Elections In North Macedonia Bring Us Back To The Era Of Pjetër Bogdan – OpEd

Flag of North Macedonia

 May 4, 2024  

By Dr. Sadri Ramabaja

There is a gap between the expectations from the elections in North Macedonia and the reality in the sphere of geopolitics. North Macedonia should not fall into the trap of ethno-nationalism.

Introduction

The results of the presidential elections that took place this week in North Macedonia were as expected. In the first round, VMRO candidate Gordana Siljanovska/Davkova won.

This victory pushed North Macedonia into the slippery slope of political instability. After all, this was also the purpose of the Russian and Serbian intervention. The West again, similar to Montenegro, rained late!

These elections, especially those for Parliament, which are expected to be held on May 8, will give this fragile state the geopolitical weight it deserves. This result is a kind of product of the naivety of the so-called modern politicians of the Albanian political space.

As a Nation, as these elections also proved, we urgently need coordination in the field of political action strategy. Macedonians who feel themselves nationalists proved to be an absolute majority. Meanwhile, they will line up even more strongly in the so-called anti-Western front, somewhat similar to the majority of citizens in Montenegro. This was the trap they fell into.

North Macedonia in the whirlwind of geopolitical storms

VMRO-DPMNE is returning to power after a review and reorientation of the national political agenda. The ideologues of this political force seem to have strayed too far from its basic objectives. The party believes that its goals and objectives are the expression of the tradition of the Macedonian people on which the political struggle and its concepts are based.[1]

Let’s remember the fact that this party was founded under the name VMRO-DPMNE on June 17, 1990 in Skopje.[2] Since the process of the disintegration of Yugoslavia had begun and there was a real danger of Macedonia being devoured by Serbia, its founders would immediately contact the Bulgarian authorities to ensure the existence of Macedonia as an independent republic. In Sofia they assured that if Serbia would invade Macedonia, then Bulgaria would use all necessary means to oppose it.[3]

If VMRO-DPMNE’s leading ruling elite has rightly been criticized for its “antique” policy (known locally as “Antikvizacija”), in which the country seeks to appropriate ancient Macedonian figures such as Alexander the Great and Philip II Macedonia,[4] in an effort to build a new identity, different from the Bulgarian one, the current leaders are gradually returning to the Slavic Belgrade-Moscow axis. This reorientation of what is the truth has started since the time when this political force was led by Nikola Gruevski.

Meanwhile, in 2015, the former prime minister and leader of the VMRO-NP, Ljubço Georgievski, would oppose the serbian policies of his predecessor. In an interview for Radio Free Europe, he expressed his opinion that “the previous government had a clear goal: to keep the country closer to Serbia and in a future phase to join the northern neighbor.” According to him, “a classic pro-Yugoslav policy of Serbization was being developed, where confrontation with all other neighbors was being sought, but the border between Macedonian and Serbian national identity was erased.” [5]

“Stop the Serbian absorption of the Macedonian nation” was the motto of the advertisements then placed on the streets of Skopje, through which the Party launched the campaign for the preservation of the Macedonian national identity. The pro-government press claimed that the “Bulgarian” Georgievski organized a new provocation. As a result, the signs were quickly removed by the VMRO-DPMNE authorities. [6] The comeback had just begun.

The agreement with Greece would help this return, while membership in NATO would guarantee the survival and existence of the Republic. Thus, the way was being opened for the march towards the EU. But, in this context, the leaders of this multi-ethnic state could not be sure of a clean success: its prospects have been anything but clear since Greece vetoed its neighbor’s candidacy at the NATO summit. in Bucharest in 2008 due to the name conflict,[7] which will also be followed by Bulgaria’s condition regarding the constitutional position of the Bulgarian minority.

Only those who made up and make up over 1/3 of the population, i.e. the Albanians, did not put forward any conditions! At least not until the spring of 2001, when the National Liberation Army ended the experiment with the Albanians and imposed the Ohrid Agreement.

It was exactly the compromise presented by the Ohrid Agreement that guaranteed the Albanians a thread of moral and political dignity, but also that ended the war, that had brought into question the survival of Macedonia as a state.

Eleven years later, in a symbolic gesture of reconciliation, Greece would become the first country to ratify North Macedonia’s accession to the alliance.

On the road to North Macedonia’s alignment with the EU, as we stated above, another obstacle that North Macedonia faces on its way to European integration is, surprisingly, its now strained relations with Bulgaria.

North Macedonia thus returns to the whirlwind of geopolitical storms.

In September 2019, Bulgaria sent official Skopje a list of conditions that had to be met if they hoped to receive support for EU membership. The list includes twenty items with specific deadlines carefully aligned with the dates of pre-trial hearings.

One of them involves the withdrawal of the Macedonian side from any claims related to the Macedonian minority of Bulgaria. In addition, any mention of a “fascist Bulgarian occupation” should be removed from all historical monuments and commemorative plaques. In this context, a polishing process should be initiated that aims to remove all ex-Yugoslav communist activists from the state apparatus. Harmonization of the content of the history texts of the two countries is another condition of the Bulgarian side that must be fulfilled in order for North Macedonia to count on ratification from its eastern side.[8]

But in all this clash, the essence of the political disagreements in the Skopje-Sofia relationship is revealed – it is language. Bulgaria demands that the European Union not use the term “Macedonian language” in the accession talks, but rather the term “official language of the Republic of North Macedonia”.

This insistence is consistent with the Bulgarian view that Macedonians are actually Bulgarians. Bulgaria itself sees Macedonian as a Bulgarian dialect.

Under the motto “proud of North Macedonia”, Siljanowska-Dawkowa, the candidate for president from VMRO-DPMNE, brought back the issue of the country’s integration with the West into the focus of her election campaign. She and her party returned the ethno-nationalist vocabulary to the center of the field, promising that upon coming to power they will put an end to “the national humiliation that Skopje had to endure under the social democrats by making compromises for the sake of EU and NATO integration. “

In this case, it is about changing the name of the country, which Greece, a member of the EU, had conditioned, promising to give up the veto against the start of membership negotiations between Brussels and Skopje.

North Macedonia has been a candidate for EU membership since 2005. Between 1991 and 2017, the country was called the “Republic of Macedonia”. In 2017, this dispute was resolved and the country was renamed the “Republic of North Macedonia”. Then, North Macedonia’s neighbor, Bulgaria, will begin to take over the role of Greece – that of the blocker of this process.

Basically, the dispute between Skopje and Sofia is about culture, history and tradition, that is why we have Sofia’s request that the Bulgarian minority of North Macedonia be clearly highlighted in the preamble of the Constitution of North Macedonia.

This change will be significant for the future of North Macedonia. He demands a two-thirds majority, which VMRO-DPMNE, which is meanwhile considered pro-Russian and pro-Serbian, has not accepted. Will he be able to resist even after coming to power, it is not very reliable.

At this point, she may have the first difficulties even with the Albanian partner of the coalition.

Constitutional changes are thus essential for overcoming the unitary mentality that VMRO-DPMNE has cultivated. Until then, VMRO-DPMNE would be able to give up unitarist and chauvinistic policies, while the plural multicultural life would be reflected in the real political life in North Macedonia.

But the strained relations between Skopje and Sofia must first of all be seen in the new geopolitical context. Therefore, the North Macedonian elections were the subject of many reports in the Bulgarian and Albanian media [in Kosovo and Albania].

On the Bulgarian web portal mediapool.bg, a reader comment on the election result wrote: “Further proof that Macedonians are Bulgarians.” Meanwhile, the noise of the Albanian media in Tirana and Pristina was dominated by the political battle for the preservation of the status quo led by the Albanian Prime Minister, Edi Rama, and that in the background is the return to the Open Balkans project.

The return to the logic of redefining the limits of influence in accordance with the regional geopolitical identities that are being created, taking into consideration the interests of the states that will conclude the process of the nation-state cannot be considered as modern constructions.

The oldest of these boundaries, with the greatest extent, was that between East and West – or rather: between Asia and Europe, between Orient and West. This tendency is also observed in the depths of the centuries – in antiquity, when Aristotle emphasized the contrast between the democracy of the Greek polis and the despotism of the Persian king.[9]

The wars between the autochthonous peoples – the Illyrians and the Thracians in the face of the Slavic influx since the 6th century of our era, such as the earlier ones of the Greeks with the Persians and later against the Romans and Parthians, were the military expression of this demarcation, which totally the present clash of the Pre-Red [NATO] with the East [first of all with Russia].

Meanwhile, the Albanian-Serbian confrontation and rivalry took on new colors since a part of the elite

Serbian culture adopts the ideas of the European Enlightenment [let’s remember the war diary of Dimitrije Tucovic, the journalistic writings of Kosta Novakovic…]. This world contrast is revised, accepting the Serbian genocide of the Albanians in accordance with Hegel’s perspective, in whose philosophy of history the stagnant Oriental world is contrasted with the advancing Greek, Roman and Germanic world.

Geopolitical identity in the making

The border between Europe and Asia, progressive scholars judge, is also a construct, since Europe is not a separate continent in the geographical sense, but only the western appendage of the Eurasian land mass.

The westernmost limit was drawn by Ewald Banse (1912). It runs from St. Petersburg to the mouth of the Danube in the Black Sea; it includes the Baltic states, but already defines Belarus and Ukraine as part of Europe. While Ukraine continues to be the front of the war between the East and the West, Belarus is being filled with mouths of Russian nuclear weapons, while the extension of this influence towards the Balkans remains a strategic objective not only of Russia.

Whereas today, when the war in Ukraine has entered its third year and there is no end in sight, geopolitical identities are being reviewed in their entirety, while in Southeast Europe they are adapting to the new circumstances. Those borders are being anchored in the consciousness of people, even those who were able to fight for the dissolution of Yugoslavia, through intellectual and political efforts, there is a tendency to justify the return to the Open Balkans project, which is de facto the new Yugoslavia without Croatia and Slovenia, but with political Albania!

Even within Europe, the old borders have already changed radically. That is why we had a war in the Balkans in the last decade of the last century; that’s why we have war in Ukraine today.

The border between the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church, the border between the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire – the latter in the Balkans now, have become the border of “core Europe”. Russia’s attempt to bring under its influence, in addition to Serbia and the Republika Srpska [Bosnia and Herzegovina], also Montenegro and North Macedonia, means a new battle between the East and West in the process of finalizing the borders of the new identity. geopolitical. Meanwhile, Skopje can return to a center that gives specific weight to this geopolitical identity, not only on the cultural level, but also on the political and military level.

We are returning to the positions we were in the era of Pjetër Bogdan.

In the era of Bogdan, Europe’s confrontation with the invasion of the East in the Balkans had just begun, even in the ideological and cultural domain that accompanied the Ottoman Empire (and Islam), it was the Albanians who were becoming front-line fighters, respectively shield of western civilization. This was not something accidental: the Albanians were the eastern extreme of this civilization. Where there were no more Albanians, Western civilization ended. Skopje was therefore the center of the Diocese of Arbers in this part of Albania.As Pjetër Bogdani teaches us, the Slavs (Serbs) therefore called Catholicism as “Arbanashka vera” [Religion of trees].

May 8 elections – the three possible scenarios

North Macedonia is actually in a position where it has to be determined for one of the three possible scenarios:

The first scenario – Starting after the May 8 parliamentary elections, we will have the coalition between VMRO/DPMNE and VLEN. This scenario was warned by the chairman of VMRO, Hristijan Mickoski.

Meanwhile, VMRO-DPMNE entrusted him with the negotiations for the formation of the new parliamentary majority.

Mickoski from the first appearance, starting after the communication of the official results for the victory of the candidate Gordana Siljanovska, sent a public message to the Albanian opposition, inviting it to be part of the change, even expressing his willingness to talk about the participation of the opposition. Albanian in the next government after May 8.

In the following days, he received an indirect answer from Arben Taravari, reminding him of the main condition: the constitutional changes through which the two entities: the Macedonian entity and the Albanian entity, share ownership of North Macedonia equally.

In Skopje, the coming to power of the Young Turks [Young Turks] began in 1908 with the support of the Albanian lobby. They came to power first of all with the strong support of the Albanian lobby in Constantinople and made great promises to change the situation in the Empire.

VMRO-DPMNE is clear that the fate of North Macedonia is closely connected and completely interdependent with the position of the State towards the national freedoms of the Albanians.

Albanians at this turning point for North Macedonia, with real opportunities to contribute to it moving with accelerated steps towards EU integration, will not tolerate the MV falling into the lap of Serbian-Russian geopolitical interests.

This scenario can only succeed if VMRO-DPMNE has understood that MV is as much their homeland as it is Albanians’.

Second scenario – The second scenario implies political paralysis in the country. Of course, if the Albanians would not agree to become a decorum of the VMRO-DPMN power. This could impose the creation of a governing coalition from the loser of the Macedonian bloc – the SDSM together with the two factions of the Albanian bloc. This scenario, however, will not be sustainable. Therefore, Macedonia risks sinking into the cycle of deep political crisis and instability of its own kind.

The third scenario – It can be defined as the exit gate from the possible crisis. It has to do with the creation of a technical, comprehensive Government, with a limited term of government, for one year, which would be enough to prepare the ground for special elections.

This scenario can become a reality if the diplomatic diplomacy understands the seriousness of the crisis where the situation in North Macedonia can slip and intervenes in time.

The VMRO-DPMNE trap – A black hole for the region

Sun Tzu said: “Don’t interrupt your opponent while he is making mistakes.” Should the Albanians let VMRO-DPMNE deepen the mistake and sink further into the trap it created?!

In these circumstances, when Macedonian nationalism is on the rise and waiting to take power, the Albanian parties must demonstrate an even greater national and political maturity, making votes together with those progressive forces in Macedonian society which are more immune to Russian-Serbian influences in Macedonia. Belgrade and Moscow are committed to Macedonia remaining a black hole to prevent EU and US reflectors from shedding more light on the region’s future.[10]

The political platform of both blocs within the Albanian electorate needs to rise above narrow interests, when the issue is the position of the Albanians in North Macedonia as a state-forming party; it has an urgent need for consensual spirit in this plane and unity of action.

Albanians should definitely not fight for power, the publicist and writer Emin Azemi rightly insists, before they have clarified the common vision on the cooperation strategy with the Macedonian political parties.[11]

Even under these circumstances, this strategy would have to be fully in line with the pre-modern spirit of the geopolitical realignment that is unfolding before our eyes.

The possible creation of a coalition between WMRO and VLEN should therefore be based on several essential preconditions:

1. VLEN should make it even clearer, first of all for the Albanian electorate, especially now on the eve of the second round for the election of the president and for the elections for Parliament, what is the position of this coalition in relation to “Open Balkan”?!

2. VLEN must clearly and unequivocally inform the party leader and the coalition partner – VMRO that any cooperation with Serbia and Vučić that would benefit the strengthening of Serbia’s hegemonic positions in the region are unacceptable. Consequently, renouncing the Open Balkans and commitment to the Berlin Process is sine qua non and of vital interest for both Macedonians and Albanians of North Macedonia.

3. It should be clarified what is the position of Mickovski and VMRO regarding the constitutional changes and how the Albanians will be treated in this process. What will be the position of Albanians and that of the Albanian language, respectively its treatment in state and public institutions, etc.

4. VLEN has a moral and political obligation to clarify in advance the position of the future Prime Minister of North Macedonia, how the investment policies in the municipalities with an Albanian majority will be handled and what the concrete projects will be?

Conclusion

In this political battle between the West and the East in Macedonia, with this current re-alignment of VMRO-DPMNE, the identity of the Macedonians will fade every year and more, while the position of the Albanians can return to the state when they were forced to take weapons in hand and to secure their dignity and life by force. The statement made public on April 30 of the VMRO’s candidate for president of the Republic, in Kumanovo, returning to the accusations of alleged “crimes against humanity” committed by the Albanian National Army [UÇK], and of “recall” effects as a lawyer who is , it is stated that “acts against humanity never become obsolete”,[12] they are ominous for the future of North Macedonia.

It seems that without the authoritarian mechanisms and patronage of the West, the future of North Macedonia is again being questioned. See for this, there is a high probability that our generation will be eyewitnesses of how a geopolitical project will collapse before our eyes, and with it the Macedonian nation and state.
________________________

1. The party politics in Macedonia, 1993, Skopje, G. Ljubancev
2. Walking on the Edge: Consolidating Multiethnic Macedonia, 1989-2004, Židas Daskalovski, Globic Press, 2006 (page 46)
3. Красимир Каракачанов пред Васко Ефтов: През 1990 г. България гарантира сигурността на Р Македония. 04.04.2011г
4. Macedonia profile, BBC News Europe, 23 October 2012
5. Радио Слободна Европа, јануари 23, 2015, Марија Митевска, Србизација на Македонија?
6. Po aty
7. https://www.treffpunkteuropa.de/nordmazedonien-im-aufwind-oder-im-auge-des-sturms?lang=fr
8. Po aty
9. https://www.blaetter.de/ausgabe/2017/mai/das-ost-west-konstrukt
10. Emin Azemi: https://www.facebook.com/emin.azemi.7
11. Emin Azemi: https://www.illyria.com/lakmicaret-qe-duan-te-behen-me-zor-pushtetare-pa-votat-e-shqiptareve/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR2jzEGMCI7YzOC5pRu0CgogFcI3Iwye3ROqmRlRgwBz_xjUu-Jj22nVC_o_aem_AZziiRZzqgo8QNDK7lFJxl9wdfsg2LeITF-EtoC42v8B66fTpimfB9blnN8IuTLTTjPa4puSjGwSDpAsl6_xgBYI
12. https://lajmpress.org/siljanovska-propozoi-tribunal-nderkombetar-per-luften-e-vitit-2001/

Dr. Sadri Ramabaja

Dr. Sadri Ramabaja was born on October 4th, 1961 in the Village of Gollak, in the town of Dardania, Republic of Kosovo. Dr. Ramabaja has been an active member of the National Albanian Union Party for over fifteen years (1990-2005) until this political party ceased to exist and later on actively participated in the Social Democratic Party of Kosovo. Since 2010 has emerged as one of the leaders of the Self Determination Movement while promoting the main principles of this alliance and is a member of the National Assembly of Prishtina for two terms. In 1983 he was arrested by the Serbian Secret Service for his active role in Kosovo’s quest for independence. Thereafter Dr. Ramabaja was jailed as a political disident for three years in the penitentiary of Vraja. During his residence in Switzerland (1987-2002) he continued his University studies in Tirana, and his postgraduate studies in the University of Basel, in the European Studies Institute. For three years in a row (1987-1990) Dr. Ramabaja was the editor of VOICE OF KOSOVO, a newspaper published in Switezerland. During the years 2001-2004 he was the professional collaborator for Communications Media at the OST Institute-West in Bern, Switzerland. In 2002 returned to Kosovo and continued with his post-graduate studies at the College of Law and International Relations, where he graduated with a Masters Degree in International Law Sciences. In 2004-2006 Dr. Ramabaja served as a Senior Political Adviser in the Office of the Prime Minister of Kosovo. In November 2008 was a PHD Student of Political Sciences and International Relations, in the European Center for Peace and Development (ECPD) at the Peace University of the United Nations. In 2012 was transferred at the Graduate School of the European University of Tirana, to continue with his postgraduate degree defended through the presentation of his dissertation: “Albanian Federation-Cohesion of a Nation-State and the European Union” Dr. Ramabaja, has been published abroad in many renowned newspapers and magazines; has published eleven scientific and research papers in the field of international affairs and geopolitical studies. He is a Fellow of the International Political Studies Institute of Skopie, Macedonia. Dr. Ramabaja is the author of four Books in Albanian Language: “Realizmi politik dhe çështja kombëtare” (Tiranë, 1998); “UE-ja shpresë apo ringjallje utopish” (Prishtinë, 2003); “Gazetaria” (one of four co-authors of this university text book- Tiranë,2002); “Feniksit ia gjeta çerdhen”(Poetry - Tiranë, 1993); “Federata Shqiptare – Kohezioni i shteti-komb në BE”(Ph.D. Dissertation).

 

Jean Houston’s Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self

Sacred Psychology in Western History

LONG READ

by Bruce Lerro / April 6th, 2024

Orientation  

How I came across Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self                                                                                              

In the middle of the 1980s I had decided to return to college to get a degree in counseling psychology. I was sitting in a café in the North Beach area of San Francisco waiting for my interview to get into Antioch University. It had been ten years since I had recognized that I wanted a more expansive view than what Marx and Engels had to offer. I began studying the work of Teilhard de Chardin, especially The Phenomenon of Man. From there I stumbled on Barbara Marx Hubbard’s  book Conscious Evolution. I also became interested in books that had a sensitivity to the visionary possibilities for the globalization of society through the work of Oliver Reiser and General Systems Theory. I wanted to expand the work on social evolution so that it had a biological dimension on the one hand, and a cosmic dimension on the other. I was jazzed by a book I was reading called Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self. Up until this book, I perceived western history, western psychology and western spirituality as all separate disciplines. This book integrated all three into one movement. This tells the story of the dialectic between social evolution and psychological development through the description of Life Force.

Lack of a psychological and spiritual evolution of Marx and Engels stage theory

Marxists have a stage theory of social evolution. The first stage was primitive communism. The second stage was something Marxists called “Oriental Despotism” which roughly corresponded to the ancient states of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and India. They were all caste societies. From there Marx and Engels argued that the next three social formations were all class societies. Slavery corresponded to Greek and Roman civilization. The second form of class society was feudalism, which in the West lasted from the 10th  to the 14th  centuries. The last form of class society was capitalism, which is roughly coextensive with the modern world, beginning with the fifteenth century into its decline in the 21st century. After a successful revolution against the capitalists, Marx and Engels predicted that first socialism, then communism would replace it. There was no integration of this model with the evolution in the micro psychology in individual development. Further, since spirituality was inseparable from organized religion, Marx and Engels only saw religion as an ideology of the priests to oppress the population for their benefit and that of secular rulers.

Lack of social evolution in psychology and religion studies

Meanwhile, the field of psychology treated the evolution of society as having little or nothing to do with the problems of how people learn, how emotions get produced, the stages of cognitive development or how mental illness evolved. As for spirituality, monotheism seems to have had little to do with psychology or social evolution. They imagined that in the evolution of religion, monotheism was an advance over the polytheism of ancient times but it was not connected to the evolution of human societies.

Integration of social, psychological and spiritual evolution

The first of two people I found who actually combined social, psychological and religious evolution was Jean Houston in her book Life Force. The other was Ken Wilbur in his book Up From Eden. Jean Houston’s book will be the study in this article.

Jean Houston’s Mentor Gerald Heard

As I was reading Life Force, I noticed that she referenced a book called The Five Ages of Man by someone named Gerald Heard. His book was written in 1963. I was very eager to read the book but in the days before the internet and Amazon, the chances were slim to none I would ever find it in a used book store twenty years later. But, thanks to the wonderful resources of Moe’s Books in Berkeley, I found a copy. It was expensive ($50.00 in the early 1990s) but in retrospect, it was well worth it. So, who was this guy Heard anyway?

He has been called “an advanced scout” on the Aquarian Age frontier. He played the role of global midwife to a New Age of human potential movement long before Jung or Joseph Campbell became popular. Heard was born in London in October of 1899 to parents who were landed gentry. At the age of 17, in the midst of a crisis in faith, he turned to and embraced secular humanism. Gerald was involved in progressive education along with social and prison reform. While in Ireland, he came to know George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats. Heard also was involved with an agricultural cooperative in Ireland and he was a champion of an Irish cultural Renaissance.  In 1926, he became a public speaker and made a name for himself as a science journalist for the BBC. He worked on an editorial board that included Julian and Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells and Rebecca West. In the middle third of the 20th century, he was a well-known polymath. He influenced Huxley away from the cynicism of The Brave New World to the perennial philosophy of esoteric religion.

In the early 1930s Heard became influenced by Hindu and Buddhist thought. He transitioned from being a secular humanist to a mystic. He learned exercises for regulating his diet, attitude, inspiration and meditation. In the 1930s and early forties Heard was involved in the research committee for Society for Psychic Research. With World War II looming, he emigrated from England to the US with fellow pacifist Huxley and never returned. He had a long-cherished dream to establish a place where  the study of comparative religion could be combined with research into the techniques of meditations. In Los Angeles they joined the Vedanta Society of Southern California as a place to nurture his dreams.

The 1940s were Heard’s most productive writing years where he turned to novels and science fiction. His early writing included nonfiction work such as Ascent of Humanity, 1929; The Social Substance of Religion, 1931; Source of Civilization, 1935; and Pain, Sex and Time written in 1941. His magnum opus was The Human Venture.

Like Jean Houston, in the 1960s he pioneered the study of LSD and its value while it was still legal to do so.This early hero of the Esalen founders of the Human Potential Movement died in 1971 in Santa Monica at the age of 81.

For my purposes, what is most important about Heard was his attempt to connect social, psychological and spiritual evolution. In terms of psychology and spirituality, Heard published a remarkable fictional story Dromenon (like a Labyrinth). The story is of an archeologist who encounters an ancient therapy which involves the mystical transformation of body, mind and spirit by following the pathways inscribed on the floors and walls of a medieval English cathedral. 

Each of his stages was beset by a specific crisis-ordeal under which the individual was either broken down or transformed and then went on to the next stage. Heard suggested therapies of initiation for each stage along the lines of ancient mystery traditions. The psychotechnology that Heard advised as providing for the initiation of movement included LSD, electrical stimulation and walking on fire.

The Life of Jean Houston

Like Gerald Heard, Jean was an early pioneer in the Human Potential Movement along with her husband Robert Masters. She was born in 1937 in New York City and is still alive and working 87 years later. Her father was a comedy writer who also developed material for theatre, movies and television. This helped Jean to develop her theatrical approach to what she later called “sacred psychology” and group dynamics. She continued to live in NYC after her parents got divorced and she graduated from Barnard College in 1958. Jean was an interdisciplinary from way back. She received a PHD in both psychology and religion. This further supported her later work in sacred psychology. She has taught and lectured at many colleges and has made a name for herself as a social visionary. In the mid 1990s she was given the Keeper of the Lore Award for her studies in myth and culture.

Early Research on Altered States of Consciousness

In the 1950s up until the mid 1960s, psychological research on the effects of LSD was legal and she met her husband working on a government research project on the effects of LSD. This led to their book The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience in 1965. They married the same year and soon became known for their work in the Human Potential Movement. Both Masters and Houston continued their interest in altered states of consciousness without chemical inducement. Their book in 1972 called Mind Games detailed their findings of the power of guided imagery and body movement for altering states of consciousness. Together they conducted research into the interdependence of body, mind, and spirit through their Foundation for Mind Research until 1979.

Group sacred psychology

Jean had been deeply influenced by Heard’s short story Dromenon.  Her rites of passages are powerful new versions of what Heard, following Cambridge anthropologist Jane Harrison, terms the Dromenon. In 1975 she formed the Dromenon Center which was named after the ancient Greek rites of growth and transformation. In Pomona New York, she began to offer workshops on this material. She used the Dromenon book and often implemented it in her seminars by inscribing it on the floor and having her participants walk its pathways. She crafted her own transformational rituals as I will illustrate later in the article. Around 1978, she decided to offer an experimental advanced Dromenon workshop in which she would rethink some of the themes of the Five Ages of Man in light of her own subsequent research and findings.

From her study of Toynbee, Sorokin and others, she attempted to discover a relationship between social evolution and individual development. Child psychologists like Stanley Hall and his student Arnold Gesell have suggested that the individual infant, child and adolescent are recapitulating in their individual growth phases of past epochs of humankind’s psychosocial evolution. Jean’s interest in anthropology brought with it an appreciation of social evolution and its integration into Western history.

The New Dromenon

Jane Harrison in Ancient Art and Ritual points out that for the ancients the enactment of the Dromenon extended the boundaries of the self so that it became part of the larger social order. From the spring of Dromenon there arose two of the main forms of Greek life and civilization:

• Agon or athletic contest
• The agon of the drama

At the heart of the ancient Dromenon is the principle of conflict, the conflict that comes from the anima and animus of the old self and birth of the new year and a new self. She had a yearly 10-week mystery school format of spiritual study and sacred psychology.  An emphasis on myth and story began to be essential to her work since about 1980. The use of the mythic is not as implicit in Life Force as it is in her later works. Works on myth include: The Search for the Beloved: Journeys in Sacred Psychology and The Hero and the Goddess. So how does the structure of her groups work?

The structure of Jean’s groups

Her groups include between 5- 25 people. Ideally, members have sufficient life experience to appreciate the historical and psychological scope of the human drama they will be required to go through. At the initial meeting, the group assigns members to take responsibility for obtaining and preparing the setting for each Dromenon. This includes music and recorder, tape or CD players, art materials, as well as bringing food for a  closing celebration for each Dromenon. The setting should be treated as sacred space with no interruptions. Before the meeting, every member of the group is to read the relevant material from the Life Force book. The group discussion of this material should in most cases be the subject of the first part of the meeting. After discussing the content members are to explore the meaning of its content in their lives. There is also discussion of the changing patterns of viewpoint that members have observed in themselves since the last meeting. They are to keep a journal for their journey.

Jean’s use of Greek mythology

In 1982, Houston began teaching a seminar based on the concept of “the ancient mystery schools” which proposed that human beings have an inherent potentiality which is far deeper and wider than their experience in everyday life. All her later work involved first tapping into that potential in her group settings and then learning how to bring it into everyday life. She used Greek mythology to instill in her students a quest which was not just for individual growth but part of the evolution of the human species.

Jean’s influences in stage theories of history

In Jean’s studio, statues of the gods of Greece and Egypt sit with the most advanced biofeedback equipment. A mummy case overlooks the conference area, while a wildly colored nine-foot carving of a Garuda bird-god of Indonesia shares quarters with a xerox machine. The historical material for stage theories for her workshops were influenced by the stages depicted in St. Augustine, Vico and Hegel. She studied historical cycles of Arnold Toynbee, Walter Schubart, Spengler, Berdyaev and Pitirim Sorokin. Cross-culturally she worked with societies that have scarcely changed form since the time of Christ as well as societies that are still medieval. Every kind of society that has ever existed can be seen today in a hybrid form. Their rituals can be drawn from and incorporated into the Dromenon work.

The Five Stages of Social Evolution

Following her mentor Gerald Heard, Houston divides western history into five stages:

• Tribal societies and agricultural state civilizations
• Greek civilization from 800-300 BCE
• Middle Ages of feudalism (10th – 14th centuries)
• Modern Europe of the capitalist/scientific revolution of the 15th to middle 20th. This includes the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution
• Planetary civilization

These five stages mostly follow Marx and Engels’ writing. The problems with her model include the slurring over the differences between tribal societies and agricultural state civilizations. These civilizations developed cities and states for the first time. They created caste relations which were a radical departure from egalitarian societies that exist mostly on a tribal level. They produced enormous wealth and created the first divisions between mental and manual labor. What agricultural civilizations have in common with tribal societies is that they are both collectivists. However, in my opinion this is hardly enough to justify lumping them together.

The characterization of Greek society as individualistic, aristocratic and warrior-like is good. The otherworldly characteristic of stage three, feudal society also makes sense. Her fourth stage of capitalism and the scientific revolution as the explosion and expansion of goods, infrastructures and population increase follows the work of Toynbee, Vico, Spengler and Sorokin.

Her last stage, planetary civilization, makes sense if you can imagine it as spreading of communism around the world. The problem with Houston-Heard’s stages is that they really ignore the power of capitalism to destroy populations either through world wars, colonialism or the exploitation of labor. Neither do either Heard nor Houston  take into account the emergence and spreading of socialism. The place of either capitalism or socialism is not worked into her global civilization. 

Five Stages of Individual Development

Houston identifies five stages of individual development which compliment her stages of social evolution:

• Infancy
• Childhood
• Adolescence
• First maturity
• Second maturity

One of the more exciting proposals Houston makes is that there is a relationship between social evolution and psychological evolution. In the cross-cultural literature on the evolution of the self, there is a movement from horizontal collectivism of tribal societies to vertical collectivism of agricultural states. Greek civilization can be characterized by first order individualism or what she calls “proto-individualism”. Houston’s 4th stage  of social evolution – science – can be characterized as 2nd order individualism. If she added the cross-cultural research, the model of social evolution to individual evolution would work. But she doesn’t do this. Instead, she argues that social evolution conforms to individual development. This harkens back to the old racist anthropologists who suggested that tribal society corresponds to infancy while modern industrial capitalist societies correspond to maturity. This is exactly the kind of ordering of societies that Franz Boas rightly called racist and which justified imperialism. However, if we take out the implication of social evolution recapitulating individual development there are some interesting connections.

Five Types of Selves

The first stage of individual development is the pre-individual, co-conscious human. At this stage, egotism is repressed, sensuality is important and what goes in here is what she called “polymorphous perversity”. This stage does correspond to tribal societies since their senses are heightened because of the need to survive in a hostile environment.  People are co-conscious because they do everything together.

Houston called the second stage the proto-individual heroic, self-assertive human.

These are the heroes of Greek civilization, the characters in the Iliad and especially the Odyssey. Greek aristocrats are likened to a warrior kind of self, where a code of honor is vital. Doing anything dishonorable leads to shame. Mythology is very important as Greek psychology was inseparable from mythology.

The third stage of the self is called the ascetic self-accusing man. Instead of a hero, this kind of self at its best is a mystic. The Middle Ages was dominated by the Catholic Church so the ideal self was the self-denying, otherworldly individual attempting to escape from the material world. The entire feudal society of the Middle Ages was anti-materialist and anti-secular. Because the Middle Ages was dominated by a Christianity that lost the appreciation of the gods and the psychology of mythology, the stories told were allegories, not myths. Allegories are moral tales as to how to behave.

The fourth stage of the self is called the individual humanistic, self-sufficient adventuring man who is self-confident. This corresponds with the period of the Renaissance, the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. There is an explosion of interest in the external world. If the Middle Age visionary cultivated subjectivity, the new self-sufficient individual became enthralled with objectivity. World trade spans the globe. Science reaches beyond the mesocosm of earth to explore the macrocosm of the stars (telescope) or the miniscule world or organism (microscope). There is a harnessing of energy – coal, steam and oil. Population grows, great wealth is produced by world trade, diseases are controlled and life is lengthened. Leonardo, Goethe and Bruno are the best examples of this type of self.

The final stage of the self is what Houston calls the post-individual, planetary ecological human. This is a stage where society becomes globalized. Books that support this kind of world are books like Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man

Peter Russell’s book The Global Brain; the books of Oliver Reiser such as the Integration of Human Knowledge and Cosmic Humanism and Barbara Marx Hubbard’s book Conscious Evolution. I found nothing in Houston’s work which describes the economic system or political system where globalization will take place.

The kind of self in the last stage is dialectical in the sense that it is a return to the co-conscious, egoless self of tribal societies but on a higher level. The post individualist self is wealthier, less afraid and operates at a grand global scale rather than in local identity. This self is well-rounded like individuals in tribal societies but also well-rounded in the power to use technology on a global scale. One model for this kind of self is Buckminster Fuller.

Crisis, Pathology, Therapy

For me the most interesting part of Jean’s evolutionary landscape is the connection she makes between the stages of the self and three processes.

• The developmental crisis of each stage
• The pathology which arises at each stage
• The mythological therapies that resolve the crisis and the pathology

We will go through each of the developmental stages.

Pre-Individual Tribal societies: crisis, pathology and therapy

To protect themselves from natural disasters, other animals and some other kinds of societies, tribal societies, have ideology that, at least socially, things do not change. It is true that change in these societies is slower than any other social formations, which makes the break-up of tribal societies more difficult. So too, in individual development. When a child leaves home for the first time it can be traumatic. In both cases, Houston calls the crisis a “birth drama”. The pathology in social evolution is to refuse to change. This might mean living on less and less resources born out of a refusal to seek new lands, develop new technologies and politically and economically reorganize themselves. In individual development, the pathology is called “infantilism”. This means acting out, refusing to go to kindergarten or feigning sickness to maintain dependence. Houston’s proposal for a solution is “the mysteries of the earth” which remedies the trauma of birth by becoming “a one among the many”.

In this next section I will describe what the crisis and pathology look like. Space doesn’t permit me to do this with each stage but I wanted to give you a feel for what it is like.

The Dromenon for the pre-individual: The recovery of the beginning

The experiences are divided into four stages:

• First stage recalls the hypnotic symbiosis and comforting securities of the early social group
• 2nd stage one is wrapped in the arms of another, there to undergo a terrible birth of the individual and a hero
• In the 3rd stage birth is inspired to its blessed form, we relive our birth based on the work of Fredrick Leboyer. Here the atrocities of deliveries are refused
• The classical mystery of the earth is reenacted

Stage one: the remembrance of the primal community

One member will sit in a circle, arms linked and facing each other. Members of the second group will sit back-to-back with members of the first group reaching behind them. The entire group is a woven network corresponding symbolically to the interwovenness on all levels of the early community.

After 10-15 minutes of entering into participation mystique and continuous chanting, the guide will tell some to continue chanting but that very shortly some members of the group will be touched on the head. Those touched represent the proto-individual who are trying to break away from the close and interwoven society. Those selected should struggle to break loose while the untouched ones should hold them back and keep them from moving out. (58)

Some members of the hero group will be celebrating their revolt on the outer perimeter and even launch an attack on the inner group trying to drag members off. Some may form into wandering bands of marauders, fighting among themselves and their attacking other bands (59)

This is the beginning of the waking and appreciation of your inner life.

Stage four: the mystery of the earth

This invocation is recorded in Aeschylus The Suppliants and is thought to have been part of the initiatory chants to one of the mysteries…move downward, move inward, return to the earth…of initiates and prepare to receive the ancient mystery of earth rebirth.

Like Persephone in the ancient Eleusinian mystery, ascend out the earth, cave, womb, tomb.

The meal that follows should be a simple, ancient rite, with fruits and cheeses and good bread and perhaps a little red wine, only a little, however. (70-72)

Proto-Individual Heroic societies: crisis, pathology, therapy

The heroic aristocratic society of ancient Greeks are proud individualists, easy to anger and ready to fight. These individuals are not grounded in their individualism and behave like children of 7 or 8.  Their individualism is short-sighted and gets them into trouble. Their crisis is that the drive for separation winds up in fighting, which Houston likens to a Tower of Babel. The pathology of this age is paranoia, always finding enemies even when there are none. The therapeia for this is the “mystery of water” where the egotism is tempered through communing with nature. Another therapeia is that of Odysseys “holding people under the water”

Mid-individual Ascetic societies: crisis, pathology, therapy

Ancient Greek society of the heroic aristocrats was followed by the rise of a merchant, trading society of Greece developed by a democratic polis and a more sophisticated individualism of the classical Greeks of Democritus, Plato, Aristotle and the Sophists. When the Greeks were conquered by the Romans, the Roman civilization lasted 800 years including the very sophisticated Alexandrians. When Roman civilization was conquered by the tribes of Northern and Southern Europe, ancient civilization lay in ruins. The only unification  which followed throughout Europe was the Catholic Church. The Church at that time was extremely otherworldly.

The feudal societies that were built were hierarchical including a weak king, decentralized aristocrats, artisans and peasants . The only individualism really came from self-denying mystics who expressed their individuality through severe control of their bodies. Turning to individual development, this is the stage of adolescence, when the body explodes faster than the individual can keep up. Their self-mortification is a strategy for controlling the body. Aristocrats in the Middle Ages expressed bodily prowess through tournaments and gymnastics. The pathology of this stage is schizophrenia where the individual is torn between the poverty of the material world and the supposed glories of the spiritual world. The therapeia of this stage is the stories of Parsifal and the Holy Grail. Houston has her group enact “the mystery of the air” which is a correction of the drive to self-mortification.

Individual humanistic adventurous self: crisis, pathology and therapeia

The emergence of the Modern world was hammered by seven revolutionary movements: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the scientific revolution, capitalism, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution and the emergence of socialism. This produced in the individual both a feeling of liberation from the closed world of the Middle Ages and at the same time a feeling that just as there were no longer ceilings, so there were no floors.

The development of capitalism produced both more material wealth and more alienation. There was specialization of labor and a loss of a sense of how all the world fit together. There were no longer Renaissance men. There was both an expansion of society as well as informational overload. The struggle of Faust typifies the psychology of the humanist-self-sufficient self. What is meaningful in life is chocked full of new knowledge. Faust solved this problem by putting the knowledge to work in what Marx called “developing the productive forces”. Most other individualists were not so fortunate, swinging between mania and depression. They were haunted by the myth of Midas, where everything touched turns to money.

The therapeia for this Promethean self was the mystery of fire, where the self becomes more disciplined and deeper, rather than wider. There are also exercises for integrating the higher self with using mandalas with both mechanical devices as well as artificial intelligence.

Planetary higher self-crisis, pathology and therapeia

At the time I first read Jean’s book, I thought there was no book more inspiring and hopeful about the next stage of civilization than Teilhard de Chardin’s book Phenomenon of Man. Though I am a materialist, I highly recommend this book by this Jesuit renegade, at least as a place to start. Vernadsky’s great book The Biosphere is strictly Marxist materialist, but a lot more technical. Buckminster Fuller’s Utopia or Oblivion shows us that the scarcity that exists in the world is socially produced, rather than natural. My article The Slavophile Russian Cosmists lays out how social visionary models need to include colonizing other planets. The anarchist Fredy Perlman characterized the history of social evolution in three stages.:

• Tribal societies – having little and being much
• Capitalist societies – having much and being little
• Communist societies – having much and being much

In this individual second maturity, if Marx had his way, we would become as well-rounded as we were in tribal societies, except on a higher level—fishing in the morning, cattle rearing in the afternoon, criticizing in the evening. A major obstacle to catapulting into this planetary world is what Jean calls “involutional melancholy”. My way of interpreting this is the zero growth, people-are-pollution, Malthusian renunciation of human societies as a higher form of nature. Instead we imagine humanity as outside of nature, as a degenerate form of nature. But we must take the Promethean self, developed first with Greeks and along with the adventurous self of the modern world sore higher, not clip our wings and beg an otherworldly god for mercy. We must continue to be proud of our individualism, while recognizing the individuality of others on a global scale in a converging confluence of agape love. This is Jean’s Mystery of the Fields exercise.

Missed Opportunities

I was very surprised that Jean Houston did not attempt to integrate Heard’s five ages with the work of Jean Gebser and Ken Wilber. In the second edition of Life Force, she mentions both but she doesn’t take things any further. This is especially a shame because in the case of Gebser, his states of consciousness could have fit in beautifully with Heard’s stages. For example, Gebser’ magical state of consciousness goes with Heard’s tribal societies. Greek civilization would go with Gebser’s mythical consciousness. Gebser has an in-between 3rd stage which he called mystical, which is perfect for the Middle Ages. Gebser’s 4th stage, mental consciousness, goes with Heard’s humanistic self-sufficient self. Gebser even has a degeneration of mental consciousness which he calls rationality. In Heard’s stages this would begin with the scientific revolution. Gebser’s last stage, which he calls integrative, has a wealth of examples showing how it would go with Heard’s post-individual planetary human stage. Gebser’s stage could have been a whole other category called states of consciousness. Further, Gebser’s work is very rich and could have easily lent itself to therapeutic group exercises.

Integrating Heard’s work with Wilbur would have been a taller order. Both Heard and Gebser are really focused on Western civilization and neither has much to say about the civilizational processes of India and China. Wilbur, with his training in Buddhism, has a lot to say about these civilizations, their individuality and especially their states of consciousness. Integrating his work Up From Eden is probably too much. However, a couple of pages of footnotes suggesting the overlaps and divergencies between The Five Ages of Man and Up From Eden could have been enlightening and inspiring while provoking new research. Please see my table below for a summary.

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond CapitalismFacebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. He is a co-founder, organizer and writer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website.