Perspectives

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche (1882) famously declared we have murdered God. Where has God gone? Will God come back? These are peculiarly modern questions.

In his short story “Answer” (1954), the celebrated science fiction author Fredric Brown (1906–1972) imagines God as a supercomputer (Brown, 1954). A galactic civilization creates a computational network that connects the ninety-six billion populated planets in the universe—a “cybernetics machine,” the story says (i.e., a cyborg possessing both artificial and natural systems)—that has access to all the information in the cosmos. When the creators of this machine finally, triumphantly, throw the switch that turns the machine on, they then ask it “a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer”—the ultimate question: “Is there a God?”

Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.

He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe—ninety-six billion planets—into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.

Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment’s silence he said, “Now, Dwar Ev.”

Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.

Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.”

“Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.”

He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?”

The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.

“Yes, now there is a God.”

Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.

A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut. (Brown, 1954, pp. 36–37)

When the metaphysical image of God as the creator of humanity is dead, God reappears in the image of a machine, the creation of humanity. Brown’s “Answer” to the question, “Is there a God?; there is now,” is one of the first examples of a trope that would become increasingly widespread in science fiction in the decades to follow. And in life as well. Those familiar with the nonfiction writings of Ray Kurzweil will find this science fiction story from the 1950s strikingly familiar. “Does God exist? Well, I would say not yet,” is how Kurzweil puts it. When the God-like super intelligence in “Answer” fuses its switch shut, this means it cannot be turned off. The machine is beyond the control of its makers. As with prior images of God, the machine God—we now speak of artificial intelligence—has a dark side. In “Answer,” superhuman AI is a source of fear as well as hope.

Yuval Noah Harari, a professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is a best-selling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011), and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016). He was invited to speak at the 2018 and 2020 World Economic Forums in Davos. In an April 2023 interview with Piers Morgan, entitled “AI Could be the End of Democracy—Yuval Noah Harari on the Threat of Artificial Intelligence,” he gives an answer to the question of what we might do to ameliorate the dark side of AI. For us to “be OK,” Harari suggests, we will have to spend as much time and money on developing our consciousness as we do on developing our machines.

I think that AI is nowhere near its full potential. But also, human beings are nowhere near our full potential. We don’t really understand the full potential of our brains, of our minds. If for every dollar, for every minute, that we invest in developing AI we invest another dollar and minute in developing our own minds, and our own consciousness, I think we’ll be OK. (Harari, 2023)

What might it mean, however, to develop the full potential of our own minds? How do we do that?

Harari seems well-intentioned when he suggests psycho-spiritual evolution as the counterbalance to technological progress. But there is an assumption hidden in Harari’s way of putting it, an assumption perhaps so obviously true to the modern mind that it goes unnoticed: Our consciousness is ours. We can take charge of where, when, and how consciousness transforms, just as we would with a machine. It is as if Harari were saying: “You know how we made such great strides with tech? Let’s do the same thing with the psyche. We will do the developing; we will invest time and money; we will oversee the process.” But this R&D metaphor is psychologically naïve. In reality, the transformation of consciousness does not go like that but instead very differently. Or, at the least, that is the central assertion of the articles in this issue of Psychological Perspectives entitled “Divine Darkness.” They all suggest consciousness evolves by confronting perceived evil and madness through the excruciatingly humiliating experience of facing all we do not want to face, through submission to the mystery of the unknown.

When it comes to the phenomenology of “developing our own minds, and our own consciousness,” we can learn much from literature, myth, and dream, from the poets and psychologists, and little from the technically-skilled elite. James Driscoll, who has written extensively on Jung, Shakespeare, and Milton, tracks the development of “our minds” in his lead article, “King Lear, Answer to Job: The Archetypes of Godhead.” The characters of Lear and Job develop in parallel with the development of the Western God-image as distinct from the paradigms of the Industrial Revolution. Marie-Louise von Franz remarked, “we will have to obey and submit ourselves to Mother Nature if we want to escape an imminent global catastrophe” (von Franz, as cited in Abt, 2006, p. 133). The human quest for wholeness Jung calls “individuation,” Driscoll asserts, is mirrored in a transformation of the Trinitarian God image to a Quaternity that includes—rather than excludes—the “creative and regenerative shadow elements” of the feminine and evil. In other words, the transformation and evolution of consciousness requires more than good intentions, money, and time; it requires chaos and the “abject black,” darkness experienced to the utmost degree. Lear “returns both mad and supremely aware … he is a man rent, beaten, and shattered, howling his irrepressible will to become more conscious and more whole.” Driscoll’s essay is a tour de force expression of the “terrible authenticity” of the struggle to attain “human consciousness—and a more humane consciousness” through an encounter with the dark side of God understood as “injustice, death, suffering, time, and evil,” in which “tragedy and evil are essential to wholeness in both man and the Deity.” As Driscoll leads us to King Lear and Answer to Job, he also leads us, as readers of these monumental works, toward “an authentic religious vision that gives singularly profound and disturbing meaning to events that, seen realistically, proclaim only a meaningless doom.” The secret of that authentic religious vision is a secret the modern mind is loath to confront: “Pride tells us we are everything; necessity shows us we are nothing. In our nothingness we can discover the truth about ourselves and compassion for others.”

Next up, Jungian analyst Michael Gellert guides us into “Reframing the Problem of Evil.” Over 40 of Gellert’s extended family members vanished in the Holocaust, and his parents, who survived and are now deceased, were victims of torture in the camps. “Yet both my parents,” Gellert notes, “had religious experiences during the war; both felt that God saved them.” Gellert takes up the conundrum perennially haunting the Judeo-Christian faithful: “How could the sophisticated, transcendent Godhead whose substance is absolute nothingness coexist with—and worse, permit!—the evil and suffering in our world?” Drawing from extremely moving accounts of the Nazi death camps by Elie Wiesel, the wisdom of the Talmud, and the Kabbalah, Jacob Boehme, Teilhard de Chardin, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the renowned Persian and Muslim poet Saadi Shirazi, and others, including an amazing visionary warning about Hitler recounted by James Kirsch (who was a personal friend of Jung’s), Gellert offers us a wide-ranging and personally-grounded reflection on that “vexing paradox.” Gellert concludes that “the mystical dimension of the human spirit reminds us of who we really are and helps to give us the courage and stamina to fight evil.”

In his essay, “C. G. Jung and God,” Lance Owens offers us the third installment of his series of essays on “Jung’s last quartet,” as he calls them: Psychology of the Transference (1946), Aion (1951), Answer to Job (1952), and Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955), the first essay written on Aion in 2011 and the second on The Psychology of the Transference and its connection to Jung’s Red Book in 2015. Drawing on material from Jung’s Black Books that only became available in 2020, Owens focuses “on one recurrent theme in Jung’s visionary venture: his search to apprehend the ultimate mystery of God as he met it in evolving visionary and imaginative forms over the course of the experiential journey recorded in his journals.” This must-read, comprehensive survey of “an explanatory myth,” as Jung called it, opens with John Freeman’s question to Jung in a 1959 BBC interview: “Do you now believe in God?” Jung’s answer: “Now? [Pause.] Difficult to answer. I know. I don’t need to believe. I know.” (This question echoes the query posed by the scientists in “Answer” to their cosmic cybernetic machine.) By unpacking that answer, Owens discovers how Jung’s “knowledge of God” considers “the immense darkness of the human mind.” Jung’s initiatory transformation through that darkness might be taken straight from King Lear: “Men flee in horror from me since I bear the marks of the fire. … My God, why have you forsaken me? Oh, horrendous silence!” And what is the redeeming word coming through the fire? “Surrender.” As in King Lear, both evil and the feminine inform the full development of Jung’s mind.

Donna Glee Williams, a Pushcart Prize-nominee, and Jay Joslin offer us “Reflections,” a collaborative revisioning of the myth of Medusa and Perseus that Joslin dreamed and Williams wrote. Perseus, grown old, no longer a warrior but “a harper and a singer of songs,” tells us the true story of Medusa, a legend mangled by history. In Joslin’s redreaming and Williams’ retelling, the turning of men’s bodies to stone transforms from a monstrous curse into a “transmutation of Life into Beauty.” In a particularly striking passage, Medusa tells Perseus, “of course” she will kill him—“But will you have the little death, or the great one?” “I chose as if a choice was offered,” Perseus responds, “and turned my lips to yours.”

Jungian analyst Holly Fincher’s “The Cosmic Tree is Rending” brings our theme of encounter with divine darkness into the personal experience of the author during the COVID pandemic, “which stopped our regular goal-directed activities,” as she says. During quarantine, Fincher drops down into a profound realization of grief through the discovery (in a dream) of the suicide of a man she had been in significant relationship with during her 20s—a relationship, she says, that “was a reflection of unredeemed eros languishing in us both.” Thus, being alone in the pandemic and grieving the death and unlived life of another, Fincher has a profound dream of a “Cosmic Tree” hovering in the sky and rent into four sections. Synchronistic experiences around that dream image emerge, alongside related themes, including twelve dreams from eight different dreamers. The author’s brilliant interpretations of this dream series, a pitch-perfect example of how to work with dreams from the perspective of C. G. Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, does not shy away from the encounter with darkness but is rather based upon it; namely, upon “the lower work, the work of the second fish; that is, the work of the dark mercurial spirit of the depths.” “Here, in darkness,” Fincher poignantly asserts, summing up the phenomenology of the dreams, “exist the realities of the body, sexuality, feeling, death, emotion, and the way of the feminine principle for not-knowing as a way of knowing.” Fincher’s essay suggests the full development of our minds will not come through investing time and money in a consciously rational/intellectual logos project, but through the development of eros as the archetypal counterbalance to the one-sidedness of our contemporary world. Latent in divine darkness is “a myth,” as Jung says, “being played out in the unconscious, a myth that extends over centuries, a stream of archetypal ideas that goes on through the centuries through an individual.”

Susan Schept, associate professor of Humanities at Stevens Institute of Technology, has been teaching psychology to students for the past 35 years. Her essay is an offering on “The Transformational Impact of Bar/Bat Mitzvah on Adolescents, Parents, Grandparents: A Jungian Analysis.” Taking her personal experience of the bar mitzvah of her son 30 years ago as the basis of her exploration of this “vital ritual using a Jungian lens,” Schept now explores how this symbolic ritual of initiation affects not only those who go through it themselves, but the entire community around them, describing “how it profoundly impacts and touches each generation.” Taking us on a tour of Jewish tradition, and then guiding us into how this tradition might be renewed today, she quotes the late feminist sociologist Pauline Bart, who once quipped, “There’s no bar mitzvah for menopause.” Schept offers us beautiful and touching examples of parents in middle age as well as grandparents late in life whose powerful experiences of the bar and bat mitzvahs of their children and grandchildren were motivated by “symbols” as “a way of stepping outside linear time to experience a sense of eternity in the here and now.” “A universal Jungian archetype of the collective unconscious,” Schept asserts, thus creates “a life-affirming involvement in the present.”

Carole Standish Mora’s “A Road Story” is an original work of creative fiction that tells the story of “Sara, a young, divorced, struggling single parent,” who has a profound encounter with a “well-dressed elderly woman [Greta], wearing a bright yellow pleated skirt, stranded on the roadside and hitchhiking. Her husband Hans, who has Alzheimer’s, sits on a bus bench.” Greta, a Holocaust survivor whose entire family has perished, needs a ride to the Dutch Consulate “so that she and Hans can go home.” Sara’s “strange encounter serves as a catalyst in which Sara mysteriously begins to acknowledge some of her own ordeals.” Mora brings archetypal/symbolic themes into the realm of personal experience as she opens Sara’s private world where the fairy tale (“Hansel and Gretel”) and real life intersect.

Elliott Morgan, an American standup comedian, actor, and YouTube personality, as well as a third-year PhD student at Pacifica Graduate Institute studying depth psychology, leads us into the theme of divine darkness through a humble, witty, and archetypally-grounded exploration of “Sacred Skies: UFOs and the Religious Function of the Psyche.” The subject is timely. In July of this year, 2023, a first-ever Congressional Hearing on UFOs (or, as they are now called, UAPs—Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena), held by a House Oversight subcommittee, hosted three high-ranking and highly credible witnesses—members of the military, two pilots, and one former U.S. intelligence official—who gave testimony under oath about their personal experience and knowledge of UAPs. David Grusch, an intelligence officer for 14 years and a whistleblower through the office of the Inspector General, told the congressional panel he is “absolutely” certain the federal government is in possession of UAPs, citing interviews he said he conducted with 40 witnesses over a four-year period. As distinct, however, from the focus of the Congressional hearing—whether UAPs exist and whether they are alien spacecraft or something else—Morgan follows in the footsteps of Jung as he focuses on “the enchantment around UFOs.” Included in that enchantment is the dark side of the phenomenon as it appears in the stigmas of madness, lunacy, and impossibility, as well as conspiratorial government cover-ups and potential mass panic. The enchantment, Morgan suggests, may be the psycho-spiritual dimension “of a living myth,” a “desire to make contact with the numinous,” understood as “a kind of holy terror, awe, or dread” in a culture for whom God is dead. UFOs open “the only thing that remains constant in our modern Western culture [as] the very thing we have sought to eradicate: mystery.”

No issue of Psychological Perspectives would be complete without poetic offerings. We are delighted to have Leah Shelleda’s homage to madness and love in her moving “The Mother Suite.” Mary Feldman’s meditations on the divine darkness of the alchemical theme of transformation through “Solutio” and “Nigredo,” and Lisa Valantine’s “The Word,” in memory of Margaret Johnson, our former beloved editor of Psychological Perspectives for decades.

We complete this issue with a film review of News of the World (2020) by Steven Galipeau, and a book review of Sachiko Taki-Reece’s Psychotherapy with Inner City Children: Mixed Methods based on Seven Case Studies using Sandplay Therapy (2022) by Robin Wynslow.

On the cover: Victor Brauner, Suicide at Dawn (detail), 1930. Oil on canvas, 40.5 × 34.5 × 2.5 in. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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Tom Elsner

Thomas Elsner is a Jungian analyst and co-chief editor of Psychological Perspectives. He trained as a Jungian analyst at the Center for Depth Psychology according to C. G. Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz in Zürich, Switzerland, is a training analyst at the C. G. Jung Study Center of Southern California, and maintains a private practice in Santa Barbara.