I think there is a universal law behind everything. We often think about things from a negative point of view because we only take into account the negative side of things which manifests as entropy. So we are in the waning days of global civilization and it's hard to see how anything good can come out of it. But there is in the universe a counter law of creativity. People are born and people die. Civilizations are born and civilizations die. Stars are born and stars die, but something else is happening too. In the sun, hydrogen atoms are being fused to form helium atoms and helium atoms are being fused to form heavier atoms such as carbon which is the basis of sentient life. So in the process of entropic activity, creation is occurring. This isn't limited to just the elemental plane, but to the mental plane as well. We as a species are evolving in how we think and how we integrate our mental functions.
In the bible, in Genesis, it talks about Adam and Eve eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This is a metaphor for the development of the rational function, the ability to separate one thing from another mentally. It says that saw that they were naked. Man had come ito self awareness. They were banned from the the garden of eden which is nature, the natural order which they now see themselves as separate from. Our current civilization is the culmination of the rational function which is so powerful that it threatens to destroy our civilization.
The counter to the rational function is the feeling function in Jung's typology. In mythology, the rational function is the goddess Athene who springs fully formed from Zeus' head. She is the Justice card of the tarot deck. Justice is blind, the pure rational function divorced from any feeling. Athene is a goddess of war and fighting. Counter to Athene is the goddess Iris who is the messenger of Hera (Zeus wife). She is the Tarot card Temperance which pictures a winged woman pouring a liquid back and forth from a golden cup to a silver cup with one foot in the water and the other on land. She is the kind and loving emissary of the feeling function. She reunites us with the paradise (nature) that we left because of our one sided development of the rational function.
The 60's for me were a time of dramatic opening. Sparked by the appearance of psychedelic drugs, we found ourselves in a paradise that we had no idea existed. The feeling function was the primary function that emerged and we all thought that the extremes of the rational function would be changed and mitigated by the rising new wave of love and openness. We were wrong. What actually happened was that the rational function, out of fear, reasserted itself in a more powerful form. But this powerful form was a last spurt of energy that inevitably revealed the decay that was growing in the rational systems, a decay brought on by it's divorce from the feeling function. A generation however had passed and the people born in this time period are more able to access the feeling function and are more open creating a race of people who have the necessary mental balance to deal with the problems that rational civilization has created.
It is always good to remember that the Soviet empire fell swiftly and it was a surprise to even the hawks in Washington. The US empire will fall too and sooner rather than later. It is on life support now. This will have extreme consequences to those of us tied to the empire and the almighty dollar but the world will go on and the exhaustion of the drives to war may just provide an opening for a wiser and more compassionate generation to create something beautiful out of the chaos.
I have no idea how things will shake out but we do have the means if we can awaken each other.
