The Jung and the Restless Part 1: How a Swiss Psychologist Tried to Save Us from a Zombie Apocalypse

Part 1 of 3 (parts 2 & 3 will be shorter I promise!)

Have you been woken up by bone chilling bad dreams? I begrudgingly admit that I have. I used to have terrifying nightmares about being chased by hordes of hungry zombies. True story: I’ve run for my life, I’ve hid, I’ve fought, I’ve outsmarted them when I had to. Even used a lightsaber one time to dispatch them in a lucid dream. Either way, for years I woke up exhausted in a cold sweat, heart racing, having escaped them once again. But please do understand, this is embarrassingly hard to admit. I find the whole zombie genre rather uninteresting, brainless entertainment. Honestly, I would have preferred to have the hallowed halls of my psyche be haunted by something less mainstream, and a little more sophisticated. I’ve got a PhD in mythology for god’s sake—no hydra, no medusa? I’d take a Balrog or a Dementor even.

Nope. Boring old zombies. Its enough to put me to sleep, but then of course, I would dream about zombies again. And as a result I’ve been forced to get curious for decades now about Americans’ a century long cultural obsession with zombies, showing up in movies, tv shows, books, comics, and most annoyingly, my nightmares.

As a mythologist and depth psychologist by training I’m also convinced that the monsters that haunt the popular culture of a society show us something about its collective shadow,—and often offer us a warning and even some wisdom. I also was taught that if you will make unconscious conscious—expose and interpret what’s really going on there—listen to the hidden message in the metaphor—it might stop haunting your dreams. So fifteen years ago I finally decided to do a little digging around the history of the undead.

What I unearthed led me back to the rantings and writings of a twentieth century mad scientist who prophesied an impending apocalypse. Ironically this cured my nightmares completely, but left me far more terrified for the state of the world we now find ourselves in… while also offering some hope for surviving what often feels like an impending apocalypse. If you’re willing to take the journey with me, I’d love to know what it quakes and shakes, stirs and disturbs in you:

Movies: Mysteries Metaphors and Meanings

Most zombie movies themselves are a relatively uncomplicated affair, but the evolution of the genre is very revealing about the moment that we find ourselves in as a culture. See what you can spot for yourself:

I was surprised to learn the word “Zombie” has African origins. It’s actual definition is “a corpse said to be revived by witchcraft, especially in certain African and Caribbean religions.” Remember I’m interested, not an expert—but the notion of the zombie seems to have come to American ears as folklore from Haiti. (I first visited Haiti at 17, and from the tarantulas to the voodoo it was indeed enchanting and terrifying to my sheltered American experience.) Stories abound about voodoo witch doctors who could put a curse on a hapless victim which seemed to kill them, only for the malevolent medicine man to resurrect them in a semi comatose state. They had to obey the control of their master, as a mindlessly obedient slave, a zombie.[1] See any cultural relevance yet?

Zombies stumbled into the silver screen in 1932’s White Zombie, -- which featured zombified Haitians, enslaved against their will, forced to work in a plantation and serve as enforcers of Bela Legosi, a white man who has harnessed the dark powers of voodoo. In this film and the films that imitated it, white folks’ clear fear of Voodoo is ever present, as is the danger that some white protagonist will also end up zombified. These films almost aways seem to have a subplot in which a woman is un/successfully turned into a zombie, as the result of yet another man confusing the desire to love a woman with the desire to enslave her. Any cultural relevance there?

The idea evolved in 1943’s Revenge of the Zombies—which featured a Nazi scientist trying to create zombie super soldiers, an enslaved unthinking undead army for the Third Reich. The tag line for this one was "DEAD MEN CAN'T DIE... but live to follow a mad-man's will!" Regardless of what actual occult activities the Nazis did/not get into despite Indianna Jones’ best efforts, the clear fear of an army of mindless evil racist soldiers is quite understandable while WWII was at its horrible height[2].

In the 1950s zombie movies were all over the place—Teenage Zombies—alien invaders[3], Russian scientists trying to enslave American citizens, crazy experiments, you name it. But many seem to be about the fear of unpredictable scientific technological advancement. To quote the great Ian Malcolm, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” And of course the cold war was filled with fear of invaders, invisible and otherwise, who were more technologically advanced, lingering memories of the near successes of Nazi science.

In 1968 George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead changed evertything. For reasons mostly unknown all the corpses everywhere resurrect as shambling hordes of “ghouls” that seek to feast on the living, terrifying a cast of characters boarded up in a random farm house. (This is the one to watch.) It was only after this movie grew in popularity that film critics began to call it a “zombie” movie—the word is never spoken in the script., But and tthe name stuck, and the “zombie” genre as we know it came to life, multiplying in all the subsequent sequels, spin offs, and inspirations into a zombie horde—with hundreds of movies alone, not to mention others forms of fiction.

Do please note here, that we’ve just taken a journey from Haitian zombies forced to mindlessly work, all the way to American zombies who stumble along and mindlessly eat, or consume. (I’ve written elsewhere about this obvious commentary on colonialism.[4]) But both worker and consumer are mindless automatons.[5]

We’ll get back to the previously mentioned zombie super soldiers next time with another set of nightmares. (But we won’t say it better than the Cranberries did in the song “Zombie”.) Long story short, many folx fear being enlisted in a cause against their will, whether it’s a religion, an imposed identity, a nationalism, etc. There’s something here about the power of culture to mindlessly enslave us. And something deeper still about being drawn into conflict—or imposed oppositional orientation--against our will.

Suddenly zombies movies are telling us something about the moment we are living in, the fears we find ourselves in, aren’t they?

Two more things to point out in the zombie genre’s evolution. In the 2000s with films like 28 Days Later and The Dawn of the Dead remake, zombies started literally running at high speed. Annoying. As if hordes of the undead weren’t enough, now they are mindlessly sprinting after you. Better get in shape if you are going to outrun the incoming apocalypse, as evidenced in the overwhelming advancing avalanche of zombie horror.

Finally one last evolution in the lore, also showing up mostly in the 2000s onward in movies and shows like The Walking Dead: Zombie plagues are now caused by a highly infectious and contagious virus, that typically spreads around the entire world in a pandemic.

So why am I telling you all of this? Again years ago in an effort to understand my nightmares, when I did a little research and I interpreted the dreams and realized some things, my nightmares just… went away. But my waking fears increased, as the messages in the movies have become all the more real. And I’m still tired of waking up tired. So let’s review, shall we?

There is a Western fascination with zombies, that has spread like a virus:

zombies who are enlisted to work,

mindless zombies,

zombies who can’t stop consuming,

and who run in a living death,

threatening to infect the entire world.

Does any of this sound familiar? Does it touch a nerve? Do I need to spell this out further? Oh don’t worry, I will. Buckle up.

Announcing the Apocalypse

Moving on from mindless zombie movies—which might not be so brainless after all--we’re going to get a little more intellectually intersting now: Because all of this reminded me of the writings of one of my great anti/heroes, a true tor/mentor in my life, who has mis/guided me by always plaguing me with hard truths. (I can’t help but think of a scene in the movie 28 Days Later in which “The end is very fucking nigh!” is spray painted on the wall of a church of all places.)

Nearly a century ago, Swiss Psychologist C.G Jung was trying to warn the world of an impending apocalypse: He claimed that the greed and speed of Western culture was like a virus that was going to infect and destroy the entire world: “The tempo of America is being taken as a norm to which all life should be directed… [but all] throughout America there are thousands suffering sick souls who are never quite hospital cases[6]… That is the sickness of Western man, and he will not rest until he has infected the whole world with his own greedy restlessness… The breathless drive for power and aggrandizement in the political, social, and intellectual sphere, gnawing at the soul of the Westerner with apparently insatiable greed, is spreading irresistibly in the East and threatens to have incalculable consequences. Not only in India but in China, too, much has already perished where once the soul lived and throve… No one wonders at his insatiability, but regards it as his lawful right, never thinking that the onesidedness of this psychic diet leads in the end to the gravest disturbances of equilibrium.”[7] Jung is saying that hunger for possessions and power—political as well as psychological—was contagious, and was spreading around the world with increasing speed. This in turn caused life to increasingly speed up in cultures that previously had a slower pace of life. Jung is exasperated by how many folks don’t bother to question their constant growing hunger for more… more possessions, more experiences, more power. Ironically, this desire for what seems like more life, faster and faster, was actually cutting people off from their vitality, and especially the traditional sources of vitality. Chasing more life was resulting in a living death.

I share Jung’s concern with how quickly this state of affairs has become normal, and that no one seems to notice. In the last century our entire way of being human has been upended by hunger and hurry. The zombie plague is here, we are all infected, and no one noticed.

Zombies, like vampires, are always hungry and never full. This is exactly how Jung describes the sickness of Western Culture. Why the hunger? Fourth century Christian mystical philosopher Gregory of Nyssa claimed that humans were created as infinite capacities for insatiable desire. This is less bad than it sounds, Nyssa believed we were created for love and connection, and that love was infinite. Thus our ability to give and receive love must also be infinite. And therefore our capacity to continually grow into that love, must also be infinite, beyond even this life. (We could explore here whether those old Christian mystics believed in reincarnation, but we won’t go down that rabbit hole.) The challenge here is if that infinite desire gets pointed at anything less than love, we will never be satisfied. And Jung might say that as we have lost the old traditional ways of finding our connection to soul, love, and meaning—God?—our hunger has increased. We are gorging ourselves with things that will never fulfill us, addictions that will never fill us up. Never mind that capitalism is ever hacking that hunger to keep us acting as consumers in a never ending spending spree. We are ever chugging salt water, chasing and chomping what will never feed us or fill us up.

All we zombies, enlisted to mindlessly work, consume, and run… till everything is destroyed. And so, like the mad scientists and aliens in those 1950s zombie movies, we invent new technologies to help us in the chase, in our speed and greed:

Jung warned that these improvements in technology, that focused on improving our external quality of life were in fact robbing us of the time and attention to focus on our internal lives—what really made us alive as opposed to undead. Our supposed progress “may do away with a great many evils whose removal seems most desirable and beneficial [disease for example!] yet this step forward, as experience shows, is all too dearly paid for with loss of spiritual culture. It is undeniably much more comfortable to live in a well-planned and hygienically equipped house, but this still does not answer the question of who-is-the-dweller-in-this-house and whether his soul rejoices in the same order and cleanliness as the house which ministers to his outer life. The [hu]man whose interests are all outside is never satisfied with what is necessary [basic necessities], but is perpetually hankering after something more and better which, true to his bias, he always seeks outside himself. He forgets completely that, for all his outward successes, he himself remains the same inwardly… the inner man continues to raise his claim [to be heard], and this can be satisfied by no outward possessions. And the less this voice is heard in the chase after the brilliant things of this world, the more the inner man becomes the source of inexplicable misfortune and uncomprehended unhappiness…”[8]

Jung claimed we were inside out, externally comfortable, internally uncomfortable. We live longer more comfortable lives while we die inside. Chasing more life faster and faster was resulting in a living death. And in our pursuit of external technological advancement, we were losing touch with the ancient sources of technology for internal exploration. This was why Jung tried to take his patients and his readers back to mythology, to yoga, to Taoism, to Zen, to the mystical and hermetic branches of Christianity. In Modern Man in Search of a Soul Jung claimed "I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life–that is to say, over 35—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life." Jung seems to have anticipated the invasion of the Western Mind with Eastern thought, and certainly influenced Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell and so many others who broadened the American spiritual conversation in the second half of the twentieth century.

To the main stream religion, Jung wrote “Christianity must indeed begin again from the very beginning” and open its eyes to its mystical and mythical origins, with the hope of helping its followers rediscovery their own mythic and mysterious meaning, their souls.[9]

Interestingly enough, around the mid twentieth century there was a movement in Catholic Scholarship called “Ressourcement” a movement that attempted to “return to the sources” by taking Catholic thought back to scripture and the early Christian mystical tradition, unfortunately known as the “Patristics.” This movement would have a huge influence on Vatican II, and give birth to the resurgence of “Contemplative” Christianity, beginning most visibly with the prolific writings of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton in the 50s and early 60s. Merton seems to have shared Jung’s concern that as we lost touch with these ancient technologies for cultivating our internal lives, we were less capable to cope with the rapid development of external technology. “What I am saying is, then, that it does us no good to make fantastic progress if we do not know how to live with it, if we cannot make good use of it, and if, in fact, our technology becomes nothing more than an expensive and complicated way of cultural disintegration.”[10] Merton offered repeated warnings against technology progressing faster than we could use it responsibly, much less process its unpredictable implications: Fossil fuels might give us cars even as quick as they cook the ozone, harnessing the power of the atom gives us nuclear energy but also nuclear weapons. And all of this is causing us to disintegrate… to decompose culturally.

Jung likewise warned our advances were dangerous: “…we exalt progress. But our progressiveness, though it may result in a great many delighted wish-fulfilments, piles up an equally gigantic Promethean debt which has to be paid off from time to time in the form of hideous catastrophes.”[11] He’d seen these catastrophes living through two world wars, but has also seen these wars fail to slate self destructive hunger for more progress, which was often self-sabotaging even in seemingly small ways.

One of my favorite teachings from Jung is the importance of paying attention to the enantiodromia—which literally means “running towards the opposite”—those behavior patterns in which our efforts and actions consistently produce the exact opposite results or impact that we intend. For example, we create devices to “save” time, but: “All time-saving devices, amongst which we must count easier means of communication and other conveniences, do not, paradoxically enough, save us time but merely cram our time so full that we have no time for anything. Hence the breathless haste, superficiality, and nervous exhaustion with all the concomitant symptoms— craving for stimulation, impatience, irritability, vacillation, etc. Such a state may lead to all sorts of other things, but never to any increased culture of the mind and heart.”[12] Why is it that the many steps we are taking to “save time” are actually costing us time, and rather than slowing down our lives, are speeding them up? Jung wrote that in the 1940s, but it is just as true today. Why are all the systems and tools that help us be more organized leaving us distracted and exhausted? Why are the tools that allow us to communicate across distances quickly—from cell phones to social media—somehow breaking down our ability to be in meaningful relationships? Why is unlimited access to information making us less intelligent? Why are so many organizations dedicated to the betterment of humanity accidentally doing harm? (It might have something to do with the fact that we haven’t dealt with our inner contradictions and addictions, and so they leak out in our creations.)

Even so, as Jung warned above, “the West” spreads its greed and its speed on the waves and webs of technological marvels. I saw this in real time when trying to travel through a large city in central China in 2006. We were delayed due to a massive digger exhuming the streets. (The little boy in me still thinks tractors are cool.) Our guide apologetically explained to us that wires were being laid throughout the city, but thenm proudly informed us that while most residents of the city had never owned a telephone, all of them would have high speed internet by the end of the year. I would never deny or decry the democratizing of information and communication. And yet I couldn’t help but wonder if this was a gift or a curse on that city. Rapidly advancing technology is changing the way we think and connect in culture and community, altering centuries of traditional wisdom and guidance for knowing how to be human, and human(s) being together.

Technology helps us go faster, but then we push our brains and bodies to keep up with technology, to out run our technology in order to have a moment’s peace, even as our mental capacity for being together is disintegrating. I can’t help recall that zombies are mindless, but in many stories zombies crave brains, and can be killed only by destroying the brain.

In The Heart of Trauma, Bonnie Bandenoch writes about Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships. She leads me to reflect on how the speed of technological progress shapes our thinking, remaking us in its image: In considering how the different sides of our brain focus on different types of thinking--the left hemisphere of our brains focuses on logical task oriented thinking, and the right hemisphere focuses on abstract creative connective intelligence—it seems that in moments of trauma danger the “left” thinking of cold logic kicks in to help us make quick decisions focused on survival. Of course traumatic triggers can also kick us into fight or flight. Badenoch warns how our speedy culture is increasing leaving its right brain left behind: always triggering and tricking us into fight or flight to go fast: “[Because] Our left-centric way of being… is busy disassembling and reassembling pieces of living experience in order to control and manipulate, it can have the felt sense of a manufacturing plant whose values are ‘how much it can do, how fast it can do it, and with what degree of precision’ (McGilchrist, 2009, p.430). This drives us to move at an ever-accelerating pace that leaves very little time for the slow, leisurely face-to-face encounters that allow us to truly see, hear, and support each other, particularly in moments of fear and pain. We might say that we are moving at the speed of trauma.[13] At the same time, the left focuses us on task over relationship, correct behavior over moment-to-moment lived experience, judgment over curiosity. All of these lead toward blindness to the opportunity for connection that is alive in every moment.”[14] If Badenoch is right, our right brains are being left behind: this type of technological thinking is increasingly eroding our connection to our creative depths and each other, right in a moment of fear and pain when we most need each other.

Now we are going to take one last step into this, one last painful look in the mirror, and I warn you, you may not like the corpse like face you see there. But, lest we assume we who are dedicated to the spiritual and material betterment of our fellow humans are already in on Jung’s warnings and immune to this infection, Jung offers one last caution: “[Hu]man[ity] has come to be [hu]man[ity]'s worst enemy. It seems to me that we have reached the limit of our evolution, the point from which we can advance no further.” Why you ask? “Humanity started from an unconscious state and has ever striven for greater consciousness.” Yes, Jung’s entire career was about helping us encounter the unconscious and bring it into consciousness. But: “The development of consciousness is a burden, the suffering and the blessing of [hu]mankind. Each new discovery leads to greater consciousness, and the path along which we are going …inevitably calls for greater responsibility[15] and enforces a great change in ourselves.”[16] Let’s unpack this for a minute. Jung is saying that when we increase our consciousness—when we grow, we also increase our burden of responsibility to change, to live differently in accordance with those new insights. The more I get in touch with my shadow, the more that familiarity is going to ask something of me. I have to consider the implications for you and for me, and to integrate that and live it. This is why Jung repeatedly referred to growth as hard ethical work. Jungian psychologist Eric Neuman’s brilliant book Depth Psychology and a New Ethic claimed unsurprisingly that by introducing the world to shadow work, Depth Psychology was calling the world to a New Ethic. And yes that is difficult, slow work.

But Jung is saying—decades ago—we are now hitting the limits of our evolution, our ability to grow and integrate that growth responsibly. And I believe it is because he is telling us that we are going too fast, and growing too fast. When our consciousness has to keep up with the implications of our technological progress, we have to grow at the same break neck speed of our technology, and all the unpredictable responsibilities that come with it—how to use smart phones, social media, artificial intelligence, and gasoline, ethically. Likewise as technology makes the world smaller, and we become more aware of the experience of our neighbors, that knowledge demands that I must keep up with the responsibilities of my actions on their well being—my white privilege, the international impacts of my spending money in the Walmart on the corner vs a corner boutique shop, my shopping on Amazon, my purchasing the electronics I used to make that purchase or type this article. As I sit here in a coffee shop in Albuquerque, with a few keystrokes I may be affecting warehouse workers across town, child workers in south east Asia, and incurring the judgement of folx online that I’ve never met in person.

Meanwhile as I attempt to do my inner work, I want to stay connected to kindred spirits. But staying conversant with friends who are doing their own inner work means that I need to consume all the latest content on Internal Family Systems Theory, Polyamory, Psychedelics, Somatics, Sexuality, the Enneagram, and Dungeons and Dragons on a slow day, just to have a conversation, regardless of where I stand on these topics. And yes, there is pressure to keep up.

The demands of this spiritual psychological and ethical progress are nowhere more prevalent than with Political Progressives, among whom I consider myself. Whether by accident, intention, or infection, our progressiveness moves at the same speed as technological progress. We are attempting to increase what we know, so we can heal, grow, and show up so fast, that we cannot keep up with our “increased consciousness”, and the responsibilities that calls for any more than we can keep up with the ramifications of fossil fuels, smart phones, antidepressants or AI. But you are expected to. You need to be up on the latest writings on your attachment style, all the inner personalities that IFS wants you to get to know, what’s up with everything from polyamory to politics to which pronouns to use for your friends—I myself prefer “they / them” by the way, so I get it—where to recycle, how to be an ally, how to be an advocate, what to call the homeless these days—not the homeless by the way—, how to wear and word you’re woke, how not to get canceled, how to deal with your religious trauma, what artists and teachers have been canceled, what is happening moment by moment in a 24 hour news cycle and why we are boycotting Target right now. And everything you learn calls you to a new place of responsible action. Can you keep up? I want to. Yet I have to wonder, have we tried to keep pace or even out run the pace of empire?[GU3] Have we demanded too much, too fast, to go-go-go, grow-grow-grow, and show-show-show it? (Not to mention that you are expected to demonstrate your inability to keep up with compensatory performative urgency and performative misery, or as I recently heard it described “tight white butthole syndrome.”[17])

I will only mention in passing that too many of us have experienced how cannibalistic progressive communities and organizations have become, especially of the predominantly white variety. Like voracious zombies we are ever on alert for an excuse to take a bite out of each other. Then we put a bullet in the head of anyone we suspect has been bit, not knowing we are all infected, as we eat each other alive. Cancel culture is a cancer, and it grows like a cancer, devouring everything it touches.[18]

There is another word for this, one that defines the zombie genre: violence.

You know: Go-go-go, and grow-grow-grow move at the same tempo, often the terrible demanding drums of domination, the enslaving energy of empire. But those of us who work for change are working as hard as we can as fast as we can. And it’s just not working.

Because meanwhile, it seems these days, the conservative masses have themselves said, NO. No more progress. No more DEI, no more political correctness, no more learning new genders, no more having to stretch to give more space to women, to BIPOC folks, to immigrants etc. Old fashioned folks have been pushed too far too fast, it’s too much and THEY HAVE SAID NO. NO MORE. Make America Great Again may as well be, Make America Manageable Again. The red hat is a red light to a progressive culture moving at break neck speed. Nope. No more progress. No more feeling or learning new things.

Let me be extra clear here: I don’t see this conservative development as a virtue. I’m not saying this is a misguided step in the right direction. This to me feels like a literal apocalypse, with the freedom and well-being of so many I love not yet realized, and the hard earned freedom and well-being of so many I love in danger.

But perhaps what we progressives have most in common with the conservatives is the exhaustion, and the experience of ever being agitated away from attention, and programmed to over plan and under perform: Backpacker theologian Beldan Lane warns us: “Our conditioning as members of a consumer society prevents us from abandoning hope that, with sufficient planning, we might yet be able to see and do [and fix!] everything. To move slowly and deliberately through the world, attending to one thing at a time, strikes us as radically subversive, even un-American. We cringe from the idea of relinquishing, in any moment, all but one of the infinite possibilities offered us by our culture. Plagued by a highly diffused attention, we give ourselves to everything lightly. That is our poverty. In saying yes to everything, we attend to nothing.”[19]

Friends this is where I live. I’ve never been chased by zombies in the real waking world, but in my efforts to make a difference I have lived the real nightmare of 60 hour work weeks, with ten hours a day on zoom, and I have delt with the constant vertigo, the body aches, the ulcers, and the insomnia that leads to, living in a constant state of activation, agitation, and distraction, feeling like the walking dead.

And I help teach the balance of contemplation and action for a living.

We progressives especially are going faster and faster in an attempt to stop the spread of hate and fascism and empire, in an attempt to wake people up and hold them responsible. But if Jung is correct, we may be blind to the ways we are actually defeating ourselves, spreading the very virus that is destroying the world, in our efforts to counter violence with violence.

Our technologically assisted attempt to do more things at once may be an attempt to grasp more power than we can hold, to force ourselves, our lives, and the world to be what we think it should be. This very effort may instead be disempowering and disintegrating us. Walter Brueggeman writes: “Multitasking is the drive to be more than we are, to control more than we do, to extend our power and our effectiveness. Such practice yields a divided self, with full attention given to nothing.” Brueggeman is an Old Testament Scholar who councils us to instead slow down and return to the sacred practice of rest, in his book Sabbath: Saying No to the Culture of Now.[20]

Public theologian Tricia Hersey has taken up the cause here, in her work on the “Nap Ministry” and her book Rest is Resistance. She declares with prophetic warning: “When we finally wake up to the truth of what a machine-level pace of labor has done to our physical bodies, our self-esteem, and our Spirits, the unraveling begins…There is no way around this. We have all participated willingly and unwillingly in the allure of grind culture. We have done this because since birth, we slowly are indoctrinated into the cult of urgency and disconnection... these toxic systems refuse to see the inherent divinity in human beings and have used bodies as a tool for production, evil, and destruction for centuries. Grind culture has made us all human machines, willing and ready to donate our lives to a capitalist system that thrives by placing profits over people… I believe the powers that be don't want us rested because they know that if we rest enough, we are going to figure out what is really happening and overturn the entire system. Exhaustion keeps us numb, keeps us zombie-like, and keeps us on their clock.”[21] So we see what the speed of these toxic systems are doing to us.

So now what? Is it too late? Can we hope for a cure?

Contemplation as Vaccination

In his book Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity Peter Kingsley claims Jung was a prophet foretelling the end of Western Civilization, that it’s too late. (But not too late, as the title seems to suggest for all of humanity, or whatever comes after the dominance of the west.) If Kingsley is right, we will write Jung’s condemnation of unbridled progress off as insane, because to an insane culture sanity always looks crazy: “Greeks and Romans, too, almost made a business of dismissing their own prophets as mad. And this intimate habit of closely associating the prophet whose job it was to bring a little sanity and balance back into the world-with insanity still clings tight to the roots of western culture.”[22] Yup. But I don’t know that its hopeless. I do agree that Jung was a prophet who tried repeatedly to warn us, a madman spraying words on the wall: “The End is Very Fucking Nigh”. But also, always the warning came with some wisdom, hoping to turn us back from the brink.[23]

In a 1931 interview Jung said that the world was being enlisted in the eager ever infectious quickening pace of American life : “The tempo of America is being taken as a norm to which life should be directed….[but] throughout America there are thousands suffering sick souls who are never quite hospital cases.” But ever the doctor, he offered a treatment plan: “What America needs in the face of the tremendous urge toward uniformity, desire of things, the desire for complications in life, for being like one's neighbors, for making records, et cetera, is one great healthy ability to say ‘No.’ To rest a minute and realize that many of the things being sought are unnecessary to a happy life…We are awakening a little to the feeling that something is wrong in the world… We want simplicity. We are suffering… from a need of simple things.”

Jung’s revolutionary solution starts small with simplicity and slowing down. Is that naïve? He certainly took his own medicine, and he quite literally opted out of technology and unplugged. Jung built a stone house with no electricity and moved in. He established a more natural home base in an increasingly chaotic technological world. While many of us could not afford that full time option, are there ways we can slow down and unplug?

In The Solace of Fierce Landscapes Beldon Lane reminds us how unnatural our current lives are. He also reminds us this is not the first time this has happened, and he counsels us to look to others who said “NO!” to the infection of dominant culture. In fact in the third century right when the Roman Empire was taking over the Christian religion, in what could have been a moment of great panic and fear, many mystics and seekers, revolutionaries in their own right, headed out into the desert to go deeper.

Merton tells us this Imperial “Christian” civilized “Society… was regarded by them as a shipwreck from which each single individual [hu]man had to swim for his life.”[24] Like Jung and many of the survivors in most zombie movies, they fled for their lives out of the cities into the safety of the wilderness. (Ironic that we think of wild places as unsafe.) These Desert Fathers and Mothers headed out into the natural spaces to slow down and pursue the physical practice of hesychia—stillness, and the mental practice of apathea—learning not to care about what didn’t matter. This of course freed up their energy and attention to care about what mattered most. Lane reminds us we too can practice this, but it requires us to be in one place at one time mentally and physically: “Full awareness of the unnoteworthy immediate moment is the grandest and hardest of all spiritual excercises… Learning to focus one's attention in any single sphere (no matter how mundane or commonplace) is a training in the attention needed for more important encounters…One only can love what one stops to observe. ‘Nothing is more essential to prayer’— said Evagrius, ‘than attentiveness.’”[25]

So, what are we to do? We infected zombies who are running ourselves into the grave, working ourselves to death, consumed with insatiable hunger, mindlessly distracted, our right mind left behind, over stimulated, triggered, and spread so thin we do not notice our brains boiling and our bodies literally falling apart around us?

Can we come back to life? Is it too late?

Jung, Merton, Lane and Hersey seem to be telling us that we need to return to re-vitalizing practices— we need to practice running for our lives, back to our lives: Finding even tiny moments to slow down and return to nature, or our own natural rhythms—what some call contemplative practice—might simply be practicing paying attention to the fact that we are, in fact, alive.

Let me write that again: contemplation is practicing paying attention to life and being alive. And it might be our best vaccination against the zombie virus.

Yes, it may be as simple as checking in to see if you are still alive. Let’s try it:

First, lets check for a pulse:

The greatest ancient Christian contemplative practice is the Prayer of the Heart, where we sink our mind into our heart and let it be recollected and re-educated. Can you take a moment right now to pay attention to your heart beating in your chest?

Give this a minute. Find your heart beat.

Can you focus your thoughts, only on your heart?

Stay with this.

Can you send your heart some love and thank it for beating?

Second, are you breathing? So many Eastern Practices—and the prayer of the heart—tell us to follow our breath… to pay attention to your breathing and slow it down. Can you simply take a moment right now to be still, to simply breathe?

Give this a second.

Can you observe your breath?

Can you slow it down?

Can you thank your nostrils and lungs for keeping you alive? Send them some love?

As you slow your breathing, can you feel your heart rate slowing down?

Do you have breath and a heart beat still? If so, you are still alive. Tell yourself there is still hope.

You can choose to begin there: focus attention on your breath and your heartbeat and send yourself love.

There is a beautifully underrated zombie film called Warm Bodies—which is also a retelling of Shakespeare’s Romio and Juliet. In it, a zombie experiences a flicker of beauty, and it causes his heart to start beating again. It’s love that brings him back from the living dead.

Maybe that’s the answer as well. Beldon Lane told us that paying attention was a form of loving. Maybe we can begin to cultivate the acts of giving small moments of loving attention—to our pets, our partners, to our problematic parents even, to our problematic internal parts?—to our neighbors, really, anything anywhere as long as it’s one something somewhere. We can eventually work our way up to problematic political adversaries, but first we start small. (Remember, in trying to pay attention to everything, we pay attention to nothing. In trying to love everything well, we love nothing well.)

This I think, is why contemplative practice is making a come back. It’s practice for being alive again, an invitation to resurrection, dying to distraction one tiny little hard fought moment of rest at a time.

From there, perhaps we can choose to wake up to what is happening.

We can choose to find our voice, to say NO. No more.

We can choose to SLOW DOWN, we can choose to practice a little stillness in our lives.

We can choose what to care about even when the world tells us that everything is an emergency.

Let go of performative urgency, let go of performative misery. It’s not really helping anyone. I promise. Unclench your butt hole.

Unplug, get off the tread mill, get off the phone, even if it’s just for a moment.

Turn off, tune out, drop in.

In practicing saying NO, you can choose, truly what you say YES to.

From there maybe we can plug back in to the sources of life:

Plug back in to the old spiritual technologies .

Plug back in to our own depths.

Plug back in to relationships.

Re-connect & re-member.

Plug back into Love.

Maybe give it a try?

More soon.

Oh, and a PS—You may notice that I have also referred to “prayer” interchangeably with contemplative practice. Is prayer another way to talk about paying attention to—and thus loving—Life—or to the Source of life which may be called God? I would argue that yes it is. Beldon Lane teaches contemplative prayer is simply a surrender of our striving to let love happen. In “the letting go of one's thoughts, the emptying of the self, the act of loving in silent contemplation what cannot be rationally understood… The ego is relinquished, along with its constant flow of chatter and illusion of control, so that love may happen. Love, after all is the only way God can he known.”[26] But if you prefer to pray the old fashioned way, I’ll only add, this is probably a good time to focus on the Source of Life and ask for help, and call on powers greater than our own. I sure do.

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[1] The 1985 book The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombies, and Magic is a wild read if you want to see this through American eyes, which is what I’m discussing in this article. If you want to take this seriously, you should read something written by an actual practitioner.

[2] Not to mention the irony of white supremacists repeatedly attempting to harness the magic of the very cultures they deemed inferior.

[3] UFOs, and the fear that an even more powerful “other” might drop out of the sky to colonize us, are a phenomena for another day.

[4] The reality of how Europeans’ insatiable craving for sugar caused the enslaved and near destruction Haiti, is more disturbing than any film.

[5] This is especially interesting, because the script of dark skinned zombies chasing white protagonists is flipped in Night of the Living Dead, as the sole black actor is the protagonist chased by white ghouls and surrounded by hapless white refugees. See my one season podcast Cinemartyr for an in depth discussion of this one.

[6] This opening line is taken from a 1931 interview with Whit Burnett, for New York’s Sun magazine. A longer excerpt appears later in this essay.

[7] (CW II, PAR. 962).

[8] Same source as above.

[9] (Jung CW12: par.13. See also 14,15).

[10] Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander pg. 67-68

[11] (CW 9 par. 276)

[12] (CW 18, PAR. 1343)

[13] Emphasis mine.

[14] (pg 27).

[15] Emphasis mine

[16] (CW II par 962).

[17] From a conversation with Amelia Weesies

[18] Recently Fr Richard Rohr reminded me several of us this the reason he founded the Center for Action and Contemplation, after starting out on the “community of communities”—over a dozen alterative progressive Christian communities working for social change and progress—and then watching all of them slowly implode and eat themselves alive. He explores this in his book, Simplicity.

[19] The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality—my all time favorite book—pg 189

[20] (quote on pg 67).

[21] pgs 20, 17,7,29

[22] Pg 249

[23] I default to the best definition of “prophet” I have yet read from retired Episcopal bishop and Choctaw elder Steven Charleston: “Prophets appear first as an early warning system within any culture at risk.… They serve as teachers to instruct people about what to do to end their suffering and alter the course of destruction. Finally, they are mystics who describe the future and guide people into it themselves…. Prophets are immersed in…ancient teaching…[and] their tradition even as they talk about how that tradition will need to change to meet new challenges.” Check out Steven Charleston’s book We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope if you are interested in learning more.

[24] The Wisdom of the Desert pg 3

[25] (pg 83).

[26] (pgs 67,73).

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