Witches are for Burning: Insights From Quantum Psychology

A new psychology, quantum psychology, is bringing new insights into how both individuals and societies can stop repeating the past.  As individuals, we can rapidly free ourselves from our past traumatic experiences, and achieve higher consciousness, by communicating with our unconscious minds in its own language – pictures.  To acquire the open mind we need to accommodate an expanding consciousness, we also need to liberate ourselves from another aspect of our past: the beliefs and concepts we acquired from our social indoctrination, which is really a form of brainwashing. Social progress occurs when we morally confront the dark side of our society, information the winners left out when they wrote the history books. Presently, the history that we need to morally confront and bring into America’s mainstream culture, is a time when "witches" were for burning. 


While America has made substantial progress in morally confronting the genocide of Native Americans and slavery, we have barely begun to morally confront the dark side of Christianity. In particular, we need to examine events that occurred in the Middle Ages, the thousand years between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Enlightenment. These were the formative years of modern Western Civilization, during which Judeo-Christianity replaced the secular humanism world view of the Greco-Roman world. Western Europe became a tyrannical theocracy, during which the Catholic Church controlled every aspect of people’s lives. This was a time of extreme brutality and suffering, a time when women were demonized by men struggling to be celibate, a time when upwards of one million women were tortured and burned alive.  We have not yet fully recovered from these traumatic experiences. 


Societies preserve the past in their social institutions. In addition to the level of violence against women that we still tolerate in this country, echoes of our medieval past reverberate in present day America as:  anti-Semitism, hostility toward science, our careless attitude toward the environment and another Christian Crusade in the Middle East. Martin Amis, in his book about Joseph Stalin, Koba the Dread, said: "Before humanity can move forward, all crimes against itself must be given their day in the sun, their victims mourned, and proper conclusions drawn." The witch burning, which was official policy of the Catholic Church for hundreds of years, has not yet been fully integrated into America’s cultural mainstream. We have yet to draw proper conclusions and learn the lessons of this history.   


Paradoxically, social progress occurs emerges when the apparently "weak" victims of heinous crimes confront the individuals and institutions responsible. When, in the sixties, African Americans, morally and legally, confronted the modern version of slavery, Jim Crow, they made great strides in civil rights and began to transcend their victim status. When the Jews morally confronted the events of the Holocaust, almost overnight, the former victims became warriors, able and willing to defend themselves. Vowing "never again," Jews brought this history into the West’s mainstream culture, and by so doing significantly decreased anti-Semitism and gained political and military support for Israel.  In the past, feminists confronted the legal system and gained legal rights for women. What remains is for women to morally confront religious institutions for their "sins" against women. Not doing so would be like African Americans not confronting the white power structure and Jews not confronting the Nazis.


Freeing ourselves from the past is crucial at this time in human history.  Our technology has created an environment that has never before existed on this planet and our failing social institutions provide plenty of evidence that the old solutions to problems are already obsolete.  If you are interested in freeing yourself from the past, two quantum personal growth techniques will tell you how. When you practice these techniques, without talking about your problems, you will rapidly achieve a level of higher consciousness that traditional psychology calls self-actualization and quantum psychology calls courageousness.   If you are interested in producing social change, moral confrontation is the key.  Quantum psychology explains why, even if you see yourself as an "ordinary" person, what you do matters.