I have just found an astoundingly interesting website from a woman named Anne Baring, a Jungian analyst with a fantastically diverse view of the relationship of the soul to the world and the cosmos. Her article The Struggle for Primacy and Dominance and the Roots of War struck me as being particularly relevant to the conjunction of Pluto to the Galactic Center that began this year and will continue throughout 2007.

I’ve excerpted a bit here but do read the whole article if you have the time:

For over fifty years the concentration on the development of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons – first and foremost by the United States and the Soviet Union, but also by the United Kingdom, Israel, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and now, possibly, Iran – has brought into being the very situation that is most feared: the ability of a nation, group or individual to destroy life on an apocalyptic scale. What is truly alarming is that a single individual who has access to the technology of destruction now has the power to destroy the lives of millions because he believes that the use of these weapons in a pre-emptive strike against a designated enemy is justified or, more dangerously, because he sees himself as the agent of God in eliminating evil from the world and instituting a new order.

The conviction that it is justifiable to murder others in defence of one’s own group or territory (with God co-opted to serve that group) has evolved out of the belief systems and the defensive tribal habits that we have inherited from the past. The efforts of the greatest spiritual teachers have attempted to free us from our enslavement to these primordial habits. But their fundamental message – that life is sacred and, at the deepest level, one and indivisible – has consistently been ignored. From their perspective, inventing demonic weapons and using them to destroy the lives of millions in order to maintain or extend our power – even to save our own lives – would be inconceivable. Believing that the sacrifice of a single life is pleasing to God would be unimaginable. In colluding with governments in the development of the deadly weaponry of modern war, in not collectively raising their voice against it, the priesthoods of the world’s religions have betrayed their spiritual teaching about the sanctity of life. One of the few exceptions to this betrayal would seem to be Tibetan Buddhism. The fact that India has developed the nuclear bomb suggests that she, like the West, has turned her back on her great spiritual heritage. The demands of a nation’s perceived survival needs override spiritual insight.

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The Web of Life
Opportunely, as if to help us to change our perspective on war, the discoveries related to quantum physics suggest that the belief that we can achieve a position of dominance in relation to nature, life or each other is, ultimately, an illusion: each of us is an expression of a vast sea or field of consciousness – invisible, and as yet barely recognised by us. We are all connected to each other, part of a great living web of life. We are, literally, ‘our brother’s keeper’. The belief that modern states can continue indefinitely to act as if they were autonomous units, competing with each other to acquire the power to destroy life on a colossal scale is not only the most insidious of illusions but an unacknowledged pathology. In destroying others, or even imagining and rehearsing the destruction of others through the invention and development of ever more terrible weapons, we are, in effect inviting our own destruction and injuring all humanity, not to speak of the planet. In seeking reconciliation and the well being of others, even in the midst of conflict and however great the provocation to retaliate, we are contributing to our own well being and ensuring that of future generations. Each individual who holds this perspective assists in the process of humanity as a whole awakening to and embodying these different values. As Jung observed, “The world today hangs by a thin thread, and that thread is the psyche of man.”

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[A] major problem in relation to the recognition of the need for change is that the overarching ethos of modern culture is one of power and dominance. At the root of this ethos is the influence of a very powerful solar mythology which polarises light and darkness, good and evil, ‘us’ and ‘them’. We can see this most clearly reflected in the manipulative relationships between the Great Powers but we can also observe it in the fact that the majority of scientists and technologists work for the military, in the drive for supremacy in space, in the telling phrase ‘full-spectrum dominance’ used by the Pentagon as well as in the commercial drive to conquer and control new markets. It is the language used in these different areas that reveals the underlying and largely unconscious addiction to power and dominance – in a word – to winning. Absurdly, even space has to be ‘conquered’. The metaphor of conquest and dominance is reflected in the attitude of modern science towards nature and matter, which it regards as something insensate, inferior to and separate from ourselves, that we are entitled to manipulate and control for our benefit.

This ethos derives from the age-old and deeply unconscious drive for primacy and dominance between men which is projected onto all manner of situations and conflicts. If you extrapolate this pattern to nations, then you have governments and the political leaders of nations locked into the pattern of competing with each other for dominance instead of co-operating with each other to serve the true needs of their people and the needs of the planet as a whole.

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In the context of the individual, particularly national leaders, archaic drives may be activated by unconscious complexes that compel certain men to seek absolute power in the first place – power to establish an invincible position of dominance in relation to other groups or individuals perceived as threatening to the supremacy of their own position or nation. Equally, a leader may take his people into war because of an unconscious desire to play the role of the warrior-hero, worshipped by millions as the ‘saviour’ of his people. He may fall into a huge inflation, seeing himself as the agent of God’s will in eliminating an enemy and projecting all evil onto his opponent.

As long as we remain unconscious of the deeper motivations that control our behaviour, there will be people who are prepared to murder others to achieve their ends – ends which they are taught and may believe to be noble, heroic, and supported by the god they worship. They will be attracted to fight for causes which polarise a situation into a conflict between good and evil and demonise an enemy. No one of us is exempt from the possibility of falling into this collective demonising; each of us has to be continually vigilant lest its compulsive power, coming from the roots of the psyche, takes us over. In projecting evil onto the other, we effectively get rid of our own guilt, our own contribution to the situation of conflict and the past history which has led to the present conflict. On the one hand we may speak of our longing for peace; but on the other we unconsciously subvert the possibility of achieving it.

Only by bringing these deeply buried instincts into our conscious awareness can we hope to attain a transcendent perspective that could eventually lift us out of the tragic compulsion to repeat the patterns of the past.

Here is where the influence of Pluto on the Galactic Center, the core of our Universe, may leverage its transformative power. Pluto reveals the hidden, exposes and unknown and offers it up as grist for the mill of change. This article is a powerful illustration of what we could be loo
king at during this Pluto/Galactic Center cycle.