Graham Hancock on Good and Evil
It's hard not to be at least a little preoccupied with evil right now. There's no escape from images played over and over of the carnage in Boston. The explosions there were quickly followed by one in West Texas -- a horrible accident that was, all the same, replete with strange echoes of past violence. It was close to Waco and handled by Waco authorities... and the ATF. It was effectively a massive fertilizer bomb. (The second largest terrorist attack in US history, the Oklahoma City bombing, utilized a fertilizer bomb. It took place on the second anniversary of the Waco Siege by the ATF which also ended tragically and which, along with Ruby Ridge, was Timothy McVeigh's stated justification.)
The horror was magnified by the bungling of media organs that seem to have devolved into self-parody. In their mad quest for the big scoop, they rushed to judgment against any "dark skinned" or swarthy male who had the misfortune of being caught on camera. And somehow, they also managed to implicate Zooey Deschanel. It's a bad time to have an unusual name, apparently. For good measure, Reuters also reported the death of one George Soros in very exaggerated fashion -- nothing to do with the Boston bombing, but seriously, what is going on with the press?!
What we're witnessing is a massive freak-out and I don't really feel like participating. I've been largely avoiding media assaults on my senses. I've barely been online and when I've watched television, I've pointedly avoided most news. But in an action that I'm determined to take as a personal slight, NBC preempted "Grimm" on Friday with more of their endless, masturbatory coverage. There's simply no escape. And maybe there's an even more important message in that.
Perhaps what we should all be asking ourselves right now is what this massive eruption of the shadow is telling us about ourselves. Like many sensitives, I suspect, I felt this coming for weeks -- that "disturbance in the force" that left me cranky, tired, depleted, and somehow "out of phase" with myself and my environment. There are still aches and pains and a sensation in the center of my chest that would be hard to describe.
A while ago I posted an interview with Paul Levy on Wetiko, one of a number of Native American terms for the expression of the collective shadow. His second book on the topic, Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil, pubbed in January. I highly recommend listening to his recent interview with Christina Pratt. Links to various listening options can be found here.
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