It is fascinating to note that the incidence of human greatness increases during one or another of the cusps of social change–during a renaissance, for example, when the culture is being so newly reimagined that it necessitates a rebirth of the self. However, the reverse is also true. A renaissance, with its accompanying rise of images and archetypal symbols, happens because the human soul has been breached, the psyche unlocked, and a flood of new questions released as to who we are and what we contain.

The European Renaissance was such a golden time when internal and external realities flowed together. In the midst of vast social and religious upheavals, a miracle occured. Ideas and images were excavated from their Greek, Roman, and Hebraic origins, forgotten texts were translated, esoteric attitudes became more widely available. A veritable archaeology of the Western world’s past thoughts and dreams was unearthed, and the horizon of what it meant to be human was greatly extended. Thus Shakespeare’s lines of pure Renaissance exaltation:

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!

But something else was happening too. The human psyche itself was growing, and the imaginal worlds of inner space were budding and flowering into the external world in a phenomenal growth of science, art, music, literature, and statecraft. The internal world knew the cosmos for its own, and the external world became “psyche-tized.”
I believe we are in a similar period of cultural and personal expansion today. We are experiencing not just the revival of ancient images, but also the harvest of all the world’s cultures, belief systems, ways of knowing, seeing, doing, being.

For some, the richness and variety of world culture is just the press of a button or the touch of a computer key away. What with fibre optics, interactive television, global IT networks, and other information superhighways, (one could almost say metahighways) no one need be ignorant of anyone or anything again. This world network portends a renaissance of renaissances. In many ways, it has already begun. Coextensive with this development is the virtual breakdown all over the globe of traditional ways of being, bringing with it the breaching of the soul and the rise of content from the inner world that up to now has largely been kept hidden. I think of a conversation I had in Taiwan with a school teacher who had been brought up in a traditional Chinese family. “I am aware every day of so many new desires, many many new ideas, many new ways of learning,” he told me. “I feel like I have inside me a sleeping dragon who has just woken up. I want to go flying everywhere and see what’s what. And somehow I know that I must find a way to do it. Otherwise the dragon will devour me.”

All over the world psyche is now emerging, larger than it was. What had been contained in the “unconscious” over hundreds and thousands of years is up and about and preparing to go to work. This fact is the news that rarely makes the News, and it will have consequences greater than anything we might imagine. The negative consequences of this revivification of hidden content are there to be seen on the media–violence, oppression, the explosion of old fears and hatreds in countries that for decades had been contained under the lid of totalitarian regimes, the frequency of alcohol and chemical addictions, especially among those who feel that they have extra life to kill.

“Thank God, our time is now,” poet Christopher Fry says, “when wrong comes up to meet us everywhere. Never to leave us, till we take the longest stride of soul men ever took.” This stride of soul must carry us through every shadow towards an open possibility, in a time when everything is quite literally up for grabs. We can do no less. The psyche requires its greatness, as do the times.

Tags: Christopher Fry, European Renaissance, human psyche, Jean Houston, renaissance, social change

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