III: A Life Full of Holes: Daimonic Defense and National Security

This inner [guardian] figure was such a powerful force that the term daimonic seemed an apt characterization. Sometimes . . . this inner daimonic figure violently dissociated the inner world by actively attacking . . . some innocent part of the self . . . At other times its goal seemed to be the encapsulation of some fragile, vulnerable part of the patient which it ruthlessly divided off from reality, as if to prevent it from ever being violated again. At still other times, the daimonic being was a kind of guardian angel, soothing and protecting a childlike part of the self inwardly, while at the same hiding it shamefully from the world. It could play a protective or a persecutory rolesometimes alternating back and forth between them Donald Kalsched, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit

In 2012, Strieber released a book called Solving the Communion Enigma. When I started this exploration I hadnt gotten around to reading it. Somehow, my interest in him had dwindled after the piece I wrote in 2012. I had thoughthad hopedthat Id put my Strieber-obsession to rest. Now I found myself reembarked on a mission which, evidently, was incomplete, and left me with little choice. Fortunately, the local library had a copy in the system and a few days later it came in. I read it while working on the first draft of this piece. It turned out to be chock full of useful information. In the second chapter, for example, The Mirror Shattered, Strieber describes a psychological phenomenon which he calls shattering the mirror of expectation:
I was very young when these things happened. Whatever they were, they certainly shattered the mirror of expectation for me, leaving me, like my wife and so many other people whose understanding of reality has been upended in childhood, open from then on to noticing what most people assume to be impossible and therefore do not see. Once the mirror of expectation is shattered, the door of perception is open, and there is something there, something alive, looking back at us from where the mirror once stood (p. 24).

I referred then to a book Id been recommended back in 2007, by a Jungian therapist. It was called The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit, by a clinical psychologist named Donald Kalsched, and Id returned to it many times in the ensuing years. In it, Kalsched writes about the same or similar phenomena to Strieber, but reaches a somewhat different conclusion. Based on his psychotherapeutic work with abuse sufferers, Kalsched describes how early experiences of trauma destroy outer meaning, and how patterns of unconscious fantasy provide an inner meaning to the trauma victim. He relates these inner images and fantasy structures to the miraculous life-saving defenses that assure the survival of the human spirit when it is threatened by the annihilating blow of trauma.1 I realized that this precisely echoed Striebers accounts of being rescued by the visitors from the abuse he suffered at the hands of unethical government agencies as a child. In Kalscheds model, the visitors might be seen as equivalent to psychic agents of daimonic intervention.
The word daimonic comes from daiomai, which means to divide, and originally referred to moments of divided consciousness such as occur in slips of the tongue, failures in attention, or other breakthroughs from another realm of existence which we would call the unconscious. Indeed, dividing up the inner world seems to be the intention of [the daimonic] figure. Jungs word for this was dissociation, and our daimon appears to personify the psyches dissociative defenses in those cases where early trauma has made psychic integration impossible (p. 11).

Kalsched saw how intense anxiety in early childhood threatened to annihilate the childs personality, causing the destruction of the personal spirit. When severe trauma occurs in early infancy (i.e., before a coherent ego and its defenses have formed), he writes, a second line of defenses comes into play to prevent the unthinkable from being experienced.2 This allows the child to survive psychologically and physically, but in later life the psychic defense system becomes a prison, preventing unguarded spontaneous expressions of the self in the world. The person survives but cannot live creatively.3
When trauma strikes the developing psyche of the child, a fragmentation of consciousness occurs in which the different pieces (Jung called them splinter -psyches or complexes) organize themselves according to certain archaic and typical (archetypal) patterns, most commonly dyads or syzygies made up of personified beings. Typically, one part of the ego regresses to the infantile period, and another part progresses, i.e., grows up too fast and becomes precociously adapted to the outer world, often as a false self. The progressed part of the personality then caretakes the regressed part (p. 3).

A person suffering from trauma may experience what appears to be an authentic spiritual awakening, but because the awakening is really a form of (necessary) dissociation to escape the effects of trauma, it entails a splitting of the psyche and the creation, not only of a progressed (enlightened) part, but also a correspondingly regressed part. This latter is in constant need of the protection and care of the higher self. The progressed part then acts as a guardian, preventing not just further trauma, but also psychic integration. This psychological model posits three primary aspects that make up the fragmented psyche: the conscious ego self; the traumatized child self (regressed part) of which the ego self is largely or wholly unaware; and the progressed part, which may partake of genuine cosmic vision and higher wisdom, and to which the conscious self may have some access, usually in the form of some kind of angelic or superhuman intervention. The initial split, due to the shock of trauma, causes dissociation, and dissociation allows for brief respite, as if it is happening to someone else (such as for example when a person is raped and has an out of body experience). The observations of psychologists suggest that, while dissociation protects the psyche from being overwhelmed, it also prevents the experience from being fully integrated, or processed. This forces the person to continuously reenact it because they are unconsciously seeking closure. Such an unconscious process is two-fold: the individual relives the trauma in the form of flashbacks, dreams, compulsive self-judgments or self-harming practices, and even (or especially) via physical encounters that echo or shadow the original event (such as a series of abusive relationships). At the same time, the compulsive retraumatization entails a further splitting within the psyche that allows for continued dissociation. This can be seen, for example, in how a traumatized person cuts themselves to release dopamine in the body. The compulsive traumatic reenactment, in other words, is an unconscious means to bring about the relief of dissociation. The awakening gained by such dissociative statesironicallyis a kind of waking sleep (trance) state in which it is possible to gain temporary access to unconscious (archetypal) aspects of the psyche, and to feel nurtured, guided, and protected by them. The trouble is that these higher (deeper) parts of the psyche are being roped into a larger complex or agenda, that of retraumatization and dissociation. Though they may seem angelic, they are really acting as the souls guardian or prison keeper, preventing

the original trauma from being integrated or processed, and the psyche from becoming a functioning, autonomous whole. To this end, the daimonic or archetypal guardian will go to any length to protect the traumatized child part of the psycheeven to the point of killing the host personality (i.e., suicide). Kalsched notes how the progressed part of the personality (the caregiver-guardian) is represented in dreams by a powerful benevolent or malevolent great being who protects or persecutes the regressed part, keeping it safe, but also imprisoned within. The progressed part has two faces and is a duplex figure, a protector and persecutor in one.4 This struck me as a perfect match for Striebers visitors, whom he continues to perceive alternately as angelic and demonic. Kalscheds description of how archetypal defenses prevent personality development closely mirrors Striebers experience and personality. Archetypal defenses, Kalsched writes,
keep the personal spirit safe but disembodied, encapsulated, or otherwise driven out of the body/mind unityforeclosed from entering time and space reality . Instead of slowly and painfully incarnating in a cohesive self, the volcanic opposing dynamisms of the inner world become organized around defensive purposes, constituting a self -care system for the individual. Instead of individuation and integration of mental life, the archaic defense engineers disincarnation (disembodiment) and dis-integration in order to help a weakened anxiety -ridden ego to survive, albeit as a partially false self (Kalsched, p. 38, emphasis added).

Early trauma, as Kripal (and my own experience) suggests, may be an effective means of predisposing a person towards individuation and eventual enlightenment. But at the same time, and far more frequently, it can be crippling. Clearly not all sufferers of early trauma go on to become spiritual seekers, much less mystics; nor does it seem likely that early trauma is essential to a spiritual outlook. (Kripal makes the same point in his article.) This may be a somewhat moot point, however; if we take into account the effects of modern medical birthing procedures, trauma may have become something of the norm in Western society over the last couple of centuries. If we allow that mysticism, spirituality, etc., are among the healthier and more natural responses to trauma, they are still far less common reactions than drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, depression, suicide, and so on.5 In comparing all of these responses, however, and specifically in comparing Striebers and my own experiences, I would say that dissociation from the body is very much the key to them. Kalsched describes how the psyches normal reaction to a traumatic experience is to withdraw from the scene of the injury. When withdrawal is impossible, a part of the self must be withdrawn, and for this to happen the otherwise integrated ego must split into fragments or dissociate. This is a trick the psyche plays on itself, allowing life to continue by dividing up the unbearable experience and distributing it to different compartments of the mind and body, especially the unconscious aspects of the mind and body (emphasis added). Thus dissociation prevents the normally unified elements of consciousness (cognitive awareness, affect, sensation, imagery) from being integrated into a continuous, perceptual whole. Experience itself becomes discontinuous.

Flashbacks of sensation seemingly disconnected from a behavioral context occur. The memory of ones life has holes in ita full narrative history cannot be told by the person whose life has been interrupted by trauma [emphasis added]. For the person who has experienced unbearable pain, the psychological defense of dissociation allows external life to go on but at great internal cost. The outer trauma and its effects may be largely forgotten, but the psychological sequelae of the trauma continue to haunt the inner world, and they do this, Jung discovered, in the form of certain images which cluster around a strong affectwhat Jung called the feeling-toned complexes. These complexes tend to behave autonomously as frightening inner beings . . . (p. 12-13, emphasis added).

In simple terms (!), when an early trauma cannot be assimilated by the conscious mind, it is pushed down into the unconscious, which is to say, into the body. One result of this is that the individuals inner world is haunted by personified agents of trauma, psychosomatic beings whose task is to bring the dissociated egos awareness back to wholeness, back to the body. I wondered then if this related to how Striebers encounters with the visitors entail extreme physical interactions, including violations of his body? To this day, he says he was raped by the visitors, even while professing love for them (a typical response of the abused). Might this also relate to how Strieber experienced physical symptoms after the memories first began to resurface? When we hear the word psyche, we tend to associate it with mind, but in fact psyche means soul; and the only way (that I know of) for the soul to come all the way into mind-awareness is for it to be experienced through, and as, the body. Psychic integration (bringing the elements of our unconscious being into consciousness) happens not in the mind, then, but in and through the body. This is because psychic fragmentation (disintegration) takes place in the body. What we think of as mind (or at least the way we experience the thing we call mind) is the result of psychic fragmentation. Spiritual experiences can accompany a soul-body (psychosomatic) integration; but they can also, perhaps more commonly, be used as a surrogate for it. Like sex and drugs, they can allow us to bliss out and further dissociate from body awareness, into mind fantasies that provide some scant bodily relief. This would be especially so if dissociation was a trick which the psyche learned early on. Dissociation would then become unconscious, automatic behavior.* Awakening to the life of the psyche means reintegrating into present consciousness the somatic distress of early trauma. As such, it can be the very inverse of bliss. Bliss states might appear to be bodily ones when they are actually the result of the mind using spiritual fantasies (dissociation) to release anesthetizing chemicals in the body to stave off integration (just as heroin or morphine can be used to create pleasing physical sensations). The very sort of techniques we learned as infants to protect ourselves from trauma, we then adapt as adults under the guise of spiritual practices. This is a very apparent danger of spiritual awakenings that result from trauma. The later trauma (Striebers abduction in 1985, just say) is almost certainly a reenactment of an original trauma that caused early dissociation, making it an attempt of the psychosomatic system to reintegrate the experience into
*

If dissociation from trauma involves numbing our awareness of the somatic affects of trauma, then it follows that real spiritual awakeningbecoming authenticwould entail allowing awareness to awaken to those early affects. The likelihood is that it would be painful more than blissful. That doesnt follow that a painful or distressing experience is ipso facto an awakening, however.

awareness. Turning it into a spiritual awakening may then be the means by which the guardian (the self-care system) tricks the individual into escaping the terrifying impact of a full bodily awakening.* Returning to Kripals fascinating piece, specifically Kripals reference to Aldous Huxleys The Doors of Perception, a book I had first read in my very early twenties, at roughly the time I discovered Carlos Castaneda. I hadnt read it since that time, yet oddly enough I had quoted from it for a recent essay on autism, citing precisely the same subject matter as Kripal, relating to the reducing valve and how it filters out reality. Kripal wrote:
The truth is that we have no reliable and replicable access to what Aldous Huxley called Mind at Large. We have no safe way to shut down the filter. Because of this, the conflation of consciousness and brain states or cultural conditions is more or less perfect, complete, and unassailable. Hence the assumption that they can be reduced to one another in our scholarly methods and assumptions. Such a conflation is certainly understandable enough. We study what we have easy and reliable access to, not what we do not have access to and can only know once or twice in a life-time, if at all.

Unless, that is, there is a way to apply the equivalent of a Hadron collider to the human psyche. What if through the intervention of technology, and perhaps more ordinary modes of interference such as sexual abuse, it were possible to access the hidden realm of matter by attacking childrens psyches? By shutting down the filter (shattering Striebers mirror of expectation), it might be possible (or at least some might believe it so) to access the matter-smashing potential of psychic energy. [T]he sacred is accessed ritually and mystically primarily through the violation of taboo. That brought to mind Kripals other comment:
Butand this is the keywe can only get there through a great deal of physical violence, a violence so extreme and so precise that it cost us billions of dollars and decades of preparation to inflict it.

*
There is the possibility, as I have discussed, that conscious life extends into an energetic level that is completely detached from the physical. Whitley Strieber, Solving the Communion Enigma

In the third chapter of Solving the Communion Enigma, Strieber discusses a shadowy organization called the Finders, whose activities first came to light when reported by the Washington Post in February 1987. Two white males were arrested in Tallahassee Park, with six disheveled children, all under the age of seven. From the Customs report from February 12, 1987:
The children were covered with insect bites, were very dirty, most of the children were not wearing underpants and all of the children had not been bathed in many days. . . . The men were somewhat evasive in their answers to police and stated only that they were the childrens teachers and that all were en route to Mexico to establish a school for brilliant children. The
*

Repressed material can only resurface into consciousness in an atmosphere of denial and negation, so a fuller awakening means an ever greater distortion of consciousness and increase in neurosis. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death, p. 232.

children were unaware of the functions of telephones, television and toilets, and stated that they 6 were not allowed to live indoors and were only given food as a reward.

A warehouse purportedly in use by the organization was discovered and evidence of their activities found. The Finders were described in a court document as a cult that conducted brainwashing and used children in rituals. Photographs allegedly showed naked children involved in bloodletting ceremonies of animals and sexual orgies, including a photograph of a child in chains. Evidence was found for an international network of child trafficking for sexual and other purposes.7 The investigation was abruptly ended, however, when the US Justice Department named it a matter of national security. It was turned over to the CIA as an internal security matter. The evidence was suppressed (theres no Wikipedia page for the case), and the children were released back to the adults who had previously been arrested for abusing them.8 Why, in a book about alien contact, does Strieber have a chapter referring to such a group? The answer is that he has ample reason to suspect that he himself was one of these children, inducted into whatever murky operation was being carried out (and apparently is still being carried out) under the cloak of national security. Strieber remembers being taken to a school for brilliant children in Monterrey, Mexico, where he witnessed some strange and unpleasant things.
I have very little recollection of what happened there. There is one flash of memory of seeing another child holding a bloody saw. I was told that this child had killed somebody with it. The child appeared absolutely terrified. While this person, whom I still know well, seems to have no memory of this incident, she has lived a ruined, disturbed life. She has never been healthy, either physically or mentally. My wife tells me that I have mentioned seeing Jewish babies there, and that I once said that the school was located in a villa owned by somebody connected with the Pan American Sulphur Company. I have no recollection of saying either of these things. The Pan 9 American Sulphur Company did indeed exist, and was once a powerful influence in Mexico.

Strieber first wrote about this period of his life (growing up in San Antonio, Texas, in the 1940s and 1950s) in 1997, in The Secret School. The book recounts a hidden life in which Strieber and other children belonged to a secret school run by the visitors (curiously, he remembers them mostly as nuns, called Sisters of Mercy). It was six years later, at his website in 2003, that he first shared memories of being involved with a secret government program that involved systemized traumatization of children, for ends never fully explained. Striebers psychic odyssey presented me with two very different narratives playing side by side: a terrifying human program of psychological and physical interference, and a sublime, transcendental apprenticeship to nonhuman beings. I was aware of how the two narratives overlapped, almost invisibly, in Striebers writings, and I could only assume they did so in his mind also. Strieber bridges this apparent gulf by suggesting that the close encounters were real, and that they involved literally breaking through into another level of reality in order to escape the hell I was enduring in this one.10 Yet what Strieber is describing is classic dissociation. Even if the encounters were psychically real, it ignores the fact that his body was still being submitted to equally real physical and psychological abuse while the supposedly transcendental lessons were taking place. Unless, that is, he believes he was physically taken away by these beings?

At this point, I feel compelled to state my position more clearly. I am not arguing that nonhuman and intelligent beings, similar to those described by Strieber, do not exist, or even that they dont interact with us. And while this might seem to some readers to be the crucial question here, I consider it beyond my capacityand possibly anyonesto ascertain. I am not even arguing that some of Striebers impressions and memories may not relate to genuine encounters with divine-infernal beings, outside of (though undoubtedly working in tandem with) his own archetypal defenses. This is all uncharted territory, and such objectively real beings may very well be involved. What I am suggesting, or at least wondering, is how accurately he, and others in similar positions, are putting together the pieces to assemble a seemingly coherent narrative that, quite simply, does not add up? There are two areas which I have been drawn to focus on to answer this question: the missing pieces that have been excludedthe holes in the narrative created by the dissociated psyche. And, in direct response to that omission, any elements that have been added to, or superimposed onto, the picture, in order to take advantage of the dissociation and fill in those holes. The first questionlocating missing piecesis almost wholly psychological; the secondidentifying any spurious elements which have been addedwhile also psychological (everything is), overlaps with the parapolitical question of social and religious engineering. To what degree have the narratives which Strieber and other contactees (and mystic commentators such as Huxley and Kripal) report, and which they may well sincerely believe, been discreetly shaped by outside agencies in order to exploit deeper, archetypal associations in the collective psyche, thereby giving a richness of meaning to a manufactured narrative and fueling a political agenda with the stuff of dreams? In other words, is there an actual, ongoing socio-political agenda using a combination of traditional beliefs with newly created ones, or new arrangements and interpretations of old ones, for the creation of a scientistic religion? The evidence is compelling that such an agenda exists, and that it includes the psychological manipulation of individuals (possibly from an early age) in an attempt to access and harness the human potential for psychism, while in the process creating leaders, teachers, and spokespeople for the new paradigm. Most disturbing of all, the basis of this (hypothetical) socio-political agenda, or at least one primary aspect of it, appears to be the appliance of trauma as the means to activate the psychic centers of the human brain, ushering in a new evolutionary stage for the species that (it is hoped) will act as a socially acceptable (i.e., manipulable) surrogate for authentic (full body) spiritual enlightenment. I am aware (have been made aware, by a couple of my readers) that this might seem to be evoking the old bugaboo of conspiracy. To some extent thats inevitable. What I am getting to, or so it seems at least, is the root of my own decades-long interest in conspiracy, occultism, ufology, and paranoid awareness. Getting to the root of things means recognizing both more and less to them than ones political (or even spiritual) eye can see. Whatever agendas might be at work in society, at the end of the day they arent my primary concern. My primary concern, in writing this piece at least, is with my past and the state of my psyche, and less directly, the state of Striebers psyche. In both cases, what I am starting to see is how much early trauma has caused fragmentation and left holes or cracks, in both our psyches and our pasts. The memory of ones life has holes in ita full narrative history cannot be told by the person whose life has been interrupted by trauma.

These holes are inevitably filled by other energies, and whether such alien energies come from the environment or from our own unconsciousor, as is generally the case, both at oncethey have their own agendas. Identifying what kind of energies have filled the holes and what their agendas might be is only part of the process. The next step is finding out whats behind those energies, and it means doing something seemingly impossible: locating the holes in the plotthe cracks in the mirror shattered means uncovering the cover story which Strieber, or I, have been telling him- (and my-) self throughout our whole adult lives. It means not only finding the holes, but going all the way into them, and out the other side.

1 2

Kalsched, The Inner World of Trauma, Routledge 1996, p. 1. Ibid. 3 Ibid, p. 4. 4 Ibid, p. 3. 5 See the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study findings from 2003: ACEs were not only unexpectedly common, but their effects were found to be cumulative. The first publication from the ACE Study examined the relationship of the ACE Score to many of the leading causes of death in the United States. Major risk factors for these causes of deathsuch as smoking, alcohol abuse, obesity, physical inactivity, use of illicit drugs, promiscuity, and suicide attempts were all increased by ACEs. Among the more notable findings were that compared to persons with an ACE score of 0, those with an ACE score of 4 or more were twice as likely to be smokers, 12 times more likely to have attempted suicide, 7 times more likely to be alcoholic, and 10 times more likely to have injected street drugs. [P]roblems such as addiction frequently have their origins in the traumatic experiences of childhood and that the molecular structure of various chemicals or the physiologic effects of certain behaviors (e.g. overeating, sexual behaviors)while ultimately leading to disease and disability, may be particularly effective in ameliorating their effects. . . . While these approaches are effective in the short term, they often have dire long term consequences such as serious chronic health and social problems. . . . In combination, the fallout from various forms of child abuse and household dysfunction is monumental, costing Americans untold sums of money because of the health risks such as the use of street drugs, tobacco, alcohol, overeating and sexual promiscuity. Not the least of these high-ticket medical costs is due to: cardio-vascular disease, cancer, AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted often -high-risk pregnancies, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and a legacy of self-perpetuating child abuse. http://www.acestudy.org/
6 7

http://www.educate-yourself.org/cn/ciadrugsabusemurder.shtml

Cursory examination of documents revealed detailed instructions for obtaining children for unspecified purposes. The instructions included the impregnation of female members of the community, purchasing children, trading and kidnapping. . . . There were pictures of nude children and adult Finders, as well as evidence of high tech money transfers. There was a file called Pentagon Break-in, and references to activities in Moscow, Hong Kong, China, Malaysia, North Vietnam, North Korea, Africa, London, Germany, Europe and the Bahamas. . . . One such telex specifically ordered the purchase of two children in Hong Kong to be arranged through a contact in the Chinese Embassy there. Other documents identified interests in high -tech transfers to the United Kingdom, numerous properties under the control of the Finders, a keen interest in terrorism, explosives, and the evasion of law enforcement. http://www.educate-yourself.org/cn/ciadrugsabusemurder.shtml 8 My source for this information besides the above link is Chapter 6, Finders Keepers, of David McGowans Programmed to Kill, iUniverse, 2004. 9 The Boy in the Box, March 14, 2003. http://www.unknowncountry.com/journal/boy-box 10 Ibid.