The Liminal and The Luminescent

Book excerpt: Our world is bathed in ongoing biological, political, cultural, climate, and spiritual crises that seem endless. If anything, these disruptions appear to be spiraling into ever larger threat fronts that challenge our survival as a species. Carl Gustav Jung, renowned Swiss psychiatrist, avowed in his archetypal psychology that there is a portal of transforming possibility if we have the courage to enter that doorway. That threshold entering demands that we embrace our individual and collective sufferings and then seek the path of meaning and destiny that is always resident deeply at the core of such trauma. This book narrates how this destiny is found and lived forward for both each individual life and for our varied human cultures. It affirms and gives examples of the deep-soul dimension of life that lies under the often chaotic surface—the liminal realm of animate and guiding dream, vision, myth, and spirituality where the gods meet us so that we all can find our mutual way Home. This liminal world is navigated through the metaphoric and literalness of pilgrimage, performance, and political processes in our personal and cultural lives. What might be your path of destiny?