. . . All are cultural vessels that are sinking fast . . . [they are] useless . . . [and even] dangerous . . . ” (p. 79). Religion gets hit particularly hard because it “represents a false reunification predicated on an illusion of separation” (p. 81). Though not without some merit, these criticisms are overgeneralizations that participate in the dualism that the author criticizes elsewhere. Like the idea that the “imperialist rational ego” separates us from others and from nature, much of Felser’s argument is Jungian. One notes much common ground: discussion of the collective unconscious; interest in Tao; the unus mundus, the one world, or what Felser has called a “connection to all things” (p. 66); analysis of archaic or original cultures; experience of unity consciousness with nature; emphasis on dreams as what Jung’s protégé, Marie-Louise von Franz, called “‘the voice of nature within us’” (p. 67); and the realization of the unconscious mind’s temporal relativity. In two places, however, the Jungian connection needs to be straightened out. The main one is where Felser erroneously defined myths as “archetypes of the collective unconscious” (p. 18). Jung (1968) stated that archetypes are not “inherited ideas . . . but inherited possibilities of ideas” (p. 66), which means that they represent merely the potential for representation. As D. Sharp stated, “Archetypes are irrepresentable in themselves but their effects are discernible in archetypal images and
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motifs” (1991, p. 27). Culture activates the archetype in order to create myth, which is why Jung distinguished between archetype and archetypal image—and why archetype and myth are not synonymous. Further, when Felser claimed that we are enchanted by a magical spell, it would have been worth noting that, for Jung, magical thinking is so-called “primitive” thinking, for which Jung borrowed L. Lévy-Bruhl’s term participation mystique—a subjective view having no clear demarcation between psychic content and outer experience, versus the allegedly objective view that Western science promotes. Since the fear of change from a magical mentality toward greater differentiation and objectivity was a major factor that kept the belief system of primitive peoples homogeneous, could it be that the Agricultural Revolution generated an ongoing fear of the unknown that now manifests as the Myth of the Great Ending? If so, then it is not just the separation from nature that fuels the myth but also fear of the unfolding alternatives. The first half of The Myth of the Great Ending analyzes the myth itself, the second half discusses how to address it, and the final third deals primarily with two exemplary persons who successfully shifted their paradigms—J. Roberts, who channeled the entity known as Seth, and R. A. Monroe. In the first half, Felser showed that the Great Ending was never “a
mass public event” and is now “a museum piece, an antique, not a living, breathing myth” (pp. 99−101). For the remainder of the text, it becomes a metaphor for self-transformation via intuition, creative insight, D. Bohm’s “in-seeing,” inner vision, the right brain, the unconscious, the Higher Self, holism (versus dualism or reductionism), and a proper connection with nature. Thus the only “world” to be destroyed is an individual person’s outworn belief system. We must “unlearn all that has been so assiduously learned—that is what ends our personal world” and what enables, in Monroe’s parlance, a “‘different overview’” (p. 186, 102). Felser is referring to such pernicious assumptions as the following: consciousness is biochemical, imperfect, and untrustworthy; the supernatural is unnecessary; self-knowledge is impossible; and the only reliable knowledge comes from external authority. He should have pushed a step further and stated, as would Jung, that we Next Page 13 TMI JOURNAL 2012 should stop projecting our inner dysfunction in the form of the Great Ending and tend to our own psychic gardens in order to move from the “self,” which Felser has used to refer to individuality, to the “Self,” the archetype of wholeness. (The title