Archetype of the Apocalypse:  Lecture 4

The New World

By Bob Bongiovanni, MA

 

Today we explore the fourth aspect of the Archetype of the Apocalypse, the coming of the new world.  Everything else has led up to this aspect:  revelation, judgment, and destruction.  Indeed, one might say the coming of the new world is the purpose or meaning behind the archetype.  Under what circumstances does the archetype of the apocalypse constellate?  When enough is enough.  When circumstances have become so choked with evil, so cut off from the true ground of being, that it makes no sense to continue.  So much of human life has sunk into misery that ending the world as we know it is actually an act of kindness.  These are the circumstances that evoke the archetype of the apocalypse.  Are we there yet?  Some would say yes.  More on that later.

 

The New Testament Book of Revelation symbolizes the coming of this new world as the descent of a fabulous new city, the New Jerusalem.  Here are passages from chapter 21 and 22:

 

In the spirit, he carried me to the top of a very high mountain, and showed me Jerusalem, the holy city, coming down out of heaven from God. It had all the glory of God and glittered like some precious jewel of crystal-clear diamond. The wall was of a great height and had twelve gates; at each of the twelve gates there was an angel, and over the gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel; on the east there were three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates. The city walls stood on twelve foundation stones, each one of which bore the name of one of the twelve apostles of the Lamb... .

The plan of the city is perfectly square, its length the same as its breadth. . . . and equal in height [the city is actually a cube]. The wall was built of diamond, and the city of pure gold, like clear glass. The foundations of the city wall were faced with all kinds of precious stone: the first with diamond, the second lapis lazuli, the third turquoise, the fourth crystal, the fifth agate, the sixth ruby, the seventh gold quartz, the eight malachite, the nine topaz, the tenth emerald, the eleventh sapphire, and the twelfth amethyst. The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate being made of a single pearl, and the main street of the city was pure gold, transparent as glass. I could not see any temple in the city since the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb were themselves the temple, and the city did not need the sun or the moon for light, since it was lit by the radiant glory of the God, and the Lamb was a lighted torch for it. ... and there will be no night there .... Nothing unclean may come into it: no one who does what is loathsome or false, but only those who are listed in the Lamb's book of life.

Then the angel showed me the river of life, rising from the throne of God and of the Lamb and flowing crystal-clear. Down the middle of the city street, on either bank of the river were the trees of life, which bear twelve crops of fruit in a year, one in each month, and the leaves of which are the cure for the nations. (21:10–27; 22:1–2)

So, John imagines that the long-awaited new world will take the form of a mandala, a complex quaternity made of precious materials, indeed something akin to the philosopher’s stone of the alchemists.  Whoever survives the trials of the apocalypse will take up residence in this fabulous place, which has at its core the manifest Self – “the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb were themselves the temple.”  Symbolically, this means that the souls that survive the challenges of human life and live out their destinies fully – “who are listed in the Lamb’s book of life” – become part of the Self, merge with that from which they arose originally.  They don’t just move to a new residence – they achieve a new identity.

 

Jung points out that this symbol of the new, though magnificent, still reflects the fundamental flaw in Judeo-Christian thought. It does reclaim the feminine, no small progress, but it still excludes the darker and earthier aspects of the Self. Here are Jung’s comments on these passages from his book Answer to Job:

 

This final vision, which is generally interpreted as referring to the rela­tionship of Christ to his Church, has the meaning of a "uniting sym­bol" and is therefore a representation of perfection and wholeness: hence the quaternity, which expresses itself in the city as a quadrangle, in paradise as the four rivers .... While the circle signifies the round­ness of heaven and the all-embracing nature of the "pneumatic" deity, the square refers to the earth. Heaven is masculine, but the earth is feminine. Therefore God has his throne in heaven, while Wisdom has hers on the earth, as she says in Ecclesiasticus: "Likewise in the beloved city he gave me rest, and in Jerusalem was my power." ... The city is Sophia, who was with God before time began, and at the end of time will be reunited with God through the sacred marriage. As a feminine being she coincides with the earth, from which, so a Church Father tells us, Christ was born.  No doubt this is meant as a final solution of the terrible conflict of exis­tence. The solution, however, as here presented, does not consist in the reconciliation of the opposites, but in their final severance, by which means those whose destiny it is to he saved can save themselves by identifying with the bright pneumatic side of God.

 

So, although clearly inspired by the Self, John was still limited by the ability of his ego to attribute only lightness to God, never any darkness.

 

Now, of course, we have been saying all along that a Jungian interpretation of the Book of Revelation disputes the literal interpretation.  We are not going to wake up one day, look up in the sky, and see a glittering city descending from the sky, with our names on some of the mailboxes.  What we will experience is a dramatic shift in consciousness, unmatched in human history, with parallel changes in outer reality.  Naturally, whatever I say about the particulars of this shift is completely speculative.  Like John, my own ego and complexes limit my grasp of this archetypal experience.  I may have it completely wrong.  When the final apocalypse comes, and I’m proven completely wrong, I will apologize to all concerned.  So take what I am about to say with a big grain of salt.

 

Once in awhile, I feel an indisputable connection to the Self.  It’s like a flash of consciousness that allows me to see life from a completely different perspective.  I know, as much as I know anything, that the Self is real – in fact, the Self is much more real that what my ego usually takes for reality.  But, maintaining that flash of insight, living daily life from that new perspective, is the real challenge. Almost immediately, I sink back into so-called normal consciousness, with its conventional notions of what is possible, what is limiting, how things get done, and who is in charge.  What I imagine for myself is that the apocalypse will come, and the flash of transcendent consciousness will not end.  I will be amazed that I ever accepted conventional ego consciousness as the only reality.  I look forward to that day.

 

I also recognize that the archetype of the apocalypse is about collective experience, not just individual experience.  A great number of people will experience this shift of consciousness at the same time, and humanity will never be the same.  How many people?  A lot, but not everyone – that’s what the Book of Revelation means when it cites the figure of 144,000.  That figure is based on 12,000 from each of the 12 tribes of Israel.  Symbolically, one might think of the “tribes of Israel” as the separate cultures of the world, each with it own underlying sacred systems and ways of connecting to the Self.  So, a great many of the world’s people will experience this shift in consciousness.

 

Why won’t everyone experience the shift?  Maybe everyone will, eventually, but just not at first.  That’s how I interpret the passage from the Book of Revelation that says that the leaves of the trees in the New Jerusalem will be “the cure for the nations.”  All will be healed eventually.  There will be a vanguard, those who have the wherewithal to make it through the experience, step out of conventional consciousness, and never return to it.  In the final years of his life, Jung wondered if there would be enough people to constitute this vanguard.  He worried that conventional consciousness might be leading us into brutal judgment and horrific destruction, a nuclear or environmental holocaust, but perhaps there would not be enough survivors to allow for the ultimate manifestation of the Self.  Jung, it seems, experienced a crisis of faith.  Arguably, things have gotten worse since then.  Will the Self just give up on us?  Are we just an experiment which might, in fact, fail?

 

Personally, I take great encouragement from recent advances in quantum theory.  These physicist and other theorists seem to be a bridge between science – which is widely acknowledged as knowing the truth about everything – and mystical insight, inherited from spiritual leaders of the past as well as Jung and other pioneers of depth psychology.  How might this shift in consciousness be described using the vocabulary of quantum physics?

 

Amit Goswami, professor of physics at the Institute of Theoretical Sciences at University of Oregon, has proposed one approach in his book The Self Aware Universe:  How Consciousness Creates the Material World.  Goswami’s basic premise is that we have come to the end of the time where we believe that matter is the primary stuff of creation.  That’s the equivalent of the belief that the world is flat – it may seem obvious to those who are wrapped up in conventional thinking, but it is frankly just wrong and limiting.  Instead, consciousness is the true foundation of all we know and perceive.  Through consciousness, certain possibilities become manifest – collapse into reality, to use a phrase from quantum theory.  Alter consciousness, and a different reality will manifest.  What would happen to human consciousness if a sizeable number of us truly experienced reality in this new way – if we realized that every problem we encounter in the outer world could be changed through an alteration of conscious.

 

Some have speculated that the precipitating event for this shift in conscious will need to be something monumental, truly a do or die situation.  Perhaps it will occur when we face our own extinction – at that moment before the nuclear weapons are released, or just before the asteroid strikes the earth.  Will it take something that death-defying to shake humanity out of its sleep?

 

I would like to end with a quote from Edward Edinger:

 

In the study of one's personal life history—going back through the traumas of early experience that make up so much of our per­sonal complexes—shallow answers to these questions may be found. And if that method suffices to provide sufficient meaning that heals, so be it. But often it does not; and one must go deeper. It is then that one may come eventually to the Self, the paradoxical God-image that Jung discusses so fully in Answer to Jo&. The experiences one has in that encounter, the knowledge that one gains in the process, is what Jung means by "gnosis of the Divine." And when that is achieved, the neurosis is finally healed.

These same matters apply on a vast collective scale as humanity begins to experience world-wide apocalyptic events. The same ques­tions arise: "Why is this happening? Who is responsible? What does it all mean?" And those questions take on increasing urgency the more desperate circumstances become. In contrast to the conscious process of individuation, the answers to these questions are dealt with collectively in large-scale regressive phenomena: the atavistic return to religious Fundamentalisms; the disintegration of complex social structures and reversion to more primitive social arrangements; massive collective shadow projections leading to factional wars and violence of all kinds on all social levels (from the family, to the neighborhood gang, and on up to the national level); and by widespread despair leading to increases in suicide and to addiction! of all kinds. In general, there occurs a disintegration of social and psychic structures and values which have been the architecture of the collective psyche—no longer "contained" by an operative religious myth. And I see these tendencies as potentially being so widespread that they generate vast waves of psychic contagion tending to infect even those who might otherwise have sufficient consciousness to resist them. Vast collective psychic moods have immense contagious power.

I paint this terrible picture, as a backdrop, in order to repeal what I believe is a possible mitigating factor. In the midst of this hor­rendous state of affairs, it is just possible that Jung's message—as he presents it in Answer to Job—will finally gain the attention of enough members in society to draw his message into general view so that ii will receive some discussion, at least, beyond the modest readership of this book. If that were to happen, people might then begin to gel a glimmer of the meaning of the collective upheaval we are all having to endure. Perhaps a certain sufficient number of the creative minority would begin to entertain the idea that a vast historical "transformation of God" is going on and that the ordeal is the necessary "sacrificial" event to bring about that transformation. Putting it differently, as Jung does in The Undiscovered Self "We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos—the right moment—for a `metamorphosis of the gods', of the fundamental principles and symbols This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing."  (Archetype of the Apocalypse, pages 178-179)