“Story teller, mythmaker, and destroyer of the living world.”

So begins Edward O. Wilson’s Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life.[1] The renowned biologist, in his most fervent work, proposes giving back half the planet’s surface to nature. Only in this way can life, aside from microbes, jellyfish and fungi, be saved from mankind’s failure to serve as loving steward of the earth.

Jackson Browne sings: “The world’s going to shake itself free of our greed somehow.”[2] Critics see this line as indicating “hope” in his otherwise dark lament. But one cannot escape the other possibility, that the earth’s shaking, in what scientists are now calling “the coming cascade of mega-quakes,” may in fact shake the world free of our greed, “to shake itself all the way free somehow.”

After one of the major earthquakes in California, I did a survey of university student’s dreams and fantasies upon awakening. What I found was that more than 80% had dreams or fantasies or feelings that the earthquake was “revenge.” Some of these experiences were highly personal, others more collective.[3] More than likely, deep in our own psyche, we already know that the earth will “get back” and cost us dearly for our transgressions.

The machinations of greed are increasingly entrenched, increasing in degree and scope, and so blinded to the consequences for themselves, others, life itself and the earth, that nothing short of something that would “shake the world” is going to lead to any consequential changes. Whether such mega-quakes occur in the earth itself, or the world’s financial system, or some other world or human disaster, my dream tells me that Ragnarök is coming—the final Ragnarök. One way to take this is that we are in fact in the sixth extinction, one that will lead to the end of much of life on earth—including humans. Ragnarök belongs to the world’s “death of gods” mythology and all such mythologies point to a subsequent rebirth of the gods. There are two ways to take this.

One is that a final Ragnarök would be the last death of gods and there would be no future rebirth of gods because people would be no more. The question of whether this means the psyche would be no more must be left an open one, because we simply do not know the full extent and depth of the psyche-as-reality and how it might manifest in such a future. The psyche may not be just a human attribute.

The second is that what would follow would be “something else”—something other than what we know as gods of myth. The Coming Guest is one such possibility. I wrote Psyche Speaks to suggest that the Coming Guest would be Eros, not as concept, not as myth, but as the fully realized manifestation of the psyche in the world. Until then, as an earlier poem suggested, “madness” will be psyche’s only nurse.[4]

So, in this sprit, I will toast the final Ragnarök and the Coming Guest—as soon as I get some Blavod, which, so far, is not possible to get where I live.

There are some who see clearly the state of the world and what is coming and who are trying to tell others the truth. As Ben Franklin said, “Honesty is the best policy.” But this has not been the policy at all, and this failure of honesty has played a key role in bringing us to our present state. I say “us,” because we are all complicit in playing along with the untruths disguised as truths. Few of us can “get off the train” of this truthless track we are living.

Here are some links to things that convey a good dose of truth you will not be hearing on the TV news or in your local newspapers.

1. http://guymcpherson.com

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCeADT8Y8Pw

3. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31661-mass-extinction-it-s-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwhh7xBj-Cg&feature=youtu.be

[1]Edward O. Wilson. Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation (W. W. Norton & Company), 2016.

[2] Jackson Browne. “If I Could Be Anywhere.” Filmed November 2010, at TEDxGreatPacificGarbagePatch. https://www.ted.com/talks/jackson_browne_if_i_could_be_anywhere#t-51079

[3] The day before this earthquake, I had workmen cut down a glorious pine tree whose roots were about to break apart the swimming pool. I felt bad about having to do this. At 6 am the next morning, I was roused by an intense earthquake (the “Sylmar Quake,” February 9, 1971). While the quake was still in progress, I lurched to the patio windows with strong images of the swimming pool cracking, the tree taking its revenge. It did not crack, but I stood there watching the water thrown up at me from the pool. I was quite shaken, literally and emotionally. It was this experience that gave me the idea to survey my students that day.

[4] I realize that these two ways of looking at “final” are sketchy at best. I am working on a future post that will go into these things more fully. Watch for, “Where do the gods go; where is the coming guest from?”