Birdsong as a Compass
Birdsong as a Compass
The booming call of the Pheasant Coucal is soft and rhythmic on a calm, springtime afternoon.
I first noticed it in 2004, when I was eight years old. From the window of our old weatherboard house, I spotted the bird splayed out on top of the wire fence, calling out into the bushland: He has a streaked black head with a robust, downcurved beak, and he’s fanning his broad, intricately patterned wings and tail. He’s big – so big, I take him to be some kind of hawk or eagle. Is he stuck in the wire? Is he injured? Is he calling for help?
I run down to the backyard to untangle him, but when his maroon eye clocks me, he simply glides away and disappears into the undergrowth. Later, I scan the pages of my bird guide for his identity. I find him nowhere near the birds-of-prey section, but rather in an odd place between the parrots and the cuckoos. The book describes: “a booming call during early summer mating season”. He wasn’t stuck – he was performing!
Over the next few years, this Coucal friend returns to his favourite stage every springtime, to fill the garden with his strange, subtle yet powerful frequency. I grow sensitive to his rhythm – to the changes in his plumage as he moults to wintertime.
But soon, I become aware that he’s performing to an empty forest – he’s the last of his kind in this remnant patch of bushland on the Northern edge of the expanding city of Sydney. One year, he too disappears, and no one takes his place. A sense of loneliness buds inside me.
This loneliness echoed through my teenage years. I remember feeling angsty, always angry at “the system”, with its fast cars and consumerism and shitty pop music. I hated how it stressed out my parents and weighed on our family. I hated how it drove species to extinction and pumped the atmosphere full of greenhouse gases.
But high school geography class taught me that all this was inevitable – that the global expansion of the industrial economy and consumer culture was the very meaning of “progress”.
So I chose to escape to another world: an island of my own imagining, in which people dwell in the hollows of huge trees painted with coloured beeswax, and live from the fruits of the forest, and make friends with the animals around them, and go on voyages to trade and celebrate with foreign-tongued peoples from afar. Giant Pheasant Coucals build nests in the vegetable gardens that the island folk plant in the massive boughs of the trees.
I drew innumerable maps of this island and sketched its inhabitants. But a sense of helpless anguish was never far beneath the surface. Every night for a year, I fell asleep listening to the music of The Cure, whose mix of whimsical pop and melancholic goth resonated with a weird little teenage boy who loved life but hated “reality”.
One evening, when I was fifteen, that reality cracked open. My friend’s mum (a hippy woman who fed me my first ever slice of seeded sourdough) took me to a public screening of the documentary The Economics of Happiness. The film railed against the conventional idea of “progress”, and revealed its skewed, neo-colonial ideological scaffolding. Through the lens of a remote community in a part of India I’d never heard of, it showed how corporate globalisation is a programme of economic engineering that is actually generating unemployment, poverty, conflict and depression, even as it chews up ecosystems and trashes the planet.
Believe it or not, this was like music to my ears. Finally, I was relieved of the crippling idea that human prosperity and ecological wellbeing are somehow separate, mutually exclusive goals. The film pointed to the shared roots of our social and ecological problems, laying out a way forward that helps on all fronts. It called this path “localisation”.
I’d never heard that word before, but somehow it made the world of sense to me. It meant growing food close to home, trading it at local markets with people with familiar names and faces. It meant allowing diverse cultures and individuals to follow their own dreams, unimpeded by the pressures of centralised profit-making. It meant rebuilding diversified farms connected to local, circular economies, in which the line between “wild” and “cultivated” was blurred.
This connection – between local economic revitalisation and cultural and biological diversification – was like the missing piece of the puzzle for me. It was a pragmatic policy framework; a roadmap to a world that looked more like my island, and less like cookie-cutter suburbia and big grey shopping malls. One that sounded less like Taylor Swift and more like Barn Swallows nesting in the eaves.
Thanks perhaps to my sensitivity to the weird and wonderful diversity of the bird world, this piece of the puzzle fell right into place. I realised that, by re-embedding our economies, our cultures and our spirits in local ecologies, the human world could one day be as beautiful, as salubrious, as intricately patterned as a Pheasant Coucal’s tail feather.
I left that film-screening a changed boy. I started volunteering at the nearby community garden, learning about composting and food-growing, and turning my obsessive mind to understanding localisation.
Now, I’m 24 years old and I haven’t changed all that much. I’m still obsessed with birds, I still listen to The Cure, and I’m still keenly learning about localisation. I even work for Helena Norberg-Hodge, the director of The Economics of Happiness and my teenage hero. We go on walks through the forest together, and she gets so excited when I tell her about the birds we hear.
Of course, it still saddens me deeply when I notice an absence where once there was a Brush Bronzewing, or a Rockwarbler, or a family of Yellow-tufted Honeyeaters. That loneliness never left. But now, I’m thankful I can feel it.
I’m thankful because its empty shape contours the place where the wider community of life should be. It therefore serves as an invaluable compass: to guide me through the confusion of ideology and pseudo-solutions, towards the only place where life – in all its wondrous diversity – can truly be cherished and nourished. It points the way forward: towards the local.
Dismantling Solid Bricks
Dismantling Solid Bricks
A knapsack packed with the essentials has been resting in the corner of the room, where my sister stood with a pregnant belly. Terrified of COVID-19, she needed constant reassurance even though I lived with the same fears and questions. We couldn’t even hug.
Month of May came by she gave birth. Her newborn son was in an incubator. She left the hospital and started wiping off everything she would touch with sanitizer in her home. It became a full time job. The devastating part was that grandma couldn’t see the newborn for a couple of months.
July arrived grandma quarantined herself. She had a COVID -19 test. Her goal was to hold her grandson. We became afraid of each other. The sacrifices we made helped to transform us to some degree. The constant scrubbing of hands and wearing face masks became part of our daily practice of compassion and caring for each other.
The value of black lives has worn thin. All in the family worry about my thirty-five year old brother. Being a black man in America ain’t easy. We don’t want his face pushed down on the pavement or falsely accused of a crime.
News of violence about people of color tore our small foundation of hope, already unstable. Now, we’re rebuilding hope & trust in the goodness of our world. My newborn nephew will grow up. May we make much progress in valuing black lives before he is of age to understand the manic oppressive world of people of color.
My knapsack in the corner of the room carries a small book of essays by Audre Lorde titled The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House.
My anger shifted from moving towards healing to a mass of rage that needs to be cut off at its roots.Transformation is not a linear journey.
I realized my progress – then regression – as ever evolving.
Maybe moving towards the light of understanding requires us to look at the darkness even more closely.
I picked up my knapsack headed to the public bus to visit my nephew. I wish rage like a wild leopard would both protect our blackness and teach us the tools to dismantle solid bricks.
Deschooling Dialogues: On Initiation, Trauma and Ritual with Francis Weller
Deschooling Dialogues: On Initiation, Trauma and Ritual with Francis Weller
This is an edited transcript of a conversation that took place on November 4, 2020 as part of an interview series titled, Deschooling Dialogues. Alnoor Ladha (AL) interviews Francis Weller (FW), a psychotherapist, writer and activist who pioneered the method of soul-centered psychotherapy. He is the author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief; The Threshold Between Loss and Revelation (with Rashani Réa) and In the Absence of the Ordinary: Essays in a Time of Uncertainty, which is the focus of this interview. The first chapter of the book, Rough Initiations, is featured in this issue of Kosmos Journal.
AL: Hello Francis. Wonderful to be here with you. Thank you for your essay contribution to Kosmos. We will get into your latest book, In the Absence of the Ordinary, but first, can you share a bit of your background with the community?
FW: The archetypal psychology of Jung and then [James] Hillman have been my main influences on how I perceive the work of soul. We are very dominated by self-psychology right now. It’s like drinking dust most of the time. What I wanted is something with a little more body to it, and that’s where I found Hillman’s writings and his teachings and guidance on how to work with the soul. I’ve been a therapist for almost 40 years, so I’ve developed my own approach to working with people, which I call soul-centered psychotherapy.
Along the way, I began to see the soul is here for the community. It’s not so much an interior project. There’s a saying that ‘the greater part of the soul lies outside the body’. If that’s true, then I’m actually ensouled when I’m participating. When I’m with the atmosphere, when I’m with the colors, when I’m with the trees, when I’m with my other fellow beings, that’s when I’m, in a sense, most ensouled.
Then I began working around cultivating relationships to community-building. I was introduced to the work of ritual through my friendship with Malidoma Somé, the African teacher and elder. We taught together for about six years trying to find this amalgam between Indigenous traditions and the western poetic, spiritual, psychological traditions. That really spurred my desire to create ritual-based community, because that’s the most archaic, that’s the most ancient form of religion.
For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings worked through trauma communally through ritual practices. Ritual was the re-regulating practice after trauma or a death. What happens when we abandon those forms? Again, another thread of what the soul yearns for is dropped. I’ve spent the last 20-plus years developing ritual practices for community around grief, around gratitude, around initiation, around reclaiming lost parts of our being, around renewing the world.
AL: One of the things that struck me from your latest essay series, In Absence of the Ordinary, but especially from the chapter Rough Initiations, is the distinction between trauma culture and initiation culture. How do you see this playing out in the dominant culture?
FW: I was working with the people in my practice, and also the community work, and then in the cancer program at Commonweal. I began to really feel into the similarities of my initiation work with men. What these patients were going through, how similar the process was, that in any true initiatory process, there’s three things that happen. First, there’s a severance from the world that you once knew. Then there’s a radical alteration in your sense of identity. And then there’s a profound realization that you can never go back to the world that was. In true initiation, you don’t want to go back to the world that was. Initiation is meant to escort you into a wider, more inclusive, participatory, sacred cosmos.
Trauma, on the other hand, has the inverse effect. The same three things happen. There’s a severance from the world. There’s a radical alteration of the identity and in a sense, you cannot go back to what was. But what trauma does to the psyche is it reduces it down to a singularity. I become cut off and severed from that sense of being engaged with a wider and more encompassing sense of identity. I become isolated in the cosmos. If you talk to anybody who’s gone through trauma, that’s the effect that it has on the body and on the psyche. You are torn out of that sense of being a part of the cosmos.
What distinguishes these two things is initiation, what I call the contained encounter with death. The containment was provided by the community, by the elders, by the ancestors, by the rituals, by the space itself. In a sense, you are initiated into a place, not into abstraction. You are actually initiated into the ground beneath your feet. Those are the five things that provided a containment field for that encounter with death, because all initiations require some kind of encounter with death.
What I call trauma is an uncontained encounter with death. There’s nothing there holding you when that same precipice is approached. You are left basically naked, nothing holding you. Again, you contract back into a place of survival in that moment rather than expand out into that wider, cosmological sense of being. We don’t have those containment fields in white, western culture. We still live through these encounters with death, which are inevitable. I often say initiation is not optional.
You don’t get to choose whether or not you’re going to be taken to these edges. You will be taken to those edges. The only thing we have to ask ourselves is what we require to make it meaningful.
And the genuine means of breakthrough happen when these containment fields are present. If they’re not, we’re living in an ongoing traumatic field. That’s where we are right now.
AL: It seems to be very difficult for people to be critical of the culture in which they are enmeshed within. There are all sorts of mechanisms that dominant cultures use to further socialize and entrench us including patriotism, nationalism, supremacy, progress, and even the idea that you should be grateful because you would be nothing in the absence of the existing culture. How does one disentangle themselves from identifying with the all-pervasive dominant culture? How do we get to the boundary-dissolving states that allow us to see the true effects of culture? How have you done this personally?
FW: These are really pertinent, essential questions for us right now. How do I want to approach this? For me, I guess it happened primarily through suffering. I had this profound feeling of emptiness in my being, and this emptiness was personalized, as if it was some character flaw, some defect in my own being. As I sat with many other people in my practice, that thread of emptiness came up over and over and over again, to the point where I had to begin to question whether it was my own personal flaw or whether it was a wider systemic issue.
Then simultaneously, through studying traditional cultures and Indigenous cultures, I began to look at how they raised people, the value of belonging, the central sense of your necessity, that you were needed, that you were valued, the value of ancestors, the value of ritual. All these practices kept a cohesiveness so that the psyche didn’t go into that place of feeling empty. Where this emptiness comes from is our hyper-focus on individualism, which began several hundred years ago at least with the Enlightenment.
We can go back even further to the disruption of tribal culture in general. If we go back deep enough into our lineages, we all come from intact tribal cultures. The Roman invasions of Europe and various other drivers began to dislodge these things and we began to become adaptive to the dominant culture, but the real rupture, I think, came in the 16th and 17th centuries when the emphasis began to move from a sense of village-mindedness to the individual. That reached its zenith now here in white western culture in America, I think, where we have abandoned primarily all sense of identity beyond my own interiority. We are separate. We may exist, but there’s nothing that really binds us together in this ideology. This ideology of individualism breeds this feeling of emptiness.
AL: Please say more.
FW: What we do with emptiness are all the isms you just mentioned. Patriotism, nationalism, capitalism, racism. All these isms are attempts to stuff the emptiness with something, because the emptiness is intolerable. We cannot endure emptiness, so we fix it. We also neglect what I call primary satisfactions, which are the satisfactions that evolved over our long evolutionary process of friendship and ritual and singing together, sharing meals, being under the stars together, hearing the stories around the fire at night, gathering wood, grieving together, celebrating together. Those are the primary satisfactions, and almost none of those exist any more.
We then lean into our secondary satisfactions. Power, strength, wealth, privilege, hierarchy, rank, etc. On a more personal level, addictions of all sorts are attempts to stuff something into that hole at the core of our lives, because it’s intolerable. As you know, as an addict, you can never get enough of what you don’t need.
You keep filling the hole with more cocaine or more power or more money. The billionaires keep saying, “I don’t have enough.” In the Native American tradition, they call it wetiko, a cannibalistic disease where you can never consume enough. You’re always hungry, always wanting more.
I think that’s partly where this is all coming from, the abandonment of the primary satisfactions, the abandonment of village life, the abandonment of a sense of identity that goes beyond the individual.
AL: Indeed. In Sufism, we talk about the universal identity as the primary identity, and our individual identities as secondary identity. But in western culture it’s topsy-turvy, as most things are. Everywhere you go, we have the reification of that individual identity from your career as personality signifier to the machinery of bureaucracy (e.g. passports, social security numbers) to the “preference porn” of social media, where your personal preferences are synonymous with your small ‘I’ identity.
So within the context of late-stage capitalism, where every aspect of our lives is mediated by capital, from where we live, what we do for a living, how we interact with other human beings, our self-worth, etc. how do we co-create and reclaim intact cultures outside of the dominant paradigm? How do we cultivate an ethic of inter-being?
FW: When I began my work, particularly, when I first began talking about grief, it was hard to convince people to even come to a lecture, let alone come to a weekend where we were going to be working with grief. Over the years, I think the denial systems have begun to crack. The denial is cracking. The façade of what capitalism can provide for us is collapsing. That’s part of the hidden benefit of COVID.
I have faith that, on small-scale encounters, whenever we hold a grief ritual, invariably there are people there who have never done anything like this at all, but they know they need to be inside of a holding space to process their grief. Invariably, somebody will say at the end of it, “I’ve never done anything like this at all, but it felt oddly familiar.” What is that familiarity? That’s our deep time inheritance. This is how we always did it. My faith is in that memory. My faith is that we’re not trying to reinvent something. We’re trying to remember something, and when you’re in states that we’re in like right now, that’s what we can call upon. People are coming more and more and more to that recognition that the secondary satisfactions of wealth and power and prestige are bankrupt. As one of my mentors said, “Yeah, you climbed the ladder of success and you only find that it’s leaning against the wrong building.” There’s nothing up there. It’s an empty promise.
When we’re in ritual space together, singing together, sharing poetry, grieving together, giving thanks, we’re not wondering where the next iPhone is going to come from or where the next TV set is going to come from or when can I get my new car? We are inside of primary satisfactions, and the soul is content.
Can we get there? We have to. The only thing that’s ever been sustainable as a human species are small-scale, localized cultures. We don’t have culture right now. We have a loose-based society. We have agreements societally, like stop at a red light and go at a green light. We have loose societal agreements, but we don’t have culture, so we have to return back to what culture really promotes, which is art, imagination, conviviality, mutual entanglement. That’s what true culture is built on.
AL: Yes, the future lies in the remembering, in the acknowledgement of the endowment of our deep time ancestry. At the same time, I feel the bifurcation as well, the extreme polarities of light and dark. The remembering is getting quickened and so is the psychosis; the wetiko fever is getting hotter. There’s no neat, tidy narrative to it. It feels like two wings of a bird going in opposite directions. Perhaps the apparent catastrophe is the rebirth?
FW: That would be my prayer. We are entering the long dark. I use that term not negatively at all. I use it alchemically, that certain things can only happen in darkness. We are in a time of decay, a time of collapse, a time of endings, a time of sheddings. These are necessary.
We are seeing this last gasp effort to try to uphold the old structures. Keep capitalism going. Keep the stock market inflated. They’re all going to collapse. They have to, because the system, as you know from your work, is unsustainable. Not only in terms of world resources, but just in terms of human capacity to endure that kind of emptiness.
The collapse is happening. I think what we have to do right now is ask ourselves and each other how do we become skillful in navigating our walk in the dark? How do we cultivate imagination? How do we cultivate collaboration? How do we cultivate fields of reciprocity with the Earth, within human and more-than-human communities, so that we’re not extracting more than what can be replenished? How do we cultivate the spiritual values of restraint and mutuality?
As far as what we’re going through right now, we’re watching the historic trauma unfold, and the reactions to trauma, which are panic, terror, exaggerated expressions of masculinity in its grossest form. And we’re also seeing a heightened and quickened sense of compassion. People are beginning to look beyond these dualities and whether that’s gender issues or race issues. They’re beginning to see what is non-binary. What does the third way look like? What does the imagination take us into when we stop seeing it as an either/or situation? We’re seeing the ancestors of Nazis sitting down with the ancestors of the Holocaust survivors finding common ground. We’re finding the ancestors of slave-owners and the ancestors of the slaves finding common ground. That’s momentous. That’s hopeful. That binary system is beginning to create a third, a new imagining of how our mutual lives are so entangled, therefore our healing is entangled.
We have to give up the idea of private salvation and the idea of private healing. That’s all fantasy. We either heal communally or we don’t.
How we get through this whitewater over the next months or years? I don’t know. That’s going to take a lot of internal fortitude. I was doing a series last month, and one of the things we were talking about was the transgenerational transmission of trauma, but I said, “We also are the inheritors of the transgenerational transmission of courage, of resilience, of love, of wisdom. Can we call on that as well?”
The work right now is to become immense. We have to get our arms around immense things. Violence and hatred and bigotry and racism. And also around love and compassion and devotion and a certain fidelity to protect what is alive. We have to become immense. This is not a time to become small.
I have no idea if I responded to your question at all.
AL: Linearity is overrated. You answered on many levels.
I’m going to read you a line from your own writing, which may be awkward, but for the sake of the context for the next question which is on mythology. In Rough Initiations, you say, “Many of the great myths begin in a time such as this. The land has become barren, the king corrupted, the ways of peace lost. It is in these conditions that a ripeness arises for radical change. It is a call to courage and humility. Every one of us will be affected by the changes wrought by this difficult visitation.” Can you talk about the mythological nature of this moment.
FW: We always think our times are unique. Obviously, it has a quality of uniqueness now because of the scale of potential collapses, not just economic, but also planetary, living systems collapse. The scale might be more exaggerated than what you’re familiar with, but human beings have gone through these epics before. The myths tell us something very important, that we can find our way through, that there are wisdom teachings in all traditions that can inform us, that can give us some sense of what we need to do in order to enact gestures of courage or gestures of reconciliation or gestures of healing. What do we do?
The myths that tell us that we can’t over extract from the Earth. For example, the Greek myth of Erysichthon. He was a king who had great contempt for the gods and goddesses, and a great deal of self-importance. He wanted to build a banquet hall to his own radiance. He sent his soldiers out to the woods to chop down the trees. It happened to be Demeter’s sacred woods, and the soldiers were very reluctant when he commanded them to cut. Every tree that they cut into bled. At the very heart of the woods was Demeter’s tree itself, and on this tree were hung all these mementos from people who received healing and prayers answered from Demeter.
No one would touch the tree. So then Erysichthon decided to cut it down himself. Demeter cursed him with endless, unsatisfying hunger. He could never be satisfied. He began eating everything in the kingdom. He sold his daughter [Mestra] into slavery to get money to buy more food, and then one day, while he was eating, he bit his finger, and the taste of his own blood consumed him, and he consumed his own body.
AL: This is the story of the west. This is where the concept of wetiko meets the Enlightenment.
FW: Yes, this is the story we are in right now. Hopefully, these wisdom stories give us some pause to say, “We have to regard the sacred.” When we lose regard for the sacred, we will consume everything. Isn’t that what we’ve done? We’ve turned everything into an object. This is a resource rather than a living system, those sacred groves. A part of our call right now is to re-sacralize, to reimagine the presence of the sacred. The deeper we go into physics, the deeper we go into biology, the deeper we go into psychology, we find at their shared root, mystery. Absolute, enduring mystery. That’s the closest I can get to what I would call the holy, to the sacred.
AL: How do we get back to the sacred grove? What do we need to unlearn both at a cultural level and an individual level, to not eat ourselves?
FW: What we need to unlearn, from my perspective, is our reification of self, because self is a boundaried, encapsulated identity. It cuts me off from you. It cuts me off from the trees. It cuts me off from the turtles and the sky and the moon. What we need to remember, to re-enter, to reanimate is that we are living embodiments of soul life, and soul, like I say, is incredibly entangled with everything around us. Only if we could unlearn the separation through identity….
And I have to confess how much my profession reifies the separate self every day as the epitome of what we’re supposed to be. That saddens me greatly, that there’s no psyche in psychology any more. There’s self. It’s selfology now rather than psychology.
If we could unlearn this artificial encapsulation and the empty self and come back into that robust embrace of the soul, what I call our composite identity, then we would remember our wild entanglement with everything. Then I wouldn’t feel like I’m just in self-preservation, but I would be helping to preserve the living fabric of all things. That would be a holy obligation.
AL: That’s a beautiful articulation of the meaning that has been lost when you’re in a context that doesn’t hold up that sacred obligation as the highest act of devotion. Not as an externally imposed duty, but rather, as the reciprocal responsibility we have for the endowments we have been entrusted with. It reminds me of a Sufi proverb attributed to the Great Mother. She says to her children, “You are entrusted with everything and entitled to nothing.”
FW: Right. I recently wrote something very similar. “The process (initiation) yielded someone more attuned to responsibilities than rights, more aware of multiple entanglements than entitlements.”
AL: That’s a perfect way to end this conversation. It’s an honor to be entangled with you.
New Visions Give Hope in Dire Times
New Visions Give Hope in Dire Times
Cover image | Loons
Beyond Silence
New visions give hope in dire times.
All our creativity and imagination must come together to create something new that lasts.
I try to create a timelessness, to transcend boundaries, to bind – to unite and not divide – with the hope that others will see that too.
May what is created be large enough to include everyone – that each viewer anyplace in the world could find some connection, some grace, some beauty that speaks to them.” – Nancy Earle
Feather and Fin
Mother and Child
Circle of Friends
Earth, Jewel of the Cosmos
Nancy Earle was first introduced to the power of art to communicate through image and color by her father, Edwin Earle, who lived among the Hopi and honored their ceremonial life through his paintings of the Kachina dancers. The beauty and imagery of native and Southwest art began to inspire her own paintings after she spent a summer at the art Institute in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico following her graduation from Trinity College in Vermont. Returning to the States, Nancy went on to study art at the University of Vermont and later at Montclair University in New Jersey where she earned her masters degree in art in 1972.
After entering the Franciscan Order in 1967, Nancy’s artistic vision increasingly became an expression of her chosen spiritual path. In 1984, Nancy set up her Wellspring studio in rural Maine where she further developed her distinctive use of color, powerful symbols, and archetypal figures. Her paintings illuminate the sacredness that surrounds us and explore our responsibilities to the world in which we live. Using images of the moon, sun, water, mountains, vessels, and trees, she creates rich visual metaphors that touch her viewers’ deeper knowing and work to dissolve barriers of culture and creed while revealing patterns of our true connectedness. Her paintings seek to enlighten and transform as well as to heal the fissures of separation.
Awaken
Communion
Death and Rebirth
Death and Rebirth
Fire season came early in 2020. An unseasonable summer lightning storm set fire to the land, the air dense with smoke, the sun rising red, ashes falling. After sheltering in place for months from fear of the pandemic, we sheltered from fire and smoke, hardly daring to open a window. Is this what it means to live at the end of an era, poisoned air and a burnt land, thousands of migratory birds falling dead from the sky in exhaustion, their migratory paths obliterated? We are experiencing a civilization dying, and as it dies it is attacking its own ecosystem, the web of life stretched to breaking. A society increasingly divided, economic inequality and poverty rising, people caught in conspiracy theories as they fear a world they cannot understand or control. We can feel the collective anxiety of a culture for whom the future is uncertain, its dream of progress and prosperity fading.
We do know that we have to learn to live in harmony with the earth and her more-than-human inhabitants. We can no longer afford to be exiles in our own land, starved of what is sacred. With care and love and respect we can learn a different way to be. But first we have to face the dying of this time, feel the sorrow in our hearts at what is being lost, species extinct, wild lands and natural habitats vanishing. We need to be fully present in this experience, because it is here as we stand on the threshold of collapse that the doors of light are to be found, as in our own life cycle. If we dream too early of a sustainable future we will miss this moment, this light, this opportunity. Our feet will not be touching the ground, our hearts will not open with grief. Then the angels will pass us by.
Spring follows winter, the earth turns and the seasons change. And unless the present ecocide is so extreme that humanity cannot survive, a new civilization will emerge from the wreckage, from the devastation of our present time. Some people envision a technological future, an advanced sustainable civilization run on clean energy. But those who have looked closely through the cracks in our present culture know that this is just a figment of a science-fiction imagination.
“If sustainability only refers to humanity and not to the whole web of life, we are just recreating a dying image. If we do not take the foundational step of returning our consciousness to the living Earth, reconnecting to the ground under our feet, the future will not come alive.”
Rebirth requires an end to the story of separation and an awakening to the story of a living oneness, a unity with all of life. These are the primal values we need for a future to come alive in the ruins of our industrial world.
Looking at the world around us, with accelerating environmental collapse, inequality and divisiveness, power dynamics and patterns of control, this seems like an intangible dream, easily dissolved by the harsh light of our present reality. Our present collective dream is still material prosperity, supported by either fragmented democracies or increasingly authoritarian regimes. Care for the Earth is not our most pressing concern, even as the temperature rises and the forests burn. The story of humanity as separate from the Earth, or having “dominion over the earth,” has a stranglehold on our conscious and unconscious selves.
How will we then transition to a living future from our present dying Earth? How many species will have to die, forests be clear-cut, oceans poisoned with plastic, before we awaken from this nightmare we call progress? The present moment seems like a Zen koan, “How do you get the goose out of the bottle without breaking the bottle or hurting the goose?” The simple Zen answer, “Look, it’s out!” may image a sudden shift in consciousness, but it does not seem to point to the reality of any transition.[1] And while I believe in miracles and magic, I also recognize the hard, broken landscape we are entering. I could see it out of my window in the smoke of the August wildfires, the air too thick to breathe.
For over twenty years I have been watching this division unfold—the vision of a future based upon oneness that recognizes the interdependence of all of life, and the bleakness of our present time of greed and corruption and the wasteland it creates. Seeing young people protest for a future that they may never know touches a deep chord—how many generations will be lost until we turn back to the Earth? Or most simply, how long will it take before we return to values that support life, that recognize that all life, all creation, is sacred? Not just human beings, but butterflies and spiders, rocks and rivers, grasses and forests, algae and fungi…
When we return our consciousness to this primary awareness, this simple truth known and honored by our ancestors, spring will come again. How this spring will awaken, how the seeds will grow, what trees will remain to bear fruit, will depend upon our attitude and actions in the coming years and decades. Those who have recognized the Earth as a single, organic, interconnected living being can support this transition, can help to keep the inner rivers of life pure, so that they can nurture what will be born. Rebirth always comes from the darkness, like seeds underground, or the initiation chambers of the ancient mysteries. But this darkness can be full of the nutrients needed for rebirth, and soil that looks barren can still be tended with love and care.
“And what of the divine light that is our true nature, and also present within and around all that exists? How can we work with this light in the darkness of the coming decades, this light that was present in the beginning and knows the meaning and purpose of our human journey together with the Earth?”
This is the light that knows the names of creation, how all of existence is woven together—our dreams with the cry of the screech owl, the wind bending the branches of the tree, the waves crashing on the shore nearby.
It is important to understand that this light is not the same as the sunlight that warms us and helps our crops to grow. This spiritual light has a consciousness, a knowing. On the most fundamental level it knows the names of creation and the divine purpose of all that exists, just as the divine light of your own soul knows your own deepest purpose. In spiritual practice connecting with this inner light enables you to live this purpose, to sing the song of your soul in your daily life. Which is why reconnecting with this light may often involve a life crisis or change, a new career or relationship, as you shift from a life centered on the ego to the life of the soul. When I was nineteen, after I met my teacher and was reconnected to my own inner nature, I stopped being an architectural student, which was my mother’s dream, and worked odd jobs until I went back to college and studied English literature and became an English teacher. My love of words has been central to my life since.
Through the work of reconnecting the Earth with Her own light, we can help Her to remember Her song and sacred purpose. She is not a resource to be exploited, nor is She a wild force to be tamed. The light of the Earth weaves this song into to the physical world, bonding matter and spirit and divine purpose. The central purpose of humanity has always been to live and celebrate this song, this primal belonging, until we forgot, began our power struggles and became separate from both the divine and the Earth. And then the soul of the Earth began to recede, and finally, thousands of years later, became sick, just as the collective soul of humanity has become sick. If you are cut off from your source you become sick. The original imbalance comes from forgetting or being disconnected from your true nature.
And this is why we stand at a crossroads more crucial than just climate crisis, and why rebirth is essential. Our covenant was to sing the song of creation, through stories and prayers, ceremonies and just simple daily acts. Humanity brought a quality of consciousness into the many-textured levels of existence; we brought a divine light into the world and wove it into the fabric of life—we brought the world alive with our stories, in a way that was quite distinct from the solely instinctual consciousness of the animate world. When we gradually stopped singing these stories to the Earth, Her soul began to withdraw, until now in our computerized world the world soul, the anima mundi, is long forgotten, unrecognized, unsung. And She needs to come back to life, to be remembered. This is the central note of any rebirth: a reconnection with the Earth as a sacred being, so that Her soul can reawaken and live in the light, as She did in the first day.
If She can reawaken, then together we can create an organic self-organizing human civilization according to the values and principles of our shared existence. We will no longer impose our ideas or patterns of power and domination, but become partners, working, living, singing together with the Earth. And when the Earth reawakens, magic and miracles will come back into life and we will remember why we are here. This is the possibility for our evolution, the door that is being opened, back to the garden after our painful journey of separation, of forgetting.
How this possibility will unfold on the outer stage of life we do not yet know. Climate crisis will batter our society, extreme heat and rising seas, fire and catastrophic storms will change our global demographics. Physical survival will become the central question for many communities. But for those who are not caught in the fading dream of our present civilization, who can develop the tools of resilience, the light will be present, the grace that belongs to any death and transition. And this light needs to be lived here, in our simple daily acts, especially those of love and care for each other and the Earth. We need to weave this light back into our everyday life and the life of the Earth, and to try to listen to its song, become a part of its prayer. This may appear as something too insubstantial in the face of the many outer challenges of the coming decades. But for any real rebirth to take place we need to return to the beginning, to the seeds of our existence, which are not just physical survival. Our forgetfulness has brought us to this place, this barren landscape where the water is running dry. Our remembrance will turn our attention to what is waiting to be born.
Adapted from A Handbook for Survivalists: Caring for the Earth, A Series of Meditations.
Available as a free PDF: www.goldensufi.org | ©2020, The Golden Sufi Center
References
[1] Some people see the possibility for such a sudden shift in our collective consciousness, from separation to an awareness of life’s essential unity. While I do see a consciousness of oneness as being foundational to humanity’s evolution, and any future civilization, I also recognize the grip that the present story of separation (and its offspring, scientific materialism) has on our collective consciousness, as well as being embodied in the structures and values of our present civilization. Which is why it seems that if we are to make this transition, economic and social collapse may be a part of our journey, breaking the stranglehold of this story.
Vision and Change | Fermentation as Metaphor
Vision and Change | Fermentation as Metaphor
I am deeply devoted to my practice of fermentation. In my home at this moment, I’m tending two long-term sourdough starters, one wheat and one rye, along with yogurt, and jun, a cousin of kombucha; periodically I dip into large vessels filled with half a year’s supply of kraut and kimchi while I wait for misos and shoyu and doubanjang and mirin and takuan and salo and saké and various country wines and meads to slowly ferment. In this realm there is a lot of waiting.
As my personal obsession with the microbial transformations of foods and beverages developed into books and a career as a fermentation revivalist, I have continued to ferment and learn and experiment in my home kitchen. I have had the great privilege to teach in many different parts of the world, and my travels have enabled me to taste and see incredibly varied fermented foods and beverages from wildly diverse cultural traditions, endlessly fascinating (and delicious).
Yet the more I ferment, and the more I think and talk and learn about fermentation, the more I realize that what is even more exciting to me about fermentation than its practical manifestations is its profound metaphorical significance.
The English language uses the word fermentation to describe not only the literal phenomenon of cellular metabolism that it is—microorganisms and their enzymes digesting and transforming nutrients—but also much more broadly to indicate a state of agitation, excitement, and bubbliness. The expansive metaphorical possibilities of fermentation arise from the etymological roots of the word, from the Latin fervere, which means “to boil.” Long before the relatively recent scientific understanding of fermentation in the late nineteenth century as the work of bacteria and fungi, it was widely recognized by the bubbles that it (generally) creates. Therefore, anything bubbly, anything in a state of excitement or agitation, can be said to be fermenting.
According to the venerable Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest documented figurative use of the word fermentation in a surviving document comes from a Bible commentary, circa 1660, titled The Treasury of David, and is rather lurid: “A young man . . . in the highest fermentation of his youthful lusts.” And nearly as early, the term was applied to religious devotion, in this 1672 citation: “The Ecclesiastical Rigours here were in the highest ferment.” A 1681 political analysis observed: “Several Factions from this first Ferment, Work up to Foam, and threat the Government.”
Fermentation is extremely versatile as a metaphor. Inside our minds, frequently, ideas ferment as we think about them and imagine how they might play out. Feelings too can ferment, as we process them and they move through us. Sometimes this interior ferment transcends our individual experience and grows into a broader social process. In metaphor, as in the biological phenomenon, there is nothing that cannot be fermented. For decades now as a reader, ever since I began taking note of all things fermented, I have noticed in writing many varied metaphorical uses of the word ferment. “In the musical ferment of the late ’60s, influences were coming from every direction,” according to one article. “In the 1920s, Punjab was in religious ferment,” stated another. An artist’s obituary noted that he arrived in New York in 1955 and “was quickly swept up in the artistic ferment of the time.” The editor of a political journal was quoted in 2017 as saying, “It took a Trump, of all people, to allow for a certain level of intellectual ferment to take place.”
Certainly no particular ideology has a monopoly on fermentation. Intellectual, social, cultural, political, artistic, musical, religious, spiritual, sexual, and other forms of bubbly excitement are part of the range of human experience. In any realm of our lives, it is possible to get caught up in a feeling of shared effervescence. We should all be so lucky. Whatever the context, like its literal twin, metaphorical fermentation is an unstoppable force that people everywhere have harnessed, and gotten caught up in, in all sorts of different ways.
Fermentation can be driven by hopes, dreams, and desires; or by necessity, desperation, and anger; or by other forces altogether. Fermentation is always going on somewhere, though generally not everywhere. Sometimes in its absence it can seem elusive.
But when metaphorical fermentation occurs, it often spreads, transforming what was into what’s next. Fermentation is no less than an engine of social change.
As a force for change, fermentation is relatively gentle. Bubbles are not flames. Contrast fermentation with that other transformative natural phenomenon: fire. Fire destroys whatever lies in its path. Fermentation is not so dramatic; its transformative mode is gentle and slow. Steady, too. Driven by bacteria that spawned all life on Earth and continue to be the matrix of all life, fermentation is a force that cannot be stopped. It recycles life, renews hope, and goes on and on.
From my perspective, fermentation is generally a good thing, in both its culinary manifestations and its metaphorical ones. But just as some people fear and revile the strong recognizable flavors and aromas of certain fermented foods, or even the idea of them, others think the world would be a better place if everyone understood and accepted their role in it, and didn’t ask too many challenging questions; in other words, if bubbliness, agitation, and fermentation were minimized. Also, hateful and corrosive ideas can result from bubbliness and agitation, just as social justice can. The mass protests against racism and police brutality are examples of fermentation, but so is the surge of racism and anti-immigrant xenophobia around the world, and people feeling increasingly emboldened to give public expression to white supremacist ideas. Fermentation is a force that cannot be controlled, and the changes it renders are not always desirable. Even so, the metaphorical ferment is an unending source of new ideas, dynamic energy, and inspiration, and our best hope for regeneration.
“What fermentation shows us is the invisible connections of everything,” writes Mercedes Villalba in her Fervent Manifesto. “You learn to cultivate the future.”
The above excerpt is from Sandor Ellix Katz’s new book Fermentation as Metaphor (Chelsea Green Publishing, October 2020) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.
We Are All Radical
We Are All Radical
Shortly before the recent US presidential election, amidst an incoming flurry of political calls, emails, and text messages, I received a text from a progressive organization I’ve been following for years.
“By voting in this election,” it said, “we can send the radical right to its rightful place: the ash heap of history.”
I closed the text and sat quietly for a moment, thinking. What end does that serve?
The night before the election, I texted a friend of mine on the far right of the political spectrum. “No matter who wins,” I typed with my thumbs, “I pray we won’t fall into violence, and that we’ll treat one another with respect.”
His answer: “No matter who wins, I pray the radical left will take control over their minions who are rioting and hellbent on destroying our country.”
In a country where peaceful demonstrators for racial justice have been labeled “radical leftists,” and law abiding pro-police advocates dismissed as the “radical right,” we would be visionary if we ask after the origin of the word “radical,” discern where our current use of the word is leading us, and decide whether we want to continue using it in this way.
The core definition of “radical” follows, from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
– of, relating to, or proceeding from a root; growing from the base of a stem
If we consider the roots of plants as a metaphor for our political climate, we might visualize the following: two different-yet-vital plants unfurling their flowering tendrils combatively toward one another, roots extending toward opposite horizons of unbound ideology.
But this is not how plants work, and this is not how life works either.
A plant cannot survive with roots exposed to the open air, however furiously it may fight.
A plant survives by sending its roots down and in. It pierces and plunges its energies deep into the earth, extracting its nourishment and protection from the soil.
We could take a cue from our plant brethren, and dig our roots deep, lest we dry up and die.
Instead we cry “socialist” and “racist,” and any word to dehumanize another, convinced that if we could only remove our opponent from the game, our precious way of life could be saved.
But that is not going to happen. No side is ever going to “win.”
For like the dancing polarities of yin and yang, the political right and left are not opposing forces, but comingling halves of a whole. We contain each other, support each other, and illuminate each other’s truths.
There is no light without dark, and there is no right without the left.
Gravity. Seasonality. Cycles of life. Fallow times and fertile times. Brightest light. Darkest night. Clay and sand.
All of it is needed.
We need other people, people who are different from us. We need the push and pull of opposition to evolve. Other people and their opposing views are portals into the full experience of being human.
When political leaders use the term “radical” as a means of othering, we must see that for what it is: weaponization of language.
When we fall into such othering ourselves, we must realize that by labeling someone a radical we dehumanize not only them, but our own selves, in the process. By separating other people from their humanity, we lose the connection to our own.
Either way, we fall into the trap of powerful interests that benefit from us hating one another. If we allow our perceptions to be programmed by divisive labels, our thoughts run the danger of appropriation by factions on both sides who would use them to divide and conquer us.
And I don’t know about you, but I refuse to be programmed to hate.
That is why my vision is a future without a radical right…or a radical left.
My vision is to build upon new definition of radical, which is already part of our lexicon:
– favoring extreme changes in existing views, habits, conditions, or institutions
A radical, in this definition, is a person dissatisfied with the way things are, and willing to work far outside the box to change it.
If we choose, we could see our so-called opponents as “radicals” like us: rooted in our convictions, deeply pained by the state of affairs and ready to fight for something better.
According to this definition, we are on the same side.
To be clear, there are people in our society being “radicalized” to become hateful and violent. But using “radical” as a derogatory label for those with diverging opinions from ours does not lessen the potential for dangerous radicalization. It heightens it.
And of course, there are many things worth fighting for. But if we spend our energies fighting each other as enemies, we’ll have precious little left for healing our collective wounds.
I didn’t respond to either of those text messages I received during election week. They sunk further down in my thread and I refused to give them any of my energy. But the metaphor of the plant stuck with me. And from it emerged a vision. What if, as members of opposing sides, we defined ourselves by our roots and our extremes?What if we dug in our roots, not along linear diverging lines of right and wrong, but down and in, alongside and toward one another in intertwining destiny?
And what if we were so extreme to dare think we could work together for the radical change we seek – and dearly need?
Let’s send our roots so deep that we finally tap into that place where we all began, our shared source: we all want to live. My vision is that one day there will no longer be a “radical right” or a “radical left” in our public discourse. There will only be the radical we.
“They” are not our enemies. “They” are not the left or the right. They are the other half of us.
A Global Governance Paradigm Shift | First Principles First
A Global Governance Paradigm Shift | First Principles First
This article was informed and inspired by the brilliant and diverse colleagues who joined a month-long international dialog on Transforming Global Governance, convened by the Stimson Center, August 2020.
Given that COVID leaves us no choice but to re-invent “normal,” and given that our old normal was never a viable long term survival plan, it’s time for global governance actors to seize the moment and risk going for our highest vision of a just, compassionate, happy and well humanity living on a thriving planet. There has never been a time like the present to go all in on what is spelled out at the core of every religion’s teachings, and in “first principles” documents including the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, United Nations Declaration and Programme of Action on the Culture of Peace, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and the Earth Charter.
We cannot accomplish first principles, like equity, justice, freedom and dignity, by just fixing what’s wrong. By definition, fixes perpetuate norms. Focusing on fixes leads to maintaining a status quo that is not fundamentally engineered to fulfill on first principles, in part because it relegates them as unrealistic and secondary to maintaining economic and social norms.
Despite all the good work going on in the name of sustainability, it is not even time to sustain because sustaining the way things are would be suicidal. In terms of values priorities, sustaining is a low bar that is not very inspiring and is not even a biologically sound ideation because the nature of life is that it is always changing and the nature of the human spirit is that it’s always reaching for higher expression. When we think primarily in terms of fixing or sustaining, we are necessarily hindering development of new and different social and economic conceptual frameworks because both literally mean delegating resources to keeping the same things going.
We now have the unprecedented capacity, resources, connectivity and urgency to stake claim to a reality that reflects our highest vision of who we can be as a species. This historic moment is an epoch opportunity for the world to move beyond fixing and sustaining by actually putting first principles first.
We cannot fix or sustain our way to a more equitable and just future because our fundamental conceptual framework, our paradigm, doesn’t hold the requisite valuations for first principles like equity and justice. And our systems do not hold first principles as core accountabilities in decision-making and action-taking.
We tend to believe the high bar of mutually thriving in a verdant and peaceful world is unrealistic. The principles spelled out in humanity’s most profound declarations are also often considered not to be realistic because, like fish in water, our beliefs about what is real and possible are part of our acculturation to the ubiquitous culture we exist in. Our acculturation blinds us to how we might be unconsciously perpetuating paradigmatic norms for a world that can be incinerated many times over with a button push while millions of children go to be cold, hungry and scared. So-called “realistic” social and economic priorities hold higher valuations for financial and political entrenchment and for power mongering than for our most common, and most noble, desires and aspirations.
The argument of realism can no longer be trusted as a basis for governance, in part because our realism leads us to believe that it is more practical to make small changes than to “rock the boat”. But according to systems science, we cannot expect incremental improvements to create systemic change because small changes get absorbed by the continued functioning of a system. Creating the world we want, and the United Nations we need, calls for bold and bodacious re-visioning of what we consider to be realistic and reasonable.
Initial Conditions
Fulfillment of first principles would require a shift in initial conditions, a term borrowed from mathematics meaning “starting point values”. Just like the result of a math equation would necessarily change if starting point values are changed, a change in bedrock social norms would signify a paradigm change—a foundational, ontological shift in our very ground of being. Such a monumental shift would be a leap away from starting point norms that accommodate poverty, violence and pollution and toward norms that are peace-based, compassion-centered and earth-friendly.
First principles are generally perceived to be lofty, unrealistic aspirations to be attained after profits are secured and power games are played, but what if we decided to reset our initial economic conditions such that our valuations for weapons no longer exceeds the valuations we assign to our common wellbeing? What if we decided to take this historic opportunity to set the UN Declaration of Human Rights as our initial condition, as the very basis point for building new economic and social norms? What if we make first principles our ground zero conditions? In other words, what if we actually, unabashedly put first principles first?
Metaphysics
First principles occur in the intangible realm of metaphysics, the domain of existence, being, knowing and causality. They are articulated in terms like values, morals and ethics, all of which are metaphysical distinctions. We generally overlook metaphysical factors because the paradigm in which we are all acculturated includes fluff mythology the fictitious belief that metaphysical factors are inconsequential fluffy stuff. There is no evidence to substantiate fluff mythology. To the contrary, the primacy of intangibles, like values and consciousness, has been demonstrated by meta-physicians, unpacked by sociologists, psychologists, philosophers and spiritual leaders throughout time, and confirmed by a plethora of international values and leadership studies across all sectors over decades. Many citations can be found in my book: The Alchemy of Power.
Fluff mythology construes metaphysics as something that has no basis in reality. But the data is clear: when metaphysical factors, like consciousness and culture, are accounted for and intentionally developed, almost all social and economic indicators go up. Fluff mythology proliferates the belief that power comes with tangibles like tanks, while it dismisses the far more formidable, yet intangible, power of our consciousness. Although rarely accounted for, consciousness determines what gets materialized and what doesn’t. Consciousness is the initial condition of whatever people make happen. It is causal and determinative, yet we don’t account for consciousness as the major player it is in all outcomes.
Spiritual paths help us access, articulate and act on our consciousness of first principles. Religions and indigenous spirituality have much to add to social development because, according to Dr. Azza Karam, Secretary General of Religions for Peace, not only do they serve as social gatekeepers, even in secular countries, they also bring intelligence from a realm of discovery that has outlived, and is deeper, more powerful, and more shared than any other social realm. More and more spiritual leaders are transcending religious boundaries as they align around raising collective consciousness toward a common good centered world.
I’ve sat at many tables in and around the United Nations with a wide range of religious, indigenous and spiritual colleagues who are there because of their stellar social service work or because their people need help. But charity and aid work are secondary to their spiritual missions. They hold critical metaphysical intelligence on first principles, yet there is little space in the UN system for the deeper wisdom that is the primary work of religious and spiritual entities. I have witnessed both overt and covert censorship of metaphysical wisdom but it is mostly just overlooked. The systemic prejudicial exclusion of metaphysical considerations often results in only the fringiest voices breaking through and the cycle perpetuates.
Nonetheless, former UN Secretary General Dag Hammerskjold and countless other greats have told us that social development is well supported by our ageless and universal spiritual aspirations to raise consciousness toward higher and higher moral ground. UNESCO’s mission to “Build peace in the minds of men and women” recognizes that cultural development and consciousness are inextricably linked. We know for sure that morally compromised consciousness diminishes the possible good for people, prosperity, partnerships, planet and peace. Like the expression of all other positive values, morality stokes the human spirit and amorality diminishes it. When people align around values, they get along, are productive and innovative, and they tend to work toward win/win results. (citations in my book: The Alchemy of Power) Yet, values are rarely accounted for or managed on their own terms.
Values & Valuations
Values priorities play a primary role in how things go for societies and the people who populate them because values are the fundamental building blocks of cultures. Values are unique in how they bridge the intangibles, like morality, with the tangibles, like systems. They are the link between our consciousness and our physical world. Accounting for values is a means of accounting for consciousness as well as a means of cultural accountability.
Values are our most primal human drivers, more operative than genetics according to twins studies. They underpin personal behaviors and decision-making and they are at the heart of all great governance documents. We know for sure that when values drive processes, things more often go better for more people. Although they are metaphysical, values can be quantified and developed.
Values accountability, by way of methods like Barrett Values Centre’s Cultural Transformation Tools, establishes a common, inclusive framework for both addressing starting point assumptions that do not serve humanity’s best interests and for articulating desired intial conditions and end results. Because values transcend demographics, including gender, nationality and privilege, and they are universal yet distinct, values accountability is a coherent means for establishing and tracking first principles, as well as constituents’ needs and wants, across populations and among multilateral stakeholders.
Accounting for values alignment and divergences in multilateral processes would help clarify sovereign concerns and, at the same time, reveal common ground that lies deeper than political lenses can see. Values-based metrics provide a cogent basis for mutual resolution. Data on values alignment alleviates the need for multilateral representatives to get consent from constituents on every issue while also ensuring they get their say. Values accountability would cut down on the considerable amount of guess work and subjectivity that happens in multilateral processes.
Because the influence of values fulfillment on outcomes is so profound and so broad, and because values cut across geographic and political boundaries, values-driven data provides a baseline for tracking first principles indicators across the UN system, member states, public and private sectors, and civil society. Values accountancy provides a coherent, robust, data-based means to ground social development in first principles. Widespread values accountability would help root global projects, including the International People’s Fund, Global Parliamentary Assembly, Global Marshall Plan, or the new civil society UN platform proposed in the UN75 People’s Declaration and Plan for Global Action, in people-centered valuations. Metadata on values priorities would provide scaffolding for new economic, social and global governance structures that are fit for the purpose of building a better world.
Culture
Culture can be defined as the expression of aligned values within a group which is why measuring values is a means of cultural accountability. Just like cultures in lab dishes support the growth of some organisms and not others, human cultures can more naturally support negative values like corruption, inequity, and injustice — or not. Values-based cultural accountability not only helps locate the sources of social disruptions, it also captures shared priorities and common vision for proactively creating the future we want.
For example, block chain and other currency technologies raise transparency concerns that cannot be adequately managed by laws and penalties because internet access is such that we could simply never hire enough agents to track all transparency issues. If it was developed into a system as a primary cultural value though, transparency would become the norm. If we made transparency integral with how emerging monetary technology unfolds, it would become the baseline reality such that a lack of transparency would be considered an aberration. If we made transparency the constant, initial condition on which decision- and law-making on the use of currency technologies are based, it would go a long way toward supporting a first-principles-first world.
Former UN Secretary General, Kofi Anan, recognized the need to expand our realms of work if we are to achieve the UN Charter objectives. In 1999, he wrote,
“Over the years we have come to realize that it is not enough to send peacekeeping forces to separate warring parties. It is not enough to engage in peace-building efforts after societies have been ravaged by conflict. It is not enough to conduct preventive diplomacy. All of this is essential work, but we must also act at a deeper level if we want enduring results. We need, in short, a culture of peace.”
Annan is pointing out the need to create the cultural situation for peace—to establish the proverbial lab dish that accommodates peace and does not accommodate violence. If we want to live in a peaceful world, we need to create the initial conditions of peace. Anan advises global governance to engage more deeply in cultivation of culture. The UN Declaration and Programme of Action on the Culture of Peace illuminates the way to do that.
Paradigm change
Decades before the unanimous 2020 United Nations General Assembly vote to convene toward a New Economic Paradigm based on Happiness and Wellbeing, a groundswell of global citizens were calling for deep, systemic changes. The ever-growing international call for, and unprecedented need for, paradigmatic change reflects a global consciousness shift that can only be accommodated by transforming global governance such that first principles become our new, non-negotiable initial conditions.
Unlocking a Fresh Vision for the World
Unlocking a Fresh Vision for the World
Our sole concern must be with making manifest the future which is immanent in ourselves. – Jean Gebser
At nearly eight billion strong, humankind has populated all corners of the globe, planted flags at both Arctic poles, explored the very depths of the oceans, and launched itself into space. Yet, in a relatively brief span of time, we have simultaneously lain ruin to delicate ecosystems and catalyzed an accelerating environmental crisis, kicking off the planet’s sixth mass extinction event. However successful our species appears, without a thriving planet, without abundant biodiversity and healthy ecosystems, our kind and countless others will cease to exist. We know this. Yet, many remain unable to see, sense, feel, and therefore accept the reality before us.
“…by coming together to integrate the past and heal trauma, we can unlock vast reserves of untapped energy and hidden potential, a profound resource that can be consciously used to light the way toward better possible futures.”
The problem has been termed the meta-crisis for precisely this reason: in the words of Jonathan Rowson, it “highlights that our relationship to the crisis is part of the crisis.” This failure of relationship isn’t based in human ignorance, stupidity, or even greed, however; it lies far deeper.
From a mystical perspective, every systemic and seemingly intractable social problem, regardless where it plays out in the world, springs from the same source: humanity’s deep social, historical, cultural, and multigenerational trauma—our unhealed and unresolved past. Like dark matter, collective trauma cannot be observed directly; we can only perceive it by its symptoms—hyperarousal (e.g., social anxiety, intensity, distrust, agitation, fear, aggression, violence) or hypoarousal (e.g., numbing, apathy, lethargy, disconnection, ennui, pessimism). And by its effects: collective trauma blocks the flow of lifeforce through a living system, whether a person’s or a planet’s. It splinters persons and nations. It damages internal and external coherence, distorts perception and obscures truth, and greatly disembodies the traumatized, thereby injuring our capacity to relate to and with one another. In all of these ways, trauma suspends evolutionary progress and blunts our ability to meet the challenges of the present. In the wake of mass unresolved traumas, fragmentation yields disrelation yields polarization yields chaos yields collapse.
Think of the traumatized person or community like a large city that is experiencing power outages. Hidden layers of unintegrated past are like the sectors where electricity has failed; those zones are offline and disconnected from the whole. When trauma sunders connectivity, we grow estranged from one another and alienated from the natural world. We accept unbalanced and inhumane societal conditions as simply “the way things are.” This limits our ability to be in tune with the rhythm of life. Indeed, humanity’s unresolved past has left us so out of tune with life that, despite the rapid technological advancements of the last century, most cultures still rely on extractive economies, depleting Earth’s finite natural resources for wholly unequitable and unsustainable gains. We do this because we cannot feel the planetary system or our sacred interrelation with it.
The paradox of trauma is that its symptoms are really signposts, pointing our way out of the fog. Consider something: you are alive today because every single one of your genetic forebears, stretching back through time, survived long enough—through countless periods of volatility, chaos, and change—to reproduce a resilient child.
And that child went on to do the same.
We exist at all because of human resilience, which is our birthright. Everything our progenitors survived in order to bring us forward lives in us today, not just their struggle and suffering, but their skills, talents, tenacity, perseverance, and genius. Likewise, millennia after millennia, humans have learned and developed countless means and methods through which to mend, heal, redeem, and restore ourselves and one another—and all of that wisdom is as near as our DNA.
If our kind is to flourish and thrive, not just survive, the elegant interrelation we observe in the natural world must be mirrored in us. We aren’t merely on the planet; we are part of it. We aren’t the highest intelligence on Earth; we are a manifestation of Earth’s intelligence. The planet is us: its ancient carbon, oxygen, minerals, metals, and water are the same that comprise our bodies. Humans are simply the latest drumbeat in an ancient, cosmic, evolutionary dance, even if somewhere in our journey, we have forgotten the song.
“We can raise societal awareness, tap new levels of collective intelligence, and enact a fresh vision for our world.”
As it’s written in the Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” By surveying the roots of the meta-crisis, we see that unresolved collective trauma produces mass disembodiment, leaving us not only disconnected from self and other, but from nature. This is the source of our greatest social problems, including the climate crisis. Still, having spent eighteen years working with over 100,000 people to facilitate transformational change, I have repeatedly witnessed the power of group healing to deepen and repair human connection. What’s more, by coming together to integrate the past and heal trauma, we can unlock vast reserves of untapped energy and hidden potential, a profound resource that can be consciously used to light the way toward better possible futures.
Indeed, the poison is the medicine; both the problem and the remedy is us.
Humanity is at a choice point. We can decide together to honor our shared uncertainty, anxiety, and fear, as much as our innate strength, determination, and capacity to transform. We can engage in mutual presencing practices and reaffirm our sacred interrelation. We can augment and amplify individual and social resilience, and invoke higher insights, emergent capacities, and richer frames of correlation and connection. We can raise societal awareness, tap new levels of collective intelligence, and enact a fresh vision for our world.
We already have everything we need to heal ourselves, our societies, and our planet. And we must, for there is no time to waste.
Across the Creek
Across the Creek
This story is focused at Booroola, because that is where the journey began.
Booroola is my home place, the land where I grew up. It’s situated on the eastern side of the Macquarie River on the red and black soil plains of Central West NSW, Australia. Open, flat country that was originally inhabited by the Wiradjuri and the Ngemba Wailwan, or Nyimpaa Weilwan, people.
I’ve repeatedly found myself spread in the land at Booroola, hanging in the air in front of the shed, above a particular tree, over an area of flat or open country. At times it’s difficult to tell the difference between me and the land.
From wandering around the world, it’s my experience that special or energetic sites are everywhere. Each piece of land, each living form has its own spirit, that (when in close proximity) we interact with even if we are completely unconscious of such phenomenon. However, for them and for us, life is better when we are consciously aware of them. It doesn’t matter what nationality we are, it matters that we are alive and willing to listen and respond. An interactive relationship with a place opens us to knowledge and life at all levels of creation, a relationship where the subtle energetic impulses from the land are as important as our own.
It seems that as modern people we are largely locked within the physical and intellectual dimensions, completely missing the multiple dimensions, the multiplicity of life forms that also share our place.
On this journey I’ve used my own consciousness as the measuring tool to explore the subtle energies associated with particular places. What is written is not unusual. Along the way many people have told me they have had similar experiences. I hope this work provides a vehicle for opening, for discussion and sharing.
Through the ages, meditators, teachers and seekers like Plato, Rudolf Steiner and Sri Aurobindo, suggest that what we experience with our five senses are merely the physical emanations of more subtle levels of reality. We are immersed within a multiplicity of emanations emerging from the one Source.
Physical things have subtle energy, a non-physical being-ness that can be experienced through an internalisation of consciousness. Meditation-based techniques allow consciousness to be internalised, turned within to experience more subtle realms. Knowledge of subtle energies can occur with the eyes open or closed. It is an experience like an intuition or a sense of knowing that is beyond the senses. It’s a vision of the mind’s eye.
Artwork by Helen Russ
The watercolour paintings shown here are superimposed on faded photographs of the site where the experience occurred. In spatial terms my physical body may have been walking the land, sitting in my bedroom at the Booroola house, in Sydney or overseas, but my spiritual awareness would be located at a particular spot on the land. Some experiences came in dreams. The photographs show the location where the experience unfolded. The water colour images reveal the things I see or sense with my inner awareness.
The photographs are faded out because my sense is that the physical landscape changes and it is not as important as the energetic landscape. Trees, watercourses, grasses, animals and people come and go but the energetics of a place uphold its life and integrity. Experience suggests that the land has its own energetic ecosystem, with flows, vortexes, rivers of light and life, that existed long before people.
The Women
While I was living in Ireland and in San Francisco, the Women began coming to me during meditation. There would be a feeling of them sitting in a circle, Aboriginal women who have a knowledge and a particular role, one seeming to be more aware of my presence. This time, when I returned home, I tuned into them as I drove across the ramp. They welcomed me. A day later, I took a girlfriend across the creek to see them.
I had travelled all around the world to find what was right here; that these Women held something that I’d longed for, that these Women could teach me all kinds of mysteries that would allow me to experience ‘Life’ in the way it should be.
I always felt that Aboriginal traditions were from a different spiritual line than the western traditions, and there is a sense that these Women embody Divine Femininity, the source of All.
A journey was unfolding through listening to these Women, particularly the main one, who seems more aware of me, although at times the whole lot seem to be laughing at my antics. We are friends and more than friends, sisters. They are my teachers. The main one, is helping me remember things I have forgotten, teaching me new things and she constantly smiles, with a quiet wisdom.
x
Access granted
I sat in the caravan in the afternoon, with my computer doing research. It was beautiful. Comfortable, warm and the writers block I had been experiencing lifted. I went to sleep excited and wondering. The night was calm and starry. I could see constellations outside the window as I lay down. I was very conscious of where I was, safe and yet with a sense of nervousness.
I gradually realised that I couldn’t sleep. In my half dream space the caravan had large glass doors that I kept trying to close. It felt like everything was open, and the world was blowing through the place. And black faces started morphing through my consciousness.
One person would show themselves, clear, open, fully present and within a second, another and another. Eye contact. Presence to presence. More real than real. Beautiful, full of life, expression, full of nuance. As each face appeared, liquid dark eyes, saw me. We ‘saw’ each other. They were young and old, spiritual and not, happy and sad, angry and joyful
There was a sense that I had asked for access and it had been granted. I was seeing the hundreds and perhaps thousands of people who had lived at this site. There was no judgment and no malice. They were just here, showing themselves, morphing through my psyche.
In subtle realms time is more fluid so you can experience something from the past as if it’s occurring in the ‘now’. Subtle energies can merge and morph, so it’s not unusual to find one’s consciousness merged and spread out across the land, with other people or other energies.
Our subtle energies are not limited by our physical bodies, which means we can spread out and become as vast as a few thousand acres, we can move up or down a vertical axis to experience exalted states or deep mysteries.
When I talk about the Women I am referring to the energetic group of four or five Aboriginal women that are holding a particular energetic node across the creek from the Booroola house. Within modern culture we do not have a language or cosmology to help us name their nature or their role. However, they appear to be custodians of an energetic point within the land that could possibly be compared to a chakra within the body. They are conscious of us and of other levels of reality. They are connected to a greater wisdom and they are able to communicate with us if we listen.
Since awakening to this group of women I have found similar energetic nodes all around the country. Such as just outside White Cliffs NSW, Billabulla and Gooyong Park at Warren, in Bellevue Hill in Sydney, near Gundagai and on the stock route near Tenandra. There are also all kinds of energetic structures, similar to meridians within the body. For example there are energetic flows that look like ley lines, energy wells, men’s sites, women’s sites, camping places and the spirit of trees. There are beings associated with places.
Physically, these sites are unremarkable. They have no artifacts, no special characteristics that can be seen physically. What is significant is energetic, it’s how they feel.
A note of caution. Subtle energies are alive. They have their own life, their own story.
When experiencing subtle realms, whatever happens, the direction is to hold a gentle open awareness. Feel the experience with an intention of revealing the subtle reality behind the physical facade. It is about looking for the subtle essence or source of what we see or feel.
Oliver Wendell Holmes suggests that, Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride, and my Mum adds, and sometimes one of them takes a look out the window.
Sourcing, turning our awareness to the inner realms of consciousness, allows us to release and presence deeply held traumas and beliefs that at times are the dysfunctional corner stone of our current mental and emotional constructs. By seeing the source, the construct is released and a new way of seeing the world emerges, and perhaps more importantly the heart opens and the way is open to join in the greater flow.
There are esoteric teachings that suggest that when a Christian reports on a near death experience, they feel that they saw God or Jesus. When a Buddhist approaches death they may experience being one with the enlightened mind of Buddha. Perhaps what I have seen is a deep mystery reflected in a way my mind can comprehend. Land energies in Ireland for example have a different appearance. I suspect that some of what we see reflected as land energies is shaped by the people who have actively engaged with them.
What is clear to me is that the land has its own life, beyond us, beyond now. I understand that what I have presented may be difficult for some to relate to. I am sharing it because throughout this journey the Women have continually prompted me to do so. It would seem that the Women want their story told. They want us to remember our relationship with all life.
Adapted from the Book: Across the Creek – Land energy experiences in the home paddock, available from the author.