cause than technology, Zoroaster, or Aristotle—namely, the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years ago, which sparked human beings’ exile from nature. Thus “the Myth of the Great Ending . . . is but the psychological residue of the unresolved trauma left by our creation of linear civilization and our rejection of nature’s circular rhythms” (p. 77). Over the last 2,000 years, religious and secular belief systems have developed to shore up our species’ separation from nature. Felser mentioned St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and Jerry Falwell as proponents of the religious idea that the human mind and imagination are fallen and untrustworthy, and secular writers like René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Carl Sagan as advocates of reason, knowledge-as-power, and the denial of intuitive/unconscious resources. The key religious observation—that human consciousness is imperfect and untrustworthy because of the Fall—led to the most beautiful sentence in the entire book: “We are mental and moral prisoners of sin, captivated by bizarre fun- house mirrors of self-deception in a charnel house of terror and lies” (p. 107). Unfortunately, in addressing the way in which religion and science challenge nature, Felser painted with too broad a brush in stating, “All our mainstream religions and philosophies are rusty, worn-out buckets. They are outdated containers of antiquated ideas about reality.
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TMI Journal 2012 No. 1 · 1 TMI Journal 2012 No. 1.pdf
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. . . 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
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