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THE
MADNESS OF GEORGE W. BUSH:
A
REFLECTION OF OUR COLLECTIVE PSYCHOSIS by
Paul Levy George
W. Bush is ill. He has a psycho-spiritual dis-ease of the soul, a sickness
that is endemic to our culture and symptomatic of the times we live in.
It’s an illness that has been with us since time immemorial. Because
it’s an illness that's in the soul of all of humanity, it pervades the
field and is in all of us in potential at any moment, which makes it
especially hard to diagnose. Bush's malady is quite different from
schizophrenia, for example, in which all the different parts of the
personality are fragmented and not connected to each other, resulting in a
state of internal chaos. As compared to the dis-order of the
schizophrenic, Bush can sound quite coherent and can appear like such a
"regular," normal guy, which makes the syndrome he is suffering
from very hard to recognize. This is because the healthy parts of his
personality have been co-opted by the pathological aspect, which drafts
them into its service. Because of the way the personality self-organizes
an outer display of coherence around a pathogenic core, I would like to
name Bush's illness "malignant egophrenic (as compared to
schizophrenic) disorder," or "ME disorder," for short. If
ME disorder goes unrecognized and is not contained, it can be very
destructive, particularly if the person is in a position of power. In
much the same way that a child's psychology cannot be understood
without looking at the family system he or she is a part of, George
Bush does not exist in isolation. We can view Bush and his entire
Administration (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Ashcroft, Powell, Wolfowitz, etc),
as well as the corporate, military industrial complex that they are
co-dependently enmeshed with, the media that they control, and the voters
that support them, as interconnected parts of a whole system, or a
"field." Instead of
relating to any parts of this field as an isolated entity, it’s
important to contemplate the entire interdependent field as the
"medium" though which malignant egophrenia manifests and
propagates itself. ME disease is a field phenomenon, and needs to be
contemplated as such Being
a field phenomenon, malignant egophrenia is non-local in nature, which
means that it is not bound by the limitations of time or space. Being non-local, this disease pervades and underlies the entire
field and can therefore manifest anywhere, through anyone and at any
moment. The disease's non-local nature makes the question of who has the
disease irrelevant, as we all have it in potential. It is more a question
of whether or not we are aware of our susceptibility to fall prey to the
disease. This awareness itself
serves as an immunization that protects us from the pernicious effects of
this insidious illness, thereby allowing us to be of genuine help to
others. Bush,
like all of us, is both a manifestation of this deeper field and
simultaneously an agent affecting this field. He’s become so fully taken
over by the disease, all the while not suspecting a thing, that he’s
become a "carrier" for this deadly disease, thus infecting the
field around him. He’s become a portal through which the field around
him "warps" in such a way as to feed and support his pathogenic
process. A non-local, reciprocally co-arising and interdependent field of
unconscious denial and cover-up gets constellated around Bush to enable
and protect his pathology. Falling
victim to one's own deception as Bush has can have a very mesmerizing and
gripping effect on others, as he appears so convinced of what he is
saying. To quote C. G. Jung, one of the greatest psychiatrists of the
twentieth century, "Nothing has such a convincing effect as a lie one
invents and believes oneself." Bush has the seductive coherence of
someone who is fanatically identified, like the typical fundamentalist,
with only one side of a polarity. Thomas Merton, commenting on the case of
the obviously demented Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, points out
"One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial
was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly
sane." A key feature of malignant egophrenia is that it is very hard
to recognize when someone is a carrier, because the person can seem so
normal and even endearing. The person afflicted can be very
"charming" and have a certain type of charisma that can entrance
those who don't see through their subterfuge People
who don't recognize Bush's illness and support him are colluding with and
enabling in the co-creation of the pathological field that is birthing
itself through him into the human family. People who vote for Bush are
somehow blind to what is very obvious to others. It’s as if they’ve
become hypnotized and fallen under the spell that Bush is casting. People
who support Bush become unwitting agents through which this non-local
disease feeds and replicates itself.
By supporting Bush they are collaborating with and becoming parts of
the greater, interconnected and self-organizing field of the disease. The situation with Bush is analogous
to when seemingly good, normal, loving Germans supported Hitler, believing
he was a good leader trying to help them. The German people didn't realize
that the virulent pathogen malignant egophrenia had taken possession of
Hitler and was incarnating itself through him. By not seeing this and
supporting Hitler, they became agents used by this non-local, deadly
disease to propagate itself. This was a collective psychosis, and this is
what is taking place in our country right now. Whereas Hitler’s evil was
more overt in its cruelty and sadism, Bush’s dark side is much more
hidden and disguised, which makes it particularly dangerous. Just
like Hitler struck a chord deep in the German unconscious, Bush is
touching something very deep in the American psyche. Bush is acting out on
the world stage an under-developed psychological process that deals
simplistically with issues such as good and evil. It’s as if he hasn't
grown out of and fully differentiated from the realm of mythic, archetypal
fantasy that is typical of early adolescence. This immature aspect of
Bush's process speaks to and resonates with those voters who support him,
as it is a reflection of their own under-developed inner process. At
the root of Bush's pathology is a deep dissociation. Like the terrorists,
he has split-off from his own darker half, projecting the shadow "out
there," and then tries to destroy this dis-owned shadow.
By projecting the shadow onto each other, Bush and the terrorists are
each seeing their own shadow reflected in the other. They see each other
as criminals, as the incarnation of evil. By projecting the shadow like
this, they locate the evil "out there," which insures that they
don't have to recognize the evil within themselves.
Ironically, by fighting against their own shadow in this way, they
become possessed by the very thing they are trying to destroy, thereby
perpetuating a never-ending cycle of violence. Projecting
the shadow like this, to quote Jung, "deprives us of the capacity to
deal with evil.” By projecting the shadow, Jung continues "evil has
us in its grip…….for only the fool can permanently disregard the
conditions of his own nature. In fact, this negligence is the best means
of making him an instrument of evil." By projecting the shadow, Bush
is unwittingly being a conduit for the deepest, archetypal evil to possess
him from behind, beneath his conscious awareness, and to act itself out
through him. At the same time, ironically enough, he identifies with the light
and imagines that he is divinely inspired. People afflicted with extreme
cases of egophrenia like Bush can become so inflated that they believe
that any action they desire is justified in the name of God, as they can
rationalize it as being God's will. Unable to self-reflect, they are
convinced of the rightness of their viewpoint, which they consider
non-negotiable. They react to other people who don’t agree with them and
who don’t support their narcissism not just with aggression but with
sadism. They have contempt for and flagrantly violate the rule of law,
which they believe themselves to be above. Bush
has fallen into a state that is the embodiment of arrogance. Succumbing to
the temptation of power, he has become corrupt, which is the inevitable
consequence when one prefers power over truth. Bush has fallen into a
vicious cycle where he is compulsively driven to do everything and
anything he can to hold onto the position of power he finds himself in.
He has become addicted to power, which generates a
counter-incentive to self-reflect. Underlying this resistance to look in
the mirror, whose inner meaning is “shadow holder,” is an
unwillingness and seeming inability to experience his own sense of sin,
guilt and shame. It is as if he is afraid of being exposed, of being found
out. To quote Jung, a person stricken with a pathology such as Bush
“cannot endure his own guilt, just as he could not help incurring it. He
will stoop to every kind of self-deception if only he can escape the sight
of himself…..which consists essentially in one hand not knowing what the
other one is doing, in wanting to jump over one’s own shadow, and in
looking for everything dark, inferior and culpable in others.” All of
these factors set in motion a self-perpetuating cycle of denial, cover-up
and projecting the shadow, all of which are based on a lie. Bush then
falls into an endless loop of hiding from his own lie, which is to say,
from himself. This process allows Bush to becomes a conduit for egophrenia
to take him over and incarnate its malignant aspect through him. Malignant
egophrenia is crazy-making. It induces a very hard to recognize form of
insanity. It's a world where up is down, as its flawless illogic is
convoluted and inverted at its core. People with egophrenia do not
recognize the mirror-like nature of reality, so they accuse other people
of doing what they themselves are doing. For example, Bush is talking
about himself when he accuses Saddam Hussein of being “a man who has
defied the world,” and “a man who has made the United Nations look
foolish.” When we fall prey to egophrenia, we are unable to recognize
that we are taken over, as we become bewitched by our own projections.
Part of the disease is that when we point at it and call it by its true
name - as being a form of insanity called ignorance - people who are
stricken with the disease will see us as the one's who are crazy. Unless
we recognize the insidious nature of this non-local disease, there is a
crazy-making field around it that will make us a part of itself.
Collective psychosis is like that. One
of the signatures of ME disease is that it hooks people through their
unconscious blind-spot, so when people are afflicted by this deadly
disease they are truly asleep to what is getting acted out through them.
Bush doesn’t suspect a thing about his pathology because the field
around him unconsciously conspires and colludes with and enables his
psychosis. Bush himself is being manipulated, used and victimized, like a
marionette on a string, by a deeper matrix of cover-up and deceit that has
been perpetrated by him and his very regime, and has now taken on an
autonomous life of its own. This disease, if it gets out of control, means
self-destruction for both victim and perpetrator. There are no winners.
The entire interconnected web that supports Bush can be recognized to be
tentacles of this virulent, non-local pathogen that, to the extent that it
is not seen, is potentially gaining more and more sovereignty. Like a
sci-fi movie, we have dreamed up a higher-dimensional Frankenstein monster
that has taken on a life of its own and truly threatens all of us. Malignant
egophrenia is both an expression of and at the root of the extreme
polarization and dissociation in both the human psyche and the world
process at large. We can even say that it’s the "bug" in the
system that has in-formed and given shape to all of the conflict and
disharmony of human relationship. ME disease is as old as the human
species. However, we’re now at the point in our evolution where we can
finally recognize it, see it, give it a name and diagnose it. The
recognition of the disease is itself the beginning of the cure. By
recognizing the nature of this collective psychosis, we snap out of being
part of it. Malignant egophrenia, unrecognized and misdiagnosed until now,
has wreaked havoc all throughout human history, and is at the very root of
our current world crisis. To the extent we are unaware of the nature of
this collective psychosis, it has us in its grips and will unconsciously
get acted out through us in a destructive manner. The choice is truly
ours. The
prescription for this disease is simply for enough of us who see it to
connect with each other in lucid awareness so that it can be
(alchemically) contained. The pathogen then can’t possess us from
behind, beneath our conscious awareness, and act itself out through us.
Seeing the nature of the disease we know its name, which takes away its
omnipotence and autonomy. The pathogen is then anchored to consciousness
so that it can't vaporize back into the unconscious. This de-potentiates
the disease, beginning the process of metabolizing and re-integrating it
back into the profound unity of the psyche. The energy that was bound up
in the compulsion to endlessly re-create the disease becomes liberated and
available for creative expression. This is an evolutionary impulse from
the universe in which we are invited to participate. Malignant
egophrenia forces upon us the responsibility to come to terms with the
evil inside our own hearts. If we solidify Bush as being evil and react
with righteous indignation, we are guilty of the very same thing we’re
accusing Bush of (i.e, projecting the shadow). We then become a conduit
for the very evil we’re reacting to.
Who among us has not been guilty of being a channel for ME disease at
one time or another? If, when
we see this virulent pathogen, we contract against it and react in any
way, be it in judgment, hatred, anger or revulsion, we’re helping to
perpetuate the diabolical polarization that is the signature of the
disease. Our reacting in this way, which is typical of many political
activists, is itself an expression that we ourselves have the disease, or
to say it more clearly, the disease has us. Jung
says "Everything could be left undisturbed did not the new way demand
to be discovered, and did it not visit humanity with all the plagues of The
question is, do we recognize what is being symbolically shown to us by
egophrenia, or not? The inner meaning of the word apocalypse is
"something hidden being revealed." Will these apocalyptic end
times we are in be an initiation into a more expansive part of our being?
Or will it destroy our species? How it will manifest completely depends on
us. Malignant
egophrenia has so taken over President Bush as its living embodiment that
this deadly disease could be said to be incarnating itself through him.
Because of his position of power, Bush is able to act out and give shape
and form to his inner pathology in such a way that his inner process is
both literally, as well as symbolically, getting played out as the world
process. Bush’s process, as well as the world’s process, is a
reflection of our own process. ME disease is unique in that it collapses
the boundary between inner and outer. Egophrenia is an inner disease of
the soul that expresses itself via the medium of the outside world. Being
a non-local field phenomenon, malignant egophrenia is something all six
billion of us are collaboratively creating and dreaming up together. Bush
is an embodied, mirrored reflection of a part of ourselves, just like we,
reciprocally, are a reflection of a part of him. His disease is our
disease. Bush and his regime are a living embodied reflection of our
collective shadow. We have all dreamed them up to play out these roles, in
full living color, so that we can see and integrate these parts of
ourselves. Compassion spontaneously arises when we recognize these
fear-ridden parts of ourselves. The malignant egophrenia epidemic is
happening right in front of us, for all who have eyes to see. If we don't
look at what’s happening, if we turn away, ignore it, and contract
against it, we are lying to ourselves. Then we’re colluding with and
unknowingly feeding the disease. Our looking away is a form of blindness.
Our looking away is a form of ignorance. Our looking away, our
contraction, IS itself the disease. Our resulting complacency and inaction
is, in fact, an expression of our lack of compassion. To quote Reverend
Martin Luther King Jr. "One who passively accepts evil [allowing it
to happen] is as much involved in it as the one who perpetrates it." Compassion
is sometimes fierce, though. Sometimes it says "no," and sets a
boundary. Genuine compassion is not always smiley-faced, otherwise known
as "idiot compassion," which just enables and reinforces
asleepness. Genuine compassion is not passive. It propels us to act
for the benefit of all beings. True compassion demands us to be
willing to consciously step into our power, mediated through the heart,
and to find the courage to speak our true voice. The Bush administration
is breaking the moral code, the law of the planet, what Thomas Jefferson
called “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind.” Like a bully who
is in a position of power and privilege, the Bush regime abuses its power
simply because it can. What the Bush regime is doing is truly criminal.
The malignant egophrenia epidemic has induced a form of criminal insanity
in the entire Bush regime that we are all complicit in by allowing it to
happen. Being
truly patriotic and compassionate in our current situation involves doing
everything and anything we can, however big or small, to remove Bush and
his regime from office, for their good, as well as our own. It’s our
responsibility to recognize the extreme danger of our situation and to do
something about it. This is what Al Gore was trying to tell us in his
speech when he ended with the quote by Abraham Lincoln, "We- even we
here- hold the power, and bear the responsibility." Now is the time
to act before it is too late. As the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. says
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that
matter." A
healer, Paul Levy is a
spiritually-informed political activist. He is in private practice,
helping other people who are also spiritually awakening to the dream-like
nature of reality. He can be reached at (503)
234-6480, or at paul@awakeninthedream.com.
His website is www.awakeninthedream.com,
where a longer, more in-depth version of this article is available. Please
feel free to pass this article along to a friend if you feel so inspired.
© 2004. |
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