The Mystery of Jesus (Page 7 of 12)

THE APOCALYPSE IS ITS OWN SOLUTION

by Paul Levy

We are living in apocalyptic times. Our country and the entire world are in a state of profound dissociation. The opposites being completely split and polarized like they are is itself an expression of some deeper process that is emerging or incarnating. To quote the great doctor of the soul C. G. Jung, "the sickness of dissociation in our world is at the same time a process of recovery, or rather, the climax of a period of pregnancy which heralds the throes of birth."

Psychologically speaking, apocalyptic phenomena represent the birth, in full-bodied manifestation of what Jung calls the archetype of “the Self." In religious terminology, the emergence of the Self is analogous to the incarnation of God or the coming of the Messiah. Being a conjunction of opposites, when the Self, or God incarnates, the opposites split and become totally polarized. As Jung points out “If God reveals his nature and takes on definite form as a man, then the opposites in him must fly apart: here good, there evil." The perfect symbol re-presenting this is the Christ event, in which God incarnated through one man 2000 years ago. When read symbolically, as a dreaming process, God's dark and light sides were totally split and completely polarized in the figures of Christ, who was totally light, and Satan, who was the embodiment of the darkest evil. To quote Jung, "It looks as if the superabundance of light on one side had produced an all the blacker darkness on the other." There was a complete dissociation between the two. Referring to God during his incarnation as Christ, Jung points out: “Had he only given an account of his actions to himself, he would have seen what a fearful dissociation he had got into through his incarnation.�  The opposites being totally polarized like they are in our world today is itself an expression that some deeper process   is emerging and being revealed to us. The inner meaning of the word apocalypse is ‘something hidden being revealed.’ 

The deep dissociation in our world today is itself a reflection of the inner split in the collective consciousness of all of humanity, and we could say, the mind of God, as well. To quote Jung: “All opposites are of God, thereby man must bend to this burden; and in so doing he finds that God in his ‘oppositeness’ has taken possession of him, incarnated in him. He becomes a vessel filled with divine conflict."  To the extent that this conflict is not dealt with consciously via the inner process of individuation, it will be unconsciously acted out and ‘dreamed up’ in the external world in a destructive way, as is fully evidenced by what is happening on our planet today.

Christ on the cross is the perfect symbol of holding the ‘tension of the opposites,’ as the cross symbolizes both the state of being a ‘vessel filled with divine conflict,’ while at the same time being a symbol uniting the opposites. To quote Jung, to find yourself genuinely imitating Christ is to find yourself going through a “symbolic crucifixion experience" where we gain “a growing awareness of God’s oppositeness, in which man can participate if he does not shrink from being wounded by the dividing sword which is Christ. Only through the most extreme and most menacing conflict does the Christian experience deliverance into divinity, always provided that he does not break, but accepts the burden of being marked out by God. In this way alone can the imago Dei [God-image] realize itself in him, and God become man."  It is by holding the ‘tension of the opposites,’ and not splitting off and projecting out the shadow does the Self incarnate through humanity. To quote Jung: “This is the meaning of divine service, of the service which man can render to God, that light may emerge from the darkness, that the Creator may become conscious of His creation, and man conscious of himself."   

Because God wants to incarnate in humanity, the uniting of the opposites that are intrinsic to God’s nature must take place in humanity, too. To quote the Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton, “For we must see that the meaning of man has been totally changed by the Crucifixion: every man is Christ on the Cross, whether he realizes it or not. But we, if we are Christians [and we are all ‘Christians’], must learn to realize it." We need to wake up and recognize the deeper process (“every man is Christ on the Cross" ) that pervades the entire field and is enacting itself through each and every one of us.

Instead of ‘holding the tension of the opposites’ that the cross symbolizes, however, the religious right splits-off from and dissociates from their shadow, projecting out and dreaming up their own darkness ‘out there.’ By then trying to destroy this darkness they become possessed by it. Born-again Christians who feel that the apocalypse is soon to happen and are waiting for the ‘rapture’ are missing the entire point. Fundamentalists who buy into end-time prophecies and are willing to destroy other people to prepare for the coming of the Christ are completely misguided.

It is a very dangerous situation we are in -- because of the position of power they find themselves in, the religious right can literally dream up and create the very apocalypse that they are imagining is prophesized, like a Self-fulfilling prophecy. In a perversely self-reinforcing feedback-loop, the more death and destruction happens, the more this confirms to them the truth that their deluded end-time scenario is actually happening as prophesized. In a diabolical self-validating vicious cycle, the religious right are ignoring the role they are playing in creating exactly what they are using as evidence to prove the rightness of their viewpoint

Seen symbolically, when Christ is on the cross God is in such an extremely dissociated and traumatized state that he is not just attacking himself but is actually killing himself, literally committing suicide. The cross perfectly symbolizes the mysterious correspondence and correlation between incarnation (of the Self) and the self-destructive nature of trauma. Is there a deeper meaning to why our culture's myth of the incarnation of God 2000 years ago in Christ was in the form of a trauma, of an abuse drama (the crucifixion)? Is there a difference between God, who is one with everything and all, putting nails through his own body during the crucifixion, and propelling jet planes through skyscrapers on September 11?

When contemplated as a dreaming process, the fact that the apocalypse archetype is activated deep inside the human psyche and is playing itself out collectively in this world of ours means that the Self, or what some call God, is incarnating not just through one man, like it did through Christ 2000 years ago, but is incarnating through all of humanity. Christ was the first attempt of God to incarnate and transform itself. Now humanity as a whole will be the subject of this process.

To quote Jung: “the imago Dei pervades the whole human sphere and makes mankind its involuntary exponent." We, as a species have all gotten drafted into a deeper, more powerful archetypal, transpersonal process that has so taken possession of us that it is unconsciously acting itself out through us. It is like we are all playing roles in a mythic, archetypal drama, what Jung would call a “divine drama of incarnation."  God is incarnating through humanity, and in that incarnated form it offers itself as a self-sacrifice to bring about its own transformation- just like what happened to Christ 2000 years ago. To quote Jung: “One should make very clear to oneself what it means when God becomes man. It means nothing less than a world-shaking transformation of God."  The ordeal that humanity is undergoing is the sacrificial act to bring about the transformation of what Jung would call the “not yet transformed God"  entering the human sphere in search of its own transformation. By this self-sacrifice and self-destruction God is bringing about its own transformation just like it did through Christ, though this time, instead of being incarnated in one person, God is incarnating in the mortal, fleshy body of all of humanity.

What is happening in our world right now IS the second Coming of Christ, what Jung calls the “Christification of many."  If not recognized, however, we will continue to unconsciously act this process out (Self)destructively, where we all become suicide bombers, killing none other than our(Selves). Being possessed by a deeper archetypal force and acting it out unconsciously is always traumatic and always results in self-destruction. The only way to heal from trauma is to assimilate it, which demands that we radically evolve to a higher state. Trauma is therefore initiatory, as it furthers the evolution of the species. To say trauma is initiatory means that the experience of trauma itself is the very medium through which a deeper level of consciousness is potentially actualized.

To quote Jung, the “incarnation of God- the essence of the Christian message- can then be understood as man’s creative confrontation with the opposites and their synthesis in the Self, the wholeness of his personality."  If enough of us wake up to that the archetype of the Self is incarnating through us we can connect with each other and channel this process consciously as ‘collective reciprocal individuation,’ in which we mutually support and strengthen each other’s lucidity and realization. This is to recognize that we are all interconnected appendages in the ‘mystical body of Christ,’ which is to realize that we are not separate from each other but are actually all on the same side. This is to snap out of the self-perpetuating illusion of the fear-based separate self and recognize that we are one(Self). We can then collaboratively hook up with each other and work together to create a container so that we can metabolize this more powerful archetypal energy and express it creatively, constructively and compassionately. This is an evolutionary impulse offered us by the universe that we are invited to participate in.

We play a crucial role in the divine incarnation process. We become the medium through which God reconciles, resolves and reunites the opposites intrinsic to the totality of its nature. We become the instrument through which God becomes aware of itself and incarnates itself into, as and through this world of ours. To quote Jung “Man is the mirror which God holds up to himself, or the sense organ with which he apprehends his being."

If Christ is God incarnate, no one could have taken his life away from him against his wishes. Seen as a dreaming process, those who betrayed Christ, conspired against him, or killed him, were less fully responsible agents than instruments or tools in the hands of God. There is a hidden correlation between evil on the one hand and the work of incarnation, salvation and redemption on the other. God has mysterious ways of accomplishing his secret intentions. As Christ hangs on the cross, to quote Jung “the ’prince of this world,’ the devil, vanquishes the God-man at this point, although by so doing he is presumably preparing his own defeat and digging his own grave. According to an old view, Christ is the ‘bait on the hook’ (the Cross) with which he catches ‘Leviathan'  (the devil)."  Seen symbolically, this is analogous to what is happening in this current day, as after the election the ‘prince of this world’ has seemingly vanquished all that is Good and Virtuous and has become ruler of this world. Might he be ‘digging his own grave’ in the process?

The very process of us mutually dreaming up the expected and prophesized apocalypse is itself the very vehicle or medium through which we potentially wake up to the fact that we are all collaboratively dreaming up our universe together. Encoded in these apocalyptic times are the clues for its own integration and transcendence. The symptoms of our time contain within themselves, in hidden symbolic form, the key to their re-solution. The key to how our situation manifests depends on whether or not we recognize the deeper process that is symbolically revealing itself to us as it acts itself out through us. Becoming conscious is the key, for consciousness itself is the agency through which both God and humanity become transformed and inter-mingled as one.

People, fundamentalist Christian or otherwise, who are waiting for the coming of the Messiah are ‘missing the mark,’ which is the inner meaning of the word ‘sin.’ WE are and always have been the very Messiah we are waiting for. It is simply a question of whether we recognize this or not. Let’s realize this, for God’s sake, as well as our own.