Living in apocalyptic times

SALVADOR DALI
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My grandfather was the first

Of my blood relations

To start living in apocalyptic times

After WW1, when the Western world

Began to unravel.

The surrealists (poets and artists)

Showed us what our reality really looked like

Under the veneer of appearances.

But the collective evolves very, very slowly

And in huge cycles of time.

So the revolutionary / evolutionary shift

That characterizes the last stage of apocalypse,

The initiation, the epiphany, the vision,

The Big Dream, happens individual by individual.

Dualism is the rule for the collective mind,

Stuck on the pendulum.

Tao is the answer,

But Tao eludes the collective.

The dance of the opposites,

Which is really the key to living ecstatically,

And lucidly is reserved

For the one who seeks it.

If one looks closely at the collective,

One sees that the spectrum of collective consciousness

Ranges from those who are lost souls,

To those who have moments of lucidity.

Hell, I see people beginning to break through

At my poetry readings.

Not because I am reading, so much as

That they are ready

To find what they seek.

Someone will just stand out from the rest,

Like a cardinal in a tree.

And I feel like going up to them and saying,

"Do you know how you are shining?"

Jung had a dream between the wars

That the world was locked into a cold freeze.

Bewildered and depressed

He looked out the window and saw a tree.

From the tree hung frozen grapes.

The dream said that each grape was a person,

And that his work was to thaw the fruit

Of the tree of life

One grape at a time through dream-work.

It was an apocalyptic dream.

It was his way forward.

But most of the world remained frozen.