One of the recurring thought-forms that I hear repeated everywhere during these apocalyptic times is, “We are all in this together.” Whenever I hear this phrase, it reminds me of an amazing paragraph that Jung wrote in the late 1950’s that is as relevant today as it was then. Here is an excerpt: “We are in the soup that is going to be cooked for us, whether we claim to have invented it or not…. We are threatened with universal genocide if we cannot work out the way of salvation by a symbolic death.” In other words, we are fated to suffer an unconscious “literal” death if we don’t consciously go through a “symbolic” death. What does Jung mean by this?

There are treasures literally buried within us, concealed within our unconscious. These hidden treasures are like precious jewels or diamonds in the rough that are encoded within the fabric of the unconscious psyche. They can be conceived of as existing in a higher-dimension relative to our conscious mind, and as such, are typically invisible to our conscious intellect. When the time is ripe, our intuition—due to its connection to our unconscious—divines and begins to “see” the heretofore formless creative revelation that is brewing in the cauldron of the unconscious. Our task then becomes how to bring forth and creatively express the revelation in a form that helps it come to fruition as we realize it more clearly within ourselves.