WHAT IS HAPPENING IN AMERICA? What Will It Take To Transcend The Hate, Violence And Chaos?

I'm compelled to try to say something, to speculate, about what is happening in America. I fear we could be nearly at a collective nervous/psychological breakdown unprecedented. It seems urgent we find a way to 'believe' there is a mindful reality beyond us that has some good intentions for the nation/world but that may not be strongly like what we have imaged God to be tradtionally. We urgently need to find such a 'trust' that is not in conflict with our reasoning intellect and scientific knowledge, but that we can accept as being more than these.

Flowers placed on the  car of murdered Dallas policeman

The conflicting irrational nature of the violence and lack of sufficient collective ethics in America has moved us toward what can be evolution's way of forcing us to a higher level of consciousness. No sooner have we attempted to absorb two more black men being questionably  killed on video by police than innocent policemen are murdered by a sniper in Dallas, this while helping protect a non violent demonstration against police brutality. Such continuing blasts of hate and violence push anyone trying to deal with the inner conflict it produces toward an unprecedented conflict of rationally irreconcilable opposites.

This kind of psychological conflict of reality is at the center of C.G. Jung's work last century as the great task and necessary threatening  passage of  post modern humans. We might best   imagine ourselves enfolded within a larger imperfect 'mind'(Not, as we tend to think of God traditionally,  predetermining as to how human maturity will be reached, so  best imagined as the impartial  ' mind of evolution.'). This mind  would be the ever evolving reality, present in but also much more than  our personal and collective conscious  ego, immemorially called the Sacred or God.

One dangerous , but seemingly necessary in evolution, reality this may be pushing us toward is that a higher collective ethic than 'law and order' is required to bring humanity through this period of  horrific chaos. There will have to be some critical mass of humans world wide that face the fact that no longer can 'law and order' be efficient alone to transcend the over reach of evil and chaos we are confronted with. Americans still hold on to national 'law and order' as the ultimate tool that will keep the society from completely self destructing with hate and violence. This worshipful dependence on law and order accounts for why the public has to keep excusing the most outrageous over reaches of police as they repeatedly kill with impunity black American citizens and openly considering  government monitoring of all Muslim Americans. The military is placed in a similar elevated role both at home and especially abroad.

But the raging images of killing and death that have been such a dark side of the collective unconscious for millennia are again treacherously pouring forth into the streets of outer realty in ways that potentially tear the human psyche and society apart. Outer reality images that have now emerged in such close proximity show how futile law and order is when enough fire power and long repressed hate is turned against  the final keepers of the law.(A parallel phenomenon is happening with the strength of global terrorism.) Police and military as such are not the enemy but our reliance on them as sufficient to keep a humane  public ethic intact in America(and the world) surely is. This ineffective sentimental   'religious like'  trust  that many  persons of every political persuasion and religion still have  for preserving a civil culture is being demonstrated as misplaced, not sufficient.  Something more connecting, more rightfully 'trusted' is needed to come into our conscious grasp. We must look to something deeper and inner that is able to contain the whole in ways that enforced 'law and order' cannot.

The situation calls for some kind of natural collective transformation that we cannot fathom ,by reason and intellect alone,  to take place within the  psyche of humanity. (Similar psychological phenomena have happened before, such as at the beginning of the Christian era and  beginnings of other major religions. We have lost sight of such origins in our Western  assumption that it was all  just literal historical events understood  and believed intellectually)This implies that 'other'... God, the Sacred... the 'imperfect mind of evolution' must be understood as a real and necessarily trusted part of the our collective consciousness.

We are pushed to become 'believers' in that which is truly impartial and  more than our personal and collective ego. There is little likelihood this 'present and beyond us' reality can be imagined as just like any traditional religion's icons or dogmas but it would likely be continuous with all major previous 'religious revelations.' It could be expected to come as some new symbolic system and story of love and justice appropriate for the times and that provides a transcendence of 'law and order' ethics alone. We could expect no 'religion' will be able to claim that its symbol system or mythical heroes are the savior from the present threatening self destruction. Such ethnocentrism will necessarily have to be appreciatively realized as no more sufficient at the religious level than law and order alone is at the secular level. It will need to be understood by some critical mass of humans there is a newly released power of the Sacred, which is not any copy of such revelations that have been before. Biblically such times of evolutionary psychological change in ethics and world view is called a 'new creation' , 'new Jerusalem', 'metanoia' , 'just the right time', 'the greatest of all is love',  'kingdom of God'  and ' omega' Other world religions have similar expressions.

It seems to me that our highest personal responsibility presently is to try to realize the irrational 'split' in consciousness  sensitive persons  are   painfully experiencing(at numerous personal and collective levels) and that time honored 'law and order' is not sufficient to address , or better to transcend, them. This is obviously not primarily  a race problem, political  or even an economic one at bottom. This is a collective 'religious' , in the psychological sense, problem. It is a human trust problem. This explains why post modern humanity is stuck in  a chaos of  anger, hate and violence in a way that twentieth century America never believed itself to be approaching. It always saw itself able to   'make progress'; but this hope is much more missing  now- until we 'see' something that humans have never quite seen before, a larger picture, a less 'me and mine' picture, a grand 'we and all that is'  picture.

It is a problem of imaginatively identifying that which enfolds us and all of nature,  and  ordinary citizens being able to then  'trust' consciously at a deeper level than humans ever have before. We can each resolve to stand within this split without being pulled to any of the tempting  one-sided extremes. And too realize the powerful negative energies we are collectively   up against,  yet  to also trust  that how we inwardly conceptualize them(what I am attempting to do in this essay) is a great determining factor in how this  peak in   evolutionary history goes...... very good or very bad for our species.   And to 'trust' that at deep and now surface levels something beyond human intellectual comprehension, which also has 'mind', is participating in all this. And to imagine that mind , God or the 'all in all' , as praying for  and needing  a higher level of human consciousness to  work in cooperation with this  'Universal mind's'   promptings so that together a door into a more caring, loving, appreciative and truly impartial  future is found.

This new anticipated perception and understanding of  where we are in the universe and what is being asked of us  can be thought of as creatively evolving out of our apparently necessary  suffering chaos. So indeed we are  not alone unless we, to our own psychological detriment,   choose that.