Barabbas laments

Wholeness requires that we accept and integrate aspects of ourselves and our society that are difficult and hard to face. With that in mind, I was recently drawn to the biblical references to Barabbas, the outlaw who was released from prison in Jesus’ stead. It made me think how every small piece of the jigsaw puzzle of life is connected, how no piece is ultimately more significant than any other, and that everything somehow fits. Barabbas was given the rough end of the pineapple, so to speak, by history and deserves better.

Barabbas laments

So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released Barabbas for them; and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified.
Mark 15:15

I was prepared for death,
Prepared as any man could be.
When the guards came to the cell
They laughed so hard
Their armour rattled and creaked.
I didn’t stop to see him crucified.
I ran as soon as I was out,
Ran for life in my bones and air in my lungs.

I took Tinneus’s donkey and rode to Samaria.
My father’s eyes bid me a frozen welcome.
He broke the milk jug
As he heaped his sour bag of misery
On my shoulders.
I spat and left his shitty hovel.

I am on the road now, many years since.

And I am tired of the looks saying
"You should have been in his place."
The whispers, the sneers,
The women without kindness,
The taverns unfriendly, the towns
With their gates shut.

If not for me,
What glory for this Son of Man?
For a martyr cannot be questioned,
Cannot be doubted but his life (and death)
Are aflame with heaven.
I am no preacher or spinner of charmed words,
I work with my hands and know what is good.

King of the Jews, Son of Man.
His followers throng, they appear
As out of the ground in every town.
They parade and sing
And mimic his path to the cross.

King of the Jews, Son of Man.
They say God willed his death,
So I played my part;
No man can deny this.

How am I different to him?

Nature and the divine

I used to frown at the rows of English elms that line my walk to work each morning through Melbourne’s Fitzroy Gardens, but somehow I have fallen in love with them.

These are foreign trees, I used to say to myself. They were planted in the 19th century in that European sensibility of the promenade – the stately arboreal avenue framing the weekend strolls of couples and families at leisure. Whatever was here originally – red gums, yellow box, grassy tussocks – had to give way to an imported Europeanness with little interest in the indigenous quality of the land.

My view of the English elms began to change on a sunny day last autumn. The 30-metre giants were clothed in yellow – a vast golden dress shimmering along their length in the sunshine. Whenever a breeze blew, curtains of gold leaves descended on the path, a drifting dazzle. A stranger walking in the opposite direction with his head craned upwards stopped in front of me. “Isn’t that amazing,” he said. I felt blessed to be in the presence of this ordinary, extraordinary sight, this vision from heaven.

Ever since, my respect for the elms and whoever planted them has increased. I’m interested in the craggy, furrowed grey bark. In the way the trunk splits into two main branches and how the leaves cascade in wisps down the tree, as if it wears them like a boa. My morning walks to work have new grace and meaning, though it is hard to explain how exactly. The English elms have presence and character, soul.

Every day people walk past those trees without appreciating them; they’re simply a backdrop to busy thoughts cocooned in busy lives. Then we wonder why we are out of balance with nature and perplexed about how the situation can be fixed. The answer is directly in front of us: it’s in how we live our lives, in the quality of attention and consciousness we give to all life. Only a full re-enchantment of nature, a full awareness of everything as being alive, can lead to human harmony with and within the natural world.

I think there are three fundamental steps in human realignment with nature: appreciation, kinship and spiritual grace. In the first, we are moved by nature’s beauty and quality but we are outsiders observing it. This tends to be the most common attitude: we go to nature for the scenery, for the chance to see animals in the wild, for the fun and enjoyment of the beach, for the walks through magnificent forest. It’s important we do this because our lives would be impoverished if we didn’t and the default position in our culture is an almost complete mental separation from nature – many people feel disconnected even in the midst of great wonder. However, though we are being moved in some way, we are as outsiders looking in. There is a gap between “us” and what we define as the “natural world”.

In the second stage, that of kinship, we move beyond the position of spectator to recognising a relationship between us and nature. Thankfully, this appears to be a growing trend. Scientists, at least at the intellectual level, are rapidly coming to the conclusion that all life is related and all life is interdependent. That means we have a responsibility to nurture and care for all living ecosystems. In the position of kinship there is an implicit understanding that we are bound up with nature; we feel its pleasure and pain as our own. The inflated human ego is brought back to a point at which it can appreciate commonality with other beings. Ancient Western and Indigenous cultures established kinship relations with plants and animals knowing that mutual care and responsibility was the order of the world, and that great harm would result if those ties were broken.

Aspects of spiritual grace, the third step, can be found in the earlier stages. At the level of appreciation, it is something mysterious: we can’t fully explain why we feel a certain sense of harmony or balance, why there is deep contentment or even why at times we may be moved to tears. Spirit is the animating dynamic of the universe and it moves through and is in everything. Spirit is oneness: when we are conscious of it, we recognise the unity of all things. All is one and there is no separation. Spiritual grace opens us to a relationship of true depth with nature where we are in touch with the deepest essence – we act to further all life. With the benefit of spiritual grace, we begin to open to the different levels of being, to the different stages at which life operates in us and in everything.

Nature can be the gateway to Spirit, but so can any other aspect of living. The point is the development of a level of consciousness that is receptive to and aware of Spirit; once this consciousness establishes and grows in an individual the divine is increasingly experienced as ever-present. The challenge is to create the conditions in one’s own life and personality for Spirit, then to bring that reality to concrete action in the world.

Myth and the message

I’m just an American boy, raised on MTV
And I’ve seen all those kids on the soda pop ads
But none of them looked like me.
So I started looking around, for a light out of the dim
And the first thing I heard that made sense was the word
Of Mohammed, peace be upon him.

So begins the song John Walker’s Blues, by the great American songwriter-musician Steve Earle. Written not long after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, it’s the tragic and somewhat defiant story of John Walker Lindh, a young Californian caught fighting for the Taliban.

When I first heard the song, I was electrified. Here was Earle, hardly before the dust had settled in the rubble of the twin towers, affirming the life of a man most Americans would have considered a terrorist conspirator and traitor. With its mournful “There’s no God but God” refrain in Arabic, John Walker’s Blues was banned by radio stations and its writer roundly condemned.

Despite the outrage, the song is a classic on many levels. It tells the story of a spiritual seeker-warrior poetically and evocatively, but without judgement. Like all great art, what is left unsaid carries the most power: Walker Lindh’s certainty and religious passion is little different from the American ideal and the reality of many Americans, only he has the misfortune of being on the wrong side. Earle is provocatively asking the listener to see themselves in his protagonist, to identify with the enemy, the other.

What the song also does, as indeed all storytelling can, is elevate its subject or “hero” to myth. Through the power of story, a person or event can rise above the mundane to a region of mind that is eternal. The everyday suddenly takes on greater, richer meaning. Walker Lindh is no longer a mere two-dimensional figure described in news reports, he is magically transformed into a presence in the collective consciousness and memory, his life given depth and meaning. Earle, as the artist, is spinning myth.

This occurs in all the arts. In Australia, one can think historically of the myths of the bush and its independent, resourceful people in the work of nationalist writers like Henry Lawson and “Banjo” Paterson and the painters of the Heidelberg School. We can see the process of mythmaking in Sidney Nolan’s distinctive paintings of the armoured outlaw Ned Kelly. And more recently, examples can be found in the celebration of ordinary lives and everyday struggles in the novels of Tim Winton and the songs of Paul Kelly, and in the Indigenous fight for dignity and survival in the lyrics of Archie Roach and Kev Carmody.

In all these examples the mythmaking process meets with contemporary reality: these are no fairytales from a bygone era. Myth is connected to the complexity and tensions of the here-and-now, bringing its light (and darkness) to bear in the everyday world.

Not all stories reach the heights of myth. To get there, a story must have a quality of inspiration and aspire to the archetypal dimension of life, to the inner patterns of things. In John Walker’s Blues, Earle is working with the archetypes of the warrior, the martyr and the spiritual seeker. These are ancient, deeply resonant images in the collective human psyche, and their evocation is powerful.

Though some myths are enriching and enlightening, others may be disturbing or aligned towards separativeness or evil. All myths, no matter what their quality, reveal the inner workings of the human spirit in any given time. They link strongly to the energies of the psyche.

In our materialistic culture, we would do well with a greater awareness of myth and the mythic dimension. This would allow us to see beyond the surface, and get a sense of the inner stories that individually and collectively we tell ourselves and that are being told. We may come to know ourselves better and act with greater maturity. Perhaps above all, a greater appreciation of myth is invigorating and revitalising: it connects us with soul and replenishes the soul quality of the world. It allows us to drink from the deep wells of life and enter spaces of consciousness we rarely access in everyday reality, creating channels for those spaces of depth into the world.

Grace and the clash of opposites

Central Queensland is a long, long way from central Melbourne. So long that you traverse a plenitude of landscapes and habitats – ranges and tablelands, grassland and scrub, forest and wetlands, reservoirs, snaking rivers, coastline. You also travel an enormous cultural journey before arriving at what is uniquely and quintessentially Rockhampton.

One Rockhampton taxi driver told me the town was booming because in the past 18 months the number of McDonald’s restaurants had doubled – from two to four. “Yeah, mate, we’ve got McDonald’s, Hungry Jacks, KFC, Red Rooster ... place is going good.” Another taxi driver – sharper than the first – welcomed the election of the conservative Abbott Government because it would mean more mining jobs for Rockhampton. More mines would mean more development in the town, with progress measured by the number of high-rise hotels that were likely to appear once it was awash with money.

The views of the two taxi drivers are a long way from my own. But they are also the veritable width of an open-cut coal mine from some other Queenslanders as well. My final destination on this holiday was an island off the central Queensland coast where a local couple run a small eco-lodge for tourists. Their lifestyle is simple: they live on wind and solar power, gather rainwater, earn a little money from the lodge and some fishing and oystering. They love the island and are strong protectors of its ecology. Their outlook is so different from the mainstream “develop and make money” (which really means “destroy and make money”) mentality as to seem almost from another planet.

After I returned from my trip, I wanted to make sense of it. How is it possible to navigate through all the dichotomies and polarities in our world, at a time when we need unity more than ever?

Maybe one aspect of the answer is grace. That is, an understanding and experience of the world and a way of living that’s beyond the friction and the hurly-burly of the poles and opposites.

For people who are sensitive, it is easy to fall into despair. For those at the frontlines of battles to protect the environment, there is burn out and the experience of feeling crushed by the enormousness of the forces of power and money. How do we maintain hope?

Grace is a strange kind of dance in which there is an implicit understanding of ego liberation. Attachment causes suffering, while life is purely and ultimately life – all else is human desire and aspiration, so much that is added on. Grace allows us to surf the natural rhythms of life, its ups and downs, with dignity and respect for ourselves and all others. It recognises and meets the opposites, but is not invested in them. It is from the realm of the eternal, yet it is able to participate fully in the material world.

With grace we rise above the opposites, not in denial of them or withdrawal, but in a movement towards a higher synthesis. We act in the world not for one side or another but for the greater good, which is ever-evolving. New forms appear as a result of the continuous creation of higher syntheses.

This might sound like so much theoretical mumbo jumbo if the evidence to support it was not all around us. I think of all the social and environmental advancements that have occurred in the past few hundred years – all have required some measure of grace, or the ability to go beyond the conflict of opposites and act for the greater good. And grace does not preclude taking a stand on an issue when that stand embodies a higher synthesis: Martin Luther King and Gandhi took firm positions while navigating beyond entrenched conflicts and dichotomies.

Unfortunately, there is nothing easy about maintaining grace – it needs constant work and attention. Its starting point is in the life of the individual, where a spirit of nurture towards oneself is required. Balance and reflection are equally important. To create the conditions in your own life builds the collective store of grace and creates a channel for it to act in the world.

I wonder how grace can inform the decisions that people make in central Queensland about development and the environment. Maybe there is a notion of “right livelihood” that needs to be cultivated in which jobs and money are tied to the environmental good. Perhaps it’s possible to ensure long-term livelihoods for people while protecting nature. I think this way of thinking avoids the entrenched positions of jobs vs. environment, which in our culture currently it is easy to fall into. Of course, there are vested interests who oppose more enlightened, graceful approaches. There is entrenched power, ignorance and greed. Nobody said it would be easy, this game of human evolution. Grace, when we have it, makes it all a little easier and sweeter.

The third point

I scribbled a short poem on the way to work the other day which I think succinctly captures something of the nature of life:                        

Joy terror joy terror terror joy joy joy joy terror joy

 joy joy joy terror terror joy terror joy terror terror

 terror joy joy terror joy terror joy terror joy terror
joy terror terror joy joy joy terror joy terror joy.

Nothing but the great, wild, inexaustible OMMM

In praise of otherness

The bush stone curlew is a bird like no other – none that I’ve encountered. Not colourful, like many other Australian birds, not especially pretty or graceful, not outstanding in any discernible way. What it lacks in superficial charm it makes up for in a kind of strange, engaging presence.

You first hear its cry – a sharp, mournful “wee-loo” as night sets. Then, if you are lucky as I was recently to be in an open-sided tent kitchen in the northern Australian bush, the curlew appears, almost on cue at about 7 o’clock, when dinner is ready.

A surprisingly large bird – a kind of mini-stork – it materialises out of the dark on hesitant, quiet feet. A grey and pale-coloured body with black streaks ends in an implausible short beak and big, doleful eyes. It slowly walked the perimeter of the kitchen, looking in for any scraps it would no doubt snaffle once the humans had finished and left.

Every night when I cooked, the siren of the bush stone curlew announced its presence somewhere in the she-oak scrub nearby. Then came the sight of the bird and its cautious long-legged stepping round the outside of the kitchen, its eyes, as if painted onto the body, always still.

I was reminded of the curlew when I came across a newspaper review of a book called Birds and People, by Mark Cocker and David Tipling. The book examines the relationship between birds and people, exploring the wonder birds have held for us over the millennia, the power of certain birds in our imagination, as well as the ways we have used and abused many species. One salient quote is mentioned: “Birds dwell at the heart of the human experience, furnishing us with an imaginative and symbolic resource that is as limitless as their fund of flesh and feathers.”

I mused on that quote and thought of the bush stone curlew. I first saw the bird only recently and I know practically nothing about it, but its strangeness and otherness were what struck me most. Perhaps the story of the curlew appears in local Aboriginal myth. Maybe its habits are well known to ornithologists, and ecologists have mapped out its role in the local environment. But I would wager that no matter how familiar you are with it, the bird would still be strange and other.

There’s something that we need to remind ourselves often in our inquisitive Western culture: the more we know, the greater the mystery. That is, as our understanding of reality grows, so too in proportion grows that which is unknown. It’s like opening the door to a room and noticing that there’s a door at the far end of it; opening that door reveals another room with a door, which opens into yet another ... and so on. At some point, the realisation dawns that there is a never-ending process of unfoldment going on attended by mystery, an uncertainty not only about what awaits behind the next door, but the meaning of the process itself.

An experience of otherness can be deeply humbling. Birds do indeed “dwell at the heart of human experience”, we have evolved with them and share a common ancestor many millions of years ago, but they are also other. They are another life form that exists in its own right independent of our needs and whatever uses we may want from them. An important paradox lies here: though all life is one, it is also multiple. Though at certain times and in certain states of consciousness we can experience the oneness of life, we must never lose sight of the various forms it can take, of the amazing multiplicity of vessels in which it is carried.

This is important because our culture has become intensely human-centred. Empowered by science and technology, we believe we control our destiny and that all other life should serve us. We are the masters of planet Earth. In ages past we were much more attuned to mystery – humble before the awesome nature of the divine and its manifestations all around us. Whether it was God or multiple gods or sacred groves, rocks or animals, we existed in relationship with other powerful beings or energies. Our own power was kept in some state of balance. Now, there seems no limit to the human capacity for mastery and domination.

The falsehood of absolute human power has become increasingly apparent in recent decades as we destroy life on Earth through rampant industrialisation, overpopulation and overconsumption; the more mastery we attain the more tenuous existence on the planet becomes, including for our own species. The truth is that we are not in control and never will be – the ultimate nature of power is quite beyond the human. If we are to live in balance, we must rediscover otherness as a dynamic reality in the universe. That means an acceptance of the unknown and the unknowable as a constant presence in human affairs and in everything. It also means a relationship of respect with that otherness.

I think again of that peculiar bird of the night, the bush stone curlew. In some sense it can never be known, never adequately categorised or catalogued, and perhaps never fully appreciated unless with an openness to mystery. But then, the same could be said for all that is best in life.

The revolutionary

I remember, I remember when my world was hardly grown,
The daughter of a dead, dull king ascended to the throne.
Though I was but a lad at school I saw it all with scorn,
The solemn, sacred emptiness, the monumental yawn ...

"On Her Silver Jubilee" by Leon Rosselson

The advantage of accumulating possessions over the years is that, when the time comes to sort through everything you have, certain long-forgotten gems are rediscovered. I made such a find the other day among a collection of old audio cassettes (yes, such things once existed) I was preparing to throw out. On one of them was the song “On Her Silver Jubilee” by the British folk musician Leon Rosselson.

The song is simply composed but brilliantly written, a scalding attack on the British monarchy moving between parody and irony and laced with disgust. Rosselson sings: Oh the magic of the monarchy, the mystery sublime/Growing gracefully and effortlessly richer all the time and The monarch walked her corgis behind the palace wall/Never once betraying what she felt or if she felt at all. He attacks the fawning of the press: The slime exuding daily from the sycophantic slugs and the nobility and high officials associated with royalty: All the swarms of bloated blowflies the majestic turd sustains. In the chorus, the Queen’s ordinariness, beyond all the hype and sycophancy, is made plain: She’s as poised as a picture, she’s a sight for all to see/With a glass cage around her on her silver jubilee/With a glass cage around her she feels free.

The song is, to my mind, a fairly potent distillation of what may be called the revolutionary spirit. It’s something that has been present, at least in Western culture, for more than 2000 years, perhaps originating with Spartacus’ slave revolt against Rome. It is an attitude of opposition to the fundamental structures of a society, a radical rejection of its basic tenets, its cherished ideals, values and priorities. Where the reformer seeks to replace one ruler with another, the revolutionary wants to overthrow the system that underpins the rulership. The aim of the revolutionary is systemic not piecemeal change.

And Rosselson’s song provides one of the defining features of the revolutionary: the ability to see and expose the truth of corrupt systems, to declare forthrightly that “the emperor has no clothes”. When most people are happy to accept the norms of the system, the revolutionary is defined by talking truth to power. The message is a shattering one of the reality of the situation.

The revolutionary appeared when the Western mind took on a certain amount of dualism. When monotheism arrived, in the form of the Zoroastrian and Jewish faiths, the absolute goodness of the universal God was balanced by an opposing force bent on destruction. The archetypal revolutionary was born – Satan. The one-sided bias of the Judeo-Christian tradition towards “goodness” and “light”, its inability to accept and integrate the dark side of human nature, meant violent upheaval and revolution were inevitable.

Once the vitality of the all-embracing Church of medieval times began to wane, revolution gained force and momentum. First and foremost, the Reformation tipped the old certainties of the Western world upside down; an incredibly wrenching upheaval, it was followed by decades of war between Catholics and Protestants. Then came revolution and civil war in England in the 17th century, the American and French revolutions in the 18th century, the Napoleonic wars and uprooting of the old monarchical order across Europe, the revolutionary wildfires of 1830 and 1848, the national liberation wars in Latin America and Haiti, the Paris Commune of 1871. And in the 20th century the scale of conflict increased dramatically, with revolutions and wars of global significance unleashing unprecedented levels of destruction and suffering.

Notwithstanding the romanticism that is attached to some revolutions and revolutionaries, systemic upheaval in recent centuries has not necessarily been about creating a better and more just world. Rather, the function of revolution has been to clear out the old and decaying structures and to bring a new balance and order. The revolutionary is a psychically necessary figure under any system that rigidly believes it is right and true. When a society is unable to reinvent itself as it needs, to revivify itself through the creative use of its potential, but continues upon an outworn track, the revolutionary is present as a marker for the future. He or she is necessary balance.

One of the more celebrated revolutionaries of the 20th century, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, said “the revolutionary is motivated by great feelings of love”. In this he marked a challenge for anyone under the power of the revolutionary archetype: love has to be at the core of their actions. The revolutionary’s oppositional stance means they are vulnerable to be captured by negativity and hatred. If the sweeping away of the old order is not to descend into a maelstrom of violence and destruction, as has repeatedly occurred through history, vision and action to create new forms has to be part of the revolutionary drive. The revolutionary is then as much a creator as he or she is a destroyer, helping to release and feed society’s generative tendencies. The new way is born and develops while the old is still in process, ripening until the time comes for it to take over organically.

As humanity evolves, there will be less need for the revolutionary. Conflict will still be present, but in the form of creative tension to spark the new into life and not in the manner of warfare. It all depends on how much self-knowledge we can bring to every human endeavour and how much goodwill – or love – we can muster. Eventually, though perhaps still some way into the future, the grace-filled evolutionary will carry as much power as the incendiary revolutionary once wielded.

The dark season

Like many people, I struggle in winter. Darkness finds us too early and lingers too late – on some days you wake in darkness, leave for work in darkness, return home in darkness. The cold and rattling wind restrict forays outdoors and force you back inside. An emotional gloominess sets in that seems to parallel nature’s own temperament.

In certain countries in winter, depression is a real problem. People drink to escape the reality of the moment or withdraw into strange and musty corners. Traditionally, winter is the season when the dead return to speak to the living, when the veil between the worlds is thinnest. It’s the season of witches’ Sabbaths, rituals that honour the unfathomable mystery and dark, gestational powers of nature. It’s also the time for recognising beginnings, as winter is the lowest point at which the cycle turns towards new growth and life. Christmas is such a celebration of birth. In Greek myth, Persephone, the goddess of the dead, was also the goddess of the life-giving earth.

Myths and rituals exist to contain and channel the energies of the mind and body; to create meaning out of the conditions of life. They bind an individual to a group or community and, if based in wisdom, they expand consciousness to embrace a larger sphere of life.

Human energetic, psychological reality is not separate from nature. We are an expression of nature and therefore there is no hard, defining line where we end and everything else begins. Life consists of ceaseless waves of forms and patterns, shaping and reshaping without end. As this is reality, it is only logical that what is outside is reflected within. When nature is dark and brooding, we brood too. When the tenor of the season is energy turned inwards, gestation and dormancy, this tends to be our pattern also. The earth cold and forbidding finds us in a similar state.

Though we are a part of nature, human consciousness has evolved beyond instinct and so we are able to act in ways that are not symbiotic with everything else around us. In us, nature takes a giant leap forward beyond simple, pure being in itself, to being that is conscious of itself. That said, and despite the power games and illusions of our technological society, we are never outside nature. It affects us regardless of what actions we choose in its midst. For instance, if we are intensely creative in a dark, wintry period, our creations will have the character and flavour of the time; if we open and embrace in mid-winter, what we say yes to will be affected by the patterns of the season.

A mature apprehension of nature in our time rubs up against the older tendency to differentiate and create human systems that aim to be separate from the natural world. We create vast “artificial” environments where nature is ordered and under our control. By doing this, we also tame and make artificial our own natures, subjecting the very depths of ourselves to human will. This is hugely problematic because human will only operates within the larger will of nature. We become out-of-step with ourselves and the life of the planet.

The vast industrial civilisation that is consuming the Earth runs to a 24/7 rhythm. Its ideal is that all of us are “switched on” and available, as consumers and workers, all of the time. It pays little heed to emotional ups and downs, to seasons, to the cycles of nature. And where it does, its aim is to exploit for private gain. In its vision humans are mere ciphers, mere servants for the only god it recognises, greed.

Our society demands a kind of flat, routine consciousness that lacks self-knowledge and subtle appreciation of what it means to be human. Opening to ourselves means opening to nature. Why should we not, in the depths of winter, work less? Or have more time with family and friends? Why not create spaces and opportunities for introspection, for individual and group self-analysis? Or support quiet, indoor healing? Could there be room again for rituals that celebrate and nurture the creative powers of the dark?

To be sure, there has been a revival of interest in recent times in ritual and creating meaningful connection with nature. This has often taken a neo-pagan or New Age character. I was privileged once to take part in a winter solstice observation inspired by the traditional Celtic festival, Samhain. In the conscious spiritual connection of human with nature through ritual, a mutual reinforcement occurs. We are enriched and revivified by integrating ourselves back to the source of our being, the earth, while nature is stimulated and enhanced in the creative potential of the evolving human.

The allure of the phone

I’m in awe of mobile phones. My fascination, after many years of observation, is undiminished. 

Riding on public transport, I watch the way that so many people are transfixed by their smart phones: scrolling through their emails, checking news headlines, playing games, looking at photos, listening to music. Sometimes it seems at least half the people on my tram are tuned into their phone, held in a bubble, encapsulated in another world. A chattering couple who get on the tram fall silent as each of them whips out a phone and is mesmerised. The phone is like Mandrake the magician, a snake charmer.

I’m bothered by this; it irks me that people are so slavishly captured by a technology, and that much of the content that pours out of it is, to put it bluntly, crap. Recently I was standing in a tram next to a young man who was with a young woman. Both were intently engaged at their smart phones. Their only exchange in 10 minutes was when the man showed the woman a picture on his phone of “a fat streaker” at a rugby league game. This is what our civilisation has reached in its glorious advancement over thousands of years, the apogee of the progress of liberal ideas, education and democracy: peering at fat streakers and rifling through Facebook status updates.

The truth is that civilisation has always dragged a long tail behind it, a shadow it has never cast off. The ancient Greeks, the Western cultural pioneers, were dependent on slaves and in constant tribal warfare with each other; the Romans, who kept the torch of Greece aflame, subjugated and enslaved entire peoples; Christianity repressed women and the body and persecuted minorities and heretics; technical progress and the colonisation of the “New World” resulted in the genocide of Indigenous people; the industrial revolution meant the pillaging of nature and the transformation of agrarian lifestyles to wage slavery; the contemporary globalised world has come at the price of two world wars, an enormous rich-poor divide and an accelerated plundering of the Earth’s natural resources. All progress has come at a cost and fuelled a corresponding shadow.

Modern technology, as much as it aims to improve peoples’ lives, feeds that very shadow. Perhaps we have reached the point at which we need to reckon with all the implications of our actions, with the fullness of what it means to be human, to face the shadow squarely and honestly. The stakes couldn’t get any bigger – in our time, it is the very survival of life on the planet that is the issue. 

There’s a certain liberation of consciousness that’s required in this undertaking. The aura of the mobile phone is created by the human physical availability for stimulation – our complex brains and nervous systems respond to the complex stimulations technology provides. Stimulation creates distraction from the dull vacuity of modern life, from the spiritual emptiness of the work-consumption routine, from individual isolation and lack of warm social interaction, and from the sensory poverty of urban environments. American hip-hop band the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy once famously described television as a “cathode ray nipple”. In that sense, smart phones are like small, portable TVs. 

The spell cast on individuals by mobile phones is itself part of a much bigger “spell” of collective psyche. When one person performs an act of some kind it has a certain resonance, but when that act enters into the general psyche its power is magnified immeasurably. Humans are at one level herd animals and respond to group dynamics – when others around me are playing with their phones, I feel an urge to do so as well. Most people most of the time are in step with a kind of mass agglomeration of beliefs, morals, thoughts, prejudices, fears, desires etc. that have evolved over the millennia. Within this, each individual has little differentiation or meaning, being simply minute threads in a vast and wide weave of social fabric. By following the conscious and unconscious norms, a person fulfils the general direction of their society. 

Human history has been changed radically and immensely by individuals who have dared to step out of collective norms – the Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad are just three examples – and human evolution is dependent on rupture and disjunction that lead to new, more enlightened ways of life.

In our time undifferentiated mass consciousness is immensely problematic because media and advertising, through communications technology, create powerful currents of suggestion with little aim other than the perpetuation of consumption and self-interest. The vortex of “spin” that envelops much of our culture makes it harder for us to face reality and take the difficult collective choices to heal and liberate our world.

Mass consciousness is also extremely dangerous from a planetary ecological point of view. The human footprint on Earth is enormous and it continues to grow because en masse we blindly follow along the old, rutted paths of convention; we perpetuate without discernment thought patterns and instincts that are not helpful for life on the planet. What would happen if we put a limit on the human population and decided that other species had as much reason to exist as we did? What immense changes would be set in play if we looked up from our own biological necessity and basked in the beauty of all life?

To hold a mobile phone in your hand is to be in the presence of a technology created by human minds, with all that entails. If the phone has an addictive quality it is because in some part of us our being is diminished. Like cigarettes, the habit can be kicked, but it requires a broader, fuller opening to the possibilities of life.     

Shifting ways of the psyche

What makes consciousness change?

I ask this question after having decided, with much deliberation and angst over a long time, to move out of the flat I’ve been renting for five years. It’s expensive nowadays to live on your own in the inner neighbourhoods of a large city but I value my space, and so had been balking at the prospect of moving out to share with others. I also know that in some ways it is emotionally easier to live on your own.  A hefty increase in rent and a meaningful conversation with a friend suddenly turned the tide in my mind: next month I will do the obligatory cleaning, turn the key in the lock and say goodbye to the flat.

And so, what brings about a change when for months or years we toss and turn without resolution, beating our heads against an impasse?

Consciousness rests on the shifting tectonic plates of the unconscious which, as Carl Jung pointed out, is a vast reserve of impulses and energies beyond the threshold of the conscious mind. The psyche consists of myriad relationships between consciousness and the unconscious – where consciousness moves one way, the unconscious responds, and vice versa.  We can see this, for instance, in the way that dreams and fantasies compensate for attitudes and realities that exist in the conscious world, ensuring that there is an overall psychic balance.

Though consciousness and the unconscious are in constant relationship, it is our ability to become aware of this that is crucial. The more insight we bring into our lives, the more light we shed into dark corners, the more vital and energised is the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. It’s not a matter of expelling the dark, but rather allowing it to be in a healthy relationship with the facts of the created world, or mediating it for the greater good of life.  

Consciousness can benefit immensely from this relationship: it brings meaning and depth to life. As an example, a person may spend years changing careers until they find something that truly suits them, which is the correct alignment with energies moving deep inside. Or the ending or beginning of a personal relationship can mean previously blocked channels are opened, benefitting life. When the inner world is drawn into greater harmony with the outer world, a developmental leap occurs individually and collectively.

Jung and other depth psychologists after him have pointed out that human consciousness developed over millennia from the unconscious natural state of instinct, and the unconscious is still very much with us. Religions helped to channel and refine inner energies to create living cosmologies in which consciousness and the unconscious coalesced. The world was rich with unseen forces, spirit and meaning. In the past few centuries in the West, however, Christianity has increasingly lost relevance and atrophied. The decline of religion and triumph of materialist secularism has meant that in our society consciousness is privileged and stands apart from the unconscious. Banished from a full life in our world, unconscious energies bubble and seethe below the surface, affecting us in ways of which we are largely unaware.

I think there is an evolutionary imperative in bringing the unconscious back into a healthy relationship with consciousness.  The ascendency of human reason and the independent ego has meant unprecedented mastery over our material conditions, but it has come at a frightful cost. We are destroying life on our planet not because of a deficiency in reason, but because we are not fully awake to the unconscious drives and forces that motivate us. Greed and the drive to power are dominant in our society even as we continue to think of ourselves as civilised, sophisticated and technically progressive.

When we face any situation in our lives, we bring to it the energies that are at play inside us – our full personality is a dynamic amalgam of conscious and unconscious. The unconscious is along for the ride no matter what we do, and so it is vital to be aware of it. When a dilemma appears, such as the one I have faced with my living circumstances, the unconscious is part of the solution. I might think about a problem for a long time, talking with friends or family about it; I may take certain steps like attending a few share house interviews or driving to some suburbs to ascertain what it would be like to live there – every conscious action stirs the energies of the unconscious and in turn propels it to affect consciousness. The information that is gathered in the conscious mind from such a process is heavily inlaid with unconscious energy.

A resolution arrives because a transformation has occurred in which consciousness and the unconscious are aligned. When there is no alignment the potential exists for destructive behaviour: if consciousness attempts to force a resolution or, conversely, if it is too weak or fragile before potent inner drives. Blocked conscious attitudes can lead to the damming of unconscious energy, forcing it to spill outwards. Alcoholism and other addictions are consequences when inner energy cannot find adequate, meaningful expression in the conscious world.

The key is to maintain healthy channels between consciousness and the unconscious, to make sure there is a vibrant flow both ways. Psychology has developed many methods for self-analysis and self-knowledge, including ways to interpret and work with dreams and fantasies. Eastern religions and philosophies offer profound help through such means as meditation and yoga. The arts are a channel for conveying the unconscious. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, ritual and ceremony acts as a conscious-unconscious bridge. Ultimately, all life is a dance of mystery in which opposing forces interact, shaping and reshaping each other, meeting in union and opposition, transcending and being reborn anew.

End of nature?

American environmentalist Bill McKibben recently finished a speaking tour in Australia, lecturing to packed theatres in Melbourne and Sydney and doing an assortment of media engagements.

McKibben wrote The End of Nature, one of the seminal books of the environment movement, in the 1980s. He’s learned, passionate and inspiring. His message, much like that of Al Gore in The Inconvenient Truth, is that humanity is leading the planet down the path of catastrophe unless there is a great shift away from fossil fuels towards an economy powered by renewable energy.

McKibben founded 350.org, a worldwide group that is campaigning against carbon pollution and the coal, oil and gas industries, and for an ecologically balanced future. I applaud his work and that of the environment movement generally, even as I think the movement could benefit from a wider perspective that is not so bound to the old world view dominated by modern science and technology.

I once heard Australian academic David Tacey say something like: “Environmentalists are appealing to people’s conscience, when what is needed is a change in consciousness.” By that, Tacey was saying that saving the planet requires a fundamental shift in perspective towards an awareness in which we see ourselves as part of nature, not separate from it. According to Tacey, our materialist culture, sprung from the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, cannot solve today’s ecological problems. That’s because humanity’s perceived independence from nature and our dominance and control of it are central to the Enlightenment world view, and you cannot fix something with the very tools that caused the problem in the first place.  

While Tacey is right, I believe groups like 350.org implicitly lead towards the new consciousness to which he refers. That’s because they are aligned to something that teachers of mine have described as “the will to good”. This is the fundamental propensity towards life – its development and furtherance. The will to good is the energy that propels the work of spirit in the world and it’s connected intimately to the zeitgeist or spirit of the time. The spirit of our time is shifting towards a culture of connection, oneness and integration with nature, a culture with strong feminine energy in which we don’t abandon the lessons of the past but move beyond the narrow and ego-centred materialism that’s been our lot for some time.     

That said, I think there is a need for greater understanding within movements for change of the implications of their work, so as to better facilitate the new dawning consciousness. For example, the desire for human civilisation to shift to renewable energy is problematic unless we take into account our overall footprint on the planet. That means tackling the difficult issues of consumption, economic growth, industrialisation and population. In the old paradigm of separation from nature, humanity stands apart and looks objectively at “the natural world”. Nature is an “other” with which we have no intrinsic life bonds and that we can attempt to manage or “fix”. Ecological consciousness requires us to be fully present “in” nature, to realise that we are an expression of life on the planet and that everything we do must be aligned in accordance with life. Fundamentally, we have to return to balance.  

There is a mistake in the environment movement, I believe, in its continuing emphasis on reason. Appeals to reason are continually made for governments to change their policies and individuals to change their behaviour: if we don’t, it is said, the consequences will be dire. The truth is that if humanity acted on the basis of what is right and sensible, we would have changed direction a long time ago and be living a far different reality. Psychology right back to Freud at the start of the 20^th century established that conscious reason constituted only a small part of the psyche, the bulk of people’s motivations coming from a vast unconscious reservoir of emotions, urges and desires. Humans are largely non-rational beings, and environmentalism needs to acknowledge this.

Despite its current close connection with science, the environment movement is at heart a romantic movement. The kind of science that emerges in the new consciousness will be holistic and far more sophisticated and evolved than the modern, mechanistic version of it that still holds in the popular mind. Separative masculine objectivity will not support action to protect and repair the planet – we need to build an emotional connection with nature. That means an experience of oneness, of direct communion and active being in nature, of getting to know its cycles and myriad processes in our lives. As we become fully present in nature, fully alive in it and it fully alive in us, so human society radically changes. When we find meaning in nature and our systems change accordingly, human society itself becomes less alienated, more connected and meaningful. 

I think one other consideration is important in moving to an ecological consciousness, and that is process. Among people who are sensitive and aware, the environmental crisis is increasingly leading to grief and despair. The public appeals to “act now before it’s too late” that have been around since the 1970s are starting to be replaced by an acceptance that it is, in some sense, “too late”. Catastrophic weather is occurring and sea levels are on the rise. The Earth will warm to a dangerous degree, and it is rather the most extreme levels of danger that are now to be avoided.  A sense of failure is creeping in among those who for years have fought for the environment, a feeling that life on the planet will be changed irreversibly for the worse.

There’s a goal orientation at work here. On the level of individual psychology, goals can be useful and important in a person’s life, but they are ultimately meaningless. What’s important is what is learnt and what changes along the way to the goal, not whether the goal is achieved; it’s the process that counts. So too in a collective sense: even when the goal is as huge as saving the planet, the meaning is in the process and not the destination. There are immeasurable benefits when we direct ourselves towards furthering the cause of life, even if our tangible goals are not reached. Ultimately, we can’t fully measure the effects of our actions as they ripple outwards in time and space, in material and non-material dimensions. The planet may indeed become mostly uninhabitable, but this will be merely yet another phase in its long history; eventually, slowly but inevitably, new life will emerge in the truly breathtaking evolution of this beautiful rock, the Earth. 

After the deluge

They come to stare at their creek,
once a genial trickle
now a coffee-brown tide
slushing, sliding,
lifting the earth's detritus, spinning
it down to some inconceivable end.

They stare mute at the flooded pathways,
the leveled reeds, the battered trees,
the way the bulge has taken out bends,
flattened the world.
Only the playful ducks have a sense of humour.

The old man in the ark, he too saw the tide rising, he too could not comprehend despite God's insistent words. Pushing the rump of the nearest hyena he fingered the latch shut. The door was closed and the watery chaos would do its will.

Perspective

In my other life, my paid work writing for a home magazine, the most common concern environmentally conscious people have when renovating their home is opening it to light.

In cooler climates particularly, using the sun to passively warm a house is important. Light brings joy and life and feelings of comfort and connection. In Melbourne many old houses are dark and gloomy, energy sinks with little connection to the outdoor environment.

When they were built, and until recent years, nature was something you struggled against and retreated from when necessary. Now there is a shift towards openness and communion with the environment; householders want their homes to be oriented properly to make maximum use of the sun, for communal and energised rooms to face north and quieter study areas to be graced by the gentler light from the south. Renovations open constipated houses to embrace their gardens and backyards, replacing walls with windows and glazed doors.  

I find this heartening and inspiring. The metaphors of light, openness and connection with nature are at work in the world. I contrast this with the work of my old profession, journalism. The news we receive through the media is slanted towards conflict and disorder, disasters and impending doom. This has a profound, wide-ranging effect, engendering a level of fear and crisis in the psyche of the community. This persistent, heightened state means it is harder for people to see reality as it truly is – multifaceted and nuanced – and therefore meaningful decisions are harder to make. The media’s black-and-white vision contributes to black-and-white vision in society as a whole, acting as a brake on psychic and social development even as society itself on many levels has evolved well past its narrow and restrictive world view. 

Perspective, I believe, is increasingly important. We should never be naive about the world or live in a saccharine state of denial, but we do need perspective. It is the ability to see and experience the joy and light as well as the darkness and chaos of reality. In daily life there are myriad ways to experience profound joy: from seeing the sun rise in the morning to hearing birdsong or watching children at play; from playing tennis with friends or swimming in the ocean to simply smiling in the wonder of the present moment. Individually and collectively we have to balance the light and dark, and counter the alienating tendencies of our society with appropriate love and care.

Perspective is also about having the big picture in mind. Many activists working for positive change in the world, especially in the environment movement, seem enmeshed in the crisis mentality, attempting to shout above the rest about the impending Armageddon. There’s no doubt that our planet is in crisis, and we do need to hear about the immense ecological changes taking place, but more than anything we need vision of a way forward. We need an emphasis on vision and an understanding that the situation is not static and insoluble. Perspective allows us to see that humanity and the planet are in an immense transition, and we would do well to know more about this transition and act in whatever ways we can to further the cause of life.  

The dominant Western world is moving away from a masculine, heroic culture in which humanity sees itself as separate from nature and towards a more feminine reality in which relationship, connection and oneness with nature are paramount. Author Richard Tarnas, in his book The Passion of the Western Mind, sees the evidence of this shift not only in the rise of feminism and growing empowerment of women, the opening up to feminine values by men and women, but also in increasing ecological awareness, sense of unity with nature and opposition to governments and corporations acting against the environment. Tarnas sees it in the growing embrace of the human community, in the accelerating collapse of long-standing political and ideological barriers separating the world’s people, in the deepening recognition of the value and necessity of partnerships, pluralism, and the interplay of many perspectives. It is visible, he says, in the widespread urge to reconnect with the body, the emotions, the unconscious, the imagination and intuition – among many other things.

No transition is easy or straightforward and elements of the old co-habit for some time with the new, blazing with intensity even as the ground underneath them is disappearing. We cannot fully picture what humanity or the planet will be like in 100 or 200 years, but we can recognise that a meaningful and important shift is under way and act in concert with life to enable its right shape. In this wonderful endeavour we require a healthy amount of perspective. 

 

Land and story

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. William Blake

Heavy cloud draped the top of the hill; or perhaps it was mist masquerading as cloud, or cloud transformed by the pull of earth to mist – whatever it was, it gave the hill a grave mystique on a dark and cold autumn morning.

The hill was one of a chain undulating for several kilometres in this part of north-east Victoria, a volcanic regurgitation millions of years ago with scattered grey rocks to tell the tale. I looked out at it from the kitchen of a friend’s house on a sheep farm.

Staring at it for a while, the urge came to explore and climb: I pulled on my boots and the hill beckoned me forward. My friend had planted trees to stop erosion and there they stood, at intervals, with brown-orange bark peeling. Not much else was around except a tough-looking sedge that grew in clumps. A track that had been ploughed in red-clay mud by the farm’s quad bikes was fringed by the droppings of sheep.

A clammy cold touched my skin as I climbed to the mid-point of the hill. Here the rocks began, covered in dry and seemingly dead lichen. Occasionally an old white or red box tree appeared crookedly on the slope, incongruous amid the barrenness. Occasionally the rocks congregated to a natural seat or vantage point from which you could see for miles the changes of farmland, forests, ridges, gullies and flats; the land at times creased, then smoothed itself out, then as unexpectedly became jagged.

At the top of the hill more rocks and some dead trees dragged to form a spot for shelter and fire – a place for coming together, maybe celebration, on warmer days. The quad bike trail continued along a dip at the other side of the hill and on to the next one. This was solemn, out-of-the-way country; a mob of kangaroos scattered somewhere far below, some twigs crunched underfoot, little else rippled the profound silence.

Well after my experience of climbing I wondered about the story of that land. Indigenous people, no doubt, would have weaved creation stories for these quiet, rocky hills, binding human consciousness deeply with the country. Would the land not have stories still? How could a person recover and retell them?  

Our modern Western consciousness is focused on the concrete and the separate. Reality is largely comprised of physical objects that exist in themselves and that can be seen, felt and touched. But that’s not all that reality is: there are subtle, intuitive dimensions that don’t fit a strict materialist view, and the more these are explored the more it becomes apparent that much of life is non-rational, non-linear, non-separate, and that it is healthy to acknowledge and affirm this.

How do we approach these “spiritual” dimensions of life? I think mystery is the clue here. It’s about paying attention to the silence, the unseen that exists with everything we look at. It requires a broad but measured opening of the senses with focus on the energy or quality of objects. It is cultivated in disciplines of meditation and yoga and contemplative prayer. Its doorway is the relationship of things, and its language that of metaphor and symbol. What comes forth from mystery undergoes a certain filter as we translate it into the concrete world; it registers in the body and mind and passes through the particularities of personality, life experience and training. A certain painter will feel its presence and paint, a certain teacher will hear its call and teach, a certain carpenter will be touched by it and produce inspired work. And so it goes.

I think the land that I was privileged to visit in north-East Victoria does have a story and that it is accessible through intuition and patient listening. It would not be arrived at rationally and objectively and would not stand up to secular, rationalist scrutiny. It may have changed over time as the land has changed over time. It may, in all likelihood, be slightly different with each individual who cares to tell it. But the point, really, is the purpose of the story, the moral of the tale. It is to connect to the land, to see ourselves in it, our life its life. When we tell its story, we are walking with it in its evolutionary journey just as it feeds into ours. We cannot help but care for it, mythologise it, celebrate it, just as we celebrate our own life and those of other humans.

In a way, my simple description of the walk up the hill is a beginning of that process. In fact, any response of openness and wonder is a beginning – it is then up to us to carry it further, to act in whatever ways we can to bring the sacred back to a meaningful presence in our world.    

Joy

Flying a kite is the loveliest of things: this I discovered by chance when some friends invited me to their place one day.

It was windy and the park near their house was an invitation to play. We brought out their new kite; while my friend held the controls I stood with it at a distance, took a short run and it was in the air, climbing high through the gusty layers of wind. 

I was entranced as a kid, laughing as I watched it fluttering and bobbing. It was so high in the air that it seemed absurd to think someone was controlling it, yet my friend kept nonchalantly tugging at the strings and smiling. The kite was a free spirit and its freedom was infectious – I briefly took hold of the steering, still laughing with sheer delight at the audacity and beauty of its flight. It was the first time I had flown a kite and the memory has been etched deep since.

Joy is the unfettered exuberance of life. It is life with a clear path to express itself, direct and powerful, healing and productive. It is an elemental shout of “yes!” to all creation.

Most often and most clearly we see joy in children: a toddler has just walked for the first time and beams with achievement, or a child jumps onto a playground swing and is immediately overtaken by joyful energy. Joy and play are connected, both requiring an uncluttered and unpolluted innocence to flourish. And both joy and play thrive on discovery, the arrival at a moment that is entirely unique and fresh in time.

Joy is boundless energy: we can face almost anything, no challenge is insurmountable. It also engenders a certain lightness of being that’s crucial in facing life’s ups and downs, and which is a necessary balance to the gravity of life.    

Adult lives with adult cares often seem sapped of joy, confounded by cynicism, complicated by doubt, inhibited by unhelpful psychological patterns. When the path to joy is blocked we can seek it in the wrong places, displacing its life affirmation in drugs, alcohol or other addictions. Joy is also necessary for social stability; some amount of it needs to be stimulated or maintained for a harmonious society – witness the popularity of television, comedy and comedians, and spectator sport, all of which can elicit feelings akin to joy. 

There is also a kind of joy that is less transitory, less dependent on what is happening in each moment. In this regard I recall the work of the late Western Zen master Charlotte Joko Beck, but it’s also described in the wisdom traditions of many different cultures. For Beck, joy is a permanent condition of life that can be experienced in happy times and in hardship: it infuses life’s phenomena, but its origin is in mystery beyond. “Joy is being willing for things to be as they are,” she says in her book, Nothing Special: Living Zen. When we experience life fully but without attachment we connect with joy, a boundless energy that is the ground of being, the source from which ever-changing material forms spring. It is eternal and indestructible, a continuously renewing well of replenishment, affirmation and inspiration.  

Perhaps ultimately, joy is simply life contemplating itself. It is the act of awareness, great or small, that propels the evolutionary process, and without which nothing can exist. It is the fox that catches and devours a rabbit, and the man flying a kite in a field; it is the green algae multiplying in a creek and the pod of dolphins swimming in the ocean; it is the old woman waiting at a bus stop and the Prime Minister speaking in parliament. All are encompassed by joy, and the more awareness we bring to each act, each moment of our lives, the more we increase joy in the world. As joy increases, so all life is boosted and made more robust. Joy is simple, with a simplicity that is at the same time incredibly profound. 

The metaphysical impulse

I came across the work of English philosopher A.C. Grayling while browsing in the wonderfully named Hill of Content Bookshop in central Melbourne.

Grayling’s book, The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life caught my attention. In it he devotes short chapters to various aspects of life, some classed as “virtues and attributes”, others as “foes and fallacies” and “amenities and goods”. He ruminates on such things as death, fear, courage, Christianity, faith, health and leadership with admirable simplicity and clarity. His aim is to encourage people to think more about their lives and the world. 

From my perspective and interests, one paragraph in the book’s introduction particularly caught my eye. Grayling is a secular humanist, a follower of the Enlightenment line of Western liberal thought. He’s an atheist with little tolerance for any aspect of religion, yet he says that he believes passionately in “the value of all things spiritual”. By that he means “things of the human spirit, with its capacity for love and enjoyment, creativity and kindness, hope and courage.”

“The value of all things spiritual”: this phrase struck me. No matter how anti-religious or materialist a person is in their views, it seems impossible to find anybody who doesn’t at least entertain some measure of the metaphysical. By metaphysical I mean not of material, objective functioning. “Things of the human spirit” cannot be measured, analysed empirically or talked about in any conventional scientific way. Notwithstanding belief in a material objective universe, it seems all of us ultimately cling to something else as well. Grayling, like other humanists, turns the metaphysical impulse away from organised religion to humanity. Whereas in other times God was the source of all meaning and value, now it is Man. 

The metaphysical or transcendent impulse need not be synonymous with otherworldliness or the supernatural. It simply recognises that there is a level of reality beyond the senses and human reason. Indeed, the transcendent and the material are inextricably linked in a mutual dance. Take sexuality – making love is a physical act of two bodies coming together, yet it’s also an occasion for metaphysical union that can touch us deeply and rejuvenate our spirit. Or as another example we can think of how being in a particular place triggers certain emotions or thoughts – the material conditions of that place relate to non-material levels of experience. 

Of course, modern science is limited to purely rational, material explanations: all human responses, it would say, are ultimately the result of the triggering of certain chemicals in the body, neurones in the brain etc. within a genetic structure. One of the main problems with scientific explanations as the sole, objective descriptions for reality is that they are never ultimately objective, but constantly changing and evolving. The other problem is their tendency to reduce everything to a mechanistic soullessness that denies life rather than enhances it. As a result of this tendency other forces, social and psychological, act as counterbalance. The arts – music, film, dance, painting, poetry – are one important outlet for the metaphysical impulse. The other major component of counterbalance is the unconscious: when we deny or suppress apprehension of the transcendent, we shift its potency elsewhere. Addictions, depression and many forms of anti-social behaviour arise from an inability to comprehend and experience life at meaningful depths. 

For most people in the West there is an uneasy and somewhat schizoid relationship between science and the metaphysical. On the one hand science provides the basis for all knowledge, while at the same time it is tacitly assumed that it does not play a definitive role in many areas of life – such as the emotions and relationships. Creativity, intuition and spontaneity are some of the human attributes science finds difficult to grasp and understand. Because it is too big a leap for us to define ourselves wholly in scientific materialist terms – effectively as complex machines – we are more comfortable for science to have complete sway in the natural world. Any experience of transcendence in nature is said to come from human feelings and imagination, not from the life of nature itself. Rocks themselves don’t speak, nor trees or mountains, and any suggestion that they do is mere anthropomorphism – projecting the human onto the non-human. The modern excision of “soul” from nature means we have lost the direct, close relationship we had with it in earlier times and the resulting distance has made it easier for us to exploit and destroy it.   

The challenge, as I see it, is to bring the metaphysical up from the margins and back into the heart of Western culture: it needs to be openly acknowledged, and its importance recognised. Science would have to cede some of its power to a spiritual way of seeing and being in the world. Material and spiritual explanations would coalesce in service of the fullness and renewal of life. And the wheel does not have to be reinvented too much as we move forward – we can look for inspiration to the myriad wisdom teachings over the thousands of years of Western culture as well as learning from the traditions of others.  

I suspect secular humanists like A.C. Grayling wouldn’t agree with these thoughts. But then humanism itself has been around for hundreds of years, and, like much in our culture, is in sore need of reinvigoration, new ideas and new ways of applying them in the world.  

Human change, climate change

Another day, another political crisis in Australia. What is becoming clear is that the uncertainty that has been playing out for months in Canberra, the farcical machinations and media frenzy, are fuelling a growing sense of despair in the community.

As someone who pays attention to the news, I could be swept up in the media wash of events as they happen blow-by-blow, but I’m interested in going deeper to see what patterns or truths lie underneath.

To me the current volatility in Australian politics, perhaps unprecedented at federal and state levels, mirrors the volatility and shakiness of other societal systems and institutions. If the strength of an institution is measured by popular faith in it, few in Australia are not in trouble. Disillusionment, cynicism and outright hostility are commonly expressed not just at the state of politics, but the economic system, the media, large corporations like banks and mining companies, the legal and health systems.

More broadly, there is a global volatility that is unsettling the foundations of much that has held certain for a long time. Take the ongoing crises of capitalism and the dire economic circumstances of countries in Europe; or the Catholic Church with its urgent need for reform and reinvention.

And then there’s the rapidly changing and uncertain state of the Earth’s climate. In the currently dominant Western worldview, which emerged out of the Scientific Revolution of the 17^th century, humanity sees itself as separate from, and masters over, nature. Yet the development of science has led to conclusions that, in fact, the planet is an interconnected web of systems and relations and no single strand of life is truly separate from any other. What happens in one part of the globe is related to, and in turn affects, what is going on somewhere far away. What one species does has ramifications for many others.

The volatility in human societies and global climate change are not coincidental forces. They are related by the simple fact that humans are a species on planet Earth and as such reflect and affect the whole. It’s a measure of our present culture’s narrow vision that we only see the largest impacts of climate change like extreme weather, droughts, bushfires and the like – the mundane reality is that as the planet changes, so do we. Our societies change, our institutions change, our psychology changes, our way of life and our way of seeing ourselves and the world changes. It’s merely a commonsense observation that if humans are not separate, we are subject to change on many levels.

One of the great potentials of change for us, I believe, is that very recognition of belonging to and being part of the Earth, its life and cycles. The old Western worldview which crowned humanity as independent and superior to all other creation has to give way to something much more humble and nuanced. And, indeed, change is already afoot: there is a growing view of humans as stewards or guardians of life and its diversity. This perspective appears in the most recent documentaries of David Attenborough and seems to be increasingly informing conservation work across the globe. While I welcome it, I think it’s an intermediate step to something else, that being a holistic, earth-centred paradigm in which we experience ourselves as one with nature. This can only come about with a spiritual awakening.

The recent summer in Australia was the hottest since records began. In some towns in the interior the temperature stayed above 40 degrees Celsius for weeks, while Sydney and Hobart had their hottest days ever. Heat produces flux and movement, and is the catalyst for transformation. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus saw “fire” as the primal element behind all change, an instrument serving the divine Logos.

Perhaps this country, becoming hotter year by year, allows us a privileged position to see and take part in transformation. Maybe this will be the cauldron in which the ingredients for the new paradigm properly cohere. Whatever happens in coming years and decades, we are in for a period of heightened volatility and change.