Blog 26 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

http://midsummernewyearofjohns.blogspot.com/2012/06/blog-1

Lilacs, Leaves, and Sky.

The most difficult of issue in our times is to imagine a return of self-sacrifice as a social practice.

How is this to be accomplished after two hundred years of confidently irresponsible action by those who (following the Arab scientists, the medieval alchemists, Bacon, Paracelsus, Descartes, Leibniz) believed that “…man had reached the point at which he could be confident of his progressive ability to control nature”? (--Clarence Glacken, Preface to “Traces….”) Are we not at the point at which most everyone recognizes the disaster brought by overconfidence, as Peter Bruegel the Elder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Brueghel_the_Elder did when painting (16th c.) the Fall of Icarus? http://avatar-life.org/iki-large.jpg  

A realistic interpretation of Icarus’ fate is the sight of his leg (port and stern of the sailing ship) sticking out of the water. It is evidence beyond doubt that he is drowning and can no longer be rescued.

Icarus father http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus , Daedalus (were he able to predict the consequences of his son’s overconfidence), would have had no other choice than to warn his son by not offering advice not to fly too close to the sun, but by self-sacrificing himself. Only by giving his life as evidence of the seriousness of his word as to the consequences, could Daedalus perhaps have avoided his son growing up overconfident and careless.

The situation of humankind vis a viss the planet Earth runs a close, yet even worse parallel to the fate of Icarus. If Icarus were to fall today, Bruegel would have him fall into the plastic vortex in the middle of the Pacific Ocean http://blog.greeneventshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/image001.jpg .

In spite of the dire circumstances of our planet, is self-sacrifice an extreme counteraction? At other times and other places, I have called self-sacrifice a ‘not-violent’ act (see Esos’s Chronicles). Unfortunately, Judaism and Western Christianity has for a thousand years been preaching otherwise. Christianity’s first example of ‘suicide’ is by way of projecting it as the deserved fate of a traitor, Judas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Autun_cath%C3%A9drale_chapiteau_pendaison_de_Judas.jpg , the other example is the refusal of Western religions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_on_suicide to offer suicides a burial place in the churchyard.

The harsh opinion cast by many religions on ‘suicide’, has prevented our ‘civilization’ from contemplating the role of self-sacrifice as a serious tool by humankind in assuring a stable, egalitarian, and nature respecting society.

In spite of the censure, there are many examples when society has welcomed self-sacrificial acts by individuals as occasions for a given society’s awakening and rebirth. This generally occurs when some student, protesting oppression, commits “suicide”, as for example, the death of Romas Kalanta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romas_Kalanta  in Lithuania under Soviet rule. However, when Ādolfs Buķis did the same (1993) in post-Soviet Latvia to protest Latvian government corruption and allegedly named a several persons who believed to be guilty, he was called mentally unstable, and the promised police investigation never occurred.

Needless to say, ‘suicide’ is today closely linked to ‘terrorists’, because in the presence of a repressive attitude, it is impossible to engage in discussing the subject, whether in theological circles, let alone in the public media. Suicide is also used by governments in ‘false flag’ operations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_affair , because it enables these to further repress self-sacrifice by calling it a terrorist operation.

There is no doubt, that as long as ‘suicide’—be it out of the individual’s desire to self-sacrifice him- or herself or because of hate against whoever the individual may believe to be his or society’s enemy—the taking of innocent lives is an act contra the interests of self sacrifice. Indeed, if there were not evidence from the long ago that self-sacrifice also acts as a community creating and maintaining event, the evidence for it today would be wholly negative.

Thus, for self-sacrifice to return as a socially accepted practice, it will require the event to occur not as an event with political ends, but as an event arising out of the unconscious.

This, indeed, has begun to happen, if we take into consideration military and civilian ‘suicides’ (see blog 25), which cannot exclude the possibility of being the result of an over-virtualized man-made society or, for that matter, the intervention of the Will of God to release humankind from a man-made prison.

Blog 24 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

The Eye of a Sawn Off Limb.

Will the “miracles” of the secular age never cease? Yesterday (June 24, 2012), browsing the Internet, I came across the following item:

“Washington—Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Friday promised a new focus on suicide prevention by military leaders, not just to benefit troops and veterans, but also the country as a whole.

The article appeared in the Stars and Stripes. Quoth the Stars and Stripes on behalf of the Defense Secretary:

“’My long term goal is for the Department of Defense to be a game-changing innovator in this field,’” he said during remarks at an annual interagency suicide prevention conference. ’Just as we helped foster the jet age, the space age and the Internet, I want us to break new ground in understanding the human mind.” Panetta: http://www.stripes.com/news/panetta-suicide-problem-goes-far-beyond-combat-veterans-1.181079

What I find remarkable about Panetta’s comments is his presumption that having mentioned three earlier “miracles” by the Department of Defense  (the “we” of the Defense Secretary), he is about to “break new ground” in understanding the human mind” as a fourth “miracle”.

It is no doubt a coincidence that in a series of blogs in which I try to explain the rise of Western Christianity by way of Christianity having been usurped by a Western coup d’etad, just as I am about to close the series, there appears one from the West, who will engineer an “understanding [of] the human mind.” No lesser man, than the Pope of American Defense Leon Panetta, is prepared, through profound meditation, to gain an “understanding of the human mind.”

I could not have been presented with a more perfect example of American Christian hubris. I bet no American Christian will take a note of it, because it is such a habit of this—as some say—“Christian nation” to collaborate with secular princes, oligarchs, corporate CEOs, ministers of state, state secretaries, et al.

As the article notes, the suicide rate among American military service men and woman is increasing. Altogether some 10.3 million Americans last year are said to have tried it. The authorities are baffled why such suicides should also be increasing among the military, who have never participated directly in bloody military combat.

To give the Defence Secretary a helping hand, I would, first, suggest that he check out whether the suicide rate in a modern army does not have something to do with urban naiveté propagated by doctrinaire imaging presented and made universal by corporate  advertising, and whether the virtual nature of life in a city built of concrete, glass, and plaster board when n^thed  by the sterility of barracks life is not, by itself, an intolerable form of death.

Secondly, Panetta ought to check out whether what he calls ‘suicide’ may not have something to do with self-sacrifice—as difficult as it may be for him to imagine this. What I have in mind is that ever since the repression of Eastern Christianity and petrification of self=sacrifice into sacrifice and suicide, a military ‘suicide’ is denied the right to imagine his-her death in terms of self-sacrifice. After all, how is one to justify suicide as an act of protest against the Terminator of terrorism?

Nevertheless, such a justification may be imagined. It results from having a President who can name anyone a terrorist, and all military men and women unavoidably become the executors of the Terminator’s Will.

Let me presume that the President of Latvia decides to  call me a ‘terrorist’ and the military is asked to remove my presence from Latvia. Are the military then not the executors of a President’s will, and thereby take on the role of legitimized sacrificers sent to get me?

Which makes me wonder, whether the individual or team of individuals who receive the order to execute me are not actually priests of Templo Mayor (re Pentagon-NATO) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Templo_Mayor , but must remain unaware of the Lacanian role http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/lacanianism  assigned them by NATO psychologists?

In other words, the current plague of suicides in the military is a radical form of unconscious or Lacanian protest by X (re: a female praying mantis, see above link, facing you wearing a mask of an Aztec priest) against a government attempting to exploit human kind?.

Are not the young men and women who take their lives while serving their country committing suicide because they are made of such a ‘human mind’ (as assigned them by Panetta) as does not know the difference between suicide and self-sacrifice? Which is why they are not really committing suicide, but self-sacrificing themselves?

Blog 9 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012



A Basket of Stones.



A too literate interpretation to the question that I left off with in my previous blog (8): “Why, more kindly, not have just one of us [fish] give our life on Johns Eve?’” may shock not only fishermen, but many other people too.

This is one of the paradoxes of our time: You may talk with your doctor about your terminal illness, but you may not talk with him or her about death. At least most doctors will try to answer such a query with an answer which they consider to be a positive one.

No matter how we look at it, the subject of ‘death’ cannot escape an automatic assumption that the subject matter not only concerns ‘death’, but is also a question about suicide. While the subject of ‘death’ is a difficult one, it becomes more difficult when coupled with ‘suicide’, a word that has become a synonym of euthanasia. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtZekdMZwBE .

‘Suicide’ necessarily triggers associations with one’s Will. Is the ‘Will’ of me, a human being, or is it the ‘Will’ of God? Moreover, if a ‘suicide’ involves the Will of the perpetrator (who else is thereto blame?), why would one wish to ‘will’ one’s life an end?

The answer is given in an unconvincing manner in the following link by a ‘therapist’. Granted that a therapist is not a doctor, but given that most individuals are presumed by governments to be in one way or another ‘institutionalized’ individuals (citizen or non-citizens of some nation)—and a ‘therapist’ is certainly an institutionalized figure—a suicide is unavoidably presumed to be a cog in the wheel of the ‘institution’.  http://psychcentral.com/ask-the-therapist/2007/11/28/is-suicide-the-answer/ its modern synonym being ‘nation’.

Such a presumption is an old one (going back to Latin Rome), though the Godless or ‘God-absent’ nature of the nation was asserted only after  Enlightenment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment . For those born in the Age of Enlightenment, the creation of Adam and Eve as told in the Bible was a fairy-tale. However, by escaping the fairy-tale, Adam and Eve and all other humans became members of an institution. While the most immediate institution is a nation (sometimes also known as “my country”), all countries today belong to a league known as the United Nations (UN). So, again, like it or not, all human beings on Earth are institutionalized beings. When one thinks of it, a city (an institution) is not all that different from a prison.

The United Nations does not recognize God, but is headed by an individual known as Secretary-General, who as head of the Secretariat http://www.un.org/en/mainbodies/secretariat/ is deemed to be the de facto leader of the UN. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary-General_of_the_United_Nations . Unlike the discredited God of the pre-Enlightenment Age, the Secretary General of the UN (in spite of his credentials), does not have anywhere near the charisma that God once had.

This is just as well, because none of the members of the Security Council  of the UN (the real decision makers) wish him to have charisma. They rather keep such charisma as can be had for themselves.

One of the most charismatic God-absent nations of all post-Enlightenment nations is the United States of America. The President of U.S.A., from the very beginning recognized as the Supreme Commander of American military forces, has recently—by virtue of the Homeland Security Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeland_Security_Act —become the Supreme Commander of all Americans.

While believed to be a mortal, the President of the U.S., has nevertheless presumed for himself the charismatic role once held by God. The presumption is self-assumed (given the help of legal advisors and concurrence of the Congress) and overrides the authority of not only Americans, but any individual anywhere in the world http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tsP2hkp24s . In other worlds, the ‘citizen of the world’ has been institutionalized as subject to the U.S. President’s will.

Not unlike once deinstitutionalized Christians (the Cathars, Bogomils, Lollards, Children of Johns, etc) everyone who disputes the power of the U.S. President, becomes not only a ‘heretic’ as in the Middle Ages, but a ‘terrorist’.

If in another time and age, the only way to escape the wrath of God was to commit a preemptive act, i.e., suicide, before God had a chance to act for himself, it is not much different today. In other words, if one gets wind of being on the ‘hit list’ of the White House, one may justify to suicide, both, as a pre-emptive act and as an act of protest.