“Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Faust have taken us on a sublime journey from simple man to enlightened man. It is the journey of every man of consciousness and should not be dismissed as fairy tale or myth. Every man is somewhere on this journey, and it is of immeasurable help to know where you are on the scale of evolution. To mistake one's position might be to take medicine that is inappropriate and possibly fatal.
Almost all of us in Western society are Hamlets.
Compulsory education, our social structure, the dictates of our lifestyle have obliterated the two-dimensional man from American life. He lives in our passion for American Indian stories, in the novels of ethnic New York, and in our devotion to the cowboy. Except as pathology, he is rarely seen on our streets in adult form. A friend once described adolescents as the last primitives among us, for the two-dimensional man does live there for a brief time. America has a love-hate relationship with adolescence, obliterating it by urging youth to become adults as rapidly as possible and simultaneously bearing an unquenchable nostalgia for it.
How does a man survive if he is caught in The Hamlet Dilemma? The more intelligent he is, the more profound will be his suffering. Two avenues of solace are available. He may keep some small point of contact with a simple, warm, uncomplicated world by maintaining a bit of primitive behavior in his life. At best this can be jogging; camping; engaging in locker-room banter; having an array of adolescent equipment, including that which is most dear to every man's heart, his car (every car should be named Rocinante); gardening; or reclaiming some dimension of life ordinarily relegated to the store or shop. Its dark form- -the second avenue of solace - can be vandalism, gang behavior, and other types of juvenile delinquency, including drug use. It is a bitter indictment of some of our attitudes that the only "juice" left for many of our youth is in destructive behavior. But inevitably a time comes in adulthood when these small sources of simple energy dry up and you face the dark night of the soul when there is no joy in jogging and your garden is defeated by the insects. This is the terrible moment when the full Hamlet distress comes welling up in you. We have invented new terms for this: midlife crisis, identity crisis, the Big Four-Zero, the seven-year itch. It is a dark time when the small connection with boyish exuberance dries up.
St. John of the Cross said that this dark time lasts seven weeks or seven months or seven years or twenty-one years--depending on when you wake up to the next level of consciousness. Some information and a profound integrity can save a man from the very long dry times; but no one escapes at least a touch of the dry desert.
When the dark night begins to lift, one morning there is an unaccountable touch of joy in the air. It is the tiniest trickle of energy, light, and hope, but enough to keep you alive. This is the first contact with the four-dimensional consciousness, and one can begin to live from that source of energy. Something of the subtle inner world becomes your center of gravity: poetry, music, a new perceptiveness when you are jogging, a blossoming of philosophic in-quiry, a new religious understanding--something of this world captures you. Less worthy channels for this new energy are fanaticism, dictatorial religious beliefs, and ego inflations of all kinds. If the new energy flows into such channels, you are quickly sent back to the Hamlet condition for further boiling in the oil of transformation.
Enlightenment is never total or permanent in this lifetime. Mythology has to construct personalities who are perfect, but they always live somewhere else or at some other time. Presently the evidence of four-dimensional consciousness is not some form of perfection but rather the ability to tap in to that psychological space when needed.
I have been touched deeply to learn that the ability to perceive the color blue is a recent acquisition for the human race--it probably developed fewer than two thousand years ago. The word blue does not appear in the Old Testament or in Homer (who speaks of the "wine-dark sea"), or any of the classical writings. This ability emerged slowly, and blue is still the most often missed hue in color blind-ness.
Similarly, the musical sense of hearing harmonic structure--as opposed to melodic line--is probably still more recent; harmonic music appears only in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Is it consistent to say that a new faculty-four-dimensional conscious-ness, as we lamely describe it--is only now appearing for ordinary men and women in our human evolution? If this is so, it would follow that the new faculty is extremely rare, fragile when it does appear, and very easily lost.
But it has made its appearance and is the most important issue in any intelligent life. Dr. Jung spent his old age writing about and contemplating this new evolution of man, the progression from incompleteness to wholeness, from three to four. It is time for all of us to do the same.”
