I want more

A poem about consumption, quite relevant at this time of year, with a chorus from an old favourite tune:

I want more

More entertainment
More sport
More news
More channels
More cooking shows
More food

When the urge hits your mind
like an emptiness blind,
that's a-more!

More music
More variety
More choice
More games
More laughs
More travel

Fill the gap in your gut
there's no end to the glut,
that's a-more!

More downloads
More apps
More speed
More sizzle
More pizazz
More thrills

Jam the void in your soul
the insatiable hole,
that's a-more!
that's a-more!

Soul

“As soon as we allow ourselves to think of the world as alive, we recognise that a part of us knew this all along. It is like emerging from winter into spring.”

Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature

I went walking not long ago in the hills behind the central Victorian town of Heathcote. It is dry, rocky country full of hardy box trees and wattles. The earth is red clay dressed with grey tussock grasses, and you feel the silence more than hear any sound from a living thing. If you sit down somewhere you might see an industrious bull-ant heaving a dead bug off to its nest or a curious skink appear on a lichen-covered rock. 

I came to a lookout from where in the distance you can see the roofs of the town. The wattles were in bloom, spiky saplings with bright yellow balls lighting up the dour, olive-grey bush. 

Sitting on a rock at the lookout I began to get a sense of the presence of this land. A shimmering feeling came to me, a joy for the aliveness of this place and its unique character. I felt blessed to be there. And this joy seemed to be emanating from the land, shining from the very surface and through every living thing – it sparked the air all around. I felt like I was witnessing a gentle but deeply profound force.

For better or worse, my mind wants to conceptualise. I want to be able to connect the intangible, which I recognise to be a large part of life, to the material world.

Soul is not talked about much in our society, but its effects are profound and everywhere to see. In fact without it, life could not exist. It is the principle of quality that informs and interpenetrates material existence. All objects need soul for their integrity. Take something like a block of wood – inspecting it on many levels we can see its shape and grooves, its geometry, the mathematics of its angles, its cellular structure, its former presence as part of a tree, its design as part of the framework of a house. The block of wood has integrity and purpose, and therefore soul is present in it. 

Everything in the universe has soul, but we must have eyes to see it. I think it requires fine and developed appreciation, and this is something that the religious spirit over the millennia has tried to cultivate. Religions have sought to connect people with the meaning and integrity of their existence within a meaningful universe. All religions, whatever their differences, are ultimately ways to relationship with soul. They are means by which the gaze can be shifted from everyday material life to the inner forces that infuse and enrich that life.

At a time of decline in organised religion, we can still connect with soul. It can be through poetry or meditation, through being in nature or any place that sparks reflection, through any good relationship, celebration or ritual. Wherever there is quality, there is soul. And for those who experience it, even just an occasional glimpse, everything shines and is truly wonderful.

We humans have the capacity to recognise soul but we can also deny it and act against it. When we deny it, we have the potential to align with what could be described as the “dark principle”, the manifestations of which are disconnection, destructiveness and evil. What is often labelled “soulless” – for instance a treeless urban environment of concrete high-rise buildings and freeways – is an example of human work (conscious or not) for disconnection and dissolution. The symptoms of living in soulless environments include relationship breakdown, alienation, addictions, and poor mental and physical health. These have been well-documented in the outer suburbs of cities where there is a lack of community and integrated, meaningful life.

Soul is still present in that kind of environment, but it is obscured by that which is its opposite and which works against it. We have to liberate soul by acting to increase relationship, connection and community. Even in the most extreme circumstances, such as wars, it is impossible to say that soul is not there. If it were totally absent, there would simply be no existence.  

My experience in the hills behind Heathcote was a personal pointer to soul. I wish that I was more aware of it in my life and in the world at large, and that I acted more in concert with it. This is a challenge for all of us as individuals, but I believe it’s also something we have to face collectively as a global human community. Perhaps all the global issues – the need for environmental repair and economic, political and social justice – ultimately mean us acting together in service of soul.

Untaming the wild

Cape Tribulation, despite its name, is a jewel – there is no other way to describe it. I had the privilege of being there recently.

Named so by 18^th-century British explorer James Cook because his ship struck a nearby reef, the cape is three hours’ drive north of Cairns in far-north Queensland. It’s a blissful place, with emerald-coloured rainforest spilling down from a backdrop of the Great Dividing Range onto a beach that looks out to the Coral Sea. The tropical forest is intensely, fiercely alive in a way that surprises and beguiles a person from the temperate south. Giant fan palms and strangler fig trees, coiling vines and ferns of all description compete in a dense profusion of life. There are the bizarre “meowing” calls of the cat bird and the hooping sound of the wompoo pigeon, and on the forest floor the scratching of brush turkeys and scuttling of goannas. It’s a bewitching, magical place and quite different from any other I have been to in Australia.  

A friend of mine was at Cape Tribulation 30 years ago. Then, she says, there was but a rough dirt road and a small number of hippies living in huts. Now, the sealed road allows a steady stream of tourists up to the cape. Cabins, hostels and bed-and-breakfasts are strung along the way, mostly tucked into the forest in “eco-tourist” fashion. Some of the nearby land has been cleared for farming and horticulture.

Beyond the consumption of “sights” and activities that is tourism, I suspect many people come to a place like Cape Tribulation to commune with nature. Though perhaps not conscious of it, they want to speak to the environment and to receive its words in whatever fashion. It’s an acknowledgement and opening to mystery and to forms of communication beyond those of the ordinary human world. Even if all you do is lie on a beach for a week and read a book, that beach somehow makes its way into you; it speaks to you; its rhythm and vibration meet yours.

We seek out nature to get in touch with our true self, our soul. Outside the well-trodden paths of the human world we meet not just our own life in depth, but the very Ground of Being. The jaggedness of our ego is somehow smoothed as it begins to find its proper place in the great scheme of Life. Perhaps we experience ourselves as in nature, not outside it. 

The difficulty, nowadays, is that humans are spreading in greater numbers across all parts of the globe and wiping out non-human nature. And as places like Cape Tribulation are cornered in national parks, cut by roads and swelled with tourists, communion with nature becomes harder. What is destroyed cannot return. In order to save nature humans have to retreat somewhat, to reign in and ultimately decrease the human population, to stop building roads, dams, mines and other major incursions into the natural world. And much more money and resources need to go to saving species and ecosystems – a global Marshall Plan devoted to nature preservation. 

The heart of the matter, though, is not one of harnessing human willpower to save nature. It requires a change in human consciousness. As many ecologically minded thinkers and activists have been saying for some time, we have to see ourselves as part of nature, not separate from it. That entails behaviour that is light on the planet, that values locality and simplicity, and that is fundamentally about relationship and connection. 

Crucially, we need to rediscover nature in ourselves and in our immediate environment. For all our faults, we are one of the expressions of life on this living planet and our actions need to be in accord with this reality. In the city, we can bring non-human nature back through the planting of native trees and shrubs wherever possible, digging up bitumen car parks and empty land. We can also cultivate food in this way and keep animals. An urban green revival has already started, with examples including community gardens and revegetation groups, green roofs and rooftop hives for beekeeping. The movement, however, is still in its infancy and has a long way to go.

Perhaps, over time, something of the communion with nature that we experience at a place like Cape Tribulation could be felt just where we are – wherever we are. Many people who garden in their backyards develop an intuitive sense of nature, as well as joy and balance, from direct connection with the earth. The more we get in touch with nature, the more we are in touch with ourselves. Then, perhaps, with spiritual development and refinement we would not need to escape so much to national parks and other wilderness for inner nourishment. The distinction between the “wild” and “domestic” will be less relevant as all life is experienced as sacred.

Limits are good

The mere shattering of form is for human as well as for animal life a disaster, ritual and decorum being the structuring forms of all civilization.

Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By

Limits are a dirty concept in our culture. We want to get what we can whenever we can. And the logic of economic activity in our time is of ceaseless growth and expansion.

Limits are a dirty concept because our culture is thoroughly penetrated by the worldview of market economics, to the exclusion of almost everything else. The goal of life is a feast of materialism in which we want ever more.

This worldview is dominant in what has been described as the “postmodern” era, when the inner dimension of meaning and values is fluid and unshaped. Ambiguity and uncertainty, with no central meaning to anything, are its defining features. It is said the world is made up of an infinite number of “discourses”, of constantly changing forms without absolute value.

At the risk of sounding reactionary, I think limits are good. We are stuck in simplistic views of them as restrictive and oppressive; it’s time we developed a more sophisticated understanding of form and limits.

All material form has structure and therefore limits. As the form changes, so does its structure and the limits inherent in it. A seed in the earth becomes a sapling and then a mature tree, which eventually dies and goes back into the earth to nurture more growth. At each stage in the process of change there are embodied limits. A eucalypt seed will not sprout an oak, a sapling can only grow a certain amount depending on conditions, a tree is a tree and not a rhinoceros or any other form, and like all form it eventually dies and renews with its death the ground from which it emerged. Even with genetic modification, form ambiguity and fluidity, there is still form and limit, though it may be difficult to name or comprehend. All material form has limit.

Limits need not be restrictive – in fact, they are continuously changing as all form evolves. In the human world, limits are necessary for social relations. As we allow certain behaviours, so we proscribe others for everybody’s benefit. Over time our limits change as our understanding of “the good” changes – when once there was slavery, now it is banned; when once we restricted the roles of women, now those restrictions are lifted. When we chafe or buck at certain social limits, feeling them to be oppressive, we are saying that the forms to which they belong no longer affirm life in a meaningful way. This then allows human society to grow and develop, changing its laws, relationships and sense of itself. New limits are set which, in time, will also be replaced as society evolves.

Limits help us to understand ourselves and our world and encourage responsibility for our actions. Children learn by bouncing off limits – when a child touches a hot iron, it knows not to do that again. Adults also learn by making mistakes, or meeting the limits of their capabilities or actions.  

To be cavalier with limits is dangerous, and to ignore them outright invites disaster. The ancient Greek goddess Nemesis would visit retribution on anyone who broke fundamental laws or had too much of anything. In our own time, the result of greed and disregard of limits is the destruction of life on Earth, which ultimately imperils human survival. We need to urgently rediscover the importance of limits.

Our postmodern uncertainty and sense of ambiguity around limits are symptoms of a major period of transition in which the old ways of understanding are no longer helpful. We have reached an age of complexity in human material power and knowledge that requires new vision. As in times past, transition periods are chaotic, and much of the worst of human nature rises to the surface. There is a need for a realignment of values and meaning to meet the shape of current times. This will ultimately mean the creation of new forms and the setting of new limits.

Jungian author David Tacey says Western society is based on knowledge, but Indigenous cultures are grounded in wisdom. I think he has touched on something very important. Wisdom implies humility, which is recognition of oneself in relationship with others, a healthy tempering of the ego. A life-affirming society with ecological balance and respect cannot be achieved by form-breaking materialism. It will need to have wisdom at its core.   

Love and its uses II

Guest and friend Magi Whisson explores Love and Its Uses in the second special presentation on the subject in this blog.

By Magi Whisson

The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, "The evolution of chastity" in Toward the Future 

These words by de Chardin herald the primacy of love as an evolutionary imperative and sound a beckoning call to humanity to enter into critical and profound relationship with this new fire.

de Chardin's view is supported by many other great mystics. Rudolf Steiner states in Love and its Meaning in the World that "the mission of our Earth is the cultivation of the principle of love to its highest degree by the beings evolving upon it. When the Earth has reached the end of its evolution, love should permeate it through and through."

Love stands as one of the deep creative powers of the universe. It is relational and purposeful as it directs and binds all forms of life towards a greater whole. It is always in service to forwarding a completing design, an ultimate sacred geometry that will hold all life in accord. Through love we can enter into a pattern of dynamic, cohesive, redemptive relations.

For Socrates love was a daemon, an inner god or spirit, an inspiring force.

Love is so known and yet unknown to us.
Love is fundamentally and intrinsically woven into human nature while also remaining transcendent to it.

Parents are often unbelieving at how much they love their newborn child. The immanence of love is all-consuming. Reciprocally they are profoundly touched by love when the child, in innocence and without scholarship, smiles in recognition of them for the first time. Love draws and binds people together.

We 'fall' in love when pierced by cupid's arrow and, for a period of time, the 'other' and the world around us is euphorically embraced. Destinies are brought together. New unions that will then need to be lived into life are formed. Love draws the future into the present, that which is yet to be, into time. Precursive love offers leadership, a pathway through the ensuing mystery.

Alternatively we may have matured the wisdom, or experienced the isolation and limitation of the single 'I' and will self-initiate the outreach, the opening towards the wider group, the 'we'. In doing so we open the door for love to enter - for love's focus is the whole, not the part.

Love can penetrate our life from the 'top down', allowing that which would otherwise remain transcendent to immanently enter our lives. We are graced and shaped by love's entrance. We are gifted by the gods.

Or it can be we who from the 'bottom up' recognise the pathway to right relationship and through our own empowered, conscious actions anchor love in the world. In so doing we not only create a better world around us, but also a direct relationship with love and, indeed, return a necessary gift to the gods. The circle of love becomes a returning spiral.

The quest of love is a long, relational journey towards oneness.
This journey asks us to resolve deep complexities of difference and unity both within us and without. It asks us to relingquish all that inhibits unification with the 'other' while standing true to that which is integral and essential to our own true self. It also asks us to hold relationship to a higher order of Life, a greater whole, that serves the interest of all.

This task can only proceed and mature through eons of time. Along the way there is that which could not or has not been met by love, by right relationship, and therefore a heritage has been created. The sins of the fathers are passed on to the sons. In Jungian terms we become bound by both our individual and collective unconscious shadow. Love is misappropriated and misunderstood, tied up with conflicting, unconscious wishes and desires at all levels. Without conscious, redemptive loving, perpetration and the abuse system continue with cumulative and devastating effect.

Humanity today has crossed an evolutionary threshold. For eons we have been sustained, gifted and resourced by the gods of heaven and earth. But humanity has now used up its quota of giveness and is now at a point in evolutionary development whereby it must become the giver and enter into a co-creative relationship with life and with the gods and all they issue. We too have to be the 'Gods' that sustain and forward the Life around us. The stars will no longer sing man into being, it is we who must sing the stars. It is time for humanity to act with empowered love.

Love holds a deep paradox. It asks us to surrender into the whole, while remaining integral to it. Love asks of the 'I' that it dies to the 'we' yet in doing so finds its own central life.

The hidden jewel of love is its inherent gift of return. This is poetically expressed by Rudolf Steiner: "One's love of another being will shine back into one's own self. The self will then be able to love without loving itself." Love offers an ultimate freedom with and from oneself.

Love is generative through inter-relationships in their manifold expression. Love is directed towards the will-to-good for the good of all.

May the fire burn.



 

Reflections on the collective unconscious

A pretty young woman vanishes late one night while walking home from a bar. Her distraught family and the police appeal to the public for clues. Social media pages are set up to aid in the search. The police release closed-circuit television footage of the woman speaking to an unknown man as she walked home. Within a week of her disappearance a man is arrested and charged with her rape and murder. Her body is found in a shallow grave outside town.

These are the bare facts in the case of Gillian Meagher, who worked in administration at the local ABC radio station in Melbourne. In a city of 4 million people, with crime reported every day of the week, the public’s response to her death has been anything but typical. Thousands of people flooded social media to express their distress at her disappearance, followed by a wave of grief when it was confirmed she was dead. Hundreds of flower bouquets were laid outside the dress shop where she was last seen alive and at the front of a nearby church, where a candlelit vigil allowed strangers to pay their respects. A few days later about 30,000 people took part in a “peace” march in her name, a stone memorial appeared suddenly amid the flowers at the place where her body was found, and a large graffiti in her memory was painted in a city laneway. A torrent of hate at the accused man poured through Facebook and other social media. 

Public or mass consciousness is relatively predictable most of the time and can be shaped. Legions of experts in fields like advertising and public relations are paid to work out ways to manipulate the mass psyche. They do this by tapping into the collective and individual unconscious, recognising that there are patterns in the way people think and act, and certain basic emotions and desires that can be triggered. 

Consciousness rests on a vast sea of unconscious psychic energy. While aspects of it can be manipulated, the unconscious is essentially untameable by human will. Its ways are profoundly mysterious. Jungian psychology holds that, for individual and collective psychic health, unconscious elements need to be drawn into the light of consciousness, to be digested and integrated. They carry important messages about us we ought to hear. When the unconscious is separated from consciousness, when it is not addressed with due validation and insight, it acts autonomously, chaotically breaking into conscious life. 

The public’s response to Jill Meagher’s disappearance and death may be such an outbreak of the collective unconscious: a great rush of energy and emotion seemingly out of nowhere and sweeping everyone along with it. Nobody can quite explain the phenomenon or just why they feel so deeply.  The death of this young woman is tragic and we should be horrified and feel compassion for her, but the intensity of feeling among so many speaks of something else. Symbols are the language of the unconscious and it is to them we must turn if we are to understand it.

Perhaps Jill Meagher became a symbol of innocence; of goodness destroyed by evil. The abuse of innocence has a fundamental impact on the psyche: it is a break in the natural order of things, a crime against nature itself, a shattering of taboo. We can all relate because all of us go through a stage of innocence – childhood – and there are few who go through that stage without some rupture of innocence on some level. There is also the fact that this crime occurred in Melbourne’s inner-north, where there is a sense of community and where many young, socially connected and socially progressive professional people live. It represents a major break in the order.
  

Perhaps also the response to Jill Meagher is an expression of the desire to move beyond or redeem some abusive tendencies that have persisted in the collective psyche for thousands of years. These relate to violence towards women, the denigration of women, sexism and misogyny. It indicates that there is a readiness among a significant portion of society to transcend these archaic elements.

There is also the internet and its effects. I believe Facebook, Twitter and the other social media are bringing the unconscious much closer to the everyday world. The veil between the two worlds is becoming thinner. The unconscious holds creative, life-affirming energy as well as that which is harmful, and we have seen social media, in the case of Jill Meagher, act as a lightning rod for solidarity, social action and collective grief. Yet the internet is an outlet, through anonymity and distancing, for a sludge of hate and anti-social tendencies. Now, perhaps more than ever, we need social and spiritual processes that can contain, illuminate and redeem that which is held inside us.   

A new global order

I’ve been observing with interest on TV the protests by Muslims around the world over that Z-grade anti-Muslim film, excerpts of which appeared on the internet.

I think there is a sub-text to the outrage over the film, and it relates much more broadly to the kind of world we want to live in.

It’s clear that the film has triggered broad hostility to the West. Here we should take into account that the media typically focuses on the violent and extreme fringes of protest – many, probably most Muslims would not accept a violent response to the issue. Nevertheless I think it is safe to assume that, at the very least, there is ambivalence towards Western society and its ways in parts of the world, tending towards outright hostility among many people.

These attitudes are understandable. I think of the experience of Aboriginal people here in my country, Australia. When the British colonised this land, beginning in 1788, they carried a supremacist attitude – the indigenous people were mere brutes who needed to be thankful for the advanced civilization they were being brought. An alien, Christian god was imposed to “save them”. Aboriginal communities still struggle with the aftermath of dispossession and destruction of their culture and traditional way of life. There is a sense that White society is critically at odds with indigenous values, which are deeply spiritual and connected to land. Aboriginal people somehow have to negotiate two very different worlds, and are faced with a constant threat of loss of culture, language and values to the broader White society. 

Shift your gaze to the Middle East and a similar process is at work. When the Ottoman Turks were defeated in World War I, control of the Middle East shifted to the British and the French. Most of the current states there – Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia etc – were created in the 20^th century by the colonial powers. A supremacist attitude of the superiority of European civilization and inferiority of Arab cultures went with the colonial project. Too little has changed since – America is now the overriding power, with Western culture dominant in a globalised world.

The “clash of cultures” thesis has emerged in recent times as a way of explaining the hostility in Islamic countries towards the West. But I think it misses a crucial point: there is no level playing field when it comes to cultural interaction in our world. For all its social and technological advances, for all the talk of democracy and freedom, power is at the heart of Western civilization. Power and domination has been achieved by the West through economic forces, and the entire world now dances to the tune of multinational corporations, banks and the IMF. Nations are successful to the extent they embrace the Western economic model and the materialist culture that goes with it: open their doors to foreign investment, integrate into the global financial structure, and channel the potential of their people and natural resources for economic production and consumption. China and South Korea are two success stories in this regard.

What happens, then, to those societies that cannot or will not fit in to the demands of the global system? What happens to societies where religion is still a dominant motivating force? Or indigenous cultures with priorities that are fundamentally different to the West? They are relegated to the margins and are ultimately unequal to those who accept and participate. I think this is at the heart of the resentment in the Islamic world: “choice” is an illusion where the true reality is “no-choice” acceptance of Western ways and ideals. Inevitably extremists emerge as a reaction to the pressure of cultural domination.

What is also happening is friction of different cultures in close proximity: the goading of Muslims through denigrating films and cartoons in the West is a typical response of fear and hatred of the Other that has been played out over countless centuries by various nations and groups.

I think the resolution, ultimately, will need to be a truly pluralist global order – one involving some withdrawal of power by the West and an opening of space for other cultures to flourish and grow. This respectful approach is already happening around the world in many interactions at the personal level – here in Melbourne every day people of dozens of nationalities relate to one another peacefully and harmoniously. Along with their own histories, their own customs and beliefs and whatever prejudices they may hold, there is an unspoken acceptance of common humanity.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that the more enlightened social structures and ways of relating we experience now have come about after decades or centuries of struggle and conflict, superseding older and restrictive ways. This is the human journey. I believe that eventually the world will be guided by what is common to all of us and what is best for all of us, replacing the current global order of power and ego. It may take a long time, a lot more suffering and more social and environmental crises, but maybe that is how we will have to learn before we get it right.

        

Love and its uses

I've been privileged with many wonderful teachers in my life. One of them, Nicky McCartney, here contributes to this blog on the theme of Love and Its Uses.

By Nicky McCartney

Love is instrumental, but it is not an instrument. We often confuse the two: we try to use love to make us happier, to guilt trip and put pressure on others, to wheedle and bargain.  And we are often confused about what love is. It gets mixed up with commitment, responsibility, duty, romance, feeling good, feeling safe, being generous, cooperative, receptive, flexible. Love can lead us towards these things in its instrumental capacity, but when we try to use love to force any of these, we get victimhood and perpetration.

As soon as we try to capture and control love, the corruption starts. Love knows no boundary, and capture and control are all about boundary and the use of individual will for private ends.  Love has no private ends: it interpenetrates and infuses all of life. Love knows only oneness, the group. 

Our receptivity to love and our ability to be a conduit for it depends on our capacity for inclusiveness and oneness with a greater whole. When we are able to focus on the whole, and not just the parts that make up the whole, we enter the territory of Love. It does not matter how small that whole is. It may be the whole that is produced by 1+1, me + you, or the whole that is the manifested universe.

Love asks nothing of us except receptivity to it. As it infuses our lives, we are more and more bound by its law, which is the law of Oneness. This causes a slow but inevitable revolution in the way we think, feel and act. 

Material existence has its own necessities as well: those of categorisation, boundary, separateness, personal survival, time, priorities, different physical, emotional and mental gifts and limitations, physical and psychological developmental processes.

These exigencies define much of our lives, until love creeps in to change everything. The illusion of separateness and the divisions which serve it become more apparent. The eyes of love allow us to appreciate the multi-coloured, heterogeneous reality of the material world, while seeing and experiencing the source of oneness that binds it all.

Paradoxically, in the concrete world, love without power becomes weak and open to victimisation. Will or power provide energy, boundary, direction, focus, purpose and decisiveness: the very antithesis of love.  

Wrongly used, love and power are repellant to one another or bound by an abuse system. We take advantage of love's receptivity when we try to achieve selfish ends by directing our power towards the loving, receptive part of others or ourselves. This attempt to coerce, manipulate or ignore the right place of love in our decisions and actions makes us into perpetrators. Yet if these polarities can be resolved, the marriage of love and power produces empowered love and loving power.

There is power in a factory, power in the land, Power in the hand of the worker.

But it all counts for nothing if together we don’t stand. There is power in a Union.

There is Power in a Union song, version by Billy Bragg.

How then can we bring power to love, without violence? The only way is to direct our individual will towards our best understanding of a higher order good: a good that is inclusive and which seeks to do no harm.

The boy who decides to stay away from the gang robbery on the pretext of having food poisoning, because he feels that this is a step too far, may not be yet expressing empowered love or loving power, but he is pointing himself in the right direction. His fear and distaste for the gang action and his decision to stay away are early signs of a capacity to think beyond himself and to take action in accordance with a higher order good. He may not yet be able to articulate what the good is that his decision is directing him towards, but if nurtured by multiple such choices he may one day be an embodiment of empowered love or loving power.

His embryonic capacity for love influences his discernment and his choices. His embryonic capacity for power enables him to take purposeful action. When he brings the two together towards a higher order goal, that of removing himself from possible harm to himself and others, he begins the journey which ends with enlightenment.

Step by step the longest march can be won, can be won

Many stones can form an arch, singly none, singly none

And by union what we will can be accomplished still

Drops of water turn a mill, singly none.

Traditional song. Anon.

In the concrete world, love orients itself to and expresses itself through group relations. Our participation in groups, whether physical or virtual, on the inner planes or the outer, is the only way we have of entering love’s embrace. Here we realize something of a great truth: that all is relationship; that nothing exists outside of relationship with something else; and that Love is the binding ingredient.

At the edge

The following (somewhat rough) poem was written today. It’s one particular reflection on the journey of consciousness. I’m very privileged because many of the people in my life have chosen this journey, for which ultimately there is no map. It’s what Joseph Campbell described as “the hero’s adventure”, and it has been mythologised in myriad ways in many cultures.

At the edge

There’s no rest for those at the edge

no smooth path

no clear terrain

no planned schedule that meets approval

not even harsh words – blank looks

for those at the edge.

At every turning

wheels scrape ruts in the road

At every moment the new must be made

out of nothing

The body is an experiment in mutability

it absorbs all, suffers all.

Ahead the land

falls away to air

and so I take a step

over

kindly gravity catches me in song.

The cult of change

Move fast and break things

Motto of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg

While, with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony ...

William Wordsworth

There’s a spot on a bow-shaped wooden bridge above the Merri Creek in the northern suburbs of Melbourne to which I find myself lured on my walks.

There I gaze, for a minute or two, into the water below. After rain in winter the creek is a surging torrent of turgid brown. In summer it is clear and shallow, allowing you to see to the bottom. Depending on the day, the sun’s rays can dazzle as they gleam and glint off the water. Depending on the creek’s depth and strength of current, the water ripples and glides in a multitude of ways leaving behind endless more delightful ripples and swirls.

For a brief time once every few days I am mesmerised on that bridge. And I notice others stopping there too, gazing below as if looking for something intangible; like the way people involuntarily stand and stare at the ocean. It’s the simple beauty and the sight of ceaseless movement, nature endlessly rising and falling. The inner eye is gently opened to the deeper realms of being. Paradoxically, all the shifting and movement brings stillness and calm, an experience of the eternal that lies beyond transient form.

I contrast this with the human world in which I am enveloped for most of the day. Our culture places a high value on change, but doesn’t have the vision to see the changeless. We are caught up in the hurly burly of material existence, without experiencing the eternal which underpins it. Karen Armstrong, in her book A History of God, notes how past civilisations were essentially conservative and resistant to change – they were anchored by laws that were regarded as immutable and divine. But, she says, “The modern technical society introduced by the West was based on the expectation of constant development and progress. Change was institutionalised and taken for granted.”

Without religion to point to the eternal reality, I think the West has developed a kind of cult of change in recent times. Mark Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things” sums it up. Innovation is everything, to be stationary for any length of time tantamount to failure. Boundaries or limits are suspect and will inevitably be broken by the human drive for improvement. The ideal person participates in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of experience generated by their interaction with technology and consumer products. What Zuckerberg and others like him describe is a capitalist managerial ethic overlayed with insights from the world of marketing geared towards consumerism. Once the preserve of corporate executives, the managerial change fixation has now penetrated deeply into the psyche of society as a whole.

The great failure of the cult of change is its inability to answer “To what end?” or to speak to deep human needs. I think it generates anxiety and feelings of inadequacy in many people. Change is a constant of all created reality, but human-generated change needs to be directed and purposeful to the broader needs of humanity and the planet. The idea of constant improvement has merit, but there are times when we don’t need to strive, when simply “good enough” is fine. Indeed most of the time “good enough” is appropriate: it would be silly to attach some notion of excellence to washing dishes, or to walking the dog, or sleeping. Even at work, we should be secure in knowing we are good enough while being open to improve where we can.

There is a steady-state ethic that is starting to emerge as a counterpoint to the mainstream attachment to change and growth. Informed by the environmental movement and the wisdom of indigenous cultures, it values simplicity. It tries to place the individual in context within a web of human and non-human relationships that makes up the totality of life. It reinforces the importance of ecological and other limits. And its measure is quality, as opposed to the generation of movement and money for its own sake.       

About 700 metres south of the wooden bridge of my walks there is another bridge across the Merri Creek. It is a road that for large parts of the day is clogged with traffic, noise and car fumes. I instinctively find it hostile to any sense of peace or lasting value. Yet, on a larger level, this scene is no different to the ceaseless tumult of flowing water – behind both lies the face of eternity. A well-developed eye is required to see this, and feeling to understand that change and the changeless are essentially one.

Dreams and the unconscious

“The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium.”

C.G Jung, Man and His Symbols

I’m amazed, but mostly baffled, about the way the unconscious operates. Carl Jung emphasised how little we know about it and how important it is to learn more and to engage constructively with it.

Only a few days ago I had a powerful experience that caused me to reflect about dreams and the unconscious. My partner and I were on holiday in far-north Australia and wanted to see the Great Barrier Reef, so we joined a half-day boat tour for snorkelling and whale watching. I’d never been snorkelling and I’m not a confident swimmer – I learnt the very basics in a few days on my own in a hotel swimming pool when I was nine and still need to feel the bottom with my feet or hold on to something after a few strokes. Our guide said that would not be a problem because he had devices to keep me afloat.   

After we made it to the reef and the other tourists jumped into the water with their snorkelling gear, I plunged in – and panicked. I don’t know what I was expecting, but the deep water and the idea of somehow floating while breathing through a strange plastic mask suddenly brought on fear. I gulped sea water and managed to grab the steps of the boat. My partner and the guide were good. They coaxed me into holding on to a life ring, which the guide then pulled through the water as I learnt how to breathe through the snorkel. And within a few minutes I was actually seeing the reef, gradually relaxing in the water.    

My partner and I found it difficult to talk about the experience afterwards. I was embarrassed and needed time to digest and integrate. That night we had broken sleep with disturbing dreams: mine were a mishmash of images, a collage of strange visions and fragmented energies. Though none of them were clear to me, I connected them to my hapless time in the water. A small trauma, a little wound had been created, and the psyche was responding. As Jung pointed out, the unconscious, through dreams, acts as a kind of balancing pole to keep the total mind in equilibrium. Our ego, the personality we present to the world, is in fact quite fragile; beyond it is the vast and largely mysterious unconscious. The ego is subject to myriad stimulations and phenomena every day, all of them registering in some way in the personal unconscious. If we are generally stable in ourselves and in our lives the ego can be solid and firm, but it is always subject to upset or imbalance. New experience is one of the main ways to tip us over.

Unless the ego is mature and flexible, open enough to embrace or relate playfully with new experience, it can be knocked off balance. In that case the unconscious arrives to fill the breach, with its assorted bag of fears, irrationalities and dreams. It is the instinctive and primal counterforce to the developed rationality of the ego. Some experiences of course are just too strong to be absorbed gracefully by the individual ego – on the extreme end I think of wars and natural disasters, which can fracture the psyche and lead to long-lasting imbalances where the unconscious has too much power over a personality. 

Developing a constructive relationship with the unconscious is an important function of psychology. Often we consign the most truthful and telling parts of ourselves to the far reaches of our mind, yet the unconscious continues to speak to us in dreams and other ways, providing balance to the total psyche. Its language is that of images and symbols, which is difficult for the ego, particularly one conditioned in a rationalist, scientific culture. I try to write down my dreams and make a stab of interpreting them, my method a simple one of image association. It’s not easy, the insights coming slowly over many years, but fascinating and rewarding nonetheless. An attitude of holding and accepting mystery is, I think, crucial. Jung was often at pains to point out that the unconscious needed to be taken seriously – we can’t afford to write off dreams, visions or the non-rational as unreal and unimportant – because it reveals so much about our inner selves. At the very least it demands to be noticed and given credence in our lives.  

 .  

The importance of place

There’s nothing like a sense of place. I’ve never had a stable place of residence for more than a few years in my life, but for almost two decades my surrogate emotional home has been the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne.

I’ve been going to the Vic Market most Saturdays since 1994, sitting with friends at one of the metal tables in the lane beside the delicatessen section. Fruit and vegetable shopping is the stated aim of a visit to the market but the real interest is in meeting old friends, conversation, coffee and immersion in the vibe.

There are lots of families with children, tourists passing through, couples sitting quietly together, buskers with guitars and solo singers, dogs of every size and kind, and fat overweened pigeons. I love the way you can watch people change over the years – children who grow into fine adults, stallholders taking their breaks sitting on milk crates and smoking in the lane; the friendships that come and go, and those that last. The market’s not just a backdrop to life – I imagine it having a transformative effect, a catalyst for the best in all of us. At the very least, it’s an affirmation and celebration that we are, after all, social beings.

And then there are the Vic Market legends: the time a certain reviled politician and his wife out for a casual stroll were sent fleeing after word of their presence got out in the lane; The Band Who Knew Too Much, whose joyful swinging sound attracted impossibly large crowds; and Jim, the craggy-faced seller of the Big Issue and his familiar cry, “Getcher copy of the Big Issue ‘ere, only five dollars.”

I think place is very important to human happiness. These days there’s an emphasis and tendency towards mobility – rootlessness is seen as OK because technology allows us to hook into communication networks from anywhere. But being a “person of the world” can be harmful if there are no places that are meaningful to us and with which we have a deep relationship. Places hold memory and so are part of our development, make us who we are. They are part of the weave of our lives, resonating psychologically and spiritually. Places evoke particular responses and moods that can be positive or negative – some are uplifting, others make us uneasy, dull or stupefied. At the Vic Market, I’m always reflective and deeply appreciative. For me, it’s a place to just be. I’m thankful for its presence in my life.

For thousands of years people have gone on pilgrimage to holy places. The ancient Greeks had the Oracle at Delphi, Muslims are asked to go to Mecca at least once in their life, Jews and Christians have Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Catholics the shrines and cathedrals of various saints, and Buddhists and Hindus significant geographical places and temples. Salvation is in the journey to the holy place and in the prayer or ritual conducted there; the journey is a pilgrim’s preparation for meeting with the divine, arrival the point of connection with God. Ritual renews and strengthens the bond a pilgrim has with their particular deity or expression of the divine, as well as providing a sense of union, meaning and depth in life. Power is created when the ritual happens in a group, the individual merging both with the religious community and the divine mystery/presence.

Mircea Eliade says in his brilliant book, The Sacred and the Profane, that sacred places channel a human need for connection, transcendence and meaning. They act as spiritual centre points from which meaning emanates and to which people need to return to reinvigorate their lives. Eliade points out that there are still echoes of symbol and ritual in the contemporary secular West, and people have a continuing need for transcendence. My experience at the Vic Market has something of this quality for me. It is a psychological centre point to which I return, a place of reflection and comfort. And I don’t believe that it’s solely a projection of my needs and desires onto a particular place, though an element of that is certainly there. There is a relationship between me and the Vic Market, which is re-established and remade every time I visit. This fine, unseen level of reality exits despite our materialist age and is not diminished; whether we acknowledge it is another matter.

Maybe somebody someday will set up a little shrine at the Market as an expression of thanks. It would be a concrete spiritual gesture and something perhaps for which we are not yet ready. The truth is that people show gratitude in myriad ways there anyway – buying food, chatting with the stallholders, appreciating the colour and variety of the wares, eating with friends, enjoying the ambience. Our actions have deep and lasting reverberations.

Discernment

It’s a small scene that captures the absurdity of life in the modern world: Chinese tourists pile out of a bus near Melbourne’s Parliament House and take photos of each other, faces beaming, in front of a statue of Adam Lindsay Gordon.

I see this on many mornings walking to work. It’s safe to say the tourists have no idea who Gordon was, because most Melburnians don’t know. He was a kind of tragic hero of 19^th century colonial Australia – a famed horse rider and poet who, having suffered a bad fall in a race and burdened by self-doubt and financial problems, shot himself at the age of 37.

Gordon was one of the early writers of Australian bush ballads, most notably The Sick Stockrider, a melancholy but folksy tribute to the European pioneering spirit. The Chinese tourists with their happy holiday snaps in front of his statue may not care, even if they knew. 

It’s a bizarre scene, but one that’s repeated countless times in different ways around the world and quite instructive. Disconnection is fundamental to the modern condition. Ironically at a time when people are more connected than ever across the world thanks to technology, when information is readily available on anything, deep levels of ignorance abound. 

I think in future our time will be seen as the high water mark of material consumption. Unparalleled wealth is being created with a seemingly endless variety of material goods and choices. If you have the money you can get virtually anything you want, do anything you want, be anything you want. Money has few barriers across the globe.  

Yet as passionately as we have sailed in recent times into the adventure of the material world, the inner world of Spirit has been left far behind. We lack connection with ourselves and our environment, living as tourists in our own lives. Though contemporary technology, including IT and the internet, is helpful in many ways, ingenious and creative, it has negative personal and social effects. Distraction and hyperactivity are two of the most notable. In the absence of a spiritually infused culture with healthy values, addiction to gadgets and the products of the internet is widespread as people fill the inner void. 

Despite this, I can see change. At some point perhaps not so far in the future, as a result of immense human population, scarce resources and climate change, our society will become radically different. There will no longer be endless material abundance and sheer survival will become more important as we are forced to live within environmental limits. By then as a society we may also have moved towards the inner world of meaning, connection and community.

The move towards the Spirit starts with discernment. It’s about engaging quality. Discernment lifts an individual out of the common denominator of the mass and presents him/her with deeper choices about life. What is life about? What really makes me happy? Endless and addictive “conversation” on Facebook, Twitter or other social media does not address these questions; neither does endless consumption of goods, ideas, travel or anything else. When we engage with quality in our lives, we are on the road to creating meaningful connections. Then we can begin to relate to technology or any other aspect of our world with open interest but not with the slavery of the mass. 

The constant barrage of new technology affects social interaction and creates problems that take years to understand, let alone address. There is, for instance, the anxiety and social exclusion of people who don’t participate in or can’t keep up with technology – because of poverty, age, disability or other reasons. There are also the effects that new technology has on the body, either directly through stimulation of the nervous system – contributing to lack of sleep, distraction and anxiety – or indirectly through lack of exercise and obesity. 

Discernment needs to be a central pillar of our culture. Many individuals are already walking its path in various ways, connecting with their deeper selves and their community, but discernment has to become a template for society as a whole. For the tourists who congregate in central Melbourne by the likeness of Adam Lindsay Gordon, it might be something as simple as taking a minute to read the words on the statue; or a moment in the early morning sunshine to imagine who this person might have been, before taking a photo.