Covid-19 Meets I Ching

Turning Point (24)
Shock (51)

The I Ching is an ancient code expressing laws of nature. This accumulation of Taoist wisdom is not specifically about human nature. It’s about the nature of Nature. We can interpret these expressions, represented as hexagrams, as we would mathematical formulae. The permutations of meaning expressed by the 64 hexagrams of I Ching reveal a subtlety normally beyond our commonplace awareness. Unpacking them permits us to enter the realm of InterBeing, the dynamics of the web of life itself.

The combination of these two hexagrams, Shock and Turning Point, appeared as a response to a specific inquiry about the meaning of Covid-19. Accordingly, my amateur status notwithstanding, and despite stretching the primary application of I Ching beyond personal concerns, I interpret these two hexagrams in two ways: the first as abstract expressions of energetic laws of nature; the second as they imply emotional, rational and spiritual dynamics expressed in action.

The first hexagram is divided into three bi-grams. From the bottom up, the first bi-gram demonstrates a strong yang (solid) line lifting upward and outward. The implication of this yang force is that instinct arising deep in somatic being drive one’s perspective and one’s actions. Instincts are strong, yes, but may also be fearful and restricted by tradition. There is certainly a character of cultivation, creation and accomplishment here. Yet the energy of this basic yang impulse also overlooks the higher aspirations of production, benefitting others beyond one’s narrowly defined group.

Likewise, the yang line in the middle bi-gram has a strong character of restricting the free flow of what is rising from those instinctual drives. This yang line is like a closed gate, turned toward the first bi-gram than the third. In other words, generosity, vulnerability and more expansive views of the world, not strictly limiting oneself to the instinctual self or to one’s immediate group, with a capacity to look beyond reflexive fear are far more desirable and congruent with the open and accessible upper tri-gram.

Hence, we are given opposing ways to respond to the shock of having our worldview shaken or even destroyed by COVID-19. The questions framed by this reading relate to different planes of perception. On the physical plane, what our bodies know doesn’t require interpretation. On the rational level, we have to choose which direction we will turn for relationship, comfort and collaboration. In the realm of imagination and intuition, we explore and gain insight into the qualities of relationship providing fulfillment, direction, challenge and expansion.

The key emotion connecting all of these questions seems to be vulnerability—a sense that by remaining open–or, opening the gate in the middle bi-gram, as it were, shown in the second hexagram–to uncomfortable conditions and fearlessly sharing personal truth, we will discover the answers to every other question. We will also find the formation of relationships a natural and effortless process leading to those answers.

Covid-19 is stripping most of us—though evidence suggests that we can exclude the banking, investment, CEO class and most politicians–of all pretense. The superficialities of life are being stripped away. We are in deepening shock as the multiple vulnerabilities of our society are exposed. Yet the cultivation of relational acts of resilience are already rising broadly and creatively.

Hexagram #51—The Arousing (Shock)–changing to Hexagram 24–Turning Point demonstrates a strong shift to a more open, congruent and dynamic relationship arising from a clear-minded and unobstructed manifestation of our highest ideals in material actions. The shock of dealing directly with the threat of a potentially deadly illness is, ironically, galvanizing us to engage with the world in restorative and resilient action. This is our Turning Point, but it won’t be fast or short. A period of gestation is required, a time to gather strength and durability.

Much is being written about the ways people respond to the rolling disaster of bad news about the climate, all of which contribute to an increasingly dire prospect of a future radically disrupted from the version of Modernity we’ve enjoyed in the past. As if climate predictions alone weren’t enough of a terminal diagnosis? Covid-19 as well as future pandemics, including drug-resistant bacteria, add to a high-risk future. They may not portend catastrophe, but at the very least they undermine the sense of security we might have enjoyed as a species.

These hexagrams demonstrate that while Shock may describe the initial impact of bad news, the more fundamental impact of our current predicament is one of removing the last remaining shreds of complacency, casting us deeper into the turbulence of uncertainty and portending a volatile future. New pieces of the picture of a future beyond our control come in the form of new reports, news stories, scientific proclamations, new aspects of how natural is responding to the human-driven distortions of our world.

One might even say anyone paying attention to the news is now in perpetual, unexpected and deepening shock. We are all in various degrees of trauma, desperation, grief, panic, denial, exhaustion, rationalization or hopelessness, all of which together may be categorized as stagnation,….while, curiously, we may even simultaneously claim a sustaining determination or unbreakable resolve.

There is no safe haven. Further shock either drives us deeper underground into an insulated and isolated cavern of despair—or—awakens us to a Turning Point, casting aside what has not been working, yielding an even greater resolve to seek partners, to nurture intimacy, to repair and restore what can be salvaged from the wreckage, to identify and adhere to vital principles to guide our actions now.

Each of these shocks reinforces and underscores the mutability of nature—and our mutability within nature. They are messages reminding us that WE must find the capacity to change and to quicken the pace of change to meet the conditions unfolding before us. This is no longer about ‘fixing’ anything. The greatest shock of all is the accumulation of news telling us the possibility of fixing the dramatic unfolding of catastrophe on multiple fronts is slipping through our fingers.

Now is the time for adaptation—and not in a superficial way. Adaptation is what we can call the nature of the change we seek. The Deep Adaptation Agenda arrives as a decision to use the shocks we are receiving as fuel, to fully feel them, to permit ourselves to remain vulnerable to them, to restore a new freedom, to restore movement, to gather and direct our energies to drive more creative and innovative responses to the blows now being delivered to Modernity in rapid succession.

Reconciliation I: Peace as Rebellion

The fourth of the Deep Adaptation 4Rs framework, along with Resilience, Restoration and Relinquishing, is Reconciliation.  We imagine its meaning to be about restoring and sustaining a state of peace, resolving past conflict and, at the very least, designing for the resolution of future conflict.

We do not imagine all conflict can be resolved. Far from it. In a collapsing world, there is very likely to be increased conflict. Reconciliation refers to a consciousness and a versatility with practices most likely to resolve small and large scale conflicts in ways that extend concentrically from an ethical and practical center.

In the simplest terms, achieving peace in an increasingly turbulent world requires resolute and focused personal practice. The internal condition might be more correctly called equanimity, a capacity to respond to changing circumstances without being reflexively triggered into anger, fear, jealousy, aversion, indifference or pain. But not being triggered is not quite enough. Response-ability means being moved to act.

In this alienating and isolating world, setting one’s vertical compass to generosity and gratitude may feel good, but if we’re not also orienting horizontally to confront the mythologies (scientific materialism, separation) and operational practices (exploitation and violence) of modernity,  which establishes hierarchies and treats them as biological laws, we are committing an act of blind privilege. It’s not entirely useless, just incomplete.

How do we arrive at equanimity? Borrowing principles from both modern and ancient psychology, we can develop the skills necessary to improve our access to equanimity and we can improve our stability in it. But as long as there is conflict in the world between nations, ethnic groups, tribes, families or individuals, we are not in a state of peace. We may find a personal non-dual view, an oasis within the collective dualism, like vacationing at our own personal monastery, but we cannot permanently turn our backs on the origins of conflict all around us.

Any conversation about ‘getting there,’ arriving at the desired internal state, has to do with identifying and removing obstacles to our direct access. This inevitably requires an exploration and discovery of the many ways we remain in a state of self-deception. We are called to identify every self-limiting belief, every flawed construct, every incongruent intention and every addictive behavior that stands between us and an authentic experience of equanimity. Not the false equanimity of indifference. Not the by-passing of real emotion, but an authentic capacity to be with. Along the way, we might also have to reconcile conflicting beliefs about our own identity, asking and clearly answering the question, “Who is experiencing this peace/equanimity, anyway?” and perhaps most importantly, “How do I find it again after I lose it?”

All of the foregoing constitutes what we might call a “path” to peace, a method or a checklist of issues to resolve before we can say we “are” peace. Take out the dustpan and get behind the furniture, straighten out those sheets on the bed. Take out the trash. Then we will have peace. When there is nothing in the world (out there) to shake us from our oasis of equanimity, then we will be immune to the temptations of conflict. Then we can be compassionate. Then we can be mindfully open to whatever arises in our world without reacting thoughtlessly.

But alas, no. There is no path “to” peace, just as there is no path “to” realizing our true nature. Yes, there are practices to develop our skills, perfecting our access to equanimity. We may imagine fully awakened mind as the fruit of steady practice and incremental refinement of specific skills. Yet, upon closer examination, there is no denying the “fruit” of all that practice can only bring us back to the seminal realization that what we call a peace/process is already our nature. There is no way to any such goal. We are already there.

If we accept this premise, that there is no path, no outcome and no fruit of any labors, then there is no far-off objective of our practice that is only realized after a lifetime of disciplined pursuit. The only way “to” the goal is through direct realization, here, in this moment.

What are the components of a direct access to peace that serves each of us right now?First, cut through the illusion of a separate Self. One needn’t become a scholar of the origins and historical, cultural, cosmological or spiritual propagation of this flawed idea so much as a relentless inquisitor into the direct effects of holding it. Believing in the separate Self requires the existence of the Other. Without the Other, the only conflict that can exist is within the One.

Thus, all manifestations of conflict are internal in nature and origin. Every moment we spend out of alignment with this truth, which cannot be modified, enhanced or diminished, we abandon our innate wholeness and contribute to further conflict within the Whole.

Second, yes, there are a plethora of psychological and spiritual metaphors, conceptual frames, processes and exercises that define peace and may enhance our skill in achieving more direct embodiment. I’m not anti-intellectual nor am I anti-psychology in the least. Yet every conceptualization, rendering of thought, planning, consideration or representation of the state of peace is in essence an effort to ‘get there.’ Ultimately, there is no ‘getting there.’ There is only there. There is no other way there except to be there.

Third, whether we are being there, getting there or lost somewhere in between, there is nothing to be done. There is no action, there are no steps to take, no conceptual progression to save us or guide us. Inaction is also not the way. If there is a way, it is through non-action. Or, as it may sometimes be put, the direct realization of a state of peace is neither being there nor getting there, but somewhere in between. That is the territory in which an immense creativity resides, where something powerful and transformational is liberated.

Finally, the only matter left to this brief consideration of the true embodiment of peace is that appropriate responses are required in a world far from being aligned with the notion of no-self, which preserves and operates upon the presumed reality of the Other and which believes the only way to address conflict, or any problem, for that matter, is through direct oppositional action.

In this context, peace is rebellion. Peace lives outside the consensus frame. Peace becomes a relentless, unswerving and unapologetic commitment to one’s inner truth. And we become its guardian. It’s not a solitary truth whatsoever, as realization becomes a dynamic imperative so purely and clearly requiring engagement that there is no denying it, rationalizing or obscuring it. Arriving at that clarity is an eyes wide open, fearless and undaunted continuous journey into and through the full depth of one’s own suffering–to the point at which a magnificent, clear, fierce and uncompromising universal compassion dawns. Here, the impulse for collective Reconciliation awakens.

COVID-19: Rite of Passage

I’ve been receiving regular emails from Michael Meade for years. They are invariably timely and relevant topics full of the wisdom of Interbeing.

Today (#166) he spoke of consciously descending into the inner world, walking into the dark with our eyes open, as it were.

We are being taken down, not by choice but by necessity, and in yet another new way, to realize our true condition. As we look around us in every direction, we are witnessing decisions being made (or avoided) about how to prepare for, interact with, prevent or deal with a global pandemic. At the same time we are directly experiencing our consciousness undergoing an accelerating transformation by this phenomenon.

We cannot help but notice and examine this phenomenon as a global encounter with the biological plane of existence, a natural response of the living planet reminding us of our direct and integral connection with the biological world, the biosphere undergoing change in response to human actions. There’s no escape: this is us. Yes, we will have to think and feel our way through, but the way through also requires we discern and consider carefully the message of the crisis.

The virus promises to be (if not already) a profound response to our hubris, already arresting Business As Usual and laying bare the degree to which we take for granted the structures and comforts of modernity. All those systems, from the stock markets to commerce to transportation to the systems of mutual care are all derivatives masking our relationship with the natural world. As the mask of modernity is stripped away, we see our own true face.

The unceasing progress of the virus permeating the population is already testing the health care system and governance. It is already laying bare the income disparities, the vulnerability of large sections of our population to unanticipated costs, the marginal financial safety of millions, the degree to which the social safety net has been shredded, the lact of back-up systems for caring for ourselves in the most basic of ways. And, as well, the deeply damaging selfish and self-absorbed womb of illusion in which so many, most notably more than half the US Senate, live.

There, the denial of a pandemic follows and conforms to the spinning of falsehoods into War, the denial of the financial catastrophe of 2008, the denial of racism and the denial of climate change. Today, all we see from them is desperate bargaining to avoid both economic and psychological depression and to prop up their precious allegiance to exclusion, dominance and scarcity.

The effects of this rolling emergency are already impacting our collective imagination–the deep imagery of what America believes it is and what our relationship is to others beyond our borders, the unseen intimacy of our relations with distant strangers and the basic equality expressed as our vulnerability to disturbances in the biosphere. The dream of separation is dissolving. America as a gated community, as an impregnable suburban sanctuary is disappearing.

We are being dragged to wake up from the mythology of exceptionalism, the mythology that we are not in each other’s care at all times; the mythology of being able to construct  a fortress of uniformity in which we can continue endless bargain-shopping, safe from foreign influence; the mythology of continuous expansion. Reactionary forces are tightening their grip on their fantasy that continuing to dance will keep the music playing, that appearance is reality, that saying it’s true will make it true.

Nope. In the immortal words of Guy McPherson, Nature Bats Last. And we are not prepared because we haven’t learned that lesson. This phenomenon has arisen from the depressed immune system of the planet. It is about to expose our deepest flaws, our tenacious grip on the surreality of separation, invulnerability, of superiority, of our belief in false characterizations of Nature, of some assumed mastery in the world. Continued denial of who and what we are will now take us deeper into the Deep Self to wander and sow untold pain until we either die or are transformed.

This is the choice commonly faced by the addict who descends further into darkness until an opportunity for light to enter becomes possible. The virus is an opportunity for us to meet our addictions. But it is so often a near death experience and there’s no guarantee we will emerge any closer to wholeness. Will this be our bottom? Will this be the moment we realize caring for each other and caring for the earth are our only collective imperatives? And that they are the same thing? Will we see any new light at the end of this tunnel?

Learning To Die in the Anthropocene

In a chilling, factually grounded and provocative 2015 book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, Roy Scranton describes his tour of duty in Iraq in 2003 as an exercise in facing death every day as he departed the relative safety of his protected encampment in a Humvee, armed, armored and backed up by the awesome firepower of the US Army.

To be constantly facing death required an assembly of valued resources, one of which was an 18th Century Samurai manual, the Hagekure, which advised, “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.” He took the advice to heart, eventually adopting an attitude as he headed out each day that he was “already dead.”

He then proceeds to draw the analogy between his experience in Iraq and the human role in driving climate change; namely, that we will do almost anything to avoid naming our true predicament. We humans in the Anthropocene, named for our historically unprecedented position of being a single species driving planetary geological change, have attended a terminal diagnosis for quite some time, which we know, left untreated, will spell the death of modernity including mass extinction, possibly even our own. We humans who, at least in the developed world, have become so expert at denying death, now see The House of Modernity we have built being threatened to its foundations.

Have we been providing the required treatment of the condition? No. Not even close. And for the past 15 years, out on the fringes of climate science, there has been a rising chorus of voices (and data) telling us we are already “already dead,” that there is too much damage already baked into the atmosphere and the oceans to escape or reverse course. No one knows for sure how long it will be before much more significant impacts will roll across the globe, particularly because most predictions have turned out to be conservative. It may be 10, 30, 50-80 years or more. We don’t know. What we do know is that we have procrastinated, and continue to do so, for no good reason.

hurricanes-storms-hero-1-1024x684-1
Credit: dark-mountain.net

How do we process all this? What does that mean in terms of our attitude, our actions and our philosophy of life? What is a meaningful way to live now? What are the choices we have to make in this increasingly uncertain time?

Scranton asks, “What does consumer choice mean compared to 100,000 years of climate catastrophe?” Really. Suddenly, how important is it that we can choose from 25 different kinds of washing machines when water security could be impaired long before that machine is scheduled to die? Or, for example, we don’t know exactly what conditions will dramatically impact global harvest….but can we say governments are truly prepared for such a scenario? No.

We are suddenly awash in philosophical questions for which there are no instruction manuals. If, as a French philosopher mused, to philosophize is to learn how to die, then we have entered a new philosophical age. We have to learn how to die not only as individuals, but also as a civilization.

What does that mean, “Learning to die?” The daily context of war is one thing. What of our everyday world?

Let’s put it this way: I meet the basic qualifications for being an elder. I take that label seriously in the sense that it is my social duty to convey whatever wisdom I have accumulated in the course of my life, whatever my vision of a just and equitable world that serves all and includes all has come to be, however expansive that view may become, to younger generations. I have been fortunate in being able to live a full life, and particularly for being able to devote myself to what is most important right now. That life is also taking on the inevitable risks and obstacles and trappings that come with age. I am undeterred.

Even though I could say, with the exception of seeing no truly significant collective action on climate change and the virulent rise of fascism at home and abroad, my dreams have not been entirely stolen. To my own child and other next-generation members of my family and to all their age-cohorts across the world, I would say, “Your dreams have been (at least partially) stolen by me and my generation.” That is the true shape of our predicament and obligation. But by virtue of my complicity and that of my generation and the ones before us, you are now forced to contemplate the death of something far greater than any individual.

Their children’s dreams, which is to say the opportunity to live in a thriving, low risk, equitable and just society with a generous opportunity to lead a fulfilling life of their own choosing, have been appropriated by conditions set in motion by previous generations and will thus be more difficult to realize. The twin mythologies of endless growth and ecocide without consequences are dead. By the time their children mature, the transformation we have set in motion in the name of building our House of Modernity will be well on its way. For them, a strong, intensely focused resolve to live by life-affirming values will be an even greater challenge.

Beneath our well-constructed and endlessly adorned personal identities, beneath our striving and our plans, our coping strategies, our denial, anxiety, fear and uncertainty, beneath impacted layers of personal history, the wounds of family and the trauma and separation imposed by this culture, there is a timeless reality, deeply and endlessly compassionate, unafraid, loving and creative. Our task is to access, develop, and share that intrinsic nature, building our capacity for unconditional love, fulfilling relationships, mutual-reliance, trust and courage. This is an initiation like no other. It is our final loss of innocence. Time to really grow up. And time to grow young, to regain an original innocence that will sustain us for the future.

Stephen Jenkinson describes love as “a way of grieving that which has not yet slipped from view’ and as ‘an active form of grieving that doesn’t require sadness.’ The courage, the skill, the intelligence and the love we need right now do not require sadness. But they do require we acknowledge our grief and pass through this portal with our eyes open, leaving behind the old world as we prepare to meet and thrive in the coming world. It’s time to elevate our game.

Kali Takes The World II: Baba Yaga

By Vera de Chalambert

PUBLISHED IN Kosmosjounal:  FALL | WINTER 2017

She appeared out of nowhere, as if from an explosion of smoke thrown by a cheap magician while I was meditating on another goddess. It was a mix of vision and cartoon unfolding on my confused mind-screen. She smelled like cemetery earth from my father’s recent burial. Her hair was white, disheveled, as if on fire, her nose was a huge hook, warts and all, just like I imagined it as a child when she still terrified me from the corner of every dark room. Baba Yaga, the infamous dark hag, the evil witch of every Russian fairytale, the one who eats children and lives in her house on chicken legs and rides a broomstick, was in my room and in my face, and she meant business. Her demeanor was urgent. She barked with a deadly seriousness, shoving a femur bone in my face. She spoke in Russian, “Hold on to your bones!” Then she was gone.

I felt shaken. The experience felt so real that I wondered about my grasp of reality. I would have been thrilled with a vision of a goddess… but a fairy tale character? From the Jungian psychoanalyst Jean Shinoda Bolen I would later learn that archetypes and especially goddesses appear to us as they damn well please—cartoon fairy tales, illustrious rooftops—and that when you are handed bones, that’s an initiation, if she’s ever seen one. I learned that Baba Yaga was a primordial form of Kali even before the Indo-Aryan march across the Russian steppes. Most importantly, as the next cycle of my personal dark night unfolded only a few months later and I began moving through the devastating pain and disorientation of divorce, I returned again and again to the wisdom of the hollowness of bones. I committed to keep choosing truth over safety, the real over the convenient. I embraced the groundlessness of the Mother’s hut on chicken legs. I wailed in her dark woods until I had no voice. I let her make a stew of me. Vast emptiness, no holiness. She offered only truth.

There comes a time when nothing is meaningful — except surrendering to Love.
~ Rumi

Today, our very own postmodern Kali Yuga is upon us. The old world with its illusions of certainty and predictability is coming to an end. The Mother in her holy chaos is pulsing through every crevice of the planet, beginning her dance of change and transfiguration in the collective field. If you listen deeply, you can feel it too; we have been handed bones. I believe that Hurricane Harvey marks the first glimpse of what Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker in their brilliant upcoming book Savage Grace call the Dark Night of the Globe, a period of unprecedented global crisis, climate disaster, dissolution of old templates, and if we allow it, collective spiritual initiation. They prophesy that we are entering a dance that will either mark the end of civilization as we know it and possibly even human life on the planet or will force us to dive into the Mother’s cauldron of transfiguration and arise as what Andrew Harvey calls ‘divine humanity.’

In bemoaning the absence of the rights of passage in our culture, Marion Woodman explains the importance of undergoing a psychological or spiritual death. She says that unless we experience “a period of being in the dark hole of chaos, followed by a rebirth—then people don’t truly grow up.” She explains that in old cultures the young had to believe that during their coming-of-age rituals, they might die. This is how they would have to prove that they are mature enough to enter the adult world. Like it or not, for good or ill, this dark night of the world soul is upon us. And in the absence of rituals, this is all we’ve got as a global initiation into adulthood. Perhaps only such a deep collective reckoning can trigger the kind of spiritual maturation that is called for by our times. Only God knows if it will be enough to lead us to abandon our narcissistic notions of spirituality, to let go of the false promises and psychopathic tendencies of capitalism, to humble our hearts before the great Transparency, and to rise like the Mother for all living beings.

Hecate

In ancient Greece, its own dark crone goddess Hecate was known as the goddess of the crossroads. It is at the crossroads that we find ourselves. In The Dark Places of Wisdom, Peter Kingsley says: “If you’re lucky, at some point in your life you’ll come to a complete dead end. Or to put it another way: if you’re lucky you’ll come to a crossroads and see that the path to the left leads to hell, that the path to the right leads to hell, that the road straight ahead leads to hell, and that if you try to turn around you’ll end up in complete and utter hell. Every way leads you to hell and there’s no way out, nothing left for you to do. Nothing can possibly satisfy you anymore. Then, if you’re ready, you’ll start to discover inside yourself what you always longed for but were never able to find.”

We are at the crossroads now and there is nowhere to run. Our world is dying and so the call from the deep is strong. The work before us is uneasy and long, but great powers work by our side. And it is only from this place of darkness, of radical uncertainty, of coming to the edge of all our limits, the end of all our old stories, that something new within our soul might emerge. Life is roaring in dialects of Kali—asking us to get real, to get committed to our spiritual lives, to each other, and to this world. To tolerate the growing pains of the dark nights given to us. To get exceptionally honest and do our shadow work. Are we willing to give up our spiritual materialism and surrender the accolades of the false paradigms of success? Are we willing to dare self-disclosure, to reveal how imperfect and lonely and messy it is to be human? Are we willing to meet our grief, our confusion, our heartbreak—the very real uncertainty of it all—and not send suffering into exile? The Mother has no orphans. Dr. Martin Luther King used to say, “We must meet suffering with soul force.” The Mother is the soul force.

The truth is that Kali has always had the world. Marrow of time, oracle of holy change, she is the great gate of transformation through which all must pass. Her medicine is darkness. Her initiation is by fire. Appearing in difficult periods of transition—death, disease, divorce, loss of structure—she is the devi of disillusionment. It is said any contact with her transfigures the soul. From the moment the Mother birthed the universe of her holy dark womb to the instant she swallows it up again, we are hers, and she only ever asks one thing: when all is stripped from you, what remains? Whatever your answer, she will throw it up against death. So we must listen deeply now. Our planet is in crisis. We live in messianic times. And, tag, you are it! We are not free until we are all free. So, what are you willing to rise for? What is your True North? What do you sit and stand for? What are you willing to give up for it? If all that can burn is burned up, what remains?

She rides in on a tiger, magnificent and fierce. She wields weapons; she slays demons. But, we are in the long game now. We must remain vigilant, relentless, grounded in the Real. We must pray and prepare. The night will be long. The night will be dark. The forces of separation are great. But She IS here now, and in the late hour, when all hope is lost and all that we most loathe to give is stripped from us, she will rise, even more terrible, as only Love can be. And She will win.

Kali Takes The World I: Dark Night of the World Soul

By Vera de Chalambert

PUBLISHED IN FALL | WINTER 2017

When in the summer of 2015 I saw the breathtaking image of the goddess Kali, the great Hindu goddess of death, destruction, and liberation, tongue outstretched, third eye blazing, projected onto the top of the Empire State Building for the documentary Racing Extinction, I ranted, “This a sign of the times—Kali takes New York!” A year later, as the shocking 2016 election results were similarly projected onto the top of the Empire State Building and I saw Donald Trump’s smug smirk and sly gaze staring victoriously into the shaken soul of the country, I raved, “This is a sign of the times—Kali takes America!”

kali-1Last month, I picked up the New York Magazine’s infamous “Doomed Earth Catalog” issue and it opened right to the “The Uninhabitable Earth” centerfold. I have certainly not gone unfazed by the realities of climate change, nor escaped its oft-sensationalized overtones. But this article and its striking images, like a skeleton all decked out in Ray-Ban aviator shades melted straight into the concrete and graphic descriptions of being cooked from the inside as the earth temperature rises just a few more degrees, knocked the air right out of my lungs. I suddenly wanted to wail, but no sound came out.

I suddenly wanted to run, but there is nowhere to run from reality.

If you haven’t seen it, this issue is the only tantric iconography of the Great Mother that you will ever need. It does what every statue and image of the Dark Mother was always meant to do—make us unsettled, shake up our false selves and empty certainties, strip us of illusion. The voice roaring ruthlessly from the pages of the magazine was unmistakable. She might as well have been projected again up there on top of the world. This time, in every bone of my being I knew. This is the sign of the times—Kali takes the world!

Kali

In essence, the mythos of Kali is this: apocalypse has arrived. Demons are taking over the world. And, surprise, they can only be conquered by a woman! In desperation, the gods call upon the Devi.

Enter Durga.maadurga5

The Goddess rides in on her pussy-tiger, magnificent and fierce. She fights valiantly, but as she wounds a great demon, with every drop of its blood, a thousand more demons arise. The Mother sees she is losing the battle for the world. “Not on my watch,” she roars.

In the last hour from her third eye, the deepest, darkest, most terrifying form of the feminine rises, and that is Kali. She is the most terrible. Nothing escapes her holy darkness. She licks up the blood of separation before it hits the ground, conquers the demons, and saves the world. Oh yes, then she dances.

“If you expect any benefits from your search, material, mental or spiritual, you have missed the point. Truth gives no advantage. It gives you no higher status, no power over others; all you get is truth and the freedom from the false.” ~                                                 Nisargadatta Maharaj

Even as I write, Hurricane Harvey is still raging. Simultaneously this week, terrible floods in India, Bangladesh and Nepal have killed thousands and left millions homeless. As we stare in disbelief at images of entire neighborhoods swallowed under water, folks wading through the deep with their animals and their kids and their life in a black garbage bag, and thousands crowded into shelters, what is furiously seeping through into our collective psyche is that business as usual is over.

In our hearts we can’t help but intuit that this is only the first taste of such extreme weather cycles, that anyone of us might be next among the throngs of climate refugees, steeped in flood waters, or strung out by some future drought. Slowly, we are meeting the terrible gaze of Kali, her potent shaktipat (in Hinduism, the transmission of spiritual energy upon one person by another) meant to awaken us from our slumber of separation, burn away our prisms of illusion, mature our collective soul.

Stripped of our comforts and certainties and false assumptions about life, now faced with the vulnerability of existence, we come to feel more intimately the hollow of our bones. It is when things fall apart that we meet the un-ruined. To be planted, a seed must turn completely inside out, must break open, the old form utterly destroyed, in order to grow.

To those unfamiliar with the cycles of growth, fertility might look like annihilation. Similarly, those unfamiliar with the cycles of spiritual growth might not be able to recognize that darkening [precedes] illumination, kenosis is a condition for resurrection into divine life. Carl Jung said, “Only that which can destroy itself is fully alive.” Every fate eventually concedes to a dance in the fires of spiritual annihilation. It is important to honor holy darkness as we move through the seasons of our spiritual life. The darkness of the tomb of the ego becomes the gate into the holy darkness of the womb of the Great Mother.

Paradoxically, in spiritual life progress is marked by crisis and the only way towards intimacy with the divine is through entering the crucible again and again. Our spiritual growth is punctuated by dark nights of the soul—periods of difficulty, despair, disillusionment, and disappointment. These dark nights strip the soul of old spiritual ideas and attachments, and through radical spiritual disorientation, abandonment, and finally annihilation, they bring the soul into ultimate union.

This is why the great Mother so often appears wielding weapons, because truth cuts through illusion. Truth weans the soul from spiritual trinkets and false certainties. This is why her form is terrifying, because truth is pure terror—wrathful, uncompromising, ruthless. Truth offers no solace, no protection, yields only disappointment with the false self. This is why she appears naked, because she will strip us of all artificial safety, take away everything we use to hide and save ourselves from the real. She will shatter our most precious plans and rip off the masks we don to stay relevant, before cutting off our head, breaking our heart, and dancing on our ashes. There is no hope of improvement, no chance of resistance, no place to hide, no reason to argue with reality. Our only chance is to lean in for a kiss.

A total solar eclipse just passed across the heavens of North America and so many people looked up and were transfixed by the celestial darkening that traffic on Pornhub and Netflix hit an all-time low. An unprecedented number of Americans abandoned their addictions, gathered together—liberal and conservative alike—shared glasses, and looked up in awe.

Eclipses are oracles of change. Almost universally, eclipses are feared. They are often seen as inauspicious omens; they create terror and confusion; they can blind. In some cultures, folks lock themselves away in their homes; in others, they bang on pots or drums to scare away the demons that have swallowed the sun. And yet, of those who braved the darkness to experience totality, most report feeling profoundly transformed. Many express the sentiment that “It was like seeing the face of God.” This is the power of holy darkness: it disturbs, breeds awe, and reveals the Unseeable.

Hope, Faith & Radical Presence

What are we called to do in this time of collapse? Work harder? Think faster? Compartmentalize and multitask better?

No. None of the above. In fact, we are called to do the opposite. According to Yoruba wisdom, we are called to slow down. We are called to settle into the present, to soften and loosen our grip on whoever we imagine we are, or were, wherein we assimilate the world as it is, changing so rapidly as it is, and watch our responses, our default habits and self-serving diversions happening in the microseconds between apprehension and response.

Among other things, we discover our hyper-dependency on time. We discover the difference between its relative and absolute nature. We also discover hope is a diversion from this softening.

Time is a conception arising within our limited view of reality. Normally, we are not capable of another view. When we interrupt that dependency, a different possibility opens and we are reintroduced to timeless matters: connection, curiosity, gratitude, courage, love and grief. We discover what we seek has never been gone. It is always at hand, everywhere we look.

What enters our space in liminal moments we share with another person—or even in a group? Resonance, a timeless quality, gently arrests us. What arises in the space  between vision and execution as a quiet presence is Inter-Being. This space is filled with knowledge, yet is neither yours nor mine. We become present in such knowledge–or it becomes present in us.

There is no such thing as a unit of time in any absolute sense. Since that is so, we could even define “presence” as something more like absence. The absolute nature of time is a vastly spacious awareness no longer held in the tight grip of someone who ‘hopes’; one so expansive that even “embodiment” implies a limitation, so permeable that emotional states and the ambient phenomena of group process no longer impede the flow of connection.

Temporarily at least, one is so completely ‘here’ that time stands still. At the same time, the ego has been rendered quiescent, if only for a moment. Since there is no future, there is nothing to hope for. One may even enter a non-conceptual state in which there is only feeling, a seamless realm of knowing. There is nothing to grasp here, nothing to cling to and no one to cling to it.

From the relative (dualistic) view in which subject and object exist, we imagine events follow an order, stretched along a continuum without beginning or end. In the timeless space, discrete events exist without order, arising in random fashion, crowding each other out, competing for ‘space’ and attention, arising and disappearing in a chaotic flow.

This competition appears as sense perception and feeling, which we evaluate and then choose according to our preferences and motivations. The awakened state, the timeless space we occupy when we downshift to an imperceptible crawl is not just another unconventional and unfamiliar form of time in which ‘events’ occur.

Awakened mind lives outside of time. It permeates the construction we call time yet is not time-bound. Then again, neither is it other than time. The true nature of emergence (consciousness and biology) is the opposite of our habitual hyperactivity. It is a tsunami of perpetual stillness, an infinite evenness subsuming everything, a continuous tidal wave of creative interdependent unfolding that has no beginning, no end, no boundaries, no center and no limits.

In this realm the very idea of a separate self is an inexplicable accident; in which we realize our movement and intention within a unique place in the web of life also holds all others, informs and is informed by all others. We are so completely and fully at home there is nothing left to ‘do.’

In the context of collapse, hope has no place in such presence. It simply cannot be. It is foreign, as it is entirely incompatible with the pervasive dynamic evenness of radical presence in a timeless state. Ultimately, hope relies on causal relationships in a universe without cause. It is a condition we put on our commitment to the present, as if we need a future reward as a prerequisite for undertaking the task at hand. If we hope long enough or hard enough for a particular outcome, perhaps something will happen. Perhaps not. But ultimately, in hope we seek our own continued well-being. In that sense, hope keeps us stuck in denial of our unfolding relationship with grief. It allows us to run away from our direct experience. Hope does nothing to interrupt Business As Usual.

As Stephen Jenkinson says, “Hope is what allows us to continue [what we’re doing]; instead of stopping, we are waiting to be stopped.” If that ever happens, it will be too late. Unfortunately, such thinking exists in a narrow linearity that conflates intention with faith. Being neither intention nor faith, hope lies between the possible and the impossible, between what we know is within and what we imagine is beyond our capacity.

Vaclav Havel once remarked, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that it’s worth doing regardless of how it comes out.” That certainty is faith, knowing we are doing the right thing now and being committed to what matters most, not regardless of some future outcome, but because we already know what the long-term outcome is likely to be. Hope becomes a defense against despair.

Of course we cannot control the future.  But faith is an absolute belief in our agency in the present. Hope lies at the opposite pole of fear and despair, a duality in which we oscillate from one extreme to the other. Without hope, there can be no despair. By creating and clinging to hope, we create space for fear.

Evaluating our decisions based on an obligation to future generations, even seven generations hence, as is customary among some indigenous communities, does not require a reliance on hope. We do what we know is right. A nebulous disempowering wish about the future dies a quiet death as we rise to our obligations and clarify our responsibilities in the moment.

Again, Stephen Jenkinson:

The question is not ‘Are we going to fail?’ The question is how. The question is What shall be the manner of our inability to care for what was entrusted to us? The question is What is our manner of failing?……

Grief requires us to know the times we are in. The great enemy of grief is hope. Hope is a four-letter word for people unwilling to know things for what they are. Our time requires us to be hope-free, to burn through the false choice of being hopeful or hopeless. These are two sides of the same con-job. Grief is required to proceed.

Reverse engineering the next hundred years to determine how we must act now puts hope in a different light. We may not be able to shift the course of the entire human  enterprise, but at least we have taken a long view and fully exercised our capacities in the service of Inter-Being.

We immerse our selves in our immediate experience, in the feeling level of our responses to our senses, without regard for their source. Such immersion attains without labeling experience, becoming neither attracted nor repulsed by any of it, without analyzing, meditating upon it or turning away.

In other words, without turning it into an object of interest or adding it to a collection of memories, neither categorizing, discarding,…..nor even believing it. In so doing, we are both immersed and freed simultaneously, watching from a vast view, yet also noticing, feeling and burning in the fires of the moment. Our principle acts must be to reduce suffering, which only becomes clear as we allow ourselves to suffer. Rumi said, “In suffering is a gift. In it is hidden mercy.” There is no place for hope in this equation.

All of this may appear to be highly idealistic because mainstream thought and the pursuit of happiness is a relatively closed orbit, exerting immense inertia on moments of awakening that come from a full descent onto our grief, lest that awakening threaten the grip of consensus (relative) reality. And yes, regardless of how the expression of presence may appear, since it must co-exist with material reality, it is nevertheless a condition worthy of cultivation.

No matter what arises, even if heaven and earth change places, there is a bare state of relaxed openness [available], without any underlying basis. Without any reference point–nebulous, ephemeral, and evanescent–this is the mode of a lunatic, free from the duality of hope and fear.

—Chöying Dzod (pt. IX) Longchenpa

Let’s all become lunatics! Our resilient future depends on it.

Listen For The Beloved

Listen for the Beloved.
The walls fall down.
Listen for the Beloved.
The Stories wither to dust.

Listen for the Beloved.
The crockery dances in the cupboards.
Listen for the Beloved.
The masters obey their animals.

Empty your pockets.
You do not live in a tiny tent,
solitary in your pea pod warmth
by a dwindling fire.

No, your tent is the sky.
And that lump in your throat
is not gold.
Neither is it coal.
It is not even yours.

Set free the herd
chained to your doorstep.
Set free the millers,
chained to their wheels.

There is water aplenty
overflowing the cup
of the Beloved.
Drink by her soul hand.

The Severed Hand

(excerpted from the Dark Mountain Manifesto)

The myth of progress is founded on the myth of nature. The first tells us that we are destined for greatness; the second tells us that greatness is cost-free. Each is intimately bound up with the other. Both tell us that we are apart from the world; that we began grunting in the primeval swamps, as a humble part of something called ‘nature’, which we have now triumphantly subdued. The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is [5] evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our separation from it is a myth integral to the triumph of our civilization. We are, we tell ourselves, the only species ever to have attacked nature and won. In this, our unique glory is contained.

Outside the citadels of self-congratulation, lone voices have cried out against this infantile version of the human story for centuries, but it is only in the last few decades that its inaccuracy has become laughably apparent. We are the first generations to grow up surrounded by evidence that our attempt to separate ourselves from ‘nature’ has been a grim failure, proof not of our genius but our hubris. The attempt to sever the hand from the body has endangered the ‘progress’ we hold so dear, and it has endangered much of ‘nature’ too. The resulting upheaval underlies the crisis we now face.

We imagined ourselves isolated from the source of our existence. The fallout from this imaginative error is all around us: a quarter of the world’s mammals are threatened with imminent extinction; an acre and a half of rainforest is felled every second; 75% of the world’s fish stocks are on the verge of collapse; humanity consumes 25% more of the world’s natural ‘products’ than the Earth can replace – a figure predicted to rise to 80% by mid-century. Even through the deadening lens of statistics, we can glimpse the violence to which our myths have driven us.

And over it all looms runaway climate change. Climate change, which threatens to render all human projects irrelevant; which presents us with detailed evidence of our lack of understanding of the world we inhabit while, at the same time, demonstrating that we are still entirely reliant upon it. Climate change, which highlights in painful color the head-on crash between civilization and ‘nature’; which makes plain, more effectively than any carefully constructed argument or optimistically defiant protest, how the machine’s need for permanent growth will require us to destroy ourselves in its name. Climate change, which brings home at last our ultimate powerlessness.

These are the facts, or some of them. Yet facts never tell the whole story. (‘Facts’, Conrad wrote, in Lord Jim, ‘as if facts could prove anything.’) The facts of environmental crisis we hear so much about often conceal as much as they expose. We hear daily about the impacts of our activities on ‘the environment’ (like ‘nature’, this is an expression which distances us from the reality of our situation). Daily we hear, too, of the many ‘solutions’ to these problems: solutions which usually involve the necessity of urgent political agreement and a judicious application of human technological genius. Things may be changing, runs the narrative, but there is nothing we cannot deal with here, folks. We perhaps need to move faster, more urgently. Certainly we need to accelerate the pace of research and development. We accept that we must become more ‘sustainable’. But everything will be fine. There will still be growth, there will still be progress: these things will continue, because they have to continue, so they cannot do anything but continue. There is nothing to see here. Everything will be fine.

*

We do not believe that everything will be fine. We are not even sure, based on current definitions of progress and improvement, that we want it to be. Of all humanity’s delusions of difference, of its separation from and superiority to the living world which surrounds it, one distinction holds up better than most: we may well be the first species capable of effectively eliminating life on Earth. This is a hypothesis we seem intent on putting to the test. We are already responsible for denuding the world of much of its richness, magnificence, beauty, colour and magic, and we show no sign of slowing down. For a very long time, we imagined that ‘nature’ was something that happened elsewhere. The damage we did to it might be regrettable, but needed to be weighed against the benefits here and now. And in the worst case scenario, there would always be some kind of Plan B. Perhaps we would make for the moon, where we could survive in lunar colonies under giant bubbles as we planned our expansion across the galaxy.

But there is no Plan B and the bubble, it turns out, is where we have been living all the while. The bubble is that delusion of isolation under which we have labored for so long. The bubble has cut us off from life on the only planet we have, or are ever likely to have. The bubble is civilization.

Consider the structures on which that bubble has been built. Its foundations are geological: coal, oil, gas – millions upon millions of years of ancient sunlight, dragged from the depths of the planet and burned with abandon. On this base, the structure stands. Move upwards, and you pass through a jumble of supporting horrors: battery chicken sheds; industrial abattoirs; burning forests; beam-trawled ocean floors; dynamited reefs; hollowed-out mountains; wasted soil. Finally, on top of all these unseen layers, you reach the well-tended surface where you and I stand: unaware, or uninterested, in what goes on beneath us; demanding that the authorities keep us in the manner to which we have been accustomed; occasionally feeling twinges of guilt that lead us to buy organic chickens or locally-produced lettuces; yet for the most part glutted, but not sated, on the fruits of the horrors on which our lifestyles depend.

We are the first generations born into a new and unprecedented age – the age of ecocide. To name it thus is not to presume the outcome, but simply to describe a process which is underway. The ground, the sea, the air, the elemental backdrops to our existence – all these our economics has taken for granted, to be used as a bottomless tip, endlessly able to dilute and disperse the tailings of our extraction, production, consumption. The sheer scale of the sky or the weight of a swollen river makes it hard to imagine that creatures as flimsy as you and I could do that much damage. Philip Larkin gave voice to this attitude, and the creeping, worrying end of it.

Nearly forty years on from Larkin’s words, doubt is what all of us seem to feel, all of the time. Too much filth has been chucked in the sea and into the soil and into the atmosphere to make any other feeling sensible. The doubt, and the facts, have paved the way for a worldwide movement of environmental politics, which aimed, at least in its early, raw form, to challenge the myths of development and progress head-on. But time has not been kind to the greens. Today’s environmentalists are more likely to be found at corporate conferences hymning the virtues of ‘sustainability’ and ‘ethical consumption’ than doing anything as naive as questioning the intrinsic values of civilization. Capitalism has absorbed the greens, as it absorbs so many challenges to its ascendancy. A radical challenge to the human machine has been transformed into yet another opportunity for shopping.

‘Denial’ is a hot word, heavy with connotations. When it is used to brand the remaining rump of climate change skeptics, they object noisily to the association with those who would rewrite the history of the Holocaust. Yet the focus on this dwindling group may serve as a distraction from a far larger form of denial, in its psychoanalytic sense. Freud wrote of the inability of people to hear things which did not fit with the way they saw themselves and the world. We put ourselves through all kinds of inner contortions, rather than look plainly at those things which challenge our fundamental understanding of the world.

Today, humanity is up to its neck in denial about what it has built, what it has become – and what it is in for. Ecological and economic collapse unfold before us and, if we acknowledge them at all, we act as if this were a temporary problem, a technical glitch. Centuries of hubris block our ears like wax plugs; we cannot hear the message which reality is screaming at us. For all our doubts and discontents, we are still wired to an idea of history in which the future will be an upgraded version of the present. The assumption remains that things must continue in their current direction: the sense of crisis only smudges the meaning of that ‘must’. No longer a natural inevitability, it becomes an urgent necessity: we must find a way to go on having supermarkets and superhighways. We cannot contemplate the alternative.

And so we find ourselves, all of us together, poised trembling on the edge of a change so massive that we have no way of gauging it. None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down. Secretly, we all think we are doomed: even the politicians think this; even the environmentalists. Some of us deal with it by going shopping. Some deal with it by hoping it is true. Some give up in despair. Some work frantically to try and fend off the coming storm.

Our question is: what would happen if we looked down? Would it be as bad as we imagine? What might we see? Could it even be good for us?

We believe it is time to look down.

The Toxic Masculine Empire Strikes Back

There are many ways to describe the human drama at this moment. We can talk about psychology or brain function, economic ideologies or politics, philosophy and religion. All of them have a kernel of truth. Here is another way to say it:

Deeper than ideology and psychology, perhaps even deeper than brain function, we can speak in energetic and spiritual terms about the human disease. Masculine energy is a rising force in the body/mind, an energetic evolution toward material accomplishment, a commanding view and a spiritual search for enlightenment. The feminine is an earth-bound force, rooting in the soil of life, a generative force driven by an erotic principle, connecting and interpreting spiritual awareness in the earthbound terms of community, equality and mutual nourishment. In the most basic terms, the masculine is in profound polarity to the feminine.

In a healthy culture, those energies would be circulating freely without restriction or corruption, nourished universally and manifested in tangible and humane social structures, institutions affirming our rightful place in equal status with other living beings and the living earth itself.

In terms of the chakra system of understanding human yearnings, flaws and behaviors, the wounded male energy of the current world denies the erotic, lives in and for the upper chakras sourcing his power in vision, setting the terms of existence and progress and defining the longing of his fellow humans in base and selfish ways, separating his friends from his enemies, those who deserve his attention and those who do not. Yes, the wounded male also operates in and from the second chakra, but those energies are corrupted, manifesting as toxic domination and objectification, out of touch with the nature or practice of healing  and unifying forces. In the worst case, he is ignorant of and resistant to any complementarity

This domination and subjugation extends to the feminine as misogyny, Other-ising fellow humans in the form of racism, colonialism and exclusion; to the earth as the ecocide based on the myth of separation and the myth of extraction without consequence. The wounded female is separated from her power and influence by the subjugation of men, by the loss, denial or imprisonment of her generative, erotic force and thus the connection between her creative energies and her personal power. The true nature of her spiritual powers and vision are blocked or stunted

The wounded masculine is extremely threatened by the rise of intact feminine power and energy. The very foundation of his vision and control are under siege. Thus we see throughout the world the backlash, the retrenchment and embattled mentality of the wounded masculine in the form of legislative initiatives to depress and control the manifestations of feminine expression of her essential erotic powers; the resistance to codifying equality and reversing institutionalized oppression and increasing outright violence.  Media giants under the operation and control of men subtly propagate this agenda, conveying, among other ways, their ongoing (and increasingly blatant) bias against the possibility of a female being elected as America’s President.

The rise of nativism, the retrenchment of racism, the creeping autocracy and fascism, the reversal of environmental laws, the denial of climate change, the doubling down on extractive practices, white collar and government corruption and even the unchecked  dissemination of poisons into the atmosphere, waters and soil around the world can all be interpreted as reinforcing Other-ism and the backlash of toxic masculinity, as aggressive attempts to deny, control and sequester erotic, untamable dark forces; to deny and repress the human shadow; to damn (and dam) the ideologies of community, diversity, equality and inclusion; to re-assert autocratic control by deeply dysfunctional, wounded and now blatantly omnicidal (terminally wounded) men.

The earth-cult empire of the wounded masculine, including the billionaires and all their henchmen whose wealth depends on oppression, exclusion, domination and objectification is now demanding we all drink the kool-aid, as if that alone could wipe away the collapse already underway.

The healing of the feminine force, opening the essential creative and generative energies to manifest through the centers of personal power, vision and spiritual attainment offers an alternative clarity, an inspiring and infectious force rooted in connection, collective action, equality, inclusion and a celebration of diversity.

The upper centers of the subtle body manifesting empathy, compassion; the heart speaking with a thousand tongues; telepathy (giving voice to deep and common yearning), clairvoyance (the ability to, as Rumi said, “close both eyes to see with the other eye”) and the ability to interpret the elemental as divine nature is the promise of the awakened feminine, which is not to say these powers and reformulation of essential energies are only accessible to the female, just that men may have to struggle a little more to unlock them. This struggle is, fortunately, also expanding everywhere we look.

The awakened male will have his own interpretation of these energies. But in the end, they will be congruent, shared, mutually inspiring, fruitful in expression and igniting possibilities we have not seen. Unfortunately, that world remains beyond our grasp. Do we have enough time? Unless there is a virtual instantaneous and universal paradigm shift away from the wounded masculine and a corresponding rise of integral feminine presence co-creating with the healthy masculine, reversing the pervasive and common symptoms of the core disease, our demise as a species will likely continue to accelerate toward the abyss.