Deep Denial

I’ve been waiting for something worth writing down to come to me after reading Ishmael.

Perhaps I should still be waiting….

In the meantime, this came to me this morning.

Deep denial is not the denial of bad outcomes, like “global warming” or “injustice.” It’s the denial that we get what we are after. That beneath all the excuses around “unintended consequences” is a denial that these consequences were intended, hoped for, all along.

This touches on one of the ways Ishmael struck me as profound. Unmasking the denial that places a life “affirming” veneer over-top the Takers’ destructive ambitions.

A few years ago, I discovered a simple equation: Control = Death; that the only way we can control anything is to kill it and therefore all seeking after control is ultimately destructive.

At first I thought, “Wow! People need to learn about this! If they only knew!”

A significant part of my personal disillusionment has been to realize that this is far from the case. This morning’s whisper provided a conclusion to this disillusionment and an understanding of why it is so.

The Taker’s pledge was to put the will-to-control over life and seek out all that this sets into motion. The results are not unintended. While Will is a poor way to create anything it is perfectly suited to destruction. The Sky God’s Will is surely being done.

Quinn has dramatized how this is so. Bohm and Krishnamurti – and now Kajtar – have been working on how this happens as a result of the incoherence inherent in our uncritical acceptance of the illusions put forth by thought to make some imperfect “sense” out of its constant flow through our conscious attention.

This is where this deep denial functions. It is the final – in every sense of the term – refuge of Ego. It is Hitler’s Bunker under the ruins of Berlin. It is the rage of Ego against the – in its eyes – feeble and worthless wretches unworthy of its greatness and deserving of the destruction raining down from all sides.

This touches, directly, on the other theme of Ishmael that struck me. That the Taker’s creed or story is an attempt to end evolution with us and forever. This ambition is not merely to accept as inevitable the results of “collateral damage” and “unintended consequences,” but to embrace the Apocalyptic as the greatest aim we can aspire to. “Apres moi, le deluge.”

This arrogance of a dead king expanded out to encompass the desired end for humanity itself, at least as envisioned by the Takers.

The blinders we all wear to the violence around us works to hide this grand delusion from us. It keeps us mouthing the destructive language of “Salvation” only now extended to include non-human victims, Whales, or Bears, or “the Planet” itself. Hidden within layers of denial this is the ultimate denial that our aim is the destruction of all that might live and ever evolve. And for what? Because we’d rather believe ourselves to be right than to allow for the uncertainty that is at the center of life and the ways in which it changes through time. – Including our ultimate incapacity to ever truly encompass how life evolves within any set of so-called “Laws” we might write down. This, an accident of history as the language of reductivist Physics was carried over into the oxymoronic “life sciences.”

The key to coming out of any delusion is to accept the depth of its hold on us. So long as we remain in a habitual cycle of striving after symptomatic “relief” we will continue to be trapped within its maze. Nothing can be done without first accepting the depth of our denial and that when bad things result from our actions they are not a “complication” to be swept out of view, but most likely the very point of our deluded striving.

Here we run into the entire predicament of our Enormity. Enormity cannot be “reformed.” It cannot be solved. We cannot be saved, or save anything, from it. What we can do is sound its depths and find how it has grown out of our deepest denials.