JOY: The
Journal of Yoga
September 2002, Volume 1, Number 1
|
Breaking
Through Anew
by
Steven Swanson
“It
was easy enough to find something to do, but how was one to know it was the
thing that needed to be done?”
The above question is one that gets to the heart of the position we as
a species find ourselves in. Most
of us continue to find “something to do,” which can be just about anything,
as long as it keeps us suitably satiated and distracted.
Yet some of us have the gnawing sense that there is a deeper meaning
to all this madness, a higher purpose to which we are being called, which is
that thing we absolutely need to be
doing in order to fulfill our destiny (or, at least, live a truly good life).
This paper is an attempt to explore the subtleties and ramifications
of acknowledging that we can (and must?) choose to live our lives according
to a higher sort of wisdom than we have tended to follow during our species’
evolutionary history. In the process I hope to come to a deeper understanding of
what Brian Swimme has referred to as macrophase
wisdom, a globally-oriented (at the very least) way of living that is worthy
of our newly-acquired macrophase power and its concomitant dangers.
“’A
path laid down in walking’ came to him. . . .
Thus he would narrate the challenge of laying down a path whose next step was
impossible.”
I was inspired to undertake this process by a novel entitled Breaking Through, by Andre Vandenbroeck. It concerns a man named Tallini who feels suddenly called by
powers beyond the level of what we tend to consider ordinary human experience.
He is compelled to investigate the earliest origins of humanity: when
a certain species of primate began to wake up to a new kind of role within the
universe. Tallini’s aim in his
search is to access the kind of profound breakthrough in his own life that these
primates dared to take in theirs. In
the process of his search he is contacted by a felt presence which he is convinced
is connected with the very mind(s) that made that great evolutionary leap, and
this contact and communion subtly guides him on his way.
“For
he was convinced a certain truth was carried by whatever could be imagined,
and by that very fact, the imaginable situated itself within the domain of the
possible.”
In this paper I am embarking on a similar journey, and will be using
passages from the aforementioned book as imaginal guides; yet this journey is
a new one, not limited to the process described in that book.
I am merely using it as a foundation and inspiration, not unlike a piece
of modern music which constructs an entirely new piece by using “samples” from
another’s work. In this way I hope
to shed light on my own journey toward letting macrophase wisdom permeate my
life, and the reader’s journey as well (and our journey together), so we can
better understand the nature of what might (or might not) need to be done.
“A
search is intrusive, for it changes what it searches.
Its outcome in language is little more than a description of the search
itself and thus a most limited insight into the object of cognition.”
The early humans that Tallini is searching for are those that first realized
a distinction between themselves and the environment in which they were embedded.
Their moment of turning was not one during which proto-humans first began
using tools or language; it was the moment during which they first realized
to any degree the extraordinary nature and power of these abilities which they
had already been developing unconsciously for hundreds of thousands of years,
and thus took a measure of conscious control over that process.
Many authors have attempted to describe different facets of this transition,
but it is an exceptionally tricky task to attempt.
“[The
cave people] were bound to be strangers to conceptual terminologies ordered
by rules of grammar and syntax. . . .”
How are we to understand the lives of beings that were just beginning
to acknowledge the world of language that we are embedded in today?
One approach is to use language to evoke their reality through the tools
of myth and/or metaphor, by taking imagery common to the era and imagining our
way into the mindset that produced it.
Another approach is to take the facts
as we currently know them and to then feel our way into their reality, so they
are allowed to come alive. Thus
facts themselves take on an epic, mythical quality through the power of our
engaging with them.
“His
vision of the caves’ profound reality and of a contact with their first human
inhabitants looked to facts not for confirmation, but rather for the sense of
amazement they conferred on the existence of the evidence as such. Thinking the fact, with all the insecurities caused
by such a breach in the solid rampart of objectivism, presented itself now as
a real necessity.”
Thinking the fact (or, more precisely, feeling
the fact) is crucial if we are to awaken a new sensibility; it is an essential
component of what has been termed the “new cosmology”. It is our greatest
ally if we are to understand the depth of creativity that led our ancestors
to forsake their primal embeddedness in the world of nature and embark upon
a new and perilous adventure as the eyes and ears (and hearts) of the universe
itself. Our first step is to acknowledge
the reality of a great evolutionary leap forward, based on the “facts”, and
then to imagine ourselves into the participants’ shoes, so to speak.
It is my hope that our ability to empathize with these early explorers,
to tune into the shift of awareness they underwent, can provide valuable clues
as to the proper stance we modern humans can assume in order to make our own
great leap.
“How
could anyone have satisfied Tallini’s hankering after a particular lived moment
and a specific individualization: a first differentiation, the instant when
an accidental chipping is recognized as special, and a distinction is
drawn within the hitherto indifferent mineral universe.”
A problem that arises when seeking the mindset of the earliest humans
is that we have no known trace of the first individual (or group) that made
the kind of leap described above. As
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin described the situation, “The more we find of fossil
human remains and the better we understand their anatomic features and their
succession in geological time, the more evident it becomes . . . that the human
‘species’, however unique the ontological position that reflection gave it,
did not, at the moment of its advent, make any sweeping change in nature.”
It is an example of what he referred to as the “suppression of the peduncles”:
the earliest evolutionary forms of anything, from species to vehicles to civilizations,
tend to leave no trace of their existence.
It is only when the form has become successful that it is prevalent enough
to leave a trace. Thus the earliest
human beings developed out of sight of our prying ways for hundreds if not thousands
of years, so that by the time it becomes apparent in the fossil record that
something had changed, it had already done so long before.
This does not bode well for our attempts to understand these beings based
on the "facts”; thus we shall have to resort even more strongly to our
abilities to imagine and empathize, perhaps by looking at facts that are a little
closer to home.
“Within
the security of a self-motivated immanence, he had thought in terms of leading
his life and, somehow, even his destiny.
Suddenly, that feeling had been displaced; some other agent was guiding
him.”
It is extremely difficult to truly grasp the newness
of the leap humankind took at that time.
So far as we know, no other animal has ever become aware that it is aware.
Yet somehow, over the course of our species’ evolutionary history, we
have learned to use the very processes of thought and reflection that were incredibly
new and potentially awe-inspiring during their inception to deny
newness itself. Nowadays, we are
often taught that we can tap the wells of creativity only if we get thought
out of the way, either by quieting the mind or by carefully channeling it into
an activity. The same process that
must have seemed like magic when it was discovered (albeit in a much different
form) is today the very thing veiling us from the glory of the universe. How, then, are we to regain a sense of wonder about our very
ability to think itself? How can
we recover the freshness of perception that will enable us to take true stock
of our capabilities?
“No,
he needed new eyes, he must forget all he had ever seen and all he knew. He had to regain the eyes of a child at the onset of the human
species’ many tens of thousands of years of conscious and self-conscious seeing
and thinking.”
Even
those of us who are attempting to consciously engage our evolutionary potential
find ourselves limited by the forms given to us by a limited mindset, that
mindset being the currently typical level of human consciousness. As Charlene Spretnak repeatedly points out in her book Resurgence
of the Real, we are all swimming in a sea of assumptions about ourselves
and our place in the world (or lack thereof) that she associates with the
term modernity. We are entrained
from birth (and possibly before?) to feel like autonomous entities more or
less divorced from the world in which we live.
Our position is such that we can discuss in eloquent detail our independent,
alienated condition, while continuing to absent-mindedly breathe the earth’s
air and consume food grown in its soil.
This “alienated” state of affairs has been shown to be largely false
in numerous fields, from physics to biology to ecology (thus science, the
greatest tool of modernity, has now undercut the attitudes that gave birth
to it). Why, then, can we not
feel this to be true?
“Not
thinking about something new; that would be blatant self-contradiction,
as he would have to choose a ‘new’ to think about, and then it would no longer
be new in the thinking. No, thinking
new was thinking the new itself, shooting it live . . . and any further
talk about it would be thinking about it."
The
problem, again, is that the forms whereby we access new information tend to
limit our intake of that information in such a way that it does not truly infiltrate
our lives. It’s no wonder that
this is so, as tens of thousands of years of evolution and decades of cultural
indoctrination do not tend to change very easily.
Max Planck observed that new scientific truths do not triumph by convincing
their opponents, but because those opponents eventually die off and make way
for a new generation that has grown up familiar with those truths.
If that observation applies to my current topic, then we as a species
(and a planet) are in a lot of trouble, as we may not have time to wait for
the guardians of the old ways to die off.
If, on the other hand, those of us who are, admittedly, using outdated
modes of thinking and communicating can acknowledge the limitations of our methods,
perhaps a new way can begin to make itself known--by seeping in through the
cracks in those methods.
“[Tallini
is] touched by some deity perhaps, not the maddening kind, the tragic, but a
muse that smooths the way for what we cannot understand.
Not like the nine sisters who turn the vision into art, poetry, dance,
or science, but a muse that cleans up the vision itself.
A new muse I am inventing, one that removes the scales from the eyes
of mankind. . . . [W]hat shall we name her?”
Most of us remember little, if anything, of our earliest childhood, and
the memories that do remain are often almost dreamlike.
In my own case, I remember very little from before the time I learned
to read, an ability that was quite established by the age of four.
Of course, we begin to be indoctrinated into the world of language well
before that; but something about the act of reading
seems to solidify the particular sense of self that we then carry over into
adulthood, and which makes the memories dating from the time we learned to read
so much more vivid. Granted, many
(if not most) people may not follow this line of development; but for those
of us whose lives are almost unimaginable without the act of reading (and writing)
it may be useful to look more closely at this act that we find ourselves engaged
with so instinctively now: the act of reading.
“[Tallini’s]
pursuit was aimed at a state of mind immediately preceding its opening to language,
so this essential humanizing step could itself be experienced.”
When I first discovered the alphabet, it was like a magical new world
had opened up to me; I would see the shapes of letters everywhere, and shout
their names to whoever would listen. I
learned to read eagerly, and while I have little more than hearsay to go on
to find out about this early part of my life, I can use those stories to imagine
my way into that little boy who had a sense that the entire world would open
up to him if only he could learn to read the language.
All of those books filled with stories, and facts, and stories about
facts—I simply couldn’t get enough of them, and would often forego playing with
friends in order to read.
“It
is the moment of the real becoming of [the human], not in the generality but
specifically at that early interglacial moment when the words came, or even
more precisely, when the word came.”
Somewhere along the way, though, the magical aspects of reading began
to disappear. The exciting world
I had discovered became humdrum, just one of those things one does in the course
of everyday life. Reading eventually
became associated with schoolwork, and a means by which I could prove myself
a worthy individual. I continued
to read for pleasure, but the act of reading itself eventually became so routine
that it no longer seemed to carry the sense of the miraculous I had found so
entrancing when I first discovered it.
“
. . . [H]ow could he describe what had instructed him when he left the beaten
track, with regard to being, doing, risking? How
could he convey his state of special awareness where each step’s progress gives
rise to an exact correlation with its means?”
I now find myself enrolled in the University, a human institution whose
most visible quality, to the uninitiated, is the nearly constant reading and
writing expected of its participants.
It is considered natural to spend enormous amounts of time sitting down
with one’s eyes aimed at the written word, or else writing words oneself.
It seems almost absurd to call attention to it, as in this environment
these are just the activities we must
undertake in order to learn the relevant information and to in turn communicate
what we have learned. The danger
is that in the process we end up both overvaluing and undervaluing the potential
of the written word.
“[He]
would describe improvisation in terms of a decentered thinking that was often
inconceivable to nonimprovisational minds—highly intellectualized minds in particular—and
therefore subject to a gamut of misinterpretations.”
Academics tend to overvalue
the written word by paying more attention to the words written about
reality than the reality that gives rise to them. Thus many discourses within particular disciplines end up being
somewhat solipsistic exercises in which the field refers mainly to itself, while
continuing to assume that it is accurately describing reality.
This tendency has ultimately led to a near absence of any emphasis on
connectedness with the planet that enables these academic activities to occur,
except perhaps as a small branch of certain disciplines; and that stance has
in turn trickled down to nearly every human practice, most of which are (or
were) heavily influenced by academia.
“The
improviser can never know what he is doing, where he is going, because it would
close off the unknown, the improvisational future.
He must remain entirely in the moment, where the form is being built,
unstable from moment to moment, in disequilibrium, a process ever unfinished.
What he is doing reveals its meaning only in the future, but it has to
be acted out in a past that did not as yet possess the sense of it.”
Most academics also tend to undervalue
the written word, by forgetting to notice or take advantage of the dynamic interaction
that can occur when what we are reading is allowed to come alive.
Our tendency to see these words as objectively there
on the page is, of course, partially accurate; unlike in a lucid dream, for
example, when one looks away and then looks back at the page, the words remain
the same. So how can it be that
certain arrangements of words, if the conditions are just right, seem to come alive? Many of us
have had the experience of words speaking directly
to us, as if they are a secret code waiting for our hearts to unlock the
treasures that lay inside. This
experience is, of course, not limited to the written word; I often find that
it comes through very clearly through recorded music. Yet in this particular encounter, words are all we have.
“…[M]usicians
characterize the nonimprovisational mind as reading. . . .
[U]nlike reading, improvisation does not gather in its own moments; the
gathering occurs between those moments.
It is a preparation consisting of all that is known, all that has been
cognized, experienced, remembered, learned, and lived.
Ideally, none of this is ever present in any detail at the time of improvisation.
It exists as a totality, however, as the improviser, the individual,
whatever makes him whole.”
Unfortunately, the majority of intellectuals choose not to deal with
the living power of the word, perhaps assuming that concept is a superstition
rooted in the religious mindset, or not applicable to their particular discipline
(if they even acknowledge it at all).
Even more unfortunately, these same intellectuals have turned a blind
eye to the living power of life itself--the pulsing, energetic flux we are all
continually engaged with and nourished by.
It is my belief that these two points are not unrelated.
“He
thought he detected, in minds from which all concern with improvisation had
been eliminated, a fundamental incapacity for a kind of freedom that was most
essentially human.”
One author whose work addresses the rise to predominance of the written
word and the concomitant loss of engagement with the natural world is David
Abram. In his book The Spell of the Sensuous he proposes that language originally arose
through an intimate partnership between humans and their environment, and that
the partnership was sundered by the invention of the alphabet and the gradual
spread of literacy. He says, “In
learning to read we must break the spontaneous participation of our eyes and
our ears in the surrounding terrain . . . in order to recouple those senses
upon the flat surface of the page.”
This statement supports my assertion that those people who are the most wrapped
up in the world of written language are often the most alienated from the living
environment. Yet what I find even
more fascinating than the content of Abram’s words is the way he manages to
continually make language (and thus the entire world) come alive in the process
of writing about it. That aliveness
eloquently conveys the sense of his work and its ability to inspire one to see
with new eyes, both through the written words and despite them.
“[W]hen
they began to inscribe the stone with their chronologies and their impressions
and beliefs . . . they neglected the practice of their remembered images.
It enfeebled their penetrating vision because they began remembering
in words; this practice caused their eyes to be covered by a translucent shield.
The sickness of your life is this shield that defends you from what you
perceive. Now you are as blind
as were they who had never seen.”
The field trip for this class was intended to be a way for us to go beyond
the limitations imposed by the academic community; to not just read about engagement
with the natural world, but to go out and experience it.
Our guide instructed us to let go of the concerns of our everyday lives,
to allow our busy buzzing minds to relax and see the world afresh.
Perhaps if we pay careful enough attention, she instructed, the earth
will begin to speak to us through the particular embodiment we engage with. If only it were that easy.
I have spent days in the wilderness without my mind slowing to any noticeable
degree, and to expect it to do so within the span of a couple hours was a somewhat
futile hope. In addition, whenever
I have gone into relatively wild lands with a preconceived expectation of a
profound communion with the natural world, whatever messages I received have
in hindsight felt more like my mind mirroring itself back to itself.
That process is not unrewarding, yet I long to understand what it might
be like to truly commune with an expression of nature without the filter of
language as thought continually interjecting itself.
“[It]
was nothing but a stone, yet it was all stone with all its qualities,
its potentialities. And then you
noticed it was hard and could pound on things . . . and you thought of it as
hammer. That instilled it
with usefulness. But with its new
name, it lost its qualities of stone. . . . And so began a long chain
of events of ever greater usefulness and dependence, which grew into the complex
instrumentation now indispensable to our way of life.”
My experience and description of the field trip make it clear that I
have myself fallen prey to a process I mentioned earlier, that of demonizing
thought as being that which veils us from reality.
This is undoubtedly true, in a sense, but need we look at it that way?
How different might our thoughts be, might our quality of language be,
were we to grant them the awesome power that drew our ancestors to engage those
domains in the first place? Are
we currently fulfilling the capabilities that these pioneering humans were striving
for, or have we perhaps overshot our goal?
“Tallini
became certain that his error was in looking backward, trying to contact the
cave mind in a past, a retrospection entirely foreign to those he was attempting
to emulate. Not only was his conduct
contrary to their travail, but it implied that they were aspiring to his own
present state. . . . He was making temporal presumptions.
In fact, the construction of past/present/future was his problem,
not theirs.”
The related powers of thought and language are incredibly potent and
multi-faceted tools, but tools that are easily abused.
It has occurred to me that the entire history of the human species, dating
from the period during which we made our initial differentiation from uroboric
sleep, may have been like an extended hallucination, wherein we have become
so enchanted with the powers that awakened within us that we have completely
lost sight of their original intent. Could human history as we have variously understood it over
the centuries be the fulfillment of the differentiation and awakening that occurred
within those original beings daring to be human? Or, to reiterate, have we merely been getting sidetracked in
every way imaginable, with our true human purpose not yet manifest?
“Their
thinking—if that was the word for what reached him—was not directed toward any
aim. It was not used for knowing
or comprehending, but was at most a silent sound of their perception. . . .
It was an internal sound, speaking from soul to soul.
And slowly it infused him with the spirit of their time, a time of transition.”
My unspoken assumption all along has been that these earliest humans
made some kind of effort; that the process they underwent involved intention
on their part rather than just dumb luck.
There are evolutionary biologists who could argue eloquently for either
of these positions, blind chance or conscious choice, or the nearly infinite
gradations in between. Ultimately,
objectively, it is a mystery. Yet
the reader should know by now that sticking exclusively to objectivity is not
the name of this game.
“The
time is ripe for a turn whenever newly accessible experience can no longer be
inscribed by means of the tools currently given.”
I have been exposed to many different theories about the evolution of
human consciousness over the years, and the ideas on the subject that I have
found most compelling are those put forth by Jean Gebser. He argues that there have been several clearly defined structures
of consciousness over the course of human history, and calls the leap from one
structure to the next a consciousness mutation.
The first such mutation, which is the one that our friend Tallini was
driven to understand, was from what Gebser called the archaic
structure of consciousness to the magical
structure, whereby humans first learned to differentiate themselves from the
rest of creation. The next great
shift was from the magical structure to the mythical,
which coincides roughly with the rise of agrarian societies; and the most recent
is from the mythical to the mental
structure of consciousness, a development that paralleled the rise of western
civilization, beginning with the Greeks.
These intermediate evolutionary leaps, or mutations, are not my main
concern in this paper, and I mention them mainly to instill a sense of continuity.
“In
this manner Tallini tried to persuade himself that he was, with this new adventure,
still in command of the conduct of his life.”
What is relevant to this paper
is Gebser’s notion that there are deficient
forms of each structure of consciousness.
With each new mutation comes an ability (and perhaps inevitability) to
abuse the newly accessed capabilities of that particular structure.
The way this manifests in the mental structure of consciousness, the
structure that has now come to be the dominant one among humankind, is by our
using the powers of abstraction and directive thought characteristic of that
structure to further our own selfish ends.
As Gebser puts it, “The very act of setting aims or purposes emphasizes
the negative effect of [the] deficient form of the . . . mental structure; every
set purpose is always charged with might and is, moreover, emphatically self-serving.
Thus it is the very antithesis of the wholeness of the world.”
This deficient way of being has become increasingly prevalent and dominant since
its inception around the time of the Italian Renaissance, argues Gebser, and
we have today reached the point wherein it is considered the normal and desired
way to be. Gebser terms this deficient
way of being the rational form of
the mental structure of consciousness.
It is very similar in its feel to what Charlene Spretnak described using
the term modernity.
It is the alienated state that many modern philosophers have assumed
is the nature of existence as such, in which we have been trying so hard to
get what we (think we) want that we have forgotten what it feels like to truly
belong to the universe.
“…[O]ur
next dimension has already been expressed in the ideologies of mathematics,
physics, and cosmology, and still we are unable to live the new world.
The formulas for matter and space-time are there in front of us, nineteenth-century
epistemology lies in shambles, but we live and think like good burghers of a
century ago.”
Gebser proposes a next step for humanity, but is rather cryptic in the
way that he describes it. He names
it the integral structure of consciousness,
and gives numerous examples of its increasing frequency of manifestation; but
he never pins down exactly what he is getting at in a way that would please
a rationally-minded modern. This
is exactly as he intended, as the Gebser scholar Georg Feuerstein points out,
explaining that, “…[Gebser] tends to avoid definitions, which are perspectival
fixations in the domain of language. In
his writing he takes on the formidable task of trying to communicate intelligibly
while not allowing himself to be hampered by the rational conventions of our
language.”
It is precisely this quality of Gebser’s work that leads me to believe he is
a worthy ally in the process we are undergoing.
“The
problem is where to find this elevation from which we shall espy the next dimension.
But . . . we are already living in it, and it will just take the adequate
coign of vantage . . . to open not only our eyes, but our feelings as well,
open them to a new world.”
Gebser calls the new structure of consciousness the integral because
it is that which integrates all previous structures of consciousness. It does not do so in linear fashion (archaic + magic + mythical
+ mental = integral), but in such a way that each capability that has evolved
along with us is co-present and in proper relation within the context of all
there is. The individual is not
over-valuing and misusing any capability for her/his own sake, but is rendering
transparent the very process by which these capabilities come into being.
“An
infinitely connected alliance works itself together in pursuit of common experience.
Within the changing equilibrium of global self-adjustments emerges a
world of momentary mutual satisfaction.”
One of the most difficult, and yet crucial, features of Gebser’s
integral structure of consciousness is its time-free
nature. He claims that each
of the structures of consciousness has had its own particular way of experiencing
time, but that our task now is to transcend any single, limited experience of
time, and deal directly with time itself. Gebser argues that when we fully come
to terms with and integrate all previous ways of experiencing time (i.e. don’t
remain stuck in the rational experience/conception of it or revert to an earlier
structure), we then come into direct contact with what he calls the ever-present origin. This
origin lies before time itself comes into being (but not “before” in a temporal
sense), and may relate closely to that “state” we have been searching for throughout
this paper, the state of the earliest humans on the edge of conscious awareness.
Gebser explains, “Wherever man becomes conscious of the pre-given, pre-conscious,
originary pre-timelessness, he is in time-freedom, consciously recovering its
presence. Where this is accomplished,
origin and the present are integrated by the intensified consciousness.”
This is the fount of creativity wherein we can perhaps find the necessary wisdom
to answer one of my original questions, that of what needs
to be done. Without contact
with the very source of our humanity, how can we possibly expect to be fully
human?
“Here
all senses and faculties were trained to specific tasks of recognizing and identifying
a totality in which they took part. And
yet great nations were squandering energy and treasure on the conquest of desolate
sidereal realms, where, encapsuled in an artificial environment, humans would
be incapable of experiencing their hollow triumph.”
The passage above illustrates the difference between, respectively, macrophase
and microphase wisdom. Microphase wisdom has taken numerous forms over the course of our
evolutionary history, forms that I equate with Gebser’s notion of deficient
forms of each structure of consciousness.
Macrophase wisdom has always
been here, waiting for us to grow up; it is intimately related to Gebser’s ever-present
origin. Macrophase wisdom inspired
the initial differentiation that Vandenbroeck’s character Tallini ached to understand.
Macrophase wisdom inspired every great leap, or mutation, we have taken
since as a species, every new power we have embraced in our journey toward becoming
the Universe Awake. And macrophase
wisdom is with us now, coaxing us to embrace our true calling, to wake up and
start living what we already know.
“And
again, this relates to Tallini, who . . . experience[s] that this human being
and his inside is itself part of the outside.
He places himself in the world, and in this truly engaged posture, he
lets it think. And acts and feels
according to that thinking.”
The problem with looking for that which we must do
is that we are assuming we are the
doers. We are co-participants in
a glorious process, so to consider the question in isolation is to miss the
point completely. When one really
pays attention to the vastness and complexity of the process playing itself
out in our hearts and before our eyes, it staggers the imagination, and humbles
the inclination: what do I know about
what must be done? Often those
moments wherein I stop to fret about the possible right answer are those in
which I am already answering incorrectly.
“Where
was Tallini? This metamorphosis
staggered his senses, and he heard nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing, and yet
experienced it all. The world revolution
of billions of years ago had come upon him, overwhelmed his being and englobed
the total experience of his quest. . . . This was Terra Firma, the world that
had become inside him and on which he stood and moved and acted.
The Earth that was born was himself.”
The precarious position on which we stand today is not accidental.
Only by taking our charade to the depths of absurdity could we hope to
reawaken to the heights toward which we have been called.
In writing this paper I have attempted, above all, to establish authentic
grounds for hope, by maneuvering through the tired methods of thinking and being
that we have grown accustomed to, and by evoking, through absence and single-minded
presence, a felt sense of how glorious it is to be alive.
Being grounded in this felt sense, and gently calling ourselves and each
other back when we forget and begin to lose sight of where we come from, is
the true way forward. Only from
this depth of communion with ourselves and with all of creation can we hope
to experience being moved by that creation toward the proper course of action.
“Hardly a new idea . . . [it] has been called ‘the proper
gesture.’ The gesture that does
perfect justice to the moment.”
When we learn to allow “the proper gesture” to move us, an endeavor that
has its origin here and now, then we are truly embracing the glorious calling
that enticed our ancestors into taking this spectacular, maddening journey out
into ourselves. Do you read me?
Copyright
© 2002 JOY: The Journal of Yoga