I’m exploring Spiritual Emergency as a counterbalance to David Halberstam’s exhaustive exploration of how media giants have influenced modern life.

Mr. Halberstam hammers home outer world realities in words like this:

'He exercised awesome power over four decades, he was the voice of the Los Angeles Times; Harry Chandler had begun it, he had created Kyle Palmer, and in time Kyle Palmer and the Los Angeles Times created Richard Nixon... [Palmer] made careers and he broke them, sometimes the same career.  He chose the candidates for the Republicans, dictated policies, floor-managed legislation in the California legislature, told governors which bills to sign.  He was a journalist and a political writer, but in a real sense he was a kingmaker.'
David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

Apparently, Kyle Palmer spent zero time engaged in the pursuit of his inner world.  Spiritual emergency was not his concern.  But curiously, it seems to be mine.  Some quotes from a book about this:

What both Freud and Jung called ‘the unconscious’ is simply what we, in our historically conditioned estrangement, are unconscious of.  It is not necessarily or essentially unconscious... We need not be unaware of the inner world.

One enters the other world by breaking a shell: or through a door: through a partition: the curtains part or rise: a veil is lifted...  Our time has been distinguished, more than by anything else, by a mastery, a control, of the external world, and by an almost total forgetfulness of the internal world.  

If one estimates human evolution from the point of view of knowledge of the external world, then we are in many respects progressing.  If our estimate is from the point of view of the internal world, and of the oneness of internal and external, then the judgment must be very different...

Sanity today appears to rest very largely on a capacity to adapt to the external world - the interpersonal world, and the realm of human collectivities...  But since society, without knowing it, is starving for the inner, the demands on people to evoke its presence in a ‘safe’ way, in a way that need not be taken seriously, is tremendous - while the ambivalence is equally intense.  Small wonder that the list of artists in, say, the last 150 years, who have become shipwrecked on these reefs is so long.
D. Laing, Spiritual Emergency

Is society starving for awareness of the unconscious?  Are you?  Am I?  Is an artist the designated driver, entrusted to move people who are well acclimated to externals from their comfort zone into the ‘insane’ regions beyond the veil - and get the passengers home safe and sound and perhaps a bit rattled by the awareness of inner realities?

Last night I dreamed I drove my tiny car over a steep bridge, in search of home.  A wisp of an old crone sat next to me; I promised her we’d find our way and stop for lunch.  The streets on the other side of the bridge were dark, the pavement more like mossy trails than tarmac, the signs ambiguous at best.  The old lady morphed into a gentleman who, upon our arrival in a subterranean cul de sac, got out of the car and climbed through a small, bright window to have a look around.  ‘We’re in Italy!’ he shouted, bedazzled by the strange light.  I called to him, said we had work to do, we had to get back home.

A dream, a work of art, or a momentary lapse of modernity - a mere step into ‘that’ world leaves us, however ambivalent, vastly more secure.

Photo PlusMinus, Top of Pearl Bridge, licenced under GNU Free Documentation License