The dark season

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The allure of the phone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shifting ways of the psyche

What makes consciousness change?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End of nature?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After the deluge

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

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

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

Perspective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Land and story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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