Mind Parasites

Each post leads to other ideas.   I mentioned two books that I feel offer many openings.  The two are One God Under Cosmos (Godwin) and Pushing Ultimates (Paz).  Both authors are erudite but write in a way that can be understood.  They offer compelling visions of life and the human being, but also give, in my view, insightful analysis of what keeps us from reaching this human potential.  
Godwin's book is about four singularities: matter, life, mind and spirit.  He writes in the chapter on mind:  "...we are the only species that comes into the world with an almost infinite potential that may or may not be fulfilled."  What keeps us from reaching this potential?  Here he writes about the new understanding about how the human mind actually develops, "until fairly recently, no one considered bonding and attachment to have any great significance for how the the human mind actually develops."  Modern attachment theory is very significant.  We are born into a matrix.  This matrix is a "a fluid, shifting, unitary space between (usually) mother and infant, as if they were a single organism."  Our "earliest social interactions are imprinted into the biological structures that are maturing during the brain growth spurt that occurs in the first two years of human life, and therefore have far-reaching and long-enduring effects."  This situation can lead to pathology.   He emphasizes this insight "that our earliest relationships, in the degree to which are they unsatisfactory, lead to a paradoxical situation in which the poor parental bond  is internalized and turned into a psychic entity that compulsively seeks to reenact the situation later in life."  
The author calls these effects "mind parasites" -- complexes, fixations, repetition compulsions that operate independently of our conscious will and tend to subjugate it."

These "mind parasites" Godwin suggests, are what keep us from reaching our true potential.  "the belief in these entities is often prelude to action, generally unpleasant.  That is, mind parasites are projected into the outside world because they cause internal anxiety.  But projecting them outward does not actually eliminate the anxiety.  Rather it simply "mentalizes the environment, so that the the objective world, rather than the subjective world, is experienced as a dangerous and threatening place"  What happens on a individual level parallels what happens on a group level.  The book articulates interesting and insightful ideas about the prevalence of group violence in the past/present and the origin of scapegoating and group sacrifices.  This is still going on today.  One just has to watch TV to see the dynamics of "mind parasites" in action.

To facilitate our unlimited potential means that we strive for the truth and this means we must be open and courageous to question what we have learned.  Paz writes: "an open minded person is consistently prepared to revise his/her version of reality, if doing so brings it in line with a more substantial truth of how things really are."