10 Feb 2008 @ 09:42, by John Grieve
Homophobia is Destroying Your Planet
All over the world the battle lines are drawing up between those who can accept themselves and others, and those who have a morbid fear of Difference, of the Other. Make no mistake, saving our planet is not about technological fixes like burying CO2 or recycling, but rather dealing with the problems of consciousness which have got us and the world into this perilous situation. The ecological crisis is primarily a crisis of a fractured consciousness, and as I will demonstrate, a crisis of our consciousness of the Other, and the Other within ourselves.
One of the first things I learnt in an advanced psychology group is that “ we relate to other people in the same way as we relate to alienated parts of ourselves”. In other words all the games, alienated transactions, processes and institutions which cause problems between people in society, have their roots in our relationship with ourselves. We relate to others in exactly the same way that we relate to ourselves. Our morbid fear of the Other; the black person, the homosexual, the muslim, the feminine woman, the disabled person are all problems we have with those parts of ourselves.
As I have demonstrated elsewhere, the soul is more or less infinite, and the human personality while finite is vastly complex and manifold. Whether one talks in terms of Jung’s archetypes or Assagioli’s subpersonalities and identities, all human life is found within each one of us. It is up to us which ones we choose to embrace and nurture, but it is definitely a huge mistake to see certain of them as “alien” and to deny and reject them in ourselves and even try to destroy them. For inevitably, as we “alienate” these identities within us, we will inevitably “alienate” ourselves from their human counterparts outside ourselves in society. The macho man’s mistreatment of women is grounded in a terror of the feminine part of himself. The homophobic woman has a terror of the bisexual or gay identity within herself. It is not for me to say which identities other people should accept and embrace, I’m just warning people of the great dangers of rejecting and alienating these parts of oneself. It will dehumanise and brutalise you and turn you into an oppressor if you can’t tolerate these parts of yourself.
It is interesting that the most repressed and rejected parts of ourselves are usually the identities connected with our sexuality. I have speculated elsewhere that our alienation from nature, surely the cause of climate change , led to man’s alienation from woman ( sexism), then other men (homophobia) and even God. In there somewhere, already alluded to, is the immense rejection of “disturbing” identities and subpersonalities within himself. Nature is a huge Other, and the insane attempts by people and society to control and dominate it, point to an incredible morbid pathology existing in them. I have speculated in some essays I wrote for the Gandhi Foundation ( of London), that our sexuality, as a part of our identity, is Nature itself within us. It’s as fundamental as that. It’s clear to me that the almost obsessive, fanatical attempts to control Nature are a direct mirror-image of similarly unhinged attempts by Church, State and Public Opinion to control our sexualities and expressions of sexual difference. Nature and sexuality are opposite sides of the same coin representing the Other.
As I said above, the battle lines are drawing up all over the world. Those who believe only in technological fixes, will only create more and similar ecological problems, whatever the outcome of their “fixes”. The solution I propose is not materialist but rather Spiritual/psychological and is one which addresses the underlying problems of the crisis of consciousness.
Traditional spirituality talks about meditation as a way of reaching enlightenment. It is the mystical union with the One, the Divine. But there may be other ways. Many people have predicted, over the centuries, the coming of what they have called Cosmic Consciousness, SuperConsciousness, Universal Enlightenment and what Teilhard de Chardin termed the Omega Point. This is the whole world attaining a new level of spirituality, a new awareness, a new consciousness.
There is a connection here with the discussion above. It is possible that by accepting and integrating within ourselves the manifold identities contained in each one of us, particularly the common identity of sharing in the Godhead, that universality will ensue. Certainly, this is the purpose of Psychosynthesis, Assagioli’s form of psychotherapy, at the level of the individual. In his teaching, the individual becomes a whole person by integrating into a synthesis, these sub-personalities and identities.
This is one possibility, there are many others. Whatever happens, it will be our consciousness being healed, our willingness to love ourselves and everything else, particularly the Other, which will play a major part.
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