Being Aware of Becoming America

[First posted as a comment on 27 March 08 8:30 AM (GMT -0700) at BOVARD: The 9/11 Servility Reflex]


Q: What's a Zen poet & Kucinich supporter doing hanging out with the likes of supporters of McCain and Paul and "worse?"

A: Being aware of becoming America!

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I come to this out of a background of studying psychology as a natural science. I've been studying the role of our psychophysiology in empathically-mediated altruism since the late 80s.

I've seen pictures of kittens dressed up in the same paraphernalia (sans orange jumpsuit) as was Jose Padilla. The objective of it all is CELLF-imprisonment, the acceptance of a mere mechanical receptacle in place of these very *cisterna mystica.*

Are we human BEINGS, or mere machines? In what cosmos are we presently enacting our insane political theater?

I pick on the APA because I'm an American student of psychology (I used to be an AP Society member, the one more for natural scientists than for therapists), but it's the mechanization of Life in general that's the real target of my ire.

Both the APA and the APS believe in a mechanical cosmos. Both base themselves on an impossibility: the Newtonian point particle. Doing so implodes our shares of Psyche into black holes--and misconceived ones at that!

That wasn't legit back at the founding of modern psychology; it still isn't legit. Our psychology is unfounded.

Our psychology conceives of the cosmos as a political machine: one in which absolutely separate parts are forced into order from the outside by a Creator/God/King/Man among men. In this cosmos, TORTURE IS THE ORDER OF THE DAY.

We're dealing with authoritarian pinheads who can't think for themselves. I believe the medical profession to be the controlling authority to which BushRoveCo is listening when it demands the right to torture. They listen to the doctors and psychiatrists and psychotherapists oh my! and so feel relieved of responsibility for inhuman cruelty against our neighbors. For example, what is a polygraph but an electromechanical Iron Maiden?

Torture by isolation, the specific type practiced at Gitmo and elsewhere; torture by abuse of religion, which James Yee has said has become a weapon to break human spirits; torture by ever-present surveillance, by the implicit threat of Gitmo in the background; for psychologists, it's what we do.

Witness the treatment of climatologist Jim Hansen: his science was shaped to fit the policy, just as the intelligence was "fixed around" the policy of war with Iraq. Same thing goes on with psychology.

I propose a new fundamental unit for a living, breathing, organic psychology: the *cisterna mystica.*

The fundamental property of a mystic vessel is {self-filling/self-emptying}, aka kenosis. Our brains, our lungs, our hearts: all are kenotic vessels.

Neuronal models of stimuli are the {self-filling/self-emptying} vessels of Mind: into which experience is pouring; from which awareness is arising; and out of which we are {Mater & Pater flowing in Water}.

So even while we are here, now, being eternity; we are yet aware of becoming time- and space-embedded. This is a mystery to behold, within which we stand in awe.

Shall we trade our inalienable birthright: Divinely Being Eternally Aware of Becoming enmeshed in space and time; for reduction to mere mechanical receptacles of whatever our dear herdsmen decide to pump us with?

Shall we place our faith in the likes of Zelikow and Rice and Cheney and Rove? Or in our own experience?