Inventing the Necessary God

The de facto, actually-existing God of our world is the Evil Machine, Searuvel, working its doom.

The Gods of the religions don't begin to address this threat, conservative and out-of-date as they are.  And so, since there is no God who is of any use in this catastrophe, we need a new, ecological, God.

That being granted, we can thoroughly work out what kind of God might be fitting and effective-- and then it would just sit there, useless-- because you just can't invent the next God, it has to spontaneously arise from the deep mind as a response to trauma of the organism, that threatens survival.  This is when prophets can appear, presenting new Gods, new religions.  If what they present feels relevant and seems to offer real hope, well, it may eventually prevail and found a new culture.  The trauma can be personal, we feel that our very existence is threatened by external danger and misery leading to despair.  Or in more sensitive, caring individuals, simply the danger and misery of the world, of life itself, can lead to despair.  The existing Gods and their religions are meant to address this kind of trauma as well.  But in the present crisis, they don't serve.  And so, in certain individuals, the conscious mind's dire awareness awakens the survival response of the deep mind, and its drive and creative intelligence are set to work, not just toward the survival of the organism, but of the Organism-- Life-on-Earth itself.  As a result, a change in the 'psychic dominant,' as Jung put it, can come about, a 'change of the gods'.  In our case, it is an exchange of the god Progress for the Ecology God.  Progress in techno-industrial-economic expansion and innovation, seen as good, right, and necessary once upon a time, in our saner, wiser moments, we now see more fully as evil-- the Good God of our world is actually evil.

When the deep mind responds to awareness, either conscious or unconscious, of the threat to survival, personal or transpersonal, we can help in the invention of the new God, by contributing our abilities to learn, reason, decide, organize, and act, in 'co-responding' with the deep mind, harmonizing with it in the work.  Now, this is not the same as the spontaneous shamanic assault of the deep mind on the person that creates the inspired prophet-- but how often was it ever like that?  Prophets, I think, were often seekers and thinkers who contributed to the working-out of the revelation they then received.  Even if we try to work out the necessary God using our conscious abilities, without any apparent response from the deep mind, it doesn't mean that it isn't working in us as well, because ego-mind and Unconscious correspond, are a continuum, so even if we can't seem to interact with the deep mind consciously, we can't assume that corresponding activity isn't going on below.  And for all our personal sense of isolation in a our world of billions, whether we will it or not, human and humanity also correspond in continuum, to an extent.

 And so, the great work if 'inventing' the necessary God, the next God, and its religion and culture, is a work to which each of us can contribute, in whichever way we can.  And it must be done, for the survival of All Life.