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.

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