Watch / listen to this 19 minute video and then read my response:
This is Professor (and internet influencer) Jiang Xueqin's summary of six eschatologies that 8 major religions agree on, (where they converge), and what it means relative to the current war in Iran.
It seems that the archetypes that are activated in the psyches of the major and secondary players in this epic drama between theologies, cultures, antagonists and alliances that is intensifying in the middle east (Russian, Turkey, Israel, Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, Iraq, S Arabia etc., etc. are not the dominant archetypes that have been constellating in the Western (European / American, North American) collective psyche.
The Western psyche inherited its archetypes from Greece and Rome and from (Western) Roman-Catholicism, all of which gave birth to (spawned) patriarchal, racist capitalism and materialism. The middle eastern collective psyche (lumping that part of the world together, its "journey"), has a different destiny (than the Western psyche) due to its different dominant archetypes.
Jiang is saying the Western psychic journey is running down, running out of steam (becoming irrelevant, heading for civil war), which is correct (the real collapse of the European [Romano-Greco] power structure occurred between, approximately, 1912 - 1950), which turns on a green light for the East and Middle East, but, for this conversation, the Middle East to step up its own kind of mad-dash for fulfillment (of their respective and converging) prophecies, which are, yes, eschatological!
Where this analysis (Jiang's) breaks down is in assuming that the Western psyche is trapped in a certain, all-enveloping, downward spiral. That thinking flies in the face of people like me and, I hope, you, who are straddling. What do I mean by straddling? We have one foot in this downward spiraling Western worldview (those old archetypes that have lost their relevancy (that sucked our fathers / grandfathers down), that harken back to Greece and Rome and Roman Catholic monotheism and their ripple-outs of entrenched patriarchy, racism and exploitive, extractive capitalism . . .
We have one foot in that feeling of "going down with the ship" and one foot in a worldview that is coming up, that is being activated by new archetypes of renewal, which I won't expand on (or identify), but I will just say, we need to just pull our stuck leg out of the quicksand of the doomed Western collective shadow, (I call it the Matrix), and put all our eggs in the basket of the new world-view of renewal.
Those new archetypes couldn't even get traction in the Western psyche until it was a certainty that the old system (the old archetypes) were empty, washed up, done.
But to do that (to pull our stuck leg out of the collapse, we can't just say or claim or argue that the world is alive, and that materialism isn't compatible with any kind of deep spirituality, or waste time and energy trying to convince an atheist (or a materialist) that prayers are effective or that the ancestral spirits are "real" or that we need to live in balance, and be earth-centered, eat for the gut etc, etc or wonder if our dreams actually mean something!. . . We have to live it, walk it, with both feet in. Then we are living larger, the large version of ourselves, honoring our unique birthright to thrive on this hurting planet, and to heal the planet.(Article changed on Mar 17, 2026 at 1:32 PM EDT)
(Article changed on Mar 18, 2026 at 9:19 AM EDT)
