Cutting
Tags: Apocalypse, Jung, Earth

Cutting

A wound was opened in the fabric of Creation beginning about 3,000 years ago. What fell out of this gash in the body of All-That-Is was monotheism, monasticism, exploration, enlightenment, and the slavery of matter and the feminine. Our relationship with the natural world was severed, the umbilical cord was cut. The immanence of spirit within matter was denied its rightful home in the beauty of the Earth. This has not been a problem until now, but now we have reached our limit. Let me describe a few recent strands of this spiritual and physical clear-cutting. The history, and how we got here, I shall deal with elsewhere.

All indigenous cultures knew that the Earth was holy. Our reverence for matter was exiled by Western consciousness from the heaven that was on the Earth and found another home. It re-appeared inside the psyche as what Jung called the Self. Our wildnesses and wildernesses became quarantined, by an apartheid collective, in the townships of analytic hours.

A great unawareness has descended over the last 500 years, contra those who trumpet the upside of civilisation. No Manchester mill owner in the late 1700s asked where will all this industry lead? No colonial administrator in the days of the British Empire asked what will happen when the worm turns? And when humanity’s ecological footprint hit 1.0 planets 50 years ago, no-one, no-one, except the Club of Rome, said there are limits to growth.

To prevent the enormity of this wound, this tearing, coming to consciousness the Western psyche resists any awareness of our separation from what sustains life. Mafia-like, under the table and out of sight, in order to maintain our unconscious, comatose state the natural world has paid a price. A debt that may never be able to be repaid. If we want to let ourselves of the hook we could say this is unawareness and ignorance. But more realistically put it is our hatred and destructiveness that has incurred a price that humankind cannot afford.

This awareness of the wound is too much for most. Humankind cannot bear too much reality, said T S Eliot. And Emily Dickinson always pithy and to the bone:

There is a pain — so utter -

It swallows substance up -

Then covers the Abyss with Trance -

So Memory can step Around — across — upon it -

As One within a Swoon -

Goes safely — where an open eye -

Would drop Him — Bone by Bone -

So humankind will not notice and it will have to hurt first, really hurt. We know that the behaviour of severe psychopaths is only controlled and moderated by short-term pain. Rewards, moral compasses, long-term goals, love, attachment, relationship and appeals to their better nature simply do not work. So it is with global consciousness. And the hurt is the symptom not the disease — like an asymptomatic cancer that’s discovered too late. Then the squealing will begin — the squealing of nations, of corporations, of ministers of finance. But more so, billions will experience the pain and suffering. The majority of humans — by nature, by religion, by politics, by citizenship, by poverty, or by riches — deny the magnitude of the problem. Relying on Twitter and TV, they will remain unaware until it filters upwards and through the collective. By then it’s too late and will have been watered-down for public consumption. “We don’t want people to panic”. Thankfully, in a sense, the initial symptoms will be literal and physical — the droughts, the forest fires, the rising sea levels, the relocations, the futile migrations. But later, the personal and archetypal trauma will live on for generations.

In a sense because it is what Jung called neurotic suffering, the suffering as a defence against authentic suffering, the full apocalyptic realisation of “What have we done!”.

The principle aim of psychotherapy is not to transport the patient to an impossible state of happiness, but to help him acquire steadfastness and philosophic patience in face of suffering. Life demands for its completion and fulfillment a balance between joy and sorrow. But because suffering is positively disagreeable, people naturally prefer not to ponder how much fear and sorrow fall to the lot of man. So they speak soothingly about progress and the greatest possible happiness, forgetting that happiness is itself poisoned if the measure of suffering has not been fulfilled. Behind a neurosis there is so often concealed all the natural and necessary suffering the patient has been unwilling to bear. (CW 16, 185)

As “mental health awareness” comes increasingly into collective consciousness the knowledge of surface suffering has increased. But it is always double layered, it has a false bottom. Our deeper suffering is smuggled past our conscious customs officer and the blind eye of the collective.

The more immediate personal suffering overlays the archetypal suffering of the 3,000 year-old wound, the gash in the fabric of Creation, that Western culture has created. It is not so much about saving people from rising sea levels, stopping the fires laying waste to the Amazon, and vaccinating everyone from Covid-19, it is a complete and utter re-orientation of everything we know. Physical, emotional, spiritual and cognitive, it will feel like an apocalypse.

Like any archetype whose time has come, the apocalypse will insist on being incarnated and manifesting itself concretely. “To do this, however, the archetypal dynamic must draft or conscript human beings into its service,” Edward Edinger said. “Yet this means that human beings will be ‘consumed’ or ‘devoured’ by the process which deprives them of their personal lives… mere ‘actors’ in the archetypal drama. And usually this drama lives itself out unconsciously, willy-nilly, in collective human history where everyone is a victim. The more conscious alternative is that an individual who understands what is going on ‘incarnates’ the archetypal process as individuation.” (Edinger, Apocalypse, 169).

The self-harm and suicidality will get worse. Don’t bother with the car in the garage and the hosepipe through the back window — half the world’s population sucks on an urban exhaust pipe. Don’t bother with cutting arms, thighs, labia — mining companies have done it for centuries. Just a little blood here and there so we know we are still alive and keeping the GDP up. The tailings dam bursts like a boil in Brazil; the children are buried in coal slurry in Aberfan; the mercury lingers in Grassy Narrows. (In northwest Ontario between 1962 and 1970 the Dryden Pulp and Paper Company illegally dumped an estimated 9,000 kg of mercury into the Wabigoon-English river system. Fifty years later the Asabiinyashkosiwagong Nitam-Anishinaabeg or Grassy Narrows First Nation peoples continue to die and be disabled from mercury poisoning). Don’t bother with setting yourself on fire — the fires will come to you sooner or later. Don’t bother with treating your COPD, the Earth’s lungs are already 50% FEV1. Don’t bother, boys, with Saturday night self-harm at the pub — the war will come to you soon enough, fights from far-left, far-right, fights over land, over sea, over air, over what beauty might still be left.