As important as the Presidential elections are to the lives of individuals and communities, I believe that focusing exclusively on the recent political events will serve to distract us once again from the more encompassing issue.[1] I’d like to remind us of Jung’s deathbed visions (1961) for a moment: “I see enormous stretches devastated, enormous stretches of the earth, but thank God it’s not the whole planet”, followed shortly by another catastrophic vision which speaks of “the last fifty years of humanity”. This last vision does not report any residue of humanity left.
Jung also had two catastrophic visions forty-eight years earlier, in 1913. Placing these dream texts, separated by nearly fifty years, side-by-side and comparing them may teach us something about our current understanding of apocalyptic visions, or our own catastrophic expectations, along with our subsequent approach to the unknown future.
I want to compare the mood that lies implicit in Jung’s visions as a young man with those as he lay dying. In the visions of 1913, Jung reports a mood of menacing frightfulness, a commanding insistence that he “look at it well”. He was nauseated, ashamed of his weakness in doing so. This mood is one of forcibly grabbing an unwilling and terrified participant by the scruff of the neck and forcing him or her to watch a horror! A battle of wills is at work here within the vision. At the time of Jung’s death, this willfulness is entirely missing from the dream text. Instead we a get a mood of “it is just so” – calm acceptance of what he is seeing, as well as some relief. Since Jung was on his deathbed, we can assume that this relief springs from compassion towards the next generation, as well as, perhaps, some small residue of clinging to life, since a few days later he had a more totalizing vision, in which nothing human was spared, with no relief felt in the scene of universal human destruction.
In the 1913 visions, Jung’s perspective is from above the land but close enough to see “drowned bodies of uncounted thousands”, close enough to feel horrified. He participated in the horror, during and subsequent to the visions. In contrast, in his final visions he seems to be situated above the entire earth, remote from any participation in whatever may be happening on earth at the human level. I conclude from this brief description of mood and dream perspective that, from 1913 to 1961, Jung worked out the issue of will. His will had been tangled up with the Will of the greater one and in fact he fought it one way another for much of his life (“to this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.”[2] As he lay dying, he seemed to be more in mood of acceptance, even surrender, to the vision. The battle of wills was over and he could thus receive what the greater one had to say or show and then to simply re-say it in the language of metaphor.
The importance of our psychological preparedness when we are presented with an apocalyptic vision can be shown in the differences I outlined here, between the young man Jung’s visions and the dying Jung’s visions. I could put it this way: when we are psychologically unprepared as receivers of the greater one’s “speech”, or when we insist on imposing our own wills onto the visionary material (e.g. by wanting this outcome and not that one) then the content of the vision reflects this entanglement of the smaller one’s unconscious desires and the dreamer unwittingly interprets the vision in a way that supports those unconscious desires or fears. The message from the greater one gets distorted or even lost and we then approach the unknown future more on the basis of our current familiar beliefs, projecting them if you like onto the unknown future like a decal. The unknown future becomes once again “known”.
But Jung as an old man had attained a perspective that might be called a new status of human being as receiver. What we can hear in his dream text now is not Jung’s will, or his fears of psychosis, or his terrified predictions of war. We hear only what the greater one is saying/showing, to and as Jung, who simply receives and re-tells, giving language to what he was shown, without any self-serving interpretations. So we can trust the objective nature of this vision. We do not need to inquire whether it refers to Jung’s state of mind or to empirical world events in the way that he had interpreted his earlier visions.
We can therefore ask another question altogether: what is the greater one saying/showing self-presentationally. In order to become a human receiver, Jung had to find his way to a form of consciousness that can hold the entire planet as a content of that consciousness. This must be where the greater one “resides”, ie as that form of “outer space” consciousness. You could say that the greater one wants to show itself to itself as the “devastated earth” and as the “last fifty years of humanity”. The greater one apparently needs to come home to itself as alien to all things earthly i.e. to become self-conscious as such—an “alien” Self—an achievement that was impossible while the greater one remained unconsciously reflected in earthly appearances. This greater one had to extract itself from all earthly phenomena in order to come home to itself as pure, “alien” self-consciousness. This extraction or abstraction by the greater one from earthly phenomena has left us human beings in a dire state. We despoil and exploit natural phenomena and treat one another as resources having no intrinsic dignity. The loss of meaning that follows the greater one’s withdrawal from nature has devastated our environment and our cultural life.[3] Darkness has descended and we are looking in all the wrong places for the new light, i.e. the new form of consciousness that is redemptive!
Jung’s visions have shown us a way into the unknown future. If we can now understand all apocalyptic visions as being more or less distorted (by the dreamer’s fears or desires) versions of this truth that Jung saw so clearly at the end of his life, then a way opens up to the unknown future—a future that is at present so filled with our fears, terrors, or crazy hopes.
My own visions have shown me that this “alien” consciousness, once its movement of coming home to itself as alien to anything earthly has completed, seeks to enter the earthly once again via the human receiver, except this time consciously, knowing itself to be at once alien and human—constituting a new definition of what it is to be human.[4] Knowing this as a truth dramatically alters how we human beings approach the unknown future.[5]
The “post human” is a technologically informed view of this profound movement down to earth of the self-conscious other but this incarnation can never be achieved literally via technological means, which will achieve, instead, technological, monstrous forms, as we are already seeing. The profound descent of the greater one intends to happen through the human receiver, in order to manifest as a new definition of human-alien way of being—a totally new structure of consciousness that is seeking manifestation on earth and which alone can produce the new earth, or the new appearances. These new appearances are correlative to the new alien-human structure of consciousness and will thus appear as concrete down-to-earth beings (ie “alive”) which at the same time open up to the abysmal depths of infinite meaning. And it is this new earth and its appearances that fulfill Nietzsche’s promise of redemption:
The deep instinct for how one must live, in order to feel oneself “in heaven,” to feel “eternal,” while in all other behavior one decidedly does not feel oneself “in heaven”—this alone is the psychological reality of “redemption.” A new way of life, not a new faith.
Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ (33)
[1] Further essays on this theme are at: https://independent.academia.edu/WoodcockJohn/Drafts
[2] This is not the only manner in which one may encounter “god”, by any means.
[3] For an excellent survey of this devastation see Bonnie Bright (ed.): Depth Psychology and the Digital Age. Depth Insights. 2016.
[4] For an account of how this incarnation could appear in the life of one individual, see my book, Oblivion of Being.
[5] See my books and essays for further discussion of my dream-visions.
