As our crisis deepens, I keep reading and hearing messages of hope, even profound hope and of transformation. Modern mystics report visions of a better world, a new Earth, a Green revolution, etc. All these messages are meant to be predictions, i.e. we are to understand the message as a literal outcome for us if we stick with it through this dark time. “Therein lies hope” is the claim!
Here is a little lesson on this score from the past (drawn from Wikipedia). Around 1890, Native Americans were on the way to genocidal destruction. Their world was ended by the invasion of Europeans. A shaman, Jack Wilson, had a vision:
They told the people they could dance a new world into being. There would be landslides, earthquakes, and big winds. Hills would pile up on each other. The earth would roll up like a carpet with all the white man’s ugly things – the stinking new animals, sheep and pigs, the fences, the telegraph poles, the mines and factories. Underneath would be the wonderful old-new world as it had been before the white fat-takers came. …The white men will be rolled up, disappear, go back to their own continent.
This vision, enacted with a dance, the Ghost Dance, spread throughout the Indian Nations. It was a message of “profound hope” given them from Spirit. It was a vision of a New Earth! Well, we know what happened—genocide! Their world was never to return as the vision had promised. There was no new Earth, no renewal, and the dance fell into decline as further slaughter ensued.
What goes wrong with prophecy, and how can such a story help us today?
In today’s terms, i.e. with our state of consciousness, we can say that, when we take such visions literally, as we are indeed doing, we conflate prediction with prophecy, as I have written about previously, in claiming that prophecy entails prediction.
I will say a little more here about this issue by bringing our attention to one of my two favourite books by the late James Hillman, On Paranoia (the other being Thought of the Heart). In this lecture (Eranos Conference, 1985), Hillman puts the phenomenon of revelation and its relation to literalism (predictions and end dates, for example) under a microscope. One of his most startling conclusions is that “ this lunatic literalism (of our politically paranoid world) results directly from revelation which excites and ensures literalists of every sort by announcing itself as the voice of the hidden, speaking truth.” (40)
He is saying here that the problem of literalism lies not with our interpretation of prophecy but with the spiritual phenomenon itself which takes itself literally, i.e., Spirit speaks in noetic language, “illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance”, and certainty. (40) We could say that prosaic language, which is surface language only, is the linguistic medium in which prophecy becomes prediction. Hillman goes on to show how crucial the role of the imagination is in “saving the soul from blinding certainty, …revelation, and …inherent insanity”. He invokes Hermes the messenger who carries the divine message through hints, gestures and ambiguities. This is the language of poesis, the language of image. (41)
As I have written elsewhere, our Western culture in all of its practices and beliefs has eliminated the imagination or psyche from acceptable discourse. We have thus become literal-minded, this being the linguistic correlative to materialism. Modern mystics, with their undoubtedly real visionary experiences are thus forced to think them in literal pragmatic terms only, becoming in the process, predictions. And so we get utopian visions interpreted literally, just as the Native Americans did with their Ghost Dance. They were faced with an apocalypse—one they could not grasp at all. It was an apocalypse of language in which their naturally mythopoetic minds were destroyed by an invading culture that understood only materialism (end of 19th century) and spoke in literal terms, infecting the sacred world of the Indians like a virulent virus. The European thus linguistically obliterated any chance for transformation and renewal.
Now we are wreaking the same genocidal destruction on ourselves. The elimination of the imagination or psyche as a category of experience in public discourse, has left modern mystics with no way to say prophetic utterances other than in literal terms. We are thus blinded with certainty, as Hillman says, and, like the Native Americans, prevented from interpreting the dark reality of our times as an image, i.e., a soulful REALITY, in favour of insane hope and certainty about the birth of a literal New World.
I have worked many years on the question of prophetic or “living language” vs pragmatic, utilitarian language and the problem of bringing back the “gold” of revelation to the community. I wrote a book, The Peril of Thinking. Here is an excerpt:
The relation of human beings to language is undergoing a transformation the consequences of which we’re not yet ready to face. … it is going on in the profoundest silence. Evidently, we have to state, that language in everyday life appears as a vehicle for understanding and will be used as such a vehicle but, there are other relations to language than the common ones. Goethe calls these other relations the “deeper” ones and says of language: “In normal life we make language work in a provisional way, because we signify just superficial relations. As soon as we speak of deeper relationships, There comes up suddenly another language, that of the poetical.” [quote from Heidegger]
Modern consciousness, in the West, is structured as two domains: ordinary consciousness and visionary experience, inspiration, or what I call here, living thinking. Over centuries we have learned to privilege ordinary consciousness exclusively and the domain of living thinking has slipped into oblivion. Yet, the upheavals of cultural transformation, or paradigm shifts, always seem to originate in inceptive moments, when living thinking appears or breaks through a threshold into the ordinary consciousness of certain individuals. These people are then “given” the task of bringing new meaning across the threshold into empirical reality, through some kind of art form. We are in such a time of upheaval once more, and many individuals are, one way or another, making contact with this threshold.
This is where the peril lies!
