Excellent stuff, John!!
Yes, I am a person who looks at things from a deeper psychological and, yes, spiritual perspective and I agree with your assessment. My own experience over the last two years was in fall 2019 I’d had a strong intuition that come March 2020 it would be time to quit my teaching job of 16 years. Now, I’d thought I was going to visit the States from my home in Japan and do a cross-country trip and writing a book about the State of the Union where the question I would seek to answer is: “Can Americans still love each other, despite their differences?”
My intuitions of 2019 led me to recognize that the 2020s were going to be a make-it-or-break-it decade for America, that it could very well be akin to the 1980s of the USSR. Would the country split apart as the USSR did?
Next, my belief is that humanity as a whole is going through a Dark Night of the Soul which is causing the Shadows to rise to the surface. This is happening within us as individuals and, as you said, some were so afraid of what they found they have projected it outward. Much of what we are seeing then is projection, not reality, but there’s a paradox there because our projections, especially when they are supported by the projections of others, can and do create the reality we all swim in.
Anyway, I could go on, but I want to close by saying I’ve been saddened by Umair’s writing. I actually joined Medium in 2017 partly because I appreciated his perspective, but I feel like he’s one of those people projecting so much of his Shadow onto the world and it’s reflected in how doom-and-gloom he is and how he wrote in a recent piece that fascism was rising through a possible 2024 Trump run, rather than recognizing that the fascism exists on a more fundamental level, which was merely transferred from Trump to Biden. It’s the fascism of top-down Control, this belief that the human Spirit doesn’t exist and that the People are inherently stupid and thus we need external authority to control us for our own good. Nothing could be further from the Truth. The more we allow ourselves to explore the darker areas of our own psyche and just be with them, and even befriend them, the more the world will change into the potential that it can become and the more the doom-and-gloom will dissolve as the projection it is.
