Personality and Spirit

I’ve been enjoying the wonderful work of Bede Griffiths, particularly his autobiography The Golden String. Griffiths was an English Benedictine monk with a great interest in Eastern spirituality who travelled to India and was the central figure of the Shantivanam ashram from the 1960s until his death in 1993. The ashram follows a universalist faith where Hindu, Buddhist and Christian scriptures are read and where the rituals and iconography have an intriguing east-west blend.

Griffiths believed in the “perennial philosophy”, the idea that at their heart all religions point to the one Truth, the mystery of Love and its manifestation in the world. As an interpreter of Western and Eastern religious traditions, I have found none better than him; he writes earnestly and directly in the style of a wholehearted spiritual seeker and has a loving concern for the welfare of the world.

I joyfully discovered a few days ago that a documentary had been made about him – by an Australian film crew only a few months before he died. I picked up some ear phones and walked to my library to watch it on a computer.

That which intrigued me most and sparked my imagination occurred towards the end of the film. For most of it I followed the narrator’s description of Griffiths’ life story and interviews with him and members of his Indian community with a mixture of interest and delight. One person described him as a “prophet”, and his spiritual wisdom was, indeed, very deep. Then we saw him before a stream about to perform a ceremony with attendants by his side and a group of devotees behind him. One of the assistants said something to him and Griffiths, suddenly confused and cross, grumbled audibly “Tell me what I should do!” His face soured for a few seconds and the attendant smiled in embarrassment, then Griffiths’ demeanour changed as he bent over and splashed water in the different directions and towards the crowd.

In the context of the whole documentary, little should be made of this scene. However, it did send a shock through me. The prophet was also a man with a man’s foibles and limitations. For most of the film my mind had cruised in the wake of the spiritual beauty that it revealed, but now I was reminded of the concrete personality and the everyday material dimension of life.

I can’t comment on Bede Griffiths the man because I didn’t know him, and he was quite frail at the time the documentary was made, but I would like to make some general observations about personality and the spiritual journey and the way they inter-relate. By personality I mean ego, the constellation of forces and influences that make up an individual and the variety of ways an individual presents to the world and to him/herself.

The first observation is that a personality has to be reasonably robust to be able to meet spirit in a functional way. Usually that means some level of discipline has to be attained that allows a person to act as a container or conduit for spirit. Discipline comes over time through various ways like meditation, prayer or yoga, which strengthen the personality’s ability to meet spirit and create pathways for their relationship. The process is helped by life experience – the rough and tumble of the everyday world that doesn’t overly scar a personality but leaves it generally healthy. Spirit is inherently powerful and potentially dangerous and needs a sufficiently tempered ego for its vehicle. Sometimes, particularly in childhood, a spiritual experience can simply slip past us because we lack the development to properly assimilate it, while at other times it can be outright harmful – I think of the ways that intense types of meditation or drugs like LSD can bring on visions that psychologically damage people who are unprepared. The rule is that, exceptional people aside, personality and spirit need time to grow together.

The second observation, obvious thought important, is that a person has to will a connection with spirit. That is, they must actively seek it out. Random soulful experiences – like a holiday by the ocean, listening to music that is deeply moving or reading a powerful book – are good things but on their own don’t lead to the spiritual path. What does is the desire of the personality towards spirit and the exercise of will in that direction. The twist is that will can be exercised unconsciously, particularly in the early stages of personality-spirit development, so that for years we may be moving towards spirit without our rational, everyday self being able to name it as such. When there is a conscious link between personality and spirit, when the ego realises it is moving towards the divine, the spiritual path is strengthened and quickened as an individual organises their life in relation to spirit. The process is never smooth and at different times and in different ways the personality is usually still resistant to the demands of spirit, nevertheless the way is laid out. Once the conscious connection is made, the holiday by the ocean or the soulful music or book are no longer discreet experiences but build on one another in a chain of development that is the personality’s choosing.

Thirdly, the development of the personality can run separately to its meeting with spirit, and it does not necessarily follow that a spiritually developed person is also someone whose personality is highly mature. Once the ego is capable of holding a certain amount of divine energy, it is faced with a choice of progressively surrendering itself to spirit or maintaining a status quo. If the latter, spiritual power can distort the ego over time and create all kinds of shadow and chaotic effects; or the ego may try to harness spirit for its own ends, again producing shadow and chaos. Some Indian gurus are examples of this, milking spiritually hungry and naive Westerners for money and their own ends.

Personality-spirit relationship requires the ego to gradually surrender its autonomy to the divine, but in the process the ego is transformed (or purified) through many stages of development. All religious traditions emphasise morality and right conduct not just for good inter-personal or communal relations, but to shape the ego in relation to the divine; temporal human form has to be perfected enough to ascend to the level of divine union. However, even for those who are well-advanced on the path, faults and limitations that are subject to being human remain. I see the scene of Griffiths’ petulance by the river in this light – the eternal is perfect and we are perfect, but we are also human. The perfect can only be recognised as such when there is also imperfection, which is the condition of everything that exists in time and space.

Lastly, the personality has to embrace mystery. This is perhaps its greatest challenge as it progresses down the path of union with spirit. Mystery is the great nothingness that cloaks and thoroughly penetrates the material universe. From this nothingness we and everything else emerge and to it at death return. It is inescapable and ultimately ineffable – there is no way to describe or comprehend it. A relationship with it, however, can be built if we approach with an open heart and fashion an awareness attuned to the subtle behind the appearance of things, the language of symbols and the power of ritual.

Mystery surrounds the very choice that is made for a life of wholeness – why some people take the path and others don’t – and what becomes clear is that it is not us who choose spirit, but spirit who chooses us.

In the course of spiritual development, when the ego eventually stands at the precipice of its own extinguishment in union with the divine, the great terror of mystery, the fear of the abyss, must be faced. Wisdom traditions tell us that what lies beyond is Love, pure and simply Love. It is not a sentimental love, such as we are used to in popular Western culture, but something that is the bedrock of all existence, the spark and fulfilment of all creation. It is what Buddhists call Nirvana, the ultimate reality, and what in the Judeo-Christian tradition may be described as the experience of God or the Godhead, when a personality is simultaneously null and void and completely full, at its absolute centre in the universe. Griffiths concludes The Golden String with a reflection on Love, quoting from The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, the words of the prior of a monastery in which the brothers met:

“Brothers, have no fear of men’s sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of divine love, and is the highest love on earth. Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf and every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.”

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.