Voices from the Shadows: Listening for the Self in Apocalyptic Times

Abstract

At the end of the last millennium, Edward Edinger (2000) wrote in his final published work that apocalyptic images point toward the “momentous coming of the Self into conscious realization” (p. 5). Since the beginning of the new millennium, global apocalyptic events urgently direct our attention to the need for collective psychological transformation. How do we understand what needs to be transformed? Realizing that interconnection and community lie in our Western cultural shadow is only part of the necessary work. This article suggests that we in Euro-American culture, especially, need to penetrate our denial about the darkness of our history and begin to understand the collective ancestral traumas that shape our 21st-century individual and collective consciousness, as well as the world in which apocalyptic events occur. Illuminating our cultural shadow is a necessary first step in order that we may begin to heal ourselves and our communities and stop unconsciously visiting that ancestral trauma on ourselves, our communities, and the world.