Mystical Experience, Cultural Complexes, and the Politics of Division
Cosmic consciousness. What is it? A sense of the unity of all being. An experience of ecstatic peace. An awareness of divine presence.
When it fills you, your attitudes change. Unity feels deeply real. Division feels superficial. Hate seems ludicrous. Because there is no “us” and no “them,” there’s nothing to gain by demonizing “them.”
This became clear to me some years ago, on an airplane of all places. I was on a flight home from New York City, after attending a weekend seminar on cultural complexes.
What is a Cultural Complex?
A “complex,” in Jungian psychology, is a tangle of feelings, memories, images, and behaviours. So much can be wrapped in it—personal hurts, intergenerational traumas, fears, and more. Often, our complexes are too powerful for us control. When a complex is triggered, we act out. Afterwards, we say, “I don’t know what happened. That wasn’t me. I wasn’t myself.”
Cultural complexes work the same way. But they don’t always emerge from our personal experience. Rather, we take on our group’s history, memory, or trauma. And when we are triggered, we explode with a (sometimes stereotypical) chain of emotions and behaviours.
Visiting the 9/11 Memorial and Museum
As part of the seminar, our teacher wanted us to explore an American cultural complex. So, we visited the 9/11 memorial at the World Trade Center. But I did not see what I expected. There were no traces of militarism, conspiracy theory, or U.S. patriotism. Instead, the exhibits focused on local and personal impacts. Tour guides shared stories about their own experiences on September 11, 2001.
That evening, I visited my brother. He was a 9/11 first responder. I told him about our class field trip. About my impression of the memorial, how hard the designers worked to foreground grief, not politics. And for the first time, he spoke openly to me about the chaos he saw that day at Ground Zero. Dead bodies, injured people, debris of all kinds. Personnel arrived before their orders did. So, they improvised, following their urgent duty to care. They attended to victims from every religion, race, and ethnicity.
My brother and I talked late into the night, and I was exhausted.
Cosmic Consciousness
The next day, on the flight home to Vancouver, Canada, I had a mystical experience.
As I took my seat on the airplane, the man next to me put on giant headphones. He wanted to be alone and that had nothing to do with me. Still, it bothered me. Despite the walls he put up, we were not actually separate. His thoughts, feelings, and actions affected me.
And I saw:
His psyche is inside him, and also outside of him.
Consciousness is both inside and outside each of us.
To imagine my consciousness centered in my body, as I usually do, is an illusion.
The source of experience lies beyond my body, brain, or mind.
What I am, what we are, is not bounded by our bodies.
Of course there is life after death, because the source of life does not die.
My old view of an “I” centered within me and generated by my brain is a false product of unclear thinking.
Just as gossip makes it hard to see people truly, so the conventions of language and dogmas of science make it hard to see myself truly.
To see clearly, I have to lift veils of opinion over and over again.
The vision lasted for five hours. During this time, I was not at all “out of it.” I sat in my seat, typed a report on my laptop, entertained someone’s bored baby, walked through the airport, and endured the chaotic crush at baggage claim. But I did it all with a beatific smile on my face.
Cultural Complexes: A Political Tool
Gradually, I floated down into everyday consciousness. And I reflected on my experience. Yes, it was a gift of divine grace. But it was also a psychological teaching—about observing, questioning, and loosing attachments. About the way complexes work. Emotions, ideas, memories create an imaginary self. Then they trap that self in a cycle of repetitive behaviours.
After the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11, shrewd politicians played on (preyed on?) an American cultural complex. With economic inequality growing, many Americans worried deeply about their place in a shifting landscape of class and race. Some politicians helped grow that inequality; others had little power or will to fix it. So, few politicians addressed Americans’ economic anxieties. Instead, they deflected blame. They actively stoked fears of outsiders undermining the American way of life.
In speeches after 9/11, they spoke of unity and calm. But, in practice, their “War on Terror” encouraged Islamophobia. Within days, American troops flew to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. Over the next few weeks, the FBI detained 762 random Arabs and Muslims. (All were eventually cleared of any terrorism-related charges.) Americans got the message, associating fear and anger with the new enemy. During the next year, hate crimes against Muslims increased by 1600%. Hundreds of Americans took it upon themselves to assault Muslims, threaten them, vandalize their property.
You can connect the dots. As it was in 2001, so it is today. Only more so, more blatantly so. Political speeches—too many—don’t call for unity any more. Instead, they stoke resentment. Vilify scapegoats. Incite violence. Tell stories about monstrous “others” who deserve to be blamed and punished. And just enough people get tangled in this web to give cover and support to the deflection.
Cosmic Lessons of Vigilance
The man with the headphones chose to shrink his attention. But most people don’t. They just can’t see themselves clearly. They haven’t a clue how much of their psyche lies outside them, in the hands of propagandists. They don’t understand how ephemeral their identity can be, a swirl of emotions and images. Nor can they see past the veils of ever-changing emotionally charged opinions.
So they don’t know: there is no “I,” no “us,” no “them.”
Oops—did I slip into defining a “they”? As if I’m not susceptible to these confusions? That’s a mistake!
In fact, I need to remember the most precious insight of all: to see clearly, I have to lift veils of opinion over and over again.
The seminar was led by Dr. Jennifer Selig.
