That it is possible for human beings to love, know, and from virtually to become actually identical with the Divine Ground. That to achieve this unitive knowledge of the Godhead is the final end and purpose of human existence.

Aldous Huxley, Vedanta for the Western World

Albert Einstein reacted with alarm to the use of the Atom Bomb in 1945 on Japan and said as much publicly later: "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

In my feeble attempt to see that WW III does not rear its ugly mushroom cloud head again, I offer you the following insights that I have gained over a lifetime of decoding the symbolic art and science to archetypes of apocalypse.

But, first, it should be clarified that the word "apocalypse" simply means to uncover or unveil. So the operative thesis is what is in fact seeking to breakthrough into our individual consciousness from the collective unconscious mind?

I propose that it is as Jungian analyst Edward F. Edinger, Ph.D., said it was in Archetype of the Apocalypse: Divine Vengeance, Terrorism, and the End of the World: "… it is the coming of the Self into collective awareness, the 'incarnation of the God-image' with all its paradoxical ambiguity, a God who unites within himself both good and evil."

Indeed, that has been my life's goal: how do I reconcile within myself all the demonic evil that I see in our world with the divine goodness that I know is in it too?

Specifically, I worked for over two decades in the U.S. Department of Defense as an electronics and computer specialist at some of our finest national weapons systems laboratories from 1968-1992.

Yet all the while I suffered immensely from anxiety and panic disorder in what would be clearly diagnosed by a competent clinical psychologist as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). The primary presenting symptoms of BPD an astute layman would classify as an "emotional burn victim."

That is, I was a high-functioning professional even though at times I'd decompensate under stress and show signs of ego erosion-a false sense of self-importance: anger, arrogance, even emotional collapse. So the point is I grasp the symbolism to the effects of working in weapons factories, and being "burned" by nuclear radiation fallout. Although I wonder how many of our world leaders can psychoanalyze themselves and apply these insights to their angry outbursts, temper tantrums, and egocentric behavior before they lash out at other nations militarily? If not, I propose WW III is inevitable now-unless we rise-up as a people and peacefully demilitarize this planet soon.

Indeed, during my off-duty hours I was studying the psychology of man at community colleges and major universities depending upon my location from the high-desert of the Naval Weapons Center, China Lake, California to the former plantation cotton fields but now headquarters to Army Space and Missile Defense Command, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama.

I also had the opportunity to crawl through the phallic-shaped missile silos in North Dakota and the sewer-pipe shaped nuclear submarines berthed in the lush forest harbors of the Naval Submarine Base, Bangor, Washington.

However, when all is said and done, I was seeking to explain to my satisfaction why I suffered and why we hate each other so much that we'd want to vaporize our genetic mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters with nuclear force of gods?

I did not know then but I do know now.

That is because during this soul-searching expedition, I came into contact with the most enlightened people of our era that as journalist Bill Moyers put it in the case of Joe Campbell, "He was one of the most spiritual men I ever met in my life, but he didn't have a religious bone in his body." That pretty much explains my own orientation to organized religion: it is a marvelous social society for comforting the broken-hearted, feeding the hungry, and burying the dead with dignity, but it falls short of the mark and critical-thinking people know it.

Why?

It falls short when it comes to triggering epiphanies leading to apocalypse and as the late Dr. Edinger warned "If a danger can be experienced psychologically, one can often be spared the concrete experience of it … These matters are relevant to our apocalyptic age. The 'coming of the Self' is imminent; and the process of collective 'individuation' is living itself out in human history. One way or another, the world is going to be made a single whole entity. But it will be unified either in mutual mass destruction or by means of mutual human consciousness."

For that reason, one of my heroes is mythologist Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) and his opus work that led to the PBS series The Power of Myth. He more than any scholar and storyteller in our day was able to unveil the symbol systems of religion and science in a clear, comprehensive, and convincing manner. He concluded that the new myth must be a global one if we are to grasp the truth that "We are the fruit of an intelligent earth."

Second, I am in awe of the analytical depth psychology concepts of Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) that he initially revealed in The Undiscovered Self. He coined and brought forth the notion of archetypes of the collective unconscious mind that must become conscious, if we are to save ourselves from destruction. He said that communism, for example, would collapse, and so would capitalism. He has been billed as the "first shaman" of the modern-era due to his self-described "creative illness" that plunged him into a "dark night of the soul" after splitting with Sigmund Freud, triggering a "communication with the spirit world." Jung also realized from his breakdown and likewise said in a letter dated April 2nd, 1955:

I have come to the conclusion that I had better risk my skin and do my worst or best to shake the unconsciousness of my contemporaries rather than allow my laxity to let things drift towards the impending world catastrophe.

Moreover, it was Jung that was able to formulate a satisfying paradigm-a model of reality-that could unify good and evil by understanding the purpose of God was to reconcile the evil doers-mankind-to himself. This is what the prophet Isaiah was able to do when he acknowledged the bipolar nature of the Creator: "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things." (Isaiah 45:7, KJV)

Isaiah showed extreme courage in face of the fact that we had to come to the same realization: Our Creator can unleash forces that can destroy all that He has created too. Again, it is for this reason that he spoke in Isaiah 45:6: "That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the LORD, and there is none else."

To my point, we are the worker bees of God, not the Queen Bee. It should therefore be recalled: She can sting repeatedly without dying!

I know this is a hard pill to swallow, that we are not masters of the universe, nor do we even have dominion over our small planet. Our climate crisis confirms that every single day by throwing its elements into our face. This really deflates and infuriates our ego; it makes us feel helpless and at-risk of losing control of our destiny as rightfully and powerfully detailed in the book The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis by Paul Levy, a psychotherapist in Portland, Oregon.

It must be pointed out that the motivation of Paul Levy writings is totally non-partisan: I doubt that he even has a "political bone in his body." He is a healer that had a profound near-deathlike experience decades ago and was hospitalized by his parents and physicians for pointing out the fact that "life is a dream that we are seeking to make lucid."

In a recent essay, he clarified "When we become lucid in a dream, we don't 'control' what happens in the dream from any sort of personal agency, but rather we change our relationship to the dream. Stabilizing our lucidity, we are able to fluidly dance and flow with the dream so as to co-create with it, instead of fighting, resisting, damning and cursing it. Aligning with the dream, we become open channels for a more refined 'order' to incarnate itself through us. We are truly instrumental instrumentalists of a greater symphonic orchestra thankfully conducted by someone other than our own ego."

And again it was Edinger that summed up the problem with many of our egotistic self-serving world leaders: "By ego tyranny, I mean the 'God-almightiness' of an ego that perceives no ultimate inner, psychic agency other than itself." No doubt, why is there not a Jungian analyst and clinical hypnotherapist on staff at the Pentagon if not White House to interpret the "dream symbols" of the leadership as they seek to manage the stress-levels of the global brain itself? I can only imagine-or maybe I can't yet-the deep-well of meaningful ideas that could be mined and employed to circumvent WW III. I can hear the words of Christ echo through my ego: "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." (Matthew 10:16)

Nonetheless, both Jesus and Edinger understood that our mission is a formidable one, worthy of our best efforts because "Humanity is now in the role of the 'son of God.'" In short, we must all become self-sacrifices to the Will of God; not my will but Thy Will Be Done on Earth as it is in Heaven must become our ONLY battle cry. You know, let go and Let God: Pray for Peace!

Third, I respect theoretical physicist Fritjof Capra, Ph.D. for identifying that "energy" in all its names and forms is what we are really seeking to understand today. His unification of Eastern and Western ideas focused on the flow of life force "organic energy" or "chi" in his classic The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (1975).

No one has captured better than Capra the need to marry metaphysics with physics in a meaningful way in order to bring peace to our planet. With the only notable exception, perhaps, Gary Zukav, author of a true masterpiece The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (1979).

That is, Campbell, Jung, Edinger, Levy, Capra, and Zukav understood what Jesus Christ really meant when he said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6) Jesus was speaking to the Tao, the "way of spirit" in all its manifestations, names, and forms, and this is what people must understand at the end-time, The Turning Point of civilization, because,

When the concept of the human spirit is understood in this sense, its mode of consciousness in which the individual feels connected to the cosmos as a whole, it becomes clear that ecological awareness is truly spiritual. Indeed the idea of the individual being linked to the cosmos is expressed in the Latin root of the word religion, religare (to bind strongly), as well as the Sanskrit yoga, which means union. (The Turning Point, Capra, 1982)

In other words, the single purpose of religion and science worldwide is to "collapse the waveform of cosmic consciousness" through the opening of our third eye. Interestingly enough, it was the physician Luke that stated the case, "The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness." (Luke 11:34, KJV)

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.-Matthew 10:34, KJV

This scripture above is one of the most arguable in the Holy Bible as to its meaning; it is clearly misunderstood by the majority of scholars in theology. Thus it is by default extremely useful to the overall mission of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity: To promote utter chaos within and between people and nations. Indeed, the preachers of all three major tenets that spew hell, fire, and brimstone from the pulpit are themselves some of the most valuable servants of God's master plan.

They are, perhaps, second only to the megalomaniac dictators, corrupt politicians and lawyers, the types of folks the clueless "talking heads" of the media love to interview on the nightly news and morning talk shows to trigger interpersonal conflicts ad nauseam. Indeed, most of these programs make us sick to our stomach, or worse, give us a pain where a pill won't reach, as my beloved late grandmother Mary Evelyn Decker (1888-1977) put it.

For without religion and politics, and the "salvation armies" they create to enforce their will, in concert with electronic mass communications technology that disseminates and perpetuates the silliness and sickness in society, we may have never known that a "symbolic" war of words could lead to a collapse of civilizations. That is, our belief systems and the icons we defend until death do us part-baseball, apple pie, mom, and Chevrolet-create the chaos that we see today as a teaching tool. What we are willing to live and die for provides the mirror image to our bipolar state-of-mind. It speaks to the level of consciousness that we are currently experiencing. I mean a CEO that gets ulcers upon reading the stock market report is a far cry from the tranquility displayed by the Dali Lama as he confronts China over Tibet.

But, surprisingly, this has always been the goal of the myths that became scriptures in the Western world and the self-negating koans-puzzles-in the Eastern world. These are thresholds made to be breached, rungs to be climbed on the ladder to enlightenment. In fact, modern quantum physics is also riddled with contradictions; everywhere we turn there are only uncertainty principles, approximations of a reality that is not fixed rather fluid!

The only thing constant is change, the wise ones claim; so whatever generates chaos is always in the service of new order. That then is clearly the Tao, the way, the truth, and the life of God.

In plain terms, crisis creates the opportunity for our growth to a higher, "deeper," or maybe even lower order of consciousness. It is how we are allowed to return to the source of creation, albeit bruised and brokenhearted oftentimes, once we learn our lessons.

Thus, our mission is a hero's journey, and should we accept it, calls us to hunt down and unmask the self-fulfilling doom and gloom prophecies, and slay them without mercy. However, to do so one must have the courage of a warrior, initially be able to tolerate the tug-of-war, the tension innate within the polarized opposites of creation and the fears that they create within us. In particular, we must cultivate stillness in the face of the most formidable foe known to mankind: suicidal death by nuclear holocaust.

Be sure, WW III is an extreme sport!

For that reason the shaman employs the "trickster coyote," whose greatest joy is to spread strife, polarize every situation in life until the "warring organs of the left-right brain(s)" collapse upon itself claimed mythologist Joseph Campbell.

How is this achieved? The Taoist sages say that it is by entering into the silence in one's Self, or metaphorically "clapping with one hand" until we surrender our ego to the presence that is greater than ourselves.

In other words, we must exhaust our intellect to intuitively sense the intention of life without ever being able to "figure it out." As Albert Einstein realized, one cannot solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it.

Bluntly, we get in the way of Our Great Self when we treat reality totally objectively rather than subjectively. Life is the experience of God, the good, the bad, and the ugly. The observer is the observed.

Optimally, we are called to be the pivot point around which the polarized world revolves without participating in its madness. This is a wasteland. It is filled-to-the-brim with the walking dead.

Our mission is to become centered in order to serve the creation by reconnecting to the Creator, zero-point field of life. Speaking to this realization, life scientist John James, Ph.D. confirms, "The Field is the superstratum of all creation, the all-pervasive, all-inclusive essence from which all is created and within which all exists. It is as close to the meaning of God as we get," in The Great Field.

The Chinese call The Great Field the Tao and the force chi (pronounced chee). To manage this field of force they created a moving meditation, or an "internal" martial art known as T'ai Chi to mirror life's ups and downs, manage the ebb and flow of Tao. Most styles of this exercise trace their development to one of the five traditional schools: Chen, Yang, Wu/Hao, Wu, and Sun. The deeper meanings of T'ai Chi are a subject of much argument and speculation. However, the oldest documented tradition is that of the Chen family circa 1820s.

Here is the point, by whatever name or form, neutralizing the fundamental power that we give our thoughts and feelings is what we seek to achieve now. Everything is connected within The Field. Even the idea of a particle separate from a wave is the illusion that quantum physics has exposed for what it is-a lie. "Consequently, wave formation is composed of two perpendicular energetic swirls or loops: one is a largely invisible electric loop that seems to have connections with dark matter, and the other is a magnetic loop that is visible and palpable," adds James.

Albert Einstein struggled to understand electricity his entire adult life-and failed, he often proclaimed. What he meant was he, and every scientist before him, such as Michael Faraday (1791-1867), an early contributor to the principles of magnetism, could observe the effect but not the cause and effect relationship between these two forces; dark and light energy. They could not grasp why, for example, an electric charge is put into motion in the presence of a magnetic field.

Why?

Because The Field is a static magnetic field of cosmic consciousness containing infinite electrical charge potential. The miniscule portion of The Field that we polarize with our thoughts and feelings and thereby manifest as our world is what we call our consciousness! So in truth The Field does not move in time and space in a linear fashion, it merely vibrates, breathes in and out endlessly multi-dimensionally through beings like us. I think of this concept as balloons within balloons expanding and contracting, collapsing and then inflating each other ad infinitum. With each breath of The Field, a bit of new knowledge is collected akin to my metaphor of a worker bee returning nectar to the hive.

Further, chi, life force energy, is magnetic and so to conserve its life-promoting essence we must find the center, the neutral or null zone, in us between our own negative thoughts and feelings. That is, excessive thinking and feeling versus being one with The Field bleeds-off, drains our cellular batteries! German biophysicist Fritz Albert Popp says it best, "We know today that man is essentially a being of light."

If so, why are we so dimly lit?

It is because we gave our energy away! Remember that was the job of the forked-tongue serpent in the Garden of Eden: to deceive, to trick, to prevent us from gaining the knowledge of our light body. Not surprisingly, therefore, in the apocryphal Books of Adam and Eve, it says our first parents positively "glowed with visible light."

That is, our minds became engaged in a tug-of-war between "polar opposite opinions" by splitting us apart psychophysically into two beings of equal albeit lower power-male, female.

Everywhere we look we see the parables in myth speak to separation from The Field as the problem as conveyed by, again, psychotherapist John James: "When a person has an emotional block the client will feel trapped between two opposing yet unequal forces that are acting simultaneously inside him. Exactly as Tejman describes for energetic matter, these forces are like 'two loops that are in perpetual competition.'"

Once more we see our world family is torn asunder by our unbridled anger, fear, guilt, greed, and lust; emotional "ego" drama that turns into trauma-and interpersonal conflicts leading to international warfare among competing ideas: communism and capitalism, for example.

How tragic!

For as James points out "By implication there is a state of rest, a still point between the loops. This crucial 'neutral' state is often left out in discussion as it is often such a still point that it seems to be no more than an infinitely small moment on the cusp of movement and the next."

This, however, is the truth, the pearl of great price: We are androgynous beings, both male and female simultaneously, and whatever sexual differences we have are illusions as well. Albeit presently we do act as if two-faced, heterosexual and homosexual, because of the bifurcation of the two-stranded helix coil of DNA.

Yet once again at the End-Time when all cycles of nature converge into The Field, we're tasked to "make the two one again" at every level of creation.

Here is the solution straight from the Gospel of Thomas (a word in Greek that means "twin"): "Jesus said to them, 'When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom].'"

That is pure Taoism!

Beyond that revelation, the bigger idea is that if a critical mass of peacemakers can come together-all puns intended-in the world population in era-2012 then this will trigger a wordless, telepathic, global "wholebrain" society. This will allow open, honest as well as instantaneous communication with each other and with other beings within the cosmos-at-large.

In fact, the language of science and religion in the future will imitate art as we witness the symbolism on the murals in Egyptian and Mayan pyramids for it is simply true that "a picture is worth a thousand words"-if you are hard-wired to The Field.

John Van Eenwyk, Ph.D., clinical supervisor at the Medical School of the University of Washington, wrote an extremely insightful book, Archetypes & Strange Attractors: The Chaotic World of Symbols. The theme is that archetypes, as Carl Jung envisioned them a hundred years ago, were akin to instincts. They were alive, formed and informed the building blocks of consciousness but remained unconscious until a person was self-realized or as Jung called it-individuated: They had restored their memory of God incarnating within them,

More so, archetypes of the collective unconscious are maps with signposts that correspond between the interior of our psyche and our exterior experiences in the world. The connecting link of coincidences, called synchronicities, communicated to us consciously through meaningful incidents in our day-to-day routines that seem mystical, even magical. It was as if our life plan is being read aloud by God to us as an open book, at least for a split-second in space-time!

Again, a breakthrough in creativity, or novelty, can also initiate a breakdown in one's ego orientation to reality that is akin to splitting-the-atom apart although, thankfully, on an extremely microscopic scale, perhaps at the so-called Planck constant (h= 6.626068 × 10-34 m2 kg/s). This may be the ultimate realization of the ancient axiom "as above, so below, as within so without."

Whatever the case, Dr. Edinger said that synchronicities served a higher-purpose than ego gratification for "It is my hypothesis that, if one reaches a sufficient consciousness of wholeness during the ego's lifetime, then a permanent deposit of that consciousness will be left in the archetypal psyche-a result symbolized by the notion of being 'named in the Book of Life.'"

In summary, it is my thesis that archetypes of apocalypse, if understood and obeyed, lead to archetypes of abundance-not self-destruction. We must become cosmically conscious of the collective unconscious psychic powers manifesting through us and rewrite our WW III script to include a happy ending. The world is a stage and we are its actors. But we have to defuse these "signs of the times" that we have created unconsciously and that is no easy task, my friend. Hence, the New York City author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl and Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, Daniel Pinchbeck, has stated our situation very well in my opinion:

You are, right now, living at the time of revelation, Apocalypse, and the fulfillment of prophecy. Let there be no doubt. You stand at the edge of the Abyss. What are those shadows that crowd around you? They are the aspects of your own psyche, projected into material form. The word "Apocalypse" means "uncovering"-and in these last clock ticks of this world age, all must be revealed, uncovered, so that all can be known.

You have just a few years yet remaining to prepare the vehicle for your higher self. Use them preciously. For those who have gained knowledge of the nature of time, a few years-even a few days, a minute-can be an eternity. For those sleepwalking through reality, time exists only to be wasted-as they too will be wasted, in their turn.

"Reality," as you currently experience it, is something like a waking dream. It is a projection, or let us say an interface, disguising deeper and more intensified levels of being and knowing. For those who are ready and willing, the doors to those other levels now stand open.

Dr. John Jay Harper is a clinical hypnotherapist, futurist, medical research scientist, public-speaker, and writer. He is a retired Employee Assistance Program (EAP) specialist with the U.S. Navy. He also served as an electronics and software engineer in avionics, missilery, and nuclear submarines for twenty years with the Department of Defense. He is a veteran of the U.S. Army and married to Connie since 1969; they have 3 adult children, 8 grandchildren, and live in Spokane, Washington. Today he is Executive Director of the non-profit corporation, American Delphi Academy, dedicated to collecting and sharing ideas that promote body-mind-spirit wellness worldwide. He is the author of Tranceformers: Shamans of the 21st Century, Reality Press, California.

"Am I a man dreaming I'm a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I'm a man?" Chuang Tzu, a disciple of Lao Tzu