I am attempting to summarize a massive and complex subject and I apologise for any simplistic reductionism. I imagine I will not be saying anything you don’t know. My intention for attempting this is simply a plea that we remember the immensity of what we are up against and be kind to ourselves and each other as we make whatever efforts we can to transform and uplift consciousness and culture.
The old paradigm
For many thousands of years there have been people who have been so hungry for power, wealth and control they have stopped at nothing to satisfy their appetites. Such people are representatives of a life denying worldview or paradigm – which many of us know as the old paradigm – and which is all too clearly playing out on the world stage today. Within this human drama the majority of people, animals, nature and the soul have been subjugated and disempowered.
Here are some of the ways this story has unfolded:
Theft of land and other vital resources
Theft of land – as with the North American Indians and the Australian Aborigines, deprives people of what the New Zealand Maori call, turangawaewae – a place to stand. Our connection with the earth is the foundation of our lives and, for indigenous peoples – and we have all at one time been indigenous peoples – has always been imbued with the sacred and the recognition that all life is interconnected. Driving people from their land – the source of our livelihood, community and sacred sites – severs the root of our power at the base chakra, resulting in alienation, shame, rootlessness and loss of meaning. One of the vital resources that has been purloined by the corporate giants today of course is seeds and the future of food sustainability.
Suppression of indigenous spiritual practices.
Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the undermining of the lunar, goddess religion 4000 years ago, which connected humans to the cycles of nature, and an intimate relationship with earth, water, air and fire. The usurping religion worshipped a disembodied patriarchal sky God, divorced from the Feminine, and this has had untold consequences down the ages as we have become progressively dissociated from body, nature and soul. Again, in the Native American and aboriginal cultures, we can see clearly how theft of land and destruction of spiritual practices tragically sucks out identity and self-esteem, destroys community and fills the resulting vacuum with the false promises of alcohol and drug addiction. This closes down the solar plexus, site of our essential identity, self worth and soul power.
Changing the primary creation myth
This Christmas Day, which I spent with my brother, I was listening to a service from Kings College, Cambridge, which has always been a tradition of my agnostic family, and because I love the angelic singing of the choir. I listened with renewed incredulity to the sermon repeating the old story of the temptation of Eve and how she and Adam were exiled from the Garden of Eden by a punishing God, forever to be in exile until God sent his only son to redeem us. This cultural myth gave rise to the ideology of Original Sin and cut humanity off from our connection with our inner divinity, intuitive knowing and mystic vision – the power of the top two chakras. I’m sorry if I am offending any Christian readers, it is not my intention to undermine the teachings of Jesus Christ, which I understand to be primarily about the necessity to cultivate unconditional love, but the institution of the Church has railroaded the purity of these teachings and turned them into an excuse for murdering many thousands of innocent people during the years of the Inquisition, not to mention the billions who have died in the cause of holy wars.
The myth of unworthiness
The majority of humanity, now cut off from our roots and denied our connection with the divine, have been subject, over the centuries, to a systematic programme of indoctrination by the Church, brainwashing us into believing in our essential unworthiness and dependency and making anyone who disagreed with this doctrine, a heretic, punishable by death.
“A devastating corollary of the fall/redemption tradition is that religion, with original sin as its starting point, and religion built exclusively around sin and redemption, does not teach trust. Such a religion does not teach trust of existence or the body or of creativity or of cosmos. It teaches both consciously and unconsciously, verbally and non-verbally, fear; fear of damnation, fear of nature – beginning with one’s own; fear of others; fear of the cosmos. In fact, it teaches distrust, beginning with distrusting one’s own existence, one’s own originality, and one’s own glorious entrance into this world of glory and of pain” Matthew Fox, Original Blessing.
Persecution of healers and suppression of natural healing practices
Our innate knowledge of how to heal body, mind and spirit is intimately tied in with our connection to soul wisdom and earth wisdom. Many of those who were burned during the Inquisition as witches, were healers. In the suppression of indigenous cultures healing traditions held for centuries have been kept alive and passed on through practice and word of mouth and have been emerging back into mainstream society over the last decades as forms of natural and complementary medicine. But the pharmaceutical companies maintain their monopoly on medicines and invasive medical practices continue to alienate people from the natural processes of living and dying. Furthermore, these pharmaceutical medicines, including anti-biotics, are excreted into the earth where they contribute to the poisoning of the biosphere and the development of more virulent viruses.
Repression of sexuality, fear of the body and the persecution of women
This is such a huge subject, I can’t begin to do it justice in one paragraph. Suffice to say that a doctrine of original sin, with the temptress being a woman, opened the door to pervasive repression of sexuality and violence against women over thousands of years, which is still widespread throughout the world today. For example, the stoning of women accused of adultery in Iran; the genital mutilation of women and girls in some African countries and among Muslim women; child prostitution and sex trafficking; rape as a weapon of war; the pathologising of women by psychiatry; the unnecessary cutting out of women’s wombs by hysterectomy; and the widespread domestic violence that is still pervasive today in so called “civilized” countries.
“ What unconscious negative beliefs about herself might woman in every culture carry as a result of the silent suffering and outright persecution she has endured for millennia? What unconscious misogynist beliefs do men still hold which allow them to injure, rape and murder women in this way? Fifty thousand mainly Muslim women were raped in the Bosnian war; 400,000 in Rwanda; an unquantifiable number of women and young girls in Dafur and the democratic republic of Congo. Rapes are currently an intrinsic part of the appalling suffering of civilians in Syria… Only a minute handful of men responsible for these rapes are convicted of the crime because rape has always been regarded as a legitimate weapon of war.” The Dream of the Cosmos, Anne Baring.
Science
In the 18th century, progress in science began to challenge the hegemony of the Church and the established worldview. Alongside the scientific discoveries which have helped to liberate us came Newton’s theory of a mechanistic universe and Descartes establishment of rational thought as primary. Both of these, along with, Darwin’s Origin of Species, shattered the foundations of the medieval worldview and the story of the Creation and the Fall and opened the way for a new secular world in which God is dead and the sacredness of life is overshadowed by man’s belief in his own omnipotent supremacy. This led to two of the most brutal wars in history and a world bereft of meaning for many.
War
One third of the world’s resources today are spent on the development and stockpiling of weapons. …
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that military spending by the Unites States has increased by 81% since 2001, reaching $710 billion in 2011, with global military spending on the arms trade reaching an all time high of $1.74 trillion. The example of the United States has been followed by other nations – China, Japan, India, Parkistan, the UK, France, Israel, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia among them – many of whom are adding to their own arsenals of weapons and, at the same time, selling armaments and combat aircraft to other governments, often with corrupt and oppressive leaders….(In 2012)More than 36.4 million people in more than 120 countries have been affected by militarism. Refugees, migrants, internally displaced persons and stateless people flee from fighting or are forcibly driven out of their own countries as a result of internal disputes. Anne Baring, The Dream of the Cosmos
Liberation
If you have stayed with me this far I ask you to pause for a moment and really take in the enormity of the life denying cultural forces that are bearing upon us and have been shaping humanity’s evolution for centuries. If you do this, you may feel so overwhelmed by the deep dark shadow that exists and runs rampant in our species that you want to give up. Or you may, like me, experience awe at the human enterprise of self liberation. The dice appear to be stacked against us and yet the attempt at liberation is the most compelling game in town, for many millions of people today. Alongside awe, at our temerity to attempt to transform human consciousness and uplift life on Earth, arise complex emotions. Human beings have wreaked and are wreaking havoc throughout history and throughout the planet. We have a lot to answer for. But if you, like me, have encountered psychological and behavioural patterns in yourself that are hard to shift, no matter how hard you try, you will have some appreciation of how slow and painstaking the transformation of consciousness is and how deeply the shadow and the legacy of unworthiness lives in each of us.
It is my intuitive feeling that real change can only come when we can look at the human condition through clear eyes and find a deep unconditional love and compassion in our hearts. So next time you are wrestling with inner demons, or looking frankly at qualities in yourself you really don’t like, or failing once more to be creatively successful in the way you dream of, please exercise self compassion. Don’t give up. And remember, punishing yourself for not being as whole or perfect as you would like to be, is playing into the hands of the life denying culture.
“ In the major religions, the spiritual journey seems to be presented in two ways. One is like a journey out of this messy, broken, imperfect world of suffering, into a sacred realm of light. At the same time, within the same tradition, the spiritual journey is also experienced and expressed as going right into the heart of the world – into this world of suffering and brokenness and imperfection – to discover the sacred….
The bodhisattva doesn’t need a place to stand because he or she flies – flies in the “deep space” of the Perfection of Wisdom. And the two wings on which the bodhisattva flies are compassion and wisdom. Instead of looking for a safe harbor, for a place where you’re all protected and cosy and safe, you just fly high on these two wings and place your trust in them.” Joanna Macy
January 13 2016
Beautifully said Rose.