Author Archives: Robert Mitchell

“In all chaos there is Cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.” – Carl Jung

     Of all the inspired genius that went into the founding of the United States, nothing stands above the intuition of mythological realities that went into the democratic vote for a President every four years.  While in their own minds, the founders were trying to avoid the kind of theological fascism that they had escaped in coming to America, what they imagined in its place(whether they realized it or not) was a democratic vote for a secular king. Implicit in their notion of a democratically elected President, was the idea that the populace would elect the most powerful, able and worthy person in all the country to its’ most exalted position. This choice recognized that bestowed power was not something that lasted for a lifetime, and that a king past his prime, whether chosen by the illusion of democracy, or by the decree of something seemingly higher, could not lead a country successfully.

     Since humans were able to stabilize their civilizations with agriculture they have been ruled by kings and queens.  They represent an organizing principle at the center of the city, state, and nation.  The center of a square growing out from a beam of light shining down from Heaven(or the Primordial) around which order takes shape.  Gold Crowns symbolize this anointment, and implies the presence of a sun bonnet that surrounds only the king or queen.   When fate places powerful people in positions of leadership, civilizations thrive.  When kings or queens are not up to the task of holding this ultimate power, civilizations wobble.  This is not just historical fact, it is mythological fact, and is best expressed in the story of Phaeton in Greek Mythology.

      PHAETHON was a youthful son of Helios, who drove the Chariot of the Sun across the sky everyday.  Day after day he begged his father let him drive the chariot of the sun. The god reluctantly conceded to the boy’s wishes and handed him the reigns. But his inexperience proved fatal, for Phaethon quickly lost control of the immortal steeds and the sun-chariot veered out of control setting the earth ablaze. The plains of Africa were scorched to desert and men charred black. Zeus, appalled by the destruction, smote the boy with a thunderbolt, hurling his flaming body into the waters of the River Eridanos.

     It is my belief, that ages of order create great Kings or great Presidents, not the other way around.  Times when order reigns, or order is restored, correspond with the rise of powerful leaders.  In the United States, times of great success or achievement have corresponded with the leadership of extraordinary men.  When America rose up out of slavery and fought a civil war, Abraham Lincoln had been elected and was able to steady America’s wobbling ship.  When America was struggling to get out of the Great Depression, and was needed to help create order in a chaotic Europe, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been elected.  John Kennedy’s presidency is remembered as “Camelot”, and implied kingship and despite his short reign being ended by regicide, was provided a vision for the late 20th century.  Likewise, Bill Clinton(despite his personal weaknesses) was elected after 12 years of Reagan Bush rule that had revealed their ruling principles to be harmful to the country and stagnating to the economy. Clinton’s reign coincided with the initial internet gold rush, that he could neither have anticipated, nor caused.   Recently Barack Obama was elected, after the trauma of 9/11, an unjust war, and an economy that had been devastated by unpoliced greed and corruption.  His reign was restorative and stabilizing, no matter what your political beliefs.  Examples of these personalities aren’t limited to modern day Democrats, as I’d admit Ronald Reagan appeared in charge and ready to lead after the national humiliation of Watergate, losing the Vietnam War, and the hapless presidency of a very unkinglike Jimmy Carter.

     My premise is that chaos or order creates Presidents.  Not, the other way around.  The rise of a man like Franklin Roosevelt, or Barack Obama, is a harbinger of a larger process taking shape.  So, is the election of a man like Donald Trump.  A man who has surrounded himself with the superficial trappings of kingship his entire life.  A man who has gold leaf covering his garish apartment, and has unconsciously chosen to dye his hair an awful shade of gold to imply a kingship that he has never done anything to be worthy of.  I will not go too far into Trump’s history, or character, that has already been done elsewhere.  I will however point out that Trumps recipe for success contains one major ingredient, and that is chaos.

      Trump’s chaos is evident in everything that he does.  He says and does things almost constantly that are disorienting.  Whether they are disorienting for their lack of manners, their lack of decorum, or lack of respect for established order, creating chaos puts him at an advantage, not just personally, but in the collective.   He creates chaos by disorienting whomever it is that he is wishing to create advantage over.  Even a simple handshake, which is an archetypal gesture meant to inspire feelings of camaraderie and equality becomes an opportunity for him to pull a person off their center, and force them to reorient themselves against his assault.  When France’s President had demonstrated his resistance to his tactic, Trump responded by commenting on his wife’s appearance.  He keeps going till he has the upper hand in the exchange.

     His constant tweeting, and suggestion of inappropriate behavior(asking Russia to find Hilary Clinton’s missing e mails, or asking the Senate to change it’s rules, or demeaning his attorney general ) is designed to keep him in the thoughts of all those who use media, knowing his inappropriateness will be reported far and wide.  His largely unconscious belief is that if you are thinking about him, he has power over you, even if you are faceless and unknown.  This may in fact, presently be true.  Luckily, the laws of the country have been designed with checks and balances, and while it’s possible to challenge rules, it isn’t possible to bully them, because the rules are intractable and have no response to behavior.

     Chaos has been Trump’s calling card his whole life. His self promotion, ceaseless and fact less, of himself as an incredibly successful real estate developer, ignores his multiple bankruptcies, each softened by the greed of new investors who thought they could enrich themselves through an association with him.  His persona is a gold plated shell game.  He has never had a reason to be truthful, because it hasn’t been necessary for his past success.  However, when he became President he began to grapple with forces that were beyond his control.  In Greek Mythology, Chaos grew out of the Primordial, and existed before everything.  The first thing born from Chaos was Gaia(Earth) Taturus(The Underworld) and Eros(love), the son of Aphrodite.  Also born from Chaos was Erebus(Night) and Nyx(darkness).  Trump’s hubris and ignorance of more profound forces than a market economy(despite his claims of extraordinary intelligence) are going to be his undoing.  On cue, he attacked Gaia, through his withdrawal from the Paris Accords, and Eros, through his attack on LGBT rights, making transgender people no longer able to serve a military which he cowardly avoided.  His own descent into the Underworld fast approaches either through his public humiliation through his removal from office(the same descent taken by his hero Richard Nixon), or quite possibly his own claims of virility and health being made to appear absurd by some sort of personal health crises brought on by the stresses of failure.  As Erebus(night) and Nyx(darkness) also come from chaos, don’t be surprised if the coming Solar Eclipse that stretches across the United States on August 21, portends the end of his chaotic reign.

     There is order in chaos.  It indicates something is forming.  Like the first strong gusts of wind that announce a rainstorm is on the way.  Trump is an agency of change, a placeholder for something new on its way.  His mistake is thinking that the change is him, rather than realizing his backward beliefs about economic reality being the only reality that matters will be swept away by the coming storm.   The chaos he has brought and that will continue for awhile is not caused by him, it is caused by the forces of change that placed him into the position of President.  His purpose there is not what he thinks.  It is to demonstrate a lot of the misunderstandings that the country will be leaving behind

        if there is an upside to Trump’s Presidency.  It is that chaos he brings is a chasm between two places.  Trump is failing to make any real or lasting changes to American Society, and as an association with him becomes threatening to their electability, the Republican politicians will distance themselves from his person and his policies.  He has inspired oppositional activism at home and abroad.  Made aware that someone like him could actually be elected, the French rejected Marie Le Pen, and elected a much more progressive thinker, much to Trump’s chagrin.  Trump more than anything is a placeholder, as a newer, younger, and more progressive generation will take over in the times that follow him.  Regressive policies whether they be environmental, social, or financial will be tarred with their association with him for generations to come.

     So what is the best form of resistance to the King of Chaos?  I think resistance is ignoring his constant pleas for attention through your computer and television screens and through your car radio.  Resist him with real activism.  Inspire others to do the same.  Have faith in the structures put in place by the founders of the country.  The structures were put in place to maintain order even in the face of chaotic situations and leaders.  Don’t think about him more than necessary.  Be realistic about how his actions actually affect you.   Starve him off your attention.  Keep him out of your house, your relationships, and the time you have with those you love.  His goal is fascism.  He’d like what he says or does to control what you are thinking about, and how you are thinking. The people who support him have gladly given him this permission.  See the deeper mythological underpinnings of what is presently occurring, and have faith that chaos always brings about a new order.  When that happens, the kind of chaos created by the antics of a dying school yard bully may very well be worth the pain of the arrival of a new order.

I saw that Chester Bennington just committed suicide.  Admittedly, he was not on my radar until I saw that he sang at Chris Cornell’s funeral last month.  I followed a link to see that they had performed together on a song once.  He was obviously incredibly talented.  As his suicide was reported, I read a link to a thoughtful letter he had written to Chris Cornell when he heard about his death.  He chose to hang himself on Chris Cornell’s birthday.

      Suicide is a complicated subject, obviously.  There’s no accounting for the mindset of a person who chooses to take their own life.  But there is a mythology associated with it, that everyone who makes that decision is living by, and that mythology is that your entire experience is your ego.  James Hillman writes extensively about this in Suicide and the Soul. The impetus to suicide is a psychological and mythological desire for rebirth, to be freed of the current state of suffering and all its’ causes into an entirely different state.  It is the desire for an ultimate kind of transformation that is a big part of being human, and it is possible without killing oneself.  What desires to die is present state of the ego, which can at times seem unbearable.  But the ego is a fiction composed of memory, history, conditioned emotional states and patterned thinking.  Throw in trauma, abuse, neglect or any number of experiences of suffering and very difficult state can be created.

     But there is a way out.  The first step is being honest about how one is suffering.  That’s the catalyst of transformation.  Understanding that the experience of suicidal thoughts rise up from the depths of the psyche, from the primordial underworld that draws no distinction between physical life and death. From the places we pretend are not part of our everyday experience.   There, the daylight world of the ego and its’ creations and preferences are not meaningful or given domain over our primordial depths.  Whatever has been assembled in the daylight world of the ego, may or may not be recognized by the primordial as meaningful today, even if it has been in the past.  Whether that be wealth, a thriving career, a family, or public status.  The primordial will give state its opinion about how life is being lived. Its voice will be heard, and it may call for an overthrow of the ego’s dominant state, so that a new paradigm can rule consciousness.  That is the suicidal urge.  Making it literal, is the ultimate tragedy.

     What has to be recognized is that that there is no other life, or other world where this transformation can take place.  It takes place here, and it takes place now, or it does not take place at all.  The primordial depths within each of us reach beyond space and time, and beyond life and death.   They precede this life, follow this life, and are interwoven through this very life.  There is no state of transformation available in death, that is not available in life.  If there is a transformation in death, it is the involuntary lifting of the veil of the ego, as the apparatus that has housed it falls away.  A brain, a body, a nervous system all die, but the consciousness that was anchored to these things floats away from them, no longer fettered by the historical conditioning of physical experience.   But this transformation can happen in life as well, if one is willing to experience oneself freed from the repetitive narrative of family, history, culture and emotional conditioning.  In fact, it is transformation, not accomplishment that the primordial seeks from everyone.  If accomplishment is a by product of this transformation, all the better.

     The suicidal urge can be an enormous opportunity for transformation, or it can literally be a dead end.  If it is felt, enormous changes must be made.  Not little changes, enormous changes.  It must be faced head on.  Life must be looked at as a malleable experience where the only traps are self created, and if one has created a life that has trapped them, they can discover in its blueprints, bridges to another life.  Perhaps a life with different priorities, or a different vocation, different values, and different peers.  But a life nonetheless, not death, where the initial transformations are passive.

     Death is a constant presence in human life.  Carl Jung once said that death surrounds life like the night surrounds the day.  It occurs all the time during our lives, and is constantly rearing its head.   The deaths of loved ones, the deaths of people we know, the deaths of relationships, the deaths of epochs of our lives and ultimately physical death.  It is not to be feared.  The urge to suicide is an awareness of a kind of death.  It is the knowledge that the life we are living no longer reflects our primordial depths, and they are calling for a change,  and we must become something or someone else.

     Metanoia is my favorite word.  It is a Greek word meaning transformation of consciousness.  Literally it means one’s consciousness changes so profoundly that it can’t recognize its former problems as problems, or recognize the dominant state of consciousness that created those problems.  The urge to suicide represents the call for metanoia. It is an admission that the present ego is no longer an appropriate ambassador for the primordial in this life.  It has become outdated and and is no longer aligned with the desires of the primordial.  A new ego, built atop new foundations must be constructed to replace it.   The old ego is….. a dying King.  Let the king die, and all hail the new King.

Yesterday, I watched “Becoming Cary Grant.” It reminded me of a fun story from my childhood. In 1971 my father picked up the phone and a voice asked if Gwen Davis was there. “She is, ” my father responded, ‘may I ask who’s calling?” “It’s Cary Grant.” “Oh alright, Cary Grant,” my father responded in his best Cary Grant impression, “I’ll go get her.” My father was pretty sure this was someone putting him on, so he walked through the house saying, “Gwen, Cary Grant is on the phone,” continuing what he thought was a superior Cary Grant impression to the one that had been attempted on the phone. My mom picked up the phone and discovered that in fact, Cary Grant was on the phone. He had read her recent novel, and had enjoyed it so much that he had contacted her publisher to get her number and offer his appreciation. She and Cary Grant became friends for the last dozen years or so of his life. My one memory of him must have been around the time of the beginning of their friendship. We were living in Coldwater Canyon and we stopped at his house. It was around Christmastime, because I remember he had his lights up. he was home alone, and he was excited that my mother had brought me. I remember him being white haired and very handsome. He pulled out a box of magic tricks and proceeded to perform them all for me. When he finished his performance, he boxed up the tricks handed me the box, and wished me Merry Christmas.

         I have been observing the DACA Dreamers negotiations through my peripheral vision.  I know people feel very passionately about it.  My feeling is that those who oppose it are mostly  insecure about their identity,  value, and capacity to compete with a complex and motivated population.  Politics has never really engaged me, because I always feel that there is a deeper level to reality that political passions tend to camouflage.  Politics is about leveraging power for influence, and the pendulum’s swinging back and forth from left to right is the very nature of American Democracy.  A large part of the population will always hold conservative views and a large part will always be progressive, and the percentages of those who make the difference in elections will always vacillate.

        But the notion of who belongs “here”,  is a more fascinating concept to engage.  It asks the question “Where is here?” The concept of the United States is a powerful one.  But anybody who has traveled within it knows that as you move around, the concept of it changes from place to place, and even from person to person.  It’s not a stable concept unless we’re with people who share our opinions.  For every person who passionately felt Barack Obama was an appropriate representative of the American population, there was another person who hated him, and vice versa with Donald Trump.

       So, what can we trust as an identity, whether it is national or personal? I propose we are all Dreamers.  Their issues are symbolically our issues.  We have all been seemingly brought “here” by our parents, and for some of us, their nationality. or their identity makes us feel secure.  Ultimately, it shouldn’t. Our origins extend far beyond our parents and the histories of our families and culture.  No matter how successful or unsuccessful our families are or are not, our identity derived from them is incomplete, and our incomplete identities derived by our loss of contact with our origins is the source of most  suffering and anxiety.  Each person brings suffering into this lifetime in the form of distortion in their understanding of their origins(me included).  Our misunderstanding is shown to us in high relief by our historical and biographical circumstances. For each of us, our historical biography is an incomplete map of our ourselves.  To experience our wholeness, we must travel onwards, past our history to our primordial origins and see how that gap exercises influence in our understanding of ourselves.  Shoring up this relationship is not the only engine in our lives, we are also compelled to share our gifts,  and to love, but the need to bridge this gap can be a very stern and relentless teacher.

      Astrology has taught me that there is an identifiable intelligent intention behind the circumstances of every single person’s life, and no one is strictly the result of their historical circumstances.  One’s relationship with their parents, family, and and place in the culture is an identifiable fact at the moment of their birth.  We are born with intentional dynamics in our consciousness that will shape our experience as a three dimensional feedback loop. Every experience will follow that intention. Nobody exists outside this influence.  Nobody you ever will meet will not share these same origins or exist outside these influences. Every single person exists under the transformative pressure of these influences at every moment of their life. They are always in play, and always identifiable, no matter whether our culture of rational materialism hides them or not.

     Like the dreamers, we are all searching for safety in our location, our peers,  and our circumstances. But for each of us, the only real safety is in reconnecting with of our origins.  By getting beyond our opinions or self concepts, we can connect with the intelligent consciousness that knows us better than anyone, which amazingly turns out to be a part of us.  This is where we find our belonging.  This is where we find our safety. This is where we find our compassion for ourselves and others. This where we recognize we are all Dreamers.

“Death is not the greatest loss in life.  The greatest loss in life is what dies inside of us while we live.”- Norman Cousins

     I have been fascinated by the Elizabeth Holmes saga.  She founded Theranos, a medical company that claimed it could lower the health care cost of blood tests for 234 health conditions. It required a pin prick of blood  that was contained by a “nanotainer” which was the size of a vitamin, rather than a needle drawing out traditional tubes of blood called “vacutainers”.  She became the world’s youngest self made female billionaire.  She purposely pulled every lever of power to have her company valued at nine billion dollars, while not having the technological capacity to test for anything other than herpes with her company’s own technology.

      At first glance, the fraud that has been perpetrated by Elizabeth Holmes, looks to be financial.  But when it is unpacked(a term loved by tech gurus like Tim Ferris) it is a mythological one.   The myth that Elizabeth Holmes hijacked to become a billionaire was the myth of technological progress. This myth implies that what technology offers is a higher quality of life,  lived closer to immortality.  At this moment a company called Netcome is taking ten thousand dollar down payments from tech billionaires like Sam Altman. It offers to euthanize their  clients and download the contents of their brains onto a hard drive, bestowing immortality.  Meanwhile Elon Musk’s fantasy of colonizing Mars, “requires” exploding hydrogen bombs to melt ice caps and create a “livable atmosphere”,  this too dovetails into the pursuit of immortality.  The furthest extrapolation of this premise is the question about whether or not reality is a simulation created by a supercomputer.  Quantum Physics has already disproved this as nonsense, but still it is discussed by technologists like Musk all the time.

      My perspective on this phenomena is granted by my birth.  I was born in 1968.  I lived 20 years of my life without a personal computer, and close to thirty years( I can’t recall exactly) without a cell phone, or access to the internet. While I do recognize the value of this technology, I also recall life before it existed, and am quite sure that other than the convenience of this technology, and the democratization of information, the quality of life is no better now than it was before these technologies existed. I think it valid to question whether the quality of life as affected by distraction may have even declined.

    Elizabeth Holmes ticked every box on the ‘visionary granting access to immortality’ checklist.  Growing up the child of International aid workers in Washington D.C. she was marinated in the fantasy that the underpinnings of the pursuit of wealth and the power were actually the desire to engage in philanthropy.  Philanthropy can also be a way that people demonstrate superiority to those in need of their help.  She grew up understanding that being associated with power grants power.  Her admission to Stanford as well as Henry Kissinger being the the initial famous person to draw others into her circle of aspirations, shows she understood very well, that association with powerful people can make someone appear powerful.  She cloaked herself in all the affectations of a selfless leader who thought it was a privilege to “serve people in a decentralized process.” Her inspiration?  “Loved ones lost before their time”( as if there is really such a thing).  Her response to those who questioned the veracity of her impossible technology was, “First they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, then you change the world.”  This along with her pretentiously sonorous voice, Steve Jobs like black uniform,  hid a sociopathic entrepreneurial spirit that was second to none.

   What she delivered was valueless, what she sold was the fantasy of democratized access to the secrets of science.  She was above all an “engineer”, despite dropping out of Stanford after two years.  She posed with beakers, and droppers, wearing academic glasses that gave her the air of a scientist.  All the while she received the support of wealthy donors who also wanted to be part of the democracy of health as the internet had once been the democratizer of information.  The only problem?  None of the technology was operative.  The pinprick of blood that went into a “nanocontainer” was farmed out to the same companies that tested regular vials. She knew this was the truth and continued to defend her technology in her monotone and mock turtleneck.  When the lead scientist of Theranos committed suicide in 2016(the flipside of immortality fantasy) rather than rushing to comfort his loved ones, Elizabeth rushed to take control of any of the information he had on his computer that may have revealed that none of the technology worked.  Now the SEC has charged her with fraud.

     Elizabeth Holmes’ experience reveals a lot about the myths we currently live by, and how they can be manipulated for enormous financial gain.  The fantasy, whether it be her scam, or    having a brain downloaded into a computer, or human colonizing Mars, comes  from what is  “out there” in technology, or on other planets, an immortality that escapes us wherever we presently find ourselves.  If we could just leave our present limitations whether they be of consciousness or of physical location in the universe, we would have access to unknown aspects of ourselves that transcend life and death.

     The aspiration to transcend life and death in this very life is very human, very virtuous, and not at all new in human experience.  It has been the interest of The Egyptians in their books of the dead, by the Alchemists, and the Kabbalists.  These esoteric groups and many others pursued the same aspiration; the possibility of attaining the knowledge available once physical life ends, while alive.  This is the actual democritization of consciousness that the internet seems to promise.  These Esoteric groups are the antecedents of todays technologists, who see technology as the road to transcendence.  Technologists are just using the tools available to them, as alchemists once used chemistry, and Gnostics used the tenets of Christianity.  Technology is our emerging mystery tradition, or so we think it is.  Virtual reality contains nothing that physical reality doesn’t..  It’s another form of dream reality, that can be monetized by the Oculus Rift. We are being sold our own dreams.  Just like our technological fantasies are being sold to us as pathways to immortality.

     Our current technology culture is the heir to alchemy.  As the alchemists aspired to transform lead into gold, we aspire to transform our isolation into transcendence.  Whether that is isolation from knowledge, wisdom, or other people, we misinterpret it all as symbolic isolation from our immortality.  From access to that which has always existed, to that which will always exist, no matter what happens to our human vessels, our biosphere, or our entire physical universe.  Our question is what survives the passing away of all we know about ourselves and our lives.  Answering this question is paramount to focus on what matters right now, today.  That is what everyone seeks, no matter how they pursue it.  How can I right now do the things that make the transcendent temporal, because that is the only pursuit that has any ultimate value.  Everything else is just whistling in the dark.  Whether it is creating impossible technologies, fantasizing about living on distant planets, downloading brains into hard drives, or creating alternative realities. the real question is, “What is my relationship to all that has ever existed, or will ever exist, and how am I related to it right now?”

     Ultimately the myth of technology leads nowhere. Our fascination with technological progress  is valid but experienced in reverse.  All advancement comes from human consciousness.  Technology is a tool to express in physical reality what has existed in potentia in human consciousness.  As splitting the atom, or mapping DNA has demonstrated human capabilities for efficacy and understanding, we fantasize that technology can move us closer to eternal truths and realities.  All technological advances unearth capacities of human consciousness, they do not create them.  Elizabeth Holmes tried to reverse engineer human consciousness.  She tried to see the future of human development without first experiencing it in herself, or understanding the roots of the experience of advancing technology into the further realms of human consciousness. Her “nanotainer” granted access to none of the technological or human advancement it implied.  Let’s stay vigilant in developing our human capabilities, while not falling prey to charlatans who try to convince us that they have found a pathway into our limitless abilities. Let’s make this world as livable and beneficial to all using all our capacities, rather than fantasizing that there is another one, where our capacities will be more accessible.