America in The Crucible
❝[I]t was very clear that people saw in their neighbours the thing they did not recognize in themselves.
As a rule, when the collective unconscious becomes really constellated in larger social groups, the result is a public craze, a mental epidemic that may lead to revolution or war or something of the sort. These movements are exceedingly contagious — almost overwhelmingly contagious because, when the collective unconscious is activated, you are no longer the same person. You are not only in the movement — you «are» it.❞
👴🏻: C.G. Jung, The Tavistock Lectures, Lecture II
We all can have a real mystic experience of breaking through the veil of culture’s duality and experience the Mystery of what life is all about, the Interconnectedness of creation, but we must be willing to sacrifice looking through physical eyes and See with our Inner Eye.
To meet you, I must risk myself as I am. The naked human is challenged. It would be safer reflecting alone than confronting you. And even the favorite dictum of reflective psychology — a psychology which has consciousness rather than love as its main goal — ‘Know thyself’’ will be insufficient for a creative psychology. Not ‘Know thyself’ through reflection, but ‘Reveal thyself’, which is the same as the commandment to love, since nowhere are we more revealed than in our loving’.
James Hillman
Beliefs have contagion. We project parts of ourselves we don’t want to see onto others. Whites in America have ideas about people of color, ideas that people of color suffer from because they are incorporated into common practices by whites. But Anglos have always done this with Jews, the Irish, with Native Americans and Asians. They hold an idea of themselves as the paragon of perfection in the human family. It’s laughable, it’s stupid and it’s a constant danger to anyone in the human family who doesn’t conform to a very narrow idea of “rightness.”
It’s exasperating that people can be so small and that such a large number of people in our culture incorporate prejudice and ignorance so readily, but these ideas have a long tradition in America. Non Caucasian people are born and live within a lethal paradigm in the US, all because whites are projecting their fears onto them. Proceeding on unexamined prejudices and half baked ideas of other cultures renders a person dangerous, dangerous to the children they teach these ideas to and dangerous to harmless folks who just happen to have the wrong skin tint or eye shape.
Can America ever grow up? We hope, but nobody knows.
Societal fault lines are obvious right now. Injustices are rampant. The traditional crimes and injuries accumulate to the breaking point. The proverbial knee to the neck of the underclass has become intolerable because it’s no longer invisible. Phone cameras are everywhere. The crimes that used to be easily hidden are now in the open for everyone to see. Stories that mainstream whites could cast as doubtful are now revealed in all their ignominy. The story now revolves around the common mental sickness prevalent among whites, especially among the forces of order.
Hate is a powerful destabilizing force in any culture. America will collapse under all its indifference, ignorance and injustice because the weight is just too heavy. Nature can’t take it, people of color can’t take it, even the whites can’t take it. To carry hate in your heart is to commit suicide. This is the original sin of America.
We are living in a time of convulsions and cataclysms, all of which originate in our hearts. Now is the time for wisdom of the heart to appear on the horizon. I’ve got my eyes peeled.
- ***
- Anima Fire is my publication
- https://medium.com/anima-fire/medium-com-anima-fire/home
