Through the Apocalypse, Into the Light
Part 2: Through Mirrors, Doors, and Fires
Faces in the Mirror
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular”. Carl Jung reminds us that the energy of love is what activates the unconscious, bringing us face to face with our own darkness, enabling us to purify the psyche and prepare a space where lover and beloved can meet.”
— Llewelyn Vaughan-Lee
So we resolve to face the shadow and surrender to the process of psychological apocalypse.
What do we see?
Perhaps the first thing we’ll notice is that we cannot hold our gaze.
We begin to consciously experience our escape mechanisms: all the ways in which we deny that the shadow is an active force in our lives. It’s very hard to look at the mirror and not flinch. When we see the ugly reflection that doesn’t fit with our grand and heroic image of ourselves, we look away — sinking back into distraction, consumption, or confusion.
We like to think that we understand ourselves and the world, but the faces in the mirror suggest otherwise. They may be unfamiliar, distorted, terrifying, even otherworldly. It takes courage to admit our ignorance, and to admit the scale and power of the unconscious forces that act on us — and through us. It takes endurance and dedicated practice to learn how to dance with those forces, to commit to the alchemical process of coming into harmonious and loving relationship with them.
But the first step is to not run away. We must resolve to peek inside the grinding engines of the crazed Western mind that we have all inherited. We have to study those engines with diligence — only then can we set about making repairs and changing course.
When we do decide to lift the veil and face the apocalypse that is already unfolding within the collective psyche, we come face to face with evil, cruelty and violence — with the full extent of the darkness of the human psyche.*
We have to stare that shadow in the face, and not flinch. The first step, naturally, is getting beyond our denial of the shadow.
Beyond Denial
We will do anything to deny and disprove that we live immorally, to not face up to the violence that we carry out on a daily basis through our actions… and inactions. To run from what Jung called our “complicity in evil”, and not squarely face the immense pain we are causing ourselves and the world.
We soon realise that we are going to have to drop all these pretty images of ourselves as being thoroughly good, rational and moral, and thereby recognise that we each have an unconscious, animalistic, and often amoral shadow side that is actively contributing to the pain of the world.
We feel this pain every hour of every day, churning under the surface of our daily worries and anxieties which lead us to act in harmful, violent, self-serving ways. We are all doing our bit to ensure humanity’s steady sleepwalk into global apocalypse. And we in the industrialised West sit atop the pyramid of global oppression and destruction (more on this inbalance to come).
So we also need to admit: by leaving the shadow psyche unilluminated, we allow it to continue wreaking its violent havoc, making everyone’s lives far more painful, disconnected and depressing than they need to be, including our own.
If we continue to ignore the dark unconcious, we remain on track for violent societal collapse and planetary system crash. But if we confront the shadow psyche then we can address the problem of psychological suffering at its root and curb the violence we enact through our unconscious survival-mode behaviours.
This discovery presents us with a great challenge: stepping out of our victim mentality and into radical responsibility. If we don’t dredge these demons up from the depths, who will?
We each have a body and mind with its own landscape of survival mechanisms which act against the welfare of the whole. So we each have personal duty to address the selfish and ruthless behaviours we (and those around us) are locked into, lest they continue reproducing Hell on Earth.
Yes, it is that bad.
A friend of mine, Paul Lichtenstern, recently wrote that: “in a different era, our indifference and denial would prop up regimes as violent as Nazism or the Atlantic slave trade.”
Something clicked when I read this.
My gut lurched and I had a stark realisation: our collective indifference and denial are perpetuating atrocities just as violent, if not more so, as the Holocaust extermination of millions of Jews, the forced incarceration of countless African peoples, or the cold-blooded genocide of indigineous Native Americans.
Feeling this viscerally — the horror and the sorrow of it all — I cannot help but feel anger towards the likes of Steven Pinker who smugly proclaim that we as a species are “more prosperous and peaceful than ever before” (this is the main argument of his bestseller “The Better Angels of Our Nature”). One level it is true, but on another it is an utter lie. Yes, there is far less war, famine and disease than in the past — but take one look at life on Earth today, and you would be hard-pressed to argue that we who are living today are not collectively responsible for more suffering than Earth has ever seen.
Let’s take (live)-stock.
- There are 60 billion of our animal siblings — living, breathing, sentient beings with emotions and sensations just like you and I — sentenced to life imprisonment in death-camps (factory farms). Sixty. Billion. 60,000,000,000.
- The sixth global mass extinction continues to accelerate. More animals and plants (each irreplaceable, sacred and with as much right to life as any one of us), are being desecrated and killed than ever before.
- Via corporation-driven capitalism, the global elite have made billions of people’s lives a bleak, anxious and meaningless battle for survival. Enter: a planet of dehumanised wage-slaves. 5 billionaries own more wealth than the bottom 3.5 billion.
- We are currently witnessing ecosystems collapse across the globe due to human-driven global warming, agriculture, and deforestation… meaning that we are on track for 5°C temperature rise before 2100, in which case it is predicted that 3–6 billion people will no longer have an adequate food supply and face death by starvation. We are living through a global genocide of unprecedented, incomprehensible scale. Climate justice is the biggest social justice issue we have ever seen. It is also a racial one, given that Global North countries contribute vastly more emissions and pollutions than the (blacker and browner) peoples of the Global South. I recommend Rupert Read’s This Civilisation Is Finished: So What Is To Be Done for a big-picture overview of this situation and the range of possible futures we are facing.
Our governments and corporate leaders know about all of this. But not only are they not responding, they continue to invest in fossil fuel extraction in order to maximise profit for investors! And we keep buying their products to help them along! It’s utterly surreal to consider, when you look around at the green garden paradise of Earth, how things ever got this fucked up.
And yet, here we are. Our blind and dumb attachment to increasing capital at any cost, combined with our unwillingness to face the destructiveness of our lifestyles, is going to decimate global civilisation. It has already decimated the biosphere.
Naturally, we’re next.
It’s like we are inside a burning house, pouring fuel on the fire while telling ourselves “there is no fire, everything is fine”! This can only be understood as a case of collective insanity.
This mass psychosis, dissociated to the point of being suicidal, is heartbreaking to witness — and horrific to find actively operating within oneself (“I need this Ethiopian coffee, I need to fly to Italy, I need new shoes”…).
We have fallen into hell and it is writhing and screaming all around us and within us — but we refuse to see it, push it away behind the veil of our denial, and try to get on with our lives. But it keeps crashing back into consciousness in waves of despair, depression and nightmarish visions of the future. This isn’t going to stop, and the more we resist, the more painful it’s going to be.
We need to surrender and let the dark waters of unconscious flood in, dissolve everything we hold dear — and transform us completely. Nothing could be scarier. But if we can hold fast to the unfathomable power of love and a knowing that there is freedom on the other side, we might just find the courage to lift the veil, look in the mirror, and let the apocalypse in.
Sometimes a wild god comes to the table, and we need to listen to him.
The Door of Surrender
Let’s face it: we know what’s going on, we just don’t let ourselves feel it. Because deep down we know that if we did, we would break, and we would not be able to continue to live as we do: with our heads in the sand, tucked away in our little prisons of false security, certainty and comfort.
But when we acknowledge that apocalypse is an unavoidable psychological process, a kind of initiation of the soul into wholeness which necessarily involves a death and rebirth of the ego, we realise that either way we are going to have to face the shadow, sooner or later.
Either way it will be utterly hellish, heart-breaking, and soul-rending. But here we may realise that we have an important, essential choice:
Option 1: We experience the apocalyptic destruction of the dark unconscious when our economies, ecosystems and societies crash and collapse, and things turn violent. Oppressions are amplified tenfold (this is already happening). We are still operating in survival mode, unable to relate to the shadow psyche with understanding or awareness, and so these experiences naturally cause us immense suffering.
Option 2: We consciously and intentionally face the dark unconscious in the stability and safety of personal practice (meditation, dreamwork, psychotherapy, vision quests, active/creative imagination) and supportive community. In short, we submit to the process of psychological apocalypse and its transformative, liberating effects. That is the call of this article. What it does is allow us to begin operating in soul mode — the dimension of our psyche that lives without fear of suffering, death, or personal injury (the full transition make take an evening or a lifetime, or possibly many). We then turn towards the pain, grief and confusion of the world in order to help relieve it, even in situations as horrific as societal collapse.
“The greatest gift to the world is our fearlessness”
— Thich Naht Hanh
We are empowered to do all of this because we have gained some elements of psychological development and maturity:
We may recognise the suffering of the unillumined shadow psyche as it plays out in the people around us, so we relate to them with compassion — a longing to help.
We may know ourselves to be mortal, which stops us launching out on desperate, futile, and self-serving attempts at personal immortality.
We may have released our delusions that “I am this body, I am this mind, I am these thoughts”.
We may have tasted the power of love and compassion to transform reality and free us from the suffering of our selfishness. When we live for the whole we taste a peace and freedom that is hitherto unknowable, even in the midst of great activity.
We may have glimpsed the eternal and infinite, bringing us a freedom of vision that transcends this specific self, lifetime and world.
Reaching these levels of psychological insight and release enables us to serve others from a place of love, understanding and compassion through whatever passes.
The Path Ahead
In Carl Jung’s words,
“the chaotic unconscious is being brought to light”.
Now the shadow is being forced upon us by the world situation, we have a chance to face it, confront it, investigate it, understand it, and ultimately, embrace it, find meaning in it. Just maybe, it will free us from the prison of selfish desires.
We begin to understand that facing the horrors of the world and how we contribute to them is the exact same process of “lifting the veil” on our denial, delusion, ignorance and neglect of the world’s suffering.
It’s also the only way that we can rise out of the sleep and suffering of survival mode and into the fresh air and mystical beauty of soul mode, where we serve all beings effortlessly and joyously in spirit of unwavering love.
But the sheer difficulty of making this internal journey, of facing the torturous chaos of the unconscious, is precisely what is holding us back from facing and addressing the extremity of our society’s oppressions and the urgency of our global situation. Most people are not equipped with practices or skills to do this, let alone the guidance of shamans, elders and teachers. So it is also a case of luck and privelige. As a result, those of us who are in a position to face and work with the shadow have a duty to do so.
Using this privelige for the good of all will involve:
- understanding and overcoming our selfish (often violent) survival-mode behaviours
- listening to our grief as a force of love and compassion, one that reveals our connection to all life and call us backs to the whole.
- understanding our roles as oppressors; healing unconscious biases (such as racism, speciesism, classism, sexism) which enable our complicity in the oppressions and violences of an amoral capitalist system
- blossoming into our fullest potentials for selfless service (finding our unique soul-work) and helping as many others as possible to do the same.
Our unwillingness to use our privelige and face the shadow leaves us tranquillised and therefore vulnerable to being hacked, programmed and dominated by the elite and their algorithms that steer our hands and bodies towards generating profit to the neglect of all other values (such as sustaining life on earth). Our attention is seduced, drawn out of ourselves and into their pixellated reality-simulation. They love this because it makes them rich and keeps us silent, robotic and dumb. Thus we are living through an “epidemic of sleep” (Paul Lichtenstern again).
We desperately need to admit our robotic-ness, because it’s killing us. The irony is that the further we run from the shadow, the more powerful it gets. The darker the darkness gets. Only by moving towards it, bringing it into the light of awareness and love, does the shadow give way to light.
Soul Fire
You are not alone, friend. We are in this together. And as Winston Churchill said,
If you’re going through hell, keep going.
The only way to keep going, then, is to admit that at some level, we are experiencing hell. There is a seething hidden underworld that occasionally brushes at the edges of our awareness, often in the depths of our dreams, visions and imaginations. It’s undercurrents give rise to the surface-level ripples of anxiety, worry and confusion. Sometimes it breaks through in full force, and we are held fast by its power and tragic, desolate nature.
When it does, we need to resolve to use that as an opportunity to awaken, grow and transform. No more hiding, no more running away.
It’s true that the depth and density of the darkness is hard to fathom, let alone face. The mere mention of societal collapse within our lifetime is simply repulsive — basically unimaginable — to us.
Starvation, violence, exploitation, war, drought, disaster, death… it’s all so repulsive that we deny it, in just the same way that we deny our mortality.
“Not gonna happen.” we tell ourselves. But what would our lives look like if we were operating from “this is very likely going to happen within few decades”? If we rose to the challenge of becoming fearless servants of humanity through one of its darkest hours? And what if we realised that rising to that challenge would actually lift us out of despair and into unimaginable light, love, beauty?
If we don’t do this, we will continue to contribute to social and ecological collapse, harming ourselves and countless others in the process. If we can’t face the inner apocalypse, then an outer apocalypse is essentially guaranteed.
When things get really challenging, we will be at the whim of the unconscious, responding to difficult situations with fear, selfishness, anger, and even violence. We have to prepare for the majority of the population to act this way when the going gets tough.
If you’re reading this, then you are one of the few who are called to face the chaotic unconscious of these times — suffering consciously through it so that others don’t have to. We do that out of love in a spirit of service, not for any personal, heroic, gain. It doesn't make us better or more imporant than anyone else.
Now of course we still have to do all we can to prepare for global collapse at a material level. We still need to strive to feed everyone, to distribute water and resources fairly and evenly, etc. It always worth reflecting that it is possible that we figure this out. It’s unlikely, but we have to try.
In addition to our worldly preparation we also have to prepare psychologically, by looking inwards: redirecting our awareness away from the bottomless pit of the attention economy (scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll…), away from the objects of our rampant and uncurbed desires (eat, buy, drink, eat, sleep…) and towards the vibrant, living images that swirl in our bodies, minds, and hearts.
These images, which arise spontaneously and unexpectedly, are symbolic communications from the gods, demons, and archetypes of the vast (infinite) collective unconscious.**
Some of these shadow figures will prove to be utterly dark and terrifying, others may depict light and freedom, and still others will suggest a harmony between the two — intimations of our unique soul path through the pain of the world and into the divine mystery at the core of our being.
These images are the soul reaching out to the self in an attempt to initiate it.
And this initiation is the death-rebirth process of psychological apocalypse.
These soul-messages, which invite our transformation, are coded in the unique language of the images and symbols that come to us in our dreams, visions, artworks, poetry, conversations, and meditations. I recently wrote specifically about exploring our dreams and imaginations in order to work with the shadow material that is presented to us by the global crisis.
You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Importantly, images do not have to be visual but may be aural/auditory, kinesthetic/energetic, or even multisensory / synaesthetic. For example, I might have a fantasy-image that arises as a melody, internally “heard” with/by the imagination, and a related sense of that melody emanating from the heart centre up to the throat, mouth, and tongue, to flow into the world as an expression of love.
Whether light or dark, we learn to notice the resonances that images evoke in the body. We are touched by images. This is the great value of developing awareness of the “energy body” (or subtle body) and emotional body — it becomes a receiver, or alchemical vessel, for the images that emerge from the unconscious.
“Dark” shadow images might initially cause contraction, closing, resistance, whereas “light” images might carry feelings of opening, release, inspiration, or vastness. Such practices become very fruitful when we allow light and dark to interact, harmonise and reconcile (e.g. allowing “the saint” to contact and dialog with the suffering of the “wounded child”).
This language of images will be different for everyone. We each need to develop a personal mythology, rich with characters and places and epic journeys, in order operate and serve in soul mode. This is better than simply diving into any old kind of service because then our service will be driven and enriched by our deepest passions, energies and desires.
“Nothing happens in the “real world” without first happening as images in our head”
— Gloria Unduluza
We must learn to listen to these deep stirrings of the psyche; the many ways in which the soul is calling on the ego to die — and be reborn anew as a servant of universal, unconditional love.
Part 3: “Beyond Fucked” coming soon. Stay tuned, and please share this if you find it valuable and helpful.
*None of this is to say that we are all personally inherently evil or violent. There is an impersonality to these forces. We need to acknowledge them and try to hold them in love, awareness and compassion (that is, the movement of love that seeks to alleviate suffering). Upon contacting the characters and archetypes of the shadow psyche, we might say “I see you, I hear you, I feel your pain”. We learn to disidentify with them, without denying them. Held in consciousness, they are no longer able to act unconsciously and destructively.
**To say that gods and archetypes are images does not mean that they are “just projections” of the ego/self. They are more fruitfully related to as autonomous living forces that act on us and through — just like people and other non-human beings. They might be invisible, but they are very much alive and endowed with agency, motive and intention. Often imaginal figures will come to us, not the other way around. Khidr, the “inner teacher” is an imaginal figure in Sufism who visits the seeker (often in dreams) when they are ready for initiation into the deeper mysteries.
