Dervish Bookshop & Holistic Centre Blog

Mathnawi, III, 2306-2503

Everyone Thought Nasirrudin, a young man without any kin, was very lazy. He made no pretense of his secret desire to make money without having to work for it.

‘O God,’ he would pray, ‘give me riches without labor! It is you who have made me the way I am! I am sluggish and easily fatigued by the world’s many requirements. I cannot bear the burdens of bosses and jobs. I like to move slowly through my day without any concern for time, just praying and reading, studying and sleeping, at liberty to do whatever I like whenever I like. Surely you who provide for people such as me can send me wealth that I might live in comfort and plenty, without any worries and hunger! Or at least, Lord, send me my daily bread. O King of Kings, you who provide sustenance to the embryo in the womb, fulfill my desire!’

Excerpt from Kamla K. Kapur’s book – Rumi’s Tales from the Silk Road (available from www.dervishtrade.com)

The story of Tut-Ankh-amun, the boy king of Egypt has evoked such fascination for us over the last century that his standardised name, Tutankhamun, has become a household name. This has much to do with the fact that his royal tomb is one of the few to escape the ravages of centuries of pillaging by grave robbers, thus those physical articles, through which we identify historical personages, have remained in sufficient abundance within the grave for the archaeological world to create some link back to the character of the Pharaoh himself; other rulers of Egypt, despite having possibly exercised greater political power or acumen, are nonetheless reduced to little more than names from a bygone era.

Tutankhamun was also a boy king and his untimely death evokes from us a certain emotional connection that simply does not emerge with kings who have died after they have reached their manhood. The boy died when he was 18. One Pharaoh whose name was obscured during, or after Tutankhamun’s reign was that of his father, Amenhotep IV, better known to us now as Akhenaton. Indeed Akhenaton’s reign should have been one of the first to appear in the Egyptian Historical Annals because of its revolutionary impact upon the people. But during the reigns of his successors, Akhenaton’s life and work were obliterated from the consciousness of the Egyptian body politic and all his laws and innovations were repudiated (possibly by his own son). What had the previous king done to earn such enmity from his son and his subjects?

He had attempted what no king has attempted before or since; to create a radical new religion in the face of massive opposition from an established and entrenched priesthood. Akhenaton’s life, his mission and its ultimate failure highlight some of the fundamental shifts in evolutionary consciousness that have paved humanity’s long struggle from the distant past to the present moment; for Akhenaton introduced into the Egyptian spiritual awareness the concept of Oneness.

This was not only a radical departure from traditional belief systems of the time, it was a direct threat to the psychological and economical hold that the priesthood had upon the country and its people. Sound familiar?

The threat was deemed dangerous enough for these tradition oriented cynics to break with their own traditions and wipe Akhenaton’s reign from the record. This was no simple accomplishment; he had been, after-all, the Pharaoh. Accomplished it was nonetheless, and it was only with the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun and some obscure stellae in the mid 19^th century that the story of the revolutionary monarch began to be unearthed. In the meantime, the priesthood and the secular authorities that chose to oppose Akhenaton’s policies ensured that there were no further experiments in spiritual/religious liberation from the culturally sponsored system that sustained them in such comfort.

So ended humanity’s earliest recorded chance to leap forth into an understanding of consciousness that would have ushered in a more enlightened age; the world would wait almost 1500 years before such an attempt at awakening humanity would take place again.            It was humanity’s first stab at incorporating into its consciousness that deeper sense of the communion of all life that was the light of divine will infusing itself into the evolution of human awareness. Its failure retarded our development by centuries and illustrates the volatile struggle that continues to this day between the forces of light and darkness.

Akhenaton’s spiritual revolution and its failure marks but one milestone in the many that can chart human development of thought, belief and understanding from pre-history (Palaeolithic man) through to present day consciousness and I feel that, should we pause to reflect on these developments as they have occurred, we might be given a glimpse of where we have come from, what we have left behind that would have served us better to keep and what we have in our hands today that can facilitate our pathway to a radical explosion of conscious awareness that beckons to us now.

In light of this, it is worth holding in our awareness the tendency that humanity has always demonstrated of rejecting the teachings of the past out-right and replacing them with the new. As such, humanity has set itself up on a carousel of changing and conflicting thoughts and ideas that has reduced our enquiry into the nature of reality into a kind of intellectual/theological fashion event; as such, our understanding never attains the depth necessary to create a culture that supports conscious evolution, rather our cultures retard it and have, in that sense, become the enemy of the human mind that creates them. Culture is our Frankenstein, and if we were unhinged before we created it, it has certainly brought us to the brink of total madness now. Though simultaneously, spirit has brought us to the threshold of enlightenment.

This reactionary approach to change sets up a polarization between the new and the old which creates a vicious cycle of violent repression, first by proponents of the old who wish to prevent the advent of the new, then by the victorious establishers of the new who wish to wipe out the threat of the old.

My knowledge of the spiritual history of humanity may be vague at best, but I think it’s sufficient to draw some broad outlines which can shed light upon our present position and what is important for us to value in it. I would divide the spiritual historical narrative of humanity into 7 inter-dependent progressive developmental stages or eras; the animistic, the mythic, the pagan, the monotheist, the scientific, the social and the integrative ecological. To a certain extent, these are arbitrary; one could define more stages or less, and argue their relevance on more solid evidence than I have at my disposal. Also these ‘eras’ are chronically hard to define in the first place and will, to a greater or lesser extent, inform their fellow eras in a way that can make nonsense of any attempt to categorize them in the first place; all eras are influenced by the mythic for instance, just as all can be interpreted as scientific – but the purpose of the exercise is not to create a new model to explain the movement of human consciousness but to highlight what humanity has lost, given up or suppressed in the process of that movement, how that has hindered our path toward divine knowledge and how we might avoid continuing the process of hemorrhaging the creative genius of our ancestors.

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The animistic era was not so much about animals as it was about their ability to represent certain observable phenomena that were seen as fundamental to the continued existence of all life; the constant rhythmic pulse of the influence of the sun, on the one hand, and its association with, and opposition to, water on the other, was represented by different animals according to the characteristics they demonstrated. These two elements of light (sun) and water were seen as the most basic, the most crucial to life and were therefore initiated into human spiritual thought as the first instigators of symbolic representation. The bull and the lion became symbols of the sun, the horse and the serpent, symbols of water.

I imagine this era was quite dream-like in aspect and the movement to mythic was smooth; the mythic stage witnessed the introduction of human characters as an embellishment of the previous symbolic landscape. One of the reasons for the depth and richness of the mythic is that there was no banishment of the animistic. Thus the foundation of human thought and belief which had been developing over hundreds of thousands of years was able to continue unchecked, and the insights drawn from the animistic enriched the mythic system, providing humanity with a structure that stimulated, entertained, comforted and enlightened all in the same moment. The mythic was a multi-dimensional, multi-purposeful system of orienting the human awareness in relation to its natural environment. It was rooted in direct human experience, informed by the planetary consciousness and thus created a practical and invaluable pathway to greater conscious awareness. We suffer today immensely from the loss of the mythic and part of the process we are undergoing at this time is to re-integrate the architecture of the mythic esoteric landscape back into our awareness in order to re-orient ourselves in relation to our reality; we are, at present, oriented to an illusion that our culture holds up as reality, but this illusion has no root in the planetary consciousness and will soon be dispelled; our return to the mythic will be a vital part of our survival tool-kit in the coming years. The unprecedented popularity of the mythic film genre (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings etc) is an indication of both our communal hunger for mythic orientation and our intuitive awareness of how essential it is in our lives.

The transition from mythic to pagan was still relatively smooth, but elements of territorial dispute and resort to bigotry were already beginning to emerge. Some pagans would have seen themselves and their Gods as being superior to others and evidence of the ‘Wars of the Gods’ becomes a characteristic of the belief system. In the Norse culture, the war between the Aesir and the Vanir resulted, after the latter’s defeat, in a mild demonization of the vanquished gods. Here we can see the first vestiges of a rejection of the old system for the new. This is mitigated in the Norse tradition by the inclusion of 2 of the Vanir (the twins Frey and Freya) into the new system, but as we move on, this rejection/demonization of the old becomes more and more absolutist. Also we see the first religious wars; such as the cynical and successful attempt by the Persian usurper Darius I to unite his subjects behind the banner of the ‘true faith’. Darius is the first crusader to have led an army against a perceived enemy on the basis of difference of belief, and the purely political motivations behind the façade of religious fanaticism was to be (and still is) repeated consistently and with devastating effect throughout the ages.

The pagan era saw the beginnings of a loss of common experience between the diverse elements of humanity and this illusion of separation was to be accentuated over the next two and a half millennia, with sometimes horrifying consequences.

Whatever valuable cultural foundation was slipping away and being lost in the first transitions began ebbing more dramatically during the next 1000 years as the pagan gave way to the monotheistic era. This period was to witness the separation, not only of human society, but of the human spiritual bond with nature. Elemental spirits and divinities fell into the realm of demonic without exception. Nature itself, the very environment in which and through which, humanity existed and found sustenance, became an object of suspicion, and the emergence of a declaration of war on nature began to be prosecuted. This war has continued to intensify exponentially over the last 1500 years, checked only by technological limitation and, thankfully, some cautionary elements of modern society who are beginning to have greater impact upon the process.

Christianity and Islam both rejected the mythic and the pagan; our relationship with the planetary consciousness went through a radical transformation which left us at the mercy of theologians and authorities who had no interest in the general welfare of the people they purported to represent. Gone was our sense of sanctity in the natural world, gone was the imaginal realm, that interface between the planes of existence. We locked ourselves up firmly in the one reality, denying all contact with other realms on the basis that they were demonic. True, there was an intellectual agreement that God and his angels existed in the heavenly realms, but one ran the gauntlet of ‘Inquisition’ if one actually contacted those other realities.

Humanity had achieved the doctrinal adherence to the Oneness that Akhenaton had attempted to introduce 2000 years previously, but in the process, we had lost the enriching qualities of eons of human development; though the understanding of Oneness is the key to our health and survival as a species, its inauspicious beginnings rendered humanity bereft of the essentially balancing and integrative human structures by which it had navigated its evolutionary course. Cut loose from the roots of its past and its environment, our consciousness, rudderless and without practical direction, plunged from one catastrophe to the next, losing itself further in the storm of its own turbulent and insane mindscape. Life became dark, the past was demonized, the future became an unrealistic dream and the present was dogged by violence to the body, mind and soul. Here’s a description of contact with the elemental spirit of the natural world by Daniel Andreev, Russian author. This connection, available to our pre-Christian ancestors, was denied to all who adhered to the Catholic church doctrine. He talks of personal experiences with the spirit world which

‘occurred . . . when I . . . chanced upon unfamiliar places distinguished by the lushness and wildness of vegetation growing unchecked. Transported by ecstasy and trembling from head to foot, I made my way, oblivious to everything, through dense thickets, sun-baked marshes, and prickly bushes, finally throwing myself down in to the grass to feel it with my whole body. The most important thing was that during those minutes I was aware with all my senses that the invisible beings whose existence is mysteriously linked to the vegetation, water, and soil loved me and flowed through me.

Later he goes on to report,

‘Sure enough, the woods began taking on a different look; fir trees gave way to maples and alders. Suddenly the scorching road that was burning my feet began to slope down [and] I caught sight of a bend of the long-anticipated stream . . . What a pearl of creation, what a delightful child of God laughed at my coming! A few steps wide, shaded everywhere by the low-hanging branches of old willows and alders, it streamed as if through green caverns, softly gurgling and glittering with thousands of sparkles of sunlight . . .

When my overheated body plunged into the cool wetness, and dapples of shadow and sunlight flitted over my shoulders and face, I felt some invisible being, composed of what I don’t know, embrace my soul with such innocent joy, with such laughing playfulness, as if it had long loved me and been waiting for me. It was like the rarefied soul of the river, all flowing, all trembling, all caressing, all coolness and light, carefree laughter and tenderness, joy and love . . . my heart felt so refreshed, so cleansed, so purified, so blessed as it could only have been since the first days of Creation, at the dawn of time.’

Had Andreev written and published such a description of prose in medieval Europe, he would almost certainly have found himself the victim of Rome’s execution squads. When we handed our soul’s welfare to the religious institutions of the middle ages, we gave up this delightful and joyous interaction with life and replaced it with the misery of religious renunciation.

The burst of life that shattered the dogmatic despair in Europe came in the form of the Italian Renaissance; those pioneers of spirit who opened humanity back up to the sheer beauty of creation; Donatello, Da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, all seemed to have agreed to incarnate in the same place at roughly the same time so as to re-awaken the human mind to the creative spark that had all but been extinguished. Their own journeys into divine appreciation of beauty had been facilitated by the sudden flood of documents and writings that had fled the even more desultory tide of Islam as it submerged the last embers of Byzantium. Thus, we find in the Renaissance a reinvigoration of the mythic and the imaginal into the socio-religious landscape of Europe; this in turn, loosened the poisoned grasp of a corrupt church upon the populace and enough space was created for the Reformation, a chance to re-value the old and usher in the new.

Though the institutions that grew from the Reformation ultimately continued, and in some cases magnified, the chronic repression of Catholicism, the break had been made, the fertile mind was once again encouraged to question the nature of reality and our place within it, and the fearful iron girdle of rigid belief was permanently cracked and would, in time, fall asunder.

One element that was left behind in this transition was the mythic (which had remained covertly in the ritual and rites of the Catholic church). Luther refuted the belief that the communion bread and wine actually became the body and blood of Christ; in many ways this was a step in the right direction; the reformists appeared to be returning the faith to its allegorical significance opening up the possibility of the ritual nature of the faith assuming its rightful place in the development of the human mind. But in the end, Protestantism as a whole, threw its lot in with ever more rigid literal interpretations of the scripture and, in doing so, reduced its branch of Christianity to nothing more than a secular pawn of a cynical political class, or a repository for the fanatical reaction to Catholicism.

You could say the Protestant church is dead, but that would imply that it once lived, and it never really did; it repudiated the one saving grace the Catholics had retained from the pagan/mythic era, the use of ritual to assist the subconscious and mystical mind in its continued growth. Thus the Reformation freed humanity, in the West, from a suffocating and vicious system of intolerable cruelty, yet the path it chose to follow as an alternative was a dead end.

Its essential purpose however, along with the Renaissance movement, was to provoke the enquiring mind and it’s no accident that the paradigm shifting scientific discoveries of the next 2 centuries emerged from Protestant minds in Protestant Europe. True, Copernicus was a Catholic monk, but his work would have never seen the light of day had it not been for his admiring protégé, Rheticus, a man deeply linked with the German Lutheran movement. Kepler and Newton were both of the new faith, whilst Galileo, condemned by the church, was an example to the blossoming scientific movement of what likely fate awaited innovators caught in the thrall of the Roman Church.

So we come to the age of Reason, where enquiry into the nature of the universe became steadily more informed and grounded in observation as opposed to theological doctrine. In that sense it was a return to the pagan era of great scientists such as Ptolemy and Pythagoras but once more, this great step forward was accompanied by tremendous loss. Science rejected religion (something the pagan scientists never did) and the fruits of that loss of spiritual perspective are all too abundant for us to see today. Human approach to nature became utilitarian (seeing it only for its material use) and its approach to religion was to treat it as superstition founded on ignorance. In the scientific era, humanity cultivated a loss of soul, a loss lamented in the writings of D. H. Lawrence. Humans became machines, animals became units of production and the environment became both victim to our insatiable lust for material power, and receptacle of the poison which that lust inevitably produced.

Just as humanity seemed destined to attain the heavens through the keen intellect of its scientific mind, it was plunged yet deeper into the realms of mystical inaccessibility. This was, and still is, our most dangerous step of all and if we fail to integrate it with our spiritual essence, it will drive us to extinction. One thing it did achieve however was to bring the down-trodden elements of human society together in urbanized settings where they could more effectively organize resistance to social injustice and had easier access to the means, both material and societal, to prosecute such resistance.

From the mid 19^th century through to the late 20^th there was an unprecedented wave of revolutions, rebellions and political upheavals which left the some traditional systems of government in shreds and opened up human experimentation in the area of the political organization of human society.

This period finally dealt the death blow to the universal acceptance of slavery, serfdom and corruption (though it by no means ended the perpetuation of such injustices) and we can thank it for our current rights, freedoms and choices which our ancestors would not have dreamed possible. Yet during the social era humanity moved further from spiritual truth yet again and the manifestation of human dreams of social equality were either mercilessly stamped out by traditional power structures (Franco’s Spain or Hitler’s Germany), or they formed themselves into great monoliths of spirit-less oppression, exercising a bleak control over their subjects that even the most twisted medieval prince would have balked at (or at least, marveled at). The socialist movement struck out yet further from a spiritual reality which it saw as represented by a corrupt church in league with the old power structures, resulting in a lack of moral conduct that allowed for the slaughter of millions and the extermination of joy. In Pol Pot’s Cambodia, this was taken to such extreme measures that children were taught to psychologically and emotionally reject their parents in favor of the state, so breaking a natural bond that had been crucial for the survival of humanity since before humans became humans.

The social revolution, as was the case with its predecessors, laid the ground for the next chapter of human evolution; the integrative ecological. By ecology here we include not just the external environment that we live in, but the internal environment of our bodies and our minds. What humanity is attempting at this time is the integration of body, mind and soul, both with each other and with the planetary and universal environment. Given our past history of relating either to ourselves or to the environment, this is no mean feat, yet its accomplishment lies in the integration of that very history that has proved such a barrier to the opening of the human heart and mind.

Our passage through time has been punctuated by transitional nodes of human experience during which we have donned the cloak of new insight and expanded belief, but our inability to retain the vestments of the past epochs, containing as they do a wisdom and a practical application to life, has reduced us to constantly trying to put down new roots. Every turn of the human evolutionary screw has thrown up new civilizations, and each time this has occurred there has been a scramble for each latest venture to present its origins as drawn directly from the dawn of time, as if time itself had only emerged from the cosmic womb in order to give birth to this most recent human design. But it’s always a fallacy, each successive stage moves humanity further and further away from its own roots, which are grounded in planetary reality, and attempts to substitute the gaping hole of the latest myth with lies and tenuous illusion. The illusions eventually dissolve against human intuitive awareness of a deeper reality and a new form of self-deception is conceived, resulting in cultures that signally fail to meet the spiritual needs of the human experience.

This has brought us to the early 21^st century where we are in danger of annihilating ourselves and a great part of life on earth, where spiritual understanding is perceived (in the main) as frivolous and eccentric and where our culture is one of our greatest barriers to our own evolution. Here is where our awareness of our history, both factual and intuitive, can provide us with the means to re-integrate our body, mind and soul with the outer ecology of our world and the cosmic, universal mind of God. For we need to reclaim the deep respect for animals (and all life) that we forged in the animistic, the connections represented through our use of symbol in the mythic, the love of nature nurtured in the pagan, the sense of Oneness manifested in the monotheistic, the fascination for the evolving laws and dynamics of life discovered in the scientific and the acknowledgement of the common bond of all humanity unveiled in the social; to bring all these essentially valuable roots and shoots of human discovery and endeavor to bear upon a radical new reality which integrates them all into a sound and enlightened ecology of spirit.

Jonathan

When I look into the pages of history I am struck most of all by the ‘Savage Injustice’ of humanity’s journey through the centuries. There have been isolated incidents of humane expression and these have occasionally blossomed into national movements, such was the case with Gandhi’s India; but the human story in general has been stained deeply with the dark red hue of blood, vengeance and violent repression.

What strikes me so intensely is my own immediate reaction at the thought of having to live in the kind of societies molded by my ancestors. The attitudes of mind, the callous disregard for other’s pain, the absurd insanity of the yoke of monarchical or government policies designed to crush the spirit of the people. Our ancestors lived under social conditions that were, for the most part, unbearable for a conscious awareness rooted in this, our modern age.

Then another question swings into play. What will my descendants create and how will they look upon this life I’m living? I imagine with equal horror!

I wrote some weeks back about the most popular domestic policy adopted by a medieval English monarch, Edward I, the policy of the persecution and final expulsion of the Jews from England. It is this kind of popularly supported madness, so clearly detrimental to the interests (both spiritual and temporal) of the very population who so whole-heartedly endorse it, that I am referring to.

Similar examples abound in the story of humanity’s slow awakening which illustrate this distorted perception of reality with yet greater clarity. We are perhaps fortunate to have the example of the clash of cultures that occurred in Europe in the 4^th-6^th centuries as the highly organized and literate Roman society met the more disjointed and illiterate tribes of middle and northern Europe; fortunate because it allows us a glimpse of the workings of a society whose illiteracy would otherwise have prevented evidence of itself from coming down to us so many centuries later.

One tribal grouping with whom the Romans gained a certain intimate knowledge were the Goths, not least for the fact that they managed to inveigle themselves so deeply into Roman society that they became the first political confederations to succeed Roman authority in various parts of the empire, Rome included.

Though the Gothic story is intricate and fascinating, it is that initial meeting of Roman and Gothic society that interests us in this context. For Rome was predominantly an agricultural society run by a civil authority, and in that sense, parallels much with the society we live in today. Rome’s army was legendary, but it was controlled by the civilian state, indeed the transition of power from the state to the army in its final years was one of the instigating factors in the fall of its empire.

Gothic society, by contrast was highly militarized and this ethic, endemic throughout the tribal societies which bordered Rome and finally succeeded it, was to characterize and determine the highly military nature of medieval Europe.

I cannot pretend to know the Gothic mind, but certain assumptions, based on what evidence we have, can be made about the character of the Gothic system of values; highest among these values is that placed upon warfare and violence as the only honourable means of accumulating wealth. The Goths despised the task of scratching around in the dirt for food; it was for them, the kind of employment fit for slaves, not for real men. Thus the Gothic freeman had only one acceptable way to earn his living – war – and in the true nature of warfare, that meant embarking on a life-path of rape and pillage. We are then, looking back to a past epoch characterized by a cultural identity that required of a man that he commit acts that today would be anathema to the more humane society we have incarnated into.

I opened this article with the question as to how my descendants would view the society I live in, and the response that returns to me when I ask it, is that they will view us with comparable horror to the way in which we might view today, the Gothic love of war, or the medieval hatred of Jews, though with greater compassion. For our descendents will be able to see clearly the methods by which we destroy joy and enlightenment in our lives.

One of the purposes of this essay, indeed of most of my work, is to allow ourselves a ‘pre’-view now of that which remains hidden in the dark niche’s of our culture’s ignored attributes; attributes that will be obvious to those who come after us, and they are legion – but we’ll focus on one of the most dominant, what I would call Commercial Mind.

At best commercialism produces competition, insincerity and lack of congruency and it supports a wholly unauthentic approach to life’s challenges. At worst it breeds war, violence, repression and fear. Commercialism is the very attitude that converted tribal culture from communal self-supporting societies into the kind of murderous armies that took on the Gothic identity. So we haven’t radically shifted from early or later medieval obsession with materiality; we simply express these attitudes of mind in different form, more humane, admittedly, but not fundamentally different.

Thus obsession it is, we know that because our addiction to material gain is not congruent with our soul’s demand for authentic response to life. Our soul’s call is love, its plea to us is that we express ourselves as love, for love is the only truth. If we can do this, be this, we will created that blissful union with the outer ecology of our external environment and the inner ecology of our internal one, so creating oneness with the universe as a truth abiding within us.

Our natural environment supports this process within us because nature is pure love. Everything in the natural world, whether seemingly creative, nurturing or destructive (Brahma, Vishnu or Shiva), is all a part of the same process of impersonal love. By which I mean you don’t have to be anyone special, act in a particular way or carry any preferred ideology in your consciousness to be the recipient of nature’s love, because it simply is and we simply are and the Rose bestows its smell upon us irrespective of our karmic credits.

Commercialism separates us from this natural guiding spirit and replaces the profound grace of the natural world with dislocation, disorientation and fear. And we have fallen for it. All of us have, at one time or another, sacrificed our natural inclination for compassion, clear thought and decisive action to the God of commercial gains, and in this we have allowed ourselves to become hypocrites to our souls. As a culture, we make this sacrifice daily and routinely,  we believe attainment of power is more important that the soothing of pain, we believe money to be the ultimate measure of our worth, and we believe that we can stand in, and pass judgment upon, the destiny of all life.

The commercial mind (like the political regimes of East Asia that strove to break the natural loving relationship between parent and child), has wrenched us from our source of spiritual and temporal sustenance, and enlisted us in its war to continue the destruction of that source.

Commercial mind is the fabrication of a consciousness plagued by fear and greed and it is the mind that controls our material culture. It is the mind that we must free ourselves from as we move to a radically new field of consciousness which demands from us authentic response to life, and it is, and has been, challenged every step of the way by the arts and by the natural beauty of our planet, by the mystics and by our own intuition, our own true sense of self.

If we can re-awaken that truth within us, by being in nature and allowing that ancient ally to infuse itself into our body and soul, by feeling and acting on our compassion and clear mind despite the commercial consequences; then we have the opportunity to become fully present and fully alive to the incredible mystery that is the human experience, and life is just that; an infinite and joyous encounter with spirit, with love, with ourselves. We are the pinnacle of billions of years of evolutionary growth and awareness and we are beginning to acknowledge that power, releasing ourselves from the grip of the commercial mind, to step into a world of deep and unrestrained ecological union. In everything we think, do and believe, we can hold the awareness of this potential within our individual lives and the life of our culture, and measure all those thoughts, actions and beliefs against this transcendent knowledge, as we help breathe new life into our transmutable minds and midwife the birth of our unfettered collective joy.

Jonathan

What is the purpose of Sorrow? It’s a question that has stymied religious thinking throughout its entire historical process. Sorrow and Suffering constitute an essential experiential component of any and all human existence, yet humanity does not enjoy this emotional depressant and has directed its core ‘institutionalized processes’ of religion, politics and social organization toward the alleviation or (more hopefully) the eradication of such unwelcome guests.

All of these branches of conscious development have signally failed to achieve this intended purpose, and, due to the myopic attempts of certain elements of society to exempt specific groupings of human identity from sorrow at the expense of other group identities (resulting in delusions of race superiority or religious bigotry) most of our communally motivated attempts to plug the pathway of sorrow into our lives, have simply created more sorrow and infinitely more suffering. This tendency toward suffering reached epic proportions during the early, through to late, middle ages (in what seems to have been a truly miserable epoch for most of humanity), and was only slowly diffused by the great movements of enlightenment that began with the Italian Renaissance and continue through to our own present time. Despite having had 500 years to banish institutionalized suffering from our lives, we are, as a whole, still addicted to our desire to deny the reality of sorrow and thus we remain imprisoned within our addiction to suffer. For sorrow is an absolute reality in our present existence and at our present level of consciousness, and the failure to mesh our conscious awareness with reality jump starts the ‘suffering’ program into active operation within our lives.

Thus if we wish to rise above suffering and sorrow, we must first fully accept them as indispensable attributes of our evolutionary growth. Evolution is the key to understanding the processes involved with sorrow since it provides us with the framework into which our lives can be measured, so as to enlighten them with meaning. The ‘meaningless life’ is perhaps one of the most concentrated causes of sorrow; if we can find meaning within our sorrow-filled experience, we can move to a place where sorrow becomes something else; still sorrow but something other than sorrow as well. This change in perspective is what can help take us beyond suffering without denying us the growth stimulated by sorrow.

Sorrow is a vital part of the human experience and we have chosen to experience it in order to come to a greater awareness. I’m drawing now on the ideas of Sri Aurobindo and, more specifically, his spiritual companion, Mirra Alfassa, better known as ‘the Mother’. In their worldview the consciousness of life was in a pristine state before the infamous ‘Fall’ that we have been guiltily carrying around for thousands of years. In the biblical allegory of the Fall we are given to understand that our current ‘sorrowful’ condition is a direct result of the descent. The Fall is depicted as a fall from grace and we (particularly women) are held responsible for this reprehensible state of affairs. So far so good; apart from the twisted judgement laid upon the deep wisdom of Eve, all the above corresponds (in fact, if not in perspective) to what has actually occurred. What the bible doesn’t reveal is that the choice to eat the forbidden fruit was conscious and deliberate and the consequences of that choice were known and understood as a necessary pathway to the next level of conscious awareness.

Let’s take another look at the story of Adam and Eve with an awareness that this is a ‘creation myth’, and our interpretation of our cultural creation myth underpins our understanding of reality and our purpose within it; it thus dictates to us how we see ourselves and what purpose and meaning we are capable of infusing our lives with.

Adam is the male principle, he is also a solar hero and represents the activating aspect of the sun; Eve is woman and represents the aspect of the Moon, the Divine Sophia (wisdom and intuitive knowledge), it is no accident that Eve initiates the partaking of fruit from a Knowledge Tree. The snake is pure life force principle and represents the transformative aspect of the evolutionary process. According to the teachings of the Mother, Eve is drawn toward the Tree by the irresistible pull of the Evolutionary Life Force and nothing could be more natural; it is natural for Eve to desire to be more evolved; it is natural that the Feminine principle (that deep well of authentic knowing and wisdom) would be drawn to the Tree of Knowledge; and it is natural that Adam, the male principle, in response to the feminine wisdom, would activate the Fall.

The Fall itself is indeed a ‘Fall from Grace’ – a loss of the pristine condition of a consciousness which has the surety of instinct and the absence of doubt; the innocence and clarity of animal consciousness is replaced by a questioning of the nature of consciousness and its method of achieving its aims and meeting its needs. When we are wolf, we hunt, we kill, we eat, we sleep. All is directed and executed by, and through, unquestioned and uninhibited instinct. When we become human, the same actions are employed but a question has arisen as to the ‘rightness’ of the methods.

The emergence of the question is fatal to the pristine animal consciousness and essential for evolutionary growth. We chose sorrow and suffering because we knew it was the way we had to go; life force demanded it, in a sense we had no choice but to make the choice; as human consciousness reached the natural pinnacle of the previous realm of awareness, so it received the irresistible urge (a temptation) to leap forward to the next evolutionary moment. That’s what Eve did for humanity!

When religion depicts the snake as the evil, destructive and corrupt force in the universe, it teaches (or preaches) separation from life-force and thus becomes an ‘anti-life’ cult itself; something to give pause to any ‘Christianised’ western mind.

As we explore the nature of suffering we begin to see that its purpose is intrinsically wrapped up within the process of consciousness becoming conscious of itself. And not only is it an unavoidable tunnel through which we must pass from one realm of consciousness to the next, it has a specific and precise purpose in that it forces consciousness to re-evaluate itself. Through suffering we continually re-define our choices, our patterns and our fundamental understanding of life; we are creating new habits. If conscious awareness is the seed from which we are emerging, suffering is the medium in which the growth takes place, it creates the environment within which the seed can fulfill its potential, providing the stimulus for growth, change and resilience.

However, suffering is not the final destination (thankfully), it is merely a leg of the journey and life will always seek the balanced existence of peace and stillness in which suffering no longer has a role to play.

Thus when we observe that which causes suffering, we go through a process that ultimately rejects it as a valid means of continuing to base our existence upon. Violence, hatred, deceit, falsehood, corruption, that which is abhorred, is marked for extinction.

I opened up my hand and the Infinite ran to the edges of space -

And all possibilities are contained therein, all possibilities,

Even Sorrow

In the end, nothing that ever caused pain will exist

No one will begrudge me

The Absolute Innocence of all within My creation

Takes a while to understand

St Catherine of Siena

Our sorrow draws us to a place beyond sorrow. When the gift of sorrow enters your house, feel it with every cell of your body, allow it to infuse itself into your being and bear witness to its eventual dissolution into joy. Sorrow is the cure for all sorrow and suffering, and joy is the fruit of that cure. Eve knew that!

Jonathan

I’ve often found myself breaking into momentary tears for no apparent reason; they’d come and go, a brief upwelling of emotion; I’d let them out and then my face would relax again, my eyes would dry and my day would continue. I always thought I was crying for some ancestral pain, or some global tragedy of which I had no conscious knowledge. But I’ve been kidding myself, I’ve been crying for the exiled little boy inside of me.

I met him, by which I mean I actually took the time to go in and meet him where he is, rather than just vaguely acknowledging his existence. I can see him now, we’re on some family holiday in Wales, a somewhat disastrous holiday as I remember; my parents, my sisters, my aunt, her daughter and my grand-parents – a recipe for emotional skullduggery if ever there was one.

We’re standing on some hill, there’s lots of hills in Wales – and there’s this little boy, he’s six years old and wearing a thick bright orange jumper that I think my mother clad me in so they could all keep an easy eye on me. I was too young to know or care whether I was dressed in style, but I was far from care-free.

I can see this little boy bouncing around his world of close relatives but he’s troubled, he’s always troubled. He feels small – which he is – and insignificant, there’s no authority within him to enable him to carve out his own place in this world; he hides as best he can behind his mother’s apron from the tyranny of his father, a man for whom his feelings of extreme love and devotion are tempered by deep fear. He knows his father is wonderful and brilliant, he doesn’t know he’s wounded. He knows his father loves him in some way, but he feels this love is somehow misplaced, that he really needs to be something that he’s not, to receive this love. He’s loved as one who does not deserve it but is afforded it anyway, just because he’s there and somehow, though he doesn’t know how, he’s meant to fit into this picture. But the picture feels like it forgot to cast him in a role and he’s condemned to simply making a nuisance of himself since he really shouldn’t be there – everyone seems to beg the question of him, what’s he doing there?

This little guy is really in terrible pain; he’s actually feeling a lot of pain from all the other broken hearts he’s surrounded by, but he doesn’t know they’re broken hearted, he feels very alone in his dark world. He has allies, thankfully. His mother does what she can to protect him from father’s anger, in fact, he receives far more protection than his sisters did, but he has no concept of their vulnerability. They are towering mini-adults to him – invincible it seems, and they have little time for him anyway, he’d secretly love their affection but he’d never admit it.

His mother’s protection is from the heart but is ultimately fatally mitigated in the awareness that if father declares war on him openly, mother’s protection steps aside. One person does her best to counter this aggression; his grandma, a strong-willed, good-hearted woman who could give as good as she got. But her protection is inconstant and she doesn’t understand his father’s wounds and can thus never disarm him.

There’s a kindred spirit there as well, granddad; he’s got one of those old cameras around his neck, housed in brown leather casing. Of all the actors on that little stage, he can best appreciate beauty and life – he’s an artist in the most unaffected way; he turns wood, he sketches, paints and captures nature’s gift with his old camera. He loves the little boy, perhaps of all of them he can acknowledge the child for what he is, rather than being another actor in their play; but granddad has his own weaknesses that the boy cannot imagine, he’s not light at heart; a long marriage with a woman he loves and who loves him in her own way but never truly understood him, never appreciated the intense delicacy of his sensitive nature; within a year of that gathering on the Welsh hillside, his gentle heart would finally fall under the weight of years of misunderstanding and the little boy would lose his deepest connection to himself, a loss still deeply grieved three and a half decades on.

When his granddad left forever it awoke within the boy a deep sadness that he couldn’t understand at the time, he tried to mourn in the way he felt was fitting, with noise and anger and thrashing, but that long tear that was drawn from far within him, when he first heard the news, was his true moment of grief. It cried him that tear, it rose from his soul silently and spilled onto his face in wordless mourning – ah, so this was loss, a sad knowing that some magical part of him was gone and would never return, never be replaced, that this empty place within would remain empty, no one else would ever fill it. Still the little boy mourns that distant passing, he still wistfully wishes he could let this wonderful man know just how much he had meant to him; but he was too young to realize such things.

So there he is, standing small on a Welsh hillside, and for the first time in my life I really look at him, this child that I have marginalized all these years. You see he was always trouble this boy, trouble is what he felt and trouble is what he gave out (and trouble is how I saw him). He threw tantrums, he fought, he stole, he held grudges and hatreds, he acted spitefully and caused pain to others if he could; he hated himself for many of these things, he seemed so incapable of begin kind, diligent, hard-working, useful or pleasant – he was really just a sad little boy and I stood there and saw him for the first time as something other than ‘the little shit I had been’. I saw him and I saw his pain and my heart ached for him; that he had lived then with this lonely hurt and that I had left him there, in his world of yearning.

And you know, he was lovely, he had a sweet heart and a readiness to enjoy those around him that was heart-warming, but the spirit inside him was all crumpled and he couldn’t find a way to come out into the light, his light; he stayed in the dark and the cold.

He had a dream, he was maybe four years old and walking down a road with his mother and sister, he ran ahead and left them talking; when he got to the end of the road he stopped, but all around him was dark, even the road had disappeared into an inky blackness. He called out but there was nothing, nobody and no thing; and he was terrified; mercifully the dream ended and he awoke but he never forgot the feeling of terror that gripped him in its last seconds.

He finally realizes I’m looking at him in a genuine way, I’m not brushing him aside nor about to crack a joke at his expense. I’m reaching out to him, letting him know with my eyes that I’ve always loved him, then I gather him up in my arms and I let him know he’ll never have to walk alone again, that I’ve realized what a beautiful little soul he is, that I’m so sorry I left him alone so long, but I won’t leave him again – he’s so happy to be held, his arms cling tightly around my neck and his shirt hangs out from the back of his trousers, he’s home.

*   *   *

I wrote this shortly after meeting the little boy for the first time since I left him 35 years ago – the emotional intensity of that meeting was still acutely felt by me and I had a fascinating glimpse into a moment in my family’s history. I deliberately left it a few days to return to re-read what had emerged to gain some distance and perspective – for when I wrote, I was in the child’s experience of it.

More than anything else I am conscious of how both Mother and Father present within the framework of that moment and there are qualifications to be made, for one cannot apply a moment in time to the entire experience of life; a moment is just that, a moment, and though it is complete and multi-faceted in it’s own existence, it does not speak for other moments, rather it can only hint at possible potentialities, both from the past and on into the future.

In light of this it’s important for me to acknowledge that my experience of both my Mother and my Father has been one of great trust, beauty and companionship, and their unconscious attitudes of mind, so painfully experienced by a little boy, do not constitute the full spectrum of their capacity to love nor the transformation they have undergone in the intervening years. Father’s tyranny and Mother’s failure to stand against it were products of an environment and a period of conscious (lack of) awareness that supported such attitudes; not only that, but when it came my turn to face the demons enlivened by the little boy’s pain (the event of finding myself the father of my own small son), I carried both of these damaging attributes and dumped them on him; I was neither able to prevent myself from tyrannizing him, nor did I sufficiently protect him when he was tyrannized by others. In this way it is clear to me that the wounds I received from my parents were incidental; had I had the courage and awareness to stay with the boy (me), those wounds would have healed many years ago, but I didn’t have either courage or awareness and thus carried the wounds and inflicted them in varying degrees, upon my own children. The greatest wound received by that little boy was the wound of being left behind by me – no one can wound us as we can wound ourselves. Indeed, all our wounding is essentially and ultimately, self-inflicted. That is part and parcel of the process of experiencing and transiting through human consciousness – but that’s another discussion.

From our own, personal perspective, what’s important to take away with us is the understanding of the nature of the self-inflicted wound and its impact upon our lives; many people are wounded in childhood (I am fully aware that my own externally inflicted wounds were mere scratches when measured against the kind of wounding most children receive). This is simply what life is, a process of wounding. But we have the gift of self-healing inherent in our psychic/spiritual blue-print. We don’t understand it and would be foolish to try to do so, but we have it, it’s present and infinite within each and every one of us. There is an attitude (still very prevalent) among all us ‘wounded children’ that the wounding stops with us, we won’t be passing it on to our progeny, but this often translates into an over-compensation for one wound received, into another wound handed on; thus the child who is deprived of material comfort, lavishes the abundance of their lack upon their own children, creating an alternate wounding. Nothing has stopped, the wound is simply handed down in different packaging.

The only way we can prevent ourselves from transferring the wounding is for us to stop wounding ourselves, and that means returning to our ‘exiles’ and enveloping them in our loving kindness.

Mother and Father are not the instigators of our pain, any more than other people, society or external authorities are, they are the outward reflections of the wounding we have carried with us and which we ourselves perpetuate in our own lives. I believe we have inflicted these wounds deliberately in order to experience suffering but, whether this is the reality or not, the task we have before us is evidently to heal ourselves, and through our healing, to create a ‘Brave New World’ both within and without.

It is worth mentioning that I did not use therapy to ‘meet’ the little ‘exiled’ boy within me, unless you allow the loving acceptance of an open-minded companion to be ‘therapy’. Through a series of ‘knocks’ and insights over the past weeks, I have been brought to a deeper awareness of my feelings and paradoxically, my feelings have thus risen to the surface of my awareness. This has given me an opportunity to ‘feel’ my feelings, as opposed to distracting myself from feeling them. The result, on the morning of that meeting, was that I effortlessly connected with the person who was feeling the feeling, and once that connection was made, I was able to explore the tender nature of the child within me and the relationship we shared.

To say I didn’t go to therapy is perhaps a little misleading in that I had the benefit of the presence of a partner who is undergoing training in psycho-therapy and she was able to nudge me toward reaching out to the little boy. But the essential component in the process was the fact that I allowed myself to feel the feeling and I didn’t judge it, nor did I blame it on anyone else. When I felt it, all the usual automatic impulses kicked in, in no particular order, from blaming another for ‘making me’ feel this way, to fearing it and going through the temporary freeze that fear often instills in me, to plain ignoring its existence. But some presence of mind managed to over-ride all these defenses and I suddenly found myself on that Welsh landscape, a witness to a denied part of me – truly a beautiful experience for amongst other things, the love that was uncovered between me and the child, which had lain beneath all those defensive mechanisms. I learnt then that my feelings, if I allow myself to feel them, are the gateway to that other landscape (that of my heart) – so long as I obey some basic agreements, don’t judge them, don’t blame another for them, face through the fear they curdle within my mind, and acknowledge their existence as being there, being real and being mine. What a meeting that opened up!

Jonathan

Cast your eye around you into the world of human activity and what do you see? War and conflict. A dark picture perhaps, and the effects of conflict appear to be escalating, but this is due to technological enhancement of human action rather than a descent of human awareness. For if we look again, we can see great light streaming into the world, and we can witness the transformation that this is effecting in the lives of the many, not just the few. This influx of light is unprecedented, so far as I can make out, on such a global scale. This cannot be underestimated, and is where each and every one of us can gently rest our awareness. To draw from Osho again, we can leave behind us the urge to fight darkness, you cannot ‘fight’ darkness, you can simply turn on the light – and the light is you.

I was talking yesterday with a kind gentle soul whose nervous system is being frayed by the darkness of humanity. The light shone from her warm heart and yet she suffered from ‘darkness overwhelm’. This compulsion to allow the darkness to draw us in to its illusionary battle is still intensely real in our psyche and it is this inner conflict we must release; we cannot fix the outer conflict, we can only accept its existence and give it no more energy than that. By all means stay informed, know the darkness, but focus your action in thought, word and deed upon the light – because the light is where your life, and mine, become enlightened.

But to return to our divine gift, now that we know that we are the natural and direct recipients of it, and it does not require a priest to bestow it upon us. This gift that we all possess is our creative principle. The universal source of consciousness (God if you like), did not impregnate us with ‘original sin’ but with divine creative light and by a strange irony, the war and conflict that surrounds us is a direct consequence of this gift. For unlike our animal brethren who share this world with us, part of our divine gift is choice. Many would have us believe that we choose conflict, which to a certain degree is true, but wholesale conflict has always been driven by the ‘elite’ few – most people desire a peaceful life, but the turmoil of our selfish and fear-driven political agendas, trickles down into our own lives and, if we don’t have the awareness to remain free from it, infects our personal lives as it does our communal relations.

The Truth is, however, we have received this gift, or better to say we have emerged into an awareness of it (for the gift has ever been inherent in the evolution of the universe), in order to consciously create beauty, harmony, love and joy. Perhaps enhance would be a better word than create, for all has been pre-created, potential has been infused into the very essence of the universe, and we have arrived at that place of discernment where we have the opportunity to recognise the creative principle and enhance it, bestowing upon it greater definition, meaning, purpose and form.

For billions of years the universe has drawn life into more and more complex relationship in order to empower that life with greater conscious ability to co-fashion reality. We are the product of eons of creative direction and we are enormously responsible for the choices we make; for one choice, one decision taken by you today, is the result of a whole great epoch of universal evolution that has preceded it. To put it plainly, universal consciousness has shaped itself over billions of years, moving, changing, mutating and re-forming into this moment, this pinnacle moment when you, or I, representing the coalescing of this growth of consciousness into a sentient organism, take a decision. Everything we do, is preceded and premeditated by an evolutionary preparation of universally epic proportions. And we think we’re small and powerless!

And there’s no insurance policy that’ll cover you for that. Your choice will either honour that creation impulse, or it won’t. And it is worth giving thought for just a moment, to what we throw away when we choose not to honour our divine inheritance.

I’ll take a moment to outline an area of human activity that illustrates the power of our choices and how this has shaped our evolutionary story. We are searching here for fascinating leaps in awareness that are, often, simply taken for granted today. We can look, for example, at humanity’s interaction with the world of plants. Let us not forget that plants are our ancestors, the plant kingdom has seeded, fostered and nurtured the birth of humanity and, despite our irreverence for them, have continued to tend to all our needs up to the present time.

Keeping this in mind at all times, we can observe from our privileged viewpoint (having an extensive archive of historical records at our fingertips) that human society has evolved from the hunter-gatherer archetype consciousness, which simply harvested the fruits of the earth offered up by nature, to a consciousness which has meshed with nature in such a way as to make of us a midwife to that harvest.

The are many arguments for evaluating these two basic archetypes of human development and I would feel great empathy toward the view-point that the hunter-gatherer is, in fact, more in tune with nature, provides for greater life-enhancing existence, and is less susceptible to corruption than the more sedentary co-creative partnership that has covered the earth with artificially created and maintained farm-land. However, the process by which humanity has come to understand the world of plants is both fascinating and extraordinary and is a powerful reflection of our divine gift.

For as we peer back into the deepening mists of our human story, we discover that early (recorded) human society existed in a way that was hugely limited by their ignorance of the possibilities of agriculture and their lack of pre-created structure and knowledge to build upon. In other words, the human ability to produce a stable food base in any one area was short-lived; our ancestors did not understand well enough how to maintain soil fertility and crop levels, evidenced by their need to move every generation due to mineral exhaustion of the land. Over time humanity learnt to create the environments necessary for continuous farming, with diverse crops on the same land, whilst maintaining the levels of yield.

We have coaxed plants to grow where they would never have taken root through their own volition, we have re-designed their composition so that they produce a harvest suitable to our needs. We have harnessed the gift of providence and enhanced elements of it to cater for our existence. Though this ability has been thwarted by our own arrogance and reaches dangerous extremes today as we increasingly forget our co-creative role in the process (i.e. that we must work with the earth, that we are only modifying a truly beneficent host and poisoning her won’t serve us), nonetheless, the fact remains that we have taken enormous strides toward creating our own effortless existence through a communication with the plants that nurture us.

The emerging consciousness that we call human has begun to enter its moment of ‘design genius’, a moment that can be used to create a nuclear bomb or an integrated way of life that holds, and gives reverence to, mind, body and spirit. As the break-down of the old paradigm structures begins to accelerate and we plunge into a potential chaos, this is essential to bear in mind. We are sparks of divine consciousness and we have the ability to co-create an extraordinary and effortless peace and beauty in the world.

We first emerged into the abundance of a world in pristine condition; through fear we have come so close to fouling this bounteous home of ours that, even in our deep sleeping state, we are aware we are creating a desert from a paradise; yet, the very ability that has manifested all this pain and poverty, could be turned to communal and spiritual use, and it would then draw us into the dawn of a stunning new existence.

We have inherited a world of chaotic abundance, a gift in itself; but the real gift that we possess, every one of us, is the ability to commune with this chaos and create for ourselves, that which we want from it. We are the guardians of earth, through our touch we can cause water to spring from the desert, we can mould the morass and tangle of a forest into the hanging gardens of Babylon, we can produce the divine on earth – and for all the mess we’re in, this wonderful and magical ability is shining brighter every day from the hearts and minds of millions of souls who are, at this moment, gathering together to dream a new dream.

We’re waking up! The new day promises a great opening within us of those treasures that all the scriptures, mystics and enlightened beings have been pointing to for thousands of years. This is our chance to shine, let’s take it! Open our hearts, drop our veils of doubt, fear and judgement and embrace the world in our enveloping love and light, our Divine Gift.

Jonathan

At the last ‘Soul Republic’ event, given by Trish Lane, she made the point that our culture emphasises the ‘I’ principle in a way that would be foreign to older cultures that place more emphasis on the ‘You’. What struck me immediately was that it had never occurred to me that the ‘You’ would ever take precedence over the ‘I’. Call it the typical self-absorption of a Virgo if you will, but there is such a powerful focus on the ‘I’ in our culture that it often precludes the ‘You’ altogether. The result is intense pre-occupation with the self and the needs of the self, sometimes at the fatal expense of the ‘You’.

It is yet another example of how our consciousness is moulded by language. In many of the South American indigenous cultures, there is no concept of individual possession; the word ‘My’ has no counter-part. Thus if I was describing anything that was in relation to me, I would describe the relationship rather than ‘My’ ownership of any part of it. The expression ‘My sister’ of the Western culture perception becomes, in the indigenous cultures, ‘She who is sister unto me’.

Absorb for a moment the implications inherent within both expressions to get an idea of what a different picture of reality they both paint. One emphasises possession and ownership and is centred upon the speaker (subject); the other emphasises the relationship and is more balanced in its focus which gives equal status to both subject (speaker) and object (sister).

Measured in terms of descriptive efficiency, the second form of expression is a more accurate portrayal of the reality it is describing; there are no false presumptions inherent within the structure of the phrase and more space is given both to the participants involved and the relationship that they share.

This is an important observation since the crucial issue that humanity is grappling with is its (our) inability to understand illusion. That is to say, that our perception of reality is deluded by our own unquestioned beliefs, and language plays an enormous part in this process; we re-affirm false perceptions of reality every time we open our mouths. One can begin to appreciate, in the light of this, the benefit of silent retreats.

Osho once said that man cannot be blamed for his limited consciousness since the soil from which he comes is so barren; perhaps one could go a step further and see this soil, from which our consciousness springs, as poisonous – an apt analogy for a culture that consciously and literally injects the earth with the same.

We know, most of us, that we are disconnected, we know that soul is yet to awaken into our lives, we think we are beginning to understand the nature of the illusion we are immersed within, but I suspect that we are barely scratching the surface, and a simple analysis of our language and how it thwarts our attempt to see reality gives us some idea as to how much awareness we need to bring into our lives in order to see clearly.

An enormous task, it would seem, and it’s hard, from this place of deep illusion, to see how humanity will move collectively into an enlightened consciousness; will we have to change the very structure of our speech? I suspect so and I can also see what a radical re-shuffle this would demand from our mental faculties and, thus, I am trusting that the Gods will aid us in this process in some way; create an opening-up of our heart energy that leads us naturally toward a more compassionate way, not only of thinking, but of structuring our thought.

Our culture has developed in such a way as to give the individual ‘I’, ego-self, pre-dominance; this is what we have inherited, this is our legacy and it would be self-defeating, at this stage in our evolution, to deny it or attempt to turn the clock back to when we were a culture that gave dominance to the ‘You’. What, intrinsically, we are now involved in, is bringing the ‘You’ back into our natural awareness, balanced with the ‘I’ consciousness. By ‘You’ I mean other people, other life and our environment, all that can be perceived as without. We have finally arrived at the awareness that without the ‘You’, ‘I’ cannot survive. Even on a basic physical level. Our emerging culture has become so obsessed with insistence on the material (and only the material) reality that we had to reach a moment in history where we came face to face with the massive limitations of such an approach. As such, we are learning what it means to live as if we didn’t need to consider the material world as anything other than our play-thing, to be unendingly used and abused as we see fit (never mind the metaphysical world, which our culture doesn’t consider at all save as a fairy-tale). We are now facing that moment and the reality of it speaks clearly of the need for us to understand the natural relationship that exists between all life, a relationship that we have essentially disregarded to a greater and greater degree for thousands of years.

Our pursuit of the narrow needs of the ‘I’, has allowed us to disconnect from the spiritual truth of our purpose; it has given us permission to make a wasteland of our planet and our home, and, so long as the planet could sustain our wrecklessness, we have been able to ignore the consequences of our actions; after laying waste to one part of the earth, we simply moved to another to continue our plundering. But now there’s nowhere else to move, and those areas of our environment that remain untouched are fading fast.

We are, as we know, on the edge of a steep (perhaps even sheer) decline in material energy and our survival hangs precariously in the balance. The ‘environmental’ approach to restoring health and well-being to our planet, though inspiring in its own light, will never be enough to redress our plight, for the crisis of humanity that we now face is essentially of a spiritual nature. We have come to the end of our ability to sustain the long spiritual drought we have imposed on ourselves, and the earth is mirroring our inner ‘wasteland’ ecology.

Let me explain spirituality, as I see it, before you start feeling I’m getting religious on you. De Mello once said, ‘Spirituality means, Waking Up!’ And what we have to wake up to is reality – we’re still in slumber, we can’t perceive reality with any real degree of accuracy; we’re full of beliefs, presumptions, assumptions and misconceptions which give us a thoroughly distorted picture of what’s actually occurring. These beliefs are supported, confirmed and rewarded by a culture of indoctrination which is held firmly in place by all of us in telepathic agreement. Spirituality is the meshing of mind with reality; that’s all it is, there’s no requirement for elaborate ceremony and religious structure. A spiritually conscious being is a being whose inner ecology (of individual mind, body and spirit) interacts with the outer ecology of (universal mind, body and spirit) in such a seamless way that energy can flow from one to the other as if they were One! In the Japanese spiritual tradition this is described as ‘No obstruction’ – conscious mind of the ‘I’ responds effortlessly with conscious mind of ‘You’ creating One conscious flow of activity. That, to me, is spirituality, and it’s a principle, it informs all relationship and provides the landscape (with all its limitations and possibilities) within which relationship takes place.

Relationship is the key to understanding spirituality for relationship is everything. Even whole organisms are simply collections of relationships formed between smaller whole organisms which are themselves integrated models of relationship. Herein lies humanity’s greatest stumbling block; we fail to approach life as a series of relationships, we approach life as if ‘I’ (an illusiory concept at best) is the centre of the universe and its needs take precedence over the needs of ‘You’ (You being everything else). But the ‘I’ we place such emphasis upon, is simply a series of interconnecting relationships which are totally inter-dependent upon their overall relationship with universal truth, be it physical or spiritual.

Because of this fundamental failure to understand the basic universal principles, we are caught in an illusion of our own making; we cannot interact seamlessly with the universal mind because we don’t understand its value, nor our place within it. We are blind but don’t realise our blindness. We operate on the assumption we can see, but our sight is obscured by our obsession with ‘I’; and our task is delicate and requires constant vigilance; imagine a surgeon working in the operating theatre, blind but thinking that they can see. Life demands the same discipline of mind from us, moment to moment mindfulness of the nature of reality that we are experiencing. Yet we are not only mindless, but we think we’re mindful and act accordingly, creating the inner and outer ecological mess that we can clearly witness around us today.

Thank you Trish for getting me started on all of this!

I am aware that this essay essentially deals mainly with what we’re ‘getting wrong’ in life, so to speak, and that we are, in reality, getting a tremendous amount ‘right’ as we draw more light into our daily lives. The purpose of articles such as this which highlight the ‘negative’ aspects of our consciousness is to unveil us as much as possible as to where we are exactly right now. Obviously everyone is in a very different place around conscious awareness and their sense of inner peace, but as a society, as a global community, we carry a collective identity and it’s this identity that I always strive to portray. My sense is, once we have a clear idea of where we are, we can progress in a direction which is consciously considered and is chosen for the great benefit that it can bring us. If we are unaware of where we are, how we work, or what we truly desire because our minds are shrouded from clear sight by cultural beliefs, then we’re probably better off not moving at all as we don’t have a clue where we’re going. So first, understand who and what we are now, then once we have rooted that awareness within our consciousness we will know how to move and where to move to.

Jonathan

Human nature tends toward habitual response – this is neither a blessing nor a curse, it is a natural universal phenomenon and we can choose to cultivate habits that serve us, or we can cultivate habits that appear to serve us, yet incur a cost to our welfare. Whichever we choose, when we attempt to change those habits, or if life no longer allows us to indulge in our routines, we experience discomfort and a sense of wrongness; a sense that something is lacking and that we have somehow misplaced a part of ourselves. The urge to re-create the habitual pattern is thus subtly strong as the sense of discomfort is felt on the subconscious as well as the conscious levels of awareness and we are seemingly driven, by forces largely unseen, toward re-establishment of the old pattern.

And our strongest habitual response is generally evoked by anything we don’t like; I know this because it is well entrenched within my own conscious awareness and I see so much evidence of it in the world around me. The response to that which we don’t like is to get rid of it (if possible), whatever the offending article, event, person or idea might be. There is a desire within us to annihilate the unsavoury, and this desire under-pins the fabric of our social relationships, our political frame-work and our religious conviction. Ultimately it is internalised and gives rise to our self-hatred and lack of self-acceptance.

Since self-hatred is, in itself, a most unsavoury experience, it would seem to me that the habit of wishing death, annihilation and eradication of those aspects of our experience that we perceive as problematic, might be a good one to consciously break. By which I mean transform.

Bill Mollison (one of the fathers of Permaculture) put forward the simple equation that ‘The problem is the solution’ which challenges us to search for the diamond hidden within the coal. This is another way of describing the analogy whereby we come to face the wall of our fear – if we take courage and approach the wall, we will find it becomes a portal opening out to new worlds, possibilities and landscapes.

We come to a place then, where we begin to realise that that which we fear or hate is our gateway to a greater reality and thus it is in our profound interest to drop the habitual desire to annihilate our dislikes and instead utilise their impact upon us to transform our lives.

This is not to say that we have to like what we dislike, we don’t, the transformational potential simply lies in the observation of habitual response and instilling within ourselves a desire to question it and, if it doesn’t serve us, consciously invoke an alternative response that will.

And these responses of ours are important since our thoughts are cosmic ripples of immense potency and they leave us only for so long as it takes for them to find a resonant energy that will draw them back to us – this is our karma, the return of our energy, and we have no way of avoiding it, we can only pass through it, because it’s ours and it must return to its source – us. The question becomes; do we use our karmic inheritance to create further negative experience through denial, anger, hatred or a combination of these and other attitudes? Or do we harness our karmic experience to provide ourselves with a chance to unfold into new realities, deeper sensitivities and a more awakened self-knowledge?

The choice is always ours and in the case of habitual response we’re constantly being presented with an opportunity to refine our mode operation.

Thus is behoves us to pause and examine our rejection of so much of the world, its people and ourselves that we want to see gone, and take another view, if only for curiosities’ sake, to discover whether our desire to kill or negate cannot be used to open our minds, and our world, to the light and the love, of God.

Jonathan

A Culture of Aggression

I had just arrived back in for the ‘day-shift’ when my phone rang. It was my son’s teacher, he’d just heard the news and was calling simply to show he cared. In the previous 48 hours of endless waiting, doing my best to ‘be there’, it hadn’t occurred to me how I was being impacted by events. This call from a teacher with heart, must have opened some portal within me that had remained pretty much closed and I suddenly found myself unable to speak.

‘How is he?’, was all it took; tears threatened their cascade and my chest filled with unexplainable grief; I couldn’t answer – I felt if I said anything, if I so much as opened my mouth, I’d surely lose all control. There was my child, sleeping fitfully on the hospital bed, ten stitches in his head and a fractured skull.

I knew then that the vulnerability I saw in that wounded child was my own; the deep sadness that had touched in and out of my life over those intense few hours, was, and is, a sadness at my own wounding, for when a child is hurt, it is the parent who often feels it most keenly.

Two nights earlier I had received a panicked call from one of my son’s friends breaking the news that Sudesh had been assaulted, struck on the head twice with a hurley stick. That he was cut and bleeding. The attack had been as vicious as it had been unprovoked, and the young man who committed it had managed to bite him on the face in the course of the violence.

We waited 9 hours in the hospital waiting room before he finally received stitches, and another few before they gave him a brain scan, revealing the fracture. It was beginning to dawn on me just how close we’d come to much greater damage and I continue to offer my thanks that no permanent damage had been inflicted.

Though initially I felt an intense anger toward whoever it was that had done this, once I had picked up Sudesh my focus had shifted to being present to him and what he was going through and has remained so since. I have a kind of detached fascination for the purely random nature behind the attack and for the extreme state of consciousness which could enable someone to walk up to a stranger and crack them over the head with a potentially lethal weapon. That secret delight that is so prevalent in men (especially), of vanquishing their foe (imagined or real) through violent action.

There is so much enjoyment taken from watching movies where the hero skillfully slices up his enemies. Is this not a kind of insanity? Why would we experience pleasure from another’s pain? We can only experience the pleasure if we can remain disconnected from the recipient of the pain. If we identify with the ‘victim’, whoever they may be, we cannot enjoy it since we naturally identify empathically with another’s experience unless we have cut ourselves off from life in some way. We can only enjoy pain when we have initiated a process within ourselves of separation from others, and, I suppose, essentially, from ourselves.

In many ways, the young man who resorts to violence is very much backed up by the cultural glorification of aggressive assertiveness. It is never just one individual who acts, but all of us; those who promote it, those who condone it or place it in the context of being an acceptable way (perhaps even an essential way, if you’re to be seen as a real man) of resolving conflict situations.

Movies, of course, cannot be held accountable, they are merely symptomatic of a human desire toward hurting oneself and others, a momentary relief from rage and frustration. They no more induce violence than competitive sports induce cruelty; the attitudes are there and simply play themselves out through the actions and dramatisations. These attitudes remain until we can recognize them for what they are and cultivate a genuine desire to let them go. Once we start to lose the desire to hurt, all the symptomatic outlets will dissolve from our reality.

Sometimes one is allowed a glimpse of a reality that one is not necessarily a conscious part of; I can see and feel the pain of one who has been hurt, I suppose that experience is particularly raw for me at this time, yet there is still in me that part that enjoys the ‘spectacle of pain’, be it a movie, an historical narrative, or whatever. I’m still a part of the cultural milieu that endorses a violent world, yet, having tasted the bitter flavour of my child’s pain and vulnerability, I find that for me, the glorification of violent aggression has been, partially at least, blessedly dimmed.

Jonathan

Apart from hunger and immediate survival, this desire, the desire to accumulate, has been the most potent driving force in the history of humanity. It has spawned greed, hatred, envy and rage, amongst its other twisted progeny. It has created societies that thrive on the oppression of the many and the elevation of the few. It is directly responsible for the emergence of injustice and corruption.

Our religions, especially modern religions which are still practiced today, beseech us to cast aside our attachments to the material world, to embrace and succour the poor and needy, to redress the inherent imbalance that is born within a society obsessed with the ‘need to have’. Sometimes individuals adhere to such sentiments but, as a community, we pay them only lip-service at best; in our political arena even this pretence is largely ignored.

And yet, somewhere deep within each of us, veiled and shrouded though it maybe, there is the understanding that, ultimately, we are not measured by what we manage to acquire but by what we are capable of surrendering. So why, when given the opportunity to acquire more in less time (or even in more time), do we jump at the chance? Often, in the process, we trample upon the material welfare of others as our desperate bid to draw wealth into our own lives obscures such periphery concerns.

I suppose there are two reasons which play a large part in deciding how we act. One is the old survival instinct, that ancient part of us that has got us this far by looking out for the opportunity and taking it. The other is strongly related to this instinct for it has emerged through it and from it. This is the cultural framework we have created around the need to secure our own welfare, that of our community, our country, our religion and so on. This framework prevents us, most effectively, from adopting more humane attitudes of mind, such as seeking to ensure all are welcome, fed, clothed and given a sense of belonging. It creates a ‘game-play’ in which everyone is judged according to what they have and how they maintain possession of it. If someone releases what they have into the possession of another, they may find themselves temporarily commended (though they may not), but in the long run, unless they can re-acquire what they have given up, they will generally gain association with those elements of society who are considered the losing elements.

Thus we are driven mercilessly to ‘accumulate wealth’ – it is a drive that reaches back to, at the least, Neolithic times (10 – 15,000 years ago) and probably much further. It has determined, to a very great extent, what we are today and what kind of society we have contained ourselves within. But we are at a momentous turning point in respect to this all-consuming drive, and this turning point has been drawn in to our collective experience by a more subtle and infinitely more potent desire, that of longing for awakening.

Everyone has this desire; it is our ultimate calling and, no matter how shut down we are, no matter how much we continue to resist this divine urge, we all carry it, because we all crave ‘coming home’. The focus we direct toward material attachment (our ancient ‘wealth accumulation desire’) is inversely proportional to our level of self-awareness. Material attachment inhibits the awakening potential within us; as we become more awake, so we become less attached. This is a universal formula, a law if you like, and the reason we are at such a defining moment in our time is because we are beginning to understand it. And as we come to a deeper realisation of the universal laws and our orientation within them, so we begin to access the creative principle within ourselves. Once this happens our growth takes an exponential leap; we are no longer simply creative agents of change being directed within the cosmic soup of existence, we are conscious co-creators, ourselves acting as directors of that evolving dynamic that we are a part of.

Billions of years ago, single-celled organisms launched life into a radically new and vital dynamic when they opened up pathways of relationship to each other that led to multi-celled life forms. Suddenly (if a process that took millions of years to develop can be called sudden) life was infinitely more diverse, words cannot describe the explosion of diversity that was painted onto life’s tapestry – a moment where the seemingly inconceivable is conceived. We were in that moment and what we are now can be directly, if distantly, linked to it.

Over the past few thousand years, humans have been involved in an evolutionary leap of similar proportional impact and consequence, the transition to self-conscious awareness. This process has both intensified and magnified over the past 100 years as science has provided a lens by which we have been able to see not only what we have been created from but to understand that the elements that created us are now looking at themselves through us, space dust observing itself, through itself. We have become the creator and the created, the observer and the observed. We are now God and God’s work both, and this, in itself, is a radical departure from where we have been for millenia.

The next step we take, however, lifts us to dizzying heights for it is the step of conscious co-creation – not only will we create (we’ve been doing that for millions of years), but we become capable of aligning our thoughts and our desires with this creative impulse and thus manifest a reality of our conscious choosing. The pathways in life this opens up for us are, as yet, difficult to imagine, but we are offered glimpses of what lies in store through the examples presented to us within the stories (whether mythical or real) of the Christ, the Buddha and the many other individuals who reached this level of consciousness.

One might ask what this all has to do with ‘wealth accumulation’? Everything! For as we make our way across the river of consciousness, we are required, at critical moments, to leap from one stepping stone to the next, and in the moment one steps (from one to the next) one’s balance is, for a second, determined by the contact being made by both the front foot and the rear, and if the back foot is wobbly, the front had better be lucky else one finds oneself under water, struggling to stay afloat.

We are still tied in to the operational attitudes represented by that back foot; in some way or another almost every human being on earth is wrapped up in the business of wealth accumulation and we are thus caught in that fleeting moment of instability where the front foot is searching for firm ground and the back foot is being relied upon to support the forward thrust. We are transitioning between one mode of operation to another and it’s going to be essential for us to have found our balance in the receding modality so that we can find our feet in the approaching one. Any reticence to leave the past behind will impact the future in profound ways. And any inability to resolve our natural place within the structure of the old will have the effect of drawing these unresolved patterns from it into the new field of existence. More on this below.

Primarily I want to look at how the Gurus of the ‘New Age’ movement are cashing in on this no-man’s land place that we are in (a foot in both worlds, so to speak). In many cases, the proponents of the ‘Life Mastery School’ have embraced the discovery of the conscious creative potential in humanity and linked it to our desire to accumulate wealth. It’s a little like saying, ‘use the infinite potential of that front foot to root yourself firmly to the stone at the back’. It’s quite bizarre when one really ponders this and yet, at the same time, it’s so obvious; humanity is beginning to grow in awareness toward its unlimited ability to consciously create and, in the same moment, it still harbours a savage addiction to material attachment. Want to make money? Marry the two! Present to people the possibilities inherent in how they can use their newly discovered potential to feed their addiction. Perfect!

Strangely enough, reverting back to Buckminster Fuller’s hypothesis that the most meaningful evolutionary impulse occurs at a 90 degree right-angle to the intended target of action, this use of our addictive compulsion may well be part of the over-arching grand design, and we may need our addictions to drive us toward that which we would not otherwise envisage, but I feel there’s a trap here on an individual level and the trap is cyclical in nature, that of the victim and  predator consciousness. So long as we remain addicted to wealth accumulation we cannot progress attitudinally to conscious co-creation; so long as one is caught in the old paradigm one will not be interested in co-creation, merely in creation (of wealth for the ‘me’). Co-creation implies and requires a surrender of the mind to the mystery of universal consciousness – it is an equal partnership between the individual soul and the universal soul; our conscious awareness, filtered through the mind, manages the dictates of this partnership but does not direct it.

In the old paradigm, mind is supreme, and focussed on creating wealth and security for the ego self, it has not been engaged, and the evidence for this is over-whelming, in the task of manifesting the divine on earth. It has rather run amok.

Bear in mind that this moment is one of not-yet-conceived potential; we are transitioning to a state of awareness that would appear nothing short of miraculous to us now. As we move into that new place, we take with us the habits of the past; when consciousness enters a new morphogenetic field, it encounters a radical departure from what has gone before but it’s experience of the new reality is nonetheless shaped in some way by its past. Thus habits are not only extremely pervasive throughout the evolutionary process of the universe; they actually determine the direction that process takes, in the course of its unfolding. And addiction is a pretty strong habit.

Thus I am wary of the ‘New Age’ proponents of ‘Creating Your Own Reality’, not because we shouldn’t be involved in our own creative process, but because there are certain ethical concerns and evolutionary steps that need to be addressed prior to dabbling in the co-creative work (or at least in tandem with it) if we are to avoid bringing the destructive tendencies of the previous morphogenetic field into the next one.

The universe is a playful place and we are following the natural and exploratory principles that guide universal evolution when we gain deeper access to the creative element in our lives, and there is phenomenal work being produced to support, encourage and inform us on this journey; but like all modalities there is the work that facilitates its emergence (toward its natural destination) and there is the work that uses the latest discovery to entrench us deeper into our old repressive and limiting attitudes of mind.

This should give us pause therefore, when we encounter ground-breaking material, to question where exactly the work is coming from and to what end is it leading us. The answers we are presented with by both the internal and external Gurus of consciousness never represent the ultimate destination, they are merely the platform from which our deeper questioning can be formulated.

Jonathan