However, since this spill Americans have been very quick to say “British Petroleum” instead. I can’t help but feel that this is some way of Americans distancing themselves from this problem by having a clear-cut villain to project their anger onto. It can mean that it’s no longer “us” (to Americans), but “them”, and indeed, there’s been a great deal of anti-British sentiment since the incident.

It seems like an awfully convenient way of dealing with the problem emotionally. If we go back to the Shadow, the US is infamous worldwide as ruthless oil consumers and drillers, with the need for oil often being seen as a reason for even invading countries. Now the Shadow has come to the surface almost literally (a big black thing has covered US shores!), and one way of dealing with that would be to find an external villain to shift the blame to, such as BRITISH Petroleum.

But exactly how British can a company like BP really be in today\’s multi-national corporate world? If people were honest with themselves, there’s really little to no difference between them and an outwardly American company.

So next time you find yourself specifically saying “British Petroleum” instead of BP, ask yourself: is it to shift blame onto an external tormentor, or is it a way of hiding from the fact that we’re supporting a corrupt system that rapes the ground we walk on? Every time you fill up that car, or open that bag of chips, or use a plastic supermarket bag, or…… (you get the picture)

I think that the idea of humankind’s collective shadow being manifest in the destructiveness of nature demonstrated in the BP oil spill was mythopoetically and beautifully expressed.

Just as such global “summonses” as HIV and climate change mean confronting such archetypal “shadow” qualities as metaphysical materialism and consumerism in the developed world.

I just wanted to suggest an idea for a future podcast.This might cover the epistemological “psychophysical problem” and the nature of the mind/brain/consciousness interfaces.

Although discussed in my “Mind and Matter” paper in section 4, this issue deserves, I believe, a more comprehensive treatment than was possible in our interview.

I have mentioned Professor Harald Atmanspacher to you. Another possible guest might be neuroscientist Professor Karl Pribram at Georgetown University.

He published a very provocative paper “Consciousness re-assessed” in the “Mind and Matter” Journal, 2004, 2(1) pp 7-35.

I do hope that these ideas are useful to you and thanks again for our interview.