PRAGMATIC SPIRITUALITY AND VISIONARY ATHEISM

I have lived all my life with an ongoing set of inner experiences that have enriched me, guided me, and sometimes terrified me. The experiences come in the form of startling dreams and night-time visions; a clear personal voice that guides me; encounters with ghosts and other emanations from a seemingly Other world; clear visions of lives I have previously lived; and moments of powerfully transcendent joy where I experience the Oneness of all…well, of all Creation.

Those moments of clarity are filled with a sense that this world of which I am a living, growing, dying part is also living and growing. I do not sense its death – though I do sense its transformation. I sense that my personal death, too, is also a transformation – even if only a transformation into decaying flesh that becomes worm-food and from which something else will gain the sustenance to further its own growth.

I recognise that this way of being in the world is called “spiritual”. I do not cultivate it; don’t go out looking for it; don’t go on vision quests or take psychotropic drugs. It is just there. It’s not a matter of ‘believing’ in a spiritual world, but of accepting that it is part of my reality.

Right now the world is torn by a debate between something called ‘atheism’ and something else calling itself ‘religion’. The spiritual is a victim of the crossfire.

Proponents of religion often distance themselves from those of us calling ourselves spiritual. The Archbishop of Canterbury, for example, recently carefully spelt out his sense of the moral superiority of a Christian approach to living in this spirit thing from ‘mere spirituality’. See …ARCHBISHOP.

And those of us with a sense of a spiritual essence to our lives have historically been real thorns in the side (or pains in the ass) for organised religion. Declared heretic we’ve often been killed, exiled, excommunicated or just plain ignored as we’ve argued for our own personal and direct experience of the Numinous without the gatekeeping of priests.

Now we’re getting it from the other side, too. The atheists, the skeptics, the rationalists find much to fault in our descriptions of our lived essence.

What we are in agreement on is that the world is in real, physical danger. But we trade insults over who or what is at fault and how ridding the world of religion, spirituality, or atheism is the first necessary step to saving it.

But the world is in far too much real danger for those of us with a desire to save it to spend time quarreling over our different modes of perception: our different ways of being in the world.

How does living with a consciousness of this thing called ‘spiritual’ measure up against people who live with a consciousness of a thing called ‘atheism’? How do the two seemingly opposed groups communicate and co-create life on earth? How do these two seemingly opposed groups work together to overcome the global crisis facing us?

Can we reach agreement on, as a starter, working to rid the world of licensed murder, mutilation and exploitation – whether in the name of politics or of religion? Can we just put a stop to the practices, and quarrel about the philosophies as we go? Can we also reach agreement on ceasing the pollution of the earth before we agree on the ultimate causes of that pollution? Can we set aside these differences to solve world hunger and poverty?

How do we start a global dialogue between people who experience the world in such vastly different ways? Can we do it by first acknowledging that our own perception of the world is not the final version? The world is bigger than any one person’s perception of it.

Can we find a way to share our spirituality and our atheism, our rationality and our visions?

FEEL THE CHANGE COMING

My dream last night was of a ghost town with a cemetery overgrown with wild grass.
A meditative space I wanted to go and stand within and listen to the wind in the grass.
But I was warned that the field was full of snakes
grown sleek on eating what lay in the graves beneath that soil.

Awake I remember the last time I meditated and was roused by the sound of wind in the grass.
I was sitting on a sand-dune near the beach
my life at a very low ebb.
Opening my eyes I found myself
eye to eye with a snake rustling through the sand.

It passed by my bare feet, its glittering eye on mine.

The sun was setting over the ocean
shafting through the rain clouds on the horizon
and I knew that I was
in the presence of the All
and all was being transformed.

A new world story is being born.
The old lies rustling in the wind
the crisp, flaking dead skin abandoned by the moving snake.

So many times, as a child, I picked up those
delicate membranes
and looked across the paddock
to see that sleek, shining
new-fleshed serpent.

The thrill of fear and awe as it slid across my path.

Deconstructing ‘team-building’

We don’t need a ‘team’, we need an interconnected network
that can operate in a constantly changing environment
with a constantly changing set of rules
constantly assessing self/environment/universe/ purpose
ready to shed the old skin and evolve the new
thriving on change
thriving on multiplicity
feeling the interconnectedness of all things.

Ask not, “What is wrong with the world?”

Ask: “How have we come to see the world as we see it?”
Ask it personally and ask it corporately and ask it of your world.

Ask where is the power in this world?
Ask where is the love in this world?
And bring them together.

Ask each: “What is the wisdom you have discovered?”

Together, write a story about what really matters to us all.

Listen for the rustling of the snakes through the sighing grasses
over the graves of all that went before.

The snake listens with its belly, feeling the earth’s vibrations
as menace approaches. Feel with your belly what you fear
for the future.

Feel what it is you want to happen.

Feel for joy, for it is there
in the grass, in the air,
shimmering with expectation.

Choose it and work to make it happen.

Shafting sunlight through storm clouds
purple and gold and the running sea
and the grey sand and the light fading.

And we are together on the beach.

AVATAR, ARCHETYPES AND FOOLISH HEROES

I went to see Avatar not expecting much more than a spectacle. After all, it was a ‘Disney Picture’, and Disney pictures have a baked cookie-cutter storyline to them, with characters and situations cut from the Hero’s Journey mold, haven’t they?

The first 20 minutes confirmed my dark suspicions. A crippled marine in place of a child as hero, alone in a mocking adult world, but offered the chance to redeem himself and save his world. But then the story got interesting. The Hero’s Journey became the Fool’s Journey from the Tarot. The Patriarchy became the enemy and the dark, beautiful and treacherous world of Pandora became the only way to save the planet and our souls. The Masculine confronted the Feminine, and the Feminine won.

THE HOLY FOOL. Jake Sully

( ‘Sully’, verb, ‘to soil, to make dirty’)

An interesting name for a clean-cut American hero, yes? He’s come not to clean things up but to make them dirtier!

He’s wounded in the legs – the appropriate symbolic wound for the Fisher King of 12th Century Romances. He cannot be healed and his lands cannot be renewed until a perfect Knight asks the right questions. In this story he must ask himself the questions. In the end he must shame himself by admitting to his treachery. Only then can he begin his Healing journey.

He’s a fool with a strong heart. The Goddess gifts him constantly but he will not recognize the gifts. He makes inappropriate jokes at the wrong moment. He acts, ‘the fool’.

Contrast his buddy who has slavishly learnt everything about the Na”vi’ and yet does not have the blundering fool’s ability to make a mess of things – as when Jake first wakes up in the lab and disregards everyone’s call for him to be cautious. ‘A bull in a China shop’.

Assigned to the team as a security guard/soldier, he wanders off and becomes entranced by the flowers and plants. He fails to understand the threats hurled at him and incorrectly attributes his survival to his own Machismo. Pure Fool!

THE WARRIOR. The Colonel. The dark side of the warrior. Given his orders, he follows them relentlessly. Patriarchal thinking is about confrontation, winning and losing. Compare the actions of the women in Avatar with the actions of the women in Clint Eastwood’s, Unforgiven. The latter can only express their needs through the crippled language of the Patriarchs.

A woman’s world vs a man’s world. In the former, woman is strong, seer, teacher, partner, warrior. In the latter she is a whore and victim who calls up the Dark Warrior in an act of vengeance when the Law refuses to help. The two worlds could not contrast more.

Similarly with Cormac McCarthy’s depressing, masculine world of The Road. A story that begins with the author-induced suicide of the mother figure so that he can develop his world of bleak masculinity. I wonder how that story would have played if Doris Lessing, Jeanette Winterson or Margaret Atwood had written it? Would they have envisaged a mother killing herself rather than staying to fight for her child?

THE HEALING GODDESS GAIA. Neytiri is an ‘Avatar’ of her, as too is her mother, the Seer/Shaman. In Avatar acknowledgment is given both to the healing power of the earth and to the reality of death as part of the cycle of life.

I was intrigued why the planet was called ‘Pandora’? Was the use of a name that has become synonymous with ’women’s treachery’ the beginning of a campaign to reclaim women’s stories and return them to their original meanings? Was it a way of presaging a world built not on conflict but on cooperation? Even if we stay with the corrupted version of Pandora’s story that we have been bequeathed, we are still left with “Hope”. It is the first thing we need before we move to change the world.

Pandora? CLICK HERE.

Avatar is not a complete revision of the patriarchal hero’s journey by any means. It’s still a Disney Picture. Despite the tribal culture, nuclear family values are upheld. Neytiri obeys her parents. Women are given in marriage. It’s not a matrilineal culture. In the end the current cultural need to resolve conflict through a fight to the death between two Heroes is acted out. (But with an interesting twist if you think who it is that delivers the final, killing blow. The story has come a long way since the heroine twisted her ankle as she ran from the villain in her high heels…and was saved at the last gasp by the Hero.)

People have told me they found Avatar boring/irritating because they found the ‘story’ predictable and cliche-ridden. I always like to differentiate between ‘story’, ‘plot’ and ‘narrative’. The story of Avatar was sort of predictable to a point. The point being when he changed sides. The plot was intriguing. A hero fights most of his quest whilst in a coma and, in the end, embraces the Coma World as the real world. In his last fight he is defenseless whilst his Avatar does battle for him. Then he dies and is reborn as his Avatar.

Narrative? To me ‘narrative’ is the engagement between the audience and their values and wishes and the world of the film they are watching.This is what generates box office. It doesn’t matter how good the ‘story’ is if people’s narratives are not engaged.To me the narrative was one of engagement with the earth’s forces and the empowerment of individuals to live their personal values and to risk all to save their world.

And for me, personally, it was to revalue my own Fool’s Journey – and the fact that I, like Jake Sully, became my own Avatar and changed sides – and the way I value Pandora’s Hope as my constant companion through the darkness.