are true: Life is—or has—meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle.” (Jung, 1963, pp: 358 )
So, part of her cure was to realize this was not personal but transpersonal and that she needed to see it from a larger, universal or archetypal view. Next, the dream brings in Sally. A little girl she knows in life with autism and says that she is rarely politically correct when speaking and says just what she feels and thinks. She is very instinctual in her responses. Sally says go inside, down to the basement, and get your own white board and begin to work on your black and white conflicts. This hints that in spite the importance of the protests and civil unrest, the work in the end is an individual work. As Jung says, “does the individual know that he is the makeweight that tips the scales.” (Jung, 1970, para 586) Do we know that by doing our own individual work with our shadow and opposites, that we are performing a world work that can rebalance the scales of the universe? Ellen got immense relief out of this and hints about directions to take in her life.
.
Claire, a woman in her late 30’s, came to see me for debilitating panic anxiety. Her work
had been going very well when she too was presented with a dream from the deep unconscious.
I am in a school with a bunch of rooms. Outside the school is a row of portables. I am supposed to be in a class, but I have my pit bull with me. The teacher says that I can bring my dog in and tie him to a desk. When the dog's leash is getting tied to the table, he pulls away. He lunges at the teacher. My dog is being uncharacteristically aggressive towards the male teacher. The dog runs out of the room and outside of the school. I run out after him. He keeps going after men in suits, leaving everyone else alone. All of the men in suits are walking wolves. I am worried that he will get attacked and either he will be hurt or killed. Every time I get close to catching up to him, he runs away. The sun is beating down on the school grounds and there are no trees for shade. The entire area is just dirt, with no vegetation. It is getting too hot for me to be out in this weather. A female in a dress pulls me into one of the cool portables. She has an old-style apron on over her dress. She says, "Let him go, he's following his instincts. Trust him." She makes me a peppermint tea to help me relax but I am so worried about my dog that I find the minty smell makes me nauseated.
Again, even though the dreams can have individual subjective meanings for both patients,
let’s concentrate on its comments about the current state of the world. The dream ego is going to school, learning what the world wants to teach, often the status quo or orthodoxy fitting the spirit of the times. Her dog instincts are tied to a desk, but this arrangement no longer can hold back the animal. He also attacks the teacher, indicating that what is being taught makes no room for him. The dog (a symbol often for the essence of Eros, relationship, love, and loyalty) feels tied down this way….he wants out….what becomes fascinating is that he now only attacks men with suits that are walking wolves. This reminded the patient of the movie the Wolves of Wall Street and her association about these men were high powered businessmen. Symbolically wolves often represent power, greed, avarice.
Does this indicate that what we are being taught, tied down to, indoctrinated into,
represses our instincts telling us that something is terribly wrong? That love, relationship, eros has no place in the world where the ego ideal is money, power, greed, and narcissistic self-importance. As Jung said so famously, “Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking.” (Jung, 1966, para 78) Hillman also comments, in one of his late-life interviews, that greed and predatory capitalism may be inbred in human beings making it hard to wake up to just common sense. As most of us are living, unconscious to our extreme power motives, we can’t see the commonsense realization that we are destroying the water we need to drink and the air we need to breath
This brings us back to Ellen and the dream she had about 3 weeks later in therapy. I
believe this is the most crucial dream in the group and will tie into the wolf and greed motif in Claire’s dream.
I'm walking down a dark hallway made of stone. It's dark and feels like the hallway of an old fortress. The Coronavirus is sweeping throughout the world with no end in sight. It has mutated and is even more deadly now. I'm on a mission to find the source. I pass people as I walk and make sure to maintain social distance between us. In some of the people I can sense an inherent corruption, and in a select few true evilness. Others I sense are puppets that do not realize the true intentions of their masters. I come to a stairway to spirals upward. I climb upwards until I'm in the tip-top rafters of a turret. The rafters are wooden and maze-like. After searching for a while, I find an anvil hidden behind a thick beam. It is black color and the surface looks smooth. However, looks are deceiving and as I move closer, I can see it is marred with dings and cracks.
There is a person, a man, standing behind me who says it is also giving off a sense of putrid sickness. I pick the anvil up and feel the heavyweight in my arms and against my chest. A person in the distance asks if I found anything and I say no. I must find a way to secret the anvil out of the fortress before anyone else can find it and strengthen it. I carry it down the winding stairway. With each step, my arms and chest ache, but I push onwards. Eventually, I come to car outside the fortress. I sit in the front passenger seat and lay the anvil heavily at my feet. My arms feel weak and I can finally draw a full, deep breath. A man sitting in the driver's seat puts the car into gear and drives us away.
She is dealing with the mutating and even more dangerous virus and her association is
that the virus is a metaphor for all that is going wrong in the world. As if nature is attacking us for the lack of care of the earth and all that is occurring socially. Again, there is this sense of evil as per her previous dream. She is looking for the source. Where is it coming from, this evil? It is above, up in the rafters…She must go up to find it. That often means up into the intellect, ideas, beliefs—what makes up the spirit of the times. When she gets there the source is discovered to be a black anvil. She associates black with saying that most anvils are not black, and this reminds her of something dark, ominous, and depressing. An anvil reminded her of blacksmiths and using the anvil with heat and fire to mold metal. We began to talk about the alchemical idea of people having metaphorical metals inside them that needed to be shaped over the course of life into
character. One famous story tells how souls are led from heaven by their daimon and stop for longer or shorter amounts of time at the planets. Each planet is associated with a metal: Venus/ Copper, Mars/Iron, Saturn/Lead, Moon/Silver, Jupiter/Copper, etc. These unformed metals make up a person’s character and are shaped over a lifetime. But what if the anvil that they are shaped on is now comprised of attitudes of greed, avarice, and power at all costs. That love and compassion are left out. What if schools, family, society, and the ego ideals now linked to our current Zeitgeist are shaping human beings. This is the anvil now brought down from above to earth and the realization of its heavy reality. It no longer hides in the rafters, tucked away in our intellectual defenses. It is now visible as the vehicle that drives us and we can begin the hard work of repairing what may be the true psychological cause of the virus. These dreams give us hints about actions we can take, but also put out a clarion call that the bag of tricks that most therapists use for anxiety are not enough. Much of anxiety and depression in this epoch is not about just childhood or biochemical causality; it is about the world in extremis and only the deeper work that dreams allow can heal both our patients and possibly the world.
Bibliography
In response to my "poetry invited post, blog member Estela Bourque has offered up a poem expressing what many are feeling, what many are questioning. There are no sure-footed answers yet, but immersing oneself in these questions and others swirling about, is something worth doing.
A State of Disbelief
These days I live in a
State of disbelief
As thousands of people succumb
To an invisible force and
Structures crumble in submission.
There is no sense to be made
Of this foe that has arrived
On the doorstep of humans
Unwelcome in its vengeance.
Where has this enemy come from?
Some speculate that it escaped from a lab
Others say it is conspiracy borne
Still others say it is Nature’s revenge
Against the exploitation of life by humans.
It has arrived during a dark time on Earth
When humans no longer live in harmony
With Nature or the Cosmos
But instead have gouged and destroyed
The land and habitat of animals
In pursuit of wealth and power.
Now the search is on for an antidote
A vaccine that will eradicate the virus
And once again restore the power of
Humans over Nature without
A deeper lesson being learned.
What is the lesson?
That humans cannot control life
And continue to exploit it
For their benefit alone
Instead they need to cherish the
Gifts bestowed upon us all
With love, care and gratitude.
These days I wonder . . .
Where is the wisdom that will
Lead us back to the Holy Grail.
In response to my post entitled "Tipping Point" that accompanied the link to the film The Century of the Self," someone asked me if I really felt that the coming election was more important than the election of 1860. This is my reply, which may be of general interest.
Thanks for your question, Roberto. As you imply, the election of 1860 is often considered the most important election in US history and particularly so in retrospect. As everyone knows, Lincoln was nominated by the Republicans, Douglas by the Democrats, and several other parties also contested. The Republican platform was not opposed to slavery as such but only opposed extending slavery to the territories. The Democratic platform supported the idea that each area of the country should decide for itself about slavery. The underlying issue here was not slavery per se, but the competing economic implications of slavery.
I think it fair to say that all the presidential candidates were honorable and competent men. The different outcomes if others had been elected have been the subject of much speculation. The ordinary understanding is that Lincoln saved the country from splitting and freed the slaves. A fair reading of events since the Civil War, reveals the splitting of the country has only taken more nefarious forms, as has the so-called “freeing” of the slaves. Racial equality is still very much a dream in this country all these years later.
Yes, I do feel this coming election is the most important in our country’s history. Part of the reason for feeling this is that the coming times will be the most challenging to humans in their entire history. I’m referring not only to the racial issues, the divided country issues, the inequality issues, and all the rest of the political, social, and economic issues but to the developing crises of climate change, societal collapse, and human extinction. Facing these congeries of issues will require the best efforts that humans can bring to these issues. People of high competence will be needed to face and deal with complexities beyond imagining.
The problem is that the alternate-reality virus is spreading unchecked and may well lead to the re-election of the most incompetent person ever to hold the office. Given the demands of the coming times, this election may lead to a catastrophic degree of human suffering (already underway) even before the events that are looming come about. Leaders will need to call on the best that humans are capable of to realize the best ways to live when life itself is threatened and becomes lost.