The Atman has been empirically discovered to be subject to what Atmanologists have come to call the Houdini Drive. Houdini was a famous performer who was driven to create more and more extreme situations—situations of impossible difficulty—in which he was constrained, for example, by ropes, handcuffs, straitjackets, inside locked trunks, thrown into ice-cold water and in danger of drowning, with only seconds to escape before the onset of fatality. His challenge to imminent death kept his audiences on the edge of their seats. They were thrilled and amazed when he succeeded in appearing, unexpectedly, outside the trunk, free of all constraints, and triumphant against all odds.

This same trick, based on the same drive, describes the performance of the Atman. The Atman creates an ego and places it in a situation of impossible constraints, including the constraint of ignorance, and forces itself to cope with unbearable suffering of every sort. Egos also love to play two-handed versions of this game. Politicians sometimes call it brinksmanship. In fact, they are willing to go over the brink, initiating wars. Teenage drivers call it ‘playing chicken’. At the collective level, the human ego-system even faces itself with imminent death on a planetary scale. It creates conditions of utter hopelessness and despair—only to miraculously find the way out, at the last moment, and emerge victorious over all obstacles. But can we do it this time? We are in suspense. It can only happen if the trunk we are trapped in becomes a magic cocoon, in which our ego dies and our immortal spirit reveals itself in all its power. (more…)

Human character structures are undergoing cataclysmic deformations worldwide. This disruptive process is accelerating exponentially. The factors involved are well known. They include alienation, cynicism, and collective paranoid psychosis, exemplified by the irrational social overreactions to the fear of terrorism. More profound factors include the loss of values and role models of sublime nobility or generosity of spirit. We have also suffered the loss of true communication in the deluge of data streams and technological apparatuses that interrupt, rather than summate, lines of thought leading to wisdom and genuine rapport. There has, in short, been a collective loss of soul in the human species. This could be considered the meaning of the postmodern. The loss of soul follows a previous loss of spirit that brought about modernization in the first place. The loss of both these dimensions of human reality remains unnoticed by the collective discourse. That discourse has become too dumbed-down to even be able to conceptualize, let alone grieve, such losses.

The continuing deformation of human character outpaces the capacity of the field of psychology to describe or understand its dynamics. Diagnostic manuals become obsolete before they can be published. The only field even endeavoring to keep up with the shifting psychic sands of human consciousness is that of psychoanalysis. But that field has become mired in its own battles with the establishment for legitimacy, resulting in compromises with the psychiatric preference for neurological explanations and the pharmaceutical industry’s preference for pill-pushing, rather than the offering of insight and understanding, let alone transformation. Moreover, psychoanalysis, like Freud’s role model, Moses, stops before the promised land of superconscious presence, and thus can never guide patients beyond the threshold of neurosis to the real inner peace that passeth understanding. (more…)