The Cosmos, the Psyche & You

I was too young to remember when the New Age began. But somewhere between the love and peace of Woodstock in 1969 and the strange cheeriness of Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” in 1984, spirituality in America took a left turn. The consciousness-raising doctrines of the 1960s went through their own kind of transmutation and showed up refashioned in the 1980s, custom made for a decade that was a little less grit and a lot more gloss. And one book captured the New Age zeitgeist perfectly—published with a name that must have been a marketer’s dream, perfectly tailored for a generation of boomers who had grown older, wiser, and richer but were still driven by a desire to change themselves and the world. Called The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s, it was both a book and manifesto, the “handbook of the New Age” as USA Today called it. The author was Marilyn Ferguson, a popular science writer who had spent most of the 1970s exploring breakthrough research and ideas in a diverse range of subjects and translating them for the lay reader.

What made Ferguson’s work so influential was the sheer scope and breadth of her network. She was connected to a great number of leading individuals across various fields of study, and through them she seemed to have her finger on the pulse of the future. In fact, in the late nineties, the editorial staff of this magazine briefly considered interviewing Ferguson on precisely that topic—the future—almost twenty years after her manifesto hit the stands. It was in the process of doing research for that issue that I came across a fact that I never forgot—an obscure bit of information that struck me deeply at the time and has continued to affect me as I consider the nature of the new century that humanity has embarked upon. It seems that Ferguson, as she gathered material for her opus, asked everyone she interacted with—all of the hundreds of scientists, philosophers, researchers, academics, mystics, and others on the leading edge of their fields—which person had been most prominent in shaping their work and ideas. The individual who came in second among all those cited is not likely to surprise anyone—eminent psychologist Carl Jung. But the person who came first certainly surprised me—Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Almost three decades have passed since Ferguson’s work, and in the intervening years, the New Age movement has enjoyed its fifteen minutes on the stage of history and receded from prominence. But as our global society hurtles toward the second decade of this young century, the influence of Carl Jung and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is arguably more significant than ever. Like stone guardians standing at the gates of the future, Jung and Teilhard continue to subtly and profoundly shape the voices and perspectives that are defining the leading edge of our contemporary culture. And those voices are, in turn, influencing our collective perception, understanding, and most important, our response to the challenges of the new century. This raises an interesting issue, because these two prolific and creative thinkers represent distinct and seemingly contrasting visions of life and reality.

Jung, the great master of the human psyche, taught us to look inward and downward as we never had before, showing us the extraordinary breadth and depth of the human psyche and revealing the mythical, archetypal, and impersonal forces that are operating in the hidden caverns of our consciousness. Teilhard, the great prophet of evolution, taught us to look forward and upward with new eyes, unveiling the vast evolutionary context in which the drama of human life is unfolding, reviving our faith in the future and restoring a powerful sense of meaning and purpose to human consciousness. Both of them forever changed our conceptions of what it means to be human, and both offer fresh ways of looking at the unique challenges that confront our postmodern society. Both did the bulk of their work in the worst part of the twentieth century, forging their visions out of the unlikely raw material of two world wars and a world gone partially mad. Both sought to provide answers to the chaos and a new direction for the survivors, hoping to give humans in the coming decades the tools to reshape society. And both have provided key ideas that are shaping several of the most significant contemporary attempts to fashion a new worldview.

Indeed, it occurs to me that these two unusual visionaries are, in some sense, the twin fathers of the twenty-first century, with different, and often contradictory, ideas about how to raise their precocious child. In fact, after spending time exploring the work of each individual and reflecting on their influence, I have come to believe that the distinctive orientations of these two father figures, and of those who have followed in their footsteps, represent one of the great fault lines of our time, and that ultimately we must make a choice as to where our allegiance lies. The stakes are high. In this time of postmodern alienation, extreme individualism, environmental crisis, civilizational conflict, technological triumph, massive globalization, and spiritual confusion, we have not yet formed a worldview that can knit our hyper-diverse and fragmented society together and shepherd it safely into a thriving new millennium. So to whom do we turn for answers? To the brilliant insights of a self-described Swiss “witch doctor” or to the visions of an unlikely Catholic revolutionary? In order to more clearly perceive the choice that confronts us as we face the challenges of the coming decades, we must first better understand these two unique figures and the nature of the revolutions in thought that they helped set in motion.

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This article was previously published in EnlightenNext magazine.