The Dragon’s Egg is a little science fiction story, by Robert Forward, in which “human scientists establish a relationship with intelligent life-forms—the cheela—living on Dragon’s Egg, a neutron star where one Earth hour is equivalent to hundreds of their years. The cheela culturally evolve from savagery to the discovery of science, and for a brief time, men are their diligent teachers.” As the human astronauts begin to communicate with the cheela, the book describes the difficulties of doing so between the two species when the time difference has to be navigated. Generations of cheela have to interpret the records of their ancestors in order to advance the communications with the humans, as each new signal is received from them, each signal being understood by the cheela as a “revelation from god”. For the humans, only minutes pass between each signal sent. The cheelas respond to each human signal with revolutions in their culture, making greater and greater advances as they “catch up” with the messages from the “gods”. Finally they are able to meet as equals, making contact at the threshold between the two realities, cheela and human.
We are the cheelas, forever trying to “catch up” to the latest transformation in the objective psyche, as received by us in the form of revelations. Our evolving cultural practices are our way of expressing the latest revelation and then maintaining the knowledge gained from that revelation. We are always “behind the times” in these efforts. Just as one set of cultural beliefs, practices and knowledge is developed, refined, and stabilized, we are faced with the catastrophic news, through a further revelation, that another transformation in the psyche has “always-already” happened and that we are now out of date in just about everything we are doing.
The story’s “time” threshold between cheela and human is now available to us too, in our contact with the objective psyche as “other”, but we are drifting further and further away from the threshold. We fear the price of having to give up old ways of being and doing, yet the consequences of acceding to this fear are a total and irrevocable loss of connection with the objective psyche and its life-giving waters.
My essay, Jung and the Posthuman, included in the recently published book, Jung’s Red Book For Our Time (Chiron pub.) is an attempt to address the time-distorted communications taking place between the latest transformation in psychic reality and the cultural practices that have subsequently emerged as we attempt to both interpret and align our culture with that transformation. I focus on dreams and art as the vehicles of both revelation and cultural attempts to reconcile our lives with the objective psyche in its latest configuration.