Life and Life-Energy

Roy Lisker

Chapter 2

The Unconscious and Mental Illness

The unconscious constraints that limit the freedom to adapt can be a heavy burden. This can lead people to seek some kind of therapeutic relief or program: counseling, meditation, religious guidance or psycho-therapy. Sadly, there are few psychotherapies in active practice in today’s world with a medically acceptable track record of cure. Hardly any of them follow up the consequences of their intervention into the lives of their patients. One of the rationalizations current is that it is much easier to define and identify physical health than it is mental health. However, the goal of mental health itself is not that hard to define:

It is the acquisition of fullness of being in the identification of the Self with living energy.

The key attributes are flexibility, spontaneity and freedom from attachment. It is the binding to unassimilated experience, and the corresponding malfunctioning of psychological adjustment that lies at the root of mental illness. Like a stone wedged between the spokes of a wheel, restricting or even preventing its motion, the lingering traces of traumatic experiences ( not so much something in the unconscious as the very substance of unconsciousness itself) reacts back upon the Rebirth Mechanism, aborting the child of emergent consciousness, damaging one's vitality , one’s capacity for effect action, and even one’s capacities for understanding or learning.

A global definition of illness, covering both mind and body, is any internal (unlike, that is to say, external conditions like poverty or jail) condition that severely limits the possibilities for living a full life. The model for the Unconscious being presented in this essay identifies mental illness with the presence of the psychologically inanimate conceptual structures within the living psyche. The sense that one is estranged from one's very self is called alienation. It conditions all personal and social relations, and produces such emotional states as boredom, loneliness and panic.

Conversely, the life and thought of a fully realized psyche is neither lonely nor bored. This assertion may perhaps go contrary to the popular wisdom, like the pedestal supporting a sculpture, insists that a structure of external ‘relationships’ is obligatory to combat loneliness, and that a frenzy of cultural activities is needed to overcome boredom. Yet if one’s relationship with the universe is dynamic and positive, one need never feel isolated or alone, nor sustain irrational fears, and there will always be some problems or business to attend to that mitigates boredom.

Is it not so terribly sad that so many people rush into marriage to "solve” the problem of loneliness? Has it been definitely proven that married people are less lonely than anyone else? I doubt it; yet I have observed that married couples spend lots of time and waste their energy in fighting! Pathological loneliness, boredom and fear come out of a false attitude towards oneself, which lead to a false relationship with respect to the world.

I am not advocating that feelings should be shunned or rejected. There are no negative feelings: there are only incorrect interpretations or attitudes towards feelings when they do arise. What I am talking about however are the chronic emotional reactions associated with depression.

Supporting evidence for these observations may be discerned in the correlations one finds between acute mental illness and learning disabilities. We are all familiar with undeniably intelligent persons who, owing to the presence of some emotional block, are unable to learn or master certain simple skills, memorization for example, or simple mathematics. Sometimes we are in a position to recognize the relationship of the mental condition to the learning handicaps, without knowing how one might go about severing the connection between them.

Psycho-somatic symptoms such as hysterical blindness, catatonia, hallucinations and delusions obviously interfere with one's learning abilities. Fixed ideas and obsessions can render one incapable of focusing one's mind on any matter not connected to the obsession. One brings to mind individuals obsessed with guns, who oppose any form of gun control laws, or compulsive gamblers who destroy their life’s saving through their obsessive belief that they must ultimately defeat the roulette wheel. Someone afflicted with such mental illnesses cannot allow his mind enough time to think properly before it inevitably returns to its sole pre-occupation.

Although they are far from co-extensive, both “scholastic study” and “psychological adjustment” involve mental effort; thus they are closely related. One may perhaps cover both processes by the word “assimilation”.

If the learning process involves memorization, understanding and skill gained through application, so adjustment involves introspection, decision-making and interaction with one’s environment, whether social or physical. Any theory of education which hopes to be realistically applied, particularly to children, must simultaneously encompass factual knowledge, development of basic skills, socialization, a realistic appraisal of the student’s human potential, and activities designed to activate that potential.

Contemporary educational theory tends to gloss over all such matters, reducing the rich possibilities of learning to the acquisition of factual information. Science itself is taught as a pointless collection of “factoids”, while the arts are reduced to “extra-curricular activities”, that is, superfluous entertainment .
With the disastrous imposition in 2001 of the ill-informed (shall we say “ill-intended” ) No Child Left Behind program by the federal government (Pub.L. 107-110, 115 Stat. 1425) the links between learning, adjustment, assimilation and growth have been disastrously severed; all classroom instruction is now focused on “teaching to the test”.

A healthy educational curriculum is one in which knowledge and socialization are interconnected in a mutually supportive, balanced fashion. Both spiritual and intellectual development find common ground in the remarkable flexibility of the living nature.

The Rebirth Mechanism

(a) Inertia

There is a time delay between change and one's perception of change.

This time lag is measurable. Both Being and the recognition of Being are contingent: Aal things in the universe depend or some substrate for their survival or continuation. However: the time it takes for someone to recognize that the conditions to his self-definition have been undermined, and then accept the obligation to adjust to new circumstances , can be of long or short duration, but it is never negligible.

In an episode of the Nibelungenlied , Siegfried manipulates his magical sword Balmung against an enemy with such precision, that he is able to slice through his body without him even being aware of it. In a taunting voice, Siegfried asks him to shake his body. When he does so, the two parts fly off in separate ways; of course he dies. It is as if Siegfried's adversary were to be dead already without being aware of it.

An obstinate resistance to accepting the reality of the need to alter one's relationship to the world is universal in mankind. Likewise, a sure mark of the enlightened mind is the extent to which this is overcome or reduced. To certain unfortunate representatives of educational, political or religious authorities this innate or natural resistance (inertia) can be crippling. [1]

Up to the moment of his execution Charles 1 of England seemed to have had no inkling that he and his cause were doomed. Throughout the course of his trial he insisted on the “illegality” of his trial. His astonishment at not being treated with the deference due to a king was completely genuine. Similar reactions have been recorded by Ceausescu, Sadaam Hussein, Ghaddafi and Noriega. As they are being led to the scaffold or firing squad they can be heard crying out against the illegality of the procedure, the divine right of kings, the duties of a subject, etc. That is “inertia with a vengeance”! [2]

The heroine of Puccini's Madame Butterfly obstinately persists in her belief that Captain Pinkerton will come back to her. Their official marriage (under Japanese law) had to be binding. Only the actual presence of Pinkerton's American wife forces her to change her mind. In response to an intolerable situation she commits suicide. In our culture we would say that she had failed to adapt; in the Japanese this alternative would be considered normal and acceptable.[3]

30 years after the end of the Vietnamese War, the black “skull-and-crossbones” POW-MIA flag can still be seen flying from the flagstaffs of local government buildings, fire departments and post offices around the country. These promote the ideas of deluded souls who are convinced that American soldiers are still being worked as slaves in Vietnamese POW camps. These people suffer from an unshakable belief in the invincibility of the United States. Because they think that America can never lose a war, for them the Vietnamese War will never end.

Alluding to a similar phenomenon with a neurological basis, one can cite the "phantom limb". There appear to be two ways in which this phenomenon can manifest itself:

(1) The patient has the sensation that a recently amputated limb is

still part of his body. A considerable shock occurs when he discovers that the region where he imagines his leg to be is only empty space.

(2) In the second case,( known as Anton's or Babinski's syndrome),

an appendage is perceived of as an alien presence totally distinct from the proprioception (internal self awareness) of one's own body, although though it can be as closely attached as one’s shadow. In A Leg To Stand On (Simon & Schuster, 1984) Oliver Sacks relates:

"When I arrived I found the patient lying on the floor by his bed and staring at one leg...... He had felt fine all day, and fallen asleep towards evening ... Then he found, as he put it, 'someone's leg' in his bed - a severed human leg, a horrible thing! .... feeling that a joke was a joke, and that this one was a bit much, he threw the damn thing out of the bed. But - and at this point his conversational manner deserted him, and he suddenly trembled and became ashen pale - when he threw it out of bed, he somehow came after it - and now it was attached to him ! "(pg.76):

It was, in fact his own leg. Sacks goes on :" With my poor patient ... emergency surgery had disclosed a large vascular tumor overlying the right parietal lobe of the brain... as a result it was impossible for him to feel his leg normally - to feel it as 'present' or 'part of himself'. “( pg. 82)

(b) Shock

The word shock will be employed in a technical way throughout this essay. In our use of the word, the presence of shock is ubiquitous to the emotional and mental life:

Shock has two phases:

(a) The initial psychological response to a fundamental

change in the external world, which one can designate as the “initiation of the conflict between Being and Non-Being”

(b)The second phase is governed by the binding force of a

state of trance wherein the individualized mind is fixated on the evolving transition to a new state of Being. This may be designated, variously, as “Becoming”, “Pregnancy or “Hypnosis”.

Shock is therefore both a mental state and a complex of emotions, hence what one could call a mental climate. There is no reason per se to think of it as painful, save in extreme amounts depending on the stimulus: one thinks of the chill of delight that we may feel when frightened by something that proves to be harmless. Some of us watch horror movies, others do white-water rafting for precisely that reason.

The emotional distinction between the first stage, (the onset) and the second (the fixation) can (roughly) be characterized as “fear” and “anxiety” respectively. (in some sense ‘fear of a presence’, versus ‘fear of unknown possibilities’)

Since, ultimately, your “self awareness” is your only real possession, anything that threatens to undermine one’s identity (one thinks of the modern computer - related crime of ‘identity theft’!) may be interpreted as a challenge one's very existence, almost as a death threat! For in fact, something very real has died, namely that a composite construction of conscious awareness filled with feelings and sensations called the “sense of Self” that is indeed “killed” by the onset phase of shock.

Even as the “onset phase” is akin to death, so is the “fixation phase” followed by the reassertion of a new sense of self, akin to pregnancy. Thus, the saga of Death and Resurrection, fundamental to all religions, and the very core of religions such those of Christ, Tammuz, Osiris and Adonis, is an embodiment of the process of psychological adjustment.

(c)The Divided Mind

The fixation stage actually produces a split in consciousness, one that appears to be exaggerated in schizophrenia[4]

This split combines:

(1) A “fixation” on Being, whatever it is that one believes, or once believed about oneself, which must be reconstructed, and

(2) A “fixation” on the threat posed by Non-Being, which may vary from the innocuous to a recognition of mortal peril. Thus, this process of simultaneous destruction and creation incorporates (and rejects) elements of one’s formal identity and the wake-up call from the outside, to produce, in their mutual reconciliation and assimilation the birth of the “child” of renewed identity in the ultimate drama of Rebirth.

Note that one's picture of oneself is perceived externally, in a manner identical to that of one’s views about the external world. One's mentally constructed self-image has the same existential status as the perception of someone with whom we are having a conversation. This alienation, which is at the origins of the philosophy of Phenomenology, is easily explained: our sensed or stated self-image is the reflection upon our understanding of a being who has already changed.

At the very moment of self-recognition one has already been launched onto the journey of fading from memory.

Both Being and non-Being are inanimate, drained of vitality; in some sense, both are obstacles to personal freedom. It is therefore incumbent on the psyche that it seek some path of liberation from both of them, some therapy to cure the wound in consciousness created by the double fixation on Being and non-Being.

(c) Obsession, Paralysis, Panic:

3 pathologies of the rebirth machine

Obsessions are self-referential cycles of a pernicious fixed idea with both intellectual and emotional content. The mental state of fixation upon an object is a combination of creative and destructive impulses. The destructive or hostile component is what is meant by the word “obsession”.

Any woman who has experienced being the object of a man’s sexual obsession[5] knows that, despite all his assertions to the contrary (and such rationalizations can be carried to extraordinary lengths) his intentions are hostile. Indeed her life itself may well be in danger.

The friendlier versions of this obsession fall into the class of scenarios of unrequited love. They are normally deemed harmless; however no pathological state is harmless.

One sees why obsession is so well suited for representations on the stage. The repetitive character of obsessive thought and behavior sets up a kind of rhythm, a musical beat, the obsessional motor, a psychological mechanism that feeds on itself, a dynamic rather than static process that deviates from itself only to return at redoubled speed.

Consider Victor Hugo's powerful novel, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. The narrative depicts the unfolding of the stages of the sexual obsession of the Archdeacon of Notre-Dame, Claude Frollo, with a gypsy dancer, Esmeralda. From the very paragraph in which we witness Claude Frollo staring at Esmeralda out of the window of his study in Notre-Dame cathedral one knows that events can only move in one direction. By all the conventions of literature the reader knows that the endgame of the ensuing drama must culminate in her murder. Raising the level of horror a few notches, the policeman, Phoebus, to whose charge Frollo delivers Esmeralda for execution is her own faithless lover with whom she is infatuated, yet who never wanted anything more from her than a night’s stolen love-making.

Yet Frollo sees his own state as "love" because that is what he feels. Since he is a churchman, he disapproves of this attachment, but reasons that he could always leave the church and settle down to a married life. Esmeralda’s cruel, rather mindless rejection of him convinces him that she is a fact a witch and must be hung.

On a deeper level we realize that this was the inevitable outcome: the machine must work out its inexorable destiny. This quality of acting like a mechanism underscores the lifeless process within a morbid neurotic state.

This fundamental dualism of the tenderest sentiments with violent and destructive intent is captured in the word: passion.

Fixation, hypnosis, passion, obsession, intense concentration, hostility, love: every one of these attributes are incorporated in pregnancy of Being, in the trance-state of shock.

(d) Hypnosis

One cannot speak about the mental phenomena of hypnosis, fixation, obsession, or trance without touching on philosophical issues of mental freedom and will power. In the common understanding hypnosis is the state in which the mind is least free. It is a state wherein the will is totally absorbed by fascination with an external object, whether it be the person of the hypnotizer, or some part of that person, often nothing more than a tone of voice.

In hypnosis the machine of adjustment appears to be idling . In obsession it is cycling ; in panic it is short-circuited . These, briefly, summarize the 3 mechanical breakdowns to which the rebirth mechanism is prey. In all cases it is clear that the condition of transic attachment is a bound, not a free state. The mind, with its natural freedom, is being held in bondage by an external sensory source (like the flame that holds the mind and body of the moth.) One may characterize this state, simply, as the state of bound life-energy .

Obsession is but one of several conditions in which the binding of life-energy can occur. Others are “hysteria” “suspicion”, “depression”.

Suspicion is the universal reaction, in both humans and animals (and for all we know, plants) to the perceived presence of an enemy. One’s senses leap suddenly to an all-points alert. All other mental activity is cancelled immediately, One’s attention is fixated almost totally, and all other mental activity instantly blotted out. Frightening presences are indeed hypnotizing .This has both positive and negative consequences, the positive being that one is forced to take time to “assimilate” the danger, locate its true source and find ways to deal with it. The negative aspects of fear are, of course, panic and immobility, which may interfere catastrophically with the need to make an immediate response to a direct assault.

Consider Act I, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet . As to a scaffolding, this scene is built around a succession of frightening encounters between the soldiers of the night watch on the battlements of Elsinore castle. These hysterical bursts of fear and relief are only the foretaste of the paralyzing horror that will overwhelm them when the Ghost appears. This omnipresent fear, so powerfully instilled in its opening scene, will permeate the play until the very end: “The rest is silence”. (For my detailed analysis of this play, one can go to

http://www.fermentmagazine.org/essays/hamlet1.html )

To summarize: under the influence of extreme fear, the mind may become either paralyzed, or forced into rash, thoughtless action. Both of these are bound states. One’s mental and physical energies must concentrate on the threat. One may attack it; fly from it; one may stand one's ground; or pretend (or convince oneself) that it isn't there; or try some form of negotiation. The soul lapses into indecision, a state which is relieved but not adjusted to by intemperate action.

The decisions are made in the second stage, that of Becoming. This state may be short-circuited by panic. Imagination becomes a dispensable luxury and the psyche proceeds directly to the third stage, that is to say, decisive assertion of will without reflection.

In the complementary situation of psychic paralysis , the process becomes stalled permanently within the second stage. In this idling condition, imagination is invited to richly gratify itself (through fantasy and day-dreaming for example) and never proceeds to decision-making and personal affirmation.

One way or another, in dealing with any threat to security, one must surmount the hurtles, clear away the obstacles posed by all three stages, and that in real time. Clearly the first stage, the “onset” of shock, is not free. The process by which it progresses to the second stage is also not free. Freedom from the second state, the latent state of anxiety, waits upon the vagaries of pregnancy to reach a decision, and until that decision is made the mind remains in bondage to its internal quandry. It is in the final outcome that a creative synthesis is achieved.

In the classical arena of the hypnotic seance, the decision making power is somehow delegated to an external object via a mysterious process which, 250 years after the discoveries of Franz Anton Mesmer[6] , is still not well understood, but which has been given another name that explains nothing : suggestion. Note the significant distinction between hypnosis and obsession. In hypnosis the mental adjustment mechanism is idling; in obsession it is cycling.

Freedom, self-affirmation, the resurrection of identity, are fully realized in the third stage: Rebirth.

This should not be seen as some form of magic, but as something emerging by the constructive labor in the stages of latency and pregnancy. Thus, the process by which freedom is achieved is itself determined , or, to be more accurate, driven by necessity.

One could treat the word “freedom” as some arbitrary definition. Some fairly cogent sophistic arguments could be brought into place to show that no-one can ever be “free”. This derives from an all-too-common confusion of language. It is important to stress that the word “freedom” is essentially transitive, not intransitive: one is free from this; one is free from that. “Freedom” then refers to specific liberations from some set of fetters and chains which have, or could potentially inhibit thought and action.

The closest one can come to a universal notion of freedom is the 3^rd stage of the rebirth process, in which the fetters of Being, Non-Being and Becoming have all been passed through, broken or dissolved.

It is, of course, standard practice for the advocates of a political system to claim that it provides some kind of “absolute freedom” for

its subjects. But this is logically and even grammatically incorrect, a somewhat cynical abuse of language. One is “free” from this constraint; one is “free” from that constraint. Of course, it enough constraints are lifted, one begins to feel a certain emotion, that of being free. To feel free, and to be free (from this or that) are very different.

Someone locked in a dungeon investigates all means of escape. Through escape one is liberated. Making too fine a distinction between “freedom” and “liberation” is mere quibbling with language. One can play with words, and argue that “freedom” can’t be defined, or doesn’t exist: but to one has fled the dungeon, who cares?

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The Fundamental Processes of Psychic Adjustment

Table I: The Categories of Ontology

(1) Being :

Self-consciousness; Assertion: ‘I Am’, I Am This or That; ‘I Am Such-and-Such’; ultimately, “I Am Alive.”

(2) Shock:

Traumatic Contact with Non-Being, or that which negates Being, or Death. Unconsciousness

(3) Becoming:

Latency; Fixation; Hypnosis; Psychic Pregnancy. The gestation of the new person from a combination of factors of the old and the assimilation of the challenge of Non-Being. Sub-Consciousness

(4) Rebirth:

Resurrection. Reaffirmation. Consciousness

Table II: The Rebirth Cycle

A

Non-Being

Being --------- | ----Becoming-------|--- Reborn Self ---|Being--

Shock

B

Death

Ego ---- |---Pregnancy, Hypnosis ---| --- Rebirth ---| Ego ---

Fixation

(e)Rebirth and Christianity

The mythic history of the origins Christianity is framed by two “miraculous birth” narratives:

(1) The Annunciation/ Virgin Birth. The Christ saga (The “greatest

story ever told”, according to Fulton Ousler ) opens with a miraculous parthanogenic birth. This immediately sets up the timeless

archetype of the “Holy Family”. It manifests itself in the religion in a somewhat confused form, which seems to have evolved through the need to reconcile the religion with Platonism and other schools of Greek philosophy. Thus there is the “Holy Family” of Mary, Joseph and the Christ Child; but also the “Holy Family” of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost (perhaps Holy Spirit). Implicit in both of these Trinities, is the 3s-stage spiritual Rebirth Mechanism, cast into a somatic drama of sexual interaction, pregnancy and birth.

After a literary tour-de-force in which the life, deeds and doctrines of the founding prophet are narrated , the story leads to:

(2) A climax as dramatic as any Greek tragedy, (and clearly

influenced by that tradition, from Sophocles to Aeschylus): this is the trial of Jesus, his death by crucifixion and his resurrection. This climax is played out in 3 parts:

(a) The Crucifixion, a judicial murder that seems to have little

motivation if one reads the heavily censored accounts in the 4 Gospels[7]

; these attempt to convince one that an emissary was sent from the Hebrew God charged with the mission of gathering up all the world’s evil karma in the performance of one gigantic act of expiation;

(b)The 3 days in Hell;

(c) The miraculous Resurrection

Thus, the Christian legend proceeds from miraculous Birth to Rebirth.

There are many similarities between the initial and terminal pillars of the narrative. Up to a point they are telling the same story, with different emphases. The terminal 3-act drama has an independent chronology, and posits a direct rebirth of Christ from the tortures of Hell, following by a brief sojourn on earth before he ascends back to Heaven. It’s “birth process” is also non-sexual, lying entirely outside the “normal (Darwinian) channels” of Natural Selection.

The initiating legend is also about a miraculous birth. Although one can speak of a chronology from the Annunciation to the crèche, it is not readily decomposable into stages and may be considered synchronic, or temporally static, whereas the great drama of the Crucifixion is as diachronic as a Greek play.

The Annunciation of the Virgin Mary by the Christian God (who bears little resemblance to Jehovah) symbolizes the onset phase of the Rebirth Mechanism. There is no symbolic or metaphysical equivalent to the Pregnancy Phase; after a documentary account of the flight into Egypt and return to Bethlehem, the story moves directly to the Nativity. [8]

Both the Annunciation and the Crucifixion represent “inseminations” by the Christian God, an amalgam of Jehovah, Zeus, Plato’s Timaeus and Aristotle’s Prime Mover. In some sense, both the beginning and the ending narratives are “immaculate conceptions”, the joyous and hideous faces of the passage from Being, through Shock to Non-Being, Becoming, and triumphant Rebirth.

Death and Resurrection, the central drama of Christianity and the Near Eastern fertility cults of Osiris, Adonis, Tammuz and others, may also be interpreted in terms of sexual role models, the “Holy Family”, This metaphorical equivalence between the physical and the psychological finds its expression in virtually every religion, all extant mythologies, in philosophy, drama, and in a deformed, well nigh ludicrous form, in the Oedipus Complex of Freudian psychology. The interpretation of the 3 phases of adjustment in terms of the respective roles of Father, Mother and Child is also basic to the structure and content of Greek tragedy.

In the conflict of Being with non-Being one recognizes the fundamental paradox of submission and rebellion in the r ole of the father. The fertile state, the state of latency, hypnosis, Becoming, or psychic pregnancy with its mixture of tenderness, ecstasy and anguish, exemplifies the role of the mother. While the final viral phase, that of rebirth of spirit, or of body, has its apt metaphor in the vigorous assertion of the child

Likewise the moment of insemination of the female by the male functions as a somatic metaphor for the traumatic onset of shock in the confrontation between Being and Non-Being that initiates the Rebirth process. The personal embodiments of Being and Non-Being, cojoining through insemination in the womb of Time, (Becoming) function like the fertilization of the egg by sperm.

The close correspondence of spiritual, psychic and physical processes is captured in the emotion of anxiety. It is anxiety, desperation, fear, hope mixed with despair, that drives the psyche through the stages of conception, pregnancy and labor, to bring to birth the Reborn Child of Self, a pure manifestation of creative life energy, spontaneous, unconditioned, free.

One sees how, through analogy, it is natural to use sexual imagery to describe the psychic process.

In some sense, physical procreation is the somatic metaphor or objective correlative to the fundamental psychic process.

Likewise the various scenarios associated with this metaphor, though useful as analogies, are like film plots: tales of incest, sibling rivalry, adultery, abortion, infanticide, homosexuality.

It is therefore easy to recognize the source of all the Freudian superstitions that identify the life of the psyche with sex. These are myths and legends, not structures in the Unconscious. Furthermore, as dramatic narratives of death, desire, birth and rebirth they are totally lacking in the emotional appeal of such myths as Christ’s resurrection, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, even the legend of Quetzalcoatl’s mysterious rebirth through the shedding of its snake-skin!

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[1] Not only for themselves but for those under their control!

[2] Shall we say, the confrontation of inertia with vengeance!

[3] although things have changed. American pharmaceutical companies such as GlaxoSmithKline, have convinced the Japanese public that it suffers from a disease no-one had ever heard of in the past: depression. Through Blitzkrieg-style advertising campaigns, annual sales of Paxil and other anti-depressants in Japan quickly soared in the billions. Read Ethan Watters “Crazy Like Us” Free Press 2010

[4] . though the label be so vague that it appears that no-one really knows what one is talking about.

[5] Anyone of any sex may become to victim of the sexual obsession of someone else of any sex; this situation is the cliché

[6] My interpretation of this historical development can be read at http://www.fermentmagazine.org/MTParadis.html

[7] Historians have revealed that Pontius Pilate was a brutal tyrant, an ancient Gauleiter, who hardly needed the assent of the people of Israel to execute anyone he pleased. Throwing the burden of collective guilt onto the Jewish people seems to have been the not so hidden agenda of the authors of the Gospel of St. Luke.

[8] To interpose a Pregnancy Legend at this stage would allow that the Virgin Mary suffered the full anguish and torments of labor; but there can be no uncertainty or suffering in the birth of a perfect Being.