GENIUS FORUMS

Bob Michael wrote:"My conclusion from a lifetime of psychohistorical study of childhood and society is that the history of humanity is founded upon the abuse of children." (Lloyd deMause)

I was not familiar with deMause, so I googled him to get an intro. My first reaction to the quote Bob presents is that it is just grandiose enough to get people to to listen to what Lloyd has to say. It is illogical, on its face. If the entire history of humanity is founded upon something, that something has to be the norm, by definition. Therefore, it cannot be the case that humanity as a whole has always abused its children.

But it did get me to do the googling, and the first thing that popped up was:

In a 1994 interview with deMause in The New Yorker, the interviewer wrote: "To buy into psychohistory, you have to subscribe to some fairly woolly assumptions [...], for instance, that a nations's child-rearing techniques affect its foreign policy". - Wikipedia

Put that way, it doesn't sound so "woolly." Else: "The way a nation raises its children has no effect on its foreign policy." Which simply cannot be true.

Where were you going with this, Bob? It helps if you comment on something you quote.

cousinbasil wrote:Where were you going with this, Bob? It helps if you comment on something you quote.

Seems so often we tend to focus on the messenger rather than on the message, CB. Especially if the message doesn't fit into our own little cozy scheme of things. I've done this often myself in the past. The truth is often quite unpleasant, especially the truth about ourselves. But it must be faced, dealt with, and transcended (if possible) if one is ever find true liberation. Or more preferably, fullness of human being.

That having been said, many others have made very similar observations as deMause's regarding how we are damaged and very often destroyed as children by our conditioning or enculturation by corrupt, violent, spiritually and morally bankrupt societies. Some of them I've placed below. My reason for placing deMause's observation here (and the others) is that I find they're the reason that most of us never make the return again to the "BRIGHT" (which is the topic of this thread). Or to the natural human state one might also call it. Instead we live out our lives as dehumanized and thereby robotized human beings. And as the result of having been so deeply and irreparably desensitized by our conditioning, we're not at all aware that we're essentially self-centered, cold, calculating, and callous robots rather than being warm, loving, unselfish, and genuinely caring human beings.

"From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful." (R. D. Laing)

"Most of us are no longer really human, we have been deprived of our humanity. We have been dehumanized by the processes of conditioning, upbringing and socialization. We are no longer the organized authentic self which we were once capable of being.....What we are born for is to live as if to live and love were one. Unless we learn that lesson 'the goose is cooked' as it were." (Ashley Montagu)

"The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt--and there is the story of mankind." (John Steinbeck)

"You may have love in your heart, because to love is a natural thing when one is young; but it is soon destroyed by the parents, by the educator, by the social environment." (J. Krishnamurti)

"A human nurtured instead of shamed, and loved instead of driven by fear, develops a different brain and therefore a different mind. He will not act against the well-being of another nor against his larger body, the living Earth." (Joseph Chilton Pearce)

Rejection is the blame game of the ego. Go away - mourn sufficiently for the loss of my company and you will be back in the click.

Please explain what back in the click means.

At any time in an adult's life, regardless of how he perceives he is being treated by others now or how he perceives he was treated by others as a child, he can take full responsibility for his own nurturing and enlightenment. It is my experience that it is only when an individual makes this decision to be whole of himself [absolute to himself] does he find unconditional love and wisdom of the infinite to live of, and by. This man is a free man, a "bright" man, beholding not to his past or to his future, and certainly not to opinions of others as to his value or worth in the world of "reasons."

Pam,
You've just explained that 'bright man' comes in to existence because of reasons.

movingalways wrote:At any time in an adult's life, regardless of how he perceives he is being treated by others now or how he perceives he was treated by others as a child, he can take full responsibility for his own nurturing and enlightenment.

This is a fallacy held by virtually everyone everywhere. A fallacy that continues to keep the evolutionary process at a stuck point. And those who hold this view are not sufficiently self-knowing nor is their enlightenment or their relationship with the Infinite full and complete. The key here being Love. Human love. If a person has not had an adequate realization of love (which includes right-discipline) and warm human touch from the adults around him in the critical formative years of his life, along with having had a reasonably quiet and sheltered growing environment, he will never come to know love or enlightenment all its fullness and glory and perfection. Nor will his relationship with the Infinite be of such integrity that he'll be a real asset in the enlightenment of others. Those relatively few others who were raised up similarly. The rest, the many, being totally incapable (through no fault of their own) of taking "full responsibility for his (their) own nurturing and enlightenment", as you allude.

movingalways wrote:It is my experience that it is only when an individual makes this decision to be whole of himself [absolute to himself] does he find unconditional love and wisdom of the infinite to live of, and by. This man is a free man, a "bright" man, beholding not to his past or to his future, and certainly not to opinions of others as to his value or worth in the world of "reasons."

There is really no "decision" to be made here. He who chooses the Infinite has been chosen or called by the Infinite. Which is to also say he has been called home again (via suffering due to his extraordinary sensitivity) to that and by that innate firmly planted foundation of human love. And then he becomes not a "free man" but a man who's perfectly bound or totally subservient to the will of the Infinite or his own refined and purified true heart's desires. Which is the only true human freedom there is. One that comes with a grave responsibility. That being to totally lay down one's life for the sake of his fellows and the evolutionary process.

I could be wrong, but your understanding of and relationship with the Infinite seems to me to be primarily a textbook, theoretical, or legalistic one. And not a dynamically living and fully spirited one.