Bruce Cockburn on God and Raccoons

In recent years, Bruce Cockburn’s spiritual odyssey has come to include Jungian-based dream therapy. “That’s what gave me the image of Christ as a collective animus,” he says. “But is he more of a collective animus figure than Buddha? I don’t think so.” The dream therapy has also led to an interest in neuroscience and the nature of consciousness. “The idea of God as the boundless, as an undefinable and in a certain way unapproachable being except by proxy, has a lot of validity,” Cockburn says. “That means sometimes he’s going to seem like a hallucination or a motivator of things we don’t really want to see. There’s a juicy element of chaos about that, and that’s where I tip over into ‘I don’t have a clue.'”

He continues: “Why are we different from raccoons? We believe we’re special, historically and by nature, but who knows how raccoons see things? In some universe, parallel to this one, raccoons may be running the place. That’s a nice thought. None of us knows shit from Shinola, and the people who claim they do know are grasping at straws – or worse.”

Via Rolling Stone