From Chaos to Clarity: Navigating a World Gone Mad
Now is our time to embrace the spiritual revolution.
Our modern Western society has made extraordinary progress in human consciousness and all the advantages that derive from it: universal morality of human rights, scientific and technological progress, etc…
yet, many contemporary humans experience acute physiological angst.
We see the rise of nationalism, fascism, nazism, communism, war.
Culture, reason, and civilization have not been able to balance those phenomena of collective madness.
Where does this madness stem from?
The root cause of this madness lies in the amputation of the soul of modern humans.
“Psychoneurosis is in its deepest sense a suffering of the soul which did not find its purpose.” (C. Jung)
How did we amputate our human soul?
- Loss of faith
- Loss of unity with Nature
- Loss of wisdom from our past
- Loss of love, connection to our heart, and interiority
Loss of faith
In the past, religions and political ideologies were the places where Westerners invested their need for purpose and meaning.
Religion had a therapeutic effect and people who lived a religious or spiritual life were generally less subject to psychological suffering.
With the recent decay of religions, a big void remains which consumerism cannot make up for.
That void is fertile ground for many neuroses.
Loss of unity from Nature
Before humans migrated to big cities and positioned themselves consciously as ‘masters and possessors’ of Nature (as says René Descartes), Nature was not a simple environment for human beings: it was lived, experimented, and interiorized.
Nature was part of human beings, as much as human beings were part of Nature.
By separating themselves from Nature, modern humans have been deprived from their most vital relation to the world, the one that has structured their psyche for millennia.
The deep symbolic relation that Nature has with human beings has been broken and with it its profound affective energy.
Loss of wisdom from our past
In the past, our ancestors were living from what they possessed, in the present moment. They were very much connected with their instincts and their roots.
Now, torn off from our roots and our ancestors, we are constantly being projected into the future, rocked by this illusion that the best is yet to come.
This breeds an ever-growing sense of discontent, discomfort, and agitation
We are not living anymore from what we possess, but from promises; not anymore from the light of the present day, but in the shadow of the future where we expect a true sunrise.
The less we understand what our ancestors were looking for, the less we understand each other, and we are contributing with all our strength to strip the individual from its instincts and its roots.
Loss of love and interiority
We have sacrificed our interiority for the profit of exteriority.
In other words, we have increasingly negated our hearts and imagination for the profit of reason. We impoverished our inner life at the expense of outer success.
But this came at a high cost.
Despite the pleasures coming from outer, individuals are living a scaled-down life. The profound joys of the heart and the inner life become less and less accessible.
The more the ‘critical mind’ is dominant, the more individuals waste away.
Connecting with our heart evokes our capacity to listen to the voice of our unconscious psyche, and nurture our imagination and its symbolic and mythical universe.
Through our imagination, we can ‘re-enchant ourselves with the world.’
A fracture exists within the modern individual between its conscious personality and its unconscious personality. The conscious personality has become civilized, organized, and rational, while the unconscious personality remains primitive, wild, and irrational.
However, if the latter is not being integrated into the conscious psyche through a symbolic life, a spiritual practice, or a profound psychological work, it can express itself at any moment as violent, barbaric, and compulsive, both individually and collectively.
This is unfortunately what we witness in many places nowadays.
The solution is interior and individual.
To heal ourselves and respond wisely to the evil that is devouring human beings and the world today, we need to rediscover and reconnect with our soul.
It might sound simple, but it’s not easy.
The great transformations in history have always come from the evolution of consciousness of a few individuals that then rallied all the others.
Think of the birth of all great religions.
As Margaret Mead famously said:
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. It’s the only thing that ever has.”
Now is the time for the next spiritual revolution.
So, let’s reconnect with our faith, with Nature, with the wisdom of our ancestors and with our loving heart.
If we want to heal the world from its latest epidemic, the depletion of the soul, it will have to come via a transformation and an elevation in the consciousness of individuals.
