Kinda feels like I’m an astronaut who can’t pay attention. Other interpretations welcome.
I’ve been pretty stuck lately, hard time writing, harder time finishing anything. This drawing was just a bunch of doodles that didn’t mean anything, but it kinda shows where my head’s at lately. Lots of activity underneath, not much happening in my consciousness.
Just watched all seasons of Peaky Blinders and it occurs to me: Society and the criminal world are really mirror images of one another. They have a symbiotic relationship, all of it to do with avoiding the tax man.
The underworld tries to transform dirty money into wealth, and the system tries to make sure dirty money stays dirty and wealth stays at the top.
Where people can’t find jobs, there will be dirty money. If the only money you have is dirty, the only way you can build wealth is by washing it. You can’t buy property if you can’t pay taxes.
That’s why organized crime exists. Organized criminals are better able to wash their money through seemingly legitimate ways and get away with it. It allows them to turn dirty money into wealth. Witness all those glass towers in Miami.
Peaky Blinders is set in England, but it puts me in mind of Gangs of New York. Different factions of the underworld fighting over slices of the pie. I think just about every ethnic group in America has had some kind of mafia.
The mainstream and its favored tribes are less likely to need a mafia because it has the police and the law. The legitimately wealthy get to use police to fight their battles with the ambitious poor and keep the illusion of clean hands.
Gangsters tend to get themselves killed or thrown in prison and don’t get to taste the aristocrat’s life for long, but as long as their operations are running successfully, they’re paying the guy who took the deal and that business hires people.
That’s where the real trickle down happens. The slow conversion of dirty money into small amounts of clean money.
People have been gambling, paying for sex and doing drugs for as long as anyone has kept track. People at the top, and just below the top, and every level below the top will find a way to get those things no matter what the law says.
Where there is dirty money, there will be laundering. Where there is laundering, the system will try to stop it. By cracking down harder or by seizing the means of corruption. Then all that vice starts with clean money and produces clean tax money.
It may capture the means and turn it into something taxable. That’s why we have state lotteries instead of the numbers racket. It’s why Vegas and all those mini-Vegases exist.
It’s why everybody uses plastic now, instead of folding money. The system got tired of all that papermoney disappearing off the grid and producing wealth outside the system.
But capitalism’s evil shadow always finds a way. Now we have cryptocurrency, so the black market can convert those digital ones and zeros into clean currency.
The system can “declare war” and crack down harder, but that raises the price, which just makes it easier to bribe people. With enough money and potential for violence, every means of enforcement can be corrupted.
Like Tommy Shelby says in Peaky Blinders, “Everyone is a whore, we just sell different parts of ourselves.” Some people sell their bodies, some sell their integrity.
Why wouldn’t it go that way? These are our values. Wealth trumps everything. We don’t mind when billionaires thumb their noses at the law and get away with it. They’re our heroes. We watch them on TV.
We don’t want to stop them. We want to be them.
Which is why capitalism’s shadow won’t go away no matter how strict our society gets. All that wealth stuck behind that logjam at the top. All the rest of us who can observe that with a good work ethic, you’re lucky to pay the rent, much less get wealthy.
All that mess is exactly what Jesus was talking about when he said “money is the root of all evil.” We’ve made the act of getting rich into a virtue in itself, so what else should we expect?
….
BTW, if you think the above is a conspiracy theory about a shady cabal making all that happen, you don’t have enough imagination. I’m way crazier than that. I’m saying the system has a mind of its own. I’m saying it’s alive. And we live inside it.
I tried Carl Jung’s active imagination technique and it kinda worked. The fact that I was just returning to bed after an old man bathroom break probably helped.
The visions that led to Jung’s Red Book (aka Liber Novus) and ultimately informed most of his psychological theories were produced using this method, so I thought I’d give it a try.
I read that while doing active imagination, you can talk to the characters you imagine and they will reply. They did. It was brief but impactful.
Of course it’s still you – it’s imagination – but you can still learn something. It gives you a bit of access to the unconscious mind, which can in some ways be wiser than your ego, the part you think with.
It’s just that it doesn’t talk in words. It communicates through images and symbols, though it can take years to understand what they mean. Sometimes it’s good to ask your unconscious for answers.
Sometimes it solves puzzles before your thinking mind does. You just don’t always have enough pieces of the puzzle to understand what it’s saying right away.
I decided to use Jung’s technique on a nightmare that had been bothering me since my early 20s, back when I was still trying to be a Christian, though I was beginning think I might not be a Baptist. I think I just figured it out.
The Nightmare: Being a demon against my will
The nightmare involved a plot to assassinate Jesus. Race also played a minor role, but I wanted to understand it. It was disturbing, but the bad dreams are usually the interesting ones.
The decades-old nightmare I chose to investigate really ate at me. I hated even thinking about it. I decided that made it a good target for Active Imagination. One of those subjects I was avoiding.
As I said in the last post, this post involves religion and race. I promise not in a mean way, though if you’re religious you may quibble. I go my own way when it comes to spirituality.
In my nightmare, I was one of the unclean spirits mentioned in Mark Chapter 5. If you went to church, you probably remember that one – it’s the “My name is Legion” story where Jesus unclean spirits out of a troubled man.
The spirits were on their way to assassinate Jesus. The man we possessed ran through tunnels and culverts, looking for Jesus as I yelled “Stop! Stop! Stop!”
I was desperate not to take part. I kept yelling, “Noooo! Noooo! Let me out of this! I love Jesus. I would never do that!”
But there was no way to stop it.
I exited a tunnel and Jesus was sitting on a log in a dry creek bed, his back turned to us. Suddenly he turned and I knew he saw me, not just any “unclean spirit,” but me.
His sad look told me he was very disappointed in me. That was more than I could take and I woke, covered in sweat. My uncle said I cried out in my sleep. It was a fear I’d picked up in church, that I might one day become irredeemably bad.
The nightmare nagged at me for decades, more than a decade as a self-proclaimed Christian. What the hell was that dream trying to tell me?
I thought I’d figured the dream out years ago, though I knew nothing about Jung at the time.
Two themes jumped out right away: The first was betrayal. I feared I was betraying Jesus, and yet I felt betrayed because he never acknowledged I didn’t have free will.
The second theme was doubt. Questioning my deeply held beliefs was frightening at times, ashamed. I’d been warned about “falling from Grace,” something I’d vowed never to do. But my doubts refused to go away, hard as I tried to push them away.
Those two themes alone explained why I would have a nightmare like that. I was going through a transition. But I still felt like I was missing something.
I decided Jung’s Active Imagination might help me find the missing pieces. I was curious as to why it kept popping into my head long after it had quit upsetting me. I’m not that person anymore. I decided to ask my dream characters some questions.
I spoke the man the “Legion” of spirits had inhabited. “Did you find it unfair when Jesus judged you?”
“He was looking at you,” the man said. As I had suspected. The dream was about me and me alone.
It also bothered me that the man in my dream was black and that he, like me, was forced to do something bad against his will, just like me. (We didn’t actually do it.)
I asked him why race had been part of my dream. “I represent unfair treatment,” he said.
That made sense.
I asked Dream Jesus why he had judged me. “You were friends with sinners and tax collectors. You accepted the thief on the cross. You knew I didn’t mean you harm.”
“I was never in your dream,” he said. “I was part of your unconscious. You were judging yourself.”
I think that solved it. There were two main themes other than betrayal and doubt. These were judgment and unfairness. Two characteristics of the faith I grew up in that always bothered me and part of why I had to change my beliefs.
Late Boomer's Den 
You must be logged in to post a comment.