Sir Laurens van der Post (photo: Robert Hinshaw)

OUR MOTHER WHICH ART IN EARTH

Address by and Extract from a Film Interview with Sir Laurens van der Post

(Originally published in Quadrant: The Journal of Contemporary Jungian Thought. Volume 23, Number 2, 1990, pp. 9-19)

Sir Laurens van der Post met with Robert Hinshaw and Peter Ammann on December 16, 1989, in his Chelsea home in London, England, to share his thoughts and feelings about how consciousness must re-establish a living relationship with the depths of the unconscious if we are to truly " conserve " the wholeness of ourselves and of the earth we live on.

Laurens van der Post: When I was a boy, I was already passionately interested in conservation. When I was age six, I was horrified to hear that there were only nine white rhinos alive in the world. So what I have to say begins with the rhinoceros, begins with an animal that goes back to prehistoric times-the nearest flesh-and-blood creation that we have in the world today of which the unicorn was a symbol, this animal that is so much involved in the imagery of our search for individuation- and wholeness. What I felt then as an apprehension about the white rhino has grown into a certainty that unless we succeed in arresting the assault and violation of the natural world, we ourselves will not survive.

The battle of conservation on earth is an indelible part of all Jung's ideas and comes through in all his work. His concern is with the "nature" within us as it is very closely linked to the nature outside of us, in the world. It seems to me that the battle started, or the threat started, long, long before the rhino was threatened, perhaps long before the rhino existed, long before I was born. But what amazes me today is that in the Europe where I live, in the Britain where I live, people have this fantastic concern for the destruction of the forests of the Amazon, the great rain forests of Brazil. Quite rightly, they feel outraged and angry about it, but they seem to think there’s a special kind of villainous, thoughtless, uncaring society in Brazil that is perpetrating this destructive business we all deplore. They don't seem to ask themselves, Where did it start? They seem to think it all started in Brazil, as I thought it all started in Zululand, in Africa, with the threat to the white rhino.

It seems to me that the most important thing we have to grasp is how old this battle is. For example: Where did the Sahara come from? We know that the Sahara was the granary of Rome. All the wheat came from there. What happened? What was a great extension of the Nile delta has disappeared; the waters have receded. The forests and the savannas are gone. The animals are gone and there is this great desert left. The same with the Syrian and the great Assyrian deserts right through Asia to the Gobi desert. Where did all that come from? All manmade in the past behind us. The Mediterranean today, the Europe that I know, is for me, "; really, when I think of what it was in classical times, a scorched earth. Where have all the European animals gone? The last bear in Switzerland was shot at the beginning of this century. There are perhaps a few bears left in the Pyrenees. Where are the wolves? Where are the mammals? They've all gone. This devastation, this spoliation of nature has gone on for centuries, and unless we realize how old, how stubborn, how devastating is this thing in us that exploits nature this way, we will not tackle the problem properly.

And where does this strange urge to go on destroying come from? I can go back in my own mind and say that when I ultimately come to where the record vanishes, to where my vision of the world vanishes, there is a myth. There is a Greek myth that says to us very clearly where it began. It began with the Promethean gift of fire. When Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to human beings, the trouble began. What Prometheus did was, in a way, Christ-like-he gave divine power into the hands of flesh and blood. He gave us fire. And this fire, of course, was consciousness. He made us conscious.

White rhino grazing in the safe environment of the rhino sanctuary on Solio Ranch in Central Kenya (photo: Reuters/ Bettmann)

The gods suddenly allowed a particular animal species on earth to become conscious. And in the history of life on earth, of course, consciousness is a young phenomenon. It's young, it's new, and it's vulnerable. And it's conferred on us great power over what is unconscious. But this great power of consciousness has gradually corrupted us. Our spoliation of the earth is part of the spirit of the corruption of consciousness itself, unless it's used in keeping with the greater value. In other words, the Promethean gift is the gift of divine power, and in order to use it, , we ourselves must become divine and take over a sense of responsibility for creation. And the whole trouble comes down, in a simple sentence, to the fact that we have never developed sufficient sense of responsibility to what we know and toward the power that we have over nature and over ourselves.

So here for me is the conclusion that we're not going to win this battle for creation. unless we win the battle for greater awareness. In this task that Jung called individuation, we must learn that we are in an awesome partnership with what we call God. Unless partnership is also restored with this great Mother Earth, so that what the earth gives to us in such great abundance and with such willingness, unless we accept that love and use it with love we are doomed. Because the time is going to come when the earth itself will turn bitter, when nature will turn bitter, as it's increasingly turned bitter, when the air we breathe will turn bitter and no longer give life, when everything on earth will turn against us and we'll vanish.

Our Mother Which Art in Earth

But I do believe that if the hubris, which is an expression of the abuse of power, this hubris of power, this hubris of consciousness that we suffer from, if it includes also the Eros element, which transcends consciousness-the Eros that has in its keeping all the emotions and the energies of metamorphosis-it will transform matter in such a way, at such a pace, that something not there before will enter in and a new act of creation will happen. We need to pull our conscious power together with the spirit of metamorphosis, the Eros, if we are to become whole again. Otherwise we are not going to win the battle for conservation.

Any other course is going to be concerned with symptoms-and not the problem proper. So I would suggest to you to think about the gift of fire, the process of divine power being handed over to human beings so that the whole calling of people on earth was altered. If we have a meaning, if we have a right to continue to exist, it's only in so far as we respond to the charge: as keepers of the trust of creation and the continuing task of creation. Just as the gods, or what we call God, sought to become human, humans must seek to become more worthy of what is divine. These are joined, and in only that way can we win the battle.

For me, personally, the Promethean myth is the greatest of the classical myths. It's a great point of departure not only in human life on earth, but in what one feels is the whole pattern of creation in the universe. It’s the sense that what is godlike suddenly became part of humanity. But more than that-in making us conscious, a lopsidedness occurred, which the unconscious abhors. You can't talk about consciousness unless you think of the unconscious, because consciousness is a product of the unconscious. So there is this extraordinary process that even the gods themselves couldn't visualize-this yearning, this longing of the unconscious to become totally aware. That's why the Eros aspect of the myth is so frightfully important-the mystery of love that one must accept in silence: the idea that the gods suffer with us for our awareness.

It is this mystery of love that motivated Prometheus to sacrifice himself; he was a Christ-like figure. He is the first, one of the first clear announcements of the pattern of the Christ in the human spirit. We may not think of him as the Christian Church would, but, in essence, he is of a Christ-like pattern, and he's punished very severely by the gods. He becomes a suffering god. He's bound to a cliff in the Caucasus where an eagle comes and feeds on his liver by day. And he suffers agonies, and then the liver is healed by night. And the process continues by day. It's healed in sleep; it's healed in the world of dreams. But then the next day he has to give of himself again to the eagle, which is a great bird of awareness. The eagle represents the inspired awareness, inspired consciousness that comes winging out of the blue. He has to feed this eagle that ravages him day after day out of his own suffering. There is this message: There is a god suffering with us in our suffering. It gives a meaning to suffering on earth, which nothing else does, so it is a very important myth because it's as much of a crossroad for what we call God as it is for us and it puts both humanity and God really firmly on the same path.

The battle for the earth without is a battle for the soul, for the Self within. The Self also demands. In one of my stories I have an old hunter at the end of his life who encounters a thunderstorm, and he smells this wonderful rain coming toward him. A wonderful fragrance comes out of the earth. It's the end of a great drought. He gets off his horse, and he wants to say thank you, he wants to say a prayer. The only prayer that comes to his mind is "Our Father which art in heaven." And he feels this is not love. It seems arrogant; it seems presumptuous. He feels he's got to add to it, not to improve it, but to say what he feels, and he says, "Our Mother which art in earth." He says, "Our Father which art in heaven, and our Mother which art in earth, may your love O Mother be fulfilled, and Father may your will be done. May love and will be one." And that is the message that comes through if you follow the Promethean myth and all the religious quests in primitive cultures.

Question: Laurens, thank you very much for these thoughts and reflections. Some of us have been accused of being too poetic and too idyllic about our thoughts and our goals for the wilderness and for the environment. What would be your advice on a more concrete level? What can the individual do today?

LvdP: I'm a little bit worried by your using the word "concrete," because I think what I've been saying is concrete. Of course, I know what you mean, I know the importance of what you're asking. The battle for rehabilitation is so great that we've got to meet it on all levels of awareness where it presents itself to the individual. I'm not saying that dealing with the symptoms, for instance, is unimportant. I'm just saying that doing something about the white rhino is to deal with the consequence and not the cause of the problem. I realize that it's important to do that, too. So I think that all the conventional ideas, like having laws forbidding the cutting down of trees, are necessary. There's no question about it- I think we have to respond in this way.

And don't forget that there are all over the earth today the people who preserved the white rhino to this point, the people who founded the Wilderness Foundation, for instance. They are already expressing what is of this divine thing in themselves. And on every level, however humble, even if it's only establishing window boxes for flowers in the cities-these responses are frightfully important. I don't want to say that one thing is more important than another.

Heracles Rescuing Prometheus (detail), c. 610 B.C.E. Terra cotta, height of body 131/2 in. Athens: National Archaeological Museum

What I'm trying to say is that these things we are seeing are hints of the collective unconscious coming to our aid. To me there's a great shift going on in the collective unconscious. The answer does not come from us, it comes from something beyond us, and this is where I have my trust. What I'm saying right now comes out of a stirring of my own collective unconscious. I know that all over the world an increasing number of people from politicians to taxi drivers to scientists are thinking now, are already moving in this direction. This is vitally important. But this other level is also vitally important. I'm not inventing it in a spirit of idealism. It's been thrust upon me in my experience of conservation. And in the moment when I realize where it comes from, I feel strangely emancipated.

A lot of fear left me because Prometheus was not abandoned to suffer indefinitely. Prometheus was rescued. He was rescued from his chains, and a substitute put in his place. That was Chiron, the centaur, the great healer and trainer of heroes In Greek mythology. He was made to suffer in his place. In other words, whatever there is in the Promethean myth, there is also that which heals as represented by Chiron. So there is a remedy, if you will. There is the Shadow that consciousness casts in the unconscious realm, and the means of dealing with the Shadow. We have the ability to transform the suffering. It is there. I can put it only in mythological language at the moment. It means there is power in the collective unconscious to unchain a suffering consciousness, to heal it.

Q: Do you see some way of accomplishing a more general awareness of this mythological truth, this mythological development that you feel coming?

LvdP: It'll start, as always, with individuals. The world is already full of individuals who are pledged to this-the most unlikely people. It's already there, and I think of the pace that has been gathering. I speak as somebody who all my life has been working wherever I've encountered this problem. As a young man I wrote for newspapers in which I advocated doing the sorts of things in Africa that have been done in the United States-the idea of conserving certain areas that are very important. And then I joined up in my part of the world, in South Africa, with a friend of mine, Ian Player, who started the Wilderness Foundation, which understands that conserving nature is part of the conservation of the human spirit. And for the first time we've had, for instance, in Great Britain, a prime minister who has spoken out about ecology and the importance of ecology. This has never happened in Europe before. People say that she's talking rubbish and she doesn't really hear, but she has. And laws are being changed all over Europe. There are people from all over the world meeting politically. It's become a political issue. The thing is on the march and I think it will accelerate. It's going to be the most important political issue within our time, within a generation. It's going to be far more urgent than economics, and it's far more urgent than the search for markets and profit because it really is a battle for survival. This urgency is increasingly coming to us from the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious never brings anything to human attention without also bringing the energies to deal with the changes.

Q: Is there still time?

LvdP: There always is time. I believe in death-bed repentances. They're very effective. Much more effective than the vows taken in childhood. I think that the moment a person sees the necessity, there's time to rehabilitate the earth. There's no time to lose, of course. But I really don't believe that human life was created to destroy life on earth. That's just a hunch, an intuitive perception; I can't prove it. This is the point again of consciousness. People always say, "Oh, yes, I know, but there's no time," and they cop out of the burden put on us by our fine consciousness-obedience to our greater awareness. That is where the destruction of nature started. Because we were never obedient to the greater awareness. We were obedient only to the immediate awareness. And so that's why I think it's so important, this enlargement of human consciousness. Something is stirring. And there is a great community of new awareness. I think it always starts with one person, you know, and for me Jung is a great turning point in history-not Jung, but what was expressed through Jung. Lots of people contributed to it, but he became singularly aware of it and made it his life's task to communicate it-and look what's coming out of it. And that's all you can do. We may not be asked more than what we can do.

Q: What about the role of legislation? You've been talking about how it begins with the individual, so where do you see laws and agreements and this kind of thing coming in?

LvdP: I'm saying the battle must be fought on every level. It's got to be fought in Parliament. Parliament is now beginning to tackle the question of pollution, for instance. This won't save us, but it will give us more time. What life there is left on earth should be conserved. We need to worry not only about the pollution of the earth, but the pollution of the sea. All these things are becoming desperately important. All the chemical pollution. Do we need all this bloody chemistry that we're getting? You see, it's no accident that we have this drug problem on our hands. Our own society is drugged. We use drugs in the earth, we are looking for shortcuts all the time, and the irony of it is that chemistry is no longer ours. You see its benefits in the works of the alchemists who are using it as a way to the ultimate wisdom, which is the mystical marriage of heaven and earth. We've forgotten this side of chemistry. We've got to bring the "al" back to chemistry.

Q: Where would you see the danger or the possibility of Shadow in the movement toward more concern for the environment, the Green movement, political activity in this direction, and so forth? That worries us profoundly.

LvdP: It worries me profoundly, too. I think the Green movement doesn't really know what conservation is about because it looks upon it as purely an external process and thinks that something is being achieved by a political approach to it-and usually a very one-sided and slanted political approach. The movement is being consumed as far as I can see by its own collective Shadow. The moment they got two million votes here in England in the last European election, the whole scene was transformed. People said, Ha, now we've got them. In the Green movement, they said, Now that the politicians have to do what we tell them to, what shall we do? They very wisely decided not to become a political power. Although real conservation must have political expression, it must not become politics. It must not become political. It should have consequences in all phases of life.

Q: Could you talk some more about some of the places where you see things happening today, either on the diplomatic level or perhaps in Great Britain or perhaps in South Africa-areas you're familiar with?

LvdP: Well, I can only tell you that there's a lot not been done that can be done on this safe level. For instance, we've now had the Second World Wilderness Conference in Cannes. In Queensland, Australia, as a result of their conference, Malcolm Frazer, the prime minister of Australia, declared the Great Barrier Reef a world heritage forever, an area on which exploitation of any kind would be prohibited forever.  It would be there as a blueprint of what its creation was like in the beginning. There was the battle to prevent Tasmania from becoming one huge dam and destroying one of the most precious, ancient forests in that country. That battle was won. So there are a few examples of these things that are being done, you see, and I think you can think yourselves of battles that we've had and won. When I was last in the United States, I was talking with your environmental people in Washington, and I was terribly excited that they had succeeded in preserving one river from its source to its emergence into the ocean. And they told me about the plans they had for preserving parts of the original prairie grass areas. There is, I think, an immense urgency for population control because people are really, in an indirect sense, cannibalistic. We're consuming ourselves indirectly- I mean this is going to be the end of us if we go on like this. The threat of number to nature is colossal. All these things come into it.

It all starts with what used to be called our relationship with God, and you have to decide: What is that relationship in a contemporary way? What is the Self that we are pursuing? What is this journey toward the moment when the "I" gets down into this area of the Self and the "I" and love can meet and become one? This is what it involves. It's not some ultimate Nirvana of the mind. It is how we have performed this dreary little journey in the here and now.

Q: You mention at times taking people on treks in Africa even today, and the hunger, the yearning that people have for this. Could you talk a little bit about the wilderness within and without and the importance of what these kinds of safaris can mean to people. What is the idea behind this kind of trek?

LvdP:  I think the whole idea is for the person who has never been in contact with nature-if he comes in contact with nature, nature speaks to him. It speaks to him. You needn't say any more and the less you say the better. He can have his own experience with nature. The experience becomes his and he changes. It changes him and it confirms something in him. Somehow hunger is satisfied in him and that's a fact. That's all we do and that's why we-what distinguishes the Wilderness Foundation from other conservation organizations-this seems to us the most important thing to encourage in a person. Once a person recovers reverence in contact with nature, he becomes a conservationist. You see, a lot of people feel like the Wildlife Society. They do admirable work, but they're concerned with particular forms of life that they think are in peril. We are trying to conserve the spirit of the conservationist in people. We think that unless this spirit is increased, people won't do the other things that are so necessary. If you keep the earth as close to the initial blueprint of creation as you can, and you bring a person into contact with it-a person who is not whole, from a lopsided society-poof, that person changes. I've never known it to fail. Problem children, all sorts of people who have lost their way in life, once they've had this experience, they're different.

So that is why I personally have gone with the Wilderness Foundation. It's amazing that we thought it was purely a thing we'd started in Africa, but if you read a poet like Gerard Manley Hopkins, you find it already. He is a religious poet, perhaps the greatest religious poet we've had in the English language, a Jesuit who said that the whole world is charged with the grandeur of God. These ideas are already here, all around us.

Q: I think in a certain way the word "conservation " suggests maintaining something that is already behind us, but all the things you've said point to the future as well. So the word "conservation " may not be expressing exactly and entirely what you're aiming at.

LvdP: Yes, of course, that's a valid point, but I've been trying to deal with it by saying that conservation is essential for what is most important, which is metamorphosis. That's what Prometheus was about-metamorphosis, or what the Greeks call metanoia, which is the awareness that transforms. So conservation is from one end of metamorphosis-of .continuing, as I said, the task of creation. One of the great fantasies of religious fundamentalism is a feeling that creation is something that happened behind us, that it's all been done and we are just contained in the now. But the task of creation is ongoing, and we've just got to discover and continue to realize it.

The message that creation has barely begun is to read the Promethean message right. We are given powers not for our own use, but to continue the task of creation, to continue it consciously. Consciousness properly used is an instrument of creation, and if it's properly used, there is a moment when the spirit of creation enters and something is added that was not there before. This is metamorphosis, because the whole of mythology, as Ovid discovered, is metamorphosis. This is renewal, and in the process you are adding something to life that was not there before. This is evolution. Even the zoologists have discovered that in evolution, you can say, "Well, this and this brings this other thing about," and suddenly there is this extraordinary thing they call mutation. For no reason that anyone can fathom, life takes a leap into the dark and into a shape that wasn't there before. This is metamorphosis. Everything is metamorphosis. Conservation is an essential prelude to metamorphosis. And you'll find that in conserving life, you are equipped with the power to create life, because survival is legitimate. If you use survival properly, it becomes not only a form of procreation, but the re-creation of the species.

Robert Hinshaw, Ph.D., received his doctorate in psychology at the University of Zurich and his analytical training at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. He is a cofounder of Daimon Verlag, which publishes books about depth psychology, and frequently collaborates with Peter Ammann on film projects.

Peter Ammann, Ph.D., is a graduate of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, and holds a doctorate in musicology. After several years of film work in Italy with, among others, Federico Fellini, he returned to Switzerland, where he now lives in Geneva and divides his time between his analytical practice and filmmaking.