“Everything in existence exists and functions on one of several planes of being or is composed of things from more than one plane acting together as a whole system. These planes are discrete, not continuous, and the passage of influence from one plane to another can take place only under conditions defined by the relationship of the planes involved.”*
One “map” of the planes I’ve found useful also features in many other spiritual teachings (mystical Christianity, Neo-Platonism, and some forms of Hinduism among them), including one I’ve followed for over thirty years, and identifies the physical universe as just one of several other planes. Besides the physical plane which we experience with our physical bodies, we experience the astral (see the third paragraph of Earth Mysteries — 4 of 7) or emotional plane (also sometimes called the etheric plane), the causal plane of memory, and the mental plane of thought. These last two also sometimes have different names — not surprising, considering they can seem more removed from immediate physical sensation and experience — and thus, understanding. Yet we exist in and experience these planes all the time.
Who’s doing the experiencing here? According to this way of perceiving things, that’s the real you, soul or spirit who wears these other bodies like clothes appropriate to different seasons and climates. So if we say “my soul,” who is talking? The experiencer or consciousness is soul, using the mind to think, the causal body to remember, the astral body to feel and imagine, and the physical body to experience physical reality.
While we can’t directly experience the astral world with our physical bodies, given the close proximity of the two planes, we certainly can feel the effects of strong emotions with our physical bodies and the “atmospheres” of places likewise charged with feeling. We’ve all walked into a room where there’s just been an argument, where religious observance has been performed over a sustained period of time, etc. We may pick up the vibe of such places — vibrating at a characteristic frequency, physics tells us, is what everything is doing already anyway — and if we’re inattentive we may internalize it, harmonize with it, and then not understand why we ourselves may feel tired, energized, angry, calm, etc. after spending some time there.
But our astral body is fully capable of experiencing the astral plane, and doing neat things like flying, changing form, and generally responding rapidly to thought, as it does in dreams. (Our physical bodies also respond to thought, but being of a slower vibrational rate, they more often take years or decades to show the effect. You’ve heard the expression “to worry yourself sick,” and that’s one of the more negative uses of focused and intense emotion — a kind of magic turned against ourselves.) The astral is the plane of imagination, where we may see things in “the mind’s eye,” or with “rose-colored glasses,” if we’re particularly optimistic, because pink or rose is one of the dominant colors there, just as green is characteristic (though by no means ubiquitous) in the physical world with its plants and chlorophyll.
The astral plane, according to many traditions, is where most of us transfer our consciousness after the death of our physical bodies. It is certainly possible to open our astral awareness (often without much control, which can make it dangerous without proper guides) with alcohol or drugs. Safer techniques include drumming and trance work, dance (like certain Dervish orders do, for instance), chant, mantra, ritual, physical exhaustion, daydreaming, meditation, creative visualization, and so on.
The causal plane of memory, like the astral plane, has its own rules and qualities, as does the mental plane. We say “that rings a bell” when we’re reminded of something, and each plane has characteristic sounds associated with it as well as colors. When we focus attention on these other planes while physically awake, we tend to tune out the physical world and its body, and are “lost in thought,” or “in another world.” In these and other instances, our languages preserve fragments of ancient wisdom our modern world tends to ignore, though we often intuitively know something of its truth in spite of the habitual skepticism of our current age.
Our contemporary default position of disbelief is no better than the habitual credulity of previous ages, when people believed all sorts of things which, while they may have been true of some other plane, weren’t usually true of this one. And in our turn toward the currently widespread religion of science, we’ve adopted its characteristic blind spots just as wholeheartedly. Ask scientists why the universe exists, for instance, and you can usually reduce them to speechlessness. It’s simply not a question science is equipped to answer.
The ability to manifest consciously the realities of one plane in another — and since we’re focused heavily on the physical world, for the sake of this discussion that usually means bringing something into physical form — is a supremely human accomplishment. Yes, animals are wired with instinct to reproduce their own kind, and in the case of birds and mammals, care for their young, but in addition to such instinctive drives, humans create cultures, with their languages, arts, crafts, technologies, rules, perspectives, and ways of living in the world.
In each of these posts on the seven Laws, I’ve barely scratched the surface. Each Law deserves repeated meditation, and in his book Greer makes several suggestions for experiencing the creative force of each Law and some of its far-reaching implications. Alone, the Laws can seem rather abstract, hard to apply to daily concerns and problems, too generalized to match the specifics of our individual situations. This itself is a powerful realization: to bring things into manifestation, we need the individual, the distinct and unique set of qualities, experiences, memories, talents, perspectives and strengths, in order to achieve what makes and keeps us human.
If it seems that the Laws swallow up individuality in statements about general tendencies, groups and patterns larger than one human life, it’s important to remember that it was humans who first noticed these principles, and humans can choose either to disregard them or to work consciously with them. Conscious and creative cooperation with the spiritual principles of existence is the fulfillment of humanity. Through such means, we can manifest what has not yet been seen or experienced or even imagined, in forms of power and beauty and usefulness, for others as well as for ourselves. That’s one way to repay the gifts we’ve been given.
/|\ /|\ /|\
*Greer, John Michael. Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth. Weiser, 2012.
“Everything that exists is the effect of causes at work in the whole system of which each thing is a part, and everything becomes, in turn, the cause of effects elsewhere in the whole system. In these workings of cause and effect, there must always be a similarity of kind between an effect and at least one of its causes, just as there must be a similarity of scale between an effect and the sum total of its causes.”*
Under the guise of karma, this principle is superficially familiar to more people, perhaps, than the other six laws. Though not exactly what some people have in mind when they wish you “good karma,” as if it were the same thing as luck. Where does luck fit in a world system of cause and effect? Worth considering. A Wise One once remarked that it’s not always possible to be the cause in every situation — to initiate, to be the active force, to get things moving — but that if we must be effect, at least we can strive to be conscious effect. Recognize the cause, and respond consciously, rather than be manipulated by it unconsciously. Because who knows? — it may not have your best interests at heart.
That’s not to say that a cause is necessarily actively malevolent or is seeking you out to destroy you and unmake you. But it may simply be a cause you or someone else set in motion at random, unconsciously, unintentionally. If you’re its unconscious effect, it’s suddenly detour time. Willing to go for a ride with a strange cause, one that beckons to you, flashing those stunning looks, that oh so beguiling smile? Have fun! Just don’t expect things to be the same when you get back. Whenever that turns out to be …
You can be spontaneous and conscious too. But be the cause. Otherwise, what’s consciousness for? I find that a fascinating, troubling question.
So many beings get along fine without the human excess of self-consciousness, that strange echo-chamber or feedback loop that tells us our thoughts, our feelings, our thoughts about our feelings, and our feelings about the thoughts we’re having about our feelings. How often we long for pure experience, without that inner narrator who insists on supplying second thoughts, doubts, fears, insecurities, grubby little (or big) desires, and so on. It’s like a bad voice-over in a film, a jangling mess that some spiritual traditions remedy with meditation to calm the “monkey of the mind,” so we can get at whatever of value may lie underneath the noise of consciousness.
OK, that’s human consciousness, and specifically self-consciousness, at its least attractive. But what of consciousness itself? It’s not all bad. In fact, it seems to confer some evolutionary advantages. A conscious being can make choices, react with more than instinct — maybe even live through challenging situations where instinct isn’t enough. If you’ve observed animals, you can sometimes catch reflection and thinking. Dogs and cats give evidence of it. Both birds and mammals can learn and adapt, maximizing their ability to survive, and to pass on their genetic material to their offspring. But is there more than evolutionary advantage to the species? How about to the individual?
In more conscious creatures, play and possibly even pleasure are gifts that consciousness also seems to confer. Otters play for hours, and birds — if you’re convinced by people like David Rothenberg — sing not only to defend their territory, attract mates and warn off rivals, but also to express joy. Is that too human? Are we anthropomorphizing?
And creativity … to me that’s the greatest gift of consciousness. We’re problem solvers. We love smooth sailing for sure, long for it deeply in the trough of trouble, but we’re often at our best when challenged, when pushed to grow. Even our attempts at avoiding growth are frequently clever, creative, inspired. We procrastinate, rationalize, justify, repress, suppress, distract ourselves, get addicted to something too small for the love we’re driven to express, and our suffering is outrageous, ridiculous, painful, outsized, exaggerated — often because we’ve made it just that way in our struggles to escape what we know we must do eventually.
And here’s the kicker: even — and maybe especially — our avoidance just makes us stronger for when we finally do face down the problem or issue or challenge. We’ve tried everything else, all the other options, and they’ve failed in some way. So we bring to that eventually unavoidable moment of growth a head of anger and frustration, true, but also a chunk of wisdom and strength that we got precisely because we’ve resisted for so long. That momentum, that power and wisdom with a glow of a little anger and a dash of curiosity under the fear — this very mixed package of preparation — may not always get us through the challenge. It still may not be enough this time around. Now we’re still effect, but we’re on the way to becoming cause.
The failure to meet the challenge this time, to pass the test, signals to us what we still need to do to be ready next time. And the heightened emotion clinging to the lesson, the issue, and the events and people around it, flags it for us. Never again will we completely be able to avoid it, to shove it entirely back into the shadows, and let ourselves slide into unconsciousness. A tail sticking out of the box, or paw scratching at the door, or fur on the carpet, will be evidence of this animal self, our helper, our “trouble double,” that we’ve tried to hide. We willbe cause, even if we can’t yet pull it off. Something in us knows this. Our growth will seem to pursue us on its own — because we’ve made it ours by being cause even to a limited degree, and cause must, inevitably, unavoidably, have its effect.
All this time, we’ve not been idle; we’ve also been building up strength for our next attempt: by more avoiding, maybe (if we’re really good at that), but also by a slowly growing awareness that growth is what we’re destined for, that we can actually work toward it, even if our own lives have to drag us there kicking and biting and howling the whole way, functioning as some of the causes we ourselves have set in motion. There’s more strength building in us, and if there’s a cost, then we’ll pay. (Another cause, another effect.) We’re slow learners, because sometimes that’s the only way the lesson sinks in deep enough that we really get it good, get it down pat, and run with it. One way or another …
And so the causes we absolutely needed to set in motion will become just the effects we need to experience down the road. But because we grow as a result, the effects which were “everything we ever wanted” at the time will eventually come to box us in, because we’ve grown, and so they’re no longer enough for us. Then they start to strand us, and constrict and blind and infuriate us, until we arise from them stronger and are again able to set new causes in motion. Open-ended growth. Our ideas of perfection often seem to involve stasis: at some point we imagine we’ll “arrive” and not need to grow anymore. Heavenly choirs and streets of gold, no telemarketers or spam or mosquitos or flu, and sitting around all day in Paradise Lounge, plucking at harps and sipping (virgin) daiquiris and margaritas. Likewise our perspective on setbacks often doesn’t take in enough time to see the causes and effects playing out. Sometimes we can’t see them all, if they span multiple lives. Or parallel ones, if you’re not prone to reincarnate like I am.
But back to perfection as stasis: from what I’ve seen, that misses how the system works. “Everything becomes, in turn, the cause of effects elsewhere in the whole system.” No final perfection — that’s just another trap or sidestep. Which is fine, if you’d like that experience: then it’s no trap or sidestep so much as interesting or even productive diversion. (Having your cake iseating it too, after all. Otherwise it just sits there.) We don’t arrive at long last at any unchanging endpoint. That’s not perfection. We’re travelers. We may get rest stops, but the growth is endless. “Eden bears those footprints leading out …”
/|\ /|\ /|\
*Greer, John Michael. Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth. Weiser, 2012.
“Everything that exists is subject to limits arising from its own nature, the nature of the whole system of which it is a part, and the nature of existence itself. These limits are as necessary as they are inescapable, and they provide the foundation for all the beauty and power each existing thing is capable of manifesting.”*
Though it’s not good New Age gospel to admit it, we’re faced with limits and boundaries all the time, and more to the point, that’s a good thing, for the reason Greer points out, and for others. Limits are the counterweight, the resistance for our training, the sparring partner to keep us in fighting trim. Rules change on other planes of existence, but to manifest power and beauty here, limits are absolutely essential. They’re the valve that allows us to build up pressure in the boiler, the enclosure that intensifies the heat of the fire, the focus for the laser — or the conscious, persistent human intention that manifests a goal.
Physical limits allow us to give shape to things, and to have a reasonable expectation they’ll stay in that shape, usefully, predictably. These rules don’t apply in the same way elsewhere. All of us have had experience on, and of, at least one other plane, the astral, where most dreams occur. You know how fluid and changeable the forms and shapes are there. The dog chasing you morphs into a car you’re riding in with the person who bullied you in high school. You look closely and that person’s hands aren’t holding the steering wheel any longer, but clutching a bouquet of flowers instead, two of which turn into ropes that winch you so tight you can’t breathe. You struggle, wake up gasping, and — thank God! — you’re in your bed. It’s the same bed as last night, last week, last month, the bed which someone made years ago, and it stays put, reassuringly solid and unchanging beneath you, obeying the laws of this physical world. You slowly come back from the feeling-sensation of your dream on the astral plane, welcoming the heaviness of your physical body around you, touching a few of the things here, pillows and sheets, your partner, a pet curled against your thigh or your face, the nightstand or wall beside your bed. Familiar, stubbornly solid objects and beings, responding to gravity and inertia. Yes, things mostly stay put here, in this world. Though we all have stories about the car keys …
The image at the top comes from a site with its own take on freedom and limits. What I find interesting is the image of flight presented as one of limitless freedom. Yet flight depends on air, resistance, lift, momentum, wing span and area, an appropriate center of gravity, and so on. Not everything stays aloft after you fling it into the air, and flight in a vacuum like in space follows different rules than flight in an atmosphere. It can seem paradoxical that freedom increases the better we understand and work within limits.
/|\ /|\ /|\
*Greer, John Michael. Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth. Weiser, 2012.
Since my wife and I are too cheap to spend money on cable, we get most of our programming through the internet. Vermont sometimes gets tagged in people’s minds as one of the hinterlands of the U.S., though in fact it’s scheduled to have ultra high-speed internet by 2013, billed as “fastest in the nation,” and VTel (Vermont Telephone) installers are actually ahead of schedule in some areas.
One result of our cable-free existence and frequent obliviousness to whatever is “trending now” is that we often discover programs toward the end of their initial run, or well after they’ve already gone to syndication or archive status. Hulu is one of our friends, so if you’ve already watched the Canadian series “Being Erica” and you’ve moved on to newer fare, this post may not be for you. It may be a case of BTDT (been there, done that). So my electronic alter ego here with his Druidry and opinions and evident desire to pry where it’s sometimes uncomfortable (but interesting!) to pry isn’t offended if you log off and go do your laundry, or at least surf onward toward something more engaging.
==PILOT EPISODE SPOILER ALERT==
If you’re still here, the show’s pilot episode does a good job of making the series premise clear. 32-year old Erica feels she’s over-educated (a Master’s degree) and under-fulfilled (single, and with a low-level telemarketing job). The pilot brings her to a low point — she wakes up in a hospital bed after an allergic reaction, and receives a brief visit from a Dr. Tom, who leaves her with a business card that reads “the only therapy you’ll ever need.” As Erica and the audience simultaneously discover, he’s able to send his patients back through time to deal with events in their pasts that they regret. Not to “fix” them in some facile way, but to learn more fully what they have yet to teach.
Vancouver Actor Erin Karpluk, who plays Erica, reveals a wonderful vulnerability and resilience, and she develops a daughter-father chemistry with Dr. Tom, played by veteran Michael Riley. There’s also a “Canadian” flavor to the series, by which I mean something mostly vaguely felt, but nevertheless detectable at certain moments: many episodes are less politically correct, more real, better scripted and more risk-taking than the typical formulaic and “safer” equivalent might end up being in the States. There’s been abortive planning to make both U.K. and U.S. versions.
So you know I just have to make a connection about now. Ah, and here it is, right on schedule. In my experience, the past is not some fixed thing, written into concrete forever, like one false step into a bog that draws you down and suffocates you. Instead, it depends for its whole existence on you, in your present, here and now, in these circumstances and with this awareness, to understand and explore it. Change your understanding of the past, and your past itself can change in almost any sense you care to claim. Not whatthe “facts” are, which is almost always the least important thing*, after all (peace to all those police procedural shows and their fans!), but howthey matter and still shape you today. Just as history gets revised through time, as we gain new understandings and perspectives, so too do our own experiences, choices and destinies appear new or different to us as we change. That bully in grade school turns out to have helped us develop a thicker skin, or empathy — or an unacknowledged contempt for “trailer trash,” or a keen taste for revenge that dogs our heels to this day. Pick your blessing or poison.
The future is what is fixed, the track we’re still following, and reconfirming right now with our current habits, choices and focus — fixed, and set in stone — untilwe “change” our pasts by knowing and owning them more fully. Seen from this perspective, “fate” is undigested, rejected past that’s come back to haunt you. Healing comes not from literally changing “what happened” — possible only through repression or selective recall — but from squeezing out of each experience every last drop of wisdom and growth we can get from it. Yes: easier said than done. Much easier, often.
But if we find our pasts too painful to deal with, we’ll not only carry them around with us anyway, regardless, but miss out on their lessons as well. As therapist Rollo May said, “Either way, it hurts.” The point is not avoidance of pain, but growth. My past comes at me whispering (or shouting, depending), “Dosomething with your pain, Dude.” Revisiting and re-imaging the past may sound all New-Agey and Hallmarky, but if it’s one way among many to heal, why mock it or discount it, unless you love your pain more than anything else you have? “Yes, it may be pain, but it’s mine, my darling, my precious. Go dredge your own.” Gollum much?!
This present moment is the pivot, the hinge, the point of transformation, if I’m evergoing to act on those New Year’s resolutions that now seem so distant. How many of them have I achieved? (In a December post, I confess to not making any, at least not big ones, partly for this reason.) Baby steps. What’s the smallestchange I can make? That’s often the best starting point, because unlike the large resolution, I really can do the small stuff, and stick with it. And then build on it. Treat it all as experiment. Document it — write it down. (Oscar Wilde says one should keep a journal so that one always has something sensational to read.) My life as lab for change. Talk about a show.
Part of the appeal of “Erica,” of course, is watching somebody else go through this. Yet this isn’t merely a voyeuristic thrill so much as it is a provocation to reflect. A significant part of the interest of the series for me is that even Erica’s therapist Dr. Tom, while often truly guru-wise with her issues, isn’t God, or some perfected being. (We often really can see and understand others’ problems more clearly than our own. The challenge is not to abuse this insight, but make the most of it in the best way for our own specific circumstances.) He still has his struggles too — deep ones, as we come to discover, ones that come play a role in Erica’s therapy, to the dismay and growth of both of them.
And my response was “How right!” A perfect being would be a bit of a pain, and might have forgotten (or never known) what it’s like, this human gig. Jesus is never more useful and accessible than when he suffers humanly: when his friend Lazarus dies and he weeps, when he gets angry and physical at the money-changers for profaning the Temple, when the fig tree has no fruit because it’s not the season, and Jesus curses it anyway, when his friends ditch him to save themselves. This human thing, he gets it.
Incidentally, I’ve never understood the Christian obsession with sin. We’re all guilty and imperfect. Check. We’ve messed up. Check. But the point is that our pasts are our teachers. They help us grow. Our “sin” is what tempers and forges and perfects us in the end. Yes, it’s a long end. We’re all slow learners, those “special ed” kids, every one of us. A sequence of lives to learn and experience and grow and love in makes sense for this reason alone. For God or any Cosmic Cop to damn us to hell for “sin” cuts off the whole reason we’re here, from this perspective. It’s like flunking everyone out of first grade because we haven’t mastered algebra yet. We’re not ready. Give us time. Life’s tough enough to break every heart, several times if necessary — and to remake it bigger. OK, here endeth the lesson.
==Final Season Spoiler Alert==
Except not quite. The fourth and final season — Hulu doesn’t carry it — of “Being Erica” comes out this month on DVD, and Amazon.ca just sent email confirmation that it’s shipped. My wife and I are looking forward to watching Erica become a therapist: “Dr. Erica” in her own right. Isn’t that part of our journey, too? Out of our experience we grow, and then we can help others along the way, specifically because of who we are, and what we’ve learned. Our imperfection and individuality are our great gifts, which we grow into ever more fully. That’s an eternity to look for, if you’re in the market for one.
/|\ /|\ /|\
*Even facts prove slippery, as any attorney, judge and gathering of eyewitnesses knows. But sometimes it’s precisely a fact that makes all the difference. Then it’s usually a fact that confirms or disproves a perspective, and so it throws us back to the centrality of perspectives and understandings once again.
Here, in the third of this series on J. M. Greer’s principles from his book Mystery Teachings, we come to the Law of Balance:
“Everything that exists can continue to exist only by being in balance with itself, with other things, and with the whole system of which it is a part. That balance is not found by going to one extreme or the other or by remaining fixed at a static point; it is created by self-correcting movements to either side of a midpoint.”*
The Dao de Jing (Tao Te Ching), another keen guide to the natural order of things, observes, “Extremes do not last long.” After storm, sun. After destruction, rebirth. But what are we to make of natural disasters? How in hell, literally, are we supposed to “live in harmony” with an earthquake or hurricane or tornado?
Our science, which is just another word for knowing or wisdom, has only begun to recover some of the nature wisdom of our ancestors and spiritual traditions. And perhaps too much time, at least in some of the “hard” sciences, is spent in pursuit of a grand theory, where close observation might serve our immediate purposes better. But we’re recovering lost ground as we can.
The horrific tsunami of December 2004 in southeast Asia makes for a good study. Here and there, among the human and natural devastation in its wake, are curious and instructive stories. The case of 10-year Tilly Smith, vacationing with her parents in Phuket, Thailand, merits recounting. According to the Telegraph‘s article, Tilly saw the tide drop unnaturally, remembered a recent geography lesson about tsunami warning signs from her school back in the U.K., and alerted her parents. They were wise enough to listen to their daughter, warned the hotel where they were staying to evacuate inland, and over a hundred lives were saved as a result.
Another story comes from off the coast of India, in the Andaman Islands. One of the aboriginal peoples living there is the Onge, who still practice hunting-gathering. When the sea level dropped abruptly, the tribe responded immediately. After a quick ritual scattering of pig and turtle skulls to propitiate the evil spirits they perceived at work, they retreated inland. Unsuspecting tourists and local fisherman walked the exposed beach and gathered the fish floundering there, only to perish in the approaching monster waves. The National Geographic account from about a month afterwards includes commentary from Bernice Notenboom, president of a travel company specializing in indigenous cultural tourism and one of the few westerners to have visited the area. She observed of the Onge, “Their awareness of the ocean, earth, and the movement of animals has been accumulated over 60,000 years of inhabiting the islands.”
While this isn’t exactly expert testimony, every member of the tribe did survive, and her reasoning is sound. The commercial influence of Western culture has uprooted many tribes, and this is something Notenboom does know, since she’s on the forefront of it with her tour company. She remarked that one day in another nearby village, an old man approached her and said, “It is great to have you here, but let’s not make it a habit.” There can be a cost to careless physical ease and the acquisition of material abundance, and if we “gain the whole world and lose our souls,” to paraphrase the renowned Galilean master, we may be swallowed up, figuratively or literally.
Balance doesn’t mean stagnation. Many Westerners have felt the stirrings of a vague dis-ease with their own lives. We point to this or that cause, shuffle our politicians and opinions, our allegiances and subscriptions to cable, but to reuse the almost-cliche, it’s another version of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. When the problem is systemic, tinkering with symptoms won’t help. The “solution” is not one single thing to apply like a band-aid, but it will indeed involve changes of heart, which will come in different ways for different people over time. Anyone who has a single prescription for the troubles that ail us is frankly talking out his ass. Getting the ____ into or out of political office won’t budge the problem.
The “self-correcting movements to either side of a midpoint” of the Law of Balance sound so innocent. But whenever the balance shifts, the corrections come just as predictably and inevitably. Whether we like them or not, welcome or resist them, is another matter entirely. We forget that we’re not “in control”: there’s no helm to manage, no boss to prop up in place so that “things keep going the way they always have.” Already they aren’t, and they won’t. We’re part of a whole: whatever happens to the whole happens to us, and what happens to us happens to the whole. This is good news for those who work with the whole, and bad news for those who think this particular rule doesn’t apply to them.
There issuch a thing as natural “justice” — it’s another name for rebalancing — but not always as humans would have it. There’s no court of appeal when we’ve fouled the air and water, destroyed local economies with mega-corporations, junk-fed ourselves sick, fought our way to a glutton’s share of the world’s resources which are running out, and tried to rationalize it all. Now we have to find ways to live through the re-balancing. What tools do we need? The inner resources are still available, though we’ve burnt through so many outer ones. The classic question of “Where is wisdom to be found?” really needs to be answered individually. It’s a fine quest to devote a life to, one that I happen to think is far better than anything else you can name. Right now especially, money certainly doesn’t look like it’s worth the game. I know that I feel more alive looking for wisdom, and finding a piece of it I can test and try out in my own life, than I do swallowing anybody else’s brand of fear and paranoia and cynicism. This blog is a piece of that quest for me. Whose life is this, anyway? Make of life a laboratory for truth.
In the end, balance really is a matter of the heart. One Egyptian image of the after-world that’s stuck with me is the Scales of Anubis. The jackal-god of the Underworld places the human heart of the deceased in his scales, to weigh it against the feather of truth, of Ma’at, the natural order, cosmic justice or balance. (For inquiring minds, that’s Anubis to the right of the support post.) Only a light heart, literally one not weighted down by human heaviness (you can fill in the ____ with your favorite kinds), can pass muster. One distinguishing quality of the truly holy or wise ones that we encounter in their presence is a lightness of being, a kind of expansion and opening up. There is always possibility, a way forward. Whatever happens, we can face it better with that kind of heart beating in our chests. Look for that, in others and yourself, in your quest.
The second principle or law Greer examines is the Law of Flow. Before I get to it, a word about spiritual or natural laws. In my experience, we tend to think of laws, if we think of them at all, in their human variety. I break a law every time I drive over the speed limit, and most of us have broken this or some other human law more than once in our lives. We may or may not get caught and penalized by the human institutions we’ve set up to enforce the laws we’ve established, though the majority of human laws also have some common sense built in. Driving too fast, for example, can lead to its own inherent penalties, like accidents, and besides, it wastes gas.
But spiritual or natural law can’t be “broken,” any more than the law of gravity or inertia can be “broken.” Other higher laws may come into play which subsume lower ones, and essentially transform them, but that’s a different thing. A spiritual law exists as an observation of how reality tends to work, not as an arbitrary human agreement or compromise like the legal drinking age, or monogamy, or sales tax. Another way to say it: real laws or natural patterns are what make existence possible. We can’t veto the Law of Flow, or vote it down, or amend it, just because it’s inconvenient or annoying or makes anyone’s life easier or more difficult. There are, thank God, no high-powered lawyers or special-interest groups lobbying to change reality — not that they’d succeed. Properly understood, spiritual or natural law provides a guide for how to live harmoniously with life, rather than in stress, conflict or tension with it. How do I know this? The way any of us do: I’ve learned it the hard way, and seen it work the easy way — and both of these in my life and in others’ lives. Once it clicks and I “get” it, it’s more and more a no-brainer. Until then, my life seems to conspire to make everything as tough and painful as possible. Afterwards, it’s remarkable how much more smoothly things can go. Funny how that works.
OK, so on to the Law of Flow:
“Everything that exists is created and sustained by flows of matter, energy and information that come from the whole system to which it belongs and return to that whole system. Participating in these flows, without interfering with them, brings health and wholeness; blocking them, in an attempt to turn flows into accumulations, brings suffering and disruption to the whole system and its parts.”*
“Participating in these flows, without interfering with them,” can be a life-long quest. Lots of folks have pieces of this principle, and some of the more easily-marketed ones are available at slickly-designed websites and at New Age workshops happening near you. But note that the goal is not to accumulate wealth beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. (As Greer points out, if the so-called “Law of Attraction” really worked as advertized, the whole planet would be a single immense palace of pleasure and ease. Though who would wait on us hand and foot, wash our clothes, make our high-priced toys, or grow and cook our food, remains unclear.) Flow means drawing from system, contributing to it, and passing along its energy. “Pay it forward” wouldn’t be out of place here.
If all this sounds faintly Socialist, well, remember that as Stephen Colbert remarked, “Reality has well-known liberal bias.” It means sharing, like most of us were taught as toddlers — probably shortly after we first discovered the power and seduction of “mine!” But it could just as easily and accurately be claimed that reality has a conservative bias. After all, these are not new principles, but age-old patterns and tendencies and natural dynamics, firmly in place for eons before humans happened on the scene. To know them, and cooperate with them, is in a certain sense the ultimate conservative act. The natural world moves toward equilibrium. Anything out of balance, anything extreme, is moved back into harmony with the larger system. The flows that sustain us also shape us and link us to the system. The system is self-repairing, like the human body, and ultimately fixes itself, or attempts to, unless too much damage has occurred.
Ignorance of this law lies behind various fatuous political and economic proposals now afloat in Europe and America. Of course, what’s necessary and what’s politically possible are running further and further apart these days, and will bring their own correction and rebalancing. We just may not like it very much, until we change course and “go with the flow.” That doesn’t mean passivity, or doing it because “everybody else is doing it.” Going with the flow in the stupid sense means ignoring the current and letting ourselves be swept over the waterfall. Going with the flow in the smart sense means watching and learning from the flow, using the current to generate electricity, or mill our grain, while relying on the nature of water to buoy us up, using the flow to help carry us toward our destination. Flow is not static but dynamic, the same force that not only sustains the system, but always find the easier, quicker, optimum path: if one is not available, flow carves a new one. The Grand Canyon is flow at work over time, as are the shapes of our bodies, the curve of a bird’s wing, the curl of waves, the whorls of a seashell, the spiral arms of galaxies, the pulse of the blood in our veins. Flow is the “zone” most of us have experienced at some point, that energy state where we are balanced and in tune, able to create more easily and smoothly than at other times. Hours pass, and they seem like minutes. Praised be flow forever!
Readers of this blog know I frequently quote John Michael Greer. As a writer, blogger, and leader of another Druid order, he challenges me to dig deeper into my own order and understanding of Druidry, and examine its teachings more critically, as well as ponder the implications of his cultural criticism. While his popular blog The Archdruid Report deals primarily with the consequences of Peak Oil, and offers productive strategies for thriving in the coming hard century or more of scarcity and turmoil, as we transition to a post-industrial age, most of his other writing centers on his spiritual journey until now.
As a case in point, his most recent book, Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth (Weiser, 2012), is a reimagining of The Kybalion*, published anonymously in 1912. Greer asserts as his book’s underlying principle that “The laws of nature are the laws of spirit; this is one of the great secrets of the Mysteries.” He reworks the seven principles of the earlier book into insightful observations about spiritual ecology, framed as spiritual law. Here’s the first one, the Law of Wholeness:
“Everything that exists is part of a whole system and depends on the health of the whole system for its own existence. It thrives only if the whole system thrives, and it cannot harm the whole system without harming itself.”
The American myth of rugged individualism and self-reliance, part of the cultural story we Yanks have told ourselves over the decades, has served its purpose, and possibly run its course: it may be more of an obstacle now, in an era when we need cooperation and interdependence more than we need stoic endurance. We’re interconnected, and what I do affects you. One of my teaching colleagues always used to laugh at the idea of non-smoking sections in restaurants. “It’s like imagining there’s a non-peeing end of the swimming pool,” he’d exclaim. “A feel-good label doesn’t make it so.” I cannot harm myself without harming the whole system. But anyone buying wholesale into the myth of individualism doesn’t want to hear that.
Rather than seeing the divine as standing outside nature, here’s a way of perceiving the universe as a single immense feedback loop. Suddenly the Golden Rule isn’t just a good moral guide, but also blindingly obvious common sense. What you do comes back to you. What goes around comes around — not because “God punishes me,” or because of “karma” or “sin” or anything other than what goes in, comes out. Computer programmers know it as GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. Maybe it’s time for LILO: love in, love out. As long as we see the world as a collection of separate, discrete individuals rather than an interconnected series of networks, we’ll kill, abuse, pollute, steal, etc. And likewise, as long as we believe that we should be free to do something that “doesn’t hurt anyone else,” we live in illusion. Everything that each of us does matters to all the rest of us. We’re interconnected, linked up to each other in astonishing ways that we’re only beginning to discover.
At first this seems to dump all the guilt for why things suck squarely on our shoulders, and a lot of people today are sick of guilt. Rightly so: it doesn’t accomplish anything except to poison the heart and to distract us from moving forward. It’s only useful if it goads us into constructive action and that’s rarer than it should be. But guilt isn’t the same thing as responsibility. Accepting responsibility is the death of victimhood. If I begin to see that everything I do has an effect, a consequence, then my life matters in a way it may never have seemed to matter before.
To put it another way and quote a Wise One, “If nothing we do matters, then the only thing that matters is what we do.” In the midst of nihilism and cynicism and hopelessness, each word, thought, deed and feeling carries weight, shapes the universe for good or bad, and leaves a trail, a wake, a ripple, that will flow outward from my life now and also after I am gone. I matter, and so do you, simply by virtue of being alive and here in this place, now. To not choose to act, or to act foolishly and blindly is to waste a priceless opportunity to contribute to the commonwealth, the res publica, the Republic, this shared world of ours.
Who among us can deny that even small acts of kindness or cruelty committed by others have an effect on us out of all proportion to their apparent scale? Can we then imagine for a moment that our own acts don’t set in motion a similar set of ripples? We don’t have to be “big” to matter. Love has no size. Any is much. Blessed be this life, gift to others and ourselves, chance to act, to love, to participate in the Web, to leave ripples at our passing, to vibrate the strands with our existence and choices, to play on life and pluck its melody, note by note.
/|\ /|\ /|\
Image of Mystery Teachings: Amazon.com
You can read the Kybalion online and download a PDF of it.
One of the great gifts of Druidry is that when I feel like crap, and inclined to self-pity, Druid teaching reminds me it’s really not all about me. Not to say that I don’t matter, but that so many other things also do, and so I can gladly get lost in the immensity of worlds of other beings, and often enough regain perspective just from watching till the ego subsides again to some reasonable scale. Feel like crap? OK, then really feellike crap, docrap, be crap as only you can, then get it out of your system, the way you do with crap. Excrete! Crap isn’t forever. Even (or especially) recycled, it turns into something else, becomes nourishment and sustenance for beauty and glory and life. Give away your crap, gift that it can be, and let earth transmute it to feed something hungry precisely for what you can’t use, don’t want, can’t wait to get rid of. This is the gift of Earth, the alchemy this element offers. Blessed, fearful change.
Right now the neighbor’s dog, chained for an hour’s air to the railing on the front steps next door, is barking himself hoarse at something no doubt beyond his reach, but in between volleys, through the open living room window, I can also hear goldfinches calling near our niger-seed feeder. I look up to see five of them clustered on and around the tube of seed swaying from a tree-branch. It’s one of their favorite seeds, and my wife finally found a way to rig a feeder that keeps off our resident chipmunk family while still drawing birds.
Further in the distance, our neighbor up the hill has paused his Harley, which thrums and rumbles as it sits at the bottom of the hill drive on the far side of our yard. He’s doing his ritual last-minute check of gauges and gear before he heads out for an evening run. After he leaves, beyond that, the sound of a lawn mower fades in and out. And in the gaps of silence, wind in the trees. The true silence of dawn and late evening can feel like a cat curled up on itself, listening for its own purring. Then the downy woodpecker assaults the corrugated tin roof of our woodshed in quest of grubs. It sounds like gunfire, beak on metal, still startles us, though we’ve heard it maybe a dozen times over the last few months. Sometimes I think he does it for the pure rousing hell of it. I would.
I’ve just finished a one-week intensive at Hartford Seminary, Understanding and Engaging Religious Diversity. The class ran six day-long sessions broken only by buffet meals on-site that simply continued the discussions in a slightly different mode. Remarkable group. This last Friday morning, our final meeting, one of our classmates exclaimed seriously and humorously at the same time, “Damn you, people, you just keep changing me!” In the greenhouse of close proximity, intense engagement and curiosity, we managed to go very deep. How far are we willing to go in encounter and challenge to what we think we know and believe? What, as our instructor asked us, really is our core conviction, which — if we yielded to another’s truth, or gave ours up — would leave us different people? Can we touch that and walk away unchanged? What happens if we try to come as near as possible to that boundary? What was almost equally fascinating was where people were going right after the class ended. Some to another summer workshop, two to different destinies in India, some to new chaplaincy assignments, a couple of us on to more summer classes elsewhere, a few back to work, and I to days of recovering from a nasty bout of bronchitis, time to process it all, and to write this post. Time, the pause that earth can give. Sickness and healing, its punctuation.
Muslims, a Jain, Buddhists, Pagans, Christians, several of us of multiple faiths in one person, Jew-and-Hindu, a Buddhist-Wiccan-Sikh, and so on. And the simple and lovely ritual we spoke to each other, going round in a circle that closed out our time together: “Thank you for the blessing that you bring; thank you for the blessing that you are.” Vortex that has sanctified.
Normally I steer clear of posts that border on the political, because they accomplish little except to harden opinions and positions, and sharpen arguments, without leading to a solution. But I make an exception in this post, for reasons I hope will become clear.
Especially in difficult times like these, we rely for perspective and direction on the supposed Wise Ones of our world, so it behooves them to be more cautious and informed in their public statements than this article by Tim Worstall in the U.K.’s Telegraph of May 16, 2012. The article byline for the author identifies him as “Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, and one of the global experts on the metal scandium, one of the rare earths,” so you’d think he’d exercise more care in an international forum like this newspaper. Here are his opening words, remarkable for their flippancy, misrepresentation and ignorance:
Apparently something terrible happens when we get to peak oil. I’ve never really quite understood the argument myself, but when we’ve used half of all the oil then civilisation collapses or something. I’m not sure why this should happen: we don’t start starving when there’s only half a loaf of bread left. But I am assured that something awful does happen.
That oil fields do get pumped out is obviously true – and also that you can have a good guess at when the ones we’re currently pumping will run out. The part I don’t get is the catastrophe. Some people seem to think that “peak oil” is when we can’t actually pump out a higher amount: that if we’ve got 70 million barrels a day, then that’s the most we can ever have, 70 million a day. Which is also called a disaster. Apparently this means that demand will move ahead of supply, which is simple sheer ignorance of the price system. There is no such thing as “supply” or “demand”. There is only either of them at a price. So, if there really is a limit on how fast we can pump the stuff up, the price will rise.
Worstall’s observations illustrate a confusion of realms, a common-enough misperception, and one we all make from time to time. In the case of a recognized expert, though, we expect greater wisdom and sense — he simply isn’t thinking things through. If you’re talking about the human economy of making brooms, say, or copies of DVDs of The Avengers, or oranges, or purebred Siamese cats, well and good. Then Worstall is right, and supply and demand will play out pretty much as he claims. Price is indeed the hinge between them. Even in extreme cases of demand, say for parts to an antique car that went out of production decades ago, you can probably find a craftsperson who will forge and finish them for you. Because they’re one-offs, they’ll cost you plenty. But if you want the parts badly enough, and you have the necessary cash or other acceptable medium of exchange, someone will oblige and supply your demand. That’s Econ. 101. It’s how modern economies are supposed to work. We get it.
But turn to the natural economy of the physical environment and a different picture emerges. The human and natural economies are NOT the same, and it’s dangerous to assume they are. In the natural economy, many materials aren’t renewable, and they’re simply not subject to supply and demand. A finite quantity exists, and when we use it up, there’s no more to be had, at any price.
Yes, we can grow more trees for wood, plant more fruits and vegetables for food. Many metals and other materials can be recycled, and so on. At least we’ve made a start on re-using and re-purposing. But oil and natural gas, to name just two resources, exist in finite qualities. Use more and we’ll run out sooner. Use less and they’ll last longer. Until we have replacements or other viable sources of energy, it’s only common sense to conserve and sip, rather than guzzle. It’s not like running out of milk and going down to the nearest convenience store, or ultimately putting another 10,000 cows into milk production. It’s rather as if I’m running out of air, trapped in a house-fire, or dragged underwater by a sinking ship. My demand for air may become extreme, but if the supply runs out, I eventually die. Life itself is finite, and no one has escaped its ending. No extensions for love or money. Demand for more hours or days has never obligated the universe to provide them, and no promise of payment or bribe suffices to keep our hearts beating a second longer. They stop.
In the case of oil and gas, unknown supplies no doubt still exist. Hydrofracking may prove helpful to buy us a little more time — or not. It may well go the way of ethanol, which for a while looked like the next sure thing. Yes, there’s petro-energy to be had, but if it costs more to produce than it’s worth, a different side of supply and demand switches on. For the geeks among us, that’s EROEI — energy returned on energy invested. We may have enough oil for 50 more years, or 75, or 100 or 200, but we willrun out. At that point, demand won’t budge the simple physical fact of an exhausted resource. At too high a price, it’s not worth it to anyone to extract a few more gallons or cubic meters. As in the Monty Python parrot sketch, it’s kaput, used up, done, extinct, no more.
Unlike many peak-oil doomsayers, I’m willing to concede that down the road we may well devise a marvelous technological solution to our mammoth energy needs. But until we do, it’s deeply stupid to continue using moreeach year, rather than less, now that production has recently peaked, even as peak oil historians predicted it would, six decades ago. How high must the price of a barrel of oil rise, and how much must the economies and households and peoples of the world suffer, until that’s clear?
But good things will emerge from this crisis, too. They may not be what we want, but as the Stones (almost) said, “we just might find we get what we need” in the moment. And there’s material for future posts.
Here are Yin and Yang, our two rhododendrons — a single red flower grows on the pink bush in the foreground, with a branch of the red bush showing in the background. Plant envy? Unfortunately the red bush doesn’t have a single pink flower, or the image would be complete. In a month they’ll be back to their usually ungainly woody scraggly selves, with no hint of the glory they present each May. Is the aftermath the only time we appreciate what we had — when it’s finally gone?
The aftermath is the consequences, the results, the outcome. But we never hear of a “foremath,” whatever it is that stands before the event, the “math” — literally the “mowing” in Old English.
Most of our yard is the typical rural patch of grass, which given half a chance will turn to sumac, crabgrass, chicory, dandelions and even slender saplings inside six months. In the few years that we’ve owned the house, we’ve let whole quadrants go uncut for a season. Sometimes it’s from pure practical laziness — we’ve no one to impress, after all, and no condo association to yelp at us — and it saves gas and time, until we get around to putting in more of the permanent plantings that won’t require cutting. Until then, we’re getting the lay of the land, seeing how soil and drainage and sun all work together (our three blueberry bushes, visible in the background in the second photo, thrive on the edge of our septic leachfield), and which local species lay claim first when we give them a chance to grow and spread. The moles that love our damp soil also tunnel madly when we leave off mowing for the summer. We think of it as natural aeration for the earth.
The northwest corner, shown here, shaded by the house itself for part of the day, yields wild strawberries if we mow carefully, first exposing the low-lying plants to sun, and then waiting while the berries ripen. Patches of wildflowers emerge — common weeds, if you’re indifferent to the gift of color that comes unlabored-for. I like to hold off till they go to seed, helping to ensure they’ll come back another year, and making peace with the spirits of plant species that — if you can believe the Findhorn experience and the lore of many traditional cultures — we all live with and persistently ignore to our own loss.
This year we’ve “reclaimed” most of the lawn for grass, as we expand the cultivated portion with raised beds and berry patches. But I remind myself that we haven’t left any of it “undeveloped” — the unconscious arrogance of the word, applied to land and whole countries, suggests nature has no intention or capacity of its own for doing just fine without us. Who hasn’t seen an old driveway or parking lot reverting to green? Roots break up the asphalt remarkably fast, and every crack harbors a few shoots of green that enlarge the botanical beach-head for their fellows. Tarmac and concrete, macadam and bitumen are not native species.
And what would any of us do, after all, without such natural events like the routine infection of our guts by millions of beneficial bacteria to help with digestion? A glance at the entry for gut flora at Wikipedia reveals remarkable things:
Gut flora consist of microorganisms that live in the digestive tracts of animals and is the largest reservoir of human flora. In this context, gut is synonymous with intestinal, and flora with microbiota and microflora.
The human body, consisting of about 10 trillion cells, carries about ten times as many microorganisms in the intestines. The metabolic activities performed by these bacteria resemble those of an organ, leading some to liken gut bacteria to a “forgotten” organ. It is estimated that these gut flora have around 100 times as many genes in aggregate as there are in the human genome.
Bacteria make up most of the flora in the colon and up to 60% of the dry mass of feces. Somewhere between 300 and 1000 different species live in the gut, with most estimates at about 500. However, it is probable that 99% of the bacteria come from about 30 or 40 species. Fungi and protozoa also make up a part of the gut flora, but little is known about their activities.
Research suggests that the relationship between gut flora and humans is not merely commensal (a non-harmful coexistence), but rather a mutualistic relationship. Though people can survive without gut flora, the microorganisms perform a host of useful functions, such as fermenting unused energy substrates, training the immune system, preventing growth of harmful, pathogenic bacteria, regulating the development of the gut, producing vitamins for the host (biotin and vitamin K), and producing hormones to direct the host to store fats.
Such marvels typically set off echoes in me, and because much of my training and predilection is linguistic in nature, the echoes often run to poems. A moment’s work with that marvelous magician’s familiar Google brings me the lines of “Blind” by Harry Kemp:
The Spring blew trumpets of color;
Her Green sang in my brain–
I hear a blind man groping
“Tap-tap” with his cane;
I pitied him in his blindness;
But can I boast, “I see”?
Perhaps there walks a spirit
Close by, who pities me–
A spirit who hears me tapping
The five-sensed cane of mind
Amid such unsensed glories
That I am worse than blind.
Isn’t this all a piece of both the worst and the best in us? We can be fatally short-sighted and blind, but we can also imagine our own blindness, see our own finitude — and move beyond it to a previously unimagined larger world.
Urban Dictionary (check it out if you haven’t yet visited it) obliges with this definition of “sick nasty”: “This word is to be used when no other word can be used to describe the cool factor, greatness, or overwhelming emotion of something. However, the something is neither sick, nor nasty. The combination of the words sick and nasty provide a higher connotation of coolness then even the words tight or wicked can provide. It is kind of ghetto.”
Since I’m going for the literal rather than the metaphoric, I’ll bypass the ghetto, and the slang meanings of “ill,” too, and head straight for “body in misery.” (It’s worth considering what connection coolness has with physical sickness, because when you’re in it, it’s distinctly notcool at all.)
Food poisoning can leave you half alive, no longer trusting your organs and bones. My wife and I had been out of state to attend our niece’s high school graduation, and bad food choices dropped me into my own private third level of hell (that’s for the gluttons, which seems appropriate). I won’t gross you out with gastrointestinal details: enough to say that the aftermath left me with aching joints, residual fever and chills, a nasty headache, and no desire ever to eat again. To add insult to injury, we’d scheduled medical check-ups back home the next day. Sometimes you feel rotten enough that a doctor is the last person you want to see. And on top of that, he insisted it was time I had another digital rectal exam, part of the follow-through since my prostate surgery. Necessary, maybe, but oh so evil.
OK, enough self-pity. You get the idea. This is a blog, after all, that’s supposed to provide plenty of buck (see the 5/18/12 entry). No time to slack off now.
What illness can offer, besides a physical cleansing and rebalancing (we get sick when something’s out of whack, off kilter, messed up), is clarity, humility and gratitude. At least that’s what I often get (when the worst of the symptoms have subsided), if I’m lucky.
Clarity first. Flat on your back, you’ve got time to reflect. If you’re not unconscious or delirious, reasonably free of pain, and cable is unavailable, you’re thrown back on yourself. Time to make friends with the body, to coax it back to health if you can. This marvelous machine of flesh now sits in the garage, lies in drydock, has gone off-line. Time to adjust the timing belt, scrape off the barnacles, repair the hull, and reboot. You get all kinds of ideas, some of which might even be useful. You get to watch your thoughts spin like a Tibetan prayer wheel, only more gooey. And through and above and below and within it all, you realize there are limits. You get reacquainted with the fact that you will die. Your time here is limited. You can’t have it all, do it all, own it all. You get your turn, and then it’s the next person’s. What you do with your life is your gift to yourself.
And yes — I can get didactic and preachy, kinda. Bear with me.
The humility part is good. You have to rely on others. When your body’s in meltdown, somebody else has to bring the drugs and the drinks, or you don’t get them. You can’t get up without the world playing spin the bottle with your brain, or chills racking you, or legs turning to water. That backrub to ease the crying vertebrae, the cool washcloth so welcome on hot skin, the light turned off because it hurts your eyes, the curtains drawn for the same reason, the soup that’s the only thing you can keep down — all of these are gifts that either others give you, or you don’t get them. They’re out of your control. Your minute-to-minute life is discomfort, interrupted by the kindness of someone caring for you.
Which brings you to gratitude. You certainly have time for it. If you have to be sick, at least there’s some good that comes of it — later, if not right away. As you start to feel better, you recall how you took so much for granted. You resolve to try to do better. Maybe the first stirrings of belief in immortality begin here, with recovery from illness. You’re aren’t dying after all. This too shall pass. You rise again. You will live to enjoy life again.
Druid teaching, both historically and in contemporary versions, has often been expressed in triads — groups of three objects, perceptions or principles that share a link or common quality that brings them together. An example (with “check” meaning “stop” or “restrain”): “There are three things not easy to check: a cataract in full spate, an arrow from a bow, and a rash tongue.” Some of the best preserved are in Welsh, and have been collected in the Trioedd Ynys Prydein (The Triads of the Island of Britain*, pronounced roughly tree-oyth un-iss pruh-dine). The form makes them easier to remember, and memorization and mastery of triads were very likely part of Druidic training. Composing new ones offers a kind of pleasure similar to writing haiku — capturing an insight in condensed form. (One of my favorite haiku, since I’m on the subject:
Don’t worry, spiders —
I keep house
casually.
— Kobayashi Issa**, 1763-1827/translated by Robert Hass)
A great and often unrecognized triad appears in the Bible in Matthew 7:7 (an appropriately mystical-sounding number!). The 2008 edition of the New International Version renders it like this: “Keep asking, and it will be given to you. Keep searching, and you will find. Keep knocking, and the door will be opened for you.”
Apart from the obvious exhortation to persevere, there is much of value here. Are all three actions parallel or equivalent? To my mind they differ in important ways. Asking is a verbal and intellectual act. It involves thought and language. Searching, or seeking, may often be emotional — a longing for something missing, a lack or gap sensed in the soul. Knocking is concrete, physical: a hand strikes a door. All three may be necessary to locate and uncover what we desire. None of the three is raised above the other two in importance. All of them matter; all of them may be required.
And what are we to make of this exhortation to keep trying? Many cite scripture as if belief itself were sufficient, when verses like this one make it clear that’s not always true. Spiritual achievement, like every other kind, demands effort. Little is handed to us without diligence on our part.
And though the three modes of investigation or inquiry aren’t apparently ranked, it’s long seemed to me that asking is lowest. If you’ve got nothing else, try a simple petition. It calls to mind a child asking for a treat or permission, or a beggar on a street-corner. The other two modes require more of us — actual labor, either of a quest, or of knocking on a door (and who knows how long it took to find?).
It’s possible to see the three as a progression, too — a guide to action. First, ask in order to find out where to start, at least, if you lack other guidance. With that hint, begin the quest, seeking and searching until you start “getting warm.” Once you actually locate what you’re looking for — the finding after the seeking — it’s time to knock, to try out the quest physically, get the body involved in manifesting the result of the search. Without this vital third component of the quest, the “find” may never actually make it into life where we live it every day.
Sometimes the knocking is initiated “from the other side” In Revelations, the Galilean master says, “I stand at the door and knock.” Here the key seems to be to pay attention and to open when you hear a response to all your seeking and searching. The universe isn’t deaf, though it answers in its own time, not ours. The Wise have said that the door of soul opens inward. No point in shoving up against it, or pushing and then waiting for it to give, if it doesn’t swing that way …
/|\ /|\ /|\
*The standard edition of the Welsh triads for several decades is the one shown in the illustration by Rachel Bromwitch, now in its 3rd edition. The earliest Welsh triads appearing in writing date from the 13th century.
**Issa (a pen name which means “cup of tea”) composed more than 20,000 haiku. You can read many of them conveniently gathered here.
Ah, Fifth Month, you’ve arrived. In addition to providing striking images like this one, the May holiday of Beltane on or around May 1st is one of the four great fire festivals of the Celtic world and of revival Paganism. Along with Imbolc, Lunasa and Samhain, Beltane endures in many guises. The Beltane Fire Society of Edinburgh, Scotland has made its annual celebration a significant cultural event, with hundreds of participants and upwards of 10,000 spectators. Many communities celebrate May Day and its traditions like the Maypole and dancing (Morris Dancing in the U.K.). More generally, cultures worldwide have put the burgeoning of life in May — November if you live Down Under — into ritual form.
I’m partial to the month for several reasons, not least because my mother, brother and I were all born in May. It stands far enough away from other months with major holidays observed in North America to keep its own identity. No Thanksgiving-Christmas slalom to blunt the onset of winter with cheer and feasting and family gatherings. May greens and blossoms and flourishes happily on its own. It embraces college graduations and weddings (though it can’t compete with June for the latter). It’s finally safe here in VT to plant a garden in another week or two, with the last frosts retreating until September. At the school where I teach, students manage to keep Beltaine events alive even if they pass on other Revival or Pagan holidays.
The day’s associations with fertility appear in Arthurian lore with stories of Queen Guinevere’s riding out on May Day, or going a-Maying. In Collier’s painting above, the landscape hasn’t yet burst into full green, but the figures nearest Guinevere wear green, particularly the monk-like one at her bridle, who leads her horse. Guinevere’s affair with Lancelot eroticized everything around her — greened it in every sense of the word. Tennyson in his Idylls of the King says:
For thus it chanced one morn when all the court,
Green-suited, but with plumes that mocked the may,
Had been, their wont, a-maying and returned,
That Modred still in green, all ear and eye,
Climbed to the high top of the garden-wall
To spy some secret scandal if he might …
Of course, there are other far more subtle and insightful readings of the story, ones which have mythic power in illuminating perennial human challenges of relationship and energy. But what is it about green that runs so deep in European culture as an ambivalent color in its representation of force?
Anya Seton’s novel Green Darkness captures in its blend of Gothic secrecy, sexual obsession, reincarnation and the struggle toward psychic rebalancing the full spectrum of mixed-ness of green in both title and story. As well as the positive color of growth and life, it shows its alternate face in the greenness of envy, the eco-threat of “greenhouse effect,” the supernatural (and original) “green giant” in the famous medieval tale Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the novel and subsequent 1973 film Soylent Green, and the ghostly, sometimes greenish, light of decay hovering over swamps and graveyards that has occasioned numerous world-wide ghost stories, legends and folk-explanations.
(Wikipedia blandly scientificizes the phenomenon thus: “The oxidation of phosphine and methane, produced by organic decay, can cause photon emissions. Since phosphine spontaneously ignites on contact with the oxygen in air, only small quantities of it would be needed to ignite the much more abundant methane to create ephemeral fires.”) And most recently, “bad” greenness showed up during this year’s Earth Day last month, which apparently provoked fears in some quarters of the day as evil and Pagan, and a determination to fight the “Green Dragon” of the environmental movement as un-Christian and insidious and horrible and generally wicked. Never mind that stewardship of the earth, the impetus behind Earth Day, is a specifically Biblical imperative (the Sierra Club publishes a good resource illustrating this). Ah, May. Ah, silliness and wisdom and human-ness.
We could let a Celt and a poet have (almost) the last word. Dylan Thomas catches the ambivalence in his poem whose title is also the first line:
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail …
Yes, May is death and life both, as all seasons are. But something in the irrepressible-ness of May makes it particularly a “hinge month” in our year. The “green fuse” in us burns because it must in order for us to live at all, but our burning is our dying. OK, Dylan, we get it. Circle of life and all that. What the fearful seem to react to in May and Earth Day and things Pagan-seeming is the recognition that not everything is sweetness and light. The natural world, in spite of efforts of Disney and Company to the contrary, devours as well as births. Nature isn’t so much “red in tooth and claw” as it is green.
Yes, things bleed when we feed (or if you’re vegetarian, they’ll spill chlorophyll. Did you know peas apparently talk to each other?). And this lovely, appalling planet we live on is part of the deal. It’s what we do in the interim between the “green fuse” and the “dead end” that makes all the difference, the only difference there is to make. So here’s Seamus Heaney, another Celt and poet, who gives us one thing we can do about it: struggle to make sense, regardless of whether or not any exists to start with. In his poem “Digging,” he talks about writing, but it’s “about” our human striving in general that, for him, takes this particular form. It’s a poem of memory and meaning-making. We’re all digging as we go.
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.
Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.
My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
I’ve been thinking over the last several weeks about the NBC midseason replacement series Awake. Maybe you’ve seen it or at least heard about it. (With the continually growing number of networks and choices, it’s become harder to find media experiences to talk about that most of us have in common. Besides, each of us is busy enough as it is, pursuing our own reality show called Life.)
In its eighth episode as of this post, the drama stars Jason Isaacs as L.A. detective Michael Britten. The premise is an intriguing one: after a car accident involving Britten, his wife and son, his reality splits: on alternating mornings he wakes to one life in which his wife Hannah survived the accident but not his son Rex, and in the other reality to a life in which Rex has survived, but not Hannah.
Britten is seeing two different therapists, one in each reality, each attempting to convince him that the current reality is the only “real” one. Britten experiences some “bleed-through” of both similar and different details and situations from each reality to the other. This naturally confuses him at times, but also gives him odd clues and insights into criminal cases he is working on, and into family dynamics that previously had too easily slid past him, until the accident forced him to pay more attention to the surviving family member in each alternate reality.
The series concept is a provocative one on several levels. Who among us hasn’t wondered at least a little how things would be different if (fill in your own blank here)? But more significant in Britten’s case is the immediate matter of his sanity. Is this schizophrenia? Can both of his realities be “real”? Or is one destined to win out, forcing the detective to abandon what one of his therapists insists is an unhealthy clinging to an illusion that is preventing Britten from healing? Which reality might prove “false” — one in which his wife Hannah is gradually coming to terms with their son’s death and planning a new life for them both, or the other, in which Britten is slowly learning to be a better father and to connect with the teenage Rex for the first time? Who could ask a person to choose between these two?
Both realities are internally consistent, and as far as Britten can tell, neither offers any evidence of being “more real.” Several spiritual traditions describe this consensus reality of ours as a kind of dream. By itself, however, that’s never been a useful piece of information as far as I can see. More helpful is guidance about how to live the dream fully and gracefully, and to shift in and out of this dream and other dreams. Most of us try not to leave a trail of dead bodies or broken lives behind us, and we generally see this as a good and admirable thing — not something we’d worry about if this were “merely a dream.”
I remember going through a period in my twenties of perhaps six months of very violent dreams, featuring me both as victim and perpetrator, but the experience didn’t disturb my waking world. No one arrested me as a serial killer, and the dream dismemberments, stabbings, shootings, beheadings and so on didn’t disturb my digestion or emotional life. (They didgive me useful material for contemplation and growth, but that’s a separate post.) The whole time of the dreams I was both actor and disinterested spectator in that curious way dreams can have. Obviously the quality of realities is different: waking and dreaming matter as category distinctions. If they didn’t, most of us would face radically different waking lives as a consequence of what we’ve dreamed! Unless you’re seriously repressing, you’ve had at least some dreams that would probably garner an X film rating. And if you don’t remember them, you’re missing out …
So if Britten is truly “awake” in both realities, he doesn’t need to choose, but simply to keep them straight. If you’ve ever had a lucid dream, however, in which internal consistency and conscious awareness approach, equal or even surpass that of waking reality, the distinctions can become much harder to sustain. Britten wears different colored wristbands to help him distinguish which reality he’s currently in. (Curiously, we don’t hear about his dreams. Perhaps “waking twice” consumes enough energy that he doesn’t need to — or can’t — dream.)
I have no idea how the writers of Awake intend to play this through. But it seems to me that it would be an enormous and series-destroying mistake ever to call one reality “true” and the other “false.” For better or worse, Britten logs parallel lives.
For most of us, both dream and waking are normally discontinuous. Each has its own interval of duration, and each eventually ceases before the other resumes. Under the influence of extreme fatigue, illness, or psychotropic substances, we can hallucinate and experience a “bleed-through” of dream-like perception into waking reality. For most of us this is a temporary state of affairs, perhaps useful or insight-producing up to a point, but not something we desire to sustain permanently. A good night’s sleep, a return to health, or the exit from an altered state of consciousness resets consciousness. Generally this is a good thing!
Yet when life goes flat, when the “same-old” of our daily experience — which is almost always a symptom of our inattention and soul-sickness — threatens to bore us literally to death, we need those moments of “awake now!” that may arrive with an accident, death in the family, close escape, or other major transition. Drama is punctuation to life — I don’t seek it habitually (unless I’m a bored teenage girl). Regular spiritual practice, as I’ve learned from experience (positive and negative, in the doing and in the ignoring), can both defuse the sense of “same old” and deliver us to smaller and less life-upsetting moments of insight, inspiration and — yes — transformation. We all dream of becoming more, better, greater, wiser, more loving, more fulfilled. Now is the always and only time to awaken in that dream — to “live twice,” awake both times.*
*Many of us “get” small bursts of at least the potential for transformation from art and music, or from sheer beauty on the playing field, or in a craft or manual skill. The Chinese poet Li Po exchanged poems with his contemporary and friend Tu Fu, and on one occasion exclaimed, “Thank you for letting me read your new poems. It was like being alive twice.”
The challenge: to write a coherent and meaningful post in about an hour — before I’m out the door and off to another commitment during a particularly busy couple of weeks — without a topic already in mind. What will get tossed up on the beach of consciousness? The trick is to keep writing, trusting that something will come. Ah, there it is: trust.
I trusted the presence of Skaði sufficiently to create a separate shrine-page for her, as I mentioned a couple of posts ago. To ask whether I believein her feels like it misses the point: she appeared in my consciousness, amenable for an exchange. I made a choice to engage, she honored her part, and I mine. What’s interesting to me is that we would never ask a similar question about a human-human interaction. Do I “believe” in the shop-clerk who sold me a sandwich at the cafe where my wife and I had lunch yesterday? The question never arises. What do our interactions imply for the future, in the case of either shop clerk or goddess? That’s something we’ll negotiate as we go. From what I can tell, none of us would have it any other way. If I patronize the shop regularly enough, the clerk and I may learn each other’s names, we might make small talk, I might eventually come to have a “usual” that I predictably order, and so on. With the goddess, the terms might be similar: future interactions will build a history between us. With that kind of growing trust, is belief necessary?
Trust is a curious thing. Like water or mustard or fire, too much or not enough suggests there’s a happy middle ground. Trust is also earned: babies may come by it naturally, and the other blessed innocents of the world may not yet have had it betrayed out of them, but usually ya gotta deserve it to get it. I trust the sanity of the clerk not to poison the food the shop sells, and Skaði and I trust each other enough at this point to fulfill any exchanges we have agreed on. Liking may enter the relationship down the road, which may broaden outside the immediate context of simple exchange if both parties are willing. But that’s not a given. Right now we have a starting point — that’s all.
Other kinds of trust operate at deeper levels. There’s a kind of trust, after all, every time you open door of your room, your apartment, your house, when you step outdoors on a sunny today like today is shaping into, a trust that the air is breathable, that the universe, at least in the foreseeable future, is not out to kill you — that it might even cooperate with you long enough that you can accomplish something worthwhile. If you’re fortunate enough, aware enough, lucky enough, or just attentive enough, you might even call it love. I’ll close with Kathleen Raine‘s fine poem “The Marriage of Psyche,” written 60 years ago now, in 1952. It feels like it fits here — the sense of amazement, of wonder at beauty that lifts you out of yourself. A gift. Read it to yourself out loud, to hear its rhythms.
He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water
Whose ripples travel from the heart of the sea,
He has married me with a ring of light, the glitter
Broadcast on the swift river.
He has married me with the sun’s circle
Too dazzling to see, traced in summer sky.
He has crowned me with the wreath of white cloud
That gathers on the snowy summit of the mountain,
Ringed me round with the world-circling wind,
Bound me to the whirlwind’s centre.
He has married me with the orbit of the moon
And with the boundless circle of stars,
With the orbits that measure years, months, days, and nights,
Set the tides flowing,
Command the winds to travel or be at rest.
At the ring’s centre,
Spirit, or angel troubling the pool,
Causality not in nature,
Finger’s touch that summons at a point, a moment
Stars and planets, life and light
Or gathers cloud about an apex of cold,
Transcendent touch of love summons my world into being.
/|\ /|\ /|\
Updated 25 May 2014: next to last line of Raine’s poem corrected from “gold” to “cold.”
A Druid Way 
