Planet Amnesia web site

Books, journal articles, web pages, and news reports that can help to clarify the history and promise of the Electric Universe hypothesis.

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nick c
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Re: Planet Amnesia web site

Unread post by nick c » Tue Jul 23, 2013 9:46 am

The discussion here should be Collective Amnesia.
Any posting of chronological schemes can only serve to derail the focus of the thread. Chronology has little or nothing to do with Amnesia. The theory of collective amnesia applies to each of the rival chronological models. It matters not whether the catastrophic events took place in 1500 BCE or 5000 BCE, the question is why when modern man encounters his ancestral tales of cosmic catastrophe he interprets them as metaphors for processes observed today? When that is clearly not what is being described.

I put this thread on the Resources board because Andrew's website has a nice compendium of links dealing with the topic of Collective Amnesia.

Michael, you are more than welcome to start a new thread (or post on a preexisting one) on the NIAMI board, focused on the topic of the chronology of events.

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Re: Planet Amnesia web site

Unread post by Andrew » Tue Jul 23, 2013 12:07 pm

Hi Micheal,
Well, hopefully we can agree to disagree. Yes, chronology is most important, and I must therefore defer to scholars such as de Grazia (have you read God's Fire - Moses and the Management of the Exodus?). Whether it was Venus that caused the disturbances is interesting, but not primary to the human experience. I also follow Jno Cook - see his robust chronology here:

http://www.saturniancosmology.org/gim.php

My contribution is in the discussion of Cultural Amnesia. I am a psychotherapist and businessman, and am alert to the human condition of neuroses and various psychopathologies related to trauma. Amnesia is a blanket term for forgetfulness. A helpful term is the opposite - anamnesia. It is closely tied to the psychotherapeutic process of grieving. In recalling difficult memory, there are a host of discomforting emotions. Despite this often painful situation, it is the only way through to a healing.

Another important understanding in this discussion is the 'collective unconscious', Jung's term. If we ascribe to this understanding, we can accept that no human experience, individual or group, is ever lost. Everything we wish to block out and suppress gets sublimated in some way into the unconscious. We could also call it the sub-conscious. These residues don't just hide out there, they play out through the daily surface consciousness in unexpected ways, and usually through some pathological reaction.

I believe this is where we find ourselves today as a human society. We think warfare is normal, that humans naturally prey on each other, and that tyrants arise logically in order to govern the helpless masses. ALL THIS IS LEARNED BEHAVIOR. People need to realize that we are running with faulty software. Our biological hardware is an amazing foundation, but is only that.

Our faulty software, IMO is a result of traumatic culture building, and is directly related to Earth catastrophes caused by roving planets and comets.
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Re: Planet Amnesia web site

Unread post by Michael Anteski » Wed Jul 24, 2013 4:02 am

In posting my idea that the Worlds in Collision cataclysm occurred in a much older time frame of 11,000 BC, to me it appeared related to the topic of "collective amnesia," because if an event actually occurred well back in human prehistory, its recollection - amnesia would be marked. Our historical records only go back to 5000 BC.

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Andrew
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Alfred de Grazia'a Homo Schizo

Unread post by Andrew » Fri Jul 26, 2013 12:10 am

This from de Grazia's book - Homo Schizo:

"In explaining the development of the human mind in relation to the catastrophes of Venus and Mars in the period 1453 to 687 B. C. Velikovsky pushes beyond Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, and Eliade with the concepts of collective amnesia and aggression. Mankind is destructively aggressive as a result of suppressing its memories of natural disasters. "The inability to accept the catastrophic past is the source of man's aggression... Freud did not come to understand the true nature of the Great Trauma -- born in the Theogony or battle of the planetary gods with our Earth, brought more than once to the brink of destruction -- which was the fate of Mercury, Mars, and Moon.

The view which I am setting forth embraces this criticism of Freud and the concepts of collective amnesia or repression concerning catastrophes. Also, aggression is to be correlated with this suppression, and the techniques of aggression are in a direct sense analogized unconsciously and consciously to events witnessed in the sky. Nevertheless I perceive social imprinting as at best an auxiliary source of human nature, an intensifier, which itself needs to be intensified from time to time by fresh natural (or man-made) catastrophe.'
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Cultural Amnesia in the Age of Catastrophe

Unread post by Andrew » Tue Jul 30, 2013 9:29 pm

This is an essay I put together in response to a conversation I had with Dave Talbott this past May. He has helped heighten my awareness of the subject of amnesia. I hope it resonates with you:

Amnesia is forgetfulness. It is most often associated with psychological trauma. In fact, the only other kind of amnesia is caused by physical damage to the brain, which originates from an organic cause. In the case of trauma, the brain has buried the memory of something as a way of dealing with a grave pain that was experienced. Of course, no memory can be completely obliterated, and therefore a residue is left, but is no longer readily accessible to the waking consciousness. It has been repressed and driven underground.

Where does the memory go? It ultimately slips into the unconscious, but not before it leaves its imprint in many places. On the cultural stage, myth is the place that memory goes, to record these great upheavals in our lives, but in a reinterpreted form that is safe for us to self-reflect upon. We both want to remember and not to remember these tragic and difficult transitions. We work hard to sublimate this memory to ease ourselves into a familiarity with past events that are no longer so raw and unsettling.

Amnesia is a cloud of protection, and underneath that cloud there exists the activity of the sub-conscious mental residues. The psyche must deal with them in some way lest they overload the emotional/psychological body of the surface consciousness. All kinds of compensating and adaptive behaviors come into play. Not only helpful myths get created – other times maladaptive behaviors, or psychopathologies get established as a dysfunctional response to trauma. There are a host of symptoms possible under the familiar banner of PTSD. Also contributing, are reactive behaviors associated with abuse, with coping mechanisms seen in split personality disorders, self-created in order to sequester the disturbing emotions in a hidden away part of our being. In such ways we become terribly vulnerable, open to being manipulated by others promising succor and salvation.

The human response to trauma is to provide an amnesiac cover so that in the background we can subliminally encode these memories in our collective and individual consciousness and not be overwhelmed. We don’t want to be entirely rid of it, but to keep it as a badge of passing as one of the more precious memories of our raison d’être. This can either be a neurotic entanglement or one of healthy acculturation. We are survivors and we have lived to tell the story.

It is a love/hate relationship - we both want to bury the memory and raise it up. In the example of the collectively devised mythic explanation, in the end we raise it up, but in an altered, usually anthropomorphic way that gives it a meaning that is palatable to us as well as our descendants. At times, this process gets twisted and becomes encumbered by agendas of social control over the meaning and function of these myths. The outcome can be coercive and psychologically unhealthy.

Quoting Alfred de Grazia in his Quantavolution perspective:

“What begins as traumatic terror is suppressed in memory; then, rather than gradually becoming adjusted to the memory, the mind is committed to the suppression by priests and ritual. And it never can accommodate to the reality of the present. This mental condition is bound up with the invisible god and is a large factor in the psychological operations of [various religions]…”

This is the dark side. When we bring the Earth catastrophes into the picture, as de Grazia does, and posit the involvement with a projected god who is an agent of these upheavals, we get a sudden rich picture of a developing amnesia. Events are so overwhelming that we must retreat into interpretations that are self-familiar.

“Memory always has a function, and, to have the function, especially in terrible instances, must be distorted. The trauma of anthropomorphic natural force can be managed; a great natural force cannot, and hence must be denied.”

So there we have it - the physical and mental trauma is too great and so is denied in its bare truth. We must put a god/human face on it to access it. Unfortunately, hidden away in this repressive response is a malady that eats away at our human happiness. We are lost to the complete picture of what has happened.

In this case the amnesia has been incorporated into the body politic, and serves as a bulwark against recovering any future memories of past cataclysmic events. Neuroses flower in response – we go to war to replay old catastrophes. We recreate such vicarious events as a stage to reengage our memories. This disappointing state of affairs is our legacy in the modern West these days. We are still acting out old hurts. That’s what we do in order to work out our collective karma – try it on for size one more time and see if the same result occurs. This need to continually revisit the tragedy is the compulsion that comes from our need to re-experience the intensity of the event, for we are both fascinated and appalled. For some, replaying the vicarious experience can help to exhaust the struggle by finally seeing it more plainly, or conversely others may drive deeper into neuroses and change their status of victims into perpetrators and keep the game going. Left as an instinctual compulsion, it continually reinforces itself, completely divorced from the memory of what originally set if off.

Many of our religious based myths and cultural ethos were engineered in reflection of the struggles of long ago, and no longer serve us well. The catastrophes, the human trauma and the forgetfulness still haunt us today. We are rigidly defended against this recollection, as it has not been properly dealt with.

In a sympathetic response we can instead revisit these memories and in the light of a modern syncretist movement make sense of them so they no longer haunt us.

Despite the catastrophes being tragic in loss of life and immeasurably damaging to culture, we stand apart from those times on a more stable footing. Perhaps now is the time to take a closer look and chip away at the amnesia that still hovers around us. For the hour is late, and our entrenched human psychopathologies are leading us to the brink of self-destruction. We must break out of this self-imposed amnesia and the matrix of dysfunctional belief and unhealthy response we have led ourselves into. The only way to heal our dis-ease is to recover our unconscious collective memories and hopefully make new sense of them in the light of a more complete and compassionate understanding of a past humanity under siege.

Sarva mangalam
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Re: Planet Amnesia web site

Unread post by moses » Wed Jul 31, 2013 1:04 am

Trauma creates altered gene expression, that is altered epigenetics, which can be passed on to the offspring. And it is these epigenetic changes we now have that is the big effect, not some effect of repression of our ancestors traumatic experiences. Of course recovering those very ancient experiences, somehow ? ?, may well lead to reversing or altering the epigenetic changes.

There may be other ways to alter those epigenetic changes, but it is these epigenetic changes that are the issue. And this needs to be stated and understood in any discussion of amnesia or ancient trauma.

And one wonders just how the survivors described to their offspring the starry effects they saw. It would surely have been in terms of gods. Perhaps some of the gruesome things would have been left out. And so there would be stories of happy times destroyed by angry rampaging gods. The offspring would have recognized the planets as the gods, but as things calmed down the stories would have persisted but the connection to the planets would have slowly subsided because of the disconnect between the little dots of light in the sky and the description of the planets in the stories. The gods became something else.

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Mo

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Andrew
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Epigenetics

Unread post by Andrew » Thu Aug 01, 2013 2:17 am

Thanks Mose for some stimulating thoughts about epigenetics, or is it epigenetic theory? According to Wikipedia, the meanings are different. Mostly, the idea is that environmental conditions, or trauma, or whatever strong influence occurs, is able to change the genetic coding, and thus can be passed along hereditarily. Did I get that right?

This is an interesting conversation because it posits that an organic cause gets established, not just a vague Jungian collective unconscious urge that is driving awareness. Me thinks that epigentics it is just a more scientific, materialist viewpoint, pointing to physically resident memory. Do we really need this? Are we now throwing Jung out the window?

Maybe we need this, as those more scientifically oriented do need more concrete evidence, which is usually a measurable physical attribute. If we think (or scientifically establish) that tendencies do get written into some biological code, perhaps we can convince more people that the result is more believable. Whatever..

Personally, I think the message is the same - it is still about the symptoms arising out of trauma repression, and the memories that are held in amnesia.

Any more thoughts? This is an important subject IMHO.

- Andrew
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Re: Planet Amnesia web site

Unread post by moses » Thu Aug 01, 2013 4:55 am

Do we really need this? Are we now throwing Jung out the window?
Andrew

Epigenetics is most definitely needed to understand the effects of the past on us. But being able to access past experiences, either through ancestral means (via DNA ) or through the existence of a reincarnating entity, must be considered a very real possibility.

Personally, I think the message is the same - it is still about the symptoms arising out of trauma repression, and the memories that are held in amnesia.
Andrew

A change in epigenetics is like getting completely new DNA - it is that significant. One does not even need to invoke repression, not that I am saying that there is no such effect. In fact, being able to access ancient experiences must be deeply significant to us just in terms of understanding ourselves. But it is the truth that counts.
Cheers,
Mo

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Re: Planet Amnesia web site

Unread post by jacmac » Sat Sep 07, 2013 9:35 pm

I am posting this on the amnesia topic to bring attention to the importance of Chaco Canyon. I believe the builders of Chaco Canyon were actively engaged in remembering the past; a past that included a change of the alignment of the sun. I believe the people of Chaco Canyon were so intent on watching the sun and moon, and aligning their structures to the cardinal directions and to the major and minor Lunar Standstills, because they remembered a different past; a past with changes as discussed here at E/U world.

This link should bring up a short paper I wrote in 2009.

http://home.comcast.net/~jackmcghie/Petroglyph.pdf

Please ignore comments about Kiva D. The paper assumed one had the book sited as a reference.

The important part is that the Pueblo Bonito Petroglyph has the east wall section on the spiral; the wall section on the building that is NOT aligned with the cardinal east-west direction.

The bow and arrow puts this all in the past.

The E/U story is supported by the people of Chaco Canyon.

I hope someone will agree with this and help me share it with the E/U community.

Thanks,
Jacmac

P.s. If the link does not work let me know and i will fix it.

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Andrew
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Alfred deGrazia passes at age 94

Unread post by Andrew » Thu Aug 07, 2014 1:29 am

This thread has gone quiet, but wanted to update it by mentioning that my friend and mentor, Al deGrazia died last month at the ripe old age of 94. I visited him in France one month before he died. I feel privileged to have known this great man. I wrote a short note in my Planet Amnesia web site:

http://www.planetamnesia.com/a-three-month-road-trip/
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