The Event as a Dream
Letter from Mexico | September, 2001
The following letter was written by Joseph Dispenza, co-founder of LifePath, in response to the tragedy of September 11th.
I am sitting in my office high on a hill above San Miguel de Allende, watching the final fireworks display (I think) of the night. Today is the Feast of St. Michael, the patron saint of the city, so the rounds of celebrations have been continuous since early this morning — colorful parades, folkloric Indian dances, acrobatic acts, vendors selling balloons and toys — all against the background of high spirited brass band and mariachi music.
The town is magical today. Even for this place of seemingly unending fiestas, today is a special, miraculous treat. It would be easy to get swept up in today's entrancing mood.
But my mind is on something else.
THE EVENT AS A DREAM
Like you, I am beginning, after the initial shock, to try to sort through my thoughts about the Event of September 11. In this, I feel like those city demolition workers in New York, dismantling and carting away ton after ton of twisted metal that was the World Trade Center, trying to get to my own Ground Zero: what does all this mean?
In the early stages of what is now being called “the crisis,” I was seeing everything as if it was happening in a dream. If the Event really was a nightmare, as the media was calling it, then maybe I could look at it in dream terms, and try to interpret its meaning that way. In the dream, American culture's two symbols of Money and Power are suddenly smashed into — not by outside forces, but by vehicles-turned-weapons that had originated from within the culture, and bore the names of the culture: American and United (States). The culture's Shadow, it seemed, had swung around from behind and inflicted a terrible blow upon it.
THE SHADOW
Since Jung, we have been understanding the Shadow* as the place in our personality where we shove everything we don't want to look at. The Shadow is our self, but that part of us that is not standing in the light. We stuff unbearable truths about ourselves that we can't face into the Shadow until, bloated beyond its borders, the Shadow bursts forth, sometimes violently.
In a personal dream, when our Shadow swings around for a hit, it is demanding to be acknowledged. It is saying, “Pay attention to me — this is the business you have been leaving unfinished…now you need to deal with it.” If the dream warning goes unheeded, the Shadow will force itself out into the “real” world, incarnating as a personal disaster — a “wake-up call.”
In a cultural “dream,” such as the Event, I suppose we could say that the same scenario is being played out. Looked at on the dream-screens of our cultural imagination (not unlike the screens of our television sets), the Shadow, in the form of airplane-missiles, crashes into our cultural icons of Money and Power, sending up the alarm that we need to pay attention to our dangerously deepening psychosis around those two issues.
CULTURAL PSYCHOSIS
When I say “psychosis” around Money and Power, I am thinking quite literally. This is the dictionary definition of the term, and of “schizophrenia,” its twin derangement.
Psy*cho*sis (noun), plural -cho*ses (1847): fundamental mental derangement (as schizophrenia) characterized by defective or lost contact with reality.
Schizo*phre*nia (noun) (1912): a psychotic disorder characterized by loss of contact with the environment, by noticeable deterioration in the level of functioning in everyday life, and by disintegration of personality expressed as disorder of feeling, thought (as in hallucinations and delusions), and conduct.
I believe the direct hit by our cultural Shadow is letting us know that we may be nursing a defective contact with reality in how American culture regards and handles Money and Power.
The Event seems to suggest that the culture may have lost contact with the proper uses Money and Power, and gone off balance in our actions and attitudes in these areas. Those imbalances would include, but not be limited to, arrogance, greed, materialism, judgment, self-absorption and self-importance, dominance over others, disrespect for nature, narcissism, selfishness, isolation, misuse of influence, and separation from others. Our cultural Shadow appears to be informing us that we may be delusionary in considering ourselves the Good Empire. Far from that, we may actually be a culture drifting into a kind of Money-and-Power madness. (Thomas Berry, the author of The Dream of the Earth, goes a step further and calls our culture “autistic.”)*
One of the media headlines the day after the Event was: “Bush Says We Will Rid the World Of Evil!” But the Shadow can't be eradicated without eradicating ourselves — since the Shadow is simply the self that is not in the light. When the Shadow calls, as it did for our culture on September 11, the appropriate first response would not be retaliation, but an examination of conscience. The first question to ask, in other words, is not Who (we know Who — our Shadow: and what could be more shadowy than a dark-skinned, black-bearded man in hiding), but Why. The Shadow can't be blotted out without blotting out ourselves; it has to be acknowledged by our cultural personality, and integrated into it.
We might have expected such a reckless comment from a political leader. But some of our spiritual leaders have gone toward similar rhetoric. Jean Houston's email letter reflecting on the Event ("We Are All New Yorkers"), writes quite eloquently about its meaning as “the birth of an opportunity,” but then backtracks into oldspeak, calling the terrorist perpetrators of the Event “a cancer” that must be removed from the body of humankind. But the Shadow is not a cancer, and it can't be surgically or chemically eliminated.
THE SHADOW'S CALL IS POSITIVE
On the positive side, if we will recognize our cultural Shadow, acknowledge (own) it as such, and resolve to integrate it into our cultural personality, we can achieve balance — we can experience heaven on earth. In this case, integrating our Shadow would mean that we would address, as a culture, all the symptoms of psychosis I mentioned above, and seek to heal them.
The Event then becomes the great “wake-up call” for our culture: the call, specifically, to bring our Shadow in to the Light, to get sober from the Money/Power bender we have been on and to understand that both Money and Power are to be used not to control others, but to love them.
INTEGRATED CULTURAL PERSONALITY
The Event as “wake-up call” has opened the door to the possibility of a whole new awareness of ourselves as global citizens — not separate and apart from the rest of humanity, not isolated and insulated in our wealth, but part of the human family. Our first glimpse of this new consciousness came in 1969, when a photograph of Earth was transmitted back to us from our nearest cosmic neighbor, Moon. For the first time ever, we humans saw our planetary home from outside of it, and we began to understand that national and cultural boundaries are an illusion — perhaps a delusion. The photo of Earth from Moon is an image of an integrated cultural personality.* Now, at last, 32 years later, we are being pushed into the full reality that we had only glimpsed up to this time: it has taken us a generation to absorb the meaning of that Earthrise image.
WE ARE IN NEW TIME
What has pushed us into global consciousness is the Event. With one violent thrust, it woke up our slumbering, psychosis-prone culture. We are now in New Time. A profound shift has taken place in consciousness — there is no going back. The Dominant World Culture has been cracked open like an egg, and that huge Act has brought about a new way of thinking about ourselves, both on the cultural and the personal level.
A friend of ours who works for NASA, phoned today to suggest to us that the destruction of the “World Trade Center” may mean that we have “traded worlds” — that we have, in fact, traded the center of the old world for the center of a new world.
I believe this is what has happened. I am beginning to understand that the American Tribe, which had thought and acted as if it was alone in the world, has suddenly become part of the family of humanity. Our superficial culture of celebrity gazing, millionaire sports stars, reality television, and obsessive media speculation over politicians’ sex lives — caught up in the love lives of singers, the drug problems of retired ball players, and people pretending to be "survivors" for television shows — has been pushed into the serious business of transformation.
THE SATURN/PLUTO CONFRONTATION
I thought of our cultural Shadow, and its explosive emergence at this time, while I was re-reading after the Event John Sutton’s article, “The Saturn-Pluto Opposition” in theAugust/September edition of “The Mountain Astrologer.”*
Together with Robert Hand's piece, “A Crisis of Power: Saturn and Pluto Face Off” in the same issue, it describes the immense transforming energy surrounding the opposition of Saturn to Pluto — a confrontation, from August 2001 to May 2002, that would suggest enormous and widespread social change. As another astrologer, Maya deMar, puts it, “Saturn is ‘the system.’ Pluto is transformation.”
But we don't need to look to the stars for confirmation that we are in the midst of fundamental transformation. Our human species is the self-reflecting layer of Earth's surface. If you are living on the planet, you have to be feeling the effects of its seismic shift into heightened self-awareness. Some are describing it as a kind of lightheadedness, others as a queasy feeling in the stomach, still others as distracted mental activity, and the certain understanding that the old patterns of our culture — and of our personal lives — don't work anymore.
PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION
The challenge for all of us now is to answer the call that has come out of the skies. This needs to be done on a personal level, since we — you and I —are the culture, and in fact, we are the planet. Karen Armstrong, the historian of religions, said a few days after the Event, “It is a revelation…we are not in isolation from the rest of the world. We cannot, in our privilege, cut ourselves off from the rest of humankind: we are not a fortress. We must go out to the world, or in some terrible way, the world will come to us.” She was speaking of our culture, but she might as well have meant each of us in our personal lives.
Our species is ascending. In the New Time, we will see that we are one planetary family; understanding that will be prelude to an awareness, in the near future, that our species is part of a galactic family of self-reflecting beings.
Margaret Mead said, "We are all immigrants into a new time." Now, suddenly, you and I are being handed the challenges and opportunities of all immigrants: to assimilate and to contribute to the new planetary consciousness. We will change in the process — we will see “the old” dry up and die away. But the coming of “the new” is inevitable and inexorable. And the rewards for entering fully into it will be boundless.
My best to you,
Joseph Dispenza
LifePath
San Miguel de Allende
Mexico
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