This question must arise, at least for those of us who love nature: are we allowed to enjoy watching it rise up and smite us from the face of the earth?
There are two parts to this question; loving the power of nature and resenting the powerful ignorance of humanity. But they come together when we feel a sense of righteous satisfaction, witnessing the brutal beauty of nature showing us humans just how unimportant we are, in the scheme of things.
Anyone that despises the way humanity has considered itself to be so high and mighty may be forgiven for a sniff of misanthropy. I have always loved the poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, which places this in context beautifully. Like so many tyrants, autocrats, dictators, oligarchs and bullies before and after, this “big man” styles himself a “King of Kings,” believing his works to be oh so high and mighty. Yet, around the ruins of his sculpted form:
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay, Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Ozymandias painting by Charles Griffith
It has been said many times since, but it also applies to us, in smaller, everyday ways. We fade, fast, while life – the universe, our world – lives on. The Biblical chapter Ecclesiastes calls out the ultimate vanity of our ‘conceited self-indulgence’. Jung called out the modern Eurocentric world’s ‘godalmightyness’ while working on the alchemical process as a soul path. Arrogant pride is like a drug and it’s one we’ve always struggled with. The Oracle at Delphi advised not only that we should seek to Know Thyself, but also warned that Surety Brings Ruin – paraphrased commonly as ‘pride comes before a fall.’
And i can’t carry out this conversation without mentioning my main man of antiquity, a genuine culture hero for humanity, Prometheus. A true son of the Goddess, who has the gumption to steal into the heavens and nick out with fire, bringing it back down to poor humanity, who until then were a snivelling lot, living without cooking, warmth or even control over our own interior lighting. That name Prometheus should be engraved in memory forever (oh, wait, the whole point is that there is no future; sorry, i keep forgetting, in so many little ways, every day – that’s material for a future post, no doubt).
But we never learn. Somehow, we seem biologically predisposed to reinvent the wheel of pride every generation, like boys need to learn to run around together and spear kangaroos or woolly mammoths or bears, and if they don’t, they turn into sullen teenagers incapable of better than a grunt … oh wait, isn’t that exactly what happened when we were banned from taking them out bush for initiation ceremonies? (Yep, another future post, thanks to Paul Shepard and his incredible Nature and Madness; what we’ve lost without initiation ceremonies)
Prometheus: master thief, troublemaker, jester, culture hero. And look what happened to him … chained to a rock for 10,000 years, with his liver eaten out every morning by an eagle, to have it grow anew each day, only to be torn asunder by those fearsome, powerful talons again and again. This is the violence of life and death, as Tennyson declared: Nature, red in tooth and claw!
This magnificent Zeus and the imagery of Prometheus is from a mural at the Melbourne Fire Brigade, designed by Harold Freedman.
Bloody Zeus. The gods are ruthless, which is why we must be chained to this rock of earth, bound to the adamantine demands of our myths, strengthened by discipline, determined to suffer unto truth. Not popular, i recognise, compared to donuts, air conditioned buildings, chocolate, fast cars and dishwashers. Understandably. I like all these things too. But that seems to be the rub; easy life, horrible cost. What’s coming, we can see now, is the death and destruction on an unimaginable scale of all that is beautiful in humanity and what we know of the plant and animal kingdoms.
If we deserve it – if we can take some pleasure in watching human civilization unravel – it is mostly because we let powerful bastards run the show. And it’s not like we – the people, most of us, most of the time – wanted this. Power breeds on itself, profit builds arrogance, and while we all share in a little of this shame, it is those ruthless enough to thrill to it that are mostly to blame. However, as we all know, the poor will be more downtrodden, will die first and hardest, while the wealthy who profited the most will watch it on big screens in their bunkers.
What is left, but to enjoy the victory of life over stupidity and to align ourselves with what survives death; some element of spirit, or consciousness, the spark that animated us in the first place, the great mind or the god/goddess matrix, the serpent flying out of the cosmic soup, the light …
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It’s nice to have the company of like-minded souls on the downward slide.
Every now and then, you have a conversation that brings everything together. After many years of working on a concept i have come to call the “ecomythic”, this interview with Al Jeffery from “spaces between” inspired me to become unusually coherent about this realm. Al’s approach offers plenty of space to explore, no pressure to conform to any expectations, even our own, and is a real breath of fresh air if you want to find out more about how other people are stretching themselves beyond conventional boundaries.
I was so pleasantly surprised by how much territory we covered in this hour. It’s like a melted down version of hundreds of hours of reflection, deep listening in nature, philosophy and the big picture of how we got where we’re at right now – you know, the history of civilisation, development of technology, showing proper respect for the spirits, that kind of thing.
There is a fair bit here to digest, and some of it arises out of non-ordinary reality, so if you would like to follow that path for a bit, here is your invitation. It’s called “Attuning to the Spirit of Place & the Ecomythic” and you can find it here.
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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How can we learn to live in the light, more often, with better outcomes?
Let’s start with the physical reality of being lit from within, with a loving glow, and then work our way towards putting that into practice in everyday life. First of all, if you have had an experience like this, there is no reason to doubt its value or ‘truth’, because we are literally lit from within, just as all matter is aglow with life. Part of any modern concept of ‘enlightenment’ must include this physical reality: that all life radiates out from a cosmic conflagration in space, which is still happening everywhere, all the time. Light is associated with so many positive connotations because of this fundamental life-giving force. This is why an experience of inner light and its gnosis is so highly valued, whether it arrives spontaneously or is inspired by a particularly radiant sunrise or sunset, the romance of moonlight, the simple glint of a dewdrop on a leaf, sparkling in the breeze, or any other phenomenon.
However, despite learning from physics that everything is made from starlight, including our minds and bodies, the origin of consciousness still remains a sacred mystery. Being self-aware allows us to live a life filled with meaning and spiritual growth. Understanding how and why light has been used as the preeminent metaphor for consciousness – for our ability to think, to read these words, to consider them, weigh them up and decide where we stand in relation to them – can deepen our capacity to become more awake to the miracle of our lives as conscious beings.
I have also learnt, mainly from my experience of meditation practices, but also from neuroscience, that this realisation can improve with practice, just like everything else. As self-aware primates, we truly are the universe becoming aware of itself. Both our bodies and our minds are lit from within, in a way that overcomes the seeming separation of mind and matter. In fact, we are better off thinking of ourselves as a ‘bodymind’ that glows with life and consciousness, something the shamanic arts have always known. Experiencing this realisation can dissolve doubt and confusion, leaving spiritual generosity, forgiveness, understanding and gratitude in its wake.
Now, we need to rekindle the light within more than ever. In a ‘post-truth’ world riven with fake news and political corruption, media propaganda and data mining, we need trustworthy guidance. This will become increasingly important as climate chaos, resource wars and other forms of societal breakdown threaten us with correspondingly fierce internal storms of anxiety, depression and grief.
Such guidance is available to us, both as we grow in faith in our own personal abilities to discern right from wrong and in great stories filled with the power and authority of collective wisdom. These kinds of stories are traditionally called myths. Mythic lore is not merely the fanciful narratives we have been taught to mistrust, as if they were the childlike explanations of a universe that hadn’t yet been explained away by science. Myths are multidimensional universes of information, designed to enable us to manoeuvre through chaos and evolve beyond dangerous new circumstances. The mythic symbol of light is especially capable at conveying such information, when it is interpreted with respect, appreciation and familiarity.
‘That Inner Glow’ Retreat is now SOLD OUT. However, the book is forthcoming, so keep your eyes open for that later in the year!
It was really refreshing to have a conversation with my mate, Dr Thomas Bristow, an expert in ecopoetics, and Senior Editor of the journal i am also an editor for, PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature. Tom wanted to chat about what the Romantic poets – Blake, Yeats, Wordsworth, Byron and co – saw in nature, and in particular what they learnt from listening for the spiritual aspects of the earth. It was a fun yarn and we touched on many aspects of the subject matter, following a handful of questions, or prompts, in a free range flow. Tom called this chat ‘Romantic Vision’ and you can access the video of it here (no pressure, but Tom tells me this may only be posted for a limited amount of time).
But first, i must wonder aloud about the value of literary explorations, poetic conversations, appreciating the Romantics and attuning ourselves to our local ecosystem in an age of planetary destruction. There’s a point in the interview where i admit that Thich Nhat Hanh might be right: perhaps what we most need to do is to hear the earth crying. This is not a very good sales pitch. And it’s probably only true to a certain extent: we are also a miraculous incarnation of consciousness in a primate body, embodying the spirit of life in a fantastically rich way, a celebration waiting to be had. My point is that opening our minds to the Deep Listening that i suggest at the culmination of this chat is not necessarily going to make you happier, but it may very well help you to be liberated from some of the more innocuous yet pervasive limits of your mind. Worth a shot?
To get there, Tom and i talked over the resurgence of European myth in the 18th century, which inspired Romantic poets to personify or anthropomorphise the environment, as a means to address ‘nature’, to represent vast fields of energy, beyond the human scale, and to create textual events that trigger legacies of ecocentric writing and orality. If you’re interested in the historical development of Western consciousness, you might enjoy our riff on how Romanticism worked as a response to Enlightenment. My key term for this was the ‘suprarational,’ which i saw as an attempt to develop consciousness beyond the human, to include our ancient predilection for pantheism, or notion that intelligence is a quality of the universe, or another dimension, which arises with this one (or even as its prerequisite).
This reminded me of the intelligence we find in nature, which is revealed in the way plants reach for the sun, or animals know instinctively how to hunt prey or follow seasons or find their way back across entire oceans to their birthplace. I can’t help but feel that for all of our technological development, the modernised psyche is a truncated version of something that could be far greater, in scope, depth and alacrity. We need to incorporate reason into our toolbox but be ready for so much more, when we open our minds to a conversation beyond the merely human, with plants and animals and places.
“We are leaning our for love and we will lean that way forever” Leonard Cohen
This more open-minded consciousness could also perceive more beauty in the world and thereby require less stuff from human society and production. There’s more to say about how recognising spirit of place can help protect the natural world, but i’m writing that for the next issue of PAN, so i’ll keep the water nymphs and satyrs for then.
When we are alive to the ecomythic dimension of life, human consciousness opens up to what actually is arising in nature, which is other forms of intelligence. This can also be called animism, which indigenous people have always said is real, not metaphorical: spirit beings, spirits of place, and spiritual entities are all other types of intelligent beings, which exist but do not take physical bodies in this dimension with us. They represent life force, sometimes of that place, sometimes from beyond. If we want to learn from them, we have to put aside our historical, socialised self, and enter into a trance of timelessness, beyond our personal foibles and concerns. Even as we are thoroughly enmeshed in capitalism and colonisation, simply by being alive in the world today, we can turn our backs on the worst of it, the most obvious effects it has on our minds, and find ourselves as we also always were and are: trailing clouds of glory, as Wordsworth wrote in his Ode on Intimations of Immortality.
Any true Romantic knows how to love a storm
Tom asked how we get there. I can only humbly suggest we meditate in sand dunes, or under trees, or by a babbling brook (or, if you’re in urban lockdown, on a pot plant and its own mysterious urge to live). A great place to start is with Miriam Rose Ungunmerr, who made the practice of Deep Listening more accessible to the public, especially helpful for non-Aboriginal Australians living on this ancient land.
Then maybe, if we can quieten the voices of our humanity for long enough, we might be able to hear the muses still, as they sing the song of the earth, for those who will listen.
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