by Peter Onelio.
There is a choice, a deadly, diabolical decision built into the psyche of humanity that comes in the form of an ultimatum. It strips the individual of their right to live a thoroughly free life, and it lives in the blind spot of the collective unconscious, the veritable black hole at the center of the archetypal shadow. It is the rabies of the human psyche, which will bite and infect all it can to spread its soul sickness; it has always been there, and will likely always be there, so long as humanity continues not to recognize and integrate the evil within itself. It has manifested in various ways, in various degrees down through the centuries.
According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of ultimatum is: a final proposition, condition, or demand, especially one whose rejection will end negotiations and cause a resort to force or other direct action.
The World Book Dictionary defines it as: a final proposal or statement of conditions, acceptance of which is required under penalty of ending a relationship, negotiations, or of punitive action.
One sure sign of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is the giving of an ultimatum. If a narcissistic person or group is confronted with their own shadow, or is working to put themselves in the power position over another, they will give their victims an ultimatum.
When this disorder spreads through a collective it is known as group narcissism neurosis in the psychology of Erich Fromm, and the totalitarian psychosis according to C.G. Jung. Its authoritarian pattern of language and domination are symptoms of what’s called the archetype of the negative father. Due to the mass unconsciousness that has reigned for thousands of years this pattern has clearly emerged through Christianity, as well as other institutions and systems. The negative father archetype can be identified by its “calcification of consciousness which, out of fear of his own weakness, clings and becomes addicted to power, dictating to and attempting to control all who fall under [its] dominion. This figure becomes rigidified, egocentric, set in [its] ways,” writes Paul Levy, author of several books on wetiko, the Native American name for this psychosis. “The archetypal figure of the dark father symbolically represents a dominant position in consciousness—a ruling principle—which has outlived its usefulness, and thus becomes an obstacle to the further development of consciousness.” Its perception is void of the subtle nuances of life, all perspective is funneled and qualified into wrong and right, as it sees fit. “The negative father archetype, with its lust for and addiction to power is the mythic process being played out collectively on the world stage in endless iterations; it is the very process informing the oppression of countless people worldwide as well as the destruction of our planet.”
The foundational doctrine of Christianity, the “do you take Christ as your personal savior,” when taken in human terms, and not attributed to an indefinable, unlimited God, resembles a symptom of this archetype and narcissistic personality disorder. This doctrine is taught as the grace of God; the choice of forgiveness is grace, not forgiveness itself is grace. This is no choice in the truest sense of the word, this is a Hobson’s choice, a “my way or the highway” proposition. From the World Book Dictionary, Choice is defined as: The power or chance to choose. Instead, this looks to be a violent threat, a cosmic gun to the head. The doctrine itself seems to be contrary to the underlying theme of scripture. As it says in 2 Corinthians 3:17 “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”
How has humanity not seen that the definition of grace has been changed? True grace would be forgiveness whether we deserved it or not, whether we made the right choice or not. They say believe in Jesus and you shall be saved. But switch the wording and it speaks more truthfully: Take Jesus’ offering of forgiveness, or you will be eternally punished.
Would God, in his one gesture of redemptive help to humanity, resemble a symptom of narcissism, God who is the apex of love? Taken in this light, it is a conditional love, therefore a narcissistic love.
This warping of words, until they no longer hold any semblance to their original meaning, is a form of violent language, if not diabolical, deceitful language. “The Buddha pointed out that lying—in one form or another, be the lies big or small, lies of commission or omission, to oneself or others—is the origin of all evil,” writes Levy.
But what exactly is evil? How could one identify it in almost any situation without pointing out narrow, subjective examples?
Gaskell’s Dictionary of Scripture & Myth defines evil as “the negation of God or good, this would indicate that God is synonymous with freedom, not subjugation or restriction as the moral face of Christianity would lead one to believe. This does not denote anarchy or despotism, for if the presence of God–or good—were to exclude evil, one’s seeming excessive freedom, would ultimately not cause evil to another.”
In other words we can say evil is the: suppression, oppression or punishment of someone’s freedom to creatively express themselves in the living and development of their lives and to ultimately be whole individuals.
We see further evidence of this subtle form of evil from the innovator behind nonviolent communication, Marshal Rosenberg. Here he discusses where the domination system began and its inherent use of violent, domination language. He says, “…it started with myths that began to develop long ago about human nature—myths that humans were basically evil, selfish, and that the good life is all about heroic forces crushing evil forces. [Walter] Wink wrote about how domination cultures use certain teachings about God to maintain oppression. That’s why priests and kings have often been closely related. The kings needed the priests to justify the oppression, to interpret the holy books in ways that justified punishment, domination, and so forth.
“So we’ve been living under a destructive mythology for a long time, and that destructive mythology requires a certain language. It requires a language that dehumanizes people, turns them into objects. We have learned to think in terms of moralistic judgments of one another. We have words in our consciousness like right, wrong, good, bad selfish, unselfish, terrorists, freedom fighters. And connected to these is the concept of justice based on deserve—that if you do one of these bad things, you deserve to be punished. If you do the good things, then you deserve to be rewarded.
“Unfortunately, for about eight thousand years we have been subjected to that consciousness. I think that’s the core of violence on our planet: faulty education.”
The Christian faith itself sits on a domination-centric foundation, to witness and convert means first to induce guilt, to convince a person that they have done bad simply by existing, and are evil to the core. This is the earmark of violent language, yet this is the bread and butter of the Christian faith. Not one of love, acceptance or understanding unless one has first submitted to the doctrine. No person can escape the subjugation of this ideology or at least, if they do not submit, they will be labeled a sinner or heretic and condemned for not accepting it. Levy writes in his book, Awakened by Darkness, that “Nietzsche thought the morality of the Judeo-Christian tradition was a hoax. He was of the opinion that the idea of sin was a ruse invented by wretched and deranged people to achieve a magical hold over other people by playing the “ravishing music” of guilt in their souls. Once our unconscious subscribes to the notion that we are guilty sinners, to quote Nietzsche, “The sufferer takes the hint, he has understood, and from now on he is like a hen about whom a circle has been drawn. Now he will never escape from that confining circle; the patient has been transformed into a ‘sinner.’”
Examining the center of the Christian doctrine, symbolically, what does the figure of Christ actually represent? According to the Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis, “Gods [spirits, angels, and demons] are metaphors of archetypal behaviors and myths are archetypal enactments.” If gods are metaphors for behaviors, they are states of mind and being that are inhabited and experienced, not an idol to be worshiped and subjugated to, but as an ideal, endeavoring to be as life-affirming as can be developed into or conceived.
As Paul Levy writes, ”The figure of Christ…is a living symbol of the God-image of the Western psyche…[it] is the core archetype and supreme symbol of the collective unconscious. It is the collective unconscious’s projection of itself, representing the Self as well as the individuation process. The God-image expresses our conception of and relation to God, while at the same time being the image through which God (i.e., the Self) is revealing itself to us…it is our image of God that makes us…Seen symbolically…the figure of Christ is too one-sided a symbol of the two-sided, bipolar archetype of the Self. Christ himself is too overly light and identified with the good, and as the Gnostics realized, he ”cast off his shadow from himself, which Satan is carrying.” Therefore, it is our job to develop by acknowledging our inner darkness, instead of attributing it to some malevolent figure to be expunged at all costs. We must also own the positive, repressed aspects of our shadow. As Levy continues, “We are just as willing to project onto someone else, be it Christ, Buddha, or our Guru, our positive or golden shadow, which is our highest genius. It is time for us to withdraw our positive shadow projections and creatively express and incarnate our true genius, for God’s sake, as well as our own. The world needs, and deserves, nothing less. To own our shadow (both positive and negative) and withdraw our projections is to embrace all of ourselves.”
By projecting the solution to one’s evil on an outside savior rather than by facing it themselves and integrating it, one is protecting the evil that has supposedly been ameliorated and exorcised, allowing it to flourish and expand in the blind spot of their individual and collective unconscious. As Jung writes, “Man’s worst sin is unconsciousness.” The guilt that one accepts by allowing themselves to remain unconscious of their own evil is penance for the tension and difficulties that come with true character development and individuation. This forfeiting of one’s duty comes with another layer of guilt, not wanting to bear this guilt alone, it is preferred to coerce others to bear it also, or suffer the shame and punishment of being free. Further disowning Satan and dimming the mirror of internal reflection, relegating him to superficial associations as promiscuity and rock music, this keeps humanity from seeing that the base evil that propels the world into smithereens is within them.
In his book Unmasking the Powers, Walter Wink shows how the Bible depicts the symbol of Satan as an ultimately positive force through his oppression of Job, as a bringer of light, of consciousness. “If we refuse to face our own evil…our own evil comes up to meet us in the events triggered by our very unconsciousness. Satan is not then a mere idea invented to “explain” the problem of evil, but is rather the distillate precipitated by the actual existential experience of being sifted. When God cannot reach us through our conscious commitment, sometimes there is no other way to get our attention than to use the momentum of our unconsciousness to slam us up against the wall.” He goes on to say, “Satan is not evil, or demonic, or fallen, or God’s enemy. This adversary is merely a faithful, if overzealous, servant of God, entrusted with quality control and testing. Satan, in fact, prompts God and humanity…to explore the problem of evil and righteousness at a depth never before plumbed—and seldom since.”
The ultimatum can then be thought of as an intensification of our unacknowledged shadow material; as an overzealous act of Satan; or a symptom of the global dreambody.
“The dreambody,” Levy says, “acts as a bridge that…links the inner world of our psyche with the outside world, while simultaneously being a manifestation of their inseparability.” From his book on the subject, Arnold Mindell, analyst and pioneer of process oriented psychology, describes the dreambody as “the way in which messages from the unconscious are communicated through physical symptoms, gestures and other bodily phenomena…” Levy elaborates that the dreambody “can express itself in dreams, thoughts, feelings…as well as synchronistically, through events in the outside world.” In other words, the dreambody mirrors how we perceive ourselves and the world in a feedback loop, while at the same time trying to bring us to awareness of our higher potential. “When we don’t recognize what the dreambody is revealing to us, “Levy continues, “the dreambody turns up the heat, until we become fully cooked, so to speak, invariably developing acute individual symptoms or even a collective species-wide psychic epidemic.”
The Bible portrays the dreambody as God the Father or Yahweh (which can be translated “He causes to happen what happens”) which draws us closer to wholeness by whatever means necessary, its Christ aspect compelling us; and other times, its Satan aspect forcefully pushing. Mindell writes that the global dreambody, as a whole, “creates and heals itself…can destroy or make itself ill.” This correlates to the Old Testament description of God in Deuteronomy and Isaiah where Yahweh says, “…I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal…I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.”
Perhaps some current developments in our world point to an intensifying of symptoms in the global dreambody, an even more pervasive ultimatum that almost no individual can escape from.
Taken as a psychological symbol, the ultimatum could be considered the Mark of the Beast of Revelation, either taken in the forehead (thought, belief), or on the hand (physical tribute or action) in case the person does not buy into the verity of the ultimatum.
There is a correlate to the Beast in Hebrew mythology known as the golem. Fashioned out of clay, it is then animated by placing the word “truth” on its forehead or beneath its tongue. When we take the ultimatum as exclusive truth we are in thrall and animated by the rigid, father archetype these mythological characters represent, becoming literal and mechanistic in our behavior and thinking, ultimately destructive. This truth is not the truth that helps, but the truth of strict moral rightness, superiority, and legalism. This is a militant upholding of the letter by any means necessary and despite the consequences, and not of the spirit of the law. Our goal should not be the search and adherence to seeming objective truth, whether through science or religion, but a working thesis of the mechanics of evil in its unlimited variations, and our continued endeavoring to identify and avoid them. If we have learned nothing else from such behavior and ideologies, “truth” is the front door through which evil walks in.
Thus, the ultimatum requires all to submit, the issues it decides to manifest through is whatever it can throw the widest net over, it will embody itself through concerns that seem to affect as many people as possible. This is disturbing in that it can infect nearly every corner of the globe, but can also, consequently, bring a greater majority of people to a higher realization of our inter-connectedness, if it can be seen for the gift it truly is. As Mindell concludes, “A terrifying symptom is usually your greatest dream trying to come true.”
Could this be the underlying lesson the ultimatum is trying to teach humanity: that we must learn to give ourselves true power to choose our destinies out of pure desire and love, thereby becoming free and whole individuals by our own volition? If, indeed, the concept of God is synonymous with freedom, it occurs to me that it would be more God-like to simply accept everyone born, just as they are. To exercise a compassionate attitude towards people’s flaws and opinions. To coexist and come to mutual understandings based on feelings and needs. Not a conforming and breaking of one’s will and domestication of their individuality. Our conversion of them would be to teach and show them with patience and empathy to be like this towards others and themselves. Encouraging to express oneself, drawing out the wisdom that is in man, for that is the etymology of education; not a putting in of knowledge, but a drawing out of wisdom.
There have been many life-affirming, freedom-inducing ideals and concepts developed over the millennia. The golden rule is found in almost all wisdom traditions; nonviolent communication as mentioned earlier; and the Socratic Oath (also known as the Teacher’s Oath); all would be well worth studying, adhering to and built upon.
So let us encourage every person to travel their own path and find their own inner wisdom to share with the world; not coercing or forcing or threatening to adhere to a certain ideology, this has already surpassed that which we’ve come to know as Godliness.