Freud, Hitler, and the atom self.

[_Z_]

Freud, Hitler, and the atom self.



I was just watching a program about a psychological study on Hitler; everything that he became appears to have stemmed from childhood events that he had experienced.

So I was wondering…

If we begin from the premise: we are spirit and that spirit exists in all forms including the infinite, then we existed before our birth as humans.



If this is so, then is it possible that all of our traits are within that pre-birth spirit! I have been considering the notion of ‘the atom self’ [discussed in part elsewhere] this is based on the Buddhist idea of dying as a shrinking of all our natures. The idea is that all the senses become one, and our essential natures fold inwards then we leave the body and ‘unfold’ in the intermediate realms [like pagan underworld] in our soul body. If we take this to its extreme with the modern eye, then can we think of the soul as like a ‘human singularity’? Then there is a universal principle to which both the universe and life within it manoeuvres through the Ether [i.e. how it works]! There are then two options too our ‘pre-birth state’:

We are spiritual singularities that fold and unfold according to our incarnations. And…

• We carry our natures from previous lives into the next incarnation. Then Hitler’s childhood influences could have been the result of his pre-birth state! Thus not only was his adult state relevant to his childhood, but his childhood was relevant to his own nature i.e. the person that he was at the end of his last incarnation!
• If we carry our natures from no previous incarnation, then are we like a sprinkling of arbitrary aspects and elements? We are simply ‘the part of the field where the seeds have been thrown’ so to say. This would imply we are born innocent yet may have ‘evil’ characteristics!

If we discard this spiritual side of the debate, then does our genetic configuration amount to the same resultant nature [well it would do wouldn’t it, by shear coincidence]! That is to say, our chemical robot [human being] holds the seeds to what we are and what we become, the things that happen to us both in childhood and in adult life, are - to a degree at least – caused by what we are [the seeds growing], which affects how people respond to us! There could be both a mental and spiritual side to this reflective nature we appear to have.



What are your thoughts – are some or all of our aspects pre-designed, maybe by ourselves? Then this is generated in reality.



Z

 

[Tao_Equus]

Hi Z, and a great topic for a thread

I think the field of Psychology is a fitting place to once more insert the Taoist maxim "There are no such things as Untruths......there are only Greater truths or Lesser truths".

I would say that our souls are born at conception or soon after and that they are a synthisis of our ancestors in some way. That we are in spite of our seeming individuality still a link in a much longer 'soul-chain'. This gives a simple mechanism by which to explain ideas of reincarnation and memories of past lives. Not that we were Genghis Khan, but that some part of him made it into us and that our quantum soul still carries all the details. So in a real sense we are in part all the sum of that over which we had no influence. But that is only a factor, an important one yes, but not cause enough for a total abdication of responsibility for our actions.

Really its the old nature v nurture debate and to me the balance is probably somewhere around 25/75 % respectively. The nature component can be said to be our genetic heritage and so it is clearly much more difficult to discern the exact extent to which it steers our development. Nurture on the other hand can be studied, and has been....extensively.

I missed the TV show you refer to. From the depths of memory however I seem to recall that Hitlers father was an abusive drunk and his mother a weak and ineffectual woman who went slowly insane. This probably describes about 1 in 10, or more, of the family units in the caucasian world at that, and this, time though. Not all of the children from them became Hitler. Rather I think that Hitler was in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time and his individual psychology was ill adapted to the power he found in his hands. That he got this power was entirely due to the vacuum created by the ineffectuality of the Wiemer republic in post war Germany and the need of the German people to have some charismatic leadership out of the gloom of past defeats. So in a very real sense Hitler took on his shoulders the the psychological needs of the ego and need for revenge of an entire nation. Such a terrible burden would drive anyone insane, and pushed an already insane man beyond the thinkable.

But back to nurture in genral. Here I would quote Kahil Gibran from The Prophet:
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward or tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
And He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
So He also loves the bow that is stable.

As a parent Z you know how fast they grow, how incredibly short the time interval is for us to get our nurturing right. And so often its a time of great difficulty for mother and father, especially these days when two incomes are virtualy essential for the majority. For most people having children is a selfish submission to the biological imperative to reproduce, thats as it should be, and very little thought is ever given to what our children are in their own right. Always they are seen as an extension of us, and regretfully by a few a possesion.

I think our real sphere of dramatic nurturing influence on a child is gone by the time they reach their 5th birthdays. A child of 5 on the whole has all the characteristics of personality he/she will carry through life. If a young child is neglected, beaten, ignored or abused it takes no great leap of the imagination what this child will carry into adulthood. Such a child can come to realise he/she was a victim when they reach adulthood and to a large extent counter the effects, but that can be a long hard battle, and is often never won. A child with a dedicated parent,( usually the mother but can equally be the father), at home all the time is essential IMO to a happy well balanced child, and I detest the corporate/government slavemasters who peddle their propoganda to the contarary. If you smile, laugh, play and give lots of cuddles to your child they learn how to give and recieve love themselves, they become happy and secure. Its that simple. In the abscence of neurological imbalance/damage every child has the potential to have a joy of life.

Nurture is simple and obvious. Not rocket science at all. Its entirely intuitive. Not sure if I really tackled your question as you would have hoped though. As I have a bit of an urge to go off on another tangent and delve into how this applies to the religeous education of children I think its time for me to stop. Lets see what others have to say. It could and should be a good thread.

Regards

TE

 

[sara[h]ng]

Brilliant post, David. That I will someday be as good a parent as you are.

Z, what I thought of when I read the part about shrinking all of one's natures, is the compound eye of an insect. Maybe in this life, the personality/ego/whatever is just one facet of the whole. Maybe there are tendencies that a soul (the whole) has, based on past-life/pre-existence experiences, and this one facet, as part of the whole, will have these base tendencies, but different events and free will shape the human into what it grows to be, either working towards greater knowledge of and harmony with its whole, or turning away from it for greater divisiveness.

Many religions seem to say that detachment from material things is an ultimate virtue. And people say that babies are so malleable. Could it be that infants have not yet had the chance to develop a facet sharply delineated from the whole? When Jesus says to be as a little child, when atonement (at-onement?) is encouraged to make up for sins, when Buddha said that the key to enlightenment is the realization that there is no self - this list could go on - could this be what is meant?

- Sarah

 

[wil]

There is this heated discussion, all these beings of light talking about what has been going on down in 3D in the earthly plane of existence. Major issues with racism, sepratism, nationalism and the like. The beings are trying to come up with a solution, to get the humans back on track, to the realization they are one with God, that they are a people that is supposed to work together in harmony with and for each other, that their soul growth depends on cooperation.

So one point of light comes up with an idea, a way to help unite the world for a cause, to understand their are greater things out there then their individual differerences...

This being explains the idea, the consensus is that it is a dramatic choice, could have all sorts of reprecussions, but will definitely get the planet discussing and thinking about what is going on. It is agreed that nobody else came up with a better idea and while this make take a hundred years or so to complete...if it has affect it will be worthwhile.

One thing, I need about 40 million volunteers to participate and more than half of you will have a shortened time on earth, who will join me in the struggle.

And millions of the beings of light say...in unison "We'll go down there and take part...Adolf"

What was the state racism and anti-semitism prior to...how about the state of Israel? How much have we changed, how much of a boost was received by the atrocities....could it be that God is in everything?

 

[juantoo3]

Kindest Regards, all!

What an interesting conversation!

If I may be allowed a few observations...

If we discard this spiritual side of the debate, then does our genetic configuration amount to the same resultant nature [well it would do wouldn’t it, by shear coincidence]! That is to say, our chemical robot [human being] holds the seeds to what we are and what we become, the things that happen to us both in childhood and in adult life, are - to a degree at least – caused by what we are [the seeds growing], which affects how people respond to us! There could be both a mental and spiritual side to this reflective nature we appear to have.

I think what you might be looking for pertaining to this sounds to me like Jung (not Freud). If I understand Jung correctly, (my understanding is cursory), his concept of collective consciousness seems to equate psycho-spiritually with what you seem to be getting at here Z. At least, that is a direction to consider.

I think the field of Psychology is a fitting place to once more insert the Taoist maxim "There are no such things as Untruths......there are only Greater truths or Lesser truths".

Perhaps. Yet would not ambiguity by its very nature relegate it to the status of "lesser" truth?

I would say that our souls are born at conception or soon after and that they are a synthisis of our ancestors in some way.

If this is so, it creates quite an issue regarding the dreaded "a" word. Before quickening, a fetus could (legally anyway) be considered "without soul" and merely an appendage to its mother's body.

That we are in spite of our seeming individuality still a link in a much longer 'soul-chain'. This gives a simple mechanism by which to explain ideas of reincarnation and memories of past lives. Not that we were Genghis Khan, but that some part of him made it into us and that our quantum soul still carries all the details. So in a real sense we are in part all the sum of that over which we had no influence. But that is only a factor, an important one yes, but not cause enough for a total abdication of responsibility for our actions.

The way I understand Jung's collective conscious, those stored memories are not (necessarily) ours per se, but those of our parents / grandparents / great-grandparents / great-great... on back into our collective evolutionary past to even before "we" were human and beyond.

I haven't delved deeply into this thought yet, but it occured to me that we have 6 billion bits of information in our genetic code, 3 billion base pairs. Yet "only" 30 thousand of those base pairs compose our genes. 30 thousand out of 3 billion. The rest is "trash," so we are currently told, because the researchers don't quite know what to make of this material. They do not understand it. In my humble, unknowledgeable opinion, I cannot help but think that trash is something, we don't know what yet, but it is not there for no reason. (double negative, I know...) The stuff that buffers around the code for our genes, in my philosophical opinion, cannot be there just to take up space. Maybe, just maybe, some portion of that trash reflects genetic memories of our parents, just as it may also reflect environmental influences during our own lifetimes.

Many religions seem to say that detachment from material things is an ultimate virtue. And people say that babies are so malleable. Could it be that infants have not yet had the chance to develop a facet sharply delineated from the whole? When Jesus says to be as a little child, when atonement (at-onement?) is encouraged to make up for sins, when Buddha said that the key to enlightenment is the realization that there is no self - this list could go on - could this be what is meant?

This is an astute observation.

What was the state racism and anti-semitism prior to...how about the state of Israel? How much have we changed, how much of a boost was received by the atrocities....could it be that God is in everything?

Or perhaps that evil is of human origin, the end result of free-will and free moral agency? In other words, God did not create humans on a leash, He set them free. What is the old saying? "If you love something, set it free. If it returns to you, it is yours. If it doesn't, it never was." God wants us to return His love for us, but in order to be genuine love, He had to set us free to choose to willingly return that love to Him. Otherwise, it is not genuine or sincere love.

Not all humans choose the path of love.

 

[sara[h]ng]

So one point of light comes up with an idea, a way to help unite the world for a cause, to understand their are greater things out there then their individual differerences...

This being explains the idea, the consensus is that it is a dramatic choice, could have all sorts of reprecussions, but will definitely get the planet discussing and thinking about what is going on. It is agreed that nobody else came up with a better idea and while this make take a hundred years or so to complete...if it has affect it will be worthwhile.

One thing, I need about 40 million volunteers to participate and more than half of you will have a shortened time on earth, who will join me in the struggle.

And millions of the beings of light say...in unison "We'll go down there and take part...Adolf"

I have never thought of this. What a cool idea.

- Sarah