PRENATAL EARTH: Our “Prenatal” Air; Life in Gaia’s Womb; Gaia’s Weeping, Toxic Womb ~ Toxic Earth.
Which is chapters 19 through 21 of *Psychology of Apocalypse: Ecopsychology, Activism, and the Prenatal Roots of Humanicide* by Michael Adzema. To be published at Amazon in the third week of April, 2018.
19
Our “Prenatal” Air:
Prenatal “Pollution” Become Toxic Environment, Worldwide Oxygen Insufficiencies … People Are Dying from Oxygen Deprivation
“…there are reasons, deeply rooted in our psyche, that would make us the penultimate Prometheans on Earth.”
“…the prenatal situation is analogous to our current environmental one. In both of them there is an increase in carbon dioxide — called the greenhouse effect when referring to the atmosphere.”
Having looked at the most obvious prenatal and perinatal propensities of the postmodern person in the chapters just completed, at this point let us go deeper.
The Human Nature That Is Not
We look, now, at how imprints from our early life in the womb affect us in many of the currently dire activities we are engaged in: for example, environmental destruction, war, capitalism, and imperialism. We discover that there are prenatal imprints for all these activities, which we normally ascribe to being rooted in our human nature — depicted as one of insatiable acquisition, violence and competitiveness, and desire to control and dominate.
The fact that we find that these traits are in fact not part of our nature but are instead products of some personality-forming experiences — however early those experiential events may be — is auspicious in the extreme. In looking at the prenatal blueprints for our self-destructive “human nature,” we learn why we do the things we do and we realize we are not doomed to continue to do them.
Dangling Above a Prenatal Abyss
Beyond the entertainment media, as brought out in earlier chapters, it seems prenatal and perinatal themes and elements are showing up everywhere else in our surrounding environment and culture. The scenery of our everyday reality consists of pollution of our air, water, and food; threat of death “at any moment,” caused by the knowledge of the power of nuclear weapons; fantasies of apocalypse of all kinds, magnified, perhaps, by the passing of one millennium and the end of the Mayan calendar … including fundamentalist Christian imaginings of a climax of human civilization in an apocalyptic “rapture”; New Age fantasies of ecological, spiritual, and social utopias; and so on.
First, let us consider a few of the most blatantly birth-related of the events around us.
Our Prenatal Atmosphere
The connections between the environmental and physical conditions we live in and the cultural symbols we are manifesting currently, as discussed in previous chapters, and the prenatal-perinatal unconscious should be obvious and may have already to some extent been spelled out. But let me finish connecting the dots, so to speak:
As Stanislav Grof put it, “We have exteriorized in the modern world many of the essential themes of the perinatal processes that a person involved in deep personal transformation has to face and come to terms with internally. The same elements that we would encounter in the process of psychological death and rebirth in our visionary experiences make today our evening news. This is particularly true in regard to the phenomena that characterize what I call BPM III.
“We certainly see the enormous unleashing of the aggressive impulse in the many wars and revolutionary upheavals in the world, in the rising criminality, terrorism, and racial riots. Sexual experiences and behaviors are taking unprecedented forms, as manifested in sexual freedom of youngsters, promiscuity, open marriages, overtly sexual books, plays, and movies, gay liberation, sadomasochistic experimentation, and many others. The demonic element is also becoming increasingly manifest in the modern world.
“A renaissance of satanic cults and witchcraft, the popularity of books and horror movies with occult themes, and crimes with satanic motivations attest to that fact. The scatological dimension is evident in the progressive industrial pollution, accumulation of waste products on a global scale, and rapidly deteriorating hygienic conditions in large cities.”1
Grof is saying, then, that we have manifested an external modern world that mirrors and re-creates some of the hellacious circumstances surrounding our traumatic human births. And that includes global warming and climate change and the increasing radiation of the planet, and more, which we will get into.
PME 1 and No-Exit Car Jams, People Clusters
In addition to the myriad of ways that Grof has detailed … and there are many more he could have mentioned … I would like to add a few obvious commonplace ways we manifest our birth and prebirth traumas. And I think you will see how we do this in quite a bit of our human activity.
For one thing, we re-create on a daily basis in major cities the no-exit frustration-depression-rage prior to birth in the traffic jams and gridlock of commuter traffic.
Another one: the population explosion. Simple overpopulation of the globe sets up scenarios exactly analogous to the negative conditions that existed toward the end of pregnancy when we grew/expanded too much to be any longer comfortable in the womb. The way this global overpopulation impacts us: the overpopulation, stress, and frenzy of a big city, manifesting the situation of a crushing womb.
PME 2 and Air Pollution
One overlooked, but hugely pervasive perinatal element of our humanicidal times is connected to the increasing carbon-dioxide concentration in our atmosphere called the greenhouse effect, which occurs alongside the curiously overlooked yet necessarily corresponding decreases in oxygen levels. There is increasingly less oxygen as we use it up burning carbon-based fossil fuels and making carbon dioxide.
This obvious though insistently overlooked fact has scientific support, of course. From “Atmospheric Oxygen Levels Fall as Carbon Dioxide Rises,” I quote: “According to a study conducted by scientists from the Scripps Institute there is less oxygen in the atmosphere today than there used to be. The ongoing study, which accumulated and interpreted data from NOAA monitoring stations all over the world, has been running from 1989 to the present. It monitored both the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the decline in oxygen. The conclusion of that twenty-year study is that, as carbon dioxide (produced primarily by burning fossil fuels) accumulates in the atmosphere, available oxygen is decreasing.
“Carbon dioxide seems to be almost the total focus of attention in the climate change model as it exists today. After reviewing the results of this study and talking with Dr. Ralph Keeling (one of the lead scientists on the study), it seemed to me that the consequences of atmospheric oxygen depletion should be included in any discussion of atmospheric change….”
“We are losing nearly three O2 molecules for each CO2 molecule that accumulates in the air….”2
Having less oxygen in our atmosphere has huge implications, little explored. I will tease out a few of these other, ignored repercussions of the greenhouse effect as we go.
Increased carbon dioxide, but also decreased oxygen.
We have more carbon dioxide for the reason of the burning of fossil fuels, but also because we are stupidly destroying the Earth’s mechanisms for turning that carbon dioxide back into oxygen … forests and ocean plankton, for example. While this greenhouse effect has been looked at from the perspective of it creating global warming and climate change, there are even stronger corporate (profit-motivated) as well as personal psychological reasons why we do not look at its most immediate effect on humans — the amount of oxygen we get from the air we breathe.
For the increased carbon dioxide and reduced oxygen of the globe is analogous to the situation of fetal malnutrition, described by Briend (1979) and deMause, that occurs prior to birth, and which is the basis for deMause’s explanation of poisonous placenta symbolism. Keep in mind in particular that we experience this reduction in oxygen and increase in carbon dioxide in the form of air pollution, which is most pronounced in larger cities.
Worldwide Oxygen Insufficiencies
Let me now focus on one important characteristic of those prenatal dynamics. I will deal more closely with how we re-create our early pain in one specific area that has dire significance today, for it concerns what we are doing to our atmosphere. We are driven to want to suffocate ourselves, and we will see how this is rooted in our particular human beginnings, making us the one and only species on the entire planet that is so enamored of making fire. For from the earliest campfires to the nuclear power plants of today, humans are seen to like to burn things. What we discover is there are reasons, deeply rooted in our psyche, that would make us the penultimate Prometheans on Earth.
Mimics Prenatal Oxygen Insufficiencies
We bring this prenatal oxygen struggle, this fetal malnutrition manifesting as hypoxia, into our adult attitudes toward and interactions with our planetary atmosphere and global environment. Remember, what the fetus experiences in the late stages of development in the womb is a state of reduced oxygen, which causes subtle but simmering uncomfortable feelings of suffocation and a feeling of latent oxygen panic. Many more of us than overtly have asthma have a prenatal foundation conducive to being asthmatic; even more feel this imprint in the form of panic attacks. Keep in mind also that this lessening of oxygen intake correlates necessarily with an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the prenate’s blood supply.
These changes from the optimal might seem minuscule to us as adults, yet we need to consider that the unborn child is living 24/7 in this environment. Its experience might be thought of as comparable to being stuck in a cramped room in which the air has become stuffy and gets increasingly so … and one is not even able to open a window occasionally for some relief. Think about that situation and especially how it keeps getting worse, and you may already sense the beginnings of a panic. That is what I am talking about. And remember that you as a prenate had no way of knowing that you were not, in fact, dying. You could not either, as you can now, console yourself with the thought that you can go out and get yourself more air at any point if it gets too uncomfortable.
So, the prenatal situation is analogous to our current environmental one. In both, there is an increase in carbon dioxide — which is the greenhouse effect when referring to the atmosphere. Perhaps these correlations between the prenatal and the planetary are not made often enough because in each case there is a tendency to focus on different halves of the equation: In terms of the prenatal situation, it is more common to think about the oxygen reduction, the hypoxia. Whereas when discussing the planetary situation, it is almost always talked about as an increase in the carbon dioxide.
In each case this seeing with blinders on seems unconsciously calculated to avoid another and perhaps harder to face unpleasantness involved. In the prenatal situation, this would be the increased carbon dioxide, which is analogous to the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere and air pollution in the cities. This I dealt with under the category of “bad blood,” PME 3. In the planetary context, this overlooked aspect is the reduced oxygen involved. I have never heard it mentioned in any of the scientific or environmental circles within which I circulate. This is the part that is directly analogous to the fetal malnutrition as it is normally thought of, that is, as just a deficiency of oxygen (PME 2).
At any rate, by this atmospheric rearrangement I mean that, while we reputedly have, and need, an oxygen concentration of twenty percent in our atmosphere, concentrations of oxygen these days, especially in heavily industrial areas, have been measured at much lower levels, much lower even than what is required for life, which indeed would cause death if one were trapped in it. Measurements as low as five percent — which was in Gary, Indiana, at a particular time — have been monitored. Furthermore, lowered oxygen levels are connected to the increasing incidences of many diseases we see currently going on. This is an easier and commoner connection to make. It is not just the increased toxicity of the air, with its heavy metal poisoning, in severely polluted areas like the Los Angeles basin that is responsible for the higher cancer and other disease rates. It is also the lowered oxygen that folks are getting. For oxygen is our natural antibiotic.
Results in Diseases and Epidemics
In the winter of 2017-2018 in America we are witnessing a flu epidemic, the worst in a long time. Fit and active adults and normally healthy children, full of life, have had their lives taken from them in a matter of days. Everyone, as the media portrays it, is at a loss as to why this is happening. Yet the media barely mentioned global warming when faced in America in 2017 with hurricane after hurricane and one “four-hundred-year flood” after another; firestorms caused by droughts, attributable to climate change; and mudslides resulting from the fires caused by the changing climate. With the medical and scientific establishments in bed with corporations and their focus on profits, not health, it is no wonder the link between the greenhouse effect resulting in lowered oxygen and the increase in disease is not mentioned at all.
Yet, the fact is that oxygen is our first order of defense against toxicity and diseases of all kinds — including bacterial, viral, fungal, and cancerous — for oxygen kills them all. It is the oxygen from the air getting mixed into running streams, as they surge over boulders and rocks, that makes the water so pure. Oxygen acts similarly in our bloodstream and cells.
And minute changes in oxygen/carbon-dioxide ratios have immense effects. These effects show up substantially, of course, in relation to the total number of people in any large population. A miniscule effect of only one-thousandth of a percent of the population — in America alone with its three-hundred and fifty million people — would have an effect on three-thousand-five-hundred people. That amount of diseases over the normal number in a season would certainly result in alarm, be splashed across our newscasts. One hundredth of one percent of an effect would add to the normally ill amount thirty-five thousand people! So this is significant. Let’s face it; when it comes to things that we don’t want to know, scientists and medical professionals are as averse to doing the numbers as any of the rest of us timid humans.
Is Manifest Globally, as Well as Locally
Regardless the blatant examples of oxygen insufficiency — related to particularly adverse environments as in Gary, Indiana; in Los Angeles, California; in Beijing; in Bangalore and Delhi, India — and their effects on the bodily health of humans; there is an overall global decrease in oxygen, which, while not as extreme, is so pervasive and inescapable that it has profound consequences for all life on this planet.
To get an idea of the distinction I am making, let us compare this atmospheric oxygen distribution with what we know of what is happening in the planet’s water supply, its oceans. The first instance of inordinate oxygen deficiency in particular locales on Earth might be likened to the “dead zones” we know to exist in the seas — over four hundred of them, and still climbing. In these huge areas, some of them over a hundred miles in length, no life exists for there is no oxygen in the water. The second instance of overall global oxygen insufficiency might be likened to the overall reduction of oxygen in oceans with the destruction of the oxygen-producing plankton and the other environmental factors involved in lowering the oxygen levels of the oceans worldwide. So there are wide variances of oxygen concentration in our oceans inside of a lowering of its oxygen level overall.
Similarly, there has to be wide variance in oxygen levels in air. Simply think of the differences we are aware of from indoors to outdoors, from one room — say, one with an oxygen-consuming fire blazing in the hearth and sealed to contain heat — to another, say, with its windows wide open. So while there are wide variances in oxygen levels from location to location — some so deficient as to sicken, cause unconsciousness, and in extreme situations kill people — there is also the reduced oxygen levels, on average, throughout the globe, which is caused by our uniquely human compulsion to burn carbon-based fossil fuels. These reduced oxygen levels, though minute, are increasing but even more importantly they have subtler but more pervasive and so more dire implications.
Is Measurable, as Well as Deadly
The results of one study were released by the Scripps Institute. The Scripps study monitored the oxygen in our atmosphere on the whole over a twenty-year period. It found a one-tenth of a percent decrease in global oxygen by 2005 since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the late Nineteenth Century.3
So let us deal with each of these points in turn: that people are dying because of our insistence on burning stuff; that the overall global decrease though minute is serious and is having noticeable worldwide effects even as I write; and that this compulsion to burn stuff is uniquely human and what are the implications of that.
People Are Dying from Oxygen Deprivation
In the previous section I discussed the worldwide increases of carbon dioxide and the consequent decreases in global oxygen levels, and I pointed out how they mirror the fetus’s environment in the womb in late gestation, known as fetal malnutrition. At the end, I made note of the facts that, first, people are actually dying as a result of dips in the oxygen content of their immediate environment, resulting from the intentional burning of fuels. It is not only second-hand smoke that is deadly.
Second, I said that even the minute changes in our global atmosphere on the whole are having pervasive and dire consequences. Third, I queried why we of all species are the only ones to engage in burning things outside our bodies so as to increase carbon dioxide and reduce oxygen in our environments. Let us look more closely at each of these statements in turn:
First, people do die for lack of oxygen and conversely carbon-monoxide, carbon-dioxide buildup in their cars, homes, and in cities … sometimes intentionally, most often not. If it is not the sole cause of death, it is a contributing factor, as in the widespread and mounting deaths from restricted oxygen intake caused in cities worldwide — especially noticeable on severely air-polluted days. We do not generally consider these deaths to be directly related to air pollution or reduced oxygen, for they are listed as caused by increased heart attacks and other fatal concomitants of bad air.
We also avoid the harsh truth by not wanting to look into how dips in air-quality/oxygen-concentration affect our overall health in terms of greater rates of emphysema, allergies, and stresses to the heart — among effects too numerous to mention — which have effects on our longevity. Translation: Bad air kills folks sooner than they would die otherwise. So, people are dying, yes.
Now let us consider how important this tendency of ours is for us. How greatly does this reduction in oxygen affect us when the levels of overall effect are small enough to be usually considered insignificant?
First, remember that when we consider the other half of this equation, the carbon-dioxide levels, minute changes of their levels are having major changes on our planet. Tenths of a percent increase in carbon dioxide are causing unprecedented extremes of weather — hurricanes, droughts, firestorms, tornadoes, mudslides, floods, and so on. The reason is that we exist in a delicate ecosystem, finely tuned to operate perfectly but only within very narrow parameters. You go outside those delicate lines and you have major complications and developments, with minor changes here having major consequences there.
As an example, specifically as regards the oxygen–carbon-dioxide ratios, remember that we are composed of cells … cells that take in oxygen and give back carbon dioxide. Bacteria also are cells. Many of them do better with increases of carbon dioxide and die when there is more oxygen. These bacterial organisms suck up carbon dioxide and spit out oxygen. So we find that if we create a Petri dish colony of bacterial cells and carefully monitor its oxygen/carbon-dioxide ratios, minute increases in carbon dioxide have major effects on the colony: It will explode in growth and quite soon overgrow its Petri dish environment. Meanwhile if the reverse situation is created and the oxygen level is raised, the millions of bacterial cells will die off in short order, as if infected with the plague to end all plagues.
Now, remember that we are a collection of many cells as well. What do you suppose is happening with minute changes in the overall level of oxygen we get; or conversely the increased carbon dioxide?
Well, we are seeing increases in cancer, as well as viral, bacterial, and fungal infections — all of which do better in high carbon dioxide/ lowered oxygen environments. This year’s flu epidemic in America is so unusually strong partly because the sickness is not blocked by the flu vaccines in use, with an efficiency ratio of approximately seventeen percent. With the virus’s effects, including unusual deaths in otherwise hale and hearty individuals, we must conclude that not only are more varieties of flu virus proliferating and extant, but also that they are profusely multiplying, therefore are strong and more dire in the winter of 2017-2018. The slight changes in the oxygen/carbon-dioxide ratios would explain that. But don’t expect to hear that other than here. Even with the previous year’s historically severe hurricanes, firestorms, and mudslides — reluctant as they are to make the connection even of them to global warming — “experts” fail to see the connection of the flu severity to the increasing carbon-dioxide.
I have also noticed, in my city of Eugene, Oregon, that foods are unusually more likely to develop mold, even with all the preservatives in them. That is not a scientific observation, but it is clear and observable and shows itself as quite a bit stronger than only a few years ago. I attribute it to the fact that I moved into the center of two, where it is undoubtedly more polluted, at that time. I do not believe it is a stretch to expect there to be higher carbon-dioxide levels in the city centers than on the outskirts or in the country. Else, what is meant be going out to the country and forest to “breathe some fresh air”?
Similarly, like fungal, viral, and bacterial proliferation we are noticing booming algae growth in areas of our oceans and are expecting flourishing vegetative growth on our lands because of the increases in carbon dioxide in each of them. Why would we not be experiencing effects on the other side of the equation — the loss of oxygen. Keep in mind, as the Scripps Institute study mentioned, for every increase of one molecule of CO2, we are getting a loss of almost three molecules of O2.
But don’t just take my word on this. From the same report on the Scripps study, above, I quote: “Since the beginning of the industrial revolution we have removed .095% of the oxygen in our atmosphere. True, that is only a tenth of one percent of the total supply, but oxygen makes up only twenty percent of the atmosphere. I looked up safety rules regarding oxygen concentrations and according to OSHA rules on atmospheres in closed environments, ‘if the oxygen level in such an environment falls below 19.5% it is oxygen deficient, putting occupants of the confined space at risk of losing consciousness and death.’ What happens if the world’s atmospheric levels of oxygen fall to 19.5% or lower? Are we all going to have to carry little blue oxygen tanks with us to survive? Not a pleasant possibility….
“Plants and certain bacteria take in carbon dioxide, combine it with water to form glucose and produce oxygen as a byproduct in the photosynthesis reaction. The current increase in carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere indicates that this cycle is no longer in balance. It shows that we have reached the point where the biosphere of the planet can no longer process all of the carbon dioxide that we are producing….
“We currently make estimates of how many years we have left before excess carbon dioxide becomes a bigger problem than it already is but we aren’t really sure of their accuracy. However, to the best of my knowledge, we don’t have estimates of how long it might be, if oxygen continues to be depleted at its current rate, until it might become a problem. After all, while most of us may be willing to wait out the effects of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for a time just to see if we really do get warmer weather and more abundant crops out of the deal; how many of us want to wait and see how little oxygen we can survive on”4
Manifests as Mental Illness
However, my forte is not biology, it is psychology. And the connection I wish to make here is of this reduced availability of O2 to psychological states and mental screens of perception. I am informed as well by an understanding of intake of toxins as they relate to mental and psychological states.5
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Prenatal Earth, Life in Gaia’s Womb:
Pollution as a Psychedelic? Will We Be Born? Can You Look Your Belly in the Face?
“We continually re-create the discomforts we have not faced. There is no escape from the things we have ‘put out of our mind.’ That is the closest thing to hell that exists, though there is redemption in it.”
“…we want oxygen, but we keep removing oxygen from our environment to put us back in that state in the womb when we needed air (oxygen) but did not get enough leaving us asking, ‘Please, mother, might I have some more’?”
“…increased carbon dioxide and decreased oxygen naturally stimulate perinatal feelings. Lucky us, as we continue to turn the entire atmosphere of the Earth into such a ‘therapeutic’ carbon-dioxide chamber.”
As a psychotherapist, I am adding the psychological effects of this oxygen loss to the already considerable statistically verifiable harm being registered to us physically.
Minute Changes in Atmosphere Have Psychological Impact
What decrease in oxygen stimulates prenatal memories of oxygen near-panic? Well, consider that a reduction of oxygen of only one half a percent is enough to cause unconsciousness and sometimes even kill a person — from twenty percent, which is optimal, down to 19.5% which is dire.1 So how much of a reduction is merely noticeable and uncomfortable? How much of a change means we will experience “stuffiness” … assuming we have a point of comparison, i.e., when there exists “outside” air that is different? It can’t be all that much, right? Not if a half percent reduction would darken our lights. But there is more to it.
Now ask yourself how you consciously know you are experiencing stuffiness or suffocation when there is no basis of comparison. If you experience reduced oxygen every instant of your life, do you consciously know it? I think not.
So “stuffiness” that is our ordinary situation does not register to us as being stuffy. It cannot. But that does not mean our bodies are not registering a change and that we are not unconsciously being stimulated into psychological states, like I have been mentioning. And would these psychological states then also — with no basis of comparison now either because of it being an ongoing situation — not themselves be thought of as normal? Although they would be somewhat altered from the way humans may have felt on our planet in earlier centuries?
So, environmentally — with oxygen starvation and air pollution — I submit we act out our unconscious memories of PME 2 fetal suffocation by burning up fossil fuels, further reducing oxygen in the environment, destroying forests which release oxygen, moving to cities that have little in the way of trees or Nature, and allowing cities to bulldoze all Nature away and create suffocating sterility. We continually re-create the discomforts we have not faced. There is no escape from the things we have “put out of our mind.” That is the closest thing to hell that exists, though there is redemption in it.
Sure, we want oxygen, but we keep removing oxygen from our environment to stimulate us back in that state in the womb when we needed air (oxygen) but did not get enough leaving us asking, “Please, mother, might I have some more”?
Why Humans Are Enamored of Fire
Humans did not always do things to adversely affect the air they breathe, however. We were not always fire burners or food cookers. It is common knowledge that at a certain point in our evolution we began harnessing fire for warmth, for cooking, and for other purposes, including entertainment. Consider that fact for a second … why are we the only species to do this? (And we are.) Now consider the aspect of our uniquely human fetal malnutrition as neonates and prenates we have been looking into. No other species needs to burn carbon-based fuels for survival; we only need a tiny amount of air to stoke our “inner fires” when converting food to energy. Yet we have added that incredible weight of setting things ablaze and burning fuels to our burden on the planetary resources and the environment ever since we began using fire.
Consider if the prenatal-malnutrition/oxygen-starvation we created for ourselves as unborns by standing upright might be manifesting itself as the need to burn stuff and thereby decrease the oxygen in our immediate environment, and increase the toxins there. Is it possible that fetal malnutrition, which is the result of bipedalism, contributed later to our use of fire? For, as I continually point out, we are triggered into our unfaced early pain, at the same time as we seek to run from it, while we unconsciously act to bring it about, so we might at some point face it and heal ourselves (though we rarely do).
You think it a strange idea that we might be unconsciously wanting to re-create the “stuffiness” in the womb by burning stuff and creating air around us that mimics that state? Really? Do you think it normal for someone to create tiny “fire sticks” and “suck” the bad air they produce? Do you not wonder why we are the only ones to burn tobacco and other vegetation so we might inhale the exhaust from it, the smoke from the fire we create? If we came across a culture where they built fires and stood around sticking their faces in the smoke to inhale it, how would we view that? How is cigarette smoking different? Yes, we are the only species that has that invention of cigarettes (cigars, pipes, hookahs … and so many more). And you think my hypothesis odd?
Is it any wonder we portray hell as one of eternal fire? Not only does it coincide with the prenatal feelings of burning on the surface of the skin, which I explored under PME 4. But in that human beings are the ones being referred to when we speak of the myth of Lucifer, it makes sense that Lucifer’s home after being cast from heaven would be one of fire. Satan is always pictured in a cave of sorts — another womb symbol — with fires all around him. Humans compulsively create environments in which they are surrounded by fire. Just look around you … automobiles, heaters, electrical energy created by combustion…. We also have myths that tell us alternately that use of fire is the great break with Nature that makes us humans, as well as myths saying that our being too reckless and getting too close to fire is what causes our downfall. When you think of it, am I not saying both of those?
Many ethnographies tell of Creation Myths that include a hero that brings fire, therein getting things started for those peoples as a distinct culture.2
Pollution as a Psychedelic
I mentioned how we have an oxygen insufficiency, a hypoxia, in the weeks and months before birth. Along with the reduced intake of nutrients, it is called fetal malnutrition by scientists. It actually shows up as a slowing down of growth of the fetus, just before birth, which is made up for after birth. I pointed out how this is analogous, in our adult world, to our situation of oxygen reduction and carbon-dioxide buildup, which is what constitutes our global warming.
However, there is an interesting sidelight to this. For both Arthur Janov and Stanislav Grof, at one time early on, experimented with a technique of carbon-dioxide ingestion for getting people into primal and perinatal states. In fact, at the time — in the late Sixties, early Seventies — though not on a large scale, a number of professionals were experimenting with this procedure and even offering it as a means of “expanding consciousness.”
Global “Therapeutic” Carbon-Dioxide Chamber
To make this absolutely clear, what I am saying is that a tweak of our breathable air towards greater carbon-dioxide, lower oxygen correlates with all of these — greater access to and influx of prenatal and perinatal pain-trauma, increased ability to experience non-ordinary states of consciousness, and heightened spirituality. Whereas some folks might question how greater perinatal turbulence and neuroticism come of it in adult consciousness is connected with spirituality, I respond that the only reason that is confusing is for having confused spirituality with the elimination of negative emotions and the repression of unconscious dynamics.
Whereas true spirituality involves the facing and accepting of repressed memories. As Jung wisely put it, “One does not become enlightened by imaging figures of light but by embracing the darkness.” It follows that those who live in an environment that tips one, no matter how slightly, toward a tendency for non-ordinary states would also, through more regular access, increase the likelihood that some folks would resolve them and would grow spiritually out of these encounters with their usually unfaced underbellies.
Furthermore, we will address that again in future chapters where we talk about how the emerging perinatal unconscious is related to certain personality dynamics arising in our times which have a direct bearing on our prospects for environmental and societal healing.
However, in terms of the immediate effect, the point is that increased carbon dioxide and decreased oxygen naturally stimulate perinatal feelings. Lucky us, as we continue to turn the entire atmosphere of the Earth into such a “therapeutic” carbon-dioxide chamber. For initially, let me be clear, such rising perinatal feelings will manifest as more overt mental illness and neurosis if folks. People will be pressed to integrate this rising repressed memories, yet until they do, things will be turbulent and difficult for them. This manifests, on the scale of society, as more tumultuous and dangerous times for us all.
And if you still do not believe that a perinatal unconscious is emerging at this time in history, I ask you how else to explain how the simple act of being “cut off” in traffic can trigger so much perinatal “no exit” frustration as to enrage an “otherwise normal” person to pull out a gun and blow another’s life away. I also ask you how to account for the every-year increasing incidence of gun violence, mass shootings, killings of schoolchildren and other innocents, in America. The fact that folks are so terrified they need to defend themselves with guns is by itself an indicator or perinatal feelings. Thus these unconscious pressures on us contribute to both increases of gun violence as well as of gun purchases and of rabid support of the Second Amendment and the NRA in the United States in 2018.
Prenatal Earth
The upshot of it all is that somehow or other we have managed to create a world situation that mirrors in a way unlike any other time in history our prenatal imprints. We have manifested our worst nightmare, a prenatal Earth. With that prenatal time being the closest we have experienced to hell, yes, indeed, we are bringing about a hell on Earth. Having turned in horror from our inner pain, we construct it in the world around us, as if the outside is trying to get us to look back inside. If a sufficient number of us do that, we have the potential to turn our “hell on Earth” to a “heaven on Earth.” We can experience the rebirth that likes on the other side of seeming death
Yet in the meantime, like persistent children who want to be attended to, when we are wanting simply some peace, our repressed pain bugs us until we turn to it. So it is that our increasingly prenatal Earth, with its re-creation of our toxic, cramped, nauseated, and irritating womb experience, triggers the emergence of this prenatal and perinatal unconscious and those repressed memories of suffering.
Or, you might reverse that and say that an emerging pre- and re- and perinatal unconscious — brought about by other factors, improved “child-caring” methods perhaps … more about that later — has resulted in our creating a world situation manifesting or acting out those unconscious perinatal elements, which are having increasing influence on our consciousness and on our behavior.
I suspect both of these processes are occurring — each one augmenting the other.
Noticing Our Underbellies
Let me make this latter scenario clearer. What I am saying is that we all have birth trauma and we must distance ourselves from this birth pain so we can function. Yet, if the birth trauma is extreme, or if subsequent child-caring is abusive and neglectful3 — as is the case in any of the “less enlightened” of deMause’s psychogenic modes of child-rearing4 — or both, then complete splitting, repression of the perinatal, and dissociation from the perinatal occurs. Thus a person can project his or her pre- and perinatal unconscious onto the world and be completely unaware that it has anything to do with him- or herself.
Can you look your belly in the face?
However, with more humane child-caring modes — deMause’s latest psychogenic mode, for example — less repression, and less defenses, are necessary and total dissociation does not occur. In this situation, the pre- and perinatal is not completely projected onto the outside world. We have more access to it. Hence we act it out and manifest it in lesser ways, which reflect back to us, for the times when we are able to see them, our prenatal underbellies.
On the one hand, the world is becoming increasingly pre- and perinatal and thus is stimulating more of the perinatal unconscious than previously. On the other hand, we have more access to and are closer to our pre- and perinatal unconscious so that we exhibit it more blatantly in our behavior and cultural creations and thus stimulate, again, in ourselves and others, the underlying pre- and perinatal matrices.
This is a chicken-and-the-egg process. And I suspect, in the same way, that these processes are going on simultaneously and hence augment each other.
Life or Death Matters
In Chapter 1, “Humanicidal Times,” we entertained the notion that the reason things seem so much different nowadays than anytime we can imagine from the past is because they are different. We have looked at how the character and events of our age are remarkably like the feelings and events surrounding our births and prenatal existences. And unfortunately: traumatic wombs, traumatic times! Lastly, we have considered a few reasons … more coming … as to why these times and our Earth might be uniquely imbued with our perinatal events.
Still, the biggest questions lie begging: What does this all mean for us? Is it the “end of the world,” really, like some are claiming? Are we seeing the “dawning of a new age,” an age of harmony and understanding, an Age of Aquarius, as we once thought? Is it hopeless? Or is there at least a vision which can guide us in surviving, perhaps even thriving? Will our “hell on Earth” be akin to a purgatory; and we, like Dante, traversing it realize something more like a heaven and Earth coming together?
These are not unimportant questions. And they have all the implications of life or death, again indicative of the perinatal, about them. Will we live? Will we survive? Or are we doomed? And if it is within our power to decide our fate, well, just what the hell are we going to do about it? What can be done about our situation? What can each of us — you … me — do?
What It Is That’s Happening Here
We will begin addressing these questions now. There are some processes of change in these times — processes of change unlike any that we normally encounter — that will weigh heavily on the outcome of the current emerging prenatal-perinatal unconscious. These include not only the concepts and processes of the healing crisis — as stipulated in the chapter after next, Chapter 22 — but also that of macrocosmic processes beyond our human scope, some of which we look at next chapter, “Gaia’s Cries.”
Others of these factors at play I take up in subsequent chapters. They include changes in child-caring and personality development that are fortuitously aligned with the crises we are meeting. This I explain in the chapters pertaining to “wounded deer and centaurs,” coming up, beginning with Chapter 30, “Enter the Centaur.” Also, there are planetary factors, like the prenatal-perinatal access come of pollution, which might, completely unintended, redound to our benefit in largely invisible and incalculable ways.
The Necessary Future
Finally, having considered the prenatal and perinatal nature of our times in Part Two on “Prenatal Matrix of Humanicide,” as well as the corresponding unique processes at work in these times in Part One, “Apocalypse and Insanity,” we can look at some directions forward for our species that actually have us continuing to live. In Part Three coming, titled, “Healing Crisis and Regression in the Service of Humanity,” we will look deeper. What we will see revealed emerging out of the black morass or our current futility and hopelessness is the vision of our necessary future and the necessary hero. Finally, in Parts Four and Five, “The New Hero’s Cycle” and “Sanity and Activism,” I will detail the personalities and actions corresponding to such a future and such individuals. These parts tell us what to do and how to go about doing it.
21
Gaia’s Weeping:
Toxic Womb ~ Toxic Earth. How We Re-Create Human Prenatal Irritation-Burning in a Polluted Planet; Earth Diagnosis, Prognosis, and Prospects
“…we re-create that which we need to experience. We stood upright; and now, unless something radical happens, it will lead to the end of life for ourselves and possibly everything else on this planet in short order.”
“We have done such a good job of creating the ‘toxic womb’ in our planetary environment, you have to marvel at the perfection of its replication.”
“…one needs to deal with something before one can stop oneself from reminding oneself that one needs to deal with that something.”
The Earth might “die screaming,” as Tom Waits phrased it. Till then, we can hear its weeping; we can feel its wrath.
However, let us take one more look back at from whence we have come. Tracing the trajectory of our species might provide some ideas about where we are heading and our necessary future.
Deepest Roots of Apocalypse — We Stood Up!
Basically, it warmed up pretty good in the interior of Africa millions of years ago, so our forebears headed “to the beach” — to the ocean shores, swamps, and lakes — where it was more bearable. We foraged for food in the shallow waters and found it beneficial to stand upright. For it allowed us to go into deeper waters and gather more, and for longer periods. Naturally, over time, bipedalism traits were the ones that won out through natural selection.
When we became a standing species, though, it added birth trauma and premature birth to our “species set.” For with this rearrangement of our posture, we created a narrower pelvic opening and our prenates no longer hung loosely below us but pressed down upon the arteries below them to create the fetal malnutrition and hypoxia, which I have been discussing in this book. The prematurity of birth was caused by the narrower pelvic opening, as the baby needed to leave the womb earlier than other species in order to make it out. This meant that we would do a great deal of our early life’s learning and development — much more than any other species — outside of the womb and in the context of society, not Nature. This is called secondary altriciality, which is something unique about humans.
With all these developments — prenatal malnutrition and hypoxia, premature birth, and secondary altriciality — we had greater pain and trauma at the beginning of our lives than any other species. We needed to grow a bigger brain — with an additional brain structure, vastly multiplied neural pathways, and a split brain — to deal with this pain in order to survive. The larger skull added further to birth trauma. It was even more difficult to get through the pelvic opening. So it required even more prematurity of birth.
All this development outside the womb and increased brain size resulted in language and culture, with all its complexities. Split off from horrible early pains and discomforts, our minds created substitute reflections of our early memories in our cultural products. We created an artificial consciousness construct — an Ego — as an intermediary between the impulses from our insides, emanating from early discomforts, and the stimulus and information coming to us from our outside reality in the present.
Thus, its egoic product — that is, what we end up thinking is real — would be the distorted amalgamation of the past and the present. Our reality would not be real so much as it would be a construct of our early pain, and the learning built on such early discomforts, woven together with our present-time situational reality, including the twisted cultural products within and without. So what the Ego came up with would not be true, for its purpose would be to allow us to survive, regardless of bothersome early imprints.
We’ve Created Our Own “Monsters”
We called the accumulation of cultural product, come of all this Ego activity acting over the course of millions of years, the “advance of man.” And we patted ourselves on the back for our Promethean achievements, deeming ourselves superior to Nature. To congratulate ourselves, we needed to ignore all the evidence of savagery on a scale not seen in the rest of our world, which we perpetrated on each other and on the world of Nature. This entire process — aquatic ape to patriarchal civilization — I explain in my book, Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014), and with even more detail in the more recently published, Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man (2016).
In all this abominable acting out, we were manifesting aspects of our early pain about which we were clueless. Completely without awareness of what we were doing, we created a mirror image of our early experience and its horrific pain and trauma in Reality itself. So it is that all our early trauma has led us to unthinkingly plod to the edge of oblivion, as we re-create war, fascism, class war, racism and bigotry, environmental pollution, nuclear radiation, loss of ozone layer, threat of nuclear war, and all the rest of the dire threats I have been discussing as being act-outs of our early prenatal discomforts — crowdedness, deprivation-suffocation, poisoning-disgust, and irritation-burning-revulsion.
We stood upright. And now, unless something radical happens, it will lead to the end of life for ourselves and possibly everything else on this planet in short order.
What can we do about it? Strangely, many of us are determined to just die. But if you are one of those who would prefer not to, well, going up against all the others, don’t think it will be easy.
Nevertheless, if you wish to fight to live, here is the starting point for effective change. For this knowledge of the real roots of our current crisis — like a Pandora’s Jar with hope tucked away at the bottom of it — has a chance, the only chance, to actually save our lives and those of future generations. For the first time, effective ways of healing people and planet can arise, based as they will be on this understanding of the early psychological roots of our otherwise apocalyptic propulsion.
Environmentally, We Act Out Prenatal Toxicity in a Polluted Planet
Recall that the third aspect of prenatal malnutrition is that we cannot get rid of poisons that build up in the womb environment around us … sort of like a prenatal environmental pollution. We cannot eliminate wastes as efficiently, so we exist in a toxic womb, as described by PME 4, prenatal irritation-burning.
Toxic Womb ~ Toxic World
I talked earlier about how we act out the deprivation part of late gestation experience, PME 2, in global suffocation — the greenhouse effect — by focusing on the reductions of oxygen. Yet remember that there are slight increases of carbon dioxide with the reduced blood flow for the prenate: These are a big part of the increase in waste matter, consequent upon a reduced efficiency of eliminating toxins. Obviously this is analogous to the way we have created such an increase in carbon dioxide in our atmosphere called the greenhouse effect. We have done a good job of manifesting this … not easy to do. And we should be congratulated if it were actually a good thing and not another way we have become good at self-destruction.
We re-create the “bad blood” aspects of fetal malnutrition — PME 3, related to toxins we take into ourselves, that we “breathe in” — in our global environment with air pollution. I can tell you from much personal experience in Southern California that indeed it re-creates the sensations of sickness at times — those feelings of poisoning, sickening, nausea, characteristic of PME 3. And this is when it is obvious to me. Here I am asserting that it is stimulating unconscious memories of discomfort even when we are not aware of being sickened, consciously.
Many folks, who live in polluted environments like Southern California, coming home at night after a day at work in the city; they have this really shitty, dirty feeling. They know it. They often go straight for an after-work drink, some booze to take the edge off their discomfort. Most of them would attribute these crappy, grubby feelings to stress, from their job and from interactions with people or on the freeways. Some might be more aware it is connected to the toxic atmosphere they have been forced to take in during the day. I am claiming that much of that feeling is probably due to memories buried deep inside us, however; which are easily triggered and accessible to consciousness in the form of bodily symptoms mimicking that time.
So in those last two examples we have deprivation, the suffocation of PME 2, and bad blood, the poisoning of PME 3, both of which we re-create in our environment. Of course the other aspect of late gestation is crowdedness, PME 1, which I have also dealt with earlier at length. With overpopulation and crowded urban environments we re-create that.
Prenatal Burning
Now, let us just look at some of the ways we re-create, specifically, those irritating, burning sensations in our environment — the fourth aspect of late gestation discomfort, PME 4, and the third of prenatal malnutrition.
I mentioned earlier how we sit out in the sun and endure discomfort — sun bathing — in some odd re-creation of fetal irritation. However, the most obvious environmental correspondence with PME 4, burning-irritation, is the way we have thinned out our protection from the sun, so now we can better be harmed by UV rays. With the huge reductions in our ozone layer, we are ensuring an increased burning of our skin and epidemics of skin cancer — not very comfortable I would imagine. Also, catastrophic. As the ozone layer has allowed life to evolve on this planet. Like a shield, it has protected organisms. And without it, for one thing, the phytoplankton in the ocean would die off, completely. Phytoplankton creates our oxygen, more so even than our forests do. As well, they are at the bottom of the food change. With the ozone layer gone, life cannot continue on Earth. We can look forward to that cheery prospect come of human activity, as well.
Similarly, we have managed to surround ourselves with the prospect of burning up in a fiery inferno at any moment because of nuclear weapons, which we have created out of the suicidal deliriums of some of us. That would be the prenatal burning of PME 4 acted out to the infinite power.
Prenatal Irritation
Some of this is the most obvious of all: Toxic Womb Environment leads to Toxic Environment. Again, good job, humans! If it were some kind of achievement. We have created a worldwide toxic womb, with a fractal equivalent of the situation in the womb — a buildup of poisons that cannot be eliminated anywhere: There is no longer any “away” to remove it to, exactly as what was felt to be the case in the womb.
We have air pollution, water pollution, food pollution, radiation pollution. We are polluting the genetic codes of biological organisms on Earth. We are polluting our land by fracking, so water sent through it will poison us and catch fire. If there is anything else, well, I am sure we are polluting it, too.
Just how long can you not “step in it” — a half million years?
We have become the filthiest of species, essentially pooping in our own nests. We have landfills that overflow and encroach on residences. This very evening, the nightly news reported that a mountain of trash in Ethiopia collapsed killing sixty-two people. This was at a massive garbage dump, the Koshe Garbage Landfill, on the outskirts of the capital, Addis Ababa. The mountain gave way, like a scene out of the movie, Idiocracy, and the landslide swamped huts burying people alive. The victims were mostly women and children. The landfill has served as a garbage dump for the capital for over fifty years, and it is the final destination for most of the nearly three-hundred-thousand tons of waste trucked from Addis Ababa, yearly.
This came after a similar garbage dump collapse that occurred in July of 2000, at the Payatas dump near Manila, in the Philippines. In this one, 221 people were buried and burned alive as a mountain of rain-loosened garbage collapsed and covered a shanty town built there, then burst into flames.
Horrible and tragic, for sure. Yet metaphorically astounding! What a ghastly metaphor for what we are doing to ourselves, reflecting also the situation in the womb: We are piling up so much waste around us it is swamping us, threatening to kill us … even catching fire!
Another example: We have created ticking time bombs of nuclear waste matter that have to be guarded for twenty-five-thousand years and are still deadly for five-hundred-thousand years. That’s a long time to have to avoid “stepping in it,” wouldn’t you say? And we are polluting and killing our oceans, creating the closest thing of all to a toxic, poisonous placenta, as from it, ultimately, we suck our necessary O2 and H2O.
Compartmentalizing our doom.
I could go on but you get the point. We have done a great job of re-creating the discomfort of the toxic womb. And, as I said, yes we are sickened, whether we acknowledge it or not. What I have observed is that even the most intelligent of us is trying like crazy to not acknowledge it, using all manner of denials and defensive maneuvers of consciousness. If nothing else, about our discomfort and its causes, we are “compartmentalizing” so we can go on with our lives.
Nature Balances HerSelf
We have done such a good job of creating the “toxic womb” in our planetary environment you have to marvel at the perfection of its replication. And with such perfection, there are reasons.
As I have been saying, we re-create that which we need to experience. So, as we do this, we are creating the exact situation that we need to face in our earliest lives in order to heal it … and in this lies the hope. In fact, looking ahead, I will be telling you that this is the key to a solution for us. As I say, Nature balances HerSelf, and we are part of her. We may or may not make it as a species, but certainly it looks like we are in the process of something that is perfectly set up to wake us into consciousness of what we need to heal, if we heed it.
We Need to Face the Monsters of Our Creation
For we always create around us a reflection of the kinds of issues we need to deal with “on our insides.” Our outsides will always reflect our insides, for good or ill. As a species, we have always done this.
They can be the like the wake-up knock from a master.
Yet we have added stimulus for these feelings today; we have greater prods to our waking up than ever before in our history. These will either be knocks on the head to get us to “pay attention” — as a Zen master might give to one of his students — or they will be the blow that will end our existence. It is up to us.
For as always, we both re-create and resist that which we have unresolved. In terms of oxygen “starvation” prior to birth, we both create and are made uncomfortable by air pollution … toxic air. Much like creating crushing populations in re-creating PME 1 compression pain, we create suffocating global air pollution for us to continually be triggered into uncomfortable unresolved feelings from our early lives, of the manner of PME 2, suffocation; PME 3, poisoning; and PME 4, irritation-burning. So, it is not like we are not being reminded of what we need to do — on both our “insides” as well as our “outsides.” We will never need a to-do list for this.
Gaia calling: Earth to humans — wake the f#$% up!
Many ignore the warning blows, however, no matter how severely they are felt. There is huge denial about climate change, the invisible death upon us from Hanford and Fukushima, and just about all the things I have been bringing up as important to look at, regardless how many deaths from hurricanes, firestorms, mudslides, and the rest. And from some quarters this refusal to see is deep, batshit crazy, and thoroughly intractable.
But now it is at least understandable. And as with everything else, knowing the nature of something gives us an edge.
The Tea Party and anti-abortion type response.
At least, at this point can you see why the “worst” of us — the sickest in terms of being pushed around by such early pain — would not want to do anything about these environmental problems? Can you see why the most afflicted of us are fixated on the abortion issue … here pointing exactly to the source of their discomfort … that is, in their lives as fetuses? We would think theirs to be an honest concern for prenates driven purely by compassion were it not for the fact that these same people have little sympathy — in fact, the opposite! — for the folks already born, around them, who are visibly suffering.
How Can You “Let It Go” if You Won’t Pick It Up?
One must have less of this fetal pain originally or have resolved more of it by facing, feeling, standing and dealing with it — not running away from it — and working through these uncomfortable unresolved feelings which arise inside oneself for one to have any kind of distance from their pushes and pulls, their sway … for one to tackle these problems and not wish to keep bringing them about and keep making oneself suffer. That is, one needs to deal with something before one can stop oneself from reminding oneself that one needs to deal with that something. Why would one think one can “go beyond” something by simply ignoring it, “letting it go,” or imagining, “meditating,” or even praying it away? It just doesn’t work like that.
For that simple but, for so many, strangely incomprehensible concept, let me provide a trite analogy. The other night I woke in the middle of the night, feeling annoyed that I had not gotten a good night’s sleep. I felt irritated, and my mind went on about how this lack of sleep was going to affect my work, was going to stress my heart and contribute to other health complications, and would generally be a drag on my well-being and happiness, as I needed to catch up on some sleep I hadn’t gotten lately.
Eventually, my mind came around to how I felt. I noticed I was perspiring a little: I was warm. That had made me feel uncomfortable. I also realized I was uncomfortable on the bed as I had allowed the bedclothes to get all bunched up beneath me in a way that didn’t feel good. I had unwittingly created some “prenatal discomfort” for myself. And by the way, notice how such bodily discomforts can affect you even unconsciously, as indeed, it woke me up.
While I didn’t feel like I could do anything to get back to sleep, I did attend to removing some layers of blankets, so as to be cooler, and to straightening out my bed so it would be flatter and more comfortable. And you know what? I fell asleep for an additional five hours and caught up on my sleep.
I know, this sounds like a trivial example. But if you understand as I do the roots of our apocalypse and the utter self-destructive stupidity of humans’ behavior and the mind-blowing absurdity of the reality we have constructed in order to keep from seeing our problems, you cannot help but be struck with how simple and obvious and everywhere about is both evidence of the dire state we are in but also the obvious solutions. So, I’ve allowed myself to be facetious, to make this point:
In order to solve a problem, you need to face it.
We will continue creating air pollution and suffering from it until we face our unresolved inner problems. Just as we will have an increasingly toxic Earth until we face it and deal with it in some concrete ways. The idea that we can make problems go away by ignoring them and acting as if they do not exist is nonsensical and an insanity in us. Yet it abounds! It is an irrationality borne of desperation, which we act upon but mostly deny that we do. It is that part of ourselves that continues to bring suffering upon ourselves and others.
This aspect, this thing about what can be done about our situation, is the theme I elaborate on in the final parts of this book. All of it is based upon the simple idea that we need to look at problems we want to solve and the most dire problems are the most important to look at.
That is the most important reason we would want to know all this about the psychology underlying our drive to apocalypse — that is, so we have some power or say in it … so we can do something about it.
Therefore, in the parts of this work that follow now, I deal with this in great detail, and I show where there is hope and where there are positive developments. I also indicate what we are doing wrong so as to continue manifesting that which we do not want. That is, I show where we are self-destructive, basically where we are shooting ourselves in the foot without knowing it … as well as what we can do differently.
Let us leave it at this for now and continue the diagnosis of our condition. For if we do not understand it, how can we do anything about it? I will be pointing out at the end that the biggest part of our continued self-destruction is our brain-dead refusal to understand our actions and face their consequences.
To that end, next we need to consider how in order to save ourselves we need to bring to the surface all the rotten ugliness of pre- and perinatal trauma that for millennia our species has been keeping inside. Let us now look at the evidence for a worldwide “healing crisis,” which is apparently going on right now.
— from PRENATAL EARTH: Our “Prenatal” Air; Life in Gaia’s Womb; Gaia’s Weeping, Toxic Womb ~ Toxic Earth.
— Which is chapters 19 through 21 of *Psychology of Apocalypse: Ecopsychology, Activism, and the Prenatal Roots of Humanicide* by Michael Adzema. To be published at Amazon in the third week of April, 2018.
Click for a free downloadable copy of this excerpt from *Psychology of Apocalypse*, with my compliments.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, Michael Adzema. Video below … interviewed by Michael Harrell
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— Related: See also other published versions of these ideas….
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*Dance of the Seven Veils I* (2017).
At Amazon at
*The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016).
*Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness* (2014).
*Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).
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*Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”* (2013).
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Apocalypse - NO! 
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