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.
*Thank you for reading my Nature Calling blog. If you got something out of these words, please Share, Like and Subscribe to the blog (upper right corner). It really does help to keep the juices flowing.*
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 | Mar 29, 2018 | Uncategorized
What are the shapes and spirits, the dreaming creatures and elemental characters that appear to us when we turn to the natural world and ask for its teaching? We can look to the mythologies of traditional cultures to get a big picture story of some of the things we might expect – the cosmic serpent and the animal powers, the plant spirits and hybrid forms – but none of these may appear when we do the actual work in the world with real people. So, following on from my lecture on this subject to the Jung Society of Melbourne this March, it was a privilege to explore the Archetypes of Nature with several participants in the workshop that followed. And what appeared for us in that beautiful space?
It was a very windy day. A wind that had kept me up at night, so that I felt compelled to ask it: what have you to teach? It said: you must lift yourselves up to match me. You must draw on your work, not be afraid to project your voice, lift the group’s energy so that they join forces with the Archetypes of Nature and allow themselves to be evolved by the experience. There is no turning back or turning away from this challenge. Awaken that power, meet it head on and fulfil your promise.
And it meant it. The wind kept up. I thought that a tree could come down and crash through the roof of the building we used as our base for the day. I was worried we wouldn’t even be able to go out and do the work in the natural environment, amongst the tress on the hill, with the breeze in our faces and the scent of pine needles and the sunlight glinting through the clouds. So we stayed inside and shared enough of ourselves to build a little community for the first hour. We dropped into that trance-like state available to us when we allow constant drumming, like a rhythmic heartbeat, to modify our brain waves so that our guides, guardians and allies can appear in our psyches. We shared, when comfortable, what appeared to us and what it meant, how it opened us up to new levels of consciousness that integrated parts of ourselves that had dropped away through the process of socialisation. We broke for lunch and then – the day opened out to our presence in the great outdoors.
We left the building by marking our presence, as embodied beings in a living planet, with mindfulness of every step. We breathe as if the atmosphere nourishes us; each breath entering our lungs to enrich our blood with oxygen, to fill our bodies with life, and then to return to the world to be part of the ongoing cycle. Each footfall reminds us of the miracle of walking, as we balance on one leg before the other makes ground, like monkey paws holding us up as we feel the earth with our heels and toes, gripping and rolling us along the landscape. We stood still on that hillside and imagined the place before the buildings went up, before the streets were laid, sensing the landscape beneath for its rolling hillsides and valleys, ‘placing’ ourselves rather than just assuming we live on the land as strangers: cooped up in buildings and cars all the time, walking in straight lines and looking at the straight walls of buildings … remembering instead how to be primate bodies in relationship to the earth around us.
The stillness that ensues requests our silence, but the wind continued. When we go to practice active imagination, to enter into conversation with whatever spirits of nature appear for us, or Archetypes that have entered our dreams, I have to project my voice at nearly full capacity to be heard over the gusts, as I offer guidance in the protocols of giving thanks and requesting insight. Pay your respects at all times, I remind the group; send your blessings out to the spirits as if they were real, this is what we learn from the venerable traditions. Nature is full of intelligence, so it must be treated and approached with respect. Better to always approach the numinous with a hospitable door open to the spirits that work for the best outcome for all (and the door shut to other types of energy). These are simple rites, but not to be overlooked. They are the safety net for those with the courage to allow that we are not alone on earth.
Say hello to the sun, salute the moon, give thanks to the spirits of the air and the waters, place yourself in the middle of all the directions, up and down as well as all around … be prepared for the conversation to get real and for the appearance of anything. We had wind, all day, challenging us to rise up in response. We had mountains, still and permanent, implacable in the background. We had bark, more than once, speaking of layers: protecting the tree, stripped away to reveal more depths of being, letting go to fall to the ground. We explored the sense of displacement that has marked many of our lives, as we have shifted around the world, by choice or not: an archetype, or meaningful pattern, of modern life if ever there was one. Feeling as though we are alone at the edge of the desert, or looking down into the minutiae of physical life, coming here from Europe or Asia or the Middle East, wanting to feel we belong here and seeking reconciliation with the people that called this place home for countless generations before they too were displaced by the force of modernity. Appreciating the gentle little things, the drops of water that evaporated throughout the day, the flowers small enough to fit inside an acorn cap, the way a stone lifted leaves an imprint on the ground. Flying with a magpie, swirling around the integration of black and white feathers in the mind. Awakening to the way a spider can teach us to overcome our anxiety.
But finally, how can we remember this stuff in everyday life? How do we take the images that appear, the lessons we remember, the messages we receive from this sacred time together, where we carve out a space that Jung would have called a Temenos, to relink our unique selves with the greater reality of the one great Self, in daily life? If we can do that, from our encounter with Archetypes of Nature, then we have truly begun the next phase of our journey towards individuation: towards becoming more truly our own unique, embodied, unrepeatable selves so that we can let go of our attachments to the smaller self of learned responses, defensive patterns and old dreams. Letting go into the infinite potential of the universe as it becomes what it will be, in every moment.
