Evolution

Edinburgh Labyrinth, photo by Di Williams

"For everything that one can tell of God or write,

no less than what one can think, of God who is more than words,

is as much lying as it is telling the truth."

~Marguerite Porete, 14th Century mystic. Burned at the stake, 1310.

When I started this blog 3 years ago, there were two major and connected things on my mind. One was how we return the sacred to the world of our senses, the real physical living world, and the other is how we deal with the fact that humanity seems hell-bent on destroying that same world. As has always been the case with all my spiritual excursions, I learn from them. I evolve. I learned from becoming a Christian back when I was one, I learned from being a Daoist when I was one. Every time I change, I learn something new. I have especially learned from being an Animist. Am I still one? Yes I am. But something has changed, and perhaps it is no longer accurate to describe my primary focus as animist.

I have and always will think that what humanity is doing to this planet is evil and monstrous. However, I no longer think of it as unnatural. It is as natural as a mosquito sucking your blood, as lemmings eating every trace of green from their surroundings, as black widows eating their mates. Horror, is natural. Evil, is natural. The incredible self-destructive stupidity of the human race, is natural. Inevitable, even. Flawlessly inevitable, arithmetically certain. Humans paving rainforests is just as natural as the parasitic flatworm Leucochloridium paradoxum taking over the brain of a snail so that it can cause the snail to behave suicidally, helping the parasite to reproduce. The actions of human beings are evil, but they are perfectly in accordance with nature. A species gaining an unequal power over its environment leading to its own destruction is as natural as the dinosaurs. Some years, the wolves eat too many rabbits, and the next year they starve. Whatever else we are, we are entirely natural. Why blame humans? Did not our Mother Earth bear us herself from her own dark womb? The same womb that bore forth the sabertooth tigers and the T Rex's of the past? We are the same as they.

So what then is this evil I speak of? Why would I assume that there even is such a thing? What is, is, right? No good or evil. Just creatures running through their same stupid instincts until they die, and something else comes along. A dance without meaning or purpose. Why call it monstrous?

And yet every particle of my being says otherwise. The very compassion for other living beings in this world that has driven my concern says otherwise. My love says otherwise. The other beings in this world, human and otherwise, are my fellow sufferers. They are my fellow afflicted. If I love my own miserable afflicted self, how could I not love them? And though I love the world, it is an afflicted world and I do not love its affliction because I am also afflicted with the same affliction. What is this affliction? What is it's nature? Greed, grasping, selfishness, ego, sin. From the tiniest insect to the largest man, we are all afflicted with this.

I mentioned in the previous post that I found something. I found "g-d," but you cannot even say "g-d" without making an error. What is this g-d? It is - - -. It is outside all rational thought. The god that is a thought in your mind, it is not that god. Why then am I even opening my mouth? Why am I applying fingers to keys? It is inherently futile. I cannot tell you what cannot be put in words.

Lets dance around the problem a bit then. In Buddhism (the Reader's Digest version,) the problem is stated that the cause of our suffering is desire, and we desire because we have an illusion of an independent self. Kill that delusion, and you kill the cause of your suffering, at least in theory.

Is this not fundamentally identical to certain understandings of Christianity? What is sin? Separation of our will from god's will. What is sinlessness? Annihilation of our will in god's will. The angels supposedly live in perfect bliss because there is not a nanosecond of separation between what god wills and what they will. They are nominally separate but functionally annihilated in god. They have no mind of their own, they have god's mind. This is the goal of the Christian mystics, to be annihilated in god. To un-Self themselves and have god be in the place their self once was. What the Catholics burned them for was the statement that they were god, which I grant you is a statement that could be taken out of context. Perhaps better stated, there is no "they" anymore if they are truly slain in god. There are many quotes in the New Testament that are very suggestive of this:

"I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me."
~Galatians 2:20

"If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it."

~Luke 9:23-24

Much has been written, by believers and skeptics alike, about the "silence" of god. Where is god? Why doesn't he talk to us and set us straight? Why does he let horrible things happen? What is somewhat uncomfortable to think about, is that perhaps the silence is the message. In other words, he IS talking to us and the message is, "shut the hell up." ;) Shut your noise, shut your yapping, shut your pride, just STFU and listen to the silence. In the silence is the message. You cannot get there by your yapping.

In one of the Upanishads (ancient Hindu texts), I forget which one, somebody is asking all these questions about god and the guy answering only says, "It is not, it is not." It is not this, it is not that. It is not one of the ten-thousand things of dependent causal origination, nor is it anything in your mind. This is why some Buddhists and some Christian mystics speak of nothingness in relation to god. Or as the Beatles put it rather more casually,

"Lay down all thought, surrender to the Void. It is shining."

So, what is the game plan for finding a god you inherently cannot understand? That you cannot with full truthfulness even call god without half-lying? I actually have one, of a sort.

1. Repent Sinner! Or in other words, clean the window so you can see out again. 

Obviously if we have spent all our lives building up this life of separation, grasping and ego, we kind of have to work on that before we can get much else done. As Jesus said (paraphrasing,) "Get the mud out of your own eye!" Start meticulously breaking down everything you do that is bad, examine it, start hitting it with a hammer. You might not be in the sort of religion where you go confess everything to a bored priest - confess it to yourself then. Admit it. Own up to it. Everything, every little thing.

Scourge yourself. Get out that metaphorical cat O nine tails and start whipping yourself with it. Repent. Like a drug addict in withdrawal, start shaking and if necessary puking and shitting until the drug is out of you for good. Needless to say, this is lots easier to say than to do and I certainly am not finished doing it.

Your Ego. Your Self. It is dead, it always was dead, but it keeps rising up and demanding brains like a zombie. Get that chainsaw lubed up and get busy.


2. Abandon All Rational Thought.

Does this mean that when the chain on my bike breaks, I should pray about it or cast some incantation? Of course not. Look at Reason like a computer app, or a tool. When you need it, use it. Don't be a slave to it though. You wouldn't be a slave to your wrench or your laptop, would you?

Unfortunately reason is a tool of our grasping minds, our egos. You can't use that on god. God is not going to fit in one of our boxes, one of our human categories. You approach god on gods terms, not yours. Lose your faith in reason.

I notice Christian preachers and theologians often just LOVE reason. They act like they love it more than they love god. They want to give you some rational airtight case for god, which of course will never happen. It's like they think, "If I just reason it out to you, spell it out for you slowly, you'll get it. You'll convert, I'll get to save a soul (what kind of soul-saving is this?!) you will become a donating member of my church and everything is peachy." Ya, sure, that's how it works, you betcha. ;)

No, that's a bad idea. That's just them proving that they have no idea at all what they are doing.

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! 

You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people's faces.

You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to."
~Matthew 23:13

3. - - -

Number 3 is a real step, but as per step #2 it doesn't lend itself to much in the way of exposition. You remember before when I was talking about the silence of god being the message? That part.

On My Own

"There is an indefinable mysterious power that pervades everything,

I feel it though I do not see it. It is this unseen power which makes itself 

felt and yet defies all proof, because it is so unlike all that I perceive through

my senses. It transcends the senses."

-Mohandas Gandhi, radio speech, 1931

I'm back. I did not "go into the West," not yet. I am alive. The Source is my refuge.

I am, so far as I am aware, the only one of my kind. Of course in a sense this is not so unusual, everyone even people belonging to religious institutions all experience their gods to some degree uniquely and have their own differences even from others of their own creed. But there is a template for their landscape, there is a template from which they have their own individual variations. I am completely out on my own, there is no template for this path, and yet the road that I travel seems as old as the stars. There is a trail here, overgrown with weeds and trash it may be, long forgotten by men, but there is a trail. If there are others who walk this path, I do not know them, and perhaps practicality forbids such rare and shy creatures as us from recognizing each other on the road. As far as I know, I alone walk it: the sole human attendant of the ancient gods.

As 1 John 4 says, someone who says they love the god they cannot see and yet does not love their brothers that they can see is a liar. I would take that one step further: one who says they love the god they cannot see and yet does not love the world they can see is a liar. 

Now I am going to take that and reverse it: if you want to find and revere the invisible and indescribable, logically incomprehensible One God, you must first revere the things that you know that immediately, physically, allow you to exist at all. Love Water, love the Sun, love the Earth, put yourself beneath them as you should be. Mother Water, Father Sun, Mother Earth. Humble yourself to the dirt beneath you, humble yourself to the puddle in the rain, revere them. Only if you begin to learn to love the Earth as your own self will you ever find the one behind them all. She cannot be found any other way to my knowledge. And once you begin to find her, still revere Mother Water in the puddle and Mother Earth in the dirt. Because if you do not love them, how will you love her?

Previously I was never much concerned about any absolute gods. My focus was on what was directly with me and what gave me life in any given moment. The warmth and light from the Sun, the life-feeding decay of the Earth, the life-giving Water. I still pay my attention to these. I had no concern for any other gods, I felt that a god so abstract could be no proper concern of mine. 

I began to see things in meditation. Actually I had periodically seen them before. An energy, for lack of a better word, pervading the world. I did not see this with my eyes, I saw it with my center. It was quite as Gandhiji described in the quote above, an indefinable power that pervades all things.

I could say more but this would be beside the point now. The point being, if I did not revere Father Sun or Mother Water or Mother Earth or any of the innumerable other lights of the earthly constellation I respect, I cannot see that I would have found the Source. Maintaining as always my principles that either with my own sight or with inward sight I must see the gods I revere, and I did see her with inward sight. I saw her filling everything. 
If you are living in your head, you will not see her. You are not your rational intellect, you are a human BEing not a human THINKing. You must live from your center, what some traditions call the "heart" but that is not the word I prefer. You must love the "mortal gods" of the world, the transitory Earth, just like you love her. If you do not love the world you can see, how can you love the Source you cannot see?

And so, here I am, on my own. But not alone.

Into the West

Why do I feel an affinity for this song right now? Why do I feel that it speaks to the state of my soul?

(This version of O Elbereth Gilthoniel is not exactly the same as Tolkien's original, but pretty close in spirit. This is the movie version, which I like no less for that.) 

Tolkien's elves themselves are but a broken reflection of the elves of European mythology: the elves that got diffracted by pagans and Christians until they were only a shadow. The "original elves" weren't even elves, their elfhood was retroactively placed upon them in the process of their being wiped out. They were the Tuatha de Danann, the original folk of Ireland who were displaced by invaders from Continental Europe.

You may see a pattern here. Some millennia in the future, perhaps some retroactive elfhood will be placed upon the Native Americans as they existed before the blessings of Western Civilization were forced upon them. They went into the Earth too, not metaphorically. The Tuatha de Danann, the legendary people who were retroactively made elves, in myth were given the lands underneath the Earth as part of a crooked deal with the invading Milesians. The invaders got the land above the earth, the Tuatha de Danann were given the land underneath the barrows, the mounds that enshrine the remains of the dead. Which is probably just a nice way of saying they were betrayed and killed.

Tolkien's elves are immortal, but they are compelled to go into the West: to leave Middle Earth. The West has been the metaphorical direction of the Afterlife for many cultures - the Elysium of the Greeks was originally thought to be just a place in the real world that was so far west it was impossible to sail there, where heroes went when they died. Over time Elysium became a place in the Underworld. Tolkien's elves are compelled to leave Middle Earth because essentially an age of Darkness has descended on it (the Age of Man) and their time there has gone. They either have to go into the West or stop being elves. There was some intimation on Tolkien's part that if they did not leave, they would become shadows of sorts: barely visible, secretive, not unlike what some Icelanders think of elves today. The Hidden People.

I am about to say something contradictory:

that there never were any "historical elves" and that

paradoxically I feel a deep spiritual connection with them. 

Elves were never precisely some stray branch on the tree of Homo Sapiens that got wiped out in prehistory. They are, if you will, members of an archetype of Edenic humanity: of a humanity that has never severed its connection with the World. As such, they may instantiate to some degree in real people or real peoples but never completely. They exist in the Dreaming. The guys in Iceland who see elves or their effects, if they are truly seeing elves, are not seeing them with mundane eyes. They are seeing them in the Dreaming. Thus I can say I feel a spiritual lineage to the elves myself, and not say that they are historical in any normal sense. The story of the Tuatha de Danann may indeed be a story of a more "edenic" culture being wiped out by a more "advanced" culture - the Milesians were Greeks according to some interpretations, and so even then the "advanced" label would certainly apply. Theirs was the cradle of the scorpion which is now worldwide: Western Civilization. Western Civ has been putting "less advanced" people into the barrows ever since. 

All of this is roundabout to my main message really, but you have to understand it to understand what I say next. I too am going "into the West." I am going to Elysium, the Elysium of my visions, not the Greek one. That is why the song resonates with me.

No, don't worry, I am not going today probably. I am working on my health in fact, exercising more than probably ever, I even joined Nicotine Anonymous to quit smoking and hope to quit soon. But I am 56, will be 57 in a month. As I work on all this, I wonder, what is the point really? To live a bit longer in a world that makes me profoundly sad? To live a bit longer in a world that is going to continue to make me even more sad every day, as it spirals away from anything that could remotely be called sanity? This too was a peril that Tolkien's elves lived with: profound sadness. To live to see the destruction of everything I love? To live to witness yet more tragedies as greed devours the Earth? Why?

I cannot change this Age of Darkness, any more than Tolkien's elves could keep the Age of Man from coming. Am I only presiding over my own diminishment, like Tolkien's fading elves who resist the call to the West? Indeed I already diminish, despite my relative health, as does the Earth I love. Why ought I stick around for all that? I am looking for reasons.

It is not that anyone reads or at least understands my words, I cannot hope to change hearts and even if I did, for what? That they may suffer as I do? That their eyes may open to the horror? Should I not indeed wish that their eyes remain closed and go like peaceful lambs to the slaughter? I suppose I write these blog posts not to open eyes that are closed but to comfort eyes that are open, but there seem few of those. Who am I leaving this testament, this my entire blog, for? God forbid that some as yet young or unborn should be "gifted" in the same way as I am, that they can be even more a creature out of place than I am. So that they can sorrow even more than I do. 

This is a question I will put to my "people", my fathers and mothers, over coming days because only they can answer it. I have a powerful resistance to the idea of self-slaughter, which is probably the only reason why I am still alive, but that's not the question. I am not questioning whether or not I should kill myself. The question is why should I be alive? 

Am I just going through the motions like dumb cattle because I don't know anything better to do? These things I know: that my mind and strength will diminish, that the destruction of the planet I love cannot be reversed, that the ignorance of the masses cannot be cured, that I will find few or no kindred spirits on this Earth to share my suffering at this point. Given these truths, why do I live?

I will be asking these questions to those who can tell me over coming days and months. Perhaps there is indeed an answer. 

Why Abstract Gods?

I revere the Sun, Sky, Earth and Water, and I don't think they need other names than that.

“Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.”

-Hubert Reeves

It strikes me as very strange that throughout history, Man has shown a preference for gods that are at the same time both abstract (not strongly connected with the observable world) and personal (like human beings.) In almost every case where people start to approach the idea of "gods' as the real things that keep the world alive and keep them alive - the Sun, water, Earth, the atmosphere, plants - they seem to almost immediately distance themselves again. They put it behind a layer of abstraction. Actual grains become the goddess of the grains (Ceres in Roman mythology). The actual Sun becomes the sun god (Apollo for the Greeks, Sol for the Romans, Ra or Aten for the Egyptians), who is essentially a dude with a personal history and family rivalries and so on. This is not completely universal but certainly so prevalent that you could be excused for thinking of it as universal.

I would be tempted to think of this as a symptom of "advanced" religion. By advanced religion I actually mean decayed religion or religion properly speaking as opposed to a way of life in which spirituality cannot be separated from everyday existence. The idea is that as religions continue through time they become more and more abstract so as to remove their "gods" from the suspicion that they have failed or are otherwise imperfect. The iconoclastic (image-destroying, "idol" destroying) nature of later Protestant and Puritan religious innovations and of Islam very much connect with this: that God must be removed from any taint of the material. That God must be wholly abstract and removed from any possibility of human interaction.

However the temptation to think of this as entirely a function of historical development is probably inaccurate: it has probably been there in some form all along. Archaeologists are tempted to think of the figure of the Venus of Willendorf, a figure made 27,000 years ago, as a religious figure: if so, it is clearly the distorted image of a human being. If it truly represents a god in our sense of the word, it represents a personal god. A human-like god. Since it is an intangible human-like being, it would also be an abstract god. Again, supposing all this to be true, it would represent a god not utterly different from gods that were common 25,000 years later and even in some corners of the world today.

Venus of Willendorf, image by Matthias Kabel

Is it really so difficult to accept the idea that the actual things that actually allow life to exist at all physically are gods? That for instance the Sun is a god. Water is a god. Earth herself is a god. Of course for modern people, this would require a reinterpretation of what it means to be physical, the nature of stuff, because for modern people the physical is utterly deprecated and to say that your god is a ball of plasma undergoing fusion seems to degrade the holy to the extreme. We are infected with the Western philosophical conceit that self is wholly different from the world it exists in, that matter is base and unimportant and minds or souls are lofty and important. That mind is the master and body merely its humble and base carriage. This reached a low in the Christian era with Rene Descartes declaring that minds and bodies were totally dissimilar substances and that all things except human souls were mere machines. Descartes was clearly not a pet owner, as he held to the pernicious idea that animals have no feelings and no subjective experience. Afterwards this reached a new low in the "post-Christian" era with the scientific reductionist declaration that everything is a machine, that you too were a machine, thus continuing the denigration of the physical while now including everything in this degraded classification. Modern atheists and scientific materialists and reductionists are thus truly children of Descartes, but with the troublesome issue of soul removed.

I could digress on how convenient this worldview is for those who wish to exploit the world and other people - Western societies being the all-time champs on knowing how to exploit Nature, animals and other people. To clear-cut a forest, one must first of all not know it as it really is, but objectify it. You don't see the birds, you don't see the flowers, you don't even really see the trees. It is nothing, mere mass. To exploit workers in the Third World, or to go to war with them, one must of course view them as not quite like us. What one would destroy, one must first desecrate, de-sanctify, un-know. But I digress.

In between the pit of Descartes and the new pit of universal physical nihilism, there are some dissenting voices, though this is somewhat outside our discussion. In the early 1700's Bishop George Berkeley posited in contrast to Descartes that everything was in fact mind, that matter was in fact mind, that there isn't a hard and fast line between things thought of as mental and things thought of as physical, that even objective physical measurement of such things as dimension and motion were in fact neither objective nor physical. Modern philosophers who ponder on the fact that "physical" reality on a subatomic level starts looking distinctly non-physical; symbolic, that even "reality" as we know it is squishy and things can be in states in-between real and non-real. Delving deeper on this is a topic for books, not blog posts.

I will merely put it to you as something to mull over that our categories of physical, mental and spiritual do not exist, and nor do our categories of self and other have any objective reality. Rather than the scientific view that all things are "dead" (spiritless), I rather put it to you that all things are alive and that you are a part of a whole from which you cannot be extracted any more than you could live should I extract your liver or brain with a scalpel. That your sense of ego-self is an illusion and that you are inextricably connected to a whole, the whole universe and beyond perhaps. So for me, to say that the Sun or the Moon or water are some of my gods is not strange, not denigrating to the holy but in fact the real holy. Everything is either sacred or desecrated, and the ones that do the desecrating are us. The Sun, Water and the rest give me life and give Life to all of life, and despite all our attempts to close our eyes to Life, despite our attempts to dull our senses in order to better exploit the world and avoid the suffering of knowing how we actually are, Life is still there waiting for us and still as mysterious as it ever was.

This is not your granddad's spiritual world. It is not a comfortable spiritual world, it is in fact a strange, chaotic, violent yet beautiful world, the real world. I am on a journey to reconsecrate the real world, not that it needs my reconsecration but that we might need it. To see the world with new eyes, eyes so radical that at first what they see is nonsense to worldly eyes. I hope one day you may join me on this, the voyage to rediscover the real world. 

The Light Returns

 

 

 

 

After a time of decay comes the turning point.
The powerful light that has been banished returns.
There is movement, but it is not brought about by force.
The upper trigram K’un is characterized by devotion;

thus the movement is natural, arising spontaneously.
For this reason the transformation of the old becomes easy.

The old is discarded and the new is introduced.

~I Ching, Hexagram 24 (The Turning Point), Wilhelm-Baynes translation.

 

 

 

I celebrated the Winter Solstice with a couple friends on the 21st, but since then I have been wondering about the meaning of the solstice beyond an excuse to drink adult beverages with old and new friends. At the same time I was wondering the same thing I am always wondering: how to contribute towards accomplishing a transition in this society towards wholeness, when I seem to be very much in the minority in my opinions, and the forces to be opposed are so powerful, implacable and relentless.

 

We had some sun for the first time in many days, and I was outside enjoying the garden. I even saw a bee of some sort, who had apparently poked his head above soil to go exploring for what limited sustenance my garden could provide in winter. I had decorated my garden with colorful ribbons for the solstice celebration, and as I gazed at one of these dancing in the breeze in the sunlight, I fell into a trance state.

Initially my thought was along the lines of, "I have fallen into a deep trance seemingly by accident. What is the purpose of this trance?" Very gradually that purpose became clear.

On one level, to see the world (and perhaps more than the world) as a stage of conflict between the powers of light and darkness seems an "un-animist" idea. After all, that was always seen in monotheistic terms in this culture, a conflict between God and the Devil. Animists often tend not to deal with things in such terms, as indeed much that seems bad can become good, and much that seems good can become very bad. Seeing things in different shades than merely black and white indeed makes sense, if one is tempted to oversimplify things. You need to be very perceptive to begin to make things out truly, and until then it is best not to jump to conclusions. This does not mean that Light and Darkness do not exist, but that their interplay is more complex than we generally like to believe.

 

And yet animists do have a model for the battle between Light and Darkness, and that indeed is the meaning of the Solstice. Yes, it signifies the literal turning point between night and day, when the days start to get longer again, but if that were all it was then we indeed might be justified in just having a few brews and leaving our recognition of the time at that. Instead, this has been the holiest time on the calendar, in many religions, for thousands and thousands of years. This holy day can teach us far more than that if we want to pay attention. The Solstice is not just about a very significant change in the seasons, it represents a very real spiritual battle between Light and Darkness. The I Ching, in Hexagram 24 (which can be seen as a symbol of the Winter Solstice in many ways), is not talking about visible electromagnetic radiation when it talks about "light." It is talking about spiritual light. Powers of wholeness, integration, love and compassion, coming into right relation to divinity and the universe, reverence, respect, truthfulness, courage, self-sacrifice.

 

For all of human history and beyond, we have been tracing an arc from the Summer Solstice (maximum light) to the Winter Solstice (maximum darkness). Each new progress in human history has been a progress towards the spiritual Darkness that we now experience at its full zenith today. However, the time when Darkness reaches it's greatest power is when it begins to diminish - Light Returns.

If the Human Race wants to survive the next few hundred years, it will have to turn towards the Light - it won't have a choice other than ultimate destruction. This means that the destructive ways of the last few centuries will have to be overturned. The environment will have to be healed. Humans have gone from mostly harmless parasites on the planet (hunter-gatherers, slightly dark) to very destructive parasites on the planet (modern agriculture, huge cities and development, extremely dark). The only way forward is to stop being parasites period. To make the evolutionary leap from agriculture to ecoculture, the management of ecosystems for the benefit of all their present and potential inhabitants, including but not limited to people, and the change in our values that will be necessary to do that. To make the spiritual leap from a money-centered species to a life-centered species.

I have over the last year been finding to my surprise that the world really is a stage for a battle between light and darkness. This was part of the teaching of my trance, and of dream-states I have been experiencing previously. This battle may not be confined to this world, or even this universe, it may be a feature of existence period, of everywhere and every time in existence.

What my old friend the I Ching is trying to tell me is that this transformation between darkness and light cannot be forced. We must act in accordance with the time and the limitations it imposes. So I actually need not worry about how to contribute to this change at this time when darkness is at it's fullest extent. I need only be myself, and whatever I can contribute will arise naturally, without forcing.

 

 

 

Thunder within the earth:
 The image of THE TURNING POINT.
 Thus the kings of antiquity closed the passes
 At the time of solstice.
 Merchants and strangers did not go about,
 And the ruler
 Did not travel through the provinces.

The winter solstice has always been celebrated in China as the resting time of the year—a custom that survives in the time of rest observed at the new year.  In winter the life energy, symbolized by thunder, the Arousing, is still underground.  Movement is just at its beginning; therefore it must be strengthened by rest so that it will not be dissipated by being used prematurely.  This principle, i.e., of allowing energy that is renewing itself to be reinforced by rest, applies to all similar situations.  The return of health after illness, the return of understanding after an estrangement: everything must be treated tenderly and with care at the beginning, so that the return may lead to a flowering. 

 

 ~I Ching, Hexagram 24 (The Turning Point), Wilhelm-Baynes translation.

 

 

 

 



"Attend to these only..."

 



 

 

 

"Why did you not come to us sooner, my child?

We could have put your mind at rest.

 

No others will understand

and you do not have the power to make yourself understood.

Cease to bother yourself about it.

 

You are to attend to the Old Things

And attend to your care of the Earth

Attend to these only.

 

The destiny of the world is not within your power to influence.

Cease to think of influencing the paths of Man.

They are not your paths to influence.

It's not your task, changeling of the aos sí.

Release this from your heart.

 

You are alone in the world or very close to it

Who will attend to the Old Things if you do not?

Who will love them if you do not?

How many centuries will it be before another like you

passes through this land again?

 

Should you be neglecting your care because you don't like

the way this world is going?

It was ever headed this way.

 

Who knows when your Mother will provision
for another one to come

and when and where will that be?

Your Mother labored hard to bring you forth here.

Reward her care with your own.

 

Therefore, always act as if you are the last of your kind here

and that if you do not reverence the Old Things and the Earth

then they will not be reverenced, ever."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All or Nothing

Image by Rowena Ford

If this is a blog about animism, why do I talk about everything from food to environmental policy to energy to politics to agriculture? If this blog is at least half spiritually directed, the other half is pointed in many other directions. Why?

There is to me no difference. A phrase that has become a mantra of sorts for me is "All Or Nothing." Either everything is sacred, or nothing is. Either everything is spiritual, or nothing is. Either everything is religion, or nothing is. It is ONE LIFE, and what we are talking about is oneness IN that life. To see all the world as a whole. The whole universe is my body.

If your religion stops in the bedroom or in the bathroom, or in the corporate board room, it isn't a religion that can be taken seriously as pertaining to the whole of existence, because obviously by your actions you show your truth. You believe it does not pertain in those places. Pardon the language, but when I go to the bathroom and take a dump, either that is part of my spiritual practice or I don't really have one. Not one that pertains to everything. And if it does not pertain to everything but only what you WANT it to pertain to, how should we take that seriously? We shouldn't.

Nothing to me shows our schizophrenic spiritual state like our attitude towards food and the growing of it. Of course, there are unfortunate people in the world who think that food is a product of factories and technology, and who have no idea of the bodies of the plants or animals that actually produce and store that food so that our factories can have their way with them. Even people who know where food comes from usually will not find any particular spiritual significance to the way that their bodies gain the wherewithal to continue existing. Does nobody besides me find that peculiar? The very fundaments of our existence, THAT we consider profane and worthy of no consideration, beneath our consideration, but the philosophies and dogmas in our heads or the gods in the sky we pay our attention to, we consider those important??

And of course, what we are doing to the planet reflects our conceits, that the down-to-earth and real is of no consequence, but the vain ideas in our heads are all that are important. Our religions and philosophies we entrust to priests and other experts who are genuinely supposed to be working for our benefit, whereas the life of the planet and the sources of our food we entrust to capitalists who patently have no motive but profit? What madness is this? Is it not completely clear that corporate agriculture and the corporate food industry have no financial motivation to make our food actually better for us or better for the planet, and every motive to make food cheaper, more addictive, and to make it with fewer extraneous concerns like the condition of the soil or the waterways or the air? After all, they aren't in the life business, they are in the money business. Pollution costs them nothing to make. The soil, to them, is just a preferably sterile medium in which petrochemicals of various sorts are inputs and "food" is the output. Water is simply the medium which exports their wastes to the rivers and ocean so that they don't drown in their own filth. Air is simply the medium which whisks their sprayed poisons away so that they don't become a Superfund cleanup site. Which otherwise they assuredly would become. Our system oppresses the lives of animals in the most despicable kind of slavery so that their costs to produce cows or chickens or pigs are lower. This indeed is the religion that many subscribe to, whatever words come out of their mouths. Oppression of the living in service to the dead. Oppression of the living in service to that which never lived and never could. Oppression of the living in the name of Capital and Progress and "Jobs". 

Most of my ancestors for the last 700 years or so were almost certainly oppressors of one sort or another, and they followed the Cross and abstract religion. Some may have run slave ships while reading the Bible to tell them how to be free. I know of some who were thieves and brigands and warriors. Some participated in the Civil War, on the losing side, that the practice of keeping some people as property for other people might continue.

I follow closer to the ways of other ancestors however, the ones who were here in this place for as long as anyone was here on this continent at all. Turtle Island, my home. North America. 

The ones who called the land sacred, the waters sacred, who asked forgiveness for the slaying of an animal for food. I am sure that they could be as bloodthirsty and as thoughtless as my European ancestors in their own ways, these are common human traits, but if they didn't do better at least they should have known better. The land is sacred. The land is everything, we are merely passing through it, we are not higher or better than it. It is higher than us. More important. Eating is sacred, the corn is sacred, water is sacred, air is sacred, just as much as dreaming or thinking or the ingenious inventions of our brains are. All are, or none are. It is only our blind arrogance that we think we can lift ourselves above the network of living things. 

I have been gardening seriously this year for the first time in my life, and there is nothing that has taught me the connections between all living things better. I love my plants, sincerely, and they and I are really part of one extended body. They produce some of the food I eat, and then I pee some of those nutrients out, and I save that pee and use it to fertilize them again (diluted fermented urine is a superior fertilizer) so they grow bigger and produce more food in a mutually reinforcing cycle that lifts up all the life which the plants and myself are entwined with. So my peeing is sacred too in its own way, just as my eating is, just as their lives are and my life is. As the land is, which we are both a part of. Not abstractly, not as an intellectual idea. Physically, chemically, emotionally, electrically even, really, we are connected. We are connected through the Sun, which powers all life; through the air, which they and I both breathe; through the soil, which I feed through my labors and which then feeds the plants and then me. We are connected through the waters, which make up most of their bodies and mine. We are one extended body, and I am part of the extended body of all that exists, the Universe, the stars now shining and the ones that exploded aeons ago to build the carbon and the oxygen and calcium that the plants and I both need to live.

All or nothing. You must include everything. You show by your actions whether your religion is a conceit in your head or your connection to the Cosmos. I see this connection in what people think of as the most mundane things. A drink of water. A bite of a tomato. All or nothing. You care about the whole world, or about nothing, and isn't care, love, what we really mean when we say we revere what is holy? To say that something is holy is to say that you love it. You can either love the world or not. In actual reality, you don't get to pick and choose. You cannot love yourself and hate the means by which you are sustained. Hatred of nature is hatred of self.

All is spiritual, or nothing is.