Towards a New Worldview, A More Complete Orientation

Two familiar examples of such changes are, first, ancient Greece: the difference between eighth century BCE Greece and the mythological gods of the Iliad on the one hand, and, on the other hand, fourth century BCE Greece of Plato and the birth of philosophy.  A more familiar change of orientation was the psychological shift from the Middle Ages of Dante and the building of Chartres and the great cathedrals of Europe, to the worldview of Petrarch and the Renaissance.  It was a monumental shift of emphasis: from the vertical perspective—man’s relation to a God in heaven—to a horizontal perspective—man’s relationship to the natural phenomena of Earth.  The historian Will Durant summarized this shift saying, the Renaissance “replaced the supernatural with the natural as the focus of human concern…”   

Such changes evolve over centuries.  When a people is in the midst of such a change, it is rare that what is happening is generally perceived or evaluated, as people are primarily occupied with simply coping with life’s daily demands, even as they agonize over spoken and unspoken questions. 

However, it’s clear what used to comprise Western Civilization has been passing through just such a developing “civilizational change” for at least the past three centuries.  More to the point, this change is not confined to just one country as described in the above example of Greece.  Today’s “civilizational change” engulfs the entire globe.  Thus what we are facing is not so much a crisis between civilizations as a crisis within civilizations.  This is true for all civilizations today—for what once was called Western Civilization, for Islam, as well as for the Hindu and Chinese civilizations, albeit this crisis moves at a different pace in different parts of the world. 

It may even be that what once was called a “civilization” has become an anachronism.  For a civilization presumes a shared worldview, commonly accepted standards of conduct, a shared perception of values, and above all, a collective spiritual expression that represents life’s highest meaning.   

Such a condition certainly no longer exists in America.  When we talk of an  “American worldview,” whose worldview are we talking about?  Are we talking of the worldview of some forty-eight million Christian fundamentalists who, according to Time magazine, believe the world will literally come to an end in their lifetime?  Or the worldview of the high-tech visionaries who believe that when computers go millions of times faster, the world will reach an “Omega Point” and all life will be transformed beyond anything we can imagine today?  Or the postmodernists who believe there is no reality; that life is but a social construct?  Or the computer scientists who see everyone eventually linked to an electronic consciousness and “Global Brain” via the Internet?  Or the intellectual who believes rational intelligence is life’s highest authority?  Or those molecular biologists who assert we’ve reached the end of the Homo sapiens epoch, and that our descendents will not be human as we now use the term.

One could go on, but the point is clear.  The crisis within civilizations is a spiritual and psychological crisis that, in America, has been increasingly evident over the past century.  We’re now reaching some sort of critical moment.  The psychological function of religion has been at least threefold: to validate a certain moral order within a given civilization; to offer myths that connect a civilization to life’s transcendent dimension; and to link the individual’s conscious life with its unconscious grounding.  These essential psychological functions are relevant for all time; and we shall not long endure solely on the basis of humanistic scientific materialism.  The question for America, and for Europe as well, is whether we’re losing that essential psychological function religion has played, and if so, what are the potential consequences.     

A global crisis

We see this same type of crisis happening around the world.  In what once was called “Christendom,” the Catholic Church has become concerned that Islam will eventually become the largest religion in Europe, as most Europeans themselves are now secularist.  In America, despite the rise of Evangelical Fundamentalism (which is actually a symptom of the crisis) people are turning to Buddhism, Eastern philosophy, all sorts of “New Age” spirituality, multiplying schools of psychology, while at the same time, America’s “creative minority” (scientists, educators, artists, writers, etc.) is predominantly secularist.  In China, while the Communist leadership now openly preaches Confucianism, Christianity is becoming a sub-culture, as a “crisis of belief” wracks the country.  In sub-Sahara Africa, which historically has had its tribal gods and spiritualistic rituals, Christianity is exploding.  In historically Catholic South America, Evangelical belief is spreading.  Increasingly, people are becoming detached from their society’s founding orientation, and are searching for some new belief, some new point of reference in life.     

So how’s the U.S. doing?

How do we best gauge the spiritual and psychological life of today’s America?  By public opinion polls that tell us well over ninety percent of the American people say they believe in God?  By how many people attend a place of worship?  By the proliferation of over 1500 so-called religions in America, including some anomaly called “Catholic-Buddhists”?  By our bookstores’ bulging sections on religion, spirituality and finding meaning in life?  That’s one way to look at America’s spiritual condition.

Another way is to examine the content of our culture and what it’s telling us.  And here we find a different story.  America has had nearly a century of literature, art, cinema and higher education expressing first, the supremacy and then the negation of reason; the denial of any God; freedom as unfettered ego desires; the impossibility of absolute truth; nihilism at the core of existence; the absence of any transcendent reality; unlimited material consumption and the irrationality of any degree of self-restraint; and now the arrival of the multiple de-centered self.   Evaluating this is important, because culture is to a nation what dreams are to an individual—an indication of what’s going on in the inner life, in the unconscious realm, which is the crucible of consciousness.  In this sense, the unconscious is the crucible of civilization.

When one looks at American culture over the past century, it’s clear that a predominant theme, at least since World War I, has been the supposed “meaninglessness of life,” a thought antithetical to any authentic religion.  We see it in The Great Gatsby as Daisy says, “I’m pretty cynical about everything.  I think everything’s terrible anyhow.  Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people.”  This was written in 1925 as new technologies were creating new industries, and the stock market was booming.  Daisy’s lament was followed in the ‘50s by Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, and later by Rabbit Angstrom in John Updike’s novels. Indeed, nothing could denote the alienation of twentieth-century American literature better than the name of Updike’s main character, “Angstrom.”  In the elite universities, Camus, Sartre and Beckett were all the rage.  Closer to our own time, Walker Percy, one of the giants of late 20th century literature, decried, “You live in a deranged age…more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological achievement, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”  And Saul Bellow, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, lamented a culture “that has been emptied of meaning and feeling…signs of a sort of nihilism.”

It helps to evaluate what the creation and marketing of such cultural artifacts represents.  For the fact is, there wouldn’t be a market for the alienated and psychotic themes of our movies, TV and literature if such themes weren’t resonating with something going on in us as a people.  Culture is simply a mirror held up to a people’s psychic life.  Taken as a whole, Western art, literature and cinema have long revealed a profound reorientation taking place in the depths of the Western psyche.  As F. Scott Fitzgerald’s biographer, Andrew Le Vot, wrote about the meaning of The Great Gatsby, it is “not men who have abandoned God, but God who has deserted men in an uninhabitable, absurd material universe.” 

In one sense, The Great Gatsby represents a turning point for America.  It’s publication and subsequent resonance in the American psyche signaled that while there are still millions of Christians in America, the historic religion of America and the West was no longer the informing dynamic in the soul of America’s “creative minority” who give us our literature, theater, cinema, music, science and education. 

At the same time, in Europe T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy and others were signaling the same message.  The “falcon cannot hear the falconer,” with the result that we are “hollow men,” wondering “who or what shall fill his place?”

Rise of Fundamentalism

One aspect of this worldwide spiritual/psychological reorientation is the increasing presence of fundamentalism, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or Shinto.  It’s worth considering this phenomenon, as it’s a dominant force in national and world affairs. 

At least 60% of Americans believe the prophecies of the Book of Revelation will come true.  Opinion polls tell us that a large percentage of the American fundamentalists who support Israel do so because they believe Israel must control all of Palestine before Christ will return.  A well-known senator argued on the floor of the senate that Israel should maintain control of all of the Palestinian territories “because God said so.  Look it up in the book of Genesis.”  The “Left Behind” series of books is a publishing phenomenon, having sold some sixty million copies.         

For Christian fundamentalists, the Book of Revelation is a focal point of reference.  It spells out the “end times,” the Apocalypse, and it is taken literally by millions of people.  Herein lies perhaps the basic difference between fundamentalists and what might be termed “traditional” Christians.  The traditionalists take Revelation symbolically, as did St. Augustine, not literally.  This difference between literalism and symbolism is at the core of the difference between fundamentalists and traditionalists, be they Christian, Muslim, Jewish or Hindu.  All fundamentalisms tend to divide the world between insiders and outsiders, between true believers and unbelievers, the saved and the sinners, “us” and “them.” 

The implicit question raised by the Book of Revelation is, what is meant by “end times”?  Those who interpret Revelation literally believe it means the end of the world.  As mentioned earlier, at least forty-eight million Americans believe it will happen in their lifetime.  But another interpretation is that “end times” means the end of the Christian eon.  The Church fathers long ago prophesied the end of the Christian epoch, but no date was given as to when it would happen.  In fact, the death of the Church is actually built into Christian dogma.  So the meaning of the Apocalypse may not be the end of the world, but the end of a particular way of interpreting transcendent reality, while some new spiritual dispensation emerges.  It’s happened several times before in history.

The word “apocalypse” comes from the Greek meaning “revelation, an uncovering of what has been hidden.”  According to the late depth psychologist Edward Edinger who wrote a book on the psychological meaning of Revelation, there are four features of the image of the Apocalypse: revelation, judgment, destruction and renewal.  Revelation discloses new truth about life.  Judgment assesses the state of contemporary conditions in light of this new truth.  Destruction is the collapse of old forms that are no longer effective within the context of the new truth.  Renewal is the recreation of civilization according to the requirements of the new truth.  The Western psyche has focused on the destruction aspect of the Apocalypse, virtually ignoring the renewal that is to follow.

Against this background, from a psychological point of view, the story of the 20th century might be seen as the working out of these four features of the meaning of the Apocalypse.  In all areas of life, humanity has gained more new truth about nature and the workings of the universe in the 20th century than in all previous history combined.  This new understanding of nature and the universe has only accelerated the psychological and spiritual reorientation that had been underway for well over a century, and thus we have increasingly judged the effectiveness of former beliefs, relationships and institutions.  Such assessments are at the heart of the spiritual search taking place in America today, such as our redefining the status of social relationships, or the role and authority of the nation-state.  Then has come the destruction or collapse of old forms of how we have organized our affairs, forms that are no longer effective in light of the implementation of our new discoveries.  This collapse is seen in our need to reinvent all our institutions, from education to new modes of self-government.  And finally comes the birth of some new pattern of civilization based on a new expression of truth, or on our understanding of it.  A harbinger of this new birth is seen in a greater openness and opportunity for the individual, whatever his or her background or social status.  It’s also seen in our expanding sense of identity as we learn more about other cultures and peoples. 

This would be the symbolic interpretation of the Book of Revelation and the Apocalypse.  But for those with a literal interpretation of Revelation, it is literally world shattering.  As Edinger wrote, “Revelation lays out the final scenario of the end of the Christian eon, and describes symbolically the concluding events of the Judeo-Christian myth, the myth that has been the womb and metaphysical container of Western civilization.” 

The Roman experience

This same process took place as the ancient gods of the Greco-Roman era gave way to Christianity.  During the shift in the Roman world, the poet Lucretius wrote of the “aching hearts in every home, racked incessantly by pangs the mind was powerless to assuage.”  There was a loss of collective meaning; a disappearance of what had represented life's highest value. The old gods no longer resonated in the depths of the soul, especially of the leadership class. Belief atrophied. The cry "Great Pan is dead!" was heard throughout the empire. The God-image that had informed the inner life and the culture of the Greco-Roman world for a thousand years lost its compelling force. There was a breakdown of the historic psychic structures that had been the source and container of Greco-Roman morals and beliefs. This issued into the collapse of the ethical and social guidelines underlying civilized order. New religions and sects arose and vied for popular allegiance. 

At its heart, the emergence of Christianity in the Roman world was a long-term psychological shift of the prevailing God-image from the multiple gods of the Greco-Roman period, to the monotheistic God of Christianity.  A new God-image emerged for a new phase of psychological maturation and human experience.  It was every bit as much a psychological development as it was a spiritual maturation.  From Ireland to Italy, Europe went through a period of the transformation of underlying principles and symbols.  This process took several centuries to work itself out. 

Our turn now

A similar, yet different, process is transforming Europe and America today.  Europe and America have developed in the context of a religious expression that is two thousand years old.  That is a psychological fact as much as it is a spiritual fact.  Christianity, which emerged over time from the Western collective psyche, is our tradition, our roots.  It is inbred in the deepest reaches of our unconscious, and even though it may be submerged or sometimes expressed in psychologically regressive terms, it is a part of us.

And yet, it is not the truth of Christianity that is surfacing from the depths of our collective unconscious.  Rather, in broad general terms, what we see emerging is a general “sickness of the soul.”  Our “entertainment society” has become the “bread and circuses” of Roman times, while the founding truth of Western Civilization no longer speaks to us.   

Historically, this is part of a normal process of decay and rebirth, and we must understand it.  The American poet, James Russell Lowell, once wrote: “Truth is eternal, but her effluence, with endless change, is fitted to the hour; her mirror turned forward to reflect the promise of the future, not the past.”  We are in the midst of moving out of the spiritual and psychological context of the past, and reaching for the promise of the future.   

To appreciate this change of context, look at the difference between the life of a person living in Christ’s time and the average person’s life today.  Then, few traveled more than thirty miles from their home in their lifetime.  There was no news of the world; indeed, they didn’t even know there was a “rest of the world,” and what world they did know, they thought was flat.  The local priest was the only source of news or intellectual stimulation for the average person.  Life was a subsistence struggle.

Compare that with the life of the average space-age, globalized, digitalized person today.  No need to elaborate.  But the point here is what Lowell says above: Eternal truth is fitted to the hour, to the psychological maturation of the contemporary generation.  In other words, the manner in which transcendent reality was expressed two thousand years ago is completely inadequate for the contemporary psyche, as it has developed over the past five hundred years. 

This fact began to be understood by the West’s more sensitive spirits over two hundred years ago, shortly after the French Revolution.  In 1805 Matthew Arnold wrote “Dover Beach” lamenting the “retreat of faith.”  In 1850, Lord Tennyson, England’s Poet Laureate, warned of “the secular abyss that is to come.”  In “Les Miserables, Victor Hugo announced that the phrase “God is dead” is the fashionable intellectual wisdom of Paris.  Elsewhere in France, Baudelaire urged his readers to study “the rhetorical methods of Satan,” proclaiming, “The true saint is the person who whips and kills the people for the good of the people”—an attitude that later was given concrete expression in fascism and communism.  In Russia, Dostoyevsky’s Ivan concluded that if there were no God, then “Everything is permitted.”  Then in 1883, Nietzsche confirmed the prevailing European cultural attitude; “God is dead,” a thought which merely described the contemporary spiritual and psychological condition of Europe’s “creative minority.” 

I don’t know what the psychological and cultural lag time is between Europe and America, but we Americans definitely inherit whatever cultural tradition has been expressed in Europe.  The exuberant public response to the 1913 New York Armory modern art show foreshadowed a certain psychological break with the American and classical past.  Gone were the expressions of harmony and the monumental interpretation of a Raphael, the richness and humanity of Rembrandt, or the transcendent themes of a Cole, Bierstadt or Church.  In their place were more than thirteen hundred paintings of Matisse, Picasso and many other European artists who fought to free art from the world of human affairs and, eventually, from visual reality itself. 

Yet it wasn’t until “The Great Gatsby” that the American literary elite displayed a definite attitude quite different from traditional nineteenth century American expressions. 

I’ve already commented on twentieth century American culture, so there’s no need to comment further.  The previous paragraphs have only illustrated Arnold Toynbee’s observation that the contemporary spiritual and psychological transition has been under way at least since the late eighteenth century.  With the advent of instantaneous global information technologies, it has been vastly accelerated, for information technologies transmit not only information, but psychic states of mind as well. 

It’s because of the magnitude and significance of such developments that, as I suggested earlier, the crisis is not so much between civilizations, but within so-called “civilized life” itself.  Thus the next three decades may be the most decisive thirty-year period in human history.  

So what do we do?

How do we respond to such a situation?  We're already responding in the most sweeping redefinition of life America has ever known.  We're redefining and restructuring all our institutions.  Corporations are redefining their mission, structure and modus operandi.  In education, we’re trying countless new experiments, from vouchers to charter schools to home schooling.  Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) is helping lift the burden off the back of our legal system.  Civic and charitable organizations are assuming functions formerly undertaken by local governments. There are countless efforts underway to redress the severe environmental imbalance we’ve created.   More people are involved in efforts to help the elderly and those in poverty.  In fact, it’s estimated that well over fifty percent of all adult Americans donate a portion of their time to non-profit social efforts.  Clearly we have been developing a more conscious relationship with nature and the cosmos.    

Perhaps this is a modest start, but at least it's a start.  Plainly, there's another level of effort to move to.  Bill Joy, described by the Economist as “the Edison of the Internet,” suggests such efforts must include a decision whether or not to continue research and development of technologies that could, in Joy's words, “bring the world to the edge of extinction.”  Obviously, such an examination must be done in a global context if it's to be valid.

But another question is, how are you and I to live in a world that's changing faster than individuals and institutions can assimilate?  How do we maintain anchorage and balance when we’re in between two historic ages? 

I believe the starting point is understanding; simply to understand the underlying changes taking place in the world, and understanding ourselves as individuals.  As it says in Proverbs, “With all thy getting, get understanding.”  This may sound a bit too simplistic, but there’s a psychological reason the scriptures say this.  The great scriptures of the world are not the expression of the rational intellect as it has evolved over the past five hundred years.  Rather, to a large degree, they’re the expression of the unconscious, more particularly the collective unconscious, that deepest level of the psyche that is common to all humanity.  So it’s our link with the source of transcendent wisdom that’s telling us to “get understanding.”  And we must get it not simply on the intellectual level.  We must assimilate it so it becomes a part of us.

I think the reason for this is that there seems to be a transformative effect about absorbing understanding.  Intellectual understanding doesn’t change us deep inside.  Assimilated understanding does.  And unless our understanding aligns our approach to life with the needs of the times, it’s of minimal ultimate value.  Granted, the act of assimilating understanding takes time and work.  It means living with and pondering a truth long enough so that it gradually seeps into my being.  Assimilation is not a rational process; it’s a soul process.  

How do I understand myself?  One way is to examine my reaction to people.  There are two parts of reactions. First, the objective analysis of what I’m reacting to in the other person.  And second, the emotional energy behind the reaction.  It’s by examining that emotional energy that a deeper understanding of myself can be gained. 

Edward Edinger has suggested three other ways to understand oneself.  First, to examine what I love and what I hate.  For love and hate go to the very core of the human personality.  We must ask ourselves: Whom do I hate?  Which faction or nation do I fight against?  Whoever and whatever they are, they are a part of me, for I am bound to that which I hate as surely as I’m bound to that which I love.  From the psychological standpoint, the important thing is where my psychic energy is lodged, not whether I am for or against something.  Thus the more we look at our loves and hates, the more we understand ourselves.

Edinger’s second suggestion is to examine my projections.  A projection is simply an automatic process whereby I perceive images or contents of my own unconscious to be in the other person or nation.  Projection is a completely unconscious process, which makes it more difficult to recognize it in myself.  Other people can easily see my projections, just as other nations can easily see America’s collective projections.  (The evil is “out there” in the “other,” not in me or my nation.) 

C.G. Jung, one of the world’s most perceptive psychologists of the past century, said that the effect of projection is to isolate a person from other people, since instead of a real relation to them there is now only an illusory one.  Projections change the world into “the replica of one’s own unknown face.”  In other words, I accuse other people of characteristics or motives that are actually hidden in my own unconscious.  Thus we all need the help of family or friends in order to see our projections, which, if we keep working on it, will eventually reduce them. 

Finally, it’s essential to realize that my psyche is made up of “opposites”—love and hate, good and evil, generosity and selfishness, belief and doubt, etc.  Such opposites are indispensable preconditions of all psychological life.  No one escapes them.  If I do not see these opposites clearly within myself, I tend to project them onto others, especially the negative ones.  All conflict—social, ethnic, political, international—stems from projection of one or more of the opposites.  The international situation today is a horrific example of the warring opposites within us as individuals (leaders and led), which evolve into crises.  Understanding that these opposites dwell within each of us is the sine qua non of psychological maturity.  If I emotionally identify with either one of the opposites, that prevents me from being a “carrier of wholeness.”  (That doesn’t mean that I don’t hold a balance between the opposites, or objectively evaluate one opposite as being more beneficial than the other.)  If enough individuals consciously see our opposites and hold them in such a balance, then we become a carrier of wholeness, and we contribute to a world that is crying out to be made whole.   
  
Intimations of some new expression

Some new spiritual orientation may gradually assimilate into its own forms of understanding the spiritual and cultural expressions that have preceded it, much as Christianity was influenced by Greek, Jewish and Persian thought.  Jung suggests that the God-image of a completely benevolent God of love may eventually evolve into a God-image in which there’s a union of opposites, which, from a psychological standpoint, would represent a greater wholeness of personality.  Thus a new God-image would include male and female, spirit and earth, good and evil. The Christian God-image seeks perfection—“Be ye perfect even as your father in heaven is perfect.”—which implies separation of the shadow.  A new God-image may seek completeness—which, from a psychological standpoint, would mean assimilation of the individual shadow so that one becomes a broader and more complete personality.  (And lest we are tempted to think we’ve become too sophisticated, and have grown beyond the need for a God-image, it’s well to remember that every civilization that lost it’s God-image, it’s collective sense of highest transcendent meaning, eventually disintegrated from internal psychic disorientation and loss of an informing meaning and cohesion.)     

Thus given every individual’s basic requirement for psychological continuity and connection to our roots, we’re faced with the need for a psychological reinterpretation of the scriptures that have been the psychic foundation of Western civilization.   Such a psychological reinterpretation could break the expressions of two thousand years ago out of their archaic thought-forms, and convey them in thought-patterns that resonate with the contemporary psyche.2  Psychologically, we carry all the past with us; thus outdated expressions need to be reinterpreted so they are accessible to the modern psyche, as the psychological and symbolic truth embedded in scriptural expressions represents the only solid basis for any civilized Western order. 

The challenge is that we now feel no connection with what has been the psychological foundation of Western civilization.  We need to reconnect not with the dogma of the past, but with the living experience, the psychological reality, that has been the underpinning of our culture for the last two millennia, and take it forward for the unfolding global epoch.  That Infinite Ineffable Unknowable, which is at the heart of all of the world’s scripture, needs to be rearticulated so that the truth embedded in it resonates with people of whatever background or belief.   To some degree or other, all cultures are faced with this same challenge over the coming decades.

Conclusion

In summary, we live between two ages.  There’s a new epoch of human meaning struggling to take shape for all humankind.  Through the chaos and the killing, through the heartache and inner emptiness, the birth of a heightened consciousness is fighting its way out of the womb into the light.

The womb that nurtures this New Time is nothing less than the human unconscious, especially the deepest strata that is the source of humanity’s greatest potential.  The key to unlocking this deeper realm is to know ourselves in a new and deeper way; to become aware of life’s opposites—the façade I present to the world, and my unrecognized shadow; the good and evil; the loves and hatreds—that dwell within each of us, all of which constitute the totality of who we really are.  The task is to strengthen the dialogue between consciousness and the limitless creative powers of the collective unconscious, wherein resides life’s highest meaning.

Some boundless, inexplicable power is at work in each of us, as well as in the universe.  This power is the source of renewal of all man’s most vital and creative energies.  With all our problems and possibilities, the future depends on how we—each in his or her own unique way—tap into that eternal renewing dynamic that dwells in the deepest reaches of the human soul.