The Occupier

One of the advantages of the paradigm shift, changing our context from P-B to P-A, is that we achieve a different perspective and a healthier one on the nature of reality. Aspects of the old narrative that might have proved confusing or even terrifying, when we were contained within that nightmare, become clear and we can breathe easier as the fear fades away when we enter Simple Reality.

Nothing causes humanity more suffering in P-B, as a result of the shattering of Oneness into illusionary fragments, than the resultant pseudo specter of “the other.” The fluent intellect is “loosed” upon the innocent and unsuspecting human expressing a belief in an infinite iteration the “other.” What do we mean by an “occupier?”  This is the phenomena that we have all experienced. Can you name some of the types of occupiers that plague humanity?  Let me help you. We are talking about the possession of or control of a formerly normal person or a formerly alive person by an extra-human entity.

Relevant questions might include why, how or even if such occurrences actually happen? Who or what is the nature of these “possessing” or “occupying” entities? In any case, the whole phenomenon has a bearing on the nature of reality, a very important relationship indeed.

Since we are all born into an ongoing story and handed, so to speak, an already written script by our parents, church, family, peers, teachers and friends, and the powerfully influential collective unconscious, our beliefs are, initially at least, something over which we have little or no control. The existence or non-existence of the occupier phenomenon has everything to do with the narrative into which we are born. This fact will have a strong bearing on the conclusion that we will finally arrive at concerning what to make of the occupier.

We should begin our story of sorts with an appropriate opening sentence. “It was a dark and stormy night.” Since the beginning of recorded history these occupiers have excited the human imagination and for the most part not in a good way. Human reactions almost always involve afflictive emotions, pain and suffering and too often violence. Fear is, as usual, behind each case involving an occupier; fear and lots of it—be afraid, be very afraid.

Among the simplest, most common and “quickest” form of being occupied, and sometimes the most deadly, is by simply being “looked at” by another person—the evil eye. The evil eye is a look or a stare believed to cause injury or misfortune. Millions of people the world over wear special amulets or charms designed to ward off the effects of the evil eye. With this curse, one is occupied by the hostile energy of another human being.

I remember an example I used in teaching a sociology course, of an Australian aborigine, a young man who believed that he had been stared at (with an “evil eye”) thereby cursed by an older woman who wanted him to die.  No amount of persuasion by concerned locals could convince him that she did not have this power and he simply lay down and died a few days later. Such is the power of the occupier. Don’t freak out yet, we are not finished.

The devil himself can be an occupier, but is also “sexist”, in the case of witches where he seems to occupy primarily women.  Hmmmmmm, that might be an important clue for our sleuthing efforts. So far we have learned that the “other” can be other human beings or super human entities. Satan for example can take possession of people necessitating the need for an exorcism. In the case of witches, Satan also seems to prefer Roman Catholics. Hmmmmm, another clue!

Regarding witches the devil was also, especially in the 17^th century in Europe and the American colonies, an equal opportunity occupier. That is to say, you were eligible for possession throughout the western world provided you met the aforementioned qualifiers, i.e. Roman Catholic and female. He wasn’t limited to one victim at a time, he could occupy many people simultaneously, what has been called the non-local phenomenon. Amazing! How could he do that?

Although this essay is focusing on the other as “occupier” we would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that the “other” can scare the pants off of us humans by being the “pursuer,” a fellow human transformed into a wolf. Enter the werewolf, the serial cannibal feeding on the night of the full moon. We can have a natural antipathy for this creature that resembles, at least in our imagination, the wolf that ate poor Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. We all love our grandmother.

But many of us wouldn’t mind if a werewolf prowling Wall Street after the financial collapse of 2008 would have a late supper involving certain Masters of the Universe. In Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf, his werewolf protagonist describes just such a repast. “I’d eaten a 43-year-old hedge fund specialist. I’ve been in a phase of taking the ones no one wants.  I digress—but it felt good.

We don’t want to lose grandma, but would we lament the disappearance of certain traders, speculators and investment bankers? Not so much! But that probably won’t happen so we will have to get our justice vicariously from a fictional werewolf, because we certainly can’t count on our Congresspersons, who are predators in their own right to regulate the greed run amok among the American oligarchs. But again that’s a topic for another day. A double digression in one essay—I must exercise more discipline—focus, focus, focus.

Some of us, according to the first zombie film, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), will be resurrected before the rapture and be occupied by a very slow-witted and slow-moving creature with an appetite for living flesh. In an essay in the 1979 publication of “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” Robin Wood introduced the now- familiar idea, rooted in psychoanalytic theory, that scary movies provide a valuable window onto what our society “represses or oppresses.”  In other words Wood seems to support the idea that the occupiers come from the personal and or collective shadow. Hold that thought!

The popularity of shows like HBO’s True Blood and dozens of best sellers indicate that the occupiers we call vampires are on a roll. A vampire is a “reanimated corpse” jumping the gun on the rapture to rise from the grave and suck the blood of sleeping persons. Modern vampires are much more active and can secretly or openly socialize with normal people, or so the entertainment media and pulp fiction formula writers would have us believe.

Another popular HBO original series called Game of Thrones, based on a series of books of the same name, contains occupiers as well as other super naturals in human or human-looking forms. The Game of Thrones inspired the brothers Zach and Tarn Adams to create a game of their own, a computer game called Dwarf Fortress. No! Dwarfs are not occupiers, although there is a dwarf in the Game of Thrones story. Dwarf Fortress has another form of the occupier—the vampire dwarf.

A dwarf colony in the game is being ravaged by an apocalyptic outbreak of dwarf vampires and the Adams brothers are programming the behavior of the vampires. Tweaking the behavior of the vampires, considering a programming strategy, Tarn remarks:“If they just run wild biting people, half the dwarves in the colony will be infected in no time. That would be no fun. Maybe they have to bite you three times before you are infected.”

We have established the fact that the occupier can literally scare people to death. They can also “drive” people insane or to commit suicide. Now we introduce perhaps the most frightening manifestation of the occupier, the collective occupier, which can cause people to slaughter each other en masse. When a human community believes that another part of the human community is threatening and alien, fear becomes hatred and violence escalates beyond comprehension.

Fear in communities throughout history in the West has resulted in religious wars, sectarian violence, and ethnic cleansing to name a few. Hatfield vs. McCoys, Catholics vs. Protestants, Hindus vs. Muslims,  Jews vs. Palestinians, Turks vs. Armenians, Christians projecting onto the Jews as a scapegoat for Jesus’ death, Germans designating Jews as the scapegoat resulting in the holocaust.  Hutus vs. Tutsis, Serbians vs. Albanians, Romans vs. Barbarians, Huns vs. Chinese, and on and on it goes without cessation. Historians have calculated that there have only been 29 years in the last 3,000 without a war raging somewhere on the planet.  The occupier is alive and well in the collective psyches of families, religions, ethnic groups and nations.

Obviously, occupiers wax and wane throughout human history, and as already indicated are only limited in their form and nature by the human imagination. We would suspect the level of fear in a given society is also responsible for historical phenomena like the Salem witchcraft tragedy.  For example the advent of science fiction has spawned occupiers and or abductors emerging from UFO’s. In some scenarios, creatures from the outer reaches of space have decided to take over our planet because theirs is no longer habitable. These “walk-ins” can inhabit a human taking over the body and cleverly “becoming” that person, so cleverly that no one suspects poor Harry has been “occupied” and is no longer eating his favorite Big Macs at the local McDonalds— but somebody is.

You get the idea! P-B is the playground for the sometimes ghoulish human intellect which has an unlimited capacity to create nightmare scenarios. But why do so many of us believe in the outlandish and ridiculous fictional tales? We suspect that it is more than entertainment, but what? You probably see where we are going with this. The occupiers do actually exist in a way or rather there is one occupier in many guises.

We are the occupier, or rather our false self that we created and choose to perpetuate, is the occupier. Our level of fear, our paranoia related to the other, all joining forces with our intellect in a state of panic in an unfriendly universe and voilà, the occupier is staring back at us, our projections mirroring the existential anxiety of a story where we are the aliens. We don’t belong in P-B. No wonder we can’t escape our fears and the absurdity of pursuing pointless goals. Ridiculous, phantasmagorical creatures like vampires, werewolves, zombies, the devil and witches which many of us half-believe are true, or more than half- believe, tells us something needs to change.

Alfred Russel Wallace, the English naturalist who discovered evolution independently of Darwin, puts it this way: “We have trod the face of the Moon, touched the nethermost pit of the sea, and can link minds instantaneously across vast distances…But for all that, it’s not so much our technology but what we believe, that will determine our fate.” 

The false self, a creature born of our worldview and nurtured by our reactive, fear-driven behaviors is the universal occupier, the one-size-fits-all, non-local occupier. The false-self occupies all of humanity.  It is the mostly hidden, mostly unconscious, cause of human anxiety and yet we have to visit some obscure blog of an unknown writer to find a discussion about the worst enemy humanity has had or ever will have. We have met the enemy and it is the occupier. “…it’s terror not from something externally alien or unknown but—on the contrary—from something strangely familiar which defeats our efforts to separate ourselves from it.”     Sigmund Freud

Virtually all of human suffering, most of our self-destructive behavior and the future of the global village on this planet is and will be determined by whether we continue ceding control of our life every moment of every day to this occupier. We each get up every morning and begin to make choices. We emerge lurching and shuffling from our homes with outstretched arms in pursuit of power, pleasure and ultimately useless material stuff. Endless, pointless, lustful longing in a nightmare we create day by day, moment by moment—endless darkness. It’s time to banish that darkness, and our suffering. It’s time to wake up. It’s time to exorcise the occupier!