In the Beginning was the Word ~ Paranoia's Poison Door

- Chapter Ten -

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD
~ In the Court of the Crimson King ~

- chapter index -
pg. 1 - Intro: The Schizoid Man | pg. 2 - Night Sounds
pg. 3 - Welcome to the Machine | pg. 4 - The Laboratory
pg. 5 - Agamemnon | pg. 6 - Prometheus
pg. 7 - Paranoia's Poison Door | pg. 8 - Projective Identification
pg. 9 - The Promethean Rebel | pg. 10 - Aries and the Emperor
pg. 11 - Mirrors | pg. 12 - In the Beginning was the Word
pg. 13 - Death Seed | pg. 14 - I Talk to the Wind
pg. 15 - Said the Straight Man to the Late Man | pg. 16 - Epitaph
pg. 17 - Apollo | pg. 18 - The Fate of All Mankind
pg. 19 - Malkuth

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"At paranoia's poison door
Twenty first century schizoid man"

First Emanation: The Descent of the Logos

"Upon this Cry for Light, into the Heart of the Dark-Moist-Fiery nature is injected a Holy Word, the Seed of the future Cosmos. This Word is articulate, reasonable, and ordering."

- Commentary on the Pymander

"As the Logos emerges to change formless into form, the first thing that happens is a bifurcation."

- The Principal of Duality

The Ancient of Days by William Blake

"There is no consciousness without discrimination
of opposites. This is the paternal principle, the
Logos, which eternally struggles to extricate itself
from the primal warmth and primal darkness of the
maternal womb; in a word, from
unconsciousness."

- C. G. Jung
Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype

"Man, in the normal state natural to him, is taken as a duality. He consists entirely of dualities or 'pairs of opposites.' All man's sensations, impressions, feelings, thoughts, are divided into positive and negative, useful and harmful, necessary and unnecessary, good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant. Thoughts oppose feelings. Moving impulses oppose instinctive craving for quiet. This is the duality in which proceed all the perceptions, all the reactions, the whole life of man. Any man who observes himself, however little, can see this duality in himself."

- Gurdjieff
from Ouspensky's "In Search of the Miraculous," pp. 280-82

"In Envy and Gratitude (published in 1957) Austrian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein is much concerned with dualities or opposites. She argues that the dualities inherent in life are present from, or even earlier, than birth; the sense of security in the womb is shattered by the trauma of birth which leads to persecutory anxiety and these conflicting sensations lead to the ambivalent relation to the mother, the splitting of good and bad."

- Cronos and his Children
Envy and Reparations

The Paranoid-Schizoid Position

"Melanie Klein described two states of mind, established in very early infancy, that form the basis of how we experience the world throughout life. In one mode, grimly labelled paranoid-schizoid, people cope with intense anxieties and threatening fears by relying on the more rudimentary, primitive end of the defensive spectrum, employing principally splitting, projective identification and idealization. This, in turn, leads to patterns of thought and experience characterized by blame, scapegoating, idealization, persecution and other distorted perceptions. When operating from this mode, the ability to engage in interpersonal relations is seriously compromised, and concrete thinking leads to rigidity and loss of creativity."

- Anxiety and the New Order

"This is the position thought to be held by the infant generally in the first three to four months of infancy, The word Paranoid refers to the leading anxiety at this period, which is fear of annihilation of the self. Ultimately this is considered, in continuation of Freud's conjectures concerning an original destructive force in nature, to be a result of the initial projection outwards of the infant's own death-impulses, constituting the origin of its aggression.

In the Paranoid-Schizoid position the main defence employed against the terrors of dissolution is that of splitting, hence the term ‘Schizoid’."

- Introduction the Psychoanalytic Play Technique

"In the very beginning [the baby] loves his mother at the time that she is satisfying his needs for nourishment, alleviating his feelings of hunger, and giving him the sensual pleasure which he experiences when his mouth is stimulated by sucking at her breast....But when the baby is hungry and his desires are not gratified, or when he is feeling bodily pain or discomfort, then the whole situation suddenly alters. Hatred and aggressive feelings are aroused and he becomes dominated by the impulses to destroy the very person who is the object of all his desires and who in his mind is linked up with everything he experiences--good and bad alike (Klein, pp.306-7).'

Overwhelmed by these aggressive impulses, which Klein sometimes derives from the baby's experience of frustration ...and sometimes from an innate death instinct, the baby projects his aggression onto a "bad" breast which he then feels to be attacking him from the outside and, once introjected, from the inside as well. This sense of attack is manifested as persecutory anxiety that the bad object will annihilate his ego. This organization of experience into good and bad part-objects and a split ego, characterized by persecutory anxiety, Klein names the paranoid-schizoid position.

The sinner, in the Christian anthropology, is similarly estranged from his God.

'Man, being in sin, enters into a circulus vitiosus--an evil circle in which he gets more and more involved in sin.... The result of sin upon man is that man becomes a split person. Man becomes estranged from God, alienated from his fellow men, disappointed with himself and with the world. The consequence of this is that man is overwhelmed by restlessness, fear, despair and anxiety. Man feels himself abandoned, solitary, alone and alien in the world which should have been his real home but where now a thousand dangers are hidden and seek opportunities to destroy him."

- J. Pungur, Theology Interpreted: A Guide to Christian Doctrine. Vol. 1. (p.194)

- Christianity:A Kleinian Perspective

This "Fall" is also present in the Kabbalistic tradition.

"Fig. 2 is sometimes called "the Garden of Eden" because it represents a primal state of consciousness. The effect of self- consciousness as shown in Fig. 4 is to drive a wedge between the First Principle of Consciousness (Kether) and that Consciousness realised as matter and the physical world (Malkuth). This is called "the Fall", after the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. From a Kabbalistic point of view the story of Eden, with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the serpent and the temptation, and the casting out from the Garden has a great deal of meaning in terms of understanding the evolution of consciousness. Self-consciousness introduces four new states of consciousness: the Consciousness of Consciousness is called Tipheret, which means Beauty; the Consciousness of Force/Energy is called Netzach, which means Victory or Firmness; the Consciousness of Form is called Hod, which means Splendour or Glory, and the Consciousness of Matter is called Yesod, which means Foundation. These four states have readily observable manifestations, as shown below:

- Kabbalah

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