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An excerpt from his book posted on Reality Sandwich.  Does this describe channeling? It sort of describes what I’m trying to do with TABOTD, in which I’m “talking to” my future self.  Though I’ll admit this is more plot device than something I think I’ve succeeded in doing.

Although Jung describes several means of ‘doing’ active imagination — painting, sculpting, even dance — the basic method is to allow a fantasy to appear, as Jung did. But rather than drift into “free association” — which only allows complexes to take over – one grabs hold of an element in the fantasy and sticks to it. With practice one can follow the material as it develops, and can actually speak with it, as Jung did, which means, of course, that it can speak to you. As Jung explained to a correspondent: “The point is that you start with any image … Contemplate it and carefully observe how the picture begins to unfold or to change. Don’t try to make it into something, just do nothing but observe what its spontaneous changes are. Any mental picture you contemplate in this way will sooner or later change through a spontaneous association that causes a slight alteration of the picture. You must carefully avoid impatient jumping from one subject to another. Hold fast to the one image you have chosen and wait until it changes by itself. Note all these changes and eventually step into the picture yourself, and if it is a speaking figure at all then say what you have to say to that figure and listen to what he or she has to say.”[4]

In a lecture he gave to the Tavistock Clinic in London in 1935, Jung spoke of a patient who couldn’t grasp what active imagination was, until one day he found himself looking at a travel poster at a railway station. It showed the Alps, with a waterfall, a meadow, and cows on a hill top. Jung’s patient wondered what he would find if he walked over the hill. In a reverie he did, and found himself in a small chapel, looking at picture of the Virgin. Then a creature with pointed ears popped behind the altar and disappeared. At first Jung’s patient thought this was nonsense, but he continued. The creature appeared again, although he hadn’t imagined it there at all. It seemed to have a ‘life of its own’. After that, he understood what Jung meant.

Again, it sounds easy but it isn’t. The critical ego wants to reject the fantasy for a number of reasons — it’s silly, obscene, absurd — but it must be disciplined to withhold judgment and allow the material expression. Anyone who does creative work is familiar with this problem, and in many ways active imagination is similar to writing, painting and so on; all creative work entails a give-and-take between inspiration (unconscious) and execution (conscious) (As I am writing this, for example, I have to allow my intuitions expression before I can start editing them.)  The difference for Jung is that the aesthetic quality of the end product isn’t important; understanding it is.

On 11 February 1944, the 68-year-old Carl Gustav Jung – then the world’s most renowned living psychologist – slipped on some ice and broke his fibula. Ten days later, in hospital, he suffered a myocardial infarction caused by embolisms from his immobilised leg. Treated with oxygen and camphor, he lost consciousness and had what seems to have been a near-death and out-of-the-body experience – or, depending on your perspective, delirium. He found himself floating 1,000 miles above the Earth. Seas and continents shimmered in blue light and Jung could make out the Arabian desert and snow-tipped Himalayas. He felt he was about to leave orbit, but then, turning to the south, a huge black monolith came into view. It was a kind of temple, and at the entrance Jung saw a Hindu sitting in a lotus pos­ition. Within, innumerable candles flickered, and he felt that the “whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence” was being stripped away. It wasn’t pleasant, and what remained was an “essential Jung”, the core of his experiences….

Although Jung had always believed in the reality of the ‘other’ world, he had taken care not to speak too openly about this belief. Now, after his visions, he seemed less reticent. He’d had, it seems, a kind of conversion experience, and the interests the world-famous psychologist had hitherto kept to himself now became common knowledge. Flying saucers, astrology, parapsychology, alchemy, even predictions of a coming “new Age of Aquarius”: pronouncements on all of these dubious subjects – dubious at least from the viewpoint of modern science – flowed from his pen. If he had spent his career fending off charges of mysticism and occultism – initially triggered by his break with Freud in 1912 – by the late 1940s he seems to have decided to stop fighting. The “sage of Küsnacht” and “Hexenmeister of Zürich”, as Jung was known in the last decade of his life, had arrived.

Read the whole thing at Fortean Times.

As a media dissector and editor of Mediachannel, I have followed the reporting of this story closely with many detailed articles and in two books since, even before it became a story back to 2005 when I made my film In Debt We Trust only to be dismissed by some as a doom and gloomer for exposing the subprime mortgage fraud.

I was hoping that Rachel Maddow would challenge his mass delusion theory but she bought right into it also, in her interview. At one point Lewis opined that there was DECEPTION (i.e., lying by the investment world) but that too was not examined as Lewis himself counterpoised two explanations for the disaster, asking, “was it mass delusion or crime?”

Answer is: why not both? Interestingly, Disinfo’s post immediately following is called The Real 2012 Apocalypse, with the sunny information that even if the earth doesn’t come to an end in 2012, the financial crisis could be coming to a head at the very same time:

2012 also is the beginning of a three-year period in which more than $700 billion in risky, high-yield corporate debt begins to come due, an extraordinary surge that some analysts fear could overload the debt markets….

The apocalyptic talk is not limited to perpetual bears and the rest of the doom-and-gloom crowd.

Even Moody’s, which is known for its sober public statements, is sounding the alarm.

“An avalanche is brewing in 2012 and beyond if companies don’t get out in front of this…”

What’s so interesting about talk about the apocalypse and prophecy is not if it’s real, but that the world seems to be acting out prophetic fantasies regardless.  And this puts the concept of “delusion” into a different context.  As if it’s not just blindness, but acting some kind of death wish that’s as core to human experience as belief.

To look at the financial crisis from a more-mystical bent, “mass delusion” can have larger implications -  that they were being driven by something that maybe that didn’t understand and weren’t even conscious of – acting out a kind of archetype of corruption.  Even – possibly – acting out the archetype of the end of the world.  This isn’t totally insane thinking – because if you add together “mass delusion” and the financial crisis coming to a head in 2012, it’s a singularly weird juxtaposition.  This is not to mention the parallels in the Book of Revelation and what’s happening in the Middle East.  Even if insaniacs are trying to bring the Book of Revelation to life, who’s to say if the drive to make prophecy reality is not the prophecy itself.  Put another way – we’re hard-wired to die, perhaps we’re wired to make the whole system die as well.

To take the Jungian view, the financial crisis is acting out the archetype of the apocalypse:

What Jung sees happening in our era is that the Self, the central archetype of order and meaning, has been activated in the collective unconscious.  And when the Self becomes activated, it means a change in the collective cultural worldview.  At the core of every cultural worldview is the God-image, whether it’s Christian, Moslem, Hindu or whatever.  (Buddhists don’t subscribe to a God, but they believe in the Infinite, which, from a psychological standpoint, serves the same purpose.)  But when the Self is constellated, then the process of “uncovering what has been hidden,” the Apocalypse, the “revelation of new truth,” begins.  And this is a process that takes ages….

The “archetype of the Apocalypse” is the activation of the archetype of the Self–the central archetype of meaning–that is bringing with it some new worldview, a new God-image, a new relationship to the Divine, and a new stage of psychological maturation for the whole earth.

It’s a positive view of the apocalypse – because most would argue that what’s happening isn’t a result of our maturation but our immaturation (like that word, so I’m coining it). The conspiracy is not created by a shadow government, but the shadow self acting out darker impulses, which is happening more frequently. It doesn’t really have to be as complicated as that: as the world dissolves in a myriad different ways, it’s understandable if systems fall apart because corruption becomes more allowable.

Attributing the apocalypse to the collective unconscious is pretty dispiriting, because how do you fight something that’s the work of millions of brains working together without knowing it?  It’s like trying to change fate – or change prophecy (yikes).  At its core, it doesn’t really make a difference if the breakdown of the financial industry is delusion or crime/unconscious or conscious.  The main diagnosis that matters is that it’s happening, and it’s very hard to get the collective unconscious to undergo therapy.