ratitor's corner september 22, 2001 september equinox, 4:27pm, pdt The New Myth For Our Species: The Creation of Consciousness Today, the Sun, appearing to travel along the ecliptic, reaches the point where it crosses the equator into the southern celestial hemisphere. Today day and night are of equal length. ----------------------------------------------- Today rat haus reality completes its sixth revolution around SOL and begins its 7th cycle. This is the first ratitor's corner in the last twelve months. I resigned last March, after 15 years, of working at Silicon Graphics, and have spent most of the time since doing the "limbo walk", seeing what arises inwardly in this state of free-fall. This ratitorial is dedicated to Elizabeth Thompson for all she has helped me see and experience in an utterly contemporary way of my wholeness, of being linked back to expressing a more conscious, living love of self, and of all I find I am embedded within throughout uni verse. History and anthropology teach us that a human society cannot long survive unless its members are psychologically contained within a central living myth. Such a myth provides the individual with a reason for being. --Edward Edinger, The Creation of Consciousness, Jung's Myth for Modern Man, 1984, p.9 I find it so tragic and ironical that the age in which we live should regard the word "myth" and "illusion" as synonymous, in view of the fact that the myth is the real history, is the real event of the spirit. It is this immense world of meaning with which the image links us. The myth is the tremendous activity that goes on in humanity all the time, without which no society has hope or direction, and no personal life has a meaning. We all live a myth whether we know it or not. We live it by fair means or we live it by foul. Or we live it by a process or a combination of both. We have a myth that we live badly. The Christian myth is a myth in the real sense of the word. --Laurens van der Post, "Race Prejudice as Self Rejection, AN INQUIRY into the PSYCHOLOGICAL and SPIRITUAL ASPECTS of GROUP CONFLICTS", 1957, p.18 More than a year ago a dearly cherished friend recommended a book which I have only begun reading recently by Edward Edinger called The Creation of Consciousness, Jung's Myth for Modern Man[1]. As the back cover describes, This is a timely and exciting book. Using religious and alchemical texts, mythology, modern dreams, and the concepts of depth psychology, the author proposes nothing less than a new world-view -- a creative collaboration between the scientific pursuit of knowledge and the religious search for meaning. "Religion is based on Eros, science on Logos. Religion sought linkage with God, science sought knowledge. The age now dawning seeks linked knowledge. The first chapter traces the outlines of a "new myth" emerging from the life and work of the Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung -- not another religion in competition with all the others, but rather a psychological standpoint from which to understand and verify the essential meaning of every religion. Chapter two [The Meaning of Consciousness] discusses the purpose of human life and what it means to be conscious, "knowing together with an other." In religious terms the "other" is God; psychologically it is the Self, archetype of wholeness and the regulating center of the psyche. Chapter three [Depth Psychology as the New Dispensation: Reflections on Jung's Answer to Job] examines the implications of Jung's master-work, Answer to Job, in which Jung demonstrates that God needs man in order to become conscious of His dark side. Depth psychology, the "new dispensation," find's man's relation to what has traditionally been called God in the individual's experience of the unconscious. The final chapter [The Transformation of God] explores Jung's belief that "God's moral quality depends on individuals," which translates psychologically into the pressing need for man to become more conscious of his own dark, destructive side as well as his creative potential. This is an important book, written in the shadow of ominous global forces. Its basic focus on the quality and meaning of individual human lives reflects an underlying concern for the continuation on earth of any life at all. The anchor of this ratitor's corner is the book's first chapter (below), included to convey something of the growing understanding for the need in human society of a new central living myth, grounded in the creation of more and more consciousness. Such a new myth can serve to resurrect our human family from the apparent ashes and darkness that, on the manifest level, we appear to be evermore attracted to. Instances of human activities are listed in the latter half that signify experiences lived in awareness that augments the sum total of consciousness in the uni verse. Such a fact of the creation of more consciousness provides, as Edinger explains, a tangible "meaning for every experience and gives each individual a role in the on-going world-drama of creation." With so many American flags being unfurled of late, I return with increased appreciation to the illuminated understanding Krishnamurti precisely articulates regarding where we must go as a species to successfully grow through and beyond our adolescence and embark upon the cosmologically open-ended journey and exploration of what humanity will discover and manifest as a maturing species in the process of expanding human consciousness, individually and then collectively. When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind. --J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known, pp.51-52 We can ill afford to so continue separating our selves from each other within our single, fragile, utterly mysterious, and indescribably precious human family. The opportunity facing each of us to transform this source of violence is: to expand the consciousness we are carriers of by facing squarely the despised, rejected, or ignored aspects of our selves, individually and collectively, and embrace anew these estranged yet integral parts of our whole selves. Doing so re-integrates aspects of our selves that have been split-off and sacrificed, resulting in such consequences as those we all are too painfully aware of at this moment. The tragic, terrifying experience of death so many endured on September 11th, and the ocean of agony all who knew them are now immersed within, is the most recent expression of humanity's collective unconscious shadow, containing those "dark, rejected forces massing in the shadow of the unconscious, as it were, knife in hand, demanding revenge for all that man and his cultures have consciously sacrificed of them in the specialised conscious tasks he has set himself" and demonstrating anew "how all our history is a progression on two levels: a conscious and unconscious, a manifest and latent level." This understanding of the archetype[2] of the shadow[3] by Laurens van der Post, written about in his biography of Carl Jung (excerpt below), offers an immensely relevant insight into how the shadow -- within ourselves individually, culturally, and collectively throughout humanity -- is "a pattern that ha[s] at its disposal all the energies of what man ha[s] consciously despised, rejected, or ignored in himself." (Edinger, Jung, and van der Post, writing in a different epoch, used "man" to encompass all of humanity in the most inclusive way.) He had in this journey into his own unconscious self discovered another archetypal pattern of the utmost significance in this regard. He called it the "shadow" -- a pattern that had at its disposal all the energies of what man had consciously despised, rejected, or ignored in himself. One sees immediately how aptly the term was chosen, because it is an image of what happens when the human being stands between himself and his own light. Whether this shadow should be properly regarded as archetypal in itself, or whether it is another shadow of archetypes themselves, is almost academic. The dark, rejected forces massing in the shadow of the unconscious, as it were, knife in hand, demanding revenge for all that man and his cultures have consciously sacrificed of them in the specialised conscious tasks he has set himself, are real and active enough to keep us too busy for academics and scholasticisms. They show how all our history is a progression on two levels: a conscious and unconscious, a manifest and latent level. Here is another overwhelming example of how he helped my own tentative groping in this direction and how he helped to banish the sense of isolation spoken of in the beginning. The manifest level provides all the plausible rational justifications and excuses for the wars, revolutions, and disasters inflicted on men in their collective and private lives, but in reality it is on this other latent level where, unrecognised, the real instigators and conspirators against too narrow and rigid a conscious rule above are to be found. There, proud, angry, and undefeated, they move men and women on the manifest level about as puppets in predetermined patterns of their own revengeful seeking, or like a magnet conditioning a field of iron filings on a table above. That is why all men tend to become what they oppose, why the New Testament exhorted us not to resist evil because what follows logically is that ultimately the dark, dishonoured self triumphs and emerges on the scorched level of the manifest to form another tyranny as narrow, producing another swing of the opposites of which Heraclitus spoke. The answer, as Jung saw it, was to abolish tyranny, to enthrone, as it were, two opposites side by side in the service of the master pattern, not opposing or resisting evil but transforming and redeeming it. These two opposites in the negations of our time could be turned into tragic enemies. But truly seen psychologically and again defined best perhaps in the nonemotive terms of physics, they were like the negative and positive inductions of energy observed in the dynamics of electricity; the two parallel and opposite streams without which the flash of lightning, for me always the symbol of awareness made imperative, was impossible. Containing those two opposites, putting the light of the superior functions at the service of the dark, bearing all the tensions induced thereby, the individual could grow into a resolution of the two into a greater realisation of himself. One says greater because the self realised thereby is more than the sum of the opposites, because in the process of their resolution the capacity of the individual to join in the universal and continuing act of creation wherein his own life participates enables him to add something which was not there before. --Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of Our Time, pp.217-8 Each of us carries within, our own unique, individual shadow. This aspect of our self includes -- but is not limited to -- that which we split off and sacrificed of our inner wholeness to survive the tempest of becoming self aware, initially in childhood and then through and beyond becoming a physically mature adult. That which most irritates, enrages, or disturbs us about another reveals, through the mechanism Jung termed "projection," what we unconsciously most despise, reject, or ignore within our own self. Jung revealed in great detail how the individual imposed his quarrel with his own shadow onto his neighbour, in the process outlining scientifically why men inevitably saw the mote in the eye of their neighbour. It was not just out of ignorance of the beam in their own but unconsciously to avoid recognising it as reflection of their own. He defined for the first time in a contemporary idiom a primordial mechanism in the spirit of man which he called "projection," a mechanism which compels us to blame on our neighbour what we unconsciously dislike most in ourselves. Ibid., p.219 The key here is that initially we are unconscious[4] of this process of projecting our shadow externally to avoid internally seeing, acknowledging and addressing what it personifies. We make choices both consciously and unconsciously. When we unconsciously choose we are not aware of the motivation that drives such a choice (or even the fact that we have chosen), but the choice is nonetheless made, producing the resulting actions and consequences. Seen in this light, we are unconsciously choosing to be unaware of our behavior so as to avoid recognizing within what we are all too ready to see instead as being the problem of another, of "the other", of that which is not us. Laurens points to this above when he distinguishes between events on the manifest and latent levels. In latin `manifest' means literally "what you hold in your hand" while `latent' means "to lie hidden or concealed, to lurk". Thus rather than on the manifest it is on the "latent level where, unrecognised, the real instigators and conspirators against too narrow and rigid a conscious rule above are to be found. There, proud, angry, and undefeated, they move men and women on the manifest level about as puppets in predetermined patterns of their own revengeful seeking." What is being revengefully sought? Whatever we chose to sacrifice in the past in the moment(s) of crisis to compenstate for inner experiences of pain, fear, conflict and/or lack and survive in the best way we could see to go at the time. An example of sacrificing something precious within could include any number of variations on the following theme (and an infinite number of alternative scenarios). At 10 I was desperate for my father's love when my parents divorced and he moved out of our house. To try and ensure he would still love me, I buried a part of my self that I thought he didn't appreciate and adopted in its stead a false self I thought he would value and from which he would thus continue loving "me". Of course the "me" I then offered to him hoping he would love was not me, and he could only fail in what I most deeply yearned for. The sadness, anger, grief and confusion resulting from such an unconscious choice would supply ample raw material for a revengeful inner seeking of that which had been so tragically sacrificed. Consciousness is a psychic substance which is produced by the experience of the opposites suffered, not blindly, but in living awareness. . . . Every human experience, to the extent that it is lived in awareness, augments the sum total of consciousness in the universe. This fact provides the meaning for every experience and gives each individual a role in the on-going world-drama of creation. --Edward Edinger, The Creation of Consciousness, pp.32-3 What each of us sacrifices within to survive crises we are presented with by life contains the seeds of our self transformation and redemption. In some of his most eloquent writing, Laurens points out the requisite need for each re-learn her or his own forgotten language of self-betrayal. When understanding of and facility with this dialect is not re-gained, the resulting dark need for tragedy and disaster in the life of the individual, as well as throughout society, will continue expressing itself. Re-learning this language is possible only through profound self-knowledge. In other words, through conscious awareness of one's wholeness encompassing the manifest as well as the latent -- that which lies hidden and concealed. The real trouble began for me, as it has done for countless others, when I sought to understand imaginatively the primitive in ourselves, and in this search the Bushman has always been for me a kind of frontier guide. Imagination shifts and passes, as it were, through a strange customs post on the fateful frontier between being and unrealized self, between what is and what is to come. The questions that have to be answered before the imagination is allowed through are not new but have to be redefined because of their long neglect and the need for answers to be provided in the idiom of our own day. For instance, in what does man now find his greatest meaning? Indeed, what is meaning itself for him and where its source? What are the incentives and motivations of his life when they clearly have nothing to do with his struggle for physical survival? What is it in him that compels him, against all reason and all the prescriptions of law, order and morality, still to do repeatedly what he does not consciously want to do? What is this dark need in the life of the individual and society for tragedy and disaster? Since the two World Wars that have occurred in my own lifetime, disorder and violence have become increasingly common on the world scene. Surely these things are rooted in some undiscovered breach of cosmic law or they would be eminently resistible and would not be allowed to occur? Where indeed does one propose to find an explanation for the long history of human failure? How can one hope to understand this aspect of man and his societies, and comprehend a scene littered with ruins and piled high with dunes of time which mark the places where countless cultures have vanished because men would not look honestly, wholly and steadily into the face of their inadequacies? The answers to none of these questions are available unless one is prepared through profound self-knowledge to re-learn the grammar of a forgotten language of self-betrayal, and in so doing the meaning of tragedy and disaster. It is the ineluctable preliminary to our emancipation, especially for those priests and artists who have been subverting themselves and the societies which they are dedicated to preserve. Unless one is honestly prepared to do so, one is warned at this crepuscular immigration post that one had better not cross the frontier. --Laurens van der Post, Witness to a Last Will of Man, p.124-5 of Testament to the Bushman, 1984 If one is blocked, by whatever dynamic, from looking honestly, wholly and steadily into the face one's inadequacies, the meaning of tragedy and disaster will remain obscure from conscious perception. Many in the United States at the present moment are becoming what they most ardently oppose in their desire for blood-lust revenge. The self-defeating weapon of revenge can only serve to increase the frequency and magnitude of violent response and counter-response that will escalate further unconscious, blind reaction. Our human brothers and sisters so inclined, are not currently aware that choosing to unconsciously exercise one's powers of response ability in such an amply discredited manner further consigns all being to the same "chain-gang of mere cause and effect from which life has labored so long and painfully to escape." In any case, I did not believe then as I do not believe now, that you could punish whole peoples or even solitary individuals into being better persons. This seemed a renegade, discredited and utterly archaic concept. It has been tried throughout history. Far from being an instrument of redemption, which is punishment's only moral justification, it is an increasingly self-defeating weapon in the hands of dangerously one-sided men. I know only that I came out of prison longing passionately -- and I am certain my longing was shared by all the thousands of men who had been with me -- that the past would be recognized as the past and instantly buried before it spread another form of putrefaction in the spirit of our time. I thought that the only hope for the future lay in an all-embracing attitude of forgiveness of the peoples who had been our enemies. Forgiveness, my prison experience had taught me, was not mere religious sentimentality; it was as fundamental a law of the human spirit as the law of gravity. If one broke the law of gravity one broke one's neck; if one broke this law of forgiveness one inflicted a mortal wound on one's spirit and became once again a member of the chain-gang of mere cause and effect from which life has labored so long and painfully to escape. --Laurens van der Post, The Night of the New Moon, pp.153-4 The prison mentioned above was the Japanese prisoner of war camp in Bandoeng, Java which Laurens inhabited during World War II for over three years beginning in March 1942. The extraordinary accounts of this experience, described in The Night of the New Moon and The Seed and the Sower, reveal the living power of transformation that is possible when people are enabled, and ennobled, to be conscious of their own suffering and do not hide from and make of it "an excuse for all forms of indulgences and violence and mere blind reaction." The first morning I went on parade with the officers. The men booed the officers and I thought, "Oh my God. There is something wrong. This must be put right. One can't have this." The most awful form of corrupting is the human spirit which hides behind its suffering and makes it an excuse for all forms of indulgences and violence and mere blind reaction. And I wrote a message to the camp which we pinned on all the trees. It was to the effect, `Don't think that the continuity of what you are and what your life is and what you should be has been broken because you've been put into prison walls.' I said, `This continuity is there. You've just got to rediscover it in a new way. And together we can live our lives perhaps in a way we should long since have lived it before.' Hasten Slowly, The Journey of Sir Laurens van der Post Laurens' response to incarceration at the hands of the Japanese was to start what became a prison educational system, serving over 1200 men with 40 teachers presenting more than 30 subjects. Laurens taught a class in the Japanese language because as he explained to the people who elected to pursue this course of study, "Just the fact that you are learning Japanese will change you -- your attitude to the Japanese. And however powerless you are, a change in you will produce and equal and opposite change in your captors, although you may not know it." If the men could see a meaning in their life in prison that would take care of the rest. There is ultimately only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter and that is to have thrust on them a life without meaning. Through this system of education, through the system of every person being in prison really having a chance to be his full, natural self, in terms of the spirit, the question of bitterness never arose. Ibid. It is precisely this process of manifesting change within by re-embracing and re-integrating one's rejected self that produces an equal and opposite change in others in the world who are similarly trapped in their own avoidance and rejection of their estranged selves. Such a "leap of faith" enabling one to mount this profound commitment to inner change and growth can occur only by acknowledging the formidable and transformative powers of response ability each of us as human beings is endowed with and capable of summoning when we are ready. When we are ready to truly and fundamentally discover and explore change within ourselves, issues previously considered unmovable and fixed have a tendency to become flexible and fall away with extraordinary ease. As Laurens so aptly reminds us harkening back to Shakespeare's Hamlet, "when the time is out of joint, as ours certainly is, the readiness is all." One of the most deceptive of popular half-truths is the saying that history repeats itself. Only unredeemed, unrecognized, misunderstood history, I believe, repeats itself, and remains a dark, negative and dangerous dominant on the scene of human affairs. Although the Bushman has gone, what he personified, the patterns of spirit made flesh and blood in him and all he evoked or provoked in us, lives on as a ghost within ourselves. This is no subjective illusion of mine evoked by the special relationship I have always had with him. Something like him, a first man, is dynamic in the underworld of the spirit of man, no matter of what race, creed or culture. I know this as an empiric fact because of all the books I have written and films I have made about the Bushman; his story has been translated into all languages except Chinese, travelled the world and been taken into the hearts of millions as if it were food in a universal famine of spirit. What this means for our own time depends in the first instance on our rediscovery of these patterns in ourselves and our readiness to cease being accessories after the fact of diminished consciousness, of which murder is the ultimate symbol. As Hamlet in his haunted fortress had it, when the time is out of joint, as ours certainly is, the readiness is all. "Witness to a Last Will of Man," p.123 Are we ready to assume the response ability for the consequences of choices we make consciously? Such power to transform the world is within each one of us. Intuitively, I sense more people are consciously moving in this direction, spurred on by humanity's collective grief, rage, and anguish, screamed out anew across the world on 9-11. The following has become more and more of an irrepressible law of life for me in this journey of being within which I accompany, and am accompanied by, all of you: In every human situation, all reality is always between two. And there is always this great responsibility, I believe, laid on all of us by life, that the person who is most aware, the person who is most highly, most completely, most widely conscious in a situation of conflict, must accept responsibility for the person who is less conscious. Hasten Slowly In April I crashed into a car when riding home on my bicycle that seemed, by all of the parameters of the event, as if I simply should have been killed -- or at best paralyzed -- from the impact. And yet I was spared even a broken limb, sustaining only one or two broken or fractured floating ribs. The message of that experience was clearly received and apprehended as I lay in the emergency room over the next five hours. I knew I had been enveloped by the divine and, after doing a 360-degree somersault through the air, was gently laid down on the asphalt, never losing consciousness. In hindsight, it was a death-rebirth experience. Something inside in that moment died, thus making space for something new to emerge and express it self. This supreme gift gave me the impetus to try changing an aspect of my life's course that has been a personal crown of thorns since childhood. It enabled me to commit to exploring what can manifest by removing the psychic armour I have worn around my heart for well nigh forty years. I unconsciously created this armour to protect myself from ever again experiencing the searing hurt that tempered my being with the death of my parent's marriage. Unconsciously I chose to never be that close to any human being again. I do not know what will be encountered on this altered course, consciously chosen. As has happened more in recent years, gratitude wells up inside throughout each day. I express prayers of thanks for the blessings bestowed and for all that is received -- every meal, encounters with friends and people in whatever venue, contributing to kids lives through appreciation of music and imparting the facility to make it, walking on the beach, swimming, finding my way into what-all will now be engaged to provide for my material needs, mistakes I make in relating to others that I am expanded by and the ways I find to ask their forgiveness, dreams at night that speak of and signify one of the supreme sources of the unknowable mystery of life and of consciousness -- all these and every other encounter on this plane of being at times leave me breathless with the enormity of what I am and what I have been given. The breakdown of a central myth is like the shattering of a vessel containing a precious essence; the fluid is spilled and drains away, soaked up by the surrounding undifferentiated matter. Meaning is lost. In its place, primitive and atavistic contents are reactivated. Differentiated values disappear and are replaced by the elemental motivations of power and pleasure, or else the individual is exposed to emptiness and despair. With the loss of awareness of a transpersonal reality (God), the inner and outer anarchies of competing personal desires take over. The loss of a central myth brings about a truly apocalyptic condition and this is the state of modern man. --Edward Edinger, The Creation of Consciousness, pp.9-10 The following then, is presented in the hopes it will serve as a catalyst and stimulus to explore with awareness what the implications of being a carrier of consciousness can include and what the living manifestation of this new central myth for our species can create for all life exploring itself here on earth. -------------------------------------------------------- The following is reprinted from The Creation of Consciousness, Jung's Myth for Modern Man, Copyright © 1984 by Edward Edinger, All Rights Reserved, pp. 9-33. -------------------------------------------------------- 1 The New Myth The myth of the necessary incarnation of God . . . can be understood as man's creative confrontation with the opposites and their synthesis in the self, the wholeness of his personality. . . . That is the goal . . . which fits man meaningfully into the scheme of creation and at the same time confers meaning upon it. -C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. History and anthropology teach us that a human society cannot long survive unless its members are psychologically contained within a central living myth. Such a myth provides the individual with a reason for being. To the ultimate questions of human existence it provides answers which satisfy the most developed and discriminating members of the society. And if the creative, intellectual minority is in harmony with the prevailing myth, the other layers of society will follow its lead and may even be spared a direct encounter with the fateful question of the meaning of life. It is evident to thoughtful people that Western society no longer has a viable, functioning myth. Indeed, all the major world cultures are approaching, to a greater or lesser extent, the state of mythlessness. The breakdown of a central myth is like the shattering of a vessel containing a precious essence; the fluid is spilled and drains away, soaked up by the surrounding undifferentiated matter. Meaning is lost. In its place, primitive and atavistic contents are reactivated. Differentiated values disappear and are replaced by the elemental motivations of power and pleasure, or else the individual is exposed to emptiness and despair. With the loss of awareness of a transpersonal reality (God), the inner and outer anarchies of competing personal desires take over. The loss of a central myth brings about a truly apocalyptic condition and this is the state of modern man. Our poets have long recognized this fact. Yeats gave it stark expression in his poem, "The Second Coming": Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops. again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?[1] This poem, first published in 1921, is astonishing in the way it succinctly strikes the major themes concerning the current state of the collective psyche. The magic circle of our mandala has broken and meaning has escaped. The falcon ego has lost the link with its creator, releasing primitive levels of the unconscious from control. The ensuing chaos calls forth in compensation the birth of a new central psychic dominant. What will it be? Antichrist? The allusion to the Sphinx suggests that we must once again face the riddle of the Sphinx and ask ourselves most seriously, "What is the meaning of life?" It is the loss of our containing myth that is the root cause of our current individual and social distress, and nothing less than the discovery of a new central myth will solve the problem for the individual and for society. Indeed, a new myth is in the making and C.G. Jung was keenly aware of that fact. A Jungian analyst once had the following dream: A temple of vast dimensions was in the process of being built. As far as I could see -- ahead, behind, right and left -- there were incredible numbers of people building on gigantic pillars. I, too, was building on a pillar. The whole building process was in its very beginning, but the foundation was already there, the rest of the building was starting to go up, and I and many others were working on it. Jung was told this dream and his remark was "Yes, you know, that is the temple we all build on. We don't know the people because, believe me, they build in India and China and in Russia and all over the world. That is the new religion. You know how long it will take until it is built? . . . about six hundred years."[2] Jung was the first to formulate the problem of modem man as mythlessness. As with so many of his discoveries, he found it first of all in himself. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections he describes that after the publication of The Psychology of the Unconscious in 1912[3] he had a moment of unusual clarity: "Now you possess a key to mythology and are free to unlock all the gates of the unconscious psyche." But then something whispered in me, "Why open all the gates?" And promptly the question arose of what, after all, I had accomplished. I had explained the myths of peoples of the past; I had written a book about the hero, the myth in which man has always lived. But in what myth does man live nowadays? In the Christian myth, the answer might be. "Do you live in it?" I asked myself. To be honest, the answer was no. For me, it is not what I live by. "Then do we no longer have any myth?" "No, evidently we no longer have any myth." "But then what is your myth -- the myth in which you do live?" At this point the dialogue with myself became uncomfortable, and I stopped thinking. I had reached a dead end.[4] Jung later found his myth, and it is the thesis of this book that just as Jung's discovery of his own mythlessness paralleled the mythless condition of modern society, so Jung's discovery of his own individual myth will prove to be the first emergence of our new collective myth. In fact, it is my conviction that as we gain historical perspective it will become evident that Jung is an epochal man. I mean by this a man whose life inaugurates a new age in cultural history. The epochal man is the first to experience and to articulate fully a new mode of existence. His life thus takes on an objective, impersonal meaning. It becomes a paradigm, the prototypical life of the new age and hence exemplary. Jung was aware of this fact concerning his own life. Speaking of his confrontation with the unconscious he writes, "It was then that I ceased to belong to myself alone, ceased to have the right to do so. From then on my life belonged to the generality."[5] The fact that Jung's personal life belonged to the generality was demonstrated by the uncanny parallelism between the critical episodes of his inner life and the collective crises of Western civilization. His first major confrontation with the unconscious occurred simultaneously with the collective catastrophe of World War I.[6] From 1914 to 1918 while the nations of Western Christendom were engaged in a brutal external conflict, Jung endured the inner equivalent of the World War, withstanding and integrating the upheaval of the collective unconscious from within. William James had called for a "moral equivalent of war."[7] Jung achieved a psychological equivalent of war by which the conflict of the opposites was contained within the individual psyche. Again during World War 11, Jung had his supreme revelation of the unconscious, his visions of the coniunctio, at the time of a grave illness in 1944.[8] By D-Day (June 6, 1944), although still hospitalized, he was well into convalescence.[9] Almost all the important episodes of Jung's life can be seen as paradigmatic of the new mode of being which is the consequence of living by a new myth. This is not the place to examine Jung's life as a paradigm; we must instead consider the nature of the new myth which he discovered and which released him from his mythless condition. Jung got a glimpse of his new myth while visiting the Pueblo Indians in the southwestern United States in the early part of 1925. He succeeded in gaining the confidence of Mountain Lake, a chief of the Taos Pueblos. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections Jung describes his conversation with Mountain Lake: [Mountain Lake said] "The Americans want to stamp out our religion. Why can they not let us alone? What we do, we do not only for ourselves but for the Americans also. Yes, we do it for the whole world. Everyone benefits by it." I could observe from his excitement that he was alluding to some extremely important element of his religion. I therefore asked him: "You think, then, that what you do in your religion benefits the whole world?" He replied with great animation, "Of course. If we did not do it, what would become of the world?" And with a significant gesture he pointed to the sun. I felt that we were approaching extremely delicate ground here, verging on the mysteries of the tribe. "After all," he said, "we are a people who live on the roof of the world; we are the sons of Father Sun, and with our religion we daily help our father to go across the sky. We do this not only for ourselves, but for the whole world. If we were to cease practicing our religion, in ten years the sun would no longer rise. Then it would be night forever." I then realized on what the "dignity," the tranquil composure of the individual Indian, was founded. It springs from his being a son of the sun; his life is cosmologically meaningful, for he helps the father and preserver of all life in his daily rise and descent.[10] This belief of the Pueblos that they help their father, the sun, to rise each day and make his transit of the heavens turns out to be a primitive, naive version of Jung's new myth. Later in 1925, while traveling in Africa, Jung had another experience that crystallized the formulation of the myth more explicitly. Jung writes: From Nairobi we used a small ford to visit the Athi Plains, a great game preserve. From a low hill in this broad savanna a magnificent prospect opened out to us. To the very brink of the horizon we saw gigantic herds of animals: gazelle, antelope, gnu, zebra, warthog, and so on. Grazing, heads nodding, the herds moved forward like slow rivers. There was scarcely any sound save the melancholy cry of a bird of prey. This was the stillness of the eternal beginning, the world as it had always been, in the state of non-being; for until then no one had been present to know that it was this world. I walked away from my companions until I had put them out of sight, and savored the feeling of being entirely alone. There I was now, the first human being to recognize that this was the world, but who did not know that in this moment he had first really created it. There the cosmic meaning of consciousness became overwhelmingly clear to me. "What nature leaves imperfect, the art perfects," say the alchemists. Man, I, in an invisible act of creation put the stamp of perfection on the world by giving it objective existence. This act we usually ascribe to the Creator alone, without considering that in so doing we view life as a machine calculated down to the last detail, which, along with the human psyche, runs on senselessly, obeying foreknown and predetermined rules. In such a cheerless clockwork fantasy there is no drama of man, world, and God; there is no "new day" leading to "new shores," but only the dreariness of calculated processes. My old Pueblo friend came to mind. He thought that the raison d'être of his pueblo had been to help their father, the sun, to cross the sky each day. I had envied him for the fullness of meaning in that belief, and had been looking about without hope for a myth of my own. Now I knew what it was, and knew even more: that man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence -- without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through the millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being.[11] In Answer to Job he puts it more succinctly: "Existence is only real when it is conscious to somebody. That is why the Creator needs conscious man even though, from sheer unconsciousness, he would like to prevent him from becoming conscious."[12] And later, "Whoever knows God has an effect on him."[13] In his autobiography he writes: Man's task is . . . to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.[14] And finally: Once [the union of opposites] has been experienced, the ambivalence in the image of a nature-god or Creator-god ceases to present difficulties. On the contrary, the myth of the necessary incarnation of God -- the essence of the Christian message -- can then be understood as man's creative confrontation with the opposites and their synthesis in the self, the wholeness of his personality. The unavoidable internal contradictions in the image of a Creator-god can be reconciled in the unity and wholeness of the self as the coniunctio oppositorum of the alchemists or as a unio, mystica. In the experience of the self it is no longer the opposites "God" and "man" that are reconciled, as it was before, but rather the opposites within the Godimage itself. That is the meaning of divine service, of the service which man can render to God, that light may, emerge from the darkness, that the Creator may become conscious of His creation, and man conscious of himself. That is the goal, or one goal, which fits man meaningfully into the scheme of creation, and at the same time confers meaning upon it. It is an explanatory myth which has slowly taken shape within me in the course of the decades. It is a goal I can acknowledge and esteem, and which therefore satisfies me.[15] These are the chief statements Jung has made concerning the emerging new myth. To many, especially those without personal experience of the unconscious, these statements may be hard to comprehend. The remainder of this chapter will be an effort to make the new myth somewhat more understandable. The essential new idea is that the purpose of human life is the creation of consciousness. The key word is "consciousness." Unfortunately, the experiential meaning of this term is almost impossible to convey abstractly. As with all fundamental aspects of the psyche it transcends the grasp of the intellect. An oblique, symbolic approach is therefore required. I treat the idea of consciousness more fully in the next chapter. There I speak of the etymology of the word (page 36), from which we learn that consciousness and conscience are related and that the experience of consciousness is made up of two factors, "knowing" and "withness," i.e., knowing in the presence of an "other," in a setting of twoness. Symbolically, the number two refers to the opposites. We thus reach the conclusion that consciousness is somehow born out of the experience of opposites. As we shall see, the same conclusion is reached by other means. I understand consciousness to be a substance, a psychic material usually but not always invisible and intangible to the senses. The problem in understanding concerns the words psyche and psychic. Until one has experienced the reality of the psyche, he can follow the discussion no further. Given the experience of psychic reality one can grasp the idea of a psychic substance. All psychic contents have substance, so to speak, if they are experienced as objectively real. What then distinguishes the psychic substance of consciousness? Consciousness is psychic substance connected to an ego. Or, more precisely, psychic contents which are potential entities become actualized and substantial when they make connection with an ego, i.e., when they enter an individual's conscious awareness and become an accepted item of that individual's personal responsibility. The process whereby a series of psychic contents -- complexes and archetypal images -- make connection with an ego and thereby generate the psychic substance of consciousness is called the process of individuation. This process has as its most characteristic feature the encounter of opposites, first experienced as the ego and the unconscious, the I and the not-I, subject and object, myself and the "other." Thus we can say that whenever one is experiencing the conflict between contrary attitudes or when a personal desire or idea is being contested by an "other," either from inside or outside, the possibility of creating a new increment of consciousness exists. Experiences of inner or outer conflict which are resolved creatively and are accompanied by a sense of satisfaction and life enhancement are examples of the creation of consciousness. Such encounters, sought deliberately and reflected upon systematically, are an essential feature of the individuation process which is a continual auseinandersetzung or coming to terms with contents that are "other" than or opposite to the ego. In alchemy the Philosophers' Stone is described as the mediator between opposites. In one text, where the Stone has a feminine quality, it says: I am the mediatrix of the elements, making one to agree with another; that which is warm I make cold, and the reverse; that which is dry I make moist, and the reverse; that which is hard I soften, and the reverse. I am the end and my beloved is the beginning. I am the whole work and all science is hidden in me.[16] Understood psychologically, this text tells us that in the process of creating consciousness we shall at first be thrown back and forth between opposing moods and attitudes. Each time the ego identifies with one side of a pair of opposites the unconscious will confront one with its contrary. Gradually, the individual becomes able to experience opposite viewpoints simultaneously. With this capacity, alchemically speaking, the Philosophers' Stone is born, i.e., consciousness is created. The Philosophers' Stone is often described as the product of the coniunctio of sun and moon. For a man's psychology, the sun corresponds to the conscious psyche and the moon to the unconscious. Thus Jung says, "Becoming conscious of an unconscious content amounts to its integration in the conscious psyche and is therefore a coniunctio Solis et Lunae."[17] A number of mythical and symbolic ideas can now be seen as referring to the creation of consciousness. The Gnostic idea of light scattered in the darkness requiring laborious collection is relevant, as is the grand Manichaean image of the zodiac as a vast water wheel which dips under the earth, gathers into its twelve buckets the light trapped in nature and transports it to the moon and sun.[18] The Kabbalah of Isaac Luria has profound symbolism of the same nature. According to this system, at the beginning of creation God poured His divine light into bowls or vessels, but some of the vessels could not stand the impact of the light. They broke and the light was spilled. Salvation of the world requires re-collection of the light and restitution of the broken vessels.[19] The most outstanding symbolism pertaining to the creation of consciousness is found in alchemy. Although the texts are confused and obscure the basic idea of alchemy is quite simple. The alchemist must find the right material to start with, the prima materia. He must then subject it to the proper series of transformative operations in the alchemical vessel and the result will be the production of the mysterious and powerful entity called the Philosophers' Stone. We now know through Jung's profound researches that the alchemical procedure symbolizes the individuation process and that the Philosophers' Stone represents the realization of the Self, i.e., consciousness of wholeness. A crucial feature of the Philosophers' Stone is that it is a union of opposites. It is the product of a coniunctio often symbolized by the union of the red king and the white queen, the king and queen standing for any or all of the pairs of opposites. The alchemical myth tells us that consciousness is created by the union of opposites and we learn the same lesson from the dreams of individuals. For example: A woman dreamed that she went into an underground cavern that was divided into rooms containing stills and other mysterious-looking chemical apparatus. Two scientists were working over the final process of a prolonged series of experiments, which they hoped to bring to a successful conclusion with her help. The end product was to be in the form of golden crystals, which were to be separated from the mother liquid resulting from the many previous solutions and distillations. While the chemists worked over the vessel, the dreamer and her lover lay together in an adjoining room, their sexual embrace supplying the energy essential for the crystallization of the priceless golden substance.[20] There is an interesting parallel to this dream in an alchemical text: Do ye not see that the complexion of a man is formed out of a soul and body; thus, also, must ye conjoin these, because the philosophers, when they prepared matters and conjoined spouses mutually in love with each other, behold there ascended from them a golden water.[21] The golden crystals and the golden water can be understood as the essence of consciousness synonymous with the Self. Contrary to the implications of the erotic imagery, the coniunctio of opposites is not generally a pleasant process. More often it is felt as a crucifixion. The cross represents the union of horizontal and vertical, two contrary directional movements. To be nailed to such a conflict can be a scarcely endurable agony. Augustine makes an amazingly explicit identification between the erotic coniunctio and Christ's crucifixion: Like a bridegroom Christ went forth from his chamber, he went out with a presage of his nuptials into the field of the world. . . . He came to the marriage bed of the cross, and there in mounting it, he consummated his marriage . . . and he joined the woman to himself forever.[22] The union of opposites in the vessel of the ego is the essential feature of the creation of consciousness. Consciousness is the third thing that emerges out of the conflict of twoness. Out of the ego as subject versus the ego as object; out of the ego as active agent versus the ego as passive victim; out of the ego as praiseworthy and good versus the ego as damnable and bad; out of a conflict of mutually exclusive duties -- out of all such paralyzing conflicts can emerge the third, transcendent condition which is a new quantum of consciousness. This way of putting it reveals the fact that the symbolism of the Trinity refers psychologically to the creation of consciousness. Father and Son, like God and man, are opposites which collide on the cross. The Holy Spirit as the reconciling third emerges from that collision proceeding from the Father and the Son.[23] Thus the Holy Spirit (Paraclete) can only come after the death of the Son, i.e., consciousness comes as the fruit of the conflict of twoness. Therefore Christ could say, It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor (Paraclete) will not come to you; but if I go I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will convince the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgement [the opposites and their resolution]. (John 16:7-8; Revised Standard Version) The Counselor is the Holy Spirit who will teach "all things" (John 14:26) and guide men into "all the truth" (John 16:13). Psychologically, these statements refer to the time when all individual egos will become potential vessels for the transpersonal value of consciousness. As Jung puts it, The future indwelling of the Holy Spirit amounts to a continuing incarnation of God. Christ, as the begotten son of God and pre-existing mediator, is a first-born and a divine paradigm which will be followed by further incarnations of the Holy Ghost in the empirical man.[24] The biblical statements regarding the Paraclete thus anticipate the new myth which sees each individual ego as potentially a vessel to carry transpersonal consciousness. What the Lord said about Paul may eventually apply to all: "He is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name." (Acts 9:15; Authorized Version) The image of the ego as a vessel leads to the important idea of being a carrier of consciousness, i.e., an incarnation of transpersonal meaning. Two main archetypal figures have represented this idea in world culture, namely Buddha and Christ. We are fortunate to have two such figures. With two comes the possibility of comparison and objectivity. As long as there is but one figure embodying supreme value he can only be worshipped but not understood. With the presence of two we can discover the separate third thing which they both share; understanding and greater consciousness then become possible. What Christ and Buddha have in common is the idea of being a carrier of consciousness. Characteristically, the image emerging in the West represents the standpoint of the ego and that deriving from the East speaks from the standpoint of the Self. Together, they reveal a pair of opposites. The crucified Christ and the meditating Buddha represent consciousness as agony and consciousness as tranquil bliss -- total acceptance of the bondage to matter on the one hand and total transcendence of the world on the other. United they picture the two sides of the carrier of consciousness. The idea of the individual as a vessel for consciousness brings to mind the symbolism of the Holy Grail. As the container for Christ's blood, the Grail carries the divine essence extracted from Christ by his ultimate experience of the opposites -- the coniunctio of crucifixion. In many respects the blood of Christ corresponds to the Holy Spirit as Paraclete.[25] Just as the Holy Spirit is to be incarnated in empirical man, so the blood of Christ is to find a containing vessel in the psyche of the individual, thereby creating for itself a Holy Grail. On the basis of our emerging knowledge of the unconscious the traditional image of God has been enlarged. Traditionally God has been pictured as all-powerful and all-knowing. Divine Providence was seen as guiding all things according to the inscrutable but benevolent divine purpose. The extent of divine awareness did not receive much attention. The new myth enlarges the God-image by introducing explicitly the additional feature of the unconsciousness of God. His omnipotence, omniscience and divine purpose are not always known to Him. He needs man's capacity to know Him in order to know Himself. In one sense this indicates a renewed awareness of the reality of the less differentiated, jealous and wrathful God of the Old Testament, with whom man must remonstrate. The divine opposites that were separated by Christianity into the eternal antagonists, Christ and Satan, are now beginning to be reunited consciously in the vessel of the modem psyche. The new myth postulates that the created universe and its most exquisite flower, man, make up a vast enterprise for the creation of consciousness; that each individual is a unique experiment in that process; and that the sum total of consciousness created by each individual in his lifetime is deposited as a permanent addition in the collective treasury of the archetypal psyche. Speaking of the psychotherapist, Jung says: He is not just working for this particular patient, who may be quite insignificant, but for himself as well and his own soul, and in so doing he is perhaps laying an infinitesimal grain in the scales of humanity's soul. Small and invisible as this contribution may be, it is yet an opus magnum.[26] Certain mythical images seem to suggest that accomplishments in the personal, earthly life are transferred to the divine or archetypal realm. For instance, in early Egyptian religion the dead were thought to be turned into stars or companions of the sun. James Breasted writes: In the splendor of the mighty heavens the Nile-dweller . . . saw the host of those who had preceded him; thither they had flown as birds, rising above all foes of the air, and received by Re as the companions of his celestial barque, they now swept across the sky as eternal stars.[27] A pyramid text describes the translation of the dead king to the heavenly realm in these words: The king ascends to the sky among the gods dwelling in the sky. . . . He (Re) gives thee his arm on the stairway to the sky. "He who knows his place comes," say the gods. 0 Pure One, assume thy throne in the barque of Re and sail thou the sky. . . . Sail thou with the Imperishable stars, sail thou with the Unwearied Stars.[28] Similar imagery occurs in Christian symbolism in which the righteous after resurrection will ascend to heaven; thus Paul writes: I will tell you something that has been secret: that we are not all going to die, but we shall all be changed. This will be instantaneous, in the twinkling of an eye, when the last trumpet sounds. It will sound, and the dead will be raised, imperishable, and we shall be changed as well, because our present perishable nature must put on immortality. (I Cor. 15:51-53; Jerusalem Bible) The figure of the apocalyptic Christ makes a similar promise in Revelation: He who is victorious -- I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God; he shall never leave it. And I will write the name of my God upon him, and the name of the city of my God, that new Jerusalem which is coming down out of heaven from my God, and my own name. (Rev. 3:12; New English Bible) Understood psychologically, these texts refer to a transfer or translation from the temporal, personal life of the ego to the eternal, archetypal realm. Presumably the essential accomplishments of egohood, its total of accumulated consciousness, is deposited by means of a final sublimatio in the collective, archetypal treasury of humanity. Jung seems to be saying the same thing in describing the visions he had when on the verge of death: I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away. . . . Nevertheless something remained; it was as if I now carried along with me everything I had ever experienced or done, everything that had happened around me. . . . I consisted of my own history, and I felt with great certainty: this is what I am.[29] A man's dream shortly before his death presents a similar idea: I have been set a task nearly too difficult for me. A log of hard and heavy wood lies covered in the forest. I must uncover it, saw or hew from it a circular piece, and then carve through the piece a design. The result is to be preserved at all cost, as representing something no longer recurring and in danger of being lost. At the same time a tape recording is to be made describing in detail what it is, what it represents, its whole meaning. At the end, the thing itself and the tape are to be given to the public library. Someone says that only the library will know how to prevent the tape from deteriorating within five years.[30] The dream was accompanied by a drawing of the circular piece that looked like this: [reel] I understand the dream as referring to the deposit of an individual's life-effort into a collective or transpersonal treasury (the library). The carved object and the tape recording can be considered equivalent since the drawing of the object looks exactly like a reel of recording tape. This would suggest that the difficult task involves the transformation of wood into word, i.e., matter into spirit. Based on the "Communion of Saints," Catholic theology has elaborated the idea of a "treasure of merits" which have been accumulated by the lives of Christ and the saints. A Catholic theologian writes: If merit properly so called is not directly communicable between members of the Christian society, at least satisfaction can be transferred, almost as a man can pay a friend's debt. The infinite satisfaction of our Lord and the superabundant satisfaction of the Virgin Mary and the saints form a treasure which the Church guards and administers, drawing upon it for the payment of the debts remitted to the faithful by indulgences.[31] This theological myth can now be understood as an early formulation, marred by concretistic misapplications (indulgences) of the historical process whereby the psychic accomplishments of individuals are transferred to the collective archetypal psyche. The new myth postulates that no authentic consciousness achieved by the individual is lost. Each increment augments the collective treasury. This will be the modern, more modest version of the idea of having an immortal soul. Milton seems to be dealing with the same idea in this passage from Lycidas (lines 70-84): Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of noble mind) To scorn delights, and live laborious days; But the fair guerdon when we hope to find And think to burst out into sudden blaze, Comes the blind Fury with th' abhorréd shears And slits the thin-spun life. But not the praise, Phoebus repli'd, and touch't my trembling ears Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, Nor in the glistering foil Set off to th' world, nor in broad rumour lies, But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes And perfect witness of all-judging Jove As He pronounces lastly on each deed, Of so much fame in Heav'n expect thy meed. "Fame" as here used by Milton corresponds to those fruits of the ego-life which are translated to the eternal realm and are deposited in the collective soul. Such a fame does not "grow on mortal soil," i.e., does not depend on being known by men, but exists in heaven, the archetypal realm. Fame of this sort corresponds to Milton's description of a good book, "the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm'd and treasur'd up on purpose to a life beyond life."[32] The fact that our age is a time of death and rebirth for a central myth is indicated by the dreams and upheavals from the unconscious of many individuals. Depth psychotherapists who work with the products of the unconscious are in a unique position to observe the turmoil of the collective psyche. Apocalyptic imagery is not uncommon. Here is one remarkable example of such a dream: I am walking along what appears to be the Palisades, overlooking all of New York City. I am walking with a woman who is unknown to me personally, we are both being led by a man who is our guide. NYC is in a rubble -- the world in fact has been destroyed as we know it, All of NYC is just one heap of rubble, there are fires everywhere, thousands of people are running in every direction frantically, the Hudson river has overflowed many areas of the city, smoke is billowing up everywhere. As far as I can see the land has been levelled. It was twilight; fireballs were in the sky, heading for the earth. It was the end of the world, total destruction of everything that man and his civilization had built up. The cause of this great destruction was a race of great giants -- giants who had come from outer space -- from the far reaches of the universe. In the middle of the rubble I could see two of them sitting; they were casually scooping up people by the handful and eating them. All this was done with the same nonchalance that we have when we sit down at the table and eat grapes by the handful. The sight was awesome. The giants were not all the same size or quite the same structure. Our guide explained that the giants were from different planets and live harmoniously and peacefully together. The guide also explained that the giants landed in flying saucers (the fireballs were other landings). In fact the earth as we know it was conceived by this race of giants in the beginning of time as we know it. They cultivated our civilization, like we cultivate vegetables in a hot house. The earth was their hot house, so to speak, and now they have returned to reap the fruits they had sown, but there was a special occasion for all this which I wasn't to become aware of till later. I was saved because I had slightly high blood pressure. If I had normal blood pressure or if my blood pressure was too high I would have been eaten like almost all the others. Because I have slightly high blood pressure (hypertension) I am chosen to go through this ordeal, and if I pass the ordeal I would become like my guide, "a saver of souls." We walked for an extraordinary long time, witnessing all the cataclysmic destruction. Then before me I saw a huge golden throne, it was as brilliant as the sun, impossible to view straight on. On the throne sat a king and his queen of the race of giants. They were the intelligences behind the destruction of our planet as I know it. There was something special or extraordinary about them which I didn't become aware of till later. The ordeal or task I had to perform, in addition to witnessing the world's destruction, was to climb up this staircase until I was at their level -- "face to face" with them. This was probably in stages. I started climbing, it was long and very difficult, my heart was pounding very hard. I felt frightened but knew I had to accomplish this task, the world and humanity were at stake. I woke up from this dream perspiring heavily. Later I realized that the destruction of the earth by the race of giants was a wedding feast for the newly united king and queen, this was the special occasion and the extraordinary feeling I had about the king and queen. Dreams of this sort will go to make up the scriptures of the new myth. This is not a personal dream and must not be interpreted personalistically. It is a collective dream expressing the state of the collective psyche. Eight days before his death, Jung spoke of having had a vision in which a large part of the world was destroyed, but, he added, "Thank God not all of it."[33] Years before he had written of the 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.[34] The dream I have presented portrays this mood of "universal destruction and renewal." Strikingly, it uses the same image of harvest as appears in Revelation where one angel says to another, "`Put your sickle in and reap: harvest time has come and the harvest of the earth is ripe.' Then the one sitting in the cloud set his sickle to work on the earth, and the earth's harvest was reaped." (Rev. 14:14-16; Jerusalem Bible) What does it mean to be eaten by giants or to be harvested by angels? It means that one has been swallowed up by archetypal, non-human dynamisms. The autonomous ego, whose separate stance over and against instinct and archetype is the sine qua non of consciousness, has fallen into a fatal identification with the archetypes. For the individual this means either psychosis or criminal psychopathy. For a society it means a structural disintegration and general collective demoralization brought about by loss of the central myth which had supported and justified the burdensome task of being human. In Yeats's words, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." So it was in the declining days of the Roman Empire to which Revelation refers, and so it threatens to be today. The dreamer was saved from this fate because he had "slightly high blood pressure." This was not an external fact and there were no personal associations, so we are left with general symbolism. Blood is the life-essence, but in particular it refers to the affect-life -- desirousness, passion, violence. Passionate intensity is dangerous, as Yeats implies in his phrase "the blood-dimmed tide is loosed." Too high a blood pressure would perhaps indicate a greater intensity of primitive affect than can be assimilated by the ego. Such a person would be "consumed" by the primitive archetypal energies (giants) on contact with them. Normal blood pressure, on the other hand, suggests a bland lack of reaction to the abnormal times. It is "correct" for modern man to be disturbed, to have slightly high blood pressure. It indicates his inner alarm system is still intact and there is some chance for him. His anxiety will spur him to reflection and effort that may be life-saving. A complacent attitude, on the contrary, lulls one into a false sense of security so one is quite unprepared for the encounter with the activated collective unconscious (invasion of the giants). Climbing up the staircase belongs to the alchemical symbolism of sublimatio. This operation involves the transfer of material from the bottom of the flask to the top through volatilization. Psychologically it refers to the process whereby personal, particular problems, conflicts and happenings are understood from a height, from a larger perspective as aspects of a greater process, under the aspect of eternity. Once the staircase has been climbed the dreamer will meet the enthroned king and queen face to face. This is a profound image of the process of encountering and enduring the union of opposites. It is a laborious task, as the dream makes clear, but it is the only way to avoid being consumed by the activated archetypes. The opposites are initially experienced as painful and paralyzing conflicts, but enduring and working on such conflicts promote the creation of consciousness and may lead to a glimpse of the Self as a coniunctio. As Jung says, "All opposites are of God, therefore man must bend to this burden; and in so doing he finds that God in his `oppositeness' has taken possession of him, incarnated himself in him. He becomes a vessel filled with divine conflict."[35] This is precisely the "divine service . . . which man can render to God"[36] and which, according to this dream, is what is required for salvation. Another product of the sublimatio process has come to my attention. It is a woman's vision showing how the history of humanity might look from an immense height and distance. I saw the earth covered by a single great Tree whose multiple roots fed on the Inner Sun of gold, the lumen naturae. It was a tree whose limbs were made of light and the branches were lovingly entangled so that it made of itself a network of beauteous love. And it seemed as if it were lifting itself out of the broken seeds of many, countless egos who had now allowed the One Self to break forth. And when one beheld this, the sun and the moon and the planets turned out to be something quite, quite other than one had thought. From what I could make out, the Lord Himself was the Alchemist, and out of collective swarming and suffering, ignorance and pollution, He was "trying" the gold."[37] A notable feature of the new myth is its capacity to unify the various current religions of the world. By seeing all functioning religions as living expressions of individuation symbolism, i.e., the process of creating consciousness, an authentic basis is laid for a true ecumenical attitude. The new myth will not be one more religious myth in competition with all the others for man's allegiance; rather, it will elucidate and verify every functioning religion by giving more conscious and comprehensive expression to its essential meaning. The new myth can be understood and lived within one of the great religious communities such as Catholic Christianity, Protestant Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, etc., or in some new community yet to be created, or by individuals without specific community connections. This universal application gives it a genuine claim to the term "catholic." For the first time in history we now have an understanding of man so comprehensive and fundamental that it can be the basis for a unification of the world -- first religiously and culturally and, in time, politically. When enough individuals are carriers of the "consciousness of wholeness," the world itself will become whole. * In summary, I have traced the outlines of a new myth which I believe is emerging from the life and work of Jung. This myth is not a faith but an hypothesis, based on empirical data and consistent with the scientific conscience. The new myth tells us that each individual ego is a crucible for the creation of consciousness and a vessel to serve as a carrier of that consciousness, i.e., a vessel for the incarnation of the Holy Spirit. The individual psyche is the Holy Grail, made holy by what it contains. Consciousness is a psychic substance which is produced by the experience of the opposites suffered, not blindly, but in living awareness. This experience is the coniunctio, the mysterium coniunctionis that generates the Philosophers' Stone which symbolizes consciousness. Each individual is, to a greater or lesser extent, a participant in cosmic creation, one of the buckets in the great Manichaean wheel of light, who contributes his "widow's mite" to the cumulative treasury of the archetypal psyche realized. Every human experience, to the extent that it is lived in awareness, augments the sum total of consciousness in the universe. This fact provides the meaning for every experience and gives each individual a role in the on-going world-drama of creation. 1. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan Co., 1956), p. 184. 2. Max Zeller, "The Task of the Analyst," Psychological Perspectives, 6 (Spring 1975), p. 75. 3. The first English edition appeared in 1916. This was later revised and published as Symbols of Transformation, CW 5. [CW -- The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (Bollingen Series XX). Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Ed. H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, Win. McGuire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953-1979).] 4. C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), p. 171. 5. Ibid., p. 192. 6. Ibid., pp. 175-181. 7. William James, Essays of Faith and Morals (New York: Longmans Green & Co., 1947), pp. 311 ff. 8. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 289-298. 9. Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and Work (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1976), p. 284. 10. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 251-252. 11. Ibid., pp. 255-256. 12. C.G. Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, CW 11, par. 575. 13. Ibid., par. 617. 14. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 326. 15. Ibid., p. 338. 16. Marie-Louise von Franz, ed., Aurora Consurgens, Bollingen Series LXXVII (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966), p. 143. 17. C.G. Jung, The Symbolic Life, CW 18, par. 1703. 18. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), p. 225. 19. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1954), p. 265. 20. M. Esther Harding, Psychic Energy: Its Source and Goal, Bollingen Series X (New York: Pantheon Books, 1947), p. 450. 21. A. E. Waite, ed., The Turba Philosophorum (London: William Rider and Son, Ltd., 1914), Dictum 42, p 134. 22. Quoted in C.G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par. 25, note 176. 23. See Jung's essay, "A Psychological Approach to the Trinity," in Psychology and Religion, CW 11, pars. 277-279. 24. Jung, Psychology and Religion, CW 11, par. 693. 25. For further discussion of this idea, see Edward F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1972), p. 243. 26. C.G. Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy, CW 16, par. 449. 27. James Breasted, A History of Egypt (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937), p. 64. 28. James Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (New York: Harper Torch Books, 1959), p. 136. 29. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 290-291. 30. Edinger, Ego and Archetype, pp. 218-219. 31. A. Boudinon, "Indulgences," Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922), VII, pp. 253-254. 32. John Milton, "Areopagitica," Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), p. 720. 33. Hannah, Jung: His Life and Work, p. 347. 34. Jung, Civilization in Transition, CW 10, par. 585. 35. Jung, Psychology and Religion, CW 11, par. 659. 36. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 338. 37. I am indebted to A.0. Howell for permission to quote this vision. -------------------------------------------------------- On the basis of our emerging knowledge of the unconscious the traditional image of God has been enlarged. Traditionally God has been pictured as all-powerful and all-knowing. Divine Providence was seen as guiding all things according to the inscrutable but benevolent divine purpose. The extent of divine awareness did not receive much attention. The new myth enlarges the God-image by introducing explicitly the additional feature of the unconsciousness of God . His omnipotence, omniscience and divine purpose are not always known to Him. He needs man's capacity to know Him in order to know Himself. In one sense this indicates a renewed awareness of the reality of the less differentiated, jealous and wrathful God of the Old Testament, with whom man must remonstrate. The divine opposites that were separated by Christianity into the eternal antagonists, Christ and Satan, are now beginning to be reunited consciously in the vessel of the modem psyche. The new myth postulates that the created universe and its most exquisite flower, man, make up a vast enterprise for the creation of consciousness; that each individual is a unique experiment in that process; and that the sum total of consciousness created by each individual in his lifetime is deposited as a permanent addition in the collective treasury of the archetypal psyche. --Edward Edinger, The Creation of Consciousness, pp.23-4 The idea of the unconsciousness of God is something many have probably not encountered before. That "His omnipotence, omniscience and divine purpose are not always known to Him" and that "He needs man's capacity to know Him in order to know Himself" connects with a deeper meaning in the Book of Revelation. As Laurens points out in the Matter of Heart film[5]: Calvin fought very desperately to have the book of Revelation removed from the Bible because he called it a dark and dangerously obscure book. But it really is very meaningful because it's the one book which suggests that the revelation of God doesn't end with the coming of Christ. There is more to come; that religion is a process of continuing revelation and experiencing of revelation, and being obedient to your greater awareness ... In this light, "being obedient to your greater awareness" calls each to fulfill the imperative to create more conscious awareness: of our selves, of our actions, of our relationship to all outside our self within uni verse. As quoted above, Jung experienced this when he saw the cosmic meaning of consciousness on the Athi Plains in Africa: that man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence -- without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through the millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being. Yet in "modern" times the message of both Buddhism and Christianity has undergone the same transformation away from what Buddha and Christ themselves spoke to. Buddha saw that the self -- which "stands above all gods" -- incarnates both inherent being and being known. Christ saw that his destiny was to sacrifice himself and that this suffering was imposed from within as a means of achieving wholeness. But as Jung points out below, historical trends in both Buddhism and Christianity led to the devout imitation of Buddha, resulting in a weakening of his idea, and of Christ, resulting in the individual forsaking his own "destined road to wholeness." When I visited the stupas of Sanchi, where Buddha delivered his fire sermon, I was overcome by a strong emotion of the kind that frequently develops in me when I encounter a thing, person, or idea of whose significance I am still unconscious. . . . The intensity of my emotion showed that the hill of Sanchi meant something central to me. A new side of Buddhism was revealed to me there. I grasped the life of the Buddha as the reality of the self which had broken through and laid claim to a personal life. For Buddha, the self stands above all gods, a unus mundus which represents the essence of human existence and of the world as a whole. The self embodies both the aspect of intrinsic being and the aspect of its being known, without which no world exists, Buddha saw and grasped the cosmogonic dignity of human consciousness; for that reason he saw clearly that if a man succeeded in extinguishing this light, the world would sink into nothingness. Schopenhauer's great achievement lay in his also recognizing this, or rediscovering it independently. Christ -- like Buddha -- is an embodiment of the self, but in an altogether different sense. Both stood for an overcoming of the world: Buddha out of rational insight; Christ as a foredoomed sacrifice. In Christianity more is suffered, in Buddhism more is seen and done. Both paths are right, but in the Indian sense Buddha is the more complete human being. He is a historical personality, and therefore easier for men to understand. Christ is at once a historical man and God, and therefore much more difficult to comprehend. At bottom he was not comprehensible even to himself; he knew only that he had to sacrifice himself, that this course was imposed upon him from within. His sacrifice happened to him like an act of destiny. Buddha lived out his life and died at an advanced age, whereas Christ's activity as Christ probably lasted no more than a year. Later, Buddhism underwent the same transformation as Christianity: Buddha became, as it were, the image of the development of the self; he became a model for men to imitate, whereas actually he bad preached that by overcoming the Nidana-chain every human being could become an illuminate, a buddha. Similarly, in Christianity, Christ is an exemplar who dwells in every Christian as his integral personality. But historical trends led to the imitatio Christi, whereby the individual does not pursue his own destined road to wholeness, but attempts to imitate the way taken by Christ. Similarly in the East, historical trends led to a devout imitation of the Buddha. That Buddha should have become a model to be imitated was in itself a weakening of his idea, just as the imitatio Christi was a forerunner of the fateful stasis in the evolution of the Christian idea. As Buddha, by virtue of his insight, was far in advance of the Brahma gods, so Christ cried out to the Jews, "You are gods" (John 10:34); but men were incapable of understanding what he meant. Instead we find that the so-called Christian West, far from creating a new world, is moving with giant strides toward the possibility of destroying the world we have. (On the problem of the imitatio, cf. Psychology and Alchemy, Part I, "Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy" (CW 12).) Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 278, 279-80 Years ago I recall Daniel Sheehan describing the latin root of the word `religion' -- religare -- as being re-, back + ligare, link; meaning to link back to the universe, to be reconnected to the source of one's own genesis and of all creation. Webster's defines ligare as bind, (to tie together) which is close to the meaning of link (to connect or tie). In either sense, seen in this way, living one's life with such a "religious attitude" expresses the urge to manifest more of the wholeness of one's totality. Seeking such meaning in one's experience of being does not necessarily relate to any specific creed. For Jung religion was an attitude to life and had absolutely nothing whatever to do with any kind of creed. He was actually ambivalent about creeds because, on the one hand he said, a creed will stop you from having an experience and since he believed that religion was not only an attitude but had to do with personal experience, if you block it by a creed, obviously you can't have an experience. But, at the same time, he also thought that a creed might be a tremendously important framework for someone whose ego was too weak to stand the horror, the void, of complete loneliness. --Baroness Vera von der Heydt, Matter of Heart I have been increasingly drawn to Laurens' call to re-engage the journey within to wholeness by making Christ's "example truly modern in ourselves and be individual and specific in terms of the totality of our own natures, as he was" [emphasis added]. Only in this way, can we truly participate in lifting "this moment in time, in which we are all imprisoned, back again onto a level where the great act of creation is going on." I have often felt that it is as if there has been only one modern man and we crucified him two thousand years ago. We still have to make his example truly modern in ourselves and be individual and specific in terms of the totality of our own natures, as he was. This is the way we have to go. But we now have to do our own leading. We have not to wait on masters; we do not have to wait for foolproof spiritual exercises; we can go to people and seek what they seek, but we cannot do it wholly their way and be stereotypes of one another. Like the leaves on the trees, we are compelled to be each our own way, again and again. We have, for this, to turn inwards -- to look into ourselves; look in this container which is our soul; look and listen in to it and all its hunches -- incredible, silly, stupid as they may appear to be. It might tell us to make fools of ourselves in the eyes of our established selves but, however improbable, just listen, just give it a chance in yourself, particularly at this moment when everything is increasingly impersonal. Until you have listened in to that thing which is dreaming through you, in other words answered the knock on the door in the dark, and discovered your estranged self, you will not be able to lift this moment in time, in which we are all imprisoned, back again onto a level where the great act of creation is going on, whether we heed it or not. We can join in with increased awareness, thanks to the creator's evolution, or stay out. If we stay out we perish; if we join in, we live for ever. --Laurens van der Post, A Walk With A White Bushman, p.85 For the first time in history we now have an understanding of man so comprehensive and fundamental that it can be the basis for a unification of the world -- first religiously and culturally and, in time, politically. When enough individuals are carriers of the "consciousness of wholeness," the world itself will become whole. --Edward Edinger, The Creation of Consciousness, p.31 In terms of actively participating in the on-going act of creation -- which previously has been largely thought of as belonging to the exclusive domain of God -- and of the conscious awareness such being manifests, I'd like to enumerate seven instances of the creation of consciousness in specific experiences and expressions of people exploring the intrinsic wholeness bestowed upon each of us at birth and manifesting within the life of our time. 1. Maewan Ho's vision of holistic ecological science and her work, as part of the Institute of Science in Society, heralds the emerging shift in the basic paradigm of science (and thus, of universe) from the metaphor of the machine to the metaphor of the self-organizing living organism. A highly prolific author, her 1998 book The Rainbow and the Worm, The Physics of Organisms, communicates "the message from quantum theory that we are intimately entangled with one another and with all nature, which we participate in co-creating."[6] She extends the metaphor of universe as organism with her understanding of the many parallels between the development of the psyche and that of the organism, thus making the organism the most universal archetype. The Jungian ideal of the whole person is one whose cell and psyche, body and mind, inner and outer, are fully integrated, and hence completely in tune with nature. Jung's ideas on psychical development show many parallels to those relating to the organism. Similarly, Laszlo's theory of the quantum holographic universe views the universe effectively as a kind of superorganism, constantly becoming, being created through the activities of its constituent organisms at every level. The organism is thus the most universal archetype. I describe a theory of the organism, based on quantum coherence, which is, in some respects, a microcosm of Laszlo's universe. It involves key notions of the maximization of local autonomy and global cohesion, of universal participation, of sensitivity and responsiveness, which have profound implications for our global future. Mae-Wan Ho, Organism and Psyche in a Participatory Universe Maewan's soaring vision encompasses a richly grounded self awareness manifesting an immensely creative conscious collaboration between the scientific pursuit of knowledge and the religious search for meaning. Thus, her life is an expression of Edinger's perception that the age now dawning seeks linked knowledge. The message she conveys articulates the new biology's unconditional devotion to honoring and serving life's needs by acknowledging our intrinsic organistic embeddedness in life and the cosmos. Her experience of participation -- as a "truly free individual [and] a coherent being that lives life fully and spontaneously without fragmentation or hesitation, who is at peace with herself and at ease with the universe as she participates in creating, from moment to moment, its possible futures" -- invites us all to further discover and explore our own coherence and living wholeness, made possible by the conscious awareness of our coherent `self' and all it implies. I am making a case for organicist science. It is not yet a conscious movement but a Zeitgeist I personally embrace, so I really mean to persuade you to do likewise by giving it a more tangible shape. The new organicism, like the old, is dedicated to the knowledge of the organic whole, hence, it does not recognize any discipline boundaries. It is to be found between all disciplines. Ultimately, it is an unfragmented knowledge system by which one lives. There is no escape clause allowing one to plead knowledge `pure' or `objective', and hence having nothing to do with life. As with the old organicism, the knowing being participates in knowing as much as in living. Participation implies responsibility, which is consistent with the truism that there can be no freedom without responsibility, and conversely, no responsibility without freedom. There is no placing mind outside nature as Descartes has done, the knowing being is wholeheartedly within nature: heart and mind, intellect and feeling (Ho, 1994a). It is non-dualist and holistic. In all those respects, its affinities are with the participatory knowledge systems of traditional indigenous cultures all over the world. From a thorough-going organicist perspective, one does not ask, "What is life?" but, "What is it to be alive?". Indeed, the best way to know life is to live it fully. It must be said that we do not yet have a fully fledged organicist science. But I shall describe some new images of the organism, starting from the more familiar and working up, perhaps to the most sublime, from which a picture of the organism as a free, spontaneous being will begin to emerge. I shall show how the organism succeeds in freeing itself from the `laws' of physics, from mechanical determinism and mechanistic control, thereby becoming a sentient, coherent being that, from moment to moment, freely explores and creates its possible futures. . . . The organism maximizes both local freedom and global intercommunication. One comes to the startling discovery that the coherent organism is in a very real sense completely free. Nothing is in control, and yet everything is in control. Thus, it is the failure to transcend the mechanistic framework that makes people persist in enquiring which parts are in control, or issuing instructions; or whether free will exists, and who choreographs the dance of molecules. Does "consciousness" control matter or vice versa? These questions are meaningless when one understands what it is to be a coherent, organic whole. An organic whole is an entangled whole, where part and whole, global and local are so thoroughly implicated as to be indistinguishable, and each part is as much in control as it is sensitive and responsive. Choreographer and dancer are one and the same. The `self' is a domain of coherent activities, in the ideal, a pure state that permeates the whole of our being with no definite localizations or boundaries, as Bergson has described. . . . Freedom in the present context means being true to `self', in other words, being coherent. A free act is a coherent act. Of course not all acts are free, as one is seldom fully coherent. Yet the mere possibility of being unfree affirms the opposite, that freedom is real, ". . . we are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work."[14] The coherent `self' is distributed and nonlocal -- being implicated in a community of other entities with which one is entangled (Whitehead, 1925; see also Ho, 1993). Thus, being true to self does not imply acting against others. On the contrary, sustaining others sustains the self, so being true to others is also being true to self. It is only within a mechanistic Darwinian perspective that freedom becomes perverted into acts against others (see Ho, 1996e). The coherent `self' can also couple coherently to the environment so that one becomes as much in control of the environment as one is responsive. The organism thereby participates in creating its own possible futures as well as those of the entire community of organisms in the universe, much as Whitehead (1925) has envisaged. I venture to suggest, therefore, that a truly free individual is a coherent being that lives life fully and spontaneously, without fragmentation or hesitation, who is at peace with herself and at ease with the universe as she participates in creating, from moment to moment, its possible futures. Mae-Wan Ho, "The Biology of Free Will," 1996 The coherent entanglement of all organisms provides a magnificent rubber-meets-the-road model of the organic whole as an ideal democracy of distributed, non-centralized control operating not by hierarchies of authority but by intercommunication. It is difficult to exaggerate the significance and relevance this life- partnering and honoring alternative future poses to the current, ominous, globally centralizing economic system based on concentrated privilege in the hands of an ever-shrinking few. Be evermore conscious in this extraordinary time, that: "Thine life is a miracle, think again". Th[e] amazing capture of energy by coherent entanglement is what organisms do for a living, day in and day out. Think of coherent entanglement in terms of partners dancing together, perfectly in step, but each doing different movements. As we face the threats of genetic engineering in the midst of the climate change catastrophe, poet Wendell Berry reminds us, "Thine life is a miracle, think again". Think again, for it is imperative to replace the destructive, mechanistic and instrumental view of life with the truly organic and miraculous. . . . These images also show that how we observe determines what we observe. As someone said, if your only tool is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. Mechanistic biology is like a hammer, so everything looks dead as nails, or as Brian Goodwin said, like nuts and bolts. If we observe with the sensitivity of organisms, however, we see them as organisms. Our imaging technique is non-destructive, if not non-invasive. You can put the organisms back into the aquarium afterwards. I would like to draw out some of the main lessons the organism teaches us about the organic whole as opposed to the mechanistic whole. The organic whole is an ideal democracy of distributed control. It does not work in terms of a hierarchy of controller versus the controlled, but by intercommunication. Ultimately, each is as much in control as it is sensitive and responsive. In the ideal coherent system, local freedom (or autonomy) and global cohesion are both maximised. That is impossible within a mechanical system where public and private, local and global, are always in conflict. Most important of all, the organic whole is quintessentially diverse and pluralistic. The organism is the antithesis of uniformity and homogeneity. We have some 30 000 genes and 300 000 proteins, astronomical numbers of metabolites, cofactors, inorganic ions, in numerous kinds of cells, tissues and organs that make up our body, all of which are necessary for sustaining the whole. In the same way, populations are naturally diverse, and thriving ecosystems are rich in species. Mae-Wan Ho, "Thinking again of life's miracle," Apr 2001 Notwithstanding the obstacles and barriers posed by conventional thought and the present-day corrupted systems of economic and political power, Maewan is constructively activist in the most live-affirming and religious way. She lives and expresses the courage of her convictions in a unambiguous, conscious manner both deeply inspirational and personally accountable. In 1999, I co-founded the Institute of Science in Society (ISIS) of which I am Director. I-SIS is a not-for-profit organisation, promoting socially and ecologically accountable science and the integration of science in society. I-SIS also represent a group of scientists around the world (currently 364 from some 40 countries [457 scientists from 56 countries as of Sept 2001]) who have co-signed a World Scientists Statement and Open Letter to All Governments, calling for a moratorium on environmental releases of GMOs on grounds that they are unsafe, and to revoke and ban patents on life-forms and living processes, on grounds that they are unethical. --Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, 26 Oct 2000 Witness Statement at the Chardon LL (a GM "line" [Aventis -- T25 Maize], approved for animal feed) Hearing in London. I devoted a good portion of August to creating additional files to mirror on ratical from the ISIS site to manifest more exposure to Maewan's extraordinarily wide-ranging wisdom, intelligence, and conscious awareness for people geographically closer to San Francisco than to London. The message conveyed throughout these works is one being expressed by "carriers of the `consciousness of wholeness'". Such awareness serves as a beacon, lighting the way to a future where the world itself will manifest the wholeness being expressed today by individuals like Maewan Ho and her colleagues at the Institute of Science in Society. Many remarkable individuals and local communities are indeed changing their own lives and the world around them for the better. They all do so by learning from nature and recognizing that it is the symbiotic, mutualistic relationships which sustain ecosystems and make all life prosper, including the human beings who are active, sensitive participants in the ecosystem as a whole. The same organic revolution has been happening in western science over the past thirty years. Jim Lovelock's Gaia theory, for example, invites us to see the earth as one super-organism. Even more remarkable is the message from quantum theory: that we are inseparably entangled with one another and with all nature, which we participate in co-creating. It is this holistic, organic perspective that can enable us to negotiate our path out of the moral maze of genetic engineering biotechnology. It provides the basis of a new ethic of science that can reshape society and transform the very texture and meaning of our lives. Seattle has shown us that things can be different. Society does not have to be ruled by the dominant culture. Science can transcend the dominant status quo to reshape society for the public good, which is also the private good. We begin to appreciate how the purpose of each organism and species is entangled with that of every other. Our humanity is a function of this entangled whole, and we cannot do arbitrary violence to one another, nor to the nature of other species without violating our own. The ethic of science is no different from that of being human. --Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, "Towards a New Ethic of Science," p. 14 2. Joe American Horse's expression of the Oglala Lakota people's commitment on the Pine Ridge Reservation to cultivation of industrial hemp encourages all to consciously manifest our own life-supporting visions of wholeness. When I spoke with Joe he likened the cultivation of hemp to his people's historical relationship with the buffalo. Each provided a source of shelter, food, and clothing as well as meaning in being part of the circle of life. Joe's expression of his people's commitment "to find creative ways to reinvigorate the land" and the vision that their "hemp initiative is a struggle by the Oglala Lakota traditional tiospayes to be productive on our own lands" is an expression of a carrier of consciousness, pursuing a path of wholeness that manifests in the physical and psychological well-being of all who participate. Recall Edinger's statement: Experiences of inner or outer conflict which are resolved creatively and are accompanied by a sense of satisfaction and life enhancement are examples of the creation of consciousness. In closing, Joe indicates the determination and commitment of his community -- in the face of significant obstacles posed by the unconsciousness of "drug warriors" following an archaic, worn-out hierarchical system of authority -- to maintain their vision and consciousness: "Remember us as we are making our stand; we are in it for the long run." 3. The inauguration of The Living Economies Program signals a new level of active collaboration by the The People-Centered Development Forum to augment its vision of human societies in which three values -- justice, inclusiveness, and sustainability -- serve as organizing principles of public policy. Having reached the limits of an Era of Empire, humanity is compelled to accept responsibility for the consequences of its presence on a finite planet, make a conscious collective choice to leave behind the excesses of its adolescence, and take the step to species maturity. It is the most exciting moment of opportunity in the history of the species. Introduction, "Living Economies for a Living Planet" Reading David Korten's The Post-Corporate World, Life After Capitalism two years ago provided a "wider lens" from which to view and better apprehend the nature of capitalism and the era of corporate governance, currently in its end-state. The imperative of the original thirteen "Crown Colonies," sanctioned by the divine right of kings, was to extract the wealth of the "new world" and concentrate it in the hands of those who owned the likes of the Hudson's Bay and East India Trading Companies. A primary impetus of the American Revolution sought to throw off the yoke of these concentrations of private ownership of property and economic power. Transnational corporations spanning the globe are the modern-day descendents of the 13 Crown Colonies. The present-day era of public governance by private corporations operating within the economic system of capitalism is in an end-state because capitalism's prime directive is to extract greater and greater amounts of the living wealth of the world and concentrate it in fewer and fewer human hands. Such a system is phenomenologically unsustainable to the extreme and cannot long