On September 11, 2003, the C.G. Jung Institute of Santa Fe sponsored “The 9/11 Memorial Address” for the citizens of Santa Fe.

It is a humbling honor to be invited to give the 9/11 Memorial Address. What can possibly be said that even begins to approach the horror and the grandeur of that day? The horror of the act, and the grandeur of the response of the American spirit.

We all have our particular memories of that moment in history. For me, the images of people leaping from the top of the World Trade Center are forever embedded in my memory. It was a scene from Dante's "Inferno." Equally stamped in my memory—perhaps from Dante's "Paradiso"—are pictures of firemen climbing the steps inside the World Trade Center—climbing to what they must have known could be certain death—in order to rescue those they could, as hundreds of people were frantically rushing down the stairs to safety.

They, and the men who brought down American flight 93 over Pennsylvania, are forever memorialized by the words in the scriptures that tell us, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

And so 9/11 takes its place alongside the defining moments of the American experience. Bunker Hill. Gettysburg. Pearl Harbor.

But for us, the question remains, what is the significance of 9/11 for America and the world? My own view is that 9/11 is but part of a far larger process that even now needs greater understanding and evaluation.

For some time now we appear to have come to the end of the world, as we have known it. Nukes in North Korea. Jihad vs. McWorld. A potential India-Pakistan nuclear shoot-out. The merger of human and artificial intelligence scientists say will create the "post-human" epoch. Increasingly, the next three decades loom as the most decisive 30-year period in history.

Within this context, I want to offer some thoughts on what some of the larger implications of 9/11 may be, and what it may mean for us.

I would start by offering the view of one of the world's most experienced observers of global events. In 1957 Peter Drucker wrote, "No one born after the turn of the 20^th century has ever known anything but a world uprooting its foundations, overturning its values and toppling its idols." If Drucker's right, and I personally think he is, despite all the political, social and technical advances of the past century, the underlying story of the 20^th century was about a world where the historic social arrangements, spiritual underpinnings and psychological moorings that had anchored nations for centuries, have been in a transition of epochal proportions. The tectonic plates of life as we've known it are shifting.

To illustrate Drucker's comments, I briefly offer six trends that suggest how the entire context of human existence is changing. Then I'll focus more in depth on what I see as the underlying dynamic of our particular moment in history.

First, science is in the process of redefining our understanding of terms first given us at the dawn of human consciousness: such terms as "nature," "human," and "life." Increasingly, scientists are subordinating humans to technology. The faster computers go, the faster our whole tempo of life goes just to keep up. In essence, we may be abdicating our own psychological center of being and handing it over to the computer. Within the next three decades we'll have reached the point where the question will be, "What are humans for in a world of completely independent, self-replicating technological capability?"

Second, for the first time in history, the Caucasian race is no longer reproducing itself. No European country is reproducing its population; nor are Caucasians in North America reproducing themselves. The implications of this are so far-reaching that it's difficult even to speculate what they might be.

Third, future ages may view man's seeing the Earth from the Moon as the defining event of all subsequent history. Joseph Campbell clearly considered it the most significant psychological event of the past several thousand years. Seeing Earth from the Moon vastly accelerated the collapse of all the boundaries that provide identity—boundaries of nation, race, religion, class and gender. Thus everyone, to some degree or other, faces a crisis of identity. This also profoundly affects the underpinnings of all religions, as every religion includes some cosmological concept of how the universe was first created. But space exploration has given us new and different information and perspective.

Fourth, for the first time in history, what constitutes a family is being redefined. This has acute implications for government, education, social cohesion and what we broadly term "civil society".

Fifth, the ability to create change, as well as the attitude that change is desirable, is now a global possession. Throughout history, in all civilizations, continuity rather than abrupt change has been the normal state of affairs. No society on the planet knows how to live with constant, radical change. Thus for the first time in history, every nation is, concurrently with all other nations, in a state of profound crisis as we try to adjust to an ever-accelerating pace of change. Thus there is no global center of stability and order such as Britain provided in the nineteenth century, and America supplied the second half of the twentieth century.

Sixth, our whole symbolic language has been devalued. For example, "Heaven" used to carry a sacred meaning. It was the dwelling place of the gods; a place people hoped to go when they died, our link with eternity. Now we speak simply of "space," an endless void. Similarly, we used to speak of "Mother Earth," which gives the earth a creative, nurturing implication. Now we speak only of "matter," an abstract, lifeless substance. In this way, our symbolic language has been diminished. The function of symbolic language is to infuse into our conscious life some of the transcendent meaning that emanates from the unconscious realm, from the depths of our inner being. That connection has been weakened, so there's far less transcendent vitality brought into our conscious life.

These trends—and many others—will be shaping the global context for the rest of our lives. What these trends portend is one reason I suggest we've come to the end of the world, as we've known it.

Let's focus now on what I suggest is the underlying dynamic of our time. For perspective, I want to offer the insights of three well-known Americans. Adlai Stevenson had the unfortunate luck of twice being the Democratic presidential candidate chosen to oppose Dwight Eisenhower. In 1954, Stevenson asked in a speech at Columbia University, "Are America's problems but surface symptoms of something even deeper, of a moral and human crisis in the Western world which might even be compared to the fourth, fifth and sixth-century crisis where the Roman Empire was transformed into feudalism and primitive Christianity? Are Americans," Stevenson queried, "passing through one of the great crises of history when man must make another mighty choice?"

In 1961, Dr. Edward Edinger, until his death in 1998 considered by many to be the dean of Jungian analysts, began a talk in New York on symbols and the meaning of life, with these words: "Modern man is passing through a major psychological reorientation equivalent in magnitude to the emergence of Christianity from the ruins of the Roman Empire. Accompanying the decline of traditional religion, there is increasing evidence of a general psychic disorientation. We have lost our bearings. Our relation to life has become ambiguous. The great symbol system which is organized Christianity seems no longer able to command the full commitment of men or to fulfill their ultimate needs. The result is a pervasive feeling of meaninglessness and alienation from life."

Five years later, Joseph Campbell, possibly the world's foremost authority on the symbolic and psychological meaning of myths, noted that every one of the world's "great spiritual traditions is in profound disorder. What has been taught as their basic truths seem no longer to hold." The world, he concluded, "is passing through perhaps the greatest spiritual metamorphosis in the history of the human race."

Stevenson, Edinger and Campbell—three of the most thoughtful Americans of the mid-20^th century, comparing the condition of America and the Western world to that of Rome during the end of the ancient world and the emergence of Christianity. I want to explore the ramifications of their remarks a bit, for this issue has become a dominant driving force not only in America's spiritual and psychological life, but also in our culture, our politics, and international affairs. This represents the most fundamental change a people can experience

What actually happened when the Greco-Roman world was transformed into early Christianity? The history books tell only part of the story. We know of the corruption of Rome; the severe decline of population; the neglect and even abandonment of farms; the collapse of the Roman system of aqueducts and roads; the high taxes and the trade imbalance; and, perhaps most importantly, the rise of what Arnold Toynbee termed the "internal proletariat"—those who no longer shared the traditional ethical and spiritual belief in the ancient religion that had provided inner cohesion and meaning to Rome's outward achievements. All of this set the stage for invasion by the "barbarians"—the "external proletariat"—that overran Rome from the north. That's all on record.

Those were the outer manifestations, but what happened to the inner life of the people? We get some sense from the Roman poet Lucretius who summed up the temper of his times when he wrote of "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. All in all, it was an extended, earth-shattering social and psychic upheaval.

The history books speak of the "decline" of Rome. But at its heart, it was a long-term—at least four or five centuries—psychological shift of the prevailing God-image from the multiple gods of the Greco-Roman period, to a new spiritual dispensation. A new God-image emerged for a new phase of psychological maturation and human experience. From Ireland to Italy, Europe went through a prolonged period of the transformation of underlying principles and symbols. What emerged we know as Christendom.

What Stevenson, Edinger and Campbell—and others—have suggested is that America and the West are experiencing a similar—and perhaps even greater—long-term reorientation today. This is what Drucker was referring to when he talked about a world uprooting its foundations, overturning its values and toppling its idols. If this is so, what, in fact, this would mean is that for some time now we have been living through the Apocalypse. Let me emphasize that in talking about the Apocalypse, I'm not making any metaphysical statements about God or the Unknown Immensity that created the universe. This is strictly commentary on the psychological significance of the Apocalypse on us as human beings.

Generally speaking, the Apocalypse as presented in the Book of Revelation is misunderstood, a misunderstanding arising from two different ways of interpretation. One is the literal interpretation, which is the fundamentalist view. The other is a symbolic interpretation, which was St. Augustine's belief. Thus the fundamentalists see the Apocalypse as the literal end of the world. Some forty-eight million Americans believe this will happen in their lifetime. The symbolic interpretation sees the Apocalypse as the end of the Christian eon, and a protracted time of some new spiritual dispensation coming into being.

When we speak of the end of the Christian eon, what we're suggesting is that the spiritual impulse that gave highest value and meaning to Western civilization is no longer the inner dynamic of the collective Western psyche. It is no longer the informing force in the soul of America and Europe's "creative minority" who give us our literature, theater, science, technology, education, cinema and music. In this sense, the character of our culture is the best indication of what is emanating from the depths of the Western soul. For culture is to a nation what dreams are to the individual—an indication of what's going on in the depths of the inner life.

When a shift takes place on the scale we're suggesting, when the God-image changes, that is an epochal experience. For what is happening is that part of the unconscious within us is seeking to become conscious. Such a process has happened before. It's clearly seen in the differences between the rather imprecise polytheism of the Iliad and the purposeful and morally inclined monotheism of Exodus. Indeed, the differences between the Old and New Testaments suggest another such change in the God-image. Such developments represent a significant evolution of consciousness. The underlying continuity of that process must be taken into account as we evaluate our own era.

If we are in the midst of such a reorientation, when did it start, and how has it been expressing itself? Part of the answer lies in the 16^th century when the earliest harbinger of this reorientation emerged. That omen was the appearance of the Faust legend around the 1540s.

As we know, Faust made a pact with the devil in order to gain knowledge, power and pleasure. During the second half of the 16^th century, over fifty versions of the Faust myth spread across Europe. This in an age when there was no Internet, TV or even newspapers. So the European collective psyche was beginning to express something that was clearly the antithesis of Christianity. The Antichrist was manifesting itself. The reorientation had begun.

By the time of the Enlightenment and French Revolution, reason had replaced Christian belief as life's highest authority, at least for the "creative minority." And so Notre Dame, one of Christendom's most hallowed cathedrals, was turned into a temple honoring the Goddess of Reason.

In the 19^th century, the reorientation—the Apocalypse—gained momentum—despite the Romantic Movement's reaction to reason. The great German philosopher Hegel wrote in 1827, "God has died—God is dead—this is the most frightful of all thoughts, that everything eternal and true is not, that negation itself is found in God." Hegel voiced a theme that was to grip the souls of many of Europe's finest spirits for the rest of the century. In 1850 in England, Matthew Arnold wrote "Dover Beach," lamenting the "retreating sea of faith." At the same time, Lord Tennyson, England's Poet Laureate, warned of "the secular abyss that is to come." 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 announced that if God is dead, then "Everything is permitted."

So when Nietzsche proclaimed in 1883 that "God is dead", he was not announcing a new thought; he was expressing a psychological reality for most of Europe's "creative minority." Thus it was not at all surprising that as the 20^th century opened, Thomas Hardy should write "God's Funeral," a poem noting "our myth's oblivion," and asking "who or what shall fill his place?" W.B. Yeats echoed Hardy in his 1920 poem, "The Second Coming": "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

America was not immune to these influences working on the European soul, although there was a certain "lag time." But in 1925—when America was creating the "consumer society" with new technologies and a booming stock market—F. Scott Fitzgerald published America's first celebrated expression of the loss of transcendent meaning. Said Daisy in The Great Gatsby, "I'm pretty cynical about everything. I think everything's terrible anyhow. Everybody thinks so—the most sophisticated people." Fitzgerald's biographer, Andrew Le Vot, later wrote about the meaning of The Great Gatsby, saying, it is "not men who have abandoned God, but God who has deserted men in an uninhabitable, absurd material universe." This theme of the supposed absurdity and meaninglessness of life became a core premise of American culture. From Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman", to J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, to James Dean and the movie "Rebel Without a Cause" to Allen Ginsberg's "Howl", to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, to Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom series, all were reflective of Camus, Beckett, Sartre and the "school of the absurd."

Similar disquiet showed itself throughout other areas of society. Paul Samuelson, America's first recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics, wrote in the mid-70s, "More isn't enough. People are better housed, fed and educated than twenty-five years ago, but that isn't producing satisfaction. There's a spiritual element missing." The Wall Street Journal echoed Samuelson. The Journal noted that it is "not only religious belief that has declined; so has the powerful secular faith that sprang from the Enlightenment. The power of reason, the power of science, the belief in progress—all are coming under increasing doubt."

What this darker side of two centuries of Western culture represents is an erosion of the structures and values that historically have been the architecture of the collective Western psyche, and which are no longer expressed by an operative religious myth. This breakdown of collective psychic structures has led to the increasing dysfunction of our social arrangements such as family, education, culture, government, and, inevitably, the church. This was noted in 1980 in a remarkable assessment by Robert Nisbet, one of Ameirca's foremost historians and social theorists. Wrote Nisbet in The History of Progress:

What was present in very substantial measure of the basic works of the founders of political democracy was a respect for such social institutions as property, family, local community, religion, and voluntary association, and for such cultural and social values as objective reason, the discipline of language, self-restraint, the work ethic, and, far from the least, the culture that had taken root in classical civilization and grown, with rare interruptions, ever since . . . the architects of Western democracy were all students of history, and they had every intellectual right to suppose that moral values and social structures which had survived as many vicissitudes and environmental changes as these had over two and a half millennia of their existence in Western society would go on for at least a few more centuries . . .

Then in a stark conclusion, Nisbet wrote, "But in fact they have not [gone on]."

Similar expressions of the Apocalypse—or loss of life's highest meaning—have continued on into the present day.

Walter Russell Mead is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. In February he wrote an article for The Washington Post that carried the headline, "It's the Dawning Age of the Apocalypse." After surveying what he considers to be the retreat of progress, Mead noted that "apocalypse anxiety has moved into the mainstream of American politics and culture . . . a line has been crossed. This is Oppenheimer country. The Age of Progress is in the past and this is the era of Shiva, destroyer of worlds." The Council on Foreign Relations and The Washington Post—you don't get more Establishment than that.

We see expressions of this loss of collective meaning in the regression to earlier forms of political, ethnic, nationalistic and religious ways of thinking. All nations seem to be in the midst of some form of crisis of identity. None of the categories of the past—social status, religion, ethnicity, culture, heritage, region, nation—in and of themselves alone—is an adequate context of thought and action in an era seeking some new spiritual and psychological foundation for a global period.

A further sign of the reorientation taking place is the massive spiritual search under way. Look in any bookstore and you'll see hundreds of books on religion, spirituality, mysticism, addiction of all kinds, finding meaning in life, psychic health, and much more. Forty years ago, no major bookstore would have carried such a huge category of books. Today, new religions and sects are emerging literally every day. There are over 1500 so-called religions in America, including some anomaly called "Catholic-Buddhists." Look at the popularity of TV shows such as "Touched by an Angel," or books such as the "Chicken Soup" series, with sales of over ninety million books. The Internet assumes a spiritual dimension with its endless virtual prayer chapels and prayer meetings. We're even told people see the Internet as a new metaphor for God.

One way in which the reorientation is expressing itself has to do with power. It's a psychological fact that when the psychic energy expressing life's highest value is no longer projected into a God-image, it doesn't simply evaporate. That psychic energy is often projected into some other value—frequently power or pleasure.

Thus power becomes life's highest value for many people. Power is simply psychic energy, and it's essential for life. But it needs to be held in creative tension with its opposite—restraint. Colin Powell has a plaque on his desk that reads, "Of all the manifestation of power, restraint impresses men the most." Powell understands power, as well as himself.

Many other powerful people lack Powell's understanding. Think of the countless corporate mergers that have taken place over the past decades, most of which haven't met economic or financial expectations. Many of these mergers resulted from the power complex of CEOs who didn't have power in a creative tension with restraint. Psychologically, power served as their god, their supreme value. So stockholders, employees and even communities have lost trillions of dollars simply because of individual CEO's ego-inflation. That's not an argument against mergers. It's an observation about why some mergers have taken place.

There is another example of ego-inflation that is even more serious. It comes from certain areas of the scientific community. The Washington Post offers an example. The Post quotes Microsoft researcher Steven Shafer, formerly a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Shafer said that while at Carnegie Mellon, he always felt "teaching steals from research time." At Microsoft, however, Shafer seems happier. "To me," he confides, "this corporation is my power tool. It's the tool I wield to allow my ideas to shape the world." My power tool—a classic expression of what appears to be the inflated power drive, or what the great theoretical physicist, Freeman Dyson, described as the "technical arrogance that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."

Most of America is totally unaware of the extent to which fascination with what scientists can do with their minds has gripped many in the scientific community, and is driving our scientific research and the constantly accelerating pace of technology development. Indeed, the scientists themselves are unaware of it, which is a prime reason it's potentially so dangerous. We're all so mesmerized by our own sense of power—the power of the technology we use daily—that we simply don't realize what's happening.

At least since Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century we have viewed the purpose of science and technology as being to improve the human condition. As Bacon put it, the "true and lawful end of the sciences is that human life be enriched by new discoveries and powers." The question today is whether we're creating certain technologies not to improve the human condition, but for purposes that appear to be to replace human meaning and significance altogether.

British Telecom's futures research staff predicts that with the human genome project, "a combination of man and computer search will be able to identify the genes needed to produce a people of any chosen characteristics." Someone, somewhere, we're told, "will produce an elite race of people, smart, agile and disease resistant." MIT's Sherry Turkel sees the "reconfiguration of machines as psychological objects and the reconfiguration of people as living machines."

Suggests Ray Kurzweil, "When machines are derived from human intelligence but are a million times more capable, there won't be a clear distinction between human and machine intelligence—there's going to be a merger." Another tech visionary tells us that the wiring of human and artificial minds into one planetary soul will ultimately mean "the disappearance of the self altogether, right into the collective organism of the mind." No socialist or communist could have had a more stark vision of the collectivized society.

Perhaps Jaron Lanier, who coined the term "virtual reality" and started the world's first virtual reality company, best assesses what's happening. Writes Lanier, "Medical science, neuroscience, computer science, genetics, biology—separately and together, seem to be on the verge of abandoning the human realm altogether . . . it grows harder to imagine human beings remaining at the center of the process of science. Instead, science appears to be in charge of its own process, probing and changing people in order to further its own course, independent of human agency."

Gregory Stock carries Lanier's thought to its ultimate conclusion. Stock sees a time soon emerging "when humans no longer exist . . . Progressive self-transformation could change our descendents into something sufficiently different from our present selves to not be human in the sense we use the term now." Thus arrives what some scientific intellectuals herald as the "Post-human" or the "Post species" age

Albert Einstein was concerned about just such possibilities. Warned Einstein in a speech at Cal Tech, "Concern for man himself and his fate must form the chief interest of all technical endeavors."

Ignoring Einstein's warning, some scientists are, in effect, proposing the cancellation of the five thousand year quest to create a moral order for human existence, and the potential self-destruction of humanity as we've known it—all under the guise of something some scientists say is "evolution." In a very real sense, many scientists have abdicated responsibility for the possible consequences of their research and invention.

What's the likely outcome? No one really knows. But England's Martin Rees, possibly the finest theoretical physicist today, looks at current scientific and technological experiments and estimates there's "a 50% chance of a catastrophic setback to civilization." He maps out numerous ways new technologies could destroy our species by the end of the century, and concludes that this is simply something we have to risk "as the downside for our intellectual exhilaration." Rees's use of the words "intellectual exhilaration" is a telling expression. It would appear to represent the enthrallment that grips some scientists when they see what they can do with the raw power of mind. The power of mind becomes life's ultimate principle. It becomes a god.

And so scientific power, not held in a creative tension with restraint, potentially becomes suicidal in a world of planet-destroying technologies.

This is all part of the end of the world as we've known it—the end of the Christian eon—the Apocalypse.

What is the meaning for us as individuals of all we've been discussing? Many unanswered questions abound. Do we understand the irrational side that was part of what drove Mohammed Hatta and others to fly into the World Trade Center? Why do we Americans tend to see ourselves as primarily good, and many other people as largely bad, whether we're talking about Muslims, Russians, Chinese, or French? What does it signify that both sides in the so-called war on terrorism are driven by archetypal images of "good vs. evil?" Are we aware of how much we project our shadow side to the rest of the world? Do we understand the Muslim fear that the secular Western model of globalization could mean the eventual end of Islam? What does our blithe dismissal of other nations views of us indicate? What does any possible astrological dimension to 9/11 represent?

More immediately, how do we respond in practical terms to the reorientation shaping the totality of our lives? To some extent America is already responding with the most sweeping redefinition of life in our history. All our institutions are being redefined and restructured. Corporations are redefining their mission, structure and modus operandi. In education, countless new experiments are underway, from vouchers to charter schools to home schooling. The legal system is assisted by the increasing use of alternative dispute resolution (ADR). Functions formerly executed by local governments are now undertaken by civic and charitable organizations. Numerous steps have been taken to redress the severe environmental imbalance we've created. More citizens 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. Perhaps most importantly, we're integrating a global perspective into the fabric of our education, culture, and international relations. Take West Point, for example. All the cadets at West Point learn a foreign language such as Chinese, Russian or Arabic, and they take a year's course in some foreign culture. So on one level, we're already at grips with some of the manifestations of the reorientation that engulfs us.

On the personal level, I offer what I see as the heart of the matter. To consider this, I draw on the work of C.G. Jung and Edward Edinger, who have informed so much of whatever understanding I may have of this subject.

I want to say a brief word about Jung, especially as a historical figure. Trained as a psychiatrist, psychiatry was the instrument of his work, but not the main work itself. In my view, the work he will be remembered for in centuries to come is the introduction of a new worldview, the initiation of a new cultural epoch. This worldview enables contemporary man to develop a consciousness that can give each person a metaphysical and cosmic significance. There is a sacred continuity to life that has been disrupted in our scientific age. As Edinger said in 1961, our relation to life has become confusing. Future generations may see Jung as having discovered the key to reestablishing that relationship to life. In this sense, I see Jung as one of those historical figures who only comes along every five hundred years or so. If such an assessment is valid, it is not too surprising he is so misunderstood in contemporary America.

For the layperson such as myself, Jung's work is not easy to grasp, for he dealt in immaterial realities. You can feel a heart or lung, but not an archetype or complex, although you can certainly see their manifestations. But I believe what Jung explored represents the most basic dynamic at work in the world today. It affects every one of us, and it influences everything taking place. If we don't comprehend what's happening on the level of the soul, at the level of the psyche, we won't have a basic understanding of what's happening to our world. For in the end, it's the individual that makes history; it's the individual psyche that produces all our philosophies, art, economic and educational theories, as well as our psychological assumptions, our technology and all else. The psyche is the engine of history, and right now the greatest change in the world is taking place in our collective psyche. Thus it's necessary to offer a brief look at some of Jung's discoveries that relate to the reorientation we're discussing.

Jung explored the deepest realm of the psyche, both in his own life and in his patients. In so doing, he discovered the foundational layer of the unconscious that is common to all humankind. He also discovered the psychological dynamics of spiritual experience. As Edinger notes, as a result of Jung's work, we are now able scientifically to understand the psychological processes that create religions. Prior to Jung, there was no scientific data or language enabling people to understand this, so people just generally referred to "spiritual experience." But what happened to St. Paul on the road to Damascus? Thanks to Jung's discoveries, we now have some general ideas.

In the course of his work, Jung explored the psychological meaning of the Apocalypse. The word "apocalypse" comes from the Greek, meaning "revelation, an uncovering of what has been hidden." There are four features of the image of the Apocalypse: revelation, judgment, destruction and renewal. Revelation discloses new truth about how life and the universe function. Judgment assesses the state of contemporary conditions in light of this new truth. Destruction is the collapse of old institutions and relationships 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. If one carefully considers the 20^th century, all four of these trends operating simultaneously are visible.

Such epochal changes as the Apocalypse don't take place out in the cosmos somewhere. They take place in the collective psyche of us as human beings. As the collective psyche is by definition unconscious, we're usually unaware of the inner psychological dynamics of this change, even though we see its outward manifestations in both culture and contemporary events.

One of Jung's discoveries was that an archetype is not an intert psychic pattern as Plato thought, but a dynamic agency with autonomy, spontaneity and intention. An archetype is a spontaneous phenomenon, completely independent of our will. In this sense, it's a living pattern of behavior common to all humanity. Jung once described an archetype as "an overwhelming force comparable to nothing I know." Taken as a whole, archetypes determine our every-day activity at least as much, if not more, than does ego-consciousness. We have only begun to understand archetypes and their relevance to the totality of all life forms—including their potential cosmic significance.

One of the countless archetypes is the archetype of the Apocalypse, which becomes activated at certain points in a culture's history. When set in motion, its function is to bring about a transition from one spiritual dispensation, to a new one. That's what happened 2,000 years ago in the Greco-Roman world, which was rife with Jewish apocalyptic writing, much of which was included in the Book of Revelation.

Psychologically, every worldview or spiritual dispensation revolves around the Self. Jung's experience of the Self (large "S") is quite different from the usual reference to the self (small "s"), which generally means the ego's awareness of itself and its surroundings. Jung's Self is the central archetype of order, and the unifying center of the psyche. As such, the Self functions as the God-image. The Self expresses psychic wholeness or totality. Like all archetypes, the Self is composed of opposites—spirit-matter, love-hate, good-evil. The Self appears to contain the psyche's transpersonal capacity.

During an apocalyptic time such as the shift from the Greco-Roman world to Christianity, the Self becomes highly activated. It then manifests the four apocalyptic features of revelation, judgment, destruction and rebirth.

Thus the Apocalypse not only means the end of an old worldview; but it’s also the emergence of a new spiritual expression, a new God-image that historically is part of an evolutionary process. The new manifestation will gradually assimilate into its own forms of understanding the spiritual and cultural expressions that have preceded it. It could be that the Christian God-image of a completely benevolent God of love eventually evolves into a God-image in which there’s a union of opposites. Thus the 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 is separation of the shadow. The new God-image may seek completeness—which would be assimilation of the shadow. 

Such completeness—or wholeness of personality—is, in the words of Lewis Mumford, “the destiny of mankind.” This wholeness, Mumford wrote, requires “the creation of unified personalities, at home with every part of themselves, and so equally at home with the whole family of man, in all its magnificent diversity.” For Mumford, nothing less than “a concept of the whole man—and of man achieving a consciousness of the cosmic and historic whole—is capable of doing justice to every type of personality, every mode of culture, every human potential.”

Completeness on this order would be a manifestation, in Jung’s words, of the “original oneness of the unconscious,” but this time on the level of consciousness. Such a new spiritual dispensation would be in keeping with the psychological reality of the Self. It goes without saying a development of this magnitude is a prolonged process. What I’m suggesting is a not a metaphysical statement. We’re talking strictly in terms of the psyche.

Because the activation of the Self takes place in our unconscious, one of two outcomes is possible. One is that activation of the Self be experienced consciously, and integrated into the totality of our lives by us as individuals. This is the preferable outcome. If that's not done, then the activated Self is manifested collectively in external events. We already see countless examples of this external manifestation in terrorism, in the Arab-Israeli madness, in the apocalyptic or degraded themes of our culture, and in the growing dysfunction of many of our social structures.

So, much of the future depends on how each of us studies the archetype of the Apocalypse, what it is, and what it's meaning for us and our era represents. This takes time and work, for it's not an intellectual exercise. It's something to be assimilated at the soul level over time. If enough people internalize the psychological meaning of the Apocalypse, then the destructive phase might be minimized, and rebirth will be encouraged.

Thus individual awareness of what we're talking about is critically important as all of this unfolds in our collective psyche. The more conscious we are of what's happening, the greater our chance to make a positive contribution by integrating the activated Self internally into a greater wholeness. One way to help do this is by becoming conscious of my shadow side, the rougher elements of my character social convention causes me to reject and submerge in my unconscious. A British psychologist suggests that if you want to know what your shadow looks like, just draw up a list of characteristics that you most dislike in other people, and there you will see your shadow.

The shadow is the source of evil in life, as well as the source of many creative but undeveloped qualities. Other people are aware of my shadow, as it daily expresses itself. Certainly other nations are keenly aware of America's collective shadow. The potential danger of the scientists we mentioned earlier is that they are not aware of their own shadow, of their unconscious motivation. Most of us don't seriously confront our shadow. We knowingly talk about it. It's common jargon. But resolute confrontation with our shadow takes concentrated and continued focus. It's not a short-term effort; it's a life's journey. The shadow represents my most available entry into the unconscious. The act of seeing elements of my shadow helps transform it. Jung once remarked, "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness [the shadow] conscious."

Once part of my unconscious shadow has been recognized for what it is, that triggers a need for it to change and become conscious. In this manner, I create greater consciousness, which, as Jung suggests, is the purpose of life. If we do this, we then become not only a more unified personality, but we also leave a creative deposit in the collective soul of humanity. We help create the new era that is to come. As Edinger wrote, then we "become seeds sown in the collective psyche which can promote the unification of the collective psyche as a whole."

This is how we achieve the higher level of consciousness that's so urgently needed. What we're discussing is, in my view, the most vital challenge facing any individual, for it's our personal contribution to the future of humanity.

But then there's the question of how we as a nation see our collective shadow. As suggested earlier, we worship power, whether military, technological, corporate, political or personal. Yet one of Jung's most profound insights was that the opposite of love is not hate, but power. "Where love stops," he wrote in The Atlantic Monthly in 1957, "power begins, and violence and horror." What are the implications of that both for us as a nation and as individuals?

Part of the answer lies in another question, "What is my highest value in life?" Each of us must know the answer to that question. Historically for the Western world, "God" would have been the answer for most people. For millions, that's still true. For others, they would like it to be true, but it doesn't quite have the ring of authenticity about it. It's more in the nature of reaching back for a lost emotional feeling. For still others, it's a meaningless salute to the past.

For myself, because I believe Jung discovered the key to interpreting the deepest truth of our spiritual and psychological life in terms of the needs of contemporary man, I would say my highest value is "the fullest possible degree of individual psychological maturity and completeness." This is said keeping in mind the older meaning of the world psychology—"the study of the soul." So my highest value would be "the greatest possible maturity and wholeness of the soul." Two crucial features of this would be first, a relationship with that transpersonal dimension of life that's beyond all human comprehension, and second, continuing awareness and integration of my shadow.

Psychological wholeness and wisdom is a condition I will never reach, but always seek. One sign of psychological wholeness might be, "To be able to hold two diametrically opposite views in balance without becoming emotionally attached to either view." In my opinion, such a condition of completeness includes sensitivity to the sacred mystery of all life, and, above all, that quality of compassion and love best described in St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians.

In psychological terms, what we're talking about is seeking a complementary relationship between the ego and the Self, developing a dialogue between the two. Such a relationship has historically been one of the functions of all religions. For example, speaking of the psychological implications of the biblical passage we know of as the Lord's Prayer, Edinger notes that it is "a formula for maintaining a connection between the ego and the Self." He suggests that the phrase "Hallowed be thy name," means I must remember the transpersonal sacred dimension of life. "That is what the ego is reminding itself—to remember that life is not just secular, it has a transpersonal dimension." The phrase, "Thy kingdom come," suggests that the ego is "announcing that it recognizes that the rule of the Self should prevail."

In this sense, Christianity provided the essential psychological superstructure of the Western psyche, and it's that psychological architecture that's been changing over the past generations. In my view, that's what's at the heart of our times being the end of the world, as we've known it.

So for me, the term "psychological completeness" includes the ethical grounding and symbolic significance of our spiritual heritage, but interprets and advances it in a fresh manner so as to account for the advance of contemporary consciousness. That's my personal experience. Others may find different understandings.

To sum up, I quote Richard Tarnas, professor of psychology and author of the forthcoming book, Cosmos and Psyche: "As we look at the world today, we cannot escape the fact that something epochal is dying. We daily watch and experience it in our institutions, in world events and in the ethos of destruction that has become such a cultural and social motif. What we're experiencing is a sign of the unconscious collective psyche passing through the throes of a reorientation, a death and rebirth. The great challenge is, can each of us—on an individual level—go through the reorientation that's being experienced collectively by our civilization? Can we individually recognize the great spiritual, archetypal nature of that reorientation, and engage it on that level so that civilized life finds rebirth? Or, will we be unconscious of it, blind to the deeper reality and personal implications, and consequently collectively act out the reorientation self-destructively as contemporary history?"

What we're talking about involves a degree of awareness of the unconscious impulses that are inside each of us, and thus in our civilization as well. Part of the unconscious person inside our collective soul is seeking fresh expression in a greater consciousness. That's the meaning of an apocalyptic age. It's more than intellectual. It's a psychological and spiritual maturation that is seeking new form. As Jung wrote in 1957, "We must now climb to a higher moral level; to a higher plane of consciousness in order to be equal to the superhuman powers science and technology have placed in our hands. In reality, nothing else matters at this point."

Some eternal, infinite 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.

If we Americans could engage this task, we would not only recreate a new foundation for liberty at home, but we would offer the world a fresh hope that might help ensure the world's children no longer have to experience the various forms of 9/11 so many children across the globe have had to endure.

Copyright William Van Dusen Wishard 2003.
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