In his poem, “The Hollow Men (1925), T. S Eliot famously writes:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
When asked in an interview if he would write these lines again, Eliot responded with a ‘no’ (1958 interview):
One reason is that while the association of the H-bomb is irrelevant to it, it would today come to everyone’s mind. Another is that he is not sure the world will end with either. People whose houses were bombed have told him they don’t remember hearing anything. (Wikipedia)
It seems that things have not gotten any better since Eliot’s last interview. The entire poem is stark and uncompromising! He hammers us with these lines, for example:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
I interpret these lines as saying the gap between idea and reality (mind/body, inner/outer, reflection/action, spirit/matter, etc.) has brought our entire western culture to its present “point of no return”. Witness a paradigmatic statement by the now most powerful man in the world, Donald Trump, in an interview a year ago (2015):
He is by turns animated and bored, boastful and stubborn when prodded toward soul-searching. “No, I don’t want to think about it,” he said when Mr. D’Antonio asked him to contemplate the meaning of his life. “I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see.
Into this gap falls the Shadow! When the living psyche is eliminated as a viable category of experience then we only have the gap and it is a terrifying nothingness, as Sartre describes it, from which we must, Trump-like, turn away in terror. I have written a number of essays over the years which “sound the alarm”. There appears to be an all-out attack on the living psyche, aimed at its total elimination from our consciousness. The attack is, as I have said, primarily focused in the domain of language. In Orwell’s 1984, for example:
It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. “You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,” he said almost sadly. “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.
All you have to do is, like Trump, turn away and forget! Consigning psyche to oblivion is an act for which we are paying dearly. The psyche is not just a pragmatic category to be used heuristically when convenient. It does not merely point to an inner mental state of us human beings. The psyche is the medium through which Life or world, or Being speaks to us, makes a claim on us and how we each live our lives, determines the structure of the cultural productions we make, the various forms of language we speak, the way things appear to us, and so on. We gain a sense of our ontological worth only through engagement with the psyche.
With the election of Trump, I am now convinced that the all-out war on the psyche is reaching its nadir. The Shadow that Eliot speaks of, in his poem, The Hollow Men, is approaching its darkest hour.
In 1994, I declared war on those forces that seek to eliminate the psyche (read, “life”). For the next thirty years I fought on behalf of life and the medium by means of which life may speak to us, address us, and make its claims known to us.
My decision to take up arms on behalf of psyche and Life was uncompromising. There is simply too much at stake i.e., life as other. While we are desperately and insanely looking for aliens on other planets in space, i.e., for some evidence that an other might exist who can penetrate the horrifying sense of isolation that the modern ego feels, we are doing everything we can to eliminate the one way of being that can give us that sense of “I am not alone”—the living psyche! And it is right “here!” I had a dream recently (2017) that further inspired this fiery declaration of war:
I am way above the earth, near the edge of space and I am attempting to come down to earth in a new way, no parachute. I start to descend, whispers of air pass me by as I gather speed. I am trying to put on a warm jacket but my thumb gets caught in the sleeve and I am now rushing towards earth. I frantically try to push my arm into the sleeve as I see the roofs of houses, then I know I am going to be smashed. The perspective changes to ground level where I am watching a transparent man land safely, like a cat. He is nearly invisible but I can see him. Apparently I am to participate in the descent of this marvelous being and then to separate on the ground where I can perceive him.
“He” is among us now and as my dream suggests, it is now possible to perceive him as such, i.e. as transparency itself. When we see through a transparent medium, our focus is normally on the clear objects that the medium reveals, while the medium itself “disappears” from consciousness. My dream shows my attention drawn to the medium itself. The psyche is the medium by which we can perceive (the form of) objects. The way objects appear to us depends on the configuration of psyche. For example, objects once could appear to us as numinous, “shining”, alive. When these “past” forms of consciousness prevailed, there was no need to have a concept of “psyche” at all. We just perceived the world that way, i.e, as living! Some modern individuals have shared their versions of this style of consciousness. Here is Gopi Krishna’s (20th century) description of such a world (and style of consciousness) when it opened up for him via the energies of Kundalini:
I have looked at the same site almost daily in winter for several years and the picture of it was vividly present on my memory. [On this occasion] instead I was gazing fascinatedly at an extraordinarily rich blend of colour and shade, shining with the silvery lustre which lent and an indescribable beauty to the scene.
When psyche withdraws from the world, the world becomes disenchanted, as so many have noticed. A split between spirit and matter happened and we become “The Hollow Men” as T. S. Eliot tells us. But now, my dream suggests, the medium by means of which we perceive the form or appearance of anything at all, has “returned to earth” and may be perceived as such i.e. in its nature as transparency itself. Now while I am still trying to deal with the real implications to my life of this momentous psychic event, the dream has already renewed my fervour to stand and fight for psyche as our desideratum. I say “renewed fervour” because some decades ago I had begun to feel the full force of the consequences of our consigning psyche to oblivion. A “poem” burst out of me, and, unashamedly, I share it here some thirty-odd years later as my Declaration of War! on behalf of psyche.
let these words
let these words pour from my lip
let dew fall from the moon
let the rain pour down on parched land
let jewels sprinkle the ground glittering
let the sword of love pierce and shatter
the shackles of death’s rigid hold
on all hearts
i challenge you my dark brother
whom i also love dearly
you shall not prevail
we shall become one
hear me now!
my voice rings with a clarion call
throughout the universe
love!
foolish amfortas
rushes out to battle
only to meet a spear
thrusting through his man power
he lies wounded and bleeding
waiting in relentless agony
for the redeemer
but i speak
a mouthpiece of the god
and it is the god eros
who now springs forth
to unite with his beloved
to issue his challenge to death
what called him forth
but a silent vision of beauty
psyche lying at death’s door
her silent pregnant presence
complete but unawakened
held in the enchanting spell
of death’s beauty?
If you want to join this war, you do not have to have to “sign up”. There is no pay, no accolades, no heroes. All you have to do is commit your life to the life of psyche, in the choices you make, in your deeds, in the way you conduct your life in the real world.
“The meek shall inherit the earth!?” Well maybe this was once so, but the archangel Michael, that great being of Love, carries a sword and he knows how to use it.
