The prickly Moses

The prickly Moses is a most beautiful specimen. It’s a type of bushy wattle that lives in the temperate parts of Australia. For leaves it has a profusion of little spikes, likely to give your skin a gentle massage than cause any pain if you brush past the tree.

Just now at the creek near where I live the prickly Moses (Acacia verticillata) trees are in unusual array, looking decidedly out of character. Where only a few weeks ago they were covered in yellow brushy blooms, now delicate thin seed pods hang off each tree like Christmas decorations, sometimes in single dribs and in other places in bunches. It’s hard to imagine how these pods could have emerged among the dense green spikes; old prickly Moses has a softer, fairy-like appearance.

Nature is a miracle everywhere you look. From the plants that team along the local waterway to the shapes of clouds, the body of an insect to the body and mind of a human being, it’s a profound glory if you reflect but a moment. The appropriate attitude to the world ought to be wonder, ceaseless wonder, as a function of the affirmation of life. When we approach anything with a state of open curiosity it reveals itself to us, often slowly, showing the beauty of its being and the spirit that is one in all.

It’s a strange thing to say, but I’m not sure that our civilisation knows what life is. Science has the most detailed understanding of the fundamentals of the universe – genomes and DNA, sub-atomic particles and the rest – yet we are progressively killing life on our planet. We shoot probes into space to look for life “out there” but we have not solved the most basic problems of how we relate to it down here. That’s evident in the way we continue to extend human reach even as ecosystems fall apart, and in the way our societies are haunted by inequality and exploitation, soullessness and despair. So much human energy goes into life-negating activity.

To learn from nature is to rediscover and revalue the instincts in service of life. The prickly Moses tree thrives within a web of connections of light, water, bacteria-rich soil and various insects which pollinate its flowers and live and feed on it. It also thrives within a particular plant and animal community, which in turn is part of a larger ecosystem within a specific bioregion existing on a continent subject to weather patterns, geothermal activity, ocean currents and the rest; from there it is the life of planet Earth, the solar system, the galaxy and finally the universe. The instincts serve life when the mind that controls them, the creative intelligence that propels activity, is contained within the bounds of purpose and affirmation. When we ask, “What is the purpose or life-affirmation in this action?” whether it be small or large, individual or collective, we set ourselves within the frame of nature.

To return to nature is to inhabit the circle of grace that is our birthright. Everything exists within the grace of the universe, yet human actions are sometimes within and sometimes outside the dimensions of this state. Love brings us strongly to grace, with feelings of connection, oneness, solidarity, soulfulness and ease. When grace is present, the world is a lighter and more beautiful place, the burdens of life are experienced in their proper context, and everything seems possible. Grace corrects the human tendency to be lost in the minutiae of living, the weight of dense matter, by lifting a person into a fuller vision of life. Without an awareness of grace, we are vulnerable to destructive tendencies like greed and self-interest, to separation from our true self, and feelings of abandonment and alienation.

The prickly Moses lives in a state of grace, but we must have the vision to see that. When we experience beauty in nature it is not simply an enchantment that takes us away from “the world”, but is a reflection of our own self, of what we are and what we can be. That’s not to say that non-human nature always presents a pure ideal, rather that it can act as a spur and inspiration for more enlightened human living. When I see the prickly Moses in its glory, I too want a life of glory; I too want to live its simple beauty. The lesson that is learnt is intrinsically about us.

Old and new, affirming life

Walking through a peaceful park or bushland I often get the urge to say something to the land, to intone some words of acknowledgement. Speaking directly to the presence in that place, I usually say “Thank you, spirit of this land, for having me here and showing me your beauty and wisdom.” I bring my hands together and bow slightly to add small gravity to the moment.

I never intentionally decided that I had to acknowledge place, but the desire just arrived one day when walking along a creek in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. The words floated in on some mysterious vessel, felt right. Paying some due to the trees by the path, the flitting birds, the burbling water, the occasional skinks and blue-tongued lizards seemed the natural and proper thing to do, an expression of gratitude and joy.

My gesture of thanks accords with Indigenous ways of seeing and relating to the land. In Australian Aboriginal cultures, arrival at a place is an occasion for paying homage to its spirits or ancestors. Words are reverentially spoken and ceremonies held; smoke is sometimes involved, as is water, faces are painted so the spirits can properly recognise the newcomer.

The older human mind represented by Indigenous cultures, with its magical way of seeing the world and direct kinship with nature, is still present, though largely unconscious, in the psyche of modern Western people. We choose to project our magical stories into movies and the arts in general and experience their ancient, raw power in dreams. In these stories, the boundaries between objects soften and blur, the rules we understand to govern rational reality are undone and we move between worlds unseen in our “normal” everyday existence.

It’s important, from an individual and collective point of view, to be in touch with the many layers of the psyche. A person cannot be fully whole if there is not a connection and acceptance of the different dimensions of being within them. Some of these may shock or surprise the rational mind, while others may be easier to embrace. The challenge is not to accept a flat, one-dimensional picture of reality because that limits the scope of one’s humanity and, as depth psychology has shown, the mind is incredibly complex.

Collectively, we are in the early stages of what has been categorised as “post-modernity”, in which pluralism is an important idea. This holds that there is not one truth but many truths, many different ways of expressing what is right and valuable, and each expression is one small tile in the mosaic of what it means to be human. As we move through this new era, our challenge is to reconcile all the different voices – some echoing from the distant past while others of recent genesis – into a picture of humanity as a whole, a truly beautiful and varied creation. All the voices have something to contribute as long as we keep in mind the ultimate goal of life-affirmation. Where there are tendencies towards destruction and life-denial, and there are plenty in our world, we not only call them out and resist their spread but at some core level these too must be accepted and embraced as an aspect of the reality of being human. Nobody and nothing is beyond the pale, all is of the one Life.

If we examine extreme Islamism, for instance, as one difficult tendency currently in existence, we can see a version of a corrupted pre-modern view in which there is only one notion of what is right and true. But taken in context, it can be viewed as a reaction to Western global cultural hegemony and US military domination; it is in part fed by the resources of Saudi Arabia and other conservative Persian Gulf states for the extension of their power; it feeds on elements of racism and alienation experienced in certain communities and on the particular cultural/religious dynamics of those communities.

Taken as a whole, this ought to provide us with a path towards healing and addressing the threat that Islamism poses. The solution requires everybody to be a part of it, in the sense that we are not separate and that humanity is one living body. Global power dynamics affect everybody, as does the spread of Western values in relation to other cultures; security issues are global due to the global nature of transport, the internet, economic systems and telecommunications; racism and various forms of alienation affect just about every country in the world.

We are one, and if we don’t learn to act as one we may eventually die as one on this fragile, blue planet. The idea that some people are treated as separate, that young Muslims are a potential problem to be “re-educated” to our values, misses the mark by a long way. You only have to look at the fundamentalist currents in Western culture – religious, scientific, economic – to see that no group has a monopoly on partial, self-righteous viewpoints.

Coming back to my action of speaking to nature, I can see the life-affirming aspects involved. It draws me into greater conscious connection with the web of life, the myriad interactions of beings which support me in everything that I am and do. It reminds me of the value of the non-human when for so much of the day my mind is upon human things. It rekindles my imagination and simple gratitude. And though it may sit uncomfortably in the hard-edged world of modern rationality, I’m sure that it leads to other acts of compassion and kindness, which has got to be a good thing.

Space Oddity

The capacity of capitalism to continually mine human life for self-interest and profits is fascinating and horrifying at the same time. I penned a poem recently on that theme:

Space Oddity

A man is standing on a train platform, whistling.
It's a Bowie tune, Space Oddity.

He breaks to stretch his body,
bending left and right,
squatting, twisting, shrugging his shoulders,
pressing the cyclone wire fence
to lengthen his calves.
He picks up a few bars of melody between movements.

Someone will look at that and see dollars.
And suddenly on every platform at every station
people will be performing Whistle-a-cise TM:
men in grey suits using their umbrellas
to contort muscles,
women bouncing children on their knees
to drop calories.
The tunes will cost $5 each downloadable now.

It's an individual's free choice.
It's liberty and enterprise.
It's the oddity of being human.

The spirit-matter divide

I’ve been reading a fine book by Australian writer and Zen teacher, Susan Murphy, called Minding the Earth, Mending the World.

The book confronts us with the reality of the environmental damage humans are causing and the mental ramparts that have developed over the centuries that have allowed us to see nature as “other” and to dominate, control and inflict harm on the natural world.

Murphy sounds a bugle call for all of us to wake up to nature, to see ourselves in its total embrace, to shift our consciousness in alignment with its rhythms, which are deeply our own. Through the song of birds, the appearance of animals, the shifting of the weather, the patterns of the seasons, nature is constantly speaking to us if only we have the presence of mind to listen.

Reading an insightful book is always a jolt. Suddenly you notice that which you had taken for granted, look at things in a different way. Standing at the platform waiting for my morning train to work, it struck me how encased in the human our lives are in the city; how overbearing human design and presence is, to the exclusion of all other life.

When did it all start? How did we get to this? Why are we destroying so much that is precious on Earth? Murphy, along with many other writers critical of the human impact on nature, sees the transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture and the rise of city-states about 5000 years ago as the great turning of the human mind in the direction of exclusively human purpose. The success of the Neolithic revolution in manipulating crops and animals and the gathering of large surpluses meant an empowerment that irresistibly drew us towards an inflated regard for ourselves, towards self-interest, and the desire to extend our power.

While I think there’s truth in this, the problem lies deeper and emerged much earlier than the move away from hunter-gathering. If we start from the premise that everything is nature, that there is nothing outside the universe, the notion that our species has moved outside or away from nature is impossible. Rather, we represent one unique and particular expression of created reality. Just as in our creative evolution (and that of all else) nature is evolving, in our knowledge it is learning more, so in our ignorance and destructive behaviour nature is acting against itself. The real issue is the relationship between spirit and matter, the two great forces that shape reality. Somewhere, at some point in time in the fabric of being – in the mind of God, if you like – spirit and matter began to part ways. The split was reflected in the gradual development of human consciousness beyond pure animal instinct, its dynamics have been played out in human history and are with us in our actions today.

For thousands of years from the beginning of Homo sapiens, we acted out of an instinctual blueprint, much like other species. We were born, we ate, killed for survival, procreated and died. At some point, consciousness began to evolve to a level of self-awareness in which we started to see ourselves as agents in the world, capable of choosing and discerning between one act and another. The beginnings of abstract thinking arose as we started to wonder about life and death and the world around us. The Bible’s Garden of Eden story is one myth that conveys the shift from animal being to self-awareness: Adam and Eve were expelled from the pure oneness of Eden when they ate the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.” (Genesis 3:7)

The dawning of awareness required a connection between material reality and the great mystery of life. Stories and rituals appeared in which we gave thanks and paid respect to the animals central to our lives, the animal spirits to which we felt intimately close. Spirit had been discovered, and in its discovery began, very gradually, the long process of its separation from matter in the human mind. As humanity evolved over the millennia and moved to all parts of the world, the cultures that developed expressed in a multitude of ways the relationship between spirit and matter, and their essential unity. Myths and rituals made concrete the sense of the sacred experienced in the world, and in the process spiritual insight was gathered about physical phenomena: people knew the inner stories of rocks, trees, birds, snakes as well as the incorporeal energies expressed as various kinds of spirits. They related their own stories to those of other beings in an embrace in which the life of the earth was one’s own life.

In some places on the planet, particularly in the “fertile crescent” of the Middle East, the tight spirit-matter weave of what we now broadly characterise as “Indigenous” ways of being eventually began to change. As crop and animal farming became more sophisticated, a level of technical mastery was reached which allowed humans to see the environment as somewhat manipulable. Permanent settlements, irrigation channels, pottery, grain mills and stores all showed a level of advancement in the skilful handling of matter, particularly against the vagaries of weather and other aspects of the non-human world. Spirit was still central to people’s lives and appeared in the shape of the great goddess – the mother earth – and in various other worshipped deities that expressed the forces of nature.

Technical mastery allowed an unprecedented level of material comfort which in turn drove further technical advancement. The lure of matter became greater and greater. Trade routes were established, wealth accumulated for the first time and cities built. Humans progressively became divided in classes of those who could command wealth and status – priests and nobility – and others, commoners and slaves, who were forced to struggle. A patriarchal culture of harsh, capricious gods came to dominate as warring city-states competed for wealth and resources.

By the first millennium BC, the increasing separation of spirit and matter as a result of the pursuit of the material sparked an immense spiritual response. The great religions of Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism and later Christianity and Islam created dynamic spiritual-material syntheses that ordered and gave new meaning to life. The extraordinary insights contained in such works as the Hindu Veda, the Tao Te Ching, the Buddhist sutras, the old and new testaments of the Bible and the Koran were a spiritual revolution that radically transformed societies. Their powerful hold over the human imagination was to last for hundreds of years until the coming of modernity.

The Christian revelation is particularly instructive of the human condition at that pivotal time. In Christ’s time there was an unprecedented level of existential turmoil as a result of the melting pot of cultures in the Roman Empire and the profound questioning of Greek philosophy. The growth of cities and towns, continuing wealth accumulation and technological advancements also meant an increasing separation between human culture and the non-human world. The sophistication of Greco-Roman civilisation entailed an absorption in the human and diminishment of the power of nature over human affairs. The gods had retreated sufficiently from people’s lives that a level of anguish pervaded existence.

Enter a humble carpenter from the far-flung Judean town of Nazareth. The cult and later religion that sprung from his teachings saw him as bringing the divine back into the world, of redeeming matter with spirit. Christianity offered people not just moral teachings and a community of believers – important as these were – but a new way of being based on the concrete reawakening of spirit in the everyday world. The death of Jesus on the cross and his resurrection were symbols of a new beginning for all life, a new stage in reality, and all who entered the door of this revelation took part in its glory and liberation. To have faith in it and to participate in its rituals and sacraments was to be restored to a fundamental oneness with the sacred fabric of the cosmos, with God.

The Christian project of redeeming matter with spirit was soon severely tested by the collapse of the Roman Empire. Out of the chaos and trauma of the fall of a civilisation and what for many was a descent into barbarism, the vision became increasingly dualistic and lopsided in favour of spirit over matter: the world was a crucible for unending suffering and it was to the spiritual hereafter that the faithful needed to look. To the all-powerful Church in the long medieval period, matter was “fallen”, inherently sinful and to be utterly subjugated by spirit. The virtues of mercy and grace seemed weak before a fanatical otherworldliness and anti-materialism.

The call of matter, its claims to proper recognition in the order of reality, could not ultimately be denied. An increasing tolerance towards critical thinking from about 1000AD, the rediscovery of Greek philosophy among scholars and the establishment of the first universities were signs of a more lenient attitude by the Church. Within a few hundred years, the medieval Christian consensus in Europe was to unravel as a result of the increasing power of monarchies and mercantile classes, clerical corruption and peasant unrest. The Renaissance in Italy liberated the human vision back into a celebration of the physical world, the ideals of ancient Greece and human endeavour. The Reformation shattered the unity of Christendom. The discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo in astronomy challenged the Church’s most basic cosmological assumptions.

Matter was now making claims to equal status with spirit, and in the age of discovery/colonisation that the new empires of Europe embarked upon, in radical new inventions like the printing press and steam engine, there was a strong sense of human advancement and progress. Human empowerment, however, was being made at the expense of the natural world – the colonies became scenes of vast plunder for gold, timber, spices and other resources and their Indigenous populations dispossessed and enslaved.

The scientific revolution of the 17th century and the Enlightenment about 100 years later pushed spirit further away from human concern. God, according to some scientists, was now simply the creator of the universe who had retreated after setting everything into motion. Nature could be studied objectively and its laws deduced empirically, without need for the “extraneous” concepts of religion. Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire saw reason as the pinnacle human value and the conservative Church as a roadblock in its way.

The thorough remaking of society as a result of the industrial revolution ushered in the modern era in the second half of the 19th century. By this time, leading thinkers in the Western world had abandoned spirit altogether. Matter was reality. Spiritual concerns were either illusory or an “opiate” deliberately used to befuddle and oppress, according to Marx. The great questions of life and death could no longer be answered as the universe was stripped of inherent value, disenchanted, and left to the operation of mechanical laws, the movements of particles, the interactions of chemicals etc. Man was now supreme and utterly alone.

It is in the wash of modernity that the world finds itself now. After the unprecedented suffering of the 20th century, the world wars and the atom bomb, humanity is staring at its own destruction and the ecological collapse of planet Earth. At no time has there been a greater need for a spirit-matter union which can liberate humanity from its self-obsession and entrapment in matter and ground consciousness holistically in the universe. Such a new spirit-matter synthesis can’t come solely from a spiritual reawakening, but must be of a spirit-in-matter quality that brings the sacred back into a lived reality in the world.

It would transform societies towards a planetary community of concern and be one of communion with and responsiveness to non-human nature, allowing a humbler way of being on the planet. Every person would be touched by a new sense of oneness and connection to the dynamics of life. Such a spirit-matter union would not just remake the human world entirely, but be an evolutionary step in nature overall, a leap of profound evolutionary service.

Humanity's Teenage Moment

Michael Jackson was bad, real bad; particularly in the version of himself he cultivated in the 1980s. In the song, Bad, the American pop star made his own distinctive statement about how “cool” it was to rebel, a theme in music started by Elvis Presley decades before. “I’m bad, I’m bad, you know it, you know,” Jackson sang, shuffling and jerking on the music video with a team of dancers supposed to look something like a gang from West Side Story.

Jackson was a huge hit in my adolescence and teenage years, but I was never attracted to his brand of rebellious cool. His style was shallow and, frankly, a little boring. When I discovered it, punk and its offshoots spoke to me more – especially the honesty and passion of bands like The Clash and The Pogues.

Children are taught by their parents to be good, to act in the right ways so that their instincts are properly trained and socialised. A child learns that they will be in accord with their own needs and those of other people if they follow certain rules and observe boundaries. In the process, a psychic shadow effect is created as the child represses urges that would lead to “bad” (anti-social or inappropriate) behaviour.

In adolescence, physical changes propel an emerging sense of an independent self, a maturation in which the child mind must be left behind. Rebellion against the norms of the parents and the world at large, against “being good”, is part of the process of establishing a functioning adult personality as the emerging self reacts against other forces to form its own identity.

The path of maturation is a challenging one fraught with danger. Rebellion can be extremely destructive to the individual and their community: strained relationships, depression, drug abuse and various forms of risk-taking and self-harming behaviour often result as the formerly repressed shadow breaks forward. A psychologically healthy adult emerges to the extent he or she retains some measure of core “goodness” and is able to create their own, adult expressions of the good while accepting the ongoing presence of shadow.

In some sense, humanity is in a kind of teenage phase. If we take creation as a whole as our parent/teacher – call it God, divine essence, the Self or what you will – we are effectively trying to assume its power, to rebel against its demands. For thousands of years of our development we felt directly subject to powers greater than us. The social and cultural systems that we created were believed to come directly from the higher powers, were a reflection of the natural order of existence, and doubt was held back by mortal fear that it was against this order and could destroy an individual and their whole society.

The great changes in the West that began with the Renaissance in the 15th century, through the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Scientific and Industrial revolutions, have propelled humanity in a new direction. In a grand sweep of rejection, we have finally declared that there is no God and no essential good. We’ve abandoned the old certainties, the totalising systems that clearly defined what is right and wrong, and set ourselves as “independent” of nature to pursue the course that We humans want.

There’s immaturity and folly in this in the same way that a teenager may declare themselves independent and storm out of the family home with no means of supporting themselves and no real knowledge of what being independent means. We are paying a heavy price for rebellion in the dislocation and chaos of human societies and in our increasing destruction of life on Earth, which ultimately threatens our own survival.

The reality is that humanity is still shaped by the physical and spiritual dynamics of the universe as in previous times. Our mother/father, the creative life essence, is still ever-present. Yet it seems we have felt impelled to consciously break away in order to develop something in ourselves, a dawning maturity that requires us to reach into the goodness within and find creative expressions worthy of a new, elevated way of being.

Every initiation, every threshold phase, is as much about return as it is breaking into a new order. Forces dominant in the previous period must be reconciled, internalised and reshaped. A functional adult takes the life-giving aspects of their parents, society and nature at large into themselves and creates new forms as part of a continuous process of life evolution. We have to find our way back to a reconciliation with the universe, the ground of our being. The spiritual-material unity that eventually emerges, if we are able to pass safely through this teenage moment in our development, will have been shaped by the best of the past but be relevant to the present. It will be a glorious incarnation of life ever-seeking and ever-changing in fulfilment of itself.

A Meditation on the Material World

Who knows about the humble heat riser tube? I didn’t until my car almost stalled on a hill coming into central Victoria the other day. My mechanic pointed out the ragged mess that was my heat riser after the car limped into his garage. Apparently it heats the intake manifold of the engine so that the fuel is properly vaporized and ensures that, on freezing days like it gets in winter in central Victoria, a venerably old Mazda like mine can putter around as normal.

As I drove away after it was fixed, I thought how meagre my knowledge was about cars, even though they’ve been an important part of my life for decades. I depend on them yet I live with a general ignorance about how they work and the intricacies of their operation. In fact, I understand precious little about the workings of the mechanical and digital technology that is part of my everyday world – televisions, refrigerators, phones, computers, the internet, trains, airplanes ... I interact with all of them, yet they are largely a baffling mystery.

I admit I’m not a practical person and am more comfortable in the world of ideas than the world of things, but it struck me that it was impossible for any of us, given the level of development and complexity of modern technology, to have a strong understanding of all the material components of life. We sail along dependent on the specialized knowledge of others and in blithe ignorance until a malfunction or breakdown of some kind happens. I believe this state of affairs contributes to the psychological disconnection and alienation that is so prevalent in contemporary times. Our culture is materially focused, yet because of the complexity of the human-created world, few of us are actually “grounded”. The material conditions of life, which ought to be affirming identity and meaning, present seemingly insurmountable barriers to a healthy psyche.

Culture mediates our relationship with technology, creating a means by which we make sense of it and integrate it into our lives. Our culture emphasises material expansion and consumption, where a person’s relationship with things is about identity through possession. The more things we have, the better we are supposed to feel about ourselves and the more integrated we are supposed to be in a world of meaning. The relationship with the object doesn’t matter, nor does our knowledge of it or skill in using it; the primary value is simply that we have it. I have therefore I am.

No psychologically dynamic or creative relationship with technology is encouraged. We are left to be, in the main, passive consumers of objects created by other people in systems of mass production. The introduction in recent years of more “interactivity” in technology – such as through the internet and smart phones – is simply a means of expanding choice in consumption and doesn’t improve the pervasive sense of alienation created in the first place.

The antidote to this situation lies in the values we can summon towards a healthy life: simplicity, self-sufficiency, sustainability, connection and meaning. We don’t have to take an extreme low-tech turn and go back to living in caves, but we do need a reappraisal of our individual and collective materiality so that objects are part of the way we serve our deepest needs and not a means to enslave us. There is a small but growing movement in this direction: community gardens, Transition Town groups, local sharing networks, home craft and cooking, the popularity of cycling, environmentally responsible technology, are all evidence of a more connected materiality. They still require levels of specialised knowledge, but this is in service to a more grounded and whole picture of humanity.

Ultimately the material world has to be seen in greater context, as part of a bigger reality. We are much more than flesh and bone. As we age and watch ourselves, our loved ones and the world around us change, we become more aware that matter is in an endless process of flux and that to be attached to objects creates illusion and suffering. We can live fully in the material world on the condition we are prepared to let all of it go, that life asks us to recognise and fully accept that what is here today will not be tomorrow, and that is OK. Wisdom traditions teach us to build a relationship with the Spirit at the core of all life, the essence, that which animates and infuses everything. “Make every act an offering to me; regard me as your only protector,” Krishna, representing Spirit, says in the great Hindu text, The Bhagavad Gita. So we begin to experience all things differently, perhaps as they ought always to have been experienced.

Alice Springs

I was privileged to travel in central Australia recently, and was struck by the beauty and power of the land. It seems that where there is still a strong, living Indigenous connection to country, that place is somehow more alive and spiritually potent. The following is a poem I wrote after returning from the Centre.

Alice Springs

What is aridity?

Is it lack of water,
or its presence
flowing deeply under the surface?

Is it stark rocks
piled on parched spinifex hills,
or how their presence shapes
the stark spirit of place?

Is it light so bright
that it sears everything,
or its slow evening decline
revealing form in shades of darkness?

Is it sky, so unchanging perfect blue
that a single cloudy wisp is relief,
or uniformity shaping awareness
of eternity in All?

Is it mulga and ghost gum,
ironwood and cypress pine –
the strong who overcome –
or they who are one with the land
who crown its true glory?

The Orange Band

Heavy with cloud, damp with passing showers, the day was ponderously coming to an end. Only the most diffuse light, a kind of soupy grey, had been present and now it too was beginning to fade. Then, like a miracle, a bright orange band appeared on the horizon, a stunning break at the edge of the blanket of cloud. From the balcony of my flat I watched this blaze; it shone for some time, gradually waning and deepening in colour, growing thinner until finally a faint glimmer surrendered to the purple night.

Such was the beauty of this sunset light, and its stark contrast to the rest of the day, my mind leapt to understand it more. Could it hold some meaning? Was it a sign of some kind, perhaps a portent? It was fascinating to think that, if everything in the universe is truly interconnected and inter-related, an appearance of this kind had to have meaning on many levels.

I believe that a leading edge of development for Western culture in its recovery of a respectful relationship with nature is the ability to read it intuitively. We have to learn the languages of the natural world, understand the way that everything is speaking to us, and honour people with the ability to do so.

The orange band on the horizon might be interpreted by an Indigenous person as the presence of a dreamtime creator being, by a Hindu as the dance of devas or the revelation of Shiva, by a Christian as the radiance of God’s grace in the world. A priest or medicine man/woman may divine in it a message for the future or a sign of how things are in the present. Whatever the levels of science or rationality in these beliefs, they express a fundamentally intuitive relationship to nature. And it is the valuing of the intuitive mind that is sorely needed in our highly rationalist, grossly material modern society.

We start with awe. The American mythologist Joseph Campbell believed that awe in response to the great mystery of life was the source of all religion. Awe places you in a position of humility in which there may not be simple answers but only an attitude of questing openness. With this receptivity, we start to cultivate what in Hinduism is called “buddhi”, the intellect or intuitive mind. The Catholic monk and Hindu scholar Bede Griffiths describes buddhi as “the still point” at which we open to the transcendent, unitive order of things. We find ourselves in the psychic domain, aware of a deeper reality beyond the world of the senses.

In the liminal, unitary consciousness of psyche, we start to recapture the soul of the world, the essence or nature of things. From this view point everything is radiant with meaning, everything has a purpose of some kind. To translate this meaning into the concrete world requires storytelling, the ability to weave the strands of the psyche into forms that speak to everyday experience. The creation stories of Indigenous people achieve this by linking the work, crafts, rituals, ceremonies and family life of the people with the magical activities of creator beings and animals.

What is achieved through storytelling is a poetic consciousness that values and incorporates both the literal and the metaphoric in a more inclusive, holistic vision of reality. Good poetry is always doing this – speaking of the concrete while pointing to the unseen. And unlike empirical science, which is focused on literal explanation of the world, poetry embraces mystery, the unknown and unknowable. One of my favourite examples of this is Robert Frost’s classic short poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”: we don’t know why the author of the poem stops by the forest with his horse or where he is going, but there is a strong sense of the attraction to mystery. The last lines of the poem are: The woods are lovely, dark and deep/ But I have promises to keep/ And miles to go before I sleep / And miles to go before I sleep.

Perhaps sometime soon we will recover storytelling as an integral way of meaning-making in our culture, and create new stories that connect us holistically and deeply to our world. We can re-engage with nature by appreciating it both literally and psychically, and in doing so create the kind of consciousness that will value all life. The orange band that captivated me on that wintry evening may, then, be an invitation to look deeply into the heart of the cosmos and to spin dazzling and wonderful tales anew.

Tour Du Monde

The following poem appeared in Ricochet Magazine in May. It's about the contradictions in our world portrayed through the prism of the somewhat obsessive foodie culture that has appeared in recent times. Stir liberally and enjoy!

Tour Du Monde – Degustation Menu

 

Fillet of wallaby lightly fracked

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Fukushima salad

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Mountain pygmy possum, capers and juniper berries

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Meatballs syriane in a bloody jus

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Marron, shale oil vinaigrette and kauri sprouts

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Pademelon charcuterie, bleached reef coral and quandong

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Coode Island lamb, croutons and fenugreek mustard

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Mangosteen sorbet with crème Kabul

On Power

The aliens have arrived: they’ve invaded our cities, enslaved our people, committed unspeakable acts, and now we must fight back!

According to seasoned film watchers, Hollywood has been churning out a stream of spiky alien invasion flicks in recent years, including the latest, Edge of Tomorrow, with Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, which is currently showing in Australia.

Films are products of the imagination and the imagination a product of the psyche, individual and collective. Perhaps the theme of alien invasion is particularly relevant to Americans, who it could be said are facing challenges to their self-identity. The rise of China and the constant menace of extreme Islamism are threats to US global military and economic dominance that also challenge US ideas of exceptionalism and self-belief in primacy among nations. The fear of America (and indeed the West more broadly) losing its power implies at the same time an attack on its values and self-worth. Anxiety usually triggers soul-searching (Why do they hate us? What’s wrong with our values?) and denial (They are evil, we must intensify our resistance) which can occur simultaneously. This is essentially no different to what any other empire has faced throughout history when under threat. Indeed, it’s interesting to note that the Islamic world is perhaps still trying to come to terms with its losses and decline from the 13th century.

Power is self-possession: the taking hold of an internal form and expressing it through will in the world. This applies equally to individuals, groups and whole nations. In attempting to understand a particular manifestation of power, we need to know what the “self” is that is being possessed – what kind of self? What is the operating conception of self? This is important because power can be expressed very differently. If we take the example of a referee or umpire in a sport: one umpire may conduct a game in such a way that they are barely noticed, while another might blow their whistle and intervene frequently and awkwardly. In politics, democracies and dictatorships express power markedly differently.

In the modern world, the self is typically equated with the ego; power is understood to serve a self that is narrowly defined as one’s own material interests. The individual acts for his/her own benefit, the family likewise, the extended group, the small business, the organisation, the corporation, the nation. The conception is of separate actors competing with one another in a kind of grand Darwinian drama where the sole purpose is to get more for you and your own. What is missing is the reality of interdependence, mutuality and unity of all life.

The ego, it must be said, has its place in ensuring material and psychological health for individuals and groups – we couldn’t live without satisfying our basic needs in the world – but its exclusive identification with the self means we reduce the range of our humanity. In squabbling over our individual rights to do what we like, we miss the bigger reality that is the oneness of all. We can see this in the failure of countries to unite over the current global ecological crisis, instead pursuing their own agendas of material wealth at the expense of an increasingly polluted and depleted planet.

Power needs to come from a much broader understanding of the self. When we move outwards from the ego our concern becomes centred on Life in general and on serving the greatest good. We identify with an intangible force that manifests everywhere as life-affirmation and which entails action aimed at fulfilling the best in ourselves, in others and the world. Nobody but truly enlightened souls can act from the greatest good all the time, but the more we aim in that direction, the greater is our sense of meaning and fulfilment and the happier is the full body of Life.

We know that good acts don’t need to be big – helping a sick person cross the street is action in that moment for the greatest good; so too is being kind to yourself by resting for a few days instead of taking on more work; or cooking a pleasing meal. Millions of small acts of kindness every day keep the whole world going, forming the nurturing soil upon which everything flourishes.

The challenging aspect in seeking to centre the self in the greatest good is that it defies definition and boundaries. The ego, the family, the tribe and the nation are all objectively well-defined and so it is easy to identify with them. But when power rests upon the greatest good no single entity forms the basis for identity because all life is embraced equally – all egos are your ego, all families your family, all tribes your tribe, all countries your country ...

In our time there is a desperate need to reorient power towards a self larger than the ego. This self has to be anchored in the greatest good and be expressed in forms that are meaningful in today’s world. Perhaps the ecological self, the embracing of our beautiful blue planet Gaia and all its life, will emerge as the libratory vision. The work of the great prophets like Jesus, Zoroaster, Buddha and Mohammed was to provide, through divine inspiration, the means by which latent spiritual energy could find expression. They unleashed enormous, world-changing power. Maybe in our time there will be no single individual but millions of prophets working for the good all over the world who will harvest an equally powerful transformative movement. We can only look forward to that day.

Giving Thanks

We take a lot of things for granted, maybe more so in Australia than anywhere else – take the sun as an example. I once happened to be in Germany at the start of spring. Coming from Australia, where sunshine is a staple of life, it was amusing to see people in parks basking in the feeble rays streaming down on days that were still quite cold. Then it occurred to me that these poor folk had seen very little of the sun through the dark northern European winter.

The other morning while walking to work I suddenly noticed the beauty of the sun. Over the top of the city’s buildings, past the spires of St Patrick’s Cathedral and the date palms crowded around a small patch of green, the sun was a wonderful, gracefully strong presence. Its warmth kindled something in me and I said, quietly and looking upwards, “Thank you, sun, for shining on me and the world. Thank you for the life you bring. May you shine and shine.”

What is the value of such simple gratefulness? In our highly rationalist culture my giving thanks to the sun has no meaning aside from a temporary good feeling I might get, and any further significance would be considered illogical and woolly-headed. But we think this way only because we take for granted the conditions of our existence – nothing on Earth would live without the sun; there would be no life here. In being thankful we recognise and, crucially, renew the life-giving relationships of which we are part and the grace that those relationships bestow.

We start with the assumption that everything has a life beyond its material existence. The sun, the moon, stars, rocks, water, animals, people etc resonate at subtle and spiritual levels and all are interwoven in the one Spirit. By giving thanks we identify ourselves beyond our own finite existence and into this collective channel of oneness, acknowledging that we are part of a much bigger Life. Recognition entails naming, which is synonymous with truth and carries power. The Gospel of John begins famously with “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Naming brings us into the field of direct and primary relationships.

Renewal is brought about at subtle levels because of the energy that flows between all things. An act of gratefulness directs energy back to the object of thanks, so there is a mutually enhancing flow both ways. We experience this concretely every day as positive feelings when either we thank someone or are thanked for something we have done. A measure of physical, energetic and psychic replenishment takes place. I believe it’s essentially the same when we give thanks to the sun: when we return its constant, loving presence in our world a mutual reinforcement occurs. Being more aware of nature, growing our awareness of the interdependent conditions and relationships of our existence, also creates a platform to act in life-affirming ways. Protecting a forest is then not just about the trees or the animals, but about us and all life.

Thankfulness to nature is important in another way – it stimulates and nurtures our inner child. Being connected to the inner child, and to play more broadly, brings joy and vitality; we experience life a little more lightly and manageably. Much of the time our culture denies and buries the child in us – we are supposed to be occupied with work, serious and productive, busy for the sake of money and consumption. But the child in us wants none of that; it wants to play and experience the world in its own pure way. The inner child is psychologically closer to nature and can guide us back to the sense of wonder and simplicity that is essential for reverence. Jesus said: “Let the children come to me and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.” (Matthew 19:14).

I think that our culture is in the process of casting off the extremes of rationality and is moving again, slowly but steadily, towards recognition and respect for Spirit. In the growing popular feeling for (usually non-religious or non-church based) spirituality we see the sacred starting to return to our world. In truth, it never left but our perception of it simply hibernated for a while. In the 21st century our understanding of the divine and the ways in which we give thanks – by word, ritual and deed – are evolving. Though we can draw from the wisdom traditions of the past, our time in the sun is unique and very much our own. We are in a creative moment in history.

The Wasp and the Cockroach

I watch maybe a bit too much television. It helps relieve an active brain at the end of the day, but I’m also captivated by the stories, anecdotes, myths and humour that I pick up sailing from one program to another.

Occasionally something I see leaves an indelible mark, stimulates further contemplation. This happened to me watching an episode of the British comedy infotainment show, QI. Host Stephen Fry was describing the habits of a certain species of wasp that preyed on a type of cockroach. Rather than killing the cockroach, the wasp’s bite released venom that drugged it. The wasp would then lead the befuddled victim to its nest, lay eggs on it and the hatchlings would progressively eat the insides of the still-living cockroach. After telling this story and showing some vision of the wasp in action, Fry declared in disgust: "I challenge anyone to tell me there is a loving God!"

For those of us who’d like humanity to move to an ecological or earth-centred consciousness, Fry’s challenge is a very appropriate one. We cannot simply see nature as positive and nurturing without also appreciating its destructive side. Killing is a fundamental reality of the created world – life lives upon life. The wasp kills the cockroach for its survival and that of its progeny just as we humans do the same to a multitude of beings, from bacteria right through to sentient animals. Life lives upon life: the Earth Mother and the dark goddess Kali, ever hungry for sacrifice, are one.

Of course in this we are required to see the big picture, to realise that the various interactions of living beings are contained within larger biological systems. The wasp and the cockroach have purposes within their ecosystem, contributing to particular cycles of life. The processes of nature move outwards from the smallest sub-atomic particles to the interactions of stars and the universe as a whole, each process relating to and nested within other, larger processes.

For me, Fry’s response to the story of the two insects points to what humanity’s purpose in nature may be. His outrage is the sign of a being aware of the quality of things. The development of human consciousness allows us to stand back and look upon nature, making independent choices and decisions and distinguishing between right and wrong. In a sense this process is an illusion because we’re not outside nature but are nature like everything else; what is actually occurring is life looking upon itself, creation understanding its own self deeper.

Codes of behaviour that set down what is right and wrong, and by extension what is good and evil, have been part of cultures across the world for thousands of years. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they were forced out of the Garden of Eden, banished from a simple undifferentiated existence in nature into one marked by knowledge (or awareness) but also suffering. Human consciousness, as an aspect of the consciousness of nature, had discovered the existence of good and evil, or that which furthers life and that which negates it.

Good is essentially about aligning with the processes of life in their ongoing evolution, embracing and furthering them in the understanding that all is ultimately one and that everything is interdependent. Evil entails denial of unity, separation and self-interest in opposition to other beings, and often leads to domination and abuse. Humans have been struggling with this most fundamental polarity, good and evil, and its implications for millennia.

In expressing disgust with the wasp and sympathy with the cockroach, Fry is not necessarily saying that evil is occurring in that situation, but his reaction does come out of that singular human appreciation of quality. This discernment has always brought out the best in us: from loving human relationships to love of nature, great art, architecture, civilisations, systems of thought and knowledge, magnificent leaps of creativity and inspiration. Without quality all life, not just our own, suffers. That’s the human gift to nature – an awareness of and aspiration towards quality, or soul.

What do we make, then, of the present situation in which we humans have overrun the planet and are progressively destroying so much life? Perhaps it all comes down to fundamental polarities and choices: how many of us are prepared to aim our lives in the direction of quality instead of following the path of ignorance and greed? What is at stake cannot be underestimated – it’s about the radical transformation of humanity and the planet as a whole. With good acts some forests may be saved, some people’s lives improved, some disasters averted, but the big picture is nothing short of a full-scale birth of planet Earth into a new era of life. It’s the new creation that Jesus was said to have initiated 2000 years ago ... if we pay attention, we can see it stirring all around us.

On Beauty

Walking with a friend through the Bendigo Gallery’s Royal Academy of Arts exhibition recently, I stopped at a painting by the 19th-century American artist John Singer Sargent.

In fact, on my rounds through the gallery, I returned to it several times. By about the fourth viewing, I was awestruck. The painting, “An Interior in Venice”, shows a sumptuous room where a well-to-do, older couple are sitting in the foreground, the man reading a newspaper while his wife looks directly at us. In the shadowed background a young couple is standing. The feature of the painting is the light that shines on the older pair, particularly the woman, from an undisclosed source at right. The light has a clean but bold quality, soft yet dramatically enlivening – it’s a statement in favour of a couple in the twilight of their years, a reversal of the adoration of youth with the younger folk almost inconspicuous in the room.

The more I looked at the painting and its beguiling evocation of light, the more its sheer beauty struck me. I was almost in tears. The artist had achieved more than technical mastery – which in itself requires talent and years of work – his creation was inspired. The work had transcended its own forms, its technical and functional capabilities, to a level of refinement impossible to describe in words. Its power could only be felt, experienced, its appeal drawing from our highest senses.

Beauty has that spiritual quality, that refinement that takes leave of mundane experience with its separate forms and necessary functional requirements to a different level of consciousness characterised by unity and oneness. As the mundane is transcended it is also transformed, so that everyday life takes its place in that ultimate unity. Light entering a room is not simply light, but an expression of the nameless divine; a seated woman is not simply a woman, but a vessel for divine spirit. We need beauty to remind us who we truly are, in the fullest, most expansive sense. We need beauty’s charm of transcendence.

Nature is perhaps our most constant reminder of beauty. The sublimeness of a red sunrise, the hulking cragginess of ancient rocks on a hill, the power of the ocean pounding on a beach, the misty lushness of a rainforest, all draw us back into ourselves and towards the primal unity. Like the Singer Sargent painting, nature is inspired – which is why for countless millennia humans have worshipped it and sought to explain its wondrous qualities as the work of gods and other divine beings. Nature is the first teacher of beauty: in order to achieve something beautiful the artist has to align their consciousness to reach from that divine, creative ground of being.

As a society we don’t place much value in beauty; or rather it is overshadowed by other considerations. The ugliness of modern cities – with their dominant concrete buildings, roads and endless suburban sprawl – is a triumph of functionalism over beauty, of commerce and industry over simple joy of being. The material considerations of life are important, but they are not the sum of what it means to be human. “Man does not live on bread alone,” the truism tells us, and indeed there lies the root cause of much of what we do wrong as a society – a too narrow vision of life stuck in functionalist materialism. Beauty needs to return as a serious consideration in everything we do, so that human society reflects nature’s beauty more and that reflection finds fertile ground in the life of each individual and community.

Oddly, art itself nowadays finds beauty problematic – for many artists, it is related to conservative or bourgeois values. Hence, much of what is considered cutting-edge art is dark and discordant, aiming to shock or disturb, to deconstruct and disharmonise. In a way, this is symptomatic of where our culture stands more broadly – in a kind of no-man’s-land where the old certainties of religion and values no longer hold, where nothing ultimately is real or makes sense. The artist wanders forlornly through the “dark night of the soul”, the miserable landscape evoked in TS Eliot’s classic modernist poem, The Waste Land.

It’s important to understand that every culture in every period of history has had a particular relationship to beauty, has seen it in different ways and different forms. The spiritual dimension is always entered into from the field of time and space. I think it would be fruitful to investigate our own attitudes and find a way to re-engage with beauty; not in a superficial, Pollyanna or conservative fashion, but with the intention of healing and integration. We don’t have to stay in a dark place in relation to the deeper reality of being – light and dark dissolve in the boundless magnificence that beauty reveals.

Having enough

Only he who knows what is enough will always have enough.

-Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching

My electricity company keeps sending me bills with graphs and colourful pictures. I like the one in which they line up my electricity usage with the average for my type of household. Typically, my consumption is about one-third the norm.

The company’s quoted averages seem awfully large and it would be in its interests to inflate them so people feel comfortable with high levels of consumption, but I’m proud that my glass (or grid) is only one-third full.

Maybe because I’m a conserver and frugal by nature, I don’t struggle to keep electricity use down: I don’t have many appliances, I switch off lights in rooms that aren’t being used, make sure stand-by power is off and use energy-saving light bulbs. It seems fairly simple and no-fuss to have a low-energy, more environmentally sensitive lifestyle, yet it’s not the way that many people choose to live.

Knowing when you have enough is actually quite a radical disposition in our society. Despite inroads made by the environment movement, it is still countercultural to voluntarily limit your material consumption. Ultimately I believe it is a spiritual matter based upon some fundamental questions: Where do you centre your being? What is your understanding and experience of yourself?

Our dominant culture works upon the conception of a fairly small and limited self – an individual who strives to fulfil basic material needs and desires. It manipulates these needs and desires by offering vast and ever-changing selections of material products. In the process, a gap is created between the small self and what each person actually is in the fullness of their being. The gap is in turn bridged with more and ever-changing consumption, but its existence is harmful: it manifests as various kinds of poor physical and mental health such as obesity, neuroses, addictions, anxiety and depression. The ailments that are a result of the restriction of human capacity are then often treated as isolated conditions without understanding the spiritual problem that is at the root.

The small self, the ego grasping solely to satisfy its own wants, more broadly restricts the development of humankind. The global social and environmental challenges we face require an opening outwards towards a much bigger self – one that embraces other people and other species as ourselves. The new “we” that is created can be a dynamic force to heal the planet.

Having enough is based upon a healthy relationship with yourself, upon a recognition of “I am what I am” and not “I am what I have”. It requires a fundamental valuing of self as a growing, organic process that is unbounded, unrestricted. The self, or the soul as it’s also known, has its own needs and requirements that are different, though connected to, the material needs and requirements of the body. In a spiritually developed human being it is the soul that is in charge, directing his or her actions through the personality. Such a person is not enslaved by the chaotic whims of desire and is less prone to be manipulated by outside forces. Far from being restrictive, spontaneity or life force actually increases under the aura of the soul as a person centres deeply in their own being.

There is an invocation that appears in a number of the Upanisads, the Hindu wisdom texts that were written more than 2000 years ago, that goes: That is full, this is full/ Fullness comes forth from fullness/ When fullness is taken from fullness/ Fullness remains. This could be interpreted to mean that fullness is a condition of humanity no matter what state it is in. That is, you are spiritually whole even when you feel empty, even when you have never experienced wholeness. Fullness of being is always available to us and is our true condition, the true fulfilment of what it means to be human – partiality, separation from self, alienation occur as a result of a fundamental misunderstanding of reality.

The path to having enough is simply experiencing fullness in yourself just as you are.

Globalisation for good or ill

Globalisation used to be a dirty word for me. I took part in the anti-globalisation movement that was a force a decade or so ago, marching against corporate greed and global-scale capitalism, blockading with thousands of others the World Economic Forum when it came to Melbourne in 2000.

The intentions of that movement were good: to fight the rapacious exploitation of the world’s resources and people by increasingly powerful corporations, governments and transnational entities like the IMF. However, the processes underlying the growth and reach of the exploiters have also, for instance, fed the development of global environmental organisations and understanding. The ant-globalisation movement was itself, ironically, global in scale and arose out of a global awareness. It all points to a particular transformation of humanity and the planet in our time.

Our species, Homo sapiens, ventured out from its cradle in the great rift valley of East Africa about 100,000 years ago. For thousands of years thereafter, humanity was in a state of dispersion as we spread to most parts of the globe. Separate cultures, languages and physical features formed in adaptation to particular environments and out of the social dynamics of specific human groups. Communication between groups, trade and cross-fertilization of cultures occurred mainly at local and regional levels.

The reversal of the process of dispersion – of humanity drawing back together – began in the 16th century when Spain, Portugal and Holland, followed by France and England, took to the seas during the so-called “Age of Expansion”. The colonial empires they built were global in breadth: cultures from different sides of the world came to be continuously in contact with each other. European power was entrenched through the control of vast new trade routes in natural resources and slaves, and European hegemony was eventually established everywhere – often at the point of a gun. European explorers finally “discovered” and mapped the entire globe.

In our time the process of global convergence is well advanced. Events that occur at one end of the world can have immediate effects everywhere; communication between people shoots instantaneously around the globe; financial systems tie all countries together; political and economic leaders meet to decide global protocols and directions. The result is an emerging planetary “culture” with particular vision and sets of values. Following the historical dominance of the great European powers, this culture is essentially Western in outlook and underpinned by ideas of continuous economic innovation and expansion. However, as can be seen in the rise of worldwide movements for the environment and Indigenous rights, planetary priorities are up for contest. There is no certainty what the global culture will be, say in 100 years’ time, particularly given the volatility of a rapidly increasing human population, scarce resources and the dire realities of climate change. There are also the tensions that occur between local cultures – with their own histories, views and directions – and the overarching global worldview. We can see this, for instance, in the current political struggles in the Middle East as the more globalised democratic impulses clash with older, tribal and authoritarian local traditions.

We are living in a remarkable phase of the Earth’s history. It seems to me that the template for our time needs to be “unity”, that the challenge in the process of global convergence or globalisation is to create systems that nurture and affirm life. The older, fragmented vision of self-interest, of identifying purely with one’s own needs and that of one’s immediate others, has to give way to a much bigger self, the global self. The difficulty is, of course, that the old ways are deeply entrenched in the systems and societies that we have created, and it may be that they will only be transformed by global-scale catastrophe. The nascent world spirit is developing at the edge of a cliff.

In his book Re-enchantment, Australian thinker David Tacey describes the emerging spirituality in our time as moving from an older “either/or” worldview to one of “both-and”. He says: “At the stage of post-enlightenment, life can be understood by way of paradox and complexity.” To me, this holds something important: “both-and” means we include the needs of the individual, the local and the particular with the needs of the planet overall (as in the slogan, “act local, think global”) and what is created out of that is a new life or new phase for the Earth.

I believe we are ultimately agents for and within something bigger than ourselves, that the period of globalisation is not simply happening by blind chance. Humans are an expression of the magnificence of the planet and our journey of self-discovery is very much that of the Earth. That’s why we carry an enormous responsibility of acting with its highest interests at heart, something that we are only just learning to do.

On process

Something happens to us when we reach the middle stages of life: we start to see more of the intangible and subtle dimensions; we start to identify less with the world of objects and more with the patterns and processes that underlie it. At least, that is my experience.

In a culture that is outwardly and objectively focused, process is mostly a mystery. Without wisdom traditions to guide us through the inner pathways of life, many end up in the therapist’s consulting room. Some of us break down severely before we begin to see and act on what is really the truth.

I wonder if we can become attuned to process as the reality of our lives. Process, I believe, requires us to recognise the essential meaning of existence: call it God, Spirit, Buddha or any other name, something in this universe loves us. The universe is held together by love. This cannot be explained by mental reasoning but is a subtle realisation of the heart. Even in the darkest abyss of despair, the universe is still held together by love.

When we realise that life is meaningful, we begin to deeply appreciate process. At each stage in life we are called to certain challenges, certain questions are asked of us, and it is the way we respond that shapes us. Our responses are inevitably influenced by personality, psychological development, culture and other factors, but they are nevertheless opportunities for growth, for wonderful libratory leaps in development. It’s also true that sometimes all that is required is to find the appropriate attitude for a particular stage of life – we simply need the key for the lock, not to rebuild the entire lock. That may be no small task.

Process implies continuous movement and change as life unfolds from one state to the next endlessly. The development of human consciousness means we have the choice to align with the essence of life or negate it: we can choose to be with it or fight against it. Regardless of our conscious attitude, being and unfoldment simply flow on.

I’ve been privileged to be around a few people who were dying. Often because of our strong emotional responses and the suffering of the dying person, we don’t see that a process is under way. The challenge is to find the meaning in the suffering, in the process. Dying, it seems to me, requires a great letting go, and a reckoning of our life in total. We have to accept and deal with the mistakes, miscreations and unfulfilments of our past as well as the beauty and joy we have experienced along the way. We often say that in old age we want a quick death, but to have that opportunity of letting go in dignified circumstances is a great gift and preparation for the next stage of the journey, whatever it is.

The different stages of life each have their threshold at which we are tested before we plunge into the next stage. For all of us these thresholds relate to our physical existence: birth to childhood to adolescence to adulthood to middle age to old age. For a few, those who are actively engaged in inner work, there are also the thresholds and initiations particular to the inner life. As we approach the end of a stage, there is usually great tension as the old patterns and the new collide – we may want to hold on to that which is known and secure but which no longer satisfies us fully. Suffering – physical, mental, emotional, spiritual – arises as a result and the grace with which we enter the new is related to how we meet the challenges at the threshold. Only love and compassion and the best in ourselves that we have been able to develop to that point can serve as tools in our endeavour.

An awareness of process allows us a measure of ease in life – we no longer thrash around in a world of objects devoid of meaning, but begin to see and act in accordance with inner patterns. The source of those patterns is life itself, the forms that are created in time and space and that are bound by the physical and spiritual laws that apply in temporal reality. The deeper we look, the greater the depth that is opened to view, even if that means an increase in the size of that which is unknown.

Process is therefore a door into the many layers of reality and into the wholeness of being. It could be said that all things, in as much as they are subject to constant change, are actually processes – dynamically evolving, affecting other processes and in turn affected by them in many ways. I think humanity fully waking up to process will represent a quantum leap in consciousness: separate, dualistic reality will no longer be the template for our actions as something far more subtle and sophisticated takes hold. We can already see awareness in this direction growing in the sciences but collective psyche and culture takes a long time to shift. In the meantime, we can all continue to develop attunement to process, acting as explorers in our own lives and life overall.

Angels and demons

Four stern-looking winged angels in metal stare out on top of the entrance to St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne.

Above the angels are three saintly figures. I’m not a Christian, just a person exploring spirituality as I pass through the entrance into the vast interior of the cathedral for a respite from the world outside.

You don’t hear the Catholic Church talk much about angels these days. Though it has held out resolutely for a long time in many respects, it too is influenced to a degree by the dominant materialist world view that holds physical, objective reality as the only truth.

Angels belonged to the Church’s pre-modern tradition. They, and their demonic counterparts, appear in both Testaments of the Bible (see for instance Genesis 28:12 and Matthew 12:24). Until relatively recently in history, Western culture accepted the existence of angels and demons. Christianity built on and refined the pagan heritage of various spirit beings existing in particular places and in the heavens. The Reformation, followed by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment effectively put an end to this rich world teeming with good and evil “presences”, showing that it was mere superstition, mere myth, the product of culture weak in logic and reason.

Despite this momentous shift, these beings have never completely disappeared, thanks to the attraction they have held for the human imagination. The romantic strains of Western culture, those most appreciative of nature and folk traditions, have helped to keep them alive: one can think of the poetry of Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, the music of Wagner and Greig, the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites. The popularity in contemporary times of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the genre of fantasy fiction generally is testament to an abiding attraction to beings and powers that transcend purely material existence.

Why are angels and demons at all relevant to contemporary reality? The answer lies in our attempts to bring greater connection and meaning to the universe. Recently science has started to challenge and overturn its own long-held mechanistic cosmology of discreet and disconnected objects in favour of the notion of the inter-relatedness and interdependence of all life. In this new way of seeing, humanity is not “alone in the universe”, as some influential 20th century thinkers maintained, but is an integral part of a vast patchwork of inter-related and interdependent phenomena. If this is the case at the physical levels of existence, why should it not also be true at the inner dimensions of reality?

The discovery by Freud, Jung and their contemporaries of the unconscious depths of the human mind has helped modern Western society understand itself better. Jung concluded that angels and demons were manifestations of aspects of human nature or energies of the psyche. In older times humanity had projected those energies onto the world, believing in the actual existence of various gods, fairies, demons and the like. Modern society had turned the projections inwards, and the psychic energies to which they corresponded were now unconscious. Jung famously saw the presence of the ancient Germanic storm god Wotan in the rise of the Nazi movement.

Thinkers like the American philosopher Ken Wilber and the Christian monk Bede Griffiths have started to broaden the reach of the psyche beyond humanity and to conclude that there are psychic or “subtle” dimensions to all reality. For Griffiths, writing in A New Vision of Reality, this means a rediscovery of a pre-modern sensibility in which all things have spiritual as well as material existence; all things are part of one spiritual life. Reason is not abandoned but connected to intuitive wisdom in service of meaning and soul.

I think Griffiths is right. If humanity is part of nature, of a greater life, then the energies of the human psyche must relate to or be present in other phenomena. The discernment of something as an “angel” is a human attempt, through limited human means of perceiving, to define a particular type of energy present in reality. We do the same in naming a “demon”. Both can be seen as aspects of human nature, but they are also present in the universe at large. If we are not isolated beings, this has to be so.

Our actions, no matter what they are, touch on this psychic level. Loving acts invoke angelic energies or angels, bringing them into our individual psychic sphere and allowing those energies to influence us. Likewise, evil deeds court demonic energies. Mostly unconsciously, we pick up the subtle energies around us – for instance discerning certain qualities about a particular place, or a particular person when we walk into a room.

Problems arise when we literalise or overly concretise psychic beings, holding them to be real in a material sense. They’re not – they exist subtly and are best approached through intuition and the imagination. They are powerful and effective in the world, if it is understood that power can be held at a multitude of levels. They should also not be the cause for people losing reason: angels and demons need the moderating hand of the best qualities of humanity in the work towards true wholeness.

In the land of the tree ferns

The air is damp, perpetually damp, no matter what the season. It’s heavy and close. There is shade, so much shade that the sun’s only presence is the odd hesitant ray. And all around are the brooding figures of giants clothed in brown with enormous fanned heads of green.

I’ve been a few times to this place near a friend’s property in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne, each time seductively lured by its strange, exotic, somehow dangerous feel. You approach through a tall forest of messmate and manna gum before the ground starts to slope steeply downwards. The eucalypts disappear as the ground becomes muddy and a creek whispers somewhere below. Unmistakably, inexorably, you are in the territory of the tree fern.

Below a certain level there seems to be no other plant but the tree fern – this is their domain. They stand dense and watchful, their crowns spreading outwards like great umbrellas, discarded limbs piling up around them. I’ve rarely made it all the way to the creek: the child part of me tells me to stop at some point on the descent. This world is so foreign that it scares as it entices. If you stand around long enough, hungry leeches come crawling. It’s better that the visit is short.

I’m fascinated by our relationship with nature. If we are to have a healthy relationship with non-human nature we have to accord it the respect it deserves, which includes understanding our inner or psychic interaction with it. In the modern Western way of looking at the world, my response to the place of the tree ferns would be seen in the light of psychological projection: I project certain emotions, fears etc. outwards. The environment is a catalyst for drawing emotions out of me, but it has no intrinsic quality, no intrinsic consciousness. If I say that it does, I am guilty of anthropomorphism, which is falsely seeing the human in non-human nature.

This is a simplistic and outdated view. Projection is real, but it is not the full story. Projection occurs because a person lacks sufficient insight into their own inner condition and has not integrated aspects of their emotional life. As Carl Jung pointed out, many people carry “autonomous” complexes which cause them to feel strongly a particular way when triggered in certain conditions; others in the same circumstances may react very differently. Unless we are highly mature, integrated people we will project our inner world to some degree. Yet it is also true that projections can be withdrawn as a person psychically matures. The realities of psychically healthy and non-integrated people are very different; while true objectivity doesn't exist, we gain a much more balanced and nuanced view of the world when we can arrive at emotional and spiritual wellbeing.

I struggle to imagine a fully enlightened person striding down the slope of the tree ferns and not engaging with that place. With a level of balance in ourselves, we begin to recognise that all life has intrinsic value and some kind of consciousness. The life of the plant world is different in many ways to our own, but it deserves respect and respectful enquiry through the lens of relationship not human dominance.

When I am in the land of the tree ferns, a psychic relationship occurs. The life that I am, with all that is in me, meets the life in the environment, with all that it is. My emotional response, if I am honest with myself and not engaging in projection, carries the quality of the relationship. Like any relationship, it needs to be understood but will always have some level of mystery, of the unknown. If I feel wary or uneasy, maybe it is not right for me to be there. Until the relationship deepens or I understand more about the environment and my own responses to it, I may continue to feel the same way. Relationships can change over time, but we need always to pay attention to them, to their quality.

I’m interested in the pre-modern stories of certain places like high mountains. When the first mountaineers attempted to climb the Swiss Alps in the early 19th century, locals warned them about dragons living at the top of the peaks. Likewise, the first Westerners who set out to climb Mount Everest were told not to do so because frightful and vengeful demons were up there.

Naturally, we rational moderns laugh at such stories and deride them as superstition. Yet, many people have died and continue to die in alpine areas. The dragons and demons do exist: psychically, emotionally, mythologically. The gear that contemporary mountaineers carry and the preparations they make are markers of a certain relationship to the environment and that relationship continues on their way to the summit. Many climbers become deeply spiritual for the experience. The life of the climber is affected and influenced by the life of the mountain.

We need to rediscover and revalue our relationships with nature. Most of our contemporary myths are related to human material wellbeing and power: there’s the myth of progress, the myth of the economy, the myth of success, of the self-sustaining individual. Nature, in the stories we tell ourselves and which frame our world, is largely absent. Global climate change is forcing us to see the world and ourselves differently, and the myth of Gaia – the wondrous blue planet on which we live – is starting to emerge. As in the land of the tree ferns, so too in every other place on Earth, the challenge is to broaden our horizons, our understanding, through the pathways of relationship.