Earth EEs/EHEs; Planetary Consciousness Record Type: Review   ID: 62
The Two Million-Year-Old Self Stevens, Anthony
A Jungian psychologist elaborates on Jung’s concept of "the two-million-year-old man that is in all of us," and that we can contact in our dreams, and must be in touch with in order to live wholly. Stevens goes "back to the archetypal foundations of all human experiences, back to the hominid, mammalian, and reptilian ancestors who live on in the structures of our minds and brains....which supports our finite existence and animates our dreams" (p. 5). He discusses the biological bases of archetypes and Jung’s views of how in our dreams "we speak to the species, and the species answers back" (p. 22). He points out that "to Jung true knowledge was revelatory" (p. 35). Here lies the importance not only of dreams but of any form of exceptional experience. Moreover, some EHEs reveal, as Tom Berry points out in The Dream of the Earth, that not only do we harbor within us the "two million-year-old man," but the universe to date, and beyond that, the divine! Also not limited in his thinking, Stevens observes: "As far as Nature is concerned, inner and outer, psyche and matter are all one" (p. 56). He then goes on to show how mental illness results when "the two million-year-old human being within becomes frustrated, frightened, or discontented" (p. 57). Of special interest to readers of this Journal and certainly to its editor is an account of what I may call a therapeutic EHE. Stevens says it originates in the "alchemy of the analytic relationship" (p. 100), including the analyst. At a crucial moment, the healer within, not the analyst’s conscious ego, will speak. He adds: "There is then a moment of electricity. Something changes in the total situation. When it’s all over, I think, Now what on earth was that!" (p. 103). Stevens points out what many an EHE reveals: "The natural world of our planet now depends for its whole future survival on what it can achieve through its intrapsychic representative—the primordial survivor in ourselves" (p. 120).
Publisher Information:	College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1993. 142p. Bibl: 130-134; Chap. notes: 124-129; 2 figs; Index: 135-140; 2 tables

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