As Marion Woodman explains, with Diana’s death event, most could feel themselves being lifted into some sort of limitless space not only by the facts of what they were experiencing, but by the images and silences that they were carrying - the metaphoric meaning.  What they saw with their physical eyes was literally going on.  A pounding of the psyche: the death of a mythical figure.  They found themselves going into that strange space where fairy tales occur and then back into the real world, then back to the fairy tale, then back to the real world, again and again.

The level of psychic control over the masses produced by the state through its education system and its laws, and by the media through hundreds of channels, is so powerful that unless people become aware of its influence on them they have no means of fighting against it.  They remain hopeless victims of a consumer economy that simply cannot be sustained by the Earth's resources necessary to do so.  America is slightly less than 5% of the world's population, yet uses more than 30% of all the world's resources (used to be 40%).  When the talk is about sustainability, keep in mind it's only talk.  We have no way into the foreseeable future to sustain 85,000,000 barrels of oil PER DAY.  We cannot sustain the cutting down of the forests and rain forests to make paper and open land for agriculture.  The oceans cannot endure the billions of gallons of toxic waste poured into them DAILY!  To put it bluntly, we've reached the limit in many areas of the environment.  A limit means we can't go any farther.  A lot more of us must awaken from our school-culture-induced stupor before we're going to see significant change in human behavior.

A projection, according to Jung, is like an arrow.  Mostly unconscious content in ourselves sees someone or something in the outer world to which it says “Yes” or “No.”  The arrow flies to its target.  We can recall the image of Cupid, the Roman god of erotic love and beauty (borrowed from the Greek god Eros) with his bow and arrows, shooting people and causing them to behave in a certain way.  Again, the influence comes from outside and affects the inside (or psyche/mind) of the person.

Jung said, “the ego, unless it is very conscious, has no control over the content or the direction of the flight [of the arrow]" (italics mine).  Woodman goes on to say that if the arrow carries big psychic voltage, the dynamic between the arrow and target may be electric.  Wammm!!  Romeo and Juliet die in tragic embrace.  Unable to deal with the ego of their parent's, the cultural class system that worked to separate them, and their own supercharged erotic energies, they chose to die.  Sadly, this is being repeated all over the world by young people unable to cope with the many arrows from many sources sticking in their minds.  They destroy their own life rather than submit to the life being offered.  

Reclaiming our projections on the conscious level entails a lot of work.  As both Jung and Woodman explain, it’s a slow process and our mind and body can only assimilate the “new energy” (actually the return of our projected energies) slowly.  I see this “new energy” as THE call to self-reliant behavior, which is fraught with difficulty because of the way society and cultures are set up.  While the West proclaims “freedom” and “liberty,” underneath are ten thousand laws prohibiting it.

For example, Seema Mehta of the Los Angeles Times writes recently that, “The courts in California have ruled that home schooling (which now includes about 166,000 kids) must be conducted by credentialed instructors.”  Why?  Well, because every year more and more people are pulling their children out of the public schools, and this is causing all sorts of financial problems for the school districts who are paid on a per-pupil-basis.  So the court ruling is all about money and has nothing whatsoever to do with a child’s education quality - which of course is their mantra.  The truth is almost always masked in these kinds of cases.  

The truth is that the education system is antiquated and never has prepared a child to be self-reliant in the real world.  The child is conditioned to be reliant upon the state and corporate America.  And corporate America is moving over seas, along with its jobs the kids hope to get when they get out of school.  Simply and sadly harshly put, most so-called “teachers” aren’t really educated themselves.  The tests they take to become “credentialed” requires very little in the way of global awareness.  Most teachers are as out of touch with the realities of the world as their students.  In short, the uneducated are leading the uneducated and both are going around in an ever shortening circle.  

Mehta’s piece in the L.A. Times brings out a significant reality my wife and I learned while home schooling our children (in part illegally at the time), that children will learn the basics WITHOUT instruction.  She writes about a mother who was unsure about “unschooling,” until she saw her own 2 year old learn letters and numbers because of her own inquisitiveness.  The mother said, “I decided to let it unfold and take a back seat and let her take the lead.”  The mother also said, “I know what the state standards are, but they don’t govern our lives.”  

So, as Mehta writes, “Just as a child doesn’t need to be taught to walk, or to learn a complex language, the girl’s natural curiosity leads them to read and write.”  All children have a profound desire to communicate, to tell you what they see in the world, what they feel.  And this leads to writing about it, naturally.  Of interest, Gov. Schwarzenegger pledged to support new legislation allowing home schooling, if the court’s decision is not reversed.

Whether it’s the state and its incessant desire to control people’s lives from cradle to grave, or corporate America’s desire for you to keep consuming even when your house, garage, and rental storage space, is full, each of us must find a way to awaken from these influences or suffer through to the end of man’s existence on this small finite planet.