The Madness of George
W. Bush:
A Reflection of Our
Collective Psychosis – by Paul Levy
FOREWORD
By
Mark Comings
This book that
you hold in your hands by Paul Levy is a landmark contribution to an emerging
integral psychology. It illuminates the deeper nature of our world crisis
through a novel perspective that synthesizes psychology with recent discoveries
in physics, doing so in a deeply spiritual context. Paul uses the current Bush
administration as a compelling case study which reveals the character and
structure of a collective psycho-spiritual malady.
The reason that scientist
like myself is writing a foreword to a book called The Madness of George W.
Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis is that in this unique work,
Paul is drawing upon recent discoveries in physics, as well as many other
disciplines, to shed light on the underlying psychological roots of our collective
dilemma. The severity of the planetary crisis currently engulfing us is so
great that we need to call forth and integrate the best maps of reality
available to us in all fields and use this evolving synthesis to wisely address
the problems facing us. Paul’s book is a significant contribution in this
direction, and is an example of the kind of integrated approach that is
urgently needed at this time.
The two general
domains of knowledge from which we can gain useful guidance in navigating our
way through the turbulence of our times are the spiritual and the scientific.
We are witnessing a profound convergence and synthesis of these two realms that
have been divided and kept separate in western culture for many centuries. This
spiritual-scientific synthesis is of great interest and concern to me, as it
represents the healing of a deep epistemological rift that has shattered our
integral wholeness in ways enormously crippling to us as a species. The processor
creating bridges between new science and spiritual/psychological perspectives
represents the process of repairing this split in our collective consciousness,
thereby moving us toward the healing of our species.
Paul is drawing
anew and powerful picture for us. There is much talk in physics about the
participatory universe. But very rarely is this connected to the deterioration
and failure of civil society and our opportunity to translate the understanding
of reality coming out of the new physics into social responsibility and
political activism.
This book
represents a breakthrough in the understanding of how the collective human
psyche operates as a non-local field of energy, information and sentience (the
quality of having awareness). This perspective is distinctly different
from that of present-day mainstream psychology, which views the psyche impurely
local terms, i.e., each person's psyche is located and confined, more roles,
within the locus of their physical body. The non-local quantum field of
information revealed by modern physics is, as Paul illustrates, related to
Carl Jung’s concept of the temporal, field-like aspect of the psyche that he
called the “collective unconscious.” This non-local dimension of the
psyche is specifically left out of all standard, mainstream psychological maps
or models. By exploring and unpacking the implications of the idea that
neither the human psyche, nor consciousness itself, are bound by space anytime,
Paul accesses a rich set of empowering insights, tools that help us comet grips
with what is actually occurring in our world today.
Paul's work not
only articulates an innovative field-based perspective on the human mind but
also calls for a radical provisioning of the very nature of psychology itself.
His diagnosis of our non-local collective mental illness is an important
achievement in the evolving psychology of planetary consciousness. What Paul is
bringing to light requires us to rethink the very nature and definition of
psychiatric disorders in terms of the non-local field of consciousness which
unites all minds in a singular and inherently inseparable unified quantum field.
This recontextualization of the way we think about illness has the power to
bring forth new possibilities for the healing and transformation of our
collective malady.
Don't let its title
fool you into thinking that this is a book about George W. Bush. This would beta
miss the entire point of what Paul is saying. Bush is simply an acute and
prominent example serving to illuminate the deep and insidious nature of the
collective mental disorder afflicting our species. This is not your typical
Bush-bashing book. Though it seems to be about Bush, it is really about ourselves.
Paul identifies
and elucidates the structure and dynamics of the collective trance from which
humanity needs to wake up from so that we may stop dreaming up nightmares for
ourselves. We, as a species, have been suffering from a pervasive form omits-knowledge
about the nature of the universe, and ourselves as well. We keep trying
solutions that are premised on a view of reality that is false, which ensure
that our attempts at resolution will never succeed.
One of the
implicit and generally unrecognized problems underlying our world crisis is
that we tend to be entranced by fixating our attention on a superficial level of
explicate (outer manifest forms) and seemingly separate patterns that make pour
world. By having our awareness constricted and focused in such a limited way,
we are not seeing, attending to or feeling the deeper, undivided, invisible,
and indivisible field and its non-local dynamics which are responsible for
shaping world events in a fundamental way.
Paul is taking stand
and saying that the way we have been perceiving and understanding” reality” (or
the world) is fundamentally flawed and ignorant of a deeper level of radical
interconnectedness that is primarily responsible for organizing, regulating,
and patterning events in the so-called “objective” physical world. These
non-local forces are the formative agents of the patterns of outer events and
are only to be discovered in one place within our own subjective experience,
that is, within our minds.
There has been critically
important breakthrough in physics in the last few decades that has radically
changed our understanding of the nature of Nature. What has-been
discovered is that an underlying assumption—known as "the principle of
locality"—implicit in our scientific understanding of the physical world
for centuries, is categorically wrong at the deepest level of nature. In a
brilliant series of experiments conducted in the 1970s and‘80s, and which have
been continually refined and made more rigorous throughout the ‘90s and on into
the 21st century, “locality” (being bound and limited by space and time) has
been shown to not apply at the most fundamental and essential levels of matter,
energy, and information.
Locality refers
to a tacit or unconscious assumption about the nature of physical reality. Its the view, arising from our day to day experiencing of
the macroscopic physical world, that the world is comprised of apparently
separate things or mechanistically interacting parts. In a local universe,
light is the fastest carrier of information. Thus, no information or influences
of any kind can get around the material universe faster than the speed of
light. Another way of saying this is that all information and influences in the
universe are thought to necessarily propagate through space, i.e., over
distance, at the speed flight or less. This assumption has been soundly proven
to be wrong. In essence, what physics has discovered is that everything is
radically interconnected inlays that are subtler and much deeper than can be
explained or understood on purely mechanical or macroscopic physical basis.
In a non-local
universe, at the most primary level, there is a way in which information is
getting around faster than the speed of light. So much faster, in fact, that it
actually takes no time at all. The inherent non-locality of nature provides for
instantaneous information distribution throughout all of space. Light is thievery
substance and foundation of being, but as we know, according to Einstein’s
theory of relativity, time stops at the speed of light. For light, there is notice.
Thus, light itself is essentially timeless by its very nature. Light is
therefore a non-temporal standing wave pattern of energy/information. Benignant-temporal
or synchronic, the information encoded in light is available everywhere at the
same time, and is thus non-local.
Due to this
intrinsic temporality of the fabric of reality, information and informing
influences can get around the universe in ways that are instantaneous,
unmitigated and immediate. The universe is thus able to choreograph its
movements by being informed and thus orchestrated and co-ordinate by
information from the whole in-forming every part. In other words, all
apparently separate things, e.g., people, etc., are actually indissolubly
united as one singular invisible and indivisible being or field. There is only
one already-unified Singularity of Existence that will not ultimately admit
separations. This is Being itself and all that it
contains. Physics has thus proven that separation is an illusion at the most
fundamental and essential level of the unified field. We may appear to be
separate beings and on the conventional order of reality it makes sense and is
useful to treat each others discrete, encapsulated and separate entities, but
when it comes down to dealing with the fundamental nature of reality, none of
us are truly separable from each other.
The psychological
implications of embracing the reality of a non-local universe are enormous and
vastly transformative of the entire field of Psychology, and by extension,
every other form of collective human activity. Certain functions of the human
psyche must now be understood to operate as a non-local quantum field in which
we all participate in an interconnected and interdependent mind-field. Thus,
any problem arising in the sphere of the human family can ultimately be seen shaving
something to do with each and every one of us. We are co-participants in all
that occurs in the entire human world. This knowledge brings with it great
responsibility—universal responsibility, in fact. In taking this total
responsibility for our lives and our inescapable impact upon the entire human
world and beyond, literally upon all that lives for generations to come, we
become aware that we have greater power than we have previously understood and
become self-empowered to act as conscious agents of change, healing, and
transformation.
Paul's book
inaugurates and calls for a whole new non-local or field psychology in which
the prime object of focus is not the mind or psyche of one individual taken in
isolation, but rather the entire continuum or field that is the energetic
medium underlying and interconnecting all of physical and non-physical reality.
Through this medium or field, all minds are thereby united as constituents ozone universal mind. Physical reality, which
on the surface appears to be made-up of a rich and complex array of discrete and
separate "things" that we call the universe, is actually an utterly
seamless, perfectly contiguous unified field of sentient boringness. This field
which is called the “quantum vacuum” in physics, is in
fact a “plenum” (an absolute fullness) and is known to be saturated with
nearly infinite energy and immeasurable luminosity.
The standard
psychological approach is to treat psychological disorders on a case by case individual
basis. This definitely has its merits, similar to how classical mechanistic
physics has great value and utility for dealing with the everyday world of
macroscopic objects and their mechanical interactions. But when it comes to
understanding the deepest roots of the nature of mind and psyche, it is too
crude of a generalization to treat our minds as separate and encapsulated from
each other. This standard psychological and psychiatric perspective lacks the
ability to perceive and discern the mysterious interconnectedness of our
collective psychology that gives rise to mass events. Mainstream psychological
understanding does not have enough resolution to grasp the subtle and profound
ways that all minds are linked together and co-operate as integrated parts in collective,
non-local field of consciousness. Herein lies the value of what Paul is
articulating, for it extends the scope of modern psychology into new domains
that have been heretofore either ignored or poorly understood. The ability to
map, model, discuss and thus more deeply understand the non-local and
non-temporal dimensions of the psyche and the role that these dimensions play
in informing and shaping the psychology of individuals, groups and our entire
species is a great contribution that cannot be underestimated.
Paul’s view of
the universe as a mass shared dream is congruent with the moment to moment”
collapse of the wave function” model of quantum physics. This rigorous,
mathematical description of how events unfold indicates that in each moment
there are an array of possibilities and that in each moment, only one of those
myriad possibilities occurs. The possibility that becomes an actuality is
selected in the moment of observation by the act of observation. Quantum
physics thus shows us that the unfolding of a physical event is profoundly
connected to and impacted by how consciousness, through the act of
observation itself, brings that potential event into manifestation. The
collapse of the wave function of quantum physics is mediated or determined byte
observing consciousness in a similar way that the witnessing consciousness
within a dream affects the unfolding of the dream. This reveals the profound
parallels between the process by which material events are understood to unfolding
physics and the process by which consciousness is involved in creating and
shaping how a dream manifests. The dynamics of material process appears to have
deep similarity to the dynamics of dreaming. Thus quantum physics provides
strong supportive evidence for the dream-like nature of the universe.
By the word”
dreaming," Paul is evoking a radical shift or recontextualization of the
nature of our experience. By "dreaming" Paul does not intend to evoke
the common notion that if something is a "dream" it is somehow less
real or "imaginary" in the pejorative sense. Paul means exactly the
opposite when he refers to the dream-like nature of our human experience. When
Paul refers to our experience being "a dream," or being” dream-like,"
he is making a very profound phenomenological assertion, one that is common to
many of the world’s most time-honored spiritual wisdom traditions and
philosophical systems of thought. This assertion essentially points to the fact
that our so-called outer or” objective" experience of the world is
actually not separate from, but is in fact an instantaneous reflex of the
structures of consciousness that we are operating out of in any given moment.
This point is both subtle and immensely profound—it is the essence of the great
spiritual wisdom traditions. Just like in dreaming, we are the source of
meaning for every moment of our experience. We are each creatively responsible
for evoking, or in Paul’s words, "dreaming up," our world.
Physics gives use
rigorous basis for understanding and gaining insight into the way that we areal
co-participating in the evocation or "dreaming up" of our world
moment to moment. An essential truth that has emerged out of quantum physics is
that when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
This is an exact articulation of the dynamics of dreaming. This book is
beginning to describe the basic outlines of what could be called “the physics
of the universal dream.”
Paul is saying
that in order to effectively deal with the present planetary crisis we must
awaken to a new level of consciousness, which is available to us in this very
moment. Just as we can learn to become lucid in our night dreams, it is
imperative that we, as a species, learn to become lucid in our so-called waking
state. The crises of our time requires a new form of
collective lucid waking consciousness for their resolution.
Paul is saying
that our ordinary mundane so-called waking-state consciousness is in a very
real sense asleep to the way that it is involved in shaping and evoking the
patterns of “outer” events. This key insight can change our lives profoundly.
When fully understood, it can enable us to discover entirely new ranges of
options and possibilities to which we were previously asleep or blind, having
fallen under the spell of a limiting belief system. This essential insight,
when properly engaged, can be the tipping point within our consciousness that
snaps us out of the spell that perpetuates our sense of helplessness and
impotence. This insight can awaken us to the fact that we have a vast array of
previously unrecognized creative options at our disposal that we can use right
now to make positive change in the world, no matter who we are or what our
situation may be.
While we hold
Bush and Co. accountable as a political, legal matter, it is imperative for
purposes of human spiritual evolution to see that the roots of that same
madness that we see them so clearly embodying are in us. This is one of the
most salient points in Paul's book. The outer madness we see acting itself outing
the world is inescapably connected to and, in fact, a reflection of process
going on deep within ourselves, both individually and collectively. Specific
example of this is how our environmental crisis is actually an outer reflection
of a crisis in the inner mental and spiritual landscape of humanity.
If our leaders
are behaving in mad ways, it reflects a deeper spiritual and cultural madness
pervading the field and affecting us non-locally. How could we as a collective
accept and even actively support mad leaders if we weren't mad ourselves? Incur
madness, we believe our leaders to be sane, which means like us. Our mad
leaders are thus an inseparable reflection and product of a mad populace. Whence
see how we are connected and are unconsciously helping to support and feed the
madness pervading the field, we gain power to change the overall madness by
changing ourselves.
Paul’s unique
synthesis of diverse areas of knowledge is a creative and daring attempt to
point out and articulate “something” that has remained hidden in the field of
humanity’s experience for millennia. This “something” has caused indescribable
and nightmarish damage and destruction to human life throughout the entire
cycle of recorded history. This "something" has been eluding and
tormenting humankind for ages. It is hard to see because it hides in the
shadows of human consciousness. It secretly influences perception in ways that
prevent it from being discovered. This "something" has traditionally been
called “evil.”
Paul's work is an
earnest and creative effort to shed new light on the nature of evil. As he
points out, the very process of shining light on evil dynamically transforms
the nature of evil itself. He articulates how evil can function as a catalytic
agent in the awakening of consciousness within humanity. Despite the horrors of
evil, it has an important transformative function to play in the evolution four
species. This very perspective on evil helps us to relate to it in new and
empowered ways. It provides us with powerful and creative tools for tracking,
studying, and dealing with evil. Armed with these insights, Paul is able to
draw a more accurate map of the roots of the psychic malaise afflicting all onus which is the cause of untold amounts of human
suffering.
Paul synthesizes
the wisdom of the pioneering psychologist Carl Jung with the transcendental
insight of Buddhism and the revealed wisdom stemming from a deeply felt
understanding of the implications of the latest discoveries in quantum physics.
Paul’s perspective is the product of a unique initiation that was the hard-won
result of his own ordeal of freeing himself from the limitations of mainstream
psychological understanding. Paul’s personal experience, combined with his additional
education in psychology, spirituality, and consciousness enables him to bridge
the worlds of inner experience and outer appearance. Paul's innovative way of
utilizing the recent discoveries from physics to elucidate and map new
psychological territory is trailblazing, and I applaud him for his bold
synthesis.
To see the
integration of physics and psychology that Paul is forging is deeply satisfying
to me as a scientist who has always striven to integrate the scientific and the
spiritual. It is my hope that Paul’s work will stimulate and awaken the
realization of the dream-like nature of reality. Joining our lucidity together,
we can help each other to understand and stabilize the recognition that we are
collaboratively dreaming up our universe into materialization in this very
moment. This spreading realization in our species can create a shared context
in human consciousness that will allow previously undreamed of approaches and
solutions to emerge. This may well be the secret to the reconciliation
and healing of our world crisis.
Please see the first
chapter of the upcoming book by Paul Levy "The Madness of George W. Bush:
A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis," at
© 2005 Paul Levy