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Latest Blog:  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.

Please note the new streaming videos available  under “media.”

Is Our Civilization Leaking from Below—A Subterranean  View of the Gulf Oil Spill

Explore the finanicial meltdown and its connection to psychopathy (the condition of being a psychopath):

Foxes and Reptiles—Psychopathy and the Financial Meltdown of 2008-9

(Vintage advertisement that unintentionally portrays the psychopath’s view of others.)

What connection does the movie Avatar have to

emergent archetypes in the collective unconscious related to an evolutionary event horizon?

Please Read: Avatar and the Singularity Archetype

New Video:  Two African American friends of mine said they wanted to come over to my apartment in the East Village and video tape me in 1984. I decided to create my own religion for the occasion—the Sacred Tenets of theReligion of the UFO Eye Knight. I was an English Teacher and Building Security Coordinator of a public high school in the South Bronx at the time and I got Galaxy, a graffiti artist I knew, to design the ID card and a rapper (I think with the Culture MCs) to write an official rap song for the religion. They knew nothing about the religion except its name.

The Sacred Tennets of the Religion of the UFO Eye Knight

This essay may change your view of romantic relationships forever:

No Tristans Allowed Beyond this Point—Debunking and Transforming the Western Myth of Romantic Love
Testimonials:
Rob Brezsny ,  author, visionary, and musician whose syndicated column appears in more than 200 newspapers says “My friend Jonathan Zap has created the Zap Oracle, a source you can use to do divinations for yourself. Because he has such a cagey, interesting, and holy mind, I trust the spirit behind his oracles.”
Rob also endorses Jonathan’s dream interpretation service.  In his weekly newsletter he wrote:
“Jonathan Zap, Visionary Philosopher and Dream Worker Extraordinaire. The best dream worker I’ve ever known.
Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of working on my dreams with some fine dream workers, but recently I discovered the best ever. His name is Jonathan Zap.

Highly intuitive, schooled in the wisdom of archetypes, and really smart,Jonathan has helped me crack the codes of some of my major dreams. His cost is quite reasonable, too. I exuberantly recommend his services.

(He’s not even paying me to say this. I’m simply motivated by the desire
to share his treasure with my readers.) ”

Tima Vlasto, a free lance writer and translator from Athens, Greece  who writes a column for the Examiner says of the Zap Oracle:

“… it has been a more positively transformative experience for me than any other form of inner searching I have done…and I have done a lot! It unabashedly touches and presses on every wound, every bright light, every hidden corner, and in such blunt honesty, that at the moment it “speaks”, there is no way to not face, absorb, realize and embrace those shadows that block the “connection”…and confirms, so readily like a snapshot of the “matrix dynamics” at that moment, one’s intuition. It is a great oracle.”

I’ve done three interviews with Mike Hagan/Radio Orbit now available for free download/streaming audio.  Add Radio Orbit to your favorites and listen to archived interviews with people like Alex Grey, Riane Eisler and John  Major Jenkins.

Image background created by Radio Orbit from an actual photo of me siting on a very cooperative young bengal tiger in Colorado

Click categories  to see an extensive library of  writings.
Here are some examples:
Dynamic Paradoxicalism the anti-ism ism
Dynamic paradoxicalism is my attempt to create a meta-philosophy that is a counter to fundamentalist and absolutist thought, which is nearly as common amongst New Agers and the Left as it is among religious fundamentalists and the Right.
About the creative process and my most autobiographical essay:

The Path of the Numinous—Living and Working with the Creative Muse

Born Under a Blood Red Moon—-Metamorphosis of the Feminine in the Dreams of Young Women
A brief meditation on the space-time of incarnation:
Temporal Fencing and Life Fields
A sometimes surreal study of Burning Man:Incendiary Person in the Desert Carnival Realm


Alex Grey, Jonathan at Cosm on the eve of the Solstice (2007) where many people got to try out the Zap Oracle. Visionary artist Alex joined my last  Coast to Coast show with George Noory to talk about his mind parasite experiences. I’ve  written an article entitled Alex Grey and Mind Parasites which analyzes Alex’s encounter with parasitic deities and his painting “Demons and Deities Drinking from the Milky Pool” in which he illustrates his experience.
My introductory essay to the mind parasite topic: Mind Parasites, Energy Parasites and Vampires
One definition of hell is, “The impossibility of reason.” For twelve years I have watched my friend and colleague John Major Jenkins go through exactly this kind of hell as he pursued and published his rigorous investigation into the Maya and the meaning of 2012 while the barkers of Carnival 2012 have gotten most of the attention. Finally, a vindication, a N.Y. Times article that begins to do justice to the subject and which provides the perceptive reader with enough information to get a sense of who is to be taken seriously on this subject, and who isn’t. As Carnival 2012 continues to gain momentum, you owe it to yourself to read this article: The Final Days Related readings: Dreamspell Dialogue –a dialogue between John and I on Jose Arguelles’s deceptive Dreamspell. A Trialogue with John Jenkins and Ron Lampert 2012: The Center of Time and Mythos Some things I’ve written on the subject:
The Mutant versus the Machine, the end of the Iron Age, and the Galactic Alignment of 2012, Clock Time Metastisizes Toward 2012
Cowritten with John:

A Mutant Convergence— How John Major Jenkins, Jonathan Zap and Terence McKenna met during a Weekend of High Strangeness in 1996

And a travelogue of a journey we took through Mayan ruins:
Vision at Chichén Itzá
The following link is to my major work on what I call the “Singularity Archetype” and what I believe it has to say about the evolutionary event horizon we are hurtling toward.  I first wrote about this subject in a philosophy honors paper in 1978:  Archetypes of a New Evolution. This updated treatment was first written in 1996 but has been very extensively rewritten and an epilogue has been added in 2009:
White Crows Rising—The Singularity Archetype and the Evolutionary Event Horizon
Send your comments to jonathanzap@hotmail.com
Thank you to those who support this web site with donations. Even small amounts of green energy help to allow the time and resources to further develop the oracle, to do research and to assemble the words and images, the zeros and ones,  comprising this site. Go to the oracle to make a donation.  I am also deeply grateful to those who provide feedback and to everyone who graces this site with their precious time and attention.  I hope that you find benefit from your visit.   —-Jonathan

No Tristans Allowed Beyond This Point—-

Debunking the Western Myth of Romantic Love  © 2010 Jonathan Zap

“Romantic love is the single greatest energy system in the Western Psyche.  In our culture it has supplanted religion as the arena in which men and women seek meaning, transcendence, wholeness, and ecstasy.”

—-from We by Robert Johnson

Western romance mythology centers around being in love as an ecstatic state in which we feel we have been completed, found the ultimate meaning in life, and have larger than life feelings of intensity.   Unconsciously we have the expectation that our lover provide us with these feelings continuously.  We also assume that our model of romance is the best and that love relationships not based on “being in love” must be pale, insignificant shadows by comparison. We are convinced of this despite all the evidence that tells us that few enterprises, besides diets, begin with such high hopes and typically such dismal results as the falling in love sort of romances.  Western society is the only culture in history that assumes romance should be at the core of marriages and other love relationships and is the highest ideal of “true love.” The ideal romance, the West believes, involves the ecstatic adoration of  the image of perfection in the form of a  man or woman.

The Western myth has come to flourish and dominate during a patriarchal and increasingly materialistic era where the image of the divine is only rarely experienced in the context of religion.  The “imago dei” has shifted from the image of  God, gods and goddesses, the heavens,  etc. to the romantic beloved.  With religious mania and frenzy many seek to capture and possess someone they are in love with as though this fellow, flawed mortal could redeem a lifetime that is deficient in meaning.  Just as those who have absolute, fundamentalist identifications with  particular religions have historically been some of the greatest sources of violence, oppression and suffering, so too, those who identify absolutely with the aims of the Western myth of romance  often become violent and create chaos and tragic dramas in their wake. Today’s newspaper should give you many examples of both types of violence.

Our culture does not provide us with a single ruling mythology.  In that vacuum some will seek out religious fundamentalisms, and others will  pursue the myth of romantic love as their religion.  Still others may pursue dieting or the world view of an eating disorder as their religion, or perhaps the latest multi-level marketing scheme, self-help or New Age fundamentalisms like The Secret or other variations of  you-create-your –own-reality, etc.

A person whose life is lacking in soulfulness, experience of the feminine, deep relationship and spirituality may seek to recapture all of these through the pursuit of a beloved.  Such a person will say they are looking for “love,” when actually they are looking for a very specific type of deluded romance. Our whole culture tends to falsely equate romance with love when the two are quite different, and in some cases manifest as almost polar opposites.  One can be swept up by romance and yet be severely lacking in love, commitment, loyalty, or even basic relatedness.

The Western mythology of romance is an atmosphere charged with sexual, emotional and mythological content that has surrounded us for our entire lives.  We have breathed in this atmosphere from music, movies, television shows, advertisements, casual conversations, novels, and text messages. Just like fish might have a hard time getting an outside perspective on what it’s like to be wet and immersed in water, it is hard for us to get a perspective on this key element of our inner and outer world.

For example, can you remember when you first heard that an ideal relationship should involve “falling in love”?  Was it a song on the radio?  An overheard conversation?  Most of us won’t be able to remember such a moment, because it is more like our psyches were booted up into a cultural operating system in which the Western myth of romantic love was a core, unquestioned element.  For some, to even raise the question of the value of “being in love,” may seem an offense to rightness equivalent to questioning the value of sunshine.

The religious certainty that exists in so many about key aspects of the Western myth of romantic love derives from its genuine ability to tap into some of our deepest psychological, alchemical, social, sexual and spiritual aspirations.  We are not talking about some flimsy mental construct, but a powerful mythological system that is capable of channeling our core energies. To deal with a system this powerful, and that is at the core of Western values, we are going to need one of the most powerful Western technologies for gaining distance from something.  In short, we are going to need to turn the Western myth of romantic love into an acronym.  Hereafter I will refer to the Western myth of romantic love as “WMRL” ( which I pronounce as “wormal”)

“Always you were the reason for my existence;

To adore you for me was religion…”

— from a Mexican love song quoted by Robert Johnson in We

If WMRL is a kind of religion, where and how did this religion arise?  According to Robert Johnson, the French myth of Tristan and Iseult “…was the first story in Western literature that dealt with romantic love.” ( We , p. xiv)  Johnson traces the origins of WMRL to an early religion now nearly forgotten:

“One of the most powerful of the early religions was the Manichean movement, named for the Persian prophet Manes.  In Europe this religion became “Catharism,” for the believers called themselves Cathars, meaning “pure.” By the twelfth century entire towns and provinces in the south of France, though nominally Christian, practiced Catharism, and many of the nobility in the courts of Europe were Cathars. In France the movement was called the Albigensian heresy because the movement centered in the city of Albi in France.

“One of their basic beliefs was that “true love” was not the ordinary human love between husband and wife but rather the worship of a feminine savior, a mediator between God and man, who waited in the sky to welcome the “pure” with a holy kiss and lead him or he into the Realm of Light. By contrast this with this “pure” love, ordinary human sexuality and marriage were bestial and unspiritual.  Cathars believed that the love of man for woman should be an earthly allegory of their spiritual love for the Queen of Heaven.”  (p. 69)

After a period of flourishing alongside of Christianity, Catharism was driven underground.  Johnson continues,

“The pope declared Catharism a heresy and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux drove it underground by relentless crusades.  But like every powerful idea that is driven underground, it reappeared in another form—a supposedly ‘secular’ form. The teachings and ideals of the Cathars suddenly reappeared in the cult of courtly love, in the songs and poems of the troubadours and in the ‘romances.’ Some cultural historians believe that courtly love was a deliberate ‘secular’ continuation of Catharism, that the knights and ladies who first practiced courtly love were Cathars continuing their religious practice under the guise of a secular cult of love. To outsiders it looked like a new and elegant way to make love, to woo and flatter pretty damsels, but for the insider who knew the “code,” it as was an allegorical practice of Catharist ideals.

“The ideal of courtly love swept through the feudal courts of medieval Europe and began a revolution in our attitudes toward the feminine values of love, relationship, refined feeling, devotion, spiritual experience and the pursuit of beauty.  That revolution finally matured into what we call romanticism.” (pp. 70-71)

Courtly love so caught on fire in the Western imagination that it became “…the driving force behind a flow of poetry, song, love stories and plays.  The French love stories were called romans , which was anglicized into ‘romance.’” (p. 46)  As Johnson points out, our present view of romance, even entomologically,  derived from 12^th Century French love stories:  “Our word romantic and our romantic ideal have come down to us through the romances. Romantic love is ‘story-book’ love.”

Our present view of romance is a sexualized version of Catharism- influenced courtly love.  Here’s how courtly love worked as summarized by Johnson:

“There were three characteristics of courtly love that will help us to understand it. First, the knight and his lady were never to be involved sexually with each other.  Theirs was an idealized, spiritualized relationship, designed to lift them above the level of physical grossness, to cultivate refined feeling and spirituality.  The second requirement of courtly love was that they were not to be married to each other.  In fact, the lady was usually married to another nobleman. The knight-errant adored her, served her, and made her the focus of his spiritual aspiration and idealism, but he could not have an intimate relationship with her.  To do so would be to treat her as an ordinary mortal woman, and courtly love required that he treat her as a divinity, as a symbol of the eternal feminine and of his feminine soul.  The third requirement was that the courtly lovers keep themselves aflame with passion, that they suffer intense desire for each other, yet strive to spiritualize their desire by seeing each other as symbols of the divine archetypal world and by never reducing their passion to the ordinariness of sex or marriage.”  (pp. 45-46)

WMRL, with its origins in a repressed religion,  is an encompassing mythological belief system that has as many martyrs, misguided crusades and deluded practitioners as any fundamentalist religion.  An essential tenet of WMRL is that one should “fall in love” with someone and through this path of “being in love” experience ecstatic heights, and tremendous feelings of completeness, wholeness, meaning and fulfillment.  What systems besides WMRL make such exalted claims?  Religions do; this is what people look for in religious experience.  The word religion derives from the Middle English word “religare” which means to tie, fasten or bind.  Some have interpreted this etymology to suggest that the original word means “re-link” as in relinking to the divine. To me it sounds like they are editing out the other, darker implication—bondage to a mythology or a belief system.  For many, WMRL is their religion, their way to seek to relink to the divine. Too often that path leads to a deluded bondage to a romantic relationship or aspiration. Of Human Bondage is a classic novel by W. Somerset Maugham on this exact theme. Jung once said that  everyone who came to him with a religious problem turned out to have a sexual problem, and everyone who came to him with a sexual problem turned out to have a religious problem. The religious and the romantic, the sexual and the spiritual, are highly connected, and one of them will often come grotesquely masquerading as the other. Both religion and WMRL have an ability to relink us to the divine, but also an all too familiar tendency to bind us to a rigid conceptual framework that produces mechanical, stereotyped behaviors.

The purpose of this essay will be to take a look at WMRL as a relinking or religious system for connecting to the divine and to suggest some alternatives. The central thesis is that WMRL attempts to interpersonalize the search for wholeness which needs to be intrapsychic.  You cannot find wholeness in the beloved; you can only find it where it always was—within. When we shift our relinking aspirations from the interpersonal domain to recognizing intrapsychic wholeness, we will not lose our connection to love.  When we set aside the many well-worn golden oldies of WMRL we will actually become far more capable of love, and more likely to have deep and truly loving relationships.

Getting past WMRL is not something that can be done by reading an essay. I’ve known about WMRL for many years and yet still find myself deeply affected by its awesome power. WMRL has profound influence on my sexuality, emotional body, my sense of social status, interpersonal boundaries and many other key aspects of my life and being.  Awakening from such a potent and far reaching enchantment is a long and labyrinthine process.  But the labyrinthine journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and the first step is to be able to name WRML, to see its outline, to gain some sort of observational distance so that we are not entirely encompassed by its world view.

This essay is largely inspired by the book We by Robert Johnson and a dream and synchronicity that highlighted its significance.  In early March of 2010 I was trying to summon enthusiasm to finish my essay “Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom—Androgyny, Alchemy, Evolution and the One Ring” which, as of this writing, remains in the rough draft state it has been in for the last several years. This essay uses the Tolkien mythology to illustrate the need for androgyny, the alchemical inner marriage of archetypal masculine and feminine within, to replace the externalized search for wholeness in an outside “precious”—-a romantic beloved, material goods, social status, etc.  I was having trouble summoning enthusiasm for the rewrite since the document had been sitting for a few years. During this period of neglect I had a dream where I was in the basement of my parent’s house in the Bronx and saw a book that was poking out of a book case.  It looked old, neglected, but highly numinous and filled with emotional content. The book was entitled “We.”  Immediately after I saw the book I woke up and realized I had been given a message meant to be worked out in the waking life.  In the dream I imagined the book to be a novel, but I knew it wasn’t the classic Soviet science fiction novel entitled We . Vaguely I remembered that a Jungian author I had never read, Robert Johnson had written three books entitled He , She and We . Since Johnson is a fellow Jungian dealing with mythology and depth psychology I felt sure that it was his book that my unconscious was pointing toward.  I immediately went to the used book store and got a copy.

An hour later I walked into the Roma coffee shop in Boulder and began reading the book.  We turned out to be a parallel work to “Casting Precious…”, essentially about the same thing—the drive to look for wholeness outside rather than within. While “Casting Precious…” centers around the Tolkien mythology,  We centers around the 12^th Century myth of Tristan and Iseult.  Johnson’s central thesis is that WMRL began with this myth and that Tristan, an heroic figure who violates every bond of loyalty and ethics after drinking a love potion and falling in love with Iseult, represents the Western ego fully under the control of WMRL.  For some reason, after reading the book for a couple of hours at a corner table in the coffee shop,  I turned around and looked behind me at the employee area. Just a couple of feet behind my head I found a handwritten sign had been posted that said, “No Tristans Allowed Beyond this Point.”  The meaning of the synchronicity was both obvious and perfectly succinct:  This is the point where, at least for me, being controlled by WMRL (what Tristan is emblematic of) has to be disallowed.

In We, Johnson documents that WMRL began as a religious offshoot, a path of spiritual aspiration which was championed by the knights and Troubadours of Tristan’s era.  Unlike our version of WMRL they chose to sacrifice seeing woman as sex object and “…instead made her into a symbol of the eternal feminine, the soul, divine love, spiritual ennoblement and wholeness.”  ( We , p. 54)  In our time,  Johnson points out, “For lack of any other channel, any other form in which it could be lived in our modern culture, our religious instinct has migrated almost completely into one secret place where it is allowed to live sub rosa: romantic love.”

Because WMRL carries religious content and is the modern person’s closest connection to the divine, it is necessarily out of control. The Western ego has so much trouble coping with WMRL because secretly and unconsciously we want to lose control, we want the ecstatic, transformative experience that lifts us out of the sterile, scheduled, rigidified worlds created by the ego and patriarchal society. The image of the divine, the imago dei —the god-image—-content that is submerged in materialist, patriarchal culture— resurfaces from the unconscious personified by the beloved. The person on whom we project this image will then have great power over us, though we may also seek to compensate for that effect by attempting to have power over them.  Even if we succeed, it may only be to find that the image of the divine has now shifted to someone else, and we are, like a person chasing after a rainbow, never able to bring the image of desire within our control.

Essentially, the person in the grips of WMRL projects disowned aspects of their own soul onto the beloved, causing them to light up as numinous and all-attractive.  This projection has two key unfortunate aspects.  he first is that when we project part of ourselves onto the other we get further from recognizing, owning and integrating our own inner content.  We fragment; we split off part of our inner wholeness and attribute the disowned part to someone else. The second great misfortune is that the projection causes us to be deluded about the beloved.  We idealize them, and therefore fail to locate them as the specific, flawed human being they actually are. When the idealization inevitably collapses it turns into the equal and opposite disillusionment, and the relationship to the actual person is undermined or destroyed.

The person who is “in love” is essentially related to a projection, a piece of themselves and not to another person. Their commitment is not to any particular person, despite what they may think, but to romantic passion itself. To achieve this passionate intensity the WMRL-addled person may willingly sacrifice everything else—loyalty, duty, obligation, relationship, and commitment. They are, as some have put it, “in love with being in love.”

“Being in love” is a state of intense projection in which one projects onto a human being an image of the divine—the perfect man, woman, youth,  androgyne or whatever.  I am only going to give a quick example of  Jung’s anima and animus to explain this projection because his model tends to stereotype  the way this works, and doesn’t always fully acknowledge some of the variations. Anima and animus does work well, however, to explain many of the classic cases of projection.  For example, a heterosexual man is walking down the street and sees a beautiful woman he has never seen before.  She lights up in his psyche like a goddess. He has this feeling of eternal recurrence, as if he has known this woman from other lifetimes and he feels this conviction that he and she are destined to be together. This is a simple example of what Jung calls “anima projection.”  The man projects his soul, which is connected to the archetypal feminine, onto an actual woman.  Since it his soul that he is seeing mirrored back to him through projection, he of course feels like they are destined to be together and that they have been companions in past lifetimes, etc.  He is seeing a disowned, unintegrated part of himself in the outside world.

The most common, and often deadly, form of human unconsciousness is the perennial confusion of inside and outside.  We think we perceive something in the outside world when actually it is a projection of inner content.  The result could be stalking, scapegoating, genocide or the billion he said/she said arguments going on any time of the day or night. Unless we are taking the contra naturum path of rigorous self-examination, we live in a state of continual projection.  In “Stop the Hottie!” I illustrated projection this way:

“Imagine the following thought experiment. You enter a crypt filled with pirate treasure. The crypt is absolutely dark. You have a flashlight with you and switch it on. You gasp as the flashlight beam illuminates red rubies, glittering gold, green emeralds and cobalt blue sapphires. What beautiful colors these precious objects have!

“Actually, this is the illusion of projection, these objects have no color, no light energy, the light, color and energy are mere reflections and refractions of the white light of the flashlight which contains all colors. Freud noticed something similar about the sexuality of the modern person as compared to the ‘primitive.’ The primitive worshipped the mysterious inner fire, and the object on whom this might be bestowed was secondary. The modern person conversely sees all the magic and fire in the outside object (in another words, the Hottie) and fails to recognize the mystery and power of their inner fire. Some guy sees Britney on television and says, ‘She’s so hot!’ Actually, she’s an odorless, touchless, two inch pixel phantom moving beneath a glass screen. What’s hot is his inner fire, the power that he forever gives away to the image, fantasy or person of the Hottie.”

So when a person is “in love” they are primarily or exclusively in love with their own projection.  If the actual person they are projecting onto does something inconsistent with the projection—sleeping with someone else, for example—their “love” could turn to homicide in a heartbeat.  Just as sleepwalkers can become violent if suddenly awakened, the person who is in love may be ruthless with anyone or anything that stands between them and their projection.  What clouds the picture a bit is human complexity and variability.  Some people are “in love” with someone where it is not entirely projection. The projection, for them is a superimposition on the actual person so they perceive a composite containing elements of projection and elements of the actual person.  In a fortunate case, as the projection inevitably starts to decline, authentic love for the actual person fills in the vacuum.  For example, one of the most classic cases of an authentic love relationship most of us are likely to have witnessed, is that of an elderly married couple who are devoted to each other and are life companions and best friends.  If you ask them, they are likely to tell you that they were “in love” when they were young sweethearts who barely knew each other.  When that phase ended there were many years of bitter arguments and disappointments, but they managed to survive many difficult  phases and that’s when the real love started to grow.  Louis de Bernières,  in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, describes the evolution from infatuation to authentic love with poetic eloquence:

“Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are.

“Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”

Although I would want no part of the custom, arranged marriages seem to have as good or better chance of turning out happily as marriages  based on romance.  Adult match makers may be less subject to projection and may therefore pick more suitable matches than those arranged by romantic projection.

From the classical Jungian point of view, if you are conscious of projection it is no longer a projection.  In my view that’s too clean a distinction.  For decades I have been conscious of my romantic projections, but they are still a powerful influence. I may experience aspects of “being in love” while at the same time have a fairly realistic perception of the actual person. Ideally, in such a composite case, one sees the best potential of the actual person lit up by the projection and this is inspiring to both parties. On the less ideal side one will tend to inflate the beloved’s virtues, overlook or underestimate serious character flaws, and form a codependence.

The composite case is a very realistic possibility for people consciously working on freeing themselves from WMRL. An element of projection may be necessary to have the requisite enthusiasm to form a relationship, but one does not mindlessly idealize or become infatuated with the beloved.  The outcome will be a sliding spectrum of composite possibilities with elements of neurotic WMRL in the ascendant some times, and authentic love at other times.

One way to tell you are on the wrong side of WMRL is if you find yourself ruthlessly pursuing the beloved without regard to basic ethical principles.  In the Western world it is often considered correct to suspend ethics when in love because the pursuit of romantic love is considered more important than any other value.  Hence the familiar proverb:  “All’s fair in love and war.” The saying dates back to 1850 (Francis Edward Smedley) but it seems to be a paraphrase of  a line from Don Quixote (1605-1615, Miguel de Cervantes):  “Love and War are the same thing, and stratagems and polity are as allowable in the one as in the other.”

Western romantic love is expected to be pursued with the ruthless, obsessive focus of warfare.  A movie about someone going to insane lengths to win over someone they are in love with is considered a “romantic comedy,” when actually what’s portrayed is usually a toxic blend of self-humiliation, sexual harassment,  deception, crass manipulation and cloying sentimentality.

The connection between WMRL and warfare shouldn’t surprise us given the fact that it began in the context of chivalrous 12^th Century knights who, when they weren’t pining after some impossibly idealized woman, were busily hacking people to pieces to defend or acquire territory.  The person under the sway of WMRL is focused on getting what they want, not on love.  As Margaret Anderson put it, “In real love you want the other person’s good. In romantic love you want the other person.”

Like someone coming out of a football huddle, like someone getting psyched up for warfare by a charismatic general,  WMRL tells you that you have to go for it, consequences be damned.  As U.S. Navy Admiral David Farragut put it during the American Civil War Battle of Mobile Bay:  “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”  WMRL tells you to rush in where angels fear to tread. It insists that you have a cyclopean focus on obtaining passionate, romantic love with the other person no matter what happens to you or to them. As Ronny Cammarei (played by Nicholas Cage) tells  Loretta Castorini (played by Cher) in Moonstruck :  “I don’t care if I burn in hell.  I don’t care if you burn in hell.”  In this classic star crossed lover’s statement we see a blending of WMRL and Christianity. WMRL is a kind of religion, so it is not surprising that it should have parallels to other religions. When Christianity made Gnosticism heretical, it lost sight of finding the savior within.  Instead the focus became you, the wretched sinner, in pursuit of the external, absolutely perfect savior.  This is what I have called in “Casting Precious…” the “mislocation of the Godhead.”  From my point of view, the location of the Godhead should be oriented like some of the more recent interpretations of the Sanskrit salutation “Namaste.” A popular (if nontraditional) version is sometimes translated as: “I honor the Spirit in you which is also in me.” You recognize the godhead in the other, but also recognize that is within you and everything else.  This location of the godhead is like the Sanskrit definition of God as a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. If your location of the godhead, however, is asymmetrical, if it is unevenly distributed, you get major schizoid splits and often violent outcomes.  If I locate the godhead exclusively in me than I will tend to become an Anti-Christ, a psychopath, a Wall Street executive or something of that sort.  If I locate the godhead disproportionately onto a savior, a sky god, or something like that, I tend to feel that everybody is a wretched sinner and I need scapegoats to carry the dark side of reality which I don’t want to attribute to my savior or sky god who is supposed to be the sunnum bonum or all good.  I may feel that some sort of blood bath is necessary to please God, and so forth.   (For a more thorough discussion of how this works see “Casting Precious…”)

The tendency to seek for the divine externally is a commonality between WMRL and many versions of the three Abrahamic faiths. This type of religion, the external savior type, is the gateway drug that primes the psyche for WMRL.  Robert Johnson, who is a Christian, views WMRL as sort of counterfeit religion.  Religion, he seems to assume, is a far more appropriate medium for relating to the divine.  But more blood has been spilled in the name of Christianity than even WMRL.  Islam, in many of its variations, can create even more suffering for women than WMRL. Fundamentalist religionists often adopt “all’s fair” ethics and want to convert the infidel at the point of a sword and pursue crusades and jihads. The Twelfth-Century knights that got WMRL going were also Christians. WMRL, warfare and bad religion seem to always be getting mixed together, and the Priesthood tolerates a plague of pedophilia, and religious fervor wants to proselytize, crusade and jihad.  If recent generations want Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll, for most of history it’s been a much more dangerous combo: blood, romance and religion. WMRL, warfare and bad religion all tell the psyche: “I own you. Go into a frenzy doing what I tell you to do regardless of consequences: Kill anyone who stands in the way of your love. Put on this explosive vest and sleep with afterlife virgins tonight. Onward Christian soldiers!”  WMRL, warfare and fundamentalist religion are like a good margarita—the tequila, lime juice and triple sec all seem to blend together and you’re always drunk on something: romance as your religion pursued like warfare, religion pursued as warfare, warfare pursued as religion, and so forth.  After so many centuries of intoxication with blood,  romance and  bad religion, it’s tough to sober up.  Of course, I’m talking about the dark side of religion and it doesn’t exactly correspond to fundamentalism—the Amish are peaceful fundamentalists, but almost everyone on the dark side of religion are fundamentalists. The dark side of religion is not a matter of aberrations, however, not just a few bad apples, it is a huge side of the overall expression of the human species and its relationship to religion.  Obviously, this subject is beyond the scope of this essay, but suffice to say that like WMRL, the more a particular variation of a particular religion mislocates the godhead, the more violence tends to happens  Religions that locate the godhead everywhere such as Taoism and Buddhism are rarely the ones who want to please God with a blood bath.  So if you have an outside savior—whether it is a romantic beloved or a divine entity—if you do not locate the godhead/the kingdom of heaven within—you are likely to do some major violence to yourself and the outside world as you stumble around in a state of projection.

Breaking the spell of WMRL is like trying to deprogram someone who has been part of a cult for 8 centuries.  An 800 year collective addiction to WMRL means that there will be some serious withdrawal symptoms. Sobriety is likely to be a one-day-at-a-time struggle. We may need some version of the twelve steps:

1. We admitted that we were powerless over WMRL, that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. We came to believe that a power greater than us did not reside in the other person and we thereby restored our sanity.

….and so forth.

We could shrink the antidote to WMRL down to a single phrase: the inner alchemical marriage of masculine and feminine. How to achieve that is also obviously beyond the scope of this essay. You can find more depth on this subject in the still rough draft version of “Casting Precious…”  For now, if you are WRMLaholic—admit it and aim at living your life in a way that allows authentic love to supersede romantic love.

Robert Johnson says essentially that we should replace the contrived, histrionic dramas of WMRL with “stirring the oatmeal” —a humble acceptance and appreciation of “…ordinary human life, with its obligations, its ties, its commitments, its duties, its limitations…” ( We , p. 139)  Johnson describes grounded, authentic love with an oatmeal metaphor:

“Many years ago a wise friend gave me a name for human love.  She called it ‘stirring-the-oatmeal” love…Stirring oatmeal is a humble act—not exciting or thrilling. But it symbolizes a relatedness that brings love down to earth.  It represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple, unromantic tasks: earning a living, living within a budget, putting out the garbage, feeding the baby in the middle of the night. To ‘stir the oatmeal’ means to find the relatedness, the value, even the beauty, in simple and ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama, an entertainment, or an extraordinary intensity in everything.”  (p. 195)

Johnson points out that for many of us this: “…focus on ordinary human beings, is too earthbound, too dull and sordid for our romantic prejudices.”  In other words after eight hundred years of hitting the crack pipe of WMRL the transition to oatmeal is a bit difficult.

I am wary of fluctuating between polar opposites because that just keeps you swinging forever on the pendulum of enantiadromia. For me, the transition from crack to oatmeal is a little too steep.  I need some transitional steps, and I need more than oatmeal to fill the vacuum of WMRL withdrawal.  Some may be ready for the oatmeal phase— by a certain age decreasing hormones and other physiological changes may pull the metabolic rug out from under the velvet slippers of WMRL.  It’s like the story about the old man who is walking down the street when he finds a talking frog staring up at from the pavement.  He stoops over, picks the talking frog up and puts in his overcoat pocket.  The talking frog squirms in his pocket with frustration. It’s voice muffled by the overcoat, the talking frog shouts at the old man:

“What are you doing?  Don’t you know that if you kiss me I’ll become a princess?”

“Well, at my age,” says the old man, “I’d rather have a talking frog.”

But suppose you are at an age when you don’t prefer the talking frog, but are more attracted to a prince or a princess?  Personally, I can’t go cold turkey with WRML and live on oatmeal, bad religion and talking frogs.  Giving up WRML is a sacrifice, but the potential gains are power, creativity and authentic love. Imagine if the human race were able to get back all the psychic energy that went into WMRL and channel it into something else—say space exploration.  I’d probably be drinking tea while casually looking out of the anti-reflective coated  synthetic sapphire window of my personal starship by now, wondering which galactic sector caught my fancy.  Instead, all of that psychic energy, money, lives, music, you name it, went into WMRL and instead of the starship I’ve got glossy magazines telling me all about which celebrity slept which other one, and who’s breaking up with whom, and so forth and so on.  To get all that psychic energy, sexual chi, time, attention, emotional energy, financial investment back from WMRL could be a giant reclamation of power, someone going from life support to where they are getting recruitment calls from the Olympic team.  As you can read in “Casting Precious…,” the forever pursuit of the precious—romantic beloved, externalized religious savior, territorial conquest—turns you into a withering ring wraith, it strips you of power, vitality, magic and imagination.  If you can get some of that power back you will also be more attractive to others, more likely to have fulfilling relationships, more likely to do something with your life besides acting out in a tawdry series of he said/she said soap operas.

How to reclaim that power and what to do with the reclaimed power once you’ve got it back is what this essay is challenging you to figure out for yourself. I want you to part of the team that puts a manned mission on Mars.  I want to hear from you what you’ve been able to pioneer, what propulsion systems you’ve come up with to get escape velocity, to break the surly bonds of blood, romance and bad religion and cross the event horizon into other worlds than these. We all need to be part of this great enterprise of exploration.

So before I turn the controls of the starship back over to you, I have just a few more things to say about WMRL and how to change one’s relationship to it.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher says: “Nothing is cheaper and shoddier than dramatic living.”  In fairness, it seems that we should also add that nothing is more exciting than dramatic living.  And of all dramas, romance is the most exciting.  When in love we feel like the star of our own dazzlingly unique movie, but as Robert Johnson points out,

“Strangely, this is the point where a man feels most unique, most individual, as though this has never happened to anyone other than him and his beloved.  In fact, it is at this point that he loses his individuality. The lovers lose their individual identities; they are Tristan and Iseult or Romeo and Juliet—actors in a collective play where the script is predetermined and the scenes are known beforehand.  It is precisely because one has ceased to be oneself and has become a player in a universal drama, that one feels so intense, so out of the ordinary, and at first, so wonderful.” 164

Nothing strips away individuality better than falling into stereotyped romantic delusions except for something that’s even worse—becoming addicted to despersonalized sexual promiscuity. If your alternative is to be an interchangeable part in the hydraulic machinery of sex on the level of the genitalia, then you might be better off WMRL. Deromanticized sleeping around is not a transcendent solution to WMRL.  See Born Under a Blood Red Moon and Incendiary Person…. for more on that theme.

Getting rid of deluded romance does not mean that we get rid of the magic and sense of the sacred that flowed through the distorted portal of WMRL.  It means that we work to reclaim magic and the sense of the sacred and get them flowing through perhaps better portals.

Although I’ve expressed some differences with how I view WMRL compared to Mr. Johnson, I would highly recommend that everyone read We and allow Robert Johnson to illuminate an amazing journey into the world of Tristan and Iseuld, a journey which leads right up the present day and most likely into your life and psyche. Essentially, what Johnson points out is that the real sin is to confuse the personal and archetypal, to project the divine outside and then try to bring it under ego control.  As he puts it,   “If there is such a thing as psychological blasphemy, it is to take what is sacred and try to convert it to something else; it is to try to make the sacred into grist for the ego’s mill. Psychological sin does not consist in sex nor in being physical nor in “immorality” but rather in calling a thing other than what it really is, treating it as something other than what it is, pretending to do one thing while doing another. This is the sin against consciousness, the refusal to take life consciously.”  (177)

Rereading what I’ve written, I see that I have perhaps too one-sidedly treated WMRL with sarcastic disdain. When compared to the trend of increasing materialism and cynicism which favors exploitative promiscuity as the “sophisticated” alternative to WMRL, the path of romantic love shows some redeeming qualities.  For many people, the romantic love relationship may be the most spiritually transformative experience of their lives.  Sometimes the transformation comes because it leads to dark nights of the soul and various forms of tragedy and suffering.  Sometimes the transformation comes because the projection eventually leads to authentic love for the actual person.  Sometimes the suffering and dark nights of the soul, as well as the inspiration and intensity  brought by WMRL, are exactly what is necessary to lead to the authentic love for actual persons and a renewed sense of the sacred.

The Dali Lama usually encourages spiritual aspirants to reconnect with their own native spiritual traditions.  If WMRL is a major part of your spiritual tradition, as it certainly is for me, perhaps there is a way to redeem it, to allow it to transcend itself and not merely pathologize in all the stereotyped ways. Perhaps what was unconscious enchantment could be transitioned toward a conscious sacrament. By becoming more conscious of the projection, we can learn to relate to it as symbol, as a metaphor for the divine.  A person of great physical beauty can be appreciated as evocative of the divine without confusing them with a god or goddess.  I can be stirred by the light coming through the stained glass windows of a great cathedral without thinking that I need to worship stained glass windows.  The windows, like the beautiful person, like the droplets of moisture that prismatically refract a rainbow, are a medium through which my inner sense of the divine is stirred and inspired.  If I am consciously in love with someone, and am aware of the projection, I can relate to the actual person while at the same time feel inspired by the sacred refracted through that actual person like a rainbow.  As with rainbows, I know that any particular manifestation won’t last, and that new rainbows will appear when the conditions are right.  I may know the scientific reasons for rainbows, but still experience their numinous beauty.  Rainbows are still just as beautiful even after I have learned not to chase them down for pots of gold.

Instead of seeing the other in an impossibly idealized way, as if they were permanent rainbows, their numinous beauty could instead light up their highest actual potential in my perception, and this could be inspiring to both of us.  Recognizing the projection and the machinery of WMRL, I can side step some of the obsessive aspects. Realizing that the divine projection will alight on others, and eventually fade from any particular person, I recognize that a relationship with the beloved must be grounded in their individual actuality, not on the projected idealization. The more I learn about the history and workings of WMRL, the more I realize that all is not fair in love, and that ethics should not be suspended because of an intense projection on someone. I follow the rainbow but not to a pot of gold or a god or goddess, but toward a recognition of the inner source of divinity and authentic love.

This is part 2 start with Dialogues about Prophecy and the End of Time below

Looking Toward the Event Horizon Jonathan Zap, interviewed by John Major Jenkins recorded August, 2004 by Lost Arts Media—two hours, part two of this four hour presentation.   Jonathan Zap discusses evolutionary changes currently underway and what the “singularity archetype” indicates about the evolutionary event horizon we are approaching. Topics include evidence that a more visual and telepathic mode of consciousness and communication is developing, the mind parasite phenomenon, and suggestions on how to thrive during a time of greatly accelerated change.

Part one of two

Part two of two

Dialogues on Prophecy and the End of Time
Jonathan Zap and John Major Jenkins recorded August, 2004 by Lost Arts Media
Two hours. This is part one of a four hour presentation.  Among many other topics, Jonathan Zap talks about the psychology of prophecy and why prophecies are almost always wrong about time frames.  Prophecy and the idea of an end time are examined from the perspective of Jungian psychology and the “singularity archetype” is introduced. John Major Jenkins (author of nine books on the Maya) talks about the Mayan calendar and his discoveries about the meaning of 2012 and the cycle of galactic alignment recognized by a number of cultures.

(Note there are a few seconds of dark blue screen lead in before the opening credits.)

Part one of two

Part two of two

Two African American friends of mine said they wanted to come over to my apartment in the East Village and video tape me in 1985. I decided to create my own religion for the occasion—the Sacred Tenets of the Religion of the UFO Eye Knight. I was an English Teacher and Building Security Coordinator of a public high school in the South Bronx at the time and I got Galaxy, a graffiti artist I knew, to design the ID card and a rapper (I think with the Culture MCs) to write an official rap poem for the religion. They knew nothing about the religion except its name.

Part Two

©2010 by Jonathan Zap   Edited by Austin Iredale

What is the Singularity Archetype?

Some of the most significant layers of meaning in Avatar are not to be found in the articles available on the web that discuss its underlying mythology, at least from what I’ve read.  Avatar is charged with emergent archetypal messages from the collective unconscious that relate to an evolutionary event horizon which I’ve discussed in my writings on “the Singularity Archetype.” The Singularity Archetype,  a term I coined many years ago, is a primordial image of an evolutionary event horizon that seems to be an implicit potentiality glowing in the collective unconscious of our species.  I first wrote about the Singularity Archetype (though I didn’t use the term at the time) in an undergraduate philosophy honors paper I wrote in 1978 when I was twenty-years-old and which is available on line: Archetypes of a New Evolution. I discovered that there was an emergent archetype that contained crucial information about our future evolution and that manifested itself in dreams, fantasies and religious visions forming a core element in a largely unrecognized contemporary mythology. The most potent expression of this mythology continues to be in science-fiction novels and films.

Before we can discuss Avatar we need a working understanding of the Singularity Archetype. White Crows Rising—The Singularity Archetype and the Event Horizon of Human Evolution is my most in depth treatment of the topic,  while a much briefer treatment can be found in Looking Toward the Event Horizon an article published in the Australian Magazine   New Dawn on December 1st, 2008.

An Example of the Singularity Archetype

To get a feeling for the Singularity Archetype it is necessary to study some of the specific manifestations of it.  There are many examples in the writings linked above, and to really get a sense of it requires encountering several examples.  I’ll provide a very basic one here which comes from one of Jung’s most brilliant colleagues, Marie Louise Von Franz, from a chapter she authored in Jung’s classic introductory work, Man and his Symbols. Von Franz describes two dreams reported to her by someone she describes as “…a simple woman who was brought up in Protestant surroundings…” In both dreams a supernatural event of great significance is being viewed. But in one dream the dreamer is viewing the event from below, standing on the earth, in the other dream she views the same event from above.

(The dreamer’s painting, from Man and His Symbols by C.G. Jung.)

In the earthbound dream, the dreamer is standing with a guide looking down at Jerusalem. The wing of Satan descends and darkens the city. The uncanny wing of the devil occurring in the Middle East immediately brings to mind Antichrist and Armageddon.

But in her other dream, the dreamer is witnessing the same event from the heavens. From this vantage the dark wing of Satan appears as the white, wafting cloak of God. A white spiral appears as a symbol of evolution. Von Franz describes,

“…the spectator is high up, somewhere in heaven, and sees in front of her a terrific split between the rocks. The movement in the cloak of God is an attempt to reach Christ, the figure on the right, but it does not quite succeed. In the [earthbound]  painting, the same thing is seen from below—from a human angle. Looking at it from a higher angle, what is moving and spreading is a part of God; above that rises the spiral as a symbol of possible further development. But seen from the basis of our human reality, this same thing in the air is the dark, uncanny wing of the devil.”

Implications of the Singularity Archetype

In these two dreams we see one of the classic aspects of the Singularity Archetype—what to the earth-bound ego seems apocalyptic, from a cosmic viewpoint is revealed to be a transcendent evolutionary event.  Again, to get a feeling for this archetype requires contact with several examples which you can find in the documents linked above.  In Looking Toward the Event Horizon I summarized some of the implications of the Singularity Archetype as follows:

“As we move toward the event horizon, the physics of the dreamtime more potently interpenetrates the physics of the waking life.  Synchronicity becomes more the rule than the exception, and the way we have become accustomed to experiencing space and time is drastically altered. Matter is respiritualized and transforms more readily to accord with psychic intentions. The new species are changelings and reality transformers freed from many of the mortal and corporeal limitations that bound the older species.”

“The relationship between individuality, ego, and collectivity is fundamentally transformed, and we see many variations of “homo gestalt”—new versions of the species where group telepathies enhance the synergy and symbiosis of individuals.  More visual and telepathic modalities of communication are involved in this fundamental shift.  Members of the new species are typically androgynous and many aspects of gender stereotyping become archaic.”

“To catalyze such fundamental metamorphosis may require planet-wide shocks that punctuate the equilibrium of the species and threaten the entire human genome.  The shocks may need to be of apocalyptic intensity to overcome the inherent conservatism of species homeostasis and to potentiate a will toward metamorphosis. As we move toward the event horizon there is an exponential intensification of novelty as new and unexpected forms are created, latent capacities become manifest, and emergent aspects are revealed. The human ego as defender of the old equilibrium may approach many of these transformations with fear, loathing and violence.  Patriarchal power structures, including religious fundamentalism and the military-industrial complex, may perceive the metamorphosis as a zero-sum game competition of species, with genocide or extinction as the binary options.”

“Because the eschaton of the species and the individual event horizon of death have great parallel resonance, those who are driven by the fear and denial of death will greet the metamorphosis with the same maladaptive strategies that have characterized their approach to life in general. Xenophobic violence, will to power, and territoriality may be exacerbated.  As novelty intensifies, we should expect to see the outer edges of both dark and light intensify.”

“Because of the parallelism between individual death and eschaton of the species, the typically human confusion of inner and outer will cause many prophesiers to anticipate various end dates conveniently scheduled to occur within their lifetimes. This tendency to displace fear of individual death onto a relatively close end date only intensifies the binding to linear time and represents a last effort of the ego to control a transcendent metamorphosis.”

“ The Singularity Archetype is essentially a low resolution map of an evolutionary event horizon.  From my point of view, the future contains formed and unformed elements, and the lack of specificities and exact timelines (though many will attempt to attach these) allows greater room for free will and novel outcomes.  Each of us is hurtling toward an event horizon, and whether the nearest event horizon is personal death or species-wide eschaton, it is crucial to view both as emergences rather than as emergencies.  A threshold of absolute metamorphosis is guaranteed in either case, and therefore the way one lives one’s life requires ultimate values that retain meaning when seen against the backdrop of eternity.”

The Will Toward the Glorified Body

An aspect of the Singularity Archetype that is especially relevant to Avatar is what I call “the will toward the glorified body.”  My essay, The Glorified Body—Metamorphosis of the Body and the Crisis Phase of Human Evolution, explores this aspect of the Singularity Archetype.  Here are some passages particularly relevant to this discussion of Avatar :

“To understand the will toward the Glorified Body we first need to define what I am referring to as the ‘Glorified Body.’ Many Christian writings describe the body of the resurrected Christ as being a ‘Glorified Body’ —-a radiant body free of mortal limitations. Although I am not working from a Christian point of view, I believe that this phrase captures a powerful archetype. We see images and hear stories of the Glorified Body in most or all cultures and periods. There are all sorts of variations and numerous gradations on the Glorified Body spectrum, but the defining characteristics are fairly apparent.”

“Glad Day” by William Blake

“Although the Glorified Body occurs in endless variations there are two very broad categories in which the term ‘Glorified Body’ will be employed in this article. One use of Glorified Body refers to the inherent ‘energy body’ that all human beings possess. Sometimes I will substitute ‘energy body’ to make clear this first meaning of Glorified Body. The second, and somewhat overlapping, category of use for the term ‘Glorified Body’ is to refer to human or nonhuman entities whose manifest bodies are closer to energy than conventional flesh and blood bodies. This type of Glorified Body hovers in the collective psyche of the human species as a highly charged image and expectation of our further evolution. ..”

“In mythologies, the Glorified Body appears free of some or all of the many limitations of mortality. The Glorified Body may be completely free of cosmetic blemishes, limited vitality, aging, pain, disease, and death. A Glorified Body may be able to transcend conventional limitations of space and time. For example, it may not need technology or an intermediary force of any sort to appear in any location it chooses. It may have transcendent clarity of vision and thought. Often it will transcend ordinary language and communicate through radiance or from the inside of another psyche. A being with a Glorified Body may live in a state of enlightenment and love. Or it could be evil and possess an incredibly potent array of diabolical powers. Visually, a Glorified Body may appear radiant and beautiful—–awe inspiring, numinous—–the body of an angel. But it could also choose to appear cloaked as a mundane, physical body or as a hideous apparition or demon. The most evolved Glorified Bodies are infinitely plastic, able to take on whatever form is desired. This is the quality of the shape shifter, the changeling——like the devil that ‘hath the power to assume a pleasing shape’ or the liquid metal terminator in the popular movie Terminator 2 .”

“In contemporary mythology the Glorified Body appears in a spectrum of permutations ranging from an idealized human material body to a state of omnipotent, omniscient godhood. In our materialistic culture we have Superman , ‘the Man of Steel’, who has a more industrialized version of the Glorified Body.  (‘The man of steel’ seems the perfect Iron Age personification of the Glorified Body—to put this in the perspective of the cycle of ages see The Mutant versus the Machine—the End of the Iron Age and the Galactic Alignment of 2012 ) Superman doesn’t have special radiance, telepathy or most other divine attributes, but leaps tall buildings in a single bound, outruns locomotives, and most helpful in our culture, is bulletproof. At the other end of our cultural spectrum the Glorified Body turns up as the shape-shifting UFO phenomenon perceived by human observers in endlessly varying forms.”

“The human will toward the Glorified Body is not a subtle urge. It is an iron fist pounding on both sides of the doors of perception. It is an urging of such terrible power that it will prompt some to go under the surgeon’s knife, to starve themselves to death, to sell their souls in the hope of having a mortal body that will merely better resemble a Glorified Body for a brief time. The Glorified Body is not a casual, imaginative musing or an episodic blip on the radar screens of various cultures. It is a powerful, emergent archetype. It is one of our most ancient obsessions and one of the most explosively contemporary. It is related to the deepest sources of human suffering, an inextricable aspect of a thousand types of neurotic torment, a companion in some way to almost every form of personal hell. It is also a divine muse, one of the greatest sources of hope and inspiration we’ve ever known.”

“Messages about the will toward a Glorified Body are as ubiquitous in our culture as radio and television waves. Expression of this will can also be found deeply embedded in every religion and mythology, and yet it is rarely named, rarely seen as a highly defined, differentiated and absolutely integral aspect of human psychology. The will toward the Glorified Body is at the center of some of our most destructive and also some of our most creative impulses. This will is a primary urge which can inspire incredible athletic achievement, great art, and technology that blurs with magic.”

“The will toward the Glorified Body is what inspired Michelangelo to carve David. This same will has also inspired the technological magicians of the computer industry to provide us with ‘Avatars,’ animated characters that will represent us in the once visually anonymous world of the Internet. Soon we will be able to boot up our virtual Glorified Bodies and revel in a digital garden of earthly delights. Our bodies will be infinitely plastic and with a mouse click we can be leaner than Kate Moss or have cybernetically enhanced muscle definition that will make Mr. Universe look like the Pilsbury Dough Boy. It’s interesting to note the term the computer industry has adopted for these new digital bodies—-Avatars. The first definition of Avatar in the abridged Oxford dictionary is: ‘(in Hindu mythology) the descent of a deity or released soul to earth in bodily form.’”

“But somewhere behind the ever more glowing computer monitor or virtual reality goggles will be a human being—– a digitally unenhanced mortal/organic version 1.0, who will very likely have bags under his eyes and a pot belly. The Wizard of Oz tells us not to look at the man behind the curtain. But we will look, and will be ever more horrified with the contrast between what we see behind the curtain and what’s up there on the screen. The primary urge will remain agonizingly unfulfilled.”

“However unfulfilling it may be in some ways, technology is one of the central expressions of the will toward a Glorified Body. Technology actually does allow us to extend our physical bodies through time and space. The urge to become a celebrity, for example, is an urge toward a Glorified Body that modern technology can, to some degree, create. In her films, Marilyn Monroe still lives as a youthful beauty. Since she died young there is no aging, mortal body to provide an embarrassing contrast to her Glorified Body projected on the silver screen. She remains a goddess.”

“The will toward a Glorified Body is a primary urge, the urge of our entire species and not just single individuals living in a particular culture. (I’m intentionally using the word “urge” here to blur the distinction between instinct and drive as I think this primary urge partakes of both biological and psychological forces.)  Organisms of all sorts seem to have the primary urge to reproduce, to genetically propagate. Among gendered organisms there is an insistent urge to couple with other individuals of the same species. That urging may be intense enough to be described as “going into heat.” Heat is a state of excitement and increased dynamism, whether it is the material heat of fire or the metabolic heat of a living organism. The organism in heat may appear agitated, even tormented, while in the grip of this urge. In the adolescent stage of development—–the stage of recently acquired reproductive potential—-there may be the particularly urgent will to achieve that first coupling. The unfulfilled urge is antecedent to the coupling event—-an event that in chaos math would be a called an “attractor.” (Very roughly, an “attractor” is an event in the future that is so powerful that it warps causality and phenomena in the present.) Very likely the organism will get to fulfill this urge. But it’s not a sure thing. Some organisms may die before they fulfill the urge—but certainly some individuals of that species must get to fulfill that urge or the species will become extinct. As far as I can tell, urges in nature are always fulfilled by a species, though not necessarily by every individual of that species. Only in human beings could we even imagine the existence of an urge that seems to never be fulfilled. My contention is that the human species has “gone into heat”—-a state of heightened expectation, agitation and chaos. We are nearing the attractor, nearing the place where we can couple with the Glorified Body and fulfill a primary urge.”

“The intensifying will toward the Glorified Body is happening at a time of evolutionary crisis when the metabolism of the whole species is heating up. Technological changes and scientific discoveries are fundamentally altering our experiences of self and outer reality. The biosphere that allows the existence of our physical bodies has undergone a global toxification threatening the continuance of our species. To understand the body-image plague we must view it in the context in which it occurs—–a crisis phase of human evolution. Many attributes of the human psyche, from sexuality and body image to spirituality and our sense of relation to the universe, are rapidly mutating. We cannot comprehend symptoms without understanding the general condition of a species that is hurtling toward an evolutionary nexus charged with images of extinction and rebirth. Our intensifying will toward the Glorified Body is more than an urge to reconnect with the inherent, human energy body recognized by all cultures. It is also a species-wide urge to make a quantum, evolutionary jump toward the Glorified Body as our embodied manifestation. We are experiencing an urge to massively redefine body, self and our relationship to physical reality.”

The Will Toward the Glorified Body in Avatar

The will toward the Glorified Body is right at the center of Avatar .  James Cameron seems to be aware of this.  When Larry King asked him why he picked the name “Avatar,” Cameron responded:  “I don’t know. Y’know when I wrote it in 95’ it just popped into my head that here you’ve got people projecting their consciousness into a fleshly body, a biological body, and that’s what the Sanskrit word means, the taking of flesh, the incarnation of a divine being in the case of the Hindu religion.  And although our characters aren’t divine beings, obviously, the idea is that it’s actually a fleshly incarnation.
As Avatar opens, our point of view is that of a Glorified Body, the flying dream body of the protagonist, Jake Sully, a young Marine who is a paraplegic.  His character is perfectly designed to represent the will toward the Glorified Body.  He is an athletic, vital young man with great physical courage and a warrior essence but whose body is half paralyzed.

The next hauntingly numinous scene in the movie is when Jake first catches a glimpse of his avatar.  I pointed out in my essay, “The Glorified Body…”, written in 1996, that “avatar,” a term which had then just been adopted in the computer gaming world, came from Hindu mythology and meant a spirit form descended into the flesh.  From the point of view of my essay, a human being is an avatar, a spirit bound to one body for the entire waking portion of an incarnation.  We also have an intense will to break free of the one body/one psyche rule that dominates the waking mortal life.  The movie Avatar , thanks to both content and the technological enhancements of its form, provides a powerful depiction of what it would be like to break the one body/one psyche rule.  Jake cannot restrain his unbridled euphoria when he is able to enter his avatar, a far more powerful and glorified body than he had even before his paralysis. His new body is bioluminescent, idealized, more androgynous and suited to a world where gravity is less limiting than on the earth.  In actuality it is a virtual body that is a hybridization of the actor’s body moving through space and time and a CGI avatar.

As I point out in the essay, we all get to break the one body/one psyche rule during the dreamtime when we are able to merge our awareness with a variety of dream bodies. Avatar begins with the liberated feeling of Jake flying in his dream body.  The process of merging with the avatars of the movie is very much like dreaming.  Jake lies down in a coffin-like capsule, and analogous to falling asleep and dreaming, his connection to his waking body is submerged and he bonds to a different, enhanced body that lives in Pandora, a place  analogous to the dreamtime. The dreamtime is a place of boundary dissolution.  Everyone who has seriously studied the dreamtime, including both Freud and Jung, has noticed how telepathic it is compared to the waking time.  Many of the reports of mutual dreaming illustrate this dramatically.  Similarly, the bioluminescent world of Pandora is a massively telepathic network. I’ll return to the concept of telepathic networks later in this essay.

The process of merging with the avatar, where you enter this technological sarcophagus, also has many parallels to death .  Jake dies to his waking life, passes through a tunnel of light and finds himself in a glorified body.  Jake’s life takes on a diurnal/nocturnal sort of cycling that undergoes a figure/ground reversal.  The waking life of his paraplegic body recedes with the ghetto life of corporeal limitations, bureaucratic tensions, and intrusions from imperialistic patriarchy.  His eros and enthusiasm for life become far more identified with his avatar/Pandoran life.  He wants to more fully escape the inferior corporeal/waking life into the Glorified Body/dreamtime/afterlife.

Paradoxically, Cathy Lynn Pagano wrote an article entitled “Avatar: The Archetypal Message Is ‘Get Back In Your Body!’” Pagano points out, quite insightfully,

“The freedom and joy of the body moving, leaping, daring is a major component of this story, just as Pandora’s beauty compliments the body’s freedom. The corporate people live in metal boxes, without beauty or free movement; the walking which was such a big part of the game of golf is reduced to putting in the office.”

The paradox she does not recognize is that Jake gets back into ‘the body,’ or more correctly he becomes more vitally embodied by breaking free of the limitations of his damaged human body and merging with his avatar.

Subcreating Imaginal Worlds
“It’s my world, you all are just living in it.”  —James Cameron (referring to Pandora), on the Larry King Show
While from the top layer of Avatar’s mythology, Pandora is an exotic, extraterrestrial world, on both a more literal and deeper layer Pandora is actually the world of the empowered human imagination.  Pandora is an imaginal world created by James Cameron.  Movies, as I’ve pointed out before, are essentially a dream delivery technology.  Cameron, who unlike most of us can command a thousand technicians and a quarter billion dollar budget, is able to make his dream, his imaginal world, into a collective dream.  His world is, of course, more an extrapolation of human psychology than anything extraterrestrial.  For example, since like Cameron I am a baby boomer, I notice a common cultural influence that very likely inspired the bioluminescent world of Pandora.  An early psychedelic experience for many baby boomers, including myself, was the backroom of various hippie shops where black lights illuminated black-light posters and created a little phosphorescent world reminiscent of the look of nocturnal Pandora. The avatar experience of the movie, therefore, represents to me not so much extraterrestrial travel as intrapsychic imaginal travel, which has more to do with the dreamtime, the future of virtual reality, and a human evolutionary event horizon we are hurtling toward.  By my second viewing of the movie, much of the novelty was gone, and I found that what I really wanted was a 3D IMAX immersive visit to another exotic world, which would be much more exciting than a revisit to Pandora.

Apparently there are quite a number of people, mostly young men, who are complaining on internet forums of depression because they can’t live on Pandora, which seems so real to them while they are watching the film in 3D.  For example, CNN, in an article entitled “Audiences experience ‘Avatar’ blues”  reports:

“A user named Mike wrote on the fan Web site ‘Naviblue’ that he contemplated suicide after seeing the movie.”

“ ‘Ever since I went to see Avatar I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it,’ Mike posted. ‘I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and that everything is the same as in Avatar .’”

The ‘Naviblue’ phenomenon is understandable because so many in our culture are magically disempowered.  They want to live in someone else’s dream because it doesn’t occur to them that they are dreamers and potential subcreators who can create their own worlds. They have been conditioned to be passive consumers of the imaginal plane, not empowered creators on the imaginal plane.

As I have discussed in White Crows Rising—- The Singularity Archetype and the Event Horizon of Human Evolution on the other side of the evolutionary event horizon, the physics of the dreamtime will be the default, rather than the physics of the waking time, and we will have the ability to subcreate our own worlds without access to a thousand technicians and a quarter billion dollars.  I have also pointed out that unlike Terence McKenna and Ram Das, whom I have talked to a bit on the subject, I do not expect this evolutionary breakthrough to be a cure for human evils. When novelty increases, the outer edge of light and dark both intensify, and I expect that there will be gifted black magicians making potent diabolical use of these enhanced abilities.  I think the name “Pandora” suggests this with its connection to Pandora’s Box .  In the original myth Pandora opened a jar, but a mistranslation has rendered it forever into a box.  Now the word “Pandora” has been remythologized again and will forever be associated with the world of the Na’vi.  Avatar represents an opening of Pandora’s Box in the sense that it is a breakthrough in the technological magic of the movies, and now that the technology has been irretrievably loosed into the world, we can be sure that it will not always be used to deliver collective dreams as benign as Avatar.

Liminality and the Special Role of Hybrids in Evolution

The luminescent jellyfish-like envoys of Eywah, the divine intelligence of Pandora, recognize Jake as a key evolutionary catalyst.  In many ways, to the practical intelligence of both human and Pandoran characters, he is the most unlikely of choices.  He is severely handicapped in both the human and Pandoran realms, is not particularly bright and is woefully ignorant of Pandoran culture as well as foolish about human politics. What he does have, however, that makes him the ideal choice, is an enthusiastic beginner’s mind.  As the Pandoran shaman points out, “It’s hard to fill a cup that is already full.” His lack of knowledge, of course, is also ideal cinematically as we learn things for the first time as he does.  Jake is a liminal figure, a person caught between and betwixt, who is not fully accepted in either realm, a hybrid of human and Pandoran, and it is so often that which is liminal and hybrid which is the most alchemically charged and capable of metamorphosis.

Another aspect of Jake that makes him an evolutionary catalyst is that he is a twin.  His call to adventure comes because of the murder of his twin, who was trained to merge with a Na’vi avatar.  Twins are very significant mythologically, but also from an evolutionary point of view.  As I’ve noted in my work on the Singularity Archetype, a new type of consciousness also means a new type of communication, and the new means of communication can easily be what creates the new type of consciousness. The last quantum evolutionary jump had to do with our ability to think and communicate in words. The breakthrough into a more sophisticated form of communication is very likely to happen (both in the past and the future) between identical twins.  Identical twins sometimes invent their own languages.  (Sometimes called idioglossia or cryptophasia or less technically as “twin talk” or “twin speech.”) Identical twins are a maximal case of rapport that can exist between individuals, and with lessened barriers of difference and miscommunication they seem like the most fertile ground for crossing the communication gap between individuals in novel ways.  In another 2009 CGI film, 9 , a masterpiece that, unlike Avatar , did not get the credit it deserved, we see a brilliant manifestation of the twin aspect of the Singularity Archetype. Amongst a group of prototype rag doll-like creatures there are a pair of twins. While the other prototypes have lens-like eyes that take in visual information, the twins have eyes that transmit information as light between them.  They are also able to project moving images to others.  A visually-oriented telepathy is one of the most classic aspects of the Singularity Archetype.  I discuss this at length in my four hour mp3, Logos Beheld , which will be available soon for free on zaporacle.com. Also amazing is that 9 ends with some of the creatures in luminous spirit bodies merging with a moving spiral of light in the sky, another classic element of many of the permutations of the singularity archetype (see the Von Franz dream study above).

The mysterious Norway Sprial which appeared on December 9, 2009

Jake, because of the murder of his human twin, is invited to merge with a new twin, his avatar, which has been grown to genetically match his murdered twin.  When this twinned being (Jake in his avatar) travels to Pandora he finds himself in a logos beheld kind of world where most or all of the life is bioluminescent, transmitting information about itself through the projection of light.  It is also a world that has much in common with another key aspect of the Singularity Archetype—the telepathic network. All of Pandora seems to be a telepathic network. The human world of the movie, even though it is set in the future, is as ego-fractured as ever, with human psyches encapsulated by their own short-sighted egocentric perspectives.  Like the human characters of the imagined future in Avatar , we have reached an evolutionary cul-de-sac with the ego. Given the lethality of our present level of technology, we may no longer be able to survive the egocentric perspective.  Unlike the Na’vi, the egocentric human is usually unaware, except in an abstracted way, of the living matrix of which he is a part.  Encapsulated by technological exoskeletons—SUVs, gadget filled homes, etc.—he may have no direct sense of how his lifestyle is impacting the rest of the living matrix.  The problem of the insulated ego is already a very familiar theme, and the ego is all too easy to villainize, but the prejudice against the ego so often found in New Age and Eastern circles fails to notice that the ego served many powerful evolutionary purposes.  In White Crows Rising… I wrote:

“In tribal cultures the ego seems less developed than in modern individuals living in industrialized societies. Tribal societies seem to have less individual boundaries and more group consciousness. Earlier human beings may have had less ego, but also less individuality and differentiation. A fundamental aspect or function of the ego is the creation of isolation. An individual perceives him or herself as a separate identity apart from others and the world. This perception creates a degree of isolation and within this insulating bubble an explosion of novelty occurs. A highly complex, unique, differentiated, often pathologized personality develops. Egocentric isolation, like the irritating grain of sand in an oyster, causes the development of a fantastic structure as complex buffering layers are accreted around the irritant and the beautiful pearl of individuality is created.”

One of the great purposes of the ego was to encapsulate consciousness and create a firewall between psyches, greatly reducing the networked telepathy that I believe is more the norm in nature.  We see what looks like networked telepathy, for example, in the amazing synchrony of schools of fish.  The Secret Life of Plants, and some subsequent studies, seem to show that the vegetable kingdom is not only sentient, but aware of human thoughts and changes to living tissue (while remote from any sensory information).  Tribal cultures do seem to be more aware and tapped into the networked intelligence of nature.  The Na’vi, in general, seem in most ways to resemble an idealized version of a terrestrial indigenous tribe, and that constitutes a subtle danger in the mythological resonance of the film. The danger is that the film encourages what Ken Wilber calls the “pre/trans” fallacy.  In Dynamic Paradoxicalism I described the pre/trans fallacy this way:

“Essentially, the pre/trans fallacy notices a common tendency to confuse pre-rational states with trans-rational states, since both are non-rational. The “reductivist” version of this is the tendency of “scientism,” which reduces all transrational mystical states to prerational infantilism, and dismisses authentic spiritual experience as “superstitious nonsense.” Freud clearly fell for this half of the fallacy, especially in The Future of an Illusion. The “elevationist” version of the fallacy, ubiquitous in the New Age, is to elevate prerational states to the transcendent and to demonize rationality.  From this side of the fallacy, babies are thought to be Buddhas, and anything tribal or aboriginal is romanticized and inflated as infinitely superior to anything modern or rational. Promiscuity is seen as a daring rebellion from antiquated taboos, even though it is usually in high conformity to what peers are doing. They recognize as conventional the older sexual morays of the past, but fail to recognize that their rebellion is part of a vast conventionalism of the present, and that this new conventionalism is actually based on a still more primitive level of development than the old conventionalism. Regressing to pre-rational hedonism, indulging every impulse and irrational notion is seen as enlightened, post-conventional and transcendent. This is the state of the typically goofy New Age person who never heard an urban legend or bit of mystical-sounding nonsense without adopting it wholesale. This type of person is fiercely anti-intellectual and anti-rational, so it is impossible to talk them down from their absurdities, even the attempt to do so casts you, in their minds, as this clueless rationalist stuck in their ego. They believe they have transcended rationality, while forgetting that to transcend something you first have to achieve it!”

The glorification of the Na’vi, especially since they appear not only exotic and tribal but are also occurring in a futuristic sci-fi film, is dangerous because it will encourage some people to believe that the answer to our present troubles would be a return to life as warriors in an indigenous rainforest tribe. The Singularity Archetype, however, indicates that the answer has more to do with hybridization—of East and West, of aboriginal with high tech, of past and future. Jake, who appears amongst the Na’vi as a hybrid, is a better personification of the evolutionary message than the Na’vi themselves.  Unfortunately, Jake’s character is disappointingly ordinary, he has a good heart and physical courage, but little else to recommend him as the evolutionary catalyst he becomes in the film. From a marketing and story point of view, however, Jake’s ordinariness makes him easier for young males to identify with.  Also, in many traditional hero cycles the hero is a naïve young male who has to be initiated into a new world, and Jake fits very well into that tradition.  In most of the more inspired versions of stories related to the Singularity Archetype, however, ( Dune , Akira , many others) the evolutionary catalyst tends to be a young mutant with extraordinary parapsychological abilities.

Another way that Avatar seems to lean toward preconventional rather than transconventional is that a kind of hard-wired interspecies bond with various animals is emphasized over the intraspecies, nonlocal telepathic bond that we find in more inspired story versions of the Singularity Archetype. There seems to be a pantheistic networking with nature, but it is imagined in a very primitive, materialist way where the Na’vi have tails that seems to be the organic equivalent of Ethernet cables. Schools of fish, however, don’t need to connect via nerve bundles to synchronize, so the networking model in the movie seems to have a bias toward the concrete, hard-wired connection. The imagined version of nature is actually more primitive than the already existing version of nature we find here on earth. The Na’vi seemed to be imagined in the image of a pre-Wi-Fi computer network rather than in a transcendent version of nature.

In more sophisticated and inspired versions of the Singularity Archetype, the transcendence of ego-encapsulation is not imagined in such a materialist pre-conventional way.  In White Crows Rising… I wrote:

“Collective consciousness turns up frequently in expressions of the Singularity Archetype and merits some examination. In Theodore Sturgeon’s science-fiction novel published in 1953, More than Human , a group of mutants, who each have distinctly different strengths and weaknesses, form a collective consciousness while retaining some individuality and become, in many ways, a single entity where each mutant serves in a specialized role, as if they were organs of a single body. Sturgeon coined the term ” homo gestalt ” to describe this new entity. Similarly, more recent abduction testimony has emphasized the “grays” as having a hive-like collectivity, and this is experienced as another threatening aspect of their alien otherness.”

“There are a number of possible reasons for this collective consciousness motif appearing in so many permutations of this archetype. One is that it may be a fairly literal indicator of evolutionary change. If the ego ceases to dominate the human psyche, then perhaps the boundaries that it creates around the individual will dissipate and we will become more collectively aware. The shells of the oysters dissolve and the pearls lie together.”

The homo gestalt aspect of the Singularity Archetype reflects an evolutionary possibility. Encapsulated psyches become telepathically connected, but without a loss of individuality. For example, in the world of Dune , there is a sisterhood of highly conscious warriors known as the “Bene Gesserit.”  To become a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother one must survive a perilous rite called “The Water of Life.” In this initiatory rite one imbibes a potent psychotropic, mutagenic poison.  If the initiate survives and becomes a Reverend Mother she will retain her individuality, but will also be aware of the memories and all the psyches of all other Reverend Mothers, living or dead, who have similarly survived this rite. The Reverend Mothers don’t need cables or funny tails to be part of this network.  Parapsychological researchers such as Russell Targ (the laser physicist who cofounded the U.S. Government’s remote viewing program) have long recognized that telepathy and many other parapsychological phenomena occur because our psyches exist in a nonlocal field. In other words, no signal needs to be sent anywhere because psyches do not need to be causally related. Early Soviet parapsychologists called telepathy “mental radio” because they imagined the psyche in the image of the current machine, the radio, and had a causal signal model.  But the findings of many well-conducted experiments have shown that the telepathic effect is not lessened by distance (as any energetic signaling would be), nor is it diminished when the subject is in a Faraday Cage (which blocks all electromagnetic signals).  More evolved visions of homo gestalt are based on the emergence of encapsulated individuality into a nonlocal telepathic network.

In the final battle at the end of the film, the military/industrial/patriarchal complex is personified by Colonel Quaritch, who is encapsulated in an exoskeleton.  Jake is in his avatar, but ultimately is saved because of the telepathic bond with his Na’vi lover. Ultimately Jake survives by transcending the technological connection to his avatar—done via something that looks like a cross between an MRI machine and a particle accelerator—and through an organic network permanently merges with his avatar.

Although I’ve been critical of what seem like failures of imagination in Avatar , I’d like to close with an appreciation of its immense significance for the collective.  Elsewhere, I’ve speculated that technology would provide a potent catalyst for our evolution into the imaginal realm when there was enough distributed computer power to provide real-time mapping of human facial expressions onto CGI avatars.  In other words, at our present level of technology, people from various parts of the world can interact in a networked computer game like World of Warcraft through their individualized digital avatars.  The richness of this virtual social experience, however, is greatly lessened because the avatars are not capable of the complex visual communication enabled by the microsecond-by-microsecond changes of human facial expression. When we reach the point that your webcam can record your facial expressions and map them onto your real-time avatar, we will begin to approach the complexity of face-to-face social contacts in the virtual world.  Avatar takes a crucial half step toward that because it advances the ability to give pre-rendered CGI avatars the complexity of the human form.  In the making of Avatar, each actor had a miniature camera with LED lights on a little boom in front of their face capturing minute changes of facial expression. The Na’vi avatars, especially since they were 3D, were a very significant advance from earlier live action into CGI films like Beowulf . With the well-handled bonding of Jake with his avatar, and the powerfully immersive medium of 3D IMAX, we had the best so far collective experience of what it would be like to merge with a different body in a different world.  Avatar represents a huge cultural milestone though necessarily it is a mere phosphorescent shadow of what awaits us at the event horizon.

Out of respect for the accomplishment of Avatar I’ll close with the testimonial blog I wrote the week it came out,

“I have a time-sensitive recommendation that everyone prioritize seeing the 3D IMAX version of Avatar.  This was a life-changing experience for me and the three friends that were with me yesterday.  This is a time-sensitive priority because once this film leaves the big screen you’ll be able to see it at home, but not in the venue that gives it overwhelming power—3D IMAX.  This opportunity represents the most potent attempt in human history to (without psychotropics) give you the sensory impact of experiencing another world.  Although Avatar represents a key, watershed event in the history of cinema, it may be many years before someone else is able to get a budget this size (approximately 300 million) and a thousand skilled people from several special effects studios to pull something like this off again. The 3D IMAX experience is so immersive that it creates a real participation mystique with another brilliantly realized world.  Forget the trailers and any reviews.  The trailers didn’t impress me at all, quite the opposite, because they are flat low-res representations of something not meant to be perceived that way.

Avatar is the most impressive sensory experience yet created of what it would be like to break out of the oppressive, monotonous one psyche/one body rule that currently dominates life here on the Babylon Matrix.  Notice that I’ve been careful to add the word “sensory” to my descriptions. The Ring trilogy and the Dune books are far more powerful evocations of the fully realized cultures of other worlds, but they are not sensory except in your ability to convert words into sensations.  No question, but the 3D IMAX format is giving you the most sensory information about a world that is currently possible, and this film advances the leading edge of that possibility very dramatically. Don’t miss this opportunity, because there is nothing even currently in the works, as far as I know, that is going to equal it.”

Your feeback always welcome.  Send to: jonathanzap@hotmail.com

© 2009 Jonathan Zap

Edited by Austin Iredale

Interdimensional Traveler Collage © Jonathan Zap

It is before dawn and I only just awoke from sleeping, dreaming a variety of absurd things. A pathetic robot, sort of like a rickety torso on a skateboard. I was sending it down a grassy hill, but I knew that it didn’t have the horsepower to make it back up the hill, and I gradually became aware that I was creating this pathetic situation. This was just a haphazard little reality my bored psyche was generating for its amusement, a boy with a box of crayons on a rainy afternoon. So I left the robot to coast, and withdrew into a darkened space unbound by gravity where I was rotating slowly, because it felt good to rotate slowly and feel the fields of charged energies around me. They were mostly invisible, but some seemed fringed with indigo light, and I sensed that I could go anywhere from this space and be in any form.  My disenchanting bondage of one body/one psyche had been freed from the tragic magic of the lower densities, and I was not eager to return to any version of that annoying corporeal heaviness and the absurd limitations it imposed. There was so much more power and freedom being an unbound avatar rotating in fields of energy, a self-contained vortex of awareness able to travel anywhere. It didn’t seem at all appealing to be bound to a single aging body caught in an historical time track. And this particular time track seemed especially unappealing since it was an unstable primate-collective-possible endtimes sort of time track where depressed people took serotonin specific reuptake inhibitors  and the global economy was  ruled by psychopaths and politics were ugly and riddled with parasitic elites, a world of allergens and toxicities of every sort and every sort of hassle and irritating inconvenience and so forth. And why was I supposed to accept that absurd set of impositions again? Why was an entity like myself, rotating in fields of unbound potential and shimmering energy, supposed to shrink himself back into such a narrow and obnoxious time track?

I saw then my bodily incarnation as an old vinyl record turning on a turntable with the tone arm removed. The record was somewhat scratched and dusty, but it reflected enough light to show that its surface was not so flat as at first it seemed. There were a great number of concentric lines deeply etched with information, vibrational information, and I realized that upon waking I would be obliged, for some absurd reason, to shrink myself down to a tiny diamond needle and put myself back into almost the exact time track of the very same record, the very same waking situation where I had last left off, only maybe six hours downstream in time. Then it would be as if the dreamtime had never happened. Some insidious power would make the dreamtime vanish like a soap bubble, like the little man on the stair who wasn’t there. What power of enslavement took the dreamtime away and forced me to reenter the particular waking life, this flatland of rotating vinyl, this not-so-golden oldie, this mechanical medium forcing me to turn with its monotonous revolutions until it plays itself out?  Why is that such an inevitability? Why do I have to allow myself to be shrunk down into this dusty etching of extended play plastic, this absurd flatland?

I allowed the shrinking down in my vision, allowed myself to be the diamond needle again, circling slowly in my time track on the dusty, scratchy landscape of etched vinyl. But when my diamond needle made contact with the dark vinyl I was surprised to find that it was no longer a flatland, it was more like an intricate maze of canyons. A landscape vast and complex surrounded me on all sides, and it was moving, changing, and I could barely keep up with the moving and changing, and only had time to observe the smallest part of its vast and metamorphizing complexity. Also I sensed that there were other entities rotating with me, others that were living out parallel time tracks on the same spinning record. And some of these others were deeply connected to me by inner ties. We were like planets in strange elliptical orbits with each other, and there were obligations amongst us, promises to keep. It was like we were classmates incarnating together, and somehow our grades and permanent record cards had become strangely intermingled. We were networked together as if we were nodes in a single brain, and I realized it wouldn’t be fair to the other brain nodes for me to arbitrarily withdraw from the network. It would be a betrayal for me to choose my own graduation day and skip off on my own eternal avatar summer vacation while my classmates labored on. We were brain nodes that had fired together, and  wired together, and there was a certain soulful and loving sense to it all, a sense to my enrollment in the time track, this absurdly uncomfortable classroom where I sit slightly slumped, slightly restless in my seat, part of a modular desk bolted to the floor.

And then I run my hands over the smooth imitation oak laminate surface of the desk. The desk top is sloped at an angle convenient for writing. The laminate surface is framed by a smooth, rounded border of aluminum and can be lifted up. There is space inside the desk, like a sink without a drain made of beige painted sheet metal, and in it are notebooks, my notebooks, and some are black and flecked with amoeboid shapes of white. But the notebook on the top of the pile is not black or flecked with amoeboid shapes of white. Its cover is a many-colored collage and it is thicker and held together by a long coil of wire like an unelastic spring. Words arise in my dreaming mind and I realize that this is what is called a “spiral notebook.” That name seems weird and uncanny somehow, so I pull this very thick and spirally notebook out of the belly of the desk and  I see that the cardboard cover of the notebook has been etched with blue ballpoint, designs carved and shiny from the belabored passes of a steel ball bearing greasy ink. I open the notebook to a particular blank page that has been indented by a ballpoint pen pressed between the pages like a butterfly. Or maybe like a butterfly if a butterfly had a wingless torso of faceted transparent plastic with a single, central artery of greasy blue ink. As I take up the pen and press its steel ball to the paper, I see the vision again of the diamond needle scratching along on the concentric time tracks of the record, rotating slowly at a rate of thirty-three revolutions per minute. I see that the diamond needle is reading vibrational information etched into the record, but at the same time it is also etching new information onto the record. It is a read/write needle. Then I notice other diamond needles in contact with the same record and they are read/write needles as well. I see that myself and my fellow travelers are all reading and writing from and onto the same spinning medium, orbiting together in undulating, concentric bands. I realize that I need to fulfill my role, a particular read/write needle revolving in a particular time track. I pick up my pen and write a title at the top of the blank page:  ”A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler”

An Interdimensional Traveler’s Codex

Interdimensional Passport © Jonathan Zap

At all costs, the interdimensional traveler must never surrender multi-incarnate identity and essence to the Babylon Matrix, or any other such matrix. Since so many readers are most familiar with the hideous strength of the Babylon Matrix, we will give it particular emphasis.

From a thousand thousand angles, the dark magnetisms of the Babylon Matrix would love to pull travelers into the wrong ends of telescopes. Essentially, the Babylon Matrix has a tunneling effect that can easily shrink your incarnation until it is like a twisty wormhole burrowing into the festering tissues of a rotten apple.  When you choose the BM wormhole over the rabbit hole of the self-ware interdimensional traveler, your incarnation shrivels and descends like the slow intestinal twisting of an endless, monotonous colonoscopy, winding its way down the wrong end of a telescope.

The Babylon Matrix seeks to remake you in its own image. It would like to play you out as a tragicomic retread, the six billionth remake of Honey, I Shrunk the Interdimensional Traveler.

The Babylon Matrix churns out remakes by shrink-wrapping hominids into stock characters. It would love for you to be a frat boy, a homeboy, a drama queen, a geek, a couch potato, a yuppie, a workaholic, a celebrity, a celebrity stalker and so forth.  Surrender to its shrinking rays and you might find yourself living out your incarnation as one of these diminutive caricatures, a skin job with a limited shelf life.

In the Eighties, in the early hours of a smoggy and overcast Monday morning on the Cross Bronx Expressway, I first saw what would become a ubiquitous bumper sticker. It read, “I owe, I owe, so off to work I go.” It was as if the veil had pulled back right there on the Cross Bronx Expressway, and something I wasn’t supposed to see, one of the underlying black magical spells, actual source code of the Babylon Matrix, suddenly became visible in the manifest realm.

What potency such spells of darkling magic have! A spellbound victim, the owner of the bumper sticker, laboring under the power of malign enchantment, discovers the spell, the actual contract the devil made him sign in blood, and yet cannot break from it.  There it is, the devil’s contract, turning slowly in the spinner rack of a convenience store, rendered word for word onto self-adhesive vinyl. The victim purchases this perfect copy of the spell that rules him and attaches it to the bumper of his car where he sees it every day, and yet he never awakens from its power.

An interdimensional traveler must never surrender to such spells! These spells are swirling around us like sheets of self-adhesive shrink-wrap spun by a tornado. We live within a tornado of memes, a dark and smoky twister spinning fragments of culture.  Spinning within the twister are newspaper headlines, faces, fragments of video, sound bytes of neurotic conversations, glossy magazine torsos—a swirling shrapnel of sticky cultural fragments. Lose your footing and the twister rips you out of Oz, out of agrarian Kansas, out of all the infinite places you could be, and shrinks you into an anxious meat puppet, stuck in traffic, worried about being late for the florescent-lit cubicle, unpaid bills and debts stinging like pale scorpions at your shrunken kernel-like mind animated by coffee with non-dairy creamer, kept afloat by serotonin specific reuptake inhibitors and propelled by spell-induced fears.

Is there an engine driving the twister that eludes us, adding invisibly to its torque and stickiness? The interdimensional traveler will at least keep that an open question. He knows that there are other worlds than these, and who can account for all the forces that interpenetrate the Babylon Matrix?

Certainly there is no ambiguity about the existence of the agents of the twister, the enforcers and minor black magicians of the Babylon Matrix. They are all around us, uttering their obvious and yet potent and insidious spells from school yards, televisions, street corners, classrooms, boardrooms and bedrooms, from the thousand thousand blind alleys of the Babylon Matrix.

The interdimensional traveler must not step through the wrong ends of telescopes! The interdimensional traveler must not let anxious voices, inner or outer, hurry them down narrowing corridors. The interdimensional traveler must not step onto the conveyor belts of degrading and dreary timelines!

Some foolish interdimensional travelers will perceive these injunctions through the exciting, intoxicating and scintillating distortion fields of the archetype of the eternal youth. These archetype-possessed travelers will see the injunctions of what not to do as an infinite license to indulge, and though they emulate Peter Pan on steroids, they end up as flabby Peter Pans with kidney damage, divorcing the Babylon Matrix only to marry flaccid Never Never Lands where obese lost boys play video games in their mothers’ basements. The path of the interdimensional traveler is not a license to indulge, it is a space that opens when the imagination of the eternal youth and the impeccability of the Warrior meld. It is a path that demands prodigious will and discipline. If you try to follow the path of the interdimensional traveler without will and discipline, you will end up as a pathetic lost boy of some sort, sucking weakly at the soured edges of the Babylon Matrix, caught in a grey limbo where embittered contempt for the realm of shrink-wrapped, spell-driven drones melds with a parasitic dependence on the fruits of drone labor.

Portals open for the traveler on a mission of compassion who is aligned with his or her True Will. Different portals open for a dark traveler possessed of and by a dark will. Still another set of portals open for the young fool traveler who may, for example, step through the wrong end of a kaleidoscope. Certain intentions beckon certain matrices, for better and for worse.

An interdimensional traveler must be a Warrior, must have a moral purpose, and must be aware of all the shrinking rays that press upon us. The price of freedom for the interdimensional traveler is eternal vigilance about the sticky enchantments that would like to bind us to the Babylon Matrix and turn individualized travelers into hordes of automatons and hungry ghosts. To step across the event horizon you need to molt the many layers of malign enchantment encasing your soul.

Go then, there are other worlds than these…

Detail of 1996 Parallel Journeys Collage. The two black and white photos of me were taken by my father at age 8 and as a new born.  Image  © Jonathan Zap

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self portrait age 14 or 15

(with Alex Grey at Cosm in New York City)

Jonathan Zap grew up in the Bronx and attended the Bronx High School of  Science. He graduated from Ursinus College with honors in Philosophy and English and received his Masters degree in English from NYU.

Jonathan is a photographer, author, teacher, paranormal researcher and philosopher who has written extensively on human evolution and contemporary mythology. Jonathan has worked as a staff gemologist and instructor for the Gemological Institute of America. He has taught English in High School and College and worked with troubled youth as the Dean of a South Bronx High School. As a wilderness guide, Jonathan has led inner city kids and other young people on expeditions to remote desert canyons and to the summit of Mount Rainer . (See Crossing the Great Stream—Education and the Evolving Self published in  Holistic Education Review for more on his experiences in education.)

Jonathan is the author of The Glorified Body , The Capsule of Intentionality , A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler, Parallel Journeys among many other works. He was recently featured in two DVDs—- Prophecy and the “End of Time” —a dialog between Jonathan and Mayan scholar John Major Jenkins about the nature of prophecy and the 2012 end date among other topics, and  Looking Toward the Event Horizon in which Jonathan discusses his research into the metamorphosis of the human species.

Jonathan has done numerous radio interviews including two recent three hour interviews on Coast to Coast AM—the world’s most listened to late night talk show. Alex Grey joined him in the most recent interview.

Jonathan has an extensive background in Jungian psychology, paranormal research and dream interpretation. For twenty-eight years he has been using the tools of Jungian psychology to study popular culture, contemporary mythology, and dreams for evidence that we are getting signals from the collective unconscious about the nature of a quantum evolutionary event approaching the human species.

Jonathan currently resides in Boulder, Colorado .

Anyway, that’s the dry recitation of resume like facts expected in a bio section in which it is impossible to recognize anything resembling a human being. My most autobiographical work is The Path of the Numinous where you can find a slightly more fleshed out version of some of the factoids listed above.

Some more photos follow:

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©  1999 Jonathan Zap

Revised 2009   Edited by Austin Iredale

Many people seem to view love as a feeling, and in New Age circles love often seems like a dose of aromatherapy, a passive, sentimentalized, set of hollow declarations that leaves a saccharine, toxic aftertaste, like eating Rose Bouquet Air Wick Solid for dessert.

What many people have pointed out is that love is not so much a feeling it is as a verb. If you have love, that means you take action. As someone once pointed out, if you want to find out what you really love, notice what you spend time on. Anyone can say they love their kids, or in their absence have a Kodak moment of sentimentalized appreciation, but do they spend time with their kids? M. Scott Peck said: “I define love thus: The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” (p.81, The Road Less Traveled )  Sometimes love means the will to hold back, and other times it  means the ability to get yourself to take action, to keep promises, and commitments, to be physically present when it is required, and to be consciously present, awake, listening, and attuned to the other.

A school principal once told me a story of how he had to choose between two school teachers who seemed equally qualified. At the end of the day, as they were about to leave the building, he had a kid go up to each of them and say that he had left his notebook in a locked classroom on the third floor. The first teacher was gruff,  had a bit of an attitude, but ultimately he retrieved the child’s notebook. The second teacher was much nicer, apologized profusely, but then left the building without helping the child. The principal hired the first teacher because, “he physically did the work.”

Love means that you physically do the work, and that is more important than the inconstant fluctuation of feelings. A mother who may be annoyed by her daughter, but physically does the work of making her breakfast, and helping her get to school, is a thousand times more loving than a person who professes a general love for the world  and makes a bunch of declarations where nothing is at stake and no actions are taken.

An eighty-year-old woman, who was a Jungian analyst, spoke a few years ago Boulder. At the end of her talk there were questions from the audience and the first one came from a young woman.  “Now that you are an elder,” asked the young woman, “what you can tell me as a young woman about a love?”  The elder woman replied, “When I was your age I was desperately trying to be loved. But now I know that it is better to simply be love .”

To be love means that you have the response-ability to take loving actions. Many people who make grandiose statements of how much love they have are actually trying to get attention, and their real character is revealed in their negligence to take simple loving actions.