Openness and Strength
Openness and Strength
featured image | Thomas from Pixabay
This Editorial precedes Volume 24, Issue 1 of Kosmos Journal. Scroll down to access featured content
Dear Kosmos Reader,
Welcome to the Year of the Wood Dragon, the start of a new 20-year cycle according to Feng Shui principles, dominated by the element – fire. Who knows for certain what the world will be like in 2044? Many are preparing for profound change. Yet, change is not dictated by outside forces alone, acting upon us. We too have the capacity to be agents of transformation. The Wood Dragon symbolizes this powerful potential energy, tempered by balance and inner growth. Imagine a sacred oak tree that grounds itself, rooted firmly and growing tall, reaching for the sky. This is the invitation of the Wood Dragon.
When we are grounded in reality and understanding, we can be more open to the winds of change, outer and inner. Openness is a quality we are able to cultivate when we release fear. That the coming year is dominated by the element of fire underscores the need for courage. In this edition of Kosmos, Judy Wicks speaks openly of her feelings for Gaza and the acts of courage she has witnessed there; Riane Eisler talks about transcending inherited narratives of domination; and Robert Cobbold reminds us about our left-brain bias as a species, the side of the brain associated with rigid thinking, and how this bias is inhibiting our action to protect and restore our planetary home.
In How Well Do ‘Elites’ Understand the Metacrisis? Nat Hagens warns, “we are approaching a period where speaking truth to power is going to become more dangerous.” He advocates for a spiritual intimacy that generates the energy of openness, harmony and love. Sole survival is not the answer. Soul survival is. How we treat ‘others’ through the coming storm mirrors the quality of our hearts.
From the recent Great Transition Initiative Forum “What’s Next for the Global Movement?”, we present a trio of essays. Jeremy Lent’s call for a new Eco-Civilization Framework embodies the openness to change so needed in these times:
It incorporates Indigenous concepts such as buen vivir and ubuntu, insights from ecological economics and commons theory, and principles from the permaculture, Transition Towns, degrowth, and agroecology movements. It reflects spiritual underpinnings of Deep Ecology, engaged Buddhism, and universalist Christian theology. It embraces ideas from the anti-globalization, eco-socialist, social justice, LGBTQ rights, and Rights of Nature movements, among others. Ultimately, it has the potential to catalyze globally dispersed “blessed unrest” into a coherent, benevolent force for societal transformation.
If it is true that 2024 marks the beginning of an end, let it be the cycle of domination and greed that finally loosens its hold. In preparing for the next cycle, may we open our hearts and minds to the inflowing energy of awareness and compassion, standing like oak trees in sacred togetherness, courageous and strong.
R.Fabian, for Kosmos
Transcending Inherited Narratives
Transcending Inherited Narratives
We are all working for the same goal: a more equitable and peaceful world where caring for people and nature is a top social and economic priority. But we are doing this in separate silos and with thinking and institutions that cannot solve the problems they created. On top of this, we face a backward push worldwide to authoritarianism, inequality, violence, and unsustainability.
If we closely look at this backward push, we see that it extends well beyond issues like climate change, race, immigration, or politics that most progressive people and organizations spotlight. Regressives put enormous time and energy into “social issues” that focus on family, gender, and sexuality to promote domination. They use tactics ranging from the deregulation of harmful business activities to idealizing strongman political rule to inciting violence and abuse against racial and ethnic outgroups. But their long-term strategy is to push us back to a time when domination in our foundational family, gender, and sexual relations was the accepted norm.
To understand this unified regressive agenda, let us consider the following:
(1) Neuroscience shows that children’s early observations and experiences directly affect the structure of our brains, and with this, how we think, feel, and act—including how we vote.
(2) These observations and experiences are very different depending on the degree that our early environments orient to the partnership or domination end of the partnership-domination social scale.
For those not familiar with the partnership-domination scale, here is a quick summary of what decades of research reveal about the unified regressive frame—and how we can more effectively move forward together.
Foundational Dynamics
(1) By transcending inherited social categories like religious/secular, right/left, East/West, North/South, capitalist/socialist, we see that a common goal of the consolidated regressive agenda is to restore authoritarian, top-down, punitive, in-group versus out-group systems in both the family and the state or tribe.
We find this kind of family system in religious domination-oriented cultures like the Taliban and fundamentalist Iran as well as in secular and Western ones like Orban’s Hungary, the rightist Nazis, and the leftist USSR. Why? Because neuroscience shows that our politics and economics are largely a function of our worldview and values, which are largely the result of children’s genes’ interaction with their cultural environment. And all this is primarily transmitted through families during our most formative years.
I want to add that there are hierarchies in partnership systems, starting in families, but they are empowering hierarchies of actualization rather than disempowering hierarchies of domination. Research shows that children who experience fear, pain, and anger in punitive, authoritarian, male-dominated families tend to go into denial, deflecting these feelings to different races, gays/trans people, and other outgroups they are taught are inferior, dangerous, or malevolent. This denial becomes habitual, as in denial of climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and election results.
Fortunately, not everyone raised in these kinds of families takes this route, but many people do—maintaining and even demanding punitive domination systems in times like ours of massive technological, economic, and environmental change.
(2) Regressives internalize rigid gender stereotypes, despite the evidence that both women and men are capable of caregiving (labeled “feminine” in domination thinking). They do not recognize that gender fluidity is part of human nature nor that there is massive evidence that prehistoric human cultures oriented more toward partnership than domination.
Again, we clearly see this focus on rigid gendered rankings in otherwise different domination regimes. Western secular regimes like Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s USSR, Trump’s MAGA movement, and Putin’s Russia all see men and “masculinity” as superior to women and “femininity.” This subjugation of women and the “feminine” is even more overt in religious Iran and the Taliban, where it is a top government priority, as are binary gender stereotypes and the arrest and killing of anyone who deviates, like women who refuse to wear the chador and people in the LGBTQ+ community.
All of us to varying degrees were taught to rank men and “masculinity” over women and “femininity.” Our religions teach that women are inferior and must be controlled by men, starting with Eve. The university canon has had little or nothing about girls and women, and even the new women’s, men’s, and gender studies are marginalized.
We have not been taught that the ranking of men over women, rigid gender stereotypes that allow no deviation, and ranking “masculinity” over “femininity” is a bulwark of domination systems. But how gender roles and relations are structured is not “just a women’s issue”: it is a central social and economic organizing principle.
(3) The economic operating systems we have inherited have been shaped by gendered values in which the economic contributions of the “women’s work” of caring for people from birth as well as caring for our natural life support systems are devalued.
Both Smith and Marx (fathers of capitalism and socialism) perpetuated these values. For them, the work of caring for children, the elderly, and the sick and keeping a clean and healthy home environment was to be performed for free by a woman in a male-controlled household. There is nothing in their theories about caring for our natural life support systems.
Even metrics like GDP and GNP perpetuate this distorted system of values. These metrics include activities in the market (once an exclusive male preserve) that harm and even take life, like selling cigarettes and fast foods and the medical and funeral costs they result in. But they do not include the “women’s” work of caring for people outside the market (a market where child care workers generally earn less than dog walkers). Nor do they include caring for our natural environment, so trees (which provide us oxygen) are only included when they are dead, as logs.
(4) To support domination systems, we also inherited false narratives, which are re-taught by regressives. Notable are those about an inherently flawed human nature like “original sin” and “selfish genes”—which argue with each other, but both justify top-down control. To support the old rankings based on fear and force, we inherited stories like Eve’s and Pandora’s that blame women for all our ills. We inherited “classic” fairy tales like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty that idealize royalty and promote women’s helplessness and dependence. As we see revived in parts of the US where pushback to domination systems is strongest, we also inherited narratives that promote racial, religious, and ethnic prejudices.
Conclusion
Diverse movements such as the environmental, racial justice, LGBTQ+ rights, and women’s empowerment movements require a unifying framework: a comprehensive partnership approach, recognizing our interconnection with one another and the natural world. This new frame encompasses family, childhood, gender, economic, and political relations, and is key to a successful whole-systems transformation and a better world.
“A Unifying Framework,” is a contribution to GTI Forum “What’s Next for the Global Movement?,” Great Transition Initiative (January 2024), https://greattransition.org/gti-forum/global-movement-whats-next-eisler.
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Left-Brain Bias is Harming Our Planet
Left-Brain Bias is Harming Our Planet
featured image | Leon Di Benedetto, pexels
A recent book called The Matter With Things by Dr. Ian McGilchrist points out the lateralisation of the human brain, and the ways in which left brain-bias is blinding and deluding our civilisation. It’s a staggering intellectual achievement, with an extraordinary breadth of knowledge and references which entirely justifies the 1500 or so pages across two enormous volumes.
He explores how this left-brain bias confuses our understanding of science, philosophy, and religion, and gets right to the root of why Western civilisation seems to be so confused about the nature of reality and our relationship to it. But I’d like to explore how this same bias seems to be clouding our thinking when it comes to climate action, and carbon markets in particular.
Although there’s no sharp distinction, and both hemispheres are involved to some degree in almost everything we do, the two hemispheres of the brain attend to reality in different ways. This split is found across the animal kingdom. He gives the example of a pigeon pecking corn on the ground, and the two very different kinds of awareness it needs to operate simultaneously in order to do so.
On the first hand it needs to be able to see the corn – it needs to be able to isolate it among the dust and pebbles, and then to pick it up with its beak. In other words it needs an awareness with a narrow beam of focus, capable of separating and classifying things, all in the service of operationalising its surroundings for its benefit. But at the same time it also needs to be on the lookout for predators. This kind of awareness needs to be global, general and capable of understanding and responding to something completely new and unforeseen.
Generally speaking the first kind of awareness is best carried out by the left brain, and the second kind of awareness is best carried out by the right brain – so much so that if you cover the pidgeon’s right eye (which connects to the left brain) it will still try and use its blind right eye to look at the corn.
Although the left brain is very good at breaking things into static parts and manipulating these parts for our own ends, it tends to jump to conclusions with unwarranted levels of certainty while being blithely unaware of its blindspots and limitations. The right brain on the other hand has a far better grip on reality as a whole, is much more capable of understanding flow and motion and is more comfortable with uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity. The two hemispheres work best when the left brain works in service of the right (hence the title of his first book The Master and His Emissary) – operating in the world and then feeding information to the right brain in order to complete the picture.
McGilchrist goes on to point out that Western civilisation seems to have a (potentially terminal) over-reliance on the left brain, i.e. linear rational thinking, while the gifts of the right brain (e.g. intuition, nuance, complexity) seem to be increasingly marginalized and under-appreciated. I believe this bias is showing up in climate action and inhibiting our ability to protect and restore our planet to health.
As anyone working within corporate climate action will attest, companies demand unreasonable levels of certainty and objectivity across a series of metrics before they will unleash their ESG or marketing budgets. Companies want to know the amount of plastic that has been gathered to the gram, the exact number of trees planted, and precisely how much CO2 this will absorb over time. Although I can understand why they want this certainty, all that time and energy spent gathering data is time and energy that could have been spent on direct impact.
The situation is much the same in the nonprofit world. With a few commendable exceptions, applying for a grant from a charitable foundation generally involves exhaustive form filling, data gathering and reporting. Is anyone calculating the amount of time being wasted by NGOs and charities in unsuccessful grant applications? If 500 non-profits spend a combined 5,000 hours (let’s say £100,000 in salaries for ease) applying for a £10,000 grant and only 10 of them win, then any positive effect of the grant itself has just been wiped out in wasted salaries – and that’s before any time has been spent actually delivering anything.
Left-brain bias also appears to be responsible for the malfunctioning of carbon markets. As I have written elsewhere, our binary (a feature of the left brain) approach to additionality (asserting that climate finance is the difference between a tonne of carbon remaining sequestered or not) appears to be the source of a great many perverse incentives, from exaggerating or even manufacturing deforestation threats, to disqualifying the communities who have managed their forests responsibly. But there’s simply no need to force something so complex into a binary straight jacket. When dealing with deforestation avoidance, additionality is not black or white, nor can it ever be entirely certain because we are being asked to predict deforestation levels in the future. That’s why Native assesses the additionality of each project on a sliding scale from 0% to 100%, and fully owns that these predictions are just that – predictions, and therefore will have a margin of error.
Even in trying to measure the amount of carbon stored in existing forests there will always be a degree of uncertainty, and our many attempts at eradicating uncertainty are fool’s gold. Instead of pretending that we can know for sure we could be far more effective if we simply embraced a degree of ambiguity – a feature of the right brain. As Albert Einstein wrote, “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
Taking a step back – the entire enterprise of reducing a rainforest or mangroves to so many tonnes of carbon is left brain bias par excellence. The complex web of symbiotic human and non-human life co-evolving from moment to moment in an unbroken chain which goes back hundreds of millions of years is reduced to a single metric – CO2. All so that companies can call themselves “carbon neutral” – another typically left-brain concept.
Behind all this is the assumption that CO2 is the most important part about a rainforest, and that if we can achieve carbon neutrality then all our climate woes will be solved. In reality the natural world, and planetary health – and it’s strange that this needs to be said – is far more complex than that.
(Editor’s note: The author is CEO of Native – ‘the next evolution of carbon and biodiversity credits’. They provide a methodology, a map and a marketplace so that individuals and companies can protect and restore 3x3m squares of the world’s most precious and biodiverse ecosystems.)
Native uses three core principles on a sliding scale from 0% to 100% to assess and price ecosystems – Additionality, Biodiversity and Community. While this is an improvement, we are cognisant – and vocal – that no amount of metrics can capture the value of rainforests or mangroves or coral reefs. Metrics can be useful, but we must not confuse the metric for the thing we actually care about, the number for the value which it merely approximates.
As Jerry Muller writes in The Tyranny of Metrics, “Quantification is seductive, because it organizes and simplifies knowledge. It offers numerical information that allows for easy comparison among people and institutions. But that simplification may lead to distortion, since making things comparable often means that they are stripped of their context, history, and meaning.”
In the case of the 60,000 hectares of rainforest which Native is bringing to market in the Solomon Islands, there are 13 different language groups within the project, and each tribe has its own oral traditions and intact cultural practices. The forest is – so far – largely untouched. Local belief systems say that the forest is where their ancestors’ souls go when they die. The forest their afterlife. You can’t reduce that kind of sacredness to a number, and we should not try to.
I believe the hemisphere split is the root of the difference between a Western worldview and an Indigenous worldview. Because, evidence suggests that while the West seems to have a strong left-brain bias, indigenous cultures seem to have a more right-brain view of the world. A view which is sensitive to flow, intuition, and which sees the whole rather than the parts. All these things are blind to the left hemisphere.
As Marciely Ayap Tupari, secretary coordinator of Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB) explains, “companies often end up coming to us with a proposal, wanting to finance, wanting to supposedly protect nature, but in their own way. When we explain our vision as indigenous peoples, many do not understand.”
This is the great challenge when trying to unleash private capital for the protection of natural assets under the stewardship of indigenous communities. Somehow we have to find a way of translating between an indigenous view of the forest as a living whole to a Western corporate view of the rainforest as a series of metrics in a spreadsheet, all of which serve the one metric which rules them all; companies’ bottom line.
We shouldn’t expect anything else. Companies are programmed to do one thing, and that’s maximize shareholder value. Rather than hoping for shareholder capitalism to change its stripes, we prefer to make use of this fact to unlock marketing budgets for the planet. Study after study shows that companies who are more sustainable and ethical can hire employees more cheaply, can raise investment more easily and can charge a higher price for their products and services.
But in order to achieve this, companies need a way to signal the impact they are having, and for that companies need metrics. It’s important Native provides these metrics without either losing companies along the way – in which case we won’t achieve anything at scale – and yet also without doing violence to indigenous communities’ holistic view of nature.
Native bridges this gap so that forward thinking companies can be a force for good while meeting their objectives, and indigenous communities have the resources they need to continue protecting the world’s most precious and biodiverse ecosystems, in their own way. As the market for nature-based solutions matures to accommodate a right-brain perspective, those companies who are brave enough to try something different will be way ahead of the curve.
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A Different Kind of Fast
A Different Kind of Fast
featured image | Becca Clark, Pixabay
Fasting can help us to remember our true hunger. At heart, the act of fasting is about growing in relationship to the sacred presence. Experiencing hunger gets us in touch with the desire for something we do not have. It is the longing for it and our deep need. But we can get overwhelmed by our hungers for things, especially in a culture that worships consumerism and in which the divide between rich and poor grows ever wider. Stepping back from this helps us to see what we are really yearning for in our lives.
I think of my habit of clearing off my desk and filing away old papers when I am starting on a new project. If I prolong this task it may slip into procrastination, but the impulse and desire is to remove some of the external clutter, which creates a sense of inner spaciousness as well.
The outer clutter and inner clutter are often reflections of each other. I have fewer distractions from the project I want to be working on, and it makes it a more satisfying process for me. I find this too when I rearrange the furniture in a room: I suddenly get a new perspective. Fasting can create breathing space for a new perspective on our lives. We have been so used to looking at things a certain way, we discover with small shifts there is so much more beneath the surface awaiting our attention.
Fasting from foods is only one kind of fast. There are many other kinds too. We can fast from acquiring more “things,” and excessive consumption, as the physical and material realm, as the materiality of food, and how we understand it, limit it, or explore it differently, becomes a portal to the spiritual. We may find that cleaning the house and preparing a beautiful meal lend themselves to celebratory occasions – different kinds of fasting – and help to lift us from the mundane moments to open us to a deeper connection with God.
In a world where the sacred is infused into the material world, what we release on the physical realm can also impact our interior life. Fasting is preparation, which means clearing out a space for something new to enter.
Fasting isn’t only connected to a physical level. We can also fast from thoughts and patterns in our lives that are life-denying. Fasting creates space in our lives for other- life-giving – thoughts to emerge. Rather than feeling jostled about by so many conflicting internal thoughts or tasks, when we fast, we make room internally for something else, and we are able to breathe more deeply.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophet Isaiah speaks about fasting as profoundly connected to transformation, both personal and cultural. When we release our life-denying habits and thoughts, we discover a new freedom to live differently. This is an internal freedom not dictated by circumstances. Ultimately this internal freedom leads us to desire for liberation for all beings and Isaiah makes this connection to justice:
Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? (Isaiah 58:6-7 (NRSV)
As this wisdom text reveals, fasting helps reveal our true hunger and the hunger of others. And in the process of discovering this, we begin to see what is life-giving for us as intimately intertwined with the well-being of the entire Earth community. We don’t fast merely for personal transformation, although this is a step along the way. We fast to widen our vision on ourselves and ultimately to connect to our longings to bring conditions of freedom for all.
Not only does fasting connect us to our true hunger, it has a way of also attuning us to the greater mystery in which we, as the book of Acts says, “live and move and have our being” (17:28). Thomas Ryan deepens our understanding of how fasting functions, writing:
Fasting as a religious act increases our sensitivity to that mystery always and everywhere present to us. It is a passageway into the world of spirit to explore its territory and bring back a wisdom necessary for living a fulfilled life. It is an invitation to awareness, a call to compassion for the needy, a cry of distress and a song of joy. It is a discipline of self-restraint, a ritual of purification, and a sanctuary for offerings of atonement.
I love this litany of the fruits of fasting. When we fast, we make space to see the sacred thresholds shimmering everywhere we go. It brings us more fully present to the world and to those in need. It helps us to heal our wounds and creates room for joy. Atonement is a process of removing obstacles between ourselves and God. Fasting is an intentional removing those things that lead us further away.
I am sometimes asked how we know if we have an authentic encounter with the divine and my answer is always love. When our hearts are expanded and we start to see our fellow living beings as worthy of our care, then we know the sacred has been moving in our hearts.
One of the early teachings of the Christian church find helpful to understand fasting is from John Cassian. Cassian, an early theologian, writes about what he calls the three renunciations. Renunciations are an intentional giving up of certain patterns or ways of being in the world and one form fasting can take. For Cassian, the first renunciation is of our former way of life and shifting our focus to our heart’s deep desire. He assumes his listeners have perhaps become too invested in pleasing others, in achievements, or other externally focused motivations for how we live. By beginning to intentionally turn our attention inward, we listen for the way holy direction. the sacred pulses in our own hearts call us to live from this
The second renunciation, Cassian says, is giving up our mindless thoughts. Our minds are full of chatter all the time: judgments about ourselves and others, fears and anxieties over the future, overwhelm at world issues, the stress of illness, stories we tell about our lives, regrets over the past, imagined conversations with others, and more. It can be exhausting to follow all these trails of anxiousness. Intentional thought and meditative practice have always been about calming the mind so that the spirit can listen to another, deeper, truer voice. In the beginning we may need to start by focusing our thoughts on an object of attention, as in centering prayer where we choose a sacred word to bring our awareness back to the divine. As we continue this practice, however, we eventually may find ourselves not needing to focus thoughts anymore, but simply listening to the heart’s wisdom. We begin by mak- ing the conscious choice to listen by quieting and clearing out the babble and prattle of our minds so that the heart’s shimmering can become the focus.
The third renunciation I find the most powerful. We are called to renounce even our images of God so that we can meet God in the fullness of that divine reality beyond the boxes and limitations we create. So many of us have inherited harmful images of God taught by others that are not fruitful to our flourishing. Images of a judgmental God, a vending-machine God, a capricious God, a prosperity God, a God made in the image of whiteness. We project our human experiences onto the divine. This is a natural impulse, but our soul’s deepening depends upon our freeing ourselves from these limiting images so we might have an encounter with the face of the sacred in all of its expansiveness and possibility. We might feel called to fast from these life-denying images to open our hearts to something wider.
We do not have to retreat to the desert or join a monastery to find this path of deepened intimacy with God. We each have the opportunity to choose this inner work of discerning what we hold onto and what we release at every season of our lives. We each have the choice to make. Sometimes this kind of radical simplicity accompanies a move, for example, when downsizing from a family home to an apartment. Sometimes we are forced by circumstance to change our outer life, perhaps due to illness or taking care of a sick parent. This inner transformation we are all called to seek.
One of the beautiful aspects of the Christian liturgical cycle is that the call to reflection and intensified spiritual practice returns again and again each year and meets us wherever we are. The purpose of these acts of letting go is always in service of love. When we fast out of a misplaced sense of competition or a diet mentality, we lose this focus and it becomes something that distorts reality rather than clarifies it.
When we fast, we stand humbly in the presence of the sacred and admit our humanity. We allow ourselves to be fully vulnerable and ask for the support in transformation we all need. We do not fast by our own sheer will, but by seeking the ground of being that supports and nourishes us as we grow.
One of my favorite scripture passages is from the prophet Isaiah:
Now I am revealing new things to you, things hidden and unknown to you, created just now, this very moment. Of these things you have heard nothing until now. So that you cannot say, Oh yes, I knew this. (Isaiah 48:6-7)
Ultimately, we fast so as to clear space within our minds and hearts and souls to await what holy newness is being revealed to us and to recognize it at work, as Isaiah says, “Created just now, this very moment.” God is at work moment by moment, bringing new life to birth in places we did not expect. I love of that passage, the second part which reminds us that the cynical part of our minds, which wants to say that we’ve seen it all, that nothing can surprise us any longer, is too narrow to witness what is unfolding right now.
My hope is that this will be an invitation for you to expand your concept of what fasting might mean for you and the gifts it has to offer, a way to witness those things hidden and unknown. Not just to stop eating chocolate, but to fast from things like “ego-grasping” or control, so that, in yielding yourself, a greater wisdom than your own is revealed.
We become aware of and fast from destructive patterns in our lives and direct our attention and energy toward what is life-giving, toward our true hunger and the feast. We let go of something depleting so we have more space to embrace what is life-giving and to nourish our true hunger.
And then perhaps from these Lenten fasts, we will arrive at Easter and realize those things from which we have fasted we no longer need to take back on again. We will experience a different kind of rising.
Reprinted with permission from A Different Kind of Fast: Feeding Our True Hungers in Lent by Christine Valters Paintner copyright © 2024 Broadleaf Books.
Sy-Zy-Gy | The Close Union
Sy-Zy-Gy | The Close Union
In creative terms, it can be said that Sarla Chandra’s art is an inspired dive into Quantum physics – the study of matter and energy at the most fundamental level. Her paintings serve as a powerful visual metaphor for harmony, order and power – concepts that drive the stability and balance in an otherwise chaotic and unpredictable world.
In philosophy ‘Syzygy’ (pronounced si-zi-ji) derived from a Greek word, refers to ‘Close Union’. In astronomy, it is the concurrence and coming together of celestial bodies in a unique configuration, to create an extraordinary spectacle.
A full moon night, a new moon sky, lunar and solar eclipses are such occurrences when planets align – to bring magic to the universe. In many cultures, this astronomic alignment is seen as a sign of divine intervention.
Artist Sarla Chandra invokes this magical phenomenon in her latest series Syzygy – that explores the cyclical movement of celestial bodies in the cosmic world. Her childhood desire to stargaze, while watching the night skies and her curiosity for astronomy only deepened with time, as she continued to draw insights into the mysterious relationship between Man and Universe.
As a human, she says, “I could never reach the stars, so I would imagine taking the form of a bird, that can fly high, reach the skies and see these celestial bodies up and close.” What followed, was a voyage into eternity – a spectacular parade of ‘orbs’ that dissolves space, time and distance.
In her new series Syzygy, Sarla has used metallic colors upon textured paper, often against black, to reflect the darkness, depth and vastness of our universe.
In sharp contrast, she also uses her trademark medium of radiant silver and golden foil or ‘Varakh’ to highlight the paths planets travel. Stars, planets and orbits dazzle with a luminescent golden light in Sarla’s paintings – taking us along a meditative path.
The interplay of brilliant light, lines and textures, both upon forms and formless subjects, aglow with energy, becomes a tactile experience and therefore creates a powerful gravitational pull into her art.
The age-old practice of Vedic chanting, sound and cosmic vibrations that always inspired Sarla, also find a unique expression in her paintings.
With her in-depth study of Indian scriptures, she began to see the ancient texts as a form of ‘asemic’ writing – a script that was perhaps once understood by the ancients but was now lost to the new, younger generation.
In Syzygy, she uses the lyrical tool of asemic writing in the form of collages- an open form of abstract expressionism, and produces a body of work that can be considered wordless and subtextual.
She also uses the meditative technique of ‘collage’ to make connections between isolated images and nature’s Five Elements, probing concepts like form and matter. This lends a layered narrative of subjects close to her heart – like science, spirituality, philosophy and astronomy.
In Sarla’s own words, “There are times when one wants to be at peace, to be in perfect alignment with oneself, with others around us and with the universe.
That is when I pick up my brush, paints and canvas. I walk into the Great Forest – the ‘Brihad Aranyaka’, to become lost in its vastness of thought, to become surrounded with multiple constellations of energy and ultimately achieve the singular, meditative state of Syzygy”.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
A thinking, bold and experimental artist, Sarla Chandra’s tryst with art and Indian culture has spanned over fifty years. With more than 50 solo exhibitions and 40 group shows to her credit, her signature paintings are treasured by connoisseurs of art all over the world.
Born in 1943, Sarla is a post graduate in science from the prestigious St. John’s College, Agra. However, subjects that have always fascinated her like Indian philosophy, mythology and the scriptures – have slowly manifested themselves onto her canvas. She has experimented with a variety of mediums – oils, acrylics, watercolours, etchings, lithographs, but her unique use of ‘bhojpatra’-parchment, ‘repousse’-metal embossing and ‘varakh’-gold and silver foil are unorthodox techniques that recreate the aura of our ancient cultural heritage. MORE
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Eldering as 'Dismemberment'
Eldering as ‘Dismemberment’
December 15, 2023
Remembering…
We are in Thomas Berry’s Riverdale Center for Religious Research overlooking the Hudson. The rock cliffs of the Palisades across the river shine in the early morning sunlight. The Great Red Oak lifts its branches into the air drawing in the brilliant blue sky.
This luminous light pours into the sunroom where an eight-foot Norfolk pine hovers over the table. We are pondering with Thomas over coffee how we can take apart the library here that he has gathered for decades. For some time now Thomas has been brooding over its weight, seeing it as a burden. This massive collection of ten thousand books has lived here for more than twenty years since 1972. What to do with them? How to take apart a lifetime of work and reflection that has been the basis of Thomas’ teaching, writing, and lecturing.
As we sit reflecting together, the books call out to us as persons. The Church Fathers and medieval theologians in the conference room, the Chinese sages and Indian philosophers in the reception room. Jewish and Muslim scholars gathered near books of art on all these traditions. In the hallway live psychologists, like Carl Jung and scientists, such as Teilhard de Chardin. In the copy room there are shelves of entwined ecology books. Upstairs under the limbs of the great red oak is the room filled with Native American writings abiding in resilience. This great collection is “a communion of subjects”, related to one another across time and space.
The poignancy of this moment is evident as the emotional ties of attachment, which are ebbing and flowing. How to let go of this community? How to be in the moment of change? How to embrace this great transition? For it is not only the library that will be dispersed, but the unpublished Riverdale papers that Thomas has written will need to find a home. How to manage all of this? Where to send the books? How to publish the papers?
We drink our coffee as the light passes across the estuary flow of the Hudson River – salt-water moving up from the Atlantic, fresh water moving down from the headwaters in the Adirondacks. The currents meet here and are visible as the tides change. So too the ebb and flow of gatherings of books and meetings, lectures and meals will diminish. As Thomas makes his way back home to be with his family in Greenboro, NC, this Riverdale Center will close. An era will come to an end. Thomas is eighty years old, and he wishes to let go of the responsibilities of keeping the Center going. It is time to return to a warmer climate and the embrace of family. Yet the challenge is how to manage this with grace and a modicum of ease.
We decide to send most of the books to universities where Thomas’ students are teaching. This is the beginning. A plan is forming. Now to carry it out. We begin one weekend a month driving in from Bucknell University in Pennsylvania where we are teaching. Then we have longer periods to work over spring break and Christmas holidays. This is a great turning for all of us – an eldering process for Thomas, a maturing process for us.
Thomas embraces this eldering with grace, humor, and depth. We work steadily during the day – together deciding where each box would go. Taping them shut and labeling them, then carting them to the post office for mailing. At the end of the day, we return to the sunroom, lay out a meal, and open a bottle of wine. Thomas leans back to take it all in with a smile, saying, “Oh my!”. We raise our glasses to toast the moment, bringing in our companions – the River, the Palisades, the Great Red Oak. This is the larger “communion of subjects” in which we dwell here.
Thomas speaks:
“This process is a great dismemberment, like a shaman’s initiation into his healing arts. He goes on a journey where he is torn apart. His task is to come back together, to reassemble himself. His skill at doing this over time gives him his shamanic powers. That is what this process is here – a dismemberment of a lifetime, a rite-of-passage to prepare us for the next stage. The pain of loss is real; but the letting go brings grace and renewal. How we manage it is the key. Each step is a moving forward toward wholeness. The healing powers come in – giving thanks for what has been and invoking fresh creative powers for what is yet to be.”
The Sun was setting over the Palisades, the wine was enlivening our spirits, the food was nourishing our bodies, and the silence of the evening enveloped us. This is Thomas’ dismemberment moment; this is his eldering teaching; this is his moment of grace.
THE SONG OF THE LIBRARY
These verses were written by John Grim on the occasion of the dispersal of Thomas Berry’s library from the Riverdale Center in New York on January 3, 1995.
The great work has always been
transmutation.
From the first movement of the
formative fireball
an inner silence has prepared us
for contemplation,
an expansive abyss has challenged us
to engage
the ten thousand things.
Reading flows across these realms of visual brooding
beyond the word to touch the soundless presence.
Now, the time of the ten thousand books
by the Hudson River
in the shadow of the Great Red Oak
transmutes with the Palisades’ sunset,
with the community gatherings,
with the glorious year,
with the joys and sorrows,
of the crucible of life.
Into another harmony, held by hands
in other places.
Ecclesiates wrote,
books involve endless hard work,
and much study
wearies the body.
There is no end of books.
“Put that book on the shelf!”
the storyteller said.
Here, at the Center of immensities
these books have sat on the shelf
for over twenty years
working their magic with bodies
and minds eager to encounter
the generative tumult of the universe story.
The storyteller and his marvelous
collection of writings and books
interpenetrate narrative and event.
As the Avatamsaka Sutra says:
“For unreckonable vast eons
they travel constantly through the ten directions
infinitely.
Their knowledge of enlightening means is infinite,
Their knowledge of truth is infinite,
Their knowledge of spiritual power is infinite,
Their miracles in each mental instant
are infinite.”
Looking out from the sun porch
at the juncture of these volumes of time,
reading this many treed place,
hearing the ever-renewing song
of the trickster-transformer,
gravity pours into me.
Will wine ever hold bouquet again?
Can a margarita bring your sunset smile
after the books are packed,
the boxes mailed?
This great work has tipped,
tasted, and delighted us
ever lithesome as we walk the rooms.
Never empty, infinite in their fullness.
Echoing the beauty of a healing chant.
The door does not close,
the thoughtful laughter never ends,
just a light and shadow change
in the journey.
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of its founding, the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology is releasing to the public a series of recordings by Thomas Berry, available for the first time in digital format. “The Collected Thoughts of Thomas Berry” is a work in eight parts. The Yale Forum will be releasing one portion each month,
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Die Before You Die | A Dialogue on Death and Rebirth
Die Before You Die | A Dialogue on Death and Rebirth
featured image | Every 17 December, the night of Rumi’s death, thousands of people from all around the world gather to celebrate Seb-i Arus, his ‘Wedding Day’, his reunion with his Beloved, with the Divine. Photo | Hulki Okan Tabak
Hannes Schumacher (HS) | What sparked my enthusiasm for this conversation was the title of a presentation you gave recently at the University of Birmingham: “Die Before You Die”—is that not a proper title also for our dialogue? We had a spontaneous conversation via phone when I found myself surrounded by ferocious mountains in the countryside of Greece with a fragmented internet connection. Drenched in loads of laughter we talked about death and nothingness, about our common interests in Sufism, Heidegger and the Kyoto School, about my Ayahuasca trip in Ecuador, about contemporary permaculture and traditional medicine in Nigeria … What I somewhat missed—haha—is the Ifá conception of death: Could you please explain to me what is death according to the teachings of Ọ̀rúnmìlà and where you see a close connection to the Sufism of Rumi?
Emmanuel Ofuasia (EO) | Thank you Hannes. It is a rare privilege to be able to converse over thousands of miles with a being that you may never meet in person. But for the advancement of scholarship, the words of Carl Jung ring through: “Do not be bothered when you find you find yourself alone. If you do your work conscientiously, unknown friends from far away shall seek you.” You have sought me following my discussion on the view of death by Ọ̀rúnmìlà and Rumi which was a talk delivered to the Birmingham Centre for Philosophy of Religion on September 21, 2022.
I was intrigued by the fact that among the Abrahamic monotheisms, the norm is to love God and/or his messenger, live the moral life initiated by that love and aim for eternal life. For these two sages that I encounter, it is the topic of death that seems paramount for them.
Allow me to inform you that the topic of death for these two scholars, really is that there is nothing like death since reality is more than the physical with the capacity to transcend physical extinction. Whereas the one is certain that there is reincarnation, the other is not. However, the common denominator is that persistent thinking about death has the potential to alter our agency as well as how we see the world. In a particular verse of Rumi:
I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as a plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was man,
Why should I fear?
When was I less by dying?
Rumi is a Sufi and highly respected Islamic scholar. His idea of reincarnation is tied to the fact that we need not fear death since it is through death that we graduate to a higher consciousness in the chain or hierarchy of being. An important point of departure of which I am unsure is if Rumi endorses that humans can return as humans. It is also doubtful if Sufi Islam endorses such an outlook wholly. I say this because if the Sufi take such a bold move, then they contradict the belief in the Last Day upon which Allah will mete out judgment to transgressors. So, if one has lived more than one life as a human, clearly such is beyond the jurisdiction of Islamic tenets, some of which the Sufi hold on to.
On the other hand, the notion of humans reincarnating and taking up the memory of someone from a previous life is replete among the Yoruba and this is a view also championed by Ọ̀rúnmìlà. I need to however point out that the influence of Euro-Christian civilisation and Arab-Islamic invasion into African indigenous episteme has led most Africans to rebuff their traditional beliefs openly even when they still hold these beliefs dearly.
The discourse on death between Ọ̀rúnmìlà and Rumi however has a common ground: constant meditation on death shapes action or agency and therefore their entire living. And when you consider how these two scholars arrived at this point without ever seeing one another, it becomes lucid that indeed, rationality is universal. Do you agree with this?
HS | Yes, I think I get your point. This contradiction between the doctrine of reincarnation (e.g. in the teaching of Ọ̀rúnmìlà) and the Day of Judgment in orthodox Islam probably has led to many conflicts against and among the Yoruba. Your point—as I understand it—is to argue for a genuine syncretism of Ifá and Islam based on the Sufism of Rumi, or at least to see him as a messenger between conflicting sides. I believe that Sufism is a promising alternative, not only in Nigeria but in many places all around the world. In your presentation you also cited Ibn Arabi:
Generally speaking, each person necessarily sticks to a particular belief concerning his Lord. He always goes back to his Lord through his particular belief and seeks God therein. Such a man positively recognizes the Real only when He manifests himself to him in the form recognized by his belief. But when He manifests himself in other beliefs, he flatly refuses to accept Him and runs away from Him. In so doing, he simply behaves in an improper way towards God, while imagining that he is practicing good manners (adab) towards Him.
(I have to add that this passage is, of course, very male-oriented. The gender of the God and the believer, in my view, belongs to the very “form” that Ibn Arabi talks about.)
EO | There have been no violent confrontations between Ifá priests and Sufi scholars in Nigeria. The difference in their ideology concerning death is just that the Sufi hold on to the pillar of Last Day even when the reality of cases or instances of reincarnation stares them. This is what marks the Yoruba Ifá priests apart.
I should point out to you that there are some Sufi scholars in Nigeria who see Ọ̀rúnmìlà even as a prophet sent by Allah years before Prophet Muhammad. Their argument is that even Ọ̀rúnmìlà could be a muslim and there are Ifá verses that are suggestive of this. This has however created a divide.
On the one hand there are those Muslims who claim that Ọ̀rúnmìlà is a muslim and subordinate to Prophet Muhammad. On the other hand, there are Ifá priests who argue that such cannot be the case.
Now, concerning the male image of God, the passage you quoted is from Ibn Arabi. However, I am one of those who claim that we cannot be certain of God’s sex but it is no more than mere ascription the same way we gave God power, love and knowledge in the superlative senses only to end up with theodicy. In Yoruba linguistics, there is no pronoun for He/She/It that is indicative of sex. What obtains is just a letter “O.” It is the context in which the utterance is made that the sex of the subject/object is known, not without.
This is starkly different from the Abrahamic monotheisms where they claim God cannot be apprehended with the physical eyes but still found God as male.
Ọ̀rúnmìlà
Ọ̀rúnmìlà, also known as Orunmila or Orúla, is a significant deity in the Yoruba religion, which is primarily practiced in West Africa, particularly among the Yoruba people of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo. Ọ̀rúnmìlà is considered one of the most important Orisha (deities) in the Yoruba pantheon and is associated with divination, wisdom, and fate. In Yoruba mythology, Ọ̀rúnmìlà is believed to have played a crucial role in the creation of the world. He is considered one of the “Irunmole,” a group of divine beings who aided in the process of creation. His knowledge of the sacred verses and divination is said to have been bestowed upon him by Olodumare (the Supreme God).
Mowlānā Jalāloddin Balkhi (Rumi)
Rumi, is one of the most celebrated and influential poets, mystics, and spiritual teachers in the history of Islamic literature and Sufism. He was born on September 30, 1207, in Balkh, which is now in modern-day Afghanistan, and he passed away on December 17, 1273, in Konya, Turkey. Rumi’s life and works have left an indelible mark on both Persian and world culture, earning him the title of “Mowlānā,” which means “our master” in Persian. Rumi’s poetry, written in Persian, is renowned for its profound spiritual insights, themes of love, unity, and the divine, as well as its lyrical beauty. His most famous work, the “Mathnawi” (or “Masnavi-ye-Ma’navi”), is often considered one of the greatest pieces of mystical poetry ever composed.
Rumi was a prominent figure in the Sufi tradition, a mystical branch of Islam. His poetry and teachings emphasize the importance of seeking a direct and personal connection with God, often through love and devotion. Rumi’s approach to spirituality transcends religious boundaries and speaks to the universal human longing for divine union.
HS | Beautiful. Do you have in mind a resolution of the contradiction between the doctrines of the Last Day and reincarnation in Nigeria? Rumi is a great authority but he is highly suggestive here. Or do you intend to maintain the contradiction for the sake of a more profound idea of death?
EO | I must begin by saying that for the Yoruba belief system in which Ọ̀rúnmìlà is seen as a religious, spiritual and philosophical authority, there is nothing like the Last Day. Rumi, even though a muslim who entertains the possibility of reincarnation, allowed the belief in the Last Day—one of the cardinals in Islamic faith—to override his Sufi notion of possible reincarnation. My own point however is that I was looking at how much they focused on death as the pathway to guide their agency for an afterlife.
Heidegger sees death as nothing but part and parcel of us. The prize for being alive. That which is within us waiting to engulf us as soon as we gush in the first stream of oxygen. So I agree with you that through death we are able to consider more profoundly, aspects of life which we may not wish to entertain or consider.
HS | Like in Anaximander’s fragment:
Whence things have their origin, there they must also pass away according to necessity; for they pay recompense and penalty for their injustices, according to the ordinance of time.
Ọ̀rúnmìlà’s idea of reincarnation reminded me of this: death is like a leak in the great ark of life, reconnecting us with the furious ocean whence we dwell and strive.
Emmanuel, what I keep on noticing during our conversation is your interest in rationality whereas I am more intrigued by the irrational (perhaps due to our different cultural backgrounds?) By analogy, your idea of death is a continuous contemplation of our human finitude, whereas to me death is a mystical experience. ‘To die before you die,’ in my view, is not only to contemplate about one’s death but to experience it in all its terrifying depth, but also once again to be reborn into a new light, a wholly different vision of the self and of the world.
In Sufism, this idea is addressed in the concept and practice of fanāʾ which is commonly translated as the annihilation of the self. Mansur Al-Hallaj (858-922 CE)—a more controversial figure in Islam—was executed for uttering the words “I am the Truth” (ana’l-Haq), an utterance which his opponents understand as a blasphemous identification with God. Al-Hallaj’s supporters, on the other hand, see his life and work as the realization of fanā: by killing his individual self, his limited personality, he ultimately unified with the unlimited self of God. In another passage Rumi writes:
‘I am the Truth’ on the lips of Mansur [Al-Hallaj] was the light
‘I am God’ on the lips of Pharaoh was a lie.
When the Shaykh [Al-Hallaj] said ‘I am God’ and carried it through,
he throttled all the blind.
When a man’s ‘I’ is negated from existence, then what remains?
Consider O denier.’
What is at stake here, is neither death per se, nor its contemplation, but the experience of ego-death during one’s lifetime.
EO | First, allow me to point out that we are both rational in our dealings. We are employing logic and arguments to reinforce our claims. This means no one’s position is more superior or rational than the other. Second, allow me to stress once again that I am also deeply motivated to undertake traditional African religion from the perspective of process theology, of which we had both briefly talked about over the phone. Now, here is the catch: experience is central to process metaphysics, the foundation of process theology. All things experience and it is this experience that informs how we codify and organise ourselves as entities like no other in the actual world. On this note, the claim to experience death is used loosely by you and truth is only the living can consider death and its mystical accidents or ingredients on behalf of the dead. So, to “die before you die” as used by me in the ideas of Ọ̀rúnmìlà and Rumi is that the consistent REFLECTION not EXPERIENCE on death shapes one’s relation to self, others and the world. It need not be a wholly new or different reflection or perspective. It merely needs to command reflection on the agent that the reality of death, which CAN NEVER BE EXPERIENCED can inform a better view of life.
I see that your use of words and thoughts on the subject matter is based on the concept of fanāʾ and Mansur’s. This is like moving beyond the scope of the present discourse since it centres on Rumi. However, if what is at stake is ego-death as you claim, then at what point does one, personally claim to have arrived at this state of ego-death? Is it posterity that confers such on an individual? Did Rumi and Mansur attain ego-death according to themselves or is it posterity that confers these on them? These distinctions are important for the present discourse. Death is not a thing to be experienced. However, contemplation and meditations on the subject can make one take life more simply. These are the overriding messages from Ọ̀rúnmìlà and Rumi. The notion of experience of ego-death in one’s lifetime as you conclude is another subject matter on its own. This would command some justifications not from Sufism but Buddhism.
HS | Since I participated in an Ayahuasca ceremony in Ecuador, I no longer share these concerns. Ayahuasca in the regions of the Amazon is considered as a sacred medicine that helps us reconnect with nature and experience Being in itself, which can be very terrifying.
After drinking from the potion, I slowly drifted on the floor until the first “visuals” would overtake my consciousness. These highly synesthetic impressions are so sensitive that the soft clicking of a shaman’s lips while speaking, for example, would lead me into wholly different regions such as the unfolding of history, or the food I ate last week, or me reliving the birth of my child both from the mother’s and the child’s perspective. Turning my body to the left would raise my problematic with Trinitarian elements in the spiritual spheres of Latin America, turning to the right would spark my fear and simultaneous excitement to rise higher into burning light …
Inspired by the cosmic poetry of my fellow participant Gabriel, I tried out different languages and my German mother tongue led me into the concentration camps of Auschwitz. Me myself a prisoner I was tortured with medieval torture instruments, with my arms and legs spanning over the entire ceremonial house, when my idea arose that the two shamans—before so nice and calm—intended to kill me. Second, when Gabriel began to move around aggressively while I sank into the ground, I felt that the ceremony had gone terribly out of control and we should try to reach out for some medical help. However, the rest of the night turned out rather calm and I had deep insights into my expanding consciousness and its mutual entanglement with the entire world, until warm sunlight would bring me back to a new life, spiraling in nature’s orchestra.
True, I did not literally die, I was terribly afraid to die, and perhaps this is all. And yet, when I recall that night at the ceremony, I cannot help but remember that I died: it is a tremendous paradox within the flow of my life which turned out irreducible to any other explanation. Of course, you may argue that all this is highly subjective, after all only a matter of psychology, indeed, I have my doubts in it as well. But I claim that there are such altered states of consciousness in which we may experience our own death, at least from a subjective perspective.
EO | What you witnessed cannot be categorized as death experience. Existentially, if you died, you would not be here having this conversation over thousands of miles with me and never ever meeting me. It is a religious experience and like William James once warned us, there are many regions of consciousness that exist aside from the conventional. On page 300-1 of his 2002 edition of his Varieties of Religious Experience, James said:
Our waking consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, different types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.
I need to tell you that I agree with James on this and I cannot deny that you had an experience that is not in waking consciousness. What you experience is also why Sextus Empiricus had related that we are only aware of our own mental states:
For each person is aware of his own private pathos [affections], but whether this pathos occurs in him and his neighbor from a white object neither can he himself tell, since he is not submitting to the pathos of his neighbour … And since no pathos is common to us all, it is hasty to declare that what appears to me of a certain kind appears of this same kind to my neighbor as well.
Yes, I cannot enter into your pathos and you cannot enter mine. On a rational and deeper level of reflection, you may have witnessed another dimension to consciousness. Your description does not come close to near death experiences or out of body experiences. You did not die Hannes. You only experienced reality from another dimension. What I can confidently say is that the experience that you had that night currently lacks vocabulary and parapsychology needs to be given more opportunity to express itself for cases as yours. You had a “conscious experience” beyond the normal, conventional waking consciousness.
I am a big fan of personal experience and this is one of the reasons why I chose to major in Metaphysics—if I cannot change society or the world, at least I should be able to study ways through which I can position myself to cope with whatever the society or the world throws at me. The problem we have is that there is a strict censorship pertaining to the kind of knowledge that can be published and taken as “scientific.” This is where the problem lies. On this account, some experiences, very insightful and relevant, are usually left out of scope. This is why I have the deep conviction that as humans we are not operating with our mental faculties at the optimum level. In fact, we barely use it.
So on this note, I challenge you to see yourself as studying yourself. See your experience(s) as ways that yourself keeps unfolding you to seeing yourself.
HS | I find it interesting how you conflate the discipline of metaphysics with personal experience: while metaphysics investigates the nature of the absolute, i.e. a knowledge which ranks higher than objective facts, personal experience can be terribly subjective: you seem to draw a circle here which from my point of view is very stimulating. By investigating ourselves, we learn a lot about the world around us, and most importantly about the cultural biases we inherit. If we are able to erase these cultural biases not only theoretically but also in practice, the study of the self becomes the study of the absolute but from an inside perspective.
This is another thing I learned from Ayahuasca: I am nothing, I am everything. But still I am this vulnerable, limited existence with its memories and dreams.
I grew up in a cultureless society in southern Germany where a merely formal atheism is paired with a hostile Calvinistic moral. In return, I broke with these cultural biases and went to live in various locations in the Global South in search of different perspectives which I found and adapted to some degree. But we also have to see how such movements to the opposite extreme are still triggered by the original biases, and ask how they can be relativized as well. May I ask how are your experiences in a very different cultural environment?
EO | Allow me to relay that in the midst of my philosophical-spiritual journey, I have adapted some aspects of Darwinism, especially the topic on survival of the fittest. It is not the wisest, strongest, meanest, that survives. It is the one with the ability to adapt to the changes in the environment. I have brought this conviction to my living and interaction practices to almost everywhere I find myself.
I have a background in Christianity which I had broken from since I find no point reading a Bible that teaches me that God created light before the sun or that there is Heaven or Hell when reincarnation is more real. I moved to investigate traditional African religion and I realise that they have nearly all the answers to my puzzles rather than the Abrahamic monotheisms. Nevertheless, I keep a good relationship with Muslims and Christians, but I do not let them convince me into their faith much as I do not bother them about mine.
An important point I understand is that no one is making it out of this place alive. Live and let live! My ontology, my spirituality works for me but I see people around me who seek to tap into another person’s spirituality through what they call religion. I cannot change them. My ideas are enough for me and I adapt them to wherever I find myself. Of course, whoever comes to me can only be made to think and reflect on their place in this doomed existence of ours. I cannot foist or even pass my beliefs and modus operandi to them. Spirituality is like an electric pole passing through a street. Anyone can tap into it from their plots. Why would I want anyone to “tap from my own tapping” (i.e. religion) when they can experience and manifest their god-like features?
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The Teachings in a Time of Intense World Crisis
The Teachings in a Time of Intense World Crisis
Cover image | Meandering wadis combine to form dense, branching networks across the stark, arid landscape of southeastern Jordan.
How interesting to be devoting an issue of Kosmos to the Ageless Spirit, honoring both the vast body of wisdom teachings that have been passed down through the centuries AND those many wise elders (including some who are young in years) who are today bringing fresh insight to these teachings as they apply to the mind and heart of our age.
And what an age it is! The world right now, in all its intensity, can seem to be a chaotic complex of contradictions, conflicts, stresses and tensions. And as time goes on it only seems as if this intensity is mounting. As we become increasingly aware of how interdependent we are as a species, crises in the body politic are, not surprisingly, coalescing – mirroring that interdependence. As Oxfam International Executive Director, Amitabh Behar, recently declared while speaking at the UN, we are facing “a poly-crisis: a climate emergency, a cost-of-living crisis, an inequality crisis, a crisis of democracy back-sliding”. Readers of Kosmos recognize that the coalescing crises in society and international relations are also reflected in every profession, in science and technology and, most importantly, they reach into the depths of the psyche of our most private and intimate lives. As communities, nations, peoples and as individuals we are in crisis.
So, what’s going on? How does this chaos in the world affect our relationship with the great Wisdom Teachings that have played such a critical role throughout human history? Is the Ageless Spirit simply a way of escaping from the ‘real world’ and turning our backs on all the gritty questions of our age, as some might suggest? While of course the inherited wisdom of the ages can be approached in a whole variety of ways, some of which may be disempowering and escapist, I think that something different is at play here. If there is one thing that most teachings agree on it is: what’s wrong with crisis? Crisis transforms. Bearing in mind the oft quoted thought ‘never waste a good crisis’ – this is a time to welcome and appreciate breakdown as a sign that some sort of existential change is on the way. It’s a time to shift our focus and direct our attention to signs of breakthrough.
More than anything else, the intensity of these times challenges us to deepen our own orientation to the Real – and to our intelligent appreciation of future evolutionary possibilities that are being worked out in our lives and through our lives. And that is why the Wisdom Teachings are so important right now. We are being called to really think – and to explore what it means to think for ourselves, rather than be molded in our thinking by either the fears and insecurities of those around us, or by loud voices seeking to persuade us of one ‘right’ way of responding to these times. The Teachings give us a new map of Reality, and a way of seeing that spirit is alive and at work in all the matter and substance of our lives. It is then down to us how we interpret these teachings in the face of today’s realities.
Evolution, as I understand it, is pushing us all to think and feel in fresh and quite new ways. A reorientation to the Real (with its limitless dimensions of Joy and Beauty, Love and Purpose) is about going deeper so that our intelligence, creativity, and instinctual behaviors can be more oriented around and inspired by depths of wisdom that lie within us and can drive the emergence of an entirely new culture where science, religion and spirituality can become whole again and mystery, spirit and myth re-emerge in all the professions and social organisms.
Ancient wisdom that has been passed down through the ages has the power to lift modern thought into a new fascination with time-honored qualities like selflessness, healthy self-forgetfulness, sacrifice, service – all the ways in which the love of the soul truly breathes in and through our lives and our cultures. Only a serious, deep encounter with the ancient wisdom teachings (in their diversity) has the power to do this.
There is a purpose that lives in our soul or Essential Self, our own unique Buddha Nature. And in this moment of crisis that deep purpose is pushing itself, at times quite forcefully, through into the awareness of more and more of us – as individual units as well as into the shared thinking of groups and networks. That pushing into awareness can be a source of disorientation as everything we thought was real and true and substantial begins to be seen in a new light. To counter this, visions, goals, and disciplines must be re-discovered and re-envisioned.
It is here, as we rediscover what it is to be human in a world in transformation that the Wisdom Teachings of the ages can be seen to be so vitally important. For the teachings, considered as a whole body of thought – a perennial wisdom with a wealth of myths and stories and insights into the Real – are what give our minds and our hearts access to the new consciousness that is coming in. We need these maps and guides to help us navigate afresh our way out of materialism and into some new and as yet undefined culture of synthesis where the material world and the spiritual world sit together in a more creative and enriching way.
This sort of process of realignment can inspire a quiet persistence and an almost timeless sense that everything (absolutely everything) is about unfolding qualities of relationship: between personality and soul or vision, identity, thought and emotions; between individual and group; between groups; between kingdoms of nature; between the Earth and the Cosmos.
While the notion of Emotional Intelligence is now well established in thoughtful conversations we are still not so familiar with what Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall refer to as Spiritual Intelligence: the “intelligence with which we access our deepest meanings, values, purposes, and highest motivations. It is how we use these in our thinking processes, in the decisions that we make, and things that we think it is worthwhile to do …. Spiritual intelligence is our moral intelligence.”1 It is here that the Wisdom Teachings become our guides and protectors. They provide us with an understanding of how, through individuals and groups around the world, the mind and soul and spirit are again coalescing in ways that are already shaping a new world.
As Ian McGilchrist reminds us “attention is a moral act”. As more and more of us develop a long-term encounter with the wise teachings of the ages we are developing the muscles and discernment needed to navigate our own authentic ways of attending to the world and to the relationships within the world. And, I suspect, that many of us are doing so in response to the intensity of the crises of this time.
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1. Daana Zohar and Ian Marshall, Spiritual Capital: Wealth We Can Live By. San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler. p.
Earth, Our Eldest Teacher
All images | US Geological Survey
Hafiz | Illuminating the Eternal Spirit of Love
Hafiz | Illuminating the Eternal Spirit of Love
Hafiz came on the scene during the Ilkhanate dynasty (established 1256, fifty-nine years before he was born). He was thirty-eight when it collapsed in 1353. Then, several dynasties (Injuids, Muzaffarids, Chobanids, Jalayirids, Kartids, etc.) gained power and declared independence, dividing Persia into smaller, regional states. Of these, Hafiz lived under the reign of the Injus and Muzaffarids. Persia was not united again until the Safavid dynasty (1501–1736) in the 16th century.
His dates are possibly 1315–1390 (716–791 AH), but this isn’t absolutely certain. (Please note, too: Muslims of his time didn’t celebrate birthdays.) It’s safe to say Hafiz was a contemporary of Chaucer. Yet Hafiz is more like Shakespeare, two centuries later. Both were immersed in cosmopolitan as well as local culture. Their affinity might even bear direct influence. Scholar Ernest Fenollosa points out that “the freedom of the Elizabethan mind, and its power to range over all planes of human experience, as in Shakespeare, was in part, an aftermath of Oriental contacts,” encounters with Iran included.
He was a native of Shiraz, the capital of the province of Fars, from which come the words Farsi and Persian. Throughout the Islamic world, for centuries, Shiraz had been considered as the House of Knowledge, comparable to the Athens of Iran. Situated for both land and maritime trade on the Silk Road and the Spice Routes, it was a major international trading center, and, as a regional political center, its economy was self-reliant. In Hafiz’s time, Shiraz was comparable to Florence under the de Medicis. Scholar Leonard Lewisohn describes it as home of “learned theologians, eloquent preachers, pious ascetics, ecstatic Sufis, erudite scholars, specialist theologians, great calligraphers, famous scientists, and adept men of letters.” Such a varied cultural and economic climate helped Shiraz survive intense periods of political violence. Within that background of artistic and intellectual brilliance, Hafiz’s grasp of the philosophies, poetics, and politics of his time provided solid, rich grounding for him to reach beyond any other Persian poet, before or after[1]. Indeed, Hafiz is considered the zenith, the acme, the pinnacle, the apex of classical Persian literature of all time. In his lifetime, his lyrics captivated the soul of his people. His latest ones would be copied by hand and distributed for minstrels to sing and for people to read after performances. While written words were slower to travel, song was immediate. So his audience in his lifetime extended across Iran, from Fars to Khorasan and Azerbaijan. And, attesting to the reach of extending beyond national borders, his devotees could be found in such Persianate communities as India, Turkistan, and Mesopotamia.
Someone suggested he gather his lyrics together – following the common Persian practice of collecting and publishing a poet’s works into a book (divan) in his or her lifetime. But, no. His gears seemed to know no reverse, except to further refine and polish his work. His refusal to commit to a divan meant his work remained to be collected and arranged by others, beginning a dozen years after his death. His poems weren’t dated, although some clearly refer to contemporary events. But divans weren’t typically arranged chronologically nor even thematically but, rather, by the syllables rhyming at the ends of lines. What’s important to note here is that Hafiz’s divan, some five hundred lyric poems, is half or a third less than his peers. This reflects his “soul-digging, hardworking” commitment to craft, seen in each lyric’s high degree of polish.
Today, you’re likely to find two books in homes in Iran, a Qur’an and Hafiz’s divan. Sometimes the latter is more dog-eared than the former – as people commonly memorize his poetry, and quote lines to each other.
Hafiz was deeply influenced by Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam. His poetry reflects Sufi themes of divine love, spiritual awakening, and the quest for union with the Divine. Islam is the second largest and fastest growing religion in the world, within which Sufism is sometimes considered “the other Islam.”
Sufism is believed to be both a historical reality that appeared in the Muslim world after the advent of Islam as well as a “reality without a name,” a trans-historical phenomenon that has been present from the time that the first human experienced a sense of separateness from and at- traction to ultimate reality. – Alan Godlas
Much of what the West knows about Sufism is initially through poets – Rumi, Attar, Sa’di, and Hafez, for example. This influence can be seen as early as the 12 th century, in minstrels and jongleurs, courtly trouvères and troubadours, and Dante – later in Goethe & Emerson. A leading Sufic trait is the dialogue of the sacred and the secular, through love poems, where the mortal and the divine Beloved are interfused, mirroring and magnifying each other;
A lyric poet and a mystic poet, Hafiz is also an ecstatic poet. Singing of pain and of joy, Hafiz also touches something beyond either. A member of the school of Islamic philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali once said, “For his lovers, God pours out a draft from the cup of His love, and by that draft they are intoxicated, rapt away from themselves.” In this rapturous vintage, we can taste the Greek roots of ecstasy: going beyond self. Dissatisfaction with the world, the inebriation of wine, the surprise and transport of love, and recognition of the value of methods of living in harmony and joy – each are points of departure from the illusory view of the limited, isolated self (“the skin-encapsulated ego”), into a realm of silent ecstasy.. ) But, enough prose! It’s time to saddle up the camels and journey to … Hafiz.
following are vignettes from whole poems, based on adaptations by filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami
Gertrude Bell’s Classic Translations of Hafiz
Gertrude Bell, a remarkable British archaeologist, traveler, and diplomat of the early 20th century, is renowned for her extensive contributions to Middle Eastern history and culture. Among her notable works, she is celebrated for her classic translations of the enchanting poetry of Hafiz, which played a vital role in introducing the Western world to the profound beauty and spiritual depth of Persian literature.
From The Garden of Heaven
FROM the garden of Heaven a western breeze
Blows through the leaves of my garden of earth;
With a love like a huri I’ld take mine ease,
And wine! bring me wine, the giver of mirth!
To-day the beggar may boast him a king,
His banqueting-hall is the ripening field,
And his tent the shadow that soft clouds fling.
A tale of April the meadows unfold–
Ah, foolish for future credit to slave,
And to leave the cash of the present untold!
Build a fort with wine where thy heart may brave
The assault of the world; when thy fortress falls,
The relentless victor shall knead from thy dust
The bricks that repair its crumbling walls.
Trust not the word of that foe in the fight!
Shall the lamp of the synagogue lend its flame
To set thy monastic torches alight?
Drunken am I, yet place not my name
In the Book of Doom, nor pass judgment on it;
Who knows what the secret finger of Fate
Upon his own white forehead has writ!
And when the spirit of Hafiz has fled,
Follow his bier with a tribute of sighs;
Though the ocean of sin has closed o’er his head,
He may find a place in God’s Paradise.
See more translations by Gertrude Bell at Poet Seers
I asked the sage “When did the All-Wise
make you a seer?”
“ Same day, “ he said,
“As the great Azure Dome was made”
No surprise
If in Seventh Heaven
Lyrics composed by Hafiz
& sung by Venus
Entice
Jesus to dance
At the time of Adam
In the Garden of Paradise
The poetry of Hafiz
Ornamented the diaries
Of the wild lilacs & the amaryllis
Be in harmony
With the spring clouds
Commemorate
The ones who are gone
&
Those who love
Every moment
With you
I’m falling in love
Anew
Adapted, and reprinted with permission from Hampton Roads Publishing, Hafiz’s Little Book of Life translated by Erfan Mojib and Gary Gach is available wherever books and ebooks are sold or directly from the publisher at www.redwheelweiser.com Paperback | Audio Edition, read by Samara Naeymi
[1]
His dates place him a century after Rumi. Where Rumi wrote of one lifelong theme, Hafiz’s vast scope make him all the more universal, and deserving of no less attention. As scholar Omid Safi has put it, if Rumi is a tumultuous ocean of love, Hafiz is an illuminated and many-faceted diamond.
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The Ageless Wisdom of Nancy Roof
The Ageless Wisdom of Nancy Roof
Rhonda Fabian | You’re so loved by this community, Nancy. It is a joy to be with you. The impulse that started Kosmos more than 20 years ago must have been very strong with everything going on at that time. What was it that really called Kosmos into being?
Nancy Roof | It is with great happiness that I have been invited to share my perspective on Ageless Spirit with the Kosmos community. It has given me an opportunity to pull together some deeper personal and collective spiritual wisdom and experience that may be helpful to others searching for meaning in their lives during these disruptive times.
Kosmos was originally called Spirituality and Reality. The two colleagues, Ven. Chung OK Lee, Head Minister of the Manhattan Won-Buddhist Temple and Co-President of World Conference on Religions and Peace from South Korea and Abdelkader Abbadi, UN Political Affairs from Morocco, and I had just published a book called A Vision for the New Civilization. We were concerned about the materialistic culture and separative mindsets of the time that led not only to conflicts between individuals but also between nations. We believed that putting a spotlight on values and spirituality underlying these problems could help bring nations and citizens closer together in harmony and peace. After the first two issues of Spirituality and Reality were published my colleagues moved on to other projects. It now became my responsibility to rename and design what eventually became Kosmos Journal.
Rhonda | You decided to publish it as a beautiful keepsake print journal, but you didn’t necessarily know a lot about publishing!
Nancy | I knew nothing about journalism or publishing! Our approach was planetary, distinguishing between corporate globalization and planetary care and concern. New advisors from various countries gathered around our mission of transformation. Every continent was represented.
We attracted the intellectual rigor of pioneers and visionaries in collective systems – education, government, economics, science, environment and more, as well as those whose work reflected a sensibility to heart and soul. Rather than analyzing the separate systems, we sought their wholeness and interdependence.
We looked for the kind of beauty that touched and even stunned the heart into opening, through images that reflected the sacredness we felt. Unlike most journals we sent a message of love, care, warmth, and wisdom that inspired healing and active participation in our readers. It was original and unique based on the recognition that we were entering a new paradigm.
It took enormous courage to overcome my fear of failure. Unshakable trust in inner guidance gave me the energy and vitality to say “Yes.” I worked seven days a week without exhaustion or struggle. According to Taoist philosophy, when we try to control and force outcomes, we create frustration and chaos. When we let go of control and allow things to happen we flow effortlessly with the natural energy of the universe. Kosmos arrived and I simply followed the flow.
Essays are made: they are constructed over time, like drystone walls.
Poetry arrives: it drops from the sky like dew, and is shaped as it flows onto the page
– Paul Kingsnorth
Rhonda | If I’m correct, you started Kosmos around the age of 70. What was it at that moment in your life that inspired you so deeply?
Nancy | I think that my whole life experience was essential to the founding of Kosmos. Discovering the Ageless Wisdom in my 30’s after a painful Dark Night of the Soul – co-founding The Mountain School for Esoteric studies, earning a PhD in Transpersonal Psychology – developing courses in experiential education – becoming a mentor for many spiritual aspirants – being pulled to participate in the United Nations – co-founding the Values Caucus and then the Spiritual Caucus at the UN – developing and leading trauma programs for war-torn Yugoslavia – co-authoring A Vision for a New Civilization. My life was full of active service projects. I travelled around the world presenting a vision of the new civilization based on spiritual values. It was time to bring all these experiences together and share with a wider audience.
Rhonda | You speak of inner guidance or a voice within that you’re able to attune to and receive from. Tell me more about that and how it evolved in your lifetime, this inner knowing.
Nancy | It all began with a self-developed experiment in my early 30’s. I experimented with how I made decisions, some by rational thinking and analysis and the others by energetic impulse, being drawn in a particular direction. As a result of the experiment I realized that I was inwardly guided towards the right approach to situations in life by a dynamic inner energy that superseded rational analysis. I would follow that energy for the rest of my life.
Another transformative experience dropped into my awareness at a difficult period in my life. I felt unloved and desperate. I even contemplated suicide. I was divorced and living on $75 a week, supporting three beloved children and working two jobs. One day I was stunned by the beauty of a delicate creamy pink flower image. It just dropped into my mind. And it spoke to me. “You are looking for love in the wrong places. Love is a part of you. You just need to BE love. You can smile at a stranger anywhere. You can give love wherever you are.” This realization totally changed my life. I now believe this transformative experience signaled a movement towards living more as soul. Love and beauty became central to my life and have expanded ever since. The beauty of that delicate flower has stayed with me throughout my life as a sacred symbol of transcendent love. It is this kind of beauty I tried to share with Kosmos.
Rhonda | I’m always struck by your ability to act from Presence – loving kindness and detachment – even to the point of letting go of people and things – including Kosmos to a great degree.
Nancy | I was very identified with the work I did internationally for Kosmos. I had a very active life traveling and having the honor of meeting visionaries of the new paradigm. This had to end as I got older. You were there, dear Rhonda to carry Kosmos into its next phase. One of the most important decisions we have to make in life is when to let go and give the younger generation the opportunity to bring their new ideas into the work. It seems that as people live longer now, they are less able to let go. causing numerous problems in our political and social culture.
It took some time to slow down and let go after many years of active service in the world. I was concerned about whether and how I could still contribute in some way. Polio symptoms returned from 70 years ago when I was completely paralyzed except for my hands. Although housebound by necessity, I was ready and eager to drop out of society completely and spend my remaining days engaged in deepening my understanding and experience of consciousness. My meditations had been focused on heart and soul, appropriate for an active period of service. Now they shifted to spirit and nonduality appropriate to my new stage of contemplation.
Another letting go was to follow. I was diagnosed with incurable kidney failure and given 6 months to live. Accepting this reality, I now prepared for death. The ageless wisdom taught that death is a continuation of life on a different plane beyond spacetime. I was ready. Deepening my knowledge and practice of nonduality helped me acclimate to other planes of consciousness. Sleep became important. Deep sleep is the closest experience to death we have every night and I wanted to know more.
Miraculously, my ‘incurable’ kidneys began to heal, leading to an abrupt reversal of focus. Again, I was waiting to discover the right direction through spiritual impulse, rather than rational thought. What excites me and makes me feel alive now? In addition to research and practice of inner consciousness, I detect an aliveness around understanding how the religious impulse will be manifested in these liminal times and in the new paradigm.
I am interacting most of the time with my dogs, Willy and Sophia. I am fascinated by the potential of inter-species love and the responsibility we have to help them unfold their full potential.
I got rid of the oxygen equipment supplied by Hospice and filled my room with living plants. I am drawn to the magical images of the new cosmology and the influence of the solar and galactic environment surrounding planet earth and am into the new physics. I’m intrigued by scientific discoveries that corroborate what the ageless wisdom discovered centuries ago.
I’m reading the post-modernists who are starting to develop a wholistic approach to life that includes “souls, systems, and societies” as per Jonathon Rowson and Perspectiva and warm data of Nora Bateson. Rather than beliefs and rational ideologies there is a demand for immersion in experiential learning that deepens our living experience of the sacred. The ageless wisdom is beginning to unfold into the mainstream and young souls are bringing in fresh ideas such as Presencing through Otto Scharmer.
Perhaps I’m still alive today to be one of those voices that supports and lives a new consciousness of expanded relationships and care both horizontally and vertically. Sitting in my wheelchair with my dogs and plants and the luxury of time, I feel more connected to the worlds than ever before through the internet externally and through expanded consciousness internally.
Rhonda | I’m hopeful that this quality of awakening is arising in many different sectors, many different people, despite these very difficult times. My teacher says Nirvana is all around us, but we don’t realize it most of the time. What do you think of that?
Nancy | I believe there is Life from the beginning. It is in the seed, ready to be discovered as it unfolds in our lives. We are aware and respond based on our consciousness. Our task is to uncover the loving Oneness and interrelationships that enfold our world by letting go of what is obstructing realization and listening silently to what is coming.
Rhonda | Beautiful. Nancy, the theme of this issue of Kosmos is Ageless Spirit. You are an ageless spirit, an elder who’s shining wisdom and light from your heart into the world. And there are other spiritual teachers, some in their nineties or older, who by their very existence, are still adding much to the collective consciousness. Ageless Spirit also speaks to the vast nameless wisdom that has existed since the start of time. In your 94 years, how are these two ideas related?
Nancy | I was very fortunate to discover the ageless wisdom teachings when I was in my 30’s. My early influences included Alice Bailey, Psychosynthesis, Jungian analysis, Sri Aurobindo, Ken Wilber and more. My PhD in transpersonal psychology expanded the learning to a variety of religious approaches, experiential education and alternative medicine. The endless search continues today as physics, widens the field and new wisdom comes to light in an alive and unfolding universe.
I do want to say something about my perception of spirituality as I perceive and live it, based on the ageless wisdom. Meditation, study, and service are the foundation. Self-mastery of our physical, emotional, and mental bodies involves identifying and letting go of obstructions to unfoldment. Life situations test our progress on this difficult path. More than sitting meditation, it involves continuous awareness of our interior self throughout the day and night, remaining in a state of awareness in the Now. Past and future are recognized as merely thoughts. What is real is the present. It is a never-ending process of letting go of the conditioning we’re born with as individuals (karma) and enculturated to as members of society.
With no responsibilities outside of my own household I have more opportunity to live moment to moment in the Now, just being awareness flowing with universal energy. I am deeply grateful to be graced with the freedom of this time.
Rhonda | Yes, I have witnessed your transformation these past few years. You have a kind of ageless translucence. I think there’s a difference between getting ‘older’ and getting ‘elder.’ If we just get older, clinging to our fears, we’re likely to become anxious about change. Whereas those who are ‘elder’ often are quite joyful, love being with young people, and are delighted to share and to learn. It comes back to this process of letting go, or letting be.
Nancy | One of the hardest decisions life brought to me was letting go of people I loved who unknowingly interfered with my spiritual unfoldment. Tears come to my eyes just thinking of the deep angst I felt.
Rhonda | This is a the seeker’s journey. You want to share the fruits with your loved ones and others around you, but there’s also a time when some relationships no longer nourish.
Nancy | The beauty is that even though they are not in our outer life, they are in our hearts. We can still love them, though perhaps the relationship was difficult.
Rhonda | So here we are in this moment, and so many of the things that you intuited, that Kosmos presented, that you spoke about have come to pass. Now what?
Nancy | If we fully accept the reality of the present it gives us a clue as to the next step of unfoldment. Aggression, conflict, violence, and confrontation are rampant and increasing. Lies and deception make it difficult or impossible to know what is real, and artificial intelligence increases the possibility of distorted information and images. Traditional religion is waning. Institutions are collapsing and attempts to fix them with more of the same are not succeeding. Materialistic science does not accept phenomenological evidence and values. Suicide, depression and loss of meaning are rising. Families and communities have lost a sense of human connection and belonging. Some believe the metacrisis will destroy the human race and have built bunkers to survive. The sense of powerlessness over the pain and suffering is acute. Many feel there is no way out.
Others believe that technology will save us. Despite its many benefits, there has been a price to pay. Extreme cold rationalism has overshadowed the heart and soul of our individual and collective lives. There is a yearning to move beyond the artificiality of machines. We miss the warmth of human contact. We are out of balance. According to Iain McGilchrist’s important research, the left brain hemisphere’s focus on quantitative way of knowing has eclipsed the right brain’s qualitative way of knowing. Heart and soul have no place in a culture of machines that threatens to destroy our humanity.
Now What? Doing more of the same has only increased the metacrisis. I believe it’s inevitable that we will discover that the deeper dimensions of our problems originate within. As the pain increases we will recognize that we have the wisdom and power to operate from a higher consciousness. We will experience an explosion of spiritual experiments applying the ageless wisdom to the culture of the times. Letting go of extreme rationalism and fostering Intuition, imagination, feelings, poetry and spiritual impulses will become acceptable ways of knowing, bringing back heart and soul. New leadership will not negotiate or compromise fundamental values, but will take a firm stand for what is right. Science will accept phenomenological evidence and more research will corroborate the ageless wisdom. The power to change is within, not outside of ourselves. Decentralization of power and hierarchies of “experts” in other areas will give more power to the people as well. We will realize that we are responsible for changing the world and that we have the capacity to do so – within.
Just like I once looked for love in the wrong places, now our culture is looking in the wrong places for peace. The answers were always within.
Rhonda | That’s heartening. And as excruciating as it is to bear witness to and social responsibility for suffering and death in so many places, I believe somewhere in my depths that we’re always in the process of unfolding creation, unfolding consciousness. We don’t need a meteor or volcanoes to have another extinction. We’re doing plenty that could bring it about in an instant; in an instant we could be gone. And yet there’s something so deep within me that gestures toward a different possibility. When Jesus said, “forgive them for they know not what they do,” I think he means we are unconscious. We are unaware that we are creating all of this suffering with our own minds. We’re unaware. Heaven on earth is possible, is available this very moment.
You’ve shared so much wisdom in this hour Nancy, what is it that you would like to ultimately say about Life to your loved ones who will certainly read this?
Nancy | The first thing that comes to mind is the extraordinary healing capacity of beauty. One magical precious flower softened my heart and destroyed my fears. It has led me to experience the deep calmness and love that surrounds us even in our pain.
Those who study the ageless wisdom are aware that the universe is organized around cycles and rhythms of transformation. Dark times precede transformative breakthroughs. We are called to dig deeper to understand and address the metacrisis. This means letting go of belief systems that sustain the dysfunctional society we live in. It involves an acceptance of the incompleteness of who we are. It involves the responsibility to work toward unfolding our full interior potential. We have the capacity to love and care for all beings. In truth, it is the foundation of who we are.
Rhonda | We are bread and wine to each other…you have been that to me, Nancy. I can’t express in words how transformational it has been to be near you, to know you, to work with you, to love you, to steward Kosmos. Thank you.
Nancy | Thank you. I’m so grateful that Kosmos is in your hands. I give it to you freely with love.
Rhonda | And I receive it with love, not as mine, but as an expression of our shared understanding and our shared communion with all.
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