C.G. Jung, dreams, revelations, and wilderness in Open Midnight

In the last passages I'm going to blog about from the book, Brooke Williams writes about C.G. Jung in his book Open Midnight.  pages 117-119.

In The Earth Has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology, and Modern Life, Meredith Sabini, a Jungian psychologist from Berkeley, has compiled pieces from Jung's work and written a brilliant essay to go with them....

[Sabini] believes that our inner world aligns perfectly with the earth's core--the wild places civilization has yet to cover or seal off.  And while psychologists, yogis, and poets are getting better at finding access to that unconscious, evolutionary material, the wilderness--the quiet, wild places where natural systems are still intact and obvious--can be a portal between world.

Dr. Sabini told me that I was an example of what she and her colleagues had been noticing recently.  "That people as naive as you are beginning to think about these ideas," she said, "suggests that the collective unconscious is rising to the surface in unexpected places. This always happens whenever our species has been in trouble." I took that as a compliment.

The surfacing of the collective unconscious when we're in trouble suggests that if we were more comfortable with the collective unconscious and better at accessing it, we would more likely be engaged in efforts to save our species rather than in those that threaten us.  ...

I doubt that I'd be thinking about ground-truth as a noun had I not been out on that slickrock on that spring day.  And I wonder if I'd have recalled that dream about books and midnight if, instead of driving out into the desert, I had gone into my office to work. And if the dead are really out there somewhere, eager to help us, perhaps they get through to us more easily in thin places--in the wilderness. Ground-truth--the ground telling us the only real truth there is.  

These were not isolated events. That day was unique in place and content, but the simple, profound, and unmistakable feeling that a ground-truth--a new clue to life, another bread crumb along the path, a small piece of the large truth puzzle--had been revealed was familiar.

When books have gone, open midnight.

Midnight. Yes, 12:00 exactly, but also halfway between sunset and sunrise. It's the exact point when one day changes to the next. And that vast unconscious world where important secrets are hidden. Midnight is the ending of one thing and the beginning of something else.