OUR REDEEMER: A Vision

We are all feeling that our time is out of joint and that something must change, as alarm calls sound louder every day. Given these dire well-recognised facts, how could I begin to reckon with a vision that I had in 1995? It’s force rocked me at the time and set a task in motion that has continued its momentum for 30-odd years. The dream seemed untouched by modern efforts to “exterminate” metaphysical language from modern discourse. It staged a process of creating a new kind of being that the dream calls “our Redeemer” in a surprisingly Christian, you might say outdated, move…

For some years now I have been drawn to Slavoj Žižek’s philosophical work which in my view manages to shake up many cherished presuppositions within the tradition, even turn them upside down. My interest in his work intensified as I found more and more links between his thought and my largely inchoate visionary experiences—my Redeemer dream being one such experience. I focussed on his work concerning the Real and its disruptive incursion into symbolic or imaginary order. This could be said many ways, my dream-vision simply being one particularly vivid staging of this process. I felt encouraged to approach Žižek’s opus because he privileges the Christian Incarnation as a paradigmatic version of what may also philosophically be described as the process of the universal or the Real incarnating in the particular. And my Redeemer dream seemed to me to portray such a momentous event.

OUR REDEEMER: A Vision

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