by admin | Sep 5, 2021 | Dreams, Visions, Journeys, Ecomythic, Ritual, Sacred
The second of my two very vivid childhood dreams reveals why I am not crushed by the other one, where our world crumbles away beneath our feet. While that dream foretold the extinction event we are currently experiencing, this one reminds me that no matter how much terror, anxiety, depression or grief we experience, there is wisdom in the shadows.
In this dream, i am a boy, wearing a classical toga and leather sandals. I run across the desert sands to an enormous dome building. I am very comfortable here and climb some stairs, which wrap around the dome to a flat concourse. There is simple, unreflective joy in my heart – the kind we experience so easily as children and so rarely as adults.
Suddenly, something moves in a shadow to my left. I look back, jolted by a ripple of fear in response to this movement. Out of the shadow of a stairwell an old man appears. We stare at each other for a moment, while I am frozen to the spot, wondering what will happen next, still a little scared. He smiles. There is warmth in his eyes, knowing emanates from his visage; he is comfortable in the world and wants me to feel the same.
At his smile, my childish innocence and faith in life instantly reappear. I turn back to run along the rampart. As i do, i look more closely into the clay bricks of the domed wall. There i see tiny capillaries in the wall, which i had never noticed before.
The renewed depth i discover in my vision, as a result of this apparition, works to balance the joyful innocence of the boy. Importantly, out of the shadows appears not threat, but comfort; the wise old man of archetypal power contains a frisson of danger, as true gnosis (or inner knowing) always has. But with his smile I do not fall into fear, but into an edge of discovering the unknown instead; it is the mystery that lasts and draws me along.
The Old Man expresses that wisdom or spark in us that is beyond the comforts of everyday life, what we have become used to, the personality we identify with. He is not an emissary of conventional religion, like the priests who promise hope for our lives after death if we obey their holy writ. He obeys only the imperative that is crystallised in the image: the archetypal Old Man brings wisdom from the realms beyond what we are thus far aware of; that is the whole point. Jung became wise enough through his contact with the archetypes to know they bring together a wide range of possibilities.
Coming out of the darkness, he brings wisdom – and we never needed it more than now, as we face the catastrophic, combined realities of anthropogenic climate change, ecosystem breakdown, increasing political instability and the widespread extinction event that has already begun. However, it would be facile to claim that out of the darkness (of what is happening to our planet right now) a light will come. I write of my dream now not to promise a new dawn, or comfort us with any other simplistic metaphor designed to avoid taking responsibility for the ecocide our species is responsible for. Empty hope and cheap consolation do not honour the untold suffering that will be visited upon humanity as we begin to discover what crop failures, superstorms, megafires and freakish flood events really feel like. The extinction of so many of our animal cousins and plant kin alike deserves more. It deserves awareness.
We can develop deeper awareness by looking into the Shadow, seeking the wisdom that arises from our place of not knowing. This is how the Mystery Schools found faith in gnosis for over 2,000 years. Yet, while we explore our own inner realms and Wizened Old figures, staring into the darkness without guidance can lead to despair. For as Nietzsche so presciently wrote, when we stare into the abyss, it stares back into us. What do I find when I look into the shadow, of myself and of my race? Something tells me that, if I look deeply enough, I will find not only what I fear, but what grants me greater insight, too – and perhaps even an element of solace.
I have written before about how we can find this, even when we realise that we are enmeshed in, and therefore part of, the system that is destroying the earth. With the dream of the Old Man, I recall that there is wisdom beyond courage; beyond environmental activism, beyond righteous indignation at the failure of our leaders, beyond the sad but inevitable realisation that the world as we know it is now collapsing beneath our feet.
The Old Man does not forgive the evils of transnational corporate greed, which have ensured our downfall; nor does he forget the corrupt media that sells the stories of the military industrial complex. But neither does the archetypal Old Man want to beat us up with guilt, since we have failed to stop the madness and destruction. He understands that the evolution of technology, the politics of power, the fact that we were born into this damnable system without willing it, the way we were sold the modern mythology of work, profit, holidays, breeding up and finally retiring to play Scrabble or bowls … all of this is beyond our power to change, except to the extent that we can make better choices.
The better choice we could make right now is to transfer our values from the damaging system of capitalist profiteering to the timeless tales of power, wisdom, grace that remain available to us in our dreams, our myths, our symptoms and even in our nightmares. The Mystery School lives on, because it is a representation of the ancient wisdom coursing through our veins and dancing in our DNA right now.
There is no future – the kids doing tang ping have figured it out – but there never really was. What is left to us now, beyond apathy and resignation, is deepening of the soul, refining of the spirit, transformation of the self. Nothing good will come of our planetary death throes and no amount of hand wringing, sobbing or admission of guilt will alleviate this awful reality. Rather, i will recall the wisdom of that old man and consider the life of the butterfly as my guiding metaphor. We crawl away to create a cocoon, withdraw within it, and dissolve into goop. These old selves must die.
Every traditional culture teaches that part of us passes over to another realm. With an ear on that wisdom, i have faith that my soul will crystallize into a new lifeform, in a new dimension, where i will find the strength to grow, until i am ready to break out and fly free, on another adventure. One day i will be that old man, looking out from the shadows, unexpectedly frightening the children i meant to comfort, while helping them to see that looking into the depths will deepen their vision, their insight, their capacity to look more clearly into who they are and what their relationship to the earth is.
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Images: Featured Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash;; clay Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash; Painting of a sea monster by Carl Jung, from his Red Book; painting of a fire serpent by Carl Jung, from his Red Book.
by admin | Aug 21, 2021 | Awareness Practices, Ecomythic, Ritual, Sacred, Zen Animism
One of the two very vivid dreams I recall from my early childhood in the 70s was a warning about the current times. I think of it sometimes, as it informs me about how to steady myself for the extinction event that is currently escalating on our planetary home.
Although very young when I dreamt this, I am a bearded man in the dream, standing on a granite pavement, with my two children standing innocently next to me. It feels very Atlantean; we are part of an advanced civilization, proud of our place in the world. I had been in some kind of committee meeting, inside a marble hall, and had come out for some fresh air and to see my children. Suddenly, without warning, the ground began to rumble beneath our feet. In no time at all, the pavement was crumbling away, and I begin to lose my footing, which seemed so secure just moments before. I instinctively reached down, grabbed both of my children in my arms, and pulled them up to my chest. It felt good to have them so close, even as the world collapsed into an abyss beneath our feet.
And that’s it. Like so many dreams, it simply ends, having appeared to my young mind from … from where? Nothing in my early childhood offers a reliable compass for this vision. It is a spontaneous irruption from the collective unconscious, a pattern of longing, shock and adaptation, an archetype of life and death arising out of the storehouse of human myth and symbol.
But the imagery says so much – and its visionary power goes a long way to explaining why I have always known that the world as we know it would end in my lifetime. Now that we are seeing evidence of this everywhere, it is time to draw upon the endlessly fascinating world of myth to try and navigate the tumultuous seas that are crashing down upon us, as runaway climate disaster is matched by unstoppable ecosystem breakdown, all in feedback loops of their own.
So, what can the great stories from the collective annals of culture tell us about where we’re at now and what we can do about it? What wisdom can be imparted by studying the ancient ways, as well as waking up to the limitless miracle of the moment (which is really where myth points, endlessly).
The end of this world has been a consistent image in world mythologies, from Biblical revelations to Mayan calendars, from nuclear threats to Kali Yuga. There is little point in running over the false starts and fake prophets that have predicted that The End is Nigh! So, just as my MA tracked the way that our dreams link us to the mysterious worlds of myth, let’s return to its life changing power and see what can be further divined from it.
I mention that my dream felt Atlantean, knowing that the original inspiration behind the myth of a lost but highly advanced civilisation can be found in Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias. In the latter, Plato tells of the fast and furious fall of the legendary Atlantis, when “there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune … the island disappeared in the depths of the sea.”
An entire civilisation disappearing in 24 hours is a classic ‘warp’ of mythic time, which is often elastic enough to stretch out towards the infinite (which we can experience when we practice timelessness) and back in towards the intimate (which is how we experience time in an embodied sense). Plato’s 24 hours can remind us of the riddle Oedipus answers to destroy the Sphinx at the gates of Thebes, unwittingly ensuring his own downfall: what creature has four legs in the morning, two during the day, and three at night? A human, whose life passes so quickly from the face of the earth that it may as well be one day – from crawling infant, to free standing adult, to the elder holding themselves up with a crutch – our entire lives pass as quickly as a mote in time.
This also makes sense in another way: the entirety of large-scale human civilisation – urban settlements built on the profits of agriculture and colonisation, magnified a hundred-fold with the industrial revolution – has risen and will fall in the blink of a geological eye. Our moment in the sun has been brilliant and short-lived. Like Atlantis – both the one Plato claimed was already an ancient myth in his day and the imaginative one that has been dreamt up many times since – we are now crumbling into the sea. And as in my dream, it is now happening very, very quickly. Technological development and ecosystem destruction have been increasingly rapid in postmodern industrial culture. But as I never tire of pointing out, the exponential pace of this machine was set in motion during the agricultural revolution, thousands of years ago, when we changed from treating the life around us as kin and instead started to think about it as a set of resources for our use.
And now, we are visiting panic time. Mental health issues are skyrocketing – a pandemic is highlighting and magnifying this, because we mammals don’t flourish when we are socially isolated – but we can expect this to continuously escalate, as the true horror of what faces us next becomes increasingly apparent. We don’t need old time prophetic predictions anymore – a hot house earth is now a matter of scientific certainty and will spell the end of the world as we know it (certainly for the beer and skittles reality we in the affluent west have enjoyed over recent decades).
The only thing left to do is to prepare for the best possible end we can, to draw near those or that which we love, resist the urge to become frantic, let go of our sense of entitlement, practice meditation and breath work and become proficient in dealing with grief. (I’ll keep practising environmental activism, btw, but the days are gone when we might have dreamt we were going to make any real difference to the near future of the planet.)
It’s time to spend the rest of our lives building relationship with the sliver of our consciousness that remains connected to the eternal spark of life. Paradoxically, the practice of seeking to awaken to the timeless can deepen our awareness of the moment, as we experience life in the body, in the here and now, this unrepeatable but soon to pass opportunity to be exactly who we are. Breathing in connection with all that is connects us to the spirit of life that emerges out of the universe and falls back into the ultimate matrix upon its death. Like everything else, we are the flourish of a brush stroke, the coming into being of a certain kind of energy, the passing of a firefly in the night.
My childhood dream is like a lifetime’s memento mori, a reminder that death awaits us all. My guiding metaphor for the awakening I seek out of it is the life cycle of the butterfly. We have been crawling along as caterpillars, but now it is time to create a cocoon, withdraw into it, and dissolve into goop. These old selves must die. This applies on multiple layers and across differing contexts of our lives; I recently emerged from a 5-year apprenticeship to nature spirit, guided again by my dreams, this time to leave the city and live a coastal life far away from my academic and other urban pursuits. This whole period of life, including work and parenting and being in the world in my way, was like a cocoon compared to my previous existence. But I also feel like every night is another cocoon, out of which we emerge renewed; as is every meditation sit, every relationship breakdown, every opportunity for change.
No matter what the context, we can see in nature that there is a basis for trusting that the goop of our dissolved self will re-crystallise, that a new being will grow and build strength, that eventually, after a long, dark night of the soul, we will break out of one cocoon and fly free to another dimension of ourselves. This is the cycle of energy that gives rise to religions: all that lives must die and out of death comes new life. Quantum physics tells us the same thing – life is energy and it is never completely snuffed out, just transformed. To believe that this is what happens to us, to our bodies and consciousness, when we die makes just as much sense as any other faith, like the one that states that consciousness arises out of physical matter and life is ultimately meaningless. As the world crumbles away around us, which myth will you choose? To hold onto the last vestiges of your sense of entitlement; to party as much as possible; to forgive and expand; to prepare for another dimension?
Every traditional culture teaches that part of us passes over to another realm. With an ear out for that wisdom, we can live for the moment and experience the vibration of a living, intelligent cosmos. If we do so while practicing compassion for the suffering of all beings, we may even realise some small measure of liberation from the confines of the self along the way. The possibility of spiritual liberation in itself should be enough to inspire us to reconnect with the ocean of eternity, beyond the iron cage of reason and the isolation of the individual.
I’ll still reach for my kids as the world crumbles beneath our feet. And I’ll still be thankful to feel their breath on my chest as we fall into the abyss below. That’s because the shadow of death does not seem a threat to me, but a promise. This is the ecomythic in action – inspiring compassion for all creatures, celebrating a living cosmos and an animate earth, within which we all dance, for that limited time we have allotted.
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Photo of man with kids by Juliane Liebermann on Unsplash; Collapsed street photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash; Sliver of light photo by Dyu – Ha on Unsplash; Butterfly photo by Meritt Thomas on Unsplash
by admin | Jun 3, 2021 | Awareness Practices
I recently ran an Ecopsychotherapy intensive, which requires time to reflect upon before i can share; it was so filled with exceptional moments, deep nature connection, spiritual richness and shared community that it was truly humbling and overwhelming. In the meantime, though, the question arises: why retreat?
The word “retreat” indicates that we are removing ourselves from a situation. In military terms, it often connotes a situation where we were in danger and had to run away in order to survive. Although our situation might not be so dramatic, the metaphor holds true in some ways. Everyday life in the modern world is a hectic reality and sometimes we just want to get out of the ‘rat race’. Too often we find ourselves caught up in circumstances where we feel we are fighting just to stay alive, to keep that job or position, to keep our relationship thriving, to pay the bills and keep our kids in school or our creative juices flowing in a world where everything has been reduced to the dollar.
The seemingly unending progress of economic rationalisation reduces everything in its path to commodification: what’s it worth? It doesn’t matter if it is our soul or what is left of nature; it seems that once the gaze of modern industrial society falls upon something, it is reduced to what it can be bought and sold for. No wonder the idea of a retreat seems so sensible!
Photo by Ashley Batz on Unsplash
But coming on retreat is more than just getting away from a crazy world, or a rushed existence. It is about remembering who we really are; the “me” behind what I appear to be like to others, the “I” beneath the socialised self that is caught up in all those games, the endless mystery and the crying child, the wounded romantic and the spiritually enlightened person that is forgotten in the hustle bustle of everyday life. Although the retreats i run are specifically designed to enhance deep connection to nature, these social aspects of ourselves are all present too. Every part of us needs to be included in a retreat, no matter what the focus is.
And regardless of the theme, by the time we leave a retreat, our boundlessly free spirit should be shining through again, ready to embrace the world and all its madness with loving arms and a compassionate heart. The person we know we are will be more ready, willing and able to step up to the bus for work, to the kitchen table for another day of family life or retiring reflection, to get back to our creative selves and to be here now. We retreat from the ‘real’ world of rushing about getting things done in order to return to it refreshed, better able to integrate our inner sense of worth with our outer existence in the physical and social world.
Photo by Rob Mulally on Unsplash
So, as well as going deep to rediscover our beautiful souls and loving them back into thriving, we concentrate a bit on how to integrate what we get out of the retreat into everyday life. When we’ve experienced really deep breath without any distraction, we take that out to breakfast and remain mindful of it, until it becomes natural again. When we have rediscovered that gentle child inside and how it viewed the world without judgment or hatred, we ask ourselves how it could remain alive inside our adult lives and concerns, to become a guide just as a good elder can. When we hear a bird calling to us to remind us that we are part of nature and can regain an ability to be in conversation with it, we work on hearing that voice whenever we need some wisdom to help us make a decision.
We retreat to rediscover; then we return to integrate and to share what we have learned with others. That’s how retreats work.
*NB: If you got something out of these words, please Like, Share and Subscribe for more! Lead photo credit: by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash
by admin | May 27, 2021 | Awareness Practices, Ecomythic, Ritual, Sacred, Zen Animism
Camped beneath a full moon by a remote coastline, I am alone again with the wind, the sound of the ocean, and a celestial mystery that reminds me that we are all children beneath the stars. I pitched my swag not long after dark, excited to be so alone out here, dive gear ready so that I can immerse myself as soon as possible after dawn in the roiling waters of our ancient birthplace, the ocean. I fell asleep early, exhausted by recent movements, as the full moon rose above the scrubby coastal trees of this place.
Then I awoke, a few hours later, dazed and confused by the moon, which was now only half visible. It took ages to refocus my mind around this mystery – the line down the middle of our lunar orb was distinct. This was no demarcation of heavy cloud cover, and neither was it a tree branch in the way. I kept watching, maybe only half awake, maybe having slipped into a sweet, harmless madness, or a liminal psychic cave of timeless mystery, or a crack in some sorcery set by the universe to capture those foolhardy enough to give themselves over to soul. My mind raced – what is happening? How can I fall asleep under a full moon and wake up mere hours later under a half a disc? Has time slipped, am I lost in its deep pools?
Then I noticed it slowly grow, towards three quarters full, waxing again now as if it were pregnant, bloating as it rolled around the sky, becoming full again before my very eyes.
A blood moon lunar eclipse. How could I not have known this was coming? How is this not front-page news? (I know, if I took more notice of media, I would have known this was coming yesterday too!) But if I lived in a traditional society, where we watched the natural world for its clues and signals every day, I would have known this was coming in a different way. It would have had more meaning. We might have been afraid of the lunar eclipse, as many cultures were, when the moon gets eaten by the night.
The ancient Mesopotamians, with whom I have an affinity since studying them in my full-time research days, would install a fake king for the night, in case the deadly juju of the eclipse infected the real regent with disease or death. For the Sumerians, the moon was a God, a masculine power in the night sky, as opposed to the Lady Luna we imagine drawing us into romance, mystery and the cycles of life. Nanna the Moon God was the bull of the night sky, the stars a herd of cows, all observed closely as they revolved around our planetary home. The Mesopotamians became renowned for the mathematical precision of their star gazing, another reason I loved them. Such patience, record keeping and meaning making under the celestial constellations. We don’t share this love or take this time anymore; we have created our own light in the night, artificial, reliable and easy (even though it is costing us the earth; but that’s another story).
Nowadays, it is up to us to wake up, to notice the world around us, to become aware of the cycles of life and death in ten thousand animate, intimate, real ways. I’m glad I didn’t know the eclipse was coming to swallow the full moon at night. The surprise was such a jolt, it gave me the opportunity to awaken anew to this mystery, to be confused by the cosmos all over again. In my scrambling for reality and understanding, I rediscovered a primal need, as the world as I knew it fell away beneath me, or rather above. Wherever we look for certainty, we’d better be ready for anything, it reminded me.
My Salute to the Moon, a brief version of the full yoga asana. This is included in my Nature Calling Online Course for those wanting to deepen their connection to nature. It’s freely available here.
Reassured, I got up and performed my salute to the moon, a regular ritual I like to do when I am under her pearly light. Tonight, I notice how her silver glows upon my hands and arms as I reach for the sky, as if I am imbued and glow with the power of deep connection to the cosmos. Safely full and unobscured again now, I can write my story in her light, unafflicted by the wyrdness of my lunar fascination, rebalanced by my salute to the sacred mysteries, by the circle of ancestors who deign to allow me to speak as a guest at their table.
She is behaving herself again, crossing the night sky towards the horizon, and I feel I have been given back my sanity, my faith in the rightness of things. Having lost it for a while there, I am brought back to life in the exact moment of the everpresent here and now, as ritual always does for me.
Perhaps, like me, you will join the rounds, hopefully waking up to the great mystery of consciousness coursing through our veins, hopefully breathing in and out with gratitude for this one wild opportunity at self-aware primate life in a body on earth, hopefully waking up …
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