David Peat

Pausing the Cosmos 197It is our higher functions that are hijacking our deeper instincts,rather than vice versa. We are not so much the innocent young teacherincapable of controlling an unruly class of instincts. Rather we are theparanoid teacher who is inciting the class to violence, by portrayingsome vast threat, some fear, some Other that must be opposed at allcosts. It is the perversion of thought and reason that poses the threat toour civilization, not deeply buried instincts or asteroids from outerspace. The mushroom cloud of the atom was the creation of humanreason. The “evil face of communism” that threatened at any momentto end all life on earth was the nightmare of reason, not reason’s logicalanalysis. On both sides of the Iron Curtain we lived in fear of the imagescreated by our own thoughts. We were like little children frightenedby our own shadows cast on the bedroom wall. These monstersof reason had no more substance than ghosts. Yet in their name humansocieties are willing to rape and murder, to bomb and release wholesalenuclear destruction.It makes sense that Freud’s Thanatos, that deep wish for death, isprojecting itself into the heavens in the form of an earth-destroyingasteroid. But what complements this death-wish is the amplifying anddistorting power of human thought and reason. The human imaginationclothes this image of death from the heavens. It gives it substanceand expresses it scientifically. In this way a death-giving asteroid becomesvery real in the human mind. It expresses itself in the fantasiesof cinema, such as the movie Armageddon. It gives the impulse to thosegroups of scientists and amateurs who are now monitoring the heavensfor approaching asteroids, and to politicians who plan even morepowerful nuclear weapons to attack this threat from space. The underlyingdrive may be primitive but it has been elaborated and turned intoa scenario of human thought. That is where the true danger lies.Thought and the creative powers of the human mind have producedour modern world with all its triumphs, technology, and discoveries.They have also produced wars, violence, and environmentaldevastation. Human thought has always been this way, since prehistorictimes. But in the distant past groups were small enough to containinner tensions and, even more importantly, technology was not soadvanced. Now that the power of our technology increases withoutlimit we need wisdom if we are to put our house in order.