Choose Your Crisis (and Save the Planet)
"Buddhist enlightenment consists simply in knowing the secret of the unity of opposites- the unity of the inner and outer worlds..."~Alan Watts
“Everything contains its opposite.” Hermes Trismegistus.
Driving home from Clinton on the weekly pastry pick-up trip that supplies our Café with delicious scones, cookies, biscotti and more, Orin returned to the subject of the vast and horrific oil spill going on in Louisiana that has particularly planted itself in his consciousness. And there we were, driving back to Utica from Clinton, no different from all the other oil-dependent folks on all sides of us, mired in the dilemma.
What will it take, I wonder, to accomplish the paradigm shift that might allow us to relinquish the way of life that demands fossil fuels for its maintenance? I call for “paradigm shift” because I do not particularly believe in technological solutions, but rather in change of consciousness as “the solution.” Certainly the oil companies are working at technological solutions to the embarrassing problem of oil spills (or perhaps only working to convince us that they are working on such solutions!) – and look at the results!
Speaking not as an expert, but in an effort to put this into terms I understand, what is entailed centrally in such a paradigm shift is the capacity to transcend fundamental “normal” consciousness, which can be referred to as “the plane of the opposites,” or dualistic consciousness, a concept used in eastern spiritual traditions and though with differences in western hermetic tradition to explain the realm of suffering or conflict that is “normal.” This is the common consciousness in which most of us do our “thinking” every day. (Or what passes for thinking! Personally, I waste a lot of thought on self-criticism, resentment, and other unconstructive kinds of “thought-like activity.”) In spiritual terms, it is considered the plane of the opposites because at this level of consciousness, individuals are trapped in the illusion that either this is true, factual, real, or that is. The problem is, when an individual is restricted to this level of awareness, given any pair of opposites, whether material, behavioral, mental, etc., she can only perceive one of the pair as fully real at a time. In the plane of the opposites, choices must be made on one side or the other, which makes our everyday consciousness lopsided and delusional in an interconnected, unified universe. This lopsidedness has led us to prefer mind over body and nature, for instance, to value male over female, to see others in terms of friend or enemy, to see morality as either good or bad, as if these were clearly discernible. In other words, either/or thinking, though handy, is incomplete, and can lead to destructive, consequences. It is extremely difficult to transcend this kind of thinking, and there are many spiritual practices designed to help people do this. However, these are not my focus.
Right now in our country we are experiencing what amounts to a struggle against consciousness change, an unsettling circumstance in which a significant portion of society remains firmly in the plane of opposites and allows hostility for the “other” (in the form of republican or democrat, Hillary or G.W., Obama or Glenn Beck) to drive all public expression. It’s a society-wide traffic jam!
Recently I asked my students in an upper level undergraduate writing course at the local state college, who have read several articles of radical media criticism, to read an essay by the late scholar Edward Said, called “Covering Islam and Terrorism.” In her response to the reading, one student, a young woman who is not gifted in writing, wrote in her response about how her friends had responded after 9/11: “we should drop a nuclear bomb on the middle east and wipe them all out.” Not entirely sure that she didn’t agree with her friends, even though I had been working to raise consciousness through heightening awareness of the way mainstream media functions to construct reality, I referred to her words in my final address to the class. I suggested that it was exactly the function of our media to strengthen this kind of “either/or,” enemy-making thinking that will allow us to funnel our fury onto innocent human beings in other countries, at the same time maintaining our belief in our country as being beneficent and good.
When we exist primarily in the “common, everyday consciousness,” we are ripe for such manipulation, which works against another, innate tendency to love our neighbor and to treat others as we ourselves wish to be treated. In fact, existing in the either/or consciousness it is impossible to do otherwise than to make some other “other” the focus of either our enmity or our envy, our adoration or our derision, our extreme love or our fear and hate. We have now had two thousand years in which we have not gotten the central message of Christianity’s most revered spiritual teacher, to love our enemy. This would be an irresolvable stalemate but for one fortuitous fact: the primary “other” that holds the key to all the rest, our very real and up-close “opposite number” is located within ourselves. We are granted the opportunity, at least, to accomplish this necessary transcendence at every moment. The question I ask is, how may more of us achieve this difficult integration of our internal opposite and thus be readier to inhabit the new paradigm, a change which is as much a shift of consciousness, as a matter of “lifestyle change?” Implicit in my question, because I live in Utica, NY, is how may this be accomplished by people of modest means living ordinary lives
Certainly one way to make this shift in consciousness is through personal crisis, or a “hitting bottom” of some kind. At times of pain and loss the fact of nature intrudes catastrophically in our lives; pain brings an opportunity to go through the crisis and see what it has to teach us. Our culture, because it cannot recognize the inner opposite, encourages us to take the high road, to “get over it,” and thus to preserve the ambient dualism. The low road, on the other hand, leads to acquaintance with that “other” within us, our “opposite,” who was never taught to take “the high road” and who feels everything.
But in our culture it isn’t easy to find our way onto the “low road.” instead of teaching us to make contact with this interior one who feels much, we are encouraged by practically every message coming to us via mass media, to immerse ourselves in addictive activity or/and substances. From the point of view of keeping the masses passive consumers and workers, addictions are not one bit dysfunctional: addictions, as well as do obsessions and compulsions, which are epidemic in our society, to keep us in the old paradigm and under the illusion of “either/or.”
Remember, this either/ or thinking is entirely natural and universal. But it is also natural to achieve transcendence beyond dualistic thinking. The addictive process is a means of numbing, of repressing the natural energy and aliveness contained in our bodies and thus of controlling against a higher awareness or consciousness. The consequence of the mass failure to achieve initiation, which is another word for this transcendence of dualism, is the global catastrophe we now have: destruction of the planet, incessant bombing of poor people, terrible inequities in the distribution of life’s “goods,” support for terrorist regimes while maintaining the image of ourselves as the good guys, and an incapacity to take our eyes off the “the enemy.”
Inasmuch as we have a society in which few achieve the transcendence, or paradigm shift, I am speaking of, and thus few are initiated into the psychically altered stage of adulthood, we are primarily a people who are stuck in the old paradigm, unable to imagine our way out of the tragic dilemma mentioned in the opening scenario. Faced with the overwhelming evidence that our way of life is destroying the planet, we can only protest, “But what can one person do?” – a question that itself comes straight out of the old, dualistic paradigm. Having bought into the individualistic, either/or narrative told us by our culture, we have relinquished the deeper knowledge of our connection with all of life; we have lost the comfort of that knowledge and also the sense of responsibility that naturally accompanies such awareness. Only if we know the deeper connection can we have the strength and the driving energy to pick up the awesome responsibility to act on behalf of the planet.
That is, only if we know we are loved – and this is a far greater representation of love than we are ever exposed to by our culture – can we love back with adult, generative kind of love that can say firmly no to the destructive forces that manipulate and divide, which thrive upon the dualistic, either/or thinking every single one of us is prone to. Without experience of this impersonal energy of love, human love degenerates to its pallid relative, a preference for sameness, by which we can love our family and friends generously and at the same time wish for a nuclear bomb to be dropped on “our enemies.”
So that another, more commonly available avenue to transcending the plane of the opposites and to find the consciousness dominated by compassion, we must know its opposite in ourselves; we must know we have been hated, as well as loved. The most cherished assumption of pre-transformational consciousness is that of being unconditionally loved: by parents, by society, by our country, which in turn secures our loyalty to that limited consciousness in which we grew up. That consciousness taught us: If there was anything amiss in that world, it was our own fault for not being good enough, for being unworthy.
The great psychoanalyst and writer, Alice Miller, who died last month (4/14/10), pointed the way to find this opposite within us, and thus toward transcendence and the new paradigm. In her work that bids the reader to acknowledge the generalized, unconscious cruelty that society inflicts upon children, she indicates the way to overcome that fundamental resistance to “meeting” our opposite within. As she so well knew, the first inviolable tenet of ordinary consciousness that must be overturned is the one we most cherish: our parents loved us. God bless the child who knows better, that, because parents love within the limitations of the culture, children are loved in an either/or way, meaning, inasmuch as we become the child our parents want us to be, we are “loved.” Thus we learn that to be worthy of receiving love is a matter of not being our true selves. We learn not to challenge that dualism residing in our innermost foundation that tells us, while my world is fundamentally good, I am fundamentally worthless or bad.
Back in the 1980’s many people, my mother included, were fascinated by the work of John Bradshaw, author and educator in the recovery and self-help movements, and his focus on “the inner child.” My mother, who died in 2008 at the age of 85, watched every one of his PBS specials, bought his books and devoured them. But she never took on that most difficult, extremely painful work of going within and actually acquainting herself with her own “inner child.” I say this not to point out my mother’s failing, but to underscore that it is easy to remain at the level of fascination with the “other,” it is far more difficult to actually engage with it. That “other” within, after years of our staying obediently within the bounds of everyday, dualistic consciousness has indeed become “the enemy.” It has the aspect of a monster, feeling more like malicious threat than entreaty from an adorable “inner child.” We do not gladly engage with it, just as our society does not easily open itself to the human, “like us” reality of the people behind the visage of terrorist presented to us via our media.
But they are the same act on different levels of reality. Both acts of rejecting awareness or refusing to “befriend the dark” (whether inner or other) serve to keep us in the plane of the opposites, incapable of transcendence, and thus powerless against the ongoing destruction of the planet, the rampant violence and war, the immorally uneven distribution of “goods” among populations.
Another relational area endangered by ordinary dualistic consciousness is that between the human opposites of men and women. Each of us is one or the other (skipping for the moment the ambiguities of gender orientation), and each of us has within us both aspects or archetypes, popularly referred to in men as the “feminine side,” and in women, the “masculine side.” Skipping for a moment the fact that increasingly fewer young people have any idea of what marriage is for, and fewer are perhaps even experiencing the traditional honeymoon period, it is still possible to talk about what is at stake in that moment of marital crisis when “the honeymoon is over.” So thoroughly dualistic are we, once the dazzle is seen through, and the other with bonafide feet of clay is staring at us across the breakfast table, though we are at the point when the marriage can do its deep level work and acquaint us with the long neglected “opposite” within, most of us opt to go no further. The culture gives us no help, and lets face it, divorce is good for capitalism.
As I have said many times in the past, the value of marriage at this crisis point in history is its offering to us a way into the paradigm shift by its forcing us into relation to the impossible opposite. It could be looked at as a way of embracing the crisis, rather than waiting for it to find us through loss or illness or death of a loved one. Whether performed in an institutional church or not, marriage is a sacrament, in that it is a means to connect with an archetype (divine reality) and thus to provide a path for that larger, generative, non-dualistic love to enter and transform human life. It is not an anachronism to be tossed out with the rhythm method and spinsterhood, but rather an extremely relevant, democratically available means to move human consciousness along toward the new paradigm. Consciousness will not change without the crisis that forces it out of the habitual groove of either/or, and marriage constitutes such a crisis. As we approach closer and closer the planetary crisis from which there will be no return, I am pitching for our choosing our crises instead: choose community, choose marriage, choose stable relations over time to people and place, go deep instead of only upward, learn to embrace difference.
Because I am married, I have been able to participate in transformative work in my community that I would not have done as a single person People love the things my husband and I have offered in our community, and often do not understand the source of the unusual energy we have. In particular, many people are content with hackneyed kinds of dualistic “war between the sexes” language and attitudes. At a public event recently where we hosted a superb jazz performance at our nonprofit space, The Other Side, my husband in his typically nervous way loudly sent out a couple of messages that indicated his fear that I would not get things right. In the current atmosphere, it is always permissible to suggest that the man is the oppressor. As I was stacking chairs after the performance, a woman said to me, sincerely and with all good intentions, “He couldn’t do what he does without you.” Kindly advice for the downtrodden woman, unconscious support for either/or unconsciousness. I would ask everyone, “Kindly refrain from such acts of random kindness!”
What we need at this time is not such kneejerk “team player” mentality. We need the adult perspective that recognizes what it will take to provide the generative love sufficient to change our way of life from the ground up. Such work cannot be done from within the delusion of separateness and isolation engendered by everyday, either/or consciousness. Because marriage is the smallest unit of community, made up of two “differences,” the marriage vows contain transformative potential needed in this time. The crisis entailed by this union of opposites is no different than the one we are confronted with by mortality itself. Avoidance of that crisis simply gives us a little more “wiggle room” in which it is possible to wiggle out of the truth of death and the necessity of limitation. It allows us to remain in the familiar separateness of either/or consciousness, rather than in the “freedom for” limitation imposed by community and by nature. Because of its now optional status in society. never has the time been more opportune for the sacramental, transformational, metaphoric understanding of marriage to become common.
The soul wants to transform; it wants to individuate. If you look at the work of Dr. Jung, this is what it suggests; there is an innate potential within the psyche or soul for wholeness; in fact, the template for wholeness is already there in the archetype of the Self. When we engage in the transformational process, we are merely following the direction laid out for us by nature, by our nature. Not all of the traditional limitations of culture and society were laid down in order to oppress us. Some of them are there in order that we can liberate ourselves and society toward meaning, conscious adulthood, and the creation of the new paradigm. Choose your crisis: if we cannot manage, in the tiny unit of community that is marriage, to reflect the non-dual, transcendent reality of oneness existing in and through the opposites, then heaven help us in accomplishing this on a planetary scale.
