Now is the Time for Heroes
We need an Inner Revolution to Counter Chaos and War

A clash of antagonistic forces is occurring on many fronts. Politicians and the military are major contenders and so are the people who want our democracy to grow. We will prevail if we transcend ignorance, dissension, paranoia, and hatred.

At the root of world conflict are the inner conflicts of the psyche that produce human negativity. Our own negativity can render us ineffective in the face of global hatreds and makes us doubt the value of our own self.

Overcoming negativity is humanity's sublime labor, and it is also our best security in a world where weapons of mass destruction are science's robust, evolving spawn. We begin by understanding what in-depth psychology has revealed, that we are determined, unconsciously, to experience all kinds of situations through our negativity.

Negativity infects people across a wide spectrum of behaviors, and its presence in good people causes them to suffer. We can recognize this negativity in a drug addict's need to reject and hate himself or in a compulsive do-gooder's sacrifice of self for the approval of others. But often our negativity is subtle and difficult to identify.

A negative feeling such as greed is a symptom of a deeper negative emotion.. We experience greed when we are prepared, often unconsciously, to feel deprived, to indulge emotionally in the feeling of not having enough, and to entertain and fear the possibility of loss and scarcity. Greedy people also feel that, without their acquisitions, they have no value or substance.

It is this deeper negativity that is so difficult to access and acknowledge.

Often our negativity takes the form of an antagonistic relationship with our self, through which we feel self-doubt, self-criticism, self-rejection, and self-hatred.

Unfortunately, mainstream psychology and our educational system are of little help in getting to the roots of negativity because they neglect the underlying dynamics of the unconscious mind. Only a small minority of us understand how our negativity is experienced and enhanced through transference, projection, resistance, identification, displacement, and narcissism, despite how critical this knowledge is to our optimum functioning.

The popularity of certain intemperate radio and television talk shows reflects our unwillingness to look at our own negativity. Those hosts and their cynical audience use sarcasm, blame, and condemnation as a way to project and displace their own negativity and avoid being responsible for it. Such individuals become more reactionary and negative to keep the lid on any self-awareness.

Its not so difficult to let go of a grudge or a grievance if we do so through insight rather than ritualistic forgiveness. We first see how we feed on a memory of an injustice done to us in order to evoke and indulge in that familiar negative emotion. We thereby catch ourselves in the act of cultivating negativity. However, we also need to understand how our defenses work.

For instance, in being angry at someone we feel has controlled or rejected us, we are concealing our readiness to feel controlled or rejected. Our deep negativity, which we are very quick to deny and defend against, is our resonance with feeling controlled and rejected. Anger is a surface negativity and a symptom of the deeper negativity.

When we struggle to grow, our resistance causes us to cling stubbornly to our old sense of self, limited and painful through it is. We feel that we will not know ourselves without our negativity, like a perfectionist without his self-criticism, or a jealous person without his need for rejection and betrayal, or a procrastinator without his tendency to feel ineffective, overwhelmed, and passive.

It takes an inner revolution to overthrow our negativity. The mythical hero enters a dark underworld, symbolizing his psyche, to uncover and neutralize its phantoms, ogres, and demons. The psychological hero exposes the antagonistic entities within himself, and he is humbled at seeing his collusion in the pratfalls of his life. When he purifies his psyche, he renews his soul. He has power to represent truth and justice when he emerges into the light.

Meanwhile, as we move through this critical time, we must not make reactionary groups the enemy. They represent the resistance in our own psyche to growth and self-realization. When we grow, we transmute the conflicting parts of our psyche and draw them into a harmonious whole. Now we can make our case and represent our truth with authority, as people who have plumbed the depths of our psyche and purged the negativity therein. Now is the time for such heroes.