Love vs. Split-Love
Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis in Human Evolution
Book Contents
Introduction
The Natural Order (Thesis)
The Early Natural Order
The Pleasure Function
The Destruction of the Natural Order (Antithesis)
Reductionism and Moralism
Repression and Perversion
Love vs. Split-Love
The Disintegration of Sexual Paraphilias
Parent-Child Codependence and Emotional Child Abuse
The Oedipal Mold and Oedipal Culture
Mysticism and Atheism
Narcissism
Denial of Complexity
The Plague of Sadism
Conspiracy Thinking vs. Critical Thinking
Youth Fascism
The New Natural Order (Synthesis)
The Eight Dynamic Patterns of Living
The Twelve Branches of the Tree of Knowledge
The True Religio
Toward a Science of Life
Primary Power and Permissive Education
Research Bibliography
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Page Contents
Introduction
What is Love?
Erós and Agapé
Love or Abuse?
There is no good that is always or only good, no single virtue appropriate to every situation. Lao tzu tells us that it is only when we lose contact with out innate intuitive intelligence that we resort to ‘goodness’ and ‘righteousness’ as the ethical guideposts of our lives. It is only when real love is lost that we resort to ‘filial piety’ or ‘family values’. It is in this spirit that we can understand St. Thomas Aquinas’ dictum, ‘Love God and do as you please’. Love is superior to any ethical code. — Laurence G. Bold in The Tao of Abundance (1999) The classical Taoists take a much more positive view of human nature. For the Taoist, all depraved or perverse manifestations of human behavior result from rejecting our deepest nature, not from following it. It is by denying the unity of all life and committing to the attachment of the ego that we go astray. — Laurence G. Bold in The Tao of Abundance (1999) Insofar as love expresses itself, it is not expressing itself in terms of the socially approved manners of life. That’s why it is all so secret. Love has nothing to do with social order. — Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth (1988)
Introduction
Love or Loves? is the pertinent question I am asking since my childhood. I believe the natural order knows love, the perverted order knows loves. It’s as simple as that.
Contrary to common understanding, I emphasize a holistic understanding of love that I express under the header ‘love is unity.’ That means that love is always erotic, and erotically intelligent.
To my knowledge, this understanding of love is novelty and has not been introduced yet as a scientific or philosophical concept. Yet all great poetry implicitly expresses this truth. Succinctly speaking, this means that I am against the splitting off of love into so-called erós and agapé, on one hand, and the further splits of the unity of love into neat concepts.
I believe that the natural order knows this unity of love, which is one element why it was a paradigm that fostered peaceful human togetherness, not dominance, violence and war.
Usually, our encyclopedias denote conceptual notions of love and enumerate them as:
- parental love;
- family love;
- motherly/fatherly love;
- love of children for their parents;
- siblings love;
- love for the ancestors;
- love for one’s home country or patriotic love;
- love for tradition;
- passionate love;
- love for one’s husband or wife;
- and so on and so forth.
Where does this reductionist concept of love lead to? In my analysis of this question—that I asked for the first time in high school, in the philosophy class—the answer why this happens is the fragmentation of modern man and the rationalization and intellectualization of love.
—See, for example, Michel Odent, The Scientification of Love (1999).
What originally is a matter of the heart became a concern for the brain, and instead of letting go for love to come as a spontaneous, novelty kind of thing, people in modern societies tend to think about love and wish to be loved instead of simply loving, and without asking anything in return.
The intellectualization of love, while it’s a rather modern phenomenon, is the result of splitting love in permitted and forbidden love, which is based on the upsurge of compulsive morality throughout patriarchy. Already long before industrialization, Christian life denial has done its part in the destruction of natural love and its more or less total perversion into the love-and-sex dichotomy that today is part of mainstream sexology.
The very split of love into love, on one hand, and sex, on the other, is perverse and anti-nature. The reason why this schizoid split was created in the psyche and behavior structure of Western people is moralism and fear, and here, in particular, fear of incest.
When a father says that he loves his little daughter, people want to make sure that this father means he loves his daughter in compliance with the incest taboo, and not in some way as a sexual mate. However, a unifying concept of love says that love always contains the potentiality of sexual attraction. My concept of emonic attraction is indeed such a unifying concept of love that contains no moralistic element, thus giving nature full credit.
There is no need to pervert our language simply because we are afraid that parents and children may not only experience love but also sexual attraction for each other. The chances that people act out on these attractions are, according to statistics, after all not very high, and yet because of various reasons, these ideas have become group fantasies and mass obsessions for modern man and are for this reason, and for this reason only, in our daily press.
The correct way to use language, and to use the word love, is to imply in it all its potential meanings and connotations, instead of cutting them out by splitting off love into loves, thereby destroying the unity of love. For there is no way out of this split-concept than the antithesis of perversion. We need to accept reality instead of fighting reality. Love is like the sun. It is impartial, and the force of its irradiation does not depend on those who are bathed in the heat waves. With language it should be alike.
When I say I love children I don’t bother if you think that I also love them erotically. What you think is your business, not mine. But we have to keep language pure so that our code doesn’t get messed up. I would rather say that the burden of proof in this case is upon you to demonstrate that you do not love children erotically — and why! (When love is unity, we by default love children also erotically!)
When you deny children their capacity to be erotic for adults, you deny their vital energy, and thereby you deny them to truly be alive and live! This is simple truth and not a propagandistic statement, if you can accept that in your sociocultural alienation and conditioning is not my problem, but yours!
The burden of proof is upon death to disprove that life is unity of life and death.
The Tao of Love
What is love? Krishnamurti said we can never define what love is but well what love is not. Is pleasure love? Is love something we can quantify and receive in well-defined portions? Is love something we can store and accumulate in the warehouse of our mind, or in our heart? Is love a thing we can run after, chase, conquer, and possess?
Can we pursue love as a deliberate activity?
Is love something that can be damaged or hurt, or is it rather a quality? Is love perhaps a quality of relationships, and as such, something related to something else?
I know it is confusing to ask such questions, and yet they open doors. I do not pretend to know answers to all of these questions, and in case I know them, I do not pretend that these answers are valid for others as well, let alone that they are eternal. I rather think that it’s the questions that are important, and not so much the answers, as answers to all essential questions in life are in most cases temporary and volatile.
When I look at relationships, I can see there are loving ones and ones where love is painfully lacking, and I instantly understand that when love is lacking in relationships, they tend to be formal, cold and ‘calculated,’ and hurt is only a step away. I can also see that in relationships ruled by power, and where people play power games, love is absent.
This seems to point us to the truth that where power is, love cannot be. But power in which sense? What kind of power am I talking about? Is it self-power or soul power? I have answered the question in other books, and concluded that soul power is well compatible with love, and that the power that only is destructive, and that defeats love, is worldly power, which is power born by the ego.
I think when we direct our focus toward loving relationships instead of reflecting about love as such, we are getting closer to the truth, for love is something that bears fruit only in relating. When the sage says ‘I love the world,’ he means ‘When I relate to the world, I feel love.’
You may never have reflected about love yet when a child comes to you, smiling at you, stretching out his or her hand toward you in full trust, you may be permeated with one thought: ‘Relating to this child, I feel love.’ And you may, or not, conclude ‘I love children,’ while the latter statement bears something volatile and abstract. One may ask you back ‘Do you mean you really love all children? Or does it mean you love certain children, or children who relate to you?’
And you may think that at times, when you saw a very naughty and unruly child who drove their parents crazy in a hotel, or in a restaurant or department store, you thought you did not love that child. And as this is so, and for all of us, the statement ‘I love children’ may not be taken for granted as it were as total truth, but as a generalization. Hence, if we want to avoid generalizations because they always bear an element of untruth in them, then we can honestly only talk about love as far as a relationship is concerned that is mutually felt as loving.
We all experience love and have experienced love when we were children; some of us have experienced lack of love, because their relationships with parents, relatives and educators were not felt as loving; hence, their main behavior trait and attitude is not loving, but rather cynical and revengeful. When we observe this by studying various kinds of people, we quickly realize that those who experience loving relationships early in life become ‘loving’ people, and those who have been deprived of love early in life lead conflictual lives or even end up with long prison fines.
As a young law student, interested in the psychological reasons for violent crime, I came to realize that as a general rule, people tend to give to the world what they themselves have received when they were children; when they received love, they give love, when they received hate and violence, they give hate and violence. As, contrary to many psychiatrists, I do not believe that life cycles are lifelong conditions, I have been thinking for many years how an accidented life cycle can possibly be rerouted and thus become constructive again. I studied criminology and visited people in prisons, and what I saw shocked me; it shocked me not only because of the humiliating conditions these men were subjected to, which could be called the outside reality, but how these people, after I got to know some of them more closely, were torn up inside. Their inner reality, I felt, was locked; they were bathed in guilt and shame, and caught in denial; most of them as children could not accept one or both of their parents because of the caretaker’s abusive behavior.
Generally speaking, none of the inmates I met who were in for violent crimes had experienced loving relationships when they were children; they could not build a positive self-image and identity. What then happens is that the person comes up with projections, which means that a large part of their inner drama is projected upon ‘the world’ or ‘society.’
The projections, as I found later, are in turn the effect of repression, the constant denial to recognize and embrace an inner conflict or psychological complex.
This, then, in turn and over time leads to building a characterological and muscular armor around the inner shell, the heart and the soul, which effectively shields from feeling inside, and feeling with, thereby reducing compassion and empathy to a minimum.
Once the negative and projective worldview is built, it is reinforced through experience, for we attract in outside reality what we bear inside, in our thoughts and feelings. The negative experiences that occur, and occur necessarily once the inner setup is distorted through denial, fear and shame, again reinforce the person’s negative setup, thereby triggering something like an ‘inner conviction’ of the original negative proposition about life.
Such statements can be reduced to one single base affirmation they all share. This base affirmation is ‘There is no love.’ Once you are on the ‘There is no love’ track, the way back to a normal and harmonious way of relating is rather difficult; it is difficult because willpower to effect the opening of the closed door is not enough; thus some work on the deeper levels of consciousness is required, which in most cases asks for assistance and empathic care from the side of a counselor. For example, it is of little help to give such a person an auto-hypnosis manual and tape, for working on their inner mind because their negative self-talk and their shame-based identity will invariably lead to a defensive reaction of the kind ‘What should I do with all this gimmick? There is no love in this world. They are probably out to manipulate me or it’s altogether useless.’
Erós and Agapé
Eros and Agape (ISBN 0–8446–6051–5) is the title of a two-volume treatise written by the Swedish Protestant theologian Anders Nygren, first published in Swedish in 1930–1936. It analyses the connotations of two Greek words for love, eros and agape (unconditional love), and concludes that agape is the only truly Christian kind of love, and that eros (an expression of the individual’s desires) turns us away from God. This may be contrasted with the conclusions of Pope Benedict XVI in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, that both eros and agape are aspects of divine love. (Wikipedia)
I have chosen the title of this paragraph not because a Swedish theologian has explained these ancient Greek terms in a book that bears a similar title. My title is in fact not identical with that title because it bears an important annex, the full title being:
—Erós and Agapé: A Case for Healing the Split
It is interesting to note also, and this came to my attention only recently, that Pope Benedict XVI, in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, delivered a brilliant treatise that basically says, these two notions are not to be taken in the rather vulgar and gross distinction that says erós was to be taken as sexual love, and agapé, as ‘platonic’ love. This is how I learnt it in high school from our religion teacher.
In truth, the distinction of these terms is much more subtle. To elucidate the origin of these ancient Greek words, we need to go back to the sources.
Nygren traces the connotations of these two words from classical Greek philosophy, through its influence on Judaism, the early church and up to the reformation. Agapé, the word used of God’s love in the Greek New Testament, denotes a love which gives freely, and is based on the character of the one loving rather than any merit in the object of the love. Erós, on the other hand, typifies the Greek philosophy of Aristotle, Plato and the gnostics, and denotes an ‘acquisitive love’ which responds and aspires to the beauty or perfection of its object.
Many Christians believe that only agapé is so to speak ‘flawless’ love, the love that god bestows upon us, the love that also is called ‘universal love’ or ‘unconditional love.’ Christians, however, who were influenced by the gnostics and classical Greek philosophy stress that the original concept also for the ‘religious’ kind of love, is erós. In fact, a comparative survey of various religions in East and West shows that erós was over the times considered as the truly ‘divine’ love.
It is also interesting to note that Augustine is presented by Nygren as one who in his analysis of the terms came to conclude as to the synthesis of erós and agapé. Augustine’s influence on Catholic doctrine throughout the Middle Ages becomes evident, as monasticism, legalism, and ritualism all exemplify attempts to either reach up to god, which would be erós, rather than considering god’s reaching down to man, which would be called agapé.
On answers.com, we find a slightly different explanation:
Agape is the love of the spirit. It’s the sort of love that arises from situation, and deep understanding between people. For the ancient greeks, this is the kind of love that warriors felt. It inspired them to sacrifice themselves for one another. It is also applied to religious love. For many people this is the highest form of love they will feel.
Eros is passionate love, but it is not limited to sexual passion. Eros is touched by the beauty within, which creates a longing. It is the force which inspires not only lovers, but philosophy as well. It is this love that envelopes you, and fills you with euphoria. Some people think this is what they feel when they first meet someone, but they are confusing it with mere desire.
Now, let me convey how I came to use these terms in my title and for which precise reasons. It find that the answers.com definition is the most elucidative for showing that there is really a split here, and that these two terms express different kinds of love, agapé, the spiritual kind of love that could be described also as ‘noble love,’ and erós as the love that inspires us to love beauty of another and to desire him or her erotically.
Early in my career as a writer, when I was still writing in German language, I was coining the expression ‘Liebe ist Selbstausdruck’ (Love is Self-Expression) and wrote an aphorism about it. Later, when already writing in English, I came to coin my intuitive understanding of love as ‘Love is unity.’ I wanted to contradict what I had learnt in school about erós and agapé, as that distinction did not make sense to me.
To summarize what I am saying in my glossary is that the difference between real love and what we call love is that we have conceptualized it. Krishnamurti expressed in his own words what I am saying here, in many of his talks. He especially stresses that the concept of ‘love’ simply is not love. Many humans do not seem to understand the difference between reality and the conceptual perception of reality. In Zen, there is a simple saying:
—The finger that points to the moon, is not the moon.
In English, the parable is often coined as ‘do not confound the map and the territory.’ The introduction of the word ‘map’ is helpful because consciousness research has shown that we indeed map reality, that our brain, mainly for survival reasons, has taken a shortcut around the much older way of perception which I call ‘direct perception,’ in introducing the neocortex and with it, the constant attempt of it to conceptualize all and everything it perceives and tries to store away in the memory surface.
Here is what I write about ‘direct perception’ in Walter’s Encyclopedia:
Direct Perception is the primary mode of learning that nature applies in evolution. Direct perception is the mode the human brain uses to receive and store information in its capacity as a passively organizing system. The child learns his or her first language through direct perception, the picking-up of whole patterns, using the integrative and associative mode of the right brain. Obedience and imitation are not the appropriate means to develop the human potential; therefore civilization can only function on an outside or superficial level, but not as a motor of integrating man into a truly functional power unit that is operating on all levels at once.
The mainstream educational system has put this natural intelligent and holistic learning mode upside down in forcing children to learn with their left brain hemisphere only, cutting off the necessary mode of synthesis provided by the right brain hemisphere.
This is the single major reason why the modern educational system, while it is very costly, is totally ineffective, and brings about people who are alienated from their own inner source, out of touch as they are with their innermost human potential. This also is the reason for the astonishing lack of creativity in the corporate world, that already coach and corporate trainer Edward de Bono deplored in his books.
To summarize what I am saying here is that when we are not aware of how we actually perceive reality, we are trapped in conceptualizing all and everything, including love. And that is really a trap, for the concept is not the thing, it’s but a pointer, a vector that ‘stands for’ the real thing.
Now, why is it so important to get back to the source of perception? Well, the content of this article answers eloquently this question. Love in our society when it is directed toward a child, is called abuse, not love. More precisely, when this love is erotic, that is, inspired by the beauty of the child, and when there is desire for sexual union with the child, our society says that such love is no love at all, but abuse.
This is exactly a conceptualization of pedophile love and shows the utter misconception that our society has about it; it shows with striking logic that what is perceived here is a projection of an intellectual assumption that says:
—Pedophile love is no love. It is abuse.
Now, when we go deeper into this, we see that obviously, we are dealing here with a logical error. Of course, a man who is attracted to a little girl can love that girl in the full sense of the word.
There is no doubt about this fact, except one goes as far as saying ‘when love is erotical, then it is no love at all, but abuse.’ When you look at this statement in its generality, you see that it’s absurd. Why? Because it would apply to all love relations; hence a man who sleeps with his wife because he desires here sexually, cannot love her—conceptually speaking.
Nobody who has all senses together would say that, not even fundamentalist Christians. And yet, these same fundamentalists say that when the same happens between an adult and a child, then this love cannot be love. Our whole media discussion about the matter of adult-child sexual relations in general, and pedophilia, in particular is based upon the more or less stringent ignorance of this simple logical error.
It is a perception error. The ignorance of what pedophile love really is has reached a level that most people in our society take this logical error for granted. That this ignorance could come about is the result of a monolithic image of ‘abuse’ and ‘child abuse’ that is projected and perceived as a ‘command’, not an ‘information.’
The command is, do not dare to contradict, or you are yourself going to be labeled ‘a child abuser.’ The information element is completely distorted or is missing altogether. Instead of information, our media present us disinformation when the matter is about these issues.
The way to a deeper understanding of this specific kind of love, that may not be cognizable by a majority of humans, is to go back to the origins and begin to grasp that erotical love, also when it involves a child or children, is erós in the sense, that it is divine and unspoiled.
The next step, then, is to see that love is not identical with abuse, but can well be acted out in abusive ways. Hence, to reflect what comes first, love or abuse? Obviously, it is love, not abuse that was first. Abuse is thus a way to mishandle love, to mishandle our emotions, or to mishandle our power over another.
However, here again, the monolithic image of pedophilia projected by the media comes in and says, the very fact that an adult possesses by nature more power than a child means that this kind of love can only be exercised in abusive ways. This image again hides an information element.
The information it veils is that a child can say No to any caress and to any sexual advance, and is not per se a victim only because he or she is a child.
That children do have this power to say No, also in sexual relations with adults, was namely established by two American psychiatrists, Lauretta Bender and Abram Blau who published back in 1937 one of the earliest research reports on adult-child sexual relations.
—See Lauretta Bender & Abram Blau, The Reaction of Children to Sexual Relations with Adults, American J. Orthopsychiatry 7 (1937), 500–518.
Their research showed with much evidence that children are not ‘automatically traumatized’ when they enjoy sex with adults to which they have consented and that the most accurate indicator for child trauma to occur is the use of violence, threat, coercion or brute force by the adult partner.
Further research that I quote all along my extensive study Love or Morality confirmed that children can enjoy sexual relations with adults without any psychic damage or trauma response. However, the general public ignores this research that is known only to a hand full of intellectuals, and some of the more liberal psychologists and psychiatrists, who, however, in the present witchhunt have to fear for their reputation if they open their mouth and tell the truth. In this domain, it’s really as Goethe wrote it in ‘Faust,’ what must not be cannot be. The matter has been declared taboo, anybody who raises a veto gets a violent response to ‘shut up’ if not a death threat, so that the total violation of the constitutional principle of free speech can be upheld for these issues.
To come back at a unifying perception of love, and without conceptualizing it, we cannot but admit that also pedophile love is love in the true sense and not per se abuse.
Most people, it seems to me, are to a point brainwashed by the media that they are really not in state to draw such a dead simple conclusion. They have an angst that is almost existential and that must be defended. It is defended by the repetition of formulas, foul language, aggressive and inquisitive questioning, if not outright violence. This fear is stirred by our authorities, which is why I am saying that as long as this fear barrier stands in the way to understanding and socially coding adult-child sexual relations, we cannot, and will not, reach world peace, but worldwide civil war!
I can see a parallel on the level of the common man that equates this split paradigm when they conceptualize love as ‘platonic’ parental love (while psychoanalysis has clearly shown that parental love can well be and often is erotically tinted) and equally ‘platonic’ love of children for their parents. The latter assumption was said to be a myth by Sigmund Freud and the whole of Freudian psychoanalysis that says children do have erotic feelings for their parents, at least at a certain stage of their development, that is, during the genital phase, the so-called ‘Oedipus Complex,’ when the child is between about 5 and 7-years old. However, as I am showing further down in this book and in my book Normative Psychoanalysis, this assumption by psychoanalysis is a fallacy as well.
As here is not the place to discuss this, I would rather like to elucidate what I mean when I say that the split between erós and agapé needs to be healed.
I simply say we do not need these notions, and can reformulate love as unity, as an experience of unity on all levels, sensual-sexual, tactile, intellectual and spiritual. When we do that, the fear of the ‘child sex taboo’ may vanish off and one may begin to wonder how it could possibly happen that an emotional attraction to a child can turn sexual, may turn sexual, for reasons we do not yet fully understand. This sexual attraction then can be casual, it can be temporary, it can be random, it can be surprising, it can be consistent, and it can in extreme cases turn into an obsession.
And, of course, it can turn violent and abusive, and this namely happens when the desire is not cognized, but repressed and feared. Natural love controls itself, as sex research has shown with abundant evidence, but when love becomes thwarted and denied, when it is repressed, when it is feared and demonized, there is danger that the desire turns into a violent urge, which then may be too strong and too confusing for the person to handle — hence the danger of a passion crime.
It is a matter of social policy making to reduce the fear instead of raising it with every year, to draft policies that socially code certain socially acceptable forms of adult-child sensual and randomly sexual relations when they occur outside of the family, that is, between partners who are not related in direct line.
Love or Abuse?
Any kind of work to be engaged at this point needs empathic support from an expert who knows to untie the inner knot. It’s really like a knot, an entanglement situation, both inside and in outer reality. Relationships, when the loving response has been thwarted early in life, tend to be strained and ‘calculated;’ they tend to be either ‘icy’ or are outright codependent and fusional, which is a condition not conducive for love to blossom.
The silent question I start out with is ‘What was first, love or abuse?’ I ask the question not as a matter of personal fancy but because today, after a glance at the content of our international media, you really gain the impression that what controls the public debate is abuse, not love. And yet, it seems to me that love was first, as love is the natural condition. In a society that has forgotten about love, it is not astonishing to see scientists and researchers focused on abuse.
From a simple perspective of common sense, one should think that logically, what first should be elucidated is love, not its accidented variant. It’s very similar with Western medicine that equally is focused only upon the pathological, instead of finding out, first of all, what health is all about!
As in the times of religious perversion, crusades and witch hunts, today again, at the start of the 21st century, certain forms of love have been declared anathema. This may not surprise when you consider the general level of fragmentation in our society; where life has lost its wholeness, where love is schizophrenically split into acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior, people tend to create fictitious concepts in a virtual reality of fake-values. It seems to me that only poets and lovers are able to see through the thick layers of hypocrite life denial that is currently the invisible paradigm of the majority of humanity — at least in the part of the world that has incorporated postmodern international consumer culture as its new credo and lifestyle. In a climate of bewilderment where erotic love is today again equated with abduction and abuse, there is only one step to end up in hysteria — individually and collectively. Western society has done that step, and thoroughly! It has ended up not only in hysteria, but in public paranoia.
Today we should do a retrospection and ask how this was possible, after Freud? And how it’s possible that after the turn into the 21st millennium we have ended up in the Middle-Ages? Timewave Zero, it is true, shows us cyclic patterns in human evolution — and it indeed shows that the present times are most closely related to the early Middle-Ages. However, a timelined view of human history hides the spiraled growth patterns that characterize all evolution.
When we progress, this is not a linear movement, but a spiraled one because the spiral is the only form in nature that ideally combines the line with the circle. And when we advance, we not only relocate farther but also higher. While the line leaves its root, the circle stays with it, and the spiral, while advancing, carries its root along. When that happens, we are again within that pattern, but at a higher level of it. In modern systems theory, this is expressed in the formula ‘all growth is nonlinear.’
Applying this insight to humanity’s psychological evolution, we see that right now we are evolving from the Pisces Age to the Aquarius Age. During this transition, we not only assimilate more of the qualities associated with the Aquarius, but we also go through a catharsis regarding the Pisces qualities that have hurt us collectively, such as ruthless group pressure, dogmatism, absolutism, fanaticism and a ‘sectarian,’ limited, shell-based worldview. This means that we are now more instrumental for dealing with the pattern effectively, and perhaps dissolve it completely.
What kind of pattern is that? Astrologically it is the Pisces archetype, as opposed to the Aquarius archetype. It is a pattern of energies that puts the collective, the group and the majority’s rules, opinions and feelings higher than the individual’s. It values the group before it values the individuals who compose the group. It considers standard solutions before it considers intelligent solutions. It typically fears the marginal and original and blesses uniformity and herd thinking. Its educational paradigm is one of mass indoctrination and mass alphabetization. It educates by disempowering the child, and by using threat and authority-based hierarchy, and strong competition. It basically positions the human as opposed to nature or as ‘master over nature’ and, as a result, is rather hostile toward the child’s expressing their natural emotions, feelings and desires.
This paradigm is the reigning educational paradigm of the great monotheistic religions and it often serves for justifying ritual abuse and even the torture of children as a disciplinary measure and in the name of some religious authority, savior, leader, ideology or dictator. Now, what we face, especially in controversial matters of public discussion is a resistance that operates in the masses’ collective unconscious because of their fear to progress into the unknown.
This unknown is not so unknown after all. It’s the Aquarius paradigm. The Aquarius Age will definitely be one of more individuality, more democracy, and more choice at every level of life. The Aquarian energy which is the energy of the planet Uranus, as opposed to the Neptunian energy that reigns Pisces, will help us face and confront rather then repress our hitherto unconscious desires and render them conscious so that we can deal with them on a more rational basis.
We will then be able to see love as love and abuse as abuse, or love as encompassing erotic love (erós) and abuse as a form of psychological, physical or sexual distortion that is created by the psychological mechanism of repression, and that is regularly acted out in a violent manner. To see this will render us sensitive to the fact that nonviolent and consenting forms of love are not abuse.
