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I work as a psychotherapist with an emphasis on transformational learning - a blend of psychoanalytic and transpersonal approaches, and am the author of Self Actualization and Unselfish Love and co-author of Families Helping Families: Living with Schizophrenia, as well as Mental Illness as an Opportunity for Transformation. My interests and life have taken parallel courses, which together have woven a complex tapestry: spirituality and meditation on the one hand, and political psychology on the other. I have studied and practiced with Ram Dass, Jack Kornfield, Mata Amritanandamayi and Gurumayi Chidvilasanda, and continue a daily practice of meditation. My early political education began with the writings of the founding fathers. Over time this led to involvement in the anti-Vietnam war and anti-nuclear movements. I was interested in the powerful molding of prevailing political and economic dynamics by what C. Wright Mills called the military-industrial complex. In time I have come to the conclusion that, despite various interest groups' attempts to minimize or trivialize the concept, the deep state is a reality - decisively and covertly shaping events on both the domestic and international fronts. I am interested in an exceptionally promising alternative source of energy that has yet to see the light of day. I see the current period as a precarious form of initiation rite into the beginning of adulthood for our species, and hope to do whatever I can to help us reach this goal. Meanwhile, I seek daily to recall the reality that the same awareness (the Ever-Present-Origin) looks out through all of our eyes, and actualize this in my relationship with other beings.
(25 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 10, 2020 The Essential Adventure of our Time
Facing the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced, people can dare to be comfortable with uncertainty if they are in solidarity with each other. Feeling overwhelmed easily becomes traumatizing. But once people have tasted that they can, with each other, speak about what they see and feel is happening to our world, a number of things happen. There is a trust and realization of, "Oh my god, I'm not alone."
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, November 27, 2020 Honoring our Pain for the World
We now have a previously unprecedented communications capability to connect and share our learning with our local and global neighbors as we create a new civilization into being.
We the People have the right, the means, and the power. We are the ones we have been waiting for.
And the time is now. The window of opportunity is fast closing.
(15 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 24, 2020 Evil and The Malignant Narcissist
Erich Fromm first coined the term "malignant narcissism" in 1964, describing it as a "severe mental sickness" representing "the quintessence of evil". He characterized the condition as "the most severe pathology and the root of the most vicious destructiveness and inhumanity."
(14 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 5, 2020 What we're in for if Donald Trump wins this election; A Brief Psychological Assessment of Donald J. Trump
We require a president with the intellectual and emotional maturity needed to lead our country and represent us on the world stage. It seems that too many Americans think that tyranny could never happen here. Yet if we fail to educate ourselves to the first stages of tyranny and the traits of a person who becomes a tyrant, how will recognize it when it happens?
(9 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 11, 2020 Planet Earth - The Titanic?
While much attention is understandably on the upcoming election, we may not be thinking much about the upcoming decades. But the problems we are facing are not going away and in fact are likely to worsen if we proceed with business as usual. After tens of thousands of years, humanity has begun to move into a time of great transition. In reality we are hitting an "evolutionary wall" and need to make a pivotal turn as a species.
(44 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 13, 2020 A Caterpillar, A Butterfly and Donald Trump
We are living in a time of disintegration. For the moment Donald Trump is the maestro of this highly discordant symphony. However, it is possible to step back and view his actions as representative of a culture that is antiquated, worn-out and in fact obsolete. In the midst of the chaos Trump has brought to the fore, a new, life-affirming and sustainable culture beckons.
(12 comments) SHARE Monday, August 31, 2020 Overcoming Fear of Freedom
"...more at work here than the use of coarse language or a display of incivility by a sitting president; there is also a flirtation with violence, the rhetoric of white supremacy, and the language of expulsion and elimination. Trump's embrace of unthinkable terror takes on an even more onerous tone as the language of dehumanization and cruelty materializes into policies that work to expel people from any sense of community..."
(19 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 23, 2020 Mechanisms of Escape from Freedom
Powerlessness leads to the kind of escape that we find in the authoritarian character or else to a compulsive conforming. if we don't see the unconscious suffering of the average "robot," we fail to see the danger that threatens our culture: the readiness to accept any ideology or leader if only he promises excitement and offers a political structure and symbols which allegedly give meaning and order to a person's life.
(7 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 13, 2020 Umberto Eco's 14 Common Features of Fascism
Phil Mershon:
""fascism holds that moral conceptions, as applied to mankind, are absurd, and... impede the natural course of events: nationalism, ethnocentrism, militarism, and global conquest as an extension of realpolitik"implemented by the domination of the masses" guide the natural inheritors of... civilization to a series of battles in which the global state apparatus, in conjunction corporations subjugate mankind."
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 4, 2020 Seeking Solutions to the "World Problematique." Breakdown or Breakthrough.
Our world is in crisis. Global challenges abound. The dark side is the imminent danger of the breakdown of interdependent societies with the perspective of extermination of civilized human life. The bright side marks a possible entrance to a new stage of evolution of humanity, to the self-organization of a humane world society. Systems research and the science of complexity can help us master the current transformation.
(6 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 26, 2020 The Childhood of Tyrants
Beaten children become humiliated and confused, although soon are taught that the beating is "for their own good" and does no lasting harm. Much later, this type of beating becomes a part of their own so-called good parenting--forming the basis for much violence in the world.
(13 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 23, 2020 In Relationship With An Abusive President, Will We Be Trauma Victims or Trauma Survivors? - Part 2: A Larger Context
"...for many people in nations where authoritarianism is now achieving a foothold, it is hard to see parallels between Hitler's regime and their own governments. Many accounts of the Nazi period depict a barely imaginable series of events, a nation gone mad. That makes it easy to take comfort in the thought that it can't happen again."
(54 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 16, 2020 In a Relationship with an Abusive President: Will the Country be a Trauma Victim or Trauma Survivor?
We are in a relationship with an abusive president. The question is whether we will choose to be "trauma victims" or "trauma survivors." A country's president is often at some level envisioned much like a father. We find ourselves in an analogous condition to children living in a family with an unpredictably rageful, out-of-control father. Such circumstances can have damaging, often powerfully traumatic effects.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, July 10, 2020 The Value of Cataclysm
Humanity appears to be divided against itself and pitted against nature.
With devotion, good fortune, genuine remorse, endurance and much effort, the crises in which we will predictably continue to find ourselves may together act as an evolutionary catalyst: motivating the human species to move to a higher level of awareness and skillful action by forcing the issue: what might be called "emergence through emergency."
(11 comments) SHARE Monday, July 6, 2020 The Four Stages of Spiritual Growth
"In the last analysis, the current global crisis is a psychospiritual crisis; it reflects the level of consciousness evolution of the human species. It is, therefore, hard to imagine that it could be resolved without a radical inner transformation of humanity on a large scale and its rise to a higher level of emotional maturity and spiritual awareness...This is not only possible - it is already underway. Series: Awakening to the Energy We Call God (3 Articles, 4343 views)
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, June 8, 2020 Of Trump, Caterpillars, and Butterflies
Trump is a representative of Control Culture writ large. In Slater's analogy the caterpillar stands for the existing culture, with an emphasis on domination over people and environment, growth as the critical aspect of economy, and the belief in separation and conflict. The butterfly stands for an emerging, more mature culture that values cooperation, democracy, a sustainable economy, and a belief that everything is connected.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 4, 2020 Dumbin' Us Down
Many of us at home and abroad, are incredulously asking how the American people lifted Donald Trump into the position of President of the United States.
Will we be enduring four more years with Donald Trump at the helm? Why is our next election predicted to be even close, not to mention, "highly competitive?" Trump's approval rating has remained steady between 40% and 44%. Why aren't more of us utterly appalled?
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, June 1, 2020 The Authoritarian Character in a Time of Turmoil
Today we are immersed in a disoriented and fragmented world - faced with dwindling resources, including supplies of nonrenewable energy, a destabilized global climate, mounting environmental pollution, expanding population growth and rampant corruption. This is a formula for ecological collapse and social anarchy.
Authoritarianism is a crucial obstacle to our survival and further evolution as a species.
SHARE Thursday, May 14, 2020 Domination
To make the necessary great transition to equality and sustainability involves recognizing that, as a species and despite our many differences, we have been on a common journey. To survive we must turn our attention to discovering how the human family can live sustainably on Earth. Transforming our predicament involves appreciating our history of
being divided. This article reviews the "new authoritarianism".