Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

Robert Clarke is the author of two book published by Hampton Roads: The Four Gold Keys: Dreams, Transformation of the Soul and the Western Mystery Tradition; and An Order Outside Time: A Jungian View of the Higher Self from Egypt to Christ. I know him as well as a sincere and profound observer of Western man’s precipitous decline. Herewith, an introduction to how a man’s life can be saved by someone he has never met.

CG Jung, Robert Clarke, and the way forward

Years ago, Carl Jung saved Robert Clarke’s life. He did so without ever having met him - in fact without ever knowing that he was alive. He did it in the ultimate arm’s-length manner, by appearing on a television show. The results of that TV program continue to spin themselves out as the years go by, as Robert follows where he was led, creating lessons and opportunities for the rest of us.

Robert Clarke was born during the final years of World War II and grew up in the English midlands town of Burslem, one of the towns that they call The Potteries. His family was working class, his economic and educational horizons were limited, to say the least — college was out of the question — and he wound up in series of dead-end jobs. Unable to believe in the religion he had been raised in, he became to all extents and purposes an atheist. After a while, more than 30 years ago now, the accumulated meaninglessness of his life resulted in his having a nervous breakdown.

Then one night, watching the tube, he saw a documentary that included extensive clips of Jung speaking on his life and work, and suddenly, intuitively, he knew that this was the way forward for him. (Good thing he was in England. Had he been in America he probably would have gotten something on the intellectual level of “Car 54, Where Are You?”)

“When I first saw Jung in the TV programme (by van der Post),” Robert told me recently, “Jung was literally all lit up and magical to me. This is because the ‘wise old man’ archetype was being projected onto him from the collective unconscious. Jung calls this archetype ‘the personification of spirit’ and this is what was happening, the Holy Spirit was projecting onto Jung because, he, Jung, as a wisdom figure was an entirely suitable receptacle. In later dreams the Holy Spirit actually took Jung’s form.”

Then followed years of work, reading, studying, and - mostly - dreaming and paying attention to his dreams. Sure enough, he found that it is as Jung promised: His dreams, attended to, led him back to health and wholeness. But he found much more than that: He found that he was being given the key to the breakdown and possible reconstruction of western civilization.

Robert would never make so grand a statement, so I make it for him. Bear with me.

Several years ago, Robert discovered the work of Colin Wilson, which turned out to be as important to him as it was to me. Colin’s work, first to last, is optimistic, arguing that man has powers only half-suspected that can be developed. It encourages. It’s a world away from the depressing nihilistic escapism that so often passes for serious thought in our time. Although one may argue with the conclusions he draws on any given topic, the underlying optimistic, purposeful tone never wavers.

Encouraged by what he read, Robert contacted Colin, and Colin - as he has done for so many people over the years, bless him - encouraged him to write what he had been experiencing. The result was two books: The Four Gold Keys in 2002 and An Order Outside Time in 2005.

The Four Gold Keys, subtitled Dreams, Transformation of the Soul, and the Western Mystery Tradition, is an account of some of the dream visions that led him through the transformational process. Robert explains Jung’s meaning in a way that is possible only out of personal experience. Archetypes, symbols, initiatory processes are not just words to him: He lived them! Therefore he speaks with the authority that comes only from survival of the mysterious and dangerous process of individuation. And from his own experience he proceeds to show how dreams might help us move our culture forward from its present state of spiritual stagnation.

His second book, An Order Outside Time is subtitled A Jungian View of the Higher Self from Egypt to Christ. In it he makes the startling but convincing argument that the line of western spirituality began in Egypt and was continued through the Jews, developed through the time of Christ - and then stalled, leaving western civilization at a cultural dead end. What do I mean by that? Consider this long Hemingway quotation:

“And I thought sitting up awake in the African night that I knew nothing about the soul at all. People were always talking about it and writing of it, but who knew about it? I did not know anyone who knew anything of it nor whether there was such a thing…. Once I had thought my own soul had been blown out of me when I was a boy and then that it had come back in again. But in those days I was very egotistical and I had heard so much talk about the soul and read so much about it that I assumed that I had one. Then I began to think if Miss Mary or G.C. or Ngui or Charo or I had been killed by the lion would our souls have flown off somewhere? I could not believe it and I thought that we would all just have been dead, deader than the lion perhaps, and no one was worrying about his soul….

“Did Miss Mary and GC have souls? They had no religious beliefs as far as I knew. But if people had souls they must have them. Charo was a very devout Mohammedan so we must credit him with a soul. That left only Ngui and me and the lion.”

(True at First Light, pp. 172-173)

This sincere and troubled thought reflects the terrible burden our dying culture put on people in the 20th century. Our culture is dying — and has been for a good long while — because it has lost contact with reality. I mean this in dead earnest. It is very clear to me. But it is difficult to say it in such a way that it can be actually heard.

For instance, if I were to say, “our civilization has lost contact with its spiritual roots,” many people would assume that I meant that we were not in close touch with earlier civilizations, such as the Romans and Greeks. In other words they would think that “spiritual roots” was a synonym for “heritage.”

If I were to say, “our civilization has lost contact with the reality of spiritual life,” many would assume that I meant merely that people weren’t as religiously observant as former generations.

“Our civilization wrongly construes the nature of reality” would strike them perhaps as a different sentence and a different subject altogether.

Religion is designed to help individuals give birth to the higher self. When, instead, it degenerates into ungrounded automatic belief, or lip service, it loses its transformative power, and perhaps never regains it. It has been said that the gods never return to reinhabit the dwellings they have abandoned. But if old forms die, the ever-living reality does not — and that means that it must continually find new living expression.

To regain access to our spiritual heritage, we need to find the inner key to our spiritual tradition. I am convinced that Dr. Jung found it, or a large part of it.