Not the kind of thing I usually post here, but it does have its application to consciousness. I wrote this earlier today and posted on Facebook.
Why do they hate America?
I know Republicans think they love America — and so do arch-conservatives — but they don’t. They seem to love an idea they have, an image of America that they love. But can you say you love your country when you hate the people in it? If you hate gays, latinos, muslims, blacks, liberals, and everybody whose values you disapprove of, how can you say you love America? If you would rather that the opposition president fail than that his policies succeed in solving America’s problems, how can you love America?
Just to be plain, the same arguments i’m making about the Republicans and Conservatives could be made about many Democrats and liberals. Hatred is hatred. If I’m concentrating here on Republicans and Conservatives, it is because they often seem to think they have a monopoly on patriotism and morality.
I posed the question: Here’s my tentative answer. A sense of entitlement and dispossession. They think it’s their country and it ought to be run by them according to their values. They think anyone with different ideas or backgrounds ought to sit down and shut up and let their betters decide. And (in common with Democrats and liberals) they see this unending tide of change and want it to at least slow down, and hopefully reverse course — and don’t recognize that the tide is driven not by someone’s plot but by the nature of complex systems continually getting more complex, and ever-faster.
In other words, they sense control slipping out of their grasp, and since they see the world as if it were a huge football game, with two opposing sides, rather than, say, a game of Chinese Checkers with maybe six players, they chalk everything up to be the fault of “liberals” or “Democrats” or whatever their bugaboo is.
Regardless, it winds up with them loving an idea of America and hating the reality. It’s sad to see, and it’s dangerous as well,because it gives me little reason to assume they will play by the rules if they think they’re losing.
Is it a reflection of Rita/TGU that every action has both a positive and a negative aspect?
If I understand it, that means that Love and Hate are both “normal” reactions to choices.
True, but normal isn’t the same as desirable, or to be encouraged.
I have another “Black” problem for your consideration: For over a century and a half, the economy of this country was fueled by Black slavery; the great “Ivy League” fortunes, those that later were to endow the great banks, were built on the transportation and marketing of slaves and their labor at horrendous cost to them. Plantation owners “hired” poor whites, those that had been declared excess in Great Britain and often indentured, to drive the slaves. Regular whipping of those too slow or not sufficiently slavish was the rule, as was rape. Lest slaves join slave revolts, the whites were taught that slaves weren’t as human as they were. These whites were armed and each served regularly on an armed militia to check for and suppress slave rebellions – thus, the Second Amendment on which slave-owners insisted. Until 1809 when slave transport was banned, slave babies only hindered women’s work; afterward, the breeding of slavestock attracted the bankers’ glee. So much brutality couldn’t help but engender guilt in some of these largely unschooled white men and more surely in their wives. They went looking for religious solace, found none, and theologian-free invented southern evangelism: “I’m not perfect, but I’ve been saved, because I believe that Christ died on the cross to save those who believe that Christ died on the cross to save those who believe that ….” Then, Lincoln freed the slaves and declared them the whites’ equals. For which they’ll never forgive the federal government – check out all the anti-Lincoln books still being written. Horrors! Revenge? KKK; keep them in their place; White guns galore; invention of police forces to control Blacks and, then, these strange-speaking foreigner commie unionists, staffed by those who had gun skills – guess who. Black filled prison factories as ways to put the cork back in the bottle. This is still engrained into the American soul, the American myth; the slaves and slave-masters haven’t been freed!
Frank,
I agree, hatred comes out of feelings of dispossession and change … Rita wasn’t blowin’ smoke when she spoke of the Change going on, and TGU wasn’t kidding when they said our fate is to “participate in the coming to consciousness of a new way of being human.” Seth make a quiet oblique comment about there being three civilizations before us (ours in the last 10-15 thousand years), and said “Two of them didn’t make it.”, so I’m pretty sure what’s going on isn’t trivial!
There are innumerable hatreds, iniquities and problems we can point to today and in the past. But I believe what Einstein said: “Problems cannot be solved with the same mindset that created them.”, so I’m all in for what TGU and Rita suggest about better and closer contact with guidance.
So what can we each do, personally and individually in our daily life? I believe the several paragraphs in John’s 1/17 post (beginning with ‘The soul’s state can change with will and belief.”) lay it out well, as long as we see that information applying to each of us personally in our own life. Yes, I know it’s not the ’silver bullet’ we’d all like; I’m pretty sure this process will take decades to grow through. But the wider and deeper awareness that comes from closer connection with our own greater self is our (individual and collective) best hope against ‘not making it.’
Jim
I believe if Jung were speaking he would talk about shadow here and disowned aspects. People who are narrow and unwilling to see the black person as part of who they are or the poor as well. They are terrified of not being comfortable, rich, etc. and don’t care at whose expense this entitlement comes. I agree they have a myth they were taught about America, a lie that ignored the price paid by Native Americans and black slaves for its creation. In fact, they don’t see its diversity but ironically id with the British rule they once rebelled against. That being said I hope we haven’t drawn a tidal wave of what was disowned and end up with Donald Trump. I find it amazing that adults believe he is a superman who will come in and make them well again. I so agree Jim for those of us who can see it is time to take do all we can and hope and I add pray. We aren’t facing what Germany faced after WWI yet in people’s imagination they seem to believe we are desperate on the edge of collapse and they want a savior.
Definitely shadow aspects coming up. Just look at the hatred Obama inspires in some people They don’t know they are influenced by their own unconscious racial prejudice, which makes them get furious if someone suggests the possibility. Similarly, once you go down the “fear” road, it’s hard to have the courage to turn around and say, “no, westward lo the land is bright.” Just as the 1960 election turned into a struggle of hope v. fear (though in a far more civilized fashion than this year), so now. That’s why I think Bernie Sanders’ TV ad was so brilliant. It has the possibility of reminding people that we can live in hope, not fear, which means love and inclusion, not hatred and exclusion.
Hello Frank & All.
Thank you for everything.
And here comes Seth again. It is Session 654, April 9,1973. 9:45 P.M.Monday.(on page 279 in my book)
Quote:
In your terms, practically speaking, probable events seem to make more sense when you think of them as latent future ones.
The fact remains that there are probable past events that “can still happen” within your personal previous experience. A new event can literally be born in the past–“now”.
On a grand scale THIS RARELY OCCURS IN SUCH A WAY THAT YOU PERCEIVE IT(underlined in the book)–and you had better underline that whole last part.
A new belief in the present, however, can cause changes in the past on a neuronal level.
You must understand that basically time is simultaneous.
Present beliefs can indeed alter the past…and whatever it is…
certain alterations are made that affect cellular memory, genetic codes, or neuronal patterns in the past.
In such instances there is, as easily as can explain it, a reaching into deep biological structures as they existed at one time; at that point the probabilities are altered, and the condition erased in your present–but also in your past.
Amen.
Well, well, as Seth says on page 278, in the same book:” In certain terms time intervals are jumped, as when a “past” smell or sight is suddenly perceived with present vividness, though you would say it has already occurred in the past.”
And here comes something really good by Seth:”Under particular conditions a memory may suddenly become more real than the event of the present moment, and so rush again into your current experience as validly as when it was first lived, and even to blot out the occurrences of the moment.”
Okay, this will be the same as: What we do now(in this very moment)…alter all things done in the past as well as determine the future today).
B&B, Inger Lise.
P.S. Seth says:
This is one of the reasons why psychics` predictions often do not seem to bear out, for at every point you do indeed have the free will, through your beliefs, to alter your experience.
Your beliefs form the pivot of your present experience.
As usual, Seth is on the mark — and yet it is so HARD to be living this long life watching America peak while I was still so young and then — after the murder of John F. Kennedy — go into this long fall that seems to have no ending. I can hope that we are working out our shadow side, but that seems a dim hope sometimes.
We’re having Norwegian summer today — that is, it’s snowing to beat the band. 🙂 Beautiful
Bravo Frank! This short post is one of the most succinct and true explanations I have read of why we have such an extreme political and aspirational division within this country.
Thanks.