Building the Cathedral | 6. The Master Plan (I)
Collectively Bringing God Out of the Unconscious
A SHARED DREAM
Ultimately, we can see that the term “personal myth” is a bit misleading. For while it is indeed something we construct by ourselves, its impacts can nevertheless be felt far beyond us.
A functioning personal myth is a life-changing story—at any level. It can take a person from depression and despair to wholeness and meaning. Even such personal transformations are not without far-reaching external consequences. They affect the environments in which those people live. Our orientation to life is felt by others. As McAdams notes,
The stories we create influence the stories of other people, those stories give rise to still others, and soon we find meaning and connection within a web of story making and story living. Through our personal myths, we help to create the world we live in, at the same time that it is creating us.[i]
As the meaning crisis continues to expand, such a positive influence is needed now more than ever. Personal myth changes the world from the inside out.
The impact is even bigger when one has heeded the call to externalize their personal myths in an opus for sharing with the world. Today, in the breakdown of the old religious systems, these creative myths become like small lights in a dimming world. Indeed, they might be someone’s only genuine engagement with living myth! Around these tiny fires we huddle.
But, couldn’t they also serve to re-ignite the flame of myth in our society?
Jung saw the source of every society’s renewal in individuals, whenever they navigate beyond the walls of their culture and bring back to it some novel insight for the collective’s development. This is what individuation is all about. The expansion of consciousness transforms the individual, but also has the potential to transform their culture as well. However, this can only happen if their insights are able to find a way to become successfully integrated into the culture. If they can, the entire scope of cultural consciousness expands, bringing new insights, new directions, new possibilities for the group. Culture is renewed.
In his book Living Myth, D. Stephenson Bond sees personal myth as the key vehicle for this expansion of cultural consciousness at a time when we lack a shared, living myth. He writes:
When a culture has reached its limit, the development of culture must paradoxically come from outside of culture. How is a culture to renew itself except through individuals who restore the cultural imagination? That is, where do the sustaining myths of culture come but from what were once personal myths in individual lives?[ii]
The decline of traditional religions has placed the burden of crafting a meaningful life onto the individual. But this does not mean that meaning must be only personal from now on. The task has fallen to individuals to craft meaningful myths out of their experience, but, once crafted, these myths can be put back into culture—through the diffusion of creative mythologies.
Every new opus adds new possibilities to reactivate the latent archetypes within each member of society. Indeed, every new opus provides another example to others of what myth is and how it works, and what personal myth is and how it works. Every opus thus renders its meaning-making goal that much more legitimate and feasible in the eyes of society. In all of these ways, creative mythology kindles the imagination of others—rekindles the mythic imagination of the group. Thus, as Bond says, “the birth of the personal myth in the imagination of a single individual may become the rebirth of the greater myths in the imagination of the culture.”[iii]
What if we cultivated intentional communities specifically devoted to this task? Communities dedicated to the crafting of personal myths, and sustaining the invitational and open space to share them? Where people could come to write, draw, paint, compose, etc., in the context of a shared mission?
At present, such communities are rare, but some do exist. A notable example is CoSM, a community in Wappinger Falls, New York, founded by visionary artists Alex and Allyson Grey. There, in a stately house on 40 wooded acres, “Art Church” services are held, inviting people to come and express their inner divinity through art.
“Each of us carry a spark of the Almighty Force of the Universe,” the Greys write,
that seeks expression through our lives and works. We gather as community to activate our creativity as spiritual practice. The Universal Creative Force is the Divine Artist and Cosmos is the evolving masterwork of Creation. When we make art together, a new way of seeing may emerge. As Sacred Mirrors, we reflect and re-inforce the redemptive transformative power of art in each of our lives.[iv]
What if “church” more and more became such an “art church”? A community of support for expressing the divine in all of us through creative mythmaking? Here communal ritual enters in—not as a magical act to propitiate a deity, but as a shared containing space for incubating personal intimations of the divine and externalizing them through art.
Such is the driving motivation behind so-called “visionary art.” In his book The Mission of Art, Alex Grey writes:
The visionary artist may inwardly apprehend, then uniquely transmit traditional sacred archetypes or create previously undisclosed forms, beings, and vistas. The covenant that visionary art makes with a viewer is to catalyze the viewer’s own deepest insight by plunging them headlong into the symbolic mystery play of life, planting seeds for their future spiritual unfoldment.[v]
Through art, the collective consciousness is expanded. Perhaps, had Jung listened to the voice in his head that said “It is art,” he might have gone in just this sort of direction. In any event, personal myth is an artistic production. Grey embraces this idea, and sees this as the means by which the divine is communicated and developed:
God has ordained that imagination be stronger than reason in the soul of the artist, which makes the artist build bridges between the possible and seemingly impossible. How do artists gain insight into their own character and realize their own unique vision? By entering the studio in your heart, all artists have access to a personal yet universal vision that can guide and inspire them and, perhaps, all of us.[vi]
In the past, personal visions were always deemed a threat to the official religious authority. Doctrines and creeds needed to be maintained; orthodoxy was everything. The idea that people could fashion their own personal images of the divine, letting themselves be inspired by a multitude of mythic symbols for their own unique transformations and even creating their own was anathema. It was, indeed, “heresy,” a word that meant “choice.” Choice and creativity were the last thing official churches could tolerate. Personal visions were thus largely denigrated and suppressed.
Today, however, religious authorities are no longer in a position to do this. Incredible freedom now exists, which we must put to better use than apathy and nihilism. Unfortunately, the same objective rationalism that pushed back the power of religious authorities now keeps the people stuck in its own tyranny of reductionistic materialism. The pendulum has swung the other way.
Slowly, we are finding our way through the maze. At last, the task has become clarified; the way lies before us: to make use of our hard-won spiritual freedom by putting it into the service of shaping the New Myth. This is the task that history now demands of us—the task of creative spirituality.
A TEMPLE OF VAST DIMENSIONS
Our personal myths, then, are not so personal after all. They have the potential to affect society for the better, and in the most crucial way. In a civilization that has lost its myth—and thus its aspiration, its great purpose—single individuals, expressing their mythic imaginations, can help restore the mythic sensibility and shape the new mythology for our time.
In the enveloping darkness of our world, each personal myth provides another candle of illumination. Indeed, they have been working “in the dark,” so to speak, for some time—quietly but steadily laying a new foundation for the modern spirit. As Bond powerfully expresses it:
the long and lonely labor, the fears and doubts and countless failures that the evolution of a personal myth claims in the life of a single individual, are endured not only for self, but for others as well. I do not think it is possible to realize just how large an unconscious foundation for a newly evolving myth may already have been built on our behalf, though unacknowledged and as yet undiscovered.[vii]
Our personal myths have been laying the groundwork for the coming collective myth, acknowledged or not. In this way, the “cathedrals” of our personal myths are, like Jung’s Tower, only part of something much, much bigger: a vast complex of rising mythic structures, all assembled independently and yet working together to form one harmonious whole. This is the true Cathedral: the coming Myth, on which we all build.
Jung had a sense of this vast, ongoing project in the collective unconscious. Edward Edinger relates a fascinating exchange in his book The Creation of Consciousness: Jung’s Myth for Modern Man. He recounts there how a Jungian analyst once had the following dream:
A temple of vast dimensions was in the process of being built. As far as I could see—ahead, behind, right and left—there were incredible numbers of people building on gigantic pillars. I, too, was building on a pillar. The whole building process was in its very beginning, but the foundations were already there, the rest of the building was starting to go up, and I and many others were working on it.
When Jung was told about this dream, Edinger says, he knowingly replied:
Yes, you know, that is the temple we all build on. We don’t know the people because, believe me, they build in India and China and in Russia and all over the world. That is the new religion. You know how long it will take until it is built? . . . about six hundred years.[viii]
THE UNCONSCIOUS MYTH
It was Jung, of course, who recognized that people’s dreams can spring from either their own personal unconscious or from the collective unconscious. In these latter, “big” dreams, one can get a glimpse of what huge, tectonic shifts are occurring beneath the surface of humanity’s psyche. They reveal what is still gestating inside us, waiting to be born. The analyst’s dream described above was just such a dream.
Appreciating this, we can see how this dream is actually not unique, but one in a constellation of similar dreams whose images and ideas have been simmering below for some time, in psyches the world over. For example, Bond relates this remarkable dream of a male patient of his:
I am in the vast reaches of interstellar space. No sun, no earth, no sound, only the silent starts all around. I’m walking along a thin line of liquid fire, maybe two feet wide. The fire burns intensely, but doesn’t hurt me and is solid to walk on. I’m thinking as I walk, “This is familiar. I know what this is . . .,” like those times when there’s a word just on the tip of your tongue. You know you know it. So the issue in the dream is recognition. Will I recognize what this fiery red line that is so familiar to me truly is? Suddenly I’m lifted up above the line to a much higher point of view. Now I see that my one red line that I was walking is but one of many lines. Other lines connect and intersect with my line. In fact, as I get higher still I see that all of the lines are connected in a vastly complicated beautiful living circle burning in space. My line is now one line among many in a great pattern that connects each in a subtle harmony. I see that I have been walking toward the center of the circle. Then I have the recognition I have been seeking. I realize, “This is my life.” That is why it was so absolutely familiar to me.[ix]
In this revelatory dream, it is the life of the man—his life story, his narrative, his personal myth—that he follows like a path of destiny. It leads ultimately to a vast cosmic web of other such lives, all interweaving and working together to form a much greater Whole: “a vastly complicated beautiful living circle burning in space.” But…what is this?
Myths relate the numinous through the language of symbol. It is through myth that we communicate the Ultimate Mystery, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. A New Myth means a new expression of the numinous Reality. A New Myth, operating at the level of a new religion, means a new relationship between the collective and the sacred. Lived out, internalized, meditated upon, a New Myth means a new understanding of God—a new “God-image.” The development of a New Myth, then, means the development of a new conception of God.
It is this that we see symbolically expressed in the collective unconscious. The New Myth is taking shape, and with it, a new God-image.
Indeed, the two are intricately related. For the New Myth is itself about mankind’s role in shaping the divine.
Through its own conscious development, humanity aids in the transformation of the divine.
Jung, too, had the dream rocking the collective unconscious of mankind. More than any other, probably, he helped bring it to conscious awareness. In doing so, he found not only his personal myth, but the myth in which all our personal myths play their God-shaping part. It occurred to him at last during a series of travels to New Mexico and the African savannah.
In 1925, still in the midst of composing the Red Book, Jung visited the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, and asked some of them about their religious beliefs and practices, whereupon he learned about their rituals of assisting the sun every day in its travels across the sky. “The Americans want to stamp out our religion,” said Mountain Lake, chief of the Taos pueblos, to Jung.
“Why can they not let us alone? What we do, we do not only for ourselves but for the Americans also. Yes, we do it for the whole world. Everyone benefits by it.”
I could observe from his excitement that he was alluding to some extremely important element of his religion. I therefore asked him: “You think, then, that what you do in your religion benefits the whole world?” He replied with great animation. “Of course. If we did not do it, what would become of the world?” And with a significant gesture he pointed to the sun. I felt that we were approaching extremely delicate ground here, verging on the mysteries of the tribe. “After all,” he said, “we are a people who live on the roof of the world; we are the sons of the Father Sun, and with our religion we daily help our father to go across the sky. We do this not only for ourselves, but for the whole world. If we were to cease practising our religion, in ten years time the sun would no longer rise. Then it would be night forever.”[x]
With this, Jung appreciated for the first time what it truly means to live mythologically, to have a myth of true cosmic importance. The division between such an existence and the relative insignificance of one lived purely within the objective rationalism of the modern world was painfully clear to him. Regarding his Indian interlocutor, Jung saw,
his life is cosmologically meaningful, for he helps the father and preserver of all life in his daily rise and descent. If we set against this our own self-justifications, the meaning of our own lives as it is formulated by our reason, we cannot help but see our poverty. Out of sheer envy we are obliged to smile at the Indians’ naiveté and to plume ourselves on our cleverness; for otherwise we would discover how impoverished and down at the heels we are.[xi]
Specifically, what we lack through our modern perspective is any sense of having an impact on the transcendent realm. Nothing we do affects God; we have nothing to offer the Ultimate Mystery. According to the man of science, our lives are just specks in space; to the man of myth, though, our lives are part of a divine drama, in which we aid the deity in performing its crucial, life-giving acts.
But what would a new such myth look like? What would it mean for human lives to be of cosmic significance today?
Jung received an answer to this most pivotal question on the savannah plains of Africa. There he had something akin to an experience of primeval awareness—of feeling like the first consciousness to gaze out on the world and so instantiate it.
“From a low hill in this broad savanna,” he writes,
a magnificent prospect opened out to us. To the very brink of the horizon we saw gigantic herds of animals: gazelle, antelope, gnu, zebra, warthog, and so on. Grazing, heads nodding, the herds moved forward like slow rivers. There was scarcely any sound save the melancholy cry of a bird of prey. This was the stillness of the eternal beginning, the world as it had always been, in the state of non-being; for until then no one had been present to know that it was this world. I walked away from my companions until I had put them out of sight, and savored the feeling of being entirely alone. There I was now, the first human being to recognize that this was the world, but who did not know that in this moment he had first really created it. There the cosmic meaning of consciousness became overwhelmingly clear to me. …My old Pueblo friend [Mountain Lake] came to my mind. He thought that the raison d’etre of his pueblo had been to help their father, the sun, to cross the sky each day. I had envied him for the fullness of meaning in that belief, and had been looking about without hope for a myth of our own. Now I knew what it was, and knew even more: that man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being.[xii]
By becoming conscious of the world, humans “bring it into being,” so to speak. Our consciousness is needed to raise the world out of the unconscious and into the light of phenomenal reality. We did not cause the universe to exist; but without us, the universe would never be as conscious as we are.
And, indeed, thought Jung, it was precisely toward this consciousness that all of history and evolution have been tending. “Natural history,” he writes,
tells us of a haphazard and casual transformation of species over hundreds of millions of years of devouring and being devoured. The biological and political history of man is an elaborate repetition of the same thing. But the history of the mind offers a different picture. Here the miracle of reflection consciousness intervenes—the second cosmogony. The importance of consciousness is so great that one cannot help suspecting the element of meaning to be concealed somewhere within all the monstrous, apparently senseless biological turmoil, and that the road to its manifestation was ultimately found on the level of warm-blooded vertebrates possessed of a differentiated brain—found as if by chance, unintended and unforeseen, and yet somehow sensed, felt and groped for out of some dark urge.[xiii]
The universe had been in a state of unconsciousness for billions of years. Eventually, creatures arose who rendered it, to greater or lesser degrees, conscious. But it is not done. More still must be brought out of the unconscious and into consciousness. What, exactly?
God.
Deep within, still largely unconscious, God is there. Every time we reconnect with our unconscious and bring forth material we externalize into myth, we are bringing God to greater conscious awareness—to others’ awareness, and to this emerging God’s own Self-awareness. “That is the meaning of divine service,” writes Jung,
of the service which man can render to God, that light may emerge from the darkness, that the Creator may become conscious of his creation, and man conscious of himself. That is the goal, or one goal, which fits man meaningfully into the scheme of creation, and at the same time confers meaning upon it. It is an explanatory myth which has slowly taken shape within me in the course of the decades.[xiv]
By exploring his unconscious and rendering it in material form for conscious reflection, Jung had fulfilled his “task of tasks” and uncovered his own personal myth. As it turns out, though, to craft a personal myth is to partake in a much larger mythic endeavor. To give expression to your own sense of the numinous is to participate in the Numinous coming further into consciousness, to the Ultimate Mystery becoming known. Giving shape to your God-image contributes to the overall development of the God-image. In telling your story, you add a piece to the cosmic Story. We are all working on The Cathedral…
NEXT: THE MASTER PLAN, PART II
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[i] McAdams, The Stories We Live By, 37.
[ii] Bond, Living Myth, 29.
[iii] Living Myth, 75.
[iv] Alex and Allyson Grey, https://www.cosm.org/calendar/art-church.
[v] Alex Grey (1998) The Mission of Art (Shambala, Boulder), 150.
[vi] The Mission of Art, 24.
[vii] Living Myth, 76.
[viii] Edward F. Edinger (1984) The Creation of Consciousness: Jung’s Myth for Modern Man (Inner City Books, Toronto), 11.
[ix] Bond, Living Myth, 191.
[x] Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 251-252.
[xi] Ibid., 252.
[xii] Ibid., 255-256.
[xiii] Ibid., 339.
[xiv] Ibid., 338.
Can you please help us write our personal myths? Perhaps you can provide a series of prompts, question, or exercises that can help each of us discover and share our personal myths. Thanks.