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, pleaseShare, 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.
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.
If we have finally hit the point where we have to admit that our esteemed leaders are not listening – to us, to climate science, to the voice of hope for a peaceful, healthy earth – then it is probably also a good time to let ourselves synch in to a new way of evolving. I’m going to try to outline this in under 300 words, by using dot points, to illustrate that we are still capable of profound possibilities in a digital age hurtling towards some very uncivilised outcomes.
We are here.
This means our ancestors survived and evolved successfully, across a myriad of different environments, and we can do the same. But to do this, we need to …
Adapt to reality.
Our planetary climate is heating up, drying out in many places and flooding more in others, making every micro-climate more challenging. But …
It’s business as usual at the top.
Business and politics are following the military/industrial complex model of colonisation, appealing to the lowest common denominator of our worst tendencies like greed and fear, and consolidating their power over divided peoples at the same time. So …
We have to do two things at once:
We have to get organised, hold the powers that be to account, demand action that combats climate change by taking care of our environment and treating all people (as well as animals, plants and places) with dignity and respect – all of which sounds very boring but necessary; and
We can get back in touch with our ‘deep time’ selves, as well as our fleeting sense of being alive in this very moment, right where we are, in this mind and body. This could be the fun thing that balances out the serious stuff with a blend of timelessness and existential awareness: that realisation that we are consciousness embodied, a deep time experiment in primate bodies, with the capacity for self-awareness, able to perceive complex problems and solve them with win/win solutions, social animals with personal identities and mystic abilities and the ABILITY TO SEE THE ENORMITY OF THE UNIVERSE THROUGH INSANELY POWERFUL TELESCOPES AND IMAGINE OUR PLACE IN ETERNITY ALL AT ONCE!
OK, i got a bit excited there, but watch this video and be reminded of how incredibly, unimaginably vast the universe is. And that’s just the physical one we can sense with our limited beings. Life is beyond words. Let’s party like there’s nowhere else to go*
*The universe may be very large but we can’t get anywhere else in it. The scales are too big. This is home.
NB: sorry i went over 300 words. But hey, get off the internet and read some Virgil or Shakespeare. That’ll test your attention span 🙂
PS i tried to talk about this video once during a public presentation in Hong Kong and CHOKED ON MY TEARS! Egad. I’ve performed better, but at least i found out how i really felt about the universe – cosmic!
We can’t all live in a green oasis – modern life separates us from our innate connection to nature all the time! So, what are the best ways to make sure we feel connected to nature every day?
When we spend time somewhere we love, it’s relatively easy to drop into a feeling of deep connection with nature; to breathe easier, feel the breeze on our faces, smell the roses (or native flowers!) and feel an intimate part of the universe and this planet filled with life.
But if we want to take that feeling into every day – and who doesn’t? – we need to practice some techniques and remember them while we drive, type, shop, get kids to school, and live in our modern world of buildings and cars, fridges and microwaves, and everything else that makes life easier but also distances us from the natural world we evolved in.
So, to help you keep that feeling you love, here are my Top 5 Tips! Please fee free to share the love, by adding to them in the Comments section below:
Breath: I start every meditation class with a focussed awareness on the breath. Wisdom traditions the world over assert the close relationship between breath and mind; both are seemingly immaterial (thought can fly anywhere at any time it would seem!), but both also have a dramatic, physical effect on the way we think and respond to the world. By practising breath awareness, we can make that effect one that reconnects us to the freedom, beauty and majesty of life in each moment.
Light: in just over 100 years of electric light, we have almost totally lost our deep connection to the cycles of sun, moon and stars, and the way we used to navigate our environment according to those daily cycles. How do we get back in touch with our primal connection to light? Start by getting up early enough to watch a sunrise, and take time to say thank you to that great golden orb that powers all life on earth! Then, in the evening before bed, why not try bowing to the moon (or howl, if the inspiration hits and the neighbours aren’t too close!), while reflecting upon the cycles of life that brought you to this moment. Finally, spend some time gazing into the night sky, remember how lucky we are to be here in the vastness of space, and don’t forget to wonder as you admire the stars.
Bodily movements: the way we move is an expression of our relationship to nature, both the inner nature of the way we feel in our bodies and the way we move through our environment, in terms of our spacial awareness. I found the combination of martial arts training and working in hospitality, where I had to be aware of who might be walking around the corner at any time with hot plates in their hands, drilled into me a consistent awareness of where I am in terms of what is around me. I practiced being ready for anything and sensing what might be coming next, in a physical way, and it feels good; like a hunter sensing prey in the wilderness.
Mindful eating and drinking: take time to focus on what you are consuming. Give thanks for it and don’t take it for granted. This is one of the traps of the modern world; things just appear in our shops and on our plates and we forget the chain of events that brought it to us, from farmers planting seeds to the sky magically allowing fresh water to fall onto fertile soil. Practice awareness of all that comes together to bring you that meal – including the technologies of production and delivery. (And try this free Nature Calling meditation)
Stories: we are all used to listening to the voice/s in our heads, as we daydream, talk about ourselves and others, judge and compare what we like and don’t like, remember the past with regret or longing, look forward to the future with expectation or dread, and so on … but what about listening to the ancient, archetypal patterns, the stories of our cultural DNA, the voices within that could lead us back to deeper connection with nature at all times? These voices can teach us to be attentive to our personal habits and predispositions, to evolve beyond our limits, to trust our intuition and be wary of danger when we sense it approaching, to treat the earth with love if not reverence, to take care of others as if we were all connected … in short, to be a better ecological citizen and a more balanced and centred individual in one.
I’ll extend each of these points out to more detail in forthcoming blog posts. In the meantime, please feel free to get in touch if you want to learn more about any of these options or more. There is a Nature Calling Online Course, if you would like to try some of these practices in more depth. Also, on my Ecoretreats, we also add simple but effective rituals to keep that connection alive, no matter else happens in our day. Check them out here and take that feeling of freedom and endless possibility back into your every day!
