ESOTERICA

ESOTERICA Psychological Explanations of Criminal Behavior ~Lecture VII

RECAPITULATION • Method and Ritual • “Possession” • The FETTERING of “MOTHER”~ Fatherlessness • Anthropology: • Cannibalism • Orgiastic Sex • Head-Hunting (the worship of the skull) • Sacrifice: serial-, mass-, spree-murder… • Rape and torture

We are witnessing the work of EXTERNAL INFLUENCES manifesting themselves through “DISINTEGRATED PERSONALITIES”…

“Disintegration of Personality” (Myers, 1901) Man as infinitely composite (inherited multiplex organism), yet ruling that body by a SOUL or Spirit absolutely beyond present analysis… A soul that has originated in a spiritual environment… We are portals ~ the psyche is the vehicle… DISINTEGRATION: 1) In consequence of some suggestion from without, or some inherited tendency, a small group of psychic units set up a process of exaggerated growth… Cerebral lesion also could be a trigger…

Dreams of a kind are probably going on within us both by day and by night, unchecked by any degree of tension of waking thought (lapses of attention, dozing, “spacing out”) Awake: swarming fragments of thought or imagery. Which have apparently been going on continuously, though one may become aware of them and then unaware at momentarily intervals (reading before bedtime) Waking life implies a FIXATION of attention on one thread of thought running through a tangled skein. In hysterical patients we see cases where no such fixation is possible… And other cases where it is involuntary or follows a thread which is not desirable to pursue… What if dreamfulness were our habitual mental state?

CLEAVAGE of the soul: a scrap of personality taken at random and developing apart from the rest The case of Sörgel (involuntary crime, 1824): Poor, innocent, industrious youth subject to violent fits of EPILEPSY, and then to paroxysms of second consciousness, in which he had delusions of ungovernable criminal propensities, the whole of which he was ignorant of upon returning to his ordinary state of consciousness… Sörgel murdered an old woodcutter in a forest, chopping off his head and both his feet with one of his own axes. Returning from the forest, he told several people of what he had done…He said he had drunk a felon’s blood, and that he felt better (cured) as a result (Chase)… This state of consciousness lasted a week ~ He was then acquitted of his crime, as not being responsible for his action at the time, and died a few months later in a lunatic asylum…

“Psychic cancers” take the form of fixations, idée fixes; and these show us not merely an ordinary SUPRALIMINAL INSTINCT functioning without due check, but rather a SUBMERGED and PRIMITIVE INSTINCT rising with subliminal uprush into undesired prominence, and functioning wildly instead of remaining hidden and quiescent…

With Freud, the story was that we are basically mutating (evolving) beasts, who have trapped as they have mutated, relegated, i.e., their primal instincts –sex and violence, unbridled lust above all— in some sort of physiological “drawer”: the subconscious • All forms of hysteria are derivatives of repressed lust • Negation of the divine and thus • Negation of a “super-conscious”

What are we dealing with here? • Psychology or actually merely “Brain-psychology” (Jung vs. crass materialistic approach to the mystery of the mind) • Canadian neuro-surgeon Wilder Penfield admitted that the human mind remains to this day a profound enigma • Even though surgery has shown that we may activate at least two flows of consciousness, e.g., by poking the “memory drawer”

How many BODIES do we have? • Does a mineral have a body? • Does a plant have a body? • Does an animal have a body? • So we have THREE BODIES already: • Mineral (Physical) body • Vegetative (plant) body • Wakeful, Instinctive (animal) body • So, for us humans, there is a fourth component: • The EGO ~self-awareness, coupled with organized memory and the ability to SUBLIMATE, to fashion beauty • FOUR BODIES (physical, etheric, astral, ego) RUDOLF STEINER (1861-1925)

These four bodies must be set up, imbricated into one another in harmonious fashion (Phy, Veg, Inst, Ego) • In the WAKING STATE, that is… • What if Phy, Veg & Inst are all fitted properly, but the Ego is not sitting properly in the Inst. Body?

The feelings become much disturbed • Sense impressions become dim; thoughts become livelier (dreamy, “outside of oneself”) • Since their Ego is somewhat unhinged from the Inst, when they dream, these individuals have extremely vivid, detailed impressions ~ as if they were sense-impressions… • 2nd CASE: What if Ego AND Inst are closely bound and somewhat unhinged from the Phy-Veg tandem?

The subject is prone to spells, senselessness, and violent bouts of moral argumentativeness… • Some kind of extreme altruism manifests itself through them…Stronger “feeling of sin”… • Case 3 (further development): Ego, Inst & Veg unite and leave Phy“behind”… • Total impairment of the will, mental retardation; virtual no control of the physical organism

Visionaries ~ St. Theresa, Joan of Arc~ the Ego draws the Inst to itself in the dreamful state: “fish messages” from the supersensible realm (visions, voices) • Opposite scenario: weak Ego flattened by the trio onto the physical plane, in the waking state… • Darkening of the consciousness ~ they ramble, in conversation— incoherent, yet extremely DETAILED talk…

Now take the pathological degeneration of such a state: Veg draws in Inst and the Ego too strongly dreams are carried into the waking life • Whereas in the case of the visionary, consciousness is brought into the dream-zone, in the pathological case, dreams are carried over into the waking-life • It is as if supersensible currents were reaching into the organism by saturating excessively our physical organs: this gives occasion to EPILEPTIC SEIZURES • Effects: extinction of memory ~hence the clinging to details

What happens is that Inst organization is failing to relate properly to certain organs, so that the building of MEMORY is impaired • A memory with GAPS, fragmented…This, in fact, can become so extreme that the person lives in a kind of DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS • Rhythmic alteration: two parallel streams; with memories associated to each, on two different tracks • KARMA -the inverse of saints: they are not blessed with visions, but with weak personalities, which occasion epileptic seizures, gaps in consciousness…

Stages of Growth • Septennia • Physical birth: mineral integument • Set off of the Veg forces: change of teeth (shedding of hereditary material, 7 y) • Set off Instinctual forces: puberty, sexual forces (14 y) • Ego: 21

Sheaths/Body change in 7-year cycles Body teeth sex 21 7 14 Physique Vegetative Instinctive Ego

The external contents Jung calls “Ectopsychic”; they derive from the environment, through the data of the senses: • The (peripheral) progression: • sensation  thinking  feeling intuition • Then comes the “Endopsychic”: the stuff of the conscious ego-complex: a) Memory and functions gradually less under the control of the will, such as impulses, and “affects and invasions” (epileptoid manifestations?) • The personal unconscious ¬ relative: may shrink to zero; level of personal awareness (thickness is a negative f. of the philistinism of the western mind) • And finally…. Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

The Collective Unconscious • Simply put, the supernatural realm • A bottomless pit of “archetypes,” symbols ~ the original forms of life; the idiom of the gods, of God… • We receive them in our dreams • Or actively, through clairvoyance…

The fixation with incest, the mother’s blood… • Serial killers: e.g., rape of elderly women… • Horror ~the ultimate disgust…Why? • Jung: The incest barrier channels the libido away from the parents and toward mental maturity and societal ramification… • When this does not happen ~neurosis of the type that remains infantile and begins to “phantasize” • These Phantasies arise as the introversion of sexual libido • As such, they are expressions of the unconscious; pathological, REGRESSIVE (atavistic) tapping of the pool INCEST MOTHER

When the child is ca. 4 y he is beckoned by the world • Mother must be exchanged for the “outside” • Dementia praecox occurs when the maturing subject rejects the world and regresses to the maternal womb, developing thereby backwards modes of adaptation (Lombroso’s atavism) • It would be therefore conceivable that archaic ways of functioning of the thought system, which is inborn with the brain differentiation (cosmic evolution), would be awakened • Not sexual but psychological dependence, which erupts through misdirected libido The magnetism of “Mother”

There exists “forces,” which belong to the past of our race, that are cordoned off • When the barriers fail for a variety of reasons (social epidemics, historical revolutions…) • Those of us, who are weak ~ neuropaths (flattened ego leading to epilepsy) and neurotics (paroxystic mother-complex, etc.), will find ourselves acting as diffusers of such forces, despite ourselves… • Challenges: 1) identify and explain in detail the origin and metastasis of social plagues (sociological component) • 2) Explain what it is exactly that predispose one to snap, to “disintegrate” and unleash the demons… (Steiner’s karma) In Synthesis

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