Jungian View on Changes in Consciousness

Navigating a Breakpoint in History
William Van Dusen Wishard

Introduction

Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise
From outward things, whate're you may believe.
There is an inmost center in us all,
Where truth abides in fullness; and around,
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,
This perfect, clear perception – which is truth.
A battling and perverting carnal mesh
Binds it, and makes all error: and, to KNOW,
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape,
Than in effecting an entry for a light
Supposed to be without…

'Tis time
New hopes should animate the world, new light
Should dawn from new revealings…

From "Paracelsus"
Robert Browning

Robert Browning's words describe a process that has repeated itself
numerous times throughout the ages. This essay will suggest that once
again, the world is in the midst of a similar unfolding.

Such a development is at the heart of much of the public anxiety in
America today; a concern caused by our inability to understand the
seismic upheaval the world is experiencing. The media daily pummels
us with the effects of multiple tectonic plate shifts taking place:
from a relatively slow pace of technical change, to an exponential
rate; from ultimate destructive power held only by states, to such
power held by individuals; from economic development solely a national
endeavor, to such development as part of a global system; from the
masculine/patriarchal epoch, to the feminine instinct playing an
increasing role in shaping collective attitudes.

Those who have even a minimal acquaintance with Analytical Psychology
and the life of C.G. Jung, however, are privileged to have a broader
context within which to understand the inherent meaning of these
shifts. For one of Jung's great gifts to the world was the
development of understanding how the collective soul expresses its
worldview, as well as how the psyche develops and matures over time.
History has seen several such shifts in orientation, periods of a
broadening out of the collective soul. Such psychological
reorientations have been times of uncertainty and upheaval, times when
the psychological subsoil out of which emerges all value and meaning
is ploughed up, ultimately leading to the emergence of a completely
new historical epoch. We are in the midst of another such
reorientation—a heightened activation of the Self (the regulating
center f the psyche), which brings with it a new worldview, a
broadening out of the human personality. It is a time, as Walter
Truett Anderson has written, "of rebuilding all the foundations of
civilization." One of Jung's most succinct encapsulations of this
process at work in our time was offered in 1956 when he noted that
there is "a mood of universal destruction and renewal that has set its
mark on our age. This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically,
socially, and philosophically. We are living in what the Greeks
called the kairos—the right moment—for a 'metamorphosis of the gods,'
of the fundamental principles and symbols."

This essay will consider three aspects of the contemporary
"psychological reorientation"—globalization, the human-technology
interface, and the worldwide spiritual upheaval. But first, a brief
glance at earlier periods of reorientation, which offer perspective on
the contemporary process.

Breakpoints of History

When we look back over past millennia, distinctly different
worldviews, expressions of the soul, stand out. These worldviews were
considerably different than ours today. The Mythic Age (circa 1200
BCE), for example, clearly exhibited a pre-conscious mind.
Consciousness as we know it had not yet evolved. Indeed, as Thomas
Cahill has written, the story of the Hebrew Bible is "the story of an
evolving consciousness, a consciousness that went through many states
of development." One thinks of Moses experiencing "a flame of fire
coming from the bush," his "staff becoming a serpent," Yahweh as a
"pillar of fire," the "waters of Egypt turning into blood," and the
"parting of the Red Sea." Such symbolic descriptions are expressions
of an elemental psychology in an earlier stage of development, and
still bound to a certain extent by its identification with its
environment and surroundings.

At roughly the same time, the battle of Troy (12th century BCE) when,
as Homer described four centuries later, Greek gods roamed the
battlefield instructing Achilles, Hector or Odysseus to take this or
that particular action. That was not a literary construct to enliven
Homer's Iliad; it was the way the Greek psyche viewed reality. Again,
an earlier psyche somewhat identified with its surroundings, and which
saw gods as "living presences."

Several centuries of psychic reorientation and maturation brought
forth the Axial Age (700-400 BCE). The defining characteristic of the
Axial Age, according to the German philosopher Karl Jaspers who coined
the term "Axial Age," was the move out of the Mythic Age, into an era
when "man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his
limitations." Consciousness, Jaspers wrote, became "conscious of
itself." This was the age of the birth of Buddhism, Taoism, and
Zoroasterism. The great symbolic Hebrew stories and traditions of
earlier centuries were collected together in the Pentateuch.
Confucius became the first person to articulate the Golden Rule as a
social ethic. Science, philosophy, astronomy, cosmology were born, as
were the very concepts of nature, truth, opinion, mind and
consciousness. History's first scientific questions were asked,
questions such as, what are the basic elements of existence? Water?
Fire? No one had ever before asked such questions. Pythagoras
articulated the concept of "opposites," an expression of the prime
attribute of a developed consciousness—the power of discernment and
discrimination. By the end of the Axial Age, a new orientation had
emerged.

Several centuries later a further reorientation brought a disruptive
shift when the multiple Greco-Roman gods, which had provided meaning
for the Greco-Roman world for a millennium, lost their hold on the
imagination and soul of the Greco-Roman world, and, eventually,
monotheistic Christianity became the official religion. More on this
in a moment.

Closer to our own time came another shift in worldview—the
psychological shift from the Middle Ages of Dante and the building of
Chartres and the great cathedrals of Europe, to the worldview of
Petrarch and the Renaissance. It was a monumental shift from emphasis
on the vertical perspective—man's relation to a God in heaven—to a
horizontal perspective—man's relationship to the natural phenomena of
Earth. The historian Will Durant summarized this shift saying, the
Renaissance "replaced the supernatural with the natural as the focus
of human concern…" Edward F. Edinger noted that the God-image (Self)
was withdrawn from metaphysical projection, and became available for
direct conscious experience. As Jung saw it, "Consciousness ceased to
grow upward, and grew instead in breadth of view," both
philosophically and geographically. The age of exploration—both of
earth and of the human body—began. "Meaning" was found less through
spirit, as a metaphysics of matter and material causation grew in
authority. It is perhaps symptomatic of this shift that this was when
the Faust legend—representing an enantiodromia—was born in the Western
psyche. Jung described this whole period as "an unexampled revolution
in man's outlook."

These shifts in orientation are offered simply as examples of what
we're experiencing today. The contemporary psychological
reorientation is perhaps divided into two overlapping phases. On the
one hand, disintegration, psychic rupture, and destruction have become
not only cultural motifs, but an inherent and essential part of the
process a culture and civilization must experience if the birth of a
new worldview is to take place. This is in keeping with the
progression of the four symbolic phases of the Apocalypse archetype,
which manifests itself in the Revelation of new truth about life's
origin, development and potential; Judgment of existing beliefs and
institutions against the background of the new truth; Destruction of
existing beliefs and institutions that are no longer functionally an
expression of the new truth; and Rebirth of belief, culture and
civilized order in accord with the archetypal expression of the new
truth. This sequence is a process embedded in the nature of the
archetypal psyche.

Such disintegration is simultaneous with a new and greater integration
seeking expression. Humanity is seeking a more common and complete
manifestation of our relationship to our individual self, to each
other, to the planet, and to the universe. In essence, the embryonic
form of something approaching a global consciousness is evolving. As
Lewis Mumford wrote in 1956, "Nothing less than a concept of the whole
man—and of man achieving a consciousness of the cosmic and historic
whole—is capable of doing justice to every type of personality, every
mode of culture, and every human potential." Mumford was talking of
"the creation of unified personalities, at home with every part of
themselves, and so equally at home with the whole family of man, in
all its magnificent diversity." Such a perspective is at the very
core of the new orientation seeking birth.

Globalization

In the 1940s, Sir Fred Hoyle, the eminent British astronomer, noted:
"Once a photograph of Earth, taken from the outside, is available, a
new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose."
Increasingly, the defining reality of our time has been learning how
to cope with this "new idea"—the awareness of the human community as a
single entity. As Brian Swimme has written, we are incorporating the
planetary dimensions of life into the fabric of our economics,
politics, culture and international relations. For the first time in
human history, we are forging an awareness of our existence that
embraces humanity as a whole. What is emerging is "a new context for
discussion of value, meaning, purpose or ultimacy of any sort." The
shorthand for this process is "globalization."

Mention globalization and we immediately think of global economic and
financial integration, currency valuations, job displacement/creation,
intellectual property rights, and much more. Such acronyms as IMF,
NAFTA, WTO, as well as the World Bank come to mind. The economic
dimension of globalization is what most occupies the attention of
business leaders and government policy-makers.

But the essence of globalization—its very core—is the Self's
intensified activation, which is expressed in an expansion of
individual awareness of other peoples, cultures and religions, greatly
facilitated by technological advances in communications and easy
travel. This process began very slowly in the 16th century when, as
noted in Jung's comment above, consciousness ceased to grow upward,
and grew in breadth of view, thus increasing the energy available to
the individual ego. This led to European exploration and
colonialization of Africa, South America and Asia. In the nineteenth
century this process was accelerated with the technical shift from
wind to steam driven trans-Atlantic ships, as well as with the
invention of the telegraph and telephone, the first components of what
is now the world's electronic information communication system.
Clearly, in the 20th century globalization moved at an exponential
pace. Across the globe, as people become more familiar with other
modes of thought and belief, and with other cultures and religions,
their allegiance to earlier forms of identity begins evolving into an
appreciation for, and identity with, a larger cultural and political
realm.

This process of a widening identity is not new to Americans. Before
1776, Americans didn't find their identity in relationship to the
United States (there was no United States), but in relationship to the
state in which they lived—Virginia, Massachusetts or Georgia. After
the establishment of the United States, people slowly grounded their
identity in a wider context, a new entity called the United States of
America. This widening process took time. Indeed, the historian
Daniel Borstin tells us it wasn't until nearly ninety years later, at
the end of the Civil War that a distinctly American identity emerged.
Even today, sectionalism still vies with a sense of national identity,
which is fragmenting under the pressures of information technology.

In essence, all people are going through this same process, albeit on
a far wider and more diverse dimension. The pace of this process
varies depending on numerous factors such as depth of culture and
tradition, the degree of technological development, linkages with the
rest of the world, etc. But it is happening to all peoples, if for no
other reason than a nation can no longer develop economically on its
own; economic development requires a nation to be linked to the
globalized economic and financial system.

For many in the Muslim world, globalization, and the modernization it
brings with it, confronts them with an excruciating choice. On the
one hand, they want the economic and technological—even some of the
social and cultural—benefits globalization brings. On the other hand,
they are asking themselves, "Will globalization, based on the Western,
rationalistic, consumerist, hedonistic ethos, ultimately mean the end
of Islam? Yet, how can we modernize without globalization?" Such
unknowns form a significant part of the psychological dynamic fueling
terrorism.

Globalization means that, whether we're Parisian or New York
sophisticate, African Bushmen or Alaskan Inuit, we are all being
forced into the same global, technological, postmodern, digitalized
context of life. Some African chiefs jump a century of telephonic
development dependent on wire, as they advance from drum or messenger,
to the cell phone. The tribal leader in Papua stands with his shield
and spear in a TV store bewildered as he stares at a scene from
"Baywatch" projecting images of he knows not what. Time, place and
historic contexts of life are disappearing as the instruments of
globalization force us into some unfamiliar frame of reference.

It's not only the Papuan or African whose identity and context of life
are being jumbled by globalization. Profound questions arise for all
people as globalization collapses the national, racial and religious
barriers that heretofore protected—and even defined—identity. "Who am
I? Who is my group? Do I even have a group any more? Is national
allegiance still primary in a globalized era? What does 'race' mean
in a world where people of all shades of skin color are increasingly
inter-marrying? What is my sense of who I am when computerized global
information systems merge all religions, philosophies, social theories
and cultures into a 'pick-and-mix' smorgasbord of identity?" The
whole human race—whether pre-modern, modern, or postmodern—is involved
in a vast learning process.

Over time, many people find their own sense of identity widening as
they travel to other nations, meet people of unfamiliar cultures, and
daily scan the world on the Internet. As cultures and religions
interpenetrate, the "broadening out process" enlarges people's
horizons. Yet an inherent part of any archetypal expression of this
maturing process is psychic reaction, in this case expressed in what
can only be called a "national fundamentalism." As David Ignatius of
The Washington Post notes, in some ways the current reassertion of
nationalism is "a kind of geopolitical fundamentalism—in which people
cleave to old identities as a way of coping with the new stresses of
globalization."

The Human-Technological Interface

At least since Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century we have viewed
the purpose of science and technology as being to improve the human
condition. As Bacon put it, the "true and lawful end of the sciences
is that human life be enriched by new discoveries and powers." Four
centuries later, Einstein echoed Bacon in a speech at Cal Tech:
"Concern for man himself and his fate must form the chief interest of
all technical endeavors."

Human life has indeed been enriched. Take America. During the last
century, the real GDP, in constant dollars, increased by $48 trillion,
much of this wealth built on the marvels of technology.

But along with technological wonders, uncertainties arise. The
question today is whether we're creating certain technologies not to
improve the human condition, but for purposes that appear to be to
replace human meaning and significance altogether. Consider the
following comments from some of the world's leading scientists and
technologists.

Ray Kurzweil, recipient of ten honorary Doctorates, honors from three
U.S. presidents, and is one of the world's foremost authorities on
artificial intelligence, predicts that by mid-century you may be
talking to someone who is of biological origin, but whose mental
processes are a hybrid of the person's biological thinking process and
the electronic process embedded in their brain—the two processes
working intimately together. Adds Kurzweil, "When machines are
derived from human intelligence but are a million times more capable,
there won't be a clear distinction between human and machine
intelligence—there's going to be a merger." After that, he says, we
will enhance our own intelligence by putting small computers in our
brains and introducing calculating machines into the blood
stream…nanobots will go to the brain and interact with biological
neurons.

In Kurzweil's view, what we are dealing with is not a "constant" rate
of technological change, but an "exponential" rate, the acceleration
of acceleration. The rate of technological change doubles every
decade. At today's rate, Kurzweil says, the world will experience one
thousand times more technological change in the 21st century than took
place in the 20th century.

Computer speeds will be increased millions of times in the next three
decades, Kurzweil predicts, thus taking us to a point where everything
is ratcheted up so fast that the totality of life changes, and some
new context of existence emerges that we can't even begin to imagine
at this point. This will bring the world, he says, to "a rupture in
the fabric of history," to what he terms the "Omega Point."

Kurzweil's use of "Omega Point" emits familiar echoes of Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin, who coined the term well over half a century ago.
For Teilhard, the "Omega Point" is that point in the future when
time, space and energy converge. It's a time of super connectivity,
organization and complexity when a new context of existence for man
will emerge. For Teilhard, however, the "Omega Point" would introduce
an era of the "spiritualization of matter" as well as the "creative
union" of all humanity.

Whatever the differences between Kurzweil's and Teilhard's use of the
term "Omega Point," it's fair to ask whether both men have been
influenced by an archetype of transcendence. Indeed, is the entire
"post human" movement (see following commentary) a projection of what
Edinger called "the transformation fantasy"?

Kurzweil is by no means alone in his pursuit of the "post human"
future. Marvin Minsky, co-founder of MIT's Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory, writes, "Suppose that the robot had all the virtues of
people and was smarter and understood things better. Then why would
we want to prefer those grubby, old people? I don't see anything
wrong with human life being devalued if we have something better."

Gregory Stock, Director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and
Society at UCLA School of Medicine; his latest book: Redesigning
Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future, suggests, "Within a few years,
traditional reproduction may begin to seem antiquated, if not
downright irresponsible." Stock sees a time soon emerging "when
humans no longer exist . . . Progressive self-transformation could
change our descendents into something sufficiently different from our
present selves to not be human in the sense we use the term now."

British Telecom's Ian Pearson predicts that the completed human genome
project will enable "a combination of man and computer search to
identify the genes needed to produce a people of any chosen
characteristics." Someone, somewhere, Pearson says, "will produce an
elite race of people, smart, agile and disease resistant." Pearson
calls such an optimized human "Homo Optimus."

MIT's Sherry Turkel sees the "reconfiguration of machines as
psychological objects and the reconfiguration of people as living
machines." James Hughes sees the "right to a custom made child" as
merely the "natural extension of our current discourse of productive
rights." Hughes contends that women "should be allowed the right to
choose the characteristics [of their child] from a catalog.

Perhaps Jaron Lanier, the person who coined the term "virtual reality"
and founder of the world's first virtual reality company, best
assesses what's happening when he says, "Medical science,
neuroscience, computer science, genetics, biology—separately and
together, seem to be on the verge of abandoning the human realm
altogether . . . it grows harder to imagine human beings remaining at
the center of the process of science. Instead, science appears to be
in charge of its own process, probing and changing people in order to
further its own course, independent of human agency."

Concludes Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired magazine and author of
Out of Control, "In the great vacuum of meaning, in the silence of
unspoken values, in the vacancy of something large to stand for,
something bigger than oneself, technology—for better or worse—will
shape our society. Because values and meaning are scarce today,
technology will make our decisions for us."

Thus arrives what some scientific intellectuals call the "Post-human Age."
If this scenario materializes, it won't happen in the next decade; it
is something being developed for our grandchildren's time.

A few voices are being raised regarding the dangers of an uncontrolled
rush to technological bliss. Writes Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun
Microsystems and who The Economist magazine describes as the "Edison
of the Internet," "I think it no exaggeration to say we are on the
cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose
possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction
bequeathed to the nation-states." Ray Kurzweil himself suggests we
only have "a better than even chance of making it through" the
technological changes he sees coming.

Sir Martin Rees, England's Astronomer Royal, a Professor at Cambridge
University and one of the world's foremost theoretical physicists,
surveys current scientific experiments and writes, "The 'downside'
from twenty-first century technology could be graver and more
intractable than the threat of nuclear devastation that we have faced
for decades…I think the odds are no better than fifty-fifty that our
present civilization on Earth will survive to the end of the present
century." Such risks, Rees contends, are the price that must be paid
for "personal freedoms and the pursuit of scientific knowledge."

While a full discussion of technology is beyond the scope of any one
essay, it is worth commenting on the world's first global electronic
information system. Electronic information systems have a fragmenting
effect, thus shattering the cohesion of national myths, political
philosophies, social theories, cultural styles, as well as religious
beliefs. It's this fragmenting effect that has helped create the
whole dissonance of our postmodern world in all its forms. One result
is that we no longer collectively agree what truths are
"self-evident," or even what constitutes "truth." Thus we can no
longer define the world in terms of what we "are," but only in terms
of what we have ceased to be—"postindustrial," "post-Enlightenment,"
"post-ideological," "postnational" or "postmodern."

Yet still we must try to understand what has happened to humanity that
we stand at the point of potential self-annihilation. Vaclav Havel
suggests an imbalance in our underlying concept of a technological
society. Writes Havel: "Science as the basis of the modern
conception of the world is missing something…It fails to connect with
the most intrinsic nature of reality, and with natural human
experience. It is now more a source of disintegration and doubt than
a source of integration and meaning. It produces what amounts to a
state of schizophrenia: Man as an observer is becoming completely
alienated from himself as a being…The abyss between the rational and
the spiritual, the external and the internal, the objective and the
subjective, the technical and the moral, the universal and the unique
constantly grows deeper…There appear to be no integrating forces, no
unified meaning, no true inner understanding of phenomena in our
experience of the world"

Or, as Houston Smith writes, technology, and its scientific source,
are honored for what they can tell us about nature, but as that is not
all that exists, science and technology cannot provide us with a valid
worldview. "The most it can show us is half of the world, the half
where normative and intrinsic values, existential and ultimate
meanings, teleologies, qualities, immaterial realities, and beings
that are superior to us do not appear. Where, then, do we now turn
for an inclusive worldview?"

Richard Tarnas, professor of psychology and philosophy at the
California Institute of Integral Studies, and author of the highly
acclaimed The Passion of the Western Mind and the soon-to-be-released
Cosmos and Psyche, suggests that as scientists and technologists
pursue their vision of technological transcendence, "unconscious
factors are ignored. It's just these unconscious factors that will
eventually disrupt the developmental trajectory so confidently
predicted by technologists." Tarnas then offers a thoughtful comment
about the psychology behind the quest for technological transcendence:
"Purveyors of such future scenarios are blissfully--and often
manically--unaware of the deeper psychological impulses driving their
quest, the shadow side of their aspirations, and the superficiality of
their understanding of either evolution or consciousness. When one is
unconscious of so much, one can be certain that one's plans will not
go according to schedule. A deeper knowledge of history would tell
them that, but historical myopia is a self-affirming attribute. This
does not mean that their visions are harmless, only that they are
distorted and, in that sense, likely to be highly inaccurate--though
not without consequences."

What Tarnas suggests is illustrated in the career of Steven Shafer,
formerly a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. According to The
Washington Post, Microsoft hired Shafer as a researcher. It seems
that Professor Shafer was unhappy at Carnegie Mellon, as he complained
that "teaching steals from research time." At Microsoft, however,
Shafer appears happier. "To me," he confided to the Post, "this
corporation is my power tool. It's the tool I wield to allow my ideas
to shape the world." My power tool. What better example of the
inflated power drive. It brings to mind one of Jung's most profound
insights; that the opposite of love is not hate, but power. "Where
love stops," he wrote in 1957, "power begins, and violence and
horror." Thus the archetype may not be so much a "love-hate" as a
"love-power" archetype.

Freeman Dyson, one of America's foremost theoretical physicists, and
present at the first test of a nuclear bomb, gives a graphic example
of how power can inflate the ego. Speaking in the documentary film
The Day After Trinity, Dyson said, "The glitter of nuclear weapons.
It's irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's
there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to
let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift up
millions of tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives
people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways,
responsible for all our troubles—this, what you might call technical
arrogance that overcomes people when they see what they can do with
their minds."

One effect of the computer and Internet, says Stephen Talbott, editor
of the online NetFuture, is that it represents a "disembodied
rationality, which "tends to be abstracted form with little depth of
humanly felt content." In this sense, he says, the computer is not
"neutral." It expresses primarily one side of the human character.
It tends to express "surface," but not "interior."

Is it possible that Kurzweil and the scientists/technologists quoted
above have developed a theory, a belief system based on what they are
skilled at doing, and what captures their minds? This then becomes a
kind of "technological determinism," which, at best, is only a partial
view of reality, and which may turn out to be even more misleading
than Marx's "economic determinism."

Jung, of course, was always leery of the proliferation of technology
and what harm it might eventually cause. In the abstract, he saw
technology as "neither good nor bad, neither harmful nor harmless."
The danger, Jung wrote, "lies not in technology but in the
possibilities awaiting discovery." Those possibilities are now here
and are leading to what some scientists term the "Post-human era."

While Jung didn't live to see "the possibilities awaiting discovery,"
Edward Edinger, who died in 1998, did. On the one hand, Edinger saw
the World Wide Web as "a material reflection of the growing collective
individuation in the world that is taking place. There is a worldwide
impetus to a new individuation. All the cultures will eventually be
assimilated into this new individuation." Edinger knew, however, that
"eventually" could be an extremely long time.

On the other hand, he thought "man has decided to subordinate himself
to his machine. He has abdicated his own center of being, and he's
handed it over to his machine." Edinger felt the modern ego is
"infatuated with its tools. We're totally preoccupied with 'means,'
and 'ends' has been completely lost. It's the ego dissociated from
any transpersonal dimension." As to the "Post-human" impetus, Edinger
had a clear view: "The impulse to succeed ourselves through technology
reflects the collective unconscious' goal of destruction." Thus
Edinger believed the vital question for everyone is "Do I have a
relationship with that life-giving source in my unconscious?"

In the long sweep of time, we must ask whether we've created a
scientific culture that is an immense complex of technique and
specialization devoid of any guiding ethical framework. The highest
standard appears to be efficiency; the defining ethic, "If it can be
done, it will be done." It is as Kevin Kelly suggests: "We have
become as gods, and we might as well get good at it."

What does it mean to be a "god"?

In the Introduction to the Penguin Classic edition of the Iliad,
Bernard Knox offers a description of what being a god entails: "To be
a god is to be totally absorbed in the exercise of one's own power,
the fulfillment of one's own nature, unchecked by any thought of
others except as obstacles to be overcome; it is to be incapable of
self-questioning or self-criticism. But there are human beings who are
like this. Pre-eminent in their particular sphere of power, they
impose their will on others with the confidence, the unquestioning
certainty of their own right and worth that is characteristic of
gods."

Is this a description of that miniscule percentage of the human race,
the scientists and technologists, who accelerate the pace and
character of change for everyone else on earth, and who are altering
the basics of human existence, while pursuing the "technological
imperative" regardless of the human cost?

It's not as if we haven't been warned—including by some of our most
prophetic voices—about the consequences of overreaching. In a
prescient comment, Herman Kahn and Anthony Weiner concluded their 1967
magnum opus by observing that in the final decades of the twentieth
century, "we shall have the technological and economic power to change
the world radically, but probably not get very much ability to
restrain our strivings, let alone understand or control the results of
the changes we will be making." Alvin Toffler noted in 1970 that by
"blindly stepping up the rate of change, the level of novelty, and the
extent of choice, we are thoughtlessly tampering with the
environmental preconditions of rationality." (Emphases added.)

Centuries earlier, however, everything in human myth and religion
warned about trying to become as the gods. (See Icarus and
Frankenstein.) These myths and stories caution that there are limits
to both human knowledge and endeavor; that to go beyond those limits
is self-destructive. No one knows exactly where such limits might be.
But if they don't include the effort to create some technical/human
life form supposedly superior to human beings, if they don't include
the capacity to genetically reconfigure human nature, if they don't
include the attempt to introduce a "post-human" civilization, then
it's hard to imagine where such limits would be drawn.

Myths emanate from the deepest realm of the psyche, that level which
connects us to transcendent wisdom. The record of five thousand years
of human experience suggests that at the heart of life is a great
mystery that does not yield to rational interpretation. This eternal
mystery induces a sense of wonder out of which all that humanity has
of religion, art and science is born. The mystery is the giver of
these gifts, and we only lose the gifts when we grasp at the mystery
itself. Nature may not permit man to defy that mystery, that
transcendent wisdom. In the words of Francis Bacon, "God forbid that
we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the
world…The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the
subtlety of the [human] senses and understanding."

The Spiritual Reorientation

The third issue at the heart of the psychological reorientation
mentioned at the outset is the spiritual turbulence taking place
worldwide, albeit at differing rates of speed.

At the center of this turbulence is a staggering reality that's
difficult to grasp: We are living through nothing less than a
redefinition of the human relationship to God. Such a redefinition
has happened several times before in history, and it's always been a
disruptive and disorienting period.

Such a thought—a change in the human relationship to God—or to be more
precise, to the God-image—is by no means original with this essay.
Throughout the twentieth century, thoughtful people—Thomas Hardy, W.B.
Yeats, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, C.G. Jung, Adlai Stevenson,
Rollo May, Peter Drucker, Joseph Campbell to name just a few—have, in
one way or another, raised this possibility.

Most of the above-mentioned people spoke of this prospect in terms of
Christianity and Western civilization. However, Joseph Campbell, who
was possibly the world's foremost authority on the psychological and
symbolic meaning of myths, clearly believed this spiritual
reorientation, this change in the God-image, is a worldwide phenomena.
In a 1962 New York speech, he observed, "The world is passing through
perhaps the greatest spiritual metamorphosis in the history of the
human race." Campbell referred to the change he saw taking place in
the spiritual attitudes of the Moslem, Hindu, Jewish and Christian
students he had been teaching at Sara Lawrence College over some four
decades. Jung clearly shared Campbell's views, and Jung's seminal
book, Answer to Job, is probably the most authoritative exposition of
the psychological phenomena underlying such a shift.

But as the spiritual/psychological reorientation we're considering is
clearly most pronounced in the Christian world, it is from that
experience examples are drawn that may offer helpful perspective. If
a change in the human relationship to the God-image is in fact taking
place, it is by no means the first time such a change has occurred.
Jung suggests we are, in fact, experiencing the sixth major change in
the Western God-image.

A change in the God-image is a cataclysmic development. The God-image
is the primary expression by which humans orient themselves to the
basic questions and mysteries of life—Why am I here? What happens to
me when I die? Does life have any meaning, and if so, how do I find
it? How should I live my life? In this sense, the God-image should
not be confused with the word "God." They are totally different
phenomena, and are not interchangeable. When the God-image changes,
it brings with it a cultural transformation in worldview. For many
people it literally is the end of their world as they have interpreted
it.

Part of the last such shift was evident when the Greco-Roman multiple
gods of antiquity ceased to resonate in the depths of the Greco-Roman
soul. This was a time of prolonged disintegration and disorientation.
The cry, "Great Pan is dead" was heard throughout the Greco-Roman
world. The Roman poet Lucretius observed that "in every home doubts
arose which the mind was powerless to assuage." There was a loss of
collective meaning; a disappearance of what had represented life's
highest value. The God-image that had informed the inner life and
culture of the Greco-Roman world for a thousand years lost its
compelling force, especially for the leadership class. This led to a
breakdown of the historic psychic structures that had been the source
and container of Greco-Roman morals and beliefs. A collapse of the
ethical and social guidelines underlying civilized order took place.

This breakdown was followed by the collapse of life's physical
structures—the Roman roads, aqueducts, farms, and even the Roman army,
which required "mercenaries" to maintain the Roman military machine.
Numerous cults, philosophies and religions vied for supremacy. Over
time, "spirit" and "matter" were torn apart from the psychological
unity they had enjoyed in both the Old Testament and in Greek
mythology, and Christianity became all "spirit." Finally, three
centuries after Jesus, Emperor Constantine proclaimed Christianity the
official religion of the Roman Empire. Even so, it was another five
or six centuries before "Christendom" reigned throughout Europe. From
Ireland to Italy, Europe underwent a wrenching transformation of basic
symbols and meaning.

When this reorientation took place, the process was confined to a
relatively small proportion of Earth's population, basically to
Europe, including Russia. If a similar process is in fact happening
today, it's taking place on a worldwide basis, and all the world's
major religions are affected.

One reason for suggesting that the terms "God" and the "God-image"
are different phenomena is that even the Catholic Church has suggested
that God is beyond the capacity of human comprehension. In 1215, at
the Lateran Council in Rome, the Catholic Church stated that God is
"ineffable and unknowable." A few decades later, Thomas Aquinas was
writing his magnum opus, Summa Theologica. Aquinas never finished
Summa Theologica. He simply quit writing. He stopped, he said,
because "One can know God only when one knows that God far surpasses
anything that can be said or thought about God." (Italics added.) In
Aquinas' view, God is beyond all thought, even beyond all categories
of thought. In other words, he's saying the word "God" is a metaphor
for the Mystery of Eternal Being, for that Unknowable Divine Immensity
that created all life.

Jung's views about God are clear. In a 1955 interview with the
London Daily Mail, he said, "All that I have learned has led me step
by step to an unshakable conviction of the existence of God." In a
1959 BBC interview, Jung was asked whether he believes in God. He
replied, "I know, I don't need to believe. I know." He subsequently
outlined the psychological experiences, the soul experiences, on which
that understanding was based. For Jung, it was not a matter of faith,
but of experience.

If in fact God is "unknowable" in the cognitive sense, what is it
we're referring to when we talk about God? The Book of Genesis gives
a clue when it says man is created in "the image of God." The "image
of God"—the God-image. It's this God-image in the collective psyche
that is the cohesive force of every religion, and it's this God-image,
in all it's varying expressions, that has been changing. Jung's
research suggests such a change is not only a cultural process, but is
also an evolutionary process that includes both biological and
psychological developments.

As to what is responsible for a change in the God-image, Edward
Edinger suggests two factors: first, the God-image contains a "latent
dynamic tendency" to evolve and develop; second, such development
partially results from "the feedback it receives from conscious egos."
Thus Edinger posits that while the Self, the pivotal archetype of
orientation and significance, is always manifested to one degree or
another, there are times in the history of a cultural worldview when
the Self becomes activated to a greater degree than normal. Such
times represent the great spiritual/psychological transition points of
history.

Historically, religion has been the central, life-forming, cohesive
force of all great civilizations. It constituted the formative
dynamic and informing source of all our institutions and moral
precepts. Every culture has originally been the outward expression of
some inner spiritual conviction. So it is not surprising that when a
particular spiritual dispensation atrophies, the culture and
institutions, as well as the moral conventions derived from that
religious impulse, lose their cohesion and authority. This is an
archetypal process that has played itself out several times in human
history. This archetypal process is again working itself out as is
suggested by the "hollowing out" of at least five of the foundational
areas of Western civilization, i.e., religion, culture, the family,
education and self-government.

A Different Context

To help gain perspective on why a change in the God-image has been
taking place, consider what life was like for the average person
between two and three thousand years ago, when our religions came into
being. The average person never traveled more than perhaps thirty
miles from their home in their lifetime; they thought the earth was
flat; they lived in an agricultural society, which means they had an
organic relationship to earth and natural phenomena; their only source
of education or intellectual stimulation was the priest; there were no
books, newspapers or "news of the day"; they had no idea of what was
going on in the rest of the world—indeed they didn't even know there
was a "rest of the world;" the population of the entire world was
smaller than today's U.S. population, so there were none of the
"population pressures" we experience; they knew nothing about the
universe or the beginnings of life on earth; and on and on one could
go.

Contrast that with the context within which we live today. We can see
billions of miles into space, and in so doing, we've made contact with
radiation left over from the "big bang" some 14 billion years ago;
religions which were born and flourished in total isolation from each
other are now intermingling, thus offering everyone sort of a
"do-it-yourself" potpourri of religious mix; anyone with a computer
has access to all knowledge, philosophies, religions, political
theories, and cultural expressions; we have become as "gods" ourselves
with the power to destroy the earth, and perhaps even knock the solar
system out of balance; we shall soon have the capability to create
"designer babies," and perhaps eventually eliminate the requirement
for the male sperm in the creation of human life; and television, the
Internet, the cell phone and easy plane travel have virtually
eliminated time and space, giving us all an instantaneous electronic
global reach. One could go on, but the point is clear.

We live in an age that in every way is totally different than those
times when our spiritual expressions were given us. Our psychological
orientation is vastly different. We possess abilities and face
circumstances that were simply unimaginable even five hundred years
ago, to say nothing of two thousand or more years ago. So it would be
unnatural if there were not some change taking place in how man
relates to the God-image, and to Transcendent Reality. As Joseph
Campbell put it, "Nothing really means anything because the images of
all our religions refer to millennia past." Everyone on earth—from
the indigenous people of the Amazon basin, to the "sophisticates" of
Paris and New York, are being forced into a new global, electronic,
instant information, technological context of life, which bears no
relationship to that context of life when our religions evolved.

Thus the religious life across the world is in turmoil. In India, the
passive belief that one must accept the circumstances of this
incarnation of life in order to find greater peace and happiness in
the next incarnation, this belief is giving way to the realization
that one can indeed change one's circumstances in "this life." Thus
the age-old pattern of adapting to one's "proper role," as defined by
dharma, need no longer apply. And so Bangalore is crammed with young
"techies"—making salaries their parents could only dream of—providing
"back room" services for American companies via computer. In Israel,
secularism and Judaic fundamentalism vie for political supremacy,
while Islam could eventually become Israel's major religion if
Israel's Arab population continues its present growth rate. In China,
where Confucianism and ancestor worship have been such a significant
underpinning of culture and spiritual heritage, the whole structure of
family, family authority, and the moral discipline of Confucianism, as
well as acceptance of the wisdom of one's elders, has been atrophying
under the influence of, first Communism, and more recently,
modernization, affluence and globalization. And while the Tao (or the
"Way") tickles the spiritual fancy of many Westerners, the influence
of the Tao has long been waning in China as people search for some
more "modern" meaning to life as the country ascends to the peaks of
world economic and military power.

In Europe, "secular fundamentalism" reigns, and a major concern of the
Catholic Church is whether Islam will ultimately become Europe's
dominant religion. In sub-Sahara Africa, they long ago lost their
instinctual native ways of relating to the "Divine Unknown" as
Europeans imposed Christianity and Western rationalized modes of
administration and education on a people who instinctively operated on
a more non-rational decision-making basis. Right now, Christianity is
growing rapidly in Africa, but it remains to be seen how deeply this
"foreign" religion becomes embedded in the African psyche. And in
virtually every Muslim country, significant debate of Islam,
democracy, modernity and globalization is under way.

A Copernican Revolution

But Jung has pointed to something even deeper going on. The evidence
indicates we are in the midst of a Copernican revolution of the
psyche/soul, and it's generating the same disorientation, bewilderment
and conflict that followed the original Copernican revolution in the
sixteenth century.

At its deepest level, religion is the language of the soul, the center
of which is the Self, the archetype that functions as the God-image.
What the world is confronted with in the so-called "clash of
civilizations" is, at a deeper level, the conflict of different
God-images, or, in psychological terms, different expressions of the
Self. That is the heart of every religious conflict. It is a split
in humanity's God-image.

At the center of this split is the psychological reality that, as one
analyst puts it, what we perceive as "God-phenomena" are in point of
fact "Self-phenomena." Behind such a statement is a totally new fact
of history: for the first time, as a result of Jung's discoveries, we
have come to understand some of the psychological reality of the human
interpretation of the Divinity; a reality based not on the actual
existence of the Divine Unknowable Creator of the universe, but on our
perception of that Unknowable. That perception, by definition, is not
the Unknowable Creator itself, but is the God-image as rendered by the
Self. The split in the God-image is, psychologically, a split in
humanity's collective Self. Historically, this split has been caused
by many factors, including geography and environment, varying human
characteristics, cultural and religious development, as well as the
nature of evolution and emergence. But over the past two or three
centuries, the split has been intensified by activation of the
Apocalypse archetype mentioned earlier.

What we may be facing now is the effort of this split Self, this
divided God-image, to seek a greater degree of unity and wholeness,
even while the destructive phase of the Apocalypse archetype
continues. Given the unfolding of some sort of global stage in human
affairs which has been emerging over the past several centuries, such
a move towards a greater unity in the Self, in the God-image, would
not only be natural, but is essential if humanity is successfully to
realize the vital new life this unfolding offers. This does not
necessarily mean any particular God-image must be lost; rather that as
cultures and individuals, we must move to a higher level of
consciousness at the same time as the differing God-images mature and
are reinterpreted to express themselves in a broader, deeper and more
organic unity. In this sense, a God-image need not be static; it is
responsive to the demands of evolution of the human condition, new
circumstances, and the evolving needs of the human soul.

Part of the maturation of the God-image is the need for
reinterpretation of spiritual scripture. Scripture is the expression
of an earlier consciousness just as it emerged from the mists of the
Mythic Age. In this sense, besides its spiritual significance that is
an expression of the transcendent dimension, scripture is as well a
psychological manifestation. As was said above, religion is the
language of the soul, and as the soul (psyche) seeks a greater
maturity of expression, traditional scripture must be reinterpreted in
terms that resonate in the depths of the contemporary human spirit.
This reinterpretation is far more than a matter of language, of just
re-writing the scripture in modern language. It involves taking the
original scriptural expressions, breaking them out of the archaic,
pre-modern context in which they are embedded, and expressing them in
terms that resonate with the contemporary psyche.

Edward Edinger has in fact done this to a certain extent, and his
collected works on this subject mark a historic beginning of a
monumental task. Take, for example, Edinger's reinterpretation of the
biblical passage we know of as the Lord's Prayer. He notes that it is
divided into seven petitions, and is "a formula for maintaining a
connection between the ego and the Self." He suggests that the phrase
"Hallowed be thy name," means I must remember the transpersonal sacred
dimension of life. "That is what the ego is reminding itself—to
remember that life is not just secular, it has a transpersonal
dimension," writes Edinger. The phrase, "Thy kingdom come," suggests
that the ego is announcing that it recognizes that the rule of the
Self should prevail. "Forgive us our trespasses," emphasizes the
nature of the ego's sin against the Self.

We began this essay with a glance at earlier seminal shifts in human
perception and orientation that involved a heightened constellation of
the Self. We are once again experiencing an accelerated activation of
the Self that is seen in a broadening out of the human personality,
and in a widening individual identity. Given that religion is the
language of the soul, the psyche, one is hard pressed to remember any
time in the past half century when there has been as much public
discussion in the world about religion as there is today. From a
psychological standpoint, what we're witnessing is the Self searching
for a greater maturation and wholeness.

The Fundamentalist Phenomenon

An inherent aspect of any archetypal expression of the maturing
process is reaction, in this case expressed in the more rigid
manifestation of religious fundamentalism's resistance to such a new
maturation. Various people are inclined to equate fundamentalism with
radicalism, even terrorism. This is a distinction that can be both
false and harmful. For many people, fundamentalism simply means
adhering to the fundamentals, the basics, of a given religious
expression, whether Hindu, Muslim, Jewish or Christian.

Whether moderate or fanatical, however, fundamentalism poses different
reactions to the psychological reorientation under way. This is due
to the numinous nature of the archetypal experience, which yields a
variety of expressions. If the numinous experience is consciously
integrated, then individuation takes place, strengthening the
"ego-Self axis." If, however, one's ego identifies with the
numinosity of the experience, then inflation takes place and the
chance for individuation is minimized. The ego then expresses itself
in a certain dogmatic rigidity. It identifies with a psychologically
archaic belief system residing in the collective unconscious, rather
than moving forward and engaging individuation and its process of
increasing consciousness. The individual then feels he has assumed
the spiritual "high ground." Thus, all fundamentalisms tend to divide
the world between "us" and "them," between the "saved" and "damned,"
between "those who are with us" and "those who are against us." For
inflation has diminished the room for acceptance of the "other."

One characteristic of fundamentalism is the literal interpretation of
scripture, whether the Bible, the Koran, or Bhagavad-Gita, rather than
a symbolic interpretation, which, for example, is how St. Augustine
interpreted scripture such as the book of Revelation and its
description of the Apocalypse. This is a critical distinction, as
many people are inclined to interpret the book of Revelation
literally. This difference between literalism and symbolism is one
element at the core of the difference between fundamentalists and
"traditionalists."

A basic psychological law says every psychic condition exists
simultaneously with its opposite. So the maturation and broadening
out, the evolution towards a more whole and complete God-image taking
place in the collective psyche, brings with it a regressive movement
towards an archaic reaching back for a more familiar expression of the
God-image. Essentially, religious fundamentalism reaches back for
thought-patterns that originated at least two thousand years ago, that
were expressed in a manner relevant to the psychological need and
development of that time, but which fail to resonate with much of
contemporary society—especially in the "creative minority" which sets
the tone and culture of any society. Indeed, the present-day psyche
is actually seeking to reformulate such thought-patterns as it seeks
maturation and a higher state of consciousness.

But the more energy acquired by the embodiment of the "new," the more
fiercely its opposite clutches to the safer and more familiar "old."
In other words, the maturation to a new and more complete God-image,
and the fundamentalist reaction are two sides of the same coin. As he
desperately strives to keep the old faith, the fundamentalist clings
to the certainty of the very spiritual symbols that have lost their
collective numinosity and are thus in need of reinterpretation.

That the whole world should be experiencing this
spiritual/psychological reorientation simultaneously—even if at
differing rates—is not surprising, as Analytical Psychology suggests
that the structure of the psyche is the same for all people
everywhere, even though the psyche has manifested itself in different
cultural and spiritual inflections over the millennia. In this sense,
the psyche is comparable to the human body, which has evolved into
different sizes, features and colors, but in its essential attributes
is basically the same everywhere.

The Terrorism/Religion Relationship

Part of the contemporary psychological reorientation is the question
of why there appear to be two completely different ways in which
Muslims react to their perception of America, globalization and
Western civilization? All Muslims, generally speaking, appear to
share a similar assessment of what they perceive to be the
materialism, secularism and general spiritual disintegration of Europe
and the United States. One section of Muslim society—a
minority—reacts to this perception by being prepared to sacrifice
their lives in order to kill as many of the "infidel" as possible.
These are the so-called "terrorists." Another section of Muslim
society, which perhaps could be described as "traditionalists," and
which shares the same assessments of the West as held by the
terrorists, responds by diplomacy, cultural interchange, political
action, editorial commentary, and dialogue. Why this completely
different response to shared or similar assessments? Are we asking
this question, and do we evaluate the significance it implies?

One hypothesis in answer to this question could be that the terrorist
processes his reaction to perceived ills directly from the unconscious
portion of his psyche. It is an instinctual reaction. Analytical
Psychology has helped us realize that the unconscious is raw nature,
and as such, it has no moral structure. The traditionalist, on the
other hand, processes his reaction through his consciousness, and
consciousness does contain a moral structure. As is pointed out in
Edinger's book, Archetype of the Apocalypse, "The psychological root
of terrorism is a fanatical resentment – a quasi-psychotic hatred
originating in the depths of the archetypal psyche and therefore
carried by religious (archetypal) energies…. Articulate terrorists
generally express themselves in religious (archetypal) terminology.
The enemy is seen as the Principle of Objective Evil (Devil) and the
terrorist perceives himself as the 'heroic' agent of divine or
Objective Justice (God). This is an archetypal inflation of demonic
proportions, which temporarily grants the individual almost superhuman
energy and effectiveness." (For a graphic example of this, see Time
magazine, "Inside the Mind of an Iraqi Suicide Bomber." July 4, 2005)

Edinger then goes on to say, "We need a new category to understand
this new phenomenon. These individuals are not criminals and are not
madmen although they have some qualities of both. Let's call them
zealots. Zealots are possessed by transpersonal, archetypal dynamisms
deriving from the collective unconscious. Their goal is a collective
one, not a personal one. The criminal seeks his own personal gain;
not so the zealot. In the name of a transpersonal, collective value –
a religion, an ethnic or national identity, a 'patriotic' vision, etc.
– they sacrifice their personal life in the service of their 'god.'
Although idiosyncratic and perverse, this is fundamentally a religious
phenomenon that derives from the archetypal, collective unconscious."

What Edinger is highlighting applies to more than terrorism in the
Middle East. It plays a part in many of the "religious" conflicts in
the world today—Chechen Muslims v. Orthodox Russians, Jews v. Muslims
in Palestine, Orthodox Serbians v. Muslims in the Balkans, Hindus v.
Muslims in Kashmir. In all of these conflicts, there is at least a
significant element of what Edinger describes as "transpersonal,
archetypal dynamisms deriving from the collective unconscious." No
assessment of the terrorist phenomenon is complete without including
Edinger's general analysis.

Shadow Projection

Critical to understanding the role the unconscious plays in all we've
discussed is to study our "shadow", both in its individual and
collective expressions. One analyst suggested that if we want to know
what our personal shadow looks like, just draw up a list of the
characteristics we least like in other people. That list will
represent our shadow, the repressed qualities our ego-defense
mechanism denies in ourselves, and thus projects onto other people or
nations. The psychiatrist Anthony Stevens writes that the shadow
"underlies all kinds of prejudice against those belonging to
identifiable groups other than our own, and is at the bottom of all
massacres, pogroms and wars." In this way, he says, "we deny our own
'badness' and project it on to others…" (Emphasis added)

The most heinous example of collective "shadow projection" in our time
was Hitler's ability to induce a sizable portion of the German people
to project its shadow onto the Jewish people. On a considerably less
catastrophic basis, shadow projection was more recently represented by
Iran's use of the term "Great Satan" in describing the U.S., and the
U.S. retort of "Axis of evil," both of which locates the evil "out
there" somewhere, and relieves Iran and the U.S. of considering their
own evil. Stevens suggests that what makes phrases such as these so
devastating is that they can "activate the archetype of evil" which
then gets "projected onto the 'enemy' in addition to the projection of
our personal shadow."

The question arises as to whether we Americans are capable of or are
willing to confront our own "shadow" in an objective manner, with no
value judgment reinforced by any emotional attachment. Seeing the
"American shadow," while not difficult, takes moral courage, as it
means confronting the source of malevolence in ourselves, which is
uncomfortable, to say the least. Just as the shadow is integral to
individual existence, so it's part of a nation's collective
personality. Examples abound: the brutality of Native American
genocide, of slavery and modern day racism; the arrogance of the "Ugly
American" abroad; an excessive "power-lust" for knowledge and the
domination of nature—expressed in the amorality of the sciences, and
in the unreflecting exploitation of technology by business; the
selfishness of our maximization of growth and progress regardless of
the cost; our unbalanced way of thinking reflected in environmental
degradation; the greed and disregard of consequences that lead to our
oil addiction; and the absence of love for our children that tolerates
our daily TV menu of violence, sex and death, to offer but a few
examples. These are all individual and shared shadow aspects that, in
our collective denial, we refuse to confront—at our and the world's
peril. As Marie-Louise von Franz put it, "I think that if more people
do not make the effort to reflect and take back their [shadow]
projections, and take the opposites within themselves, there will be a
total destruction."

Edinger gives helpful insight on understanding one's shadow. "We must
ask ourselves," he writes, "Whom do I hate? Which groups or factions
do I fight against? Whoever or whatever they are, they are a part of
me. I am bound to that which I hate, as surely as I am bound to that
which I love. Psychologically, the important thing is where one's
libido is lodged, not whether one is for or against a given thing."
(Italics added)

Marie-Louise von Franz comments on Jung's reaction to the accumulation
of collective shadow projection: "Jung saw this present-day
culmination of evil as typical of the historic catastrophes that tend
to accompany the great transitions from one age to another… Jung also
did not have a simple answer, but he was convinced that every
individual who undertook to come to terms with the evil in himself
would make a more effective contribution toward the salvation of the
world than idealistic external machinations would. Here we are
talking about more than just insight into one's personal shadow; we
are speaking also of a struggle with the dark side of God, which the
human being cannot face but must, as Job did." Perhaps Jung's most
succinct prescription for confronting the shadow was, "One does not
become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the
darkness [the shadow] conscious." That is the heart of
"individuation," Jung's term for achieving the most complete
development of individual personality. That is certainly a task any
individual can undertake.

Summing Up

To sum up, as we look towards the coming decades, we cannot escape the
fact that some great phase of the human experience is dying, while
some new stage seeks to take shape. We daily watch and experience the
trauma of this historic shift expressing itself in cascading world
events, in our changing institutions and human relationships, and in
the ethos of destruction that has become such a cultural motif. At
the deepest level, what we're experiencing is a sign of humanity's
collective soul passing through the throes of a reorientation, a death
and rebirth. We shouldn't be surprised, as it's happened before in
history, albeit on a more limited geographical basis. But now the
whole human family is experiencing such a critical moment. And
although we have no map of the wider historical space into which the
world is moving, the process itself reflects some new hope, some new
context of life coming to birth. Like all births it's painful.

We all are living between two ages. There's a new epoch of broader
and deeper meaning struggling to take shape for all humankind. What
we're experiencing is a broadening out of the human personality to a
new orientation that brings with it a sense of the whole person, as
well as that person's relationship to the whole of humanity. It's an
enlargement of personality and perspective bringing with it a more
inclusive and complete transcendent expression. This is the expansion
of consciousness so urgently needed. It's a process of inner
transformation and rebirth. It's that larger and greater personality
maturing within us. With all our problems and possibilities, the
future depends on how we—each in his or her own unique way—tap into
the eternal renewing dynamic that dwells in the deepest reaches of the
human soul.

Such a moment of intense possibility is, as well, a moment of grave
danger. The question that hangs over humanity is whether we shall
wake to this process and engage it in time, or continue blindly down
the road of past orientations and perspectives. It is unrealistic to
expect what we've been discussing to come to fruition in the lifetime
of anyone reading this essay, for history suggests changes in
worldview and consciousness take time to grow and mature. But if
enough people—especially in America and Europe—realize what's
happening, and internalize the symbolic meaning of the new
orientation, then perhaps we might avoid the worst, and contribute to
the new level of consciousness and moral maturity a new epoch of
history is demanding.

(c) William Van Dusen Wishard 2005. All rights reserved.

WorldTrends Research: www.worldtrendsresearch.com