Revelation: Our Creative Nature Goes Viral
By Paul Levy
Dark times are usually times of great revelation. “Revelation,” to quote C. G. Jung, “is an ‘unveiling’ of the depth of the human soul first and foremost.”
Oftentimes humanity is not saved from a crisis by what we consciously think, but rather, the saving grace comes from something being revealed to us that emerges unexpectedly as a result of the crisis. Revelations—which can be likened to timeless treasures waiting to be discovered in time—come in many forms and in many ways. Sometimes they first emerge seemingly outside of ourselves through—or are triggered by—some external event in the world like the coronavirus outbreak, for example. Ultimately speaking, however, the deepest revelation is something that lies hidden within the creative nature of our soul awaiting discovery.
There are treasures literally buried within us, concealed within our unconscious. These hidden treasures are like precious jewels or diamonds in the rough that are encoded within the fabric of the unconscious psyche. They can be conceived of as existing in a higher-dimension relative to our conscious mind, and as such, are typically invisible to our conscious intellect. These treasures, having lain buried and dormant in the collective unconscious of our species from time immemorial, are typically awakened in times of great need. When the time is ripe, our intuition—due to its connection to our unconscious—divines and begins to “see” the heretofore formless creative revelation that is brewing in the cauldron of the unconscious. Our task then becomes how to bring forth and creatively express the revelation in a form that helps it come to fruition as we realize it more clearly within ourselves. To quote Jungian scholar Erich Neumann, “These images, ideas, values, and potentialities of the treasure hidden in the unconscious are brought to birth and realized by the hero [the creative individual] in his various guises.”
The potential revelation can be conceived of as being a creative force of nature alive in the unconscious that is literally thirsting to incarnate both within our minds and into our world. As if a living entity gestating in the womb of the collective unconscious of humanity, this soon-to-be revelation will draft a suitably creative person—someone who is sensitive to and resonates with the potential revelation—to become the instrument through which the newborn revelation clothes itself, takes on a particular individualized form and enters into our third-dimensional world. Jung writes, “Suddenly there is a flash of association between two apparently disconnected and widely separated ideas, and this has the effect of releasing a latent tension. Such a moment often works like a revelation.”
Our spirit, the sentient presence that animates us, is by its very nature, creative. A human being is, in Neumann’s words, “a creative force demanding fulfillment.” We can conceive of the creative instinct as a living impulse implanted in the human psyche. True creativity is a continuation and re-iteration on the human scale of the on-going act of cosmic creation itself. The creative individual, Neumann writes, “produces in his own soul the same creative process which he finds outside himself in nature.”
The creative act is not something derivative from something else; its roots go into and emerge out of the deepest depths of our soul. To quote Russian philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev, “The creative secret is both hidden from man and revealed by man.”
This is to say that the hidden treasure of our creativity is concealed within us in such a way that nothing outside of ourselves can bring it forth. We have to reveal it out of and from within ourselves, which is a self-sanctifying act needing no outside validation. Neumann comments, “The self-generating [creative] power of the soul is man’s true and final secret, by virtue of which he is made in the likeness of God the creator.”
PIXABAY
The Creator created humanity in His/Her own image – a free being gifted with creative power. Humanity was created so that we, too, would create; being creative is our divinely sanctioned vocation. Being creative is not just our right, but our duty, a moral imperative, our calling. God waits for a response to His/Her call – humanity is called to actively participate in engaging—and revealing—our creative nature. Expressing ourselves creatively is the revelation of the image of God within us; it is to partake in our God-like freedom. It is in humanity’s creativity that our freedom is revealed, liberated and actualized.
Any one of us actively engaging our creative nature is literally preparing the ground for, going towards and symbolically evoking the proverbial “Second Coming,” a cosmic event that will never be experienced by one who has not, in Berdyaev’s words, “accomplished the daring act of revealing his own creative nature.”
In other words, to experience the glory of God, we must reveal our own innate glorious nature by offering ourselves to be an instrument for the creative spirit to reveal itself through us via our acts of creativity.
From all appearances it seems as if the creator of our universe created human beings to partake in and be the vehicle for the creative potentiality intrinsic to the universe to become actualized in form and consciously known. This brings to mind the divine saying, “I was a hidden Treasure, I yearned to be known. That is why I produced creatures, in order to be known in them.”
It should be pointed out that knowing is a creative act in itself; if we want to know creativity, however, we have to be creative. There are no holy scriptures for humanity’s creative activity – we are left to our own devices and ingenuity to discover how to best engage with and express the creativity inherent to our nature. Our open receptivity to the unconscious joined together with our active engagement with its promptings enables our spirit’s heretofore unrealized potential for creativity to be actualized in our response to its call.
Revelation is not something that the conscious ego could have created by itself, but can only organically arise out of the tension between a stable consciousness and a charged unconscious. To endure this creative tension necessarily involves a state of suffering. Describing the creative individual, Neumann writes, “Only by suffering, perhaps unconsciously, under the poverty of his culture and his time can he arrive at the freshly opening source which is destined to quench the thirst of his time.”
PIXABAY
As if the psycho-spiritual organs of our species, creative people are the alchemical vessels in which the poisons of the collective are suffered, metabolized and alchemically transmuted into medicine. In going through their suffering without dissociating or getting stuck in it, a healing power arises as a result of their ordeal, and this curative power is the creative spirit in action.
“Wherever we find the creative principle,” Neumann writes, “we venerate it as the hidden treasure that in humble form conceals [and, I might add, simultaneously “reveals”] a fragment of the godhead.”
In other words, the hidden treasure, the great revelation that is hidden within our unconscious—referred mythically as “The Treasure Hard to Attain”— is the creative spirit itself. When tapped into, this spirit is a seemingly inexhaustible source of creativity within us which issues forth a stream of revelations like a spring bubbling upwards from the depths of our unconscious. Neumann comments, “Whenever it appears, the creative force has a character of revelation.”
This “creative point,” to quote Neumann, is “the buried treasure which is the water of life, immortality, fertility, and the after-life all rolled into one.”
Connecting our consciousness with the creative powers of the unconscious is, Neumann continues, “the point of renewal and rebirth … identified with the creative divinity, and upon which the continued existence of the world depends.”
The greatest poison to the human psyche is unexpressed creativity, which is to say that if we aren’t actively involved in expressing ourselves creatively, we are betraying our nature, unwittingly colluding with our own victimization and complicit in creating our psycho-spiritual dis-ease. Because the creative function is an expression of—and creates—the greatest value intrinsic to the human soul, Jung comments, “it is most dangerous to interfere with it … if you destroy the creative impulse, you will destroy the intrinsic value of the individual at the same time. But you can still live on as a wall decoration.”14 Creativity that is not given a suitable form of expression can be envisioned as an obstructing shadow that veils the light of divinity within us. To have eyes and not see, to have ears and not hear are unmistakable symptoms of a sclerosis of consciousness and an occlusion to the call of the creative spirit.
Certain individuals gifted with particularly strong intuition sense the moving currents taking place in the collective unconscious and are able to creatively translate these changes into communicable language (whether verbal and/or nonverbal). These creative expressions can potentially spread rapidly—going viral—and have such powerful transformative power because parallel changes have been taking place in the unconscious of other people. Contagious in its effects, genuine creative expression emerging at the right moment can “virally” spread via the unconscious of our species in a way which can ignite latent, creative energy lying dormant in the collective unconscious of humanity. This can bring forth and actualize hidden possibilities (both within us and in the world) into the light of conscious awareness, which is a process that has the power to effect real change in the world.
Our species is desperately in need of the guidance and aid of the boundless creative forces latent within the depths of our unconscious to help us find new ways to resolve the myriad interwoven aspects of our multiple world crises. Given that these widespread systemic crises are the direct result of a deficiency in human consciousness, it becomes obvious that it is only through an expansion of consciousness that we will be able to navigate through the tight passage before us. Consciousness can evolve and develop, however, only where it preserves and cultivates a living connection with the creative powers of the unconscious.
The creativity of the unconscious psyche—which is an agency in a state of never-ending creative re-formation—continually transforms our experience of reality as well as itself. Paradoxically, the act of creation draws us out of ourselves while simultaneously helping us to come to ourselves. Creativity is not separate from our true nature – it IS its unmediated expression. Jung points out that “only in a situation where you are absolutely in need of a creative solution will you experience the source within yourself; so it always needs the impossible.”15 The unconscious oftentimes produces a seemingly impossible and unsolvable circumstance in our lives in order to catalyze and help us realize our creative nature.
As a creative person, we are what Neumann refers to as a “bearer of the divine miracle,” actively participating in endlessly re-creating ourselves anew, revealing ourselves—to ourselves—through the bringing forth of our creative gifts to the world. To quote Jung, “Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete.”16 In being creative we discover the true revelation that is none other than ourselves. As Jung reminds us, “Only what is really oneself has the power to heal.”17
About the Author
A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, Paul Levy is a wounded healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. Among his books are The Quantum Revelation: A Radical Synthesis of Science and Spirituality (SelectBooks, May 2018) and Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil (North Atlantic Books, 2013). He is the founder of the “Awakening in the Dream Community” in Portland, Oregon. An artist, he is deeply steeped in the work of C. G. Jung, and has been a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for over 35 years. He was the coordinator for the Portland PadmaSambhava Buddhist Center for over twenty years. His email is paul@awakeninthedream.com; he looks forward to your reflections.
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