Big Dreams Part II: The Red Pill
“Conflict exists strictly as an opportunity to raise our consciousness.” — Carl Jung
Following the Embodied Imagination training, Robbie Bosnak taught an online course on Carl Jung’s The Red Book. Over six months as I took the course, I continued to pull at random the same set of images from my Psychic Tarot deck: the Tower, Surrender, Heartbreak and Loss, and Wisdom. Wisdom was illustrated as a tall man who looked like the teacher, Robbie, holding a luminous red book. (I had only just started using the Psychic deck and, needless to say, this particular image does not exist in other decks.)
There were parallels between my collective dream about the Empire State Building collapsing and Jung’s journey with the Red Book. In 1911, Jung was plagued by nightmarish dreams: one about Europe being crushed under the foot of a giant; another of blood spreading across the whole of Western Europe. Jung feared that he was having a psychotic break. When WWI broke out, he was relieved (at least on a personal level) to know that he was not psychotic and that his dreams were foreshadowing collective events. He began to journal his interactions with the autonomous personalities and images that inhabited his unconscious. His journal, The Red Book, became the seminal tome for his groundbreaking work in psychology. The Red Book was guarded by Jung’s family and only released after a hundred years, in 2009. I don’t think this is a coincidence. Perhaps the spirit of Jung was offering this “red pill” to awaken a world teetering again on the brink of economic, political, and environmental destruction.
It was also not coincidental that my Big Dream of the American empire collapsing came at the end of 2012. There was a great deal of buzz in the public discourse about 2012 being the end of the Mayan calendar that had documented human events for thousands of years. What could this mean? Did it mean the end of the world? In an NPR interview, a prominent medical doctor and expert on the Mayan calendar explained that the Mayan calendar is a way of measuring the energy from the earth’s core. Significant changes in the earth’s magnetic field corresponded with significant events in human history such as world wars and the Great Depression. The ending of the Mayan calendar suggests that an enormous shift in the energy field which we can observe in events such as climate change, a worldwide pandemic, wars that threaten to expand worldwide, and the upheaval of socio-political norms, posing an existential threat to civilization as we know it and the survival of the planet.
The end of the Mayan calendar also represents a seismic shift in human consciousness: a shift from dualistic (polarized) consciousness to unified consciousness. Imagine when human consciousness changed from perceiving the world as flat to realizing that the earth is round. Or when Galileo posited that the Earth revolved around the Sun at a time when the scientific world believed that everything revolved around the Earth. They imprisoned Galileo for his radical science. But, at some point, the balance of belief tilted to a global understanding that planets revolve around the Sun.
We are in such a time now when great polarities threaten to tear the United States and the world apart. However, crisis and chaos are indicative of profound transformation. Dualism and materialism – which perceive the physical world as the only reality – are shifting dramatically in the scientific community and public discourse. Quantum physics provides quantifiable evidence that the observer and object (psyche and matter) are interrelated. Science has come to understand what mystical traditions have known for centuries: everything is connected.
The last line of the tsunami dream holds great wisdom: “It is only the transition that is scary.”
