Tools to Change Society
The Apocalypse Is Spread Upon the Earth and Men Do Not See It
- Details
- Parent Category: Tools to Change Society
- Category: Jungian Topics
- Published on Sunday, 29 April 2012 22:00
- Written by Skip Conover
- Hits: 1914
The Mayans were right, if they ever did predict the end of the world. But it is the end of the world as we know it, not yet the end of our planet and all life. That time will come, but we now know that Earth will likely be here for four billion or so more years, and life will likely still be here for much of that time, though the future of humanity itself might not be so long.
Jesus Christ came along at an apocalyptic time, when the old Greek and Roman gods were yielding to new ideas about something central. In the early Twentieth Century, Carl Jung defined that something psychologically as the Self—“the central archetype of order and meaning that is constellated in the collective unconscious.” But to the less knowledgeable humans of fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred years ago, this central archetype was called The One (by Buddha), God the Father (by Christ and his predecessor Rabbis), and Allah (by The Prophet {PBUH}). Other religious traditions used other names, of course.
But the problem we have today is a new Truth is being revealed and The Apocalypse is upon us. All of us have that secret sinking feeling deep within us that whatever religious tradition we have followed is not the whole story. Yes, fundamentalist Christians and Muslims rave at their less strident fellows and one another, swearing that they have the one true way, but there are few among them who lack this secret doubt.
How can one believe in an outward “sky god” when we can see back to the Big Bang, thanks to the Hubble telescope, and we can see down to infinitesimally small particles thanks to the Large Hadron Collider? Yes, recently the scientists at CERN near Geneva have found a new particle, but in all of their research there is no sign of an external God, per se. Where is Heaven? Where is Hell? Our religious leaders, who insist on the ideas of our ancient forebears, simply look more and more out of touch from the Universe in which we actually live.
This Truth is a terrific shock to the system—globally! It is said that Christianity took 600 years to coalesce into an identifiable religion; the Bible as we know it was not even settled upon until 325 A.D. (at the 1st Council of Nicaea); and Islam was not settled until hundreds of years after the time of The Prophet (PBUH). But the the breakup and coalescence of new human ideas about who we are and what we need to do to assure the continuation of our species cannot wait that long.
Professor Carl Jung identified the collective unconscious, and showed that it was common to all human beings, regardless of race, station in life, or creed. What he meant was that society as a whole (globally) is, in effect, a collective organism, with a tendency to manifest its Self (or God) in a way unique from all other creatures. In times of lesser information and communication, this Self manifested in different ways of looking at its mystery, that is, in various religions and concepts of God. But today, those old ideas cannot stand up to the Truths that reveal themselves second by second in our global communication and connection via the Internet and social networks.
In my 2007 book, Tsunami of Blood, I worried that foreign Muslim fundamentalist fighters in Iraq would return to their countries and instigate a global rising up of the burgeoning younger generation of the Muslim world against the West. I was wrong. I underestimated by quite a margin the impact of Internet based social networks on younger Muslims. As we saw in the Arab Spring, most young Muslims want the same Human Rights that Americans want.
Young Muslim women, who find themselves constrained in their home environments, don’t hesitate to exercise the rights of Western women when they travel abroad. Of course, they comply with the traditions of Islam, but even those constraints may be breaking down. At the same time, even Bible thumping Christians, who will tell you that every word of the Bible is absolutely true, are being forced to acknowledge that passages like Leviticus 20:13 and 1 Timothy 6:1 are no longer appropriate in the modern world.
As Professor Jung pointed out in his Archetype of the Apocalypse, there has been a revelation and judgment that the old ideas are no longer true, and they are in the process of being destroyed—broken asunder. As human beings, we do not yet know how the new Truth will emerge. The Internet may allow it to emerge quickly, in only a few decades, but it will surely be quite different.
The old ideas of nation states will surely break down. The Royal Society recently published a population study of what will happen between now and 2050. By the middle of this century humanity will have added another 2.3 billion people to our planet, at the current rate. That is equivalent to adding another India and another China within the next 38 years! To support that, we have to add a city of 1 million people every 5 days for the next 38 years! Long before then, India will run out of fresh water sufficient to support its population. If we, in America, think that catastrophe among many will be far away from us and we need not worry about it, we are sadly mistaken. Just the consequences of that one dislocation will be vast and varied across the entire globe.
As a species, we are going to need to wake up from our long slumber of complacency, because the Apocalypse is upon us, and it will not be over until we have either agreed on new models of society for the future of our species or we have destroyed ourselves, and left the planet to our ancient ancestors, the microbes. These issues are not in the remote future, as some may believe and will argue. These issues are for us to resolve. If we leave the work for our children and our grandchildren, the Apocalypse may be far more than just a Jungian archetype talked about in intellectual circles.
The Royal Society’s study, which no one can reasonably deny, establishes the urgency of this mission of developing the new Truth for our species. If religions don’t modernize, they will become irrelevant. Adolph Hitler and Hideki Tojo proved that you can make good people believe something very wrong for a long period of time, but eventually good people speak up and say, “The Emperor wears no clothes!”
Skip Conover is an international businessman, author and artist. He is a Founder of this organization. You can follow him and his work on Twitter using @skip_conover. "Just Askin'" is a regular feature on this site.
