Bøger af John Woodcock

In the early nineties I endured the visitation of a dream-vision that at the same time was a prophecy. A prophecy is not so much a prediction as an engine that begins to unfold into the manifest world, at first through language and then as various cultural practices, particularly the arts. We can thus begin to see, in hint and gesture, a new world coming into being. For some years I was ruthlessly caught up in the prophecy's unfolding processes, simply struggling to survive. With some hard-won distance I now know my dream-vision is a prophecy for human kind, given its scale, power, wisdom, and love.In this book I have gathered a collection of my essays that circumnavigate the mystery of my 1992 dream-vision and trace the path of the prophecy as it continues to incarnate, slowly becoming our new reality, as expressed in our modern cultural productions.

Everything we produce-art, entertainment, political events, books, movies, religion, economics, institutions, and money, etc.-is cultural, i.e. formed from within our minds, or more poetically, soul. Cultural productions find their origin in the form-making soul, as it undergoes its mysterious self-transformations. Dreams are also cultural forms and soul productions. So we can say that cultural productions constitute the dreams of a culture. They may become soul phenomena opening up to give us glimpses of possible futures flowing towards us "long before they happen", as Rilke says. Some of these essays focus on the loss of love in the world, others on the abandonment of any connection with something greater than us. Still others speak of chaos and fear, disintegration. Some address the hint of a possible future rooted in love. Finally, we cannot ignore the direst hint of all as one dark possible future gathers behind our current cultural productions-the withdrawal of the light that bestows meaning on our world: the death of psyche! Only the soul perspective can apprehend these possible futures bearing down on us at this time, looming behind our current cultural productions or dreams. These essays attempt to make these possible futures explicit from a soul perspective-glimpses appearing for a moment within the chaos that so marks the character of our modern times!

Our modern culture is on a deadly trajectory, the endpoint of which is the total elimination of the psyche or soul as a recognizable experience and even as a concept that may be discussed in any way that could matter to our daily lives. This "attack" on the psyche is taking place at the levels of language and body. Many people who personally pay the price of our erasure of soul are often childhood "trauma victims". They have no way to understand their experiences other than the "soul-less" one of "merely" human abuse. But abuse victims sometimes, inexplicably, break through into a realm of love, transforming into artists, teachers, poets, and authors-as mouthpieces for this love. My book is an attempt to account for this phenomenon from the point of view of soul. The transformation into love from within extreme violence to mind and body is pictured by soul to be a tortured process of the descent of angelic love into "matter", as my essays will show.The first essay is a story of the human experience of receiving an angelic descent into material reality. The second essay Angel of a New World shows how this descent appears as a "linguistic event" along with its consequences for our culture, while my essay Surrender shows some of the complexities involved for the human personality as love seeks to enter the human domain. I include my essay on Yunus Emre, the 13th. C. Anatolian love poet to show how at that time, the movement towards love was an upward striving by the human being, away from the ordinary personality, requiring a very different kind of initiation of the human being. Yunus Emre's ascent to love can be contrasted strongly with my last essay, Unancestral Voice, which explores in detail the kind of initiation required by an individual in our time, the time of hardened materialism, when love seeks to descend into the lowest, often most despised aspect of the human being-our personalities.

Inception and The Vortex are two short stories in which the characters are caught up in a cosmic drama of chaos and transformation. They struggle with the experience and its consequences, as they then begin to shape their future lives, in response to their discoveries. Inception is the story of three friends who find their way into chaos. Lisel and David emerge transformed, with a new art form and the beginnings of a new culture, while Peter succumbs to the fate of our technological way of being. The Vortex is the story of four friends: Ed, Gary, Allen and the mysterious Po'. As young students they are approached by a black vortex, injected into the chaos of four possible futures, and then returned to the Present. We then see how each of their lives, now transformed, unfolds in response to their experience in the vortex.