Explorations of the Collective Unconscious

This overview of the artwork of Alex Grey (also published as a multi-part series on Reality Sandwich) looks at problems the art world has with spiritually themed art, Alex’s transforming relationship to darkness and shadow material, what his art says about sexuality, and the public roles Alex plays versus his studio work.

  Painting by Nathan Zap, 1978, oil on canvass,  see more of his work here:  Nocturnal Visions, the Paintings of Nathan Zap A highly perceptive friend of mine emailed me this morning. Taking out all personal context, here is an excerpt that captures the gist: “What are you observing? I sense a collective psychosis coming over the species, sort of a crazy-desperate lunacy, out of control and/or defeatist. I also see and feel this in myself right now, increasingly so, and the parallel is … well, I can’t determine if I’m projecting my own breakdown onto the world, or the world is causing it in me. It seems triggered by independent or autonomous events outside of any imagination on my part. (He describes a couple of recent meltdowns in his personal and professional life) These things are all thematically linked, related to dissolution and breakdown of everything. But I see similar things going on with others too.” I replied: I think we are tuning into different channels of the psychic ether. Mine might be more out of touch with the recession era collective as this is one of the happier life phases for me at the moment. I also live [...]

On October 12, 2012 Jonathan gave a talk on the Singularity Archetype and the evolutionary event horizon at the Boulder Evolver. The first 40 minutes are available as two Youtubes: Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7CfJP7zq6s Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEFmT8U4fwU You can also listen to the complete audio of the talk hosted on disinfo.com: http://www.disinfo.com/2012/11/jonathan-zap-on-the-singularity-archetype-and-human-evolution/

copyright Jonathan Zap  2012 painting copyright Nathan Zap see a gallery of my dad’s paintings here: Nocturnal Visions—the Paintings of Nathan Zap (This painting was based on a Kodachrome slide I took of a roller coaster with colored lights silhouetted  by a sunset. My dad asked to borrow the slide to make the painting.) August 7, 2012  Some strange threads came together today and formed a nexus in my mind  that began to reverberate with the strange attractor of possible futures. I was riding with two friends, young intellectuals (in the truest sense of that word) who were entering PhD programs, one of them in Semiotics in Estonia. The other, some sort of advanced mathematics at CU. Both seemed to have a much darker sense of the prospects of the human species than I do. They had both been living in Europe and had been out and about seeing more of the world than I usually do. There was a cognitive dissonance because one of them had inherited a beautiful, late model Saab convertible which we were riding with the top down from Boulder to Nederland— a drive that surrounds you with beautiful high desert canyon vistas. Boulder is so much [...]

The tragedy of people getting shot at a showing of The Dark Knight Rises, is not a random, incomprehensible event. Mass shootings, like the one that just happened in Aurora, have become a recurrent nightmare that haunts the collective psyche. As the nightmare repeats, we see patterns emerging. Movies are a collective dream delivery technology. Some movies that have high access to the contents of the collective unconscious, are what Charles Fort called “window zones,” or portals between realms, and weird and uncanny things happen in their wake. Particularly, movies about dark, occult things have a long history of these crossover effects.

Awakening from uneasy dreams, I was aware of myself as a self-reflecting starship. For a few moments I lingered in that warpy place between dreams and wakefulness, still feeling partly caught up in some painful drama with another starship that had played itself out as I slept. Slowly the dream faded, and the waking consciousness returned—that all-too-familiar sense of myself as a middle-aged starship, about halfway through its lifecycle in an era where well-maintained starships often lasted a century.

This expanding document includes dialouges between me and John Major Jenkins, author of seven books about the Maya, and also between me and Ron Lampi, author, poet, visionary

Subjugation and abuse of women is one of the most critical social issues in all of human history. Violent oppression of women has been, and remains, a serious obstacle to the full intellectual growth and evolution of the human species. In recent years the subservient position of women suffering under Islamic regimes has become somewhat common knowledge in the western world where most people seem familiar with the oppression of women, particularly in Afghanistan. Yet for so many women and girls living in Islamic and Hindu communities, reality is far worse than what most westerners imagine. This eye-opening article is by Sean Moffitt of the Women’s Assistance Fund

I think I just realized why I get into trouble with so many people—-somehow I never realized what now seems obvious—-reality testing is politically incorrect! Whether you are a religious fundamentalist or a New Age fundamentalist, on the right or on the left, if it feels emotionally satisfying, then it’s true.

—–This inquiry consists, so far, as a very strange exchange with Harald Kleeman— Australian hermetic philosopher, Christian mystic and artist. This dialogue picks up from a previous strange dialogue: Piercing the Veil and Dissing the Source Code of the Matrix of Patriarchal Fundamentalism.