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This is where the key to our health is held, this is such a primal characteristic and so intrinsically essential to our growth, our happiness and our survival. The word came up in a talk given by Rob Hopkins on `Transition to a World without Oil’ – this is a Ted.com talk and I highly recommend it; actually I highly recommend Rob himself, he is one of the most insightful `positive activists’ that I have had the honour to work with.

He’s talking about Resilience in relation to our current economic/ecological crisis, and it struck me that this is the true definition of a functioning organism (as opposed to a dysfunctioning one); without resilience an organism dies. Let me back-track, resilience is defined as the ability to return to original form after sustaining shock or adversity. I would define it further and say that it’s the ability to maintain its essential quality.

The human body is truly a miracle of resilience; it must daily confront a vast array of poisons, viral infections, bacterial assault, pollution and constant physical damage through scraping, cutting, bruising and other forms of trauma too numerous to mention. Yet the body not only survives (generally) but also, when given the opportunity, regenerates and self-heals. In fact, our bodily resilience is being compromised by our beleaguered psyche, but more on that later. This resilience is an essential quality of every living organism and becomes a natural way in which we can define and differentiate one `whole life system’ from another. It is the basis for all biological classification; an amoeba is given an identity by us not because of its good looks, but because it can suffer external shock and still retain its essential quality.

Whole systems (holisms) can be viewed through this lens, from single cell to multiple cellular creatures, to highly complex colonies of cells that form bodies, animals and humans. We can extrapolate this definition out to tribal units, societies, nations, worlds and so on, each one representing a stage of evolutionary development which is, in its self, a completion.

At every level of completion, a resilience is achieved which allows the `holism’ to exist and maintain its essential quality. This moment of completion acts as a spring-board for greater, more complex, more aware entities, and this awareness is exponential in its expansion since the value of a group of holisms is greater than the sum of its parts. Our whole evolutionary cycle has been developing this theme for millions of years, building toward greater awareness, greater cohesion, and more complex yet more effective communal interaction and interdependence. This is surely the deep purpose of life, to re-create itself into ever greater levels of consciousness. And the key-stone steps in this process are those moments when holism and resilience are obtained.

So resilience of an entity, be it chemical, mineral or biological, is the means by which we can define those stages at which evolution has reached holism. And this is why we can say of humanity that it is only ‘a becoming’; physically we are contained within bodies that are highly adaptable to external shock, but our psyche is far more fragile and does not enjoy the same constitutional health. Humanity knows this, they can feel their terrifying vulnerability on a psychic level, and so great philosophies have been offered as a means to rectify the disparity between the holism of the body and the fragmented psyche. Actually, we have spent the last few thousand years devaluing the body as if we’re in some kind of competition with it. I suspect we secretly envy the body its holism and are trying to dismantle it so we don’t feel so `psychically’ inferior. As a result, the body’s constitutional strength is impacted, by the psyche’s fragmentation in the first place, and its jealous attack in the second. Considering how powerful our psyche is, it’s a miracle we’re not all dead.

But the reality is that our psyche is also highly adaptable and potentially that aspect of self which can bring body, mind and soul together to create a greater holism, what we sometimes refer to as the higher self. So our question needs to be, what is it that we need to draw in to our psyche to create its essential resilience? Spirit – of course. Without spirit, the psyche is desperately vulnerable. I am reminded of the survey conducted in Afghanistan during the Russian invasion which found that there was a higher incidence of psychological illness in peace-time than there was during times of war. The reason being that war brings us to the edge of our known limits, our familiar experience, and when we come to that place we meet either insanity or spirit – and here we can hear the echo of Yeat’s evocative words, written to describe this meeting during times of conflict, ‘a terrible beauty is born’.

Jill Hall suggests that we have lost our connection to spirit in our society due to our acceptance of the myth that we are only ‘biological processes’ ; we are just a body and a brain, no spirit. If it can’t be seen, it doesn’t exist, if it can’t be defined and proven by science it is nothing more than fantasy, the product of fanciful imagination. Actually, modern science is observing a quantum reality that totally dismantles the `purely material’ perspective, but that understanding has not filtered down into our psyche, we’re still clinging to the belief that there’s nothing but physical existence despite all the evidence to the contrary.

We deny the mystery in our global telepathic agreement and because of this, we fuse ourselves to the physical source of our creation – mother. In this fusion (a most unnatural and evolutionarily unstable attitude), we give mother all our power (she being the one who has, initially, power of life and death over us); we feel no innate resilience because we don’t believe that we are imbued with spirit, we must cling to mother for our very survival, only she can offer the holism we deeply crave. In this way we perpetuate the human psychic trap, we remain un-whole, vulnerable victims of imperfect motherhood – for, of course, our mother is also the result of an imperfect mother, and so on. In this dynamic, Mother (and to a lesser extent, Father) are to blame for our current condition since we can’t allow the possibility that anything beyond our biological process exists in reality, making us totally dependent, psychologically, upon our biological creators. So long as we are fused to mother, we cannot achieve holism, we cannot be resilient within life – we become victims of our own terror-induced reality.

If we could genuinely accept spirit as the causative quality of our lives, we would be able to take responsibility for ourselves, let poor Mother and Father off the hook and begin to become psychically whole, resilient. One may wonder how we can actually effect a transition from victim to creator; in this process everyone has their own path and this is a path to be discovered by them. The most important step is the first one, that which brings one to the path in the first place. Once the journey is begun, our path unfolds before us because spirit desires greater consciousness and will therefore conspire to draw us down our enlightened pathway.

Stepping on to the path is easy save it requires a suspension of judgement, for we must trust to our own process. We have to imagine that spirit exists in our life, pray to spirit, offer our thanks. I have long grappled with some way of contacting spirit. Whom to address? The name of `God’ would never work for me, linked as it is to one of the most arrogant and brutal institutions in our history and implying a particular character, male, dominant and altogether too separate from me to evoke any connection. Though I have always been touched by Hafiz’s encouragement to pray, even if it feels hypocritical, since he assures us that `God accepts bad coin’, I have always been keen to move beyond hypocritical prayer and start delivering up something finer than `bad coin’. What finally came to me was the identification of spirit with the Light that shines within me. That’s where spirit resides for me, and through this resident spirit, many connections open up. I can pray to a consciousness free of religious connotation, to some `beingness’ that is both intrinsically personal to me and also universally applicable to all life; thus connected, in a personal way which I can sense and embrace, to the infinite principle of life everywhere.

There has been quite the revelation in this for me; to pray to my own essential source and, in the process, pray to all life and to the infinite space of consciousness that creates, sustains  and destroys everything. Perhaps, most significantly, this opens up a conscious awareness that all of us contain this same `light within’. Such an easy thing to talk about, the ‘Oneness’ of all life, but finding a way to experience it has eluded humanity for eons. It is toward experiencing this oneness that is the motivation behind prayer.

All things by immortal power

Near or far,

Hiddenly

To each other linked are

That thou canst stir a flower

Without troubling of a star

For a culture such as ours, diseased as it is with cynicism (everyone out to take care only of themselves, often at the expense of others), separatism (no one else matters like me), and callousness (other people’s pain is irrelevant so long as I’m ok), such a motivation is a most gracious and touching antidote.

Another aspect to reaching the path requires us to allow ourselves a different perspective on how our minds interact with the world of spirit. This connection is effected through our imagination. Modern day society, obsessed as it is with materiality, tends to view imagination as a fanciful aspect of the mind that symbolises immaturity and needs to be tamed for the purposes of functioning within the culture. Yet a psyche without access to its imagination is a dysfunctional psyche, separated, alone and terrified. Imagination is not where we create other worlds, it is the tool by which we express our experience of those worlds into this reality. It is our translator for that experiential consciousness which is hard to define in terms of language, but is no less real for that. And imagination is something we can consciously work to nurture and support, through our meditations, our prayers and our creative impulses.

This is surely the moment for us to take our leap of faith! The signs are everywhere; crop-circles, synchronicities, bizarre solar-system phenomena, economic and political melt-down (all those structures which are based on belief that we’re just a biological process, are crumbling – in this I include religion). Take the chance, risk feeling foolish, offer up your prayers, talk to God, invite spirit into your life, access your creative energy; write, paint, play music, sing, dance, make love, enjoy the gift of life that you have received, let the joy flow from your being so that you become evidence of what we can be; others will be confronted with that evidence and it’ll get them thinking! We have the task of provoking the world into a deeper joyful consciousness – what a great job! And as we do this, we’ll become aware of our own innate resilience, our wholeness and we’ll find ourselves fit to survive this unprecedented evolutionary step we’re about to take, our `critical path’ to enlightened consciousness.

Jonathan

P.S. For those of you who have taken the time to comment – deep thanks, I pray I can continue to be of service.

Osho Rajneesh was once asked why, considering the depth of our species’ compassion, its intelligence and in light of its highly developed state of evolvement, do we still commit acts of insanity, brutality and cruelty. We could re-phrase the question and ask how can humanity be both God and beast. His answer was

`Man is a becoming’

And in those few words he captured the human experience; we are not complete, we are in the process of forming ourselves into something, but we are not formed yet.

Perhaps if all aspects of ourselves were forming at the same rate, this process might be easier, but we don’t; some facets of humanity (such as the ego) are highly developed. In fact the sense of self is so developed that we can observe our sense of self through our self. No mean achievement and one which would have been less straightforward to humans over a century ago, who could not reference the work of Freud and Jung who had discovered the maps by which we could locate our-`selves’. We have taken enormous leaps in the past century into awareness of our `self’ and yet we remain mere infants in our emotional body; given the right conditions, which are legion and occur daily, we become angry children caught in the cycle of the blame game.

For animals, since their varying aspects of consciousness appear to be developed at stages of parity, this does not set up any long-term consequences. They experience their emotion and act upon it immediately, dissipating, rather than accumulating emotional energy. I refer here to wild animals, `human’ animals are more complex due to their contact with the human psyche – they seem more prone to picking up our bad habits.

For humanity however, the picture is so different because of this disparity in the level of development between ego and technical advancement on the one hand and emotional consciousness on the other.

Humanity has created a society for itself in which everything is highly organized and structured. Were we not so ordered we could not possibly maintain our current levels of population. Structure creates stability; it acts as a container for all the ideas, feelings and practices of a grouping of people; on a mind level it constitutes a telepathic agreement between members of a social group as to how they can behave, what’s acceptable and what’s not etc. These agreements are essential to the smooth functioning of any society (human or animal) and their existence, which is often unquestioned, is highlighted starkly when two cultures clash who maintain different agreements within their social structure. The most obvious example of this being the ancient clash between settled and nomadic cultures – a charged relationship which continues into modern society.

Essential though they may be, these structures, particularly since they are mostly unexamined, are open to abuse and manipulation, especially by members of society who hold greater material and psychological influence, and of course, they provide us with weapons with which to abuse ourselves.

Enter into this equation the `infant emotional mentality’ of humanity and you have a recipe for disaster. In many ways, and for a great part of the human population both past and present, this is precisely what the human experience has been, an unending series of disasters, exacerbated by the human mind’s inability to adapt to adverse situations due to the mental constructs it has employed to give itself a sense of security.

Now, in the 21^st century, humanity is showing signs of becoming complete. There’s still a long way to go, it appears, and yet there is a conscious awareness working among us which is bringing our various developmental stages into balance. This is our challenge; to bring all our aspects of consciousness, mind, ego, emotions, feelings, into a state of parity with each other, and since we are so egoically developed (and over-identified) the work lies with the infant emotional body which has been so conditioned to react to any threat that the structures (created by egoic mind) have imprisoned it in. And because life demands change, structure is constantly threatened and so our emotional consciousness is repeatedly thrown from violent reaction to violent reaction, a process which weakens and exhausts it further and opens it to becoming more susceptible to reaction.

As always, the work must begin with an understanding of what work needs to be done. To understand that, we need to examine the myths the egoic mind has created over thousands of years, and we must personally liberate ourselves from those belief systems. Beliefs such as humans are the most superior species on earth (and thus they can use and abuse their environment at will, since, in this belief system, it’s all for humans anyway), that gender determines role and ranking within society, that humans are inherently faulty and need to be saved by something/someone outside themselves, and so on . . .

All these belief structures keep us from realizing our true nature, we are deep wells of compassion and love, but our wells are so clogged with the debris of institutionalized belief that there is no access to the sweet water that would flow from us like a fountain of light. That we are capable of clearing the debris there is no doubt; we have clearly demonstrated unfathomable skills for organizing and ordering, but we are invested strongly in keeping that debris in place and we have an infantile emotional reaction to any attempt (from within ourselves or without) at opening us up to our own enlightened possibilities. De Mello once said `if you become upset when somebody challenges an idea you have, you’re tied to it’. It’s a good indicator of how invested we are in ideas and beliefs that are rarely, if ever, our own.

There is a necessity for us now to be open to the possibility that all our beliefs and institutions no longer serve us (if they ever did) and for us to begin the process of re-evaluating the cultural foundations we build our lives on. If this seems an impossible task, or at least, an elusive one, just start by questioning those institutions which don’t seem to evoke happiness in people’s lives; marriage might be one (the attempt to fuse permanently 2 people who will inevitably be driven to seek individuation – this drive being an evolutionary one); sexual codes, conduct and taboos another; devotion to work (enslavement), endorsed by ambition another, and so on.

It doesn’t take rocket science to see which areas of human’s lives cause misery and depression, and yet we continue to perpetuate them, we feel driven to adhere to them out of fear of rejection (from society, from mother) and aloneness. But we have to run the gauntlet of our fears, less we be fused to `mother’ for our whole life and never truly `become’ ourselves.

These fears also arise from a knowing that if we begin to clear our debris, we’re going to hit some pretty stagnant water; trapped and un-moving, this slimy muck has been rotting inside the human psyche throughout our recorded history and we have a serious resistance to getting in there and clearing it up. Yet it must be done, and it may not be so hard; once the flow is renewed, water tends to cleanse itself, so we can focus less on the dark waters of our shadow consciousness and more on the crystal waters of our source – it will bring our shadows up and out for us, and then we shall find ourselves revealed to ourselves, for

`If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’

Jesus Christ – Gospel of Thomas

It is this bringing forth, tempered with a conscious emotional response, that will bring us toward our own completeness.

Jonathan

I am indebted to Jill Hall’s seminal work, `The Reluctant Adult’ in the writing of this article.

Here’s a word that conjures up a host of images from the divine to the profane – from luminous act to diabolic ritual.

I’ve often wondered what the human fascination with sacrifice is all about! Throughout our history humans have sacrificed and been sacrificed. This act has been perceived as an essential role in the human experience, without sacrifice (from stone-age culture to iron age civilization) society believed their tenuous hold on existence would be severed, the elemental gods, who seemed to carry human destiny in their hands, would be angered by the slight and cut off their sustenance. Harvests would fail, floods would sweep humanity away and plague would decimate the survivors.

Sacrifice was the insurance policy of the old world and, as is sadly the case today, became a central theme that ran through all aspects of society. Religious festivals, political cycles, military engagements, harvesting of food, all were punctuated with sacrifice and sometimes determined by it; the Spartans, military obsessionists that they were, would never begin a battle without consulting their oracles and obtaining favourable responses first, and they never made it to the battle of Marathon at all (the first and most famous of the Greek defeat of the Persian empire) because they couldn’t leave Sparta until their sacred games/festivities were concluded. For the same reason, Leonidas was unable to take a Spartan army to Thermopylae to hold the most easily defended pass that would have prevented the Persian advance into Greece; instead he took only 300 in a suicide mission (they would be facing 100s of thousands) and, in a strange irony, became a sacrifice to his people’s need to continue performing their sacrifices.

This desire/compulsion to perform sacrifice was, from the dawn of humanity as we know it, central to all aspects of life and central to the human psyches’ understanding of order in the universe.

Thus it became an aspect of communal life to which great importance was attached, and those who performed sacrifice for the community, became the all powerful priest-hoods of the ancient, and not so ancient world.

To become a priest one had to sacrifice one’s worldly existence. Thus the lure of psychological power was balanced by such pre-requisites, though this did not necessarily balance the use and abuse of that power, rather it twisted it into ever more corruption until, in the West at least, the role of the priest (and the religious institution that spawned them) became so synonymous with abuse that society rebelled against it, eventually reducing it to the crumbling edifice that it is today. However, society still wanted guarantee of security against life’s calamities so set up insurance companies to replace the moribund church, and these companies gladly stepped into the power vacuum thus created, and happily perpetrated similar abuses.

Throughout our history, we can trace, in every civilization, an obsession with sacrifice and its regular performance, and a deification of those who willingly sacrifice themselves for some greater purpose; the life and teachings of a prophet, mystic or political leader are brought into sharp focus if they can also sacrifice themselves in the process of sharing their wisdom or executing their tasks. If Jesus had not died on the cross, we would know nothing of him. If Leonidas had been a success in battle rather than a failure, and held the pass, he would have gone down as one of histories’ greatest commanders, but he would not have attained the God-like aura that has since been attributed to him.

It seems then, that in the human mind, sacrifice is a pre-requisite for connection with the divine and the human mind never acts in an arbitrary way; there is always a primal cause for human thought and action, however disassociated those thoughts appear to be from their source. By primal I mean that seeding, causative moment in human existence from which all other behaviour emerges. Thus primal is divine, it is our moment of absolute `natural state’ and it is this moment which binds us all together as one.

My questions to myself have often been – `Why do we sacrifice?’ What is it about performing and partaking in sacrifice that has so delighted and obsessed humanity from its inception? How can we inflict such acts of horror and cruelty on other beings (that would otherwise be construed as sadistic torture) and yet perceive this as acting in the light of divine truth and necessity?

These same questions were asked by 19^th and 20^th century anthropologists who recorded some of the most gruesome rites performed by stone-age culture across the globe. They were members of a society which was in the process of transferring its `sacrifice for divine protection’ racket from religion to commerciality and so couldn’t comprehend the connection on a religious level. To them, these were savage rites exercised by savage people who loved to engage in savagery for savagery’s sake.

But these ancient cultures were acting from the primal urge to sacrifice, because sacrifice is the ultimate truth for humanity. In our perception, we cannot offer up more than our lives, and a willing sacrifice of our life therefore appears to be our ultimate act of fulfillment of our experience and our purpose. For this reason, humanity has obsessed with sacrificial death since time immemorial, and yet, death of the body is not the ultimate offering we can make, in fact, our ultimate offering does not require death at all, it requires surrender.

This surrender is of our `self’, our ego, and because our ego is so convinced there is no existence without it, surrender is interpreted as death. Yet nothing is killed, no great dramatic episode of historic, egoic sacrifice is required or provoked by surrender – surrender is merely the giving up of the fight, the end of the resistance, with no hint of self-annihilation intrinsic within it. When the ego declares itself ready to die and cries to its God, come slay me

`for it is me you have come to hunt. [God] says laughingly, I am not here to hunt you but to save you’

For millennia we have been running from vengeful gods who are out to destroy us, and all this time they have been waiting for us to tire of our running and give up the futile fight so that they can save us from ourselves.

Surrender of the self, interpreted as death of the ego, played out as physical death in rites and rituals, is the sweet process of allowing the self to be exalted to the place of no-self. That is, no thought or deed for the self; all consciousness devoted to the divine. Only when the self becomes the no-self, can it step out of the illusion of `itself’ and into the reality of its own existence.

We deify sacrifice because it gives us a sense of intimate connection with divine energy, and we feel that that connection will bring us to a place of peace; but once again our motivation is misdirected

`We long for Peace so our troubles will go away [but] we are never given for our self, but always for others’

Our sacrifices have long been ways in which humanity has felt it can manipulate and control its reality, but the path to no-self lies in surrendering that very desire and embracing the reality as it is.

Jonathan

If ever there has been a subject most misconstrued, this is surely the one. The reason; whenever the word `sex’ enters our awareness, we think only sex, everything else gets reduced to the periphery as our minds, repressed as they are, begin to ferret around the word in the most lively fashion conjuring images that disgust or delight us. But the `sex’ the conventional mind imagines has little to do with conscious love-making which is what `Sacred Sexuality’ is.

There are certain aspects of mind that need to be understood here; we have all been indoctrinated into a conventional idea of sexuality, it is strongly patriarchal and, as such, creates the illusion of unequal relationship (that being that the female is subservient to the male). This relationship will be explored below, what’s first important to understand is that this indoctrination has been more thorough than any other aspect of our cultural repression. There will always be advocates of peace in a war-glorifying society; there will be those who speak for racial equality in a prejudiced culture – but where in our pre-modern history can we find an incidence of someone coming forward to alert humanity to its sexual wrong-headedness, to the reality that conventional sex, as we have received it, brutalizes the masculine and scars the feminine? Where the great socio/political movements championing conscious love-making over unconscious sex? Perhaps your answer to these questions will be enough to suggest that this is one inherited myth that we have remained absolutely ignorant of and slave to for thousands of years.

Those mystics who have dared to traverse into the realms of our sexuality, have reminded us that `sexual union’ is a meditation, it is a pathway to higher consciousness, a delicious and magical opportunity to meet, soul to soul, with ourselves and/or another, and ultimately, all existence.

Thus, when we are faced by the word `sex’ and we immediately think the word `fuck’, we must understand that we are totally caught in a trap which demeans `love-making’ into becoming dirty, sordid and sinful, or the equally chimerical trap of excited fantasy and compulsive physical desire. And, when we become aware of someone who advertises or promotes their work with sexuality, be they Tantric practitioner or prostitute, we project all our misconceptions regarding sex, onto them.

If we can accept that we are completely brainwashed with regard to sexuality and ignorant of its practice and its purpose, then we have a chance to unlearn all our compulsions and addictions around it and begin again.

Sacred Sexuality is less about `sex’ than it is about the intention and motivation behind and through it, this is where the foundation work lies; in confronting and transforming our intentions, literally moving our conscious awareness of our sexuality from our body through to our spirit, acknowledging and honouring all of ourselves (body, mind and soul) as we do this. Any denial of ourselves arrests this process immediately and, since most of us get stuck at the physical (bodily) level, that’s where our work needs to begin. Before we look at the work itself we need to clarify a major obstacle to it, the damage inflicted by thousands of years of what I would call `The Rape of the Feminine’.

Horrific in its imagery (to some, not all), we cannot, especially those of us who are men, ignore the reality that, when presented with the opportunity during war, rioting, civil strife etc, a much higher percentage of men turn to rape than would dare cross that boundary under more constrained conditions where civic and moral order have a firmer hold on society. Men particularly need to confront this shadow energy within them, rape is only its extreme; any action which involves `taking’ pleasure from another without their consent is part of this shadow energy. In war, women are usually considered booty, mere objects which, once won, can be used as the man pleases, with total disregard for the woman herself. This again, is an extreme attitude, but it’s all a part of the cultural `male’ attitude of `women are there for the taking’ that has been handed down from generation to generation over the centuries.

A consequence of this, even during times of civic order, is that women are seen as 2^nd class members of society. Apart from the pain caused by this underlying attitude, it is wholly divorced from reality since it encourages focus on male/female roles rather than male/female relationship and, as is the case with all life, the mystery, the magic, the very essence of life, lies in the relationships. In the Tree of Life, drawn from the Kabbala, it is the 22 paths of relationship that contain the quintessence of the teaching; the sephiroth (those points denoting aspects of consciousness between which the relationships emerge) are nothing by themselves. So it is with everything, we are nothing by ourselves, we cannot exist other than through our relationship to all life. And natural relationships are not defined by points of superiority and inferiority, good and bad (and all the other fantastical terms we have coined to express our reality), they are fluid and reciprocal and potentially transformative. The question is never, `am I superior? It is `how am I relating? There is no superior consciousness, only more awakened consciousness.

As I write this, it becomes clearer and clearer how entangled and embroiled any discussion of Sacred Sexuality is; there are simply so many myths to be unraveled, so many unquestioned presumptions and attitudes that must be challenged and examined in the true light of reality.

The reason I’ve placed so much emphasis upon the misconceptions around male/female relationships is two-fold, first, as more evident members of the male principle, men have, for millennia, inflicted such violence upon the Divine Feminine that we have deeply wounded ourselves, and second (and in some ways more significantly) we have forgotten in the process, that the feminine principle provides the environment for sexual (and hence spiritual) union. Thus the male rides rough-shod over the very environment in which he can attain his own enlightenment and deep joy. The feminine has had little or no say in the matter of sexual union and women (by force or by sheer weight of cultural mores) have had to accept a form of sexuality which contravenes their instinctive feelings and, for many women, is at best tiresome, at worst painful.

And this is where we are today; women have the potential awareness to guide men toward sacred union but men have to face their compulsion around the sexual act (especially the compulsion to be in charge of it) in order to allow women, and the feminine principle itself, to emerge into their full knowing of themselves.

Thus the re-learning and re-embodying of our sexual heritage lies (in part) in men neutralizing their compulsions in sex and relationship and in women overcoming their fear of taking control of their personal sexual experience. This is no mean task, especially for the men whose compulsive sexual habits are ingrained, like a poison, into every cell of their bodies, but it is possible, and with love and commitment to the work, the deep connection to life through sacred sexual union is available to all.

This would, and will, transform humanity!

The concept of work as a virtue as opposed to idleness as a vice is intricately tied in with enslavement of the mind. Indigenous, stone age cultures that have escaped `civilized progress’ up to the present day tend to find a rhythm in their existence in which work (the activity associated with basic survival and comfort) takes up around 3 hours of an individual’s day. The rest of the time, they utilize for other activity or they don’t utilize at all – and one gets the sense that there is no judgement associated with a tribal member’s lack of activity.

As members of a civilized society (by which I do not mean to imply any improved quality of consciousness, only a society which operates under certain civil institutions, themselves mainly originating from a need to organize too many people living unsustainably in an unnaturally reduced geographic area) we tend to view work and our compulsive commitment to it, as a result of living in a progressive, self-aware society. In other words, it would appear that only societies in which people are devoted to some kind of materially oriented work, for a high percentage of their wakeful day, can boast the achievement of being self-aware, progressive and onward moving. Yet, if one begins to measure our society against some of the stone age cultures that still exist, we appear far less self-aware, our progression seems irrelevant if not detrimental to our happiness, and our onward movement appears to be bringing us closer and closer to our own destruction.

There is the possibility (and indeed our ultimate hope) that this self-destruct process is our spirit path, and is drawing us to a place where we experience separation in its most extreme. That perhaps we need to come to this place before we can truly appreciate the joy of union. However, that is no reason to idealise the place humanity has arrived at.

The belief that we `should’ be engaged in work does not originate from any deep understanding that work heightens our self-knowledge, or brings greater quality of life, or serves the community; it stems from those early moments in human history when certain stratas of society began to gain ascendance over others. An aristocracy began to emerge and for their lifestyle choices (which demanded less and less that they live off the sweat of their own backs) to be made manifest, someone else had to work to keep them alive in the fashion they were accustomed to. Thus a society began to form in which it was essential for the preservation of the structure, that had been created, that there was instilled within the bulk of the population a belief that they existed mainly (if not only) to work; that if they refused to conform or didn’t meet expectations, they were anti-social aberrations of enlightened society and hardly worth the effort it took to terminate their existence.

This belief grew into a great river of human consciousness until it resulted in the enslavement of millions and the unprecedented luxurious living of the few. Though, of course, competition for this luxurious life-style was intense both from within and without a society and so those enjoying the lavish riches of elite living had to work just as hard as their slaves in order to keep the position that they had won or inherited. Thus all were enslaved!

This has all come at great cost to the human experience. Not just the cost of being enslaved by culture, religion, work and prejudice, but the loss of beauty in the experience of the human life. Of all aspects of life attended upon by mystics and poets alike, none is so bemoaned as this loss.

Society today has little awareness of this loss; naturally, since our freedoms have been gradually eroding over millennia and also because we’re working too compulsively and too consistently to notice what we’re missing. It is easy to underestimate the drive to be successful, yet it is relentless in its demands that we sacrifice our pure enjoyment of life in its attainment.

D.H. Lawrence wrote so passionately about this loss as he witnessed the mutilation of humanity into dull machines during the industrial revolution of the early 20^th century. Indeed, when truly `seen’ this mutilation is quite horrific and runs through all levels of society, it is the anathema of life and joy and robs the human of their deep and magical connection to spirit.

We enter now a time of radical change and it is hard to see how these sacrifices will be dropped from our lives since our political/economic system, which keeps us bodily alive if not mindfully so, is totally reliant upon the belief among the greater part of the population that they must adhere to this sacrificial life and keep their lives focused on the preservation of themselves (within the system) and thus the system itself.

Most people want change though they don’t want the responsibility of initiating it or paying for it. Yet there is nothing to pay for and as far as initiating goes, nothing to do. We simply need to be the change; action may or may not come from that state of being and is purely secondary to the being itself.

Let us become mystics and poets, it is what we truly are – lovers of beauty and enjoyers of life; then beautiful people, the world will be changed.

The secret to happiness is to leave it alone. There are so many theories concerned with achieving happiness, so much energy devoted to its manifestation in our lives; in fact, we are so culturally obsessed with being happy that we have included `the pursuit of happiness’ as one of the basic tenets of the most influential constitution in the current political world.

Yet, despite all this avowed commitment to being happy, (and partly due to it) much of humanity remains miserable, or, if not miserable, depressed.

One of the reasons for all this depression is due to the fact that we are so compulsively driven to becoming happy, but

`Those only are happy . . . who have their minds fixed on some object other than happiness’

Sir John Stuart Mill

Reality is created on paradox, perhaps this is why in Zen teachings so much emphasis is placed on Koans (contemplation of the paradoxical) – because it is here that we can make contact with what exists and begin to drop our attachment to the illusion.

Buckminster Fuller explained the natural law of paradox in geometric terms; he describes the honey bee searching for nectar; when the bee approaches the centre of the flower two events take place; the bee gets the nectar, which is directly in front of it, but also, apparently unknown to the bee, at a 90 degree angle to the direction of the intention of the bee (the nectar), pollination takes place as its legs and body rub the sexual organs of the flower. This 90 degree angle is a crucial perception of the nature of reality; it is a principle that runs through all life and gains more and more significance as one begins to study ancient science and sacred geometry. What Fuller has realised and demonstrated so gracefully, is that any action sets up a lateral complementary action that may have more far reaching consequences than the intention behind the original action. Thus the bee’s intention is to get the nectar for its local community (the hive) and in doing this, it is responsible for pollinating the world.

If the bee were human and realised this responsibility, it would probably suffer a stroke at the overwhelming nature of the task before it, or it might try to do the job more efficiently through delegation and division of labour etc. Either approach would probably be catastrophic for the future pollination of the planet.

The point is, that it’s essential to focus the intention where it naturally needs to be focussed, then all things fall into place and the web of life operates blissfully, effortlessly. And this is where humans miss the whole nature of life; they forget the nectar (their dharma) and try to create the blissful, effortless state of mind through a myriad varying avenues of thought and action. We forget that the deeper reaching effects of our actions occur laterally at 90 degrees to our intention. So if we drive toward happiness, we invite what lies at 90 degrees to that intention – depression! A simple equation it would seem.

So, if craving happiness is inviting misery into our lives, what can we focus on that will invite happiness? The Buddhists have provided this answer for centuries in the concept of dharma; dharma is the natural path to tread, one’s dharma is the life one has been created to follow. For a bee, dharma is collecting nectar, for a human? Here we can turn to the mystical traditions of the Sufis (the Dervishes). For the Sufis, humanity’s dharma is to serve. This is described in the story of a sage who repeatedly saves a scorpion from drowning as the creature wanders in to the river. Every time he saves the scorpion, he is stung by it, yet he continues in this way. When asked why he saves the scorpion when it will invariably sting him, he replies that is the scorpion’s dharma to sting, whilst humanity’s dharma is to save.

And thus we find within the Sufi tradition a beautiful and practical way to invite happiness into our lives; to be of service. This is an attitude of mind, not necessarily an action; in other words, we must be service, not do service. One Dervish once said

`any other person I happen to be with, I just think of as the Master’s Guest, therefore good to be served at the highest level’

Could anyone put it better than that?

The Sufi is the servant of all humanity, indeed of spirit, and their teaching is simple; through genuine service we fulfil our dharma, and when we fulfil our dharma we become joy. Not only do we become joy, we begin to overflow with joy so that we cannot help but infuse those around us with it. How different is this joy from the happiness that we so ardently desire for ourselves; now, instead of trying to create inner peace and contentment for the ego (to which there must be a finite limitation – i.e. the intention is to create enough happiness for me personally, there is no real thought in this intention to create happiness for anyone else), there is an intention to serve, and joy bubbles up and flows on into all life around. And thus, the following of our own individual dharma, creates the environment in which all life begins to benefit,`First we receive the light, then we impart the light, thus we repair the world’, Kabbalistic Saying.

And in the process, we become happiness!

Jonathan

Today’s society is witness to a huge gap in wealth distribution between rich and poor, and it is often written that this gap has increased over the past 20-30 years. This may be the case, but in general, over the past 6-8 millenia, there has always been such a vast difference in wealth distribution that neither side of the divide can imagine what life is like for the other.

We can safely presume that any society based on a hierarchical structure (of payments), is going to distribute around 80% of its wealth to around 5% of its population. And we have examples in history of why and how this happens; to understand the dynamics of unequal wealth examine what happens to an egalitarian society that clashes with a `civilized’ one. One of the best documented examples of this is what occurred within the lands east of the Rhine and north of the Danube over the first 4 centuries AD. The meeting takes place on the frontier of the Roman Empire between Romans and the Germanic Tribes.

The Germans were materially poor, generally nomadic/semi-nomadic and seemed to have 3 hereditary castes of citizen. Slave, freedman and freeman. The slaves were `recruited’ from prisoners of war, the freedman was someone who had himself been freed or whose ancestors, recent or past, had attained freedom from bondage. Neither slaves nor freedmen held any political power within the tribe, but the freemen did, and their power was evenly spread across the whole population. It’s difficult to know what percentage of the population were freemen, but we can estimate anywhere between 30-60%. Whatever the case, the distribution of wealth was evenly distributed across a large (possibly a majority) portion the population and was not concentrated in the hands of the few.

A consequence of this political organization for the Romans when they came into contact with the Germanic tribes was that they had no control over the peoples beyond their frontiers. So began a process of `Romanisation’ in which the Romans would foster a preference for certain individuals within the tribes, or certain cliques, and materially and politically elevate them above their fellow tribesmen. The favoured few would receive material wealth, weapons and even armed support from the empire to further their ambitions – so long as they suited Roman interests. A classic divide and rule policy that many European powers continued to exercise in later centuries (e.g. The British in India).

By favouring persons, cliques and sometimes tribes over others, the Romans spread the seed of inequality into the ranks of the German peoples and thus, German society was transformed utterly and permanently.

Politically this was expedient for the Romans; they began to obtain a measure of control over the unruly northern tribes that had eluded them before. Ironically this policy, though successful for 400 years, was to contribute hugely to the downfall of the Western Roman empire in the 5^th century, as it was through ever increased coordination amongst the German tribes and a concentration of power in the hands of a few, that provided the Germans with the means to penetrate the empire and finally parcel it out amongst themselves. But this is to reach beyond the point of interest here, that being, what occurred over these 4 centuries within the internal dynamics of German society.

As wealth flooded in to certain elements of society, so the sense of inequality and injustice began to infiltrate the tribes. The wealth being so desired by all, became an object to be fought for in itself, and evidence suggests it was hard fought for. Thus a radically new element of political strife entered the lives of the Germanic peoples. With it came a transformation of their political organization; as wealth accrued in the hands of individuals, so those `fortunate’ ones could afford retainers. Once a man could sustain this kind of `private army’, he could bequeath it to his heirs, and so wealth, as it concentrated through Romes’ deliberate policy, became something that could be passed on within the family and the creation of a landed and militarily dominant aristocracy emerged.

The radical transformation of German society resulting from this cannot be underestimated. It created an environment that would allow them to eventually take on and over-run the most powerful empire in the world (or at least, half of it) – but gone was the egalitarian society of the first century. Gone were the general assemblies in which the whole tribe would decide domestic and foreign policy (a bone of particular contention for the Romans), gone forever was the political `grass roots’ power base; from this point forward, German society, like Roman, would be dominated by a wealth grasping elite, a situation which continues into our modern day.

I would suggest, the basic principal behind the deliberate distribution of wealth, remains the same. Attract the few with the `carrot’ of wealth, power and prestige, and control society from the top down. The more wealth people have, the more they have to lose, and as such, the more compliant they will be; for in our society, like Roman society before us, only those who conform to the received wisdom of the culture, will be chosen to attain positions in society that carry the tenets of wealth, political power and prestige. This is perhaps why it was said the `kingdom of heaven’ was most accessible to the `poor’, for they have not sacrificed any of their values to become poor.

Perhaps for the first time in our `known’ history, we are at a place where there is a dawning understanding that wealth is available to all. The truth is that all that prevents us from achieving wealth in our lives is our own limited consciousness. Naturally the `elite’ classes in our society will hold on to wealth as much as they can, this is our challenge and that is their role within the unfolding play that we take part in. But creation of wealth is linked to our subtle consciousness and its elusive nature in so many of our lives, is due, not primarily to a grasping social elite, but to our inability to allow wealth into our lives through our attitudes which are so grounded in fear, sense of lack and desperate desire for that which we feel is denied us. The political and social elites of society are aware of these negative mindsets and engage themselves heartily to keep us caught there.

The system of unequal distribution of wealth challenges us to overcome our conscious blocks and create our own sustainable livelihoods. The first step in that process being to release our judgements around wealth, who has it, and why. Generally if we are caught up in resentment of those with wealth, it’s unlikely we’ll ever taste it ourselves. Yet one man’s wealth doesn’t need to be another’s lack of it. Ultimately, it is communal wealth we need, to heal the damage caused by the `distribution racket’. Thus we not only aim to bless ourselves with our wealth, but also others.

Much of the work that is emerging at this time around our ability to create our own wealth tends to centre on individuals, which is understandable since we must all start at the individual level. But it remains essential in my mind to proceed with such work with the whole community in mind; that the enriching of the self is simply a step along to road to enriching others. As this increasingly becomes the understanding of wealth creators around the world, so we will begin to see our society change dramatically. This will require a certain level of altruism, but altruism is at heart, primarily a self-interested pursuit since balance is impossible within the individual if it is not evident within the whole. Thus the redistribution of wealth will not rely on `doing good’ or a `sense of moral responsibility’ but will depend upon the wakefulness of the society as a whole. Part of that waking process requires coming to an understanding of why and how society has been manipulated into such an equal position, realizing that this manipulation is no longer necessary or in any way beneficial, and finally receiving the divine insight that the gifts we give are what truly enrich us.

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`I had gone a-begging from door to door in the village path, when thy golden chariot appeared in the distance like a gorgeous dream and I wondered who was this King of all kings!

My hopes rose high and methought my evil days were at an end, and I stood waiting for alms to be given unasked and for wealth scattered on all sides in the dust.

The chariot stopped where I stood. Thy glance fell on me and thou camest down with a smile. I felt that the luck of my life had come at last. Then of a sudden thou didst hold out thy right hand and say “What hast thou to give me?’’

Ah, what a kingly jest it was to open thy palm to a beggar to beg! I was confused and stood undecided, and then from my wallet I slowly took out the least little grain of corn and gave it to thee.

But how my surprise when at the day’s end I emptied the bag on the floor to find a least little grain of gold among the poor heap. I bitterly wept and wished that I had had the heart to give thee my all.’

The Gitanjali (Verse 50) – Rabindranath Tagore

James Hillman (author of the Soul’s Code) suggests that here in the west we are – every one of us – essentially Christian. By which he means that we have all been culturally indoctrinated into the Christian belief structure and, whether we accept it or not, it provides the fundamental value system upon which we have built our society; if we grew up in the `West’ we can’t avoid being a part of it.

He makes the point to stress that this `exclusive’ cultural basis provides a `justified’ route to War – often in the name of Peace. So it seems that when we can identify a `belief system’ that is constantly operating deep within the subconscious roots of all our minds, it is well worth bringing that `system’ into the light, to examine it and question whether it serves or hinders our purpose.

One aspect of `belief/religion’ that has developed over the generations is the tendency toward leaving behind the notion of many `Gods’ and settling on just the `One God’. This has had enormous repercussions in the way in which society has ordered and directed itself; for many Gods and Goddesses first of all allows the possibility of interpreting the universal principles as being both masculine and feminine. The `One God’ belief has invariably landed us all with the deep insistance that the male principle is the ultimate governor of life. This alone brings `God’ and `his’ existence, as a reflection of reality, into serious question.

But there are a myriad other aspects of Pantheism that offer a richer diversity and flexibility of structure than the `One God’ universe.

Due to our linear perspective on life, we tend to see everything as well defined and separate, but ancient societies would not have viewed life in this way. Thus when we (contemporary humans) talk of the Greek Pantheon of Gods we assign to each god a purpose and definite character that can identify them as separate entities from the other Gods; this was not how they were conceived and perceived by our ancestors, each God or Goddess had a name and a role but both were interchangeable and overlapped with the names and roles of their fellow Gods. They represented principles of life, and the boundaries between those principles were vague and ever changing.

This mirrors Nature’s constant flux and change and lack of definition; everything melds into everything else, nothing is independent of the Web of Life and in this way Pantheists could look to their `Gods’ and know that each was dependent upon the others for their very existence – no God/Goddess could exist alone because it was the relationships that connected them, that gave voice to their purpose, checked and balanced their power and influence and gave them identity as proponents on the stage of life.

Contrast this with the `One God’ doctrine that separates God from Nature, in that God is the overall director of the Natural World, `He’ is not part of the hurly-burly of the constantly moving reality, rather he observes it as an inventor might observe his creation and, in many cases, judge it (and us) to be misguided and need of some fitting punishment or `correction’.

The Pantheist knows his/her Gods are not independent of life, they’re in it, struggling with it (Hephaestos), or playing with it (Hermes) much as we do. There is the understanding that the Gods are representing life and our own purpose within it, and as such, they provide a more attainable and reflective image or symbol of the human experience of life – and here we have one of the greatest and most significant differences between the two belief systems; Theism in some way denies the human experience its rightful place in life, for the human is flawed, born into `original sin’ and constantly straining to achieve an impossible `sinless’ existence (the act of a madman); whereas Pantheism provides us with divine forces we can identify with, for although they transcend human experience (demonstrating an ability for us to do the same), they nonetheless find themselves intrinsically linked to it and as such offer a map for the mind of a real and meaningful experience of life.

So, if I was asked, `What is more useful to humanity as a symbol of its experience of life on earth?’ I would answer Pantheism. And if the purpose of religion is to `enable’ us to navigate our lives according to our true nature, then this begs the question `What are we doing trying to imagine the `One God’ universe when it bears so little relation to our daily lives?’ Surely the multiple representatives of a Pantheon provide a more accurate map?

I’m not suggesting we return to a Pantheist world-view in a religious sense, indeed I would advocate leaving religion completely behind us since it has mainly separated and disorientated us into false identities and spurred us into living lives in which violence and `Death culture’ predominate. Rather I invite us to consider the powerful symbolism of Pantheism, and encourage the questioning of the `Only One God’ cult we have inherited. Only by questioning that which operates so deep within our psyche can we even come to an awareness of its existence, and from that moment of awareness our emancipation can begin as we start to reclaim our true nature, our humanness.