This journal reveals a new world-view in our chaotic time, like a jig-saw puzzle suddenly recognizable. It’s recorded by a former professor of Western Civilization, whose lifelong practice of Yoga led her at mid-life to Zurich to learn the western way to brain cognition found by Jung to heal our split PoV in science and religion.
Genetics and archeology reveal the human brain reached its present evolutionary structure and capacity two-hundred millennia ago, and has been turning itself on ever since. This process has accelerated with the leap in technology of the last two centuries. The chaos in our social Fate comes from our mental resistance to break up and reorganize a new adaptive response to the environment that grew our consciousness (“spirit”) into matter.
This transformation in world culture started and failed many times and is precipitated by War, Conquest/Slavery, Plague and Famine, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse "un-veiling" spiritual vision of Truth to re-cognize the meaning of Science: humanity is forming a critical mass for a Qualium Leap in Evolution.
ISBN: 979-8-9853472-0-3
Christides’s intimate, apocalyptic journal documents both hers and the world’s experience of that annus horribilis of 2020, from the perspective of a Jungian therapist who splits her time between Florida and France, covering the plague referred to in the title, keeping a running total of deaths as the year passes, and the bumptious events that shook the world at the same time, including what she calls “mass psychosis,” the U.S. election, the rise of “Q-Anon psychos,” and more. The journal extends into 2021, as she faces the refusal of President Trump (whom she dubs “our Mafioso boss”) and the January 6 insurrectionists to concede the election. Of the latter, she notes “It is an insidious, that is, gradual and subtler approach to sedition, which is to overthrow democracy because of the fear that America is losing its demographic identity with the European ‘race.’”
Throughout, alongside such sharp-elbowed and at times despairing analysis, Christides reflects on news events and food for thought from sources as disparate as an interview with Paul McCartney or insights from Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind. One of the crucial threads tying all this together: Christides’s sense that “the Revelation of the Apocalypse is happening,” brought on by humanity’s choice “to impede our transformation or to accept the future responsibility to the planet the Cosmos requires of us.”
Christides contends that society, rooted in imperialism, has reduced life “to its material components,” cutting us off from each other, from “the planetary web of life,” and from the soul. These spiritual concerns, laid out with clarity, pulse through the book’s overwhelming beat-by-beat recounting of Covid-19, impeachment proceedings, relentless Trump headlines, plus all the corridors her mind journeys down while watching news, listening to podcasts, contemplating Hubble images of the Lagoon Nebula, and even reckoning with the darkness of history, the horror of the present, and even, on occasion, the hope that humanity can be more than this.
Takeaway: A blow-by-blow account of life during the era of Covid and political instability, from a Jungian perspective.
Table of Contents
Introduction Jung and Yoga
Prologue: The Lessons of the Pandemic
Chapter I: Blight upon the Land
Chapter III: April—The Unveiling by the Plague
Chapter IV: May—Cracking Open: What Stuff Are We Made of ?
Chapter V: June—Re-cognizing Truth
Chapter VI: July—Covid and the Meaning of Life
Chapter VII: August—Our Mass Psychosis is Inflammaging
Chapter VIII: September—Culture Change in Full Swing
Chapter IX: October—Split into Opposites before the Leap
Chapter X: November—Break-through or Break-up
Chapter XI: December—the Winter of our Discontent
Chapter XII: January—February 2021, Epiphany unveiled: Second Impeachment Treason