This journal reveals a new world-view in our chaotic time, like a jig-saw puzzle suddenly recognizable. It’s recorded by a former professor of Western Civilization, whose lifelong practice of Yoga led her at mid-life to Zurich to learn the western way to brain cognition found by Jung to heal our split PoV in science and religion.
Genetics and archeology reveal the human brain reached its present evolutionary structure and capacity two-hundred millennia ago, and has been turning itself on ever since. This process has accelerated with the leap in technology of the last two centuries.
During the first world confinement in history, the internet has made possible a whole new economic system, just as the Pandemic stopped us from running off the cliff of climate change because of the religious fervor of consumerism. This journal chronicles the events of 2020 to reveal the new world-view with 20/20 hindsight.
The chaos in our social Fate comes from our mental resistance to break up and reorganize a new adaptive response to the environment that grew our consciousness (“spirit”) into matter.
This transformation in world culture started and failed many times and is precipitated by War, Conquest/Slavery, Plague and Famine, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse "un-veiling" spiritual vision of Truth to re-cognize the meaning of Science: humanity is forming a critical mass for a Qualium Leap in Evolution.
Throughout, alongside such sharp-elbowed and at times despairing analysis, Christides reflects on news events and food for thought from sources as disparate as an interview with Paul McCartney or insights from Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind. One of the crucial threads tying all this together: Christides’s sense that “the Revelation of the Apocalypse is happening,” brought on by humanity’s choice “to impede our transformation or to accept the future responsibility to the planet the Cosmos requires of us.”
Christides contends that society, rooted in imperialism, has reduced life “to its material components,” cutting us off from each other, from “the planetary web of life,” and from the soul. These spiritual concerns, laid out with clarity, pulse through the book’s overwhelming beat-by-beat recounting of Covid-19, impeachment proceedings, relentless Trump headlines, plus all the corridors her mind journeys down while watching news, listening to podcasts, contemplating Hubble images of the Lagoon Nebula, and even reckoning with the darkness of history, the horror of the present, and even, on occasion, the hope that humanity can be more than this.
Takeaway: A blow-by-blow account of life during the era of Covid and political instability, from a Jungian perspective.
Great for fans of: Madi Atkins’s The Covid Diaries, Vic Lee's Corona Diary: A Personal Illustrated Journal of the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020 .
Production grades
Cover: C+
Design and typography: B
Illustrations: A-
Editing: B
Marketing copy: A-
