Inner Collective Weather
I have been reflecting on the concept of PSYCHIC WEATHER which I once heard someone speak of in Zurich. I need much more training in this subject, but I cannot find another teacher. It makes such a good analogy to look at some recent events of our modern world as if they were a kind of INNER WEATHER in the PSYCHIC world. Everyone is capable of viewing the OUTER WEATHER (THE RAINDROP KIND) as a non personal happening, but if there is such a thing as COLLECTIVE INNER WEATHER that we all share in common, few people are capable of viewing it as equally impersonal as OUTER WEATHER.
The thought comes to mind that INNER COLLECTIVE WEATHER should be taken as impersonally as the OUTER WEATHER. One could be free of a great deal of guilt which most people carry about with them.If they could differentiate the two kinds of WEATHER. Such a division would allow one to take appropriate measures for each kind of WEATHER.
INNER COLLECTIVE WEATHER would be the kind of suffering which is raging through our culture during the last few months and is so often viewed as a personal experience. Both WEATHERS get one "wet", so to speak, but the two are best treated by very different attitudes. INNER COLLECTIVE WEATHER is the accumulated mistakes of our whole historical experience but is not a personal matter. Ordinary OUTER WEATHER is an immediate highly personal experience. To assign guilt to the wrong level is useless suffering. To confuse these two attitudes is to leave one in a helpless confusion of cures that has no conclusion.
What can we say about INNER COLLECTIVE WEATHER? From the above manner of thinking, it is a profoundly deep attitude which is proving to be incorrect. History gives us some terminology that is useful for this inquiry: before the age of Copernicus COLLECTIVE THOUGHT was that the earth was the center of the universe and everything else was to be judged as peripheral to the earth. Copernicus upset this attitude by teaching that the sun was the center of our universe and our earth dependent on the sun as the center of our known world. Outer thinking slowly changed to the Copernican model but failed to make use of the model as an inner fact. It is high time we think of the Copernican model in an inner sense; if we could go through a Copernican revolution in an inner sense by seeing the center of our personal universe as not the ego, but as the SELF (as Jung defined it) we would have a far more accurate model of our human experience. To make this transition would be extremely difficult for modern man - who is used to thinking of his ego as the center of his universe - but it would be far closer to reality than our present ego-centric attitudes.
To put this in the simplest manner: It is time we made the Copernican revolution true inwardly as well as outwardly.
I am uncomfortable when I hear people saying that we will pull out of the present depression in six months or so and be back to normal again. If the Copernican revolution in its inner sense is required, no slight alteration of our "normality" will help. We had a chance at such a revolution several times in recent history but did not recognize it. Intelligence would urge us not to fail this chance.
5 comments:
If there is such a thing as inner collective weather, than I must surely be a barometer! I have the sense that instead of inner weather being taken impersonally, perhaps,a collectve shift might come through the personal Self, individually, for a greater shift in the collective consiousness. Instead of feelings of guilt/depression, which I also have been experiencing, perhaps an inner attitude of Self impowerment is needed to shift the collective weather. Could not the outer collective weather be infunced by the individual Self? Like the clouds are moved by the Sun? If I/we are barometers, than we as individuals have the capability of using our vessels to create a better "atmosphere" and facilitate a change in the collective weather patterns.
If our commitment to the evolution of consciousness and our related desire, patterns and shifts are attended to, then surely i would think that that would contribute to the pattern of the collective unconscious and like wise the inner weather.
Apparently inner collective weather today is not as balmy as inner collective weather was not so long ago, the change attributable to the vicissitudes of our economy. I'm reminded of the saying that a recession is when your neighbor has lost his/her job and a depression is when you have lost your job. Even in formerly balmy times a fortunate few saw their share of the pie increase exorbitantly while the majority's share was static or in decline. Phenomenal worker productivity increases over the last few decades and the wealth so produced did not trickle down. By design it did not trickle down. Furthermore, consumer indebtedness was made available to the exploited instead of higher wages. Inner collective weather, good or bad, isn't really collective because, like external weather, it is good in some places and bad in others, where inner collective weather follows socioeconomic strata around as either sun or storm.
Fault lies outside of the victimized. It should be clearer today that more ubiquitous bad internal collective weather lies in the failure of governance, both corporate and political. Inner collective weather, balmy or not, has its origin in externalities if I understand your use of the term. Yet even when feelings of personal guilt are set aside with cognizance of impersonality, even with clarity there are structural/institutional impediments to collectively taking appropriate measures to improve those externalities: autocracy on the job (for those who have one) and politics where the money of a few determines policies good for the moneyed and bad for the many.
Perhaps the most significant impediment to ameliorating external wrongs, as your clinical observations suggest, is the propensity of those victimized towards self blame. Such is always a hazard for those less suited for life on or proximate to the top of the heap. Yet if bad internal collective weather is a new experience for those formerly so ensconced, one only need remember that the bounty of their balmy weather in some measure flowed from finding ways to make life for those on the bottom a bit less bearable for the fact of sick institutional imperatives. Consider as an example the gutting of defined benefit pension plans in favor of dismal and deceptive 401ks. In a therapeutic setting it might not take much silent and caring gazing to induce in the perpetrators the realization that what they did to the least among us they did to the Self. For those wronged, a brush with the Self might find them resonating with forgiveness: "for they that know not what they do". There is no blaming in the presence of unconditional love.
I feel uncomfortable, no, I feel distressed hearing that some think "we will pull out of the present depression in six months or so and be back to normal again". "Normal" in that sense is at best no fun at all and at worst is a matter of life or death for someone.
we need to first start the ball rolling by each & everyone within the Jungian community first starting to be conscious of & adjusting each of every of their actions & how each of our every actions can & will affect each of our overall community inner collective psychic so that we may each be able to affect those around us & a whole explosive & exponential collective inner weather will be able to help each & everyone of us to listen intently, consciously & seriously to what Mother Nature has to say abt the world around us & what SHE is unhappy abt what we are doing to the world around us, just like little kids need to listen intently, consciously & seriously when their mothers tell them things to look out for, not to do & avoid so that they do not get themselves into trouble with accidents, mishaps, the law & perhaps even major life-threatening events that may results in death, which sometimes I feel that all the natural disasters in the world right now such as droughts, typhoons, earthquakes, floors, etc are all of Mother Nature's way of warning all of us to change & amend our ways & ways of living & doing things, in case each & everyone of us collectively destroys the very house, which is Earth itself, that Mother Nature Herself provided for all of us Her Children to live in.
Cheryl Peh, Singapore
cherylpeh@gmail.com
The best way I found to orient myself to our times was using Carl Jung's Aion as a large scale chart. This book is written as if to describe the psychic weather for the astrological age of the fishes. Clearly it doesn't go into enough detail to describe our history year after year, so if you want more detail, what other sources are available?
There is a book by Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, focusing on astrology as the indicator of historical psychic weather. I attended a workshop with him where he went into his ideas in detail. My conclusion was that astrology leaves so much room for interpretation that it might well be understood as a psychic process rather than as an objective indicator of psychic weather. The imagery of the planets circling the sun at a regular rate has a powerful effect which may be related to the idea of psychic weather.
Nonetheless, Tarnas's book is a great read and packed with ideas and history, worthwhile even if it fails in its main attempt to link the planets with our cultural psychic weather. It is by far the closest thing I know of to an approach to this subject at a finer level of detail. It seems to me that Tarnas's innate sense of psychic weather is so powerful that he has used the motion of the planets as a containing vessel for his intuitions about our culture and our history. This is a perfect example of the problem you're talking about, which is that the contents are not being understood inwardly as psychic contents, but are being projected onto the sky. For Tarnas the solar system is a symbol of the Self, but he concretizes the solar system to BE the Self instead of seeing it as one of MANY symbols of the Self.
As far as the inner Copernican revolution, I agree that we WOULD be better if we had it, but if you look at people they don't seem to be having it by and large. Our culture is too extraverted, always focusing on the object. This attitude has been supported and encouraged by several hundred years of amazing scientific discoveries and technological advancement. People have few anchors to the inner world. Many people, especially more extraverted types, must have experience with a new philosophy in concrete terms. They learn about the world from objects in the world, but where are the objects which can embody for them this new Copernican revolution? I haven't seen any. For me the only link has been, first through Joseph Campbell, but then later through Jung, and Edward Edinger and through you yourself, Robert A. Johnson. But extraverts are in the majority, not introverts, and only because of my introversion had I the capacity to follow my instincts to the discovery of this psychic stuff. With extraverted types encountering only extraverted models of the world, it will take so long before the inner way of life gains any traction. We have to brace ourselves for the collisions between large groups of extraverts clashing with each other, all of them lacking the necessary inner view of the world which can bring peace.
At any rate, it will take some time before this inner revolution occurs.
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