Changing the Story of Separation
By Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, via The Garrison Institute
“The only way to change the world is to change the story.”
We know only too well the story that defines our world today. It is a tale of consumerism and greed, sustained by the empty but enticing promise of an endless stream of “stuff” as the source of our happiness and well-being. Some of us are finally coming to recognize the self-destructive madness of this myth, how we are ravaging our own ecosystem to fulfill a fantasy. Even the image of a “green economy” is just covering over the truth of unsustainable materialism, while all around us we are witnessing the effects of our culture’s whole-hearted embrace of this story: a beautiful world broken and dying, on its way to becoming a polluted wasteland.
(image) We may even understand how this contemporary story is built upon an earlier one that took hold many centuries ago with the spread of monotheism: the story of a God who has withdrawn to heaven, to reign, apart and above, over an Earth now denied its sacred nature. This is the myth of separation—that we are separate from the Earth rather than part of its living wholeness—that fed into the story of science, in which the natural world was unfeeling matter to be controlled, a resource to be exploited. We are the inheritors of a patriarchal world in which spirit no longer lives in matter, and both the Earth and the feminine have suffered endless abuse.
And many of us now long for a new story, one that will restore reverence to the Earth and reconnect our souls to the sacred within creation, a story that will save our planet. Some have even already begun to articulate such a story: a beautiful and compelling vision of the entire universe as a single, inextricably interconnected, living whole, returning to us a sense of wonder that nourishes our body and soul.
(image) But is this enough? How do we change the defining story of our world? Our collective culture celebrates its story of endless desires. It feeds us with its images that, though they can never nourish us, work like a drug for our minds and bodies, even as they exploit us and the Earth. We have become addicts to material prosperity and the ego-centered greed that drives it. Sadly even spirituality, which should offer us real freedom, has often become caught in this same web of desires, selling self-focused well-being, peace, or other inner qualities, rather than opening a doorway to real compassion and service.
Once we recognize how these stories hold us in thrall, entranced or entrapped, we can get a sense of their power. They are not just slogans created by politicians, corporations, or even spiritual teachers; rather they arise from the magical inner world where myths are born. We can recognize the archetypal dimension of earlier myths—the gods and goddesses of previous eras—for example: some can see it in the more recent myth of a patriarchal, transcendent God living in a distant heaven. The archetypal power of the present myth of materialism is more difficult to recognize because it is deceptive as well as seductive. And yet if one looks more closely, one can see the archetypes at work here too. There is the patriarchal myth of the domination of nature—a primal masculine power drive. But less obvious is the way in which the dark side of the rejected feminine has caught us in her web of desires. For what is materialism but the worship of matter, which is none other than the domain of the goddess? We are more present in the archetypal world than we dare acknowledge.
And now in our quest to redeem our civilization and the planet we recognize the need for a new story, a story that returns the spirit to creation and honors the primal oneness that is the web of life. Like our current story, this new one may also be based upon an earlier story: one in which all of creation was seen as sacred, with humanity just part of the woven tapestry of life—a story still lived by many indigenous peoples. But this emerging story is also evolutionary, drawing as well on the more recent insights of particle physics into the underlying nature of creation to express its vision of the world as an interconnected whole, in which, like the symbolic image of Indra’s net, each part influences the whole. And this new story of creation connects the smallest particle with an ever-expanding cosmos of billions of galaxies—and does so in a way that bridges science and the sacred, understanding them as expressions of the same reality.
This is a compelling story for our time. But do we recognize from where this new story arises? Are we acknowledging and honoring the inner dimension from which all such world-changing stories are born? We know the vital need for a new story, but are we seeking to change life without honoring the archetypal forces at work—the gods and goddesses that still reign in the depths of creation—without recognizing the primal world that is life’s inner source? If a story is not born from the inner world it will lack the power to effect any real change.[i] It will speak just to our conscious selves, the surface layer of our being, rather than engaging us from the depths. The stories of the past, the myths that shaped humanity, spoke to our individual and collective soul with the numinous and transformative power that comes from deep within. How many men have been called to battle by the archetype of the warrior or the hero? How many churches have been built on the foundation of the myth of redemption? The power of the archetypal, mythic world belongs to the river-beds of life that shape humanity.
But sadly, our present culture has distanced itself from this inner world. We are not taught to revere these underlying powers, nor do we know how to relate to them. Our contemporary consciousness hardly even knows of their existence. We live on the surface of our lives, unaware of the depths that are in fact the real determining factors. Nor do we fully understand the influence of their stories, even though our present political landscape, the “post-truth” era, shows us the power of tribalism and its myths over fact.
When our Christian culture banished the many gods and goddesses, and then when science declared that myths were idle fantasies, we became more trapped than we realize. The archetypal world does not disappear because we close our eyes, because we say that it does not exist. Its power is not diminished by either our ignorance or our arrogance. And yet we have forgotten how to access and work with this power. Unknowingly we have disempowered our self in a fundamental way. We have closed the door in our psyche and soul—we only look outward.
And now, when there is this vital need to rewrite the story that defines our lives, we are left with the inadequate tools of our conscious self. We do not know how to welcome the energies from the depths, to constellate the power we need to co-create a real story. We have isolated our self from the energy of life’s source we so desperately need. And so we are left stranded on the shore of our conscious self.
There is a new story waiting to be born, waiting to redeem the planet and nourish our souls. It is a story of oneness that includes the diversity of creation in a self-sustaining whole, a story that can bring back the magic within nature that is needed to heal our damaged planet. We can sense it in the re-emergence of the goddess Gaia, whose archetypal energy and numinosity speak to us of the world as a living being. Her image and the sense of an animate Earth has re-entered western consciousness and acquired a life of its own.
(image) But this is also a new story, arising from deep within the psyche of humanity and the world soul at this moment in our and its evolution. It includes the mystery of life as well as the understanding that science can give us. It is a story of cooperation rather than competition or conflict. We are not the sole creators of this story, because it is the story of life evolving, recreating itself anew, but we are needed to midwife it into existence. As with all births it needs to come from the inner to the outer world.
Traditionally human consciousness has the ability to connect the inner and outer worlds. This has long been the role of shamans and poets, artists and mystics. These are the visionaries of the soul who have held this thread for humanity, who have been called to work in the depths and bring its numinous wonder closer to our collective consciousness. And now as the world is dying, and as the world is waiting to be reborn, it is calling to those who are awake to this inner dimension, who can make the connection between the worlds. As the psychologist, visionary, and gnostic, Carl Jung said, “The world today hangs by a thin thread, and that thread is the psyche of man.”
Only when we recognize the inner origins of this world-changing story can we participate in this birth. Only when we work together with the symbolic, archetypal world can its power and numinosity come into our existence and speak to the whole of humanity. Only then will this story be heard. We cannot afford the still-birth of new ideas that lack the life force that comes from the depths. We are called to return to the root of our being where the sacred is born. Then, standing in both the inner and outer worlds, we will find our self to be part of the momentous synchronicity of life giving birth to itself.
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee is a Sufi teacher in the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Sufi Order. He is the author of several books and the editor of Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth
[i] Thomas Berry hints at this in his talk “The Ecozoic Era” (Eleventh Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures, October 1991). He speaks of a “creative entrancement” as well as the “psychic energies needed” for transformation:
“My effort here is to articulate the outlines of a new mythic form that would evoke a creative entrancement to succeed the destructive entrancement that has taken possession of the Western soul in recent centuries. We can counter one entrancement only with another, a counter-entrancement. Only thus can we evoke the vision as well as the psychic energies needed to enable the Earth community to enter successfully upon its next great creative phase.”
” materialism, worship of matter”…or just the logical follow up of the dissociation… ?
“A materialist is a person who loves material, but in our culture today we are bent on the total destruction of material and its conversion into junk and poisonous gas as quickly as possible. Ours is not a materialistic culture because it has no respect for material. And respect is, in turn, based on wonder — on feeling the marvel of just an ordinary pebble in your fingers.” ~Alan Watts,
The Mother of God
A conscious and eternal Power is here
Behind unhappiness and mortal birth
And the error of Thought and blundering trudge of Time.
The Mother of God, his sister and his spouse,
Daughter of his wisdom, of his might the mate,
She has leapt from the Transcendent’s secret breast
To build her rainbow worlds of mind and life.
Between the superconscient absolute Light
And the Inconscient’s vast unthinking toil,
In the rolling and routine of Matter’s sleep
And the somnambulist motion of the stars,
She forces on the cold unwilling Void
Her adventure of life, the passionate dreams of her lust.
Amid the work of darker Powers she is here
To heal the evils and mistakes of Space
And change the tragedy of the ignorant world
Into a Divine Comedy of joy
And the laughter and the rapture of God’s bliss.
The Mother of God is master of our souls;
We are the partners of His birth in Time,
Inheritors we share His eternity.
1945
Sri Aurobindo
***
“I was first taken back to the primordial beginning before creation and there experienced human evolution in the context of a larger cosmic agenda. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by the most extraordinary Love, a love unlike anything I had ever encountered before. It was a romantic love, cosmic in scope and intensity. As I stabilised under this amorous assault, I began to remember a romance from deep within my history. An ancient love, a divine love of unbelievable proportions. I was a Cosmic Being being loved by another Cosmic Being. Though at one level I have never been separated from my lover,
at another level we had been separated for billions of years and my return was rekindling our ancient love.
The pieces were hard to catch. Creation seemed to be a reality that had come forth from the dynamic relation between two cosmic beings, which had themselves emerged from a more fundamental primal unity. One being, who felt more like a He, had remained fully conscious outside of matter while the other had plunged herself into the task of creating the material dimension, knowing in advance that she would lose her self-awareness in this work and become unconscious of her true reality for billions of years. She had voluntarily submitted to this long and painful exile in order to create the raw substance of physical life that would in time become transparent to divine intention as matter evolved into full self-awareness. This work now largely complete, the self-imposed exile was coming to an end, and the lovers were being reunited at long last.”
Christopher Bache, Dark Night, Early Dawn
***
“I then felt myself being whisked off into the cosmos, further and further, beyond the sun, beyond our solar system, beyond the milky Way. And even further until I was on the edge of the Universe, and still further until I was at such a vantage point that I could see the universe in its entirety. I was stunned by what I saw: the universe was alive! And it was a single organism of awesome complexity, but whole and totally integrated. I recognized that it was still in the stage of its early development, comparable to a fetus, still differentiating the various aspects of itself. I saw how everything that exists, including me and every being was a part of that awesome being. We were aspects of its components just like the various parts of our own being are aspects of who we are. I saw that everything that exists is part of a greater whole and that the whole requires every part in order to be fully who it is. Every part is essential. And out of this a harmony ensues.
. . .
The profound and mysterious complexity of the Universe accompanies me to this day, its unity, its aliveness, and the impossibility of ever expressing it in words haunts me. Every aspect of the Universe, including us, has a place of relationship with it. We are perhaps the only beings who think that we are somehow independent, not realizing that our most profound task is to remain aligned with the Universe, in relationship with this awesome, vast being. And that our own wholeness is vital for the wholeness of the Universe. And only in this way do we ultimately come to experience our own place of belonging in the Universe.”
– Eligio Stephen Gallegos, Into Wholeness: The Path of Deep Imagery