Untaming the wild

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Limits are good

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

Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love and its uses II

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

By Magi Whisson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May the fire burn.



 

Reflections on the collective unconscious

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new global order

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        

Love and its uses

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

By Nicky McCartney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And by union what we will can be accomplished still

Drops of water turn a mill, singly none.

Traditional song. Anon.

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

At the edge

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

At the edge

There’s no rest for those at the edge

no smooth path

no clear terrain

no planned schedule that meets approval

not even harsh words – blank looks

for those at the edge.

At every turning

wheels scrape ruts in the road

At every moment the new must be made

out of nothing

The body is an experiment in mutability

it absorbs all, suffers all.

Ahead the land

falls away to air

and so I take a step

over

kindly gravity catches me in song.