“We may assume then, that here and there, still invisible to the public eye, the future human already exists.” — Martin Heidegger (1976)
Every now and again a phantom of sorts rises up from the depths of our Common Memory, has her brief moment amongst the living, and then sinks back down again into oblivion. A shapeshifter, she seems to prefer a certain type of gathering, and especially the group identity fusion that such an event can sometimes engender. Say, for example, a concert or choir-dense church service, where rhythms pulse and bodies respond. Or the close physical proximity and repetitious roaring chants of a mass sporting event.
At other times her visitations can be quite intimate. One might catch a glimpse of her while on a solitary walk in nature, in the course of a personal encounter, during the theatrics of ceremony, or even when doing something as simple as playing a game or enjoying music with a few close friends on a warm summer afternoon. In such gratuitous moments there’s no separation. You and the other are one. And in that sweet experience of re-connecting, you just might find yourself being made inexplicably whole again — which is the original, true meaning of the word ‘heal’.
The divine benefactress of such a unitary encounter was at the zenith of her power and stature during the last great cycle of matriarchy, which came to its end some 5000 years ago. Today she’s a gone girl, at her nadir and literally a ghost of her former self. Her responsibilities as Queen of the Dead may have a lot to do with that. But so too has her profound distress over humanity’s long, slow drift into dis-connection, which has been a core attribute of our current patriarchal cycle and its hallmark form of consciousness: the subject/object split.
The split has been especially hard on her. Not so much because of its long duration, since she’s from another dimension and time is a mortal constraint. But because its inherently divisive nature is so very foreign to hers. Perhaps that’s why she keeps making all these fleeting apparitions: so that she, and we, won’t completely forget.
Cycles of any kind are circles in time. Usually they play themselves out independently; but on occasion they pair up and dance together like binary stars. That’s been the story of matriarchy and patriarchy. Thus 5000 years ago, matriarchy’s autumn was patriarchy’s spring; and humanity’s loss was to the benefit of the Netherworld. Now it’s the opposite. Patriarchy’s autumn is matriarchy’s spring; and today it’s we in the Land of the Living who stand to benefit.
The cultural historian William Irwin Thompson used to speak of a phenomenon he dubbed: “The Sunset Effect.” Exactly like a setting sun, dying cultural institutions sometimes go dark in a final blaze of color. Thus all the entrenched patriarchs in positions of power today hell-bent on suppressing women, minorities, and LGBTQ aren’t exactly the sign of a robust, flourishing movement. Instead they’re patriarchy’s swan song: the last absurd gasp of a dying, spent cycle.
And so, as more and more of us today seek to turn attention away from our weary patriarchal past, and towards a more vital, more equitable, re-matriated future, the Goddess’ darkly distraught husband comes quietly to her side. Then untold legions of the deceased tearfully gather round their beloved king and queen.
“She knows that she must make her farewells to the souls of the underworld, and ascend to her appointed place in the realm of the living. She gathers gifts of peace and paradox to take to the living, so they might remember, if only briefly, the richly textured beauty of the dark. Finally, on the eve of the spring equinox, Persephone weeps as she floats in the darkness. In her hand she holds a stalk of wheat, the symbol of her promise to return to the living. For a single, timeless moment she turns her ears to the impossible music that sings to her. Finally, she raises a single grain of wheat to her trembling lips.” (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers,” Parabola, Summer 1996.)
THE SUBJECT/OBJECT SPLIT
In 925 CE the last of the Southern Maya’s magnificent forest cities were on the verge of total collapse. For some 200 years, societal cohesion had been eroding due mainly to an increasing concentration of wealth at the top of the class structure, and the rampant deforestation that had been gradually turning their once-benign climate less friendly. All it took was one prolonged period of drought and it was game over. In quiet desperation, a disenfranchised populace numbering perhaps 3 million took what they could carry on their backs and in their hearts, melted back into what remained of the great southern forest, and returned to the subsistence lifestyle of their ancestors.
If this description of time past sounds eerily akin to time present, it should. Only this time we can see that the provoking crises of social inequity and changing climate are really the results of one underlying crisis: a crisis of consciousness. Add to that the fact that the problem today isn’t just local; it’s global. So how will you and I respond this time around, since there aren’t enough forests left for all 8 billion of us to melt into even if we wanted to or could?
Will we continue on in our denial, believing that the life we’ve known will somehow carry on, and thus make essentially the same blunder as the 5th-century CE Romans? They too were living the good, complacent life of empire. But it all came crashing down the day those 100,000 Germanic tribesmen who had been massing on the northern bank of the Rhine did exactly what the Romans were convinced was impossible, and successfully made it across the treacherous currents of that mighty river.
Will we place all our hope in the dubious possibility of a technological fix? Or will we finally recognize, and actually start to deal with, the root cause of the crisis: the unsustainable manner in which you and I have learned to be human in-the-world. I’m talking about the dominant form of human consciousness in the world today: the subject/object split. The split, if you remember, is a perceptual and cognitive divide between an experiencing ‘subjective’ awareness (you), and an experienced ‘objective’ reality (everyone and everything that’s not you).
Three factors have contributed to this form’s 2500-year hegemony. First is the now almost universal adoption of the Western, literacy-based model of education. Before his untimely death in 2009, the surgeon-turned-historian-of-consciousness Leonard Shlain had come to some revolutionary conclusions regarding the physiological effects of the sustained exercise of reading and writing alphabetically. But to the best of my knowledge, no one has yet connected the dots between those conclusions, the development of split, and humankind’s rapidly deteriorating situation. As a result, due to both education and habit, the vast majority of contemporary thinkers remain unconsciously beholding to this in some ways remarkable, while at the same time increasingly toxic, psychology.
What I do know is that in Ancient Greece, which was the birthplace of Western Civilization and the world’s first culture to alphabetize its native language, the definitive litmus-test for the presence of the split — the existence of philosophy and science as we know them today — didn’t show positive results until after the phonetic alphabet had been introduced.
Second is the fact that over the last 2500 years the split’s inherent perceptual bias has become increasingly embedded in, and in turn reinforced by, the structurally congruent subject/verb/object (SVO) grammar of the Indo-European family of languages. This family has for some time been the largest on the planet, with 445 members and 3.2 billion speakers or 46% of the world’s population.
And ironically the third factor is the implementation of the global communications network which, by its very nature, is trying to become the functional neurology for a more unified, post-split form of consciousness. Unfortunately the digital technologies that underpin it have been captured and weaponized against us by powerful economic and political institutions that owe their very existence to the split and unwittingly serve its specific interests. This includes the social media platforms, as well as both major systems of economic organization in the world today: capitalism and state-sponsored socialism. And please understand that it matters little if you call it ‘employer/employee’ or ‘director/worker’. Both descriptions reflect the same master/slave model of relationship.
Problem is, when left on its own any form of consciousness seems to eventually become toxic, unbalanced, and destructive. It happened to the At-one-ment when its hyper-conservative tendencies blocked all attempts at innovation; and now it’s happening to the split. Truth is: I cannot think of a single crisis in the world today that isn’t being directly caused or severely exacerbated by the divisive shadow-side of this deeply-engrained, unconsciously embraced, perceptual and cognitive habit.
AT-ONE-MENT DEPRIVATION DISORDER (ADD)
“Each ailment, each disease,” writes the Peruvian poet César Calvo Soriano, “comes to the world after its remedy.” We had a remedy for the ‘dark’ side of the subject/object split long before it became a problem. But because the people of that time weren’t in a position to see what was happening, they allowed their natural state of at-one state to fade and disappear — ‘they’ being primarily our ancestral Greek sisters and brothers. However, bedazzled as they were by the immense power of the alphabetically-rendered word, we can hardly blame them.
Right up through Greece’s Classical period and beyond, embodying the knowledge of how to maintain perceptual and societal unity was the primary responsibility of the Eleusinian Mysteria (See Part 1). But all that began to decay once Phoenician traders introduced Athens to the Semitic alphabet in 800 BCE. Like the oft-cited frog in the pan, the perceptual, cognitive, and societal changes that alphabetic literacy produced took place so gradually that no one noticed. And when the shrine was brutally destroyed in 396 CE by marauding Roman troops and their Visigoth partners, the natural counterbalance to the self-aggrandizing excesses of the split was irrevocably lost.
On hindsight it’s clear that allowing this to happen was a mistake. Because without a living, continuously-maintained at-one experience the internal coherence of human perception falls apart, individual psyches fracture, and collectivities fragment into the kinds of conflicting camps that have become so dangerous in the US and elsewhere today. And now, after being immersed in the perceptual and cognitive environment of the split for some 2500 years, the Western mindset is having to deal with the consequences of that mistake, chief amongst which is an explosion of what I like to call ADD (At-one-ment Deficit Disorder) — not to be confused with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).
It’s important to understand that both the At-one-ment and the subject/object split have been creative evolutionary responses to two fundamental human needs. The first is a need for connection and community — to understand who ‘we’ are. The second is the need to actualize selfhood — to understand who ‘I’ am. So purely from a needs perspective, one could argue that the At-one-ment had to slip away when and as it did because the matriarchal priority of connection had become so rigidified that the priorities of the individual were being increasingly stifled. In other words: the need for self-actualization wasn’t getting met.
Now, under the patriarchy, we’ve swung to the opposite extreme. It’s the priorities of the individual self that have become exaggerated; and this to a degree that what little is left of the societal commons is in danger of disappearing altogether. The result is the ongoing “Hell with you Jack, I got mine” free-for-all that passes for ‘society’ in America and much of the world today. This toxic over-emphasis on the priorities of self is the first of four major symptoms of At-one-ment Deficit Disorder (ADD).
The second symptom is an increasingly normalized state of loneliness and isolation. In a May 2023 advisory entitled: Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, the US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy claimed that half of adults in the U.S. are now reporting measurable levels of chronic loneliness. Similarly, a 2021 Harvard Report had suggested that 36% of all Americans, 61% of young adults, and 51% of mothers with young children were experiencing “serious loneliness.” The 14% increase in the two short years between these reports is most likely the result of a spike in isolation brought on by Covid lockdowns.
The loneliness epidemic Dr. Murthy refers to is neither limited to the US alone, nor to any particular age group. In addition to the salient mental and emotional problems it’s responsible for, significant physical health consequences include: a 29% increase in the risk of heart disease, a 32% increased risk of stroke, a 50% increased risk of developing dementia for older adults, and a 60% increase in the risk of premature death.
Dr. Murthy blamed the situation on a breakdown of interpersonal communication. A noticeable deterioration of human connection certainly is a major contributor to the loneliness epidemic. But framing the problem as exclusively a matter of human interaction is itself a symptom of this disorder, since our dis-connection from the natural world is an equally large contributor to our cultural malaise.
Symptom #3 is an increase in free-floating anxiety. The clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet believes that this kind of anxiety is closely related to chronic loneliness. In his view, both are the main prerequisites for his extremely controversial and discomfort-producing theory of “mass formation” which, for our purposes here, essentially means crowd behavior. When faced with an existential threat that cannot be dealt with effectively as individuals, humans instinctively begin to function as a crowd by reverting to a strange sort of caricature of the at-one state. It tends to happen in this manner because mass formation is largely an unconscious process, which causes the at-one instinct to become contaminated by shadow elements. Think of this as analogous to the strangely distorted image that peers back at you from a funhouse mirror.
The 4th symptom of ADD is resorting to false ways of satisfying the frustrated need. And when that need is for connection, then the counterfeit ways of meeting the need can range all the way from the deceptively bogus bonding proffered by social media platforms to fully-developed, widely-embraced ideologies such as socialism and communism. Anything will serve that creates an experience of belonging to, and participating in, something greater than one’s own personal self-interests — even when that experience is being wantonly manipulated.
One thing the history of consciousness has to teach us is that periodic swings between common-interest and self-interest are nothing new. Pre-history and history’s oscillating cycles of matriarchal (common) and patriarchal (self) emphasis, where victims in one cycle become perpetrators in the next, are a good example of this. Such back and forth, ‘tit for tat’ reversals have never really served us. Some day, and hopefully soon, we’re going to realize that it’s possible to cultivate both in a way that positively balances each.
The Shuar, a tribe of the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon, speak of a bird that has been trying to fly with just one wing for a long time now. The result of such an imbalanced effort is that the bird ends up flying in circles (or in cycles perhaps?): first in one direction (matriarchy?), then in the other (patriarchy?). This powerful common dream of theirs includes a prophecy. The day is approaching, they say, when the bird will finally learn how to fly straight by using both wings at the same time.
The Hopi have a slightly different take on the history of consciousness. By their reckoning, this is the fourth time that humans have found themselves trapped in the same evolutionary cul-de-sac. And in each of the three previous cycles, because people wouldn’t or couldn’t see that all the divisiveness threatening their societies was the result of an unbalanced patriarchal extreme of self-interest, things didn’t end well.
So whether this is the fourth time we’ve found ourselves suffering the consequences of a split-driven hyper-individualism or only the first, know that another way of being human — one that prioritizes cooperation, community, and harmony with Mother Earth — really is possible. The blueprint for it is already there in our Common Memory, just waiting to once again be made our priority.
THE TECHNOLOGICAL MATRICES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Consciousness is a hot topic these days. Still the majority of philosophers and scientists taking part in the conversation continue to espouse a ‘materialist’ view. In other words: consciousness is simply a byproduct, or epiphenomenon, of brain activity. And becauseof this its structural form, or configuration, is fixed and constant in its temporal expression.
Thus when these thinkers look to the past, the people they see peering back at them all think and behave just like themselves, except that they’re dressed in skins or togas and don’t sport cell phones. And yet we live in a world where everything changes all the time, where nothing lasts. So why should the architecture of human consciousness be the lone exception?
In addition to being unconsciously beholding in their world-view to the perceptual and cognitive biases of the subject/object split, materialists give little credence to the Big Picture being presented by an historical perspective on consciousness. Most aren’t even aware that such a perspective exists, because a hardwired neurological process would never have anything more than a personal history. Even the possibility of such is outside their accepted universe of discourse.
Personally I don’t see how humans will ever understand consciousness by remaining within the narrow, split-determined parameters of the materialist model. If you don’t include our neurology’s technological extensions in your equation, then the rich and colorful diversity of human history is reduced to a split-dominated, monochromic uniformity. This is absolutely true when it comes to the question of form, because the form we inhabit is a direct result of a symbiotic partnership between our neurology and the experiential environment generated by our culture’s dominant information technology.
When innovation results in a paradigmatic change of a culture’s information technology, that culture’s shared form of consciousness adapts by qualitatively mirroring the change. For example: like all indigenous peoples in the early morning of the world, the Archaic Greeks in-habited a more unified form of consciousness I call: ‘the At-one-ment’. Originally native to our animal forebears, the at-one form evolved into its uniquely human expression when the First People began partnering their brains with the spoken word some 200,000 years ago.
At that time, neither philosophy nor science as we know them both today even existed — not in Greece, not anywhere else in the world. The Semitic alphabet arrives in Greece in 800 BCE. And within just a few generations of immersion in the information environment of the alphabetically-written word, the form of Greek consciousness shifts away from the ancestral At-one-ment. It leaves behind its original technological matrix of right-brain activating language — be it verbalized, imaged, sung, whistled, gestured, or transcribed pictographically. And it adopts the left-brain activating matrix of alphabetic literacy, which shifts it towards the subject/object split. And once that has occurred, both philosophy and ‘natural’ philosophy (science) make their appearance.
The problem is that all this transpired beneath the threshold of human awareness. The infectious enthusiasm of the first philosophers suggests that the Classical Greeks were so caught up in the break-through excitement of the Literacy Revolution that they simply couldn’t see the Big Picture. They had neither the ‘speed’ nor the ‘altitude’ required to get that there even was such a thing — much less, what that picture might actually be.
So why are we today able to perceive what they couldn’t? Because the faster the technological extensions of our physical and mental capacities go, the faster we humans go. For instance: the automobile extends the foot. Not only did the auto dramatically increase the speed at which humans could travel, there’s no stopping it. Notice all the speeders in their high-tech machines on US interstates and freeways these days? And no one, including the police, seems to care.
The futurist Buckminster Fuller dubbed this relentlessly steepening curve: “accelerating acceleration”. And what’s pushing this? Well according to Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, humanity now generates as much information in just two days as we did from the beginning of civilization up until the year 2003. And how does the human brain deal with such a ‘cognitive overload’? The Anthropologist Edmund Carpenter has the answer to that: “Information overload requires speed-up which permits [pattern] recognition.” (They Became What They Beheld, 1973, brackets mine.) That’s precisely why you and I can now see the Big Picture that the Greeks couldn’t.
So if the unlearned lesson at the root of Western Civilization was to preserve the at-one experience while perfecting the subject/object split, ours has to be to correct this error by preserving the benefits of the split, while marrying it to a re-vivified experience of at-one-ment. So here’s an imaginal analogy to help you understand how the technology-driven process of accelerating acceleration works in the history of human consciousness...
Imagine you’re sitting in a window seat of an airliner preparing to depart the airport outside Manaus, Brazil. As the plane slowly taxis into position, distinguishing and appreciating specific trees in the wall of forest encroaching on the runway is both possible and appropriate. That’s essentially what the First People were doing with their favored pursuits of story-telling and myth-making. Right up until the midpoint of the 1st millennium BCE, humans were immersed in the sensory world, at-one, and collectively ‘taxiing’.
As the plane begins to accelerate and lift off, individual trees cease to be distinguishable; but the community they’re all part of still is. In other words: ‘grove’ has supplanted ‘tree’ as your relevant category of perception. The historical equivalent of this dimensional shift is the emergence of the subject/object split, and the beginnings of the “craving for generality” that the philosopher Wittgenstein so insightfully linked to the invention of split-enabled philosophy and science.
Then, as your speed increases further, and you gain even greater altitude, distinguishing groves becomes impossible. They and their constituent trees are obviously still there; but you’d never know it because your perception has been forced to adopt an even higher level of pattern recognition. Now the only thing you can meaningfully discern is the immense emerald majesty of the Amazonian rainforest: the endgame community of all its member communities. And the evolutionary equivalent of this stunningly beautiful panorama is the higher level, all-inclusive framework provided by the history of human consciousness.
RE-MATRIATING THE SPLIT
The darkness shifts and ripples. The world is ripped by a crash of thunder. The wind shrieks around her. The void explodes with jarring colors and a cacophony of discordant sounds. Persephone cries out in terror even as she leaps into the blinding light. For a moment that seems like eternity she forgets who she is, where she is, and why. And then, gentle laughter…the sounds of birds…the cool mist of morning’s breath. (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers,” Parabola, Summer 1996.)
Perfecting the Human At-one-ment was the work of the pre-historic matriarchy. So were we today to intentionally re-integrate both a personal and collective exploration of at-one consciousness as a corrective counter-balance to the excesses of the split, we would literally be re-matriating the split. In the language of myth, we would be welcoming Persephone back to the World of the Living. Most of our futurists these days, however, are members of the patriarchy with a very different vision of the future. Most of them are singularly obsessed with technology — i.e., boys with toys.
Meanwhile Transhumanist anticipations of enhanced physical and mental powers are reverberating through the public imagination, helped along by Hollywood’s steady stream of lucrative super-hero/super-heroine films. Hardly any of these futurist fantasies take consciousness into account. The commonly-shared materialist assumption that the form of human consciousness is fixed and constant probably has a lot to do with this. So too is the untested presumption that the subject/object split they all in-habit is that one fixed and constant form.
But after all I’ve shared with you about the split and it’s potentially dangerous shadow, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have a bunch of clever madmen with IQ’s of 10,000, all still unconsciously trapped in the divisive psychology of the split, in positions of influence and power.
The split is largely responsible for today’s digital information technologies, AI included. Pioneered by the Classical Greeks, the split came to North America with the European invasion; and those invaders immediately set about driving the native at-one form to the margins of society, or demolishing it altogether. The locals simply didn’t understand what they were up against. In an unpublished interview, Chief Oren Lyons of the Iroquois Confederacy posed himself an interesting question : “If the Europeans hadn’t come to this land,” he asked, “would we ever have invented the airplane?” His immediate answer was: “Probably not.”
The psychology of the subject/object split is by nature very masculine. Starting with its inception 2500 years ago, the rising patriarchy seized on it and made it their weapon of choice in an effort to control all aspects of the deposed feminine: women in general, the at-one indigenous population, and all the inherent resources of Mother Nature. So what if we were to think of this 5000-year-old patriarchal cycle and its current Transhumanist obsession as yet another common dream? Then we could say that the technology this cycle is producing is equally masculine and thus imagistically phallic.
A more container-like expression of consciousness — such as the At-one-ment once was — would be mythically more feminine, more ‘yonic’. So were we to begin to re-integrate the at-one form of consciousness into our own personal lives, and then grow its fruits into buttressing cultural institutions, its re-matriating effects couldn’t help but have a profound effect on everything, including the future of technological innovation.
I’ve found at least one male futurist who’s thinking in this manner; and I’m sure there are others I’m not aware of. His name is David Houle, and he publishes an excellent Substack entitled: Evolutionshift. Houle argues that as essential as the accelerating acceleration of technological innovation is to our future, it’s all in service to the still-unfolding story of human consciousness. In other words: the story of evolving technology is actually contained within the story of evolving consciousness. Were you to read Houle’s Jan 31, 2023 post, for example, you’ll see a beautiful example of what I’m talking about.
Simply by reminding us that consciousness contains technology, Houle is acknowledging that re-matriation is already well underway — even though I’ve never seen him use that specific term. It’s already in process because today’s more integrated digital communications environment no longer supports the dis-integrated psychology of the split. And we can actually catch a glimpse of this by comparing two contemporary points-of-view on the nature of human thought.
In an essay entitled “Culture and Consciousness” (1992), the social anthropologist Catherine Lutz lists the essential characteristics of 21st century thought as: an absence of emotion in problem solving, linear thinking, sustained attention span, and objective reasoning.
Only one short decade later, the writer Nicholas Carr and the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield came up with a completely different list. The characteristics they see being expressed are cultivated empathy, associative hyper-linking (a device-enabled, nonlinear manner of thinking that the humorist Garrison Keillor once likened to "a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers”), shortened attention span, and subjective reasoning. Set these two lists side by side, and you’ll see that in each of the four points they’re exact opposites. So who’s correct?
Well, when viewed through the wide-angle lens of the history of consciousness both are. Due to her own educational training and academic employment, Lutz is describing the essential characteristics of the subject/object split. So she's effectively describing the brain’s partnership with the 2500-year old literate environment that her career in higher education demands she be facile at. “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror,” observed the revolutionary communications theorist Marshall McLuhan in 1964. “We march backwards into the future.”
Carr and Greenfield, on the other hand, are describing the qualities of our emerging digital partnership. Please take note of the phrase “cultivated empathy” at the head of their list. Not only does it imply the kind of emotional engagement in problem solving the literate mindset finds uncomfortable at best, if you check your thesaurus you’ll see that many of empathy’s synonyms were essential qualities of the matriarchal At-one-ment. This fact alone should afford you some insight into the more feminine, post-split mindset your children and grandchildren are learning to inhabit every time they partner their brains with an evolving digital device.
PANDEMICS OF CHANGE
When I first got interested in history of consciousness, I decided that if that history really does consist of a pageant of changing forms I would have to find a way to verify that for myself. I initiated a search for any body of experience that might possibly have come down from an earlier form, and that wasn’t just another artifact of the split. Reading some of the psychologist Carl Jung’s Collected Works, I noticed that he repeatedly referred to astrology in a favorable way — something that few scholars in the late 20th century were doing. Surmising that astrology was probably much older than the split, I set out to see what it could teach me about consciousness.
It took me years to realize my intention, largely because I first had to understand the ways in which this old, old ‘language’ had been re-configured by 2000 years of being exposed to the objectifying bias of the split. However once I got a handle on that, and most especially by developing my own living practice of astrology, I did eventually find the vehicle I was hoping for — one that could give me an entry of sorts into the original at-one form of human consciousness. Part 1 of this essay was largely the fruit of that effort.
But then quite serendipitously, and to my utter amazement, I discovered that astrology could also be an extremely helpful ally in my ongoing study of the history of consciousness. Turns out that significant milestones in this history always seem to be accompanied by major, and sometimes quite rare, planetary configurations. So let me show you an example, apropos to our discussion here, of exactly what I mean…
By 1962, the rapidly evolving electronic information environments of radio, TV, and film were clearly beginning to undermine the split’s deeply-entrenched hegemony. At the same time, a once-in-a-century-plus alignment of the planets Uranus and Pluto was just beginning, and an obscure philosopher of science named Thomas Kuhn was releasing his classic: The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions. The astrological Uranus symbolizes the unexpected shocks and surprises of life; and the astrological Pluto, all processes of trans-form-ation. Thus Uranus/Pluto together = a shocking transformation. And that’s precisely what those turbulent years, the change in the media landscape, and this unassuming little book all turned out to be.
Kuhn took issue with the long-standing belief that science advances through a continuous accumulation of theory and fact. Charles Darwin, for instance, had once pontificated: “Nature does not make jumps.” Kuhn, however, begged to differ. He argued that science, which like all human inventions is itself a variant of nature, certainly makes jumps. And when it does, these jumps take place in a completely dis-continuous manner in which relatively stable periods of ‘normal’ advancement are irregularly punctuated by unpredictable periods of sudden change. Kuhn dubbed these revolutionary jumps: paradigm shifts.
I first read Kuhn’s book in 1968 when I was 23, and immediately recognized that his understanding of change wasn’t limited to science. Paradigms had been shifting all around me in those extraordinary Uranus/Pluto years. The alignment itself was exact in 1965; but these major configurations can be symbolically relevant for as long as a decade in advance, and continue to reverberate for as long as a decade after.
At one point in those stormy years I stumbled upon the words of a 10th century Christian monk, who in a letter to a friend wrote: “I don’t know what’s happening where you are. But here it seems that the world is surely ending.” The world itself wasn’t ending in 1968; but the world I’d grown up in clearly was. We’ll return to Uranus/Pluto shortly; but first let’s fast forward to early 2020 and the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Right from the start, comparisons were being made with the notorious Black Death of the 14th century, even though the respective illnesses really were quite different. One thing that was common to both pandemics, however, was that each played a starring role in the events symbolized by an even rarer once-every-600-year alignment of three planets: Pluto, Jupiter, and Saturn.
The mythic Pluto was the Roman adaptation of Hades — Greece’s patriarchal Lord of the Dead who, if you recall, we saw drag both the goddess Persephone and the matriarchy she was patroness of down into the shadowy ‘underworld’ of humanity’s Collective Memory. The astrological Pluto is not only the Lord of Death, but of Rebirth as well; and is therefore a potent symbol for all processes of regeneration and renewal. Combos of Jupiter/Saturn tell us something about the enduring structures, time-honored traditions, and stable institutions of society. So a Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn alignment = the death and rebirth, or transformation, of human society.
But human society trans-forms when and because consciousness trans-forms. Thus the emergence of the ‘Western’ form in the final millennium BCE, and the birth of Western Civilization were inseparable, co-evolutionary events. So if we were to consider a collectively-shared form of consciousness a stable institution of society, then we could also say that Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn = the transformation of human consciousness.
The Behaviorists had a pithy little truism that can help us understand how this actually works. Organization inhibits re-organization. So for any degree of re-organization to be effective, it must be preceded by some degree of dis-organization. “In the destructive element immerse,” was Freud’s way of applying this principle to the individual psyche. And why would he recommend such a thing? Because the only way out of a stagnating organization of one’s energies is to go through a break-down of sorts; and the reward for surviving such a rite-of-passage is an uplifting experience of rebirth and renewal. Thus a concise schematic for Plutonian transformation would be: organization > dis-organization > re-organization.
The Black Death was a perfect example of this. Throughout the Middle Ages (5th to 14th centuries), European society functioned under the rigidly dogmatic organization of the Roman Catholic Church. What broke the Church’s stranglehold on the European mind and spirit, and made it possible for the imaginative re-organization of the Renaissance to flourish in the 15th and 16th centuries, was the total dis-organization of society brought on by a century of unrelenting waves of the Black Death.
Europe’s deadliest wave crested between 1347 and 1353 CE — right on the heels of another Uranus/Pluto alignment exact in 1343. It was the intrinsic dis-organizational nature of Uranus/Pluto that made possible the transformation of human society we today know as the Renaissance — from the Latin nascentia: ‘to be born’ + re: ‘again’ — which started to get traction a century later in 1445 under Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn.
And what does all this have to do with us today? Well, the exact same sequence of Uranus/Pluto dis-organization, followed by the beginnings of a Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn re-organization, has just reoccurred during the global Covid pandemic for the first time since the 1400’s. We had serious Uranus/Pluto dis-organization beginning in the 60’s, a strong phase-2 echo of it exact in 2014, and then the beginnings of a Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn re-organization exact in 2020. There are, however, two important differences. The current time-frame is more compressed, so it’s happening much faster; and the Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn is much tighter this time, so potentially far more powerful and consequential.
In major astrological events such as this, there’s always both a downside and an upside. On the downside — the unconscious ‘shadow’ expression — Pluto can symbolize impositions of raw power, obdurate control, and ruthless manipulation. We’re seeing this in the world-wide wave of authoritarian attacks on democracy, including right here in the U.S. We’re also seeing it in the fossil fuel industry’s desperate ramp-up of it capitalist priorities, the climate and its innocent casualties be damned. And we’ve seen it big time during the pandemic as well, since Covid has been the world’s first virus to partner with a strong-arm ‘public relations’ department. When it gets acted out unconsciously, the energy being symbolized works us.
On the upside: when you understand the energies at work, and you choose ways to align with them consciously and intentionally, you work the energy. If enough of us can do that in the coming years, then the rebirth and renewal just now getting started could flower into a global Renaissance. And for reasons we’re about to discuss, it will in the end produce a far more consequential evolutionary change in consciousness than the earlier, more local European version was able to do 600 years ago.
However, keep in mind that 600 years ago it took more than a century, and wave after wave of serious illness and related crises, to break down (dis-organize) the old and usher in (re-organize) the new. Just so, the Covid-19 pandemic and all the unanswered questions it has raised and still is, was probably but one in an ongoing series of necessary dis-integrations coming our way.
So keep your seatbelt fastened. And hence the wisdom of readying a ‘lifeboat’ of some kind. If the Black Death had something to teach us about the transformation of society, might it also have something more to teach us about how consciousness transforms?
THE PATTERN THAT CONNECTS
Artistic depictions of the Black Death engulf the viewer in a vision of hell. Fire was said to rain down from the sky. Death slept with you by night, and fear ruled your days. Psychological decompensation — the inability to cope effectively with stress leading to personality dis-integration — became commonplace. Disfellowship, exclusion, and other mass formation strategies surged; and scapegoating was brutally weaponized. The usual suspects were Satan, your local ethnic minority, and your cat. The doctors, most of whom at the time were astrologers, blamed everything on a very difficult co-alignment of Saturn/Mars (‘fear-amped aggressiveness’), since no one at the time had any idea that Uranus and Pluto even existed.
As for the illness itself, epidemiologists generally believe that the plague was transmitted to humans by the fleas of infected rats. But as UK researchers Dawn Lester and David Parker point out, archeologists have never found any evidence of the mass rat die-offs that one would expect if that were the case. Neither were there any first-hand documentations of such. So if humans were dying en masse, why weren’t the rats?
What was observed, however, was: “masses of dead fish, animals and other things along the sea shore, and in many places trees covered in dust...and all these things seem to have come from a great corruption of the air and earth.” (Quoted in Lester & Parker, What Really Makes You Ill, 2019, emphasis mine.)
Tree-ring chronologies collected by the paleoecologist Dr. Mike Baillie corroborate this first-hand observation. Seems the Black Death coincided with a period of severe atmospheric and environmental stress due to a highly unusual series of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and meteor strikes — even a close comet pass in 1456. All of this happening in close proximity would certainly have had the potential to corrupt the atmosphere, which might help explain why pulmonary failure was so prevalent. It also suggests that a highly contagious pathogen wasn’t the only thing responsible for the deaths of somewhere between 75 and 200 million people world-wide.
Turns out though, that not everyone who managed to survive was hopelessly mired in mass psychosis. As society unraveled, intentional communities began to spring up in rural areas, offering safe haven from the abounding psychological decompensation and the toxic exposome ( the sum total of all your environmental exposures) co-factors of urban life. These intentional communities served as incubators for some of the more progressive ideas of the Renaissance. In other words: they functioned exactly like lifeboats off a sinking ship. Survivors and their descendants became ‘seed-people’ for the re-naissance of society.
As the threat escalated, the ecclesiastical thought-police lost control of the European psyche. The long-instilled Catholic belief in a transcendent patriarchal God divorced from a fallen nature quietly fell out of favor, along with the split-induced dogma of an unbridgeable divide between spirit and matter. Artists like Leonardo da Vinci helped antidote people’s distrust of the natural world and fear of cats by depicting both as beneficent. In response, the common people, especially in the countryside, quietly returned to the old pre-patriarchal, at-one expression of matriarchal consciousness.
In other words: rural pockets of a pandemic-traumatized populace invited the Goddess to return, and she graciously accepted. This time, however, she didn’t come in the guise of either Persephone or Demeter. In a world still deeply Catholic, she came as the Blessed Virgin Mary. Later, as the Renaissance gained momentum amongst the educated, the Goddess shape-shifted once again into Anima Mundi: ‘The Soul of the World’. Sadly, all these spontaneous resurgences of re-matriation lasted at most a generation or two. And here’s why…
As we discussed earlier, human consciousness presents experientially as content and form. Content is everything we sense, perceive, think, and feel. Form is the manner in which our psyches organize the ever-changing stream of content. The structure this provides is a cultural construct that evolves with the environment established by our culture’s dominant information technology. When innovation restructures this environment, consciousness restructures; and the result is a paradigm shift.
Even though the faith-paradigm was temporarily destabilized in 15th century plague-decimated Europe, the communications paradigm wasn’t. The alphabetically-rendered word remained the preferred technology. And because there wasn’t a new technological foundation to support a different form of consciousness, a coalition of powerful ecclesiastical, political, and economic interests regrouped around the comfortably familiar psychology of the subject/object split, used it to reassert control, and successfully restored the patriarchal agenda to dominance.
That was Uranus/Pluto > Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn 600-700 years ago. Now the exact same sequence of planetary alignments has just reconnected you, I, and everyone on Earth today to the people who lived and died in that earlier pandemic and prepared the way for the Renaissance. What’s different this time is that we have three things going for us they didn’t.
First: the literate information environment that underpinned the subject/object split through both the dis-organizing events of the Black Death and the re-organizing efforts of the Renaissance is rapidly disintegrating. The only things still holding its associated form of consciousness in place are personal and collective habit, split-based education, and split-perpetuating social, economic, and political institutions.
Second: it took 2500 years for the subject/object split and the 2nd Great Transformation of human consciousness to re-configure society. The vehicle for achieving this was the gradual dissemination of alphabetic literacy — a skill so highly valued in society today that it has to be one of the closest things we have to a sacred cow. As a consequence, my suggesting that it might also have a pernicious shadow effect is essentially akin to heresy. But what if I’m correct? Then what we’re really dealing with here is billions of unwitting humans, plus a vast societal infrastructure, unconsciously committed to an increasingly lethal perception of reality.
Marshall McLuhan taught us that technology extends our natural human capacities. A wheel extends your foot; a computer extends your brain, etc. The possibility that there’s a relationship between the dominant technological extension of your information capacities, and the form of your consciousness, has remained below our threshold of awareness for 99.97% of humanity’s existence. That too is no longer true.
And third: my best guess is that we’re about as far into the unfolding 6th Great Extinction as we are the digitally-facilitated 3rd Great Transformation. Combine that with the increasing societal pressure of the climate crisis, and we simply don’t have the time to let the emerging information environment unconsciously engineer the change for us as emerging technologies have done in the two previous Great Transformations. Fortunately, for what may be the first time in the current cycle of civilization and possibly the first time ever, the fact that we’re apprised of the technological dynamics of consciousness means that it’s now possible for both individuals and collectives to begin intentionally crafting our own forms.
MUSTERING THE SWARM
300,000 years ago, the 1st Great Transformation of consciousness partnered our at-one animal neurology with the spoken word and made us fully human. 2500 years ago, the dissemination of alphabetic literacy fostered a 2nd Great Transformation by engendering the emergence of the subject/object split which made a significant portion of us Western. And now today, as all of us partner our brains with digital technology, a 3rd Great Transformation is taking us global — which in essence means back to one, but on a higher turn of the evolutionary spiral.
So I wonder: how many of us will make the transition out of local to global consciousness by choice and personal effort? How many will simply allow the rolling digital wave to carry them passively into the new form? And how many will remain mired in the deeply-engrained habit of the split?
No one knows exactly what the emerging digital form will finally be. But I think it’s safe to assume that it will begin as a conjugate of the subject/object split and a re-vitalized contemporary version of the original at-one form. Our literacy-based educational systems are essentially designed to institutionalize the split. But with the exception of a few minority spiritual traditions, we lack the equivalent institutions to widely support and foster the at-one experience.
That’s one reason why I think it’s unrealistic at best to expect this evolutionary change to engage everyone. It’s far more likely that the majority will remain with their educational vector and what’s familiar. New worlds spring up like plants from the detritus of decaying old worlds. So if becoming a compost of sorts doesn’t sound appealing, I suggest you put some effort into becoming one of the newly-sprouting ‘plants’. Still is it pure folly on my part to think that it’s even possible to bring that about in the relatively brief time left before we all become casualties of the 6th Great Extinction with just a minority of support?
Not necessarily. I remember reading a study a decade or more ago that looked at how flocks of birds and schools of fish are able to all turn at once — the best example of which is probably a murmuration of starlings. The conclusion the authors arrived at was that 15% were initiating the turn, and the remaining 85% were following. I cannot find that study now; but here’s an article that summarizes pretty well how researchers were thinking about that question in those earlier years.
A different approach was in the works by 2013, when the science-writer Ed Fong summarized the newest research in an article in Wired Magazine entitled: “How the Science of Swarms Can Help Us Fight Cancer and Predict the Future.” In a follow-up interview on NPR, Fong stated: “As a collective, there is an intelligence that does not apply to any of the individuals, or even the aggregate of the individuals.” And furthermore: “There is this swarm intelligence, this ability to make decisions, to carry out computations that exists only at the level of the group.”
So perhaps asking how many are turning and how many are following isn’t quite the right question to ask because that approach is built on two assumptions. First: that collective behavior is determined hierarchically since there are ‘leaders’ and there are ‘followers’. And second: that in the end the determination is made by individuals, even if those individuals are all part of an aggregate.
The research that Fong cites is fundamentally different. The premise there is that insentient and sentient aggregates behave differently. An insentient aggregate — say, for example, a pile of rocks — is simply the sum of its parts. A sentient aggregate - say a flock of birds — actively generates its own unified field of perception, cognition, and experience. Their collective behavior isn’t the tabulated result of individual choices. Rather it emerges from the group’s living inter-connections and inter-actions. Fong continues…
“So for humans, for example, you can take a bunch of people and put them in a large arena with lots of different targets around them. And you - if you tell them all to stick together and you give one of them information about which target is the right one to head for, and you'll see them all moving about randomly but very gradually heading towards that target. So the vast majority of people in that group have no idea where they're going, but because they're sticking together, they can follow the single informed person to the right destination.” (emphasis mine)
If I understand this correctly, the implication is that we I don’t have to know in advance where the 3rd Great Transformation is taking us; or exactly what the form of consciousness now being ushered in will eventually be. We’ll find that out in the process of re-connecting and re-membering once again how to live at-one. All we have to do is embrace the opportunity to nurture such experiences whenever and however they present. “That’s the beauty of being part of the swarm,” says Fong. “Even if you don’t know where you’re going, you still get there.” (emphasis mine)
What seems necessary is that the fully-developed digital form of human consciousness will have to meet the two basic human needs that I spoke of earlier, and that are inherent in each and every one of us: our need for self-actualization (the split), and our need for community (from the Latin unus: ‘one’, and cum: ‘with’).
To date we’ve only done one or the other. (Remember that Shuar common dream we discussed earlier about the bird learning to fly with both wings?) We need to learn how to in-habit either form of consciousness at will and without confounding them. Some life situations will require us to move at-one; and some will require the distancing skills of the split. Eventually we’ll learn to move seamlessly from one to the other as necessary. But first we’ll have to re-learn how to live at-one with each other and the natural world. There will always be differences of opinion and conflict. But history demonstrates that it’s possible to have differences without them becoming these gulfs as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon that are tearing the US apart right now on a daily basis.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to go out and start intentional communities as some of those plague-beleaguered pioneers of the Renaissance did — although that’s certainly a valid and, as we’ll soon see, timely option. Re-vitalizing the experience of human comm-unity can begin as simply as a getting together with a few friends and asking yourselves: “What could we do with one mind and heart that would benefit ourselves, society, nature?” Buy food cooperatively perhaps? Help each other with house and yard maintenance? Plant trees on each other’s property? Trust your swarm intelligence; and stick with whatever it gives you long enough to see results.
The perceptual and cognitive bias of the subject/object split has produced an over-emphasis on individuality. We tend to assume that the individual is the sole matrix of decision-making and thought; and we aggressively disparage any possibility that groups can function as thought matrices equally well or even better. We constantly reinforce this unconscious prejudice with emotionally-charged, derogatory slurs such as: ‘hive mind’, ‘socialism’, ‘communism’ — or even the term ‘swarm’ itself. And yet the reality of intentionally-directed collective consciousness seems to be exactly what the emerging science of collective behavior is now validating in such a timely way.
We cannot solve the chronic problems of the split by remaining within the confines of its polarizing psychology. We have to find a way to step outside if we’re to find a solution. Returning to the At-one-ment is both impossible and undesirable. The First People had their problems too. What we can do, however, is learn from their legacy, which has been conscientiously passed down to us by the indigenous peoples of the Earth. We all owe them a great debt of gratitude for holding to the old form while the rest of us have been obsessed with the seductive lure of the split.
We do, however, have one very simple but profound precedent for the possibility of re-vitalizing an at-one relationship field. After all, isn’t it the challenge in any successful inter-personal relationship for the two or more ‘me’s’ involved to become a functional ‘we’? Let’s expand that paradigm and experience to include all our relationships. Because if we truly want a new world, we’re going to have to grow it together — one relationship at a time, including our relationship to the natural world.
BIOPHILIA
The term biophilia was first introduced in 1984 by the biologist E.O. Wilson (1929-2021 CE). It literally means: “to be in love with nature”. The Greek word philia denotes a very specific type of love: one that’s based on mutual respect, shared devotion, joint interests, and common values. Wilson believed that humans are genetically wired to have this kind of brotherly-love connection with the natural world. That’s why this rather exotic little term may be the best synonym we have for the purposeful cultivation of a practical, 21st-century expression of the at-one form of consciousness.
Nonetheless, given the the steadily increasing pressure of climate change on the short-sighted direction currently being taken by the human experiment, the question that all of us need answered and quickly is: how does a digitally-entrained, urbanized woman or man, who’s been conditioned since birth to in-habit the subject/object split, learn to overcome the split by falling back in love with the natural world?
I think the best way for me to attempt an answer to this question is to conclude Part 3 of this essay in the way we began Part 1: with an imaginal experiment. Only this time, instead of turning our mind’s eye to the past or to the present, let’s look to the future, and see if we can imagine what it might be like to be on the evolutionary path of human consciousness a quarter century from now — which is probably well within the parameters of life expectancy for a good number of you reading this.
So imagine then that it’s the year 2050 CE. You, I, and a woman named Sephie have recently become friends. To further cement our new-found friendship, we’ve been taking turns sharing the story of our lives. The only rule is that the people listening cannot speak. Questions or comments have to wait for another day. This afternoon it’s Sephie’s turn. So you and I have come to the modest community-supported agricultural project where she lives and works to hear her account.
It’s an unusually warm spring day, which has become the new norm here in chronically drought-stricken New Mexico. We’re sitting in the shade of a huge old cottonwood tree, which stands in one of the last surviving remnants of what was once called ‘the bosque’ — which is Spanish for ‘forest’ — before the great climate-sparked wildfires of the late 2020’s consumed most of the forest that had for eons so graciously held the Rio Grande in its arboreal embrace. Sephie, who’s been silent for some time now, begins to speak….
“I was born just north of here, in Albuquerque, in the summer of 2016. My parents were both of Greek-American heritage; and I’ve always loved that they named their children for Greek Goddesses — my younger sister ‘Tem’ for Artemis, the Goddess of the hunt; and myself ‘Sephie’ for…can you guess who?
I grew up in a rustic old farmhouse on the sunrise-facing slopes of the Sandia Mountains, which run north and south just east of the city. My father ran a small business out of our home; and my mother was a teacher in a local rural school. Tem and I spent a large part of our early childhood playing in the mixed-conifer forest that surrounded us.
My earliest memory is feeling the pure joy of being held safe in the embrace of that welcoming forest. My most painful memory is the sheer terror I felt when a climate-driven wildfire ripped through our forest and destroyed our home. I was 13. We literally had to flee for our lives in the middle of the night — my mother holding my sister and I close and sobbing inconsolably as my father drove us careening to safety.
I grew up fast in the aftermath of that fire. Trading forest life for city life was a huge adjustment; but I loved going to a much larger school, and the expanded social life it offered. For my 20th birthday my favorite aunt gifted me the autobiography of the psychologist Carl Jung. At the beginning of the book, an aging Jung stresses something that I think I needed to hear: that it was his inner-world experiences that shaped the person he ultimately became more than the circumstances of his outer life. At the time I wasn’t exactly sure why this was resonating so deeply with me; but now I do, and I still treasure my aunt’s prescient gift all these years later.
After finishing my high school years in Albuquerque, and working for a time at a couple of entry-level jobs, I enrolled in our local university majoring in business. One year in, I was clearly failing and couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. I knew I wasn’t stupid. But to avoid the embarrassment to both myself and my family of being thrown out, I voluntarily withdrew. Confused and dispirited, I needed help. So I spoke with a therapist. Turned out she was a graduate of the Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. After listening to me detail my plight, and rather than just give me advice, she suggested we see what guidance I might get from my dreams.
So I kept a daily journal of my dreams; and she and I explored their symbolism. I soon came to realize that business was what my parents had wanted me to study, not what I wanted. No wonder I wasn’t doing well! So when the university unexpectedly gave me a second chance, I changed my major to a combination of philosophy and literature. And the inner milestone that helped me muster the courage to trust my own judgement on such a life-altering decision was the following dream…
I’m squatting on my haunches on a large, low branch of a towering old-growth ponderosa mother tree, exactly like the one I often climbed to as a child. I’m quite a bit older, naked, my hair is long and somewhat matted, and I’m wearing wire-rimmed spectacles. Looking down, I see a class in session below me composed of my college friends and led by my favorite professor. A strong feeling that I’m no longer part of that world arises and moves through, triggering a painful wave of loneliness. To ease my distress, I instinctively look up through the spreading branches; and am struck by the intense blue of a cloudless sky. The stunning beauty of this sight so overwhelms me that I spontaneously burst into tears of joy.
Back in college, my grades immediately began to improve. Something, however, was still not right. I had initially thought that my dream was asking me to reconsider my choice of studies. But now I was beginning to wonder if what it was really trying to tell me was that academic life of any kind wasn’t really in the cards for me.
In the thick of all this uncertainty and turbulence, I met my husband-to-be Travis; and much to my delight our relationship really blossomed. Travis, who was three years my elder and more academically inclined than I, ‘saw’ my struggle and took it seriously. One day he surprised me with a proposal that we marry after his upcoming graduation, and offered to financially support us until I could decide what I wanted to do with my life. Well, long story short: a few months later I left academia for good, embraced married life, and soon found myself happily pregnant with our first child.
Looking back now, I can see that really we were just children having children. And even though I dearly loved being our daughter Sabine’s mother, I knew it wasn’t enough. Meanwhile I continued to hold those dream images before my mind’s eye because I instinctively knew that they had more to offer in the way of guidance than I yet understood. Just who was this primitive self of mine, and what was she doing squatting so primitively in that beautiful old mother tree? What was the purpose of those curious spectacles? And why was I so thrilled by the sight of that immense blue sky?”
A NEW WORLD ORDER
“After Sabine’s birth, Travis and I decided to remain in Albuquerque because he had been offered a job as a programmer on a project he found interesting. I was a busy full-time mom. One day a friend told me about a visiting Buddhist monk who was hosting an informal daily meditation circle in an old abandoned house not far from us. I was immediately intrigued. The ‘house’ was a hollowed-out ruin, with standing adobe brick walls but no roof. Still a small group of us sat together there each day in silence — in sun, wind, rain, and snow — learning how to stand outside our discursive intellects, and to simply pay attention. We followed the simple dictum left to us by our teacher’s teacher: Hakuun Yasutani Roshi. “Sitting like a mountain is all that’s required.”
One day, literally out of the blue, a sitting sister gave me another life-transforming book. Reading The Attentive Heart: Conversations with Trees by Stephanie Kaza, I was immediately reminded of how important my immersion in the natural world had been for my early wellbeing. But then in addition to that I realized that I was also unintentionally depriving my daughter of the same nurturing experience. With that I knew that I had to find a way to help my whole family form ongoing, day-to-day relationships with the inhabitants of what I had begun to call the ‘real’ world. The problem was, with Travis’ work, just exactly how could we do that?
One day I was thinking about my relationship with my best friend Emily. Like any healthy relationship, ours rested on two foundational pillars. First: there had to be a basic chemistry at work if she and I were to become more than just ships passing in the night. Then second: we had to spend a lot of time together sharing concrete experiences. With that I understood that if I was going to re-connect with Mother Nature, I would have to walk the same path. We knew we had the chemistry; now we need to share more experiences.
So I started spending time each day in a nearby park as part of my daily care routine with Sabine. I paid careful attention to which of the park’s trees and plants I had an intuitive affinity for. I began by introducing myself and my daughter to each of them. I visited my new friends in different seasons of the year and at different times of the day; and I would linger a while with them when and as I could. I conversed with them in my own way, and Sabine in her’s. And since ponderosas and zinnias don’t speak English, I harbored no expectations.
Occasionally other people would notice us. Some scowled at us; but most smiled. I was deliberately patient. With time I noticed that a different kind of communication was beginning to emerge. It was very subtle at first. But then it quickly became apparent to me that what Sabine and I were getting from this really wasn’t the point. It’s who we were becoming in the process that mattered.
That’s when Travis and I decided to initiate what’s now become a family practice. Every year now we plant a modest little herb, vegetable, and flower garden at our house; and we make sure our children are involved. Each person selects a few plants, sows their seed, and then takes daily care of them. Sometimes our gardening choices result in a pretty motley crew ; but that’s part of the fun!
Tom: before I continue, I’d really like to share something with you. As I was listening to you tell your story the other day, and you were talking about the subject/object split and the at-one-ment being fundamentally divergent forms of human consciousness, all the puzzle pieces of my dream and life fell right into place! Not only did you help me see myself through a very wide-angle lens, you also gave me a vocabulary with which to articulate it.
You helped me see that what we, the trees and plant life of Roosevelt Park, and the plants of our garden had been doing was perfecting a 21st century experience of at-one-ment. I realized that my primitive self squatting in that beautiful Tree of Life was the older and wiser, at-one woman who still lives buried deep within me. She was clearly present in my childhood; but it was totally unconscious. Now as an adult, and with full awareness, I need to follow Jung’s counsel and make what had once been unconscious conscious. So my new friend, thank you for helping catalyze that!
In my dream I’m naked because what you see with me now is what you get — no masks, no hidden agendas, no more calculated poses. Perhaps my hair is long and matted because I’ve been around the block now a time or two. The spectacles symbolize that I’m seeing things clearly. And now I understand the reason why I can no longer be part of that class beneath the tree in my dream.
My literacy-entrained Western education has helped me develop the perceptual and cognitive skills of the subject/object split: rationality, analysis, objectivity, control, and otherness. But the traditional musician Mary Black has a lyric that best sums up the real course of my life: “I never cared much for the things of men; but wilderness took my breath away.”
I see clearly that my life work is to help not only my family, but also my friends and the greater community, to re-member themselves to the natural world. To re-connect in a very contemporary manner to the clear blue sky of this older form of consciousness that Westerners so long ago left behind, but now so desperately need to re-connect with if humanity in general is not only to survive but flourish. In other words: to truly become, in our present everyday moment, the future human.
So if you’re feeling the call of the wild, start taking yourself and anyone else you can out into nature, in any way you can, as often as you can. Re-connect with Our Great Mother in the company of trees, rivers, mountains, prairies, oceans, gardens, lakes, plants, and animals. Welcome her back from her 5000-year sojourn in the dark.”
“She is surrounded by the children of the upper world. They bring her gifts of iris and apple blossoms, the scent of rain on the ocean, the sighs of lovers. She hears the whisper of the crocus at her feet welcoming her and spreading the word along the grassy hills — ‘She returns, she returns, Persephone returns.’ And as the sun rises, Persephone is filled with joy and the wonder of life, and she begins to remember.” (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers,” Parabola, Summer 1996.)
RE-TURNING
“In addition to the details of my own personal journey, I also think it’s important to consider the influence of the bigger picture on everything we’ve been discussing today. The decade of global tumult (2025-2035 CE) — unleashed by the economic, political, and social chaos in the US — forced each and every one of us re-think our life-choices. What we were really dealing with back in 2025, and in some ways still are 25 years later, was a phenomenon that Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor so presciently termed: “end-times fascism.”
This particularly virulent brand of fascism resulted from a marriage of two closely-interrelated psychologies: late-stage subject/object split — i.e., “Hell with you Jack, I got mine;'‘ and endgame Capitalism — with its attendant addiction to consumption, its demonstrated inability to accept limits, and its proclivity for engendering extreme inequalities of wealth. The naturalist John Muir's jarring lament that ‘nothing dollarable is safe’ has been far more true in the last quarter century than it ever was when he first voiced it a century and a half ago. And so too is the still-timely warning of Kalle Lasn, co-founder of The Adbusters Media Foundation: ‘It's a measure of the depth of our consumer trance that even the death of the planet is not sufficient to break it.’
Also in play was the fascists’ ideological choice to ignore the realities of climate change. This blunder resulted in immense unnecessary global suffering. One close-to-home consequence pf this was the 2042 wildfire which destroyed our beautiful bosque, a remnant of which we’re enjoying today. For me personally, it was the second time that a climate-driven wildfire had robbed me of the forest that was the beating heart of my spiritual life.
The global climate crisis that dramatically escalated under fascist rule was a huge wake-up call. Wave after wave of climate-related disasters rolled across the US; and ensuing food shortages quickly followed. Especially significant for me at the time was learning that many of the foundational ideas of the European Renaissance had been birthed and nurtured in intentional communities. These communal experiments served as ‘lifeboats’ during the localized collapses brought on by the Black Death of the 14th and 15th centuries. This serendipitous discovery led directly to Travis and I’s moving to this Community Supported Agriculture project where we now happily live, and I’m fortunate to work.
Re-visiting Emmanuelle Cappellin’s 2021 film Once You Know was also a profound influence on that choice. The film makes a strong case for what I’ll call matriarchy-inspired, co-operative, co-effort being the tactic that will have survival value going forward, not the rugged individualism of patriarchal, end-times Capitalism. It reminded us of a truism that when things start to get really difficult, your most dependable lifeboat is always your community, rarely your bank account.
The story I’m telling you won’t be complete if I don’t include one final life-transforming experience. Travis and I had decided to try and bring a second child into our family; and this time it was a boy who we named, following my old family tradition you’re already familiar with, Markos, a stylization of Mars, the Greek god of war. We couldn’t have chosen a more inappropriate name if we tried;,and here’s why…
Some time before our son was born, I dreamed that I had two children —only thing is, in that dream both were girls. Then one cold rainy day, when Markos was about six years old, he and I were amusing ourselves by perusing an old fashion magazine. He zeroed in on one of the decked out female models; and then after a few moments spent carefully studying her, pointed to her gleefully and said: “Mommy, that’s me!”
At the time I didn’t fully grok what he was trying to tell me, any more than I’m sure he did. But in the following months a number of related incidents forced me to admit that my son was far more the Goddess of beauty and love, Venus than he was the God of War, Mars. That’s when I remembered my dream. So we gave our child a new middle name: Venu — a play on Venus, and a popular East Indian name for both girls and boys. And novices that we were in these trans-gender matters, we told him that someday he would need to decide whether he was a Markos, a Venu, or both.
Why am I telling you this? Because when I realized that I had no choice but to become more informed about the issues raised by a son becoming a daughter or a daughter becoming a son, I was startled to discover just how common such gender transitions were becoming in American culture, even though how we’re going about this as a culture still warrants a lot of constructive review!
But just a few moments ago, as I was sharing all this with you, I had a surprising ‘aha’ moment. Could it possibly be that coming to accept that we can intentionally morph our own gender and sexual identities is preparing us for an even more consequential transformation of another long-standing cultural ‘habit’? Could it be a prelude to our learning how to intentionally transition between different forms, or expressions, of consciousness?
So there you have it: my life story. I want to thank you both so much for being my witnesses today. Pulling all these details of my life into one consistent narrative has been a truly powerful experience for me! So in closing let me say one last thing. My mother often shared with us a motto she apparently got from a popular 70’s publication: The Whole Earth Catalogue. ‘We are as gods; so we might as well get good at it.’
I now enjoy sharing my own post-patriarchal re-do of the same motto, because it best sums up what I have come to understand is my greatest joy in this life…
‘We are as goddesses; so we might as well get even better at it.’”
