The Psychic Roots of Tyranny

Alex Vandenberg, Contributor
Waking Times

“…the final goal of world revolution is not Socialism or even Communism, it is not a change in the existing economic system, it is not the destruction of civilization in a material sense; the revolution desired by the leaders is a moral and spiritual revolution, an anarchy of ideas by which all standards set up throughout nineteen centuries shall be reversed.” – Nesta Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements

The signs of our collective insanity in today’s world are ubiquitous. Looming overhead like some ghoulish specter is that dark era so powerfully portrayed by Picasso in his Guernica, what the Indian philosophers termed Kali Yuga and the Greeks called Iron, a sort of Saturnine eclipse. Intellectualism, doctrinairism, atheistic materialism, authoritarianism, realism, excessive rationality, collectivism- these are the hallmarks of our contemporary society. The Waste Land, as T.S. Eliot called it, or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World… a veritable desert for the soul.

Modernity is now home to a Reason that has usurped the throne of Spirit and declares itself the All. As opposed to using thought, thought all too often uses us. As a result, the stock market is now Genius, man towers over Nature, science walks stern and rigid, politics plays with extraneous inanity, economics races to the bottom, and orthodox, ecclesiastical religion signifies a spiritual death. The masses are always moving, never still.  Death, Degeneration, Corruption, Inversion, Perversion. The temerity of reason now a splinter fracturing the psyche the gap of which grows greater with each passing day. For man is afraid to look in his own mirror.

The Psychic Roots of Tyranny

It all started when patriarchy, like a blast of Luciferian light, burst onto the scene. With this dramatic event within the psyche of man the masculine, solar deities triumphed over the lunar, nature deities. Lilith tore out of the side of the Sacred Feminine as the subliminal, primordial darkness of Tao became suppressed. Thus opposed opposites were born. The Olympians had prevailed over the Titans. With this Man becomes man and God- the slayer is no longer the slain, the face of Christ turns asymmetric, the body spars with the soul, and the heart torments the mind.

Joseph Campbell, in his work Oriental Mythology, elucidated on the beginnings of this spiritual break when he relayed the following:

“And with the progressive devaluation of the mother-goddess in favor of the father, which everywhere accompanied the maturation of the dynastic state and patriarchy but was carried further in Southwest Asia than anywhere else, a sense of essential separation from the supreme value symbol became in time the characteristic religious sentiment of the entire Near East.  And the rising ziggurats, striving to reach upwards in tendance, while at the same time offering to the heavenly powers a ladder by which to come graciously down to the cut-off race of man, were the earliest signals of this spiritual break.”

The above sentiments, psychologically speaking, reflect a suppression of the unconscious (Mother Goddess) by the conscious mind (Father). Due to an overextended ego that has run off the reservation and forgotten its instinctual roots, a psychic split has emerged within the collective consciousness of humanity. As this gap widens between the opposites within (male and female energies), man becomes increasingly captive to neuroses he himself produces. Psychic epidemics, of which our modern day tyranny is one, proliferate and envelop the earth as our spiritual and moral values become a thing of the past. The world inexorably becomes an infirmary on fire as eternally sunny skies blind us to ourselves. In effect, when man amputates Nature he amputates himself. As Dr. Carl Jung conveyed in his often cryptic work Aion:

“Loss of roots (unconscious instincts due to repression) and lack of tradition neuroticize the masses and prepare them for collective hysteria. Collective hysteria calls for collective therapy, which consists in abolition of liberty and terrorization. Where rationalistic materialism holds sway, states tend to develop less into prisons than into lunatic asylums.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson articulated the same when he imparted the following in his essay Nature:

“The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself.”

With this acute psychic imbalance comes the destruction of the organs that have hereto allowed us to integrate the unconscious instincts that sustain our conscious life. Those organs are the numinous symbols we have relegated to the ash heap of superstition. With this unilateral dismissal man becomes omniscient. The cosmos are no longer a map of the mind, nor does any Tree represent the transformation process; Nature’s hand is no longer a guide, the Macro no longer mirrors the Micro, no Serpent is the divine embodiment of wisdom, and the Earth has ceased to be called the Great Mother Goddess. Neither seeing deep nor far man becomes a shell of his former stature- an ant as opposed to an eagle. No longer a wonderworker even if he imagines himself to be so.

Picasso’s Guernica

Gods Suppressed are Demons

As intimated in the beginning of the last section, the old gods have been ruthlessly cast out.  And it’s precisely for this reason that we now feel a need to cast them out: gods suppressed become demons. Joseph Campbell gave us some insight into this in his work Occidental Mythology when he wrote:

“…..through the operation of a second natural law, namely, that gods suppressed become demons; which is to say, that psychological and sociological factors neither assimilated nor recognized by the consciously controlled system become autonomous and must ultimately break the approved system apart.”

Dovetailing with the above, but placed within a somewhat more intelligible and palatable psychological context, Dr. Jung notes the following in his stupendous work Alchemical Studies:

“We are still as much possessed by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.”

We’ve now come round full circle with added clarity and insight. The Sacred Feminine or Mother Goddess or Egyptian Isis, is a feminine personification of the Unconscious Mind. She is the Matrix of Life itself, the Womb of Spacetime, that mysterious ineffable foundation from which everything arises and ultimately returns to. Her functionaries, administrators, attendants, guardians, or agents- the gods/goddesses of Antiquity- are parts of our innermost Self. They are the autonomous psychic factors, archetypal forces, contents, or instincts of the Unconscious Mind. When these gods/goddesses are repressed, they boomerang back in the form of veritable demons i.e. neuroses, psychoses, phobias, obsessions, and the like. The net result is a dangerous disconnect between the two minds the consequences of which have become all too apparent.

The Death of God

At the end of the day, the ultimate implication of our current conundrum could not be more profound. For the further humanity strays from the Self (epicenter of Unconscious Mind) the more the God-Image will fade which ultimately leads to the annulment of the human personality. Life then becomes completely devoid of meaning, purpose, value, and aim. A yawn of nothingness opens wide (Nietzsche’s Will to Nothingness) as humanity is swallowed by a sea of superfluity. Eventually, the chasm reaches a crescendo and an atheistic materialism results. Again, quoting Dr. Jung, this time from The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious:

“The danger becomes all the greater the more our interest fastens upon external objects and the more we forget that the differentiation of our relation to nature should go hand in hand with a correspondingly differentiated relation to the spirit, so as to establish the necessary balance. If the outer object is not offset by an inner, unbridled materialism results, couple with maniacal arrogance or else the extinction of the autonomous personality, which is in any case the ideal of the totalitarian mass state.”

It is important to note that when Nietzsche made his pronouncement that “God is dead” he wasn’t flirting with some nebulous intellectual abstraction but rather stating what has become recognized as a psychic fact of our time. In the book Man and His Symbols, Aniela Jaffe writes the following:

“Nietzsche, whom Chirico quotes as his authority, has given a name to the “dreadful void” in his saying “God is dead”. Without referring to Nietzsche, Kandinsky wrote in On the Spiritual in Art: “Heaven is empty. God is dead”…….Dr. Jung also came to realize that this strange and mysterious phenomenon of the death of God is a psychic fact of our time. In 1937 he wrote:  “I know- and here I am expressing what countless other people know—that the present time is the time of God’s disappearance and death”. For years he had observed the Christian God-Image fading in his patient’s dreams- that is, the Unconscious of modern men. The loss of that image is the loss of the supreme factor that gives life a meaning.”

The Real Revolution: Bridging the Gulf

If we wish to circumvent the clutches of the global devil-doers and thereby save ourselves from the prospect of total enslavement under a nightmarish, hi-tech, neo-feudalistic technocratic world government, then we will need to address the issue of man’s malady of mind. Man is a giant but has been relegated to crawling on all fours. Overly focalized he peers out at the universe as if through a peep-hole. Conflating the “voice in the head” with his true Self he has mistaken the part for the whole. As a result of this self-imposed slumber, this monotheism of consciousness, this over-inflated Ego, the mind has been effectively pigeon holed and cut off from that infinite ocean of awareness and power. As Bruce Lee brilliantly put it in the opening scene of Enter the Dragon:

“Don’t think! Feel. It is like a finger pointing a way to the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.”

Carlos Castaneda vexed in a similar vein in Tales of Power when he wrote:

“…..we are luminous beings. We are perceivers. We are an awareness; we are not objects; we have no solidity. We are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient. It is only a description that was created to help us. We, or rather our reason, forget that the description is only a description and thus we entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious circle from which we rarely emerge in our lifetime.”

The good news in all of this is that the future most certainly does not belong to the Occult Elite. The Ego, along with all of its apparently fortified totalitarian structures, is ultimately destined to dissolve. After analyzing over 80,000 dreams, Dr. Jung identified a sort of hidden, regulating center that creates an imperceptible process of psychic growth—-what he refers to as the process of Individuation. This irrational life process goes on whether we like it or not and is embedded within the meandering pattern that unfolds over a lifetime of dreaming. In short, it represents the pushing of the Ego to the background so as to allow the Self to come to the foreground. And so, as the circles on the shamanic medicine wheel gradually spiral towards a Center, so too are we spiraling back towards a mysterious epicenter within the Unconscious Mind. In the language of alchemy, the moon is circumambulating around the sun; the circle is being squared.

Pretty weird huh? Ironically enough, the word weird, as meaning “Fate,” is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘wyrd.’ It refers to a sense of an inward potentiality in the process of becoming with an approaching inevitable end. Thanks to the miracle of empirical psychology we now know what that end is: Wholeness. Nietzsche was right- Life is Will to Power. As the end of Goethe’s Faust runs…

“The Eternal-Feminine… lures to perfection”

About the Author

Alex Vandenberg is a writer and researcher of a myriad of different topics spanning everything from economics to the occult. He is currently in the process of completing two books on transcendental knowledge. His guiding light has been a singular focus on illuminating what lurks beneath; on the roots of humanity’s current conundrum as seen through the prism of spirituality.

This article (The Psychic Roots of Tyranny) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Alex Vandenberg and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement.

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