Code-Switch

 

A few weeks ago I had listened to an interview with Marianne Williamson by a spiritualist and she made the point that I have been talking about lately: the "code-switching" between being a spiritualist and a presidential candidate. We live in a different time now when this seems more acceptable. But for older people who understand the higher-consciousness movement as being separate from political activism, it's more of a stretch. In contrast, I was watching the Democracy Now! channel and they were talking about the recent conviction of some of the Proud Boys. The attorney for one of them said her client had no criminal record before and was "just serving his country". That's the other side of the same coin, i.e. "I defend my spiritual values", "I defend my country", "I'm doing it benignly", "I'm not causing any trouble". There's no comparison with Marianne Williamson, but I think in general in society now you see these kinds of ironic juxtapositions between being a political activist and a spiritualist. Everybody's trying to play both sides of the fence or playing both sides of many different fences. As I've said before, we're in a Hall of Mirrors and sometimes we confuse ourselves by the positions that we take. At the moment I don't know if it's true that we're going into a new spiritual age and everything's going to be fine or if we're going into a new dark age akin to the time after the collapse of the Bronze Age, where we'll enter a period of endless civil wars perhaps going on for centuries. The human mind is capable of all good and evil things, so how is it that we make a collective choice? I don't think we can make collective choices if they are already made in the Collective Unconscious.

On "Neo-Jungianism":

(From the article, Rational Magic):

"There’s the rise of what you could call popular neo-Jungianism: figures like Jordan Peterson, who point to the power of myth, ritual, and a relationship to the sacred as a vehicle for combating postmodern alienation — often in uneasy alliance with traditionalist Christians. (A whole article could be written on Peterson’s close intellectual relationship with Roman Catholic Bishop Robert Barron.) There’s the progressive-coded version you can find on TikTok, where witchcraft and activism and sage cleansing and “manifesting” co-exist in a miasma of vibes. There’s the openly fascist version lurking at the margins of the New Right, where blood-and-soil nationalists, paleo bodybuilders, Julius Evola–reading Traditionalists like Steve Bannon, and Catholic sedevacantist podcasters make common cause in advocating for the revival of the mores of a mystic and masculinist past, all the better to inject life into the sclerotic modern world."