Topophilia | Thicket
Topophilia | Thicket
Topophilia
Sun, mud, rabbit sage, parched.
Skin brittles, chastened and chapped.
Sheltering cliffs framed the high flat plain in
an irregular semicircle I interpreted as protection.
Summer did not take me by the throat but unfurled
a giant’s weathered hand in greeting.
Some kind of embrace given the red sand
dusk where dust is wind’s emissary
where the brick mesa song blistered
piping down canyons
thunderheads miles visible, splayed stars
redirecting the buzzards’ night roosts.
There were smaller threats—spider, scorpion, rattler—
but the mesa’s arms surrounded me. Stone prevails.
Safety shouldered its way into the frightened
little story of my life. I felt at home.
Thicket
Behold the thicket:
it is deep with brambles.
It is blackberries in July,
wineberries in August.
……………Move, and the thicket
……………impedes you, catches
……………your sleeve,
plucks you awake.
The bee is here. The spider.
The thicket is alive, and crawling.
Green with jewelweed to salve
rashes from the thicket’s
poison ivy. Green with prickly
horsenettle, coarse pokeberry,
the brilliant, twining nightshade:
……………thickets sweat poisons
……………as well as fruits.
I have brought you here to show
that you can never get through,
not unscathed, not without
brutality of some kind:
the saw, machete, knife.
This tangle no amount of patience
will ever undo –
……………it will overtake you,
……………grow into your hair,
……………invite warblers in to nest,
……………spiders to unfurl their orbs.
You must learn not to hate
before entering the thicket.
You must acknowledge all its ways
to understand its wild embrace.
The Unchaining and The Unveiling
The Unchaining and The Unveiling
Many think they know what is true, but really do not. It is our unexamined assumptions that give us a false sense of confidence, leading to self-righteousness. The end result of a divided self is a divided society. We have to learn to see and integrate other points of view. 2020 laid bare in even more stark relief the differences in mindsets and belief systems as the tiniest form of life—a virus called Coronavirus-19—ground the world to a halt.
In this century of awakening, we have to embark on two parallel paths to healing:
- Our inner journeys to discern, re-examine, and unchain our attachments to institutions and platforms that profit from exploitation and dehumanization of our fellow human beings.
- As collective groups, we have to transcend our tribal boundaries, learn to talk with each other again, build fields of empathy—and out of that, build shared understandings to unveil the truths that will bring healing and unity.
The Unchaining
The first step in our unchaining is to reclaim our responsibility to engage in critical thinking to guide our actions. We have to reduce the automatic formation of our views and beliefs by loud, divisive leaders and media that benefit from conflict. We have to acknowledge our own responsibility that we have abdicated to others. Most of us view institutions, governments, corporations, and all other large entities as omnipotent, and view ourselves—mere individuals—as insignificant. It takes a leap of faith to imagine that millions of micro-changes can eventually lead to mega change. For example, many people are leaving Facebook as they see the destructive power of social media, brilliantly portrayed in the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma.” Eventually, this will reduce the power of this institution and/or Facebook will become a more responsible entity, and subscribers will return.
Secondly, we have to recognize systems that benefit from feeding our ego and/or our tribe, and demonizing others. We can expand our consciousness to include care and concern for others, which has been the goal of all spiritual traditions. We begin to see the soul as the larger vessel encompassing our ego and connecting us to the source of all life and all that has been created. Whether we call that force Allah, God, Creator, Mother Earth, we begin to shift along the value spectrum below, developing our consciousness further:
- Scarcity to abundance
- Entitlement to responsibility
- Blame to gratitude
- Exclusion to inclusion
- Judgement to appreciation
- Self-righteousness to humility
As we reflect, we add to the pool of love rather than the pool of hate. Sufis call this inner work the annihilation of the “nafs” (ego), and practice the discipline of self-examination continuously knowing that this is a battle with no end or goal, as it is human nature we are working with.
The Unveiling
The Outer Work is just as hard as the inner, if not harder. As we begin to soften our rigid beliefs about what is good or right, we are more open to hearing other beliefs. The next step is to engage with those who hold beliefs totally different than our own, i.e., engage in dialogue. Dialogue is an ancient practice held sacred in many traditions, but modern pressures, such as fragmented media, have created a fragmented society wherein dialogue is nearly impossible to sustain. The social fabric lacks organic rituals of dialogue. Modern society has resorted to creating forums and platforms for dialogue in a deliberate—almost artificial—manner, as NGO’s have been doing in conflict zones for decades (usually after the damage to repair and/or reconcile aggrieved parties).
If we can bring multiple perspectives to the table, we can begin the unveiling process. There are many layers or veils we have to work through. As the “Ladder of Inference” shows, our mind is wired to build up and reinforce our beliefs in a mutually reinforcing cycle: we select information, we form assumptions and theories, we look for sources to reinforce those beliefs, and then only see information that further confirms those beliefs. Social media of course takes this basic human tendency to a much larger and destructive scale. Therefore, the unveiling or dialogue process begins by discerning and then sharing these rigid layers that form our beliefs, and resulting identity, with others.
In my work with Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslim community members in Manhattan (as part of The Dialogue Project in the 90’s), we used the broad principles of dialogue, such as suspending our own inner voice and its biases and limiting beliefs; listening to others with generous hearts; empathizing with others even if one cannot agree on the issue; and speaking in a way that values, appreciates and inspires others. While it was rare for people to change their positions, the presence of empathy was palpable, whether it was a Palestinian listening to the embedded fear of the Holocaust in Jews and Israelis, or they in turn listening to the violent eviction of one of the attendee’s siblings from their home in Palestine.
In my continuing work on interfaith relations, I witness the deep respect and admiration that emerges for each other. I recommitted to this work after 9/11. The Ground Zero controversy attracted many haters to Lower Manhattan, where my oldest daughter still lives. One evening she called very upset and distraught because these protesters were standing in front of her building and holding signs reading “Muslims go home.” Being a born American, it was confusing, upsetting, and humiliating for her and our family. We were lucky to get off so lightly, as many have suffered much more. These days I feel such empathy for Asian Americans as they are being attacked due to the COVID-19 association with China.
In our own country, the January 6th insurrection on the Capitol shattered our own myths about our great democracy. It was a wake-up call for the USA within the larger wake-up call of the global COVID crisis. What inspired me is that people are responding to the wake-up call. For example, the recent documentary “Reunited States of America” (www.reunitedstates.tv) released by Van Jones and Meghan McCain, spotlights bridge-building initiatives across our country, and we hope this small beginning will grow and flourish. “You cannot hate someone up close” says an interviewee in the documentary.
I have always believed that dialogue and violence cannot co-exist, and therefore one of the awakenings in this century has to be to bring back insaniyet, an Urdu and Turkish word that means humanism or “noble human behaviors.” We have to re-imagine what noble behaviors and dialogue would look like in our postmodern times and get to work on dismantling the systems that foster chaos and division. That is what this century of awakening is asking us to do.
Dismantling the Patriarchy Within
Dismantling the Patriarchy Within
Faranak Mirjalili | My name is Faranak Mirjalili and I’m a Jungian analyst and the founder of the Anima Mundi School, a place of learning and research for the feminine and the world’s soul. For this interview, I sat down with dear friend and mentor, Anne Baring. Anne, is a retired Jungian analyst, a writer and researcher on the history of feminine consciousness, depth psychology and mythology. We sat down to speak about the feminine psyche, both individually and collectively, and we also sat down to discuss the challenges that we are facing in this time. We often hear these days, that the time of patriarchy is over. However, if we are to survive as a human species, and most importantly as a whole earth species, we need to come into a better understanding and balance between the feminine and masculine principles. Both these principles need to be equally honored, respected and lived.
But what does this really mean when patriarchy has reigned for more than 4,000 years. How do we define the feminine? How do we know what our feminine qualities are and what does it even mean to be a woman in a time of global climate catastrophe? Are we doing enough as women to stand up against tyrannical political leaders? Is it enough to stand up in protest and even to say no to that which we no longer accept? Are we doing enough to dismantle patriarchy through our outer actions? From a Jungian perspective, real change happens within and this is true for both individual and collective change. We turn towards the inner figures of our dreams and the messages the unconscious gives us to try to find and locate these old patriarchal patterns that are rooted within us. So that from that place we can dismantle, transfigure, and transform them and rebirth them into a new masculine principle that will protect and serve life.
Now, this is quite difficult and arduous work. If you think of all the thousands of years of patriarchy and the programming and harm this has done to our feminine body, soul, and mind. Jung called the masculine principle within a woman, the animus; for a woman to really encounter her animus and to really work and transform him she first needs to walk through the valley of her own shadow.
Anne Baring | The personal shadow has to do with our individual lives and our individual experience of parents, school, university, jobs, life, et cetera, and our relationships, all our relationships. And the more we can remember our feelings as a child, what we were able to express or allowed to express and what we were not allowed to express and then look at the aspects of ourselves that might have been lost or hidden or buried and that need to be recovered. In my own case, it was writing, I had no idea that I could write and yet what I wanted to do was write. It was a strange thing of wanting to, but not knowing that one could. It’s that kind of thing. Bringing the shadow back into consciousness is about becoming aware of gifts you may not know you have. So many people have dreams of being attacked by a burglar or a murderer and of course they’re terrified of the dream or nightmare. But with understanding, asking the question, ‘what is that murderer?’ Why is he wanting to kill you? Very often they’re trying to get your attention, these attacking figures. They really want to be integrated into the psyche and you need help with that. It’s very difficult to do it on your own.
So what is attacking them would be what they’re most frightened of. But I’ve helped many people who have had that murderer transformed into a helper an invaluable assistant, a companion. I remember a dream early on in my analysis, with a woman analyst called Hella Adler. The dream was that I was sitting in my bed at night with a golden pen in my hand with a piece of paper on my lap. And then I became aware that behind me, there was a murderer with a knife in his hand, creeping up and about to stab me in the back. At which point naturally I woke up and after many long months and years of work transformed that murderer into a very helpful animus figure, who helped me to write my books.
So that was a transformation—the dream I had at the beginning, when I had no idea that I could write and then gradually that murderer or would be murderer, was transformed and the golden pen began to write. The gold is an alchemical image of the supreme value. So that is one example, but there are many, many dreams that women have been attacked and they may take the dream too literally, rather than symbolically. What is murdering me in my own psyche? What is the critical voice, which is saying, “whatever you do is no good, you’re rubbish, don’t pay attention to that because it’s no good, leave all that behind?” Whatever the voice is saying to women and to men,—because it could also be the anima of a man speaking negatively—they need to write down what that voice is saying. That’s terribly important and they’ll be amazed what they write down. Maybe not more than a few sentences, but it may be a sentence that was repeated over and over again, since they were a child: “I’m no good. I’m not as good as him or her. My brother’s better than I am”; whatever it might be—“my father doesn’t love me therefore, I’m no good.” Get the voice down onto paper.
Faranak | According to Jung when we turn towards the inner figure of our dreams, we don’t only encounter material that belongs to us individually on a personal level, but we can actually encounter what he called more collective layers of the psyche. Now this can be anything from family, ancestral, cultural, memories or even the archaic memories of humanity. In the following dream, we will hear an example of where the dreamer encounters the animus, not only on a personal, but also on a collective level.
Speaker 3 | In this dream I’m walking down this fancy carpark towards an empty prison cell. When I opened one of the guard doors, I find all these young, dead men inside there lying on the floor and they’re covered in a little bit of water. I close the door again and when I look back to the carpark, inside all of the cars are dead men now and they’ve turned blue because they’ve been dead for a while. When I look to my left behind the fence, there’s a black man coming towards me and he’s able to get through the gates and I’m absolutely petrified because I know that if he will get to me, he will rape and kill me. So I start to run towards this playground carousel, and he runs after me and we just go round and round this carousel and in my fear, I start to plead with him and I ask him, please stop because if you continue, the abuse will also just continue and as I say this, I can see his story and he’s had exactly the same thing happening to him. And when I see that, I also see that he starts crying, he just bursts out into tears and he collapses on the floor on the other side of the carousel and both of us are slumped down, absolutely devastated and I wake up.
Anne | This dream, I think is very interesting because it really shows the collective situation of men in our culture and men, as they’ve had to live their lives for thousands of years as warriors, they have had no choice. They’re sent to war, really as sacrificial victims at the order of governments who’ve entered into this war and then they act their part, as warriors. Some may be killed and some may not be killed, but they have no real choice. Once they’ve decided to be soldiers, they have no choice. They have to obey orders after that. And they’re enormously brave. One can feel the greatest sympathy for what their fate has been for thousands of years in which they didn’t have a voice. And in a way, this dream is giving them a voice because it’s showing them that they’d been drowned in the waters of the unconscious. They’d been, as it were, buried or forgotten. Their feelings have not been valued. They have not been given the attention that they need.
Then the next part of the dream where the man comes against you and you sense him coming to rape you and murder you that is the natural reaction to a woman by men who’ve been traumatized by having their feelings completely neglected for thousands of years. So woman is the enemy. But woman is the projection of the unconscious feminine aspect of their own nature, their own deepest feelings that have never been or listened to. They couldn’t speak about them to anyone because to speak about them would have shamed them as a warrior. So therefore they come to rape and murder the woman in the dream. But at the last minute something happens. They’re able to experience a feeling for the first time and they burst into tears and then you both burst into tears and there’s no question of rape or murder anymore because you’re embracing each other as brother and sister. That’s incredibly moving, I have tears myself.
Of course, man’s voice has never been listened to any more than a woman’s. Only the voices of those in power have been listened to and this has to change. I think we do influence the field, the whole field of humanity when we’re doing something at this very deep level and when a dream like that comes up and there’s a resolution to it. That resolution goes into the collective field, as a positive input and what science has discovered recently in quantum physics is that we are all connected; the whole universe is connected. So what we do in our individual lives and even in our individual dreams matters because what we’re doing with this work is creating a bridge between the conscious and the unconscious or between the conscious mind and the deepest soul. So this is something infinitely valuable. It’s terribly important. It’s like being able to build a real bridge in the physical world, but we’re building a bridge in the psychic dimension.
Animus was the word that Jung gave to the masculine aspect of a woman’s psyche, just like he gave the feminine aspect of a man’s psyche, the name of the anima, two different Latin words with different endings. But looking back over the whole history of Western civilization or Eastern civilization for that matter, the animus has been the controlling element in woman’s psyche, keeping the feminine value down or keeping it silent and now the whole relationship in a woman’s psyche is changing. The masculine aspect of her nature is changing because she needs that masculine help to get her into the world, to be able to manifest whatever creative gifts she has because he’s a facilitator coming from the unconscious. He’s like a psychopomp guiding her into society, helping her, or this is what he should be doing, helping her express her great gifts and also express her values, which have not been listened to. All the values that she’s developed through being a mother and a woman for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, caring for the life of children and bearing children—those values are the ones which protect and serve life and she is the primary carrier of those values.
It’s very important for a woman to be in a good relationship with her animus and to know that it exists, because there can be a danger of animus possession in women, particularly today. In finding their voice, being educated as men and brought up with the same teaching in schools, they may speak with a male voice rather than a female voice. And they may be so taken over by the need for power that they fall into the grip of the masculine aspect of their nature in a rather unpleasant way, because it then takes over and it speaks as it were through their voice, but in a very didactic and dominant kind of way. Suddenly she’s found her voice and she comes out like a battering ram and men run away from her because they don’t know how to handle this new woman. So both men and women need to know that the new woman is coming up, but it will need quite a few years of practicing how to be a woman and in touch with the male aspect of her psyche without being taken over or possessed by it.
So it just needs to be balanced. I think there’s too much emphasis on the yang aspect of life and too little on the yin aspect, which is the containing one. It’s terribly important that woman realizes is that she is a container of her whole family, Her husband or partner as well as her children. And also in a social sense, that there’s a containing factor in the culture, which can hold the balance between this tremendous masculine drive in both men and women. You see it in the masculine drive in Zuckerberg and Facebook. That whole scenario is driven by the male psyche want to go further and further and taking everything with them without a thought for what they’re leaving behind.
A double whammy! The negative animus is the voice that acts destructively in your life and tells you you’re no good and that you have to do this, that, and the other in order to be acceptable. You have to dress in a certain way. You have to behave in a certain way. You have to speak in a certain way. That can be the voice which is driving women to achieve more and more and only achievement matters. Relationships don’t matter. So if the animus is saying, you’re no good unless you’re top of the rung in banking or politics or unless you’re speaking at the United Nations or whatever might be your goal you’re no good. This would neglect the whole field of relationships. That is one of the characteristics of the negative animus. He is not interested in relationships at all, so if your partner is suffering from your being nasty to him, that won’t matter in relation to achieving your goal.
Women have had to obey for 4,000 years. They’ve had to obey the voice of the church, and now they have to obey whatever the cultural norm is or how the media says they should behave. They’re not really free until they’re really happy to be who they are and have no sense that they have to be more in order to be acceptable. The animus in the inner world who may be very negative to begin with. because of the woman’s formation and programming, can turn into her best friend and ally and her guide to the deeper regions of the unconscious and the deeper regions of her soul.
And if you think back into mythology, for instance, in the myth of Demeter and Persephone, how Hermes was the messenger sent by the gods to bring Persephone out of the underworld. And she was able to come out after she’d eaten six seeds of the pomegranate, which meant that she had to spend six months to in the underworld and six months in the upper world.
That’s a wonderful image of Hermes as psychopomp or guide and messenger between this world and the other world or this world and the deeper world of the psyche and woman needs to know about that—that she has this messenger within her. She has this deep guide. The function of the animus is to manifest woman’s creativity, to give her a channel or possibility of manifesting her creative gifts in some way.
Faranak | The instinct and the connection to the animal body and soul is an essential part of feminine power and it is exactly this relationship that patriarchy has severed over the past thousands of years. It is in the instinct that we find our connection to the earth that can not only help heal, nourish and sustain us, but also the larger ecology of which we are part. Through being rooted in her instinctual wisdom women can stand up and say no to that which harms life. They can stand up against the tyranny of the negative animus within, or the patriarchy without for that matter. Through reclaiming and healing. their connection to their instinctual self, women can also reclaim their inherent stewardship and guardianship of the natural world. In the following dream, we will see an example of how this initial severance can be imaged in a dream.
Speaker 4 | It was in the middle of a forest, in an open space. It was very desolate and all of a sudden I got a shock because I saw a tiger on a guillotine. and I knew that it was put there by a human, a male energy. I couldn’t see him, but I felt it was really cruel and ruthless. And I felt compassion for the tiger, I felt sorry for him and I wanted to free the tiger, but I didn’t know how so that’s why I felt so helpless. So in the end of the dream I wanted to flee away because the atmosphere was so haunting but on the other hand, I didn’t want to leave the tiger because I had a strong connection with it and then I woke up.
Anne | It shows what’s been happening to the instinct that, had its head cut off. This could apply to the whole culture, because pretty well, everyone is unconsciously driven by the instinct because we’ve, so to speak, cut off the head at of the instinct. We pay no attention to it. We don’t know anything about it and so it takes possession of us in the form of anger, rage, greed, aggression towards other people, which are acted out in all the conflicts in the world, because the instinct is out of control. It has gone back to its most primitive way of behaving, much worse than the animals. Most importantly, what has that woman allowed to be done to her own instinct? What has she, as it were, decapitated in herself—her creative life impulse? I remember a dream that a woman brought into analysis about a snake being hung on a hook and it was dying and I said to her, what have you killed in yourself? This is the reptilian brain in yourself. What have you done to it? Why is it in this state? And it came out that she’d been in an unhappy marriage for many, many years and she couldn’t stand it anymore. She was dying because she had no will to live because her instinct was crucified.
One has to really look at the whole position of the instinct and how it was treated, right the way through these three patriarchal cultures. The body was despised, cut off, which means that the instincts were cut off. They were looked down upon as inferior, something threatening to the spiritual aspirations of men and therefore they were persecuted. That is reflected in our persecution of animals today. The way we use animals for experiment, for drugs, for developing drugs for our use; the way we don’t think about the suffering of the animals that we sacrifice to our needs; that’s one aspect. Another aspect is the way we treat matter in the whole atomic energy scenario when we split matter in 1945 in order to develop the atomic weapon that now threatens all of us. The matter we have persecuted now threatens us with destruction. This is something terribly important to know and realize that we cannot treat matter the way we do or the body, the way we do or life, the way we do without there being really, really serious consequences, which are coming at us now in the form of climate change and the threat of nuclear attack. That decapitated tiger, which is the most magnificent animal in the jungle and the most powerful, he can’t be powerful anymore. He can no longer walk through his jungle. He is unable to protect himself and that is the fault of our religious beliefs, and our scientific beliefs—that it doesn’t matter what we do to matter. I think that sums it up.
Reclaiming Spiritual Wholeness
Reclaiming Spiritual Wholeness
In Isaiah 11:6-9 and Hosea 2:18, we read of a world with no more war or killing. But in Numbers 31 and Deuteronomy 20, we find divine commands to raze cities and kill every living being in them.
Jesus preached love and peace. But Revelations 12-19 tells of “the wrath of God upon the earth” and how mass killings are unleashed by divine violence.
How did we get these conflicting messages? How can we sort them out so our scriptures can no longer be used to incite hate and violence?
My Spiritual Journey
As a child refugee from Nazi Europe to Cuba, I took religion for granted. Every night at bedtime, I repeated after my father the Jewish evening prayer, the Shema. I didn’t understand the Hebrew words, but I understood that we were appealing to a spiritual power in which we placed our trust. After the Shema, I said my own prayer and, as children will, I always made sure I didn’t forget a single name of those in our family who had not escaped the Nazis: my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. Then World War II ended and I found out about the Holocaust. There are no words to describe what I felt as I grieved not only for the dead of my family and my people, but for the faith I lost. How could God let this happen?
I still found comfort in biblical passages such as the poetry of some Psalms and the Jewish tradition of helping others. But I also began to open my eyes to passages teachings violence, cruelty, and inhumanity – and was appalled that I had never reflected on them.
It wasn’t until years later that I began to research the history of religion. This research was part of a multidisciplinary, historical, cross-cultural study to identify what kinds of societies support our human capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity, or, alternately, our capacities for insensitivity, cruelty, and destructiveness.
This study went beyond conventional social categories such as right/left, religious/secular, capitalist/socialist, Eastern/Western, since there have been violent and oppressive regimes in all these categories, and on top of that, as I began to realize, they all marginalize or ignore the majority of humanity: women and children. Drawing from a more complete database that includes the whole of humanity and the whole of our history made it possible to see patterns or configurations that are otherwise not visible: the authoritarian, male-dominated, violent domination system and the more democratic, gender-balanced, caring partnership system.
The first book detailing these findings was The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (now in its 57th US printing and 27 foreign editions). It demonstrated that our early cultural direction, for millions of years, was in a partnership direction, until there was a shift toward domination just a few thousand years ago.
This shift from a partnership to a domination direction in most world regions explains why at the core of our major faiths — Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Hebrew, Christian — are values of sensitivity, empathy, and nonviolence that are more congruent with our human need for caring connections. However, like a beautiful old picture painted over, around these partnership teachings are passages that justify in-group versus out-group domination, top-down control, and violence.
Our Spiritual History and Prehistory
Many prehistoric images of deity emphasize life giving and nurturing. This is the aspect of the divine some theologians call God as Mother today.
Marija Gimbuts, Alexander Marshack, James Mellaart, and other scholars note that the 30,000 year-old Stone Age nude figures that nineteenth century archeologists mislabeled “Venuses” are the first Western Goddess representations. Twenty thousand years later, in farming societies of the Neolithic like Catal Huyuk (circa 7000 to 3500 B.C.E.), female images still predominate, indicating a millennia-long cultural continuity. There were also male deities in these societies, but they were not associated with thunderbolts (like Jehovah or Wotan) or weapons (like Zeus or Thor), suggesting that masculinity was not yet equated with violent domination and conquest.
Then came a massive cultural shift, shown by both archeology and legend. For instance, in the Enuma Elish, a four thousand year-old Babylonian epic, the war god Marduk dismembers the body of the Mother Goddess Tiamat to create land and sea. Earlier myths from that region credit a Mother Goddess not only with creating the world, but as the source of life, love, wisdom, and prosperity.
Archeological excavations show that the first art idealizing armed male force came late in Western cultural evolution. In Europe, this art dates from the Indo-European invasions (circa 4000-3000 B.C.E.), which brought an ethos of conquest and domination. In The Chalice and the Blade in Chinese Culture, examining cultural transformation in Asia, scholars at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing show that this shift also took place in China. Anthropologist June Nash’s study of the Aztecs shows a similar shift in the Americas.
This information is still not widely disseminated. However, if we know what to look for, we find traces of more partnership-oriented cultures in all world traditions – often in plain sight.
In the Bible, when the prophet Jeremiah rails against the Hebrew people for backsliding from the worship of Jehovah, they respond that there was peace and prosperity when women baked cakes for the Queen of Heaven (Jeremiah 44:15-17). Ancient Greek, Indian, and other traditions are full of female deities, even though most are already subservient to male ones. The Christian Mary is the Mother of God, and while she is now the only mortal figure in a pantheon in which only the father and son are divine, like the Goddess of old, she is associated with love and compassion.
Since the veneration of female deities originated in more partnership-oriented times, it is no coincidence that female images of the divine are reemerging in our time of partnership resurgence. For example, theologian Sallie McFague notes that seeing God as the parent who feeds the young and, by extension, the weak and vulnerable, understands God as caring rather than as punitive.
This is an important trend toward partnership, and of course, gender equity. How we see God has huge consequences for what we think is normal and moral. However, I want to emphasize, as I do in all my work, that this matter of guiding values is not a matter of women against men. It is a matter of recognizing something that has directly impacted us all.
This domination model of our species in which the male form is considered superior and dominant to the female form impacts whether we really value democracy and caring or value violence and authoritarian control. With the shift to the authoritarian, violent, top down domination system – be they brutal tribal chieftains, Roman or Christian emperors, Muslim sheiks, Indian pashas, or the regressions to domination we see today — came a gendered system of values in which anything stereotypically associated with women or the “feminine” like caring, caregiving, and nonviolence is devalued. This devaluation, and these gender stereotypes, is what children are taught through their socialization in domination-oriented cultures and subcultures,
Beginning in the authoritarian, male-dominated, highly punitive families that are the norm in domination cultures, boys are taught they must never be like a woman, and men who are caring and sensitive are labeled wimps, sissies, and girlie men. So both women and men from these backgrounds tend to support punitive policies such as funding for prisons (the familiar punitive male head of household). But somehow they can’t find money for caring for people, for child nutrition, childcare, healthcare, or keeping a clean and healthy environment (in domination systems associated with women and the “inferior feminine”).
Pain and Pleasure
This distorted system of values is reflected in our spiritual heritage. Despite core teachings of love and nonviolence, in both Eastern and Western scriptures, story after story and commandment after commandment idealize the infliction or suffering of pain. Many sacred stories and images portray acts of killing and dying. But images of giving birth are totally absent.
By contrast, as detailed in Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body, in earlier, more partnership-oriented societies, birth-giving images are prominent. For example, in the Neolithic site of Catal Huyuk in Turkey, we find an 8000 year-old figure of a seated Goddess giving birth.
When I first looked at these images, it seemed natural to make giving life rather than ending life sacred. But I was still taken aback by Neolithic and Bronze Age art in which sexuality was a sacred part of life and nature – even though this makes sense in a spirituality, and society, where pleasure rather than pain holds relations together.
This is not to say that in these more partnership-oriented societies pain was absent. There are illnesses, natural disasters, death, and other causes of pain in every society. But the emphasis seems to have been not on pain and death but on pleasure and life.
So in the biblical Song of Songs, we still find traces of this earlier pleasure-oriented spiritual tradition. The beautiful Shulamite, the Rose of Sharon, sings to her lover, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine . . . a bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.”
Mystical writings also contain clues to a time when woman’s body, man’s body, and sexuality were part of the sacred. In our mystical spiritual literature, as in our romantic literature, we find repeated references to passion and joy, often in erotic language.
But this joy and pleasure are not self-centered, frantic “fun” – all too often at someone else’s expense. It is not the escape from pain mistaken for pleasure in domination-oriented societies. It is the joy of love, the fulfillment of sharing, the awe at the miracle of life and nature, and the ecstasy of heightened states of consciousness.
By contrast, consider the message of the Christian doctrine that pain is our lot in this “vale of tears,” and all that matters is a better life after death. Or of the Hindu dogma that the caste system is divinely ordained. Or of the Buddhist teaching that our only hope is disengaging ourselves from what is happening around us while trying to do no harm.
These teachings have helped some people cope with the suffering and injustice inherent in domination systems. But they have served to maintain domination systems, teaching that pain and suffering are our inevitable lot.
When I started to question these teachings, I felt uncomfortable. But I had the analytical lens of the partnership-domination continuum. So I could see that the reason for teachings that we should just accept pain wasn’t religious. It was a political message designed to maintain the suffering caused by domination systems, be it in families or in the world at large.
Sex, Violence, and the Sacred
By the Christian Middle Ages, over and over, the emphasis is no longer on pleasure, but on pain.
Mystics flagellate themselves. They lie on beds of nails. They tattoo their bodies with hot irons. They write about this cruelty to their own bodies as an ecstatic road to oneness with God.
A transformation of both myth and reality has taken place. Ancient myths and symbols have been radically changed to meet the requirements of a system that elevates male over female and is primarily held together by pain and fear rather than pleasure and caring connection.
Men are taught to think of sex in terms of control over women, of entitlement to women’s bodies. The Bible has rules that require men to stone to death women suspected of sexual independence. For hundreds of years, the Church condemned every sexual position except man on top and woman on bottom – what came to be known as the “missionary position,” subconsciously programming women to accept subordination and men to think of domination as normal, sexually exciting, even moral.
For century after century, the pleasures of the body were linked with sin and punishment. While the medieval Church condemned sex for pleasure as a sin, it never called sexual violence against women a sin. Instead, in the Malleus Maleficarum, the medieval handbook for persecuting and burning “witches” blessed by Pope Innocent VIII, the Church labeled woman as more carnal, and hence more sinful, than man.
Nor did the Church condemn the constant warfare of medieval kings and nobles. The Church itself instigated hate and violence like the Crusades and Inquisition. It blessed the witch-hunts, during which, by the most conservative estimates, 100,000 European women were tortured to death (given the small population of Europe in those times, this slaughter of women was a holocaust).
This domination “spirituality” is not the spirituality of the great religious visionaries of history. Isaiah, Jesus, and Hildegard of Bingen did not ask us to tolerate injustice and cruelty. They tried to change things: Isaiah preached we should do unto others as we would want them to do unto us; Jesus also preached this and acted on it by stopping the stoning to death of a woman; Hildegard stood up to a pope.
All this takes us back to the fact that at the core of the major faiths — Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Hebrew, Christian — are partnership values of sensitivity, empathy, caring, and nonviolence. These are the spiritual values that support the relationships we yearn for.
Unraveling and Reweaving
All around us, we see moral and spiritual confusion. On one side are those who incite scapegoating and violence under the guise of religion, spirituality, and morality. On the other side are those who consider ethical and moral standards nothing more than cultural constructs that vary from time to time and place to place. And, as we saw, if we look at our traditional religious scriptures, we are confronted by massive contradictions.
If these contradictions distress us and we flee east, like some in New Age circles, we face the same problems. A well-known Hindu story celebrates how when the god Vishnu was a baby and his father decided to kill him, a girl baby was put in his place. The Muslim Koran says that a husband should beat a disobedient wife. In the Hindu epic Mahabharata, “superior” violence is a divine attribute as deities engage in bloody battles.
What do these teachings tell us about the value of a girl’s life compared to a boy’s? What do they teach about human relations in general – about the “morality” of using force to impose one’s will on others? Or about the “morality” of killing human beings considered less valuable than others?
How can we make sense of the biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill” when passage after passage contradicts this commandment? What do we do with biblical passages approving of slavery (Leviticus 25: 44-46) and of a man selling his daughter into slavery (Exodus 21:7)?
We each must sort out this dark side of our religious heritage, and bring together religious leaders of all faiths to do this. If we don’t, we perpetuate a system that continues to cause enormous suffering.
We must leave behind the domination part of our religious heritage and strengthen the partnership spirituality and morality we so urgently need.
The first step is to start sorting out the partnership from the domination teachings in our scriptures, and share this with others in our sphere of influence.
If we don’t, we can’t successfully counter the religious hate-mongering regaining strength today. Nor can we counter the rudderless view that there are no moral or ethical human rights standards or that to insist on standards is being “too judgmental.”
The second step is re-examining the norms and structures around us to see if they support a spirituality, morality, and consciousness appropriate for partnership or domination relations.
If we are sensitive to others, we cannot enforce rigid rankings backed up by fear and force. As documented by the neuroscience described in Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (Riane Eisler and Douglas Fry, Oxford University Press, 2019), moral sensitivity has to be suppressed in relations between “superiors” and “inferiors”– be it in families and workplaces or politics and economics. Even our language reinforces the notion that our only alternatives are dominating or being dominated; for example, terms like matriarchy and patriarchy for gender relations. In the language we inherited, there is no partnership alternative. This is why the new language of partnership systems and domination systems, along with terms like empowering hierarchies of actualization, rather than disempowering hierarchies of domination, is so vital
The third step is bringing religious and spiritual leaders from all faiths together to use the tool of the partnership-domination social lens to sort our religious teachings.
This is essential, and every one of us can do something to make it happen. We can all communicate with religious leaders and organizations, starting with those in our own sphere. My book The Power of Partnership (from which parts of this article are adapted) is an excellent tool, showing how partnership and domination system lead to very different relations across the board — from how we relate to ourselves and in our intimate relations to our relations with our Mother Earth and our spiritual relations. And Nurturing Our Humanity provides the latest evidence, including findings from neuroscience, on how these two systems affect people’s brains – and hence how we think, feel, and act, including how we vote.
We can change our spiritual teachings: they were changed before. To build a world where our human need for caring connection is honored and supported, we must separate the grain from the chaff in our scriptures. We can each play a part in leaving behind teachings idealizing pain, death, and hate and re-creating a partnership spirituality focused on joy, life, and love.
Global Challenges Are Directing Us Toward a Unity of Purpose
Global Challenges Are Directing Us Toward a Unity of Purpose
We find ourselves awash in oceans of misinformation, with millions detached from reality. The world endures a pandemic that has fully exposed lingering social and economic injustices. Current adversities make opposing forces even more pronounced, resulting in deeper divisions everywhere.
This historic “dark night” of the collective soul requires us to pause, reflect, and take the action needed. We are well into the throes of a great shift in the way we relate to each other and the planet we share. Signs of a collective leap in consciousness are clear, as is the necessity of applying a universal framework of ethical standards and shared values for the good of the whole.
We have critical choices to make in this moment of transformation. Will we allow polarization to further divide us, or will we walk toward cooperation and unity? Will we leave behind an adolescent way of relating to others, or will we embrace living in harmony with all others? This is our moment to choose the future we want to live in.1
A Holistic Vision
There is no quick answer, or easy fix. The periodic transformation of consciousness needed for our unfolding evolution depends upon the difficult work of confronting our shadow side, individually and collectively. As Carl Jung made clear, “The way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings. It is a snake-like path that unites the opposites.” The transformative process of our collective awakening has been in motion for many decades; we are the agents of its fulfillment.
A holistic vision of evolution and consciousness sees a purpose to these turbulent times. Cycles of transformation and renewal punctuate our evolutionary progress, as we see in this year of lockdowns, demonstrations, and confrontations. Yet, all the divisions that natural differences create are essentially due to an incomplete investigation of truth. This can result in extreme antisocial orientations and behavioral patterns that support separation, create hierarchies, and endanger our very survival. On the other hand, an unfettered search for truth leads to a prosocial orientation and actions built upon a consciousness of wholeness, which also fulfills our innate potentiality. Consciousness is designed to evolve toward wholeness and unity.2
Living by a consciousness of wholeness prioritizes the whole, engenders a response based on harmony and cooperation, and places a unity of purpose above all else. At the same time, a consciousness of wholeness acknowledges our diversity of views, appearances, and contributions to the whole as our sustaining strength.
This consciousness calls for a complete shift in how we relate to reality. Seeing beyond the illusion of separation allows us to focus on the one reality which is already a unified whole. Anything currently dividing us is also a catalyst for uniting us. We saw this last summer when the streets filled with people calling for racial justice and deep systemic change. A convergence of forces is building like never before. As we join hands across differences, we seek to heal a great divide in the human family.
A New Cycle of Human Power
In so many ways, this is a new Day. A relentless pandemic, and an even more pervasive pandemic of a profound loss of faith, are propelling us to the very edge of familiar life. We attempt to preserve control by replaying old power games, or fabricating conspiracy theories. Yet, each next day of new threats pushes us further into unknown territory. Our perceptions of reality are being reshaped.
We can keep holding on to what we know, or we can summon our courage and leap toward an expanded perception of the material, social, and spiritual reality we are living. We could choose to rise above our sense of self-doubts and reach for a new sense of sacredness. We could re-imagine our place in time and space and recast the rhythms of our lives to reflect a new world being born.
Dost thou reckon thyself only a puny form?
When within thee the universe is folded?
Baha’u’llah
If we do feel limited and vulnerable, perhaps even puny, under a mask of ok-ness, when we quiet our racing minds, remain still, and turn our attention inward, we hear a deeper rhythm, a core that speaks quietly but firmly.
Turn thy sight unto thyself that thou mayest find Me standing within thee,
mighty, powerful, and self-subsisting.
…………………………………………Baha’u’llah
From that core, we know it is not right to hate, to turn a blind eye on suffering fellow humans, to cast judgments, to sneer, to live without discipline and integrity, to blindly go along with what ‘everyone else is doing’. We know we can act with conscience, rather than across party lines. We know our planet urgently needs us to change our lifestyles, or fires, hurricanes and other natural calamities will keep intensifying. Within us, we know what is true and what is real.
Faith is Essential
In our collective adolescence, arguing our differences was more important than listening for common ground. Discipline and character got discarded as old-fashioned limitations to the individual’s freedom of self-expression. Savvy technology is what we put our faith in. When we found that nothing holds, we end up swimming in a sea of addictions and apathy. Conflict reaches its climax in adolescence, and neither institutions nor individuals appear trustworthy. Our public life has massively forfeited rational inquiry and integrity, embraced fabrications, and become defined by the lowest common denominator of expediency. We are left bereft of anything to put our faith in. And life without faith is only existence, permeated by self-defeating ego, and collective dishonesty.
Faith in something that matters most to us, in our ability to become better humans, in our collective will to live more honestly together, whatever that may be for us, is what sustains us, gives us hope, and inspires us. It’s time to admit that we cannot live and thrive without a faith that strengthens our backs and gives us the fortitude to do right. It is time to redefine and reclaim faith.
Faith is what withstands scrutiny, fosters on-going self-regulation and development of the mind, contributes to the growth of discernment, and cultivates a spacious, attuned, and generous heart. Such faith is infused with comprehensive and encompassing spiritual, material, and social understanding of the evolutionary and interdependent nature of consciousness and life, and of the law of love driving this evolution.3
We have to ask ourselves: does the faith I live by truly make me more coherent in both heart and mind, more loving, compassionate, disciplined, trustworthy, generous, and service-minded? Does it allow me to engage in rational consultation with people from different backgrounds and perspectives, and build trust and good will? Does it strengthen me to withhold judgments and reactivity, and remain constructive through the harder negotiations and choices? Does it encourage my mind to engage scientific perspectives? Does it strengthen my heart’s ability to perceive an underlying oneness in all our diversity?
If the answer is ‘yes’, such faith can sustain us to leap forward into the qualitatively more complex decisions before us in this global millennium. It can allow us to build new unifying collective centers across our diversity, so that we can transform planetary turbulence into a new level of order.
New Collective Centers of Unity and Illumination
We have always depended on collective centers of illumination. But the collective centers of the past – tribe, religion, ethnic group, country – have all proven too limiting to solve the problems of a global age. We now have to recognize that our underlying oneness is foundational, and our diversity represents the divine wisdom in forcing us to become better humans in dealing with each other.
The collective centers we need now have to embrace the best of our past traditions and rational development while drawing on everything of value in our collective history – the mystical vision, the most comprehensive religious guidance for societies, the vast knowledge and skills in the physical and the social sciences, and the best of our collective experience in creating more just forms of governance. Viewing all of this human heritage in a spirit of finding greater unity among us will lead to a more comprehensive and holistic evolutionary approach to fulfilling the promise of justice for all, and for the planet.
New centers of collective illumination for a global millennium can equip us with unity of vision, unity of purpose, and unity of action across our diversity. The most reliable process developed so far in moving toward such collective maturity and a new level of collaboration is consultation.4 It is a spiritual approach, different from conversation or debate, that invites the individuals involved to first find a spiritual attitude of detachment from strong personal opinions and positions, and to bring forth open and loving minds and hearts. The consultative process is entered into with a measure of humility and readiness to both express perspectives and also hear deeply and understand the perspectives of others. Moderation in speech and deep listening are encouraged.
Such a process can create conscious communities, and social spaces without borders. It can develop in every individual the integral spiritual and social skills for collective governance.5 Everything in this new Day is pointing us forward.
Holistic Solutions
In all ecological communities, continued destruction can lead to a condition in which the normal “succession” of patterns of adaptation are destroyed and can no longer rebuild that system. We may be facing such a breaking point very soon.
Even after the global cataclysms of two World Wars, and their many attendant economic and sociological challenges, the world returned to those structures and norms previously in place. The newly formed global organizations and inter-relationships—from the United Nations to many others—adopted modes of operation based on national and cultural sovereignty. Their agreements, visions, and strategies remain non-binding, without consequences for non-compliance. The result has been a blatant failure to achieve their projected goals or expectations. This has led many to question whether our current norms of global practice can actually address the breadth of the critical challenges that face us.
In contrast, people who focus deeply on these issues have elaborated multiple holistic and comprehensive design solutions for addressing our future– the Integral Vision, Spiral Dynamics, Prosocial World (from Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom’s design principles), Building the New World, The WholeWorld-View, Whole Systems Solutions, Good of the Whole, Conscious World Citizens Essential Shift, Conscious Business, Design Thinking, Partnership Consciousness, Regenerative Design, and the Earth Constitution, to name only a few.6
Thus far, these forward thinking and visionary ideas have largely remained influential only within academia, or in limited circles. The fulcrums of power and policy – (1) national sovereignties and self-serving autocracies and dictatorships, and (2) the nonbinding nature of international agreements – stand strongly in the way of their implementation. The result is that by constantly returning to the broken norms of old systems, “the problems are being embraced as the solutions,” as Albert Einstein warned against when he said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”
The paradox here is that without an awakening of consciousness in all human beings, not much can be achieved. A clear example, from our COVID era, is that the very nation that prides itself on personal freedoms and human rights, the United States, because of its highly decentralized social and governmental structures, appears to have had the most ineffective response to the COVID pandemic– with the largest per capita cases and deaths. When dealing with rampant health risks especially, a holistic approach to a solution is absolutely essential. The complexity of this problem needs cooperative centralized planning, and a vision for a sustainable, prosperous future.
Even such international visions as the United Nations Strategic Development Goals, the global climate accords, global health initiatives, and others, need to be not only binding and enforceable but also approached and fully carried out as a holistic endeavor.
Finding Ways to Make This Happen
The critical need of taking this seriously was recently stressed in a deathbed message from the celebrated western spiritual leader Fr. Thomas Keating delivered to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. This message addresses the range of needs for radical change in both structures and consciousness, concluding with these poignant words: “We need to find ways to make these really happen.”7
The challenge is finding ways, in the face of the formidable fulcrums of power and policies in the world, to first mainstream, and then carry out global holistic solutions. If we cannot do this the consequences are quite clear.
We can put some realistic faith in at least two possibilities. One is the overall effect of incremental change, across the “collective centers of illumination” mentioned above. For example, even within the overall lag of the SDG vision and implementation as a whole, innumerable elements of the goals are being realized through the accomplishments of hundreds of thousands of NGO’s and service organizations serving all around the world.
The second is our hope that this essential shift in consciousness will rapidly accelerate and mainstream the realization of evolutionary design principles as a matter of public policy around the world. A popular moniker for this sequence of essential transitions, joining required inner and outer work, is “Waking Up, Growing Up, Cleaning Up, Showing Up, Linking Up and Lifting Up,” precisely the title of a publication for the 2018 Parliament of the World’s Religions.8 The Parliament theme was “The Promise of Inclusion, the Power of Love: Pursuing Global Understanding, Reconciliation, and Change”. Indeed, the world’s interfaith and interspiritual movements have made important contributions in the last decades.9 The biggest challenge is still how to get those in the positions of power and polity to implement, in real time, holistic and comprehensive design principles on a global basis across all areas of planning and policy. The tragedy for our planet at this critical threshold would be that answers to our challenges were actually available but no one heeded them.
When breaking down the unfolding of this collective process of transformation, we usually recognize the interaction of two opposing forces. One is destructive, contributing to the breakdown of old, worn out systems of hierarchy and separation, and the other is constructive, leading toward a new holistic system. The good news is there is an often-overlooked third force always present as well, an overriding Creative force, or Divine impulse, as seen through the lens of a spiritual/religious worldview.
This is good news because this third force is also seen in the direction of evolution itself. Science and spirituality agree, as the current understanding of natural selection shows, that groups – and nature – will in the long run select for what is for the good of the whole. Modern science confirms that evolution, because of adaptation, follows an overall positive direction, which also accounts for why altruism evolves in nature.10 Evolutionary biologists, who say that “evolution is optimism itself,” see a synchronicity in joining the principles and direction of evolution with the conscious choices that humans can make in driving social and cultural evolution.11 It is up to all of us to “get in the driver’s seat” and proactively make choices that align with the evolutionary impulse itself.
Unifying Values and Principles
Humanity “needs a star to follow,” or “standards by which we can direct our steps,” as systems thinker Ervin Laszlo has said. This is also good news because, as he notes, these are already present in “the great ideals of the world’s religions,” and as compiled in the declaration A Global Ethic, by the Parliament of the World’s Religions. These universal values and principles, along with the UNs Sustainable Development Goals, agreed upon by 193 nations, are what will ‘direct our steps’ toward the shared vision of peace on earth, where our evolution of consciousness is already leading us.
A new story of wholeness and unity is emerging, in which bridges are being built across boundaries to form a global community and create a culture of peace.12 Our collective awakening, in conjunction with the current global challenges and the lessons of the pandemic, reveals our greatest need: planetary unity. Solving effectively the critical issues of our time – caring for the planet itself, healing racial injustices, bridging economic extremes, establishing the equality of women and men, ensuring universal education, and building healthy and sustainable communities – requires a unified, holistic effort.
While we are all on the same sea, some are in superyachts and others are clinging to the floating debris, as UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres noted. The hard work needed in building centers of illumination worldwide is a collective process of reflection entered into with an open, loving, and kind heart, listening more deeply across differences, to find, ultimately, that we are more alike than different.
Seeing through another’s eyes allows compassion to emerge, from which a spark of understanding brings forth the common ground of truth, upon which we find a new path to reconciliation. This is how we transcend the illusion of separation and live into the unifying story of our time in which we are all at least 50th cousins. Establishing a sense of belonging to this community of the whole, and building the necessary trust in it, is the work of a generation. Let us begin now; we have no time to lose.
Endnotes
[1] See Atkinson, Johnson, and Moldow, eds. (2020) Our Moment of Choice: Evolutionary Visions and Hope for the Future, Simon & Schuster.
[2] See Atkinson, (2017) The Story of Our Time: From Duality to Interconnectedness to Oneness, Sacred Stories Publishing.
[3] See Mustakova (2021), Global Unitive Healing, Light On Light Press.
[4] The power and comprehensiveness of the consultative approach, and the role of collective centers of illumination are described at length in chapters six, seven, and eight of Global Unitive Healing.
[5] Global Unitive Healing focuses on integral individual and collective skills for a global age and provides ample examples of such consultative processes under way.
[6] The Education Synergy Circle of the Evolutionary Leaders (www.evolutionaryleaders.net) has published a more complete list in a free e-book: Ulfik, Johnson and Winters, Eds. 2021. Universal Principles and Action Steps. New York, NY: Light on Light Publications.
[7] This letter has not been made public; it is quoted here as read by the Dalai Lama at his residence in Dharamshala, India, Nov. 1, 2019, delivered by Kurt Johnson at the request of relevant clergy of St. Benedict’s [Trappist] Abbey, Snowmass, Colorado. The sentence quoted here was originally written in boldface.
[8] See Johnson, Winters and Ulfik [Eds]. 2018. Waking Up, Growing Up, Cleaning Up, Showing Up, Linking Up and Lifting Up. Convergence magazine GPWR Special Issue: https://issuu.com/lightonlight/docs/the_convergence_special_edition_preview
[9] See Kurt Johnson article in The Interfaith Observer, “The Growing Edge of Interspirituality”, https://www.interspirituality.com/the-growing-edge-of-interspirituality/
[10] See Kurt Johnson article in Kosmos, “Evolving Toward Cooperation: David Sloan Wilson’s New Evolutionary Biology”, https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/interspirituality-and-evolutions-direction-toward-cooperation/
[11] 2019, Mind & Life Conversation with the Dalai Lama and David Sloan Wilson, https://www.mindandlife.org/insight/2019-mind-life-conversation-with-the-dalai-lama-david-sloan-wilson/
[12] See Atkinson, (2017) The Story of Our Time: From Duality to Interconnectedness to Oneness, Sacred Stories Publishing.
Gravity and Allurement
Gravity and Allurement
Gil Scott Heron, the poet, novelist, and godfather of rap, famously pronounced, “The revolution will not be televised.” You might think he was wrong in the wake of the January 6th insurrection on the US Capitol—but only if you misunderstood his meaning. Heron was not talking about believers of false conspiracy theories. He was talking about a revolutionary change in consciousness. “The first change that takes place is in your mind” he told us. “You have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move.” This revolution in consciousness is underway—a transformational shift from the individual to the collective, from humans to all of nature, and ultimately, from fear to love. These changes are necessary if we are to survive the environmental and health crises we now face.
A transformation of consciousness is momentous, but not readily visible, because the shift occurs under the surface, like the movement of tectonic plates. When larger forces are moving, surface reality becomes unsettled and rearranged. This is an interregnum period—a difficult transition because the old is breaking up and the new has yet to be born. In an interregnum, “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear,” according to Italian Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci. In the United States, the most prominent symptom has been systemic racism, which was always there, but previously suppressed.
The insurrection that threatened to upend—and did interrupt the peaceful transfer of power—was a direct reflection of this. The election was the ostensible cause for the riots; the underlying cause was white supremacy. The phrase “Take Back our Country” was a dog whistle; it referred to what immigrants and people of color have taken away (or threaten to take away) from white America. What the insurrectionists fear most is losing their white privilege.
From the Individual to the Collective
When a police officer kept his knee on George Floyd’s neck, causing him to die, but catalyzing a renewed social justice movement, it occurred to me that this was a metaphor for what humanity had been doing to the Earth. We had been keeping our knee on her neck, paving over the natural world to pursue our short-sighted economic interests. It was Mother Earth that could not breathe. If we do not change, much of the natural world will die, and so could the human race.
Zoonotic diseases, such as swine flu, Ebola, and SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) of which COVID-19 is part of, come about due to the dominant way human beings interact with nature. The human species has diminished animal habitats all over the world. It is because of this that humans are increasingly becoming infected with animal pathogens. The only solution to this is to rethink how we interact with the more-than-human world.
The pandemic, as upsetting as it may be, is serving a purpose. It is awakening humanity to the dangers of our selfish ways. The Mamos (spiritual elders of Colombia) say the virus came about to make us realize we are all interconnected, not only with each other, but with all living things. I include viruses among the living, knowing full well that scientists do not generally consider viruses to be living organisms because they require a host body to reproduce. The problem with this thinking is that humans also require a host body to survive. We could not be alive without Mother Earth and her protective atmosphere. She is our host body. Mother Earth not only sustains us, but the whole web of life, including the trees and plants that give out the breath of life (oxygen) that we return to them (Co2) in a sacred circle.
We need to revision the meaning of the word individual. It is not simply that an individual is a self-sufficient unit. The original meaning of individual comes from indivisible. A fully realized individual recognizes their inextricable relationship with the whole. Carl Jung called this process individuation, the movement from a divided, conditioned self to a true undivided Self.
As the ancients understood, the human is microcosm of the macrocosm. Our bodies are approximately 70% water, roughly equal to how much of the earth’s surface is covered by water. The rivers, brooks, and streams are comparable to the arteries, veins, and capillaries of our body. Our lungs breathe in and out as the ocean tides do. And the bones in our bodies are like the rocks of the earth. What we do to the earth we do to ourselves.
We moderns have forgotten that we are the microcosm of the macrocosm, becoming disconnected from our source. For centuries, we have despoiled the earth, polluting her waters, soil, and air—and until climate change reared its head, we seemed oblivious to the consequences. Humanity has been implicated in global warming; but climate change is not the cause of environmental pollution—climate change is the result. What the changing biosphere teaches us is that all living creatures are radically interdependent. Our survival is dependent upon the recognition of the more-than-human world as our relatives. This is the reason the Lakota people use the phrase Mitakuye Oyasin (for all my relations), often said at the end of prayers.
Love of Nature Is the Answer
This time of isolation from other human beings has a silver lining of reconnecting with the natural world. This is our opportunity to fall in love again with the magnificence of nature. It is a time to get out and explore, making friends with the plants, trees, birds, squirrels, rabbits, roadrunners, coyotes, hawks and eagles, or whatever flora and fauna are in your area. When the world feels hopelessly complicated, chaotic and random, the diversity of nature may provide an answer.
Complexity need not be scary. To be complex is to be surrounded, encircled, embraced, and braided together. All of creation is woven together with love, in a myriad of patterns of interconnections and feedback loops that self-organize and organically replicate in countless fractals of repetition.
The natural world is composed of relationships upon relationships upon relationships. Some of these are predator and prey relationships, and involve aggression and fear. But if you ever watched the dance of predator and prey, you will observe the moment when the prey submits to their fate. They give themselves up in an act of sacrifice. It is that sacrifice that makes the predator-prey relationship sacred, even loving.
In most activities in nature, it is not fear that predominates. The preponderance of interactions are based in a profound degree of cooperation and respect, what could be called love. Is it love when a fruit tree senses a bee approaching, and increases her attractiveness, secreting a burst of sugar into her nectar? If it is not love, it is at least seduction or courtship, because it works. The bee is attracted.
Love: The Greatest Transformative Force
A love that is based in acceptance, not circumstance, is unconditional. Unconditional love for life itself is the greatest transformational force there is. This is much easier said than done during a pandemic—but that is when it is needed most.
Love can easily become wrapped up in fear, particularly when our understanding of love is limited to a personal level of feeling secure and protected. If love is treated as a personal savior, it will be reduced to wishful thinking and romantic daydreaming. I am speaking instead of a love that extends beyond the interpersonal human context—a love that originates in nature.
A key to understanding the depths of love is to realize that it is an energy in nature, and as such, cannot be created or destroyed. Without love—the unseen force that binds things together —the solar system, our galaxy, and, for that matter, all galaxies, would simply break apart. Nothing would work. Instead, everything holds together. Scientists call this force of attraction gravity. But gravity is not something that has ever been understood—not by Newton, or by anyone since. All we know of gravity is that it exists.
What is the force that makes the moon want to be with the Earth, and the Earth want to be with the Sun? You could call it gravity, but that is such a grave term for allurement. We might as well call it Love.
Speaking to the beloved in all of creation is the highest expression of love. “Love is the water of Life; jump into this water,” implores Rumi. Water is an excellent metaphor for love. When the underground rivers are thirsty, they cry out to the Cloud People, calling for the rains to come down. It is the love between the Groundwater and the Sky Water that brings the rains. We humans cannot go without love any more than we can go without water. If we hold back from expressing our love, eros will wash over and drown us, like a tidal wave engulfs the shore. Love is an unstoppable force as powerful as the moon and tides.
The ultimate symbol of love in nature may be what the Keres-speaking Laguna people of New Mexico call their original being: Tse Che No, or “Spider Woman.” It is from the belly of Spider Woman that all the world was created. During these times of separation and social distancing, I find the image of Spider Woman viscerally appealing. I can feel Spider Woman is my own gut. I too was once attached by a similar thread, which we refer to as an umbilical cord. Imagining this form of creation is pleasing—not a violent explosion like the Big Bang, but a gentle weaving. The silky thread that Spider Woman spins is flexible, yet strong. It creates all things while maintaining a connection to its mother. Life that comes from life and is connected to all things feels whole, beautiful, and loving. All my fears dissipate. There is just oneness, undivided oneness. All is connected. All is whole. All is love.
The Descent to Soul
The Descent to Soul
Tell a wise person or else keep silent
for those who do not understand
will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive
what longs to be burned to death….
…And so long as you have not experienced
this: to die and so to grow
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.
— johann wolfgang von goethe
This is a field guide to an ecstatic and hazardous odyssey that most of the world has forgotten — or not yet discovered — an essential spiritual adventure for which you won’t find clear or complete maps anywhere else in the contemporary Western world. This journey, which begins with a dying, enables you to grow whole and wild in a way that has become rare — and yet is vital for the future of our species and our planet.
I believe the root cause of the dire crises and challenges of our time — all of our currently cascading environmental and cultural collapses — is a widespread failure in individual human development. This has been true for so long and in so many societies that most people today (including most psychologists, educators, and religious leaders) are unaware of this breakdown in the natural sequence of human maturation, a failure now plainly evident — as witnessed in the current epidemics of psychological dysfunction as well as social and ecological degradation. Vital threads in growing whole are missing from the cultural fabric. Too many of us are only troubled guests on this Earth.
Our developmental dilemma stems primarily from our disconnection from nature, from both our “outer” and “inner” natures: the loss of our experienced belonging to and entanglement within the natural world and the loss of our communion with the very core of our own individual human nature — our Soul.
What we have lost, in particular, is the journey of soul initiation — a psycho-spiritual undertaking that connects us in the most profound way to both the Earth community and the source of our deepest humanity. This journey, if revitalized and reclaimed, can transform everything for us, individually and collectively.
This loss is our single gravest human and planetary crisis because the journey of soul initiation is the path to true Adulthood — to becoming a cultural visionary and evolutionary — and true Adulthood is essential to a genuinely healthy, mature culture. This journey will be a core element of any future society capable of growing a flourishing culture in partnership with all other species and life processes of Earth.
Although the Descent to Soul — the expedition across a vast plain, then down into the depths of what I call Soul Canyon, and eventually, with good fortune, up and out the other side — can be hazardous and harrowing, it is also joyful and engaging. If only the hypnotized masses of the mainstream contemporary world had some idea of the extraordinary riches, mysteries, and intricacies of the human psyche and of the daily dazzling miracles of the self-organizing, more-than-human world! If they did, whatever glimmer and glamour glimpsed in the flatland of conformist-consumer culture would swiftly fade and be seen for the sham it is. What waits on the other side of that vast plain is so much more interesting and inspiring. And those mysteries and treasures are no further than your nightly dreams, your wild love for this world, or for that matter, your deepest emotional wounds; no more remote than the rustling leaves outside your door, the every-moment miracles of your own body, the mycelium-webbed soil beneath your feet, or the waxing and waning of the Moon above; no harder to find than the myths that arise everywhere from the depths of the human psyche. These mysteries are not just of nature and of psyche, but of the inherent communion and dance of mutual enrichment between them.
Our Unique Ecological Niche
Each species has its unique ecological niche, a distinctive role it plays in sustaining and enhancing life on our planet. By fulfilling its role, each species does all it can to sustain, increase, and evolve its own kind. When Charles Darwin spoke of the survival of the fittest, he meant the flourishing of those who fit best — those who cooperate best with their environment and are best able to adapt to changing conditions.
Salmon, for example, carry vast amounts of marine nutrients from the ocean to river headwaters. These nutrients are incorporated into food webs in rivers and their surrounding landscapes by many species of mammals, birds, and fish that forage on salmon eggs, juveniles, and adults. Brown bears disperse these marine nutrients into surrounding forests, enhancing the growth of trees that protect stream banks from erosion. These trees eventually return the favor for salmon by falling into the streams and forming logjams that provide shelter for juvenile salmon and protect the gravels that adults use for spawning.
In addition to each species having its own unique niche, we might suppose this is also true for each individual. It is plausible — and probably necessary — that every creature is born with the capacity and desire to occupy its species’ distinctive ecological role in its own individual way. Adolescent salmon, for example, without in-person guidance from their parents or anyone else, know how and when to migrate to the ocean and how, after several years, to locate the very river in which they were spawned and to make their way up that stream often to the exact spot in which they began life. Biologists have hypothesized what tools or mechanisms salmon use to return (how they do it) — such as being able to recognize the distinct scent of their home river — but they don’t have a clue how salmon know to migrate at all, or when, or to where, or what motivates them (why they do it). We don’t know, in other words, how it is that each salmon — or an individual of any species — is born with the capacity and desire to occupy its species’ distinctive ecological role in its own way. But without a doubt, every living thing has this innate knowledge and desire. This is one of the astounding mysteries upon which all life depends. This is a mystery of psyche, not a mystery of eco-biological mechanisms.
The curious thing is that we seldom apply these insights to our own species — as if humanity might be an exception to the rule, as if we are purposeless visitors in a meaningless world or as if we can take any ecological role we want. But as a species, we, too, have a distinctive niche in the community of life, a particular potential, a role that evolution has shaped us to occupy. Most of us are just not at all sure what that might be. Or perhaps we don’t even consider the question.
Given what is unfolding globally in the early twenty-first century, we might be tempted, in moments of despair, to conclude that our unique human niche must be to perpetrate the sixth mass extinction of life on our planet. This is, after all, what we are in fact doing and what is already well underway — the apocalyptic diminution of our planet’s biodiversity, as if Earth is seeking to renew herself by first clearing the decks through the life-slaughtering genius of our own species. Could this be it? Could we have evolved so as to “cooperate best” with the rest of life by becoming the obliging eco-assassin that annihilates most present-day species, including our own? Really?
I don’t think so. I believe that ecocide/suicide is not our destiny but, rather, our fate if we do not succeed at embracing and inhabiting our true niche (leaving aside for now the question of why we might be the only species capable of not fulfilling its true niche). Further, I believe we will not be able to inhabit our true niche as a species unless and until enough of us inhabit our true individual niches.
Let me tell you why:
In order to realize our evolutionary potential, most human cultures have to be healthy and mature enough to choose and support such a mission — “the great work” of our time, as Thomas Berry framed it in his visionary book of that title. In order to have such cultures, there must be humans mature and healthy enough to cocreate those cultures. Such humans (initiated Adults and Elders) are not people who are primarily looking out for themselves (their “small” selves), but rather people who are creatively crafting ways of inhabiting the life-enhancing individual niche they were born for. And that niche is what we discover and what we become able to occupy through the journey of soul initiation. Consequently, in order for humanity to take its true place in the world, enough individual humans must take their true places.
True Adults and Elders are people who know why they were born, who know who they are as unique individual participants in the web of life, and who, in most everything they do, creatively occupy their distinctive ecological niche as a life-enhancing gift to their people and to the greater Earth community.
The primary reason ecocide could end up being our collective fate is due to a specific kind of cultural decay that is the inevitable result of the absence of the journey of soul initiation.
In other words, we industrialized humans are failing to occupy our true collective niche because we don’t know how to find or occupy our individual roles in the greater web of life. We don’t know who we are as a species because we don’t know who we are as individuals.
But we can learn how to remember who we were born to be as individuals, and we can collectively discover who we might yet become as a species.
Twenty-First-Century Practices for Soul Initiation
One factor that makes our work at Animas new, relative to earlier, indigenous traditions, arises from the fact that we are addressing the journey of soul initiation with a very different consciousness and within a very different cultural context. This is simply by “virtue” of several cultural revolutions — agricultural, scientific, industrial, and digital. Humanity now operates with a significantly different mode of consciousness relative to the Neolithic; we exist in a radically transformed cultural context in terms of our knowledge, social structures, economies, technologies, spiritualities, and cosmology.
One of the consequences of these cultural revolutions is a degradation of our shared environment to such a degree that humanity as a whole now faces an unprecedented and ultimate dilemma, namely, accelerating ecocide and possible self-extinction.
We now find ourselves in an initiatory crisis of our own making that will result in either our demise or our metamorphosis. We cannot continue on our current course and we cannot remain as the humans we’ve been. This is a collective circumstance akin to what is faced individually on the Descent to Soul. Not all people or species — or planets — survive their initiations.
Greater role differentiation is true not only of contemporary societies compared with earlier ones but also of our species compared with others. The variety of niches individual humans can occupy seems immeasurably greater than the niches available to individuals of other species. This is our forte as well as our flaw. One of the distinctive attributes of the human psyche is that it takes wildly diverse and creative shapes. But the capacity of most earlier human cultures to support that diversity and autonomy seems limited compared to contemporary options.
More generally, I suspect there are no older or existing cultures with practices or worldviews that are unambiguously relevant to what we need to navigate our current planetary moment, none that are wholly adequate to enable us to face what we now must as a species. This, indeed, was the conclusion of geologian and Earth Elder Thomas Berry after a long life studying cultures all over the world:
We must go far beyond any transformation of contemporary culture….None of our existing cultures can deal with this situation, namely, the loss of what Thomas termed our cultural “survival capacity”] out of its own resources. We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our prerational, our instinctive resources. Our cultural resources have lost their integrity. They cannot be trusted. What is needed is not transcendence but “inscendence.”
Thomas, by distinguishing inscendence from transcendence, was declaring that we live in a time in which the spiritual descent has become essential — and more vital than the spiritual ascent, which, alone, too often amounts to a spiritual “bypass” of our individual and collective needs for healing, wholing, and tending to our crises and opportunities.
There are additional indicators of an emerging human paradigm that might require a new approach to the journey of soul initiation, a new way to understand the Descent to Soul. These include our modern awareness (astonishingly, in just the last 150 years) of a one-way, nonrepeating evolutionary arc to the unfolding world (not just ever-repeating cycles); the determining role humanity now has in the evolution of life on our planet; the relatively recent universal cultivation of the deep imagination, bestowing every person of every culture with the potential for visionary achievement (not just the rare prophet or shaman); and modern Adolescence as a potential evolutionary advance — as yet unfulfilled.
These perspectives suggest that the journey of soul initiation is itself in the process of evolving, that a new developmental possibility for humanity is emerging, and that our species is in the midst of an initiatory journey. We are entering uncharted waters.
For these reasons, I believe we will not find what we need now by returning to the initiatory practices of earlier cultures. Although we might employ some universal techniques and strategies (like dreamwork, fasting, and trance dance) and embrace certain arts of the older Western mystery schools (like deep-imagery journeys, symbolic artwork, and the Mandorla), we primarily must invent never-before-seen maps and methods to navigate our never-before-seen circumstances and courageously accept a destination we can only partially understand.
It’s not simply that we must not appropriate from or co-opt indigenous traditions. It’s not simply that we must invent our own ways of doing what earlier cultures might have done. More fundamentally, we must envision methods for a journey no previous cultures had even attempted — or were ready for. And we must do this not only to prevent horrific things from happening — like ecocide — but also to enable a human possibility not previously seen in this world.
We must now collectively weave a cocoon for the metamorphosis of our own species.
Excerpted from the book from The Journey of Soul Initiation. Copyright ©2021 by Bill Plotkin. Printed with permission from New World Library — www.newworldlibrary.com.
Sacramental Conversation
Sacramental Conversation
Featured image | Deep Conversation, Daron Maurice Cohen
This article is based on a public Zoom talk given to members of the North American Council for Anthroposophical Curative Education and Social Therapy, (NAC), on the evening of April 24th, 2020. The talk had the title “Finding Hope in Difficult Times: Conversation and Community as a Path of Mutual Development.” The NAC website is www.nacouncil.org. It appeared in the Fall 2020 edition of Being Human: A Quarterly Journal of the Anthroposophical Society in America and has been modified further for publication in Kosmos Journal.
“If you don’t know the kind of person I am / And I don’t know the kind of person you are/A Pattern that others made may prevail in the world./ And following the wrong God home we may miss our star….1) William Stafford
Experiencing our Humanity
In the last year we have all experienced shattering events, in particular the ongoing pandemic of Covid 19 and the widespread demonstrations for Black Lives Matter following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. These experiences raise questions of what it means to be human in this time, to be afraid, to face illness, isolation and possibly death and to be prejudiced or systematically to be discriminated against, jailed or murdered because of the color of your skin. Living through these events has led me to question where is it that we experience our humanity most deeply and our mutual indebtedness most strongly and directly and what can such experiences teach us about the values needed to heal ourselves and society? 2)These reflections on consciousness, conversation, human encounter and community emerged from these ponderings.
The Intentional Nature of Community Life
Those of you active in curative education and social therapy have the gift of being in a community of service, living in a house or village dedicated to the mutuality of sharing life with people of differing abilities. This life in community, even if you are still isolated in individual homes, offers perspectives and activities which are deeply life and humanity affirming because behind the activity of service lies a rich image of mutuality, of interdependence, and of the abiding value of human encounter and conversation.
Implicit in this statement, which holds true for many life sharing communities, are a number of principles made quite explicit within Camphill Communities and many other initiatives inspired by the work of Rudolf Steiner (the Austrian educator, philosopher and spiritual teacher 1861-1925). These I would like to explore while focusing in particular on the gifts of human meeting and conversation, which have been so severely challenged by the pandemic.
Perhaps the most fundamental of these principles or attitudes is the view that human beings are spiritual beings now living in a body and a soul. How we manifest in this particular life, with our gender, race, temperament, age, disposition and abilities is never a full expression of our eternal being or higher self. A connected thought is that the teacher and child in school, or the co-worker and resident in a curative home or indeed all of us in relationship serve the other in our journey of becoming. Furthermore, these relationships can be seen as having an intentional karmic quality; that we intended to be together, to learn and serve each other in this life, in this place, even when such learning is difficult.
Such an understanding of the mutuality of karma rests on a picture of repeated earth lives, of reincarnation, described in some detail by Rudolf Steiner, and acknowledged within other spiritual traditions.3) According to Steiner’s research, we create the outline of our earthly destiny together with our karmic brothers and sisters before birth and then encounter these intentions in life, seeking to become wiser, more loving beings. So it is ultimately we, and our friends, community members, colleagues, partners and children, who sculpt the learning plan for our lives while life itself becomes the great school. We therefore all provide support to each other in life, even though we are often not aware of it. Martin Luther King, Jr gave a true picture of this reality when, in describing racial prejudice in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he stated;
”All men, (people), are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be unless you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be unless I am what I ought to be.” 4)
Our mutual destiny expresses itself most directly through human meeting and conversation. It is, after all, through relationship that we are born, learn language, become part of the human community and discover who we are. It is through the gifts of our parents, siblings, teachers, friends and colleagues that we become ourselves, with our unique talents and limitations. It is also through meeting and conversation that the whole social world is created. Families, shops, schools, concerts, curative communities, towns and nations are all created and sustained through human dialogue. This is why one can see human meeting and conversation as the “archetypal social phenomena”, the source of our human becoming and that activity from which the entire social world emerges.
The Gifts of Conversation
I hope we have all had the experience of deep conversations and meetings with another in which we have felt met and understood. We experienced ourselves as fuller, more creative and insightful and also more trusting and hopeful about the future. Perhaps in moments such as these we have also felt our kinship, our deep karmic bond with the other, feeling gratitude for the soul sister or brother we have had the joy of meeting.
My great concern about the present pandemic and its likely evolution is that this central human experience will be curtailed and distorted, blocking the deeper experience and awareness of our karmic mutuality. Socially distanced, masked and resorting to Zoom or other electronic media, while helpful, will not give us the eye-to-eye contact, the face-to-face meeting, in which the full experience of our humanity and karmic bond can be felt, not to mention the sense of co-creating with the spirit that often accompanies deeper one-to-one conversations or intimate group dialogue.
I am reminded of a recent article in the NY Times by Kate Murphy called “Why Zoom is Terrible”.5) She argues that Zoom is exhausting and distorting because the images it gives of the other are altered, spliced, patched and synthesized with the result that we are uncertain and confused as our subconscious facial cues of authenticity, truthfulness, and interest are undermined. I would add that in face-to-face meetings we have real eye-to-eye contact and that our soul bodies connect and interact adding a rich, subconscious and humanity affirming context to our meetings, which I believe cannot happen to the same degree through the medium of a screen.
Suppose that the virus never goes away entirely and that the costs of using teachers in schools, of meeting and being together at work, and of traveling to conferences is seen as prohibitive in a new time of austerity. The virus then provides the perfect rationale for curtailing and in many cases eliminating face-to-face meetings, resorting to electronic communication and blocking the working of human destiny. From this perspective Covid-19 is the perfect tool for those forces in the human and spiritual world seeking to undermine the experiences of our spiritual and karmic possibilities, attempting to rob us of our future as beings trying to learn to love in freedom. The very same forces behind the corruption and decline of our institutions, namely greed, egotism, fear, suspicion, dislike and hatred, can then be further strengthened by the media and will not be balanced by the healing leaven of personal meetings. The overcoming of the illusions and viruses of the mind requires authentic face to face meetings so that we can experience our mutual humanity.
So I turn to you and ask whether you as members of healing, life sharing communities based on a deeper imagination of what is truly human can dedicate yourselves once again and newly to be guardians and protectors of authentic human meeting and conversation. I believe that within Camphill Communities there is a canon that is often sung in gatherings “Guardians of the light we have been given, Living Light for which the Gods have striven…”Can we all, but especially people living in communities dedicated to the living light in each of us, cultivate a new awareness of the blessing and deep soul and spirit working which happens in personal meetings between two or more people. And if we bring a new conscious attention to such meetings and develop a new dedication to the practice of mutuality in dialogue we will, I am sure, have experiences that answer many of the challenges which Covid-19 and which the racism and corruption in our social life present us with.
You and I meet. We speak, listen and develop some level of mutual understanding. This is itself a small miracle since in speaking we are transforming a thought or feeling, an aspect of our consciousness, into audible sounds which the other person hears and is able to then integrate into their awareness. Through deep listening and conscious speaking, through focusing our attention on the other, and through speaking to and responding to what is said, we are activating our interest. While this activity is mainly happening in the mind, requiring consciousness, it is accompanied by feelings and intentions. If these too are open and attuned, we are manifesting not only an open mind and an open heart but a caring will, a desire to serve a genuine meeting between two or more people. This builds trust, a feeling for mutuality and a reverence for life.
If we pay attention, we will also notice a dance in our consciousness in conversations between being awake to the other in listening though more asleep to ourselves, but in speaking the reverse, – awake to ourselves and what we want to express and more asleep to what is happening in the other. Deep listening, when we are allowing the other into our soul, is a supersensible experience, like true meditation, and we resist it and often quickly resort to judgements, and comments such as “ have you thought of, or how can that be true,” or the classic, “ yes, but.”
Rudolf Steiner suggested that a remarkable process of karmic recognition is happening just below the surface of consciousness in our speaking and listening. In listening to the other we for a moment have an image of our future karmic connection to the other and in speaking a tableau of our past connections.8) Many of us have had moments of karmic recognition on meeting someone for the first time, or on seeing each other after a long separation, where we feel here you are again, my heart has longed for you and missed you. Perhaps that experience can give us an inkling of what possibilities lie within human encounter and dialogue as a way of awakening to the reality of our mutual karma. In 1913 in London, Steiner maintained that the ability to bring these imaginations of past and future karmic connections to consciousness would be a birthright of increasing numbers of people in the 21st century, if such capacities were not destroyed.6) I believe that biography work, as well as dyad work, NVC and other dialogue methods are a preparation and foreshadowing of such important karmic experiences.
There are of course many distractions and disturbances which stand in the way of a deeper and authentic meeting and conversation between people. These are also important to pay attention to because they reveal what needs to be transformed in us and in the world. These forces can be described as anti-social in nature and they live strongly on our thinking, feeling and willing life.
In my experience they manifest a kind of polarity. In our thinking life doubt and criticism on one side and dogmatism and fanaticism on the other. We listen for a moment to the other and then we are off, expressing either criticism or asserting the truth of our own opinions. I frequently experience this in myself when trying to listen to my older brother, a conservative Republican, but also know it only too well in everyday life.
Our feeling life is strongly affected by the polarity of likes and dislikes, of sympathy and antipathy. Such feelings are strengthened by the media, advertising, and our peers and they color our reaction to everything, especially people. They influence our perceptions, and behavior and are often enemies of true meeting as they tell us more about ourselves than about others. As such feelings are often semi-conscious it takes considerable work to unmask them and to avoid the phenomena of projection, where we ascribe to others what lives strongly in our own soul. We see this playing out in the political arena quite forcefully, especially during the last presidential campaign.
Our will, expressed in acting, is largely unconscious and swings between the polarity of anxiety and fear on the one side and an illusionary egotism or magical belief in self on the other.
The three soul forces of thinking, feeling and willing help us to have self-consciousness, but without schooling they become anti-social, strengthened by all the manipulations of our “me first “culture. The anti-social force in our soul also represents aspects of our shadow, our double, which needs to be transformed if we are to realize our true nature as human beings.
Thus others, our children, partners and colleagues are often the annoying mirrors showing us what needs to be worked on in ourselves. Yet they are also an invitation to develop interest in the other, to experience empathy toward the other in our feeling life, and to engage in acts of love and mutual service.
Relationships, meetings and conversation are truly the mystery centers of modern life, the places where a soul and spirit drama of mutual transformation takes place.7) It is here in our relationship with others in private and public life that the demons of lying, projection, racism, greed, egotism and the mind viruses of Wetiko must be overcome through attention, interest and love. This is our task and our opportunity now if we are to have a human future. And we can practice every day.
I have attempted to capture something of these thoughts in the following diagram. You will note that the development of interest in the other, of empathy for the other, and of love for the other is a balancing activity in our thinking, feeling and willing life between the anti-social extremes of doubt and dogmatism, dislikes and likes, and fear and egotism. It represents the invitation which others provide us with in meeting and conversation. And it is the mutual practice of ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.
|
I Behold the Other (I) With |
||
|
Doubt/Criticism |
Interest (II) |
Dogmatism/Being Right |
|
Thinking/Open Mind |
||
|
Dislikes/Hatred |
Empathy (III) |
Likes/Self Love |
|
Feeling/Open Heart |
||
| Fear/Anxiety
(Anti-Social Forces) |
Love (IV) |
Ego-Inflation (Anti-Social Forces) |
|
Willing/ Serve the Other |
||
|
(Conscious Social Forces) Which make visible the reality of Karma |
||
Sacramental Conversation
Conversations and small group gatherings can have a sacramental nature. This is not only because we can experience the mutuality of our destiny connections and the spiritual striving of the other, but also because we have the possibility of co-creating with and being aware of the inspiring presence of spiritual beings. Many of us have had moments of startling insight in conversations, a sense that we have been given a gift from the Gods. We may also have had a fleeting sense of what I would call a star-filled space between us in small group gatherings, aware that an invisible being is present with us for a shorter or longer time. The possibility of such conscious co-creating with spiritual beings can be described as the raising of our collective consciousness into the realm of spirit and creating a spiritual community in freedom.8)
When we manifest a living interest in the other through deep listening to word and gesture a warm feeling toward the other arises. When this has occurred and is not interrupted by likes and dislikes, lengthy monologues, or expressions of impatience, a certain soul space is created which allows feelings of mutual empathy to live. Into this heart space positive working spiritual beings can manifest, creating a communion experience, often referred to as a Whitsun event in the Christian churches. This is implied by the four stages suggested in the diagram above.
We enter a common space and behold each other as beings of body, soul and spirit (I). We then listen to the other and the conversation with deep interest (II). We then, out of deep listening develop empathy for the other and openness, wonder at what is unfolding in this meeting and conversation (III). Lastly we can have a communion experience, a sense of spirit presence and blessing (IV). Practicing reverential conversations can become a new sacrament in which we experience our full humanity in the presence of the spirit and are uplifted and strengthened by experiencing “beloved community”.9)
Another way of describing the conditions and activities of Sacramental Conversation in more common language was developed at a series of conferences in the late 1990’s on the topic of Group Synergy sponsored by the Fetzer Institute and the Institute of Noetic Sciences. The participants at these conferences noted both a needed horizontal gesture of human warmth, interest and commitment and a vertical one of co-creating consciously with spirit. The conditions mentioned included:
- A mutual commitment to each other and a clear shared human and spiritual purpose.
- Developing an atmosphere of safety, confidentiality and trust.
- Speaking from the heart and out of experience.
- Respect toward different spiritual orientations.
- An ability to deal with differences and conflict.
- Creating a sacred space open to spiritual guidance and inspiration.
- A joint commitment to inner development and learning.
- A meeting that is prepared, held and guided by a clear process and form of facilitation.10)
When these conditions are met, and a sacramental mood achieved, we feel an enhanced level of trust, mutual encouragement, a sense of spiritual presence and guidance, and greater creativity and will to serve the world.
Practicing Sacramental Conversation and Group Dialogue can thus become a powerful antidote to the ravages of Covid 19 and the ever present anti-social qualities of racism, prejudice and egotism. So let us commit to conscious listening and dialogue. It can work small miracles and perhaps great ones, giving us an experience of what it means to be fully human in these difficult times
Notes:
- William E. Stafford, A Ritual to Read to Each Other, www. Poetry Foundation.org
- See Christopher Schaefer, Re-Imagining America: Finding Hope in Difficult Times, Hawthorn Press, 2019, pp.3-19
- Rudolf Steiner, Karma and Reincarnation: Two Fundamental Truths of Human Existence, Rudolf Steiner Press, 2001
- Martin Luther King, Jr, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, quoted in The Atlantic, April,2013
- Kate Murphy “Why Zoom is Terrible”, NY Times, April 29, 20
- Rudolf Steiner, Approaching the Mystery of Golgotha, Steiner Books, 2006, pp.8,9
- See the inspiring book by Harry Salman, The Social World as Mystery Center: The Social Vision of Anthroposophy, Threefold Publishing, 1999, in particular pp. 99-134
- Rudolf Steiner, Awakening to Community, Anthroposophic Press, p.157
- See Athys Floride, Human Encounters and Karma, Anthroposophic Press, 1990, pp,13-61
- Fetzer Institute, Robert Kenny, Group Service and Group Synergy, Kalamazoo, MI, 2001
Awakening to Life
Awakening to Life
“I am life that wills to live in the midst of life that wills to live” – Albert Schweitzer
There was a debate that fascinated theologians in Christian Europe for a millennium or so, engaging them as recently as the nineteenth century. It revolved around this imponderable: If you’d lived a righteous life and your soul ended up in heaven for eternity, how could you remain beatific if you knew a loved one was suffering eternal torment in hell? One theory was that God wiped your mind clean of memories of any loved ones now enduring perpetual torture. Other prominent theologians, amazingly, suggested that those in heavenly bliss would simply rejoice when they heard the “dolorous shrieks and cries” of the damned, knowing that they got their just deserts.
The bizarreness of this question arises from a paradox deeply ingrained in the Western tradition: the supposed impermeable essence of the human soul. For millennia, people were told that their soul—their true identity—was a discrete eternal unit that was rewarded for a good life by permanent residence in heaven with God. Their bodily incarnation, with its complex desires and feelings for others, was a dangerous distraction tempting them from what really mattered. While the traditional Christian story of the soul might seem consigned mostly to history, it shares the same deep roots with our dominant neoliberal capitalist system, based upon the foundational idea of an individual as an autonomous agent utterly distinct from the rest of humanity.
There is a telling contrast to the Christian story of the soul’s salvation in the Buddhist conception of the bodhisattva—someone who, having worked tirelessly to achieve enlightenment, has arrived at the threshold of nirvana with the opportunity to be released from persistent cycles of reincarnation. But rather than opting for liberation, the bodhisattva chooses to return to the world and work ceaselessly until all beings have awakened from needless suffering. This seems at first like an act of boundless altruism. However, a deeper analysis reveals something even more profound. The bodhisattva has achieved the realization that the boundaries separating the self from others are all mere constructions of a conditioned mind. In this “perfection of wisdom,” the bodhisattva recognizes her inherent interdependence with all sentient beings. She’s not sacrificing herself for the benefit of others—she has awakened to the realization that the very notion of a separate self is a falsehood.
Ultimately, our values arise from our identity. If someone defines themselves as an isolated individual, they will feel entitled to pursue their own happiness at the expense of others. Someone who identifies primarily with their nation will have no qualms about putting up barriers to prevent others from entering. If your identity is based on a fundamentalist religious creed, you may be ready to martyr yourself for the cause. And if you identify primarily with all life, you’re likely to devote your existence to work for the benefit of all sentient beings.
Our mainstream culture, forged in medieval Europe and rationalized by reductionist science from the seventeenth century onward, tells us to find our identity in separation, just like the Christian soul. Mainstream economists posit that humans are selfish, rational maximizers of individual welfare. Popularizers of outmoded scientific theories, such as Richard Dawkins, have successfully peddled the idea that we are machines driven by selfish genes, and any moral framework we construct must overpower our true nature “because we are born selfish.”
But that old worldview of separation has expired. It’s not just dangerous, leading us to the precipice of ecological devastation and climate breakdown—it’s plain wrong. Modern scientific findings from fields as diverse as systems theory, complexity science, cognitive anthropology, and evolutionary theory all point to the same fundamental insight that wisdom traditions such as Buddhism, Taoism, and Indigenous knowledge have been telling us for millennia: that our very existence arises from our interconnectedness—within ourselves, with each other, and with the living Earth.
We learn from complexity science that the relationships between things are frequently more important than the things themselves. Think of a photograph of yourself when you were a child. You know it’s you, but virtually every cell within you now is different from what comprised that child—and even the cells that remain for life are constantly reconfiguring their internal contents, so you can be certain that not a single molecule in that little child is still part of you. And yet, you know you’re the same person. You have the memories to prove it. It’s the complex set of relationships between your different parts that retains the resiliency that links your personhood to that child. The same principle holds true for virtually all natural systems: candle flames, rivers, and ecosystems.
Far from being separate from the rest of nature, we are part of an endless meshwork of life going back over billions of years. Biologists explain that as a result of deep homology, fruit flies share more than half their genes with humans, and even bananas share 44 percent. The rich diversity of life on Earth arose, not from the selfishness of those genes, but because different organisms learned how to cooperate with each other in a stunningly complex network of mutually beneficial symbiosis. And as humans evolved into a unique species, cooperation was their defining characteristic. Alone among primates, we developed moral emotions—such as compassion, shame, and a visceral sense of fairness—that caused our identity to expand beyond individual selves and incorporate our entire group.
While this pervasive interconnectedness may seem surprising to modern mainstream thinking, it’s fundamental to the sense of identity that non-Western traditions foster. When members of the Native American Blackfoot tribe meet each other, they don’t ask “How are you?” Instead, they ask “How are the connections?” Similarly, in Central and Southern Africa, a guiding principle for life is ubuntu, which is frequently translated as “I am because you are, you are because I am.” In many Indigenous communities, the type of self-seeking behavior promoted by neoliberalism would be seen as a form of madness.
Traditional Chinese sages similarly based their moral compass on the foundation of the interrelatedness of all life, the realization of which they called ren. Philosopher Cheng Yi declared that a person who achieves the state of ren “regards heaven, earth, and all things as one body; there is nothing not himself.” This understanding was unforgettably expressed by Zhang Zai in one of the greatest expressions of human wisdom called the Western Inscription, which begins:
Heaven is my father and earth is my mother,
and I, a small child, find myself placed intimately between them.
What fills the universe I regard as my body;
what directs the universe I regard as my nature.
All people are my brothers and sisters; all things are my companions.
In the face of our civilization’s onslaught against life, an increasing number of modern Western visionaries are beginning to throw off the mantle of separation that has muddied the moral clarity of mainstream society—what Einstein called “a kind of optical delusion of consciousness . . . a kind of prison for us”—and rediscover the core truth of our shared identity.
The founder of Deep Ecology, Arne Naess, called this expanded identity an ecological self. “We may be said to be in, and of, Nature,” he declared, “from the very beginning of our selves.” For the great humanitarian, Albert Schweitzer, who experienced his own identity as springing from life itself (as expressed in the epigraph) a system of values becomes self-evident: “I cannot but have reverence for all that is called life. I cannot avoid compassion for everything that is called life. That is the beginning and foundation of morality.”
Once we recognize that we are life, we are called by the overriding imperative to devote our own little eddy of sentience to the flourishing of all life, of which we are but one tiny part. With an expanded sense of identity, this becomes not so much a moral obligation as a natural instinct based on life’s own drive for flourishing. An ecological worldview leads naturally to acting out of love, which can simply be understood as the realization and embrace of connectedness. A deep recognition of interdependence can become a foundation for what Buddhist scholar David Loy calls “bodhisattva activism”—wherein each new situation presents an opportunity to re-orient from individual separateness toward a shared identity.
Part of becoming an ecological self is to find our participative role within a larger community of changemakers creating what George Monbiot calls the “new politics of belonging.” Just as trees in a healthy forest communicate with and fortify each other through their underground mycorrhizal network in a “wood-wide web,” each of us can be most effective in transformative change when we connect with the existing network of life-affirming groups already operating around us.
We have arrived at a stage in the human story on Earth where the decisions made over the next few decades will determine the future direction, not just of humanity, but of Earth itself. Ultimately, it will be a collective decision based on our shared sense of identity. While our civilization has been destroying much of life on Earth in the past few decades, we have also been developing a greater collective consciousness as a species than ever before. Can we wake up in time to appreciate our collective identity and participate in something greater than our fixed selves? As Thích Nhât Hanh has suggested, the next Buddha may not be in the form of an individual, but the awakening community.
A full recognition of interconnectedness brings with it myriad implications as we traverse its tapestry. Some pathways invite possibilities for the bliss of liberation from the confines of a bounded self. Other pathways open up grievous avenues of shared anguish as we become intimate with the suffering of others and the horrifying devastation of nonhuman life on Earth unfolding before us. Awakening to life in this century of turmoil is far from a painless experience. It takes courage, authenticity, and the humility to reach out to others when the enormity of the loss becomes too unbearable to hold in your own heart. But taken together, pursuing these pathways of awakening can imbue our lives with vibrant meaning as we participate in regenerating the Earth, in setting humanity and nonhuman nature on a course for the Symbiocene—an indefinitely prolonged period of mutual flourishing.
[Note: this article contains selected excerpts from Jeremy Lent’s upcoming book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe.]
Poems for the Solar Age
Poems for the Solar Age
Kosmos | Dear Hazel, everyone knows you as a futurist and as an evolutionary economist, an author and a consultant, but I don’t think many people know you as a poet.
Hazel | I knew, for my mission in this lifetime, I would have to do battle with all the alpha males who run the public and private bureaucracies in most countries, and also run most of the academic scene and the silos and the boundaries between disciplines and all the competition and so on. I knew I would have to shift to my left brain and document everything very deeply. So the poetry was when I came home after doing battle in Room 100 under the Capitol Dome for six years as a cabinet level science policy advisor. I would get home and all I wanted to do was to write poems.
Kosmos | So, the poems go back?
Hazel | It was from 1974 to 1980—that was when I was in Washington advising The Office of Technology Assessment and The National Science Foundation. I was on the committee on Public Engineering Policy at The National Academy of Sciences and Engineering. And they did a big interview with me in Science Magazine back then because I was the only woman charging around in science policy.
Kosmos | Before we get into the poetry, I do have just a couple of burning questions. I think anyone would agree that we’re at an inflection point—what is it going to take at this point to shift the economy and our economic thinking to be more regenerative and more just?
Hazel | Good question. In the 60s, as an environmental activist, I knew what would shift the paradigm would be the social movements: the environmental movement, the women’s movement—all of these are now reaching critical mass, and, thank God, with all of our children jumping in. They cannot be dissuaded because they see the future looming. And in most of my writing, I was pointing out that basically breakdowns drive breakthroughs.
I could see at every system level, things breaking down and being papered over, and I realized that the theme of everything I was writing was about the acceleration of change. And so, what we’re living through right now is that the system is coming up to real time. It’s been accelerating and there are no more niches to hide the truth. In every system now we’re seeing flaws, and the rationalizations, the assumptions that turned out to be short-sighted and incorrect, are now patiently obvious.
It’s the planet now which is waking us up. And if climate change isn’t enough, then it’s going to be COVID-20, COVID-21, COVID-22. And we’re realizing that until we look at our assumptions of materialism and our model of success and our whole lifestyle, until we accept the fact that it is not fit for our purpose on this planet, it’s completely unsustainable. That’s all nature is trying to tell us.
Kosmos | Yes, I believe we are tuning in more to what the planet is trying to communicate. We’ve desacralized or desecrated many of our relationships with nature. I know what a sun lover you are, and I am too. As a species we used to be in awe of fire, in awe of the sun. And so when we desacralize something, we no longer treat it with care or reverence or respect. What would it be like to resacralize our relationship to the sun and to energy?
Hazel | Well, for one thing, it would be so relaxing! Because all of this urge to dominate, control, and be in charge of everything is such an arrogant sophistry. The lesson is humility! It’s about enjoying being part of the wheel of life and enjoying our relationship with all the other species so that we slow down enough to really notice the beauty. That’s why I love Kosmos so much—because of the beauty in each issue. It’s part of the slowing down.
I have a personal mantra, and it’s all to do with my life’s purpose. It’s about universal love, which is the most powerful force in the cosmos. And my theme and my mantra in this lifetime is connecting with all of those who understand that love does conquer all eventually.
Kosmos | Let’s talk a little bit about the first poem, Cyberspace is Sacred Space. Kosmos has been meeting, as you know, with young millennial inheritors of wealth. Many of them are looking for meaning and purpose. They’re struggling to align with Purpose. And I wonder what you would say to them—what is the message of your poem Cyberspace, particularly for millennials?
Hazel | I think that when I wrote this poem in 1999, I could see the promise of cyberspace and the internet we all felt back then. We were all just dreaming of this kind of platform, where we would bypass all the old structures and get our voices heard for the first time. And already back then in 1999, I could see it falling into the “money meme.”
It reminds me of The Sounds of Silence: “and the people bowed and prayed to the neon God they made.” And this is all neon God. When I saw the internet being swallowed up by profit-making, and the same kind of Silicon Valley business models, it was just so sad. Yet, I have complete faith in our young people now, that they’re onto this and tracking it, and that we’re going to eventually fulfill the promise of cyberspace and use the internet for the purpose we always intended it.
Cyberspace is Sacred Space
Kosmos | Thank you. Yes, we do need to think of these as sacred technologies because they really are gifts from the universe. Cyberspace biomimics human consciousness. All of our technologies—solar energy, robotics, artificial intelligence, drones—all of them need to be put to sacred use, restoring life on Earth. But will they?
Hazel | The U.S. Office of Technology Assessment was founded in 1974 for this very purpose. And I helped to promote the legislation that founded the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, and, of course, I was the only woman. They were all white alpha males. And the first meeting we had in room 100, just off the Capitol Rotunda underneath the dome, I walked in there and they looked at me and said, “Oh, could you go and get us the coffee?” Because they assumed, of course, that I must be a servant.
I have a complete copy of all the reports of The Office of Technology Assessment online, and in electronic form. I’ve been doing a project with the University of Florida Press. And we’ve re-introduced one which is free on our website. It’s called Assessing Technology for Local Development. And it could have been written yesterday, because it’s all about community owned wind farms, solar energy, contract agriculture, farmer’s markets, micro grids, everything that we’re doing today.
Well finally, what happened was that Newt Gingrich shut it down because the Republicans were so upset with what we were doing. And they said, “We don’t need an office of technology assessment, because the market drives the technology.” So they had weaponized economics once again. These two wonderful technologies that humans developed: money and markets, wonderful tools when used correctly, have been weaponized and turned into tools of power and exploitation, and we haven’t yet fully unraveled that.
40 other countries adopted the OTA model, and we were the only ones that shut it down. We decided to slay the messenger, but 40 other countries have been doing this all along, including Japan. So, here’s some interesting news: about 40 members of Congress right now are trying to refund OTA because it’s still authorized.
Kosmos | Interesting story.
Hazel | So you see, it would be very helpful if Kosmos could tell that story.
Kosmos | Absolutely. And that’s a good segue to the excerpt from your poem, Pecos River Meditation. So tell me a little bit about that story.
Hazel | I was giving a series of talks at a corporate ranch that was being built in this wonderful wild area of the Pecos River, just a little South of Taos. And my friend who invited me to do this, Larry Wilson—a really beautiful ethical guy—he was trying to teach corporate executives about the long term. And I was sitting there that morning, the first morning, thinking how do I actually get through to these guys? There were maybe 50 of them. And that was where I wrote that poem.
Excerpt: Pecos River Meditation
Kosmos | We really do need to use our reverence for nature to inform our use of technology,
Now, the Ode to the Solar Age poem is quite long. And I don’t want you to get too tired. This one is so apropos for the spring edition, “Century of Awakening.” So, would you say that we are closer to this dream of the solar age or further away than say 30 years ago?
Hazel | Much closer, because I have been tracking through our Green Transition Scoreboard that this has now entered the mainstream as the biggest investment opportunity, that all of these former fossilized sector investors are suddenly realizing. And as you may notice from our website, I have been doing all kinds of videos with asset management groups. And one in London that I’ve been working with has a portfolio of pure solar energy investments, all small SMEs, and it’s called exponential energy fortunes. And it costs a lot to join, to find out about this portfolio, with it’s double and triple returns, on all these small scale companies that everybody misses because they’re not in the major indexes.
Kosmos | Let’s go for it.
Ode to the Solar Age
Kosmos | So one final question for our century of awakening—I guess it’s a parallel question to the one I just asked you about energy—but what must we fundamentally change in our economic way of thinking in order to usher in a century of regeneration and hope, a new era?
Hazel | Okay. We have to remember the two ways that human beings transact with each other. One way: we use money, shells, wampum…cattle, cigarettes, whatever. And the other is relationships – the Golden Rule. And basically, even if you look today, almost every deal is based on some kind of human relationship that may be a bit obscure, who was a friend of somebody else who went to school with their kids who married their second cousin.
What we have to remember is that relationships actually drive the economy, and the money is just a symbol. It’s a way of tracking and keeping score. But until we fully understand that, money is just a string of digits in a computer, and that it’s a social protocol based on the network effects of platforms, and that the value of currencies, all currencies, is simply based on how many people on that platform trust and use it. That’s all.
Kosmos | Before we close, I’m not sure that we ever heard your mantra, did we?
Hazel | I could grab it if you have a minute.
Kosmos | Yes please.
Hazel | OK…And this came to me in the middle of the night, maybe 25 or so years ago. And finally I got clear what I’m supposed to be doing. And I just took it down.
“Each day I recommit myself to the almighty power of universal love and the evolutionary life force of which I am a small part. I will always be guided by this source of my eternal being and will walk in faith and hope for life on this earth and always seek those who share this knowing as my companions in love on light. I balance my energy in joy and serving my highest purpose, my universal self.”
Kosmos | Absolutely beautiful. Glad I asked you to share it.
Hazel | I just love what Kosmos is doing. Thank you.
Hazel’s Poems
Cyberspace is Sacred Space
Earthbound humans
Soaring at last,
In cyberspace.
A leap in their long
And painful journey
Upward: from Olduvai,
Altimira’s caves
Catal Huyuk,
Sumer, with waves
Of patient migration
To cover all the lands
On the bosom
Of Mother Earth.
Cyberspace:
Entrance to the Mind
Of God.
Sacred Space,
Full of promises
Sung by all our sages
From Nomad Gatherer – Hunters
To Agriculture: Gift
Of all our Mothers.
To Industrialization,
Materialism, Consumerism,
Onward to the vaunted
Information Age.
Triumph of Technique
Yet mindlessly playing
Earlier childhood games:
Clicking on trades
In the Global Casino,
Dungeons and dragons.
Escaping from the Sacred Duties
Of Earthbound Life.
More ancient win-lose games,
Netizens crowing
Over Citizens,
Celebrating freedom,
Rights without Responsibilities.
Will we reach
The Age of Knowledge,
Learning at last,
To understand
The mysterious glories
Of Mother Earth
Teeming with Life
Symbiotic with our own?
Will we move on
To the Age of Wisdom
Seeing all Life
As inseparable
On our planetary journey?
Will we use our tools
Of Communication
To reach Community,
And a new Communion
With the Cosmos?
Excerpt: Pecos River Meditation
When all remember they are lovers
Then all places are sacred once again,
Each red pepper drying in the sun,
Each seed of corn,
Sweet smelling cedars flanking
The peaceful stream.
The spirit of all things in the brisk, chill wind,
The untidy, boisterous dogs,
The winter-coated, sweating horses.
Sacredness is everywhere,
From the lonely pueblo ruins,
To mysterious dugouts, black pots
Lost on sandy isles,
Amid tangled seagrape and diving waterbirds.
Neither is sacredness the province
Of antiquity, or any age,
Each time and culture offers us its gems
Even our own “post-industrial era.”
It is for us to see the beauty in this too,
Amid the strutting “Information Age,”
The nuclear nightmare.
Ode to the Solar Age
Entering the Age of Light
A new Age of Enlightenment
Humans awakening
To the Solar Age!
Envisioned for centuries
By many peoples on Earth
Those who worshipped the Sun,
Saw land and fire as sacred
Living with earth and winds,
Respecting the Four Directions.
Yet hordes of strutting conquerors
Brought globalization and the vaunted
Industrial Era.
Weaponizing ancient tools:
Money and Markets.
Narrowing relationships of caring,
Sharing and mutual respect.
The ancient Golden Rule of community.
Mathematizing exploitation,
False metrics concealing the pain.
Devastation of the Anthropocene Age
Hidden by illusions of abstraction.
Destruction of other lives and species
Marketed as “progress” and “success”.
The planet’s wake-up call
Arriving in pandemics
And climate catastrophes.
Humans now face graduation time.
Are we fit to continue on this Earth?
Tested now before allowing
Our ambition to colonize
Our Solar System as
An inter-planetary species.
We need first to learn
Our true situation
Living with other species,
Dependent on our still-hospitable planet
Powered by the daily photon shower
From our Mother Star: the SUN!
Learning at last, from green plants
Their ways of harvesting
Those free daily photons
With Photosynthesis!
Life’s primary technology
Besting all human techne as
Merely biomimicry.
Plants producing food and sustenance
Inhaling our CO2 while
Providing us with oxygen.
No need to dig deep in Earth’s crust
For fossil oil, coal or minerals.
Solar cells, wind turbines,
Geothermal and ocean energies
All stored and distributed
By the lightest element:
Hydrogen.
All provide beyond our dreams
Healthy lifestyles, enough for All.
No need to compete, instead:
Joy in sharing and communing
In all our communities,
Families, tribes and nations
Face to face and in
Cyberspace.
As our beloved children are teaching.
Released at last from
Conceptual prisons,
Recycling our cultures and theories.
Freedom from cognitive limits,
Academic boundaries and silos.
A new Age of Enlightenment for All.
Healing ourselves and the Earth.
Re-planting, re-wilding
Lands, rivers and forests.
Fulfilling at last
The promise of generations of
Fire and sun-worshippers,
In this new Age of Light,
The Solar Age!
