Psycho-Spiritual Evolution
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Beyond the Predator Archetype
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Fire Rainbow*
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Contents
Lessons from Depth Psychology – Seeing in the Dark
The Predator: De-Colonizing Our Psyches
The Predator vs. the Conscience of the Whole
Group Process: Evolving Collective Intelligence
Conclusion: Metamorphosis of the Gods?
A
mood of universal destruction and renewal...has set its mark on our age. This
mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially, and philosophically.
We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos—the right moment—for a
"metamorphosis of the gods," of the fundamental principles and
symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious
choosing, is the expression of the unconscious human within us who is changing.
Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation
if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology
and science.... So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological
constitution of the modern human. — Carl Gustav Jung
It
seems to me that we've all got to strive toward consciousness. And it's not any longer about being subject
to father-patriarchy or mother-matriarchy. It's about finding ourselves and
taking responsibility for ourselves as mature, grown-up human beings. That's
what I think this big transition is about. We're moving out of being children and
adolescents, and we're being forced into the responsibility of making mature
decisions – or we're not going to survive as a planet. — Marion
Woodman, “Taming Patriarchy: The Emergence
of the Black Goddess”
When
'The End' seems near, it's the mythic sense, the eternal roots, and creative
imagination that are missing. Behind the 'ecological crisis' and the 'war on terror,'
there lies a crisis of meaning and a loss of the sense of the sacred in the
immediate pulse of the world. The blind exploitation of the earth follows upon
lost connections to the realm of nature, as if humanity has broken a secret
bond with Great Nature and become estranged from 'inner nature' as well. — Michael Meade
How are humans going to be able to make the Great Turning from the
unsustainable and destructive industrial growth society to a life-affirming and
ecologically sustainable way of life on Planet Earth?
That is the concern of many Dharmagaians, and of this website. It is
increasingly common to hear people talk about the evolution of consciousness, a
shift in consciousness, cultural evolution, cultural change, etc., as a necessity if the human species is to survive the crises of this century. (Many who take a
systems view of this subject are represented in the links pages on this
site.) Among the numerous books
and websites dedicated to conscious evolution and shifting the paradigm, nearly
all of them encourage hope that we can adjust to the realities of this century
by creating sustainable communities.
Not often stated in these discussions is the fear that if we do not
collectively evolve our consciousness and our culture, and create sustainable
communities, the disintegration of industrial civilization will evoke the worst
aspects of human nature. Darker
scenarios of the future seem to have two assumptions in common: 1) that as
economic contraction and ecological disintegration make survival the main
issue, the reptilian brain will assert itself in conflict
and violence at the expense of civilized, compassionate values and norms; and
2) the resulting chaos will further degrade the biosphere, our planetary life
support system, and could lead to a dark age from which humanity may never
recover. These are the main fears,
I believe, behind the concern that humanity may not survive the collapse of
industrial civilization and of our ecological support systems (which are
already severely stressed by climate change and overexploitation).
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My
own best hope is that future generations will establish what I call Dharmagaian
tribes and communities. Dharmagaian communities would be composed of sane,
reverent, mature human beings who have adapted to the limitations of their
ecosystems, and who nurture the flourishing of nonhuman life within those
ecosystems in a spirit of appreciation, gratitude and respect. Dharmagaian myths, stories and rituals
would honor and celebrate the sacredness and interdependence of all Earthly
life. They would also include an
understanding of why and how the unraveling of our present system came about,
and how – through psycho-spiritual evolution – their ancestors
developed the wisdom to re-establish right relationship with all beings.
Whatever they choose to call themselves, Dharmagaian tribes and communities of
the future would be the fruition of the evolution of consciousness and culture
among people who seek and speak the truth, cherish and protect the Earth, and
act responsibly on behalf of future generations of all sentient beings.
I acknowledge that it will not be easy for these communities to
evolve, establish and sustain themselves amidst political, ecological and
climatic chaos. In 2009, the odds
appear to be stacked against such an endeavor, but I believe there are people –
more than we think – who are capable of meeting this challenge.
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Depth psychologists argue that the collective crises we are facing in
the 21st century are manifestations of unconscious forces that have
been split off and repressed in our civilization. Unhealthy, fragmented psychic structures manifest in
unhealthy, unsustainable social structures, and these are now beginning to
unravel. If humans are to survive
this century, it is likely that we will have to come to terms with our
collective and personal unconsciousness – particularly our proclivity for
self-deception and delusion, cruelty, injustice and predatory behavior. In other words, we will have to wake up
and deal with the consequences of our unconsciousness.
One of the foremost areas of unconsciousness, or lack of awareness,
is with regard to the biases built into our inherited Western worldview.
Dharmagaians argue that those biases, and our blindness to them, have
created the crises that are making psycho-spiritual evolution necessary. An indispensible task on our
psycho-spiritual evolutionary journey is to dismantle the dysfunctional psychic
structures implanted by our culture. Mainstream Western infotainment media and government propaganda keep
people in a cultural trance, a state of delusional semi-consciousness, and this
trance is one of the primary obstacles to human sanity and survival, not to
mention evolution. This is
discussed at greater length further on in this essay and on the Deep Ecology,
Paradigm Change, Ecopsychology and Dark Side pages.
However, in order to establish Dharmagaian communities, we must
necessarily take our personal evolution and healing to another level: the
collective level. This involves
lateral learning, learning from and with peers, as well as from and about the
human and nonhuman ‘others’ that have been excluded and marginalized by Western
civilization. This is about
learning in groups as equals and transcending the habitual cultural tendency to
perceive the world dualistically and arrange it hierarchically. I believe the survival of sane human
beings in this century depends upon our ability to co-evolve with each other,
which is addressed in Group Process below.
The psychologist Erich Fromm said, “In times of change, learners will
inherit the Earth.” We are in a
time of accelerating change, and we are in a steep learning curve. For humans, the ability to learn is the
key to becoming fit for evolution. It requires sober, intentional work amidst change and insecurity, which
is not particularly ego gratifying. But that doesn’t mean it is without satisfaction or enjoyment, for this
learning initiates a meaningful journey that has the potential to redeem and
renew our species and our planet.
If it is true that the human species must evolve in order to survive the crises it has
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created, what do we need to learn? First of all, we can take a lesson from the other species
that share Planet Earth, the majority of which evolved tens of millions of
years before humans appeared. Many of those species have not changed
significantly for
millions of years, despite changes in the Earth’s conditions, yet
they have remained sustainable through adaptation. Those existing today learned long ago to pay attention to
‘positive’ or ‘deviation amplifying' feedback from the environment, which told
them they had to adapt or they would perish. They became fit for evolution by fitting in with the myriad
other species and the demands of their environments. This is the true meaning of “the survival of the fittest.”
In Teaching
Sustainability: Whole Systems Learning,
Molly Brown and Joanna Macy describe the way that open systems adapt and evolve
sustainably:
Systems thinking is basic to understanding sustainability and implementing sustainable policies and practices. It reveals the general principles at work in all open systems, be they biological, ecological, or organizational. The essential feature, which permits open systems both to maintain their form over time (homeostasis), and adapt to challenges by changing (evolution), is feedback. Alert to signals both from within and without, open systems monitor their own performance by matching it to their existing goals or values (acquired through previous learning). When a mismatch persists, the healthy system adapts by reorganizing its internal structure and goals. Information flow is of paramount importance, therefore, to the health of any living system--or enterprise. Feedback from its component parts, and from the larger systems in which it operates, is essential to its long-term survival. When feedback is blocked or discounted, the system cannot meet its own changing needs or respond to a changing environment.
In other words, creatures, species and organizations that are fit for
evolution are open systems that perceive and respond to challenging feedback by
changing their internal structure (values and norms) and their goals. A major obstacle to the evolution of
the human species is the social conditioning that imposes the Western worldview
throughout the industrialized world and upon the ‘developing’ world as well;
for the unconscious, unexamined biases built into the Western worldview –
which structure psyches, behaviors and institutions in the industrialized world
– block feedback. This is
the main reason that industrial civilization has become dysfunctional and
unsustainable.
The values, norms and goals that Dharmagaians suggest for humans have
to do with bringing ourselves into right relationship with Mother Earth and
each other so that we can receive and respond accurately to feedback. Human societies need to function as
open systems if we are to survive and evolve, for we are receiving challenging
feedback from every side.
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What will determine whether we learn the lessons that will enable our
species to evolve and survive the crises that we have created? The most relevant lessons I have taken
on this subject come from the Buddhadharma, Deep Ecology, and Depth Psychology.
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Kalachakra Mandala (Wheel of Time) |
The Buddhadharma is a psycho-spiritual evolutionary path that offers
useful guidelines for our species at this time. Spirituality in this tradition is about working with our own
body and mind in a process called “mind training” in order to achieve
sanity. Sanity is being aligned
with reality, the dharma, the laws of the natural world. The human mind needs to be trained to
open beyond belief to the space beyond concept. In this way the mind becomes an ‘open system’ that allows
the flow of energy, matter and information from reality to inform it. This is how we free ourselves from
delusion and become sustainable.
The late Jamgon Kongtrul III put it this way in Awakened Heart, Brilliant Mind:
From a Buddhist point of view, spirituality is basic and fundamental to all people without exception. Each person has the inherent potential to attain the highest possible sanity--the complete awakened mind. What is introduced through Buddhism is the means to recognize and experience this potential, no matter who we are. It is important to recognize that true spirituality can be assimilated into and permeate a culture, but on the other hand a particular set of customs and beliefs cannot become assimilated into what is spiritual. Since Buddhism addresses what is basically and fundamentally true of the phenomenal world and our own existence, it is not confined to a set of beliefs or customs designed for a particular group or locality.
Teachers of Buddhadharma are regarded as spokespeople for the
phenomenal world, or reality, and their teachings are called ‘the dharma.’ Traditional dharma teachings offer
relevant metaphors for what enables a person to learn – or what prevents
a person from being able – to align herself or himself with reality. It is up to the student to make
him/herself a ‘worthy vessel’ for the truth that the teacher, or the feedback
from reality, presents. It is a choice we make for ourselves, and nobody else
can do it for us.
Traditionally, there are three conditions that prevent a human
individual, or a society, from learning. Unsuitable vessels for the teachings are those that are turned upside
down (or have a lid or are already full), have holes in them, or are
contaminated. The ‘vessel’ is the
mind of the student. A worthy
vessel is clean, turned right side up, has no leaks, and is therefore ready and
open to receive and retain the unadulterated truth of the teachings or
reality.
An upside down vessel – such as a pot – is obviously not
able to receive anything. If the vessel has holes in it, it will not be able to contain or retain the teachings. The third kind of vessel that is unable to receive the dharma is
the contaminated pot. If you pour
something pure into it, the purity becomes polluted. A polluted mind can easily misconstrue the teachings,
or feedback from the environment, and deceive itself into thinking it has the
right response to signals.
Think of the contaminated pot as lined with an incrustation of old,
decaying food. It needs to be
cleaned before pure, nourishing food is put into it. In the Buddhadharma, this metaphor refers to the kinds of
incrustations in people’s minds that prevent them from perceiving the truth or
reality of a situation. Incrustations include primitive beliefs about reality, ego attachments,
conflicting emotions, and habitual, unexamined thought patterns.
Dogmatic belief systems and ideologies are incrustations that block
new perceptions, ideas and information. The Euro-American worldview, for example, is based on outdated (19th century) science and false beliefs about the nature of reality. (See Deep Ecology, Paradigm Change and
Positive Disintegration.) Unfortunately, most members of the societies that hold this obsolete
worldview link their personal identity with it; thus their egos are attached
to, and contaminated by, primitive beliefs about reality that block feedback.
Among other things, the Western industrial worldview contaminates
people’s minds with a cultural hubris, the main obstacle to learning to live
harmoniously and co-creatively with the natural world. We’ve been indoctrinated
with many dualistic beliefs that separate us from other humans and the natural
world: beliefs about the
superiority of our civilization, our country, our economic system, and of
humans over other forms of life, and of certain humans over other humans.
Such beliefs prevent people from accurately perceiving the
seriousness of the crises that our civilization has created, and from
responding appropriately. Perhaps
the characteristic of industrialized humans that most distinguishes us from
other animals is our astonishing capacity to block feedback. This is one way to account for the
denial, rationalization, and obfuscation that are common responses when people
are confronted with the facts about peak oil, climate change, fatal flaws in
our economic system, and the dire state of the planet.
Again, the purpose here is to discern the conditions needed for
humans to perceive and adapt to reality, and thereby find a footing from which
to evolve in order to survive the crises we have created. The ability to
accurately perceive and understand the messages coming from the phenomenal
world is the essential condition that enables a person or a species to evolve
in response to changes in the environment. We can neither adapt to reality nor
evolve if we are in flight from reality.
Vessels capable of receiving the dharma – the truth of reality
– are minds that, having been purified of pollution and obstruction, have
become awake and ‘mindful.’ A
mindful mind is able to pay attention and intuit the meaning of what it perceives. It is a mind that is open (receptive),
undistracted (retentive, able to remember, not leaky), fully present and aware
– that is, wakeful (uncontaminated by illusions). It is a mind that is able to think
clearly and deeply and to receive the wisdom from within that connects
intellect and intuition, which enables accurate responsiveness.
If that seems like too tall an order for ‘ordinary human beings,’ the
2,500-year tradition of Buddhadharma offers evidence to the contrary. Buddhism affirms that ordinary human
beings are capable of waking up and accurately perceiving and responding to
reality. The tradition consists of
the teachings of countless people who have done so. The core teaching of Buddhism is that the human mind
possesses the inherent capacity to wake up, free itself from fixation and
illusion, and become fully present. Indeed, if that were not the case, humans would not have survived the
changes on this planet that they have, and would not have established
sustainable ways of life that lasted for thousands of years, which they
have.
However, civilized minds need to be trained to become open
systems. The capacity for
wakefulness needs to be consciously cultivated – especially in such
distracting cultures as Western consumer societies – because
civilizations tend to produce cultural trances. Cultural trances render their members unable to adapt to
changing conditions in their environments, as Jared Diamond has shown with his research into the collapses of
civilizations, particularly the tragedy of Easter Island. Civilizations seem to turn open human
systems (starting with children in early childhood) into closed systems that
block feedback. Our challenge at
this time is to wake up from our cultural trance, perceive the reality of the
converging crises, and respond in ways that enable us to create sustainable
communities.
How do we wake up and become worthy vessels – open
systems?
Ancient contemplative traditions from the East and indigenous
traditions from the Western Hemisphere have developed effective methods of purification precisely to enable people to be receptive to the messages coming from the
encompassing cosmos – the dharma. These methods include fasting, solitude, silence, and solitary and
communal rituals that slow people down to Nature’s rhythms and require them to
pay precise attention. Some of
these practices also induce altered states of consciousness that enable people
to perceive realities that socially conditioned consciousness can’t
perceive. The ethnographic record
is replete with examples.
Many Westerners have taken up practices from these traditions in
order to find relief from the tight little mental (left-brained) boxes that
Western civilization has created for us, and to integrate mind and body. Practices that integrate the right and
left brains – commonly known as ‘alternative,’ ‘holistic’ and ‘shamanic’ practices
for healing and wholeness – have flourished since the counterculture days
of the 1960s. Having engaged in
many of these on my own healing journey, I can affirm their benefits. I have
also found solo wilderness rites of passage to be especially effective. (See Creating Space for Nature and My Bush Soul.)
However, in my experience, traditional Buddhist sitting meditation
has been indispensible for cleansing the mind of cultural contamination and
becoming a worthy vessel for the dharma – an open system. Buddhist meditation, after all, is a practice of
letting go of mental fixations in order to ‘see things as they are’ and ground
oneself in reality – the here and now. It is a tried-and-true process of unlearning cultural
conditioning as well as of ‘taming the mind’ of knee-jerk reactions. Meditation ‘puts a leash on the
reptilian brain,’ in the phrase of eco-theologian Matthew Fox. This occurs organically when we relax
into silence and open space, and become present to ourselves moment by moment. In my life, solitary cabin retreats
– the longer, the better – have been the most powerful and
effective means to cleanse and open the mind.
As the mind slows down and synchronizes with body and breath, the
doors of perception open. In fact,
opening further and further to awareness, without mental reservations and blockages,
is the essence of mindfulness meditation. In the beginning stages of mind training, whatever we’ve been hiding
from ourselves about ourselves spontaneously rises to consciousness. Unbidden, our own darkness comes to
light, which tends to arouse unpleasant feelings that are related to cultural
conditioning, inherited beliefs, and personal ego fixations. But continuing to sit and breathe
through those uncomfortable, unwanted, embarrassing, fearsome feelings
dissolves habitual emotional reactions and prejudices.
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As our self-protective barriers dissolve, the energy that has been
locked up in mental evasion and repression becomes available for further clear
seeing. If we sit long enough, the
mind naturally disabuses itself of personal and cultural illusions. We see through ourselves. We become more self-reflective, aware
of our foibles and our dark side, and hence, more authentic and genuine as we
become transparent to ourselves. This natural sanity was the Buddha’s discovery when he withdrew from his
culture.
When a mind becomes an open system, it becomes more sensitive to
connections and its awareness of interdependence (egolessness) expands. It doesn’t block incoming information
or the feelings evoked by that information. The feelings are allowed to just be, and become integrated
into awareness. The circle of
compassion expands outwards from a heart softened and humbled by the
realization of its own vulnerability and the vulnerability of all sentient
beings.
The Earth’s children, sentient beings, are not machines. We are all vulnerable, sensitive life
forms, subject to the three marks of existence – suffering, impermanence
and egolessness/interdependence – as the Buddha taught. Through our sensitive organs and
senses, we take in energy, matter, and information. Blocking feedback through defense mechanisms such as denial
and self-deception does not make us safer, it puts us more at risk because it
makes us less able to learn. When
a culture is an elaborate system for blocking feedback, as ours is, it makes
people obtuse.
My teacher Chögyam Trungpa often told us that meditation makes us
more intelligent. Another way to
say this is that training the mind to remain open and receptive dissolves the
barriers preventing us from accurately receiving feedback, and from evolving
further. People who meditate tend
to be inquisitive and to have a sense of humor because they don’t take
themselves so seriously. Mind
training enables us to become more resilient, flexible, and able to recover
from shocks. Thus, it makes us fit
for evolution – for fitting ourselves in with the rest of creation amidst
changes in the environment.
For those who are interested in developing this capacity, see the
Meditation section in Psycho-Spiritual Links.
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One of the reasons there is so much confusion and obtuseness in the
world at this time of crisis, I believe, is resistance to (and fear of)
acknowledging the Dark Side of our culture and our own nature. Western culture
has conditioned us to believe absurdities: for example, the belief that our
civilization is superior, exceptional and cannot collapse as others have; and the
belief in the necessity of infinite economic and population growth (or
‘progress’) on a finite planet, and that “there is no alternative” to our
economic system, as famously asserted by Margaret Thatcher as Britain’s Prime
Minister. This assertion was
echoed with characteristic American hubris when George H.W. Bush or Dick Cheney
(or both) declared that “The American way of life is non-negotiable.”
In the 18th century, Voltaire aptly observed, “Those who
can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” And indeed, our anthropocentric,
imperialistic civilization has been committing atrocities for far too long
– against the natural world, other species, indigenous people, and other
innocent populations. The
accumulation of error and wrongdoing based on absurdities and lies is now
manifesting as the crises of the 21st century, as described in the
Positive Disintegration section.
Depth psychology is the study of the unconscious mind, ‘the dark
side’ of the human psyche. It
arose as a field during – and partly in response to – the
atrocities of the 20th century. Carl Gustav Jung was particularly concerned about the
phenomenon of “mass psychosis” that can and does occur when a whole population
follows a psychopathic leader, such as Hitler, Stalin or Mao Tse Tung. According to archetypal historian,
astrologer and philosopher Richard Tarnas, “[T]he whole rationale for
depth psychology, from Freud and Jung onward, [is] to become conscious of the
unconscious, to release ourselves from the bondage of blind action, to explore
and experience the hidden forces in the human psyche.”
What depth psychology, particularly Jungian archetypal psychology,
has shown is that the dramas played out on the world stage are the outward
manifestations of forces within our own psyches. When those psychic forces become collectivized, they become
overwhelming, like a black hole for autonomy and sanity. Thus, until humans come to terms with
our unconscious drives, we will continue to threaten our own survival and most
of life on Earth. Paul Levy tells us that “Jung was very conscious of the
great danger facing humanity, and he realized it had to do with coming to terms
with the darkness within ourselves. He realized that the great danger facing
humanity was the ‘psychic danger’ of collective psychosis that resulted from
disassociating from our own darkness.”
The concept of the ‘shadow’ that was introduced by Jung is
now somewhat familiar to many people. Jung distinguished between the personal shadow and the
collective unconscious. He
recognized that the personal unconscious is the part of the unconscious that is
unique to each individual. It
consists of unresolved issues, or complexes, from early childhood that have
been repressed either willfully or unconsciously. The personal shadow contains parts of ourselves – such
as memories – that we find inferior, unacceptable, shameful, dangerous, or
just too painful to acknowledge. These aspects of ourselves become unconsciously split off from
consciousness and projected onto other people – individuals, ethnic
groups, races, genders, or nations.
The collective unconscious consists of archetypes that are universal
within humanity. In An
Introduction to Archetypal Astrology,
Archetypes can be understood and described in many ways, and in fact much of the history of Western thought from Plato and Aristotle onward has been concerned with this very question. But for our present purposes, we can define an archetype as a universal principle or force that affects – impels, structures, permeates – the human psyche and human behavior on many levels. One can think of them as primordial instincts, as Freud did, or as transcendent first principles as Plato did, or as gods of the psyche as James Hillman does. Archetypes (for example, Venus or Mars) seem to have a transcendent, mythic quality, yet they also have very specific psychological expressions--as in the desire for love and the experience of beauty (Venus), or the impulse toward forceful activity and aggression (Mars). Moreover, archetypes seem to work from both within and without, for they can express themselves as impulses and images from the interior psyche, yet also as events and situations in the external world.
Jung thought of archetypes as the basic constituents of the human psyche, shared cross-culturally by all human beings, and he regarded them as universal expressions of a collective unconscious. . . . To the exact extent that we are conscious of the archetypes, we can respond with greater autonomy and self-awareness.
Tarnas goes on to describe the planetary archetypes, how they express various archetypal energies and mythic figures, and the different names those have been given.
I think of archetypes of the collective unconscious as ways the human
imagination identifies and personifies the different energies and patterns that
exist both within ourselves and throughout the cosmos. Humans have been dreaming up names,
forms and explanations for these energies and patterns throughout history and
probably at least since we acquired language.
One of the most important things to realize and remain aware of is
that collective archetypes have their dark side as well as their light
side. This becomes especially
clear in the study of archetypal astrology, of which Tarnas is a contemporary master. As he says,
All archetypes are Janus-faced, with positive and negative sides…. The same archetype can express itself benignly or destructively, in an exalted way or an ignoble way, and to a great extent which of these occurs will be affected by the kind of consciousness that is brought to the situation. The god needs to be honored, the archetype will manifest, but there is considerable latitude as to how that may happen.
The light side of each archetype is what we idealize and become
seduced by; but if we are not aware of an archetype’s neurotic potential, we
can find ourselves acting out the dark side, sabotaging ourselves and creating
havoc.
When we become conscious of the archetypes and their characteristics,
we can identify when they are active and make a choice about how to relate with
them. Archetypes have their own
rules, which are not necessarily in our best self-interest. But we do not always have to play by
their rules. Working out our own
relationship with the archetypes is one of the most fascinating challenges of
human existence, and it is central to what I refer to as psycho-spiritual
evolution.
When they remain unconscious, however, archetypes of the collective
unconscious can be even darker and more dangerous than the personal shadow because they are collective. For example,
when an individual becomes ‘possessed’ and ‘inflated’ with an archetype, he is
often charismatic and attracts attention. If he gathers a following, he and his followers may think that he is a
messenger of ‘God’ (or some other attractive archetype) and can do no wrong, an
assumption which is of course mistaken. This is a common psychopathology among preachers, politicians and other
leaders, and even garden-variety patriarchal fathers and mothers. ( See Are
We Possessed? by
Paul Levy for a description of the process, characteristics and symptoms of
archetypal possession and inflation in individuals, groups and masses of
people.)
When a group or mass of people projects a collective archetype
– say, a ‘savior’ archetype – onto a leader, they can, in effect, create a
demagogue who will lead them to commit atrocities such as wars, mass suicide,
or ecocide. Western history is
rife with examples of this, and Tarnas has done us the favor of providing an
archetypal interpretation of this history in Cosmos
and Psyche. For
a personal guide to working with archetypal energies in one’s own life, I
recommend Caroline Casey’s Making the Gods Work for You.
Our problem as a collective is that we lack “psychospiritual
literacy,” the term Alastair McIntosh uses to designate the perspective of
depth psychology and its relevance to community life in his book Rekindling Community: Connecting
People, Environment and Spirituality (2008). This is literacy or fluency in symbols,
patterns, archetypes and myths, which is conferred by the development of the
mythopoetic imagination. As
McIntosh reminds us, “[T]he Latin word psyche derives from the Greek, psykhe, which
means the soul, mind, spirit, breath, or life.” However, he says,
Materialistic ideology has degraded this [meaning]. Its reductionism has spun the word ‘psychology’ into a diminished redefinition as the study of behaviour. But that is merely behaviourism, cognitive or otherwise. Such behaviourists should own up to their paucity of perspective rather than continue to colonise the etymological energy of a much richer epistemology. I would define colonisation as the presumption of right to take that which has not been given. We should therefore insist on decolonising psychology and restoring its meaning as the study of the soul. (p. 55)
McIntosh defines the ‘triune basis’ of human community to be soil,
soul and society: community with
the Earth, with Spirit, and with one another. In most places within the industrialized world, we have lost
the sense of belonging within community that is the basis for psycho-spiritual
literacy. In fact, belonging
within community has been replaced by the soulless, alienating
consumer/celebrity culture.
Without psycho-spiritual literacy, people cannot recognize when
archetypal inflation is occurring, nor that feeding (or enabling) the inflation can
lead to the abuses of power in collective life that cause what McIntosh calls a “rupture
in the fabric of reality.” That is, when a group or mass of people projects their own power onto a
person or an elite group, surrendering their critical intelligence and power of choice to those they perceive as 'gods' or authorities or saviors (parental figures), they feed the archetypal inflation of those projected upon. The abuses of power that often result can cause the population to become “unmoored from reality,” as Chris
Hedges describes in America the Illiterate, and even be led into a state of
collective psychosis.
America, I believe, became unmoored from reality during the
administration of George W. Bush because of a general lack of psycho-spiritual
literacy. The majority of Americans seemed to go into a trance of naïve
literal-mindedness that prevented them from seeing or challenging the lies and
holding that administration accountable. While the Bush II administration famously claimed that it was ‘creating
its own reality,’ it proceeded to exacerbate all of the potential crises that
have since become acute in the realms of economy, energy, ecology, climate, terrorism,
social upheaval, and international instability. However, the ‘shock and awe’ of the wreckage that
administration left behind appears to have awoken at least some people from the
trance.
Psycho-spiritual literacy enables us to ‘see in the dark’ –
that is, see the dark side hidden within shimmering promises to deliver all our
hearts desire – or to save us from what we most fear. The dark side has great power to seduce
and delude us until we gain enough psycho-spiritual literacy to see through bogus
claims, promises, and outright lies. Seeing in the dark provides a ‘bullshit detector’ that breaks the spell
cast by the archetypes. We become
‘allergic to the lie.’ A good
bullshit detector is an essential psychological defense mechanism that neutralizes
the power that archetypes can exert in our personal and collective lives. But we only gain this literacy through
confronting the darkness within ourselves and within our culture. Any psycho-spiritual evolution worthy
of the name must include psycho-spiritual literacy.
 |
| Zebras and their shadows - This fascinating image of zebras (black and white like us) casting large, dark shadows on the Earth is worth contemplating from a psycho-spiritual perspective. |
The
Predator: De-Colonizing Our Psyches
Jung said, "Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is
embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it
is." This is as true for
societies and nations as it is for individuals. And Western civilization carries a large, dense, black
shadow: the unacknowledged atrocities that this civilization has committed
through abuses of collective power over the centuries. We
– the citizens of imperialistic colonizing societies – also carry
the shadow of those societies. This cultural shadow appears to be another,
almost autonomous, level of unconsciousness that falls between and overlaps the
personal and collective unconscious. Jung also said, "The unexamined
contents of the shadow become our outward fate." The unexamined contents of our cultural shadow, I believe,
are congealing into the fate we are facing in the converging crises of the 21st century.
In chapter
two of Women Who Run
with the Wolves (Ballantine, 1992), Clarissa Pinkola Estés discusses at
length the archetype of the “natural predator of the psyche,” personified in
the Bluebeard fairytale. The natural
predator is one of many “beings” in the collective unconscious that populate
the psyches of all individuals. But, she warns us, this entity in particular is “the most deceitful and most powerful fugitive
in the psyche,” and it “requires our immediate consciousness and containment.”
Although the natural predator appears very seductive, it is actually
a “derisive and murderous antagonist” that opposes nature, creativity, and the
evolution of consciousness. It is
a “malignant force” that preys upon gullible, naïve and “instinct injured”
individuals and societies. It
wants superiority and power over others, and gains it through deception and
mesmerism. Its “sole assignment is
to attempt to turn all crossroads into closed roads” – in other words, to
deprive us of choice by casting a spell, putting us into a trance, making us
believe “there is no alternative.”
After describing the destructive role of the predator in women’s
lives, Estés tells us:
Each group and culture appears to also have its own natural psychic predator, and we see from history that there are eras in cultures during which the predator is identified with and allowed absolute sovereignty until the people who believe otherwise become a tide. . . . In a culture where the predator rules, all new life needing to be born, all old life needing to be gone, is unable to move and the soul-lives of its citizenry are frozen with both fear and spiritual famine.
Recognizing the predator archetype in America’s cultural shadow
during the 2004 ‘re-selection’ of GW Bush, I was inspired to re-read Estés and wrote Demons in Our
Midst: Facing the Tyrant Inside and Out for an online magazine. In that article I outline Estés’
prescription for disempowering the predator.
Since then I have come to regard Western Civilization as a ‘predator
culture,’ which I define this way:
Predator culture is a culture that is ruled by the predator archetype of the collective unconscious. The predator archetype seeks to dominate others and works through seduction, deception and manipulation. When it operates through a culture, it behaves as dictatorship or imperialism, although it may maintain a pretense of democracy. This archetype has the power to cast spells and put whole populations into a cultural trance while it wreaks overt and covert destruction. When the predator archetype gains sovereignty in a culture, human consciousness and creativity and the vitality of the natural world are vastly diminished. Exposing it by seeking and telling the truth of its activities is the only way to break its spell and disempower it. The alternative is to wait until it destroys the culture.
I thank George W. Bush’s administration for making the
characteristics of predator culture so obvious. It isn’t that the predator archetype wasn’t operating within
American politics and culture before GW Bush. It was, but Bush & Co. made its traits
unmistakable. These are
identifying features of predator cultures:
Predator cultures permit, encourage and reward blatant lying, intentional deception, covert manipulation, the creation of illusions and misinformation, mesmerism, and all manner of corruption of the human spirit and instincts – including greed, fraud, cruelty, torture, and taking pleasure in deceiving, cheating, terrorizing and causing pain to others, which is often called “winning.”
Through deception and stealth, coercion and violence, predator
culture takes what is not given and corrupts both individuals and the social
fabric. It steals people’s power
and freedom to choose, enslaving them while empowering itself. In this way, it becomes inflated with a
heedless will to power and domination, as if believing it is invincible. Its arrogant behavior is ultimately
self-destructive, but on the way to its collapse, it wreaks irreparable damage
upon society and the natural world. The regime of President Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe is a vivid example
of a predator culture that arose in reaction to being colonized by a predator
culture. Possession by the predator archetype is indeed contagious.
There are other names that have been given to the sickness of the
soul that is both expressed and engendered by predator culture – a
sickness that has become pervasive with the influence of Western civilization,
and became especially heightened during the Bush II administration.
In The Madness Of George W.
Bush: A Reflection Of Our
Collective Psychosis, Paul Levy calls it “Malignant Egophrenia” (ME
disease or “Mad Emperor disease”). Levy says,
Malignant egophrenia is an
expression of, and is at the root of, the extreme polarization and dissociation
in both the human psyche and the world process at large. The disease is
archetypal in nature, which is to say that it has eternally re-created itself
and played itself out over the course of history. We can even say that it’s the
"bug" in the system that has in-formed and given shape to all of the
conflict and disharmony of human relationships. ME disease is as old as the
human species. However, we’re now at the point in our evolution where we can
finally recognize it, see it, give it a name, and diagnose it.... Malignant egophrenia is truly
diabolical in nature and is what the ancient, indigenous cultures would call a
"demon." We, as "civilized" people, have withdrawn our
projection of Gods and demons from nature (which has therefore become "depsychized").
Jung said, "Even though nature is depsychized, the psychic conditions
which breed demons are as actively at work as ever. The demons have not really
disappeared but have merely taken on another form: they have become unconscious
psychic forces." Jung warned
that a difficult task lay ahead of us after the mass insanity of the Second
World War. He pointed out that after the "demons" abandoned the
German people, these negative energies weren't banished. Jung elaborated by
saying, "…the demons will seek a new victim. And that won't be difficult.
Every man who loses his shadow, every nation that falls into
self-righteousness, is their prey." Projecting the shadow literally opens
the door for malignant egophrenia to take up residence in our being.
In an interview with Curtis White about his book The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money, and the
Crisis of Nature, White says, I was reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire and started thinking about the concept of the barbaric.
Roman virtue was not all that different from the virtues of the barbarians:
they were both willing to profit from violence, and they both thought that the
only virtue was triumph. Winning. What we don’t quite understand is how
faithful our culture has been to this idea of virtue over the last two thousand
years. Virtue as violence with a skill set is still the leading source of
national pride in our military, in our business leaders, in our athletes, and in
our action movie heroes. A truly
new way to think about the causes of the destruction of the natural world is to
see it as this ancient (if not primeval) tendency in Western culture to admire
survival through violence. If we
allowed the arts, philosophy and religion to play an equal role with science
and technology, we would understand the relationship between capitalism, the
dehumanization of work, and the destruction of the earth.
What is interesting to me is the confluence between Levy’s
psychological analysis and White’s cultural analysis. Both of them refer to a one-sided literal-mindedness, an
incapacity for self-reflection – which amounts to saying a lack of
psycho-spiritual literacy – in Western culture. Levy points out,
What the ancient people called
demons, Jung calls autonomous complexes. These are split-off parts of the
psyche that can compel one-sidedness, possess a person (or a nation), and
seemingly develop an independent will and quasi-life of their own. Autonomous
complexes can be likened to the rabies virus, which travels to the part of a
person’s brain controlling the whole person.
Levy quotes Jung as saying,
"… the inability to be anything but one-sided, is a sign of
barbarism," thus concurring with White’s insight about Western culture. Levy also emphasizes the
importance of naming the disease:
When we see a demon, we know its
name. Naming it is exorcistic, as it dis-spells the demon's power over us. To
name something is to symbolize it. The word "symbolic," which means
that which unites, is the antidote and antonym to the word
"diabolic," which means that which divides and separates.
I appreciate the names that Levy and White have given our cultural
shadow – "malignant egophrenia" and the "barbaric heart" – for they
expand and enrich my understanding of predator culture. And there are yet other relevant names
for the predatory nature of our cultural shadow. Noam Chomsky calls the leading doctrine of foreign policy
during the United States' period of global dominance the Mafia Principle” (‘I’ll protect you for a price,
and if you don’t comply, you’ll get whacked’). In The Unipolar Moment and the Culture of Imperialism, Chomsky vividly describes the American empire (predator culture) using Edward Said's term 'culture of imperialism.' Chris Hedges calls the American predator culture the 'empire of illusion.' The title of economist James K. Galbraith’s book Predator State refers to the G.W. Bush
administration’s economic policies, which undermined public institutions for private
profit. William Kötke calls predator culture the "culture of looting." Clarissa Pinkola Estés
simply calls it the “overculture” in a September 2009 interview, which implies
‘overbearing culture.’
All these names show a growing understanding of the dark side of our cultural inheritance. However, I still prefer the term ‘predator culture’ for the shadow of
our Western, imperialistic culture, with its one-sided, inflated view of
itself. ‘Predator culture’
captures the dark side of our civilization’s pride in itself, its sense of
entitlement to take what is not given from the Earth, from living human beings
and from the future of all beings. So that is the term I will use throughout the rest of this essay.
Until 2008, I didn’t realize that the predator archetype in the
European shadow had been revealed to Carl Jung himself. Then I discovered depth psychologists
Helene Shulman Lorenz and Mary Watkins, who tell this story in Individuation, Seeing-through, and
Liberation: Depth Psychology and
Colonialism:
In 1925, at the age of 50, Jung visited the Taos Pueblo in New
Mexico. According to Jung (1961), Ochwiay Biano, the chief, shared that
his Pueblo people felt whites were "mad," uneasy and restless, always
wanting something. Jung inquired further about why he thought they were
mad. The chief replied that white people say they think with their heads - a
sign of illness in his tribe. "Why of course," said Jung,
"what do you think with?" Ochwiay Biano indicated his
heart. Jung reported falling into a "long meditation," in which
he grasped for the first time how deeply colonialism had affected his character
and psyche.
In 1961, the year he died, Jung described how he had come to
understand the predatory nature of the European shadow:
What we from our point of view call colonization, missions to the
heathen, spread of civilization, etc., has another face--the face of a bird of
prey seeking with cruel intentness for distant quarry--a face worthy of a race
of pirates and highwaymen. All the eagles and other predatory creatures
that adorn our coats of arms seem to me apt psychological representatives of
our true nature.
This insight was further elaborated forty years later by Lorenz and
Watkins in “Individuation, Seeing-through, and Liberation” and in Silenced Knowings, Forgotten Springs: Paths to Healing in the Wake of
Colonialism, Part 1 and Part 2. Speaking of Americans, Lorenz and Watkins say in “Silenced
Knowings, Part 1”:
To help readers explore these questions, Lorenz and Watkins provide
small group experiential processes with instructions for facilitators at the
end of part 2 of “Silenced Knowings.” These processes are among the “psychologies of liberation” that the
authors describe in their 2008 book Toward Psychologies Of Liberation, which draws on psychoanalysis,
trauma studies, liberation arts, participatory research, and contemporary
cultural work. Indeed, as they
point out, liberating and healing ourselves from the imprint of the predator
culture of colonialism is a multidisciplinary endeavor.
My own healing path was guided and enriched by my studies of
Buddhism, deep ecology, paradigm change, depth psychology, and the practice of
meditation. Along the way I
engaged in many other liberating disciplines and processes. Each was an integral part of an organic
process of de-colonizing my psyche of the habitual thought patterns, beliefs
and assumptions that I inherited from both family and culture. Deep ecology
gives permission and encouragement to ask deeper and deeper questions about our
cultural worldview and its effects on our psyches, relationships, and the
natural world. An understanding of
the process of paradigm change provided an objective, big-picture perspective
on my own process. Decades of
meditation practice gave me the grounding within myself to sort out my own
values and perceptions from my social conditioning, and the courage to let go
of much that no longer served my path.
Unpacking the cultural shadow and ‘de-colonizing’ my psyche of the
myths and assumptions of American culture was a process that provided a needed
perspective on my family wounds, which of course carry the imprint of the
cultural shadow. Having a
perspective on the cultural imprints within my family’s dysfunctions helped me
to forgive my family as well as to individuate (leave the herd). As Estés says, “While much psychology
emphasizes the familial causes of angst in humans, the cultural component
carries as much weight, for culture is the family of the family.”
Depth psychology endeavors to give people enough psycho-spiritual
literacy to understand and overcome the inherited beliefs and inhibiting
loyalties of our families and culture, and the courage (encouragement) to do
so. It does take courage to
question what is taken for ‘normal’ in the predator culture of imperialistic
countries, especially within the American military-industrial-consumer-prison
complex. There are often severe
sanctions against simply questioning what family and culture take for granted.
Each family and each culture has its signs and signals that tell us what is
‘off limits’ and that there are risks of punishment if we dare to even question
what is behind the symbolic doors with the off-limits signs on them.
How many times have we heard the bark and snarl of “How dare you
question!”? Bringing consciousness
to what has been repressed breaks unspoken taboos and threatens one with
shunning by, if not exile from, society and kin. However, that is the risk one must take if one is seeking
psycho-spiritual literacy, truth, wholeness, sacredness, the wellbeing of all
life, and a sustainable future for humanity.
I have come to understand that the closed doors with their off-limits
signs have been placed there by the predator archetype, which is opposed to
consciousness and its further evolution. Therefore, psycho-spiritual evolution depends upon liberating –
revealing and relating with – whatever is hidden on the other side of
those doors. Daring to question is an indispensable practice to initiate
liberation and evolution for the individual and the collective. Estés says, “Questions are the keys
that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.”
The predator archetype is obsessed with domination: power over people
and resources. This is the mindset
of colonialism and imperialism. Predator culture colonizes our psyches with the ‘divide-and-conquer’
mentality, which causes us to perceive ourselves and the world in terms of
dichotomies and hierarchies, the primary frames within the Western worldview
that lead to rankism. When we perceive other people
and other living beings in terms of either/or, up or down, in or out, better
than or less than, we are thinking within the frames set by the predator
culture. When we don’t question
the putative separations between spirit and matter, body and soul, psyche and
culture, humans and animals, and culture and nature, we are necessarily seeing
through the lenses and frames of our inherited worldview.
This worldview and these habits of mind perpetuate the pernicious
legacies of patriarchal authoritarianism – oppression, competition,
exploitation, violence, degradation, disempowerment, and ecological destruction
– that are still with us today. For an inside view of the current, collective incarnation of the
predator archetype, one need only read reports on the world’s most powerful
cabal, the Bilderberg Group, which has met secretly amidst high security every
year since 1954. Research into the
Bilderberg Group has revealed its deep and far-reaching
influence on business and finance, global politics, war and peace, and control
of the world's resources and its money – and that these elites are no less determined to control
the world than they ever were. See Daniel Estulin's
"True Story of The Bilderberg Group" And What They May Be Planning
Now by Stephen
Lendman 6/1/09, and The
Bilderberg Plan for 2009: Remaking the Global Political Economy by Andrew G. Marshall 5/26/09.
Lorenz and Watkins describe the psychology of the predator archetype
in this way, again in “Silenced Knowings, Part 1”:
The colonial self, profiting from
the oppression of others, has created a view of others that justifies
oppression. The other is inferior, impulsive, underdeveloped, unable to
abstract, superstitious. The other needs colonial stewardship to contribute
to their minimal survival. Colonial superiority, intelligence, disciplined work
ethic, logical thought, resourcefulness, scientific thinking elevate the
colonial self and justify control of the "cake." But this colonial
self must also split-off its own inferior, underdeveloped, impulsive, and
vulnerable aspects. This binary splitting, whereby one pole is lauded and the
other degraded, falls into the psyches of both colonizer and colonized,
creating caricatures of identity, and mis-readings of history. Intelligence
becomes severed from feeling, intuition, imagination. Work becomes
disassociated from spontaneity, vitality, generativity.
This ‘binary splitting’ has cast into the shadow a great deal that is
of value to our lives and our world. This, I believe, is the source of the “fear and
spiritual famine” that beset the soul-lives of citizens “in a culture where the
predator rules,” as Estés says.
Predator culture cuts us off from our inner knowing and feeling,
causing us to fear finding out what we have lost, and also to fear daring to
look for it. But what is repressed
are some of the most important aspects of our humanity: our capacities for deep
feelings, mythopoetic imagination, soulfulness and empathy, which are connected
to our instincts and our bullshit detector. We are most susceptible to possession by the predator
archetype when our instincts have been injured and/or disabled, which is
exactly the effect of the predator culture. We have become so afraid of feeling things deeply that, in
our apathy, we can no longer perceive the meaning of what is happening to our
selves and our world.
As I have suggested throughout this essay, I do not believe our
species will evolve sufficiently to establish a sustainable, life-affirming
presence on this Earth unless we assimilate the darkness of the personal and
collective unconscious. In order
to move forward, we appear in need of an initiation or rite of passage that
will increase our capacity for psycho-spiritual literacy and soulfulness. Thomas Moore in his wonderful, wise
book Dark Nights of the Soul tells us that flight from the
dark infantilizes our spirituality because dark nights of the soul are supposed to
initiate us into spiritual adulthood. Such a rite of passage opens us up to deep feelings as we confront inner
and outer darkness – including deep feelings about the realities of loss,
pain, destruction and mortality within our lives and the cosmos. Dharmagaians are increasingly interpreting our dark moment in history as a collective rite
of passage for the human species.
Estés tells us that awakening to the existence and danger of the
predator archetype is an initiation into the “Life/Death/Life” mysteries that
bring maturity and wisdom. Life/Death/Life refers to the understanding of cycles, and that death is necessary for regeneration, new life, in both Nature and the psyche. She
describes an initiation as “a psychic change from one level of knowing and
behavior to another more mature or more energetic level of knowledge and
action.” It is an initiation into
psychic depths, where insight into symbolic meaning resides.
This initiation requires that we actually take in and register the
death and destruction caused by the predator while we’ve been in his thrall
– the knowledge of which has been ‘off limits,’ and which Lorenz and
Watkins refer to as ‘silenced knowings.’ This knowledge awakens feelings, instincts and intuitions that have been
numbed and repressed in the predator culture, and this awakening cures us of
the innocence and naïveté that prevent us from seeing things as they really are.
In Is the Modern Psyche Undergoing a
Rite of Passage?, Richard Tarnas says that “What individuals and
psychologists have long been doing has now become the collective responsibility
of our culture: to make the unconscious conscious.” He focuses on the West, he
says,
because it is the West that has brought forth the political,
technological, intellectual, and spiritual currents that have been most
decisive in constellating the contemporary world situation in all its
problematic complexity. For better or worse, the character of the West has
had a global impact, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Yet
I also address the historical evolution of Western consciousness because, for
most of us reading these words, this development represents our own tradition,
our legacy, our ancestral cultural matrix. Attending carefully and critically
to this tradition fulfills a certain responsibility to the past, to our
ancestors, just as attempting to understand its deeper implications fulfills a
responsibility to the future, to our children.
After reviewing the history of the lopsided evolution of
consciousness in Western civilization, and noting the loss of initiation rites
(and therefore the absence of psycho-spiritual literacy), Tarnas sums up our
moment:
[T]he very absence of initiatory rites of passage in our culture
appears to have effectively created a kind of closed container, a psychic
pressure cooker, an alchemical vessel that is intensifying the archetypal
energies into a collective morphic field of explosive power. Perhaps the fact that our culture does
not provide rituals of initiation is not simply a massive cultural error, but
rather reflects and even impels the immersion of the entire culture in its own
massive collective initiation. Perhaps we, as a civilization and a species, are
undergoing a rite of passage of the most epochal and profound kind, acted out
on the stage of history with, as it were, the cosmos itself as the tribal
matrix of the initiatory drama. I believe that humankind has entered into the most critical stages of
a death-rebirth mystery. In retrospect it seems that the entire path of Western
civilization has taken humankind and the planet on a trajectory of initiatory
transformation, into a state of spiritual alienation, into an encounter with
mortality on a global scale . . . an encounter with mortality that is no longer
individual and personal but rather transpersonal, collective, planetary. . . . It is a collective dark night of
the soul, a deep separation from the community of being, from the cosmos
itself. We are undergoing this rite of passage with virtually no guidance from
wise elders because the wise elders are themselves caught up in the same
crisis. . . . It seems that we are
all entering into something new, a new development, a crisis of accelerated
maturation, a birth, and we cannot really know where it is headed. But Tarnas doesn’t just leave us clueless. He suggests that we can
We need to radically expand our ways of knowing, our epistemology. We
need to move beyond the very narrow empiricism and rationalism that were
characteristic of the Enlightenment and still dominate mainstream science
today. We need to draw on – to use a single encompassing term – the wider
epistemologies of the heart. We need ways of knowing that integrate the
imagination, imaginal and archetypal insight, the intuition, the aesthetic
sensibility, the revelatory or epiphanic capacity, the capacity for kinesthetic
knowing, the capacity for empathic understanding, the capacity to open to the
other, to listen. Indeed, a highly developed sense of empathy is critical if we
are to overcome the subject-object barrier.... I believe we have a choice. . . . We are beginning to see that we play a crucial role in the
universe's unfolding by our own cognitive processes and choices, tied to our
own psychological development. And thus our own inner work – our moral
awareness and responsibility, our confrontation with our shadow, our
integration of the masculine and feminine – plays a critical role in the
universe that we can create. Here depth psychology can serve the further development of that moral
impulse. . . . I believe that it
will take a fundamental moment of remorse--and we know this is an essential
element in the death-rebirth experience – a long moment of remorse, a
sustained weeping and grief, a mourning. . . . It will be a grief for that shadow and that unconsciousness
concerning others that afflicts even the best of us, including our revered
predecessors and teachers. It will take a fundamental metanoia, a
self-overcoming, a radical sacrifice to make this transition. Sometimes when we
speak about the emergence of a new paradigm and a new world view, we focus on
the intellectual dimensions of this shift; these are indeed crucial. But I do
not think we can minimize the central importance of the moral dimension for
this great transformation to take place. [I]t is a matter of experiencing, suffering through, the
struggle of opposites within our consciousness. We must in a sense undergo a
kind of crucifixion, become a vessel through which the consciousness of our
era, and of the future, works out its contradictions, within our minds and
spirits, our bodies and souls. . . . For I believe our task is to develop a
moral and aesthetic imagination deep enough and wide enough to encompass the
contradictions of our time and of our history, the tremendous loss and tragedy
as well as greatness and nobility, an imagination capable of recognizing that
where there is light there is shadow, that out of hubris and fall can come
moral regeneration, out of suffering and death, resurrection and rebirth. I would like to underline what Tarnas says by emphasizing the
relationship between moral awareness and the capacity for deep feelings,
especially the capacity to feel remorse and to mourn. Our culture has very effectively suppressed our natural
human capacity for deep feelings, which activate conscience. In our death-denying, death-defying culture,
we repress grief and despair – the ‘dark emotions’ – out of ego’s
fear that our social persona and acceptability would be compromised if we
‘indulged’ in those emotions. Our
denial of these feelings plays a large part in our denial of the atrocities and
the crises caused by the predator culture. If we did not repress fear, grief and despair, we would not
be able to deny the dangers we are facing as a species and a planet at this
time.
I believe, with Tarnas and Octavio Paz, whom he quotes, that
"the examination of conscience, and the remorse that accompanies it . . .
is the single most powerful remedy against the ills of our
civilization." I experienced
this during the mourning rituals that are conducted within the Council of All Beings, a deep ecological retreat
designed by John Seed and Joanna Macy to create a safe container for deep
feelings that are repressed in our culture. The expression of these feelings can lead to a passionate
commitment to action on behalf of our world.
Echoing Tarnas on our collective initiation, Albert Villoldo quotes
the Inkan shaman elders of Peru, with whom he works, describing our time of initiation from a
southern indigenous perspective:
[T]his is a time of initiation, a time of initiation for humanity. .
. . [T]hose who refuse to go through this great initiation are going to live
increasingly chaotic lives. Those who do go through this initiation, where they
face the death of the old and a resurrection into who they are becoming . . .
will experience the bliss and the light of the fifth sun . . . of the radiant
one. [T]his is a time of tremendous testing, of personal testing for all
of us, and . . . it’s a time where all that has resided in the realm of the
shadow, in our own unhealed parts of ourselves, is rising to the surface and
clamoring for attention. It . . . confronts us with that which remains unhealed
within us. [W]e’re in the middle of the initiation, we’re in the dark night of
the soul, collectively, before the coming of the new dawn. And while it’s
comforting knowing that the dawn is coming, you cannot sit back and channel
surf until it gets here. It’s a time that requires an evaluation of all that we
take for granted, a dismissing and clearing of dated belief structures that
keep us in suffering, that keep us bound to scarcity and to violence towards
ourselves and towards others. There is no benefit for any of us in cursing the dark – or
predator culture – unless we make a conscious effort to transform the
psychic structures that have been conditioned into us as individuals, families
and societies by millennia of predator culture. This begins with recognizing the imprint of the predator in
our psyches, families and societies, and the danger that imprint poses to our
species and our world, the ecosphere. This recognition activates our conscience, which gives us the motivation
to replace that imprint, those structures, with healthy, creative, transparent
structures and behaviors.
Ironically, many of the characteristics that we deny in ourselves
— that end up in the shadow – are not necessarily or inherently
‘bad.’ The problem with the contents of the shadow is that they manifest in
perverse ways because they are split off and repressed – that is, disassociated and
un-integrated and therefore dysfunctional. This is our collective psychic wound. In order to be healed,
it must be recognized. Until we do
that, we will continue to project onto others what we cannot acknowledge within
ourselves, and will continue to both look for saviors and demonize others
– either of which can lead to violence and warfare. Meanwhile, shadow
elements will continue to haunt us, trying to get our attention with obsessive
and compulsive behaviors. As
Villoldo says, “All that has resided in the realm of the shadow, in our own
unhealed parts of ourselves, is rising to the surface and clamoring for
attention.”
What a predator culture represses are the qualities and elements of
the human spirit that oppose
it – and that have value for psycho-spiritual evolution: creativity, curiosity, inquisitiveness,
imagination, spunkiness, feistiness, courage, insight, animistic sensitivity,
natural intelligence – all kinds of unrealized talents and potentials. Martin Prechtel, a shaman in the Mayan
tradition, calls these qualities and energies ‘the natural indigenosity of the
human spirit.’ This is what the
predator culture has repressed in order to dominate the Earth and the humans
who stood in its way – particularly the indigenous people. (See Indigenous Wisdom.)
Although what we hide in the
shadows of the psyche can be destructive when repressed, those very same
aspects of ourselves that we are afraid to face – because they threaten our
ego identities or are taboo in our social circles – can become allies
when brought to consciousness. In
fact, those shadow parts of ourselves often contain healing powers and gifts
when clarified in consciousness.
In the United States it has become common for people to call those
unhealed parts of themselves that clamor for attention ‘demons.’ We say, ‘My food addiction demon . . .
,’ or ‘My negativity and self-doubt demon. . . ,’ or ‘My demons are getting the
better of me.’
Interestingly, help for liberating the shadow is available from the
Buddhadharma in the form of a practice that was originated by an 11th century Tibetan woman and resurrected by a contemporary American woman, the
dharma teacher Tsultrim Allione. Allione calls the practice “Feeding Your Demons,”and says,
Isn't egocentricity, whether on a personal
or collective level, the real demon? Fears, obsessions, addictions
are all parts of ourselves that have become “demonic” by being split off,
disowned, and battled against. When you try to flee from your demons, they
pursue you. By struggling with them, you become weaker and may even succumb to
them completely. . . . We need to recognize the futility of this struggle and
begin to accept and even love those parts of ourselves.
To liberate the shadow we need to engage what Tarnas speaks of as
“the capacity for empathic understanding, the capacity to open to the other, to
listen.” We ‘feed the demon’
– something that just won’t leave you alone – by sitting down,
visualizing and formally dialoguing with a demon and asking what it wants and
what it needs. Then you visualize
giving it what it needs until it is satisfied. Sometimes it is easy, and sometimes it takes repeated
dialogues to gain insight into a particular demon’s demands. But patient and sincere inquiry
allows the demon to relax and transform into an ally – a new inner strength
– that can help one to evolve further, and potentially contribute to
collective evolution.
‘Feeding our demons’ is basically a process of fearless negotiation
and generosity on a spiritual level. This fearlessness can be cultivated in meditation when we learn to see
through and past our fears by abiding with them, sitting through them, until we
enter a grounded space of wellbeing. In the space of wellbeing, we become confident and resilient enough to
allow our shadows to come out of the closet and present their case. One can easily see how this also
applies to the process of relating and negotiating with the ‘terrorists’
– the dark ‘others’ in the world who have been marginalized and enraged
by the predator culture.
In Meeting The Other Within Paul Levy puts it this way:
What is happening within us, the microcosm, is a reflection of the
same process that is happening collectively, in the macrocosm. Just like the
dark other within ourselves is the very figure that can awaken us to a greater
and more comprehensive state of being, the darkness that is playing out on the
world stage can potentially activate the light of consciousness in our species,
thus serving as a catalyst for collective evolution. Becoming intimately
acquainted with the dark other within us empowers us to relate with and
effectively deal with the darkness in the outer world.
This is exemplified by the work of Marshall Rosenberg, the originator
of Nonviolent Communication (NVC), who has mediated in many of
the most violent conflicts in the world. Rosenberg has developed a process of compassionate communication that
focuses on feelings and needs within oneself and within others. And he identifies the source of
conflict and violence to be the social conditioning we receive in what I am
calling predator culture. He says
that “life-alienating communication has deep philosophical and political
roots”:
Most of us grew up speaking a language that encourages us to label,
compare, demand, and pronounce judgments rather than to be aware of what we are
feeling and needing. I believe
that life-alienating communication is rooted in views of human nature that have
exerted their influence for several centuries. These views stress humans’ innate evil and deficiency, and a
need for education to control our inherently undesirable nature. Such education often leaves us
questioning whether there is something wrong with whatever feelings and needs
we may be experiencing. We learn
early to cut ourselves off from what’s going on within ourselves. Life-alienating communication both stems from and supports
hierarchical or domination societies, where large populations are controlled by
a small number of individuals to those individuals’ own benefit. It would be in the interest of kings,
czars, nobles, and so forth that the masses be educated in a way that renders
them slavelike in mentality. The
language of wrongness, should, and have to is perfectly suited for this purpose: the more people are
trained to think in terms of moralistic judgments that imply wrongness and
badness, the more they are being trained to look outside themselves — to
outside authorities — for the definition of what constitutes right, wrong, good,
and bad. When we are in contact
with our feelings and needs, we humans no longer make good slaves and
underlings. In other words, empathic or compassionate communication that focuses
on feelings and needs within ourselves and within others is empowering. We are empowered by recognizing and expressing our
feelings and needs! If we are
willing to see the ‘dark other’ as an equal and allow it to express itself, the
dark other comes out of hiding, ceases to oppose and sabotage us, and can
become an ally, a partner. It
requires respect and trust rather than repression. Developing trust is a lot easier said than done, of course,
which is why training is necessary to truly practice nonviolent communication. The training involves both inner
work— to identify one’s own feelings and needs as well as to empathically
intuit others’ feelings and needs — and group work in which people practice
NCV with each other.
The Predator vs. the Conscience of the Whole
But what about the predator archetype? Can it be negotiated with and turned into an ally? Will listening and empathic
understanding work with the predator? Dr. Estés advises against empathy or compassion in dealing with the
predator archetype because it is seeking absolute power. It wants to be equal or superior to God
and Nature. It covets everything
for itself and cares nothing about the cost to others. Since its modus operandi is deceit and trickery,
it cannot be trusted. It is very
primitive and has no conscience.
Although Estés doesn’t say so, I believe the predator archetype
resides in the reptilian brain, the oldest part of the triune human brain,
which predates the limbic or mammalian brain where empathy and compassion
developed. You can’t make friends
with or tame a crocodile like you can a wolf. The predator archetype is a pernicious form of egocentricity
and a murderous antagonist. If you
give it any power, it will use it against you. Once we are conscious of its presence and its nature, we
cannot afford to give it mercy, forgive it or let it get away with
anything. Rather, Estés says, for
our own sakes, we need to contain and dismantle it.
We counter and dismantle the predator with soulful truths –
what Gandhi called satyagraha or truth force, which he used to counter and defeat
British imperialism in India. We
disempower the predator by confronting it with the truth of what it’s done,
what it’s taken, holding it accountable, turning our backs on it, refusing to
play its game, and removing our energy from it. We achieve justice not through revenge but through
reclaiming the powers of insight and autonomy that the predator has stolen from
us – our ‘silenced knowings.’ Then we use what we have learned from this initiation for visionary
tasks in the world.
The conviction I gained from my own dark night of the soul, which led
to my study of predator culture, is that humans will continue to be susceptible
to falling into the default mode of the predator (the reptilian brain) until we
regain allegiance with the conscience of the whole. This conscience cares for the whole of life and understands
that the health and wellbeing of the larger living system of Earth transcends
the concerns or consciences of human subsystems. I believe that human sanity and sustainability in the
coming centuries of challenge will depend upon honoring and adhering to this
conscience, which we could also call the ecocentric conscience.
All human systems are subsystems of the whole, integral ecosphere of
Earth, in which there are no divisions or partitions. Predator culture manipulates the anthropocentric consciences
of human subsystems by conjuring up enemies, keeping people in fear, and
constantly reinforcing the perceived need to protect our families, clans,
ethnic groups, social classes, religions, regions, and nations from threats by
others. By manipulating our
inherited loyalties, predator culture divides and conquers us.
The conscience of the whole is what Joseph Chilton Pearce calls “the intelligence of the
heart,” which is a transpersonal, universal, impersonal type of intelligence
– the intelligence of the whole system. He contrasts the intelligence of the heart with the individual
intellect of the brain, and says that the success of the human is in the
balance between the universal and the individual, the heart and the head. All the problems in the world, he says,
are the result of cutting the cerebral intellect off from the intelligence of
the heart.
This echoes what Ochwiay Biano told Jung about why the Pueblo people
thought white people were mad – because white people think with their
heads and not with their hearts. The Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert said the same thing: they know and think with their hearts, and think white people are crazy because we think with our heads. It also echoes what Tarnas says about the need to draw upon “the wider
epistemologies of the heart, . . . ways of knowing that integrate the
imagination, imaginal and archetypal insight, the intuition, the aesthetic
sensibility, . . . the capacity for empathic understanding,” etc.
The conscience of the whole is what our indigenous ancestors honored
with the intelligence of the heart. This intelligence was repressed in Western predator culture during its
centuries of persecuting our indigenous human spirit and those who embodied
it, and this repression continues today in educational systems and other mainstream
institutions. The conscience of
the whole was replaced by the fragmented, dualistic, hierarchical social
conscience of our civilization. Predator culture encourages us to forget that the interests of the
subsystems – whether an individual, family, clan, tribe, corporation,
nation or species – cannot be protected at the expense of the larger systems of
which they are a part and upon which they depend. Only when this is understood and assimilated collectively
will humans stop treating parts of the fabric of life – such as other
humans, other species and ecosystems – as if they are expendable. Only then will we become sustainable
members of the Earth community.
The good news is that, according to Pearce, an activated intelligence
of the heart can change the brain’s structure, its alignment and
integration. He says that if we
can bring intellect back into alignment with the intelligence of the heart,
which is a biological intelligence, this will bring our relations with each other and with the Earth back
into balance. It is perhaps with
the intuition of this possibility that group processes, in which people are
encouraged to speak from the heart, are proliferating.
Group
Process: Evolving
Collective Intelligence
The transformation of human consciousness and culture towards
allegiance with the conscience of the whole – an ecocentric ethic –
will require what Joanna Macy calls a “holonic shift.” In The Holonic Shift and How to Take
Part in It, she says:
All living systems--be they organic like a cell or human body, or
supra-organic like a society or ecosystem--are holons. That means they have a
dual nature: As both systems and subsystems, they are wholes in
themselves and, simultaneously, integral parts of larger wholes. . . . From the systems perspective, mind or consciousness arises by virtue
of feedback loops that permit living systems to self-correct, adapt and evolve.
Self-reflexive consciousness seems to emerge only at the level of humans and
some other large-brained mammals. Here the system's internal complexity is so
great that it can no longer meet its needs by trial and error. It needs to
evolve another level of awareness in order to weigh different courses of
action; it needs, in other words, to make choices. Decision-making brings about
self-reflexivity. Self-reflexive consciousness does not characterize the next holonic
level, the level of social systems. . . . The locus of decision-making remains
within the individual, susceptible to all the vagaries of what that individual
considers to be of "self-interest". Yet might not survival pressures
engender a collective level of self-interest in choice-making--in other words
self-reflexivity on the next holonic level? Fearful of fascism, we might reject any idea of collective
consciousness. It is important, therefore, to remember that self-organization
of open systems requires diversity of parts. A monolith of uniformity has no
internal intelligence. Healthy social systems require a plurality of
views and the free circulation of information. The holonic shift does not
sacrifice, but instead requires, the uniqueness of each part, the distinctiveness
of its functioning and its perspective. It would seem that such a holonic shift is necessary for our
survival. Since Earth's carrying capacity is limited, and since the ecosystems
supporting us are threatened with collapse, we must learn to think together in
an integrated, synergistic fashion, rather than in fragmented and competitive
ways. Present modes of collective decision-making, like the ballot-box or
consensus circles, are simply too corruptible and too slow for the swift,
responsive self-guidance that we as societies need now. Macy suggests twelve attitudes and behaviors that can contribute to
But Macy isn’t the only one working in this direction. There are many people who sense the
importance and urgency of ‘changing the paradigm’ through collective processes
that increase collective intelligence. Those who interest me have been experimenting for decades with group
processes based on the self-organization of living systems for this purpose.
The way I see it is that the pernicious social structures of predator
culture will not change unless the psychic structures implanted and reinforced
in us by the predator culture change. At the same time, as social animals, the inner work of healing and
changing our individual psychic structures can only take us so far until we
heal our relational patterns and change our social structures. And that occurs through learning ways
to relate consciously with each other – ways that short-circuit the
habitual patterns of predator culture and reset our immature default settings. Marshall Rosenberg’s nonviolent
communication practices go to the heart of the matter, but there are many other
initiatives that contribute to increasing collective intelligence.
Many of these ‘new ways’ of relating to one another are actually old
ways – they are the ways that humans deliberated and made decisions
together before the predator culture traumatized and coerced us into
patriarchal, authoritarian, hierarchical command-and-control structures that
made us alienated, obtuse, cowardly and cruel.
The old way of making collective decisions and setting a sustainable
collective course was to sit down and listen to each other, allowing all our
knowings and ways of knowing to be expressed and considered. Before the predator culture of Western
civilization colonized our psyches, we used to think with our hearts for the
sake of our childrens’ childrens’ children, and even for the next seven
generations. We used to
collectively think with our hearts and with the conscience of the whole, and that
gave us a good bullshit detector, the best defense against the predator. We still have those capacities, but
they need to be regenerated and reinforced through practice.
Deep, empathic listening is how we recover the ‘other ways of
knowing’ within our psyches that Tarnas describes. We hear and align ourselves with the conscience of the whole
through deep listening to our inner knowings and feelings, to other humans, and
to the messages of the natural world. The practice of listening is greatly enhanced by silencing the voice of
the culture that invades our private homes through radio and television with
its inane melodramas, propaganda and noxious commercials, and our public spaces
through trance-inducing music, images and spoken messages aimed at promoting
consumerism. When we let there be silence and listen, we give our psyches
permission and space to allow silenced knowings and other ways of knowing to
surface.
As I said earlier in this essay, the practice of mindfulness
meditation is an effective way to become an ‘open system’ that can receive
feedback. Thus, meditation becomes
an open invitation for other ways of knowing and silenced knowings to arise in
consciousness and expand awareness. At the same time, it is also a way to self-reflectively ‘put a leash’ on
the reptilian brain and the predator archetype. This inner work prepares us to hear the voices of silenced
knowings in other individuals and groups. Whether dialoguing with the inner
‘other’ or the outer ‘other,’ deep listening is the essential practice. But just as it takes training and
discipline for this to occur in meditation, it also takes training and
discipline for it to occur in groups of people.
By some mysterious process, all over the world, people at the
grassroots are seeking new forms and processes for reconnecting, deliberating
about the future, and taking action. Since we lack elders to guide us through this initiation, as Tarnas
observed, and since global leaders have not prepared us for the converging
crises, people have been turning to one another.
Paul Hawken has helpfully catalogued this unnamable grassroots
movement, which focuses on social justice and ecological sustainability, in his
book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest
Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the
World. He believes we are in the midst of a
spontaneous, decentralized, world-changing emergence of activist groups that
are responding organically to the recognition that environmental problems are
social-justice problems, and he compares this gathering of forces to the human
immune system. It is as if this
enormous citizens’ movement of thousands, if not millions, of groups is acting
as the Earth’s immune system against tyranny and ecological destruction.
Within this larger movement is a
spontaneous, decentralized movement that seeks methods to dialogue across the
political, economic and cultural divisions that have been imposed by the
predator culture. Dialogue is the way we learn from each other by listening, hearing, seeing and considering the 'other side.' It is the process by which we can overcome the one-sidedness of our social conditioning. The dialogue
movement takes many forms, but they all share in common an increasing awareness that,
collectively, we need to listen to the voices that have been marginalized or
banished within our psyches and societies.
Ecopsychologist Craig Chalquist, in his review of Toward Psychologies of Liberation,
writes, "A key ingredient in liberatory work is
dialog: the invitation of all voices to the table. Psychologies of liberation
create ‘public homeplaces’ where normally marginalized voices and visions can
be shared safely in ongoing conversations that create community. These dialogs
also foster the ‘critical consciousness’ to break through the internalized
fatalisms of oppressive social conditions and begin to entertain a conscious
desire for new ways to live humanely together. Such conversational enclaves
also open spaces for practicing new roles that give the performer a regenerated
sense of agency and personal efficacy."
Chalquist concludes this review with his
vision of the book’s relevance:
This statement contextualizes the rise of the movements for
dialogue. Even while the predator
culture continues to impose its dualistic, polarizing structures on the world,
movements at the grassroots are seeking to heal the divisions through truth
telling in order to bring people together for the common good. In doing so, they are reclaiming their
power from the predator culture and revealing its 'irrelevance and entropy.'
Among people concerned with the evolution of humanity toward a
healthier, more sustainable state than 500 years of predatory colonialism and
8,000 years of imperialistic civilizations have left us in, the practice of
dialogue is recognized as a co-creative path forward. Taking lessons from depth psychology, indigenous wisdom,
Taoism, Buddhism, living systems theory, ecology, evolution, and the new
cosmology, Dharmagaians in many fields and walks of life have been creating and
exploring processes by which humans may co-evolve collective intelligence
together. These group processes
hold the potential for a holonic shift in our species.
Many of these efforts involve relatively small-group, decentralized
processes that work with the energies and issues that are brought by the people
who show up. An essential element
is to create a safe container in which participants feel inspired to drop
conditioned inhibitions and other habitual patterns, and speak the truth of
their feelings, needs and insights. Therefore, it is of great help to have an experienced and insightful
facilitator – at least at the beginning, until the participants ‘get it’
enough to rotate facilitation for the benefit of the whole group.
In their excellent article on group process, We Can Survive But Can We Communicate?, Carolyn Baker and Sally Erickson
explain the role of the facilitator:
There are principles that underlie effective group interaction. It
helps immeasurably to have one or two strong facilitators present who are
familiar with the inner terrain a group must travel to develop trust and to
transcend differences. The process is rarely smooth. Facilitators
are different from what we generally think of as leaders. Facilitators
help the group, as a whole, move into shared wisdom. This is very
different from a group that accepts and follows the wisdom or philosophy of a
charismatic leader or the dictates of an authoritarian leader. Rather,
this kind of community may be said to be "a group of leaders."
Each person is regarded as someone who brings a unique set of gifts,
experiences, skills, and insights. Strong facilitators help empower
individuals to share those individual qualities for the greater good of the
group. The optimal condition for collective intelligence to emerge within
group work is created when all participants have been practicing inner dialogue
work, self-examination and self-questioning. This inner work brings enough
awareness of personal shadows, assumptions, and hot buttons that participants
can be relatively open, self-reflective, and non-reactive. Individuals who do inner work tend to
be more transparent and free of hidden agendas when doing group work, so that
there is less need for experienced facilitators.The group can rotate facilitation among members when each
focuses on co-creating the space for collective intelligence to emerge. But even when a participant has a high level of self-awareness, it still takes practice in a group context to speak from the heart without calculation or fear of judgment. To create a safe container, participants need to make and maintain agreements about how they will conduct themselves. For example, these are agreements that have enabled circle practices that I've participated in to achieve a deeper level of group cohesiveness, awareness and intelligence:
• we regard one another
respectfully as peers or colleagues, equal in value
• we speak in “I”
messages, from our hearts and our own experience
• we endeavor to
recognize, disclose and suspend our assumptions
• we listen, inquire and
consider without judgment
• we do not interrupt or
engage in ‘cross-talk‘ (do not challenge or debate each other)
• we maintain the
confidentiality of what is said within the group
• we each take
responsibility for the safety and well being of the whole group
• we are mindful not to
dominate the dialogue or make ourselves the center of attention
• we do not try to use
the group for personal therapy, but take responsibility for our own states of mind
When a group has established safety and trust among themselves, what
emerges can then come from the open, spacious, egoless center of the group as
an offering of insight and creativity for the benefit of the whole. It is ‘work’ in the sense of practice. It takes self-discipline and repeated experiences to build
the capacity to listen and learn from others in a group context,
self-reflectively and on the spot.
One innovative program that synthesizes several dialogical practices
is The Art of Hosting:
The basic practice
for nurturing collective intelligence in groups is to sit in a circle among people
we regard as equal in value for group work. We see each others’ faces, listen to each others’ stories,
insights and ideas, speak from the heart, and take responsibility for the
safety and wellbeing of the whole group. These are the beginning steps towards restructuring social relations in
non-hierarchical ways that open the space for the conscience of the whole to
emerge. (For more on group
process, see Psycho-Spiritual Links.)
Conclusion: Metamorphosis of the Gods?
Is it going to take a metamorphosis of the gods for humanity to make
a holonic shift in alignment with the conscience of the whole? This is what C.G. Jung suggests in the
quote at the beginning of this essay:
A mood of universal destruction and renewal...has set its mark on our
age. This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially, and
philosophically. We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos—the
right moment—for a "metamorphosis of the gods," of the
fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is
certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious
human within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account
of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through
the might of its own technology and science.... So much is at stake and so much
depends on the psychological constitution of the modern human.
Until I saw Princess Mononoke,
the Japanese animated feature
film by Hayao Miyazaki, I was mystified by Jung’s
statement. Although Princess Mononoke is set in medieval Japan, its dramatic
story and mythopoetic images provide relevant archetypal insight into our moment
in history and what a metamorphosis of the gods might look like. Though I cannot claim to have
comprehended what Jung meant by a “metamorphosis of the gods” or his statement
that “the unconscious human within us … is changing,” I have gleaned the following
clues from Princess Mononoke.
The film opens with views of thickly forested mountains draped in
clouds, with a narrative spoken slowly by a kindly male voice that sets the
tone for the action in the film:
In ancient times the land lay covered in forests, where from ages
long past dwelt the spirits of the gods. Back then man and beast lived in harmony, but as time went by most of
the great forests were destroyed. Those that remained were guarded by gigantic beasts who owed their
allegiance to the great Forest Spirit, for those were the days of gods and of
demons.
Ashitaka is the protagonist and the first character we meet. He represents a peacemaker between
humans and Nature. His allegiance
is with the conscience of the whole. He doesn’t take sides and doesn’t give up on either humans or
Nature. He represents the
indigenous human, to whom all life is sentient and interdependent. He relates with all life forms as if
they have feelings and are intelligent, and therefore must be honored and
respected. His best friend is his
wise and trusty steed, a red elk, Yakkul. Ashitaka speaks to and is understood by all creatures, and in his
village he goes about barefooted, in contact with the Earth.
His people, the Emishi, are the last remnants of their
ethnic group, which is Caucasian and preceded the oriental Japanese. They live secluded in the far East of
Japan and practice the ‘old ways’ of shamanism, but are dying out due to
isolation and repeated attacks by the imperial Japanese state, a predator
culture. The Emishi are warriors
skilled in archery and sword fighting, whose guerrilla tactics kept the Japanese
from taking them over for centuries.
Ashitaka is a prince in his tribe and expected to become its
leader. However, when a demon
monster threatens his village, he is forced to engage with it. This demonic creature is huge, fierce,
powerful, and determined. Ashitaka
implores the demon, very respectfully, to leave his village in peace, but it is
not to be dissuaded. It is full of
disdainful hatred towards humans. When its slimy, dark tentacles reach out and grab Ashitaka’s right arm,
burning it, Ashitaka kills it with an arrow in its forehead (the third
eye).
The Wise Woman of the village arrives and bows to the dying demon
that is revealed to be Nago, the former god of the wild boars, as its tentacles
melt away from its body. She
promises him proper burial rites, but he tells the humans he wants them to
suffer as he has suffered. Later
the Wise Woman does a divination with stones and sees that the boar god came
from far to the West. He was
driven mad by a poison within him that consumed his heart and flesh. This turned him into a demon monster
full of hatred and rage. She
tells Ashitaka that the burn on his arm is a curse that will spread throughout
his entire body, causing him great pain, and will eventually kill him. There is no remedy. He must leave the village.
However, Wise Woman tells Ashitaka, although he cannot change his
fate, he can rise to meet it. She
shows him an iron ball that was found in the boar’s body and was the cause of
his pain and madness. This iron
ball turned him into a demon. She
says, “There is evil at work in the land to the West, Prince Ashitaka. It’s your fate to go there and see what
you can see with eyes unclouded by hate. You may find a way to lift the curse.”
So Ashitaka’s fate is to leave the tribe, rather than become its
leader. In leaving, he becomes
‘dead’ to them and can never return. His quest is to go to the West in order to discover the cause of the
poison that is inflaming hatred there. He takes his clear-seeing eyes, free of hatred, to the outer world in
order to understand and possibly dispel the curse that has befallen him.
All of this information is given within the first ten minutes of the
film, and sets the stage for the action that follows in the next two
hours. This is the beginning of a
harsh rite of passage for Ashitaka, an initiation into the realities of the
predator archetypes waging war in the forests to the West. As Clarissa Pinkola Estés has told us,
awakening to the existence and danger of the predator archetype is an initiation
into the “Life/Death/Life” mysteries that bring maturity and wisdom.
As Ashitaka travels West he meets different archetypal characters and
the factions that are warring with each other: Samurai acting on behalf of the
emperor and attacking villagers; Jigo, a government agent posing as a monk; the
people of Irontown led by Lady Eboshi; San, the wolf girl, with the wolf god
Moro and her two sons; the Kodama or ephemeral tree spirits who lead Ashitaka
through the old-growth forest where ordinary humans fear to go; the boar and
ape clans who, as well as the wolves, fight the humans to protect the forest;
and the great, primordial, divine Forest Spirit.
The Forest
Spirit is a magical creature who changes form from day to night and back
again at dawn. During the day it
is a large, elegant stag-like creature with many antlers, bird-like feet, and a
kind face. As he walks, flowers
bloom in his footprints and then quickly wither and die. He gives life and takes it away, heals
wounds with a kiss, and also walks on water.
At night the Spirit of the Forest transforms into the enormous,
transparent Nightwalker,
a towering god in humanoid form that appears to be made of stars. It has a long, pointed face and fluid
tentacles running down its back. The tree spirits, the Kodama, gather in the tops of trees, twirling
their heads and making clicking sounds to pay reverent homage to the
Nightwalker as he strides across the mountains.
San is “Princess Mononoke.” In the film, mononoke refers to the guardian spirits
of the forest, so San is the princess of the guardian spirits. She is human but was raised by the wise
wolf god Moro and, like the wolves, she is a protector of the Spirit of the Forest. She mediates between the competing
interests of the different powerful ‘tribes’ or clans: the apes, boars, and
wolves. But she hates humans for
destroying the forest habitat of all the wild creatures. She is a fierce, feral, instinctual
creature who does not fear death.
San’s greatest enemy is the Lady Eboshi, a clever industrialist who has
brought guns to the forest to kill off, with lethal force, the forest gods who
resist the humans clearing the forest. Eboshi is the leader of Irontown, which includes a fortress surrounding
dwellings and a huge iron smelter. Her dream is to clear-cut the forest to make it safe for humans to mine
the ore. The trees are the fuel
for the iron smelter. Eboshi is the one who shot the ball of iron into Nago,
the boar god, which turned him into a demon. She also shot Moro, the wolf god and San’s ‘mother,’ who is
now slowly dying. However, Moro is
not becoming a demon, she says, because she does not fear death.
Lady Eboshi has other enemies besides the animal gods and their
populous avenging clans of the forest. The Samurai are also a threat to Irontown. Eboshi has formed an uneasy alliance with Jigo, the
government agent, who has made a deal with her: his hunters will track the Forest Spirit so that she can
shoot off its head. If the Spirit
of the Forest is killed, she thinks, then the forest gods will be defeated and
she’ll be free to clear the forest for her people. Jigo’s interest is in the gold that the Japanese emperor
offered to anyone who would bring him the head of the Forest Spirit, which is
reputed to grant eternal youth and immortality. Eboshi doesn’t trust the trickster Jigo, but can’t kill the
Forest Spirit without him, and Jigo can’t get its head without Eboshi and her
gun.
So there are three warring factions: the animals and gods of the forest against humans; Lady
Eboshi against the forest gods and animals, and against the imperial armies of
Samurai; and the Samurai against human settlements that resist imperial
authority, such as Irontown.
The only characters in Princess Mononoke who are not at war are
Ashitaka, Yakkul, and the Forest Spirit. The Spirit of the Forest is a benign, primordial creature with the power
of Life and Death inseparable. He
heals a fatal gunshot wound in Ashitaka’s chest, but doesn’t heal his
curse. Throughout the film,
Ashitaka – who comes from a culture that lives in peace with Nature, and
bows to Nature – keeps imploring, “Why can’t humans and the forest live
in peace together? Why can’t the
fighting stop now?”
In answer, Moro, the wolf god, tells him, “The humans are gathering
for the final battle. The flames
of their guns will burn us all.”
In other words, the humans who are at war are possessed by the
predator archetype that defies Nature and the gods. Determined to dominate and get what they want at any cost,
each human faction thinks its own cause is just and right. At one point, Jigo expresses the
conventional view in the predator culture: “Look, everybody wants everything. That’s the way the world is. But I might actually get it.” The possibility that it might get everything it wants is
what drives the natural predator of the psyche in humans. When the predator is in power in a society, it makes promises that we might get everything we want if we just do what it tells us. What the predator tells us to do, of course, is always immoral because it causes division and conflict, and violates the conscience of the whole. In the consumer culture created by predatory capitalism, the illusion that we can get everything we want is fed by media focus on glamorous movie, sports and corporate celebrities, who seem to get everything they want: beauty, romance, money and power. Thus the predator culture entrains the predator archetype in the collective unconscious and leads masses of people by the nose into the slaughter pen. In the Mononoke film, this what happens to the boars.
The animal factions are instinctual nature fighting to live and
preserve their natural habitat. The
animals are ‘natural predators,’ but they do not ‘want everything’ – they
want only to live. However, like
the humans, the animals are protecting the interests of their subsystems, their
clans, at the expense of the greater living system that includes humans. Thus each warring faction has hatred
for those who oppose it, and wishes to destroy its enemies. None except Ashitaka sees the
possibility for peace within an interdependent whole. Only he can see with eyes unclouded by hatred.
From an archetypal perspective, it is likely that ‘gods’ and ‘demons’
exist only in the collective unconscious of humans. Whether animals perceive ‘gods’ in the way humans do is
unlikely but unknowable. However,
we do know that humans project gods and demons onto powerful forces that we
admire and/or fear within the human and natural worlds. We’ve been doing it throughout human
history. We create ‘demons’ with
hatred towards the gods/archetypes that we cannot acknowledge within ourselves
and thus project onto others. We
create enemies in the outer world with the violence we do to those we perceive
as embodiments of the demons that we ourselves project.
It would be interesting to explore the relationship between the
projection of god/demon archetypes and post-traumatic stress disorder. Both phenomena seem to be common in predator cultures, but I
leave the study of the relationship between them to professional psychologists.
In the Princess Mononoke film, when powerful animals are shot by humans, the pain drives them mad and they become ‘demons’ seeking
revenge. When the Forest Spirit’s
head is shot off by Eboshi in the midst of its transformation into the
Nightwalker, its magical, transparent, starry body turns into a demonic,
amorphous tar-like sludge that spreads and kills everything it touches as it
seeks to find its head, its order-making intelligence. Only humans can return the Forest
Spirit’s head, and when Ashitaka and San return its head, Ashitaka’s curse is
healed. Ashitaka, the indigenous
human, and San, the feral human, return to the god of Nature its intelligence,
turning the demon back into a god.
However, as the Nightwalker stands up with its head on, the first
rays of the rising sun hit it before it can transform back into its daytime
manifestation as the Forest Spirit. It collapses and falls head first into the lake next to Irontown. Its enormous body falls across the
town, destroying the fortress and its ironworks in a tremendous explosion of
fire and wind that leaves nothing intact. A short time later the mountains all around, which have been denuded by
the demonic sludge, begin to turn green, with grasses, flowers and tree
saplings sprouting up everywhere.
San laments, “Even if all the trees return, it won’t be his forest anymore. The great Forest
Spirit is dead now.”
Ashitaka responds, “Never! He’s life itself. He’s not
dead, San, he’s here right now, trying to tell us something – that it’s
time for both of us to live.” He
tells San, who cannot forgive humans for what they’ve done, to return to the
regenerating forest with her two wolf brothers. He will stay and help rebuild Irontown, but he and Yakkul
will come to visit her as often as they can. Like Ashitaka and San, Yakkul and the wolves are now friends
and allies.
What about the other humans?
After Lady Eboshi blows the head off of the Forest Spirit and tosses
it to Jigo, the head of the dying wolf god Moro, which has been detached by the
sludge, flies to Eboshi and bites off her right arm. To bite off Eboshi’s head was Moro’s dying wish, but she
only manages to bite off her arm.
Ashitaka carries Eboshi to an island in the forest pond that is safe
from the sludge for the moment, where San awaits. San wants to kill Eboshi, but Ashitaka tells her, “Your
claim has been avenged. Your
mother saw to that.” The implication is that Eboshi has been redeemed by losing
her arm to Moro.
Eboshi’s men bring her across the lake on the shore of Irontown on a
wooden raft and find other townspeople in the lake where they took refuge from
the sludge that had inundated the town. Many of the inhabitants of Irontown have been killed by the sludge, but
those in the lake observe what happens to the Forest Spirit and to
Irontown. Watching the hills grow
green, one of the men says, “Huh, I didn’t know Forest Spirit made flowers
grow,” indicating how little ecological literacy these people had.
After Eboshi and her people are back on land, where greenery is fast
taking over the ruins of Irontown, she says, “Amazing – the wolf and that
crazy little wolf girl helped save us all. . . . Ashitaka! Can
someone find him? I need to thank
him. We’re going to start all over
again. This time we’ll build a
better town.”
The suggestion is that now Eboshi and Irontown will have the
clear-seeing, holistic wisdom of the indigenous Ashitaka to guide them in
rebuilding a humbler human settlement that is more in harmony with the natural
world.
As for Jigo, his inner predator seems also to have been chastened, if
not defeated. At the very end,
Jigo gets the last human word: “Well, I give up. Can’t win
against fools.”
Is this something like what Jung foresaw as the ‘metamorphosis of the
gods’? Can the ‘unconscious human’
within us change enough – become conscious enough – to withdraw its
projections of gods and demons? Can
we ‘rise to the occasion’ and honor Nature’s intelligence and our inseparability
within it, thus healing the ‘curse’ within ourselves? Can we become responsible enough to stop claiming
that God – or ‘the gods,’ or the planets, or this or that archetype or
trauma, or this boss, that general or emperor – ‘made me do it’? Can we transcend our biological
programming through consciousness? Can we regain the conscience of the whole, the intelligence of the
heart, the natural indigenosity of the human spirit, which will enable us to
evolve beyond the predator archetype before it is too late? Must humans create an ecological
catastrophe before the predator in us is quelled?
The predator archetype in humans does not acknowledge, much less
honor, the sacredness of the interdependent web of life. It does not bow to the powerful forces of
life and death, but seeks to overpower them and destroy anything that resists
its all-consuming will to power. It is blind to the sacred spirits that permeate the natural world and
enable Nature to regenerate.
Instead of projecting ‘gods’ onto powerful forces and creatures,
fighting them, and turning them into ‘demons,’ we need to respect and work with
all the forces of Nature if we are to create sustainable communities. For this to occur, we need to regain
the conscience of the whole, as exemplified by Ashitaka. Systems thinking and ecological
literacy are as urgently needed as psycho-spiritual
literacy, so that we are not beguiled by the predator archetype when it arises,
nor by any of the other archetypes. To collectively regain the conscience of the whole would truly be a
metamorphosis of the gods.
The Princess Mononoke film suggests we need the feelings, instincts
and intuitions that have been numbed and repressed in the predator
culture. These are powers that
still exist within the indigenous human within us all, and that enable us to
see through the predator archetype’s tricks. A non-dualistic, holistic, respectful, cooperative
relationship with the life/death/life mysteries of human existence can be
consciously cultivated, evolved, and practiced. I believe this is how people will make it through the 21st century and establish Dharmagaian communities that will be a life-sustaining
presence on the Earth in the centuries to come.
In the meantime, as my friend Stephanie says, “Let's do our best to
keep the faith for the next seven generations, who will need a lot of spiritual
wisdom to maintain sanity, given the destruction caused during our generation.”
See
Psycho-Spiritual Links for more on the main topics in this essay, including
links for Princess Mononoke. Animistic Soul, Dharmagaian Practices, Sustainable
Communities and their links conclude this Dharmagaians website.
Meditation
is the royal road to the unconscious. — C.G. Jung
If
we don’t become our own authority on the inside, we will invariably create
people on the outside to do it for us. — Caroline Casey,
astrologer, on the Saturn archetype
When
an old culture is dying, the new is created by a few people who are not afraid
to be insecure. — Rudolf Bahro
You
can think of the groundlessness and openness of insecurity as a
— Pema Chödrön, Practicing Peace in Times of War
*The fire rainbow at
the top of this page is the rarest of all naturally occurring atmospheric
phenomena. This picture was captured on the Idaho/Washington border. The
event lasted about 1 hour. Clouds have to be cirrus, at least 20,000 feet in the air, with just the
right amount of ice crystals, and the sun has to hit the clouds at precisely 58
degrees. It seems a fitting image
for the kairos—the right moment—for a "metamorphosis
of the gods."
© 2009 Suzanne Duarte
We have each been educated in a system that grew out of, and
reflects, 500 years of colonialism, and are struggling for awareness in a new
era of globalization that leaves increasing numbers of people hungry and
disenfranchised. Our cultural legacy is profoundly imprinted by the
often-silenced after-effects of the genocidal war against Native
Americans, the dislocation and forced slavery of Africans in America, and
the oppressive labor conditions of the poor. But how do we carry these
kinds of knowing inside ourselves and in our relations to others and the world?
When the dictionary describes colonialism as "the practice or manner of
things colonial," what does this mean personally, psychologically and
culturally? How has colonialism left its wounding imprint on our
individual psyches, on the ways we imagine and interpret our life experiences?
What are the paths to awareness and healing of these wounds?
The Art of Hosting
and Convening Meaningful
Conversations explores hosting as an individual
and collective leadership practice. It is a practice retreat for all who aspire
to discover new ways of working with others to create innovative and
comprehensive solutions. We are a growing community of practitioners,
supporting each other to explore and accomplish what we most care about. The
challenges of these times call for collective intelligence. We must co-create
the solutions we seek. The Art of
Hosting pattern and practice is based on our assumption that it is common sense
to bring stakeholders together in conversation when you seek new solutions for
the common good. We believe that
when human beings are invited to work together on what truly matters to them,
they will take ownership and responsibility for moving their issues and ideas
into wiser actions that last.
But the very last word comes from a tiny Kodama, a tree spirit who
appears in the regenerating forest, spins its head and makes the clicks that
acknowledge the presence of the spirit of the forest. The gods/demons of the boars, wolves and forest have died,
Irontown (industrial civilization?) is destroyed, and yet humans remain and
life on the land regenerates.
