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 | Apr 20, 2020 | Ritual, Sacred, Zen Animism
It’s like every conversation has to be about Covid-19, which in this digital age means the viral has gone viral. So what’s the ecomythic angle? What would we hear if we heard Nature Calling, if we tuned into the stories that are arising out of the earth, communicating to us about how we live on this planet? How we live as human animals, but also beyond the limited consciousness of the mortal; in the body, but also from the imagination, which flies beneath, below and above the physical frame, from the stars to the embers, as cosmic consciousness embodied here and now …
Well, think of it like this. What do you call an invisible enemy, which attacks your life support system from within, can be contracted by touching a surface that shows no sign of the infection, either stops you breathing altogether or merely gives you a dry cough, mutates occasionally as it crosses hosts, appears and disappears without a trace, sometimes not even showing up for the diagnosis, even with the best of modern medicine at hand? And what about when it creates total chaos around the world, shuts down the capitalist system, keeps nearly everyone cooped up at home and inspires panic buying of essentials like toilet paper, even when it can’t be seen?
Covid-19 has been talked about in terms of its symbolic potential (eg by Charles Eisenstein), and most importantly its ‘meaning’ in terms of the ecological crisis, but what about its ecomythic spirit? What kind of creature is this, that appears out of nowhere and has such powerful effects, completely rearranging human life almost overnight? A superstitious witness to such events would want to know what demonic spirit let this evil force loose upon the world, as well as what the victims did do to deserve it. This touches on the karma of the situation too, which points us back to the rise of the various plagues that have afflicted humanity over time. An objective observer would have to ask – has this got something to do with the way humans treat animals; seeing as living in close contact with them has something to do with it, and you’re doing this in order to eat them, skin them and trade them?
The existential level of questioning gets pretty brutal pretty quickly, but this is appropriate if you want to look the truth in the face (or as closely as you can get to this before you feel the need to look away). Joseph Campbell pointed out that compared to the human ego, the mythic universe is ‘adamantine’ in its challenge – harder than a diamond and as unflinching as nature when it comes to dishing out just rewards. If the human race is about to reap what it’s sown, over millennia of ecocidal abuse, then we should prepare for a near future of disastrously epic proportions. This looks like apocalyptic sci-fi on steroids, as the oceans begin to repel excess carbon and heat (its time of being a passive soak for our bad behaviour is effectively over). The only reason we can’t face the reality of this situation is because it is too horrible to digest; such a truth would make a mockery of all our plans, our love for our children and grandchildren, our hopes for the beautiful life this planet supports. But now that climate scientists have taken the gloves off, having admitted they’ve been too polite for too long, it’s time to face the future and its ecomythic power – to upset our dream of never-ending human glory, as even conservative commentators are now admitting (even if sometimes begrudgingly).
The dream of endless growth is closely associated with fantasies of immortality and these can be tracked across the history of human myth. Although such wishes exist in every culture, the dream of living in everlasting peace with an ultimate power (for example a Christian God) or in a field of deathless energy (such as the Buddha’s nirvana) seem like harmless fantasies compared to the scale of what modern, technologically developed societies do with the human lust for immortality. Because our modern world rejects both Gods and the liberation offered us by a mythically-informed depth psychology, we make our desires manifest instead, in desacralised rites of consumption.
That’s right folks, if we can’t have eternal afterlife we’ll just fill up right here, thanks. The sensual thrill of satisfying appetite – of fancy foodstuffs, of cars and hotel rooms and exotic holidays and sofas and sex & drugs & rock ‘n roll and electric light and everything – fills in for the spiritual paradigm we lost on the path to our materialistic paradise. This one, which is costing us the earth. Ironic, no? But wait, there’s more …
The paradox of ephemeral satisfaction – of feeling we have overcome the limits of life in the body, life on earth, in a materialistic orgy of consumption – is an ‘all feast, no famine’ deal we made with technology. It comes as a historical result of the agricultural myth (from around 10,000 years ago), that we can profit from the earth and not pay the ultimate cost, which is then dialled up by the machine age of the industrial revolution (starting around 250 years ago), then made global by colonisation, then exponentially skyrocketing over recent decades, as digital technologies concentrate our dream of being both primate and god at once. How about that? The more worldly and less seemingly religious we have become, the more the great spiritual ideal of living free and forever has taken hold of our imagination, like a feverish dream.
This is the karmic law of Covid-19. It’s not just that we reap what we sow, that we deserve to die en masse for treating the earth and its other animals like disposable resources for our profit. It’s also an Oedipal paradox: as we try to escape the traditional versions of our subliminal desires (for God/Nirvana), they revisit us in exotic new forms, from behind and below, in our dreams, when we’re not looking. We treat the earth like dirt and it gives birth to new lifeforms, some of which threaten to wipe us out in its name. It’s viral karma, joining the unprecedented bushfires and magnified superstorms and every other fury unleashed by the earth we thought we’d controlled for our own purposes.
Just as Freud saw, the primal desire of ‘man’ (if not all men) to consume the mother’s body in a pervasive rite of carnal satisfaction cannot often be fulfilled by the individual male at large in society; but we can find myriad other ways to feel filled up on mind-blowing power, to feel fully nourished and filled with love, warmth and self-fulfilment. Sadly, many of these ways are not so wholesome or respectful of ‘the other’ that is required to satiate our desires. Many of the ways a patriarchal capitalist framework like ours offers to satisfy our inner needs are very far from being kind to others, or to our planet.
We cannot help wanting stuff, as embodied beings, but we have a choice as to how we satisfy our desires. Sure, if we are born (or ‘fated’, as the ancients would say) to be a certain type of person, to want certain things as a way of feeling satisfied, it can seem almost impossible to change that. Put another way, we are coded towards certain predispositions, both as a race and as individuals. We seek nourishment, shelter, company, as a species; and perhaps lust, intoxication, the thrill of the gamble, any other sin to any degree, or none of them – perhaps the quiet life, a simple family existence, escapism or hard work. In any number of ways, we have a program from birth, a personality type, things we can change and things we cannot. As the old saying goes, wisdom is the capacity to discern which is which, to try and change what we can for the better and to accept what we cannot. The aim of a wisdom tradition is to offer guidance so that we don’t get lost in the labyrinth of our own desires, so that we come through the darkness of our challenges and find new light, integrating what we learn from our weaknesses and foibles and expanding our sense of self, so that we become greater and more spiritually generous, not giving in to our base desires and becoming more mean and selfish.
By contrast, contemporary capitalist society is 360 degrees of influence aimed at exactly the opposite outcome. It directs you to your cheapest thrill, your most immediate appetite, offering to satisfy it so long as you play the game. Likewise, modern politics – especially since the rise of the ‘Big Man’ era [find link?] – is designed to appeal to your fear of the other, to target difference as the problem, to become more judgemental and aggressive about your opinions. It’s only a small step from fighting over toilet paper to supporting war, and the same drive informs both – we are right, they are wrong, and we have a lot to profit from beating them. War is the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse, riding across the horizon, following the Fires, Plague and Floods let loose by anthropogenic climate change. And all of this acts as a reflection and a logical result of how large-scale, colonising, capitalising societies like the West and China have been treating nature for millennia. Only now do we see what our unleashed power looks like, in the mirror of the world, as it unravels to reveal the hidden desire beneath those ads on television, that screen you’re reading this on, the constant news of the destruction of our world: the horrible irony that we have unleashed the demons of death by trying to run away from them. Only this time, according to the global power of unrestrained corporate greed and the military industrial complex (as we used to call it), the death we wanted to avoid is revisiting us on a planetary scale.
Oedipus was warned he would kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he ran to escape his fate, thereby making sure it happened, just as the seer predicted it would. We were warned too, by the sober deliberations of climate science, yet rushed headlong to our collective demise in the rush to satisfy the gamut of our desires, as if there were no limit. Ultimately, the ancient Greek tragedy has its redemptive aspect; Oedipus ends up a lot wiser and even has a sacred place named after him. It’s unlikely, short of a miracle of transformation, that our esteemed leaders will be afforded any such respect by future generations, if they are even to appear.
Oedipus is “filled with an inner strength as his fate nears” – he stands and walks (long after his horrible fate, having killed his father and married his mother).
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by admin | Jul 4, 2019 | Awareness Practices, Zen Animism
In Anima, Thom Yorke follows a trail that was set out for his soul when his European ancestors crossed paths in the great forest.
For this new audiovisual feast from Paul Thomas Anderson is fairy tale, folks, mark my words. And as a writer who has long explored the deep trails made across our psyches by the play of light and darkness since time immemorial, the idea of ancient tales with modern significance is something dear to my heart. This isn’t myth as falsehood, but myth as powerful storytelling, opening doors to our secret longings, our hidden hopes, our romantic selves.
So how does this modern mythmaking work? Well, where once wise old crones shared secrets beneath the wild spreading branches of an oak or elm, or curious children allowed themselves to become enchanted by the thrilling call of a songbird until they were lost in the forest, Yorke is drawn along this heartfelt tale by similar instincts. His character in this romance is on the scent of the chase, following a girl of his dreams, yearning to return her lunch case, which is as precious to him as any other form of lost treasure could be. By the time he has woken up on his crowded train, dodged countless commuters on crammed escalators, and faced other barriers to his distant love interest, Yorke is following the golden imperative of the mythic journey: the hero is inspired to set things right, by returning the case and maybe meeting someone to care about in the deal. The foes and barriers, the challenges to his path, the obstacles that threaten to derail the fruition of his dream … these are all inevitable in the hunt, or life is not being lived. The thorns cross the path, the villain stands in the way, the mountain must be climbed. Our goal may seem just out of reach, but it is in such a quest that we are reminded of our power, as Joseph Campbell so often reminded us.
But while the chase is timeless, the imagery of Anima reflects our new ‘natural environment’: the city. The opening, submerged in the subway, enfolds us within a train shooting along a tunnel, like a probe into our everyday underworld. We don’t want to over-analyze the film – as Martin Shaw wrote, the best stories remain dark around the edges, they leave us in mystery, grappling with our own inner truths and conflicts, unsure rather than overly confident in our self-knowledge. But the nodding of the commuters, Yorke included, seems to stand as the inevitable process of socialization, a dance we all join in order to get by, a way of being that lets us be in the world. Turning it into dance is the magic that art, in this case film, allows us – to settle into the truths of our lives while also making them part of a greater whole. We play the game, we know we play the game, but we know we are also more than this, that we come from a place of unlimited potential and ultimately we belong in that place, as much as we do here, in our world of limit and dissolution.
In this world, Yorke and Anderson play with the familiar while feeling out its edges. As soon as Yorke glimpses his Anima – a Jungian term for the feminine within – his otherwise tired character is opened out into new worlds of excitement, with the possibility that everyday life might not leave us flattened but invigorated; that something might change for the better, after all. The chase includes a classic flying dream sequence, as well as epic scenery, and Yorke’s character responds with passing episodes of passive acceptance, fleeting anger, playful exploration and hopeless resignation in turns. All of these human responses are bound within another mythic signalling: towards the wonder of awe. Can it be true? Is it real? The dream of Anima speaks of these gentle inner experiences, which we all know and hold dear but too often let slide along the rigmarole of modern life.
The eventual meeting, the reuniting of two lost souls who complement each other in the endless dance of being around being, rolling along a laneway wall, is a testament to the hope of our unquenchable longing. Anima draws us down and reminds us where we come from and where we belong. This is Home, a place we have sometimes forgotten is also a planet with limits, forests and lakes, seas and other creatures that need protecting.
Whatever parts of us face the world – our Persona to society, family and each other – find relief in the depths of Anima. Psyche, or mind; self, the individual, you person, the mind/body, your vehicle for getting by … that person seeks their dance partner beneath the surface, where she lives and breathes and waits for us to remember. Take the trip, again …
Geoff Berry wrote his PhD on the symbol of light, his MA on dreams and myths, and sings along similar themes with Melbourne post-punk band SEVERINS.
