“all time is present now"

Non-Prophet: [Guest Blogger] Daniel Pinchbeck: The Mayan Apocalypse:

"I was left wondering why Western culture found it necessary to drastically repress not only psychedelic chemicals, but the entire worldview of shamanism with its focus on intuitive and magical aspects of reality, represented by the burning of witches in the Inquisition, and the destruction of native traditions during Colonialism. It seemed to me that this suppression masked some deep ontological threat to the modern mind.

...Jung’s essay, "Answer to Job," one of the most important texts of the Twentieth Century, providing a psychoanalytic portrait of the Western "god-image," Jahweh, as he developed, in a dialectical relationship with his chosen people, the Jews, through the Old and the New Testaments. Jung notes that the Western god-image has been undergoing his own evolution – in the earlier works of the Old Testament, Jahweh often seems to have the personality of a primitive war-lord or despotic king, inciting increased consciousness by inflicting suffering on the Jews. Job is the first human being to recognize that the god-image is not simply beyond judgment and understanding, but contains antinomies, schisms within his own nature, that make him the "dark god" of the unconscious as well as a benevolent life-giving deity. According to Jung, Job’s realization forces a concomitant realization on the part of the god-image; the creator fears the skeptical gaze of his creature, and he is forced to incarnate as Christ, a manifestation of the "good god," as a dialectical compensation for his previous amorality. Jung realized that the incarnation of Christ was preparation – that the god-image intended to incarnate in the collective body of humanity, and that this event was approaching quickly. Jung saw the flying saucer phenomenon of the 1950s as a sign of an imminent transformation in the nature of the psyche.

...The process of Apocalypse involves a realization that Western civilization is founded on a fundamentally flawed conception of time. Through our solar calendars, desynchronized from natural cycles, and our technological projections, we have reified a conception of time as an unvarying linear extension akin to space, in which ultimate fulfillment or completion lies in a far-distant and undefined future condition. We are constantly projecting our hopes, dreams, and desires onto the future – acting as though the present moment is somehow insufficient, founded upon a lack or failure of being. Part of Christ’s mission on the earth was to directly challenge this misconception through his parables and elegant paradoxes. He said, for instance, “The hour is coming, and now is.” Christ spoke and acted from the perspective of what Gebser calls “origin,” the transcendent domain, outside of space and time, given rigorous formulation by quantum physics.

Indigenous groups such as the Hopi or the Australian Aboriginals live in a form of time that is vastly different from our modern conception of it. The Hopi have a “continuum consciousness” in which “all time is present now,” and events follow a pre-set pattern. `For the Aboriginals, there was never a “fall of man” into a degraded state. Every day is the “first day,” the origin point, and the purpose of their rituals and ceremonies is to maintain the perfection of creation. "