The Search for a new Mythology (3)

Eve… of Destruction or Renewal?

These two mythologies – Judeo-Christianity and the primacy of “logos,” the world of language, thinking, and reason –structure and underlie many of our daily dramas in modern life. They combine to create a sense of value that is abstract, above-it-all, and not present. Thought is abstract; heaven is abstract. Both are distant from and uneasy with physical life. The old-testament gods are not of the earth. They’re unreachable, untouchable, beyond the sky, and without a body. The pleasures of sensual life are seductions, sins, obstacles blocking the way to joining the divine. The union with the divine does not happen here; it happens in the after-life. Likewise, the scientists remain “above it all,” their bodies and feelings a distraction, irrelevant and an impediment to scientific truth. They stay separate, observe, and do not participate.

These paradigms created a value system and “reality” divorced from the feminine principle; from the emotions and senses; from the earth, our fellow creatures, and life itself. Concepts of “good” and “right” have come to be based on abstract criteria until what “makes sense” completely ignores the senses. Notions like “property rights” give humans permission to deny their relationships with and violate the lives and “rights” of the beings who live on the land, as well as destroy the land itself. Overvaluing abstractions at the expense of flesh, emotions, and the living, at the expense of those who can actually suffer, has allowed thousands to be bombed, maimed, or imprisoned in the name of bringing them “freedom,” “peace,” “God,” or “civilization.”

These mostly unexamined myths still underpin our lives. We act them out as we exploit and consume resources, destroy the habitat of our own and other life forms, and assign value and a sacred dimension to only human affairs. They influence and define debates over schools, social services, forests, and wildlife. They lead us to consign children to twelve or sixteen years of intellectual training while ignoring their emotional intelligence, development, and maturity. They are at play when we deny people basic medical care based on economic criteria or use property rights or “development” to justify doing whatever we want with “our” land and resources.

In the realm of the psyche, these inherited stories are encompassing and invisible forces that structure our consciousness and shape our awareness. They make up the water we swim in and the air we breathe. But when the water and air are polluted, it affects our health and vitality. It limits our ability to experience wholeness, harmony, and joy. These myths disconnect us from our bodies, emotions, dreams, and the rest of life. They create a sense of isolation and alienation, keeping us stuck in our heads, numbed to our feelings, and emotionally illiterate. Their dark shadow hinders our search for meaning and any sense of belonging; and leaves us unwilling or unable to engage in those simple, basic processes that create a sense of community and relatedness.

For millennia, the earthly values have been forced underground, and the fire in the sky has turned the earth barren. It’s now time for the hidden springs to bubble up, for the emotional, sensual, feminine principle to be resurrected from the shadows. A sustainable future needs a spirituality that puts us on equal footing with the plants, animals, waters, and biosphere. To live a vital and earthy life with any possibility of ecological balance requires myths that honor our place on earth and our relationship with this planet as a path and connection to the sacred. The divine principle – the Source of life, our Origin, our gods and goddesses – must become embodied and present, immanent as well as transcendent, and these entities or energies must be found, sensed, touched, and communed with through life rather than by leaving it.

The traditional values of primal peoples and today’s discoveries in quantum physics both point to a universe that is mysterious, evolving, and interactive… a universe of engagement, participation, and co-creation. We must begin living in this psychic universe to become whole, or even to survive the crises we’ve already created on earth.

An ancient and ever-renewing paradigm of a sacred and sustainable existence still lives within us. To create or co-create a dream worth living, we will have to welcome back much of what we’ve lost, those powers and energies – those gods and goddesses – spurned and driven into shadow by reason, religion, and righteousness.

Honoring and celebrating all of the movements, directions, and powers on the Medicine Wheel of life is the way to healing and wholeness… is the way to a dream worth living. This includes Gaia, Mother Earth, the feminine… It includes Eve (and snake), whose curiosity, desire for knowledge, challenge of authority, and taste for what’s sweet and succulent will serve us far better than the jealousy and judgment of some fearful father in heaven. When we’ve finally cast him from our garden, the springs will well up and the Tree of Life will bloom again.

Sometimes we think what we are saying about God is true when in fact it is not…

I have come to learn that the truth never harms or frightens.

I have come to learn that God’s compassion and light can never be limited; thus any God who could condemn is not a god at all but some disturbing image in the mind of a child we best ignore, until we can cure the dark.              ~ St. Thomas Aquinas