Being an artist means getting away with it.

Carl Jung was an artist who got away with being a prophet.

In October of 1913, Jung started having a recurring apocalyptic dream.

I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision lasted about an hour…. Two weeks passed; then the vision recurred, under the same conditions, even more vividly than before, and the blood was more emphasized.

An inner voice spoke.

“Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it.”

When Jung’s apocalyptic visions started, his first thought was that he was falling into a psychosis.

However, a few months later, in 1914, the first World War began.

This cracked something in Jung.

He had to contend with the fact his visions seemed to foretell the future, but also that this dream came to him.

This confrontation led to Jung committing to a kind of personal ritual. For the next 16 years, he worked on a private project where he painted his visions and recorded the voices he heard. He developed techniques to get into altered states so he could re-enter visions and confront the voices. This private practice bore the fruit history calls The Red Book.

The Red Book was never shown to the public during his life. His will stated it could be published 50 years after his death. However, Jung credits all his mainstream psychological success to The Red Book — that every useful idea he produced came from his attempts to translate the symbolic content in that book into modern psychological language.

Hopefully you’re familiar with his view on dreams;
-that they are intentional symbolic messages from an ancient intelligence.
-that the language of dreams is symbol.
-that dreams attempt to aid our evolution, reveal our blindspots, and, at times,
-reveal the future.

I wanna talk about this ‘revealing the future’ part of dreams.

I had a small dream recently that had this final element.

It’s Monday morning, 2 minutes before my cat wakes me up. I’m in REM sleep and a dream finds me.
A man stands before me reporting the status of the city.

I feel the city.

It feels real like New York but mythic like Gotham.
He treats me like a soldier treats a general or king. Not deferent; focused.
We realize we are standing on the open roof of a skyscraper. I can see the city now. Almost like a game, the city displays itself to me as a map.

He tells me some blocks of the city are being demolished and the land will be used to create something that feels like a regenerative alchemical farm process that will digest the city's waste.

I feel pleasantly surprised, curious, and interested.

And like most of us, I didn’t try hard enough to record this dream when I awoke.

I assumed I’d remember it (that voice is always a lie lol).

I forgot this dream.

But, thankfully, I needed to go to the bank that day.

I work from home and have a gym in my garage, so I sometimes go weeks without driving. Today was the first day I drove into downtown Austin in a few weeks. As I get onto South Congress, I’m surprised by the massive abandoned parking lot I’ve driven by 900 times has been completely demolished, and the lot is now a field of rich, dug up dirt.

The moment I see this, my dream comes rushing back.

I laughed deeply, bathed in awe.

This is a mild example of what Jung would call a prognostic dream. If you aren’t a student of dreams, you can wave this anecdote off by calling it coincidence. That’s blessed. Enjoy that worldview.

However, Jung didn’t believe in coincidence.

Jung was careful during his lifetime to never explicitly expand on this prophecy function of the psyche.

But I’m not as professional as Jung.

I’m willing to make a mess, so we’re going to get explicit about it.

Let’s talk about where prophetic dreams come from.

Meet ZOD

We’re going to have to learn a map if we’re going to talk about this. So get something to take notes with.

Psyche is the word Jung used to describe the ‘field’ in which all our psychological experience unfolds.

Think of psyche as a circle. The circle is the whole you.

⭕ ← your psyche

Now draw a line through the middle of the circle. This line is conscious awareness. Above it marks all psychological content that can be accessed by consciousness. Everything below the line, unconscious material.

🚫 ← conscious / unconscious

The conscious half has a ‘leader.’ We call it the ego.

👑 ← your ego

Our ego is our personality or identity.

The unconscious half has a leader too. Jung called this leader the Self. For ease, think of it as your Soul.

🏵️ ← your soul

So a crude map of our personal psyche could be the following:

However, the scale isn’t right.

You see, the magnitude of Jung’s Self, compared to the Ego, is the kind of scale that is the stuff of Lovecraftian dreams and nightmares.

Here is Jung attempting to describe this underworld leader (it’s worth reading out loud):

“If it were possible to personify the unconscious, we might think of it as a collective human being combining the characteristics of both sexes, transcending youth and age, birth and death, and, from having at its command a human experience of one or two million years, practically immortal.

If such a being existed, it would be exalted above all temporal change; the present would mean neither more nor less to it than any year in the hundredth millennium before Christ; it would be a dreamer of age-old dreams and, owing to its limitless experience, an incomparable prognosticator.

It would have lived countless times over again; the life of the individual, the family, the tribe, and the nation, and it would possess a living sense of the rhythm of growth, flowering, and decay…

Unfortunately — or rather let us say, fortunately — this being dreams…”

Welcome to your Soul.

This is the intelligence inside us that sends us dreams.

The Soul dwarfs the Ego in its knowledge, power, and scope.

But let’s try to feel some vertigo — because this god-like intelligence inside us, that dwarfs our ego, is itself dwarfed by what Jung called the collective unconscious.

Check this out: (to get a sense for the kind of scale we’re talking about here).

Ego is like the Earth.
Your Soul is the Sun.
The Collective Unconscious is The Helix Nebula.

Humanity has a psyche, and the collective unconscious is to it what our personal unconscious is to us.

The astute reader will notice that this means there must be an organizing intelligence to the collective unconscious, like The Soul in each of our unconscious minds.

That humanity must have a soul.

Good job dear reader. This is what Jung’s most controversial idea implies.

Humanity has an ego, and it has a soul.

Humanity’s ego can get sick, and Humanity’s soul can send the ego dreams.

Humanity’s ego appears to still be in infancy.

Humanity doesn’t yet have a coherent identity. The ‘world powers’ can be seen as different ‘parts’ in the toddler that are trying to figure out how to integrate.

Humanity’s soul, well, I don’t know what it is.

But I know it dreams.

If you’ll grant me the kindness, from here on I will refer to the collective psyche as ZOD (Zeitgeist god). It’s easier to spell, and will hopefully be just odd enough to shake you from the delusion that you understand it (I am included in not understanding it).

ZOD has a conscious mind and an unconscious mind.

ZOD's ego struggles, and ZOD's soul sends dreams.

What we call prophecy are ZOD dreams.

Those who catch ZOD dreams, Jung called visionary artists.

The task of the visionary artist is to turn the ZOD dream into art that gets into the culture's overmind.

Visionary artists are to ZOD what good jungian therapists are to patients -- dream doulas.

Jung’s vision of Europe covered in blood was a premonition that came from the collective psyche — from ZOD.

His response was The Red Book.

Jung's visionary art is still rippling through the Zeitgeist.

And to understand our current situation, we're going to track ZOD's dreams.

Because ZOD has been dreaming about our current existential crisis for the last 25 years.

Visionary artists practice catching ZOD dreams.
Catch enough ZOD dreams, and eventually you’ll catch a prophecy.
However, if you wanna get away with it, let history decide.
Just keep catching dreams and making art you fuck with.
Visionary Artists are prophets who get away with it.

Why are we talking about all of this?

Because I told you in part 1 of this series that the brutal fact of our time is that our culture is in a death spiral, and the only way to meaningfully help will come from those willing to give us new stories.

The best place to gather the raw material for new stories is from ZOD dreams.

It is to learn how to be a visionary artist.

And in order to tell potent new stories, we’ve got to understand the nature of the nightmare that currently haunts ZOD.

The best place to go to understand ZOD’s nightmare is to look where the visionary art was exploding in the 80s and 90s.

The visionary artists who best caught ZOD’s dreams and got away with it were apprenticing in a new, young, and audacious medium: Anime.

Anime: ZOD’s Newest Dream Machine

My first encounter came when my mom threatened Time Warner Cable.

The cable bill was just too damn high so she called to cancel. The agent that convinced her to stay did so by promising a few premium channels for free.

One of those channels happened to exclusively show Japanese anime.

As a child of the mono-cropped americana 90s, getting a new premium cable channel was a bigger deal than Gen Zers can possibly imagine. An atomic bomb of ink, pixels, color, and passion ignited in my psyche.

In a matter of weeks, I saw violence, sexuality, death, and trauma at a volume and in a vividness that ended my interest in public television.

Sadly, most people I know don’t have a taste for this richer side of anime. If they have seen any anime at all, it ends at Simpsons, Family Guy, and maybe Rick and Morty.

There’s another group who has seen DragonballZ, Naurto, One Piece and maybe some Studio Ghibli.

But then there are my kin. People who have seen Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Evangelion, Berserker, and Ninja Scrolls.

This last tier of anime is a totally different experience.

As a child, what gripped me about this art form was the intensity of the emotion the creators were able to convey. Because they weren’t restrained by physics; the power, violence, and scale these shows showed was a category of one.

Two decades before CGI became cost-effective for use in blockbuster movies, Anime stood alone as the artistic medium story-tellers with visionary inclinations went to play (it's a story for another time, but I can make the case that Japanese Anime was the artistic art-form most alive with visionary art in the 80s and 90s -- for now, humor me).

Anime was the coming-of-age rebel in the storytelling genre (the god genre).

This is the genre to look for ZOD’s dreams.

The emergence started in 1988 with the movie Akira.

Akria was a cultural phenomenon.

It set a new standard in anime visuals (number of color cells per frame). It explored mature themes with violent, unflinching lucidity, and it is regarded as the anime that punctured the Western psyche, creating a hunger in the youth for more dark animated stories.

Here is a brief description:

In 1988 the Japanese government drops an atomic bomb on Tokyo after ESP experiments on children go awry. In 2019, 31 years after the nuking of the city, Kaneda, a bike gang leader, tries to save his friend Tetsuo from a secret government project. He battles anti-government activists, greedy politicians, irresponsible scientists and a powerful military leader until Tetsuo's supernatural powers suddenly manifest. A final battle is fought in Tokyo Olympiad exposing the experiment's secrets.

Here is a trailer.

Here is a video on it’s impact with 4.3 million views.

Akira is set in a ‘neo-tokyo.’

There is a rising of telepathy and similar parapsychological abilities.

There is a sense of explosive individual power that could trigger an apocalypse.

The success of Akira created the opening for the next film to lodge itself deep in the Western Psyche.

The next film was Ghost in the Shell.

I saw this film when I was 8 or 9, maybe 10. It seized something in me and in a way, has never let me go.

I’ve listened to the soundtrack throughout my life. I return to the film ever few years.

The theme of the film: what happens when the machine wakes up?

In a Jungian way, Akira created the imaginal city that Ghost in the Shell grew out of.

Neo-Tokyo.

Ghost in the Shell came out in 1995. Almost no westerner in 1995 was anticipating the AI singularity we are facing now.

This movie was preceded The Matrix, and if you have seen Ghost in the Shell, you can see how significantly it influenced The Matrix.

Here is a trailer.

Here is a great analysis with 617k views

This story builds on Akira.

What happens when machines wake up?

What happens when traumatized humans, through technology, acquire power that can threaten entire cities, nations, and countries?

Well, the third story in our animated triumvirate accepted the baton and finished the race.

It’s name was Neon Genesis Evangelion.

I’m going to show my hand.

I believe these three films make up a prophetic ZOD dream. I believe the anime of the 80s and 90s had the just right conditions for producing uniquely concentrated visionary art. I believe visionary art comes from ZOD, the collective consciousness of humanity, and that the calling of the artist is to become fit enough to doula ZOD’s dreams into culture. I believe ZOD dreams are were the most powerful stories come from.

And I believe these three films were heralding our current existential crisis.

The image to contemplate is the Evangelion.

The Evangelion is a massive robot infused with a soul.

Each Evangelion can only be piloted by a teenager who’s soul can synchronize with the soul of the machine.

The Evangelion is the only tool humanity has that is powerful enough to protect itself from ‘The Angels’ — huge planetary threatening entities that attack the planet.

For me, this symbol represents the brutal fact of our time.

If you want to be an adult in 2025, you first have to accept that we are in a kind of war.

The war isn't for land or capital. The war is for ZOD.

The current gods of our time, the stories that make up ZOD's ego, are in a schizophrenic conflict with each other. As our technological power grows, their conflicts increase increase the chances we will make a cataclysmic mistake.

As I see it, we all have 4 options:

Repression
Resistance
Revolution
Renaissance

Regardless of which you choose, and we'll explore each of them in this series, the creature of our time to understand is symbolically represented by what Neon Genesis Evangelion calls Evas.

An Eva is an Egregore you can pilot.

The machine aspect of your Eva is it's legal structure.

The most powerful machine for housing an egregore in 2025 is the corporation.

The soul in the machine is your humanity, your dharma, your goodness.

The task of the adult in 2025 is to learn how to pilot their Evangelion.

This is your vehicle that can grow to a size large enough to enter the arena of the god fight.

It is the vehicle powerful enough to change culture.

And the truth is, most of you are like the protagonist in Neon Genesis Evangelion.

You hate your culture.
You don't want to pilot your Eva.
You'd rather run away.
You'd rather someone else do what only you can do.

This was me for a long time.

My primary intention with this series is to entice the parts still scattered in my personal psyche that don't want to accept the brutal facts of our time.

My hope is that by trying to entice my scattered parts, I may inspire a few of you to step into the game too.

Song on Repeat:

Can't Make It

Quotes I'm Enjoying:

"I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries -- the realists of a larger reality."
-Ursula K. Le Guin

"We all must do what Christ did. We must make our experiment. We must make our mistakes. We must live out our own version of life. And there will be error. If you avoid error you do not live."
-Carl Jung

"I'm not trying to repeat the sagas. I make my own stories and I'm very obsessed with not being nostalgic, because I think 90% of the world is too nostalgic. They don't have the courage to face the present and make stories that are relevant today, about life today...I want people do more of that."
-Bjork

My Evangelion:

The Dharma Artist Collective

Erick Godsey

Feasting Friday