In this article we will continue our discussion of the emotional realm, delving now into the highly charged area of mental health and mental illness. In the last article we covered the emotions of guilt in relation to our ideas of good and evil, and before that we covered fear, paranoia and hate. Now we discuss the emotions of depression, hopelessness, despair, apathy, worthlessness and unworthiness.
“Understand the great number of entities with the so-called mental diseases being due to those entities unready mentally to face the self for the first time.”1
So then “Acknowledge the dark side in order to combat it.”
“Laugh and face it out boldly whatever it may be,” said Rabelais.
Mental Disorders & Chemical Imbalances
“Mental conditions have a way, sometimes, of working themselves out better without your professional therapies than with them – often cures happen in spite of your best intentioned treatment.
One of the latest ideas is that certain mental conditions are caused by chemical imbalances.
Supplying these does result in some improvement, but such inequalities do not cause any disease.
Your beliefs about the nature of your own reality do.
If medication of that sort improves the immediate situation, the inner problem of beliefs must still be worked out.
Otherwise other illnesses will be substituted.
Naturally and left alone, any chemical upsets in the body will right themselves after the inner problems causing them are worked out through any of a variety of innate healing methods.”2
Mental Disorders & Beliefs
“Mental “diseases” often point out the nature of your beliefs as they agree or conflict with those held by others.
Here the belief systems are different than those of society to such a degree that obvious effects show in terms of behavior.
There are crisis points here as with many physical illnesses, and left alone an individual may well work through to his own solutions.
Even with so called mental disorders, however, orientation with the body is very important, as are the individual’s beliefs about his own form and its relationship with others and with time and space.
There will often be chemical imbalances in such a situation, unconsciously produced by the individual, sometimes in order to allow him to work out a series of “hallucinatory” events.
Such sustained “objectified dreaming” necessitates a change, chemically, from the normal state of waking consciousness.
It is important to note that regardless of the mental or physical illness adopted, it is chosen for a reason, and is a natural method that the individual himself knows he is physically and mentally equipped to handle.”3
As Robert Lawlor writes, “Humans have the capacity, through symbolism, to create totally imaginary mental worlds – worlds having a very limited relationship to the fullness of an integrated sense of reality. Humanity alone seems capable of creating vast, symbolic forms inconsistent with the deeper rhythmic wholes of universal expression.” When we create mental words that do not accurately coincide with the vision of the integrally real, the mind becomes fragmented, frightened and cut off from its healing Source. Entire phantasmic belief systems can be created which do not coincide with Universal harmonic laws or the cooperative reality of Nature. Many of our belief systems can act as a prison in this sense: Darwinism, Atheism, the belief in competition, the belief that money and material possessions are the most important aspect of life, the belief in Hell, Scientism, Virtual Reality & Transhumanism, Contrived mass befuddlement in the political arena, contrived and falsified history…etc.
Phantasms as Mind Control
Robert Lawlor, in The Geometry of the End of Time explains the role of phantasm in mind control which all too often leads to various forms of mental illness.
“The Greek word phantasm indicates a configuration or condition with a purely mental source. Phantasms are a special case of virtuality. Most ideological systems, religious or political, utilize virtualism in one form or another. They are the products of that aspect of mind capable of fictions, falsehood, and misjudgment. Phantasms arise from minds that are subsumed by illusions of desire, power seeking or neediness.
In the centuries preceding these developments Europe watched the collapse of village regional societies, rituals and agriculture-based attitudes and the respect for the authority of the ancestors and the forces of nature. This societal transformation became known as Modernity and its priests carried the phantasm, wealth, capital and scientific objectivity to the very marrow of European consciousness.
Hidden forces can utilize the powerful weapon of phantasmically projected propaganda, capable of locking individuals into flawed or false ideologies to which they dedicate their life or offer their death. Propaganda inserted into the collective mind can also lull vast populations into a deathlike sleep or stupor.
As long as the words or names are repeated over and over, spreading like a contagion, the phantasm will actualize, be sustained and grow. We see this in popular music with generation after generation implanting via the audio cortex, erotic sublimations that weaken the mind’s capacity to respond to actual social or personal status or circumstance.
This psycho-magical process is called the “projection of phantasms.
Aristotle and others laid particular emphasis on the power of phantasm over the masses. Phantasms aren’t unlike the persuasive powers of modern entertainment and media. In addition to popular cinema-graphic methods of projecting phantasmic materializations into the public mind, one must suspect that there are some less obvious aspects of this pernicious “art”. It is possible, for example, to detect phantasmic technique operating in any consistently repeated media format in which there is a choice of content. The audiences of these poplar formats are generally unaware of the motives for the selection of content and the implication of the order of presentation or any of the intended subliminal effects of conditioning objectives of so-called “news” items. This sort of focusing and meddling with the so-called “factual” content of daily life renders it comparable to prepared dramas and television serials with audience empathy causing a gradual mutation in collective and individual self-esteem and identity.
The phantasm of sport is especially pernicious. The ritual of competitive sports continues to generate the heroics and phantasmic nobility of war. The male-dominated varieties of competitive sports incorporate physical contact, including throwing or kicking at other players various missiles that imitate rocks or bombs, or alternatively, aggressively wielding clubs, bats or spear like objects. We are conditioned to believe these sorts of sports are the natural rough-and-tumble extension and maturation of the universal tendency of young children to “play”. However, these sports are not “play”, they are the ritual re-enactment and reinforcement of the serious competitive instincts and skills to hunt, slay, procure and protect access to and availability of food, water, tribal territory and sexual reproduction.
“Play” is something entirely different. As the word itself implies, it is a kind of theatrical imitation of otherness – other phase of human life, the movements, behavior or sounds of other animals, creatures or plants. Play invariably includes interactions with other, parallel dimensions such as that of the ancestors or dreams or the realm of the dead. These forms of play are a major aspect of indigenous culture throughout the world. These cultures do not overemphasize the enactments of war and hunting nor, as we do, glorify the “games” of dead game and gain.
Dance and music, along with certain plant concoctions, stimulate and enhance the capacity to communicate with the unseen world and the spirit essence within every aspect of the natural environment.
Competitive sports, by contrast, elevate the enactment of contentiousness and aggression within an artificial conflict situation. The simplistic focus on winning and losing ultimately results in injury or physical disablement as well a psychological immaturity. Competitive sport has become the mind-control device of militarily maintained hierarchical civilizations. The frequent marching parades and public rituals, such as those for sporting events, allow governments and political organizers who employ such methods to enthrall the throngs, thus engendering a pliable national psychosis. There is also pop music utilizing the enunciation of repetitious words accompanied by rhythms and beat patterns form implanting emotional, religious, rebellious, sentimental or sexual imagery, behavior or appetites. One must also credit the cult of celebrity with inducing delusional identities or distractive desires for glamorous lifestyles and relationships among the impressionable.
Among the greatest phantasmic phenomena moving throughout the world, exploiting and enslaving, are money, banking and usury. Peter Kershaw, writes in Economic Solutions: ‘When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.…Banks have been established for one purpose only – to plunder the wealth of honest, hard-working people. Countless persons have spent enormous sums of time and money attending Ivy League schools, in a futile attempt to aggrandize and dignify a system, that at its very core, is based upon thievery.”
Psychology, Religion & Mental Illness
“Your psychology of the past 50 years has helped create insanities by trying to reduce the great individual thrust of life that lies within each person, to a generalized mass of chaotic impulses and chemicals — a mixture, again, of Freudian and Darwinian thought, misapplied.
The most private agonies of the soul were assigned a more or less common source in man’s primitive “unconscious” drives.
The private unquelled thrusts toward creativity were seen as the unbalanced conglomeration of chemicals within a person’s most private being — a twist of perversity.
Genius was seen as a mistake of chromosomes, or the fortunate result of a man’s hatred for his father.
The meaning of life was reduced to the accidental nature of genes.
Science thought in terms of averages and statistics, and each person was supposed to fit within those realms.
To some extent, this also applies to religion in the same time period.
Churches wanted sinners galore, but shied away from saints, or any extravagant behavior that did not speak of man’s duplicity.
Suddenly people with paranoid characteristics, as well as schizophrenics, emerged from the wallpaper of this slickly styled civilization.
The characteristics of each were duly noted.
When a civilization does not support creativity it begins to falter.
When it distrusts its gifted people, rather than encouraging them, a nation is at least in trouble.
Your psychologies, stressing “the norm,” made people frightened of their individual characteristics and abilities, because psychology’s norm did not fit the contours of any one human being.
It did not touch the heights or the depths of human experience.
People became afraid of their own individuality.”4
Psychology, the Soul & Darwinian Evolution
Mark Booth writes, “In time the science of psychology would arise. But psychology would make the materialistic assumption that matter influences the mind, never the other way around. Psychology, then, turned a blind eye to a universal part of human experience – the experience of meaning.”
“Previous to psychology’s entrance, before psychology mapped the acceptable or forbidden, the dangerous or safe compartments of the self, man used the word “soul” to include his own entire complexity.
That word was large enough to contain man’s experience.
It was large enough to provide room for conventional and unconventional, bizarre and ordinary states of mind and experience.
It was roomy enough to hold images of reality that were physically perceived or psychologically perceived.
Evolutionary man, with Darwinian roots, could not be a creature with a soul.
It had to have hidden in its psychological roots the bloody remnants of the struggle for survival that now cast it in its uneasy role.”5
Mental Health & the Industrial Revolution
“It was in the English textile industry that the industrial revolution really began…By 1838, there were 1600 cotton mills in England, three quarters of which were in Lancashire. The cotton mills housed the machines. And thousands upon thousands of people, many of whom were women and children, now spent the best part of their lives working long hours (normally a twelve hour working day) in service to these machines…
The industrial revolution must be understood as introducing a new relationship between machines and human beings, in which the human being for the first time experiences the greater-than-human power of the machine as enslaving rather than as liberating. In the mill, the traditional relationship of machine to human being is reversed: rather than the machine serving the human being, the human being must serve the machine.
At the same time the worldview of materialism, in which human beings were seen as mere animal-machines, slowly gained ground, in the face of the still formidable opposition of the Church…This mechanical intelligence was exercising a greater and greater influence on the inner life of human beings, so whilst the invention of the steam engine and the machinery of mass production could be claimed as human in origin, its inhuman effect on people’s lives revealed the extent to which human creativity and genius had in fact been captured by a mode of thought intrinsically inhuman…It was as if the machines were being produced by an intellectual power that up until this point in human evolution had been restrained by a living spiritual awareness.
These machines could not yet reason but they were manifestations of thought-processes that were divorced from the human heart. They mirrored an aspect of the mind in which no trace of the divine could be found…
As a consequence, the European psyche was thrown out of balance, for it lost (or at least suffered the severe weakening of) an essential countervailing force to the impulse towards the promotion of a one-dimensional, literalistic stance towards knowledge. This stance, which became deeply ingrained as ‘common sense’, led in the sphere of science to distrust in anything other than a quantifying and therefore merely calculative mode of thought.
This reduced view of reason…was typically accompanied by suspicion of the inner life of imagination, inspiration and numinous experience.
For the European psyche, the new ‘Age of Reason’ thus involved an inner spiritual convulsion. By way of compensation, the loss of authentic religious orientation led to reason attracting to itself fanatical, pseudo-religious feelings. A new cult of reason, understood as unaided logical thought, arose…This intelligence, despite its totally anti-religious character, drew to itself a deep-seated emotional allegiance, hardly distinguishable from religious fervor. It was, we might say, a massive psychic investment in technological thinking, in which mechanical intelligence was apotheosized.
The cost of the industrial revolution to psychic health can be gauged by the fact that at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in 1700, there was in the British Isles only one lunatic asylum, Bethlem, which held little more than 100 patients. By the end of the same century, in 1800, it is estimated that numbers of confined lunatics had risen to as many as 10,000. By the end of nineteenth century, as if it were Psyche’s tribute to the Goddess Reason, the number had escalated to 100,000. It is to the period of the turn of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth that the first fully documented case of schizophrenia can be traced.”6
Psychoanalysis
“Often psychoanalysis is simply a game of hide-and-seek, in which you continue to relinquish responsibility for your actions and reality and assign the basic cause of some area of the psyche, hidden in a dark forest of the past. Then you give yourself the task of finding this secret.
In so doing you never think of looking for it in the conscious mind, since you are convinced that all deep answers lie far beneath – and, moreover, that your consciousness is not only unable to help you but will often end up camouflaged instead. So you play that game.
When and if you manage to change your beliefs in that self-deceptive framework, then any suitable “forgotten” event from the past will be used as a catalyst. One would do as well as another.
The basic beliefs however were always in your conscious mind, and the reasons for your behavior. You simply had not examined its contents with the realization that your beliefs were not necessarily reality, but often your conceptions of it.
At the same time, in psychoanalysis, you are often programmed to believe that the “unconscious”, being the source of such dark secrets, cannot be counted upon as any bed of creativity or inspiration, and so you are denied the help that the inner portions of the self could give to your consciousness.
Such a situation denies the individual their full strength, and cuts them off – consciously – from the important sources of their being.
These conditions inhibit creative expression in particular, and deny the conscious self the continually emerging insights and intuitions otherwise unavailable.”7
Depression
“One of the strongest general causes of depression, for example, is the belief that your conscious mind is powerless either in the face of exterior circumstances thrust upon you from without, or before strong emotional events that seem to be overwhelming from within.
Vitamins, better food, medical attention, may temporarily rejuvenate the body, but unless you change your beliefs it will quickly become swamped again by your feelings of depression.
Your beliefs generate the appropriate emotion that is implied. A long period of inner depression does not just come upon you.
Your emotions do not betray you.
Instead, over a period of time you have been consciously entertaining negative beliefs that then generated the strong feelings of despondency.
It is not enough to meditate, or to imagine in your mind some desired goal being accomplished, if you are afraid to act upon the very impulses to which your meditations and imaginings give rise.
When you do not take any steps toward an ideal position, then your life does lack excitement. You become depressed.
You might become an idealist in reverse, so that you find a certain excitement in contemplating the occurrence of natural disasters, such as earthquakes.
You may begin to concentrate your attention on such activities.
You may contemplate the end of the world instead, but in either case you are propelled by a sense of personal frustration, and perhaps by some degree of vengeance, seeing in your mind the destruction of a world that fell so far beneath your idealized expectations.”8
Despair – Hopelessness – Apathy
“Despair or apathy is a biological “enemy.”
Social conditions, political states, economic policies, and even religious or philosophical frameworks that foster such mental states, bring about a biological retaliation.
They act like fire applied to a plant.
Individually, each “victim” of an epidemic was to one extent or another a “victim” of apathy, despair, or hopelessness, which automatically lowered bodily defenses.
Not only do such states of mind lower the defenses, however, but they activate and change the body’s chemistries, alter its balances, and initiate disease conditions.
Many viruses inherently capable of causing death, in normal conditions contribute to the overall health of the body, existing side by side as it were with other viruses, each contributing quite necessary activities that maintain bodily equilibrium.
The environment in which an outbreak occurs points at the political, sociological, and economic conditions that have evolved, causing such disorder.
Often such outbreaks take place after ineffective political or social action — that is, after some unified mass social protest — has failed, or is considered hopeless.
They often occur also in wartime on the part of a populace [that] is against a given war in which [its] country is involved.
Now if you believe in one life only, then such conditions will seem most disastrous, and in your terms they clearly are not pretty.
Initially there is a psychic contagion: Despair moves faster than a mosquito, or any outward carrier of a given disease.
The mental state brings about the activation of a virus that is, in those terms, passive.
Despair may seem passive only because it feels that exterior action is hopeless — but its fires rage inwardly, and that kind of contagion can leap from bed to bed and from heart to heart.
It touches those, however, who are in the same state only, and to some extent it brings about an acceleration in which something can indeed be done in terms of group action.”9
Worthlessness
A commonly held personal core belief is: “My life is worthless. What I do is meaningless.”
“Now a person who holds such an idea will ordinarily not recognize it as an invisible belief.
Instead he or she may emotionally feel that life has no meaning, that individual action is meaningless, that death is annihilation; and connected to this will be a conglomeration of subsidiary beliefs that deeply affect the family involved, and all those with whom such a person comes in contact.
You make your own reality. I cannot say this too often.
Believe then, that you are a being unlimited by nature, born into flesh to materialize as best you can the great joy and spontaneity of your nature.”10
Unworthiness
“Many such philosophies make you cower at the idea of entertaining “negative” thoughts or emotions.
In all cases the clues to your emotional experience and behavior lie in your systems of belief; some more evident to you than others, but all available to you consciously.
If you believe that you are of little merit, inferior and filled with guilt, then you may react in several ways according to your personal background and the framework in which you accepted those beliefs.
You may be terrified of aggressive feelings because it seems others so much more powerful than you could retaliate.
If you believe that all such thoughts are wrong you will inhibit them and feel all the more guilty – which will generate aggressiveness against yourself and further deepen your sense of unworthiness.
You cannot will yourself to be happy while believing that you have no right to happiness, or that you are unworthy of it.
You cannot tell yourself to release aggressive thoughts if you think it is wrong to free them, so you must come to grips with your beliefs in all instances.”11
Loneliness
“If you are lonely it is because you believe in your loneliness in this present point that you acknowledge as time.
From what seems to be the past you draw only those memories that reinforce your condition, and you project those into the future.
Physically, you are overwhelming your body as it responds to a state of loneliness through chemical and hormonal reactions.
You are also denying your own point of action within the present.
In such a case you must realize that you make your own loneliness, and resolve to change through both thought and action.”12
Powerlessness – Meaninglessness
“Disappointments, conflicts, and feelings of powerlessness can begin to make unfortunate inroads in the personalities of those who believe that life itself has little meaning.
Such people begin to imagine impediments in their paths as surely as anyone would who imagined that physical barriers were suddenly put up between them and a table they wanted to reach at the end of the room.
People who feel powerless, and who find no cause for living, can come together then and “die for a cause” that did not give them the will or reason to live.
They will seek out others of their kind.
The inner mechanics of emotions and beliefs are complicated, but these are individuals who feel that physical life has failed them.
They are powerless in society.
They think in black and white, and conflicts between their emotions, and their beliefs about their emotions, lead them to seek some kind of shelter in a rigid belief system that will give them rules to go by.
Such systems lead to the formation of cults, and the potential members seek out a leader who will serve their purposes as surely as they seem to serve his — through an inner mechanics of which each member is at least somewhat aware.”13
Plato and Mental Disorders – Mindlessness – Madness – Ignorance
Plato’s take on the situation goes as follows: “It’s indisputable that mindlessness is a disease of the soul, and since there are two kinds of mindlessness – madness and ignorance – it follows that everything which happens to a person that causes him to become either mad or ignorant must be called a disease.
So we should count excessive pleasures and pains as the most serious diseases that can afflict the soul, because when a man is over-joyed or, conversely, suffering from pain, he’s so immoderately concerned to gain the one or lose the other that he’s incapable of seeing or hearing anything aright. In short, he’s in a state of frenzy and, for as long as it lasts, he completely loses the ability to think rationally.” Timaeus 86b-c
- Elkins, Rueckert, McCarty, The Law of One, Session 40.15, http://www.lawofone.info/results.php?s=40
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Naydler, Jeremy, In the Shadow of the Machine, Temple Lodge, 2018
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- Roberts, Jane, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1981
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1981
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