We live in one of the most beautiful planets in the solar system here on earth. The nature we have been given or risen up out of through some kind of miracle is our foundation. We draw our life blood and energy from it and when we sever ourselves from it we do great damage. I was discussing this issue with my sister a few days ago. How older primitive cultures lived immersed in nature not fully having developed so called ‘sophisticated minds’ where the cerebral cortex gained supremacy.
If you make an attempt to study the evolution of consciousness as certain writers and mystics and philosophers have you see how humans evolved through progressive stages and slowly began to separate out from and believe we were superior to nature or at least had power or control over nature.
Older more primative cultures recognised the apparently capricious forces of nature. They made sacrifices as a way of appeasing the celestial and natural powers and as they developed egos formed mythologies around these in the mythological age, (which evolved out of the magical age of emersion).
There were times in Goddess cultures where males were sacrificed. And if you study that evolution of consciousness you come to see how suppression of the feminine followed on from this around the time God was concieved as a masculine force in the sky split off from the body of the earth and in power over earthlings instead of living in their bodies and in nature as pantheistic cultures believed.
In the book The Return of the Goddess Edward Whitmont addresses the developmental period where God became to be associated with moral codes of right and wrong, of ought and should and most definiately some attempt to impose controls over wild instinctive primal forces may have been necessary for the so called “civilising” of life, but what we need to bear in mind is that these are just imposed orders or mental constructs or parameters and often natural forces have little regard for them.
My personal belief is that we did evolve to this level of consciousness for a reason but there comes a time when we have to recognise the limits of so called ‘egoic’ consciousness when it seeks power over instead of partnership with and deeper connection with and understanding of the power of nature and the deeper forces that govern it. That time is now.
The earth is crying out to us, she shows us when we step out of alignment with nature. Our bodies are a part of nature and they show us when we step out of alignment with natural rhythms. I feel also there is a power of love in the earth, nature knows when a cycle needs to complete. There are stages of winter or entropy or breakdown in the cycle that must be accepted with grace, surrendered to and flowed with. We can fight them if we want to but I do believe there comes a time we need to submit to a deeper law. If we don’t find the wisdom in necessary breakdowns, if we try to lift something up or preserve it when its due date has come then we go against the force of nature and we pay the price. In sacrificing our dying and decaying seasons we also sacrifice our new birth. How many who were on the brink of spiritual emergence or deeper soul work were medicated through the necessary grief or suffering stages accompanied by inner death that then, in time, leads to rebirth? Many.
Let us be more aware of what existential depression may be about in this modern day and age when we are becoming more and more removed from nature and natural rhythms by our obsession with progress, medicine and technology. Let us remember the wonderful laboratory of nature which has all we need to heal and grow and evolve. Let us draw on that power instead of battling it or setting ourselves up in opposition against it.
The symbol of crisis in Chinese calligraphy stands for danger and opportunity. Any crisis we undergo is dangerous and scary but also an opportunity to dig deep within and grow, transform, evolve.
Emerging From The Dark Night 