When solar consciousness is one-sided

When Light Forgets the Dark

What is it about the sun that seems so irresistible?  We are at the end of May, and the summer solstice is fast approaching - the sun at the height of its power.  All around us, the natural world is vibrant and at its peak.  We are drawn increasingly outdoors into the warmth of the sun, basking in its brilliance and energy.  Life turns outward into activity, productivity, and engagement with the visible world. 

Could this be a form of ‘solar consciousness’ at its most seductive: self-radiant, clear, purposeful, and confident in its capacity to know and to act?  But, if we look at the world stage, we can also see solar consciousness in its shadow form.  Inflated to the point of collective madness, convinced of its own godhood, and blind to the catastrophe it courts. 

Every day we hear declarations from powerful political figures – delivered with absolute certainty – with little or no tolerance for ambiguity, and the conviction that they alone possess the truth and the answer.  Whether it is the rigid statements coming from Washington, or the sense of righteousness that fuels the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, many so-called leaders speak with a dangerous and blinding confidence.  They behave as if they have a monopoly on truth, as if they are somehow uniquely enlightened.  It seems a perfect illustration of what Jung called inflation on a massive scale.  But, when the ego identifies with the archetypal energy of the Self, and the human believes itself divine, the result is not enlightenment but calamity.

Trump's political style, among others in our current landscape, offers a particularly clear example of solar consciousness free of any balancing principle.  There is no room for doubt, no acknowledgment of shadow, no capacity to hold the tension of opposites.  Everything is absolute and polarised - total victory or complete disaster, genius or fool, light or dark.

This is the myth of the solar hero gone awry.  The ego is totally convinced that it can slay all dragons, illuminate all darkness, solve all problems through sheer force of will and certainty.  This is pathological.  There is no balancing lunar wisdom - no receptivity, no listening, no recognition that some things cannot be known or controlled, no humility before the untold mysteries of life.

The wars ravaging our world offer different aspects of the same inflation. Each side is certain of its own righteousness, its clear vision, its possession of the light and the truth – it is the ‘enemy’ who lives in the dark.  When solar consciousness becomes absolute, compromise feels impossible.  Any compromise with ‘darkness’ would be to betray the light.  Jung understood this when he wrote about the shadow - that whatever we cannot own in ourselves we will project onto the other and then feel compelled to destroy.  The wars we are witnessing are not really about territory or resources; they can also be understood as competing inflations, solar egos that cannot tolerate the existence of another truth, another light.  They are about power and how it is used.

Perhaps one of the most revealing symbols of our collective solar hubris is the Artemis program - humanity's current project to return to the moon.  Beautifully named after the ancient goddess of the moon, the wilderness, and the untamed feminine - and yet enacted through pure solar consciousness.  Human beings have a genuine drive towards exploration and curiosity – we have looked up at the night sky for centuries and sought to understand its mysteries and to venture into the unknown.  This is a legitimate expression of consciousness, perhaps even a sacred one. But this does not seem to be what Artemis represents.

We are not going to the moon to honour mystery, or to practice humility before the cosmos, to contemplate our smallness in the vast dark of space. We are going to extract resources, to establish dominance, to extend the same controlling, dominating consciousness that has already brought Earth to the brink of ecological collapse.  The moon is already being discussed as a site for helium-3 extraction.  Meanwhile here on Earth, species vanish, forests burn, oceans acidify, and communities lack clean water.  The financial, technological and ecological cost of these ventures into space is mind-blowing.  What could we change if we spent that $93 billion on healing the world we have rather than preparing to exploit the next one.

When Earth is exhausted, depleted, and rendered uninhabitable by our greed and domination, will we simply move on?  Is this the plan, to treat planets as we have treated every other resource, using them up and then seeking the next frontier?  The moon, then Mars, then who knows what?  This is not exploration.  It smacks of the logic of the abuser who moves from victim to victim, the addict always seeking the next fix, unable to face what they have done or to stay and make reparation. We are perilously close to enacting the darkest of our science fiction stories.  Those novels that we once read as warnings about humanity's capacity for destruction and flight, may now become operating manuals for our actual future.  We may yet inhabit the dystopian worlds of some of our most compelling fiction.

What Jung helps us to understand is that this is not just a political or technological problem but a psychological one.  We have a great capacity for clarity, distinction, and purposeful action; these things are essential to human life.  We need them; we need an ego.  But when it becomes cut off from its opposite - from lunar consciousness, from the feminine principle of receptivity and relationship, from the acknowledgment of limits and shadow - it becomes a monster.  The alchemists understood this well.  The sun without the moon does not produce gold, it produces ash.  Yang without yin is not strength but rigidity, not light but blindness.

Ecopsychology shows us how profoundly disconnected we have become from the natural rhythms of our world.  We live in artificial light, and climate-controlled environments.  We have a vast array of food available regardless of the season.  We seem to have almost eradicated winter from our lives, literally and psychologically.  There are no fallow periods, no rest, no darkness that we do not immediately try to illuminate.  We have forgotten that we are creatures, subject to natural law, part of ecosystems that require balance between growth and decay, activity and rest, light and dark, life and death.

The natural world around us in this season of summer is at the height of growth, but plants are not trying to transcend their limits.  Trees do not have ambitions to grow forever, or to be the biggest tree in the forest and lord it over the others.  They grow according to their nature, and when autumn comes, they will shed their leaves and rest.  Only human beings, inflated by solar consciousness, believe we can maintain perpetual expansion, perpetual productivity, perpetual growth.  Only humankind believes that limits are for others, that death and darkness can be engineered away, and that we can escape the fundamental rhythms that govern all life.

In our Icarus-like ascent toward the sun, we have forgotten how to belong to the rest of life on earth and to the planet.  We relate to Earth not as kinfolk but as resource.  We relate to the moon not as sacred companion but as next conquest.  We relate to each other not as fellow beings in mystery but as obstacles or assets in our various projects of domination.

We are living under a subtle tyranny of brightness, a constant pull toward the light.  We are urged to remain hopeful, solution-driven, and oriented toward what can still be saved.  Staying too long in that place hardens optimism into demand.  Anything that does not fit that frame - grief, limitation, the weight of what has already been lost – slips from view.  Rebecca Solnit warns that optimism, when it becomes cultural mandate, excuses us from genuine engagement: “Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement,” she writes, while pessimists assume the opposite.  Both positions let us avoid the difficult work of acting in uncertainty.  James Hillman recognised “a one-sided affection for life”; a sickness in our refusal to honour the necessary descent into darkness.  This soul-work happens only when we stop trying to flee toward the light.

This enforced positivity is itself a form of solar tyranny, a refusal to sit with difficult truths.  We cannot bear to acknowledge the grief of what we have already lost, the scale of the climate catastrophe we have caused, or the violence we perpetuate in the name of light and progress.  So, we grab, like magpies, at the next shiny thing: carbon capture, geoengineering, Mars colonization, moon mining.  Anything rather than face the darkness of what we have done and what we are.

What would it mean to bring lunar consciousness to this time in our history?  To acknowledge that we don’t and can’t know everything and to balance action, clarity and engagement, with receptivity, and listening.  To recognize that some problems simply cannot be solved but only endured and, in time, perhaps we will be the ones to change.  To accept our limits not as failure but as the very structure of reality.  To honour darkness as teacher.

For those of us engaged in depth psychological work, this collective crisis asks something particular of us.  We cannot change the trajectory of nations or space programs, but we can examine where we participate in solar inflation in our own lives. 

Jung was unambiguous about the dangers of inflation.  In Psychology and Alchemy, he wrote: "Inflation should never be interpreted as a sign of definite psychic superiority; at the most it proclaims a corresponding degree of unconsciousness."  When we - individually or collectively - believe ourselves to be godlike, it reveals not our advancement but our profound dissociation from reality.  The gods we think we have become are the archetypes that possess us.

As we move into June and toward the summer solstice, the invitation is not to reject solar energy but to hold it consciously, in balance with its opposite - which too, if one-sided can be equally problematic.  To let the light be strong without becoming blinding.  To engage fully with the world without losing touch with the darkness that grounds and teaches us.  To act with clarity and purpose while remaining humble before all that we cannot know or control.

The moon will not be saved by our restraint.  The Artemis program will proceed.  Wars will continue until some new balance of exhaustion or horror is reached.  The political inflations will play out their destructive arcs.  But we can choose, in our own lives and in our depth work, to practice a different consciousness.  We can honour both sun and moon, both doing and being, both the clarity that illuminates and the darkness that gestates – and remember that we are not gods but humans.  We are limited, mortal, and embedded in natural rhythms we did not create and cannot transcend.

The sun is strong now, and that is good.  But the moon is still there, patient and constant, waiting for us to remember that we need both lights to see truly.  May we find the balance before the hubris costs us everything.