Personally, I fared very well growing up in the United States. My grandparents were farmers yet they sent all their children to college and they all progressed into the middle class. My mother was the only daughter who, due to my surprise arrival, did not finish college immediately after high school and only later did she finish her education. We passed through all of the socioeconomic spectrum while this single mother finished her education while living in a poor working class environment and gradually ascended into a middle class profession. I grew up close to the other members of my family kind of like an extended Latino family. Also, my grandparents, aunts and uncles helped me financially while I was studying at the university. While my mother simultaneously worked full time in a low-paying job and studied, we lived in a rather poor apartment complex. Many parents of the white children did not allow them to play with the black children. My mother never imposed such ideas on us. I o
I made many changes to this essay this morning: Anybody who has looked into the abyss of his or her consciousness knows that the abyss looks back at you, as Nietzsche said. The unconscious mind is a very live and active zoo of escaped animals raging about in pure chaos and savagery. Does their years of pent-up frustration make them even more crazy when they finally escape? And in all of this unintelligible impulse speaks back from the chasm some kind of insidious intelligence. In modern psychology, this hidden intentional has been called the id, the shadow, or the unconscious. Pluma Blanca called the unconscious mind “psorax”. His definition of this entity of the unconscious is much more mystical and profound than any other explanation that I know. It is more of a practical understanding of how the mind creates frustrated realities that remain trapped within one, like an itch under the skin. He called it psorax because he saw it as subtle mental energy that becomes contaminated and get